→ December 27, 2018
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Zama.

Zama, available on amazon Prime, is the weirdest movie I’ve seen this year. Originally released in Argentina in 2017 and submitted by that country for this past year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it’s based on a 1956 novel and plays out like a Kafkaesque fever dream in colonial South America, where lives are cheap and promises worthless. It’s violent and full of confusion, to the point that it’s unclear whether any of what we’re seeing is real, or whether the main character himself is losing his mind. I haven’t read the novel, which wasn’t translated into English until 2016, but any sort of guidebook would have helped me navigate this weirdness, which had me befuddled from the opening scene and never did much to set me on track.

Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a local functionary in Spanish South America, in the town that is now Ascúncion, Paraguay, who has been waiting some time for a transfer order to reunite him with his wife and child. His title, corregidor, was unique to the Spanish colonial system and referred to the top official in a subdivision of the country’s massive holdings in the Americas, dating back to Castile in the Middle Ages, and they were typically quite powerful because they worked at such great distances from their superiors. Zama, however, always answers to a governor in this film, first one and then his replacement, and the transfer is forever delayed or even forgotten by the men with the power to put them into action. He continues to rule over petty matters of the locals but becomes increasingly erratic, at one point promising two Spanish landowners thirty Native Americans as slaves, and eventually gives up hope of a transfer and joins a vigilante party searching for the bandit Vicuña Porto, who was supposedly killed (twice, I think) earlier in the film but remains a threat to trade and travel between cities.

Zama starts the film as a sort of would-be lothario, obsessed with the lady Luciana (Lola Dueñas, who is made up and dressed to look utterly ridiculous), and acting as the protector of some young women in his household of unknown purpose. He becomes more disheveled as the film progresses, and the dialogue starts to break down and become increasingly disjointed, to the point where I wasn’t sure if I had missed bits of it or if the characters were simply speaking past each other. Zama brings up the letter multiple times in conversation at one point, only to have the governor seem to completely forget what he was talking about. There’s also a llama in the governor’s office at one point, never explained and never remarked upon by any characters, who seem to regard it as just another llama in the office (reminiscent of Elizabeth Moss’ roommate in The Square). I assume it was partly a play on Vicuña Porto’s name – a vicuña is a South American camel related to llamas – and thus an acknowledgement that he always exists under their noses and they’re unable or unwilling to defeat him.

Zama felt like an experimental novel brought to the screen but losing too much in translation. The gruesome finale feels absurd and metaphorical, but a scene like that requires a greater foundation to provide it with sufficient impact beyond mere revulsion. The extra descriptive text in that sort of book can make it comprehensible, but here I couldn’t get much further than understanding that Diego de Zama was a man trapped in a remote place in circumstances he couldn’t control, to the point that it may have caused him to lose his sanity. And that is a story I’ve seen before.

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→ December 26, 2018
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Blindspotting.

Blindspotting (amazon • iTunes) marks the writing debut for its co-stars, Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton) and Rafael Casal, who play the two lead characters, best friends in Oakland who end up confronting explicit and implicit racial bias over the course of three days in the city. It is spotty – no pun intended – okay, maybe a little bit intended – but also contains many strong scenes that point to the tremendous vision of the two writers that might just need a little more development time.

Diggs plays Collin, who has three days left on his yearlong probation for an assault that occurred while he was working as a bouncer at an area bar, and Casal plays his best friend Miles. Collin is black, Miles is white, and the two have been best friends since grade school. Miles ‘acts’ black, to the point where Collin refers to him with some affection by the n-word, but their relationship doesn’t reflect how the world as a whole views the two of them. Meanwhile, Collin is driving home from one of their jobs for a moving company one night when he sees a white police officer kill an unarmed black man who is fleeing and has his back turned when he’s shot. Because of the circumstances of his probation, he chooses not to come forward as a witness, which haunts him over the remainder of the film.

Blindspotting is about everyday racism, which means we get a greatest hits sort of look at the subject. Police brutality and BLM come up multiple times, in humorous and serious contexts. Guns and how people, including the police, view a white man with a gun and a black man with a gun differently also figure in the plot. The gentrification of Oakland, which has been becoming less black, is a regular topic within the dialogue, and drives a scene where Collin and Miles go to a party held by a white hipster tech executive that ends poorly when Miles loses his temper, as he’s wont to do.

There are plenty of well-drawn side characters here, including Collin’s ex-girlfriend Val (Janina Gavankar), whose ethnicity is left unstated in a film where racial identity is paramount; and Miles’ African-American wife Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones, also of Hamilton), but the two men are the heart of the film. Both are complex, but Collin is better developed, and the script maintains the audience’s connection to him by gradually revealing the depth of the character over the course of the film, reserving the story of why he went to jail until somewhere around the midpoint, a flashback that really changes the perception of his character.

The climactic scene in Blindspotting is both absurd and its best, tightest sequence, requiring a fair-sized coincidence and a touch of reality suspension … but this is Diggs’ screaming guitar solo here, and he absolutely nails it. Although this is fiction, it reminded me of the monologue Hannah Gadsby delivers at the end of her comedy special Nanette, where she has lulled the audience into acquiescence with some blisteringly funny jokes, only to turn very serious on her captive audience and give a speech on equality and identity that could crumble mountains. Diggs’ performance in this last scene enters that same zone of unreality – we were here, now you’ve just moved us somewhere else, but we were already in the moment enough that we’ll just come along for the ride. There’s a level of trust required to pull off that kind of trick. Gadsby completely earns that trust. Diggs gets most of the way there, and has to resort to a gimmick to keep viewers in that moment long enough to complete the scene.

