Soul

SOUL   ***

Pete Docter

2020

IDEA:  Jazz musician and middle-grade music teacher Joe Gardner finds himself trying to escape from purgatory after falling down a manhole.

BLURB:  With Soul, Pete Docter and Pixar strive to open up the ambitious existentialism of Inside Out onto a much broader canvas, and with a more challenging goal: to reify nothing short of the birth of individual consciousness, and to define what it means to be a subject in the world. Following, perhaps too loyally, in the footsteps of Inside Out, it imagines an ethereal, pastel-hued landscape that makes intangible ideas and feelings literal, from an endless recreational hall where unborn souls find their passions to a crepuscular zone populated by spirits that have lost their way. If this tends to read as naively reductive - and it almost inevitably does, as would any attempt to schematize the mysteries of being - it nevertheless represents a humanistic drive toward clarity, a fundamentally empathic sensibility echoed in the film’s themes of fraternity and fellow-feeling. Where Soul falters is in its narrative priorities. One wishes it spent more time with Joe immersed in his art, in the animators’ extraordinarily rich rendering of New York City, rather than repeatedly and dubiously deny a rare Black protagonist his own bodily autonomy. The madcap body-swap antics feel overly hectic, a formulaic kid-friendly premise not entirely at ease with the film’s contemplative aims. When Soul slows down - to luxuriate in the “flow” of playing music, to home in on sensory impressions, to apprehend life’s sheer plenitude - it soars. For the most part, this is enough. The busy plot mechanics and fuzzy metaphysics don’t dim the film’s timeworn, but deeply felt message: that existence itself is worth living for.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS   **1/2

Charlie Kaufman

2020

IDEA:  On the way to meet her boyfriend's parents in rural Oklahoma, a woman ponders her ambivalent feelings about her relationship.

BLURB:  Charlie Kaufman’s self-pitying solipsism is on fully display in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, an invigoratingly surreal, then gratingly banal exercise in meta-textual navel-gazing. Although adapted from another’s work, the film pulses with the festering existential dread and pungent, neurotic middle-aged male misanthropy that is apparently Kaufman’s baseline mode of being. In a fashion similar to the writer’s best past works, however, its morose, blackly absurdist atmosphere keeps the film buzzing for a long while. This is especially true during the early and mid stretches, when Kaufman’s accrual of eerie details - from disorienting camera angles, cuts, and sounds to the increasingly erratic behavior of the characters - effectively lulls the spectator into a place of acute perceptual instability. Subjects blend and blur as chronological time and selfhood become derealized; projections and memories yoke together in one insoluble movement of consciousness, where anxieties, regrets, and nostalgias run amok in an echo chamber of rumination. If Kaufman had been able to sustain and deepen this braid of funny, disquieting metaphysical inquiry, I’m Thinking of Ending Things might have more heft. But, and perhaps it’s more the fault of the source material than anything, the film rather abruptly fizzles in its final quarter. What was evocatively enigmatic is hollowed out by trite nihilism; worse, the integrity of our name-shifting protagonist, played with such palpable, soul-whimpering melancholy by Jessie Buckley, is betrayed by a perspectival bait-and-switch as lazy as it is narratively nonsensical. What can be said, at least, is that Kaufman intimately knows the inside of an overworking, self-tortured psyche, and he’s honest about what it looks and feels like to not really know a way out.

Mank

MANK   ***

David Fincher

2020

IDEA:  A behind-the-scenes look at the career and late life of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, and the events leading up to the writing of Citizen Kane.

BLURB:  Like many a cinematic portrait of Golden Age Hollywood, Mank approaches Tinseltown from a cockeyed perspective of both appreciation and bone-deep cynicism, paying homage to its creative minds while always remaining aware of the ruthless capitalist apparatus in which they worked. Framed by the lives of two artists who clashed with the system - the titular Citizen Kane writer and, by association, Orson Welles - Mank reveals a Hollywood of contradictory faces, at once accommodating and hostile to bold voices, where ego and politics both make and break art. Fincher depicts this milieu, visually, in a dialectic of uncanny surfaces, evoking the language of 1940s film only to subtly and continuously puncture it through jarringly modern effects, from the grayscale digital sheen of Erik Messerschmidt’s widescreen cinematography to CGI animals and cue marks. As Mank himself ruffles the established ecosystem of the conservative Hollywood status quo, the Finchers expose the Dream Factory’s unwieldy marriage of reality and fantasy, creating a self-consciously slippery biography where truth is shrouded in myth. In its meandering, anecdotal narrative, Mank doesn’t fully find its footing, or seem able to keep up a head of steam before sinking, like Oldman’s prodigiously crapulous Mank, into a muddle of dawdling digressions. Yet at its most lucid, the film channels such juicy, jaundiced screenwriter classics as In a Lonely Place, serving as an acrid reminder of the strained labor - economic, political, social, psychological - that so often drives our entertainment.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen

THE FABULOUS BARON MUNCHAUSEN   ***1/2

Karel Zeman

1962

IDEA:  After landing on the moon, Baron Munchausen whisks a cosmonaut away on a series of rollicking earthbound adventures.

BLURB:  Building on the giddy old-fashioned fabulism and awe-inspiring artisanship of his prior two films, Karel Zeman crafts The Fabulous Baron Munchausen as a lapidary marvel, fueled by a gamboling imagination as boundless and fanciful as its titular character’s stories. Of course, in Zeman’s vision, the orgulous Munchausen is not a liar, but a raconteur whose yarns are rooted in an existent reality of swimming webbed-foot horses and pipe-smoking frigates, a colorful, shape-shifting storybook world realized before our very eyes. How could one deny it? Ornate landscapes and arabesques; blood-red plumes that overtake an army in hot pursuit; rides on mid-flight cannonballs; a myriad of mythical creatures populating the land, sea, and sky; all are tangible creations, forged through Zeman’s seamless, singular collage of live action, animation, and puppetry. Fastidiously composed and musically edited, the spectacle utterly shames most contemporary computer effects work, its intricate, handcrafted tactility an assertion of infinite material possibility. While the narrative of The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is inevitably but a trifling pretext for its visual bewitchments, the film does manage to make valuable points about the need for imagination, not merely as a form of aesthetic play, but as a practical complement of reason, as a necessary component of social and scientific progress. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen unleashes its often illogical fantasia as a kind of resistance, and, with childlike wonder and willfulness, continues to dream.