Hamilton (2020)
Having never listened to the soundtrack album, and having never attended a performance of the play, I was introduced to Hamilton through the Disney+ movie of the original production.
Instead of posting a review here, I am saving my response for the Looking Closer Specialists, that lovely community of readers who have chosen to show some appreciation for my work by making a donation — small or large — to help cover the costs of this site.
You can do that too and participate in our frequent conversations about movies, music, and more in that private Facebook group. Join the Looking Closer Specialists! Read about this opportunity here.
Overstreet Archives: A Very Long Engagement (2004)
Recent journeys back in time to World War One — in Sam Mendes's 1917 and Peter Jackson's documentary They Shall Not Grow Old — made me wonder what I would think of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 2004 film A Very Long Engagement if I revisited it again.
Looking for my original review of it, I discovered that isn't included in the archives here at Looking Closer. (It was originally published at Christianity Today.) So I figured it was time to republish that review here. I'm a big fan of Jeunet's work — Delicatessen and Amelie are both films I find well worth watching again and again. But something about this one just didn't work for me. Here's my review — now sixteen years old!
During wartime, art about war can play an important role. It can coax us into contemplation and dialogue about the ethics of violent conflict. It may remind us of the lessons we can learn from the past. Sometimes it offers comfort and even hope during a time of fear, uncertainty, and loss.
You could probably name a few favorites with such redeeming qualities. For this moviegoer, David O. Russell’s Three Kings, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Edward Zwick’s Glory, and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. Kubrick’s later work, Full Metal Jacket, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, are all sobering and rewarding portrayals of the madness that war can unleash.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement, based on a novel by Sebastien Japrisot, aspires to be a meaningful war film about holding on to hope against all odds. Unfortunately, it assaults our senses with imagery so intense, subplots so disposable, and tones so different that we’re likely to find ourselves bewildered instead of moved, overly entertained instead of enlightened.
Here’s the premise: In the wake of World War I, Mathilde, a beautiful young woman crippled by polio, longs to know the fate of Manech, her fiancé who went off to fight for France. Manech, convicted of self-mutilation on the front lines, was punished alongside four other condemned soldiers. He was ordered to make himself an easy target for the enemy, and he never returned. Conflicting reports about his fate have thrown fuel on the feeble fire of Mathilde’s hopes. She will stop at nothing to find out if Manech survived.
If you’re feeling any déjà vu, that’s because the premise is similar to another epic that arrived at this time last year — Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain. But it would be better to describe A Very Long Engagement as a collision of Minghella’s melodrama, Jeunet’s 2001 blockbuster Amelie, and Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Watching it feels like going to an amusement park in the middle of a war zone while a battle is underway. We’re strapped into dozens of dizzying rides, some of which are sickening and terrifying, others that are goofy and strange, and every few minutes our faces are shoved into the grisly horrors of war. There’s no reason that a war film cannot blend comedy and tragedy. But Jeunet is in such a rush that he fails to give us enough opportunities to catch our breath, to consider what’s happening, or to care about the characters.
Engagement, one of only a few films to examine the Great War of 1914-1918, captures battlefield bloodshed in way that will test your nerves, your stomach, and your patience. Bayonet-impalements, shattered heads, bomb-blasted showers of body parts, corpses used as shields against bullets—some moviegoers should steer clear of such sights. In a parallel narrative, an assassin performs brief but severe executions, one involving shards of glass that will make even the toughest viewer wince in dismay. The bloody chaos is interspersed with tangents of Jeunet’s famously comical cleverness and fairy-tale whimsy. One minute, we’re watching French troops charge unshielded into machine gun fire, the other we’re watching Mathilde have sensual daydreams about her missing boyfriend, or we’re chuckling at the way her bicycling mailman tumbles onto her doorstep.
Just as our emotions are jostled back and forth, our sense of chronology is challenged as the narrative makes acrobatic leaps backward and forward in time. A narrator introduces us to enough eccentric supporting characters to fill a phone book. They each have their own particular histories, which are presented in high-speed flashbacks, Amelie-style. Like Amelie, Engagement charges ahead like a runaway freight train, and if you miss anything along the way (which you will), Jeunet seems confident that you’ll take the ride again in order to catch glimpses of the things that you missed. You certainly won’t be bored.
But is all of this excitement worth the exhausting journey?
Some will think so, and they will defend it on the grounds of the cast and the visual wonders.
Amelie‘s Audrey Tautou is a beautiful and engaging Mathilde. Her performance seems like Amelie a few years older, quieter, and more melancholy, but that’s forgivable considering how powerfully she commands our attention. Gaspard Ulliel, who looks like a young Matthew Modine, plays her lost lover with innocence and gentleness. Jeunet gives them some wonderfully intimate moments, including an enchantingly romantic scene lit with matchsticks, that give us reason to believe this is true love that will last a lifetime … if Manech survives the war.
Many of France’s finest actors show up along the way. Fans of French cinema will be glad to see Dominique Pinon (Amelie, Delicatessen), Denis Lavant (Beau Travail), and Jean-Claude Dreyfus (The Lady and the Duke) in memorable supporting roles. The true performance highlight of the film is a show-stopping turn by a famous American actress. (I won’t spoil the surprise here, but if you read other reviews, you’re sure to stumble onto her name.) She’s so fluent in French, so convincing as the tormented wife of a missing soldier, you’re sure to hear viewers whispering in amazement. This unfortunately works against the film; we end up marveling at a conspicuously clever acting stunt instead of being drawn into the story.
These actors move through a whole library of unforgettable—often stunningly beautiful—images. The animators who recreate France circa 1920 have done their work so well, viewers will never suspect that the backdrop is artificial. Production designer Aine Bonetto makes every frame exquisitely elaborate, and director of photography Bruno Delbonnel guides us through as many styles of cinematography as there are chapters in this story. Jeunet brings trenches, a Paris marketplace, and a train station up from the dusts of history, three-dimensional and beautifully illuminated. Even the most fleeting moments leave you awestruck, asking “How’d they do that?” If you blink, you’ll miss a glimpse of Mathilde’s face in a train window that looks like a breathtaking impressionist portrait. In the opening scenes, the famous trench warfare sequence from Paths of Glory is surpassed so powerfully that Kubrick, were he still alive, would have considered it a challenge. Near the end, there is an explosion that would be best described as “gorgeous” if the circumstances surrounding it were not so horrific.
Therein lies the central problem of the film: In his dedication to dazzling spectacle, Jeunet ultimately distracts us from attending to the central story. Instead of arriving at a meaningful conclusion, he wraps up his mixed-media marathon with a solemn acknowledgment of war’s consequences and an optimistic flourish. The film’s overriding sentiment — that hope is a good thing — feels trite and ultimately unsatisfying. If the film is seen by anybody with family members currently on duty in Iraq, it’s more likely to encourage their nightmares than to offer them comfort. In what are we to place our hope? Mere chance? This war movie seems to think so.
The Quarry: murder, scripture, and Southern Gothic style
This review of The Quarry, the new film from director Scott Teems and co-writer Andrew Brotzman, could begin by grabbing your attention with a description of its tense and then suddenly violent opening scene. That might be a smart "hook."
But let's zoom in on a different scene instead, one that unfolds soon after we leave that scene of heartless cruelty:
In a hush of uncertainty, a Spanish-speaking congregation gathers for worship in the small sanctuary of their depressed border-town church, eager to hear a sermon from their new shepherd, who identifies himself as Pastor Martin. To their surprise, Pastor Martin is a white man who speaks only English. They'll need a translator. A bold woman volunteers, passing along whatever the preacher says.
But The Man — that's what the movie's nameless protagonist is called in the credits: "The Man" — speaks haltingly, uncertainly, staring down at his open Bible as if he's reading a doctor's message that he only has a few weeks to live. In fact, this stranger has no real sermon at all. All he can do is acknowledge that he is a sinner, and then read from the holy book as if seeing the words for the first time.
What his congregants don't know is that that is exactly the case — The Man hasn't read the Bible before. What's more, he isn't actually Pastor Martin, the man they've been waiting for. He is, in reality, a criminal on the run. And he hopes to hide the fact that they will never meet the pastor they expected.
Does anyone in town see through this con man?
Maybe. Celia (Catalina Sandino Moreno), the woman who has prepared a room for Pastor Martin, finds the man who moves in to be unlike other pastors they've had. He wants to keep to himself, but she's watching closely.
