drama

The Skeleton Twins (2014)

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fourstar

In the WWE there’s a little used, very illegal tactic of winning matches known as “twin magic“. This particular form of cheating occurs when wrestlers Brie & Nikki Bella swap places mid-match beyond the ref’s comically limited vision and use their identical twin likeness to win in a dire situation. It’s typical heel behavior, but also very specific to their sisterly gimmick (and also amusing because they barely look similar to one another at this point in time). I mention all this because the idea of “twin magic” exists far beyond the wrestling ring & the concept of confusing twin identities. “Twin magic” can also refer to, in my mind at least, the inexplicable mental link twins seem to have on an almost telepathic level. Twins can sometimes relate to each other in a supernaturally close, metaphysical kind of way that strains our understanding of the basic ways two human minds can communicate with one another. Their connection is, in a word, “magic”.

The recent indie drama The Skeleton Twins opens with an example of “twin magic”much more bleak than any you’re likely to see between pro wrestling’s The Bella Twins. The film opens with estranged twins (played by SNL vets Bill Hader &  Kristen Wiig) both preparing to commit suicide in bathtubs on opposite ends of the country. Spooky. Hader’s attempt is the more “successful” of the two & the shock of the news of her brother’s anguished state brings Wiig to stage a reconciliation after a decade apart. This is about as dark of a place as a movie can start off and, indeed, The Skeleton Twins is sadistically committed to piling on even more tragedy from there. A fuzzy childhood memory of a parent’s death, a past controversy involving a teacher’s sexual exploits with an underage student, and a current struggle with substance & sexual addiction all weigh heavily on the film’s grim proceedings. Another bit of “magic” at work here, however, is how the film’s talented cast & understated writing keep this tragedy from feeling soul-crushingly dour. It’s a sad film, for sure, but it also can be soulfully uplifting & deliriously funny in spurts.

Hader & Wiig have incredible chemistry from their SNL days that sells the The Skeleton Twins‘s central sibling bond much more comfortably & believably than would even be necessary for the movie to work. Wiig has delivered so many of these depressive, self-hating performances in past projects like Welcome to Me & The Diary of a Teenage Girl that at this point her dramatic chops are even more finely tuned than her comedic ones. Hader is more of the newcomer in the soul-crushing cinema game & it’s genuinely fascinating to watch him embody what his character calls “another tragic gay cliche” in a way that feels realistic enough to be genuine. Hader’s twin is more of a tightrope in terms of characterization, since his effete homosexual mannerisms could easily devolve into caricature, but the actor pulls it off in a wholly convincing, endearing way (despite his theater kid theatricality & gothy acerbic sarcasm). Oddly enough, it’s Luke Wilson who steals the show on the comedic front, playing a naive “Labrador retriever” of a dopey husband. Wilson is so on point in this role that he can make the simple act of eating a frozen waffle & talking about his shoes a total knee-slapper of a character beat. Hader & Wiig are more in charge of the film’s lowkey line of pitch black dramedy and it’s their intimate exchanges of sour worldviews & mental anguish that make the film sing in its own quiet, understated way.

I was just complaining that the recent indie drama Adult Beginners failed to coalesce its interesting ideas & talented cast into a cohesive product above anything beyond basic mediocrity. The Skeleton Twins is a perfect example of how the same approach of small stakes understatement & depressive humor can work when it’s handled a little more confidently. The film’s Halloween costume motif is a great example of how a metaphor can be developed with very simple gestures (in this case linking current familial tragedies to ones buried in the past) instead of the way Adult Beginners briefly addresses its central swimming lessons metaphor without any clear intent for its meaning. Both films are, perhaps, exercises in small ambition indie drama, but The Skeleton Twins makes the formula work in an engaging, even devastating way. I don’t know if it’s a case of better writing or the “twin magic” performances of Hader & Wiig that make the difference, but The Skeleton Twins is a shining (and depressing) example of the lowkey indie dramedy done exactly right.

-Brandon Ledet

Adult Beginners (2015)

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three star

Not every film is greater than the sum of its parts. Case in point: the cast for last year’s indie dramedy Adult Beginners is just oozing with talent, but the film itself if a little mushy & muddled in a way that can’t help but underwhelm. A Duplass Bros production starring Nick Kroll, Rose Byrne, Jane Krakowski, Jason Mantzoukas, and Bobby Cannavale sounds like a perfect formula for a lowkey drama with real emotional & comedic staying power, but Adult Beginners struggles to be much more than light entertainment with a promising premise & a failure to launch. The film is serviceably entertaining as decent Sunday afternoon romcom viewing fare, but I expected a little more out of it considering the level of talent involved. It’s an enjoyable film, but not a particularly efficient or memorable one.

Nick Kroll begins Adult Beginners as a cocaine-addicted sexual deviant with an endless appetite for greedy monetary gains, displays of power, and notoriety among his sycophant peers. In other words he’s a run of the mill NYC business man (in movie speak, at least). When his empire inevitably crumbles & he becomes a business world pariah, he has to move back home under the roof of his somewhat estranged sister (Byrne) & her increasingly emotionally distant husband (Cannavale). In order to pull his weight & learn humility, Kroll’s heartless business prick must care for the stressed couple’s hyperactive child Teddy,. He treats Teddy like a monstrous terror, but the truth is the kid is just a perfectly normal toddler. Not much changes once this comedic set up is established. The family learns to adjust & become comfortable with its unexpected shift in household dynamic & Kroll’s broken protagonist learns to become comfortable acting like a decent, empathetic human being. Throw in a third act crisis to shake things up a bit & a rapid resolution to that last minute monkey wrench and you have your basic outline of a typical romcom-style dramedy with an exceedingly charming cast.

