→ March 4, 2024
→ By

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
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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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→ 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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→ March 11, 2023
→ By

Women Talking.

Women Talking doesn’t lie – it is a film of women, almost exclusively, and they do a lot of talking, and since the vast majority of the film takes place in a single room, it has the feel of a stage play that’s been adapted for film. That’s not the case, as this is an adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel of the same name, but it does mean it won’t be to everyone’s tastes. It is to mine, though, as I love a movie that’s packed with strong dialogue, although the film’s extreme realism starts to break down near the end once the talking is done and the time for action arrives. (It’s available to stream on Amazon Prime.)

The novel is based loosely on a true story: In the early 2000s, the women in a small, isolated, retrograde Mennonite community in Bolivia would wake up with bruises and blood that indicated they’d been sexually assaulted during the night. The community’s elders claimed that they were making it up, calling it a matter of “female imagination,” and then claimed it was the work of demons. Some of the victims eventually caught their rapists in the act; it turned out a group of men in the colony were using an animal anesthetic to sedate entire families so they could rape the women, with victims ranging in age from 3 to 65. Ten men were convicted of rape or associated crimes and served jail time, while one fled and, as far as I can tell, remains at large.

Women Talking starts with the premise of the attacks and has the women of the colony, many of whom are functionally illiterate and almost none of whom has knowledge of the world beyond the community, hold a vote on whether to do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The vote results in a tie between the last two options, so a subgroup of the victims meets in one large room in a barn to decide for all of the women what to do. This discussion comes with time pressure, as the elders have told the women they have two days to forgive their rapists or face excommunication. The ensuing debate occupies the majority of the film’s running time.

The cast of Women Talking is an All-Star lineup. Two-time Emmy winner Claire Foy plays one of the women, Salome, who wants to stay and fight, advocating violence if necessary. Jessie Buckley, who has BAFTA and Oscar nominations to her credit, plays Mariche, whose anger comes out as sarcasm and derision directed at her fellow women, although as in most cases we learn that there’s a reason why she acts the way she does. Rooney Mara, herself an Oscar nominee, has probably the best performance I’ve seen from her as Ona, who has become pregnant by her rapist, and who is determined to carve an independent path for herself in a community that denies this to its women. Two-time Tony Award winner Judith Ivey plays one of the older victims in the room and delivers on of the most nuanced performances, as we first get the idea she might be a little daft, only to learn about her character’s depth and strength in layers. And Frances McDormand, the most decorated cast member of all, appears briefly in the film, although by the second time she appeared I’d forgotten her first scene completely.

Which all makes it a bit frustrating that the best individual performance in the movie comes from its lone male cast member, Ben Whishaw. He’s consistently great, but the way the script is written, his character, the milquetoast schoolteacher August, has the broadest range of emotions and actions, He’s hopelessly in love with Ona, who appears to return his affections to some degree but has refused to ever marry anyone. He’s in the room as the scribe, since he’s one of the few colony members who can read and write, but often finds himself asked for his opinions, which are then welcomed by some of the women and derided by others (Mariche in particular). It’s a numbers game – the women are all sharing the bulk of the great dialogue, while Whishaw is the sole male voice, and he’s half of the only real interaction between any two characters that doesn’t come from the stay/leave debate.

For most of its running time, Women Talking had me completely in its grasp, but the way the story resolves broke that spell. There’s a strong element of feminist fantasy here, almost from the start, but I could stay with it until the plot has to leave that one room. Either decision would have presented problems for the script, but this particular choice of resolution was improbable and also highly impractical, to the point where I couldn’t extend my suspension of disbelief enough to accept it. It takes a potentially great movie down to an above-average one, a 60/65 to a 55, although the power of much of the dialogue and some of the individual moments still stayed with me.

Women Talking took two Oscar nominations this year, one for Best Picture, which I think is fine given the other nominees; and one for Best Adapted Screenplay, which I know it probably won’t win but I think should get strong consideration because the script itself is so dense. This is all dialogue, and so much of the dialogue is great – although, again, this story puts vocabulary into the mouths of these characters that may not be realistic for women who’ve been denied education or worldly experience – that the film relies more on the quality of its script than most.

