→ January 4, 2023
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Farha.

Farha was the Jordanian submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and it’s the first full-length film for Palestinian director Darin Sallam, who had been trying to make the movie for nearly a decade. Based on a story passed down for over 70 years about a 14-year-old Palestinian girl’s harrowing experience during the Nakba in 1948, it works with a very simple plot and strong lead performance, but is also hemmed in by the director’s commitment to the original narrative. It’s currently streaming on Netflix.

Farha is the girl’s name, and as the film opens in mid-May, 1948, we see her playing with friends in their village in Palestine as the families there prepare for the arranged marriage of one of their daughters. Farha begs her father to send her to secondary school instead of marrying her off, and he eventually agrees, but while the paper is still in her hand, gunfire erupts as the British Mandate ends and Israeli troops threaten the village. Farha’s father tries to send her away with a neighbor who is driving his own family to safety, but Farha jumps out of the car and returns to her father’s side, so he puts her in a storeroom, locking the door and telling her he’ll return for her as soon as it’s safe. She ends up trapped in the room for several days, witnessing some of the horrors of the war through the keyhole, including an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers.

Farha is both a coming-of-age story and an anti-war film, one that has upset Israeli authorities because it shows Israeli Defense Forces soldiers, one of whom wears a yarmulke, committing acts of senseless, gratuitous violence (albeit off-screen – we hear it, Farha sees it). The story takes place during the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” which refers to the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from what had been British Palestine and would later become independent Israel. The displacement had already begun, with a civil war starting after the announcement of a plan to partition the territory between Jews and Arabs six months earlier. Israel declared independence on May 14th, shortly before the British Mandate was to end, and within days, four Arab nations invaded to try to abolish the Jewish state. Farha doesn’t give a specific date, but it’s at least well into the Nakba given that some neighbors try to get Farha’s father to come fight the Israelis with them.

This movie is tense, as Sallam films nearly all of it from within the storeroom; we only hear what Farha hears and see some of what she sees. Any noise from outside is a threat, and when those IDF troops arrive, every second could be the end. This would be a terrible experience for anyone, but for a 14-year-old girl who was just hoping to continue her education, it’s a horrific way to come of age. Sallam shows the viewer without telling – there’s no narration and after the first fifteen minutes there’s very little dialogue. Once the door closes and locks, life happens to Farha, and she is powerless to stop any of it.

Sallam’s choice to keep the viewer in that room works by centering Farha’s emotions, primarily fear, thus keeping the conflict personal rather than allowing it to spill over into something bigger and more showy (e.g., adding more on-screen violence, turning into a polemic against Israel or Great Britain). The viewer experiences everything through Farha, including her terror and her helplessness. Farha’s plight stands in as a synecdoche for that of Palestinians as a whole – they were, in a sense, trapped in their homeland, with Israel fighting on one side and taking much of their land, while the Arab nations fought Israel sort of on the Palestinians’ behalf, while the people themselves did fight but were by far the weakest force of the three, while more than half of the Palestinian Arab population was displaced by the war.

Farha is a little long for its content; there’s barely enough here for its 92 minutes, with arguably too much time showing Farha alone in the storeroom, although, again, Sallam is sticking to a specific oral history. It could have been 10 minutes shorter and perhaps been even more powerful, though. First-time actor Karam Taher is excellent as Farha, as she must be for this film to work, and I imagine we’ll see much more of her given the reception this film received in Toronto and positive reviews elsewhere. It didn’t make the shortlist of fifteen titles for the Academy Award, which I fear will relegate it to afterthought status, but at the very least, if you have Netflix, it’s worth seeking out.

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→ January 2, 2023
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Elvis.

Elvis Presley was anything but boring, as a person or as an entertainer, which makes it all the more criminal that Baz Luhrman’s biopic Elvis is such a dull, overlong mess. Even a game performance by Austin Butler, who’s doing the sort of impersonation that Oscar voters seem to love, can’t salvage this thing, which could have been 45 minutes shorter yet somehow misses some of the most interesting parts of the singer’s life story. (It’s free for HBO Max subscribers, or you can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Elvis tries to be a cradle-to-grave story, or at least an early childhood to death one, starting out with Elvis as a very young boy who moves with his family to a house in the white part of a Black neighborhood, where he was introduced to the gospel and blues music that he later used (or appropriated) in his own sound. The narrative then winds its way through his rise to stardom, marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu, stint in the army, the comeback special, and so on, until he gets addicted to drugs and dies, in connect-the-dots storytelling that might still have worked if Lurhman had any interest at all in telling the whole of Elvis’s story. Instead, we get a nonsense framing device of Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who is both the narrator and whose perspective is supposed to be our lens on the story, as Parker keeps trying to tell the viewers that he’s not that bad of a guy, and Elvis wouldn’t have been anything without him. It’s a pointless distraction and shifts the focus to a character nobody really cares about – or, if they did, maybe the film could have been called Parker and just put Elvis in the background. (Please, nobody do this.)be an

Presley’s actual life was far messier than the one we see in Elvis, not least of which is that he had several affairs while married to Priscilla, something the film glosses over almost entirely until the point where she announces that she’s leaving him and taking their daughter Lisa Marie with her. Among other sins of the script, such as the superficial treatment of his substance abuse issues or scant discussion of his appropriation of Black music or how his success may have allowed Black artists to follow in his wake, this amounts to a sort of hagiography that paints Elvis as a victim. Col. Parker did take advantage of Elvis financially and probably did so emotionally as well, but the story is so weirdly one-sided – even though Parker is the narrator – that the singer comes off as a pathetic man-child, and often not responsible for his own actions. I doubt this is accurate, and it’s certainly not interesting to watch.

