→ March 11, 2023
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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
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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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→ March 14, 2022
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West Side Story.

StevenSpielberg had wanted to film a new version of the 1957 musical West Side Story, which was first adapted in 1961 in a film that won Best Picture, for several years before filming began in July of 2019. This new version, with a script by Tony Kushner that hews more closely to the original stage play at several points, was delayed by a year due to the pandemic, but came out in time to be eligible for this year’s Oscars, earning seven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Ariana DuBose. It’s better than the 1961 film in some ways, worse in others, making it a perfectly fine film that nobody actually needed.

The framework of the story is the same as that of the first film: Two gangs of street toughs are engaged in a turf war on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the largely Puerto Rican Sharks and the white Jets, led by Bernardo (David Alvarez) and Riff (Mike Faist), respectively. Tony used to be in the Jets before he went to jail, and is trying to go straight now that he’s home, but at a community dance where both gangs arrive with their girls, he meets Bernardo’s sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), and the two fall immediately in love. Tony works at Doc’s, which is managed by Doc’s Puerto Rican widow (Rita Moreno), who advises him against pursuing Maria while helping him learn some Spanish phrases. Bernardo isn’t happy to see his sister with a white guy, and wants her to marry his friend Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera), while Bernardo himself is with Maria’s friend Anita (DuBose). The two gangs decide to hold a “rumble,” a fight that ends up leaving two dead and has disastrous consequences for the star-crossed lovers.

I’ll save the biggest problem for last, but one major flaw in this version of West Side Story is that Ansel Elgort sucks. He wasn’t good in Baby Driver, where he barely had to do anything, but he’s awful here in every way – he’s stiff, uncharismatic, and dull, and his singing is the worst of any major character. Casting him was a poor choice, underscored by how much better Faist is as Riff – he’s a rascal, but has all the charm that Elgort lacks, and he owns every scene the two have together. Zegler is far better as a singer and actor than Elgort is, and unlike most of the cast, looks close to the age of her character. In general, the women in the film outshine the men, and the Jets’ big number, “Officer Krupke,” is one of the songs that’s clearly inferior to that of the original film.

There are some small differences from the 1961 film that do improve the end result, not least of which is employing Latinx actors as the Sharks and their girlfriends. The original had Natalie Wood, the daughter of Russian immigrants, in the lead role as Maria, and George Chakiris, the son of Greek immigrants, as her brother Bernardo. Both used comically bad accents that sounded more like mockery than imitation. Zegler and Elgort do their own singing, which neither of their counterparts did in the 1961 film. The character of Anybodys, a tomboyish Jets wannabe played by Susan Oakes in the original, is now much more fleshed out here, depicted as a trans man and played by iris menas, a nonbinary and trans actor. It’s a win for representation, but also adds substantially to the story, with Anybodys the character who gains the most in depth and screen time between the original and the remake. The audio quality is improved, of course, although sometimes that works against the singers, such as the men in “America,” whose vocals sound tinny, especially in comparison to the women on that song.

West Side Story can’t escape its fundamental, ontological problem: There is no good reason for this film to exist. The story is the same. The songs are all the same. The choreography is the same – perhaps captured more effectively by better camerawork and modern technology, but it’s still the same old song and dance. Elgort is a dud, a poor actor and mediocre singer whose hold on Maria is hard to believe. It’s a nostalgia play for Spielberg, and I’m sure 20th Century/Disney thought it would be a huge moneymaker, although that was foiled by the pandemic. For this film to get seven Oscar nominations while the superior In the Heights got zero – not even one for a song! – is a travesty.

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→ February 17, 2022
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Dune.

Dune could have gone wrong so many ways, but the biggest risk in converting Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic to the big screen was always the plot. The novel’s setting is iconic, from the desert planet to the sandworms, yet the complexity of the story around the Christ-like Paul Atreides stood out as the greater challenge, the one aspect of the book that couldn’t be addressed with CG. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune does a remarkable job of distilling the first half of the book into a single, accessible story that simplifies the plot without overdoing it, while also providing the look and feel that have helped make the novel an enduring classic of its genre.

(Disclaimers: I love the original Dune novel, so much that I read all five of Herbert’s increasingly terrible sequels, but have still never seen the David Lynch film adaptation from 1984.)

Dune follows the familiar template of the ‘chosen one,’ a story arc that stretches back to the Bible and continues now in YA fiction, most notably the Harry Potter series. The messiah here is Paul Atreides, the teenaged son of the Duke Leto Atreides, who rules the planet Caladan, and his concubine Lady Jessica, a member of the cultish spiritual order the Bene Gesserit. Paul exhibits unusual mental abilities from an early age that indicate that he may be the savior foretold by the Bene Gesserit’s prophecy. The story opens when the Emperor orders the Duke to take stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the drug known as spice or mélange, which also happens to be an essential element in interstellar travel. The present rules of Arrakis, House Harkonnen, are not especially keen to lose their powers, leading to armed conflict that puts Paul on the run and in charge of his own destiny.

