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National Anthem (2023)
Too much going on, yet not enough
Charlie Plummer is one of the best American actors who's still largely "undiscovered." In LEAN ON PETE (2017), his quietly searing portrayal of a sensitive boy trying to lead a life of kindness in a cruel and grinding world helped to elevate that film to one of the twenty-first century's best. It's a movie that's not wholly different from NATIONAL ANTHEM, although gay director Andrew Haigh (WEEKEND, ALL OF US STRANGERS) took an asexual approach that left most of the queerness of Plummer's character as merely a subtextual potentiality. The potential parallels between the two films--combined with the fact that Plummer never disappoints in pictures as varied as SPONTANEOUS, KING JACK, ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, and more--left me excited to see this movie. Unfortunately, while National Anthem is not a bad movie, it never really achieves the spark of greatness. It left me largely bored and disappointed.
Director Luke Gilford, in his feature film debut, strives for a few different emotional tones but doesn't really nail any of them. There are sex scenes, but they're shot with the strange lighting and angles of some 1980s music video, and so they're not really sexy. There are romantic scenes, but despite strong performances from Plummer as Dylan and his love interest played by Eve Lindley, there's not much chemistry--their romance is more of a coincidental shrug than anything that conveys passion. There are scenes of romantic conflict driven by Rene Rosado, the third part of the love triangle, but the development of Rosado's character is cliche and nearly nonexistent. There aren't any clear stakes to the question of "will they or won't they," so the conflict is dramatically inert and its resolution unsatisfying. The film is ostensibly a showcase of queer joy in the hidden world of gay rodeos in the American West, but it never feels very joyful, inspiring, or uplifting because there is extremely little humor or spontaneity; instead of taking in this world through Dylan's perspective, we see it in the form of docudrama photojournalism--colorful characters smiling for the camera--which gives us a nice glimpse of an unfamiliar world but never really lets us feel like we're taking part in it. There are scenes of coming-of-age family drama that perhaps come closest to achieving their goal because of how well Plummer plays off the actors portraying his mother and little brother, but even that drama is pretty tired and unremarkable. There are memorable moments, but they don't cohere into any strong thread. On top of all that, there's a psychedelic drug scene that is inconsequential; scenes of work that don't seem like they're depicting real jobs; a tragic action climax that is random, forced, and predictable; and, of course, the titular performance of the national anthem, which fails to add any real thesis to the movie's narrative sloppiness.
I've written many negative things, yet the movie itself was ultimately fine if unremarkable, and I'm willing to round up with my star rating because its heart is ultimately in the right place. I'm sure many people, perhaps especially young queer people growing up in rural America, will see a lot to relate to and enjoy in this movie, and I'm grateful for that. Personally, however, I was just kinda bored.
Longlegs (2024)
Aesthetically great, narratively awful
When the theater was emptying out, I overheard a kid of maybe fourteen bragging to his friend that he had "predicted everything from the beginning." The third-act exposition dump in this movie is so convoluted, contrived, and ridiculous, however, that if this kid was telling the truth, I'd suggest he seek psychiatric treatment for his psychosis immediately. This movie starts out very strong and has a lot to admire, but its ultimate overreliance on artificial and nonsensical plot elements left me feeling disappointed.
My highest praise goes to the cinematography of Andres Arochi, who somehow doesn't have a single other credit with any IMDb votes. I'm curious to see more of his work. He makes the camera an active presence in the film, filling every frame with eye-gripping dread. The movie's sets feel both utterly normal and deeply unsettling thanks to how Arochi lenses them, and that sense of visual suspense is the sole source of the stars I'm willing to rate this film.
The acting is also quite strong, although the characters are a little too static to bring out the best of the actors. Blair Underwood is fantastic as a jovial detective and family man, Alicia Witt is compelling as the mysteriously monotone mother of the main character, and Shafin Karim and Daniel Bacon both shine in their single scenes as a psychiatric warden and a coroner. Maika Monroe, who is generally fantastic and mesmerizing even in not-very-good movies like HOT SUMMER NIGHTS, is equally up to the task here, but unfortunately her character never has any scenes that really allow Monroe to show her depth or range, so the performance ends up seeming pretty one-note from beginning to end. Nicholas Cage is Nicholas Cage, perhaps a little distracting in this role, and his titular "Longlegs" psychopath is ultimately not as interesting or scary as the opening scene suggests he will be. A scene with Kiernan Shipka, star of writer-director Oz Perkins's prior Satanic horror mystery THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER (a superior albeit still not very good movie), is distractingly bad here; I think Perkins directed her to be inhuman with her speech and intonations, but it just comes across as bad acting rather than creepiness or menace.
Those are the best things I can say about this movie. Overall, the plot is one of diminishing returns--an extensively detailed yet somehow very flimsy supernatural contrivance where the clues and the mystery and the motivations aren't really interesting because they're not rooted in anything other than the gibberish words on the pages of Perkins's screenplay. The third act is awful, with redundant flashbacks, a backstory narration dump, dialogue, and a present-day sequence all showing (but mostly telling) us the same thing over and over again. The motivations are vague rather than ambiguous, the twists random rather than revealing, and the whole thing just too silly and stupid for me to bear.
I don't begrudge anyone who's able to enjoy this movie. Perhaps a little substance abuse would make it easier to go with the flow and simply enjoy the aesthetics. For me, however, the movie was an overlong and underdeveloped disappointment.
MaXXXine (2024)
Weakest film in the trilogy, with nothing new to say
This movie is enjoyable enough to watch until the climax arrives, when it becomes apparent that it doesn't add up to much. I hesitate to say that the movie "has nothing to say" because it does have plenty of things it wants to comment on--perhaps too many different little things. It's just that none of these things are really all that fresh, witty, insightful, or provocative. A lot of what is said in the movie has already been said elsewhere and better--including in the previous films of Ti West!
Some topics that this film fleetingly references, and the movies that did it better: the competitiveness of show business (cf. ALL ABOUT EVE, SHOWGIRLS), pop culture's glorification of serial killers via television news (NATURAL BORN KILLERS), a docudrama and metaportrayal of making a horror movie in which the process behind creating the artistic vision seems to bleed into the real lives of the filmmakers in chilling ways (BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, BODY DOUBLE), the gritty ladder climb from pornography to horror to respectable cinema (KNIFE+HEART), moral panic around pornography (X), moral panic around horror movies (CENSOR), moral panic around 1980s "satanic cults killing babies" in every town in America (West's own HOUSE OF THE DEVIL), somebody so desperate for Hollywood fame that they'll do anything to achieve it (PEARL), the creepy and slippery border between acting and living as an actor (MAY DECEMBER), organized Christian leaders who turn out to be murderous hypocrites willing to go to any evil length in the name of "fighting for good" (THE FIRST OMEN, SUSPIRIA)....
I could keep going on. My point is that this movie says a lot of things, but it doesn't say any of them particularly well, so much so that while watching the movie I was constantly being reminded of better films. Sadly, in no respect would I ever say that this movie "said it best." There isn't a single scene that raises the bar or changes the stakes concerning how any particular subject could be presented, neither on a substantive level or even in a more superficial stylistic way. Although the movie is consistently fine (uniformly well acted, with convincing production design and some engaging cinematography and editing), it's never all that engaging or memorable. Except for one scene involving the process behind making a special effects mask, there's not much worth mentioning. The characters aren't very interesting or deep (except maybe Giancarlo Esposito as Maxine's agent). The slashings and death scenes are few and unremarkable. The horror scenes are not at all scary or suspenseful, and the action scenes are not at all nail-biting. The climax is predictable, the twist is full of plot holes, and its ultimate message is so preposterous and exaggerated that it struck me as a complete misfire.
X was fun. PEARL was fantastic. This is just a hollow sequel. West threw enough quality ingredients into the blender so that some people might get some enjoyment out of it, but I was largely just disappointed.
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
I honestly don't understand how anyone can like this
I have seen all of Yorgos Lanthimos's feature films, starting with DOGTOOTH when it was first available in the US, a movie I eagerly anticipated and that I remember vividly and fondly fifteen years later. I have liked or loved all of his movies; my least favorite would be ALPS, but even that I found thought-provoking and amusing, definitely more good than bad. Yet now I am confronted with KINDS OF KINDNESS, which is so atrociously awful, so lacking in merit than I can only imagine that Lanthimos is being deliberately hostile to his audience, purposely trying to squander the good will he has built up among the mainstream in recent years.
There is almost nothing positive I can say about this film. It earned a few laughs from me from shock value alone, and it technically held my attention captive as I stared at it, trying to find something of value, but that's literally it. In the end, my time felt violently wasted. Several people walked out of the theater I was in. I honestly can't fathom why it has received above average plaudits from critics, IMDb users, and film festivals.
By my measure, this is not satire or allegory or even surrealism. All of those genres, in order to be effective, need at least some intersection with reality. For example, SHOWGIRLS is delicious satire of show business, misogyny, and double standards. The acting is absurdly exaggerated, the plot far exceeds melodrama, and the screenplay has the characters saying things that no rational human being would say. YET: it's always clear that these people are versions of the irreconcilable beliefs we hold about sex, art, and work. The main character's boyfriend, for instance, can loudly sex shame her for being a stripper with aspirations of becoming a showgirl--showgirl dancing isn't "art," plus "everybody's got AIDS!"--but the "fine art" dancing that he would rather her be performing is indistinguishable from her giving him a lap dance on stage. What the difference? Only that in the "high art" version, he's the one directing her. Throughout, SHOWGIRLS--as well as any other effective satire--provides a key for deciphering what its real-world target is. The presentation may be exaggerated, absurd, etc., but it's clear that this presentation is just "taking literal" what we tend to believe more metaphorically.