Luhrman also plays loose with some key facts, which I suppose is par for the course in these music biopics, but his depiction of a race riot at an Elvis concert at Memphis’s Russwood Park is almost pure fiction. It plays into Lurhman’s ham-fisted attempts to tie Elvis’s career to the civil rights movement, which comes up again when Luhrman moves the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in time so that it happens during the taping of the comeback special, rather than some weeks before it, so that there can be a Big Moment backstage where Elvis and the producer decide the singer has to make a statement during the show and change the closing number. (There’s some good comedy in that whole sequence, though, as Parker sold the show as a Christmas special, and keeps insisting that Elvis close with a Christmas song and wear an ugly sweater.) A screenwriter can alter some timelines or small facts in service of the story, but here, Luhrman does the opposite – it holds the story back, makes the film longer, and adds no real interest. Even the comeback special, which was the most-watched TV program of its year and has entered music history for its impact on the culture and the way it opened up the second act of his career, is kind of boring in Elvis. I’d much rather watch that special three times, which would match the running time of this mess, than watch Elvis again.

Butler is a lock for a Best Actor Oscar nomination at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor – Drama, with Colin Farrell in a separate category because The Banshees of Inisherin counts as a Musical or Comedy. And Butler is good, even if he looks more like Miley Cyrus than Elvis when he’s in his stage makeup. The oddsmakers favor Elvis getting a Best Picture nod, which would be a real travesty, both on its face (this movie sucks) and because it’s going to push out something far more worthy. It’s just a waste of a lot of time and money, and the only film I’ve seen this year that I’d rank below it is Amsterdam, which would also fit that same description.

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→ January 1, 2023
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La Caja.

La Caja (The Box) was Venezuela’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, but didn’t make the shortlist of 15 that was announced in December; it’s on MUBI, for which we signed up to watch Decision to Leave, so I watched this as well. It’s a simple, bleak story that is exceptionally well-told, and while the story is quite specific to its setting, the themes of displacement and loss should have a much broader appeal.

Hatzín (Haztín Navarette) is a young Venezuelan teen or pre-teen who has traveled to a village in Chihuahaua, Mexico, to pick up the remains of his father, which were discovered in a mass grave there. After he gets the box, he’s on the bus back to Mexico City when he spots a man in the street (Hernán Mendoza) who looks just like the pictures of his father, whom he hasn’t seen since he was very little. Hatzín gets off the bus and confronts the man, who insists he’s not Hatzín’s father, but Hatzín returns the box of remains to the office and confronts the man, repeatedly, until he takes Hatzín in and ends up bringing him to his work as a recruiter for a maquiladora (factory) near the U.S. border. The work isn’t always savory, and at times is illegal, leading Hatzín to question whether he should stay there or even wants this man to turn out to be his father.

The story is pretty simple, and revolves around just those two questions: Is this man Hatzín’s father, and what will Hatzín do if it turns out that he is? The man, who calls himself Mario, is furious with Hatzín at the start for the boy’s insistence that this is his father and refusal to leave, although of course that could be a sign that Mario doesn’t want his old life – where he at the very least left Hatzín, Hatzín’s mother (since dead), and his own mother – to intrude on his new one. As Mario, he has a wife, child, and a baby on the way, as well as a job, a factory of his own in progress, and a middle-class existence. Or maybe he just thinks this kid is a pest and doesn’t want to be responsible for him. But he then takes Hatzín in and uses him as a helper, especially when he discovers the boy can read and write well and has a good memory. Does he actually care for the boy, or is he just an opportunist?

Meanwhile, Hatzín confronts an escalating set of moral quandaries as he follows Mario through his job, from recruiting desperate people to work in the sewing factory under dubious pretenses to quelling dissent to grand larceny, and more. Hatzín barely had any memories of his father; if Mario is, in fact, his dad, is this the dad he wanted? What happens to us when our memories of those we’ve lost are tainted by reality? Is it better to know the brutal truth, or to leave the past buried? He’s also faced with a more immediate dilemma: If he were to go to the police, would he be betraying his father? What if he does nothing, and it turns out that Mario isn’t his dad? The excellence of La Caja lies in just how many of these moral questions, ranging from basic to profound, it manages to pose despite just two main characters and what had to be a fairly short script.

This is Naverette’s first film or TV role, and he delivers an essential performance – without him, the film can’t work – that doesn’t line up with his lack of experience. Hatzín the character is a stoic, taciturn kid, already resigned to the tragedies that have taken both of his parents from him and the life it implies; when pure chance throws Mario into his path, he’s already mature enough to make the serious choices required of him. Navarette puts that tension to work on his face and in his sparing movements, making it easy to see his future as a noir detective or a sardonic action hero. Mendoza is almost his equal, threading the needle between the gruff and callous businessman he is at work and the caring family man he can be at home – or the maybe-father he is to Hatzín.

