→ November 21, 2022
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Amsterdam (movie).

Amsterdam takes an incredible cast and some fantastic costume work and turns it into … not much. I can’t even call it nothing, because it’s more than that, but this latest film from David O. Russell, his first since 2015’s Joy, is just indescribably bland. (You can rent it now on amazon and elsewhere.)

The script is the real problem here, as it’s convoluted, undecided about what kind of story it should be, and totally humorless. It’s part mystery, part political thriller, part historical fiction, and mixes in a tepid romance, but fails at virtually all of these things, lacking the tension for the first two or the humor to make it more of a wink and a nod at all of these disparate genres. It’s based on a real episode from U.S. history known as the Business Plot, and creates three protagonists – two wounded vets from World War I in the doctor Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and lawyer Harold Woodsman (John David Washington) plus nurse Valerie (Margot Robbie) – who get pulled into the intrigue, 39 Steps style, when someone they knew in the War shows up dead. That leads to the introduction of a Tolstoy-esque list of characters, adding to some of the confusion of the film and depriving some of the better players here of screen time, before we find out what the conspiracy is and get to the big resolution.

I’m in the target audience for Amsterdam. I like political thrillers, especially of that era, whether we’re talking about the Hitchock oeuvre or novels like The Dark Frontier or Le Carré’s best. I like murder mysteries. I love almost anything set in the 1920s or early 1930s. And I do often fall for movies that are stylish – if the dialogue matches. But Amsterdam doesn’t have a great story, neither in the murder part nor in the political conspiracy part, and the dialogue is drab.

Bale’s character is supposed to be a wiseass, but he’s neither clever nor funny enough to do it, yet he’s too smart to be comic relief. There’s something endearing about his loyalty to his fellow soldiers from their unit – which is itself rooted in kindness, although again, it’s a convoluted back story – but that’s not enough to fully define a three-dimensional character. Robbie can’t help but be endearing, but her character is weird for absolutely no reason at all, making art out of the shrapnel she removes from soldiers’ wounds, something that’s explained at length and then dropped for the rest of the film. Of the big three, Washington’s character is the best defined, and the most interesting, and his understated style works well here. But there are far more actors in this film who are nondescript or actively bad, none more so than Anya Taylor-Joy, who is playing an even more shrill version of her character from Peaky Blinders. She’s supposed to be suspicious, but instead, she’s obvious – and annoying as hell when doing it. Her husband is played by Rami Malek, whose skin condition from No Time to Die has resolved itself but who’s almost simpering here. Robert de Niro deserves credit for a very by-the-book turn as the General whose help the trio needs to secure, as the moment he appeared, I thought we were in for an overacting clinic. He’s quite credible in the part and holds it even when his character has to make a pivotal, emotional speech at the climax.

And that climax is … nothing. This is based on a real story; although the veracity of the accusations of a plot to overthrow the U.S. government remains in dispute, Amsterdam treats it as real, which should make the ending far more exciting. The script here has it end in a meeting and a whimper, although there’s a tussle over a gun that feels forced, like Russell was trying to insert some action into the film but couldn’t figure out how.

I was just never engaged in the story of Amsterdam, and that’s the biggest indictment I can offer. I am an easy mark for everything this script was trying to do, but it’s so busy trying to do so many things that it succeeds at none. The film actually opens with a long flashback sequence to World War I that explains how the dead body connects to Burt and Harold, and how they connect to each other (along with Chris Rock’s character, another member of the same unit), but it comes after a ten-minute or so opening scene that sets up the murder. The flashback itself is padded with too much detail anyway, so by the time we get back to the actual story – which features Taylor Swift as the deceased’s daughter, and she’s also not very good – any momentum that there might have been at that point is long gone. And the one thing that might have salvaged Amsterdam, wry humor, is mostly absent. There are a few attempts at some Marx Brothers-style wisecracking, but those fall flat. No single character is funny, and the script is too self-serious for something this stylized or slick. It’s not actually a bad movie – it’s a movie, and a colorless one at that.

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→ February 25, 2022
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Hive.

