SCREENINGS & MEANINGS BLOGS
2018
September:
The Human Condition
My most recent peak cinematic experience
was in the last days of August at Toronto’s Bell Lightbox, home base of the
Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) which starts September 6. (I’ll be
seeing about 25 films at this year’s edition. That’s for a later blog.)
This was the
screening over three days—August 25, 26, and 28—of the monumental Japanese
masterwork The Human Condition directed by Masaki Kobayashi and released
as three two-part films—No Greater Love, Road to Eternity, A
Soldier’s Prayer—from 1959 to 1961. Presented as part of TIFF’s “Summer
in Japan” series, this was a rare chance to take in a theatrical showing of one
of the greatest achievements of Japanese cinema. The timing also coincided with
the 80th birthday on August 28 of a longtime Ottawa friend George Wright
whose son Roger and family with two young granddaughters live in Tokyo.
Bringing George with me to his hometown of Toronto for four days made sharing
this movie event extra special for us.
Based on a
six-volume novel, The Human Condition centres on the existential dilemmas
encountered by its protagonist, a gentle soul named Kaji, whose social humanist
ideals are repeatedly challenged by the brutal conditions of Japanese-occupied
Manchuria during the period of the Second World War. It’s a transcendent performance by Tasuya
Nakadai. Kaji escapes army service by
becoming a supervisor in a savage work camp for Chinese slave labour.
When that ends badly he is forced into
military service, faces appalling attacks, must kill to survive and escape,
becomes a prisoner of war, then escapes again in wintertime sustained only by
the faint hope of a loving reunion with his wife Michito (Michiyo
Aratama).
Each
of the three parts opens in a scene of snow falling; the last moments end in a
snowy landscape. It’s as if Kaji is struggling to “stay on the humanism train”,
as one piece of dialogue puts it, within the winter of the human condition—the
ravaging horrors of imperialism, racism, and total war.
The
scale of the production succeeds in being both truly epic and intensely
character-driven, from stunning widescreen cinematography to extreme close-ups
that highlight Kaji’s humanity and moral choices tested by life-and-death
situations. Good summary descriptions of
the three parts can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Condition_(film_series).
See also the link to the essay by Philip Kemp for The Criterion Collection: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1226-the-human-condition-the-prisoner
Had
I seen this extraordinary work earlier it would certainly haven been among the
top movie milestones in my film book anthology.
It does go to show that there is always more to discover, past and
present, in the wider world of cinema.
By
chance, after returning from the August 26 screening of No Greater Love, the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) channel was
showing the 1961 feature Bridge to the Sun directed by
Etienne Périer based on the true
story of an American woman who falls in love and marries a Washington
D.C.-based Japanese diplomat in the mid-1930s.
She returns with him to Japan, struggling with the cultural differences
and strict honour codes of a patriarchal society. He is posted back to the Japanese embassy in
Washington before the war. Then Pearl
Harbour upsets their world as the Japanese are expelled. With a young daughter she takes the brave
decision to follow her husband back to Japan, facing the inevitable
suspicions. Somehow the family manages
to survive the vicissitudes of a terrible war. The movie, a France-U.S.
coproduction, is not a masterpiece. But
it is a compelling love story and wartime drama. With that period of Japanese history on my
mind, I was glad of the opportunity to watch it again.
October: Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)
I arrived for the 43rd
Toronto International Film Festival mid-way, much later than usual due to heavy
demands organizing the 29th One World Film Festival. It was a Tuesday, the 17th
anniversary of 9/11, another Tuesday.
Nearing the TIFF headquarters Bell Lightbox, a group of activists were
handing out pamphlets advocating Catalonia’s struggle for independence from
Spain because September 11 is also “La Diada”, Catalonia’s National Day. Not the best coincidence perhaps.
I finally
started writing these notes on October 8 (Canadian Thanksgiving Day), a week to
the day after the anniversary of Catalonia’s controversial “illegal”
independence referendum in which 90% of Catalans voted “yes” but based on a
turnout well below 50%. As populists
everywhere claim to speak for “the people” fed up with the status quo, who are
“the people”? It seems what “the people”
want is often far from clear.
Back to the TIFF
selections, what follows are notes on the 27 features I managed to squeeze into
five-plus days as well as several other high-profile TIFF films, starting with
the most controversial that I was only able to see later in Ottawa. I have given each a letter grade.
Filmmaker provocateur Michael Moore
loves Canada and again chose TIFF for the world premiere of his latest
incendiary documentary. The title is a
clever play on his 1994 film Fahrenheit 9/11, a blast at the “fictive” Bush
presidency that remains both the only documentary to win the top prize ‘palme
d’or’ at Cannes and the highest grossing documentary ever at the box
office. The “11/9” reference is to
November 9, 2016 when Donald Trump’s presidential triumph in the Electoral
College (though not popular vote) was confirmed.
Although
Fahrenheit 11/9 has not enjoyed a similar box-office success, to my mind it is
Moore’s best, most important and powerful film in years. It is much more than a rant against Trump and
his ilk because it digs into the systemic institutional rot and corruption that
has put private interests ahead of the public interest in a deeply divided and
disaffected America. Moore examines this through the lens of the capture of the
Michigan state government and the poisoned water crisis in his native Flint. He excoriates the Republican governor but
also doesn’t spare Obama. The
disaffection with the established elites of both
main parties is palpable.
In 2016 Moore
was one of the few to predict that Trump would carry Michigan. The anger and disillusion with elite politics
as usual was there to be exploited by a demagogue. At the same time, Moore warns, not too
subtly, against the proto-fascist tendencies latent in Trumpism. In a time of dangerous disruption for
American democracy, with the right wing wielding power, Moore finds hope in a
counter-mobilization taking place (especially among women, youth, people of
colour) who are unafraid to challenge the powers that be. And thank God for
that! A
Birds
of Passage (Colombia/Denmark/Mexico/France)
I just made it to this gripping drama
directed by Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra who took part in a post-screening
discussion as part of TIFF’s speakers series organized with the University of
Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
The
film delves into the genesis of the involvement of Colombian Indigenous
peoples, specifically the Wayuu clans in the country’s north, in international
drug trafficking, and the violent internecine conflicts that resulted.
Indigenous non-professional actors give it a documentary-like
authenticity. The destructive toll of
the drug trade leads to tragic consequences, another source of conflict in a
country long wracked by internal divisions. B+
Through
Black Spruce (Canada)
Don McKellar directs this screen
adaptation of the eponymous Joseph Boyden novel about a young Cree woman Annie
who travels from James Bay to Toronto in search of her sister Suzanne who has
been missing for over a year. Suzanne
was working as a high-fashion model when she disappeared. Coming from communities afflicted by violence
and abuse, Annie and her uncle Will exemplify the family’s trauma of pain and
loss. Annie’s own troubled journey opens her eyes to the dangers of being drawn
into a world of addictions and exploitation. B+
Non-Fiction
(Doubles
Vies, France)
Master filmmaker Olivier Assayas directs
this fast-paced talky ensemble piece on the comedies of modern life in the fast
lane. Guillaume Canet and Juliette
Binoche are brilliant in the lead roles of a high-powered publisher and his
accomplished wife who are cheating on each other. The witty conversations over food and drinks
are a delight. I loved this movie! A
Anthropocene:
The Human Epoch (Canada)
The third collaboration among filmmakers
Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and photographer Edward Burtynsky is a
visually stunning and intellectually challenging exploration of a burgeoning
humanity’s increasing impacts on the planet, leading to a new epoch in
geological time. Awesome images capture
the many effects that include destruction of nature, pollution, extinctions,
climate change and more. The film’s release
coincided with the opening of exhibitions of Burtynsky’s stunning photographs
at the National Gallery and Art Gallery of Ontario. More information at: https://theanthropocene.org/ (See also the 2015 documentary of the same
name: http://www.anthropocenethemovie.com/. And on the scientific Anthropocene Working
Group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene.)
A
Donbass
(Germany/Ukraine/France/Netherlands/Romania)
Belarus-born filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa
helms a searing portrait of what is happening in “Novorossiya”, the heavily
Russian-influenced breakaway eastern part of Ukraine since the Putin regime’s
boldly illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea. The occupation has an Orwellian
character. It harks back to a Stalinist recreation of the Soviet system. It libels Ukrainian patriots and the
“Euromaidan” revolution as “fascist” (when in fact it is Putin’s game to
support the far right across Europe). It
shows the daily horrors being inflicted by this reactionary revanchist civil
war. Loznitsa, awarded best director in
the Un Certain Regard sidebar of Cannes for this masterwork, took part in an
extended post-screening discussion with a scholar from the Munk School of
Global Affairs on Russia’s colonial designs on Ukraine, evidence of Putin’s cunning ruthlessness in seeking to
restore a great-power sphere of influence. A
The
River (Kazakhstan/Poland/Norway)
This was part of the juried “Platform”
section. It’s part of a trilogy by writer-director/produce/cinematographer/editor
Emir Baigazin. Five young boys dressed
in dun-coloured rags in a desolate dun-coloured landscape are dominated by
their father, their one escape being swimming in a nearby river, until the
disruptive arrival of a city-dwelling boy. Confessions, beatings, and
disappearances follow. It’s enigmatic
and often perplexing slow cinema, rigorously composed, resisting any answers. B
Transit
(Germany)
I loved director Christian Petzold’s
previous wartime drama Phoenix (2014).
