Hard Truths

 

Celebrated British writer / director Mike Leigh's latest film, Hard Truths, is described in some promotional materials as a comedy-drama.

It would more appropriately be described as a harrowing psychological family drama with humorous leavening that lightens, somewhat, the enormous weight of the movie's distressing story of the toll mental illness can take on a family.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who appeared in Leigh's wonderful 1996 film Secrets and Lies, carries this heavy picture on her back as Pansy, a wife and mother in London who appears to be suffering from at least a half-dozen mental and emotional problems ~ paranoia, agoraphobia, social anxiety, bipolar, obsessive compulsive, narcissistic disorders and hypochondria. She's an unholy mess, a terror to her emotionally trampled plumber husband, Curtley (David Webber), and her diffident and depressive son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who receives the bulk of Pansy's verbal abuse because he's 22, unemployed and living at home, arrested in his development to adulthood.

Pansy's beautician sister, Chantelle (played with wonderful bonhomie by Michele Austin) is at a loss for how to help her older sister, whose anger and resentment seem to grow worse by the day, if not by the hour.

A visit to their mother's grave followed by a Mother's Day gathering at Chantelle's home with her daughters (Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson) turns into a nuclear meltdown that only hints at the extent of the damage has been done to Pansy, herself.

To its great credit, Hard Truths is not delivering easy answers or sunny platitudes. There are no bromides about the healing power of love and devotion because in Pansy's world, even the most innocent gesture is a threat, every extended hand holds a knife, every compliment is condescension and relief only comes in sleep.

Leigh, who wrote the wonderful screenplay, keeps the story free of psychological diagnoses, preferring to "show" rather than "tell" the audience what life is like in Pansy's world, that seems to be shrouded in darkness and misery, and determined to keep the curtains drawn.

One of Them Days

 

Lawrence Lamont's One of Them Days, written by Syretta Singleton, is a vibrant and profane laff riot that follows the surefire day-of-disaster formula that is a staple of urban feature films (Friday, The Hangover, Go, to name just three).

This energetic treat finds Angeleno besties and roommates Dreux (Keke Palmer) and Alyssa (SZA) on the verge of being evicted from their decrepit apartment in The Jungles, a predicament created when Alyssa entrusted the rent money to her leeching but sexually gifted boyfriend, Keshawn, (Joshua David Neal), who, rather than pay the landlord (Rizi Timane), used the dollars to start a line of T-shirts -- "Cucci." (Yes, the humor is broad and utterly adults-only.)

Dreux (pronounced "Dru") is rightfully livid and collars Alyssa into a series of money-making schemes to collect the needed $1,500, each more outlandish the one before. Both Palmer and SZA are ablaze here, giving the "buddy picture" a complete, sistah-girl makeover.

The movie straddles the line between "street" and "slapstick" but presents the struggles of the urban underclass with keen insight, I thought. In the Jungles, work is precarious, sketchy hustles abound, and opportunities for advancement must be seized when they present themselves, even when the sky is falling. Relationships run the gamut from diehard to predation, with many women missing out on genuine connections because potential mates are swallowed up by the streets.

Lamont does a lot in the film's 90 minutes; the leads are totally winning, the laughs are steady and the raucous conclusion as neat as a pin curl.

Yura Borisov in Anora

 

It's not always clear why performers get nominated for supporting roles in films. Major star turns are more obvious. Featured players, not so much.

I think in the legitimate cases -- not those overly freighted with social relevance or cultural importance -- the performer's presence in the picture -- no matter the part's length -- is so impactful that the engaged viewer cannot imagine the movie being the same product without it.

I think this is very much the case for Yura Borisov's Igor in Sean Baker's multiple Oscar-nominated Anora. Igor is a muscle man who works for a fixer (Karren Karagulian), who has been babysitting the son of a wealthy Russian family (Mark Eydelshteyn), who has on a whim married a Brooklyn sex worker.

Igor's expressionless demeanor during the escapade hides his great empathy for the young woman Anora, played with amazing vitality and heart by Mikey Madison. He sees her as caught in the oligarch's web, invited in by the trifling son. Igor's is the most physically demanding supporting role in the picture, and having to match Oscar-nominee Madison's energy and focus is no small thing.