Hive became the first film in the history of the Sundance film festival to win all three of its main awards (Grand Jury, Directing, and Audience Prizes), and became Kosovo’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Film, making the shortlist of fifteen films but not the final five (in a very competitive year). The movie is a worthy successor to the 2021 nominee, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Quo Vadis, Aida?, continuing the region’s Both movies revolve around stories of the Serbian-led genocides of the 1990s, but while the Bosnian film stays almost entirely within the events of the Srebrenica massacre, Hive deals with the aftermath of the genocide in Kosovo, following one woman whose husband disappeared during the killings in Krusha e Madhe, now called the “Village of War Widows,” and tries to find a way to support her family.

Based on the true story of Fahrije Hoti, Hive follows its main character as she has the idea to work with other (presumed) widows in their village to start a business selling ajvar, the local red pepper-based relish, similar to Bosnian pinjur (which, briefly, was available at Trader Joes!). As the film opens, Fahrije is seen working with a local charity that is offering to teach women to drive so that they can find work, although many of the women object to the fact that the teacher will be male. In a state that is 96% Muslim, being alone with a man in a car would be unacceptable, and these traditional gender restrictions are one of the film’s major themes, as the massacre of the town’s men means many of the women have no source of income.

Fahrije lives with her father-in-law, who uses a wheelchair and refuses to give up hope that his son is alive or to make allowances for the need for his daughter-in-law to earn a living; and her two children, one of whom is a teenager who is sensitive to the way the town perceives her mother. She keeps bees and tries to sell the honey in town, but it’s too meager an income to support their needs. When Fahrije tries to start the business, she finds a willing buyer at the local supermarket, who is willing to give them shelf space and supports their efforts – I kept waiting for the twist there, but there wasn’t one – yet faces needless opposition from the men in her town, from having her car window smashed to someone coming into their makeshift warehouse and destroying inventory. The man from whom she buys the main ingredient for the ajvar, red peppers, keeps pestering her to go out with him. And she’s trying to find out if her husband’s remains are among those found near the town’s river, an effort that requires DNA from her father-in-law but which he refuses to provide.

Hive offers a simple narrative, taking the viewer from that initial meeting with the women’s organization through the idea and to execution, without spending too much time on any one part of the story – especially not the conception of the ajvar cooperative, which could have been dreadful if they’d tried to extend the scene. One of the great strengths of the script is how much is left unsaid; the characters talk tersely, which keeps the story moving and also infuses it with a sense of rage and frustration simmering below the surface. Yllka Gashi plays Fahrije, and her taut, anguished performance is essential; even when her efforts succeed, there’s always a sense that it’s transient, or that no matter what happens, she’ll continue to be haunted by the uncertainty of her husband’s fate. (The movie’s ending is not entirely factual, at least on that last front.) Its strength lies in its simplicity, but at the same time, it also limits the film’s ceiling – as does the general adherence to a true story. It doesn’t have the serial gut punches of Quo Vadis, Aida?, instead telling a story about the survivors, one that juxtaposes the horrors of the Serbians’ atrocities in the former Yugoslavia with a single anecdote of hope. It has the feel of a good, low-budget indie movie – which is not to detract from first-time writer/director Blerta Basholli’s efforts here. If anything, I’d like to see what she can do next, perhaps with more resources, even to continue shining a light on what happened in her native Kosovo.

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→ August 10, 2020
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The True History of the Kelly Gang (film).

I enjoyed Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang when I read it ten years ago, but the new film adaptation of the book, released briefly to theaters this spring by IFC Films (now available via amazon), is a huge disappointment. It bears little resemblance to the book, revels in pointless violence, and makes use of some confusing camera tricks that left me with the impression that the filmmakers were more impressed by their technical ideas than they were concerned with making the film comprehensible.

Ned Kelly is a real historical figure, a bushranger and outlaw in 1800s Australia who has become a sort of Robin Hood-style folk hero in the century-plus since his capture and execution. He was born to an Irishman who was forcibly transported to Australia as a convict, and fell in with horse thieves before a violent confrontation at his family house with a Constable named Fitzpatrick led to Ned shooting the Constable and taking flight. He stayed on the run for two years with a ‘gang’ of fellow outlaws, gaining sympathizers across the continent due to antipathy towards the English or distrust of the corrupt colonial police, before he was caught and arrested in a shootout and conflagration that led to the death of Ned’s brother, several hostages, and a 13-year-old boy. Ned was tried and hanged for the murder of one of the officers who had been hunting for him, whom Kelly and his comrades ambushed at Stringybark Creek.

