drama

Cold Water (1994)

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With both of his recent critical darlings, Personal Shopper & Clouds of Sils Maria, I’ve found myself mildly frustrated with the cinema of Olivier Assayas. Both of those films were hinged on incredible performances (especially from Kristen Stewart) and intriguing narrative conceits, but both also felt just short of greatness as completed works. In particular, I remember leaving Personal Shopper last year thinking that Assayas would one day deliver a movie I would totally fall in love with, but that he wasn’t quite there yet. What I didn’t know to consider at the time is that I shouldn’t be looking to Assayas’s future, but rather to his already rich past. While I assumed Sils Maria & Personal Shopper were the films of a young artist still honing their craft, it turns out Assayas has been directing feature films since the 1980s; they’ve just been outside my genre trash-loving radar. A recent local screening of his 1994 indie romance Cold Water has, in one picture, convinced me I’ve had Assayas all wrong. I now see his current crop of near-great films as a transitional adjustment period, the first stage of an evolution in the craft he already honed decades ago. I can’t say with certainty that Assayas’s best work is ahead of or behind him, because there is a much larger catalog of films than I was aware of to indicate that trajectory. However, I can report that he has made at least one great film before, one that relies on the same tactics & tones as the two titles that recently left me wanting.

Cold Water is a kind of 1970s rock n’ roll spin on a classic Romeo & Juliet teen tragedy. Forever understated, Assayas delivers the least commercial version of that premise imaginable, telling a slow, stubbornly quiet tale of pointless teenage rebellion & aimless romance the exact way you’d expect a 1990s French indie to. Two teenage reprobates on the outskirts of Paris seek excitement in petty vandalism & minor shoplifting, staging small-scale rebellions against their increasingly frustrated caretakers at home & school. At the threat of being quarantined in boarding school & mental institutions, they make a foolish pack to run away together to a mythical artist’s colony in the frostbitten provinces, risking their lives for a utopia that may or may not exist. Before they begin this fool’s journey, however, they pause to enjoy an out of control teenage rager where kids form their school & community party to rock records, smoke hash, and destroy everything in sight with an ever-growing fire. It’s in that chaotic centerpiece that Assayas pulls back in scope to explain that these two lovelorn teenage runaways are not at all atypical. The just happen to be their social circle’s scapegoats, the two who always get caught while everyone in their vicinity indulges in the exact same teenage depravity, undetected. Cold Water is an intimate love story between two naïve, self-destructive fools, but it’s also a larger portrait of an entire generation of aimless, frustrated rebel children itching to break free of the societal doldrums of the early 1970s.

Maybe in part because I’m used to these types of stories being told in American & British contexts, I was a little perplexed by Cold Water’s temporal setting not being six to ten years later than its early 70s hippiedom. Watching these kids smash & burn their surroundings in bratty, frustrated rebellion to a soundtrack defined by the likes of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Creedence Clearwater Revival is a little disorienting, especially when they start pogoing & slam-dancing at the climactic bonfire party. Cold Water is so obviously a punk story to me; it just happens to be set to the sounds of pre-punk hippies. Regardless of what’s spinning on the turntable, however, Assayas achieves a blissful hedonism in that party’s nihilistic teenage chaos. It plays like a sprawling, hazy predecessor to the rager that opens Lynne Ramsay’s similarly quiet, nihilistic Morvern Callar. The majority of Cold Water is guided by hushed, conversational gloom as neither teens, their teachers, nor their guardians know what to do with their frustrated, rebellions energy. There’s no proper score to the film outside its diegetic needle drops & rock radio tune-ins, so that everything outside its loud, vibrant, destructive party sequence feels dead & hollow by comparison. Even the central romance doesn’t feel especially impassioned or life-changing to the two protagonists outside their need to feel something in the cultural, emotional void of their surroundings. Chasing the high of that emotional rush is an ultimately tragic impulse, so maybe the worn-out hippie melancholy of Woodstock-era classic rock is exactly what this film needs. In the transition from Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” to Joplin’s “Me & Bobby McGee,” you can somewhat feel the tone Assayas was reaching for; it’s just difficult to shake the feeling that these kids are punks who had not yet heard the sounds that would later define them.

Something I’m coming to admire in Olivier Assayas is that every film I see from him feels like a young artist actively trying to figure themselves & their craft out on the screen. Just like how I assumed Personal Shopper & The Clouds of Sils Maria were the works of a fresh-faced filmmaker chipping away at future greatness, I could just as easily see Cold Water as being a debut feature from someone young & hungry to make Important Art. It’s not the shoplifting, vandalism, or teenage-runaway romance that makes me feel that way either. It’s more that Assayas appears open to messiness, haunting quiet, and unresolved emotional crises in his movies, having made no apparent effort to tidy up these impulses into more controlled work in the past two decades. There is a kind of coldness to that restraint in his more recent works, however. Assayas’s aimless wanderings feel much more appropriate to the pointless, frustrated teenage rebellions of Cold Water than they do to the adult ennui of his more recent work; or at least they feel more effective in that context. Heighted teenage rebellion lends itself well to his oddly youthful, consistent sense of messy, open, vulnerable gloom. As I further dig around in his decades of back-catalog features, I might make a point to seek out any titles I can find with teenage, lovelorn protagonists; it’s thematic territory that feels at home with his style. It also helps that Cold Water allows those teens a slash & burn catharsis in the bonfire party centerpiece, an emotional release he hasn’t afforded his more recent, adult protagonists.

