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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Promising Young Woman

Promising Young Woman, directed by Emerald Fennell, is punching well above its weight as a Best Picture nominee. It doesn’t bother fulfilling most of the responsibilities of cinematic storytelling, such as character arcs or crafted visuals; instead, it represents a kind of ritual sacrifice to the #MeToo gods, a wild, disturbing attempt to cleanse the ugly demons haunting Hollywood. By virtue of this film’s undeserved nomination, the academy appears to hope, maybe the legacy of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk will fade into distant memory? Maybe the constant drip of reported malfeasance by male stars and bigwigs will finally stop? Please?

There’s not much to discuss in the way of depth or nuance. The film’s trailer pretty much hits all the highlights, because above all, this movie wants to be quotable. The problem is that all of its quotes have already been said or written many times over: it’s a Frankenstein’s monster of feminist thinkpieces—especially the pieces that want to let you know that you, whoever you are, aren’t off the hook…so don’t get too comfortable!

In channeling them, the talented Carey Mulligan goes uncharacteristically over the top, packing so much swaggering snark that she can’t help but burst frequently into campiness. Since I’m a fan of Mulligan’s work, I choose to believe that it was director Fennell’s decision, not hers, to have the character, whenever she drops her drunk girl charade, pop open her eyes cartoonishly like Sandy Cheeks coming out of hibernation.

What Promising Young Woman does have is rage. If you loved the movie, you probably have a decent amount of it, too. This is the kind of film you wish that all the worst people would watch, so that they could recognize themselves and see how terrible they are (but they won’t watch it because they suck too much—argh!). Or perhaps your friends and family who aren’t quite feminist enough, who don’t quite get it: if only they watched this movie, and felt the proper shame!

Don’t get your hopes up. Possibly, just possibly, outrage is the one thing we have plenty of already, which is why this film doesn’t feel original in any way. What we always need more of, on the other hand, is intimate, truthful storytelling, but Promising Young Woman, with its swollen, pandering bravado, falls far short of providing that.

It’s notable that this film, for all its ostensible sympathy with the unheard plight of survivors, leaves its own victim off the screen entirely: we never see the pivotal video of Nina’s attack, nor the character’s subsequent decline. Fennell, then, has chosen to commemorate the invisibility of these women rather than use her powers to illuminate. Who will be the director brave enough to shine the light?

 

– Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my positive review of Minari.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Minari

Minari, directed by Lee Isaac Chung, is a stubborn film, one that refuses to be what we expect it to be. What could be a more reliable mark of authentic artistry? Insistently small in scope, opaque in narrative trajectory, and complex in its treatment of characters who surprise (and disappoint) to the very end, Minari is a truth teller’s rendition of the immigrant tale, a quirky family saga that makes a worthy bid for inclusion in our canon of cinematic Americana.

In the film’s opening sequence, the Yi family arrives at their new home, an unremarkable trailer that feels poorly captured by the frame, as if Chung is intentionally depriving us of the full picture. This serves to introduce us to his directorial strategy: we will experience this story, like the children of the Yi family, without the full picture, wondering about things unseen and unsaid.

How big is the farm, really, and where is it located? How is it doing financially? Do Jacob (Stephen Yeun) and Monica (Han Ye-ri) still love each other? Is Grandma Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) up to something? Why does Jacob want this so badly? Bits and pieces filter down to us, through the walls, from around corners.

By extension, we learn about the characters progressively throughout the film, such that their actions even late in the story reveal major new facets of their personalities. When little David (Alan Kim) tricks Soon-ja into sipping pee, for example, she chases after him, enraged, and he flees accordingly. But when Stephen and Monica lay out his punishment—Chung isn’t afraid to show what discipline in this family inevitably looks like—Soon-ja backtracks and hilariously recants her complaint: “It was fun!”

We thus learn of her soft side just as David does, allowing us to experience his relief in real time. Jacob’s character, too, is constantly in flux: he initially seems the easygoing, down to earth dad, juxtaposed with his frustrated wife—but after an eccentric war vet visits for dinner, we realize that Jacob may in fact be the more prideful and inflexible of the pair. We, like children, must rely on these rare cracks in the facades to help us mold our impressions of the adults.

Chung knows to mostly avoid easy comic scenes in which his immigrant characters interact awkwardly with the community. These “fish out of water” scenarios, in my opinion, are a frequent misstep of immigrant movies, since they create the impression that the family is basically united, an alliance of common purpose facing an uncomprehending world. Whereas in reality, as Chung shows us, the important conflicts for an immigrant family—as with any family—are all within the family itself.

Minari doesn’t conclude with the family “making it;” if anything, the opposite occurs. And questions linger about family tensions that aren’t quite resolved. But Chung pushes us to identify a different type of happy ending, and sure enough, it’s there. His initial aim was to adapt Willa Cather’s great American novel, My Antonia, and this personal film indeed showcases him as an up-and-coming disciple of Cather’s: a fellow celebrant of self sufficiency, pioneering spirit, and the endless mysteries of the people we love.

 

-Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my negative review of Nomadland.

Categories
Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Nomadland

Originally published December 2020

Is this movie seriously going to win Best Picture? By all accounts, Nomadland, directed by Chloe Zhao and starring Frances McDormand, is the odds-on favorite, which is bewildering, since it offers little in the way of artistic or entertainment value. Despite solid cinematography and acting, Nomadland’s thematic center is gooey and insincere. Its current critical acclaim, rest assured, will fade into disinterest with time.

Nomadland could only have appeared in the age of Instagram. The film’s imagery is reflective of the kind of superficial profundity that we ourselves have popularized on social media: a woman stands atop a cliff gazing at nature, a gathering of strangers sings around a campfire, big animals trudge across terrain. Zhao doesn’t have any insight as to why these scenes might be deep; she only knows that we’ve trained ourselves to think they are. Her movie thus devolves into, essentially, a collection of shallow images that we can easily get elsewhere or even stage ourselves. It’s been said that Nomadland is “lyrical” and “poetic;” if so, it’s surely Instagram poetry: its tagline might have been, #wanderlust.

