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Godzilla Minus One (2023)
In his seventy years, Godzilla has been many things, a force representing mankind’s hubris, a protector of the Earth, a father, a weird chicken-like creature that Godzilla 1998 director Roland Emmerich asked his concept artists to make “sexy,” but rarely has the famous giant lizard been genuinely scary, and even rarer still has any of the thirty movies been genuinely serious. The surprisingly affecting Godzilla Minus One achieves both with impressive execution. Set shortly after the end of World War II, the far majority of this monster movie is given to somber human drama, with our protagonist a kamikaze pilot too afraid to give his life senselessly for the cause. Once he returns home, he is treated like a pariah, shamed by his neighbors attempting to literally put the pieces of their lives back together amidst the rubble. He’s riddled with post-traumatic stress and two counts of survivor’s guilt eating away at him. For this man, his war is not over. To make matters even worse, there’s a gigantic lizard terrorizing the seas and heading straight for Tokyo. The second half of the movie follows a very satisfying formula taken from Jaws, with a group of men getting on a boat, working together, and trying to catch their big prize. The ingenuity of their plans makes use of the meager means at their civilian disposal, as the military cannot get involved out of fear of stoking U.S.-Russia aggression in the dawn of the Cold War. The way this character’s arc comes together, at a great moment of heroism that also ties in his relationship with other supporting characters you’ve come to enjoy, is great storytelling. Usually in monster movies the human drama is filler and you can’t wait for those pesky people to get squished to make way for the waves of destructive fun. Not so here, as every scene the characters are in peril has you clenching your fists in fear that Godzilla could triumph. This Godzilla is terrifying and I really enjoyed the sense of scale the filmmakers exhibited, making sure we saw him from a human-sized perspective, and the special effects, while not outstanding, are quite remarkable for its small-scale budget. For Godzilla fans, there might not be enough of the Big Guy for them. I was taken with the emotional journey of these hardscrabble characters fighting for dignity and redemption and to protect their found families, and that was never something I thought would be the major selling point of a Godzilla movie — human emotion. Fear not, the 2024 American release looks to bring back the cheesy nonsense.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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The Boy and the Heron (2023)
It’s been over ten years since renowned animation legend Hiyao Miyazaki graced the silver screen with what was believed to be his last film yet the retirement didn’t kick, for the benefit of all of us. I’ve resisted watching 2013’s The Wind Rises simply because of the melancholy of it supposedly being his final film. The man is in his 80s and still hand draws much of his storyboards, so if indeed this is the last Miyazaki movie we ever get, it ties thematically with many of the concepts and interests of this man’s storied career that it feels like a fitting capper. It’s his most autobiographical, following 12-year-old Mahito as he relocates to the country after surviving the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II. Unfortunately, he lost his mother in the bombing, and now his father is remarrying his mother’s younger sister, who looks near identical to Mahito’s mother. On the grounds of his new home, the boy discovers a strange overgrown tower with a door that leads to another world, and it’s within this world that a creepy scary bird promises Mohito can find his mother again. The Boy and the Heron is an imaginative and transporting fantasy with some major themes around the edges about grief and acceptance and environmental disaster, but it’s the haphazard structure and poor pacing that hold it back for me. Simply, it’s too long to get going and then too short to conclude. We don’t exit to the hidden fantasy world until almost halfway through, and the time in the regular world is stretched out, especially without going into further detail about our protagonist, who is kept very opaque. The discovery of the new world and learning its strange mostly bird creatures and rules and conflicts is where the movie really gets interesting, especially once the menacing heron becomes a squat man serving as our reluctant guide. It feels like there’s going to be some heavy revelations forthcoming, especially with the supposed duplicate nature of Mohito’s mothers, but it all comes down to an aged Man Behind the Curtain with a reveal straight out of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. We take too long to get to that intriguing fantasy world, and then once we’re there it feels a little too surface-level in design for a world on the cusp of dying. Then it’s a mad scramble to leave, and while the culminating decision feels earned in its wisdom, it also feels like the movie has simply run out of ideas. The Boy and the Heron is beautifully animated; the world feels like it’s undulating before your eyes, and there are numerous moments that allow it to breathe. However, it feels like maybe we could have gotten started sooner and finished a little later. Even mid-level Miyazaki is better than most, so The Boy and the Heron is still a worthwhile animated fantasy even if it doesn’t reach masterpiece status from a master storyteller. At least now I can finally watch The Wind Rises, so there’s that too.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Joy Ride (2023)
The “girls can do it too” spirit pervades the raunchy comedy Joy Ride, which follows four twenty-something women of various Chinese-American heritage as they road trip through China to discover one woman’s birth mother. It’s a comedy about smashing representation barriers, giving voice to a specific identity crisis while also promoting sex positive shenanigans. I enjoyed the details of the cultural perspective of being young and Asian, but I felt the characters were too thinly drawn, settling into archetypes without fully embracing their comic differences. I liked each character from the actors and their performances primarily. There is one really ribald comic set piece where the ladies, collectively, hobble a basketball team from their individual sexual appetites, and I heartily laughed at the mounting catastrophes, but the other crass humor feels a bit too listless and surprisingly forced. An impromptu K-Pop performance of “WAP” should have been a lot funnier. Still, Joy Ride, while being less than euphoric, is a mostly fun movie that coasts thanks to the easy camaraderie of our four funny leads and some well-articulated perspectives getting their chance at the ole’ sex comedy formula.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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May December (2023)
The critical darling May December reminded me of another 2023 Netflix prestige awards contender, David Fincher’s The Killer. That genre movie was about trying to tell a realistic version of the cool super spy assassin and I found that enterprise to be fitfully interesting but mostly dull and unfulfilled. This movie seems to be going for a similar artistic approach under director Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven), tackling a sensationalized ripped-from-the-tabloids tale of perversity but telling a more realistic version, which also leaves the movie fitfully interesting but mostly dull and unfulfilled. May December is a frustrating viewing experience because you easily recognize so much good, so many exciting or intriguing elements, but I came away wishing I had seen a different combination and execution.
Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is a famous actress with an exciting new movie role. She’s going to play Gracie (Julianne Moore), a woman who gained national scandal for her sexual relationship with a then-13-year-old Joe. The two of them have been together for several decades and have several children and now are inviting Elizabeth into their home to better understand her character. Each person is on their guard. Elizabeth wants to keep prying to uncover emotional truths that she can gobble up to improve her future performance and career. Gracie is wary of making sure the version of her story that she wants for public media consumption is what Elizabeth receives. And Joe (Charles Melton), now in his mid-thirties and looking more like an older brother than father to his graduating children, is reflecting about the history of his relationship and who was culpable.
There’s so much here in the premise of an actress studying her subject and wreaking domestic havoc in her attempt to discover secret truths that would rather stay hidden. May December uses this premise as an investigative device, allowing the inquisitive actress to serve as the role of the audience, trying to form a cohesive vision of events from each new interview. It allows the first half of the movie to feel like a true-crime mystery, uncovering the different sides of a sordid story and the lasting consequences and legacy for so many. There’s a very lurid Single White Female approach you could go, where the avatar of the person starts to replace the real person, where Elizabeth crosses all sorts of lines and even thinks about crossing some of the same lines that Gracie had; what better way to get in the mind of a predator, right? I was waiting for this interloper to destabilize this carefully put-together illusion of a “normal family,” but by the end you feel like little has been learned and most everything reverts to its prior stasis. I suppose that’s, again, the more realistic version of this kind of story, that even when confronted with uncomfortable revelations most people will fall back on what they know. May December’s underwhelming conclusion is that, by the end, maybe people are actually who we think they are.
Haynes’ cinematic specialty is exploring the artificiality of movies, from having multiple actors portray Bob Dylan in 2007’s I’m Not There, to destabilizing the nostalgia of the 1950s Douglas Sirk-styled romantic drama with 2002’s Far From Heaven. He’s also inherently drawn to stories of emotional and sexual repression. This movie is all about performance as identity; it’s about an actress trying to refine her tools, but it’s also about a middle-aged woman who has adopted performance as her defense system (this also might explain why Gracie’s lisp seems to come and go). Some part of her has to know that she crossed some very serious lines, no matter how many times she explains away their relationship as merely “unconventional.” Even though they’ve kept this union for 25 or so years, it still began when Joe was 13 years old and she was an adult. There are very intriguing dimensions to this dramatic dynamic, with the excuse of a Hollywood version of their “love story” to motivate each participant to reflect with renewed perspective. The problem is that Gracie has worn her mask for so long that I doubt there is another version of her any longer (“I am naive. In a way, it’s a gift”). As a means of survival, she projects herself as a well-intentioned victim of scrutiny rather than as a child predator who has manipulated her husband into codependency for decades. This means that, frustratingly, there isn’t much there to glean once the facts of the case have been collected, which makes watching a bad TV actress try and better emulate a bad person incapable of introspection seem like an empty exercise in artistic masturbation, and maybe that’s the point?
The conversation around May December being some kind of “camp comedy” (it was recently nominated for Best Comedy/Musical by the Golden Globes) has left me genuinely stupefied. I think the term “camp” is used a little too loosely, as some seem to conflate any heightened emotion as equivalent to camp. May December is really more an example of melodrama. It’s near impossible to retell the Mary Kay Letourneau story without the use of melodrama, so its inclusion doesn’t merely qualify the movie as camp. But at the same time Haynes is making deliberate use of certain elements that make the movie even more jarring, like the oppressive and operatic musical stings that hearken to earlier 1950s melodramas. These musical intrusions are so broadly portentous that it’s practically like Haynes is elbowing you and saying, “Eh, eh?” I suppose you can laugh at how arch and over-the-top the musical stings are, but is this a comedic intention? Are we supposed to laugh at how out of place this musical arrangement is in modern filmmaking, or is Haynes trying to draw allusions to old Hollywood melodramas and make a case for this being similar? Whatever the case may be, I guess one could laugh at the stilted performances but then I think that’s approaching the movie from an ironic distance that makes it harder to emotionally engage, which seems like the whole point of the exercise, to go deeper than lazy tabloid summation.
The performances from the female leads circling and studying one another are rather heavy on mannered affectations and arch irony, but it’s Melton (TV’s Riverdale) who emerges as the soul of the movie. He’s so easy going and dutiful, quick to defend his wife and assure everyone that even at 13 years old he knew what he was doing and consented to their affair. Of course this is nonsense, and the real draw of the movie is watching this family man begin to crack, and when he does it’s like every repressed emotion comes spilling out. It makes you wish that he had been the main character of the story and Elizabeth more the supporting character trailing after.
