→ March 21, 2022
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CODA.

CODA has become the top underdog to win Best Picture after taking the top honors at the Screen Actors Guild and Producers Guild of America awards in the last few weeks, buoyed by Jane Campion tone-deaf comments at the Critics Choice Awards when The Power of the Dog won the top prize there. It’s definitely the feel-good movie of the year, and well-executed for its type, but it’s formulaic and predictable enough that it doesn’t belong in the Best Picture conversation despite its positives. (It’s available to stream free on Apple TV+.)

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) is the CODA of the title – a Child of Deaf Adults, born hearing to deaf parents (Troy Kotsur, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and Marlee Matlin) and with a deaf older brother (Daniel Durant). The family lives in Gloucester, on the north shore of Massachusetts, and runs a fishing boat, for which they depend on Ruby as the one hearing member of the family, thus keeping them in compliance with Coast Guard rules. Ruby loves to sing, and if you can’t see where this going, you might not have seen a movie before. Of course, the music teacher at Ruby’s school (Eugenio Derbez) hears Ruby and suggests she apply to Berklee, offering to help her prepare for her audition, forcing her to choose between her family and a career.

As a coming-of-age story, CODA checks the right boxes, not least of which is the humor essential to this sort of narrative. Ruby’s parents are impossible, probably too much so to be credible, but because the film largely works from her point of view, it works because just about every teenager thinks their parents are impossible. Kotsur is fantastic, including a few scenes where he improvised some dialogue, not just in his scenes with Ruby but also in the subplot about the decline of commercial fishing in general and the way that the single buyer for fish at their port seems to take advantage of the family when Ruby isn’t there. (More on that in a moment.) Ruby is also bullied at school, in part because when she first started attending she spoke ‘funny,’ but also because her family fishes for a living, even though they are hardly the only family in town to do so – and, by the way, where exactly are the Gloucester accents? – which gets in the way of her crush on Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo of Sing Street), who the music teacher assigns to do a duet with Ruby, because of course he does.

CODA follows a pretty clear formula from start to finish, and you’ll see everything coming a mile away, right down to the big finish. It at least improves on the French original by casting deaf actors in the roles of the deaf characters, but this is still a paint-by-numbers script, and it centers the experiences of Ruby over those of her family members, as if to say that the burden of being a hearing person in a deaf family is greater or more important than the burden of being a deaf person in a hearing world. That includes some nonsensical scenes at a doctor’s office and in a court where Ruby translates for her father, even though the Americans with Disabilities Act requires the provision of an interpreter in both settings. This isn’t just a plot contrivance – it violates a federal law, and a half an hour or so north of Boston, this just isn’t going to happen. The doctor’s office scene is mined for Ruby’s embarrassment, but the courtroom scene is there just to underline how helpless her family will be without her there, and that’s both wrong and embarrassing for the screenwriters – who are hearing, by the way, and appear to miss the boat (pun intended) several times on deaf experience and culture. (Here’s a take from a deaf writer who found the film frustrating for that reason.) You know she’s going to nail the audition and get the guy and figure something out with her parents, because that’s just how these movies work.

The film does do many things right, starting with representation of deaf people in the first place, although I’d like to know where the family’s deaf friends, who are mentioned but never seen, are hiding for the entire film. This world is built by people without disabilities for people without disabilities, and if you have a disability of some sort, whether it’s mobility, sight, hearing, or something else, you will find the world has built extra obstacles for you because the easiest and cheapest path was to pretend that you don’t exist. Ruby’s family ends up playing an important role among the fishing community as they push back against an exploitative middleman and what they perceive as overregulation (for which they must pay directly), and that wouldn’t happen if Ruby weren’t there to interpret in both directions at one critical public meeting. It’s a sign of what’s lost to everyone when we marginalize any set of people, and shows the isolation of her family while also providing several humorous moments.

Kotsur’s performance rivals that of Kodi Smit-McPhee’s for the best by an actor in a supporting role, and I’d be good with either winning the Oscar in that category on Sunday. Jones’s work might be flying under the radar too much, but she’s also excellent, with great comedic timing and a lovely singing voice that at least makes it plausible that her teacher would react to her singing the way he does. Derbez’s character is ridiculous, but he plays the hell out of it, and I challenge you not to like him as he leans into the artiste stereotype, flipping his hair and rolling the r in his name, Bernardo, for about ten seconds each time he says it. By the time she gets to the audition at Berklee, which you know the whole time she’s going to end up attending, the script just piles one absurd element on top of another to get to the desired outcome. It’s charming, but you’re just going to have to accept the unreality of it, and that’s a shame given the movie’s clear intent to put deaf people and deaf culture in the center of the story. It’s an entertaining film, but not a great one, better honored for its performances than for the script or the film as a whole.

