→ December 17, 2019
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Booksmart.

I wanted to like Booksmart, now streaming on Hulu, and the first twenty minutes were so promising … but I don’t think it lives up to its opening, and while there are some clever running gags and a few good quips, in the end it’s another teen movie that’s just a shade smarter than some of the films it rips off. (You can also rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are best friends and massive overachievers who’ve spent their high school years studying and doing all the things you’re supposed to do to get into a good college, but never doing anything fun, only to discover that a bunch of their classmates who have partied their way through high school have also gotten into elite schools. Molly’s the Class President and has a crush on her Vice-President, Nick, who appears to be a dimwit but, of course, isn’t. Amy has been out for two years, but has never kissed a girl, and has a crush on a classmate, Ryan, although she doesn’t know if Ryan is into girls. The night before graduation, they decide to go to a huge party at Nick’s aunt’s house, and spend about the half the movie trying to figure out where the party is and then trying to get there. Once they do arrive, they go after their respective crushes, only to have things not go as planned (obviously) and then something else works out for each of them instead.

There’s a lot of promise in this premise, and the two leads are both quite good. Feldstein is wonderfully annoying throughout the movie, and handles the transitions well from earnest to flailing to, at one point, shockingly rude to her closest friend in a way that makes the character feel entirely coherent and three-dimensional. Dever has somewhat less to do until they get to the party, and even then plays an unfortunate second fiddle to Feldstein until she has her unexpected tryst and can be the main character on the screen without her co-star. Billie Lourd is hilarious as Gigi, a prominent side character with the best running joke in the film, and some of the other kids are effective in narrow roles, although half of the actors are in their mid-20s already and look it. There are a couple of gay kids in their class played by Noah Galvin and Austin Crute who play both their characters as if they’re acting in a play within the movie, and most of their scenes are well-written and funny in an absurd way. (I’d watch a movie that starred just those two.) In fact, just about all of the actors playing the students are good at what they’re asked to do – in contrast to the adults in the movie, most of whom look out of place or uncomfortable, and all of whom are poorly written.

The story is nothing you haven’t seen before, unfortunately. A couple of kids want to have fun/drink too much/get laid before they go to college, and have a hard time doing any of these things correctly at first, only to get to the big party and have things go wrong before they go right. There’s some witty banter early in the film, but the script can’t keep up the pace, and things start getting progressively weirder as the film progresses. Their principal (Jason Sudeikis) moonlights as an Uber driver, and the situation gets kind of creepy. Another of their teachers has serious boundary problems, leading to a seriously cringey movement at the party. Amy’s big moment is sort of marred by a bad writing decision at the end of the scene that was unnecessary. One of the girls ends up in jail – seriously, the entire plot is ripped from Can’t Hardly Wait, which isn’t a good enough movie to rip off in the first place – and the way they get her out is a ridiculous plot contrivance. And how are they totally unable to figure out where Nick’s aunt lives in an era where most addresses are listed online and everyone has the internet on their phones? Oh, in the span of a few seconds one of the girls loses her phone and the other’s runs out of charge, because of course it does. These characters deserved a smarter story, right up to the resolution.

It was just too easy a movie to pick apart. Very little of it seemed realistic, and the script couldn’t maintain all the energy from the first few scenes – especially the one scene in a classroom, where the one-liners are flying back and forth and the kids all show their most interesting sides. This movie took in around $22 million at the box office, beating its budget comfortably but spurring a weird social media campaign, led by director Olivia Wilde, that made it seem like the movie was a flop. The better explanation is that the movie didn’t find a big audience because the script wasn’t good enough. Feldstein and Dever did their parts, but this is a forgettable entry in the sad tradition of mediocre teen comedies.

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→ December 10, 2019
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Marriage Story.

Noah Baumback’s Marriage Story, now streaming on Netflix, landed six nominations yesterday for the Golden Globe Awards for Male Filmmakers, including Best Motion Picture and Best Screenplay, although it didn’t get a nod for Best Director. It’s a bit puzzling given how weak the film is in most aspects, with thinly-drawn characters, a story that actually isn’t all that interesting, and a stunning lack of self-awareness about how one-percenty this story is.