Likewise with surrealism. There's less of a one-to-one allegorical correlation between a surrealist film and reality than there is with satire, but there still has to be some kind of intersection with the world we recognize; otherwise, what's the point? Consider the films of Luis Buñuel--for instance, THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL. Much of it makes no sense. The plot depends upon a physical impossibility: without any scientific explanation, people find themselves unable to leave a party while the outside world is literally unable to access the party venue where they are trapped. We will never be trapped in this situation ourselves; indeed, as a sci-fi premise, the improbability of what unfolds isn't even worth exploring as a thought experiment. And yet it works very well because the moments, the emotions, the characters themselves are all recognizable. We know what it's like to FEEL trapped at a party, and Buñuel shows us a new way of looking at those feelings. Many of us know what it's like to be too timid to be the first person to depart from a party that has passed its peak, but what understanding of that feeling do we gain if we choose to explore them through the unlikely lens of a sci-fi disaster thriller? A lot, in fact! The movie is mesmerizing and hilarious.
My point is that these examples and so many others give their audiences something to hold onto: "this is what people do in situations such as this" or "this is what the world would look like if we really took seriously what it is you claim to believe." KINDS OF KINDNESS gives us NONE of that. The acting is atrociously bad, and it seems like the editor just stitched together the first take of every line reading. The plot meanders from one absurdity to the next with complete disregard for how the pieces might fit together. It contains so many disparate pieces that the center absolutely cannot hold. Any individual moment might have potential for meaning--what if your boss controlled every aspect of your personal life? What if dogs were people and people were dogs?--but it's all surface, no depth, no juxtaposition even. People might be animals, sure, but what does that have to do with paranoia or jealousy or cannibalism or grief or the myriad other ideas that are all supposed to be part of the same story? Throughout this film, I kept hoping that the focus would rack, that something would click into place, that suddenly all (or at least some) of the points that Lanthimos was driving at would make sense to me. But trust me, that moment never comes. You could rearrange many of the scenes in this movie, remove some, replace them with completely different scenes, and the movie as a whole would hardly change. The experience of watching this is one of hostility and malice, like Lanthimos is punishing you for wanting to see a movie about kindness.
If it were funnier, more engaging, better acted, more stylishly shot, more amusingly written, more *anything* really, then maybe that alone would suffice. But instead this movie is cheap cheap cheap: cringey acting, serviceable production design, and a screenplay that feels like a first draft written in a single sitting by someone who had no idea what they wanted to write about when they first sat down. If this were a directorial debut starring unknown actors giving equivalent performances, then this movie wouldn't even have a 15 on Metacritic.... because it wouldn't have even been greenlit or released in the first place. I honestly want to understand how anybody got any satisfaction out of viewing this, and to anyone who hasn't seen it, I can only suggest that you save three hours of your life for anything else.
A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)
The apocalypse is just the backdrop
You wouldn't expect it from the title or the marketing material, but this is really a character-driven drama about death and dying--and a vehicle for Lupita Nyong'o to show off her exquisite acting--and only a sci-fi horror thriller as an afterthought. I suppose the plot couldn't quite exist without the premise of the world being suddenly torn apart, but the specifics of the lore from A QUIET PLACE are more incidental than anything. That's a good thing; the last thing we needed was some exposition explaining where the aliens came from, and this movie doesn't bother with any of that.
Nyong'o is incredible, displaying a broad range of the human emotional experience with her expressive face and very few words. Her eyes sell the terror of the film's premise far more than any visual or sound effects. From beginning to end, she makes the film's world seem real, and there would be no point in the movie existing if not for her. Alex Wolff and Djimon Hounsou are also fantastic in much smaller roles, and while Joseph Quinn is perfectly fine as the co-lead, something about either his performance or his character's underdeveloped backstory or both make him the weakest link in the movie. It's hard to fathom why exactly he behaves the way he does, and nothing in the movie makes clear just how much he's motivated by fear, passivity, romantic attraction, pity, and/or something else. A better actor--perhaps even Alex Wolff--could have conveyed something more convincing.
I'm avoiding spoilers in this review. In short, if you're looking for a third thriller about alien invaders who hunt with their ears, then this should satisfy you by providing just enough of what you need in terms of sound-based action horror. If you're like me, however, and don't expect that you need "more of the same" or "another retread prequel overexplaining what's already obvious," then know that this movie offers a lot more than that: a moving humanist story amazingly performed by Lupita Nyong'o.
The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023)
Entertaining, but nothing new
This sunbaked suspense film, which plays out like a bottle episode of some Yuma County PD procedural, is pastiche but not postmodern. It proudly wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve--name dropping Terrence Malick's melancholy murderers from BADLANDS as being more worthy of emulation than the more popular and presentable BONNIE AND CLYDE, for instance--but it never really reveals anything new about any of these genres or films, neither explicitly nor more subtly. It's not NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, despite an appearance from Gene Jones, who will probably always be remembered as the dimwitted convenience store "friendo" forced by Anton Chigurh to gamble for his own life on a coin toss; in fact, it's not FARGO or any other Coen Brothers film either, despite the echoes given off by the brainy and brawny duo of sociopathic bank robbers played by Richard Brake and Nicholas Logan. The movie's sensibilities don't even qualify as neonoir or spaghetti western; rather, it's much more old-fashioned than that. It's more TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE than Sergio Leone, more DETOUR than A SIMPLE PLAN, more John Wayne than TWIN PEAKS. Although set in 1973, this movie's screenplay seems like it was pulled straight from 1953.
And there's nothing wrong with that! It's a good film, a crisp and entertaining 90 minutes. It's well acted and well directed throughout, with no false steps. It kept my attention at all times, with several surprises, and I felt more or less satisfied when it was all over. Nevertheless, it seems mostly forgettable when all is said and done. What does this movie have to offer that we haven't already seen before? What does it have to say to us? Nothing much. If it had unparalleled style and panache, then that wouldn't matter, but it doesn't really have that either. Instead, we get some predictable substance packaged in some above average style, worthy enough to pass the time but unlikely to ever be ranked on anyone's list of the year's best.
I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
A painfully recognizable and deeply unsettling depiction of dissociation
This is a powerful film that manages to capture dissociation in look, sound, face, and voice. Call it what you will-the melancholy of remembering a place (or a tv show, or a feeling) that you can never revisit; the alienation of growing apart from your childhood friends and having no clear pathway to filling that void; the easy comfort of slipping into the high-stakes catharsis of television narratives; the unfairness of familial dysfunction and estrangement; the dissonance of working a job that bears no similarity to what you feel to be your own inner richness; or the utter dysphoria of lacking the words or the actions or both to somehow make the body you're living in comport with the life you feel it deserves-I SAW THE TV GLOW somehow conveys all of this and more with unsettling, aching realism without really ever saying any of it in explicit words and images.
There's so much to applaud here for making that so. The original soundtrack, with its songs that sound familiar although you've certainly never heard them before and their lyrics that seem to be hitting precisely at what's going on even though you can't quite follow them all, is of course a huge standout, and it's one of the greatest soundtracks to come out in a long time. The cinematography by Eric Yue is also exceptional. In color and light and focus, Yue has somehow perfectly rendered the feeling of being a child on the cusp of puberty and adulthood, up past his bedtime on a summer night-the kind of adolescent summer night that can easily go on right past dawn since there are no jobs or alarm clocks or bills or responsibilities to demand that you go to bed at a decent hour. The cinematography is sultry, carnivalesque, and ripe for adventure, but it also hints of danger and otherworldliness.
And of course there are the performances of Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maddy, Justice Smith as Owen, and the exceptional Ian Foreman as young Owen. Lundy-Paine and Smith play characters half their age (as well as those same characters when they closer to their age), and it's perhaps some of the most effective "twenty-five-year-old playing a teenager" casting I've ever seen. Lundy-Paine transforms from a chill, overly hip, 14-year-old goth girl to a just-barely-hanging on, failing-to-fit-in, 16-year-old lesbian loner to a twentysomething drifter with severe mental health challenges in an especially captivating and fully convincing way. Her performance is a far cry from the cheerful, well-adjusted younger sister she played in ATYPICAL. Smith, who is always rather monotone, also gives his best performance here, his "expressionless" voice and face barely concealing the turbulent seismic activity raging in his soul. A line towards the end of the film, when he remarks how much he loves his family, is still haunting me.
And of course Jane Schoenbrun's writing and direction are what make it all work. I gave up on trying to finish their tedious prior film, the highly acclaimed but frustratingly uneventful microbudget horror WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR. My dislike of that film prevented me from watching this one sooner. But all the silent pain, the alienation, and the surrealism of that previous film is done with maximal efficacy here, and it's anything but boring. Rather, it's riveting, and the frequent clips of "The Pink Opaque," a fictional fusion of "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" and "The X-Files" and any number of horror/sci-fi shows that captivated teens in the late nineties, manage to simultaneously be a hilarious, pitch-perfect parody as well as absolute nightmare fuel.
This is an excellent and evocative film, highly recommended for anyone who likes Millennial period pictures, psychological horror, and/or queer coming-of-age dramas.
Good Boy (2022)
Suspenseful and Unsettling
This is a lean, taut suspense film--only 80 minutes long, and more than half of that is truly suspenseful and unnerving. There are only four actors in the movie, and they all do an excellent job of seeming like real people with real motivations, blind spots, and flaws. For the most part, writer/director Viljar Bøe does an excellent job of showing us things that don't quite make sense and convincing us that it's not necessarily irrational or unreasonable. He creates a feeling akin to being seduced into a toxic relationship, where in hindsight you realize how abundant all the red flags were but in the moment you're willing to rationalize and excuse every individual one. If this is allegorical horror, then its allegory is for the poor "NTA" victims on the Reddit thread "Am I The A**H***?", who post detailed narratives of having been gaslit by psychopaths yet seem totally clueless about the blame not being their own.
