→ November 20, 2018
→ By

Widows.

Steve McQueen’s new film Widows, his first since his Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave in 2013, is an adaptation of a 1980s British TV series of the same name, a series McQueen says he wanted to adapt for some time. He’s maintained much of the framework of the series’ six-episode first season, which spawned a second season (Widows 2: Electric Boogaloo) and later a sequel series, but added some new elements and rewritten the resolution completely. It’s a dense, layered, frenetic heist film that packs a ton of backstory into the first two-thirds of the film – too much, really – before a tremendous finish worthy of the genre.

Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) is the leader of a four-man crew that we see trying to escape from a robbery at the start of the film, only to have them die in a police shootout and explosion, which leaves their four wives as the widows of the film’s title. Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis, who’s going to get an Oscar nomination for this) finds out that Harry stole from would-be city alderman Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who wants his $2 million back and gives her a month to find it any way she can. Harry left behind a notebook with details on his next job, with a potential $5 million prize, so Veronica decides to contact the other widows – whom she’s never met – to assemble a crew and pull off the heist themselves so she can pay off Jamal and set the widows up financially.

The effort by the widows to become a team and pull off this heist is the main plot in the film, but there’s so much more layered on top of it that many scenes end too quickly, so the tension doesn’t always build enough and we don’t always get enough exposition on the characters. Jamal is running against Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), who’s trying to win the seat long held by his father (Robert Duvall as a pretty obvious Trump surrogate), but it turns out that Jack has a connection to Harry, and also ends up with other connections to the widows. Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), another of the widows, was abused by her husband and by her mother (Jacki Weaver, underutilized here), and ends up trying to be a high-end escort to make ends meet, but really comes into her own by working with these other women and taking care of herself for the first time. The third widow in the crew, Melinda (Michelle Rodriguez), is the least interesting character by far, with the most cursory backstory, a role that certainly does the actress playing it no favors and ultimately ends up overshadowed by the other members of the group, including the woman they bring on as the driver, Belle (Cynthia Erivo).

There is a lot of extra material in this movie, which feels at least like McQueen might have tried to pack in all the backstories from the TV series into one two-hour film. There’s a strand around Veronica’s son, deceased before the movie begins, that has no relevance to anything else in the movie and feels like it’s been tacked on to make a political point (a valid one, but not germane to this film). The political campaign is overstuffed for a subplot, and includes its own threads that never get resolved – the black preacher whose support is with the white candidate gives us a dynamic sermon and then seems to serve no other purpose in the film. Jamal’s story is vague – possibly by design – and his arc has no real ending. The salon is where we first meet Belle, but nothing else about the salon is interesting; it reappears later in another scene that tries to make a political point, this one less effective than the one about Veronica’s son. Even Frumpy Carrie Coon is just a prop here, which is a waste of a terrific (and beautiful) actress.
The real strength of Widows isn’t its story, but its cast, which looks like someone drafted a fantasy team of actors in a league with only four players. Davis is excellent, as she always is, although I think her character doesn’t become three-dimensional enough until the film is well underway. Erivo doesn’t even arrive until halfway through but she is an immediate force, with an epic scene when Belle first meets Veronica. Debicki – who towers over the other women, even though her character starts as a shrinking violet with no strength to defend herself – has the strongest arc of the women in the crew and delivers an outstanding performance to make that character growth credible, discovering that she’s capable of doing more than she imagined while also learning to stand up for herself. (Her character’s scenes as an escort, with a very short-looking and oddly coiffed Lukas “The Pin” Haas, give the film its best side quest.) Daniel Kaluuya plays Jamal’s brother and is utterly terrifying as a sociopathic killer. Farrell’s role could easily have been a caricature of a crooked Chicago political scion, but he turns on the Farrell charm – not to mention a passable Chicago accent – and gives the character some emotional depth and enough different faces to avoid that trap.

There’s a pervasive sense in Widows that McQueen is telling the story of women pushed into bad situations by the men they trusted, then finding their own power and agency in the wake of the botched heist, only to have even more men threaten them, push them around, or just ignore them. We can see Alice develop that sense of confidence and empowerment explicitly, like when she asks Melinda for the building plans and manages to figure out where the target is (with one convenient little coincidence). Belle hustles to make money to support her daughter, but is held back by a lack of economic opportunity or a reliable support structure. Veronica had the strongest career prior to their husbands’ deaths, but is also pushed into unexplored territory, the extent of which isn’t clear until the final scene of the film.

Where McQueen goes astray is in piling so much other thematic material on top of this. There’s a statement about politics, how so many of the people who want to represent us offer both good and bad sides, that issues are frequently not as clearcut as we’d like … and then there’s Tom Mulligan speaking like President Trump about minorities and immigrants. There’s a subplot about white police shooting unarmed black citizens that has nothing to do with the rest of the story – and much of the content here that touches on issues of race just doesn’t work, even as it sits alongside discussions of gender that do. Economic inequality pops up. All of these are themes worth covering, but the total puts a weight on Widows that no two-hour film that is also busy telling a ripping heist story could support.

There is far too much good in Widows for all of these quibbles to bring the film down too far; it’s still a lot of fun and very sharp, never talking down to the audience except for the police brutality thread, and with some details in the heist sequence itself that aren’t properly resolved. There’s a ton to unpack from this movie, and five performances that are at least worthy of consideration for awards – Davis seems like a lock for a Best Actress nomination, while Debicki, Erivo, Kaluuya, and Farrell are each outstanding in supporting roles. If you can hang with all the prologue and the terse editing, the payoff here is enormous.

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→ November 19, 2018
→ By

Burning.

