Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire)

Celine Sciamma, the director of last year’s most emotionally overwhelming movie, Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), has said that she borrowed, to some extent, the structure of James Cameron’s Titanic. She wanted the movie’s two lovers, Marianne and Heloise (the poised and exquisitely cast Noemie Merlant and Adele Haenel) to be like Jack and Rose, Leo and Kate.

It’s a fascinating bit of inspiration. For a French artist such as Sciamma, Titanic must seem emblematic of Hollywood grandiosity. How easily we forget (and how quick we are to make memes), though, that Cameron’s Gulliver of a film is, in fact, a decent love story, cheesy dialogue aside. When Gloria Stewart sack-of-shit tosses that MacGuffin into sea, it’s a wistful feeling we’re left with, one, notably, not found elsewhere in Cameron’s work, and one that is, to use the lazy cinephile parlance, “earned.” Love, loss, chagrin, time — it’s all in that Celine Dion’s song.

That wistful feeling, that swelling in the chest, happens no fewer than five times in the last fifteen minutes of Sciamma’s latest and best movie. Heretofore, Sciamma has made more down-to-Earth, so-called coming-of-age stories focused on the uneasy alchemy of gender, sexuality, and growing up. Movies like Girlhood and Water Lilies are very fine works. But with Portrait, which is spellbinding in ways few films these days even aspire to be, one has the sense of an artist having fully cleared her throat.

The Titanic notion of a deliberate, if unnecessary, framing device escorts us into the story of Marianne, a painter in 18th century France who is teaching an art class to girls. (Recall Kate to Leo, “Draw me like one of your French girls.”) As if picking things right up from Sciamma’s prior films, the young artists’ cherubic faces and youthful fingers are among the first images we see. Marianne is posing at the front of the class, urging her students to mind their technique — “First my contours, the silhouette,” “Take time to look at me.”

When Marianne winces at an old painting of hers a clueless student pulled out of storage, we’re sent into Marianne’s memories of “A long time ago” when she painted the titular work. (The actual “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” to which the title refers is seen only once, here, and would have stood out as unusual for an 18th century French painting, a surrealistic anachronism that somehow feels plausible.)

The first hour of Portrait is the kind of slow, getting-to-know-you cinema that feels more urgent than a series of car chases and murders in the first reel. The plot is so simple you wonder why no one else thought of it. Marianne, the daughter of a successful portraitist who will one day take over his business, is summoned to an island estate off the coast of Brittany to paint a portrait. She has been told very little but seems to sense intrigue. Upon arrival, she questions the maid (Luana Bajrami). There were, in fact, two daughters. The first killed herself rather than be married off to a Milanese nobleman she’s never met. That leaves Heloise. And she’s just been pulled out of a convent by her mother (Valeria Golino) to marry the nobleman.

The dialogue is spare. It often lacks subtext. (In the sense that characters pretty much say what they mean and mean what they say.) And they have every reason to be, given their circumstance. Apart from clusters of unnamed men at the beginning and end of the film, there are but four characters, all women, and their world is one of stark realities and clear options and non-options. After a meeting with the mother of Heloise, Marianne ascertains that Heloise, like her late sister, refuses the marriage to the nobleman. If the nobleman likes Marianne’s work, he will agree to marry Heloise. Marianne must paint Heloise without Heloise knowing (Heloise is told Marianne is a walking partner, and buys it because women painters were so rare as to place Marianne beyond all suspicion.) Heloise wore the last painter out, we learn, when she refused to pose or expose her face.

Marianne gets the job because her painter father had painted the marriage portrait of Heloise’s mother, which hangs in the sitting room that hosts Marianne and the mother’s conversations. Although it isn’t in dialogue, the missing furnishings and lack of, well, stuff in the home suggests a wrecked family life (it also suggests a ghost story). We’re not told that Heloise’s father is dead, and that her mother has arranged this marriage so that the family can continue to live as more or less aristocrats — it just hangs in the air as an unspoken truth. Portrait, is, in fact, suffused with male energy — male dominance, even — as these women’s lives are literally governed by the absences and inroads left for them by their patriarchs.

There’s an unassuming quality to Sciamma’s direction, even moments of deliberate formalism feel effortless, like the trailer-made scene of the two leads in profile, their faces overlapping and taking turns looking at one another. Additionally, the ease with which Sciamma executes the traditional setup-and-payoff of her story is impressive. From the start, we’re constantly learning information that will be relevant later, and these are often simply layered in the background. (Note the striking rock formation on the beach when Marianne first ambles toward the estate over rough terrain; it later makes it into an Orpheus and Eurydice painting Marianne completes. This is easily missed on first watch.) We are so wrapped up in paying attention to the eyes and gestures and faces of the two leads that we don’t realize we’re being taught things.

And these performances are easy to get wrapped up in. Haenel is other-worldly as the angry, closed-off Heloise. (She softens, of course, into the both broken-hearted and open-hearted person who closes out the film.) But the film belongs to Merlant. Despite the egalitarian framing of the two actors, Marianne is, I believe, in every single scene of the film. She is the point-of-view character, and it’s her occasional voiceover that reminds us we’re viewing a memory. Merlant deftly conveys that Marianne is more experienced, more worldly, and older than the somewhat child-like Heloise. Older, but not by much. More worldly, but perhaps not for long. (As it happens, both actors are the same age, thirty-one.)

