drama

Vision Quest (1985)

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The 1985 high school sports drama Vision Quest has exactly one attention-grabbing detail that argues for its continued cultural relevance four decades later: a mid-film Madonna concert. About halfway through his rise-to-local-notoriety story, the film’s high school wrestling hero (Matthew Modine) meets with his age-inappropriate romantic crush (Linda Florentino) at a dive bar where Madonna happens to be performing to a small crowd as if she were a punk act and not, in fact, an international pop star. At the time of casting & filming, Madonna was just one of many 80s pop acts included on the soundtrack to signal hip, with-it tastes to the teenage target demo: Journey, Dio, Berlin, Tangerine Dream, etc. By the time Vision Quest hit theaters, however, Madonna’s fame had exploded, and she was already a generational style-icon, prompting the film to be marketed under the alternate title Crazy for You in multiple countries outside the US. Italian distributors even featured her image on the retitled film’s poster, despite her commanding only two minutes or so of onscreen performance time. Madonna sings two songs in that brief sequence: a godawful tune I’ve never heard before called “Gambler” and the semi-titular hit “Crazy for You,” which later replays anytime the romantically conflicted wrestler gets in his feelings. Still, it was the notoriously cinephilic pop star’s first motion-picture appearance, which does afford it a lasting cultural significance.

Madonna aside, it’s worth noting that Vision Quest is a very good movie. It may walk & talk like a corny, cliché sports drama, but it finds surprising complexity & nuance in every character beat that elevates it above formulaic tripe. Modine’s troubled-young-man protagonist might think he’s struggling to get his body in shape to become a legendary high school wrestler, but he’s really struggling to get his mind in shape so that he doesn’t become a bully with an eating disorder. The 18-year-old kid is caught between two all-consuming pursuits: cutting weight so he can qualify to wrestle the county’s most intimidating competitor (the relatively unknown Frank Jasper) and losing his virginity to the 21-year-old drifter who’s temporarily staying in his family’s spare room (Florentino). Neither goal is especially high-stakes. The mutant teen he desperately wants to wrestle will lead to no championship trophies or financial scholarships; it’s an entirely arbitrary, self-imposed metric for greatness. Likewise, the mildly taboo Age Gap relationship he pursues with the drifter is not his only sexual or romantic opportunity (he is a sweetheart jock, after all), but he’s still so obsessed with the self-imposed goal that he starts to consider a professional career in gynecology so he can “be able to look inside women, to find the power they have over [him].” The only thing at stake in these pursuits are his own mind & body. Will he permanently harm himself in order to temporarily drop a couple weight classes for a wrestling match that ultimately doesn’t “matter”? Will he become a manipulative fuckboy in his frustrated yearning over the more sexually casual, mature drifter? These are not world-changing consequences, but they are life-changing ones.

As with all great genre films, it’s not what happens in Vision Quest that makes it stand out from its easiest comparisons; its greatness is all in the delivery. Modine does a great job playing a friendly, ambitious young man who’s in danger of becoming a dipshit if he allows his ambitions to overpower his friendliness. Most of his dialogue is delivered as shy muttering, which makes him a more convincingly authentic Movie Teen than most. Florentino conveys a laidback, detached sultriness as the (relatively) Older Woman archetype, a quality that her younger lover provocatively describes as exemplifying everything he likes about girls and everything he likes about guys. Even all of the obligatory gay-panic moments required of an 80s teen drama about male wrestlers are handled with surprising nuance & complexity, with Modine only describing himself feeling “a little freaked” by homosexual advances, not violently furious. More importantly, his older, grizzled coworker in a small hotel’s room service kitchen (J.C. Quinn) delivers a convincing argument that the climactic wrestling match does serve a greater communal purpose outside its importance to the teen’s self-worth. He describes sports as a divine transcendence of the human form, arguing that when an athlete can “lift himself, and the rest of us sad-assed human beings, up to a better place to be, if only for a minute […] it’s pretty goddamn glorious.” It’s such a great speech about the communal ritual of Sports that it doesn’t matter that the film ends on a hack freeze-frame image of the wrestler’s moment of personal triumph (or that Madonna’s prominence on the poster is a lie). It’s a conventional story told with great emotional impact.

-Brandon Ledet 

The Unbelievable Truth (1989)

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Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth is an interesting picture. Robert Burke plays Josh Hutton, a man who returns to his hometown after serving a prison sentence. The truth of what actually happened in the past is something that the film builds to while we in the audience hear various different versions of events passed around as gossip, but all retellings place the blame on Josh for the deaths of his girlfriend and her father. Said deceased are survived only by a young woman named Pearl (Julia McNeal), who works as a waitress in a diner alongside Jane (Edie Falco). Pearl is friends with our other lead, Audry (frequent Hartley collaborator Adrienne Shelly), a high school senior full of relatable angst about the presumed imminent end of the world in nuclear fire; as she says, “the human race never invented anything that it didn’t use.” This existential dread is a counterpoint to the Gen-X apathy of her peers, other than Pearl, whose own childhood tragedies have given her a resilience that tempers her. Josh reappears in town and quickly gets a job working for Audry’s mechanic father Vic (Christopher Cooke), who is frequently at odds with his daughter about her plans for the future. She’s been accepted to Harvard, but she and Vic constantly bargain over whether she will attend that university or the local community college, or if she will study literature or broadcasting, and what promises Vic has to make in order to get her to compromise. 

Audry and Josh meet and there is an immediate connection. Both are separated from the community around them, with her as the philosophically inclined old soul and him as the misunderstood loner with a troubled past who loves reading about history. At her graduation party, Vic is talked into paying for a portfolio of photographs for Audry by an agent, and although this initially seems to be nothing but a con, Audry finds work quickly and often. She’s upset that Josh didn’t come to the party, but she and Pearl spend some time together and Pearl admits that she thinks Josh is a nice man despite her family’s history with him and gives Audry the go-ahead to pursue him. Josh, for his part, lives ascetically, dressing all in black like Johnny Cash when he’s not in his mechanic overalls, living in his father’s abandoned house, and abstaining from drinking. This results in him being compared to a member of the cloth multiple times, as his celibacy prompts fellow mechanic Mike (Mark Bailey) to ask him, aghast, “like a priest?” and still later, when Josh asks that Audry not call him “Mr. Hutton,” she counters that she feels like she should call him “Reverend.” Vic isn’t happy to learn about this budding romance and forbids the two from seeing each other, once again bargaining with her about her future and what he’s willing to pay for and what he expects in return (namely that she’ll proceed to go to college as promised after her modeling gap year, and in return he won’t fire Josh). When Audry ends up in a jewelry ad that features her in the nude, Vic is convinced by Mike that Josh is reliable, and thus sends him into the city to bring Audry home. 

