BABY DRIVER (2017)
Someone
please remind me to never again trust movie critics—especially when they are
writing about summer films.
Professional reviewers face that interminable wait
between the Oscar-bait of December and Memorial Day, when Hollywood restarts
its engine and releases films it actually believes more than a handful of
people want to watch. By June, critics are desperate to like something…anything;
which brings us to “Baby Driver,” a pretentious, simple-minded attempt to make
crime cool again.
Ansel Elgort,
an actor-musician-celebrity known to the under-25 crowd, plays Baby, (hip name,
right?) a spectacular driver who rarely takes his ear buds out even as he’s
recklessly evading authorities after a bank robbery. Baby’s participation in
these criminal endeavors is excused as he owes the crime boss (Kevin Spacey)
money, forcing him into his getaway-driver role.
British writer-director
Edgar Wright (“Shaun of the Dead,” “The World’s End”) front-loads the sympathy
factor for Baby—necessary since the youngster is helping facilitate robbery and
murder—by making him the guardian of an elderly black man who is
wheelchair-bound and deaf. Seriously. He probably also helps little old ladies
across the street. This movie requires you to check expectations of seeing
anything resembling real life at the theater door.
Just in case you felt the film was short on clichés, Baby
falls in love on first sight with a blonde, naïve waitress (a bland Lily James).
But his real love seems to be his tunes,
an eclectic collection spanning the last 40 years of pop, which is both Baby’s
and the movie’s soundtrack.
The main crew working for Spacey is as
skeptical of Baby as I was. Jamie Foxx plays the hot-tempered Bats, who trusts
no one, especially the oddball Baby, while Buddy (Jon Hamm) and his much
younger girlfriend Darling (Eiza Gonzalez) are poor imitations of druggies
fueling their habit. All are cold-blooded killers who take out police, civilians
and each other without remorse (including a gun-runner played deliciously by 1970s
legend, songwriter Paul Williams!).
But as the
bullets fly, Baby just keeps groovin’ to his tunes, blocking out reality for
himself and the audience.
GET OUT (2017)
An inventive
cocktail of racial stereotypes and gory horror has turned this goofy,
over-the-top African-American nightmare into the most talked-about movie of
2017.
Writer-director
Jordan Peele leaves the message of the story ambivalent, easier for viewers to
inject their own viewpoint onto the film. Is it a satire of black paranoia
about white racism? A commentary on the real fears young black men face in
America? An attack on black men who date white women? Or just a feature-length “SNL”-style
skit parodying the inability of blacks and whites to relate?
The film begins
as an updated version of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” as Rose (Allison
Williams) has invited Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), her new boyfriend, to her parents
country home, insisting that they won’t care that he’s black.
From the
start, it’s clear to Chris, and the audience, that the parents (Bradley
Whitford and Catherine Keener) are trying way too hard to be accepting. Yet
never, for a second, do they stop making reference to his race.
After even
stranger encounters with the black nanny and a black handyman (coincidence? I
think not….), Rose’s crazed brother and a very odd late night conversation with
Rose’s mother, Chris knows he should get out. But, of course, he sticks around;
it’s all just his imagination, his girlfriend convinces him.
The next day,
the parents host their annual neighborhood gather, bringing dozens of wealthy
white folks who all want to meet Chris. It’s not long before true motivations
are exposed and the horror shifts from psychological to bloodletting.
Kaluuya and
Williams aren’t very convincing as the newly in-love couple, both actors
lacking the ability to command a scene. Saving the movie is comedian LilRel Howery
playing Rod, Chris’ best friend, a TSA agent, who, through a series of phone
calls, keeps warning his friend about various conspiracies about whites. It’s
one of the funniest “best friend” performances I’ve seen in years; he turns
almost every line into a laugh-out-loud moment.
Peele,
previously a TV writer and actor, has impressed Hollywood with his directing
debut, and the movie’s $200 million plus box office take. To me, he overplays
his hand in the film’s second half, as the story dips into bad 1950s
comedy-horror plotting and then resorts to the horror-film staple of turning a
mild-mannered hero into a killing machine.
But “Get Out”
has clearly hit a nerve with filmgoers simply by looking at race relations
through an unconventional lens. And, unlike in real life, the good guys get to
win.
THE BEGUILED (2017)
For over 40
years, the 1971 version of this Civil War tale of sexual politics has been
regularly playing on television. Yet, writer-director Sofia Coppola, whose
continuing career as a major filmmaker leaves me baffled, felt it deserved a
new version, one that is more ambiguous, less fun and rather pointless.
I’m not fan of
the Don Siegel-directed 1971 film, which is remembered only because it stars
Clint Eastwood, but it fit into the American cinema’s attempt, from the late 1960s
through the ‘70s, to explore long-suppressed sexuality and the deep-seated
connection between sex and violence.