Merlant and Haenel circle each other for over an hour of the film’s runtime, always seeming on the verge of a personal admission (“I don’t know if I will marry,” Marianne says, casually, averting eye contact for a moment) or about to hold a glance for a nanosecond too long. Rarely have two actors been as convincing as Merlant and Haenel are with respect to portraying the way strong romantic feelings can sometimes seem cooked in a Crock-pot rather than a microwave. Sciamma is in not hurry. There’s a scene at a harpsichord — yet another of Sciamma’s covert setups for a later payoff — in which Marianne, in the midst of a budding friendship, plays melodies from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” for Heloise, who has never heard an orchestra. The shot composition gives us shades of Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson” before cutting in for a two shot. One can practically taste the moment when Heloise softens toward her new pal. Haenel, an actor who has never over-played anything, gives it to us with posture as much as with facial expressions. In a very real sense, where their eyes might dart or glance in a given scene says more than the dialogue.

Eventually, Marianne executes an initial portrait. And it’s not very good, though, of course, her subject never posed. (The artist Helene Delmaire accomplished the artworks depicted in the film, with her hands standing in for Merlant’s.) In one of the story’s satisfying acts of agency, she insists on telling Heloise the truth, who she is and why she’s been there. She insists on showing Heloise the painting.

The revelation ignites the story’s next section, in which the fate of the first painting leads to a second, one where Heloise is willing to pose. This new order of things is attended by Heloise’s mother leaving for five days, enabling the remaining three women, the lovers and the maid Sophie, to form a temporary nuclear family. Without any male energy around, the women are free to bond, share secrets, support one another, and, yes, fall in love. The pacing with which this all comes off will be the stuff of film school legend. The film speeds up but never gallops. Each of its three sections is quicker and more urgent than the last but maintains the same contemplative mood.

Portrait is a quiet work, full of background sounds of fires crackling and heeled shoes clacking against wooden floors. Yet there are two music moments that are so sublime in their execution that they merit mention in any discussion about the film. The first is a bonfire scene that takes place when painter and subject try to help the maid with a problem. They enter a village on the island, seemingly populated by women only. The village women begin chanting an arresting baroque-sounding song while our lovers lock eyes across the fire. Sciamma hard cuts out of the scene after earning her film’s title, but the moment is strangely elegaic and staged with such simplicity that its impact sneaks up on you.

The second music moment constitutes one of the film’s alleged three endings. Which is not altogether accurate. The story has one ending, and it takes place on a staircase. After that, Sciamma tacks on a coda, and the coda is in two parts. Again, Marianne’s voiceover guides us. She saw her a first time, and then a second, and, presumably, never again. Sciamma’s final music moment amounts to a cinematic knockout punch, and feels like one. Our two heroes find themselves inhabiting the same space but not the same place, so to speak. There is literal and figurative time and space between them. One might want to cry for what was lost and what might have been. But, interestingly, Sciamma ends her tale of heartache and loss with melancholic reverie and even a dash of elation. “Don’t regret, remember,” Marianne had told her beloved. This is what art is for.

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) — FOUR STARS

Directed by Celine Sciamma

Lilies Films

Pyramide Films

Rated R

High Life

High Life is almost an anti-science fiction movie, a work that has affection less for the visual character of the sci-fi genre than for what that imagery can yield toward such classic Denis themes as isolation and exploitation.

We begin, after all, on a slow-gliding shot of a garden. Which is itself the food source on an unremarkable looking spaceship that looks like a backup battery pack phone charger. Robert Pattinson, an actor I still find mostly a blank stare, carries the picture with that blankness. Denis’ best work has been with expressive actors who carry in them an element of essential strangeness, which makes High Life an outlier of sorts.

Pattinson is quite affecting as Monte, a prisoner on spaceship where prisoners are on a mission to a black hole. (The idea is to harness the black hole’s power for use as an Earthly energy source.) The prisoners think they’ll win their freedom, but the whole thing is a kind of perverse double-cross that ends badly.

Denis gives us the narrative out of order — itself a kind of double-crossing of story that allows her to brush past the sci-fi conventions and get to the oddities of humans in space.

The twist involves both Juliette Binoche and the sexualized science. Binoche’s character, coyly named “Dibs,” is running experiments on the death row prisoners.

Monte got convicted for, as a child, killing his best friend over a dog. And Monte certainly has the monotone and saltine pallor of someone who’s been on death row that long. By the time Denis’ stirring ending flashes before us, we’ve been sat alongside Monte long enough to have never actually seen his crime.Thus we feel a deep, unusual-for-Denis ambivalence toward what he and his companion may or may not be soaring into.

High Life — THREE STARS

Directed by Claire Denis

A24

110 min.

Us

Jordan Peele’s Us seems shaped by everything from Haneke to Hitchcock, from Almodovar to John Carpenter to, indeed, Polanski. But it’s Peele’s own wry aesthetic and penchant for dialogue that’s at once realistic and off-beat that sets his second film apart. So often in the film, which opens today, what’s most impressive is not the scares, many of which are well orchestrated, but the in-between moments of a family eating fast food for dinner, or a boring car ride to a summer home that features memorable diagetic music (there’s some of that Haneke).

Much praise has already been collected by Peele for his careful craft — and the film is impressively put together — but, as in Get Out, what sells the scares is that Peele is such a studious observer of the banality of daily life.

After a spooky flashback cold-open, Us begins as Haneke’s Funny Games does, with a somewhat idealized but recognizably human family driving to a vacation home. Again, Peele, who also wrote the screenplay, excels at this sort of exposition, which in typical horror films is excruciating. We find the Wilsons at ease with one another. There are jokes and banter. But the spooky aura of the cold open hangs in the air. Where Get Out had a more straightforward relationship to form, Us is more observant of its characters faces, the camera seeming to study, even probe, them. It moves its angles slightly in between shots. Scenes shot in broad daylight seem to be imbued with the coldness of midnight.

