Carnivale (redux)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwtMpL-zxEY

During its short run (2003-2005), I was completely hooked on Daniel Knauf's Carnivale, despite its end-of-days hokum and endlessly evolving mythology.

Set during the Great Depression, the story told of a ragtag roving circus traveling through the dusty Southwest, unwittingly on its way to a showdown between agents of goodness and wickedness.

Sweat, dust and dirt, sweltering heat and blinding wind storms filled the screen weekly. I loved the feel of the show. Carnivale won Emmys for its production values but was overlooked for performance awards. Maybe the size of the cast worked against them.

Michael J. Anderson played the diminutive leader of the band, Samson, a former weightlifting dwarf who answered to the mysterious (hell, everything about this show was mysterious) Management, who sat shrouded in a trailer, visited only by Samson and one or two others.

Nick Stahl as escaped prisoner Ben Hawkins and Clancy Brown as evangelist Brother Justin were the incarnations of light and darkness, although it was never clear who was which. That question and a host of other puzzlers made the show intriguing but also frustrating to those who really like narratives to have definitive meaning.

Though it lasted only two seasons -- to the great disappointment of its fans -- it was a bit of a game changer, at least to me, in how it handled themes of faith and morality. (See especially the season 1 episode titled Babylon) Criminality and lasciviousness were written on every page, judgment meted out with relish, but Knauf and company seemed interested in the grayness of human existence not dogma. This notion is present in the series' opening monologue, delivered by Anderson.

The series is grim and because it was cancelled prematurely leaves many loose threads dangling but it is a fascinating treatment of the duality of human beings, as we struggle with right and wrong along unfamiliar paths, into uncertain futures.

Live Fast, Die Young

 

Saturday Night Drive-in ~ Live Fast, Die Young

Back in '58, California high-schooler Jill gets lousy grades, picked on by her teachers and the other school kids, talks trash with her out-of-work-bum-of-a-washed-up-jock of a father, and runs away because her life is "for the birds."

Man-Hating Big Sister Kim joins her on the run, and they become thieves, seducing and hitting up drunks in bars -- all because their trashy mother ran off with a lousy salesman and they ain't got no education.

Two real choice dames in this Eisenhower-era cautionary tale about the dangers of being an independent woman!

Starring a pre-Mannix Mike Connors and dreamy Troy Donahue.

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans

I'm sauntering through Jon Robin Baitz's Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, a Hulu series that I'm finding fascinating and exhausting.

Tom Hollander's Capote is a scarved, behatted masochist who has revealed the unseemly underbelly of New York high society in an Esquire article that leads to the end of his relationship with a quintet of women, The Swans, and banishment from their inner circle. Naomi Watts (Thanks for the catch, Peach!) is wonderful as chief Swan Babe Paley, socialite and wife of media executive Bill Paley (a fine Treat Williams), with whom Capote was especially close and whose friendship the writer missed the most.

I found particularly intriguing episode 5, an imaginary day-long meeting between Capote and Black ex-pat author James Baldwin during the dark days of Capote's alcoholism. Baitz admits the day never happened, and is an encounter between two highly influential gay men of letters, contemporaries but not friends, who responded to alienation and truth in very different ways. Baldwin left America for France many years before Capote's crisis.

Baldwin, played convincingly by Chris Chalk, is Capote's counselor and comforter, pushing the acerbic writer -- who is struggling to finish an imposing new work titled Answered Prayers -- to finish what he has begun, revealing America's falseness and social disparities.

The conversations between the two men are some of the most insightful in the series, with Capote sharing startling awareness of racial dynamics not explored in previous episodes. Capote, famously biting, is likely not to have ever uttered these words or had these thoughts, is just Baitz's tool to air them, but that is fine by me.

Baldwin's part in the epiphany may strike some as a little regressive, magical Negro intervention, but Chalk's portrayal is so self-possessed and clear-eyed I never felt Baldwin was any more than a man shaking some sense into a friend who was wasting his gifts and time.

Were we all to be so lucky to have someone who cared that much to tell us to cut the crap and get back to work!

American Society of Magical Negroes

 

Kobi Libii's debut feature, American Society of Magical Negroes, is tanking in its theatrical release, but I trust it will find a more appreciative audience when it arrives on streaming, which will quite likely be soon.