You can only find La Caja on MUBI, at least right now, but if you subscribe to that site it’s worth the watch. You can also sign up for it via amazon, with a 7-day free trial, which would also let you watch Decision to Leave, one of the best movies of 2022 that I’ve seen, and Aftersun, which is coming to MUBI on January 9th.

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→ December 31, 2022
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Decision to Leave.

Decision to Leave is the latest film from South Korean director and screenwriter (co-writer, in this case) Park Chan-wook, his first since 2016’s The Handmaiden and only his third as director in the last ten years. It’s a Hitchcockian thriller with a slow burn, reminiscent in many ways of Vertigo, right down to the romance between the male lead and the femme fatale he’s chasing, that also taps into bigger themes of alienation and self-worth, anchored by two incredible lead performances that should be earning broader acclaim.

Detective Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is called in to investigate the death of an immigration worker who fell while climbing a mountain near Busan, a mountain the man liked to climb and livestream. Jang suspects the man’s young Chinese wife, Seo-Rae (Tang Wei), who works as a caregiver to senior citizens, and who has suspicious marks and bruises on her when they police speak to her. Jang only sees his wife on weekends, because she works at a nuclear power plant, and he quickly becomes obsessed with Seo-Rae, following her and imagining he’s with her at work or in her apartment, which she realizes and turns back around by following him. The two end up in a chaste relationship – not without sexual tension – that Jang must keep secret while she’s still a potential suspect. Of course, nothing is as it first appears, and he finds evidence that might point to Seo-Rae’s guilt, leading to a second act where their power dynamic shifts repeatedly as Jang tries to figure out what’s real and what matters.

Some of the plot points in Decision to Leave are a little easy to spot, but the story isn’t the real strength here – it’s the two main characters, and the actors who do such incredible work to flesh them out. Jang has shadings of the noir detective, a tough guy with a grim exterior, capable of solving tough crimes, earning plaudits from his colleagues while he’s also putting them down for their coarse methods, but he’s also dealing with an existential grief that he tries to assuage with Seo-Rae. He’s not maudlin, or quiet, but actually depressed – he doesn’t seem to love his wife, although he will go through the motions to keep them together, and he doesn’t seem to gain satisfaction from his job, even when he’s doing it well. Park Hae-il has won a slew of awards for his portrayal here, deservedly so, as there’s a nuance to the performance that keeps him away from the stock hard-boiled character that’s fine in genre films but would take away from the bigger ideas here. Seo-Rae, meanwhile, is an immigrant from China who frequently apologizes for her poor Korean and appears in many ways to be an isolated figure – perhaps a damsel in distress for Jang to save – but, of course, she might also be a very cunning killer. Tang, who first rose to prominence in Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution, is Park’s equal here, playing the did-she-or-didn’t-she part without the cheap seduction common to the archetype; in fact, there’s very little sex at all in this movie, as the script almost dispenses with the idea that these two are physically attracted to each other, or at least removes it from the equation so the focus is instead on who they are and what might be driving them. (Apropos of nothing, I couldn’t believe Tang is 43 years old; her character, at least, seems at least a decade younger than that.)

Park Chan-woo utilizes a number of symbols in the film, two of which recur enough to merit mention. One is the eyes of various characters, including the victim at the start of the film, whose eyes we see several times in close-up. Jang uses eye drops to moisten his eyes frequently throughout the film, which the director has said is his way of showing that the detective has a hard time seeing what’s right in front of him, whether it’s with Seo-Rae or his wife or other cases. Blurred or diminished vision also comes into play with the frequent fog and mist we see in the film, which apparently is a feature of Ipo, where Jang’s wife works. You could also have a field day just with Jang’s bespoke suit and its seemingly infinite number of pockets, and how Seo-Rae seems to know where he keeps various things – as he is always prepared with little supplies, like he has every mother’s purse’s contents scattered throughout his clothes – while his own wife doesn’t.

My only quibble with Decision to Leave is the ending, as it just doesn’t quite stick the landing, but that’s a tiny complaint in a movie of this ambition. Like Hitchcock’s best films, however, much of the film’s inherent mystery lingers after the conclusion – and Decision to Leave does just that, giving you plenty to ponder long after the movie ends. I seldom watch movies twice, but this one likely rewards a second viewing.

Park won Best Director at Cannes for the film, which was also nominated for the Palme d’Or, and at the Grand Bell Awards, the South Korean equivalent to the Oscars, it took home the honors for Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor for Park Hae-il. Decision to Leave was South Korea’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, making the December shortlist and I have to assume eventually getting one of the five nominations. But it also seems like it’s going to get shut out of everything else, which seems like a shame – I can’t imagine there are ten better movies in the 2022 crop than this one.

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→ December 29, 2022
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The Eternal Daughter.

