Maya Hawke in “Wildcat.” credit: Oscilloscope Labs
The literary work of Flannery O’Connor can be both impressive and scary. Her writing is colorful and seemingly effortless – start reading one of her short stories and you’ll feel your brain being guided into her world, the rural white American South, homey and welcoming, twangy and chummy, then slowly sliding into incremental eccentricities: men of casual cruelty or insistent ‘splaining, manipulative or cloyingly prideful women, older children just a bit off – yearning, desperate people looking for moral clarity or religious deliverance, or predators looking for easy marks or malicious personal retribution. One description I’ve heard (that I disagree with, but I get…) is that she’s the H.P. Lovecraft of the Southern Gothic – she’s not shy about the specters of racial animus, toxic masculinity, the intrigues of mobs and cults or deranging personal transformation. I’m more inclined to see her as a Diane Arbus, far more observational and nonjudgmental than outrightly presentational or presumptively instructive.
O’Connor can be more associatively autobiographical than most. She became aware of her uncommon intelligence and empathy, and gravitated to devout Catholicism, very early on. Her father died of lupus when she was a teen; after high school, she spent three years in university in Georgia, then was invited into the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop (her MFA), and, soon after, to the writer’s community in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. She returned to Milledgeville, Georgia in 1948, to live with her mother thereafter upon learning that she had inherited her father’s lupus. Her first novel, Wise Blood, was published in 1952.
“Wildcat.” credit: Oscilloscope Labs
Ethan Hawke, while being familiar to us as a capable and wide-ranging actor and performer, has also been becoming a seasoned writer and director. The latest evidence is his admirable new film, Wildcat (USA, 2023), which also serves as a labor of love for his talented actress / daughter Maya Hawke (Maya auditioned to Juilliard with a monologue derived from O’Connor’s Prayer Journal). Ethan, and collaborator Shelby Gaines, have written a hybrid screenplay, interweaving Flannery O’Connor’s biographical details with enactments of a number of her short stories, with O’Connor moving in and out of the place of her own main female characters. A few of the narrative transitions don’t work especially well, but Maya is tenacious in establishing O’Connor herself, and I admire the experimental impulses here. She also gets solid, sometimes astonishing, support from Laura Linney in multiple roles, and a cameo gem of character understatement from Liam Neeson (“You don’t need to see grace – it’s always here. We resist it because grace changes us, and change is bloody painful.”)
Shelby Gaines, with his actor/composer brother Latham, provided the subtle but well-placed musical score, and Steve Cosens does good work with the grainy but expressive photography. But the real hero here is editor Barry Poltermann, whom I suspect had to string together many, many disparate elements to do justice to the filmmakers’ better intentions. Bless his heart. But 23 producers? Really?!
Like Frida Kahlo, O’Connor’s personal tribulations, temperamental and physical, informed her profoundly good work in unsettling but undeniably truthful ways. Kahlo passed away when she was 47; O’Connor, 39. The Hawkes and their other collaborators haven’t made a great movie, though the great movie it could have been pokes out frequently enough to keep things admirable, and well worth investing your time in. I highly recommend it. Then go get her book of Complete Stories, and thank me later.
“Wildcat” is showing at the Music Box Theater, the Gene Siskel Film Center, the AMC River East and the AMC Evanston theaters.
Maya Hawke in “Wildcat.” credit: Oscilloscope Labs
Hitoshi Omika and Ryo Nishikawa in “Evil Does Not Exist.” credit: Sideshow / Janus Films
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is an extraordinarily talented Japanese filmmaker who has been working his way through the distribution minor leagues and film festivals circuit. He shot his own remake of Solaris (20070 while still in university in Tokyo, and his well-received graduate film, Passion (2008) started a pretty consistent film career characterized by the slow examination of relationships and cultures. How slow? Happy Hour (2015) follows a group of four women transitioning into their thirties and their ongoing (or failing) marriages in Kobe, Japan; it’s 5 hours and 17 minutes long, and reportedly very good. The films recently getting more recognition in the west are Wheel Of Fantasy And Fortune and the Oscar-winning Drive My Car (which were both released in 2021).
His most recent film, Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない, Aku wa Sonzai Shinai) (2023) is another contemplative but superb work. Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) lives in a pastoral rural village, Mizubiki; he’s a widower raising his eight-year-old daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa). They’re not too far away from Tokyo and the highways thereof, but it’s still surprisingly secluded and peaceful. Settled into their modest routines, Ryo spends the day in school while Takumi does odd-jobs and errands for his neighboring friends and their small businesses, and he maintains their small cottage home.
Ryo Nishikawa in “Evil Does Not Exist.” credit: Sideshow / Janus Films
Sounds too good to last? Yup. A corporate developer and (of all things) a talent agency have joined forces to develop big ‘glamping’ sites (glamorous camping) to lure urbanites looking for weekend nature escapes. It’s A Trend That’s Catching On™, and restless entrepreneurs compete for post-pandemic startup subsidies, regardless of having any real expertise. The company has sent two representatives to Mizubiki to meet with the citizenry, promote the site’s development and address any concerns the longtime inhabitants may have. The representatives, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka), the talent rep, and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), a care worker transitioning to a new career, are taken aback at how knowledgeable and protective the people are about their environment and the negative impacts the proposed site will have on water management and long-settled wildlife. They’re polite about it, but have big reservations, and Mayuzumi assures them their higher-ups will hear about all of their objections.
We never hear details of why Hana’s mother is no longer with them, but Takumi is a loving and engaged father. He and Hana often stroll through the immense woods they live within together; Hana memorizes tree types, learns the behavior of wildlife and knows to take care when hiking. But she tends to keep her own company over her fellow schoolmates, and Takumi is often late collecting her from school at the afternoon’s end, which encourages her to explore the woods on her own.
Mayuzumi and Takahashi bring the Mizubiki folks’ misgivings to their superiors’ attention and get a crash course in blowing smoke and offering half-measures to their marks clients. The land is already bought, and the subsidies expire soon. Throw them a bone or two – hire that Takumi guy as a site supervisor and assure them they’ve been heard. Done deal.
Hitoshi Omika in “Evil Does Not Exist.” credit: Sideshow / Janus Films
These various narrative strands eventually start to converge – our two glamping representatives consider a career change while still doing their best to appease Takumi, but events of unpredictable consequence arise to challenge, eventually, the entire village populace.
Much of Hamaguchi’s film brought to my mind another; Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. (Romania, 2022), which similarly addressed community cohesion against unfairly disruptive forces. In R.M.N., it’s xenophobia, while in Evil Does Not Exist, it’s capitalism, and the erosion of a kind of spirituality. Both are terrific films, smart and artfully expressed, but not necessarily optimistic overall.
Finally, Hamaguchi’s film is eloquent in its technical aspects as well; apparently, the film began as a visual correlative, a 30-minute short, for the music score of Eiko Ishibashi, a beautifully alternating string composition of minor chords moving towards, but never landing on, resolution. Equally impressive is Yoshio Kitagawa’s cinematography, employing a subtle use of a variety of lenses and tracking shots to expand and contract our sense of the outdoors, as well as the crisp and contrasty beauty of the woods in winter. Kitagawa gives us the visual spiritual tone that the narrative reveals to be inevitably vanishing.
“Evil Does Not Exist”is currently running at the Landmark Century Theaters and the AMC River East in Chicago.
“Evil Does Not Exist.” credit: Sideshow / Janus Films
Michael Lonsdale and Delphine Seyrig in “India Song.” credit: Criterion Collection
As we’ve seen, Delphine Seyrig is perfectly comfortable in conventional narrative films (Muriel, Accident, Hedda Gabler, Stolen Kisses), but there’s also no shortage of film work that challenges both herself and the audience for which it’s made (Last Year At Marienbad, Mr. Freedom, La Musica, Jeanne Dielman…). We can now add our film today, India Song (France, 1975), to that second category. Written as a play and directed by Marguerite Duras, Delphine followed her here after Chantal Akerman and a few years after her performance in La Musica (1967), Duras’ directorial debut (with Paul Seban).