I enjoyed the picture and appreciate what Libii tries to do in blending the cinematic trope of deferential Black secondary characters with the reality of African American endangerment because of the itchy discomfort of some white folks.

The fine young actor Justice Smith (The Get Down) plays Libii's alter ego in a story I take is rooted not only in the filmmaker's study of motion picture history regarding depictions of race but in his own lived experience. Smith plays Aren, a struggling textile artist (I can't imagine any other kind) who has been navigating L.A. with a quick smile and a quicker apology.

One evening, after an especially disheartening art show, he finds himself accused of taking a young woman's purse at an ATM. The situation is "miraculously" de-escalated by David Alan Grier's mystical Roger, who invites Aren to a recruitment meeting. At the meeting, Aren is introduced to the eponymous group whose role is to help ease the anxiety of white folks for the safety of Black folks because dis-ease equals death.

Yes, that premise is a lot to swallow, but it didn't strike me as being that much more challenging -- considering current events -- than Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) or Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle (1987), both of which wrestled with race and racism to wildly divergent audience response.

Aren earns his "Magical Negro" wings and is assigned a client, Jason, a vacuous and self-involved co-worker at a social media platform. Aren is first assigned to helping Jason (Drew Tarver) earn a promotion but shortly also to woo a bright young designer (An-Li Bogan), to whom Aren himself is attracted.

Aren has been warned, however, that he must never act in his own behalf or all of the Magical Negroes will be powerless to help anxious white folks. This, in turn, would endanger Black folks everywhere. Things go awry, as one might expect, which leads to a final act that is both clunky and inspired (that tonal unevenness, again).

Smith, a skilled stage actor, is bright and engaging and is the reason the picture works as well as it does, I think. A less likable protagonist would have made it much easier to dismiss the whole thing as a sad misfire.

I understand why many audiences might be frustrated by the film's uneven tone and its under-developed narrative structure, but I still think it introduces intriguing ideas that are worth exploring in more depth.

Poor Things

 

One measure of the relevance of director / philosopher Yorgos Lanthimos' fantastic "immorality" tale Poor Things might be the number of viewers taken back by the sight of Emma Stone's untrimmed pubic hair and not by the bloody evisceration of corpses -- both make frequent appearances in this striking and hilarious film. These responses would suggest that people have less tolerance for graphic presentations of women's sexuality than they do for butchering the human corpus. 

Stone plays Bella Baxter, a Victorian-era revivified victim of suicide, a Frankensteinian experiment into which the ghastly Dr. Godwin "God" Baxter (Willem Dafoe) has implanted a baby's brain. Baxter is raising the full-grown Bella as his daughter with the help of a young medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), who falls for Bella's beauty and innocence.

Bella is intellectually and emotionally arrested, at first, but then her brain begins to grow rapidly, along with her raven hair. The doctor fears Bella, who has been sheltered from the world, won't survive outside of his London estate. He intends for Max to marry Bella, and the couple would then never leave. 

Baxter's plan is disrupted when the wolfish Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) takes Bella, who has developed an insatiable sexual appetite, on a tour of foreign cities. Once away from "God" and Max, Bella starts to learn about the ways of the world, that is, the ways of men. And, because Bella has not been conditioned by social conventions, she responds in ways that seem both "radical" and "rational," traits not commonly demonstrated by "decent" women of the period. 

Stone, an Oscar winner for La La Land, is wonderful as the science experiment who grew into a fully actualized woman, taking full ownership of her mind and body in a world that despite Lanthimos's visually stunning production elements -- eye-popping sets and costumes -- is not far removed from the real.

Oscars 2024

 

I've seen nine of the 10 Oscar nominees for Best Picture and they're all so different that it doesn't really make sense to compare them. Maybe it never has made sense. Dunno.

Many industry observers are saying it's Oppenheimer's to lose. Probably so. Having 10 pictures, though, could split the vote and a dark horse darling like Barbie or The Holdovers might sneak in. 

I suspect awards will be spread out among the pictures and American Fiction might win for screen adaptation. I don't see Jeffrey Wright, as wonderful as he always is, will win Best Actor against Paul Giamatti in Holdovers or Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.