Villeneuve’s decision with his co-screenwriters to split the book into two films, hoping the first would fare well enough that the studio would greenlight the second, paid off twice – it did do well enough that we will get a sequel, and I would argue that it only did that well because it didn’t try to cram a densely plotted 500-page novel into a 150 minute movie. There’s so much room to breathe here that Timothée Chalamet gets far more screen time to give a little depth to Paul’s character, while Rebecca Ferguson, as Lady Jessica, may be an even bigger beneficiary, as some of that character’s most important scenes would almost certainly have been cut in a single-film adaptation. Paul’s character comes alive more in the second half of the book, once he’s on the run with the Fremen people, which leaves a modest void in a first-half movie for another central character to fill, and Ferguson does so with the film’s best performance.

The cast of Dune is incredible on paper, although the result is more “I can’t believe they got Charlotte Rampling!” than “I can’t believe how great Charlotte Rampling is!” Oscar Isaac is here. So is Javier Bardem. Stephen McKinley Henderson, who you know by sight even if you don’t know him by name. And there is some value in having these very famous people, any of whom can command a scene by themselves, in smaller roles. They don’t get quite enough to do – not even as much as Jason Momoa does in a memorable turn as Duncan Idaho.

The film does look amazing, though. Villeneuve is no amateur at worldbuilding on the screen, and this is the Arrakis of the page, whether in wide shots or close-ups, feeling vast and foreboding and terrifyingly dry. You’ll find yourself craving water watching this film. Many of the special effects are impressive, especially those showing the various flying vehicles on the surface of the planet, but there’s just as much wonder in the sword fights or the scenes showing troops massed in formation when the Atreides arrive on Arrakis to take control.

Dune ended up with ten Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Cinematography, and Best Adapted Screenplay, but not Best Director, which surprised me given how much Villeneuve had to put together here even taking the script (which he co-wrote) as a given. I’m not surprised at the lack of acting nominations, given how many people and named characters in the film, and how little depth most of them get even in a film that’s a solid two and a half hours. Ferguson might have had an argument for a supporting nod, but that’s probably it. My guess is Dune wins a bunch of technical awards – ones it may very well deserve – without taking Best Picture or Adapted Screenplay. Of the four BP nominees I’ve seen so far, though, I think it’s my favorite.

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→ January 12, 2022
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The Lost Daughter.

The Lost Daughter is the directorial debut of actor Maggie Gyllenhaal, who also adapted the screenplay from an early novel by the Italian author known as Elena Ferrante, the mind behind the Neapolitan cycle of novels that begins with My Brilliant Friend. Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as the same character in two different eras, the film presents a haunting portrayal of motherhood in a world that prefers mothers to exist in tightly constrained boxes.

Leda, a college professor of comparative literature and mother of two grown daughters, has come to a Greek island on a working vacation, with Colman playing her in the film’s present day. Shortly after her arrival, a boisterous American family arrives to disrupt her idyll, including a young mother (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter, Elena. The girl goes missing on the beach one day, and Leda ends up the one who finds her – but Leda takes Elena’s doll, holding on to it even though the girl is inconsolable. Her subsequent interactions with the family trigger a series of flashbacks to when Leda was a young mother herself (where Buckley plays her), trying to balance her career and her two young daughters, with a husband who is unsupportive, to say the least. Leda’s memories, and the choices she made, invade on her present day, leading to erratic behavior and more questionable decisions.

Much of Ferrante’s work revolves around casual sexism in Italian society (a fair analogue for western society as a whole, but probably even more misogynistic than its peers), from who women marry to what they may do for work to how they’re expected to be mothers. At its most superficial level, The Lost Daughter shows Leda today coping with the weight of memories, and some regrets, over choices she made as a young mother, all because she’s seeing a young mother now whose husband doesn’t appreciate her and who herself may not fully appreciate her own daughter. Leda faced an untenable situation, trying to complete her graduate studies with two young children at home and a husband who believes his work takes priority. An academic conference gets her a brief respite from the dual life at home, and leads her the major inflection point of her life.