India Song draws from two earlier novels by Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964) and The Vice-Consul (1965). In the first part of …Lol Stein, we meet Lola, in Morocco, who is the young lover of Michael Richardson. Early in the story, Michael meets Anne-Marie Stretter, the lovely wife of the French ambassador to India; enraptured, he leaves an elaborate ball with her, never to return to Lol. Despite being consoled by her good friend Tatiana, and her subsequent marriage to another, John Bedford, with whom she moves to Uxbridge (outside of London), she’s obsessed about Richardson’s betrayal, and, ten years later, they return to Morocco. In The Vice-Consul, we discover Michael Richardson, and meet the former Vice-Consul of Lahore, at the French embassy in Calcutta; the vice-consul is awaiting word from Paris on his fate, as he’s been dismissed from his commission in Lahore for erratic behavior, including firing a gun at beggars and lepers on the embassy grounds, and an attempted suicide.
This is where the film begins. As the sun sets over the Ganges, two female voices discuss a madwoman who lives on the grounds – thrown out of her home in Laos for a pregnancy at 17, she’s wandered, bearing 12 abandoned children along the way, and makes her way to the Ganges river and Calcutta, where it’s suggested that the French ambassador’s wife, Anne-Marie Stretter (our Delphine) lets her have her run of the embassy’s grounds.
Mathieu Carrière, Claude Mann and Delphine Seyrig in “India Song.” credit: mubi.com
At an evening reception, Anne-Marie dances with Michael Richardson (Claude Mann), whom she’s kept around all this time, as well as a few other members of the male staff. They are joined by a newly commissioned young Austrian (Mathieu Carrière), who converses with the sad but sane-seeming vice-consul of Lahore (Michael Lonsdale). A bit later, the vice-consul talks to the ambassador, Stretter (both unseen), who persuades him to stay on in Calcutta for a while until Lahore is well in his past. It’s not clear that he’ll take the advice.
It’s no secret that Anne-Marie has many lovers besides her husband – the vice-consul resents the fact that she won’t have him as one of them. He manages to dance with her a bit, but it’s clear she’s just trying to be polite. He eventually makes a loud scene of shouting and crying over her rejection, at first performatively, but eventually in genuine anger and despair. She and the other men make their way upstairs as the vice-consul continues to howl and scream into the night. They all sit, practically motionless, at a small room at the top of the stairs as they describe the things that they’ll see from the car on the way to leaving for the islands, the largest of which has another embassy residence, a villa, as well as the huge and luxurious Prince of Wales hotel.
Upon arriving, she sleeps at the villa, and dines at the hotel with her entourage of young men. Unbeknownst to them, apparently, the Laotian madwoman and the vice-consul have somehow each made their way to the island, too.
Delphine Seyrig and her entourage in “India Song.” credit: Criterion Collection
It’s, eventually, a pretty straightforward narrative, but Duras doesn’t make things easy. While her visual narrative is strikingly beautiful – in the embassy, a two-room parlor with a grand piano, with walls covered in lush green fabric, a large floor-to-ceiling mirror, access to the outdoor patio and a stairway upstairs – the trick is there’s no direct conversation between the characters. Instead, the conversations are related as voice-over – none of the characters even pretend to physically speak to each other. Their movements, expressions and gestures generally correspond to what’s being said, but we find ourselves almost oversaturated with the layers of descriptive recitations and the interactions of the characters in the visual story, especially when the participants aren’t visually present on the screen, as happens in a few instances. Our involvement and surrender to the visual distracts us from the narrative elements we’re hearing, but then our hearing the details of the characters and the storyline blurs the information the visual elements hold for us. Our brains can do this, but it’s surprisingly hard work. We never see the Laotian madwoman, but she’s an early topic of conversation; she sings beautifully, and her whoops and wild interjections aren’t necessarily lamentation as much as mimicry of her natural encounters while wandering across southeast Asia, as sad and rigorous as it must have been. One of the most important conversations, Ambassador Stretter finally speaking with the disgraced vice-consul, happens entirely off-screen; we never see or meet Anne-Marie’s husband. Likewise, we see the vice-consul dancing with and talking to Anne-Marie, calmly but firmly propositioning her, but we don’t follow him outside as he commences to debase himself with his crying, screaming and caterwauling.
The main characters are interesting, but, as Alain Resnais did in …Marienbad, Duras uses the languor and luxury of the environment to insulate the characters from normal social interactions and thoughtful ethical behavior. Duras ultimately hates these people, wealthy and entitled French colonists – she herself grew up around them, and their privileged British counterparts in India; her parents were French schoolteachers in French Indochina, and relatively poor. Duras’ father passed away when she was 7, and she and her mother moved between Saigon and Paris, Mom for teaching gigs, and Marguerite working on her own education, eventually landing advanced diplomas in public law and political economy. She worked for the French government in the Ministry of the Colonies (which she had some personal experience in, clearly). In WWll, she initially worked for the Vichy government, but soon joined the French Resistance and the French Communist Party. She published her first novel, Les Impudents, in 1943.
Mathieu Carrière, Delphine Seyrig and Claude Mann in “India Song.” credit: cinelounge.org
I can’t say that India Song isn’t more work than entertainment. It’s a bit humorless. I can only assure you that it’s a sexy, intelligent, artfully structured and lushly beautiful film that’s quite unlike anything else you’ve seen. Longtime French cinematographer Bruno Nuytten did the astonishing photography. I’m hoping you’ll agree and find that it gets better every time you see it, as I do.
Léa Seydoux and George MacKay in “The Beast,” credit: Carole Bethuel/Janus Films
Bertrand Bonello is one of my favorite filmmakers these days. He’s terrific at experimenting with the structure of his narratives without making a pretentious muddle of things. House Of Tolerance (2011) posited a turn-of-the-century Parisian brothel in a variety of eventful episodes blending specific character studies with anachronistic references to present day. Saint-Laurent (2014) is a non-chronological grab-bag of professionalism, eccentricity, indulgence, raw talent and style celebrating the rightfully famous French designer. Nocturama (2016) follows a group of school-age would-be terrorists setting off a series of explosions in downtown Paris, then hiding out overnight in a high-end department store. Bonello encourages you to make strong associations of your own, but he never explains, or even theorizes, the logic behind their weapons-grade cure for boredom. His 2019 film Zombi Child (2019) begins exploring Voodoo in the culture of slave labor fostered by French colonials, but he again shifts to the present day and confronts the legacies for the French that, while done in their names, may still be unaware of how Haiti has been left nearly uninhabitable and ungovernable. And it’s pretty scary, too.
Bonello’s most recent film uses a novella by Henry James, The Beast In The Forest, as his jumping-off point for a trilogy of stories over three distinct time periods. In 1910, the celebrated concert pianist, Gabrielle Monnier (Léa Seydoux, solid as always) attends a lush reception and salon where she meets the engaging Louis Lewanski (George MacKay). They’re exemplars of Edwardian reserve and decorum, but they cautiously foster a friendship. Despite the Paris-Seine flood, they lunch, they attend the opera (Madame Butterfly); Gabrielle’s husband, Georges (Martin Scali), designs and manufactures dolls for children, and Gabrielle offers to provide Louis a tour of the factory. Nonetheless, Gabrielle has confided in Louis that she feels an incessant personal fear or dread that dire catastrophe awaits her in her near future, which makes her cautious in her own associations. She sees a clairvoyant recommended by Louis and has an unpleasant run-in with a pigeon trapped in the house.
Léa Seydoux in “The Beast.” credit: Janus Films
In 2044, Gabrielle Monnier (Seydoux) is job hunting, and must consult with the disembodied AI presence that controls all culture and commerce in the world. The AI tells her she’s essentially too human, too inefficient to qualify for any job besides her present one, which she’s trying to escape. She’s advised to subject herself to a cleansing of her DNA, which will filter the detritus of past lives and useless intrigues and vastly improve her present prospects. No one walks the streets, there are no cars, phones, screens or networking of any kind between human citizens; everyone serves the AI. Louis (MacKay), too, is interviewing – they seem curious about each other, and amiably civil, but they clearly aren’t encouraged to socialize, and Gabrielle has her intrinsic fear of intimacy carried over from her life in the Belle-Epoque. While she undergoes her DNA cleanse, she’s monitored by Kelly (Guslagie Malanda), who insinuates herself into Gabrielle’s life as a therapeutic escort while she’s going through the cleanse. Kelly encourages her towards a few final indulgences – they decide to go dancing in a club with a 1974 theme. Gabrielle runs into Louis there, and being in the midst of her cleanse, she has re-lived some of her past with Louie, and may have doubts about finishing.
