It’s Oscar season, and to mark the occasion, here’s capsule reviews of all the Best Picture nominees. If I were to handicap the race, I would say 1917 has the lead, but Little Women might be a dark horse. If nothing else, every film nominated this year bears the unique stamp of its director.
1917 (Dir. Sam Mendes):
Nothing is quite as classic in form and presentation as the war movie. While other genres like crime thrillers have become increasingly playful with narrative switcheroos and filmic sleights of hand, war movies have remained resolutely straightforward. But that was before Christopher Nolan’s World War II opus Dunkirk (2017) used a most basic premise — move troops from Point A to Point B — as a pretext for tricksy shifts of time and space. Compressing and elongating events into parallel storylines that converged at a single point, Nolan privileged form over content; one can argue whether this fracturing of the storytelling process added any depth to the events on screen, but as a demonstration of cinematic brio for its own sake, it was quite a feat.
With 1917, Sam Mendes has devised a cinematically inventive war movie of his own, which also happens to be a point A-to-Point B story. Two luckless soldiers, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Scofield (George MacKay), are tasked to venture across miles of battle lines to reach an isolated battalion, and prevent it from walking straight into a deadly ambush. Although Mendes dedicates the film to his grandfather, whose World War I tales inspired some of the movie’s events, this is one film where the telling trumps the actual story, as Mendes and the great cinematographer Roger Deakins present Blake and Scofield’s entire journey in one unbroken shot (aided by some understated CGI transitions, plus a mid-film cut to black when a character is knocked unconscious).
Technically, 1917 is undeniably impressive, thanks to Deakins’ camera, which swoops, tracks, dives underwater, and sprints alongside his characters on their perilous quest through bombed-out sets, and wastelands of bodies and barbed wire. While Colin Firth, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch are on hand to cameo as stiff-upper-lip officers, Mendes devotes most of his attention (and sympathies) to Blake, Scofield and the other grunts they encounter. Like most war movies, 1917 mourns the needless costs of conflict, and the hypocrisy of aristocratic commanders sending working-class soldiers to their deaths. In short, it’s the type of grand, sober prestige picture that often cleans up at the Oscars.
But dig underneath the usual war-is-hell themes and the filmmakers’ logistical bravado, and what is left? Mendes remains an essentially cold director, maneuvering his actors and scenery like pawns, imagining an entire world as a theatre in the round, in which new sets and backdrops are rolled out before our eyes (not surprising given his theater roots). In the process, spatial logic and plausibility suffer: one minute Scofield is surrounded by dozens of fellow soldiers on a dirt road, and in the next he’s by his lonesome one hundred feet away as the enemy takes potshots at him, his allies nowhere in sight. Thematically, it all makes a certain sense — what is war but one unending loop of potential doom? — and as a near-virtual experience, 1917 can’t be beat, as the camera’s mandated movements generate fleeting moments of suspense, danger always lurking just beyond our line of sight. But as we pinball from one crisis to another, Mendes has little to say about the devastation that engulfs his characters, or indeed, about his characters themselves, apart from striking images that look as composed as a modern art exhibit. There’s plenty of actual viscera on display in 1917, but the movie on the whole is bloodless, substituting fancy staging and precise choreography for humanity.
Ford v Ferrari (Dir. James Mangold)
Boys will be boys, James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari assures us; such a sentiment sounds downright threatening in today’s climate, but the film, which is set in the sixties, has enough self-awareness to be sarcastic about it. It would be hard not to be, when you’re dealing with the monumental egos of two overgrown boys, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) and his rival Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone). Pouring millions of dollars and a great deal of personal angst into their racing programs, the two auto giants are committed to sticking it to the other, with the turbocharged bends of the Le Mans Grand Prix their battleground. Fortunately, the movie’s true “boys” are not these mega-rich buffoons, but the men tasked with doing the actual auto designing and driving: Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), an independent car developer who Ford co-opts as their point man, and Ken Miles (Christian Bale), the hot-headed driver Shelby believes is the right man for the wheel of his newly modified GT-40 racer.
Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Keller’s script hits all the usual underdog sports movie notes: Shelby and Miles are perfectionist mavericks who constantly butt heads against the corporate establishment (represented here by a Ford double-dealing yes-man played by Josh Lucas, who’s made a career out of these roles), when they’re not daring the limits of auto specs and safety, all for love of the sport. And before you ask, yes, Miles has a dutiful wife (Caitriona Balfe) and son (Noah Jupe) at home, rooting him on despite the risks of the job. Naturally, it all builds up to a grand finale at Le Mans, as good-old American sweat and know-how shows the stuck-up Italians what’s what.
If all this sounds like a movie custom-made for Ron Howard, you’d be right — except that Howard already did his racing film a few years back with Rush (2013). Instead we get Mangold, who is less cornpone and more deliberate in his pacing (some would say plodding), with all the attendant drawbacks and benefits. The race scenes, mixing practical filmmaking with CGI, are immersive if not especially dramatic, and the humorous bits (Shelby stealing stopwatches from the Ferrari pit crew, or Miles throwing a temper tantrum at a racetrack official) tend to labor rather than soar. On the plus side, Mangold allows plenty of room for the actors to strut their stuff. Letts is a hoot as the preening, full-of-himself Ford, and Jon Bernthal brings a starched-up snap to his line readings as future automotive titan Lee Iacocca. But most of all, the film belongs to its leads. Damon, armed with a Texan drawl stolen from his buddy Matthew McConaughey, skates by on charm; he’s happy to play second fiddle to Bale, who turns in his most relaxed, likable performance in ages. In fighting trim, intense yet goofy, fully aware that he’s a pain in the ass and reveling in it, Bale’s Miles is a Movie Star Hero in capital letters, and no less fun because of it.
Ford v Ferrari rockets towards a bittersweet finish line (as anyone who knows the real-life story behind these characters might anticipate), staying old-fashioned all the way. “You can’t win a race by committee,” insists Shelby. “You need one man in charge.” The movie fits snugly in that uniquely American genre of rugged individualist heroism, where spit, polish, guts and ingenuity save the day. As these gearheads charge forward in search of that magical 7000-rpm glide, they remain boys at heart, but likable boys, nonetheless, and Bale’s performance can almost make you believe that they actually exist.
The Irishman (Dir. Martin Scorcese)
An elegiac final entry in Martin Scorcese’s triptych of gangster movies (including Goodfellas (1991) and Casino (1995)), The Irishman is a meandering, misshapen piece of work — but its essential pointlessness is the point. Based on the biography of tough-guy Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, the movie tracks his career as an enforcer and friend to infamous union leader Jimmy Hoffa, including his purported murder of Hoffa (much of which has already been debunked). Steven Zaillian’s adapted screenplay hits the standard beats: days of wine and roses in which the young Frank gains entrance and acceptance to the mob, followed by a downhill trajectory as old friends become untrustworthy or dead, and the wiseguy life turns out to not be as grand as first imagined. This time, though, Scorcese is hell-bent on de-glamorizing the life from the start, forsaking
Goodfellas and Casino‘s intoxicating tracking camera movements, where filmmaking thrills were equated with the fun of being a hood. The tone is set in an early World War II flashback, when Frank (Robert DeNiro) guns down unarmed German POWs in a shot that’s brutal and commonplace in its framing. From that point on, we’re very much aware that this man is a lunkheaded killer, and really not much more.
