Hulu postscript

I stuck around on Hulu an extra month to see Anora (MC-91), which won Sean Baker four Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Editing) and eponymous lead Mikey Madison (of Better Things!) Best Actress.  Social realism meets screwball comedy in this story of a sex worker with a will of iron more than a heart of gold.  Her name means “honor” or “grace,” but she prefers to go by Ani.  Brooklyn through and through, she works – very competently – in a high-toned Manhattan strip club.  Because she spoke Russian with her grandmother, she is assigned to the callow young son of a Russian oligarch, and enters a dream world of wealth and privilege in her home borough.  On a wild, drug-fueled vacation in Las Vegas, the two get married.  But consequences ensue, and her Cinderella story turns sinister.  The oligarch’s wife sends three Armenian thugs to break up the marriage, but they are no match for Ani, who makes common cause with them in going on an all-night search for her fleeing boy-husband.  Sean Baker upscales the diverse energy of his marvelous indie evocations of marginal lives in Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, achieving mainstream acceptance and then some.
 

The crucial question for A Complete Unknown (MC-70) is whether you can believe Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan, and for me the surprising answer was a resounding yes.  He’s an opaque character, in keeping with the film’s title, but inhabits the music in a way that is fully satisfying.  Edward Norton is an earnest, kindly Pete Seeger.  As Joan Baez, new-to-me Monica Barbaro nails the voice more than the look, in an effective performance.  Elle Fanning is fine in the thankless role of Dylan’s early Sixties girlfriend.  James Mangold, an accomplished director who has been down this road before with Walk the Line, stages all with confidence.  The film runs from Bobby Zimmerman’s teenage arrival in NYC to the moment he went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, offering convincing renditions of so many songs to which I can mouth along the words.  TC as BD goes from nobody to somebody, and needs to shield himself from celebrity (and affection?) in order to remain obstinately his own obsessive person.  This film should work for all but Dylan superfans or the utterly indifferent, a great companion to the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home.    

I’ve never read Clare Keegan, but the film adaptation of her novella Small Things Like These (MC-82), along with the even better adaptation of The Quiet Girl, suggests that she is a writer who can do a lot with a little.  And Cillian Murphy is an actor who has proved that he can do a lot with a little, here playing a coal merchant in 1985 Ireland who begins to pry into the local “Magdalene Laundry,” the abusive “refuge” for unwed girls and “fallen women” run by the Catholic Church for centuries.  Emily Watson is creepily even-tempered as the steely Godmother of the institution, someone inadvisable to cross.  But the Murphy character has five young daughters of his own – along with a conservative wife unconcerned with matters that are “not our business” – with flashbacks to his own history as an illegitimate child.  His conscience will not let him close his eyes to what he has seen, and Tim Mielants’ film paints an effective portrait of the small Wexford town in which his moral quandary plays out.  I certainly prefer films about moral quandaries to action films, and Murphy has an appealing and revealing inwardness that suits the story.  Too bad his moral decision ends the story without revealing its costs or outcome, but otherwise this is a deeply involving film.

It's been a decade since I ran film programs at the Clark, but I still have an eye out for art-adjacent films, and thus Exhibiting Forgiveness (MC-82) had been on my watchlist since initial release.  So its eventual appearance on Hulu constitutes a further feather in the channel’s cap.  I did not realize going in that writer-director Titus Kaphar was in effect making a docudrama about his own paintings.  That takes balls or brass or something, but he pulls it off.  With a large measure of support from his avatar, André Holland, who delivers a sensitive performance, along with singer Andra Day as his wife and Anjanue Ellis-Taylor as his mother.  While watching I wondered who made the paintings for the film, and only later realized that the film was made in order to tell the backstory of the paintings.  It works either way, because the film carries enough dramatic weight on its own, so that it’s not merely a gloss on the paintings but a layered story of its own, about coming to terms with an abusive, crack-smoking father.  This movie is much more than an act of self-promotion, and I would have been happy to show it at the Clark.

