November 2022

TÁR  (2022)

      This film quickly establishes orchestral conductor Lydia Tár, whose distinguished career is chronicled in an on-stage interview with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik (as himself), as a self-assured, name-dropping intellectual who rarely censors her opinions, barley notices those who cater to her every whim (including an ambitious assistant played by Noemie Merlant) and enjoys being feared as she rushes through her life.

    In a seminar at The Juilliard School, Tár (a steely, strutting Cate Blanchett) berates a student composer while establishing the central question of the film: should artists be judged by their art or how they lived their lives?  After the young man informs her that he’s not interested in Bach because he was a straight white man who sired many children, Tár throws the same judgment back at him: if he creates some important music does he want it judged by its artistic worth or by his personal life?

      Unlike most American films, “Tár,” written and directed by Todd Field (“In the Bedroom,” “Little Children,”) focuses on seemingly mundane aspects of a life—long scenes of rehearsing Mahler’s 5^th with the Berlin Symphony, discussions with the conductor’s assistants and agent and complaining to her partner (Nina Hoss), who is the orchestra’s first violinist (read into that what you want).

     Nearly two hours into the film, rumblings of a plot being to stir when a video of her the Juilliard class (editing to make her look bigoted) surfaces and, simultaneously, a woman she had rejected for a symphony position, and may have had a relationship with, commits suicide.

    The filmmakers don’t push for a judgment on Tár; instead leaving the controversies she faces vague and unresolved. But what’s crystal clear is that Tár’s refusal to recognize the tenor of the times spells her doom. What you are allowed to say, do or write and how you respond to others has changed dramatically in the past 10 years.

     Just because she’s a self-described “U-haul lesbian” and a protégé of “Lenny” (legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein) doesn’t exempt her from the vagaries of societal expectations. Even her clumsy attempts to bring the orchestra’s new, young cellist (Sophie Kauer) into her orbit can be seen through two lenses. Is she a boss playing favorites in hopes of a sexual relationship or a woman searching for love?

     As much as I enjoyed this film, it requires hard work. Blanchett, giving an extraordinary performance, one of her best in a stellar career, rips through the musical-jargon filled dialogue in a no-nonsense, keep-up-if-you-can manner. At least a passing knowledge of classical music helps as nothing is explained.

     Tár’s fate and what it all means remains a bit of an unsolved puzzle right to the sad and shocking ending. (Some critics have speculated the final act is a dream.) 

      Writer-director Field hadn’t directed a film, nor acted in one, since 2006, having worked on a pair of high-profile novel adaptations that were never competed—Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” and Jonathan Franzen’s “Purity.” But, after his previous work and “Tár,” it’s clear he remains one of the cinema’s finest writers and most interesting filmmakers.

  

THE WOMAN KING (2022)

     Not long into watching this intense story of 19^th Century West African tribal warfare, I recognized its source—John Ford’s classic Westerns.

     That the film utilizes the format created by Ford and other 20^th Century directors of Westerns in no way diminishes what director Gina Prince-
Bythewood (“Love and Basketball”) and writers Dana Stevens and Maria Bello (yes, the actresses with her first writing credit) have accomplished here. As another cliché goes: there are no new stories, just new ways to reimagining them.

     The result is a first-rate picture, with closely observed characters, the usual generational conflicts and action sequences that makes Marvel movies look like video games for children.

     Viola Davis plays Gen. Nanisca, the John Wayne character, who leads the Dahomey tribe’s already legendary troop of female warriors. If she seems a bit old, at 57, for the part, she makes up for it with her fierce, determined attitude, a brutal back story and a take-no-prisoners stance.

    Of course there’s a neophyte member of the troop---Nawi (an excellent Thuso Mbedu)---who struggle to earn the respect of her elders but eventually becomes a key member of this impressive fighting force. (In the Ford films, John Agar would serve in this role.)

    And not leaving any element of classic storytelling out, there’s also a tough but beloved “drill sergeant”-type (think Ward Bond in a dozen films) played by Lashana Lynch, who whips the new recruits into shape.

     The reason behind the tribe’s reliance on women to fight their battles is that the slave trade has decimated the male population. The way that Prince-Blythewood deals with this issue turns what could have been an ordinary actioner into something more relevant. Not only does the film show the results of slavery at its source but also explores how the tribes themselves grew rich by selling off its population and those of its rivals captured in battle.

    The film pivots on the decision by the tribe (led by the King played by John Boyega) to either take the easy route to wealth and continue to supply the slavers or take a moral stand against it.