Released in 1989, The Unbelievable Truth reminds one in some ways of another alliteratively named director’s teenage romance angst film, Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything. Our main character is an oddball, like Lloyd Dobbler, except this time she’s a teenage girl, and what isolates her from her peer group is her resignation to her absolute faith that the apocalypse draws nigh. She’s precocious and bright, but her certainty about the uncertainty of the future means that the moment that she’s given the chance to live in the moment by making decent money as a model, she gets distracted from all of the gloom and doom; this is epitomized when she tells Pearl that she doesn’t even keep up with the news anymore. She’s the one who pursues Josh, not the other way around, and he really only seems to entertain the idea of entering into something romantic with her once she’s matured from experiencing more of the world outside of the suburbs that she’s always known. It’s unclear just how old Josh is, but Burke manages a way to convey both a world-weariness from his time in prison as well as a kind of innocence that he’s managed to maintain a hold on. Audry’s mother tells her a version of the story of Josh’s guilt and when Audry questions it, she says that the girl was too young to remember, but other dialogue implies that Audry was an infant at the time. One gets the feeling that more attention was paid to imagery than to those little details (or the dialogue for that matter). 

Another film that this one draws to mind is the 1990s Winona Ryder vehicle Reality Bites, as few other films lean so hard into Gen-X disaffection. The problem is that, when viewed by a modern audience, Reality Bites presents a main couple who both struggle with “selling out” into a lifestyle that is very appealing to anyone of the same age as the characters in every generation since. As Lindsay Ellis put it in one of her video essays years ago, everything is so much worse now, and, in the time since that essay’s release, there has been no further improvement in, uh, anything. Somehow, despite having the same sort of spoiled-for-choice opportunities, Audry remains likable and grounded, and we empathize with her early adulthood ennui and the altering states of being (a) panicked about preparing for a future and (b) resigned to the fact that there is no future. It may just be that Shelly is simply that likeable, like Lloyd Dobler and his boombox. 

Stylistically, there’s fun being had here. Having watched several of Hartley’s short films prior to sitting down to this one, I think I was prepared for this to be a film that would, in a scene in which Audry and Josh discuss their passions, be more focused on the images on screen than the dialogue. There are some great performances in scenes between the two, but they appear so sporadically, sprinkled in among scenes where the two monologue at each other with snippets of poetic-sounding but meaningless phrases. Half of these exist in order to provide a reason for some tableau that Hartley has created rather than because they provide further insight into character. This is a mixed bag. But Burke and Shelly sell it, even when it shouldn’t work, and that can also be owed to the presence of the mystery of Josh’s past helps keep the gears moving even when things start to feel like they’re running in place. 

Although nothing in the film made me laugh out loud, it has a decent sense of humor. Much of the repartee is pretty good, and it works with these actors. Cooke’s performance as Vic and all the ways that he deludes himself or gets talked into things make him more fun than his curmudgeonly nature would imply. There’s also a pretty good recurring bit where Audry’s ex-boyfriend Emmet (Gary Sauer) keeps physically attacking every man that he sees in Audry’s proximity, as he can’t believe that she would leave him for any other reason than that there is another man. There are interstitials to represent time passing (“A month, maybe two months later”) and as an interjection (“also,” “but”) which feel just irreverent enough for an indie like this. A lot of the jokes read as if they would come off a little too campy if the film weren’t taking itself mostly seriously. For example: 

Audry: Did you make love to Josh?”
Pearl: No, did you?
Audry: No.
Pearl: Why not?
Audry: I just got here.

On the page, there’s something about that which reads like a joke from Clue, but it’s delivered here in a way that elicits a smile but not quite a laugh. Perhaps the best bit, however, occurs when everyone converges on Josh’s house in the finale for various different reasons, converting the film into a bit of a farce for a while. Pearl has information that could help Josh, Audry has realized that Josh came to New York to look for her and has the wrong idea about her living situation, Vic seeks to confirm that Josh was able to get her back, and Mike is looking for Pearl. It’s fun, and the wrap-up from there is sweet. 

I’m not sure that I would recommend this to everyone. The back-and-forth can run on quite a bit sometimes, but it ultimately averages out to be a very lovely movie that will sit on a shelf in your mind and give you warm feelings for a long time to come. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Conformist (1970)

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When I think of movies about The Banality of Evil, I generally expect them to be a little, well, banal. The reason The Zone of Interest is such an effectively chilling picture, for instance, is that its visual patina and its editing rhythms are just as coldly impersonal as its Nazi ghouls. It’s framed as automated security-cam footage, documenting the domestic & bureaucratic rituals behind Nazi violence, while Holocaust victims ambiently scream in agony on the opposite side of the garden wall. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 spy thriller The Conformist takes the opposite approach. The Italo-French co-production is mostly staged in cold, clinical spaces, but its minimalist mise-en-scène is more akin to the fine-art production design of Last Year at Marienbad than anything credibly bureaucratic. The women in its cast model gorgeous 1930s Euro fashions, while the men in their lives dress in full Old Hollywood noir costume, segmented by the graphic parallel lines of Venetian blinds. Driving cars are shot in a wide angle from street level, as if Bertolucci was the main inspiration for Beastie Boys music videos to follow. The rear-projection imagery of train rides are pure Old Hollywood magic, reaching more for pop-art abstraction than real-world novelty. There’s something outright perverse in making a movie about The Banality of Evil so aggressively stylish & beautiful. Somehow, though, that approach doesn’t even register as one of the top-five most perverse things about the picture.

If Bertolucci was trying to make a point by making his Banality of Evil treatise so achingly beautiful & cool (besides attempting to make a name for himself as an up-and-coming auteur), it’s that the Banality itself is contrary to basic human behavior. Our antihero protagonist Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an undercover assassin struggling to complete his most recent mission because he falls in love with his target’s bisexual wife, likely because he recognizes a mutual queer sexuality in her that lingers in his own persona. However, as the title indicates, he spends his every waking moment suppressing anything about himself that could be read as morally deviant, mostly in response to the childhood trauma of being raised by mentally ill parents and being sexually assaulted by an adult stranger. Marcello volunteers to become an assassin-spy for Mussolini’s Italo-fascist regime, seeking to squash all moral deviancy in others’ behaviors instead of just focusing on his own. When a former professor & mentor (and current political target) accuses him of asserting his conformist moralism “through oppression,” he counters that he’s actually asserting it “through example,” which is so much stranger and more perverse. Fascists don’t usually buy into the restrictive morals they enforce on the masses, at least not behind closed doors. Clerici is the one true believer in fascist bullshit, seeking the ideal of normalcy in a world where it fundamentally can’t exist.

