Wiz Redux (A Truthy Tale)

 

When it was released in 1939, the United States was coming out of what we now call the Great Depression. Things were looking up -- for a while.

The movie, which was roundly praised by critics of the day, has never fallen out of favor with the American public. No surprise that. The film is a thinly veiled propaganda piece in favor of naked capitalism.

Consider this treatment that was recently discovered by a Hollywood mole:

"A shiftless farm girl runs away from honest work after letting her equally shiftless dog nip at the heels of a local landowner.

She narrowly escapes the clutches of a grasping conman and finds herself amongst a tribe of hopped-up socialists after their leader is overthrown in a targeted hit.

The yammering villagers are marshaled by a beguiling but sinister regional rival who tries to make the farm girl comrade-in-charge but the girl's not interested.

Instead, she finds willing road companions in the limping education, manufacturing and defense sectors, who follow her mindlessly to seek handouts from a wealthy industrial wizard.

The industrialist has mastered the forces of branding and marketing and built an empire but is later destroyed by the meddling farm girl and her communistic malcontents after they fail to give over to the fallen leader's beneficiary stolen property, killing the beneficiary instead.

Girl tries on the reigns of leadership, fails miserably and dies in a mob hit."

A note at the bottom by Producer Mervyn LeRoy reads: "Zowie! Make it a fairy tale and go with it!"

Maestro

 

Bradley Cooper's Maestro is a marvel not just because of the extraordinary work of the film's two leads -- Cooper as Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as his wife / muse Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein -- but the astuteness of Cooper's cinematic vision and the smartness of his approach.

In some ways -- perhaps its main way -- Maestro is a subversive love story in the age of MAGA revisionism. Bernstein, who was bisexual, is depicted as loving Felicia deeply but always continuing his intimate relationships with men (Matt Bomer, then Gideon Glick).

Felicia, an insightful woman who nonetheless lacks personal emotional awareness, tells Leonard during their courtship that she knows the kind of the man he is and is willing to "give it a whirl." She asks only that he be discreet, no doubt anticipating the hay the press would make of such a discovery. It seems apparent that those in Bernstein's circle are aware of his sexual proclivities, none more than his sister Shirley (Sarah Silverman), who warns Felicia about life in Lenny's "orbit."

Leonard and Felicia marry and have children and Bernstein builds his legendary reputation as a brilliant conductor/composer/teacher, principally in New York City but eventually all over the world via television broadcasts and tours. (On a personal note, Bernstein was among my first music teachers through his engaging Young People's Concerts of the '60s.) Felicia becomes a renowned stage actress and manages the Bernstein household and her husband's complicated life but grows increasingly unhappy about his indulgences. It's in this growth that Mulligan does her most remarkable work, simply captivating with pain and understanding.

It is in the interactions between the Bernsteins that Cooper and Mulligan (a celebrated actress seen most recently in a small part in Saltburn but nominated for her lead work in Promising Young Woman) offer a masterclass in focus and shared space. Their chemistry is phenomenal; the characters love and lash out at each other with alternating tenderness and anger, which makes their last screen appearance all the more heartbreaking.

As a visual artist, Cooper seems at the top of his game; the opening section of the film, when a 26-year-old Bernstein gets a morning call he'll be conducting the New York Philharmonic that afternoon, is stunning, as the camera tracks along with Bernstein, breaking through walls and ceilings as he bursts into the balcony at Carnegie Hall. It's a thrilling opening that sets the bar amazingly high for the rest of the film.

Cooper doesn't disappoint, as the picture is loaded with such cinematic moments -- the staging of the sailors' dance from Fancy Free early in the picture and the extended scene of his conducting Verdi's Requiem in London near the film's conclusion are simply wonderful. Throughout, Cooper wears prosthetic features that bring him within a hair's breadth of the real Bernstein. (Some have taken issue with Cooper's choice but I feel the effect is brilliant; I guess that's an individual call.)

Cooper shoots most of the film in black and white, reflecting the memory aspect of the tale, and the more contemporary parts -- primarily the opening and closing -- in color. Like the use of the facial prosthetics, the choice of black and white stock is artistic privilege that I think in this instance might also suggest those passages have the qualities of memory -- selective and romantic, comforting and bruising.

I think that pretty much describes all of Maestro, too -- a tough but riveting, loving tribute to a legend.

Nyad

 

Documentary directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (they of the remarkable and vertiginous Free Solo) invest most of the emotional power of Nyad in the dynamic between Olympic marathon swimmer Diana Nyad's all-consuming myopia and her best friend Bonnie Stoll's complete devotion to Nyad, if not to her dreams.

