Review: Standing Up, Falling Down — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Standing Up, Falling Down

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

Stars: Billy Crystal, Ben Schwartz, Eloise Mumford, Grace Gummer

Writer: Peter Hoare

Director: Matt Ratner

 

Billy Crystal has been in our lives for so long it’s easy to forget he doesn’t make that many movies these days, but he’s found a worthy return in this big-hearted comedy about two hard-drinking, emotionally tormented loners who, despite themselves, strike up the most meaningful friendship of their lives.

One is Scott (Parks and Recreation’s Ben Schwartz), a struggling young standup comic returning home to Long Island after finally dropping the mic on his career in Los Angeles. A booze-infused tavern encounter introduces him to a garrulous barfly named Marty (Crystal), who turns out to be a successful local dermatologist (thank goodness he doesn’t have to operate on anybody, given his systemic blood alcohol level).

There’s not much plot to speak of in Standing Up, Falling Down; we spend most of our time becoming acquainted with the two guys and the various characters in their orbits, particularly Scott’s oddly distant father (Kevin Dunn), his mother (Debra Monk), who is weirdly delighted her son has taken up residence in his old bedroom, and his sister (Grace Gummer), with whom he engages in merciless insult duels that usually end up with one of them saying, “I love you, I guess.”

As for Marty, he’s twice widowed with two grown kids who have little or no use for him — a status that dates back to the dark days of his first marriage. Aside from the occasional one-night stand, Marty’s most constant companions are Jack Daniels and Jim Beam, and it is his considered opinion that they all deserve each other.

Crystal, now an elder statesman of comedy, has easy chemistry with 30-something Schwartz. Both actors possess that unique type of screen presence that makes you happy just to spend time with them, and indeed that’s the best thing that Standing Up, Falling Down has to offer. We hang with these guys watching a ball game on TV, going for a few car rides, playing some bar games, and smoking some pot (the latter resulting in an absolutely hilarious sight gag). Eventually they come to share more meaningful moments, as casual friends become intimate confidantes.

In the end, each man is inspired by the other to move ahead with his life rather than remain in the self-defensive foxhole he’s dug for himself.

The rap on Crystal has long been that he too often — and too sharply — veers between broad comedy and maudlin sentimentality. But age has been kind to him in that respect. That jarring dichotomy is present here, as well, but somehow it’s more understandable in someone like Marty, a guy whose long life has encompassed both delirious joy and crushing sadness, and whose memories of those extremes can arrive in rapid succession — and perhaps even simultaneously.

Featured image: Ben Schwartz and Billy Crystal in Standing Up, Falling Down, Courtesy Shout! Studios

Seriously Good Films to Get You Through the Rest of Winter

Locke & Key

(Netflix, February 8)

Based on Joe Hill’s bestselling graphic novel, this long-awaited 10-episode series finds a recently widowed mother (Scandal‘s Darby Stanchfield) moving back to her ancestral home with her three kids after her husband is brutally killed. they find a series of reality-bending keys that may help solve the mystery of his death, but may free a long-imprisoned demonic presence as well.

Little Fires Everywhere

(Hulu, March 18)

Fresh from Big Little Lies and The Morning Show, Oscar-winner Reese Witherspoon stars in this eight-episode series, based on Celeste Ng’s bestselling novel, as a wealthy Ohio matriarch who rents an apartment to a struggling artist (Scandal‘s Kerry Washington) and her daughter. The pair’s kids become fast friends, but when some of them get a lot closer than that, sparks start to fly.

Hope Gap

(March 6)

Writer/director William Nicholson (Gladiator, Shadowlands) based this portrait of a dissolving marriage on his own parents’ split after 33 years. A history professor (Bill Nighy) who thinks he’ll be happier with the mother of one of his students, and a writer (Annette Bening) so focused on her work that she never noticed her husband’s unhappiness, etch a tableau of mutual reclusiveness enlivened only by a shared love for their grown son (Josh O’Conner, The Crown‘s Prince Charles).

Military Wives

(March 27)

In November 2011, viewers across Great Britain were transfixed by a performance by The Military Wives Choir — a group of women who came together while their husbands were deployed in Afghanistan. Director Peter Cattaneo’s (The Full Monty) stirring dramatization of the group’s beginnings stars Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan (Amazon Prime’s Catastrophe) as the mismatched pair who launch the choir, bickering and reconciling their way to unexpected fame.

For biweekly video reviews of the latest films, visit Bill’s column, “Movies for the Rest of Us,” or check out his website, moviesfortherestofus.com.

This article is featured in the March/April 2020 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

Featured image: Darby Stanchfield in the film, Lock & Key. (Netflix)

Review: Seberg — Movies for the Rest of Us

Seberg

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: R

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

Stars: Kristen Stewart, Jack O’Connell, Vince Vaughn, Anthony Mackie

Writers: Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse

Director: Benedict Andrews

 

You can take your pick of lowlights from J. Edgar Hoover’s long reign of terror at the FBI; Seberg depicts one of the lowest: The agency’s years-long campaign of harassment and slander against Jean Seberg, an actress/activist who took up the cause of civil rights in the late 1960s.

Kristen Stewart, herself something of a Hollywood firebrand, is a perfect choice to play the tragic star, adopting the pixie hairdo and hollow-eyed look that made Iowa-born Seberg the darling of French New Wave Cinema. We meet her en route from France to audition for one of her few major Hollywood films, the disastrous Clint Eastwood musical Paint Your Wagon. During the long flight, the married Jean meets Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), a likewise married black civil rights activist who ignites in Jean twin passions: One of the social justice kind and one of the more carnal type.

But the pair’s political and private entanglements are being monitored from the start by a pair of G-men: the gung-ho bloodhound Carl Kowalski (Vince Vaughn, offering up his trademark dead-eyed cynic persona) and the somewhat more conflicted Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell), who becomes queasy over all the late-night window peeping and bedroom bugging that’s being ordered with salacious abandon from on high.

Seberg presents a chilling account of the FBI’s escalation of torment as it seeks to poison the public’s attitude toward Seberg — and also discredit Jamal in the eyes of other black activists for having taken a white lover. It begins with anonymous phone calls to Jamal’s wife (Zazie Beetz) that replay the sounds of the lovers’ bedroom passion. Then come graphic leaflets posted throughout the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Even after Jean breaks off the romance, the Feds won’t let it go: They spread the false rumor that she has become pregnant with Hakim’s child.