Even more suspicious of the stranger is the local sheriff, Chief Moore (Michael Shannon, in simmering menace mode). Moore watches the stranger through narrowed eyes. But even if he suspects that "The Man" is actually a wanted man, he isn't doing anything about it. Not yet, anyway. He doesn't seem to care if the church flourishes or fails. He's a disgruntled, world-weary lawman who scoffs at Jesus's message of forgiveness, has a habit of sleeping with Celia, and would prefer to lock up and punish brown-skinned men from his community than inconvenience a white man.
But it's Valentin (Bobby Soto), a young Mexican-American who ranks high on the sheriff’s “Give Me a Reason to Arrest You List," whose suspicions about the stranger are strongest. And when he ends up in jail blamed for a crime he didn't commit, Valentin's ready to gamble on his hunch.
Will the stranger — played with anxiety and rage by Shea Whigham — escape justice on account of the white policeman's prejudice? Or will he be exposed as... wait, who is The Man, really?
I'm inclined to brand him with a different nickname: "The Misfit." After all, he reminds me of the kind of troubled crook who we find wrestling with a feeble conscience in a Flannery O'Connor story. By reading the Bible aloud as a smokescreen, The Misfit ends up choking on the wisdom of the Scriptures. The Word of God surgically dismembers his falseness. And we arrive at the core of the story's suspense: If The Misfit sustains his charade to escape the ongoing manhunt, will he be able to escape the conviction of the Gospel itself? And if not, is he capable of believing in the grace and forgiveness offered in those pages?
Whigham plays The Man like a battered old car that's committed one too many hit-and-runs. He's driven himself so hard that he's either going to crash in violence, burn up with guilt, or sputter to a stop on account of emptiness. Teems, a filmmaker who has expressed admiration for the meditative cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski, attends to The Man's torment in close-up, but also gives us good views of the desolate territory around him, increasing our sense of his exposure and of his desperate thirst for consolation. It's an observant (if not exactly intimate) portrait of a man who set fire to those who did him wrong, and who now has no way to escape the ongoing smolder of rage, bitterness, and guilt.
Whigham's scenes with Shannon are the highlight of the film, as the actors work so well together, and Shannon is in his sweet spot: This performance resembles his brilliant breakout turn in Jeff Nichols's excellent Shotgun Stories more than any role he's played since. Their interplay suggests intriguing similarities between their characters: Moore may dress as a representative of the law, but he uses it to follow his whims, which are guided by cynicism and racism; he has no more integrity than The Man, who has at least a dawning awareness of his own wickedness.
What is the cause of Sheriff Moore's irresponsibility and violence? In his brief rants, we learn that he is dealing with a sense of helplessness and pointlessness in the ruins of a small town, where the arrival of the Capitalism Highway stole away the town's essential businesses — "and," he adds, "all the nice quiet folks along with it.” He's not content to police the poor who are left scraping out a living. His dissatisfaction manifests as an eagerness to punish anyone he perceives as a problem, and he's not inclined to hear even a pretense of the Gospel. "Forgiveness only works in a world where people learn their lessons.” Whether he's complaining about repeat offenders or his own uncontrollable impulses, it's hard to say.
Moore and The Man raise some of the more challenging questions I've encountered at the movies in 2020. So I'm dismayed to see so many critics dismissing this film for being "slow." By contrast, I'm drawn in to its weighty concerns. There is a lot going on here — and none of it is delivered in the typically lurid and crowd-pleasing vocabulary of sensational violence, sex, and verbal sparring. These characters have complicated interior lives and histories, and much of the drama is taking place beyond the reach of their words.
The burden of guilt, the reality of consequences, and the possibility of forgiveness: That's the heart of the matter. But there's another subject at hand that intrigues me even more — and that has to do with language barriers.
Celia is fond of a hymn she sings in Spanish because, even though the words don't rhyme that way, at least that connects her to the song in a direct and personal way. Similarly, the Mexican-Americans of this town need consolation, guidance, and vision in their own language. The woman who serves as a translator, motivated by the people's needs, is the true voice of Gospel in this desperate church. The Man himself, reading God's word in his native English, can't seem to "translate" these concepts of love and grace in any way that makes sense to him, even though it's clear that he is despairing over his sins.
https://youtu.be/YMvND6g67Cc
The film's weighty spiritual inquiries may suggest we're on a narrative arc toward a heart-warming redemption. But Teems and Brotzman, transplanting a story by novelist Damon Galgut from South Africa to West Texas, are braver storytellers than that.
They're clearly working in the same world where Flannery O'Connor's violent, jarring, difficult stories take place — a world in which characters rarely reform and, if anything, they might catch a brief epiphany regarding grace before things fall apart entirely. They're also traveling the same roads as Cormac McCarthy's characters from No Country for Old Men, where a reckoning for humankind's evils is coming, and no gunslinging sheriff has what it takes to restore law and order. I am also reminded of Robert Duvall's The Apostle, with its earnest portrait of preacher trying to reconcile his violent impulses with the Gospel he preaches, and Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, with its story of a seeker staggering through a wasteland in a last-ditch effort to get one thing right after a lifetime of wrong.
I was delighted to see the subtle talents of Catalina Sandino Moreno again — I frequently have students watch and write about her character in the film Paris, Je T'aime — but I wish her character had more to do in this story.
That is, in fact, the only weakness I find worth mentioning here: The film's fleeting run-time seems to prevent us from getting to know these complicated characters better. Teems, who has done outstanding work for the TV series Rectify, directed a distinctive indie called That Evening Sun, and made a little-known but beautiful documentary portrait of Hal Holbrook in Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey, excels when he has time to patiently attend to explore the relationships between characters' crises and the secrets of their histories. While The Quarry gives us glimpses of the wages of sin and the need for a hope beyond the damage of the immediate human sphere, it leaves us with a lot of room — perhaps a bit too much — to imagine where these characters come from and discuss what we might learn from them.
But the strengths of the film — its performances, its truthfulness, its thoughtfulness, its timeless relevance — far outweigh its weakness. I saw the film weeks ago, and I'm still thinking about the problem of the monster that Sheriff Moore has become, the options for Celia as she looks for a meaningful future, and The Man as he seems to have dug himself a grave and cannot now free himself from its gravity. Teems is truthful enough to show us that no confession can undo damage done, and the ground is soaked with blood of those who suffered and died for crimes the didn't commit.
As Americans recently watched in horror as their Liar-in-Chief used violence and cruelty to clear out a church property just so he could hold up a Bible for a photo-op, perhaps the single-most iconic moment of American hypocrisy in my lifetime, we might read this film as a prophecy that we are now headed towards blood and ruin. No less a Christian visionary than J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote (in a letter to Miss J. Burn on July 26, 1956), "[O]ne must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however ‘good’...." But then he concluded that statement with another truth: "... and the Writer of the Story is not one of us." The story of The Quarry is unfinished when the credits roll. And I find that both frustrating and encouraging. Life is like that.
It's Groundhog Day in Palm Springs
God must love Groundhog Day — he has determined protect it from sequels... so far. (Let's not count 2019's amusing Super Bowl commercial).
That premise is so perfect that is has crossed the borders of mere pop-culture lingo to become a permanent part of the English language. In fact, I admire the premise more than the movie itself. (The 'rom' in that rom-com lacks any discernible spark — a significant flaw, in my opinion.) The power of that idea is evident in how frequently it is referenced despite the movie's weaknesses and its underwhelming climax. I don't even have to tell you what it's about — odds are you know already.
Two remarkable strengths of the film explain its status as a classic:
- The perfect casting of Bill Murray as the exasperated Phil Connors (I'd go even farther and say the casting of Murray and Stephen Tobolowsky — their confrontations are the iconic moments most people recall first from the film); and, most importantly,
- the genius of its central time-loop metaphor.
Phil's confinement in purgatorial Punxsutawney portrays a particular paradox: One of the greatest causes of human suffering is also the mechanism by which we find our greatest joys. We are not only creatures of habit, but we are born into predetermined cycles. We are liturgical creatures. We are bound to certain rhythms of biology and cosmology; we live in a certain sameness. But we make meaning by what we do within those structures. Just as Lars Von Trier's revelatory documentary about creativity The Five Obstructions demonstrates, the ways in which human beings respond to obstacles and challenges reveal both their capacity for failure and their potential for genius. Our inclinations toward creativity and innovation are largely driven by the desire for surprise — an interruption of the mundane, a disruption of the familiar.
