→ February 23, 2022
→ By

Nightmare Alley.

Nightmare Alley took home a Best Picture nomination despite tepid reviews for a movie that ended up in that echelon, with unfavorable comparisons to the 1947 black-and-white version that director Guillermo del Toro chose to update. For fans of noir cinema, however, this is a fantastic melding of that genre’s conventions with del Toro’s visual style and meticulous placement, one that I found incredibly entertaining up until the rather predictable, on-the-nose ending.

Adapted from a 1946 novel of the same name, Nightmare Alley follows the path of a con man named Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), who we see burning down a house with a body in it, without any explanation given, and then who walks off a bus and into a carnival, where he ends up with a job. On his first night there, he sees the carnival geek, whose role is to bite the heads off live chickens and drink their blood as entertainment for the carnival’s patrons. Stanton learns the art of cold-reading from other carnival workers, and falls for one of the other carnies, Molly (Rooney Mara). The two take off together and form a mentalist act for a dinner theatre show in Buffalo, where they encounter Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett) and her wealthy client, the latter of whom believes Stanton can communicate with his dead son. Stanton hatches a plan to con that client and other wealthy men in the city by using information from Dr. Ritter, offering to split the money with her, but it goes awry when another client, Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), wants more than Stanton can provide.

The film looks incredible, as you’d expect from del Toro, although this time around he has no supernatural elements to work with – the monsters are inside the characters themselves, so to speak. The city of Buffalo has never looked so vibrant and glamorous, and even the carnival has a grim beauty under the lights, when the show is on. The film is set in 1939, with a depression on and war beckoning, but you’d never know it except when the characters mention the war in passing, with opulence everywhere once we get to the big city – especially Dr. Ritter’s office, with walls that appear gold-plated and a recording apparatus that looks like it came from the science fiction stories of that era.

Del Toro also coaxes some great performances from a loaded cast, not least of which are those of Cooper and Blanchett. Cooper earned more Oscar buzz for the two minutes he’s on screen in Licorice Pizza, but there’s far more to this character and Cooper plays it so effortlessly that perhaps we’re starting to take him for granted. Blanchett is marvelously inscrutable as the good doctor, with unclear motives and fungible ethics; her actual interest in Stanton is obscured until their final scene together. David Strathairn and Toni Collette do their usual, understated thing as the pair who pretend to be psychics at the carnival, while Willem Dafoe leans into his creepier side as the carnival’s operator, although he unnerves less through malice than through his lack of empathy for anyone else. There’s a great cameo from Mary Steenburgen in a one-note role as well. Mara, unfortunately, is as flat and toneless as ever, making it hard to see what Carlisle sees in her, and almost as hard to sympathize with her when he leaves her in the lurch.

This film looked like it was going to end in one of two ways, and del Toro chose the one that’s telegraphed early on in the film, which is true to the novel’s ending but feels so overdone – foreshadowing is great, but the amount of time this script spends telling you where it’s going to end up gives the ending the aftertaste of an artificial sweetener. It contrasts with the film’s refusal to be explicit with background details, including Carlisle’s and Ritter’s pasts, and what drives each of them to do what they do. There’s a recurring symbol of the corpse of a baby that Dafoe’s character keeps in his trailer, but it’s never fleshed out in any way, with a lot of speculation (this one is pretty good, with a small spoiler involved) but nothing concrete, and it felt more like del Toro being del Toro, rather than something that added to the finished product.

I enjoyed Nightmare Alley for its noir vibe and some of the very strong performances, but I can’t believe this is one of the top ten movies of the year – it’s more style than substance and it failed to stick the landing. It’s not as good as Parallel Mothers or The Lost Daughter, neither of which took a Best Picture nomination, just to pick two that I’ve already seen. It took a Best Cinematography nomination as well, but of the four nominees I’ve seen, I’d rank it fourth for that category. It’s also nominated for Best Costume Design and Best Production Design, however, and seems worthy of both honors.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 22, 2022
→ By

Parallel Mothers.

Pedro Almodóvar earned his first Oscar nomination in 1988, as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made the final five for that year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film (now Best International Film). He won the same award eleven years later, for Todo Sobre Mi Madre, my introduction to his work, and was most recently nominated for the strong, introspective Pain and Glory, which earned a Best Actor nomination for Antonio Banderas two years ago.

