Carey Mulligan in “Promising Young Woman.” credit: Focus Features
A splendidly righteous provocation, Promising Young Woman (USA, 2020) is the first feature film from Emerald Fennell, an influential actress, writer, producer and, now, director in the U.K., known for TV work such as Call The Midwife, Killing Eve and The Crown. The film starts out as a dark and clever turn-the-tables wish-fulfillment fantasy, with a quirky-budding-romance sweetener thrown in for contrast; but when Cassie Thomas (the splendid Carey Mulligan) finds herself in close proximity to the perpetrators of her original, harrowing, motivating incident, Fennell refocuses her own motives and raises the stakes in the film’s genuinely shocking final chapters.
Cassie and Nina Fisher had been childhood besties well before they both attended med school at Ohio’s Forest University. But Nina was viciously date-raped and took her own life soon after. The haunted and furious Cassie has put her own life’s aspirations on hold, and has since been regularly posing as the too-drunk-to-get-home easy target for ostensible nice-guy predators who offer to get her home safely, but somehow always land at his place instead. Fennell is coy about how these intrigues play out when, feeling frisky and home-free, these lotharios are suddenly confronted by the clear-eyed, stone-sober Cassie, mercilessly interrogating them about what “nice guys” they’ve turned out to be. One episode results in blood spatters on Cassie’s white blouse (we don’t see why), and we think the darkest. But another has Cassie just walking out disgustedly when her mark expresses a goodly amount of self-loathing remorse. She doesn’t seem, for the most part, to be criminally dangerous or psychotic, but there’s no doubt she’s pursuing an obsessively addictive activity. Otherwise, Cassie’s still living with her parents in that same Ohio town and working retail as a barista in a small coffee house, with no subsequent pursuits relating to her past med-school goals or the obvious intelligence that brought her there those many years ago. But one day an old acquaintance from med school, the awkwardly charming Ryan Cooper (Bo Burnham), happens upon her at the coffee house, and, after a singular conversation, convinces her to have lunch with him. The relationship advances, but, inevitably, Cassie’s nocturnal reconnaissance activities take a toll on their budding couplehood, and complications ensue.
Carey Mulligan and Bo Burnham in “Promising Young Woman.” credit : Merie Weismiller Wallace / Focus Features
Fennell clearly has good rapport with her production design team (cinematographer Benjamin Kracun, production designer Michael Perry, art director Liz Kloczkowski and costumer Nancy Steiner) – hard to believe the film only took 23 days to shoot. There are clear, but not overbearing, visual distinctions between Cassie’s daytime working life and time with friends and family (all bright colors and sunlight, at times veering into music-video contrivance) and the alcohol-fueled shadow-life she pursues at night. But Fennell’s good for a few curve balls as well – a somewhat formal hotel lunch date with Madison MacPhee (Alison Brie), another school acquaintance familiar with Nina’s incident, is all off-white damask tablecloths and warm indirect sunlight, until Cassie leaves and slips a male co-conspirator an envelope full of money for services yet-to-be rendered. There’s also a pro turn by the great (uncredited) Alfred Molina as retired lawyer (with good taste in artwork) Jordan Green, who got rich defending trust-fundish male perps against browbeaten victims foolish enough to file charges and expect to be taken seriously.
Fennell keeps a levelling undercurrent of self-effacing humor under her main characters, and she’s smart to set up the potential for violent retributions while giving her characters (and us) time to weigh the real consequences. Portentous references to religious iconography abound. But just when you’re thinking the narrative isn’t committed enough, losing seriousness, or Fennell’s losing her nerve, she sets up a few vicious twists that validate Cassie’s righteous crusade while confirming our worst impressions of her targets. There’s some strong medicine delivered here, and not everyone will think it’s justified. But it’s all smartly structured and artfully presented, and miles ahead, in conception, of other films in the usually-grueling rape-revenge genre. I don’t think the Oscars will be especially kind to it, although Fennell’s screenplay is very good. But I haven’t seen many better films, flaws and all, this year. It’s definitely worth your watching it.