And the sappy, social media flavor of this film pervades its narrative, too. The story follows Fern (McDormand), a forgotten victim of the Great Recession, whose hometown was shuttered when the plant closed down, and whose husband died long before that, leaving her totally adrift. It’s an intriguing backstory, but instead of seeing it fleshed out, we watch Fern serve primarily as a kind of sponge for others’ similarly sad stories, so that the movie can squeeze in as many of them as possible.

A nameless woman’s husband died of cirrhosis, for example. A man’s son committed suicide. And so on. These stories are heartfelt, but we only hear about them, never experiencing them for ourselves: the power of film is left untapped. In trying to herd so much untold sadness into one place, Zhao has made something closer to shareable CNN segments than a cohesive work of art.

The film’s high point comes early on, when a terminally ill companion of Fern’s delivers a monologue reflecting on her life and recounting a particularly touching moment of natural beauty. The delivery is great, and the descriptions are memorable—but even so, it still rings somewhat shallow. Pretty words are always nice, but without any insight or wisdom, they flutter away from us, groundless. Even the pinnacle of the movie, then, is more John Green than Shakespeare.

McDormand is one of our finest actresses, and here, as usual, she’s a bright spot. With her talents and the film’s serious, somber premise, Nomadland could have been so much more. It may do well at the Oscars, where sentimentality often rules the day, but it would still be an unusual entrant into the award season history books. After all, even the bland Green Book’s (2019) sentimentality was of the traditional, feel-good sort; Nomadland instead borrows the breathless, melancholy kind cultivated by my own generation of indie musicians and social media influencers.

I suppose they don’t call them influencers for nothing.

 

– Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my review of Sound of Metal.

Categories
Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Sound of Metal

Originally published January 2021

Sound of Metal, directed by Darius Marder and starring Riz Ahmed, features original subject matter and some memorable acting, but it’s too sloppy for my taste. I see its appeal, as there are certainly some powerful moments in this film. Those tend to be the scenes including both Ahmed’s character, a heavy metal drummer who quickly loses his hearing, and his concerned girlfriend, played by Olivia Cooke.  But these moments arise too infrequently from behind a flawed script that tries to tell two stories, neither of which are completely fleshed out and neither of which connects especially strongly to the other.

Within minutes of Sound of Metal, Ruben Stone (Ahmed) is deaf.  But before the halfway point of the movie, he has already found purpose and tranquility among a shelter for deaf individuals, having learned sign language and having started teaching deaf children music and other joys. It feels a bit rushed. This could have been the full movie, but for some reason Marder doesn’t want it to be, and instead Stone leaves the shelter on his own and gets surgery for a cochlear implant, disregarding all of what it seemed that he had learned and essentially restarting the movie.

In fairness to Ruben, the primary philosophy of the shelter—that deafness isn’t a handicap—can’t really be applied to his case: it may not be a handicap in general, but to a professional drummer, it is. Shelter leader Joe (Paul Raci) accuses Stone of acting like an addict, but isn’t this a bit unfair? An addict to…his career as a musician? His livelihood?

Stone rejoins his girlfriend Lou (Cooke) in Paris, and an excellent scene ensues during which they mutually recognize that given their assorted issues—Lou has ongoing mental health struggles—returning to tour won’t be possible, even though they’ve already essentially saved one another’s lives with their earlier mutual support. But the completion of this interesting arc, which, again, could have comprised the entire film, is unfortunately drowned out by a different problem that comes to dominate this portion: Ruben doesn’t like his cochlear implant. And indeed, we get to hear what he hears, and it’s not pleasant. So he decides not to use it anymore.

This is meant to be a triumph: Ruben has finally come to heed the advice of Joe and others that deafness is no handicap at all. But this isn’t quite right, because the problem wasn’t the return of hearing per se; it was that Stone’s implant sounded terrible. Well, anyway, this opens the door for Stone to return to the shelter: will he reconcile with Joe? Maybe express feelings for noticeably attractive deaf teacher Diane (Lauren Ridloff), and start a new relationship?

Whoops, we’re out of time.

Poorly paced and freewheeling as it is, this script is just too messy, and it should be said that some technical aspects of this movie are messy as well. For example, Stone initially has to use a speech-to-type translator, and it somehow knows how to spell names like Lou, and to capitalize their first letters. In one scene, it even reflects sarcastic quotation marks when Joe expresses disdain. We must find this state-of-the-art AI being used in rural Missouri, and bring it back to the rest of the world!

Visually, these scenes don’t quite work either, with the back and forth camera angles creating high suspicion that Ahmed and Raci aren’t actually in the same room. They also clash with the primarily handheld camerawork that characterizes other scenes at the shelter. There just isn’t sufficient attention to detail throughout, and this is subject matter that demands extraordinary attention to detail.

On some level, I suppose Sound of Metal is supposed to be jarring and unorthodox, like heavy metal. But it feels like the work of multiple hands trying to develop various unrelated themes: the difficulty of coping with a new disability, the idea that deafness is in fact not a disability, the power of love to weather difficult times, the power of community to weather difficult times in the absence of a loved one (who could serve as a distraction), the constant battle of overcoming addiction, and last but not least, that cochlear implants don’t sound good. As any band would know, everyone has to be on the same page, and this movie never quite gels.

 

–Jim Andersen

For other movie reviews, see my review of Beckett.

Categories
Commentary and Essays

Die Hard’s Enduring Entertainment

The action classic Die Hard (1988), directed by John McTiernan and starring Bruce Willis, is a movie far better than it has any right to be. It’s so well crafted that it can essentially function as a textbook for how to pull off onscreen action entertainment, even though it never pretends to be anything more than a genre flick. So in this piece, I’ll pick apart Die Hard to find out what makes for old-fashioned, pure movie fun.

In short, the secret to Die Hard’s success is character development. Everyone knows that character is crucial to a good screenplay, but few invest in it as heavily as McTiernan and screenwriter Jeb Stuart in this film, and few are as savvy in their execution.

