Carol Kane and Jason Schwartzman bond Between the Temples
An early draft of this review was originally published on September 3, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
Here’s a movie I was certain I would love:
- The trailer got my attention.
- The early buzz praised two actors I have deep affection for.
- It shows no sign of having been crafted for crowd-pleasing or any last-minute revisions due to audience reactions.
- The obvious filmic reference points are all features I either cherish or greatly respect.
I mean, wouldn’t you want to see a movie that was pitched as “A blend of Harold and Maude, Punch-Drunk Love, Lars and the Real Girl, The Big Sick, and A Serious Man, served with some unnerving Shiva Baby sauce and a dusting of The Graduate”?
But alas... very little of Between the Temples worked for me.
The setup is interesting enough: Ben (Jason Schwartzman) is a 30-something widower fractured by the sudden death of his wife, and (like Punch-drunk Love’s Barry) troubled by what appears to have been a life among overbearing women. In his grief and insecurity, he’s lost his voice. Literally: he cannot sing the required ceremonies and services at his local synagogue. He seems stuck in a state of arrested development, unable to navigate, wary of opening himself to new experiences or relationships.
But one day, his childhood music teacher Carla (Carol Kane) appears out of the blue, and he reconnects with a formative influence from happier times — a teacher he respected, a grown woman who may have inspired something like a boy’s first crush. (I’m speculating about that, but I think the film suggests it.) And when Carla decides to show up as an unlikely student in his classes on bat mitzvah preparation, their student/teacher experience is flipped, and it brings them onto strange, new, and equal footing in which they now interact as peers, as friends, and, perhaps… even more? Both Ben’s and Carla’s families and friends are perplexed by his fixation on this new companion (like Lars’s community is perplexed in Lars and the Real Girl). He certainly seems more comfortable with, excited by, and interested in Carla than in any of the young, single women his mothers and Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) are lining up as candidates (just as Kumail’s family parades eligible prospects in front of him in The Big Sick).
As we slowly collect the clues and confessions to understand why Ben is so devastated, we have no trouble believing that he would suffer a crisis of faith and be “disabled” — perhaps permanently — when it comes to relationships.
His trauma is multi-faceted: It’s not just that he lost his wife the way he did. It’s the way she treated him — dominating and manipulating him. And it’s the fact that he's grown up with his mother Meira (Caroline Aaron), and his stepmother Judith (Dolly de Leon) who rarely agree on what’s best for him. He’s become a tangle of nerves and insecurities and confusion. Everybody wants to solve him like a problem. It seems he hasn’t found a safe space within which he can figure himself out yet, much yet figure out what he wants… or who he wants.
Schwartzman has become one of my favorite actors in his work with Anderson. Come to think of it, the first time I ever saw him was in Rushmore, a film in which he’s got a crush on one of his high school teachers. But Rushmore understood that an adolescent boy’s pursuit of his adult teacher is a symptom of immaturity and ill-advised fantasy. Not so here.
If I’m supposed to see Ben’s relationship with Carla as a mutually encouraging friendship that gives them both a safe place to be themselves and grow, I’m all for that. Carla takes him back to a pre-trauma time in his life when he was a boy full of potential. And she pays attention to him in a way nobody else does: with tenderness, with good humor, showing that he offers things she values even as she can help him. But I keep getting the feeling that the movie wants me to hope for a full-blown romance between Ben and Carla, and that means I cringe when I should be caring.
What’s more, I find Ben himself distractingly difficult to read. As Schwartzman plays him, Ben veers between adult anguish and a boyish playfulness, as if he’s reverting to being a child because grownup hardships have proven too much for him. He’s confused, sure—but he’s also confusing. Am I supposed to find his fitfulness funny? That’s difficult when he’s attempting suicide. Am I supposed to be grieving for his loss? That’s difficult when the hints we get about the nature of his marriage are alarming.
As Carla, Kane is radiant, complex, and often a joy here. Has she ever had such a substantial role before? I’d be delighted to see her get some awards attention for this.
Nevertheless, Carla, too, remains a mystery to me. Why is she drawn to Ben? At times the film hints that it might be a sexual attraction, but most of the time it doesn’t. At times it suggests that she’s afraid of the recurring strokes she is suffering, and that this relationship gives her a path of living in denial rather than investigating the causes of her illness. At times it suggests that he’s giving her a second chance to be a mother, and as her relationship with her existing son is less than ideal, perhaps that’s how we’re to read this.
Whatever the case, the movie seems to be teasing us with the idea of a romance, but in its last act, Carla seems perplexed to realize that Ben is thinking of her in this way, and then the question of whether or not they’re headed toward some kind of consummation is abandoned entirely.
Director Nathan Silver and his co-writer C. Mason Wells choreograph a climactic dinner event as epic in its extreme awkwardness as anything in Shiva Baby, and while I think I’m supposed to be laughing at the escalating chaos, it’s hard to find much of it funny when there’s also an escalation of harm: everyone at the table seems likely to hurt someone else, if not everyone else, before it’s over.
Gabby (Madeline Weinstein), the young woman who is pursuing Ben is suffering; her family so eager to see her find a match is suffering; Ben’s moms are suffering. And while I think we’re supposed to see this scene as Ben’s lunge toward a path of salvation, I experience it as Ben’s dismaying surrender to a fantasy. I think I’m supposed to want him and Carla to be together forever in some kind of Harold and Maude “rebellious lovers” mode, thumbing their noses at the restrictive and manipulative system. And the system—that is, this controlling community—seems to deserve that!
But Harold and Maude makes me believe in and root for them; they’re a match that seems strange and taboo until you consider how much stranger and more dehumanizing the world around them has become. Between the Temples aims for something similar. But instead I just feel sorry for these two. I want them both to go to serious therapy.
What a discombobulating picture.
Nine reasons to see Didi
An early draft of this review was originally published on August 30, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
9.
Something’s working when a guy my age is relating so much to a film about a teenager from such a different time, with so many different challenges. Holy handicams, Batman — Didi brings things back! The best moments of my teen years… and the worst.
I’ve never been to Fremont, California, and I was three times Chris’s age in 2008, so the specifics of his day-to-day routines are very different than what I remember of being thirteen years old. And yet, I felt drawn right into that time and place without ever feeling like the film is too excited or show-offy about its period specificity.
I’ve never skateboarded, but Chris’s adventure in meeting and filming skateboarders felt effortlessly authentic.
While I made goofy videos with my friends in high school, they required so much heavy lifting that such adventures were rare, and we had no way to embarrass ourselves in front of the world the way these kids do; still, the creative impulses, the playful escapism, the reckless rebellions that end in regret—all of it rings true.
I’ve never investigated a crush of mine on social media, but watching Chris’s investigative endeavors on MySpace felt weirdly familiar; it’s probably exactly what I would have done in his place at his age. When a movie introduces you to unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar environment and enchants you so gracefully, inspiring such swift and affecting empathy, something is really working.
8.
Didi is the directorial debut of Sean Wang, who shows great promise here. He also wrote and produced it, and he took home the Sundance Audience Award for it. I suspect it’s very personal project for him. “Chris” is a singular character, one that persuades me he must have a great deal of Sean Wang in him. Rather than trying to serve up an “Asian-American adolescence representation film,” Wang give us an intimate focus on an idiosyncratic boy dealing with familiar fears, peer pressures, and family struggles in a way that will feel familiar to most viewers, even as its lived-experience particularity makes every scene interesting.
7.
Along those lines, please note that Zhang Li Hua, the woman playing Chris’s grandmother Nai Nai, is Sean Wang’s actual grandmother. Her presence in the film and her complicated relationship with her grandchildren is a big reason why many are linking Didi to Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari. But that’s a feature, not a bug: Nai Nai’s scenes are some of the film’s most endearing.
6.
Very few coming-of-age films feel as effortlessly absorbing and convincing. My compliments to editor Arielle Zakowski for her efficient, funny, imaginative work here. She has a lot to do with why this movie works. Maybe I should rewind and see Missing after all, just to see what she did with that.
5.
If anybody needs a reminder that A Walk to Remember was a big movie for a lot of teens, well… this is probably the best way to get that reminder. I laughed out loud at the jump-scare of a reference to the film and the part it played in the drama.
4.
Lots of critics are comparing this (favorably) to Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade… and rightfully so. The trailer made me think it was going to be closer to a dramatization of Minding the Gap, or maybe even a boy’s take on Lady Bird. But I was surprised at how hard this movie goes on the humiliations of adolescence, and Eighth Grade kept coming to my mind as the closest equivalent.
And even as its attention to the fragile bond between Chris and his mother recalls Lady Bird’s slow journey to appreciate her own exasperating mother, Didi takes much darker turns in its last act than I anticipated.
3.
It’s rare that a film like this sticks so resolutely to honesty in its storytelling, with such a willingness to leave conflicts unresolved, at the risk of frustrating those who want a fairytale ending. But that has a lot to do with why I’m still thinking about it days later.
And I’m beginning to believe that it is, at its heart, a film about love — a film about how we grow up needing it for different reasons, but needing it all the same, and looking for it from so many of the wrong people in so many flawed and self-defeating ways. Sometimes we need to make those mistakes and end up hurt, embarrassed, and lonely before we realize what love really looks like and where we’ve been offered some measure of it. While the movie never gives this any formally religious vocabulary, by my lights I can trace God pursuing young Chris through the longsuffering heart of his mother, who is herself lonely and filled with longing to be seen, known, and embraced.
2.
Far too many films about the struggles of adolescence have a protagonist we care about primarily because he’s being bullied and because his parents are awful. Didi dares to let Chris make terrible decisions and treat others (particularly his sister Vivian) badly. So much of what he suffers comes as consequences for his own impulsive choices and audacious lies. Again, wow — I could really relate to this kid.
