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.