That’s nine of the ten Best Picture nominees for me; I can’t be bothered sitting in a theater for three and a half hours to watch the blue people, especially since I never saw the first Avatar. I haven’t changed my overall opinion that Everything Everywhere All At Once is the best movie of 2022, and the one I most want to see win the top honor. I’ll have more thoughts on the Oscars and my top movies of the year on Sunday.

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→ February 27, 2023
→ By

Blonde.

Blonde isn’t just the worst movie I’ve seen from 2022, by a long shot; it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s a patched-together collection of scenes that barely connect to each other, jumping through aspect ratios and shutter speeds and even from color to black and white with neither rhyme nor reason, like a teenaged filmmaker’s limited understanding of what it means to be experimental. It also fails at its most important task – giving the audience an interesting, three-dimensional portrait of its lead character, Marilyn Monroe.

The film tries to do a cradle-to-grave story, although the script, based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name, isn’t going for any sort of accuracy – most of what’s in this film is made up, often leaning towards the lurid, which you could probably guess quickly by how much time Monroe (Ana de Armas) spends topless for no apparent reason. We see her abusive childhood with a mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson, giving maybe the only decent performance in the movie). When she’s removed from her mother’s care to an orphanage, the film jumps forward to her pin-up years, then to a meeting with a studio head who rapes her almost the minute she’s done reading, then through a meandering story that sideswipes the films she made while spending far more time on her tabloid romances, one of her miscarriages, and an abortion that apparently never happened. She meets and marries Joe DiMaggio (played by some actor doing a bad Bobby Cannavale impression), then meets and marries Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), with no chemistry between her and either of these men, and in the case of Miller, no explanation at all of why they ended up together. An ongoing subplot where Monroe receives letters from a man purporting to be her father, whose identity she never knew, ends ridiculously, leading Monroe to take her own life with barbituates.

There is no defending this movie. It’s badly shot, looks bad, poorly acted, and incredibly poorly written, from character to dialogue to pacing. The opening story with Monroe and her mother, which recalls a better-done scene involving Mitzi in The Fabelmans, is disjointed, dark, and features her mother using stilted, bizarre vocabulary that wouldn’t make sense for an adult talking to another adult, let alone a parent talking to a preteen child. The flips between color and black-and-white photography happen without reason, and add nothing to the film. Monroe’s character jokingly asks if she’s just “a piece of meat,” but that is exactly how this movie treats her – she’s a bag of flesh and bones to be passed around or discussed or ogled, but she has no agency, no depth, no explanation beyond these idiotic Freudian notions that she has daddy issues or desperately needs to be a mother. Even the idea that she wanted to be taken more seriously as an actor is only brought up in passing, where the script just sort of waves to the notion as is drifts on by. Marilyn Monroe in Blonde is nothing but a victim of the world. I can’t think of a less generous interpretation of her life.

There are two rape scenes in Blonde, the second of which is unspeakably gross and degrading, even beyond what a complete fabrication that particular scene is. The camera focuses its male gaze on de Armas’s face while she is performing oral sex and trying not to gag, and stays there for something like two minutes. It has no artistic intent or merit; it exists to shock. I guess it worked, but it also underscored just how terrible this movie is from conception to execution. I doubt I would ever defend the existence of an on-camera rape scene in any film, but this film’s version is the worst of the worst.

De Armas does a dutiful impersonation of Monroe, although she can’t entirely lose her Cuban accent (and she’s a lot smaller than Monroe was, which seems a very odd choice given all the efforts to otherwise make people in this movie look like their real-life counterparts). It’s just a dead character, and she isn’t capable of infusing any life into it. Her brief role in No Time to Die highlighted how ebullient and energetic she can be on screen; Blonde shows that a bad script can leave her a walking doe-eyed corpse. You could argue this isn’t her fault, but giving this performance an Oscar nomination for Best Actress is more an acknowledgement of the fact that she had to suffer through this awful film – as did everyone who voted for her – than a measure of actual quality. Giving de Armas a nod over Tilda Swinton (The Eternal Daughter) is a giant farce, and should have garnered way more controversy than the Andrea Riseborough one did. I can think of at least five other lead performances by actresses that would have been more worthy, and I’ve only seen about 36 films from the 2022 Oscar cycle.