But as the film’s narrative follows a straight line, Stewart’s Jean spirals into the depths of despair and crippling paranoia (if you can call it paranoia when people really are following you). It’s a galvanizing performance, one of the most measured of Stewart’s career (and if you’ve seen her in the harrowing Personal Shopper, you’ll understand what a compliment that is). Jean enters the ordeal already emotionally and physically scarred: A prologue depicts the awful moment when, on the set of Saint Joan, director Otto Preminger allowed the on-screen Inquisition’s execution flames to literally lick the flesh from 17-year-old Seberg’s body. Barely a decade later, Jean moves from simmering suspicion to outright horror, formulating a gnawing certainty that she is being observed day and night. In the film’s most heartbreaking scene, the sobbing actress tears her home apart, searching in vain for eavesdropping instruments while her helpless husband (Yvan Attal) comforts their young son in his bedroom. It’s a compelling tableau of a life torn asunder, inside and out, by powerful, invisible forces.

Blacklisted by Hollywood, scarred by unearned scandal, she muddled through the final decade of her life making largely inconsequential films in Europe. In 1979, after having been missing for 10 days, her body was found in the backseat of her car on a Paris street. At the fadeout, Seberg allows its subject — and its audience — a moment of quiet peace — one that, sadly, was probably denied the real Seberg.

It may be small solace that Seberg finally tells Jean’s tragic story, but it’s never too late to be reminded of the insidious power of gossip — and how it can swallow reputations, causes, and even human lives, whole.

Featured image: Kristen Stewart in Seberg (Amazon Studios)

Review: Come to Daddy — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Come to Daddy

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: R

Run time: 1 hour 33 minutes

Stars: Elijah Wood, Stephen McHattie, Martin Donovan, Michael Smiley

Writers: Toby Harvard, Ant Timpson

Director: Ant Timpson

 

Admittedly, the directorial debut of idiosyncratic New Zealand film producer Ant Timpson (The Greasy Strangler) will not be everybody’s cup of tea. But if you like your cinematic tea served with a dash of arsenic and a teaspoon of bile, this gleefully twisted tale of intergenerational angst might be the sip you’ve been waiting for.

From the start, Come to Daddy parachutes us into a world of ominous peril. We meet Norval (Elijah Wood), a 30-something man-child, as a bus drops him off in the middle of a dense forest. From there, following a hand-drawn map, he picks his way to a rustic but dramatic seaside house that seems a cross between The Cabin In The Woods and Dr. No’s volcano lair.

Tentatively, he knocks on the door. It swings open to reveal a gaunt, bearded, clearly agitated old man.

“Dad?” the young man blurts — and we’re off to the races. Needless to say, this is no Hallmark Channel reunion: There’s quite a bit of blood, gratuitous violence, and squirm-inducing gore in the offing.

To say much more about the plot would spoil the many wild 90-degree turns Come to Daddy negotiates, each more outlandish than the last — yet each surprisingly acceptable in Timpson’s narrative universe. Central to the film’s success is Wood as a man who is clearly damaged, yet who even as all Hell breaks loose remains determined to forge some sort of relationship with the man who abandoned him at age five (it’s no accident that more than one character comments on his wide, blue, innocent eyes).

Amidst all the mayhem, Come to Daddy never loses its off-kilter sense of humor. The characters, each stamped with their own defining quirk, speak in a sort of formalized prose that brings operatic gravity to their conversations, both mundane and threatening. Most importantly, the film remains at heart a father-son story; a blood-spattered meditation on the human bonds that can’t be snapped, no matter how hard we tug. 

Come to Daddy ends with a written tribute to director Timpson’s own father, a pithy text that goes some distance to explaining what we’ve just seen. By that point, even seasoned thriller fans will have given up trying to predict what will happen next and surrender to the film’s fever dream narrative. It’s the kind of thriller where, even as the most horrendous events unfold, you get the distinct feeling that everyone involved is having a wonderful time.

Featured image: Elijah Wood in Come to Daddy (Saban Films / Tango Entertainment)

Review: Color Out of Space — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Color Out of Space

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Not Rated

Run Time: 1 hour 51 minutes

Stars: Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Tommy Chong, Madeleine Arthur

Writers: Scarlett Amaris, Richard Stanley, based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft

Director: Richard Stanley

There are good latter-day Nicolas Cage movies — films like 2018’s Mandy and 2013’s The Frozen Ground, in which his characters manage to embody the unique world-weary-yet-bat-guano-crazy vibe Cage plays like no other actor.

Then there are the Nicolas Cage curiosities — supernatural potboilers that seem to employ the great Cage primarily as a wild-haired weirdo, raging at the walls in a carnival fun house.

Color Out of Space falls somewhere between the two extremes, plopping Cage’s trademark character — a middle-aged family man confronting demons inside and out — in a psychedelic sci-fi lunatic asylum. Even as the plot spirals out of control to the point of incomprehensibility, Cage manages to hold our attention, largely by matching the escalating developments, outrage for outrage.

Based on a 1927 sci-fi/horror tale by H.P. Lovecraft, Color Out of Space introduces us to the Gardner family. They’re already living on an emotional bubble: Dad is a failed painter with a drinking problem, mom (Joely Richardson) is recovering from cancer, and the daughter (Madeleine Arthur) has emotional problems that may well have contributed to the clan leaving the city and moving to a remote farm where dad is now raising alpacas (for their milk). Two younger brothers seem less afflicted, although they seem always to be sniping at each other.

Still, the Gardners appear loving enough, and reasonably content. Then one night a meteorite plows into the front yard — and pretty soon strange things start happening. For one thing, the entire area seems bathed in a strange, pinkish light. Then odd, pink plants start blooming. And the family starts acting, well, weird — lashing out in anger, collapsing into sobbing fits, losing the ability to concentrate. Finally, some truly ghastly physical transformations begin to occur, shades of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa.

As for the alpacas, well, don’t ask. Suffice to say one of the film’s highlights is Cage bellowing, “The AL-PAC-AAAAAAAS!”

Lovecraft wasn’t known for his happy endings, and that’s the main problem with Color Out of Space — after that rock lands outside, the family is clearly on a one-way slippery slide to something awful. But to what end? Co-writer/director Richard Stanley — a cult fave who hasn’t directed a narrative feature film since he was thrown off the set of Marlon Brando’s Island of Dr. Moreau in 1996 — seems to be saying something about the rot he perceives at the heart of our society (is that a Donald Trump imitation that Cage occasionally adopts?). We’re all just one unexpected catalyst away, it appears, from going stark raving mad.

Unfortunately, any point Stanley wants to make is suffocated in the film’s final freak-out, an atomic explosion of color and sound that serves only to make us lose focus on whatever resolution the film might have been building toward.

Still, for Nic Cage fans, Color Out of Space adds one more milepost in the movie star’s most intriguing career. To chowing down on a live cockroach in Vampire’s Kiss, to hitting the road with his head on fire in Ghost Rider, to his clarion call “Not the Bees!” at the end of The Wicker Man, we can now add to the Nic Cage Hall of Fame, with pride, “The AL-PAC-AAAAAAAS!”