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→ March 18, 2022
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Drive My Car.

Drive My Car has become the critical favorite of awards season, winning the best film prize from the LA Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Society of Film Critics, a trifecta that has happened six times previously, with the last four films to do so going on to win Best Picture. It spurred one of the best pieces I’ve read on movies in this, a  cycle, Justin Chang’s piece from late January arguing for the Oscars to nominate the film – his favorite of 2021 – for Best Picture. He was right, and the film did get the Best Picture nod it deserved, as well as nominations for Best Director and Best International Film. After Jane Campion’s tone-deaf, ill-timed comments at the Critics Choice Awards, which came just four days before voting opened, it might even have a chance to win the big prize.

Based on a brief short story by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car is a three-hour meditation on grief and recovering from loss, beautifully shot and acted, with a script that pulls great emotion from small moments and quiet interactions among its characters. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a stage director and actor whose wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) narrates stories she creates for him during and after they have sex. Shortly after Yusuke discovers that she’s cheating on him, he returns home to find her dead on the floor of a cerebral hemorrhage. Two years later, he’s invited to stage his version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a multilingual production, in Hiroshima, where his contract requires him to stay an hour away and use a driver, Misaki (T?ko Miura), to get him back and forth. These drives, and the conversations that take place in the car, explore the two characters’ traumas and share difficulty coping with their grief and guilt over what they might have done differently to prevent the tragedies in their pasts.

Drive My Car immerses you in its world, the one facet it shares with Murakami’s writing – it’s akin to living inside of someone else’s dream for three hours, thanks to the gorgeous shots of Hiroshima and the unhurried plot, which reveals its secrets naturally, as the relationship between Yusuke and Misaki develops and the two begin to confide in each other. Yusuke and Oto lost a child earlier in their marriage, which we learn in oblique fashion near the start of the film but without any explanation, which only adds to Yusuke’s guilt and grief over losing his wife – especially since he never had a chance to confront her about her infidelity. He ends up hiring the actor with whom she cheated to play the title character in Uncle Vanya, with what seems like ill intent, but after an intense conversation between the two in the back of the car where the actor tells Yusuke the end of a story that Oto had never finished, his view softens and he realizes there were things about his wife he never knew.

There are some strange plot contrivances that never quite pay off. Yusuke develops glaucoma in one eye, which he discovers after the condition causes him to get into a car accident, which you’d think would be reason enough for him to end up with a driver. Instead, the glaucoma never comes up again in the film, and the screenwriters concoct this bizarre contract with the theater to force him to use a driver – which he’s reluctant to do because of the importance of his routine while driving, right down to the car itself, which we learn is closely associated in his mind with his wife. Getting Yusuke a driver is central to the unfolding of the story, but the glaucoma could have been the reason for it – or it didn’t need to be in the film at all.

I have never seen or heard any performance of Uncle Vanya, so I read the Wikipedia summary of the play to try to understand what was happening on the stage within the film, as well as its connection to the overall plot. (There’s a brief scene near the start of the film where Yusuke appears in a production of Waiting for Godot, a story about two people waiting for a third, unseen person who never comes, talking endlessly about it, which seems like a more obvious parallel to the story of Yusuke and Misaki.) The actors in the play speak different languages and often can’t understand each other without Yusuke or his local assistant translating, with actors who speak Mandarin, English, Korean, and Korean Sign Language in the production, but despite diffident direction from Yusuke, several of the actors experience breakthroughs while working with the material, forming bonds with each other and connecting more with the characters, an allegory for Yusuke’s own resistance to exploring his own grief or just his own emotions. Two of the main characters in Chekhov’s play are stuck, pining for the same woman, the wife of Vanya’s brother-in-law, whose first wife (Vanya’s sister) has died. Vanya has dedicated most of his life to managing his brother-in-law’s estate, but realizes that he’s wasted his time on a man of limited ability and even less sense of the value of other people, all while waiting for a woman who is unavailable to him.

Much commentary about Drive My Car has focused on how well it translates the dreamlike nature of Murakami’s writing to the screen. The comments get it half right. This film does replicate the all-consuming aspect of Murakami’s work, but that’s found in his novels, not in his short stories; the stores in Men Without Women, the collection where “Drive My Car” appears, are scant, like shadows of ideas, and lack the texture or altered realities of most of his novels. The comments also constitute Burning erasure, as that film, the best of 2018, followed the same formula, extrapolating a wispy Murakami short story into a film well over two hours long that developed its characters (its men, at least) and created layers of back story and scene. Drive My Car does so as well, with strong performances by both of its leads, and offers a thematic and visual complexity absent from the story on which it is loosely based. It’s the best movie I’ve seen from 2021 so far, with just two Best Picture nominees (CODA and Don’t Look Up) and at least two significant international films (Playground and Petite Maman), and while the odds are still against it winning Best Picture or Best Director, it absolutely deserves both honors.

