Post by The Narrator Returns on Aug 21, 2017 22:02:44 GMT -6
Elle
The surprises start early in this film, with the credits. I went in expecting a pure black comedy, and was instead greeted with a dramatic credits sequence underscored by lush, Hitchcockian strings. These are then followed by an exquisitely dispassionate view of the end and aftermath of the rape of Michele (Isabelle Huppert), a CEO of a video game company. She cleans up the broken glass and plates and takes a bath, with the film's first great, sick joke being the perfect circle of blood in the bathwater forming from where she was raped. She brushes it away, of course.
The film is sold as a rape revenge movie, with the dark comedy elements being the intriguing x-factor of sorts, but while the rape is certainly a large part of the movie, it's still just one piece in a masterful tapestry that director Paul Verhoeven (working for the first time in French) weaves here. In fact, the midsection of the film seemingly forgets about the rape entirely, as it follows Michele as she deals with a series of subplots (all of which are joined together at a crowded Christmas dinner). Huppert doesn't play her for sympathy at all, allowing her to be unrepentantly cruel and mean to others. And yet, by not reaching for the audience to be on her side, Huppert and Verhoeven get them there anyway. Because, really, shouldn't her cat have fought back against her attacker? Doesn't her patsy of a son, who can't even hold onto a job at a McDonald's clone, deserve a little tossing around for not admitting that his girlfriend's new baby, whose skin tone is shades darker than that of the either of them, isn't his? And her mother deserves to be chewed out for insisting that she visit her (quite) estranged father, not to mention her impending marriage to a hunky young gigolo, even if she's incapacitated while the chewing out is occurring. When the rape angle does come back, it has teeth unseen even in the provocative early sections, with Michele taking the road less traveled to some truly fucked-up ends (this is very much a film by the man who brought you Basic Instinct and Showgirls; there's also some of the gore that he brought to his American sci-fi work). One watches the movie absolutely giddy that the makers got away with it, and the feeling doesn't subside after the movie ends (and not just because the ending is kind of a hilarious fuck-you to anybody left in the theater who thought the movie might finally start going the predicted way at the end). And now that this movie's villain is our president, we should take more comfort in seeing someone completely deny him the satisfaction of victimizing her (I'm sorry, I swear this is only #TrumpsAmerica reference I'll make in any movie review this year).
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- I happened to be seated near a woman who was very involved in the film. Unfortunately, that meant she very loudly gasped at the film's jumps (all from threatened or very real assaults, including a literal "It was only a cat" gag at one point), which stopped being endearing by the time the movie flashes back to the full first assault maybe ten minutes in. And no matter how many times Michele gets slapped by her assailant in this movie, this lady found every instance nothing less than shocking. I guess Verhoeven would like that his movie caused this extreme a reaction, but I might've preferred if she internalized her shock a little more.
- Silence tomorrow! Hell goddamn yeah, religious persecution all the way, baby.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
Toni Erdmann: Hell yeah, I want me some of that German tragicomedy goodness.
Paterson: Aw hell fuckin' yeah, gimme some of that Jarmusch goodness.
The Zookeeper's Wife: Seeing one second of Jessica Chastain saying "animals" in a heavy Polish accent is definitely going to be better than sitting through two hours of this.
Julieta: Almodovar is a blind spot, I'll say that much.
The Sense of an Ending: Or ~45 Years.
Split
M. Night Shyamalan's Split opens (after a great use of the now-sadly-neglected dolly zoom in the opening shot) with a back-and-forth dialogue scene that suggests the "I'm an unstoppable ego-monster" Shyamalan of Lady in the Water and The Happening. Two teenage girls are talking to one of their parents about having to bring a third, unpopular girl with them in the car, and the words they're saying go beyond tin-eared into metal-eared. Teenagers don't talk like that, grown-ups don't talk like that, people outside of bad M. Night Shyamalan movies don't talk like that. So the movie's major twist is that they actually were in a good M. Night Shyamalan movie the whole time.
If Shyamalan's comeback picture, The Visit, was him testing new waters as a way of seeing if he still had it, Split is him doing the old stuff. Gone is the (still gorgeous) found-footage cinematography of that and back is his instantly recognizable formal rigor. Here, he works with Mike Gioulakis, DoP of the similarly formally rigorous It Follows, to compose his coverage-averse medium shots and tight close-ups (this movie was shot in widescreen, and seeing James McAvoy's head nearly fill a huge theater screen really adds to the film's effect). Their work helps to liven up what is mostly a chamber piece, unfolding in one underground basement (the main deviations to that take place in the office of psychiatrist Karen Fletcher, played one of the few even theoretically good parts of The Happening, Betty Buckley) as it follows the three girls after they're kidnapped by the many personalities hijacking a man named Kevin (James McAvoy)'s body. The main ones we see are Patricia, a stern British woman, Dennis, an obsessive-compulsive creepo who imitates another personality in his sessions with Dr. Fletcher, and Hedwig, a nine-year-old only joining along because it means he'll stop being made fun of. This sounds like a recipe for McAvoy to overact, and while he's hardly subtle in the film, it's still a terrific high-wire act he pulls off here. But just as good, and more likely to be ignored, is Anya Taylor-Joy, lead of last year's The Witch. She plays the outsider of the trio, and the only one who Shyamalan seems interested in at all. Many of the film's thrills rest entirely on close-ups of her, as she comes up with escape methods on-the-spot and gazes in stony horror as those attempts fail, and she never ceases to deliver. I'd be disappointed if she was solely relegated to scream queen status for the rest of her career, but she's goddamn good at it, at least.
That's about it for the parts of this review where I can not explicitly talk about Shyamalan. First, there's his still-undeniable skills as a director of tension. This movie's got nail-biter after nail-biter, sometimes played straight and other times mixed with off-kilter comedy. The latter mode was the one that dominated The Visit, and if this isn't the overt horror-comedy that Visit was, there are sequences here that definitely recall it, most memorably one that hilariously brings back Visit's most maligned element (little white boy rapping) and marries it to Dogtooth. But Shyamalan's four Disney thrillers were more than just exercises in suspense, they're also deeply moving films even when Shyamalan overplays his hand. If The Visit didn't see that side come back to Shyamalan easily, Split does. There's genuine pathos to be found in Kevin's situation here, especially as the film goes on and the takeover of his body is further emphasized, and Shyamalan also overtly compares it to Taylor-Joy's backstory, using them as two halves of one portrayal of the scarred. They are Shyamalan's reprise of the David Dunn-Mr. Glass relationship, two broken people whose opposite choices in the battle between good and evil are really their only separation. Which reminds me...
Chances are this movie will be almost entirely remembered as a [redacted] to [redacted] and the start of a possible [redacted] (hey, at least Shyamalan isn't still trying to make studio action blockbusters, give him that). That overt element is, as I said below, dumb, poorly-written, and totally fucking irresistible to me (I was eating out of the movie's hand by the time a certain piece of music played over the final title card), but that shouldn't overshadow how many other elements of Shyamalan films past show up here. I mentioned the pieces of The Visit present here, but there's so much more. There's Kevin, who ultimately fits into Shyamalan's line of broken men made whole by the supernatural. There's hidden personality in Kevin, dubbed the Beast, which is treated alternately like a Lady in the Water-esque invented fairy tale (it works better here too, because it's not made up entirely of nonsense words) and a "Those We Do Not Speak Of"-esque fact of life. But there's also Taylor-Joy's backstory, which is doled out in a similar fashion to the last conversation Mel Gibson has with his wife in Signs... but Shyamalan only punishes those who make that connection by setting them up for a cathartic conclusion to it that never arrives. Really, much of the film sees Shyamalan recognizing that people expect him to combine disparate elements into a rousing/shocking conclusion and denying them that pleasure (I am not surprised to learn from his AVC interview that Cache was one of the films that influenced this), to the point that [redacted] is an act of mercy after two hours of blue balls. I don't know if this exists solely to lead to that, and I don't even know if that will be any good, but this is a fascinating film even without that connection, and I think a great one too. Welcome back, M. Night. I'm glad I may no longer have to be your apologist. Unless you really do make Last Airbender 2 next.