Featured image: Nicolas Cage as Nathan in the horror / sci-fi film Color Out of Space (Photo courtesy of RLJE Films)

Review: 1917 — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

1917

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: R

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

Stars: Dean-Charles Chapman, George MacKay, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch

Writers: Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns

Director: Sam Mendes

 

The cinematic experience has sometimes been described as a semi-dream state, where surroundings and other people seem to slip away and the mind enters an altered state of consciousness; a world jointly created by the semi-dreamer and the filmmaker.

There comes a moment in 1917, Sam Mendes’ fiercely focused yet apocalyptic view of World War I, when I found myself almost mystically absorbed into the onscreen realm. It is the middle of the night. We are in a bombed-out French town. Crumbling walls rise to our right and left; the way ahead is veiled in murky darkness. All of a sudden, the air is pierced by brilliant white light from above, as if the sun has awakened from a nightmare. It is the light of a phosphorous flare, swinging from a parachute. We never see the flare itself, just its garish light sharply illuminating the rubbled landscape, the impossibly inky shadows growing and shifting like gloved fingers as the torch rapidly descends.

Through this hellscape dashes a lone soldier, two hands grasping his bayonetted rifle, lurching from shadow to shadow. But the cover of night is gone. Soon he is being chased. Ratlike, he scurries through the brick-lined maze, ducking around one corner after another, but he simply cannot shake the incomprehensible shouts and rattling gunshots at his heels.

And that’s just five minutes of 1917, a film that deposits us at the Western Front, then pushes, pulls, and pursues us for two hours through the nightmare that was the War to End All Wars.

The film opens on an unexpectedly idyllic note: Two young British soldiers, Corporals Blake and Schofield (Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay) are relaxing beside a broad green field, chatting amiably, when they are summoned to the bunker headquarters of their commanding general (Colin Firth). The officer informs Blake that, 18 miles across enemy lines, a British regiment is about to march into a German trap. With communication lines down, the only way to prevent absolute carnage is for the two of them to get there by foot with a warning, and to get there before morning.

As added incentive: Blake’s brother is in that unit. He’s not just saving more than a thousand soldiers from certain death; he’s preserving his own flesh and blood.

And so these fellows, fear etched into their faces, jump over the lip of their foxhole, slip through the barbed wire, and trudge off into No Man’s Land.

Much has been made of the choice by Mendes (Skyfall) to present the story as if it were a single long tracking shot, and credit his longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins and editor Lee Smith (Inception) for making the seamless transitions that sustain that illusion.

The technique adds a sometimes unbearable immediacy to the story as Blake and Schofield try to strike a balance between duty and self-preservation. Narratively, it also requires that the film follow a relentlessly eventful course: 1917 is composed of one startling set piece after another involving, among other trials, a crashing biplane, a booby trapped bunker, a raging river clogged with bloating bodies — and that late-night scramble through an enemy-held town.

While in some ways 1917 speaks the visual language of a current-day shooter video game, the performances elevate the film to almost operatic drama. MacKay and Chapman, their baby faces smeared with blood and mud, convincingly toggle their characters between horror and blind determination. As the commanding officers who bookend the action, Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch embody the wearying perpetuity of war. And a word must be said of the absolutely essential small role played by Claire Duburcq — the sole woman in a cast of nearly 100 — who floats into the narrative like an angel of mercy for the characters and audience alike.

Oh, yes, and you: Mendes may as well include your name in the credits, as well. After all, 1917 is one of those rare films that draws you into the screen and holds you there, an active participant wholly invested for every blistering, in-your-face second.

Featured image: Scene from Sam Mendes’ 1917 (Francois Duhamel/Universal Pictures)

Review: Just Mercy — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Just Mercy

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 2 hours 16 minutes

Stars: Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, Brie Larson

Writers: Destin Daniel Cretton, Andrew Lanham, based on Bryan Stevenson’s book

Director: Destin Daniel Cretton

 

Not all good-for-you movies are actually all that good. Just Mercy, populated by monumental performances and powered by a story of uncommon courage, is by every measure a great film.

For more than 30 years, civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson has been toiling to rescue wrongly accused or unfairly sentenced death row inmates — the overwhelming majority of them African American — from execution. Just Mercy the book covers decades of outrageous and tragic cases nationwide, but Just Mercy the movie focuses on Stevenson’s earliest: Three men facing the electric chair in Alabama during the 1980s.

As Stevenson, Michael B. Jordan (Creed, Black Panther) bristles with indignant compassion. More importantly, his performance traces the young lawyer’s exodus from an idealistic neophyte who sees himself as the principled outsider/savior of these men to a profoundly changed, intimate participant in their personal tragedies. Jamie Foxx plays an innocent man wrongly placed on Louisiana’s Death Row, and here he reclaims his place as one of the screen’s most thoughtful actors. Hollow-eyed, physically and emotionally depleted, Foxx brings harrowing immediacy to the role of a man who has relinquished all hope of escaping his date with the chair — and who at first views Stevenson with justified skepticism.

The richness of Just Mercy’s tapestry is enhanced by some wonderfully defined supporting performances. Rob Morgan is heartbreaking as Herb, a PTSD-afflicted client who mournfully admits he did, indeed, plant the bomb that has landed him on Death Row. His final scenes, as a man torn between accepting his punishment and rejecting the inhumanity of the process that brought him to this moment, bring stark reality to the awful finality of the death penalty. O’Shea Jackson Jr. brings unexpected warmth to the role of Anthony, another client whose assigned punishment far outstrips his offense — the victim of a culture that considers black lives dispensable in the service of making a point. As Stevenson’s assistant, Brie Larson (Room) serves as our stand-in, sharing our growing exasperation as the racist underpinnings of the justice system throw one roadblock after another in her boss’s path. And Tim Blake Nelson — most memorable as one of George Clooney’s fellow escapees in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? — turns the thankless role of Ralph Myers, a semi-repentant jailhouse snitch, into a thing of wonder. Squirming in the witness chair, all twitches and grumbles, Nelson’s backwoods bigot drags himself, kicking and screaming, to defying the institutional racism that has until this moment defined his life.

Likewise, a word must be said for the essential, if minor, character of a prison guard played by Hayes Mercure. We barely notice the guy at first — he’s just another white-faced keeper in a human warehouse — but with marvelous subtlety and measured authenticity, Mercure’s guard grows to understand that these men are far more human than the mere animals he’s been trained to see. His shift toward the light is, admittedly, little more than an emergence from the darkest of shadows, but with few lines and just a little screen time, Mercure provides us with a spark of hope; the possibility that people can change.

Movies like Just Mercy inevitably find themselves tagged as “Oscar Bait,” a derogatory term in an industry that too often casts a cynical eye on big-name dramas that explore social injustice through closely observed personal stories. But that attitude does Just Mercy a criminal injustice: co-writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12) never goes for cheap sentiment. His characters face difficult choices, and don’t always make the right ones. Like the real-life hero at its center, Just Mercy sees what is happening in America’s legal system and asks the question: “How can you not take this personally?”