Burning, Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is based loosely on a 1992 short story by Haruki Murakami called “Barn Burning.” It takes that very brief framework and builds a dreamlike, post-noir feature film, running nearly two and a half hours, that entraps viewers in its layered mysteries early and then increases the tension like a vice as it approaches its shocking resolution. (The Murakami story appears in The Elephant Vanishes, and is also in the online archives of the New Yorker.)

Lee Jong-su* is an unemployed, would-be writer who bumps into an old classmate, Shin Hae-mi, whom he doesn’t recognize because she’s had plastic surgery. She spots him, and makes it clear that she has some interest in him, eventually bringing him back to her tiny apartment and sleeping with him. She also asks him to feed and clean up after her cat while she takes a two-week trip to Africa, which he agrees to do even though it’s a long drive from his father’s farm in the country. When Jong-su goes to pick Hae-mi up on her return, she’s with a new guy, Ben, who is rich, condescending, and possibly her boyfriend. Jong-su seems resigned to the loss of Hae-mi to Ben, but those two keep inviting him out with them, stringing him along, until one day Ben confesses to Jong-su that he has a hobby of burning greenhouses, burning one every two months or so because it’s the ‘right pace’ for him. Later that night, Jong-su makes a cutting remark to Hae-mi, after which she vanishes, leaving Jong-su to try to figure out what’s going on. From there, the story turns darker as Jong-su follows – or stalks – Ben in search of the girl.

* Korean names are written with the family name first; I’ve held to that convention in this review.

At one point in the film, Ben says to Hae-mi, “it’s a metaphor,” after which she asks what a metaphor is, and Ben says Jong-su should answer, since he’s a writer. This entire film is a metaphor wrapped around a set of smaller metaphors. There’s a strong subtext of the pervasive nature of class distinctions in Korean society, and how the upper class may view the lower classes as not just inferior but expendable. Ben represents the idle, entitled rich, while Jong-su and Hae-mi both come from the lower classes. Jong-su lives on a farm while his father is in jail for assaulting a government official, and has very little spare cash; his estranged mother reappears at one point, complaining of how rich Koreans treat her in her menial job and saying how she needs money, which Jong-su promises to provide despite lacking means. Hae-mi, we learn, is broke, with outstanding debts she can’t pay, working just occasionally as a model/dancer outside shops that hire girls like her to try to drum up business. Ben drives a Porsche, lives in a gorgeous apartment, thinks nothing of spending money on food or drink, and appears to have little regard for people he views as beneath him, as do the friends of his who appear in the film – totally ignoring Jong-su while he’s at their parties while treating Hae-mi and Ben’s next girlfriend as if they’re some sort of entertainment, not actual people.

Throughout the film are smaller metaphors, not least of them the actual burning and references to it. There are cigarettes everywhere (and the occasional joint), fires in the background of shots, the burning color of the sun at sunset, and hints of the world burning around our characters with Donald Trump appearing on a TV lying about immigration and with North Korean propaganda audible outside Jong-su’s house. Birds make several appearances; there’s a postcard drawing of a bird in Hae-mi’s apartment, but it’s gone after she vanishes. Hae-mi tells a story about a well that might also have been a metaphor, but discussing its implications would reveal too much.

The main criticism of Murakami’s writing has long been that he doesn’t write compelling women, and the woman in “Barn Burning” is nothing but a prop, so the screenwriters here had a blank canvas … and didn’t do a ton with it. Hae-mi, played by Jeon Jong-seo in her first film role (where she really reminds me of Lily James), is a Boolean character – she has two modes, the flirtatious and perhaps overly sexual coquette as well as the stark depressive who seems to lack a will to live. All her edges are extremely sharp, while Jong-su in particular is drawn with far more nuance to just about every aspect of his character. Jeon does what she can with a character that verges on the ridiculous, at times appearing more like the object of male fantasy than like a fully realized woman, but the writing limits what she can do.

The two male leads deliver outstanding performances. Yoo Ah-in plays Jong-su as a sort of slack-jawed stoner – seriously, his mouth is constantly open – whose expressions and slow reactions would imply that he’s not very bright, but there’s more intelligence beneath the surface here, and Yoo gives him some emotional depth that I wasn’t expecting given how the film first introduces the character. Stephen Yeun is totally magnetic as Ben, smarmy and confident and charismatic, the character Jong-su wants to dislike but can’t quite come around to doing so because Yeun gives him that extra layer of amiability on top of what appears to be a rather unpleasant core.

The original story has Jong-su’s character comparing Ben’s to Jay Gatsby, a line that also appears in the film, while William Faulkner comes up twice during the movie as well. (I had a book with me to read while I waited for the film to start, and in a pure coincidence, it was Faulkner’s The Unvanquished.) The Faulkner connection is fascinating as his writing was frequently opaque, full of symbol and metaphor, and covered themes like racial prejudice and the moral decay that can accompany rising financial status. Ben’s skin is substantially lighter than those of the other main characters, as are his friends’, and the question of his morality and motivations, and even how he acquired such wealth, hangs over the last half of the film.

Murakami’s story doesn’t make the ending clear, but the film makes it much more evident what’s happening with these characters – at least, I think it does, although director Lee Chang-dong ensures that we never get explicit proof that our suspicions are correct. There’s sufficient misdirection here to keep viewers thinking about this film for days afterwards, as I have been. It’s well-written, extremely well-acted, features some stunning and memorable shots, and is just tortuous enough to keep you off balance right through the final scene. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen so far this year.

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→ November 18, 2018
→ By

The Wife.