Which might bring up the question: Why devote an epic-length movie to a man who is the very opposite of epic? Scorcese tries to answer by doing what he does best — expanding the canvas to take in a whole milieu of characters, and settle us into a tumultuous portion of history, from JFK’s election through the dissolution of Hoffa’s empire. Forget gangland allure: cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto shoots the action in dulled-out browns and reds, and when side characters are introduced, we’re treated to subtitles revealing their eventual demise (“blown up by a mail bomb under his porch, March 15, 1981”). Adopting the conversational tone of DeNiro’s narration, Scorcese ushers us forward with infinite patience, and nary a trace of showy editing (a carnival-esque assassination scene rendered in slow motion is the closest he comes to an arty moment). As one thing leads to another in plodding, inexorable fashion, Scorcese makes his meaning plain, and it’s anything but sexy. Frank and his buddies are just palooks being led by the nose to unsavory ends, with their futures limited to either wasting away in prison, or getting riddled with bullets. It all culminates in a final execution that’s as harrowing as it gets in its banality: two aged men, murderer and victim, puttering towards an empty run-down house, neither of them wanting to be there.
The Irishman‘s primary pleasures lie in its performances. Ray Romano is all amusing bluster as a mob lawyer, while Joe Pesci, returning from retirement, is a welcome presence as Russell, a ruthless boss who’s the only sane guiding figure in Frank’s life. Meanwhile, Stephen Graham has a blast going over the top as Hoffa’s diminutive, short-tempered rival, Tony “Pro” Provenzano (a role that Pesci would have inhabited in the past). The film clicks into a sly rhythm in its lengthy mid-section when Frank and Hoffa (Al Pacino) buddy up, the crotchety odd couple plotting moves, sharing hotel rooms, and baring their souls to each other in floppy pajamas. Raging against the dying of his light, Pacino reliably hams it up, but he’s balanced out well by DeNiro’s Frank. The Irishman himself is a notably passive creature, buffeted to and fro by events, often stuck in observational mode, both rapt and befuddled, a parody of a man’s man. Indeed, the only woman who gets to make an impression is Frank’s all but mute, disapproving daughter Peggy (played by Lucy Gallina and Ann Paquin), and for good reason; what self-respecting woman would want to get mixed up with these thugs? Russell supplies the movie’s mantra when he sighs, “It is what it is.”
The Irishman is far from flawless; the controversial “de-aging” effects Scorcese uses on DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci are distracting at best, and the film’s back half gets bogged down with veiled back-and-forth power struggles between Hoffa and the mob in which much is said and then re-said, over and over. Still, there’s no mistaking the power of the film’s conclusion, in which Frank awaits death in a nursing home, stranded with nothing but memories. It’s the perfect opportunity for Scorcese to shut the door on this reprehensible man, and the gangster genre in general, but he’s not letting us off that easy. “Don’t shut the door all the way,” Frank requests of a priest, and through an open doorway, we’re forced to contemplate this husk of a man for a few moments more. It is what it is.
Jojo Rabbit (Dir. Taika Waititi)
“Give me a Heil.” So says an imaginary Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi) to the 10-year old wanna-be Nazi who conjures him up, Jojo Betzler (gawky Roman Griffin Davis). On the soundtrack, The Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” pipes up (the German version, of course). We’re in the waning days of World War II in Germany, and timid yet deluded Jojo is bent on joining the Hitler Youth and playing his role in getting rid of all those disgusting Jews — but little does he know that his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) is sheltering Jewish refugee Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) inside his home. Holy Anne Frank, Batman! What’s a self-respecting Jew hater and good little Nazi to do? Besides interrogating Elsa about what Jews are really like, and compiling his exaggerated findings in a book titled “Yoohoo, Jude,” that is?
Yes, Jojo Rabbit is a Nazi farce, the first we’ve had in a while, and it comes courtesy of Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok), who has yet to meet a genre he hasn’t tousled up with his whimsical, non-sequitur approach. Basing his screenplay on the Christine Leunens novel Caging Skies, Waititi takes the book’s solemn premise and hits turbo on anachronistic comedy. Jojo might be one confused kid, but we’re never in doubt about his essential decency — just ask the rabbit he decides to save during Nazi Youth training, instead of following his superiors’ orders to break its neck. Waititi surrounds Jojo with a bunch of caricatures: Sam Rockwell as fatalistic, closeted Nazi captain Klenzendorf (“Heil Hitler guys, you may call me Captain K”), Rebel Wilson as his gung-ho subordinate (“My uncle died in an unrelated accident, but it was the Jew’s fault”), and Stephen Merchant as a breezy Gestapo commander (“‘Hello, is this the Gestapo? I think there’s a Communist hiding behind my fridge.’ So we investigate, and it’s just some mold. Which is not far off”). Most of all we have Waititi’s Hitler, part-cheerleader, part-best friend, a loopy combination of childish whimsy and froth-at-the-mouth propaganda. “Sheesh! That was intense!” he comments when Jojo is taken off guard by Elsa’s presence. “You see how fast she moved? Like a little female Jesse Owens-Jack the Ripper.”
