→ November 21, 2024
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Anora

Writer/director Sean Baker has carved out a niche for himself with stories about sex workers that rely on a small number of well-developed characters and a strong element of time and place. Anora is his biggest film to date, showing that his eye for character and mood translate well even when the stakes of the story are much higher.

Anora is the given name of Ani (Mikey Madison), an exotic dancer at the club HQ in New York whose life is turned upside down when Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch, shows up in the club, asking for a girl who speaks Russian and throwing around $100 bills. Vanya is 21, seldom sober, and living the high life, often literally, on his father’s ruble. He buys a week of Ani’s time, flies to Las Vegas with her and several friends, and then marries her at a Vegas chapel, complete with a 3-carat ring. The fun and games end when one of Vanya’s handlers tells him that Vanya’s parents are flying to the U.S. for force an annulment and bring the prodigal son back to Russia to join his father’s business, taking the film in a darkly comic direction that only further underscores how little agency Ani has in her own life.

Ani is a flawed heroine, looking out for herself at every turn because it’s clear no one else would; she’s 23 and effectively on her own, living with her older sister, with a mother in Florida who appears to be absent from her life and no mention of any other family. Ani squabbles with her boss and some of the other dancers over mostly petty matters, but when she’s cornered, she’s vicious – often appropriately so – because she has so little to call her own. She lives a precarious existence, both in finances and in safety, as most sex workers do, a fact that is only underscored when Vanya’s handlers, including the amoral Orthodox priest Toros, show up and force her to help them find the fugitive Vanya in a mad and often funny chase across the city. When the resolution comes, Ani takes control in the only way left available to her, although in the end it becomes clear to her (and the audience) just how little she has.

Each of Baker’s prior two films revolved around a strongly written character played extremely well, with a plot good enough to move the pieces along and get the character to the right conclusion. Ani is just as well-written as The Florida Project’s Mooney or Red Rocket’s Mikey, and Madison gives the best performance of the trio, but the story does suffer a little under the strain of the second half. The plot strains credulity at a few points to either increase Ani’s helplessness or to amp up the comedic aspects, although the courtroom scene – one of those less believable moments – did deliver some big laughs.

Baker’s The Florida Project was my favorite film of 2017, and his follow-up Red Rocket made my top ten in 2021, but neither received the plaudits that Anora has so far. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year and is atop most of the Oscar prediction lists right now (although it’s still early days), while Madison appears to be a strong favorite to win Best Actress. I’ve seen just four of the Best Picture contenders, and this is easily the best, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I see something better. It isn’t up to the level of The Florida Project, and is more ambitious than Red Rocket without the latter’s taut story. Madison, though, is a revelation – I’ve never seen her before, but other than her overdone Noo Yawk accent, she’s delivers the kind of performance that deserves all of the awards. The contrast between Madison’s tiny stature and Ani’s big, smart-assed, and foul-mouthed personality perfectly encapsulates the struggle the character faces as a woman in a misogynistic world, working in an even more misogynistic industry, trying to make a living in what may be the only way available to her.

Anora lacks some of the stronger secondary characters who popped up in Baker’s previous two films as well, making this even more of a character study than either of them was. Mark Eydelshteyn plays Vanya as a Russian cosplaying as a louche Timothée Chalamet, and the character turns out to be disappointingly one-note and is usurped in the second half by the film’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Garnick and Igor. Vanya’s parents, especially his mother, are caricatures. Even Toros, who contributes some humorous moments because of his desperation to get the marriage annulled before Vanya’s parents walk off the plane, literally leaving in the middle of a baptism to go find him, turns out to be just craven, nothing more.

Which ultimately adds up to Anora being merely very, very good, when Baker has been transcendent before. Mikey Madison takes a great character and plays it to the hilt, keeping you on her side even when you don’t like or understand what she’s doing, in a performance that will probably see me actively rooting for her to win everything this winter. I wish the characters around her were more interesting and less idiotic.

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→ November 20, 2024
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Emilia Pérez.