Almodóvar’s most recent work, the outstanding Parallel Mothers, finds the director similarly pensive, but this time he’s looking outward, with a two-layered story about truth and reconciliation in Almodóvar’s native Spain, a country that is still grappling with the legacy of a dictatorship that ended nearly a half-century ago. Parallel Mothers starts with a story about a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War, then pivots abruptly into the two mothers of the title, both of whom give birth in the same hospital but find themselves intertwined by the events that come afterwards, before we return to the story of the grave in a sweeping conclusion. The middle story itself packs an emotional wallop, but it is also a grand metaphor for the challenges Spain – or really any country – faces in confronting the truth of its past.

Penelope Cruz, who got the film’s one Academy Award nomination this year (for Best Actress), plays the photographer Janis Martinez, who happens to be taking pictures of a forensic anthropologist named Arturo. The fascists killed her great-grandfather in the 1930s, forcing him first to dig the mass grave in which he’d be buried, and then tore him from his family a night later. Janis asks Arturo if he could help exhume and identify the bodies, with help from the government’s truth commission. They also sleep together, from which Janis gets pregnant, a development she welcomes, as she’s 40 and has always wanted children. She shares a room at the hospital with the teenaged Ana, who is unhappy at her condition, and they become friends for the moment, although they lose touch once they resume their lives outside the hospital. When they reconnect, Janis learns that Ana’s baby died of SIDS, and she asks Ana to move in and be her au pair, but she has an ulterior motive as well.

The Janis/Ana story itself contains multitudes; both characters are complex, with detailed backstories, reasons why they are who they are, yet no connection to each other beyond the coincidence of their simultaneous arrivals at the hospital. Janis knows a truth that she can’t bear to share with anyone, including Ana and Arturo, but without the truth – and even a chance for reconciliation – nobody can move forward with their lives. When that truth comes out, it sets off a bomb in their lives, threatening everything Janis has wanted, but that’s followed by a period of forgiveness and understanding that wouldn’t be possible without the truth, no matter how brutal. Only after that can we return to the story of the mass grave, as Arturo takes a team to the village where Janis’ great-grandfather died, and where her family still lives, and begins the process of searching for and disinterring the remains.

There’s enough metaphor and symbolism here to fill someone’s senior thesis. The parallels between the Janis/Ana story and Spain’s own uncomfortable grappling with the impacts of the Civil War and the fascist Franco’s tyrannical, forty-year reign give Parallel Mothers its narrative framework, but Almódovar has populated the film with smaller details that give depth to the story of the two women while also sharpening the connection between the nested stories. As for symbolism, there’s food everywhere here, such as when Janis teaches Ana to make a tortilla Española, a classic Spanish dish of thinly sliced potatoes poached in olive oil and finished with eggs to bind it. It’s a national dish (a big deal in a country with divers regional cuisines), and its history goes back at least 200 years; passing this knowledge from one generation to the next, as Janis does to Ana, may stand in for the idea of passing along all knowledge, presaging a later scene where the two argue in Janis’s kitchen, and the older women lectures Ana over her ignorance of her country’s history. (I don’t know if there’s any symbolism to this part, but I certainly noticed the gigantic wheel of Manchego sitting on Janis’s counter, under class, and you are fooling yourself if you think I’m not trying to figure out how to get my wife to sign off on that in our house.) The color red appears everywhere in the film, from Janis’s handbag to her phone case to various decorative objects in her home, which is an Almodóvar trademark; here it could stand in for the blood spilled in Spain’s 20th century, unmentioned and yet pervasive even if no one wishes to discuss it. There are substantial hairstyle changes, little language quirks, so many choices in the script that seem deliberate given what Almodóvar was trying to do with the concentric narratives.

This is one of my favorite films of 2021, although I wouldn’t put it at the very top. The film’s finale is moving, although it comes upon the viewer rather quickly; the script probably could have gone longer, both to resolve the Janis/Ana storyline and provide more time in the rural village where the exhumation takes place. There’s also a smaller twist in the relationship between the two women that seemed to come from nowhere, almost as a convenience, and it doesn’t contribute meaningfully enough to the plot for me to buy into it. Cruz is so good in this, with Milena Smit also superb as Ana, that combined with the literary, layered script, I still found myself lost in its depths long after I left the theater.

I’m not sure why Spain selected The Good Boss, which stars Javier Bardem (Cruz’s husband), over this as its submission to the Academy Awards this year, although the one-film-per-country thing has already outlived any usefulness it may have had, but the one nomination it got, for Cruz, is well deserved – she’s certainly better than Nicole Kidman, who may win. (Cruz also became just the fifth woman nominated twice for Best Actress for films in languages other than English, and the first to do so for two Spanish-language roles.) I have read, but have no way to verify, that the Spanish film group that chooses its submissions dislikes Almodóvar, having passed over his Volver and Bad Education, but the joke is on them, as The Good Boss made the shortlist but not the final five nominees for Best International Film.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 19, 2022
→ By

Stick to baseball, 2/19/22.

