→ November 13, 2018
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Beautiful Boy.

Beautiful Boy, the film, is based on twin memoirs by a father and son, titled Beautiful Boy ($5.18 on amazon right now) and Tweak, respectively, of the latter’s long struggle with drug addiction, especially to crystal meth. It’s by turns a bleak portrayal of the effects a child’s addiction can have on the family and a distant, almost toneless depiction of what should be a gut-wrenching subject, saved primarily by yet another star turn by Timothée Chalamet as the son in the one great performance in the film.

Steve Carell co-stars as David Sheff, the father in the story, looking very paternal, as a successful journalist who is surprised to find out that his son has a serious drug problem and tries to throw himself at the issue to solve it. His son, Nicholas, behaves as you might expect an addict to behave – lying, stealing, deceiving, and then collapsing in apology and self-loathing. The cycle repeats multiple times until Nicholas eventually overdoses in New York, the event that more or less closes the movie and in real life marked the start of his journey to sobriety.

My experiences with this kind of addiction are mostly through depictions in writing and on screen; I had one relative who dealt with it, hiding it from me for most of my life, until the last few years before his suicide when he was probably no longer capable of the deception required. So when I say I think Beautiful Boy does a solid job of showing Nicholas’ addiction, and his up-and-down cycle through rehab, recovery, and relapse, or that I think the way his disease tears his family up is accurately portrayed, bear in mind that I’m playing with a handicap here.

But the rest of the script feels heavy-handed and even one-sided. Nicholas’ mother (Amy Ryan) lives in LA and is only on screen a few times, but the character is a shrew, and the fact that she takes care of Nicholas for about a year when he’s clean is brushed under the rug so she can fall apart again on the phone when he relapses after a weekend of visiting David. David’s second wife, Karen (Maura Tierney), is an artist, the mother of Nicholas’ two step-siblings, and is something of a cipher of a character, given more screen time but no development. There’s one scene near the end where she takes action after years of watching the damaging David-Nicholas dynamic, a wordless sequence that is the best thing any woman gets to do in the film – but that just speaks to how little the script regards its women, and I can’t believe that neither Nicholas’ mother nor his stepmother was that important in his early life or his path through addiction.

Chalamet is superb, again, probably earning his second Oscar nomination in as many years for this performance; he physically fits the part, looking a little haggard for someone with such a young face, earning the plaudits every time Nicholas experiences moments of clarity and remorse. It’s Carell who disappoints here – he looks right, but he’s just inert in this performance, and I found myself without any emotional connection to his character, even though I am a father myself and should at least have felt that paternal anxiety and grief through his eyes. If David Sheff is just a bottled-up guy, maybe Carell’s performance would make a little more sense, but it doesn’t translate well on screen. I needed a lot more here to feel what the character was feeling and didn’t get it.

There’s also a bunch of stuff in Beautiful Boy that a decent editor would have clipped – the weird, incongruous sex scene between Nicholas and a girl he hooks up with late in the movie served no purpose, and I’m not sure why we saw Karen working on her art at all – and the flashbacks to Nicholas’ youth aren’t well integrated into the primary narrative. Andre Royo has a nice bit part as Nicholas’ sponsor in NA, a fun bit of casting for viewers who remember him as Bubs on The Wire, but the fact that he’s so little used in the story also points to how little we see of Nicholas’ time in those meetings or in the process. There is one little fact delivered toward the end of the film by a doctor played by Timothy Hutton, where he explains to David that the rehab facility director lied to him about success rates of rehab from meth addiction – that the success rate tends to be in the single digits because meth damages the user’s nerve endings. Nothing shook me in this script more than that scene; even I, someone generally empathetic to addicts because I understand it’s a disease and saw it lead to the suicide of a loved one, didn’t quite understand just how brutal it could be. Nicholas Sheff recovered, and is still alive today, working, writing, and living a life that was probably unimaginable for him or his father during the time covered in Beautiful Boy. That miracle needed to come across more in the film.

One postscript: Nic Sheff did an interview with The Fix where he praised the film and Chalamet’s performance in it. It’s worth reading even if you have no interest in the movie.

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→ November 8, 2018
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First Man.

First Man reunites director Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling, who worked together two years ago on La La Land, in a different sort of movie, this time a serious biopic that deals with the biggest themes possible – life, death, and man’s search for meaning. Ostensibly a biography of Neil Armstrong from the death of his young daughter from cancer to his landing on the moon, First Man is much more a story of grief and coping, or not coping, and as a result less insightful as any sort of document of the man himself.

Gosling plays Armstrong, whom we first meet as an engineer and Navy pilot whose two-year-old daughter Karen is seriously ill with a brain tumor that will claim her life (via daughter) very early in the film, after which Armstrong shows the only real emotion he will display anywhere during the course of the movie. The story follows him through his entry into the space program, flight testing, and training, eventually to his selection for Apollo 11, but his path involves living through the deaths of at least five colleagues due to crashes and the cabin fire on the Apollo 1 craft, only furthering Armstrong’s turn inward with its constant reminder of Karen’s death. Armstrong also distances himself from his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), and two young sons, burying himself in work rather than risking further grief by getting too close to anyone else in his life.