(In no order: Emma Thompson from Good Luck to You, Leo Grande; Jennifer Lawrence from Causeway; Ruth Wilson from True Things; Florence Pugh from The Wonder; and Frankie Corio from Aftersun.)

No one else fares much better, although there’s a mercy in how many characters we see in that none of them is on screen for very long. The two actors playing Cass Chaplin and Eddy Robinson are the most cringe-inducing, as they’re both doing some kind of impersonation of Skeet Ulrich’s character from Scream, right down to the hair (wrong decade, guys), in yet another complete fabrication that in this case informs the movie’s incredibly ill-conceived climax.

Blonde barely qualifies as a movie. It’s an absolute mess. I admit that having not read the book, I may have been unprepared for how far it diverges from history. If I set that aside, however, this movie is still garbage. Norma Jean deserved so much better.

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→ January 11, 2023
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Fleishman is in Trouble.

Fleishman is in Trouble, streaming now on Hulu, is an adaptation of the 2019 novel of that name, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the title character and Claire Danes as his ex-wife. It’s bad. In fact, it’s bad in a lot of different ways, but none more so than the fact that it doesn’t even seem to understand who the most interesting character in the series is.

Dr. Toby Fleishman (Eisenberg) is a successful hepatologist at a New York City hospital who is somewhat recently divorced from talent agent Rachel (Danes) when, after a weekend when he has their two kids, she fails to come pick them up at her assigned time – and the next day, she’s not only still AWOL, she’s unreachable. This becomes the catalyst to explore the history of their now-defunct marriage, Toby’s experiences as a single guy, and his friendships with Libby (Lizzie Caplan) and Seth (Adam Brody), whom he’s known since they all spent a semester in Israel during college.

Libby is the narrator, and the stand-in for the author, and we also get a fair amount of her story as well. She’s married to a safe, boring lawyer (Josh Radnor), with whom she has two kids and shares a nice house in the Jersey suburbs. She was working as a writer, but quit about two years before the events of the show to become a stay-at-home mom. With Toby getting a divorce and living it up as a single guy, while she finds the other stay-at-home moms to be incapable of having a modestly intellectual conversation, she falls into an existential crisis of her own.

The way the series unfurls, we get mostly Toby’s perspective for the first six episodes. Rachel is derisive towards him, even in front of friends; consumed by her work; and diffident towards her kids. In his telling, she’s all of the problems, and he comes to believe she was also unfaithful to him with a mutual friend. Only some of this is accurate, although when we get more of her side of the story, the result is we realize he’s also kind of an ass. Blame may not be shared equally, but neither of these two is free from it. By the time the final episode began, I hated them both, with Eisenberg more or less doing the Mark Zuckerberg character from The Social Network and Danes hitting one very loud note over and over.

Toby, it turns out, is high on his own supply, probably exacerbated by the success he’s having on dating apps. (Jesse Eisenberg is listed at 5’7”. He would not be doing that well on the apps in real life.) He and Rachel have differing memories of pivotal events in their marriage, including a traumatic scene around the birth of their daughter, and when Rachel develops post-partum depression with psychotic elements, Toby, a medical doctor, recommends … a support group. Not a psychiatrist, or anyone who could prescribe something. It’s hard to fathom, but it also may be a sign he really doesn’t take his wife seriously at all. She, meanwhile, is a very thinly drawn stereotype, the embodiment of the myth that you can’t be a successful working woman and a good mother together, which is especially odd in a series that depicts the alternative, stay-at-home moms, as vapid robots who walk around with an unearned sense of superiority and refer to a certain style of interior decoration as “mid-cench.”