Emilia Pérez has so much going for it that it seemed like a can’t miss – it’s a musical, it’s a redemption story, it’s about a trans person coming out and finding themselves, it’s a comedy. Unfortunately in trying to be all of those things, it ends up almost nothing at all. It’s an incoherent babblefest, salvaged only a little by its three main performances, notably that of Zoe Saldaña. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

Saldaña plays Rita, a lawyer in Mexico who is disgusted by her work as a defense attorney, as she’s helping defend a man who killed his wife by arguing that she killed herself – and she doesn’t even get the ‘glory’ of arguing the case, as she writes the words and her dim-witted boss gives the big speech. She’s then contacted by the cartel boss Las Manitas, who reveals that he wants to come out as a trans woman, including undergoing gender confirmation surgery, and wants Rita to make all of the arrangements – including faking his death so she can begin a new life as Emilia Pérez. (She’s played in both incarnations by Karla Sofia Gascón, a trans actress from Spain.) Las Manitas was married, however, to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two kids, and after transitioning, Emilia decides she can’t live without her children, so she poses as a wealthy cousin of Las Manitas and invites the them and their mother to come live with her, which goes off the rails when Jessi takes up again with her old lover Gustavo. Meanwhile, Emilia decides to make amends for her past by helping relatives of people presumed killed by drug cartels find out their loved ones’ fates, using her money and her connections to the underworld, becoming a popular hero for her efforts and her criticism of the authorities.

That would be enough plot to fill a ten-part TV series, but not only does Emilia Pérez try to pack it all into two hours, it does so in song. There are sixteen songs in the film, some of which are actually quite good (“El Mal,” sung by Saldaña during the gala dinner, is a real standout, and she nails it), although I’m not sure if “Vaginoplasty” ever really needed to see the light of day. The result is that a plot already stretched to translucency ends up so shallow that the film never actually says anything – even though it seems to think it has a lot to say.

The kernel at the heart of the story is fantastic: A drug lord fakes his death, comes out (privately) as transgender, establishes an entire new identity as a woman, and becomes a crusader against the violence of the drug trade and the government’s war on the cartels. That’s all this film needed to be an epic satire of the current state of Mexico, and Gascón would have been up to the task, as she’s perfectly menacing as Las Manitas, then entirely credible as a remorseful Emilia who uses the same determination that made her a successful criminal to become a serious reformer – even though the violent resolve is still there in reserve.

This isn’t that film, starting with the decision to make Rita the main character rather than Emilia, even though Emilia is in the title. Rita’s just nowhere near as interesting as Emilia is, not through any fault of Saldaña’s, but because she’s written so austerely, while Emilia is the one truly three-dimensional character in the film. Her trans status is more of a detail; it makes the plot work, but it’s not a part of why her character is so interesting. Emilia has the emotional depth and range that the other characters lack, and she should have been the central character, but the script has no interest in, say, exploring her emotional growth, or just her change of heart, or perhaps questioning whether she really understands the wrongs she committed. There’s a faint implication that she was just so deeply unhappy that it drove her to bad acts, but that’s pretty facile (if that’s even what writer-director Jacques Audiard intended) and I think could even lean into the whole “queer as mental illness” myth.

Saldaña is as good as she can be with a poorly written character, and when she sings and dances – she’s a trained dancer, which I admit I didn’t know until after I watched the movie – she owns the scene. Her songs look like scenes from a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, in the best way: she grabs the camera with both hands and won’t let go until the song is done. And she gets just about all of the best songs, which is ironic with a pop singer elsewhere in the cast. It’s fun to see Gomez playing a vixen, even if the film doesn’t give her much time to vamp it up, and she barely gets to sing at all. She and Gascón are wasted by roles that don’t really make enough use of their talents.