This isn’t a marriage story, but a divorce story. Charlie (Adam Driver, nominated for Best Actor) and Nicole (Scarlett Johanssen, also nominated) are splitting up, although she’s the more adamant of the two and eventually is the one who takes the firm steps to move from separation to divorce. He’s a somewhat successful playwright in New York and she is his muse and lead actress, but when she gets a part on a pilot in LA, she leaves and takes their eight-year-old son with her, which Charlie seems to think is temporary but Nicole intends to be permanent. Their trouble communicating, highlighted in the first of many caricatures with their incompetent mediator (who is playing couples counselor, not like an actual mediator), eventually leads Nicole to hire a strong attorney (Laura Dern, nominated for Best Supporting Actress and deserving) and to surprise Adam with divorce papers, after which the process becomes more contentious and further details of their marriage start to spill out.

The entire story is smug from start to finish, full of knowing nods to life in New York and LA. (Really, the tea and biscotti sequence was so cringeworthy.) There’s a lot of arguing about how they don’t really have any assets to divide, even though these are two hilariously privileged people. Nicole refers to Charlie as a narcissist and she’s not entirely wrong; for most of the movie, really up until he realizes that he might lose custody entirely, he’s wrapped up in himself, and comes off that way in Nicole’s retelling of their marriage and courtship, then again near the end when he’s telling his actors about mundane details of divorced life. I could have done without Driver’s weird karaoke thing towards the finish as well. What might have been interesting about their dying relationship is how the two of them are unable to hear each other, especially Charlie’s inability or unwillingness to hear Nicole and see her as an equal with agency and goals beyond his, but the script barely explores that at all, and eventually careens into two big arguments, one on the phone that introduces an element to the divorce that makes you turn completely on Charlie (with reason), and then a blowout argument in his apartment that rather confirms that he’s an asshole and ends in utterly unbelievable fashion.

Most of the side characters are painfully one-dimensional, starting with Henry, who is supposed to be 8 years old but still sits in a car seat meant for much younger kids, who whines like a younger kid, who doesn’t want to eat any food that touched the “green thing.” Baumbach wrote him like a kindergartener, and he’s played like one, which makes him kind of insufferable – just like nearly every other side character. Nicole’s mother is an atrocious character played with a nails-on-the-chalkboard childlike voice by Julie Hagerty. The expert who comes to observe Henry at his parents’ houses is impossibly mousy and humorless. The lawyers are better developed than the family members across the board, and I suppose if this were Lawyer Story that would make sense. 

Why do critics seem to love this movie? Do they see something of their own lives in it? It is anchored by a great performance by Johanssen, a solid one by driver, and some strong supporting turns by Dern, Alan Alda (just wonderful in a small role as an avuncular attorney Charlie hires), and Ray Liotta (looking roided up as a bulldog attorney Charlie consults), but Baumbach forgot to finish drawing everything around them – the other characters, the depth their back story required, or some of the realism around their conflicts after she’s served him with papers. Even the one revelation about Charlie, which of course happens all the time in actual marriages, ends up derailing the story in a way because he goes from maybe-the-bad-guy to definitely-the-bad-guy, rather than advancing the actual marriage story – and it gives us another scene with a one-dimensional side character that tries to be funny but doesn’t work either. I don’t get any of this, even though you might think that I’d be right in this film’s demographic. It feels like the story of a marriage and divorce written by someone who’s never gone through either.

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→ November 3, 2019
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Parasite.

Parasite won the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes film festival, making director Bong Joon-Ho the first South Korean to win the top prize at that event, and the film has since racked up tremendous critical accolades and earned $5 million-plus already at the U.S. box office. It’s enough of a hit that it showed at my local, mainstream multiplex this weekend. It’s South Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t make the shortlist. On this Friday night, there were 20 people in the theater, including us, there to watch a Korean-language film with no actors who’d be recognized at all in the U.S. I’m thrilled to see it get this kind of audience because Parasite is a remarkable, funny, dark, and deeply metaphorical movie.

