Thoughts about deliverance

I've been thinking about deliverance a lot lately. It's a concept that's central to Christianity as I know it. Perhaps it is one of the main contributions of the Judeo in Judeo-Christian.

Christians study deliverance from sinfulness, deliverance from tyranny, deliverance from uncertainty and doubt, deliverance from temptation, deliverance from bondage, deliverance from pain and suffering, deliverance from eternal damnation. It brings to my mind passage through trials.

That's what I suspect those who first sang "Didn't It Rain" were picturing when they first were hearing about the Bible and Jesus. But not, as Massa might have assumed as he listened from the porch of the Big House, the end to Noah's tribulations during the Great Flood and the believer's eternal reward for being "good and faithful servants."

No, they sang about the end to "40 days and 40 nights" of the toil and terror of chattel slavery. But even after Emancipation, and when the words and notes of the great "Negro Spiritual" were set on paper in 1919, the song's full meaning was intact. And I feel it retains its meaning to this day.

"Well, it rained forty days, forty nights without stoppin'
Noah was glad, when the water stopped droppin'
When I get to heaven, sit right down
Askin' Jesus for my starry crown."

While it most certainly intones assurance of heavenly reward, it also says to me, with clarity, the present world will be set aright for it is wicked.

This rousing, jubilant rendition is by Hugh Laurie, known to most who know him as Dr. Gregory House from the television series House. Laurie, as was demonstrated on the program, is an accomplished musician who has great affection for the American songbook. Jean McLain is the featured vocalist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7MZtyV_X6o

Chernobyl

I've tried NOT to watch Craig Mazin's astonishing TV series Chernobyl -- the nearly hour-by-hour recounting of the 1986 Soviet nuclear reactor disaster -- through the prism of our own national catastrophe. It's really tough when a parade of craven apparatchiks snap to, salute, toady, bleat and lie as millions are poisoned by bureaucratic bungling and incompetence and motions toward truth-telling are silenced by threats of bullets or defenestration.

With apologies to Stephen Stills, "I think it's time we stop, children. What's that sound. Everybody look what's coming down.   

The final episode is wonderfully written and this scene (link below) is particularly powerful, as the two men leading the clean up after the meltdown reflect on human frailty, the tyrannical Central Committee of the U.S.S.R. and the men and women who were forced to do its bidding. Both Stellan Skarsgard and Jared Harris are stellar throughout but especially here. 

I reflect on this scene now, in the midst of a health care and economic catastrophe, the severity of which might have been averted if wisdom had trumped pride, and wonder if its too late for "one good man" to help us. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvod3T945ds&fbclid=IwAR3rYCjJBA_M0kJ3AX48R1AbiVRGTlyWl68P6H6Fv6rZVLCm-fhX_fQUrbA

"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7366338/" (9.7/10) Do you know anything about this town, Chernobyl? Not really, no. It was mostly Jews and Poles. The Jews were...

The Crowd (1928)

Occasionally my mind wanders back to a silent film I watched when I bought my first video cassette player (it didn't record). King Vidor's The Crowd (1928) dates back to the movie era right before sound but is a classic because its story of lucklessness is pretty freaking universal. The young couple at the center of the picture are nice as they can be even though John is a big talker (well, you know what I mean) and Mary has big hopes for them and is not real good at hiding her disappointment -- especially when his successful buddy is around. The marriage doesn't seem to be working when Mary gets pregnant. John commits to sticking with it and doing better, but he's a faceless drone in an insurance company, another suit in a New York office, and can't seem to make his mark -- until, a detergent company buys his contest-winning slogan for 500 smackers. Now he and Mary and their kids will be on Easy Street! Except, when the happy parents call their kids from their apartment window to come see the presents Daddy has bought with his winnings, the littlest one gets hit by a truck while crossing the street. Yes, it's a festival of unhappiness (albeit with a fairly bright ending) that puts all of the news of pandemic pain and misery in a new light.