Allow me a tangent, dear reader, because I’m reminded of the 2023 re-release of 1979’s notorious Caligula where a producer tried to re-edit the famously trashy movie, hewing closer to author Gore Vidal’s original screenplay and less the explicit excess of producer and Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s editorial influence. It seems like so much effort to reclaim one of cinema’s most over-the-top movies, but can you really make a classy version of a movie about the cruel Roman emperor that has a wall of spinning blades as an execution device and copious floating brothels? The movie is forever known for its trashy and outrageous elements because it is emulating an outrageous tyrant of history given to hedonistic and lascivious excess. Nobody wants the “classy” version of this sensational story because that’s the tamped-down and boring version of this story (granted, there are plenty of prurient Guccione additions that we could also do without). Taking sensational melodrama and trying to subvert the sensationalism under the guise of genre deconstruction can work; however, the key is that the “classy” approach has to be a more compelling alternative to the soapier, melodramatic version. I think I would have enjoyed the more sundry and soapy version of May December because with this version I felt too removed, and the movie itself felt too removed and uninterested in so many of its more potent elements for the sake of drifting ambiguity. It’s a drama that seems to stew in downy contemplation but without enough compelling examination to make the effort fulfilling. I kept waiting for the movie to open up, and then the movie just ran out of time. It’s got some admirable goals, and a strong performance from Melton that makes your heart ache, but May December would have been better served either being far more trashy or far more serious rather than straddling a middle ground that left me distant and impatient and ultimately disappointed.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Cold Mountain (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released December 25, 2003:
Premise: At the end of the Civil War, Inman (Jude Law, scruffy) deserts the Confederate lines to journey back home to Ada (Nicole Kidman), the love of his life he’s spent a combined 10 minutes with.
Results: Terribly uneven, Cold Mountain‘s drama is shackled by a love story that doesn’t register the faintest of heartbeats. Kidman is wildly miscast, as she was in The Human Stain, and her beauty betrays her character. She also can’t really do a Southern accent to save her life (I’m starting to believe the only accent she can do is faux British). Law’s ever-changing beard is even more interesting than her prissy character. Renee Zellweger, as a no-nonsense Ma Clampett get-your-hands-dirty type, is a breath of fresh air in an overly stuffy film; however, her acting is quite transparent in an, “Aw sucks, give me one ‘dem Oscars, ya’ll” way.
Nate’’s Grade: C
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
I kept meaning to come back to Cold Mountain, a prototypical awards bait kind of movie that never really materialized, but one woman ensured that it would be on my re-watch list for 2003. My wife’s good friend, Abby, was eager to hear my initial thoughts on the movie when I wrote my original review at the age of twenty-one. This is because Cold Mountain is a movie that has stayed with her for the very fact that her grandfather took her to see it when she was only nine years old. While watching, it dawned on nine-year-old Abby that this was not a movie for nine-year-olds, and it’s stuck with her ever since. I think many of us can relate to watching a movie with our parents or family members that unexpectedly made us uncomfortable. For me, it was Species, where I was 13 years old and the movie was about a lady alien trying to procreate. I think my father was happy that I had reached an acceptable age to go see more R-rated movies in theaters. Social media has been awash lately with videos of festive families reacting to the shock value of Saltburn with grumbles and comical discomfort (my advice: don’t watch that movie with your parents). So, Abby, this review is for you, but it’s also, in spirit, for all the Abbys out there accidentally exposed to the adult world uncomfortably in the company of one’s parents or extended family.
Cold Mountain succumbs to the adaptation process of trying to squeeze author Charles Frazier’s 1997 book of the same name into a functional movie structure, but the results, even at 150 minutes, are unwieldy and episodic, arguing for the sake of a wider canvas to do better justice to all the themes and people and minor stories that Frazier had in mind. Director Anthony Minghella’s adaptation hops from protagonist to protagonist, from Inman to Ada, like perspectives for chapters, but there are entirely too many chapters to make this movie feel more like a highly diluted miniseries scrambling to fit all its intended story beats and people into an awards-acceptable running time. This is a star-studded movie, the appeal likely being working with an Oscar-winning filmmaker (1996’s The English Patient) of sweep and scope and with such highly regarded source material, a National Book Award winner. The entire description of Cold Mountain, on paper, sounds like a surefire Oscar smash for Harvey Weisntein to crow over. Yet it was nominated for seven Academy Awards but not Best Picture, and it only eventually won a single Oscar, deservedly for Renee Zellweger. I think the rather muted response to this Oscar bait movie, and its blip in a lasting cultural legacy, is chiefly at how almost comically episodic the entire enterprise feels. This isn’t a bad movie by any means, and quite often a stirring one, but it’s also proof that Cold Mountain could have made a really great miniseries.
The leading story follows a disillusioned Confederate defector, Inman (Jude Law), desperately trying to get back home to reunite with his sworn sweetheart, Ada (Nicole Kidman), who is struggling mightily to maintain her family’s farm after the death of her father. That’s our framework, establishing Inman as a Civil War version of Odysseus fighting against the fates to return home. Along the way he surely encounters a lot of famous faces and they include, deep breath here, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Giovanni Ribisi, Cillian Murphy, Eileen Atkins, Taryn Manning, Melora Walters, Lucas Black, and Jena Malone. Then on Ada’s side of things we have Zellweger, Donald Sutherland, a villainous Ray Winstone, Brendan Gleeson, Charlie Hunam, Kathy Baker, Ethan Suplee, musician Jack White, and Emily Descehanel, and this is the storyline that stays put in the community of Cold Mountain, North Carolina.
That is a mountain of stars, and with only 150 minutes, the uneven results can feel like one of those big shambling movies from the 1950s that have dozens of famous actors step on and as quickly step off the ride. Poor Jena Malone (Rebel Moon) appears as a ferry lady and literally within seconds of offering to prostitute herself she is shot dead and falls into the river (well, thanks for stopping by Jena Malone, please enjoy your parting gift of this handsome check from Miramax). Reducing these actors and the characters they are playing down to their essence means we get, at most, maybe 10-15 minutes with them and storylines that could have been explored in richer detail. Take Portman’s character, a widowed mother with a baby trying to eke out a living, one of many such fates when life had to continue after the men ran to war for misbegotten glory. She looks at Inman with desperate hunger, but it’s not exactly lust, it’s more human connection. When she requests that Inman share her bed, it’s just to feel another warm presence beside her, someone that can hold her while she weeps about the doomed fate of her husband and likely herself. There’s a strong character here but she’s only one stop on our expedited tour. The same with Hoffman’s hedonistic priest, a man introduced by throwing the body of a slave woman he impregnated over a ridge, which might be the darkest incidental moment of the whole movie. His character is played as comic relief, a loquacious man of God who cannot resist the pleasures of the flesh, but even he comes and goes like the rest of our litany of very special guest stars. They feel more like ideas than characters.
