→ April 13, 2023
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The Whale.

I don’t know what The Whale was like on stage, but Darren Aronovsky’s adaptation, which took two Oscars home last month, is excruciating on so many levels that even a strong performance from Brendan Fraser can’t salvage it. When the main character’s daughter screams at her father “Just fucking die already!” she could be speaking for all of us, because at that point there’s still nearly 40 minutes of misery porn to go. It’s manipulative, sermonizing claptrap, and I can’t believe no one saw this film before its release and saw how bad and offensive it was.

Fraser plays Charlie, a morbidly obese man who lives by teaching English and writing classes online while keeping his camera off. His eating disorder is his reaction to the trauma of the death of someone close to him, the details of which are revealed in bits over the course of the movie. The entire film takes place in or just outside of his apartment, where he’s visited by a young missionary named Thomas; Charlie’s nurse and friend Liz; Charlie’s estranged daughter Ellie, whom he hasn’t seen in nine years; and Charlie’s ex-wife Mary. As you might expect from a movie adapted from a play, the dialogue between all of these characters exposes their back stories and gives Charlie some modest depth. We discover why that particular death has sent Charlie into what is essentially suicide by binge-eating, why he and Ellie haven’t seen each other in so long, why his friendship with Liz is both profound and complicated, and some inspirational-poster advice about writing honestly.

What we don’t get, unfortunately, is any real insight into Charlie, or what it means to be capital-f Fat. Charlie’s obesity is handwaved away as the product of trauma, which is facile enough but could work in the service of a better story. Instead, the movie spends too much time pushing that angle while tying it to religion, homophobia, and a fairly naïve interpretation of both grief and eating disorders. This isn’t new, and it isn’t interesting, and if you don’t have either I’m not sure why you make this movie.

Charlie is the only remotely interesting character in the movie, which is important since he’s in almost every minute of it. (I think there are two conversations that do not involve him and take place in a different space.) Even so, there’s little exploration of who he is other than that he’s very sorry. The film isn’t laughing at Charlie, or inviting us to do so; it’s telling us to gawk at him, condescend to him, and maybe, if we’re feeling charitable, pity him. He’s pathetic, a mess, a slob, apologizing to everyone for merely existing. He’s not a bad person because he’s fat; he’s not a bad person, but he’s fat, and that is supposed to make us think less of him. Rather than spend more of the dialogue showing us who he is under all that excess weight, it embarrasses us by embarrassing him: Liz saying “beep beep” when he’s backing up, when he chokes doing routine things like eating or nearly dies laughing or masturbating (a scene the movie really, really did not need), it’s all just fat-shaming of a different sort. You can extrapolate from what we learn to see Charlie is probably an interesting person, an intellectual who loves words, whether in prose or poetry, and who has a lot more empathy for other people than they do for him. I wouldn’t mind getting to know him. The Whale won’t let us.

The ending is a huge tearjerker, ruining one of the very few real emotional moments in the entire movie with an excess of gimmickry and artifice. It got me, even though I know better, because it’s just so manipulative, especially given everything that came before. The Whale hasn’t earned the right to make the audience feel this way.

Fraser is the only saving grace in the film, and while he wouldn’t have been my pick (Colin Farrell and Paul Mescal were slightly ahead for me), he’s worthy of the various Best Actor accolades he received. If he hadn’t been good this might have been the worst movie of 2022. He manages to get somut e range of emotions into the character, and when he’s hurt, ashamed, embarrassed, and so very often sorry, you feel it, probably the only honest emotions that come out of this film. Hong Chau was also nominated for an Oscar, as Best Supporting Actress, but she’s very flat in this movie and often comes across as whiny; she was better in The Menu with a character who was only slightly more multi-dimensional. Sadie Sink gives the second-best performance as Ellie, but it’s an extremely one-note character who might as well be from Flatland. (Fun note: In a flashback scene, Sink’s sister Jacey plays a younger Ellie.) Adrien Morot, Judy Chin, and Annemarie Bradley won the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and I think they were the most deserving of the nominees, although I can see the argument that this was all about a single character rather than an entire cast. The transformation of Fraser into a 600-pound man is completely believable.

