Movies Up Close

Train Dreams is a folksy tale about an ordinary man and his ordinary life. It consists, accordingly, of folksy, ordinary images: trees, dogs, wives, sunsets, sad faces. This aesthetic might be for you; it isn’t for me. While I revere Malick’s The Tree of Life, its many knockoffs, like this film and 2020’s Nomadland, won’t touch their predecessor’s theological wrestling, so their cinematographies remain stubbornly themeless—nature anthologies without context, as if no one had ever seen a leaf before. The true precursor to Train Dreams may actually be Forrest Gump: its hero, Robert, is a simpleton, and the movie wants to confer mythic status on his simplicity, to honor it as a kind of forgotten, unappreciated wisdom. (This, really, is the premise of all things folk and country: that our problem is too much overthinking—that we’ve made life too dang complicated!) The corollary to this, though, is skepticism toward actual wisdom: the learned kind, the kind that can be articulated in words or even actions. Neither come easy to Robert, so we’re left only with the space to ponder life, not the tools to do so; the film is derelict in its responsibilities to us. A final montage reaches its grand statement: that the world is beautiful. Okay. Care to elaborate?

The Secret Agent is an unsatisfying movie by design. The tale, ultimately, of a nation’s new generation sifting through records of its gravest modern chapter, its uneven narrative flow and tonal detachment mirror the patchwork of a curious, frustrated historian. I admire these structural risks, and the craft is admirable all around, but a viewing challenge like this needs intellectual payoff, and the bounty here is just too weak. Its main lesson is that the study of historical evils, drudgery and all, toughens us up, such that we might stand down similar evils in the present. The point is well taken, but it’s slight, and it’s been made many times before, including in last year’s I’m Still Here, another Brazilian film that covered such similar ground that the two films could pass for remakes of one another. The lesson is also a tad self-serving. The secret weapon against fascism, you ask? Slow, fragmented, historically accurate stories. You’re welcome!

Hamnet is the story of Shakespeare’s fictional wife, Agnes, a devotee to nature and all its powers, who sinks into depression after the death of her son. She’s resentful of her husband, too, whose city business kept him away while it occurred. (Men and their little projects—they’ll never understand.) But wait: William’s new creation has the town talking, and when Agnes witnesses its familiarly-named protagonist struggling with and accepting death, she knows what it’s really about. Maybe there’s not such a gulf between the endless rhythms of nature and the timeless compassion of great art—and, phew, maybe husbands have feelings after all. Of course, to the extent that this movie actually believes that Hamlet is a convoluted, masculine attempt to grieve, it’s wrong. But notice, as Hamlet dies, the audience’s reaction. Not only Agnes but everyone reaches out to comfort him: watching this grand tragedy, they all feel something; they all know, as she does, what it’s really about, and they’re all wrong, each in different ways. The masterpieces hold everything and everyone; no interpretation has authority; like nature, they belong to all of us. A celebration of that shouldn’t be missed, so I place this film among the year’s best—an emotional and meditative modern achievement.

One of the worst Best Picture nominees in recent years, F1 is less a movie than a feature-length commercial meant to drum up American interest in Formula One racing. And even in this regard, it’s dishonest—a wild misrepresentation of the sport that features drivers intentionally crashing into one another without consequence, cars launching into the woods and bursting into flames, lady engineers banging their drivers after discussing aerodynamics, and more. It’s like calling a movie PGA, then showing Happy Gilmore. But I can begrudgingly tolerate sensationalism; what really rankles me about this production is its corporate complacency: even its cliches, which are many, function not to lower the bar for accessibility—their usual and understandable role (if not for an Oscar contender)—but to give the movie a fake reason for existing beyond the obvious one: absorbing sponsorship cash. While movies about rogue bad boys are always paradoxically the most predictable, rarely has the irony extended this unbearably into basic integrity: after spending two plus hours emblazoned with a dozen brand names, vrooming past signs for Qatar Airways, Brad Pitt concludes with the line: “It’s not about the money.” The driver doth protest too much.

The Phoenician Scheme is another masterstroke from Wes Anderson, his third in five years (The French Dispatch; Asteroid City). Excluding Scorsese, he’s our greatest living American director, and when it’s all said and done, I think he’ll be the more important artist.

This latest output is a tad more subdued than his previous two, but it shares their meticulous commitment to style—detractors be damned—and their fabulous subject: the outrageousness of our inflated self-perceptions. His variations on Cervantes (always complete with their own Sancho Panzas) are a tonic to our fantasy-obsessed popular cinema, which keeps bombarding us with the message, better suited for children, that we can do anything. We can’t, of course, so I scratch my head at those who accuse Anderson of lacking humanity: he, more than any director, forces humanity upon us, reminding us, usually comedically, that we’re not the superheroes or celebrities that we’ve made ourselves out to be. The Phoenician Scheme winds down in a restaurant backroom, a single lightbulb above, a deck of cards on the table, smoke in the air, egos finally dissolved… Wes Anderson, robotic? Watch the movie again.

–Jim Andersen

One can view the Mission Impossible film series as a recurring effort to entertain audiences while making the least amount of logical sense possible—and of all eight entries, perhaps none stretches the gap as far as The Final Reckoning. Things start out uncertainly: the movie’s first half is strangely devoid of action, its only seeming purpose to add, via never-ending exposition, myriad layers of incoherence and inconsistency to the exciting things that are about to happen in the second half. Why, exactly, does The Entity want to destroy the world and hide in a South African bunker? Why would the IMF risk allowing it into the bunker, when they know that, otherwise, it would never carry out its nuclear threats? Why does Gabriel flee the bunker when Ethan has the MacGuffin he desperately wants—and why does Ethan not simply give it to Gabriel in midair, considering that he originally wanted Gabriel to have it? Why are they trying to kill each other on planes when they supposedly want the same outcome, and the destruction of either’s MacGuffin would mean catastrophic defeat for both?

But none of this matters. Not even the inexplicable first part of the film—an hour of my life sunken like the Sebastopol submarine—matters. Thanks to the reliably awesome action centerpieces provided (eventually) by Tom Cruise and company, it’ll remain a guilty pleasure for years to come.

–Jim Andersen