He’s back with this absorbing story of a German refugee who escapes to
Marseille, assumes the identity of a writer who committed suicide, and seeks
asylum in Mexico. That journey transitions into a story of love and exile,
playing with time between past and present, and evoking as the TIFF program
book puts it: “ghosts, memory, and historical trauma”. B+
The
Land of Steady Habits (U.S.)
I probably should have skipped this
Connecticut-set melodrama directed by Nicole Holofcener given that it was on
Netflix before TIFF ended. But it has
some modest pleasures and witty ironic moments depicting an American consumer
society at loose ends. As Christmastime
approaches family tensions play out in an atmosphere of spiritual and cultural
drift. The dramedy benefits from good
performances by Ben Mendelsohn as the hapless divorced father, Edie Falco as
his steadier remarried ex-wife, and Thomas Mann as their sensible son. B
Maya
(France)
In this gripping cross-cultural story
from director Mia Hansen-Løve, Gabriel is a war correspondent who has been
taken hostage and rescued. Later he learns that a fellow hostage and journalist
colleague has been killed. Suffering from post-traumatic effects he travels to
Goa, India to see his godfather. There
he meets Maya, the beautiful daughter who has been studying in London. He is taken with her but unable to leave his
old life behind. After meeting his
estranged mother in Mumbai, Gabriel parts ways with Maya and returns to the
frontlines, lacking faith but still searching. B+
What
is Democracy? (Canada)
This National Film Board production
directed by activist filmmaker Astra Taylor asks a lot of important questions
though it omits any Canadian content.
One of the main framing devices is a Renaissance painting in Siena depicting
class-cultural hierarchies of oligarchic virtue while demonizing the dangers of
succumbing to the lower orders. Another
goes back to the ancient Greeks and the warnings against democracy as mob rule
degenerating into the tyranny of strongman rule. One can see a contemporary
parallel in the proto-fascist potential of reactionary authoritarian forms of
“populism” such as Trumpism. As radical
philosopher Cornell West puts it: “Plato’s challenge will never go away.” There is also Dostoevskyès challenge about
how many people really want to be free. Delving into the trials of current
democracies, the film explores the challenges to realizing a fundamental
equality of citizens under conditions of globalized capitalism, technocracy,
racism, sexism, etc. Questions arise as
to who is included in government for and by the ‘demos’. Who really counts in “we the people”? What does people power mean in practice? What about individual and minority rights?
Skepticism about the current state of democracies is rife. What keeps the aspiration to democracy vital
is its constant struggle from below to achieve the revolutionary ideals of
equal citizens and self-government.
Forthcoming will be a companion book and an associated campaign to
counter widespread “political illiteracy”.
More at: https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/whatisdemocracy
and https://www.nfb.ca/film/what-is-democracy-2018/
B+
22
July (Norway/Iceland)
The latest chilling docudrama from
director Paul Greengrass, now on Netflix, has provoked some very divided
reactions. The date refers to the
infamous day in 2011 when the self-described White nationalist “Knights Templar”
defender of Western Christian Civilization Anders Breivik, dressed as a
policeman, killed 77 people, mostly Norwegian youth at a summer camp, because
they deserved to die as “Marxists, liberals, members of the elite”. The explosion in Oslo aimed at decapitating the
government and subsequent massacre on nearby Utoya island are recreated in
shocking detail. So is the fate of
wounded survivors and the traumatic aftershocks including the prosecution of an
unrepentant Breivik who revels in notoriety and rejects a defence of
insanity. I would have liked more on
Breivik’s terrorist rationale: his lengthy manifesto of Islamophobic,
anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism venom that is too close for comfort to
current far-right and neofascist agitation in many European countries,
Scandinavia included. It’s why 22 July
could happen again. Greengrass has
alluded to these parallels in interviews, observing how at the time Breivik’s
rantings were “considered outré and outrageous.
That’s mainstream now across the populist right. Not that they approve
of Breivik’s methods, but the rhetoric, the world view, the words, they’re all
the same.” B+
Kursk (Belgium/Luxembourg)
This is another docudrama based on
actual events—the August 2000 sinking of a Russian nuclear submarine (spoiler
alert: there are no survivors). It’s
directed by Danish “Dogme” auteur Thomas Vinterbeg but it left me cold. The disaster, fight-for-survival,
heroic-tragedy genre is sometimes effective if unoriginal, while lead roles go
to non-Russians (Matthias Schoenaerts, Léa Seydoux, even the venerable Max Von
Sydow) affecting Russian accents. 22 July
is also an English-language production yet manages a more compelling
verisimilitude. C
I
Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (Romania/CzechRepublic/France/Bulgaria/Germany)
This searing feature by Romanian
director Radu Jude (it’s Romania’s Oscar submission) was also part of the TIFF
speakers series with the Munk School of Global Affairs. The protagonist is a
young female theatre director commissioned to stage a reenactment of a Second
World War massacre of tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews. She is determined to
confront a whitewashed history in which Romanians are the victims, of the Nazis
then the Soviets, when in fact Romanians were long complicit in a murderous
anti-Semitism. As the authorities try to
tone down the pageant with a threat of shutting it down, she faces both
personal challenges and a fight against the historical amnesia of populist
nationalism. B+
Red
Joan (UK)
Dame Judi Dench is terrific in this
biopic, directed by renowned theatre director Trevor Nunn, based on the life of
Melita Norwood who in the late 1930s, while attending Cambridge University, was
drawn into spying for the KGB. During
the Second World War, when the Soviet Union was an ally, she passed on
high-value intelligence secrets. The
Norwood character, here named Joan Stanley, is an elderly retired scientist
living quietly alone when finally exposed in the year 2000, arrested and
charged with espionage to the astonishment of her lawyer son. B+
The
Weekend (U.S.)
This slight romantic dramedy, directed
by Stella Meghie, follows the relationship entanglements of a group of young
Black men and women, single and attached, over a weekend away from it all in shared
accommodations. C
Cold
War (Poland)
Director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida was awarded the 2014 best
foreign-language Oscar. Awarded best
director at Cannes, this is another historical masterwork filmed in
black-and-white (and a retro squarish 4:3 aspect ratio) that uncovers deep
passions against a wrenching postwar backdrop, drawing on the story of
Pawlikowski’s own parents. The protagonists are Wiktor, a musical director and
pianist and Zula, his singer protégé in a folkloric chorus in Communist Poland. The lovers are separated when Wiktor defects
to the West. Yet their fates remain
entwined up to a final choice—to be forever together “on the other side where
the view is better”. A
Donnybrook
(U.S.)
This “Platform” selection directed by
Tim Sutton is a raw, violent journey into a dark American underbelly of drugs
and disorder in which young men with no prospects enter no-holds-barred fight
contests—“donnybrooks”—for the chance at a large cash prize to the bruised and
bloodied victor. One of these is “Jarhead Earl”, played by Jamie Bell,
desperate for money for his family and wife who needs cancer treatments. (If your image of Bell is as the
ballet-loving kid in Billy Elliot,
think again.) His nemesis is a meth-dealing psychopath with an abused sister played
by Margaret Qualley (another total role reversal from her role as the young nun
in Novitiate). There’s a sordid scene
of her contemplating suicide that is almost unwatchable. The visceral desperation and brutality
provoked some walkouts. Be prepared for a movie that is as gut-wrenching as the
punches thrown. B
Shoplifters
(Japan)
Director Hirokazu Kore-eda took the top
prize ‘palme d’or’ at Cannes for this superb social-realist drama of life on
the margins of a Japanese society that is rarely seen. Shoplifting is just one of the ways that a
multigenerational unconventional “family” gets by. Their number grows by one, with added
complications, when an abused little girl comes under their protection. As much as an uncaring society looks down on
them, sometimes it’s the misfits who most exemplify family values. A
Directed by master filmmaker Werner
Herzog and André Singer, this insightful portrait of one of history’s great
men, now aged 87, draws on a series of interviews that Herzog conducted with
Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow. From a
humble peasant background in the north Caucasus, Gorbachev excelled as a
student and rose in the ranks of the Communist Party to become the youngest
leader in Soviet history, and the one whose reforms (‘glasnost’, ‘perestroika’)
would presage the USSR’s dissolution.
While he’s blamed for that in his homeland, becoming an isolated almost
tragic figure, the world owes him a huge debt for the Cold War ending without
bloodshed. Among his laments are that
“we didn’t finish the job of democracy in Russia.” We sense Gorbachev’s genuine
warmth and humanity as well as the reflective wisdom of an elder
statesman. The contrast with Putin’s
strutting strongman pose is too apparent to need mentioning. B+
Styx
(Germany/Austria)
In director Wolfgang Fischer’s tale of
solo challenge, Rike is a German emergency physician and first responder
suffering from burnout who embarks on a perilous journey, setting sail in a
yacht for Ascension island midway between Africa and South America. More than stormy seas, she will face a
life-and-death moral choice. Even alone
on the high seas, there’s no escaping the test of one’s essential humanity. B+
Everybody
Knows (France/Spain/ Italy)
This Spanish-language feature represents
somewhat of a change of pace for Iranian master Asghar Farhadi, though troubled
familial relationships remain at its dramatic centre. When Laura (Penelope Cruz) returns from
Argentina with her daughter and son to her native Spanish village for her
sister’s wedding, tensions that lie just under the surface involve a former
lover Paco (Javier Bardem). The
daughter’s disappearance during a power outage turns into a suspected
kidnapping that brings Laura’s distraught Argentine husband Alejandro (Ricardo
DarÃn) on the scene. For the daughter’s
return, family secrets and suspicions “everybody knows” must come to
light. B+
American
Dharma (U.S.)
