→ 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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→ September 17, 2018
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The Endless.

The Endless (just $0.99 to rent on amazon or iTunes) is very much my kind of horror film – which is to say that most viewers today would probably not consider it a horror film at all, since it includes precisely zero on-screen violence of any sort, and the horror is entirely of a psychological sort, primarily that the viewer mirrors the protagonists in their incomprehension of what might be wrong. It’s a film of creeping dread until the secret is revealed, after which the dread merely intensifies because it appears that the two heroes might have no way out of the trap, powered by a brilliant, subtle script by Justin Benson (who plays one of the two leads, with co-director Aaron Moorhead) that piles existential angst on top of the physical dilemma the two characters face.

Benson and Moorhead play brothers, conveniently named Justin and Aaron, who live a meager existence on the fringes of society, barely connected to anyone or anything but each other, whose lives are upended when they receive a video cassette from members of the cult from which the two escaped about ten years previously. Aaron, the younger of the two, is more disturbed by the video, which implies that the cult’s members expect to soon undergo “The Ascension,” which Justin interprets as a coming mass suicide, and wants to revisit the cult, citing the brothers’ pointless lives of empty work for a cleaning service and lack of any meaningful links to other people. Justin agrees to take Aaron there for a single day, which turns into a second day, by which point Justin in particular realizes something’s amiss at the cult’s campsite while Aaron seems to relish the presence of a community where he feels like he belongs. Justin encounters other people who live in the same woods as the cult but aren’t members, which shows him what exactly is wrong and why escape might never be possible.

The psychological horror story on the surface of The Endless is straightforward – the brothers may be trapped on the campgrounds with no route for escape, and it’s never clear if the cult members are trying to help or hinder them. There are totems marking the boundary of the property from which members can’t leave, and as the brothers explore the area they run into other people also trapped by the unknown force who urge them to flee before they’re imprisoned by it too. The cult itself is partly a red herring – the horror isn’t the cult members themselves, but is related to whatever they might be following; they’re just at peace with the situation while the other denizens of the woods are increasingly desperate to escape it.

The Endless is also a film about the bonds of family, and how losing can leave a person unmoored and grasping for some sort of connection. Aaron is especially lost and miserable before the brothers return to the campsite, and despite having only scattered memories of his life before they escaped, he slides back into a comfortable skin among the other members, serving as the (obvious) foil to Justin’s skepticism about the cult’s intentions towards him and his brother and their plans in general for some kind of mass event. The split between the brothers over the cult – including whether to stay longer than they’d planned – is predictable, but the script resolves this, at least partially, in an unexpected way that highlights the strength of familial bonds without ignoring the baggage that comes with them.

Aside from the two leads, the other standout performance in The Endless comes from Callie Hernandez as Anna, a sort of den mother within the cult, a character with a wide range of requirements for the actor depending on which brother is with her on screen. She’s the most interesting of the cult members, several of whom are depicted as if half in shadow to disguise their possible motivations or simply to amplify the uncertainty facing the main characters. (If her face is familiar, you may have seen Hernandez in La La Land as one of Emma Stone’s character’s friends in the “Someone in the Crowd” number.)

The Endless is apparently inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly his Cthulu writings, but I’ve never read any of his stories and really just know them through the significant number of tabletop games inspired by that universe; Lovecraft fans may find even more here to chew on than I did. Even without that background, however, I found The Endless totally compelling from start to finish, with tension that crescendoed in the second half, and a resolution that gives you just enough information to wrap the film without attempting to answer every question you might have had about what happened.

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→ September 13, 2018
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On Chesil Beach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ September 10, 2018
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Foxtrot.

Foxtrot (amazon • iTunes) was Israel’s submission for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and made the December shortlist of nine titles, but didn’t advance to the short list of the final five nominees, with the honor eventually going to the Chilean film A Fantastic Woman. Foxtrot is now the eighth of the nine films I’ve seen – the Senegalese film Felicité is the exception – and wouldn’t have made my top five out of this set either. Its messages are powerful, its theme important, its symbolism fascinating, but it’s also jumbled thanks to a structure that breaks the film up into a disconnected short stories and doesn’t sufficiently arm the viewer for what’s coming or give enough context to much of what we see.

The film opens with a woman, Dafna, answering a knock at the door and immediately fainting upon seeing who’s there – two Israeli soldiers who, she correctly assumes, have come to tell her that her son has been killed on duty. Her husband, Michael, stands there impotently while the soldiers give his wife a sedative and carry her to a bed, and then gets the news himself and reacts in not too dissimilar fashion. This whole scene, with a grieving uncle and sister adding to the fray, goes on for a half an hour or so, until we find out the IDF screwed up: It’s the wrong Jonathan Feldman, and their son is actually still alive, after which Michael demands that the IDF bring him his son immediately, regardless of where he is or what he’s doing.

The action abruptly shifts to Jonathan’s side, where he and three other very young soldiers man a rural, ramshackle checkpoint, occasionally examining the ID’s of the few travelers to pass down their dusty road. It’s thankless, boring work, but eventually someone does show up and the boys incorrectly perceive a threat, which results in the deaths of the travelers, an IDF cover-up, and then the call for Jonathan to come home.

There’s a lot to unpack in Foxtrot, which was condemned by conservative forces in the Israeli government for its unflattering portrayal of the IDF. The film asks fundamental questions about the purpose of all of this security theater in Israel, and whether the country is sacrificing the lives of young people for little or no benefit. (The Palestinians themselves are merely props in the movie.) It also examines the weight of history, of what happens when we ignore our cultural heritage, and whether in this case MIchael has pushed his son to do something to satisfy his own weaknesses and insecurities.

The film practically overflows with symbolism, not least of which is the foxtrot itself, which appears as a dance and a word in several spots, and which Michael later explains as a dance where several steps never take you anywhere – you always end up back where you started. Mud appears repeatedly as a motif, both as something the soldiers can’t get rid of and a symbol of the futility of their attempts to make any progress, including the way the shipping container the boys have as their base is gradually sinking into the mire. Camels appear several times as well as a symbol for the absurdity of the fight against an enemy whose existence is known but prevalence is not.

The story, however, never coalesces into a coherent narrative, and the way that Michael and Dafna reconcile at the end – after Michael has seriously injured their dog by kicking it – was thoroughly unconvincing. (I don’t care what the reason is – if you can seriously injure an animal on purpose, I can’t even be friends with you, let alone married to you.) It feels like we’re getting two almost completely unconnected stories here, with the futility of the war the one thing that unifies them. It’s a better vehicle of metaphor than it is a functional movie.

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