   It’s a story that has too long been ignored by Hollywood: looking at Africa in a real way (not the comic book version in “Black Panther”) where heroic and heartbreaking lives were playing out with equal drama to those in Europe or America.

    And it is, to some degree, based on real events. In the area that now is the country of Benin, adjacent to Nigeria, a feared group of woman warriors fought many vicious battles with neighboring tribes. Whether this tribe considered dropping out of the slave trade is most likely a stretch.

     Davis should score her fifth Oscar nomination and Mbedu, a South African actress in her second feature, also deserves consideration. Equally impressive is Polly Morgan’s vivid, dexterous camera work.

   

JOE MACBETH (1955)

    I have seen plenty of film adaptations of “Macbeth,” including Roman Polanski’s and Orson Welles’ versions, Akira Kurosawa’s magnificent “Throne of Blood,” along with recent efforts featuring four of the best actors in film—Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand directed by Joel Coen and Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in Justin Kurzel’s film. But this 1950s noirish mob picture might be the most unusual and creative.

    Paul Douglas, best known for “Angels in the Outfield (1951) and “Clash by Night” (1952), plays Joe Macbeth, an underboss to the Duke. If you know your Shakespeare, it’s not hard to guess what Duke’s future holds.

     Interestingly, he’s stabbed to death while out for a swim near the estate Macbeth has taken over when he executes another mobster for Duke.

    There’s a Banquo (Sidney James as Banky)—Macbeth’s comrade in arms who ends up as a victim—and his son (a fiery Bonar Colleano), here a twentysomething mobster whose fate in the original play is vague. He plays a crucial role as an outspoken critic of the power-hunger Macbeth.

    And, of course there’s a Lady Macbeth, played by the underrated Ruth Roman (“Tomorrow Is Another Day,” “The Far County”), pushing the indecisive husband to take what the fortune teller (a feisty Minerva Pious), subbing for the witches, predicts.

    The strength of the picture is its screenplay by the great Philip Yordan, who had just won an Oscar for the Western “Broken Lance.” Yordan scripted some of the best films of the 1950s, including “Detective Story” (1951), “Johnny Guitar (1954) and “The Big Combo” (1955), “The Harder They Fall” (1956) and “God’s Little Acre” (1959). In “Joe Macbeth,” he deftly combines the film noir cliches with the Bard’s bloody tale.

    Director Ken Hughes, a Brit whose oddball career includes the inane musical “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (1968) and Mae West’s comeback attempt “Sextette” (1977), shows some stylish touches in the final sequence and makes interesting use of severe closeups, but most of the film looks like a TV production.

   This is very much a B-film, but offbeat enough to merit a look. Maybe the most interesting decision the filmmakers make is that no one in the film takes note of the parallels to the Scottish play. Not that the members of this crime group spent much time in English Lit, but surely someone would have noted their boss’ name as sounding somewhat familiar?

  

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (2022)

     The team that gave us “In Bruges,” one of the true gems of the last 20 years, reunite for this seemingly simple tale of a pair of friends who live on a desolate island off the coast of Ireland, circa 1920s.

    The leisurely picture grows repetitive after Colm (Brendan Gleeson) tells his long-time drinking buddy Padraic (Colin Farrell) that he no longer enjoys his company, demanding that he stop talking to him. Yet “Banshees” shines as a portrait of a world that no longer exists while exploring timeless issues of the importance of friendship and what constitutes a worthwhile life.

     Farrell, giving what may be the best performance of his career, and writer-director Martin McDonagh create a classic small-town character who lives for his afternoon beer and has little interest beyond his uneventful life (he resides with his unmarried sister and has a pet mule). Colm, a fiddle player who wants to write a piece of music that will outlive him, has grown tired of listening to Padraic’s nonsense and seeks peace.

     That conflict makes up almost the entirety of this episodical film. Yet it’s filled with hilarious, ridiculous and touching moments are just as impactful as the main plot, not unlike McDonagh’s last film, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

    While Gleeson has the less interesting role, he is, as in so many of his films, a charismatic force; in many scenes in “Banshees” just by sitting silently in his humble home. His 67-year-old face is like a map of Ireland.  

     Farrell, whose best work has mostly been done in little seen pictures including “Tigerland” (2000), “The New World” (2005), “In Bruges” and “The Lobster (2015), deserves Oscar consideration for his Padraic. You can sympathize with this limited, but good-hearted man while understand why Colm wants nothing to do with him. The sadness you see in his face as he keeps trying to resurrect their friendship is heartbreaking.