-Brandon Ledet

Hearts Beat Loud (2018)

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There’s something really satisfying about the trial & error process of songwriting that lends itself well to feel-good cinema. The recent heartfelt indie drama Heats Beat Loud recognizes the joy of building a song from scratch, where confused & frustrated emotions can start in an incoherent haze and then be better understood & emotionally processed once solidified in song. It’s nowhere near the first movie to adopt that songwriting-as-self-therapy concept as foundational thematic ground, but it does feel like part of a recent push to build on that theme by closely following the frustrated stops & starts of the songwriting process while characters figure themselves out. 2016’s Sing Street used that conceit to craft a full-on romantic fantasy piece as a band that barely knows what they’re doing become more confident & cohesive with practice. 2017’s Band Aid is much more brutally honest about the underlying emotional devastation that dives its characters’ need for musical self-therapy, supplanting fantasy with darkly humorous observations about small-time musicianship & romantic crises. Hearts Beat Loud treads water between those two extremes. It flirts with attacking raw nerves with Band Aid’s ruthlessness, but tempers that impulse with Sing Street’s tendency for wish-fulfillment fantasy. The result is still a wholly satisfying movie, even if a less distinct one.

Nick Offerman continues his career-long Grumpy Cat routine as the owner of a failing record store in a small East Coast town. Depressed about the inevitable closing of his shop, his complete lack of romantic & professional prospects, and his daughter’s impending move away to college on the opposite coast, his face only lights up when he dedicates his energy to one obsession: making music, forming a father-daughter band. Hearts Beat Loud occasionally pretends to be an ensemble drama, spreading its POV energies to character crises as wildly varied as middle-age dating anxiety, queer teen romance, senility, addiction, grief, and the list goes on. No one topic is ever explored at any thorough length or depth. That approach can sometimes be admirable, especially whenever same-gender or interracial romance is treated like no big deal, entirely unworthy of comment. For the most part, though, the potency of its emotional beats isn’t reached through any character-based drama as much as through the emotive power of music. Each relationship lightly sketched out in the film could have been more fully developed, but that time is instead dedicated to the cathartic payoff of a climactic concert where the half-formed songs that have been tinkering their way to completion over the entire film are allowed to shine in their now fully-realized glory. It helps that the music is genuinely good and easily carries the emotional weight the deliberately light narrative demands of it.

Low-key, earnest indie dramas like this often survive by the strength of their casts, which is no problem for the Hearts Beat Loud ensemble. Offerman is surrounded by such heavy lifters as Toni Collette, Ted Danson, Blythe Danner, American Honey’s Sasha Lane, and impressive newcomer Kiersey Clemons, who sings the film’s original numbers with Lorde-like emotional heft. High-Fidelity packed just as many impressive performers into a romantic drama about a failing record store, though, and that film’s caustic, self-absorbed bitterness sits on the stomach like a bout with food poisoning (not a fan). By contrast, Hearts Beat Loud approaches its own vinyl dude’s midlife crisis with a welcome dose of heartfelt sweetness to balance out the melancholy. It’s not quite as willing to interrogate its own emotional darkness as Band Aid, but its story of somewhat mediocre musicians finding immense relief in the therapeutic joys of songwriting still lands with a thundering thud when it counts: while the music plays. You can feel mediocrity creeping in from the corners of the frame in moments when the film pauses to worship at the almighty altar of Jeff Tweedy or updates the band-excitedly-hearing-their-music-on-the-radio-for-the-first-time trope with coffee shop Spotify listening, but mediocrity is oddly part of its low-key charm. This is a story about normal people finding joy in D.I.Y. song-building, a process that is infectious in its built-in satisfaction, as indicated by the increasing number of recent films in this genre.

-Brandon Ledet

Have a Nice Day (2018)

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Questions of cross-cultural influence are always difficult to pin down with any definitive authority. At first glance, the animated Chinese gangster story Have a Nice Day looks like an awful lot like the post-Tarantino American crime pictures of the 1990s, where criminals spend way more time hanging out & chewing the fat than they do committing crimes. However, as Tarantino himself was heavily influenced by Hong Kong action cinema of the 1980s (the A Better Tomorrow franchise’s influence on Reservoir Dogs is especially apparent), it’s difficult to determine whether Have a Nice Day is a reflection of his work, a continuation of a larger Chinese crime cinema tradition, or a combination of both. There’s a second 90s-era American auteur who potentially had just us much of an influence on Have a Nice Day’s tone, though, a much more unlikely source of inspiration: Richard Linklater. The film’s flat animation style and long stretches of meandering, sometimes philosophical dialogue recalls a distinctly Linklater headspace that’s not exactly common to crime thrillers about villainous gangsters. It’s an unlikely source of inspiration that solidifies the film’s 1990s indie cinema atmosphere, even though its visual design resembles a graphic novel from the 2010s.