Annette Bening's Diana finds herself at 60 feeling incomplete because she was unable to finish a swim from Cuba to Key West that she attempted when she was 28. Jodie Foster's Bonnie, Diana's uncritically supportive friend, gets caught up in her friend's resolve and commits to helping her make another attempt, despite Bonnie's reservations. She signs on as coach, one suspects not just because the two women, former lovers, are close but because Diana knows Bonnie will be compliant.

Though the titular star of this engrossing story, Diana is actually not the figure who does the most growing in the tale of what appears to be a foolish exploit that eventually, because of Nyad's domineering attitude and obsession, becomes a cause celebre.

Bonnie's enthusiasm gradually becomes distress as Diana's physical and emotional fitness begin to show signs of wear. Enlisting support from a veteran Gulf Stream navigator named Bartlett (Rhys Ifan), Bonnie tries to rein in Diana's more reckless impulses while not squelching her desire. It's a delicate balancing act that Diana seems to resist.

Based on true events, the conclusion is a part of the historical record but the film's dramatic heft, which is substantial, is its handling of Diana's drive, some rooted in the sexual abuse she suffered as a girl, as it is reflected in Bonnie's responses to her friend's burning need to succeed.

Though the directors provide details of the mechanics of the feat at the center of the film, Nyad is not about sport, really. It's about love, devotion and community and how they are actualized by a singular dream.

May December

 

Director Todd Haynes (Safe, Far From Heaven, Carol) does not gravitate toward easy subjects. His films are complex; his characters multi-dimensional and often unaware of all of their dimensions.

In his latest picture May December, Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, an actress who is preparing for a role based on a Savannah woman named Gracie (Julianne Moore) who was imprisoned more than 25 years before for having an affair with a seventh-grader. Gracie subsequently gave birth to one of their children while she was incarcerated. She eventually married the boy, Joe, played by Charles Melton as an adult, and they appear to have built a life of quiet respectability when Elizabeth arrives.

As we watch the actress explore her subject in these suburban environs, we become aware, slowly, that this benign domesticity might be masking anger and repression.

Gracie runs a baking enterprise out of her home; Joe is an X-ray technician. Their two younger children (Gabriel Chung and Elizabeth Yu) are graduating from high school and their older daughter (Piper Curda) is returning from college for the event. The more Elizabeth is in their company -- watching and asking questions -- the more it becomes apparent nothing is as it seems; motives, including Elizabeth's, are murky; questions are raised but not answered.

All of this contributes to the film's atmosphere of unease, which is conveyed especially well in the exchanges between Moore and Portman. Is Gracie a fool for love or a predator? And what will Elizabeth do with the answer?

The Color Purple and Wonka

 

Blitz Bazawule's The Color Purple and Paul King's Wonka are quite different in story and tone but they are both decidedly Hollywood Holiday fare, packing sumptuous visuals and ear-pleasing tunes while approaching their themes of family, lost and found, from different directions.

Bazawule's adaptation of the award-winning Broadway musical is dazzling and stirring but also quite different in thrust and focus from Steven Spielberg's first film adaptation in 1985, which starred Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey (her first movie role). Both the '85 and the latest production capture accurately the brutality of Alice Walker's novel but the musical emphasizes to a greater degree the women's response to their harsh treatment at the hands of their fathers and husbands and their roles as healers and redeemers not only of themselves but of the men in their lives, most menacingly Mister (Colman Domingo).

Empowerment and the trappings that come with it run through this picture that stars an essentially all-Black cast. Fantasia Barrino's Celie is the focus of a sisterhood intervention marshaled by Taraji P. Henson's blues chanteuse Shug Avery and Danielle Brooks' fiercely defiant Sofia. All three ladies are wonderful and fill the screen with powerful voices, even if the acting, in places is not as strong. But where God's mercy and deliverance were essentially absent from the earlier dramatic film, the musical uses the gospel roots of its showstoppers to not only raise the rafters but the audience's hands in praise.

King's Wonka is a sort of prequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) that rises above the controversy around Roald Dahl's original story as being marred by subtly racist conceits with diverse and international casting and a universal story of pursuing elusive dreams.

Despite nimble choreography and fanciful confectionary scenes, Wonka doesn't stick the landing with hummable songs. It might be too early to fairly make that observation, but I can't imagine any of the dozen perfectly lovely numbers sung by Timothée Chalamet (who has a fine but not particularly strong voice) and the cast (principally Calah Lane as Noodle) will challenge The Candy Man or Pure Imagination from the original picture. In fact, the latter number, given a warm reprise near the end of Wonka will surely pull the tears where other numbers didn't.

