→ October 26, 2018
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Disobedience.

Sebastián Lelio directed 2017’s A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this spring and was one of my top five films of last year. His follow-up, Disobedience (available free on amazon prime), is his first English-language movie, but continues the theme of focusing on people who are and feel marginalized by their communities, in this case looking at two gay women who have taken different paths since their sexuality was uncovered by the Orthodox Jewish community where they lived. It’s based on the 2006 novel by Naomi Alderman, who later won the Women’s Prize for Fiction for The Power.

Ronit (Rachel Weisz) has returned to the community from exile upon learning that her father, Rav Krushka (Anton Lesser), has died, but it’s clear from her arrival at her childhood friend Dovid’s (Alessandro Nivola) house that she is an outcast. She’s also surprised to see that her other close friend from childhood, Esti (Rachel McAdams), has married Dovid in the interim, and that no one even tried to contact her to tell her of the wedding. Dovid invites Ronit to stay in their guest room, to the chagrin of the more conservative members of the community, and the film slowly reveals the history between the two women – that they had some kind of affair as teenagers, and were discovered by the Rav, which led to Ronit’s hegira to New York, but also led the Rav to push Esti to marry Dovid. The two women find their attraction to each other hasn’t dimmed, but as the flame is rekindled, the inevitable consequences ensue, and Esti and Dovid both find themselves facing difficult choices between the constraints of their insular community and the exercise of the free will that the Rav himself discussed in his final sermon.

Where A Fantastic Woman was dramatic and brisk, moving the lead character from one crisis to the next, Disobedience is subtle and measured, relying on words far more than actions to advance the plot. Esti is the real heart of the film, because she chose to stay when Ronit left, and is now facing the same emotional conflict a second time – but now has the obligations of marriage as well as the understanding of an adult. The script emphasizes the lack of agency for women in such a community, which could just as easily apply to strict Muslim or fundamentalist Christian communities, even before we consider the taboos of homosexuality in such religions. Ronit’s life in New York is defined solely by her career as a photographer; there is no mention of friends or lovers, except when she confesses to Esti that she hasn’t been with another woman since their liaison ended, so while there’s an implication that Ronit is happy because she fled, there’s also a void where the information surrounding someone’s life would be. Yet if Esti has friends, we don’t really see them either; her role is the devoted wife of the presumed heir to the Rav’s place as leader of the congregation, but there is no definition to her independent of that.

The film is anchored by three very strong performances, McAdams’ in particular, as Esti has the central struggle in the film – deciding whether to even give in to her feelings, and then, since she does (in the movie’s one truly intense scene of action rather than dialogue), coping with the consequences and the choices she must make in the wake of those. You could diagram the film’s story as one where the troika’s friendship has devolved to the point that Esti is now pulled equally by one friend on each side – Ronit on the side of freedom, Dovid on the side of tradition or family or obligation. Nivola’s accent is utterly convincing; the American-born actor’s grandmother was a Jewish refugee who fled Germany in the 1930s, but he also studied Hebrew to be able to recite many of the lines in the film and the accuracy of the accent helps establish his character’s hidebound nature. When the denouement arrives, Dovid has as much to do with it as Esti does, with the film’s themes of agency and free will returning after the late Rav’s speech introduced them in the opening scenes. The ending might be a little too pat, making the next steps that come after the big decisions seem easier than they would certainly be, but the path that these characters take from Ronit’s arrival until that moment is a journey to appreciate.

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→ September 13, 2018
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On Chesil Beach.

I read Ian McEwan’s Atonement back in 2007 but strongly disliked how manipulative the narrative turned out to be, so I skipped the highly acclaimed film adaptation that came shortly after, with a then-unknown 13-year-old actress named Saoirse Ronan playing one of the pivotal roles in the movie. Ronan is now, of course, a three-time Academy Award nominee, including one nod for Atonement, and returned to McEwan’s milieu as the star of this year’s adaptation of his novella On Chesil Beach (amazon • iTunes), which covers familiar thematic territory but does so without the trickery of the earlier work, and builds slowly to a crescendo finish that ends with an gut-punch conclusion that speaks volumes with very little dialogue to punctuate it.

On Chesil Beach is an ostensible love story between upper-class Florence (Ronan) and working-class Edward (Billy Howle), told mostly via flashbacks on their wedding night as the two approach their first time in bed. A sweet, awkward romance emerges in scenes from their courtship, including stories of her frigid mother and angry, distant father, as well as images of his difficult childhood with a mother who suffered brain damage in an accident and has trouble with memories and with some basic social graces (including, as it turns out, wearing clothes when required). It eventually comes out that Florence’s wedding-night jitters are more than just tremors of anticipation, but that there is something extremely wrong beyond mere ignorance of the mechanics of sex. When Edward makes his first, clumsy attempt, the flashbacks turn darker – apparently the reason for her terror is clearer in the movie than the book – and the tone of the film turns abruptly into one of regret and shame for Edward as he details his life after the wedding night.