As a director, Waititi is so deadpan that the tongue planted in his cheek threatens to come out the other side, but when the brutality of life during wartime rears its ugly head, he presents it glancingly, heightening the impact. “Yuck,” Jojo says when he and his mother pass some executed Jews in the street, only their dangling feet visible, but Johansson’s distressed reaction says it all; it’s a scene that will be repeated later in the film to even more devastating effect. Like Davis’s Jojo, Waititi walks a difficult line between wisecracking slapstick and sincerity; the story proceeds pretty much as you would expect, but like a master fencer, his comic dodges and feints keep you off-balance. Still, Jojo Rabbit becomes something more than vaudeville every time Jojo interacts with the women in his life. Johansson is touchingly steadfast yet starry-eyed, saddened by her kid’s racism but optimistic he’ll figure things out; it’s easy to see where Jojo gets his prodigious imagination, not to mention his goodness, from. McKenzie is a steely mix of aggression and vulnerability as Jojo’s new Jewish pal, and when their burgeoning friendship is threatened by the powers that be, Waititi shifts gears, ever so slightly, for a finale that’s a strangely stirring brew of visual gags and honest fear.
Do the ends of Waititi’s flippant approach to such a dark period of history justify the means? Your mileage may vary, but Watititi’s heart, like Jojo’s, is in the right place. Operating under the assumption that nothing defeats racism, hate and fascism as well as some well-directed jokes and sincere companionship, Jojo Rabbit ends in fable-like fashion, as we’re regaled by David Bowie’s “Heroes” (the German version, of course), our hero breaking out his dancing shoes for the first time. The movie might not teach us any lessons about human decency we haven’t learned before, but any film that climaxes with a very sincere “Fuck off, Hitler!” and the sight of the Führer getting drop-kicked through a window, can’t be all bad.
Joker (Dir. Todd Phillips)
Joker is a fulfillment of sorts; more than any other movie in the DC Comics universe (and plenty have tried), Todd Phillips’ take on the Clown Prince of Crime is a straight distillation of the work of Frank Miller and Alan Moore, who revitalized mainstream comics in the eighties with their dark, politically charged takes on the Batman mythos. While nothing from Joker overtly steals from Miller or Moore’s stories (although I’m sure there are fans out there who can point out similarities I’ve missed), it adopts their corrosive tone in depicting a world going to hell, where the only response to insanity is insanity plus violence.
Set in Gotham City in the early eighties (specifically 1981, based on the Blow Out and Zorro the Gay Blade cinema marquees), we follow the fortunes of would-be comedian Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), who’s having a very bad life. Fired from a clown gig after a series of mishaps, burdened by an infirm mother (Frances Conroy) who’s clearly off her rocker, afflicted with a condition that forces him to giggle even when he doesn’t want to, and all but abandoned by any societal safety nets (his social worker and medications are cut off due to government cutbacks), Fleck is in need of purpose, not to mention a genuine laugh, and when a confrontation with obnoxious yuppies escalates to murder, his newfound notoriety threatens to turn him into something else altogether.
