Blog Archives
The Zone of Interest (2023)
The Zone of Interest is one of the more maddening film experiences I’ve ever had, and I’m sure that was part of the intention of writer/director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin). While based upon a 2014 fictional book by Martin Amis, Glazer had hollowed out the novel’s fake story and replaced it with its inspiration, the Höss family, a real-life German couple and their children who literally had their villa next door to the horrendous Auschwitz concentration camp. The husband was the chief commandant for the camp, and he had his family literally sharing wall space with the notorious factory of death. The entire feature film is then given to observing this family from afar as they try to live a “normal domestic life” in the shadow of something profoundly abnormal and abhorrent. It’s a classic example of a type of movie I will dub the “Yeah, okay, so what?” movie. I get it, I do, but why is this exactly a feature film?
I understand artistically what Glazer is going for here. It’s the ironic juxtaposition of the ordinary and the awful, asking the viewer to think about how many millions of Germans went along with the mounting anti-Semitic and racist policies of Nazi Germany out of self-interest and/or willful ignorance, the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt termed it. That becomes the challenge of the movie, watching this family tend to the garden, host a birthday party, and read bedtime stories while watching the gloom of the chimneys, listening to the constant soundtrack of scattered gunshots and the screams of victims, including the wails of babies. Every scene is elevated by the dramatic irony of the context that it is happening next door to a concentration camp. We watch them plant flowers, and it just so happens to be next door to a concentration camp. We watch them invite the mother-in-law to make her new bedroom her own, and it just so happens to be next door to a concentration camp. It gets tedious as a viewer because without the irony, we’re just watching a family live their life. I get that’s the point, this example of one family trying to ignore the terrifying reality literally at their very doorstep. I understand that message and I understand why that is even more relevant to our troubled modern times with an alarming rise in anti-Semitism and the celebration of fascism and repressive strongmen. However, I don’t think we get real insights into these characters because they’re more just general ideas intended to forward the critical thesis of the power of self-delusion and excuse-making. That’s fine as a starting point for a provocative movie, but don’t make me watch a family do their laundry for an hour and then tell me it’s an Important Statement because they happen to be next door to the horrors of history.
Let me try this same kind of approach on another human tragedy. Say we have a family drama about a hard-working couple trying to go through the day-to-day challenges of marriage and raising a family, and it JUST SO HAPPENS that they live within distance of… the internment of the Japanese in World War II. Does this magically transform and elevate the ordinary actions on-screen into more than what they are? Perhaps to some, but for me it felt too transparently methodical and quickly redundant. I don’t need a whole movie documenting a family next door that barely scratches the surface of their circumstances of living.
There are a few moments that manage to break through. There’s a scene where the daughters are swimming in the nearby river and the family realizes that the gray streams intruding upon the water are the ashes from the camp. From there they furiously scrub themselves clean, the grotesque horror something they attempt to cleanse, whether they’re horrified because the ash belongs to people or because it specifically belongs to Jews. The mother (Sandra Huller) refuses to move away after her husband Rudolph (Christian Friedel) is reassigned by the Nazi brass. This is the home she’s put her time into remodeling and reshaping and she isn’t going to just let anyone live under her roof. This setback is far more upsetting to her than anything she overhears on the other side of her garden walls. There’s also an ongoing story where one of the Höss children is leaving behind a trail of apples, inspired by a favorite bedtime fable, and this has an unfortunate unintended tragedy for people these children will never know or see. There’s an offhand remark by the mother-in-law as she’s touring the backyard where she wonders if a woman in her book club is among the throng next door in the camps. Rather than use this as a moment of reflection over the genocide occurring next door, she then moves onto lamenting that she never got this same woman’s curtains that she always prized. I wish the movie had more of these character moments that directly confront the willful ignorance rather than keeping the audience simmering with the same meditative Big Picture concept that has been relentlessly winnowed down so finely that it may as well be dust.
