→ November 18, 2024
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The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.

Mats Steen was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that would eventually kill him at age 25. When he died, his parents logged into his blog and posted a note saying that he’d passed away, including Mats’s father’s email at the bottom. Messages poured in from people the Steens had never heard of; they’d thought that Mats was isolated, spending most of his waking hours playing World of Warcraft – over 20,000 hours, by their estimates. It turned out that he’d lived an entire life online, building deep and real connections to people around the world while showing those people aspects of his personality that his own family rarely got to see.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (streaming on Netflix) is a biography of Mats, whose character’s name was Ibelin, but also a window into the digital world, where things become possible for people with disabilities that are shut off to them in the ‘real’ world. Even for able-bodied users, these online communities can become meaningful parts of their lives, going beyond the shared experiences of trying to advance within the game to the point where players open up about themselves and develop real attachments, platonic or romantic, to others they meet in cyberspace. It’s an emotional ride, even though you know from the start that Mats is going to die young, because the film follows his parents through their discovery that their son lived a much richer life than they knew – and that he helped many, many people he’d never physically met.

The story here does not lionize Mats, which would be an understandable impulse for a film whose subject is dead and who was disabled most of his life, but that honesty gives the story much greater resonance (and keeps it from turning saccharine). Mats was kind, mostly, but he had a temper and a bit of a mean streak, and he could be jealous, or heedless of others’ emotions. He did hurt others’ feelings, and we hear about that, and ‘see’ it through recreations the filmmakers commissioned using WoW graphics and the actual characters’ avatars. There’s an eccentric romantic story arc that might seem very weird to people who haven’t spent much time in online communities, but it tells us a ton about who Mats was, for better and worse, and if you consider it outside of the digital context, it maps pretty well to romantic relationships in the real world.

Ibelin really gets at a question I’ve discussed with many people over the last twenty-odd years: Are digital friendships real? I have always maintained that the answer is … they can be. (This, of course, was in conversations with people who think they can’t.) The friendships Mats/Ibelin had were certainly real, real enough that some of those friends he made in the game came to his funeral. The broader view, however, would say that these friendships were real because of their nature, not because of their medium. Mats and his friends discussed their lives and their emotions the way that people do in meatspace, and experienced many of the same feelings we do when talking to people in reality – or, say, on the phone. Their relationships were real because they made them real through their actions, so that when some of the players decided to hold a meetup – Mats didn’t tell them why he couldn’t come – those friendships and the feelings behind them carried over. The connections we make with other people are real, regardless of the medium, as long as we make them real. Ibelin’s life was remarkable not because he was disabled, or died young, but because he did so much with the life he had, validating, listening, caring, and being there for his friends, even though he never met a single one of them. It’s a simple film at its core, but illuminates such a universal theme that it works – and it’s punctuated by a scene from the game that is as life-affirming as anything they could have done in the real world.

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→ November 12, 2024
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Woman of the Hour.

Woman of the Hour is the directorial debut for actor Anna Kendrick, who also stars in this loosely adapted story about the contestant on the TV show The Dating Game who chose as her date a serial killer – and probably narrowly eclipsed dying at his hands. I’ve never been a fan of Kendrick as an actor, but she shows significant promise behind the camera, elevating a script that overplays its hand repeatedly to make for a solid thriller.

Sheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick) is a struggling actress in 1978 whose agent books her a spot on The Dating Game, which often had its four seats – one woman and three bachelors – filled with would-be actors and comedians. It is her misfortune to have Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), a smart, charming photographer who has already killed multiple women in sadistic fashion, not just as one of her three bachelors, but, as the film tells it, the most charismatic and suave of them. (One of the other bachelors on her episode was an unknown actor named Jed Mills, although the film never names him or the third man.) A huge portion of the film’s running time takes place on the show’s set as we watch Sheryl navigate the ridiculous process and deal with the obnoxious host (an underutilized Tony Hale) while Alcala keeps giving the best answers. It’s only afterwards, when the two meet off set, that Sheryl sees more of his personality and becomes sufficiently creeped out to call off the date – but not before their interaction takes a very scary turn.

Woman of the Hour actually gives Alcala a substantial amount of screen time, which establishes his character in important ways but also makes us privy to some disturbing scenes. It opens with a an unfortunately fairly accurate depiction of one of Alcala’s murders, where he strangled his victim, resuscitated her, raped her, and then killed her again, and later we see another murder and a kidnapping, also close to the true story. On the one hand, it shows the audience just what Alcala is capable of, and since most viewers will know going in – or could probably just guess – that he’s going to be her pick, it shows that the stakes are life or death. On the other hand, it’s macabre, and leering, not quite in a celebratory way, but in a way that ends up establishing Alcala as at least as much of a central character as Bradshaw.

