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Movie Review: King Richard

The deck is stacked heavily in favor of King Richard’s protagonist. He’s crowned as the hero in the movie’s title, and his daughters, also key characters, are executive producers. Right from the beginning, then, things don’t sit right with me. I question the value of a “biopic” made with its own subjects’ approval in mind, other than as fan service; the usual purpose of 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, as it turns out, is not interested in doing that, there’s little reason to see it.

The film is the latest in a burgeoning and dubious genre, which I call the “celebration” movie. This genre aims not to portray reality but to honor and even promote megastars who surely don’t need the press. The last celebration movie nominated for Best Picture was 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which also solicited creative input from its living characters. The result was at best a genial nostalgia trip for Queen fans—and at worst a two hour commercial for the band. (Sales of their music, of course, skyrocketed following the release.) Notably, Bohemian Rhapsody garnered unexpected award success, especially with Rami Malek winning Best Actor for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury. This year, Will Smith is the overwhelming favorite to win the same prize.

Smith does a fine job as Richard Williams, father of tennis prodigies Venus and Serena Williams, but, as with Malek’s Mercury, something feels missing from the portrayal due to the film’s goal of lionizing his character. In King Richard’s best scene, Richard’s wife Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis) confronts him about his supposed narcissism, accusing him of putting his own needs above his daughters’. She even claims that, if not for Venus and Serena, she would have left him long ago. But this scene belongs in an entirely different, more honest movie. Because we haven’t seen Richard do anything that would warrant this tirade. In fact, he’s been shown to be a loving (if stubborn) husband and a dedicated (if tough) dad.

Oracene’s words, then, are only a glimpse of what director Reinaldo Green has chosen to withhold from us. Without having seen the truth for ourselves, we’re reduced to the position of the girls listening at the top of the stairs: thinking, what is this all about?

There are many similarly false notes in this film that hint at the heavily filtered nature of what we’re seeing. But perhaps the most discordant of all is the persistently smiley reaction of Venus and Serena to their father’s harsh methods. In one scene, he takes them out to hit balls in pouring rain, and both girls laugh and grin throughout. Something’s awry.

And maybe this is beside the point, but I couldn’t help wondering whether some innocent reputations were torched in the quest to promote a few already-great ones. Jennifer Capriati, who would later return from personal troubles to become the top ranked player in the world, is implied to be a flamed-out delinquent. Arantxa Vicario, the first Spanish woman to be inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame, is portrayed as a White Goodmen-esque dirty trickster.

But these issues all come down to the same thing: artistic integrity. When the goal of a film is to “celebrate”—not to illustrate—there are going to be inevitable mistakes and distortions. King Richard is not a great film and, unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, did poorly at the box office. Hopefully that will dampen the enthusiasm for similar future projects, which, I’m sure, celebrities are lining up to lend their names to. Who wouldn’t want to be the subject of a movie like this?

 

-Jim Andersen

For more movie reviews, check out my review of Licorice Pizza.

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Movie Review: Licorice Pizza

Licorice Pizza, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is a funny, pleasant comedy that nevertheless harbors a sneakily dark core. It represents, in fact, a return to the thematic focus of Anderson’s early films, by which I mean Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999). Those two acclaimed but often misunderstood movies also take place in the San Fernando Valley and explore the brutal, cruel culture of greed and glamour that, in Anderson’s cynical vision, dominates the region.

The protagonist of Licorice Pizza is Alana Kane (Alana Haim); her romantic counterpart is the juvenile Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman). Alana is twenty-five, and Gary is fifteen (and behaves like it), making for an unlikely pairing chock full of laughs, mostly at the expense of the earnest but naive Gary, who, for example, on their first date leads with, “So what are your hopes for the future?” and later pines to see Alana’s boobs. But after some silly scenes documenting the pair’s misadventures, the movie progresses, essentially, into Alana being pursued by a slow parade of older men, all of whom prove disappointing or worse due to varying manifestations of self-centeredness. She finally realizes that Gary’s sincere love for her, despite his goofiness and undeniable immaturity, is a rare thing to be valued, and the romance ends happily.

