→ 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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→ September 6, 2018
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First Reformed.

First Reformed is a return to form for Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver and writer/director of Affliction, whose recent career has been marred by bad choices of projects, none worse than The Canyons, billed as a comeback project for Lindsay Lohan but a critical and commercial failure. (It also featured porn star James Deen, who was accused shortly thereafter of raping several women on adult film sets.) Featuring a virtuoso performance by Ethan Hawke, First Reformed asks powerful questions about the meaning of our existence, our responsibilities to the planet and to others, and whether people of faith can know or pretend to know the mind of God. For most of its nearly two hours, it is a taut, well-acted, Oscar-worthy film, but Schrader doesn’t quite stick the landing and I’m still not sure what to think about the closing scenes.

Hawke plays a minister named Ernst Toller, overseeing a dwindling congregation in a small rural town, subsidized by a megachurch called Abundant Life led by a charismatic minister named X (played by Cedric “The Entertainer” Kyles). Toller is visited by a woman, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), who is concerned about the mental state of her husband, a former environmental terrorist who remains obsessed with man’s destruction of the planet. She’s pregnant, and her husband wants her to have an abortion because he believes it’s cruel to bring a child into this world and the bleak future for humanity. When the husband takes his own life despite the counsels of Toller, however, the reverend is set off into his own dark night of the soul, reexamining his own past mistakes.

The movie is very much a showcase for Hawke, looking haggard and ground down by life in this role, who carries a drawn look throughout the film, the way someone fighting an inner torment and refusing to reach out for help or accept any offered might present himself to the world. We learn more about Toller’s past, and some reasons why he might act the way he does and be experiencing his own crisis of faith, but it is Hawke’s demeanor and intensity that carries the character and the film as a whole, as no other character, not even Mary, can come close to his role or his three-dimensional nature.

The choices of names in the film can hardly be accidents, and Schrader has cited specific films as influences (although I haven’t seen them, including Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, and wouldn’t have caught those allusions). The real Ernst Toller was a German playwright known for left-wing views; he collaborated with anarchists and communists and served for six days as the leader of the so-called Bavarian Soviet Republic, but spent his last six years in exile before hanging himself in 1939; the film’s Toller is himself in exile, figurative and semi-literal (as he’s cloistered himself at the head of a scarcely-attended church). Mary is pregnant in the film, and the child’s father is known but disappears from the narrative, and while she first appears on the scene as someone trying to save her husband, she’s really here to try to save Toller – or at least allow him to save himself.

The ending is distinctive and shocking enough that I won’t spoil it, but I will say here that I’m not sure if what we see in the final scenes is real, and if it is, what it’s telling us about redemption or second chances. The last fifteen minutes or so include a dream sequence that could be a bit of magical realism, and an ending that is at least open to interpretation, especially the way Mary’s character appears in the last sequence, bathed in sunlight. The few reviews I’ve read or heard about First Reformed commented on how the ending doesn’t seem to fit well with what came before, and I mostly agree with that sentiment; I thought we might be seeing Ernst having a religious experience, but if that was the case it wasn’t well set up before or afterwards. It’s a very good movie with a solid script and a great central performance by Hawke, further punctuated by some of the wide shots contrasting Toller’s old but charming church with the antiseptic megachurch that helps keep his going. Whether it’s a great movie to you will probably depend on to what extent you buy the ending.

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→ August 30, 2018
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BlacKkKlansman.

Spike Lee’s return to directing with BlacKkKlansman has been met with wide critical acclaim and a positive commercial response, with the film earning back its reported budget in its first week of release. The film is based on the true story of African-American cop Ron Stallworth, who infiltrated a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan while working in the Colorado Springs Police Department, surrounded by white officers, detailed in Stallworth’s memoir Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime.) Stallworth paired with a white partner who was his stand-in at KKK meetings, and eventually managed to speak to and meet David Duke, while revealing that there were members of the chapter who worked in law enforcement, the military, and, in two cases, NORAD. (Those last two were allegedly reassigned to Greenland or somewhere else in the Arctic.) Lee invents a few details and then intersperses the story with vignettes that are far more clearly targeted at the modern audience, closing with footage from the neo-Nazi rally and the eventual murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last year. It’s a powerful story that offers no pretense about its ideals or what viewers should think and do in this era of New Racism, and is by turns terrifically funny and intense. It’s also a total mess of a film that reeks of the director’s self-indulgence and eventually works to undermine some of its most important messages.