Contributing to this imbalance is Zovatto’s performance; he makes Alcala’s ability to charm everyone, notably women, totally plausible, overshadowing everyone else on screen except when he and Kendrick are on opposite sides of the game show set. That’s also where the script begins to diverge from reality; the actual dialogue on the show was typically racy and oversexed, but in the movie, Bradshaw ditches the questions she’s been given and engages in witty, highbrow banter with Alcala while mocking the other two bachelors. It makes Bradshaw into a bit of an implausible heroine, while it shows a different Alcala than the one Bradshaw and viewers saw. The film veers further and further from reality, and more into unnecessary melodrama, right up through the text over the closing scene, which is a complete fabrication where none was necessary. (And yes, that especially annoyed me.)

This could easily have gone off the rails once the story gets the characters on set, where we get another subplot as an audience member recognizes Alcala as the man who she believes killed her friend. Kendrick handles the scene-shifting and the need to maintain the pace extraordinarily well for a first-time director – or any-time director. Once we’re on the show, the script tries so hard to ratchet up the tension, and Kendrick manages to keep it in check until the parking lot scene after the show, where the tension is real, and earned. It’s the best scene in the movie, one where so much happens without a word spoken, and takes this one woman’s bizarre experience and uses it to express something far more universal: the fear of violence that women face even in seemingly routine interactions with men, like a simple date, because of the pervasiveness of violent men.

Woman of the Hour could so easily have ended up a woman-in-jeopardy Lifetime movie in different hands. Kendrick wouldn’t have seemed like the person to steer it straight, but by taking a hyperventilating script just down a notch, she turned it into a more interesting and riveting film.

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→ October 25, 2024
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His Three Daughters.

His Three Daughters is not, as it turns out, a King Lear adaptation, as all three of the daughters of the title do in fact live to see the end of the movie. It is instead a very theatrical (as in, like a play) story about how we deal with grief and with watching a loved one die, and how such situations bring out the best and worst in us – especially with our siblings. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

The film opens with Katie (Carrie Coon) delivering one of the most obnoxious soliloquies you’ll ever see on screen, and it’s a few minutes before we even see who she’s haranguing. It’s her sister, Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), who looks stoned because she is, although in her defense that might be the only way to listen to this tirade without being driven to violence. The interminable conversation, if you could even call it that, breaks when the third daughter, Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), emerges, and it turns out she, like Katie, can’t stop babbling, although in her case it’s far more self-directed than Katie’s style of lashing out at Rachel. The three women are staying in their father’s apartment as he is receiving hospice care at home for terminal cancer. Rachel is the only one who lives in the Manhattan apartment, while Katie lives elsewhere in the city with her family (including a rebellious teen daughter) and Christina lives in California with her husband and a young child. The three could not possibly have less in common, from personality to habits to appearance, and the tension of living together temporarily and of watching their father drift away leads to some dreadful fights and eventually some moments of tenderness and common understanding, showing two different sides of how familial ties bind us – even if, as it turns out, we’re not actually all tied by biology.

Almost every scene takes place in the apartment, and the vast majority of those take place in the common living/dining area; that, coupled with a cast that numbers about eight people in total aside from a few extras, gives the whole thing the feel of a play that has been adapted to the screen. It also is nearly all dialogue, which further enhances that sense, and puts a lot more pressure on the performances, especially the three leads, and to my surprise, the best one by far is Lyonne. She may have the hardest role of the three, since unlike her sisters, Rachel holds her emotions inside, and has a much harder time articulating – or facing – what she’s feeling, which, of course, may be why she seeks solace in THC. She is the only one who refuses to go into her father’s room, even when the hospice nurses encourage it, and the script does eventually explain a bit more of why her relationship with their father is slightly different than her sisters’. Coon and Olsen are both solid actresses whose characters are more one-note, and later attempts to soften both of them through more dialogue fall a little short. You don’t have to like these characters, but both are quite grating in different ways, and the way Katie treats Rachel is so offputting that I found it hard empathize with her even in scenes where she does open up and show some vulnerability. Perhaps Coon is just very good at playing someone who is capable of being extremely awful to others.

With so little change in the scenery of the film, His Three Daughters has to rely on subtler cues to help the audience follow the changing states of the main characters. Katie’s hair seems to grow increasingly unkempt as she becomes more frazzled and volatile, and Christina’s ‘together’ appearance also starts to break down; Rachel, on the other hand, is supposed to be a mess, but actually holds steady pretty well in appearance and mostly in how she deals with her two sisters.