Even so, I think it's the picture's quieter moments between the combative Anora and the big-hearted and, frankly, smitten Igor that sell not only his wonderful character to the audience but the entire picture as being so much more than a comedy about bad people getting what they deserve (or not).

To me, it's about what so many of the more affecting films in this age of moviemaking are about -- missing and making connections, knowing oneself and accepting that knowledge as often painful truth. Yes, during this period of great deception, Hollywood seems to be peddling authenticity and honesty.

Anora the film is brutal and profane and satirical and political and vulgar ... and tender and beautiful because of Borisov's performance.

The Brutalist

 

Like the architectural style at the center of its story, writer / director Brady Corbet's The Brutalist is about unadorned truth, stripping away artifice and falseness to reveal the raw material underneath. It's a large, monolithic masterwork that I feel will stand the test of time.

Corbet uses enormous aesthetic sweep in presenting images of form and space, both interiors and exteriors, which serve as metaphors of the spiritual condition of America and its people. Aspiration and indulgence, racial and cultural supremacy, insecurity and exploitation. There's much to unpack here.

Corbet's outstanding performers -- led by an introspective Adrien Brody as Hungarian concentration camp survivor and architect László Tóth -- are not just full-bodied people but emblems of America and Europe's collective past.

This past is marked by prosperity for some -- as described in the film's brief prologue and in the bristling narcissism of Guy Pearce's nativistic millionaire Harrison Van Buren -- and its startling inhumanity, as revealed in the lives of Tóth, and his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), also a camp survivor and journalist, and the continuing pain and indignity the two must endure.

Tóth's jubilant arrival in a town near Philadelphia in the '40s is quickly dampened by his discovery that his beloved cousin Attila, a chilling performance by Alessandro Nivola, has changed his name, converted from Judaism to Catholicism and married a Gentile. Attila explains that it’s the only way to be successful in America, and though Tóth is at first skeptical, he slowly, gradually discovers the truth beneath the surface of superficial cordiality and politesse.

"They do not want us here," he tells his wife, who must use a wheelchair because her health was destroyed by famine and imprisonment. She's reluctant to agree and resists, but finds her husband, contracted by Van Buren to build a cultural center in town, becomes obsessed with work, pulling away from her as if possessed. (Audiences discover in the film's epilogue the reason for his extraordinary meticulousness.)

The Brutalist will undoubtedly test many filmgoers' patience -- it's more than 3 and half hours long, with 15-minute intermission -- and its themes and depictions of cold, emotional, psychological and physical abuse are troubling, disturbing, frightful.

Is it a comment on contemporary matters? Many will make those connections; it's difficult to imagine anyone not seeing this as not so much a cautionary tale as a mirror reflection of the toll unbridled power and pride can take on the human soul. But it might also be read as a celebration of a person's refusal to submit.

Midway through Ridley Scott's Gladiator 2, enslaved warrior Lucius said to another slave as they were being carted into a corrupt and chaotic Rome for battle in the Colosseum, "This city is diseased. " Corbet might be saying the same thing about America.

Emilia Pérez

 

Jacques Audiard's extraordinary genre-busting and award-winning Emilia Pérez might become the nexus for Hollywood's renewed reflection on questions of gender / sexual identity in light of Trump's executive order establishing only two genders in the U.S.

This reflection will be more fraught for those living comfortably in a binary world but that's not to say the questions have been fully resolved in communities accepting of gender / sexual fluidity. It's this fluidity that is the central thread coursing through the film, which is as bold in its execution as it is in its premise.

Karla Sofía Gascón, a transwoman, plays the title character in the film, whom we first meet as a male Mexican drug lord named Manitas. Manitas is married to Jessi (Selena Gomez) and is the doting father of two boys. Unknown to his family, he has been undergoing hormone treatments in preparation for a full transition to female.

Manitas contacts unappreciated Mexico City attorney Rita (Zoe Saldaña) and hires her to be his agent in the search for a reassignment surgeon. He's offering to pay her millions, which would free her from the thankless job of pursuing justice in a system that is as corrupt as the drug cartels themselves.

She accepts and identifies a surgeon in Tel Aviv (Mark Ivanir). Rita also plans the relocation of Manitas' family to Switzerland because he will fake his own death and never see them again.

Several years after the transition, Manitas, now Emilia, meets Rita at a party, makes herself known and asks her to help move Jessi and the boys back to Mexico to live with her, as she assumes the identity of Manitas' wealthy cousin.

