Between the period when critics
issue Top Tens and the period when annual awards are handed out, I’ll be doing
my best to catch up with the best films of 2023, from streaming channels or on
DVD, and adding them to this post.
With
Barbie (MC-80, Max),
the question is whether Mattel has coopted Greta Gerwig or rather the reverse? And the answer is that it doesn’t really
matter, since the brainy result is so effective and entertaining, confirming
Gerwig as an auteur to be followed, wherever her career may take her. Starting with a hilarious parody of the start
of 2001, this film takes its wild and wonderful way from Barbieland to
La-La-Land and back again. As
“Stereotypical” Barbie and Ken, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are outstanding,
but all the other Barbies and Kens are pretty good as well, peopled by various
celebrities and even some graduates of Sex Education. Boldly pink, meticulously detailed, and
comically lavish, the décor and costumes are delightfully over the top, along
with music & dance routines to match.
It’s all giddy fun, the quintessence of pop art, with some serious
points to make about feminism and the patriarchy. So, is it a commercial for Mattel or a witty deconstruction? Who cares, since the movie grossed a
billion bucks, and worked out for all involved? But I am highly unlikely to watch any more of the toy-branded
blockbusters inevitably coming our way (unless Scorsese decides to direct one, ha-ha).
Instead the greatest
filmmaker of my generation delivers a 3½ hour epic that mixes Western,
gangster, historical, and romantic genres in the powerful but overstuffed Killers
of the Flower Moon (MC-89,
Apple+). Scorsese’s adaptation of the
David Grann true-crime bestseller shifts the focus from the birth of the FBI to
the oil-rich Osage people, and their systematic murder by predatory white men,
right around the time of the Tulsa Race Massacre in the same state. Indigenous people are given a voice in this
telling, though subsequently sidelined in a tale of crime and punishment that
revolves around the white villains, with Robert DeNiro as the most duplicitously
evil of the crime bosses he has portrayed for Scorsese (with more than a hint
of contemporary political relevance), and Leonardo DiCaprio as the most
dimwitted of his henchmen, somewhat offset by his love for his Osage wife,
despite his involvement in the murder of her family members. Lily Gladstone caught my eye in Certain
Women, and her profound presence here has earned well-deserved Best Actress
nominations. As if to sum up his
distinguished career at eighty, Scorsese flourishes all his strengths except
concision, and packs recollection of so many of his films into this valedictory
that it feels like a career retrospective in one big film. So many good things, yet so protracted I
wished it were a series (like Deadwood) rather than a single film. Let’s hope it’s not the last masterpiece from
the maestro.
For another glowing
performance from Lily Gladstone, track down The Unknown Country (MC-82, Mubi). She is the lodestone that holds together the
heterogeneous elements of Morrisa Maltz’s debut feature. After the death of the grandmother she’s been
caring for, Gladstone hops in her old Cadillac and heads out on a roadtrip to
recapture her ancestor’s early life. She
drives from Minnesota through the Dakotas to a cousin’s wedding on the Lakota
reservation, and then follows grandma’s own wanderlust down to Texas. That quest anchors disparate semi-documentary
scenes amidst grand and degraded landscapes, finding humanity in unexpected
corners of Trumpland, as heard on the car radio. With echoes of Nomadland and Terrence
Malick, Maltz mixes lush and hardscrabble imagery with Gladstone’s watchful
depth, in this all-over-the-map but deeply-felt film.
In style and setting, The
Holdovers (MC-82, Peacock) is a 1970s
throwback that revisits two of director Alexander Payne’s great early films, Election
for its high school setting and Sideways for cranky star Paul
Giamatti. Here the school is a New
England prep (filmed partly at Deerfield Academy, where co-lead Dominic Sessa
was discovered), and Giamatti is a cantankerous old teacher of ancient history. He’s flunked the son of a major donor and
hence been assigned the duty of watching over the students whose parents have
abandoned them over the Christmas holiday.
His charges are soon reduced to one troubled boy, watched over by the
school’s Black cafeteria manager (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, deserving of her
supporting actress nominations), whose son recently graduated from the school
but, lacking money for a college deferment, was killed in Vietnam. The three eventually take off for a
revelatory holiday roadtrip to Boston.
Working from David Hemingson’s semi-autobiographical script, Payne is somewhat
less sardonic and more sentimental than usual, conspiring to produce a new
breed of "Christmas classic," with a pleasant mix of wit and heart.
With American Fiction (MC-82, MGM+),
Cord Jefferson debuted as director and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Oscar-nominated Jeffrey Wright is the film’s center
of gravity (and levity) as a college professor who writes erudite novels based
on Greek classics. Angry at his
publisher’s demand to write Black, he composes a satiric ghetto novel that
meets unexpected success. Meanwhile, he has
returned from the distant West Coast to his well-educated and well-to-do family,
and their homes in Boston and on the South Shore. With mother, brother, and sister (all
well-portrayed), he seethes with barely repressed anger (derived from his
father, whose prior suicide overshadows all) in a quietly comic manner. A welcoming neighbor lady might soften his
rough edges, but he’s just too abrasive.