1.
For Your Consideration: Joan Chen as Chris’s mother Chungsing is the quiet center of every scene she’s in, compelling without ever looking like she’s swinging for those Oscar-nomination marks. As a single mother, Chungsing has clearly suffered unspeakable betrayals and disappointments, but the film doesn’t dwell on that or wring melodrama from it. Her wounds are private, and for the most part they stay that way. When we learn Chungsing is an artist at heart, but one whose creative impulses have been constantly disrupted by misfortune, we might brace ourselves for a predictable story of sudden discovery and success. But Wang is more interested in what the characters do with their suffering than in the causes of that suffering. Chungsing’s is a story of sacrifice driven by necessity, and the moment when her neglected heart is halfway-glimpsed by an unlikely someone and her face blooms with surprise and joy, I nearly choked on a rush of mixed feelings. Oh, to be seen for who we are, not for the roles life has required us to fulfill!
It’s so great to see Joan Chen in this role being so radiant and uninhibited and heartbreakingly human… and with so little dialogue! How many people remember that her face was one of the first images we saw in the opening moments of Episode 1 of Twin Peaks? It’s embedded in my DNA. May this performance open many new doors for her.
Lee Isaac Chung gets carried away with Twisters
An early draft of this review was originally published on August 16, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
Come on — you already know whether or not you’re going to go see Twisters. You’ve probably already seen it. This isn’t the kind of moviegoing option that people lose sleep over, arguing with themselves about its chances of being worthwhile. The trailer makes it clear: This is Dairy Queen Blizzard — a whole bunch of sugar-high hooey whipped up a blender with the primary purpose of entertaining your taste buds. If you like ice cream, you’re going to get your fix of this eventually, either on the big screen or on streaming.
And you certainly don’t need my detailed synopsis. Several hundred such summaries are waiting for you at Rotten Tomatoes or other review aggregate sites. I doubt anybody heard that a sequel to 1995’s Twister was coming and responded, “Oh, I don’t know… I need to read a detailed plot summary before I can make up my mind.” It’s a Blizzard. It’s full of ice cream and bits of candy. It’s a formula. What do you expect?
If Blizzards aren’t your thing, you probably aren’t even reading this review — unless you’ve come hoping to read a stream of entertaining insults. That’s not going to happen. I like ice cream. I do. I’m just picky about it: I like the good stuff. And that can be hard to find.
And, as whipped ice cream beverages go, Twisters… is pretty good stuff.
Full disclosure: I’ve had the unexpected delight of befriending Lee Isaac Chung through a sequence of interviews, including this one that you can listen to at Image.
And I even had the joy of participating in an early script reading of Minari. (I played the Alan Kim part before he did! I played young Isaac!) So I’m rooting for Isaac as he rides this rocket to Hollywood success, even if I’m a much bigger fan of his earlier work—Munyruangabo, Lucky Life, Abigail Harm, and his deeply moving but little-known documentary I Have Seen My Last Born—than I am of big, broad-stroke crowd-pleasers like Twisters.
(I’m posting links to my full series of posts on the films of Lee Isaac Chung at the end of this review.)
So, I’ll do my duty and provide some kind of synopsis. What kind of review doesn’t offer information about the ingredients? Here, in short, is what you’ll find in this summertime sugar-high:
It opens with a typical Trauma Flashback: Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a weather nerd hell-bent on “taming” tornadoes with new technology. But alas! She and her crack team of storm chasers suffer a tragic, deadly encounter with a wild windstorm. Scarred for life!
Boom! Fast forward: Now Kate works for a weather service, safely indoors, nicely dressed, watching the storms on screens instead of up-close and person. (I’m a little surprised she hasn’t changed course to pursue a quieter line of work—library science, or something.) She’ll have to be dragged kicking and screaming back into the chase.
So, of course, when one of her former teammates—Javi (Anthony Ramos of In the Heights)—promises her a chance to try out some new-and-improved tornado tech, her resolve collapses like an old barn in a gale-force wind, and Kate’s back, baby! She’ll do it… for science!
Or, maybe she’ll do it for a muscular cowboy with pecs bulging through his white t-shirt?
Tyler (played by Hollywood’s New Cruise: Glen Powell) is a storm-chaser who’s in it for the thrills and for the subscribers blowing up his storm-chaser YouTube Channel. He might seem like an asshole the way he brags about ignoring science, thumbs his nose at PhDs, and charges headlong into tornados so he can see what happens when he launches firecrackers up their… up their cones, let’s say. I mean, what scientist wouldn’t swoon for a guy who says things like “You don’t face your fears. You ride ‘em!” (Oooh, wow, says Kate. Maybe I’m afraid of Tyler after all!)
Ah, but that’s just one of many ways that this movie is out to surprise us.
Much to the outrage of cliche-fans everywhere, and quite unlike Jan De Bont’s early-90s original, this story is not about a couple of one-dimensional action figures figuring out that they need to be together. It doesn’t abuse audiences, as Twister did, with a barrage of excruciating, sophomoric euphemisms and double-entendres. That film seemed like the most elaborate allegory about erectile dysfunction ever made. When I first saw it in the early ‘90s, I was too naive to realize that all of the "How do you get this phallic device inside the tornado to release all of these little mechanical sperm with their cute little tails?" exposition was really carefully engineered to make this movie both a hot date and and a sex-ed video. At the 30-minute point, Hunt and Paxton are given lines about Billy's "inability to finish things.” You could tell that Cary Elwes was right on the screenwriters' euphemistic wavelength. As his character bragged about his “device,” he looked like he was going to break and bust out laughing.
In Twisters, screenwriter Joseph Kosinski shows some restraint when it comes to serving up audience wish-fulfillment, especially regarding the romance. And he’s so gutsy that some viewers have been ranting as if they want their money back just because they didn’t get pandered to. His sequence of storms raise more interesting ideas. And it deals with those ideas lightly, thank goodness, without ever become heavy-handed or preachy about anything—love, trauma, or even climate change.
(Some are complaining that the movie never mentions global warming, and that’s true. But showing is more effective than telling, and I think director Lee Isaac Chung knows that. It’s obvious that the weather is going all wrong in this movie world, and maybe that’s enough to slow a few folks down long enough to ask why. Climate change deniers aren’t going to have their minds changed by somebody in Twisters shouting, “Gee! Do you think global warming might be a real threat after all?!”)
Before I get to the film’s themes, let’s address what we’re here for: Big, loud, IMAX spectacle. Where Twister could have been called Gyrat-ic Park, with its snarling sneak-attack storms acting like wily predators, Twisters feels more like Jaws. It’s more inclined to attend to the challenge of getting people “off the beaches”—or, in this case, clear of a packed rodeo arena, or away from a vulnerable small town. And it likes the visual of a truck pursuing the monster with a bunch of yellow barrels set to explode.
Where Twister leaned into the monstrousness of the storms, Twisters’ cinematographers, production designers, and animators are more interested in inspiring our awe at the beauty of weather gone wild in these panoramic Oklahoma landscapes. And yet, Chung strikes an admirable balance: he respects the glory of those towering infernos in a way that will please Terrence Malick fans in the audience even as he gives generous, large-hearted attention to the people whose homes are devastated by those very wonders. (When actor David Corenswet stares wide-eyed through a truck windsheld and shouts, “Look at the size of that thing!”, I bark back, “Cut the chatter, Red Two!” My Star Wars reflexes are still sharp.)
What’s more, the cast of characters is much more interesting. It’s easy to imagine that some of them could step to the forefront of a third film, if this one is popular enough.
And, thankfully, Chung and Kosinski aren’t eager to set any of them up as easy targets for contempt. Twister presumed that we were all game to laugh at both therapists and vegetarians. Billy's therapist fiancée was the butt of many jokes, culminating in her preposterous dislike of [checks notes] steak. My, what an abominable human being! And even worse, she wasn’t excited about the idea of throwing her life into the path of deadly windborne debris! What a pathetic excuse for a human being! By contrast, the characters in Twisters — mad as they are for their storm-chasing obsession — aren’t ridiculing other people for their interests or their common sense.
Tyler’s tough and reckless team is made up of actors I’m happy to recognize: from the band TV on the Radio, Tunde Adebimpe! straight from her breakout/Hulk-out role in Love Lies Bleeding, Katy O’Brian! Brandon Perea from Nope! And there’s Sasha Lane doing Sasha Lane things. I'm starting to imagine that her character from American Honey became her character in How to Blow Up a Pipeline… and later she became this character. It kinda works.
Most pleasantly surprising is who they’ve cast to play Kate’s mother: I’m enjoying Maura Tierney’s All-American Mom era. It’s good to see her here after watching her play such a tortured, tragic figure in The Iron Claw.
Most disappointing is how little the movie does with Anthony Ramos. When you see how multi-talented he is in In the Heights, it’s hard to see him stuck in a movie that doesn’t really ask much of him. His job is basically to draw Kate back into the game, seem vaguely tragic in his unrequited attraction to Kate (but he’s just no match for Tyler), and then sell himself out to a corporate interest.
All in all, Twisters is an engaging, amusing allegory for how we need to “tame” America’s storms. Its heroes are seeking ways to quell surges of “wrath,” and they are prioritizing care for those in danger’s path—whether the storm be a pandemic, prejudice, climate change, the pending economic disruptions of A.I., political violence, “Christian” nationalism, or whatever.
Personally, I found it strangely cathartic as I am headed into an academic year that looks likely to unleash some harrowing hardships upon me and my collagues. These are hard times in higher education, harder times in Christian education, and extremely hard times for Christian educators who care about history, science, the environment, social justice, and loving their neighbors without prejudice. The storms of racism, nationalism, and anti-intellectualism, along with the systemic abuses of patriarchal hierarchies—these are the tornadoes laying waste to institutions that have the potential to provide meaningful service and inspire lasting change. I wish I could protect strong academic programs with those anchor-rods like the ones Tyler uses to secure his truck to the earth as the storm advances. But ignorance and fear are powerful storms, and if you care about truth and love, you’re going to suffer a lot of loss in this world.