 

As usual with Hulu’s interface, you need to dig deep to discover that they cycle through a lot of worthwhile older films from month to month.  This time through, I gave Sideways (MC-94) another look.  Always impressed with Alexander Payne, his recent The Holdovers and repeat viewing of his early classic Election sent me back to re-evaluate this midcareer peak, which I remember liking less than many.  Lo and behold, my opinion twenty years ago, in the very first month of Cinema Salon, is exactly what I thought this time around, so here is that old link.
 
Seeking to squeeze the last ounce of value out of an extra month on Hulu, I gave a chance to Eileen (MC-72).  I was ambivalent about director William Oldroyd’s previous film, Lady Macbeth, but I predicted great things for Thomasin McKenzie after Leave No Trace.  The setting in the near North Shore of Boston in the winter of 1964 was also interesting, but the actors’ accents are studied and variable rather than convincing.  McKenzie as the title character plays the drab 24-year-old daughter of a dissolute former police chief, who works in a juvenile prison where Anne Hathaway arrives as a psychologist with a Harvard Ph.D.  She’s absurdly glamorous, but we may be viewing her through the eyes of the smitten Eileen.  For a while I assumed this film was headed in the direction of Carol, but then there’s a genuinely shocking twist, and then another, and it becomes a different sort of film altogether, which left me dangling and feeling somewhat cheated.
 
The new Hulu tv series A Thousand Blows (MC-78) is reminiscent of Steven Knight’s previous series Peaky Blinders, but with a healthy dose of Harlots added.  Two Jamaican immigrants to 1880s London fall in with a female ring of thieves intent on moving up from pickpocketing and smash-and-grab to a major jewel heist.  Boxing is the corollary side-story, so prepare for some brutal bare-knuckle bouts.  Despite anachronisms and unlikelihoods, the world-building is dense enough to deliver a Dickensian sense of historical plausibility.  Erin Doherty is the leader of the gang, and Stephen Graham is her protector and suitor, an East End pub proprietor and muscle-bound boxer (suffering from ’roid rage avant la lettre).  Malachi Kirby is the Jamaican boxer with big West End dreams.  With multiple story lines, I wondered how they would wind up the series in six episodes, and the answer is they didn’t, just teasing a second half to come.  I may be back for it, or I may have seen enough.  We’ll see.
 
Gotta be suspicious of a tv series that began as a podcast, but the presence of Michelle Williams was enough (along with the FX label) for me to sample Dying for Sex (MC-82) before my month of Hulu expired.  And it greatly exceeded expectation.  As Molly, Williams is as soulful and funny as one would expect, embodying a woman with Stage 4 breast cancer who is determined find out who she is and what she likes before dying.  Surprisingly, Jenny Slate is equally soulful and funny, as the friend who accompanies her every step of the way; she plays Nikki Boyer, the originating podcast co-host and now writer and producer for the show.  The eight half-hour episodes are as much about friendship as sex and death (and oh yes, childhood sexual abuse), and pretty frank about all of them.  Sissy Spacek as Molly’s mother is a bonus, as is Rob Delaney as the “neighbor guy” with whom she explores her kinks (which also seals the comparison with Catastrophe, high praise as far as I’m concerned).  The supporting cast is notably fine as well, with Esco Jouley earning a shoutout as the palliative care death doula.  The series adeptly walks a fine line between raunchy humor and seriousness, with an almost documentary feel for life and death at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC, as well as some outré sexual practices.  Watch it if you want to have truthful fun with some touchy subjects.
 
Just as I was thinking that we were past the era of Peak TV and that film had regained its primacy in quality viewing, I was blown away in quick succession (pun intended) by three great series, including this one and two whose reviews will soon appear in round-ups here, Wolf Hall: The Mirror & the Light and season three of The White Lotus.
 
I guess all this was enough to justify an extra month’s subscription, but now I’ll pause Hulu, probably till the return of Welcome to Wrexham in a month or two.