As with Atonement, one character’s rash decision in youth affects multiple lives, but here there is no pretense or deception on McEwan’s part – we know what happened in the ‘real time’ of the script, and there’s no sleight of hand to mislead us. For me, at least, that made the final half hour, from the wedding night, the revelation (to us, but not to Edward) of Florence’s past trauma, and the jumps forward to Edward’s future without Florence gutting to watch, as he realizes what his reactions in the heat of the moment – both out of anger and shame – have cost him over the remainder of his life.

Music is a recurrent theme in On Chesil Beach as well, including the use of classical music (Florence’s passion, as she plays in a string quartet) and early rock and roll (Edward especially loves Chuck Berry) to further distinguish the two main characters’ class differences. There’s also a scene about adding a fifth member to the group where we see a totally different side of Florence, a stronger, almost domineering presence at the head of the quartet, in full contrast to the timid woman shown in intimate scenes with Edward, as if to make clear that she’s not a nervous or weak person, but is repressed in a specific situation for a specific reason.

Ronan is superb, as always, although there are certainly scenes here where she’s reduced a bit by stilted dialogue to standing around in cute dresses; her character is by far the more pivotal of the two, and requires more restraint than the role of Edward, whom Howle plays as emotionally messy and underdeveloped, himself probably as unprepared for the institution of marriage and the responsibilities one has to a partner as Florence was for sex. The movie’s first hour or so is fairly slow going, I think by design, and some of the side characters are very thin, including Florence’s mother (played by Emily Watson), whose role in all of this could have used more explanation and whose attitude towards her daughters is itself hard to fathom.

At the 80 minute mark, I was sure I’d be calling On Chesil Beach a trifle, or even a bit dull, but the turnaround towards the end was so powerful that it forced me to reassess everything that came in the first 2/3 of the film. Nothing prepared me for how the story would wrap up, or how McEwan’s screenplay would shift the focus to make it clear that the blame isn’t on Florence, and that we’ve seen too much of the story through Edward’s eyes to understand how wrong he was to react as he did. The result is a potent, wrenching portrait of regret that also serves as a plea for understanding when someone we love needs it most.

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→ August 30, 2018
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BlacKkKlansman.

Spike Lee’s return to directing with BlacKkKlansman has been met with wide critical acclaim and a positive commercial response, with the film earning back its reported budget in its first week of release. The film is based on the true story of African-American cop Ron Stallworth, who infiltrated a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan while working in the Colorado Springs Police Department, surrounded by white officers, detailed in Stallworth’s memoir Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime.) Stallworth paired with a white partner who was his stand-in at KKK meetings, and eventually managed to speak to and meet David Duke, while revealing that there were members of the chapter who worked in law enforcement, the military, and, in two cases, NORAD. (Those last two were allegedly reassigned to Greenland or somewhere else in the Arctic.) Lee invents a few details and then intersperses the story with vignettes that are far more clearly targeted at the modern audience, closing with footage from the neo-Nazi rally and the eventual murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last year. It’s a powerful story that offers no pretense about its ideals or what viewers should think and do in this era of New Racism, and is by turns terrifically funny and intense. It’s also a total mess of a film that reeks of the director’s self-indulgence and eventually works to undermine some of its most important messages.

BlacKkKlansman is at its best when Lee focuses the story on the investigation as it was led by two men, Stallworth (John David Washington) and Phillip “Flip” Zimmerman (Adam Driver). After about 30 minutes of prologue that gives some backdrop to the racial animus in the country at the time and gets Stallworth into the police department under its minority hiring initiative – and exiles him to the records room – he makes the fateful phone call in response to an ad in a local paper, looking for new members, from the local chapter of the Klan. Stallworth calls, tells the man on the phone how much he hates black people and every other group the Klan was known for targeting, and is invited to a meeting that Friday night, which is a problem given the color of his skin. He recruits Zimmerman to go in his stead, under his name, wearing a wire, which begins the investigation that, in reality, lasted nine months and uncovered those members’ identities. (The film creates a fictional, planned bombing that never happened, but that does allow for an intense climatic scene that drowns in its own bathos as the overwritten script piles clichés on top of a pivotal moment.)