Through one-on-one interviews and
archival footage, veteran documentarian Errol Morris tries to get at what
drives Steve Bannon, the far-right guru who attached himself to the Trump
campaign and for a time the Trump presidency.
Bannon invokes the Sanskrit term ‘dharma’ to refer to the forces of
duty, destiny and fate. He sees these in
favorite old war movies like Twelve
O’Clock High. Bannon’s checkered
background in both the movie business and high finance prior to steering the
extreme right media outlet Breitbart certainly makes him a fascinating if
malign character. While the liberal
Morris explicitly disavows Bannon’s incendiary politics, one senses Bannon, a
master manipulator of narrative, having the upper hand in this encounter. (For a deeper critique of Bannonism’s baleful
influence see the Joshua Green book Devil’s
Bargain.) B
Putin’s
Witnesses (Latvia/Switzerland/Czech Republic)
Ukrainian-born director Vitaly Mansky
lived in Russia during the momentous events of the demise of the USSR and its
aftermath, years during which he had extraordinary access to the inner circles
around the erratic Boris Yeltsin and ambitious Vladimir Putin, the former KGB
operative and rising star who replaced him on New Year’s Eve 1999. In the
production of a television documentary, Mansky was hired to follow Putin as he
took over the top job. Almost two
decades later Putin dominates Russia as no one has since Stalin. Mansky’s film revisits this intimate footage
he shot from the early years, shedding light on Putin’s cunning, calculating
character and the opportunistic making of an autocrat. Not surprisingly Mansky has had to leave
Russia for Latvia to escape the Putin regime’s repressive control over media.
B+
Monrovia,
Indiana (U.S.)
Director Frederick Wiseman, now 88, is
the acknowledged master of observational “direct cinema”. Here he turns the candid camera on life in
small-town rural Indiana, an area where white Christians predominate that would
have voted heavily for Trump in 2016. While Wiseman listens in on some
community debates over the direction of local development, there’s no mention
of national politics or Trump’s name. There’s a Republican party booth at a
local fair but no one is shown wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap. The
steady flow suggests an appreciation for the modest virtues to be found in the
rhythms of everyday life (church services, weddings, funerals, council
meetings). I found it too passive to make any point, or maybe that very middle
American steadiness is the point?
There’s more parochial common-sense contentment than Trumpian “American
carnage” to be found here. B
Jirga
(Australia)
Writer-director Benjamin Gilmour
achieves something remarkable in this story of an Australian ex-soldier Mike
(Sam Smith) who is haunted by a deadly war crime that he witnessed while
deployed to a small village in Afghanistan.
He is driven to undertake a dangerous journey back to the village in an
area now controlled by the Taliban, seeking forgiveness and putting his life in
the hands of the village ‘jirga’ (council of elders). Actually shot in Afghanistan (not Jordan,
Morocco or New Mexico) with Afghans, including former Taliban members, as the
supporting cast, this is bravura filmmaking that respects the Afghan reality. A
First
Man (U.S.)
Director Damien Chazelle’s fourth
feature is also his most impressive.
It’s based on James R. Hansen’s eponymous 2005 biography of the late
Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon in July 1969. Canadian Ryan Gosling is perfect in the role
of the sober-minded Armstrong who had to grieve the loss of a young child, and
who survived an arduous series of death-defying preparations for that first
moon landing to become reality. (Claire Foy is also excellent as Armstrong’s
wife Janet, as are all the supporting roles.) We really get the sense of the
man, and of how audacious the Apollo program was with the technologies of a
half century ago. Armstrong’s “small
step for man … giant leap for mankind” had world-historical significance but he
resisted any flag-waving heroic mythmaking.
(Although we get a view of the American flag on the moon’s surface, we
don’t see the actual planting of it by Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. That omission has provoked a backlash among
some American right-wingers almost as ridiculous as the never-ending conspiracy
theories about the landings having been faked.
Indeed there are still flat-earthers who deny all images of the earth
from space.) A
[A
half-century ago, the Apollo 8 mission which orbited the moon was the first to
capture the distant earth as a fragile “blue marble” in the vastness of
space. Those iconic images created a new
global consciousness as observed in the award-winning short film Earthrise (see https://www.earthrisefilm.com/;
available on Netflix). It was JFK in the
early 1960s who put America on the path of ambitious space exploration. That extraordinary effort, its tragedies as
well as triumphs, is detailed in an excellent new documentary film by his
filmmaker niece Rory Kennedy (Robert Kennedy’s youngest daughter) whose Above and Beyond: NASA and the Search for
Tomorrow was first broadcast October 13 on the Discovery channel. The film also points to the great
contribution of NASA’s programs and earth-orbiting satellites to the
understanding of earth systems, including the effects of climate change on the
planet.]
Before
the Frost (Denmark)
The last feature I saw at TIIF was a
bleak drama set in 19th century Denmark, a conflict over land as
winter approaches. Misfortune leads a
father to promise his daughter to a wealthy Swedish landowner or risk losing
the family’s means of livelihood. But
with another suitor loving the daughter, the desperation and burning jealousies
will take a terrible toll. B+
October:
Other TIFF Selections Viewed Post-Festival
A
Star is Born (U.S.)
Is a fifth screen remake of this story
really necessary? Tempted as I was to
say “no” I was won over by the powerful performances of director-protagonist
Bradley Cooper as the husky-voiced country-rock star Jackson Maine on the skids
and Stefani Germanotta (aka Lady Gaga) as the discovered talent turned soaring
pop diva “Ally”. Sam Elliot is also
excellent as Jackson’s much older and wiser brother who’s unable to arrest his
slide into alcoholism and drug addiction. A love story that turns tragic it’s a
melodramatic fairy tale of course. But
the singing performances (on real stages), the candid backstage scenes, and
private raw emotions are all wondrously believable. Expect multiple Oscar nominations. A
The
Sisters Brothers (U.S./France/Romania/Spain)
Although set in mid-19th
century Oregon, this is a strange “western” tale made odder by the fact of
being an international coproduction helmed by France’s Jacques Audiard loosely
adapting a best-selling novel by Canadian Patrick De Witt (whose new novel is
titled French Exit). The brothers are
a pair of assassins hired by a tycoon they call the “Commodore”. Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) is a psychopathic
drunk who killed his father. Big brother
Eli (John C. Reilly) is goofier and pudgier but no less deadly. Headed for San
Francisco during the Gold Rush, in their sights is a prospector (Riz Ahmed)
with a mysterious caustic formula for finding gold, joined by a detective on
his trail (Jake Gyllenhaal). While their luck runs out, the odd-couple brothers
get to go home mostly intact. Audiard films many scenes in a darkness matched
by the shady characters, with flashes of light that are mostly gunshots as the
bodies pile up. B
October: Three Other TIFF Films
and Three More
White
Boy Rick (U.S.)
This
is multiplex fare that didn’t really merit the fillip of festival
exposure. Nonetheless, based on a true
story, it is aggressively directed by European Yann Demange and benefits from
good performances. The “Rick” in
question (played by Ritchie Merritt) is the teenage son of shady gun-dealing
dad Richard Sr. (Matthew McConaughey) when he is recruited as a drug-busting
informant by several FBI agents. The
grim scene is the industrial wasteland of 1980s Detroit in which Rick’s own sister
Dawn (Bel Powley) is a junkie. Rick gets used, in over his head, trapped and
thrown to the wolves. In 1987 at age 17
he received an absurdly long 30-year prison sentence for selling cocaine. (The
real Rick was paroled in 2017 and the movie ends with a voice recording from
him.) It’s all rather sleazy and another
sad lesson of the casualties from the failed “war on drugs”. B+
Helming
this captivating true story is Texas-based David Lowery who previously brought
the masterful A Ghost Story to the
2017 Sundance festival. Sundance founder
Robert Redford stars as Forrest Tucker, a compulsive bank robber and
jailbreaker who leads a geriatric “Over the Hill Gang” (Tom Waits and Danny
Glover play his partners in crime.) on a series of bank jobs. Tucker may have a
gun but he is a gentlemanly irrepressible charmer who wins the heart of
horse-loving widow Jewel (Sissy Spacek) even while being doggedly pursued by
Detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck from A
Ghost Story). Elizabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale) has a cameo as
Tucker’s long-estranged daughter.
Although Redford, now 82, has said this will be his last acting role, he
proves once again his consummate skills on screen. Consider also the case of another
octogenarian, 88-year old Clint Eastwood, still going strong with a new feature
as actor-director The Mule scheduled
for a December release (and also starring Bradley Copper of A Star is Born). A
In
2006’s Sharkwater, Canadian filmmaker
and ecological activist Rob Stewart drew attention to the mass slaughter of
different shark species for their fins.
Although many countries have banned the practice of “finning” a
lucrative illicit trade continues with hundreds of millions of sharks being
killed. Material from hunted sharks can
also be found in other consumer products.
