→ February 26, 2025
→ By

James.

Percival Everett has been writing novels for over twenty years, but he’s having a moment right now: his 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction, which won its screenwriter Cord Jefferson an Academy Award; and his latest novel, James, won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction while making the Booker Prize shortlist. (It should have won that too, but lost to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.) James retells the story of Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s novel, from Jim’s perspective, completely reimagining the character and most of the narrative, in a book that is far more of an adventure than the novel that inspired it while also giving its protagonist far more humanity than his creator ever did.

James narrates Everett’s novel, and does so in an erudite voice that, of course, has nothing to do with the slave dialect the character uses in Twain’s work. In this novel’s universe, slaves know how to speak as well as or better than their white tormentors, but they feign all manner of ignorance to make the whites feel better about themselves and thus try to improve their own odds of survival. The plot starts out on the same track as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with Huck faking his own death to escape his abusive father while James runs away to avoid being sold and separated from his wife Sadie and daughter Lizzie. (Twain mentioned Jim’s wife, but didn’t name her; Everett is following the convention of other writers who’ve used these characters.) The two flee upriver, with James seeing the corpse of Huck’s father but not telling the boy, Huck witnessing the murderous feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, and the two encountering the con men who call themselves the King and the Duke and who eventually sell James to a local slave owner.

Everett fills in the blanks in Twain’s novel by following James rather than Huck, giving James’ dialogue with other slaves – all in proper English, generally more proper than what the white characters use – and his own inner monologue on his life and on philosophy. He’s visited in dreams by Locke and (I think) Rousseau, reads Voltaire and John Stuart Mill, and eventually gets a hold of a pencil at great cost so he can begin to write some of his thoughts on paper. James’s narrative diverges from the original when the King and Duke briefly leave him with a third man, who sells him to a traveling minstrel group, where James meets a man named Norman and escapes with him while looking for Huck, who’s still with the two bandits. This arc returns James to their home in the end, without an appearance from Tom Sawyer, and leads to a conclusion that is far more satisfying than Twain’s, if less realistic.

James, or Jim in Twain’s work, is just not a well-developed character in the original stories, even as Twain wrote him in a far more sympathetic manner than just about any of his contemporaries did when writing of slaves or even of Black people in general. Everett’s James is intelligent, sure, but the difference is that he is whole: he has fully-developed thoughts and ideas, values, a sense of justice, empathy for others, and a desire for even a little agency over his own life. It stands above nearly every other continuation or adaptation of a famous novel I’ve ever encountered, with the possible exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s similar retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic – but Everett’s novel is angrier and wittier and much better paced than Rhys’s.

Everett also mimics Twain’s use of the picaresque format both for its thrilling elements and its satirical ones, although here the satire is subtler than it is in some of Everett’s other works, like the absurdist Dr. No or the violent fantasy of The Trees, the other two of his novels I’ve read so far. James reads like Everett was trying to stay authentic to Twain’s work as much as possible until he veered away from the plot in the last third of his own novel – and it works, because of the familiarity of the original (one of the few novels I’ve read twice, and the only one I had to read in high school and in college) and because of how well-structured it was in the first place. Everett is brilliant and wildly imaginative, so his restraint here isn’t just impressive, but makes the whole work more powerful in the end. I have read very few works of great literature with this sort of haste, because the story and the character are so compelling I never wanted to put the book down.

Next up: Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day, winner of the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ November 20, 2024
→ By

Emilia Pérez.

Emilia Pérez has so much going for it that it seemed like a can’t miss – it’s a musical, it’s a redemption story, it’s about a trans person coming out and finding themselves, it’s a comedy. Unfortunately in trying to be all of those things, it ends up almost nothing at all. It’s an incoherent babblefest, salvaged only a little by its three main performances, notably that of Zoe Saldaña. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

Saldaña plays Rita, a lawyer in Mexico who is disgusted by her work as a defense attorney, as she’s helping defend a man who killed his wife by arguing that she killed herself – and she doesn’t even get the ‘glory’ of arguing the case, as she writes the words and her dim-witted boss gives the big speech. She’s then contacted by the cartel boss Las Manitas, who reveals that he wants to come out as a trans woman, including undergoing gender confirmation surgery, and wants Rita to make all of the arrangements – including faking his death so she can begin a new life as Emilia Pérez. (She’s played in both incarnations by Karla Sofia Gascón, a trans actress from Spain.) Las Manitas was married, however, to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two kids, and after transitioning, Emilia decides she can’t live without her children, so she poses as a wealthy cousin of Las Manitas and invites the them and their mother to come live with her, which goes off the rails when Jessi takes up again with her old lover Gustavo. Meanwhile, Emilia decides to make amends for her past by helping relatives of people presumed killed by drug cartels find out their loved ones’ fates, using her money and her connections to the underworld, becoming a popular hero for her efforts and her criticism of the authorities.