Carey Mulligan in “Promising Young Woman.” credit: Focus Features
Eddie Redmayne, Mark Rylance and others in “Trial Of The Chicago 7.” credit: Nico Tavernise / Netflix
As an entertaining but serious-minded presentation of a very important event in the political and judicial history of the United States, Aaron Sorkin’s Trial Of The Chicago 7 (USA, 2020) has involving dramatic flair, looks great, and is a right-minded history lesson that gets many (but not all) of the facts right. Sorkin the writer has always been reliable (A Few Good Men, The West Wing, The Social Network, Moneyball, his stage adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird), even when it’s Sorkin’s particular brand of show-up-the-hateful-dopes-with-our-earnest-hearts-on-our-sleeves Sorkin formula. But he remains a far better writer than director, and it’s a shame such good writing and committed acting can’t propel the whole endeavor into a broader, bigger and more effective work of cinema.
The Chicago 7 were the leaders of various factions who participated in anti-war demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. None of the protesters were looking forward to a Richard Nixon Republican presidency, but they felt that Hubert Humphrey was far too moderate, and far too placating to entrenched corporate interests in the Democratic party, to make any real consequential shift in the Vietnam War, the subsequent draft lottery or U.S. foreign policy in general. They wanted the war over, now, and the convention needed to know that, one way or another.
Defendants Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) represented the Youth International Party, or the “Yippies.” Seemingly the anti-war movement’s performance art faction, the Yippies brought a healthy sense of intellectual anarchy to their generally theatricalized events, and, more importantly, they were TV camera magnets. Students For A Democratic Society (SDS) were a more sober, polemical organization, more college-campus based, older but also national. Defendant Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) became politically active while a journalist and editor at the University of Michigan in the late fifties (he later joined the Freedom Riders in equality marches in the South). His Port Huron Statement served as the founding manifesto of SDS. Defendant Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp) went to school at Oberlin in Ohio from 1958, got his masters at University of Illinois, and then moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to join Hayden’s SDS as one of their most ardent activists.
Rubin, Hayden, Davis and fellow-defendant David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) also established the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam in 1966. Its mission was pretty self-explanatory, but as a centralizing effort existing just before the convention, it became an easy target for government suppression. “The Mobe” organized big, successful newsworthy anti-war demonstrations in New York City and Washington D.C. in 1967, and the Convention was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up. While Dellinger was instrumental in The Mobe, it’s notable as well that he was an avid proponent of nonviolent political action, and did hard prison time for being a conscientious objector during World War II.
The last two of the 7, John Froines (Danny Flaherty) and Lee Weiner (Noah Robbins), had been observed by undercover cops with other protesters and charged with teaching demonstrators how to construct incendiary devices. (Ironically, it’s Rubin we see onscreen giving instructions on Molotov cocktails.) The working theory was that these two were charged to later be acquitted, reinforcing the apparent guilt of the other five, more severely charged, defendants.
Kelvin Harrison Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Rylance in “Trial Of The Chicago 7.” credit: Nico Tavernise / Netflix
Also charged with conspiracy was Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), one of the founders of the Black Panther Party. He’d only given a few speeches in the Grant Park during the demonstrations, and any links to the other alleged co-conspirators were tenuous-to-non-existent. Seale’s own attorney was unable to represent him at that time, but Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) would neither grant a postponement nor allow Seale to represent himself, despite Defense Attorney William Kunstler’s (Mark Rylance) protestations that he couldn’t do it either. Seale made a number of interjections during the trial, many justifiably, that Judge Hoffman didn’t appreciate, and, at one point, Hoffman had Seale bound, gagged, cuffed and chained to his chair. The film shows this, and the declaration of a mistrial on his behalf, as a single day’s occurrences; in truth, Seale was subjected to three full days of this treatment before the mistrial judgement. His case was separated from the other 7, and never retried.