Glazer makes very specific choices to highlight the detachment of the movie. His camera angles are often taken from far fixed points, and the coverage makes for smooth edits that let you know there were multiple cameras filming these scenes rather than the stress of multiple setups and different takes to cobble together. This makes the movie feel closer to a documentary where we have captured real life as it is happening instead of a group of actors on a set pretending to be different people putting on a show for our entertainment.
The Zone of Interest is a movie that crushes you in the everyday details, and in that it reminded me of 2020’s The Assistant, another indie that didn’t quite work for me. That film was about a young woman who served as a film production assistant to a producer modeled after Harvey Weinstein, and it asked how much she can ignore for the sake of her own upward mobility. It had a really compelling premise but the movie spent most of its running time just watching her do her job, filing papers, getting coffee, walking home, with the implicit knowledge banging around in our anxious minds to then elevate the mundane (she’s not just fixing the copy machine, she’s fixing the copy machine and Harvey Weinstein might be abusing someone just in the next room!). This ironic juxtaposition proved too tiring for me without also exploring the characters and conflicts more explicitly. Things happening off-screen while far more boring things happen on-screen is not itself great drama. Being drama-adjacent does not automatically magically imbue the ordinary with transcendent meaning. I need more than, “Big things are happening… over there.” The Zone of Interest is a critical favorite for 2023 but I think many viewers will have the same response I did: yeah, okay, so what?
Nate’s Grade: C+
Share this:
Eileen (2023)
Based upon the novel of the same name, and adapted by the novelist and her husband, Eileen is an affectingly broody unrequited romance awash in noir trappings and feelings. It’s set in a prison facility in 1960s Boston, and one young worker Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) becomes enraptured with her new co-worker Rebecca, a psychologist with an exceptional sense of confidence and hunger, played by Anne Hathaway. For a solid hour, the movie becomes something akin to 2015’s Carol, a lesbian romance where the social norms of the time force both participants to speak in codes and glances and gestures. Eileen is given to flurries of intense daydreams, often sexual, and sees a fellow creature in Rebecca, who doesn’t so much as walk through rooms as slinks, doesn’t so much as stare but smolders. Hathaway is in full-on femme fatale seduction mode here and enjoying it. It is following along this path of possible mutual connection, of finally acting upon these hidden desires, and then the movie takes a SHARP LEFT TURN and stays there for the rest of the duration. The twist works, and forces the audience to reconsider our notions of obsession and perspective, but it also feels like we’ve abandoned the prior movie into this new even pulpier, slightly more manic movie, and I don’t know if I wanted to leave so suddenly. If this twist were to stand, I think it needed to be introduced sooner, especially if it obliterates the prior dramatic work, and allow more time to deal with its myriad consequences. There is a powerfully gripping and deeply devastating monologue by Marin Ireland that might be the best part of the movie. Eileen the movie is a little like Eileen the character, gliding on appearances and secretly something much darker at its core.
Nate’s Grade: B-
Share this:
Aporia (2023)
In writer/director Jared Moshe’s low-budget indie film Aporia, the Trolley Debate, killing one person in order to spare the lives of, presumably, more people or a greater number of people, gets its own movie in a thoughtful and provocative little indie. The thorny ethical questions are given their rightful due, and this is where Aporia really shines for me, as a small-scale sci-fi story with Big Ideas bursting forth and the understanding to give them adequate space for satisfying contemplation. It bowled me over.
Sophie (Judy Greer) is still very much not over the death of her husband, Malcolm (Ed Gathegi). He was killed by a drunk driver months ago and that driver also seems to have escaped justice. Sophie is left alone to raise their pre-teen daughter Riley. That’s where Jabir (Payman Maadi) comes in. He was a friend of Malcolm and reveals they had been working on a prototype for a time machine in secret. The machine has its own limits. It sends a photon particle back in time, which will kill any living creature that it materializes inside. All you need are the time, place, and coordinates and you could kill anyone. The further in time you need to go the more power the machine will have to draw. Sophie is beside herself but taken over with the excitement of possibly bringing her husband back to life. All it takes is murder.