Little Richard

Crystal Closet Queen (1971)

To say Little Richard was conflicted is certainly to understate the case. Out/In, Gay/Straight/Omnisexual, his story shifted over the years. It seemed like he couldn't square his sexual nature with Jesus. He ultimately denounced LGBTQ as contrary to God's plan.

Leon Russell may have taken some liberties when he wrote this tune about Little Richard, swapping gender references and titling it what he did. But, to me, it is an affectionate tribute to a man whose style of rock 'n' roll was all through Russell's own high-powered, piano-pounding, scream-and-shout revivalism.

"There's a rainbow around my beautiful face and I'm living in a pot of gold."

Normal People

Streamers who enjoy highly emotive drama with credible characters who you love even when, or perhaps because, they behave badly will love Hulu's sweetly endearing Normal People. We meet two Irish teens in the last year before going off to university. The brainy Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is icy and angry, and we discover why when we meet her mother and brother. The quietly bookish jock Connell (Paul Mescal) is eaten up with unaccountable insecurities that seem to lighten when he's with the irascible Marianne, who fancies him. His mother works for Marianne's and through that arrangement boy and girl become lovers in some of the most wonderfully tender scenes of intimacy I've seen on screen. But they're a secret, to avoid the "awkwardness" of his mates' ribbing. One can anticipate the inevitable clash, and the crisis is pure devastation, especially for Connell, who doesn't know how to own his feelings. The series, which covers a number of years of romantic entanglements for the pair, features brief episodes filled with insight and candor.

#blackaf

I never got on the Black-ish bandwagon -- something about it struck me as self-serious and pedantic -- but creator Kenya Barris's Netflix series #blackaf is #funnyaf. It covers much of the same ground as Blackish and its offshoots but it feels smarter, less racially brittle, more combative and outrageously profane. (Well, it IS Netflix.)The parents (played by Barris and Rashida Jones) are a hot mess of questionable intentions and their half-dozen Gucci kids wear stylish insecurity, irony, introspection and resentment as if it were hair tint.

Episode 5 of #blackaf might be the "realest" 30 minutes of Black Television ever. In it, Barris tries to have a conversation about black cinema with his faux family, friends, co-workers and even some actual black filmmakers and cannot get anyone except his wokest daughter Drea (Iman Benson) and the white writers on his shows to agree a recently released motion picture, directed by and starring blacks, is actually crap, despite raves on Rotten Tomatoes. Even his wife, Jo (a terrific Jones), thinks its gold, but she's wrestling with her own identity issues.

The conversation between Barris and Tyler Perry, who is a pet target for many among the black and cinematic cognoscenti for making several fortunes shoveling formulaic dreck to, mostly, black audiences, is uncanny. Perry offers his defense, and its persuasiveness will probably depend on how much the viewer likes Madea.

This episode of #blackaf, as most of them in this series, is complex. That's not to say it's "complicated," as in "puzzling." It's complex, as in "that's deep, right there." Barris is inviting us to have an important conversation but I doubt it actually goes beyond this wonderful episode. I, for one, would love to be a part of it.

But, unfortunately, the wheels came completely off in epis 7 and 8. Borrowing from a host of other sitcoms that sent the family on an exotic vacation as a Sweeps Attraction, producers moved the action to Fiji, where all of the cantakerousness could get some sun and, maybe, work some TV magic. The bitter scornfulness among the Barrises (especially parents Kenya and Jo) had apparently grown to nuclear proportions even though it wasn't ever clear to me what was at the center of the animosity between any of the warring family members. Maybe having so much money made life worse for them because now they could retreat to their respective silos of privilege and tell everyone else to bugger off? The word "petty" is tossed around a lot and, perhaps, self-referentially, as the relational matters the narrative seemed most interested in probing just didn't feel that important. Maybe that's the real takeaway here. Dysfunction may just be something we create to kill time.