The Wife, based on novel of the same name by Meg Wolitzer, has received early acclaim primarily for the performance of Glenn Close as the wife of the movie’s title. She delivers a solid performance, as you might expect, but the movie is dreck, the cinematic equivalent of painting by numbers, with moments so big and predictable that I actually walked to the back of the theater at one point to message a friend about how bad the movie was.

Close plays Joan Castleman, the wife of author Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) who, as the film opens, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993; the story takes us with Joan and Joe to Stockholm for the ceremony while giving us flashbacks to when they met and through the development of his career and their marriage. Joan was a student in Joe’s writing class at Smith, with Close’s daughter Annie Starke playing young Joan and Harry Lloyd hamming it up as young Joe, and they start an affair even though Joe is married and the two are teacher and student. Their romantic relationship also involves a professional partnership, as Joan is a gifted writer in her own right, but subverts her talents because she believes there is no market for a female novelist, while she can help Joe turn his writing into something that can succeed critically and commercially. Back in Stockholm, Nate (Christian Slater) is hounding the family so he can write a biography of Joe, while their adult son David (Max Irons) is there to sulk, smoke pot, and yell at his father. Of course, the tensions build over the course of the film to a melodramatic climax where we learn the truth about Joe’s work while Joan makes some major decisions about the rest of her life.

The hackneyed story runs through a series of coincidences, clichés, and outright groaners that destroy any suspension of disbelief because you can’t possibly accept anything this stupid as remotely realistic. Joe’s about to kiss the stunning young photographer who’s been assigned by his publisher to take pictures of him in Stockholm when the alarm Joan set on his watch to remind him to take his heart medication happens to go off at that precise moment. The winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics is supposed to be there for comic relief but is just an unfunny caricature of the overbearing, bragging parent, and of course we later find out that his kids are messed up. Nate is an even worse caricature of a mercenary writer, unctuous enough to soak the audience in grease, even dressed to depress with a cheap leather jacket and jeans while everyone else is attired for the occasion. David is the brooding young author and his fractured relationship with his father is overwrought and undersold. The scene with the walnut in the hotel room is insultingly trite. And if you can’t see the ending coming with all the clues the film positively throws at you from the beginning, the little plastic castle must be a surprise to you every time.

Close’s performance in The Wife has garnered substantial praise and she’s considered very likely to earn a Best Actress nomination, both for her performance and because the subject matter is clearly Oscar bait. Close is … fine. She gives a good performance in a role that is just not all that interesting – Joan’s character is just not that remarkable and the confines of the script do not give Close all that much room to stretch out. Joan says she doesn’t want to be seen as the long-suffering wife, but that’s just what she is, and we’ve seen this character a thousand times before. Close does what she can, but there’s no new thing under this sun.

Pryce is a scene-chewer by nature, although he deserves credit for how spot-on his Brooklyn Jewish accent is; he gives Joe a little charisma so you can see how women might still be interested in him despite his gruff manner and bombast. Irons scowls his way through the film, although the script gives him little else to do, and Elizabeth McGovern, whose bizarre diction was a constant distraction on Downton Abbey, tries to deliver some sort of weird 1950s dame voice to match an overblown speech that alters the course of Joan’s life.

The groupthink around this film just flabbergasts me – this is a badly written story with two competent performances at its heart, neither of which can elevate this movie beyond the level of dreadful. Even the few laughs are forced and the jokes frequently obvious. If Close gets a nomination over Rosamund Pike (for A Private War) or Melissa McCarthy (for Can You Ever Forgive Me?), it might be more a career achievement honor than a reflection of their respective performances.

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→ November 13, 2018
→ By

Beautiful Boy.

Beautiful Boy, the film, is based on twin memoirs by a father and son, titled Beautiful Boy ($5.18 on amazon right now) and Tweak, respectively, of the latter’s long struggle with drug addiction, especially to crystal meth. It’s by turns a bleak portrayal of the effects a child’s addiction can have on the family and a distant, almost toneless depiction of what should be a gut-wrenching subject, saved primarily by yet another star turn by Timothée Chalamet as the son in the one great performance in the film.

Steve Carell co-stars as David Sheff, the father in the story, looking very paternal, as a successful journalist who is surprised to find out that his son has a serious drug problem and tries to throw himself at the issue to solve it. His son, Nicholas, behaves as you might expect an addict to behave – lying, stealing, deceiving, and then collapsing in apology and self-loathing. The cycle repeats multiple times until Nicholas eventually overdoses in New York, the event that more or less closes the movie and in real life marked the start of his journey to sobriety.

My experiences with this kind of addiction are mostly through depictions in writing and on screen; I had one relative who dealt with it, hiding it from me for most of my life, until the last few years before his suicide when he was probably no longer capable of the deception required. So when I say I think Beautiful Boy does a solid job of showing Nicholas’ addiction, and his up-and-down cycle through rehab, recovery, and relapse, or that I think the way his disease tears his family up is accurately portrayed, bear in mind that I’m playing with a handicap here.

But the rest of the script feels heavy-handed and even one-sided. Nicholas’ mother (Amy Ryan) lives in LA and is only on screen a few times, but the character is a shrew, and the fact that she takes care of Nicholas for about a year when he’s clean is brushed under the rug so she can fall apart again on the phone when he relapses after a weekend of visiting David. David’s second wife, Karen (Maura Tierney), is an artist, the mother of Nicholas’ two step-siblings, and is something of a cipher of a character, given more screen time but no development. There’s one scene near the end where she takes action after years of watching the damaging David-Nicholas dynamic, a wordless sequence that is the best thing any woman gets to do in the film – but that just speaks to how little the script regards its women, and I can’t believe that neither Nicholas’ mother nor his stepmother was that important in his early life or his path through addiction.