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir was a semi-autobiographical film that received general plaudits from critics but was also notable for its casting of Tilda Swinton and her daughter Honora Swinton-Byrne as mother and daughter in the film, with the latter serving as Julie, Joanna’s stand-in. That film led to a sequel last year, and now a connected film, The Eternal Daughter, that features the same two characters but isn’t a direct sequel or continuation of any sort. The artifice this time is that Tilda Swinton plays both Julie and her mother, Rosalind, as we’re about 30-35 years on, and the two women head off for a week’s stay at quite possibly the worst bed & breakfast in Wales – which happens to be in their former family home. (You can rent The Eternal Daughter on Amazon, iTunes, and so forth.)

Julie is hoping to make a movie about her mother’s life, and has taken her mother on this trip to try to entice her mum to tell her more of her story and, as we learn over the course of the film, to better understand her mother, who has always been just inscrutable enough that Julie feels insufficient to the task of summarizing her on film. The hotel is something out of a classic horror film, dark, empty save for the world’s least-helpful clerk (Carly-Sophia Davies, who is superb) and later one other staff member (Joseph Mydell), and constantly surrounded by mist and fog. Julie, Rosalind, and Rosalind’s dog Louis (played by Louis, Swinton’s dog) are alone everywhere, in their room, the dining room, on the grounds, anywhere they go. There’s an air of mystery from the air itself, and the constant darkness. The hotel seems to have weird sounds, and Julie even thinks she sees the visage of an old woman in a particular window on the first floor. The answer to everything does appear near the end of the film, although the mystery isn’t the real point here; it’s about a mother and daughter, and how we can never truly know our parents no matter how close we try to get to them.

Swinton has become so known for playing weird characters – and doing so in weird fashion – that a bravura performance like this might just go unappreciated and even unnoticed. If you take GoldDerby’s Oscar odds seriously, she’s at 100 to 1 to win Best Actress, the lowest probability they assign to anyone who has better than a zero chance of winning, although they only gave seven actresses higher odds in that category. (Also at 100:1 is Ana de Armas, who was considered a likely nominee before Blonde bombed.) This is two performances, of course, and the roles required some improvisation, as Hogg typically does not provide word-for-word scripts to her actors, but provides treatments and works with them as director to see where the dialogue goes. There are several obvious reasons to cast Swinton in both roles, from the physical similarities we expect from a mother and a daughter to the fact that this was filmed early in 2021 when a small cast was probably a greater asset for COVID mitigation, but perhaps the best reason is that she’s an amazing actor and very much rises to this occasion. There’s one scene where she seems to pour it on a little thick, but after the film’s reveal at the end, her emotions in that one conversation are easier to understand.

The twist, or mystery, is not that hard to discern; my wife called it within five minutes, and of course we spent most of the film looking for clues to verify or debunk it, but she was right. It’s something we’ve seen before, although I won’t spoil it by citing other films that have used this conceit, but I will defend the choice again by saying it’s beside the point. When you find out what’s been happening, it provides context to everything that’s come before. It’s not a “did you figure it out?” mystery, and there are no jump scares or shocks here; any review calling this a horror movie, in any sense at all, has completely missed Hogg’s intentions. The gimmick exists so Hogg and Swinton can further elucidate the difficulties we face as adult children who are trying to understand our parents better before it is too late to do so. The fog and mist are fairly obvious metaphors for that last part – we simply cannot see our parents clearly because we haven’t lived their lives, or even seen the first portions of their lives, and have then spent much of our lives looking at them not as people, but as parents.

There are only seven credited actors in The Eternal Daughter, including Louis, since the hotel appears to have no other guests – I can’t imagine why not, as it’s dank, noisy, and the one full-time employee seems to hate her job. Davies is pretty fantastic as that clerk, and waitress, and almost everything else, as she isn’t so much mean as apathetic. Your concerns are not her concerns, and since there’s no one else there like a supervisor, she doesn’t have to worry about whether you ever get that kettle you asked for. Mydell plays Bill, who seems to work there sometimes in a sort of catchall porter/groundskeeper post; it’s a dicey role, as it veers close to the Magical Negro trope, since his main function here is to help and comfort Julie, with just a slight backstory of his own. I think the counterargument here is that his race is immaterial to his character, and there isn’t a good way to give him anything more to do in a script that is about 90% Julie and Rosalind. I have another possible explanation for this, but that would require spoiling something in the story to explain.

I find it incredibly impressive just how deep The Eternal Daughter is despite the sparse cast and single setting, a testament to what good writing can do and in many ways a nod to the movies’ roots on the stage, where words were almost all that mattered because you didn’t have huge casts, sets, or special effects to paper over flaws in the script. This exploration of filial ties felt especially poignant to myself and my wife, as our parents are all alive but getting older, and this desire to hold on to what you can because you can’t hold on to what you desire is something that crosses boundaries of race, class, and so on. The bond between a mother and daughter, and the strain that can coexist with it, is something I know I can’t understand, but I hope I can at least appreciate how Hogg has brought it to life on film. It’s a shame that The Eternal Daughter has been so overlooked, between Swinton’s excellent and – gasp! – understated twin performances and the themes that power the story.

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→ December 28, 2022
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The Banshees of Inisherin.