The central conceit of Us is hinted at with prefatory text across a black screen at the beginning of the film. As the trailer revealed, a family is haunted by bizarro versions of themselves. Where these versions come from and what they want is at once intellectually stimulating and cockamamie if you mull it over for too long. Peele’s penchant for allegory is a gift and a curse. One wonders whether he received studio notes to the effect of “Explain this in dialogue.”

Indeed there are tense, highly memorable scenes that are freighted with long, verbal explanations of What’s Going On. Not a crime in itself (Hitchcock does this all over the place in Vertigo). But too many details in terms of the Hows and Whys just serve to thicken the sauce needlessly.

Story aside, the picture belongs to Lupita Nyong’o. Her character, Adelaide, walks through life haunted by a childhood trauma — a shopworn horror trope Peele twists into something legitimately interesting. Nyong’o is a screen acting ninja of body language. When Adelaide tells her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), about the childhood event, Peele writes her a dramatic monologue that borders on the maudlin. But it’s Nyong’o’s posture that sells it. She hugs her own elbows as if to protect a body she isn’t quite sure is hers.

The scares and the blood and the gore Us has on offer is better than most horror submissions these days, which tend to linger on the violence in a cheap, juvenile way that doesn’t interest Peele. In Us, the manner in which the characters commit their violent acts actually reveals something about them. (What a concept.) Of course, most discussions of the film will center around the meaning of it all.

Unlike Peele’s first film, Us is more ambiguous in its thematic destinations. The ideas of doubles, doppelgangers, shadows, and mirrors have a deep mythos all their own and can be read in any direction you like. The cognitive bias programmed in us by Get Out  is to see the film as, on some level, about Race in America. Put a gun to my head and I’d say I read Peele’s film — which is at bottom about a permanent and exploited underclass who are out of sight and out of mind — as an allegory for the prison system. The inmates are exactly like you, only in red jumpsuits. 

Us — THREE STARS

Directed by Jordan Peele

Rated R

Universal Pictures

Blumhouse

Monkey Paw

116 min.

Captain Marvel

Although it is a muddled and superficial film, Captain Marvel stars Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, the latter of which is among the most watchable movie stars working today. Their tandem charms and relative comfort working within the Marvel aesthetic make the experience almost tolerable.

Directed by indie journeymen Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Marvel’s latest chapter in its never-ending story is almost unwatchable in its first reel. The titular character has about three names, thus we can stick with “Captain.” We meet Captain on her home planet, where she’s haunted by memories she can’t quite snap into focus. It’s a warrior society, and in its first third the film borrows from everything from Green Lantern to Superman to The Matrix and grows more tedious with every purloined almost-idea.

There’s an early covert mission Captain goes on with her fellow alien freaks that’s a mess of too-dark cinematography and meandering, uninspired direction. The formal maneuver of representing Captain’s repressed/erased memories of a past life through extremely on-the-nose editing gets old instantaneously. It’s also annoying. There was an opportunity here to do something interesting with the are-we-our-memories philosophical underpinnings of the story, the feminist subject matter, and the 1990s setting. But these elements are never explored, just simply presented.

It would have been great, for example, to see the 90s setting used to some thematic effect rather than simply mined for its obnoxiously obvious playlist. A Marvel movie that actually mimicked a 90s movie aesthetic would have been… well, it would have been as good as any idea in Captain Marvel. The film’s one actually worthwhile major theme — that Captain Marvel had been fighting on the wrong side of a war because she didn’t know who she truly was (literally) — is rendered in such an incurious fashion that the notion is wasted.

Larson navigates the character’s intensity and, remarkably for an alien, penchant for wry comedy more or less skillfully. Of course, the problem with a hero who literally doesn’t know her true identity is that whatever personality traits she might exhibit seem random. Which they are. Oh, is she also a swordsman of sarcasm? Sure, why not?

Larson gets by on her instincts, never really seeming to know, well, who this character is. (Compare with Robert Downey Jr.’s handling of Tony Stark in the Iron Man films; this is less a testament to Downey’s talents than it is to the fact that Tony Stark has character traits that make him recognizable in a literal crowd of superheroes.) Predictably, her best scenes are ones that resemble her own indie background — e.g., sitting at a kitchen table and reminiscing with an old friend, or engaging is semi-barbed banter with Nick Fury (Jackson).

To the extent that Marvel films exist as long-form trailers for the next Marvel film, Captain Marvel is about as effective as it gets. It has the perfunctory boisterousness and pointless swagger that only the finest (worst) trailers can effect. Sitting in the theater, one realizes that the reason the fans come out is the post-credits sequences, in which it becomes clear that the main attraction is never the film you’re watching but the one you’re meant to watch next.

Captain Marvel — TWO STARS

Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

Rated PG-13

Marvel Studios

Walt Disney Studios 

124 min.

The Best Movies: 2018 Edition

As usual, house rules apply. I consider these year-end lists as acts of subjective curation rather than mathematical proofs. It’s simply a list of what I loved in 2018, in ranked order. Nothing about these lists makes much sense anyway. So enjoy the madness.

10. You Were Never Really Here

YWNRH is at once quiet and emphatic — an apt description of Lynne Ramsay’s work in general — a film that doesn’t rise or fall but simply simmers the whole way through, always seeming to be on the verge of something, then holding back… until. Ramsay bottles the oddball verve of Jaoquin Phoenix and sells its wholesale in this poetic and gloomy character sketch of a ruthless hitman who really is a nice guy deep down, you know? Only a filmmaker of Ramsay’s caliber could make this adaptation work. And it works wonders.