Tales from the Loop

Amazon's contemplative sci-fi series Tales from the Loop matches strangely forbidding exteriors with even stranger interior landscapes where characters -- often young people -- find disassociation from family paired with disconnection from their own spirits. It reminds me of the science fiction work of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky -- deliberate, hypnotic and unsettling. The setting of Tales is a bleak little Ohio town that sits atop an experimental laboratory employing the town's best and brightest in activities that early on are not explained and likely little understood. The surrounding forests are littered with robotic detritus and the residue of bad ideas, waiting to cause mischief. Obsession seems to be the coin of the realm. The refreshingly diverse cast is led by Jonathan Pryce and will no doubt remind many of Syfy's Eureka and Netflix's Black Mirror anthology.

Emma.

 

Fashion photographer Autumn de Wilde's Emma. is an admirable work, finely crafted and meticulously composed. Its production values are exquisite; each frame is a study, a tableau of near artistic perfection -- stately interiors of the 19th-century British country estates and the expansively verdant countrysides surrounding them. It's all just breathtaking. 

De Wilde directs an array of fully realized characters nestled in Jane Austen's mannered story space and led by the luminously doe-eyed Anya Taylor-Joy as the title character, a young and unattached woman of means who enjoys playing match-maker but is not particularly well-suited to the task. Her latest project is the school girl Harriet (Mia Goth), whose lineage is dubious but whose devotion to Emma is unquestionable. 

Circling around the two women are suitors with varying degrees of dexterity, played by Johnny Flynn, Josh O'Connor and Callum Turner. Screenwriter Ellen Catton's dialogue is as rich and sumptuous as the tea cakes gracing the parlor tables.

 

As marvelous as Emma. is in its entirety, I was especially taken by Miranda Hart's performance as the bounteously dithered Miss Bates, upon whom Taylor-Joy's Emma directs withering condescension. Of all the manor folk who populate Austen's beauteously appointed but frequently unmannered chambers and porticoes, Miss Bates is the gentlest and utterly without guile. Hart's depiction of this prim bundle of self-deprecation elevates every scene she's in. I was charmed.

 

Homer Price / reflection

Some of my earliest reading adventures were with Homer Price. I read the crazy doughnut story, which has been made into movies, dozens of times and especially loved it when the poor kid -- Rupert Black -- got the doughnut with the diamond bracelet. Even though the passage below would surely give some folks fits, there seems to be a guilelessness to its offensiveness, and Robert McCloskey was such a mensch that it's hard to get mad.

"(T)onight (Friday) was the dress rehearsal of the Pageant. Homer and Freddy and a couple of their friends were taking the part of Indians. They were going to be powdered all over with cocoa, striped with mercurochrome, and draped with towels around their middles. Homer had to get to rehearsal right on the dot, because he started the Pageant by rubbing two sticks together to make a fire. Most of the Pageant was historical, all about Ezekiel Enders and the founding of Centerburg. The organist of the African Baptist Church wrote the words and music for a long choral work, which the choir was going to sing all the while the Pageant was being acted."

William Thomas Jr. / Buckwheat

This is a studio portrait of William Thomas Jr., the child actor who played Buckwheat in the Little Rascals / Our Gang film shorts of the '30s and '40s. His was reputedly the longest continuing character in the popular serials. The serials were criticized by many for perpetuating harmful racial stereotypes, but celebrated by others for featuring black and white children co-existing amicably. Thomas left the series in '43 and entered military service. He never performed in another motion picture. He was not quite 50 when he died 40 years ago this October.

In White America / reflection

Much of my life has been about making discoveries and connections.

One of my earliest memories of serious theater was a production of Martin Duberman's "In White America," performed in a small chapel at Claflin College. It may have been reader's theater. It was 1970 or '71.

I was not familiar with the work but was riveted, chilled and touched by the stories, documented tales of personal and impersonal encounters between the races. The six member cast of black and white actors was a mix of students, faculty and guest performers. In looking back, I figure that by the time I saw this staging, the play had been circulating for a few years. It's original off-Broadway production in 1963 included Moses Gunn (a distinguished stage performer and co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company) and Gloria Foster (later known to millennials as the Oracle in the Matrix films).

