Postscript to last year

[Plague-time update, April 13:  Sheltering in place has given me time to take an unexpected detour and survey the career of Burt Lancaster, and to post a summary – called “Burt’s A’s & B’s” – in the Pages column to the right.  Meanwhile, I'm bringing this post to a close.]

I started this survey immediately after the Oscar sweep by Parasite, and will continue it until I actually see that film and any other contenders, covering “awards season” movies as they become available for streaming.  Or occasionally, by a library-borrowed DVD, that relic of the past, once the center of my viewing universe, while now I barely remember how to work the remote.  Recently, to stay more current, I’ve also turned to pay-per-view streaming.  Once I’ve seen everything I can or want to on Metacritic’s Top 50, I’ll conclude with my own comparative best of 2019 list.

The local library happened to have Harriet (MC-66, dvd), which was worthy enough to make one wish it were better.  Harriet Tubman’s life is certainly worth telling, Cynthia Erivo is outstanding in the role, Kasi Lemmon’s direction and all the production values are solid, but the script is not content to tell the amazing story of a genuine hero, instead has to accent it with crowd-pleasing Black Panther-ish superhero twists.  I was fully engaged, even through an unlikely leap from a bridge into a rushing river, until scenes of confrontation that made me exclaim out loud, “This is stupid!”  I’ve devoted decades of study to this period of American history, and through most of this film I was impressed with its veracity – allowing for some dramatic license – and rarely thrown out of the story by anachronism, but at some point it veered in my estimation from 12 Years a Slave to Django Unchained, which is not a good thing.  Nonetheless, I recommend this film for the history it does highlight, for the credibility of the title performance by Ms. Erivo, which is truly affecting, and for a generally fine cast.  

I appreciated the authenticity and apparent honesty of Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (MC-89, AMZ).  I expected something jokier, but these Asians turned out to be neither rich nor crazy, seeming true to life and intimately observed.  The protagonist, well-played by Awkwafina, is plainly based on Wang herself (coming from China to U.S. at age six) and I always look for the autobiographical element in any director’s work.  If it’s not there, I’m probably not watching the film, not feeling that I am seeing a reflection of lived experience.  And this film is infused with it, but in the specificities finds a generality, if not universality, of family life across cultural divides.  A dispersed clan gathers in China as news spreads of the grandmother’s impending death, one of her sons having emigrated to Japan and the other to America.  She alone is not told the news, as the family collectively takes on that burden, while the American granddaughter objects to the lie.  The clan is seen in various situations and perspectives, as individuals bear the collective burden in their own idiosyncratic ways.  Joy and sadness intermingle to complex effect, yielding affectionate satire and effective tugs of emotion.  You’re invited to the party – this funeral or wedding or family reunion, as the case may be – whatever your nationality.

I was going to politely pass by Luce (MC-72, Hulu) without comment, until I read some reviews and realized that you, dear reader, may need to be warned away.  Believe the negative reviews, discount the raves.  This film means to be provocative and controversial within a thriller format, presumably in the genre of Get Out, but it’s totally incoherent and ineffectively manipulative.  Don’t be swayed by the likes of Naomi Watts, even good actors can’t plays characters who make no sense, have no lived reality, twisted back and forth by the screenwriter’s whim.  I actually liked Kelvin Harrison Jr. as the title character, who is meant to be enigmatic, but fails to cohere as the script’s puppet.  As the poster-boy high school student – leader, athlete, performer – who happens to be black and have high-achieving white parents, the role is very reminiscent of one of the leads in Sex Education, but much less plausible, more signpost than genuine person.  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (MC-77, Kanopy) is a haunting experience, hauntingly beautiful and hauntingly horrific, sometimes both at once.  It’s sort of a BBC Planet Earth production for depressives, a visual summary of the findings of a working group of scientists who argue that in terms of geological eras, the Holocene has been replaced by the Anthropocene, where the main force changing the face of the earth is humankind, who may be setting up a Sixth Extinction.  The cinematography is stunning, with directorial credit going to Jennifer Baichwell, Nicholas de Pencier, and famed photographer Edward Burtynsky.  The sparse narration in the voice of Alicia Vikander is, well, haunting, and so is the music.  The points are not hammered home, but unfolded visually, in ways that border on the trippy, as you lose yourself in geological formations that turn out to be manmade, for example by the world’s largest excavator.  This Canadian documentary completes a trilogy with Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark.