Leda in the present is a powder keg in search of a spark; the flashbacks show how the keg got its powder. Gyllenhaal gives us scene after scene of Leda struggling with one or both of her girls – at bath time, at meal time, and especially when she’s trying to work and her husband is nowhere in sight. It’s such an atypical and nuanced portrait of motherhood for the movies: Most movie mothers are saints, and if they’re not, they’re monsters. We see Leda losing her patience with her kids, or failing to respond to them as a mother “should” by the norms of the genre, and Gyllenhaal portrays it all without judgment or scorn. It is here that the film becomes whole, and solid, rather than superficial. The greatness of The Lost Daughter lies in how it treats Leda’s motherhood as aggressively normal.

The Lost Daughter loses something, no pun intended, when Leda starts to act bizarrely in the present, none more so than when she keeps the damn doll. The theft itself was plausible, but to continue to keep it when the child is wailing for it and her mother and family are desperate for its return just paints Leda as a terrible person. My interpretation, at least, is that what the world has done to Leda has led her to this point, whether she’s crazy, or delusional, or truly misanthropic, and that serves to undermine the more important theme here, that society is crazy, and misogynistic, and forced Leda into a choice she still can’t reconcile.

In Greek mythology, Leda is a young woman whom Zeus covets, so he takes the form of a swan, rapes her, and impregnates her. She gives birth to a girl, Helen – as in, of Troy – which is the Anglicized version of the name Elena. (Elena was my maternal grandmother’s name. She went by Helen.) Here, Elena isn’t Leda’s daughter, though; she’s the child on whom Leda seems to fixate when thinking about her own daughters, Bianca and Martha. Homer’s version of the myth has Helen abandoning her children to elope with Paris (or, possibly, being abducted), sparking the Trojan War. The Leda myth appears elsewhere in the movie, as Leda the character was a scholar and avid reader of Yeats, who wrote “Leda and the Swan” about the legend, so the allusion is clearly intentional.

Colman has already been nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, and won Outstanding Lead Performance (an all-gender category) at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. She’s a lock for an Oscar nod for the same, and deserving. At the same time, Jessie Buckley is just as pivotal to this film’s success, and overdue for this sort of accolade, delivering an outstanding performance in Beast and a similar one in Wild Rose to little fanfare. Buckley has less screen time to fill out the character of Leda the young mother, yet that character provides essential depth to the story; if Buckley can’t convince the viewer of the agony and struggle of Leda as a mother and striving academic, the present-day parts that were already shaky would collapse. Gyllenhaal should be in the running for nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay (likely) and Best Director (unlikely, given the category’s extensive historical bias against women).

This might be the best movie I’ve seen so far from 2021, and if not, it offers the most fodder for consideration after it ended. There’s more here than one blog post, by one writer, who also happens to be a man, could possibly cover.

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→ January 6, 2022
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tick, tick … BOOM!

tick, tick … BOOM! is the ‘other’ Jonathan Larson musical, the one he wrote and performed himself a handful of times before he finished and sold Rent. As you probably know, Larson died of an aortic aneurysm, likely the result of undiagnosed Marfan syndrome, the night before Rent opened. That makes the story of tick, tick … BOOM! even more poignant – and sometimes painful – to watch: It’s about a young would-be playwright who is about to turn 30 and is wondering if he’ll ever get a play produced, or if he has to give up his dream and find a ‘regular’ job like his roommate Michael.

Lin-Manuel Miranda directed this film from Steven Levenson’s adaptation of Larson’s stage musical, splitting the film into two threads: A live performance of the play itself, powered by Andrew Garfield as Larson, and recreations of scenes from Larson’s life to which he refers within the play. At the time that he wrote this play, Larson was working at a diner while trying to get his first play, a dystopian sci-fi musical called Superbia that was loosely based on 1984, produced. His difficulties and his approaching birthday have led him to an existential crisis, and to a breaking point with his girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp), a dancer who gets a big opportunity in western Massachusetts that would force her to move out of New York. Larson’s roommate, Michael (Robin de Jesús), has given up his acting dreams to take a job in advertising, earning a steady income that’s enough to get him a better apartment and a fancy car. The story takes place against the backdrop of late 1980s/early 1990s New York, especially the AIDS crisis, with one of Jonathan’s co-workers dealing with the disease (which became a major subtheme in Rent as well).

Garfield is tremendous here as Larson – he’s brimming with enthusiasm and dry wit when he’s doing the stage part, anxious and frazzled and torn in different directions when he’s in Larson’s regular life. He carries the movie, even with a raft of strong supporting performances, including Shipp, de Jesús, and a surprisingly strong turn from Vanessa Hudgens as his foil in the stage play. It hinges on the lead, though, given how much of the movie is him singing and talking on the stage, and he delivers. I’d be floored if he didn’t join Will Smith among the Best Actor nominees for the Oscars this year.