She won an Obie for her performance.

Duberman was born in 1930 the son of a Ukrainian immigrant. He is a historian, biographer and retired professor who was also a tireless civil rights and gay rights activist. In the preface to the 1964 edition of his play, Duberman wrote (in part):

"My starting point was the wish to describe what it has been like to be a Negro in this country (to the extent that a white man can describe it). Neither popular journalism nor professional history has made much effort to tell this story. Both have been dominated by whites, and the whites, whether from guilt, indifference, or hostility, have been slow to reveal the American Negro's past. The revelations are painful, but they must be faced if the present is to be understood, and the future made more tolerable."

Here are a couple of scenes from the play's Second Act.

Oscar Picks

Oscar prognostication is a harmless (and useless) activity that folks who love movies toss at anyone who will listen. I don't know the movie business well enough to really handicap any of the pictures that made the cut this year, but I know that "best" is such a loaded term that it is almost meaningless as a label for quality or importance.

"Big" does not necessarily equal "best," neither do "edgy," "uncompromising," "artful," "sincere" and "truthful." I would attach at least one of those words to each of the nominated pictures. Which is the best? HTFSIK? But here are my thoughts, FWIW.

"The Irishman" was huge, Scorsese's homage to Scorsese, and he's already been celebrated for directing a mob picture.

"Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" was Tarantino playing in the same auteur's revisionist sandbox he played in with "Inglourious Basterds."

Haynes' "Joker" pulled no punches and Joaquin Phoenix was his usual uncannily committed self. He's protean and fascinating in a picture that puts a disturbing, painted face on gun violence. Maybe too sympathetic?

Gerwig's "Little Women" was a thoroughgoing, beautifully composed empowerment statement using familiar material. Though lovely, no surprises.

Mangold's "Ford v Ferrari" featured some thrilling racing sequences but lacked a firm emotional center. Waititi's "Jojo Rabbit" had tons of heart but satirizing Nazism has been done before and it didn't win then either.

Baumbach's "Marriage Story" is so raw and abrasive in its honesty that audiences likely felt battered by the scheming and vitriol.

This leaves Mendes' phenomenal cinematographic achievement "1917" and Bong Joon-ho's savage opera buffa of class warfare "Parasite."

If Academy voters pick "Parasite" as Best Foreign Picture, the big winner will likely be “1917."

A Fall From Grace

Tyler Perry's Netflix trifle A Fall From Grace is a soapy thriller with monstrous implausibility and criminal misuse of some talented actors. Perry himself can deliver a line when directed but his own narratives are unimaginative, formulaic. In this one, middle-aged divorcee Grace Waters (Crystal Fox) is courted by a young, studly beringed photographer in a Larry Blackmon high-top 'fro (Mehcad Brooks) whom she soon marries. Predictably, he turns out to be a cad and a thief who cheats on Grace in their bedroom! Grace, shamed and taunted, bashes him in the head with a bat and ends up arrested.

A poorly schooled and nearly indifferent public defender, Jasmine, played by Bresha Webb, is assigned to Grace's case to enter a guilty plea but is persuaded something is amiss, because the cad's body was never found. Meanwhile, Grace's BFF Sarah (Phylicia Rashad), who has been in her corner all the while, becomes Jasmine's only hope of winning an acquittal, as Jasmine hopes to convince the jury the Sunday School cookie baker was too nice to kill her husband -- even though Grace admits to having done it. Yes, it's an unholy mess with a howlingly ridiculous twist at the end that will send many viewers screaming from the room -- if they hadn't already done so.

Perry is the fabulously wealthy purveyor of urban market schlock who many people will defend as a dependable and known commodity. You'll never get art from Mr. Perry but his fans don't want that. They want shrieking women in Vera Wang and Red Bottoms and the men who love (or hate) them. One doesn't stumble blindly into a Tyler Perry experience; one enters with eyes and ears wide open. And that's the real crime.