This is a shame because there are some fantastic scenes and moments that elevate Cold Mountain. The opening Civil War battle is an interesting and largely forgotten (sorry Civil War buffs) battle that begins with a massive surprise attack that produces a colossal explosion and crater and turns into a hellish nightmare. Granted, the movie wants us to sympathize with the Confederates who were bamboozled by the Yankee explosives buried under their lines, and no thank you. The demise of Hoffman’s character comes when he and Inman are captured and join a chain gang, and they try running up a hill to get free from approaching Union troops. The Confederates shoot at the fleeing men, eventually only with Inman left, who struggles to move forward with the weight of all these dead men attached to him. When they start rolling down the hill, it becomes a deeply macabre and symbolic struggle. The stretch with Portman (May December) is tender until it goes into histrionics, with her literal baby being threatened out in the cold by a trio of desperate and starving Union soldiers (one of which played by Cillian Murphy). It’s a harrowing scene that reminds us about the sad degradation of war that entangles many innocents and always spills over from its desired targets. However, this theme that the war and what it wrought is sheer misery is one Minghella goes to again and again, but without better characterization with more time for nuance, it feels like each character and moment is meant to serve as another supporting detail in an already well-proven thesis of “war is hell.”
Even though I had previously watched the movie back in 2003, I was hoping that after two hours of striving to reunite, that Inman and Ada would finally get together and realize, “Oh, we don’t actually like each other that much,” that their romance was more a quick infatuation before the war, that both had overly romanticized this beginning and projected much more onto it from the years apart, and now that they were back together with the actual person, not their idealized imaginative version, they realized what little they had in common or knew about each other. It would have been a well-played subversion, but it also would have been a welcomed shakeup to the Oscar-bait romantic drama of history. Surely this had to be an inconvenient reality for many, especially considering that the men returning from war, the few that did, were often not the same foolhardy young men who leapt for battle.
Zellweger (Judy) was nominated for Best Actress in the preceding two years, for 2001’s Bridget Jones Diary and 2002’s Chicago, which likely greased the runway for her Supporting Actress win from Cold Mountain. There is little subtlety about her “aw shucks” homespun performance but by the time she shows up, almost fifty minutes into the movie, she is such a brash and sassy relief that I doubt anyone would care. She’s the savior of the Cold Mountain farm, and she’s also the savior of the flagging Ada storyline. Pity Ada who was raised to be a nice dutiful wife and eventual mother but never taught practical life skills and agricultural methods. Still, watching this woman fail at farming will only hold your attention for so long. Zellweger is a hoot and the spitfire of the movie, and she even has a nicely rewarding reconciliation with her besotted old man, played by Brendan Gleeson, doing his own fiddlin’ as an accomplished violin player. As good as Zellweger is in this movie is exactly how equally bad Kidman’s performance is. Her Southern accent is woeful and she cannot help but feel adrift, but maybe that’s just her channeling Ada’s beleaguered plight.
I think there’s an extra layer of entertainment if you view Inman’s journey in league with Odysseus; there’s the dinner that ends up being a trap, the line of suitors trying to steal Ada’s home and hand in the form of the duplicitous Home League boys, Hoffman’s character feels like a lotus eater of the first order, and I suppose one reading could have Portman’s character as the lovesick Calypso. Also, apparently Cold Mountain was turned into an opera in 2015 from the Sante Fe Opera company. You can listen here but I’m not going to pretend I know the difference between good and bad opera. It’s all just forceful shouting to my clumsy ears.
Miramax spent $80 million on Cold Mountain, its most expensive movie until the very next year with 2004’s The Aviator. Miramax was sold in 2010 and had years earlier ceased to be the little studio that roared so mighty during many awards seasons. I think Cold Mountain wasn’t the nail in the coffin for the company but a sign of things to come, the chase for more Oscars and increasingly surging budgets lead the independent film distributor astray from its original mission of being an alternative to the major studio system. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, it had simply become another studio operating from the same playbook. Minghella spent three years bringing Cold Mountain to the big screen, including a full year editing, and only directed one other movie afterwards, 2006’s Breaking and Entering, a middling drama that was his third straight collaboration with Law. Minghella died in 2008 at the still too young age of 54. He never lived to fully appreciate the real legacy of Cold Mountain: making Abby and her grandfather uncomfortable in a theater. If it’s any consolation to you, Abby, I almost engineered my own moment trying to re-watch this movie and having to pause more than once during the sex scene because my two children wanted to keep intruding into the room. At least I had the luxury of a pause button.
Re-View Grade: B-
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Beau is Afraid (2023)
Beau is Afraid is a ramshackle mess of a movie, and that is both the highest compliment and an indictment on its tremendous excess and lack of focus. It’s Ari Aster’s big swing after his modest successes in elevated horror (Hereditary, Midsommar), so the indie maven studio A24 gave him a thirty-million budget and three hours and full artistic reign to do whatever he wanted, and love it or hate it, one has to objectively admit, Aster really went for something all right. I’m still deliberating where that final something falls on the artistic merit equation. There’s undeniable ambition and artistry here, but there’s also so many ideas and moments and bloat, it genuinely reminded me of 2007’s Southland Tales (did your stomach just drop, dear reader?). It’s because both movies are stuffed to the brim with their director’s assorted odd ideas and concepts, as if either man was afraid they were never going to make another movie again and had to awkwardly squeeze in everything they ever wanted into one overburdened project (in Richard Kelly’s case his suspicion might have been correct, as he did only direct one more feature -so far). While I certainly enjoyed -if that is the right word- Aster’s movie more, Beau is Afraid is not an easy movie to love, or enjoy, or even simply sit through, and not just because of its bloated time.