Lily Gladstone will get Best Actress as many are predicting but Carey Mulligan was terrific in Maestro and Emma Stone unbelievably good (and committed) in Poor Things. 

I would love to see Best Supporting Actress go to Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer but think Da'Vine Joy Randolph from Holdovers is favored and that's OK with me.

I thought Robert Downey Jr. was actually more compelling in Oppenheimer than the lead so I'm fine with him getting Best Supporting Actor. 

Christopher Nolan has never won an Oscar for directing. I think he will this year. 

 

“American Fiction”

“Anatomy of a Fall”

“Barbie”

“The Holdovers”

“Killers of the Flower Moon”

“Maestro”

“Oppenheimer”

“Past Lives”

“Poor Things”

“The Zone of Interest”

All Of Us Strangers

The less one knows about Andrew Haigh's beautiful and quietly devastating film All of Us Strangers the better. It's a small, intimate picture about loss and recovery that must be heard as much as seen with one's guard down. 

Adam (Andrew Scott) lives in near isolation in a London high-rise, trying to write a screenplay about his parents, who died in an accident when he was a boy. Andrew gets the notion to visit his childhood home and while there encounters his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), living in a world suspended between the past and present. He begins regular visits. 

Around the same time, a friendly neighbor (Paul Mescal) comes to Adam's flat one night with a bottle of whiskey and a sexual proposition. Adam declines at first but then ventures out and they begin an affair.

These events are linked, and the beauty of Haigh's film is the way it reveals how and what they tell us about Adam. The answers are unexpected.

The screenplay, based on a novel by Taichi Yamada, is exquisite in its intelligence and honesty. Each performance by the small cast of principals is deeply moving, with Scott's slow burn as an isolated man learning, perhaps for the first time, the power of love the most gripping.

Origin

 

Ava DuVernay's Origin takes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson's personal journey of discovery, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent -- which sought to reframe public conversations and explorations around race and inequality -- and transforms it into a motion picture of singular beauty and brilliance. 

The film, which features a tremendous cast led by the amazing Aunjunue Ellis-Taylor, is poetic and painful -- so painful -- fiercely intelligent, compassionate and analytical, factual and metaphorical, intimate and global, historical and pressingly relevant. 

It's a sermon, a dissertation, an indictment, and a love story. It is so many things, but perhaps foremost, it is a cinematic triumph. DuVernay's best work yet.

I'll leave it at that and urge everyone to see and don't resist its message -- even if that were possible. Let it move you and bruise you and, finally, give you hope.

American Symphony

 

Documentarian Matthew Heineman's Oscar-nominated film American Symphony generates warmth and a tinge of claustrophobia with its intimacy and closeness, but not at all negatively. 

Heineman's subject is multiple Grammy-winning musician and composer Jon Batiste, a native New Orleanian performer with a personality and smile as big and broad as the Mississippi River. His radiance is nearly shamanistic; he communicates in languages that are both mystical and grounded. It's wonderful to watch him at work as he navigates the many waterways and eddies of his very full and complicated life.

During the time of Heineman's filming, Batiste is working on an ambitious venture that would combine all of America's musical traditions into a single symphony, pulling from the traditions of African Americans, native peoples and other resident cultures and folkways. It's an enormous undertaking that Batiste seems called to produce but also unsure if he can make it happen.

At the same time, Batiste's wife, writer Souleika Jaouad, is battling leukemia, which has returned after years of remission. The tender exchanges between the couple, filmed in their most private places and at their most vulnerable times, gives the film a near voyeuristic quality, but doesn't cross the line into prurience or misery porn. Rather, these scenes rise to a spiritual level, and not just because of Batiste's very open devoutness. We can see and hear every breath, hope and despair, resignation and resolution. 

The combination of a truly unique human subject and phenomenal access to the ebbs and flows of the subject's life gives the film American Symphony itself a kind of classical structure -- many, many melodic passages followed by tension and counterpoint, the repeating of earlier themes and motives and a rousing closing section that fills the heart.

Mean Girls and The Book of Clarence

The latest version of Tina Fey's Mean Girls juggernaut has arrived in theaters carrying the same Hi-NRG inclusiveness that has made earlier iterations enormous hits (and big paydays for the Queen Bee of SNL alums).