This upstairs, downstairs story revolves around the Kims, an unemployed family of four living in a dank semi-basement in Seoul where they steal WiFi from neighbors who forget to turn on passwords; and the Parks, a very wealthy family in the city with two young children and more money than they know what to do with. The two families intersect when Ki-woo, the Kims’ college-aged son who doesn’t attend school because he can’t afford it, gets a job filling in as the English tutor to the Parks’ teenaged daughter, Da-hye. Seeing how well the other half is living, Ki-woo hatches a plan to get the rest of his family hired – his sister as the Parks’ son’s art teacher, his father as the chauffeur, and his mother as the housekeeper – by also getting their existing help fired. This all goes very well until one night the housekeeper returns, revealing a secret of her own, turning the film from a hilarious farce into a darker satire that ultimately ends in violent chaos.

For about 3/4 of its running time, Parasite is consistently, laugh-out-loud funny. From the lengths to which the Kims go to perpetrate their con on the Parks or to justify their increasingly unethical behavior to themselves, on to the utterly ridiculous Park family themselves. The three Park characters who have something to do in the film – their son barely speaks at all – are all deeply stereotypical, with the mother (stays at home, can’t take care of herself or the house, heavily neurotic) and daughter (acts/dresses below her age, falls in love with her tutors) both so much so that I wondered if they were meant to be caricatures. The plot to get rid of the chauffeur is amusing; the subsequent plot to get rid of the housekeeper is bananas. Even as the film starts to become violent, there are still moments of humor, including some great physical comedy, until the final cataclysm tears the cover off and reveals the swirling mess of class rage that was beneath the surface the entire time.

Bong isn’t subtle about the fact that the film is replete with metaphor; Ki-woo uses the word “metaphorical” several times, often because he is trying to impress the Parks, but the presence of the word at all felt a bit like a message to the audience to wake up and smell the symbolism. There’s water everywhere in this movie, but while it’s clean and revivifying for the Parks, it’s anything but for the Kims; while water brings the Parks a modest nuisance, it eventually contributes to the Kims’ destruction. The physical locations of their living spaces – the Kims halfway (or more) underground, the Parks on the upper floors of a house with lower floors that they never even visit themselves – correspond to their relative status and their absolute status within a South Korea that rapidly developed after the Korean War but has created substantial income inequality, especially for older citizens. The rock, the Parks’ son’s artwork, the use of American “Indian” imagery – Parasite is absolutely rife with metaphors to underscore the conflict between the Parks and the Kims.

I assume Bong’s use of Kim, the most common family name in South Korea, for the lower-class family, was not a coincidence; Park is the third-most common name, so perhaps the point was that neither of these families is all that atypical, and that Bong is trying to represent wide swaths of Korean society. He’s also created a real dramatic balance between the two families; while the Kims are rascals, they’re not heroes, and if you were still rooting for them at the time that they dispatch the housekeeper, their ruse should be enough to dissuade you. There are no heroes here, no ‘good guys;’ it’s a movie about a lot of regular people who do bad things in the quest for money and all that it brings: status, comfort, freedom from future financial worry.

I won’t spoil any of the end other than to say it turns quite violent, although in the context of everything that has come before, it felt like the inevitable conclusion after two hours of growing tension that had no outlet for release, as the Kims wanted to preserve their ruse at all costs. When one of them finally realize that the Parks will never see them as anything but the hired help – and thus as lesser people – Parasite reaches a disturbing climax and conclusion that will cause you to rethink everything that came before.

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→ October 21, 2019
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High Life.

Claire Denis’ dystopian sci-fi film High Life, which just hit Amazon Prime earlier this month, is a strange and brooding film that uses its setting to distill life to its most basic functions. By putting her characters into tense situations that force them all to confront their mortality in a more overt way than we would normally face, she explores the darkest sides of humanity … but it is a long, slow drag to get there, punctuated by some highly disturbing sequences.

Robert Pattinson plays Monte, the sole surviving member of an interstellar journey whose purpose becomes apparent later in the film. His only companion on the ship is a baby, the one successful child to come from the ship’s scientist’s artificial insemination program – a program that, of course, causes a lot of outrage among the rest of the crew – all of which is explained in flashbacks over the course of the film. Without spoiling too much here, the gist is that these crew members were all criminals, given the choice to go on a mission that takes them well beyond the solar system rather than face life in jail or execution. Living in such close quarters, with the added stresses of both the control of the scientist (Juliette Binoche) and her bizarre effort to breed the crew members, only increases the odds of conflict, which is graphic and violent when it comes.