Grade: A-
Stray Observations:
- Shyamalan's cameo in this (his first noteworthy appearance since Lady in the Water) is delightful. He shows up and is immediately mocked for his lack of meticulousness, his weight gain, and his love for Hooters (no joke, his credit at the end is literally "Jai, Hooters Lover").
- I'm experiencing the strange sensation of liking this movie more and more as I write this review. I may have to see it one more time before it leaves theaters.
- This is the first movie of Shyamalan's since Wide Awake to be scored by someone other than James Newton Howard (The Visit was scorefree), and West Dylan Thordson's score does a great job of combining the more tuneful Howard elements with some really discordant elements (never better accomplishing that during the quietly masterful opening credits).
- Okay, I'll go into one spoilery thing here; when the film's Unbreakable connections are brought up, I'm not sure if one detail will be dwelled upon or just forgotten and that's that this movie ends with a character much like the evil home invader in Unbreakable, someone who was roundly defeated in that movie, getting exactly what he wants in the end.
- I can only imagine that Blank Check with Griffin and David will discuss this movie with far more insight than I can muster, but I thank you for reading through all that, assuming you actually did.
- Up next this weekend: 20th Century Women! I just watched Beginners for the first time and now I'm even more stoked for this.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
Get Out: Hell goddamn yeah.
Life: Really, Seamus McGarvey, this is what you spend your time on?
A Cure for Wellness: Thank god we sprung Verbinski from Director Jail with Shyamalan.
Before I Fall: Groundhog YA
Rings: I'm not watching your shit, Akiva Goldsman.
CHiPs: Go fuck yourself.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Finally, I'm even moderately excited for a Marvel movie again.
The Mummy: HURGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
20th Century Women
The best thing I can say about this movie is that it's exactly as good as you'd expect a team-up between distributor (and occasional producer) of fine films A24 and producer (and soon-to-be distributor) of fine films Annapurna Pictures to be. Which is to say it's amazingly good.
20th Century Women comes from Mike Mills, whose previous film was the Oscar-winning Beginners, which resembles as much a visual essay as it does a film. This film is both looser (in that it has even less plot than the already pretty plotless Beginners) and tighter (in that Mills has grown even more talented with the medium in the time between) than Beginners, and even better than that already excellent film. Beginners mused on Mills's relationship with his dad, and Women focuses on his mother, played by Annette Bening (there were a few scenes in Beginners about the mother, played by Mary Page Keller in effectively a teaser trailer for Bening's performance, whereas we see literally nothing of the dad in Women). But Bening is hardly the film's sole focus, and neither is Mills' teenage surrogate Jamie, played excellently by Lucas Jade Zumann. The movie darts around five characters boarding in the same house in 1979 Santa Barbara, including those two, punk photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig), friend of Jamie's Julie (Elle Fanning), and hippie handyman William (Billy Crudup). The effect of the way Mills flitters through incidents and lives (making more use of fast-motion than many films I can remember) doesn't become clear until partway into the film, at which point the scenes Mills chooses to stay on (like Bening and Crudup dancing first to Black Flag and then to Talking Heads) or details he chooses to point out (like Abbie dying her hair red after seeing The Man Who Fell to Earth) or even footage he inserts (including scenes from Koyaanisqatsi over Jimmy Carter's "crisis of confidence" speech) really hit with a force much greater than their small part in the film. And helping is Mills' exceedingly generous filmmaking, extending sympathy to every character at all times and capturing them in wide-open, warm frames that Mills frequently dollies out of just to give the characters enough room (this was shot by Sean Porter, and it's the furthest cry from his dark, claustrophobic work on Green Room). Mills loves these people and their mistakes and their good fortunes, and one gets the sense this movie could've been three hours spent in their company without him growing tired of it.
But who are these people? They're incredibly well-performed, for one. Annette Bening doesn't get nearly enough opportunities to shine at this point in her career (the movies she is in make me want to fall asleep rather than acknowledging their existence for any longer), and here she does just that, with a wonderful, understated performance that illuminates this woman while still leaving her slightly mysterious. Elle Fanning continues her run as the best young actress currently working, and Billy Crudup is a delight as usual, but Greta Gerwig is maybe the best in show here. She tones down the effervescence she displayed in Noah Baumbach films for Abbie, playing her as scarred (she's recovered from cervical cancer as the film opens) but still resilient and ready to live and turn her experiences into art. She's one of my favorite characters and performances of the year, and definitely the character from a 2016 film that I most want to hang out with (although ideally I'd hang out with both her and Glen Powell from Everybody Wants Some!!).
See this movie. It's that simple. It's not doing too well this weekend and may not be long for this world. Hell, Bening might not even get the seemingly surefire Oscar nom she deserves. The fact that part of your ticket money is going to Planned Parenthood is icing on the cake of you seeing the kind of terrific movie about women that we'll need more than ever now.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- I get that there's only so many looks you can give vaguely hippieish men in the 70s, but Billy Crudup, with the stache and long hair, really does look like a slightly older version of Russell from Almost Famous.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
Table 19: Well there's a cast to get me interested in your "neglected table at a wedding" movie.
Fifty Shades Darker: Why are the trailers not just extended clips of Hugh Dancy psychoanalyzing Christian Grey?
Personal Shopper
Did you see Olivier Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria and want a whole movie about Kristen Stewart's assistant character in it? Did you also wish it was called Ghosts of Sils Maria? Then have I got the movie for you!
But of course, that's simplifying things. One has to simplify things when talking about Personal Shopper, a morass of genres and ideas. Ostensibly, the main genre is that of the ghost movie, with Stewart playing the twin sister to a recently-deceased medium (as well as a personal shopper for an extremely difficult celebrity), trying to make contact with her brother in the spooky French mansion where he died. Except the ghosty parts come surprisingly early in the film, and Assayas handles them so that there's no doubt about what it is we're seeing (digital ectoplasm is vomited up). And then K-Stew leaves the mansion and aside from one shot near the middle, the only other shots we get of ghosts are of the decidedly low-fi variety (I'll just say that between this and David Lowery's A Ghost Story, this year is going to be killer for children's visions of what ghosts look like appearing in serious arthouse dramas). And then the movie is a thriller with the thrills all coming from Stewart's iPhone, where she engages in an extremely prolonged texting battle with someone or something (whatever it is, it isn't impervious to Airplane Mode) and watches videos about spiritualists on YouTube. And while all this is going on, Assayas is making an arty drama with Stewart brooding through Europe in search of clothes for her employer. I haven't gotten to the murder yet.
If any of the above paragraph sounds like I'm mocking this movie, I assure you I am not. The film is never anything less than engrossing in any of its genres, and only made more unpredictable by how thoroughly it skirts being pigeonholed. It helps that Assayas' direction (along with Yorick Le Saux's cinematography) throughout is quietly superb, even wringing tension out of all those shots of iPhone screens (I've never been more on-edge about someone taking a bit to read a text before they write a response to it). But the biggest thing that makes the movie work is Stewart. She doesn't just copy-and-paste her Sils Maria performance here (the nitwits who think she's a bad actress with only one mode remain hopeless numbskulls), instead playing someone who's naturally magnetic but just completely drained, and who only goes down from there as the paranormal business starts ramping up. She's captivating when she's doing almost nothing and only more so when she starts to break down, and she's already a pretty fierce lead contender for the best lead female performance of the year.
