A Fall From Grace

Tyler Perry's Netflix trifle A Fall From Grace is a soapy thriller with monstrous implausibility and criminal misuse of some talented actors. Perry himself can deliver a line when directed but his own narratives are unimaginative, formulaic. In this one, middle-aged divorcee Grace Waters (Crystal Fox) is courted by a young, studly beringed photographer in a Larry Blackmon high-top 'fro (Mehcad Brooks) whom she soon marries. Predictably, he turns out to be a cad and a thief who cheats on Grace in their bedroom! Grace, shamed and taunted, bashes him in the head with a bat and ends up arrested.

A poorly schooled and nearly indifferent public defender, Jasmine, played by Bresha Webb, is assigned to Grace's case to enter a guilty plea but is persuaded something is amiss, because the cad's body was never found. Meanwhile, Grace's BFF Sarah (Phylicia Rashad), who has been in her corner all the while, becomes Jasmine's only hope of winning an acquittal, as Jasmine hopes to convince the jury the Sunday School cookie baker was too nice to kill her husband -- even though Grace admits to having done it. Yes, it's an unholy mess with a howlingly ridiculous twist at the end that will send many viewers screaming from the room -- if they hadn't already done so.

Perry is the fabulously wealthy purveyor of urban market schlock who many people will defend as a dependable and known commodity. You'll never get art from Mr. Perry but his fans don't want that. They want shrieking women in Vera Wang and Red Bottoms and the men who love (or hate) them. One doesn't stumble blindly into a Tyler Perry experience; one enters with eyes and ears wide open. And that's the real crime.

Carnival Row

As allegories go, Amazon’s Carnival Row is on par with celebrated space series Battlestar Gallactica and The Expanse for depth and complexity. Unlike Tolkien’s trilogy, these three programs wear their politics on their sleeves. Tolkien, at least in my scattered readings, was more circumspect about the meanings of his books.

Carnival Row is a thoroughgoing fantasy thriller set in some mythical world where storybook creatures walk (or fly in the case of the Faeries, or Fae) among men. These non-humans have fled war in their own lands, sought asylum and been ghettoized in dank and dangerous districts away from humans, who detest them and debate their fate in Parliament.

Because of the costuming, art direction and British casting — Orlando Bloom (LOTR's Legolas) as the conflicted police inspector Rycroft Philostrate and Cara Delevingne as his winged ex-lover and revolutionary Vignette Stonemoss (the character names are marvelous and ridiculous) — one might assume the setting is Victorian England but the location is as murky as the mysterious creature disemboweling city residents and casting entrails about the vacated carcasses.

It’s all ghastly and gruesome and set against the backdrop of xenophobia and immigrant panic. Its strange appeal is suspended in the air, like the statues of the bound and hanged martyr erected in the churches in this seriously effed up world. This last device was a startling reminder to me that, though we’re inured to them, crucifixes are pretty barbaric religious emblems, for real.

1917

The artistry of Sam Mendes’s 1917, a staggeringly realistic depiction of wartime devastation, doesn’t just push the envelope of cinematography with its nearly hour-long continuous tracking shot (a marvelous visual accomplishment) but also with the intelligence of its narrative. Two young WWI British soldiers — Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) — are dispatched on a veritable suicide mission to deliver a general's command to stand-down to a hawkish colonel about to send 1,600 men into a German trap. Among the men is Blake’s older brother, which gives the younger much incentive to complete the mission, casting his mission as a coldly cynical order from the general but in keeping with the madness of war. Chapman and MacKay are tireless troupers in Mendes’ experiment to depict the two soldiers narrowly escaping one potentially fatal encounter after another, with the bodies of dead soldiers draped along barbed-wire fences and lining the sides of trenches and craters. It’s a horrifying landscape of misery, and the two men, not entirely up to their mission, trudge along through mud and viscera toward heaven knows what. It is a triumphant testament to modern movie-making and the human spirit.

Just Mercy

Destin Daniel Cretton’s Just Mercy has a compelling and dramatic story and strong lead performances by star / producer Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx and Brie Larson. But it is freighted, as so many big studio pictures about civil rights and social justice, with depictions of racist cops and courts that feel as if they’ve been pulled from To Kill a Mockingbird, which is referenced several times at the outset. The evocation might be the director’s intent, to suggest little has changed over the 60 years since Harper Lee published the book. That makes sense as the film is based on Bryan Stevenson’s published account of his work on behalf of death row inmates in Alabama beginning in the early ‘90s. Jordan plays Stevenson with stalwart resolve and humanity as he puts his Harvard law degree to work for those who can least defend themselves against a bigoted justice system. Foxx is Walter McMillan, a man falsely accused of murder, railroaded by an unscrupulous police chief and sentenced to death on the word of an unreliable witness (a terrific Tim Blake Nelson). The film has more than a few powerful moments — Rob Morgan’s work as war-damaged veteran Herbert Richardson is particularly outstanding — but occasional missteps that detract from an otherwise solid piece of work. A snapping German Shepherd at the entrance to the courtroom felt ham-fisted, and Richardson’s reference to a PTSD diagnosis while certainly possible didn’t feel plausible considering the time period, and Stevenson’s comments to his associate (Larson) about slave ships and lynchings, while all certainly true, felt strangely out of place — directed less at her and more at the audience. Still, the picture packs genuine emotional power.

Fast Color

Julia Hart's Fast Color is visually enticing but lacks the aching self-reflection of Hart's wonderful 2016 feature Miss Stevens. It has a few quiet moments of revelation but is mostly ghostly puzzlement and non sequiturs that fall short of nuance and poetry. Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Ruth, a young woman with mysterious, seismic powers that appear to have outgrown her control. She comes from a line of similarly gifted African American women (quite literal "black girl magic"). On the run from scientists with murky agendas, Ruth returns to her family home in Texas at a time when the world's resources have been depleted. (It's not explained what forces beyond human wastefulness are responsible). At home is mother, Bo, (the always engaging Lorraine Toussaint) and Ruth's precocious daughter, Lila (Saniyya Sidney), whom Ruth left with Bo after a near catastrophic incident that is augured and depicted in the film but then abandoned, as is Bo's relationship with the local sheriff, played with strange remove by David Strathairn. Mbatha-Raw (an unconventional beauty) is always luminous on the screen and her performance here strikes me as committed but the material (written by Hart and Jordan Horowitz) is frustratingly thin. Much of the story's weakness is its lack of detail, which is ironic for a film whose central conceit is its main characters' ability to deconstruct and reassemble the physical world.