Category: Movie Reviews

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Movie Reviews

Elvis Has Become a Character, Not a Person

Last year, in my review of King Richard, I described my disinterest in what I called the “Celebration movie” genre. These films function essentially as positive press for stars or celebrities—and by inevitable necessity play loose with the facts. As I wrote then:

I question the value of a “biography” made with its own subjects’ approval in mind, other than as fan service; the usual purpose of a biography is to illuminate truths that the subjects may not want to come to light, in order to supplement, round out, or even contradict the popular image. Since King Richard is not interested in doing any of this, there’s little reason to see it.

A similar dynamic is at play in the new biopic, Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Austin Butler. But it’s not quite the same. Because unlike the Williams tennis family, Elvis Presley has already been the subject of many movies, and he’ll surely be the subject of many more to come. He’s also long dead, which means that neither he nor his estate stands to gain much financially from the venture.

The ones who do stand to gain from a movie like Elvis are the viewers who cherish Elvis Presley as a preeminent American hero. Because while Elvis may not need press, he does need, as James Bond does every so often, a reinvention—a reboot of his character that will allow him to fit back into the national psyche. After all, since his last movie appearance, Elvis has accumulated some skeptics and haters: many wonder, for instance, whether he was an artistic freeloader, hijacking Black musical aesthetics for his own fame and fortune.

Never fear, though. Because just as Bond maneuvered to avert nuclear war in the 1960’s but last year endeavored to fight bioterrorism, Elvis Presley in this new film stands against…the scourge of racism.

Must we really do this? Must we break down historical figures and reassemble them into 2020’s-approved versions of themselves? In addition to being inaccurate, it prevents any nuanced discussion or commentary about the issues at hand. For example, in the movie, Elvis yearns to fight injustice, as if he could enlist against it like a soldier. But racism isn’t some cabal that one can try to take down; it’s something pervasive that culturally affects everyone. Framing the story in this way ensures that we learn nothing about Elvis and nothing about racism.

In addition to Elvis’s new role as a would-be Civil Rights hero, the other focus of the movie is Elvis’s financial exploitation at the hands of greedy capitalists (represented by an unwatchably campy Tom Hanks). This theme, also, just happens to be 2020’s-approved—informing, for example, recent national stories like Brittany Spears’ proprietorship and NCAA athlete compensation.

Maybe once the polar ice caps melt a little more, we’ll get a biopic about how Elvis fought the evils of climate change.

In summary, the only purpose of this movie is to rehabilitate Elvis Presley—to assuage our collective anxiety that he hasn’t deserved our worship over the decades. But such movies don’t ring true, even as propaganda. Because Elvis is not James Bond. He’s a real person with a legacy like any real person’s: complicated and context-dependent. Maybe in his next reboot, he’ll come closer to feeling like one.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, check out my review of Women Talking.

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Women Talking Shows Morality’s Aesthetic Limits

There’s certainly no more aptly named film this year than Women Talking, directed by Sarah Polloy. Indeed, this film consists of women talking. If you want to hear them out, go see the film. If you want the dramatic elements that typically appeal to moviegoers, though, you may struggle to enjoy it.

Morality and aesthetics don’t always go hand in hand, and Women Talking provides an example of the two very much at odds. For instance, Polloy leaves entirely off the screen the character Klaus, the principal aggressor who has brutalized the women of a religious community. Such a directing choice is morally laudable: why should he get air time, given his actions? Wouldn’t that partly glamorize his behavior?

But aesthetically, the decision is unconscionable. Klaus may be monstrous, but he has set the entire story in motion. Eliminating him leaves us with no drama, no narrative power. Imagine if Shakespeare had decided that Iago didn’t deserve to be portrayed onstage—who would want to see Othello? What great story could withstand the removal of its primary antagonist?

I’m reminded of the recent Netflix series, Dahmer. According to its director and producers, the artistic aim of the show was to “decentralize” notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer—to put his victims at the center of the narrative, where they supposedly belonged. But the sad truth about Dahmer’s crimes is that dramatically, his victims aren’t at the center of the story. Heinous and pathetic though he is, Dahmer links his victims together. They hold no importance for us other than that they crossed paths with him. That makes him, unfortunately, the main character.

So Netflix’s effort was doomed from the start: victims’ families complained that, contrary to the ostensible goal, Dahmer had been glamorized. And they were right. Because the moment Dahmer appears, he inevitably attracts all the attention.