The result is a film that is oddly boring for one that has some comic elements, a lot of song and dance, and eventually a big action scene. That last bit isn’t even that well earned, and leads to an ending that is an inexcusable copout where Emilia is no longer even in control of her own fate. That conclusion also underscores just how superficial Emilia Pérez ultimately is as a film: It has so little to say that it was completely fine resolving its plot with a figurative lightning bolt from the sky to wrap things up. What a waste of an opportunity.

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→ October 30, 2024
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Conclave.

Conclave takes a mass-market paperback novel by Robert Harris and turns it into a prestige drama that already has jumped ahead in the awards conversation. The surprise is that it’s pulpy good fun, with a strong cast led by a masterful performance by Ralph Fiennes, until it goes a little off the rails with the first of its two big twists and reminds you of its shallowness.

The Pope is about to die as Conclave opens, and, oops! His Holiness is dead, may the jockeying for his job commence. The Church must convene a conclave of all of its cardinals, but everyone already seems to know who the contenders are, primarily the Italian reactionary Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), who wants to roll back the clock a few hundred years; the Canadian schemer Joseph Tremblay (John Lithgow), whose ambition is so naked Jesus would clothe it; the Nigerian Joseph Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), whose views range from liberation theology to virulent homophobia; and the pragmatist American Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), whose interest in the papacy may stem as much from a desire to stop Tedesco from destroying the institution as his own ambition. Lording over the sequestered group is Thomas Lawrence (Fiennes), a friend of Aldo’s who recently tried to resign his position over a crisis of faith. Meanwhile, there’s a secret cardinal who arrives unannounced to the conclave, Vincent Benitz (Carlos Diehz), who has been working in multiple warzones and whose identity the previous pope protected for his safety. What happens from there is sort of Election with old men – there’s backstabbing, scandal, and vote-buying, with Cardinal Lawrence trying to gather information from beyond the sequestration, which is supposed to protect the Cardinals from all news of the outside world while they cast their votes.

For about three-fourths of Conclave, it’s a slick, dialogue-heavy, prime time drama that keeps moving from one controversy to the next, with Cardinal Lawrence’s nervous energy and some campy plot turns powering the film. It’s quite fun, with Fiennes at the top of his game, Tucci more or less playing Stanley Tucci in a Cardinal costume, and Castellitto leaning hard into his villain’s role. (The film’s philosophical heart could not be clearer.) Then the first twist happens, and it bursts the realistic bubble enough to take you completely out of the film’s environment and remind you that this is just a page-turner adapted for the screen. The twist would itself have been enough to upend the film, but the timing is just heavy-handed, not to mention ridiculous, and the whole sequence relies on something outside of the conclave to redirect the course of events – which undercuts the film’s greatest strength, the sequestered nature of the conclave itself.

The second twist, which ends the film and apparently is straight from the book, is probably going to be the more controversial one if Conclave gets some legs in award season, but despite its similarly “WTF?” nature, it is more effective than the first twist because it’s funny, and in a script that largely dispenses with humor, that’s a pretty powerful way to wrap things up. It does lead Cardinal Lawrence to have to make a quick decision with huge consequences, with one (divine?) hand on the scale already, but the twist’s bigger impact might just be the reminder that, hey, this has all been good pulpy fun, and don’t take it all so seriously. And it is fun – I enjoyed the movie for what it was. It never drags, Fiennes is great in every scene (and he’s in just about every scene), and I certainly didn’t see the second twist coming. If you take it at face value, it’s a good time at the theater, nothing more.

I’ve seen none of the other Oscar contenders so far except for Dune 2, so I’m only guessing whether Conclave will end up in consideration for any of the big awards, but my gut says it’s going to sneak in as one of the last Best Picture nominees because it feels like a Serious Drama and has a lot of accomplished actors in its cast. Fiennes, who has two Oscar nominations to his name, feels like a lock to get one for Best Actor, and this is a fantastic performance from him; his combination of understated speech and telling expressions is perfect for Cardinal Lawrence, a man bedeviled (pun intended) by doubt yet driven by responsibility and love for the institution. Lithgow, a two-time Oscar nominee with six Emmys and two Tonys, is a Very Serious Actor who is kind of hamming it up here as Tremblay, wearing this “who me?” expression throughout the film that makes it pretty clear that, yes, you, almost from his first appearance. Tucci. The film utterly wastes Isabella Rossellini, who plays a nun who runs the housekeeping and catering staff for the conclave and is there to provide information on one of the scandals and, I presume, to be Isabella Rossellini. Of all of the supporting players here, Castellito might deliver the best performance, even though his character is rather two-dimensional, as he gives Tedesco such a fiery personality that he makes the threat of his papacy more palpable, with, perhaps, an unanticipated parallel to an imminent election of another sort.