9. Unsane

Utterly unpretentious as ever, Steven Soderbergh has a blast with the plot of Unsane. You might walk away thinking you’ve experienced a gripping (if a bit silly at times) and taut thriller about identity, mental health, and the true nature of madness. But I think to Soderbergh, it’s just a genre romp, something fun to do. He shot it on an iPhone. Claire Foy registers the year’s most underappreciated lead performance, not to mention the most awesome character name of the year: “Sawyer Valentini.”

8. BlacKkKlansman

A morally serious deconstruction of hatred (as well as a hymn to competency in our institutions) shouldn’t be this funny, but Spike Lee’s film is one of the funniest of the year. (As well as one of the most harrowing, to be sure.) It’s probably all the dunking on racists that’s done just in the minor mannerisms of Topher Grace’s portrayal of David Duke. Or it could be John David Washington’s mannered pronunciation of the word “white” (he really hits that “wh-” sound). Lee is never subtle. But we don’t live in subtle times.

7. First Man

Damien Chazelle’s biopic of Neil Armstrong is extremely un-biopic-y. Like its star, Ryan Gosling, First Man is downbeat and morose and utterly mesmerizing. La La Land won the box office over. This, a far better and more humane film, did not. It’s the first Chazelle film about which I’ve been unequivocally enthusiastic. The guy can do endings, I’ll give him that.

6. First Reformed

Ethan Hawke and Paul Schrader have teamed for, at the very least, the best plot twists this year. At best, Schrader’s brooding film acts out his love of Bresson and Dreyer more than anything he’s ever done. The wayward and damn-near insane Reverend Toller has a heart too pure for mainstream religion, and bad habits that make him fit right in. What the ending signifies, much in the tradition of Schrader’s European heroes, is up to you.

5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

I don’t know what I was expecting when I heard the pitch for the Coen brothers’ latest movie. A series of western short stories that, truth be told, looked fairly cartoonish in the trailer. It is cartoonish. The titular character (Tim Blake Nelson) ascends into heaven playing a harp the way Bugs Bunny used to. But the trailer sells the film short. What the Coens’ inimitable brand of alchemy has created here is easily one of their best films. (“The Gal who Got Rattled” is my favorite, if you care.) And the best dialogue of 2018 is found therein.

4. America to Me

After screening at some festivals, Steve James’ latest documentary aired on Starz earlier this year. America to Me is a ten-hour docuseries that takes us inside Oak Park River Forest High School just outside Chicago. The racially diverse student body and faculty allow themselves to be followed (and followed home) by James and his crew. Where Frederick Wiseman might hang back and capture, James probes, asks questions, delves into the lives of the students and adults as they live through questions of race, class, and justice. It’s amazing how James, who possesses such a soft touch, has social conscience that hits hard.

3. The Tale

Jennifer Fox’s autobiographical film about coming to terms with having been sexually exploited as a child veers toward magical realism but is at its best when closer to the ground. The plain old matter-of-fact realism Fox achieves with her actors — particularly Laura Dern and Elizabeth Debicki — is searing and intense. Fox doesn’t spare us the details, which makes for a most uncomfortable film. (The actual molestation scenes were achieved with deft editing and the use of an over-18-years-old body double for the child actor, Isabelle Nelisse.)

2. Madeline’s Madeline

I bristle when I see Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline described as “art house fare” or “experimental cinema.” It’s the most narratively coherent movie I saw in 2018. A teenage girl (the scary-good Helena Howard) is part of an adult’s acting troupe that specializes in experimental theater. Its director (Molly Parker) thinks it’d be a great idea for Madeline’s real-life personal turmoil to be material for the troupe’s art. Typical descriptions point out that the lines between the troupe’s art and Madeline’s inner world “begin to blur,” but what blurs is our ability to play favorites with the characters. People don’t behave logically in this film, but somehow their surprises are what one would expect. It’s not artsy so much as it’s about artsy.

1. The Mule

Clint Eastwood’s reputation as a conservative firebrand has to be in some kind of jeopardy at this point. This is a film about, among other things, white privilege, the futility of the war on drugs, and the ways in which economic pressures can disintegrate families. It’s also the funniest film of the year. Eastwood’s casualness as a director, the ease with which things play out and the low-key feel of the images, mirrors his own demeanor as an aged actor, one who still has the singular grit and grimace of The Man With No Name.

Creed II

Ryan Coogler’s Creed was a clever and ultimately satisfying resurrection of the Rocky franchise, one that updated the formula without monkeying with it very much at all. That easygoing reverence for the source material wasn’t precious and was all about moving forward with its new hero, Donnie, son of Rocky’s first foe and eventual friend, Apollo Creed (played with singular pizzazz by Carl Weathers).

Creed II, directed by Stephen Caple Jr. with a script co-written by Stallone himself, is, for my money, a better film, one that finds the series’ sea legs with Donnie as a protagonist. It also connects more firmly than its predecessor with the prevailing theme of Rocky films: fathers and sons.

One of the detriments of the first Creed film was the lack of a compelling opponent for Donnie (Michael B. Jordan). (Perhaps the plot of Creed II should have been the plot of Creed I?) This time they get it right. Somewhat ham-fisted dialogue lets us know that there’s been a six-fight time jump between films. This film begins with Donnie, with Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and Rocky (Stallone) at his side, now challenging for the heavyweight title (the champ is played by former light-heavyweight titlist Andre Ward).