Thus begins the core intrigue of the film, which blends conventional narrative with musical numbers, several large-scaled elaborately staged production. How long will the deception last? Will secrets and confidences hold?

This uncertainty grows more pressing as Emilia takes on the cause of finding some of the thousands of people who had been kidnapped, killed and buried all over the country. Emilia is on a high-profile mission (seeking redemption?) to uncover the truth, even as she shields her past and the role she played in these horrors.

We would not be wrong to anticipate disaster awaits, but Audiard's film is not a disaster. In fact, it is a triumph. A daring, bold vision about social and individual truths that won’t change anyone's mind on the matter of gender / sexual identity but that's no matter.

It's not so much about societal acceptance, anyway. As Selena Gomez sings at one point in the film, English translation:

I want to love myself

Love, yes, my life

Love, yes, what I feel

I want to love myself

Love myself fully

Love myself just as I am.

Nickel Boys

 

Director RaMell Ross's bold debut feature film, Nickel Boys, is based on Colson Whitehead's prize-winning novel of the same name, about the abuse and exploitation of Black boys in a Florida reform school called Nickel Academy.

Nickel Boys is based on events at a reform school in the pandhandle where boys were abused and some killed and buried on the property in unmarked graves. The story is told through variations on first-person perspective, an imaginative approach that broadens the viewers' perception of the things, large and small, that give life meaning.

In the film, Nickel Academy houses boys of all races but only actually "schools" the white boys; the other boys get a smattering of teaching. They mainly work at the school or on neighboring farms to produce income for the school. It's a type of chain gang imprisonment for children. The boys are poorly nourished, except when inspectors come. They are policed endlessly and punished brutally if / when they misstep by the school superintendent (Hamish Linklater).

The film is set in the early '60s; the Civil Rights Movement sits prominently in the background as a historical marker and reminder that institutional discrimination permeated all aspects of life in the South. Sixteen-year-old Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is walking to enroll in a trade school when he hitches a ride, unaware the vehicle was stolen by the driver. Audiences don't witness Elwood's trial, if there was one; we presume he was found guilty of being an accessory to a crime and sentenced to Nickel. His grandmother, Hattie, (another wonderful performance by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), promises to win his release, but her attempts to do so and even to visit her grandson are stifled.

Elwood becomes friends with a streetwise boy named Turner (a terrific Brandon Wilson), who is weary of the talk of changes coming for Blacks because he has seen no evidence of that at Nickel or even in Houston, his hometown. The boys become close. Turner helps Elwood navigate the harsh terrain and secures for him lighter duties working for a young white man, Harper (Fred Hechinger), who for a while adds a deceptively benign presence to the picture.

Ross and the film's director of photography, Jomo Fray, move the camera fluidly and unexpectedly around the events in this harrowing story, often switching between points-of-view. Some audiences might find the dynamic lensing disorienting or affectatious. I appreciated the immediacy of the camera and Ross's discretion in how much of the visual horrors he would include -- almost none.

Many have heralded Nickel Boys as a stunning cinematic achievement. I won't disagree in the least, but do worry some audiences might not embrace this important story because of it's unorthodox approach. Their loss, I say.

Sing Sing

 

Indie writer / director Greg Kwedar's Sing Sing stars powerhouse player Colman Domingo (Rustin) as wrongfully imprisoned "Divine G," the co-founder and creative soul behind a unique program in the eponymous maximum-security prison that gets inmates on the stage and in touch with their humanity and worth -- some for the first time.

When we meet G, he and the dozen or so other men in the program, called Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), are planning their next production, having successfully staged A Midsummer Night's Dream. Hard new arrival named "Divine Eye" (Clarence Maclin, who like most of the film's cast are alums of RTA) presents a challenge to G, G's close friend Mike Mike (Domingo's longtime collaborator Sean San José) and the rest of the group because of his wary combativeness and reluctance to "trust the process." G accepts the challenge, however.

The company's director, Brent Buell (Paul Raci), writes a sprawling, genre-crossing play that incorporates the cast members' wide-ranging tastes and re-energizes the group, the members of which are waging individual battles with confinement. Meanwhile, G is working on a clemency hearing, hoping new evidence he's uncovered will prove his innocence and lead to his release.