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→ October 24, 2024
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Dune: Part Two.

The first Dune movie from Denis Villeneuve was fantastic, ranking among my top 5 movies of 2021 for its scope, its pacing, multiple strong performances, and outstanding visuals. The film did well enough for Villeneuve to finance a sequel to complete the story from the first (and only worthwhile) of Frank Herbert’s novels. While Dune: Part Two still has the same strong special effects, the script isn’t as strong as that of the first film, and the limits of Timothée Chalamet’s range become all too apparent as the film progresses. (It’s streaming free on Max, as is the first one, or can be rented on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Dune: Part Two picks up right where the first film left off, after the Harkonnens have taken over Arrakis, killing most of Paul Atreides’s (Timothée Chalamet) family, while he and his mother (Rebecca Ferguson) have joined up with the Fremen, a tribe of nomads who live in the desert, led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who help the pair escape after Paul wins a duel against one of their warriors. The sequel tracks two major plot lines that will intersect at the film’s conclusion. The first covers Paul and his mother’s time with the Fremen, hiding from the Harkonnens and coexisting with the skeptical nomads while they plan how to retake the planet. The other follows the Harkonnens’ effort to control the planet’s spice trade, with Rabban (Dave Bautista) serving as his uncle’s (Stellan Skarsgård) proxy, but Rabban’s brother Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), a sadistic lunatic, is angling for the job.

The film seems to stay true to the book by devoting substantial time to Paul’s tenure with the Fremen, including how he works to convince them that he’s worth their protection but isn’t a prophet or a hero, just someone fighting the same evil forces he is. What works on the page doesn’t work as well on screen, though, as the result is a film that can’t manage its pacing, with long scenes of explanations and far too much of the movie’s constructed languages. There are some great action scenes, and the intrigues of the Harkonnens pulse with their own energy, even if Feyd-Rautha’s madness is over the top. Unfortunately, the script gives too much time to Paul, and not in a way that lets his character fully develop – and a lot of that comes down to the portrayal.

Chalamet is a highly decorated actor, with an Oscar nomination and three Golden Globe nominations under his belt, but I’m starting to think he’s more limited than it first appeared. (As if I weren’t already dreading the Bob Dylan biopic enough, now I’m worried we’re going to get Paul Atreides on the guitar and harmonica singing “Shelter from the Storm”.) There’s too little variation in his tone or expression here, which not only doesn’t fit the story, it doesn’t fit the character of the novel, either. Paul Atreides matures and develops substantially over the course of the book, and the script clearly allows him to do so as well, but there’s little to no difference between his affect and his delivery from the first movie to even the end of this one, when we get to the Big Speech and then the story’s resolution. I’m just starting to think he’s not as good of an actor as we thought he was, or as we thought he’d become.

Chalamet’s mediocre performance is even more stark because of the strength of many of the other people in the film, notably Bardem, as Stilgar, the leader of the Fremen and the one who believes that Paul is the prophet of their religion; Ferguson, as Paul’s mother, who becomes the spiritual leader of the Fremen, in accordance with the prophecy; and, of course, Zendaya, as Chani, Paul’s love interest, a much stronger character in the film than she is on the page, thanks also to Zendaya’s assertive portrayal. The cast even includes two other Academy Award winners beyond Bardem, Christopher Walken and Charlotte Rampling, both of whom play small roles without a ton of dialogue, but they help further overshadow Chalamet’s toneless performance.