Clerici’s rigid, moralistic worldview is constantly subverted by the animalistic sexual desires & behaviors of every human being he comes into contact with, including himself. The main thrust of the story concerns a semi-requited love triangle with his friend-turned-target’s wife while she torments him by sexually pursuing his own wife, who is too blissfully ditzy to keep up with the dangerous game being played. The tensions & revelations of that sexual competition ultimately have no effect on his actions in the field, since he’s pathologically predisposed to do What He’s Supposed to Do. The only reason he married a woman he doesn’t love is because a man his age is supposed to be married. Likewise, there’s never really any question of whether he will follow through on violently betraying his former mentor; he loves following orders. The Conformist posits Evil Banality as a participatory choice.  It’s something that fascists consciously opt into, as opposed to getting swept up in the momentum of a political movement. Bertolucci undercuts any of the spy-thriller conventions of the story to instead dwell on how inhumanly strange that choice is, allowing editor Franco Arcalli to scramble the timeline with a disorienting, overlapping flashback structure. It’s ultimately a hyper-stylized character study of a deeply perverse man, one whose single-minded pursuit of normal human behavior makes him the most abnormal freak walking the planet. Meanwhile, everyone around him is just trying to enjoy a few orgasms before they die, which is the way things are supposed to be.

-Brandon Ledet

Imitation of Life (1959)

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Imitation of Life is a weird document. All That Heaven Allows lives and dies based upon your investment in the happiness of its lead character, and Written on the Wind is a narrative about a wealthy American family in slow decline, rent asunder by internal forces of jealousy, desperation for approval, and poor parental love; both are also shot in glorious Technicolor. Imitation of Life, on the other hand, was marketed in much the same way as Heaven, namely that it was supposedly a romantic picture about a widow finding love again, but that narrative is by far the least interesting thing about the film. What it turns out to be instead is an unexpectedly heartbreaking story about a family that is torn apart by societal forces that even an abundance of motherly love can’t overcome, with the emergence of a new theatre star as the supposed primary plot of the film while actually serving as the background to a much more interesting story. 

Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) loses her daughter, Susie, at Coney Island one day, then finds her in the company of another girl, Sarah Jane. Lora, delighted, meets who she first assumes is Sarah Jane’s nanny, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), but learns that Annie is actually Sarah Jane’s mother. Annie describes her late husband as having been “close to white” and that Sarah Jane takes after him, rather than Annie. Upon discovering that Annie and her daughter are essentially homeless, she takes them into her apartment, as there is an extra room off of the kitchen (a common feature of the time, as Lora is essentially putting them up in the maid’s quarters, and their placement there is not an accident). The supposed A-plot features Lora seeking to make it as a star onstage in the big city; she successfully bluffs her way into the office of talent agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda) and gets an invitation to a party that same evening where all the movers and shakers will be. When it turns out that this is a prelude to a casting couch situation, she leaves in an understandable huff, although this is all forgiven when Loomis ends up becoming her agent regardless. He gets her an audition for the latest play by David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy), and when she stands up to him about a scene not working as written, he’s likewise impressed with her moxy and gives her an even bigger part. This is counterposed with her budding romance with Steve Archer, a photographer whom she met that fateful day at the beach; he took a photo of the girls balancing an empty can on a sleeping man’s stomach that day and eventually sold it for use in advertisements for beer. (Incidentally, Steve is played by John Gavin, who you may remember as Marion Crane’s afternoon delight stud-muffin in Psycho; try not to let his character being named Sam Loomis there while his character here is romantic rivals with a different Loomis confuse you.) Steve and Lora grow closer until he finally proposes, but his insistence that she give up her career is a non-starter. 

All throughout, the film focuses on Annie and her relationship with her daughter, who is clearly struggling under the weight of her Black identity. When she and her mother first arrive at the Merediths’, Susie tries to give Sarah Jane her newest and most prized doll, which happens to be Black, causing Sarah Jane to resent the younger girl’s innocent insensitivity. When Annie is telling the story of Mary and Joseph’s trip to Bethlehem at Christmas time, Sarah Jane asks what color Jesus was. Lora tells her that Jesus is whatever color one imagines him to be, and Sarah Jane protests that this can’t be the case since they are being taught he was a real person. Finally, she says “Jesus was white. Like me.” Things really come to a head, however, when Annie comes to Sarah Jane’s school to bring her lunch and learns that her daughter has been passing as white among her peers and the teachers, and the realization among her classmates when they learn the truth bears out much of Sarah Jane’s fears about exposure and the mistreatment she can expect because of the racism of the society in which she lives. When I started that last sentence, when I got to the end of it, I had to rethink my initial plan to conclude that Sarah Jane is mistreated “because of the color of her skin,” because that’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening. Sarah Jane is being treated fairly because of her apparent whiteness, and injustice and unfairness enters into the equation when a white supremacist society inexorably forces its way into these dynamics. Annie laments that her heart breaks because she can’t explain to the daughter that she adores why reality is so unfair, because Sarah Jane was “born to be hurt” by the world because of no fault of her own. 

Things are even worse for Sarah Jane when there’s a time jump from 1947 to 1958, the passage of time represented by continuously superimposed images of Lora’s name on various marquees and the accompanying year. Her newfound wealth has afforded them a manse in the countryside, where Annie and Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) continue to live with Lora and Susie (Sandra Dee). It’s unclear what exactly Annie’s role in this new house is, as there are other servants now. A charitable read of the situation is that Lora and Annie have essentially been coparenting both of the girls since Annie and her daughter first came into the Meredith household, with Lora in the breadwinner role and Annie as the housewife, but even if that’s what’s happening here, it ignores all of the power dynamics at play. It’s also clear that Lora has been paying Annie in addition to housing her, as Annie mentions having saved up enough to send Sarah Jane to college. I’m not sure, but how you read this situation can have a lot of bearing on how you feel about its participants. If we choose to read Annie as co-head of household, as she’s mostly treated, then her oversight of the house and meals feels a little funny but isn’t ultimately demeaning. If we choose to read that the relationship between Annie and Lora has changed from being two women trying to make it in the big city together to one that feels familial but is nonetheless employer-employee, then Lora becomes much less sympathetic. My ultimate reading boils down to how Lora reacts when the two are parted by death, and that although she truly loved Annie and considered her a partner in life and not a servant, she nonetheless found herself occasionally acting in the patronizing manner of the era despite her affection and devotion. 