An in-over-his-head professional driver steals a bag stuffed with one million yuan from his crime-boss. Over the course of a single night, several disparate parties, from top level gangsters to money-hungry restraunteurs, jockey for possession of the bag, leaving a trail of broken bodies in their fight over its ownership. Have a Nice Day is less distinct for its narrative, which is a typical post-Tarantino crime story, than it is for its atmosphere. It feels as if its conflict is contained in a universe where it’s perpetually 3am and everyone’s as delirious as they are desperate for easy money. The landscape is established as a quiet, desolate picture of urban squalor, backed by hip-hop instrumentals & (more often than not) total silence. Meat cleavers, switchblades, cellphones, plastic surgery disasters, rundown internet cafes, a sparsely populated pavement slick with light rain: this is a small, inconsequential world defined by financial desperation & early morning depravity. The money in that bag means a lot to many people, maybe even least of all to the gangsters it was stolen from. The stolen money seems to be the only road out of this forever-rut of 3am crime sprees, a chance for freedom worth drying for, if not for escaping boredom alone.

The actual animation of Have a Nice Day isn’t as much of a draw as its static visual design. The crisp lines & flat fields of color feel representational of modern graphic art sensibilities, but the computer-smoothed movements of its action isn’t exactly impressive. Often, entire scenes will play out with a single character unloading long paragraphs of dialogue, portraying no movement outside the Flash animation flapping of tense mouths. The only break from this late-night drudgery is a tangential musical spoof of Chinese propaganda films, a brief daydream in an environment that requires that kind of mental escapism for survival. Otherwise, this is Tarantino (or Woo, depending on how you want to track that influence) without the explosive violence. This is Linklater without the broad relatability. The blankness of the animation style matches the financial & ambitious rot of desperate characters in an empty world where the only excitement offered is a stolen sack of cash. The film is calm, hollow, and slow-moving in its escalation of violence & danger, a distinctly 90s hangout vibe in an animated context where that type of atmosphere is a rarity.

-Brandon Ledet

The Seagull (2018)

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At first glance, it’s easy to see why the costume drama The Seagull is being undervalued in its early critical reception. A literary adaptation of an Anton Chekov play led mostly by women in period-specific costuming, this is the exact kind of stuffy-seeming costume drama that typifies most people’s perception of independent cinema, the kind of film festival fodder that lures elderly audiences into daytime-napping in public. However, The Seagull is only half the stately indie drama indicated by its Chekov stage play source material. Its other half is a surprisingly morbid, exquisitely bitchy comedy that laughs in the face of self-important, artsy fartsy types who would typically watch that more pretentious end of cinema in the first place. Saoirse Ronan anchors the genuinely dramatic end of that divide as an aspiring, vulnerable actress caught between the love & lustful whims of two playwrights. Annette Bening & Elisabeth Moss run wild & gnaw scenery on the morbidly humorous end, affecting the performative, comedically exaggerated femininity of a barroom drag act. Together, the trio transform The Seagull from minor prestige indie to slyly subversive comedy & meta-melodrama, an oddly delightful mix of femme-specific tones that deserves more critical respect than it’s ever going to get.

Annette Bening lords over the proceedings as a boastful matriarch (inviting a 19th Century Women pun I’m too clumsy to pull off) and a successful stage actress who demands 24/7 admiration from her family & fans. Her son is a depressive playwright who believes her craft is empty, pandering frivolity, as opposed to True Art. A lesser movie this stately in appearance might side with him, using his complaints that “The modern theatre is trite and riddled with clichés!” to comment on its own elevated place as true art in a cinematic landscape ruled by Transformers sequels & the MCU. Instead, his artistic idealism is satirized as being born of juvenile insecurities, especially in comparison to the much more successful playwright who is mother’s de facto concubine. This jealousy only deepens as the two playwrights struggle for the affections of the same hopelessly naïve muse (Ronan), while Bening & Moss (who is in love with the son) look on in horror. This he-loves-her-but-she-loves-another web of unrequited affections plays out in both perfect comedy & tragedy, equally balanced. Moss hovers between both ends with the most versatility, dressing as a widow because, as she explains it, “I’m in mourning . . . for my life.” Bening & Ronan are more constant in their demeanor (self-aggrandizing & hopelessly wide-eyed, respectively), as they allow a petty tug-of-war between two foolish, destructive men play out to an inevitably tragic end.

At its start, The Seagull feels artistically nondescript, as if anyone could have made it at any time. Early music cues even feel as if they were lifted from episodes of Downton Abbey. Its costumed soap opera stage setting eventually melts away, however, as the caustic relationships between its characters devolve into absurdist, playfully cruel humor (not to mention genuine, old-fashioned cruelty). Bening, Ronan, and Moss pull a minor miracle in transforming The Seagull into a must-watch subversive comedy that is not at all telegraphed by the film’s humble, lovelorn melodrama beginnings. Director Michael Mayer does his best to keep up with the trio, becoming increasingly daring in his framing & music choices as the stakes of the story increase and become more deranged. The cathartic emotional climax of the picture only works because of its performers, however, who sell the severity of this story’s cruelty, whether played for humor or genuine dramatic effect, with full, lasting impact. The Seagull is worth watching for those three performers alone, whether or not Chekov adaptations & stately costume dramas are your usual cup of tea. Here, the tea is boiling hot and surprisingly bitter, leaving the whole room laughing & fighting back tears in equal measure. It’s a shame it isn’t getting enough respect or attention for that accomplishment.