Maybe that’s why I found myself surprisingly susceptible to Twisters’ charms. It was genuinely encouraging to see people with very different philosophies and mindsets working together for the good of the vulnerable and the poor, embracing the gift of science, and facing — maybe even riding — their fears. That’s the kind of vision that Lee Isaac Chung brings to his meditative arthouse films, his Oscar-winning personal storytelling, and now, his first summertime blockbuster.
Here’s hoping the success of Twisters gives him all the resources he needs to make whatever movie he wants to make next.
Okay, I’m gonna say it: Next time I see Lee Isaac Chung, I want to give him a high five for showing heroic restraint and not fulfilling the kissing fantasy so many people need here. That would’ve made the movie about something it wasn’t. Love is about listening to the person in front of you so much more than lip-locking. And I felt that here. I respect both Kate and Tyler more for staying focused on the most important matters at hand. Leave the shallow fantasies to fan fiction.
Here are links to my five-post series on the films of Lee Isaac Chung at Looking Closer: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Part Five.
Kings of infinite space: Inmates of Sing Sing stage a prison break through art
An early draft of this review was originally published on August 14, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
“The glory of God is man fully alive.” Have you heard that before? It’s a quotation attributed to St. Irenaeus, and it has become a popular way of saying that when human beings live up to their potential we glimpse a revelation of the Divine. Unfortunately, like so many catchy lines in the social media age, the line has been ripped from a very particular context and, thus, sorely misinterpreted.
Nevertheless, there is something true in the botched, popular interpretation. Nothing makes me believe in God more than seeing someone exercise the capacities that set human beings apart from other living beings—the distinctive unity of the mind and the heart; the power of the conscience; the extravagance of the imagination in the achievement of art; the ability to break cycles of violence through suffering, sacrifice, and forgiveness. We can usually tell the difference between a real human, a dynamic entity alive with mysteries and contradictions, and an artistic representation of one. So it’s a rare and wonderful thing when an actor suspends our disbelief and moves us by bringing to life a character who is complex, convincing, and compelling.
I thought of the St. Irenaeus line while watching Sing Sing. While movies about the power of art to change lives are common, and far too commonly formulaic and sentimental, Sing Sing is better than most. One reason for that is that has roots deep in a real-world story: Sing Sing is based on the lives of real prisoners participating in a real arts program—Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA).
Further, the film features men involved in this program—some still incarcerated, some free—playing themselves. They’ve lived this story, and the authenticity they bring to the project shows.
And, much to my surprise and delight, director Greg Kwedar — he wrote the screenplay with Clint Bentley, took counsel from some of the men that screenplay concerns, and drew from a 2009 Esquire article on RTA—shows remarkable restraint through almost all of the film’s dramatic and emotional scenes. On only a couple of occasions in the film do I feel the filmmakers’ energy focused on moving moviegoers’ to strong emotion. If you’re like me, you have an allergy to heavy-handed tactics—extreme close-ups on exaggerated expressions, huge swells of dramatic music, and all the tools of sentimentality that trigger conditioned responses instead of earning authentic emotions. Instead, Kwedar’s attention is focused lovingly and respectfully on the complicated men themselves: their strengths and weaknesses, their idiosyncrasies, their specific histories and hardships and hopes.
And because of that, I’m inclined to say that I was moved by sensing God alive and at work within their midst.
Uh-oh, a reader somewhere is saying. Is Overstreet going to get all religious on us? That is, I suppose, a fair reaction. But before you bail on the rest of this review, let me explain what I mean whey I say that I sense “God alive and at work” in this film:
I believe that God is Love. I'm going to assume that most who of you who don’t want to hear any God Talk will be a little more open to the idea of Love Talk. “All you need is Love,” right? “Love makes the world go round.” “Love is patient, Love is kind, etc. … Love never fails.” I have yet to meet anyone who has a fundamental objection to Love as a necessity, as a pleasure, as a healing agent. So, if you're annoyed by my references to God in my perspective on what’s happening in a film, just assume that I am talking about Love: that creative, active, inspiring, consoling, reconciling, and—by my lights—sovereign force in the world. All of our unhappiness, all of our grief, all of our anger—all of those painful experiences are, in essence, evidence of ways in which Love has been harmed or compromised or resisted or denied. But (if I may quote a U2 lyrics) Love is bigger than anything in its way. Love can save us all, and the sooner we know that, the sooner we can taste what some call “the kingdom of God.”
We can see this happening all around us. Even in Sing Sing.
Love is alive and well in this prison, among these men. Love is working on their wounds, attacking the hatred and the rage within them like white blood cells attacking a disease. Love is what the main character, Divine G, offers his fellow prisoners.
Played with such Theater-Guy Gusto by the charismatic Colman Domingo, Divine G is one of several characters here based on real people. (In fact, the real Divine G shows up here in an amusing, tongue-in-cheek cameo.) And it is the reliability, the generosity of his love that convinces us he might have the respect of suffering human being in that barred, barbed-wired institution. And one of the ways in which he makes Love real in the prison is to get creative—especially in a collaborative and communal way. When we activate our imaginations in the exercise of theater, playing parts of people different than ourselves, or attending to someone else’s play, we make ourselves vulnerable to change, to the expansion of our minds and hearts, because we occasion the opportunity to observe, understand, and thus love someone else. As the great Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner said (and as I incessantly quote him):
If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
It is Love, I propose, that we observe at play among these prisoners. Love is not just doing a God-like work: Love is the manifestation of God in this place. Where two or more prisoners are gathered in a spirit of humility, generosity, compassion—Love is busy. It is Love that they occasion as they surrender their egos, wrestle their demons, and serve the greater work of staging a play together. It is Love that we see scaring some of the men who have learned the hard way that no one can be trusted. It is Love that coaxes them out of their shells and helps them discover outlets for hurt and for passion in theatrical performance. Love helps them express the hurt and longing they have bottled up. Love reshapes the world for them. They can find some measure of freedom and peace even in the midst of their hard time. It might even help one or two of them survive to find their way back out into the larger world.
But don’t get me wrong: This is not a squishy, sentimental, bring-the-tissues tear-jerker. I suspect that this movie gives us a good sense of what it actually feels like to live in these rigid cells and corridors, and to crave freedom and beauty and nature and family. It’s not a comfortable place. Accentuating this, Pat Scola’s cinematography and editing is a familiar sort of cinema verité, but it isn’t showy—it doesn’t distract you with its endeavors to make us inhabit this space, feel these anxieties, get up into the often-hostile expressions of these men who are accustomed to fighting and defending themselves. These men aren’t accustomed to giving and taking criticism outside a context of violence, so every conversation carries a hint of battery acid, a sort of caustic energy that might suddenly explode. That instability and volatility is effectively captured here.
Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com compares the aesthetic to the ways in which Mike Leigh and Ken Loach compose scenes, and I can see that: There’s a sense of improvisation and unpredictability in many of these exchanges. When it comes to the narrow, discomforting mise-en-scene, I thought of the Dardenne brothers, whose masterpiece The Son (Le Fils) navigates the spaces of a carpentry workshop and a carpentry teacher’s austere apartment with a similarly up-close and semi-claustrophobic nervousness.
The emphasis given to crowded, confining spaces and to reserved, uneasy crowd dynamics are part of why the rehearsal space and the stage itself feel so alive, so liberating. They’re also why Domingo’s performance is so vivid and endearing. These are stark, unlikely contrasts to the day-to-day routines of incarceration. The RTA space is where these men discover they can breathe in ways that not even their Yard hours offer them. And their interactions with Divine G are of a quality that no other conversations have…
…until Divine G himself suffers one too many painful setbacks—and that sets us up to see that he is not invulnerable. In what stands as the film’s highest point of tension, we see a startling shift that reveals just how much effort it takes to maintain hope, to sustain the imagination, to cultivate Love in these hard spaces.
Unfortunately for me, this is also the only scene in the movie in which my belief in what I’m seeing really breaks. Some of that has to do with the direction: It’s as if we suddenly realize that the filmmakers have been calibrating everything to jolt us with this shake-up, and now they surrender their restraint. It felt too staged, too self-consciously Dramatic. What’s more, Domingo, whose best performances are always those in which he reins in his more flamboyant and extravagant capacities, goes very, very big in a way that made me feel a Deliberate Oscar Appeal for the first time. It’s not an egregious error or even a mistake; I’d call it a moment of obvious strain, a place where the film loses its balance ever so slightly.
But, unlike the other big movie this year that focuses on the redemptive power of theater,* it does recover that balance quickly. And even as we move toward some familiar resolutions—the big play performance, clips of The Real Events upon which the film is based, and a few moments of climactic hope—all of these are presented with admirable restraint and grace. At one point, we hear the men’s volunteer director, played with modesty and care by Sound of Metal’s Paul Raci, acknowledge the marvels taking place in their creative effort: “Who would’ve thought that the beginning of healing for the whole planet would start right here?” In most other movies about the power of art, that line would feel over-the-top, like it was insisting on meaningfulness that the drama hasn’t yet earned. But here, it feels right and true.