Which brings us back to Libby, who should have been the star of the series (and, I presume, the book). Caplan gives the one truly good performance of anyone here, and it’s partly to her credit and partly because Libby is the only three-dimensional character. The winter of her discontent should have been enough to carry the movie, without the pointless mystery of Rachel’s disappearance (which gets an answer, but in a very unsatisfactory way). Libby is 41, with two kids who are approaching the point where they don’t need her like they did probably two or three years prior, and no longer has an active career. It’s the age and the point in life where feelings of regret over past choices you can’t unmake and the closing of future possibilities just due to age and circumstance are common. It’s a midlife crisis. It shouldn’t bother you, but it does. And Libby is aware of this, on some level – she knows her life is, if not great, solidly okay, and privileged, and even that she has unusual agency to make things better for herself. She even has the agency to choose to leave it through divorce, if she wants. The series isn’t interested enough in going deeper with her character, instead spending time with some of the worst sex scenes you will ever see as we follow Toby’s adventures in dating. There are some good parts of the Libby story, with one episode that’s primarily dedicated to her, but for every bit that’s telling (the freezer) there’s one that’s absurd (the pancakes).

The cinematography in Fleishman is a disaster too; the series relies way too much on a spinning camera gimmick that wasn’t just overused, but was nauseating, and that added nothing whatsoever to the story. It becomes the series’ crutch any time it needs to speed up time, or try to show a character’s confusion, rather than just doing so via dialogue or narration. I’ve seen action and sci-fi films/shows that were less reliant on camera movements, and can’t remember feeling like I had to turn away multiple times to avoid getting disoriented myself. This is supposed to be a realistic story, and all this gimmick does is detract from that.

The ultimate failure of Fleishman, though, comes down to where it rests its eye. The story puts us in a tiny niche of society – a very narrow subset of upper-class Manhattanites, where almost everyone around Toby and Rachel is a social climber obsessed with status and money, getting their kids into the Right Schools and using the right decorators and so on. (I was glad to see Ashley Austin Morris, who played Francine on the Electric Company reboot, appear as a side character; she doesn’t have a lot to do, but she does it well.) The script substitutes character quirks, like having Toby on some sort of weird keto or paleo diet for his entire adult life, for real depth, to the point where we don’t get to know any of the principals, let alone empathize with them beyond Libby. Caplan gives by far the best performance of anyone in the series, which makes it even more galling that the story doesn’t center her character outside of one episode, and even at that it’s never quite explained why Libby puts up with Toby when he’s consistently horrible to her. Libby is in Turmoil would have been a much better series, and then she could have just introduced Toby and Seth as her jerk friends.

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→ March 21, 2022
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CODA.

CODA has become the top underdog to win Best Picture after taking the top honors at the Screen Actors Guild and Producers Guild of America awards in the last few weeks, buoyed by Jane Campion tone-deaf comments at the Critics Choice Awards when The Power of the Dog won the top prize there. It’s definitely the feel-good movie of the year, and well-executed for its type, but it’s formulaic and predictable enough that it doesn’t belong in the Best Picture conversation despite its positives. (It’s available to stream free on Apple TV+.)

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) is the CODA of the title – a Child of Deaf Adults, born hearing to deaf parents (Troy Kotsur, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and Marlee Matlin) and with a deaf older brother (Daniel Durant). The family lives in Gloucester, on the north shore of Massachusetts, and runs a fishing boat, for which they depend on Ruby as the one hearing member of the family, thus keeping them in compliance with Coast Guard rules. Ruby loves to sing, and if you can’t see where this going, you might not have seen a movie before. Of course, the music teacher at Ruby’s school (Eugenio Derbez) hears Ruby and suggests she apply to Berklee, offering to help her prepare for her audition, forcing her to choose between her family and a career.