First Man is extremely loud and incredibly close, to the point where the sound editing and cinematography, while perhaps accurate for the subject matter, make it hard to watch in several parts. The scenes aboard the various spacecraft involve a tremendous amount of shaking – not just showing us that the people on the ships are shaking, but shaking the camera so much that I repeatedly had to turn away from the screen, something I can’t remember ever doing for another film. The sound in those scenes where Armstrong is aboard any sort of ship is also mixed so that the background noise is amplified and it’s very hard to understand any of the communications between Armstrong (and any colleagues) and Mission Control; I eventually just gave up on understanding that dialogue, much of which involved technical chatter.

Gosling and Foy dominate the movie both in screen time and with their performances, with Gosling making Armstrong almost unknowable with his restrained portrayal, at times painful in his reticence and utter refusal to show emotion. There’s a pivotal scene where Janet forces him to talk to his two sons before he leaves for the Apollo 11 mission, knowing there was a good chance he wouldn’t return, and he can barely talk to the boys or even look at them; when one son asks if he might not come home, Armstrong responds as if he’s still in a press conference, with Gosling barely making eye contact and answering with a robotic tone and cadence. Foy gets to show a broader range of emotions, and her character develops some strength over the course of the film, enhanced by how her character is dressed and Foy’s own waifish appearance.

The movie has disappointed at the box office – much to the glee of alt-right trolls upset over the absence of a scene where the American flag is planted on the moon, which would be so out of place given the context of what Armstrong actually does after he lands – and I think one reason might be that the movie isn’t just a biopic. There is some celebration of space exploration here, and certainly some jingoism involved as the U.S. reached the moon before the Soviets could, but the larger theme in First Man is death and how we cope with it. The script’s premise is that Karen’s death changed Armstrong forever, leading him to create distance between himself and his family while driving him to take bigger risks at work, including accepting the riskiest mission in the history of the space program. (As a side note, I enjoyed watching Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and The Pin flying to the moon.) Rather than fully explaining his character, though, the script instead shows a man unwilling to open up to anyone in his grief, and the damage that ultimately does to him, to his marriage, and to his relationships with his two surviving children. Perhaps audiences wanted to see more of a hero at the heart of the film – there are a few such moments, but it’s not the dominant tone – and were surprised to see a movie that is so somber and pensive about a topic just about nobody wants to spend any time considering. That theme, and that choice to go with that theme over a rah-rah space and ‘merica tone, makes First Man a stronger film even if it’s less commercially appealing.

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→ November 7, 2018
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Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is based on the true story of biographer and literary forger Lee Israel, who discovered she had a knack for mimicking the style of famous authors and began producing fake personal correspondence from the likes of Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker when her own books stopped selling. With two strong performances by Melissa McCarthy and Richard Grant, the film bounces along at a brisk pace, running from the nadir of Israel’s legitimate career through her forgery streak to her eventual trial, but the script itself is flimsy and does way too much to try to make a remorseless con artist into a sympathetic character.

McCarthy plays Israel, a frumpy, mid-50s author who drinks too much and doesn’t really care for people, and whose agent, played by Jane Curtin, has lost interest in working with her between her difficult personality and the lack of commercial appeal of her books. We see her lose an editing job, struggle to pay bills, and experience writer’s block (presaged in one of the many heavyhanded scenes in the movie), before she eventually meets Jack Hock, played by Grant, a flamboyant gay libertine who becomes her one friend and eventually a partner in her crimes. While researching her latest book idea, on comedienne Fanny Brice, she finds a real letter from Brice tucked in a library book, steals and sells it, and hits on the idea of forging letters for profit. Eventually, she’ll be caught, giving McCarthy a scene for her Oscar reel at the sentencing hearing, and hits on the idea of writing a memoir of her stint as a forger both as a way to make money and to satisfy her inner desire to write.

The story is just too light and way too kind to its main character to work. It does show Israel as difficult and often rude to others, but the depiction of her forgery sales gives off the sense that, hey, it’s all okay because she’s just selling stuff that wealthy idiots will buy, and that the independent bookstores who buy her letters to resell them are somehow complicit for their failure to verify that her letters are authentic. Because it’s based on Israel’s memoir, there’s no attempt to explain why she is the way she is – why she drinks so much, why she likes cats more than people (her words), why she can’t maintain romantic relationships, and so on. And that means we don’t learn anything about why she slides so easily into forgery, other than that she had a financial need and then realized she was good at it. There’s zero sense that she regrets any of this, or considers that there might be consequences for the other people she involves, including Jack, and the script doesn’t even try to explain how she ended up without scruples.