Like Rocky before him, Donnie’s success in the ring is attended by ennui and familial strife. It’s revealed that the mighty Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), who was defeated by Rocky only after killing Apollo Creed in the ring, lives in Ukraine with his son, Viktor (Florian Munteanu). Viktor is a young, inexperienced fighter. But he has the benefit of his father’s training and resentments. It is revealed that after losing to Rocky, Ivan’s country turned its back on him, and his statuesque wife (Brigette Nielsen), Viktor’s mother, left them in shame.

Viktor also has the benefit of being big and scary looking, winning all of his handful of fights via devastating knockouts. In keeping with Rocky movie tradition, a slick promoter named Buddy Marcelle (Russell Hornsby, who is excellent with what little dialogue he’s given) sees an opportunity to make a superfight.

Can the newly crowned champion avenge his father’s death by defeating the son of his father’s killer? Pretty straightforward. Interestingly, Creed II swaps the cold war conflict of Rocky IV for what is essentially a familial dispute.

In the prior film, Coogler brought some degree of bravura camera moves to the Rocky franchise, which had until that point been conventionally shot. Caple at times mimics the style but without Coogler’s eye for shots. The fight sequences this time are less convincing, more choreographed seeming where Coogler used more wide shots that better resembled two fighters actually going at it.

Caple, though, is not without his tricks. The fight sequences are well timed and reliably surprising in how they play out. Once Donnie enters the ring with Drago, we really do feel the momentousness of it all.

Rocky’s reluctance to be in Donnie’s corner for a fight with Drago’s son is borne of the fact that Rocky failed to throw in the towel back in the day, which would have saved Apollo’s life. He doesn’t want history to repeat itself. Donnie feels this is simply his trainer and surrogate father having a lack of faith.

What Creed II cleverly achieves is that very dynamic — Rocky’s fear of repeating history, and his refusal to participate in the fight, actually repeats Mickey’s history with Rocky. Two consecutive movies have managed to literally recreate story aspects of the original films without it feeling stale or lazy.

Still, there is much to criticize in Creed II. Where Coogler’s film took its time in establishing its characters, this sequel leaves much under-developed. Drago & Son are actually fascinating, and the baggage they carry is somewhat more interesting than Donnie’s and Rocky’s. (If you play the movie from Viktor Drago’s point-of-view, it’s still a Rocky movie.) The dialogue is on-the-nose (as it was in the original films, admittedly), and the complications that arise in Donnie and Bianca’s efforts to build a family are of questionable wisdom.

Moreover, Rocky himself, and his strained relationship with his biological son, is dealt with in cursory fashion, making a key ending moment feel somewhat unearned. And yet —  Creed II impressed me. It is a beautiful exposition of the main themes of the franchise that, refreshingly, doesn’t worship the franchise.

Creed II — FOUR STARS

Directed by Stephen Caple Jr.

Rated PG-13

Warner Bros.

MGM

New Line Cinema

130 min.

First Man

Downbeat and contemplative, Damien Chazelle’s First Man hits all the Great Man of History biopic beats, but then executes them in a way that’s surprising, resulting in a humane and emotionally nimble film that focuses all its energy inward. A standard studio biopic of Neil Armstrong would seek to answer the question “What made this great person great?” Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer, though, address themselves to the question “What made this great person so withdrawn.”

Consider the realities that would tend to hamstring an Armstrong biopic. The men selected for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs in the 1960s were not selected for their charisma. And perhaps no astronaut exemplifies this better than Armstrong. Like every other early space program pioneer, Armstrong was something of a boy scout, a shirt-tucked-in company man — reliable, serious, a pilot and engineer who was able to stay rational under pressure.

Moreover, his reclusiveness later in life has rendered him more mythic than historical. Unlike some of the other astronauts, such as Buzz Aldrin, who were more willing to participate in documentaries and oral histories and the like, after Apollo 11 we hardly saw Neil Armstrong again. Other space program films, such as The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, have had to embellish personality conflicts and the like because, frankly, astronauts have even-keeled, boring personalities. That’s why they’re astronauts.

And so Chazelle enlists Ryan Gosling to play Armstrong. Gosling is kindred with Armstrong in the sense that they’re both eminently reliable — the script says “angrily,” and so Gosling plays it angrily; he’s not going to surprise you, but he’s not going to let you down either. Arguably Gosling is at his best when playing shut-down loners, emotionally closed off from the rest of the world (as in Drive). This is the portrait of Armstrong Chazelle renders, a man so competent and smart but can’t navigate a difficult conversation with his sons.

The film posits that the death of Armstrong’s young daughter, Karen, in the early sixties was the defining event of his life, not the Apollo 11 landing. The explanatory power of this choice seems as plausible as any to me. After a jostling, breaking-Earth’s-atmosphere test flight sequence, we begin not with Neil enclosed in a capsule but his daughter, receiving treatment for a childhood cancer as Neil and his wife Janet (Claire Foy) look on through a glass pane (panes, barriers, and doors are a motif). Armstrong’s engineering mind leads him to fill notebooks with equations concerning tumors and treatments. We cut from the treatment to the burial, the casket being lowered into the earth.

Alternating among 16-milimeter, 35-milimeter, and the IMAX film stocks, First Man is far more visually arresting than the lauded La La Land. The earthly scenes are well observed and downright impressionistic at times, with Chazelle even channeling Terence Malick’s domestic deftness in The Tree of Life. Televisions remind us that Vietnam and the social strife of 1968 are happening, and even as these touches feel more obligatory than necessary, Chazelle folds them into the background so casually they barely register.