Carey’s novel follows the true story of Ned Kelly fairly closely, at least at the level of macro events, but this film goes its own way, inventing new events out of whole cloth, often to try to amp up the violence or depravity of the story. More than half of its two hours pass before Kelly (played by George Mackay) goes on the run, which happens earlier in the book and opens the door to most of the action in the story. The film dwells too long on Kelly’s upbringing, overdramatizing his tutelage under the bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe), then dropping the latter with a one-sentence narration, and jumping ahead in time to show Ned getting out of jail for a crime he committed under Harry’s direction. There’s a lot of underexplanation in this film, and knowing the book or the real story of Ned Kelly isn’t a lot of help because the script deviates so far from both.

The movie has Dan Kelly, Ned’s brother, and his fellow horse-thief Steve wearing fancy dresses on their escapades, a disguise that Ned adopts as well for his gang – something that appears to be pure invention on the part of the screenwriters. The film also implies multiple times that Ned and his friend Joe Byrne were lovers, which doesn’t seem to derive from any historical evidence at all. There’s also a brothel where Ned first meets Fitzpatrick, who later tries to woo his sister; the wooing is true but the house appears to be a fabrication, one that appears multiple times in the story.

The one shining light in the movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Fitzpatrick with a sort of disturbing yet genteel charm, although this again doesn’t appear to match the historical record. The real Alexander Fitzpatrick was only a Constable for three years, was a longtime alcoholic, and had a reputation for arresting and charging men on dubious pretenses – such as spiking Ned Kelly’s drink and then arresting him for drunk and disorderly conduct, a probably true story that would actually have made for a good scene in this film. Hoult plays Fitzpatrick less as a lush and more as a proud yet unscrupulous man, one whom you could understand Ned briefly befriending and young women possibly admiring. You might know Hoult as the boy in About a Boy, but he came to my notice more recently in 2018’s The Favourite, where he played the only male character of any substance in the film, a foppish dandy of sorts whom Hoult played to the hilt.

Mackay, unfortunately, plays Ned as a bestial figure, one devoid of nearly all personality or reason; it’s unclear why anyone would follow this madman, let alone why he’d eventually become a folk hero whose legacy is still debated to this day in Australia. Mackay was very good in 1917 and a pleasant surprise in the uneven Captain Fantastic, but this script did nothing to make use of his talents. Dismissive of its main character’s complexity, obsessed instead with pointlessly graphic violence, and shot in eccentric ways, The True History of the Kelly Gang does a disservice to its protagonist and to the book from which it came.

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→ June 25, 2017
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Land of Mine.

The Danish-German drama Land of Mine (Under Sandet) was one of five nominees for the Best Foreign Language film at the most recent Academy Awards ceremony and swept the Robert Awards, the Danish equivalent of the Oscars, last year. The story is fictional but is based on the real-life effort after World War II where 2000 German POWs, many of them teenagers or elderly men, were forced to come to Denmark to clear the up to two million landmines the Nazis had planted along the country’s western coast. Half the Germans either died or were maimed in the work, and the question of whether this constituted a war crime still hangs over Danish history. Land of Mine is sparse and taut, rarely sentimental until the very end, and doesn’t let the Danes off the hook one bit for the choice to force children to pay for the sins of their fathers. (It’s available to rent/buy on amazon and iTunes.)

The kids forced to clear the mines arrive at a Danish beach under the command of Captain Ebbe and Sgt. Carl Rasmussen, both of whom appear to be completely unconcerned with their charges’ welfare – they are human fodder for clearing the mines, and if they die in the effort, that’s the Germans’ fault for placing the mines there in the first place. One boy doesn’t even make it out of the initial training. The group includes Helmut Morbach, who is either the most realistic kid of the group or just an asshole, depending on your view; Sebastian Schumm, who is the de facto leader of the troop; Wilhelm Hahn, a naive kid oblivious to what’s ahead of him either in Denmark or after a return home; and the twins Werner and Ernst Lessner, who plan to go home and become bricklayers to help rebuild Germany now that the war is over. There’s no question over their volition here: the boys are barricaded in their little hut at the end of each work day and aren’t even fed for the first few days at the beach.