-Brandon Ledet

Shock Corridor (1963)

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It’s rare to find films of a certain age that take an honest look at mental illness, racism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other psychiatric issues with sympathy, and fewer still that take a deft approach to the subject. Anything that predated 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest generally treated those with these illnesses as villains or obstacles, portrayed asylums as bedlams that protected society from vagrants rather than places where one could ever hope to become well again, and if the protagonist was unwell of mind, such sickness was something that could be overcome with machismo or the love of a good woman, not through medical practice or therapy. Not so in the case of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (released 1963, one year after the publication of Cuckoo’s Nest, although Fuller had been shopping the original screenplay around since the 1940s), in which mental patients are presented as objects not of derision but as people deserving empathy, not as evil madmen but as victims of society who were pushed to the psychic breaking point and beyond.

Reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) has spent the past year training with Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn) in order to accurately portray an incestuous fetishist and be committed to a local mental hospital. His goal: to earn a Pulitzer by solving the murder of a patient who was killed by meeting the three witnesses, also patients there. His editor Swanson (Bill Zuckert) is behind this plan, but his exotic dancer girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers) objects, worried that Barrett’s time among the madmen will break him psychologically as well. She eventually relents and poses as Barrett’s sister in order to have him “involuntarily” committed. Once inside, Barrett must maintain his cover under the observation of Dr. Menkin (Paul Dubov) and kindly orderly Wilkes (Chuck Roberson). He is placed in a room with a patient known only as Pagliacci (Larry Tucker), whose operatic exultations occur day and night, and he sets to work making contact with the three witnesses: Stuart (James Best), Trent (Hari Rhodes), and Boden (Gene Evans).

Each man has been institutionalized after their psyches were fractured by manifestations of America’s social and political failings, representing the dark underside of the American dream. Stuart was the son of a poor, abusive, racist father. When Stuart was captured while serving in Korea, he came around to their way of thinking easily, as they showed him the first kindness he had ever experienced in his life. When he was returned to the U.S. as part of a prisoner exchanged, he was denounced as a traitor and treated as a pariah; despite being brainwashed, his countrymen had no sympathy for him and instead debased and abused him. As a result, he has retreated into a delusion wherein he is Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, still fighting the war.

Trent was the first black student in a segregated university in the American South, who suffered such harassment and hatred at the hands of his classmates that his mind has broken. He is introduced as a thief of pillowcases, and we quickly learn what that means: he steals these from other patients and cuts holes in them to create a makeshift Klan hood. Trent no longer sees himself as he is but as white, and he stirs up the other patients in the ward by shouting racist, white nationalist invective, including inciting violence against other black patients. Finally, Boden was an atomic scientist who, upon realizing the earth-shattering power of the atom bomb and that he had contributed to the scientific “progress” that gave mankind the ability to wipe itself from the face of the earth, broke down and regressed to the mentality of a child. Once a talented artist, he now spends his days wandering the titular corridor, where patients are allowed to congregate and socialize, drawing crude renderings of his peers.

Barrett’s time on the inside begins to have a profound effect on him. As his own mental state begins to deteriorate, the film becomes a race against time to get to the truth before Barrett’s faculties diminish beyond the breaking point.

When looking at the release date and the subject matter, one couldn’t be blamed for jumping to the conclusion that the film would be heavy-handed or unsympathetic, but not so. And even if one knew the film was sympathetic, it would likewise be easy to assume that it would be have the moralistic and paternalistic “eye” prevalent in propaganda of the time, but that is not the case here either. Instead, the tone is like the film overall: a mixture of documentarian distance and character study, which echoes the (color video, in contrast to the B&W film that makes up the plot of the movie) documentary inserts of Japan in Stuart’s psychic break and the indigenous dances and rituals that constitute Trent’s breakdown. Although there are some dated moments, most notably the attack on Barrett by a ward full of glassy-eyed women identified only as “nymphos,” they are few and far between, and do not detract from the film’s overall thesis: mental illness may be “invisible” in ways that physical illness isn’t, but it can be no less debilitating or life-altering, and the key to healing is sympathy, not criticism. Sadly, over half a century later, this is a lesson that still needs to be reiterated, but it renders the film no less potent now than it was in its day.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

First Reformed (2018)

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Sometime in the mid-2000s, back when I would do this kind of thing regularly, I found myself at an outdoor punk show at a squat/co-op in the Marigny, waiting to see a traveling hardcore band called Talk Me Off. One of the opening acts, the only one I honestly remember, was not another noisy rock act, but rather a slideshow and a political sermon. I sat in the warm, boot-stomped grass listening to a lengthy spiel about an environmental activist group’s successes in deforestation protests, patiently nodding along with the local punks who were gracious to not nod off entirely. I was mentally transported back to that oddly booked punk show this week while watching Paul Schrader’s latest directorial effort, First Reformed. Like the environmentally-minded slideshow enthusiasts who did their best to keep a gaggle of riled-up punks’ attention that night, First Reformed offers an admirable political sermon about modern humanity’s responsibility in the face of world-devastating climate change, but in an entertainment medium that’s not especially useful or interesting. Both Schrader and those real-life activists made a worthwhile political point in their respective sermons, but they did so in such bizarrely niche settings that they were essentially preaching to the already-converted. Given the audience & the delivery in both settings, it all just felt like wasted effort.