Part of the reason why Adult Beginners is so frustrating is that it could’ve been so much more than that kind of charming, but ambitionless middle ground. I smelled trouble as soon as the opening scroll announced a “Story By” credit for three different writers (Kroll among them). At Adult Beginners‘s worst moments it feels like it was compiled from a Frankenscript of several half-cooked stories that didn’t quite come together as a cohesive whole. Byrne’s stressed out mother has troubling alcohol addiction & workplace politics issues that threaten to complicate her livelihood & her pregnancy, but never amount to any clear kind of narrative conflict. Kroll’s business douche protagonist never really shows any personal growth or epiphany within the film other than growing increasingly comfortably with his role as a “manny” (man nanny). Cannavale’s gloomy husband admits his mistake in growing distant, but the couple’s reconciliation is never on public display. Worse yet, the film’s central/titular metaphor about an “adult beginners” swimming class is lazily introduced & referenced only briefly, never materializing into anything too significant or incisive. It’s tempting to think of these half-cooked ideas as intentionally understated narrative & character beats, but the film never really earns enough confidence to warrant that kind of patience & understanding. It’s a messy movie that only remains endearing through the sheer will of its talented cast. It’s not something I’d recommend as a greatly orchestrated, highly impactful small scale drama, but it’ll do as light viewing when you’re in need of this kind of cinematic comfort food. The letdown is that there are germs of two or three much better movies lurking just right under the surface of that mediocrity.

-Brandon Ledet

Love (2015)

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three star

Browsing through John Waters’s Top Films of 2015 list (which included personal favorites Tangerine & The Diary of a Teenage Girl! whoo!), I was reminded of a film I was once mildly interested in, but had since completely forgotten: Gaspar Noé‘s Love. I’m not typically a fan of Noé‘s work. His provocateur tendency for shock value & Max Landis-levels of insufferable public persona usually keep me away from rushing to check out his work. Waters has a way of getting me to scope properties far outside my comfort zone, though (Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip comes to mind). His blurb for Love made the film feel near impossible to resist: “The first Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival to show hard-core heterosexual rimming—in 3-D, no less. Thank God for Gaspar Noé.” With a byline like that from The Pope of Trash himself, I figured Love was worth a gander no matter how little patience I have for Noé’s personality.

Love is an erotic drama featuring not one, but two overriding gimmicks: 3D & unsimulated sex. Whether the film is a heartfelt indie drama that approaches high art in its fearless depiction of human sexuality or a well-manicured HD porno with a nice soundtrack is mostly up to the audience. Director Gaspar Noé certainly didn’t distance himself from the porno accusation. He was quoted before the film’s release as saying, “With my next film I hope guys will have erections and girls will get wet.” Sounds like porn to me. In modern film naked breasts are plentiful, but erect penises are . . . hard to come by. Whether or not Noé is aiming for pure shock value, you have to admit that there’s something unique about an art house drama that not only starts with an unflinching depiction of mutual masturbation in its very first frame, but also features an erect penis twice ejaculating directly onto the camera lens (“in 3-D no less!”). However, it’s difficult to claim that the film purely exists for titillation. Only 15 or so minutes of the film’s 135 minute runtime are hardcore sex (though those 15 minutes obviously make a massive impact) and the drama that surrounds that pornographic material is far too sad to be sexually stimulating. The truth is, of course, that Love exists somewhere between those two extremes, high art & cheap porn, and that push & pull is partly what makes the film an interesting work.

The trouble with Love, unfortunately, is that its central drama isn’t nearly as engaging as its hardcore 3D sex gimmick. Noé positions himself as something of an indie circuit carnie huckster here: he promises the greatest show on Earth with a cavalcade of fleshy delights, but once you’re in the tent he has already separated you from your dollars & has very little pressure to deliver the goods. Our fearless protagonist in this particular 3D sex circus is a selfish asshole of a film student emotionally stuck between two women he doesn’t deserve: the mother of his child & an ex-girlfriend he cheated on to produce that child. When he discovers that his ex (who has a history of self harm & substance abuse) has been missing for months, he takes a drug-addled trip down memory lane, ignoring his current family unit so that he can mentally relive his glory days of vicious break-ups, drug-fueled arguments, and, of course, rampant forays into sexual bliss & discord that he experienced with the one who got away. He imagines that his life would’ve been better if he never split with his now-missing ex, but never takes personal responsibility for how shitty things turned out, when it was most certainly his fault. Worse, his disregard & negativity towards his current relationship shows the pattern repeating itself and when the mother of his child spits “Take care of your past while I take care of your future” it’s all too apparent where their own romantic bond is heading. The sad thing is that he’ll probably regret that break as well & find anyone but he person responsible, himself, to blame for it. His negativity & selfishness are purely toxic. God help anyone who loves him.

It’s just as difficult to pinpoint exactly how you’re supposed to feel about Love‘s protagonist as it is to decide where the film falls on the art/pornography divide. He’s a selfish ass, prone to sexist remarks like “Living with a woman’s like sharing bed with the CIA” or calling the supposed love of his life variations of “whore”, “cunt”, “bitch”, etc. He also uses transphobic language in a scene that felt like it would’ve been uncomfortable as far back as the 90s, but even Noé himself has referred to the actress in that scene as a “tranny” in his interviews. Gaspar Noé aligns himself so closely with the protagonist that it’s impossible to separate them. Murphy is an idealist film student who wants “to make movies out of blood, sperm, and tears” & “make a movie that depicts sentimental sensuality.” I’m not sure Love accomplishes either of those goals (except maybe the part about the semen), but those sentiments really do feel like a mission statement directly from the horse’s mouth. The question is if Noé is living out his own romantic bitterness on screen here or skewering himself for indulging in that bitterness & self-absorption in the first place. I don’t have an answer,but I will say that this aspect of the film isn’t nearly as interesting as its salacious carnie gimmickry. Its story is pitifully thin, drawn out, and overlong. No matter what Noé was trying to say with his romantic navel-gazing, what he ended up proving was that the least interesting thing about Gaspar Noé films is Gaspar Noé himself.