BlacKkKlansman is at its best when Lee focuses the story on the investigation as it was led by two men, Stallworth (John David Washington) and Phillip “Flip” Zimmerman (Adam Driver). After about 30 minutes of prologue that gives some backdrop to the racial animus in the country at the time and gets Stallworth into the police department under its minority hiring initiative – and exiles him to the records room – he makes the fateful phone call in response to an ad in a local paper, looking for new members, from the local chapter of the Klan. Stallworth calls, tells the man on the phone how much he hates black people and every other group the Klan was known for targeting, and is invited to a meeting that Friday night, which is a problem given the color of his skin. He recruits Zimmerman to go in his stead, under his name, wearing a wire, which begins the investigation that, in reality, lasted nine months and uncovered those members’ identities. (The film creates a fictional, planned bombing that never happened, but that does allow for an intense climatic scene that drowns in its own bathos as the overwritten script piles clichés on top of a pivotal moment.)

Lee appears to have been given a free hand with the project, which was produced by Jordan Peele (who was set to direct it but gave it to Lee to work on other films), and I wonder if Peele felt unable or unwilling to confront one of the most important figures in black American cinema over some of the film’s many bombastic or incoherent sequences. There are gimmicks galore here, such as the isolated head shots of black audience members listening to Kwame Ture and the hallway scene near the film’s conclusion, that are nothing more than directorbation, the film equivalent of an umpshow, where Lee has to remind us that he’s at the wheel and we are watching an artist at work. One of the film’s many interludes from the Stallworth narrative itself is the Klan initiation rite, where Stallworth’s partner attends in his stead and David Duke presides, showing the racist 1916 film Birth of a Nation to whip the members (and their wives) into a frenzy. Lee intersperses that with scenes from a black student union meeting at the local college – I think it’s University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, but wasn’t sure if it was named as such – where a man, played by Harry Belafonte, tells the story of the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, in 1917. Belafonte’s character was a close friend of Washington’s, but the character and the meeting appear to be fabricated for the film, although the grotesque torture-murder of Washington was very real, attended by thousands of whites as if the castration, mutilation, and slow immolation of a black teenager were merely the day’s entertainment.

The unexpected star of the film isn’t Washington – yes, that’s Denzel’s son – but Driver, who delivers a nuanced, two-sided performance as a cop who finds his stolid attitude that any case is just part of the job affected by his exposure to such inveterate hate, while also posing as a very convincing racist, anti-Semitic zealot. (Zimmerman’s character is a non-observant Jew, but the real undercover officer, known only as “Chuck” in Stallworth’s memoir, was not.) He’s so magnetic in the role that the film lags when he’s out of the dialogue, which I’d say is the opposite of the effect he has as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars franchise. Washington is fine, but isn’t charismatic enough to be the center of the film, and he’s often overshadowed by others on screen including Driver; Topher Grace as a dead ringer for David Duke; and Laura Harrier as Patrice, Stallworth’s (fictional) love interest and President of the Black Students’ Union in the film. Corey Hawkins has a small part earlier in the film as Ture that is a clinic in delivering a rhetorical speech, although it’s again blunted by those camera tricks Lee employs to remind us he’s in charge.