What the characters have created is essentially a magic gun that can shoot into the past, which means the only use for this time travel device is to take life. They will only ever be murderers if they decide to use it, and so it becomes a question over under what circumstances would it be permissible to utilize this weapon. The first victim is obvious, the man responsible for the death of Sophie’s husband, and like magic he returns good as new without any memory of ever having been gone. It’s an important rule introduced that only the people in the room with the machine will still have memories of the previous timelines before the space-time revisions. This is a good move for an obvious dramatic one, so that the characters will be able to be impacted by the changes because they can recall a life without them, but it also sneakily supplies another complication. Each one of them has the potential to use the machine alone and thus never having the others realize what they had done. It’s one more tricky ethical question, asking whether you would betray the trust of someone close to you if you could get away with it. Naturally, the characters debate the merits of when to use the machine and when not to, with each new use further complicating matters because the next change can always destabilize the state of things, and then it’s a chain of changes to try and find the right order, and that leaves a trail of bodies littering the past.
It wouldn’t be a compelling time travel narrative without the ole’ favorite of unintended consequences. By removing the drunk driver before he could ever fatefully get behind the wheel, Sophie has brought back her husband and felt like the cost was negligible, as that driver in present-day is an abusive husband who gets drunk and yells at his family while he escapes justice for manslaughter. However, once you start pulling at the knots of the human timeline, some interesting and unexpected results can happen. That same man has been removed but his family isn’t necessarily better off. Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), the widowed wife, is struggling to make ends meet as a single mom with a daughter (Veda Cienfuegos) suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS). They are deep in medical debt. It seems that the least this man did was help provide a financial cushion. Without his presence, they’ve had to go it alone and they’re broke and likely unable to continue paying the costly medical treatment for this adolescent girl. Because of Sophie’s desire to bring back her husband, she has doomed this innocent victim. Sophie’s guilt causes her to seek out the family, check up on them, and upon the discovery of their hardships, befriend mother and daughter and find a way to make things right as the unknowing perpetrator of their dilemma. From there it becomes a game of thinking how she can erase their misfortune while keeping her own husband.
I will discuss one significant turn because I think it’s an evocative example of the thought-provoking nature of the screenplay, but I will warn you there will be significant spoilers. If you wish to remain pure, dear reader, then skip to the next paragraph. The team comes up with a new name to eliminate to solve the fortunes for Kara and her daughter, a man who swindled her, a Ponzi scam artist who left her penniless and forced to close her bakery. Seems open and shut with an obvious bad person, thus an easy solution. But you should recognize there are no easy solutions in stories untangling timeline interference. All of a sudden, Sophie and Malcolm come home to discover that they have a completely different child. Their teen daughter is now a teenage boy with a different personality and different interests. How? How could eliminating one bad man in a completely different state change the course of history enough that their child has been affected? They debate the possibilities, perhaps something as small as a different sperm winning out or conceiving her on a different day or month, but the results are irrefutable. While their child is alive in this timeline, in a very real sense they have both now lost their daughter. The person they raised together, loved, and helped shape has been eliminated and the grief is palatable. This new child is a stranger, but they too are strangers to this child. They are absent formative memories and do not have the shared connections and history to draw upon. When Sophie tries to comfort this new Riley, she doesn’t know what may work because she doesn’t know anything about this child. I don’t think the filmmakers are making negative commentary on adoption, which is essentially what this scenario mirrors, but the grief goes two ways. They mourn the child blinked from existence, and this child also had his parents blinked from existence and replaced with lookalikes, they just don’t understand it yet. It’s this escalation that personalizes the unintended harm of what they’re doing and sets the stage for the final decision.