By all means, Love shouldn’t be a likeable film. Its director is something of a self-indulgent ass. Its acting isn’t anything special, which is a major problem for a romantic drama built on emotional performance. Its dialogue can be laughably awful, especially in Murphy’s internal monologues that include statements like “I’m a loser. Yeah, just a dick. A Dick only has one purpose: to fuck. And I fucked it all up.” Ugh. Its electric guitar solo soundtrack often spoils the mood of its erotic moments with unbearable cheese. Themes are drilled home in obvious, self-congratulatory ways, such as when a title card explains the definition of Murphy’s Law (because the protagonist’s name is Murphy! get it?!). Still, Noé sets this paper thin, self-indulgent narrative to an interesting enough visual language that it’s impossible to brush it off entirely as an empty exercise. Beds are colorful voids playfully shot form above as the hardcore sex sessions they host play out in a frank, striking manner. The film’s drug use isn’t particularly interesting by its mere existence, but they do lead to interesting psychedelic images made of flashing lights & 3D ejaculate that afford the film a unique look. The same dream logic of haunting memories that elevated the relatively week narrative of the VHS slasher Sorority House Massacre work their wonders here in an interesting way as well. A tour through a European swinger’s club is treated with the same sex  church reverence as the gorgeous Atlanta strip club sequence of Magic Mike XXL. The stark, alternating lights of dance clubs & bedrooms can be downright hypnotic. Love might be riding on the novelty of its hedonistic 3D sex gimmick, but it does it well enough not to lose your attention before the credits roll.

If Gaspar Noé was trying to break any special sort of ground here, I don’t believe he accomplished his goal. Much like history’s first 3D feature film, Bwana Devil, Love talks a big game about delivering a one of a kind spectacle, but ultimately ends up feeling like so, so many works that came before it . . . just in 3D. I’m not sure, for instance, that the world needed another indie drama about how monogamous jealousy & fear of polygamy can ruin long-term relationships. That story’s been told before with much more interesting nuance in its character & narrative beats. As far as the hardcore, unsimulated sex goes, 2014’s French sex thriller Stranger by the Lake indulged in the same pornographic impulses, but had a lot more to say about the push & pull between lust & companionship. I honestly believe that John Waters has made the best case for Love’s position as a groundbreaking work of cinema. It truly is “The first Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival to show hard-core heterosexual rimming—in 3-D.” That much is true (although it’s possible Mr. Waters mistook some of the film’s cunnilingus for rimming). Even if that’s all the film accomplished I still enjoyed moments where it desperately reached for more, Gaspar Noé‘s obnoxious personality notwithstanding.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 2: Persona (1966)

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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 Persona (1966) is referenced in Life Itself: In the first edition hardback, Persona is referenced on pages 1, 154, 267, and 270. It is the film most often referenced in Roger’s book. He first likens its opening credits & mid-film “break” to the way life & memory flicker into existence, initially without cohesion. He later describes how as a young critic he met an inability to discuss exactly what happens in the film, which prompted him to write about what happened to him as an audience instead (a technique of critical subjectivity he would return to often). He also describes Bergman’s casting of the film as being surprisingly impulsive in a brief anecdote.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Most movies try to seduce us into forgetting we’re ‘only’ watching a movie. But Bergman keeps reminding us his story isn’t ‘real.’ At a crucial moment in his plot the film seemingly breaks, and after it rips for a dozen frames it seems to catch fire within the projector. We see it melting on the screen. Then blackness, then light and then the old silent comedies again, as Persona starts again at the beginning.” – From his 1967 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“Persona is a film we return to over the years, for the beauty of its images and because we hope to understand its mysteries. It is apparently not a difficult film: Everything that happens is perfectly clear, and even the dream sequences are clear–as dreams. But it suggests buried truths, and we despair of finding them. Persona was one of the first movies I reviewed, in 1967. I did not think I understood it. A third of a century later I know most of what I am ever likely to know about films, and I think I understand that the best approach to Persona is a literal one.” – From his 2001 review in his “Great Movies” series

There are two massive, go for broke moments in Ingmar Bergman’s small cast drama Persona that tend to overwhelm discussion of the film. The first is the film’s opening six minutes. A chaotic montage of loose film strips, whirring projectors, impossibly bright light bulbs, grainy footage of what looks like a silent era horror, spiders, human hands, animal slaughter, exposed organs, an erect penis, and crucifixion imagery overwhelm the film’s first breaths. Even today these fist few minutes of visual chaos are disturbingly vivid, but difficult to pinpoint with any certainty as to what they could mean, exactly. Somewhere in the fog I see a progression of life → art → death, but that personal interpretation is far from concrete in any significant way. As difficult as it is to decipher Persona‘s opening minutes today, it’s even more of a mystery to me what the experience would’ve been like for someone watching the film fifty years ago. As if that opening barrage weren’t enough, Bergman then repeats the trick a second time in the film’s second Go For Broke moment. A little over halfway into the film’s runtime the movie essentially breaks down & returns to the visual chaos of its opening minutes, wiping the slate clean & completely changing the rules of its delicately laid-out narrative. It makes total sense that these two moments would dominate most discussion of Persona & the strange places its story goes in its haunting final minutes, but for the most part the film itself is a rather quiet, intimate drama.