     Among those populating this rocky island are a nosey store owner, a bully of a policeman and his troubled son (a memorable Barry Keoghan), an elderly woman who could be related to one of Macbeth’s witches and Siobhan (Kerry Condon), Padraic patient sister who has dreams beyond the confines of Inisherin.

     The picture grows unnecessarily intense in the last act, a metaphor, I assume, for the unforgiving world they lived in, but breaking the comical magic it had built for the first hour or more. Yet the time spent with this collection of very recognizable and unforgettable characters makes up for the picture’s extremes.

 

BLONDE (2022)

     As someone who has never bought into the deification of Marilyn Monroe, I find myself in the surprising position of defending the reputation of the actress-model-celebrity against this bleak, disturbing profile.

     Joyce Carol Oates, among the finest novelists of the past 50 years, wrote the fictional account of Monroe’s life on which the film is based. In other words, the reader/viewer has no idea what parts of the profile are true and what are imaginary. Unless done as a satire, I’m not sure there’s much value in this approach to a life. And it becomes more troubling when acted out on film.

      Director Andrew Dominik (“The Assassination of Jesse James…”), who also adapted Oates’ novel, and actress Ana de Armas (“Knives Out,” “No Time to Die”) depict Marilyn as a socially inept, easily manipulated child-woman who, damaged by the absence of a father, never shows the ability to make the most basic of decisions about her life. Even when she’s discussing Chekhov with future husband Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody, billed as “The Playwright”), her eyes and voice indicate a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. To drive home her father issues, she calls both husbands “daddy.”

     “Blonde” touches some highlights of Monroe’s life, while skipping large, important periods, leaping from a childhood dealing with her insane mother (Julianne Nicholson, giving the film’s only believable performance) to her early film roles. The film erases her first marriage and her pre-Hollywood days, when, according to most accounts, Norma Jeane was a very normal young lady.

    While the film avoids showing her interactions with other actors, it portrays her first serious Hollywood relationship, a ménage à trios with Charlie Chaplin Jr. and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (reportedly, she dated both but not, as the movie depicts, at the same time). Later they are shown trying to blackmail her second husband, baseball great Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) with nude photos of Marilyn. In actuality, she had appeared naked in the first issue of Playboy magazine, a year before she married DiMaggio.

     But facts are secondary to “Blonde” as it tries to explain her journey through the sexism of the 1950s while documenting her inability to give birth despite various pregnancies. Surprisingly, only one scene shows the alleged relationship with President John Kennedy; by then she’s little more than a drugged-up rag doll, at least according to the film.

     The picture skips from the filming of “Some Like It Hot” (her best performance) to her final days in 1962, having ignored her work on “Monkey Business” (1952) opposite Cary Grant, “Bus Stop” (1956), “The Prince and the Showgirl” (1957) opposite Laurence Olivier (see “My Week with Marilyn” for what seems like a more believable portrayal) and “The Misfits” (1961), starring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. It seems obvious why the film ignores this period of her career: it contradicts the premise that she was falling apart, misused by Hollywood and incapable of simply doing her job.

      Overall, this is a cold and lifeless film that jumps from one bad moment to the next (usually ending with Marilyn topless). It’s popular to blame the studio system, run by misogynistic bullies, for the tragedies: Monroe, Judy Garland and a dozen other lesser knowns. Yet, as portrayed here, she would have lived a terrible life no matter what her profession, a teacher or CPA or sales clerk.

  

RAWHIDE (1951) and THE MAN FROM COLORADO (1948)

   From the late 1940s through the 1950s Westerns reached their apex, led by filmmakers John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. I recently saw two rarely shown cowboy pictures that may not be great films but deserve recognition as better than standard Hollywood horse opera.

   With “Rawhide” starring Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward, I assumed I would be seeing a cliché-filled story about a frontier romance but instead it’s an intense, brutal, psychological study that plays out more like the B-westerns of Boetticher and Randolph Scott than a picture by studio veteran Henry Hathaway and two star actors.

    Not long after Vinnie (Hayward) and a young child (it turns out to be her deceased sister’s) arrive at a remote stagecoach stop, Rafe, an escaped con (Hugh Marlowe, far from his usual urbane roles), and his gang kill the station manager (Edgar Buchanan) and take her and the assistant manager Tom (Power) prisoner. While they all wait for a gold shipment that Rafe plans to rob, the film plays out like a dusty version of “Key Largo,” a claustrophobic waiting game with Vinnie constantly under danger from the psychotic Tevis (Jack Elam, of course).      

