Leslie Odom Jr. is likely to be nominated for his amazing performance as Sam Cooke in my pick of the week, One Night in Miami (but don’t miss Mank and Minari either)
Here I am, still catching up with 2020’s movies! This is an exciting batch though, as several of these are well worth seeing and likely to be in my eventual top ten (yes, I’m still doing one, just have to finish watching everything).
MANK * * * 1/2 (Dir. David Fincher)
Amanda Seyfried makes a wonderful Marion Davies
What you get out of Mank requires to a large extent what you bring to it. If you happen to have any knowledge or interest in 1) 1930’s Hollywood, 2) 1930’s politics, 3) the 1941 classic Citizen Kane, or 4) all of the above, then wow is this the movie for you. And all three happen to be in my field of interest, so in this case, David Fincher’s Mank feels like a personal serenade. Gary Oldman (despite being 20 years older than the person he’s supposed to be portraying) gives a fantastically lush performance as Herman Mankewicz, screenwriter of Citizen Kane and an infamous lush himself, who’s hired by Orson Welles (an amusingly accurate Tom Burke) to write the script in seclusion. From there the movie apes the non-linear style of Kane (along with the black and white cinematography) to flash back and forth to earlier episodes in the writer’s pre-Code Hollywood career which led to the inspiration of his greatest work, particularly his relationship with mogul William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and his mistress Marion Davies (a dazzling Amanda Seyfried). The movie is dense and specific, shaped from a script written by Fincher’s late father, which he brings to life with a dark humored energy and a sharply cynical critique of Hollywood politics and executive power structures that threaten to suffocate artists. In this the movie is not simply a nostalgic look back at old Hollywood, but a parallel to modern day, both in political criticism and personal inhibition. It’s not a love letter to the industry, though it may be one to Mank himself, a figure who remains under known in the annals of Hollywood despite winning an Oscar for his Kane screenplay, often overlooked in comparison to his brother Joseph L., the director of All About Eve and many other classics. The movie does not reach out to you- there are no open doors or windows for anyone who doesn’t know much about any one of those three topics I mentioned (having seen Citizen Kane is the minimum requirement). If you aren’t in the know, the whole thing may feel like another language altogether, a world you have no familiarity with that won’t be explained to the uninitiated (famous Hollywood figures like Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg are hardly introduced onscreen before jumping into conversation with Mank). Often I think having prerequisite knowledge of anything in order to enjoy a film is a failing of that project, but in this case the movie is so piqued to everything that tickles my funny bone that my honest reaction was to soak it all in, and revel in every delightful moment of insular pleasure. It’s one of Fincher’s best films, outsiders be damned.
MINARI * * * 1/2 (Dir. Lee Isaac Chung)
Minari pulls at your heartstrings
An American immigrant story is sensitively conveyed in Minari, an enormously moving and tremendously effective semi-autobiographical feature from Lee Isaac Chung, based on his own childhood experiences. Steven Yeun and Han Ye-ri star as Jacob and Monica, a Korean couple in their thirties who emigrated to Los Angeles as twentysomethings in the aftermath of the Korean and Vietnam wars. Now it’s the 1980’s and Yeun wants to own his own land in Arkansas to start a crop farm. The family, with two kids in tow, moves into a kind of mobile home in the rural southern state to begin life as farmers, but of course it’s not in any way easy or even encouraging. The young parents haven’t been getting along for years, so they send for Monica’s mother (the scene-stealing Youn Yuh-jung), who comes to play kooky Grandma to the kids, who aren’t adjusting easily to life in the boondocks either. This is a story that recalled to my mind Jim Sheridan’s In America, another film about an immigrant family with young kids who tries to make it in the U.S. in the 1980’s, and it reminds us that stories about the immigrant experience can be universal in unexpected ways. Minari is a bit of a tearjerker, with an evocative, beautiful score by Emile Mosseri that tugs at your heartstrings without over sentimentalizing this very human, relatable experience. Alan Kim is another scene stealer as the young son, whose unusual grandmother makes a strong impression on him before tragedy strikes. The movie is hopeful but not over optimistic, as anyone with any experience emigrating from another country and building a life in this one (or knows anyone who has), can relate to everything that happens on screen here. It invokes the ideals of America and reminds us why people want so badly to come here that they’d leave behind all they know for its illusive promise.
NEWS OF THE WORLD * * * (Dir. Paul Greengrass)
Another father/daughter journey through the Old West
Hollywood used to produce so many westerns monthly (even weekly) that it resembled a kind of assembly line product. It’s hard to contemplate that time when the genre is now rarely if ever revisited by the studios, but Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks’s second collaboration (after Captain Philiips) is the kind of low key, smoothly executed western that would have fit right in with its many predecessors- this may once have starred Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne in their later years and that you’d come across now on TCM in the middle of the night. It’s hard to believe this is Tom Hanks’s first crack at the genre, given how easily and convincingly he inhabits the role of a Civil War veteran who now roams across the Reconstruction era South and Southwest, reading newspaper stories to rural communities that have little contact with the outside world. So comfortable in the part is he that he really does invite comparison to those old stars, as he carries the entire film on his shoulders with minimal dialogue amid a largely silent relationship with a feral child (newcomer Helena Zengel), whose white and Native American families were killed, leaving her an orphan twice over. This “old man and child” setup is a familiar one of course, most recently seen in The Mandalorian, Logan, etc. but despite the formula storytelling, it’s soothing and well told comfort food with authentic performances from Hanks and Zengel that do convince us of their bond by the film’s end. Greengrass leaves the shakicam aside for this one, directing with a sprawling eye across the vast southern landscape of the American west. There’s a meandering pace which may leave some pondering the lack of action (most modern period pieces up the violence and action sequences) but as with all good westerns, there’s a well filmed shootout, and episodic encounters with danger as our two companions make their journey homeward. There are even allusions to the divisions in this country that have lasted well beyond the time this film is set, and exploitations of those divisions that make a story about a society set more than a century and a half ago somehow feel relevant to now.
ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI * * * 1/2 (Dir. Regina King)
We’re flies on the wall in One Night in Miami
Regina King’s directorial debut is an electric adaptation of Kemp Powers’s 2013 play, a lively discussion of race, power, entertainment and what makes black artists and public figures responsible to and for their community and not just their own success. These are ideas and questions that were riveting around Powers’s mind and that he took to paper as he fictionalized a night in 1964 where Malcolm X (a brilliant Kingsley Ben-Adir), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) got together to argue, laugh, and volley these themes back and forth in front of an audience (us) that asks us what to think about where each of them are coming from. King doesn’t want to film it as a play and opens up the setting as much as possible, starting off with each celebrity in a different location and taking them from one hotel room to various open spaces in and around the public area, and though it’s skillfully done, the wonderment is in the intelligence of the conversation, the importance of each man’s perspective and the times they are living through that gives weight and gravitas to the feelings they express. You’re glued to the screen as each actor (all phenomenal, but especially Ben-Adir and Odom Jr.) gets multiple turns in the spotlight to not simply impersonate his icon of the past (Brown is the only one of the group still living), but place us in their shoes as they hit the peak of their fame in what was a tumultuous era in American history, particularly for African-Americans. It’s funny, enlightening, compelling and best of all, provocative in what it asks you to consider. Forget realism, this is the kind of thing that plays can do for an audience- imagine a what if scenario that feels like it could have happened. This is what we wanted to know about them behind the scenes, what we always wanted to ask, and this film gives you the opportunity to sit in and listen.
LA LLORONA * * * (Dir. Jayro Bustamante)
A disturbing tale of politics and horror
This Guatemalan film is being advertised as a horror movie, and its distribution by the small horror studio Shudder, would lead you to think that’s what it is, but i’m here to redirect your expectations. This is a political allegory, a drama with supernatural elements and a tragic and contemporary setting. A former dictator general is tried for his past genocide of the natives and miraculously found guilty, to the rejoicing of the Guatemalan people, but then the High Court voids the case and lets him off the hook for his crimes (sound familiar?). This causes the dying general to be sheltered within his mansion with his immediate family members and servants (those who stayed) as he faces the ghosts, both literal and figurative, of his life of abhorrence. This movie is a quiet, meditative, haunting ode to the spirits of the suffering, and explores the culpability of a criminal’s family of enablers (though it gives a consciousness of guilt to his wife and daughter that assumes women have more feeling of regret than we have reason to believe based on recent events). It leaves a penetrating impact and is well worth seeking out.
PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN * * 1/2 (Dir. Emerald Fennell)
Carey Mulligan is serviceable in PYW
Promising Young Woman is a highly ambitious debut thriller for screenwriter/director Emerald Fennell, one that perhaps overreaches in its attempts to defy conventions and blend tonal shifts, but is nevertheless intriguing in its sky high aims. Carey Mulligan gives a serviceable performance as Cassie, a woman suffering from survivor’s remorse whose continual grief over the death of her best friend Nina, who killed herself (we presume) after being raped at a party in college, overtakes her life as she spends her nights feigning drunkenness at bars in order to get predatory men to take her home with them. From there she takes revenge on these men…sort of. From the style and composition of this movie (which has much in common with the tonal quirks of Killing Eve, the series Fennell worked on previously), it appears to be a revenge thriller, but the setup of Cassie’s obsessive revenge plots never quite pay off, as it’s not explicitly shown or explained what she does to these men when she has them in her sights, or what she intends to do. We know she’s angry as she sets out to make the various people guilty for perpetrating and enabling Nina’s rape pay for what they did, but the movie sets us up to root for things that may or not be taking place. The intention on Fennell’s part appears to be to throw the audience for a loop, but it doesn’t quite work as a satisfying thriller when your antihero protagonist is operating in the vein of what she could realistically do for vengeance, while the highly stylized tone of the movie- its colorful production design, striking cinematography, exaggerated pop score, suggests a pointedly unrealistic, superficially heightened reality. But then Fennell pulls her biggest twist in the final act, which launches the movie into pure revenge fantasy, and that works, for what it’s attempting- to shock the audience. But it also makes the rest of the movie seem pointless, as we were never given enough evidence to suspect what she was truly capable of, or how far she was willing to go. It’s an uneven film with interesting directorial flourishes and hints of a unique creative vision waiting to become more developed.