A somewhat mousy nurse is assigned as a caretaker for an actress who has not spoken in three months’ time. After a dreary stay at a hospital, the two women attempt a therapeutic, seaside respite to help cure the actress of her anxieties. To fill the void left by her nonverbal companion, the nurse gabs incessantly, first about seemingly nothing at all and then about deep seated fears & regrets. Take away the two experimental jaunts of rapidfire montage & Persona is mostly a collection of monologues, sometimes delivered directly to the audience in a way of breaking the fourth wall that recalls the grave seriousness of a stage play instead of the winking Ferris Beullers of the world. The topics covered in these speeches are a wide range of concerns from the importance of art in people’s lives to a distant memory of casual sex & subsequent abortion. If it were anyone but Bergman at the helm, the film’s existential crises could possibly play as arthouse self-parody, especially once one character starts pondering about “the hopeless dream of being. Not seeing but being. In every waking moment aware, alert. The tug of war between what you are with others & who you truly are.” The navel-gazing & despair in Persona is so tragically sincere, however, that there’s no way to avoid being arrested by it. Bergman may work with a tone of cinematic obfuscation that’s been copied & parodied endlessly in the last few decades, but he does it with such sincerity & confidence that it still knocks you on your ass, despite familiarity with how his style has been assimilated into cinema at large. In a lot of ways the bare bones monologues of Persona can be just as unsettling as the film’s Big Risk montages of pure light & sound.

Of course, Persona‘s ambitious Big Risk montages & low-key, confessional monologues cannot be considered in total isolation. One plays directly into the other. Shortly before Persona‘s mid-film narrative “break”, the overly-talkative nurse confesses to her silent companion “Somehow I think I could change myself into you if I tried. I mean, inside. You could be me, just like that.” An act or two of betrayal sets in motion the pure light & sound montage “break” that allows that fantasy to become a tangible reality. The two women’s identities shift & meld. Ugly anxieties about fear of motherhood & questions of sexual desire bubble to the surface in such a horrific, unsettling way that you could consider the film a work of avant-garde horror if you view it in the right context. Persona was my first introduction to Bergman as a filmmaker and I’ve heard that entry point likened to jumping into the deep end. This is a messy, languid picture that somehow pulls together a pointed & purposeful tone from the wreckage without ever affording the audience a clear picture of what exactly is transpiring.

It’s no surprise, then, that reviewing Persona was such a daunting task for a young Ebert or that the film resonated with him in such a vivid way throughout his life & career. One thing I picked up while reading over his reviews of the film that I may have missed the first time I watched it was how artificial the whole thing felt. While watching Bergman’s so-called “Silence of God” trilogy during our Movie of the Month discussion of The Seventh Seal last year, I became intensely focused on the way the director called attention to the artificiality of his films by making them feel like staged plays. Returning to Persona (with Ebert’s take in mind) made me realize how much that film in particular pushes that idea to an extreme. In the film, Bergman not only calls into focus the artificial stage of his  narrative, but also the medium through which he delivers it. Literal film strips & projectors appear in the film’s two biggest moments (even breaking down the narrative in the second instance) and the film’s final scene cuts away to show camera crews filming the actors on set. As Ebert puts it, “Most movies try to seduce us into forgetting we’re ‘only’ watching a movie. But Bergman keeps reminding us his story isn’t ‘real.’ […] We have been brutally reminded that the story is being filtered through technical equipment.” Persona‘s ambiguity & existential distress is rewarding enough on its own to demand multiple viewings, but looking for that self-referential artificiality in the film was alone well worth a revisit.

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Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

 Brandon’s Rating: (4.5/5, 90%)

fourhalfstar

Next Lesson: Apocalypse Now (1979)

-Brandon Ledet

The Boy (2015)

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fourstar

“We’re running a dead motel, son. These rooms just don’t know yet.”

I first heard of the 2015 horror The Boy when James included it in his top films of the year list on the first episode of our podcast. I, of course, had a hard time differentiating between the film & the recent evil doll horror flick The Boy. 2016’s The Boy & 2015’s The Boy couldn’t be more dissimilar in their approaches to horror cinema. Although I enjoyed them both both a great deal, it’s remarkable that they even share the same medium, let alone the same title & genre. As much as I was amused by the trashy goofiness of the more recent The Boy, it’s a shame that it ended up being a higher-profile release, since the confusion between the titles is sure to do the artsier film a great disservice.

An arthouse slowburner about a murderous child, The Boy sits firmly in a category of films I like to call Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Have Kids, which includes titles like The Bad Seed, The Babadook, and We Need to Talk About Kevin. More specifically, though, The Boy is a firm warning against raising a child in isolation & limited means . . . unless you’re looking to birth a serial killer. Living alone with an emotionally absent, spiritually broken father (played by character actor David Morse) in a remote, vacant motel in the desert, a young child (who could easily pass for a forgotten Culkin brother) is left to fend for himself in terms of entertainment & socialization. His best friend, sadly enough, seems to be a yellow bucket. His favorite activities include stealing “weird adult stuff” (tattered issues of Playboy, old Polariod cameras, etc.) from the motel’s infrequent guests & trapping small animals/vermin for pocket change that his father pays him from the motel’s desolate till. His playground is a nearby junkyard & drainage pipe. His days are mostly empty. It’s only natural, then, that his animal-trapping graduates to human prey, beginning with snaring a suspiciously guarded drifter (Rainn Wilson) so he’ll have someone, anyone to interact with. The pile of victims & monstrosity of his intent only escalates from there.