More importantly, we rely upon repetition for a way to distinguish between the bad, the good, and the best. We learn from our mistakes — or, at least we try to. Groundhog Day's Phil, played so perfectly by Bill Murray, represents anyone who has recognized a pattern, exploited it, suffered consequences or (better) an awakening of a conscience, and then sought to walk a more rewarding road.
But while Harold Ramis's philosophically potent comedy has been spared the diluting influence of sequels so far, it hasn't been spared the inevitable copycats or (as I'm sure they'd prefer to be known) homages. As I scan reviews of the latest — a Hulu Original film called Palm Springs — it is apparently a requirement that I remind you of several, so here we go: Edge of Tomorrow found a way, turning it into an exhilarating sci-fi thriller with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. It's worth seeking out, even though you can find it now by its silly video-release title Live.Die.Repeat. The TV series Russian Doll went for a sprawling, complicated, hard-R-rated treatment, giving us at least one trip through the loop (sometimes several) per episode. You may recall the horror version called Happy Death Day, or the rom-com 50 First Dates.
While this list includes some memorable innovations, the over-reliance of American filmmakers on doing what has been done before strikes me as creative laziness. The derivative nature of so much mainstream entertainment causes me to flinch when I recognize a formula as easily as I do watching the trailer for Palm Springs. Once again, an exasperated protagonist gets caught in a single-day time loop, panics, tries to get out, can't, realizes the possibilities behaves very badly, gets bored and sad, and then starts trying to do the right thing.
https://youtu.be/CpBLtXduh_k
So it took a sneaker wave of sudden positive buzz to get me to revive my Hulu account and surf the repetitive waves of Palm Springs.
In this variation from director Max Barbakow and co-writer Andy Siara, Nyles (Andy Samberg), a troublemaker with a devil-may-care grin, is living it up in loop-land as long as he can stay a step ahead of the sadistic and vengeful Roy (J. K. Simmons) who he accidentally led into the loop alongside him. As he hangs out at a wedding that he's suffered through a thousand times, he becomes entangled with Sarah (Crisin Milioti), the cynical sister-of-the-bride, and soon she's following him into the madness.
By throwing Sarah and Nyles together into ongoing will-they-or-won't-they scenarios — Will they or won't they fall in love? Will they or won't they have sex? Will they or won't they wreck the wedding by exposing nasty secrets? Will they or won't they escape the loop? — we get a timely a clever, timely comedy about learning to make the most of a routine, learning to live with one another, learning to become our best selves, etc.
Many critics are noting how right this movie feels right now, during a season in which audiences are isolated and trying to survive long-term confinement with their loved ones, their roommates, and themselves. And sure, that's a reasonable observation.
Many more have noted the remarkable chemistry of Samberg and Milioti, which I believed in more than I ever believed in the matchmaking of Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in Groundhog Day. (I felt more of a connection between Murray and the groundhog than Murray and MacDowell.)
But I'm more concerned with whether or not Palm Springs, with its mix of cringe-worthy crassness, intermittently interesting shenanigans, and endearing lead performances, actually leads us anywhere meaningful. It isn't hard to lead characters to lessons when they start as low as these two do. (And for a movie about characters who need to grow up, its brand of comedy is painfully juvenile. Take, for example, a scene near the beginning in which Nyles's girlfriend shouts "Shit!" repeatedly while he's trying to masturbate. This is how the movie shows us that Nyles needs to change his life. Okay, then.)
Samberg and Milioti would be a perfect pairing in a stronger movie.Comedies like this feel longer than they really are when they flail about looking for some kind of profundity — especially when they settle on Longsuffering Romantic Partnership as the only route to a meaningful life. These two appallingly irresponsible characters, lost in a community of similarly shallow human beings, have a lot to learn. And this movie wears itself out trying to figure out what some of those things might be. It tries to brush aside Groundhog Day's "Become a Kind and Loving Person" lesson as trite, but then it can't make up its mind between the triteness of "Falling in Love Makes the World Turn" or the slightly more mature "Sticking Together For Better or Worse is the Secret of True Love." In short, it is fumbling its way toward the ideal of marriage as if it's discovering a new idea altogether.
It is also bizarrely nonchalant about its characters' misdeeds — from slight recreational indiscretions to torture to murder to long-term sex crimes. (Ha ha! Nyles exploited his time-loop advantage to sleep with countless women — some repeatedly — without revealing that he was manipulating them! What a funny guy! Surely all we need here is for him to find the right woman and all these Whoopsies will be forgiven.)
What kept me watching to the end of Palm Springs, besides the delight of discovering Milioti's comic agility, was the hope that Barbakow and Siara would innovate an ending that surprised me either with its cleverness or its wisdom. That didn't happen. The conclusion feels more like exhaustion.
Instead, I found myself wanting to revisit another film in which two troubled young people follow a cyclical pattern of meeting and falling in love until they learn what love is really about: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, from the minds of director Michel Gondry and writer Charlie Kaufman. Now there's a romantic comedy that explores its sci-fi premise in memorably meaningful ways.
Or, even better — there's always Jarmusch's Paterson, which avoids the time-loop concept but frames its scenes effectively with Adam Driver waking up each morning, checking his timepiece, and then using his day's mundane routines as a scaffold for literary creativity. Here's a film that highlights our common daily template and, rather than putting the spotlighted couple through the humiliation of so much sophomoric behavior, allows us to learn from their example of improvisation, optimism, enthusiasm, and true love. Why settle for mediocre variations that seem eager to revel in sensational mistakes when you could instead watch something beautiful that reveals the wonder and glory possible within a routine, and how mindfulness can transform sameness into something sacred?
Da 3 Movies in Da 5 Bloods
Three for the price of one is usually a valuable bargain. But when it comes to Da 5 Bloods — the remarkable new film from Spike Lee — the film's most distinctive strength is also its weakness: It is trying to be at least three kinds of movie at once.
Lest that sound like damning the film with faint praise, let me begin with some praise that is anything but 'faint': Da 5 Bloods is unpredictable, surprising, instructive, and wildly imaginative. Few of my 2020 moviegoing experiences — if I can call my home-theater isolation 'moviegoing' — will remain as vivid in my memory as this one. Few will ignite a hotter desire in me for God's justice to roll down. Few will inspire more constructive conversation and debate among my friends and favorite critics in years to come. In the eclectic harvest of 2020 feature films, Lee's latest epic is one of the few I've seen so far that I would highly recommend.
But then, haven't we come to expect this from Spike Lee? His films — Da 5 Bloods is Number 24 — rarely fit comfortably in any category. He's proven that he can make a slick, thrilling genre movie: Check out Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, and Jodie Foster in Inside Man, for example. But he seems happiest when he's free-styling, keeping the audience guessing about what kind of movie they've actually signed on for. And he seems to have turned a corner recently, cranking up the intensity with which he splices together varieties of storytelling, image-making, score settling, justice seeking, history teaching, and Gospel preaching.
Lee's Oscar-winning 2018 feature BlacKkKlansman was an undercover cop thriller, a workplace comedy, a blistering expose of Trump's racist agenda, and a satire that dared to imagine hilarious reversals of moments from The Birth of a Nation. It was arguably his strongest film since his 1989 masterpiece Do the Right Thing, but it also felt like he was beginning to establish a new genre: an incendiary hyrid.
And Da 5 Bloods is another in that mode. As Spike Lee Joints go, it's triple-jointed.
At first, it feels almost like one of those cringe-worthy paycheck parties like Last Vegas, Going in Style, Space Cowboys, or Wild Hogs. You know the films I mean: Veteran actors go through the motions of an easy script as if showing up for a charity event. Who knows which motivation rose to the top? The easy money? The camaraderie? The ego-boost of being on an all-star team? Here, the team of old pros comprises Delroy Lindo — who has always delivered forceful and memorable supporting turns, and who doesn't disappoint here; stage veteran Norm Lewis; and The Wire's superstars Clarke Peters and Isiah Whitlock Jr.
But they're not alone: The star power is amplified by the presence of Chadwick "Black Panther" Boseman as a saintly soldier rising immortal from the grave of the Vietnam War. Most exciting for me is the inclusion of a young rookie — Jonathan Majors, star of my favorite narrative feature of 2019: The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
After about 20 minutes, it becomes clear that this is not just a flashy all-star game. It's as ambitious a film as Lee has yet made.
How do I synopsize a film so multi-faceted and so busy? I'll try.
Who are the titular five bloods? We have the four Vietnam veterans — Paul (Lindo), Eddie (Lewis), Otis (Peters), and Melvin (Whitlock Jr) — who joyously reunite at the beginning and set out to find the the Fifth Blood: Norm, who they admiringly call "Stormin' Norman." That is to say, they set out to recover his remains from the Vietnam wilderness where he fell in a firefight.