If I had to boil down this sprawling movie into one easy-to-digest concept, it’s about Jewish guilt. If you’re not a fan of feeling uncomfortable or anxious from the intensity of a movie, I would skip this one entirely. Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) might as well be a stand-in for the biblical figure of Job for all the cruel punishments and indignities he endures. Just when you think, “Well, it can’t get any worse,” Aster rolls up his sleeves and rises to the challenge and makes things even worse for his pathetic put-upon plebeian. This is a movie of escalating discomfort, chiefly meant to convey the constant state of anxiety that is Beau’s daily existence, and for the first hour or so, Aster works marvelously at making you squirm. It’s a movie less meant to reflect our objective reality and more a projection of one man’s anxious feelings and paranoia, the unsettling urge that everyone secretly hates you and something bad is always ready to lethally strike.
Beau is Afraid is an absurdist comedy of heightened almost screwball proportions, with Beau becoming increasingly frazzled and muttering “Oh no” hundreds of times as fate has it out for him. Small worries become all-consuming, like the simple task of trying to get water to swallow his new prescription medication, and how this eventually spirals to the ransacking of his apartment building, which is also all Beau’s fault, inadvertently, though that won’t mitigate the guilt. There are numerous fears and worries amplified to breaking points, inviting morbid chuckles and nervous titters. Beau sits in his bathtub to stare at an unknown man squeezed against the walls of his ceiling and about to slip and fall. Why is this man there? Why does Beau not immediately leap out of the tub? Why do both men remain fixed in their positions until the inevitable? It’s because it’s a ridiculous paranoid fear manifested into a ridiculous scenario made even more ridiculous. It’s the same with ignoring his mother’s calls only to have a stranger answer her phone to inform Beau that she has been killed and happens to be without a head now. It’s a realistic fear, avoiding phone calls and the draining emotional energy required to answer, and following it up with a consequence of darkly absurdist proportions to make him feel even worse. The movie leaps from one squirm-inducing, grueling sequence to the next, testing your limits and patience. There’s a post-coital revelation debunking, and then confirming, an outlandish worry that made me laugh out loud with tremendous auditory force. What else could I do? It certainly feels like Aster is inviting the audience to laugh at Beau’s pain and tragedy because what other human response can there be but to laugh in the face of unrelenting torment?
Where the movie loses momentum is about halfway through, after Aster has established the drive of the movie, Beau’s attempts to get to his mother’s funeral so they can finally bury her. Every hour he is delayed, Beau is reminded that his mother’s body is rapidly decaying and only furthering her “humiliation” at the hands of Beau’s inaction. The second part of the movie involves Beau recovering from injuries in an upper class family’s home, the same family (Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan) that accidentally ran him over and is now kind of holding him hostage against his weakened will. We have an urgent goal, we have obstacles keeping him from that goal, and this is where the movie continues to work, as each new attempt to escape only confirms how much stranger and dangerous this family unit is. This dynamic plays into the established heightened fears and absurdist complications. It’s keeping him from his goal. But when he does eventually free himself from this hostage scenario, he literally wanders into the woods and discovers a troupe of thespians that refer to themselves as the Orphans of the Forest, and then a theatrical production may or may not present the rest of Beau’s natural life. This was where the movie’s momentum, which had steadily been ratcheting up along with the dark comedy, began to flag, and when I started to worry, then suspect, then confirm my sinking feeling that this all isn’t going to add up to something more cohesive and thought-provoking. It’s really more a movie of sustained memorable moments and unpredictable, tone-shattering twists and turns. Beau is Afraid is unpredictable, and that both works as an asset and eventually as a handicap. That’s because every scene is hammering the same overall thematic point just with a different stylistic arrangement of fears and anxiety. Following this redundant framework, a 130-minute version of this movie world would feasibly have the same thematic impact as the 180-minute version, merely eliminating some of the many detours.
Another nagging aspect of the movie that failed to add up to much more for me was how little Beau seems to matter in his own story. He’s more intended to be the universe’s lone fall guy rather than a person, a victim whose chief characterization is his ongoing victimization. He suffers and that is his identity. Considering the movie is more a loose fable, this can work since Beau is essentially a stand-in for all of humanity, but there are more personal aspects of him worth exploring in finer detail. The toxic relationship with his mother is worthy of further examination, especially the decades of emotional manipulation to ensure Beau would never replace her with another woman. I wish Aster had devoted more of his 180-minute run time to exploring Beau as a person rather than pitting him against a proverbial assembly line of pies to the face. Phoenix (Joker) has so little to do here except stare wide-eyed, helpless, and mumble as the world constantly befuddles and antagonizes him. It’s a performance purely of pained reaction.