That would be enough plot to fill a ten-part TV series, but not only does Emilia Pérez try to pack it all into two hours, it does so in song. There are sixteen songs in the film, some of which are actually quite good (“El Mal,” sung by Saldaña during the gala dinner, is a real standout, and she nails it), although I’m not sure if “Vaginoplasty” ever really needed to see the light of day. The result is that a plot already stretched to translucency ends up so shallow that the film never actually says anything – even though it seems to think it has a lot to say.

The kernel at the heart of the story is fantastic: A drug lord fakes his death, comes out (privately) as transgender, establishes an entire new identity as a woman, and becomes a crusader against the violence of the drug trade and the government’s war on the cartels. That’s all this film needed to be an epic satire of the current state of Mexico, and Gascón would have been up to the task, as she’s perfectly menacing as Las Manitas, then entirely credible as a remorseful Emilia who uses the same determination that made her a successful criminal to become a serious reformer – even though the violent resolve is still there in reserve.

This isn’t that film, starting with the decision to make Rita the main character rather than Emilia, even though Emilia is in the title. Rita’s just nowhere near as interesting as Emilia is, not through any fault of Saldaña’s, but because she’s written so austerely, while Emilia is the one truly three-dimensional character in the film. Her trans status is more of a detail; it makes the plot work, but it’s not a part of why her character is so interesting. Emilia has the emotional depth and range that the other characters lack, and she should have been the central character, but the script has no interest in, say, exploring her emotional growth, or just her change of heart, or perhaps questioning whether she really understands the wrongs she committed. There’s a faint implication that she was just so deeply unhappy that it drove her to bad acts, but that’s pretty facile (if that’s even what writer-director Jacques Audiard intended) and I think could even lean into the whole “queer as mental illness” myth.

Saldaña is as good as she can be with a poorly written character, and when she sings and dances – she’s a trained dancer, which I admit I didn’t know until after I watched the movie – she owns the scene. Her songs look like scenes from a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, in the best way: she grabs the camera with both hands and won’t let go until the song is done. And she gets just about all of the best songs, which is ironic with a pop singer elsewhere in the cast. It’s fun to see Gomez playing a vixen, even if the film doesn’t give her much time to vamp it up, and she barely gets to sing at all. She and Gascón are wasted by roles that don’t really make enough use of their talents.

The result is a film that is oddly boring for one that has some comic elements, a lot of song and dance, and eventually a big action scene. That last bit isn’t even that well earned, and leads to an ending that is an inexcusable copout where Emilia is no longer even in control of her own fate. That conclusion also underscores just how superficial Emilia Pérez ultimately is as a film: It has so little to say that it was completely fine resolving its plot with a figurative lightning bolt from the sky to wrap things up. What a waste of an opportunity.

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→ October 30, 2024
→ By

Conclave.

Conclave takes a mass-market paperback novel by Robert Harris and turns it into a prestige drama that already has jumped ahead in the awards conversation. The surprise is that it’s pulpy good fun, with a strong cast led by a masterful performance by Ralph Fiennes, until it goes a little off the rails with the first of its two big twists and reminds you of its shallowness.

The Pope is about to die as Conclave opens, and, oops! His Holiness is dead, may the jockeying for his job commence. The Church must convene a conclave of all of its cardinals, but everyone already seems to know who the contenders are, primarily the Italian reactionary Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), who wants to roll back the clock a few hundred years; the Canadian schemer Joseph Tremblay (John Lithgow), whose ambition is so naked Jesus would clothe it; the Nigerian Joseph Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), whose views range from liberation theology to virulent homophobia; and the pragmatist American Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), whose interest in the papacy may stem as much from a desire to stop Tedesco from destroying the institution as his own ambition. Lording over the sequestered group is Thomas Lawrence (Fiennes), a friend of Aldo’s who recently tried to resign his position over a crisis of faith. Meanwhile, there’s a secret cardinal who arrives unannounced to the conclave, Vincent Benitz (Carlos Diehz), who has been working in multiple warzones and whose identity the previous pope protected for his safety. What happens from there is sort of Election with old men – there’s backstabbing, scandal, and vote-buying, with Cardinal Lawrence trying to gather information from beyond the sequestration, which is supposed to protect the Cardinals from all news of the outside world while they cast their votes.

For about three-fourths of Conclave, it’s a slick, dialogue-heavy, prime time drama that keeps moving from one controversy to the next, with Cardinal Lawrence’s nervous energy and some campy plot turns powering the film. It’s quite fun, with Fiennes at the top of his game, Tucci more or less playing Stanley Tucci in a Cardinal costume, and Castellitto leaning hard into his villain’s role. (The film’s philosophical heart could not be clearer.) Then the first twist happens, and it bursts the realistic bubble enough to take you completely out of the film’s environment and remind you that this is just a page-turner adapted for the screen. The twist would itself have been enough to upend the film, but the timing is just heavy-handed, not to mention ridiculous, and the whole sequence relies on something outside of the conclave to redirect the course of events – which undercuts the film’s greatest strength, the sequestered nature of the conclave itself.

