Napoleon

 

Director Ridley Scott's epic study of war and ambition, Napoleon, tells two stories -- one of a military genius whose daring and precision were unmatched for a while in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the other of a severely flawed and emotionally stunted man. The picture is most involving during the elaborate battle scenes Scott has spared no expense in staging with an exacting master's eye for detail. They are brilliant, stirring and bloody and might be painful for some to watch in light of events in the Middle East. The film droops when probing Bonaparte's storied egoism that led the great general and emperor to conflate his personal will and triumphs with those of his country. He WAS France for a while. The source of his narcissism is left to speculation, which might be just as well. Joaquin Phoenix plays the taciturn Napoleon, whose ambitions, fueled by the insatiable hunger for power and admiration, would eventally turn all of Europe, which he had hoped to rule, against him. A savvy strategist in battle, Napoleon was lost in his marriage to the willful, and willfully unfaithful, Josephine (a never-better Vanessa Kirby). Though he seemed to love her desperately (or maybe more precisely needed her to love him desperately) Josephine's inability to bear an heir to succeed Napoleon as emperor -- even though she had two children from a previous marriage -- led Bonaparte to divorce her, ostensibly for the nation's future. But in Scott's telling, it is clear Bonaparte felt diminished by not having a son and could not live with the possibility others would pity him. Still, his attachment to Josephine never waned over the years of their separation, his exile and return, and ultimate defeat at Waterloo. The film's unevenness is not because of the performances -- I did not detect any weak links in the large cast -- but in the vastness of the movie's ambitions. A subject as enormous as Napoleon Bonaparte requires more time, I think. The 4-hour cut of the picture which will be streamed on Apple TV might fill in some of the narrative holes and offer a more fully satisfying viewing experience.

Saltburn

 

Writer / director Emerald Fennell's smoldering send-up of English aristocracy, Saltburn, casts the terrific young Irish actor Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin) as Oxford first-year scholarship student Oliver Quick, who befriends an impossibly handsome and irresponsible older student, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the heir to a large country estate.

After becoming carousing buddies, Felix invites Oliver, who has said he's estranged from his drug-addict parents, to the Catton home for the summer. At the house will be Lord and Lady Catton (Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike), Felix's sister Vanetia (Alison Oliver), their cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe of Gran Turismo) and Lady Catton's sister Pamela (Carey Mulligan of Promising Young Woman). It's a coterie of clueless self-absorption with which Oliver appears to fall in love.

Unlike the title character in Anthony Minghella's 1999 thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley (the comparisons will be inevitable), Oliver is a cipher for much of the first half of the picture. He lurks and observes his betters, and we suspect there is more going on here but can't be sure who, or what, is the object of his obsession. The most obvious answer would be Felix, but there's the boozy Vanetia with whom Ollie consorts half-naked in the garden, and the carping Farleigh, who suspects Oliver is on the hunt but is not immune to seduction.

Fennell takes her time unwrapping the story; Oliver's menace becomes more obvious as the summer progresses. Like Tom Ripley, the unassuming Ollie knows how to stroke the vanities of the idle rich. That they are so easily flattered and manipulated simply adds to the audience's disdain for them and makes it easy to root for the cagey Quick.

Like her 2020 debut picture Promising Young Woman, Fennell's Saltburn will not be for every taste. Its bitterness is heavy, as is its kinkiness. But it's Keoghan, fearlessly baring all in the film's last reel, who makes the whole smarmy party pretty entertaining.

Rustin

 

Award-winning stage director George C. Wolfe's stirring biopic Rustin (a Netflix production that has first been released to big-screen theaters) is more evidence to me that the arts communities will fill the gaps left by the scrubbing of marginalized people from classrooms and history books.

Bayard Rustin, the masterful organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, was long forced out of history's frame by established civil rights leaders who were either envious of his abilities or repulsed by his sexuality.

Only after the success of the historic march and Rustin's expansion of his social change agenda to include labor unions and LGBTQ+ equality was his work re-evaluated and elevated. In fact, Barack and Michelle Obama are executive producers of this wonderful film.

As played by the always-engaging Colman Domingo, Rustin's character is conflicted about some things but absolutely certain about the rightness of his calling, even after being ousted from NAACP leadership by Roy Wilkins (an impressive turn by Chris Rock) and failing to win, at first, the support of his old friend Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen).

Rustin's relationships with a young, white fellow organizer (Gus Halper) and later a young Black minister affiliated with the NAACP (Johnny Ramey) show that even one steeped in the importance of exactitude in planning social change can be blind to personal matters.

Though he had an outsized personality that galvanized teams of workers and won him great affection and loyalty, Rustin was forced to operate in the background, seeking anonymous and dangerous rendezvous that his political enemies (Sen. Strom Thurmond, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) sought to dishonor him and dismantle the movement.

Ultimately, the coalition Rustin created with the support of his mentor A. Philip Randolph (a terrific Glynn Turman) united behind him, as evidence was clear of what had been accomplished on that day in August 1963.

And that, to my mind, is the beauty and gift of this film -- that it reminds us (or perhaps tells some for the first time) that turning a country around does not happen with thoughts and prayers but with the "grunt work," as Rustin refers to it, to move people to lay comfort on the line and demand that the nation live up to its promise and its promises.