The first character developed, of course, is John McClane (Willis), and like many action heroes, he’s a rough-around-the edges tough guy with a turbulent family life. But Die Hard adds uncommon nuance to his exposition. Within minutes of watching John and his wife, Holly, we learn that John is not some inscrutable rage-machine, as his many predecessors and copycats tend to be, but rather a man in a truly complicated situation: she moved away from him for a job opportunity, but his attachment to his work as a NYC cop combined with his innate stubbornness made moving West a bitter proposition. And not only does he want his woman back, as is standard fare for a troubled action hero, but she wants him back, too: the maid knows to make John’s bed in the guest room without needing to be asked, just in case he shows up for Christmas.

Later in the film, an emotional scene takes place wherein an injured John radios his friend to ask that a message be relayed to his wife if he dies: that he wishes he had been more supportive, and that although he said “I love you” many times, he never said what was needed: that he was sorry. This only packs such a punch because we already know that the situation between the two was complicated and understandably difficult for John, even if he was ultimately in the wrong. The audience can relate.

Perhaps other directors have trouble pulling off this level of nuance because it requires creativity to squeeze in so much of it before audiences get impatient for the excitement to start. Die Hard rises to the occasion in this regard. One example of effective, rapid exposition is the aforementioned conversation between Holly and Paulina, the maid. Another is the clever screenwriting device of Argyle (De’voreaux White), the nosy limo driver who teases out key information. A third great idea is the character of Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner), a goofy would-be suitor whom Holly rejects, John snaps at, and Holly dismisses to John as having no chance with her—all within the early minutes of the movie.

Merely through Ellis’ presence, then, we learn that Holly a) prefers John to a fresh start, b) isn’t the type of woman to intentionally inspire jealousy in John despite resenting him, and c) is comfortable talking frankly with John in a husband-wife manner. We also learn that John is still very protective of his wife despite having resisted moving with her to the West coast.

These revelations mean that when John and Holly reunite, we’re rooting for both of them. This is actually a rarity, because, sadly, the woman in these situations is often portrayed in a negative light throughout the film to bolster the plight of the protagonist. After all, if she’s short tempered, demanding, and disloyal, then the hero seems more justified—so we like him more, right? Eh, maybe, but we also can’t understand why he wants her back in the first place, so their reunification doesn’t make us happy. Another unfortunate cliché (potentially derived from High Noon (1952)) is to have the hero’s love interest suddenly become a badass toward the end of the film and start whooping bad guys herself—maybe even finishing off the main villain—to show that she’s had a change of heart toward the hero. Since Holly is already likable, that isn’t needed in Die Hard.

The positive portrayal of Holly also means that John doesn’t “get the girl” through his action heroics: instead, he had her from the start. The only alteration comes from John himself, who, faced with the probability of death, realizes the wrongness of his stubborn ways and vows to change if he gets the chance. Thus, there’s a true arc for the main character, a fundamental requirement of enjoying a movie that’s nevertheless often neglected by action films, most of which prefer to make their heroes so skilled in killing people that their love interests simply can’t resist them, surely a male fantasy rather than a depiction of reality.

Not only is the character development in Die Hard nuanced; it’s unorthodox. Surprisingly late in the movie, we meet Sergeant Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), the main supporting character. Because he arrives in the thick of the action, his exposition is shallower and his arc is less detailed. But that arc is memorable all the same, completed when he guns down a thought-dead villain at the finale. It would have been easy to write Powell as merely a helpful, supportive guy, and leave it at that. Die Hard goes the extra mile, even supplying Powell with a meddling chief to emphasize his acumen in the field and his loyalty to John.

Now to the villains, which is where things go from great to masterful. Everyone remembers Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), but why?

Well, for starters, Hans is very good at what he does. His plan is meticulous, and he deals with setbacks calmly and effectively. His deliberate style also provides a clear contrast to John, who is forced to improvise his way through events, and who is often visibly upset when things don’t go his way or gleeful when they do. To be sure, Hans does encounter unexpected challenges, but he responds not with instinct and guts, as John does, but by quickly creating new, clever plans, such as feigning an American accent when cornered and shooting glass to injure John’s bare feet.  This stylistic difference is reinforced in the script by the two characters’ opposing valuations of cowboy heroes like Roy Rogers: Hans perceives these figures as implausible products of a dumbed-down American commercialism, while John sees them as valid inspirations for his career in law enforcement and his efforts to take down the terrorists.

But sneakily, Hans is also similar to John in a fundamental way. This becomes clear in a late scene when Holly accuses Hans of being nothing more than a “common crook.” Hans reacts to this by becoming truly angry for the only time in the film, wrenching Holly toward himself and correcting the record: “I am an exceptional crook.”

Perhaps the money, then, is only a secondary motivation for Hans: what truly propels him is outsized personal pride, the very flaw that Holly accuses John of allowing to destroy their marriage. We could imagine a similar exchange taking place between John and Holly before their separation. But whereas John, the hero, eventually sees the error of his ways (“Tell her I’m sorry”), Hans, the villain, never does—taunting John at the movie’s climax instead of shooting immediately, his only major mistake throughout. And when Hans finds himself hanging out a 30th story window with his plot certainly thwarted for good, he doesn’t scramble for safety; rather, he pulls a gun at the pair that wounded his ego.

Hans is also charismatic and likable, which adds to his villainous appeal. It’s tricky to make a villain likable, but again, Die Hard rises to the occasion. As before, the character of Ellis facilitates development, as he returns to misguidedly barter with Hans and winds up dead. I’ll admit that this is probably the worst scene in the movie, because Ellis is really too stupid to be believable, but by being so unlikeable he forces us to root for Hans, who responds to the insufferable interlocutor with appropriate sarcasm. We want him to kill Ellis, and he does. And when arrogant FBI officers take over and ignore Powell’s pleading for caution, we want them to pay a price, and Hans again obliges us, giving the order to obliterate their forces with bazookas.

The top-notch villainy extends beyond Hans, though. The rest of his team is memorable, too. Like Sergeant Powell, these are characters that would have received little to no development in a standard action movie, but McTiernan manages to give most of them recognizable personalities, sometimes with only one scene to work with. Theo (Clarence Gilyard), the tech specialist, is a jackass and relishes it: a malicious version of the equally exuberant Argyle, who fittingly takes him out later on. Karl (Alexander Godunov) is the strongest and most ruthless of the gang, but he’s not a mindless brute in the fashion of James Bond henchmen; rather, he’s angrily avenging the loss of his brother, the first of the crew killed, who is briefly shown to be the more cerebral and cautious of the two brothers.