The second twist, which ends the film and apparently is straight from the book, is probably going to be the more controversial one if Conclave gets some legs in award season, but despite its similarly “WTF?” nature, it is more effective than the first twist because it’s funny, and in a script that largely dispenses with humor, that’s a pretty powerful way to wrap things up. It does lead Cardinal Lawrence to have to make a quick decision with huge consequences, with one (divine?) hand on the scale already, but the twist’s bigger impact might just be the reminder that, hey, this has all been good pulpy fun, and don’t take it all so seriously. And it is fun – I enjoyed the movie for what it was. It never drags, Fiennes is great in every scene (and he’s in just about every scene), and I certainly didn’t see the second twist coming. If you take it at face value, it’s a good time at the theater, nothing more.

I’ve seen none of the other Oscar contenders so far except for Dune 2, so I’m only guessing whether Conclave will end up in consideration for any of the big awards, but my gut says it’s going to sneak in as one of the last Best Picture nominees because it feels like a Serious Drama and has a lot of accomplished actors in its cast. Fiennes, who has two Oscar nominations to his name, feels like a lock to get one for Best Actor, and this is a fantastic performance from him; his combination of understated speech and telling expressions is perfect for Cardinal Lawrence, a man bedeviled (pun intended) by doubt yet driven by responsibility and love for the institution. Lithgow, a two-time Oscar nominee with six Emmys and two Tonys, is a Very Serious Actor who is kind of hamming it up here as Tremblay, wearing this “who me?” expression throughout the film that makes it pretty clear that, yes, you, almost from his first appearance. Tucci. The film utterly wastes Isabella Rossellini, who plays a nun who runs the housekeeping and catering staff for the conclave and is there to provide information on one of the scandals and, I presume, to be Isabella Rossellini. Of all of the supporting players here, Castellito might deliver the best performance, even though his character is rather two-dimensional, as he gives Tedesco such a fiery personality that he makes the threat of his papacy more palpable, with, perhaps, an unanticipated parallel to an imminent election of another sort.

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→ October 24, 2024
→ By

Dune: Part Two.

The first Dune movie from Denis Villeneuve was fantastic, ranking among my top 5 movies of 2021 for its scope, its pacing, multiple strong performances, and outstanding visuals. The film did well enough for Villeneuve to finance a sequel to complete the story from the first (and only worthwhile) of Frank Herbert’s novels. While Dune: Part Two still has the same strong special effects, the script isn’t as strong as that of the first film, and the limits of Timothée Chalamet’s range become all too apparent as the film progresses. (It’s streaming free on Max, as is the first one, or can be rented on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Dune: Part Two picks up right where the first film left off, after the Harkonnens have taken over Arrakis, killing most of Paul Atreides’s (Timothée Chalamet) family, while he and his mother (Rebecca Ferguson) have joined up with the Fremen, a tribe of nomads who live in the desert, led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who help the pair escape after Paul wins a duel against one of their warriors. The sequel tracks two major plot lines that will intersect at the film’s conclusion. The first covers Paul and his mother’s time with the Fremen, hiding from the Harkonnens and coexisting with the skeptical nomads while they plan how to retake the planet. The other follows the Harkonnens’ effort to control the planet’s spice trade, with Rabban (Dave Bautista) serving as his uncle’s (Stellan Skarsgård) proxy, but Rabban’s brother Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), a sadistic lunatic, is angling for the job.

The film seems to stay true to the book by devoting substantial time to Paul’s tenure with the Fremen, including how he works to convince them that he’s worth their protection but isn’t a prophet or a hero, just someone fighting the same evil forces he is. What works on the page doesn’t work as well on screen, though, as the result is a film that can’t manage its pacing, with long scenes of explanations and far too much of the movie’s constructed languages. There are some great action scenes, and the intrigues of the Harkonnens pulse with their own energy, even if Feyd-Rautha’s madness is over the top. Unfortunately, the script gives too much time to Paul, and not in a way that lets his character fully develop – and a lot of that comes down to the portrayal.

Chalamet is a highly decorated actor, with an Oscar nomination and three Golden Globe nominations under his belt, but I’m starting to think he’s more limited than it first appeared. (As if I weren’t already dreading the Bob Dylan biopic enough, now I’m worried we’re going to get Paul Atreides on the guitar and harmonica singing “Shelter from the Storm”.) There’s too little variation in his tone or expression here, which not only doesn’t fit the story, it doesn’t fit the character of the novel, either. Paul Atreides matures and develops substantially over the course of the book, and the script clearly allows him to do so as well, but there’s little to no difference between his affect and his delivery from the first movie to even the end of this one, when we get to the Big Speech and then the story’s resolution. I’m just starting to think he’s not as good of an actor as we thought he was, or as we thought he’d become.