In 2014 Los Angeles, Gabrielle is an aspiring actress who picks up some modeling auditions as well. She’s house-sitting a very posh home in the hills with an elaborate home alarm system. Another model acquaintance of Gabrielle’s invites her to a downtown club that night but ends up no-showing. Gabrielle takes a hit of a drug Dakota was going to share, but even in her uninhibited condition doesn’t find any fun on her own. Heading home, she becomes a stalking target of Louis Lewanski, an aggrieved and avenging incel who looks forward to taking revenge on women who don’t notice him or have regard for him. (Apparently modelled on Santa Barbara’s Elliot Rodger). Gabrielle stays up at home, and just after dawn, there’s an earthquake. Running outside, she meets Louis.
Léa Seydoux and George MacKay in “The Beast,” credit: Sideshow/Janus Films
All sorts of things start overlapping in this episode, this timeline. For Bonello, contemporary Los Angeles is best expressed in David Lynch-ian terms: Gabrielle, existentially fearful of love, yet keeping deep passions in reserve, has a weirdly seductive scene with Louis, the incel who probably deeply needs to kill her; meanwhile, there’s a karaoke show on television in front of them featuring a Roy Orbison song, and the paranoid owner of the house won’t stop calling her about the earthquake, or the alarm, or what other neighbors are calling him about. But now she’s back in the DNA treatment. She goes to the 1974 club, but now it’s the 1980 club, and she’s still not having any fun. Is this Dakota’s club? Then it dawns on her…
So Gabrielle sends Kelly to find him, and she meets Louis again at the club, renamed a different year, with red drapery everywhere and “Evergreen” playing softly…
And here’s a spoiler, so avert your eyes. Avert your eyes!
Gabrielle’s catastrophic fear comes true because Louis completes his DNA cleanse, eradicating his memories of the two of them through the ages. Gabrielle’s tragedy is that her own imagined fear kept her from fully sharing love with the man most likely to be the love of her life, over all that time. And, remember, the original Henry James novella was about Him, not Her.
So, even if you read the spoiler, it doesn’t ruin Bonello’s rich storytelling, his unique narrative eccentricities, nor the fantastic art direction (Katia Wyszkop), amazing costuming (Pauline Jacquard) nor the splendid cinematography (Josée Deshaies). It’s dense, it’s well thought out, and I’m glad Bonello collaborated on this screenplay (Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit).
The film is about twenty minutes too long, but most of the time when I say that I have no idea what I would trim myself. I would rather say it’s rigorous and challenging rather than a slog, but I suspect a number of you will find themselves in Slogville. That’s a risk when your film is over two hours long (hint hint!!)
Quick, go see this on the biggest screen you can find, and you’ll be thinking about it for the next few weeks.
“The Beast (La bête)” opens at the Music Box Theater on Friday, April 12th.
Greta Lee, John Magaro and Teo Yoo in “Past Lives. credit: A24
2023 was a fantastic year for films. Of the films I chose to see this year, it’s tough for me to single out any I didn’t genuinely like. And there’s a disproportionate list of really good films that didn’t get anywhere near the Oscars: After Love, Air, All Dirt Roads Taste Of Salt, All Of Us Strangers, Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret, Dream Scenario, Earth Mama, Ferrari, Memory, Palm Trees And Power Lines, Passages, Priscilla, Quiz Lady, Reality, Sharper, Showing Up, You Hurt My Feelings. The Super Mario Bros. Movie – unnominated in animation – came in second at the box office. Number One? Barbie, directed by – wait, let me check my notes – oh, yeah, unnominated Greta Gerwig. Four of the top five Disney box office films were shut out, and only John Williams saved Indiana Jones from being fifth of five. Usually undeserving films squeeze in anyway because of studio / distributor P.R. blitzkriegs during the holidays. This year they’re all good; the old school aged very quickly while Megan Ellison of A24 handed then their asses. The mega-millions franchise films are losing their riz, while smart independents with real money behind them continue to stick around
Admittedly, a number of these films didn’t qualify, as they didn’t have theatrical runs – streaming only. I don’t get why the studios and distributors keep pushing streaming content so much – they don’t make nearly as much money as a healthy movie screen run. Streaming seemed effective and profitable, but Noo…
I also know the nominees are all great films because of how impossible it is to rank them. This is, of course, part of the argument against awards shows; choosing specific winners from such diverse subject matter is, in many ways, self-defeating.
Jeffrey Wright in “American Fiction.” credit: blackfilmandtv.com
Best Picture:
American Fiction – a smartly written, well-conceived examination of how art filters, and filters through, reality, honestly or manipulatively, opportunistically or shamefully. Having trouble negotiating the new shifting landscapes of wokeness and representation, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison is persuaded to take a break from academia. He heads home to Boston from L.A. and reacquaints himself with his family: his aging Mom Agnes (Leslie Uggams), like-minded sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and, a bit later, his wild-oats-sowing brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown). Monk stews over criticism that his own books are dismissed as too soft, and not “black” enough. Tired of the bestselling books that exploit and distort lived black experience, specifically the alleged brain-dead doorstop We’s Lives in Da Ghetto by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), Monk writes his own purple-prose version of a cliched inner-city black crime saga featuring guns, drugs and messed-up families – My Pafology by “Stagg R. Leigh,” maliciously snickering throughout his labors. Of course, the manuscript gets distributed and wildly succeeds. Arthur, his agent (John Ortiz) encourages him to grab the reins and ride this winner home, but despite the satisfaction of proving himself right, he has very mixed feelings, alternately promoting and sabotaging his blockbuster. Some well-measured hilarity ensues, but unfortunate little sprouts of smug condescension still poke through this otherwise masterful and thoughtfully written satire. The performances are flawless throughout, and Cord Jefferson’s debut feature (he came from journalism, then writing television) definitely deserves to be in this league.
Anatomy Of A Fall – “(Justine Triet’s) ensuing narrative is, indeed, the “anatomy” of the Maleski family, and what might have led to Samuel’s death.
“The obvious question is “Did He Jump or Was He Pushed?” – and the obvious suspect for the latter is his wife. Sandra isn’t immediately charged; in fact, it’s pretty clear that the vigorous and efficient police investigation is more about the truth of the circumstances rather than landing on a perpetrator, which is also a pretty good summary of Triet’s narrative strategy as well.”
“Triet here (with her reliable writing partner Arthur Harari) revels in the complexities, the details, the incongruities and the unpredictability of her characters. The film looks great, shot by Simon Beaufils, but isn’t particularly cinematic; it’s too fussy and repetitive, is probably 45 minutes too long, and at one point I exasperatingly decided that they couldn’t tuck in all of the loose ends, gave up, and stuck with the story that the ambiguities were all on purpose.”
Margot Robbie in “Barbie.” credit: Warner Bros.
Barbie – Greta Gerwig’s terrific fantasia works like a Warner Bros. cartoon from the early 50’s – little kids will love it for the visual audacity, music, fun surprises and bigger-than-life characters, and adults will love it for the canny and pointed adult critique of gender roles, commodification, commercialization and disposable culture. But it’s all genuinely smart and funny, and looks great.
Barbie lives in Barbieland with a wide but tasteful assortment of other Barbies and Kens-in-waiting. At some point, Barbie gets a notion of her own mortality, even though her showers are never wet, and her food is never eaten. She makes a break for the real world (unaware that Ken [Ryan Gosling, effortlessly entertaining] has stowed away in the car to stick with her) and they discover that, unlike Barbieland, here the men are in charge, and being female is oppressive and infuriating, when it’s not just flat-out depressing. Her real-world guide turns out to be Gloria (America Ferrara), a secretary at Mattel, who has a cynical and pragmatic daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and a few ideas of how to update Barbie for how life in the real world has turned out for women. Among other things, they involve cellulite… and mortality.