My prospects ranking package is now all posted for subscribers to the Athletic. Here’s the complete rundown of everything that ran:

BaltimoreHoustonChicago Cubs
BostonLA AngelsCincinnati
NY YankeesOaklandMilwaukee
Tampa BaySeattlePittsburgh
TorontoTexasSt. Louis
Chicago White SoxAtlantaArizona
ClevelandMiamiColorado
DetroitNY MetsLA Dodgers
Kansas CityPhiladelphiaSan Diego
MinnesotaWashingtonSan Francisco

I also did two Q&As over at the Athletic, one the day the farm rankings went up and one the day the top 100 went up.

Since my last stick to baseball post, I’ve reviewed several board games over at Paste as well, including Nidavellir, one of my favorite games from 2021; Equinox, a new version of Reiner Knizia’s game Colossal Arena; The Rocketeer: Fate of the Future, a two-player game based on the 1991 cult classic; and Wilson & Shep, a cute bluffing game for players as young as five.

I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and radio things related to the top 100, including the Seattle Sports Union; the Update with Adam Copeland (talking Giants prospects); Press Box Online (Orioles); Sox Machine (White Sox); and Karraker & Smallmon (Cardinals).

My own podcast returned in late January, with three episodes since my last roundup: Michael Schur, author of How to Be Perfect and creator of the show The Good Place; the post-punk band Geese, an episode where I answered a bunch of reader questions on the top 100 too; and union labor lawyer Eugene Freedman, who gave his thoughts on the MLB lockout. You can subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
→ January 25, 2022
→ By

Spencer.

Director Pablo Larraín has a specific vision when it comes to biographical films: He takes a very small, pivotal period in his subject’s life and shows it in minute detail, sometimes moving events from outside the window into it for dramatic purposes. He did this to good effect in Jackie, fueled by an outstanding performance from Natalie Portman; and to mixed effect in Neruda, which lacked focus and glossed over some of Pablo Neruda’s significant character flaws. Larraín’s vision frames Spencer, his portrait of Princess of Wales Diana Spencer, but even Kristen Stewart’s award-worthy performance as the title character can’t salvage this overblown mess of a film. (It’s available to rent on Amazon and Google Play.)

The time window in Spencer is three days around Christmas in 1991, when the Royal Family made its annual pilgrimage to Sandrington, near where Diana grew up. At this point, her marriage to Prince Charles was already in shambles, fully aware he was having an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles, and she felt (with reason) attacked and scorned by multiple other members of the royal family. She had bulimia at this time, and is shown frequently running to the bathroom after and even during meals, and appears more comfortable speaking with the staff than with those of her social class. By all accounts, she dreaded these family sojourns, but was powerless to object to them.

Spencer also dealt with bulimia for about a decade, which included the time period of this film, and food is both a substantial theme and major framing device. This could have been a major point in a different script, but here, it’s lazy, and because the script has Diana behaving erratically – undressing with the curtains open, wandering the fields at night, talking to birds/ghosts/inanimate objects, breaking into her abandoned childhood home (which was not, in fact, abandoned at the time) – it comes across as just more evidence that Diana was crazy, rather than suffering from mental illness. Diana says in the film that she feels like she’s in a “cage,” with very little control over just about any aspect of her life, and the script seems to equate her eating disorder, which can be about exerting control over something, with her demand that she be allowed to select her own dresses. It comes across as unserious, accentuated by claustrophobic camera work that has Stewart crashing down hallways, drunk on despair.

Stewart is doing a fair impersonation of Diana, particularly in facial expressions (sometimes too much so), but by the time the story gets to Sandringham and she has to interact with other characters, she’s far more effective, and in many cases seems like she’s the only thing reining in this Woman on the Verge script. If she weren’t credible, and actually a bit restrained, the movie would have gone completely off the rails within a half an hour, because nobody else in the movie gets more than a smattering of lines or screen time. Sally Hawkins plays a fictional character, Maggie, the royal dresser to Diana, wearing a bad wig, with the movie’s dumbest twist, a complete waste of a very talented actor. I would guess the second-most lines belongs to Sean Harris as Royal Chef Darren McGrady, who would later become Diana’s personal chef, although the film also makes their relationship improbably casual. (The real-life Chef Darren weighed in on his Youtube channel on what’s real in Spencer and what’s not.)