I finally caught up with the last Oscar nominee for best documentary, The Cave (MC-83, Hulu), another eyewitness view of the carnage and devastation wreaked by the Syrian regime and Russian airpower on besieged areas of that country, from the perspective of those trying to provide medical care on the ground.  Frankly, it stuck me as somewhat superfluous after For Sama, which was certainly better put together as a film, but still gives one a glimpse of life under unimaginable and unendurable conditions.  The wrinkle in this one is that the hospital under siege is being managed by a young female pediatrician, with whom we experience all sorts of trials and tribulations, with no happy ending in sight.

The Two Popes (MC-75, NFX) is highly-watchable, with Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict and Jonathan Pryce as Pope-to-be Francis, ably directed by Fernando Meirelles, if not fully realized.  I can’t summarize the result better than A.O. Scott in the NYT, so I quote his lead:  This “is really three movies: a behind-the-scenes tale of Vatican politics, a mini-biopic about the current pontiff, and a two-man study of friendship, rivalry and major British acting. The first, though intriguing, is more puzzling than illuminating. The second feels a bit like a Wikipedia page, albeit one with first-rate cinematography. The third is absolutely riveting, a subtle and engaging double portrait that touches on complicated matters of faith, ambition and moral responsibility.”  I’d add a fourth, highbrow cultural tourism on the order of The Crown, with surrogate access to the hidden precincts of the rich and famous who are anything but nouveaux.  Hopkins and Pryce are a match made in heaven, but put them alone together in the Sistine Chapel, and you’ve really got something.  Nice to hang out at the Pope’s summer pad too.  And the spectacle of it all, all that high-class if antique fashion!  Plenty to make your eyes pop, though not enough to make you a believer.

With Knives Out (MC-82, Vudu), Rian Johnson does for Agatha Christie what he did for Dashiell Hammett in Brick, which is to create a knock-off that is both homage and subversion.  Like the Coen brothers, he has a genuine fondness for old-fashioned genres and the inclination and ability to make them his own.  In this one, a fabulously successful mystery novel writer played by Christopher Plummer dies unexpectedly in his spooky Victorian mansion (shot in Natick MA!) on the night of his 85^th birthday, for which all of his progeny are present – and suspect.  Daniel Craig is the non-police sleuth having fun with an incongruous Southern accent, and Ana de Armas is the writer’s beautiful and sympathetic young Latina caretaker.  As appropriate for the genre, an all-star cast portrays a wide range of family members with a suspicious relation to the deceased.  Johnson’s writing and direction have wit and purpose, with clever twists and complications, but beyond the fun and mindgames lies a genuine statement about good and evil, which makes for a rousing entertainment and a satisfying moral to the story.  (You might note that this is the first film I’ve watched through the Vudu rental service for recent films, which will allow me to see selected films a la carte before they reach my various subscription streaming channels.)

Reaching back to 2018, I’ve caught up with a few films on a one-month subscription to Starz.  The Wife (MC-77, Starz) centers on a dazzling performance by Glenn Close (I was surprised to find out she is almost exactly my age!), married to a famous Jewish novelist played by Jonathan Pryce.  He’s just won the Nobel Prize, and they fly to Stockholm for the ceremony, dragging a sulky grown son and stalked by a would-be biographer (Christian Slater).  Through flashbacks to the beginnings of their relationship, but mainly through the cross-currents of emotion revealed by Close’s face, the premise becomes clear – she is at least as much the author of the celebrated books as the condescending phony accepting the award.  Directed serviceably by Bjorn Runge from a witty and knowing novel by Meg Wolitzer, this film should be catnip to bibliophiles or to connoisseurs of screen acting.

I really enjoyed the British sitcom Upstart Crow, with David Mitchell as Shakespeare, which was written by all-purpose writer and comedian Ben Elton, so I was interested to see him return to the Bard with a film by and starring Kenneth Branagh.  Upstart Crow was really funny, but surprisingly true to what little is known of Shakespeare’s life, which I confirmed by reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World.  Unfortunately Branagh’s vanity project (as all of his projects tend to be) – called All is True (MC-59, Starz) – is neither as true nor as funny.  It’s serious to the point of solemnity and somnolence.  Not that there aren’t good and clever things in it, from Judy Dench as Shakespeare’s wife, to convincing period settings and costumes, to cinematography that can be striking when it is not strikingly fake, and most of all, one brief scene with Ian McKellan as Southampton, where he and Branagh quote Sonnet 29 back and forth.  The film starts with the burning of the Globe Theater in 1613 and covers Shakespeare’s return to Stratford for the last three years of his life.  The story that Elton and Branagh conjure out of that period is dubious and glutinous, but not wholly without interest or appeal.