Sarah Jane, for her part, is having a rough go of things, continuing to seek inroads to the life of privilege to which she feels entitled and which her perceived whiteness gives her just enough ingress to see how things are on the other side. This reaches a point of harrowing violence, when she goes to meet up with the boy who’s talked about running away together and getting married, only to find him sullen and unable to look her directly in the eye. He demands to know if what he’s learned—that Annie is her mother and that Sarah Jane is Black—is true. Sarah Jane denies it, but he nonetheless beats her savagely. Meanwhile, she’s having to deal with all of Susie’s stories about finishing school and watching her not-quite-sister get a pony as a graduation gift; to get out, she claims to be working at the NYC library, but Annie discovers she is actually working as a sort of sexy lounge singer where men leer at her, and when Annie’s appearance once again outs her as non-white, she loses the job. This prompts her to flee even further, finally ending up as a chorus girl out west, but when Annie comes to see her one last time, she tells Sarah Jane that she has come to say that she won’t chase her anymore, and that she loves her daughter enough to accept her choices. When one of the other chorus girls finds them together, Annie pretends to be no more than Sarah Jane’s old nanny in order to preserve her daughter’s concealment of her true identity. 

It’s this that serves as the film’s climax. Sure, there are other things going on. Lora and Susie are distant because Lora always put her career first. Steve re-enters the picture, and he and Lora make plans to travel together and get to know one another again that she immediately reneges upon when offered a part in a new film from an Italian art director. Steve keeps Susie busy that summer and she falls madly in love with him (who wouldn’t?). Susie tells her mother to just be with Steve, and they get together. All seems kind of rote and pale in comparison to what’s happening with Annie, doesn’t it? That’s clearly intentional, and even though there’s a kind of going-through-the-motions energy of everything happening with the Merediths, I was never bored by any of it. Everything happening with Annie just overpowers it, as she ultimately succumbs to (perhaps literally) a broken heart from losing her daughter, spiritually if not literally. Her funeral service features a performance of “Trouble of the World” from Mahalia Jackson, and it’s beautiful. 

In many ways, this is one of director Douglas Sirk’s finest hours. Annie’s story is beautiful, thoughtful, and tender, while Lora’s is perfectly serviceable. It may be that the DVD I saw of this didn’t have a very colorful transfer, but where this one is lacking is in its visual panache. You can almost feel the chill of the blue snow in All that Heaven Allows, but the colors here seem muted, although that may be due to the fact that this was a Eastmancolor production, not a Technicolor one. Susie’s room in the country manse stands out for this reason, as her bubblegum pink room should really pop, but it feels rather dull. Infamously, a publicity stunt surrounding this film was that half of its two-million-dollar budget was spent entirely on Lana Turner’s wardrobe, and while there are many fine pieces, it feels like they’re lacking in some razzle dazzle that one of Sirk’s other pictures would have more effectively conveyed. There are also some places where the narrative seams are less than flush. For instance, the extended sequence of Sarah Jane doing a musical number at the NYC club seems to be a leftover sequence from when the film was conceived as a musical. Both Steve (demanding that Lora forsake the stage in 1947) and Susie (realizing that her infatuation with Steve is childish and relinquishing her mother of any guilt in pursuing him in 1958) make decisions that feel more narratively convenient than true to the characters. Nonetheless, this one is definitely a contender for Sirk’s greatest work.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Armand (2025)

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There is currently an American remake of Andrei Żuławski’s monstrous divorce meltdown Possession in the works, to be directed by Smile‘s Parker Finn and produced by Robert Pattinson. The project is both catastrophically misguided and totally understandable. Just a decade ago, it was difficult to access the 1981 political psych thriller through any official, legal means, which afforded it a kind of cult-curio prestige. The full-bodied mania of Isabelle Adjani’s performance in out-of-context clips in which she writhes in a tunnel while smashing her groceries against the concrete wall got passed around the internet enough that it gradually became a staple of online film culture, though, initiated by its copyright-infringing use in the Crystal Castles music video for “Plague.” A few expensive physical-media reissues & short streaming-platform stints later, and Possession is now an official part of the canon. There’s even enough evidence to argue that Adjani’s interpretive-dance tunnel freakout is the most influential movie scene of the current moment. It was cited as direct inspiration for at least three of last year’s biggest horror-heroine performances (Nosferatu, Immaculate, The First Omen), and now some poor actress will be tasked with retracing Adjani’s exact steps in a mainstream remake removed from its original cultural & political context — the final stage in legitimizing any once-subversive piece of art.

Adjani’s interpretive-dance freakout is now so cinematically ubiquitous that it’s influencing procedural dramas about tense parent-teacher conferences, not just horror flicks. The Norwegian film Armand is mostly structured as a stage play in a single primary school classroom wherein two couples argue about a physical altercation between their 6-year-old sons, as mediated by a timid schoolteacher and her hard-nosed administrative higher-ups. In the initial telling of the story, the titular child Armand is accused of having sexually assaulted his playmate in a school bathroom, an event that neither (unseen) child has the full vocabulary to communicate to the confused, horrified adults. Every parent and school employee has a hidden, selfish agenda in how they react to this crisis, which is slowly teased out in a web of secrets & resentments that link the two families far beyond the transgression they’re currently debating. It’s Armand’s mother Elizabeth who’s afforded the most complex internal life, though, as performed by Renate “Worst Person in the World” Reinsve. As the intensity of the parent-teacher conference escalates, she has a full psychotic breakdown that destroys all decorum by releasing something monstrously inhuman in the room, transforming a small-scale drama into a full-blown psych thriller merely by laughing & crying with violent intensity at unpredictable intervals. Armand might have gotten the title, but the movie is Elizabeth’s story.