Carnival Row

As allegories go, Amazon’s Carnival Row is on par with celebrated space series Battlestar Gallactica and The Expanse for depth and complexity. Unlike Tolkien’s trilogy, these three programs wear their politics on their sleeves. Tolkien, at least in my scattered readings, was more circumspect about the meanings of his books.

Carnival Row is a thoroughgoing fantasy thriller set in some mythical world where storybook creatures walk (or fly in the case of the Faeries, or Fae) among men. These non-humans have fled war in their own lands, sought asylum and been ghettoized in dank and dangerous districts away from humans, who detest them and debate their fate in Parliament.

Because of the costuming, art direction and British casting — Orlando Bloom (LOTR's Legolas) as the conflicted police inspector Rycroft Philostrate and Cara Delevingne as his winged ex-lover and revolutionary Vignette Stonemoss (the character names are marvelous and ridiculous) — one might assume the setting is Victorian England but the location is as murky as the mysterious creature disemboweling city residents and casting entrails about the vacated carcasses.

It’s all ghastly and gruesome and set against the backdrop of xenophobia and immigrant panic. Its strange appeal is suspended in the air, like the statues of the bound and hanged martyr erected in the churches in this seriously effed up world. This last device was a startling reminder to me that, though we’re inured to them, crucifixes are pretty barbaric religious emblems, for real.

1917

The artistry of Sam Mendes’s 1917, a staggeringly realistic depiction of wartime devastation, doesn’t just push the envelope of cinematography with its nearly hour-long continuous tracking shot (a marvelous visual accomplishment) but also with the intelligence of its narrative. Two young WWI British soldiers — Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) — are dispatched on a veritable suicide mission to deliver a general's command to stand-down to a hawkish colonel about to send 1,600 men into a German trap. Among the men is Blake’s older brother, which gives the younger much incentive to complete the mission, casting his mission as a coldly cynical order from the general but in keeping with the madness of war. Chapman and MacKay are tireless troupers in Mendes’ experiment to depict the two soldiers narrowly escaping one potentially fatal encounter after another, with the bodies of dead soldiers draped along barbed-wire fences and lining the sides of trenches and craters. It’s a horrifying landscape of misery, and the two men, not entirely up to their mission, trudge along through mud and viscera toward heaven knows what. It is a triumphant testament to modern movie-making and the human spirit.

Just Mercy

Destin Daniel Cretton’s Just Mercy has a compelling and dramatic story and strong lead performances by star / producer Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx and Brie Larson. But it is freighted, as so many big studio pictures about civil rights and social justice, with depictions of racist cops and courts that feel as if they’ve been pulled from To Kill a Mockingbird, which is referenced several times at the outset. The evocation might be the director’s intent, to suggest little has changed over the 60 years since Harper Lee published the book. That makes sense as the film is based on Bryan Stevenson’s published account of his work on behalf of death row inmates in Alabama beginning in the early ‘90s. Jordan plays Stevenson with stalwart resolve and humanity as he puts his Harvard law degree to work for those who can least defend themselves against a bigoted justice system. Foxx is Walter McMillan, a man falsely accused of murder, railroaded by an unscrupulous police chief and sentenced to death on the word of an unreliable witness (a terrific Tim Blake Nelson). The film has more than a few powerful moments — Rob Morgan’s work as war-damaged veteran Herbert Richardson is particularly outstanding — but occasional missteps that detract from an otherwise solid piece of work. A snapping German Shepherd at the entrance to the courtroom felt ham-fisted, and Richardson’s reference to a PTSD diagnosis while certainly possible didn’t feel plausible considering the time period, and Stevenson’s comments to his associate (Larson) about slave ships and lynchings, while all certainly true, felt strangely out of place — directed less at her and more at the audience. Still, the picture packs genuine emotional power.