The dialogue makes it clear at the beginning of His Three Daughters that the father is going to die at the end, but the way in which the script handles that is probably going to divide a lot of viewers. This movie tries so hard to be realistic that the brief detour into some kind of fantasy is both jarring for its complete tonal shift and useful for its introduction of a different mode for the three women to interact with each other. It does set up the resolution, even if there may have been a better way to handle it.

His Three Daughters appears to be nowhere in the awards race, although if it gets anything at all, I hope it’s a nod for Lyonne, who is pretty remarkable in this film; she sounds like Natasha Lyonne, because I don’t think she can sound like anyone else, but this is by far the most range I’ve ever seen from her, and I hope it opens the door for her to play more dramatic roles. I could have seen Best Original Screenplay consideration as well, although at this point I’ve only seen about ten movies from this calendar year so I’m just speculating.

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→ October 23, 2024
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Daughters.

Daughters is a documentary about a single father-daughter dance, remarkable because the fathers are all incarcerated, some for many years to come, and the dance is part of a program that began in Richmond, Virginia, called Date with Dad.

The film follows several daughters and an entire circle of fathers at a prison in Washington, D.C., from when the men start their required fatherhood coaching sessions about ten weeks before the dance through the event itself and its immediate aftermath. There is no narration, as the subjects do all of the necessary talking to the camera or in groups. We hear from the girls and some of their mothers about how hard it is for them to grow up without their fathers around, sometimes going months or years without touching their dads and maybe talking to them once a week for 15 minutes – for which the mothers are charged outrageous fees. The fathers open up quite a bit about their feelings about being absent fathers, sometimes as children of absent fathers themselves, and the film wisely avoids telling us anything about why they’re incarcerated. Some of the strongest scenes are the smallest ones, like the one where the men, who are provided with suits and haircuts before the dance, are tying their ties, with one man showing a group of the others how to tie a Windsor knot; or the one of Aubrey, the youngest of the daughters we meet, as she rattles off her multiplication tables but who is too young to fully grasp how long her father will be gone. The daughters we see range in ages from 5 to about 15, and their feelings range from sorrow to confusion to outright anger at their dads for their life choices.

When we finally get to the day of the dance, and those girls start walking down the hall towards their fathers, who are sitting in a row of plastic chairs in their suits and polished shoes, I dare you not to cry. I just dare you. Those reactions, both of the daughters and the fathers, are as pure a distillation of what it means to be human as you will see in years of movies. There is far more to the movie than that – the conversations the fathers and daughters have in the dance itself are illuminating and direct and often heartbreaking – but that one moment is the perfect unscripted scene.

I can’t relate to these men completely, because I have never been in that situation, where I couldn’t see my daughter, or hold her, or even talk to her whenever I wanted. That scene where the dads see their daughters for the first time the night of the dance did remind me of one thing, though: the fear that gripped me for almost all of my daughter’s childhood that I would die before she was an adult. I just imagined the grief, the hole in her life, all the things I didn’t get to do or say. When they tell you that being a parent means living with your heart outside of your body, they aren’t even scratching the surface. Being a parent meant living for her more than I was even living for myself.

Daughters follows the dance with brief looks at the aftermath for both sides, with one man, whose daughter couldn’t make it but who is there in suit and tie (and perhaps thought she was coming?), giving a speech to the other dads that is so open and vulnerable that it underscores again their humanity and the cruelty of our prison system. The film ends with two-sentence updates on a few of the incarcerated dads and their daughters, one of whom is now in a facility that doesn’t allow visitation rights. I don’t think I knew that was possible outside of people held in solitary confinement (which is, itself, cruel and unusual punishment), but what Daughters underscores is that such a policy harms more than just the inmates: Regardless of what the father did, depriving his children of the right to even see him – not for a dance, or even a “touch visit,” but literally just to see him to talk to him – harms the kids, and I can’t imagine what the benefit or justification is for the policy other than spite. Our national addiction to incarceration is bad enough, but this film makes it clear how the carceral state also harms succeeding generations. The damage done when we are deprived of a parent, regardless of the reason, is immense. The Date with Dads program boasts a 5% recidivism rate, meaning 95% of fathers who go through the program and are subsequently released from prison do not reoffend. That such a simple program has such powerful results should be reason enough to expand its reach.

Avoiding mention of the fathers’ crimes, alleged or otherwise, is a choice, of course. If we found out that one of these men was responsible for someone’s death – which I don’t think is true given what we hear about the lengths of their sentences – it would alter our view of him whether we want it to or not. That choice by the directors, documentarian Natalie Rae and activist Angela Patton, keeps the focus where it belongs, on the people themselves and the essential relationship between fathers and daughters that will resonate with most of the viewing audience. There are some outtakes from the dance that play alongside the closing credits, and they are definitely worth hanging around to watch, as they show more joy from the night itself than is immediately evident from the main footage, which doesn’t show a whole lot of actual dancing, a choice I understand (this is about their relationships, not the Harlem Shuffle) but that they could have balanced differently.