Featured image: Michael B. Jordan as Bryan Stevenson and Jamie Foxx as Walter McMillian in Warner Bros. Pictures drama, Just Mercy, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Copyright: © 2019 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. Photo Credit: Jake Giles Netter

Review: Little Women — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Little Women

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: PG

Run Time: 2 hours 15 minutes

Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern

Writer: Greta Gerwig (based on Louisa May Alcott’s novel)

Director: Greta Gerwig

 

When I was a kid my family had a card game called Authors. It involved playing cards bearing the likenesses of 10 famous writers — four cards per writer, each card annotated with the name of one of that writer’s most famous works.

The object of the game was to collect complete sets of each author and their four selected works. So by the time I was 7 I knew James Fennimore Cooper wrote, among other things, The Deerslayer; Charles Dickens wrote The Pickwick Papers; Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote Charge of the Light Brigade, and Washington Irving wrote The Alhambra.

But knowledge is not the same as experience, and I’m not proud to say I never read most of the books whose titles I competed with my brothers and sisters to collect: Not Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, not Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish — and certainly not the works of the lone woman in the deck, Louisa May Alcott.

Likewise, I came kicking and screaming to Little Women, the latest screen adaptation of Alcott’s most famous novel, the story of four Civil War era sisters, each carving their unique life path in 1860s Massachusetts. One needn’t be a literary historian to sense the importance of the novel; an account of how a nation of women — left on their own as the men folk marched off to kill each other — planted the seeds of personal independence that would within decades give rise to women’s suffrage and, a half-century after that, the women’s liberation movement.

Still, that didn’t mean I needed to subject myself to two hours of flouncing teenagers, disapproving parents and callow courtiers. But now writer/director Greta Gerwig has gone and forced the issue, creating an artful, impeccably acted, and unexpectedly thrilling film that has stubbornly elbowed its way to the top tier of my favorite films of 2019.

Gerwig’s casting is perfect from the top down: Saoirse Ronan — she of the transparent blue eyes and ice princess face — is Jo March, the first among sisterly equals; a free-spirited writer who sets the tone of rebellion, no matter how subtle, in the March household. A master interpreter of steel-willed young characters in films like Brooklyn and Lady Bird, Ronan makes Jo a force to be reckoned with — or simply acceded to.

So strong is Ronan’s performance, the roles of Jo’s three sisters could easily have faded in its shadow, but Gerwig smartly enlists a powerful lineup: Emma Watson (the Harry Potter series), prim and lovingly critical as oldest sister Meg; Florence Pugh (Lady Macbeth), reclusive and endlessly observant as youngest sister Amy; and Eliza Scanlen (Sharp Objects), fragile yet infuriating as the sickly sister Beth.

Laura Dern plays the girls’ mother, Marmee, a product of her era, watching with distracted bemusement as her daughters rise up against the social norms that have defined her lot in life. Dern’s is the most challenging of the film’s roles — Marmee clearly shares many of her daughters’ sentiments, but she’s so institutionalized her daughter Jo is blown away when she calmly confesses, “I’ve been angry almost every day of my life.” It’s one of Little Women’s quietly shocking moments, and Dern handles it with effortless sleight-of-hand.

There’s yet another woman in the Little Women’s lives: the spinster Aunt March, played with masterful understatement by Meryl Streep (and any time you can get this far into a movie review before you mention Meryl Streep, you know the other performances are remarkable). It’s a thankless role, in place primarily to represent the old ways that are clearly being swept away by the tide of progress. But Streep refuses to let the old girl go quietly: Aunt March is a powerful woman by nature of her personal fortune, and Streep captures her subversive glee as she ruthlessly wields influence through selective generosity.

A few men populate the corners of Little Women’s world. Chris Cooper is a drawling delight as the March family’s wealthy neighbor, a man of genuine good grace and generous spirit. Bob Odenkirk puts in a late appearance as the March family patriarch, back from war. From the audience’s perspective, he’s something of an interloper. We’re happier to spend time with Tracy Letts as Jo’s publisher, a guy who doesn’t particularly like the way women are progressing in the world, but who knows a good story when he reads one.

Otherwise, the males that populate Little Women are shallow pretty boys who in any other movie would be to-die-for hunks, the objects of much female scheming and desire. Here, they skitter about, desperately hoping to find favor from these clearly superior women, living in a hellish fear of rejection (that often comes, just as they’d dreaded).

The dreamlike cinematography of Little Women is courtesy of Yorick Le Saux, providing the unique brand of otherworldly beauty he’s brought to haunting films like Personal Shopper and I Am Love.

Add the sumptuous touch of Alexandre Desplat’s splendid score, and Little Women winds up a practically perfect film.

I must dig up that old deck of cards to see what else I’ve been missing.

Featured image: Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, and Emma Watson in Little Women (Photo credit: Wilson Webb; © 2019 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved)

Review: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 2 hours 11 minutes

Stars: Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, Carrie Fisher

Writers: Chris Terrio, J.J. Abrams, Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow

Director: J.J. Abrams

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

Sitting there waiting for John Williams’ opening fanfare at the start of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, I harbored one apprehension: That despite their assurances that this ninth film in the series would bring the entire 42-year Star Wars saga to a close, the Sith Lords at Disney would nevertheless concoct a cliff-hanger ending, teasing yet another three-part go-round with the Skywalker clan.

Also, I whispered to my companion, “This better not end with a bunch of dancing Ewoks.”

Breathe easy: The Mouse House has admirably resisted going over to the Dark Side. Rise of Skywalker has a fully resolved fade-out, leaving no one in jeopardy and the bad guys vanquished. (Spare me the “spoiler alert” e-mails: What, you thought the Star Wars saga would end like The Hateful Eight?)

Will those who still wear their hair in Princess Leia buns or who argue about whether Han Solo shot first be satisfied with the way director J.J. Abrams and his army of writers have resolved the tale? Who knows? But for the casual observer — albeit one who since 1977 has seen every Star Wars movie during its opening week — this is a pretty satisfactory wrap-up.

The iconic opening text rambles on about rebels and an evil emperor, and then Chapter 9 picks up right where Chapter 8 left off: A ragtag army of rebels is holed up on some distant planet, desperately trying to figure out a way to resist a powerful galactic dictatorship that has developed a super weapon capable of destroying entire planets.

Now, you may ask: Wasn’t that the exact same plot of the original Star Wars? Well yes, yes it was. But back then the chief bad guy was the Emperor Palpatine, and the rebels were led by Princess Leia.

Oh, wait …

Okay, well, yeah, this time the Emperor remains (Ian McDiarmid, still playing the role after 36 years), and so does Leia (Carrie Fisher, still playing the role three years after her passing). But that’s definitely where the similarities end. Except for the hallway shootouts between our heroes and the Storm Troopers (terrible shots as ever) and the climactic dogfight in which mosquito-like space fighters wreak havoc on enemy ships the size of Manhattan (you just need to know where to aim). And of course there’s the brave young heroine in white (Daisy Ridley) who’s got multiple handsome guys hopelessly in love with her.