The hair and makeup on Stewart are remarkable, helping make the transformation more credible – it’s easier to forget the actor behind the role here than in, say, King Richard. Jonny Greenwood’s score is way over the top, however – there’s too much of it, and it’s too loud, as if this is supposed to be a psychological horror movie rather than a biopic. It’s at its worst in the first half hour of the movie and then tapers off to sort of a dull roar, a rare miss for the Radiohead guitarist.

As if Spencer isn’t enough of a tortured watch with its melodramatic fabrications, the entire concluding sequence is such obvious arrant nonsense that it takes you right out of any suspension of disbelief you might have had going. None of this happened, because none of it could have happened. It’s all bollocks. I would be happy to see Stewart get a Best Actress nomination for this, but I couldn’t recommend this movie for any other reason.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 20, 2022
→ By

Quo Vadis, Aida?

Quo Vadis, Aida? falls into the weird in-between category created by AMPAS’s alteration to the rules for Oscar eligibility last year: It wasn’t officially released in the United States until 2021, but was nominated for the Best International Film in the 2020 cycle because it was released before the end of February (and was submitted by Bosnia and Herzegovina). Available to stream on Hulu, with perhaps the most incongruous commercial breaks in film history, the film is an unstinting look at the genocide of Bosnian Muslims, mostly men, during the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

Aida is a translator for the UN’s peacekeeping force at the UNPROFOR base in Srebrenica, as well as a schoolteacher and mother of two teenaged boys. The film all takes place over a matter of hours as Serbian forces take over the town and residents flee, with several thousand entering the base but thousands more gathering outside to try to gain entry. Serbian Gen. Ratko Mladic, now a convicted war criminal known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” offers safe passage out of Srebrenica to any Bosnian Muslims who wish it, but Aida is one of the few who suspects that the offer of safety is fake. She pleads with the Dutch peacekeepers to keep her family safe on the base, even as those same forces find themselves impotent in the face of Serbian arms, with the promised air support from NATO never materializing.

If you’re familiar with the Srebrenica massacre, you may have some idea how this is all going to turn out. Serb forces slaughtered more than 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, raped thousands of women and girls, and tortured more civilians. They threw the victims’ corpses in mass graves. Much of the massacre took place just outside of the base – the buses that were supposed to take the men to safety simply drove beyond the ‘safe’ area and emptied their passengers so Serb soldiers could murder them. Many of these war crimes were caught on film; some perpetrators were later charged by the Hague, including Mladic, although saying they were brought to justice implies justice is even possible in a case like this. The current mayor of Srebrenica and current Prime Minister of the Republika Srpska, one of the two divisions of the current government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, both deny that the massacre and genocide even occurred.

Aida, played by Aida Selmanagi? – her husband plays Mladi? – is perfect as a woman who sees disaster impending and feels powerless to stop it, but will try anything to save her family. The tension on her face provides the film with all of the intensity of a thriller, even though there is no actual violence until near the very end of the story. Her desperation increases by degrees, as with the frog in the pot of slowly boiling water, so that she may not fully realize how hopeless her situation is until well past the point that hope was gone. Aida survives, but there is no redemption in the ending here; if anything, the script underlines to the endless horror of those who do survive a genocide, and then are faced with daily reminders of what they’ve lost, of those who lost less (or even gained), and of those who did nothing while these crimes took place.

I don’t watch horror movies that rely on violence to create fear in the viewer, because I simply can’t adjust my mind to a worldview that finds entertainment in human suffering. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a horror movie of a different sort. You know this has to end badly for Aida and her family, somehow, because you know the world sat on its hands and watched as the Serbs murdered 8000-plus men simply because they were Muslims, as over 60,000 Bosniaks were killed in the war. You feel horror for Aida, and shame at the impotence of the peacekeepers and at the willful blindness of the west, rather than cheap fear from body horror or, worse, the lurid entertainment that some people feel from rooting for a killer. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a great film, shouting an important piece of history from the hilltops, but it’s anti-entertainment by design. You want to avert your eyes, but if you do, you’re complicit in the crime.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ January 14, 2022
→ By

Mass.

Mass marks the directorial and writing debut of actor Fran Kranz, an actor who hasn’t done anything so far that might have indicated he was capable of this. Mass feels in so many ways like a stage play, with just four characters in one room constituting the vast majority of the film, and it pulls off a discussion of a difficult subject in an engrossing and credible way. (You can rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

Mass takes place at an Episcopalian church, almost entirely in a meeting room, where two couples, played by Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Reed Birney, and Ann Dowd, will meet some unknown period of time after a school shooting where a son of one couple killed the son of the other couple, and other classmates, before killing himself. The parents whose son committed the murders are no longer together, and have taken different paths – mom is wracked with guilt, and wants compassion, or at least more of a kinship with the grieving couple, while dad is still trying to absolve himself somehow and is bottling up his grief. Meanwhile, the parents of the victim are still deep in their grief, and can barely contain their rage when the conversation first turns to the killings. The meeting is unmoderated, but has been arranged by a counselor who seems to have worked with both couples; the four are simply left to their own devices. (I’m not saying which couple is which by design; it’s better to avoid knowing until the dialogue reveals it.)