Daughters won two Audience Awards at the Sundance Film Festival this year, U.S. Documentary and Festival Favorite, after which Netflix picked it up; it’s already showing up on top of predictions for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with another Netflix documentary, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, that premieres today. I imagine the powerful social justice angle here will help Daughters in awards season, and I hope that encourages more people to watch it and to consider doing something to help fight the incarceration cycle.

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→ December 14, 2022
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The Wonder.

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

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

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

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

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

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→ February 24, 2021
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The Trial of the Chicago 7.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (now on Netflix) has a great movie at its heart, with all of the quick, witty dialogue you’d expect from an Aaron Sorkin script, but it is the most over-Sorkined thing imaginable. The actual story of the Chicago Eight (later reduced to seven, when Bobby Seale was granted a mistrial) is compelling enough that Sorkin had to do nothing more than supply the dialogue. Instead, he fabricated events and added melodrama to a story that didn’t need it.

The Chicago Seven were seven men who were involved in some way in the protests against the Vietnam War held in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which itself took place in the wake of the murder of Robert F. Kennedy. Those protests descended into violence when the Chicago Police Department responded with violence to the protesters’ mere existence, but the city, and then the new Republican Administration of President Nixon, chose to charge eight men with conspiracy to incite violence. The eighth, Seale, wasn’t at the protests, but was the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, and had the misfortune to be in Chicago for a few hours during the convention, so he was arrested too on a charge that was even more bogus than those faced by the other seven. The trial was a farce, over before it started, thanks in no small part to a judge who kept one foot on the scales the entire time.

Sorkin chose to tell the story of the trial, giving us the protests and the violence through flashbacks, which is a reasonable device for explaining this part of history, especially given the historical populiarty of courtroom dramas on TV and in film. With the cast he’s assembled here to play the courtroom principals, he can get away with most of the action taking place inside that room, giving them the dialogue and letting the likes of Sacha Baron Cohen (Abbie Hoffman) and Eddie Redmayne (Tom Hayden) handle the rest.

There are portions of this film that work, which makes it all the worse when Sorkin decides to tinker with the story. The actual courtroom was something of a circus; Hoffman and fellow Yippies co-counder Jerry Rubin (played by Jeremy Strong) did pull a lot of the antics you see in the film, the judge (Frank Langella, good in a one-note role) really was this crooked, and what happens to Bobby Seale in the movie did happen in the real trial. So why would Sorkin insert so much fiction into this narrative? Why would he have the pacifist David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) punch a bailiff in the courtroom, when no such thing happened? Why do we get this fake honeytrap storyline around Rubin, with an FBI agent who never existed? Why wouldn’t Sorkin show any of the testimony from the many celebrities, including Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, and Allen Ginsburg, who did appear at the real trial? And the ending of the film, while certainly stirring, is a complete fantasy, and it is maddening that Sorkin decided that actual history wasn’t good enough for him or for us.

Cohen may not quite have the most screen time, but he’s clearly the star of the film, and if anyone gets a nomination for this movie – and the oddsmakers have it getting a whole bushel – it should be him. The secondary framing device showing Hoffman retelling the story of the protests and trial during a standup routine doesn’t work either, but Cohen is tremendous inside the courtroom and in the flashbacks, especially when he’s on the stand – he and Rubin were the only two of the seven to testify – and we get more of Hoffman than just the wisecracks. It’s not really an Oscar-worthy performance because the role itself is too slight, but Cohen runs it right up to its ceiling. Rylance also stands out for his performance here, also in a limited role, and this might be the movie that truly deserves the Best Ensemble Cast award rather than any individual honors.

How this got a nomination for the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama over Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom or The Nest, to name just two superior films, is beyond me. It’s entertaining, beyond a doubt; the movie never drags, and Sorkin can write some great dialogue, but this script is too bombastic, too overwritten, and, weird as it is to say, too slanted in favor of the defendants to call it a great work of art. I’m not even arguing for the side of the prosecution and certainly not the cops, not one of whom was convicted of any crime in connection with the riot they started, but Sorkin is trying so hard to canonize these seven men that he often turns them into cartoon characters. They can be heroes without Sorkin’s help, and the film is worse for his efforts.

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→ December 29, 2020
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The Prom.

The thing with musicals is that, even if the plot is good, shouldn’t you remember at least one of the songs after you’ve watched it?

