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Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
With 2019’s Saint Maud, writer/director Rose Glass made her mark in the realm of religious horror, but it wasn’t just a high caliber boo-movie, it was an artistic statement on isolation, on obsession, and with stunning visuals to make the movie stand out even more. Next up, Glass has set her sights on a similar tale of isolation and obsession, in the realm of film noir.
In 1989, Lou (Kristen Stewart) works as the manager of a small gym in the American Southwest. She spots Jackie (Katy O’Brian) passing through on her way to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. Together, the two women form a passionate relationship and are transfixed over one another, but in order to keep the good times rolling, each will be required to commit more desperate acts, including body removal and keeping secrets from Lou’s estranged father, Lou Senior (Ed Harris), a shooting range owner who operates as a cartel gun runner.
Love Lies Bleeding powers along like a runaway locomotive, a genre picture awash in the lurid and sundry language of film noir with a queer twist, until it goes completely off the rails by its conclusion, a pile-up of tones and ideas that’s practically admirable even if it doesn’t come together. Until that final act, what we’re given is a contemporary film noir escapade following desperate and obsessive people get completely well over their heads into danger. Reminiscent of the Wachowski’s Bound, we have a film noir that lets the ladies have all the fun playing into the tropes of the sultry femme fatales, and in this movie, both the lead characters are their own femme fatales and ingenues. Lou is the one who pushes steroid use onto Jackie, who resists at first and wants to go about building her body the old-fashioned way. Lou is also the one with the shady past and connections that come calling back at the worst time. Once fully hooked on her diet of steroids, Jackie becomes increasingly more unpredictable and desperate, leaving Lou to try and clean up their accumulating messes. They both use the other, they both enable the other, and they both project what they want onto the other even after their collective screw-ups. It’s a self-destructive partnership but neither can see through the haze of desire. They see one another as an escape, when really it’s an unraveling of self (though I suppose one could argue “living your best self,” already a subjective claim, could include being a genuine garbage human). In a way, this is a relationship that’s all rampant desire and unfulfilled consumption, and it leaves both parties always wanting more. It’s a bad romance with bad people doing bad things badly, and if that isn’t a tidy summation of most film noir, then I don’t know what is.
For the first hour, I was right onboard with the movie and its grimy atmosphere. The plot has a clear acceleration point, though the first twenty minutes is also given to some cheap “who-slept-with-who-before-they-knew-who” drama that I was instantly ready to put behind. However, once the climactic death hangs over our two lovers, there’s an immediate sense of danger that makes every scene evoke the gnawing desperation of our characters. The screenplay by Maud and Weronika Tofilska has such a deliberate cause-effect construction, and no film noir would be complete without the loose ends the characters would have to fret over. What also helps to elevate the immersion is the electric chemistry between Stewart (Spencer) and O’Brian (The Mandalorian), who worked previously in the world of women’s body building and clearly felt a kinship with this role, and she is also a born movie star. The two women are great together, enough so that the audience might start believing that these two lost souls are actually good for one another. We too might get seduced by the possibility that everything will turn out for the better, when we all know that’s not how film noir goes. I will say there are some gutsy decisions toward the end that will test audiences with their loyalty to our couple, but most felt completely in character even if their lingering impact is for you to reel back, hold your breath, and then heavily sigh.
It would also be impossible to discuss the movie without discussing just how overwhelmingly carnal it can be. I recently reviewed Drive-Away Dolls and noted how horny this lesbian sex comedy road trip was, though to me it felt empty and exploitative. With Love Lies Bleeding, the desire of these two women, and their mutual fulfillment, serves as another drug for them to mainline and then abuse. There is a hanger to the film’s gaze that is effective without feeling overly leering. The body building aspect puts a more natural fixation on lingering on the muscles and curves of human forms, and how Jackie is intending to transform herself into a fantasy version. The sexual content begins to ebb as soon as the murder content ramps up.
Unfortunately, for a movie that gets by on some big artistic chances, not all of them work, and most of the miscues hamper the final thirty minutes. In the final act, Jackie abandons Lou and goes off on her own to her Las Vegas bodybuilding competition, and at that point it’s like she’s in a completely different kind of movie. Hers is a movie about drug addiction and hitting a wall, as she has some very public freakouts and hallucinations. Although from there, Love Lies Bleeding indulges in some peculiar imagery that emphasizes the extreme bulging muscles of Jackie like she was the Hulk. While the movie never presents these flights of fancy as magic realism meant to be taken literally, the sheer goofiness of these moments and imagery can hamper moments, especially during a climactic showdown that feels more like someone’s kinky dream. Ultimately, I don’t think the characters of Lou or Jackie are that interesting. Lou’s criminal past was deserving of more attention far earlier, and Jackie is so narrowly-focused that every scene with her after a certain point is only going to reinforce the same obsessive drive and perspective. Like other genres, film noir works with archetypes, and Love Lies Bleeding isn’t re-inventing the genre, merely giving it a very specific sapphic spin, set amidst the haze of the go-go 1980s.
Rose Glass is a hell of an intriguing filmmaker after two very different movies in two very different genres, both of which have been defined for decades by male filmmakers. This woman is a natural filmmaker with clear vision, and even through the bumps, you know you’re in good hands here with a storyteller that’s going to take you places. The cinematography is fluid and grimy to the point where you may feel the need to take a shower afterwards. Everything seems coated with dirt and sweat. The synth-heavy musical score accommodates rather than overwhelms. The performances are strong throughout, and the screenplay choices, while not always working out, are bold and in-character. Love Lies Bleeding provides just about everything you could want from a lesbian bodybuilder film noir thriller, a movie that recognizes the sizzle of its genre elements and makes grand, scuzzy use. At this point, we should all be paying attention to whatever Glass wants to do next as a filmmaker. It might not be perfect, it might not even work, but it will certainly demand our attention and time.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Drive-Away Dolls (2024)
Drive-Away Dolls is an interesting curiosity, not just for what it is but also for what it is not. It’s the first movie directed solo by Ethan Coen, best known as one half of the prolific filmmaking Coen Brothers, who have ushered in weird and vibrant masterpieces across several genres. After 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, their last collaboration, the brothers decided to set out on their own for an unspecified amount of time. This led Joel Coen to direct 2021’s atmospheric adaptation of Macbeth, and now Ethan has decided that the fictional movie he really wants to make, unshackled by his brother, is a crass lesbian exploitation sex comedy. Well all right then.
Set in 1999 for some reason, Jamie (Margaret Qualley) is an out lesbian who unabashedly seeks out her own pleasures, even if it brings about the end of her personal relationships. Her friend, Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), hasn’t had a lover in over three years and is much more prim and proper. Together, these gal pals decide to drive to Tallahassee, Florida using a drive-away service, where they will be paid to drive one way, transporting a used car. It just so happens that these women have mistakenly been given the wrong car, a vehicle intended for a group of criminals transporting contraband that they don’t want exposed. Jamie is determined to get laid and help Marian get laid all the while goons (Joey Slotnick, C.J. Wilson) are trailing behind to nab the ladies before they discover the valuable contents inside the trunk of their car.