McCarthy and Grant are both tremendous in their respective characters and in all of their scenes together, an odd couple of misfit friends, neither of whom has anyone else close to them. Late in the film, Israel’s previous girlfriend appears in a confessional scene, although it merely rehashes what we already knew about Lee’s character – she can’t open up, she creates walls between herself and people who try to get close to her – without explaining any of why. That somewhat limits what McCarthy can do in the role, but given its constraints she goes to an extraordinary length to try to give the character some three-dimensional qualities and create empathy for Israel, even when it’s probably not deserved. Grant makes Hock a delightful scamp, a bit ridiculous at points, but both consistently entertaining and a better elicitor of pathos for the character than McCarthy can be with Israel, as his character is more of an open mess while Israel is a closed one.

There’s already a consensus forming around Grant as a lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and McCarthy probably has a shot at a Best Actress nod, although that might depend a bit on how many voters actually see this movie. She deserves plaudits for easily transitioning from comedic roles that rely on her timing and her gift with physical comedy to a dramatic one where none of those comic skills come into play. It’s the script itself that’s the problem – this is a trifle of a story, told from the perspective of the main character, someone who had every reason to lie about herself and who had an actual history of lying. Some insight on her character would have gone a long way to justifying the film, but we get none of that and too much of the drama around her friendship with Jack and her forging career. It makes for an unsatisfying product beneath the two superb performances that sit on top of the film.

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→ November 5, 2018
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Madeline’s Madeline.

I’d never so much as heard of director Josephine Decker’s film Madeline’s Madeline (available on amazon & iTunes) until the Gotham Independent Film Project’s award nominations came out about two weeks ago. Honoring – you guessed it – the best in independent film of the year, the movie earned one of the five nominations for Best Feature Film (along with First Reformed and the upcoming If Beale Street Could Talk), while its star, Helena Howard, earned a nod for Breakthrough Star. It’s very much an indie film, nonlinear, highly metaphorical (the first line of the film tells you this), and often inscrutable, but Howard delivers one of the best performances by a teenaged actor I can remember seeing.

The movie is very, very weird, which is why it’s regularly called “experimental,” although in this case I’m not sure what’s experimental about it beyond just the nonlinear storytelling. Howard plays Madeline, a 16-year-old actress, who has recently found her calling with a local theatrical troupe (or interpretive dance troupe), and has a deeply troubled relationship with her mother Regina (Miranda July). Madeline suffers from some serious mental illness, may have injured her mother before, and has an eating disorder and self-mutilation habits. The troupe is led by Evangeline (Molly Parker), who at first appears just like a director/writer consumed with her art, but her actual role and motivations are not so clear. She sees in Madeline both an incredible talent and a rich story of mental illness; her drive to get Madeline to open up and provide the subject for their performance lead Evangeline into a toxic relationship with Madeline that threatens the girl’s fragile tie with her mother and the integrity of the troupe itself.

Howard gives a virtuoso performance for a tyro – this is her first screen credit, film or TV – as a complex, difficult character prone to massive mood swings and primal behavior (yelling, screaming, using her body beyond simple gestures). The film depends entirely on the ability of the actress in that role, and Howard is strong from the beginning, only to get better as the film progresses and the script asks more of her. There’s a climactic scene where she imitates her mother that feels like the “that’s the scene that won her the X Award” moment in the film, but even in smaller scenes she excels at pushing the borders of the screen with those sudden shifts in mien or tone.

The script itself leaves a hundred questions along the way, resolving nothing. Foremost among them is whether Madeline is actually acting or dissociating; her most intense performances with the troupe seem to come from somewhere deeper within herself than most people can readily access, and that climactic scene ends with everyone reacting while she briefly goes catatonic. Related to that question is how much of what she tells us about her relationship with her mother is real; we see a little bit of her home life, and Regina is certainly not winning Mother of the Year given her extreme neuroses and how she takes those out on her daughter, but is it all true? For one example that comes up at the start of the movie: did Madeline actually burn her mother with an iron – or herself? Madeline’s father is mentioned but never appears; he seems to have left the family, but is discussed as if he’s present, and the most we learn about him comes when Madeline and some friends go in her basement and explore her father’s stash of porn. Why he left, and if he had any role in creating Madeline’s maladies, are both left unanswered.

The theatrical troupe is also … well, not quite right, to the point that it appears that the troupe may really be a cult, led by Evangeline, who sees a perfect recruit in Madeline, only to see the ingenue later threaten her control of the entire enterprise. The rhythmic breathing and humming, the all-black outfits, the masks (really, are you dancers, or are you Slipknot?), the often affectless way they greet each other all speak to some kind of relationship beyond members of the same dance ensemble.

I’m assuming the choices of the three main characters’ names were deliberate here, as two of them in particular have strong biblical connotations that seem to apply to the story. Madeline is derived from the same way we get the name Mary Magdalene, whom Jesus is said to have driven out “seven devils” – likely a reference to mental illness – according to the Gospel of Luke. Evangeline means the bringer of a gospel or good news, ironic since Evangeline is nothing but bad news for Madeline and her family but is unable to see anything beyond her own needs.