I actually liked The Prom, which has received some scathing reviews and mixed marks overall, even with some obvious flaws, from a hackneyed plot to the choice to cast a straight actor as a gay character at the center of the film, but the biggest problem with the movie is that the music just isn’t any good. I couldn’t sing or hum a single tune from the movie within a few hours after we turned it off. No musical can work like that, even when the feel-good story feels good, the lead actress is a star in the making, and some great actors are quite game for a script that doesn’t always serve them well.

The premise of The Prom, which was a Broadway musical before coming to Netflix and may have seemed fresher or more current when it debuted, is familiar: A high school in Indiana cancels its prom rather than let a student bring their same-sex partner as a date to the event. The student, Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman), is out, but her girlfriend isn’t. Her principal (Keegan Michael-Key) is supportive, and sees this as a civil rights issue, but the head of the PTA (Kerry Washington) heads the opposition, spouting some typical bromides about family values, life choices, and ‘won’t somebody please think of the children.’ (I found it interesting that they cast a Black actor in that role, perhaps to avoid bringing race into a story about defending  LGBTQ rights.) Four Broadway actors, two of whom have just learned their brand new show has received such savage reviews that it’s likely to close after just one night, get wind of this story and decide to head to Indiana to rally behind Emma – and give their own careers a boost of good publicity. Needless to say, this isn’t how things go once they arrive.

The four actors are played by Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells, all of whom throw themselves completely into their rather absurd characters. Streep plays the diva, Corden her flamboyantly gay co-star, and both profess to be rather unaware of how the hoi polloi might live (although we later learn that’s a put-on). Kidman is a permanent understudy who never got her big break, and Rannells is “between gigs” and happens to be tending bar at the afterparty for Streep and Corden’s show. Kidman is, unsurprisingly if you’ve seen much of her work (like To Die For), the film’s secret weapon, sporting a convincing New York accent and giving her slim character her all, especially in her one big song, “Zazz,” a gentle satire of Chicago’s “All That Jazz” that unfortunately lacks the dancing part that would seal the homage. Rannells has even less to do, but does it well, especially in the song that sends up the show that made him a star, The Book of Mormon, where he responds to the argument that the Bible forbids homosexuality with a song that points out that it also forbids tattoos and the wearing of hats.

The story doesn’t really work if you squint at it, although that’s true of a lot of musicals, and many of the classics have plots that are little more than afterthoughts in service of the music. The resolution relies on a rather substantial plot contrivance, something the viewer knows for most of the movie, that is just too convenient. Some of the subplots actually work better – Key’s principal being a huge fan both of Streep and of Broadway in general, James Corden’s estrangement from his parents – but the script strains too hard to make the main storyline, which itself feels a few years out of date, work.

It succeeds in spite of itself, in large part because of Pellman, who makes her film debut in The Prom and looks every bit a star in the making. With her girlfriend still closeted, Emma carries most of the weight of the kids’ part of the storyline – her girlfriend is the only other teenaged character with any depth here – and Pellman is more than able to carry her share even in scenes with Streep and Kidman, two great actors who can be dominant on-screen, and when she finally gets a scene of her own, singing “Unruly Heart” as her character starts a Youtube channel and takes charge of her own side of the publicity battle.

Corden has come in for a fair amount of criticism for the fact that he’s a straight man playing a gay character, and for doing so with some effeminate flourishes that lean a little bit into stereotype. I can’t argue the point, but from a straight performance perspective, Corden was fine. He’ll never not be Smithy to me, but he was more than adequate here, and was enough of a presence to counterbalance Streep, who is the good kind of hammy for most of the film, even though the script really lets her down in several ways.

But all of this comes with the basic problem I had with The Prom: There isn’t a single song in it that I could still recall a few hours after we finished the film. I enjoyed the experience of watching it, but a musical without good music is a rather empty shell, with barely enough plot to fill a short film. The Happiest Season, a holiday film on Hulu starring Kristen Stewart, had a rather similar plot at the core of its story, and handled it more deftly and with bigger laughs, even though it relies on some hackneyed tropes in its story. So while I liked The Prom just enough, there’s no staying power to it, and, unlike with most musicals, I have no real interest in watching it again.

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→ November 21, 2020
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The Queen’s Gambit.

The Queen’s Gambit, adapted from the 1983 book of the same name by Walter Tevis, is ostensibly about chess, but it’s really a coming-of-age story about a chess prodigy who overcomes multiple family tragedies and drug addiction to become one of the absolute best players in the world. The story is somewhat flawed, and perhaps ties up too neatly at the end, but it’s a compelling ride from start to finish with a very strong cast.

Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy, who is certainly a star now if she wasn’t already) ends up in an orphanage when the series opens after her mother dies in a car accident from which Beth walks away physically unscathed. While in the orphanage, which is strict but not quite Dickensian, she spots the gruff custodian (Bill Camp) in front of a chess board and demands that he teach her to play. He’s a strict teacher, explaining the game and chess etiquette, but realizes how incredible her mind is and introduces her to a teacher at a local high school who runs a chess club. She’s off to the races … except that she’s also hooked on the tranquilizers that the orphanage feeds to the kids to keep them docile, which presages a long battle with substance abuse even as Beth continues to stun male players and rise up the ranks in the chess world, eventually facing the Soviet champions in Moscow.

There’s a lot to recommend in The Queen’s Gambit, not least of which is the dedication to getting the chess scenes right. I’m not a chess expert, or even much more than a beginner, but I never felt like they were faking the ‘action’ on the chess boards – there were no obvious mistakes like moving a bishop straight up a row or column, or claiming a player was checkmated when it was visibly false. The series spends a lot of time on the chess itself, a difficult creative choice given how hard it is to make what is essentially an intellectual activity exciting on screen. The director emphasizes the tension inherent in chess (and most great two-player games of any sort), where you must figure out your opponent’s likely responses to any move you might make, and they use a gimmick to demonstrate Beth’s prodigious chess mind where she visualizes the board on the ceiling upside-down. The gimmick is cute, maybe a bit overused, but the way they parse the moves on the board with shots of the players – and some help from music and editing – makes the matches seem as tense as the end of any close athletic event.

Taylor-Joy has been on a steady ascent over the last few years, from The Witch to Thoroughbreds to this year’s adaptation of Emma, but The Queen’s Gambit is probably going to be the role that makes her a star. She’s especially good here when she’s not speaking – she’s good at expressing a broad range of emotions just with her face and body language, and handles the transition from awkward teenager to fashion plate (someone had a lot of fun dressing her in mod clothes highly evocative of the mid-60s) with aplomb. Her speech can come across a bit affected, although that’s a minor quibble. This series doesn’t work without her nailing the lead role.

There are a lot of very strong supporting performances, including Camp, Marielle Heller as Beth’s adoptive mother, and Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Beth’s obnoxious rival Benny Watts, but none made a stronger impression than Harry Melling, whose transformation into a series and versatile actor has been a remarkable surprise. Melling plays Harry Beltik, an early competitor whom Beth defeats on the board and enraptures off it, turning him into both a suitor and a friend whose loyalty she doesn’t always deserve. He shows up as an arrogant, overconfident local chess champ, but softens as he grows up, and eventually becomes a voice of maturity and reason that Beth needs, even if she’s not always willing to heed it, and Melling plays that second version of Beltik with compassion and a very amiable nerdiness that makes him the most compelling character in the retinue of men orbiting Beth’s star. Melling was good in The Old Guard as the villain and excellent in a small role in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, but this is the best thing I’ve seen him in since he finished up his run as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies.

The Queen’s Gambit has a couple of problems that didn’t detract from its entertainment value but did keep it from becoming a truly great series (that might, say, win all the awards). One is that its depiction of drug addiction and alcoholism is facile, and there have already been many thinkpieces accusing the series of glorifying substance abuse by depicting it as essential to Beth’s chess genius. That isn’t the ultimate lesson of the series, but she’s probably far too functional as a chess player for someone who is constantly shown drinking and taking benzodiazepines. A second is the use of Jolene, a Black girl whom Beth meets in the orphanage, as a Magical stereotype that ends up coming across as racist even though Jolene’s inclusion was probably an attempt to make the cast more diverse.

The one flaw in the show that did detract from the entertainment value is that Beth’s story arc is just too smooth in its upward trajectory, so there isn’t as much drama at the chess tables as there might have been. Some of this is unavoidable: she’s not going to bomb out in the first or second round of a chess tournament, playing some junior player, because chess has absolutely no luck or randomness in game play. But much of the potential fodder for drama away from the chess board is frittered away by the script, including multiple tragedies after she’s adopted, where potential difficulties are just resolved by good fortune or exceptional foresight. By the time we get to Moscow in the final episode, it’s all seemed a bit too easy for Beth to go from the orphanage basement to a match against the best player in the world.

That wasn’t enough for me to dislike the show; I was still hooked, and my partner and I watched the whole thing inside of three days. It’s paced so well that my attention never flagged, and several of the episodes ended sooner than I expected. I could have used more balance in the story, and the way Jolene returns in the last episode is borderline cringey – a shame, as the actress, Moses Ingram, does the best with what she’s given – but I completely understand the hype. The Queen’s Gambit is worth the binge.

