November-December 2021

WEST SIDE STORY (2021)

    On the face of it, the idea of remaking a film that won 10 Oscars, including best picture, seems foolish at best. Yet again, the original movie version, based on the landmark Broadway production, was released 60 years ago. It’s really no different than staging another production of Shakespeare, which, of course, is exactly what “West Side Story” is: “Romeo and Juliet” relocated in 1950s New York.

     The result surpasses the overrated original as Steven Spielberg and his team deliver a film version this musical—some would argue the greatest in Broadway history—deserves. Supported by hypnotic choreography by Justin Peck (of the New York City Ballet), incredibly detailed production design by Adam Stockhausen, two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s colorful day scenes and noirish nighttime and a script by Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”) that grounds the characters in real life, Spielberg has brought to life what is probably the best film musical since “Cabaret” (1972).

     Of course, the foundation was laid by some of the greatest talents in musical theater history: Leonard Bernstein’s music, as essential to America as the National Anthem, Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics of impossible love and racial unrest, Jerome Robbins’ energetic choreography and Arthur Laurents’ story. Theirs was a musical of its time, dealing with contemporary issues as a white gang (The Jets) fights against newly arrived Puerto Rican community and its young toughs (The Sharks) for control of an area of Manhattan in the process of being razed to build Lincoln Center.

     In the new film, Ansel Elgot (“Fault in Our Stars,” “Baby Driver”), plays Tony (the Romeo stand-in), fresh out of jail and trying to stay clear of the delinquent activies of the Jets. But he attends a community dance staged to bring whites and Latinos together and falls in love with Maria (Rachel Zegler, in her film debut), the Puerto Rican sister of the Sharks’ leader Bernando (David Alvarez of Showtime’s “American Rust”).  

     You need not have ever heard of “West Side Story” to know how this will turn out, but the dramatic staging and smoothly integrated dancing and singing elevated this simple story. And what a collection of songs this Bernstein-Sondheim collaboration created: “Maria,” “America,” “Tonight,” “I Feel Pretty,” and the soundtrack’s masterpiece “Somewhere,” poignantly sung by 90-year-old Rita Moreno, the Broadway legend who won an Oscar for her role as Anita in the 1961 version (Ariana DeBose shines in the role in the new film.)

   As important a filmmaker as Spielberg has been over the past 45 years, he’s rarely moved the camera as much as he does here. In an obvious homage to “Citizen Kane,” the film opens with a traveling shot over the construction site and then rises over a fence, signaling that this world is on the edge of extinction.

     Unlike the original Tony and Maria (Richard Breymer and Natalie Wood—as a Puerto Rican!), Elgot and Zegler come off as real people, sincere in both their love and attempts to bring their feuding communities together. In this version, the Jets (led by a snarling Mike Faist as Riff) and the Sharks actually seem dangerous, even as they do pirouettes.

     This Spielberg-Kushner version doesn’t shy away from the racism of the Jets; these are misguided, hate-filled young men whose offspring are still fighting against immigrants and those who don’t look or act like them.

      So yes, it was a good idea to refilm this essential musical, getting it right on the second try and introducing its still timely themes to a new generation of viewers.

 

THE POWER OF THE DOG (2021)

    If you don’t mind movies that raise questions, about the story and characters, without answering them you’ll appreciate Jane Campion’s new film, a Western set in 1925 Montana.

    Filled with exquisitely composed visas shot by cinematographer Ari Wegner, the film seems influenced by Terrence Malick’s work, his early film “Days of Heaven” and his more recent work that attempts to present psychologically complex characters with little dialogue. For me, “Power of the Dog” tries too hard to be murky and vaguely symbolic, filled with characters whose actions and reactions remain unexplained.

    Benedict Cumberbatch plays Phil Burbank, an Eastern educated man who has dedicated his life to running a cattle ranch with his brother George (perfectly cast Jesse Plemons). It’s hard to imagine them as brothers; Phil never stops bullying and berating his brother, whose calm demeanor feels almost ghostly.

    The dynamics change, but not much, when George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who runs a restaurant in a nearby town. (I wanted to know what happened with her business when she moves in with her husband, but that was never addressed.)