That said, once the mystery is revealed about midway through the movie, the movie does lose a great deal of its suspense as characters quickly devolve into horror movie stereotypes. While the second half is disappointing, it's not so bad that it brings the whole film down--plus, the final moments are fresh and surprising enough that they'll guarantee the film's haunting images will stick with you for a few days. On top of that, Bøe's writing wisely leaves a lot of backstory unsaid, leaving audiences with plenty of queasy questions that they won't want to think about the answers to. A lesser film would feel the need to tidy things up more.
I'd recommend this for anyone who's into disturbing thrillers. The strong acting, masterful editing, and original premise are enough to earn a solid recommendation, even if the final act doesn't fully live up to the movie's promised potential. I eagerly anticipate Bøe's next film.
In a Violent Nature (2024)
A failed experiment
Horror is my favorite genre. I saw TERRIFIER 2 twice in theaters. When I first saw the trailer for this film with its evocative title, I had high hopes for it... but also suspected that it could be pretty boring. The trailer itself is pretty boring. A slasher film that stays in the perspective of a lumbering monster has never been done before, so perhaps it could make audiences feel dread in a whole new way. I praise the idea of the experiment, but I also think it failed to set proper controls. Either way, the end result is incredibly boring.
What the trailer suggests is real-time mayhem. It even hints at the possibility of a single take. The movie isn't really either of those things, and this is the most significant reason why the experiment fails. From the very beginning, there are artificial cuts; we don't just follow the killer as he walks up upon his first victim--rather, there's some editing that advances the pace along. What would be a 90-second walk down a driveway instead becomes a 75-second walk because of a couple of quick time elapsing cuts. Why bother? A 90-second take could be tedious, but it would also be immersive. A 75-second edit can only be tedious since your eyes and imagination are literally jarred out of being placed in the scene. The whole film is like this: writer/director Chris Nash wants us to feel immersed in the killer's movements but isn't daring enough with his editing to do full immersion. There's a reason why films like JEANNE DIELMAN (201 min.) and AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (234 min.) with their long, static, unedited shots feel "shorter" than this movie (94 min.): they commit to fully placing us in the unblinking perspectives of their characters. Our gaze fixates, our pupils expand, and our attention holds and absorbs with long takes, whereas edits inevitably lead to "saccades"--our eyes jolt to the change and our attention span reloads to take in the new sight. (Don't believe me? Search for "Motion Pictures and Saccade Patterns," an excellent video about audience eye movements during THERE WILL BE BLOOD.) In short, the very editing that was presumably done to make the scenes briefer and less tedious probably only served to make them more uninteresting, not less.
On top of that, most of the killings aren't even done in a single take. Some of them are, and those are the most effective scenes of horror in the film, but many of the slashings are hindered by jump cuts, deliberately obscured blocking, and off-camera action that only call attention to the film's limited special effects budget. A real-time, unflinching depiction of a murder is a terribly unsettling thing--see IRREVERSIBLE, DANCER IN THE DARK, and DEKALOG: FIVE for some particularly disturbing examples. A movie that just edits together different angles of a murder is simply standard slasher fare and not especially capable of terrifying. That's how most of this movie is, which is another reason why it's a failed experiment.
If Nash had made this movie without all the unnecessary editing, it would have been a more successful experiment but it could've possibly been just as boring of a failure. Most of the acting is quite bad (in part because of the bad writing, which could have been avoided through some more naturalistic improvisation), the backstory is confusing and cliche, and there's nothing on display here that stands out as any indication of excellence--but at least we'd have a more accurate depiction of what appears to be promised by the trailer. I can't recommend this film to anyone--not even horror aficionados--who are likely to feel that their time has been wasted. At one point in the middle of the film, my husband went to the bathroom. When he returned, I filled him in on what he'd missed with a whisper: "He did some walking." We laughed in our shared misery. Perhaps it's possible to make an effective horror movie in this style, but IN A VIOLENT NATURE is certainly not it.
Abigail (2024)
Why is this movie pretending to be something else?
Fifty minutes pass--fifty!--before the filmmakers reveal that Abigail is a vampire. They must think this puts them in the same ranks as PSYCHO--how shocking that the main character is stabbed to death in the shower at the end of the first act!--but Psycho came out in 1960. To release a movie like this in 2024 is to be so stupid as to not realize that the trailer, poster, and all other marketing materials--not to mention any likely word of mouth--will make it perfectly clear to everyone watching this film that the little girl is a vampire. The director even says in the IMDb trivia section that he wants "ballerina vampire" to become a popular Halloween costume. Who on earth do they think will be watching this movie and needing 50 minutes of "mystery" before this big "spoiler"?
That would maybe be okay if those 50 minutes were filled with something worthwhile, but they most certainly are not. The reason the trailer didn't instead try to sell us on just a "kidnapping gone wrong" crime heist mystery is because that mystery is so painfully cliche and hollow. We get three separate moments in which one character goes through the room explaining every single person's backstory. Admittedly, the first round is supposed to be completely wrong and that wrongness is meant to be a joke insofar as it's so stereotypical--but every other round is just as stereotypical, fake sounding, and hollow. And why is that? Maybe because, according to the movie's IMDB trivia page, the screenwriters didn't even write these backstories and had no idea who the characters even were as they were making the movie! Know your audience: we're here to see a little girl biting people in between pirouettes, not to get spoonfed some faux-serious messaging about opioid addiction.
Some of the vampire action in the second half of this very overlong film is pretty fun, but it's much too little too late. Angus Cloud is the only actor who manages to consistently seem like a real person (he's also the first to die, of course), and Alisha Weir as Abigail is also quite good when they're not forcing her to monologue, but for the most part the acting (especially Dan Stevens) is godawful, compounded by the most unnatural sounding writing.
This isn't Psycho, nor is it RESERVOIR DOGS or an Agatha Christie mystery. Know your role, Project X: this is a movie about a ballerina girl vampire. Don't try to be something you're not.
Wyrm (2019)
Two different movies that don't quite add up
WYRM bifurcates into two movies, both of which are very good but neither of which is great. The first is a comedic satire about sexual education for children. The second is an indie dramedy about grief and growing up. I haven't seen the short film on which this is based, but my guess is that it was mostly just one of those and that once writer-director Christopher Winterbauer secured funding to expand it to a feature-length, he whisked in through the back door what probably should have been a new, separate project rather than expanding what was already there. Which is fine, it works-but the second half of the movie does seem very different from what was promised at the start.
The first half is a lightly dystopian satire that's both sci fi and 1990s period film. The titular outcast Wyrm (Theo Taplitz) lives in a world where sexual development is front and center in the education of adolescents and is mediated through ostentatious technology that monitors their sexual behavior. The target of this satire is what queer theorist Lee Edelman would call "reproductive futurity": the idea that American society places a huge premium on procreative hetero-sexuality because "children are the future." In Wyrm's world, bureaucrats are driven to make sure that all children start engaging in healthy, age-appropriate sexual exploration at just the right time so that "no child is left alone": monogamous, moderate sexuality is the key to happiness and health. This world isn't anti-gay in the way one might expect, but it does sideline queer individuals such as the quasi-asexual Wyrm, who is currently struggling with bigger problems than trying to impress a new girlfriend or boyfriend. His developmental "delay," which is made extremely visible by the blinking, padlocked collar around his neck broadcasting his virginity, is only reinforced by his school's wrongheaded emphasis on incentivizing sexuality through shame; by the time the film starts, the fact that he is still a virgin is likely to be a major factor in making him stay a virgin. This aspect of the film is funny and weird and makes for some very memorable, surreal imagery. Halfway through the movie, however, Wyrm achieves the milestone that gets his collar to pop off. At that point, the whole dystopian premise essentially disappears.
The indie dramedy is present throughout the movie, but once Wyrm's collar pops off, it becomes the sole focus. In fact, almost everything in the second half of the film could just be a 1990s period drama with no sci-fi elements whatsoever. Wyrm is grieving the death of his older brother, which has estranged his parents in different directions and has made Wyrm's twin sister (Lulu Wilson) bitter and jaded. Wyrm records interviews with people who knew his very popular, accomplished brother, and in the end he presents his findings on the many complicated forms of grief and memory. This aspect of the film is perfectly fine! Sosie Bacon is excellent as the dead brother's surviving girlfriend, Rosemarie Dewitt is very convincing has Wyrm's lost mother, and Wilson gives a memorable turn as a sister whose grief has manifested as anger. It's all very realistic and touching, but it has almost nothing to do with the other half of the film, and when that premise is completely jettisoned midway through the running time, it leads to a jarring feeling that somehow outweighs the fact that each individual half was quite solid on its own merits. Taplitz, who had the quieter of the two leading roles in 2016's LITTLE MEN, sells every moment of the film and somehow manages to hold it all together, but the movie is nevertheless disjointed.
What I've critiqued is minor, and I would certainly recommend the film to anyone who's curious. But I hope that the next film Winterbauer writes has a more solid structure holding it all together.
Arcadian (2024)
Cool creature design, but that's it
From what I've seen of positive reviews of this movie, there's really only one thing that people enjoy: the creature design of the monsters. They are quite gruesome and memorable--part cockroach, part shoebill stork directly descended from dinosaurs, part hellspawn lyncanthrope, part xenomorph, part uncanny valley katsina doll, part (according to the filmmakers) Disney's Goofy. They behave extremely unpredictably, move in infesting packs, and are not quite like anything I've seen before in a horror film. The movie makes no attempt to explain where they came from, what they are, what they want, or anything else about their natural history, and that's a good choice--the mystery is what keeps them scary. They don't even have any catchy trademark name that all the people in this world refer to them by, which is nice! Benjamin Brewer is foremost a visual effects artist, and this is apparent in the fact that his creature design is the only aspect of this film that is at all good.