Blindspotting‘s humor isn’t as consistent as it tries to be – the best gag in the film is a sight gag around Collin’s hair – with a lot of cringeworthy jokes that don’t land and feel out of place in a film that’s trying to deal with some huge subjects. Miles handles the bulk of the successful comic relief, and Casal’s fast-talking act is riveting to watch. His negotiations with a potential buyer over a sailboat are Marx Brothers-level comedy and among the funniest moments in the film. That lightens the mood for a while, but the humor eventually fades out or just stops working (the scenes at the hipster party, with the utterly clueless white host, are really painful) while the serious nature of the film takes precedence. It’s not a top ten film of the year for me, but it’s a very good one, and I think a very promising writing debut for Diggs and Casal.

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→ December 24, 2018
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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is technically a movie – it was released to theaters, and is also on Netflix as a single, 135-minute … well, movie. But it’s also kind of not a movie: it’s an anthology of six stories that have nothing in common beyond their settings, the American West of the frontier period, and the fact that Joel and Ethan Coen wrote and directed all of them. As you might find with any short story anthology, this sextet has highs and lows; the longest story here is the least interesting and perhaps worst acted, while there are also some truly brilliant moments comparable to the best work the Coens have done.

The first story bears the title of the whole film, and it’s short, silly, and establishes the theme that runs throughout the entire anthology – fate does not care for your narratives. You may take this as meaning the universe is random, or simply that man proposes, God disposes, but regardless, the Coens revel here in setting up one story only to take a right turn at the conclusion. Buster Scruggs is a sharp-shooting, fast-talking outlaw, prone to hifalutin vocabulary and expressing himself through song, a bad guy who enjoys killing worse guys and then singing over their corpses. He’s utterly ridiculous except that he’s good enough to shoot off a man’s trigger finger at a significant distance, until, of course, he meets someone a bit quicker.

The six films are all pretty dark, even when they’re very funny, and only one has anything you might consider a ‘happy’ ending. Tom Waits appears in the fourth story as a lonely goldpanner who spends days digging in a bucolic riverside spot to find the vein he believes is there, only to learn he’s been followed by a jumper with a pistol. What follows turns the narrative on its head and then flips it back again, although all of the story takes a back seat to the gorgeous scenery, which reminded me of the incredible landscape shots from the Coens’ remake of True Grit.

The worst of the six, by far, is set on the Oregon Trail, where Zoe Kazan plays a young woman traveling with her mansplaining brother to Oregon, where he’ll start a business and she’s due to be married to his business partner. He dies rather early in the trip, which is no great loss to the viewer, leaving the story to focus on the travails of a young woman left on her own on the caravan with no one to help her but a hired boy she may not be able to pay. The plot itself fits the broader themes of the anthology, but Kazan looks and especially sounds completely out of place here. I thought she was the weak link in The Big Sick, and I think she’s even more of a problem here, only adding value because she’s little and that helps emphasize the helpless nature of her character.

That leads into the concluding story, a gothic horror story set on a stagecoach at night, the one part of the film that feels like a play and by far the portion of this anthology that boasts the best cast, including Tyne Daly and Brendan Gleeson as two of five travelers on the coach. As they talk and argue, telling bits of their life stories, it becomes less clear that the passengers understand where they are going – and, to the Coens’ great credit, it isn’t clear at the end of the story, either.

Aside from the uneven nature of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which is inevitable for any set of six mini-films, the anthology suffers from how few real female characters it has in the film. Four of the stories have none; the last two have one each, Kazan’s and Daly’s, and the latter, while probably my favorite performance in the entire movie, shares screen time with four other actors all kind of having the times of their lives. (There’s a little surprise for Major League fans in this segment, but I won’t ruin it.) I could understand an argument that a movie set in the Old West would likely have few women in an authentic plot, but six different stories, only one revolves around a woman, and she’s not very strong at all. In a year where most of the best films had women at or near the hearts of their plots, the lack thereof in this film stands out as a real weakness.

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→ December 18, 2018
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Shoplifters.

Shoplifters, Japan’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a nominee for the same award at the Golden Globes, is a little film with an enormous heart that spends almost all of its two hours on the verge of shattering, asking huge questions about the meaning of family without providing any easy answers. It won the top prize at Cannes, the Palme d’Or, this past May, and is out in U.S. art theaters now.

The family at the heart of the film includes Osamu Shibata and young Shota Shibata, who work as a team of shoplifters to cope with their poverty, as Osamu says that items in a store belong to nobody until someone purchases them. Coming home from one such escapade, they spot a very young girl, four or five, named Yuri, playing outside in the cold, alone, with scars on her arms that point to child abuse. They take her in, and her arrival in the household – which includes Osamu’s wife, Nobuyo; her young sister, Aki; and Hatsue*, whom they all call “Grandma” – changes the dynamic within their tiny apartment, at first causing strife (such as Shota’s jealousy) but eventually bringing some of them closer to each other and causing them to act much more like a family, culminating in a big day out to the beach for Yuri’s first time seeing the ocean. Over the course of the film, director/writer Kore-eda Hirokazu gradually reveals the actual relationships among these different characters, who form a family by choice rather than by blood, opening up questions of what it means to be a family and how much we need those relationships to thrive. Of course, this situation can’t last, and when a shoplifting trip goes off the rails, the family is caught, and no one escapes unscathed from the aftermath.

* The actress who played Grandma, Kiki Kirin, passed away in September at the age of 75, after the film’s release in Japan.