What Coppola
had in mind with this remake is anyone’s guess—L.A. Times critic Justin Chang
writes that she’s trying “to capture the tricky, elusive interplay of
heterosexual longings in close quarters.” Well, right, but do we really need to
repair back 150 years to enlighten audiences about sexual mores?
The story
begins when a young girl, living at a Virginia girls’ school not far from the
front lines of the war, finds an injured Union soldier (Colin Farrell) and
brings him back to the home. Headmaster Martha (a chilly Nicole Kidman) decides
to let him stay until he’s healed, rather than turn him over to Southern troops.
It doesn’t take
long before he’s sweet talking all the girls, especially the needy Edwina (the
always superb Kirsten Dunst), the school’s teacher; and flirty teen Alicia
(Elle Fanning).
The central
plot turn doesn’t offer the malevolence that was quite clear in Siegel version
of Thomas Cullinan’s novel, making the characters’ motivations in the last act
of this new version confusing, at times arbitrary.
I have no idea
why Coppola earned the best directing award at the Cannes Film Festival for
this; the production is poorly paced and indifferently acted (Farrell doesn’t
seem to have a clue as to who his character is), while the conclusion is drained
of any potential drama. Somehow, Coppola failed to improve upon an unexceptional
70s film.
THE CONSTANT NYMPH
(1943)
We all
complain about contemporary Hollywood’s obsession with remakes, but when this
adaptation of British novelist Margaret Kennedy’s 1928 book was released, it
was already the third film version of the story.
Charles
Boyer, one of the era’s top romantic figures, plays Lewis Dodd, an iconoclastic
composer whose mentor (Montagu Love) has three daughters Lewis dotes on. But
it’s the middle teen daughter, convincingly played by 26-year-old Joan
Fontaine, who is seriously in love with the dashing, much older man.
The
relationship becomes complex when he marries her cousin (Alexis Smith) after
the girls, left homeless when the father dies, are taken in by a rich, if
inconsiderate uncle (Charles Coburn).
You can
guess most of the plot after Dodd marries the cousin and Fontaine’s Tessa tries
to hide her continuing devotion to him. But Fontaine never is anything less
than touching in her portrayal of the love-sick girl. Nothing is quite as
heartbreaking as unrequited love and this is one of the best depictions of it
from a female point of view.
The film is a
first-rate Warner Bros. production, featuring superb acting by the entire cast,
elegant directing by Edmund Goulding (“Grand Hotel,” “The Razor’s Edge”), a
thoughtful screenplay by Kathryn Scola (“Baby Face,” “Female”) and a memorable
score by legendary film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. There is something
about a fabulously made studio film that more than compensates for story flaws
or creaky ideals.
Fontaine, one
of the most striking and naturalistic actress of her time, was in the midst of
her most successful run. In 1940, she was the second Mrs. de Winter in Alfred
Hitchcock’s masterpiece “Rebecca,” then won the 1941 Oscar for her role
opposite Cary Grant, again for Hitchcock, in “Suspicion.” The same year as
“Constant Nymph,” she played the title role in “Jane Eyre.” Later in the
decade, she starred in the romantic classic “Letter to an Unknown Woman.”
After the 1940s,
the good roles dried up for Fontaine and she spent most of the second part of
her career in television, better known as bitter rival to her sister Olivia de Havilland
(who recently celebrated her 101st birthday), than for her own
career. But at her best, in the right role, she was her sister’s equal, and
that was especially true during the 1940s.
THE LOVERS (2017)
This film about
a married couple hiding affairs is among the most half-baked, misguided and tin-eared
attempts to examine middle age I’ve endured in a long time. About as authentic
as a Pixar animation and acted with the kind of off-handed, stagy realism that
seeps the energy and tension out of the story, the film can’t even be saved by
the presence of Debra Winger.
In her first
major role (well, I guess it’s major) since 1995’s “Forget Paris,” the
62-year-old actress, once proclaimed the best of her generation, plays Mary,
whose longtime marriage to Michael has hit the rocks awhile ago. Michael,
played by stage actor Tracy Letts is having an affair with an emotional dance
instructor (Melora Walters) while Mary has taken up with a serious novelist
(Aiden Gillen). That they both have sought out artistic types must mean
something, but I don’t know what.
More
depressing than this couple having lost interest in one another is that these ongoing
affairs are not much more compelling. The script offers little to show that any
of these relationships are either good or bad—neither Mary nor Michael exhibit
enough personality to make you believe they were ever happy people or even
would take the initiative to engage in an affair.
Writer-director
Azazel Jacobs (“Terri”) has confused tedious realism with insight and truth;
the film plays like (but wasn’t) an overly earnest theater piece poorly
translated to the screen.