Much like the empty, existential trudge of life at its desolate motel setting, The Boy brings its pace down to a slow crawl for most of its runtime. Most of the film plays like a lowkey indie drama that turns the idea of morbid fascination into a mood-defining aesthetic. It isn’t until the last half hour so that the film becomes recognizable as an 80s slasher version of Norman Bates: The Early Years. It takes a significant effort to get to the film’s horror genre payoffs, but allowing the film to lull you into a creepily hypnotic state makes that last minute tonal shift all the more satisfying. If you’re looking for a generic, straightforward horror picture, you’re likely to get more out of the evil doll The Boy from 2016. Last year’s The Boy is a lot more akin to a gloomy mood piece, one that culls its terror from such unlikely sources as road kill, deer antlers, and a towheaded child with no friends & a yellow bucket. It’s a much more challenging film, for sure, but the payoff is all the more satisfying because of it.

-Brandon Ledet

Anomalisa (2015)

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fourhalfstar

As is the case with virtually every project that has Charlie Kaufman’s fingerprints on it, Anomalisa is an insight into the writer/director’s particularly idiosyncratic worldview and plethora of neuroses. The film tells the story of a lonely, mentally ill man (voiced by David Thewlis) who travels to Cincinatti to present a keystone speech at a customer service convention. Every person that he encounters along the way has the same face and speaks with the same voice (Tom Noonan), including cab drivers, his wife and son, and even the former lover with whom he attempts to reconnect on his single night in town. When she revels how emotionally and irrevocably devastated she was by his departure, he finds temporary succor in the arms of a shy woman named Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), whose face is scarred and who is attending the conference with her more extroverted and attractive BFF Emily. Although he contemplates leaving his family for her, in the light of day, she moves from anomalous to anonymous as she takes on the face and voice of everyone else. His presentation goes awry when he has a mental breakdown on stage, and he returns home as empty and incomplete as he was at the film’s outset.

The film is a technical marvel, a stop-motion animated feature that utilized 3D printing to create the many stages of facial expression across a sea of duplicate people, and the design and detail work on display is simply stunning. Michael Stone’s gradually building psychotic episode is beautifully telegraphed in a mirror-contemplating scene that sees his face revolving through a series of different faces, and an operatically composed dream sequence includes a moment where his countenance falls apart and reveals the framework underneath. Technically, the film is virtually flawless once you become accustomed to the world’s aesthetic (the line that separates the tops and bottoms of faces is distracting at the outset), and the concept of a world of interchangeable people is realized elegantly.

The narrative, however, leaves a little to be desired. As a peak into Kaufman’s mind, this is yet another story about a reprehensibly self-oriented and self-interested man whose outbursts this time around are rationalized as the result of an undiagnosed mental illness. Once again, an unsympathetic man is brought so low that we the audience cannot help but feel some empathy for his plight; we spend so much time with Stone alone and in an “unobserved” state that he becomes familiar enough that we’re willing to go along on his journey. Of course, his journey exists only in the literal sense, as, ironically, there is no self-discovery for a man who spends so much of his mental energy reflecting upon himself.

Stone is a man who: passively suggests hooking up with his ex, moments after she reveals that she spent the first year after he left her unable to get out of bed; has raised an utterly spoiled and ungrateful child whose brattiness is communicated in a scant three minutes onscreen; and considers leaving his wife and family for what he presumes would be a life of less self-loathing with an uncomplicated Midwestern woman (who has much more going on under the surface than he is willing or able to see). Although we’re living in a post-Don Draper world and it feel’s like the west is drowning in stories of this ilk, Anomalisa feels fresh, if only because of its unusual visual rhetorical space. It’s utterly impossible to like Stone despite his fundamentally broken nature, but the nature of the presentation goes a long way towards making him stand out from the Tony Sopranos and Dr. Houses of the world. It’s a third-person depiction of a first-person point of view, and this immersiveness saves the film from feeling too stale.

This should in no way be read as an indictment of Thewlis’s performance, which is fantastic. He’s not alone: Leigh also does great work here, playing Lisa’s vulnerability and tenaciousness in equal parts, giving life to a character that is ultimately much more human and endearingly honest than Stone. There’s an edge to her line-readings that gives Lisa a physical presence that could be felt even if there were no plastic bodies awkwardly humping each other on screen. Noonan embues each of the diverse characters he plays with variations on a theme, and his irascible cab driver and burned lover are standouts. Still, Thewlis brings a great dimension to the role of Stone, which also contributes to the effectiveness of the story despite its static narrative.

The story is really only tired in broad strokes, however, as the particularities of details are generally novel. Lisa is essentially the opposite of a manic pixie dream girl, a customer service team leader from Akron who lives in Emily’s shadow and considers herself stupid; her favorite food is scrambled eggs and her musical interests skew heavily toward Cyndi Lauper, but she is genuinely interested in improving herself and the state of her life. Her encounter with Stone changes him not at all, but she grows as a result of it, which is a narrative anomaly (no pun intended). The film is also quite observational in the way that it captures true-to-life moments in awkward conversations with eager service industry personnel (including phone reps, cab drivers, bellboys, bar attendants, and cashiers) and being forced to witness interactions between unhappy couples.

This all illustrates the film’s interest in drama but fails in its recapitulation of the comic elements. Much like last year’s Queen of Earth, there is a conscious meditation upon the way that living with or adjacent to mental illness is not the perpetually joyless experience that forms the narrative basis of most literary interrogations of the subject. It’s a rarely discussed observation of the human condition, that while some people are comic or tragic figures, most of us have varying percentages of both throughout our lives, and it’s not always easy or indeed necessary to categorize existence in such binary terms. That’s not to mention the other subtle jokes throughout the film; for instance, Cincinatti chili sounds intriguing and horrifying, and I appreciate the pride that the fictional Ohioans take in their bizarre concoction and their zoo. There’s also a lot to unpack about the fact that Stone’s breakdown stream-of-consciousness is interpreted to be critical of soldiers, prompting an attendee to shout about “supporting the troops,” especially combined with the hotelier’s framed George W. Bush portrait in Stone’s dream sequence.