The dialogue is raw and doesn’t flinch from its subject, including, at one point, a detailed description of the sequence of the murders. The parents share how they found out about the massacre not long after they were sharing photos of their kids, which appears to have been their pre-arranged conversation starter. The script shines when it centers their shared grief, how both couples lost sons that day, and how this isn’t some sort of Grief Olympics between them. Kranz doesn’t try to explain the inexplicable, other than to have the shooter’s father run through the litany of possible explanations – which follows an abortive discussion of gun laws in America. The victim’s parents ask the questions you’d expect, including why the killer’s parents didn’t do something to stop this, but Kranz doesn’t give any easy answers. The end of that conversation in the meeting room might be the only time the script loses its intensity, because the quartet reaches that point abruptly given what came before. It’s relentless without ever becoming lurid or otherwise pandering to retain your attention. It’s a story about one small bit of the aftermath of a school shooting, and Kranz never loses sight of that.

Mass has received a slew of honors from local critics’ circles and independent film groups, including taking the Robert Altman Award from the Independent Spirit Awards, won in recent years by Moonlight, Spotlight, One Night in Miami…, and Marriage Story. Dowd and Isaacs have each won a supporting actor award, although I’m not sure what makes either of them ‘supporting’ in this film. All four are great, but Dowd stands out – the script gives her the most to do, and she’s incredibly affecting both in her grief and her need to be understood by the other parents. The idea that Being the Ricardos might get a Best Original Screenplay nomination over this is … well, especially aggravating because the nomination would ensure more people know that Mass exists. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, because it’s very talky, because it so resembles a play adapted to the screen, because it’s so unsparing of its topic. It is a tough watch, but it achieves everything Kranz could have wanted from his script.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ January 13, 2022
→ By

Being the Ricardos.

Aaron Sorkin just can’t help himself: After directing The Trial of the Chicago Seven into an occasionally entertaining but bloated, self-important mess, he’s done it again with Being the Ricardos, and here the offense might actually be worse. This is a funny script about very funny people, one that touches on a couple of important topics, and Sorkin directs the audience right out of the film multiple times. (It’s free for Amazon Prime members.)

The film covers one week during the heyday of I Love Lucy, when a blind gossip item tagged Lucille Ball as a Communist, another tabloid story said that Desi Arnaz was unfaithful to Ball, and Lucille reveals that she’s pregnant, which was a huge complication for the highly censored, misogynistic medium of television in 1953. Those events all did take place, but in reality, they happened in separate weeks, and Sorkin condensed them all for (melo)dramatic purposes, which is small potatoes compared to other choices he made here. The conflation of three crises lends itself well to Sorkin’s trademark rapid-fire dialogue – yes, we get walk-and-talks – and despite its lack of adherence to the truth, it probably improves the film on the whole.

Far and away the biggest problem with Being the Ricardos is Sorkin himself. He frames the movie with what are supposed to be interview clips with the show’s three main writers in something like the present day, although those three people have all been dead for at least ten years now. The interviews add nothing, and I mean nothing, to this movie, and at times are actively insulting, such as the scene near the very end of the movie when none of the three can remember Desi Arnaz’s catchphrase. I wanted to throw something at the TV. Sorkin makes his presence felt in plenty of other ways, not least in the many scenes that tell us just how incredibly important the work of television is, what a difficult art form it is, and uses that to tell us what a genius Lucille Ball was – except the whole thing rings very fake. A fair amount of the movie is devoted to Ball obsessing over the blocking in one scene, and I’d be shocked if any of that was true, including the bizarre 2 a.m. meeting she calls to go over it again.