Unfortunately, a cool monster design can't sustain even this 90 minute chore. The acting is fine, but the writing and directing give the actors little opportunity to make their characters and world feel lived in. I never got a real sense that these were three family members who depended upon each other and had limited interaction with any other human beings; they seemed more like strangers who were teaming up for the first time--or, rather, actors who had just arrived on set. There are no instances I can remember where the characters did (or said) anything that seemed to confirm the reality of their dreary existence. A knife-stabbing "Are we not men?" ritual during one dinner scene is the closest example I can think of, but that peculiarity is undercut by a dozen more examples of half-baked dystopian cosplay. For instance, why is Thomas's haircut so godawful? If you've been cutting your own hair for your entire life--or even if this happens to be the first time that the teenager insisted on cutting his own hair rather than letting his father do it--the end result isn't going to scream "civilization has just ended." Civilization ended fifteen years ago. They would've adapted to having no more Hair Cutteries.
The plot is extremely thin and riddled with implausible character choices as well as numerous extraordinary coincidences. Too often, things happen only because the screenplay needs them to happen. The characters are paper thin, and there's really nothing that this movie even attempts to explore thematically; like lots of other postapocalyptic films, this one doesn't have anything to say about humanity, civilization, or its downfall. All it really has to offer, truly, is a creepy creature design.
That would be fine maybe if the movie were exquisitely edited--if the encounters with the monsters were shot in such a way that they were actually terrifying, nerve-racking, or gripping. They're not. In fact, the blocking of many scenes (for instance, in the cave) doesn't make any logical sense at all; if you can't even figure out the layout that the characters are confined in and what's physically possible within that space, then how can you be concerned about them being trapped or not trapped? Sometimes the camera just cuts and a character has bypassed an obstacle without any explanation. This is a movie where characters overcome obstacles simply through the aid of the screenwriter beginning the next scene. Likewise, the only thing positive I can say about the editing is that the movie ended before it had completely overstayed its welcome.
Feel free to hit that fast forward button and "skim" this movie if you're still curious; as long as you see the ten minutes of monster scenes, then you're not missing anything.
Problemista (2023)
A tired retread of Torres's older, better material
Julio Torres has been presenting his comedy to the public for about eight years now, and I've been a fan of his work for almost all of that period. I was happy to see PROBLEMISTA in theaters even though I knew it would lack the spectacle and the crowd that usually drives me to the theater these days. About half an hour in, my inner voice was reasoning to myself, "Well, it's good you're here in the theater because if you were watching this at home, you'd have probably turned it off by now"-as though feeling obligated to finish something unpleasant all the way through to its bitter end is somehow a good thing. I watched the whole movie and I do not feel the wiser for it. Torres has recycled his earlier bits into something less alive, and his debut film makes me fear that he should stick to shortform comedy.
For someone only vaguely familiar with Torres's work, some of these bits will probably feel fresh, but I couldn't help feeling that most of the scenes were uninspired imitations of bits he did years ago. In some of his earliest standup, he talked about the desperation of turning to Craigslist to find income. He tells the same story here, but in a rushed manner that lacks the "stranger than fiction" relatability of his original material. On SNL, his "Wells for Boys" sketch found immense charm in a very specific portrayal of a daydreaming, sensitive boy; Problemista is bookended with what seems like a more autobiographical spin on this, but with a story and images that failed to connect. Torres's Instagram turns toys and small objects into full-fledged personalities that are loveably annoying, and his object-oriented HBO special MY FAVORITE SHAPES likewise is able to spin an entire surreal universe out of narrating stories about inanimate props. His character in Problemista is likewise supposed to possess this gift, but what we see in the film comes across as idiotic rather than wondrous; his running gag about Cabbage Patch kids with smartphones simply isn't very funny, and his idea for a Slinky that requires constant supervision likewise comes across as inane rather than innovative. The dead painter Bobby who is central to the film's plot is also meant (I think) to inspire audiences to see the world with the infinite imagination of a child, yet the egg portraits that comprise his life's work are likewise a dud, never coming across as anything more than a pretentious lack of talent.
Finally, there is the character of Tilda Swinton, who (I presume) is the Problemista of the title. Torres's SNL sketches about Melania Trump were a tour de force; a sketch in which she builds a loving friendship with a Pakistani Amazon call center employee played by Kumail Nanjiani is easily one of the best things ever aired by SNL. Cecily Strong's Melania was entitled, demanding, and dangerously powerful but also desperate, yearning, and akin to Dark Romantic poets like William Blake and Lord Byron in her gloomy and barbed lust for life. His Melania was a Gorgon, a lonely victim of her own monstrous power, as dangerous as she was in need of saving. She was a completely ridiculous object of satire but also an object of empathy, somehow oddly relatable, and-most importantly-endlessly fascinating. With Swinton's Elizabeth in this film, I think Torres attempts to capture the same loud dissonance but fails miserably. Swinton is one of my favorite actors, but every line she has in this film is delivered in the same obnoxious bray; she provides occasional glimmers of depth in her facial expressions, but the writing simply doesn't support it. I suspect Torres was too intimidated by her to give her any direction or demand a second take. The result is that her character is thoroughly repulsive, flimsily drawn, and unwatchably annoying. Her "squeaky wheel gets the grease" behavior serves as an inspiration for Torres's change in the climax of the film, but it's almost appalling that the screenplay thereby seems to be condoning her aggressiveness, ineptitude, and entitlement. Perhaps the point is that Torres's character, who has real problems and is facing true injustices, has learned to leverage the power of acting like a privileged one percenter, in a sense using evil for good... but I don't know. The story is too sloppy to communicate any clear message, and I can't imagine we're supposed to celebrate that the world has gained one more impolite loudmouth.
Overall, Torres's debut film suggests to me that he should stick to shorter formats. Not only has he recycled numerous bits that worked far better when he first conceived them years ago, but the film as a whole fails to gel into anything that feels complete or properly structured. There are certainly some good bits here. In Greta Lee's single scene, she gives a more powerful (and hilarious) performance than in the entirety of her starring role in last year's acclaimed PAST LIVES. James Scully, Larry Owens, and Megan Stalter also earn some solid laughs. But, in the words of my husband, this is simultaneously the most "half-baked yet overcooked" film you're likely to see in a while, where you'll walk away knowing more about why Torres hates FileMaker Pro than you will about the background story of the main antagonist, and where multiple customer service calls are presented in their entirety whereas the exhibition that the film climactically builds to doesn't get any screentime at all.
I will continue to enjoy Julio Torres's comedy, and I hope he is given a chance to direct a second film that presents us something new and fresh from his lovely imagination. I cannot at all recommend this strange, slapdash, and insufferable film, however.
The Zone of Interest (2023)
It isn't the movie people are praising
What if I told you that the Nazi who ran Auschwitz was an awful person-that he didn't care about the people who were being killed in the concentration camps, that he turned a blind eye to the violence around him, and that, on top of all that, he wasn't even someone who was especially fascinating in his evil but was instead just kinda flabby and boring and, well, banal? Would that blow your mind? Would you be shocked to learn that? Would I be telling you anything you didn't already know? If I put him on film for two hours petting his dog and visiting his doctor for a medical checkup and sharing inside jokes with his equally heartless wife, would I have made a masterpiece? Is it necessary for you to spend two hours coldly examining the banality of evil?
That is the movie that Glazer has made. The movie that the trailer sells, however, and that the sound crew tried to create and that lots of viewers seem to believe they have just seen is something completely different, something far more interesting. I have heard many people talking about this movie as being about the "complicity of violence." Reviews claim that it has a message for ALL OF US about what it means to ignore the oppression in our backyards. These reviews suggest that this is a story about what it means to have to live your life in the midst of someone else's oppression. Will you cover your ears? Convince yourself it's not what you think it is? Convince yourself that there's nothing you can do? Focus on your own problems? Be brave and try to resist somehow?
If that were indeed what THE ZONE OF INTEREST was, then yes, that would be quite a compelling and meaningful movie! What I saw, however, was something much more simplistic and much less vital. This is due to Glazer's choice of perspective: for the most part, we see the film through the eyes of the camp commander and his wife-the two most powerful for hundreds of miles. They are evil and awful. Glazer knows they are evil, you know they are evil, anyone who knows the first thing about history knows they are evil, and they are also willful, active, voluntary agents in perpetrating the Holocaust. We are not meant to empathize with them (which would be a bizarre and much more problematic artistic choice); instead, we are meant to stare at them in tedious, disgusted horror. The only potential surprise-although it probably wouldn't be a surprise for anyone watching this movie-is that they are boring and "just like us." Except we know that they're NOT like us. They're not like us at all because they're very powerful Nazis, and we would and could never be in their position. The film asks nothing of us; it's all too easy to keep your distance from them from beginning to end. Your opinion will not change, for they do not change. From the opening minutes you will hate them, and when the credits roll you will realize that you still hate them for exactly the same reasons. At no point will you put yourself in their shoes. At no point will you ask yourself, "Well, if that were me, would I be able to trust myself that I wouldn't do the same thing?" At no point will you get so wrapped up in their story that you find yourself actually caught up in their petty bourgeois melodrama, only to be snapped back to the reality that people are being murdered just off screen and you have been guilty of focusing on the wrong thing. The film never asks that of you, and so it's hard to see how it has anything to do with calling attention to our own complicity with violence.
The film briefly glimpses through the point-of-view of other characters, and these are some of the only interesting moments in the film. I can only imagine what this movie could have been if it had instead focused mostly on, for example, the viewpoint of the commander's teenage son: someone old enough to know what's happening and to possibly do something about it, someone capable of questioning the privilege of his position, yet someone who also just wants to make out with his Aryan girlfriend. Such a perspective would be rife for exploring what it actually means to be complicit in such a system. Likewise, if the film had been more firmly rooted in the perspective of one of the "local girls" who work as housekeepers for the family, that could have given a better portrait of what it means to be trapped in an unjust system. What do you do if you know that your employer is a murderer yet you still need a job to support your family? By focusing the camera on these side characters, Glazer could have actually given us some interesting questions to ponder. Instead, the majority of the film is wasted on hammering home the obvious points that Nazis are evil and evil is banal.