Hawke stars in First Reformed as Reverend Toller, an alcoholic holy man in crisis. His crisis of Faith is slightly different from the usual Silence of God anxieties expressed by Bergman & Scorsese in the past. He’s more worried here about whether humanity deserves God’s forgiveness for what it’s done to a planet in peril. He preaches to a tiny congregation in a historical church in Albany, New York that has become more of a souvenir shop than an effective religious institution. Cedric the Entertainer costars as the pastor of a nearby, nondenominational megachurch that is much more successful in reaching people (and making money), but also fearful of alienating its patrons with substantial political rhetoric. The politics of modern religion weigh on Reverend Toller’s mind with great anguish as he counsels a young mother from his delegation (Amanda Seyfried), who is afraid she is losing her husband to radical environmental activist causes. Long, drawn-out theological discussions about what Earth will look like in 2050 and what responsibility Christian leadership has in challenging political apathy to the world’s gradual destruction eat up most of the film’s runtime, often in hideous digital photography close-ups. Occasional bursts of violence or slips into supernatural mediation will disrupt these theological & political debates, but for the most part the film is an environmentalist tirade that alternates between being a frustrated call to action and a gradual acceptance of humanity’s impending doom.

There’s a clear parallel between Reverend Toller’s voiceover narration here and the similarly structured sermons Robert De Niro delivers in Schrader’s early-career script for Taxi Driver. The difference is that Toller’s righteous, dangerously violent theological stance actually has a worthwhile point to it, while Bickle’s misanthropy was coded as vile moral decay. Toller shares many of Bickle’s self-destructive tendencies, barely covering up his declining health with gallons of hard liquor & Pepto Bismol as he limps towards making a grand political statement at the film’s cathartic end. There might a figurative correlation between his failing body and the continual desecration of the planet, but for the most part his deliberately poor health recalls the self-destructive martyrdom that runs throughout Taxi Driver as well. Toller also shares Bickle’s unseemly sexual repression (a very common theme in Schrader’s writing), but doesn’t allow that guilt to express itself externally in as pronounced of a way. The main difference between them is that Bickle’s “cause” was mostly an excuse to enact male rage in a society that he found despicable for (to put it lightly) questionable reasons, while Toller’s own moral anguish about humanity’s negative impact on the planet actually has a point. The agreeability of the moral outrage makes the approach much less distinct & engaging in the process, leaving only room for the audience to nod along in recognition. The comparison also does First Reformed no favors in that Scorsese directed the hell out of Taxi Driver, capturing one of the dingiest visions of NYC grime to ever stain celluloid, while Schrader’s vision only escapes the limitations of its digital cinematography in two standout scenes (you’ll know ’em when you see ’em) and the production designer’s selection of a really cool, eyeball-shaped lamp.

It’s probably safe to say that Schrader is well aware that First Reformed is “a little preachy,” but I think it’s worth questioning who, exactly, he’s preaching to. I can’t deny the truth of a character pleading that the Earth’s destruction “isn’t some distant future. You will live to see this,” but it’s likely to safe to say that the arthouse cinema crowd who will turn out for this picture in the first place already knows that. Reductively speaking, First Reformed is two good scenes & one great lamp, all tied together by an agreeable political sermon. That’s not going to do much to grab the attention of anyone besides the people who already support your cause, no more so than dragging your slide projector out to a late-night punk show. Without Travis Bickle’s moral repugnance making his physical & mental decline a complexly difficult crisis to engage with, Reverend Toller’s unraveling feels like a much less interesting, less essential retread of territory Schrader has explored onscreen before, even if the political anxiety driving it this time is more relatable.

-Brandon Ledet

Beast (2018)

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It’s increasingly rare to walk into a modern theatrical release without any extratextual info setting expectations for what you’re about to see. Maybe it’s because I spend way too much time engaging with film criticism online (it is), but I’m usually familiar at least with a film’s critical consensus, if not its basic plot & production history, before I get to experience a movie for myself. Especially with bigger, heavily advertised blockbusters under the ever-expanding Disney umbrella, it feels as if I’m so familiar with a film’s history & early critical buzz by the time that I actually see it that there’s no possibility left for surprise or discovery, just an echo of what’s already been observed. Completely blind experiences are the stuff of local film festivals, not national theatrical releases. It was wonderful, then, to walk into the recent, darkly romantic drama Beast at a corporate multiplex with no idea what I was in for. Based on the film’s title, promotional poster, and inclusion in this year’s Overlook horror film fest I halfway expected a werewolf-type creature feature. Based on its promotional push on the MoviePass app and complete lack of critical buzz otherwise, I expected it to be a cheaply-produced frivolity. My vague expectations, based entirely on personal conjecture, were entirely wrong, something I wish could happen at the theater much more often.

