Babylon

BABYLON   ***1/2

Damien Chazelle

2022

IDEA:  A veteran actor, a Mexican immigrant, a fledgling starlet, and a black jazz trumpeter navigate the choppy waters of Hollywood's transition from silent film to sound.

BLURB:  Movies about Hollywood may be a dime a dozen, but there are few if any as devilishly committed to eviscerating its glamour and mystique as Babylon. Chazelle’s rollicking, scabrous opus presents the early days of Tinseltown as a farcically debauched Wild West fueled by all manner of turpitude, abuse, and obscene excess. To make it here, he posits, is to leave morality at the door, to submit to a system of exploitation and debasement in the name of mass entertainment. Even then, longevity and success are hardly guaranteed. As a contemporaneous classic asked: what price Hollywood? Kicking things off with a Bel Air bacchanal before transitioning to the hilariously protracted pandemonium of a desert film shoot, Chazelle constructs much of Babylon as a series of self-contained set pieces that astringently undercut the romance associated with Old Hollywood. The director revels in pointedly sardonic juxtapositions. A bromide about making it to the land of dreams is followed by most of the principal characters waking up in shabby tenement buildings and boarding houses; an inquiry about the need for sound in movies is answered by a loud bowel movement; the shooting of a single take of a cheap early talkie, constantly bungled, is punctuated by streams of profanity before culminating in a negligent homicide. Like all of Chazelle’s films so far, Babylon is a portrait of mad endeavoring, in which the endeavor in question seems increasingly unable to justify the human toll of achieving it. Also like his other films, and in some ways to an even greater degree, it’s an exhilarating showcase of sheer outsize filmmaking mastery and gusto, marked by Linus Sandgren’s elaborate tracking shots, Tom Cross’s rhythmic editing, and Justin Hurwitz’s thumping jazz score. With its monster length, Babylon can feel pleonastic in its messaging and effects, and Chazelle’s handling of the character arcs within his multi-stranded narrative falls well short of the Altman- or PTA-level complexity to which he sometimes seems to strive. But this is thrilling, audacious stuff, a Hollywood philippic/valentine for which the dream factory is perhaps more accurately seen, at least for those inside, as one of nightmares.

Avatar: The Way of Water

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER   ***

James Cameron

2022

IDEA:  After starting a family on Pandora and enjoying years of peace, Jake and Neytiri once again find themselves threatened by colonizing human forces. To escape, they join a seafaring clan that teaches them how to exist in the water.

BLURB:  Whatever their shortcomings, James Cameron’s Avatar films are sui generis in the history of cinema; they’re exorbitantly budgeted, technologically groundbreaking auteurist epics whose primary pleasures, despite the storytelling intentions of their maker, have little to do with narrative concerns. Cinema has been a vehicle for spectacle since its inception, and blockbusters have long privileged the form as one of attractions above all, but Avatar feels somehow different. Perhaps it’s the fact that Cameron, with all the resources at his disposal, has mobilized the true vanguard of moving-image technology in the service of a story and characters that are almost perversely disproportionate in quality and interest. That’s not to say that the story or characters don’t elicit our involvement and emotional identification; the narrative may be trite, but Cameron is enough of a savvy storyteller to make it sing dramatically. Yet one might find themselves (literally) looking past those conventions, entranced by how palpable the blubber of that alien whale appears in 3D, or how it really feels like it’s raining in the theater. The telepresence conjured by Cameron’s use of the technology is so consistently potent that Avatar almost aches to be experienced outside of traditional narrative viewing habits. As in the first film, whose novelty of discovery the new one inevitably lacks, The Way of Water is best when it engages in pure sensory play, particularly in the scenes of marine exploration. These moments are wondrous and enveloping, so hyperreal at times they would mimic lucid dreaming if not for the visible boundaries of the screen. While this sequel offers several elements that spice up the formula of the first - not least among them the Sully children and the reef tribe, who add new layers to the themes of transhumanism and cultural belonging - The Way of Water works mostly because it furnishes a perceptual experience that doesn’t currently have any cinematic analogue.