Stunning underwater cinematography captures Stewart’s interactions with
these ancient and wondrously evolved creatures.
He seeks to share his marvel at and appreciation for their role as apex
predators that are nothing like the fearsome monsters of popular
imagination. Using some of the footage
Stewart had already shot, his team carried on following his tragic death in a
January 2017 dive off the Florida keys. The result is a fitting epitaph to his
legacy and a warning about the ongoing human-caused threats to the natural
world—the more of which we extinguish, the more we diminish our own
future. (Filmmaker and diver Robert
Osborne’s documentary on the troubling aspects of Stewart’s death, The Third Dive: The Death of Rob Stewart,
can be streamed online in Canada at CBC Docs POV: https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/episodes/the-third-dive-the-death-of-rob-stewart.) A
[*Note:
The screening I attended was preceded by a trailer for Wonders of the Sea 3D, co-directed by Jacques Cousteau’s son
Jean-Michel, and narrated by Arnold Schwarzenegger. More information at: http://www.wondersofthesea3d.com/.]
Craig
William Macneill directs this chilling morality tale that premiered at the 2018
Sundance film festival. It’s based on an actual gruesome double murder by
hatchet in 1892 Massachusetts. Chloé
Sevigny plays Lizzie, the stifled, epileptic and embittered daughter of a
wealthy father and stepmother when an Irish maid Bridget (called “Maggie”)
played by Kristen Stewart comes into the household. Lizzie has a shy spinster sister and a conniving
uncle interested in the family fortune.
There are dark undercurrents in the suggestion of the patriarch taking
sexual liberties with the maid, and forbidden desires in a lesbian liaison
between her and Lizzie who’s threatened with being sent away and denied her
inheritance. Did shared desperation
provoke the scandalous killings? Lizzie
was charged but acquitted. The all-male
jury could not believe a lady of high society could be a murderess. Bridget moved far away and the two women
never saw each other again, taking their secrets to the grave. Sevigny and Stewart excel in their roles as
unhappy women driven to flashes of passion, straining against the crushing
weight of their respective repressive and dour societal stations. B+
Also
premiering at Sundance, British actor Rupert Everett stars as Oscar Wilde in
this historical drama at the end of the 19th century that focuses on
the last years of the famous playwright, author and celebrated wit. They were spent in ignominy and exile after
suffering two years imprisonment “at hard labour” for the crime of “gross
indecency”. Wilde had a wife Constance
(Emily Watson) and two young sons whom he never saw again. His weakness was for homosexual liaisons with
boys and young men. His undoing was a
notorious affair with “Bosie”, Lord Alfred Douglas (Colin Morgan), the wastrel
son of the Marquess of Queensbury. Everett is openly gay but in this late
Victorian era it was the illicit love that dare not speak its name. While sympathetic to Wilde’s plight, the film
is an unsparing depiction of those penurious yet dissolute final years in
France and Italy under the assumed name of Sebastian Melmoth. Wilde had a loyal
ally in Reggie Turner (Colin Firth) but he also played off his feuding lovers,
the fickle Bosie and steady Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas) whose ashes were later
interred with him. Wilde died at age 46 in wretched circumstances in Paris and
it was Ross who arranged for a priest Fr. Dunn (Tom Wilkinson) to effect a
deathbed conversion. A small comfort
perhaps. The movie’s title come from a
children’s story Wilde recalled reading to his sons. But this is anything but a happy story. B+
In
this melodrama, based on the Meg Wolizer novel and helmed by Swedish director
Björn Runge, Glenn Close is masterful in the role of Joan Castleman, the
long-suffering “wife” of the title.
She’s been married for four decades to Joe Castelman (Jonathan Pryce)
who was her college English professor, now a renowned author, when they get
word he is to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Joan was a student of brilliant promise but
has sublimated her talent in the service of making his career while also
excusing his philandering ways. The real
writing power behind his public literary success, she’s stayed in the
background until reaching a breaking point while they are in Stockholm to
accept the award. News of the birth of a grandchild provides a brief moment of
shared joy. But accompanying them is
their brooding resentful adult son David (Max Irons), an aspiring writer in his
own right who knows the truth. Adding to the combustible mix is Nathaniel Bone
(Christian Slater) who goes after Joan to pry juicy material for a hack
biography of the great man. She rebuffs
him with dignified reserve. In private
she lays it on the line with Joe—“time’s up” for the lionized centre of
attention; “time’s up” for the patronizing thanks to the silent helpmate in the
shadows. He gets the medal. For overdue honesty she takes the prize. B+
October:
Jean Vanier and Sumer in the Forest
On
October 26 the National Gallery hosted a very special event—the Ottawa premiere
of director Randall Wright’s moving and insightful documentary Summer in the Forest, a
UK/France/Palestine co-production that profiles renowned Canadian-born Catholic
humanist Jean Vanier (http://www.jean-vanier.org/en) and the work of his “l’Arche”
communities for people with disabilities, a movement of acceptance and loving
joyful hope that has spread around the world. (More information on the film and
availability at: http://www.summerintheforest.com/.)
Introductory remarks by Senator Jim Munson, a
longtime advocate for people with disabilities, were followed by a video
message from Vanier himself, who turned 90 last month. For decades he has lived simply in the
original l’Arche community at Trosly-Breuil adjoining a forested area in
northwestern France. As he expressed his message: “We live in a world where
people want to hide behind walls when we need to build bridges of shared
vulnerability.” Summer in the Forest isn’t a nature or adventure story as the title
might suggest, but in a sense it speaks to an adventure of the heart, open to
the beauty of nature and trusting in the human spirit.
Highlights of the film were screened interspersed at intervals
with an extended conversation on stage between Randall Wright and noted
journalist and author Ian Brown who has a disabled son about which he wrote a
2011 bestselling book The Boy in the
Moon: A Father’s Search for His Extraordinary Son. Brown revealed that a geneticist once told him
his son was a “genetic mistake of evolution”.
But he wondered if those that society and science have considered as lesser
human beings are not in fact “crucial to the ethical evolution” of our
humanity. They are persons with no power
or concern for it, no pretentiousness or cunning competitiveness. What makes
them appear childlike also gives them a freeing simplicity that seeks not
advantage over others but friendship and love through genuine human
relationships. They impart an important lesson. In making time for others we lose the fear of
the other that can poison society. In taking time “we become who we are called
to be.”
Summer
in the Forest profiles Vanier’s life and legacy. He had an elite background
and Catholic education. (His father Major-General Georges Vanier was Canada’s
19th Governor General.) He entered a naval college at 13 and had a
post-war naval command. In Paris he earned a doctorate in philosophy. But the spiritual call he experienced also led
him to an awareness of the plight of those with developmental disabilities and
the founding of the first “l’Arche” residence in 1964. From humble beginnings that has expanded into
a global network of some 150 communities in 37 countries. A striking sequence of Summer in the Forest takes place in Bethlehem in the Palestinian
West Bank. Into a region notorious for
violent divisions l’Arche brings a symbol of shared empathy and common
fragility.
In this Trumpian moment of toxic
power politics and polarization it can be hard to find signs of hope. But
through the example of l’Arche Vanier insists: “The weak and the foolish have
been chosen to confound the wise and the powerful.” It is still possible to “dream of a world
where everyone belongs.”
There are presently 31 l’Arche
communities in Canada, three of which are in the national capital region. Summer
in the Forest was preceded by Rostyk Makushak’s short film “Paranormal”
about one of them named “La Source”. There was also a reception featuring wine
tastings from a nearby Ottawa Valley vineyard (https://kinvineyards.com/) that emphasizes sustainability.
Vanier has dedicated his life to laboring in the
vineyard for a greater humanity. He has
an infectious laugh and lightness of being.
He radiates warmth. He calls us to our better nature. It was, in all
respects, an extraordinary, inspiring and illuminating evening.