Hmm. Come to think of it, all that does sound familiar …

Ah! So, here’s an element in Rise of Skywalker that was definitely not in the first Star Wars movie: A repentant villain performs the ultimate act of self-sacrifice to save the life of an innocent. Ha! That didn’t happen … until the end of The Return of the Jedi.

The point here, I guess, is that repetition isn’t a glitch in the Star Wars universe — it’s a feature. Not unlike Medieval passion plays, for which audiences tolerated only the most minor variations on a theme, the Star Wars movies vary primarily in the people speaking the lines and the exact nature of the deus ex machina that will deliver our heroes from the brink of destruction this time.

The chief contribution Abrams has made in producing the last three Star Wars movies has been in assembling an appealing cast (as opposed to George Lucas’ three prequels, which seemed to have held their casting calls at Madame Tussaud’s). Daisy Ridley, beautiful and bad-ass, brings Marvel-caliber energy to the role of Rey, a Jedi. Adam Driver gives the most thoughtful and sympathetic of his three turns as conflicted bad guy Kylo Ren. We still don’t get enough time with Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, and Keri Russell as hotshot fighter pilots — I wouldn’t mind following that trio in some future Star Wars spin-off (but not a sequel).

And, of course, Abrams has had the advantage of recruiting Star Wars veterans whose audience goodwill is automatic. I won’t spill how many of them show up here, but it’s well known that Abrams employed previously unused footage of Fisher to cobble together a supporting role for her here. It’s the most ambitious gamble of the film, and surprisingly successful: Despite the fact that the entire script was reverse engineered to accommodate the snippets of film at hand, Princess Leia’s part in the narrative is not only substantial — it’s central to the plot.

No one is deluding themselves into thinking Disney is flushing the whole Star Wars universe. But it’s clear that the whole Skywalker saga ran its course a few films ago, and now is the time to stop. For one thing, if trends continued, the next installment would have required the return of Jar-Jar Binks.

Spoiler alert: There are Ewoks at the end. Dancing.

Featured image: Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Photo by Lucasfilm/Lucasfilm Ltd. © 2019 and TM Lucasfilm Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Review: Richard Jewell — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Richard Jewell

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: R

Run Time: 2 hours 9 minutes

Stars: Paul Walter Hauser, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde

Writer: Billy Ray

Director: Clint Eastwood

 

Alfred Hitchcock said the way to make a viewer’s skin crawl is not to suddenly explode a bomb under your characters’ feet — but instead to show that hidden bomb five minutes before it’s set to detonate, then leave your audience helpless as the bomb’s targets obliviously sit right on top of it.

“That’s suspense,” Hitch said.

Clint Eastwood has already joined Hitchcock in the pantheon of legendary directors, but at 89 he’s still taking tips from the Master. Richard Jewell, Eastwood’s account of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing, tortures us with hand-wringing buildups to not one, but several cataclysms— only one of which involves an actual explosive device.

Richard Jewell was a security guard assigned to an Olympics week concert at Atlanta’s Centennial Park. Spotting a suspicious backpack placed at the base of a camera tower, he notified his bosses and dashed up into the tower, screaming to everyone they had to evacuate. He was on the ground, pushing the dense throng of revelers away from ground zero, when the bomb exploded, killing one person and injuring 111.

Jewell was hailed as a hero, featured on magazine covers and in TV interviews, even as the FBI scrutinized him as a possible suspect. The initial probe was strictly routine — just as the spouse of a murder victim is always the first person of interest, so is the guy who supposedly finds a bomb.

But almost immediately, routine flew out the window. A former employer at Piedmont College, where Jewell had been a security guard, went to the FBI with stories of Jewell — perpetually single, grossly overweight, and socially awkward — acting inappropriately in his duties. Even worse, the Atlanta Journal Constitution got wind of the probe and splashed it all over the front page, taking unfiltered delight in pushing the hero-turned-demon narrative.

Eastwood, no friend of the press, relates Jewell’s story with vengeance-fueled energy. But you don’t have to be a Fake News zealot to share his indignation at what happened to Jewell — who despite complete exoneration by the FBI is still remembered primarily not as a hero of that day, but simply as the prime suspect.

As usual, Eastwood displays his astonishingly streamlined style of storytelling. There’s not a wasted beat in the film: We meet Richard, we acknowledge his eccentricities and, to be honest, we empathize a bit with those who find him somewhat weird. Even the buildup to the bombing, structured for maximum suspense and filmed right at the original Atlanta site, moves along at a steady clip.

But that’s not to say Eastwood doesn’t give his actors room to breathe. In fact, the characters in Richard Jewell are exquisitely crafted — no small feat, given how many of them there are.

Eastwood says the moment he saw Paul Walter Hauser as Tonya Harding’s bodyguard in I, Tonya, he knew he had his Richard Jewell. Indeed, with one look at Hauser fairly bursting out of his rent-a-cop uniform and peering at the world through suspicious, squinty eyes, you know he was born for this part. But looks are one thing: Hauser also provides telling glimpses of the principled man at Jewell’s core. Even as the FBI, with absolutely no evidence implicating him, grinds its heel to Jewell’s head, the man refuses to surrender his lifelong assertion that lawmen are basically good, motivationally pure. With heavy sighs and slumped shoulders, Hauser’s Jewell seems halfway resigned to accepting blame for the bombing if these guys insist he’s their guy.

“When are you gonna get mad?” demands his lawyer, a low-rent contract attorney played with perfectly calibrated disengagement by Sam Rockwell.

In reality, it’s just Clint Eastwood at work, planting another bomb. We can almost hear it, ticking away inside Richard Jewell as one indignity piles upon another: The FBI tries to trick him into signing away his Miranda rights…the bureau storms the apartment he shares with his mother and confiscates just about everything, including Mom’s beloved Tupperware…the newspaper continues a daily drumbeat of accusations through innuendo.

All that’s bad enough. But then they make his mother cry.

The actual detonation is muted, but Hauser portrays the moment with uncanny clarity. His face, formerly set in a mask of stoicism, suddenly seems to physically soften. As Jewell’s anger boils to the surface, he takes on an expression of near-peaceful serenity — finally released to do what his gut has been telling him to do from the start.

Eastwood lays the groundwork for lots of smaller explosions throughout the film. There’s a cathartic encounter between Jewell’s lawyer and the reporter who smeared him. And a simmering eruption as Richard faces off against his FBI accusers.