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→ March 15, 2022
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The Worst Person in the World.

Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World earned two Oscar nominations this year, for Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay, and should have gotten a third for Renate Reinsve as Best Actress. It’s a blast to watch, particularly because Reinsve is so charming and so convincing as the main character, but there’s a superficiality to the story that made the movie less satisfying than it could have been in a different writer’s hands.

Reinsve plays Julie, a woman about to turn 30 who is trying to figure out her life, dropping out of med school as the film begins to become a photographer, where she meets Aksel, an author of underground comic books who is about 14 years her senior. They begin a relationship despite his warning to her that she still needs to find herself, that he’s too old for her, and that they’ll want different things – which, of course, eventually turns out to be true, as they meet his friends, discuss having children, and, of course, meet other people. The movie unfolds in twelve ‘chapters,’ as well as a prologue and epilogue, each showing a small anecdote or slice of Julie’s life, ranging from funny to tragic, as she navigates her love life, her family, and more.

This film succeeds because of Reinsve, who looks younger than Julie’s age despite being about 32 when the movie was filmed. She’s so compelling from the moment we first see her, with a smile that fills the screen, yet over the course of the twelve episodes that constitute the film, she not only gives the character depth but makes it clear why she is the center of this particular universe. Julie is flawed but full of life, so that we can see her make mistakes, or at least what might be mistakes, and still be completely invested in her story. She’s the prototypical character who you just believe will come out all right in the end, without becoming hackneyed or unlikeable.

The script, however, is another matter. The plot is a bit beside the point, but it depends on two very fortunate twists that seem awfully convenient for the purposes of Julie’s story, getting her to the right people and places at those moments in the film. It serves to underscore how shallow the story is: this is a woman’s late 20s as seen through the eyes of a man. Julie doesn’t seem to have any friends of her own, and never has a conversation with another woman in the film without a man there – even then, those conversations are nearly always about a man, often Julie’s father, who lives with her stepmom and their daughter and takes no interest in Julie’s life at all. The movie views the life of a woman turning 30 primarily through the question of whether she wants children, and how that affects her relationships with men. Her career is an afterthought – we barely see her pick up a camera for about 10 chapters, and when she’s working at all, it’s in a chain bookstore, with no mention of photography or another career. Even the essay she writes that goes viral is about her relationship to men. Julie does have agency, and shows it in romantic relationships, so it’s puzzling to see her portrayed as lacking initiative or authority in other aspects of her life.

The Worst Person in the World has some gorgeous shots in and around Oslo, including a running scene – every great film this year had to have a running scene, it’s in the rules – that might be the most memorable sequence of 2021 for me. There are many fantastic shots, and Kasper Tuxen’s cinematography makes this a film in which you want to just exist. It’s also funny and bittersweet and often heartwarming, but in the end, I found it all a bit exasperating, not least because Trier ends the film with an improbable epilogue drowned out by the pretentious “Waters of March” by Art Garfunkel. Reinsve is so incredible that I’d still recommend the film – and can’t get over the nominations of three women doing impersonations for Best Actress over her – but wish that the two men who wrote it had considered getting a woman’s perspective on it.

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→ March 14, 2022
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West Side Story.

StevenSpielberg had wanted to film a new version of the 1957 musical West Side Story, which was first adapted in 1961 in a film that won Best Picture, for several years before filming began in July of 2019. This new version, with a script by Tony Kushner that hews more closely to the original stage play at several points, was delayed by a year due to the pandemic, but came out in time to be eligible for this year’s Oscars, earning seven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Ariana DuBose. It’s better than the 1961 film in some ways, worse in others, making it a perfectly fine film that nobody actually needed.

The framework of the story is the same as that of the first film: Two gangs of street toughs are engaged in a turf war on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the largely Puerto Rican Sharks and the white Jets, led by Bernardo (David Alvarez) and Riff (Mike Faist), respectively. Tony used to be in the Jets before he went to jail, and is trying to go straight now that he’s home, but at a community dance where both gangs arrive with their girls, he meets Bernardo’s sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), and the two fall immediately in love. Tony works at Doc’s, which is managed by Doc’s Puerto Rican widow (Rita Moreno), who advises him against pursuing Maria while helping him learn some Spanish phrases. Bernardo isn’t happy to see his sister with a white guy, and wants her to marry his friend Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera), while Bernardo himself is with Maria’s friend Anita (DuBose). The two gangs decide to hold a “rumble,” a fight that ends up leaving two dead and has disastrous consequences for the star-crossed lovers.