Can I recommend Beau is Afraid? For most viewers, probably not. It’s too long, too sporadic, and doesn’t come to anything cohesive or cumulative or even meaningful beyond a mean-spirited sense of pessimism directed at our titular human punching bag. It’s wildly ambitious and off-putting and bloated and outlandish and the kind of big artistic swing that artists usually only get so rarely in their careers. And yet I have to admire the sheer gusto of Aster making a movie this strange and alienating, a movie that’s constantly altering its very landscape of possibilities, usually to the detriment of Beau’s physical and mental well-being. It is an exhausting experience, so that when the end finally arrives, we, much like Beau, are simply ready to accept the finality we’ve been waiting for after so much abuse. There are moments throughout these ungainly 180 minutes that are sheer brilliance, and sequences that are sheer torture, some of which are on purpose. There’s also just way too much of everything, and without variance or finer exploration of its themes and specific characterization, it becomes a cosmic game of whack-a-mole where you might be the one actually getting hit over the head, and after so long I can’t blame anyone for not enjoying the prolonged experience.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Are You There God? It’s Me, Margret (2023)
When is it not weird for a 41-year-old man to cry about a young woman getting her first period? When you’re watching the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s long-celebrated coming-of-age novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Blume waited almost fifty years before signing over the rights to writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig, whose 2016 movie Edge of Seventeen showed a downright Blume-esque combination of authenticity, good humor, and grace. That trusted vision is evident with how natural and deeply felt the movie comes across. We’ve had numerous coming-of-age tales since Blume’s influence, so I worried that maybe it would feel outdated or surpassed, but the movie taps into a great reservoir of empathy, bringing to relatable light the uncertainty of puberty, of fitting in, and trying to navigate the ever-approaching adult world. Usually these kinds of movies invite the viewer to reflect back upon their own young adult experiences, which I did even though I was never a teenage girl, but I had my own awkward and vulnerable moments too. I really enjoyed that Craig’s movie makes ample time for the adults too, which is where my relatability was prioritized. Watching Rachel McAdams try and explain why her parents disowned her for marrying a Jewish man is a powerfully affecting moment of an adult trying to explain a very hard truth to their child. The movie is affectionate and uplifting and earnest without being too cloying. It’s a pleasant and wholesome movie that showcases Craig as an agile filmmaker who deserves more opportunities and that even fifty years later, being an adolescent girl is still the same old awkward agony.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Saltburn (2023)
Promising Young Woman was easily one of my favorite films of 2020. It used the structure of a rape-revenge genre movie to tell a hard-hitting drama and pitch-black comedy. Writer/director Emerald Fennell was nominated for Best Director and won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, so I wasn’t alone in singing her praises (my critics group declared it the top film of 2020, huzzah). It was, in short, pastiche elevated into something jarring and relevant and daring. With her follow-up Saltburn, she has taken the British class drama of an outsider trying to fake their way in the world of the rich and powerful, a Vanity Fair or Brideshead Revisited if you will, and attached a whole lot of salacious campy nonsense. If Promising Young Woman was elevating a trashy genre movie with vision and daring, then Saltburn is taking the soapy costume drama and degrading it with cheap shock, and “degrade” is quite the appropriate term.
Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is a young Oxford student who doesn’t quite fit in with his peers. He doesn’t come from money and instead from a broken home, but he’s set his sights on success, and that includes winning over the handsome Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). He’s popular and athletic and from a rich family, and Felix takes a liking to Oliver, even defending him against his posh peers. Oliver is infatuated with Felix and convinced that he’s in love. After a personal tragedy, Felix invites Oliver to summer at Saltburn, his family’s enormous private estate in the country. Oliver amuses Felix’s parents (Richard E. Grant, Rosamund Pike) and sister (Alison Oliver) and settles into the black-tie dinners and racchous parties. He might not ever want to leave, and he might not be able to leave, and he might not ever want to be able to leave.
Saltburn is like if The Talented Mr. Ripley was made by the auteur of tawdry trash Larry Clark (Kids, Bully). It’s trashy nouveau camp that works as a sour class comedy until it becomes too sour and most definitely doesn’t work as any sort of engaging character piece or legitimate thriller. I don’t really know what Fernell was going for here and it doesn’t feel like she does either. I think back on the similar tale of Mr. Ripley as an advantageous upstart who got a taste of the good life and didn’t want to give it up. Like Saltburn, we know about our lead’s duplicitous and untrustworthy nature early, but with that movie we could see why others could be charmed by Tom Ripley, and we understood why he would want to stay in this privileged life. With Saltburn, when the rich are treated as shallow twits practically bored with one another from their opulence, the question remains what exactly is the appeal beyond simply attaining more? Also, the appeal of watching con artists slip into a world not their own includes seeing how they will get away with everything, how they’ll cleverly avoid all the traps that materialize. With Saltburn, there is no thrill of clever escapes because the insidious force is obvious and the other characters are too stupid to recognize because they’re meant to be satirical send-ups. It’s a would-be thriller that has gutted all its thrills by eliminating a foreboding sense of consequences.
However, the movie cannot work because all of the surprises were alleviated through poor character development of Oliver and in the performance of Keoghan. I don’t think anyone who ever watches this movie will be even the slightest surprised that Oliver isn’t quite the noble and honest young coed that he may have appeared to be. Except after maybe a couple of early scenes of nerdy awkwardness, Oliver has been depicted as an obvious predator. From the beginning, as he’s sharing his sad family back-story, I was already shaking my head in skepticism and predicting that the truth would be something ordinary and boring that he would choose to cover-up. It’s just too obvious where this scheming, covetous character is going, and Fennell doesn’t do anything to counter this overwhelming and, again, transparent assessment. If you have a character acting all weird and shifty and literally slurping up spent bathwater belonging to the target of his obsession, you shouldn’t then make the later machinations a big reveal. I wanted to laugh that Fennell thought the audience would need flashbacks to better clarify Oliver’s scheming nature behind a series of tragic events. I always assumed it was him because who else would it be? It’s an obsessive young man with oblique and yet obvious motivation to have what he desires from the privileged. We get it. The problem is that the movie never really better examines this desire from his outsider status. We already know he’s the malignant force.