     The film kicks into full Freudian when Rose’s son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) returns from medical school. A rail-thin, well-scrubbed effeminate young man in a world of tough-guy cowboys, he’s endured a lifetime of harassment and it continues at the ranch. But what is also clear, almost from the opening frames, is that Phil is a closeted gay whose belligerence can be traced to his frustrations over his sexuality. Yet, why, as a gay man in the 1920s, did he return to Montana instead of finding a freer world on the East Coast?

     A friendship emerges from the bullying between Phil and Peter, which seems destined to end badly. (The picture’s much-discussed ending—no matter how you interpret it—doesn’t bring much clarity to the script.)

    One of my central problems with the film is Rose and her decent into depression and alcoholism after she marries George. Here is a woman who lost her husband, put up with ornery cowpokes in her business and dealt with what had to be a fraught childhood of her son, yet finding herself between her passive husband and his snarling brother descends into darkness.

     Dunst, one of the finest actresses of her generation, does her best to work out her character, but she’s let down by Campion’s script (based on a novel by Thomas Savage)

     Cumberbatch, as usual, offers a memorable performance as this deeply conflicted man who seems to relish berating everyone who comes near him, including his parents and brother. Though I’m partial to his hypnotic portrayal of Julian Assange in “The Fifth Estate” (2013), the British actor gives his best film performance as the intensely sad Phil.

     The 25-year-old Smit-McPhee, an Australian who played Viggo Mortenson’s son in the desolate “The Road” (2009) and was Nightcrawler in a couple of X-Men films, gives a breakthrough performance as Peter, a teen whose outward appearance belies what is going on in his head.

     Campion, the second woman to receive a best director nomination, in 1994 for “The Piano” (the first was given to Lina Wertmuller, who just recently died at age 93), hadn’t made a feature film since 2009’s “Bright Star” and certainly has failed to live up to expectations for her career. Positive critical appraisal for “Power of Dog” seems to guarantee she and the cast will be contenders during the award’s season, but, for me, the film falls short of the basics: telling a clear, interesting story with understandable characters.

 

DEAN STOCKWELL  (1936-2021)

    In the big picture of Hollywood cinema, Dean Stockwell was a minor figure. But I’d argue that if he hadn’t turn his focus to television work, he might have been one of the leading actors of the 1960s and 70s.

    Stockwell, who died at 85 in November, was the son of a pair of Broadway actors, which led to his film debut at age 9 in the Gregory Peck movie, “The Valley of Decision.” Before he was 14, he was in the war musical “Anchors Aweigh,” the Oscar-winning “Gentleman’s Agreement,” and as the title character in both “The Boy With Green Hair” and the adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim.” 

    But it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he looked to be right there with Paul Newman (who was 10 years older) as the most talented young actor of the era.

     In “Compulsion,” an intense courtroom picture based on the famous Leopold and Loeb murder case, he plays an easily manipulated, sensitive student who comes under the spell of a psychotic classman (Bradford Dillman). These wealthy young men arrogantly believe they are too smart to be convicted of murder. It’s a memorable performance, which he followed by playing a pair of sons trying to escape oppressive fathers, in “Sons and Lovers” (1960) and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962). Stockwell holds his own with British acting legends Trevor Howard and then Ralph Richardson.

      In the brilliantly acted Eugene O’Neill adaptation by director Sidney Lumet, Stockwell plays Edmund, the sickly younger son, who goes mano-a-mano with brother Jamie (Jason Robards) in some of the most emotional scenes ever put on film.  

     Rather than becoming a star, he turned into a familiar face on episodical TV, occasionally popping up in counterculture movies, including “Psych-Out,” “The Last Movie” and “The Loners.” Near the end of the 1970s, he quit the business and worked in real estate.

     Not until 1984, in German filmmaker Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas” did he reestablish himself as a mainstream movie guy. He was also in David Lynch’s “Dune” that year, which led to being cast as the twisted Ben, part of Dennis Hopper’s hopped-up crew in Lynch’s masterpiece “Blue Velvet” (1986).  His lip-syncing of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” remains one of the creepiest moments in recent film history.

    Stockwell became a go-to character actor at this point, peaking in 1988 with two fabulous performances, as mobster Tony “The Tiger” Russo in “Married to the Mob” (which scored him an Oscar nomination) and as Howard Hughes in Francis Coppola’s underrated “Tucker: The Man and His Dream.”

      The following year he was tapped to co-star in the TV series “Quantum Leap,” which became a huge hit, continuing until 1993. Though his last memorable performance was as the judge in Coppola’s “The Rainmaker” (1997), he continued to act in both TV and film until 2015.