But, again, King puts all of the wonderful casting and perfectly listenable though not particularly memorable songs to the purpose of exploring the meaning of family, of detachment and of the search for "mother," both literally and figuratively.

Both Celie Johnson and Willy Wonka -- while fictitious creations -- present to movie audiences very different faces of a common real-world longing for connection with that which gives life meaning and purpose. Celie finally discovers she was loved by her mother and is reunited with her beloved sister and children. Willy finally understands a lesson from his long-absent mother that life, like chocolate, is enjoyed best when it is shared.

Terrific messages for this season.

Leave the World Behind

 

Writer / director Sam Esmail's chillingly cryptic apocalypse tale Leave the World Behind on Netflix asks us to consider not just the "how and why" of societal collapse but the "what then."

Unlike other popular Armageddon movies and series that take a fight for a new day position, the answer Esmail offers, much like what he presented in his fascinating machines and madness series Mr. Robot, is "Well, it depends. But every possible scenario is bleak and will likely not speak well of us."

Ethan Hawke and Julia Roberts are a New York City couple who go with their two kids (Farrah MacKenzie and Charlie Evans) to a Long Island rental for a weekend vacation at the beach. The house is luxurious and the family settle in just as they lose all connectivity to their devices -- phones, laptops and televisions. Snowy hiss is interrupted briefly by warnings of cyberattacks and the grounding of an oil tanker at the nearby beach suggest much is amiss.

When father and daughter Mahershala Ali and Myha'la arrive that night claiming to be the owners of the house returning after a blackout in the city, the film's coiled mystery, told in ominously titled chapters, begins to unwind -- along with the characters' wits and in one instance health.

Esmail is a master of misdirection, so it is not surprising that the truth is elusive, maybe frustratingly so for some, but for me the fun of Leave the World Behind is listening to the six principals take stock not only of the fate of the world but their own vitality and purpose, how open they are to others, to their own hearts and how committed they are to one another's welfare. These are meaningful exchanges that I think are meant to prompt us to assess and reflect.

How well they succeed depends on, er, well, who we are, I suppose. Hopefully our conclusions will speak well of us.

The Last of Us

I resisted watching The Last of Us for nearly a year. I got about 20 minutes into Season 1 and decided to pause it. I guess I was not willing to make space for a pandemic / zombie apocalypse series in light of real-world distresses.

Golden Globe nominations for the show and its two stars -- Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey -- piqued my interest, and I re-started it.

Pushing through my initial concerns, I opened my mind and eyes to what has captured the imaginations of viewers and critics around the world. Three episodes in, I have discovered a few things that are quite refreshing.

Pascal's wounded warrior Joel is, paradoxically, a three-dimensional cipher. We know he carries the death of his beloved daughter with him 20 years after she was killed by militarized police, but he doesn't seem like a run-of-the-mill anarchist. He's something more, fighting for something more abstract perhaps than overthrowing the fascists regime that has bombed American cities to smithereens. I am fascinated by this guy.

Another is Ramsey's pugnacious orphan Ellie, whose spirited interactions with the taciturn Joel give the series wonderful tension without playing so obviously to Joel's stymied paternalism, deadened after his daughter's death. I love Ellie's profane glibness and that the narrative invests so much in her survival.

Lastly, I think it was counterintuitive of the series creators to place the tender love story about Bill and Frank (Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett, respectively) titled Long, Long Time so early in Season 1. While the move might be read by some as pandering to the woke generation, I prefer to see it as a model of what under the best circumstances within an apocalyptic scenario we are capable of, i.e., finding our humanity and our purpose, as Bill writes so wonderfully, in caring for someone else.

I'm hooked.

The Iron Claw and The Boys in the Boat

 

Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw and George Clooney's Boys in the Boat offer audiences different takes on androcentrism (male-centered culture) with one (Claw) depicting the destructiveness of toxic masculinity dressed up like filial bonding and the other (Boys) espousing the productive nature of circumstantial fraternity. Both are insightful and engaging pictures.

Durkin's Iron Claw is based on the lives of real-world professional wrestlers the Von Erich brothers of the '70s, who shared an enviable familial attachment to one another and to their father. The brothers are played by Zac Efron (The Greatest Showman), Jeremy Allen White (The Bear), Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness) and Stanley Simons. Efron's Kevin is father Fritz's (Holt McCallany) second favorite after Dickinson's David, followed by White's Kerry (an Olympic-hopeful discus thrower) and Simon's non-wrestler Michael.