But there's another way to read the title: In Norm's place, we have the son of Paul — David (Majors). On this adventure, he's the Fifth Blood: an inquisitive and meddlesome youngster who senses some of the real danger in the team's mission, and who recognizes just how mercurial and mentally unhealthy his father — the PTSD-scarred "Blacks for Trump" Goliath of the group — really is.
Anyway, it doesn't take long before word gets out about the secondary motivation of the Bloods' quest. As Melvin exclaims in a moment of drunken enthusiasm, "There's gold in them hills!" Yes, in the place where they survived their last traumatic firefight, they buried a stash of gold bars that they are now ready to claim. Eddie calls them "reparations" in respect for those who have suffered neglect and disrespect from both the American people and, worse, the government that has exploited and sacrificed them.
The Bloods' journey back into Vietnam. And to locate the scene of their loss and their fortune, they charter a private boat ride upriver into the jungle. (You knew there would be all kinds of allusions — visual, musical, etc. — to Apocalypse Now, right?) Their adventures are episodic: They experience jarring flashbacks and sobering reunions. Their progress is rattled by run-ins with old enemies, complicated by entanglements with an NGO focused on landmines (Mélanie Thierry plays a flirtatious do-gooder), and complicated even further by an encounter with Otis's old flame (Le Y Lan) and the revelation of a secret she's been keeping. Making everything even more unstable is the volatility of a French agent (Jean Reno) who might help the Bloods translate their gold into money.
If that sounds complicated, that's because it is. The narrative — a screenplay by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo that has been revised by Lee and Kevin Willmott (co-writer of BlacKkKlansman) — is a zigzagging line drawn on a map of themes, grievances, questions, and sermons.
And Lee delivers all of this in at least three modes of cinema, modes that clash as often as they cohere.
We get enough archival footage and footnoting here for a documentary on the exploitation of African Americans during the Vietnam War, where black soldiers were pushed to the front lines and died in vast numbers. We learn the names and faces of some of the most important black soldiers of the time, men who should not be lost to history.
In her review at Vox, Alissa Wilkinson celebrates Lee's inclination to remind us of our own history. She highlights how, throughout his filmography, he
refuses to submit to a barrier between fact and fiction. Frequently, and especially in his more recent work (including Da 5 Bloods), he splices together montages of archival footage, news reports and speeches and moments we previously experienced on screens, reminding us that what we saw was both real and framed, shot for our consumption. Over time, history gets reduced to iconic images from newsreels and grainy pictures. By putting them in the context of his movies, Lee revives them, putting his films into a context that’s both cinematic and far bigger than cinema alone.
We get an honest-to-goodness Vietnam War movie in a style somewhere between the earnestness of Platoon and the dark satire of Full Metal Jacket, with the genre-standard soundtrack of war-era songs. (I couldn't help but recall Good Morning Vietnam as a reimagined version of the famously provocative Vietnamese DJ "Hannoi Hannah" — played by Ngo Thanh Van — speaks directly to American troops, stirring up trouble the way Robin Williams' Adrian Cronauer sought to inspire them.) It's snarky, at times, and prone to commentary on contemporary politics — David gets to land a particularly satisfying punch against Trump. But it also paints deeply empathetic portraits, revealing the fact that when these men were sent to war, they never returned — they were just relocated and assigned to lonely new wars and dehumanizing nightmares. This is where Boseman shines: As an apparition of the fallen "Stormin'" Norman, he is a disciple of both the Reverend Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and his testimony of grace and forgiveness is deeply moving.
And yet, there's a third movie happening here — a meta-movie one that cleverly references earlier movies about the war and about fortune-seeking, and which gets downright stage-y as characters abruptly kick down the fourth wall and, with familiar Spike Lee bravado, start ranting to (or at?) the audience.
As every critic worth his or her salt has already noted, this goes beyond the easy Apocalypse Now references to become a 2020 take on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But it's also a recontextualization of Lee's own Do the Right Thing — a sobering meditation on the myriad forms of prejudice and hatred; a bloody illustration of all that can go wrong when we let the injustices committed against us embitter us and incline us toward self-destructive acts of rage or self-indulgence. (In both films, Lee wryly observes that African Americans, rightfully calling out the evils of white supremacy, aren't innocent of racial prejudice and hate crimes.) A pair of expensive sneakers slung over a wire is a direct visual reference to Lee's 1989 masterpiece, creating an obstruction for the passage of the Bloods' upriver voyage. And the humid, sun-burnt Vietnam jungles recall that vivid colors of Mookie's heat-wave neighborhood.
It's too bad that these moments of glory are intermittent, disrupted by several tonal missteps.
Lindo is the actor getting all of the attention here, but I'm not singing with the choir that celebrates his turn as the film's highlight. Lindo has always given indelible performances — I'm particularly fond of unforgettable moments he created in Heist as well as his memorable role in Lee's Clockers. Here, he dominates the film in ways that ultimately contribute to its imbalances hurt it. It isn't his fault — it's the role, which leaves the other four travelers fighting to make meaningful impressions. I wish an actor of greater range and nuance would have played the part of Paul; Lindo's performance matches his physical proportions, which already overshadows everyone else. (What might Jeffrey Wright have done with this part? Or Forest Whitaker?)
Further disrupting the film's coherence is its veering from comedy to suspense to shockingly grisly war-movie violence. My suspension of disbelief is frequently spoiled by the way the film asks me to keep interpreting its formal inventiveness, or to think about the connections between historical events and current cultural upheaval. I'm never drawn in to the characters' interior struggles enough to experience their emotions with them. Thus, when violence breaks out, I'm thinking more about the practical execution (no pun intended) of the special effects and choreography.
Contrary to some critics, I'm not troubled at all by Lee's avoidance of digital de-aging effects — I think those would have introduced another jarring distraction (one that compromised another recent Netflix movie: Martin Scorsese's otherwise glorious epic The Irishman). In fact, I think that having this cast of actors play younger versions of themselves in the wartime flashbacks is effective, reminding us that they are still very much trapped in those jungles, forever doomed to the fear and the horror of those injustices.
Still, for all of the disorienting tangents along the way, Da 5 Bloods is ultimately an enlightening experience for the education it gives its audience in untold Vietnam stories. What I might typically categorize as weaknesses in Lee's cinematic artistry are, at the same time, exciting contributions to a far more urgent and important matter — namely, waking up Americans to a heartbreaking self-knowledge. Da 5 Bloods spotlights our need for humility and repentance for our crimes against global neighbors. It recommends the exercise of caution regarding the corrupting nature of wealth. It underlines the debt we owe to veterans, as they have go on paying a harrowing price for America's crimes against humanity, crimes committed by American leaders and by the people who elected them (and are thus complicit). It's a necessary reminder that America does not have the moral high ground on matters of international justice. We gave up that ground a long, long time ago.
Lastly, though, I must recommend this film for how Lee does not allow his camera to become paralyzed by the horrors or despairing in its focus. Lee refuses to let this be a simple act of payback, a rant against injustice. This isn't just a movie about America: It's a movie about human nature. His characters are complicated, flawed, and in some ways doomed to take their beleaguered selves from bad to worse, allowing their zeal for that buried treasure to divide them and, in some cases, conquer them. And just when he seems likely to deconstruct all hope, we get a supernatural speech from Stormin' Norman, one suggesting the possibility of transcendent grace, a redemption found only in a vision that embraces eternity.
If you have eyes to see and ears to hear, there is redemption in the blood of Da 5 Bloods.
Extra Ordinary Ghost-busting in Ireland
"Come on, Martin. That ectoplasm's not going to collect itself."
Believe it or not, those are some of the most endearingly romantic words I've heard in a movie this year.
It's not just the words, spoken by retired ghost-buster Rose Dooley to one of her clients, Martin Martin, a haunted widower. It's not just the context — she's trying to round up that famously sticky residue that Ghostbusters taught us to expect when a ghost has been busted. Nor is it the actress who speaks them, although Irish comedian and writer Maeve Higgins proves to be a fantastic comedy lead.
No, it's the very particular chemistry cultivated between Rose and Martin (Barry Ward) by the writers and directors Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman in Extra Ordinary, their genre-hopping debut.