Anderson’s nostalgic, breezy tone, as in the first half of Boogie Nights, is liable to distract from his disdain for most of the adults that people 1970’s San Fernando Valley. But that disdain, as becomes eventually explicit in Boogie Nights but never quite so in Licorice Pizza, is his major project. Perhaps Magnolia is an even better parallel, since it more obviously cherishes the innocence of the Valley’s children, which invariably comes under assault from egotistical adults. In both early Anderson films, a clear division is marked between earnest, innocent characters and the stern, selfish ones who carelessly damage the first group.

Licorice Pizza is a return to that vision. Alana’s symbolic choice is between joining the egocentric adults and staying behind with the kids. And she chooses the kids. Like the truck that rolls all the way back down the hill, she undergoes not so much a coming of age as a return to origins.

It’s certainly a good movie and at times a hilarious one, but given the similarities between Licorice Pizza and Anderson’s 90’s films, I’m not quite sure what this movie adds to Anderson’s eminent body of work. The one thing I can think of is that Gary, unlike his Anderson predecessors like Rollergirl (Heather Graham) from Boogie Nights and Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) from Magnolia, isn’t easily bullied. During a live taping, he pillow-whacks the mean, pompous actress who hosts his show, and when he’s condescended to by an unhinged producer, he leaves the mercurial big shot’s water on and beats up his car. Gary emerges from both encounters grinning and proud, a far cry from the misery that engulfs his early Anderson parallels.

Is this the new Anderson? Unfazed, even joyous in his satire against West Coast misers?

Not really. As I said, Alana is the protagonist, not Gary, and it’s with her that Anderson identifies. Like her, he’s emerged from the San Fernando Valley’s fog of self important losers with his sincerity intact, and if he hasn’t quite retained the innocence of a Gary Valentine, then that, too, is for the best, since his most personal films derive their authenticity from the hurt—and the anger—that always lurks just below the surface.

 

— Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my review of Don’t Look Up.

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Movie Review: Don’t Look Up

Few would argue that the ground right now is awfully fertile for a great political satire. After all, the absurdity of our contemporary moment certainly rivals that of the era that produced, for example, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1963), the sharpest of American political comedies. That film hilariously parodied the then-pervasive notion of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and became a permanent cinematic classic. Isn’t it about time somebody stepped up, as Kubrick did, and painted paint our current world leadership as the farce that it is?

Netflix’s Don’t Look Up, directed by Adam McKay, would like to do just that. But the problem with the comedy of Don’t Look Up—and really with most political comedy today—is that its creators are too horrified by its intended satirical targets to make real jokes. They don’t find their material funny.

Whereas Kubrick saw the genuine humor in the absurd gamesmanship that was bringing our world to the brink of annihilation, and made us laugh (and thereby reflect) by foisting that comic vision on us, McKay and his actors are simply rattled. Don’t Look Up, one quickly realizes with dismay, doesn’t have much interest in comedy, because it’s too saddened, frustrated, and above all angry: angry at the media, angry at Trump, angry at tech companies, angry at old people.

The lead casting of Jennifer Lawrence, queen of the profane scream, is a tipoff that this movie, despite its ostensible purpose, isn’t joking around. True to form, Lawrence’s character spends the film cursing into the void and moodily sulking around, and on several occasions she advances the opinion that depression and panic are the only rational reactions to our current moment. Maybe so, but I’ve never watched a comedy before that argues that now isn’t the time to be laughing.

Besides, by harboring a dismissive view of humor and charging straight for vexed didacticism (“If we can’t agree on that, what the fuck HAPPENED TO US?!”), McKay paradoxically ensures that his film will have no tangible impact whatsoever, beyond further discomposing the already-pissed off liberal base it was made for and by. Humor, when done with conviction, has power. Giving the finger, on the other hand, has very little, especially when it’s done by a bunch of rich people.

I understand the position that Trumpian politics is inherently unfunny, given its clear dangerousness and its sad indictment of American culture. I’d argue back that Kubrick found humor in the apocalypse, and it’s assumedly still there. But regardless of how you feel on that subject, we can all agree that if you don’t find something funny, you shouldn’t make a comedy about it. Comedies that end with their characters morosely saying grace around a dinner table as their inevitable deaths approach might—just might—have missed the mark when it comes to the spirit of farce.

Sapped of its humor by its indignant creators, the only thing Don’t Look Up has to offer is the questionable personal catharsis of a big “Fuck you” to the idiots running our world. Maybe watching that makes you feel better about living in 2021. It didn’t for me. And it didn’t look like it did for Jennifer Lawrence, either.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, check out my review of CODA.