Chalamet is superb, again, probably earning his second Oscar nomination in as many years for this performance; he physically fits the part, looking a little haggard for someone with such a young face, earning the plaudits every time Nicholas experiences moments of clarity and remorse. It’s Carell who disappoints here – he looks right, but he’s just inert in this performance, and I found myself without any emotional connection to his character, even though I am a father myself and should at least have felt that paternal anxiety and grief through his eyes. If David Sheff is just a bottled-up guy, maybe Carell’s performance would make a little more sense, but it doesn’t translate well on screen. I needed a lot more here to feel what the character was feeling and didn’t get it.

There’s also a bunch of stuff in Beautiful Boy that a decent editor would have clipped – the weird, incongruous sex scene between Nicholas and a girl he hooks up with late in the movie served no purpose, and I’m not sure why we saw Karen working on her art at all – and the flashbacks to Nicholas’ youth aren’t well integrated into the primary narrative. Andre Royo has a nice bit part as Nicholas’ sponsor in NA, a fun bit of casting for viewers who remember him as Bubs on The Wire, but the fact that he’s so little used in the story also points to how little we see of Nicholas’ time in those meetings or in the process. There is one little fact delivered toward the end of the film by a doctor played by Timothy Hutton, where he explains to David that the rehab facility director lied to him about success rates of rehab from meth addiction – that the success rate tends to be in the single digits because meth damages the user’s nerve endings. Nothing shook me in this script more than that scene; even I, someone generally empathetic to addicts because I understand it’s a disease and saw it lead to the suicide of a loved one, didn’t quite understand just how brutal it could be. Nicholas Sheff recovered, and is still alive today, working, writing, and living a life that was probably unimaginable for him or his father during the time covered in Beautiful Boy. That miracle needed to come across more in the film.

One postscript: Nic Sheff did an interview with The Fix where he praised the film and Chalamet’s performance in it. It’s worth reading even if you have no interest in the movie.

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→ November 8, 2018
→ By

First Man.

First Man reunites director Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling, who worked together two years ago on La La Land, in a different sort of movie, this time a serious biopic that deals with the biggest themes possible – life, death, and man’s search for meaning. Ostensibly a biography of Neil Armstrong from the death of his young daughter from cancer to his landing on the moon, First Man is much more a story of grief and coping, or not coping, and as a result less insightful as any sort of document of the man himself.

Gosling plays Armstrong, whom we first meet as an engineer and Navy pilot whose two-year-old daughter Karen is seriously ill with a brain tumor that will claim her life (via daughter) very early in the film, after which Armstrong shows the only real emotion he will display anywhere during the course of the movie. The story follows him through his entry into the space program, flight testing, and training, eventually to his selection for Apollo 11, but his path involves living through the deaths of at least five colleagues due to crashes and the cabin fire on the Apollo 1 craft, only furthering Armstrong’s turn inward with its constant reminder of Karen’s death. Armstrong also distances himself from his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), and two young sons, burying himself in work rather than risking further grief by getting too close to anyone else in his life.

First Man is extremely loud and incredibly close, to the point where the sound editing and cinematography, while perhaps accurate for the subject matter, make it hard to watch in several parts. The scenes aboard the various spacecraft involve a tremendous amount of shaking – not just showing us that the people on the ships are shaking, but shaking the camera so much that I repeatedly had to turn away from the screen, something I can’t remember ever doing for another film. The sound in those scenes where Armstrong is aboard any sort of ship is also mixed so that the background noise is amplified and it’s very hard to understand any of the communications between Armstrong (and any colleagues) and Mission Control; I eventually just gave up on understanding that dialogue, much of which involved technical chatter.

Gosling and Foy dominate the movie both in screen time and with their performances, with Gosling making Armstrong almost unknowable with his restrained portrayal, at times painful in his reticence and utter refusal to show emotion. There’s a pivotal scene where Janet forces him to talk to his two sons before he leaves for the Apollo 11 mission, knowing there was a good chance he wouldn’t return, and he can barely talk to the boys or even look at them; when one son asks if he might not come home, Armstrong responds as if he’s still in a press conference, with Gosling barely making eye contact and answering with a robotic tone and cadence. Foy gets to show a broader range of emotions, and her character develops some strength over the course of the film, enhanced by how her character is dressed and Foy’s own waifish appearance.

The movie has disappointed at the box office – much to the glee of alt-right trolls upset over the absence of a scene where the American flag is planted on the moon, which would be so out of place given the context of what Armstrong actually does after he lands – and I think one reason might be that the movie isn’t just a biopic. There is some celebration of space exploration here, and certainly some jingoism involved as the U.S. reached the moon before the Soviets could, but the larger theme in First Man is death and how we cope with it. The script’s premise is that Karen’s death changed Armstrong forever, leading him to create distance between himself and his family while driving him to take bigger risks at work, including accepting the riskiest mission in the history of the space program. (As a side note, I enjoyed watching Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and The Pin flying to the moon.) Rather than fully explaining his character, though, the script instead shows a man unwilling to open up to anyone in his grief, and the damage that ultimately does to him, to his marriage, and to his relationships with his two surviving children. Perhaps audiences wanted to see more of a hero at the heart of the film – there are a few such moments, but it’s not the dominant tone – and were surprised to see a movie that is so somber and pensive about a topic just about nobody wants to spend any time considering. That theme, and that choice to go with that theme over a rah-rah space and ‘merica tone, makes First Man a stronger film even if it’s less commercially appealing.