For most of its length, Joker is an up-close and uncomfortably personal portrait of a guy cracking up while society cracks up around him. Todd Phillips, director of the Hangover movies, is no stranger to dissolution, and he drenches Gotham with the sickly, scummy feel of pre-Giuliani New York City. One can imagine many of the shots as a Miller or Moore comic book panel, with the protagonist trapped in the center of the frame while the Babel-like ruckus of a society gone wrong threatens to pour in from the edges. Stealing moves from Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy and Death Wish, Phillips constructs the plot like one stacks a loaded deck of cards: no matter how much Arthur struggles against his hellish existence as a figure of ridicule, the world only pays him back with spite, indifference and callousness. Cruelly, Phillips holds out one shining light in the darkness — Zazie Beetz as a neighbor who Arthur finds companionship with — only to rip it away with a late twist. Even supposedly benevolent millionaire Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), father of a familiar superhero-to-be, comes off as an out-of-touch one-percenter, though one would be hard-pressed not to be alarmed when Arthur turns up on the doorstep of Wayne’s manor, claiming to be his illegitimate kid and chatting up young Bruce.
Arthur is deluded, of course. The question though, is what we’re supposed to make of him. The film’s title alone sets up expectations; we await the inevitable heel turn, and the moment Arthur becomes the anarchic psychopath the kiddies know and love. On the other hand, Phillips also wants to challenge our preconceptions of The Joker, and even conjure up some sympathy for this devil, who is as much a victim of an uncaring world as he is of his own psychoses. But Phillips’ rote attempts at a nature vs. nurture argument fall flat, given the fact that Arthur is clearly unhinged from the get-go. When his eventual transformation happens, it comes off as a particularly bad day rather than a catharsis.
In other words, Phoenix’s Joker is essentially one big pose — a conglomeration of ticks and half-formed motivations searching for a character. Still, it’s one hell of a pose, especially when Phoenix cuts loose. His limbs reduced to sinew, contorting like a performance artist, basking in the attentions of a nonexistent audience, Phoenix puts forth the kind of demonic kitchen-sink performance that will surely earn him an Oscar, and it’s to his credit that none of it comes off as overdone or self-satisfied. Still, there’s only so much one actor can do, especially when a movie goes south in its final act. When Arthur is invited to appear on a popular late night show after its unctuous host (Robert DeNiro, too uptight to convince as a glad-handing smoothie) makes fun of his comedy routine, his visit leads to a cataclysmic finale in which Phillips goes all in, dealing out heavy-handed commentary on societal rot, The Joker suddenly an unconvincing mouthpiece for the dispossessed and plain angry. “I’m waiting for the punchline,” says DeNiro, and Phoenix responds plaintively, “There is no punchline.” As it is with The Joker, as it is with the film’s sputtering conclusion, and Phillips’ smug nihilism signals that this film is not only a fulfillment, but a dead end.
Little Women (Dir. Greta Gerwig)
With a Greta Gerwig film, one can expect many things, but fustiness is not one of them. It would be easy to turn an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (the third movie version of the book so far) into a tasteful, winsome little Masterpiece Theatre confection, high on style but low on sustenance. Instead, Gerwig does what she always does: give everything an offbeat, dizzying spin, with delightful results. Not that we should be surprised. Alcott’s work, bustling with wry dialogue and literate, unpredictable heroines, is as effective a proto-feminist work you’ll find, and Gerwig plugs right into the book’s spirit, while adding idiosyncratic touches of her own. She intelligently intertwines the two parts of Alcott’s book so that the present-day developments of volume 2 reflect off the sunnier, earlier events of volume 1, and vice-versa. At its best, this back-and-forth across time is both illuminating and staggering, as when Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) descends the stairs of her family home, dreading the fate of one of her sisters, the moment played out simultaneously in two time frames, with two very different outcomes.
Otherwise, Little Women sticks close to Alcott’s tale of four precocious sisters negotiating their own shifting allegiances as well as the trying conditions of post-Civil War middle-class life. Naturally, the focus is on Jo, the budding writer of the group, firmly set on the artistic life and resistant to any suggestions that marriage is the answer to all her problems. “I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for,” she snaps; the dialogue may be straight from Alcott, but Ronan’s cadences are decidedly modern, and she’s as vivid a presence as you would want in the role. Her tête-à-têtes with her dubious publisher Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts) crystallize Gerwig’s themes: under pressure to rewrite her work to better fit what popular audiences want, Jo fights the good fight for artistic integrity over commerce, all the while recognizing that writing for the masses, like marriage, is an economic obligation.
Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen in “Little Women”
Ronan may be the top-line attraction, but the rest of Little Women‘s cast offers plenty of unexpected pleasures, especially Florence Pugh as Jo’s envious younger sister Amy. Not always portrayed in the best light in Alcott’s book, Amy emerges in this version as a fully fleshed-out figure, impetuous and prideful, yet well aware of her limitations. In only a handful of scenes, Pugh takes the character from petulance to maturity, even her posture and bearing transforming before our eyes; it’s a revelatory piece of physical as well as temperamental acting. As Jo’s would-be love interest (and Amy’s eventual suitor), Timothée Chalamet makes for an unpredictably breezy boy toy, his diffidence riding the knife edge between fervor and ennui. Bustling in the background are Laura Dern as the girls’ mother, her tight smile suggesting frustrations behind her cheeriness; Meryl Streep, likable against all odds as the March sisters’ odious aunt; and Chris Cooper, unexpectedly moving as Chalamet’s bereaved father.
Little Women does have its missteps: Emma Watson seems altogether too young and guileless to convince as Jo’s duty-bound older sister Meg, while Eliza Scanlen barely makes an impression as saintly sister Beth. (“She was the best of us,” Jo tearfully says at one point, a statement that rings hollow in the context of the film. To be fair, Alcott, like Gerwig, is far more in tune with the older sisters’ erratic passions than with Beth’s rectitude.) Gerwig also gives in a bit to convention by making Jo’s future husband, Professor Bhaer (Louis Garrel), a hunky young thing, rather than the older, more shambling figure he is in the book. Then again, indulging the audience with a romantic ending is part of the movie’s strategy. Initially adamant that the heroine of her story (that is, herself) stay single, Jo eventually caves in to her publisher and the “economic proposition” of pleasing her readers. She gets the last word nonetheless, as fresh copies of her book run off the presses before her eyes in a literary consummation as rapturous as any in recent movies. In the final reckoning, the true romance of Little Women is that between a woman and her art, and like Jo and her book, Gerwig happily stakes a claim as the author of her movie, having her cake and eating it — and getting away with it, in grand fashion.
Marriage Story (Dir. Noah Baumbach)
Name any thriller in the cinemas this year, and chances are that none of them have the slow-motion car-wreck intensity of Marriage Story, which observes the end of a marriage with a mixture of abject horror and humor. Director and writer Noah Baumbach, who has been through a divorce himself, has already staked his claim to being a hipper, up-to-date version of Woody Allen, and all the attributes that have served him well in the past are on full display here. Populated by characters that run circles around themselves with self-analysis, crammed with uncomfortably true-to-life quandaries, and peppered with gag lines that catch you unawares, Marriage Story is one rough ride, but it’s a ride worth taking.
The set-up is simple: rising indie theater director Charlie (Adam Driver) and his budding actress wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) are seeking a divorce. He’s a New Yorker through and through, and she’s a southern Californian transplant ready to return to LA for her shot at the big time in a new TV pilot. The sticking point between the two of them is custody of their son Henry (Azhy Robertson, appropriately sympathetic one moment and throttle-worthy the next), and when Nicole consults with attorney Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern) about her case, it sets off a chain reaction of escalating threats and hardships that threatens to consume the couple, and erase any last vestiges of affection they have for each other. To Nora and Charlie’s attorney Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta), as well as a labyrinthine legal establishment, the divorce proceedings are a battle that insists on winners and losers, not to mention plenty of bank. Flirting with debt, dealing with custody issues, and still reeling from the end of their relationship, Charlie and Nicole would be happy just to survive the ordeal.
