One Battle After Another

 

The release of a new Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) feature film is an event for cinephiles because the decidedly quirky and celebrated auteur has a distinctive narrative style and voice in his movies. He writes and directs dense, often broadly satirical or outrageous stories about damaged people trying to recover from, move past, embrace or benefit from the damage, e.g, The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), Punch-Drunk Love (2002).

That is the thrust of his latest feature, One Battle After Another, which I believe will be listed among the very best of PTA's 10 productions, maybe even moving ahead of Magnolia (1999) and There Will Be Blood (2007).

In Battle, an endlessly watchable Leonardo DiCaprio plays "Ghetto" Cat a/k/a Bob, an explosions expert who hooks up with a revolutionary mob in California called the French 75, which is waging war against the U.S. on behalf of victims of exploitation and oppression, among them immigrants in detention camps and cages.

On his first job, Cat / Bob meets at a detention center the spirited and profane Perfidia Beverly Hills (a scalding hot Teyana Taylor) and they begin a romance, of sorts, shortly after Perfidia coerces at gunpoint a dalliance with the center's commander, Steven Lockjaw (a wonderful Sean Penn), to get his "attention" and his goat. (War is hell!)

Some months pass, Perfidia and Bob are a revolutionary power couple in the Southwest underground, and she gives birth to a daughter, whom she resents. Bob takes over childrearing, and Perfidia presses on with the mission of changing the world. Soon, after a botched bank robbery, the French 75's luck runs out, and they are disbursed. Peridia is captured by Lockjaw, who promises relocation if she give up the names and locations of the others. She does and enters witness protection.

After the 75 is dismantled, Lockjaw is recruited by an underground supremacist group that calls itself the Christmas Adventurers (they greet each other by invoking the name of St. Nick and their secret knock is opening two bars to the chorus for Jingle Bells). They recruit him as an agent of racial purification.

Bob and daughter Charlene / Willa (Chase Infiniti) are in hiding, off-the-grid. Bob does little but smoke weed and lay low. When Lockjaw receives word Bob is still kicking, he dispatches his troops and thus begins the series of "battles" between supremacist eradication, governmental cold efficiency and revolutionary soulfulness.

But this is only one variety of battle depicted in PTA's landscape, which was inspired by Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. The political and the familial are also fighting for which is more important, with the clearest answer being, unironically, both and neither.

HIM

 

TV director Justin Tipping "tackles" professional football in a daring and bloody fashion in HIM, his first major feature film that is more surrealism than horror.

Tyriq Walters stars as Cameron Cade, touted as the best college quarterback in the country, as he travels to New Mexico after a brutal, disabling attack to work with the GOAT, Isaiah White, played by Marlon Wayans, the high-powered QB for the San Antonio Saviors

Cade was reared by his father, Cam Sr. (Don Benjamin) to aspire to be the next Isaiah White, and he cannot decline the chance to work into the post, even if his head injury is a recurring concern.

He arrives at White's compound and is greeted with warm affection by White and his wife, Elsie (Julia Fox) but that quickly turns into intimidation and increasing levels of brutality, made bearable by daily injections and transfusions administered by White's personal physician, Marco (Jim Jefferies).

The script by Tipping and writers/producers Skip Bronkie and Zach Akers pulls from a number of cinematic and cultural traditions. Its religious symbolism and references to denial of self and blood sacrifice brought to mind the films of Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel. It bears more than a passing resemblance to the work of Jordan Peele, one of the picture's producers.

Though both Wayans and Walters deliver tireless performances (Walters more than Wayans), the story's trajectory feels uncertain, the messaging is muddy and seems to be mostly about the deceptive qualities of ambition than anything else. That is a rich concept to explore, and I hope Tipping gives it another shot.

I suspect HIM will find a cult audience drawn to the movie's physicality, sexual tensions and treatment of sacred cows.

The Long Walk

 

Stephen King is 77, and he was in his early 30s when he published The Long Walk under the pen name Richard Bachman in 1979. That was way before the current political darkness and threat of social upheaval, but its story fits like a glove.

Francis Lawrence, director of the Hunger Games series, has given masterful shape to King's dystopian tale of teenage boys representing the 50 states in a "walk or die" competition for great wealth and the granting of a single wish to the lone survivor.

The screenplay by King and J.T. Mollner focuses on a dozen or so of the boys, with the friendship between Ray (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Peter (David Jonsson of Alien: Romulus) being the engine behind this grueling and often devastating machine.

The 50 boys, chosen by lottery, gather on a remote Midwestern road, where armed soldiers under the command of The Major (Mark Hamill) wait to escort them on the 300-mile trek. Like competitors in a high school marathon, the boys talk trash to one another, and through this sparring we get to know a bit about each of them, just enough to get us to invest in their fates.