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→ November 7, 2018
→ By

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is based on the true story of biographer and literary forger Lee Israel, who discovered she had a knack for mimicking the style of famous authors and began producing fake personal correspondence from the likes of Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker when her own books stopped selling. With two strong performances by Melissa McCarthy and Richard Grant, the film bounces along at a brisk pace, running from the nadir of Israel’s legitimate career through her forgery streak to her eventual trial, but the script itself is flimsy and does way too much to try to make a remorseless con artist into a sympathetic character.

McCarthy plays Israel, a frumpy, mid-50s author who drinks too much and doesn’t really care for people, and whose agent, played by Jane Curtin, has lost interest in working with her between her difficult personality and the lack of commercial appeal of her books. We see her lose an editing job, struggle to pay bills, and experience writer’s block (presaged in one of the many heavyhanded scenes in the movie), before she eventually meets Jack Hock, played by Grant, a flamboyant gay libertine who becomes her one friend and eventually a partner in her crimes. While researching her latest book idea, on comedienne Fanny Brice, she finds a real letter from Brice tucked in a library book, steals and sells it, and hits on the idea of forging letters for profit. Eventually, she’ll be caught, giving McCarthy a scene for her Oscar reel at the sentencing hearing, and hits on the idea of writing a memoir of her stint as a forger both as a way to make money and to satisfy her inner desire to write.

The story is just too light and way too kind to its main character to work. It does show Israel as difficult and often rude to others, but the depiction of her forgery sales gives off the sense that, hey, it’s all okay because she’s just selling stuff that wealthy idiots will buy, and that the independent bookstores who buy her letters to resell them are somehow complicit for their failure to verify that her letters are authentic. Because it’s based on Israel’s memoir, there’s no attempt to explain why she is the way she is – why she drinks so much, why she likes cats more than people (her words), why she can’t maintain romantic relationships, and so on. And that means we don’t learn anything about why she slides so easily into forgery, other than that she had a financial need and then realized she was good at it. There’s zero sense that she regrets any of this, or considers that there might be consequences for the other people she involves, including Jack, and the script doesn’t even try to explain how she ended up without scruples.

McCarthy and Grant are both tremendous in their respective characters and in all of their scenes together, an odd couple of misfit friends, neither of whom has anyone else close to them. Late in the film, Israel’s previous girlfriend appears in a confessional scene, although it merely rehashes what we already knew about Lee’s character – she can’t open up, she creates walls between herself and people who try to get close to her – without explaining any of why. That somewhat limits what McCarthy can do in the role, but given its constraints she goes to an extraordinary length to try to give the character some three-dimensional qualities and create empathy for Israel, even when it’s probably not deserved. Grant makes Hock a delightful scamp, a bit ridiculous at points, but both consistently entertaining and a better elicitor of pathos for the character than McCarthy can be with Israel, as his character is more of an open mess while Israel is a closed one.

There’s already a consensus forming around Grant as a lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and McCarthy probably has a shot at a Best Actress nod, although that might depend a bit on how many voters actually see this movie. She deserves plaudits for easily transitioning from comedic roles that rely on her timing and her gift with physical comedy to a dramatic one where none of those comic skills come into play. It’s the script itself that’s the problem – this is a trifle of a story, told from the perspective of the main character, someone who had every reason to lie about herself and who had an actual history of lying. Some insight on her character would have gone a long way to justifying the film, but we get none of that and too much of the drama around her friendship with Jack and her forging career. It makes for an unsatisfying product beneath the two superb performances that sit on top of the film.

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→ June 18, 2018
→ By

Incredibles 2.

Incredibles 2 comes almost fifteen years after the first installment’s release, but takes place immediately after the events of the previous film – literally, as we see Mr. Incredible & his family fighting the Underminer (John Ratzenberger making his obligatory appearance), which is how the first movie ended. That sets off a new story that bears a lot of resemblance to the original but flips the script so that Elastigirl is now the superhero out fighting crime, while Mr. Incredible turns into Mr. Mom and has to feed the kids, help Dash with his math homework, navigate Violet’s first foray into dating, and deal with Jack-Jack’s hitherto unknown array of spontaneously-appearing superpowers. It is just as good as the first movie, but without the boost the first movie got from being new. We know all these characters and we know how their world operates. The magic of meeting them all for the first time is now replaced by the comfort of seeing all the familiar faces and places and hearing those same voices (“daaaaahlink”) after so many years away.

The movie forks early on into two subplots that, of course, will rejoin near the end so someone can save the day – and really, if you can’t figure out where all this is going, you haven’t watched a Pixar movie before. Winston Deaver (Bob Odenkirk) is a communications tycoon, something Frozone explains to us in a clumsy aside worthy of an SVU episode, and a longtime fan of superheroes, just as his father was. He and his sister (Catherine Keener) have a plan to make supers legal again by launching a PR campaign around Elastigirl, putting a camera in her uniform and then letting the public see just what good work she’s doing fighting crime. She gets an opportunity to do so in suspiciously short order, saving a brand-new monorail from total disaster, which introduces her to a new villain, the Screenslaver, who says we’re all spending too much time looking at our phones (duh) so he’s going to cause chaos to wake us all up (good luck with that).