Chalamet’s mediocre performance is even more stark because of the strength of many of the other people in the film, notably Bardem, as Stilgar, the leader of the Fremen and the one who believes that Paul is the prophet of their religion; Ferguson, as Paul’s mother, who becomes the spiritual leader of the Fremen, in accordance with the prophecy; and, of course, Zendaya, as Chani, Paul’s love interest, a much stronger character in the film than she is on the page, thanks also to Zendaya’s assertive portrayal. The cast even includes two other Academy Award winners beyond Bardem, Christopher Walken and Charlotte Rampling, both of whom play small roles without a ton of dialogue, but they help further overshadow Chalamet’s toneless performance.

Perhaps Dune: Part Two would work better if viewed immediately after the first film, rather than three years later – and I’m sure it would play better on the big screen than on my home television. It sounds like it’s going to get a Best Picture nomination, and possibly a Best Director nod for Villeneuve, neither of which is an outrage, although I’m guessing I’ll find ten movies I rank higher by the time this cycle is over. It’s just a disappointing ending given how great the first film was.

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→ September 17, 2024
→ By

Dorf Romantik.

I’ve played the solitaire video game Dorf Romantik, and found it kind of mindless – yes, there is some scoring to consider, but you always have a ton of options, it’s pretty easy to hit the basic objectives, and the game goes on way too long. I don’t really get the appeal, but I’m also not a video gamer of any stripe.

The board game adaptation of Dorf Romantik won the Spiel des Jahres in 2023, and man does that baffle me. The game isn’t bad; it’s just boring, even with the various additional rules you unlock as you play the campaign and get a handful of new tiles and tokens. I’m baffled by its victory, or the claims that either the board or video game is some sort of gentle or relaxing activity. It is aggravating in its dullness, in that while playing I thought of all of the other things I could do.

The board game is sort of a cooperative game, but the rules are the same as in the solo mode and I have no idea how or why you would play this with others. You draw a new hexagonal tile on each turn and place it on the board, making sure it is adjacent to at least one tile already on the map along a side (not a vertex). Tile edges only have to match if there’s a river or a railroad on the edges; otherwise, you can place tiles anywhere you’d like. Some tiles have a flag icon indicating that you must draw and place a scoring tile on them, which will display a number and show the color of one of the terrain types (including the river and railroad). To win the flag and its victory points, you must then create a continuous region of that terrain type, including the tile with the flag on it. Some require an exact number of tiles, while others have a minimum number that you can exceed. (Once a flag is removed, you can of course go beyond the number.) You can’t place a tile with a flag on it in such a way that its flag requirement will already be satisfied, of course. You must have at least three active points tokens on the board at all times; if you finish one, you draw a new tile from a separate stack that will give you a new flag.

At game end, you add up the values of the flags you completed and then score your longest river and longest railroad. That’s the first game, at least, as the box comes with a soft campaign where you mark off circles on a separate sheet to track your progress and then get to open additional boxes that add new rules and tiles once you reach certain milestones. The new stuff adds a little complexity and some additional ways to score, along with some different tiles that do things like combine a river/railroad with a terrain so the latter isn’t split in two, but none of it fundamentally changes the game.

The video game is actually worse, although I know it’s been a massive hit, probably aided by its low price (I got it on sale on Steam for under $10). That game gets longer as you complete its objectives, adding tiles to the stack every time you finish a flag, so you actually have to play worse to get it to end sooner. I suppose in that sense the board game is an improvement, because the tile stack is finite and thus so is the playing time. The video game version also sets objectives based on the number of trees or houses in a contiguous set of tiles, which becomes just the number of tiles showing these things in the board game, another big upgrade because in the video version you’re really just taking the app’s word for it.

I don’t think this game needs to exist in the first place – it’s not so much that it’s bad, but there is nothing original here, and it seems like little more than a brand extension. It’s like solo Carcassonne, which isn’t a thing. Nobody gets in your way and if you don’t get the tile you need this time, you’ll get it soon, because nothing is scarce in the tiles, not even the railroads or rivers. It just … is. I need a whole lot more than that from a game.

(There is a two-player version called Dorf Romantik: The Duel that just came out this month. That might be a lot more interesting, as it has a module that involves some direct player interaction. Or maybe it’s just another cash grab.)

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→ September 11, 2024
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Escape from New York.

The film Escape from New York is a cult classic, a film that is a weird relic in its way, aging more poorly for its simplistic views of the technology of the future than for any social aspects or commentary. A convict named Snake Plissken is sent into the penal colony of Manhattan to rescue the President from the prison gangs that run the island, leading him to team up with three untrustworthy people he meets there to try to complete the mission and escape with the President and a cassette tape (!) with critical information.

It’s perfect fodder for a cooperative board game, and indeed Pendragon Game Studio has produced just such a product, bringing on designer Kevin Wilson (Descent, Cosmic Encounter) to create it. Escape from New York the board game is solid enough and reasonably true to the theme once you get it on the table and set up, but this thing is a massive table-hog with too many components, and the rulebook is way too long and convoluted for a midweight game.