Directed by the duo of Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., Mean Girls is a now familiar tale of high school cliques and trauma, so familiar that since the original film in 2004 "mean girls" has become a separate class of teen-ager for many.

New arrival to North Shore High School Cady Heron (Angourie Rice of The Nice Guys) is befriended by queer outcasts Janice and Damian (Auli'i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey, a hilarious pair) who then encourage the newbie to infiltrate the camp of the Plastics (the eponymous Mean Girls) which is led by Campus Queen Regina George (Reneé Rapp). Cady is to report back what Regina and her wannabees (Avantika and Bebe Wood) are up to. The Plastics keep the scorching judgments about their schoolmates in a "bedazzled" (thank you, Moira Rose) portfolio, the Burn Book, a central plot device.

A math whiz, Cady falls for a handsome Regina-reject in calculus (Christopher Briney), which, predictably, complicates the mission and Cady's life as it evokes the Queen's wrath. All of this is observed with varying degrees of remove by Mr. Duvall (Tim Meadows) and Ms. Norbury (Ms. Fey) and told through energetic pop-y tunes and nimble ensemble choreography.

Mean Girls is free of moralistic bromides, especially as articulated by the few "grumps" in the picture, but it is not without healthy messaging about self-identity and the power of transformation, even for people who aren't quite done with growing.

British director Jeymes Samuel's The Book of Clarence is an interesting idea in need of a more cohesive presentation. LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah, Atlanta) stars as the title character, who is the twin brother of one of Jesus's 12 disciples. Yes, nearly everyone in the picture -- including Jesus and his Apostles, is Black. The exceptions are, of course, the Romans, who here are standing in for oppressive laws and enforcement.

Clarence is a first-century atheistic rogue and drug dealer, who with his partner Elijah (R.J. Cyler) are indebted to crime lord Jedediah (Eric Kofi-Abrefa), whose sister Varinia (Anna Diop), Clarence fancies.

Samuel matches the story's mix of religion, crime and romance with widely varying tones -- from the reverential to the fanciful and a thumbing hip-hop musical bed -- which is the picture's strength and weakness, to my mind. Was all of this intended and strategic or is Samuel exploring the more free-wheeling, expressive side found in his music?

After seeing throngs drawn to Jesus (Nicholas Pinnock), Clarence gets the notion to try his hand at being a messiah, using stunts involving fake miracles and mud-hut wisdom to raise enough money to settle his debts.

It wouldn't be a movie if the scheme went as planned, of course, and the dismantling of this one is swift and multilayered, ultimately wrestles with matters of faith and redemption, not altogether convincingly.

Samuel's The Harder They Fall (2021) was a fresh take on the American Western that benefited from his outsider perspective. I'm not sure from The Book of Clarence where Samuel, who also wrote the screenplay, is on the religious continuum. I don't think there's any question he's a believer, who embraces forgiveness and sacrifice as eternal truths but his faith lacks the rigidity of more orthodox traditions.

Maybe it doesn't matter, ultimately. Clarence will not be added to the burgeoning canon of contemporary Christian films, but it might best be viewed as an interesting though flawed attempt to make the gospel relevant, regardless of authorship.

American Fiction

 

Cord Jefferson's American Fiction takes questions of authorial authenticity and develops a fascinating study of the meaning of identity, asking what is it that makes each of us who or what we are and what do we do once we find out.

Jefferson's protagonist in this highly entertaining and provocative tale is one Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (the always wonderful Jeffrey Wright). Ellison is an L.A.-based writer of modest renown, laboring in the fields of academia, where he appears to have stagnated. Ellison appears distanced from his craft, from his family and from himself. The film is about how all of these estrangements converge.

Assembled around Monk are his agent Arthur (John Ortiz), who is trying to keep a talented man invested in his career; his sister (Tracee Ellis Ross), who is Monk's truthteller trying to pull him back into the family; and his brother (Sterling K. Brown), who is on his own quest for authenticity.

At a book festival in his hometown of Boston, Monk hears bestselling urban writer Sintara Golden (a terrific Issa Rae) read from her blockbuster "We's Live in Da Ghetto," (yes, the satire is that broad), a book celebrated by the publishing world as the needed voice of Black America.