Although Shoplifters never stops moving – there’s barely any silence in the film, as the characters are always talking, even if it’s about the most mundane matters – almost everything that happens in the script is there to highlight some facet of the family’s dynamic, and how these people, all misfits of some sort, have come together to fill in the voids in their lives left by the absence of a proper family. Nobuyo and Hatsue have a running conversation throughout the film about whether family is better when you choose it, rather than when it’s chosen for you; Nobuyo thinks the bond is stronger when it’s one you chose. Even though Shota, who, as you might have guessed, isn’t actually Osamu and Nobuyo’s son, and Yuri were kidnapped, they were also both taken from situations where their families neglected or abused them, and taken into a household where they were provided with love and affection – which doesn’t excuse the kidnapping, certainly not in the eyes of the authorities, but again raises the question of what happens to us when our biological families don’t give us what we need.

None of the adult characters has clean hands in this story, and Kore-eda takes pains to avoid lionizing them for their poverty or absolving them of their sins for their kindness towards Shota and Yuri. Aki’s parents think she’s studying abroad (maybe), but she’s actually working in a peep show parlor, where she may be falling in love with a customer. Grandma milks her late husband’s family for regular gifts, but complains about their parsimony. Nobuyo and Osamu have a bigger secret that isn’t revealed till the tail end of the film, as well as the true story of how and where they found Shota. Kore-eda has given his characters good intentions, but each shows an entirely human failure of execution, while the various authorities, from a shady landlord to the investigators who eventually find the family, all seem able to execute while suffering from an absence of heart.

You’ll want a happy ending for these characters by the end of Shoplifters, especially for the two kids, but it just wouldn’t be realistic, and doing so would undermine the points Kore-eda is trying to make with his melancholy story. Characters who don’t fit in anywhere, who live on the margins of society and take the family they can build because the world hasn’t given them another one, aren’t going to get that kind of resolution.

Sakura Ando is especially affecting as Nobuyo, whose history we see in glimpses that hint at past tragedies, and who ultimately sacrifices more than anyone else to try to make things right for Shota. Both kids are played by first-time actors – Kairi J? (Jo), who plays Shota, looks like he’s going to lead a J-pop boy band at some point, while tiny Miyu Sasaki, playing Yuri, has a knack for heart-melting facial expressions, especially amazing for someone who was just five or six when this was filmed.

Embed from Getty Images

J?, Sasaki, and Mayu Matsuoka (Aki)

Shoplifters even beat out Burning at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards for best film, and both should be nominated for Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category, although that one seems like it’s Roma‘s to lose. It’s such a lovely, heartbreaking film, with such universal themes, that it’s worth seeking out near you while it’s still playing in independent theaters.

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→ December 17, 2018
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Roma.

Alfonso Cuarón’s passion project Roma, his first film as director in five years and just his eighth feature film since his debut in 1991, has already become the most-lauded movie of 2018, and it’s easily one of the best I’ve seen this year. It looks different from anything else I’ve watched, it sounds incredible, and the script finds a seemingly impossible equilibrium between the tension of its story and the lyrical quality of both the setting and the way Cuarón layers the scenes with moving cameras.

Based on Cuarón’s childhood, growing up in the Colonia Roma neighborhood in Mexico City, Roma shows us this story through the eyes of the family’s maid, Cleo, played by first-time actress and preschool teacher Yalitza Aparicio. Cleo, a woman of Mixteco ancestry who speaks that language to other servants but Spanish to the family, and another servant Adela seem to handle everything for the family, as the father is emotionally absent when there and then physically leaves the film not that long after it begins, while the mother seems incapable of handling even basic domestic chores – or just unwilling to do so. Cleo cooks, cleans, puts the kids to bed, wakes them up, dresses them for school, takes them there, picks them up, and more, while the mother, Sofia, watches and occasionally criticizes, when she’s not dealing with an obviously breaking marriage to Antonio.

Cleo’s story eventually takes center stage when she becomes pregnant by Fermin, a young, feckless man, obsessed with martial arts, who naturally leaves her the moment he finds out she’s expecting. Along the way, we see the resolution of the issue with Sofia and Antonio’s marriage, the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre of antigovernment protesters by a PRI-backed paramilitary group, the tensions between landowners and tenants outside of Mexico City, and the divides of race and class that separate Cleo and Adela from the children they care for every day. Almost everything that happens in the movie is serious, even heavy, from a marriage imploding to an unplanned pregnancy to political unrest to, eventually, a threat to some of the main characters, yet the film is often silly or sweetly funny, especially when it comes to Sofia’s attempts to drive the family’s oversized car or Fermin’s naked display of toxic masculinity.

If Roma had been a major American studio release with a big budget and dialogue in English, the posters could easily have used the tagline “Cancel All Men.” Every male character in this film is some sort of terrible, with Antonio and Fermin competing for the title of worst. Cleo is the heart of the movie and the only character to get full development; the kids are more like props, and Sofia is often shown in shadow because we see her through Cleo’s eyes. The necessity for Sofia, Cleo, and Sofia’s mother to carry on in Antonio’s absence in a culture that clearly doesn’t respect women the way it respects men is never made explicit but is a clear undercurrent throughout the story. Cuarón populates the film with lesser male characters as well – the chauvinist doctor who doesn’t think Sofia’s (female) obstetrician is up to the task, the random creep who decides Sofia needs ‘cheering up,’ even the comic Professor Zovek (played by the Mexican wrestler known as Latin Lover), whose outfit should have left more to the imagination.

