So, having been rather busy since Christmas I am playing catch-up and recommending some movies you might have missed.
Here are brief notes, but I will revisit some of these films at length later.
Destroyer. In Karyn Kusama’s film DestroyerNicole Kidman provides an amazing performance, playing the kind of role usually reserved for male actors; a broken down alcoholic cop racked by guilt for a tragic failure years ago and by the breakup of his marriage which estranged him from his daughter. But this time it is a woman in the role, with flashbacks to the crucial events fifteen years earlier. So Kidman (now in her early fifties) plays both the decrepit present day cop aged maybe around 40, and her much more sprightly younger self. The film has a good story line and able support from Sebastian Stan (Avengers), Bradley Whitford (The West Wing) and Tatiana Maslany (who played multiple roles as the lead in Orphan Black, but this is absolutely Kidman’s movie, and she is astonishing.
Spiderman; into the Spider-verse. I enjoyed the first two Spiderman movies but lost interest in those that followed, until this movie came along. It is animated to wonderful (and Oscar winning) effect in ways that honour the comic book origins of the character, and the writing keeps Spider-man’s backstory but does utterly new things with him, or rather with them. An evil experiment breaks the bounds of the multiverses – the billions of other parallel universes hypothesized by some cosmologists – allowing other manifestations of the character to appear to aid this young working-class mixed-race New Yorker, a teenager who isn’t quite Peter Parker. These visitors include a film noir, very black and white, Philip Marlow figure, ananime heroine and her futuristic robot-spider, a Spider-Pig and (of course) a Spider-Woman, alongside two alternative versions of Peter Parker himself. The splendid voice cast includes Chris Pine, Jake Johnson, Shameik Moore, John Mulaney, Nicolas Cage, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali and Lily Tomlin. This is not just a film for Spider-man fans, it is absolutely accessible, enormous fun and beautifully animated.
Long Shot is a rom-com starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogan written by Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah and directed by Jonathan Levine. (Seth Rogan was in Levine’s 2011 50/50) Once upon a time she was his babysitter. Now she is the US Secretary of State and he is a radical journalist. Happenchance brings them together (of course) as she prepares her bid for the upcoming Presidential nominations and she decides to hire him to add some humour and pizazz to her rather flat speeches. You can guess the rest, but don’t let that stop you seeing it. It will not quite shake up the gender politics of Hollywood, but it does offer us a smart and powerful woman in a funny rom-com, who does not have to sacrifice her smarts or abandon her power in order to find love. Being a Seth Rogan movie there is one gross out scene, but otherwise the humour is benign and tasty.
Fighting with My Family is a British (very British) movie that has a very different female star in a very different female role. Florence Pugh (Lady MacBeth andThe Little Drummer Girl) plays Sayara Knight, who is part of the real life English wrestling Knight family. Stephen Merchant wrote and directed this, and persuaded The Rock, Dwayne Johnson to play himself, recreating the part he actually played in the Knight family’s fortunes. Sayara and her brother Zac (Jack Lowden, England is Mine andDunkirk) try to break into the American World Wrestling Entertainment circuit. She succeeds, he does not, and they both struggle with the consequences, but this is not a down-beat docudrama, it is a funny and heartwarming story. Nick Frost and Lena Headley (Game of Thrones) play the wrestling parents with enormous gusto, properly vulgar humour and great charm. In fact that is what describes the whole movie, despite the hard falls some of the Knights have to endure. Vince Vaughn is an actor whose performances I do not always admire, but that may be more to do with the roles he accepts rather than his acting ability. Here he does very well as the apprentice’s wrestling boot-camp boss. Stephen Merchant has made an impressive directorial job, his second after his 2010 Cemetery Junction.
Leave No Trace. Eight years ago I saw Debra Granik’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning film Winter’s Bone, a simple, stark story simply told, set in the Ozark wooded hills in a community characterised by poverty and consequent criminality. A young woman, 17 year old, has to find her crystal-meth brewing bail-jumping father. Unless he appears in court on time the family home will be forfeit and the family homeless. Jennifer Lawrence (aged 19 at the time) played the girl and the film and its star blew me away.
Granik’s 2018 film Leave No Trace takes place in the forests in coastal Pacific Northwest Oregon, the same setting as Captain Fantastic, a movie that shares some its elements, but has a very different tone.
Winter’s Bonefelt like a black and white movie – even black and grey – and the woodland setting was lean and bleak. Here the woods are a lush, luxuriantly fertile green and this reflects the much warmer daughter/father relationship at its heart. The father, Will, is a PTSD damaged vet. He identifies the horror of war with the conformity of those who accept the rules of society, who follow orders, do as they are told and so march off to war when told. So he has rejected all conformity – and even the houses that ‘conformists’ live in. So he lives in the forest with his daughter Tom, where he uses his intelligence and army training to survive and avoid detection. Father and daughter are clearly devoted to each other. She is well trained and disciplined, knowing their situation is bizarre, but accepting it because it seem necessary for her father’s mental stability. But when they are spotted by a jogger the local authorities come looking for them, find them and offer them a place to live and work for Will to do. Will and Tom react to these radical changes in different ways. That is all that happens. There is no high drama. There are no extravagant outbursts of emotion. In fact the script is as lean as the Ozark woodland. But the two stars are amazing in their ability to convey subtle but profound internal changes without words, or even gestures. Ben Foster (Hell and High Water, Kill Your Darlings) plays the father and Thomsasin McKenzie (The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies) plays the girl, Tom, and it is one of the most impressive films I have seen this year – almost up there with Winter’s Bone,and that is very high praise indeed. Both films were shot by Michael McDonough.
US. I have been thinking and writing notes on Jordan Peele’s film Us for many weeks now. I will continue to work on them, as this remarkable movie deserves the effort of a really considered response. All I will say at the moment is that this may well be my film of the year. It uses the horror tropes, but is much more complex and profound than any horror film I have ever seen. Us provides a scathing critique of America, using an inventive script that includes sound characterization and humour alongside the horror of the central metaphor. The acting is amazing, with all of the main character’s having doppelgangers, both played by the same actors, including Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Shahadi Wright Joseph and Even Alex. If you saw and enjoyed Get Out! This is a film for you.