This is a difficult movie to describe because its characters are so distinct, its comic tone is so complicated, and its storytelling takes so many unexpected turns. In fact, it's a familiar challenge: I've had difficulty writing about Edgar Wright's brilliant Cornetto trilogy — Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End — for the same reasons. Is it evidence of filmmaking genius when a critic finds it so difficult to summarize what makes a movie so satisfying? As a comedy, as send-up of horror movies, as a romance — Extra Ordinary succeeds at all of these things. Come to think of it, I'd be thrilled if they made some sequels just to be back in this movie's world again, with these particular characters.
Let me take another swing at describing the premise here:
Rose Dooley is a patient, good-humored driving instructor is drawn back into paranormal investigation by Martin Martin, a troubled single father whose ex-wife is haunting his house with a fierce temper. What they don't know is that their case is about to become more complicated due to the interference of the nefarious Christian Winter (Will Forte at his most manic), an American pop-star-turned-Satanist. (Yes, you read that right.)
And yet, as Martin persuades Rose to go back to her old job — the one she abandoned due to her part in a tragic ghost-busting accident — she begins to see him as more than just a client; she imagines he has potential as a partner... in more ways than one.
That's the gist of it. I can't imagine re-casting this in any way that works: The chemistry between Higgins and Ward somehow makes me believe this preposterous premise beginning to end. And it's a bumpy ride: One moment the comedy is understated, sweet, and amusing, and the next it's either jarringly gory (exploding farm animals!); hilariously raunchy (Winter seeks his ceremonial victims with an obscene divining rod); cleverly referencing a horror classic (watch for the Exorcist moment); or veering into stylized informational interludes that seem cut from a 1987 VHS tape.
Somehow, it all works.
I'm not going to give you more details than that — I hope you'll have that rare moviegoing experience, as I did, of feeling like you've stumbled onto buried treasure. This has all the makings of a cult classic, like a paranormal Irish Napoleon Dynamite spiked with some of the same magic that animates the best comedies of Taika Waititi and Christopher Guest. I haven't laughed out loud like this since 2018's out-of-nowhere comedy Game Night. And that means that, while it's not likely to be the most important movie I recommend this year, it's likely to be the one I recommend most often.
Catching Up With The Bling Ring
As a teacher, I often glimpse hope for the future in the zeal of an ambitious student, one whose mind is sharp and whose conscience is sharper.
But I often envision a very different future, one that has come to be ruled by others — those students who, today, do the bare minimum of the work assigned to them, who demonstrate no capacity for critical thinking, and who live with such a sense of entitlement that they consider it an injustice if they are given less than an 'A' for unimaginative plagiarism. These are often the students who have been "provided for" their whole lives, and who thus have little or no experience with the kinds of suffering that might kindle that most essential of human traits: empathy. They sometimes act without thinking — but, more importantly, they act without caring about the consequences of their actions. And any inconvenience they encounter is thus mistranslated as injustice. Due to their substantial material advantages, these young people will have an easier time finding their way into seats of power. In my darker moments, that reality weighs on my mind.
So Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring plays for me like a horror film.
Released in 2013, this film about young women who beg, borrow, and steal their way into the Hollywood high life never drew me out to theaters in spite of my admiration for Coppola's previous films. It was more a matter of subject than style. I love Coppola's sensuality, her impressionistic imagery, her empathetic view of lonely young women in contexts dominated by men and corrupted by excess. In spite of the cultural and artistic prominence of her father Francis Ford Coppola and her family, many of whom are household names of Hollywood royalty, she has found her own voice, her own distinctive style, and it is decidedly more poetic and intuitive than her father's. Whether I'm watching the lonely celebrity newlywed in Lost in Translation, the lonely celebrity daughter in Somewhere, the lonely and tragic historical figure in Marie Antoinette, or the imprisoned daughters of a controlling father in The Virgin Suicides, I always feel that I'm receiving a personal and heartfelt testimony, a self-effacing self-portrait, an honest appeal from the daughter of a Hollywood godfather. But, more importantly, Coppola's films never feel preachy: she clearly loves her characters, and the honesty and affection in her portraiture inspires me to love them too.
Still, the trailer for The Bling Ring made it seem shallow, heavy-handed, even preachy in its satire. What's more, it pushed my buttons. I was a kid who steered clear of materialistic classmates, those who valued wealth over wisdom, sex over relationship, and sensation over substance. That isn't a self-righteous boast: Much of my aversion to those crowds came from how much I coveted their popularity and comparative wealth. But it's also true that they just disturbed me — they were so nonchalant in the cruelty and superficiality that characterized so many bullies and villains in the stories that influenced me growing up. So a movie about a clique of teens who make role models of glamorous and vacuous starlets like Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Megan Fox didn't appeal to me.
But as Coppola's films have proven to have lasting power for me, rewarding repeated viewings, I eventually decided that I needed to pick up the missing piece. Now I have — and I'm glad I did.
I've never read the story by Nancy Jo Sales in Vanity Fair on which this film is based. I'm unsurprised, though horrified, to learn that, between 2008 and 2009, five high school students from wealthy Los Angeles families threw themselves into lives of clumsy crime, driven by a zeal to live like the super-rich. They broke into celebrity homes and made off with several million dollars in fashion and accessories, and then brazenly flaunted what they took in the company of their admiring peers.
In the film's depiction of their daring and their dashes for the door — often presented as surveillance video footage — these thieves perfect the art of exploiting their parents' detachment and obliviousness, living double lives as indifferent high-school students by day and as partygoers by night, constantly striving to sustain a state of intoxication as dangerous as their perpetual state of denial. By alcohol, by drugs, and by materialism they cannot afford, they catapult themselves compulsively into the highs of lies, getting away with as much as they can until they crash their stolen cars.
They could easily have been played for big laughs. They could have become easy targets for those of us who shake our heads self-righteously at such shenanigans. But through Coppola's lens, these young rebels without a meaningful cause — played by Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Clare Julien, Taisa Farmiga, and, in the film's most talked-about turn, Emma "Hermione" Watson — are portrayed thoughtfully, even compassionately, as if the director, quite well-acquainted with privilege herself, is saying, "There but for the grace of God go I." Or, perhaps, "There, in spite of the grace of God, I have gone — I confess it."
It's to Coppola's credit that audiences are unable to avoid seeing the emptiness — even the lunacy — in the "religion" of the families in which these young people grow up. The only things here more dismaying than the seeming soullessness of these young Bling Ringers as they rob the rich to feed the bottomless pit of their egos is the fact that their elders are as clueless as they are, and that the wealthy and glamorous targets of their thievery are every bit as vacuous and self-worshipping as the wannabes. Nicki's mother Laurie, played perfectly by Leslie Mann, preaches a hybrid of the prosperity-gospel, new-age hocus pocus, and surface-level social justice concerns. And it amounts to convictions as surface-level as a designer-label t-shirt, as loosely worn as a slogan-bracelet made in China, and just as disposable. With no example of character or integrity to follow, these kids embrace and distort their parents' vocabularies into flimsy defenses and excuses for everything they do. They're made of the superficial media they've absorbed.The Church of Whatever Makes You Feel Good goes on pronouncing everyone absolved and righteous. And Capitalism goes on rewarding and exalting them.
The most frightening of the bunch is Nicki (Emma Watson), a girl I swear I remember from my high school days, one who could speak earnestly into a camera about real-world problems and then, like a beauty-pageant queen, turn on a dime and play pop-culture princess to the applause of ogling male teachers, the attention of the most popular jocks, and the ecstatic enthusiasm of her princess-obsessed mother. It's hard to see what compels Nicki to make a sex-tape celebrity her role model; it's not fame she's after. It has more to do with an insatiable ego, the drive to see herself mirrored back on every platform — a goddess, adorned in the trendiest of everything.
Watching The Bling Ring in 2020, I read it very differently than I might have several years ago. How prescient of Coppola to film an origin-story account of recent and upcoming White House Press Secretaries or other Trump-ish cronies. You don't need qualifications — you just...
- sped substantial time in pre-camera make-up;
- revel in privileges you haven't earned and that you probably stole;
- boast about yourself and your non-existent plans, and make unsubstantiated claims about your charitable instincts;
- lie through your teeth, believing that the only thing that matters is the escaping of consequences;
- change the subject when confronted, shift blame, and deny responsibility at every turn;
- when you're caught, turn the tables and paint yourself as the victim, reframing your crimes as experiences you've suffered rather than suffering you've caused for others;
- embrace a profit-driven version of religion that has the vocabulary of Christ in it but no evidence of love or sacrifice; and
- exploit every on-camera moment to direct the audience toward the URLs of your ego.