Then there’s the slow burn of Jewell’s emotional mother. As Bobi Jewell, Kathy Bates flits and fawns over her son. Doting and dewy-eyed, Bobi is clearly responsible for a lot of what is wrong with Richard — yet she is also his most enthusiastic champion. It all leads to Bates’ most powerful scene confronting the press, calling to mind a grieving mother presiding over a child’s funeral.

Stepping straight out of his Mad Men corner suite and into an FBI cubicle, Jon Hamm is deliciously infuriating as the button-down agent who cavalierly decides Richard Jewell is guilty, then never gives an inch. Square-jawed and steely-eyed, he’s the picture of that most scary of creatures: The man relentlessly doing evil, utterly convinced he is doing good.

The film’s principal ire, though, is reserved for the press. Olivia Wilde plays Kathy Scruggs, the real-life Atlanta newspaper reporter who broke the story that Jewell was being investigated by the FBI, then persisted in pushing that line long after it was clear Jewell truly was the hero everyone thought he was. Much has been made of the film’s clear implication that Scruggs — who died in 2001 — traded sexual favors for tips from law enforcement officials. But while Eastwood is willing to offer Scruggs some measure of redemption, he’s not about to let the Fourth Estate off the hook so easily.

From its opening minutes, Richard Jewell builds an indictment against a press that trades in others’ misfortune and builds narratives guided more by audience interest than facts.

Most damning, Clint Eastwood depicts an industry that plants its own bombs under society’s essential underpinnings, then returns not to claim responsibility— but to profit from reporting on the carnage.

 Featured image: Paul Walter Hauser as Richard Jewell in Warner Bros. Pictures’ Richard Jewell, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Copyright: © 2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

 

Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott: Abbott and Costello Meet the 21st Century

See all Movies for the Rest of Us.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons

Review: A Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

A Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

Rating: PG

Stars: Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Chris Cooper, Susan Kelechi Watson

Writers: Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster

Director: Marielle Heller

 

We live in mean times. So mean, in fact, that these days the meanest of the mean boast openly of their meanness. If you’re not at least a little mean, we’re told, no one will take you seriously.

It’s especially true in the movies. The meanest curs in Marvel comic movies are invariably the films’ most interesting characters. Disney has spun off a whole genre of villain movies that seeks to explain just why those evildoers are so mean and absolve them of their meanness. And the Joker? Mean and loving it.

You know what I mean?

So what are we to do with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a film with not a mean millisecond in its length; a film that celebrates kindness, forgiveness, compassion, faith, and innocence with reckless abandon?

Here’s what you do: You embrace it. You treasure it. You take your family to it and drive your friends to the theater door, if necessary.

Because if A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood does not move you on some level, you should check your pulse. And double-check your humanity.

The big surprise of this film, based on a true story, is that the most famous figure in it is actually a supporting character. Sure, Tom Hanks’ portrayal of Fred Rogers — TV’s kindly Mister Rogers to generations of preschoolers — is the main attraction here. Hanks’ portrayal of Rogers, whose Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood eased the childhood angst of untold millions of toddlers, is a walking Beatitude: the meek, the merciful, the peacemaker. And like the real Fred, the character draws power from those attributes, the power to forgive where others can’t — and the power to inspire others to forgive themselves.

But the central character here is actually a magazine writer named Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a fictional version of Tom Junod, on whose Esquire article the script is based. We meet him as a hard-driving investigative reporter whose specialty is stripping public figures naked to reveal their secret foibles in the most vicious manner possible. He’s also a mess: a hard-drinking, short-tempered cynic who sees his subjects as raw meat and his wife (Susan Kelechi Watson) as little more than an affectionate inconvenience. Towards his father (Chris Cooper) he harbors undisguised hatred with a rage that explodes into a fistfight at a wedding.

Lloyd is, of course, appalled when his editor assigns him a puff piece on Fred Rogers, and he approaches the job like it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.

Then, in a Pittsburgh television studio, Lloyd falls almost immediately under Mister Rogers’ spell. Director Marielle Heller dispenses with any sense of resistance on Lloyd’s part, because quite simply by all accounts this is precisely the way Fred Rogers affected people. The most jaded of visitors, simply by being pulled ever so slightly in Fred Rogers’ orbit, felt the warmth of kindness that he radiated.

But that doesn’t mean Lloyd is comfortable with this feeling. The meatiest passages of A Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood come as Lloyd’s soul is troubled by his repeated encounters with a truly selfless man. Fred doesn’t just project kindness to Lloyd; he invites the writer into his own life and in the process begins to infill the voids in Lloyd’s soul.

That’s the power of A Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood: Not for one second does the film deny the dynamism of anger, the strangely irresistible appeal of cynicism. Here, though, those twin demons run full-speed into a wall of charity and acceptance, and although the collision is momentarily messy, in the end there’s no contest: The Golden Rule doesn’t just repel the Law Of The Jungle, it absorbs it, dissolves it, neutralizes it.

Like Fred Rogers himself, A Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood swarms with gentle wonders, most memorably the film’s establishing shots of Pittsburgh and Manhattan.  They’re not the usual stock footage, but instead fanciful constructions, extensions of the miniature neighborhood that opened each episode of Fred Rogers’ show.

Significantly, A Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood never shies away from the essential truth at the core of Fred Rogers’ goodness: As an ordained Presbyterian minister, his view of the inherent value of all people, young and old, good and bad, is rooted in his Biblical understanding of the nature of God. One of the film’s most mesmerizing moments is one of its quietest as Fred, a dedicated swimmer, does laps in the local pool, praying for each individual in his life by name.

As the troubled writer, Rhys invites us along for his midlife awakening. His face at the start seems set in wax, fixed by anger and barely conceived rage. Slowly, he softens in the warmth of Fred Rogers’ humanity. By the end he seems like a prisoner released, liberated by the realization that although he is now a better person, even   in his most degenerate state he was, in the eyes of one good man, of infinite value. Rhys, the galvanizing star of TV’s The Americans, overplays neither Lloyd’s misery nor his revelation; his is a miraculously subliminal performance. As Lloyd’s defensive and flawed father, Cooper masterfully summons the classic parental lament: “Where did I go wrong? Oh, yeah…”

You may well find a tear leaking from A Beautiful Day’s first frames, and the weepies will most likely reassert themselves through the beatific conclusion. And as you leave the theater, you just might imagine the hand of a certain red-sweatered fellow on your sleeve, gently whispering into your ear, “It’s okay to feel this way.”

Featured image: Matthew Rhys and Tom Hanks in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Photo by Lacey Terrell. Copyright ©2019 CTMG, Inc. All rights reserved.

 

Review: Ford v Ferrari — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Ford v Ferrari

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 2 hours 32 minutes

Stars: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Tracy Letts, Caitriona Balfe, Josh Lucas

Writers: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, Jason Keller

Director: James Mangold

 

If you opened the hood of the Fast and Furious movies and dropped in a brain, you might come up with something like Ford v Ferrari, a film with all the screeching tires and howling engines of that simpleminded street racing series, but with engaging characters and a refreshing dose of history set in a universe that is, unlike the F&F franchise, observant of the actual laws of physics.