Athena

ATHENA   **1/2

Romain Gavras

2022

IDEA:  In the fictional Parisian banlieue of Athena, three adult brothers of Algerian descent become variously involved in a violent uprising against the establishment after their little brother is killed by the police.

IDEA:  Everything about Athena - from its title to its archetypal story of fraternal conflict to its operatic visual and musical overtures - suggests aspirations toward myth, particularly Greek tragedy. Gavras certainly signals his epic intentions in the grandiose formal construction. The film is nothing if not cinematographically dazzling, composed of a series of stupefying, physics-defying sequence shots that have the camera gliding through windows, in and out of a speeding van, and at one point straight into a blaze, fireworks of both the figurative and literal kind exploding all around. It’s the kind of virtuosic camerawork and pyrotechnic spectacle designed to flabbergast, which means it also captures the preponderance of your attention at any given moment. Gavras seems more interested in these kinetic maneuvers than in his characters, who are given only a few defining traits, or in the film’s sociopolitical dimensions, which he engages with mostly as a narrative pretext for the thrilling action set pieces. The latter point is especially troubling, making it difficult to view Athena as much more than another ethically dubious commercial entertainment built from real-life strife and suffering. Gavras has evidently inherited his father’s sense of political urgency and skill for depicting on-the-ground social unrest, but an equivalent human sensitivity, at least here, is less abundant.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO   ***

Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

2022

IDEA:  An update of the classic tale set in Fascist Italy.

BLURB:  It’s easy to understand why Guillermo del Toro has such an affinity for Pinocchio, a story of a Frankenstein’s monster who proves to be more human than many of the actual humans around him, and whose desire to be more than a literal and metaphorical puppet makes him a figure of recalcitrance. By transposing the tale to Fascist Italy, this reimagining introduces an authority that especially warrants resisting. The update also shifts the focus of the material’s inherent darkness to more urgently political modern-day evils, adding new connotations to its theme of real and symbolic father-son dyads. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio bristles with the various paternalisms and violences of patriarchs, whether they be, at the most extreme, the peremptory apparatus of fascism, or at the least, the well-meaning but short-sighted attitude of a bereft father trying to ply his wayward wooden creation into the mold of his lost son. Del Toro and his animators generate poignant and at times visceral visual expressions of the clash of barbarity and kinship, from the quasi-body horror of Pinocchio’s conception to the sandy, twilit purgatory and near-death scrapes that reflect Sebastian J. Cricket’s maxim that “love hurts.” The film is relatively sprightly considering the historical context, with musical numbers and a gently comic tone seemingly aimed at keeping the youngest viewers engaged. If del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson don’t totally pull off the balance - the songs feel mostly like an afterthought, and the comedy is lukewarm - this Pinocchio still bewitches in its macabre, intricate handcrafted world and moves in its lucid emotional stakes.

Mystery Train

MYSTERY TRAIN   ****

Jim Jarmusch

1989

IDEA:  A flophouse in a dilapidated area of downtown Memphis becomes a way station for a pair of Japanese tourists, a recently widowed Italian woman, and a British transplant and his two acquaintances.