I found that The Bling Ring reminded me above all of a film that has come out since then: Hustlers. However, it does so by contrast rather than similarity. Unlike Hustlers, it doesn't treat its con-artists as heroes for beating monsters at their own game, or give them big moments to pronounce righteous judgment on their own culture. Marc, Rebecca, Chloe, and the gang are always in action, so lost in their "Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall" enchantment, they can't wake up. And the thing is, not much of their kamikaze behavior is their fault; it's behavior they've learned from screens, the most prominent, reliable, and ever-present influence in their lives. (And yes, that's an indictment of their parents who, to all appearances, are setting the worst kind of example.) I suspect their criminal compulsions have less to do with an appetite for destruction and more to do with an appetite for love: They're starving for it, hey don't know what it is or how to begin looking for it. So they go running after counterfeit versions of love — that insufficient substitute called fame.
We're living now in the sadder, scarier sequel to the real-life events that inspired Coppola's film. Those news outlets with any integrity left deliver daily surveillance video as Nicki and company spend and snort what's left of our country's soul and savings; the pirates that have seized and pillaged the halls of our democracy are too intoxicated to see the collapse that is already well underway, too vain to realize that there will be no negotiating their way out of the coming judgment.
At the end of watching this, I feel (and probably look) exactly like Sheriff Bell at the end of No Country for Old Men. I see that there's no stopping the consequences of so much recklessness indulgence from coming. That flood is coming. And there's no stopping it from taking with it those of us who recognize the evils being committed. So, like poor, haggard, world-weary Sheriff Bell, we have to see our hope beyond the human sphere.
Why The Vast of Night hits close to home
This review is dedicated to my father-in-law, Dr. Frederick Doe, who passed away one year ago, and whom we miss every single day.
Disclaimer: I am close enough to some aspects of this movie that my critical assessment might be somewhat skewed. I'll reveal that connection momentarily.
I have a responsibility, after all. Professional film critics will be honest from the start if they have a personal connection to the material they're about to review. There is no such thing as "objectivity" or "unbiased reporting" in journalism, but the best writers aim to make a reasonable, well-supported, and enlightening argument. When I reviewed Doctor Strange, it was only fair of me to confess my friendship with one of the filmmakers, even though I was going to praise it as my favorite Marvel movie regardless of that connection.
So, stay tuned for a note about why The Vast of Night hits so close to home for me.
No, I have never been visited by aliens. That's not what I mean — although The Vast of Night, the new Amazon Studios indie sci-fi flick now streaming on Amazon Prime, teases us with the possibility of just such a visitation in the small town of Cayuga, New Mexico.
Yes, I did play high school basketball — and this film opens as the whole town (or so it seems) converges on a Cayuga campus gymnasium for a big game. And the specifics ring true to high-stakes high-school sports rivalries. What's more, they ring true to the 1950s — impressively so. No, this isn't my connection to the film: I played in the '80s, not the '50s. But the the production designers, writers, and cast, serve up an enthrallingly convincing recreation of that time. They do so by leaning with enthusiasm into the sights and sounds of the period's science fiction, beginning with an homage to The Twilight Zone and quickly segueing into clever references (in substance and in style) to War of the Worlds. Everything from the cars to the radio station to that gymnasium feels so legitimate that we're likely to find our disbelief impressively suspended.
At this basketball game, we meet a fast-talking young local celebrity, radio DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz, like a young Cillian Murphy), who has a reputation as an expert when it comes to any kind of electrical circuitry. He's also popular with listeners, young women especially, who find his voice — if not his Clark Kent-ish-ness — to be dreamy. (Note: This is where I recommend viewers activate the Closed Captioning, because the dialogue in this movie, especially in those first 15 minutes, is often muffled and convoluted by a complicated sound design and by characters who revel in the lingo of their dialect — lingo that I suspect to be as much invented as revived.) It's clear that Everett was born to be a DJ, and even clearer that he enjoys the status his position gives him with the locals. And you don't want to miss anything he has to say.
Similarly, you want to catch every little twitchy line from Everett's young friend and fangirl Faye (Sierra McCormick, a crackerjack with tricky dialogue the likes of which we haven't heard since True Grit's Haley Steinfeld or, reaching back farther, Raising Arizona's Holly Hunter). Faye's enthusiasm for the future of technology is amusing both for how much the 1950s dreamers got right ("TV telephones") and how far they were off (transportation innovations both magnet-controlled and vacuum-tubed). No, I have never been a switchboard operator or a DJ — that's not my connection with this material. But I do share the film's preoccupation with primitive electronic gadgets of the time — particularly tape recorders, which were my favorite childhood toy. Everett loves recorders. And Faye is a switchboard pro. A slow-zoom long-take allows her to show off her skills as she zigzags between a dozen conversations in what may be my favorite scene of 2020 so far.
As Everett broadcasts the hits" to almost nobody during Cayuga's big basketball game, and as Faye connects calls from listeners to the DJ, they stumble onto an inexplicably creepy sound on the circuitry — a muffled noise like a broken reel-to-reel inside a wind tunnel. And it quickly becomes clear that something is up. I mean that quite literally — something is up. It isn't long before they hear reports about "something in the sky." And then the lines from panicked callers start going dead. Everett and Faye, as if born for a moment like this, spring into action like a Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew, or a young Mulder and Scully.
No, my disclaimer isn't about how much I love this movie's influences, although the aforementioned debt its dialogue owes to Coen Brothers is substantial. And the tension of its night-driving scenes recall both Raising Arizona and Blood Simple. Before it's over, there will be clear references to Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and obvious X-Files associations.
But I'm led to speculate about other possible influences, too. I thought of the indie horror hit It Follows during the film's wonderfully unsettling ankle-level, long-take, high-speed journeys through the maze of Cayuga's dark streets. (One low-level take in particular feels like it was filmed by WALL-E himself, or one of those Amazon Delivery Droids. We go zipping around the empty shadows of the city center until we zoom from the dark into the bright and crowded gymnasium, then stop in the middle of a basketball game, and become part of the fast-break action. Exhilarating!)
I also thought of — or rather, felt the influence of — Twin Peaks, which achieves a similar sense that something supernatural and even spiritual is at work in the shadows. (If you're familiar with Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, you know what I mean.) The Lynch influence is particularly strong as the movie begins spotlighting the testimonies of characters emerging from behind closed doors, those who represent the overlooked, the oppressed, and the flat-out ignored. (This movie is as much about the quiet sufferings of the alienated as it is about the possibility of aliens. And, in a timely tangent, we hear the voice of an African American veteran who seems delighted to be taken seriously for, perhaps, the very first time.)
I don't know any of these impressive young actors, although both Horowitz and McCormick are spectacular. And they chew on a screenplay by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, both also new to me, that is generous with speeches and acrobatic with slang and figures of speech. Nor do I know director Andrew Patterson, although I'd love to pick his brain about his playfulness with formats and screen ratios.
But I do know Roswell, New Mexico. I know it and I love it. My wife Anne, who grew up there, knows it far better than me. Yes, I know — I said the film takes place in Cayuga, but that's a fictional stand-in for Roswell, clearly. In fact, many of the local references, including basketball-team rivalries and street names, were spot-on; Anne verified that for me.
What's more, I'm a believer that, as Mulder would insist, the truth is out there.
Anne's father — who passed away a year ago this week, which is why I'm dedicating this review to him — was a local Roswell celebrity as a long-time doctor and chief of staff at its local hospital. He knew some of the people who had worked at the hospital on the occasion of the famous "Roswell Incident." They verified several details of what has ballooned — or rather, weather-ballooned — into American mythology. They verified that the hospital got a call when something was discovered in the desert outside of town. The call was an urgent request for several child-sized coffins. As Anne likes to say, you don't call the hospital and make that request if what you've found is a weather-balloon dummy. But then, whatever—or whomever—was recovered there and brought to the hospital was seized and taken by the government. Now, not everybody jumps to the conclusions that this was an alien crash site. Some will point to the fact that there was still an active POW camp in the region, as well as a nuclear testing site. And when I start thinking about possible connections there, well... let's just say I would prefer to learn that it was a UFO crash site to the other possibilities that come to mind.
Anyway, my point is this: I love a lot about Roswell, particularly the details of what it was before The X-Files turned it into an alien-seeker's amusement park (much to the dismay of most of those who live there). And I loved this occasion to revisit something very like it, to play with the possibilities yet again of what events might have unfolded on the occasion of that mysterious 1947 incident.