Speaking of which, as the film largely sticks to a realism even if the point of view is warped, the surreality of Stone’s nightmare sequence is worth the ticket price alone, and is what I expect most people will be talking about long after seeing the film. It’s also the most recognizably Kaufman-esque part of the movie; the sea-of-interchangable faces conceit is present throughout and is obviously evocative of the restaurant full of John Malkovitches seen in Being John Malkovitch (and revisited in Adaptation), but Stone’s story doesn’t otherwise lend itself to Kaufman’s more eccentric imagery. In the dream sequence, however, there’s an exploration of space that is reminiscent of the half-floor in the office building from Malkovitch, and Stone’s attempt to escape through a sea of improbably-close desks is pure Kaufman visual flourish. There’s less Synecdoche, New York in the film’s DNA, which may be for the best, as this film feels less like a masturbatory ode about being a misunderstood and self-destructive artist and isn’t also largely impenetrable (individual responses may vary). That having been said, in defense of Synecdoche, none of Anomalisa’s images are as haunting as that film’s perpetually burning house, curling tattooed leaves, or infinitely recursive series of miniaturized metropoli.

Overall, Anomalisa is a great film that draws you into its headspace with compelling imagery. While the plot may not be as much of a technical masterpiece as its cinematography, its potentially played-out story is sufficiently fleshed out (again, no pun intended) that it will likely remain culturally relevant long after the genre of paint-by-numbers privileged-white-guy-versus-ennui has receded back into the ether from which it came. If not a masterpiece, then the film is definitively a cinematic experience that demands to be seen.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mary and Max (2009)

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fivestar

The 2009 stop motion animation indie drama Mary and Max is somewhat of a strange case. It’s ranked among the highest-rated titles of all time on IMDb, but it’s not a particularly well-known film. That disparity is readily recognizable in the film’s box office numbers, which posits it as a financial flop that only managed to earn back $1.7 million of its $8.2 million budget, despite near-universal critical acclaim. Perhaps the divide between its critical & financial accomplishments is a question of tone. The sole feature film credit of stop motion animator Adam Elliot, Mary and Max adopts the visual format & storybook narration of a children’s film, but it’s, at heart, an emotionally merciless drama that touches upon, among other things: mental illness, alcoholism, unwanted pregnancy, atheism, war crimes, repressed homosexuality, obesity, and the endless cycle of poverty. It’s likely that the film didn’t do particularly well at the box office because it’s difficult to market an animated feature about heartbreaking loneliness, depression, despair, and the search for human connection among the disenfranchised. I’m getting choked up right now just mulling over the film’s themes, so easy to see why it might’ve been a difficult sell as a comedy (however black) & a fun night at the movies. All that being said, Mary and Max is a masterful work in the stop motion medium, easily one of the best examples of the format I’ve ever seen. It’s a shame it couldn’t have turned that achievement into financial success, though, or we might’ve had a few more Adam Elliot features in the six years since its release.

Detailing the strictly-epistolary friendship between two total strangers, a young Australian girl & a middle aged man in New York City, Mary and Max relies heavily on storybook-style narration to move its story along between its back & forth letter reading. This narrative structure doesn’t allow much room for complicated plot maneuvering or a fast-paced momentum. Mary and Max, as its title suggests, is more of a two-handed character study than a whirlwind of action & consequence. Mary is a young girl with an alcoholic mother & an emotionally reclusive father. Initially described as looking like mud & poo, Mary is somewhat of an outcast, self-conscious of her appearance, bored, and alone. Max is a lonely, atheist man of Jewish descent who has difficulty navigating the modern world due to his struggles with Asperger’s Syndrome. It seems at first like they might have very little in common besides the drab greys & browns that define their respective worlds & their shared love of a children’s show called The Noblets. As their friendship deepens & is challenged by decades of hard-fought battles with mental illness & life at large, though, a remarkably rewarding swell of emotion begins to elevate the film miles above the basic precociousness & impressive handmade craft stop motion automatically commands as a medium.

For a film loaded with fart jokes & gags involving bird anuses, Mary and Max is a remarkable achievement in emotional provocation. Toni Collette (who I’ve recently been binge-watching in United States of Tara) does an excellent job voicing the adult Mary & Phillip Seymour Hoffman (who, of course, everyone has been inadvertently binge-watching in quality work for the last two decades & mourning in more recent years) is even more of a treasure as the deeply-complicated Max, although neither personality is especially essential to the film’s charm. The real crux to Mary & Max‘s perfection as a small stakes drama/black comedy is in director Adam Elliot’s nuanced characterization of his titular leads & in the finely detailed visual world he made by hand (with help, I’m sure) in a painstakingly meticulous method/dying art. I like to imagine a world where Mary and Max was a wild financial success that allowed Elliot to immediately produce a long string of other feature films, the same way the success of Coraline, released the same year, launched Laika Studios. As is, I’m happy that this pitch black gem was ever produced in the first place. It’s not often that an animated feature about the importance of “real friendship” is this well constructed & this reluctant to play by the rules of its medium/genre. Just writing about the film’s emotional severity is making me tear up in the retrospection, which is a clear sign that Elliot got something significantly right here, even if that something was a difficult commodity to monetize.

Side Note: You can go ahead & include Mary and Max as yet another indication that no place in time has ever loved ABBA quite as much as 1970s Australia. The ABBA poster in Mary’s bedroom feels more significant than a mere callback to Toni Collette’s starring role in Muriel’s Wedding. It’s part of a larger Australia Loves ABBA narrative that I swear is A Thing. It makes more sense every day that ABBA: The Movie was set in Australia. It’s the band’s home away from Sweden.