I’ll save the biggest problem for last, but one major flaw in this version of West Side Story is that Ansel Elgort sucks. He wasn’t good in Baby Driver, where he barely had to do anything, but he’s awful here in every way – he’s stiff, uncharismatic, and dull, and his singing is the worst of any major character. Casting him was a poor choice, underscored by how much better Faist is as Riff – he’s a rascal, but has all the charm that Elgort lacks, and he owns every scene the two have together. Zegler is far better as a singer and actor than Elgort is, and unlike most of the cast, looks close to the age of her character. In general, the women in the film outshine the men, and the Jets’ big number, “Officer Krupke,” is one of the songs that’s clearly inferior to that of the original film.

There are some small differences from the 1961 film that do improve the end result, not least of which is employing Latinx actors as the Sharks and their girlfriends. The original had Natalie Wood, the daughter of Russian immigrants, in the lead role as Maria, and George Chakiris, the son of Greek immigrants, as her brother Bernardo. Both used comically bad accents that sounded more like mockery than imitation. Zegler and Elgort do their own singing, which neither of their counterparts did in the 1961 film. The character of Anybodys, a tomboyish Jets wannabe played by Susan Oakes in the original, is now much more fleshed out here, depicted as a trans man and played by iris menas, a nonbinary and trans actor. It’s a win for representation, but also adds substantially to the story, with Anybodys the character who gains the most in depth and screen time between the original and the remake. The audio quality is improved, of course, although sometimes that works against the singers, such as the men in “America,” whose vocals sound tinny, especially in comparison to the women on that song.

West Side Story can’t escape its fundamental, ontological problem: There is no good reason for this film to exist. The story is the same. The songs are all the same. The choreography is the same – perhaps captured more effectively by better camerawork and modern technology, but it’s still the same old song and dance. Elgort is a dud, a poor actor and mediocre singer whose hold on Maria is hard to believe. It’s a nostalgia play for Spielberg, and I’m sure 20th Century/Disney thought it would be a huge moneymaker, although that was foiled by the pandemic. For this film to get seven Oscar nominations while the superior In the Heights got zero – not even one for a song! – is a travesty.

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→ March 9, 2022
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Belfast.

Belfast nabbed seven Oscar nominations this year, including nods for Best Picture, Best Director, and both Supporting acting categories, which seems like a decided lack of ambition for the voters. It is a perfectly fine film, pleasant and funny with enough of a serious underpinning to make it more than just a slice-of-life story, but there just isn’t that much to it, and if anything, the Academy whiffed on the one category where it deserved a nomination – Best Actress.

Belfast follows nine-year-old Buddy, a Protestant boy in 1969 in the titular city, the capital of Northern Ireland and the main site of the sectarian violence known as the Troubles that had begun just a few years previously. Buddy’s father (Jamie Dornan) works in England, only returning home every few weeks, so Buddy spends most of his time at home with his mother (Caitrona Balfe) and grandparents (Ciaran Hinds and Judi Dench, both of whom got Oscar nominations). He goes to school, where he has a crush on the smartest girl in the class, Catherine (Olive Tennant – yes, David’s daughter), and gets into trouble with his degenerate cousin, Moira, whose only role in the story is to shoplift. Buddy’s father also has to deal with the Protestant thug Billy (Colin Morgan), who insists that he must come to fight on the Protestant side or be considered a traitor and a target. When the August 1969 riots come to their quiet street, the situation becomes untenable, and forces the family to decide whether to stay in the neighborhood where they’ve always lived or take a job offer in England.

Branagh can be a heavy-handed director, but he works with a lighter touch here that reminded me of his work on Much Ado About Nothing, where he hammed it up as Benedick but largely let his actors (and the outstanding dialogue) do the work. Other than the decision to make this film black and white, a showy choice given the year in which the film’s events take place, Branagh stays out of the way, and the script has just one scene that doesn’t work (the club, although it was surprising to hear Dornan can sing), while the rest of the film provides the contrast between the mundanity of quotidian life and the stress of knowing that the place you were made is now less safe for you and your kids. It’s a slight film, but strong for its size, and gets in and out in about 90 minutes, just right for this sort of story. I just keep coming back to the film’s total lack of ambition – I’d say it’s like a novella, rather than a novel, but it’s not a matter of its running time (or page count). Belfast isn’t trying to do anything. It has very modest goals and it executes them well.