I also appreciated the scene in which Powell first arrives to investigate and is met by Eddie (Dennis Hayden), a member of Hans’ team responsible for manning the security desk. In a lesser film, this would have been Hans himself, to increase his airtime and emphasize his cleverness. But the fact that Eddie is so effective in his job—nonchalantly watching football and making small talk with Powell—increases our appreciation for Hans much more than an appearance from Hans himself would have done. As the leader, he has chosen a skilled team and delegated with purpose.

As I near the end of examining an action movie, I can’t neglect to discuss the action. The strange thing is, there isn’t all that much of it in Die Hard. There are a few short confrontations in which John kills Hans’ crewmembers, and one extended fight scene between John and Karl. These scenes are fine. I think what I most appreciate about them is that they don’t try to reach some unattainable degree of coolness with characters pulling off impossible moves and demonstrating superhuman strength. Instead, they are what they are: human fight scenes, won by John. Since we’re rooting for John (and we kind of like the villains too), this suffices. In our current post-Matrix movie landscape, this approach is rarely seen.

Also noticeable in 2020 is the lack of stunts.  To be fair, there are a few, but by modern standards they’re not awe-inspiring.  John’s leap from an exploding roof and subsequent reentry through a window is certainly a true stunt sequence, and again, this scene is fine.  It’s not Mission: Impossible-level cool. The emphasis on John’s bloody feet increases the tension, reminding us that this is not an invincible hero, but mostly, the effectiveness comes from our concern for John. While I was watching Die Hard, I actually found myself wondering whether stunts in movies tend to decrease the overall tension, by building it up unsustainably high and then releasing it. Since Die Hard has so few stunts, there are few releases; thus, the tension remains high throughout.

John McTiernan had previously directed Predator (1987), which is also a good action movie but has noticeable weaknesses compared to Die Hard. Both feature highly successful character exposition and focus on cat-and-mouse tension rather than stunts and combat scenes. But Predator’s hero is a hulking Arnold Schwarzenegger, a casting choice surely influenced by producers with the aim of emulating Sylvester Stallone’s then-popular Rambo franchise—so laughably macho in retrospect that it’s now the stuff of easy parody.

Schwarzenegger’s presence severely limits what can be done with the script, and the result is a kind of “in-between” action hero: McTiernan seems to have envisioned a relatable everyman for the role, but a snarling Austrian bodybuilder can only be so unassuming. Both Stallone and Schwarzenegger turned down the role of John McClane, thank God, allowing McTiernan’s talents to be fully realized, as little-known Bruce Willis was given the opportunity to play the lead in a chatty, emotional manner that the 80’s had heretofore avoided.

Why haven’t we had an action movie equal to Die Hard since its release in 1988? As I indicated, it seems to me that during the 90’s, special effects breakthroughs in movies like Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and The Matrix (1999) raised the bar so high for the action sequences themselves that attention to character development was diminished, with producers fearful of boring audiences with comparatively tame set pieces and accordingly funneling their efforts in that direction. Today’s popular action franchises, like the juggernaut Fast and Furious movies, have shrugged off not only character development but also all notions of remote seriousness, instead pouring dollars into visually amazing stunt sequences.

Despite this, I think there’s still a market for a movie like Die Hard. After all, it’s still massively popular: doesn’t that indicate that action audiences haven’t lost the taste for a well-written script? We’ll see what the next decade of moviemaking brings. For now, I recommend a re-watch of this classic, a master class in movie craftsmanship.

 

— Jim Andersen

For more on blockbuster hits, check out my criticism of Avatar.

Categories
Movie Reviews

Movie Review: The Tinder Swindler

It’s time to review the latest Netflix sensation, as I do every so often (see my last one on the dull Beckett). Up to bat is the documentary that’s been all the buzz for the past few weeks: The Tinder Swindler.

To me, this movie belongs to a sort of trilogy of Netflix documentaries that also includes Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019) and The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley (2019). Each is about scams and, especially, the scammers: Who are they? Where did they come from? How did they pull the wool over everyone’s eyes?

And each consists primarily of rattled bystanders and victims recounting how smooth sociopaths (Billy Macfarland in Fyre, Elizabeth Holmes in The Inventor, and Simon Leviev in The Tinder Swindler) cashed in by exploiting absurdities in our image-obsessed culture.

The key to all these documentaries’ success is that we inevitably root for the scammer. Their charisma attracts us just as it attracts their victims, and their success compels our admiration. By extension, the victims receive our contempt. And it’s fun to be contemptuous of Macfarland’s and Holmes’ victims, since they’re such big shots. After all, few of us could afford a luxury Caribbean music festival or invest in a Silicon Valley startup, so watching people who do have that kind of clout get taken for a ride is ready-made schadenfreude.

But in The Tinder Swindler, the swindled are ordinary people, posing a moral conundrum. And we fail the conundrum: we still root for the swindler; the effect of the movie is still undeniably schadenfreude. Resist it we may, but truly, no viewer can help getting a thrill from a close up of the $250,000 “loan,” which, we know by this point, is actually a down payment on another woman’s dream date. In fact, our smiles are already cracking when a doomed victim’s opening narration extols the wondrous virtues of love. It doesn’t matter that Leviev, a dweeby-looking would-be aristocrat, is the least likable scammer in the trilogy: like MacFarland and Holmes, he’s the protagonist by virtue of the stunned plebeians he leaves in his wake.

This may be why the predominant reaction to this movie online has been frustration and even anger directed toward the women. What were they thinking? How could they have been so stupid? We attack them because their errors have made us root against the common interest, against love. Morally, we want to side with them, but we can’t: like Trump, we like people who weren’t captured. I’ve noticed that most viewers have scrambled to distance themselves from the defrauded women in some supposedly crucial way, for example pointing out the privilege in being able to cough up so much dough, or cursing the gold-digging ways of women, or criticizing users of shallow dating apps, or sighing at women’s typical naivety in romance (surely no man in the era of OnlyFans would ever be sapped of his savings by an illusory romantic connection!).