The story itself ends up a muddle without any clear here to there – often it wasn’t apparent whether we’d jumped back in time – and there is no answer to anything posed here. The final sequence of the script is powerful visually, and I thought reinforced the idea that this might be a cult, but I can’t say I know where we went on that journey or what the screenwriter was trying to say. That said, if you can watch a film just to see one character’s tremendous performance – not to mention to see someone throw up a 2012 Bryce Harper sort of debut – Madeline’s Madeline is worth the time just for Howard’s performance. This, it turns out, is how a star is born.

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→ November 3, 2018
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A Star Is Born.

The latest iteration of A Star Is Born, the third remake in the 81 years since the original premiered, manages to craft a clever, well-executed film beneath its enormous budget and the star power of the two leads. It dispenses with much of the schlock and sentiment of most mass-market dramas – and of the original film – but keeps the essential framework of the story, layering it with humor and well thought-out dialogue. For about two hours, it might be the best movie of the year, although the failure to set up the film’s climactic moment detracts from much of what came before.

Bradley Cooper co-wrote the new script and directed the film while also starring as a roots-rock artist Jackson Mayne, who is selling out stadiums and can’t go in public without people trying to surreptitiously take his picture. He’s also an alcoholic and drug addict, which we see in the opening scenes of the film, and which leads him to stop in a bar somewhere outside New York City – a drag bar where their former waitress Ally, played by Lady Gaga, sings every Friday night. She performs “La Vie en Rose,” and Mayne is utterly smitten by her voice, her personality, and her looks. She confesses to him that she wants to be a singer but she’s been told by every record executive that she’s not attractive enough to be a commercially successful artist. Of course, if you know the story at all, you know that he disagrees, takes her under his wing, and turns her into a star, all while the two have a fairy-tale sort of romance that can’t possibly last given his self-destructive tendencies.

The story has been told before, although the original script, co-written by Dorothy Parker, revolved around a young actress discovered while working as a waitress at a Hollywood studio party by a famous actor already on the decline due to his drinking. The new version of A Star Is Born works hard to provide complexity to both of its main characters, including an extensive back story to Mayne to try to explain why he continues to abuse a panoply of substances; the story’s focus on those two characters to the almost total exclusion of anyone else makes it an unusually dense, smart script for a major studio release, and gives the two leads tremendous material for performances that both seem like locks for Oscar nominations.

Cooper has more to work with here, as he’s the primary character, has that more detailed character history, and has written in much more complexity to Jackson than he gave Ally. But Lady Gaga’s performance was even more revelatory, both because she has virtually no acting experience in film and very little in TV, and because she conveys so much of her character’s emotional vulnerability beyond reciting dialogue. If they gave out awards for the best use of an actor’s hands to show you a character’s emotional state, she’d be the overwhelming favorite. The two together have undeniable, immediate chemistry, and the story just of the first night they met is a perfect meet-cute anecdote that, of course, can’t last in the long term. (My only quibble with Lady Gaga is that she’s too pretty for the whole “you’re not pretty enough to be a rock star” gambit.)

For two hours, this machine hits cruise control and rolls along at 70 mph without so much as hitting a pebble in the road. The pacing is remarkably smooth, the dialogue smart and believable, and the inverse paths of the two characters’ careers handled intelligently and credibly. But the ending to this movie, which is very similar to those of previous versions, is rushed to the point that the last big plot event isn’t earned by the story that comes before it. That kind of plot device, even borrowed, needs more justification than it received here, and the way it’s written trivializes the choice that character makes. The script spends more time on the mechanics leading up to that moment – the practical steps the character takes – than on his emotional state and explaining how he came to such a drastic decision.

I’m going to predict, even though it’s early in the season, that A Star Is Born ends up with the most Oscar nominations, with at least nine, including Best Picture Director, Actor, Actress, Song, Cinematography, and some sound awards, while Sam Elliott could grab a nod for Best Supporting Actor in a small but pivotal role as Jackson’s brother and a critical member of his touring team. The concert scenes are incredibly well staged and shot, giving you a sense of the grandeur (and, to me, the anxiety potential) of performing in front of ten or twenty thousand people, yet much of the movie is filmed close – you are often right there with the characters, even when they’re talking to each other, in a way that works to heighten the intensity of arguments and breakdowns throughout the story. The sound in those concert scenes is superb as well, along with the way the film uses sound to bring the recurring bouts of tinnitus that Mayne experiences home to the viewer. It’s not the best film of the year, but it might be the biggest winner come awards season.

–

I’m going to reveal the big climactic event in the movie, since it’s worth a separate discussion. It is slightly different from the analogous moment in the three previous iterations of the movie, although in all four U.S. versions of this movie, the Mayne character dies, twice by drowning himself in the ocean, and this time by his own hand but via another method. I understand that in the real world, people do commit suicide for what might seem to an outsider a totally insufficient reason, and they also commit suicide with little to no warning. I’m holding this movie, and others, to a somewhat higher standard: If you’re going to have a character do this, I need to buy it. This time, I didn’t.

