Clint,
Jack, Marwen, and Ben
As the holiday movie season begins, for good
entertainment value and family viewing I can recommend several animated
features still in theatres: Ralph Breaks
the Internet and Spiderman: Into the
Spiderverse. The latter is such a hyper-kinetic
kaleidoscope of computerized sound-and-light special effects it carries a
sensitivity warning. What appeals is the story that reimagines the cartoon
legend with a Latino teenage boy as hero. More adult awards-contending pictures
will open Christmas Day, about which more in a next post. Below reviews of four
other very different recent releases.
The Mule http://www.themulefilm.net/
I’ve long been a fan of Clint Eastwood
and at 88 he still has the chops both in the director’s chair and on the
screen. This is one of those truth is stranger
than fiction stories based on a New York
Times magazine profile of a 90-year old who worked for the Sinaloa cartel
transporting their cocaine across state lines.
(The screenplay adaption is by Nick Schenk, whose true story of drug
addiction was the basis for the fall release Beautiful Boy, reviewed earlier.)
Eastwood
plays the titular drug ‘mule’ Earl Stone. A champion horticulturalist of day
lilies from Peoria, Illinois, he’s also a crusty incorrigible character who’s a
terrible husband and father estranged from family. Faced with foreclosure he
falls into an easy money scheme that involves driving from El Paso to the
Chicago area with a load of barely concealed drugs, no questions asked. Having never been stopped by police or given
a ticket, who would now suspect an elderly gent on the road? Bradley Cooper
plays a drug enforcement agent trying to trap the cartel’s top mule (this
clean-cut appearance in sharp contrast to his role playing the alcoholic
musician in A Star is Born.)
Earl’s
softer side—taking a forbidden detour to be at his dying ex-wife’s bedside,
spreading the wealth around—brings down the curtain on his drug-running
exploits but earns our sympathy. There’s
a semi-autobiographical element to that.
Eastwood like Earl is a Korean war veteran and has cast his daughter
Alison in a supporting role. Like
octogenarian Robert Redford in The Old
Man and the Gun, these criminals as charming old coots still have a
seductive appeal. B+
The House that Jack Built (Denmark/France’Germany/Sweden)
Danish provocateur Lars von Trier
doubles down on notoriety with this film that sparked many walkouts at Cannes where
he was famously banned a few years ago for comments about “understanding Hitler”. It’s the only film I’ve ever seen to have
both a 100% and 0% rating on metacritic.com.
I stuck it out even though my take is closer to the 0%.
Jack,
played by Matt Dillon, is a psychopathic serial killer, aspiring architect, obsessive-compulsive
clean freak, and narcissist who styles himself “Mr. Sophistication”. The viewer is subjected to the recall of a
series of gruesome “incidents”, culminating in a failed attempt at multiple
homicide involving male victims rather than the usual solitary females. Particularly revolting are scenes in which a
mother and two young sons are targeted and one with a female breast. Don’t ask. Somehow von Trier convinced the great
German actor Bruno Ganz to play a character “Verge” who is only heard as an
offscreen voice until the last act that leads from a chamber of horrors to a
vision of hell. (This suggests a reference to the character of Virgil in Dante’s
Inferno. Ganz memorably played an
angel who falls to earth in my favorite film of all time Wings of Desire. Fallen indeed. Another of Ganz’s notable roles was
as Hitler in Downfall.)
This ghastly
affair is definitely demonic, as well as a misogynistic and nihilistic parody
of human depravity notwithstanding its pretense to philosophical and artistic
desiderata which include periodic black-and white clips of Canadian virtuoso
Glenn Gould at the piano. Classy, eh? Jack
may not be the year’s worst movie but it is the vilest. F
Welcome to Marwen https://www.welcometomarwen.com/
In 2010 Jeff Malmberg made a superb
documentary Marwencol about a middle-aged
man Mark Hogancamp living alone in upstate New York who had suffered physical
and emotional damage from a vicious beating that was a hate crime. A heavy
drinker who loved the ladies (“dames”), he appeared “queer” due to a fetish for
collecting and wearing women’s shoes (the higher the heels the better). Hogancamp had been an illustrator. His recovery therapy turned obsession was to
create in his yard a miniature world—a fictitious World War II Belgian village called
“Marwencol” in which an alter ego G.I. Joe character Cpt. Hogie does battle
with the Nazi enemy, aided by female warriors but opposed by a female
nemesis. Hogancamp made these fantasy
figures out of costumed dolls and then photographed them in action poses.
Writer-director
Robert Zemeckis’ gaudier dramatized version stars Steve Carell as the oddball
survivor Hogancamp and uses motion-capture techniques to animate the doll
figures in scenarios conjured by his troubled mind. The town originally called ‘Marwen’ is an
amalgam from imagined lovers Mark and Wendy. When a sympathetic young woman Nicol
(Leslie Mann) moves next door Hogancamp is smitten to the point of proposing
marriage, adding ‘col’ to the name of his beloved village. Fortunately she lets
him down gently, and he recovers from that blow to display his photographs at
art shows. Unfortunately this “enhanced” version lacks subtlety (Nicol’s nasty
bothersome ex-boyfriend becomes a “Nazi” doll figure; one of Hogancamp’s
assailants sports a swastika tattoo) Moreover, the often violent special-effects
sequences tend to overwhelm the actual story of Hogancamp’s ingenious relief
from traumatic injury. C+
I’ve already praised Lucas Hedges for
his performances in Mid90s and Boy Erased. He is at his best here as
the 19-year old Ben in a role he had to be convinced to take with his father
Peter Hedges as writer-director. The drama is condensed to one day from the
afternoon of Christmas eve through Christmas morning. It opens in a church with
Ben’s mom Holly (Julia Roberts) and his siblings preparing for that night’s
service. Ben has a younger sister from
her first marriage, and a much younger half-sister and half-brother from her
current mixed-race marriage. Returning to the family home they unexpectedly find
older brother Ben there, absent from a rehab program for his opioid
addiction. Holly and husband Neal
(Courtney B. Vance) are skeptical but Holly grants him a day with them under
the strictest conditions of tough love and constant supervision.
That
seems to work for a while. Holly takes
Ben shopping and to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He’s with the family for the
Christmas eve religious service. But
when they arrive back to a break-in and the family dog missing, things go awry.
Ben wasn’t just a user, he was a dealer with criminal connections. Holly insists on going with Ben to get the
dog back.
When he absconds with her car she has to
borrow one form the mother of a young woman he got hooked on drugs who died of
an overdose (as tens of thousands of Americans do every year.) Holly grows increasingly
desperate through a long, not holy, night.
Her refusal to give up on her son is the only thing that can save him.
There
are many more details but I’ll leave it at that. Both Hedges and Roberts give Oscar-worthy
performances in one of the better family dramas ever made about the perils of
drug addiction. Christmas holiday movie settings
are often sappy and sentimental. This realistic
story’s spirit, so totally opposite, is actually a blessing. A
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