BLURB:  Jim Jarmusch is ineluctably drawn to coincidence and congruence, rhyme and repetition, similarity and resemblance; those phenomena that, if not exactly indicative of some grand cosmic design, provide fortifying patterns in the chaos of life. Such connections make up the drolly mesmeric form of Mystery Train, one of Jarmusch’s most explicitly and meticulously structuralist works. Everything in the film is somehow both idiosyncratic and commonplace, possessed of its own spirit yet ineffably bound to someone or something else. Memphis doesn’t look so different from a depopulated Yokohama; Will Robinson exists here just as he did on television’s Lost in Space; even Elvis Presley, that singular icon of 20th-century America, resembles the Buddha and the Statue of Liberty from certain angles! And just how many hundreds of impersonators does he have? For Jarmusch, the King is a synecdoche for the country, a mythic chimera of achievement and an ad-mass sign of grandeur concealing deep racial divisions and cultural contradictions. He is the elusive American wholeness the characters of Mystery Train are either chasing or being haunted by, the imago animating and rending the film’s woozy nocturnal Memphis, shot by Robby Müller like a living diorama of Edward Hopper paintings. What Jarmusch’s ingeniously adjacent narratives, transnational cast of outsiders, and myriad formal echoes reveal is a culture that, however distinctive it may seem, cannot be located in any unitary place or idea. As in so much of the writer-director’s work, Mystery Train hilariously and elegiacally embraces the cross-contamination, polyphony, and nomadic nebulousness of America both as it is and, unavoidably, as it’s imagined.

Armageddon Time

ARMAGEDDON TIME   ***1/2

James Gray

2022

IDEA:  In 1980 New York, preteen Paul befriends a black student to the dismay of his family and the school administration.

BLURB:  An autofictional childhood memoir almost entirely shorn of nostalgia, Armageddon Time is shot through with the world-weary perspective of its now adult subject, who replaces halcyon reveries with a clear-eyed look at the structural forces, both subtle and overt, that shape a young person’s life before they’re aware of it. Around the youthful innocence of Paul - played by Banks Repeta in a performance of tremulous, piercing authenticity - Gray renders a climate of stifling cultural conservatism and racial and class inequality. The Reagan era hasn’t begun quite yet, but its dehumanizing politics hang palpably in the atmosphere like a shroud waiting to swallow up Paul, and those far less fortunate than him. The budding artist is pressured on nearly all sides to conform to a standard vision of white middle-class complacency that entails disavowing his creative aspirations as well as his friendship with a black student. Although it serves as a safety net, his privilege also becomes a kind of spiritual cage that bounds him as he gravitates outside its mores, beyond the prescriptions of school and family. Gray’s emphasis on Paul’s Jewish heritage is particularly pointed; a monologue delivered by his immigrant grandfather (a stellar Anthony Hopkins) succinctly conveys volumes about the inherited generational trauma and attitudes toward success that reverberate throughout the household. The plangency of Armageddon Time echoes in Darius Khondji’s autumnal lensing, casting a persistent half-light on the faces and worn textures of the film’s grasping, gasping American Dream. While Gray allows no easy escapes from the seemingly intractable systems that govern our lives, he does provide a certain reassurance that Paul will come away from his trials not defeated, but armed with the conscience and compassion to be better than he’s asked to be.

TÁR

TÁR   **1/2

Todd Field

2022

IDEA:  World-renowned orchestra conductor Lydia Tár finds her career in jeopardy when scandals about her improprieties begin brewing.

BLURB:  Apparently women can abuse their positions of power, too. That’s the not-exactly revelatory thesis of TÁR, a well-acted and handsomely mounted but tautological character study. The film starts auspiciously; following an end credits sequence daringly placed at the offset, it sinuously builds an air of mystique and intrigue around the titular character and the insular, epicurean world of classical music in which she fancies herself a god. The more time we spend with Lydia - whom Cate Blanchett lends a slippery mixture of vivacious creative passion and smug, nonchalant imperiousness - the more her delusional, narcissistic tendencies seem to get entangled with her obvious intelligence, talent, and conviction. Field’s judgment to not judge Lydia, to resist demonizing, exalting, mocking, or excusing her or guiding us through how to feel about her fall from grace, is as provocative a statement as you’ll find in TÁR. Otherwise, the drama that leads to her inevitable career implosion is predictable and not particularly compelling, stretched thin over an egregiously bloated runtime filled with repetitive, ploddingly portentous scenes. And for a film concerned with music and the aural realm, the sound mix is perplexingly fallow. Watching Blanchett do her magisterial thing as a magisterial character is, more often than not, mesmerizing, but in a supreme irony, the grandiose Lydia could have used a grander showcase than what TÁR ends up offering.