Meanwhile, after scoping out the real world for himself, Ken brings his newfound discovery of patriarchy (and ponies!) back to Barbieland, and transforms it into Kendom, transforming the other Barbies into cocktail waitresses and the dreamhouses into chapters of Sigma Chi. Barbie is devastated and defeated, but gets a lift from Gloria and young Sasha, arriving in time to revive Barbie and prepare for beach war with the Kens.
Sasha really gets it: “Kendom contains the seeds of its own destruction…Now that they think they have power over you, you make them question whether they have enough power over each other.”
This’ll start to get repetitive, but Barbie is a really good movie; it will nonetheless most likely end the evening empty-handed. But Greta Gerwig is the real deal, a major-league filmmaker who isn’t going anywhere, and just made Warner Bros. and Mattel the #1 box office winner of 2023. She don’t need no stinking Oscar.
The Holdovers – A thoroughly professional filmed entertainment, adapted and shot by seasoned pros, featuring impressive performances by all involved, but especially Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph.
A teacher (Giamatti) is persuaded to stay with, and supervise, a small group of prep-school students who are unable to go home for the holidays. Their chief-cook-and-bottle-washer, Mary Lamb (Randolph), has worked at the school for years; because of that her son was afforded an education there, but was then drafted into the army and killed.
“Like CODA from two years ago, it’s a comedic crowd-pleaser featuring just enough intelligence, eccentricity and empathy to relate a good story in a way that will challenge or offend absolutely no one.”
Killers Of The Flower Moon – “Leonardo DiCaprio does great work with a not-very-bright character who isn’t all that likeable, yet we’re still hopeful for him near the end. That’s tough – that’s good acting. It’s also the best, most arresting performance in years for DeNiro as well. Again, any other year… As you’ve no doubt heard, Lily Gladstone is revelatory here. She spends much of the latter part of the film in sweaty delirium and is still the heart and soul of the narrative.” She’s one of the film’s best shots for an Oscar, along with Robbie Robertson’s musical score.
William “King” Hale owns a cattle ranch in Oklahoma adjacent to the Osage reservation outside of Fairfax. The Osage discover their land is rich with oil, and commence to making enormous fortunes, which persuades the white establishment there to horn in on that windfall, literally by hook or by crook. Hale’s nephew, Ernest (DiCaprio) marries an Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and makes a home for her while being complicit in separating Mollie’s family from their oil money and abetting murder.
“In any other year, this film would have mopped up six or eight categories. And it’s absolutely a must-see, preferably in the biggest theater you can find. But settling for your TV at home will be just fine if you can avoid the usual distractions. This is incomparable American storytelling… I think I have to rate this thoroughly superb film in the Goodfellas (1990) league.”
Bradley Cooper in “Maestro.” credit: Netflix
Maestro – “(Bradley) Cooper’s second feature film, Maestro (U.S., 2023) his biographical treatment of world-class composer, conductor, musician and educator Leonard Bernstein, and his actress wife and mother of their children Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), has given (Cooper) a far more challenging degree of difficulty to overcome. Once again, God bless ‘im, like A Star Is Born, acting the lead role, writing the screenplay (with Josh Singer) and directing the film leaves us with a patchwork struggling to be a quilt. He has given us a genuinely intelligent film with a lot of interesting visual ideas, a number of impressive performances and a sincere regard for these characters, but there are just too many moving parts, too many spinning plates in the air; the great ideas flash past quickly, the underlying tectonics heave and fracture, and the conclusion of the saga leaves us with far less than the sum of the parts of these two profoundly fascinating characters.”
“Watching him be recognized, and then losing Oscars anyway, will be cruel and unfair this year. But there’s more where this came from, trust me. He’ll be fine, sadder but wiser.”
Oppenheimer – Hollywood’s always happy when a really good movie targeted for adult audiences does well at the box office. Christopher Nolan generally delivers on that, with the possible exception of Tenet, which had Covid running a bit of interference on its theatrical numbers. I still think The Dark Knight is his best film to date, warts and all, but Oppenheimer is damned impressive. The storytelling is admirably tight this time, even allowing for his usual temporal and visual trickery, and it’s clear he’s a director that other actors are happy to collaborate with. This is the expected Best Picture winner, and perhaps rightly so, but I wish he could get a better handle on his female characters. Florence Pugh does what she can with Jean Tatlock, but primarily comes off as pushy and abrupt, and, even in intimacy, is held at emotional arm’s length by Oppenheimer. Kitty Oppenheimer’s marriage to Robert was her fourth, and she was a formidable scientist and Communist herself, a fascinating character that Nolan barely scratched the surface of. It’s Oppenheimer’s film, clearly, but it’s a shame he couldn’t give Emily Blunt a bit more to work with.
Technically, of course, the film is, again, irreproachable. Hoyte Van Hoytema never shies from Nolan’s admirable sense of visual scale and is Nolan’s go-to; this is more excellent work, taken up just after shooting Nope for Jordan Peele. This is Jennifer Lame’s second editing gig for Nolan after Tenet, and she also did Wakanda Forever and Marriage Story for Noah Baumbach. Ludwig Göransson’s score is very good and avoids the bombast of Hans Zimmer while still being boldly evocative. As always, wear earplugs to theaters when you see a Nolan film – that’s just how he rolls.
Best Picture, Director, Actor and Supporting Actor, as well as many technical awards, are faits accomplis on Sunday night, but a shocker upset from Emily Blunt would be a special treat. God bless Da’Vine Joy Randolph, but Blunt, as they say, made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear with her performance, and is way overdue for being recognized for her work.
Past Lives – My personal #1 film this year. It’s Celine Song’s feature film debut.
“Past Lives is a smaller film that absolutely nails its modest but well-conceived ambitions. Song’s inspired-by-her-own-history screenplay (write what you know…) is a superbly rendered short-story that shows us the 24-year connection between two people who have loved each other dearly, from youth to present day, and how their lives nonetheless diverged.”
“Hae Sung sends word that he’ll be taking a vacation in New York, and it would be great to see Nora and meet Arthur. It’s a pleasant surprise, but no one really knows how that 24 years of each other’s voluntary exile is going to express itself. All three are good people, and there’s a delicate graciousness to each of them in their own ways. But there’s an enormous emotional undercurrent of longing and empathy underneath it all. Hae Sung confesses “I didn’t know that liking your husband would hurt so much,” but he, like Arthur, understands and accepts how they’ve ended up here.”
Best seen in a big-screen theater with no distractions, but do what you can – it’s brilliant.
Emma Stone in “Poor Things.” credit: Searchlight Pictures
Poor Things – My #2 choice this year, as creative, involving and entertaining a film as has been released in the cinematic mainstream in years. The book Yorgos Lanthimos adapted for his film, by Alasdair Gray, stretched both Lanthimos and actor Emma Stone well into another league of filmed storytelling. An intriguing reversal on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Bella Baxter’s full-grown woman, seemingly lost to suicide over her pregnancy, has her baby’s brain transplanted to her own corpse by the alternately brilliant and crackpot Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who nurses her back to a whole new life, albeit one that she must grow up into, starting from mental infancy. Movie magic accelerates the process, of course; Godwin (God for short, of course) assigns his assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to observe and record Bella’s progress over a few years. Bella, of course, can’t be imprisoned in Godwin’s home forever – already restless, she runs off with lawyer and profligate rake Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, stretching out admirably in a deeply goofy turn), and gets a crash course in luxury on a cruise ship and the lower depths of Victorian-era Lisbon and Paris.
Best Actress is an embarrassment of riches this year, and neither Lily Gladstone nor Stone deserve disappointment. Nonetheless…
The Zone Of Interest – Jonathan Glazer’s haunting fourth film chronicles the day-to-day domestic life of the family of the supervising Kommandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children. Their home is very nice, quaint, with smallish rooms, but with generously sized gardens that Hedwig is happy to cultivate. It is directly abutting the fence that separates their home from the camp; we never witness any atrocities or other direct military activities of the camp, but the film starts with a black screen and Mica Levi’s ominous ambient music, subtly shifting in tone and intensity, instructing our ears to zero in on the soundscape of the story.