Drive-Away Dolls is clearly an homage to campy 1970s exploitation B-movies but without much more ambition than making a loosey-goosey vulgar comedy consumed by the primal pursuit of sexual pleasure. I was genuinely surprised just how radiantly horny this movie comes across, with every scene built in some way upon women kissing, women having sex, women talking about having sex, women pleasuring themselves, women talking about pleasuring themselves, and women talking about pleasuring other women. When I mean every scene I mean virtually every scene in this movie, as the thinnest wisp of a road trip plot is barely holding together these scenes. From a representational standpoint, why shouldn’t lesbians have a raunchy sex comedy that is so open about these topics and demonstrates them without shame? Except it feels like the crude subject matter is doing all the heavy lifting to make up for the creative shortcomings elsewhere in the movie, which, sadly there are many. The script is co-written by Coen and his wife of many years, Tricia Cooke, an out lesbian, so it feels like the intent is to normalize sex comedy tropes for queer women, but the whole movie still feels overwhelming in the male gaze in its depictions of feminine sexuality. I’m all for a sex-positive lesbian road trip adventure, but much of the script hinges upon the uptight one learning to love sex, which means much of the story is dependent upon the promiscuous one trying to then bed her longtime friend and get her off. Rather than feel like some inevitability, the natural conclusion of a friendship that always had a little something more under the surface, it feels more like a horny and calculated math equation (“If you have two gay female leads, you can get them both kissing women by having them kiss each other”).
I’m sad to report that Drive-Away Dolls is aggressively unfunny and yet it tries so hard. It’s the kind of manic, desperate energy of an improv performer following an impulse that was a mistake but you are now watching the careening descent into awkward cringe and helpless to stop. The movie is so committed to its hyper-sexual goofball cartoon of a world, but rarely does any of it come across as funny or diverting. When Jamie’s ex-girlfriend Suki (Beanie Feldstein) is trying to remove a dildo drilled onto her wall, she screams in tears, “I’m not keeping it if we both aren’t going to use it.” The visual alone, an ex in tears removing all the sexual accoutrements of her previous relationship, some of which can be widely over-the-top, could be funny itself. However, when her reasoning is that we both can’t use this any longer, then the line serves less as a joke and more a visual cue for the audience to think about both of them taking turns. It doesn’t so much work at being funny first and rather as a horny reminder of women being sexual together. The same with a college soccer team’s sleepover that literally involves a basement make-out party with a timer going off and swapping partners. It’s not ever funny but features plenty of women making out with one another to satisfy some audience urges. I will admit it serves a plot purpose of first aligning Jamie and Marian into awkwardly kissing one another, thus sparking carnal stirrings within them.
My nagging issue with the movie’s emphasis is not a puritanical response to vulgar comedy but that this movie lacks a necessary cleverness. It doesn’t really even work as dumb comedy, although there are moments that come close, like the absurd multiple-corkscrew murder that opens the movie. It’s just kind of exaggerated nonsense without having the finesse to steer this hyper-sexual world of comedy oddballs. The crime elements clash with the low-stakes comedy noodling of our leads bumbling their way through situation after situation that invariably leads to one of them undressing or inserting something somewhere. The brazen empowerment of women seeking out pleasure is a fine starting point for the movie, but the characters are too weakly written as an Odd Couple match that meets in the middle, the uptight one learning to loosen up and the irresponsible one learning to be less selfish. The goons chasing them are a pale imitation of other famous Coen tough guys; they lack funny personality quirks to broaden them out. There’s a conspiracy exposing political hypocrites condemning the “gay agenda,” and I wish more of this was satirized rather than a briefcase full of reportedly famous phalluses. If you got a briefcase full of famous appendages, I was expecting more jokes than blunt objects.
I feel for the actors, so eager to be part of a Coen movie, even if it’s only one of them and even if it’s something much much lesser. Qualley (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) is a typical Coen cartoon of a character, complete with peculiar accent and syntax. She’s going for broke with this performance but the material, time and again, requires so little other than being exaggerated and horny. There is one scene where her physical movements are so broad, so heightened to the point of strain, that I felt an outpouring of pity for her. It feels like a performance of sheer energetic force lacking proper direction. Viswanathan has been so good in other comedies and she’s given so little to do here other than playing the straight women (no pun intended) to Qualley’s twangy cartoon. Her portrayal of sexual coming of age and empowerment was better realized, and funnier, in 2018’s Blockers, a superior sex-positive sex comedy.
As a solo filmmaker, Ethan Coen seems to confirm that his brother is more the visual stylist of the duo. The movie is awash in neon colors and tight closeups of bug eyes and twangy accents, but the most annoying stylistic feature, by far, is the repeated psychedelic transition shots, these trippy interstitials that don’t really jibe with anything on screen. It felt like padding for an already stretched-thin movie that can barely reach 75 minutes before the end credits kick in. That’s why the extended sequences where the intention seems exploitation elements first and comedy second, or third, or not at all, makes the whole enterprise feel like a pervy curiosity that has its empowering yet obvious message of “girls do it too” as cover. Agreed, but maybe do more with the material beyond showcasing it. Ethan Coen is a prolific writer who has written short story collections (I own his 1998 book Gates of Eden), poetry collections, and he even wrote five one-act plays before the pandemic struck in 2020. I’d love to see those plays. This man has true talent but it’s just not obviously present throughout this film.
Drive-Away Dolls is an irreverent sex comedy with good intentions and bad ideas, or good ideas and bad intentions, an exploitation picture meant to serve as empowerment but still presents its world as exploitation first and last. It’s just not a funny movie, and it’s barely enough to cover a full feature. I suppose one could celebrate its mere existence as an affront to those puritanical forces trying to oppress feminine sexuality, but then you could say the same thing about those 1970s women-in-prison exploitation pictures. It’s a strange movie experience, achingly unfunny, overly mannered, and makes you long for the day that the two Coens will reunite and prove that the two men are better as a united creative force; that’s right, two Coens are better than one.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Killers of the Flower Moon has the banner of an Important Movie, telling a story many history books have overlooked for too long, an American tragedy built upon one of America’s original sins with the indigenous peoples, and tying a direct line to not only how we live now as well as how we choose to remember the past. The true story behind the murder of the Osage Nation natives in the 1920s is an urgent story that gets to the heart of greed and the human capacity for evil, and Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour movie is somber and mournful and appropriately devastating. But I’m also wondering why I wasn’t as enchanted with it as a movie-going experience. Should I feel movie critic guilt for finding the movie merely good but not transcendentally great?
The whole of Killers of the Flower Moon is bleak, which is naturally much of the point. It’s difficult to retell the history of Native Americans in this country, or before there was a “this country,” without making use of lots of synonyms for the word “bleak.” The first hour presents the Native Americans as being legally incapable of greater agency; the murders are consistent, sloppy, and obvious, but the fact that no investigation was triggered for years in an acknowledgement that, simply put, the government just didn’t care about dead Indians. Oh, I hear you saying, but weren’t these Osage different? They had so much money from their oil rights that the local economy exploded with vultures offering common services for egregiously inflated prices to take advantage of people unaccustomed to having money and options. Even with a surge of riches, the Osage didn’t have an elevation in status. They were still looked upon as interlopers in the way of powerful white men getting that money, and there’s nothing these greedy people won’t do to get that money, especially with a system of justice of little accountability for dead minorities. One of the more galling scenes is when the town coroners are questioned over their unusual protocols, like chopping a corpse into tiny pieces so it could not be re-examined by other professionals. The whole town is in on this vile scheme, every doting neighbor can be guilty through complicity or complacency. Death after death, they all know what’s really going on; it’s plain as day, but nobody outside of the Osage feels the burning outrage, and that’s the point of the first half of the movie, to give the audience the same sense of anger and futility.