By chance, I could repeat that sentence except for the names, and apply it to Never Look Away (MC-68, Starz), director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s appropriation of the life and career of German painter Gerhard Richter.  For this one, however, I am in the middlebrow sweet spot, knowing enough background to follow the story, but not enough to be put off by its slippery relationship to truth.  Honestly, I didn’t even mind when it passed the three-hour mark, and I thought about the interesting conversation that would have ensued if I were still hosting a film club at the Clark.  We start at the Nazis’ “Degenerate Art” exhibition with the Richter stand-in as a small boy in Dresden, then follow him from postwar training in socialist realism to the tutelage of a Joseph Beuys-like character in Dusseldorf, and finally to the brink of art-world success in the West.  I can’t guarantee you’d like this film as much as I did, but it does make me regret missing the Gerhard Richter retrospective that is currently shut down at the Met Breuer.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (MC-95, Hulu) would be an even better film to show and talk about at the Clark.  All of Céline Sciamma’s films foreground forms of female solidarity, though none is so explicitly (and naturalistically) a lesbian romance, as this period piece about a painter falling in love with her model, in a feminine twist on the story of Pygmalion (or Orpheus).  On an island off the Brittany coast sometime before the French Revolution, the artist arrives at a desolate chateau to paint a portrait of an aristocratic young woman, to be sent to a prospective husband.  The young woman does not want to marry (her sister may have committed suicide to escape that fate), and she refuses to sit for the portrait.  The painter must pretend to be a lady’s companion, and compose the portrait from secret observation, but she is observed in turn.  Sparks fly, emotions flare, things get hot indeed, but not quite in the manner of Blue is the Warmest Color.  It’s certainly not coincidental that the writer/director was in a long relationship with this object of her female gaze, Adèle Haenel; the stand-in artist being played by Noémie Merlant.  I haven’t seen so many magnificent and magical tight two-shots of women’s heads since Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.  After this film and Atlantics, Claire Mathon has made a name for herself as a cinematographer to look for and at, painterly indeed.  Check out the blue of the sea versus the blue of the interior walls; check out the maid, who looks like she stepped out of a painting by Chardin.  This is a lovely and lovable film about love, without being sentimental, more honest looking and clear thinking than vicarious wish-fulfillment.

If you’re looking for entertainment, there’s no way I’m going to convince you to watch Capernaum (MC-75, Starz), by Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki, for whom I have a particular fondness.  Her first two films were pointed but satiric; this one is a cry of rage and despair.  The name refers to a frequently-destroyed town on the Sea of Galilee, which became a byword for “chaos,” certainly applicable to the Beirut setting of this film.  In a jittery, semi-documentary style, Labaki follows an 11-year old Syrian refugee boy, as he escapes his chaotic family and finds a home with a similarly displaced Ethiopian woman and her one-year-old child, for whom he becomes caretaker, by himself when the mother is rounded up and put in jail.  In a great tradition of children’s roles in neorealist films, Zain al Rafeea is magnetic and heartbreaking, and the baby delivers one of the great infant performances in the history of cinema.  I won’t say anything about the twists and turns of the story, and how it ends.  If you’ve got the stomach for it, just immerse yourself in the tragic consequences for displaced and devalued people in the modern world, but particularly the children.

It would have been hard for me to pass up Blinded by the Light (MC-71, HBO), but I wouldn’t have missed anything if I did.  This film about the impact of Bruce Springsteen’s music on a Pakistani teen in a factory town in Thatcherite Britain is directed by Gurinder Chadha, who was one of my picks for a film series of the ten best directors under fifty, which I presented for the Clark’s 50^th anniversary celebration sometime back.  Given my appreciation for her, and my word-for-word familiarity with the Boss’s music, I took a look without having read any critical endorsements.  Ultimately I enjoyed the film’s Bollywood exuberance, but did not think it fresh or distinguished in any way, endearing but obvious, energetic but far from profound.