It’s when Elizabeth steps into the school’s hallways & empty classrooms that the movie goes full Possession. The whispered rumors that spiral out of that closed-door meeting haunt her like vengeful ghosts as they echo off of every hard surface to the point of supernatural cacophony. Her public-figure role as a semi-famous actress combines with the scrutiny of her mothering technique to give her the feeling of constantly being pawed at from every direction, which is literalized by the imagined hands of fellow parents roughly groping her flesh in interpretive dance. The proceedings are coldly clerical in nature, but there’s an erotic violence to the tone that reverberates throughout the building, frequently turning moments of heated intimacy into physical abuse as parents & staff siphon each other off into empty rooms. Whether abuse is learned or inherited and whether you can ever fully separate truth from spin provide the film a thematic justification for what’s mostly just an excuse to rattle the audience, often through unexpected nosebleeds, fire alarms, and thundercracks. First-time director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel is playing a game of tonal precarity here, unlocking something intangibly evil in a parent-teacher conference the way Possession unlocks something intangibly evil in a simple act of adultery or, more notably, a trip to the grocer. My comparing Reinsve to Adjani is probably doing her performance no favors, but she does hold her own among other recent actresses who’ve explicitly stated that’s where they’re drawing their inspo.

It’s entirely possible that no one making Armand had Possession in mind during production. As the nepo-grandbaby of Ingmar Bergman & Liv Ullman, Tøndel has plenty of under-the-surface menace to pull from just within his own family’s cinematic legacy. Where & when he chooses to break from reality in this psychological meltdown felt Possession adjacent to me, though, especially by the time the cast breaks into violent, abstract dance. By default, it’s a more compelling, interpretive use of Possession’s influence than any straight-forward Hollywood remake could be, regardless of whether the influence was conscious. The influence is unavoidable right now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do something new with it.

-Brandon Ledet

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987)

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Swampflix just hit its tenth anniversary as a movie blog, which was already a dead medium when we started posting reviews on the site in January of 2015.  The longer I stick with this project the more I question what, exactly, I’m getting out of it, which is a question likely best left unanswered.  There are some obvious, tangible benefits that come with time.  I can look back to the earliest writing & illustrations published on this site ten years ago and have confidence that my basic skills have improved with practice (even though the early drawings are still in active rotations, like the camera pictured above).  It’s also beneficial to have an ongoing log of the movies and thoughts that have passed through my brain in that time, since the majority of that memory would be lost otherwise.  Not least of all, Swampflix has become a social ritual for me, especially as the entirety of the crew has been assimilated into weekly podcast recordings, so that my friends are routinely obligated to talk to me about my personal favorite small-talk subject: movies.  The grand Swampflix project is one of self-fulfillment, operated entirely at a monetary loss, so the question is more about what I get out of publishing the site for public view and less about what I get out of it as a personal hobby.

That difference between internal and external fulfillment in a long-term amateur art project is one of the major tensions at the core of Patricia Rozema’s coming-of-middle-age drama I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing.  Our aimless, thirtysomething protagonist, Polly, is unsure of who she is and what she wants out of life.  She does not care about what she does for work, getting by on office temp jobs until she stumbles into a sweet regular gig assisting at a hip Toronto art gallery.  She’s disconnected from her own sexual desire, just now discovering in her thirties that she’s attracted to women, thanks to the magnetic allure of that gallery’s erudite curator, Gabrielle.  The only thing Polly knows for sure is that she loves taking photographs, and she’s transformed her one-bedroom apartment into an impromptu art gallery of its own, carpeting the walls with photos she’s taken of images that make her happy – mostly urban architecture & candid portraiture.  Only, her heart is broken when she anonymously submits these photographs for her employer’s consideration and is eviscerated by dismissive critiques that the artist behind them represents “the trite made flesh.”  Before that unknowing betrayal, her photography hobby was the one thing that Polly found personally fulfilling in life.  Hearing a negative, outside opinion on her work breaks the spell, and she’s left with little to live for, especially since she’s betrayed by the one person she looks up to.

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing finds immense beauty in “the trite,” the twee, the quirky.  Polly is a kind of Holy Fool archetype who makes great art (to the audience’s eye, anyway) simply by amusing herself with a camera.  Gabrielle is her Art World foil: a cynical materialist who only values art based on its marketability and its relevance to hip New Yorkers’ tastes, which plays as a joke on Torontonian insecurities.  Their ideological clash escalates when Gabrielle starts passing off widely beloved “golden” paintings created by her lover, Mary, as her own original work for marketing purposes, which causes Polly to lose even more respect for her idol.  Meanwhile, Polly goes on fantastic mental adventures while developing prints in her dark room, living a true artist’s inner life in an over-imaginative dream space of her own making while the more successful Art World team of Gabrielle & Mary waste their time orchestrating much pettier, more lucrative schemes.  It’s the same volatile mixture of authentic authorship debates and adventures in self-fulfilling sensuality that Rozema pushed to a further extreme in her follow-up film White Room, except this time it’s framed as a quirky indie romcom instead of a Hitchcockian voyeur thriller.

I’ve only seen a couple of Rozema’s films so far, but she has a distinct eye for fairy tale visuals and an ear for dreamworld tones that make for singular work that could’ve been made by no one else, despite the fact that she’s often shooting commercial-grade video art in a major Canadian city.  Still, the major triumph of I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is Sheila McCarthy’s adorably insecure performance as Polly.  McCarthy approximates what it would be like if the Jim Henson Creature Shop captured the spirit of Ann Magnuson & Pee-wee Herman in a single Muppet.  She’s simultaneously a dorky, overgrown child who can’t get through a business lunch at a sushi restaurant without giving herself a milk mustache and the chicest person in every room she enters, largely thanks to her total lack of self-awareness.  She might not know what to do with any appendage of her body in any social scenario, but she out-cools all of the Art World poseurs who turn their noses up at her.  Polly is proof that the “Adulting!” brand of stunted maturity is not unique to Millennials as a generation, since Rozema’s film was produced when we were mere babies.  It’s also evidence that the main reason so many of us are Like That (useless but adorably dorky) is that we’re only suited to be making art for our own pleasure but living in a world that requires us to make money for survival.  I can say this for certain: Swampflix would improve greatly if I didn’t spend so much of my time working for a paycheck elsewhere.  It would likely also improve if I turned this hobby into my paycheck, but I assume that would zap all of the fun & self-fulfillment out of it, so no thanks.

-Brandon Ledet

Evil Does Not Exist (2024)

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My number one movie of last year, La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro, was advertised at my local arthouse theater with a quote calling the film an “eco-fable,” a term I had theretofore been unfamiliar with. When Aku wa Sonzai Shinai, or Evil Does Not Exist, was advertised at the same earlier this year, there was another quote in their trailer referring to it using the same neogenre epithet. I was excited by this, but missed the window in which it was playing and had to wait for other means to view it to come around. 