Women Talking seeks to rectify this problem by truly decentralizing its aggressor: by taking him out of the story entirely. But the experiment shatters the test tubes, because without him, there’s barely any story at all. Moral, yes; interesting, no. Such is the dilemma of the socially conscious artist.

There are other issues with this movie. The most impactful is that the women have been written as recognizable “types,” which makes them too one-note to believe in. The Fighter. The Sweetheart. The Troublemaker. The Matriarch. As a byproduct of this, the most likeable character in the film is…the only man in the movie, since he’s the only one who gets to have the kind of diverse and conflicting qualities that real people have. This disappointing backfire, in fact, often plagues movies about women having their own space. (See: A League of Their Own.) Having more characters of one gender can actually reduce the complexity of those characters, because it can leave each one with too few qualities to feel real.

As you can tell, I didn’t much enjoy Women Talking. But I’ll give it this: it’s unique. It represents the limit, in some ways, of morality-centric storytelling, the demand for which has obviously increased in the past few years. Maybe this kind of storytelling will become a dominant aesthetic going forward. But I doubt it. After all, few have seen Women Talking. Whereas, for example, Dahmer—that exploitative and immoral sleaze-fest—was the second-highest viewed Netflix series of all time.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my review of All Quiet on the Western Front

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All Quiet on the Western Front Strains For Shock Value

Every year, it seems, we must have a film that reminds us that War Is Bad. The Netflix production All Quiet on the Western Front fulfills the function this year, so if you enjoy films with that message—surely you already know whether you do or don’t—then it may be for you.

But I can’t help but wonder: is the movie really necessary? Back in 2020, I wrote in a positive review of the war film 1917:

Like Dunkirk (2017) before it, 1917 uses the newest technology to spike maximum adrenaline. But how long before even newer technology spikes even more adrenaline? In this genre, the next big effort is never far behind.

If anything, my prediction now seems too optimistic. I had anticipated “more adrenaline,” but All Quiet on the Western Front, a film with nearly the exact same subject matter as 1917 (and with a protagonist who even looks strangely similar) only provides more gruesomeness. Disembodied limbs, young men crying, kids killing people: this movie has it all. Because apparently, it’s now passé to say that War Is Bad. One must say that War Is Really Bad.

Therein lies the problem with making movies of unoriginal concepts. The only way to justify their existences is to startle viewers with even more of what the precursors already provided. Okay, Saving Private Ryan, I call your soldier carrying his own blown-off arm, and I raise you…a trench full of soldiers being flamethrower-ed alive! And a crippled guy killing himself with a kitchen fork!

The implication, even if unintentional, is that the precursors were too timid—that this, finally, is the real deal.

But is it? None of us were there, so we don’t know. It’s awfully suspicious, though, that all of these World War I movies happen to be coming out at around the time when none of the war’s survivors could possibly be alive anymore to debunk any inaccuracies. Surely no one doubts the horror of war, but is it sacrilege to wonder whether, artistically, we’ve lost the plot?

You get my point. Before I finish, though, I do want to admire the one interesting aspect of this film: its original score, composed by Volker Bertelmann. Blaring but sporadic, ominous but not evil-sounding, it gives us a taste of what this movie could have been with a different approach. It’s too bad that among the contributors to All Quiet on the Western Front, only Bertelmann actualized a wartime vision that was grounded, stylish, and, most importantly, unconventional.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my review of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

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Marcel the Shell Can Support a Whole Movie

I knew in advance about the universal acclaim piled on the feature-length Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, but the delightfulness of the movie still caught me off guard. I suppose in retrospect that the concept struck me as a cash grab. I thought: a bunch of silly YouTube shorts extended into a full movie? Please. Going viral is one thing; sustaining attention over 90 minutes is another.

Except…maybe it isn’t. After all, there’s no reason why a great character shouldn’t grab us, no matter what the media format. Remember that unlike other smash hits of the early YouTube era, the original “Marcel the Shell” shorts didn’t rely on zany or stupid behavior, and they weren’t real-world goofs a la “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Instead, they functioned essentially as old fashioned dramatic monologues.

So then, skeptics of a Marcel-based feature film, I ask you: why not?