In the 1934 original, Norman Mayne’s decision to drown himself comes after a steep decline that was already underway at the start of the film. He’s a successful actor but a known drunk, he’s sozzled when he meets his ingenue Esther, and his career fortunes drop consistently throughout the film, until, near, the end, he’s a has-been and a public laughingstock. When he realizes that he’s destroying Esther’s career, he decides to take his own life. It’s not ‘right,’ of course, but the script spends more than enough time explaining how Norman got to that point.

The new version really doesn’t do that, and I think at least some of the problem comes in the writers’ choices to focus more on Ally’s rise than on Jackson’s fall. Ally gets a lot of screen time after Jackson has made her a star, including a new if unfinished arc about her choice to pursue a more commercial direction than Jackson intended for her career, one where she might be sacrificing some of her artistic integrity to sell more records. The cost of that additional story is that we get less detail to Jackson’s slide; there’s one enormous scene where he embarrasses her at the Grammy Awards (just as Norman Mayne did to Esther at the Oscars), but what follows from there doesn’t really lead to suicide. It’s the point where the film just stops being a great story and starts to rush to connect the remaining dots, so that the last 15-20 minutes don’t live up to everything that’s come before – and it all does so in a way that makes suicide seem like an entirely impetuous, selfish act, instead of the desperate decision of someone suffering from mental illness or great physical pain.

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→ October 30, 2018
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Let the Sunshine In.

Let the Sunshine In (available to rent on amazon and iTunes) is a star turn for Juliette Binoche, a thinly plotted wisp of a movie that works entirely because of Binoche’s performance as a middle-aged woman looking for something in her love life but unable to find it – perhaps because she doesn’t know what it is she wants. It’s a sort of cringe comedy for adults, full of awkward interactions in and out of the bedroom, punctuated by emotional scenes of Binoche lamenting her unhappiness and questioning the decisions she’s made, while she’s surrounded by some generally awful men.

Binoche plays Isabelle, an artist and single mother who, at the start of the movie, is experiencing but definitely not enjoying sex with a rather unattractive banker named Vincent, who quickly reveals himself to be something of a pig – and is also quite married and full of himself. Isabelle says she’s in love with him, although her actions would imply otherwise. Between watching Vincent treating a bartender like he’s something less than human and hearing Vincent say he will never leave his wife, Isabelle decides to break it off and venture out on her own, which leads to a couple of doomed affairs with brooding artist types and a lot of conversations about her misadventures and melancholy.

It’s unfair to say nothing happens in Let the Sunshine In (the actual title of which, Un Beau Soleil Intérieur, is better translated as “a beautiful sun within”), but what does happen is usually inconsequential. Isabelle seems unable to distinguish physical intimacy from genuine emotional affection, a confusion of which men around here seem more than happy to take advantage – I was reminded of the opening couplet from the Shelter song “Here We Go,” about a guy using love for sex while the girl is using sex for love. Nearly all of the men Isabelle encounters are creeps of varying levels of aggressiveness, and when the one possible ‘nice guy’ in the film kisses her but doesn’t want to rush right into sex, she feels rejected. There’s no destination here, or even any real growth; the film ends with Isabelle’s visit to a psychic (and, obviously, a fraud) played by Gérard Depardieu, with his bad advice and her questions continuing through most of the closing credits.

With the wrong actress as Isabelle, this would have been unwatchable; even though there are a few sex scenes and a few other big moments, the script is powered entirely by dialogue, nearly all of which involves the main character. Binoche delivers an Oscar-caliber performance here, owning the screen every time she’s on it, conveying a mix of strength and vulnerability, the understanding that she’s still attractive (can confirm) but the awareness that she’s aging and that her ‘window’ to find that perfect mate might be closing. The character is locked in a sort of arrested development when it comes to romance, thinking of love and sex as a young adult might, even though Isabelle is somewhere in middle age (never specified, although Binoche was 52 when this was filmed). She still dresses young, and that sex-for-love confusion dictates nearly all of her behavior with men, exacerbated by the fact that pretty much all of the men in this movie are terrible to her.

But is there a point to all of this? It’s not quite #CancelMen territory, although all the men in this movie who get more than a few minutes on screen are either out to get laid or to find someone to mother them (or, in at least one case, both). Isabelle herself has plenty of points in the film that could cause her to reevaluate her decisions in dating, yet she continues forward on the same path, so she just repeats her mistakes, right down to the decision to go to a clairvoyant (whom we see is a phony in one of the few scenes that doesn’t include Binoche). I’d watch Binoche work in almost any movie, and Isabelle is a suitably three-dimensional character, just one deserving of a more complex story.

(Random trivia: Director Claire Denis’ first film was called Chocolat, but it’s not the same film as the Oscar-nominated film of that name that starred Binoche and earned the latter a Best Supporting Actress nod.)

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→ 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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→ October 15, 2018
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Hold the Dark.