-Brandon Ledet

Phoenix (2015)

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threehalfstar

I’ve been putting off watching Phoenix, despite it appearing on many Best of 2015 lists, due to the grim nature of its pedigree as a Holocaust survivor’s tale. Its recent appearance on Netflix’s streaming service made watching the film too convenient to avoid, though, so I finally bit the bullet. It turns out my apprehension was far from unfounded. Phoenix is a rather grim slowburner about an Auschwitz survivor trying to piece her life back together in a post-war Germany. It’s a frustrating film & not a fun watch by any means, but it is most certainly worth the emotional effort. By telling a very specific, limited-scope story about a handful of people trying to recreate a way of life that’s been lost forever, Phoenix captures an aspect of war’s toll that a lot of films often overlook. Instead of portraying the heroes & villains who fight it out on the battlefield, it’s much more concerned with the men & women who are left to sift through the rubble, both literal & metaphorical.

Despite loved ones’ insistence that she move to Palestine to help establish a Jewish state, a Holocaust survivor moves back to Germany to find her husband. Left horrifically scarred by concentration camp atrocities (and initially wearing a bandage that recalls the women of Goodnight Mommy & Eyes Without a Face), she undergoes plastic surgery that normalizes, but forever alters her appearance. She looks similar, but not quite identical, to her pre-war self, just as the state of her homeland has been forever transformed. With her entire family dead or missing, she tries to re-establish her relationship with a husband who treats her like a total stranger due to her change in appearance. Instead of telling him outright who she is, she allows him to slowly get the picture, perhaps in a bid to prove to herself that her pre-war self still exists in some way, that her identity didn’t perish forever in Auschwitz. The problem is that her husband has also been forever altered by the war & the romance she’s trying to recapture is no different from the bombed-out buildings & ripped to shreds Germany that serve as haunting reminders of their past.

Again, Phoenix is far from light entertainment. My own Best of 2015 list doesn’t include anything too comparable to the film in terms of emotional severity (except maybe The Diary of a Teenage Girl or Felt), but that’s more an indication of my personal inclination for over-the-top absurdity than it is of Phoenix’s quality. This is a really tight, surprisingly understated drama with one of the most satisfying final scenes in recent memory. Its use of the song “Speak Low”, which includes the haunting lyrics “Love is a spark lost in the dark too soon,” is especially commendable, as it’s incorporated several times throughout the film with great tonal & narrative consequence. If you’re looking for a solid, grim drama with an emotionally tender gut punch at its conclusion, this film is highly recommendable. It’s not the kind of experience I put myself through often, but I’m glad I put in the effort here.

-Brandon Ledet

 

Carol (2015)

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fourstar

Todd Haynes is a genius filmmaker. Sometimes his genius is readily recognizable in its grand scale spectacle, like with the glam rock opera Velvet Goldmine. Other times, it’s  a more subtle kind of genius, like in Far From Heaven, a period drama about forbidden romance. Haynes’ latest, Carol, is firmly in the latter category. Carol has been topping a lot of Best of 2015 lists (including Britnee’s) & generating early awards-season buzz for its two stars (Cate Blanchett & Rooney Mara), but as is the case with the human-captivity drama Room, the buzz surrounding Carol might be working somewhat to the film’s detriment. At heart, Carol is a handsome, but muted drama about homosexual desire in a harsh environment where it can’t be expressed openly. The subtle glances & body language that make the film work as an epic romance are very delicate, sometimes barely perceptible. In fact, if you had no idea what the film’s about going in, it’s possible it’d take you a good 20min or so to piece it together. That kind of quiet grace is in no way detrimental to the film’s quality as a work of art. It’s just that the critical hype surrounding the picture puts an unnecessary ammount of pressure of what should be experienced as a collection of small, deeply intimate moments shared between two star-crossed lovers.

The titular Carol (Cate Blanchett) is a wealthy 1950s housewife undergoing a messy divorce with a husband who refuses to accept her homosexuality as a natural aspect of her personality. The much younger Therese (Rooney Mara) is a shop girl going through a similar romantic struggle with a young beau she knows she should be smitten with, but simply isn’t. At these romantic crossroads, our two heroines fall for one another at first glance. Unable to express exactly what they’re thinking in the public eye, they speak merely through a socially-acceptable customer-saleswoman dynamic until they feel free to push the boundaries of where they’ll allow their desire to take them. It isn’t until the two discover freedom through travel on the open road that their yearning reaches its tipping point, leading to all sorts of emotional & legal fallout thanks to the uncaring world that sees their passion as a question of poor morality & mental illness. The power dynamic of their relationship (with the learned, elegant Carol tending to mother the girlish, just-discovering-herself Therese in an uncomfortable way) also strains what feels like a wrong place/wrong time, but ultimately meant to be romance.

Haynes handles the delicate nature of Therese & Carol’s passion with a surgeon’s precision, expressing their unspoken desire through intensely focused looks at details like the nape of a neck, the curve of a lip, the fetishistic exploration of a pair of gloves. He matches the obscured way they express their desire by filming the couple through windows like a voyeur so that they’re one step removed, especially in the stretches where the film functions as a travelogue. He also directly nods to the very medium he’s working in, making a big to-do about Therese’s interest in photography & having a moviegoer explain directly that you have to pay close attention to what characters say vs. what they actually mean. Blanchett & Mara obviously deserve much of the credit for making the film work in its small, under the radar way. It’s incredible that they can communicate so much desire through body language & low, guarded voices while still selling humor in lines like “Just when you think it can’t get worse, you run out of cigarettes.” As a trio, Blanchett, Mara, and Haynes construct a deeply romantic, emotionally trying, and at times damn sexy narrative seemingly without ever lifting a finger.