For a film with a deadly serious subject, BlacKkKlansman doesn’t skimp on the humor. There’s a Wire reference near the start of the film that had me laughing very loudly – and I was the only one in the theater who did so – although I was disappointed not to hear Paul Walter Hauser drop an “incorrect” somewhere to nod to his scene-stealing performance in last year’s I, Tonya. The allusions to our modern era of ‘very fine people’ can go too far – Stallworth telling his white sergeant that Americans would never put an openly racist person in the White House is a bit too on the nose – but work well when Lee steps back and lets the dialogue and/or action show us how little has actually changed. An early scene when Patrice and Ture are stopped for driving while black and then threatened and assaulted by the officers, while also fictional, is extremely effective for how it just tells a story and lets the audience connect the dots. The telling of the Washington lynching might have been more effective as a straight scene, rather than one cut back and forth to the frothing Klan members watching and cheering on Birth of a Nation. The film just needed less of these trappings and more of the basics. The scenery, the clothes, and the hairstyles all set the scene incredibly well; even little touches like background colors in offices or the weaker lighting in some of the scenes in Klan members’ houses (so the film looks like movies or TV shows from the time period) contribute to the atmosphere. The one gimmick that really works, the transition to Charlottesville footage, with a clip of Trump referring to violent neo-Nazis as “very fine people” just in case anyone still wondered where his sympathies lie, is a masterstroke – but it’s the only gimmick BlacKkKlansman needed. Instead we get a half-dozen on top of that, so by the time you get to the end of the film, you’re exhausted from trying to figure out where any of this is going.

Note: The Slate piece discussing what’s real and what’s fictional in this film was essential in writing this review.

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→ July 11, 2018
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Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

I was born in 1973, and watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a huge part of my early childhood, something I’d watch every day until I was old enough to go to school. Along with other PBS shows like Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Write On, and the later 3-2-1 Contact!, they made appointment viewing for me before the term even existed.

(Side note: My parents swear I loved the mid-70s show Zoom, but unlike the shows I mentioned above and a few others, I have zero memory whatsoever of Zoom, other than that You Can’t Do That on Television! borrowed its format and one time had its actors sing Zoom‘s theme song.)

So the new documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, about the show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and to some extent about its star and creator, couldn’t be more squarely aimed at me. Featuring extensive interviews with almost everyone who was involved in the show, it gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the program and provides some historical perspective to the show’s importance, although I don’t think it does nearly enough to explain who Fred Rogers was and what drove him to create this seminal yet utterly counterintuitive television program for the youngest viewers.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? focuses on the story of Fred Rogers from the advent of the TV show until his death in 2003, with just scant references to his life before he created Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood at Pittsburgh’s public television station WQED. Other than Betty (Lady) Aberlin, who was interviewed but declined to appear on camera (as she apparently felt too self-conscious), it seems like director Morgan Neville talked to everyone living who might have something to tell us about the show, including the actors who played Mr. and Mrs. McFeely, Officer Clemons, and Handyman Negri; producer/director Margy Whitmer and floor manager Nick Tallo; Rogers’ widow and two sons; and his longtime friend Yo-Yo Ma. Combined with clips from multiple interviews Rogers gave over his career about his work and the show, along with quite a bit of archival footage from the show itself and behind the scenes, the documentary manages to explain why Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was so influential and yet seemed so out of place in an environment that thought children needed faster-paced shows and often used the medium simply to sell stuff to young viewers.

But there is a lot missing from this story, both about Rogers himself and the pre-history of his show. The film does include some clips of The Children’s Corner, the first show he created for WQED and the place where many of the puppets who appeared on the later show were first conceived, one of which was an ad hoc fill-in because the show was live and the film strip they had been airing had melted or otherwise broken down on air. It omits the show he created for the CBC, Misterogers, which contributed numerous elements to the later WQED show, and has no mention of his former colleague Ernie Coombs, who became Canada’s Mister Dressup, a show that had much in common with Rogers’ show and which (Wikipedia claims) contributed some songs to the latter.

There are a few hints along the way about Rogers’ life before the Neighborhood, but hardly enough to give us a full picture of his character. Rogers was 40 years old when the first episodes of the show aired, having joined, left, and returned to the seminary, and participated in at least two other shows before his big success. Of his childhood, we learn little; there’s a reference to “Fat Freddy” near the end of the film, but it’s barely explained (and if the pictures we’re shown are any indication, he seemed hardly overweight). He had a quixotic obsession with the number 143, which to him stood for “I love you,” including maintaining his weight at 143 for most of his adult life. That seems like something we might explore more, but other than two of his friends commenting on it being “weird” we get nothing more.