The film primarily concerns a widower named Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who lives in the rural mountain village of Mizubiki, with his daughter, Hana. Takumi is a vital member of the community as a performer of local odd jobs, like collecting and transporting water directly from a mountain stream to a cafe in town that is noted for its exceptional udon. He lives in a state of constant distraction caused by the grief of the loss of his wife, not necessarily reliable but relied upon, with the fact that he often forgets to pick his daughter up from school being established early on. Two representatives from a glamping development project that is set to begin construction near Mizubiki arrive in town from Tokyo, and a polite-but-tense interaction ensues. Initially, the male representative, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka), comes off as condescending while his partner Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) is more receptive to the locals’ concerns. These include but are not limited to: the placement of the glamping site’s septic tank will result in runoff that will enter the water table for the village, that the location is part of the migration area of local deer, that the lack of 24-hour on-site management opens up the possibility of guests starting campfires that result in major forest fires. By the end, even Takahashi recognizes that the concerns of the villagers are far from trivial, but his and Mayuzumi’s efforts to have all issues addressed are rebuffed by their upper management in Tokyo, who concede on the issue of 24-hour support but not moving the septic tank, and who recommend hiring Takumi to act as the caretaker of the site. As he and Mayuzumi return to Mizubiki to discuss this with Takumi, Takahashi confesses that he’s grown tired of this, as he entered the industry as an entertainment agent and feels that his work has moved him into places that he finds morally questionable and for which he is largely unsuited; he’s even considering applying for the caretaker position himself. He can barely keep from repeating this to Takumi shortly after they arrive, and the local man takes the two on his rounds, before realizing that he’s forgotten to pick up his daughter from school yet again, although this time, she’s not home when he gets there. 

The title is incorrect, of course. Evil does exist, it simply rarely announces itself and is good at obfuscation. When Takahashi and Mayuzumi’s boss refuses to consider the possibility of finding some other way to address the septic tank issue at the proposed glamping site, he does so with a tense and polite smile that demonstrates that he’s only willing to concede on the issue of having a caretaker because it’s possible to do it without any additional funding. He says that they’ll just have to cut overall staff. On the issue of making sure that the precise natural resource that forms the most delicate, intricate part of the experience that the company is selling is threatened, he is unmovable. Comically underscoring his point, he presents as evidence a “stocks go up” style graph that says merely that the glamping industry exists and is profitable. None of this is seen by him as “evil,” merely as him fulfilling his position in a capitalist hierarchy. Nonetheless, each of his decisions has a direct effect on the health of a village of people “downstream.” That is the nature of evil, that it’s all a series of selfish decisions that each person justifies to oneself, snowballing downhill and getting larger and more harmful as it goes. No person’s individual choices are evil in their own hearts, but it does exist. 

Unfortunately, this film lacks the clarity and cohesion of La vaca que cantó. That film dove hard into its magical realism, while this one is straightforwardly realistic, at least until its final minutes, which are narratively ambiguous to the point of potential frustration. I have a feeling that most people will be turned off by the film’s pace, which one could describe as “meditative” or “glacial,” depending upon how much patience you’re willing to lend it. Evil Does Not Exist spends a lot of time in observation of the peaceful stillness of its setting, as it is filled with long and loving shots of people travelling through the picturesque beauty of the forests and mountains that fill virtually every frame of the film. To be frank, I found this one taxing my patience, and I have a lot more patience for these kinds of slow, sprawling pastorals than most. It could be argued that it’s a necessary part of the package for interpretation of this as a text, but the parts of the film in which something does happen are electric, even when it’s something that’s as objectively uninteresting as a town hall meeting in which no one ever raises their voice. I can see what’s being done here, by making the banality of real estate development and the resultant community conflict more interesting by juxtaposing it against a landscape which is beautiful but also harsh and empty – that is, not in the least bit escapist. However, that doesn’t make the movie a more enjoyable experience for me. 

What I did like was the density of the narrative that exists. When we first meet Takahashi, he seems like just another stuffed shirt who’s been sent solely in order to make it appear that his employing corporation checked all the boxes needed to get nominal approval from the local community. And that’s exactly what he is, but he does soften up a bit after hearing from the people of Mizubiki. Unfortunately, he learns exactly the wrong thing from this, as he immediately thinks that he would be best suited for the caretaker position, and he’s exhilarated and energized when Takumi allows him to chop a single log and assist with the collection of springwater for the udon restaurant. Earlier in the film, one of the local women asks for a clarification on what “glamping” is, and settles for the definition that the new development will be a “camping themed hotel.” Takahashi, despite rejecting his company because of their treatment of the people of the village, completely buys into the exact thing that they are selling. That’s one of the more interesting insights that the movie plays with. One of my other favorite moments is when Takumi refers to his grandparents as “settlers,” and notes that even the people who already reside there are responsible for “deform[ing]” the nature that exists there to some extent. The issue is not so straightforward as “glamping bad,” but that there’s no action without reaction. I like all of that quite a lot. Unfortunately, I just can’t find it in my heart to love this one as much as I wish I did. I see why it is the way that it is, but I just can’t bring myself to love it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Nickel Boys (2024)

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It has been heartbreaking to watch Barry Jenkins succumb to the Disney filmmaking machine, pouring years of his life & art into the lifeless, artless product of the studio’s “live-action” CG prequel to The Lion King.  Regardless of whether Jenkins’s Mufasa is any good, it’s undeniably a waste of the talented filmmaker’s time when compared to his previous critical hits Moonlight & If Beale Street Could Talk: two gorgeous, somber portraits of Black American life, as opposed to a pale, sickly sing-along starring computer-animated lions.  Anyone who’s mourning that loss and feeling nostalgic for The Old Jenkins is likely to find refuge in RaMel Ross’s Awards Season sweetheart Nickel Boys, which offers a more formally extreme version of Jenkins’s earlier triumphs.  As already evidenced in his own earlier, artsier documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross is a more challenging, experimental filmmaker than Jenkins, but the two directors share a fearless, formalist approach to Black portraiture and work well in tandem.  Nickel Boys softens a little of Hale County‘s narrative looseness in its distraction with other tools of filmmaking language, but it’s still a potentially alienating work with uncompromising politics.  Let’s just hope that its Oscars buzz doesn’t lead to Ross directing Moana 3 or Black Panther 4 over the next few years; the financial paycheck is never worth the artistic payoff.