For anyone interested in seeing a film that is actually about what ZONE OF INTEREST is supposedly about, I highly recommend all 9.5 hours of the riveting 1985 documentary SHOAH by Claude Lanzmann. Lanzmann captures a wide variety of witnesses with his camera: powerful camp commanders and their families, bureaucrats whose contributions to the Holocaust consisted in selling train tickets, local people who came to terms with the fact that their farms were now neighboring killing factories, people who resisted, people who hid, people who survived. SHOAH's all-encompassing scope hammers in the horrifying fact that the Holocaust was a fact of OUR existence, that it happened in our same boring world with people just like us on all sides. THE ZONE OF INTEREST's one-note sound design gimmick, on the other hand, is all it really has going for it; otherwise, it has nothing more to add to our understanding of Nazi violence than the most recent Indiana Jones movie.
Elemental (2023)
No chemistry
I found myself unable to suspend disbelief for a single moment during the entirety of watching this overlong movie, and of the thousands of movies I've seen in my life, I can't recall ever having such similar discomfort. This movie made my brain hurt, and there wasn't a single positive attribute (except maybe the soundtrack) to alleviate that pain. Since its inception, Pixar has been committed to building worlds out of fantastical premises: what if toys were sentient, what if cars were people, what if our emotions were personalities who inhabited a surreal geography within our minds. They've made movies that weren't very great, but never, in my opinion, was that due to a failure at worldbuilding. For instance, I wasn't the biggest fan of INSIDE OUT, but it wasn't because I couldn't get on board with its depiction of our brains' interiors; rather, it was because I thought the real-world plot was too simplistic, melodramatic, and unbelievable, unable to properly sustain the fantasy world within. For ELEMENTAL, I can't help but imagine its origins in some burnt out writer sitting in a stifling office, in need of sleep, perhaps intoxicated, thinking, "Well, what if a fire woman and a water man, like, had sex? I don't think that's been done before." And then that premise, which could have only been sustained in a two-minute, extremely experimental and surreal short film, was workshopped in a series of uninspired Zoom brainstorming meetings where instead of trying to figure out how this bizarre idea could be developed into a character-based plot, the other writers only felt safe pitching the most obvious jokes: what if the water man, like, cries all the time? And if she's made of fire, then, like, maybe she eats really hot food! And that, moreover, instead of then trying to develop these obvious jokes into actual silliness that could be the main (and only) attraction of the film, they instead put extremely little effort into the humor and instead somehow got the idea that they were making a serious film about failing infrastructure and the emotional obligations of second-generation immigrants. The end result is an uncomfortable and lifeless mess.
I could not for the life of me wrap my mind around this universe. There are "earth" people who look like trees and dirt and flowers, but the buildings also have hardwood floors and the fire people eat "coal nuts" made by compressing pieces of firewood in their own piping hot hands. They explain at one point that a "water person" is "not just water," so clearly there's a distinction between "elemental people" and inanimate objects that are made of those elements, but I still couldn't get over the fact that if I were a tree person, I would probably be horrified by the fact that fire people eat things that look like my babies. This kind of confusion inevitably haunts every frame of the film. I could not wrap my mind around the characters' basic stupidity surrounding things such as evaporation and condensation, and I was deeply unsettled by the abject boundarylessness of their bodily forms--that in "Elemental City," air people are constantly being walked through, earth people are constantly having their leaves burned off, and water people are frequently being sucked into puddles and floods but still manage to hold onto their clothing... which, why and how are they wearing clothing and what is it made of? The people are chaotic and boundaryless, yet they live in a city that has building inspectors and bureaucracy. The population should all be used to certain facts about their coexistence, yet every character seems constantly surprised by the strange sights happening all around them. The whole plot is built on a modern conception of ethnic segregation, yet the premise segments the population groups based on premodern taxonomies that couldn't possibly be segregated. Isn't a cloud just the gaseous state of liquid water? If fire and water have a baby, then will it be a cloud? If the cloud baby gains too much weight, then does she look more like her water mother? The movie constantly asks you to consider these things while also forcing you to not think too hard about these things because of how obvious it is that the filmmakers haven't thought very hard about these things because if they had thought about these things then they would realize that the film could not exist. It's dizzying and unlike any movie experience I've had before.
All that aside, the romantic plot is entirely devoid of chemistry and heart. The acting is abysmal, and the two leads, who are supposedly young adults, speak and behave like eight-year-olds. The film very obviously wants to be an allegory for realistic American people, yet there's no humanity whatsoever in how these characters are written. If you strip away the disorienting fantastical premise, which is pretty easy to do, then you have a very poorly written and acted Hallmark romcom. If the animation were at least appealing, then there would at least be that, but instead this is probably the least visually pleasing movie Pixar has ever made. I watched the movie two days ago yet cannot recall a single image that I was impressed by. Only the score and soundtrack are halfway inspired.
Writing this, I feel like I might be coming across as a jerk who just doesn't like animated fantasy family films. So in contrast, I point you to ROBOT DREAMS, a movie that is up against ELEMENTAL at the Oscars this year and is not altogether different. It's a feature length film without dialogue about a New York City inhabited by humanoid animals of all species as well as their sentient robot friends. There are ducks who are people wearing hot pants and driving motorcycles and there are pigeons who are just pigeons, and this does not feel weird. There are robots who have minds despite being made of inanimate machine parts and there are also inanimate machines, and this does not feel weird. There's even a snowman that comes to life and somehow has a robust preexisting social life despite having just been born, yet none of this is weird or unbelievable or unsettling to me; the movie is so exquisitely and convincingly made, that it's easy to buy into every mesmerizing frame. The movie is sexless and (largely) genderless and very much kid friendly, yet the love felt between the two main characters is one of the most heartfelt and human portrayals of a romantic friendship that I've ever seen depicted on film. ELEMENTAL is a colossal failure, and that has nothing to do with my inability to enjoy the genre.
Sick (2022)
Inaccurate and Uninteresting
In general, I consider anachronisms and other goofs a source of trivial amusement, not negative criticism. SICK's entire raison d'etre, however, is to be "a slasher movie about the height of the covid pandemic," so it seems a bit more essential that it actually get those details right. Without its commentary on covid paranoia, this movie would just be a very hollow, cliche, and unrealistic slasher film. Yet this "period film" does such a bad job of historical accuracy despite being made in such close proximity to the era it's trying to reflect. Years from now, people will watch this movie and assume that it somewhat accurately reflects the atmosphere of spring 2020. Obviously, they will know this satirical thriller is not a "historical document," but that won't stop scholars of the future from falsely assuming that its depiction of grocery store shopping, etc., is realistic. It is not.
In 2020, our routines so rapidly shifted from unprecedented to urgently necessary to obsolete that it's easy to forget exactly what we were doing during any particular snapshot in time. This film blurs those changes together in a sloppy way resulting in plot holes. In the first week of April, people were still cobbling together what they could to make masks. I, who very much took covid seriously from the beginning of the stay-at-home orders, would have still been wearing a combination of an old disposable painting mask and a bandana. The medical facemasks ubiquitously seen in the film took longer to enter widespread use, nor do I think they were ever so consistently and appropriately worn even in the most rigidly controlled environments, where you would still expect to see at least one person wearing a mask loosely hanging below the nose. This inaccuracy immediately made the first sequence difficult to believe for me, which was additionally complicated by the fact that when the character's TV turns onto a live newscast, it says 5:03pm despite it being full on nighttime from the start of the film, an impossibility anywhere in the United States in the first week of April. Later in the film, we see covid rapid tests that didn't even exist until months later, being used in a manner that isn't realistic to produce results that make no sense given the timeline of exposure being discussed. (These last details could be explained as character errors, but still.)
All of these mistakes could be forgiven if the film otherwise provided a trenchant examination of our pandemic-era mindset. Unfortunately, it does not. The final act yields some darkly humorous conflict that I won't spoil here, but otherwise this movie does not resemble anything at all the experience and horror of the disruptions and death tolls of 2020. In fact, this movie seems like it was made by someone decades in the future making a best guess about what covid was like. There's no actual insight to be found.
On top of that, the film is overall just hard to swallow. The performances are all questionable, and the screenplay is absurd. There's one random scene about an urban legend in which one character randomly cites the Folklore Index off the top of her head--a scene which I suppose was meant to provide some realism and character depth since it adds nothing to the themes of the film, yet which fails to do even that because of how unrealistically it's all delivered. Characters who should be dead miraculously aren't. Characters who should be afraid and trying to survive instead do completely unlikely things. This whole movie is a mess.
I was disappointed by director John Hyams's previous horror film, ALONE (2020), but thought that he at least had potential. In that film, after all, the behaviors of the killer and the would-be victim are refreshingly realistic and unpredictable despite some other glaring plot holes and deficiencies. Unfortunately, this film makes me lose all interest in seeing what Hyams has to offer in the future.
Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
There will never be a great Moby Dick movie, but luckily there is Avatar: The Way of Water
There have been many attempts to film Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. Some, like the 1998 tv miniseries with Patrick Stewart, have made a more earnest effort to stay faithful to the source material, but they all are ultimately disappointing because the task itself is a fool's errand. Moby-Dick was a novel written in 1851 American English; a movie--and try to look beyond the obviousness of what I'm saying--can never be a novel written in 1851 American English. A movie made in 2022 can only ever be a movie made in 2022, and so Avatar: The Way of Water--stay with me--may be the closest will we ever get to a spiritual adaptation of Moby-Dick to film that can speak to us in the same way that Melville hoped to speak to his contemporaries.