Within an isolated community in the British Isles, a young, well-to-do suburban woman with an overprotective family falls in love with a wildling bad-boy who often finds himself on the wrong side of the law. Their shared physical, dangerously intense thirst for each other is apparent as soon as they first lock eyes, making it inevitable that she will have to leave the comfort of her country club lifestyle for a life of off-season rabbit hunting & menial physical labor. Part of this attraction is the pair’s capacity for & history of violence, something they sense in each other before it’s ever spoken aloud. She struggles to live down a childhood incident where she lashed out at a schoolyard bully with disproportionate vengeance. He suffers suspicion of being a serial murderer of young girls on the island, due to a similarly guarded secret from his own past. They’re mutually unsure whether to trust or fear each other after being drawn together though intense desire, as their volatile passions & separate histories with lethal violence can only mean their romance will end in bloodshed. Beast is partly a murder mystery concerning the missing young girls in this isolated community, but mostly a dark romance tale about two dangerous people who can’t help but be pulled into each other’s violent orbits. Issues of class, self-harm, domestic abuse, and never truly knowing who to trust run throughout, but the film mostly mines its intensity from the unavoidable pull of Natural impulses, whether violent, romantic, or otherwise.

What’s most immediately impressive here is the tone director Michael Pearce acheives in this debut feature. There’s a distinctly literary vibe to Beast, nearly bordering on a Gothic horror tradition, that almost makes its modern setting feel anachronistic. The intense, primal attraction at the film’s core (sold wonderfully by actors Jessie Buckley & Johnny Flynn and the seedy murder mystery that challenges that passion’s boundaries make the film feel like Wuthering Heights by way of Top of the Lake. It’s the same dark, traditionally femme side of romantic literary traditions I’ve recently fallen for in both Marrowbone & Never Let Me Go, a cinematic vibe I wish were afforded more respectful attention. Pearce makes this undercelebrated tone his own by clashing the Natural imagery of Beast’s violent instincts with the modernity of neon-lit nightclubs and the ominous soundscapes provided by Jim Williams (who also scored last year’s coming of age horror Raw). The distinct nightmare logic of its protagonist’s stress dreams also justifies the horror genre label implied by the film’s (barely existent) advertising, even if its overall tone is close to a modern take on Beauty & the Beast (except with two beasts). Beast is an overwhelming sensual terror as much as it is a twisty murder mystery with a romantic core, an incredible accomplishment for an unknown’s debut feature.

Of course, by reading this review you’re guaranteeing that you cannot replicate the going-in-blind experience I personally had with Beast. That’s the nature of engaging with this stuff on the internet. All I can do is report is that I was happy to have a relatively context-free experience with the picture, which I believe deserves to be seen as big & loud as possible based on the strength of its imagery & sound design. I want more people to experience that pleasure for themselves before it disappears from theaters entirely. The more I promote its merits the more I’m diminishing its chance for an expectation-free audience, though, which is why this entire mode of communication is so inherently imperfect & self-conflicted.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 39: Dogfight (1991)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Dogfight (1991) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 158 of the first edition hardback, Ebert explains his general taste in cinema. He writes, “I don’t care much for movies that get all serious about their love affairs, because I think the actors tend to take it too solemnly and end up silly. I like it better when love simply makes the characters very happy, as when […] Lili Taylor thinks River Phoenix really likes her in Dogfight.”

What Ebert had to say in his review(s): “To fully appreciate Dogfight, it helps to see it as the record of a particular time. In November 1963, John Kennedy was still president, ‘Vietnam’ was not yet a familiar word, hair was short, and the counterculture was still idealistic and tentative – more concerned with realization than revolution. And also, more in 1963 than today, male bonding sometimes consisted of the real or imaginary humiliation of women.” -from his 1991 review for the Chicago Sun-Times

Reductively speaking, it’s always a little counterintuitive to praise a work of art for leaving me heartbroken or otherwise emotionally devastated. Why should I celebrate the accomplishment of a stranger making me feel like shit? There’s always something admirable about witnessing a job done well, though, which is exactly what Lili Taylor’s performance in Dogfight conveys: a wondrous display of craft. As the craft in question is destroying my emotional well-being, you’d think the instinct would be to cower from Taylor’s tragically vulnerable presence in Dogfight, but her work was too magnificent not drink in with every available moment. It helps that Dogfight’s brand of emotional havoc wasn’t akin to the sadism of a provocateur like Lars von Trier. Director Nancy Savoca handles the film with an unmistakable kindness, something that’s apparent as soon as Taylor is introduced sweetly playing folk music on an acoustic guitar in her frumpy diner waitress drag. She isn’t afforded the authorial command of a protagonist’s POV, but rather her kindness & delicate wit is observed from an emotional remove, softening the sadism she encounters in an increasingly hostile, unforgiving world. Sacova & Taylor break hearts in Dogfight, but not with deliberate maliciousness. They do it by contrasting the sadism of modern life with a vulnerable sweetness & optimism for change, a kind of personal resolve that makes you weep for the cruelty of the world surrounding it, threatening to grind it to dust.

The majority of Dogfight is set over the course of a single night in 1963, the day before JFK’s assassination. In their final night of freedom before shipping off to a tour of duty in Vietnam, a rowdy group of boneheaded Marines stage a competition to see who can woo the ugliest date into attending a private party in an underwater-themed tiki bar. The rules of the competition require the men to be polite, never cluing the women in on the fact that they’re being paraded & mocked for their supposed ugliness, but the cruelty of the “dogfight” remains painfully clear throughout. When Lili Taylor’s lonely diner waitress is first charmed by the invitation to party with River Phoenix’s handsome Marine, her pure joy is devastatingly tragic. In an especially telling dress-up montage, her initial bliss devolves into self-deprecating scrutiny as she tries on several unsatisfying outfits to a Woodie Guthrie tune in her bedroom mirror. Her mood drops even lower when she discovers the true, hideous nature of the tiki party, naturally, but she chooses not to recoil from Phoenix’s thoughtless brute entirely. The two embark on an unlikely Before Sunrise-style Linklater romance (years before that much more frequently-praised work), talking through their attractions & differences as they casually roam the late-night streets of 1960s San Francisco. As she pokes at & challenges the baffling displays of toxic, unbridled masculinity barking from her military-man date, her openness to seeing good in the world only becomes more heartbreaking in its optimism & vulnerability. She’s a heartbreaking figure not because anything especially tragic happens to her, but by the way she contrasts with a world that doesn’t deserve her.