Instead, Neville chose to include some truly tangential material like the right-wing attacks on Rogers’ show and philosophy or the PSAs Rogers filmed after the 9/11 attacks, none of which is that interesting or elucidating on this man whose character still resonates and yet still seems too good to be true. Of all of the archive footage shown that wasn’t directly part of the Neighborhood, none seems to get at this conundrum more than the cringeworthy interview Tom Snyder conducted with Rogers, in which Snyder asks Rogers if he’s “straight.” While I know the question – coming right after Snyder asked “are you square?” – could simply be asking Rogers if his character is really who he is, there’s an undeniable subtext, one this documentary acknowledges, that people assumed Rogers was gay. It is unfathomable to my ears today that an interviewer would ask such a question, but at the same time, showing it now reminds the audience that people have questioned Rogers’ authenticity for a half-century now. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is a beautiful trip down the nostalgia path, and does its part to convince the viewer that Mister Rogers is very close to who the real Fred Rogers was; unfortunately it does very little to tell us why.

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→ July 3, 2018
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The Death of Stalin.

The Death of Stalin (amazon • iTunes) , the latest film from writer/director Armando Iannucci, is a rollicking farce that is only loosely based on the death of the dictator in question and the mad scramble for power in the vacuum that resulted, with Iannucci moving events and even people around to suit the story. It’s frequently funny in a face-palming sort of way, even when the story is more barely contained chaos than structured plot, and a reminder to me that I need to spend some time with Iannucci’s past and better-known work, including In the Loop and the HBO series Veep.

Stalin appears as a character early in the film, mostly so we can see the rest of the Central Committee playing obsequious Ed McMahons to his Johnny Carson, laughing at nonsensical jokes and trying hard to stay off of Stalin’s legendary enemies lists, people to be rounded up and exiled or, more likely, shot after torturing, with one of the Committee members appearing on the lists the night that Stalin takes ill. (His death is also fictionalized – he did die of a cerebral hemorrhage, but the proximate cause, in the film, is fictional and played for laughs.) After a brief bout of will-he-die-or-won’t-he, he finally kicks it, and the chess game to succeed him starts, except it’s chess as played mostly by people who’ve never played anything more than checkers, except for the scheming Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and the odious Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale). The factions behind these two are fluid, often in a nearly literal sense as when the two sides try to squeeze past each other to be the first to offer emphatic condolences to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough).

Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) temporarily became the Soviet premier in Stalin’s death, but Khrushchev wrested much of the power away from him in the nine days afterwards, which roughly corresponds to the events shown in this film. Tambor plays him as a seasons 4/5 George Bluth with more of a temper, generally a step behind everyone else and thus easily outplayed by Khrushchev and Beria throughout the story. The fact that everyone seems to be operating at a different speed, often missing things right in front of their faces, provides much of the humor in the film and all of those face-palm moments, as one character says or does something that others completely miss or just fail to understand.

The second half of the film, where the real machinations start up, kicks in when the army arrives, led by Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov (Jason Isaacs, chewing scenery left and right), and Khrushchev cooks up his final scheme to wrest control of the Committee for himself by throwing Beria under the bus. From that point, the humor shifts from the almost slapstick, misunderstanding-driven comedy of the first half to a mixture of high- and lowbrow farce, from the game of telephone the leaders all play while standing around Stalin’s casket to the antics of Stalin’s drunken son Vasily (Rupert Friend).

There’s no point in this film where it’s not funny, which saves it from the fact that the plot is rather slapdash and doesn’t hew closely at all to real events. The dialogue never stops, and Iannucci isn’t afraid to mix some bathroom humor (about up to my tolerance for that stuff) in with political gags, notably in the Keystone Kops routine after Stalin’s unconscious but not-dead-yet body is first discovered. The framing of the film around a recorded concert and vengeful pianist doesn’t work well, and some of the other Committee members seem superfluous to both the plot and the comedy, although it was great to see Michael Palin (as Vyacheslav Molotov) on screen again.