By saying this, I don't mean that this sequel to Avatar is an attempt to adapt Moby-Dick to the big screen, although clearly the mid-film scenes of hunting "tulkuns" in order to harvest the extremely valuable liquid inside of them were directly inspired by scenes from that book. What I mean more than that is that The Way of Water has the same feeling, the same composition, and overall some of the same messages as Melville's novel. In crafting Moby-Dick, Melville was able to pull together all the influences that his audience would have been very familiar with: Biblical scripture and Great Awakening oratory, the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, protoevolutionary scientific literature, bloody adventure tales mythologizing the lucrative whaling industry, anthropological ethnologies, and so on. The chapters are written differently to reflect these different discourses, and often his keen observation treats them with satirical distance, albeit a biting satire that one can easily mistake for sincerity. Cameron would be a fool to incorporate the same influences into his twenty-first century film, so instead he draws from the sources that we are more familiar with: the nature documentary, the ecological disaster film, the militaristic action blockbuster, the coming-of-age, star-crossed romance, and the outsiders/outcasts-banning-together sci-fi parable. In many cases, Cameron has already made masterpieces in these genres, so he's also evoking his own oeuvre. He knows the language of cinema just like Melville knew the language of literature, and he can distill each form to the essences that make them endure. The averted glance of a teenager in love, the horror of a destroyed environment, the thrill of a battle between high-tech machines and oppressed freedom fighters--Cameron has been filming all that for years, and he does so extremely well.
Cameron's reckless disregard for conventional storytelling structure also parallels Melville's. Moby-Dick will end a chapter with two gossiping sailors ending their secret conversation because they see the villain approaching with "something bloody on his mind," only to begin the next chapter with thirty pages of taxonomic classification of whale species. Cameron's 192-minute movie likewise will juxtapose an intimate family scene against an abrupt battle sequence; will show us that the villains are inching closer toward having the upper hand only to then linger on children admiring the seascape for fifteen minutes. This was very jarring and off-putting to me at first, but once I learned to embrace the experience as being something beyond my complete comprehension and control, I surrendered to a feeling akin to believing the stories in the Book of Genesis. This was mythic storytelling that was going to place me in vivid moments of an imaginary realm. Unlike the original Avatar, there are no exposition dumps nor any carefully choreographed structure signposting how one scene leads to the next. Instead, when you learn that there is a human fishing crew operating in the oceans of Pandora, you are simply supposed to expect that this world is much larger and more complicated than you initially assumed. The original Avatar seemed small and artificial to me, but this version of Pandora comes across as a vast, immersive, fully realized world with many different people in it.
Melville faced technological progress with wonder yet also fear, questioned the power of authority to dangerously oversimplify while nevertheless succumbing to the awe that authority and prowess evokes, and celebrated the differences among individuals, species, and cultures while also embracing their potential to bond together over their similar interests. Melville showed masculinity in all its dangerous, fragile, and inspiring forms. Avatar: The Way of Water does many of the same things in a way that speaks to modern filmgoers.
Cameron has made a film that greatly surpasses the original. Just like Melville took the nineteenth-century American novel to its most experimental and essential form, Cameron has given us a film that showcases twenty-first-century filmmaking in its highest and most consummate capacity. This is more of an experience than a mere movie, and it should be experienced under the best possible conditions, i.e. 3D IMAX, by anyone interested in seeing a sci-fi master using cutting edge technology to transcend reality and take us deep into his imaginative dreams.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)
The screenplay is a mess, but the miniature props are lovely
I was astonished to learn, via IMDB's Trivia page, that the filmmakers had spent seven years writing, storyboarding, planning, and filming this movie. It does not look like much organization or forethought went into making this movie. The screenplay and plot seem largely improvisational, some half-baked concepts cobbled together during the first months of the COVID lockdown.
Here are some of the many things that fell flat for me:
Director Dean Fleischer-Camp's role as a newly divorced man trying to figure out single life? That seemed like a backstory that was simply slapped on in order to justify the character hanging out in an AirBnB for an extended period. The fact that Dean is the movie's actual director and that he was actually married to Jenny Slate, the voice and co-creator of Marcel the Shell, and that they underwent an actual divorce during the making of this film: well, that just seemed improbable! The movie's treatment of divorce seemed tacked on, superficial, and extraneous. The backstory involving Thomas Mann and Rosa Salazar as two homeowners who broke up in a flashback likewise seemed insubstantial--more about putting the machinations of the plot in place rather than providing an actual exploration of the contours of a breakup.
Director Dean's unwillingness to open up in front of Marcel or the cameras? A hint of depth that never goes anywhere, even when the 60 Minutes interview gives them a perfect opportunity to dive into this character arc.
Marcel's longing for community? Well, that was a headscratcher. In theory, I very much liked this theme, but when the community was finally reunited at the end, the artistic choices about how to present this reunion made me feel like the whole theme was pretty minor. Most of Marcel's family and friends barely seem to have even noticed that he was gone, including his own father and (to a lesser extent) his mother. The film barely gives us a glimpse of what it means to be back in this community, and what it shows us is surprisingly disturbing. Watching the whole crew devour a loaf of bread conjured up images of vermin and infestation for me; the happy ending gave me a feeling of revulsion. The fact that the reunited community included things like peanut shells and Chex cereal pieces was also baffling. If all these inanimate things were just as capable of becoming sentient as the seashells, then what are the odds that Marcel would be all alone in this house? I know I shouldn't be thinking too hard about the parameters of this world's scientific reality, but that final reunion was not the happy ending I would have hoped for.
Marcel's disappointment over his online fans is also surprisingly paper thin and stereotypical. Undoubtedly, most fans would just use Marcel's virality as an excuse to record TikToks of them dancing in his lawn, as is depicted in this film. But an audience of millions of people is likely to include a handful of amateur online investigators like myself who would thrill at the possibility of solving Marcel's mystery. In fact, I'm sure I would have been able to solve the mystery in about fifteen minutes, and I question why Dean was unable. Property deeds are available to the public. As is facial recognition software. The mystery at the heart of this film makes no sense.
It wasn't all worthless, though. Marcel's relationship with his nana Connie (Isabella Rossellini giving a fabulous voice performance) is the only plotline/theme explored in the film that actually has depth, meaning, and believability. There are likewise a number of good laughs throughout the film, and the miniature production design is clever, whimsical, and memorable. At one point Marcel serves a single Pepperidge Farm goldfish that looks to be the size of a turkey on a silver platter that is in fact a dime. Touches like that are magical, and the props alone make the movie worth seeing.
Perhaps the themes about divorce, intimacy, and community mean more to the filmmakers than they do to the audience. I wish I'd been able to get something out of the film's exploration of these themes, but they seemed to me to have been hastily cobbled together. I recommend this movie, but it might have been better if it were only 40 minutes long.
Emily the Criminal (2022)
Plot is somewhat forced, but nevertheless an enjoyable drama
The performances throughout this film are incredible, which leads me to believe that first-time director John Patton Ford must know what he's doing. Next time, though, he should probably put a little more time into revising his screenplay. The action unfolds at a thrilling pace, but if you hesitate to second guess any of the plot mechanics or the characters' motivations, then the whole thing risks plummeting into one of many gaping plot holes. Sheer momentum propels much of what happens in the final act, which ultimately leaves what could have been a phenomenal and original character story feeling just a tad superficial in retrospect.
Aubrey Plaza is mesmerizing as a woman who never allows herself to be taken advantage of. It's inspiring to see her consistently stand up for herself in the face of adversity and violence, never letting herself succumb silently to victimhood. It seems surprisingly original (sadly) to see such behavior in a realistic drama manifested in a young, working class woman who is neither insane nor possessed with supernatural powers, and I appreciate this movie for presenting such a character in such a realistic way. Theo Rossi, Gina Gershon, Sheila Korsi, and Jonathan Avigdori likewise have incredible on-screen presence.
The somewhat silly contrivance of the plot doesn't detract from what's ultimately a very entertaining film, and I look forward to future efforts from Ford and Plaza.
The Woman King (2022)
Solid action, acting, and production design
This film offers some of the best action choreography of the year--certainly more thrilling than any of the scant fight scenes loosely scattered throughout the overlong, tedious, and eye-roll-inducing WAKANDA FOREVER. This film may in fact be the antidote to Marvel's latest mess, lending actual historical credence to the same stirring feeling that motivated the first BLACK PANTHER film.
The many musical numbers are moving, the costumes and production design are memorably rich, and the performances by Viola Davis, Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, John Boyega, and Sheila Atim are all fantastic. The screenplay may be a bit overlong and tedious at times--there are some moments in the first third especially where there seems to be no forward momentum--but overall this is a fascinating glimpse into a historical culture not often depicted so thoroughly in big-budget films.
Don't let the review bombers scare you off. This movie is more entertaining and uplifting than its corny title and goofy trailers suggest.
The Good Nurse (2022)
Slickly made but insubstantial
Director Tobias Lindholm has a penchant for making movies with a polished superficial sheen suggestive of far more depth than the hollowness they actually contain. He's like a college essayist whose impeccable grammar and engaging diction mask the fact that he's only skimmed his research sources and has failed to develop an original argument of any real depth or weight. I imagine this makes him an excellent conversationalist, too, as I'm not otherwise sure how he managed to secure an Oscar win for ANOTHER ROUND, which, in keeping with THE HUNT, was another slick but insubstantial film.
THE GOOD NURSE is a fine film. Redmayne and Chastain are consummate professionals, and they are engaging to watch. Everything from the screenplay to the set design and cinematography is perfectly tolerable, yet the film never justifies its existence beyond being a vehicle for more filmmaking accolades. I read the first few paragraphs of convicted killer Charlie Cullen's wikipedia page prior to watching the movie, and nothing presented in the movie went beyond the conventional vision that played out in my head while skimming. There's nothing surprising, thought-provoking, or truly memorable about this film. It tries to muster a message of condemnation against America's budget-strained, for-profit healthcare system, a message which is cheaply and stupidly manifested in the coldly villainous persona of a bureaucratic obfuscator played by Kim Dickens, but this message fails to amount to anything more than a glib shrug. It's perfectly possible to film a thrilling, razor-sharp indictment of failed accountability systems--see David Fincher's ZODIAC or the Netflix series UNBELIEVABLE--but this film doesn't bother to put in the effort. Its police procedural elements are hammy and stereotypical (never before have I been so confused by the line, "We need a body or we don't have a case!"), and if IMDb's Goofs page for THE GOOD NURSE is to be trusted, then they didn't put much effort into making the hospital scenes accurate either. This isn't a movie about reality; it's a character study about a killer who's ultimately a cipher and a (spoiler alert) "good nurse" who is doing the best she can to raise two spunky little girls on her own.