I amiably grant these viewers their solace in whatever distinction they make between themselves and the Tinder Swindled. True, these women had affluence to burn. True, dollar signs were in their eyes anyway when they boarded a man’s caviar-equipped private jet.

But whatever defense you might justifiably summon to grapple with this documentary’s success in amusing you with the ruin of people who might be your neighbors, I maintain that the engaging quality of The Tinder Swindler, heightened in comparison to its Netflix predecessors, owes to its relative small scale, to its relatability. Indeed, with each successive documentary, our fascination with scams is gradually shedding its disguise to reveal its true self: fascination with our own individual stupidity.

Yes, a current of self-loathing runs beneath the popularity of these documentaries, and it’s getting closer to the surface. Closer, actually, to the aesthetic of horror movies, in that the entertainment doesn’t come from the victims’ demises, but rather from the exciting possibility of our own. Michael Myers doesn’t hunt down Wall Street fat cats, and neither does Simon Leviev. The next Netflix swindler might just be coming for you!

Am I saying that we subconsciously want to be taken for a ride, that we want to be swindled? Of course not. But…wouldn’t it be wild if we were? (And if we were, wouldn’t we totally deserve it, too?)

 

– Jim Andersen

For more Netflix reviews, see my review of I Care a Lot.

 

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Uncategorized

Movie Review: Beckett

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.

Categories
Commentary and Essays

The Worst Best Picture: The Badness of Slumdog Millionaire

Everyone knows that winning Best Picture doesn’t guarantee that a film is any good. In the past few years alone, duds like Spotlight (2015) and Green Book (2019) have snatched the prize, so you don’t need to think very far back for evidence that the Academy isn’t always clear-eyed. But there’s one disaster of a movie that in my opinion tops them all for taking the honor without merit.

That film is Slumdog Millionaire (2008), directed by Danny Boyle. You’ve probably seen it or at least remember hearing a lot about it, since it was a sleeper hit at the time of its release and was the subject of numerous parodies and pop culture references in the ensuing years. Its badness is multifaceted enough to sustain an entire essay, which I’m happy to write. Then, I’ll try to draw some conclusions from its award success.

Slumdog Millionaire follows Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), an Indian teenager on the brink of winning “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Unfortunately for him, the show’s host believes that he’s a fraud and alerts the police of his presumed cheating. He must then explain to the police, who endeavor to torture him, how he has correctly answered every question in the trivia game show thus far despite his humble origins in the slums.

This premise is already irredeemably ridiculous. Why, exactly, is host Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) so upset about this situation? He appears to believe that he’s being upstaged, fuming, “it’s my fucking show!”—but in real life, undoubtedly a game show host would delight in participating in the dramatic story of a modest, likable underdog beating the odds. Instead, Jamal, who has generated the very human interest that the show is designed for, is…electrocuted? And…beaten to a pulp?

Neither does the police’s logic behind the suspicion of Jamal make any sense whatsoever. The officer in charge of the interrogation sputters that “doctors, lawyers” struggle with the show’s questions, whereas Jamal, a “slumdog,” impossibly answers them correctly. But as Jamal himself accurately protests, “You don’t have to be a genius” to answer these questions, as they’re all related to culture or pop culture. What do the contestants’ occupations have to do with whether they can answer these random trivia? I see no connection, but apparently the other characters have decided that the relationship is so ironclad that Jamal needs to be treated like a POW.

As an aside, I’ve noticed that when various media try to parody Slumdog Millionaire, they inevitably run into problems with this particular flaw, because it prevents the parody from distinguishing itself from the actual plot of the movie. For example, a spoof character is shown being interrogated and having to explain how he “knows the answers” due to comically improbable events that have occurred recently or during his life. But no matter how improbable and silly these parody events are, the parody invariably isn’t very funny, because Jamal also encounters the answers to the game show’s questions at extremely improbable moments—equally improbable, to be sure, as in the parody. Thus, the parody can only replicate the original, not subvert it with commonplaces. The plot device of Slumdog Millionaire, sneakily, is already commonplace: don’t we all learn the answers to potential trivia questions at very random moments during our lives?

Another important moment occurs when Kumar attempts to feed Jamal an incorrect answer. Kumar interprets Jamal’s disregarding of the lie as proof of cheating—but this is never even referenced by the interrogating officer, perhaps because it doesn’t prove anything at all. Maybe Jamal didn’t see the letter written on the mirror; or maybe he knew the answer already and only used the 50:50 lifeline to be sure; or maybe, as is actually the case, he simply doesn’t trust Kumar (for good reason). Yet another head-scratcher of a plot point.

But enough with the plot for now. Even more important to this film’s unsavoriness is the filmmaking itself.

I’ve never been to India, but on first viewing, I nevertheless sensed something false in the way the setting in this movie was treated. On repeat viewing, the issue is clear: Boyle, a white director, is only interested in the Indian slums for shock value, and his scenes accordingly employ the slums as a spectacle, even a gag at times—never as a complex world of fully realized, struggling characters. Of course, from our American perspective, the lack of resources in this environment is shocking. But focusing solely on this aspect poisons the relevant scenes with unreality; it prevents us from feeling as though we’re seeing the whole story. Boyle, by staging scenes like Jamal’s fall in the outhouse, is being greedy, sifting through the slums for their most alarming images. And it’s all for the titillation of American viewers.

At his best moments, Boyle gestures toward a kind of Indian Oliver Twist, with angry, heartless grownups and scared, meager children. But whereas Dickens and his true successors stare unflinchingly at poverty, painting the world of the poor with the authenticity of experience, Boyle, a stranger to the setting, is too astounded at what he sees to be true to us. He’s repulsed by the slums, and, scene after scene, it shows.

I leave it up to others with more relevant expertise to comment on the morality of what Boyle is doing here, and a quick Google search reveals that plenty have indeed done so. But there’s no question that from an artistic perspective, it’s malpractice. The setting of a film can’t be cheapened like this. Whereas Boyle could have cast an insightful lens on overlooked terrain, he instead leaves us with the impression of the slums as a zany launching pad for the two leads, a madhouse unworthy of their admirable personal qualities. There’s a Disney-esque aspect to this attitude, actually; I suspect Aladdin (1992) as one of Boyle’s subconscious influences.