 

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Movie Review: CODA

Originally published January 2021

CODA, directed by Sian Heder, has the most intriguing and original cast of this year’s Best Picture nominees. However, it’s the least original film of the group, a “be yourself” drama that’s even more saddled with cliché than you’d expect from the premise: a girl with deaf parents who just wants to sing. It’s Disney Channel-inspired in concept and, truly, Disney Channel-adjacent in quality.

In one sense, CODA is a missed opportunity, given that we’ve seen so little of deaf individuals onscreen, notwithstanding last year’s Sound of Metal (my review here). But more accurately speaking, Heder falls into a trap set by that very opportunity, struggling to develop his characters due to a worry of shocking the audience with too much newness. While most movies instinctively focus their exposition on how the characters are unique and worthy of our attention, CODA instead spends its efforts showing us how the characters are totally normal, hoping to preempt the otherness we might have been tempted to assign them.

Ruby (Emilia Jones), the protagonist whose family is deaf, sings along to the radio, gets bullied by jerks, rolls her eyes at her parents, and talks sex with her girlfriend. Given the overwhelming normalcy highlighted by these early scenes, why, other than the deafness of her family, are we watching an entire movie about her?

And the script is even more mediocre than she is. The music teacher (Eugenio Derbez) happens to need two students to sing a duet for the fall concert, and he chooses Ruby along with—wait for it—her secret crush. The song is a love song, and the two singers lack chemistry at first, but the teacher berates them: “It’s a duet! That means ‘do it’ together!” Hmm… Where could this be going??

When we were kids, movies like High School Musical (2006) and shows like Hannah Montana were helpful to us, because they gave us a foothold on what was expected socially, on how to be ordinary. But as adults, we need the opposite: how to be extraordinary, how to tap into what’s odd or strange about ourselves without letting society sand off our edges. CODA, with its commendable aim of providing a fresh glimpse into the experience of deaf families, had a lot of edge to start with—but sanded it all off before it got to the screen, trapping its interesting cast in the most mainstream content imaginable.

The movie’s better moments—most of them featuring Ruby’s parents, who, like Disney Channel parents, have to provide all the entertainment to compensate for their dull children—are infrequent and non-central. And the parents’ main dilemma, the lack of a sign language interpreter for their fishing boat in Ruby’s absence, goes totally unresolved. Is this really Best Picture material?

In an early scene, Ruby’s teacher casually wonders if his students have been watching too much Glee, a Disney-style spinoff if there ever was one. It’s a revealing slip. Why make the reference as a screenwriter, if not as a subconscious admission?

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, check out my review of Dune (2021).

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Movie Review: Dune (2021)

Dune is out in theaters, and it’s hyped. Director Dennis Villaneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner: 2049) seems to have the perfect credentials for the job, and fans of Frank Herbert’s seminal 1965 novel have waited quite some time for modern special effects to be applied to their beloved classic of interplanetary action, politics, and warfare.

I haven’t read Herbert’s Dune; take that as you will. But as a moviegoer being introduced to the story for the first time, I found myself admiring the effects and scale of this adaptation—while ultimately struggling to care much about it.

The reason to see Dune is that everything in the movie is big. Big spaceships, big deserts, big weapons. Big explosions. A big score from Hans Zimmer, although his blaring, discordant thunderings, I’ll admit, I’m starting to find a bit tiresome. And big sandworms that function as mobile sinkholes. All this bigness succeeds in its intention: to create compelling spectacle. The assault on the city midway through the film, especially, felt pretty awesome.

The problem, though, is with the small. In particular, Villaneuve fails at his most important task: to convey the harshness of the desert, which is the central driver of the entire plot.

To be sure, Dune‘s characters talk plenty about the desert and how dangerous it is, and their actions—wearing moisture-preserving suits, walking irregularly in the sand, shying from the daytime sun—do reflect the proper reverence. But it’s not enough for characters to say that the desert is brutal, or even to act like it is. We have to feel the harshness of the desert. And in this movie, we don’t.

This is because none of the characters seem all that uncomfortable walking around in it. Timothee Chalamet plays a sort of pampered prince, but somehow, the notoriously unlivable sands of Arrakis don’t visibly faze him at any point in the movie: he trots around—hair styled to perfection, makeup Twilight-esque—with his mom, and neither appear labored whatsoever. Isn’t this desert supposed to be…hot? Why is everybody handling this so well?