     Of course, could have beens/should have beens are a dime a dozen in show business, but few 20^th Century actors have shown such screen presence and understanding of creating characters as Dean Stockwell displayed in a 70-year career.   

   

BELFAST (2021)

    After a 32-year career as an actor-director, 60-year-old Kenneth Branagh has tapped into his own childhood, 1969 Belfast amid the Northern Ireland Troubles, for his most recent picture.

     Though the black-and-white remembrance has its share of heartfelt moments and touching performances, the film’s episodical script and overuse of uplifting pop music undercuts the serious nature of the situation faced by the story’s young family.

     The nine-year-old Buddy (a very natural Jude Hill) seems to have an idyllic life contained in his close-knit Belfast neighborhood until the violence of the centuries-old feud between Catholics and Protestants erupts anew.

      Between the scenes of menace, Branagh’s script offers the usual coming of age moments for his young stand-in---a classroom crush, bullied into shoplifting, talks with Pop, his grandfather, superbly portrayed by Ciarán Hinds---until the family must consider leaving the only home they’ve ever known.

     Too often, Branagh relies on the comforting spell of the songs of Irish blues master Van Morrison to camouflage the story’s shortcomings in connecting disconnected scenes.

     Belfast native Hinds, who has been a reliable supporting player on both side of the Atlantic since the mid-1990s, shines as Buddy’s grandfather, the lived-in face of 20^th Century Ireland. As his wise-cracking wife, Judi Dench, as always, delivers a perfectly calibrated performance. Less memorable are Buddy’s parents, played by Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe.

     Branagh has never realized his promise as an actor-director predicted by his “Henry V” (1989) when he was 29, and then “Hamlet” (1996), both among the finest Shakespeare adaptations put on film. In recent years he’s directed “Thor,” “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” and a remake of “Murder on the Orient Express.”  In the last 20 years, Branagh has had more success finding interesting character roles, including his doomed detective in the British TV series “Wallander,” probably his finest work as an actor; as Laurence Olivier in “My Week with Marilyn” (2011); the commander in “Dunkirk” (2017) and the despicable Sator in “Tenet” (2020).

      Though it falls short of its ambitions, “Belfast” is probably director Branagh’s best film since his Shakespeare movies, and, I suspect, will reap plenty of nominations come Oscar time.

 

PASSING (2021)

    Actress Rebecca Hall, daughter of British theater director Peter Hall, seems an unlikely candidate to bring to the screen Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel about the lives of two upper-class Black women. In fact, Hall, in recent years, discovered that her American mother was part African American, who, in some ways, spent her life “passing.”

     This thoughtful, understated picture, appropriately shot in glistening black-and-white, begins when Irene (a quietly intense Tessa Thompson) pushes her bonnet to cover half her face and gains entrance to a high-end café in downtown Manhattan, far from her Harlem home. There she is spotted by an old friend from school, the fearless, outgoing Clare (Ruth Negga) who is not only passing for white in the café, but has married a white man who remains clueless about her race. (Though he has noticed her growing “darker” as she ages and has an offensive pet name for her.)

     While Irene’s life in her large home with a housekeeper, her doctor husband and two children seems ideal, especially when considering what most African Americans faced in 1920s America, she feels like something is missing. When Clare becomes part of their lives—her husband seems to constantly be away on business---Irene’s feelings of inadequacy grow as her husband and children embrace the charming Clare.

      Despite the lack of plot (and actually little about passing), Hall’s adaptation offers a fascinating psychological study of the African American life, focused on the two women who have sought out happiness in very different ways.

     Both actresses are superb. Thompson, who plays Michael B. Jordan’s girlfriend in the “Creed” films, has the more complex role as she navigates Irene’s path out of her depression. Negga, who in “Loving” (2016) played a Black woman whose legal fight to marry a white man was a landmark case in the 1960s, is perfect as the life of the party who, unlike Irene, lives life one day at a time.  

     Hall seemed destined for stardom after her turn in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (2008) and the British TV thriller “Red Riding 1974” (2009), but nothing much happened for her after that. She received good notices for “The Night House,” a thriller released earlier this year. If her work behind the camera in “Passing” is any indication, she may have just carved out a new career.      