A similar laziness applies to the relationship between the two leads. Jamal is our protagonist, and his goal is to save and marry Latika, the love of his life. Latika, who starts out with him in the slums but later winds up trapped in the world of a cruel crime lord, is very much the “damsel in distress” cliche. Now, I grant that this archetype can bear an interesting story if the characters are treated with nuance. But Latika barely receives any characterization at all throughout the film: she’s extremely bland, having no discernible personal qualities as an adult. She’s “tough,” I suppose, because she endures the slums and gets scarred with a knife (but it turns out looking kind of sexy, phew); still, rom-coms have better leads. Heck, Princess Peach has more personality.

Again, I leave it to others to argue about whether portrayals like these are socially damaging, but there’s no doubt that artistically, they don’t work. The characters of a film need to be true to life, and entirely bland people like Latika don’t exist, so when they appear on the screen, the film becomes merely abstract entertainment and loses its power to move us.

Let’s skip ahead to the monumentally absurd climax, where Jamal uses his “phone a friend” lifeline during a live broadcast of the show. It’s beyond obvious that this wouldn’t be allowed, since the person receiving the call could easily be cheating by looking up the answer. What’s more, the show’s producers don’t seem to know what phone number Jamal is dialing, which is also not how the show works, since he could theoretically be calling an expert on the subject whom he’s never met. This contrived situation leads to Latika picking up the phone even though she isn’t the intended recipient of the call, another irregularity that threatens the integrity of the show.

I’ll take a second to rewind here, because, as I recall, everybody seemed quite concerned about Jamal cheating when there was literally no evidence to suggest it. But here, they casually allow him to phone an unknown individual who, honestly, would be stupid not to be cheating, given the clear opportunity to do so unchecked. If only Jamal before the second broadcast had told someone, anyone, to be near a computer, look up the answer, and wait for his call…

Well, screw it, Jamal wins the grand prize anyway (if you didn’t predict that from the movie title), randomly guessing the answer out of the four choices. After he reunites with Latika and kisses her new (aesthetically pleasing) scar, the movie ends, and we get a dance number.

Now, I apologize to all the die-hard Bollywood fans out there—but come on. Liam Neeson doesn’t break out in a tap dance at the end of Schindler’s List. Let’s remember that this, um, wasn’t exactly a merry movie, featuring at one point, for example, the intentional blinding of children to maximize their utility as beggars. But that doesn’t matter, apparently; only the two main characters do, and they’re fine. So cue this tone-deaf final note.

In summary, my dislike of this movie spans virtually every aspect of production. The film features an implausible story; shallow, functional characters even in lead roles; a phony, sensationalist portrayal of an important setting; and inconsistent tone and message. Each of these flaws on its own should be sufficient to disqualify a film from Best Picture contention. This film boasts them all.

Sadly, though, not only did these attributes not disqualify Slumdog Millionaire from contention, but instead, they likely fueled its success. That’s because all of us, even experienced critics, are liable to be fooled into accepting the semblances of profoundness and depth without thinking twice about whether we’re been tricked. We’re liable to be caught up in ghastly images of the slums and believe we’re seeing the brutal truth, when we’re actually being fed a caricature for shock value. We’re liable to pull for Jamal as he pursues the woman of his dreams without wondering ourselves why, exactly, Jamal even likes her in the first place given her disconcerting lack of personality traits.

There’s a word for this dynamic: sentimentality. We’re conditioned to feel emotion when it’s conjured up, even when it’s not earned. And because of that, directors like Boyle will always be around, cynically offering us a feel-good high without any substance behind it. The films of these directors, of course, will eventually be relegated to obscurity, forgotten as Slumdog Millionaire nearly is despite winning only a decade ago—but by taking advantage of their viewers’ hunger for positive emotion and catharsis, and the consequent leniency those viewers give to films with a rough start and a happy ending, they can achieve both financial and critical success in the short term.  Ignore these charlatans, and focus on the films that put in the effort to do things right—even if the Academy often doesn’t.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more criticism of Best Picture winners, check out my review of Forrest Gump.

Categories
Commentary and Essays

Twists That Don’t Work, Featuring Shutter Island

Everyone loves a twist ending. I do, too, but only if it’s done correctly. Below I present two groups of films: one group of famous twist endings that, in my opinion, deserve their acclaim; and another group of twists that don’t.

Good Twist Endings:

  1. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
  2. The Sixth Sense (1999)
  3. The Prestige (2006)

Bad Twist Endings:

  1. Shutter Island (2010)
  2. The Usual Suspects (1999)
  3. Memento (2000)

I can feel the huffing and puffing already, especially over the denigration of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, which is one of the most commonly requested movies I get for extended analysis, hence this essay. But I don’t have much to examine—at least with any admiration—, because Shutter Island and the other two on the second list, in my view, are artistic failures. I’ll spend this piece explaining why. For favorable contrast, I’ll intermittently refer to the films in the first group.

The core problem with Shutter Island is that almost the entire movie consists of irrelevant nonsense. The narrative of the film is set up as a mystery, and Scorsese leads us to become highly invested in that mystery, which is: what shady dealings on Shutter Island have led to the disappearance of dangerous murderer Rachel Solando? Our protagonist Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DeCaprio) dives into this puzzle, collecting clues and opinions from various island residents—clues that involve, among other things: Nazi experimentation, governmental testing of nuclear weapons, and scary new psychotropic medications.

But as the runtime drags on, these various potential conspiracies don’t seem to be bringing us much closer to the solution. And indeed, it turns out that they’re all for naught. There are no shady dealings. There is no Rachel Solando. There’s not even a Teddy Daniels.

The reason this is a terrible twist ending is that the revelation is a joke on us: we’ve wasted our time watching the body of the film. There’s no reason to re-watch Shutter Island, because now that we’ve seen its ending, we know we’ve been strung along by caring about the rest of it. A.O. Scott of The New York Times nails it:

“Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.”

Indeed it is a “contrivance,” because the fantasies of Andrew Laeddis that we observe over the course of Shutter Island are not in any way tied to the event that precipitated his madness: the murder of his children by his insane wife and his subsequent murdering of her. Instead, Laeddis conjures up random red herrings designed to avert him from reality. No meaningful analysis of these red herrings is possible, because they’re explicitly deployed by Laeddis’ psyche to be as misleading as possible—to have no traceability back to the truth.