Straight Up

STRAIGHT UP   ***

James Sweeney

2019

IDEA:  Refusing to believe he's gay, 20-something Todd forms a close relationship with a woman named Rory that has him further questioning his sexuality.

BLURB:  Straight Up is like a queered synthesis of Woody Allen’s and Whit Stillman’s verbose intellectual wit and the Hollywood screwball classics that influenced those filmmakers. It’s also its own thing: an unusually smart, perceptive, aesthetically adventurous millennial romcom that marks its own triple-threat creator, James Sweeney, as a serious talent. Employing the Academy ratio, Sweeney immediately establishes a lucid visual grammar, composing in static symmetry for his own character, the obsessive-compulsive Todd, and in more naturalistic handheld for Katie Findlay’s Rory, his soon-to-be maybe-soulmate. Sweeney merges the dual paradigms after the two meet, and finds simple but effective ways to express the growing tensions between them by introducing split-screens and fidgety pans. This fastidious and knowingly mannered style is entirely in line with the affectedly erudite dialogue, delivered by Sweeney and Findlay with a motormouthed rat-a-tat precision to rival Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. All of this can make Straight Up feel stiff and self-regarding, and it does on occasion get lost in its thicket of pop-culture references and arch wordplay. But eventually the authenticity of the emotions cuts through the fussy surface, enabled by the superb, agile work of the two leads. Deviating from the typical romcom couple, they challenge cultural assumptions about the relationship between sexual identity (and sex) and romantic love. Is Todd gay if he’s in love with Rory? Would he be straight if he only enjoyed sex with her? In the uncertainty engendered by these questions, Straight Up exposes just how variable and reductive our identity labels are, and how anxiety-inducing yet liberating it can be to resist them.

Alcarràs

ALCARRÀS   **1/2

Carla Simón

2022

IDEA:  In the town of Alcarràs, Spain, a family faces the looming destruction of the peach farm they've tilled for generations when the owners decide to take back the land for development.

BLURB:  With its cast of nonprofessional actors, unfussy camerawork, and focus on the lives and labor of ordinary working-class people, Alcarràs operates wholly in the mode of neorealism, to mixed results. Simón has clearly put a lot of thought and care into developing the interplay of her large ensemble cast, whose members convincingly represent three generations within an extended family. Their sprawling dynamic is permitted ample space to play out in scenes that showcase their bustling, often idle interactions, with Simón staging multiple simultaneous levels of conversation and action that teem beyond the frame. The sense created of a family ecosystem - with all its frictions and alliances - is the film’s chief accomplishment. Alcarràs is less successful in dramatizing the impact of its central conflict on the family. Simón’s non-hierarchical, multi-character scope may be good for a kind of observational macro social portraiture, but it proves too diffuse to sow narrative immediacy, and results in individual characters that don’t have much definition. The film’s visual style is similarly lacking in distinctiveness and punch. One wishes the always-timely subjects of Alcarràs - collective labor, the loss of tradition to corporate industry - had a more impassioned and inventive vehicle for their exploration. 

Triangle of Sadness

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS   **

Ruben Östlund

2022

IDEA:  Models and social-media influencers Carl and Yaya - whose romance is on the rocks - win a spot on a luxury cruise where things turns from bad to worse in short order.