    Cinematographer Milton Krasner (“All About Eve,” “Three Coins in the Fountain”) shoots the picture like a film noir, filled with interesting shadows and angles. This nail-biter was written by Dudley Nichols, one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood history, penning scripts for “The Informer” (1935), “Bringing Up Baby” (1938) and “Stagecoach” (1939), among dozens of others.

    Hathaway, a child actor in silents who was still directing in the 1970s, was best known for “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer” (1935) and “Kiss of Death” (1947) before this picture. Later, he directed parts of “How the West Was Won” (1962) and guided John Wayne to his best actor Oscar in True Grit” (1969).

      In “The Man from Colorado,” William Holden and Glenn Ford, Columbia Pictures twin stars of the 1940s and 50s, shared the bill, as they did in “Texas” (1941).

    It begins with a vicious scene of Northern troops, led by Ford’s Owen Devereaux, killing a regiment of Confederates after they raised the white flag. (We’ll ignore the fact that there actually weren’t any Civil War confrontations in Colorado.)

     Later, he’s appointed the region’s judge by the local silver baron (Ray Collins), who has taken over (many would say stolen) the stakes of dozens of men who volunteered to serve in Ford’s regiment. Though outrageous, it was legally sound—the men had failed to work the mines during a three-year period, so it was up for grabs.

     Holden plays Del Stewart, the more sensible best friend of Owen, who serves as the court’s Marshall. But it is a tenuous relationship as Owen’s wife (Ellen Drew) is coveted by Del, who also suspects that his friend suffers from mental problems.

     Never before have I seen a picture that addressed the possibility of Civil War vets suffering from battle fatigue or any type of post-war stress issues. Ford does a nice job of showing the Jekyll and Hyde nature of Owen as Del eventually takes sides with the victimized citizens against his friend and Collins’ greedy monopoly.

    Though B-movie director Henry Levin doesn’t bring much in the way of style to the film, it is well written by Robert Hardy Andrews and Ben Maddow from a story by Borden Chase (“Red River,” “Winchester ‘73”).

      Holden, of course, went on to become one of the most enduring stars of the cinema, winning a best actor Oscar for “Stalag 17” (1953) along with top lining four of the greatest films ever made, “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957), “The Wild Bunch” (1969) and “Network” (1976).

     Ford’s best work can be seen in crime pictures like “Gilda” (1946) and “The Big Heat” (1953) and the Western “3:10 to Yuma” (1957). Even though his choices in roles landed him in many mediocre films, Ford’s combination of soft-spoken sensitivity and tough-guy determination made him a popular star throughout the 1950s.

 

AMSTERDAM (2022)

    It’s baffling that the same director who made first-rate pictures “The Fighter” and “Silver Linings Playbook” back-to-back supervised the ridiculous chaos of this dreary Coen brothers imitation.

    This isn’t David O. Russell’s first disaster; he made “I (Heart) Huckabees” after directing “Flirting with Disaster,” one of the best comedies of the 1990s, and “Three Kings,” a popular action picture. Then, in 2015, his “Accidental Love,” despite enthusiastic efforts by Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal, was so disappointing that Russell had his name removed from the final print. Not helping his rep, the director has been repeatedly accused of abusive behavior on his sets.

    The primary action of “Amsterdam” takes place in 1933 New York, when three friend from the World War I battlefield, played by Christian Bale, John David Washington and Margot Robbie (three of Hollywood’s best actors), try to uncover those responsible for the poisoning of a heroic general and the murder of his flighty daughter (Taylor Swift).

     Nothing makes much sense or generates much energy as the bad guys are mostly hiding in plain sight.

     The idea is based on the very real attempt by a cabal of American businessmen to install a dictator and end democracy in the U.S. in the 1930s. (Similarities to 2022 are not coincidental)

     Like the writer-director’s “American Hustle” and “Joy,” the actors are occasionally amusing—Bale’s Dr. Berendsen is half crazy, half genius, while Washington and Robbie are convincing as an on-and-off couple—but mostly wasted.

     Also in this impressive cast are Rami Malek as an eccentric bird-loving millionaire, Zoe Saldana as a sympathetic medical examiner, Michael Shannon and Mike Myers as some kind of federal agents and Robert De Niro, who almost saves the film as another WWI general who befriends the sleuthing trio. 

    While no filmmaker scores a success every time out, Russell’s highs and lows have been especially extreme, despite the powerhouse lineup of stars he attracts for every film. 

PHOTOS:

Cate Blanchett in "Tár." (Focus Features)

"Joe Macbeth" poster (Columbia Pictures)

Bobby Cannavale and Ana de Armas in "Blonde."  (Netflix)

Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington in "Amsterdam." (20th Century Studios)