As compelling as the plot can be at times – the protests, the delivery, the beach scene near the conclusion – Roma is an even better technical achievement. Shot in black and white, filmed by Cuarón himself after his regular cinematographer couldn’t commit to the full three and a half months for the project, Roma plays out like a fugue for the eyes, with cameras often moving laterally at a different pace from the characters they’re following, with characters in the backdrop moving at yet another pace. (If I see this again, I’d like to just try to watch what’s happening in the background, as there was never enough time to focus on that and the main characters, but I always knew there was more to see if I shifted my gaze.) The quality and pervasive sense given by the sound is just as remarkable; even watching at home, without any high-end equipment, I felt immersed by the sound of the waves in that beach scene, so much so that I was mildly relieved I hadn’t seen it in the theater because it might have been overwhelming. Cuarón seems to have made this film to put viewers into a specific atmosphere of time and place, using these visual and auditory techniques to do so, and it works, well enough to make up for the lack of strong characters beyond Cleo or the non-traditional nature of the plot, which has several smaller, interlocking arcs rather than a single narrative that takes us from start to finish.

Roma has already won top honors from film critics’ groups in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York (three different such bodies), San Francisco, Toronto, and Washington, although it was ineligible for the Golden Globe category for Best Motion Picture – Drama. (The Golden Globes can be a fun telecast, but their movie awards and nominees the last two years have been awful.) It seems like Roma is a dead lock in two categories at the Oscars, for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography, and should earn nominations in Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound Editing at the very least. I’d love to see Aparicio get a Best Actress nomination, but that seems like an unrealistic hope given her much more famous competition; I’d certainly give her the nod over Glenn Close (The Wife) or Melissa McCarthy (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), both of whom are currently in the top five on GoldDerby.com’s Oscar odds. I still have a few contenders left to see, but this and Burning are the two best films I’ve seen so far in 2018.

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→ December 11, 2018
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Mirai.

Mirai, a Japanese animated film that isn’t from Hiyao Miyazaki but is very much in the tradition of his films and those of his Studio Ghibli, snagged the fifth Golden Globe nomination for Best Animated Feature, along with the four obvious nominees this year (including Isle of Dogs). Directed by Mamoru Hosoda, Mirai tells the story of a young Japanese family from the perspective of the son, Kun, who seems to be about four years old, and how his life changes when his baby sister Mirai arrives, upending Kun’s world, especially as his father decides to work from home and take care of the kids.

The plot itself is very simple and sweet: Kun is fascinated at first by the baby, but quickly realizes she isn’t going to be a playmate (at least not yet), and that her presence means he’s getting less time and attention from his parents, so he starts to say she’s boring and he hates her and the usual stuff. The family lives in a curiously-shaped house that has a small enclosed yard, and when Kun goes there in the middle of one of his tantrums or otherwise storms off, he has these … experiences, never specifically identified as dreams or even explained as real or imagined, but where the family dog is a tall young man with shaggy hair, or Mirai appears as a teenager and asks Kun for help with something. (The name Mirai means “future,” so there’s some wordplay involved here that doesn’t quite translate; the Japanese title is Mirai no Mirai, meaning “Mirai from the future.”)

Mirai is whimsical the way most Miyazaki and similar Japanese animated films are, with some genuinely funny sequences like when Kun, teenaged Mirai, and the human version of the dog are trying to creep into the house to put something away and then must creep up on Kun’s father to retrieve a little bamboo piece stuck to his pants. It’s entirely a visual gag, one of several strong ones that dot the film. And the handful of landscape shots are stunning, whether out in a field or forest or, at one point, on a rainy city street, as well as shots of trains and within Kun & Mirai’s family “tree” that evoked a sense of motion like you’re speeding through a tunnel or on a roller coaster. If we don’t quite have a cat bus or parents turning into hogs, we do still get the blending of reality and fantasy that characterize the genre and allow Hosoda to tell us Kun’s story from the child’s perspective without it becoming a tired mess.

The story drifts along through Kun’s various fits over trivial stuff either directly around Mirai or around how his parents are different now that he has a sibling, until he has the worst tantrum of all because he wants to wear his yellow pants (they’re in the dryer) on a family trip. This leads to Kun running away, or at least imagining it, the longest of these dream sequences and by far the darkest – probably not appropriate for young kids, even though everything before that would be fine for little ones. This is also what separates Mirai from so many other cute but ultimately forgettable animated films; Hosoda doesn’t pull up short, showing viewers a graphic depiction of what it’s like to be a child who’s lost and terrified, calling back an image we saw at the start of the film in one of Kun’s board books.

Writing as a parent who still remembers how difficult the first few months were after my daughter was born, when her mom was still recovering from a difficult delivery and neither of us was getting enough quality sleep, I thought the whole air of this story felt very authentic. I have memories of sitting at the kitchen table, trying to write or even think through my fatigue, while also trying to do my part around the house (cooking and some cleaning) and feeling like doing little more than going back to sleep. I can’t imagine how much harder it is when you have an infant and another little one around.

The English dub has voice-overs from John Cho and Rebecca Hall as Kun’s parents and Daniel Dae Kim in a smaller role as Kun’s great-grandfather – a war hero who built motorcycles, just generally an all-around badass – who appears in one of Kun’s escapades, all of whom are excellent if perhaps a little too easy to recognize (especially Cho, who is so damn good in everything he does). GKids is doing a limited theatrical release, showing the movie exactly once in my local multiplex over the weekend, so if you get the chance to see it near you on the big screen, it’s worth seeking out.

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→ December 10, 2018
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The Favourite.