This one shortcoming is enough to crater the film, since, as I stated, fear of the desert is the focal point of the storyline. In retrospect, Villaneuve may not have been a wise choice to direct, with his cerebral, sci-fi background. What this film needed, I realize now, is a director of nature movies.

Villaneuve also struggles to carve out an original niche for Dune, especially since many of the novel’s inventions were looted by Star Wars and other familiar films. One can’t really blame him; the story is what it is. I do wish that he could have avoided falling back on the ubiquitous influence of the completely overrated Lord of the Rings trilogy, especially two of its qualities that for some reason have become near-requirements for any fantasy saga:

  1. Everyone must speak with stately, stilted diction; as if they just arrived in a time machine from the royal palace in Victorian England
  2. Regardless of technological advances or available magic, armies must at some point run at each other with swords

For God’s sake, it’s the year 10,191! We don’t even do that now! Put the damn swords away!

I get it, people are thirsty for a big budget cinema spectacle, and Dune is one. It’s certainly better than the last three Star Wars chapters. And there’s nothing wrong with finding a reason to get back to the theater after a long, frustrating hiatus. I just feel that this movie could have been more just than another effects-driven saga. Guess I’ll need to read the book for that.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more movie reviews, see my review of West Side Story.

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Movie Review: West Side Story

Everyone has their favorite song from the original West Side Story (1961), but mine is “Gee Officer Krupke,” which consists of a few errant youths making fun of a policeman’s—and by extension, America’s—obsession with tracing their delinquent behavior to cliché childhood misfortunes:

“My daddy beats my mommy / My mommy clobbers me / My grandpa is a commie / My grandma pushes tea / My sister wears a mustache / My brother wears a dress / Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess!”

The point of the song isn’t to dispute the idea that people are influenced by their environments. Rather, it’s to mock the establishment’s fetish for speculating on the causes of behavioral problems while neglecting to give badly needed help to those caught in the cycle of degeneracy. To the boys singing the song, the question of how they got where they are is irrelevant. What matters that Krupke and others won’t lend a desperately needed hand. Since this point is implicitly made at several other moments, I’ve always viewed it as the film’s central social thesis.

Somehow, though, Steven Spielberg seems to have missed that message entirely, because the updates he’s made in his remake of West Side Story, now in theaters, are in direct contradiction to it. Like Officer Krupke, Spielberg in this version has a shallow, pointless explanation for everything. For instance, the two gangs are fighting because their neighborhood is being razed for a shiny new development. Ah, so that’s it! And Tony wants out of the Jets because he had some time in prison to reflect, and besides, he can’t break his parole. Makes sense! Also, it’s emphasized that the aimless Riff has no family, and it’s hinted a few times that his dad may have been killed, a fate that awaits him, as well. How logical! On and on.

Spielberg is trying to treat his characters with love, trying to help the audience see where they’re coming from. But this does nothing for the film and, perhaps more importantly, nothing for young people on the margins of society. Again, this is the point of “Gee Officer Krupke”: that without the intention to give concrete assistance, tracing social evils is merely an academic exercise. Spielberg has so ignored the song’s warning against cheap psychologizing that when “Gee Officer Krupke” is eventually performed, it’s genuinely confusing for a minute whether the boys are being ironic, as in the original, or whether they’re actually serious in tabulating scapegoats, since the latter would seem to be more congruent to the aims of the director.

I’ve been beaten to this point, unfortunately, by Richard Brody of The New Yorker, with whom I rarely agree but who has precisely zeroed in the misguidedness of the new West Side Story:

Brody: “Spielberg… delivers the very kinds of diagnoses that the song is meant to mock—he himself Krupkifies the film. He leaves no loose ends, no ambiguities, no extravagances, no extremes. Instead, he enumerates topics and solutions dutifully and earnestly, creating a hermetic coherence seemingly rooted not in the positive shaping of drama but in the quest for plausible deniability in the court of critical opinion.”

Indeed, the “court of critical opinion” is Spielberg’s true audience, and it will surely grant him his desired approval. That’s because many who evaluate movies today perceive themselves, essentially, as academics—not academics of film, but rather academics of social forces; and for these viewers, it may well be satisfying to discover Spielberg’s “hermetic coherence,” to find that he has scrupulously supplied, if only in passing, the unseen root of each evil portrayed in the film.