This is important because Fritz makes it clear to his boys they win his favor and improve their rankings, which they all desperately want, by working hard to give him what he wants. He's the center of a household in which deeply religious mother Doris (Maura Tierney) plays a decidedly supportive role, fearing to interfere or intervene on behalf of her sons as it relates to their father and his demands.

Durkin's story makes it clear the Von Erich brothers love one another and their parents, after a fashion, but they have been groomed to fulfill their father's frustrated dream of winning a world championship in the heavily scripted televised competitions where image and fan-base wins over talent. The falseness and destructiveness of Fritz's enterprise parallels the chaos and heartbreak they foster in his sons, who seem to have no close associates other than themselves, no desires except what their father has given them. A series of tragic events, beginning with the death of the fifth Von Erich son when he was just a boy, has convinced Fritz the family is cursed, but his sons can defeat it.

Kevin eventually meets Pam (the ever-luminous Lily James) but he lacks dating experience and is uncomfortable outside of the family enclave. Pam eventually frees him, they marry, begin a family, and Kevin slowly loses his edge as a wrestler. This leaves him conflicted and resentful.

As Kevin's star descends, David and Kerry's rise with the aid of drugs, and they eventually become casualties. In fact, the whole family is decimated by the quest.

The opposite of narratives of destructive bonding are stories about the creative potential of brotherhood in the form of team competition. Clooney uses the true story of an underdog University of Washington rowing team defying the odds to compete in the '36 Olympics in Berlin to celebrate the forging of nine individuals into one performing unit.

Joel Edgerton (a personal favorite) stars as Coach Al Ulbrickson, who hopes to mold a junior squad of newbie rowers into shape against better funded and legacy teams in California and on the East Coast. Among the newbies is Joe Rantz, a struggling student living in a migrants' camp, who tries out for the team to get money to continue his studies.

Joe draws the attention of classmate Joyce (Hadley Robinson), who is curious about the quiet boy with the serious face, and their relationship offers counterpoint to the toil of training.

Clooney is a Hollywood traditionalist with a penchant for character-driven stories, but Boys is most riveting as it recreates the bracing action during rowing meets. He puts a lot of emotional weight in Joe's adventure, the blossoming of the introverted oarsman Don (Jack Mulhern) and the brash coxswain Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery) and it's for them we root. But it's in the racing set pieces that Clooney show his razor-sharp eye for telling detail and the thrill of winning because of singularity of purpose.

Such a needed message these days.

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.

All reacti

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.

Killers of the Flower Moon

 

Martin Scorsese's engrossing masterwork Killers of the Flower Moon takes the true story of the murder of members of the wealthy Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the 1920s and turns it into a study of corruption, greed and white supremacy.

The picture's 206-minute running time covers about a dozen bloody years, when white settlers on Osage land overflowing with oil find ways to insinuate themselves into tribal affairs in hopes of eventually making themselves rich. Standing between the schemers and the tribe's money are laws prohibiting non-tribal members from inheriting oil rights ... except through marriage.

Robert De Niro, Scorsese's longtime collaborator, is William "King" Hale, the prime schemer and uncle to returning doughboy Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a slow-witted young man with no demonstrable talent who goes to work as a cab driver.

Through this job, he meets an unattached Osage woman named Mollie, played by the remarkable Lily Gladstone, whom he is encouraged by his uncle to woo, as Mollie's mother is sickly, her older sister a destructive alcoholic, and her other sisters already married. Mollie herself is suffering from diabetes. King tells Ernest if he marries Mollie and lets "nature" take its course her family's great wealth will one day be his, or rather theirs.

The plan progresses. Members of Mollie's family are slowly killed off by ghostly figures, leaving her only support Ernest, who claims to love her more than he does money, and King.

More than 20 Osage members are murdered, and the federal government dispatches investigators led by Tom White (the ever-reliable Jesse Plemons) to ferret out the killers.

Scorsese weaves into the tapestry of this "gangland" tale much historical and cultural context about the Osage people, and it is in those passages -- some staged as newsreel footage and others as dreams and fantasy -- that the director offers his most elegiac imagery.

Most notably for me was a field-burning scene late in the picture that depicts the event giving the picture and its source material its meaning. It is chillingly emblematic of the destruction of not only Osage people but all Native American tribes.

Joan Baez: I Am a Noise

 

Directors Miri Navasky, Maeve O'Boyle and Karen O'Connor's touching and illuminating documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise is only secondarily a musical retrospective. 