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→ November 16, 2018
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They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

No story has a happy ending unless you stop telling it before it’s over. — Orson Welles

Orson Welles’ spent about a decade on his last film project, The Other Side of the Wind, but never completed it before his death in 1985, having shot the film for over five years and spent several more editing it, or simply tinkering with it, before he lost the rights to the footage in a legal dispute. Netflix has commissioned a completion of the film with what was shot, in line with what’s known of Welles’ plans, as well as a companion documentary about the making of the original project called They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. The former film holds little interest to me, for many reasons, but the documentary is one of the most purely entertaining things I’ve seen all year. Morgan Neville, who also had a hit this year with Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, spoke to just about everyone involved in the making of The Other Side of the Wind who is still alive, used archival footage from others, footage from the movie itself, plus recorded interviews with Welles and bits of his other films to create an informative and fast-paced look at a slow-moving cinematic disaster.

The documentary covers the period from when he began the project on The Other Side of the Wind in 1970 through the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which, for reasons explained in the documentary, cost Welles control of his project, with a quick run through the last few years of Welles’ life and some of the other projects he left unfinished. Welles appears to have had a general vision for the movie, which was itself a film-within-a-film and had a clearly autobiographical bent that he repeatedly denied, but the script and that vision kept changing, while Welles, strapped for cash, kept improvising on matters of location, crew, and even cast. He tried to use impressionist Rich Little in the film, and later cast a local waitress with no acting experience (or, it would appear, talent) in an important supporting role. He tried to work with a skeleton crew of people especially loyal to him, but the set is described by surviving members as “a circus” where it was often unclear why Welles was doing what he was doing, or if he even knew.

Welles comes off as a narcissist and megalomaniac who openly lies to his cast and crew to avoid any admission that things weren’t going well. He was also a perfectionist, in the worst way that can be, in that he couldn’t bear to let films go, leaving at least four projects unfinished at his death — this one, The Deep (an adaptation of the novel Dead Calm), The Dreamers, and Welles’ adaptation of Don Quixote. The perfectionism meant that scenes were reshot and rewritten many times, often on the fly, while the editing process also took years as Welles, in the retelling of people who worked with him, altered his vision for the film as he edited it – while doing so as a squatter in the house of director Peter Bogdanovich, Welles’ friend and one of the stars of the film.

The documentary doesn’t so much address the question of why the movie wasn’t finished – that’s straightforward – or what Welles hoped to accomplish with the movie beyond making his magnum opus, which is unanswerable. It seems more a study of Welles the character, a man undone by a massive early success in Citizen Kane, subsequent betrayals by Hollywood, a lack of contemporary acclaim for later works – many now seen as great films, as his entire legacy has undergone a total reassessment since his death – and strained personal relationships. There’s even a hint at the end of They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead that Welles’ upbringing played a substantial part in his perfectionism and constant need for approbation, although it’s underexplored, likely because there was no one to interview on camera about it. Instead, Neville seems to ask this question about The Other Side of the Wind: Did Welles ruin his own movie or did the movie ruin him?

The film also includes vignettes from Welles’ personal life in the 1970s and early 1980s that both flesh out (no pun intended) his character while further explaining, or trying to explain, the endless story of the making of his movie. That includes the story of Welles’ friendship with Bogdanovich, which ended, per Bogdanovich’s telling, when Welles and Burt Reynolds mocked him during a television appearances; his longstanding affair with Oja Kador, a Croatian artist and actress who also starred in his film; and his extensive working relationship with cameraman Gary Graver, which crossed into the abusive. Those three relationships were essential both to the making of The Other Side of the Wind and its unmaking as well, as there is no way Welles would have fallen so far down this rabbit hole were it not for the devotion he inspired in his friends and colleagues.

Neville uses some quirky devices to keep the pacing brisk, especially at the beginning, such as using clips of Welles from his films to create a false dialogue with the narrator, Alan Cummings, something that I found amusing but is certainly atypical for serious documentaries. There’s also a clip of his wonderful appearance in The Muppet Movie, likely the first appearance of Welles I ever saw, which forever cemented his image for me as a hefty, silver-bearded man with a deep voice and great charisma on the screen. As it turns out, Welles had a spectacular sense of humor as well, which comes across as a side effect in They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead; he had a huge laugh and a quick, dry wit, never evident in his films but very much a part of his persona and likely a reason people in his orbit were so willing to throw their lives into chaos when he called. I can’t say anything here made me more interested in seeing The Other Side of the Wind, but it did remind me of how much I enjoyed his work behind the camera (The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil) and in front of it – especially The Third Man, a film so good that for years I assumed he directed it.

