Roma

ROMA   ***1/2

Alfonso Cuarón

2018

IDEA:  In 1970 Mexico City, a domestic worker balances her own personal struggles with those of the increasingly fraught family she cares for.

BLURB:  Cinematic excess – the chaotic, formless flow of existence that can never be contained within the scope of the frame – is a concept Alfonso Cuarón intimately understands. In Roma, the filmmaker frequently packs his wide, long panning shots with abundant activity, every movement from the center of the image to its ever-expanding margins suggesting the breadth of a world his film can inevitably capture only a fragment of. This knowingly circumscribed perspective becomes the organizing principle of Roma, a film that subtly and rigorously modulates point-of-view so that we feel as if we’re simultaneously seeing a big picture (Mexico City social and political life in the 1970s) and an interior, inherently limited one (the life of a live-in domestic worker), privy to the former only to the degree that the latter can observe it. Literally from the first image, Cuarón’s visuals are crafted to evoke this bifocal perspective: acutely rooted in the subjectivity of Cleo, the housekeeper, while made constantly aware of the societal fabric around her, Cuarón’s panoramic shots by turns center Cleo and push her into non-hierarchical tableaux, favoring a Bazinian democracy of vision that refuses to privilege individual subjects through close-ups. This aesthetic ideology is not only in keeping with the neorealist films that are Roma’s progenitors, but is an elegantly logical approach to representing Cleo’s liminal social-domestic position. If Cuarón sometimes holds us at a remove in Roma – and the film can often be rather placidly remote, to a fault – it makes a certain sense. This is a portrait of a place that situates us on its material and spiritual boundaries, making us wonder about the multitude of lives we’ll never know, or only get to know through the cinema.

The Favourite

THE FAVOURITE   ***

Yorgos Lanthimos

2018

IDEA:  The power balance in the court of Queen Anne is destabilized when a fallen noblewoman sets her sights on winning the queen's favor at all costs.

BLURB:  In the relatively narrow but rich canon of caustic, subversive costume dramas, The Favourite enters as a satisfying – if hardly groundbreaking – addition. Like its forebears, most notably The Draughtsman’s Contract, Lanthimos’s film is interested in the absurdity and savagery contained within the decorous walls of the noble elite, its pleasures coming from how impishly it scrapes away the lacquer of politeness that typically coats media representations of royal history. The opulence of Queen Anne’s palace is certainly a spectacle, but it would mean nothing to Lanthimos if it wasn’t also the marker of an excess as monstrous as the power plays and debauched rituals taking place amongst it. The Favourite doesn’t have to do much digging to find the volatility, malaise, and perversity festering in such posh quarters. They are amply apparent in Anne’s infirm body and hair-trigger rages, so volcanically and viscerally enacted by Olivia Colman; in her advisor Lady Sarah’s incorrigible bellicosity, wielded ruthlessly; in the bizarre japes of the parliament; and certainly in the actions of the usurper, Abigail, whose monomaniacal deceits know no bounds. While the dysfunction and skullduggery are predictably, nastily delightful, the film’s real achievement is in how it draws out pathos from the interpersonal warfare. Even when his merciless gaze threatens to level the characters into grotesque caricatures (not helped by the gratuitous and arbitrary-feeling fish-eye lenses), Lanthimos uses the triangulated relationship between Anne, Sarah, and Abigail to uncover complex layers of vulnerability and desire simmering behind the crown, ready to be exploited. If not exactly novel as bawdy historical satire, The Favourite nonetheless haunts as a tragicomic illustration of how easily our humanity is compromised when mechanisms of power overwhelm good sense.

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.

First Man

FIRST MAN   ****

Damien Chazelle

2018

IDEA:  An account of the years in Neil Armstrong's life leading up to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

BLURB:  Gratifyingly resisting any impulse to simply relay historical information or lionize a famous public figure, First Man commits itself to invoking a cosmos of sensations – frightening, exhilarating, overwhelming – with Neil Armstrong as an embodied conduit. Chazelle channels his subjective, sensory experience(s) through a magisterial command of the medium’s formal properties, placing us inside clamorous cockpits, bombinating test vehicles, and even astronaut helmets, manipulating visual and acoustic space to thrillingly immersive perceptual effect. The film’s visceral emphasis on embodied experience is as much a self-justified experimental approach to this subject as it is a thematization of the story’s preoccupation with life, death, and the phenomenal. Subverting nationalist-historical narratives as well as aesthetic expectations, Chazelle foregrounds the unwieldy and precarious materiality of spacecraft to convey the danger, even folly, of interstellar flight. Propagandistic discourse is stripped away in favor of a representation of the space program as suicide mission, as a possibly preposterous boondoggle whose human risks outstrip its potential for scientific gain. Contextualized alongside the Vietnam War, First Man measures the defensibility of putting lives in jeopardy for questionable ends, and Chazelle takes every opportunity to conjure the magnitude and physical weight of this peril through rattling equipment, groaning metal, and the tension of bodies strapped inside the apparatuses constituted by them. 

Rocked by the tragedies that surround him, a series of shocks catalyzed by the loss of his daughter, and unable to easily communicate emotion, Gosling’s Armstrong is an unlikely biopic hero. For most of the film he is taciturn, sullen, even inscrutable; Singer’s script wisely homes in on his internal struggles, framing his missions through the unspeakably private rather than the mass-mediated, and the actor responds with a portrayal of anxious, guarded, but resolute obsession. Chazelle and Singer suggest that his quest to walk on the moon was as much motivated by any professional pride in country as it was by the desire to literally defy limits, to tempt and transcend death, to accomplish the impossible. To the degree any film reasonably could, First Man approximates the transgressive, masochistic thrill of this desire made historically manifest, allowing us to feel the dread and the excitement of flying so close to the void.