Thus, the self-gratifying pontification lambasted in “Gee Officer Krupke” is sadly a dominant mode of art criticism today. Its purveyors want everything put explicitly into context: they’re interested in what’s off the screen, such as the villainous property developers, rather than what’s on it. What a strange way to watch a film!

It’s a shame that Spielberg has been caught up in trying to please these folks, because he has made, otherwise, a very good film. Several musical numbers pop. New actors and actresses give excellent performances. The set design is mostly top notch. Nevertheless, when this movie is watched fifty years from now (perhaps upon being remade again), it’ll stick out oddly for its obsession, so traceable to our current moment, with emphasizing the larger forces impacting the characters, such that every misfortune and misdeed is made to seem logical rather than dramatic. Hamlet in 2021, I’m sure, would be about a Danish hunger crisis that spurred a few innocents to murder.

Somehow I don’t think that would do well at the box office, either.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more reviews, check out my review of The Power of the Dog.

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Movie Review: The Power of the Dog

The Power of the Dog is a country drama that reaches back to filmmaking basics with great success, thanks to the skill and patience of its director, Jane Campion. Invoking picturesque masterpieces like Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) while at the same time injecting contemporary rage and torment, Campion has given us a revision to frontier mythos: the big tough cowboy, it turns out, maybe wasn’t so tough after all. Considering American cinema’s continued lionization of the John Waynes and Clint Eastwoods who played such characters with one-dimensional charisma, that’s an original and useful artistic statement.

The actor charged with showing us the dark, damaging side of that Western stoicism is Benedict Cumberbatch, and he’s the right man for the job. When brother George (Jesse Plemons) presumes to ask Phil Burbank (Cumberbatch) to wash up before some distinguished guests arrive for dinner, it takes him several minutes to get the words out, so scared is he (and everyone) of Phil’s reaction to being even the slightest bit insulted. It occurred to me watching this scene that I’ve never actually seen Clint Eastwood live anywhere (not permanently, anyway), nor thought about, if he did, what his housemates would think of him.

The main target of Phil’s meanness is George’s new wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst), who succumbs to alcoholism and infirmity under Phil’s ferocious psychological warfare. But why is he doing this? Why can’t he stand to have her in the house? Early on he professes that he’s taking a stand against her supposed gold digging, but no one’s buying that.

The answer, rather, appears to lie in revelations about the nature of Phil’s relationship with his deceased mentor, Bronco Henry. Rose, it seems, is a reminder to Phil of what he had, what he lost, and what he can never have again. He’s Yale educated (it’s pointedly emphasized) and thus free to make a living elsewhere, but he wants to be alone with his thoughts on this ranch, and Rose has unwittingly invaded the isolation he’s crafted for himself. In this portrayal, then, the stoicism of the Western hero doesn’t lead to loneliness, as The Searchers (1956) or Unforgiven (1992) would have it; rather, stoicism is an intentional technique to preserve loneliness—for reasons likely dark and ugly.

Campion only falters in her final act, when Rose’s son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) becomes the focal point. This isn’t quite up to par with the rest of the film, partly because Peter, who is awkward and skinny—the cowboys yell “faggot,” in case the perception wasn’t clear—isn’t as compelling a character as Phil or Rose. Mostly, though, it’s because the hard logic of Peter’s plan departs from the unruly emotional torment that had dominated the earlier sections and provided the main interest of the film. Campion, I think, knows her material is weaker here, judging by the rushed pace of the last few minutes: she knows Phil was more interesting when he was running the show.

Overall, I’m a fan of this movie: what critic wouldn’t be? It delivers on the technical merits—acting, cinematography, structure of screenplay—, it has interesting symbolism (Bronco Henry taught Phil how to ride…and how to do other things), and it looks toward classic films for inspiration while providing interesting criticism of those same films.

I have my qualms: the weaker final act, why George disappeared for nearly the entire film, why Rose was able to access a seemingly unlimited supply of whiskey, why Phil didn’t take revenge for Peter discovering his hideout. But most of these are minor complaints. The Power of the Dog is old school, character-based filmmaking from a thoughtful and experienced director.

 

— Jim Andersen

For more movie reviews, check out my review of Belfast.