So back to Sils Maria. It's not just Stewart and her profession that links this to that (or the fact that Assayas recreates the opening scene of Sils Maria at least two times during this movie). Sils Maria meditated on the fluidity of identity in many forms, including the changes in perception actresses experience as they grow older, the differences between identities created by tabloids and the real thing, the recasting of roles, the blending of fictional characters and real ones, and ultimately the disappearance of a character into the aether. Personal Shopper runs even further with this, quietly uniting its individual pieces. The most obvious one is the identity of the ghost haunting Stewart, whether it's really her brother or something else, and whether the person texting her is it. But the identities for the film's flesh-and-blood characters are barely less hazy than that of the ghost. Outside of the girlfriend of Stewart's brother, who becomes Stewart's partner of sorts in communicating with him, the existence of most of the supporting cast is hinted at more than it's shown, with Stewart's celebrity only appearing in the flesh in one scene (where she doesn't speak to Stewart) and Stewart's boyfriend only being seen via Skype. One could conceivably make the case that several characters here do not exist (and Assayas seems to openly suggest such an interpretation for one of them late in the film, with a trio of duplicated shots with one key difference).
And then there's Stewart herself. She's so similar to her brother (they're both mediums, they both have the same heart condition) that his death seems to have meant the death of half her identity. Her job is maybe the biggest identity mindfuck of all, making her serve as an alternate identity through which the celebrity can buy clothes like one of the people while also denying her the pleasure of acting like the celebrity (she is not allowed to try on the clothes she buys, although goddamned if the designers she meets don't want her to do it regardless). She even literally takes her celebrity's place at one point, as a stand-in for her at a photo shoot. And it's unclear if the later turn into her text-stalker demanding that she try on her employer's clothes is liberating or even more constricting. She seems to be neither here nor there at any point in the movie, and Assayas closes the movie with an explicit confirmation of this.
I have absolutely no idea how IFC Films got AMC to show this in theaters that might be better used for more showings of Logan, given how many people are likely to hate this movie for not delivering the ghosty goods, but god bless 'em for it. And I just realized my opening title joke should've been The Conjuring of Sils Maria, shit.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- Kristen Stewart is a very pretty woman.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
The Dinner: I initially thought this was going to be a trailer for the next The Trip movie. I wish it was that.
The Lovers: Well, we finally found Melora Walters again. I just wish it was for something that looked more than okay.
Colossal: I am here for this.
Norman: This is noteworthy only because it's both the second Richard Gere trailer I saw and the second Dan Stevens trailer I saw.
Chuck: This actually played after the "and now our feature presentation" card. Looks good enough, I guess.
The Lost City of Z
I saw The Lost City of Z today, oh boy
Much has been made about what a departure from James Gray's previous work The Lost City of Z is. And yes, that is true in many respects. The film's scope is epic, spanning from England to Bolivia to France during World War I, when Gray was practically shooting a block from his apartment in his other movies. And Percy Fawcett, the real-life explorer played here by Charlie Hunnam, is a good deal more confident than any of Gray's other protagonists, who are hindered by guilt and indecision that almost never comes to Fawcett. The crisply-delivered, prim-and-proper English dialogue is the furthest thing from the streetwise, often mumbled dialogue of Gray films past. And none of Gray's other films explore, as this film does, the sometimes overt and sometimes inadvertent evils of colonialism. I'll admit, that's all it took to leave me blind to the Gray of it all, even as I loved the film. And then the final scene came about, and it started to make sense. This is essentially We Own the Night, with the skin of Fitzcarraldo attached.
The film spans 20 years in the life of Fawcett, as he makes several trips to the jungles of Bolivia, first to chart the border between it and Brazil and eventually to find the titular city. The extended sequences of Fawcett and his men, chief among them a wonderfully squirrelly Robert Pattinson, traveling along the river are among the best in the film. Gray doesn't go whole-hog into madness like Herzog or Coppola before him, but instead keeps things at a low boil throughout, where even a surprise attack on their raft is more unsettling than pulse-pounding, and no more dangerous to the explorers than one of them (played by Angus Macfadyen) being ill-equipped for the mission. And they're so goddamn purty.
The great Darius Khondji (reunites with Gray here after working on The Immigrant (my pick for the best cinematography of that year, and a movie I was glad to be able to see in theaters despite the Weinsteins' efforts to bury it), and the results are similarly spectacular and appropriate to the story. The lush jungle setting would seem to invite other directors and DoPs to make Bolivia look like a paradise on Earth, and that might even tie into Fawcett's (patronizing, if near-revolutionary at the time) belief in the goodness of Bolivian natives. But Khondji instead plays up Fawcett's perpetual dissatisfaction with anything that's not the lost city, making even the most gorgeous, sun-dappled scenery oddly murky and shadowy, to say nothing of when it get actually gets dark out. And the scenes outside of the jungle actually aren't much different, with the same combination of dim greens and yellows and all-encompassing shadows (the most extreme version of it comes in the World War I scenes, which look like someone spilled lemonade on that section of the negative). But then that final shot comes and... well, I should probably build up to that.
So, Charlie Hunnam. He's honest to god really good in this movie. I'll admit I never hated him as an actor, with his bland work in Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak being just genial enough to keep me from getting too angry at him (Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Godzilla, however...), but this is a massive step up from even the performances of his that I have liked in the past. He has just the right level of charm to make it clear why people would follow him, and he perfectly sells how Fawcett's confidence ultimately calcifies into a dooming stubbornness. Robert Pattinson is completely wonderful as his aide-du-camp, disappearing behind a great big bushy beard and a quiet nature that's only punctured in his very final scene. And Sienna Miller does very well in a part that feels like a pointed critique of what became the "Sienna Miller part" after she did Foxcatcher and American Sniper back-to-back, the role of the one-dimensional wife to a tragic man. Okay, we're finally getting back to that last scene now.
Despite the high quality of much of everything in the film, the scenes back at home with Miller's Nina Fawcett are what I've been stewing over the most since I left this movie, and they are the parts of the film that made the connections to Gray's oeuvre most clear to me. You see, Nina is, as she bluntly puts it, an "independent woman" who chafes against the constraints of male-driven society (it's even made literal by her complaining about wearing a corset). She can't get the credit for discovering a document important to Perry's case for the lost city, she is told by Perry that she can't join him on his second expedition because she's a woman, and she can't even be with her husband when he passionately lectures the Royal Geographical Society on his findings. But if it feels like this is building up to her becoming a great figure in her own right, it instead leads her into becoming an early Gray protagonist.
Gray's first three films all follow tortured men for whom family is a ball and chain while they're trying to swim. Tim Roth reuniting with his family in Little Odessa only has dire consequences for him and others, Mark Wahlberg in The Yards is left out to dry and worse by his, and Joaquin Phoenix in We Own the Night is left to become a miserable cog in the system because of his. Gray hints at this in the beginning, when the unexplained shame and disgrace of Percy's father is revealed as a reason for Percy wanting to make a name for himself, and much later on, when Percy makes the mistake of bringing along his son (Tom Holland) on a third expedition, but it's Nina who is most left out to dry. By that final scene, Nina is left completely beholden to her family, in ways that are all the more chilling for how Gray doesn't comment on them. And there's that final shot, which nods to The Immigrant and somehow manages to top its mixture of awe-inspiring beauty (Khondji finally lets loose here) and bone-deep sadness. What was once alive is now dead, and no civilization is worth that.
btw, this movie is real good. Okay bye.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- If Amazon Studios can get Lucas Hedges an Oscar nomination, I dearly hope they can use that considerable muscle to get this thing some awards attention. At least get Khondji a second nomination and make it so that he hasn't only been nominated for goddamn Evita.