Lee appears to have been given a free hand with the project, which was produced by Jordan Peele (who was set to direct it but gave it to Lee to work on other films), and I wonder if Peele felt unable or unwilling to confront one of the most important figures in black American cinema over some of the film’s many bombastic or incoherent sequences. There are gimmicks galore here, such as the isolated head shots of black audience members listening to Kwame Ture and the hallway scene near the film’s conclusion, that are nothing more than directorbation, the film equivalent of an umpshow, where Lee has to remind us that he’s at the wheel and we are watching an artist at work. One of the film’s many interludes from the Stallworth narrative itself is the Klan initiation rite, where Stallworth’s partner attends in his stead and David Duke presides, showing the racist 1916 film Birth of a Nation to whip the members (and their wives) into a frenzy. Lee intersperses that with scenes from a black student union meeting at the local college – I think it’s University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, but wasn’t sure if it was named as such – where a man, played by Harry Belafonte, tells the story of the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, in 1917. Belafonte’s character was a close friend of Washington’s, but the character and the meeting appear to be fabricated for the film, although the grotesque torture-murder of Washington was very real, attended by thousands of whites as if the castration, mutilation, and slow immolation of a black teenager were merely the day’s entertainment.

The unexpected star of the film isn’t Washington – yes, that’s Denzel’s son – but Driver, who delivers a nuanced, two-sided performance as a cop who finds his stolid attitude that any case is just part of the job affected by his exposure to such inveterate hate, while also posing as a very convincing racist, anti-Semitic zealot. (Zimmerman’s character is a non-observant Jew, but the real undercover officer, known only as “Chuck” in Stallworth’s memoir, was not.) He’s so magnetic in the role that the film lags when he’s out of the dialogue, which I’d say is the opposite of the effect he has as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars franchise. Washington is fine, but isn’t charismatic enough to be the center of the film, and he’s often overshadowed by others on screen including Driver; Topher Grace as a dead ringer for David Duke; and Laura Harrier as Patrice, Stallworth’s (fictional) love interest and President of the Black Students’ Union in the film. Corey Hawkins has a small part earlier in the film as Ture that is a clinic in delivering a rhetorical speech, although it’s again blunted by those camera tricks Lee employs to remind us he’s in charge.

For a film with a deadly serious subject, BlacKkKlansman doesn’t skimp on the humor. There’s a Wire reference near the start of the film that had me laughing very loudly – and I was the only one in the theater who did so – although I was disappointed not to hear Paul Walter Hauser drop an “incorrect” somewhere to nod to his scene-stealing performance in last year’s I, Tonya. The allusions to our modern era of ‘very fine people’ can go too far – Stallworth telling his white sergeant that Americans would never put an openly racist person in the White House is a bit too on the nose – but work well when Lee steps back and lets the dialogue and/or action show us how little has actually changed. An early scene when Patrice and Ture are stopped for driving while black and then threatened and assaulted by the officers, while also fictional, is extremely effective for how it just tells a story and lets the audience connect the dots. The telling of the Washington lynching might have been more effective as a straight scene, rather than one cut back and forth to the frothing Klan members watching and cheering on Birth of a Nation. The film just needed less of these trappings and more of the basics. The scenery, the clothes, and the hairstyles all set the scene incredibly well; even little touches like background colors in offices or the weaker lighting in some of the scenes in Klan members’ houses (so the film looks like movies or TV shows from the time period) contribute to the atmosphere. The one gimmick that really works, the transition to Charlottesville footage, with a clip of Trump referring to violent neo-Nazis as “very fine people” just in case anyone still wondered where his sympathies lie, is a masterstroke – but it’s the only gimmick BlacKkKlansman needed. Instead we get a half-dozen on top of that, so by the time you get to the end of the film, you’re exhausted from trying to figure out where any of this is going.

Note: The Slate piece discussing what’s real and what’s fictional in this film was essential in writing this review.

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→ July 1, 2018
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Annihilation.

Paramount made some curious decisions earlier this year with the release of the film Annihiliation (amazon • iTunes), loosely based on the Jeff VanderMeer novel of the same name (which I have not read yet), including an off-period release date in the U.S. and the sale of the film directly to Netflix for most of the world (other than the U.S., Canada, and China). Marketing of the film wasn’t great either; I saw the trailer before its theatrical run, and the trailer doesn’t represent the film well at all, overselling the horror elements and underselling the story. The result is that the movie didn’t fare that well at the box office despite positive reviews, undercut somewhat by Paramount’s machinations and I think the failure to push this film as a smart sci-fi flick that overcomes some modest flaws with a big finish.

The movie opens with Lena (Natalie Portman) in medical isolation, being interrogated by a British scientist (Benedict Wong) about what happened to her on a mission that went wrong and from which she is the only survivor. She’s somewhat vague on details, after which we flash back to before the mission and see that she’s a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School and that her husband, a special forces Sergeant (Oscar Isaac), has been missing for a year and is presumed dead. He shows up at the house one day, but is totally vacant and almost immediately begins hemorrhaging, which eventually leads to Lena volunteering to lead a mission of five women soldiers and researchers into a mysterious, growing region called the Shimmer, into which the military has sent many missions but from which only Lena’s husband has ever returned. The women find a seemingly impossible environment where animals and plants are swapping DNA, with increasingly horrifying results the longer the team stays within its boundaries.