Fast Color

Julia Hart's Fast Color is visually enticing but lacks the aching self-reflection of Hart's wonderful 2016 feature Miss Stevens. It has a few quiet moments of revelation but is mostly ghostly puzzlement and non sequiturs that fall short of nuance and poetry. Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Ruth, a young woman with mysterious, seismic powers that appear to have outgrown her control. She comes from a line of similarly gifted African American women (quite literal "black girl magic"). On the run from scientists with murky agendas, Ruth returns to her family home in Texas at a time when the world's resources have been depleted. (It's not explained what forces beyond human wastefulness are responsible). At home is mother, Bo, (the always engaging Lorraine Toussaint) and Ruth's precocious daughter, Lila (Saniyya Sidney), whom Ruth left with Bo after a near catastrophic incident that is augured and depicted in the film but then abandoned, as is Bo's relationship with the local sheriff, played with strange remove by David Strathairn. Mbatha-Raw (an unconventional beauty) is always luminous on the screen and her performance here strikes me as committed but the material (written by Hart and Jordan Horowitz) is frustratingly thin. Much of the story's weakness is its lack of detail, which is ironic for a film whose central conceit is its main characters' ability to deconstruct and reassemble the physical world.

Uncut Gems

Benny and Josh Safdie's courtship of Adam Sandler for the demanding role of Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems is storied among cinephiles. They started pitching the idea to Sandler in 2011 and he finally said yes two years ago. The wisdom in their determination is in nearly every frame of this riveting and exhausting film.
Sandler's Ratner is a middle-aged New York jeweler and gambler who is working tirelessly to prove that he is not the chump much of the world is taking him for. He is being chased by a half-dozen bad debts and is trying with ever-growing futility to score big and settle all scores.

His latest scheme involves a brick of raw Ethiopian opal that he hopes to auction for a million bucks. When Boston Celtics superstar Kevin Garnett is escorted to Ratner's shop by a finder (LaKeith Stanfield), Garnett is struck by the rock's brilliance, imagines it will bring him luck and convinces Ratner to let him borrow it for that night's game. Seeing a chance to capitalize on Garnett's confidence, Ratner places a bet on the game but once again, fate works against Ratner. He misses the big score, is broke once more and time is running out to make whole everyone on his tail.
The movie's pacing is brisk, the intensity excruciating. The Safdies use a film stock that is as grainy and unflattering as a florescent light, which adds to the starkness of Ratner's predicament that, based on the unsavory characters circling about, can only end badly.

Cats

While not quite the abomination critics have described, Tom Hooper's Cats is an ostentatious exhibition of theatrical craftsmanship that, regrettably, is also frequently annoying, made so primarily by a story line that casts the mischievous Macavity (Idris Elba) as a sort of demon feline abducting his competition for the chance at another life. Elba and the other "big name" draws -- Taylor Swift, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, James Cordon and Rebel Wilson -- acquit themselves admirably while not completely answering why they signed on to the project in the first place. (It probably all looked great on paper and Hooper is, after all, a celebrated, masterful director.) It is not a mystery why belter Jennifer Hudson is on board to serve up the timeless showstopper Memory. Despite all of the CGI motion fur and flopping ears, Hudson's performance practically drips with all of the melodic angst composer Andrew Lloyd Webber poured into it 40 years ago. The picture rewards the patient with more than a few outstanding production numbers and lots of splendid dancing by the company. (The Jellicle Ball sequence is particularly arresting and pretty freaking sexy.) The pas de deux by the leads, ballerina Francesca Hayward as the abandoned Victoria and Robbie Fairchild as the master-of-ceremonies Munkustrap, are especially lovely. Yes, there is more than enough visual absurdity for a half-dozen movies based on lesser material but the cast's treading and hoofing the boards is so top-shelf it almost makes one forget how unnecessary it all is.