Perhaps Dune: Part Two would work better if viewed immediately after the first film, rather than three years later – and I’m sure it would play better on the big screen than on my home television. It sounds like it’s going to get a Best Picture nomination, and possibly a Best Director nod for Villeneuve, neither of which is an outrage, although I’m guessing I’ll find ten movies I rank higher by the time this cycle is over. It’s just a disappointing ending given how great the first film was.

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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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→ October 21, 2024
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Kinds of Kindness.

Kinds of Kindness is a film about cruelty, the sort that others inflict on us, but more so the sort that we inflict on ourselves to try to please others – our employers, our partners, our religions. This latest work from Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, The Lobster) comes in three short films, connected by theme rather than substance, each of which tells an ultimately horrifying story of how far people will go to satisfy someone else’s wants. (It’s streaming free on Hulu and you can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Each of the three parts of Kinds of Kindness uses the same set of actors as different characters  in new stories, each of which starts out normally enough but quickly devolves into complete insanity. The first one features Jesse Plemons as Robert an employee of an exacting boss, Raymond, played by Willem Defoe. Raymond tells Plemons what to eat, what to wear, when to have sex with his wife, and so on, mapping out every detail of his employee’s life, but when he asks Robert to kill another man in a staged car accident – even claiming the victim is willing to die – Robert turns his boss down for the first time. This leads to his extradition from his job and his life, and because he can’t seem to function without this level of control and without this approbation from his boss, he becomes willing to go to great lengths to try to win it back.

The second has Plemons as a police officer, Daniel whose scientist wife, Liz (Emma Stone), has been missing at sea for several months, when one day he gets a call that she’s been found. She returns, but he notices little differences that make him believe that she isn’t actually Liz, so he starts making increasingly bizarre demands on her as a test to see if she’s really Liz, or even really human. The third has Plemons and Stone as members of a sex cult led by Defoe and Hong Chau, but when Stone’s estranged husband does something to get her expelled from the cult, she goes off the rails to try to gain re-entry.

There are some tiny details tying the triptych together, including the character R.M.F., who appears in the titles of all three but doesn’t speak, but the greater connection is the theme of people doing outrageous things to please someone else, whether on command, as in the middle part, or on their own. These characters will hurt anybody, including themselves, if it regains them the affection or acceptance of the other party – their boss, their husband, or their religion – without any regard to the consequences for other people. The script doesn’t concern itself too much with realism, and in two of the three segments it doesn’t provide a proper resolution to any of the questions raised by the end, as the focus instead is on the toxic relationships in our lives and the cruelty we inflict on others and on ourselves as a result. The middle part of the film is the most twisted, as it is never clear whether Daniel is right, and thus whether he is the victim of a cruel con or in fact Liz’s abuser, yet he is the focus of the script and the camera throughout the story. The final third is also quite vicious, although here its target is organized religion, yet because its target is so obvious and so easy it’s also the weakest attack of the film, held up mostly by Stone’s performance.

Plemons delivers three outstanding performances here, as he’s the star of the first two segments and utterly convincing twice over as a man on the verge, even overshadowing a two-time Oscar winner in Stone – who, as always, is game for anything. (I won’t spoil the context, but her dancing scene ought to be some sort of meme by now.) Plemons’ first two characters are both teetering on the edge of insanity for some time before they tip over into the crevasse, and his depictions are so precise that they make the absurdity that follows easier to believe. Stone gets her real moment in the third part, where she is torn between her fervent belief in the cult’s nonsense and her love for the young daughter she left behind, although her performance as Liz is convincing enough to make Plemons’ doubts seem ridiculous and cruel.

Among the supporting cast, Chau really seems to have found a niche playing characters who show no affect, especially when saying or doing awful things, as in The Menu and Showing Up; there are some truly horrible people in Kinds of Kindness, but her cult-leader character Aka might be the worst of the lot. Defoe is playing the sort of lunatic we’ve seen him play too many times before, and after seeing him deliver so many better performances in straight roles (The Florida Project, At Eternity’s Gate), it feels a little clichéd to see him portray a couple of madmen. Margaret Qualley is underutilized in the first two segments of the film before getting a little more to do in the third.