- Guys, it sounds like Gray's next movie, Ad Astra, is going to be like this but with even stronger themes about family and in outer space. I'm fuckin' amped. But only if Khondji is back for it.
- Even if Ebertfest hadn't spoiled me with two fantastic audience experiences, I would've been mighty frustrated with mine here, where several people wouldn't stop goddamn whispering during the movie. I wonder if seeing it with a better audience or at home would make me love this movie even more.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea: Looks pretty good.
After the Storm: Looks pretty good.
Frantz: Looks pretty good.
Norman: Looks pretty good.
The Beguiled
Before I go on, it should be noted that this film is a piece of white supremacy and racism unheard of since the days of D.W. Griffith, and Sofia Coppola should absolutely be stopped at all costs if cinema wants to make forward progress. With that out of the way, holy shit, this film is fucking phenomenal.
Any rumblings about this being a departure for Sofia Coppola were mostly incorrect, and god bless us for that. Sure, this one has much more dialogue than several of her films combined (there's probably more talking in the opening 10 minutes than there is during the entirety of Somewhere), it takes a turn into the simultaneously sexy and gruesome, and it has a plot that clearly builds and climaxes, but that's merely windowdressing for a story that perfectly suits Coppola's skills and thematic concerns as a filmmaker. And it's the best film Coppola has made since Lost in Translation, if not The Virgin Suicides.
The film's source material was first adapted on-screen by Don Siegel in 1971, as a Clint Eastwood vehicle. That film is aggressive in its New Hollywood techniques, including zooms galore, frantic handheld shots, and silent incest flashbacks. Coppola, uh, does not play that way. So while the two films are almost identical structurally (aside from the new one having NO INCEST), their effects are totally different. This film is shot (by The Grandmaster's Philippe Le Sourd) almost entirely in tableaux, often murky (especially during a few solely candlelit scenes) even when they're not shrouded in fog. The camera patiently holds on the activities of the girls of the Farnsworth Seminary, a southern school for girls that's absent most of its students (only the ones with truly nowhere to go stayed) and all of its slaves as the Civil War draws to a close (the sound of muffled cannon fire in the distance is used more than Phoenix's sparse, electronic score). They learn French, knit, pray, and lounge around, waiting for the opportunity to leave. Coppola captures every routine in staid long shots that some of the most gorgeous and painterly of her or anyone's career (if I see a movie more gorgeous this year, I will be surprised). It's in this slow boil atmosphere that a Union soldier arrives, his leg badly scarred but everything else still devilishly handsome. Many of Sofia Coppola's other films deal with unexpected relationships as tickets out of ennui (like Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson's courtship and Elle Fanning suddenly showing up in Stephen Dorff's hotel room), but this guy is something else. He's Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), the lead of the Siegel version (played by Clint Eastwood, even), but here he's kept a remove, because his role is to be whatever the girls want to see in him. He's a kindly father figure, a piece of forbidden fruit, a ticket out, and a tempting lover from scene to scene, and all of those roles are bound to come crashing into each other.
Much has been made about this version shifting to a more female perspective than the original, and Coppola does a good job of making quiet cuts and additions tip the scales in favor of the women of the story. We almost never enter McBurney's room when it's not also occupied by a woman (which is admittedly quite often; everybody in the school quickly sneaking off to his room eventually becomes a running gag, the best variation being a visit that occurs mid-evening prayer and ends before the prayer is done), and Coppola adds all the little shots of the girls in their natural routines. Coppola also makes improvements on the performance level. Many of the women in Siegel's version (outside of Geraldine Page as Miss Farnsworth herself) either blend together or are sort of underserved, but Coppola makes sure that each is given strong showcases over the course of the film. Nicole Kidman plays Miss Farnsworth here as a matriarch who needn't raise her voice to make others respect and obey her (as she puts it in the film, "I'm as blunt as I need to be"). Oona Laurence is wonderful as Amy, the girl who discovers McBurney and regards him the kindly father figure and confidant (they share an interest in nature) denied to her while the war continues, and The Nice Guys' Angourie Rice is quite good as music prodigy Jane, who doesn't have an equivalent in the Siegel version (and if she does, they were extremely unmemorable). But the biggest improvements come with Alicia, played by Elle Fanning. Her equivalent in the Siegel movie is a one-note teenage nympho, but here, she's given all kinds of wonderful grace notes. She's not just trapped in the school, but in the image of a child, left to play and study with the younger girls at the school despite her burgeoning sexuality (she practically chafes under the modest dress she wears to dinner in one scene), so she relishes McBurney's entrance as a way of exercising atrophied muscles more than anything. It's an interesting counterpart to her character in 20th Century Women, who threw herself into sex ostensibly as rebellion, but mostly just as conformity (yes, this is your latest reminder to watch fucking 20th Century Women already). And Colin Farrell provides a very interesting counterpart to Clint Eastwood's performance in the role. McBurney in the Siegel version is definitely not a good guy, but he's practically easy-going compared to Farrell here. There's a slightly oily quality to McBurney's charm, a calculation to how he so perfectly fits each vision of him, and one gets the sense his true self is the vicious rage he unleashes late in the film.
But as excellent as the film's entire cast is, its MVP may very well be Kirsten Dunst. The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette both saw Dunst hustled into a cage that would ultimately lead to her demise, so it's fitting that she's one character here who really feels the pain of her confinement. Here she plays Edwina Dabney, the last remaining teacher at the school. In a film full of quiet looks, glances, and gestures, every look she gives is tinged with sublimated desperation and sadness with where she finds herself, like an older but not freer Lux Lisbon. McBurney offers the slightest chance of escape, but of course, that cannot be. The war may be coming to an end, but there's no such end in sight to her plight.
The Beguiled is Sofia Coppola's True Grit, a mining of existing source material for auteurist riches (and improvement on an already pretty dang good older adaptation) and one of the crowning achievements of an amazing career. Although, again, it is a racist piece of art that should be destroyed at all costs.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- I never did write a real review of Baby Driver, but I might if I end up seeing it again in theaters (which is a distinct possibility). The point is, it's real good, although this movie is even better.
- I will also likely be seeing this film again in theaters. This is the best film I've seen thus far this year, with a bullet.
- Coppola returned to 35mm for this after using digital for The Bling Ring (which, to keep the thing going, I was the only person to see twice in theaters), and celluloid's inherent softness is perfect for this like the glossy, hollow digital of Bling Ring couldn't be.
- It will be an actual prosecutable hate crime if this movie doesn't get Oscar noms for cinematography and costume design (probably production design too), at very least. Noms for Dunst, Farrell, and/or Kidman would be a dream, but I'm not getting ahead of myself here.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
Dunkirk: Screw all the nonconverted, I'm fuckin' hyped as shit for this.
Thank You For Your Service: Eh.
Atomic Blonde: Now this is more like it.
Victoria and Abdul: An even stronger "eh" than the last one.
A Ghost Story: Now this is also more like it.
Patti Cake$: An "eh" somewhere in-between the previous two "eh"s.
The Glass Castle: A smaller "eh" than any of the "eh"s before it.
- Seriously though, you need to watch 20th Century Women if you haven't. You're hurting me with every day you spend ignoring my passionate advice.