I can’t think of another 2018 film I’ve been looking forward to more than The Favourite , which pairs three actors I really like – Olivia Colman (whom I loved in Broadchurch), Rachel Weisz (very good in this year’s Disobedience), and Emma Stone (I mean … duh) – with Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of 2016’s The Lobster, a film that included Weisz and Colman as well. It’s a dark comedy, that sends up stolid films about the political backstabbing at the English court, and shifts much of the power to the women, with nearly all of the men playing secondary roles in every bit of the story. It’s brutally funny, often surprisingly crude, and yet somehow just a beat or two off the mark even with the three women all at the tops of their games.

Colman plays Queen Anne, a slightly dimwitted monarch who eats too much and suffers from gout, and who is friends with/controlled by Lady Marlborough (Weisz), the wife of the head of the British Army (Mark Gatiss), who rules the court with an iron fist, often by running roughshod over the Queen. Enter Abigail (Stone), a cousin of Lady Marlborough’s who has lost her title thanks to a profligate father and begs for a job in the castle, landing as a scullery maid before she manages to attract the Queen’s attention by concocting an herbal remedy for the Queen’s gout. This elevates Abigail into a higher orbit, and sets off a rivalry between her and her cousin for position and status – Abigail trying to secure some, Lady Marlborough trying not to lose what she has. The Queen, meanwhile, isn’t quite as oblivious to their machinations as she seems, and rather enjoys the competition for her affections as well as the novelty of having another person around to fawn over her.

The studio has positioned Colman as the lead actress for award season – she won Best Actress from the LA Film Critics’ Association on Sunday, and earned a Golden Globe nomination for the same in the comedy/musical category – but I side with the Gotham Independent Film Awards’ approach, where they gave a Special Jury Prize to all three women as an ensemble. Nobody is the lead here, and all three deliver Hall of Fame-caliber performances. Colman had the hardest job of the three, playing a woman whose body is gradually betraying her (she’s helping, of course, with her libertine eating habits) and who is prone to emotional outbursts and outright juvenile behavior to get what she wants. Weisz, who’s always good but can often translate on screen as inadvertently cold, has found the perfect role for her mien, as Lady Marlborough is some kind of wicked, possibly a sociopath, definitely lacking empathy, and permanently looking out for herself. Her severity in appearance and speech, the former amplified by how she’s costumed and made up, makes Lady Marlborough an easy antagonist for viewers to loathe while the plucky young Abigail makes her first moves – even though, of course, Abigail is far from the ingenue she pretends to be.

Stone already had the Oscar win for La La Land, but this is her first leading role in this sort of film, and she’s more than up to the task, including affecting a convincing upper-class English accent – which should have marked her from the start to others in the castle that she might be of the manor born despite her circumstances. Abigail will smile and flatter as she’s sharpening the knife to slit someone’s throat (metaphorically … there is blood, but not that sort), and plays the victim beautifully to her advantage, with Stone running through a panoply of faces to Abigail’s world, scheming behind closed doors and displaying a quiet cunning that the film reveals as her standing and confidence grow. I did not expect less from Stone than from the others, but I also walked away more impressed with what she delivered given that she hasn’t made films of this caliber before. Abigail is a Moll Flanders for our time and Stone has outdone even the work that won her an Academy Award.

The script as a whole is a lowbrow black comedy in the most highbrow of settings. Aside from a few servants who get a line in here or there, the film takes place entirely Upstairs, and almost no dialogue comes from anyone but the Queen, her retinue, and the MPs leading each party. That makes the crass humor and heavy use of gutter language – the c-word flies through this movie like a hornet harassing its victim – amusing at first, simply for the contrast, although the script leans too much on that; by the time there’s a joke about semen on someone’s hand near the end of the film, the novelty of this bathroom humor in fancy dress has long worn off. The humor works far better in the extremely witty repartée between characters, especially when Lady Marlborough and Abigail go at each other directly or through a third party, and with some outrageous visual humor, notably the dance scene with Weisz that gets a glimpse in the trailer but builds its humor perfectly with each escalation until its abrupt end. There’s still humor to come later in the film, but that is the movie’s zenith.

The Lobster, written by Lanthimos, ended on a question – whether a character would do something dramatic for the woman he might love. The Favourite ends in ambiguous fashion, as it’s unclear whether the ‘victor’ in the competition between the two women has won a Pyrrhic victory, but the story loses steam as it approaches the finish line. One problem is that there’s a moment with Abigail that shows her capable of far greater cruelty than the story gave us reason to believe; her venality to that point came entirely in pursuit of gains for herself. Another, greater problem is that as the film approached its resolution, it became less clear what the story is really trying to tell us: Is there a point to this beyond the sheer entertainment of two women trying to one-up each other, or of three great actresses putting on the performances of their lives for two hours? That’s probably enough, but I left the theater thinking that I wasn’t sure what the capital-p Point was, and even 24 hours later I still don’t know.

That said, I’m calling at least five major Oscar nominations for The Favourite: Picture, Actress, Supporting Actress (two), and Screenplay. Director seems a bit less likely than those; the Golden Globes didn’t nominate Lanthimos, but did nominate Peter Farrelly for his hamhanded, sentimental direction of Green Book. I’d also expect nods for Costume and Set Design; although we always tend to notice the women’s dresses in costume dramas, the men’s here are actually far more interesting to look at because so many of them are utterly ridiculous. (There’s a sort of running gag about wigs that I rather enjoyed.) I’d be very curious to hear what experts think of the cinematography, as Lanthimos employs some very strange shots, including fish-eye looks at rooms and off-balance pan shots, which I found offputting but could easily be effective to more experienced eyes. That’s probably seven to ten nominations in the end, and that kind of bulk probably puts it up near A Star Is Born for the top prize.