It’s 1966, and Italian car maker Enzo Ferrari has just humiliated the mighty Ford Motor Company: He led Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) to think he’d be willing to sell his boutique nameplate to Ford, then abruptly pulled the rug out. Ford’s fury over the episode might have dissipated in time as a business deal gone wrong but for one twist of the knife: Haughty Ferrari sent word back to Detroit that the current president of the company “Is not Henry Ford…He’s Henry Ford II.” (He also called him fat.)

Letts, who as an actor continues to do more and more with less and less, is almost scary in the scene. His shark-like stare never widens and the tightening of his jaw is nearly imperceptible. But there’s no mistaking he’s Krakatoa about to erupt, Mount St. Helens ready to blow. He’s internal combustion personified, and he channels his thirst for revenge into a plan to show Ferrari who’s the real boss when the rubber meets the road.

Ford determines the best way to repay Ferrari’s insult will be in the most public way possible, and that means beating him on the racetrack — specifically the 24 Hours of LeMans, of which Ferrari is the undisputed king. He hires America’s greatest race car driver and designer, Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) to not only whip up a car that will outpace Ferrari’s lineup, but to do it before the next LeMans race, less than four months away.

Shelby accepts the outrageous assignment only because Ford is willing to pour every drop of the company’s resources into the project. He asks just one thing: That he get to hire his own driver, a roughneck, ragged-edged fellow named Ken Miles (Christian Bale), known as much for his hot temper and habitual insubordination as for his mastery of the race driving arts.

Ford and his button-down board balk —Miles is not what they see as a “Ford Man” — but Shelby insists, and the film’s most thrilling race, the one to put four wheels on the pavement of Le Mans in 90 days, is on.

As fine a screen actor as Damon is, his performances are basically variations on two themes: Easygoing Matt (We Bought a Zoo, Ocean’s 11) and Intense Matt (The Bourne movies, The Talented Mr. Ripley). This time out he’s the former in spades, a laid-back Dallas-born maverick whose good-old-boy demeanor softens an insatiable ambition to be the fastest man alive if not behind the wheel (he’s had to give up driving due to a heart condition) then at the drawing board.

Bale, on the other hand, once more seems to emerge from an alternative universe to play a character utterly unlike any he’s ever tackled before. As the easily irritated Brit driver Ken Miles, Bale hurls wrenches, spits invective, and generally abuses the Ford suits. But he’s not an angry man — he’s one who feels deep emotions and happens to express them in unfortunate outbursts. Happily, the film offers generous moments of Miles sharing everyday life with his endlessly understanding wife (Outlander’s Caitriona Balfe) and adoring son (Noah Jupe); passages which don’t soften his personality so much as add dimension to his complex and, in the end, warmly appealing character.

The film’s best scenes come when Damon and Bale let the chemistry of their characters jell together, opposite personalities filling in each other’s blanks to create an irresistibly appealing pair. The guys love and fight like brothers — especially in a particularly delicious scene outside the driver’s house, beating each other up with such affectionate frenzy Miles’ wife can only pull up a lawn chair and enjoy the WWF-like spectacle.

Director James Mangold (Walk the Line, Logan) probably lets Ford v Ferrari make a few laps too many; we could use a little less time in the board room, especially when the film labors to set up a stuffy executive, played by Josh Lucas, as the film’s villain. To his credit, Lucas does establish his guy as one the audience would dearly love to see end up as a speed bump in the racing pit.

We may see several names from Ford v Ferrari on the list when Oscar nominations come out, but most deserving will be Letts as Henry Ford II, if only for one exquisite scene in which he browbeats Shelby into taking him for a ride in the prototype race car.

After wedging the burly Ford into the passenger seat, Shelby hits the gas, and off they go on the test track. The camera focuses on Letts’ face as his emotions shift every time Shelby hits the clutch: Shock, thrill, terror…and finally, when the Ford GT40 skids to a halt, a torrent of tears springing from the well of a man who, despite his plush environs in the executive suite, is still in his heart a car guy. He’s Henry Ford, after all.

Featured image: Matt Damon and Christian Bale in Ford v. Ferrari (Merrick Morton TM and © 2019 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved. Not for sale or duplication.)

Review: Motherless Brooklyn — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Motherless Brooklyn

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Run Time 2 hours 24 minutes

Rating: R

Stars: Edward Norton, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Willem Dafoe, Bruce Willis

Writer: Edward Norton (Based on Jonathan Lethem’s novel)

Director: Edward Norton

 One name in that bold-faced list above explains both the considerable strengths and undeniable weaknesses of this lavish tale of a small-time detective taking on the powers that ran 1950s New York City.

The name is Edward Norton, and it appears three times: as star, writer, and director. He’s also a producer of the film, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he bought everyone lunch each day, as well.

In short, Motherless Brooklyn is what in Hollywood they call a vanity project, which means Norton gets all the credit for everything that’s good about the film: Its uncanny re-creation of Manhattan in the ’50s, steady performances by a pitch-perfect cast, and a current of commitment that infuses every frame.

But as the man in charge, Norton must also take responsibility for the film’s ponderous length, its over-reliance on the central character’s brain disorder as a plot device, and the insistent inclusion of entire scenes that should never have been shot, much less left on the cutting room floor.

Still, Norton, working from the best-selling novel by Brooklyn-born Jonathan Lethem, has crafted an undeniably appealing character for himself. He stars as Lionel Essrog, a detective afflicted with then little-understood Tourette’s Syndrome. The condition causes him to erupt with uncontrollable expletives, along with other physical and verbal tics, at the most inopportune moments. But because Essrog’s condition causes him to obsess over details and patterns, it makes him a perfect detective, collecting the most obscure clues and organizing them in the RAM of his jumbled brain. With his puppy dog face and gentle demeanor, Norton draws us into Lionel’s interior world, sharing his triumphs and embarrassments in equal measure

Motherless Brooklyn gets to its central mystery with admirable speed. When Lionel’s understanding boss Frank Minna (Bruce Willis, gone too soon) is killed by thugs, Lionel and the four remaining members of the detective agency go about trying to solve the murder. Well, Lionel does, anyway — the others, especially the senior staffer, played by gruffly appealing Bobby Cannavale, seem oddly disinterested in getting to the bottom of it.

Lionel follows the trail of suspects all the way up to Harlem, where he befriends a sexy singer named Laura (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), an anti-urban renewal activist and daughter of a kindly jazz club owner (Robert Wisdom) who may know too much about Minna’s death. Also flitting about the periphery of Lionel’s investigation is a nervous small-time architect (Willem Dafoe), a guy with a mysterious connection to Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), New York’s all-powerful master builder.