Annihilation has two main conceits in its story: the ongoing mystery of what the Shimmer is and what it’s doing, and the fact that previous teams have all disappeared and are likely dead, a Lovecraftian mystery trending towards horror since we know from the start that Lena is the only survivor. (The Wikipedia entry on the movie notes the script’s similarity to a Lovecraft short story, “The Colour of Space.”) The former is revealed gradually at first, but proceeds in fits and starts in accordance with discoveries the team makes and with Lena’s examinations of blood and other cells under her microscope. The latter builds as the story progresses and the team moves through the Shimmer with increasing disorientation; they encounter animals that loosely resemble familiar creatures but that have evolved at impossible speeds. Eventually Lena reaches the lighthouse at the center of the Shimmer and discovers something more of the nature of the anomaly in a gorgeous special-effects sequence right before her final battle to escape.

The script does waste too much time on irrelevant details outside of the mission, including Lena’s affair with a colleague while her husband is missing, a subplot that is neither germane to the main story nor resolved in any satisfactory manner during the film. And while screenwriter/director Alex Garland (Ex Machina) tries to give the team members some identities as individuals, none but Lena comes across as much more than a redshirt, not even ostensible team leader Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), so none of their losses is particularly tangible to the viewer. One team member cracks under the stress after the first death and another attack, which is foreshadowed in earlier dialogue but really not well explained by her character at all. Lena’s decision not to reveal to other team members that her husband was on an earlier mission is played up as a major issue, but without justifying why that’s a big deal or why the team member who cracks is so angry about the omission.

There are two scenes of gore in Annihiliation, more than enough to earn its R rating but not so much that I’d call this a straight horror film. There’s more of an intellectual undercurrent to the script than the trailer gave it credit for having; the way the Shimmer evolves, and then affects the members of the team, poses real questions about what it means to be human or even conscious, ones the film doesn’t try to answer even as characters directly ask what the Shimmer “wants.” Maybe it was just too hard to market on its own merits, but Annihilation is intense and smart enough to deserve to find an audience now that it’s more widely available.

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→ February 25, 2018
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The Girl Without Hands.

When the Oscar nominations were announced a few weeks ago, I tweeted an image showing all of the eligible films for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and showed that Boss Baby, which scored one of the nominations, wasn’t close to a top five film in the group in the estimation of critics. At that point, though, I hadn’t seen any of the films ranked above it (using Rotten Tomatoes scores, a crude measure but useful for our purposes here). I can now say I have seen one film that was eligible for the award, and was #BetterThanBossBaby: The Girl Without Hands (La jeune fille sans mains), a stunningly animated version of the Grimm Brothers folk tale about a girl … um, with no hands. It’s available to rent on iTunes and amazon.

The girl, never named, suffers for her father’s avarice; when the film starts, the impoverished miller strikes a deal with the devil to give him “what’s behind his mill” in exchange for wealth, not realizing that his daughter was in the apple tree behind the mill at that moment. Eventually, the man’s refusal to give up the river of gold that is now running his mill costs him everything, including his daughter, whose hands he lops off at the devil’s insistence. She flees, eventually finding a prince who marries her, only to have the devil reappear and try once again to claim her for his part of the original bargain.

This adaptation, first released in France in 2016, was entirely written, directed, and animated by Sébastien Laudenbach, marking his first feature film. The animation style is like nothing I’ve seen before in an animated feature – the outlines of characters and objects are rough, and the colored portions inside those lines don’t always move in sync with the outlines, which is obviously by design and gives the entire film a ghostly atmosphere. The colors are bold and vibrant, with less shading than we expect now from animated films that try to look three-dimensional. The film is mostly faithful to the original tale, which has many supernatural elements, and Laudenbach’s non-realistic approach fits it perfectly.

The Grimms’ story is a rather blunt, grotesque fable about the corrupting power of greed, with just one character of any import, the girl, voiced beautifully by French actress Anaïs Demoustier. Her faith in her father is not rewarded, and her strength in the face of the tragedy is part of the story’s moral (which sort of pounds you over the head). Laudenbach and Demoustier at least manage to humanize her, even though his fidelity to the story limits how much depth the character can get on screen, and he altered the ending slightly to tie the restoration of her hands to something more specific than the Grimms offered. She’s an obvious object for pity; Laudenbach and Demoustier make her more than just pathetic.