It resonates for me, above all, because of the performance of Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin as himself. Maclin plays a man who has buried his wounded heart beneath many layers of aggression and defense. He’s the one other inmates have to watch out for, the one you don’t want to cross. He’s the one whose nerves convince us that he’s been stabbed in the back before, and he just might lash out at someone who unwittingly walks to close to him. I suspect there will be heavy Oscar attention on Domingo’s performance, and rightfully so, but if I believed in the integrity of the Academy I would be out campaigning for Maclin. He’s the presence on screen that makes things feel dangerous and daring. He’s the one with the more dramatic arc, and every moment he’s onscreen I believe him. Most actors would love a chance to play the kind of caged-predator energy Maclin has, but what makes the performance so remarkable is how Maclin keeps his menace on “Simmer,” and slowly reveals a tender, insecure human being who still might be coaxed out to live in the harsh light of the real world. What’s more, he’s not treated as a charity case or a victim. He’s a complicated man with surprising curiosity and a promising intelligence when it comes to art and literature. A lot is going on beneath that unnerving exterior that he has cultivated for his own self-preservation.
It is Maclin, the actor and the character, who made me think of St. Irenaeus’s out-of-context quotation. Here is a human being who bears unfathomable suffering—some of it his own fault, much of it due to the world that conditioned him to live desperately. And yet, when he’s drawn into a work of imagination, those shields start to come down, and we see a brilliant soul. If that spark can be stirred up into a flame in a controlled space like the theater, we know his performance will be a revelation.
As an insecure schoolboy, I was taken under the wings of several observant teachers who believed in bolstering my confidence and boosting my creativity. As an English professor today, I have seen worried young men and women—some of whom came to school intent on taking dehumanizing courses on the way to a misery-making career—stumble into my creative writing classes or my film classes and suddenly awaken to other possibilities in the experience of art. When it happens, it really is like seeing a prisoner begin to believe that freedom is possible.
Sing Sing gets that. And, unlike most other films about the same idea, it makes me believe.
* I’m talking, of course, about Ghostlight. It’s a wonderful film in some ways—the performances, above all. But the severity of the spectacular, preposterous coincidence that the movie treats like a mind-blowing revelation really fractures that movie for me. I recommend it, and I enjoyed it; I may even have shed a tear or two. But there’s nothing nearly so contrived or frustrating in Sing Sing.
Wicked Little Letters serves up wisdom with a clustercuss of conflict
An early draft of this review was originally published on August 3, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
They can have their Summer of 2024 Godzilla-versus-Kong madness. I’d invite you to meet me the smaller theater down the hall where I discovered an altogether different and so much more satisfying match-up: Olivia Colman versus Jessie Buckley. They do not disappoint!
Even more impressive: This outrageous clash of complicated characters, played by two of the big-screen’s best actors, is based on a true story.
My review comes too late for you to catch this in a theater as I did. But you can, at the moment, find Wicked Little Letters on Netflix (if you’re still a subscriber) or rent it from a variety of streaming platforms (if you’re not). And I encourage you to do so.
Moviegoers probably won’t remember Wicked Little Letters for its elegant cinematography (although Ben Davis also shot Doctor Strange and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), or even for Jonny Sweet’s sprightly screenplay. Nor will they come away talking about the thing that the trailers emphasized: Colman vs. Buckley in an epic brawl of slurs and expletives. While the marketing made the movie this look like an old-fashioned British farce, with all of the actors clowning for the camera and cussing up a storm, and everything delivered in big, broad, crowd-pleasing punches, director Thea Sharrock (Me Before You, The Hollow Crown) takes this to much more interesting places and gives us much more to think about. Thus, moviegoers will most likely remember it for two other reasons: a fantastic ensemble of the UK’s best and a revealing story of the damage done with oppressive societal and religious hierarchies.
Sure, the elevator-pitch version of the story delivers as promised:
This is “based on a true story” of a town called Littlehampton where, in the 1920s, residents were scandalized by vicious and profane letters from an anonymous assailant. In particular, Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) is targeted by the obscene tirades. Edith is an anxious but well-respected spinster who lives with her heavy-handed and religiously zealous father Edward (Timothy Spall) and her softspoken mother Victoria (Gemma Jones), and though Edith believes that willfully and quietly suffering such abuse counts as righteousness, eventually they decide to get the police involved. In their prejudice and haste, the family has set their sights on their neighbor Rose (Jessie Buckley), an Irish migrant raising a child on her own, as the most likely culprit.
And right away they have a fight on their hands. A battle of crude outbursts erupts between neighbors, causing great civil unrest. And meanwhile, the titular letters just keep coming.
Not all of it works. The police officers may as well be jokes tumbling out of a clown car. They’re more interested in checking a box marked “SOLVED” than they are in discovering the truth. And this frustrates a rookie cop, Gladys (Anjana Vasan), who has smart suspicions about the nature of the crime. Like Rose, Gladys is an easy target for those who think diversity is a dirty word, and this adds energy to her intuitions. Still, everyone in aspect of the film seems to exist in a familiar genre of manic British comedies. They could step from this big screen onto one that’s playing Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz and feel right at home.
Don’t get me wrong — I love wacky British comedy. But Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Timothy Spall, and Gemma Jones are, by contrast, acting in a more ambitious and nuanced film that has a surprisingly dark undercurrent: Wicked Little Letters is, ultimately, about what comes from resentment and disease that festers in the heart when we're forced to survive in a system that is fundamentally rigged against outsiders, the poor, and the vulnerable. It’s about how ugliness of the heart, buried beneath layers of false righteousness, will manifest in destructive ways.
Wicked Little Letters looks and feels more like a made-for-TV endeavor than something framed for the big-screen. But I'm so glad I trusted my gut, got to the theater in time, and experienced it with a crowd that loved it and laughed hard together. I may have been the only man in the theater; I wonder how it would have played if that were different. So, while you may not have that chance, I’d encourage you to watch it with friends and family (so long as they’re up for some comically severe language).
And the great Timothy Spall, who barely figures in the film’s marketing, is as strong as anyone here: The man does more with his grumpy-old-man role, playing Edith’s curmudgeonly father Edward, than an audience has any right to expect. He's fearsomely incredible here as a man behaving monstrously. Playing his wife Victoria, Gemma Jones does wonders with a very small role.
The focus on religion on Jonny Sweet’s screenplay is unexpected and welcome. This becomes (inadvertently, I expect) a study of how the glory of the Gospel can so easily be distorted into just another form of moral legalism — the opposite of what the actual Gospel literally is: good news for the poor, the outcast, and the vulnerable. It's a psychodrama about how piety begets mania and corruption.
And as such, it rings very true. I grew up around, witnessed up close, and participated in the sick and twisted manias that grow like tumors in communities of religious self-righteousness. So I felt sick — and for sins of my past, complicit — through a lot of the film’s running time. It felt too familiar, too real. How often did my evangelical community condemn those who use harsh language without ever humbly and attentively investigating what horrors might inspire such language? Where love and grace are secondary to strict moralism and judgment, you may hear Jesus’s name being praised, but believe me — he's not there.
While I was worried that the conclusion of Wicked Little Letters would feel trite and preachy, our last glimpse of the troublemaker responsible for the crimes really surprised and moved me. (I wasn’t expecting to think back on various portrayals of the Joker as the credits rolled!) I'm going to be thinking about those dreadful, shadowy moments and that laughter for a long, long time.
Dazzled and disappointed by Furiosa, "the darkest of angels"
An early draft of this review was originally published on July 31, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
I must begin with high praise for the restored SIFF Cinema Downtown — ye olde Cinerama, where I've seen so many of the greatest widescreen movies ever made over the years. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now Redux, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner (the original and the director’s cut), a special screening of Punch-drunk Love with special guests Paul Thomas Anderson and Adam Sandler (who sat behind me), every Lord of the Rings movie on their opening weekends, and now… Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
This theater, with its massive, panoramic big-screen experience, is sacred ground for Seattle moviegoers. It felt like a heart attack to the Seattle arts community when it closed. How could we let this happen? This was supposed to be the platonic ideal of a movie theater, and its reputation was so great that filmmakers would go out of their way to see their movie projected on this screen, in this context!
Today, thanks to the Seattle International Film Festival’s bold investment in the future of Seattle’s moviegoing community, the place looks great. The chocolate popcorn is still scrumptious. And big movies like this one are just awesome to behold here. The surround-sound is so sharp that when someone in Furiosa spoke from offscreen far to the right, moviegoers’ heads across the auditorium swiveled as if someone in the back of the theater was shouting at the screen.
I am so, so glad it’s back. For now. But it will only remain if moviegoers seize the opportunity. I hope they will. Whatever complaints I may have about Furiosa, please keep in mind that I had a fantastic time at the movies, and I wouldn’t hesitate to go back for more.
Okay, let’s begin…
George Miller has been one of dystopian sci-fi’s giants in the medium of cinema since his second Mad Max film. The Road Warrior gradually won him a large audience and woke moviegoers up to the fact that he was trailblazing futuristic storytelling in unexplored territory. In the ‘80s, the big screen had seen nothing like this.
But I don’t think anybody anticipated that Miller's escalation of the spectacle he'd started in 1979’s Mad Max were only the beginning of a saga that would grow exponentially in story and in scale. (And I never would have guessed that, in doing so, he would leave behind Mel Gibson, the superstar he'd created.) If you'd told me that those two would seem gentle in comparison to what was ahead, that the series would become increasingly acrobatic and extravagantly violent, we might have wondered if moviegoers were capable of taking much more sensory overload.
What’s more — I don’t think anybody anticipated just how profoundly prophetic this mash-up of a three-ring circus, a freakshow, and a monster-truck show really was. Back then, we’d watch Max and the Gyro Captain take on The Humungus and it was like watching professional wrestling in some bizarro nightmare. Now, we nod at what we’re seeing, reading it as an obvious allegory of just how rapidly the corporate ganglords of Planet Earth are burning up the ground beneath their feet.
Let’s review what’s happened in the years since 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome wrapped up the Gibson era.