Monk is repulsed by what he considers pandering prose, but personal circumstances soon persuade him to give the genre a shot. The shot turns into a goldmine, which fuels Monk's deep crisis of conscience.

Jefferson's film is an adaptation of Percival Everett's "Erasure," which I have not read, but, knowing some of Everett's other works, I expect the source material is even more incendiary in its depiction of the publishing industry's relationship with Black writers -- a topic that Everett, who was reared in Columbia, no doubt knows well.

Fans of Wright who like me welcome anything the man decides to do will undoubtedly love the complexity of the character he portrays with the easy grace that typifies his work. But the film's ensemble is also strong, especially the lovely and understated supporting appearance by Erika Alexander (Living Single) as Coraline, Monk's love interest who gets as close as anyone might to understanding the enigma that is the man.

I hope American Fiction, a wonderful picture, will inspire much post-screening conversation and productive navel-gazing among literary agents and writer's struggling to find their voices amidst the cacophony of modern publishing.

Anatomy of a Fall

 

Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall is a riveting suspicious-death procedural that's wrapped around a domestic drama of incompatibility and "blinding" self-regard. 

I use the term "blinding" deliberately and ironically because the prime witness to the suspicious death is the son of the couple living in a chalet in Grenoble (Sandra Hüller and Samuel Theis), who lost his vision in an accident.

The boy, played by the impressive child actor Milo Machado Graner, has been a silent witness to his parents' acrimonious relationship, which has worsened since the family moved from London to the Alps. Daniel's mother, Sandra, is charged with the murder of his father, Samuel, whose body the boy found in the snow, a fatal wound to his head.

Triet exposes through the investigation and the court trial competing scenarios to explain Samuel's death, with the chief prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) describing jealousy and resentment between the couple, a successful writer, Sandra, married to a struggling writer / college professor. Sandra's attorney is a former love interest named Vincent (Swann Arlaud) who acknowledges that the circumstances point to Sandra as the culprit but promotes another cause of Samuel's death.

Anatomy's structure is pretty standard for whodunits but departs from it when piecing together the competing views -- reality and illusion -- about the couple's relationship and the role Daniel's blinding accident played in the dissolution of what may or may not have been true love. So much weight is put on the boy's presence in the lives of these two egoists and the changes to the family's dynamic after he was blinded that one wonders how (or even if) he's remained sane. 

And therein lies the biggest mystery of Anatomy of a Fall, and one the film does not answer readily. And that makes the fascinating picture all the more so.

The Retirement Plan

 

Director Tim Brown's The Retirement Plan is a breezy, outlandish mob comedy / thriller starring Nicolas Cage as a former government asset named Matt, living a drunken existence in the Caymans when his 'tweeny granddaughter Sarah (Thalia Campbell) arrives at his beachside bungalow, deposited there by his estranged daughter Ashley (Ashley Greene Khoury) after her husband (Jordan Johnson-Hinds) runs afoul of the gangster he drives for (Jackie Earle Haley).

Brown's picture is a convoluted mess of crosses and double-crosses with layers of nonsensical political intrigue on top of dense strata of murky backstory. It's all more impressions than information. The closest the picture gets to understanding Matt's motives is when an old friend (Ernie Hudson) shares a bit with Sarah and Ashley about Matt's deadly exploits, foreshadowing for them and the audience what the last reel would deliver.

The Retirement Plan shares more than a passing resemblance to featured player Ron Perlman's The Baker (2022), another lazy story of an aging cantankerous grandfather with a smoky past on a mission of vengeance and redemption.

The Origins of Evil

 

French director Sébastien Marnier's The Origin of Evil (L'origine du mal) takes the nastiness of patriarchal legacy film and television (Knives Out, Secession, etc.) and distills it into a concentrated intoxicating potion. Superbly composed and hypnotic.

The picture opens with film star Laure Calamy getting ready for a shift in a fish-packaging plant. She's an assembly-line worker in a company that seems to employ only women. One night after work, she gathers the courage to dial a number and make contact with a local business magnate (Jacques Weber), identifying herself to him as his daughter Stéphane.

Next we see, she is taking the ferry to the island of Porquerolles to meet Serge; his wife, Louise (Dominique Blanc); and other members of his household.