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→ March 4, 2022
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Escape from Mogadishu.

The South Korean film industry has produced some remarkable, world-class films in the last few years, highlighted by Parasite, of course, but with Burning, The Handmaiden, Train to Busan, and more all earning critical acclaim and often significant followings outside of the Korean-speaking audience. So even when South Korea’s submission to the Academy Awards doesn’t make the shortlist, I try to catch it if possible, as I did with this year’s Escape from Mogadishu, a very strong, exciting action film based on the true story of how diplomats from South and North Korea worked together to escape Somalia when the country collapsed in 1991. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play.)

The film opens with scenes of intrigue, as the South Korean delegation to Somalia tries to curry favor with the African country’s longtime dictator, Sian Barre, against a similar effort by the North Korean diplomats as both nations fought for UN recognition. This early bickering and gamesmanship quickly becomes trivial as Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, falls to rebels, turning the city into a war zone as competing rebel factions fought each other and the remnants of the Somali national army, a civil war that engulfed the country and still has not entirely abated thirty years later. The two Korean missions were both stranded without transportation out of the country or ways to communicate with their parent countries, and the two groups decide to mount a daring escape together to get to the Italian embassy, as the Italians have promised them space on a cargo plane out to Kenya that will allow them to get home.  (You can read one of the diplomats’ recollections of the escape and his criticism of the movie in this English-language article.)

Escape from Mogadishu bounces around between genres in the first third or so of the movie, with some outright comedy, inept spycraft, and a general air of disdain for the scheming of the Cold War era, which makes it more incongruous when the movie follows actual events and becomes a straight-up action film – although this may be a deliberate choice to try to recreate the feeling of shock the diplomats, staffers, and family members must have had when the country fell apart around them. The last two-thirds of the movie are an intense, often relentless rush of movement and peril, punctuated by moments of humanity that arise between the two sides. There’s never the over-the-top recognition that you might expect in an American-made movie, where someone says ‘why can’t we all just get along’ or ‘we’re all the same’ or some other cliché, but the point here is quite clear, and only further underscores the human tragedy when the two groups can’t even acknowledge each other on the runway in Nairobi for fear of getting the North Koreans killed.

It’s an ensemble film and very much a group performance, but there are three more or less central characters, including the North Korean ambassador to Somalia (Heo Joon-ho), the South Korean ambassador (Kim Yoon-seok), and the South Korean intelligence officer (Jo In-sung), the last of whom is younger and far more dapper than the two ambassadors. Heo has earned wide praise for his performance as the strict North Korean leader, dressed in officer’s clothing with a taut military bearing, but who is also the leader of his group, and thus when he softens his attitude towards the South Koreans, his comrades are willing to do the same. Jo is the more memorable character, and gets some of the film’s funnier moments in the first third, but I can see the plaudits for Heo given the tighter reins around the character’s display of emotions. It all looks incredible – the re-creation of the city and the subsequent destruction of it as the civil war hits its streets is remarkable, and the filming of the final action sequence, with the two delegations packed into four cars trying to navigate the streets to get to the Italian consulate, is white-knuckles stuff all the way. I’m not shocked it didn’t make the shortlist for the Oscars, since it feels so much more like a big-budget, popular movie than the sort of film that usually makes the cut, but it’s a well-made film that executes its action scenes well, a sort of On Wings of Eagles or Argo for an even less well-known escape.

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→ March 3, 2022
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Red Rocket.

The idea of the con man as amiable rascal goes back decades, at least, but the archetype has been overtaken by current events, not least from our four years with a con man in the White House. In Sean Baker’s latest film, the hilarious dark comedy Red Rocket, Baker plays with the format by giving us a charming, fast-talking con man as the lead character, making it clear in stages that he’s a self-aggrandizing loser who does not care whose lives he destroys as long as none of them is his own. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, or Google Play.)

Baker’s previous film, The Florida Project was my favorite film of 2017, anchored by an incredible performance by a 6-year-old actress, Brooklynn Prince, with no previous acting credits. Red Rocket is almost as good, and once again he’s cast two unconventional actors as leads: former MTV VJ and unserious actor Simon Rex, and an unknown actor named Suzanna Son, who had just one minor movie credit before this one.

Rex plays “Mikey Saber,” a former porn star who has returned to Texas City after his career ended for unknown reasons, and tries to move back in with his estranged wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), who at least for a time was in adult films with him. After a few futile attempts to find regular work, stymied by the long gap on his resume, Mikey begins selling weed for Leondria, who distributes with the help of her kids, especially her stoic daughter June. When Mikey has enough money to finally pay Lexi and her mom Lil something for rent, he takes them to the local donut shop, where he meets 17-year-old Strawberry (Son), and immediately sets his sights on seducing her, with an eye towards taking her to LA and using her as his way back into the porn industry.