The house is peopled with servants, food and domestic supplies are delivered daily, the children seem happy and healthy, and the Hösses entertain and accommodate other military families in their home and spacious backyard in the summer. They’re a very happy family who has settled into a nice life.
So what is the capacity of these people to ignore what’s going on opposite the wall they plant flowers and vines against? How can Hedwig be comfortable helping herself to the clothes, fur coats and jewelry confiscated from the prisoners? When Rudolph is transferred to another city, Hedwig insists she and the children won’t be going with him – their happy here at Auschwitz. Golly, who wouldn’t be? A chilling and important film based on the writing of the late Martin Amis, adapted by Glazer brilliantly, and ending with a reaction by Rudolf that may or may not be a glimpse of humanity and shame. A must see.
Best Picture – should win – Poor Things, Barbie or Past Lives (dream a little dream…).
will win – Oppenheimer.
Best Director – should win – Martin Scorsese.
will win – Christopher Nolan.
conspicuous in her absence – Greta Gerwig.
Best Actor – should win – Colman Domingo.
will win – Cillian Murphy.
Best Actress – should win – Carey Mulligan or Emma Stone.
Will win – Lily Gladstone.
Although I must say I saw Poor Things and thought ‘C’mon, who’s gonna beat that,’ Then I saw
‘Maestro’ and found out. All five are fabulous, though.
conspicuous in her absence – no one saw it, apparently,
but Sydney Sweeney was superb in “Reality.”
Best Supporting Actor – they were all good, all deserving –
should and will win – Robert Downey, Jr.
Best Supporting Actress – should win – Emily Blunt or Danielle Brooks.
Will win – Da’Vine Joy Randolph.
International Feature – should and will win – The Zone Of Interest.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in “Killers Of The Flower Moon.” credit: Landmark Media
“Yeah, Osage are the finest and most beautiful people on God’s green earth.”
So says William “King” Hale (Robert DeNiro), a rich and successful cattle rancher who for years has lived adjacent to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. It’s just past the worst of World War I, and the Osage, providentially, have begun a fresh new history as the wealthiest people on the planet, or at least in the good ol’ U. S. of A. When a natural gusher of oil erupts from the ground out of, seemingly, nowhere, the Osage know exactly what to do; hire the smartest white people they can find, set up rigs, drill, drill, drill, and have the whites educate them to manage their new industry. While their relationships with the whites are understandably cautious, even cynical, they know they’re going to need to go along to get along until they can run the whole empire themselves. And, make no mistake, it’s their empire. So, under the Osage’ watchful eye, Oklahoma arranges for the white folks to do most of their administrative management. What could go wrong?
In Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon (U.S., 2023), Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is returning home from service in the war. Still in his military wools, he arrives by train into hometown Fairfax, Oklahoma, and is surrounded on the platform by workers looking for jobs with the drilling rigs. He’s picked up at the station by Henry Roan (William Belleau), an Osage friend doing business with his uncle, William Hale, and they drive through miles of farmland covered with oil derricks. “Whose land is this, Henry?” asks Ernest, clearly a bit culture shocked. “My land,” replies Henry. “My land.”
Past the oil fields are grazing cattle – William Hale’s cattle – and Henry delivers Ernest to a warm welcome from his family; Uncle William and Ernest’s younger brother Byron (Scott Shepherd), his Aunt Myrtle and young Cousin Willie. The men go inside, have a whiskey, and Hale, amiably, lays down the law. He will employ Ernest, and give him good work, but the Osage aren’t chatty. They’re friendly, but don’t embarrass yourself. Don’t get liquored up. Don’t talk shit. Ernest confides that “his stomach burst” in the field, which could be diverticulitis or a hernia. Hale gives him a job as a driver; he trusts Ernest, but generally schools him to be discreet. Once he earns Ernest’s trust, and gets him into a working rhythm, he’ll be ready for Hale to give him his other true job; eliminating particular Osage tribespeople to accumulate their interests in the oil for themselves.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in “Killers Of The Flower Moon.” credit: lwlies.com
“Being a driver” essentially means being a cabbie for the Osage clientele in downtown Fairfax, for clothes shopping, lunching, doing business or anything else they may be inclined to indulge themselves with. One of Ernest’s clients is Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), one of four daughters of Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal); she’s taken to Ernest, who is flattered, but it’s not until Uncle William takes notice that the advantages of pursuing Mollie’s favor become apparent. Lizzie Q and her daughters have ‘full-blood estate’ status; if Ernest marries Mollie, and the rest of the family passes before them, then they inherit enormous amounts of continuingly replenished money. “That’s good business,” advises Uncle King, “and legal – not against the law. That’s smart investment.” Investment or romance, Ernest has his heart set on marrying Molly, and they tie the knot at a big outdoor celebration, where we learn that Lizzie’s daughter Minnie (Jillian Dion) hasn’t been feeling well. Hale makes his resources available for whatever she might need, much to the chagrin of her husband, Bill Smith (Jason Isbell). Minnie dies soon afterwards of her “wasting illness.”
Another death follows – Mollie’s party-girl sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers), the wife of brother Byron Burkhart, and the tribe appoints one of the white administrators, Barney McBride (Brent Langdon) to go to Washington D.C. Indian Affairs to provide them with additional law enforcement to stem the killings. His trip doesn’t go well. Bill Smith is now married to Reta (Janae Collins), sister of his late wife Minnie (and Mollie, of course). Clearly, Bill Smith knows a bit about headrights as well. Hale wants Mollie to have all of Lizzie Q’s headrights (for Ernest, and himself), but Ernest isn’t devious or forward-thinking or cold-blooded enough to arrange for that himself. Hale appeals to Ernest’s devotion to his wife and children, and the ‘work’ responsibilities Hale has given to him along with his brother. Hale thinks things are going awry, and he puts the burden and the initiative on Ernest to fix it. (Masonic ritual is a scary/perfect metaphor for Ernest’s place in King’s hierarchy). Hale, nonetheless, hedging his bets, also goes to see Henry Grammer (Sturgill Simpson), rodeo wrangler and moonshiner, for advice on eliminating Bill Smith and Reta in one fell swoop. His solution is impressively thorough, involving Acie Kirby (Pete Yorn), and brings more death, with an additional bit of destruction. Reta and Bill Smith are vaporized, and another sister is gone. Meanwhile, King Hale goes to the cinema, watches the newsreels of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and you honestly can’t tell if he finds it saddening or impressive.
And we’re not even halfway through. Nor have we even gotten to Jesse Plemons (of the newly formed U.S. Bureau of Investigation), nor the lawyer John Lithgow, nor the eccentric lawyer Brendan Fraser. Justice comes fitfully but inevitably to Fairfax, Oklahoma.
Robert DeNiro and Jesse Plemons in “Killers Of The Flower Moon.” credit: AppleTV+
I previously stated that The Irishman(2019) was Martin Scorsese’s best film since The Departed. After much thought, I think I have to rate this thoroughly superb film in the Goodfellas (1990) league. Well-written (Eric Roth and Scorsese adapted David Grann’s reportedly wonderful book), well-shot (by Rodrigo Prieto, Scorsese’s cinematographer of choice, previously employed by Alejandro González Iñárritu) (Prieto shot Barbie this year as well), well designed (irreproachable veteran Jack Fisk), and well scored by the late Robbie Robertson. Another interesting sidebar concerns the number of working musicians taking acting roles here: Jack White, Jason Isbell, Pete Yorn, Sturgill Simpson, and Charlie Musselwhite. It’s not just novelty casting – he wants reliable artists of various interests to diversify the overall creative vibe on-set. And I suspect Robbie Robertson will be in-line for an original score Oscar, despite Oppenheimer’s bombast (Ludwig Göransson) and Poor Things’ dinks, doinks and glissandos (Jerskin Fendrix).
At 3 hours and 26 minutes, I honestly don’t think there’s a throwaway frame in the entire movie. Leonardo DiCaprio does great work on a not-very-bright character who isn’t all that likeable, yet we’re still hopeful for him near the end. That’s tough – that’s good acting. It’s also the best, most arresting performance in years for DeNiro as well. Again, any other year… But, as you’ve no doubt heard, Lily Gladstone is revelatory here. She spends much of the latter part of the film in sweaty delirium and is still the heart and soul of the narrative. She already has a Pacino-like gravity and brings a hearty sense of humor where there doesn’t seem to be an opening for it.