BLURB:  The centerpiece sequence of Triangle of Sadness concerns the violent gastrointestinal upheaval of elderly passengers aboard a luxury cruise. Acted and edited as a rising symphony of comically timed bodily expulsions, it’s an extended piece of gross-out farce that effectively undercuts the put-together privilege of the characters by reducing them to their crudest corporeal functions. As queasily funny and often cathartic as it is, the scene’s broad, in-your-face approach to satire is also disappointingly emblematic of Triangle of Sadness’s overall strategy and tenor. Across the film’s unforgivably bloated runtime, Östlund consistently squanders opportunities to more trenchantly examine the class dynamics at play among the ship’s affluent patrons and its laborers. His aptitude for scalpel-sharp, squirm-inducing sociological dissection - so richly displayed in Force Majeure and The Square - has here been replaced by caricatures, ideological pontificating, and tepid, groaningly obvious cultural commentary. Equally galling is the relative absence of Östlund’s customary scene-building rigor. Although his actors, particularly Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean, bring a sense of rhythm and precision-timing to their performances, they’re at odds with slackly paced, unimaginatively staged sequences that fail to gather either dramatic or comedic momentum. This is never truer than in the film’s final chapter, a familiar stranded-on-an-island scenario that mostly results in predictable, cynical observations about how even societal reorganization can’t eradicate our entrenched capitalist systems. For all its quotations of Marx, Triangle of Sadness is awfully content with resignedly repeating this into dogma.

Close

Part of my coverage of the 58th Chicago International Film Festival.

CLOSE   ***1/2

Lukas Dhont

2022

IDEA:  A tragedy ruptures the intimate friendship between young Belgian teens Leo and Remi.

BLURB:  Emotions in childhood are tricky things; there’s perhaps no other time in life when they’re simultaneously so intensely felt and so difficult to verbally communicate. It’s in this inchoate, inarticulate space where Close locates its drama and grows its tragedy. The cruel irony is that Leo and Remi don’t need to define their relationship at all; their friendship is a bond that defies explanation, and one that only comes apart when previously unacknowledged gender mores and the self-image sensitivities of adolescence are made conscious. One of the canny achievements of Close is how it evokes a tumult of shame, envy, anger, and grief in a way that’s rooted in the headspace of subjects for whom those feelings are unevenly legible. Rather than attempt to explicate or psychoanalyze, Dhont simply observes patiently and quietly, his camera - often lingering in limpid closeup - picking up all the slight variations in the boys’ dispositions. Leo’s reticence of speech in particular forces us to lean in closer, to scrutinize his countenance and behavior and reflect on how those things may or may not belie what he’s thinking at any given moment. This inquisitive orientation also holds true for Remi’s mother Sophie (a superb Émilie Dequenne), suggesting how adults might not always be so much more proficient than their children in matters of emotional fluency. Dhont impressively avoids the clichés one would expect to populate a premise tailor-made for mawkish tear-wringing. He remains honest and relatively unsentimental in his dramatization of the slow, lurching, and frequently delayed shockwaves that follow a seismic personal disruption. The potency of Close, ultimately, rests on the shoulders of its sensational young duo Gustav de Waele and Eden Dambrine. Like the film itself, they pack huge emotions into a small package, with or without words.

EO

Part of my coverage of the 58th Chicago International Film Festival.

EO   ***

Jerzy Skolimowski

2022

IDEA:  Passed from owner to owner, a circus donkey witnesses human kindnesses and brutalities.

BLURB:  To what degree do animals have internal lives, thoughts, and imaginations, and to what degree do we simply anthropomorphize them? Without denying the latter inevitable impulse, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO endeavors to express a consciousness beyond the limited scope of human perception. When the writer-director and DP Michał Dymek aren’t reveling in the tactile earthly textures of donkey fur, grass, and mud, they’re launching into hallucinatory flights of fancy that suggest something like the titular creature’s fever dreams. Suddenly, the image might become drenched in a hellish crimson, the camera detached from any corporeal subjectivity as it soars weightlessly over forests and streams or curiously examines the travails of a four-legged robot. We always return to the donkey, who looks alternately indifferent and perturbed as Paweł Mykietyn’s booming trance-cum-classical score floods the acoustic environment with foreboding. What is EO really seeing and feeling? The shape and content of Skolimowski’s montage – which is driven by an often inscrutable, arbitrary-seeming logic – conveys a sense of temporal confusion and alienation. Perhaps EO is feeling obsolete in a modern world where his labor has become outmoded due to mechanized industry. Most likely he doesn’t much care about us humans, whose cruelties and follies appear as mere dots on the periphery of his implacable journey, until they actively impede his progress. EO may be directly inspired by Bresson’s classic Au Hasard Balthazar, but it has just as much in common with Viktor Kossakovsky’s Gunda or even Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan, films that seek to channel non-human perspectives by confounding our naturalized modes of experiencing the world. Skolimowski’s film is a similarly transfixing, at times bewildering audiovisual trip, gesturing toward something insuperably out of grasp.