As a coming-of-age story, CODA checks the right boxes, not least of which is the humor essential to this sort of narrative. Ruby’s parents are impossible, probably too much so to be credible, but because the film largely works from her point of view, it works because just about every teenager thinks their parents are impossible. Kotsur is fantastic, including a few scenes where he improvised some dialogue, not just in his scenes with Ruby but also in the subplot about the decline of commercial fishing in general and the way that the single buyer for fish at their port seems to take advantage of the family when Ruby isn’t there. (More on that in a moment.) Ruby is also bullied at school, in part because when she first started attending she spoke ‘funny,’ but also because her family fishes for a living, even though they are hardly the only family in town to do so – and, by the way, where exactly are the Gloucester accents? – which gets in the way of her crush on Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo of Sing Street), who the music teacher assigns to do a duet with Ruby, because of course he does.

CODA follows a pretty clear formula from start to finish, and you’ll see everything coming a mile away, right down to the big finish. It at least improves on the French original by casting deaf actors in the roles of the deaf characters, but this is still a paint-by-numbers script, and it centers the experiences of Ruby over those of her family members, as if to say that the burden of being a hearing person in a deaf family is greater or more important than the burden of being a deaf person in a hearing world. That includes some nonsensical scenes at a doctor’s office and in a court where Ruby translates for her father, even though the Americans with Disabilities Act requires the provision of an interpreter in both settings. This isn’t just a plot contrivance – it violates a federal law, and a half an hour or so north of Boston, this just isn’t going to happen. The doctor’s office scene is mined for Ruby’s embarrassment, but the courtroom scene is there just to underline how helpless her family will be without her there, and that’s both wrong and embarrassing for the screenwriters – who are hearing, by the way, and appear to miss the boat (pun intended) several times on deaf experience and culture. (Here’s a take from a deaf writer who found the film frustrating for that reason.) You know she’s going to nail the audition and get the guy and figure something out with her parents, because that’s just how these movies work.

The film does do many things right, starting with representation of deaf people in the first place, although I’d like to know where the family’s deaf friends, who are mentioned but never seen, are hiding for the entire film. This world is built by people without disabilities for people without disabilities, and if you have a disability of some sort, whether it’s mobility, sight, hearing, or something else, you will find the world has built extra obstacles for you because the easiest and cheapest path was to pretend that you don’t exist. Ruby’s family ends up playing an important role among the fishing community as they push back against an exploitative middleman and what they perceive as overregulation (for which they must pay directly), and that wouldn’t happen if Ruby weren’t there to interpret in both directions at one critical public meeting. It’s a sign of what’s lost to everyone when we marginalize any set of people, and shows the isolation of her family while also providing several humorous moments.

Kotsur’s performance rivals that of Kodi Smit-McPhee’s for the best by an actor in a supporting role, and I’d be good with either winning the Oscar in that category on Sunday. Jones’s work might be flying under the radar too much, but she’s also excellent, with great comedic timing and a lovely singing voice that at least makes it plausible that her teacher would react to her singing the way he does. Derbez’s character is ridiculous, but he plays the hell out of it, and I challenge you not to like him as he leans into the artiste stereotype, flipping his hair and rolling the r in his name, Bernardo, for about ten seconds each time he says it. By the time she gets to the audition at Berklee, which you know the whole time she’s going to end up attending, the script just piles one absurd element on top of another to get to the desired outcome. It’s charming, but you’re just going to have to accept the unreality of it, and that’s a shame given the movie’s clear intent to put deaf people and deaf culture in the center of the story. It’s an entertaining film, but not a great one, better honored for its performances than for the script or the film as a whole.

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→ March 18, 2022
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Drive My Car.

Drive My Car has become the critical favorite of awards season, winning the best film prize from the LA Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Society of Film Critics, a trifecta that has happened six times previously, with the last four films to do so going on to win Best Picture. It spurred one of the best pieces I’ve read on movies in this, a  cycle, Justin Chang’s piece from late January arguing for the Oscars to nominate the film – his favorite of 2021 – for Best Picture. He was right, and the film did get the Best Picture nod it deserved, as well as nominations for Best Director and Best International Film. After Jane Campion’s tone-deaf, ill-timed comments at the Critics Choice Awards, which came just four days before voting opened, it might even have a chance to win the big prize.