There’s a sensual pleasure to Dogfight’s historical tour of San Franciscan nightlife. From the wholesome arcades & second-hand clothing shots to the all-night tattoo parlors & adult theaters running nudie cuties like The Immoral Mr. Teas, the movie covers a wide portion of a city that would later transform dramatically after the Vietnam War inspired the protest culture of the hippies. I even found myself immensely pleased with the tiki bar setting of the titular dogfight; although the circumstances were obviously cruel, it’s easy to mistake that underwater, neon-lit Ugly Women Dance Party for a kind of real world Shangri-La. The meandering, conversational rhythms of the plot allow for small bit players like Elizabeth Daily (“Dottie” from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure) & Brendan Fraser (in his first big screen role!) to drift through these environments with lasting, even if narratively inconsequential impact. What truly outweighs any of these momentary concerns, however, the philosophical clash between the hopelessly infatuated couple of a brutish, impulsive jarhead with terrifying anger issues & a desperately lonely diner waitress with a delicate passion for political idealism. Because the actor died three years later, still in his early 20s, you’d think that River Phoenix’s performance would the heartbreaker of that pairing, but it’s Lili Taylor’s divinely empathetic presence that overwhelms the film’s pathos. Dogfight is an expertly crafted heartbreaker, but not in any flamboyant or cloying way. Its emotional devastation is as soft & delicate as Lil Taylor quietly playing folk songs on her acoustic guitar, glumly staring out the window. It’s a sadness that corrodes & lingers instead of hammering you with its intent, to the point where you hardly notice how much it hurts.

Roger’s Rating: (3/4, 75%)

Brandon’s Rating (4.5/5, 90%)

Next Lesson: A Night at the Opera (1935)

-Brandon Ledet

I Kill Giants (2018)

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The 1980s saw a wealth of children’s fantasy films that were incredibly dark in theme & tone, considering their target audience. Titles like Return to Oz, The Never-Ending Story, The Dark Crystal, and Paperhosue seemed custom designed to bore parents out of the room just so they could scare children shitless as soon as they were alone with the VCR. These tonally hazy fantasy films are a little too traumatic for most kids and a little too precious for most adults, but they can generate a fascinating tension through that divide. There are plenty of modern entries into that canon keeping the tradition alive too; they just tend to be minor indie releases too few people get to see: MirrorMask, American Fable, The Hole, etc. Let’s go ahead and add I Kill Giants to the traumatic children’s fantasy movie pantheon. Remarkably similar to the recent dark fantasy drama A Monster Calls in both themes & tone, it might be tempting to pass off I Kill Giants as a lesser echo of that more accomplished work. The truth is, though, that both films are part of a larger tradition and work exceptionally well as companion pieces, especially since I Kill Giants offers a version of A Monster Calls’s dark fantasy template through a more femme POV.

Like A Wrinkle in Time, I Kill Giants is the perfect fantasy piece for gloomy middle schoolers who believe they’re fundamentally different from all the “other girls.” Truthfully, all middle school girls would probably self-identity as being Not Like Other Girls, but the giant-killing anti-hero of this film pushes that personality trait to the extreme. Dressed like a feral Louise Belcher left to run wild & dingy in the New England wilderness (bunny ears & all), our troubled protagonist finds herself at the center of a mythical battle everyone else in her small town seems to willingly ignore. Deploying homemade steampunk contraptions of her own invention (straight out of The Book of Henry), and casting spells & potions like an amateur woodland witch, she serves as a self-elected protector of her town against the impending threat of murderous giants. Since she’s an avid D&D player and a fantasy illustrator with a vivid imagination, it’s unclear if these giant CGI threats at the edge of the woods & ocean are “real.” Her obsession with their looming danger makes her hopelessly socially awkward around peers and her hexes are often interpreted by authority figures to be frivolous vandalism, but she very well may be saving those lives from the towering brutes they rationalize as “tornadoes and earthquakes and crap.” What is clear, however, is that she is using her pursuit of the giants as an excuse to avoid dealing with a mysterious trauma in her own home, the reveal of which serves as the film’s cathartic release.