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→ November 28, 2018
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Green Book.

Green Book might have been a great movie in different hands. Based on the true story of a friendship between African-American pianist Don Shirley and the Bronx-born driver Anthony “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, the movie makes some dubious choices on perspective and sharpens almost every character to such a fine point that the result feels as nuanced as an after-school special. The National Board of Review just named Green Book its best film of 2018, which is entirely fitting for a body that gave the same honor to The Post last year: They favor popular, well-acted films that talk down to the audience with positive, timely messages and avoid answering or even addressing the toughest questions around their topics.

There’s a long prologue centered on Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), a bouncer at the Copa Cabana, showing his boisterous family, pugnacious style at work, and gluttonous appetite, all of which is just character development of a sort before the meat of the movie begins. Shirley (Mahershala Ali, likely to get an Oscar nomination) is looking for a driver and, although he doesn’t use the term, bodyguard to take him on a tour of the Midwest and then American south, which, in 1962, was still highly segregated and thus dangerous for African-Americans traveling there. Tony and the men in his family are all typically racist of the Italian-Americans of the time – the word mulignan, a disgusting Italian-American racial slur, comes up often in the film – but, of course, Tony and Shirley grow to understand each other, becoming friends, even teaming up on a duet of “Ebony and Ivory” in the closing scene. (I may be remembering that last part wrong.)

The film is directed by Peter Farrelly, known for directing gross-out comedies with his brother, and you can see his hand all over the finished product – not in a good way. The film is slapsticky at times and grabs far too many cheap laughs around things like Tony spitting out food he doesn’t like or other peccadillos of personal hygiene. But the biggest mistake is that the script, co-written by Tony’s son, Nick, tells us a story about racism from the perspective of white people. This is not a story about race in America. There’s virtually nothing here about what it’s like to travel while black (a phrase Tony uses in the film), or simply to be black in a white man’s world, or, in Shirley’s case, to be a black man trying to succeed in a career that requires him to, in a sense, suppress his blackness. Beyond the true story of the friendship these two men developed, one that lasted fifty years beyond the time depicted here until their deaths in 2013, this is a movie about a white guy realizing what racism means at a tangible level. When Shirley says he wants Tony to drive him into the Deep South, Tony says there’s going to be trouble, but is still shocked when he sees the visceral effects of the casual racism that characterized the everyday South. (Which is not to say that racism is gone today; it’s merely hiding behind nice furniture.)

The film also plays fast and loose with too many details of the story and history, starting with condensing what was a real-life tour of nearly 18 months into a two-month whirlwind tour that ended on Christmas Eve, punctuating the film with a feel-good resolution that never happened. Shirley’s surviving relatives, including a brother mentioned in the film and a niece, say the depiction of him as estranged from his family and the black community is false, as is the idea that he had never even had fried chicken, which makes for a brief running gag in the film. There are also minor details that get in the way of the core story, such as Tony discussing Aretha as a household name in 1962 (she was only 20 and had yet to become any kind of star) to try to show Don as out of touch with popular culture.

The way the film depicts Italian-Americans is about half right – and the half it gets right is probably the important part. Italian-Americans, at least those in New York, were tight-knit, family-oriented, insular, and definitely racist and even xenophobic, not just due to outright racism – cultural prejudice in Italy was more north versus south, rather than based on skin color – but because of typical othering, the way one class that faces prejudice might find another group on which they can look down. Mortensen and the actors who portray his family members all boast an embellished bada-bing Brooklyn Italian accent, even though they’re supposed to be from the Bronx. Some of the older characters in the film speak Sicilian – I heard travagliari, the Sicilian word for work, rather than the Italian lavorare – but Mortensen speaks standard Italian with a very clean accent when he switches languages. Linda Cardellini plays Tony’s wife, Dolores, but has nothing to do except look pretty, and her accent is even more exaggerated than Mortensen’s. We do fold our pizza to eat it, because we’re not savages, just not the way Tony does in the film.

Ali’s a lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and might win the award for the second time (the first was for Moonlight). He’s wonderful, because he always is, and I think he does his best to soften the depiction of Shirley as an overly fastidious, isolated person, so that the character comes across more as a person of color trying to navigate a very narrow path through a white world. Mortensen really loses himself well in Tony Lip, but without the subtlety of Ali’s performance; he might still get a nomination now that the furor over him using the n-word in a discussion about the film seems to have died down. Had the film done better at the box office, perhaps it would be a lock for a Best Picture nomination, and it still might get one, but there are going to be at least ten more worthy movies out there in what looks like a crowded year.

Finally, I didn’t like the film, but I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking this is a terrible film. It’s a bad film compared to what I usually watch, but I don’t watch many really awful films. I skim off the top, because I’m not a professional critic and see only what I want – typically films critics have loved or that are nominated for something major. It had a CinemaScore of A+ last time I looked, and it is absolutely a crowd-pleaser sort of film, and smarter than most films that try to hit those emotional notes. I personally found it sentimental, predictable, and even schlocky at times, and I was bothered by aspects of the film that I think won’t bother most people. Your mileage – and the film has a lot of mileage in it – may vary.

If you want another perspective, Monique Judge reviewed the film for The Root, and within her review there’s a letter from Harry Belafonte praising the film, urging audiences to go see it. He feels it’s accurate to the time and place, since he performed himself across the country in that period, and that “there are many perspectives from which to tell the same story and all can be true.”