The Netflix movie Hold the Dark, which was released briefly in theaters and debuted at the Toronto film festival, is a slow-burning mix of Jim Thompson-esque noir and psychological horror, set in the bleakest of American landscapes – a small Native American village somewhere in Alaska. Based on the novel by William Giraldi and directed by Jeremy Saulner (Green Room), the movie falls for a few cliches of the noir genre but keeps the tension high at virtually every point, eventually arriving at a climax that appears to have left many readers guessing at what it meant.

A writer and wolf expert Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) gets a letter from an Alaska woman named Medora Sloane (Riley Keough), who says her son was kidnapped by wolves and asks Core to come find the wolf and kill it. He does, but things get weird almost immediately, when on his first night staying in her house, she appears nude, wearing a wolf mask, and lies down next to him while trying to get him to choke her. Her husband, Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård), is seen in graphic scenes of firefighting in Iraq, and is nearly killed, returning home to find his son dead and his wife by that point missing, which in turn sets off a string of violent shootings that envelop an unwilling Core in their web and the manhunt for Vernon that ensues. (Medora is the young woman who waits at home for her pirate captain lover Corrado on Verdi’s opera Il corsaro; she and Corrado both die at the end, because that’s just how things went in 19th century opera.)

Hold the Dark is decidedly, deliberately creepy, with barren white landscapes and wooden cabins with dark interiors, so that nearly all of the movie is a little hard on the eyes and leaves you unsettled regardless of what’s happening on the screen. Core is the central character, although the narrative does shift to follow Vernon on the lam, and much of the camera work tries to give you that same sense of dread and confusion that Core would be experiencing as he’s exploring the Sloanes’ basement or is caught in a firefight with cops and a suspect. There’s a lot of graphic violence – almost every shooting involves blood and flesh flying from the body, certainly more than anyone really needs to see here – but the most powerful on-screen deaths are the ones that occur with little or no warning. Core is a witness to nearly all of them, and his reactions, coupled with the trouble he has coping with the short daylight hours of the Alaskan winter (it’s near the solstice, so the days are just five or so hours long), infuse the film with a sense of permanent unease, like the world is spinning just a tick faster than normal and you can’t find your footing.

Wright is especially apt for his role, as the grey in his beard and his overall mien convey seriousness and an implacability that will be quickly tested by the events of the story, and he has the deep, sonorous voice that can work even as the characters are mumbling. There is a lot of mumbling, though, which struck me as a too-hard attempt to give the movie that noir feel – it’s all serious, we’re serious, a little violence won’t even change the cadence of our speech – when the plot itself should do that. This is dark noir, like Thompson or even some James Cain, where no character is safe and thus you don’t feel like you can anchor yourself to anyone in the film. Even Keough tries to join in, with a vacant, affect-less speech that makes her sound more strung-out than anything else (exacerbated by makeup that makes it look like she hasn’t slept in a long time – which would fit her character’s arc).

The sky and the dark are frequent themes and characters mention them several times, both as a metaphor for the psychosis that appears to have gripped some of the characters in the film and as a literal reference to the effect that the wide open spaces and pervasive darkness can have on people who are already living isolated lives. The wolf mask and several scenes with wolves acting in what appear to be counterintuitive ways speak to the fact that we are animals at heart, and the story seems to ask whether we are really all that able to suppress the animal instincts within us. There’s also a subtext here, never spelled out but to which the dialogue alludes a few times (and with one picture), that I shouldn’t mention for fear of spoiling the ending, although apparently this is clearer in the book (I did not think it was very clear), but it’s important to fully understand what Hold the Dark is trying to achieve. If you can stand the violence – and I would say this was on the edge of what I tolerate – it’s a really gripping, dark vision into humanity on the edge of civilization, and most of the film lives up to the tension of a good thriller.

(One warning: there’s a rape scene near the start of the movie that isn’t explicit but makes it very clear what’s happening. The scene is shot strangely anyway, but I thought a trigger warning was justified.)

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→ October 9, 2018
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Dark Money.

The documentary Dark Money, now airing free on PBS after it received very positive reviews at Sundance this spring, focuses primarily on a very specific case of electoral manipulation in Montana, where the Koch brothers used various 501(c)(4) front groups – “social welfare” nonprofits that don’t have to disclose their donors – to flood districts with misleading or fraudulent materials in the last 30 days before elections. Montana’s history of restrictive campaign finance laws and tradition of citizen legislators makes it the ideal environment to expose these methods, which are at least subversive and unethical even when they’re not illegal, but a system designed to thwart such manipulation still wasn’t enough to stop it or make it easier to detect or fight. And, as the filmmakers show throughout the story, what happened in Montana is increasingly happening elsewhere, with the Koch brothers in particular behind much of it in their fights to eliminate labor unions, demonize public education, and gut environmental regulations on businesses. It’s horrifying, and Dark Money makes it clear that we the people have few if any tools available to stop it.