November:
Two More Toronto film festival selections reach theatres
Timothée Chalamet turned heads and
earned an Oscar nomination in last year’s Call
Me By Your Name. With his classical
features and mass of wavy curls, the screen loves Chalamet, who excels again,
this time in a real-life role, as Nic Sheff, a talented young man in the throes
of drug addictions. Also excellent is
Steve Carell as the father, journalist David Sheff, who stands by Nic through a
series of rehabs and relapses culminating in a near-fatal overdose. Nic has younger siblings from his father’s
second marriage. He spends some time with his concerned mother Vicki (Amy Ryan)
in another city. Nothing seems to work and the increasing strains on all concerned
are palpable. Helmed by Belgian Felix
van Groeningen (best known for The Broken
Circle Breakdown), the screenplay draws on the revealing memoirs published
by both father and son in 2008: David’s Beautiful
Boy: A Father’s Journey through His Son’s Addiction and Nic’s Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines. The good news is that Nic not only survived
but has thrived as a successful scriptwriter. This story of his struggle with
addiction is raw and compelling. B+
Filmmaker/professional mountain climber
Jimmy Chin and partner Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi were the directing team behind
the 2015 Sundance prize winner Meru about
a death-defying Himalayan ascent. Here
their focus is on a solitary and even more extreme pursuit—that of legendary
free climber Alex Honnold to conquer Yosemite’s “El Capitan”, the sheerest and
highest 3,200 foot granite rockface on the planet, alone and without the aid of
ropes or any other devices. The
filmmakers delve into the back story of Honnold’s childhood and climbing
obsessions. He is an odd bird indeed,
living alone in his van for many years. But he does have a devoted girlfriend
Sanni McCandless and has established a nonprofit foundation that currently
promotes solar energy in the developing world. We see a complex, driven young
man who is more interesting than the image of the loner misfit. The film captures all of these human sides, including
setbacks from injuries and an abortive attempt begun in pitch darkness. The
drama of several years of preparations builds to the astonishing successful
free-solo ascent of El Capitan on June 3, 2017 in just under four hours—the
dizzying heights and breathtaking angles captured through multiple camera
positions from drone shots to intense close-ups by an expert film crew. The realization that the smallest mistake
means recording a death is always on their minds. One of the camera operators
has to repeatedly look away before Honnold reaches the summit and expresses
“delight” with his accomplishment. Both
as ultimate climb and absorbing character study, Free Solo, winner of TIFF’s documentary People’s Choice Award,
never loses its grip. A+ [I might add that the film also features
scenes with a main climbing partner of Honnold’s, Tommy Caldwell, whose own
exploits on El Capitan—a seemingly impossible 2015 wintertime ascent with
companion Kevin Jorgeson—is the subject of another heart-stopping documentary The Dawn Wall (http://www.dawnwall-film.com/),
a 2017 Austrian production that took the documentary spotlight audience award
at the 2018 South By Southwest Film Festival.]
November:
Penguins, Widows, Forgiveness
Who doesn’t love penguins? I certainly do, all 17 species. It’s been 18 years since I had some memorable
encounters with these remarkable seabirds at the other end of the earth. This wonderful documentary helmed by Peter
Getzels, Harriet Gordon Getzels and Erik Osterholm, was produced in 2014 but
appears to have had a theatrical release only in 2017. (It’s available on iTunes. I saw it via the Sundance Now streaming
service.) The film follows the voyage of
a research team led by Ron Naveen to document penguin numbers in order to
understand what is happening to these populations and their adaptability in the
face of climate change. (Read more about
his decades-long Antarctic Site inventory project on the film’s website above.)
What
made the movie extra special for me was that it was on the same Russian ship,
the Akademik Ioffe, following a similar route to the one I did in December
2000—from Buenos Aries to the Falkland Islands, to South Georgia, to Deception
Island at the tip of the Antarctic peninsula. South Georgia, home to millions
of King penguins, is also central to the legendary feats of explorer Sir Ernest
Shackleton. The abandoned whaling station at Grytviken is where he is buried.
Naveen’s crew got there on an expedition that included a granddaughter of Frank
Wild, Shackleton’s second-in-command whose ashes were laid to rest there beside
Shackleton’s grave.
South Georgia is the most extraordinary
place I have ever experienced on this planet. My best prize-winning photo was
taken there (the World Wildlife Fund members international grand prize).
From
there to the desolate landscape of Deception island, a still active volcano,
where Naveen’s scientific crew transfer to a smaller vessel and begin the
counting of the island’s chinstrap penguin colonies, braving difficult terrain
and challenging weather conditions. It’s efforts like these to study changes in
the natural world that give us a deeper appreciation of the future of life on
earth. A
Several more Toronto film festival
selections are now in theatres:
British director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) takes on the crime
action-thriller genre in this bleak affair.
The setting is the mean streets and corrupt politics of South Side
Chicago in which a crooked African American named Jamal Manning who employs a
lethal sidekick (played by Daniel Kaluuya of the 2017 hit Get Out) is challenging an established white machine politician
Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell) the son of irascible patriarch Tom Mulligan
(Robert Duvall). But the key figure is
not these bad guys but Veronica (Viola Davis), the wife of crime boss Harry
Rawlings (Liam Neeson) and his gang who have stolen a couple $million from
Jamal and seemingly been blown up with it.
So Jamal goes after Veronica for the lost loot and she enlists the three
other desperate widows Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez)
and Belle (Cynthia Erivo), and one other, to pull off a heist using Harry’s
playbook. These women go from being supposed innocents living off the avails of
to becoming badass gun-wielding robbers.
Except
that Veronica isn’t actually a widow, not yet anyway, since her dirty Harry has
set up his crew, is secretly consorting with another widow, and is in cahoots
with the junior Mulligan. It’s more sleazy than plausible, though there’s some
satisfaction that Veronica gets Harry back in the end.
Time’s up
indeed! But if one is going full
action-thriller mode, I confess that, for all its fast and furious excess, I
enjoyed more the Tom Cruise global war-on-terror fantasy Mission Impossible – Fallout that had a quartet of strong female
roles. B
Melissa McCarthy has made a name for
riotous behavior in a string of raunchy dumb comedies. She admirably extends her range and proves
her acting chops in this drama, directed by Marielle Heller, about the
real-life travails of Lee Israel, a penurious author of biographies who,
forsaken by her agent, turns to forging witty letters under the names of famous
authors and personalities. The chatty and catty screenplay by Nicole Holofcener
and Jeff Witty is based on Israel’s memoir; its eponymous title taken from an
alleged Dorothy Parker line.
Lee, a
depressive dumpy lesbian, lives alone with an aging sick cat. Her sole social
contact seems to be a drinking buddy, a gay gadabout Jack Hock (Richard E.
Grant hamming it up) who gets in on the act but whom she is unwise to
trust. Eventually duped collectors get
wise and the FBI come calling. The jig is up. Lee is charged and convicted but
avoids prison time and the scheme makes for a great confessional story. Watching
how well McCarthy and Grant play off each other on screen makes it easier to
forgive too. A-
November:
A Lucas Hedges Triple Play
Two young actors have emerged recently as among the
most promising male talents of their generation. Both already have Oscar nominations: Timothée
Chalamet in 2018 for a lead role in Call
Me By Your Name; Lucas Hedges in 2017 for a supporting role in Manchester By the Sea. Chalamet has
earned praise for his latest role as a drug-addicted son in Beautiful Boy (see previous blog post on
Toronto film festival selections).
Hedges appears in three current films.
The last to be released, Ben is
Back, is also in the role of a drug-addicted son, and is helmed by his
writer-director father Peter Hedges. It
opens December 7. Here are notes on the other two. All were TIFF selections.
Australian actor-director Joel Edgerton
helms this sobering true-story drama about the consequences of religious
so-called “gay conversion” therapy programs.
He has enlisted Aussie A-listers Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman to play
the evangelical parents of 18-year old Jared Eamons (Hedges), a religiously
observant student wrestling with same-sex attraction. The setting is Bible belt
Arkansas in which Marshall Crowe, a Baptist pastor, and wife Nancy sincerely
believe they are helping their son by accepting the counsel of church elders to
enroll him in such a program. It’s done
with his consent. Jared wants to be
“cured” of his latent homosexuality. The
screenplay by Garrard Conley draws on his eponymous memoir of that experience.
The
program Jared enters is run by Victor Sykes (Edgerton) who exudes evangelical
zeal and psychological authority without having any real qualifications. Jared
is troubled by dubious confessional exercises such as a “moral inventory”. He
becomes increasingly disturbed when, for all the talk about God and “love”,
confrontations lead to psychological and even physical abuse. One even results in a suicide. (As a side
note, among the inmates is a sullen character “Jon”, played by openly gay
Quebec actor-director Xavier Dolan.) When Jared can no longer play along—“fake
it to make it”—he appeals to his mom to take him out. Fortunately she listens, expressing sympathy
and regret. Jared’s preacher dad takes
longer to adjust to having a gay son. What is most assuring is that both
parents never stop loving their son. The
movie closes with an honest heart-to-heart father-son talk as affecting as that
celebrated in Call Me By Your Name.
The
harm done by “gay conversion” was also the subject of the more sharply
political The Miseducation of Cameron
Post, centred on a female subject, which received the U.S. dramatic grand
jury prize at Sundance in January. Boy Erased is as good. Hedges, who got his Oscar nod for playing a
macho teen juggling girlfriends, is also well cast here. Indeed he has been open about his own “fluid”
sexuality. Noting that 36 states permit
such “conversion” programs, the movie makes one reflect about the damage from
the self-hatred inflicted on hundreds of thousands of vulnerable young
people. The kicker in Boy Erased is an endnote observing that
the real Victor Sykes subsequently came out as gay and is living with his
husband in Texas. Perhaps one should not
be surprised that religious hypocrisy is also part of this picture.
A
Lucas Hedges in the role of an older
brother drew me to this film, the directorial debut of actor Jonah Hill who
also wrote the screenplay.
The
setting is the Los Angeles skateboard subculture, circa mid-90s, centred on a
pint-sized 13-year old kid Stevie (Sunny Suljit) who wants to hang out with a
crowd of older skater dudes pretending to be as tough and cool. It’s a loudmouthed gang of characters, with
the show- off casual profanity and stupidity of restless adolescent males.
Stevie’s single mom (Katherine Waterston) isn’t impressed. Older bro Ian (Hedges) is more sullen and abusive
than supportive, treating him like a nuisance.