The surprises start early in this film, with the credits. I went in expecting a pure black comedy, and was instead greeted with a dramatic credits sequence underscored by lush, Hitchcockian strings. These are then followed by an exquisitely dispassionate view of the end and aftermath of the rape of Michele (Isabelle Huppert), a CEO of a video game company. She cleans up the broken glass and plates and takes a bath, with the film's first great, sick joke being the perfect circle of blood in the bathwater forming from where she was raped. She brushes it away, of course.
The film is sold as a rape revenge movie, with the dark comedy elements being the intriguing x-factor of sorts, but while the rape is certainly a large part of the movie, it's still just one piece in a masterful tapestry that director Paul Verhoeven (working for the first time in French) weaves here. In fact, the midsection of the film seemingly forgets about the rape entirely, as it follows Michele as she deals with a series of subplots (all of which are joined together at a crowded Christmas dinner). Huppert doesn't play her for sympathy at all, allowing her to be unrepentantly cruel and mean to others. And yet, by not reaching for the audience to be on her side, Huppert and Verhoeven get them there anyway. Because, really, shouldn't her cat have fought back against her attacker? Doesn't her patsy of a son, who can't even hold onto a job at a McDonald's clone, deserve a little tossing around for not admitting that his girlfriend's new baby, whose skin tone is shades darker than that of the either of them, isn't his? And her mother deserves to be chewed out for insisting that she visit her (quite) estranged father, not to mention her impending marriage to a hunky young gigolo, even if she's incapacitated while the chewing out is occurring. When the rape angle does come back, it has teeth unseen even in the provocative early sections, with Michele taking the road less traveled to some truly fucked-up ends (this is very much a film by the man who brought you Basic Instinct and Showgirls; there's also some of the gore that he brought to his American sci-fi work). One watches the movie absolutely giddy that the makers got away with it, and the feeling doesn't subside after the movie ends (and not just because the ending is kind of a hilarious fuck-you to anybody left in the theater who thought the movie might finally start going the predicted way at the end). And now that this movie's villain is our president, we should take more comfort in seeing someone completely deny him the satisfaction of victimizing her (I'm sorry, I swear this is only #TrumpsAmerica reference I'll make in any movie review this year).
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- I happened to be seated near a woman who was very involved in the film. Unfortunately, that meant she very loudly gasped at the film's jumps (all from threatened or very real assaults, including a literal "It was only a cat" gag at one point), which stopped being endearing by the time the movie flashes back to the full first assault maybe ten minutes in. And no matter how many times Michele gets slapped by her assailant in this movie, this lady found every instance nothing less than shocking. I guess Verhoeven would like that his movie caused this extreme a reaction, but I might've preferred if she internalized her shock a little more.
- Silence tomorrow! Hell goddamn yeah, religious persecution all the way, baby.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
Toni Erdmann: Hell yeah, I want me some of that German tragicomedy goodness.
Paterson: Aw hell fuckin' yeah, gimme some of that Jarmusch goodness.
The Zookeeper's Wife: Seeing one second of Jessica Chastain saying "animals" in a heavy Polish accent is definitely going to be better than sitting through two hours of this.
Julieta: Almodovar is a blind spot, I'll say that much.
The Sense of an Ending: Or ~45 Years.
Split
M. Night Shyamalan's Split opens (after a great use of the now-sadly-neglected dolly zoom in the opening shot) with a back-and-forth dialogue scene that suggests the "I'm an unstoppable ego-monster" Shyamalan of Lady in the Water and The Happening. Two teenage girls are talking to one of their parents about having to bring a third, unpopular girl with them in the car, and the words they're saying go beyond tin-eared into metal-eared. Teenagers don't talk like that, grown-ups don't talk like that, people outside of bad M. Night Shyamalan movies don't talk like that. So the movie's major twist is that they actually were in a good M. Night Shyamalan movie the whole time.
If Shyamalan's comeback picture, The Visit, was him testing new waters as a way of seeing if he still had it, Split is him doing the old stuff. Gone is the (still gorgeous) found-footage cinematography of that and back is his instantly recognizable formal rigor. Here, he works with Mike Gioulakis, DoP of the similarly formally rigorous It Follows, to compose his coverage-averse medium shots and tight close-ups (this movie was shot in widescreen, and seeing James McAvoy's head nearly fill a huge theater screen really adds to the film's effect). Their work helps to liven up what is mostly a chamber piece, unfolding in one underground basement (the main deviations to that take place in the office of psychiatrist Karen Fletcher, played one of the few even theoretically good parts of The Happening, Betty Buckley) as it follows the three girls after they're kidnapped by the many personalities hijacking a man named Kevin (James McAvoy)'s body. The main ones we see are Patricia, a stern British woman, Dennis, an obsessive-compulsive creepo who imitates another personality in his sessions with Dr. Fletcher, and Hedwig, a nine-year-old only joining along because it means he'll stop being made fun of. This sounds like a recipe for McAvoy to overact, and while he's hardly subtle in the film, it's still a terrific high-wire act he pulls off here. But just as good, and more likely to be ignored, is Anya Taylor-Joy, lead of last year's The Witch. She plays the outsider of the trio, and the only one who Shyamalan seems interested in at all. Many of the film's thrills rest entirely on close-ups of her, as she comes up with escape methods on-the-spot and gazes in stony horror as those attempts fail, and she never ceases to deliver. I'd be disappointed if she was solely relegated to scream queen status for the rest of her career, but she's goddamn good at it, at least.
That's about it for the parts of this review where I can not explicitly talk about Shyamalan. First, there's his still-undeniable skills as a director of tension. This movie's got nail-biter after nail-biter, sometimes played straight and other times mixed with off-kilter comedy. The latter mode was the one that dominated The Visit, and if this isn't the overt horror-comedy that Visit was, there are sequences here that definitely recall it, most memorably one that hilariously brings back Visit's most maligned element (little white boy rapping) and marries it to Dogtooth. But Shyamalan's four Disney thrillers were more than just exercises in suspense, they're also deeply moving films even when Shyamalan overplays his hand. If The Visit didn't see that side come back to Shyamalan easily, Split does. There's genuine pathos to be found in Kevin's situation here, especially as the film goes on and the takeover of his body is further emphasized, and Shyamalan also overtly compares it to Taylor-Joy's backstory, using them as two halves of one portrayal of the scarred. They are Shyamalan's reprise of the David Dunn-Mr. Glass relationship, two broken people whose opposite choices in the battle between good and evil are really their only separation. Which reminds me...
Chances are this movie will be almost entirely remembered as a [redacted] to [redacted] and the start of a possible [redacted] (hey, at least Shyamalan isn't still trying to make studio action blockbusters, give him that). That overt element is, as I said below, dumb, poorly-written, and totally fucking irresistible to me (I was eating out of the movie's hand by the time a certain piece of music played over the final title card), but that shouldn't overshadow how many other elements of Shyamalan films past show up here. I mentioned the pieces of The Visit present here, but there's so much more. There's Kevin, who ultimately fits into Shyamalan's line of broken men made whole by the supernatural. There's hidden personality in Kevin, dubbed the Beast, which is treated alternately like a Lady in the Water-esque invented fairy tale (it works better here too, because it's not made up entirely of nonsense words) and a "Those We Do Not Speak Of"-esque fact of life. But there's also Taylor-Joy's backstory, which is doled out in a similar fashion to the last conversation Mel Gibson has with his wife in Signs... but Shyamalan only punishes those who make that connection by setting them up for a cathartic conclusion to it that never arrives. Really, much of the film sees Shyamalan recognizing that people expect him to combine disparate elements into a rousing/shocking conclusion and denying them that pleasure (I am not surprised to learn from his AVC interview that Cache was one of the films that influenced this), to the point that [redacted] is an act of mercy after two hours of blue balls. I don't know if this exists solely to lead to that, and I don't even know if that will be any good, but this is a fascinating film even without that connection, and I think a great one too. Welcome back, M. Night. I'm glad I may no longer have to be your apologist. Unless you really do make Last Airbender 2 next.