Watching Marcel the Shell (Jenny Slate) doesn’t get tiresome. His vacillations between exhibitionism and insecurity provide seemingly endless ironic entertainment. Like Michael Scott from “The Office,” Marcel is a contemporary presence: lonely, sensitive, and ridden with performance anxiety (which sometimes bubbles over into hapless frustration). Perhaps the reason the mockumentary format has birthed so many of our generation’s funniest characters is that it enables us to see them ham it up for the camera: the most relatable mode, these days, that a character can inhabit.

Critics have highlighted the movie’s warmth. And it is indeed warm, but coldness seeps in around the edges. A couple breaks up ferociously, and when they reunite years later, they immediately start arguing again. (One of the two has been in Guatemala doing charity work; even this has failed to teach her serenity.) The mostly unseen documentarist (Dean Fleischer Camp) has recently divorced and can’t even bring himself to discuss it. Marcel gets Internet famous, and annoying influencers swarm his house for clout, ignoring his plea for help.

Can’t anyone get along anymore?

Maybe, and maybe not. But the real lesson of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is that we better not stop trying, because the alternative is even worse. If that seems like a dubious message to celebrate, I agree. But only from hard truths can we get real tenderness. And maybe because of this inclusion of the lows along with the highs, I’m among the many who found this one of the most moving films of the year.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my review of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story

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Glass Onion is Indeed a Stupid Mystery

**Spoilers herein**

At the climax of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, master detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) makes an unusual complaint. Upon identifying the culprit, a reveal that shocks no one, he exclaims, “This is a stupid mystery!” He’s frustrated with the simplicity of the case, which any layman—or, maybe more importantly, any police officer—would have correctly solved in one guess.

I, for one, think he’s on to something. Just as Blanc implies, mystery movies are supposed to challenge and test us. They should be based on clever crimes committed by clever, unseen foes. Otherwise, why would an expert detective be needed? In fact, Blanc’s presence is the only reason that we don’t guess the villain: we expect that, since Blanc is around, something trickier must be at play. But, as it turns out, there isn’t.

Writer and director Rian Johnson is very pleased with himself for this fakeout. That’s because he has social commentary in mind: he wants to show us that our misguided reverence for tycoons like Miles Bron (Edward Norton) blinds us to crimes and misdeeds going on all around us. That our corporate oligarchy is one big “glass onion,” a collection of labyrinthian layerings that actually needn’t be peeled away, since they can easily be seen through, if only we thought to look. In other words, our emperors have no clothes, and our collective assumption that they do distracts us from society’s true crooks.

That’s a fine sentiment, but, again, it’s not the reason we fall for the misdirections of this particular film. The reason is that we’re watching a movie, and we therefore expect layers, because we expect filmmakers to reward our two hours of engagement with something interesting. We don’t expect a film without layers, because such a film would obviously be a huge letdown. Johnson promises us a great mystery, disappoints us (and Blanc), and then lectures us on why giving him the benefit of the doubt was foolish. He graciously explains that if we took the bait, that proves that we’ve allowed ourselves to be brainwashed by dumb tech bros.

Johnson also wrote and directed Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), and while I’m not one of that film’s many ardent haters, I can see a discouraging pattern forming in his work. He denies us the payoff that we came to the movie expecting, then he dares to use our surprise as a teaching moment. I support defying or even criticizing one’s viewers, but wagging a finger at them for wanting the kind of movie they were promised is priggish. You’ll notice that Johnson opts to direct movies with big budgets and big stars, thereby attracting a blockbuster Hollywood audience. Being so disdainful of Hollywood expectations, perhaps he should just…make a non-Hollywood film. (Less money in that, of course.)

It’s not only at the end of the movie that Benoit Blanc expresses frustration with a lack of intellectual challenge. A pensive sage in Knives Out (2019), he in fact spends much of this film grumpily complaining about the idiocy and banality surrounding him. That makes him the one relatable character in the film, and his awareness almost salvages the experience for us. But in the end, acknowledging that you’ve made a “stupid mystery” doesn’t mean you haven’t.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my review of Top Gun: Maverick

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A Man Called Otto is too Timid to Resonate

A Man Called Otto, directed by Mark Forster, is a feel-good flick adapted from a popular Swedish novel by Fredrick Backman. I haven’t read the book or seen the 2015 Swedish movie adaptation, but the new American film falls squarely under the storytelling umbrella of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: a grump terrorizes his community, then rejoins it upon rediscovering the joys of love.