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The Marvels

 

Despite tissue-thin plotting and a frustrating lack of narrative freshness, writer / director Nia DaCosta's The Marvels squeezes a surprising number of solid laughs into its earnest celebration of female fire in which most of the principals are women.

Brie Larson returns as star-powered Capt. Carol Danvers a/k/a Captain Marvel, and finds herself linked to two other women in (what else?) a battle to save the universe.

Her partners this round are Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), the brilliant cosmologist daughter of a lost companion who has been mentored by the ubiquitous Avengers wrangler Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), and a teenaged New Jersey fangirl named Kamala (a wonderfully energetic Iman Vellani), who has inherited a powerful bracelet that can turn light into matter.

Hunting the bracelet is Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), the monomaniacal leader of a dying planet that Captain Marvel doomed in an over-zealous attempt to save its people from a tyrannical intelligence. Dar-Benn owns the bracelet's partner and when she has both she'll be able to restore life to her planet, and destroy everything and everyone held dear by Captain Marvel, whom she calls the Annihilator.

As usual, the picture's sci-fi mumbo-jumbo will turn on diehards but others might find real entertainment in the cockeyed lunacy at work when the serious matters of galactic upheaval are not on the screen. For example, a sequence set in a watery world where the inhabitants' native language is song is so outrageously ridiculous that I thought for a minute I was watching a Monty Python bit.

Of the more than 30 pictures produced by Marvel Studios, The Marvels will not be counted among its best. But for what it is -- a full-throated declaration that "the ladies got this" -- it's a welcome addition to the seemingly endlessly expanding universe.

The Holdovers

 

In Alexander Payne's hilariously tender The Holdovers, a curmudgeonly ancient civilization teacher (Paul Giamatti) spars with his equally dyspeptic teenaged counterpart (Dominic Sessa) in a boarding school over the two-week Christmas break in 1970, when the two of them and the school's kitchen supervisor (Da'vine Joy Randolph) spend the holidays together.

The characters, lovingly crafted by seasoned television writer David Hemingson, are managing personal trauma that they reveal over the course of the fortnight with spirited good and bad humor and the occasional tear.

Payne, who doesn't make a lot of movies but his pictures are always on the money, precisely captures enduring moments that are meaningful because the frailties and fears on display are so familiar to us. All three of the movie's principals -- Giamatti, Randolph and Sessa in his first movie role -- are so immersed in their characters' skins that the parts feel tailor-made.

Giamatti is a frequent Payne collaborator; his monologue on the pinot grape in 2004's Sideways is a cinematic moment for the ages, because of the actor's nuanced reading and the pure poetry of the passage. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCS1Gnwbtp0)

Holdovers has several captivating scenes and Giamatti, who is on camera for most of the film's running time, delivers a performance that will undoubtedly be celebrated for quite a while.

Fiddler on the Roof redux

 

Canadian director Norman Jewison has not only made wonderful pictures but wonderfully IMPORTANT pictures, at least to my mind.

Jewison is photographed here with the stars of 1971's Fiddler on the Roof Norma Crane and (Chaim) Topol. Jewison also directed In the Heat of the Night (1967), A Soldier's Story (1984) and Agnes of God (1985), among other "message movies."

Despite his surname, Jewison was not Jewish. He and his family were Protestants. Jewison had an expansive cinematic eye and a progressive social consciousness regarding human rights.

I rewatched the last scene of Fiddler on the Roof (Anatevka) recently and was put in mind of the many film depictions of the persecution of Jews -- the list is long and no doubt informed by the prominence of Jewish filmmakers in Hollywood.

But that's not to say the depictions are trifling; they do reflect the horrors of history. And that record might in turn inform America's affinity for Israel -- although other political matters are part of it, too.

Even so, it's difficult watching the last scene of Fiddler as the bereft residents of Anatevka march out of their burned-out village after a visit by the tsar's cossacks and not imagine similar scenes of pain and devastation in Gaza.

A friend of mine who describes herself as almost reflexively pro-Israel said to me yesterday, it's all so awful. It cannot be why we're on this planet.

I agree -- on both counts.

Radical

 

Especially for educators, Radical will resonate loud and long after the credits roll.

Set in a desperately poor Mexican town across the border from Brownsville, Texas, Radical is Christopher Zalla's heartwarming account of a zealous 6th-grade teacher (an amazing Eugenio Derbez of CODA) who comes to a distressed, under-resourced and under-inspired school where the students rarely graduate, lost to the harsh realities of criminality and poverty. Those students followed most closely in the picture are delightfully authentic; we care deeply about them and their families, their fates.

Derbez's Sergio Juarez is imbued with spirited confidence in the rightness of his unorthodox approach to teaching, his faith in the children's potential, so much so that he makes a convert of the battle-worn school director, played by Daniel Haddad, and their friendship is one of the movie's bonuses.

But as is the case with most of these inspirational true tales, events involving governmental corruption and parental shortsightedness threaten to derail Sergio's good work and douse the fire he has lit in his young charges.

Yes, the story is a bit familiar, but its heart is enormous and its optimism so welcome in these cynical days.