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Movie Review: Belfast

It’s hard not to love Belfast, the coming of age drama that follows young Buddy (Jude Hill) and his family through political upheaval and violence in Northern Ireland in the 1960’s. Written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, the film is notable for its excellent black and white cinematography, some wonderfully subdued but powerful performances, and its coverage of interesting historical terrain.

Ultimately, Belfast is a film about how family works, and it has a lot to say on the subject. A surprisingly large number of Buddy’s kin receive their dues in nuanced characterization, thanks to Branagh’s wise yet emotional screenwriting. By movie’s end we’ve been presented with what feels like a complete portrait of three Irish generations.

I found especially compelling Buddy’s older brother, who receives comparatively little screen time but whom Buddy always seems to be watching with great interest. He’s more introverted than Buddy and tends to react sourly to Buddy’s antics, but he appears to have an inner strength and resilience that Buddy initially lacks. Slowly, though, Buddy comes to emulate his brother, such that by the end of the film Buddy has become far more stoic toward the chaos around him, in part by following his brother’s example.

In fact, Buddy seems to absorb something from each of his loving family by movie’s end, and this may be where the interest lies in re-watching: how does the nature of Buddy’s personal growth trace back to interactions and observations with his separate family members?

While the bond of family may be powerful, Branagh shows us that it can be disrupted by a community out of control. In my favorite scene, Buddy is coerced into joining a gang of looters who destroy a supermarket. When he proudly returns home with a stolen box of cereal, clueless about what he’s done, his Ma (Caitriona Balfe) is having none of it and drags him back to return the stolen item.

In a typical film, this episode might end there, presented as an admirable and humorous example of tough parenting—but not in this one, as the anti-Catholic looters won’t allow the mother and son to return the cereal, and instead the situation becomes gravely dangerous. The wild spectacle of Buddy’s Ma attempting and failing to teach a traditional moral lesson amidst a backdrop of viciousness and amorality makes this moment stick in the mind long afterward.

It’s useful to compare Belfast to Jojo Rabbit (review here), the Best Picture nominee from two years ago with a nearly identical premise. Belfast, of course, is the better film by light years, but it sometimes veers too close to the unwelcome whimsy of its predecessor. For instance, Buddy, like Jojo before him, is a bit too precious, his character needlessly losing some believability in the name of cuteness. And also like Jojo, Buddy has an extravagantly tolerant, sagelike, speechmaking parent: his Pa (Jamie Dornan). A deus ex machina moment at Belfast’s climax and the Van Morrison soundtrack that hints at fun that nobody appears to be having, recall Jojo Rabbit by sapping gravitas from key sequences.

Nevertheless, the craft of Belfast bolsters it to the cream of this year’s crop, and if it wins the Oscar for Best Picture, as some predict it will, it’ll be a far worthier choice than last year’s Nomadland or even the prior year’s Parasite. I’m skeptical it has the power of a permanent classic, because, for all its great insight into family dynamics, it can’t quite look at its historical material head on: it retreats to a child’s ignorance when convenient, substituting feel-good lessons for the authentic images—however ghastly—we deserve. Branagh’s Belfast can be mentioned in the same sentence as Schindler’s List (1993), but Spielberg showed us his atrocities, whereas in Belfast we only hear of them.

Are children are too innocent to see death and gore? No. The slightly too innocent one, sadly, is Branagh.

 

— Jim Andersen

For more old reviews, see my rankings of the 2020 Best Picture nominees.

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Movie Review: The Harder They Fall

Like most westerns, The Harder They Fall is boring. I’m not a fan of this genre due to its restrictiveness: as with the rom-com, the western’s conventions are so strict that they typically exclude significant innovation. The story of a western must play out in an extremely specific way: a good and a bad cowboy, one of whom is a newcomer of sorts, slowly build toward a showdown, and eventually the good cowboy shoots the bad cowboy dead. The end.

Having the cast be comprised of black actors is a good idea, but it ultimately doesn’t change things. We still have a swaggering villain, a climactic shootout, etc., and the pieces fall into place as they must. I should add that this movie is very long (also a hallmark of westerns), due, as usual, to the many, many threats the characters drawl at each other that don’t advance the plot in any way.