The film's power -- and don't mistake, it is substantial -- lies in what these widely diverse boys reveal about themselves, things that transcend their nightmare world and land squarely in the audience's lap -- and on their hearts.

I put off seeing The Long Walk because I thought its narrative of desperation and death would be too much ... and it nearly is. But it is kept from being unbearably depressing through the performances by Hoffman and Jonsson, mainly. All of the young actors are wonderful.

The bond that Ray and Peter develop, the energy that radiates from their devotion, lifts not only the other boys but the audience as well. It is heartening to see selflessness and sacrifice given such life at a time when it would be far too easy to think we had lost them somewhere down the road.

Downtown Abbey: The Grand Finale

 

British director Simon Curtis rings down the curtain on the venerable historical drama Downton Abbey with a mix of wistfulness and celebration as one generation passes the torch, reluctantly at first, to their successors. Even for one who has not seen a single episode of this show, the story struck notes of warmth and resilience ... much needed these days.

Set during the time of the great market crash at the end of the '20s, "The Grand Finale" opens with a wonderful tracking shot into a London theater where Noel Coward's Bitter Sweet is being performed, its most enduring number -- I'll See You Again -- being reprised at the close of the last act. The camera pans over the audience -- the peers and aristocrats in their boxes, the commoners in the balcony. All in keeping with British tradition.

In the first few minutes, we are (re)introduced to the main players in Downton's world of class and privilege -- principally Mary Talbot (Michelle Dockery), the elder daughter of Lord and Lady Grantham (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern), the master and mistress of the eponymous estate outside of London, a large property that is struggling financially. Mary, a sharp and decisive woman, is heir apparent to the Grantham legacy but is facing her own personal challenges.

News of Lady Mary's divorce hits the London papers, and she becomes a social pariah, invitations to Grantham parties are declined. Other intrigues unfold as Lady Grantham, American born, welcomes her luckless brother (Paul Giamatti) from the States with troubling news about their family's fortune. He is accompanied by an oily friend, Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola), who has been managing the family's accounts, and who presses the wounded Lady Mary into an intimate encounter.

That is a broad outline of the "upstairs" happenings. Changes are also underway "downstairs," in the kitchen and servants' quarters, where the veterans are preparing to take their leave and retire to what is presumed to be a life of well-earned ease. Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) is leaving the kitchen in the hands of Daisy Parker (Sophie McShera), a young woman she's thought of as a daughter. Jim Carter's Mr. Carson, the senior butler at Downton, is having a bit more difficulty loosening his grip on a post he's held for decades, but his successor Andy Parker, husband to Daisy, shows great deference and forbearance, even as news of the uncertainty about the house's future filters from above.

The film is about the rigidity of class differences in England, but, I think, it is also about how porous those distinctions were becoming. The relationship between Mary and her maid Anna Bates (Joanne Froggat) is one of the richest and more complex. Mary's reliance on the other woman's support and discretion represents the upper class's long-standing (eternal?) dependence on the working class to give their lives form and structure, recognizing (though not verbally expressing) their deep incapability. This is reflected most pithily in a brief exchange when Grantham tells Carson to tie his bowtie for him as he prepares for a public appearance to which the butler is not invited. (Though I spotted only one person of color in the entire picture, the film's message easily translates to America's history with race and class.)

Grace notes on this theme are added when the trio of actor Guy Dexter (Dominic West), his companion and former Downton servant Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Colllier), and Coward (Arty Froushan) are invited to a Grantham affair where all manner of social convention are teased and in the end capsulized by Coward's performance of Poor Little Rich Girl for Lady Mary and the other guests.

At the time, it would have been a huge "FU" to those who were in a twist about propriety and status, and it has a savory deliciousness even today.

Fantastic Four: First Steps

Marvel's comic series about four science explorers genetically altered by radiation during a cosmic event is nearly as enigmatic as the X-Men series.

Veteran TV director Matt Shakman's The Fantastic Four: First Steps plays with the comic book's classic puzzlement about differentness and duty and adds in family drama in this story of heroes in an anachronistic '60s world responding to a seemingly invincible existential threat.

Led by the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal as rubberized Reed Richards / Mr. Fantastic, the amiable quartet -- Sue Storm / Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby), Ben Grimm / The Thing (The Bear's Eben Moss-Bachrach) and Johnny Storm / Human Torch (Joseph Quinn) -- are media darlings, making regular appearances on television and basking in their hard-earned celebrity. They're an international brand on what is an alternative version of Earth that mixes '60s cultural artifacts with futuristic robotics and aeronautics. (MCU once again tapping the parallel multiverse theme.)

When a silver-coated herald on a surfboard (Ozark's Julia Garner), arrives and announces Galactus, The Devourer (Ralph Ineson) is on his way to gobble up the planet and all of its inhabitants, the Four, including a very pregnant Sue, spring into action.