Contrast this with the seminal twist ending of The Wizard of Oz (1939). As everyone knows, Dorothy Gale wakes up at the end of the movie: as the cliché goes, “it was all a dream.” But dreams aren’t random: they’re grounded in reality, and indeed, the colorful characters that Dorothy has dreamt appear to have been based on her actual family and acquaintances in Kansas. Thus, it’s fruitful to examine the connections between the dream characters and the originals: one might observe, for example, that Dorothy longs for a faraway escape (“Somewhere over the rainbow”) and accordingly dreams one up. But, previously unrecognized by her, she truly loves the quirky and odd personalities that she lives with Kansas, so they, not exotic strangers, populate her dream. No wonder that she eventually concludes, “There’s no place like home”: her fantasized escape was barely different from her current, humble life.

Andrew Laeddis in Shutter Island also has dreams, and these dreams also gesture toward reality, faintly hinting at the darkness of his past. But Scorsese doesn’t want us to know the big secret, so he spends relatively little time in the dreamscape. He prefers Laeddis’ fantasies and delusions, which by contrast have no connection to the truth. As a prominent example, Laeddis believes that Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) is his trusty detective partner, but in reality, this man is Lester Sheehan, Laeddis’ psychiatrist. Unlike in The Wizard of Oz, there’s no thematic connection between these two roles, no substance to analyze. One is real, one is made up—that’s it.

Scorsese is hardly the first to attempt a twist that renders his entire movie a waste of time. Another wrongfully celebrated film is Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1999), which consists of a story told by a character named Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) about a gang of street crooks who are tricked and sabotaged by an uber-criminal named Keyser Soze. But Kint, as it turns out in the movie’s finale, is Keyser Soze.

Oh boy. This one is even worse than Shutter Island, because whereas Shutter Island consists of the protagonist’s delusions, The Usual Suspects consists of the protagonist’s intentional lies, such that after the twist we have no idea what actually occurred before it. Every single thing we have seen is now liable to have been whimsically fabricated by Kint/Soze.

This becomes palpably clear on re-watch toward the end of the film, when Kint recalls seeing a dark figure on a boat, assumed to be Soze. Duly reflecting his version of events, we see the dark figure onscreen. But since this figure obviously never appeared to Kint, all of what we have seen is now felt to be useless, since it also reflected the story told by the lying Kint in service of his evading arrest.

Reinforcing this, Kint/Soze is picked up from the precinct by a friend, who was seen in Kint’s story as Soze’s lawyer “Kobayashi,” the man who brought the crooks together. But we now know that this man isn’t called “Kobayashi.” So…if his name was a lie, was his supposed role in the job one, too? Was he even there? We can never know.

Another analogous failure to Shutter Island is Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). Like Shutter Island, Memento features a narrator with severe perceptual limitations who aims to avenge the murder of his wife, and in both films, the twist is that the protagonist, in fact, killed his own wife. (Borrowing a bit, eh Martin?) Nolan’s premise is more sound than Scorsese’s, though, because he exposes Leonard Shelby’s (Guy Pearce) limitations from the start, subsequently building toward unveiling what those limitations have been hiding from the character and from us. This should allow for emphasis on the telling of an actual story that we can invest in and not get punked for caring about.

But alas, Memento punks us anyway, falling into the same trap as Shutter Island. The solution to the puzzle is that there is no puzzle. We’ve longed to discover the identity of the murderous “John G,” but—sike!—there is no John G: we’ve been watching a wild goose chase. Like Shutter Island, Memento uses a protagonist with an infirm grasp on reality to misdirect us for two hours, building suspense for the answer to a question that, it turns out, needn’t have been asked.

This approach digs both films’ screenplays into deep holes, out of which there is only one way to climb: painful verbal exposition. The finales of both movies, therefore, consist of disappointing monologues told by supporting characters that spell out for us (by necessity) what in the world has been going on.

To be fair, in Shutter Island, there’s at least a plot-related justification for the character delivering the monologue, as Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) wants to impart these revelations to Laeddis for therapeutic benefit. But in Memento, there’s no such justification: the supporting character, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), simply explains the truth to Leonard for no apparent reason, starting, as he very well could have foreseen, a process that culminates in his own death. It’s a huge storytelling letdown. Nolan, it seems, has bit off more than he can chew with his innovative narrative structure, working both backward and forward to reach the all-important fulcrum of…a supporting character being unbelievably stupid.

Contrast these droning finales with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), one of the best twists in film history. No verbal exposition whatsoever is needed for this famous reveal, because the story we are invested in actually happened. The protagonist has perceptual limitations (“They see what they want to see”), but they’re not so great as to negate either what we have been watching on the screen (a la Shutter Island and The Usual Suspects) or the central drama of the film (a la Shutter Island and Memento).

This means that Shyamalan doesn’t have to pull the whole rug out, as the others do. Instead, he merely shows clips from before, which now have massively altered significance. For instance, he repeats the shot of Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) grabbing at the dinner check too late—but now we know why his wife got to it first. This is how authentic shock and amazement is created: it feels believable, given Shyamalan’s direction, that Malcolm didn’t realize he was dead. We saw what happened, and things seemed legit to us, too.

Unlike the three negative examples I’ve discussed, the bulk of The Sixth Sense’s runtime isn’t wasteful. It contains an interesting and dramatic arc: Cole’s acceptance of his gift, which grants Malcolm redemption for failing Vincent Grey. It also sets up honestly the arc that the twist will eventually complete: Malcolm’s struggle with regret over letting work get in the way of his marriage. Thus, re-watching The Sixth Sense is genuinely worthwhile, even when we know the twist in advance. I’ve been critical of the film (and Shayamalan’s entire body of work) for other reasons here, but credit where credit is due.