Keoghan is a great actor but “naif” is not a comfortable role for the man. By his casting alone, you’re already looking at Oliver with measured distance and scrutiny. He’s already got a leer that will set people ill at ease. The way the character is written only further confirms this judgment. If Tom Ripley was acting this outlandishly bizarre and creepy from the get-go then he would have been arrested immediately. It’s not even a lack of nuance that hurts Oliver. Not all villains and screen psychos require a full three dimensions, but the characterization is just so lazy and unexplored. He’s just a font of unchecked lust. At least in 2017’s Killing of a Sacred Deer, where Keoghan also played a malevolent young man tearing apart a family unit, his character was meant to have a mythic quality of inescapable retribution, like the Greek tragedy its title was in reference to. With Saltburn, he’s just a creepy perv, but he’s also a boring and redundant creepy perv by the ongoing refusal to provide other context. He’s less a character than a proverbial set of hands to prod characters and poke the viewer in the eye. He’s a recycled program of tedious provocation.
Given how masterfully Fennell utilized and subverted salacious elements in Promising Young Woman, I’m shocked there wasn’t much more than empty shock value. Whatever intended satirical value of this movie is glancing and fleeting. Did you know rich people can be, wait for this, superficial? Saltburn becomes a gross-out game of how far this daft creeper will go with his deadly obsessions, and on that front it all feels too annoyingly flimsy, constructed merely to be transgressive for its own provocative sake. Watching the lengths Oliver will go to prove his disturbing bonafides, it overwhelms the movie and simply becomes the movie’s purpose itself, a measurement between how far Fennell can repulse you before you reach a breaking point. It’s not merely that the characters are easy jokes, it’s that they’re bad jokes. I will say though that the ending shot is so joyously performed that I wish the rest of the movie had this kind of entertainment.
I do think there is an audience for Saltburn, the kind of people who celebrate Harmony Korine’s art-trash movies (Gummo, Spring Breakers), the kind of people who love candy-colored stylistic excess and tongue-in-cheek provocations, and people that seek out twisted love stories and dark romances. Satburn styles itself as a romance, at least early, but it’s clear that there’s nothing romantic about watching a predator set his sights on his prey and work through the family. Sadly, there’s also nothing truly entertaining here either, other than wondering when the next extreme yet desperate attempt at shock value would appear. The characters are too thin and unexplored to support this movie, and the antagonist is too obvious, as are his machinations, though his motivation remains cloudy and also undeveloped. This movie would be akin to watching a bad flu work its way through a family for all the personality Oliver offers. Fennell is a talented storyteller and exceptional at spinning genre pastiche into something so much more, so it’s quite disappointing that Saltburn is so much less than even the sum of its sundry parts.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Big Fish (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released December 25, 2003:
Premise: Estranged son Will (Billy Crudup) travels back home in an effort to know his ailing father Edward Bloom (Albert Finney; Ewan McGregor as the younger version). Will hopes to learn the truth behind a man who spent a lifetime spinning extravagant tall tales.
Results: Despite a shaky first half, Big Fish becomes a surprisingly elegant romance matched by director Tim Burtion’’s visual whimsy. McGregor’’s shining big-grinned optimism is charming. Not to be confused with the similar but too mawkish Forrest Gump, Burton’’s father-son meditation will have you quite choked up at its moving climax. Fair warning to those with father issues, you may want to steer clear from Big Fish. You know who you are.
Nate’’s Grade: B+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Tim Burton has never really made a movie like Big Fish before or in the twenty years since. He’s made movies that are aimed at children, like the Disney live-action remakes for Dumbo and Alice in Wonderland, and he’s made animated movies that are more wholesome while still holding to the man’s creepy-cute aesthetic, but he’s never made a movie so unabashedly sentimental as 2003’s Big Fish. Many of his stories involve alienation and outcasts and outsiders and characters accepting themselves, their unique oddities, and their unconventional families. This movie was different. It was based on the 1998 novel by Daniel Wallace and primarily concerns the relationship between fathers and sons as the paterfamilias is nearing his end, a not unfamiliar plot structure for treacle and tears. It’s about a smooth-talking man of legendary tall tales about his life and his exasperated son trying to find real answers. That’s the movie. It’s purposely small even though the tales are tall. There’s nothing larger than simply resolving the strained relationship between father (Albert Finney) and son (Billy Crudup). It’s the most intimate movie of Burton’s career while still finding a place for his fantastical visual whimsy, as the outlet for Edward Bloom’s (Finney as the dying version, Ewan McGregor as the younger version) fantastical tales of adventure. It’s a movie elevated by Burton’s signature style and it’s one that still, in 2023, had me choking up and tears streaming down my face by the conclusion.
This is an episodic movie by design and it does hamper some of the emotional investment, until that whammy of a culmination. Because we know the younger Edward Bloom is exaggerating his life’s travails for entertainment, and perhaps a dash of pride to heighten his deeds, it makes the many sequences of young Edward and his escapades feel a bit fleeting, as if we’re trying to find the larger meaning hidden within the fables and the fabulous. The ultimate point is that the entertaining diversions and exaggerations are who Edward Bloom is, and ultimately trying to discern truth from legend loses sight of the appeal of this charming man and his wild tales. I can understand this while also slightly disagreeing with the conclusion. It’s a little pat to say, well, the point of all these extravagant stories is simply that they were entertaining, never mind about finding a buried meaning or truth. It’s like saying, “Hey, just enjoy the ride.” The point is to fall in love with the storyteller and see the storytelling itself as its own act of love, which I don’t think works until the very end of the movie. Until then, it’s a transitory series of adventures, from wartime to the circus to aggressively persistent courtships and hidden magical towns, each reflective of the indomitable spirit and cheery optimism of our chief yarn-spinner.