A movie deal leads to the film we are watching, which is given three
different endings in a meta twist that definitely worked for me, preposterously
funny, clinching the film’s theme of the twists and turns of blaxploitation.
In Fallen Leaves (MC-86, Mubi), the
accomplished Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki deploys a minimalist style
reminiscent of Bresson or Fassbinder, but overflowing with humor and humanity. This understated rom-com about two deadpan characters
leading dreary lives is spare and constrained in its 81 minutes, but potent in
its nonstop cinephile allusions and precisely-chosen pop songs, which serve to
universalize the poignancy of this unlikely pairing. She’s a lonely fortysomething moving between
various menial jobs, he’s a drunk of similar age working in railroad yards or
construction sites. They meet in
passing, then connect but lose touch, meet again but have a falling out, before
a crisis brings them together again. Though
the underclass social milieu may be compared to a Loach or Dardenne film, the
whole is infused with a wry wit that shines through, even when the woman turns
on the radio and it’s always playing news from the war in Ukraine, of
particular interest since Russia also borders Finland (no trace of that country’s
high happiness quotient here). If you
ever sample the Mubi channel, don’t miss this film.
Another worthwhile film from my
brief stint back on Mubi was Full Time (MC-83), a social realist
story in an action film style, mundane but jacked up, about a stressed-to-the-max
single mother with two young children commuting from a distance to her job as head
chambermaid at a ritzy Paris hotel during a rolling series of transit strikes. Eric Gravel’s film also plays against type in
starring Laure Calamy, who is more familiar in romantic comedy roles, but the
desperation that draws laughs there is effectively distraught here. The film hurtles through a transformative week
of her life, demonstrating all the hurdles she must surmount to make a living
and a life for her kids, a mission that may seem impossible.
Judy
Blume is having a moment in her mid-80s, in the news because her YA books are
being banned again, with a good new documentary on Amazon, and after fifty
years an excellent adaptation of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (MC-84, Starz) by writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig.
As a follow-up to her striking debut, The Edge of Seventeen, this
might have been called The Edge of Twelve, about a sixth-grader negotiating
a move from NYC to NJ in 1970, and meeting a new group of friends eagerly
anticipating breasts, menstruation, and first kisses. Abby Ryder Fortson is outstanding as Margaret,
charming and believable, and matched by Rachel McAdams as her mother and Kathy
Bates as grandmother. Besides physical
maturation, Margaret is on a quest for religion, since her parents’ mixed
marriage led to family ruptures and an agnostic upbringing. It’s all funny and truthful, and rivals Pen15
as an exploration of the tween girl experience. I expected modest entertainment, but got one
of the best and most enjoyable films of the year, just a missing scene or two
from perfection.
Sofia
Coppola delivers another of her bird-in-a-gilded-cage films in Priscilla (MC-79, Max), adapted
sympathetically from Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me. It’s an effective counterpoint to the
previous year’s Elvis, without a note of his music. Instead the focus is on the title character,
wonderfully embodied by Cailee Spaeny, from the 14-year-old ninth-grader he (played
with some plausibility by the towering Jacob Elordi) met and groomed while
still a soldier in Germany, to when he later brought her over to Graceland in
semi-chaste intimacy bordering on captivity, finally marrying her and fathering
her child, until she ultimately awakes from the drugged dream of their
relationship. Clearly the story is told
from her perspective but - as is Coppola’s wont - through surfaces and styles
rather than interiority. We see Priscilla/Cailee
go from adorable little teen to pompadour-ed arm-candy doll to 70s mad
housewife letting her hair down. We don’t
know what she’s thinking, but we do know how her look is changing, which is
emblematic of her life and times.
I
seem to preface my response to any Wes Anderson film with the proviso that I’m
no fan (except for Fantastic Mr. Fox and French Express) and Asteroid
City (MC-75, AMZ)
is no exception, another all-star piece of whimsy most notable for the cast
list.
He must be able to lure A-listers, in addition to his regulars like
Jason Schwartzman and Tilda Swinton, by promising them only a day or two of
shooting on a stage set in Spain. So, as
usual it’s a very mixed bag of bits.
Some incongruous jokes land, and some do not, but nothing much holds
together, in this story of a young people’s science fair in 1955 at a remote desert
town, famous for the ancient asteroid that hit there and the more recent
testing of atomic bombs, presented as a play within a play. It moves fast, with clipped dialogue and
rapid set changes, but the hypertrophic invention sometimes drags as the viewer
tries to keep up. I didn’t hate the movie,
but can offer no recommendation.
By now the Oscars have been
awarded – with the anticipated and deserving sweep by Oppenheimer – and
there are still some nominees I have yet to see, so I will be catching up with
them as I can, including two that arrive on Hulu in March that will provide the
finishing touch to my long composite review of recent offerings on that
streaming channel.