Grade: A-
Stray Observations:
- Shyamalan's cameo in this (his first noteworthy appearance since Lady in the Water) is delightful. He shows up and is immediately mocked for his lack of meticulousness, his weight gain, and his love for Hooters (no joke, his credit at the end is literally "Jai, Hooters Lover").
- I'm experiencing the strange sensation of liking this movie more and more as I write this review. I may have to see it one more time before it leaves theaters.
- This is the first movie of Shyamalan's since Wide Awake to be scored by someone other than James Newton Howard (The Visit was scorefree), and West Dylan Thordson's score does a great job of combining the more tuneful Howard elements with some really discordant elements (never better accomplishing that during the quietly masterful opening credits).
- Okay, I'll go into one spoilery thing here; when the film's Unbreakable connections are brought up, I'm not sure if one detail will be dwelled upon or just forgotten and that's that this movie ends with a character much like the evil home invader in Unbreakable, someone who was roundly defeated in that movie, getting exactly what he wants in the end.
- I can only imagine that Blank Check with Griffin and David will discuss this movie with far more insight than I can muster, but I thank you for reading through all that, assuming you actually did.
- Up next this weekend: 20th Century Women! I just watched Beginners for the first time and now I'm even more stoked for this.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
Get Out: Hell goddamn yeah.
Life: Really, Seamus McGarvey, this is what you spend your time on?
A Cure for Wellness: Thank god we sprung Verbinski from Director Jail with Shyamalan.
Before I Fall: Groundhog YA
Rings: I'm not watching your shit, Akiva Goldsman.
CHiPs: Go fuck yourself.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Finally, I'm even moderately excited for a Marvel movie again.
The Mummy: HURGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
20th Century Women
The best thing I can say about this movie is that it's exactly as good as you'd expect a team-up between distributor (and occasional producer) of fine films A24 and producer (and soon-to-be distributor) of fine films Annapurna Pictures to be. Which is to say it's amazingly good.
20th Century Women comes from Mike Mills, whose previous film was the Oscar-winning Beginners, which resembles as much a visual essay as it does a film. This film is both looser (in that it has even less plot than the already pretty plotless Beginners) and tighter (in that Mills has grown even more talented with the medium in the time between) than Beginners, and even better than that already excellent film. Beginners mused on Mills's relationship with his dad, and Women focuses on his mother, played by Annette Bening (there were a few scenes in Beginners about the mother, played by Mary Page Keller in effectively a teaser trailer for Bening's performance, whereas we see literally nothing of the dad in Women). But Bening is hardly the film's sole focus, and neither is Mills' teenage surrogate Jamie, played excellently by Lucas Jade Zumann. The movie darts around five characters boarding in the same house in 1979 Santa Barbara, including those two, punk photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig), friend of Jamie's Julie (Elle Fanning), and hippie handyman William (Billy Crudup). The effect of the way Mills flitters through incidents and lives (making more use of fast-motion than many films I can remember) doesn't become clear until partway into the film, at which point the scenes Mills chooses to stay on (like Bening and Crudup dancing first to Black Flag and then to Talking Heads) or details he chooses to point out (like Abbie dying her hair red after seeing The Man Who Fell to Earth) or even footage he inserts (including scenes from Koyaanisqatsi over Jimmy Carter's "crisis of confidence" speech) really hit with a force much greater than their small part in the film. And helping is Mills' exceedingly generous filmmaking, extending sympathy to every character at all times and capturing them in wide-open, warm frames that Mills frequently dollies out of just to give the characters enough room (this was shot by Sean Porter, and it's the furthest cry from his dark, claustrophobic work on Green Room). Mills loves these people and their mistakes and their good fortunes, and one gets the sense this movie could've been three hours spent in their company without him growing tired of it.
But who are these people? They're incredibly well-performed, for one. Annette Bening doesn't get nearly enough opportunities to shine at this point in her career (the movies she is in make me want to fall asleep rather than acknowledging their existence for any longer), and here she does just that, with a wonderful, understated performance that illuminates this woman while still leaving her slightly mysterious. Elle Fanning continues her run as the best young actress currently working, and Billy Crudup is a delight as usual, but Greta Gerwig is maybe the best in show here. She tones down the effervescence she displayed in Noah Baumbach films for Abbie, playing her as scarred (she's recovered from cervical cancer as the film opens) but still resilient and ready to live and turn her experiences into art. She's one of my favorite characters and performances of the year, and definitely the character from a 2016 film that I most want to hang out with (although ideally I'd hang out with both her and Glen Powell from Everybody Wants Some!!).
See this movie. It's that simple. It's not doing too well this weekend and may not be long for this world. Hell, Bening might not even get the seemingly surefire Oscar nom she deserves. The fact that part of your ticket money is going to Planned Parenthood is icing on the cake of you seeing the kind of terrific movie about women that we'll need more than ever now.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- I get that there's only so many looks you can give vaguely hippieish men in the 70s, but Billy Crudup, with the stache and long hair, really does look like a slightly older version of Russell from Almost Famous.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
Table 19: Well there's a cast to get me interested in your "neglected table at a wedding" movie.
Fifty Shades Darker: Why are the trailers not just extended clips of Hugh Dancy psychoanalyzing Christian Grey?
Personal Shopper
Did you see Olivier Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria and want a whole movie about Kristen Stewart's assistant character in it? Did you also wish it was called Ghosts of Sils Maria? Then have I got the movie for you!
But of course, that's simplifying things. One has to simplify things when talking about Personal Shopper, a morass of genres and ideas. Ostensibly, the main genre is that of the ghost movie, with Stewart playing the twin sister to a recently-deceased medium (as well as a personal shopper for an extremely difficult celebrity), trying to make contact with her brother in the spooky French mansion where he died. Except the ghosty parts come surprisingly early in the film, and Assayas handles them so that there's no doubt about what it is we're seeing (digital ectoplasm is vomited up). And then K-Stew leaves the mansion and aside from one shot near the middle, the only other shots we get of ghosts are of the decidedly low-fi variety (I'll just say that between this and David Lowery's A Ghost Story, this year is going to be killer for children's visions of what ghosts look like appearing in serious arthouse dramas). And then the movie is a thriller with the thrills all coming from Stewart's iPhone, where she engages in an extremely prolonged texting battle with someone or something (whatever it is, it isn't impervious to Airplane Mode) and watches videos about spiritualists on YouTube. And while all this is going on, Assayas is making an arty drama with Stewart brooding through Europe in search of clothes for her employer. I haven't gotten to the murder yet.
If any of the above paragraph sounds like I'm mocking this movie, I assure you I am not. The film is never anything less than engrossing in any of its genres, and only made more unpredictable by how thoroughly it skirts being pigeonholed. It helps that Assayas' direction (along with Yorick Le Saux's cinematography) throughout is quietly superb, even wringing tension out of all those shots of iPhone screens (I've never been more on-edge about someone taking a bit to read a text before they write a response to it). But the biggest thing that makes the movie work is Stewart. She doesn't just copy-and-paste her Sils Maria performance here (the nitwits who think she's a bad actress with only one mode remain hopeless numbskulls), instead playing someone who's naturally magnetic but just completely drained, and who only goes down from there as the paranormal business starts ramping up. She's captivating when she's doing almost nothing and only more so when she starts to break down, and she's already a pretty fierce lead contender for the best lead female performance of the year.