Lindy West (of Shrill) eviscerated this movie and its ridiculous view of fat people better than I ever could. I’ll just leave it that this movie was awful, and while I’m very happy for Fraser and love the stories of actors who go from acting in bad mainstream movies to turning in Oscar- or Emmy-worthy performances (Michael Keaton being the best example), he’s not reason enough to suffer through The Whale. I’m too much of a completist to skip it, but you should feel no compulsion to join me.

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→ January 2, 2023
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Elvis.

Elvis Presley was anything but boring, as a person or as an entertainer, which makes it all the more criminal that Baz Luhrman’s biopic Elvis is such a dull, overlong mess. Even a game performance by Austin Butler, who’s doing the sort of impersonation that Oscar voters seem to love, can’t salvage this thing, which could have been 45 minutes shorter yet somehow misses some of the most interesting parts of the singer’s life story. (It’s free for HBO Max subscribers, or you can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Elvis tries to be a cradle-to-grave story, or at least an early childhood to death one, starting out with Elvis as a very young boy who moves with his family to a house in the white part of a Black neighborhood, where he was introduced to the gospel and blues music that he later used (or appropriated) in his own sound. The narrative then winds its way through his rise to stardom, marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu, stint in the army, the comeback special, and so on, until he gets addicted to drugs and dies, in connect-the-dots storytelling that might still have worked if Lurhman had any interest at all in telling the whole of Elvis’s story. Instead, we get a nonsense framing device of Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who is both the narrator and whose perspective is supposed to be our lens on the story, as Parker keeps trying to tell the viewers that he’s not that bad of a guy, and Elvis wouldn’t have been anything without him. It’s a pointless distraction and shifts the focus to a character nobody really cares about – or, if they did, maybe the film could have been called Parker and just put Elvis in the background. (Please, nobody do this.)be an

Presley’s actual life was far messier than the one we see in Elvis, not least of which is that he had several affairs while married to Priscilla, something the film glosses over almost entirely until the point where she announces that she’s leaving him and taking their daughter Lisa Marie with her. Among other sins of the script, such as the superficial treatment of his substance abuse issues or scant discussion of his appropriation of Black music or how his success may have allowed Black artists to follow in his wake, this amounts to a sort of hagiography that paints Elvis as a victim. Col. Parker did take advantage of Elvis financially and probably did so emotionally as well, but the story is so weirdly one-sided – even though Parker is the narrator – that the singer comes off as a pathetic man-child, and often not responsible for his own actions. I doubt this is accurate, and it’s certainly not interesting to watch.

Luhrman also plays loose with some key facts, which I suppose is par for the course in these music biopics, but his depiction of a race riot at an Elvis concert at Memphis’s Russwood Park is almost pure fiction. It plays into Lurhman’s ham-fisted attempts to tie Elvis’s career to the civil rights movement, which comes up again when Luhrman moves the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in time so that it happens during the taping of the comeback special, rather than some weeks before it, so that there can be a Big Moment backstage where Elvis and the producer decide the singer has to make a statement during the show and change the closing number. (There’s some good comedy in that whole sequence, though, as Parker sold the show as a Christmas special, and keeps insisting that Elvis close with a Christmas song and wear an ugly sweater.) A screenwriter can alter some timelines or small facts in service of the story, but here, Luhrman does the opposite – it holds the story back, makes the film longer, and adds no real interest. Even the comeback special, which was the most-watched TV program of its year and has entered music history for its impact on the culture and the way it opened up the second act of his career, is kind of boring in Elvis. I’d much rather watch that special three times, which would match the running time of this mess, than watch Elvis again.

Butler is a lock for a Best Actor Oscar nomination at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor – Drama, with Colin Farrell in a separate category because The Banshees of Inisherin counts as a Musical or Comedy. And Butler is good, even if he looks more like Miley Cyrus than Elvis when he’s in his stage makeup. The oddsmakers favor Elvis getting a Best Picture nod, which would be a real travesty, both on its face (this movie sucks) and because it’s going to push out something far more worthy. It’s just a waste of a lot of time and money, and the only film I’ve seen this year that I’d rank below it is Amsterdam, which would also fit that same description.

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→ December 28, 2022
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The Banshees of Inisherin.