It’s the imagery that makes this movie, though; Laudenbach gives the film a tactile look, like we’re watching images flicker on canvas or paper. He plays little visual games with his characters as well, having them move as if they’re aware that their outlines and their flesh aren’t quite together, such as having a character hide in what looks like its own shadow at one moment. It’s just such a feast for the eyes, in a way that’s completely novel in the era of hyper realistic CG animation, and it’s thoroughly refreshing.

As for why this was overlooked by the Academy … I have no idea. It ran at Cannes in the ACID program, a simultaneous screening during that city’s film festival, in 2016. It won the grand prize in the Tokyo Anime Awards last year. It’s at 100% fresh with 19 reviews, all of which were written in 2017. I can’t believe voters saw this and still went with Boss Baby; hell, The Red Turtle got a nomination last year and was just as obscure. Watch The Girl Without Hands and I think you’ll agree its omission is a mistake.

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→ November 6, 2017
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The Lost City of Z.

The Lost City of Z is based on David Grann’s bestselling 2009 book about Percy Fawcett, a renowned British explorer who disappeared in central South America sometime after 1925 during an expedition to find the remnants of a long-gone advanced civilization there. Starring Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett, the movie hews relatively closely to Fawcett’s true story and offers many compelling scenes from his first two expeditions to the Amazon basin, but doesn’t give us enough understanding of its protagonist to create real interest in the character’s fate. The movie is available free on amazon prime.

Hunnam plays the dashing hero, complete with a Poirot-esque mustache, whom we first meet as the Royal Geographical Society asks him to journey to the center of the continent to help map the disputed border between Brazil and Bolivia. (If you don’t know much South American history, here’s a good summary: Bolivia kept picking border fights with its neighbors and lost every one of them, including one fight that cost the country its narrow coastline on the Pacific.) He’s reluctant to take on a non-military mission, but does so in the hopes of restoring his family name – the film has his father as a degenerate gambler and drunk, although that may be fictional – and sets off with the help of Coatson (Robert Pattinson) to chart the border and eventually find the source of a major river. The journey is perilous, many redshirts don’t survive it, and even the men who do are in sad shape when they reach the river’s source, but they do and return home to a heroes’ welcome. That spurs another expedition that doesn’t go quite so well, but the two combine to convince Fawcett of the existence of the city of Z, and he yearns for one more chance to go discover it.

Hunnam himself is a charmless man in the lead role – he probably knows his claret from his Beaujolais – and the movie truly suffers for it. Benedict Cumberbatch was originally attached to the project, and his charisma is sorely missed here. Pattinson steals every scene he’s in with Hunnam, thoroughly inhabiting his character’s rakishness and loyalty right to the very end of his arc. Sienna Miller is similarly blank in her role as Fawcett’s wife, looking pretty but feeling one-dimensional – she’s the suffering wife, no, she’s the loyal little lady, no, she’s the proud wife and mother, as if we see three different women at different points in the film.

The scenery, however, is stunning – it is an expertly made film, with gorgeous, expansive shots of the jungle and the rivers. There’s real action and suspense when they’re on expeditions, and the scenes in London feel more like interstitials. There’s a short subplot, based on actual events, around another explorer who comes on their second mission and is badly injured, giving Fawcett a real antagonist but also ending abruptly (as it did in real life). When Fawcett came home, as a father and husband I couldn’t understand his willingness to leave his wife and children, but as a viewer I wanted him to get back to the jungle and do stuff.

Of course, the movie suffers from the unknown: Theories abound as to what happened to Fawcett and his son on their final mission, and Grann used a legend he heard from one of the native tribes in the region to craft a new hypothesis, but we just don’t know. The script doesn’t deal well with the uncertainty, giving us an ambiguous egress for the two men and a sentimental ending for Fawcett’s wife. Perhaps fabricating a specific outcome would have gone too far, but charting their progress and disappearance from London may have served the film better.

This is a very solid, competently made film that just lacks the extra level of emotion that would connect viewers to the story or the main character. We learn so little of Fawcett’s background that his wanderlust is a bit hard to grasp, and Hunnam plays him so clinically that, if I didn’t know better, I’d think he was an American actor trying too hard to nail the upper class British accent. (Hunnam is English.) More prologue might have helped – or less, if perhaps we’d started in the Amazon and skipped some of the home scenes. It feels very much like a movie that could have been great, but isn’t.

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→ October 18, 2017
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Our Souls at Night.

The new film Our Souls at Night, now available on Netflix, reunites Robert Redford and Jane Fonda for the first time since 1979’s The Electric Horseman in an adaptation of Kent Haruf’s final novel, published shortly after his death in 2015. It’s a slow, sentimental story of two neighbors, both widowed, who end up in an unlikely romance that brings each of them out of their long, dark nights of mourning while exposing the past wounds that haunt them both … but really, it’s about watching Redford and Fonda remind everyone why they were iconic actors of their generation.