The Banshees of Inisherin is writer/director Martin McDonagh’s first film since 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which was his most acclaimed movie to that point and took home the BAFTA for Best Film and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama. His latest led all films this year with eight Golden Globe nominations, and reunites the two leads from his debut film In Bruges, Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, in a dark comedy with two distinct, serious themes lying beneath the film’s absurdist surface. (It’s streaming now on HBO Max.)

Padraig (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson) both live on the small island of Inisherin off the west coast of Ireland, where not much of anything happens, and as far as I can tell almost nobody ever has to go to work. Padraig and Colm are drinking buddies who walk to the pub every afternoon, with Padraig stopping by Colm’s house on the way, until one day Colm completely ignores Padraig’s knock, and ignores him at the pub as well, eventually telling him he doesn’t want to be friends any more. This unprovoked severing of ties, which Padraig can’t understand and won’t accept, even in the face of Colm’s threats and rather disturbing actions, leads to an escalation of hostilities that wrecks the peace of the island and leaves nobody better off than before.

McDonagh has a gift for language and crafting witty lines, starting off early on in Banshees when everyone asks Padraig if he and Colm are “rowin’” often enough that it becomes funny just by repetition. The comic elements here are a necessary reprieve from the film’s increasingly dark elements, including the deterioration between the two main characters, the insidious gossip that poisons the island’s culture, young Dominic (Barry Keoghan) and his abusive father, and more. It’s the sort of story where its pervasive awfulness becomes even more apparent after it’s over, because the humor and absurdity mask the bleak story while you’re still watching it.

The film works on one level as an exploration of male friendship, and how fragile those bonds can be in the wrong sort of environment. It’s not so much a question of toxic masculinity, as neither character exhibits much in that vein; Padraig is probably too sensitive, at least when he’s not in his cups, and Colm’s reasons for shunning Padraig and subsequent reactions are more those of someone dealing with mental illness. One of them eventually takes their quarrel too far, pushing them past the point of no return, and a once-solid friendship, one that everyone on the island took as a given, is reduced to ashes.

It’s also a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Irish Civil War, which is often mentioned in the script, including in the final scene, and is nearing its conclusion as the movie takes place. This civil war began after the Irish War of Independence, which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State as a “dominion” within the Commonwealth, giving the island – sans Northern Island, which exercised its opt-out clause and became a free agent remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Island – greater autonomy, leading to full independence in 1933. After the Free State was established, however, pro-independence forces who opposed this partial solution fought an armed rebellion against the new, provisional government, with former IRA members from the war of independence now split between the two forces. The Irish fought a war to kick out the English, won it, and then ended up fighting themselves, leading to nearly 2000 deaths and substantial economic losses. The conflict may have begun over a principle, but escalated into violence when a democratic solution was likely achievable. It led to decades of mistrust between the spiritual descendants of the two sides, one of which later split into the political parties Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. The metaphor here doesn’t map perfectly one-to-one – I don’t think Colm is one side and Padraig the other, although a scholar of Irish history may see it quite differently – but it does speak to the pointlessness of war, especially when the two sides escalate hostilities in turn.

This is the best thing I’ve ever seen Colin Farrell do, requiring more range from him than In Bruges or The Lobster, as he makes Padraig feel completely three-dimensional – you know someone like him, someone well-intentioned but unable to get out of his own way, someone who’s probably not the most interesting guy to have a beer with, let alone a beer every day, but who would likely be the first person to show up if you needed help. Gleeson is also strong, as always, but his character is just not as well-written, and his complexity is, shall we say, a little harder to understand. Keoghan is fine as Dominic, who is probably developmentally disabled, although his story feels tangential and his main function seems to be to serve as a plot point for Padraig and Padraig’s sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon), on whom Dominic has a crush. Siobhan’s life is even more stifled than Padraig’s, and an opportunity eventually arises for her to leave Inisherin, a move that completely unmoors her brother, already shaken from having Colm cast him off.

We’ve largely just begun our run through Oscar-worthy movies, so I can’t compare it to much, but I wouldn’t put this over Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is still the best movie I’ve seen from 2022, although I could take an argument for McDonagh’s script over the Daniels’ script for EEAAO. Both are outstanding, but McDonagh’s dialogue is better. The Academy has already nominated McDonagh twice before for his screenplays, which makes me strongly suspect he’ll get a nod for this one as well.

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→ December 14, 2022
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The Wonder.

The Wonder is another adaptation of a book by Emma Donoghue (author of Room), directed by Sebastian Lelio (Una Mujer Fantástica, winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), and starring Florence Pugh. It has no reason not to be good. And it is good, imperfect but good, taut and spare and well-acted, with Pugh, who seems very unlikely to get any awards love for her performance, showing once again what a compelling talent she is.

Set in 1862, The Wonder tells the story of Elizabeth Wright (Pugh), a nurse who is called to an Irish village where a young girl, Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), appears to have been fasting for four months, requiring no food or sustenance, subsisting solely on prayer. Her Catholic family wants to believe she’s blessed by God, as does the local priest and several other town authorities, although there’s enough disagreement that the triumvirate of local leaders (Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, and Dermot Crowley) have called in Mrs. Wright and a nun to watch over Anna for two weeks, taking twelve-hour shifts to determine whether she’s for real or is somehow sneaking or being given food. An Irish journalist with a questionable past (Tom Byrne) shows up as well, and he’s even more skeptical than Mrs. Wright is, but it’s unclear if or how Anna and her family might be pulling this off.