The Banshees of Inisherin is writer/director Martin McDonagh’s first film since 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which was his most acclaimed movie to that point and took home the BAFTA for Best Film and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama. His latest led all films this year with eight Golden Globe nominations, and reunites the two leads from his debut film In Bruges, Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, in a dark comedy with two distinct, serious themes lying beneath the film’s absurdist surface. (It’s streaming now on HBO Max.)

Padraig (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson) both live on the small island of Inisherin off the west coast of Ireland, where not much of anything happens, and as far as I can tell almost nobody ever has to go to work. Padraig and Colm are drinking buddies who walk to the pub every afternoon, with Padraig stopping by Colm’s house on the way, until one day Colm completely ignores Padraig’s knock, and ignores him at the pub as well, eventually telling him he doesn’t want to be friends any more. This unprovoked severing of ties, which Padraig can’t understand and won’t accept, even in the face of Colm’s threats and rather disturbing actions, leads to an escalation of hostilities that wrecks the peace of the island and leaves nobody better off than before.

McDonagh has a gift for language and crafting witty lines, starting off early on in Banshees when everyone asks Padraig if he and Colm are “rowin’” often enough that it becomes funny just by repetition. The comic elements here are a necessary reprieve from the film’s increasingly dark elements, including the deterioration between the two main characters, the insidious gossip that poisons the island’s culture, young Dominic (Barry Keoghan) and his abusive father, and more. It’s the sort of story where its pervasive awfulness becomes even more apparent after it’s over, because the humor and absurdity mask the bleak story while you’re still watching it.

The film works on one level as an exploration of male friendship, and how fragile those bonds can be in the wrong sort of environment. It’s not so much a question of toxic masculinity, as neither character exhibits much in that vein; Padraig is probably too sensitive, at least when he’s not in his cups, and Colm’s reasons for shunning Padraig and subsequent reactions are more those of someone dealing with mental illness. One of them eventually takes their quarrel too far, pushing them past the point of no return, and a once-solid friendship, one that everyone on the island took as a given, is reduced to ashes.

It’s also a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Irish Civil War, which is often mentioned in the script, including in the final scene, and is nearing its conclusion as the movie takes place. This civil war began after the Irish War of Independence, which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State as a “dominion” within the Commonwealth, giving the island – sans Northern Island, which exercised its opt-out clause and became a free agent remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Island – greater autonomy, leading to full independence in 1933. After the Free State was established, however, pro-independence forces who opposed this partial solution fought an armed rebellion against the new, provisional government, with former IRA members from the war of independence now split between the two forces. The Irish fought a war to kick out the English, won it, and then ended up fighting themselves, leading to nearly 2000 deaths and substantial economic losses. The conflict may have begun over a principle, but escalated into violence when a democratic solution was likely achievable. It led to decades of mistrust between the spiritual descendants of the two sides, one of which later split into the political parties Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. The metaphor here doesn’t map perfectly one-to-one – I don’t think Colm is one side and Padraig the other, although a scholar of Irish history may see it quite differently – but it does speak to the pointlessness of war, especially when the two sides escalate hostilities in turn.

This is the best thing I’ve ever seen Colin Farrell do, requiring more range from him than In Bruges or The Lobster, as he makes Padraig feel completely three-dimensional – you know someone like him, someone well-intentioned but unable to get out of his own way, someone who’s probably not the most interesting guy to have a beer with, let alone a beer every day, but who would likely be the first person to show up if you needed help. Gleeson is also strong, as always, but his character is just not as well-written, and his complexity is, shall we say, a little harder to understand. Keoghan is fine as Dominic, who is probably developmentally disabled, although his story feels tangential and his main function seems to be to serve as a plot point for Padraig and Padraig’s sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon), on whom Dominic has a crush. Siobhan’s life is even more stifled than Padraig’s, and an opportunity eventually arises for her to leave Inisherin, a move that completely unmoors her brother, already shaken from having Colm cast him off.

We’ve largely just begun our run through Oscar-worthy movies, so I can’t compare it to much, but I wouldn’t put this over Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is still the best movie I’ve seen from 2022, although I could take an argument for McDonagh’s script over the Daniels’ script for EEAAO. Both are outstanding, but McDonagh’s dialogue is better. The Academy has already nominated McDonagh twice before for his screenplays, which makes me strongly suspect he’ll get a nod for this one as well.

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