Players play as the four main protagonists of the film – Snake, Maggie, Brain, and Cabbie, with the game using the actors’ actual likenesses on cards and tokens. The game plays 1 to 4 players, although there are no separate solo rules; I assume you just play as a single character in that case, or control any number of characters you’d like. The players will start at the Library in the center of the large board, revealing adjacent spaces before moving into them, fighting prisoners, picking up items, and eventually reaching the Points of Interest spaces where they might meet any of the three Boss enemies (Duke, Romero, and Slag), find the President, or discover something else of importance. The goal is to get the President and the tape and the diagram of one of the bridges off the island, then get all player tokens to the start of the bridge, after which any one player can move everyone off. You need to do this before the Timer deck reaches the final card, which is the only way the players can lose.

That’s the most clever aspect of Escape from New York: You can’t die during the game; you can just run out of time. Players’ actions are all determined by their cards, with each character getting a unique deck and players beginning the game with their entire decks in their hands. If you take damage from a prisoner or a boss, you discard that many cards at random, rather than losing hit points. To pick up your discard pile, you must advance the Timer deck by one card, so this is a drastic choice you want to use only when necessary. Losing a lot of cards to damage results in moving through the Timer deck more quickly.

When you reveal an empty space that isn’t a Point of Interest, you take a tile from either the City or Central Park decks and flip it over, revealing icons that show what you’ll find there. Usually that’s one or two prisoners, but sometimes it’s an item, sometimes it’s a manhole that lets enemies move around more quickly, and sometimes it’s an event symbol that tells you to flip and reveal the top card of the event deck.

On your turn, you play two cards from your hand, choosing them both at the start of the turn before you know the outcome of the first card. Most action cards will advance the Noise tracker on the New York board; when that reaches ten you move a Mission cube, and when all four mission cubes are in the right box you flip and resolve another Timer card. Then you flip two cards from the New York deck, one of which advances the Noise tracker by one space, the other of which tells you an action to take that somehow makes things worse for you. All enemies in adjacent spaces will move into your token’s space if possible. Then the next player goes.

By now, you probably have some sense of just how many components there are in Escape from New York, and I haven’t even mentioned the roadblocks, cars, levels, special action cards, or personal objectives. (It’s semi-cooperative, as any player can turn traitor and try to win by themselves.) The rulebook itself doesn’t even cover everything – I found at least one icon without any explanation, and I wasn’t the only one confused about where the Duke is supposed to appear – and it explains many of the rules completely out of order of how you’d encounter them. A game with this many moving parts needs a quick summary to explain the basic rhythm and then a clearly organized list of explanations of all of the constituent parts of a turn and icons players might encounter. It’s not actually a heavy game, but it looks like one, and sets up like one, and the overlong rulebook (it’s at least 24 pages) makes it feel like one. It’s a shame on some level, because the game is way more accessible than it will seem to new players. All the card text is self-explanatory, and most of what you’re doing is moving, fighting, or “tricking,” a way to move prisoners out of your way without killing them. The setup has close to 20 distinct steps. Even bagging it up is a drag. Despite all of that, I would still recommend the game to players who like a heavier cooperative experience than Pandemic, and certainly to gamers who like the film. (Oh, I saw a video sponsored by the company in advance of the crowdfunding effort where the scapegrace describing the game called the movie “a very old film.” I got so mad I threw my Timex Sinclair 1000 out the window.) I can’t imagine bringing this to my table very often, though, given the setup and the time it’ll take to explain all the parts to new players.

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→ March 4, 2024
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All of Us Strangers.

A reclusive writer in London starts a fling with a young man in his apartment complex, after which he takes a trip to visit his childhood home, where he finds his parents – who died twenty or thirty years earlier – just as they were right before they died, apparently alive and very happy to see him. It’s a bizarre and immediately compelling premise, with the superb Andrew Scott in the leading role. Alas, All of Us Strangers squanders all of these gifts by completely flubbing the ending in the most trite and predictable fashion. (It’s streaming now on Hulu, or available to buy on amazon.)

Scott plays Adam, a screenwriter who lives alone, without a partner or even many (or any) friends, but when he spots Harry (Paul Mescal) outside, the two have instant chemistry, although Adam is as reticent as Harry is forward and it takes several encounters before the two even go as far as a kiss. Their first conversation seems to free up Adam to write more, and he decides to take a train to the neighborhood where he grew up so he can see his childhood home, which should be sitting empty. Instead, he sees his parents, who died in a car accident when he was twelve, apparently alive and well, as they were just before the died, although they seem unfazed by the fact that he’s an adult and if anything is older than they are. He returns to see them several times, gradually revealing more about his life, including a scene where he comes out to his mother and she reacts as if it’s still 1990 or so. He also begins to see Harry more frequently, but when he tries to bring Harry to see his parents, the house is dark and abandoned, and Harry is clearly perturbed at his friend’s erratic behavior.

