One from the Heart

ONE FROM THE HEART   **

Francis Ford Coppola

1982

IDEA:  A couple rethinks their relationship as they embark on simultaneous affairs with more seemingly ideal partners.

BLURB:  One from the Heart is a curious creation: an extravagant spectacle boasting all the aesthetic signifiers of a classical Hollywood musical but deprived of the attendant spirit and charm. In the elaborate, hyper-stylized artifice of its studio-simulacrum Las Vegas, and in the paper-thin romantic narrative that weaves indifferently through it, the film almost seems to perversely reject the titular “heart” foundational to the genre, so preoccupied is it with bombastic mise-en-scène. Coppola distends the pageantry – a lavish parade of neon signage, superimpositions, color-coded stage lighting, and lap dissolves – to such an exaggerated, even distancing degree one wonders if he is in fact shooting for ironic Sirkian critique rather than unfettered homage. The idea is certainly reinforced by the Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle soundtrack, which jazzily but listlessly fills in for the voices of the nonmusical protagonists, as well as by the aforementioned romance that feels as ersatz as the sets. But if One from the Heart really is supposed to be some kind of auto-critical pastiche, a husk of seductive formalism exposing the empty center of Hollywood fantasy, it forgot to tell its director. In the face of such all-devouring visual excess, Coppola insists on the sentimental pull of his lovers even though their tepid chemistry and flat characterizations undermine our engagement. There is little passion in their discord or inevitable reconciliation, and so they come to seem like just more parts to move around in this giant mechanical contraption. Neither a convincing genre reimagining or tribute, One from the Heart ends up an immaculately constructed, mostly inert bauble.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS   **1/2

Joel and Ethan Coen

2018

IDEA:  An anthology of six mordant tales about the old American west.

BLURB:  Torn from the pages of myth but drained of heroism, glory, and most metrics of justice, the Wild West depicted in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a vast province of amoral chaos and merciless death. It plays host to killers, cowards, mountebanks, and miscreants, all roaming a boundless, seemingly godless Earth, subject to the caprices of the mortal plane. When decency does threaten to find purchase, it becomes almost inevitably snuffed out. Characteristically mischievous and as blithely morose as ever, the Coens exploit this pitiless American frontier for perhaps their most acrid expression yet of an essentially indifferent universe. Their six self-contained tales, cleverly positioned as chapters in an old storybook, constantly betray a worldview vacillating between the nihilistic and the absurd, although the tenor of most chapters leans closest to the former, as the Coens convey how tenuous and expendable life was in the old west while positing little consistent rhyme or reason for the fates that befall their characters. Actions may not be meaningless, but they certainly don’t guarantee anything as psychopathic gunslingers ascend to the heavens and innocent settlers lay in the dirt with bullets in their heads. Everyone’s going to the same place, just as surely as that book will be closed by film’s end. While the Coens take evident delight in many of the ways they get there, there is a lack of visual imagination and thematic texture on display that is disappointing coming from such ingenious filmmakers. The stories tend to strike the same contrapuntal notes of frivolity and despair with little variation, and while the sense of redundancy is apt for a film concerned with the cycles of human folly, it creates a fairly leaden viewing experience. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which also can’t find a way to accommodate a narrative about anyone who isn’t white, ultimately remains somewhat stuck in the cobwebs of the myths it riffs on as well as on ideas the Coens have explored to greater depth in the past.

Boy Erased

BOY ERASED   ***

Joel Edgerton

2018

IDEA:  A young man in conservative Christian Arkansas is sent to a conversion therapy camp when he is outed to his parents.

BLURB:  Boy Erased is a social advocacy film that appeals unabashedly to the emotions, not from a place of calculated tear-wringing but from an instinctual alliance with its LGBT subjects. There is nothing new about a film highlighting injustice by stoking the audience’s anger and empathy, but Boy Erased subtly diverges from many in how non-didactically it does this, assuming already the spectator’s knowledge of LGBT persecution so that it can train its attention on a wider fabric of oppressive social and religious conditioning. Indeed, Edgerton is interested in more than simply exposing the inhumane, pernicious nature of conversion therapy programs. Though the scenes inside the institution are appropriately grueling and maddening, what stand out just as much are the conversations and gestures of the ostensibly virtuous Christian parents played by Kidman and Crowe, which reveal the ingrained beliefs that invariably and often unconsciously dictate harmful actions. Edgerton, whose own performance deftly avoids the cartoonish villainy that might have predictably attended his noxious character in another director/actor’s hands, does not demonize these parents, or Christianity. He understands a milieu and a mindset that extend far beyond them, and recognizes with sensitivity the strides that must be taken in order to ameliorate their entrenched ideologies. And in the powerful performances of Kidman and Crowe, and certainly of Lucas Hedges, he locates the personal pain, longing, and strife that so much dogma has engendered. Boy Erased is fully, cathartically on Jared’s side, but it is so poignant because it maintains hope that those who demanded he change might realize it is themselves who must do so instead.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?   ***1/2

Marielle Heller

2018

IDEA:  The true story of biographer Lee Israel, who turned to forging letters from prominent writers when her career was in the ruts.

BLURB:  Melissa McCarthy’s Lee Israel is something of an accidental countercultural hero. Everything that excludes her from acceptance by the literary establishment – her abrasiveness, her femaleness, her iconoclasm – become in McCarthy’s portrayal the markers of a personality defiantly inassimilable to its market-driven standards. She exposes the meretriciousness of a system that values brand above content; she punctures the hypocrisies of publishers and agents who purport to honor authentic voices but only do so on their rigid institutional terms, shunning ones like hers that don’t conform to commercial expectations. But just as Israel’s foray into forging authors’ letters starts as an economic necessity, this undermining of literary pretenses is not a purposeful salvo but a byproduct of how she navigates a tenuous professional position, which the film understands as profoundly bound up in her personal struggles. Without defending the immorality and deceitfulness that were the results of this, Can You Ever Forgive Me? displays a poignant admiration for Israel and her complicated outsider status. The depth of Holofcener and Whitty’s script is such that she transcends roles of victim and felon. While she might be antagonized by her industry, she also does her own part in pushing people away through her uncompromising and rancorous demeanor. In a manner as delicate as Israel is gruff, Heller reveals the vulnerabilities and insecurities that are defensively encased by the author’s combative resolve. Between moments of splenetic rage, McCarthy embodies the contradictions of a woman seeking recognition but also deeply afraid of it, in need of approval but also wary of what that would mean, a woman who could ironically only realize her own voice by assuming others’. As the tale of an unlikely, unlawful route to self-actualization, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a perversely inspiring coming-out story, an example of how an individual’s renegade ingenuity, however disreputable, permitted her to become the person the system never allowed her to be.