The script does have a lot of humor in it – zingers, banter, sarcasm, you name it, and the actors bring the energy required to keep up with a script like this. Nicole Kidman won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, a surprising result to those who follow this stuff, but she’s better here than Renée Zellweger in Judy or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody, both of whom won Oscars for what amounted to very strong impersonations. Kidman gets the voice right, but the script doesn’t have her engage in much physical mimicry, focusing instead on the very wide range of emotions Ball would have felt if all of these things had happened in the span of a week. Kidman’s performance is superb, giving Ball depth and complexity; if you don’t think she’s worthy, it’s a comment on the film, not on her performance. Javier Bardem, as Desi, is right behind her, although in his case getting the accent right was critical and I could see an argument that his performance is more of an imitation than hers was. Tony Hale also deserves some mention for a quiet but essential performance as showrunner and head writer Jess Oppenheimer, and J.K. Simmons is very funny as William Frawley, playing him as a drunken asshole with occasional moments of clarity. I’m fine with Kidman getting a nomination, as seems likely, but if this gets a Best Original Screenplay nod over, say, Mass, I might throw something else, too.

Ball was not an actual card-carrying Communist, of course, and the controversy blew over quickly in reality; Sorkin sorkins it up with a very Hollywood ending that he fabricated, perhaps to match the incredible real-life resolution to the issue of CBS refusing to let Lucille be pregnant on the show. (The telegram in the movie is real.) Sorkin overdraws his dramatic license many times, but he does bring it all together for a strong finish, with Ball and Arnaz talking in her dressing room just before they go on stage … except the movie keeps going after that, and the second ending Sorkin gives us is worse. The film starts badly and ends badly, and even though much of what comes in between is funny and emotional, someone needed to tell Sorkin to trim all this fat and just let the two main characters carry the story.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 12, 2022
→ By

The Lost Daughter.

The Lost Daughter is the directorial debut of actor Maggie Gyllenhaal, who also adapted the screenplay from an early novel by the Italian author known as Elena Ferrante, the mind behind the Neapolitan cycle of novels that begins with My Brilliant Friend. Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as the same character in two different eras, the film presents a haunting portrayal of motherhood in a world that prefers mothers to exist in tightly constrained boxes.

Leda, a college professor of comparative literature and mother of two grown daughters, has come to a Greek island on a working vacation, with Colman playing her in the film’s present day. Shortly after her arrival, a boisterous American family arrives to disrupt her idyll, including a young mother (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter, Elena. The girl goes missing on the beach one day, and Leda ends up the one who finds her – but Leda takes Elena’s doll, holding on to it even though the girl is inconsolable. Her subsequent interactions with the family trigger a series of flashbacks to when Leda was a young mother herself (where Buckley plays her), trying to balance her career and her two young daughters, with a husband who is unsupportive, to say the least. Leda’s memories, and the choices she made, invade on her present day, leading to erratic behavior and more questionable decisions.

Much of Ferrante’s work revolves around casual sexism in Italian society (a fair analogue for western society as a whole, but probably even more misogynistic than its peers), from who women marry to what they may do for work to how they’re expected to be mothers. At its most superficial level, The Lost Daughter shows Leda today coping with the weight of memories, and some regrets, over choices she made as a young mother, all because she’s seeing a young mother now whose husband doesn’t appreciate her and who herself may not fully appreciate her own daughter. Leda faced an untenable situation, trying to complete her graduate studies with two young children at home and a husband who believes his work takes priority. An academic conference gets her a brief respite from the dual life at home, and leads her the major inflection point of her life.

Leda in the present is a powder keg in search of a spark; the flashbacks show how the keg got its powder. Gyllenhaal gives us scene after scene of Leda struggling with one or both of her girls – at bath time, at meal time, and especially when she’s trying to work and her husband is nowhere in sight. It’s such an atypical and nuanced portrait of motherhood for the movies: Most movie mothers are saints, and if they’re not, they’re monsters. We see Leda losing her patience with her kids, or failing to respond to them as a mother “should” by the norms of the genre, and Gyllenhaal portrays it all without judgment or scorn. It is here that the film becomes whole, and solid, rather than superficial. The greatness of The Lost Daughter lies in how it treats Leda’s motherhood as aggressively normal.

The Lost Daughter loses something, no pun intended, when Leda starts to act bizarrely in the present, none more so than when she keeps the damn doll. The theft itself was plausible, but to continue to keep it when the child is wailing for it and her mother and family are desperate for its return just paints Leda as a terrible person. My interpretation, at least, is that what the world has done to Leda has led her to this point, whether she’s crazy, or delusional, or truly misanthropic, and that serves to undermine the more important theme here, that society is crazy, and misogynistic, and forced Leda into a choice she still can’t reconcile.