Addie (Fonda) knocks on Louis’s (Redford) door one evening with a proposal: That he come to her place some night to sleep with her, literally, rather than in the Biblical sense. They’re both alone, she says, and she’s finding the nights particularly troublesome. It’s a cute conceit, but of course, the more they spend time together, the more they both open up, and we learn that each has a major, life-altering event in the past that remains unresolved – a death for one, an affair for the other – only to have their pasts sneak up on them as their romance blossoms. When Addie’s son asks her to watch her grandson for an indefinite period, the boy bonds with Louis, Louis himself opens up further to Addie, and Addie’s own mistakes come full circle and threaten to derail their newfound happiness.

The story is bookended by two less-than-credible events – Addie’s proposition to Louis that sets the story in motion, and her decision near the very end of the film that at least temporarily splits them up. The first is a necessary plot device, and it’s at least played out well by Fonda (nervous, but determined) and Redford (reticent and befuddled). The second is a bit harder to accept, because the plot gives Addie a false choice – she could have both, and for reasons that aren’t fully justified in the script, chooses to sacrifice her relationship with Louis. That leads to a very cute and somewhat more credible conclusion, but I could never quite buy into how we got there. It is primarily to the credit of the two actors and the familiar, comfortable chemistry between them that any part of this story plays out seriously, and that the audience can be absorbed in the minutiae of their relationship – the small-town gossip, the first-date hesitancy, the reactions of their adult children. (Judy Greer appears in one scene as Louis’s daughter, playing the character type at which she excels – off-kilter, goofy, effusive, and seeming younger than her actual age.)

The details are what really sell Our Souls at Night, as the plot itself is limited; the script just sort of throws these two characters together and sees what will happen. It avoids the worst cliches, like a forced conflict between the two where they fight and “break up,” and instead gives us two kind but hurting people who choose to be kind to each other. The deaths of secondary characters underline the idea that this is a last shot at happiness for Addie and Louis, rather than saddle the two of them with morbid dialogue, which further allows the script to focus on the organic evolution of the two characters’ relationship and their discussions, largely prompted by Addie, of the old wounds they each suffered that never fully healed.

Our Souls at Night played briefly in a few theaters in September, which should make it eligible for awards, which may really matter for the two lead actors, both of whom are previous winners and, at 79 (Fonda, who’ll turn 80 in December) and 81 (Redford) may not have many more leading roles in their careers. Fonda has won Best Actress twice, with five other nominations, and has three more Golden Globe wins for the same. Redford, to my surprise, has never won a Best Actor Oscar, earning just one nomination in the category (The Sting), with a win for Best Director (Ordinary People) his only regular Oscar, along with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. The Best Actor category is so competitive that I wouldn’t predict a nod for Redford here, even given the natural boost he’ll get from his reputation and age, but Fonda, who carries a little more weight with her role in this movie, has a fair shot at some nominations for playing Addie. It’s more than a mere nostalgia play, though; Our Souls at Night showcases two great actors in a movie unadorned by anything but dialogue and some beautiful panoramas of the Colorado landscape, with performances that elevate the simplistic plot into something memorable.

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→ September 22, 2017
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War Machine.

Three new Insider pieces for you to check out this week: scouting notes on Yu Darvish, more notes on Aaron Nola and some young Phillies hitters, and my annual look at players I was wrong about.

War Machine, released briefly to theaters this spring but residing in perpetuity on Netflix, is a thinly fictionalized adaptation of Michael Hastings’ non-fiction book The Operators, itself an expasion of Hastings’ infamous Rolling Stone article that led to the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal from his post as Commander of the coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan in 2010. It is a decidedly unflattering depiction of just about everything and everyone involved in the endless war against the Taleban, although it succeeds more in its portrayal of individual foibles than as an indictment of the war effort as a whole, laying more on the comic end of the scale than on the satirical side.

Brad Pitt stars as General Glen McMahon, the movie’s pseudonym for the McChrystal character, a tough-talkin’, f-bomb-droppin’, let’s-go-kick-some-terrorist-ass general brought in to replace the last let’s-go-kick-some-terrorist-ass general who couldn’t win the unwinnable war in Afghanistan. It appears that this is what McChrystal was really like, although he feels like a walking cliché, a Hollywood-ized representation of what a no-nonsense military leader should look, act, and talk like. He comes to the coalition with his group of acolytes and toadies, including the rah-rah Major General (based on Michael Flynn) played hilariously by Anthony Michael Hall, who largely cheer him on or at least avoid contradicting him, and has somewhat predictable conflicts with American diplomats, notably Karl Eikenberry stand-in Pat McKinnon, played by Alan Ruck (whom you know as Cameron Frye). McChrystal comes across as well-intentioned but largely naive about how unwinnable the conflict really is, although he does have moments of clarity – like the talk he gives to the European Parliament where he explains how killing insurgents likely creates more insurgents in the long run – amidst the standard military maneuvers.