The ending is going to divide people but it felt note-perfect for me. It ends on an emotional high of coming to terms with their culpability but also on accepting uncertainty. We end on an ambiguous note, absent a resolution about the final extension of the final decision. I think it works very well not just in trying to have it multiple ways but because after being in the know, it puts the characters, and vicariously the viewer, in a state of vulnerability and the acceptance of staying there. It’s an uplifting conclusion thematically because it’s about accepting loss but also accepting our limitations. The final conversations are inadequate because how can you summarize a life with another person, whether a lover or a friend or a spouse, into just a handful of clumsy words. Our vocabulary does us a disservice when it comes to expressing the glorious debt we feel having had these people in our lives. That is why the movie ends on an emotional high for me and really comes together, personalizing the ethical conundrums.
Greer (Halloween Kills) has had a long career as a supporting actress, usually the funny but supportive best friend to the lead, and as an outstanding voice actress (Archer, Let’s Go Luna), but rarely does she get a meaty dramatic lead role. She’s terrific here and serves as our dramatic anchor through the turbulent changes and moral soul-searching. She is our reflection, and Greer’s emotional journey is well encapsulated in a performance that doesn’t go big into histrionics but is more carefully grounded and natural. I don’t think the movie would work as well, at least on an emotional level, without her.
Is Aporia a perfect film? Well, very few are, and the movie could have even more development, leaving possibilities behind given its tantalizing premise. I’m glad the movie didn’t go overboard into some slapdash thriller territory and instead grounded its science fiction timeline wonkiness into engaging human drama about loss, sacrifice, and acceptance. As my pal Eric Muller said, Aporia likely works better as a screenplay than a finished film, though this discounts the heavy-hearted contributions of Greer. I’m glad this movie emphasized its ideas and provided the time to really dwell in them, even if the movie is only about 90 minutes altogether. Aporia is a deeply engaging movie that worked on all levels for me, enriching emotions and satisfying intellect, and is definitely worth the discovery.
Nate’s Grade: A-
Share this:
Spencer + Penny, Forever (2023)
In the best way, Spencer + Penny feels like a Pixar short, something sweet and subtly profound that then suckerpunches you into a mess of feelings that you didn’t think were possible given the abbreviated length as well as the subject matter. You may ask yourself, “Am I really about to cry over some pencils?” and I’m here to tell you yes, and it’s okay to cry. In just a matter of seconds, this Ohio-made short film gets you to think from a different perspective, that of a mechanical pencil named Spencer (voiced by writer/director Eric Boso), and through that object we will feel all-too familiar human traits. There’s elation at aligning with one’s purpose, but also a melancholy that comes when we feel spent, empty, and rundown, needing to be replenished. Because of Spencer’s unique identity, his lead can be replaced, though this also causes him to feel hollow at times. Then one day he meets a friend, a traditional wooden pencil named Penny (voiced by Samantha Martin). She’s chipper and unflappable in her enthusiasm and optimism, lifting Spencer’s spirits. And then this relationship rapidly changes through a simple and elegant visual means of montage, and all at once this cute film about two pencils, and thematically about mental health, has transformed into one about mortality and legacy. It works so well that I was shocked to be feeling urgent emotions, begging a muted pencil to speak back. That’s quite a creative coup for Boso (Bong of the Living Dead). The short itself is visually lean and clean, given to presenting the story like it was a writing utensil catalog. The sparse visual arrangements further made Spencer + Penny, Forever feel like a children’s storybook come to whimsical life. I enjoyed the emphasis given to erasers and the disappointment we feel at making mistakes but the acknowledgement that mistakes are also a part of life, a big idea but made easily digestible for all ages through the carefully crafted writing style of a bittersweet child’s storybook.
I won’t delve into detailed spoilers but I think the ending concept is fitting but we needed a different path to finally wind up there. It’s sweet but feels like a different story starting, which may well be the point. I also think the metaphysical and eschatological implications are rather large to try and make this work, so I think something more practical with the in-universe setting and a direct connection would have felt like a more appropriate thematic conclusion. Still, it works, I just quibble with the means we reached this ending.