The majority of the lengthy movie follows our villains plotting their very obvious conspiracy, with Leonardo DiCaprio badly clenching his jaw in every scene as Ernest Burkhart, a WWI-veteran who comes home, becomes a cabbie, and marries Mollie (Lily Gladstone), one of the rich local Osage women. The question for the rest of the movie is whether or not his love for her is genuine or perhaps she is just a means to an end. He’s the lead of the movie and a total dope, a man who unironically proclaims repeatedly, “I love me some money!” Seems hard to read this guy, right? He’s an idiot, and again this might be the point, that this sort of small-thinking man could be the hinge on this entire conspiracy, which results in a lot of Mollie’s family members dying under increasingly mysterious circumstances to consolidate their inheritance. It’s a frustrating and spiritually exhausting experience to watch all these poor characters get murdered, again, so casually and transparently. One of them is staged as a would-be suicide except he’s shot through the back of the head and the gun wasn’t left at the scene. Eventually, the FBI does finally (finally!) arrive in town at the two-hour mark, but by then, I’ve been watching two hours of people dying without a legal stir.
This perspective is best embodied through Mollie, beautifully played by Gladstone (Certain Women, First Cow). When we first meet her, she’s a forward woman who can assert herself and what she wants. Then it all goes downhill after marrying Ernest. She loses damn near every family member she has and is forced to rely upon her husband for support, the same idiot bungling his way through arranging the deaths of her family members. She’s a personal stand-in for the Osage Nation as a whole, as we watch what they have whittled down and bled dry, watching the weight of all this suffering deteriorate their spirits and dignity. This is Mollie, our avatar for tragedy. She’s literally bedridden for a solid hour, and I dearly missed Gladstone’s presence. Since we’ve been aware of the bad deeds of the bad men from the start, much of Killers of the Flower Moon becomes a waiting game of when Mollie is hopefully going to wise up or at least suspect what is happening to her and her family. When will she see Ernest as a more nefarious force in her life, the kind of person you don’t want to solely trust with the responsibility of delivering your life-saving intravenous medicine. It adds to the overall frustrations of watching. Gladstone’s performance rises above whatever limitations her character is stricken with. First off, it’s a powerful performance of immense sorrow; having to watch her pained reaction to overhearing her sister’s skull sawed open for a disrespectful public autopsy is just sickening. The movie lives off this woman’s response to unfathomable trauma on repeat. When she is bedridden and lost in a medical fog, she still manages to communicate her wariness and suspicion through these extra layers of obfuscation.
Robert DeNiro, appearing in his eleventh Scorsese movie, is terrifying as a kindly cattle baron who fashions himself as the best friend of the Osage, preferring to refer to them by their indigenous names and warmly speaking their language. He’s also a monster, a stand-in for American big business and the blood-stained hands of capitalism without morals and oversight. The dramatic core of the movie, besides how far will this go before consequences will at long last germinate, is how can such self-styled men of God commit such heinous acts? How can people justify and equivocate over their own cruel crimes? This question is epitomized in Ernest and his direct connection to Mollie, but it’s also epitomized through DeNiro’s character, William Hale. We have two characters fulfilling the same thematic purpose, which might be the point, but it makes for a redundant narrative experience. DeNiro’s character is so much more interesting than Ernest too, with the full cognitive dissonance of being an avowed man of the people and true ally to the Osage while he’s plotting their demise. DeNiro holds to this homespun, Foghorn Leghorn accent throughout, and I can’t recall him ever raising his voice. It’s a performance where the lasting terror comes through its friendly disconnect. It’s a more impressive performance than watching DiCaprio grimace and mumble through three and a half hours.
Some chastise Killers of the Flower Moon for choosing to tell its story from the perspective of its white perpetrators. I understand from a narrative standpoint and an overall larger thematic point why this was done. Scorsese clearly thinks of his own limits of being the one to tell this story, appearing as a cameo in the coda to provide commentary on how the American morbid desire for true crime and historical atrocities will lead to yesterday’s outrages becoming today’s distilled and de-contextualized “content.” The problem is the movie already feels frustrating as is while we wait for there to finally be some accounting for the ongoing injustices, and centering the entire perspective on only the Osage would magnify this frustration with even less elucidation on the depths of what was happening. Scorsese strips away a lot of the stylistic flourishes and even the electric pacing and editing that we come to expect from his filmography. This is a slow, ponderous movie. It’s meant to provoke outrage. It’s also designed to frustrate, and I suppose I can admire that while also impatiently shifting in my seat and wondering how many of these 206 minutes could have been lost. I feel like a philistine for looking at a $200-million Scorsese movie, while this man is in the late stages of his career and clearly thinking of this reality, and asking, “Hey, can you give me maybe less movie?”
If you haven’t noticed, dear reader, I am a critic in conflict. Killers of the Flower Moon has fantastic production values, strong acting, and the importance of staging history as it was rather than how it may be remembered, especially over events long ignored by history. I even admire the choices that are deliberate that make the movie feel less like easily consumed entertainment. It’s a movie that I feel compelled to see a second time before I settle on my eventual rating (a seven-hour commitment). It’s a sad movie, a bleak movie, a challenging movie, a meaningful movie, and an Important Movie about Important Things. It’s also long, frustrating in structure and execution, and occasionally redundant with its characterization and plotting, giving the impression that things have been stretched beyond breaking. Again, maybe that’s the larger thematic point, but then again I might just be stuck in a rabbit hole of excuses to find some justification for my less-than-ecstatic reaction to Killers of the Flower Moon, a movie of strident artistic vision that can also feel like you’re eating your vegetables for three nonplussed hours.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Pain Hustlers (2023)
Pain Hustlers is the next attempt to dramatize the numerous stories behind the opioid crisis, a storytelling edict that is becoming its own tragic true-crime sub-genre (Dopesick, Pain Killer, Four Good Days, Recovery Boys, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed). The Netflix original has a starry cast and a topical and serious subject but it’s an un-serious movie caught up in the superficial quirks and appeal of being and making a goofy crime story of greedy sleazeballs.
Liza (Emily Blunt) is a struggling single mother trying to claw her way out of debt and, with her unfinished education and criminal record, few options are widely available. Then enters Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a loud, gouache pharmaceutical rep for a powerful pain killer. He promises a lifestyle of luxury and power, as long as Liza is willing to ignore or bend a few ethics along the way. Together, they build a sales force of attractive women who wine and dine smaller doctors in order to get them to prescribe their special drug to anyone in need. It’s just that a drug intended for end-of-life pain wasn’t meant for common headaches. As sales boom, Liza begins to worry that her glitzy lifestyle is built upon a mountain of American corpses.
The biggest drawback of Pain Hustlers is that it fully focuses on the glitz and gives lip service to the cost of chasing that avarice. Plenty of movies illuminating bad people doing bad things are accused of glamorizing the misdeeds, from gangster movies to dark romances, though this narrow viewing often seems to conflate depiction with condoning the behavior (see: The Wolf of Wall Street). Watching stories about people stumbling their way into glamorous positions should provide some allure so as to better understand the seductive draw for the characters. The world of vice and power will be a compelling conflict, but for Pain Hustlers, it falters by just focusing on the high-powered lifestyle yet it still lacks specificity to make this story feel interesting on its own. You’ve seen variations of this kind of story before (we’ll call it Scorsese-esque) about the people struggling with less who get a ticket into a new world of access and freedom and then begin to worry At What Cost. Pain Hustlers goes through its plot beats with the most mechanical of movements. The personal details from this supposedly true story feel so generic, reminiscent of similar tales like, Love & Other Drugs and Hustlers. It feels less like an insider account of how these shady people exploited so many and more like the screenplay was cobbled together by what the filmmakers assumed this story must have pertained without reading much of the source novel by Evan Hughes. It’s absent the useful details that allow more of these accounts to prosper as we investigate moral relativism.