Carol deserves each & every one of its accolades. If I had seen it before the year had ended it may have very well made our Top Films of 2015 list (distribution schedules are a cruel, confounding beast). It certainly would’ve been included with my 2015 Christmastime Counterprogramming list if nothing else. I don’t think that the film needs to be championed in that way to get its full due, though. It’s almost better that it can exist under the radar, hidden from the awards season glamour, much how like its characters’ homosexual subculture is a secret world in plain sight. Carol is an elegant, understated gift that needs to be handled with care. I’m hoping its longevity as a work lasts much longer than the end-of-the-year roundups & trophy distributions. Thankfully, Haynes’ career is fascinating enough as a whole that it most likely won’t be an issue. I look forward to revisiting this one in the years to come.

Side Note: Whoever negotiated Carrie Brownstein’s credit in the opening scroll deserves a raise. I don’t know if her part was cut down in the editing room or what, but she barely even makes an appearance. So, you know, don’t get too excited about spending time with her when you see that opening credit. There’s not much of her part to go around.

-Brandon Ledet

The Revenant (2015)

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threehalfstar

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest is a difficult film to pin down in terms of quality. The Revenant is at times an intense spectacle of intricately detailed action choreography, but it’s also a meandering slowburner of a film that constantly reminds you that you’re watching Important Art. Its cinematography (provided by master of the form Emmanuel Lubezki) is gut-wrenchingly beautiful, but is often employed for such an empty purpose that it leaves you feeling cold. It aims for High Art severity in its narrative consequence, but the grotesque savagery of its rape & pillage masculinity feels like a well-constructed exploitation pic from a bygone era. I’m tempted to group it in with other arty, all-dressed-up-with-nowhere-to-go slowburners that were impressive but impossible to connect with (for me, anyway) like Only God Forgives & The Tree of Life, but I enjoyed too much of the film to dismiss it that easily. What is clear is that Iñárritu should at the very least be commended for not following up the critical success of Birdman (a film I was less than kind to) with a carbon copy of his most high profile film to date. I appreciate him sticking his neck out there, even if the results were the ultimate mixed bag of soaring successes & cringe-worthy missteps.

Part of what makes The Revenant so frustrating is its daunting 156 min runtime. The film’s opening battles between white men fur trappers & tribes of Native Americans and Leo DiCaprio’s protagonist & a pissed-off mama bear are breathtakingly savage, epically orchestrated orgies of visually striking violence. At the other end of the film, a  concluding knife fight between DiCaprio’s beaten-to-shit protagonist & Tom Hardy’s selfish brute who wronged him ranks up there with Friedkin’s The Hunted as one of the best hand-to-hand combat scenes ever committed to film. The long stretch between those heart-racing anchors, however, are painfully in need of some shrewd editing. It’s tempting to think of The Revenant as a revenge film floating somewhere between a Western & an exploitation, but a majority of the film is a travelogue. DiCaprio, Hardy, two opposing bands of American & French Fur trappers (one headed by Domnhall Gleeson, who’s been batting a thousand lately), and a revenge-hungry native tribe all slowly trudge toward an inevitable climactic bloodshed (while still recovering from the one that opened the film) in an unnecessarily-detailed step-by-step procession. At times the film itself feels like DiCaprio’s broken protagonist, crawling & gurgling blood for days on end under the weight of an over-achieving runtime.   Shave a good 40 minutes of The Revenant by tightening a few scenes & losing a shot here or there (as precious as Lubezki makes each image) & you might have a masterful man vs. nature (both human & otherwise) revenge pic. As is, there’s an overbearing sense of self-importance that sours the whole ordeal.

For the most part, though, the self-importance on display in The Revenant isn’t nearly as off-putting as it can be in Birdman. For instance, Lubezki’s camerawork is just as showy here as it was in Iñárritu’s Oscar Winner, but it ditches the single-extended-shot gimmick of that film in favor of a more tasteful line of highfalutin action cinematography. There are some gorgeous transitions from intense close-ups to long tracking shots in impossibly smooth single-swoops, but these shots are broken up in a way that Birdman‘s unrelenting gimmick of a structure allow for. Plot wise, The Revenant echoes the loud & obnoxious majority vs. the righteous intelligence of the few in the know that turned me off so sharply in Birdman (with Hardy anchoring the obnoxious brute end of that equation & DiCaprio serving as the righteous), but it’s not quite as much of a turn-off here. At worst, the preciousness & empty philosophy of lines like “As long as you can still breathe, you fight”, “Remember what mother used to say about the wind?”, and endless mutterings of “You are my son, you are my son,” (similar to the way Sean Penn whispers “Mother” into the void for hours in Tree of Life) are worth a hearty eyeroll or two. At best, they’re a nice break from watching DiCaprio gurgle & crawl his way through the snow. The dialogue in Birdman was much more off-putting.

Like I said, there’s too much of The Revenant that resonated with me to dismiss it outright. I’m more than willing to forgive an overwrought image or two (there’s a particularly egregious moment when a white bird emerges from a bullet wound, for instance) in exchange for the film’s more successful flashes of brilliance (like the bear & knife fights). For all of The Revenant‘s try-hard stabs at achieving High Art through hyper-masculine brutality, there’s a hell of a lot of praise-worthy ambition & striking imagery that’s well worth the patience required to make it through the perilous journey of its over-inflated runtime. Shorten some its travel time through montage & soften the cheese factor of its philosophical mumblings & I might even have heralded it as a masterpiece of brutish revenge cinema.

-Brandon Ledet