Stevie’s pals may call him “Sunburn”, but the family dynamics are less
than sunny to say the least. If this is a nostalgia trip, it’s not a
heartwarming one. Still Suljit gives the
character of Stevie a plucky presence that impresses, and Hedges makes the most
of an uncongenial supporting role as the unhappy Ian. B
November:
Bohemian Rhapsody and Coldplay Dreams
This ode to the British rock band and
their legendary lead singer Freddie Mercury had a production as troubled as its
star subject, with director Bryan Singer being replaced by Dexter Fletcher
(who’s at the helm of Rocketman, a
forthcoming biopic on Elton John). Only
Singer gets credited however. Many reviews have been less than kind. Still, what’s best is how Rami Malek (Mr.
Robot) throws himself into the role of the mercurial Mercury, actually born
Farrokh Bulsara in 1946 in Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania). Of Indian Parsi
descent, he was in his late teens before immigrating to the UK with his
conservative Zoroastrian parents. With extra teeth and an exotic look, Mercury
went from working as a baggage handler to the top of the charts.
The movie glides
over that unusual backstory, including an early marriage undone by Mercury’s
flamboyant bisexuality. More usual is the slide from meteoric rise into
addictions and excess, as well as the tensions leading to the band’s breakup.
Where the movie soars is in the creation and performances of Queen’s greatest
hits, notably the now-iconic operatic titular track that confounded critics at
the time. This culminates in the band
briefly reuniting to perform during the huge 1985 “Live Aid” concert, when
Mercury was already suffering from AIDS.
That highpoint also ends the movie which simply notes that he died of complications
in 1991.
Bohemian Rhapsody will be a must-see
nostalgia trip for Queen fans. Beyond that, Malek is convincing enough in the
audacious lead role to make this compulsive and cautionary tale worth watching.
B+
Coldplay: A Head Full of Dreams (UK)
This terrific rockumentary covering
several decades of another hugely successful British band had only a one-day
global theatrical release on November 14 before going to the streaming platform
of Amazon Prime. I braved Ottawa’s traffic
congestion hell to catch the last of two shows at a suburban multiplex and am
so glad I saw it on the big screen.
I’ve
been a big fan of the Coldplay foursome (only the Irish foursome U2 rank higher
in my estimation) since first hearing about them from some 20-something Brits I
travelled with across the Australian Outback in the spring of 2001. They couldn’t get enough of the first album
“Parachutes” and its global hit “Yellow”. The four—lead singer Chris Martin,
guitarists Jonny Buckland and Guy Berryman, drummer Will Champion—came from
English boarding school backgrounds and shared tudent camaraderie at University
College London. Among many aspiring
musicians the four friends created something special that caught on resulting
in a stratospheric ascent. Despite the
inevitable downs, and even outs, their at times rocky evolution has formed an
enduring bond among the original four and a key manager, also a friend from
student days.
Directing
the film is Mat Whitecross, another friend who has followed them from earliest
days, resulting in a trove of remarkable close-up archival footage. They were
still nobodies in 1998 when the charismatic Martin, still wearing geeky braces,
cheekily predicted a band stealing the name “Coldplay” would be “huge”. Then in
a few short years that actually happened.
There’s a lot of revealing behind-the-scenes-material, much of the home
video variety in grainy black-and-white, contrasting with the pulsing rainbow
colour-bursting spectacle of massive soldout stadium shows around the globe,
mainly from their most recent 115-show, 18-month “Head Full of Dreams” world
tour, starting and ending in Buenos Aires.
The
film to its credit does not leave out the rough spots of “depression,
addiction, divorce”, or the hostile reviews from some critics. The band has had to cope with frontman
Martin’s celebrity status and its pitfalls, notably when his marriage to
actress Gwyneth Paltrow and their subsequent split became tabloid fodder.
This is no
hagiography and one gets the sense that the four are still pinching themselves
at how far they have come without imploding.
They have forged a genuine collaborative friendship that keeps asking
what’s next. There’s a disarming candour throughout that belies the outsized
“rock star” image. These guys can
critique and poke fun at themselves. An
element underplayed is the band’s social-justice activism (https://www.looktothestars.org/celebrity/coldplay)
which is similar if less famous than that of Bono and U2. That said, Martin does wear his “global
citizen” consciousness-raising literally on his sleeve.
The
mix of thrilling live performance and intimate backstory reminds me of Phil
Joanou’s Rattle and Hum made about U2
some 30 years ago which also took its title from a major album tour by a global
supergroup that never sounded better.
It’s a compelling combination that makes Coldplay: A Head Full of Dreams one of the best music documentaries
of recent years. A
November:
Two More from TIFF—Of Private Wars and Green Books
A Private War (UK/U.S.)
After helming two masterful
documentaries (2015’s Oscar-nominated Cartel
Land and 2017’s Emmy-nominated City
of Ghosts), director Matthew Heineman approaches this dramatic retelling of
the life and death of intrepid American war correspondent Marie Colvin with a
similarly compelling passion that serves its subject well. Rosamund Pike is
extraordinary in the role of Colvin who wrote dispatches for the London Sunday Times from the world’s worst
conflict zones—Sri Lanka (in 2001 where she lost an eye), Iraq, Afghanistan,
Libya (the last Western journalist to interview Gaddafi), Syria. She became known for wearing a black eye
patch (and a fashionista La Perla bra).
The film doesn’t gloss over the demons of PTSD and a stormy personal
life in which she chain smoked and drank to excess. But it connects most
strongly when she is face to face with the victims of war’s evils, determined
to tell the truth of these human stories. As she tells her boss: “I see it so
you don’t have to.”
The
movie’s timeline leads towards Colvin’s final fatal moments in the besieged
shattered Syrian city of Homs. On these
dangerous assignments she was accompanied by ace photographer Paul Conroy
(Jamie Dornan is a much more worthy role than as the hunk in the worthless
“Fifty Shades” franchise). Colvin was
driven to take great risks to get the story.
We hear the powerful interview she gave to CNN on February 22, 2012
before being killed in a bomb blast as rebel-held Homs was being relentlessly
pounded by the Assad dictatorship. Her witness gave the lie to claims that only
“terrorists” were being targeted.
Observing that over a half million Syrians have been killed since her
death, this film is a timely tribute to fearless frontline journalism telling
truth to power.
Director Peter Farrelly, of the Farrelly
Brothers associated with lowbrow comedies, is solo at the helm here tackling a
more serious subject—America’s racial and
class divides—through an unusual true story of the mixed-race Don Shirley
trio touring the deep South in 1962. Dr.
Don, a classically-trained pianist living in solitary splendor above Carnegie
Hall, needs a driver with muscle to be his chauffeur on the tour. He also happens to be a tall elegant
multilingual Black man of refined tastes who would prefer playing Chopin to
jazz. (The other two members of the trio, white, Russian-speakers, travel in a
separate car.) The driver he ends up
hiring, Frank Vallelonga, who goes by “Tony Lip”, is a blunt Italian-American
family man of unrefined tastes, a bouncer at the Copacabana nightclub who needs
the good money of this 2-month gig while that joint is closed for renovations.
So begins a very odd-couple roadtrip that evolves from fractious to unlikely
friendship. (The title comes from a “Green Book” guide for Negro motorists
advising where “coloreds” can stay and be served.)
What’s
best about the movie, which won the Toronto film festival’s “People’s Choice
Award”, regarded as an Oscar harbinger, are the terrific performances of
Mahershala Ali (Oscar winner for Moonlight)
as Dr. Don and Viggo Mortensen as Tony.
Don is subjected to racist indignities the deeper south they go, even
from wealthy hosts. Several times Tony comes to his rescue from threats and
abuse. But Tony has a point when in a moment of exasperation he claims to be
“blacker”. Because he’s the one opening doors for the boss and taking orders;
in New York he’s the lower-class proletarian, the doctor the high-class
aristocrat.
Tony
has grown up with causal racial attitudes but he’s fundamentally a good-hearted
guy. And the movie comes to a heartwarming conclusion on a snowy Christmas eve
that leaves a crowd-pleasing effect.
Still over half a century later one has to wonder—about class
inequalities that are greater and the racist attitudes in Trumpland that,
albeit less overt and more insidious, are far from being overcome.
November:
Netflix Highlights—Babylon Berlin, Outlaw King
Babylon Berlin
Netflix has some truly amazing
content. Let me highly recommend this
German dramatic series set in 1929 that is the most expensive non-English
language series ever made. There is a great deal more information about it
available online through the official website https://www.babylon-berlin.com/en/overview-babylon/
and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_Berlin.
Despite a very busy volunteer schedule I’ve managed to view all 16 episodes of
the first two seasons. The third is currently in production.
Two
central characters are Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), a police detective
transferred from Cologne assigned to a vice squad, and Charlotte Ritter (Liv
Lisa Fries), a hostess in a nightclub and stereotypist who goes to work for
him. Gereon is a First World War veteran
who needs drugs to calm his nerves.
Charlotte’s home is a squalid family flat. There are many more characters in the
richly-conceived intersecting storylines, one of which centres on a train from
Soviet Russia carrying illicit poison gas and a supposed secret fortune in
gold. The political atmosphere—the
doomed Weimar republic before the Great Depression and triumph of National
Socialism—is fraught and feverish: one of decadence and despair, extremes and
extortion, Communist and Trotskyite intrigue, violence in the streets,
rearmament and fascist plots, and much more.
Not only are the performances outstanding across the board, the
production team (helmed by master filmmaker Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, and
Henk Handloegten) have created an entire world that brings this intense febrile
historical epoch to life as never before on the modern screen.