Spencer + Penny, Forever was produced for the 2023 Winterfilm Festival in Ohio and won several awards, including Best Writing, Audience Award, Best Music (the music does have a definite Jon Brion-esque quality of deceptive whimsy that blends into heartache), and Best Film. It’s easy to see the movie as a crowd-pleaser and an unassuming charmer, able to delicately hit weightier themes with cute observational quirk (a.k.a. The Hidden Life of Writing Utensils). It will be entering the festival circuit shortly and I’m sure I won’t be the last person walking away from Spencer and Penny and shaking my head and smiling that an eight-minute short made me think differently about my pen.
Nate’s Grade: B+
Share this:
Monster (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released December 24, 2003:
Monster follows the life of Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron, now nominated for a Best Actress Oscar), Americas only known female serial killer. In the late 1980s, Wueros was a roadside prostitute flexing her muscles with Florida motorists. She describes hookin’ as the only things shes ever been good at. One day Wuornos has the full intention of taking her own life, but she meets 18-year-old Selby (Christina Ricci) at a lesbian bar and finds a companion. Driven by a growing hatred of men from sexual abuse, Wuorno’s starts killing her johns to try and establish a comfortable life for her and Selby.
Let’s not mince words; Theron gives one of the best performances I have ever seen in my life. Yes, that’s right. One of. The. Best. Performances. Ever. This is no exaggeration. I’m not just throwing out niceties. Theron is completely unrecognizable under a mass of facial prosthetics, 30 extra pounds, fake teeth and a total lack of eyebrows. But this is more than a hollow ploy to attract serious attention to the acting of a pretty face. Theron does more than simple imitation; she fully inhabits the skin of Aileen Wuornos. The closest comparison I can think of is Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison in The Doors.
Theron is commanding, brave, distressing, ferocious, terrifying, brutal, stirring, mesmerizing and always captivating. It may be a cliché, but you really cannot take your eyes off of her. Her performance is that amazing. To say that Theron in Monster is an acting revelation is perhaps the understatement of the year.
With previous acting roles in Reindeer Games and The Cider House Rules, Theron is usually delegated to pretty girlfriend roles (who occasionally shows her breasts). Who in the world thought she had this kind of acting capability? I certainly did not. If Nicole Kidman can win an Oscar for putting on a fake nose and a so-so performance, surely Theron should win an Oscar for her absolute transformation of character and giving the performance of a lifetime.
With this being said, and most likely over said, Monster is by no means a perfect film. Minus the terrific central performance, Monster is more of an everyday profile of a grotesque personality. The film weakly tries to portray Wuornos more as a victim, but by the end of the film, and six murdered men later, sympathy is eradicated as Wuornos transforms into the titular monster. Some supporting characters, like Ricci’s narrow-minded Christian up bringers, are flat characters bordering on parody. The supporting characters are generally underwritten, especially the male roles that serve as mere cameos in a film dominated by sapphic love.
Monster is proof positive that human beings will never be phased out by advancing machinery when it comes to acting. Monster boasts one of the greatest acting achievements in recent cinematic history, but it also coasts on sharp cinematography and a moody and ambient score by BT (Go). Monster is a haunting film that you won’t want to blink for fear of taking your eyes off of Theron. She gives an unforgettable tour de force performance that will become legendary.
Nate’s Grade: B
——————————————————
WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Monster was a revelation for Charlize Theron, an actress who until then had mostly been known for parts that asked that she be good looking and little else. Twenty years later, Theron is one of the best actresses working in Hollywood and it almost never happened without her breakthrough performance where she brought to startling life the horror of Aileen Wuornos’s tragic life and tragic desperation. When this movie came out originally in 2003, I doubt anyone but Theron’s closest friends suspected she was capable of a performance this raw and spellbinding, but that’s also a condemnation on all of us. How many other actresses out there could maybe rival the best of the best if they just had the right opportunity? How many actresses are stuck playing the same limited roles because that’s all they’re ever asked to do? How many actresses are wrongly assumed to be of limited talent simply because of their comely appearance? That isn’t to say there’s some hidden universal equation that the uglier you are the better at acting you have to be (though it sure has worked out for [insert your example of a conventionally unattractive actor here]), but this movie is a clear indication that too many actors are never given enough opportunities to shine.