As characters, Charlie and Nicole are sketched in with a few specific traits: she’s self-doubting and relentlessly introspective, he’s an artist with tunnel vision and less of a grasp on the everyday stuff. For the most part, though, they serve as likable stand-ins for the audience, and we’re meant to vicariously experience the carnage as Baumbach puts them through the wringer. It’s left to Driver and Johansson to fill in the rest of the portrait, and the two of them bring it off with aplomb. One of the quirkiest leading men in the game, Driver portrays Charlie as a man being forced awake from the deep sleep of complacency. Dazed and confused, shading from indecision to helplessness to slow-boiling rage, his off-kilter timing fits Baumbach’s hilariously awkward dialogue to a T. Johansson has less to work with, but she gets a show-stopping five-minute monologue in which Nicole struggles to articulate the reasons why it’s best she leaves Charlie, concluded by a tossed-off punchline that lands with the force of an uppercut: “Also, I think he slept with the stage manager, Mary Ann.” Circling around them are a colorful supporting cast: Dern and Liotta are wonderfully slimy as they manipulate their clients with the truth, then make plans for lunch together; Alan Alda turns up the mensch factor as a lawyer who is out of his depth precisely because he acts like a normal human; and Merritt Wever dials it up to 11 as Nicole’s discombobulated sister in the film’s most excruciating scene, a serving of divorce papers that comes off in exactly the wrong way.
Speaking of excruciating, the movie peaks down the stretch with two agonizing setpieces. In the first, a quiet conversation between Charlie and Nicole devolves into a full-on shouting match, capped with Charlie wishing death on Nicole in somewhat qualified terms (“Like, If I could guarantee Henry would be okay, I’d hope you get an illness and then get hit by a car and die!”). In the second, Charlie must prove his fitness as a parent by hosting an observer (a mousy, unnerving Mary Kelly) for dinner with Henry. Nothing of major consequence happens, and yet Charlie’s burgeoning anxiety is overwhelming, as he internally second-guesses every word he says — and that’s before he accidentally stabs himself with a pocket knife and passes out.
It would be near-impossible to follow up these two bravura sequences, although Baumbach tries. Charlie and Nicole each get a turn singing Sondheim: newly free, Nicole does up “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” with her always-crazy sister and mother (Julie Haggarty), while a forlorn Charlie finds the ironic poetry in “Being Alive.” Cute as these interludes are, they don’t have the concise emotional force of the rest of the movie. Still, as Marriage Story arrives at a conclusion that is a resolution, however tentative, Baumbach never lets Charlie and Nicole be anything less than human and relatable, which is no small thing. If the film doesn’t celebrate the ties that bind, it at least respects them, even if they’re legally erased, and arrives at a hard-won realization: sometimes just surviving is a miracle worth treasuring.
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (Dir. Quentin Tarantino)
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, set in 1969 and featuring real-life characters such as the Manson family, Sharon Tate, and other assorted celebrities, might seem as stylized as every other Quentin Tarantino film (isn’t Hollywood nothing but artifice?), just another flirtation with history in which real happenings are pounded like Play-Doh into warped alternate timelines. But while Once Upon a Time doesn’t necessarily deviate from that approach, the tenor has changed. Now three decades into his career, and drawing near to the finish line (he claims that he’ll only direct 10 movies, and this is #9), Tarantino might be feeling a bit reflective. For the first time since Jackie Brown (1997), he’s fashioned a hang-out movie, in which the paroxysms of violence and plot are secondary to his characters.
Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) are an actor-stuntman tag team, both aging out of the business and both struggling to stay relevant. Although Tarantino views them with his usual hip detachment, he clearly has affection for them. For once, what’s important isn’t bloody revenge, a glowing briefcase, or oodles of money, but a little self-respect and a final chance to ward off obsolescence, and the more relatable stakes ground his characters. Throw in the fairy-tale existence of up-and-coming actress Sharon Tate (radiant Margot Robbie), and you have something as good as anything Tarantino has ever done. In a world where everyone is besotted with the movies (even Charles Manson’s clan gets star-struck when they bump into Dalton), Tarantino’s tribute to the Dream Factory has ironically led him to his most naturalistic work in decades, and while his third act takes a few strange detours, the movie concludes with a resolution both heartwarming and elegiac—a true Hollywood ending, in fact. If Tarantino remains as knotty as ever as a filmmaker, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood shows, to pleasing effect, that even a pulp purveyor can have a beating heart underneath it all.