Based on a brief short story by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car is a three-hour meditation on grief and recovering from loss, beautifully shot and acted, with a script that pulls great emotion from small moments and quiet interactions among its characters. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a stage director and actor whose wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) narrates stories she creates for him during and after they have sex. Shortly after Yusuke discovers that she’s cheating on him, he returns home to find her dead on the floor of a cerebral hemorrhage. Two years later, he’s invited to stage his version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a multilingual production, in Hiroshima, where his contract requires him to stay an hour away and use a driver, Misaki (T?ko Miura), to get him back and forth. These drives, and the conversations that take place in the car, explore the two characters’ traumas and share difficulty coping with their grief and guilt over what they might have done differently to prevent the tragedies in their pasts.

Drive My Car immerses you in its world, the one facet it shares with Murakami’s writing – it’s akin to living inside of someone else’s dream for three hours, thanks to the gorgeous shots of Hiroshima and the unhurried plot, which reveals its secrets naturally, as the relationship between Yusuke and Misaki develops and the two begin to confide in each other. Yusuke and Oto lost a child earlier in their marriage, which we learn in oblique fashion near the start of the film but without any explanation, which only adds to Yusuke’s guilt and grief over losing his wife – especially since he never had a chance to confront her about her infidelity. He ends up hiring the actor with whom she cheated to play the title character in Uncle Vanya, with what seems like ill intent, but after an intense conversation between the two in the back of the car where the actor tells Yusuke the end of a story that Oto had never finished, his view softens and he realizes there were things about his wife he never knew.

There are some strange plot contrivances that never quite pay off. Yusuke develops glaucoma in one eye, which he discovers after the condition causes him to get into a car accident, which you’d think would be reason enough for him to end up with a driver. Instead, the glaucoma never comes up again in the film, and the screenwriters concoct this bizarre contract with the theater to force him to use a driver – which he’s reluctant to do because of the importance of his routine while driving, right down to the car itself, which we learn is closely associated in his mind with his wife. Getting Yusuke a driver is central to the unfolding of the story, but the glaucoma could have been the reason for it – or it didn’t need to be in the film at all.

I have never seen or heard any performance of Uncle Vanya, so I read the Wikipedia summary of the play to try to understand what was happening on the stage within the film, as well as its connection to the overall plot. (There’s a brief scene near the start of the film where Yusuke appears in a production of Waiting for Godot, a story about two people waiting for a third, unseen person who never comes, talking endlessly about it, which seems like a more obvious parallel to the story of Yusuke and Misaki.) The actors in the play speak different languages and often can’t understand each other without Yusuke or his local assistant translating, with actors who speak Mandarin, English, Korean, and Korean Sign Language in the production, but despite diffident direction from Yusuke, several of the actors experience breakthroughs while working with the material, forming bonds with each other and connecting more with the characters, an allegory for Yusuke’s own resistance to exploring his own grief or just his own emotions. Two of the main characters in Chekhov’s play are stuck, pining for the same woman, the wife of Vanya’s brother-in-law, whose first wife (Vanya’s sister) has died. Vanya has dedicated most of his life to managing his brother-in-law’s estate, but realizes that he’s wasted his time on a man of limited ability and even less sense of the value of other people, all while waiting for a woman who is unavailable to him.

Much commentary about Drive My Car has focused on how well it translates the dreamlike nature of Murakami’s writing to the screen. The comments get it half right. This film does replicate the all-consuming aspect of Murakami’s work, but that’s found in his novels, not in his short stories; the stores in Men Without Women, the collection where “Drive My Car” appears, are scant, like shadows of ideas, and lack the texture or altered realities of most of his novels. The comments also constitute Burning erasure, as that film, the best of 2018, followed the same formula, extrapolating a wispy Murakami short story into a film well over two hours long that developed its characters (its men, at least) and created layers of back story and scene. Drive My Car does so as well, with strong performances by both of its leads, and offers a thematic and visual complexity absent from the story on which it is loosely based. It’s the best movie I’ve seen from 2021 so far, with just two Best Picture nominees (CODA and Don’t Look Up) and at least two significant international films (Playground and Petite Maman), and while the odds are still against it winning Best Picture or Best Director, it absolutely deserves both honors.

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