Back in early 2004, I credited Theron’s performance as one of the best I’ve ever witnessed in my then-twenty-one years of moviegoing (although that number should be smaller considering I wasn’t keenly watching Scorsese as a baby). She is very good, but I’d like to claw back some of my rapturous words of praise now that we’ve seen twenty years of Theron acting excellence. Looking over her career, I might actually cite 2011’s Young Adult as her finest performance, and that one didn’t even nab an Oscar nomination (she’s since been nominated twice since, for 2005’s North Country and 2019’s Bombshell). The draw of the movie is the head-turning performance from Theron and she just disappears completely inside the skin of her subject. It’s hard to remember at times that this is Theron, thanks to the richness of her startling performance but also the accomplished makeup effects, which were not nominated. At every point, you feel the fire burning behind the stricken complexion of Theron, a fire that will eventually consume her and everything she loves. While highly compelling, this is not a performance of subtlety and restraint. This is a big performance, and the movie is often prone to making loud pronouncements about its subjects and pertinent themes. It’s loud, brash, and maybe for some it will seem a little too loud, a little too unsubtle, but it’s a movie that refuses to be ignored for good reason.
In my original review I raised some reservations with the rest of the movie, and I’m here to recant one of them. I wrote back in 2004, “The film weakly tries to portray Wuornos more as a victim, but by the end of the film, and six murdered men later, sympathy is eradicated as Wuornos transforms into the titular monster.” I’m positive that many will still cling to this same idea but oh boy have I come around in twenty years. By the time the movie is over, you wonder why more women haven’t just snapped and gone on killing sprees. Wuornos is indeed a victim. She’s responsible for terrible deeds but that doesn’t change the fact that she started as a victim and continued as one until put to death by the state of Florida in 2002. She was a sexual assault survivor, groomed into prostitution, and then trapped by a society that saw her as little other than trash, something to be pitied but ultimately forgotten. She comes of age as an adult thinking her only value is the fleeting moments of pleasure she can provide for men, and in the narration, we hear her dreams that one of these men who repeatedly tell her how pretty she is would take her away to another life, like a princess. Alas. It’s impossible to separate her past as a victim of predatory men from her actions when she turns on predatory men. Being forced into prostitution out of desperation is one of the definitions for sex slavery and trafficking. The movie does try to make her last few johns more ambiguous over whether or not they are “good people” and thus “deserving” of their fates, like a scale is being introduced and we’re doing the calculation whether Wuornos will strike (#NotAllMen, eh felas?). There’s a clear dark path where the murders get considerably worse. She begins by defending herself against a rapist, but by the end, it’s just a kind family man who picked her up without even the intention of having sex. We’re meant to see her transform into the titular monster, but I kept wondering about Aileen Wuornos as the societal stand-in, accounting for thousands of other women who lived and died under similar tragic circumstances.
I also found myself growing increasingly contemptuous of the love interest character played by Christina Ricci (Yellowjackets). When we’re introduced to Selby, she’s a wide-eyed naif testing her boundaries of comfort but clearly tapping into repressed homosexual feelings. Their relationship is meant to serve as the emotional rock for Wuornos, the reason that she’s acting more rash is because she’s trying to earn enough money for the two of them to run away together and build a new life. She is her motivation, but Selby is absolutely the worst. You can excuse some of her hemming and hawing about striking out on her own and leaving her controlling parents, as she’s fighting against repression as well as trepidation for starting out independently, but this lady becomes fully aware of the dangers and dehumanization that Aileen goes through to earn her meager amounts of money, and Selby encourages her to do so. Not just encourages her, Selby pressures her to do so, to get back out there and “provide” for her, knowing fully well what that means, knowing fully well how these men have treated Wournos, repeatedly abusing her. What are you doing to help things out, huh Selby? She’s embarrassed hanging around Wuornos around some other lesbian friends she just met, so she’s already looking to upgrade and move past her lover. By the end, as she’s trying to coax a confession of guilt from her girlfriend to save her own skin, Selby becomes just another user, taking what they want from Wuornos and discarding her when they’ve had their fill.