The big plot
turn comes when the pair admit to the affairs and—who would have guessed—fall
in love with one another. While love is not to be understood, neither are these
characters; their silence speaks not volumes, but underwritten shallowness.
Letts, who won
the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his play “August: Osage County,” could have used
some of that script’s over-heated emotions, while Winger seemed at times lost, as
if she was reading the lines for the first time.
20TH CENTURY
WOMEN (2016)
This film
belongs to a very distinctive sub-set of coming-of-age pictures revolving
around a dysfunctional family, such as “The Squid and the Whale,” “The Royal Tenenbaums”
and “Running with Scissors.”
Writer-director
Mike Mills, who earlier tapped his life story in “Beginners,” about his
75-year-old father coming out of the closet, chronicles a childhood defined by
Dorothea, his free-spirited, outspoken mother
The Mills
stand-in, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), is a 15-year-old adult who has little
connection to contemporaries, pointedly shown when he tried to explain feminism
to his teen mates.
Struggling
to survive as a single mom, Dorothea (Annette Bening, who has this type of
woman down pat) fills their run-down Santa Barbara house with like-minded
types: an ex-hippie, jack of all trades drop-out (Billy Crudup) and a purple-haired
punker (Greta Gerwig, of course). Along with neighbor Julie (Elle Fanning),
closer to Jamie’s age, who sneaks into his room each night to share
(platonically) his bed, they shape the person Jamie will become.
The problem
with the film is that the characters are so aware of their “role” in the theme
that I couldn’t buy them as real people. Everyone is working so hard to
understand each other that I had to wonder what planet they arrived from. This
certainly wasn’t the 1970s I remember.
Mills also
strains to tell us everything about everyone, muddying the focus. But he does
create (or re-create) a great character in the mother, and has found the
perfect actress to inhabit her. Bening’s Dorothea can be suffocating one minute
and totally distracted the next. She’s the center of everything in this film. (But
I really didn’t need to see her attempting to understand punk—a creaky
cliché.)
Fanning is
equally impressive as Julie, casually capturing the fragile, pseudo-confidence
that defines so many teens. I actually thought this was Dakota while I was
watching the movie; both sisters have the potential to be exceptional
actresses. Hopefully they get along better than de Havilland and Fontaine (see
above).
While there is
much to like about “20th Century Women,” the nonstop quirky events, fine
on their own, become tiresome clichés as they pile up. Like most memoirists,
Mills gives us more information than we need and lets his own sentiments
clutter up a story that, in one way or another, everyone can relate to.
THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN
(2016)
Maybe the only
genre of movies that has improved in the past 15 years has been the high school
film. For years, movies about teens were nothing more than exploitation
pictures showing bad behavior and attractive youths.
Recently,
movies such as “Easy A,” “The Spectacular Now,” “Me and Earl and the Dying
Girl,” and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” have elevated the genre. Suddenly
Hollywood screenwriters are interested in the reality of high school kids.
This film can be
added to the list, mostly because of an exceptional performance by Hailee Steinfeld.
Just seven years ago she broke out as a star playing the spunky Mattie in the
Coen brothers remake of “True Grit.” Now 20, she plays Nadine, whose life takes
a tailspin when her best (and only) friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) takes
up with her seemingly perfect, popular older brother (Blake Jenner).
Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig, in her directing debut, clearly
remembers the hormone-fueled emotions and bad decisions of those teen years, portraying
them without sentiment or need to exaggerate. The modern world has filled those
last two years of high school with adult-level stress as teens must make
critical choices that will affected the rest of their life, while facing
hard-to-ignore temptations and the expectation to get everything right; quite a
plateful for so-called children. It sometimes seems like a miracle that most teens
emerge from it sane.
While the
usual complications ensue in the movie—lunchtime drama, an unlikely boyfriend,
pursuit of the cool guy, self realization—it doesn’t touch much on education.
Nadine has little stress from academics and seems to have zero extra-curriculars;
she seems headed for community college, even though she’s portrayed as more
thoughtful and mature than her classmates.
The only
aspect of the film I didn’t like was the clichéd role of her mother (a
scenery-chewing Kyra Sedgwick), who is so self-indulgent that she’s barely
aware of her children (the father died of a heart attack when the children were
small).
For once,
teachers aren’t portrayed as clueless bystanders. A perfectly cast Woody
Harrelson plays Nadine’s favorite teacher, the sarcastic Mr. Bruner. She interrupts
his lunches on a regular basis to rant about her tragic life (yes, I can
relate) and he actually offers some good advice. Hey, we try.
CORRECTION—In one of my more embarrassing typos,
I misspelled Warren Beatty’s name in my review of “Rules Don’t Apply.” I’m not
sure if that quite matches his kerfuffle at the Oscars, but it is pretty close.