In any other year, this film would have mopped up six or eight categories. And it’s absolutely a must-see, preferably in the biggest theater you can find. But settling for your TV at home will be just fine if you can avoid the usual distractions. This is incomparable American storytelling.
Benoît Poelvoorde in “Man Bites Dog.” credit: filmschoolrejects.com
Made over thirty years ago, Man Bites Dog (C’est Arrivé Près De Chez Vous, or It Happened in Your Neighborhood) (1992, Belgium) seemed like a grisly goofball provocation, with the insolence and audacity of a young John Waters or George Romero. It was not for the faint of heart, nor is it now. But it was alarmingly prescient, presenting a charismatic smart-assed psychopath gleefully committing robberies, murders and various other Class A and B felonies while being filmed for a documentary devised by Ben, the unrepentant serial killer (Benoît Poelvoorde), a producer/reporter and participant (Rémy Belvaux), and their cameraman (André Bonzel). Sadly, they lose a few sound-people along the way, but they are undeterred.
Ben acts as the master of ceremonies, giving us ongoing commentary on his methods and personal preferences. He introduces the audience to his family – Mom runs a successful bakery and seems to be supporting Ben’s chatty grandparents as well. They all fawn over memories of young happy Benoit, seemingly unaware of his cold-blooded occupational pursuits nowadays. He strangles a random woman on a commuter train to demonstrate how he wraps his dead victims up before throwing them into a nearby river, meticulously explaining how he calculates their weight and figures how much other material he’ll need to add to keep them submerged after the body starts bloating. Next up, he beats a postman to death; he tries to do this early each month in order to make off with pension checks.
The atrocities keep escalating, with breaks in-between to introduce his old friend Valerie (Valérie Parent) from school, the professional flautist he used to accompany on piano, or treating the film crew to cocktails at his usual bar with his favorite bartender Malou. Like Valerie and Malou, the two filmmakers strike a balance with staying on Ben’s good side while not doing anything to upset him. Ben insists Rémy and André accompany him to a fancy restaurant for mussels (moules marinières) and drinks, and proceeds to make himself sick, making an overindulgent scene, a common dilemma for Malou as well.
Valérie Parent and Willy Vandenbroeck in “Man Bites Dog.” credit: theotherfilms.blogspot.com
As train-wreck / car crash fascinating as Ben can be (he recites improvised poetry about pigeons while chasing and firing at a rival killer through a factory), the complicity of the two documenting crew members starts to escalate as well. Watching Ben work both sides of the narrative, with his charm and consistency slowly softening the effects of his violent psychosis, Rémy and André continue to normalize Ben on film until all three participate in an especially horrific rape and murder. Now add the revelation that an Italian assassin with a grudge is pursuing Ben, and all three of their futures look bleak and inevitable.
We all have a penchant for true stories and colorful villains, whether Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer or Jeffrey Epstein or Henry Kissinger or Roger Stone. These three young filmmakers had some very forward-thinking ideas about how media can soften, distort and normalize villains and atrocities that we nonetheless see and hear about every single day, until they just become part of the wallpaper in our lives. The film lures us, early on, into thinking this is all pretty interesting, yet challenging. But the filmmakers are very smart about not glamorizing the violence, towards others or for its own sake, while warning us about its effects in a patronizing or hypocritical way. A great deal of it is pretty hard-to-watch, and alpha-preener Ben most definitely wears out his welcome, as he should. I referred to George Romero earlier – the director’s admired, by me and others, for his unerring moral sense of showing us very bad things without luring us into that amygdala-driven identification with them.
Man Bites Dog, an honest trip-through-the-mill, isn’t interested in convincing you of anything other than how despicable man’s inhumanity to man genuinely is, and how its seeming eternal presence wears down our better selves. Its black humor is only there to help the medicine go down.
“Man Bites Dog” will be screened on Sunday, March 3rd at 1:30 pm.
The European Union Film Festival, a longtime fixture of the Gene Siskel Film Center, is slowly but surely building back from both the pandemic and some artistic and administrative changeover over the last two or three years, as is typical in any fine arts organization in the U.S. This year’s festival runs from March 1st to the 10th, and will feature, each year, films from the country that holds the presidency of the E.U. This year that’ll be Belgium, and there’s a great combination of recent films and a few modern classics.
Marc Zinga in “Omen.” credit: Wrong Men
There’s an enormous amount of crossover, and separation, between countries and cultures just in Europe alone. Now imagine those same outer boundaries as the conditions of colonizers and colonized, here exemplified with African culture, but indicative of any other diverse population – South Asian, South American, Middle Eastern. There’s a sense of what’s established here, what constitutes family, morality or bad and good here, and the scary idea of what things must be like there, at either end of the equation.
The opening night film is Omen (Augure) (Belgium / Congo, 2023). Baloji is a Belgian rapper, writer and filmmaker who draws from his own Congolese heritage to craft a superb film about Koffi (Marc Zinga), who left his Congo family behind to live in Belgium. But having found his ideal partner, Alice (Lucie Debay), who is early on in her pregnancy (with twins!), Koffi feels it’s only right to return to the Congo to introduce her to his family and, hopefully, get some manner of reconnection and/or blessing from them. Koffi is frank with Alice about the culture shock she may face, but she’s respectfully game.
Believe me, the ‘Congo’ that Baloji conjures here is both fascinating and foreboding. Koffi’s sister Tshala (Eliane Umuhire) ostensibly will meet them at the airport and put them up, but she’s a no-show, and Koffi rents a car and keeps calling her to establish where he’ll be staying with his pregnant wife. Koffi’s mother, Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua) will barely acknowledge him – Koffi bears a dark stain on the side of his face that Mujila, at his birth, decided was (and still is) the ‘Mark of the Devil.’ He and Alice arrive at a family gathering, glared at by Mom, taken down a peg or two by his territorial uncles (she’s pregnant AND white?!) (with, incidentally, no sign whatsoever of their brother, his father), and commits a faux pas that furthers his undeserved reputation as the Absolutely Evil expatriate betrayer of all that is Congolese familial ritual tradition.
Marc Zinga and Lucie Debay in “Omen.” credit: Wrong Men
We’re also introduced to two consistently resentful and malicious teenage gangs, and the best I can describe them without spoiling your own discovery of them is an amalgam of George Miller, Alejandro Jodorowsky and the Mardi Gras. Like many gangs of the sort, there’s serious danger of disfigurement or death for either side, but there’s also an ongoing sense of the malleability of gender and/or gender signifiers, and sinister carnival affectations alternately disguising or parading their indulgences. They seem to be subversion personified. Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya) is the leader of the Goonz, dressed entirely in pink dresses and/or lingerie, living in an abandoned school bus, while their rivals, in black with makeshift gold crowns, have captured one of Paco’s female gang members (he’s already mourning his younger sister, Maya) and will indeed do their worst unless Paco decides to confront his rival leader one-on-one.
It’s a free-associative miasma of national identity, tribalism, cold survival, family structures, friendships, violence, loyalties and love (even when love doesn’t seem like a great idea, but it hangs on tenuously nonetheless). I enjoyed Baloji’s film immensely – it was a great year for International Films that didn’t make the Oscar cut, too, as this film ended up. Wildly creative, undeniably entertaining, and, at times, genuinely terrifying. What’s not to like?
“Omen” (Augure) opens this year’s EUFF on Friday, March 1st at 7:00 pm.
Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman in “May December.” credit: Netflix
Todd Haynes’ May December (USA, 2023) is based on the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal of the late nineties, wherein the 34-year-old married elementary school teacher initiated an intimate love relationship with one of her sixth-grade students, Vili Fualaau, a 12-year-old boy of Samoan heritage. In 1997, she was charged with second-degree child rape; their first child, a daughter, had been born just before sentencing, and her lawyer managed to reduce her sentence to six months incarceration, three suspended. She was forbidden from seeing the Fualaau boy, now caring for the child, as well as her five children from her previous marriage to Steve Letourneau. A few weeks after her 3-month release, she was discovered with Fualaau in her car again; her original pre-reduction sentence was reinstated – seven-and-a-half years – and she gave birth to their second child, another daughter, while in prison. Fualaau’s mother assumed custody of them while Mary Kay served her full sentence. By the time of her release, Fualaau had turned twenty-one, and got the no-contact order against her reversed. They married soon after.