Nevertheless, I do wish The Vast of Night had a stronger conclusion, not the familiar and somewhat-predictable denouement at which these filmmakers arrive. It answers questions too neatly and fails to surprise us.
Further, I wish it had done more with what ends up being its strongest thread: the idea that we cannot hope to arrive at meaningful truth unless we open up the lines to all callers, and listen in particular to those voices that have been silenced, undervalued, and even condemned. Black callers matter.
Still, these are ultimately quibbles about what is, altogether, a fantastic surprise and one of the highlights of the pandemic's home-cinema season.
I wish I could have see this on a big screen. And I am immediately a fan of the filmmaking team of Patterson, Montague, and Sanger. I want to see them make more movies. And I would particularly request that studios refuse to give them more extravagant resources, as this movie is, I believe, powerful evidence that their creativity soars when they are faced with the challenges and limitations of low-budget filmmaking. With fantastic editing tricks and an evocative score — they cleverly incorporate Struass's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," best known for its role in 2001: A Space Odyssey — they cast a remarkable spell. As with last-year's biggest sci-fi surprise, Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell's Prospect, The Vast of Night is a reminder that less is more, most of the time, and while cinema can dazzle us with special effects wizardry, it does us far more good when it calls upon that priceless capacity within its audience: their own imaginations.
Predators in academia: Shirley's search for lost girls
[At this writing — early June 2020 — Shirley is streaming through various arthouse-cinemas services during COVID-19 theater closures.]
You wouldn't want to be quarantined with the horror-story author in the spotlight of Shirley.
If you're looking for straightforward, historically grounded biopic of Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House and that gold-standard short story "The Lottery," you'll have to hope for a different film. Josephine Decker's Shirley takes artistic license the way a 16-year-old earns her driver's license and then roars out of the parking lot into traffic and slams the pedal to the floor. This is something much more imaginative: a stubbornly realistic fantasy (that is to say, it doesn't go the predictable route of using easy fairy-tale images as metaphors) about what life might have been like for this troubled but and troublingly talented writer. And it just might be that director Josephine Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins have tapped into something truer than any fact-adherent drama might offer.
But before I get to the best that this psychodrama might have to offer, let me assure you that there are many reasons to see it — from the complex work by an outstanding ensemble cast, to the twitchy and expressive cinematography, to the period detail of academia in 1950s Vermont, to the subversive and surprising script that dares to open a reservoir of very particular grief rarely acknowledged at the movies.
Best of all, this Shirley draws from Elizabeth Moss what looks to me like the best performance of her career thus far — which is saying something, as I'm still shaking from the forces she unleashed as a Courtney Love-like rocker in last year's Her Smell. Moss's Shirley is compellingly mysterious. She's a feminist carrying a furnace of righteous rage in her belly. She's an artist who sees everyone more clearly than they see themselves, which makes her dangerous. And yet there's much more: She seems to teeter on the edge of an abyss of grief we don't quite understand. And there's a long-take performance in the closing minutes that deserves to be mentioned alongside Nicole Kidman's legendary long take in Jonathan Glazer's Birth. (That's all I'm going to say about the performance's peak. I want to spare you spoilers.)
Matching Moss's excellence with another remarkable turn of his own, Michael Stuhlbarg is perfectly cast as Shirley's husband Stanley Hyman, a philandering Bennington College professor whose lectures are as smug and self-serving as his criticism is cruel — he's phenomenal in a complicated role. One moment, he's hamming it up in front of a class of spellbound girls; the next, he's pulling his near-comatose wife from their bed and urging her to get back to work; the next, he's holding a butter knife over her head and comparing her to Lady Macbeth. We never know what he'll do next.
The house where Jackson and Hyman carry on their cold war of grudges, egos, and infidelities isn't exactly squalid, but look behind the wrong doors and you'll see evidence of disarray, whether its the bedsheets where Shirley sweats in her depression or the offices of papers and projects predictably strewn. "A clean house is evidence of mental inferiority," she says in self-defense, allowing herself a rare cliché. But it doesn't take long for the film to reveal at least one of the primary causes of Jackson's distress.
Shirley may be the main character, but she's too strange, too complicated a character for us to bond with quickly; we need tour guides into the labyrinth of her angers and obsessions. So we follow Rose Nesmer (Odessa Young) and her new husband, the ambitious PhD student Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman), into the community of Bennington College. There, Rose and Fred will find themselves as tenants in the Jackson/Hyman home while Fred looks for a foothold on the academic ladder. They will bear witness to the stormiest marriage since Javier Bardem terrorized Jennifer Lawrence in Darren Aronofsky's mother!, the Jackson–Hyman manor a literal battlefield of verbal grenades and nuclear silences. This haunted house is the nexus of Stanley's habitual mischief and Jackson's sudden success over "The Lottery," the dystopian nightmare that will have scarred some of us in high school.
It takes only a few hours for Rose get over being starstruck; the reality of Shirley, teetering on the edge of madness as she wrestles a new novel (cross-reference Jackson's 1951 Hangsaman), is far darker and more difficult than she could have imagined. Meanwhile, Fred goes to work networking and awkwardly angling for a foothold on the academic ladder, which will bring with it, it's easy to see, the very temptations that have rotted the heart of the Jackson/Hyman marriage.
Drama will ensue, of course. The certainty of extramarital affairs and affairs of imaginative exploitation. The possibility of poisoning. Eruptions of heartless literary criticism. The threat of emotional and physical abuse. And the promise that a big faculty party might turn into a stage for Shirley's vengeful theatrics. There's even a missing-person mystery at the heart of things, one that occasionally threatens to make a detective team of Shirley and Rose. (Thank goodness, this movie is smarter than that.)
For a while, this film gave me a familiar headache: It felt overacted, like the work of gifted actors giving each other big moments to play until the weight of their Acting crushes an insufficient script and spoils our suspension of disbelief. (That's what I was anticipating, anyway, as the film began because it's exactly how I felt about the improvisational delirium of Decker's last film, Madeline's Madeline, which enchanted others but exhausted me.)
On top of that, the film is abrasive in its visual approximations of misery, a mise-en-scène often green-tinged and blurry, that reminds me of the stifling gloom of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. Such grim aesthetics have become all too familiar in movies about depression, movies that rarely rise above wallowing in lurid spectacle.
But step by step, Shirley and Rose — the latest target of her jealousies, who becomes her flirtation, and then her confidant, and then her co-conspirator — come to share an understanding as intimate and as substantial (perhaps more so) as that shared by Héloïse and Marianne in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Shirley's long-term loneliness and disillusionment and Rose's naïveté become magnetic. From their first moments onscreen, it's clear that Young has been cast as Rose so her character can remind us of a younger Shirley, or suggest her potential to embrace Shirley's brand of madness. In their quiet conversations, the two actresses look like Before and After photos.
But is this a story of a master finding an apprentice? Of Shirley finding company in her loneliness? Or is this all ultimately an author's opportunistic exploitation of the young and naive for sake of material?
The answer isn't simple or clear, but it is fascinating.
As Shirley moves from seeing Rose as a threat to pitying her for pending trouble, she is revealed as a sort of saint for "unseen" women. For all of her literary celebrity, Shirley still feels unknown; her refusal to conform to community expectations, and her husband's complaints about tending to her depression, brand her among the academic elite as a pariah. She refuses to settle for anything but authenticity, turning down invitations to smile and accompany her charismatic husband into the swamp of the rich, the fashionable, and the popular, where he feels so comfortable. (There is also an insightful examination here of what happens to to the souls of artistic introverts in the context of self-promoters, socialites, and peer-pressure.) Ultimately, Moss's performance ends up being more than mere theatrics — there's real wisdom in this invention. Shirley is discomfortingly real and ravenous, determined to make a heaven of this hell she can't escape. Madness — fueled by constant cocktails — starts to make an appealing kind of sense when there's no other way around condescension and betrayal except suicide.
By the film's furious conclusion, I find all of these studies compelling — the one about artists, but even more the one about women (spouses and students alike) who suffer in male-dominated academia. Yes, we've seen progress. But while women have gained ground long denied them, the world of higher education is still a raging battlefield of egos.
I've known a lot of charismatic professors. I've heard plenty of stories about teacher-student affairs, and I've had good friends shock me with testimonies about teachers who made passes at them, or worse. And I've been unsettled by influential men who, getting high on attention, become addicted to one-on-one time with starstruck female students, preferring office hours to time at home. It fills me with a tremendous sense of responsibility in my new work as a teacher, and a deep sadness for so many who have been harmed by men who disgrace their position. And so this movie feels custom-made to weigh heavily on my heart. It's scary because it isn't just melodramatic — it's truthful.