It’s mildly diverting to watch Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly impersonate Laurel & Hardy, on stage and backstage, in Stan & Ollie (MC-75, Starz), but the takeaway seems minimal.  The film is competently made across the board, but does not trigger any deeper engagement, except for scenes like the one where Coogan and Reilly reenact a “two-doors routine” with balletic timing.  Laurel and Hardy were certainly familiar from mid-Fifties TV reruns, but I don’t remember ever being a particular fan, and this film’s glimpse behind the greasepaint does not make them seem any more interesting.  The pair hit the road on a reunion tour in Britain in 1953, almost two decades past their peak of popularity, already supplanted in popular culture by Abbott & Costello.  The end of the road looms large in the story, predictably tear-jerking and life-affirming.  But not at all bad, if you like that sort of thing.

There are so many things to like about Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory (MC-87, Vudu) that I wonder why I wasn’t as enraptured with it as All About My Mother or Talk to Her.  If I always look for the autobiographical aspect of cinema, here is nearly naked directorial autobiography, in a tradition that includes masterworks by Truffaut and Fellini et al.  Lifelong actor-director relationships are always interesting, and in their eighth collaboration, Antonio Banderas has never been better than here, playing a subdued and hurting version of Almodóvar himself, literally wearing his clothes and performing in a replica of his apartment.  Meanwhile Penelope Cruz is back again, to play the mother in flashbacks to the director’s boyhood.  Many threads are woven into this colorful tapestry of a life, never less than engaging to watch, but somehow at a distance, as reflected in the flatfootedness of the title; the pain is depicted in brief and witty takes, but I came away with no sense of where the glory lay.  In memory, in the act of creation, in love maternal and carnal?  Probably all of the above, but I would have preferred a more direct statement along the lines of All About Myself or Talk to Me.  It’s weird to fault Almodóvar for diffidence, but I wonder if he really put enough of himself into this film.  Still well worth seeing.

It may be otiose at this point to enter my dissent to all the acclaim showered upon Parasite (MC-96, Hulu), but my reaction is the same as with two other recent hits, Get Out and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood  – why’d you have to go and ruin a perfectly good movie by resorting to cartoonish violence?  Violence exists in the world, and thus is ripe for representation in film, but the impulse to make entertainment out of it – to make it splashy, funny, and exciting – is part of the sickness of the modern world.  This laurel-laden Korean film has plenty to say about the various ills of the modern world, but squanders its message by succumbing to the virus of violence and its showy thrills.  Marvelously acted and impeccably designed, witty and observant about economic inequality, as well as family dynamics, Bong Joon-Ho's film follows one lower-class family as it infiltrates a deluxe architect’s home now occupied by a tech entrepreneur, along with his wife, son, and daughter, a family constellation mirrored in the other.  First the poor boy becomes the rich girl’s tutor, and then brings in the rest of his family in various household roles.  This is all very well done, and if I knew enough to stop the film somewhere around the 90-minute mark, I would have considered it worthy of accolade.  But having suffered to the end, reinforcing my own preference for realism over fabulation, I can only recommend that if you are looking on Hulu for an Asian film about a poor family doing what it has to do under conditions of inequality, choose instead Kore-eda’s sublime Shoplifters.

Not wanting to end this survey on a downbeat note, and seeing that Little Women (MC-91, Vudu) had finally arrived for streaming rental, I extend this post to one final film.  I’ve totally come around from a Greta Gerwig skeptic to an enthusiast (confirmed by this interview).  In this case, she threw Louisa May Alcott’s novel in a blender and came up with a real smoothie.  Bringing the fantastic Saoirse Ronan (and Timothée Chalamet) over from Lady Bird, adding emerging star Florence Pugh and Harry Potter alum Emma Watson, and flavoring secondary roles with all-stars like Meryl Streep, Laura Dern, Chris Cooper, Tracy Letts, and Bob Odenkirk, this is a delicious concoction.  Shooting in settings that are recognizably Concord-like, and appropriately incorporating Alcott’s own story into her fiction, Gerwig offers an authentic adaptation that is also oh-so-personal to herself, so there can be no questioning of whether we need yet another adaptation of this classic.  This is an entirely fresh and energetic revisiting.  What a year of creation for Greta and her partner Noah Baumbach, as they were making a baby while she made this wonderful film and he made A Marriage Story.  I hope the baby turns out as well as these two films, both of which will make my best of the 2019 list.  (I wasn’t that keen on his French New Wave adoration for her in Frances Ha, but I was ecstatic with the way she lifted the end of this film from Francois Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women.)

I’ll be back soon, after tracking down a few other films, with a post to sort out my final recommendations on the films of the year.