As Haynes’ film opens, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) is awaiting the arrival of the actress who will be playing her in a TV movie. Her husband Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) and a neighbor friend Rhonda (Andrea Frankle) are helping her put out a spread for a backyard cookout, and two of their kids have some of their high-school-aged friends over. They live in Savannah, GA, on one of the islands. The actress is Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), well-known as the star of TV’s Norah’s Ark, a long-running show about a wildlife veterinarian. Everyone’s initially friendly, albeit from an unobtrusive personal distance, but Elizabeth chats up Rhonda, the daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) and a few of her friends. (Here, Mary is a fraternal twin with her brother Charlie [Gabriel Chung] – the oldest daughter is away at school.)
The next day, Joe finds some tiny eggs on a plant leaf in the garden – he likes to collect the eggs, place them in wooden birdcages, and incubate the eggs until they hatch as monarch butterflies, a diminishing species. Meanwhile, Elizabeth joins Gracie at a craft class for flower decoration with more of her neighbors, and then comes over to the house for dinner, where she and Joe are amiably receptive to Elizabeth’s further questions about their marriage. Over the next few days, Elizabeth makes more biographical headway. She has coffee with Gracie’s first husband Tom (D.W. Moffett), who has remarried and moved on, along with the original five kids. She meets the owner of the pet store where Gracie found managerial work; the store belonged to the owner’s mother, and they brought on Gracie to help Mom out. After a while, Gracie asked for another worker – perhaps a kid on part-time minimum wage. And young Joe Yoo applied for the job. Later, Elizabeth meets Morris Sperber (Lawrence Arancio), the attorney who represented Gracie at trial. “She said ‘We’re in love – I didn’t mean for it to happen, but we fell in love.’ She didn’t think she did anything wrong – head-over-heels, a good-looking kid…” While talking, they run into Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), one of Gracie’s children with Tom, now a derisive acting-out post-adolescent egotist. ”You can see the situation is not without its casualties,” observes Morris.
Charles Melton in “May December.” credit: Netflix
There’s a reason this script is Oscar-nominated – it’s a well-structured story from beginning to gobsmacking end, and each written character is given smart boundaries the actors can trust while taking advantage of the creative space afforded to each. (Samy Burch is an NYU-trained writer who primarily paid her bills as a casting director, and Alex Mechanik is an editor and technical jack-of-all-trades who worked with Burch on the story. It’s their first feature-film screenplay.) The Oscar acting categories are a buzzsaw this year; I’m not surprised neither Moore nor Portman were nominated. They’re two actresses with divergent styles, which actually enhances the friction between the characters. It’s a shame Charles Melton couldn’t wedge into the Supporting Actor list – his is the subtlest turn of the three, with real calmness and gravity, and he’s heartbreaking in his own unique way.
One of the questions I’ve learned to ask myself concerning challenging films like this is “Who Cares About These People?” Lots of people won’t bother with the film because of the subject matter, and, indeed, won’t feel they have the two hours to invest in it. Others are genuinely interested in the psychological aspects of these people, and Burch’s work here will reward their curiosity. But for as interesting as these characters are, the film demonstrates levels of manipulation, opportunism and denial that almost beg that question I’ve learned to ask. There’s some astonishing artistry in play here – you’ll have to decide for yourself if, after seeing it, you’ll want to avidly talk about it over cocktails with pals, or head directly home for a shower. Me, I’ll spring for the first round.
Currently streaming on Netflix.
Koji Yakusho and Arisa Nakano in “Perfect Days.” credit: NEON
Koji Yakusho is one of the most well-known and hardest-working actors in Japan. Tampopo, Shall We Dance?The Eel, Cure, Memoirs Of A Geisha, Babel and 13 Assassins are some of his better-known projects here in the west among his current total of 115 films, and he’s made three more since having done our film today, Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (Japan, 2023). Wenders, of course, has a similarly broad C.V., topped, in my view, with Wings Of Desire and Paris, Texas, as well as his current 3-D documentary “Anselm,” a beautiful survey of Anselm Kiefer’s monumental artworks and the concepts behind them. Did I mention it’s in 3-D? It’s wonderful.
Yakusho plays Hirayama, an unassuming hard-working fellow who cleans the (seemingly already) pristine and modernized public toilets in downtown Tokyo (they even have little bidet jets!). There are certainly worse jobs, but these workers aren’t exactly admired, either – thankfully, the occasional disaster is only described, not illustrated. In any case, Hirayama is perfectly content with his daily responsibilities, focused and efficient. His day-to-day is very Kant-like: how he wakes up on his own every day, his morning routine, when he eats lunch, what music he listens to in his Tokyo Toilet van from stop-to-stop, where he goes after work, when and what he reads, what time he sleeps – but it’s all pleasantly regular, rather than obsessive or humorlessly diligent. When he steps out his front door, he looks up and around, taking it in and looking forward to his day. He lunches in nearby parks, admiring how the trees affect his view of the sky, and vice-versa; he likes to take pictures of this with a standard camera. He rarely talks, but he’s friendly nonetheless, nodding cheerfully, opening doors and acknowledging others. He’s present in all of the good ways. He uses the public bathhouse (also clean and civilized), tends small plants at home, and bicycles everywhere on his off-hours.
Hirayama’s “perfect days” are what he aspires to, and mostly succeeds at, but reality occasionally intrudes. His young helper for cleaning toilets, young loose-cannon Takashi (Tokio Emoto) can be vexing, and there are issues with his larger family. His niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano) likes her uncle and visits him, whether she’s told Mom or not. But she’s always welcome, and he always lets his sister know she’s there.
There’s nothing narratively complex happening here, and it’s all blessedly unsentimental. But it’s also a lovely way to spend two hours, a visually captivating chronicle of a small slice of humanity. There should be six movies a year just like this, but most filmmakers muck it up with earnestness and Valuable Lessons™. As I’ve mentioned, the International Film Oscar this year belongs to The Zone Of Interest, but the other nominees are well worth watching this year. This one, especially.
Koji Yakusho in “Perfect Days.” credit: NEON
Opens at the Music Box and other area theaters on Friday, February 9th, 2024.
Including the 1932 original What Price Hollywood (Constance Bennett), and the 1973 Philippine / Tagalog version, there have been six versions of A Star Is Born – those previous two, Janet Gaynor (1937), Judy Garland (1954), Barbra Streisand (1976) and the Bradley Cooper-directed Lady Gaga version from 2018. Cooper is an adequate director who we can safely say will get better with each successive work, so I mean no disrespect, but having four versions of the same story template to draw from (and two additional writers besides himself) made conceiving what he wanted to do with his version less onerous. There were plentiful resources for him to draw from.
Cooper’s second feature film, Maestro (U.S., 2023) his biographical treatment of world-class composer, conductor, musician and educator Leonard Bernstein, and his actress wife and mother of their children Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), has given him a far more challenging degree of difficulty to overcome. Once again, God bless ‘im, like A Star Is Born, acting the lead role, writing the screenplay (with Josh Singer) and directing the film leaves us with a patchwork struggling to be a quilt. He has given us a genuinely intelligent film with a lot of interesting visual ideas, a number of impressive performances and a sincere regard for these characters, but there are just too many moving parts, too many spinning plates in the air; the great ideas flash past quickly, the underlying tectonics heave and fracture, and the conclusion of the saga leaves us with far less than the sum of the parts of these two profoundly fascinating characters.