Perhaps it's a personal thing, then, that this film moves me so deeply in its final act. By the end, I'm longing for Shirley's release, for a righteous rant that delivers her from captivity. So the closing scene shakes me in a way I can't connect to anything but Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut — it's complicated, it's perverse, and it feels exactly right. It's going to keep me awake at night. But that's a spoiler-ish conversation for another time.
I'm inclined to say that, given a script that's can sustain the energy of her camera and the intensity she draws from actors, Decker might make a great film someday. I'm reluctant to hail Shirley as great, as it's exploring emotional and psychological territory outside of my experience. (I'm eager to know what women—particularly women in higher education—think of this movie.) But I'm inclined to believe that Decker and her collaborators have achieved something meaningful and compelling here. Shirley is a powerful portrait of two lonely women — an artist of brilliant and burdensome vision and a young woman in search of herself — in a world of vain and harmful men. It is also an illustration of that most sobering of proverbs in the Book of Ecclesiastes: "For in much wisdom is much vexation, and she who increases knowledge increases sorrow." Shirley, an artist of genuine vision, is made wise by what she sees — and that wisdom wears her down until she cannot play along with the hypocrisy and vanity of her community. She's a tragic and fascinating figure, and I'll come back to learn from her sadness again.
Raised by 20th Century Women
I know too many extraordinary people. I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
Sometimes I think about switching genres — hanging up the film-critic hat, putting the fantasy novels away — and just writing to the world about as many of them as possible. My family and their unlikely histories. My schoolteachers, the sacrifices they've made, their generosity. The mentors and guides. The artists who have illuminated my world. I've had that daydream a lot lately. Maybe it's the pandemic — maybe it's that reminder of how suddenly one or more of these magnificent characters might leave the stage. I'd like to say "I love you" in art.
I guess I'd like to be more like filmmaker Mike Mills.
Mills's movie Beginners (2010) gave Christopher Plummer one of his greatest roles: Plummer played a character loosely based on Mills' own father. Ewan McGregor was the filmmaker's modest self-portrait — a young man coming to understand that his father was more mysterious and complicated than he'd ever guessed. The movie glowed with respect, gratitude, and love. I was moved. (Who would I cast as my father? Not Christopher Plummer, clearly. Let's check on Christian Bale in 25 years, or Steve Coogan in 10.)
I was also impressed by the big creative risks that Mills took in order to say things that a typical, straightforward drama couldn't capture. The movie even found room for a talking dog — and it worked. A whimsical gambler, this Mills fellow. (Could I get away with a talking rabbit?)
When I spoke with Mills and McGregor in 2010 during the Seattle stop of their promotion tour, he talked about how he coached his cast to give such delicate, complex, and sincere performances: “I remember saying, ‘Help me not make this a narcissistic, self-pitying, sentimental memoir.’ I love films that are naturalistic and organic, when you feel the truth of life is in there somewhere.”
I should have made time in 2016 for Mike Mills’s next feature — 20th Century Women. I've seen it now, and it is every bit as impressive in the complexity of its characters, the clear affection Mills feels for them, and the stylistic adventurousness that keeps audiences guessing. Like Beginners, it's semi-autobiographical — but this time, it's a tapestry of tributes to women who raised him, inspired him, and taught him how to be a man. In those roles, he has cast Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, and Elle Fanning.
What's more — and many critics have written about this in detail, and with greater historical insight that I can — it's a rich and complicated portrait of a transitional period in American history, with the ideals, values, and contradictions of several generations embodied by these women. We get lessons in history, psychotherapy, sex, and more from multiple threads of narration, different voices, different generations.
This time, the somewhat-self-portrait is of a younger Mills — this time, the young man is named Jamie, and played by Lucas Jade Zumann. It would have been easy for this 15-year-old growing up with his mother and her boarders in a Santa Barbara home to have become merely an avatar for the audience — wide-eyed, mystified, and sometimes bewildered by the dramas surrounding him. But Jamie is interesting enough in his own right. His story is about more than just witnessing these strong, challenging women — it’s about how by listening to women he might synthesize their wisdom and grow to be something better than the men they've known.
And, lest this testimony seem disingenuous, Mills is careful to avoid claims of authority or expertise: His women remain delightfully mysterious and unpredictable — that is to say, they’re alive enough to keep audiences guessing. As I eased into its meandering weave of storylines, I became increasingly delighted: This wasn't ever going to turn into a Movie Movie. Nothing would become more important than Jamie’s exploration of relationships and identity; no threat would emerge to the film’s free spirit, no crisis would draw us into any familiar arc, serving up Oscar moments for famous actors.
And then, suddenly, I recognized it. It was familiar. Without any insider knowledge, I came to suspect — or at least imagine — how the inspiration for this film might have occurred. Consider this possible origin story:
A filmmaker who has always wanted to make a film that celebrates the beautiful, complex, and influential women in his life, young and old, sees Cameron Crowe's year-2000 masterpiece Almost Famous for the first time.
The filmmaker marvels at the relationship between the young and fatherless William Miller (Patrick Fugit) and his mother Elaine (Frances McDormand), who wants him to be safe and good and responsible and drug-free, and who has feelings about the trouble with popular music.
The filmmaker marvels at young William's relationship with his gorgeous music-loving sister (Zooey Deschanel), who gives him her record collection and promises him that someday he'll be cool. And he is enchanted with the scenes of young William being embraced by, celebrated by, and sexually educated by a bunch of rock-star-obsessed girls who play with him like their new toy. And one of them — Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) — will grow William's heart several sizes larger and then break it.
The filmmaker isn't as interested in the stuff about the rock band young William is following, but something about Billy Crudup as an irresponsible rock god makes an impression. This character will get a good lecture from William's mother, who is never played as prudish or tyrannical, but is revealed for her wisdom in the end.
And so, with these Almost Famous impressions vividly in mind, this filmmaker goes and writes his own movie.
It's about Jamie who is fatherless and raised by a complicated mother (Bening’s Dorothea), a woman who has strong feelings about the direction of American culture, particularly when it comes to popular music. Like William, Jamie is influenced by a young and gorgeous rock-music enthusiast (Greta Gerwig) who becomes a big sister to him and helps him learn to be cool. Jamie’s also obsessed with his dreamgirl Julie (Elle Fanning) who chases "inappropriate" men but drives him insane by sleeping beside him and insisting he lock up his raging teen hormones. Every day, little by little, Julie breaks his heart anew.
Oh, and then — perhaps the clearest tribute to his inspiration — the filmmaker casts Billy Crudup as William, an irresponsible handyman who needs a good lecture from Jamie's mother. And even then, where most filmmakers would punish their elders with condescending characterization, Dorothea gets to score solid wisdom points over the handyman’s irresponsibility.
Perhaps I sound like I’m planning to dismiss 20th Century Women as derivative. But no — Mike Mills takes those remarkable strengths from Almost Famous — or, at the very least, he strikes remarkably similar notes — and composes from them something new and personal. Meandering observantly and patiently in his storytelling, gambling with a variety of styles, he gives a remarkable cast a lot of room to develop their characters.
I've never seen a stronger performance from Bening — and that’s saying something, as she’s been impressing me since I first saw The Grifters in 1990. She’s probably best-known for her turn in American Beauty, but here she’s portrayed with all of the compassion that that sneering and cynical movie lacked.
Gerwig is Gerwig, and that's a very good thing here — her Abbie, suffering from cervical cancer, is half in ruins, almost tragic, and utterly fascinating without ever stealing a scene (which Gerwig can easily do without trying).
As played by Fanning, Julie is a different kind of wise, a different kind of tragic — the sort of girl gives Jamie whispered lessons about sex through her cigarette smoke while never letting him kiss her. She’s learned about life from the men of all ages want to use and abuse her beauty, and she’ll easily surrender to mistreatment in hopes that sometimes she’ll get a taste of the real love she lacks.
And in the middle of these three icons of evolving feminism, Lucas Jade Zumann makes Jamie a remarkable mix of curiosity, confusion, frustration, and desire.
What a pleasure to see a film that isn't in any hurry; it just loves its messy and magnificent characters — all of them — and because of that, I do too.
In that sense, I can't help but wonder if Gerwig brought any of her experience on this film to her own Lady Bird. I sense some of this movie in that one, just as I hear echoes of Almost Famous all the way through this: great art inspiring great art, the greatness in all three being defined by their loving hearts and their courageous imaginations.