The other nagging shortcoming of Pain Hustlers is the consequences for all these bad people. I’m not saying that we need to see comeuppance and justice levied in order for the movie to work thematically; very often these white collar criminal types receive the faintest glance of judicial punishment. What this movie lacks is the emphasis on the consequences, and considering our main characters are pushing sleazy doctors to push highly addictive opioids, that’s a big miss. The movie is all about the climb for its heroine, the comparison of having the fancy life versus a life without. It shortchanges the extremely human cost of its bad actors in a way that does a disservice to the movie and its message. Because of its lack of specificity, this story could have been propelled by any prescription drug, from Viagra to Lipitor. The fact that we’re talking fentanyl, a drug responsible for 200 deaths every day last year according to the CDC, seems immaterial, and that is bizarre.
The effects of the opioid crisis begun by Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, and then trickled down through the complicated tributaries of the American medical infrastructure, will be felt for generations. This is a major story. It would be like, say, telling the story of a struggling single mom who decides to take a career advancement in the Nazi Party in 1940s Germany. You’re not just doing a disservice to the people who really suffered, you’re doing a disservice to the audience to ignore the gravity of their moral culpability and excuse-making, of the drama of the character having to confront their part. For a movie about people profiting from opioid over-prescriptions, there is a grand total of one scene where Liza has to deal with the harsh real-world consequences of her actions (minor spoilers ahead, but I’d advise you to continue, dear reader). Early in the movie, when Liza was forced out of her home, she spent a few days living in a motel. The neighbor lady at the motel has a husband who dies from the opioid crisis, and this one man is meant to symbolize what she has wrought as a whole. It doesn’t work, and the fact that the movie presents Liza in tears trying to make amends to this widow, a character we haven’t had any thought over since Liza leaving her Act One beginnings, is a pitiful excuse for a reckoning.
Evans (The Grey Man) and Blunt (Oppenheimer) feel on autopilot here, namely because of the broad and bland characterization. Blunt resumes her Southern accent I recall from the Quiet Place movies, but her energy level feels too low, too disengaged, like she’s already at her quiet rectitude character phase when she should be at the gee-whiz giddiness of her moral slide. Evans is meant to be playing a cad prone to vulgar boasts and condescension for those he willfully steps over to reach his goals, but his “sleazeball” acting tics feel too forced, too played up, in all the ways that Blunt feels dialed down. There’s no baseline for the two of them, so the scenes they share together feel over and under-cooked, and with a generically developed rise-and-fall screenplay to boot. Andy Garcia (Father of the Bride) is the most interesting character as the head of the company, a doctor who began trying to ensure those in desperate need could have the dignity of mitigating their pain, and transforms into a megalomaniacal huckster who only wants to keep meeting the next sales projections. His rise-and-fall seems much more steep and intriguing than trying to give us Liza, a gutsy single mom (with a wacky mother of her own played by Catherine O’Hara) who we’re supposed to identify with and forgive for playing her part in a deadly chain that has wrecked untold lives across the country and world. She did it for her own kid’s medical treatment. So it’s all okay, right?
This is director David Yates’ first movie away from the familiar confines of the Harry Potter universe since the ill-fated 2016 Tarzan reboot, and only his second non-Potter movie since 2005. Given that history, I’m curious whenever this man jumps onto a non-Potter project because you would assume it has to be special in some manner. I’ll credit Yates with changing his visual preferences from the very drabby and gray palette of his Potter filmography.Pain Hustlers adopts a lot of the stylistic tics we expect in glitzy crime thrillers, from handheld camerawork to sun-bleached colors. There are other techniques to bring a documentary-like authenticity, but the constant cutting back to black-and-white interviews with the characters after the fact only serves as a narration crutch to keep things moving. The character narration lacks further insight from the distance or remorse of the onscreen events. The whole movie feels like a copy of a Scorsese imitator, something akin to 2009’s forgettable The Middle Men, a crime movie about a plunge into the underworld from a naif that doesn’t try too hard beyond empty reconfiguration of the superior style of its influences that I doubt anyone really remembers (you might as well add directorial narration, “Ever since I was young I always wanted to make a gangster movie…”). As immediate evidence to the case, there is a slow-motion house party in Pain Hustlers set to “Turn Down For What.”
Should you spend two hours watching Pain Hustlers? Not really, though if you have a fascination with the many schemers who contributed to making the opioid crisis as trenchant and terrible as it currently is, and likely will be for the near future, then maybe there’s some mild value to be had here. But even those people would be better served watching another Netflix series tackling the same subject matter, the 2023 limited series Pain Killer. For me, the Pain Hustlers story was too broad, and where it could have broken out with specificity is where it decided to wimp out and defer to genre cliches. It’s hard for me to argue that you should spend two hours watching this movie on the subject when you would be far better served, from an informative and entertainment standpoint, watching the two-part, four-hour 2021 documentary Crime of the Century by masterful filmmaker Alex Gibney. That film is damning and compelling and authentic in ways Pain Hustlers can only hope to imitate.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Gigli (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released August 1, 2003:
It’s the feel-good movie of the year revolving around a lunkhead mobster (Ben Affleck) and his mentally challenged kipnapee and their attempts to covert a lesbian hitman (Jennifer Lopez) in between her yoga/horrific monologues concerning the superiority of female genitalia. Believe the hype people; Gigli is indeed as bad as they have told you. It’s not even entertainingly bad, like Bulletproof Monk, no folks; Gigli is just mundane and awful. During the entire two-hour stretch, which feels much much longer, I kept saying one thing aloud: “How could anyone making this think they were making a good movie?” Did they think audiences would find it funny that Affleck’s mother (the mother from My Big Fat Greek Wedding) shows us her big fat Greek behind? Did they really think that a mentally challenged kid (who has an affinity for gangster rap and wishes to travel to the mythical “Baywatch”) would come off as endearing? Well instead it comes across as insulting. And what else is insulting is the laugh-out-loud dialogue Lopez is forced to spit out concerning her attraction for women. I can’t think of any actress that could say the line, “I love my pussy” convincingly. And I’m sure a lot of actresses out there have true affection for it. The writing is just atrocious. And so much else fails as well. The score is a perplexing mix of upbeat jazz and inappropriate string orchestra. I don’t understand what emotions they were going for during scenes in Gigli but a full string orchestra playing music better suited for a real drama does not fit. Maybe it was for a tragedy. In that case, then it’s right on the money. You won’t see a more sloppily executed, horribly acted, painfully written, lazily directed, inept film this year. And what the hell did Christopher Walken walking in have anything to do with anything?
Nate’s Grade: F
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Gigli. It’s a word that instantly trigger shudders and shivers, a code name for fiasco, for career-destroying miscalculations. Writer/director Martin Brest was a Hollywood heavyweight with hit adult comedies like Going in Style, Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run, and Scent of a Woman, and since the cataclysmic disaster that was Gigli in 2003, this man hasn’t directed a single thing in these twenty years. The man is still reeling from the wafting stink from this very bad movie. I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit what I dubbed the worst film of 2003, though I was not the only critic to make this distinction, but now I’m questioning why I even bothered. It’s not like this movie was somehow going to get that much better with two decades of safe distance. The amazingly miscalculated artistic decisions will still be the same, still bad. I guess it must have been primarily my own morbid curiosity, much like revisiting 2001’s Freddy Got Figured, about whether this famous flop could still live up to its reputation. Well, dear reader, allow me to put any lingering doubts to rest you may have had about Gigli. It’s still very very very bad.
