My pick of the week is a tie between 1917 and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (above)
Here I am, still making my way through the films of 2019. With luck, there should be just one more batch of reviews left after this one. My recommendation of the week is a tie between Portrait of a Lady on Fire and 1917, which I liked about equally.
THE REPORT * * 1/2 (Dir. Scott Z. Burns)
How many times do we have to relearn the lessons of the past?
In some ways this movie is an excellent companion piece to Official Secrets, the year’s other recent history political drama set in roughly the same time period, taking place on the other side of the pond. Right now, when nothing can seem worse than the current monster in the White House, taken together, these two films are enough to remind us that the evils of the Bush administration were more than monstrous enough to shame whatever pride you may have felt in this country at any point in the recent past. Is there even such a thing as a Republican president who possesses human decency? Not in my lifetime at least. The Report tells the story of Dan Jones, senior staffer to Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), who spent years of his life assembling an investigative report on the CIA’s torture methods during the Bush-Cheney years. The report was commissioned by the Senate intelligence committee, and a heavily redacted executive summary was not released until 2014, after a long hard struggle to make it see the light of day. Jones went through thousands of records and produced a 7000 page document that painted many in the CIA as war criminals, none of whom ever faced accountability for their crimes against humanity. The movie flashes back and forth between Dan’s research during the Obama administration and the practices as they were put in place in the years after 9/11, and though compelling in fits and starts, it’s weighed down in the second half by too many outraged broadsides yelled almost directly into the camera by Adam Driver, as the script feels the need to explain to us why we should feel angry about this. If you have to preach to your audience about why torture is bad (and also illegal) then something was lost in the translation. It’s unnecessary and it treats the audience like children. They may be children, and torture is endorsed by popular media and has sunken into the public consciousness as acceptable at times, but nothing is more effective in an investigative drama than a simple relaying of the facts as they happened. We don’t need Dan Jones’s anger or the swelling music to convince us what’s right- if you do then you’re already lost.
A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD * * * (Dir. Marielle Heller)
This movie soars when Tom Hanks is onscreen
Fred Rogers was such an eccentric figure that the only way to approach him in a movie is to explore his effect on the people around him, as a kind of near mystical guru, a spiritual zenmaster of sorts. The same thing was more or less done in the documentary Would You Be My Neighbor, and now director Marielle Heller takes things to a surreal level in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, by focusing on the story of Mr. Rogers’s influence on one man, Lloyd Vogel (Mathew Rhys). Vogel is an investigative journalist for Esquire magazine known for hit pieces on his subjects, and Fred Rogers is the only person willing to talk to him for a “heroes” profile. He’s a man with longstanding anger towards his father (Chris Cooper), who abandoned him in childhood, and just being around Mr. Rogers for the article, being absorbed into his world of total and unique kindness, eventually has an eerily profound effect on him. The movie takes place in 1998 (based on the Esquire cover story by Tom Junod) and is framed as an episode of Mr. Rogers’s iconic children’s program, complete with dream sequences and transition scenes set in the make believe world of the neighborhood. This experiment has a hit and miss effect, but what makes the movie work is Tom Hanks’s performance as Fred, who drops all his own mannerisms to completely embody the living, breathing, gentle nature of Mr. Rogers. When he’s on screen he’s captivating, even though his character remains shrouded behind a cloud of mystery, as no one can really pierce the authenticity of the man himself. But Tom Hanks makes him larger than life, and you believe the oddness of his supremely gentle, yet overwhelming influence on others in his vicinity. It’s a strange movie at times, but a stirring one.
FROZEN II * 1/2 (Dir. Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck)
One of the most unnecessary sequels I’ve ever seen
Frozen II is such a poorly conceived film it’s almost not worth talking about. Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck return to co-direct the sequel to the 2013 phenomenon, but they had no story and no place to take the characters in what was clearly a studio mandated entry as an excuse to print more money. The movie finds Queen Elsa, her sister Ana and Ana’s boyfriend Kristof going off on a journey to find the mysterious voice in the sky that’s calling Elsa to it, and there’s some questions raised about the origins of their parents that don’t get answered, some secrets regarding spirits and mountain people, and none of it makes much sense as one forgettable song after another is plugged in seemingly at random to fill out the blank paragraphs in this meandering and muddled screenplay. There is one hilariously awful song sung by Kristof (Jonathan Groff) about being lost in the woods that appears to not be being performed as a metaphor- a scene so bad it’s already a parody of itself. Nothing of importance or meaning happens in this movie, and when Elsa apparently gives up her crown to her sister by the end, you barely realize it happened and definitely do not understand why. These cardboard characters prove they cannot stand on their own in any serious way, and don’t even get me started on Olaf, the worst sidekick in Disney history. The less said about him the better. Don’t waste your time on this one. I’ve already forgotten it exists.
PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE * * * 1/2 (Dir. Celine Sciamma)
Forbidden love in 18th century France
Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an elegant, beautifully understated yet passionate romance between a female artist and her model that takes place in 19th century France. The movie is a quiet, moving and gorgeously shot exercise in minimalism, that slowly gets more passionate as it goes along. The artist Marianne, played by Noemie Merlant, is commissioned by a wealthy woman to paint a portrait of her daughter Heloise (Adele Haenel), who is set to marry a man from Milan, where her mother hopes she will escape her life of seclusion and the memories of her late sister, who jumped off a cliff rather than go through with her own engagement. Heloise feels angry and trapped, and Marianne must capture the soul of her subject through study and secret observation, rather than let her know she has been hired to paint the portrait she knows will sell her into servitude. The films slowly and deliberately builds the relationship between the two young women, who have more in common than they realize, along with the friendship and identification of the housemaid who works for Heloise, as the film illustrates the singular realities of women in the 1700’s, exploring and bringing to life the feelings of isolation, entrapment and endless limitations of a world that asks fiery souls to bury their essences in totality. Sciamma is obsessed with physical details, faces, hidden passions and visions of an ominous and pre-written future for her heroines, and mourns their losses while celebrating their inner lives. It’s a beautiful piece of work, a painting come to life as vividly as the one created in the film.
1917 * * * 1/2 (Dir. Sam Mendes)
An intense journey through the weeds of the trenches
There aren’t as many movies about WWI as there are WWII or even other wars of the twentieth century and before. Perhaps because the first war to incorporate modern warfare was too ugly, too brutal and too devastating to look back on. Sam Mendes’s new film takes a different approach, a much hyped “long take” technique that films the entire movie in one seemingly continuous shot with tricks that hide the cuts (and a couple of fade to black moments), that have the cumulative effect of placing you alongside the action, following right there with the soldier in question. He’s played by newcomer George MacKay, a young man given the task of making his way through no man’s land with his friend Tom (Dean-Charles Chapman), to deliver a message to a regiment stationed on the other side of the battlefield, to call off their suicide attack on the Germans planned for the next day. We then follow the two as they fight their way through the fields, trenches and an abandoned village in ruins as they endeavor to fulfill their task. This film could easily be a simple cinematic stunt, but a lot of what makes it work is your emotional involvement with the main character, who is sympathetic and whose young, naive face conveys the terror and determination to make his way through hell. The cinematography is breathtaking, with the legendary Roger Deakins lighting some gorgeous nighttime shots of a countryside on fire as MacKay runs through the decay, and though the subject matter should be tough to take, as the horrors of the Great War were almost unimaginable, this movie is more like a throwback to the kind of old-fashioned wartime/action movie that manages to make the charge through battle more exciting and suspenseful rather than horrifying. This could be another effect of the long take, placing you right in the middle of the action as though you’re in a first person video game. It may not be the filmmaker’s intent to have made an enjoyable action movie over a terrifying war movie, but…what can I say? I genuinely enjoyed it.
LITTLE WOMEN * * 1/2 (Dir. Greta Gerwig)
There is curiously little heat between Jo and Laurie in this version, something that’s necessary for the story’s appeal
As a Little Women aficionado, I have no problem saying that it’s not necessary to remake this movie over and over again. There are only so many things you can do with certain material, and what Greta Gerwig does with it this time is basically take the timeline of the book apart and put it back together in non-linear order, an experiment that adds nothing to the story except confusion, especially if this is your first viewing of Little Women. Gerwig probably assumes that it isn’t, since this is one of the most remade properties in Hollywood, but even so, it’s a needless and unnecessary trick that serves no purpose the way it’s handled. The movie jumps back and forth between “present day,” which is the second half of the book when Jo is in New York and Amy and Laurie in Europe, to childhood family scenes that take place at some point in the recent past, but the problem is that no one looks any older or younger at any time in the film. With no time stamps to indicate where we are, the only signifier is sometimes (but not all the time), the length of Jo’s hair. The scenes themselves are familiar to any Little Women viewer- Jo and Laurie at the Christmas dance, Amy burning Jo’s manuscript, Beth’s scarlet fever, etc. Saoirse Ronan makes a confident and fiery Jo, but the other sisters are unconvincing, especially Florence Pugh as Amy, who has the second biggest role in this version. I said this in my review of last year’s BBC miniseries- Amy must be played by a child actress when she’s twelve year old. Florence Pugh already looks older than her age (she looks older than all the sisters and Laurie), so having her play the youngest as a 12-year-old is ridiculous to the point of distracting. Braids and bangs don’t cut it, especially when she’s in a schoolhouse surrounded by classmates who are actual adolescents. She’s utterly unconvincing in every scene of her as a child, which hurts any ability to buy her as an adult. It just doesn’t work. Other poor casting decisions are Chalamet as Laurie (also unconvincing in his love for either Jo or Amy) and Emma Watson as Meg, who is weakly written and acted. The movie is filled with anti-marriage screeds that were more appropriate for the real Louisa May Alcott and her struggles with the publication of the original story- turning the ending into a kind of meta joke does a disservice to the novel itself. One wonders why Gerwig didn’t make a stylized biopic of Alcott herself with scenes of Little Women being brought to life as she fought her battles with the editor over the ending of the novel. That would have been more original and far more interesting than another remake of the same material.