If this were a Lifetime movie, I would be inclined to say it was above average. But as a movie that probably generated six- or seven-figure paychecks for its director and two stars while purportedly bemoaning the struggles of the working class, it needs to do more than this.
Bones and All (2022)
The most abrupt 180 from allegorical masterpiece to superficial trash you'll ever see
The only way this movie works for me is if you accept that Mare and Lee (Taylor Russell & Timothy Chalamet) are deluded, egotistical, awful people and if, furthermore, that is somehow the whole point. That would be an accurate portrayal of many instances of teenage love, so that very well could be director Luca Guadagnino's point. The film is masterfully made--at least for the first 90 minutes or so--and I want desperately to justify that it is a brilliant masterpiece. However, I fear that this reading may not actually be the point and that the movie is actually a steaming hot mess. Let me explain.
The previous collaboration between Guadagnino and Chalamet was CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, a gay romance between two self-assured young bisexual men who ultimately weren't quite right for each other yet wanted the power of their physical intimacy to prevail nonetheless. (Let's set aside the real-life accusations of fetishistic cannibalism against romantic co-lead Armie Hammer as being, perhaps, irrelevant to the cast at hand.) Clearly, then, the director and the male star of this film have a history of making complex depictions of queer attraction, and I think it's no stretch to say that this film is also extremely gay by the standards of, say, 1982 rural Kentucky.
Right before our first graphic, startling glimpse of flesh-eating, young Mare, having slipped out of the sight of her overprotective father (Andre Holland), is nestled with her high school best girl friend, cocooned between carpet and coffee table, sharing intimate secrets of grief and childhood trauma. Mare smells her friend's neck, appears to detect something she likes, and then snuggles closer. It is, almost certainly, the prelude to a first regretful kiss, happening right within eyesight of two other girls who are most certainly not feeling the amorous vibe. Without thinking, Mare sucks on her friend's finger, gnaws it to the mangled bone, and initiates the film's horror: screaming, fleeing from the police, self-hatred, questing for signs and understanding and escape.
It's hard not to see her story as one of self-loathing homophobia, set against the backdrop of Reagan's Bible Belt to a soundtrack of conservative talk radio amidst the specter of an AIDS--err, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency--crisis of which we must never speak.
Scrawny, dyed-mullet Lee, simultaneously proud yet insecure about his 140-pound-soaking-wet body, represents the possibility of a normal--i.e., straight--life for these two, but then why does he insist on wearing that flashy shirt that his younger sister says makes him look like a "f**got"? His choice to prey on a blatantly homosexual young carnie seems exactly like something a gay-baiting homophobe would do, but then, who actually jerks off to climax the gay victim that they're about to bash? And, more importantly, how does Mare manage to witness this and then say absolutely nothing about it afterward? Is it so meaningful that merely invoking its truth would destroy them both?
I'm getting ahead of myself. BONES AND ALL is a story about a young cannibal trying to figure out an ethical practice of cannibalism in a world that is built for non-cannibals and that would rather pretend that cannibals do not exist or can somehow be sectored off from the rest of society. Her first lessons in this, after being abandoned by a father who's come to accept that this isn't just an awful phase that his daughter is going to grow out of, comes from Sully, a Leatherstocking cosplayer embodied by Mark Rylance with mesmerizing, lived-in idiosyncrasy. Sully is weird in the way that all old strangers are weird to teenagers. He's additionally weird because he, well, eats human beings, which is something Mare has never encountered in real life before aside from her own indiscretions. Using his heightened sense of smell, like some gnarly turkey vulture, he tracks down elderly folk who are already on the verge of death and passively waits for them to cross the threshold so that he can feast on meat that is as fresh and ethically sourced as possible. (At least, he says, that's how he tries to do it most of the time.) This, it seems, is about as moral as cannibalism can be within this world, assuming that cannibalism is, like vampirism or lycanthropy, something that born-eaters cannot fully control or expunge.
But wait, is that true? Is it something they have to do, or is it more like a heroin addiction that they don't have the self-control (or what have you) to resist succumbing to? At one point, an eerie Michael Sthulbarg (more on him in a moment) calls Lee a "junky." But then, don't many proponents of ex-gay conversion liken homosexuality to a sinful addiction? A gay person can of course live a celibate life devoid of all romance, but should they have to? Is that a fulfilling life? Is a gay life necessarily harmful and self-harmful, as mid-twentieth-century psychologists were arguing, or is it only harmful if society makes it so?
This movie makes it so easy to get off track! I'm about to start arguing that Christ would not have condemned my marriage to my husband, yet I'm doing that within the context of people who literally murder and consume the bodies of actual gay people. Why is it that Mare has no problem with Lee killing and robbing the gay carnie until the moment she realizes that he has a wife and baby at home? Does his life have no value until he shows glimmers of being heteronormative? And why is it that young, brooding, looks-just-like-sex-icon-Timothee-Chalamet Lee is someone who's okay in her book, despite literally travelling the country murdering and robbing people, whereas old, smelly Sully is immediately dismissed as "creepy" despite trying to live an ethical yet fulfilled life? Why is it that Mare is so horrified by hillbilly Michael Stuhlbarg and his traveling companion (David Gordon Green), who live a life of "bones and all" shamelessness that gives off every impression of being a star-crossed romantic entanglement? The former cop played by David Gordon Green "doesn't have to be doing this," Mare discovers with horror; he's not a born eater--he was converted into it by contagious proximity, and now he CHOOSES to eat people, which, apparently, Mare would never do if she didn't have the choice!
Again: is it a choice? Mare and Lee eat hot dogs and milkshakes throughout the movie. They're not vampires or zombies who will decay and die if they don't get the sustenance of human flesh. Mare's mother (Chloe Sevigny of BOYS DON'T CRY fame), also a born eater and the genetic reason for Mare's awful inheritance, has apparently been able to live a life (such that it is) just fine without eating people under the confines of a mental institution--although her missing hands are evidence of "self-abuse." Perhaps Mare and her lover can resist their genetic fates by simply being stronger than their parents were? Perhaps they can move to Maryland, get jobs, go to college, raise a family, eat scrambled Teflon eggs, and just "be normal"?
Everything I've explained thus far is why I believed this movie to be a masterpiece resonant with symbolism about the dangers of allegorizing sexual identity as a moral quandary reducible to choice or genetic fate. If it's a choice, then it can just as well be seen as an immoral choice. If it's genetic, then it can just as well be seen as a disability that science and medicine may one day be able to treat and/or eradicate. Perhaps it only becomes problematic because society forces it into a black-and-white fallacy. Maybe it's possible to dream and construct a different society where it isn't a problem that needs to be deciphered and solved at all. Film that with beautiful cinematography, bedeck it with gorgeously immersive 1980s production design, round it out with some brilliant performances by Russell, Rylance, Stuhlbarg, and Holland, and you've got another 10-star masterpiece from Luca Guadagnino....
Except, wait, what's that in the third act? A flashback- and exposition-heavy twist about the oft alluded to circumstances of Lee's arrest record? A declaration of love between the two beautiful young stars despite them having no chemistry, openness, or significant shared depth whatsoever? A weepy climactic monologue from a self-doubting Lee that had my husband and I later discussing all the evidence for why Chalamet might not actually be a good actor after all? The realization that Mare and Lee's rejection of Sully as a "creep" isn't just blind ageism but is instead a prescient assessment of character since Sully is indeed a murderous, rapey stalker who fully becomes a villainous monster in the film's abrupt climax? A laughable finale of sex and violence that somehow manages to evoke the Kalima scene from INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM?
I can think of few movies that fall apart so radically and so thoroughly as this one does in its final half hour. The focus of the plot in the third act, the reveal of Sully's true character at the end, and the ludicrous decision of how to structure the final moments of this film all bely any of the evocative subtext that I've analyzed throughout this review. It's almost insultingly hostile how the film rejects all the substance it has so powerfully suggested in the first two acts of the film by loudly declaring, "No! It's not about any of that at all! This movie is about superficial, hollow, YA romance cliches! Haven't you been paying attention? Chalamet and Russell are sexy! They love each other! He CRIED, for crissake, and that made her love him for the MAN he really is!"
Either that's intentional, vitriolic, audience-loathing satire on the part of the filmmakers, and this movie is the masterpiece it resembles for so long, or I'm simply spending too much time trying to justify why I wasted over two hours on a pointless pile of crap.
Black Lodge (2022)
Do you even like David Lynch? What is your understanding of "Lynchian"?
I saw the world premiere of this in Philadelphia, with live musical performances and vocals playing out concert-style on stage as the film played on a screen behind.
The advertising materials suggested this would be an energizing, mystical blend of David Lynch, William S. Burroughs, and Nine Inch Nails. I will admit that the musical score was interesting and the performers played their instruments very well. Beyond that, this was one of the worst things I've seen all year.
The libretto is absurdly bad. Subtitles allowed me to see that the author was not content simply with nonsensical, cliched noise patterns--no, she also wrote them as homophonic wordplay, so that a word like "synthesis" was rendered as "SIN/thesis." (I'm making up that example, I think, as none of the lyrics were interesting enough to stick with me, but that captures the overall essence of the writing.) In other words: this nonsense is rich with layered meaning! The most pretentious drivel I've ever seen. My husband and I got our money's worth from several days of extemporaneously adding lines to the script: "Disfunction of a NIGH-HILL-ation / Superfluous Adams in a hydrogen explosion / Like cold FUSE/shun with no ending.... / Like cold FUSE/shun with no ending...."