It appears that Kinds of Kindness isn’t going to get much awards attention if any this winter, which seems like a shame given how audacious and thought-provoking it is, and how incredible Plemons’s performance is. I haven’t seen many other films yet from this cycle, so I can’t say he’s deserving of an actual nomination, but I hope that he’s not forgotten when those discussions get more substantial in the next few months.

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→ October 18, 2024
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Will & Harper.

Will & Harper (streaming on Netflix) telegraphs its main problem in the title, which is too bad for a film that has its heart in the right place and mostly gets the emphasis right. Will is Will Ferrell, without whose involvement this documentary likely never happens, but it is his friend Harper Steele, a trans woman who only came out about a year before the film was made when she was around 60 years old, who is the real star and the focus of the story.

Steele was a writer on Saturday Night Live when Ferrell first joined the cast, and she saw his comedic potential when other writers didn’t, leading to a longtime partnership and friendship between the two that went beyond the show into movies (including Eurovision Song Contest).

Harper emailed Will to announce her transition a year or so before the events of this documentary, and Will suggested the idea of a cross-country road trip, something Steele liked to do before she transitioned, but that obviously brings some new challenges she hadn’t faced before.

For the first half of the film, Harper is the real main character, as it should be. This is very much her story, and she needs to be at the heart of the movie. Ferrell is supportive and cracks the occasional joke, but he cedes center stage to Harper at every turn where there are other people around until we’re past the one-hour mark. His personality is so big, and he is so recognizable, that of course it is hard for him to fade entirely into the background, but he does manage to step back enough to allow Harper space to speak and even to have conversations with other people where he is just an observer.

Ferrell ends up taking center stage in a weird sequence where the pair go to a Texas steakhouse that offers a 72 ounce steak that’s free if you eat it within an hour – and he goes into the restaurant as Sherlock Holmes. The whole thing feels like a stunt, or something to help market the film, and it doesn’t go over well, for which he does offer a sincere apology afterward – one of many points in the film where it becomes clear that he’s trying to be supportive but that one of his usual mechanisms for that, his over-the-top comic style, doesn’t work here. Later in the film, Harper suggests that the two go out for a nice dinner, and Will goes into a costume store to look for something to disguise him enough that he won’t be recognized … and then buys the most ridiculous wig, glasses, and mustache so that it’s even more clear that he’s Will Ferrell. It’s like he can’t help himself – in a potentially stressful situation, and one where he is trying to be a good friend, he resorts to his favorite trick of playing the clown. In so many environments, that might work wonders by diverting attention from Harper when she’s extremely self-conscious or simply doesn’t want that kind of attention, but in these two scenes it backfires. 

That said, the two do meet some wonderful, accepting people in unlikely or unexpected places. Hate is not inherent to humanity. Fear is, and we have plenty of people who will weaponize that fear to advance their own agendas, and the two stop at one point and read some vile tweets directed at Harper from people who saw the two together at one of their more public appearances on the road trip. That’s one of several moments in the film where Harper is the entire focus and her emotional struggles are laid bare for everyone to see – and where Ferrell acts “normally,” just being a supportive friend who listens to Harper and validates her feelings as best he can.

Documentaries like Will & Harper do suffer from the observer’s paradox: people will behave differently when they know they’re being observed, and in this case, recorded. There are certainly points in the film where you can see the joists holding it together; the two meet up with Molly Shannon near the end of the movie, and she asks a question that is so obviously scripted it took me out of the movie for a moment. Yet there is still a lot that is real, or feels real, from the interactions in an Oklahoma dive bar to the retired therapist they meet in Arizona, things that couldn’t have been scripted but that also read as far more honest and authentic, along with several of Harper’s spontaneous soliloquies – the one near the house she bought is particularly powerful – that give this film its emotional heft.