In that way, it’s easy for the viewer to adopt the same perspective as Will (Crudup), and that may be the hidden genius of screenwriter John August (Go), or I may be projecting. Our plight is the same as the son: we’re trying to discover what is actually real about the real man. It’s easy to feel his exasperation as he wants something genuine from this man and only keeps getting the same old tales and stories, and everyone else is smiling broadly and happy to just accept the man on his own terms. That’s where Will’s character arc goes, finally accepting his father on his terms, which means playing along with his rules. It’s a level of empathy and acceptance rolled together, but it’s also like two hours of a character going, “My dad might be a liar and I’m curious who he is,” and then in the end going, “My dad might be a liar but I guess that’s who he is.” It doesn’t feel like the grand epiphany that the movie thinks it is, even with Danny Elfman’s Oscar-nominated score trying to stir every doldrum of your heart (Elfman has only been nominated four times in his storied career, also for Good Will Hunting, Milk, Men in Black). So for much of the movie’s running time I’m pleasantly entertained but a little frustrated that the movie doesn’t seem to be digging closer into the man garnering all this unwavering attention.
However, it’s at the very end where Big Fish really transcends its limitations to become something deeply moving and powerful. As I re-watched, I’m twenty years older, and likewise my own father is twenty years older, and moments like this have more potency to me. It’s about the son accepting his father on the same terms he fought so hard to circumvent, and so the ending becomes a beautiful exchange of the storyteller inviting someone else to finish his story’s ending. It’s surprisingly profound when you boil it down to its essentials, and that may be why I had tears dripping down my face as the adult son narrates one last fantastic tale of helping his father escape from the hospital, dart through traffic in his classic car, and arrive for a farewell with all the many friends he’s made through his many decades of laughter and camaraderie. Edward then transforms into the fish, becoming the very symbol of his “fish tales,” and lives on through the stories and memories of others, simply but effectively communicated with the mourners engaged in retelling Edward Bloom’s escapades through engaged pantomime. It’s one of the most clear-cut examples for me of a perfectly good movie really hitting another level in the end.
Big Fish began a long collaboration between Burton and August, who has become such a prolific Hollywood scribe that he’s likely had his hand on just about every script in town. August would later be trusted to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie, and Dark Shadows; that’s five Burton projects in nine years. For those keeping track, this was only the second Helena Bonham Carter appearance in a Burton movie, the first being the misbegotten 2001 Planet of the Apes remake. It’s also fun to watch Marion Cotillard (Inception) in her first American movie as Will’s pregnant wife.
Big Fish also has a strange unintended legacy regarding someone else who connected with it. It was the last film seen by the famous playwright and monologist Spalding Gray, an enormously compelling storyteller who, much like Edward Bloom, favored the oral tradition. He suffered through depression most of his life, which was amplified after a severe car accident and multiple surgeries to recuperate in the early 2000s. On January 10, 2004, he took his children to see Big Fish and the next day was declared missing. His body was found in the East River in New York City and it’s believed Gray took his own life leaping from the Staten Island Ferry. His wife, Kathleen Russo, told New York Magazine in 2008 that Gray had cried throughout the movie and she concluded, “I think it gave him permission to die.” It’s unfair to blame the movie for a suicidal man’s decision-making, but I think it’s interesting that the emotional closure onscreen was so powerfully felt that Gray may have felt a personal level of closure as well.
My original 2003 review was so minimal, one of five or six short capsule reviews I wrote together as end-of-the-year awards contenders (same with the upcoming Cold Mountain re-watch), so I wanted to add more thoughts to the subject. My opinion feels relatively the same twenty years later though the ending had even more power as a 41-year-old than at twenty-one. I’ll keep my review the same for relatively the same reasons, though I hope Burton returns back to telling another Big Fish kind of detour (2014’s Big Eyes was not that).
Re-View Grade: B+
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The Holdovers (2023)
Oscar-winning director Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti re-team for a poignant and crowd-pleasing holiday movie about outcasts sharing their vulnerabilities with one another over the last week of 1970. Giamatti stars as Paul Hunham, a rigid history teacher at an all-boys academy who just happens to be liked by nobody including his colleagues. He gets the unfortunate duty of staying on campus during the Christmas break and watching over any students who cannot return home for the holidays. Angus (Dominic Sessa) is the last student remaining, a 15-year-old with a history of lying, defiance, and on the verge of expulsion. The other holdover member is Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) as the kitchen staff forced to feed them, a woman whose own adult son recently died in Vietnam. The teacher and student butt heads as they try and co-exist without other supervision, eventually connecting once they lower their defenses and attempt to see one another as flawed human beings with real hurts and disappointments. It’s a simple movie about three different characters from very different experiences pushing against one another and finding common ground. It’s a relationship movie that has plenty of wry humor and strong character beats from debut screenwriter David Hemingson. There may not be a larger theme or thesis that emerges, but being a buddy dramedy about hurt people building their friendships is still a winning formula with excellent writing, directing, and acting working in tandem, which is what we have with The Holdovers. It’s a slice of-life movie that makes you want bigger slices, especially for Mary’s character who thought having her son attend the same prep school would set him up for a promising future (he was denied college admission and thus deferral from the draft). It’s a beguiling movie because it’s about sad and lonely people over the holidays, each experiencing their own level of grief, and the overall feel is warm and fuzzy, like a feel-good movie about people feeling bad. That’s the Alexander Payne effect, finding an ironic edge to nostalgia while exploring hard-won truths with down-on-their-luck characters. The Holdovers is an enjoyable holiday comedy with shades of bitterness to go along with the feel-good uplift. It’s Payne’s Christmas movie and that is is own gift to moviegoers.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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