It’s time to do another Netflix movie review. So let’s check in on what’s hot.
The movie currently at number one in Netflix’s top ten and thus the subject of my check-in is Beckett, directed by Ferdinando Filomarino. Watching it is a kind of funny experience, because it’s so incredibly generic that it winds up being oddly original: the filmmakers, in attempting to strip their creation of the flashy razzle-dazzle that, admittedly, often overinflates today’s spy thrillers, have incidentally stripped away, in addition, everything that might have been remotely interesting about the movie. What’s left behind is a boldly pointless experience.
I understand the desire to achieve a raw and gritty tone by removing unrealistic glamour; we don’t really need any more Mission: Impossibles. But films that feel truly raw and gritty are actually very difficult to make. Creating the effect of something like, for example, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) takes painstaking attention to visual and audial detail. Watch this essentially perfect scene from that film in which a main character is beaten to a pulp. The sheer dirtiness of the characters and their surroundings is only made tangible by precise camera framing and close-ups, and a band playing right outside the shack, juxtaposed with the violent sounds from inside, emphasizes the characters’ relative unimportance in the world surrounding them. Quentin Tarantino frequently shares his admiration for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and he’s clearly learned from it: certain scenes from Reservoir Dogs (1992), in particular, show a similar skill in deploying violence as a way to make his characters seem more common or base, rather than more awesome.
By contrast, Filomarino appears to believe that a gritty tone will result from less effort, not more, because he spends his film dropping an aimless John David Washington into random, unremarkable places in Greece and showing the character simply ambling around. Washington plays an American everyman caught up in a kidnapping scheme gone wrong, and he spends the movie traversing…brush. And grass. And streets, and subways, and parking garages… Yeah, it’s not exactly North by Northwest (1959). Filomarino has confused an affinity for realism with distaste for any production value whatsoever.
But all in all, I can’t say I really hated this movie, because there’s not much to object to, other than its boringness. Like I said before, its defiance in refusing to add anything—scenery, stunts, twists, sex, music, other characters—to its bare bones wrong-man plot comes off as somehow appealing, in part because it prevents the film from making any impact at all. It’s easily watched, easily forgotten. Only the very beginning is noxious: we’re treated to a full twelve minutes (I checked) of uninterrupted rom-com quality flirting, after which the protagonist, who is supposed to be likable, suddenly falls asleep at the wheel and causes a car crash that kills his girlfriend (?), a needless tragedy for which he doesn’t really do anything to redeem himself over the course of the film. (Although, really, his girlfriend’s death is aesthetically merciful, since, had she lived, the two might still be ever-so-cutely roasting each other.)
So my review is straight up neutral. Watch it, or don’t. Put it on in the background; you won’t miss anything. I do wonder, though, what kind of underlying anxiety or addiction is affecting us so much that we need something to watch, even if it has no estimable qualities to recommend it, and that a movie like Beckett that’s merely palatable—because it has no taste (as it were)—is therefore good enough to shoot to number one in a few days. Food for thought.
–Jim Andersen
For more Netflix reviews, see my review of I Care a Lot.
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