Digging into new releases

For stay-at-home viewers such as myself, the pandemic has its brighter side, since now I frequently get to see new films on day of release, instead of waiting for 3-6 months till they reach streaming availability.  So I get to weigh in here on a more timely basis.
 
So many reasons I was eager to get an early look at The Dig (MC-73, NFX)!  It’s an adaptation of a veracious historical novel about the fabled Sutton Hoo excavation in 1939.  My son is an archaeologist in England, and my current reading is Digging Up Britain: Ten Discoveries, a Million Years of History; I’ve always got my eye out for Carey Mulligan performances; and the British landscape holds a maternal allure for me.  Count me satisfied on all counts, by Simon Stone’s movie, with just a few quibbles.  Though I am a Malick-ite myself, I’m not happy to see his mannerisms adopted by young directors, especially the asynchronous dialogue, with the characters’ voices overlapping the action.  I can accept a bit of manufactured romance, especially as portrayed by Lily James and Johnny Flynn, but wonder whether the young female character’s role was undermined from serious archaeologist to light-weight ingénue.  Carey Mulligan is the widowed and ailing landowner who hires reliable Ralph Fiennes as a self-taught excavator, to dig up a group of mounds on her property.  The rest is – quite literally – history.  And a lovely warm bath of Anglophilia.
 
Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself (MC-82, Hulu) comes from stage to screen with a ringing endorsement from Stephen Colbert (as well as a variety of celebrities glimpsed in the audience).  DelGaudio is a conceptual magician and deep-think monologist, whose one-man show was filmed repeatedly during a long run in New York, and assembled into a film by Frank Oz, who artfully interweaves audience interactions from various performances into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.  Besides dazzling card tricks, DelGaudio confronts questions of identity and self-definition in an indescribable and inexplicable mix.  Each audience member upon entry chooses one of a thousand cards reading “I am [whatever],” and at the climax of the show DelGaudio goes through the audience and tells each which card he or she has picked, in an exercise of seeing and being seen.  The performer’s mesmerizing pace was a bit slow and quiet for me (the antithesis of What the Constitution Means to Me, which just kept getting louder and faster), and didn’t strike me as deep as it did some others, but was definitely an event worth sitting through.
 
Since I tend to guide my viewing by Metacritic ratings, I was exceptionally glad to see Rocks (MC-96, NFX) on day of release.  So let me add my voice to the chorus of praise.  Sarah Gavron’s film about multi-ethnic teenage sisterhood in London was written by a Nigerian-British woman and stars another (Bukky Bakray), among a cast of real high school students who workshopped their roles for a year before filming (notably, Somali firecracker Kosar Ali), lending authenticity to the proceedings.  “Rocks” is the nickname of the stalwart girl whose rocky story this film tells.  She’s abandoned by her mother and left to care for her adorable little brother.  Resourceful and prideful, she tries to cope with her mounting problems without divulging them to anybody.  The film is by turns heartbreaking, funny, and hopeful, in a parable of resilience under adversity.  And above all, a true to life coming of age story, highly particular but with an element of universality.
 

The White Tiger (MC-76, NFX) is Ramin Bahrani’s adaptation of his college friend Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel (by circuitous routes they met at Columbia).  It stars Adarsh Gourav as a low-caste young man who rises from rural poverty to become an entrepreneur in Bangalore, and purportedly tells his backstory in emails to a visiting Chinese premier.  He considers himself the once-in-a-generation phenomenon implied by the title.  But the rags-to-riches story has its dark side, reminding us that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.  Observant, fast-paced, and darkly comic, the film hurtles along throwing out ideas and situations, about caste and class, capitalism and the humiliations of inequality, even if it never settles on one overriding theme or tone.  Tasty, but not filling.  Striking, but not memorable.  This is not quite the Bahrani I’ve come to know and admire, but definitely watchable.
 

Judas and the Black Messiah (MC-87, HBO) was another new release I was glad not to have to wait for, in a recent wave of standout Black-history-themed films.  This won’t join One Night in Miami and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (not to mention the “Small Axe” series) as one of my best of the year, but is worth seeing largely for the performances in the two title roles.  Lakeith Stanfield is compelling as the Judas, an FBI informant within the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers in the late Sixties.  Daniel Kaluuya is incandescent with charisma as Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois BPP and a master of revolutionary rhetoric and organizing at an astonishingly young age.  Dubbed a dangerous “Black Messiah” by J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen, in a scary transformation from President Bartlett), he’s put under FBI surveillance and harassment by the “pigs,” and eventually condemned to extra-judicial official murder.  Shaka King’s film focuses too much on various shoot-outs, which vitiates the shock effect of Hampton’s assassination in his sleep by three coordinated branches of so-called law enforcement, and leaves less scope for the very interesting psychology and politics of the title pair.  The story is true in large measure, but a little too much movie action and romance, and not enough documentary realism and depth.  Two knock-out performances, however.

There was no recent film I approached with more anticipation than Nomadland (MC-94, Hulu), based on my enthusiasm for Chloé Zhao’s previous film, The Rider.  While I always look forward to a Frances McDormand performance, I didn’t realize how instrumental she was to this film, having herself purchased the rights to the nonfiction book of the same name and then recruited Zhao to write and direct, bringing along super cinematographer Joshua James Richards.  What a match!  Zhao has already proven adept at mixing documentary and narrative in film, and McDormand is the most natural and responsive of actors, whether she is a mere figure in the landscape or so close up that her face eclipses the outdoors and becomes a landscape all its own.  Some of the subjects reported by the book play themselves in the film, around a few professionals such as David Strathairn.  Fran McD is Fern, a fictionalized character – not only has her husband died, the Nevada company town where she lived was literally wiped from the map when the company left.  So she is reduced to living in her van, and driving around to seasonal jobs at Amazon warehouses or beet harvesting or park maintenance all across the West.  She finds a community amongst her fellow nomads, and relishes the freedom of the open road and the change of natural vistas, despite all the inconvenience and adversity.  Zhao’s touch is deft, and Richards’ camera takes it all in, and the music adds to the contemplative whole.  This is the exceptional movie that I wish I could see in a theater at maximum projection.  It seems likely to be the rare year when the best film actually wins a Best Picture Oscar, as well as Best Director and Best Actress.  I'd call this a neorealist masterpiece.