Before then, however, we see much more of the quotidian lives of the crew members through flashbacks, including their work in the ship’s gardens, the favorite spot of Tcherny (Andre Benjamin), and the use of what fans of the film have called the “fuck box,” a masturbation machine used by most of the crew members but not by Monte. Denis appears to want to strip her characters down to the basics – food, sex, shelter – to dehumanize them, making it easier to follow some of them down into a bestial sort of madness that ultimately leaves all of them dead except for Monte.

I’m not sure why this film exists, though. Pattinson is excellent – he’s turned out to be quite a good actor – and does everything he can to prop this movie up, especially in the torpid first half, but by the end I certainly had no idea why Denis had taken any of us on this particular journey. What does the rising tide of violence that engulfs the crew actually tell us about people as a whole or these characters in particular? Are we just to think that once a violent criminal, always a violent criminal? Or are they driven to madness and violence by the realization that their mission can only have one possible end?

The look and feel of High Life far surpass the content of the film. The spaceship’s exterior has a barebones look by design, as Denis has said she couldn’t imagine this dystopian future country spending on anything superficial for a mission of this kind. The interior also looks stark and grim, again fitting the nature of the mission, also enhancing the general sense of dread around the story and the fatalistic outlook of the various people on the ship. There are little details around things like resource management – including, of course, how they recycle their waste products – that give the film a layer of additional realism that would have really paid off if the story were better.

In the end, though, I never got on board with High Life‘s plot. Pattinson is good, but I didn’t relate to the character, and I think Denis’ decision to tell the story via flashbacks ultimately robs the movie of any real dramatic tension. It’s an experiment, with a decent idea at its core, but the experiment doesn’t succeed.

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→ September 10, 2019
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Non-Fiction.

Non-Fiction‘s original French title, Doubles Vies (“Double Lives”), does a much better job of summarizing the story itself, which covers two couples — a publisher, an author, an actress, and a political consultant – who cope with aging and the changing circumstances of life by having lots of sex with people other than their partners. It’s a smart and witty film, punctuated by one of the funniest meta-jokes I’ve ever seen, that has a lot to say about the inevitability of change and our inept ways of handling it. It’s streaming on Hulu and available to rent on iTunes and amazon.

Juliette Binoche, who continues to churn out tremendous performances nearly 35 years into her career, is one of the stars of Non-Fiction, playing the television actress Selena, the star of a French police procedural called Collusion; she’s married to literary editor Alain (Guillaume Canet), who has a strained relationship with onetime star author Léonard (Vincent Macaigne), who is married to the political consultant Valérie (columnist and comedian Nora Hamzawi). Selena is having a lengthy affair with the frumpy and morose Léonard; Alain starts sleeping with his firm’s young new digital media director Laure (Christa Téret) at the first opportunity. Léonard’s last few novels haven’t sold well, and Alain thinks his newest is a dud, which Léonard takes about as well as you’d expect – but Valérie has no sympathy for him and doesn’t even seem to like him very much. Meanwhile, Alain’s professional world is facing the upheaval of e-books and audiobooks as well as the changing demographics of fiction readership, while Selena grapples with the choice of continuing on a show that has made her successful but is professionally unfulfilling.

These are first-world problems, to be sure, but they are also somewhat universal at this point. Although writer/director Oliver Assayas focused the script on the massive shifts in the publishing world – which braced for a paradigm change that would lead readers to eschew dead trees for e-books, only to see readers gravitate back to physical books – technology is leading to similar creative destructions in lots of industries, changing the entire structure of employment and the relationships workers have to their employers. What hits Alain just at work over the course of the film could stand in for any industry.

The serial infidelities in the movie are a bit harder to grasp on a metaphorical level, although they provide a good bit of the humor. Selena seems broken up by the possibility that Alain is having an affair, but we find out shortly afterwards that she’s having one too – and it’s been going on for years. There’s a comic tension throughout as you wait to see if any of the spouses might figure out what’s going on and in watching various characters squirm when they might be caught, but understanding why Alain, married to a gorgeous and successful actress who seems to appreciate art and literature, chases a much younger woman just because she’s there is at least more opaque. Is it a reaction to change by regressing into adolescent behaviors? Similarly, if Selena is a significant TV star, why is her longtime affair – one in which she appears to have no emotional investment – with the mopey Léonard, a rather stereotypical modernist author who says he rejects materialism and tries to hold himself aloof from criticism that he obviously can’t bring himself to ignore?