But the central casting of professional nice guy Tom Hanks telegraphs that this movie isn’t much interested in the “terrorizing” half of the equation. Indeed, Forster has stacked the deck for Otto by legitimizing his supposedly grumpy complaints in the first section of the movie. He has surrounded Otto with a carnival of newfangled weirdos in (of course) California: one neighbor, to get his daily steps in, marches up and down the block like Frosty the Snowman; another, so bad is his driving, nearly backs through his new rental house upon arriving. No one for miles, it seems, can perform basic property maintenance.

And even this neighborhood of ineffectual dopes pales in comparison to the dystopian mob that awaits outside of it: when a man falls on the train tracks at a local station, anonymous teenagers film the scene greedily for social media clout.

The problem with setting up the story like this is that it mitigates the intended emotional payoff. Whereas Ebenezer Scrooge goes from the town’s biggest miser to its biggest benefactor, Otto Anderson barely changes at all over the course of the story. He’s nice all along. Even the movie’s basic symbolism reiterates this: whereas the Grinch’s heart, for example, memorably grows three sizes, Otto’s is already secretly big. This crucial difference separates a moving, classic story from an average tearjerker.

The important dynamic is forgiveness. We love to forgive characters for their misdeeds, as we do with Scrooge, the Grinch, and many others. But if A Man Called Otto is any indication, contemporary studios doubt our capacity to do this. Otto can’t be made to commit any real misdeeds, because if he did, we wouldn’t forgive him when he tried to rectify them. He has to stand up to corporate developers, talk to his dead wife, have black friends, etc., from the beginning—because we’re apparently too sanctimonious to welcome him back into the fray if he truly stepped out of line.

This disheartening, cynical view of modern audiences is, in my opinion, inaccurate. After all, don’t we still cherish A Christmas Carol and its best spinoffs even after many years? While a vocal few might jump to cancel a protagonist after Act I, people in general are forgiving, and they can tolerate stories of misguided people who change for the better.

The unnecessary trepidation from the studio, though, has left us with something like a cross between Gran Torino (2008) and Sesame Street. With a movie about a mean old man whose meanness consists of…enforcing traffic regulations.

But maybe this is just what you’re looking for to start 2023. A Man Called Otto has positive messages, funny moments, and reflective scenes. It’s a light, enjoyable film. It just doesn’t have the courage to reach for the classic pathos of its predecessors.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movie reviews, see my review of Top Gun: Maverick.

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Top Gun: Maverick is Tom Cruise’s Final Bow (analysis)

Tom Cruise since the mid 90’s has pioneered, or at least epitomized, a movie archetype that has helped define the most recent era of cinema: the hyper-focused, sexless action hero. Whereas action stars before him won audiences with natural charm or at least physical prowess, Cruise, who has neither, has instead built an empire around compelling viewers to watch him—through sheer dedication to giving viewers what no one else will give. Insane stunts. Mind-bending plots. Envelope-pushing pace.

Top Gun: Maverick may be his definitive work. MI5: Rogue Nation (2015) and MI6: Fallout (2018) are more inventive, but they’re also more absurd. Maverick feels like the “right” balance of implausible action and mindfulness of (if not fealty to) the laws of reality. For example, yes, the anonymous enemy neglects to guard a canyon that leads directly to their target. (They’re clearly third-world; they’ve never seen Star Wars.) But there’s enough talk about planes and tactics and losing consciousness that things still feel grounded enough.

It’s also Cruise’s most reflective film. Specifically, the plot functions as a meditation on the approaching end to his own movie stardom. Cruise’s character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, is dressed down by his turnkey boss: “The future is coming. And you’re not in it.” This could surely double as admonishment to Cruise himself, who, at 60, strains credibility by merely appearing in a movie like this. And Mitchell’s notorious habits—pushing limits, bucking trends, endangering himself—are Cruise’s own as an actor.

Watching the movie with this meta interpretation in mind, I wasn’t as bothered by its obvious weaknesses. For instance, Cruise, never a standout in romantic scenes, even in Jerry Maguire (1996), can’t hold up his end of the film’s halfhearted love story. Grinning stupidly throughout, he plays the part as 16, not 60. Costar Jennifer Connelly, a skilled performer in serious erotic roles, has been hired to convince us that Cruise is still sexy, or even that he used to be. The effort is futile.

But flat notes like these only reinforce the elegiac feeling that Cruise is running out of gas, that this is his last hurrah. As his character emphasizes to his trainees with curious intensity: “Time is your greatest adversary.”