Shakman and his screenwriters choose not to stage a half-dozen or more loud and long battles between good and evil (I think this was a wise decision, considering the ragtag assortment of superpowers the Four present). Instead, and refreshingly, the movie spends much more time on "science" and "science-y things" and problem-solving, using brains to confront a powerful opponent whose appetite makes him myopic and a bit addled. (One is free to make whatever real-world comparisons one wishes.)

In many ways, First Steps includes familiar elements of Marvel's winning formula -- attractive stars, menacing villain(s) and the punchy kind of banter that fans expect. In addition, and I believe this is a first, the movie gets a valuable assist from an infant who, depending on the ambitions of the MCU brain trust, might be the "herald" of a brand-new generation of bombastic heroics, which, in turn, suggests this franchise might be interminable.

The Roses

 

Film and television director Jay Roach is a master of calamitous comedy that snarls, slobbers and snaps but is nonetheless delightfully entertaining to those of us who savor bashing battles royale -- Austin Powers, Fockers, Bombshell.

His broadly outrageous remake of 1989's The War of the Roses (Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas) has been whittled down to just The Roses but has not dropped "the war." In fact, Roach expands the battlefield, amps up the emotional and material destruction and spreads the dysfunction of the central pairing -- icy Ivy and theatrical Theo (Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, respectively) -- to their closest associates and friends, each more callous and self-involved than the one before.

Roach serves up a banquet of withholding resentment as Ivy's career as a California celebrity chef rockets and Theo's as a visionary architect crashes to earth, literally. Theo, an unemployable pariah consumed by passive aggression, turns their children into fitness weapons of destruction after Ivy's years of fatty indulgence. It's this dynamic that offers the freshest grace notes to the spirited rancor of domestic intranquility. The airport scene where they send the kids (Hala Finley and Wells Rappaport) off to a sports school in Miami says so much about this family and the connective tissue that they lack.

Unhappiness continues to mount, divorce proceedings are initiated, weapons drawn and the fiery ending, well, inevitable. It's a blast!

Caught Stealing and Relay

 

Darren Aronofsky and David Mackenzie are competing for Best New York chase film currently playing in the cineplexes.

Aronofsky (The Whale, Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream) is offering an unhinged rock-em sock-em that gives a nod to Martin Scorsese's feverish nightmare in Lower Manhattan, After Hours (1985). In fact, the star of that little-known gem, Griffin Dunne, is a featured player in Aronofsky's latest film, Caught Stealing, which stars Hollywood It Boy Austin Butler as hunky Hank, a battered California baseball player living in Alphabet City a decade before the Twin Towers fell.

Hank is dating a foxy EMT named Yvonne, played by Zoe Kravitz, and is generally hail-fellow-well-met to the down-but-not-out denizens of his hardscrabble neighborhood, including the spiky Brit punker next door named Russ (a sporty Matt Smith of Dr. Who and The Crown).

Russ leaves his beloved feline companion, Buddy, in Hank's care so that Russ might visit his ailing father in London. While away, Russ's flat is visited by Russian bruisers who after being confronted bash Hank, believing he is Russ's cohort in a criminal enterprise. They think he knows the location of a large payout Russ owes them.

A police detective (Regina King) tells Hank that Russ is involved with several groups of mobsters that the police have been monitoring. They need Hank's help shutting the mobs down. Hank's reluctant involvement pulls him into dark waters where he and everyone around him, including Buddy, are targets. He spends most of the movie trying to avoid capture.

The film is described as a dark comedy -- the darkness being the body count and the comedic elements being Hank's preposterous predicament. It mostly works, banking on Butler's cheekbones and chiseled abs.

Directed by David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water), Relay stars Riz Ahmed as an anonymous fixer who goes by the name of Tom. He's part of an organization in New York that parlays deals between whistleblowers and the companies they're prepared to drop a dime on.

Lily James plays Sarah, a biochemical researcher who has documentation that a product about to be released by her former company carries dangerous side-effects for some humans who come in contact with it. She was prepared to go public with her findings but has changed her mind because of the threats she's received.

She wants out, and Tom arranges through an untraceable communication network to coordinate the exchange, secure Sarah's safety and get the company to pay the intermediary $500,000 for making it happen.

Of course, it doesn't happen as planned. Sam Worthington's Dawson and his team try to subvert Tom's plan by intercepting messages so that they might retrieve what was taken and silence Sarah. Tom stays a few steps ahead of Dawson's crew as they crisscross New York City, until forced to improvise by unforeseen complications and turnabouts that some audience members might view as a bridge or two too far in credibility.

Still, Ahmed has an impactful demeanor as he hoofs through the congested alleyways of The Big Apple like a half-back.

Though set in different decades, Caught Stealing and Relay are commenting -- in different ways -- on public and private distrust, heroic loneliness and the elusiveness of enduring happiness.