"Unsettling" does not adequately describe the unfiltered animosity at the gathering but Stéphane doesn't appear deterred by the cold, rudeness of daughter George (Doria Tillier) or the off-putting officiousness of housekeeper Agnes (Véronique Ruggia). In fact, Stéphane's lack of discomfiture is an early indication that all is not as it seems in this wickedly sly movie.

Serge has recently suffered a stroke and is prone to fainting spells. He's secretive and suspicious and is looking for an ally. Louise is a Baby Jane-grotesque, whose sole aim appears to be spending Serge's money. She cares little about her husband's welfare or much of anything else, apparently.

George, who seems to care even less for her father than her mother, manages Serge's many enterprises, and housekeeper Agnes keeps George informed of household intrigues. The only family member who seems to be above the toxicity is college-aged Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell), whose counting the days before she'll be free of her family.

Sébastien Marnier, who also wrote the screenplay, has crafted for his cast -- especially Calamy -- a maddening tour de force of greed and misery, slowly revealing the dimensions and depths of the family's morbidity as the picture slowly burns.

Bad Seeds?

 

In Mervyn LeRoy's 1956 child-killer thriller The Bad Seed, sprightly, pig-tailed, 8-year-old Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack) kills a classmate and later a handyman who suspects her of doing it.

Her mother, Christine (Nancy Kelly), suspects Rhoda inherited evil genes from Christine's birth father, who she had discovered was a serial killer. Christine tries to dispose of evidence of Rhoda's crimes and then do away with herself and her daughter.

Her plan doesn't work but Rhoda gets her just deserts. I won't say how.

Kelly and McCormack were nominated for Oscars, deservedly so, because the picture (based on a stage play by Maxwell Anderson) explores in more surreal terms, at least to my mind, the complex dynamic between parents and their errant children.

The film's plot centers on the killing of one child by another but is actually about the nature of criminality and culpability. Christine's distress and confusion are highly relatable, while Rhoda's sociopathy would likely be alien to most people.

Even though film standards and audience tolerance for violence have evolved since the '50s, the picture still packs a wallop and not just because of McCormack's creepy performance. The troubling questions the movie provokes resonate.

Who is ultimately to blame when our children go "bad"? Is it an easy dodge to saddle parents with the responsibility for their children's behavior? Genetics? Media? Society? Satan?

These questions came to mind when I read this morning of three teenagers being charged with the shooting deaths of three others and injuring a fourth. A family court judge will decide if the 14-year-old accused shooter will stand trial as an adult, a determination that will suggest the teen acted with full knowledge and responsibility.

Can this ever really be the case for someone so young?

Beyonce's Renaissance

 

Beyonce's invigorating cinematic testament to personal empowerment, Renaissance, builds on the narrative model she used in 2019's Homecoming, which was released on Netflix, to create not only a record of her latest tour but a thundering challenge to MAGA nation's stagnating worldview. As with Homecoming, Renaissance combines concert footage with that of production preparation during which Beyonce, 41, displays the control over all aspects of the tour that has made her legendary. Her drive is phenomenal, and the quality of her products -- the visually and aurally dazzling shows AND her personal brand -- are indeed remarkable. She's been described as a "force of nature" and everything in the nearly 3-hour film supports that description. Early in the film, Beyonce announces from the stage that her shows, booked in sold-out stadia, are "safe spaces" for those who have been marginalized or rejected. And they flock to her shows, costumed in silver and popping fans marked "Heated," after one of the numbers from the Renaissance album. Her highly diverse crew includes non-gender conforming dancers, several from New York's ball culture. And in voice-over, Beyonce says she was excited by the number of women working on the tech side of the enormous enterprise, building the gigantic sets. Those familiar with Beyonce's catalog know that her songs celebrate, sometimes in the coarsest of terms, women's ownership of their lives and bodies, of their destinies. She talks in the picture about balancing her public and private obligations, her devotion to her craft and to her family, the long hours, the injuries, the need for calm between the storms of her exhausting routines. And the enormous gratification she gets from being able to play at the top of her game and succeed. In so many ways, Beyonce Knowles-Carter represents what America should be -- a place that encourages and supports all of us, where we can realize our dreams no matter how grand or modest, unimpeded, giving us space to grow, free of others' limiting perspectives and prejudices. And, of course, plenty of room to dance.

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.