Full-length review: https://www.camera-roll.com/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-review/
Parasite (Dir. Bong Joon Ho)
Bong Joon Ho’s films might drape themselves in genre (Memories of Murder a police procedural, The Host a horror flick, Snowpiercer a dystopian sci-fi thriller, Okja — well, whatever the hell Okja is), but at heart they’re satires, in which facades are peeled back, and the hubris of humankind at large is laid bare. With Parasite, there’s no more pussyfooting around — the film’s title explains it succinctly, or as the characters in the movie often observe, “It’s metaphorical.”
The film begins in a subterranean setting (like we said, metaphorical). Ki-woo (Choi Woo Shik) is a ne’er-do-well kid who lacks the brains for college, reduced to living with his family in a sub-basement apartment, earning money by folding pizza boxes. Never mind dreams of hitting it big — Ki-woo would settle for living in a place where he doesn’t have to watch drunk salarymen piss above his window every night. This hardscrabble existence is soon interrupted by opportunity: Ki-woo bullshits his way into tutoring Da-Hye Park (Jung Zisa), a teenage daughter from an obscenely rich family, and when he learns Da-Hye’s brother Da-song (Jung Hyeon Jun) needs an art teacher, he refers his wiseass sister Ki-jung (Park So Dam) for the position, all the while pretending they’re unrelated. Before long Ki-woo and Ki-jung’s father Ki-taek (Bong regular Song Kang Ho) and mother Chung-sook (Chang Hyae Jin) are also brought into the fold to take on the job of family chaffeur and housekeeper, and as fast as you can say “bloodsucker,” Ki-woo and his brood have insinuated themselves into the Parks’ lives, living it up like never before.
Cho Yeo Jeong in “Parasite”
Up to this point, Parasite is as nimble and droll as anything in Bong’s oeuvre. The Parks may be prey, but as entitled rich folks, they do plenty of preying themselves. The repressed Da-Hye all but throws herself at Ki-woo, while Mr. Park (Lee Sun Kyun) regards Ki-taek with polite condescension, and Mrs. Park (an amusingly frazzled Cho Yeo Jeong) is simply unable to function without delegating everything to the hired help. As for Da-song, he’s a “troubled” kid who apparently sees ghosts, but as Parasite progresses, it becomes clear that there’s more behind his visions than mere hallucinations. Without spoiling too much, it’s accurate to say that the best-laid plans quickly unravel, and what started as a clever scheme descends into chaos and catastrophe.
Parasite is elegantly structured; Bong sets parallel sets of characters and situations against each other, and then pilots everything towards hell with Hitchcockian glee. As sometimes happens with Hitchcock, the characters can seem like mere puppets at the whim of the plot, behaving like cunning rogues one moment and dim-witted oafs the next, but Bong has a knack for throwaway bits and lines that make them feel like real people. At the very least, their frustrations are very real. “You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan,” harumphs Ki-taek. “It doesn’t matter what will happen next. Even if the country gets destroyed or sold out, nobody cares. Got it?” In the dog-eat-dog world of Parasite, late-stage capitalism might be the biggest bloodsucker of them all, the rich and poor reduced to stooges fighting each other for scraps. What begins as a satire takes a late turn into shocking violence at a genteel tea party that’s a parody of bourgeois contentment. And still Bong has one last trick up his sleeve: a melancholic denouement that plays like a bleak fairy tale, as we hunker down in another subterranean location, the characters trapped in the prison of their endless avarice. It’s metaphorical, all right, and it ranks among Bong’s best works. ■