Cooper introduces us to an aging Bernstein during a TV interview – he’s playing a composition on the piano inspired by his late wife, and it’s a good example of Bernstein’s ease with self-promotion (no one in the American classical music realm used TV more effectively, nor has anyone since) while also expressing his earnestly emotional temperament towards the evocative power of the music itself. The film abruptly shifts into black & white, to the young, effervescent Bernstein’s small apartment in 1943. He receives a fateful morning phone call, pulling him out of bed with his male partner to race down to Carnegie Hall (with a stylized overhead crane-shot flourish) and conduct his first New York Philharmonic concert in relief of an under-the-weather Bruno Walter. He nails it. We’re then given a digest of Bernstein’s other friends and artists: his partner is clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), he’s writing the music for the ballet Fancy Free for Jerome Robbins (Michael Urie) and gets a second set of hands on his piano from longtime friend Aaron Copland (Brian Klugman). Later, he attends a party thrown by his sister Shirley (Sarah Silverman) for Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau, and Shirley introduces ‘Lenny’ to Felicia Montealegre, which sends us into another whirlwind sequence of Lenny and Felicia reciting each other’s C.V. to each other, while the party plays on with Broadway composers Betty Comden (Mallory Portnoy) and Adolph Green (Nick Blaemire), and Ellen Adler (Kate Eastman), Stella’s daughter. Leaving the party a bit early, the couple sneak off to the small theater where Felicia is rehearsing her acting debut and quickly realize they’re going to be together for a very long time.
Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper in “Maestro.” credit: Netflix
Leonard Bernstein was an avid smoker – he died of emphysema – but Cooper overdoes it: at one point he blows a massive cloud of it into Felicia’s face, and there are at least three occasions where characters need to relight cigarettes that have gone out on them. Lenny and Felicia meet Serge Koussevitzky (Yasen Peyankov) at Tanglewood (with Copland), where he relates his own old-school standards – full commitment to the classics, without distractions like musical theater or ballet. He also admonishes Bernstein not to take antisemitism for granted, again, based on his own experiences in Russia. The Bernsteins, rather than being discouraged or chastened, take new inspiration, and, in another Magical Overhead Crane-Shot™ dream sequence, find themselves onstage dancing with the sailors of Fancy Free. But, as the dancers and activities increase, the sailors start pulling aside Lenny from Felicia, while an old flame of Felicia’s, Richard Hart, makes a play for her. Aaaand… cut! Meanwhile, back in reality, Felicia assures Lenny that she knows what she’s into with him, and ardently suggests they “give it a whirl.” That is, get married, have children, and do what they want with their careers. It’s also a tacit admission that she knows how many “sailors” there are out on the edges of his life tugging at his dress whites, and she trusts him to manage it discreetly.
A marriage and a few children later, Felicia finds herself ensconced in motherhood and moral support for her working husband. Standing in the wings, a small figure behind the masking stage curtains, Felicia is dwarfed by the giant whirling shadow of Leonard’s arms as he conducts. Stepping off of the stage between salvos of applause, he hugs and kisses her, then returns. She remains in the wings, standing calmly, smoking a cigarette, and we can’t help but feel the small ache in the pit of her stomach through her semi-smiling gaze, asking herself if this is the life that she truly wants.
The aging Bernsteins are throwing parties in their Connecticut home, as they are inclined to do. Their kids are in their teens, the world isn’t shot in black & white anymore, Lenny’s hair is salt-and-pepper, and his indiscretions are becoming far more indiscreet – daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke) hears stories; she’s working at Tanglewood now – and Lenny’s friend Tommy is around a lot. “You don’t even know how much you need me, do you?” posed Felicia in her pre-marital optimism. Now his finishing major works like Mass just makes her sad, and he holds Tommy’s hand at the opening, not hers. There’s a superbly surreal scene of them arguing while the giant floats of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade float just outside their Dakota apartment windows, and Felicia unloads on him in humbling fashion. They then separate.
Carey Mulligan in “Maestro.” credit: Netflix
On paper, their couplehood is a complex and heartfelt deal that they couldn’t imagine not making with each other. The dichotomy that hit me throughout was that Bradley Cooper loves this man, ardently wants to tell his story, and knocks himself out to be Leonard Bernstein. Carey Mulligan is Felicia Montealegre. Whatever Mulligan’s process is, it was seamless. I wasn’t watching a really good actor portraying Felicia Montealegre – that was her, on the screen. What is communicated by those swooping crane shots that wasn’t already manifest in those characters – the excitement, the kineticism, the risks? Felicia in the wings in his shadow – when you see Felicia after the hug and the kiss, she, standing there, alone, her face a rueful history writ intimately, it renders the big portentous preceding image redundant. Carey Mulligan owns this movie, and owns the character she has brilliantly created. Bradley Cooper can be a terrific actor – when he works with David O. Russell, he’s great. But Bradley Cooper, as an actor, needs a really good director, and here he’s saddled with an overworking, overthinking, not-untalented aspiring director who took on too much. I’d love to see Leonard Bernstein at the scale that Cooper sees him, but Cooper doesn’t have a director that will get him there. Matthew Libatique’s cinematography makes Cooper’s ideas look great, even when he crams one too many people into the corner of a room. I don’t blame him for indulging Mulligan – that first shot of her stepping off of the bus and walking towards us into the street-light is iconic. I’ve probably seen it in other films, but I don’t care. It’s lovely. Cooper includes lots of small tight close-ups of his characters that only last a few seconds – Maya Hawke, Matt Bomer, Kate Eastman – but he knows exactly what he wants to capture in each case.
No director wants smaller projects with smaller budgets – they want the biggest palette they can get. But I really think if Bradley Cooper writes himself (or collaborates on) a few of those, not aspiring to less but spreading things out a bit – directing a good TV mini-series’ episodes for other writers, or vice-versa, it’ll do him a world of good. Watching him be recognized, and then losing Oscars anyway, will be cruel and unfair this year. But there’s more where this came from, trust me. He’ll be fine, sadder but wiser.
Leonie Benesch in “The Teachers’ Lounge.” credit: Sony Classics
When asked about his thoughts on Western Civilization, Mahatma Gandhi said “I think that would be a good idea.” First-term middle-school new hire teacher Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch, really good) understands that sentiment as well. Western culture has imbued her students with the same kind of competitiveness, suspicion and defensiveness that infect their parents and her fellow school staff. Everyone wants to solve problems without assuming any liability themselves. But when you take on risk, or liability, to solve a real problem, you invariably get hammered. These days, no good deed goes unpunished, right?
That’s a fair amount of negativity and cynicism for German director Ilker Çatak to bring into his third feature film The Teacher’s Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) (Germany, 2023), but the emotions and motives of his film are well-choreographed. Since Carla s fairly new, she’s a bit taken aback to learn thievery among the school population is an ongoing problem, and the school’s management has instituted what they characterize as “zero tolerance” protocols: surprise classroom searches, interrogations and even recruiting students to spy on each other. Carla finds it all a bit inappropriate, but, as the new hire, doesn’t want to disparage what the other teachers and administrators have learned and chosen through their own experiences. Working on her laptop in the teachers’ lounge, Carla, aware of the small crime wave, checks how much money is in her wallet, puts her wallet in her coat, which is hanging on the chair, turns on the laptop video camera and walks away to take a break. Is she setting a trap, or just being cautious? Sure enough, she returns to find some of the money missing from her wallet, and what seems to be hard evidence of the culprit on her laptop. But the incident escalates in unpredictably divergent ways: the alleged thief, an otherwise long-trusted member of the office staff, is wildly indignant in protesting her innocence, the alleged thief’s son Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch) (one of Carla’s more interesting students) is embittered over his mother’s treatment, and eventually the students rise up together to make Ms. Nowak’s working life thanklessly grueling. The whole film takes place in the school – a few people leave at some point, but we never see the town they live in or the homes they reside in, which just adds to the institutional claustrophobic tension in which everyone’s swimming. The ending, however, is oddly triumphant, and it’s up to us to decide how profound or pyrrhic that particular accomplishment has become. Judith Kaufmann did the pleasingly kinetic and almost entirely eye-level-horizontal cinematography, hot on the heels of her great work in Corsage for Marie Kreutzer. It’s Germany’s submission for the International Feature Oscar, but there’s stiff competition. Go see it now.
“The Teachers’ Lounge” opens Friday, January 19th at the Music Box Theater.
Leonard Stettnisch in “The Teachers’ Lounge.” credit: Sony Classics
Periscope In The Bathtub 