The formal experiment in this case is in adapting a novel written from a 3rd-person POV into a 1st-person narrative film, putting the audience in the alternating minds & bodies of its two main characters.  Instead of taking a straight historical look at the recent abusive, racist past of boys’ reformatory schools in the American South, Ross walks you through the first-hand experience of being imprisoned there as a young, innocent victim of the system.  It’s like playing a 1st-person shooter video game except instead of committing acts of violence you walk into the wrong place at the wrong time, and your fate is locked into a one-way track you have no opportunity to break away from, which accounts for the experience of many young Black men in America.  The result is a clear, direct argument that the institution of American slavery continued well after the Civil War; it’s just now carried out through schoolyard & prison labor under the guise of punitive justice.  To his credit, Ross breaks away from the linear one-way-track structure of that political argument with intrusions of memory and glimpses of his protagonists’ future—which fully take over in the final, fragmentary montage that pulls the full scope of his story together—but the central conceit is having to suffer inside the two boys’ bodies & minds as if they were your own, fearful that you might not make it to the end credits without getting dumped into one of the school’s unmarked graves.

If you end up watching Nickel Boys at home instead of the theater, I recommend using headphones. A lot of attention has been paid to the 1st-person perspective of its imagery, but its sound design is just as intensely, complexly immersive.  I wish I had more to say about what it’s doing dramatically rather than formally, but the technical achievement of that sensory immersion can’t be dismissed.  If it has any narrative grace to it, it’s in the smaller, observational details that distract from his larger historical & political bullet points: focusing on the thread of a garment while news reports of a landmark Civil Rights event echo in the background, using the recurring image of a freshly picked orange to anchor the audience to the Floridian setting, throwing in a couple alligator jump scares to heighten the already tense experience of being a sensitive boy raised in a macho, militarized environment, etc.  I can’t say the dramatic exchanges between actors ever overpowered the visual & aural devices that Ross spent so much of his energy tinkering with; it plays more like a VR experience than a traditional narrative film.  Still, that’s more of an exciting, daring technical achievement than figuring out how to get a CG lion to mouth the words to a Lin Manuel-Miranda song or whatever Jenkins has been up to in his Disney Vault prison cell. 

-Brandon Ledet

FYC 2024: Difficult People

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This is not my time of year.  While every multiplex in town is overbooked with screenings of four-quadrant crowd-pleasers like Wicked: Part 1, Moana 2, and Gladiator 2, my e-mail inbox is overflowing with FYC screeners for the critical favs that premiered at festivals months ago but distributors have held back for optimal last-minute Oscar buzz.  Neither option is especially appealing to me, personally, as most of my favorite new releases tend to be the high-style, low-profile genre titles that quietly trickle into local arthouse cinemas during the first half of the year, playing to mostly empty rooms.  Still, I make an effort to catch up with what hipper, higher-minded critics single out as The Best Movies of the Year, mostly as an effort to stay informed but also somewhat as an effort to not waste my time & money on the corporate IP currently clogging up American marquees.  It’s during this holiday-season FYC ritual that I’m most often confronted with my most hated & feared cinematic enemies: Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint.  It’s also when I watch the most capital-A Acting, since these tend to be projects greenlit & distributed with the intent of stirring up awards buzz for a particular performer on the poster.  If there’s any one theme to the trio of FYC screeners I happened to watch over Thanksgiving break, it’s that they were all easy-to-watch dramas about difficult-to-handle people, each highlighting the acting talents of their headlining performers by allowing them to get socially & emotionally messy onscreen without other cinematic distractions getting the way – petty details like dynamic, daring cinematography and editing, the art of the moving image.

If you’re ever in the mood to watch a movie that values acting over any other cinematic concern, you can always look to actors-turned-directors to scratch that itch.  Jesse Eisenberg’s second directorial work, A Real Pain, is a two-hander acting showcase for himself and screen partner Kieran Culkin, who are both good enough in the movie that it’s been in The Awards Conversation for almost a full year since it first premiered at Sundance.  Jesse Eisenberg stars as a Jesse Eisenberg type: a nervous New Yorker who can barely finish a conversational sentence without having a panic attack.  Kieran Culkin is his socially volatile cousin: a bi-polar timebomb who breaks every unspoken social convention imaginable while still managing to charm every stranger he meets.  Structurally, the film is a travel story about the cousins’ journey to Poland to reconnect with their Jewish heritage in the wake of their grandmother’s recent death, which leads to a lot of solemn sightseeing at major sites of The Holocaust.  From scene to scene, however, it functions as a darkly, uncomfortably funny comedy about two men who love each other very much but have incompatible mental illnesses that make it impossible for them to share a room.  No one wants to hear their Awards Season drama described as a breezy, 90min Sundance dramedy about The Holocaust, but that’s exactly the movie that Eisenberg made.  A Real Pain‘s saving grace, then, is the strength of the performances the two central actors deliver as absurdly difficult people.  Culkin’s social brashness and emotional volatility makes his difficulty more immediately apparent, but Eisenberg gives himself plenty of room to do his Nervous Fella schtick as much as possible.  It’s an anxious archetype that Culkin’s character aptly describes as “an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late.”

Marielle Heller is another actor-turned-director who has made empathy for difficult characters a core tenet of her artistry, most successfully in Can You Ever Forgive Me? and The Diary of a Teenage Girl.  Her new adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel Nightbitch doesn’t reach far beyond that search for empathetic cheerleading, though, and the movie is mostly a dud as a result.  Amy Adams stars as a visual artist who has put her creative pursuits aside to raise a child while her husband travels for work.  Spending weeks in isolation with only her young child for company, she loses her adult social skills and essentially goes feral, convincing herself that she is physically transforming into a dog.  Suppressing her artist’s spirit to play housewife breaks her brain, causing her to hallucinate monstrous canine hair, tail, and nipple growth in the mirror and to act out wildly in public (barking, stealing food off strangers’ plates, dressing her son in a leash, etc.).  Where her internal fantasy of motherhood bringing out her most animalistic traits ends and her external, real-life social misbehavior begins is intentionally kept vague, as Heller is more concerned with seeing the world through her protagonist’s color-blind eyes than with constructing genuine, heartfelt drama.  Nightbitch is conceptually amusing as a body-horror metaphor for how motherhood physically & mentally transforms you, but it’s pretty lackluster in execution, especially as a page-to-screen adaptation.  There are long stretches of narration in which Adams recites passages from Yoder’s book, as if Heller’s relationship with the material was more admiration than inspiration.  She’s so concerned with landing its political jabs about gendered, invisible domestic labor that she forgot to make its characters feel like real people, so the whole thing ends up hollow & phony no matter how committed Adams’s performance is as the titular Nightbitch.  It should’ve been an audiobook.