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→ November 20, 2018
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Widows.

Steve McQueen’s new film Widows, his first since his Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave in 2013, is an adaptation of a 1980s British TV series of the same name, a series McQueen says he wanted to adapt for some time. He’s maintained much of the framework of the series’ six-episode first season, which spawned a second season (Widows 2: Electric Boogaloo) and later a sequel series, but added some new elements and rewritten the resolution completely. It’s a dense, layered, frenetic heist film that packs a ton of backstory into the first two-thirds of the film – too much, really – before a tremendous finish worthy of the genre.

Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) is the leader of a four-man crew that we see trying to escape from a robbery at the start of the film, only to have them die in a police shootout and explosion, which leaves their four wives as the widows of the film’s title. Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis, who’s going to get an Oscar nomination for this) finds out that Harry stole from would-be city alderman Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who wants his $2 million back and gives her a month to find it any way she can. Harry left behind a notebook with details on his next job, with a potential $5 million prize, so Veronica decides to contact the other widows – whom she’s never met – to assemble a crew and pull off the heist themselves so she can pay off Jamal and set the widows up financially.

The effort by the widows to become a team and pull off this heist is the main plot in the film, but there’s so much more layered on top of it that many scenes end too quickly, so the tension doesn’t always build enough and we don’t always get enough exposition on the characters. Jamal is running against Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), who’s trying to win the seat long held by his father (Robert Duvall as a pretty obvious Trump surrogate), but it turns out that Jack has a connection to Harry, and also ends up with other connections to the widows. Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), another of the widows, was abused by her husband and by her mother (Jacki Weaver, underutilized here), and ends up trying to be a high-end escort to make ends meet, but really comes into her own by working with these other women and taking care of herself for the first time. The third widow in the crew, Melinda (Michelle Rodriguez), is the least interesting character by far, with the most cursory backstory, a role that certainly does the actress playing it no favors and ultimately ends up overshadowed by the other members of the group, including the woman they bring on as the driver, Belle (Cynthia Erivo).

There is a lot of extra material in this movie, which feels at least like McQueen might have tried to pack in all the backstories from the TV series into one two-hour film. There’s a strand around Veronica’s son, deceased before the movie begins, that has no relevance to anything else in the movie and feels like it’s been tacked on to make a political point (a valid one, but not germane to this film). The political campaign is overstuffed for a subplot, and includes its own threads that never get resolved – the black preacher whose support is with the white candidate gives us a dynamic sermon and then seems to serve no other purpose in the film. Jamal’s story is vague – possibly by design – and his arc has no real ending. The salon is where we first meet Belle, but nothing else about the salon is interesting; it reappears later in another scene that tries to make a political point, this one less effective than the one about Veronica’s son. Even Frumpy Carrie Coon is just a prop here, which is a waste of a terrific (and beautiful) actress.
The real strength of Widows isn’t its story, but its cast, which looks like someone drafted a fantasy team of actors in a league with only four players. Davis is excellent, as she always is, although I think her character doesn’t become three-dimensional enough until the film is well underway. Erivo doesn’t even arrive until halfway through but she is an immediate force, with an epic scene when Belle first meets Veronica. Debicki – who towers over the other women, even though her character starts as a shrinking violet with no strength to defend herself – has the strongest arc of the women in the crew and delivers an outstanding performance to make that character growth credible, discovering that she’s capable of doing more than she imagined while also learning to stand up for herself. (Her character’s scenes as an escort, with a very short-looking and oddly coiffed Lukas “The Pin” Haas, give the film its best side quest.) Daniel Kaluuya plays Jamal’s brother and is utterly terrifying as a sociopathic killer. Farrell’s role could easily have been a caricature of a crooked Chicago political scion, but he turns on the Farrell charm – not to mention a passable Chicago accent – and gives the character some emotional depth and enough different faces to avoid that trap.

There’s a pervasive sense in Widows that McQueen is telling the story of women pushed into bad situations by the men they trusted, then finding their own power and agency in the wake of the botched heist, only to have even more men threaten them, push them around, or just ignore them. We can see Alice develop that sense of confidence and empowerment explicitly, like when she asks Melinda for the building plans and manages to figure out where the target is (with one convenient little coincidence). Belle hustles to make money to support her daughter, but is held back by a lack of economic opportunity or a reliable support structure. Veronica had the strongest career prior to their husbands’ deaths, but is also pushed into unexplored territory, the extent of which isn’t clear until the final scene of the film.

Where McQueen goes astray is in piling so much other thematic material on top of this. There’s a statement about politics, how so many of the people who want to represent us offer both good and bad sides, that issues are frequently not as clearcut as we’d like … and then there’s Tom Mulligan speaking like President Trump about minorities and immigrants. There’s a subplot about white police shooting unarmed black citizens that has nothing to do with the rest of the story – and much of the content here that touches on issues of race just doesn’t work, even as it sits alongside discussions of gender that do. Economic inequality pops up. All of these are themes worth covering, but the total puts a weight on Widows that no two-hour film that is also busy telling a ripping heist story could support.

There is far too much good in Widows for all of these quibbles to bring the film down too far; it’s still a lot of fun and very sharp, never talking down to the audience except for the police brutality thread, and with some details in the heist sequence itself that aren’t properly resolved. There’s a ton to unpack from this movie, and five performances that are at least worthy of consideration for awards – Davis seems like a lock for a Best Actress nomination, while Debicki, Erivo, Kaluuya, and Farrell are each outstanding in supporting roles. If you can hang with all the prologue and the terse editing, the payoff here is enormous.