The Wonder isn’t really a film about religious mania or doubt, although those themes are there below the surface, but about the way in which adults use children – and, really, all manner of people – as objects to advance their own ends. The religious leaders and Anna’s own family are so invested in the possibility that her survival without food is the product of divine intervention that they’re willing to overlook signs that she’s dying, even ignoring the protestations of Mrs. Wright that the girl needs food. The nurse herself has a past of tragedy, telling Anna’s family that she’s widowed but leaving out several other details from her history, and it turns out the journalist is doing the same, leaving both of their motivations here open to question as well.

Of course, you can’t read this without seeing an implicit indictment of religion’s capacity to harm and kill, and the way that people will turn to religion, even with that capacity fully on display, in times of strife. The novel and film are set in the wake of the Irish famine caused by a potato blight that led to the deaths of about a million Irish people and the emigration of two million more, a time where you might think that people would ask why God had abandoned them, especially given the island’s history of dedication to the One True Church of Rome even as their overlords in England tossed it aside for divorce and other heresies. Instead, we have a family and a town clinging to that faith as fiercely as ever, impervious to material explanations and physical evidence of harm (as when Anna spits out an entire tooth, a sign of malnutrition), turning even more deeply into religion even when any rational person would see a person surviving without food for four months as a physical impossibility. The script doesn’t dwell much on the science versus faith battle directly, instead pitting the rationalist nurse against the nun and the spiritual leaders as a stand-in for that debate, which had just exploded on the world with the publication of On the Origin of Species just three years prior to the film’s setting.

This film is nearly all about Pugh’s performance, with a strong assist from Cassidy. Pugh has become one of those “whatever she’s in, I’ll watch, unless Olivia Wilde directed it” actors, and while she’s not going to get any awards consideration for The Wonder, it’s certainly worthy of it. Her portrayal of Elizabeth as a skeptic who’s dealing with her own secret pain and finds herself geographically and socially isolated in this small Irish hamlet is compelling and credible, and her interactions with Cassidy’s Anna are the best parts of the movie. The film overall feels a bit small for awards attention – its only nominations so far were from the British Independent Film Awards, where it earned twelve but only won for Original Music – and that might be why Pugh’s been overlooked in a very packed category. I’ll give this the highest praise I can give a film, though: I was never bored, and what’s more, it took me a while to figure out what might be going on.

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→ November 29, 2022
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Top Gun: Maverick.

Unlike many people my age, I hold no particular nostalgia for Top Gun. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the movie start to finish, and I have no desire to do so now. I remember the girls in middle school loved it for Tom Cruise, and the guys loved it because pew pew pew airplanes. You also couldn’t escape the soundtrack, which ranged from tolerable (“Danger Zone,” which was 20+ years from its real cultural import, as a Sterling Archer catch phrase) to insufferable (“Take My Breath Away,” by an emasculated Berlin). The movie was a huge commercial success, but critics remained unimpressed.

So when Top Gun: Maverick (rentable on amazon) was first rumored, I admit to some strong disinterest. The sequel to a movie that wasn’t supposed to be all that great 36 years ago? Tom Cruise may not really age, but come on. Dude’s 60 now, right? Is he only allowed to fly the plane before dusk? Will this just be another stop on the “make Miles Teller happen” tour?

Of course, the movie is very good. It’s a popcorn blockbuster, and has its moments of absurdity, starting in the cold open, but it is fun, well-paced, often smarter than its ilk, and gives us some real moments of character development without resorting to schlock or excessive fan service. I was shocked by how much I enjoyed the film just about from start to finish, and if you chop off the unnecessary and ridiculous opening sequence – where Maverick (Cruise) absconds in a fighter jet to fly it at Mach 10, which is about three times faster than any manned plane has ever traveled, just because “ten” sounds cooler than “four” – it has just one eye-rolling moment the rest of the way.

Maverick is in the film’s title, but the script makes quite a bit of room for other characters, including the son of his former colleague Goose (played by Teller). Maverick is more or less given one last case before he retires, as he’s drafted to lead a crash course of a dozen elite young pilots to identify a few who can engage in a secret mission to destroy a weapon in an unnamed country. The weapon itself is located in incredibly inhospitable terrain, at the bottom of a valley surrounded by very high, steep peaks, so flying in and out requires skill, timing, and endurance. As movie challenges go, it’s a pretty good one, and evokes without actually naming a certain country we’ll be playing in football later today. The group of wannabe aces includes Teller’s Bradley Bradshaw, who thinks Maverick is the one who tried to stop his naval career; Hangman (Glen Powell), affably arrogant but also very much a team player; Phoenix (Monica Barbaro), the lone woman in the group, who is often the voice of reason and exudes a sort of quiet confidence; Bob (Lewis Pullman, son of Bill), nerdy – you know this because he has glasses – but of course highly skilled; and more. Maverick has to figure out who can handle the mission’s demands while also figuring out why Bradley is still so mad at him, and, of course, he has to deal with higher-ups (including Jon Hamm) who question his reliability and willingness to follow orders.