    

HOUSE OF GUCCI (2021)

    Ridley Scott, while one of Hollywood’s most accomplished filmmakers, is hardly a stranger to over-heated melodrama. “The Gladiator” (2000), “American Gangster” (2007) and “The Counselor” (2013) are among his films that have ratcheted up the histrionics, which makes him the perfect director for this barely believable, hot-blooded revenge tale of the Italian fashion family, the Guccis.

    Lady Gaga, still a work-in-progress as an actress but with screen presence to spare, plays Patrizia Reggiani, the ambitious daughter of a small-town trucking firm owner who sets her sights on Maurizio (Adam Driver), the wide-eyed, law-student son of Roldolfo Gucci (a corpse-like Jeremy Irons), half-owner of the fashion house.  

    Against the family’s wishes, they marry. Then, seeing an opening, Maurizio’s uncle Aldo Gucci (perfectly cast Al Pacino, back in “Godfather” milieu) bring the newly minted lawyer into the fold, looking to undercut his brother.

     The film is so overstuffed with plotting that it would take longer to explain than the picture’s excessive 2 hours and 38 minutes running time.

     Jared Leto provides the most entertaining performance of the picture, unrecognizable under heavy makeup playing Pacino’s comically inept son who longs to have his own fashion brand. 

     He soon finds himself—this played out in the 1980s and 90s—in the middle of a family-crushing takeover scheme set in motion by Patrizia and Maurizio.

     Scott’s film plays like a condensed version of a streaming series, with many crucial details left out or unexplained, but the director, as always, keeps the action moving and guides his actors to spirited performances.  

      The script, by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna based on a book by Sara Gay Forden, sometimes struggles to make sense of the idiocy of the truth, but this isn’t a documentary. It’s an Italian soap opera as seen through the equally extravagance of Hollywood.   

 

SPENCER (2021)

    I’m not sure what to make of this psychological study of Princess Diana, circa 1991, ten years into her misguided marriage into the suffocating world of the British Royal Family.

   I’m not even sure how to label the film: deep-dish fan fiction? A metaphorical diagnose of a troubled celebrity? Certainly, as I’ve argued for decades, most feature films about real people or events should be viewed as an uncomfortable mixture of truth and fiction, in the best-case scenario, uncovering the underlining truths without becoming a documentary.

     Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who made the compelling “Jackie,” starring Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy, along with screenwriter Steven Knight (“Dirty Pretty Things,” “Eastern Promises”) paint a disturbing picture of 30-year-old Diana (an impressive Kristen Stewart) unraveling during a Christmas gathering at the royal’s country estate, Sandringham. The stress of her husband’s affair, her nonexistent relationship with the Queen, her eating disorder, her conversations with 16^th Century Queen Anne Boleyn and her frustration of playing the good wife and mother all culminate in this weekend filled with traditions going back hundreds of years.

     While there are a few scenes in which Diana interacts directly with Charles (Jack Farthing) or his mother (Stella Gonet), the royals are mostly seen in the background as the camera swirls around the Princess, seeing everything from her POV. She does confide in her dresser (the always wonderful Sally Hawkins), a sympathetic chef (Sean Harris) and earns a bit of respect from the steely head butler (Timothy Spall, who’s become the go-to old guard Brit), but the script is much more concern with what goes on inside Diana’s head. Adding to the Freudian reading of her life, within walking distance from Sandringham is her childhood home, now boarded up and crumbling.

    But, and that’s a very serious “but,” the story is an invention of the filmmakers. Other than the basic premise that the royal family repairs to this country estate for the holiday, the film has little basis in fact, creating events and confrontations that might have happened, but probably didn’t, to represent how Diana saw her life, they think.

     I’m not sure if there’s real merit in this kind of fiction featuring real people. Yet my criticism may be biased.

       After watching “Spencer,” I thought about the classic bio-pics from the movie studio era that pretended to be telling the true story of athletes, politicians, soldiers, scientists and writers while spinning tall tales of flawless heroes. For some reason, I accept the fiction in these stories even when I know better, but expect something more in contemporary films.   

    Judged as a piece of fiction about a woman in crisis, “Spencer” is an inventive, insightful film; as a story of the late Ms. Spencer, who knows?

 

Photos:

Ariana DeBose and dancers in “West Side Story” (Twentieth Century Studios)

Dean Stockwell, right, with Jason Robards in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (Embassy Pictures)

Tessa Thompson in “Passing” (Netflix)