For plot and purpose, Non-Fiction works far better out of the bedroom. Even the lengthy discussions of art for art’s sake, with somewhat obvious complaints like how these young kids don’t read any more, work well as parallels to the natural human inclination to romanticize the past and rationalize the status quo when we’re faced with the discomfort of change. (To borrow and slightly alter a line from Spike Milligan: I don’t fear change. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.) These four people are all adrift and facing some kind of imminent upheaval at work, with the threat of the same at home, and mostly react in similar ways, driven to poor decisions by uncertainty and doubt … like most adults confronted with the potential for significant changes at work or at home.

Binoche is wonderful, as always, although her character is more unlikeable than many roles she’s had before; Selena is a bit full of herself, especially about her job, and thinks nothing of advocating for her paramour to her own husband. Canet has the larger role, as we see so much more of him at work, and the subplot around his publisher is more significant than that around Selena’s TV show or Valérie’s work for a leftist candidate (a rather neglected side story). Macaigne is fine as the aloof, self-absorbed author, but I found zero reason to think that Selena would want a long-term affair with him, and the relationship between Léonard and Valérie is almost as befuddling.

Non-Fiction may also have clicked for me more than it would for many viewers – I’m not that much younger than these characters, am divorced, and work in a similar field that is also going through a lengthy period of tectonic-type changes. So much of the dialogue, which is fast-moving despite the weight of what Assayas wants to say, is insightful about facing changes as you get older that I found most of the film’s non-adultery content resonated with me. And that metajoke near the end is just (chef’s kiss).

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→ August 10, 2019
→ By

Stick to baseball, 8/10/19.

One ESPN+ post this week, a scouting blog entry on Luis Robert, Nick Madrigal, Deivi Garcia, Triston Casas, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the delightfully named card game Point Salad, which mocks the trend towards complicated scoring by giving you over a hundred different ways to earn points as you collect vegetable cards from the table.

My latest email newsletter edition went out on Tuesday, after I returned from Gen Con. You can sign up here for free to get more of my personal writing.

And now, the links … I assembled this on Thursday night before leaving for vacation, so it’s shorter than usual and anything that happened on Friday won’t be reflected here.

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→ August 7, 2019
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Climax.

Gaspar Noé has a strong reputation among critics for provocative movies that often skirt the line of good taste, and seems to revel in his ability to shock or even repulse audiences while similarly challenging them with his stories. This year’s Climax is probably his best-received film, even though it was made with just a loose outline, employed mostly non-actors, and took just a few weeks to film. It’s a nightmare come to life, one that is more revealing than horrifying, but also clearly crosses the line into poor taste.

Climax is based loosely on an actual story of a French dance troupe whose afterparty was spoiled because someone spiked their drinks with LSD, although in that case no serious harm came to any of the dancers. That is not true in Noé’s retelling here, as the party devolves into Lord of the Flies-level savagery because someone spiked the punch, made by the troupe’s den mother Emmanuelle, with LSD or a similar psychotropic drug. (The very end of the film makes it seem like it was LSD, although the dancers never know this.)

Things don’t fall apart until about halfway through the brisk 93-minute film; the first half includes an impressive, long modern dance number that incorporates numerous styles and presents more to the viewer than the eye can possibly follow. The party starts out well enough, but eventually the dancers who drank the punch start to feel unwell; no one speaks of hallucinations, but they become disoriented and paranoid, and start to revert to base instincts. As it becomes clear that the punch was tainted, they begin to band together to try to identify the culprit, blaming Emmanuelle, then blaming the two dancers who didn’t drink it, never considering that the person who spiked the punch may in fact have consumed it themselves. This devolution also sees them lose many of their inhibitions, giving in to violence and sex, and by the time the police arrive the next morning there are several dancers dead or grievously wounded, while others are simply damaged by what’s occurred.