Pitt seems so focused here on doing his impression of McChrystal that any nuance in the character is lost. The portrayal is all accent, facial expressions, and gait – his jogging scenes are just strange, as it seems impossible that Pitt could appear that unathletic – and lacks any depth, which is shocking because Pitt is capable of so much more. His performance is indicative of the misuse of so many talented actors in two-dimensional roles here – Ben Kingsley as the drug-addled, feckless President Karzai; Topher Grace as McMahon’s “civilian media adviser,” who sets up the ill-fated Rolling Stone article; Meg Tilly, looking disturbingly old in short grey hair, as McMahon’s ignored, adoring wife. Only Tilda Swinton, given one scene as a German politician who interrogates and questions McMahon during the talk to the Parliament, gets any material with which she can work, and it’s all of one scene. (There’s also an uncredited cameo at the end of the film that I won’t spoil but that did generate one of the many laugh-out-loud moments I had.)

War Machine has been reviewed and marketed as a satire, but I think it works better as a straight comedy with tragic elements. It’s too close to real events to work as farce; the U.S. effort in Afghanistan was destined to fail, at least once the initial goal of removing the Taleban, who harbored al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, had been achieved, and everything after that was theater. The script certainly hones that to a fine point – the value of the war effort to politicians and the political cost of increasing the engagement both come through – but without parodic exaggeration. Instead, the script succeeds by crafting comedy against an unusual backdrop, including two scenes where Kingsley’s Karzai gets probably the biggest laughs of the film, without telling the viewer anything s/he didn’t already know about the circular nature of the war effort.

(The film contains a clip of President Obama’s speech at West Point, announcing a troop surge in 2009; just last month, almost eight full years later, President Trump announced the same thing. The effort to train Afghan forces to protect their own country has already cost us $70 billion and costs another $4 billion every year, while parts of the country remain within Taleban control or “contested” between the government and insurgents.)

The magazine article that eventually led to this film toppled a general and drew back the curtain on a little bit of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, but ultimately led to no substantive change in our policy there. Even if this film had become a massive hit in theaters – Netflix doesn’t release viewership numbers, so we have no idea how many people have even seen it – it’s unlikely to change anyone’s mind on our policy there. War Machine is often very funny, and it may increase your weariness of the war, or our country’s repeated, failed attempts at nation-building (even where our intentions were good) abroad, but I don’t think this movie tells us anything about the war or the politics thereof that we didn’t already know.

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→ August 9, 2017
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The Sense of an Ending (film).

I adored Julian Barnes’ Man Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending, a spare and unsparing look at how one impetuous act could ruin multiple lives yet leave the actor unscathed until he discovers the consequences decades later. Barnes’ protagonist, Tony Webster, is bright and can think critically except where he’s involved; his lack of self-awareness is the central theme of the work, and Barnes unfurls the history to Tony as he does to the reader, allowing us to share in the main character’s befuddlement, denial, and rationalization in a sort of literary real time.

The film version of The Sense of an Ending came out earlier this year and is now available to rent/buy on amazon or iTunes, and it is excellent but falls just short of the book. The acting is superb, and the story largely hews faithfully to Barnes’ concepts, but alters a few key details in ways that muffle the impact of various revelations – and utterly alter the meaning of the book’s ending.

Jim Broadbent plays Tony, a divorced, very slightly grumpy old man who runs an antique camera shop in his semi-retirement, maintains good relations with his ex-wife Margaret (Harriet Wheeler), and is on call for the imminent birth of his first grandchild to his unmarried daughter Susie (Michelle Dockery). Tony gets a certified letter saying that a woman he knew decades earlier, Sarah (Emily Mortimer), has died and left him an object, but it turns out that Sarah’s daughter, Veronica (Freya Mavor), whom Tony briefly dated, refuses to part with the object – the diary of Tony’s friend and later Veronica’s boyfriend Adrian. Tony becomes obsessed with obtaining the diary, largely because it’s legally his (rather than any expressed interest in its contents), and his efforts to acquire it lead him to an encounter with Veronica (now played by Charlotte Rampling) and revelations from their shared past that will discolor Tony’s entire understanding of his own actions and character.

This is in so many ways a very British movie, from the way almost everything in it is so understated and even under the surface to the murderer’s row of a cast all delivering sparkling performances. The filmed Tony is less self-aware than the literary one, and Broadbent infuses him with aloofness in manner and accent, as if he is constantly flummoxed by the existence of other people and their feelings. Rampling absolutely seethes in her few appearances in the film, an angrier Veronica than the one in the book, who holds herself above Tony in word and deed because it is the only victory available to her this late in the match. Mortimer also gets limited screen time, only in flashbacks, but the subtlety of her performance as Sarah is more evidence once Sarah’s role in the events that followed becomes clear.