Kwedar's film weaves together the preparations for the RTA's ambitious show, the work the men must do to connect with this more personal piece, G's persistence with Eye and pursuit of his own freedom into a tale that forces the "institution" further and further into the background (the absence of correctional officers during long stretches of the story is notable), until, inevitably, prison presses in again and threatens to mar the beauty and hope we, the audience, have embraced -- maybe naively.

Still, Sing Sing's message about the indomitable human spirit and the incalculable benefit of the arts on one's peace and happiness endures and wraps its arms around you in the end.

Better Man

 

What Aussie director Michael Gracey's The Greatest Showman (2017) may have lacked in historical authenticity, it certainly made up for in spectacle and verve.

Gracey has applied his substantial chops for creating high-powered music videos to his latest feature film, "Better Man," the blood-and-sinew biography of British pop star Robbie Williams, who was a member of the boy band Take That in the early 90s and later a record-breaking solo performer.

Williams' rise-and-fall story involves the all-too-familiar catastrophic descent into drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness that accompany stardom. As an ingenious twist, Gracey subs a CGI chimpanzee for Williams, whom we meet as a child in the English Midlands (motion-capture actor Asmara Feik) who idolizes his father (Steve Pemberton), a modestly talented crooner, and dreams of being not just a great singer but a great "entertainer," like Frank, Dean and Sammy.

Williams begins battling the demons of insecurity and isolation as a child, and the skirmishes get worse as the years progress and his fame builds. He finds stability during this time in his loving grandmother Betty (Alison Steadman), who stokes young Robert's need to be special and makes up for his father's inattention and then absence and his mother's (Kate Mulvaney) busyness keeping the food on the table and a roof over their heads.

Though Williams narrates his story, Jonno Davies is the motion-capture actor playing the mature Williams with stunning agility, and Adam Tucker provides the soaring vocals on the baker's dozen songs in the picture.

To Gracey's credit, the CGI chimp doesn't come off as gimmicky as one might think. In fact, it's amazingly seamless, even during the big production numbers. Rock DJ is a mind-blower.

Williams' legion of fans -- among whom I do not count myself, to be honest -- will undoubtedly lap up the movie's cinematic indulgence and party fever like kittens to milk. Cinephiles, like myself, will be delighted by the film's audacity, which matches Williams' own bravura, beat-for-beat.

The Fire Inside

Rachel Morrison's The Fire Inside is an uplifting and provocative sports movie that, like sports themselves, is about more than competition -- even though it is about winning and losing. 

Singer / actress Ryan Destiny stars as the real Olympic gold medal boxer Claressa Shields, who under the tutelage of her devoted coach Jason Crutchfield (the always enjoyable Bryan Tyree Henry) rose above the challenges of urban distress in her hometown of Flint, Michigan, to stardom in a male-dominated sport.

The screenplay by writer / director Barry Jenkins, who won an Oscar in 2017 for Moonlight, is by-the-numbers in plotting and structure but goes beyond a run-of-the-mill recitation of overcoming adversity and landing the killer blows over cheers and a triumphant soundtrack. In fact, half of the story is about life after getting the medal. It asks, "What comes next?" -- especially for women in unconventional arenas, even those at the elite level.

Sheilds, at 17, was juggling a fractured, dysfunctional family to which she was committed, being the person best positioned to make a difference in their fates. Despite her coach's attempts to help Claressa temper her expectations and set aside disappointments, she grew increasingly bitter, feeling she was being unfairly penalized for being female -- which, of course, she was.

Ryan Destiny's scowling fierceness conveys Shield's intensity in and out of the boxing ring for most of the picture. When she finally moves beyond self-defeating fixations, her face blooms and radiates, which is the point of the movie, I think.

Female athletes are not free to "brutal" ... they must in the end be "beautiful"  or they will be denied the benefits of their achievements. 

As Claressa says with her usual unvarnished candor, "That's bullshit." 

Nosferatu (2024)

Robert Eggers has directed only four films, but his list of pictures for which he served as a director of art or production or both is much more substantial. This might explain the extraordinary visual impact of his movies -- The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, and his latest, a wonderful remake of the silent classic Nosferatu (1922)

Eggers' auteurism pays homage to the work of masters like James Whale (Dracula), Jean Cocteau (Beauty and the Beast) and Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) while retaining a bold originality, especially in the worlds he creates. I suspect Eggers felt especially free to experiment with the familiar Dracula story in his crafting of the narrative for his Nosferatu. 