I’m sure the film wouldn’t have sold as well had it been called Harper & Will, but that’s what this movie is about. Ferrell’s occasional missteps don’t overshadow Steele entirely, just for some segments, and even with those choices it is very clear that Ferrell is trying to be a good friend and a good ally, and in moments where he doesn’t know exactly what to say or do, he doesn’t just resort to cheap laughs, but says very little and just listens, making it clear he’s there to listen – and giving Harper the floor to share some very vulnerable and painful thoughts. It’s uneven and sometimes uncertain, but at the end of their trip, Will and Harper get us, and the film, where we needed to go.

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→ January 10, 2023
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Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is the full-length feature based on the series of short films from 2010 that featured the title character, a one-inch tall shell with an eye in its aperture and, yes, shoes on, voiced by Jenny Slate. It utilizes stop-motion animation to bring the dimunitive, wide-eyed shell to life as it shows us around the world he has created in an AirBnB, where he lives with his grandmother (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) after most of their family vanished when a previous tenant moved out. It’s charming, and slight, and for most of its 80-odd minutes it feels like a short that’s been overstretched, but the whole thing is salvaged by a tremendous finale. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Marcel and his grandmother have jury-rigged a bunch of devices from household objects to help themselves adapt to their living space, most notably rolling around the apartment in a tennis ball, and to allow them more easily move between their indoor and outdoor environments. The gimmick in this film is that a guest at this AirBnB has decided to film his conversations with Marcel and post them online, where they find a cult following (as the real clips did), which leads to interest from the favorite show of Marcel and his grandmother, 60 Minutes. Their favorite host, Lesley Stahl, ends up visiting the apartment to interview Marcel and explain his quest to try to find the rest of his family, which, of course, leads to the big finish.

There’s not a whole lot more to Marcel the Shell with Shoes On; either you get on this film’s wavelength, and you enjoy the dialogue between the interviewer and the shell, or you don’t. The film is more witty and cute than laugh-out-loud funny, although the line about “everything comes out in the wash” did get a big laugh from me. Some of Marcel’s soliloquies veer awfully close to “inspirational poster in a waiting room” territory, and those were the ones where I found myself tuning out – that’s great in a short film or sketch but wears very thin over an hour-plus. With only the three characters for the vast majority of the movie’s running time, there’s a sameness that sets in until Lesley Stahl shows up to save the day.

From the point the filming of the show-within-the-movie starts, the movie’s tempo picks up, and suddenly it’s not entirely about Marcel’s witticisms and observations. Cute has a half-life, and it turns out it’s pretty short. When Marcel reunites with his family, the whole tone changes as well, and it’s surprisingly emotional as well, while also showing off a higher level of animation quality. That final twenty minutes or so takes this movie from below the ‘recommend’ line to just above it.

Marcel earned one of the five nominations for Best Animated Feature Film at this year’s Golden Globes, although I’m going to guess it has no chance to beat both Turning Red (which was mid) and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (which I haven’t seen yet). I’ve only seen one other potential Oscar contender, another stop-motion film, Wendell & Wild, which was more entertaining throughout than this one but had a less inventive story. You can see Wendell & Wild, which was co-written by Jordan Peele, on Netflix; it has some important themes about race, gentrification, and the weight of history, but I thought the main character’s narrative was too familiar. Also, they kill the parents in the first scene, which I thought was trademarked by Disney. I’m hoping whatever wins the awards is still out there among films I haven’t seen yet.

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→ January 19, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 1/19/19.

Nothing new from me this week, between prospect writing and a trip to NYC the last two days to attend a MEL magazine event. The prospect rankings will start to run on ESPN.com on January 28th and will roll out over two weeks.

And now, the links…

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→ January 1, 2019
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If Beale Street Could Talk.