Ultimately, I don’t believe I Kill Giants uses its killer-giants metaphor as a way of dealing with Death & bullying through a childhood lens quite as well as the thematically similar A Monster Calls; it certainly doesn’t have as sharply specific of a point to make about processing trauma through that device, at least. However, it does work well enough on its own terms to survive the comparison, especially once it finds its narrative grooves in the relationships our emotionally-battered protagonist establishes with her best friend, her school psychologist, and her older sister (the latter of whom are played by Zoe Saldana & Imogen Poots, respectively). If the movie needs to separate itself from J.A. Bayona’s similarly gloomy children’s literature adaptation (I Kill Giants was adapted from a 2008 graphic novel, while A Monster Calls’s own illustrated source material was published in 2011, so who cares), its existence is more than justified by reframing the story with a femme perspective and finding its emotional core in a wide range of female bonds. It’s an unnecessary distinction to have to make, though, since both films are part of a much larger dark children’s fantasy tradition. If you normally fall in love with films that hover between child’s imagination sensibilities & traumatically adult themes, you’re likely to find worthwhile qualities in either picture. If that tension is not usually your cup of genre movie tea, though, I doubt I Kill Giants will be the one to finally win you over.

-Brandon Ledet

Tully (2018)

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Diablo Cody’s work as a screenwriter is a bit of a required taste, as her dialogue often slips into overwritten self-amusement. It’s a tough stylistic choice to accommodate in a real-world drama, something she pulled off very awkwardly in Juno and with expert emotional cruelty in Young Adult. For me, Cody’s writing style is more consistently rewarding when it’s paired with an over-the-top premise that matches its eccentricity. The coming of age body horror genre beats of Jennifer’s Body and the D.I.D. multiple personality showcase of The United States of Tara frame Cody’s dialogue in its proper over-the-top context. The path to success is much easier in those works than in the grounded realism of a Young Adult, which requires more restraint. Cody’s latest project, a return to collaborating with Young Adult actor Charlize Theron & director Jason Reitman, smartly splits the difference between those two approaches. Tully is, in part, a brutally realistic drama about a woman who feels run-down & unacknowledged in the postpartum aftermath of her third childbirth. It’s also a tense fantasy piece swirling with nightmare imagery & reveries about mermaids that allows for Cody’s more batshit impulses to invade the dialogue & narrative without feeling out of place. I suspect that Tully will be as divisive as any of Cody’s other scripts, as its uncompromising dedication to both the recognizably true and the deliriously surreal are likely to leave audiences split between which side they’d wish to see more of. Personally, I found it to be one of her most substantial, rewarding works – one that fully figured out how to incorporate her eccentric artificiality into a real-world subject without feeling excessively awkward.

Tully begins with an idyllic, calm image of Theron’s protagonist playing mother in a sunlit, almost divine interaction with her son. That illusion is immediately disrupted by the harsh reality of an overworked, underpaid woman carrying her third child while wrangling her other two without much help from her eternally aloof husband (Ron Livingston). Her smug, wealthy brother (Mark Duplass, the Ron Livingston of the 2010s) offers to alleviate some of her blatantly apparent stress by hiring a “night nanny” to watch her newborn baby while she sleeps, affording her more stability in her daily routine. At first, this offer appears to be just as judgmental as every other unsolicited slice of advice about what she should be eating during pregnancy, how she should school her kids, and how much effort she’s putting into the upkeep of her home. As the horrors of daily routine mount to the piercing chaos of The Babadook, however, she breaks down and hires the night nanny anyway. A quirky eccentric with a college-age idealism that’s persisted well into her mid-20s, this Manic Pixie Dream Doula (Mackenzie Davis) completely changes the temperature of the home. The mother finally has the assistance she wasn’t getting from her tragically oblivious husband, but more importantly she has someone to acknowledge her and discuss her daily struggles instead of judging her supposed shortcomings as a homemaker. Still, although she seems more put-together on the exterior, she finds herself both jealous of & codependent on the night nanny and increasingly troubled dreams of mermaids & car crashes invade her more grounded thought patterns. The night nanny quick-fix is a life-saving miracle that completely shifts the reality of her daily routine, but it’s an Edenic dynamic that can only last for so long before the impossible obligations of modern motherhood come crashing back into the frame full-force.

Written after the birth of her own third child, Tully feels like a very personal project for Diablo Cody, who fills a somewhat delirious character study with plenty real-world detail. The way wealth determines quality of child care, the way fathers conveniently bumble their way past alleviating mothers’ daily responsibilities, and the horrifying tension built through a newborn baby’s incessant screams all feel like knowledgeable, lived experience. Cody’s overwritten dialogue tics are still present throughout, like in the mother’s description of the night nanny being like “a book of fun facts for unpopular 4th graders” or the nanny describing herself being “like Saudi Arabia” because she has “an excess of energy.” There’s also an extensive shout-out to the cult classic Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains awkwardly shoehorned into the film, exactly the way Kimya Dawson was clumsily forced into Juno’s DNA. For some audiences, Cody’s idiosyncratically overwritten style will always be a tough hurdle to clear. Her work requires a little bit of giving-in & good faith on the viewer’s end, but I personally find it to be very much worth the effort. Tully is deeply rewarding as a tense, darkly comic fantasy piece about the routine, real-life horrors of motherhood. It finds a great, delirious headspace that allows Cody’s stranger impulses to feel right at home with its more grounded character study of a woman frayed at the edges by an unfair, impossible collection of daily obligations. From the first appearance of an angelic mermaid disrupting the film’s realistic domestic drama you should be able to tell if you’re going to be onboard with the bizarre balance the film attempts to maintain between the surreal and the all-too-real. If you can accept what Cody’s doing on her own loopy terms, though, you might just find her results uniquely fascinating, even if inconsistent.

-Brandon Ledet