The
result truly deserves that overused term awesome. The historical complexity also puts it above
my previous best-ever television series, the Danish “Borgen” which has a
contemporary political setting. I can’t
wait for the next episode.
Outlaw King (UK/U.S.)
The Toronto International Film Festival
has a history of dubious choices for its opening night gala presentations,
getting scooped by Venice and Telluride for Oscar-worthy fare. In some ways this made-for-Netflix production,
a “big bloody mud-and-honour epic” as one fairly positive review calls it, is
no exception. The setting is 14th
century Scotland and the subject is Robert the Bruce (Chris Pine) who takes up
the Scottish crown in the wake of the martyrdom of the rebel William Wallace
(see Mel Gibson’s Braveheart),
rallying the clans to repulse the evil royal English overlords … which of
course they do after terrible reprisals.
No
expense has been spared on the production, helmed by Scottish director David
Mackenzie and shot on Scottish locations. Pine is fine as the warrior king and
there are a few tender even racy scenes with his wife, a goddaughter of the
English monarch Edward I who expires en route to the ultimate battle showdown.
The focus however is on the action of swords and savagery, guts and gore. Worth watching, but only if you have the
stomach for that sort of thing.
December:
In Praise of the Danish Screen—Walk With Me and The Guilty
The Canadian Film Institute’s 33rd
European Union Film Festival wrapped today presenting excellent features from
27 of 28 member countries. (See all titles and descriptions at: https://www.cfi-icf.ca/euff. The UK has not participated since the 2016
Brexit vote.)
I was able to see 20, and in addition
had already seen Cold War (Poland)
and Transit (Germany), both by master
filmmakers, at the Toronto film festival (see previous post).
The
one I was most struck by was the Danish entry Walk with Me (not to be confused with the eponymous 2017
documentary about a Zen Buddhist community). Tiny Denmark punches way above its
weight when it comes to both the big and the small screen. Borgen
(Danish for “government”) sounds dull but is the best ever made-for-television
contemporary (2010-2013) political drama series. There is an abundance of film
talent beyond the works of internationally acclaimed directors such as Lars von
Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, and Susanne Bier.
Walk
With Me (Denmark/Sweden/France 2016)
Directed by Lisa Ohlin, the film begins
in the poppy fields of Helmand province Afghanistan when Thomas (Mikkel Boe
Følsgaard), a 25-year old gung-ho Danish soldier on patrol, steps on a landmine
that destroys his legs. Surviving as a double amputee he tries to maintain a
macho military pose, egging on an army buddy to return to the battlefield. But as reality sets in, and his girlfriend
deserts him, he faces another personal battlefield, beyond overcoming the
agonizing physical challenge of learning to walk on prosthetic legs. While in hospital he is introduced to Sofie
(Cecilie Lassen), a principal dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet, who is there
for an aunt dying of cancer. The gradual bond that forms between them becomes
central to his recovery and the emotional saving grace that prevents him from
becoming a suicide statistic. Thomas has
to come to terms with many hard truths, including that a young Afghan boy he
thought he had befriended may have placed the mine. Sofie’s touch helps him
adjust to a completely new life. This is
a convincingly realistic post-traumatic story told with immense feeling and
sensitivity—without any melodramatic musical score and not a trace of
sentimentality. A
Director Gustav Möller’s debut feature
premiered at the 2018 Sundance film festival where it won the world cinema
audience award, most deservingly. The
film ratchets up the suspense of a homicide thriller and kidnapping in progress
even though the camera stays in one room focused, often in extreme close-up, on
one character, Copenhagen police officer Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren), assigned
to phone duty in an emergency services call centre as a result of his
involvement in the fatal shooting of a young man. The night before a key court
hearing he takes a call from a frightened woman named Iben. From her quavering dissembling voice inside a
vehicle it appears she has been abducted by a vengeful ex-partner Michael,
leaving a terrified young daughter at the home with a baby brother. Asger tries to keep her on the line to
identify the vehicle to dispatch a police unit, and also speaks with the
daughter to try to calm her and send police to the home. He also gets hold of his police partner
Rashid, who must testify at the next day’s hearing, and has him break into
Michael’s residence for clues about the vehicle’s destination. As the tension
rises, there’s a heart-stopping moment that flips everything on its head and
will lead to a desperate confession to prevent a suicide. Throughout the only face we see is Asger’s;
the others are only voices on a phone line.
Yet this is as intense a psychological crime thriller as any I have
seen. A
(*Worth noting is another Sundance award
winner, Searching, also a disturbing
and surprising psychological police thriller, told entirely through computer
screens.)
December:
Painting Eternity
On December 4, the Canadian Film
Institute of which I am a longtime ambassador member presented a very special
event—the screening of a fully restored version of Andrei Tarkovsky’s
205-minute masterwork Andrei Rublev, first seen in Moscow in
December 1966 but suppressed by the Soviet authorities. It was not shown internationally until 1969
(at the Cannes film festival), and not in North America until October 1973. [Interestingly 1966 is also when Sergey
Bondarchuk’s epic monumental 427-minute War
and Peace was first released in the Soviet Union. Among my greatest films
of all time it’s reviewed in my book The
Best of Screenings & Meanings
at
pp. 29-30 and 168-169.]
The
setting for Andrei Rublev is the
early 15th century Russian empire.
The titular central figure is a monk and renowned icon painter. Beyond the monastery many of the scenes take
place in and around the ancient city of Vladimir (200 kms east of Moscow),
which had been the medieval capital. Its
Cathedral of the Assumption (Dormition) is where the grand princes were
crowned. Beyond striking black-and-white
cinematography, the film is notable for its deeply religious imagery and
allusions. (As master painter Theophanes the Greek says to Rublev: “If Jesus
returned to earth, they would crucify him again.” That calls to mind
Dostoevky’s famous parable of The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov.) There is much else: ribaldry, nudity in a
pagan ceremony, rain-soaked mire, treacherous rivalries, extreme violence
including torture and a massacre in the cathedral when the Tatars sack
Vladimir. (This Mongol invasion actually occurred in 1238.) Scenes of that, and
subsequently of the casting of an immense bell, are staged on an awesome scale
in which Orthodox Christendom faces a constant struggle between good and
evil. It seems almost impossible that a
movie so steeped in reverential religion was made in the officially atheist
Cold War USSR.
There’s
actually very little painting shown in Andrei
Rublev, until near the end when
the screen resolves into a glorious montage, in colour, of rich iconography
that has survived the ravages and vicissitudes of history. The icon painters
were clearly aiming for the eternal, however compromised and ephemeral the imperial
masters that employed them. (Read more: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/43-andrei-rublev-an-icon-emerges.)
The life and work of the late 19th
century Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh continues to fascinate.
Last year’s Loving Vincent was an unusual exploration creating a story around
him told entirely through oil-painted frames using his signature swirling brush
technique. This film, helmed by Julian
Schnabel, a filmmaker who is also a painter, is a more conventional biopic of
Van Gogh’s troubled later years. Van Gogh was a disturbed personality and
social outcast. He famously cut off an ear and was committed several times to
asylums. Unable to sell his paintings he survived through support from his
brother Theo. (Now considered masterworks
worth hundreds of millions of dollars, those not in museums could only be
afforded by billionaires.)
Willem
Dafoe throws himself into the role of the tormented Van Gogh (awarded best
actor at the Venice film festival) although, in his mid-60s, he is old for the
part of a man who died at age 37 in 1890. (Following a period of intense
productivity in Auvers-sur-Oise, the untimely cause of death, from a gunshot
wound to the stomach, remains controversial—was it self-inflicted?) The film spends considerable time on Van
Gogh’s relationship with Paul Gaugin (Oscar Isaac), a more successful
post-impressionist artistic rebel. Van Gogh was driven, and almost driven mad,
by a compulsive eccentric artistic vision of nature and beauty. In an asylum he confesses to a skeptical yet
sympathetic priest (played by Mads Mikkelsen): “Maybe God made me a painter for
people who aren’t born yet.” (That has
proved to be prescient indeed.) In the
conversation Van Gogh also speaks about Jesus.
Viewers may recall Dafoe’s remarkable title role in Scorsese’s controversial
The Last Temptation of Christ.
For
all of Dafoe’s admirable effort, including imitating brush strokes on famous
canvasses, At Eternity’s Gate isn’t a
masterwork. The language mix is odd with
smatterings of French but most of the dialogue in English (including a few
voiceovers by Van Gogh with a blank screen), The musical score is intrusive at
times. Key relationships (notably with
Gaugin, Theo) and encounters are more sketched than deeply explored. Still the enduring Van Gogh mystique is enough
to make this an interesting work. B
December: Political Sex Scandals Then vs.
Now
The Front Runner
The biggest irony of the “Me too/time’s
up” climate of zero tolerance for alleged sexual misdeeds is the seeming
impunity of the serial offender in the White House. Donald Trump’s ardent followers, including
evangelical Christians, seem to excuse with alacrity his bragging about
sexually assaulting women (“you can do anything”) and illegally paying off porn
stars.
Mind you, in the 1990s Bill Clinton survived
an impeachment process over his sexual sins.