Mike Leigh did not start his career as an actor, but he does have a career-long history as a stage theatre director, which is a very actorly profession.  That background heavily informs the sparse, minimalist approach to familial drama in his new film Hard Truths, which sits with its characters’ interpersonal conflicts rather than resolving them.  As the most difficult person of all in this triple feature, Marianne Jean-Baptiste stars as a middle-aged grump who wages a one-woman war against the “smiling, cheerful people” of the world for 100 relentlessly sour minutes, including her own loving sister. Her performance is intensely funny and bitter, as she finds so much to complain about every second she is awake that she cannot even sit comfortably in her own home without obsessing over the activities of the pigeons, foxes, and bugs outside the window.  There are multiple scenes that start with her gasping in horror at the sensation of waking up from a nap, and her nonstop tirades against the waking world’s many offenses leads to the highest incredulous-teeth-sucking-per-minute ratio I’ve ever seen in a movie as her audience is held hostage by her hostility.  Meanwhile, a softly droning violin draws out the pathos of her pathological misery, especially in scenes where her much better adjusted sister gently attempts to diffuse her anger.  Leigh pays careful attention to the social & economic circumstances of the sisters’ past that would’ve burdened one with awareness of the world’s wretchedness while leaving the other unscathed, but most of the thematic & emotional impact of the picture is achieved through the forcefulness of Jean-Baptiste’s performance, which is exactly how all of these movies work, even the lesser ones. 

If any of these movies indulge in the Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint that torment me during the Awards Season screener deluge every year, it’s Hard Truths, which is what makes it so unfortunate that it’s the best of this batch.  If all of the cinematic value of a picture is going to be invested in the difficulty & thorniness of a central performance, that performance might as well reach for the extremity of Marianne Jeanne-Baptiste’s, which is a cinematic spectacle in and of itself.  The problem with Amy Adams, Kieran Culkin, and Jesse Eisenberg’s performances—if there is one—is that you always get the sense that their respective directors need you to like their characters, so they’re careful not to push their difficult-person conflicts far enough to abandon the audience.  Mike Leigh is fearless in that respect, even if he restrains himself elsewhere.  Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s hopeless grump is somewhat lovable as a movie character, but you wouldn’t want to be in the same room as her for ten consecutive minutes, whereas you could easily imagine yourself splitting a bottle of wine with Adams, Culkin, or Eisenberg’s grumps to hear more of their side of things.  If I’m going to watch a low-key movie about a high-maintenance individual, I’d prefer that character to be as high-maintenance as possible.  Make them a real pain, a real bitch – a really, truly difficult person.

-Brandon Ledet

The Last Showgirl (2024)

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“Why must a movie be ‘good?’ Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a beautiful face, huge?”

That 19-word tweet from Mike Ginn is one of the most concisely insightful pieces of critical writing on cinema in the past decade.  It’s also never been so strenuously tested since it was first tweeted in 2018 as it is in Gia Coppola’s latest feature, The Last Showgirl, which relies heavily on the simple pleasure of seeing Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face, huge.  The Last Showgirl is not a Good Movie in an artistic sense, or it’s at least too phony & hollow to pass as a well-constructed drama.  It’s got a nice visual texture to it, though, which helps make it an effective advertisement for Anderson’s reinvented screen presence as an anxious, fragile Betty Boop.  Anderson stars in the film as a traditional Las Vegas showgirl who’s aging out of her decades-long stage act, echoing her real-life career as The 90s Babe who was quietly forgotten after the end of her signature decade.  She’s overly delicate & vulnerable here in a way we’ve never seen her in more youthful, forceful titles like Baywatch & Barb-Wire, which is a great benefit to the movie, since it otherwise only shows us things we’ve seen before.  If you’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler or any post-Starlet title from Sean Baker, you’ve already seen The Last Showgirl done better.  You just haven’t seen it with Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face on the screen & poster.

Even so, The Last Showgirl doesn’t do entirely right by Anderson, since it allows her more forceful costars to steamroll her daintily sweet performance whenever they want the spotlight.  Jamie Lee Curtis is the guiltiest of her scene partners in that respect, playing a too-old-for-this-shit cocktail waitress who still stubbornly carries the self-assured boldness that Anderson left behind in the 90s.  Dave Bautista is innocent as the only male member of the central cast and the only costar who tones himself down to match her low-key volatility.  Meanwhile, the three actresses that she takes under her wing as daughter figures, only one biological (Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd), each hungrily scrape for single-scene impact that will allow them to stand out in a movie built entirely around an already-famous actor’s persona.  The result is a long procession of phony interactions that feel like out-of-context scenes from a longer movie where these personal relationships actually mean something to the audience beyond an acting showcase.  The important thing, though, is that Pamela Anderson gets to model gorgeously tacky Vegas showgirl outfits while either whispering or screeching dialogue that no one would have dared to feed her when she was a 20something sexpot.  It’s an audition for a better movie that can make full use of what she has to offer, now that we know it’s on the table.

There isn’t much of a story to speak of here, just fragments of one that gradually unravel and dissolve.  At the start of the film, Anderson’s titular showgirl is given two-weeks’ notice that her decades-running show of employment, Le Razzle Dazzle, is being closed to make room for more exciting, novel acts.  She’s distraught by this professional blow, not only because she’s unlikely to find new stage work but also because no one around her seems especially nostalgic for what’s being lost.  Everyone from her fellow dancers (Shipka, Song), her estranged daughter (Lourd), her romantic-interest stage manager (Bautista), and her cocktail-waitress bestie (Curtis) all see Le Razzle Dazzle as just another tits-and-glitter show – a way to pay the bills.  In her mind and, presumably, the audience’s, it’s more substantial than that. It’s a moving work of visual art and a relic of Old Vegas kitsch, which Anderson’s showgirl likens to Parisian traditions like shows at The Crazy Horse.  That’s a great starting place for a film, but Coppola never finds the way to develop her premise into a plot.  Individual scenes from those two depressing weeks in the showgirl’s life clash against each other in gentle, splashing waves, then the whole movie just recedes away from the audience in a low tide, leaving us dry.  Of course, though, just because it isn’t any good doesn’t mean it isn’t worth seeing Pamela Anderson’s face in it, huge.

-Brandon Ledet