So back to Sils Maria. It's not just Stewart and her profession that links this to that (or the fact that Assayas recreates the opening scene of Sils Maria at least two times during this movie). Sils Maria meditated on the fluidity of identity in many forms, including the changes in perception actresses experience as they grow older, the differences between identities created by tabloids and the real thing, the recasting of roles, the blending of fictional characters and real ones, and ultimately the disappearance of a character into the aether. Personal Shopper runs even further with this, quietly uniting its individual pieces. The most obvious one is the identity of the ghost haunting Stewart, whether it's really her brother or something else, and whether the person texting her is it. But the identities for the film's flesh-and-blood characters are barely less hazy than that of the ghost. Outside of the girlfriend of Stewart's brother, who becomes Stewart's partner of sorts in communicating with him, the existence of most of the supporting cast is hinted at more than it's shown, with Stewart's celebrity only appearing in the flesh in one scene (where she doesn't speak to Stewart) and Stewart's boyfriend only being seen via Skype. One could conceivably make the case that several characters here do not exist (and Assayas seems to openly suggest such an interpretation for one of them late in the film, with a trio of duplicated shots with one key difference).
And then there's Stewart herself. She's so similar to her brother (they're both mediums, they both have the same heart condition) that his death seems to have meant the death of half her identity. Her job is maybe the biggest identity mindfuck of all, making her serve as an alternate identity through which the celebrity can buy clothes like one of the people while also denying her the pleasure of acting like the celebrity (she is not allowed to try on the clothes she buys, although goddamned if the designers she meets don't want her to do it regardless). She even literally takes her celebrity's place at one point, as a stand-in for her at a photo shoot. And it's unclear if the later turn into her text-stalker demanding that she try on her employer's clothes is liberating or even more constricting. She seems to be neither here nor there at any point in the movie, and Assayas closes the movie with an explicit confirmation of this.
I have absolutely no idea how IFC Films got AMC to show this in theaters that might be better used for more showings of Logan, given how many people are likely to hate this movie for not delivering the ghosty goods, but god bless 'em for it. And I just realized my opening title joke should've been The Conjuring of Sils Maria, shit.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- Kristen Stewart is a very pretty woman.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
The Dinner: I initially thought this was going to be a trailer for the next The Trip movie. I wish it was that.
The Lovers: Well, we finally found Melora Walters again. I just wish it was for something that looked more than okay.
Colossal: I am here for this.
Norman: This is noteworthy only because it's both the second Richard Gere trailer I saw and the second Dan Stevens trailer I saw.
Chuck: This actually played after the "and now our feature presentation" card. Looks good enough, I guess.
The Lost City of Z
I saw The Lost City of Z today, oh boy
Much has been made about what a departure from James Gray's previous work The Lost City of Z is. And yes, that is true in many respects. The film's scope is epic, spanning from England to Bolivia to France during World War I, when Gray was practically shooting a block from his apartment in his other movies. And Percy Fawcett, the real-life explorer played here by Charlie Hunnam, is a good deal more confident than any of Gray's other protagonists, who are hindered by guilt and indecision that almost never comes to Fawcett. The crisply-delivered, prim-and-proper English dialogue is the furthest thing from the streetwise, often mumbled dialogue of Gray films past. And none of Gray's other films explore, as this film does, the sometimes overt and sometimes inadvertent evils of colonialism. I'll admit, that's all it took to leave me blind to the Gray of it all, even as I loved the film. And then the final scene came about, and it started to make sense. This is essentially We Own the Night, with the skin of Fitzcarraldo attached.
The film spans 20 years in the life of Fawcett, as he makes several trips to the jungles of Bolivia, first to chart the border between it and Brazil and eventually to find the titular city. The extended sequences of Fawcett and his men, chief among them a wonderfully squirrelly Robert Pattinson, traveling along the river are among the best in the film. Gray doesn't go whole-hog into madness like Herzog or Coppola before him, but instead keeps things at a low boil throughout, where even a surprise attack on their raft is more unsettling than pulse-pounding, and no more dangerous to the explorers than one of them (played by Angus Macfadyen) being ill-equipped for the mission. And they're so goddamn purty.
The great Darius Khondji (reunites with Gray here after working on The Immigrant (my pick for the best cinematography of that year, and a movie I was glad to be able to see in theaters despite the Weinsteins' efforts to bury it), and the results are similarly spectacular and appropriate to the story. The lush jungle setting would seem to invite other directors and DoPs to make Bolivia look like a paradise on Earth, and that might even tie into Fawcett's (patronizing, if near-revolutionary at the time) belief in the goodness of Bolivian natives. But Khondji instead plays up Fawcett's perpetual dissatisfaction with anything that's not the lost city, making even the most gorgeous, sun-dappled scenery oddly murky and shadowy, to say nothing of when it get actually gets dark out. And the scenes outside of the jungle actually aren't much different, with the same combination of dim greens and yellows and all-encompassing shadows (the most extreme version of it comes in the World War I scenes, which look like someone spilled lemonade on that section of the negative). But then that final shot comes and... well, I should probably build up to that.
So, Charlie Hunnam. He's honest to god really good in this movie. I'll admit I never hated him as an actor, with his bland work in Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak being just genial enough to keep me from getting too angry at him (Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Godzilla, however...), but this is a massive step up from even the performances of his that I have liked in the past. He has just the right level of charm to make it clear why people would follow him, and he perfectly sells how Fawcett's confidence ultimately calcifies into a dooming stubbornness. Robert Pattinson is completely wonderful as his aide-du-camp, disappearing behind a great big bushy beard and a quiet nature that's only punctured in his very final scene. And Sienna Miller does very well in a part that feels like a pointed critique of what became the "Sienna Miller part" after she did Foxcatcher and American Sniper back-to-back, the role of the one-dimensional wife to a tragic man. Okay, we're finally getting back to that last scene now.
Despite the high quality of much of everything in the film, the scenes back at home with Miller's Nina Fawcett are what I've been stewing over the most since I left this movie, and they are the parts of the film that made the connections to Gray's oeuvre most clear to me. You see, Nina is, as she bluntly puts it, an "independent woman" who chafes against the constraints of male-driven society (it's even made literal by her complaining about wearing a corset). She can't get the credit for discovering a document important to Perry's case for the lost city, she is told by Perry that she can't join him on his second expedition because she's a woman, and she can't even be with her husband when he passionately lectures the Royal Geographical Society on his findings. But if it feels like this is building up to her becoming a great figure in her own right, it instead leads her into becoming an early Gray protagonist.
Gray's first three films all follow tortured men for whom family is a ball and chain while they're trying to swim. Tim Roth reuniting with his family in Little Odessa only has dire consequences for him and others, Mark Wahlberg in The Yards is left out to dry and worse by his, and Joaquin Phoenix in We Own the Night is left to become a miserable cog in the system because of his. Gray hints at this in the beginning, when the unexplained shame and disgrace of Percy's father is revealed as a reason for Percy wanting to make a name for himself, and much later on, when Percy makes the mistake of bringing along his son (Tom Holland) on a third expedition, but it's Nina who is most left out to dry. By that final scene, Nina is left completely beholden to her family, in ways that are all the more chilling for how Gray doesn't comment on them. And there's that final shot, which nods to The Immigrant and somehow manages to top its mixture of awe-inspiring beauty (Khondji finally lets loose here) and bone-deep sadness. What was once alive is now dead, and no civilization is worth that.
btw, this movie is real good. Okay bye.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- If Amazon Studios can get Lucas Hedges an Oscar nomination, I dearly hope they can use that considerable muscle to get this thing some awards attention. At least get Khondji a second nomination and make it so that he hasn't only been nominated for goddamn Evita.