* I kept trying to figure out what the pun in his name might be, since its sounds like “winst endeavor” every time anyone says it. Google tells me “winst” is the Dutch word for profit, but of course it’s pronounced “vinst,” and that’s a long way to go for a pun anyway.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Mr. Incredible learns that parenting is hard. Some of the jokes are a little too familiar – yes, I’ve been through the new math versus old math thing, and still think the way my daughter’s school teaches long division is dumb – but most are at least funny, notably the sight gags. But it’s Jack-Jack who steals pretty much every scene he’s in. His numerous superpowers, a few of which were previewed in his fight against Syndrome (who, fortunately, does not magically re-appear in this film) at the end of the first movie, are pretty funny on their own. He also ends up in a fight scene with a tenacious raccoon that is by far the movie’s best sequence, busting out all of his powers and flabbergasting his sleep-deprived father – who, of course, decides not to tell Elastigirl about any of this while she’s out saving the world and trying to convince the public to make supers legal again.

The problem with Incredibles 2, other than the lack of newness – there are some new supers but they’re not that interesting, except maybe Void (Sophia Bush), who needed more to do – is that the villain is meh. You’ll probably figure out who it is fairly quickly, and then you’ll spend the rest of the film trying to figure out the villain’s motivation, which is not terribly convincing, and certainly doesn’t do enough to justify the plan to make supers illegal on a permanent basis. The exposition required to get to that point gives the film its one slow-down moment, and it’s not sufficiently credible to explain everything that the villain has done or is about to do.

The resolution, however, is a blast, literally and figuratively, with Jack-Jack again playing a critical role, as he and the family make use of his powers and his growing ability to control them. Brad Bird, the director and writer of both Incredibles movies, reprises his role as E in another fantastic sequence where she bonds with Jack-Jack (and, of course, makes him a new superhero costume). Even the ending leaves it open so that if they do decide to make this a trilogy, Bird can write the script right from the moment where the family takes off to go stop another crime. It’s very good, almost as good as the first one, but it could have been tighter.

The Pixar short film that airs before this – after the seven trailers, one of which was for Christopher Robin and five of which were for movies you couldn’t pay me to see – was Bao, a twisted, funny, and very sweet story about being a parent and letting go. The first ever Pixar short directed by a woman, Bao gives us a wife who makes exquisite xiao long baozi, the steamed dumplings that look a bit like a Hershey’s kiss in its wrapper – or, as it turns out, a lot like a little head, as one day the woman starts to bite into one of her dumplings only to have it cry out like a baby, sprout arms and legs, and then grow like a child. Eventually, the little bao starts to grow up and become a teenager and then a young adult who brings home a fiancée – blonde, and definitely not Asian – which really pushes mom over the edge. There’s one slightly demented scene in the short, which I thought was hilarious, but the end will have almost any parent in the audience tearing up. I know opinions on Bao are mixed but I think it’s one of their best shorts ever.

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→ May 29, 2018
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Beast.

Who is the actual Beast of this taut, Hitchcockian thriller’s title? Although we’re led to believe from the start that it’s the rakish, mysterious outsider, who quickly becomes the suspect in a series of killings of young girls on the British Crown Dependency of Jersey, the title, like many other names and aspects of this intense and well-acted film, carries more than one meaning. (It’s available to rent on amazon.)

Beast is the debut feature from director and screenwriter Michael Pearce, who has just a handful of British TV credits to his name, and hinges on a star turn from Irish actress Jessie Buckley as Moll, a young woman in her mid-20s who lives with her domineering mother and senile father in a giant house that still feels awfully close on screen. The film opens with Moll’s birthday party, at which she is quickly upstaged by her beautiful sister, leading Moll to flee to go out dancing all night, eventually leading her to a chance encounter with Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a rifle-toting loner who lives on his own and seems to be the only person who treats Moll as an individual. His status as an outsider from polite society – ironic, as he’s of old Jersey stock, evidenced by his French surname, Deneuve – makes him an easy target for the police as they look for the man who’s raped and killed three teenaged girls on the small island, pushing Moll into the quandary of having to lie to protect her new lover or to question the possibility that he’s a murderer.

Pascal posterAlthough the obvious implication of the title and the posters showing Flynn out of focus at the front of the picture is that Pascal is or might be the beast, the script regularly offers us potential interpretations of the term. Moll herself has something in her past that’s revealed in stages over the course of the film, but it’s clear from the start that she is at least a complex character with something serious and unaddressed inside of her, based on something she does before leaving the house during her party. There’s a graphic scene later in the film involving an animal Moll shoots under Pascal’s training that also reveals an unexpected rage within Moll that will also be gradually and incompletely explained as the film progresses. And her mother, Hillary (Geraldine James), who favors her other two children over Moll, is utterly terrifying in her controlling nature, reducing Moll to a blubbering child, and her instantaneous shifts to everything-is-okay mode, even concluding one scolding with, “Let’s all be friends again.” Even as we’re given a Moll-Pascal relationship that could be dangerous, we’re given plain evidence that the relationship between Hillary and her mother is downright toxic.

Pascal’s name itself feels like another ironic twist in a film laden with irony and misdirection. Pascal’s wager argues that a bet on God’s existence, and thus eternal life after death, has a positive payoff if correct but little or no negative cost if wrong, while a bet against God’s existence, thus living a life of sin, has a huge negative cost if wrong and little to no benefit if correct. Beast‘s version of Pascal’s wager for Moll is flipped on its head – she can bet that he’s not the killer, but that bet carries some rather substantial downside risk for her, and she may actually be chasing the illusion of love rather than a true version of it. Even when she sees a glimpse of what Pascal is capable of doing when angry, and gets evidence from her very creepy cop friend (or cousin?) that Pascal has hurt someone before, she still decides to believe in her lover rather than anything else she’s seen – and we are left in the dark right up until the end of the film on whether she made the right call.