As in The Florida Project, the majority of actors in Red Rocket are non-professionals; only Rex and Elrod had more than one acting credit before this film, with Elrod mostly working on the stage since she was in Shutter Island a decade ago. Baker’s skill for finding people who can fill these roles is remarkable, with Brittney Rodriguez (June) especially standing out once her character finally gets to talk, in the film’s funniest scene by far, a family squabble near the end of the movie that was, of course, provoked by Mikey.

But it’s Rex and especially Son who make this movie. Rex is perfectly annoying as the guy who never shuts up about himself, his plans, how greatness is just around the corner, how he would already have been rich and/or famous except that something happened. He has an external locus of control large enough to enclose his giant ego, and he never tires of telling everyone who’ll listen about it. Son is a revelation as Strawberry, a convincing teenager (she’s actually 26) who leans a little into the Lolita role Mikey sees for her, but who is also naïve enough not to realize how sinister Mikey’s motives are and to appear to fall for him and his schemes, even when some external factors should tip her off. She evinces the superficial worldliness of the teenager who thinks she’s an adult, especially since the world often treats her that way, but who’s also too trusting and sometimes misses obvious points about how the world works. She also gets to sing in one of the movie’s stranger moments – it comes after a sex scene, which is awkward like every single sex scene in the movie, almost always because of Mikey – and has a lovely voice that had me convinced I’d heard her before. (She sounds like one of the many indie singer/songwriters out there right now, although I haven’t been able to figure out which one yet.)

The film is dark, despite being incredibly funny, and never quite grapples with how awful Mikey is other than letting you see the person under the hood (quite literally, near the end of the film). He’s a 40-something creep who seduces a 17-year-old and sees absolutely nothing wrong with it, even when he tells her ex-boyfriend to leave her alone because she’s with Mikey now. He uses his closest friend, or the closest thing he has to a friend, for free transportation for weeks, only to land that friend in a world of trouble from which Mikey escapes. He weasels his way back into Lexi’s life, clearly giving her false hope that he’s sticking around and will allow her to put something back together – her mother is addicted to opioids, and Lexi might be as well – only to have him ditch her the moment he locks in on Strawberry as his mark. He’s irredeemable with no interest in redemption. I have known several people, all men, just like him, convinced that a huge success is just around the corner, that the world simultaneously owes them this success and is the only thing denying it to them. They’re insufferable even as friends or acquaintances, and that’s if you don’t get caught up in one of their schemes. It’s a testament to Baker’s script and Rex’s performance that Mikey is so familiar and recognizable, and that he can entertain us even as we want to throttle him.

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→ March 2, 2022
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C’mon C’mon.

C’mon C’mon was written and directed by Mike Mills (not the REM/Baseball Project bassist), and doesn’t include that song, just to answer the two most obvious questions up front. It is a beautiful, tiny, intimate film, sweeping you up into its leisurely rhythm, combining humor, grief, and a vision of parenthood from the outside into a near-perfect film. (You can rent it now on Amazon, Google Play, or iTunes.)

Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a journalist working on a radio documentary where he and a small crew travel to large cities in the U.S. to interview kids about their views on the world today and what the future might be like. He calls his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffman), who asks him to come to Los Angeles to watch his nephew Jesse (Woody Norman) for a few days while she travels to Oakland to look after her estranged husband Paul, who is bipolar and not getting the proper help or taking care of himself. A few days turns into a few weeks, so Johnny takes Jesse on the road with him, and has to serve as a friend and a guardian and a temporary parent to a kid who misses both his mom and his dad.

It’s part buddy comedy, part road movie, but it’s always authentic – there is something very honest about every detail in this film, which gets a boost from the real interviews that Phoenix conducted during the filming. (One of the boys he interviews was shot and killed last summer on his stoop; the film is dedicated to his memory.) These vignettes, often Phoenix asking a question followed by several kids, who look like they’re maybe 8 to 16 years old, providing answers – thoughtful, funny, sad, honest answers that gives the outside look at childhood to contrast with the main narrative’s inside look.