Once we break the atmosphere, Chazelle juxtaposes the violence and vigor of space travel with the never-ending serenity of the inky void. Attention is paid to the tactile banality of the capsules, the rivets, the control panels. The film’s most exciting sequence is not Apollo 11’s landing but an earlier mission in which Armstrong manages to pilot a “rolling” (spinning) command module back into his control, saving the day. We rarely see master shots of the spacecrafts, rather, we’re in close on the faces and hands of the astronauts, noting each bead on sweat on their brows.

The movie’s idea that Armstrong’s single-minded focus is a function of his trauma of his having emotionally shut down after the loss of a child seems at once dubious and good enough to get by narratively. There is an appealing beauty to this construction. We see Armstrong’s first step, accompanied by the famous line, and we realize that when he’s exploring the moon “for all mankind” it was his daughter who was on his mind. The dramatic license that is taken here and there does seem to get at some larger truth about the man. Where something like Apollo 13 is a true Hollywood film about brilliant people overcoming adversity, First Man is about grief and pain. Its themes are entirely terrestrial.

For a work of popular storytelling that makes little effort to condense — the running time is roughly two-and-a-half hours — the actual climax, the Apollo 11 landing, is somewhat rushed, almost to the point of it being given short shrift. This may be by design. The idea is to depict relationships, which are back on Earth. Claire Foy’s performance as Janet Armstrong is centered in the narrative in a way that doesn’t quite correspond with the amount of depth the character has, making the film’s final shot, which is elegiac and gorgeous in its simplicity, seem almost like a cheat. But I suppose one of Chazelle’s strengths is making a certain kind of manipulativeness feel delightful.

First Man — FOUR STARS

Directed by Damien Chazelle

Rated PG-13

Universal

138 min.

A Star Is Born

The boredom that set in during my watch of Bradley Cooper’s retread of A Star Is Born came after the first hour or so, when our heroes have well fallen in love and the script, co-written by Eric Roth and Will Fetters with Cooper, must decide what will jeopardize paradise. That first leg of Cooper’s directorial debut, though, is well edited, with Cooper and Lady Gaga having a certain ease and collective charisma with one another onscreen that is appealing.

The film begins aurally. A stadium crowd clamors for a drunken Jackson Maine (Cooper), a not-quite-country singer whose demeanor suggests a lost Allman brother. We hear the crowd meld with the ringing in Maine’s ear. Like many rockers, he has a hearing problem (except his apparently dates back to childhood?). Already we feel like we’ve been here before with Jeff Bridges’ turn in Crazy Heart, a better movie in some respects. Cooper’s camera keeps us on the stage. The point-of-view character is not Jackson or his love, Ally (Gaga), rather, it’s The Performer.

After being dunked into what Maine’s life is like — drink, perform, stumble on to the next town — we meet Gaga’s Ally in a hilariously large bathroom at her job, some kind of banquet hall or large restaurant. Chambered in a stall, she argues with some boyfriend who clumsily proposes marriage over the phone. Ally wisely breaks up with him. Then she walks to the center of the room and engages in a primal scream. Gaga gives Ally a self-assurance that sometimes almost becomes a tough-guy sneer. When she’s not hauling garbage in food service, she’s an aspiring singer who performs in a drag queen bar, the only cis-woman so honored, we’re told. All this is handled more or less with directorial alacrity. Cooper is a careful director, backing his way into painterly shots without being too precious.

Maine leaves a gig and instructs his loyal driver to find a bar. When he finds it to be a drag queen spot, he reacts with vaguely woke equanimity. Hey, they serve booze, says his body language. Jackson is recognized by Ally’s friend (Anthony Ramos) who announces that his pal from work will perform presently. Drink in hand, Jackson is riveted by Ally Gaga’s table-walking rendition of “La Vie en Rose.” Shuffling through a thicket of starstruck drag queens — Maine signing a set of fake breasts is one of many cheap laughs had at a drag performers’ expense — he finally meets Ally, who is self-confident as a person, self-possessed as a performer, but somehow freighted with self-doubt as a songwriter. They flirt and are immediately off on an impromptu first date.

To my surprise, I bought the central relationship here. Cooper and Gaga engage in the sort of drunken-first-date banter that is realistic in its inanity. The over-share and over-praise one another. Although in every scene, someone eventually outright states the point of the scene, with dialogue stuffed with character backstory. Maine eventually has his driver stalk Ally, waiting outside her family home, where she lives with Andrew Dice Clay who plays her dad, to deliver her to Jackson’s next gig. In one of many twists we see coming a country mile away, their post-gig consummation is postponed due to Jackson passing out drunk. He is tucked in by another trusted handler, played by Sam Elliot, who, though used sparingly, is fiery with unspoken emotion and utterly believable.

Once the story shifts, as it must in every A Star Is Born iteration, from two artists falling in love to two artists dealing with the tribulations of their relationship in the context of one partner’s growing fame, Cooper loses the tight control that characterized the first third of the film. Where once the editing was impressionistic and judicious, things become tedious and long-winded. Whole conversations with side characters delivering minor background information are handled as if they carry essential information. As the eternal story wears on, and Ally goes from viral sensation to Grammy-nominated pop star, Cooper becomes too indulgent. The characters tend to say exactly what’s on their minds in a way that grows into stale predictability.