Dark Waters

Queer Cinema icon Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, Safe) directs films about the exploited, the marginalized and the dispossessed, people who are injured by circumstances but press on or don't depending on their proclivities. In many ways, the Mark Ruffalo-project Dark Waters fits into Haynes' portfolio neatly, as it tells the true story of a West Virginia town on the Ohio River being poisoned by the corporate goliath DuPont and challenged by Ruffalo's legal eagle David, Robert Bilott, a partner in a corporate law firm and former DuPont defense attorney. Bilott is made aware of the case of a farmer (a terrific Bill Camp) whose herd of cattle is decimated, he believes, by runoff from DuPont's nearby dump. Bilott is first reluctant but the farmer's insistence, and his own childhood memories of his grandmother's home in the town, spur him into what he believes will be a quick resolution. Haynes' direction is methodical and by-the-numbers, with Ruffalo (who never fails to hit his marks in any film -- from Avengers to Spotlight) displaying the physical manifestations of Bilott's professional and personal battles with the first-reticent and later-defiant chemical manufacturer. Haynes and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan and Mario Correa have crafted a compelling story of greed and indifference that has several stirring moments of indignation and outrage rooted in the filmmakers' deep commitment to the value of human life and dignity. It is not a perfect film (some performances feel weary and indeliberate) but it is a marvelous statement for these times -- which is much more important.

Pain and Glory, Honey Boy

Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory and Alma Har'el's Honey Boy are, respectively, the tender story of the celebrated Spanish writer / director's relationship with his spicy and withholding mother and actor Shia LaBeouf's traumatically dysfunctional boyhood in the care of his disastrously incapable father. The films are reflective, fanciful and decidely ambivalent about the central character's feelings toward the wounding parent.
In Pain and Glory Antonio Banderas is Almodóvar's alter ego, a stifled filmmaker racked with physical and emotional ailments that he tries to quell with opioids and heroin. Banderas's addled, somnambulate Salvador seems suspended between dream worlds, one lively and magical, the voice of his mother (the always radiant Penelope Cruz) providing the soundtrack for his colorful awakening, and the other, his decorous, doleful and dismissive maturity, resplendent with wall art and loneliness.
In Honey Boy, LaBeouf's alter ego Otis at 12 is played by the fine young actor Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place) and at 22 by the estimable Lucas Hedges. The younger Otis lives with his father (a striking LaBeouf) in a grungy roadside motor inn at night and acts in various forgettable roles on a studio lot during the day. Driven by his father's shame and self-loathing, Otis grows into a defiant, destructive and self-sabotaging young man whose only memories of warmth are of another abused child (FKA Twigs), a teenaged girl living in the motor court with her bottomfeeding parents. Both Hedges and LaBoeuf do the heavy emotional lifting in this unsparing, conflicted but ultimately forgiving letter to LaBeouf's father.
Both Pain and Glory and Honey Boy feature elements of magical realism that enhance their messages of regret and forgiveness despite the damage done by those charged with loving us.

Waves

 

The family at the center of Trey Edward Shults's Waves is frayed, but nearly undetectably at first. Exchanges between father (Sterling K. Brown) and his coltish son (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) feel prickly but maybe that's just the natural push-pull between two alphas. Nothing more. And maybe daughter Emily (Taylor Russell) is reserved because she's shy and uncertain and not because she's lost, overshadowed by her athlete-brother and hurt by the attention both father and mother (Renee Elise Goldsberry) pour on him. The family home is a pressure cooker of expectation and disappointment, and the stresses quickly begin to show both physically and psychologically until an event sends these four damaged people flying off in different directions, taking their pain with them. Waves is quiet but its intensity is nearly unbearable. All four leads deliver extraordinary performances but young Mr. Harrison's is far and away the most real and raw depiction of youthful confusion and agony I have seen in quite a while. He is truly outstanding and on par with generational peers Timothee Chalamet and Lucas Hedges, who also appears in Waves as daughter Emily's love interest and rescuer. Waves is devastating and exhausting but richly detailed, knowing and human.