For nearly all of this film’s run time, it exists on another plane, where you can accept the unreality of what’s happening because it’s simple and self-contained and gives us little glimpses into Adam’s character. The film is about him, and his growth, or at times his regression, is the heart of the film. Each of his interactions with his parents, played by a frumpy Claire Foy and a mustachioed Jamie Bell, reveals a little more about his personality and why he’s become the person he is, for better and for worse. The character development is strong enough to justify the premise, but the script still needs to find a way to resolve the question of what’s actually happening with Adam’s parents, and unfortunately it does so in as unsatisfying a manner as it could have, undoing much of the remainder of the film in the process as well.

Scott is the film’s saving grace, although his performance has gone largely overlooked in awards season here and in the UK beyond one nomination for him at the Golden Globes. The film was even nominated for six BAFTAs, winning none, but Scott didn’t even get a nod for Best Actor. It’s an understated performance in a quiet role, which may have hurt him with critics and voters, but without him this film is dead on arrival. Mescal is fine as Harry, although the character itself is a little one-note, with Mescal giving him enough charm and pathos to let the viewer overlook how fortuitous his appearance in Adam’s life seems to be.

With twenty minutes or so left, I thought All of Us Strangers would end up among my top five films of 2023, between Scott’s performance and the way it establishes such a clear vibe from the start. I’m struggling to think of a film that unraveled so badly in the way it concluded, though. There’s failing to stick a landing, and there’s missing the mat entirely.

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→ March 3, 2024
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Killers of the Flower Moon (film).

David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read, a true story that works as a thriller, an important part of American history, and a document of racism and injustice that continues to echo today. Like most fans of the book and/or Grann’s work, I was thrilled to hear Martin Scorsese was adapting it for the screen…

…and then I saw the movie was three and a half hours long.

It is a very good movie, but it just didn’t need to be this long, and it works in more detail than the core narrative actually needed. It’s become a trend with Scorsese to create these overlong films that bog down in minor details that sap the energy of the main plot, which in this case detracts from what might otherwise have been the best movie of the year if anyone had said to him that he needed to edit this down to a reasonable length. (It’s streaming on Apple TV+.)

The Osage Nation were once the dominant civilization in the central plains of North America, but in the 1870s, the U.S. government exiled them to a desolate part of what is now northern Oklahoma, a move that backfired on the white colonizers when it turned out that the new Osage lands sat on a large oil field. This made the Osage people quite rich on paper, giving them headrights to a share of the proceeds from the nation’s oil revenues, although a 1921 federal law said that the Osage couldn’t access the cash directly without approval of white guardians until they were ruled “competent.” A series of murders of Osage tribe members in the 1920s, ignored by local authorities, led the tribe to beg the nascent Bureau of Investigations to look into the cases, which uncovered a conspiracy to kill the Osage for their headrights and indeed birthed the modern FBI.

The Osage woman at the center of the case that brought the Bureau into Oklahoma was Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), who married a white carpetbagger named Ernest Burkhardt (Leonardo DiCaprio). Mollie’s two sisters, brother-in-law, and cousin were all murdered at the behest of Ernest’s uncle, William King Hale (Robert Deniro), while Ernest and King nearly killed Mollie by poisoning the insulin injections she needed for her diabetes before the Bureau arrived, led by Thomas White (Jesse Plemons), and solved the case, saving Mollie and sending her husband and uncle-in-law to prison.

The story here is so rich and compelling, especially in Grann’s rendition, that it would be hard to make a bad movie out of it; even when the film drags a little in pace, it’s still interesting because of the wide cast of characters and the sense of creeping doom that dominates the first two hours. All three leads are superb, with Gladstone especially strong, and Deniro looking the most invested in a part he’s been in forever. There’s no mystery as to who’s behind the killings, so any tension is from wondering how long they’ll get away with it, and, if you’re unfamiliar with the story, how many people will die before anyone takes the Osage – who are well aware these deaths are not accidental, as ruled by the coroner – seriously.

That makes the film’s bloat far harder to understand, because it just bogs things down and introduces a broad array of characters, nearly all drawn from real life and many played quite well by famous musicians, that the film doesn’t need. Keeping everyone straight in this movie requires a cheat sheet, and there’s a real imbalance to who’s getting that extra screen time – it’s the villains, all white men, while the Osage get far less screen time and have far fewer named characters on their side; the story unfurls from a neutral perspective, rather than from Mollie’s or that of the Osage in general. The real conspiracy was indeed this broad, involving cousins and criminals alike, yet for the sake of telling the story in a reasonable amount of time, Scorsese should have trimmed some of the names or at least kept a few more of them off screen.