Canadian
filmmaker Jason Reitman takes us back to the 1980s with a cautionary tale about
the rise and precipitous fall of Colorado Democratic Senator Gary Hart who in
1988 was the prohibitive favorite for his party’s presidential nomination. Hugh
Jackman gives a convincing portrayal of the well-spoken progressive telegenic
Hart who, although then separated from his wife Lee (played by Vera Farmiga),
seemed to have everything going for him.
Hart’s campaign, led by the hard-nosed operative Bill Dixon (J.K.
Simmons), was going great guns until a news story—obtained through rather shady
surreptitious means—set off a media frenzy.
Hart tried in vain to project forward his policy ideals while protecting
his private life. It didn’t work. Just
the suggestion of a possible consensual extramarital affair was enough to
torpedo his campaign and destroy his political career. The Democratic candidate ended up being the
ill-fated Michael Dukakis. The election was won by the late George H.W. Bush so
recently eulogized. It’s worth
reflecting how differently the 1990s might have turned out.
By
the way, Gary Hart was born in Ottawa—Ottawa, Kansas that is. More to the point, Hart and his wife are
still married after all these years. In
2018 they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. B+
December:
New on Netflix for the Holiday Season
I keep being impressed by the quantity
and often quality of the content made available for online
streaming on Netflix. HBO is just now showing its first non-English
language production—the excellent Italian series My Brilliant Friend. But Netflix, now in over 180 countries, is
way ahead in terms of top-notch international productions. In a previous post I praised the German
series Babylon Berlin set in
1929. I’m also hooked by the new Polish
series 1983 set during the last years of the Communist Cold War era (8
episodes so far, fraught with danger, intrigue, murder, sex, and treachery in a
hothouse of repression versus revolutionary agitation).
On
the documentary side, an absolute must view are the 8 episodes of Sir David
Attenborough’s Blue Planet II: A Natural History of the Oceans. One runs out
of superlatives to describe the diverse range of of astonishing underwater
images illustrating an amazing compendium of often little-known information.
Attenborough narrates another epic achievement that is awesome, enthralling and
utterly absorbing. A+
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
From the acclaimed writer-director duo
of the Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, comes this offbeat Western that plays out
as a series of tall tales. In the first
one, about the titular Buster Scruggs, Tim Blake Nelson hams it up as a goofy
devil-may-care gunslinger, until he meets his match. Subsequent Western
stories, always told on the wry side, cycle though a host of fine actors
evidently enjoying appearing in a Coen brothers production. Although the movie does lose some steam
towards the latter half, it’s a consistently entertaining affair. Indeed the Coens took the best screenplay
award at the Venice Film Festival and the National Board of Review named Ballad one of its top 10 films of 2018.
B+
Mowgli-Legend of the Jungle
Director Andy Serkis is best known for
his motion-capture performances—as “Gollum” in the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, and as “Caesar”, the simian leader in
the recent Planet of the Apes movies
(2011-2017). Given the Disney Jungle Book films (most recently in
2016), one wonders about another remake, even if Serkis does go back to the
original source material of Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 All the Mowgli Stories collection.
Mowgli
is the “man cub” rescued as an infant by a black panther Bagheera (voiced by
Christian Bale) after his parents have been devoured by the terrorizing tiger
Shere Khan (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch), a threatening presence
throughout. The feral Indian boy Mowgli
(played by 11-year old Rohan Chand) is raised by a wolf pack he seeks to
join. Another protector is a bear named
Baloo (voiced by Serkis). Mowgli’s
adventures take a fateful turn when he gets taken in to a human village that
includes a tiger hunter (Matthew Rhys), leading up to a showdown that also
involves elephants and a python among other talking jungle creatures. This isn’t a great movie but it does feature
quality animation combined with live action.
A caution about some quite violent scenes which may be disturbing for young
children. B
Netflix’s
Mexican Masterwork is the Movie of the Year
If you don’t have Netflix it would be
worth getting it just to watch this Mexican masterwork as it will have only a
very limited theatrical release. Roma, which won the Venice film
festival’s top prize, is the year’s best reviewed film with reason. I’ve added below one among many laudatory
reviews.
Let
me add a few notes to that. The story,
set in the “Roma” residential neighborhood of Mexico City 1970-71, obviously
draws on director Cuarón’s personal memories.
It combines strikingly evocative images, a cinematic poetry, with
remarkable realism, so much so that at times you could swear you were watching
a black-and-white documentary from that period.
The class structure is apparent: the lower orders with Indigenous blood
(a majority of Mexicans are ‘mestizo’- mixed race) serve well-to-do households
like the one depicted in the film—a professional couple with five children
(four boys and a girl) and a grandmother living with them. Cuarón chooses to make the central character
the nanny and housemaid Cleo.
What
happens to Cleo drives a narrative on several levels. One is her personal life troubles when a man
into martial arts makes her pregnant then abandons her. He is last seen in an astonishing sequence in
which Cleo, accompanied by the grandmother, goes into labour in a department
store while a massacre by paramilitaries takes place outside. On another level, Cleo is not the only woman
to feel abandonment and heartache. The
husband of the household leaves early on just before Christmas. The pretense is maintained that he is doing
research in Canada (Quebec) until during a brief beach holiday in Tuxpan the
mother breaks it to the children that their father is “not in Ottawa” and not
coming back. The storylines converge in that Cleo and the family seem to draw
strength from each other, forming a bond that endures. Indeed ‘Roma’ spelled
backwards is ‘amor’—Spanish for ‘love’—a memory worth holding on to.
This
lovingly lensed masterpiece is the best movie of 2018. A+
December:
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.
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
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
December:
Christmastime Releases
These opened across Canada on Christmas
Day.
Several of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s
previous films have left me cold, indeed repelled (Dogtooth, The Killing of a
Sacred Deer). But in this case, an
uproarious ribald costume drama set during the early 1700s reign of Britain’s
Queen Anne, his twisted sense of black humour results in sheer delight. The dotty, gout-afflicted Anne (Olivia
Colman) is being controlled by a viperish right-hand woman Lady Sarah (Rachel
Weisz) determined to raise land taxes to prosecute a war with the French. That is until a servant woman Abigail (Emma
Stone) comes on the scene, relieves Anne’s condition and schemes her way into Anne’s
favours, affections, and bed. Abigail
gets her way in cahoots with the leader of a flamboyantly bewigged and attired
parliamentary faction of landowning gentleman. From a vicious rivalry for
Anne’s attentions, only one “lady” can emerge on top as the “favourite”.
Anne
as addled monarch is a rather pathetic figure, yet also oddly sympathetic. Claiming to have lost 17 children she
surrounds herself with 17 rabbits. Colman is superb in the role, as are Weisz
and Stone as the jealous contenders to be the power behind the throne. It’s a sumptuously entertaining affair and
one of the year’s best movies. A
I loved writer-director Adam McKay’s
previous film, 2015’s The Big Short
which satirized the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and had high hopes
for this take down of former U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney. However McKay’s tongue-in-cheek approach to
Cheney’s remarkable rise misfires as much as hits the target, notwithstanding
Christian Bale’s equally remarkable portrayal of the man. (Bale has become famous for such
shape-shifting physical transformations.)
We
first see Cheney as the underachieving young man, a n’er-do-well dropout from
Yale, who gets an ultimatum to shape up or ship out from wife Lynne (Amy
Adams). Cheney’s break is to become a Congressional intern to future defence
secretary Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), from there catapulting to become
President Ford’s chief of staff following Nixon’s downfall. Cheney will prosper again during the Reagan
years, then even more so when he becomes chief executive of the Haliburton
corporate empire. McKay even inserts an
early fake ending to the Cheney success story.
That’s before 2000 when Cheney is wooed by Bush family “black sheep”
George W. (Sam Rockwell) and only agrees to become his running mate on the
“unified executive theory” understanding that he will operate in effect as an
all-powerful and unaccountable co-president.
The terrorist tragedy of 9/11 further empowers Cheney’s ambitious
self-serving designs (highlights including the invasion of Iraq, “enhanced
interrogation” torture of suspects, and omnipresent surveillance by the
national security state). Along the way
McKay has fun with Cheney’s multiple heart attacks as well as recounting the
bizarre incident when he accidentally shot a hunting companion.
McKay
never uses the critical phrases most associated with Cheney—as being the
“prince of darkness” who mused about the need to “work the dark side”. But it’s
clear he sees Cheney as a ruthless operator who has exerted a nefarious
influence on American democracy and ethical norms; the one exception being his
acceptance of a lesbian daughter and concern to protect her. For most of the
story McKay uses an unidentified narrator (Jesse Plemons) who ends up being a
heart donor. Then at the end he has an
unrepentant Cheney address the camera, and during the closing credits inserts a
mock riff on the film’s evident “liberal bias”.
The problem is that too much of this plays as parody rather than incisive
exploration of vice-presidential vices.
Adams is excellent as Cheney’s equally ambitious wife Lynne. But Carell as a cynical Rumsfeld and Rockwell
as a pliable George W. turn in amusing caricatures rather than insightful
character studies. Somehow Cheney outsmarts everyone else and the joke is on
the American people.
Vice has received an enthusiastic rave
from veteran critic Todd McCarthy in The
Hollywood Reporter but most reviews have been much less kind (a middling
65% rating on rottentomatoes.com). Bale deserves an Oscar acting
nomination. The movie unfortunately does
not. B-
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