Sunday, May 19, 2019

At altitude, with attitude


Let’s be honest here.  Airplane viewing is no way to judge a movie, but I’m going to do it anyway, to continue my survey of the so-called best films of 2018.  On trips to and from the UK this month, there were a couple available that I expect to make my own top list, but I’ll wait for better conditions to watch them, rather than a tiny screen and tinny earbuds, over the sound of jet engines, while trapped in coffin-like seating.

Well, those conditions were suitably torturous for viewing Vice (MC-61, streaming tbd).  Director Adam McKay negotiated a successful seriocomic approach to financial collapse in The Big Short, but this biopic of Dick Cheney is neither serious nor comic enough.  Christian Bale has always been an accomplished thespian shapeshifter, and makes a credible Dick at various ages.  Amy Adams delivers Lynne Cheney in Iron Magnolia accents.  Steve Carell is way too likeable for Donald Rumsfeld, but Sam Rockwell is dim enough as W.  Some facts are delivered, but the film fails to give the devil his due, on either side, for the enormity of his evil, or for the virtue of his actions in his own eyes.  You’ll be reminded of how bad he was, but you won’t understand him any better. 

On the other side of the political ledger, On the Basis of Sex (MC-59, tbd) doubles down on hero worship of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but seems superfluous after the popular documentary RBG.  Felicity Jones is an appealing English actress, and occasionally gets future Justice Ginsburg’s accent right, Brooklyn Jewish overlaid by Ivy League.  The suddenly ubiquitous Armie Hammer is charming as her famously charming husband.  Despite some aspiration, this film does not really rise above the level of a tv courtroom drama, and never gets past her first big case.

You can see why the Oscar went to The Green Book (MC-69, tbd), since it is certainly sanctimonious and platitudinous enough for the Academy.  But in spite of predictable writing and pedestrian direction, the acting makes the film quite watchable, as long as you can keep from rolling your eyes.  Viggo Mortenson chews his way through the role of outer-borough bullshit-artist goombah (with the always-welcome Linda Cardellini as his understanding wife), who happens into a job as chauffeur/bodyguard to Dr. Don Shirley, the real-life pianist and musicologist (he literally lives in Carnegie Hall!) played with both dignity and humanity by Mahershala Ali.  They hit the road in 1962 for a concert tour into the Midwest, then taking a turn into the still-segregated Deep South.  Think of it as In the Heat of the Night meets Driving Miss Daisy, with bits and pieces from other movies, more than from anything like real life.  Still, you want to see what these unlikely road buddies will get up to, with the actors supplying some surprises that the story never does.

Appropriately scaled to the small screen, Can You Ever Forgive Me? (MC-87, tbd) came off as the best of these four in-flight “based on a true story” movies.  Melissa McCarthy shows unexpected range as a sad-sack lesbian author, whose agent won’t even try to sell her third biography, so she finds a desperate alternative source of income through forging letters by the likes of Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward.  She enlists gay fellow-drunk Richard E. Grant in her schemes, which prove lucrative for a while, but increasingly risky.  Based on Lee Israel’s autobiographical book, and directed by Marielle Heller (who emerges as a name to look for), this film seems more authentic and lived-in than the others, not to mention more darkly comic.  And of course, I appreciated the view from the margins of the Manhattan literary world, amidst bookstores and libraries.