Further heralding the imminent end of the line, Cruise’s costar from the original film, Val Kilmer, appears in cameo as a cancer-ridden, speech-challenged shadow of his former self. This isn’t an act: Kilmer actually has lost the power of speech amidst a real life battle with throat cancer. His character dies mid-film. Cruise stands alone.

Tom Cruise has never been an Avenger. He has never been an avatar. He has never been a wizard or a jedi or a hobbit. In an cinematic era dominated by fantasy, Cruise has planted himself stubbornly in action-hero realism. So when he and a protege take charge of an ancient F-14 plane (the protege exclaims, “This thing is so old!”), we should catch the symbolism. The meaning: they’re about to do this old school. No magic, no superpowers, no cliffhangers. Just good old fashioned shooting, ducking, and yelling. And they do it. And it works.

But Cruise is only one person, and he knows that despite his contributions, the industry has moved in a different direction. Perhaps this is why for most of the film he plays a teacher to a new generation. His mantra: what matters isn’t the equipment or even the task at hand, but rather “the person in the cockpit.” If there was ever a more grandiose statement from an actor, I’m not aware of it. (Cruise’s experiences with scientology likely haven’t done much to dampen his ego.) Exiting his role as Hollywood’s biggest action star, he wants his successors to know that they can singlehandedly drive a film—and that, by extension, he singlehandedly drove his.

That may be outlandish self-aggrandizement, but given Cruise’s output over the past two decades, how can we argue? Until he slips up, we can only admire.

Top Gun: Maverick is an entertaining throwback that pleads for successors. Will anyone answer the call? Cruise has faith: all of his students are portrayed as skilled and worthy, even the arrogant pretty boy. (Maybe especially the arrogant pretty boy, who’s possibly a version of Cruise as a young man. Indeed, evidence abounds that Cruise likes him the most.)

I have less faith. But one thing is for sure: whatever Cruise puts out in his remaining years as an actor, this is his final bow. After seeming to insist on eternal youth in the last two Mission Impossibles, he has finally surveyed his place in moviemaking and acknowledged:

“Time is your greatest adversary.”

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my review of Tár.

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Tár Lacks Punch or Purpose

I’m squinting to see what’s so great about the critically acclaimed Tár, and…I’m still not seeing it.

Chained to mediocrity by a pondering, lecture-y screenplay that nevertheless avoids any real stances on the issues it strains to raise, Tár, directed by Todd Field, fails to animate the character drama at the heart of its story. It wants to be a modern-day King Lear: a self-inflicted fall from grace of an egotistical but sympathetic protagonist. But even more, it wants to splash around in political controversy. The result is little more than a stale summation of the MeToo era, a boring both-sides tale of contemporary gender politics.

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), conductor of the Berlin orchestra, is a predatory abuser of young women. She’s arrogant and frigid, and she appears to have caused the suicide of a young woman with her diabolical behavior. On the other hand, she loves classical music and believes in the power of art.

You see the difficulty of rooting for this character. Enjoying old composers doesn’t automatically make you likable. (To acquire the notion that it does, I suspect that Field has misunderstood A Clockwork Orange (1973)). Nor does facing off against equally irredeemable foes, like the whiny social justice warriors that Field pits against Tar.

These brats are, indeed, horrible. But a sympathetic character still must have relatable traits, and Lydia Tár has none. It would be as if Lear, instead of withholding Cordelia’s share of the kingdom for her lack of sycophancy, had instead raped her for no reason at all. He would be awfully difficult to identify with after such an act.

As I indicated before, these basic failures of dramatic characterization are traceable to the film’s preference to spend its time hemming and hawing about MeToo and cancel culture. On one hand, Field portrays the movement’s proponents as a conceited, ignorant mob; on the other, he goes to great pains to portray Tár as the very type of individual that necessitates their crusade. This provides balance—but not nuance. A more skillful storyteller would have shown us the complex reality behind the media narratives. Field has only presented both extremes and declined to choose between the two. Some may see this as “objectivity;” I see it as aimlessness.

I admit that I’m biased toward any film—or any media at all—that proclaims the aesthetic value of art. After all, art needs its champions at a time when all manner of misers, idlers, and ideologues vocally question its legitimacy. But I know enough not to parade a film like Tár as the vehicle for my beloved cause. It’s too dramatically unrewarding to succeed as either a tribute to or criticism of classic aesthetic principles.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movies reviews, see my review of Avatar: The Way of Water.