The drugs really are beside the point in Climax, which explores the nature of fear and how quickly we come to distrust others when we think we’re in danger. Noé wrote an outline and some general directions but asked the actors, most of whom were professional dancers without acting experience, to simply act as they would if under the influence, showing them videos of people who’d taken LSD or other hallucinogens. There are two professionals in the cast, Sofia Boutella (Selva) and Souheila Yacoub (Lou), who do more heavy lifting than anyone else, the former as the de facto social leader of the group, the latter the one character with something resembling a storyline.

Noé’s hand is all over the film even though there wasn’t a proper script. There’s one continuous shot that runs over 40 minutes, shifting perspectives and angles, drifting to different characters, that helps convey the dancers’ disorientation to the viewers. He also moved the closing credits to the beginning of the movie, and the typical title card with cast listing to the middle, which felt more like a gimmick to me than an important change. (Plus Adam McKay did it better in Vice.) He made one truly regrettable decision, the part of the film that crosses the line into needless suffering; Emmanuelle’s son is at the party, and while I won’t spoil it, what that child is put through did not need to be in this movie at all. Noé could have accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish without that. Assuming the boy’s inclusion was an active decision by Noé, it was a blatant attempt to shock the audience for shock’s sake.

Several days after watching Climax, I can’t decide if I think the film is good. I would say I didn’t enjoy watching it, because it is so unpleasant (by design) to watch the dancers lose control of themselves and their situation, wandering around a dark building that looks like an abandoned school or mental institution. I also couldn’t stop watching it, and was past the halfway mark before I even thought about how much time might have passed, and it’s certainly had me thinking about it in the time since I watched. There is something essential about stories that remind us of the thin line between the way we live and utter anarchy, of the tiny genetic barrier that separates us from chimpanzees, of the social norms we take for granted that allow us to live our daily lives. When one brick is removed, the entire edifice could collapse. Noé is willing to stare into that abyss and show us what he sees.

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→ March 2, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 3/2/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, I wrote three pieces, breaking down the Bryce Harper deal, ranking the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and offering scouting notes on players I saw in Texas, including Bobby Witt, Jr. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the gaming front, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game The Quacks of Quedlinburg for Paste, and also reviewed the digital port of the game Evolution for Ars Technica.

I went on the Mighty 1090 in San Diego with Darren Smith to talk Manny Machado, Olive Garden, and the Oscars, and on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about Ross Atkins’ strange comments on Vlad Jr.. I also spoke to True Blue LA about Dodgers prospects, and joined the Sox Machine podcast to talk White Sox prospects.

I’m due for the next edition of my free email newsletter, so sign up now while the gettin’s good.

High Street on Market’s Sandwich Battles begin this Monday, with tickets available for $25. They’re my #1 restaurant in Philly, in large part because their breads are otherworldly.

And now, the links…

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→ February 21, 2019
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Euthanizer.

Continuing my trek through films submitted for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, I watched the Finnish entry, the dark, disturbing film Euthanizer, which seems to start out as a revenge-fantasy story and ends up in an even bleaker place by the time the film wraps up. It’s also quite short, under 90 minutes, and the script sticks the landings on most of its gymnastics, although a film this tight probably needs a more limited thematic focus. It’s streaming free for amazon prime subscribers.

Veijo is the euthanizer of the film – he euthanizes pets as a side job, charging less than the local vet, but seems only willing to take on such cases if the pet is being mistreated or is otherwise ill, emphasizing that he only does this to end suffering, not, say, to help someone get rid of an unwanted pet. He lectures owners who bring their pets to him for how they’ve mistreated them – cooping up a cat in a tiny apartment, ignoring signs of illness in a dog, buying a guinea pig as a pet without getting it a companion. Veijo’s father is in the hospital in the late stages of some kind of terminal disease, in a good bit of pain, but Veijo’s caring for the suffering of others doesn’t extend to his father for reasons we’ll learn near the story’s end.