In Greek mythology, Leda is a young woman whom Zeus covets, so he takes the form of a swan, rapes her, and impregnates her. She gives birth to a girl, Helen – as in, of Troy – which is the Anglicized version of the name Elena. (Elena was my maternal grandmother’s name. She went by Helen.) Here, Elena isn’t Leda’s daughter, though; she’s the child on whom Leda seems to fixate when thinking about her own daughters, Bianca and Martha. Homer’s version of the myth has Helen abandoning her children to elope with Paris (or, possibly, being abducted), sparking the Trojan War. The Leda myth appears elsewhere in the movie, as Leda the character was a scholar and avid reader of Yeats, who wrote “Leda and the Swan” about the legend, so the allusion is clearly intentional.

Colman has already been nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, and won Outstanding Lead Performance (an all-gender category) at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. She’s a lock for an Oscar nod for the same, and deserving. At the same time, Jessie Buckley is just as pivotal to this film’s success, and overdue for this sort of accolade, delivering an outstanding performance in Beast and a similar one in Wild Rose to little fanfare. Buckley has less screen time to fill out the character of Leda the young mother, yet that character provides essential depth to the story; if Buckley can’t convince the viewer of the agony and struggle of Leda as a mother and striving academic, the present-day parts that were already shaky would collapse. Gyllenhaal should be in the running for nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay (likely) and Best Director (unlikely, given the category’s extensive historical bias against women).

This might be the best movie I’ve seen so far from 2021, and if not, it offers the most fodder for consideration after it ended. There’s more here than one blog post, by one writer, who also happens to be a man, could possibly cover.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ December 31, 2021
→ By

Licorice Pizza.

Licorice Pizza, the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson, feels like the work of an entirely different writer than PTA’s last film, Phantom Thread. Where that movie was tense, quiet, often creepy, Licorice Pizza never stops moving – in one sense, almost literally, as the two main characters spend a substantial portion of the film running, often in less-than-sensible shoes. It’s a beautiful, quirky, and funny coming-of-age story. I just wish so much of its greatness wasn’t undone by a pointless racist gag that PTA could have excised without losing anything.

Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a precocious almost-16-year-old actor and would-be entrepreneur who spots Alana Kane (Alana Haim) when the photography company she works for comes to his school for picture day. He tries to flirt with her, despite the ten-year age gap, and somehow coaxes her into meeting him for a not-date date at the absurdly named but extremely ’70s restaurant Tail o’ the Cock, where he’s on a first-name basis with the staff and is treated like a VIP. Gary tries to get Alana some movie and TV work, while she tags along with his venture to sell waterbeds, and the two continue to move along as if they don’t actually have feelings for each other, even though we know by the time the movie ends, they have to get together somehow.

Hoffman and Haim carry this movie, Hoffman in particular, with his effortless charm and a self-aplomb way beyond his years. The age gap between them – which is larger than the one that had certain folks upset in Call Me By Your Name, although that criticism was probably about something other than their ages – is less evident on the screen, because Gary is developmentally advanced for his age, while Alana is still quite immature. The latter point especially shows up in scenes at Alana’s home, where she still lives with her parents and two older sisters, all played by Alana’s actual family (quite well, in fact – her father is a riot), and she’s very clearly the baby of the bunch, twenty-five but aimless. She hangs around with Gary and his friends, even though she knows it’s “weird,” in part because they give her a way to stave off adulthood. Because Hoffman plays Gary as this worldly teenager who understands more of adult ways than just about any teenager I know, which is built into the character’s story (and that of the real-life actor, Gary Goetzman, on whom PTA based Valentine), the love story between the two comes off as more innocent than it might otherwise.

The unsung hero of Licorice Pizza might be the costume department. Films set in the 1970s often shove that decade’s regrettable fashion choices in the viewer’s face, but Licorice Pizza instead leans into the better side of ’70s fashion. Haim is a fashion plate, wearing some gorgeous prints across a series of short dresses that wouldn’t be out of place today aside from the oversized collars. Valentine doesn’t have quite as much fun, but the white suit and fuchsia shirt he dons near the end of the film couldn’t come from any other decade.

PTA also populates the film with many real-life characters from Hollywood of the time, including Sean Penn as the legendary actor William Holden (thinly disguised as “Jack Holden”), and Bradley Cooper in an absolutely ridiculous (and very fun) turn as producer Jon Peters, with whom Cooper worked on the remake of A Star is Born. Benny Safdie appears as city councilman Joel Wachs, on whose campaign Alana works near the end of the film. If you listen carefully, you’ll catch the voice of John C. Reilly in an uncredited role as another real person. Most of this works to add color to the film, accentuating its sense of time and place, although the Holden segment goes on longer than it needs to.