This was the directorial debut for Patty Jenkins, who also served as the sole credited screenwriter, and while the indie darling-to-franchise blockbuster pipeline has been alive and well in Hollywood, it was quite a surprising leap that her next movie after Monster was none other than 2017’s Wonder Woman. To go from this small character-driven true crime indie to leading the big screen solo outing for comics’ most famous female hero is quite a bizarre but impressive jump. Her only other feature credit is the much less heralded 2020 Wonder Woman sequel. She was attached to direct a Star Wars movie about fighter pilots but that seems to have gone into turnaround or just canceled. So is the way with Star Wars movies after 2019’s Rise of Skywalker. Just ask the Game of Thrones creators, Josh Trank, and Taika Watiti how that goes.
Monster is a phenomenal performance with a pretty okay movie wrapped around it in support. Twenty years later, Theron is still a monster you can’t take your eyes away from. It changed her career destiny and I think acts as an exemplar for two reasons: leaving the viewer with the question how many other wonderfully talented performers will never get the chance to showcase their true talents because of faulty assumptions, and how many other women are out there living in quiet degradation like Aileen Wuornos.
Re-Veiw Grade: B
Share this:
Leave the World Behind (2023)
Apocalyptic thrillers can oddly enough serve as a therapeutic means for dealing with our fears of being helpless against forces well beyond our control, but they’re also reflections of our current state of anxiety as well. There’s more than just giant hurricanes or earthquakes breaking records on the Richter scale, it’s about how we respond to the momentous and alarming changes and what that says about The Way We Live Now. The new Netflix apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind, based on the 2020 book of the same name, has some big mysteries that I feel safe to say won’t fully be explained by the end. There is a possible explanation but it’s a movie more consumed with how people respond to tumult than the tumult. I found the majority of the movie to be gripping and engaging, and while it doesn’t exactly nail the landing, writer/director Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot, Homecoming) crafts a paranoid thriller with flair. It’s an apocalyptic thriller at crossroads with a paranoia thriller and a disaster movie, and the biggest challenge of them all is ultimately being able to trust another person during a time of remarkable uncertainty.
Amanda (Julia Roberts) and her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) have elected to take a spur-of-the-moment family vacation out of New York City and onto a lavish home in Long Island. Everything seems so placid until the phones no longer get a signal, the TV broadcasts are strictly limited to a blank emergency screen, and two strangers show up (Mahershala Ali, Myhal’la) saying this is their house and they would like to stay inside. They claim that the U.S. is under a cyber assault and there’s more to come.
Leave the World Behind has two intriguing questions to keep the audience hooked: what is actually happening and who are these new people? Most disaster movies put you in the thick of the action, from presidential boardrooms to scientific outposts keeping up with the changing data and going over the options to prevent further loss of life. This movie purposely leaves you in the dark in a well-kept Long Island home and the first thing that goes is the expediency of knowing things from our phones. When two new people come knocking at the door to say the world is falling apart and this is our home, trust us, it’s hard not to hold some level of suspicion. Can we take these people at their word? What kind of agenda could they secretly have? And if so, what does that say about what has happened or what is happening in the outside world? They seem like they know more than what they’re letting on, so how much do they know themselves? It’s the slow drip of information that makes the movie simmer in such an anxious predicament of looking at every new piece as another new question. This places the viewer uncomfortably in similar territory as Amanda, who despite her prejudices might be right not to trust the newcomers. We’re stuck on the outside wondering what has happened and what may be left. The movie is carefully crafted to only give us so much to work with while our minds start reading and rereading everything for more connection and meaning, running rampant and going stir crazy just like the characters. While the second big question naturally gave way and could only produce so much tension, the main thrust of the movie kept me hooked and excited and worried and actively questioning just what exactly was going on.