The novel on which this is based is only about 165 pages, but it felt like the film still rushed past some of the book’s flashbacks to Tony’s time in school with Adrian and his dalliance with Veronica. It also changes several major details from the story, not least of which is dispensing with Barnes’ structure, where the book starts with the school days, and the bequest doesn’t happen until about a third of the way into the book, starting part two and causing Tony to reevaluate the story he has narrated in part one. Tony follows Veronica from one of their meetings, somewhat creepily, whereas in the book Veronica shows him what he discovers by stalking her in the movie.

The most unforgivable sin of the film’s script, however, is the ending, which is much kinder to Tony than the book’s conclusion – and kinder than the film version of Tony deserves. He set this all in motion, but the movie’s ending doesn’t make his culpability sufficiently clear, and concludes his story on a somewhat hopeful note – even as we hear the text of a new letter he has sent to Veronica that left me thinking that even after he’s learned the truth, he still doesn’t get it, and at this point, he probably never will.

I don’t usually give grades or ratings of movies, especially since I often write about them months after their release, but in this case I’ll make an exception. This is a good movie that falls short of a great book – a 55 film from a 70 novel, in scouting terms – buoyed by a tremendous cast and that very British way of letting the audience work out a lot of details on its own. If you’ve read the book and enjoyed it like I did, however, you may find the deviations distracting, especially as they’re all to the bad.

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→ March 1, 2017
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A Man Called Ove.

A Man Called Ove was one of five nominees for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, won by the preseason favorite, the Iranian movie The Salesman, whose director had won previously for the amazing film A Separation. Ove was Sweden’s submission for the award, and it is a perfectly serviceable movie but not remarkable in any way. It’s just very well-made and well-acted, but it’s based on a best-selling book of the same name that seems like the sort feel-good pablum that offers a superficial meaning-of-life message like “be nice to others.”

Ove is a grumpy old man, recently widowed, obsessed with following and enforcing rules, making enemies of everyone in his little planned community. He’s utterly miserable and tries multiple times in the film to kill himself to be with his beloved wife, Sonja. When a new family moves in, with the father Swedish and the mother, Parvaneh, of Iranian descent, they interrupt more than one of these suicide attempts, and the mother seems totally immune to his misanthropy, forcing herself into his life, making him teach her to drive and even to watch her kids one night, to the point where she cracks his exterior and gets him to tell her (and us) his life story. In the end, Ove becomes a changed man, a friend to all, a grandfather surrogate to her kids, and I’m sure you can guess what happens after that. (It’s available to rent on amazon and iTunes.)

This movie goes nowhere without the performance of Rolf Lassgård as Ove (pronounced “OOH-vuh”), a turn that won him the Swedish equivalent of the Academy Award for Best Actor. Ove is the only nuanced character in the entire film, a grumpy old man whose grumpiness is a cover for misery, loneliness, and a return to the chronic shyness that plagued him pre-Sonja. There’s something inexplicable in his resistance to kind overtures from neighbors, or simple requests from one woman he’s known for decades to help fix her radiator. (The reason turns out to be both funny and stupid at once.) It seems like Lassgård had a harder task because he was playing a character whose complexity was compromised by the absurdity of his behavior.

The story itself is faintly ridiculous, not least because the movie never gives us a single reason to think that Sonja, who is kind, intelligent, and very pretty, would have the slightest interest in the insular, moody, and unromantic Ove. He doesn’t so much pursue her as stalk her, and she responds by more or less leading him around by the nose. They have almost nothing in common, and their personalities are dead opposites. I can see why she illuminated Ove’s life to the point where he says there was nothing before Sonja and there is nothing after her, but what exactly did she see in him?

(Incidentally, part of why I found Sonja so compelling was her taste in literature. When they first meet, she’s reading The Master and Margarita, my favorite novel ever.)

Parvaneh is too relentlessly positive to be realistic, and the fact that she’s already very pregnant at the start of the movie means we know that baby is going to pop out before the film ends, probably at a dramatic or inopportune moment. (It’s like Chekhov’s gun.) The story checks all the boxes about modern prejudice – we see Ove get over his casual sexism, racism, and homophobia over the course of the film. And one of the various subplots in the story, the fate of Ove’s neighbor and former rival Rune, has an utterly ridiculous deus-ex sort of resolution that undermined all of the details that came before it. None of this made Ove’s revival in the film’s final 20 minutes any less emotional to watch, but when A Man Called Ove was done, I had the distinct feeling of having consumed a lot of empty calories.

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