Phoenix is perfectly understated as Johnny, but Norman steals the show here – he’s more than just the cute kid, and rises to the challenge of a script that asks him to show a wide range of emotions and behaviors. Jesse is a pretty typical 8-year-old kid, by turns sweet and rambunctious, not always aware of his surroundings but sometimes acutely aware that his person wasn’t nearby. He’s a social kid, and funny, but also has that habit of kids that age of assuming that whatever they find interesting will be just as interesting to everyone around them. He also loves conspiracy theories, with Johnny’s crewmates eating up his talk about them in one scene in a restaurant that helps establish how easily Jesse gets along with adults – something we learn from later scenes is an adaptive behavior.

The Viv material is the weakest part, not least because it’s not entirely clear why her presence is required in Oakland, especially once Paul gets into inpatient mental health treatment. The arc of Viv and Jesse’s relationship suffers a little from its scant screen time; we do see through flashbacks that it has had its vicissitudes, and learn from a poignant conversation between Jesse and Johnny that the latter may have had a role in his sister’s marriage breaking up. It’s not implausible, but it falls into the space in between useful background and underdeveloped subplot.

C’mon C’mon is entirely in black and white, which cuts two ways here; it’s always gimmicky when a modern film is shot that way, but it does add to the film’s sense of scale. Everything about this movie is so small, in the best possible sense. The black and white aspect only increases that intimacy, making the movie seem leaner and more spare, although I can also see an argument that it’s not necessary, and that doing so in 2021 is showy.

I admit to liking this movie more than my faux-critic side does – C’mon C’mon depicts a fundamental part of being human, and does so with compassion and humor. Many of my favorite movies do something like this, and the fact that this movie does so in such a simple, elegant way makes me love it even more. And I wish that Norman had gotten a Best Supporting Actor nod for his work, to go along with the BAFTA nomination he got in the same category. He’s just fantastic, and without him, the movie wouldn’t seem as real or pack the same punch.

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→ March 1, 2022
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The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

Jessica Chastain won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress in a Film this past weekend for her portrayal of the title character in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, yet another in the ongoing series of crappy biopics churned out by Hollywood as Oscar bait. It’s especially unfortunate here, as Tammy Faye Bakker was a far more interesting person than this movie even considers, and wastes a solid performance by Chastain that’s more than the garden-variety impersonations that usually win these categories. (It’s streaming free on HBO Max.)

If you know of Tammy Faye Bakker already, it’s because she was the wife of televangelist Jim Bakker for most of her life; they met in college and she appeared on air with him for over two decades, helping him build a following and then an entire network, while also becoming a bit of a punch line herself for her excessive makeup and the way it would run when she’d cry. Their empire imploded when two scandals hit – Jim had been siphoning off donors’ money, and some of it went to pay off an employee, Jessica Hahn, who accused Bakker of raping her. The Bakkers divorced while he was behind bars, and Tammy Faye later married a business associate of theirs who himself later went to prison for bankruptcy fraud – she could sure pick ’em! – and died in 2007 of colon cancer.

That’s her story, at least the most public part of it, and that’s the story that The Eyes of Tammy Faye tells, when it bothers to tell a story at all. (Don’t even get me started on how much is made up in this film – pun intended.) This is a biopic, but not a biography. It’s not interested in telling us about Tammy Faye Bakker, the person. It’s a recitation of things that happened to her. She had an unhappy childhood. She married young. She helped Jim Bakker build his business with her puppets and her high, sing-songy voice. Her marriage crumbled, then fell apart. We get a few glimpses of her character, such as the various times she refuses to be the subservient wife when Bakker’s colleagues Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are around – Jerry Jr. isn’t depicted, as he was busy with the pool cleaner – but those are scant, because a script this perfunctory has to play the hits. (Vincent D’Onofrio is unrecognizable as Falwell, although you might pick up his voice behind the clipped speech.)

The script does show the most important anecdote from Tammy Faye’s public life, at least: her on-air, live interview with Steve Pieters, a gay pastor who was diagnosed with HIV in 1982. (He’s still alive and gave a wonderful interview with Religion & Politics about the experience and the new film.) It was a compassionate, non-judgmental conversation, one that was consistent with Tammy Faye’s view of Christianity, showing love and compassion for everyone without judgment, but not Falwell’s and Robertson’s. Even today, it’s hard to imagine an evangelical TV show airing such a segment. In 1985, though, it was revolutionary – and Tammy Faye remained a supporter of the LGBTQ+ community for the rest of her life, even serving as the grand marshal of a pride parade at one point. This illustrates a lot more about the person she was than a series of vignettes, like the nonsense one about how they first ended up on television after their car was stolen (never happened), shows us.

Instead, The Eyes of Tammy Faye paints by numbers – this happened, and this happened, and then this happened, and then she took a bunch of pills, and then it all fell apart. (As far as I can tell, she never appeared intoxicated or stoned on air, either.) It is a series of unfortunate events, with no attempts to connect any of them, or give the audience any understanding of the people behind them other than painting Jim in broad strokes – which may be all he deserves, as both a philanderer and a fraud – and Tammy in only slightly less broad ones.