In 2015, after 30 years of playing in other genres, Miller went back to Australia’s most original big-screen mythology and gave us Mad Max: Fury Road, which is now regarded as one of the greatest films — some call it the greatest — of the 2010s. With unprecedented live-action stunt work and awe-inspiring practical effects, Miller made widescreen adventure filmmaking enthralling again for the first time since Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. The volcanic eruption of this one film made the MCU movies look like toys pumped out by vending machines: artificial, superficial, lazy, and fake.
In Fury Road, we returned to a world of barbaric tribalism, in which grossly amplified male egos were burning the planet, torturing and enslaving women for sex and for male offspring, and voraciously consuming essential natural resources to power their fleets of customized war trucks. Two vigilantes — Max (now played by Tom Hardy), a wanderer, and Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a rebel deeply embedded in enemy territory — ended up joining forces to break away from the tyrant and slave master Immortan Joe and help some of his sex slaves escape. As these spectacularly violent frenzies played out, Furiosa slowly moved to the center of the drama. Haunted by a memory of a lost paradise, a world in which human flourishing had been possible, she captured our attention and our empathy. For all of the roaring engines, explosions, stunts, and flame, throwing, the most iconic image in Fury Road remains a simple and panoramic shot: Furiosa falls to her knees in the open desert and unleashes an anguished scream, realizing that there will be no going back to the world she remembers and loves.
At the time, dystopian science fiction was already at flood stage. The fever for Katniss’s rebellion in The Hunger Games was breaking, and John Hillcoat’s big-screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (which I rather liked) had come and gone without getting much more than shrugs from moviegoers. (In retrospect, Hillcoat's film looks like a dull prologue to the long-running success of television’s The Walking Dead.) Today, audiences would be justified in complaining that they've reached a big-screen dystopia saturation point. The genre dominates film, television, games, YA fiction, and graphic novels. Many of these stories focus on traumatized survivors who must venture through wastelands and wildernesses, at great risk to themselves, in the hopes of overthrowing the Powers that Be, or the hopes of finding a better world. As a professor of creative writing, I can tell you that many of my students, so scarred by the way the pandemic disrupted their high school experience, struggle to imagine stories in any other genre. It’s almost all they know.
My first experience with a story like this came early in childhood, when I discovered Watership Down, Richard Adams’ apocalyptic novel of rabbits striving to survive in a brutal wilderness, one fraught with predators and “governed” by the most destructive and heartless species of all. (You get one guess.) And yet, in the rabbits’ pursuit of a world that seemed meant for them, I felt something distinctly human at work: a longing for paradise, a deep-set sensibility that we are meant for a better world. The prevailing impression of that story is one of tremendous beauty and hope.
Thus, I am troubled by the proliferation of dystopian stories that seem to exist to indulge horrific possibilities without much imagination for beauty, hope, or healing. In recent years, such stories and franchises seem to insist that they are relevant to our present circumstances and prophetic of the very near future. I’m not troubled that people are writing them: A society’s collective nightmares reveal a lot about the state of our health. But I’m troubled that they make me feel like we’re sliding, inevitably, into a reality very like these nightmare visions.
And indeed, reading the news, feels increasingly like reading and dystopian sci-fi. The reality of climate change, for example, paired with the dismaying denial of this very phenomenon by those who are accelerating its destructions — these are enough to trigger despair. What’s more, such self-destructive trends can inspire a righteous rage in younger generations as they find themselves doomed to suffer the consequences of the willful denial and cruel selfishness of their elders. We who have neglected the consequences of our selfish consumerism for so long have robbed our children and grandchildren of so much goodness that the world was designed to provide.
Miller’s vision of a wasteland ruled by hyperviolent gangs, their bikes and cars and sixteen-wheelers customized for open road warfare and off-road races, is both viscerally thrilling to watch and deeply troubling to contemplate, especially as we have to admit that there are parts of the world in which apocalyptic tribalism is present-day reality. The monster trucks that soar and crash and rumble across his blazing panoramas might symbolize unchecked human hubris; a rampant, ravenous, and steroidally distorted masculinity; a fury born of — what? A starvation for love? And his movies reek with the scent of scorched gasoline, touched with the madness of present-day politicians who have made “Drill, baby, drill!” a rallying cry.
Now, a decade after Fury Road set fire to our screens, we have Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the origin story of Fury Road’s rising star. We already know that she will grow up to save a few of Immortan Joe’s sex slaves, and that she will give the world a chance to try and salvage what time, resources, and hope remains. This new film serves up many of the open-road action sequences that the franchise fans have come to see. But this isn’t just road-warrior chaos: Furiosa is much more Dickensian in its storytelling.
While I’m tempted to agree with those who say this chapter of the saga is entirely unnecessary — I’m more interested in what happens after Fury Road than what led up to it — the story that unfolds here is compelling enough to justify its existence. As the world’s wealth and power becomes increasingly consolidated and controlled by fewer and fewer entities, we need stories about how the weakest and most vulnerable — in this case, an orphan with nothing but anger to get her through — might find ways of overpowering a superstructure. Or at least permanently compromising it structural integrity.
This time, we follow the story of a waifish child who witnesses indescribable horrors, including the brutal execution of her mother at the hands of a barbarian gang lord named Dementus (a delightfully batty Chris Hemsworth). Taken captive, Furiosa fights for a chance to escape and ends up among the ranks of the wasteland’s most powerful and sinister overlord: Immortan Joe. There, she tries to earn favor and opportunity in order to plot her revenge. With cleverness and daring, she joins forces with another disgruntled agent, Praetorian Jack, The Souvenir’s Tom Burke), to wreak vengeance on Dementus and escape the whole hellish system. Her promise to her mother echoes in her mind: Find a way home.
Because we know how Fury Road begins, with Furiosa still laboring under Immortan Joe’s iron fist, we know that this Furiosa story cannot end with victory. So the fundamental suspense of this film lives in questions about how — or if — the storytellers will deliver a satisfying conclusion. This was, for me, a compelling reason to see the movie early enough to avoid spoilers. Fury Road had given us so many questions: Where does such a woman as Furiosa come from? How could she have any agency in a city governed by a monster like a Immortan Joe? How could she hope to pull off her getaway surrounded by such vicious predators? Where did she learn to drive like a maniac? Why is one of her arms robotic? What drives her? How has she not been driven mad?
I was frustrated to find that Charlie Theron would not be the lead in this film. Her Fury Road performance was nothing short of extraordinary — sci-fi epic acting as an Olympic sport. Theron had the strength, intensity, and athleticism to make us believe that Furiosa had grown up in that world. She almost stole the show from Tom Hardy — not an easy feat — making Furiosa the equal of Mad Max in every way.
But when we realize that this prequel focuses on a much younger Furiosa, it makes sense that Miller chose 13-year-old Alyla Browne and the ubiquitous Anya Taylor-Joy to represent the character’s journey from early childhood to young womanhood. (Digital animation is employed here very cleverly, trying to make the handoff from Browne to Taylor-Joy seem seamless.) To my surprise, it’s easy to suspend disbelief and accept these two as the earlier versions of Theron’s character. Much of that has to do with Taylor-Joy’s full-bodied commitment to suffering Furiosa’s ordeals, developing her physical prowess, and convincing us that she can drive like a bat out of hell. (Perhaps you’re old enough to remember the thrill of seeing Indiana Jones maneuver beneath a truck that was running at high speed on a dirt road. Wait until you see what Furiosa can do in similar circumstances!)
As Furiosa spends much of the film wearing masks of face paint and dust, Miller wisely and effectively exploits Taylor-Joy’s cartoonishly large and expressive eyes to anchor our empathy in her suffering. And, as Furiosa rarely says anything in this film, that is an achievement. I find it easy to stay focused on her in every scenario, and the film loses some of its electrical-storm energy whenever she’s offscreen.
Eventually discovering an ally in Praetorian Jack (The Souvenir’s Robert Burke), a driver who is angling for escape, Furiosa survives an appalling and exhausting sequence of ordeals that cost her severely, including the battle in which she loses the arm that is replaced (we know from Fury Road) with a robotic appendage. (It’s one of the film’s most frustrating stumbles that we come away without any clue as to how she gets that arm working or becomes so comfortable using it.)
I was hoping we would get, along the way, a more complex and revealing exploration of Fury Road’s not-so-subtle critique of Western civilization’s cruel cocktail of capitalism, white supremacy, and toxic masculinity. And Miller delivers some of this. In his vivid aesthetic, whiteness is intensified, standing out in stark contrast to any living color: the vibrant oranges and reds that dominate the landscape, the greens and blues that dominate glimpses of the last world. Immortan Joe’s chalk-white skin and streaming white mane seem to represent a divorce from human nature — all that is natural, earthy, healthy, and brown. Joe’s minions paint themselves the same chalky white, whether to imitate him or to absorb some intoxicant, it’s hard to know from just watching the film. The effect is ghastly. It seems like the brand of a death cult, employed to inspire fear. Perhaps we’re to draw from this a parallel with the surging currents of white supremacy. I’m not sure. (Is it just me, or do Immortan Joe’s sons seem like steroidal lampoons of Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric?) But the film doesn’t seem very interested in exploring any such insinuations.
Fury Road made clear that women in this world of maximal misogyny have been reduced to the role of sex slave. This, too, seems to mirror how “conservative” political forces — most obviously in America — are aiming to turn back the clock on the women’s movement and confine them to cooking, cleaning, and mothering (at best), which will also enabling and excusing abuse and exploitation. (See almost any report on J.D. Vance and his history of opinions on women.)
Another of Miller’s relevant critiques comes in the film’s treatment of Dementus as a sort of antichrist. Note how the first time we see Hemsworth onscreen, he’s cloaked — literally — in White Jesus iconography. I couldn’t help but find myself thinking how easily persuaded so many American evangelicals would be by Dementus, with his fondness for opening his arms in a cruciform pose and promising worldly prosperity, all while engaging in flagrant violence against anyone who gets in his way. (In view of how the film concludes with a perverse reimagining of the Eucharist — "This is my body. Take, eat." — I think Miller is going out of his way to lampoon what American evangelicals have made of Christianity.)