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→ November 28, 2017
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Icarus.

Icarus, a documentary now available on Netflix, covers the Russian state-sponsored doping program for Olympic athletes from the most direct, personal angle possible: The director was working with the architect of the program on a completely different project when the story broke in a German documentary, The Doping Secret: How Russia Makes its Winners. So instead of merely following the chronology of the program’s execution, the leak to the press, and the subsequent drama around the WADA recommendations to ban all Russian athletes from the 2016 Olympics and the IOC’s decision to give WADA the finger, Icarus gives it to viewers in real time from the perspective of one of the whistleblowers who ends up fearing for his life.

Filmmaker Bryan Fogel decided, on what appears to be a whim, to race in a Haute Route cycling event, a seven-day endurance test across difficult terrain, this time in the Alps of southeastern France. (They also hold similar events in the Pyrénées and in the Rockies.) He finishes in the top 20, but his body just gives out near the end, so he does what any normal person would do in response – he decides to start doping to see how much a little artificial help will improve his performance. (He notes that the event bans performance-enhancing drugs but doesn’t bother testing for them.) He contacts the former head of the main U.S. testing lab, who agrees to help but eventually reneges and refers Fogel to Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of the Russian Anti-Doping Centre, a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory that would test athletes for PED usage. Rodchenkov also knew quite a bit about the benefits of the various PEDs available to Fogel and helped him design a protocol, with the help of an “anti-aging” doctor here in the U.S., to improve his performance in a second shot at the Haute Route.

That second race doesn’t go as well as planned, but it becomes thoroughly secondary to the film’s real story: The German documentary exposes the Russians’ state-run doping program, claiming many of the country’s medals in recent Olympics, including Sochi, were achieved by athletes who should have failed PED tests but didn’t. Rodchenkov was actually running the doping program on the side, even while he was running the anti-doping facility, and during the filming of Icarus, he begins to fear that the government is watching him and possibly preparing to arrest him, so he flees to the U.S. and tells his everything to the New York Times for a piece that ran on May 12, 2016. That article blew the doors off the scandal and led to a longer WADA investigation, which the IOC chose to ignore because of reasons we can only imagine – as Rodchenko makes it clear that he believes Vladimir Putin, who approved the doping program, will stop at nothing to silence his enemies. We learn that one of Rodchenkov’s associates died, allegedly of a heart attack, in February 2016, shortly after the German film aired; another died the same month, with both men former directors of Russia’s anti-doping agency.

There is so much to unpack in Icarus, which is thoroughly gripping even though you invest the first 40 minutes or so in a story that doesn’t matter. (It’s never really clear why Fogel is willing to subject his body to the doping regimen, whether it’s a desire to win, a desire to show what doping can do, a Morgan Spurlock-style attitude to filmmaking, or something else). What was a weird but intriguing documentary that looked at the history of doping and the cat-and-mouse game between the athletes who use such drugs and the labs that try to catch them turns into a darker, real-life spy thriller. The film doesn’t bother with bothsidesism; Rodchenkov’s credibility isn’t questioned, nor are we given any reason to question it, and he provides Fogel with detailed notes on specific athletes’ regimens that seem to immediately convince a group of appalled members of WADA who walked into a conference room believing that this kind of program was physically impossible. (The KGB manages to tamper with WADA’s tamper-proof caps, among other tricks.) And a subsequent special investigation, led by Canadian law professor Richard McLaren, found that over 1000 Russian athletes had doped in events over the time period covered.

Two angles in particular stand out from this. One, relevant to those of us here with an interest in baseball, is that a sufficiently determined and organized group can defeat even a sophisticated testing program. This isn’t about masking agents, or super-secret new drugs that haven’t hit testing protocols yet, but about physical exchange of dirty samples for clean ones that won’t test positive. It shows how difficult such a scheme would be to pull off … but also that it was pulled off, successfully, for years, and therefore is at least feasible.

But I don’t know how you can watch Icarus now without drawing the obvious parallel: Vladimir Putin approved a program to interfere with a competition that went beyond his own borders to try to engineer the results he desired – and even when given irrefutable proof of what he did, he just dismisses it as, in essense, fake news. He even gets away with it, despite those meddling kids, because I’ve seen jellyfish with stronger spines than the IOC, which just gave carte blanche to any major power to dope the hell out of its athletes. There’s even a scene where we see a Russian TV show airing emails between Fogel and Rodchenkov – emails obtained via hacking. We’re fighting someone who appears willing to do anything, perhaps even kill, to achieve his goals, and who thus far has proved immune to any penalty or retribution. It’s a grim projection for the future of international sport … and our elections, too.

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