I might possibly recommend watching this once in your life (depending upon how many years you are lucky to earn) for the sheer fascination; Hollywood so easily makes mediocre and boring and familiar movies that feel like pale imitators of some prior hit, but Gigli is something different in the realm of studio stinkers, a project where just about every single creative decision warranted the incredulous Tim Robinson gif response: “You sure about that? You sure about that?” Gigli feels like two tonally dissonant movies in conflict at every moment. The plot elements feel lifted from some mid-to-late 90s indie crime comedy, the likes where they would just throw together a grab-bag of ironic provocative plot elements you wouldn’t expect together. “Mobster doofus kidnaps mentally challenged kid who is obsessed with gangster rap and wants to visit the ‘Baywatch’ which he thinks is real! Romance with a lesbian! Severed thumb ruses!” The collection of strange parts feels like it’s supposed to be a madcap, wacky comedy, and yet the tonal approach is complete treacle, with a shockingly syrupy score that rises and falls throughout, trying to convince you that what you’re watching is quixotically aiming for Oscars. It is astounding if you stop and pay attention to the film score at any moment, no matter how strange, as it attempts to provide jazzy saunter to “comedy” scenes, like an ex-girlfriend showing up into an unstable situation, and then it segues to Spielbergian emotional heft, like when that same ex-girlfriend attempts to take her own life to convince Jennifer Lopez to come back. There were so many moments where my only response possible was to avert my eyes, shake my head, and wonder whether anyone at any stage had any misgivings, tried to reach out to Brest, but then shrugged and dismissed their very legitimate worries as, “Well, he made Midnight Run after all. What do I know?” You know enough that these different tonal approaches will not work.
Apparently, the movie was intended to be a straightforward mob comedy but the studio wanted the focus to shift toward a romance because of the actual romance between its stars, Lopez and Ben Affleck. Whenever actors begin a relationship after a movie or over the course of making one together, it provides another lens to review the movie, to gauge their chemistry and, if you’re so lucky and observant, able to “see” them falling in love with one another. That is nowhere to be found with Gigli. Maybe it was the shared experience of finding what they could to cling to while making this movie that nobody fully understood but committed to anyway (I guess love can be described the same way under some circumstances). Regardless, the romance between the two characters is, like all other plot elements, haphazard and spontaneous and foolhardy.
The characters are all awful and they never remotely come across like relatable or even remotely interesting people. Affleck’s Italian lunkhead Larry Gigli is just awash in early 2000s misogyny and bravado, dubbing himself the “sultan of slick, the rule of cool, the straight-first-foremost, pimp-mack, hustler, original gangster’s gangster.” Allow that macho boast to also exemplify another critical problem with the movie in that almost all the dialogue will make you cringe. There’s an entire monologue by Lopez, while she’s contorting her body in a plethora of lithe yoga positions, all about how superior the vagina is in appearance and function. What about when Lopez, as an indication that she wants to engage in heterosexual congress, utters the immortal phrase: “It’s turkey time. Gobble gobble.” Larry slams a kid’s computer on the ground and triumphantly says to suck an appendage of his, but then adds, “dot com” because the kid’s a nerd or something because he likes computers. Ho ho, the kidnapped young man insists that he be read to before going to bed, and what does Larry have at his disposal? Not books, oh no, so he’s forced to read him instructions on shampoo and toilet paper. Hilarious, right? What about when this same mentally challenged kid says, “When my penis sneezes, I say, ‘God bless you.’” The early 2000s weren’t an enlightened time with depiction of mental handicaps, and poor Justin Bartha (National Treasure, The Hangover) goes fully into the worst of these impulses, making the performance feel like a minstrel show for those with mental challenges. At least this aspect is not alone. Nothing ages well in this movie and its comedy only falls flatter and the drama is only more inexplicable twenty years later. It’s a special kind of bad so rarely achieved at this level of Hollywood.
Given that the majority of the movie consists of kidnapping a naïf, most of the movie is set in Gigli’s apartment keeping the man unseen and unheard from. This makes the movie feel for a long stretch like a glorified one-set play, with special appearances from traveling guest actors popping through for a brief moment in the spotlight. Here’s Christopher Walken dispensing with a monologue and then never being seen again. thanks for coming. Here’s Al Pacino, yelling so hard I’m surprised Lopez and Affleck didn’t need to wash the layers of spittle off. Here’s Lanie Kazan (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) who needs an insulin shot in her butt and let’s make sure we see her thong while we’re at it. These incursions of well-known actors re-explain the plot, not that it was hard to keep up with, and it all feels like stretching for time when the movie is already two hours long. The resolution, where our characters drive off into their sunny endings, lasts twenty minutes itself, which feels as long as the endings of 2003’s Return of the King. It’s a screenplay that feels like it’s holding itself on ice, content that the kooky characters butting heads and trading quips and monologues would be enough, and one that feels unsure of those same impulses, relying upon a revolving door of one-scene guests to remind us what we already know. It makes you feel simultaneously trapped with awful characters yet also in the hands of someone who doesn’t quite think you’re understanding the nuance and hilarity of the strained effort.
I’m not an automatic Affleck hater. I enjoyed his rise from the films of Kevin Smith to Hollywood leading man. I can understand the draw of working with a filmmaker like Brest, and it’s probably that same appeal that lead him to also star in 2003’s Paycheck, directed by John Woo, who like Brest never worked in Hollywood again. This was the period where Affleck’s star was on the decline, and Bennifer was dominating tabloid space, and if it weren’t for the failures we might not have ever gotten Affleck as film director, so maybe we never would have gotten The Town or Argo or Gone Baby Gone had it not been for Gigli, so there’s a silver lining for you.
Look, you already know you shouldn’t even get near Gigli and with good cause. It’s a rarity to see something this colossally bad with this level of artistic freedom to be bad, not simply having too many cooks in the kitchen but having one very wayward chef nobody felt they could interfere with. This was a runaway chef, the kind of fiasco that only comes from unchecked artistic hubris. In that regard, there may be some rubbernecking appeal here for those who can endure bad characters, bad drama, bad comedy, bad acting, and horrible depictions of human beings who never at any point sound like human beings. It’s hard to watch and two hours of your precious time. 2003 began as a rough year for movies, sporting fascinating disasters like Bulletproof Monk and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Watch those movies if you’re looking for a good-bad time. With Gigli, it’s only going to be a bad-bad time, whether it’s 2003, 2023, or any year until the sun explodes. Hey, if Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez could put this movie behind them and reunite, and even get officially married in 2022, then we can put it behind us as well.
Re-View Grade: F
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Sound of Freedom (2023)
The surprise of an otherwise underwhelming summer at the box-office, so far, has been an indie movie made for only a fraction of the bigger studio fare. Sound of Freedom is an action drama originally filmed in 2018 and even resorted to crowdfunding for post-production assistance, so you’d be curious as to what about this movie is making it the hot commodity in 2023? Well, the answer is both uplifting and also dispiriting, with good intentions running against possible bad faith. However, as an action drama chronicling the ills of human trafficking, it’s pretty mediocre genre stuff and indulges too often in wallowing in the danger of these innocent children under the guise of raising awareness of a pertinent problem that too many may unfortunately misconstrue.