- Guys, it sounds like Gray's next movie, Ad Astra, is going to be like this but with even stronger themes about family and in outer space. I'm fuckin' amped. But only if Khondji is back for it.
- Even if Ebertfest hadn't spoiled me with two fantastic audience experiences, I would've been mighty frustrated with mine here, where several people wouldn't stop goddamn whispering during the movie. I wonder if seeing it with a better audience or at home would make me love this movie even more.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea: Looks pretty good.
After the Storm: Looks pretty good.
Frantz: Looks pretty good.
Norman: Looks pretty good.
The Beguiled
Before I go on, it should be noted that this film is a piece of white supremacy and racism unheard of since the days of D.W. Griffith, and Sofia Coppola should absolutely be stopped at all costs if cinema wants to make forward progress. With that out of the way, holy shit, this film is fucking phenomenal.
Any rumblings about this being a departure for Sofia Coppola were mostly incorrect, and god bless us for that. Sure, this one has much more dialogue than several of her films combined (there's probably more talking in the opening 10 minutes than there is during the entirety of Somewhere), it takes a turn into the simultaneously sexy and gruesome, and it has a plot that clearly builds and climaxes, but that's merely windowdressing for a story that perfectly suits Coppola's skills and thematic concerns as a filmmaker. And it's the best film Coppola has made since Lost in Translation, if not The Virgin Suicides.
The film's source material was first adapted on-screen by Don Siegel in 1971, as a Clint Eastwood vehicle. That film is aggressive in its New Hollywood techniques, including zooms galore, frantic handheld shots, and silent incest flashbacks. Coppola, uh, does not play that way. So while the two films are almost identical structurally (aside from the new one having NO INCEST), their effects are totally different. This film is shot (by The Grandmaster's Philippe Le Sourd) almost entirely in tableaux, often murky (especially during a few solely candlelit scenes) even when they're not shrouded in fog. The camera patiently holds on the activities of the girls of the Farnsworth Seminary, a southern school for girls that's absent most of its students (only the ones with truly nowhere to go stayed) and all of its slaves as the Civil War draws to a close (the sound of muffled cannon fire in the distance is used more than Phoenix's sparse, electronic score). They learn French, knit, pray, and lounge around, waiting for the opportunity to leave. Coppola captures every routine in staid long shots that some of the most gorgeous and painterly of her or anyone's career (if I see a movie more gorgeous this year, I will be surprised). It's in this slow boil atmosphere that a Union soldier arrives, his leg badly scarred but everything else still devilishly handsome. Many of Sofia Coppola's other films deal with unexpected relationships as tickets out of ennui (like Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson's courtship and Elle Fanning suddenly showing up in Stephen Dorff's hotel room), but this guy is something else. He's Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), the lead of the Siegel version (played by Clint Eastwood, even), but here he's kept a remove, because his role is to be whatever the girls want to see in him. He's a kindly father figure, a piece of forbidden fruit, a ticket out, and a tempting lover from scene to scene, and all of those roles are bound to come crashing into each other.
Much has been made about this version shifting to a more female perspective than the original, and Coppola does a good job of making quiet cuts and additions tip the scales in favor of the women of the story. We almost never enter McBurney's room when it's not also occupied by a woman (which is admittedly quite often; everybody in the school quickly sneaking off to his room eventually becomes a running gag, the best variation being a visit that occurs mid-evening prayer and ends before the prayer is done), and Coppola adds all the little shots of the girls in their natural routines. Coppola also makes improvements on the performance level. Many of the women in Siegel's version (outside of Geraldine Page as Miss Farnsworth herself) either blend together or are sort of underserved, but Coppola makes sure that each is given strong showcases over the course of the film. Nicole Kidman plays Miss Farnsworth here as a matriarch who needn't raise her voice to make others respect and obey her (as she puts it in the film, "I'm as blunt as I need to be"). Oona Laurence is wonderful as Amy, the girl who discovers McBurney and regards him the kindly father figure and confidant (they share an interest in nature) denied to her while the war continues, and The Nice Guys' Angourie Rice is quite good as music prodigy Jane, who doesn't have an equivalent in the Siegel version (and if she does, they were extremely unmemorable). But the biggest improvements come with Alicia, played by Elle Fanning. Her equivalent in the Siegel movie is a one-note teenage nympho, but here, she's given all kinds of wonderful grace notes. She's not just trapped in the school, but in the image of a child, left to play and study with the younger girls at the school despite her burgeoning sexuality (she practically chafes under the modest dress she wears to dinner in one scene), so she relishes McBurney's entrance as a way of exercising atrophied muscles more than anything. It's an interesting counterpart to her character in 20th Century Women, who threw herself into sex ostensibly as rebellion, but mostly just as conformity (yes, this is your latest reminder to watch fucking 20th Century Women already). And Colin Farrell provides a very interesting counterpart to Clint Eastwood's performance in the role. McBurney in the Siegel version is definitely not a good guy, but he's practically easy-going compared to Farrell here. There's a slightly oily quality to McBurney's charm, a calculation to how he so perfectly fits each vision of him, and one gets the sense his true self is the vicious rage he unleashes late in the film.
But as excellent as the film's entire cast is, its MVP may very well be Kirsten Dunst. The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette both saw Dunst hustled into a cage that would ultimately lead to her demise, so it's fitting that she's one character here who really feels the pain of her confinement. Here she plays Edwina Dabney, the last remaining teacher at the school. In a film full of quiet looks, glances, and gestures, every look she gives is tinged with sublimated desperation and sadness with where she finds herself, like an older but not freer Lux Lisbon. McBurney offers the slightest chance of escape, but of course, that cannot be. The war may be coming to an end, but there's no such end in sight to her plight.
The Beguiled is Sofia Coppola's True Grit, a mining of existing source material for auteurist riches (and improvement on an already pretty dang good older adaptation) and one of the crowning achievements of an amazing career. Although, again, it is a racist piece of art that should be destroyed at all costs.
Grade: A
Stray Observations:
- I never did write a real review of Baby Driver, but I might if I end up seeing it again in theaters (which is a distinct possibility). The point is, it's real good, although this movie is even better.
- I will also likely be seeing this film again in theaters. This is the best film I've seen thus far this year, with a bullet.
- Coppola returned to 35mm for this after using digital for The Bling Ring (which, to keep the thing going, I was the only person to see twice in theaters), and celluloid's inherent softness is perfect for this like the glossy, hollow digital of Bling Ring couldn't be.
- It will be an actual prosecutable hate crime if this movie doesn't get Oscar noms for cinematography and costume design (probably production design too), at very least. Noms for Dunst, Farrell, and/or Kidman would be a dream, but I'm not getting ahead of myself here.
- Trailers I Saw Before the Show
Dunkirk: Screw all the nonconverted, I'm fuckin' hyped as shit for this.
Thank You For Your Service: Eh.
Atomic Blonde: Now this is more like it.
Victoria and Abdul: An even stronger "eh" than the last one.
A Ghost Story: Now this is also more like it.
Patti Cake$: An "eh" somewhere in-between the previous two "eh"s.
The Glass Castle: A smaller "eh" than any of the "eh"s before it.
- Seriously though, you need to watch 20th Century Women if you haven't. You're hurting me with every day you spend ignoring my passionate advice.