The ending of Beast is wonderfully ambiguous as well; after Pascal does something I would call unforgivable, the tenor shifts, and the last layers of Moll’s exterior are peeled back, and their entire relationship changes color to something much darker and bleaker. Buckley’s performance as Moll is riveting – I doubt there will be five better performances by lead actresses in all of 2018 – as she seems to portray a set of interrelated characters all rolled up into one, at times appearing to be an awkward teenager, at times an independent and headstrong adult. The film also gives us clues as to her states of mind or roles within scenes by changing Buckley’s hairstyle, whether it’s pulled back, tightly curled, frizzy, even a little mussed, just enough to alter her mien and put her in different footing in each setting. (Also, I know that the fairy tale character’s hair isn’t red, but the scenes of Moll walking through the forest gave me a Little Red Riding Hood vibe … and we’re left to wonder if Pascal is a real human or just a wolf in disguise.)

The scenes with Cliff and one with a stark, accented policewoman from off island are a bit forced, and it’s unclear why Moll or Pascal would be interrogated without attorneys or would agree to it when not obligated to stay; those are the only times when the tension flags and the element that puts the viewer right into the film starts to fade. The remainder of Beast is utterly intense from start to finish, and the conclusion is just ambiguous enough to let the viewer come up with another interpretation, Memento-like, to everything that came before. This deserves a much wider audience, and Buckley in particular should be on everyone’s short list for acting awards in the fall.

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→ December 3, 2017
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The Florida Project.

The Florida Project is the best movie I have seen so far in 2017. Granted, it’s December 3rd, and there are many movies left to be seen, but I will go out on a limb and guess that when I’ve seen all the likelies I will still end up with this bold, empathetic film at or very near the top of my list. The movie takes a look at a small bit of the American underclass, delivering a slice-of-life story that becomes so much more because of the living, breathing characters that populate it and the script’s obvious regard for its denizens.

The title is a play on words of sorts; it takes place in the Magic Castle, one of the welfare motels around Walt Disney World, a place where residents pay by the week and often must vacate the premises for one night, moving to a neighboring flophouse, because the apartment’s management won’t let anyone stay long enough to establish residency. (I presume Florida has a consecutive-days threshold where a transient guest becomes a tenant and acquires additional rights.) The property manager is Bobby (Willem Dafoe), who plays an important role in the lives of the two central characters, single mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), as they live through a period of a few weeks at the start of Moonee’s summer break from school.

The movie shifts focus frequently, but the bulk of the story is told from the eyes of the kids, Moonee, her friend Scout, and new friend Jancy, with whom the first two get acquainted when they are caught spitting on Jancy’s mother’s car – because that’s the sort of thing you do all day when there’s no school, little money, and lots of time to fill. The three head off on daily adventures in the neighborhood, which is mostly filled with other low-end housing complexes and tacky stores selling Disney paraphernalia, finding trouble when it doesn’t find them first.

The struggles of the adults in their lives play out right in front of them, including the central struggle, paying the rent. Much of what happens in The Florida Project mirrors the problems Matthew Desmond covered in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: paying the rent means working, which means someone has to watch the kids, which either costs money or means leaning on neighbors, friends, even strangers, so some people don’t work. Halley is an unemployed stripper whom we see selling knockoff perfumes to tourists for cash and who eventually (and inevitably) starts turning tricks to pay the rent, which precipitates the crisis that turns this movie into a routine slice-of-life piece into a story with an arc and a conclusion. Her background is never discussed, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume she’s a victim of something traumatic, especially given her disproportionate responses to even minor disappointments. Halley feels like a fictional incarnation of Sen. Orrin Hatch’s “people who won’t help themselves,” but while she’s unsympathetic on the screen, it’s also quite easy to see how she could feel thoroughly trapped by her environment. There’s no path for her out of poverty, and she’s basically one mistake away from losing her home and/or her kid.

Moonee is the real heart of this movie, and Prince, who was six at the time of filming, gives one of the best performances of the year. She’s mischievous, vivacious, and perceptive, adept at manipulating adults and navigating their world, often tumbling out adult words that you don’t expect to hear from a six-year-old’s mouth. She’s the ringleader of the three kids, and is almost totally unflappable, even when crises seem to unfold around her; when they cause real trouble, she’s the one trying to come up with the cover story. You can see glimpses of the impact this life is having on her, but she’s also still at an age where she’s resilient to setbacks, and her bond with Bobby, while seldom directly referenced, is one of the best emotional threads in the story. (Prince, who reminds me a bit of English actress Honeysuckle Weeks, and her two young co-stars did an adorable interview about making the film with Variety.)

Dafoe also delivers the best performance I’ve seen from him, even though Bobby is probably a bit too good to be true – he’s likely poorly paid, constantly dealing with tenants who are late on the rent or causing trouble, and often doesn’t have the money to undertake needed repairs, but he’s still got a heart of gold, especially where Moonee is concerned. The scene where he sees a non-resident adult talking to a group of the project’s kids as they play is one of the film’s most gripping moments, giving insight into Bobby’s character and setting his temperament apart from the more labile personalities living in the building.

Director/co-writer Sean Baker employs some subtle perspective shifts, some just varying the distance to the characters, but getting particular value from dropping the camera to the kids’ level even when the adults are the center of the scene. The Florida Project would be utterly joyless to watch without the kids – even though it would be true to life – and Baker uses the kids’ storyline both to provide some needed relief from the depressing reality of Halley’s life and to show how the wonder of childhood isn’t tied to wealth or possessions, but to time and that sense of adventure. That contrast between Moonee’s view of the world and Halley’s parallels the other, unspoken contrast between the story in this movie and the fantasy world in the shadow of which the film occurs. The Magic Castle may not quite be the Unhappiest Place on Earth, but it feels close when we see it through Halley’s eyes. The movie ends on a perfect note, as well, as the climax itself, which was not just inevitable but which I would say was the only possible outcome of what had come before in the script, gives way to an utterly priceless concluding sequence. Yes, we know it’s temporary, and we all know what will come afterward, but for that one last moment, we see the characters leave the world behind and run for joy.