Chastain and Andrew Garfield expend so much energy trying to sound like the Bakkers that their work feels more like mimicry than acting – which is probably unfair to them both, but more to Chastain, who also has a lot more to do than Garfield does. Garfield’s Bakker is wooden, ambitious, single-minded, and if his faith was real at some point, it loses out to his desire for money and power. That transition occurs off screen, although you could argue its impact on Tammy Faye deserved more explanation. Chastain’s performance is more central, given that she’s the protagonist of the film, yet her imitation of Tammy Faye’s voice and mannerisms, as well as hair and makeup that make it hard to recognize the actress beneath, is hard to separate from the performance. She’s probably better than Nicole Kidman’s in Being the Ricardos, but there is no way on earth I’d vote for her over Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers or Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter, and I think Alana Haim was better in Licorice Pizza as well. The Eyes of Tammy Faye also got a nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling; I’ve only seen one other nominee, Dune, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see this one win. It’s just not a very good movie, despite, or perhaps because of, all the emphasis on making it look right.

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→ February 25, 2022
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Hive.

Hive became the first film in the history of the Sundance film festival to win all three of its main awards (Grand Jury, Directing, and Audience Prizes), and became Kosovo’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Film, making the shortlist of fifteen films but not the final five (in a very competitive year). The movie is a worthy successor to the 2021 nominee, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Quo Vadis, Aida?, continuing the region’s Both movies revolve around stories of the Serbian-led genocides of the 1990s, but while the Bosnian film stays almost entirely within the events of the Srebrenica massacre, Hive deals with the aftermath of the genocide in Kosovo, following one woman whose husband disappeared during the killings in Krusha e Madhe, now called the “Village of War Widows,” and tries to find a way to support her family.

Based on the true story of Fahrije Hoti, Hive follows its main character as she has the idea to work with other (presumed) widows in their village to start a business selling ajvar, the local red pepper-based relish, similar to Bosnian pinjur (which, briefly, was available at Trader Joes!). As the film opens, Fahrije is seen working with a local charity that is offering to teach women to drive so that they can find work, although many of the women object to the fact that the teacher will be male. In a state that is 96% Muslim, being alone with a man in a car would be unacceptable, and these traditional gender restrictions are one of the film’s major themes, as the massacre of the town’s men means many of the women have no source of income.

Fahrije lives with her father-in-law, who uses a wheelchair and refuses to give up hope that his son is alive or to make allowances for the need for his daughter-in-law to earn a living; and her two children, one of whom is a teenager who is sensitive to the way the town perceives her mother. She keeps bees and tries to sell the honey in town, but it’s too meager an income to support their needs. When Fahrije tries to start the business, she finds a willing buyer at the local supermarket, who is willing to give them shelf space and supports their efforts – I kept waiting for the twist there, but there wasn’t one – yet faces needless opposition from the men in her town, from having her car window smashed to someone coming into their makeshift warehouse and destroying inventory. The man from whom she buys the main ingredient for the ajvar, red peppers, keeps pestering her to go out with him. And she’s trying to find out if her husband’s remains are among those found near the town’s river, an effort that requires DNA from her father-in-law but which he refuses to provide.

Hive offers a simple narrative, taking the viewer from that initial meeting with the women’s organization through the idea and to execution, without spending too much time on any one part of the story – especially not the conception of the ajvar cooperative, which could have been dreadful if they’d tried to extend the scene. One of the great strengths of the script is how much is left unsaid; the characters talk tersely, which keeps the story moving and also infuses it with a sense of rage and frustration simmering below the surface. Yllka Gashi plays Fahrije, and her taut, anguished performance is essential; even when her efforts succeed, there’s always a sense that it’s transient, or that no matter what happens, she’ll continue to be haunted by the uncertainty of her husband’s fate. (The movie’s ending is not entirely factual, at least on that last front.) Its strength lies in its simplicity, but at the same time, it also limits the film’s ceiling – as does the general adherence to a true story. It doesn’t have the serial gut punches of Quo Vadis, Aida?, instead telling a story about the survivors, one that juxtaposes the horrors of the Serbians’ atrocities in the former Yugoslavia with a single anecdote of hope. It has the feel of a good, low-budget indie movie – which is not to detract from first-time writer/director Blerta Basholli’s efforts here. If anything, I’d like to see what she can do next, perhaps with more resources, even to continue shining a light on what happened in her native Kosovo.

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