Clearest of all are the film’s pessimistic but not unrealistic prophecies about consumer culture. By organizing the chaos of the wasteland’s warring gangs around the exploitation of water and gas and bullets, Miller gives us an easy-to-read allegory about the inevitable destruction brought on by capitalism that is unchecked by conscience. We can see what the world becomes when we give power to trigger-happy, power-hungry agents whose masculinity has become a monstrosity.
But for all these striking visual contrasts, a subtle thread seems to be missing here. By focusing so intently on all that Furiosa has lost, and all of the crimes she and the world around her have suffered, Miller’s energy seems focused on whipping audiences into a frenzy of vengeful rage. Furiosa is hailed in this film as “the darkest of angels,” exalting her as a sort of John Wick-type figure who will stop at nothing to kill anyone who gets in her way. She is an agent of slow-burning and calculated revenge.
At the film’s climax, the action slows for an unexpected and promising dialogue between hero and villain that makes me believe, for a few sweet moments, that the conclusion might take a turn toward wisdom. And I’ve seen some critics try to argue that it does. I’m not sure I buy that. The resolution we get, while it may not unleash the kill-shot and the fountains of bloodshed we might have expected, is still designed to fulfill audience revenge fantasies. It’s an outcome that we might argue is even more cruel than an execution.
“What did you expect, Overstreet?” That’s what I anticipate I will hear from some readers. “Did you expect love and mercy to win the day in a story that delivers us to the bleak beginning of Fury Road?”
No. But I suspect that braver imaginations might have found a way to something wiser and healthier for moviegoers who are facing dystopian futures.
I will gladly watch whatever Miller does next. Nobody makes movies that stagger the imagination like he does. (I can't help but wonder what a saga like Star Wars might have become if a master like Miller hadn’t taken it higher as visionary cinema. Instead, we saw it sprawl and devolve into endless streaming-series variations.) The artistry on display here makes most MCU movies look like disposable television. In every wild scenario and in every quiet moment, Miller’s asking, “What is the most interesting angle on this action? How can I use the whole screen without ever distracting viewers from the action's focal point?” It’s a joy to see his formidable community of artists at the peak of their filmmaking powers in every aspect…
… except, alas, the most important one. Miller’s saga shows us very clearly so much of what is wrong with the world. But do these storytellers have any sense of what is worth saving, and why? Do they have any idea about what might make a meaningful difference beyond retaliatory violence? I have to hope that, in the grand scheme of things, Miller will either bring this apocalyptic saga to a more substantially hopeful conclusion, or, if that’s not in the cards, at least arrive at a profound reflection on the ultimate futility and emptiness of perpetual violence. I’m with Steven Greydanus, who has written at U.S. Catholic one of the best pieces about this movie I’ve yet seen. On its own, Furiosa is a dazzling but punishing experience, one that gets audiences cheering for the vengeful violence of “the darkest of angels” rather than appealing to “the better angels of our nature.”
It is true that such bleak world-building and such cruel circumstances as the Furiosa scenario are unlikely to leave much room for examples of love and mercy. Few storytellers could convince us of the existence of a gentle, civil, gracious soul surviving in such a wasteland and making a meaningful difference. (Again, Cormac McCarthy remains a vivid exception. His novel The Road may not lead us to any glorious hope, but the pleasure of that book is not its violence but its poetry, and that in itself is worth discovering.)
Miller’s saga shows us very clearly so much of what is wrong with the world. But do these storytellers have any sense of what is worth saving, and why? Do they have any idea about what might make a meaningful difference beyond retaliatory violence?
But fantasy, more than any other genre, can do this: It can give us glimpses of possibilities beyond the sphere of our grim experience. It can take our breath away with rumors of glory that beam in from beyond the frame, the frame that we’ve come to believe is the limit of all hope. Tolkien, Lewis, L’Engle, and even Lucas knew this. Here’s hoping Miller does too.
It seems within the range of Miller's talents to achieve this. After all, this is the filmmaker whose most admirable masterpiece, by my lights, remains his all-ages adaptation of Dick King-Smith’s classic children’s story Babe — a singular joy, radiant with goodness.
And, to his credit, Miller does give us fleeting glimpses of human kindness. Between Furiosa, Praetorian Jack, those they help, and a few who help them along the way, we can recognize seeds being smuggled into the darkness, seeds that might someday, against all odds, make possible a garden in this desert. What sticks with me from this movie as vividly as that image of Fury Road’s screaming Furiosa are the words of Praetorian Jack as he reflects upon the fate of his parents: “Even as the world fell, they longed to be soldiers for a virtuous cause. For them, it never happened.”
Perhaps there’s some comfort in that fact that Jack and Furiosa, if they fall, will fall fighting for “a virtuous cause,” even if their efforts seem doomed to fail.
What would it look like if all of these creative, passionate, innovative imaginations conspired to give us a final act that gave us all a vision for a transformed world? What if this were a saga not merely about survival and revenge, but also about redemption? I suspect that such a marvel would elevate the whole series. And it would mean so much to those of us who long to strengthen what’s left of our increasingly dystopian world.
A Quiet Place: Day One is a decent exercise in an exhausting, exhausted genre
An early draft of this review was originally published on July 15, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
Even more than the alarmingly lifelike special effects, even more than the searing screams and concussive explosions of the sound design, it’s Lupita Nyong’o who makes us believe that all hell has broken loose in New York City in A Quiet Place: Day One. She is so good here — as usual — at making us believe in, and share, her desperation, that I found myself wondering about how she does it. Is she drawing from genuine feelings of desperation that she will only ever get leading roles in movies where her character suffers terror and trauma?
She is upsettingly compelling in such roles, so it’s easy to see why filmmakers want her front and center for such stressful dramas. But I would love to see her as the lead in a romantic comedy, or in a historical drama that isn’t about slavery.
Anyway — here she has the spotlight for the unnecessary prequel to John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, and she does a good job cultivating an unexpected protagonist — Samira (or “Sam”). Samira wins our sympathy as a struggling and despairing cancer patient with a therapy cat named Frodo (because what else would anyone named Sam name their cat?) She shows spirit in her antagonistic exchanges with a nurse (Pig’s Alex Wolff), insisting so fiercely that he help her get a slice from a very particular pizzeria that we know there’s got to be a revelation around the corner.
But when her quest for pizza is interrupted by the most chaotic alien invasion since Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, she becomes even more compellingly desperate—for survival and, yes, strangely, for the pizza.
While the movie takes its inevitable turn into a sequence of terrifying encounters with aliens who are as violent as they are relentless, we might settle into a familiar formula, dashing and dodging our way through a video-game-like obstacle course. And it seems almost predictable that Sam will pick up an unwanted companion who she can’t seem to shake.
The companion who complicates Samira’s quest is a panic-prone English law-school student named Eric, played by Joseph "No, I Am Not Related to Robert Downey Jr." Quinn. Quinn made a name for himself as Eddie Munson in the fourth season of Stranger Things, but I would never have recognized him as that guy. He’s very good here in an emotionally demanding role that could easily have turned the audience against him as an unnecessary drag on Sam’s chances for survival.
And then there’s Frodo the Cat, who takes all of this concussive trauma as if it’s just another day in New York, cooperating impressively whether being led on a leash or being carried around in a bag or being held tightly be a person swimming in an underground tunnel.
When the movie surpasses expectations by giving us many quieter moments of surprising nuance and human kindness along the way, Nyong’o does her best work. The actress seems as determined to give her character as much human complexity as possible in the brief opportunities that the movie gives her. Little by little, Day One becomes a movie not so much about aliens as it is about two very different people who, forced to rely on each other for survival, will come to respect and even save one another.
There are good reasons to see this movie: the aforementioned performances and, of course, the quality of the special effects.
But downtown devastation movies have been a dime per dirty dozen for a long time now, and I'm beyond bored by them. If anybody ever comes up with a narrative in this franchise — or in this genre — that really engages me again, I will be astonished. This franchise, like so many others, so heavily prioritizes scenes of “shock and awe” devastation that it's hard to contemplate any implications the human drama might have. (Is the Sam and Frodo reference supposed to incline me to read this as a story about faithful companionship in a world erupting with orcs and destruction, and then a melancholy boat sailing away to the Gray Havens?)
I fully respect critics who do their best to read real substance here (like Andrew Welch, who almost persuades me here.) And I'm still willing to give films in this genre a chance, as I did for Michael Sarnoski here. (I owe it to him for his sublime work in Pig, one of my favorite films of this decade so far.) And I think he makes the scenes of human intimacy as substantial as anything I’ve yet seen in the series. But just as I did with the first two, I staggered out of the theater glad that the movie hadn’t run longer, and suffering from another concussion headache.
And I've got to note that, given all of the energy that the film invests in a hopeful vision, the gut-punch of its final shot leaves me boggled, flushing away a lot of the goodwill the film has earned to that point. (You'll have to see it for yourself.)
Hopefully Sarnoski will earn enough for this that he can make something as surprising, as absorbing, and as human as Pig again.
Hail any cab but Daddio's
An early draft of this review was originally published on July 15, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
Let me begin by highlighting what I find praise-worthy here:
With each passing year, Sean Penn becomes a more fascinating subject for creative cinematographers. Terrence Malick’s team of camera-wielding superheroes made much of his haunted, harrowed face in The Tree of Life. Here, Phedon Papamichael’s camera feasts on Penn’s weather-scarred visage.
It seems almost too predictable that the child of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith would be so radiant onscreen, and Dakota Johnson is luminous here. It’s as if she’s been waiting her whole career for someone to put her in a car at night for the duration of a film just so we can see how the lights of passing traffic glorify her face.