The Death of Stalin isn’t a great movie, or a particularly sharp satire, but it is very funny, often with jokes that build on top of each other as scenes become increasingly absurd. (Buscemi’s dance around Tambor at the funeral is beyond description and wonderfully choreographed.) I laughed, often, and then forgot much of the plot once the film ended – and the incongruous if generally accurate ending does burst the comic bubble too. The humor is smart, but the rest of the story doesn’t back up the humor with anything of substance.

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→ July 1, 2018
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Annihilation.

Paramount made some curious decisions earlier this year with the release of the film Annihiliation (amazon • iTunes), loosely based on the Jeff VanderMeer novel of the same name (which I have not read yet), including an off-period release date in the U.S. and the sale of the film directly to Netflix for most of the world (other than the U.S., Canada, and China). Marketing of the film wasn’t great either; I saw the trailer before its theatrical run, and the trailer doesn’t represent the film well at all, overselling the horror elements and underselling the story. The result is that the movie didn’t fare that well at the box office despite positive reviews, undercut somewhat by Paramount’s machinations and I think the failure to push this film as a smart sci-fi flick that overcomes some modest flaws with a big finish.

The movie opens with Lena (Natalie Portman) in medical isolation, being interrogated by a British scientist (Benedict Wong) about what happened to her on a mission that went wrong and from which she is the only survivor. She’s somewhat vague on details, after which we flash back to before the mission and see that she’s a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School and that her husband, a special forces Sergeant (Oscar Isaac), has been missing for a year and is presumed dead. He shows up at the house one day, but is totally vacant and almost immediately begins hemorrhaging, which eventually leads to Lena volunteering to lead a mission of five women soldiers and researchers into a mysterious, growing region called the Shimmer, into which the military has sent many missions but from which only Lena’s husband has ever returned. The women find a seemingly impossible environment where animals and plants are swapping DNA, with increasingly horrifying results the longer the team stays within its boundaries.

Annihilation has two main conceits in its story: the ongoing mystery of what the Shimmer is and what it’s doing, and the fact that previous teams have all disappeared and are likely dead, a Lovecraftian mystery trending towards horror since we know from the start that Lena is the only survivor. (The Wikipedia entry on the movie notes the script’s similarity to a Lovecraft short story, “The Colour of Space.”) The former is revealed gradually at first, but proceeds in fits and starts in accordance with discoveries the team makes and with Lena’s examinations of blood and other cells under her microscope. The latter builds as the story progresses and the team moves through the Shimmer with increasing disorientation; they encounter animals that loosely resemble familiar creatures but that have evolved at impossible speeds. Eventually Lena reaches the lighthouse at the center of the Shimmer and discovers something more of the nature of the anomaly in a gorgeous special-effects sequence right before her final battle to escape.

The script does waste too much time on irrelevant details outside of the mission, including Lena’s affair with a colleague while her husband is missing, a subplot that is neither germane to the main story nor resolved in any satisfactory manner during the film. And while screenwriter/director Alex Garland (Ex Machina) tries to give the team members some identities as individuals, none but Lena comes across as much more than a redshirt, not even ostensible team leader Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), so none of their losses is particularly tangible to the viewer. One team member cracks under the stress after the first death and another attack, which is foreshadowed in earlier dialogue but really not well explained by her character at all. Lena’s decision not to reveal to other team members that her husband was on an earlier mission is played up as a major issue, but without justifying why that’s a big deal or why the team member who cracks is so angry about the omission.

There are two scenes of gore in Annihiliation, more than enough to earn its R rating but not so much that I’d call this a straight horror film. There’s more of an intellectual undercurrent to the script than the trailer gave it credit for having; the way the Shimmer evolves, and then affects the members of the team, poses real questions about what it means to be human or even conscious, ones the film doesn’t try to answer even as characters directly ask what the Shimmer “wants.” Maybe it was just too hard to market on its own merits, but Annihilation is intense and smart enough to deserve to find an audience now that it’s more widely available.

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