To his credit, director Jeymes Samuel seems to sense the staleness of his foundation, and he wants to jazz it up. But his efforts backfire. The story is about a certified badass outlaw (Nat Love) and his gang (RJ Cyler and Edi Gathegi), who are possibly even more badass than he is. Also, his love interest (Zazie Beetz) is without question more badass than the gang is, and they’re also helped by a sheriff (Delroy Lindo) who might be the most badass of all. Meanwhile, the man (Idris Elba) who murdered the protagonist’s parents is a legendary badass, and his badass partner in crime (Lakeith Stanfield) is the quickest draw around. And…his love interest (Regina King) is almost certainly more badass than any of them.

Do you see the problem here? Every character cannot be a badass. Badassery is a zero sum game: being a badass means that other people are not badasses. As Syndrome would say, when everyone is a badass, then no one is—it’s just the norm. Samuel has created a world in which being a mega-badass is the norm. He’s overstuffed his movie so that there are no particularly memorable moments, no focal points. What he winds up with is two plus hours of people comebacking and one-upping each other, such that who comes out on top doesn’t feel important.

Samuel has also made a number of intentionally anachronistic decisions: the hip hop score, the glamorized sets, the lack of proper accents. Again, I credit him for trying to mix it up. But the effect of these choices is to create a feeling that it’s all playacting, that it’s not to be taken seriously. It implies, actually, that accuracy of setting and of tone were never truly important components of the western: that only the characters and their motivations gave the genre its impact.

That’s an interesting theory, but it’s not right. The setting is indeed the central component of the western (hence its name) and the reason its aesthetics remain with us. We watch the classics—The Searchers, High Noon, Shane—to reacquaint ourselves with the Wild West and its idiosyncratic yet alluring set of values, but The Harder They Fall shrugs off the possibility of allowing us that glimpse of what used to be. It therefore doesn’t offer us anything from the past, only the present. And apparently, the present is full of badasses.

 

—Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my thoughts on Netflix’s Mank.

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Movie Review: Mank

Mank will be an inscrutable entry into the Best Picture academy field this year. Directed by David Fincher in his first feature film since 2014, this quirky dramedy stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the smart-tongued screenwriter who pens the cinematic masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941).

To derive any enjoyment whatsoever from this movie, one has to be familiar with Citizen Kane, and even then, it’s not easy to keep up—either with the endlessly ironic Mank or with the screenplay’s many pivotal references to Hollywood history and lore.

Interpreting this chatty throwback is a doozy, but here goes. In summary, I view Mank is a kind of Marxist statement about the origins of art. The primary concern of the film seems to be Mank’s left-wing politics and the alienation they cause him in high up Hollywood circles. He irks studio executives with his irreverent disdain for their money-grubbing ways, and he pulls hard for liberal candidate Upton Sinclair, who ultimately loses the California governor’s race (thanks in part to Mank’s bosses)—all against a distant backdrop of rising fascism in Germany, which no one but Mank seems to be taking seriously.

It’s implied that Mank’s building animosity toward greedy bigwigs fuels his inspiration for Citizen Kane, the title character of which he bases on the curmudgeonly news tycoon William Randolph Hearst, greediest of them all. By extension, then, Mank the film argues that Citizen Kane is essentially a political reaction to a ruling elite increasingly detached from the reality of ordinary people at that time.

But is it just me, or this a pretty bad theory? For starters, Charles Foster Kane the character is actually written with great empathy, a far cry from the hard villain that Mank makes of Hearst. And the screenplay of Citizen Kane really just isn’t political in any way: it’s focused almost exclusively on the personal successes and failures of one man, with little attention paid to historical affairs. Fincher’s rendition of Herman Mankiewicz and the actual finished product of Citizen Kane just…don’t connect.

Nevertheless, when it’s all said and done, I have to admit the vision is interesting. I thought we had lost David Fincher the artist after big name adaptations like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gone Girl (2014) started dominating his feature film oeuvre, but surprisingly, he’s come back swinging. He may be our foremost visual presenter of bitterness: among his sour creations are William Somerset from Se7en (1995), The Narrator from Fight Club (1999), Paul Avery from Zodiac (2007), the entire cast of The Social Network (2010), Lizbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Amy Dunne from Gone Girl; now we can add Herman Mankiewicz. Where there’s dissatisfaction and disappointment, there’s Fincher.

I don’t think he’s ever produced a masterpiece, and I don’t think Mank is one, but the technical attention to detail and genuine artistic interest of his latest entry, however flawed, makes me hold out hope that one day, he still might.

 

– Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my praise of The Father.