The Woman King

THE WOMAN KING   **1/2

Gina Prince-Bythewood

2022

IDEA:  In 1820s West Africa, a young orphaned woman trains to become a warrior with the Agojie, an elite all-female battalion fighting for the Kingdom of Dahomey.

BLURB:  Such is the incremental yet steady march of social progress that it might not dawn on the viewer how uncommon The Woman King is, or how improbable it would have seemed not that long ago. Here is a big-budget Hollywood historical action epic helmed by a black woman with black women occupying all the main action roles, and most of the other roles, as well. It’s a film that illuminates, even through its fair share of factual distortions, sides of African history, culture, and geopolitics that rarely appear, let alone act as the subjects of, major American studio releases. This is not to suggest that The Woman King should be evaluated wholly based on the relative scarceness of stories like it, or that its import as such should shield it from criticism. Despite the fresh subject matter, the film remains highly traditional at the script level, committed as it is to banal “let’s-go-to-battle” and family melodrama idioms. Visually, it lacks the grandeur of its genre forebears; the costumes and sets are lush, but the flat digital lensing and choppily edited action scenes leave something to be desired. That last point is ironic considering The Woman King’s emphasis on ferocious women warriors and their combat prowess. While Prince-Bythewood certainly leans hard on the physical badassery, the film is more satisfying as a portrait of sisterhood, a celebration of the community solidarity that’s no less integral than brute strength in making the Agojie a force to be reckoned with. In the quiet, intimate moments shared between Nawi (a fantastic Thuso Mbedu), Nanisca, Izogie, and others, The Woman King rises above its more rote trappings to prove its mettle.

Moonage Daydream

MOONAGE DAYDREAM   ***

Brett Morgen

2022

IDEA:  An impressionistic look at the life and career of David Bowie.

BLURB:  Some alternative titles to Morgen’s documentary: Montage Daydream. The Gospel According to St. Bowie. Composed of rapid-fire, kaleidoscopic cascades of image and audio, the film uses the lens of Bowie’s artistry to center his guiding philosophies on art, identity, relationships, and the purpose of life. Alongside a dizzying spate of concert footage, film clips, and various archival materials and new audiovisual inventions, the multi-hyphenate (or “generalist” as he wryly dubs himself) ruminates eloquently on everything from his methodology to humankind’s deepest existential quandaries. Morgen is the director, but the words mostly come from Bowie, giving Moonage Daydream the feeling of a personal diary or homily. We are given mesmerizing entry into the mind of this brilliant, willfully unclassifiable figure, whose erudite lucidity and coherence of vision fascinatingly belies the protean form in which he presented himself. He comes across as something of a Zen guru, dispensing wisdom derived from keen observation and introspection, qualities not often associated with global pop stars. The overall impression is of a man and artist preternaturally attuned to himself and the world(s) in which he operated, who found success not by molding himself to public perception but by molding public perception to himself. It’s hard to deny the colors of hagiography shading this project, especially because Morgen reinforces Bowie’s self-appointed mythological status as a high priest of social misfits. At the same time, the film’s hectic, often pell-mell form - which aptly embodies the artist’s ethos about embracing the chaos of existence - ensures that Moonage Daydream doesn’t become disingenuously pat. In the end, it’s a reverent but necessarily fragmented portrait that honors all the polymorphic ways Bowie expressed his passion for being.