It’s arguable that had a genuinely competent judge presided over the trial, it would not have become the media circus it did. But both Mayor Richard J. Daley and newly-appointed U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell wanted quick work in creating examples of the defendents as unpatriotic subversives, thereby justifying whatever force the Chicago Police Department brought to bear to save and preserve the American way of life, and law and order. One highly-placed witness is indeed called upon to expose that lie in testimony, and reveal that the Chicago Police Force’s actions, rather than the demonstrators’, were the catalysts for whatever “rioting” occurred. But Judge Hoffman had other ideas about allowing that.
Frank Langella in “Trial of the Chicago 7.” credit: Nico Tavernise / Netflix
I was twelve-to-fourteen years old when this stuff happened, and it wasn’t just big in Chicago; it was crucial national news. One of my biggest complaints with Sorkin’s film is there’s no sense whatsoever of the effect of these proceedings on the rest of the country, or whether they made any real difference concerning what came after. The Vietnam War ended, but had these activist organizations really made a difference? Sorkin scores satisfying “screw you” points in presenting Tom Hayden’s final coup-de-gras towards Judge Hoffman in final arguments, but did it really matter? Sorkin’s film happens almost exclusively in the narrative’s own interiors – the courtroom, or the “Conspiracy Office” house they share, or government offices. The rest of the country, no matter how abstractly represented, or not, seems to have been on another planet. The few exterior shots of demonstrations and/or confrontations are oddly unconvincing as well – urgent things are happening within them, but there’s no sense of where they are in the city, or how various places – the Conrad Hilton, the police department where Tom Hayden is held, the International Amphitheater (the actual convention site), Grant Park – relate to each other in the real city’s space. Most of the location shooting was in New Jersey, save for a few computer-composited shots of Grant Park landmarks and a short scene near the old Dearborn Station in Printer’s Row. Sorkin isn’t aspiring to be any kind of epic-action director, but he needs to be at least a credible world-builder within the context of his films.
I still recommend the film – as I said, the writing and performances are well worth it. Sorkin’s good at both creating conflicts, and then flushing out commonalities, between his varied characters. On the one hand, Abbie taking Hayden down a notch on pure grammatical geekery is a bit cringeworthy, but it’s classic Sorkin-ese. On the other hand, it’s especially gratifying to see what Mark Rylance makes of Sorkin’s dialogue – his degrees of wry-understatement-to-withering-righteous-rectitude are masterful, as always. Everyone nails their roles – Langella, Jeremy Strong, Joseph Gordon Leavitt as Federal prosecutor Richard Schultz, John Carroll Lynch; even a miscast, weirdly petulant Eddie Redmayne somehow pulls it off. As Sorkin himself states, “Honestly, when I came to work in the morning I felt that I was being tossed the keys to a Formula One race car and all you had to do was not put the car in the wall and these guys were going to win the race.”
Jeremy Strong and Sasha Baron Cohen in “Trial Of The Chicago 7.” credit: Nico Tavernise / Netflix
Sorkin ends the film with some conventional intertitled updates: Here’s What Happened To These Guys Afterwards, etc… But the title I sorely missed was “America’s involvement in the Vietnam War ended with the Fall of Saigon in 1975.” I absolutely agree with Sorkin’s subtextual assertions that the American judicial system is just as screwed up today as it was back then. (Iran-Contra? WMD in Iraq? No prosecutions for the 2008 financial crisis? NONE?!) But the mission those defendants were on back then, in the sixties, was accomplished, and they made no small contributions to that end. Sorkin’s made a clever and engaging chamber drama with and around this history, but he (and his 43 (!) producers) still fail to bring it up to its rightful historical scale. By all means, see it. But don’t let Sorkin’s artful and well-meaning constructions undersell the history itself.
Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (USA, 2021) is such a well-conceived, well-written, well-shot and well-performed story that I feel a little guilty saying it falls short of being genuinely satisfying. But most movie viewers and critics are rightfully singing its praises, and I have little argument with that.
Jacob and Monica Yi (Steven Yeun and Yeri Han, both excellent) came to the U.S. from South Korea and settled in California, making their living working in chicken hatcheries dividing male chicks (don’t taste great grown-up, don’t lay eggs) from more desirable female chicks. They also started a family, daughter Anne (Noel Cho) and her younger brother David (Alan S. Kim). They’ve saved quite a bit of money, so Jacob feels compelled to follow his next great ambition; starting a farm to grow Korean vegetables for the American, and expat Korean, markets.
As the film opens, their rental truck and the family station wagon are pulling into a green and open piece of Alabama farmland, upon which is perched a fair-sized mobile home. Jacob feels like he just woke up on Christmas morning, but Monica wasn’t planning on a trailer-park-without-the-park that’s twenty miles away from a lot of basic necessities. Young David has an abnormal heart murmur, and would ideally be closer to a hospital. There’s a nearby hatchery they’ll both work at while the farm is coming up to speed, and a few fellow Koreans work there. But otherwise, they’re on their own with few socializing options.
Jacob’s newly-purchased used tractor is delivered by Paul (veteran character ace Will Patton); he’s a twitchy born-again local eccentric, friendly and gracious, who isn’t afraid of some hard work, and he and Jacob work together to start laying down crop. Monica’s having big, understandable adjustment issues, though, and after a high-volume “discussion,” she and Jacob decide they’ll bring Monica’s mother, Grandma Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung) out from Korea to live with them. Bearing Korean chili powder, anchovies and humbling infusions of cash for the grown-ups, Grandma and David engage in hilarious adversarial negotiations and pranks – she teaches him to play cards and hurl profanities, and he turns her on to professional wrestling on TV.
Jacob’s game to meet the challenges of his version of the American dream. and writer/director Chung is keen to convince us that their original nationality makes no difference whatsoever. I’m not convinced that’s how things uneventfully went in that regard, but I won’t second-guess Chung’s discretion here – his film is about other things, and his streamlined and efficient narrative has its own admirability. Besides a bit of predictably wrong-headed “ching-chong ping-pong” from a kid or two at the local church, the Yi’s are welcomed, and start to settle in to their new life. Unpredictably, though, Korean produce purveyors in Dallas renege on their contracts with Jacob, and he must scramble to make quick cold-sales while his already-harvested goods sit in storage.
Youn Yuh-jung in “Minari.” credit: A24
Lee Isaac Chung wrote the film as well as directing it, and it’s a minor masterpiece of understatement, clarity and honest credibility. Predominantly autobiographical (David is his younger alter-ego), he’s content to trust the story to tell itself, and gives his actors as much freedom, or, crucially, as much control over his characters as they see fit to express.
As a short story that he’s chosen to film, it’s moving and surprisingly powerful, and this is the primary, legitimate reason to see it. But Chung is far better at writing and directing actors than he is in crafting a genuinely cinematic experience. I found Minari to be a terrific made-for-TV-scaled movie; apart from a few Malick-like ‘golden-time’ landscape shots too few and far-between to leave much of an impression, there isn’t a lot here visually besides the ordered presentation of narrative and location. Cinematographer Lachlan Milne has professionally delivered all (I suspect) that Chung asked for, but I imagine Milne himself absorbed a lot of missed visual opportunities, and carried on nonetheless.
But I don’t want to grouse too much. Chung’s film displays an extraordinary amount of intelligence, empathy, good humor and gracious humanity without softening the rigors of starting over in a new place with some new ideas and putting a lot of familiar things at risk. Chung has seized on an insistent Steinbeck-ian tone here, and it pays off. I still have Bryan Stevenson’s Alabama in the back of my own brain, but Chung gives us a nice break from that. Not to mention that he filmed it in Oklahoma.
Periscope In The Bathtub 