What Top Gun: Maverick does right, better than most films that aim for such a broad audience, is avoid the worst cliches of the genre. There’s a love interest between Maverick and Penny (Jennifer Connelly), but it’s deeply understated, and the most serious moment between the two is both unromantic and important to the plot. The younger pilots are a little thinly drawn, but the script takes them seriously as people, and Phoenix isn’t just there as someone’s love interest. We never even see the enemy, which is good as it avoids depicting them in stereotype, but also mirrors modern warfare’s remove from the people it’s killing (for better and worse).

Maverick also comes across as a man of a certain age, and that might have been the most surprising part of the film. Top Gun: Maverick lets its title character stare into the abyss, however briefly, and it is a much stronger film for it. He’s a bit too perfect, as the story seems to think he hasn’t lost any reaction time despite the character being at least in his late 50s, which is definitely not true to life, but there’s a wisdom to the character, and a reserve as well, that befits the character’s age and experience.

Of course, the script goes well over the top in two pretty significant ways. The opening sequence is scientifically preposterous, while the big plot development later in the film, where Maverick and Bradley have to work together to survive, just beggars belief. You can get past the first one, because the story them moves into the actual plot, but the second one blew me right out of the film, and made everything that came after seem artificial.

The other way this film goes over the top is in its pro-military bent. Like most movies that include the U.S. military as part of its story, Top Gun: Maverick received substantial assistance from the U.S. armed forces, and they were allowed to make subtle alterations to the script. It’s not a propaganda film per se, but the film is full of propaganda. The U.S. military looks good here. There’s no mention of, say, the civilian casualties that often result from U.S. airborne operations in foreign countries – to say nothing of the violation of sovereignty involved. Navy good, enemy bad. It doesn’t quite devolve into the level of a recruitment video, as some critics charged, but you’d have to cover your eyes to miss the military’s guiding hand here.

There’s talk of Top Gun: Maverick getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, which, sure, fine, it’s not going to win, and whether it’s worthy depends a lot more on what other films are contenders. It should get a slew of nominations for technical awards, as well as one for Best Cinematography, one for Best Film Editing, and perhaps two in the sound categories. Anything more than that, like an acting nod for Cruise, would be overkill. This is a perfectly enjoyable movie on its own merits. We don’t have to overpraise it to appreciate it for what it is.

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→ November 21, 2022
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Amsterdam (movie).

Amsterdam takes an incredible cast and some fantastic costume work and turns it into … not much. I can’t even call it nothing, because it’s more than that, but this latest film from David O. Russell, his first since 2015’s Joy, is just indescribably bland. (You can rent it now on amazon and elsewhere.)

The script is the real problem here, as it’s convoluted, undecided about what kind of story it should be, and totally humorless. It’s part mystery, part political thriller, part historical fiction, and mixes in a tepid romance, but fails at virtually all of these things, lacking the tension for the first two or the humor to make it more of a wink and a nod at all of these disparate genres. It’s based on a real episode from U.S. history known as the Business Plot, and creates three protagonists – two wounded vets from World War I in the doctor Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and lawyer Harold Woodsman (John David Washington) plus nurse Valerie (Margot Robbie) – who get pulled into the intrigue, 39 Steps style, when someone they knew in the War shows up dead. That leads to the introduction of a Tolstoy-esque list of characters, adding to some of the confusion of the film and depriving some of the better players here of screen time, before we find out what the conspiracy is and get to the big resolution.

I’m in the target audience for Amsterdam. I like political thrillers, especially of that era, whether we’re talking about the Hitchock oeuvre or novels like The Dark Frontier or Le Carré’s best. I like murder mysteries. I love almost anything set in the 1920s or early 1930s. And I do often fall for movies that are stylish – if the dialogue matches. But Amsterdam doesn’t have a great story, neither in the murder part nor in the political conspiracy part, and the dialogue is drab.

Bale’s character is supposed to be a wiseass, but he’s neither clever nor funny enough to do it, yet he’s too smart to be comic relief. There’s something endearing about his loyalty to his fellow soldiers from their unit – which is itself rooted in kindness, although again, it’s a convoluted back story – but that’s not enough to fully define a three-dimensional character. Robbie can’t help but be endearing, but her character is weird for absolutely no reason at all, making art out of the shrapnel she removes from soldiers’ wounds, something that’s explained at length and then dropped for the rest of the film. Of the big three, Washington’s character is the best defined, and the most interesting, and his understated style works well here. But there are far more actors in this film who are nondescript or actively bad, none more so than Anya Taylor-Joy, who is playing an even more shrill version of her character from Peaky Blinders. She’s supposed to be suspicious, but instead, she’s obvious – and annoying as hell when doing it. Her husband is played by Rami Malek, whose skin condition from No Time to Die has resolved itself but who’s almost simpering here. Robert de Niro deserves credit for a very by-the-book turn as the General whose help the trio needs to secure, as the moment he appeared, I thought we were in for an overacting clinic. He’s quite credible in the part and holds it even when his character has to make a pivotal, emotional speech at the climax.