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Avatar: The Way of Water Isn’t Made For Humans

It’s been 13 years, and Avatar: The Way of Water is finally here. Was it worth the wait?

No.

There are many reasons why James Cameron’s follow up to 2009’s smash blockbuster isn’t a good movie, but most central is a surprising lack of imagination. Cameron has directed some of the best sequels of all time (Aliens, Terminator 2) by cleverly subverting or expanding upon the material of the original film. The Way of Water, however, merely retreads the first installment in both story and style. The result accordingly suffers from all of Avatar’s (2009) weaknesses while failing to provide the novelty that, in the first film, distracted from them.

Foremost among those weaknesses is unbearable seriousness. The Way of Water, like its predecessor, is no fun. To be sure, the characters occasionally have fun, for example adapting with joy to an aquatic lifestyle. But Cameron delivers even these moments in a crushingly reverent, pious tone, as if he wants us to believe (or he himself believes) that, for instance, a blue creature befriending a CGI whale is self-evidently a monumental, poignant event.

Because of this approach, the movie is dead on arrival. By demanding that we take things so seriously—via triumphant choral music, grand long shots, etc.—Cameron keeps us outside the experience. That we would enjoy the scene isn’t enough for him: he wants us to believe in it. But that’s too big an ask.

A useful comparison is The Lion King (1994), which is the heaviest influence on The Way of Water other than the first Avatar. (Cameron has a thing for Disney: he took from Pocahontas (1995) for the previous film.) Like The Lion King, this film leans on tribal spirituality, emphasizing harmony with nature’s cyclical rhythms. But Disney, unlike Cameron, knew to crack a smile every now and then—giving, for example, Timon and Pumba significant screen time. Without characters like these, we’re left only with stoic, smothering dogma.

It’s almost as if Cameron made this movie not for humans, but for the Na’vi. They would surely have rejoiced with much more enthusiasm than I did about, for instance, the seasonal return of the mighty tulkun. I didn’t see any Na’vi in the theater, though, so here we are.

Another weakness that has carried over from the first movie is reliance on cliché storytelling. It’s painful to watch a film with so much visual detail spend so little energy on character and story. A stock bully asks, “Why are you a freak?” Later, the recipient of the dig asks, “Why am I different?” And so forth.

And as in the first movie, characters repeatedly make implausible decisions. In one scene, a group of avatar baddies inexplicably explores Pandora wearing full camo gear, which, of course, does the opposite of camouflage them: it reveals them as obvious intruders. Their identities would have been otherwise impossible to discern, since they look exactly like natives. Again, with so much attention paid to visual detail, blunders like this are that much more difficult to understand.

I can’t write a review of this film without mentioning the quality that, for many, will most influence the viewing experience: its horrendous length. Cameron has never been one to curtail his runtimes, but we’d have to go back to The Abyss (1989) to find something this egregious. The final battle of The Way of Water takes—completely unnecessarily—something close to an hour and a half. The full movie is 3 hours 12 minutes. Plan bathroom breaks. I’m typically forgiving of movies that take their time, but The Way of Water truly seems, like its titular worldview, to have “no beginning and no end.”

Exactly one element of The Way of Water is improved from the original: the villain. It’s theoretically the same villain, but this version of Colonel Quaritch is newly cerebral and formidable, a far cry from the gung-ho fanatic of the first film. He also has a more interesting backstory. Unfortunately, the premise of his origin largely goes untapped for its existential possibilities. Nevertheless, the character inspires more fear and hatred than he did in the first movie.

My essay on the original Avatar criticized the film for deploying video game aesthetics in the cinema, where they don’t belong. This new film does so even more obviously. A character meets a beast with a torpedo in its fin, removes the torpedo, and gains the beast’s help. This kind of mechanical, cause-effect plot point is sufficient for video games, which have relatively few storytelling resources. But a long-awaited movie? That took 13 years of development?

Not good enough.

 

–Jim Andersen

For my thoughts on the first film, see my essay on its CGI visuals here.

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Movie Review: The French Dispatch

People are getting tired of Wes Anderson. In fact, they have been for some time. The knock on him, which has permeated in some way nearly every critical meditation on the recently released The French Dispatch, had already crystalized by at least 2005, when Anthony Lane of The New Yorker wrote:

“We have grown accustomed to the unassailable claims of deadpan, although Anderson’s detractors might argue that underreaction, having begun as a show of hipness, has now frozen into a mannerism. What chance remains, they would ask, for the venting of genuine feeling? What would it take to harry these controlled characters into grief, or the silliness of bliss, or unconsidered rage?