We already know she can sing, and in A Star Is Born she does so beautifully. (Cooper, on the other hand, is not a professional singer, which is evident not in the notes he hits or doesn’t hit but in the professional-musician confidence that his voice lacks. E.g., Gosling in La La Land.) But Gaga achieves a naturalism in the non-singing scenes that is, in fact, the thing that made me believe her as Ally. Gaga’s best acting moments are those when Ally is worked up about something, joking around in bar early on or becoming angry with Jackson while she soaks in a bath. You only see her acting in the smaller, quieter moments, particularly early on, wherein there’s no extreme emotion happening, just conversing at work, etc.

The film gives so much backstory to Jackson and Ally that other questions that pop up go unaddressed. Ally appears to be a tri-state area chick who performs in drag bars, whereas Jackson is a country-rock fusion singer from Arizona who wears a cowboy hat (although not onstage) and speaks with a low, rumbling twang. Do they share the same values? Additionally, would not their musical tastes not quite aligning be more of a problem, at the very least, a conversation? Such practical questions, the film seems tacitly to argue, are rendered moot when two people are “in love.”

The effect for which the film is shooting is one of alternately swooning and crying. But I found the second half of A Star Is Born to be maudlin. Cooper elongates the sad scenes with such melodramatic deliberateness that one feels almost assaulted. And with the exception of a tune called “Shallow,” the songs, some of which co-written by Cooper himself, are lyrically underwhelming. Of course, the Academy likes swooning and star-making and actors directing. The Oscar swamis have predicted that this thing will clean house on the awards circuit. The best thing one can say this time of year is that the Academy could do worse. Perhaps they will.

A Star Is Born — TWO STARS

Directed by Bradley Cooper

Rated R

Warner Bros.

137 min.

BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, a pro-law and order and anti-terrorism tract, is based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, a black Colorado Springs cop who figured out a novel way of infiltrating the Klan in the early 1970s. As is his wont, Lee immediately begins by mingling straightforward polemics with emphatic artistry. We begin on the famous Gone with the Wind crane shot, unaltered by Lee, before moving to a diegetic slide presentation by a racist (Alec Baldwin) that fixes that Klan’s point of view in a historical and cultural context.

Throughout the film, Lee (who co-wrote the screenplay with David Rabinowitz, Charlie Wachtel, and Kevin Willmott) breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the now. These moments are jarring and are meant to be jarring. BlacKkKlansman is a kind of essay in narrative that predictably perceives a continuity of circumstance between past and present. Yet it resists platitudes and easy moralizing. It may be Lee’s most contemplative non-documentary film.

Stallworth (John David Washington) is the first black officer on the Colorado Springs department. Before gaining any real experience, he finds himself being put to use in the Criminal Investigations Division as an undercover sent in to collect intel at a Stokely Carmichael speech. Carmichael’s speech and the crowd’s reaction are depicted with expressionistic zest, focusing on faces in the crowd as much as the words of the speaker, who encourages the blacks of Colorado Springs to fight back against their oppressors. Stallworth, who we’ve already learned is a proud man who takes absolutely no shit, seems moved by Carmichael even as Stallworth is there in his capacity as an undercover “pig.”

Stallworth’s dual allegiances — pride as a black man  and pride in his job — is not dumped on us over and over but rather is simply set forth at the outset as a necessary tension. Lee accepts Stallworth’s double-consciousness, the Du Boisian term that is explicitly debated later in the film, without suggesting he must choose a “side.” In fact, the film seems to be nostalgic for a time when law enforcement was more pro-active in its disruption of hate groups. Stallworth is on the right side by being on both sides.

BlacKkKlansman works its magic beautifully in its first half, where the nuts and bolts of the operation are as fascinating as they are absurd. Often we move from a laugh-out-loud moment of ridiculousness to a sobering reminder of just how sick the Klan is. Sometimes these moments are one in the same, as when a particularly simpleminded Klansman childishly asks if he can touch a live C-4 explosive. One hundred percent of the comedy is making virulent racism look silly, with near constant dunking on the Klan members.

On a whim, Ron phones the local KKK chapter after noticing an ad in the newspaper that suggests they’re organizing locally. The inexperienced rookie unwittingly uses his real name on the phone call in which he uses his voice skills to “pass” as a racist white man interested in Klan membership. When it dawns on him that a black officer will have a difficult time blending in at a Klan meeting, the CID task force determines that Detective “Flip” Zimmerman (Adam Driver) will be the one to go in, while Stallworth will handle the over-the-phone stuff. Interestingly, many of the white cops are portrayed as accepting of Stallworth, joshing him only for being a naive rookie and not for his race; although other cops on the force are clearly hateful, referring to black suspects as “toads” if not worse.

The police, the film seems to argue, are imperfect and set in their ways (particularly in how they shelter and protect bad officers), but are integral to disrupting terrorism. Stallworth and his task force use cleverness and audacity and a lot of luck to infiltrate the Klan. The most interesting relationship in the film is not the romantic entanglement between Ron and a young anti-racist organizer named Patrice (Laura Harrier) but the relationship between Washington and Driver. It is revealed that Flip is Jewish, which, as Ron admonishes him, gives him “Skin in the game.” In the same way Ron’s elocution skills allow him to pass for white over the phone, Flip’s estrangement from his Jewishness has allowed him to coast as an officer without thinking much about the kind of hate the undercover operation has now ensconced him in.

When it becomes clear the local Klan chapter is planning a terrorist attack upon local black activists, Stallworth and his men must scramble to thwart the attack. All the while, Stallworth has also had a phone relationship with none other than David Duke, who is played with exquisite clownishness by Topher Grace. Grace never goes over the top but gives Duke a kind of pencil-neck aplomb that amounts to as perfect a lampooning of racism I can recall in a motion picture. “You’re darned tootin’,” Duke says over the phone, as if he were some sort of even more reprehensible version of Jerry Lundegaard.