The kids don’t stand out much as individual characters, but are vehicles for telling the greater story, including how Sgt. Carl (Herr Feldwebel to the kids) ends up caring about their welfare in spite of his own misgivings and the commands from above to treat them like slaves. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything to mention that some of the 14 kids in the original group aren’t going to live to the end of the movie – they’re crawling on a beach looking for and defusing land mines, so of course there will be casualties. The movie’s impact comes more from how they’re injured or killed than how many, such as the effects of failing to feed the kids adequately, and in some of the cases we don’t really know the characters well enough to feel their losses as individuals.

Sgt. Carl, played by a relative novice actor in Roland Møller, is the moral center of the film, and his evolution over the course of the film becomes the movie’s conscience – he doesn’t want to think of the boys as people, comes to see them that way once the suffering and death begin, then is reminded of how they all ended up in this situation in the first place before he has to make one final decision to do the ‘right’ thing. Møller’s performance is dominant because most of it is so understated, and because his character gets the emotional complexity Ebbe’s and even the boys’ characters lack. That makes the ending of the film a little harder for me to accept – it’s the one true moment of sentiment, and the only part of the script that didn’t ring true. When he develops a little camaraderie with the boys, it seems only natural; he’s with them all day and starts to see them as real people, and struggles to transfer his hatred of the Nazis or the Germans over to them once he knows them. Whether the end works may depend on how much you buy into his personal transformation from the initial scene of abject hatred to the last day of work on the beach.

The characters of the POWs aren’t that well defined, but the young actors playing them at least give them depth in their emotional responses to the series of catastrophes that follow their assignment to the beach. They’re afraid every day, and every time the script seems like it’s giving them a few moments of calm, another mine explodes, setting off a new chain of emotional reactions in the survivors. Joel Basman delivers a strong performance as Helmut, the least likable of all of the boy soldiers, while the twins, Emil and Oskar Belton, playing Ernst and Werner get a small subplot of their own that gives Emil in particular a powerful scene in the back half of the film. The script also adds little details, like Sebastian answering a question about whether his father’s still alive with a long pause followed by a remote “I don’t know,” to flesh out the emotional states of these children even without giving us much in the way of biographical details.

Land of Mine is almost old-fashioned in its anti-nationalism; the easy thing to do in any historical drama about World War II is make any German characters the villains and move outward from there, but the protagonists of this movie are all Germans and don’t show the slightest hint of Nazi sympathies or even of German nationalism. They’re just kids, and all they want to do is survive and go home. The Danes are the nationalists, carrying forward their rage at the Nazi atrocities on to prisoners of war who had nothing to do with the mistreatment of Denmark. Sgt. Carl has to face the reality that the kids who’ve been conscripted to clear these mines are victims of the Nazi regime too, and the difficult decisions that the script gives him could apply to any conflict and any attempts at postwar reconciliation too.

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→ February 8, 2013
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Lincoln.

One more plug for the top 100 prospects package, which starts with the top 25 players with scouting reports. Thanks to all of you who’ve read, offered feedback, caught typos, or signed up for the first time this week.

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Lincoln is a fine film about the man we would all like to believe was our 16th President, a hagiography so thorough in its depiction of Lincoln as a latter-day saint that it reminded me of the likely apocryphal story of George M. Cohan’s reaction to the film about his own life, Yankee Doodle Dandy: “It was a good movie. Who was it about?”

I find it hard to imagine that Abraham Lincoln was anywhere near as perfect a man as Steven Spielberg’s movie would have us believe he was. In the film, which largely covers the month of January, 1865, and Lincoln’s efforts to get the wartime House of Representatives to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States. It’s not the ideal subject matter for a lengthy drama, one that involves a whole lot of talking (in language that feels stilted today and may have even been so for the time) and not much else, nor does such a short period of time and such a binary issue of right and wrong lend itself to a thorough character study. Titling the film The Thirteenth Amendment rather than Lincoln would have been more accurate, although I imagine it would have hurt ticket sales and perhaps even awards buzz.