Reportedly based on the experiences of Tim Ballard (Jim Caviezel), a former Homeland Security agent who was tasked with breaking up child-trafficking rings. He even goes undercover to bust skeevy mustachioed pedophiles looking to meet up with buyers, which causes obvious physiological distress and a strain on his marriage, although his wife seems saintly (played by Mira Sorvino, who is only here briefly to urge her man on). A Honduran brother and sister are sold through the front of a child beauty pageant into sex slavery, and after rescuing the brother, he’s determined to reunite the siblings. His efforts lead to Ballard quitting his government job and going to Columbia to try and rescue the children being held as commodities by gangs.
Allow me to be a little glib, dear reader, as I summarize what the plot of Sound of Freedom boils down to. Here goes: the movie quickly establishes sex trafficking as bad. Not hard. Got it. Our hero sees this and says, “This is very bad. I should do something.” The government says, “This is very bad. But what are you gonna do, you know?” Then our hero proclaims, “I can do something,” and the government brass says, “Well, we don’t know if you should,” and then our hero declares, “Well, I’m gonna!” Then he infiltrates the trafficking ring and reunites a little girl with her brother, and by the end we all learned a valuable lesson that human trafficking is very bad. The end. Now, yes, when you reduce any movie to its most essential plot points, it can feel reductive and like you’re missing something (Star Wars: farm boy leaves home, has adventure with hermit, saves princess), but there isn’t anything more to this Sound of Freedom than any of the Taken movies. It’s not exactly illuminating though it feels very sincere in its convictions.
As an action movie, there sure is a deficit of action to go on for a movie pushing two hours. There’s a climactic rescue but the majority of this movie is the overly simplified journey of trying to find one missing girl. Criminal procedures can be intriguing when there’s a real sense of continuity and progression, chasing down leads, connecting the dots, building the case. It can be invigorating when done well by smart people, like in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty or the more recent true-life tale of exposing the murderous subject of 2022’s The Good Nurse. With Sound of Freedom, the problems are too easily overcome and the details are minimal. A lot of the breakthroughs are reliant upon chance.
Sound of Freedom feels like a professional action movie, with grimy cinematography and a mournful score, but there’s too little else going on here that is unknown to a general audience. It’s all pretty straightforward and yet sludgy with its overwrought pacing. This is a slow burn of a movie with an obvious end point manufactured for audience uplift, with Caviezel appearing as himself during the end credits to plead for others to donate to the cause and buy tickets for others for the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the twenty-first century,” which is what many are doing and donating them to others or passing them off to strangers.
There is one moment that I thought was unexpected, where reliable character actor Bill Camp (The Queen’s Gambit) plays an ally to assist Ballard in putting together a fake sex trafficking palace for pedophiles (this is much of the last act). Camp plays a businessman who indulged in the illicit excess of power until one fateful sexual encounter with a prostitute that he believed to be in her mid twenties. He’s sickened by the revelation that she was only fifteen years old, and this causes him to have a moral shakeup of his behavior, his complicity, and the entire system of wealthy and powerful people indulging in vices that leave others trapped in cycles of violence and degradation. It’s a potent moment that I wished that Camp’s character was the actual protagonist, a character with flaws trying to overcome a shameful past and do some measures to rectify change. That’s a more interesting starting point than a stoic yet familiar action hero who is defined by his dedicated calling to save the lives of children.
Nobody needs much persuasion to believe that sex trafficking is a definite bad thing, and yet the movie spends so much time wallowing in the grotesque terror of its captive children. It’s one thing to highlight the harsh reality of real-world trauma, but it’s another thing to keep going back for dramatic weight not provided through the rest of the movie. It’s hard to watch young children, gasping and crying, knowing they are likely minutes away from being abused, but why go back to this repeatedly? Did they think the audiences forgot what was happening? Because there is so little else to this movie, plot and character-wise, the frequent stops to watch kids in horror right before being abused are galling, and not just for the intended artistic purpose. Too much of Sound of Freedom is watching a grief-stricken dead-eyed Caviezel gravely intoning, “How can we let this happen?” intermingled with prolonged scenes of terrorized children. It feels too exploitative and gross. I recognized it as a cheap emotional cudgel, and one I didn’t appreciate considering the film’s intended message about the well-being of children.
Here’s where I think the movie’s good intentions run up against the reality of trafficking. The far majority of people who are victims of sex trafficking are not being abducted in public by foreign strangers, they’re not being grabbed at Target stores or somehow hidden in Wayfair furniture (this specific and moronic conspiracy theory was propagated by Ballard as well, sigh); instead, the common perpetrators are friends and family. Often it’s low-income parents with significant substance abuse issues who, in desperation, resort to the most cruel outcome to resolve their addiction. The far majority of trafficking victims are in their teens, seventy percent between 15-17. Victims are also often members of the LGBTQ community who have been kicked out of their homes, and some of these victims resort to trading sex for their own survival. Victims are often those seeking out relationships because of abuse and neglect at home and those coercive relationships then transforming into trafficking. The reality of human trafficking is a lot more complex. It is a worthy topic of imminent concern, but it’s not scary brown-skinned foreigners coming to steal your unsupervised babies. It’s not a cabal of Democrats wanting to drink the blood of children for its power (this specific and moronic conspiracy theory was propagated by Caviezel as well, sigh). The problem with crusading against sex trafficking is when your concept of the topic does not match the reality of the problem. It’s this sensationalized boogeyman, and not knowing the actual reality of the problem will only lead to misapplied solutions for a different reality. Also, the far majority of human trafficking is with labor trafficking, which will be much easier to succeed by lowering the age of child labor in certain states, so there’s that too.
By every objective measure, Sound of Freedom is a hit. The movie cost $14 million and has already grossed over $50 million at the U.S. box-office. While part of this is a campaign for people to buy tickets to then give away to others, the tickets are still purchased regardless of whether the seats are filled in their entirety. Many people have been inspired by the movie and its heroics, and far be it from me to deny them their uplift. I was let down by the deficiency of the find-and-rescue plot details and the sludgy pacing. I was especially put off by the excessive time spent exploiting the terror of abused children for unnecessary drama. Obviously the subject should make anyone feel uncomfortable, and sex trafficking is a very real evil that everyone should be able to condemn, but there needs to be more to this movie than reminding you that sex trafficking is very bad. I will credit Sound of Freedom with not depicting any specific pernicious QAnon conspiracies, but there’s significant overlap between that community and the audience for this. As a genre exercise, it’s kind of dull. As an expose on human trafficking, it has potential but skirts complexity for the finality of a feel-good mission with clear cut heroes and villains. There are obvious good intentions here wanting to highlight a worthy cause, and that might be enough for many viewers who can coast on the slick production values and overall stoicism.