The singing was likewise grating, though I may be biased against opera vocals in general. There is no plot, of course, nor any surrealistic imagery that is evocative of anything beyond trite messages about alcoholism and death. The filmmaking is dreadful--uninspired lighting, cheap set design, far too many close-ups of stupid-looking faces. Some of the imagery, such as a surgeon-shaman coating the main character's corpse in a papier mache cocoon, was mildly stirring, but most of it was insipid. This film gave me a newfound respect for Matthew Barney's CREMASTER CYCLE, which at least had interesting art design and evocative cinematography even if the end result was cold and pretentious.
William S. Burroughs's cut-up style can be tedious and off-putting at times, but at its best, as in JUNKY/QUEER, it can be mesmerizing. David Cronenberg's 1991 masterpiece NAKED LUNCH proves that it's quite possible to put his strange, comical, disorienting, and unsettling word salads about addiction, sexual dysfunction, paranoia, and the death drive on screen in a mesmerizing way. Just because Burroughs is "random" doesn't mean that a work paying homage to him can simply be "random" and capture his tone.
Likewise, the work of David Lynch is frequently oversimplified as mere psychedelic "randomness." Take a wholesome scene of small-town Americana, inject some abysmal violence in it, and throw in some random objects and a few speech patterns evoking the uncanny valley: bam, you've got something "Lynchian"... or, at least, that's what some people think. Such oversimplifiers neglect that Lynch's work is deeply humanist, with a genuine love for our flawed human condition and an earnest conviction for eradicating violence and hate. Lynch is a master of evoking humor, grief, romance, and terror, often in the same scene. The surrealism is only fascinating because it's tied to recognizable moments of human experience.
There's nothing like that in this opera/film. The writer seems to believe that Burroughs/Lynchian surrealism is simply "grotesque weirdness for weirdness' sake," and the end result is something hollow, unintentionally laughable, and (despite a brief running time) tediously overlong. If this had simply been an instrumental symphony, I might have enjoyed it. The addition of a libretto that seems like it was written in two hours and a film that looks like it was made by college students, however, makes it a truly eye-rolling experience.
Tár (2022)
Music means what it is
Lately, I've been trying to enter into movies as unspoiled as possible--no trailers, no reviews, no news. This strategy has greatly improved my enjoyment of movies, I think. In the case of TAR, I went in knowing that it was about a controversial female conductor trying to put together a difficult symphony. I also, for some reason, was convinced that it was based on a true story--an illusion that the film itself in no way dispelled. Was it unusual to be seeing a biopic about such very recent events in the life of a living person? Sure. Was it refreshingly bold that the film seemed to hold no punches in its portrayal of its real life protagonist? Absolutely, but that seemed to fit what Lydia Tar would want. I imagined her giving her full endorsement to a film that exposed both her phenomenal talent and her most despicable flaws. Was I confused by the apparent artistic license that director Todd Field must have taken when choosing to reveal intimate private details that contradicted what was being told to the public? Sure, but this is art! Was it a bit mind blowing that I had never heard about some of the newsworthy events in the film? Well, yes and no--for one, I kinda remembered reading about that climax in The Atlantic last summer, and for another, well, what the hell do I know about the world of classical music? I can't tell you the name of any conductor, living or dead, world famous or not. For hours after seeing the film, I had no idea that it was not a fairly accurate account of real recent events.
Todd Field has created a masterpiece. The world he has captured feels utterly believable. The jargon-laden conversations, so frequently peppered with charged opinions about esoteric ephemera; the complete lack of anything that feels expository or explanatory; the magnificent embodiment of these characters by Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noemie Merlant, and the others, so evocative of real lived emotions and back stories and contradictions; the atmospheric realism to every setting, prop, and costume: everything about this film seems suggestive of nonfiction, as though Todd Field and the other filmmakers were able to convey this international ecosystem of elite musical performance so convincingly because they were simply copying details, interviews, and footnotes that already existed. It is simply astounding that this screenplay is an original creation; its level of immersive realism surpasses anything else I can think of.
The cinematography by Florian Hoffmeister, the editing by Monika Willi, and the work accomplished by their sound team likewise contribute to this impressive illusion. The camerawork in the opening scene so effectively places us in Lydia's New Yorker interview with the real life Adam Gopnik as he enumerates the many accomplishments on her CV that the enunciation of her bio becomes a hypnotic spell ferrying us into the alternate reality on the screen. Other scenes capture gestures, tics, expressions, and glances that add infinite subtext and subversion to what is happening on screen.
Towards the end of the film, a 1958 recording of Tar's mentor Leonard Bernstein explains to us "what music means" and how it's infinitely more layered and meaningful than our verbal communication. This is illustrated throughout the film, showing a woman of humble beginnings who has mastered not just English but apparently several vocabularies and yet often uses those precise words to conceal, to obfuscate, to abuse, to disorient, and to terrorize. Most of what she says often comes across as inauthentic, dishonest, pretentious, or performative except when the subject is musical expression, which she truly seems to intuit and love. At times, you'll want subtitles to fully understand her hypereducated and superspecialized speech; if you can't keep up, it's only proof that she belongs in the ivory towers and you do not. Sometimes literal subtitles are needed (and not always provided) to fully understand the multilingual conversations, although the sense of the language can be appreciated simply from the sounds and delivery. When Tar tosses out ten-dollar words like "misogamist" in the midst of an argument in order to simultaneously belittle, confuse, and derail her opponent, one sees the ways in which education can be used simultaneously as a weapon and as armor. Beneath her venomous loquaciousness cowers an insecure frailty. Ignore the mask, the identity, the performance of self, Tar seems to beg--only the music matters.
That is, in fact, her literal argument in one very captivating scene early in the film. During a screed against identity politics, she effectively asserts that art must be separated from the artist--a stance which the remainder of the film then troubles to the utmost. The movie engages in the cultural politics of today with full complexity, refusing easy answers or the clear taking of sides.
There is a lot to unpack in this beautiful, artful, and provocative film. I imagine many audience members will be turned off by its many discomforting choices: forcing us to watch and acknowledge the full credits of all the filmmakers in the crew before beginning the movie, making us empathize with a protagonist whose actions are often contemptible and unforgivable, forcing us to keep up with allusions and references that are often unfamiliar, tantalizing us with glimpses of moments that have no clear purpose or meaning within the structure of the film, and then denying us any of the obvious catharsis that we've come to expect from our character arc-driven movie structures. Nevertheless, this is a rich, powerful, and moving film that I will certainly be revisiting many times.
To Leslie (2022)
A too flattering depiction of forgiveness
I very quickly realized that this movie would be "Sean Baker-lite," and my hypothesis proved correct. Just like Quentin Tarantino spawned a lot of pale imitators in the late 90s, TO LESLIE seems to be a naturalistic take on American poverty riding on the success of superior films like THE FLORIDA PROJECT, TANGERINE, and RED ROCKET. But what exactly does it mean to be "Sean Baker-lite," I wonder? Why are his films searing and powerful while this above average movie simply seems predictable and at times boring?
I don't think it has to do with the casting. My first thought was that casting a classically trained British actress, an Oscar-winning A-lister, a Jersey Jew, and, for lack of a better word, Stephen Root as a bunch of small town Texans was part of the problem--and perhaps it is--but I don't think "authentic local casting" is a necessity or a solution. The fantastic LEAN ON PETE grippingly tackled similar themes despite starring many recognizable non-rural faces like Steve Buscemi, while the extremely similar film LEAVE NO TRACE seemed "less real" to me despite having a supporting cast rounded out by local non-actors. And I'm still not sure why Chloé Zhao's THE RIDER, which has no actors at all, feels "staged" to me while her film NOMADLAND, which plops a Method-acting Frances McDormand in the midst of a bunch of real people who don't realize she's an actress, is a masterpiece. Whatever the case may be for why To Leslie falls short of these other films, casting doesn't seem to be the problem.
I think perhaps the real fault lies in the moral compass of this film. Don't get me wrong--I'm happy to see that this film makes a case for forgiveness, redemption, and the ultimate patient goodness of some people. But it also plunges into that thesis in a very clean and obvious way. Within ten minutes of this (overlong) movie, you'll know pretty much everything that's going to happen; when I first saw Marc Maron on screen, I had almost crystal ball clarity of every remaining scene in the film. Andrea Riseborough's acting as the titular Leslie is wonderful, but her character is a little too pitiable and not quite nasty enough. Even before the opening credit sequence is over, you've seen her with a black eye presumably given to her by a handsome man (an outcome which is repeated yet again very early in the plot). We see her suffering the consequences of her actions from the very beginning, and although she commits some misdeeds on camera out of desperation, we never see her do anything truly unlikeable. Our sympathies are always with her. There's very little revulsion to overcome. Thus, it seems a foregone conclusion that the movie will find a happy ending for her, and it seems to easy to see the actions of characters like the one played by Stephen Root as cruel and unproductive. The film has shades of gray, for sure, but the characterization seems far simpler than the rampant ugliness sometimes on display Bria Vinaite in The Florida Project, Simon Rex in Red Rocket, or Mya Taylor in Tangerine.
In order for a film about forgiveness and redemption to work, I guess, we also have to be in a position where we need to understand and accept something unlikeable about the character. To Leslie is far too sympathetic to its protagonist for this story arc to ultimately be effective, which is a shame given that the story hinges around a truly horrible thing that she did in the past but which we never see. When this horrible act is confronted in the climax of the film, the movie comes close to achieving its goals, but the choice to never fully display the flaws of her character on screen in a way that might actually make us condemn her results in a story in which it's far too easy for us to forgive her. And perhaps that moral simplicity is what makes this "Sean Baker-lite."
This is a decent film, and the solid acting and uplifting story make it worth the watch. It never quite rises to the level of being a great film, however.