It is primarily an exploration of the spirit of an 82-year-old woman who has been both gifted with a heavenly voice and social consciousness and tortured by demons she's never fully understood.

The film is bookended by Baez's preparation for a final tour after many years of absence from the stage and includes family footage mostly shot by her father, a Mexican immigrant who was an accomplished physics professor. Baez recounts being plagued by depression and anxiety as a child, conditions she would struggle with for the rest of her life and the cause of which is suggested but not firmly established.

Her public story is familiar to many -- her relationships with Bob Dylan, whom she introduced to public audiences in the early '60s, and anti-war activist David Harris, whom she would marry and with whom she had a son, Gabriel. Many already know of her participation in Civil Rights protests in the South and world peace campaigns all over the country.

Less familiar would be the parts of her story that involved her sisters -- Pauline and Mimi -- and their varying degrees of closeness and distance, support and resentment, and the impact her parents would have on both her success and her despondency.  

Themes of personal and familial unhappiness course through this riveting picture, which incorporates live and recorded performances by Baez and footage of her social justice work. 

Though she no longer has the clarion soprano of her youth, her voice is still lovely and her convictions have not waned, despite the fierce battles she has waged to maintain her sanity and emotional wholeness. 

A scene of Baez dancing barefoot to a drum squad in a Paris street is so joyful we forget for a minute her struggles with stifling sadness, most achingly portrayed in passages and drawings from her childhood journals. 

Hers has been both an incredibly public and private existence that has enriched the world in incalculable ways. The picture is a loving and vital tribute to a remarkable woman.

Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal

 

Season 1of Netflix's Murdaugh documentary featured no people of color in any substantial way in running down the events of the murders and the earlier boat crash.

Season 2 prominently features a Hispanic woman who worked as the Murdaugh's housekeeper and an African American woman who was caretaker to Alex Murdaugh's parents.

These are longstanding roles in the South, especially where there were strict divisions between the white, wealthy propertied class and those who worked for them -- poor whites and people of color -- with the latter often being exploited and manipulated by the former.

The Creator

 

Gareth Edwards' The Creator presents two minds to audiences.
One is concerned with the threat of unbound technological advancement, and the other the benign hybridization of humans and machines.

Both of these themes have been explored numerous times in film and television and, I feel, with more impact (Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence [2001] and Alex Garland Ex Machina [2014]).

The apocalyptic world that Edwards has created with co-writer Chris Weitz is set decades in the future with humans and machines on two different continents. The machines inhabit "New Asia" and the humans, a militarized America, where the president is a uniformed officer. Yes, the socio-political messaging here is pretty heavy.

John David Washington plays Joshua, an Army sergeant on undercover assignment in New Asia, married to Maya (Gemma Chan), a human raised by A.I., who is pregnant with the couple's first child.

They are living peacefully in an A.I. enclave when a gigantic, floating American vessel drops bombs on the village just as Maya, who did not know Joshua was a spy, tries to join the A.I. forces in fighting back. Joshua and Maya are separated, and Maya presumed dead.

Five years later, Joshua is part of a mission led by Colonel Howell (Allison Janney) to locate and capture a device that could neutralize all American weaponry. Joshua discovers the device is actually a simulant child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). After the rest of the mission team is killed, Joshua takes charge of the child / weapon.

Predictably, Joshua and the child, whom he names Alphie, develop a bond as they try to elude Howell's forces who are determined to destroy her. During their flight, Joshua learns from a simulant fighter (Ken Watanabe) that Maya may be alive, and Joshua sets out to find her.

Edwards' visual effects artistry is on display in nearly every frame of this picture, particularly in the robots and simulants. But the movie's reliance on familiar narrative tropes and some anachronistic dialogue (Get in! This will be hellafun!) kept it from becoming a fully immersive experience.

Jesse Plemons

 

Jesse Plemons does not have a Hollywood-handsome face and is paunchy. I don't think I've ever heard him in a role where his Texas accent was not present. He will likely never play Hamlet -- though I think that could be quite a performance. He's not a method actor but appears to invest himself fully into his characters -- men who would quite likely -- were they real -- look like him. He's done comedy, family drama, period pieces, psychological thrillers -- film and television. He's won awards and will surely win more. He's as solid and appealing an actor as any I can think of and if film distributors DO NOT include him in the trailer for a picture -- no matter how small his part -- they're absolutely crazy. Plemons is in Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon as FBI agent Tom White. He is one of the few younger members of the Friday Night Lights television series cast to go on to build a substantial career.