Veijo’s strange, solitary existence, punctuated by facial expressions worthy of late-career Harrison Ford, is interrupted by two visitors: the nurse who’s taking care of his father and hears him discussing his side gig, and a local thief who falls in with a white supremacist group and wants his dog put down strictly for reasons of convenience. The nurse is obsessed with death, and seduces Veijo, which leads to the most bizarre sex scene of the year, but she sees in him a fellow traveler without understanding the reasons why he euthanizes select animals but not others. The white supremacist, who looks way too much like the bassist/actor Flea, is about to lose his job at a mechanic’s for stealing tires, which he then resells to his racist buddies while trying to get into their ‘gang,’ and spends much of the film screaming at his wife on his phone or raging against nothing at all while sitting in his car. There’s a third subplot with the local vet, who appears to be more motivated by money than by any love of animals, that doesn’t work as well and serves mostly as a plot device to send Veijo off the rails for good. Veijo runs afoul of the white supremacists (not hard to do), which begins a back-and-forth revenge pattern that is satisfying at the start but ends in utterly gruesome fashion that throws the meaning of everything that came before into question.

There’s a clear point here about how we either treat animals far worse than we treat other people, as if they’re not even sentient, or how we treat animals better than other people, although Euthanizer doesn’t do enough in either direction. The film also doesn’t give us enough about Veijo until the very end of the movie to explain why he is the way he is – both why he euthanizes pets to prevent further suffering and why he’s isolated himself from just about everyone else, at least until the nurse pries her way into his life. There’s certainly satisfaction in watching him dress down people who have abused or neglected their pets, and there’s even more in watching him go after the white supremacists – who are amusingly stupid and, fortunately, never do anything racist on screen in the movie, instead just talking about how tough they are – but the final scene falls short as an explanation of everything.

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→ February 20, 2019
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At Eternity’s Gate.

Willem Dafoe earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor this year for his turn as Vincent Van Gogh in the sort-of-biopic At Eternity’s Gate, which is a beautiful but sort of dreadful film that doesn’t give the viewer much of a sense of who Van Gogh was, while advancing a somewhat questionable hypothesis about his death. Dafoe is excellent, as he nearly always he is, but I have no idea what this movie was trying to accomplish.

Van Gogh was one of the most important painters in the western canon and an important bridge from impressionism to post-impressionism, a prolific painter during a short period of his life who struggled to make any money from his art while alive – we know of one painting he sold during his life, although there may have been others that were not recorded – but became immensely influential in death and whose paintings now sell for millions of dollars. At Eternity’s Gate has some wonderful sequences where we see Van Gogh at work, both in how the film reconstructs his painting or sketching – I have to assume someone stood in for Dafoe in these scenes, although the editing is seamless – and in how Dafoe depicts an artist in the flow state, oblivious to many things around him, including the discomfort of many of his subjects.

That’s about the end of what’s good in At Eternity’s Gate, which takes its title from one of the colloquial names of the painting most commonly known as Sorrowing Old Man, as the rest of the film is muddled in story and in technique. There are some positively bizarre, disorienting camera angles, often at 90 degrees to the ground, or POV shots of Van Gogh’s feet as he walks through a sunflower field, that only make the film harder to watch without adding any value. The film makes frequent use of extreme close-ups, to no apparent benefit. There are a lot of shots of Van Gogh running through fields – so while the landscape scenes are gorgeous, it’s often unclear what the purpose is. Even when there is a purpose here, such as showing Van Gogh’s confusion in tangible terms through camerawork and layered, hollow audio tracks, it also has the side effect of making the movie harder to watch.

And ultimately the film doesn’t tell us anything about Van Gogh that we didn’t already know, which is probably the greatest disappointment of all. The generally accepted cause of Van Gogh’s death is suicide by gun, but the script pushes the alternative and unlikely hypothesis that he was killed by some local boys in an accident, which feels like revising history and whitewashes Van Gogh’s history of mental illness (itself the subject of ongoing debate). Oscar Isaac appears as Paul Gauguin, another post-Impressionist artist who was similarly underappreciated during his lifetime, and the film depicts their troubled friendship, where Van Gogh appears to adore Gauguin. He does indeed eventually cut off his own ear in some sort of gesture towards his friend, although that story, which also should be part of the bigger picture of Van Gogh’s mental infirmity, also becomes muddled in the retelling here. Isaac is also generally quite good, but he does a bit of Poe Dameron here and overacts a modest part, with points added back on for his Parisian accent.

There’s no reason to watch At Eternity’s Gate unless you’re an Oscars completist; I don’t think this film does Van Gogh justice or tells us anything new about the man, his life, or his works. Dafoe is great – I thought he should have won the Best Supporting Actor award last year for The Florida Project – but even a top-tier actor can only do so much with inferior material.

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