I appreciate how Esmail is a restlessly ambitious filmmaker. He took on directing duties for the entire second season of Mr. Robot and from there continued coming up with new challenges. There was an episode meant to be told as an episode-length elaborate tracking shot. There was an episode that was told almost without any spoken words, entirely through visual action. There was an episode that was presented like a five-act stage play and it was enthralling. While these are the easy to recall gimmick episodes, Esmail’s directing vision for his series never eclipsed the series itself. It elevated the episodes but the emphasis was still on the significance of the characters and their emotional states (highly recommend Mr. Robot, one of my favorite 2010s TV shows, to anyone who has yet to watch). With Leave the World Behind, only his second feature after 2014’s parallel universe rom-com Comet, Esmail refuses to let any sequence pass without some kind of visual flourish. His camera is constantly swooping through the visual landscape, flipping and spinning and craning above the characters from on high. It reminded me of Brian DePalma, who also loves the high angle pans across rooms and also abides by the dogma that there should be no uninteresting shots in a movie. It’s easy to appreciate but without an engaging story can quickly become a distracting exercise in empty artifice, which is also how I view most DePalma. Here, much like Esmail’s accomplished prestige TV work, the style makes me better appreciate how much effort and thought Esmail has put into his presentation and his ideas. The man wants you to see his work, and there’s no fault in that as long as you’re enjoying the experience, which I was for the most part.
There are some supremely well-crafted moments played to a breaking point of intensity. Early on, as the family relaxes on the beach, they see a ship in the distance, an ordinary sight on a seemingly ordinary day. Then hours pass and it’s getting closer, and closer, and finally the realization begins to settle in that this thing is now a danger and they need to very much run very much now. Esmail’s camerawork keeps the scene feeling kinetic, with a long take that establishes the colossal danger as the tanker runs aground and the family has narrowly fled in time. In many ways this moment also serves as an ecological metaphor, with problems looming in the distance but ignored until they are at their most dangerous and right on top of us. Another sequence involves Clay venturing outside and discovering what appears to be a dust storm the color of blood. It’s getting closer and closer and the movie is testing how much we can take before you start hitting an imaginary gas pedal to strongly suggest Clay out of there. There’s another sequence that’s a literal pile-up of driver-less cars coming to the same nexus point like they’re all migrating. It makes for an immediately eerie sequence that becomes extra horrifying once the Teslas become unmanned missiles.
The themes of disconnection aren’t exactly subtle but that doesn’t mean they are misguided. This movie is about as subtle as an oil tanker heading straight for you, but I didn’t mind because of the skill of the storytellers and the ongoing mysteries that kept me begging for every new morsel. The messaging isn’t exactly complex. At one point Amanda has a speech that might as well be titled “This is Why Humans Are Terrible and We Deserve This.” Following this, another character tells her that they may not agree on much but she agrees with every word she just uttered with her speech, so you know this is the kind of pessimistic monologue that can reach across the doom-scrolling aisle. The movie almost frustratingly ends without a larger sense of clarity over what has been happening, a fate that would have greatly angered my wife. Esmail gives you something that can work as an explanation without making it definitive; it’s merely a theory but it’s enough to hold onto if you desperately need an explanation. However, the way the movie ends feels less conclusive and more like the conclusion of a season of television where the characters, now grouped together, are in for something fierce next year so stay tuned. The nature of this story is designed to leave you hanging, and that’s why I circle back on it mattering more on how these characters respond to this apocalyptic event versus what is clearly happening.
Chilling and effectively plotted to keep you guessing until the end, Leave the World Behind is an apocalyptic thriller that really simmers in the anxiety of the unknown. It’s not perfect but it’s pretty good, as long as you can accept not having all the answers. The acting is strong but it’s the control and finesse that Esmail exhibits as director and screenwriter that really makes the material engaging and impactful. It’s an apocalyptic thriller where the scariest proponent might be having to live with one another.
Nate’s Grade: B
Share this:
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+
Share this:
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
Share this:
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-
Share this:
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+
You must be logged in to post a comment.