Dark Money largely follows the work of an investigative reporter named John S. Adams, who was let go when the state’s largest newspaper group shuttered its office covering state affairs and decided to start working on this case on his own. In several elections for the state legislature, candidates found themselves targeted by mailers that included inflammatory and often false claims, but were unable to effectively respond to them because they arrived at voters’ houses so late – and because responding would have required campaign funds they didn’t have. These mailers came from ‘dark money’ groups, nonprofits with innocuous names who don’t have to disclose their funders’ identities and in many cases don’t exist beyond a PO Box. Adams, with the help of some of the targeted candidates (many of whom were Republicans who were primaried from the right by candidates aided by dark money groups) and eventually some volunteer attorneys who helped the state build its case against one legislator, did his best to follow the money, and with some good fortune was eventually able to show that the Koch group Americans for Prosperity was behind the mailers. The film follows one specific case, against Republican Art Wittich, for accepting illegal contributions from the National Right to Work Committee, which is largely funded by the Koch brothers. The group has even continued meddling in Montana elections past the court case and timeline covered in the documentary.

Filmmaker Kim Reed does a superb job generalizing the case to constituencies beyond Montana, including showing how the Koch brothers and affiliated groups helped rig the recall election of Scott Walker and stack the Wisconsin Supreme Court with allies who shut down a state investigation into the Walker campaign’s finances. The IRS regulation on 501(c)(4) groups, which are categorized as “social welfare” organizations, is one major obstacle to allowing voters to know who’s funding those mailers or donating to political candidates. Another is the emasculation of the Federal Election Commission that began under Don McGahn, who joined the FEC with two other Republicans and made a pact to always vote in a bloc that effectively prevented the Commission from doing anything, killing the group’s authority to adjudicate in cases of campaign finance violations. (The FEC, by design, is a six-member panel, with three commissioners from each party, and thus is prone to 3-3 ties along party lines.)

And the third, of course, is the 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. FEC, where the Court ruled 5-4 that corporate donations to political campaigns were protected speech under the First Amendment – thus arguing that corporations, which are legal entities, have the same free speech rights as people. (Corporations primarily exist in law as a way to shield investors or owners from many forms of legal liability; they also enjoy different tax benefits from individuals, and also allow owners to gain from economies of scale not available to smaller entities. Corporations may act as individuals in the economic sphere, but they are not individual actors in the political space, or at least were not until Citizens United.) The rise of dark money also has created the possibility or even likelihood that foreign corporations or governments are funding American political campaigns; who’s to say that Chinese companies or the Russian or North Korean governments aren’t funding American Tradition Partnership or other front groups that support mostly conservative candidates who have agreed to reduce or eliminate regulations in exchange for campaign support?

There is so much to infuriate voters in Dark Money; even if you agree with these astroturfing groups’ policy aims, do you really agree with their methods? Should campaign funding be untraceable? Should there be consequences for sending out fliers with misleading or false statements against candidates? To what extent should corporate money be involved in politics when, as described in the documentary, those candidates will in turn vote on matters like environmental regulations where the interests of the companies funding candidates do not align with those of voters (assuming voters like clean water)? One of the many examples in the film that serves as a microcosm for the increasingly dirty, toxic atmosphere of our body politic is when the Montana branch of Americans for Prosperity holds a “town hall” meeting, promising voters they can ask a specific candidate why he’s supporting Obamacare or voting certain ways on issues … but didn’t invite the candidate himself, despite using his name and image on fliers advertising the event. The candidate shows up, and the group’s director, Zach Lahn (now involved in a Koch-funded primary school in Wichita, despite having no background in education) claims he left the candidate “two messages,” and then tells a voter that he didn’t lie about the event because he used a “different definition of town hall.” Our rights are at stake, and we don’t know who’s paying for the information that shows up in our mailboxes, or to whom the names on the ballot might be beholden once they’re elected. Even if you don’t care about the methods used to get the candidates you think you want in office elected, once they’re there, they may be voting for a lot of things you didn’t know they’d support. Dark Money is the ultimate cautionary tale as our republic’s foundations begin to crack.

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→ October 2, 2018
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Love, Gilda.

Readers above a certain age will react one way to the mention of Gilda Radner’s name; readers below it will likely react less effusively, if at all. I’m above the line – I remember Radner’s brief, soaring peak as an unlikely television star in a male-dominated field, a fearless performer with impeccable timing and a gift for physical comedy, without whom Saturday Night Live might not have survived into adolescence and whose trailblazing work paved the way for dozens of women in comedy in the ensuing three decades. Now first-time director and former Gilda’s Club volunteer Lisa D’Apolito has memorialized Radner’s life in a new documentary, Love, Gilda, that relies heavily on source material from Radner herself, including journals, letters, audio recordings, and home videos, to give a simple, straightforward biography of a woman who belongs on the Mount Rushmore of women in comedy.