Lane believes that Anderson’s signature style, whatever its merits, suffers from a stifling drawback: it limits the emotion that can be depicted onscreen. He also implies, rather insidiously, that this limitation reflects a deficiency in Anderson himself: that the filmmaker’s style is a result of his valuing “hipness” over authenticity.

This view, as I said, has now become close to dogma for professional critics, most of whom profess to enjoy The French Dispatch—perhaps suspecting its artistic significance—while having mostly negative things to say about it. Richard Roeper of The Chicago-Sun Times exemplifies the general reception:

“It’s as if we’re in a museum of modern art and we’re silently applauding the latest exhibit, but our tear ducts remain desert-dry.”

Notwithstanding the melodrama of “desert-dry,” Roeper’s—and by easy extension, the critical establishment’s—evaluation of The French Dispatch is plainly off the mark. As the passing of time will surely solidify, this movie is very possibly the best film in the oeuvre of one of the very best filmmakers in all of American cinema.

One theater viewing is not nearly enough to synthesize and delineate the tremendous amount of imagery and wit saturating The French Dispatch. Perhaps once I have the pause button (always a godsend for an Anderson film) at my disposal, I’ll give that project a try. But it’s clear to me that first and foremost, the film is a tribute to being human: to our fallibilities, quirks, and desperations. It takes the form of a compendium of three magazine stories, but the events of the stories themselves, as well as the theme of journalism, are red herrings for anyone looking to make sense of the film.

That’s because we actually learn very little about modern art, culture, politics, cooking, or even magazines from the stories on display. What we do learn about are the characters who tell (write) these stories, all of whom I found funny and lovable, and some of whom I found painfully touching in their offbeat plights—in total contradiction to Anderson’s supposed indifference to human emotion.

This is where the Lanes and Roepers of the world have Anderson completely wrong. What Lane fairly describes as Anderson’s characters’ “underreaction” doesn’t equate to lack of feeling. It only requires that we supply more of what Anderson has deliberately left out to get the catharsis he’s luring us toward. In The French Dispatch, a lonely college professor (Frances McDormand) has an affair with one of her students (Timothee Chalamet), but later encourages him to get a room with his rival revolutionary. At the episode’s conclusion, she stoically types the story in an empty, blank room, her back to the camera. It’s filmed, like everything, in a quick-cutting, whimsical tone—but if your tear ducts are “desert-dry” here, you may not be thinking enough about what you’ve seen.

But what’s Anderson’s larger statement with this new film? You surely don’t need to plumb those depths to enjoy it, but I can’t help myself, so here I go.

The death of Arthur Howitzer (Bill Murray) at the movie’s beginning signifies a cultural change. The character’s most emphasized trait is the freedom he allows his writers, who, we soon begin to learn, have used this freedom liberally to spin wild yarns that indulge their own interests and weirdnesses at the expense of conveying reliable, factual information. Howitzer’s death, then, seems to hint at the demise of a certain kind of artistic liberty, or at least an imminent shift in priorities from style and character to realism and straight reporting. But with Howitzer dead, it seems, stylistic flourish may have lost its champion. Without him, journalism is likely to be shorter, drier, and more accurate. And indeed, the types of stories we see in this film are not exactly the norm in today’s magazines.

Howitzer’s death is placed in 1975, when Anderson was six years old. Surely the auteur is idealizing an older era when, he believes, a writer might have been rewarded for exploring human eccentricities rather than heckled for deviating from realism, as he himself has been upon nearly all of his major releases, including this one. After all, Howitzer’s credo is: “Make it seem like you wrote it that way on purpose,” which could surely double as Anderson’s own standard: surely no one would doubt The French Dispatch as an intentional, deliberate creation.

But perhaps Anderson views himself not as a casualty of changing values—as the magazine’s writers are sadly about to be—but rather the successor of his beloved Howitzer. The film ends with the line, “What next?” What, indeed? Well, the Dispatch might be defunct…but if only there was another, newer medium, where a burgeoning artist might pick up where Howitzer left off and produce work that seems to be made “on purpose”! If only!

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movie reviews, check out my review of Drive My Car.