But this is movie-star glamour we’re talking about in both cases. I wouldn’t ever describe Daddio as a film of visual poetry. Instead, Papamichael’s savoring of the sexy sleekness of the hermetically sealed space is just flashy and entertaining, only occasionally turning to capture the greasy, polluted reality of New York night life for contrast, where we might have found context that could have brought more dimension to the primary drama.
And when it comes to what I admire about this film, well… that all I’ve got.
First-time film director Christy Hall strives to make strong impressions here by framing her film with ambitious limitations. First…
she shows impressive restraint by containing a feature-length drama in one Yellow Cab (although Steven Knight, who wrote and directed Locke with Tom Hardy, made something much more substantial out of this idea, and there was only one person in that car).
Second…
she ups the ante by locking two people in that cab who seem to be trying to outdo each other in their appalling behavior over the course of a long, long drive. If you’re like me, you will dread how much damage these two might do to each other, but you’ll be even more distressed if they somehow warm to each other and learn “life lessons” along the way.
Johnson plays “Girlie,” or at least that’s what the driver, Clark, calls her. She’s clearly suffering from some kind of relationship crisis, and we’re going to learn far too much about it: She’s with a guy who texts her as if she’s his personal sex toy, and who seems to think she’ll enjoy getting dick pics on her phone. (Yes, we have to see them up close on a big screen.) I fully expected to see her dump this guy’s ass by the halfway point of the film, somehow goaded to do so by Clark’s “wisdom.” What happens, or doesn’t happen, is so much worse than that. I'm tempted to say I'd rather have watched a movie about Girlie giving up on transit and just walking all the way home. But she’s making such appalling decisions every step of the way that I'd probably have bailed on that too.
Meanwhile, Penn’s Clark clearly doesn’t care if he loses his job over customer complaints, given how inappropriately he pokes that the boundaries of his fare’s privacy, and serves up unwanted advice.
If there had been a credit at the end of this film about a nightmare in a Yellow Cab revealing that the whole thing was sponsored by Uber, I would have believed it.
The movie seems to think I should be glowing with joy over the "connection" these two have made by the end, but I don't see why and I'm not feelin' it. It's like watching one of those spoof trailers that plays Sleepless in Seattle as a stalker-horror movie, only this one plays Taxi Driver as a sentimental heart-warmer about how a mentally ill, isolated driver meets a self-destructive young woman and they learn something about the power of the human spirit or something.
Since I'm not feeling moved to say more, I'll turn the mic over to Jeannette Catsoulis at The New York Times:
"Somehow, Penn never allows Clark’s inappropriateness to become predatory, and Johnson’s marvelously expressive features reveal details the dialogue declines to provide. Yet if there’s a finer point to any of this — beyond yes, talking to strangers is sometimes beneficial — it eluded me."
Me too, Discerning Moviegoer. Me too.
Stranded on Janet Planet, a young girl struggles to survive
An early draft of this review was originally published on July 1, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
When I first reviewed Janet Planet at my Substack, I gave readers this unusual recommendation: Be very careful in selecting where you see this movie. Seek it out at an arthouse theater that isn’t playing other summer blockbusters. Or, perhaps you can just wait until you can see this streaming instead of seeing this in a theater. Why?
If you see it in a multiplex, as I did, you’ll probably become painfully aware of any big summer action movie playing at the same time. As I watched Janet Planet at AMC Alderwood’s sixteen-screen theater, I struggled to hear the movie’s half-whispered dialogue due to the subwoofers rumbling next door like an ongoing thunderstorm. It felt like trying to appreciate a poetry reading in a tent across the street from an open-air monster truck show.
Nevertheless, the movie moved me. It’s a challenging drama that, in some ways, hits painfully close to home. Here are some first impressions:
In my experience, it’s been quite common to observe that those who have the most expertise in, and the greatest gifts for, taking care of other people are often — and I stress, often, not always — terrible at taking care of themselves, or of recognizing that they have needs at all.
That may sound harsh. But I’ll volunteer myself as Exhibit A: If there has been any overlap in the observations of my therapists, my colleagues in education, and my family about my personality, it has been on this very subject. I will invest more time and energy than I actually have in trying to assist a friend, a stranger, a student, or a family member — and that includes my cat — but I will not do something for myself about illness, exhaustion, or spiritual struggles until things reach a crisis stage. This has become a much bigger problem since I started teaching; I’ve had to re-learn how to preserve my physical, mental, and spiritual health since I started serving 40 to 60 students per academic term. And I’ve known many who suffer similar self-neglect, many of whom have served in medical or mental health professions.
I recognize this behavior in Janet, an acupuncturist and single mother who lives off the main roads and back in the woods in Massachusetts. Janet cares in her own misguided ways for her 11-year-old daughter Lacy, and who throws the doors of her home and heart open wide to anybody likely to take her up on her over-generous offers. (While I’ve never visited this area, it felt strangely familiar, bringing back memories of conversations and encounters I experienced on the edges of some ex-hippie communities in rural Oregon and California in the early ‘90s, which is when Janet Planet takes place.)
As a result, Janet (played here with persuasive complexity by Julianne Nicholson) suffers the exploitative behaviors of manipulative men who move in, complicate her life, and then have trouble leaving. And her habitual troubles with personal boundaries are not only self-destructive but they are consistently destabilizing and upsetting to her quiet, intuitive, and deeply observant pre-teen daughter.
Lacy seems to be a second thought in almost all aspects of her world. We might envy her a childhood in the woods in what appears to a beautiful home. These locations are filmed by Maria von Hausswolf (who also shot the moonscape-like Icelandic wilderness of 2023’s Godland) in ways that capture their beauty and grace without ever becoming showy or heavy handedly symbolic.But the more questions we start asking about how Janet can afford to live and work where she does, or wonder about what’s really going on in Janet’s acupuncture business (we don’t see many clients), the more unsettled we might become about their security there. And anyway, while their hideaway home might seem somewhat idyllic, we become increasingly aware, through long silences and through Lacy’s perspective on summer campers and schoolmates, that the isolation is doing more harm than good.
And anyway, it seems that it’s rarely just the two of them out there in the woods. We watch as Janet, in her impulsive and misguided generosity, opens their world to three disruptors. Two are men. Wayne, played by the great character actor Will Patton (who was so good a few years back in Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari) has already abandoned his family and existing children and he does not look at all interested in being a stepfather to Lacy. When his migraines come on, if that is indeed what they are, Janet and Lacy suddenly seem endangered. Avi, played by indie-film legend Elias Koteas (who has been particularly skilled in portraying weird manipulators and charismatic con men since his roles in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica and David Cronenberg’s Crash), doesn’t seem aggressively violent, but in his leadership role for a local theater group he looks a lot like a commune’s cult leader. And there’s a vibe of sexual libertinism in the community that adores him that we can sense will not make anything better for Janet or Lacy, even when Avi expresses a particular affection for Janet.
But men aren’t the only problem: Janet also allows her empathy for one of the women suffering in Avi’s commune to trouble her home. Regina, played by Sophie Okonedo, clearly needs help in separating herself from Avi, her longtime manipulator. But she is quick to turn Janet’s offer of help into an occasion to make herself at home and start asserting herself as an unwanted second guardian for Lacy.
I’m making it sound like a lot happens in Janet Planet, and I suppose it does. But first-time filmmaker Annie Baker, who has already made a name for herself as a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, is impressive in this debut. The movie doesn’t feel like “filmed theater” at all — it’s patient, quiet, observant cinema that asks us to pay as much attention to what isn’t said as what is spoken, as much attention to stillness as to action. Don’t get me wrong: This isn’t a Terrence Malick aesthetic in which details of the environment become powerfully suggestive. Janet Planet isn’t asking us to interpret much in the way of imagistic poetry. But it is asking us to think like a therapist, paying close attention to ways in which Janet has trapped herself in a web of fear, need, and insecurity.
Pay special attention when Janet talks about her compulsion to make all men fall in love with her, or her deep need to be “liked.” While our concerns about Janet’s fitness as a capable parent worsen, so do our suspicions that much of this isn’t her fault — that somewhere along the line, she herself was deprived of the love and support she needed.
I come away haunted by the quietness of the film — by the absence of a caring and engaged community. When Janet is drawn into a vibrant, lively community in the final minutes of the film, we see her light up in ways we haven’t through the whole film. We also see Lacy’s little brain kick into overdrive, as if she’s observing a phenomenon that is entirely new to her — an activity that terrifies her because of what it will ask her to risk, but that also calls to her with its energy and motion, a sort of simulated cosmos in which everyone is drawn into everyone’s orbit, and a more symphonic way of being starts to seem possible.
I’m still thinking this one over, and I suspect I might have much more to say by the end of the year. I find myself wanting to discover that a sequel is on the way, if only because I’m tied up in knots about what will become of Lacy. I’m inclined to predict that she grows up and becomes an artist — perhaps a sculptor, like Michelle Williams’ character in Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up (a film that could easily play out in the same unverse as Janet Planet). Lacy would certainly fit right in in that Oregon art school community, and it would give her occasion to explore ways to express all of the trauma and hardship she both suffered and inherited.
What’s more, I’m particularly mystified by a scene near the end of the film that involves a picnic and a jarring disappearance, and I’d love to hear from you about how you interpret that scene.
Not so fast, but oh so furious: Thelma is a blast.
I've just spent another weekend at the home I grew up in, assisting my mother with all kinds of things, as she now begins the next season of her life mostly alone in that house, my father having passed on after their 57 years together.
A heavy shadow of grief lies over this Northeast Portland property where my parents have lived since I was four years old. Those clouds occasionally part to remind us that my father's severe sufferings — the hearing loss, the loss of speech and language, the loss of memories, the increasing confusion and distress — are finally over. Still, that awareness of a void, an absence, an unresolvable problem, is there waiting for us at every turn.