Daniel Day-Lewis is superb as Lincoln in a performance that has been largely sweeping the major acting awards so far this season, although he may be receiving too much credit for the consistency and power of his portrayal of the man’s bearing and accent, as the character on the screen lacks much depth. The worst thing you can say about this version of Lincoln is that he’s willing to trade a handful of patronage jobs to secure passage of an amendment that would free millions of people from bondage. He is otherwise unflawed, a devoted husband, a pillar of strength in his family and for his country, a tireless leader fully committed to his principles of freedom and some form of equality. Day-Lewis looks the part, and sounds the part, but was the part really as complex as his mantle full of trophies might indicate?

The somewhat two-dimensional nature of Lincoln’s character opens the door for Tommy Lee Jones to steal a few scenes as the cantankerous Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a radical Republican (back when that party stood for something very different) and staunch abolitionist whose speeches in favor of the Amendment are shown as pivotal to its passage. Lincoln may have the best monologues, but Stevens gets the one-liners, and Jones gets to stretch a little more, especially in the range of emotions required for his role. Beyond Jones, the film is packed with white character actors you’ll recognize and spend a few minutes trying to place, including a few veterans of The Wire, as well as a brief appearance by David Oyelowo, who played Danny on the first few seasons of the British series MI-5. These roles seem to be more focused on historical accuracy than depth of character, with the same applying to Sally Field’s nuance-less portrayal of the neurotic Mary Todd Lincoln, a role in which she practically wrings her hands off their wrists.

The story opens in early January of 1865, as Lincoln has just won re-election but, as was true until the passage of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933, must deal with a lame-duck Congress until March 4th, at which point the numbers will shift more strongly in Lincoln’s favor. Lincoln chooses, over the counsel of his tiny Cabinet, to push for passage of the Amendment even though the House had been stalling since the Senate’s passage of it the previous April. Lincoln indicates that he wants to use the threat of passage as a way to force the South’s hand and encourage their surrender, beginning a series of horse-trades and slight deceptions that gradually line up the required votes in the House. The most interesting of these scenes, however, don’t involve Day-Lewis, who is so thoroughly embedded in his depiction of Lincoln that he precludes the potential for balanced dialogue (which may simply be the fault of Tony Kushner’s script) when he’s on the screen.

This shouldn’t really spoil anything in the film, but the amendment does, in fact, pass the House with about fifteen minutes left in the movie, meaning we get the great climax and then a bunch of housecleaning scenes, including the South’s capitulation at Appamattox and, of course, Lincoln’s assassination, shown off-screen and handled in the most perfunctory manner. The film could just as easily ended with Lincoln’s reaction after the climactic vote, but finishing his personal story at the movie’s conclusion felt forced given how little of his personal story appeared elsewhere in the film. It’s not really a biopic, but the story of a specific political endeavor, and tacking on the war’s end and Lincoln’s death was, at best, unnecessary.

Although the script was written and the film completed before the 2012 Presidential election, I thought there might be some faint parallels intentionally built into the movie. We now have a liberal President, entering a second term, pushing issues of freedom – with lower stakes than slavery, but, whether we’re talking about the War on Women or marriage equality, still matters of liberty and equal rights – while trying to wind down not one but two unpopular wars. Lincoln used the political capital of his second term to try to push through a morally justified but not overwhelmingly popular amendment to the constitution. Is Kushner encouraging President Obama to cash in some of his political capital to fight for specific causes, like marriage equality? I concede I may be reading far too much into the film, but the parallels seemed too strong to ignore.

I’ve now seen seven of the nine Best Picture nominees, all but Les Miserables and Amour, and while Lincoln may very well win the award, I couldn’t give you a competent argument that it should. I wouldn’t rate it higher than fourth, behind Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained, and Argo, and if you want to tell me it should be behind Life of Pi I won’t fight you on it. Day-Lewis is a lock to win the Best Actor award, but since I’ve only seen one of the other nominees’ performances – Brad Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook – I can’t offer an opinion on that one. Jones shouldn’t beat out Christoph Walz (Django) for Best Supporting Actor, while Field is probably going to be trounced by Anne Hathaway for Best Supporting Actress and would be behind Jacki Weaver (SLP) on my ballot anyway. (All links in this paragraph go to my reviews of those films.)

Lincoln was based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s hefty, critically-acclaimed book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. I’ve got a few long reads on my to-do list already, so I’ll save this for another time.

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