I didn’t see Rent during its 12-year run on Broadway, or any of its tours; I’ve only seen the recording of the last date of that initial run, and have listened to the soundtrack. I know the music well enough now to know that it’s much better than the music in tick, tick … BOOM! This musical doesn’t have anywhere near the memorable numbers of Larson’s magnum opus – a tautological argument, since that’s why Rent is his magnum opus in the first place – but this film feels like the double A version of Rent‘s big leagues. These songs sound like they come from Larson in both music and lyrics, but they lack the strong hooks of “Seasons of Love,” “Take Me or Leave Me,” “Light My Candle,” or “La Vie Bohème.” The best song here might be the finale, “Louder Than Words,” which is the song that would sound most at home in Rent. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge this musical against a critically acclaimed juggernaut, but that’s the inevitable result of a compelling story that adheres so closely to Larson’s real life.

That might imply that tick, tick … BOOM! isn’t worth watching – it is. Being less than Rent is hardly an insult. The plays differ primarily in how the stories differ: This is autofiction, where Rent is a broad study of a set of characters, a time, and a place. It’s more than a historical artifact, not just of interest only because Rent became a Broadway classic, but my honest response was that it was fun and enjoyable but the music didn’t hit me like I want a musical’s soundtrack to.

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→ November 15, 2021
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Passing.

Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing had, somehow, never been adapted for the screen until this year, despite decades of acclaim – Penguin included it in their Classics series, and LitHub named it one of the 50 best short novels published before 1970 – and themes of race and identity that have lost nothing in relevance since the novel’s publication. Rebecca Hall, star of 2018’s Christine, took on the task of both writing the screenplay and directing the film, producing a highly faithful version of Larsen’s original story that preserves the original’s ambiguity and incisive eye on its main characters.

The novel and film focus on two Black women, Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), who were friends in childhood but drifted apart at some point afterwards, only to stumble upon each other in Manhattan one day – in a tea room where both women are “passing” as white. Irene learns that Clare has been passing for years, to the point of marrying a white man who has no idea of her racial background, and that as part of the ruse, Clare puts on a show of hating all Black people – even more so than her husband does. Irene has married a successful doctor (Andre Holland), living in Harlem with their two boys, and is very involved in the Negro Women’s League – a cause to which Clare seems to attach herself, at least as far as attending the social events where she can slide back and forth between her two identities. When Clare becomes closer to Irene’s husband, who is happy to pay her some attention, Irene starts to doubt her friend’s motives, and a coincidental meeting puts them all on the inevitable collision course with the truth.

Hall’s script hews almost completely to Larsen’s original story, down to the characters and settings, a sensible choice given the strength of the original material – especially the characterization of Clare, who might have less screen time than Irene but is the most interesting character by far, as she dances with danger by trying to live in both worlds at the same time. Negga has to be headed for awards nominations with this performance, where she takes the heedless Clare of the book and makes her more subtle, daring with the chances she takes but more sympathetic as she hints at the ways in which she’s trapped herself by passing to this extent. Is she flirting with Irene’s husband, or does she just enjoy the attention of men other than the husband she secretly loathes? (Is he flirting back, or just being chivalrous?) The two women both appear to envy what the other has; Clare is the life of the party, and has access to a whole world that is closed to Irene, while Irene never has the stress of passing, and does not have to deny her identity, or give up her family and friends to have material wealth. Both actresses portray this exquisitely, through tone and expression as well as Hall’s dialogue. Negga in particular could strip paint off the walls just through a change in how she looks at another character, while Thompson’s portrayal of Irene is understated because of the way that character keeps her mistrust and rage bottled up.

Hall shot the film in black and white, which certainly helps evoke the 1920s (pre-Crash) setting, but also creates additional ambiguity around the varying skin tones of the main characters. If you had never seen Thompson or Negga before Passing, you might not immediately know either woman was Black. (Negga is part Ethiopian and part Irish, and has been vocal about her identification with and interest in Black history.) Negga’s hair is dyed blonde, further developing her racial ambiguity and making it easier to see how she might slide back and forth between the white world of midtown Manhattan – and her racist husband – and Irene’s world of Harlem. It is as un-showy a directorial effort as you might find, especially for someone’s debut in that chair, but that makes it all the more remarkable, and one I hope is fully recognized by critics and awards shows.

I’ve only seen two movies that are awards contenders for 2021, this and In the Heights, so saying this is one of the best things I’ve seen all year seems rather disingenuous, but I feel confident I won’t see five better movies than Passing in this cycle. It’s so well-written and well-acted, and it is the type of movie I especially enjoy. Passing has a leisurely rhythm that contrasts the seriousness of its subject matter in such a way that the conclusion packs the maximum possible punch, and even though I knew what was coming, I still felt the full impact because Hall and her two leads set it up so well.

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