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→ November 19, 2018
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Burning.

Burning, Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is based loosely on a 1992 short story by Haruki Murakami called “Barn Burning.” It takes that very brief framework and builds a dreamlike, post-noir feature film, running nearly two and a half hours, that entraps viewers in its layered mysteries early and then increases the tension like a vice as it approaches its shocking resolution. (The Murakami story appears in The Elephant Vanishes, and is also in the online archives of the New Yorker.)

Lee Jong-su* is an unemployed, would-be writer who bumps into an old classmate, Shin Hae-mi, whom he doesn’t recognize because she’s had plastic surgery. She spots him, and makes it clear that she has some interest in him, eventually bringing him back to her tiny apartment and sleeping with him. She also asks him to feed and clean up after her cat while she takes a two-week trip to Africa, which he agrees to do even though it’s a long drive from his father’s farm in the country. When Jong-su goes to pick Hae-mi up on her return, she’s with a new guy, Ben, who is rich, condescending, and possibly her boyfriend. Jong-su seems resigned to the loss of Hae-mi to Ben, but those two keep inviting him out with them, stringing him along, until one day Ben confesses to Jong-su that he has a hobby of burning greenhouses, burning one every two months or so because it’s the ‘right pace’ for him. Later that night, Jong-su makes a cutting remark to Hae-mi, after which she vanishes, leaving Jong-su to try to figure out what’s going on. From there, the story turns darker as Jong-su follows – or stalks – Ben in search of the girl.

* Korean names are written with the family name first; I’ve held to that convention in this review.

At one point in the film, Ben says to Hae-mi, “it’s a metaphor,” after which she asks what a metaphor is, and Ben says Jong-su should answer, since he’s a writer. This entire film is a metaphor wrapped around a set of smaller metaphors. There’s a strong subtext of the pervasive nature of class distinctions in Korean society, and how the upper class may view the lower classes as not just inferior but expendable. Ben represents the idle, entitled rich, while Jong-su and Hae-mi both come from the lower classes. Jong-su lives on a farm while his father is in jail for assaulting a government official, and has very little spare cash; his estranged mother reappears at one point, complaining of how rich Koreans treat her in her menial job and saying how she needs money, which Jong-su promises to provide despite lacking means. Hae-mi, we learn, is broke, with outstanding debts she can’t pay, working just occasionally as a model/dancer outside shops that hire girls like her to try to drum up business. Ben drives a Porsche, lives in a gorgeous apartment, thinks nothing of spending money on food or drink, and appears to have little regard for people he views as beneath him, as do the friends of his who appear in the film – totally ignoring Jong-su while he’s at their parties while treating Hae-mi and Ben’s next girlfriend as if they’re some sort of entertainment, not actual people.

Throughout the film are smaller metaphors, not least of them the actual burning and references to it. There are cigarettes everywhere (and the occasional joint), fires in the background of shots, the burning color of the sun at sunset, and hints of the world burning around our characters with Donald Trump appearing on a TV lying about immigration and with North Korean propaganda audible outside Jong-su’s house. Birds make several appearances; there’s a postcard drawing of a bird in Hae-mi’s apartment, but it’s gone after she vanishes. Hae-mi tells a story about a well that might also have been a metaphor, but discussing its implications would reveal too much.

The main criticism of Murakami’s writing has long been that he doesn’t write compelling women, and the woman in “Barn Burning” is nothing but a prop, so the screenwriters here had a blank canvas … and didn’t do a ton with it. Hae-mi, played by Jeon Jong-seo in her first film role (where she really reminds me of Lily James), is a Boolean character – she has two modes, the flirtatious and perhaps overly sexual coquette as well as the stark depressive who seems to lack a will to live. All her edges are extremely sharp, while Jong-su in particular is drawn with far more nuance to just about every aspect of his character. Jeon does what she can with a character that verges on the ridiculous, at times appearing more like the object of male fantasy than like a fully realized woman, but the writing limits what she can do.

The two male leads deliver outstanding performances. Yoo Ah-in plays Jong-su as a sort of slack-jawed stoner – seriously, his mouth is constantly open – whose expressions and slow reactions would imply that he’s not very bright, but there’s more intelligence beneath the surface here, and Yoo gives him some emotional depth that I wasn’t expecting given how the film first introduces the character. Stephen Yeun is totally magnetic as Ben, smarmy and confident and charismatic, the character Jong-su wants to dislike but can’t quite come around to doing so because Yeun gives him that extra layer of amiability on top of what appears to be a rather unpleasant core.

The original story has Jong-su’s character comparing Ben’s to Jay Gatsby, a line that also appears in the film, while William Faulkner comes up twice during the movie as well. (I had a book with me to read while I waited for the film to start, and in a pure coincidence, it was Faulkner’s The Unvanquished.) The Faulkner connection is fascinating as his writing was frequently opaque, full of symbol and metaphor, and covered themes like racial prejudice and the moral decay that can accompany rising financial status. Ben’s skin is substantially lighter than those of the other main characters, as are his friends’, and the question of his morality and motivations, and even how he acquired such wealth, hangs over the last half of the film.

Murakami’s story doesn’t make the ending clear, but the film makes it much more evident what’s happening with these characters – at least, I think it does, although director Lee Chang-dong ensures that we never get explicit proof that our suspicions are correct. There’s sufficient misdirection here to keep viewers thinking about this film for days afterwards, as I have been. It’s well-written, extremely well-acted, features some stunning and memorable shots, and is just tortuous enough to keep you off balance right through the final scene. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen so far this year.

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