And that climax is … nothing. This is based on a real story; although the veracity of the accusations of a plot to overthrow the U.S. government remains in dispute, Amsterdam treats it as real, which should make the ending far more exciting. The script here has it end in a meeting and a whimper, although there’s a tussle over a gun that feels forced, like Russell was trying to insert some action into the film but couldn’t figure out how.

I was just never engaged in the story of Amsterdam, and that’s the biggest indictment I can offer. I am an easy mark for everything this script was trying to do, but it’s so busy trying to do so many things that it succeeds at none. The film actually opens with a long flashback sequence to World War I that explains how the dead body connects to Burt and Harold, and how they connect to each other (along with Chris Rock’s character, another member of the same unit), but it comes after a ten-minute or so opening scene that sets up the murder. The flashback itself is padded with too much detail anyway, so by the time we get back to the actual story – which features Taylor Swift as the deceased’s daughter, and she’s also not very good – any momentum that there might have been at that point is long gone. And the one thing that might have salvaged Amsterdam, wry humor, is mostly absent. There are a few attempts at some Marx Brothers-style wisecracking, but those fall flat. No single character is funny, and the script is too self-serious for something this stylized or slick. It’s not actually a bad movie – it’s a movie, and a colorless one at that.

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→ November 15, 2022
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See How They Run.

The success of Knives Out in 2019 didn’t just spawn a highly-awaited sequel, Glass Onion, which hits theaters later this month – it has spawned attempts to capitalize on its success, with two similar movies coming out this fall, See How They Run and Amsterdam. These movies are like catnip to me, as I love mysteries and detective stories in general, and Agatha Christie stories in particular, having read 50 of her novels and four of her short story collections. See How They Run doubles down on this, as it’s a period piece mystery that involves Christie’s famous play The Mousetrap and eventually features an appearance by the Queen of Murder herself as a character. So while I recognize this film’s limitations, I also loved just about every minute of it. (It’s streaming free now on HBO Max, or rentable everywhere, including Amazon.)

See How They Run is a bit more than a perfunctory murder mystery, though, as the script engages in some legerdemain, even starting out in one direction before the murder takes place and the whole thing shifts. After that point, we get our intrepid investigators, the overeager young Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), who is one of the first women in that position in the London police; and Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell), the drunken detective of stereotype. Someone has been murdered after the 100th performance of The Mousetrap, and, of course, everyone’s a suspect, from the actors to the playwright to the stage director. Constable Stalker is new to the homicide beat, so she starts jumping to conclusions, assuming every suspect is guilty, giving the film the biggest of its running gags, although Ronan’s performance makes it work. There is, of course, another murder, and the script plays around with the tropes of the British murder mystery, many of which Christie invented, before getting to the identity of the murder.

The script is about 80% formula, 20% clever, but this is a formula I happen to love, and there is at least a playfulness in the script that nods to the inherent predictability of it all. The core mystery is both well hidden and well written, credible with enough clues dropped along the way that at least in hindsight you can see how you might have figured it out. (I did not.) There is also some humor in here, not as much as Knives Out offered, but a number of laugh-out-loud moments for me from the bantering and a few sight gags. Your mileage may vary, of course.

What really makes this movie, though, is Ronan’s performance. We’ve seen Ronan be funny, including her Oscar-nominated turn in Lady Bird, but we’ve never seen her be this silly, and she seems to throw herself completely into it. Her comic timing is great, but she manages to make Stalker a comic character without making her seem totally un-serious. Stalker’s overzealousness actually leads to a significant blunder, although even that scene is also kind of funny, but she’s never an object of pity or derision, and Ronan’s portrayal is the main reason. Stalker is earnest but green, and her errors, even when played for laughs, are borne of inexperience rather than incompetence.

Rockwell, on the other hand, is a replacement-level detective here, with a generic British accent and nondescript mannerisms beyond a slight limp that itself becomes fodder for the script’s mockery of the formula. I’m not sure why Rockwell was chosen for a role when there are plenty of English actors available, but he doesn’t have a real direction here – he doesn’t lean into the role and ham it up, but he also doesn’t give the character any urgency or gravitas. The conventions of the genre almost require one or the other, and instead Rockwell gives a fine but ultimately forgettable performance. The remainder of the cast is mostly big names or great actors in bit parts. The one major exception is David Oyelowo, who plays the closeted writer Mervyn Cocker-Norris and is clearly having a blast, while also getting a good amount of screen to chew. Adrien Brody is very good but doesn’t log enough minutes, and Ruth Wilson, who was stunning as Jane Eyre in the 2006 BBC mini-series of that name, is barely in the film at all.

The script does offer a bunch of Easter eggs for hardcore Christie fans, some of which appear in this EW story, although I won’t mention them here beyond the one in the title – the original name of The Mousetrap was Three Blind Mice. I caught a couple, but clearly missed the majority, although I admire the cleverness in slipping so many tiny nods to Christie, her works, and her adherents into the script. That may have ultimately worked against the finished film, however, as there’s so much Christie-ness or those that there’s probably less plot and less humor than there could have been. It doesn’t fare that well in comparison to Knives Out for that very reason. If you liked that film and also just like this genre, you’ll probably enjoy See How They Run as I did. If you aren’t a fan of witty murder mysteries, though, this isn’t going to have the same broader appeal that Rian Johnson’s hit film did.

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