It appears that Nolan learned some lessons from Shyamalan. We can infer this because Nolan tried another big twist in his 2006 film The Prestige, and it’s far more successful than the one from Memento. (The Sixth Sense came out only a year before Memento, so it’s reasonable to assume that Nolan had only absorbed its influence after Memento’s release.) Nolan’s surprise, this time, is that Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) has been sharing a life with an identical twin, an arduous and painful endeavor for both men undertaken for the single-minded purpose of enabling impressive magic tricks. This shocking truth is the most extreme example yet of the desperate measures to which the competing magicians in the film go to best each other, so the twist adds to the central thematic drama, rather than nullifying it. Therefore, as with The Sixth Sense, we continue to appreciate the full storyline, and we benefit from seeing The Prestige again, even with all the knowledge the twist bestows.

———————————————-

I think I’ve laid out a pretty sharp demarcation between the two groups of twist-featuring films I provided in the beginning of this piece. Nevertheless, most moviegoers enjoy all of these six films, so it’s worth speculating on why we enjoy twists so much in general, even when they come at our own expense and add nothing to the movie’s themes or meaning.

I suppose it’s because it’s fun to be in on something. It’s fun to leave the theater with a secret—a secret known to only those who have seen the movie. It’s fun to observe, firsthand, a newbie gasp as you did: although I’ve repeatedly noted the pointlessness of re-watching the negative examples in this piece, I admit that seeing a friend’s confusion turn to understanding (when you’ve understood all along) can be a real thrill.

These enjoyments, though, are out of the realm of art or even the realm of entertainment. Their value is more akin to practical jokes, to the gag-type pleasures of the world. Recommending Shutter Island, The Usual Suspects, or Memento is like offering a handshake with a buzzer attached to your palm; watching these films for the first time is like going in for the shake and getting zapped yourself. Is it fun? For many, yes. But is it greatness? Is it genius? Let’s not get carried away.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more about Christopher Nolan flicks, check out my explanation of Inception.

Categories
Commentary and Essays

Movie Review: The Trump Presidency

-Originally published April 2020

The new film, The Trump Presidency (2017), melodramatically set to be released just a day before the imminent inauguration of Mr. Trump, is ostensibly a sort of liberal nightmare, a speculative epic that imagines our soon-to-be president’s very worst traits careening the nation toward catastrophe and devastation. Though it benefits from fine performances and at times wild creativity, I found it tasteless, monotonous, overlong, and worst of all, implausible.

Even given Mr. Trump’s faults—and, as any objective observer knows by now, there are many—the movie simply fails to project a feasible vision for our country’s next four years, instead bouncing from one impossible episode to the next. In one sequence, for instance, now-President Trump openly threatens witnesses deposed by a special prosecutor about Russian involvement in the 2016 election—and indeed publicly berates the prosecutor himself—while suffering no legal or even political consequences. While this is dramatic and at times entertaining, I fail to see how congressional Republicans and even conservative journalists, most of whom are good, upstanding people, would stay silent in such a scenario; it’s as if White House activity in The Trump Presidency occurs within a vacuum, isolated from the checks that would certainly reign in or, if necessary, punish such behavior.

But this is just one ludicrous chapter among many. Other subplots, written evidently for sensationalism rather than conceivability, include the president having paid off a porn star (the week before election day, of course), who then graphically details their affair on, of all programs, 60 Minutes; his personal lawyer going to prison in connection with the same scheme; the government being shut down for a month with no apparent objective or result; whimsical nuclear threats being made toward multiple countries; and the president demanding that a vulnerable foreign government pretend to investigate Joe Biden to preempt his supposed 2020 candidacy (Trump, it should be noted, is subsequently impeached for this—but oddly, no one in the film seems to care).

Other imagined moments, especially those driven by Trump’s racial insensitivity, feel more authentic given his campaign rhetoric in 2016, but these, too, come off as overdone and ham-handed. Early in the film, a deadly neo-nazi-style rally—chillingly filmed—leaves the nation wounded, and Trump predictably fails the test of leadership. But rather than use the scene to develop the nuances of Trump’s ideology and personal flaws, the movie portrays him as almost a spokesman of the rally, robbing the moment of the poignancy it deserves. And later, when the administration sloppily attempts to enact the harsh anti-immigration measures it promised during the campaign—an admittedly inevitable moment—children and parents are subjected to treatment the likes of which aren’t fully describable here, but which, I’m not so cynical to doubt, would be swiftly curtailed by better heads if they were ever put into practice.

The film is ultimately a character study about a man, Donald J. Trump, fueled by petulance and narcissism. Indeed, his obsession with negative press coverage provides the true arc of its narrative. In the opening, Trump’s press secretary lies about the attendance of Trump’s inauguration, setting the tone for a barrage of chaotic misinformation—dubbed, in perhaps the film’s signature scene, as “alternative facts” by Kellyanne Conway—that only intensifies throughout Trump’s aforementioned misadventures in office. This quixotic quest is aided by the personalities at Fox News, who, in an impressive, dystopian twist, are seen not only to advance a pro-Trump narrative, but also at times to generate alarming policy ideas that Trump quickly adopts. (It appears that in this movie’s peculiar universe, the President has no more pressing responsibilities than to endlessly watch cable news.)

By the finale, the nation reaps the consequences of Trump’s addiction to convenient untruths, as he characteristically underplays a larger-than-life virus and blunders his way through the ensuing crisis, contributing to wide scale death and an economic meltdown. I found this an interesting, if overly fantastic ending, one that expands the film into a parable of sorts: a warning of the dangers of veering too far from facts and reality in our ever more personalized media bubbles.

Nevertheless, this idea drowns in chaos and spectacle; this film lacks the subtlety characteristic of better material. Mr. Trump will certainly have his failures in office, as all presidents do, but a portrayal as exaggerated as this accomplishes little, other than to aid those who would criticize his vocal opponents as hysterics.

I am no hysteric. I, for one, wish Mr. Trump success in his endeavors to improve our country for all Americans. As this is 2017, and none of these events have happened or will happen, now that I’ve finished writing this review I plan to go to the gym; and later I’ll meet my friends at the bar to watch a game; and tomorrow I’ll go to work at the hospital where I, of course, am completely safe; and this weekend I’ll see my grandparents; and I’ll continue to duly appreciate, as I often do, that most of the people in my life are healthy, employed, and out of harm’s way.

Yes, it’s a good time to be an American—don’t let the worriers get you down.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more on horror films, see my explanation of The Shining