Quotidian tasks still need to be done. Their printer is not working, and the processes of choosing a new one, uninstalling old programs, and installing new ones, must be carried out in a language of today's technology that my mother does not speak. Firewood must be stacked. Outdoor faucets must be covered to protect them from the freeze. Documents must be scanned and emailed to the funeral home. And on and on.
We need each other. We need to be there for one another. We need to consider the daunting challenges of those who depend on younger and more physically agile people in order to accomplish what must be accomplished. We need to give our love and attention (are those not the same thing?) to those whose world is fading into the past, whose physical capacities are diminishing, whose intellects are not equipped to keep up with the rapidly changing demands of being connected to basic human services, pleasures, and necessities.
In the last few weeks, I have met husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, and grandmothers who are now relying on healthcare workers in hospitals and foster care homes. I have met nurses, doctors, and foster care hosts. I have seen sufferings that have been devastating to behold, even though I know that they are common; there is something about being there, in person, and paying up-close attention, that will shake you and restore your perspective to What Is Really Going On Here in this fragile world. There is something about showing up, holding those cold and feeble hands, and watching the courage and the diligence and the professionalism of good healthcare workers that will humble you and show you who the Real Heroes of the world are. As Karin Bergquist of Over the Rhine often reminds the band's audiences — we give standing ovations to the wrong people in our world. Many (if not most) of the world's greatest heroes are doing hard and often thankless work behind closed doors.
Going through this, I find that I have been given new lenses to see things more clearly. And now even the most incidental recent experiences seem different to me.
For example, Thelma.
Here's a film that pays loving, good-humored attention to characters who are usually ignored. It celebrates them. It shows us how manic, how irresponsible, how foolish we can be when we lose touch with our elders and those who need our help. It shows us how they, attending to urgent life-and-death needs, are often seeing things more clearly than we are. And yet, it is not a grim or dire film. It is a joy.
I recommend that you and your family visit Thelma this Christmas.
An early draft of this review was originally published on June 24, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
Subscribe, and you'll read many of these reviews while the films are still breaking news!
Very few of us have had family members kidnapped, but look at how many moviegoers rush to theaters year after year to watch the latest action thriller about a father hunting down the crooks who took his daughter!
Now… raise your hands: How many of you have been frustrated by scam artists trying to trick you into giving them money? Okay — that’s a lot of hands! Wouldn’t you like to see a movie about somebody who’s mad as hell, who can’t take it anymore, and is ready to hunt down a predatory caller? I have good news for you. There’s a movie in theaters right now, scheduled for prime summer showtimes, that you’re going to love.
I don’t think I’ll stir up any controversy if I claim that youth, big-name celebrities, and action rule at the summertime box office. Having said that, I can hardly believe what I get to recommend — with confidence! — as a sure thing for big-screen entertainment here in the fourth week of June.
Thelma, the first feature written and directed by Josh Margolin, stars 94-year-old June Squibb as a widow who gets scammed online and decides to hunt down the criminal trickster. Okay — she’s not exactly Tom Cruise, and this isn’t anything like Bad Boys 2. But trust me, it’s a joy. If enough people go see this, word of mouth will spread fast, and it just might end up the sleeper hit of the summer.
You’ll notice that I used the “E” word in those opening paragraphs. I’m more inclined to movies that inspire the “A” word — art — than I am to rave about entertainment. And yes, sure, both words are fairly flexible. I tend to think of art films as films that are about much more than the surface-level narrative suggests; thus, they require close observation to both style and substance, asking us to do some measure of interpretation. Art films tend to reward multiple viewings with new discoveries, and they inspire challenging discussions. If I lean on the term entertainment, I’m probably thinking of a film that is more focused on satisfying the audience once, with easy pleasures that signal we can, to some degree, “turn off our brains” and relax. They’re fun as they play, but we’re probably not still reflecting on and interpreting them a week later.
Thelma strikes me as above-average entertainment — a good time for just about anybody who buys a ticket. The characters are endearing, the cast is a pleasure to watch, the jokes are strong, and the narrative arc has enough surprises and delights to send everybody home happy.
But there is an art to executing formulaic entertainment. And Thelma is artfully made. The formula is familiar: Someone has been harmed, and so they vow to carry out some vigilante justice. This leads to a quest, the help of a sidekick, episodic adventures that involve risk and cunning, and eventually a climactic confrontation with a villain.
But there are unique variations on that formula here. Thelma is not a typical action hero. She is bound by almost all of the limitations that anybody in their 90s would typically be.
Thelma is played by June Squibb, who turned 93 as Margolin was making this movie, and while she found her way to stardom late in life, she’s racked up quite an impressive record of screen credits, and she’s showing off her big movie-star charisma here. Squibb makes us believe, she makes us care, and she makes us laugh — a lot. I wouldn’t be surprise if this wins her a second Oscar nomination next winter. (Stick around for the closing credits to spend a few moments with the real-life Thelma who was the inspiration for Squibb’s character.)
While Thelma and her grandson watch a recent Mission: Impossible movie in Thelma’s opening minutes and comment on Tom Cruise’s remarkable athleticism considering his age, a feat of action-hero strength for Thelma might just be riding a scooter a few miles, or navigating a crowded antique shop where it’s easy to knock something over. And while Ethan Hunt’s latest adventure involves outwitting extremely sophisticated A.I. technology, Thelma, grieving the loss of her husband but enjoying her first experience of living alone, is taking her first steps in trying to catch up with a world of technology has left her far, far behind.
Almost all of us have a family member or two who, like Thelma, need our help in carrying out the most basic functions at a computer. (I recently introduced a close relative to the concept of attaching a file to an email, and pretty much blew their mind.) But I’ll bet the challenge has never seemed exciting — for them, or for us. And yet, all of this unfolds onscreen with playful Mission: Impossible conventions, including a musical score by Nick Chuba that riffs on that action franchise’s familiar motif.
Another clever reference to a legendary action franchise comes in the casting of the late Richard Roundtree — the original Shaft. Roundtree, in his final big-screen role (he died in October last year), is the perfect partner for Squibb, and their chemistry is substantial. Roundtree plays Ben, a retirement-center resident who has a lot of history with Thelma and who is quickly, if unintentionally, recruited to be her sidekick in this cross-town venture to regain Thelma’s stolen funds and teach the offender a lesson.
The movie finds another layer of comedy, tension, and thoughtfulness in the parallel action of Thelma’s family as they search for her.
Thelma’s grandson Danny (played by Fred Hechinger) is so devoted to his grandmother that she might be his best friend, and as the adventure unfolds we come to understand why: Danny is struggling to figure himself out, to learn how he can be useful to the world in view of his formidable insecurities. He knows his grandmother loves him unconditionally and believes in his capacity to get unstuck and find his way in the world.
Danny’s parents are played by Parker Posey and Clark Gregg, and while they may not have much chemistry together, they both contribute significant manic energy to the crisis of Thelma’s “disappearance” to make the situation progressively worse — and funnier.
As I found all of this more entertaining than thought-provoking, I have to admit that Anne and I had a meaningful conversation as we walked through a park after the movie. It isn’t often that movies challenge us to think about and share our expectations about aging, what we suspect we need to learn and prepare for, and what kinds of decisions we might make if we’re ever faced with the challenges that face Thelma and Ben in these scenarios. (I think we’re probably too sharp to be scammed, but how much longer will be we fit enough to navigate long stairways?)
So, here’s hoping that Thelma inspires more movies about geriatric heroes! The daunting complications that the elderly face can be as frightful as those facing any action hero, and the strengths that such struggles can reveal in them can make them inspiring role models. The more attention that creative filmmakers give the later seasons of our lives, the more we’re likely to think about them, talk about them, and be ready for them. What’s more, we might be inspired to show more love and respect to our elders who are probably laughing at this movie’s jokes with a deep and bittersweet recognition.
Here’s what I wrote on Letterboxd as soon as I got home from this good time at the movies:
Top Ten Flash Reviews I Considered Posting While the Credits Rolled
10.
A great movie for the revealing post-movie conversations you will have with whomever you see it with.
9.
It's just a hunch, but I'm calling it: The guy who plays Dumbass Michael is going to be a huge movie star someday, and we'll point back to this the way we point back to Harrison Ford in Apocalypse Now and say, "Wow. Look at that guy. Who could have imagined what he would become."
8.
Parker Posey's record is still perfect.
7.
R.I.P., Richard "Shaft" Roundtree. You made a noble choice for your last film!
6.
There's no such thing as a perfect movie, but for a straight-down-the-middle crowd-pleaser of a comedy, this knows exactly what it wants to be, achieves that, and does so with an extra measure of grace and more moments of visual cleverness than I expected.
5.
Thumbs down to the 60-something dude in front of me who sulked on the way out: "Wayyy too sleepy for me. They had the wrong editor. It needed to move much faster." My dude, could you possibly be farther from getting this movie? Who hurt you, man?
4.
Starey Garey = best non-speaking role in years.
3.
See it for the added layer of unintentional comedy coming from some of the elderly audience members who think they're in their living rooms and carry on loud conversations up and down the row, and shake their popcorn barrels loudly to see if anything's left, and very clearly relate to everything Thelma's struggling with and thus find every joke about aging twice as funny as you do. (And you know full well you'll laugh harder at this movie as you get older, too.)
2.
Along the same lines: Biggest laugh of the movie for me came after about three minutes of Thelma obviously being scammed over the phone — the scene that kick-starts the plot, and the premise that has been clear in every blurb and every trailer — and at the end of that scene, the woman in front of me loudly gasps and announced to the theater: "That was a scam!!"
1.
”I think I know her!”