Relying heavily on those original materials from Radner, including recordings she made while writing her autobiography It’s Always Something (released just two weeks after her death at 43 of ovarian cancer), Love, Gilda gives viewers a window into why Radner, who grew up in relative privilege in Detroit, chose a life in comedy, and how she coped (or didn’t) with her sudden ascent to stardom after she joined the original cast of Saturday Night Live in 1975. This is a true biography in that it starts with Radner’s birth, detailing her upbringing, her close relationship with her father (who died when she was 12 of a brain tumor), a solid but flawed relationship with her mother (who obsessed over Radner’s weight and perceived unattractiveness as a child), her grandmother Dibby who served as a second mother of sorts and inspired the character Emily Litella, and how Radner started to find her acting and comedic voice as she grew up. Why this particular woman became known as one of the funniest comedians on the planet and anchored a subversive, late-night TV show that was dominated by men on both sides of the camera, is itself enough fodder for a documentary, and it’s the question that Love, Gilda answers best.

The film is framed by clips of several modern, highly successful comedians reading from Radner’s notes and journals, expressing a few stray thoughts of their own on Radner’s influence, but within the body of the film anything that isn’t from Radner herself is from people who worked with her. Several of the most important figures from her tenure on Saturday Night Live appear, all replete with praise for her comedic genius and the way she confronted institutional sexism by working harder and carving out a place for herself in a show dominated by men. It’s a bit incongruous in today’s environment, where the her approach to this sort of patriarchical workplace seems dated, but the film at least implies that for the time period she was a revolutionary.

Her time on SNL was marked by that sudden rise to fame, to the point where she was frequently recognized on the street (about which she had mixed feelings), as well as tumultuous romances with fellow cast members, notably Bill Murray. (D’Apolito reached out to Murray and over 100 other people for the film, but most didn’t respond. Chevy Chase is the only male SNL castmate of Radner’s to appear in the documentary.) Gene Wilder, Radner’s widow, is a major character in the last third of the film, but D’Apolito chose not to use any footage of her conversations with him before his death in 2016 because he was already unwell at the time.

I have two quibbles with Love, Gilda, but neither is the more common criticism about the relative paucity of clips of her work. One is that her struggles with mental illness – mostly depression, but certainly hints of anxiety, and then a diagnosed eating disorder that led to a hospitalization – are insufficiently covered, including what aspects of her upbringing may have contributed to all of this. (There’s a brief mention of her mom & pediatrician putting her on an amphetamine to try to control her weight, but it gets little follow-up.) The narrative technique of relying almost entirely on Radner’s writings seemed ideal for delving further into this subject, since Radner mentioned feeling neurotic and depressed, as well as expressing concerns about her appearance, quite a bit even in the journal entries and letters the film presents to us. There’s also no mention of what effect, if any, the public revelations about her eating disorder by authors Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad in 1986 – I’d argue that they ‘outed’ her – might have had on her.

The second quibble, perhaps more than just that word implies, is the lack of a real discussion of Radner’s legacy as one of the first women to break through the gender barrier in comedy. Carol Burnett preceded her, to name one, but there weren’t many women who became stars in their own right before Radner did; Radner was the first breakout star from SNL, and declined a chance to lead her own variety show on NBC in 1979 (a point omitted from the film). The filmmakers got Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, and Melissa McCarthy on camera to read some of Radner’s notes and offer a thought or two, but more from them, or from Radner’s contemporaries like Laraine Newman (who also appears) or Jane Curtin (who doesn’t), to try to place Radner’s impact in some context, even if it tended towards the hagiographic, would have been helpful. Love, Gilda simply assumes you know how important she was, and tells her life story in simple terms, which is fine but will be lost on younger viewers who have few or no memories of Radner’s work or popularity before her early death.

The film’s minimal reliance on clips of Radner’s work, assumed in other reviews to be a result of the filmmakers’ unwillingness or inability to pay for the rights, didn’t faze me, because I’ve seen so much of her SNL work and most of her best clips are available online anyway. I didn’t watch this film to stroll down memory lane and see the best of Emily Litella. Love, Gilda does include some significant bits from her solo stage show, although more of that, given its introspective, semi-serious nature, would have been welcome.

The inevitable comparison here is to the year’s breakout documentary hit, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but they’re very different films. While that film, about Fred Rogers, focused more on the what – the show he created, the things he accomplished, and some of the legacy he left behind – Love, Gilda focuses more on the why. Radner was such an unlikely star, because she didn’t look like most female stars of her era, and her own insecurities about her appearance helped drive her to become one of the funniest people on television during her career. There’s a scene around the midpoint of Love, Gilda that seems to sum up her on-stage approach, and how different it was from who she was off screen. In a “Weekend Update” segment on the death of Howdy Doody, Radner is supposed to be playing his widow, Debbie Doody, whom Newman’s reporter character is trying to interview. The sketch is bombing, so Radner, with strings attached to her as if she were a marionette, improvises by throwing herself at Newman and entangling the reporter in a bit of ridiculous but sublime physical comedy. To have that kind of confidence to wing it when you’re dying up there, and to do so in the most absurd way, while struggling with a mountain of doubts about herself and her worthiness to do anything but make people laugh is the great paradox of Radner’s life. Love, Gilda at least begins to answer that question for us.

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