Nate’s Grade: C
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The Outfit (2022)
What a disarmingly suspenseful movie this was. The Outfit flew under the radar when it was released in the early months of 2022, but it deserves better and is genuinely one of the best films of that year. It’s structured much like a stage play, based in one location with a group of characters under great duress. Set in 1956 Chicago, the movie takes place entirely within the tailor shop of Leonard (Mark Rylance), an expat from Britain’s famed Savoy Road who has a special arrangement with local gangsters. He lets them use his shop for their business and doesn’t ask questions. Then one fateful night a job goes wrong and the surviving criminals hide out in the shop, suspecting one among them is a traitor. Written and directed by Graham Moore (Oscar-winner for 2014’s The Imitation Game), the movie is an ever-shifting game of constant suspense, with new characters coming into the fray and with every person holding their own secrets. I was impressed with how the movie kept upending my expectations while holding onto clarity, as each new combination of characters onscreen meant a different dynamic of who knows what and what angle they’re gunning for. Rylance is our anchor of this shifting game and it’s an open question whether he is hapless victim or manipulative schemer. The writing is so sharp and the ensemble are so refined each in their role (Dylan O’Brien, Zoey Deutch, Simon Russell Beale) that you ignore the rather pedestrian direction by Moore. This little movie is such a sly surprise that can pack a wallop while keeping you entertained and duly satisfied by the end. The Outfit is is a well-made yet familiar story but told with pristine craftsmanship.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Decision to Leave (2022)
Imagine crossing a classic film noir detective story with some unrequited romance heavy with yearning, like In the Mood for Love, and that’s the combo you get with director Park Chan-wook’s newest, Decision to Leave. In Busan, a straight-laced detective (Park Hae-il, The Host) is investigating an older government official who fell to death from a mountain peak. He suspects that the man’s wife, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei, Lust, Caution), a much younger Chinese immigrant, might have something to do with the death, and so the detective gets closer and closer to his suspect, blurring the lines of the investigation and his own personal desires. It sounds like familiar genre territory, and it can be, but director Park Chan-wook (The Handmaiden, Oldboy) is the X-factor, and quite simply, he shoots the hell out of this movie. There are some jaw-dropping shot selections and camera arrangements here to cherish. The movie is less interested in its sordid murder mystery details and more the possible relationship between its two magnetic poles, made even more complicated by the detective already being married, though only spending the weekends at home. There is a stormy swell of will-they-won’t-they sexual tension in constant churn, and it adds a dour sense of melancholy to the entire movie. There’s a time jump two-thirds of the way through the movie that is slightly aggravating, because it’s like starting over and repeating the mystery catch-up but with less time, making the details of this new case even less meaningful than earlier. Decision to Leave ends on a strong downbeat that feels appropriate given the mood of the preceding two-plus hours. I don’t think the characters are as textured as they could be, part of this is being jostled around by the non-linear storytelling and artistic tricks of Chan-wook. I think the movie generally favors mood and flirts with wanting to be seen a tragic romance worthy of Hitchcock, though I don’t think it fully gets there. So much of the movie is about probing whether or not the feelings are real between these two, whether she’s toying with him or he just wants to complete the unfinished assignment (the dynamic reminded me of Luther and Alice in the BBC series Luther). Decision to Leave feels like a solid film noir mystery, elevated by A-level directing talent, and then missing its ambitious grasp with its lilting love story that feels a little too subdued and understated to really smolder.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Emily the Criminal (2022)
This Sundance indie thriller packs more anxiety into 90 minutes than most Hollywood thrillers combined. It’s a starring vehicle for Aubrey Plaza as the titular Emily, a woman with a prior criminal record who finds herself in debt and struggling to find a better paying job. In desperation, she joins a small-time credit card fraud squad, using stolen identities to purchase expensive electronics and pass along to her employer to resell. At first, it’s a quick and easy fix and she can walk away at any time, but the money is good and Emily begins to take on bigger and riskier jobs. It’s here where I really started sweating as Emily gets into some very serious jams, but she comes back swinging, and it’s a thrill. At the same time, you worry that she’s going too far and there may be no turning back. The movie reminded me a lot of 2016’s Good Time, an electric indie thriller that vibrated with anxiety as well as a surprising but thoughtful cause-effect story flow. Emily the Criminal begins as an indictment on the social mechanisms that trap the poor into poverty but then in its second half escalates urgently, spiraling into a tragic confluence of violence and vengeance. Plaza is outstanding from the first scene onward. Even her posture speaks volumes about her character. It’s a performance where you can see the gears of her decision-making, whether it’s fight-or-flight impulses, swallowing her pride, holding to a façade, or regaining what has been taken from her. The very ending of the movie is perfect and a fitting end of Emily’s character arc. It’s the American Dream turned into a modern nightmare of perfectly perpetual desperation.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Gangs of New York (2002) [Review Re-View]
Originally released December 20, 2002:
Watching Martin Scorsese’s long-in-the-making Gangs of New York is like watching a 12-round bout between two weary and staggering prize fighters. You witness the onslaught of blows, see the momentum change several times, and in the end can’t really tell which fighter is victorious. This is the experience of watching Gangs of New York, and the two fighters are called “Ambitions” and “Flaws.”
The film begins in the Five Points district of 1840s New York among a vivid gang war over turf. Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) witnesses the slaying of his father, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), at the blade of William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his “Native” Americans gang. So what does this son of a dead preacher-man do? Well he grows up, plots revenge by making a name under the wing of the Butcher becoming like a surrogate son. But will vengeance consume him?
Watch Leo DiCaprio assemble toughs, rake heels, and ne’er do wells to his Irish gang of rapscallions with facial hair that looks to be tweezed! Witness a one-dimensional Leo suck the life out of the film like a black hole! See Leo become the least frightening gangster since Fredo. Watch the horribly miscast Cameron Diaz play pin-the-tail-on-an-accent! Witness as she tries to play a pickpocket with a heart of gold that falls hopelessly and illogically in love with Leo! Marvel how someone looking like Diaz would exist in a mangy slum! See the brilliant Daniel Day-Lewis upstage our stupid hero and steal every scene he inhabits! Witness one of the greatest villains in the last decade of movies! Watch Day-Lewis almost single-handedly compensate for the film’s flaws with his virtuoso performance! Admire his stove-top hat and handlebar mustache!
Witness a wonderful supporting cast including John C. Reilly, Jim Broadbent and Brendan Gleeson! Wish that they had more screen time to work with! Wonder to yourself why in all good graces this film took nearly two years of delays to get out! Speculate away!
Gangs has the sharp aroma of a film heavily interfered with by its producers. The whole exercise feels like Scorsese being compromised. Gangs is a meticulous recreation of 1860s New York that often evokes an epic sense of awe. The story has more resonance when it flashes to small yet tasty historical asides, like the dueling fire houses and the Draft Riots. But all of these interesting tidbits get pushed aside for our pedantic revenge storyline with Leo front and center. You know the producers wanted a more commercial storyline, which probably explains why Diaz has anything to do with this.
The script is credited to longtime Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks, Steven Zallian (Academy Award winner for Schindler’’s List) and Kenneth Lonergan (Academy award nominee for You Can Count on Me). So with all these writing credentials, don’t you think one of them would realize all of the dumb things going on with the story? The ending is also very anticlimactic and ham-fisted. Just watch as we segue from a graveyard to present day New York, all thanks to the Irish rockers of U2!
I know this much, Day-Lewis needs to stop cobbling shoes and act more often. Gangs is his first visit to the big screen since 1997’’s The Boxer. He spent part of this hiatus in Italy actually making shoes. I don’’t know about everyone else but this man has too much talent to only be acting once every five years. Somebody buy his shoes and get him a script, post haste!