As Stallworth carries on his telephonic friendship with Duke, he finds that the former “Grand Wizard” has dubbed himself the “National Director” of the Klan to make himself seem more mainstream. A key plot point has to do with Driver’s undercover “white Ron Stallworth” waiting to receive his Klan membership card in the mail. The members, hilariously, are sticklers for this. One must have his membership card in hand before one may participate in cross burnings and the like. The real, black Ron makes a call to the clueless Duke, who helpfully expedites the card’s arrival. We realize then that the Klan’s entire bureaucracy consists only of the sad little man Duke sitting in his office. “I can always tell a white man’s voice from a black man’s” Duke says. It could be a Mel Brooks sketch.

Ironically, the closer BlacKkKlansman gets to its violent climax the less riveting it becomes. The first half, in which the logistics and subterfuge of Stallworth’s operation is laid out in detail, is as watchable as any stretch of film I’ve seen this year. Lee’s film leans into serious points about what real lawlessness looks like and what its consequences are. The moments in which Lee explicitly connects the narrative to contemporary concerns are at once seemingly unnecessary and, well, quintessentially Spike Lee. It’s difficult to blame a veteran filmmaker for being himself.

BlacKkKlansman‘s coda includes footage of last year’s Charlottesville riots, in which a white anti-racism activist, Heather Heyer, was killed. The film is, in effect, dedicated to her. Footage of David Duke, filmed around the same time, sees the man himself endorsing Trump, and in doing so, providing the most forceful rebuke possible to the idea that Spike Lee sometimes lays it on too thick.

BlacKkKlansman — FOUR STARS

Directed by Spike Lee

Rated R

Focus Features

135 min.

Mission Impossible: Fallout

The Mission Impossible films are to storytelling what the Slam Dunk Contest is to the NBA Playoffs. It’s all spectacle because that’s what it’s supposed to be. No one watches the dunk contest thinking they’re going to see a full game.

So it goes with writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s Fallout, the sixth film in the franchise. The convoluted plot unfurls faster than even the smartypants characters can keep up with. This time Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) mission, and he chooses to accept it, involves keeping three orbs of plutonium from falling into the grasp of a terrorist syndicate of inchoate commitments. What’s really objectionable about these terrorists is that they’re beliefs are hilariously generalized.

Hunt and his homeboys, Luther and Benjy (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg), must broker a deal to obtain the weapons before the terrorists, known as The Apostles, blow up the world. These terrorists are a mountain of ideological contradictions. It seems they’re anti-… belief systems? They think the public’s faith in the law, society, and religion is misguided. Greater disaster, they insist, leads to greater peace, or some such nonsense. The one thing you can’t take away from real-world terrorists is they have their principles. Not these guys.

But Fallout isn’t interested in ideas or principles. The film could make some kind of thematic move if it made the terrorists’ beliefs something realistic, but their grievances are so generic that this might as well be an alien invasion.

How then is Fallout so delectable an experience? All spy stories, to one degree or another, are about what patriotism and sacrifice mean. Hunt has sacrificed a lot for his work. McQuarrie’s screenplay establishes that early with a dream-fantasy sequence in which Ethan’s wedding is disrupted by disaster. Ironically, the only tiresome spots in the film are these moments, when our charismatic hero ponders all he’s lost for his work.

We don’t like Ethan because he’s had his personal life wrecked by the spy trade any more than we like John McClaine because he wants to get back with his wife. What we dig about these guys is their audacity. Contrary to every screenplay writing guru’s advice, I’ve long held that in the better action films it’s the artfulness of the action, not the relationships, that actually draws us in. The fact that Ethan has loved and lost is a common experience; guys crashing helicopters and jumping off of rooftops like Spider-Man is not.

And boy does he. For most of the film’s parade of preposterous contrivances of double-crosses and aliases and daredevil close calls Cruise is joined by Henry Cavill, a younger secret agent known for his lack of a soft touch. Cavill has been assigned to work alongside Ethan. The government trusts Ethan enough to get the plutonium but not enough to do so without supervision from a less experienced spy. Together, the two impossibly handsome stars dart from fight scene to chase scene to whatever chaos is happening and leave stacks of dead bodies in their wake. The most astonishing of these set pieces involves Cavill and Cruise jumping from a plane at dusk over Paris with cinematographer Rob Hardy jumping with them — with an IMAX camera strapped to him.

This literally awesome stunt is the centerpiece of Fallout‘s action. I, however, found the car stunts and chases more impressive. Cruise races through Paris on motorcycles, fishtails four-door sedans, jumps out of planes, and flies helicopters trying to stop these utterly uninteresting villains from engaging in nuclear terrorism. Tom Cruise’s sheer zeal for the stunts combines with his awareness of his own charms in a way that’s as mesmerizing as it is distracting. With every leap from a building or sharp turn taken on a motorbike, the fifty-six-year-old seems to ask “Isn’t it something that I’m willing to do all this?”

A bathroom fight scene goes on forever and is admirable for its realism. A shootout in a sewer is that rare darkly lit action scene that looks good and pays off in an interesting fashion. McQuarrie’s direction is restrained. The action moves fast, but the editing is disciplined, with lots of medium and wide shots that allow us to see the whole performances. That, alone, makes Fallout a high-quality action film. The so-called “emotional stakes” for Ethan feel set in place as more a convention of blockbusters than as a necessity of anything the film intends to achieve.

Mission Impossible: Fallout — THREE STARS

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Rated PG-13

Paramount Pictures

Bad Robot

147 min.