Eggers turns the tale of the undead predator sideways. As played with shadowy menace and pounds of prosthetic make-up by everyone's favorite beastie Bill Skarsgard, Eggers' ancient bloodsucker is a victim of grave misfortune (pun intended). The Transylvanian Count Orlok is entrapped by the beautiful Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a young woman who is married to the handsome Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a clerk for a dodgy real estate agent named Knock (pronounced Ke-nock) who is also Orlok's ravenous toady (Simon McBurney). 

Ellen is barely aware of the power she has over the haunted Count Orlok, but warns Thomas not to go on the mission to the count's castle, an assignment he'd received from Knock. Danger awaits, she warns, having developed clairvoyance and somnambulance. Her condition draws the attention of a local master of the occult (Willem DaFoe), who is convinced she's possessed by a demon but eventually concludes it's Nosferatu.

As we know, Thomas arrives at the count's castle, falls under the vampire's spell but escapes and finds his way back to Ellen, just as Orlok arrives, having devoured the crew of the ship that brought him from Transylvania. Orlok means to move into a delapidated castle and claim Ellen as his own. His plan does cannot withstand the light of day, however.

Eggers Nosferatu is marvelously constructed -- as one might expect from a director with his gifts -- but the writing is also quite grand. Theatrical. Shakespearean. The picture is as delightful to hear -- especially Skargard's guttural intonations as Orlok -- as it is to see. Those early 19th-century streets, overstuffed interiors and diaphanous gowns (watch for the dust rising off of DaFoe's robe as he is patted on the back) gives testament to Eggers eye for telling detail.

It's a feast (pun intended) for the eye and ear.

A Complete Unknown

 

The rootlessness that comes from pride and calamity threading through Bob Dylan's 1965 hit single "Like a Rolling Stone" also courses through James Mangold's biopic "A Complete Unknown," a phrase from the chorus of the aformentioned song.

The picture features another transformative performance by Timothée Chalamet as the youthful Dylan, who we meet when he has just arrived in New York City, seeking an audience with his hero, the ailing social justice songwriter Woody Guthrie (Scoot Mcnairy). It was during his first visit with Guthrie at the psychiatric hospital where he is receiving treatment for Huntington's disease that Dylan met Guthrie's close friend, singer and activist Pete Seeger (Edward Norton in wonderfully assured performance), who would become the early Dylan's champion, recognizing the taciturn singer's talent immediately and ushering him into the vibrant musical underground that would launch his career.

It was during these early days of playing coffee houses and old haunts that Dylan met Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), the celebrated folk singer who would have a storied, fiery romantic and creative relationship with Dylan, and the young painter and civil rights worker here named Sylvie Russo but based on Dylan's actual girlfriend Suze Rotolo (Elle Fanning). It was she who posed with Dylan for the cover of his "Freewheelin'" album.

In Mangold's compelling recreation of Dylan's nascent musical exploration, these women are alternately mates and muses, confessors and competitors, and "Bobby," a charming but unreliable companion. He's an unapologetic, preternaturally gifted user.

Mangold tracks Dylan's emerging brilliance along with his emotional and professional evolution, culminating in his "switched-on" appearance at the formerly acoustic Newport Folk Festival in 1965. In the picture, which is based on Elijah Wald's Dylan Goes Electric!, the act, familiar to pop culture mavens, reflects Dylan's need to rebel, the changes in contemporary music and the shifting underground folk scene of the late '50s and early '60s.

As delivered through Chalamet's remarkable portrayal, Dylan is driven to be an iconoclast, growing increasingly dissatisfied with the expectations held by Seeger, his manager Albert Grossmen and record producer James Hammond (Dan Fogler and David Alan Basche, respectively), all of whom have their own agendas -- some noble, some commercial. 

The picture doesn't reveal the reason for Dylan's self-absorption and perennial coldness but neither of these qualities dims his creative spark or his need to push himself to higher creative levels while pushing away those closest to him. He was enigmatic then and continues to be at age 83.

A Complete Unknown is not as thoroughgoing in its story as some would like, but it has enough narrative heft -- and wonderful musical performances -- to satisfy even the most critical of audiences.