Baldwin’s character is a thinly disguised portrayal of Robert Moses, the New York powerbroker who forged the identity of the city by hurling mighty bridges across its rivers and rolling broad highways through its neighborhoods. The real Moses’ ruthless disregard for the societal disruptions he caused — fueled, many say, by simple racism — becomes the film’s chief theme in its second half. For many, Baldwin’s frequent portrayal of President Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live will inform their understanding of this character; for others, it will be a distraction. Either way, Baldwin makes the most of the role, especially in one powerful scene between Moses and Lionel in which the stars’ mutual scenery chewing threatens to bring the set crashing down.

One gets the distinct sense that Norton envisioned Motherless Brooklyn as an East Coast Chinatown, a cautionary tale of corrupt infrastructure development wrapped in a noir mystery. As Roman Polanski did in that masterpiece, Norton succeeds in creating a remarkable sense of place that goes beyond merely having the right model cars parked along the curbs. His invocation of a New York still unsteady after two decades of Depression and world war, willing to bulldoze its past in search of a more promising future, is gloriously envisioned in a spectacular recreation of the old Penn Station, its vaulted glass ceiling towering above the city’s now-small, seemingly insignificant citizens.

Lethem’s 1999 novel predates Tony Shaloub’s classic obsessive-compulsive TV detective, Monk, but as a film Motherless Brooklyn must live in the shadow of that monumental character. In the series, Shaloub’s “defective detective” went about his work without much self-awareness — but here too much of the film is spent on Lionel explaining his condition to others (“It’s like having glass in my brain…”).

He could have used a calling card like the one Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker hands out to confused strangers, explaining why he often bursts into uncontrollable laughter, and spared us the repetitious exposition.

If only Edward Norton the producer had told Edward Norton the screenwriter to streamline Edward Norton the star’s lines a bit, Edward Norton the director might have had a mini masterpiece on his hands.

Featured image: Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Laura Rose and Edward Norton as Lionel Essrog in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama Motherless Brooklyn, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Copyright: © 2019 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. Photo Credit: Glen Wilson

Review: Harriet — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Harriet

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

Stars: Cynthia Erivo, Leslie Odom Jr., Joe Alwyn

Writers: Gregory Allen Howard, Kasi Lemmons

Director: Kasi Lemons

 

In epic historical biographies, it’s tough for a film director to strike a balance between intimate portrait and grand scale. The spectacle can easily overshadow the human story — or else the central character may become an inordinately oversized player on a broad historical canvas.

David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia got the mix just right, as did Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. And so does Kasi Lemmons’ Harriet, a sprawling, inspiring, and at times downright enthralling biopic of Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who courageously kept returning to the South to usher fellow slaves to freedom.

First and foremost, Lemmons (Black Nativity, Eve’s Bayou) understands that the story of slavery is a lot bigger than even a dominant figure like Harriet Tubman. Here Lemmons paints a stark picture of a country divided between freedom and slavery; of people whose fates are defined by imaginary lines and misbegotten fantasies of racial superiority. As those two worlds engage in a clumsy dance of accommodation and resistance, Lemmons depicts the widening fissures that will inevitably lead to all-out war.

And then there’s Tubman. In Lemmons’ telling, after Harriet escaped from the slaveholding South to the free North, she continued to slip between those two tectonic plates with almost supernatural skill. Indeed, Tubman credited direct guidance from God Himself for her uncanny ability to avoid and outsmart the Southerners who were always hot on her trail. As director and co-screenwriter, Lemmons doesn’t shy away from Tubman’s claims of heavenly guidance; she lets Tubman have it her way, and why not? After all, she was there.

Cynthia Erivo arrives as a legitimate big-screen powerhouse in the title role, playing Tubman as a diminutive dynamo who answers to no one but God. She peers at the world through impassive eyes, informed by a tortured combination of rage and compassion.

Skeptics will scoff at the passages where Tubman’s divine chats result in inspired changes of strategy and last second, slave hunter-avoiding detours. But Erivo portrays those episodes with unnerving and convincing matter-of-factness. Plus, there’s no arguing with the breathtaking success Tubman had against long odds, skittering back and forth across the Mason-Dixon line with scores of escaping slaves in tow on the Underground Railroad.

There’s one other element that makes Harriet resonate in a way many other slavery era films might not. Historically, films about slavery tend to unfold in the Deep South, that “other” place where isolated human monsters reigned over their African captives. In those movies, slavery is distant from most of us not only in time, but also in geography. Like the similarly powerful 12 Years a Slave — the story of a free Black man kidnapped from the North into slavery — Harriet explores the thin veil that separated the free states from those that practiced slavery, a veil that was so easily pierced it becomes impossible to sustain the myth that the North was utterly non-complicit in the sin of slavery.

I happen to live in Delaware, where Tubman lived under the whip of a family that genuinely thought it was their birthright to own and abuse other human beings. I drive the back roads here; roads that Tubman and her companions slunk across under cover of night, following the North Star to the Pennsylvania border, and freedom.

When I drive up Route 1 past Wilmington, a sign proclaims, “Welcome to Pennsylvania.” Thanks to Harriet, I doubt I’ll ever again read that billboard in quite the same way.

Featured image: Cynthia Erivo stars as Harriet Tubman in Harriet, a Focus Features release. Credit: Glen Wilson / Focus Features

Seriously Good Films for November 2019

Harriet (November 1)

Sprawling, inspiring, and downright enthralling, this biopic of Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who courageously kept returning to the South to usher fellow slaves to freedom, is a historical drama with the kind of expansive scope we seldom see anymore. Cynthia Erivo plays Tubman as a diminutive dynamo who answers to no one but God. Director Kasi Lemmons (Black Nativity, Eve’s Bayou) shows herself to be a visionary filmmaker with an unerring eye for both spectacle and intimacy.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (November 22)

Here’s a movie that delivers everything it promises — a nostalgic look at a beloved children’s TV icon, a reminder that the lessons of childhood still have currency long after we’ve grown up — and much, much more. Tom Hanks’ portrayal of Fred Rogers reminds us of the power to forgive where others can’t — and the power to inspire others to forgive themselves. You may well start tearing up from the first frames of A Beautiful Day, and as you leave the theater, you might well imagine the hand of a certain red-sweatered fellow on your sleeve, gently whispering into your ear, “It’s okay to feel this way.”

Knives Out (November 27)

The cinematic equivalent of comfort food, Knives Out is a classic murder-in-a-locked-room whodunit, complete with an eccentric detective (Daniel Craig), who calls a drawing room assembly of all-star suspects — including Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon, and Don Johnson. Craig drawls his way through the role of Benoit Blanc, a detective whose name conjures up Hercule Poirot but who sounds more like Sheriff Andy of Mayberry. The resolution isn’t quite the surprise you might have hoped for, but writer/director Rian Johnson keeps us sufficiently off balance to make things interesting.

Featured image: Glen Wilson / Focus Features