The crimes themselves take up about two-thirds of the film, which does allow for the complex (to put it mildly) relationship between Mollie and Ernest, who had two kids together, to develop on screen, although the script may go too far in casting Ernest as a feckless pawn of his uncle rather than someone aware he was committing murder and poisoning his own wife. By the time the Bureau shows up, it is a welcome shot of energy in a film that had gotten stuck in its own mire, and Plemons livens things up even in an understated performance. The last hour, where the killers are brought to justice, zips by compared to the slow build that came before, with the main tension around whether Ernest will choose to stand by his uncle or confess to his crimes and, on some level, side with his wife. Even so, we get some overblown scenes like Brendan Fraser’s defense attorney bloviating in the courthouse with Ernest on the stand, a perfectly fine scene in its own right but not one that pushes the story forward. There are just so many bits here that could have been cut to make this movie two and a half hours, and in that case, it might have challenged for Best Picture, but instead we get an Apple TV+ movie that feels like it was trying to be a limited series instead.

Killers of the Flower Moon earned ten nominations, including the obligatory Best Director and Best Picture nods for Scorsese; this is the seventh film of his last nine to get him a Director nomination, although it seems far more of a recognition of his name than his work here. Gladstone is the overwhelming favorite to win Best Actress, which may be the only major award it wins; if it wins another, I’d guess Robbie Robertson might win for Best Original Score, as the score is strong, adding to many scenes without ever overwhelming the action or dialogue, and the fact that he died before the film was released will likely win him some additional votes. DiCaprio did not get a Best Actor nomination, even though he at least was better than one nominee in Bradley Cooper.

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→ June 11, 2023
→ By

Demon Copperhead.

Barbara Kingsolver shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – the first time the honor was split among two books – for her novel Demon Copperhead, which shared the honor with Hernan Diaz’s Trust. Demon Copperhead borrows its structure and characters from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, transplanting the whole story to a poor mining county in the Appalachians, narrated by its title character from his early childhood to adulthood as the opioid crisis devastates his community, family, and his own life.

Demon is born to a single mother in Lee County, where the mining industry employed nearly everyone and then left them underemployed, injured, and increasingly addicted to painkillers. Demon, whose real name is Damon but acquired the nickname “Demon” early in life and had it stick, never knows any stability from the word go – his mother is a recovering addict, marries a local tough guy who terrorizes her and abuses Demon, only to have his mother die and his stepdad toss him out into the hands of social services. His path takes him through two foster homes, including the con-artist McCobbs, then to his estranged grandmother’s house, then back to Lee County and the high school football team, only to have a knee injury push him into the bottomless well of oxycontin. It’s a parade of tragedies interspersed with dark humor, leading towards eventual small triumphs, told by one of the most memorable narrator characters I’ve ever encountered.

If you know the bones of David Copperfield, from the book or perhaps from Armando Iannucci’s faithful 2020 film adaptation, then you’ll know the general plot outline of Demon Copperhead, as it adheres to the former book’s major story beats right to the end. Almost every character here has a clear analogue in the original – Demon is David, the McCobbs are the Micawbers, U-Haul is Uriah Heep, and so forth – that also provides the foundation for the modern versions, although they’re fleshed out enough to feel different from the originals. You could see U-Haul becoming Demon’s main antagonist early on, especially once you connect him to Uriah, but the way in which this plays out is different enough from the original to make it seem new.

This novel’s real strength is Demon, though. Kingsolver has given him a unique voice that combines the wisdom of his experiences through the story, the naïveté of his place of birth, and layers of empathy that appear at surprising times throughout the work. Kingsolver has used interesting narrative techniques before, as in The Poisonwood Bible, but here she does so with a single character who is thoroughly developed, who grows and learns throughout the novel, and whose flaws are right there on display even in his own telling. David Copperfield is someone you root for throughout Dickens’s novel because he’s so inherently good, and his travails are the result of encounters with terrible people and the extreme economic inequality of England in the early 1800s. Demon is more complex, making poor choices, sometimes to the point of treating people who care for him quite badly, even missing out on opportunities and lifelines. It’s a little harder to root for him, although ultimately I came down on that side, bearing in mind that it was clear where things were all going to end.

Dickens’s work was a social commentary on that inequality and the abysmal treatment of the poor, especially children, in his era, a theme he’d first covered in Oliver Twist and would return to many times in the later parts of his life. Kingsolver does the same here, with two focal points – the opioid epidemic and its main drivers in Purdue Pharmaceuticals; and the abandonment of rural people by nearly every stage of government, from counties and school districts up to the federal level. It’s not subtle by any means, and that’s been a criticism of the book, but I don’t know how you can be subtle about the harm that opioids have wreaked on these parts of the country. Kingsolver delivers the commentary in the most granular fashion, by showing the epidemic’s impact on individual characters and their families, most notably children neglected, abused, or left orphaned by those addicted, with scant discussion of policy questions or legal maneuvers. Purdue gets its mention, but mostly because Demon’s Aunt June briefly dates a guy who’s a sales rep for the company, and for the rest of the book they’re an offscreen villain, while every form of government is asleep at its respective wheel. It’s very Dickensian in a contemporary way, trading the workhouse for rehab, sharing its disdain for the central government’s failure to protect its most vulnerable charges.