Scorsese’s Gangs of New York is at times sprawling with entertainment in its historic vision and at other times is infuriating, always dragging behind it a ball and chain called “stupid revenge story/love story.” I’’m sure the film will get plenty of awards and Oscar nods in prominent categories, and this seems like the Academy’’s familiar plan: ignore a brilliant artist for the majority of their career and then finally reward them late for one of their lesser films. So here’’s hoping Scorsese wins the Oscar he deserved for Raging Bull and Goodfellas.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
It is rare to find a movie that is almost exact in its percentage of good aspects and poor aspects. This 50/50 balance is best exemplified by 2002’s Gangs of New York. The ten-time Oscar nominated movie (and zero-time winner) was intended to be director Martin Scorsese’s epic, and twenty years later it’s still his biggest movie in size. Scorsese waited twenty years to tell this sprawling story of New York City’s early criminal underworld, so at 160 unwieldy minutes it’s no surprise how overstuffed and unfocused the finished product ended up. It’s a movie with so many engrossing historical anecdotes, amazing texture and supporting actors, and a stunning return to upper-tier acting by Daniel Day-Lewis, and yet it is hampered by Leonardo DiCaprio’s lackluster storylines, both for vengeance and for love (maybe a love of vengeance?). It’s so bizarre to watch this movie because there can be sequences where the movie just excels, and then there are sequences where I just want to sigh deeply. It’s like the movie is in conflict with itself, and you, the viewer, are ultimately the frustrated victim.
Let’s focus on the good first. Day-Lewis had essentially retired from acting and went to work in Italy as a cobbler until Scorsese appealed to him to reconsider acting. Every second this man is onscreen deserves your utmost attention. DiCaprio was the advertised star of the movie but Day-Lewis was the real star. The movie is almost a Trojan horse of sorts, luring you in with a standard revenge plot line only for you to lose all interest and root for the charismatic villain. Day-Lewis is so enthralling, so commanding as Bill the Butcher that every moment he is absent feels like an eternity. He remained in character for the duration of the shoot, spooking waitresses, and learned how to throw knives from circus performers and how to cut meat from an actual butcher. Considering the man’s famous Method-acting approach, I wonder just how many skills Day-Lewis has acquired over decades. This man could be the living embodiment of Michelle Yeoh’s character in Everything Everywhere All at Once, able to, at a moment’s notice, tap into a uniquely honed skill-set upon need. I wish that itself was a movie; Day-Lewis filming a role when terrorists invade the set, and now he has to utilize every lesson and skill of his past acting roles to defeat the baddies and save the day. He may be the most interesting man in the world. Since Gangs, Day-Lewis has only appeared in five other movies, and amazingly he has been nominated for Best Actor three times, winning twice (that averages an Oscar every 2.5 movie roles). This man has become like an acting Halley’s Comet, waiting for him to swing around again and burn brightly and then, just as suddenly, pass back into the lengthy waiting period.
I loved the historical asides in this movie. I loved the scene showing, in one unbroken take, Irish immigrants stepping off the boat into New York harbor and getting immediately signed into service, given a rifle and uniform, and lined up to board another boat to fight the Confederacy. I loved the entire character of Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) and how transparently corrupt he is, reminding me of Claude Rains in Casablanca. I loved him competing with the dozens of other firefighting units squabbling over turf while a house burned down to cinders. I loved him scrambling for some entertainment for the masses, and he asks Bill to gather up four nobodies that they can publicly hang, and then we cut right to these relatively innocent men saying their last words before being hanged, including one man’s young son watching. It’s an incredible sequence. The culmination of the 1863 Draft Riots is terrific and maximizes the messy nature of the movie best, communicating the many breaking points that lead to this notorious riot. The opening of this movie is wonderful and a terrific mood setter as we watch the members of the Dead Rabbits assemble for battle, with the rattling percussive score by Howard Shore (The Lord of the Rings), finally breaking outdoors and watching gangs advance like armies. I loved the narrated history of the different gangs settled in New York and their peculiarities and fixations. I loved the before and after stories of Happy Jack (John C. Reilly), who settled as a corrupt police officer, and Monk McGinn (Brendan Gleeson), a mercenary who tries to go straight through, of all things, politics. I loved that the movie reminds us that just because these people reside in the North doesn’t stop them from being racist (an archbishop is especially aghast at a black man being allowed in his church). I loved the occasional P.T. Barnum appearance. I loved the proliferation of so many tall hats amidst all the handlebar mustache-twirling villainy. I loved when the movie felt like a living documentary, soaking up the richness of the recreated history.
Where the movie sputters is with just about all that involves DiCaprio’s character, Amsterdam. The revenge storyline is just so boring compared to everything else going on, enough so that I think even the movie forgets about it. Amsterdam becomes Bill’s budding protege and literally saves his life at several points (if your goal is for him to die, why save the man?). He’s such a boring character because all he thinks about is vengeance, so every relationship he builds is only about how much closer to achieving his goal he can be. Amsterdam is a thoroughly dull character, and DiCaprio doesn’t come across as a credible tough guy yet, especially diminished in the large shadow from Day-Lewis’s Butcher. It wasn’t until 2006’s The Departed where I felt like he shed his boyishness fully to play a credible adult man. DiCaprio has been great with Scorsese, and this movie was the start of a decade of collaborations (four movies, two Oscar nominations), but he feels miscast here as a brooding hero given inordinate attention.
Worse is the romance with a pick-pocket prostitute played by Cameron Diaz. I pity Diaz. She’s been given the spunky love interest role in the Oscar-bait movie, which is generally underwritten and only viewed as aiding the hero’s journey of our male lead or being the offramp not taken (“Don’ get y’er refenge, Amsti’dam, ‘stead come wit me to San Fran in Calyfer’nia”). This is not a good character and she’s meant to give voice to the female underclass perspective, so it’s even more irksome when her headstrong, defiant nature gets sublimated as a rote romantic option. Diaz is also woefully miscast and my 2002 quip of her playing “pin-the-tail-on-the-accent” is accurate. I might argue that maybe dramas aren’t her strong suit, but she was great in Being John Malkovich and In Her Shoes and The Holiday, though all of those had notable comedy elements. She has the ability but this might just have been too unfamiliar for her, and so she struggles throughout with a character defined by her sexual connections to the villain and the hero.
While these characters and the performances are the biggest misses in Gangs of New York, there are other misguided or poor elements adding to that 50/50 margin. The opening sequence is great until the actual gang warfare begins and you realize that Scorsese, arguably the greatest living American director, cannot direct action to save his life. The action is choppy and lacking any of the kinetic qualities we associate with most Scorsese movies. Not even the talents of editor Thelma Schoonmaker can help save this deficit. The movie’s overall scattershot nature also makes it rather uneven and difficult to build momentum. The ending plays out like a footnote to the Draft Riots and robs the viewer of whatever catharsis could be granted from the long vengeance plot. If the whole movie has been leading up to Amsterdam’s vengeance, well robbing him of it could be meaningful, if the self-destructive nature of vengeance had been a theme. It’s not like Amsterdam has suffered at all, beyond the occasional stab wound or black eye, so him learning a lesson about the futility of vengeance would seem inappropriate and trite. I also want it known for posterity that there is an un-credited actor listed online as playing “Hot Corn Girl.”
”Twenty years later, Gangs of New York is still a frustrating and sometimes exhilarating viewing. It began a road for Scorsese that led to him finally winning his first, and still only, Oscar for directing The Departed. The sprawling nature of the movie is both a blessing and a hindrance. It allows for a wider scope and cast of characters but it also means that if you’re liking a subplot or a supporting character, you’ll have to wait your turn before they re-emerge. My old review back in 2002 perfectly sums up the majority of my feelings in 2022. There’s much to see and much to like with Gangs of New York but also too much to restrain its potential greatness.
Re-View Grade: C+
nathanzoebl 
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