That racist gag, though. John Michael Higgins plays a real person, Jerome Frick, who owned a Japanese restaurant in the LA area called Mikado. In the film, he appears once with his Japanese wife, and speaks to her in slow, exaggerated English with a mock-Asian accent. He appears again, later, with a different Japanese wife, and pulls the same shit. There is a punchline there, at Frick’s expense (turns out he’s just an ignorant asshole), but I’m not sure any punchline could justify that lead-up. It appears that Jerome Frick’s second wife, Hiroko, was a fluent English speaker, yet PTA only has the two women speak Japanese in the film. Perhaps this was some complicated way to mock the real-life Frick – and, for what it’s worth, the punchline itself is funny – but few if any viewers will be in on the joke, and the whole thread adds precisely nothing to the film. It’s a shame that either nobody called PTA out on it, or, more likely, that he just ignored them. The Hollywood Reporter just published a longer piece on the controversy this morning, which links to a November interview with PTA where he tries to defend it as true to the time period.

If that bit were cut from the movie, Licorice Pizza would be just about perfect; it’s still my favorite of the movies I’ve seen so far, even with the bitter taste of that failed gag. The chemistry between the leads is so strong – both should be in the running for Oscar nominations, and both scored Golden Globe nods already – that almost everything around the two of them melts away. Maybe there will be a director’s cut that spares us those objectionable scenes, because the rest of this movie is wonderful.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ December 30, 2021
→ By

The Power of the Dog.

Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is the closest thing we have this year to a Best Picture front-runner, although its status as favorite rests on the slimmest of margins according to Gold Derby. It appeared first on more critics’ year-end lists than any other film, and received more second-place votes than any other film received first-place votes except the acclaimed Japanese-language Drive My Car. Based on a 1968 novel of the same name, it follows a tense family drama on a ranch in Montana in 1925, with long, expansive shots of the landscape alternating with close-ups of characters, an auteur’s film that builds on several great performances and the slow burn of its plot.

Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) is one of the ranchers, a tough guy who refuses to use the bathtub inside the house he shares with his daintier brother George (Jesse Plemons), whom Phil thinks is soft and often derides as “fatso.” George falls for the widow who runs the local inn, Rose (Kirsten Dunst). Rose has a son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who speaks with a lisp, makes paper flowers, and generally acts and looks un-masculine, earning him the ire of Phil, who mocks and bullies the boy, a situation that only worsens when George marries Rose, moving her into the ranch while Peter attends boarding school. Phil bullies and torments Rose as well, driving her to drink, so when Peter returns from school, the situation threatens to boil over.

Campion directs the hell out of this movie. It cuts both ways; there are moments in this film when you just know it’s being directed, especially some of the lingering shots on characters’ faces (or sometimes hands) that last a few frames too long. It works for setting scenes, in the incredible landscape shots, or for framing segments like Phil’s awkward conversation with his parents and the state’s governor, shot from behind Phil with the other characters all facing the camera beyond him. There’s a solo scene with Phil on the side of the river that is so overwrought that it took me completely out of the movie. It may be the kind of direction that wins awards, but I prefer a subtler touch.

The acting shines across the board, starting particularly with Dunst, who does the most with a limited but critical role as a suicide widow who becomes the victim of Phil’s bullying, losing herself in drink and seeing her relationship with her son deteriorate in the process. Cumberbatch delivers, as he always does, although I found his American accent a little forced – but given some of the character details, that might be deliberate. Smit-McPhee may have the most to do, even though it’s a supporting role, as his character is the only one that truly evolves over the extent of the story, and the one we understand the least at the beginning, as Peter is far more than a weak, effeminate mama’s boy.

Much commentary on The Power of the Dog has revolved around the ambiguous ending – which isn’t ambiguous at all. You might argue that what comes next is uncertain, as is true in just about every movie, and the argument that what came before the film starts is now uncertain is even stronger, but there’s no doubt in my mind what happened at the end of the story. It simply casts what preceded it in a different light, and that is one of this film’s strongest attributes. You can see this ending coming if you watch carefully, but once it occurs, it should change your interpretation of the first ¾ of the film – and even some of what we were told about its prehistory. (If you want to discuss that part, throw it in the comments – I just don’t want to spoil anything here.)

I haven’t seen enough potential nominees yet to say what nominations the film and its people deserve, but it definitely feels like a movie that voters will support. It’s a movie that puts its movie-ness out in front of you, especially in the direction, for better and for worse. I think this is a very good movie, a B+ if I assigned letter grades (as my friends Tim Grierson and Will Leitch do on their superb podcast), but could have been an A- or better with a different director, someone whose fingerprints were less evident in the finished product. In hindsight, it’s the sort of film I should have loved – cowboy noir, in a sense – but that I respected and liked instead.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,