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→ January 26, 2017
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La La Land.

My top 100 prospects ranking is rolling out this week, with prospects #40 to #21 in today’s post. Over at Paste, I reviewed the new edition of Citadels, a classic game from 2000 that plays 2-8, and comfortably plays five-plus – I’d say it’s best with at least four.

Imagine if Once were set in L.A., opened with a classic musical-film song and dance number, and starred two ridiculously beautiful people wearing nice clothes and singing happier songs?

Once didn’t get the love it deserved from the Oscars, although it later became a cult hit and a Tony Award-winning musical. La La Land is a lot more ambitious and bigger-budget than Once was, and it’s going to win a lot more Academy Awards, but at their hearts are quite similar stories about love affairs that just can’t last, set to music.

Of course, that’s a bit glib – La La Land is more than just that. It’s part homage to the bygone era of the big Hollywood musical. It’s a feast for the eyes, with vivid colors in the background and on Emma Stone. It’s a little bit parody, and then it folds a little back in on itself and plays along with its own gag. It’s also a really good time, which makes it a rarity among the Best Picture nominees this year. La La Land is an outright pleasure to watch, even with the half-and-half ending, and with so many movies draped in grief, regret, sorrow, and isolation this year, it stands out even more.

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling play Mia and Seb, two beautiful people struggling in their careers in LA – she an aspiring actress working in a coffee shop, he a jazz pianist playing Christmas music in a nightclub and then, in a sight gag that Stone turns into something much more, in a bad ’80s cover band. They meet more than once and don’t hit it off right away, but eventually the movie keeps pushing them together until there’s a spark, along with a song about how there’s no spark between them. Eventually, he gets a medium break, playing in a jazz-pop band led by his old frenemy Keith (played by John Legend), which forms the first wedge between the star-crossed lovers, although they manage to careen back and forth until the movie’s epilogue, five years later, where we see that, even in the movies, sometimes you just can’t have everything after all.

This is a musical, but not an old-time musical. If you just saw the opening scene, a huge ensemble dance number set in a traffic jam on a highway on-ramp, you’d expect something like the classics, where people just spontaneously start dancing while singing their dialogue. Instead, this is a regular movie with a handful of songs, and it isn’t until the end, when Emma Stone sings for her Oscar with “The Audition Song” (earning the movie one of its two Best Song nominations) near the very end, that we get another flashback to the halcyon days of Hollywood. Did critics who’ve said of La La Land that “they don’t make movies like this any more!” realize that Hollywood never made movies like this in the past?

Stone really owns this film in just about every way. Her character is better-developed, more three-dimensional, and shows real growth over the film. When Mia and Seb have their first quarrel as lovers, Mia holds her own in the argument, and Stone manages to portray inner turmoil on a face that’s outwardly composed until Seb finally insults her enough for her to leave. That’s Stone’s greatest achievement in the movie – her character is often put in situations where she’s turning from one emotion to another in a flash, and she can do this without making you aware that this is just someone acting.

The movie also uses her as a blank canvas of sorts, running her through an array of dresses in solid, vibrant colors that seemed to underscore the fact that, hey, we’re in California, where everything is sunny and bright and colorful all the time. It doesn’t hurt that she can get away with wearing all of those colors, or that her eyes seemed to be green in one scene and blue in another, but it ensures that your eyes are on her in nearly every scene.

Gosling, meanwhile, can turn on the charm when his character permits, but Seb is prone to this sort of insular, sulking behavior that I thought was as offputting as his strange amalgam of New York and Philly accents. And neither of these two is winning any awards for dancing, although, as always, we must give more credit to the woman for dancing backward and in heels.

Some of the L.A. jokes were a little too on the nose – the Prius gag, the gluten-free line – and the movie is funnier when it draws humor from situations rather than punchlines. When Seb is trying to explain jazz to Mia, and she answers with, “What about Kenny G?” it’s his reaction that drives the entire scene. He is totally beyond exasperated, like he wants to claw the skin off his face, yet is so passionate about the subject and obviously smitten with her that he tries to talk her down off the smooth-jazz ledge. It’s probably my favorite Gosling scene in the movie, especially since Seb’s ego returns to the center of his character towards the end of the film.

The movie ends with a dream sequence that shows an alternate reality five years on, what might have happened if things went … well, the other way, and I think here director and writer Damien Chazelle did two things: paid homage to classic musicals in more explicit fashion, and reminded the Academy just one more time to vote for him. I caught direct allusions to An American in Paris and Royal Wedding, and Funny Face, but I’m no expert on the genre and assume I missed many more. In that sense, it was the most engrossing part of the movie – you’re looking at the flip side of the movie’s internal reality, and also watching the two of them move through a rolling reference to Hollywood history.

I’ve seen four of the Best Picture nominees and hope to see as many as eight – I have zero interest in a Mel Gibson movie, and even less in that particular one – although I might only get Lion after the awards ceremony. Of the four I’ve seen, I think La La Land would get my vote. It just does more, and does more well, than Moonlight or Manchester by the Sea, both great movies but less ambitious than this one. I think any would be a worthy winner, but I rank things, and I currently have La La Land at #1.

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