If Beale Street Could Talk feels like a film that is very of the moment, for its theme and its source material. James Baldwin is himself having a renaissance after the acclaimed documentary I Am Not Your Negro appeared in 2016 and contemporary writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates have explicitly alluded to Baldwin’s works, such as Fire. Even though the novel on which Barry Jenkins, director of the Oscar-winning Moonlight, was written over 40 years ago, it revolves around a very current theme of racial injustice and police misconduct towards African-American men. It succeeds without sermonizing by wrapping those huge themes in a very sweet, straightforward love story between two young black people played by rising stars.

Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt (Stephan James of Homecoming) and Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne, making her film debut) are childhood friends who’ve fallen in love in 1970s New York City, but whose relationship faces many obstacles, including the most obvious one – a society that views them as second-class citizens because they’re black. As the film opens, we learn that Tish, just 19, is pregnant, and that Fonny is behind bars, accused of a rape that he didn’t commit, put there by a vengeful white cop. Jenkins alternates scenes of the present day, where Tish and her family work to try to clear Fonny’s name, with long, languid scenes of their nascent romance, mostly from Tish’s point of view as she also learns more about who Fonny has become as an adult and the challenges a young black man faces, even in a multicultural place like New York.

The story hits a wall when Tish’s mom, played by Regina King, travels to Puerto Rico to try to convince the victim to revoke her identification of Fonnie as the rapist. The scenes that follow are important to the plot, but the lyrical mood Jenkins has set hits an abrupt stop the moment she steps on the island, and it takes the rest of the movie, until the concluding scene, to get that atmosphere back. There’s also an utterly corny scene where Dave Franco, dressed as an observant Jew named Levy, delivers a monologue to Fonnie and Tish to explain why he might be the one landlord in the whole city willing to rent an apartment to a young black couple. The soliloquy is hackneyed, right down to the whole “I don’t care what color you are, black, white, purple” line that could be borrowed from any of a thousand films where a white character tries to explain how he doesn’t see color.

King has been listed as a shoo-in for a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Beale Street, but I don’t think she’s in this film enough to have that sort of impact. She’d slip in under the Judi Dench Exemption, I suppose, but King isn’t the Queen, and her character is actually not that well-developed. There’s nothing missing from King’s performance, but the script just doesn’t demand enough of her. James and Layne are both outstanding, and Bryan Tyree Henry, who is having a year himself, is strong again, this time as a friend of Fonny’s who was just paroled after serving two years for a crime he didn’t commit, but to which he pled guilty rather than face a more serious charge for marijuana possession. (This remains a major reason African-American men are incarcerated today, but first appeared as a weapon of the state, often with the support of leaders of black communities, in the 1960s and 1970s. Locking Up Our Own, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction, documents this trend and its effects on the African-American population.)

Jenkins made several smart decisions that power Beale Street past its flaws and made it one of my top ten movies of 2018, including the choice to retain some of Baldwin’s original prose, often having Tish use it as narration; and the way he maintains much of that glowing atmosphere even into some of the scenes around Fonny’s incarceration and the efforts to clear him. Keeping that mood into early conversations that Tish and Fonny have through glass while he’s in prison makes the scene where he loses control of himself more visceral, and the early scene that you’ve likely seen in the trailer, where the two families come into conflict because Fonny’s mother blames Tish for leading her son into sin, starts out with the same atmosphere only to dissolve as the rancor in the room overtakes it. Between this and Moonlight, Jenkins has made his style very clear – he’s in no rush, often letting scenes breathe longer than any other contemporary director I can name, and when he does take the wheel, such as for close-up shots of specific characters’ faces, you’ll be aware of the transition.

If Beale Street Could Talk seems destined to earn a slew of nominations at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony and lose just about all of them; its best chance, aside from King as Best Supporting Actress, might be in Best Adapted Screenplay, where it will be up against A Star is Born and BlacKkKlansman, although I’d vote for this over both of those. If any film has a chance to upset A Star is Born for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, this would be it. It is a wonderful film, so kind to its two main characters but with a story that will make you seethe by its end, worth seeking out if Annapurna gives it a wider release beyond just the 65 screens it was on this past weekend.

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