Richard Jewell

Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell takes the story of the Centennial Park security guard falsely accused of setting off a bomb that killed and injured visitors to the Atlanta Olympic in 1996 and turns it into a blunt instrument to bludgeon the media and the FBI. The film -- which features a fine performance by Paul Walter Hauser as Jewell -- also takes swings are higher education-- a prime target for rabid red staters. Jewell comes across as a socially awkward underachiever with a juvenile zeal for law enforcement that is both admirable and naive. Olivia Wilde and Jon Hamm play an unscrupulous Atlanta newspaper reporter and an FBI agent, respectively, who sacrifice Jewell for personal ambition. The rendering of these characters is so atrocious, the dialogue so dull and unimaginative that they make viewing the film a real chore. Watching their interactions was like witnessing a mob hit. Jewell's relationship with his mother Barbara (a strangely off-kilter Kathy Bates) is cloying and with his lawyer (Sam Rockwell) is peculiarly uninvolving and underdeveloped. This picture has precious little of Eastwood's usual workmanlike competence. It feels incomplete, more of a notion than a picture, but it will be raw meat for MAGA heads everywhere and more the pity.

The Irishman

Martin Scorsese’s mobster epic The Irishman harnesses the latest in film technology to follow the story’s primary characters as they age through decades of gangland maneuvering and murder. Robert De Niro is the narrator and pseudonymous fixer, Frank Sheeran, who performs both painting (hits) and carpentry (disposals) for pay — he’s got mouths to feed. When we meet Sheeran, he’s an old man reflecting on his life after war duty in Italy. He begins with driving a meat truck in Philadelphia, stealing from his bosses and making friends with powerful criminals, including mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and later Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and becoming a trusted consigliere as well as wet worker. That Sheeran is his own witness leaves his accounting open to question, of course, but his tale of rising to capo in a crime family while serving two masters (the Mafia and the IBT) is fascinating. Scorsese is nonpareil as a storyteller, and he manages the complexity of mob action and political wrangling with dexterity. Yes, he loves criminals, and his treatment of these wise guys is no less affectionate than his earlier valentines Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and The Departed, but that’s not to say he’s amoral or that The Irishman celebrates corruption. In fact, the film includes screen notes on the often grisly deaths of the gangsters Sheeran encounters over the years — those we don’t actually see dispatched by a bullet to the face. That Sheeran himself survives to tell the tale — or at least his version — is not so much cynical as existential. As one G-man reminds him, everyone he’s known and loved is either dead or has abandoned him. That he is alone and hoping for more — redemption? expiation?  — in the picture’s last reel is a powerful statement.

Marriage Story

Writer/director Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story puts the auteur's signature wit and insight to work in a tale of the most personal and excruciating of human trials -- the dissolution of a marriage. Scarlett Johansson and Adam Drive are New York off-Broadway theater couple Nicole and Charlie, parents of young Henry (Azhy Robertson), and parties in a marriage that is threatened, we come to discover, by presumption and resentment. When we meet them they are seeking counsel, not altogether successfully, to resolve issues driving them apart. Then Nicole, who has been genius director Charlie's muse and leading lady, accepts a role in a television pilot and moves to L.A. with Henry. Charlie is unperturbed, thinking the change is temporary and he'll visit frequently. In the meantime, Nicole, who has discovered Charlie's infidelity with a company member, hires a top-dollar eviscerator (the wonderful Laura Dern) to represent her in a divorce. This action leads to an escalation of tension and spiraling bitterness that culminates in a scene of blistering vitriol the likes of which I've not seen since Liz and Dick tore at each other's throats in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966). It's a sad, depressing clash of two decent but damaged people trying to perfect the imperfectible. (And alone is worthy of the accolades the film is receiving.) Baumbach is a masterful wordsmith but in two particularly nice set pieces near the end he juxtaposes musical numbers from Stephen Sondheim's Company that Nicole and Charlie perform to different audiences. These are nice moments -- one frothy and the other wistful -- that had they been given to lesser actors would have fallen flat or been soupy. Instead, they capture two people who are slowly finding their ways out of misery..