It’s an arduous read because of all of the slings and arrows Demon suffers along the way, but Kingsolver does it more concisely than Dickens, and with such a compelling voice as the narrator that it’s both quicker than its page count would imply and more enjoyable than you’d think for a story where people do horrible things to each other and themselves. The adult Damon’s wry, wise telling of his own life is what truly powered me through the book so quickly. And with such a distinctly American plot and setting, it’s a worthy winner of the Pulitzer honor.

Next up: Susanna Hoffs, one of my favorite musicians of the 1980s and early 1990s, just released her first novel, This Bird Has Flown.

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→ April 27, 2023
→ By

Living.

Living was the last English-language Oscar nominee on my list of movies to see, since I’m not interested in seeing Avatar and the only other nominees of note I haven’t seen are three of the International Feature picks. Scoring nominations this year for Best Actor (for Bill Nighy, his first) and Best Adapted Screenplay (for Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro), this adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s famed Ikiru is a quiet gem of a film, with a tour de force performance from its star and some lovely dialogue supporting him. It’s available to rent on amazon, iTunes, etc. (Full disclosure: I have never seen Ikiru.)

Nighy plays Mr. Williams, a widower and an aging bureaucrat in in the London County Council in the 1950s whose job seems to consist primarily of pushing paper around, especially when it can be pushed to another department on another floor. He never declines a request, merely passing the buck (or quid, I suppose) to someone else. His staff includes the young Miss Harris (Aimee Lee Wood), the lone woman in the group; the eager, brand-new employee Mr. Wakeling (Alex Sharp); and a few other replacement-level men who show no desire whatsoever to challenge the existing system.

This is all upended when Mr. Williams receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, with just months left to live, and finds himself terribly dissatisfied with his life. His son and daughter-in-law show little interest in him as a person, and he doesn’t seem to have any friends. He has no legacy to leave, no one who will truly miss him, so after vanishing from work for several days, he decides to take on one particular project that has been presented to his department and kicked around the building that he can see to fruition: turning a bombed-out building into a playground. His attempts to live a little also bring Miss Harris into the picture, as he takes her to lunch once or twice, and to a film, in an entirely chaste relationship that she can’t understand and that his daughter-in-law, with help from the neighborhood gossip, assumes is something more prurient. The film jumps ahead around the midpoint to show his funeral, after which we see flashbacks to the last few months of his life and the way his family and co-workers respond to his death. Their words and their behavior don’t exactly line up, although this might be the most authentic part of the entire script.

This is Bill Nighy’s film. I’ve always enjoyed his work, and argue just about every year that his story is the only remotely acceptable one in Love Actually, in large part because he treats the film with the reverence it deserves – none. He was outstanding in the British mini-series State of Play, and even charming in the ridiculous The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. This is the role of a lifetime, and he gives a performance to match it. His Mr. Williams is restrained, so constipated in speech that he’s hard to understand, but it makes the moments of actual emotion so much more powerful, even though he’s still actually kind of hard to understand. (Turn the volume up. Just a tip.) Nighy is often at his best in patrician roles, even though that’s not his upbringing, but here he gets a more consequential role in which to deploy that high-born air.

The script takes its time hitting its points, which appear to mirror those of the original film (based, I admit, on my reading of the latter’s Wikipedia entry), including a long, slow buildup to the doctor’s visit that defines the whole movie. That works because the dialogue is so precise – every word seems placed there for a specific purpose, especially those that come out of the mouth of Mr. Williams, yet these words never come across as forced, or out of character. Ishiguro is one of the greatest living prose writers, yet even across his novels, his voice changes to suit the style and genre of the work. Living is his work without sounding like his work, and the result is that Mr. Williams’ grief and revelations and enthusiasm for his one last project come through as genuine.

Nighy became an Oscar nominee at age 72, which Collider says puts him in the top ten for oldest such first-timers, forty-two years after his first credited film role. This is too un-showy of a role to win the honor – I’m surprised he even got the nomination, given how quiet and unpretentious he is as Mr. Williams – but he was certainly better than the fat-suit guy and the Elvis impersonator. Aimee Lee Wood, who is one of the stars of Sex Education, also gives a lovely turn in a smaller role as Miss Harris, serving as the unwitting confidante and comforter to Mr. Williams, while Alex Sharp, who bears more than a small resemblance to Matthew Murphy of the Wombats, is perfect as the wide-eyed innocent who hasn’t yet been ground down by the do-nothing mentality of the office. I’m not sorry to see Ishiguro lose out to Sarah Polley for her adapted screenplay of Women Talking, but both were quite deserving.

For those who are still curious about such things, I’ve got this in my revised top ten for 2022, at #9, just behind Tár and ahead of La Caja and Nope. I still have to see EO, Close, The Quiet Girl, and Return to Seoul, all of which are at least now out as rentals.

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