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Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Killers of the Flower Moon has the banner of an Important Movie, telling a story many history books have overlooked for too long, an American tragedy built upon one of America’s original sins with the indigenous peoples, and tying a direct line to not only how we live now as well as how we choose to remember the past. The true story behind the murder of the Osage Nation natives in the 1920s is an urgent story that gets to the heart of greed and the human capacity for evil, and Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour movie is somber and mournful and appropriately devastating. But I’m also wondering why I wasn’t as enchanted with it as a movie-going experience. Should I feel movie critic guilt for finding the movie merely good but not transcendentally great?
The whole of Killers of the Flower Moon is bleak, which is naturally much of the point. It’s difficult to retell the history of Native Americans in this country, or before there was a “this country,” without making use of lots of synonyms for the word “bleak.” The first hour presents the Native Americans as being legally incapable of greater agency; the murders are consistent, sloppy, and obvious, but the fact that no investigation was triggered for years in an acknowledgement that, simply put, the government just didn’t care about dead Indians. Oh, I hear you saying, but weren’t these Osage different? They had so much money from their oil rights that the local economy exploded with vultures offering common services for egregiously inflated prices to take advantage of people unaccustomed to having money and options. Even with a surge of riches, the Osage didn’t have an elevation in status. They were still looked upon as interlopers in the way of powerful white men getting that money, and there’s nothing these greedy people won’t do to get that money, especially with a system of justice of little accountability for dead minorities. One of the more galling scenes is when the town coroners are questioned over their unusual protocols, like chopping a corpse into tiny pieces so it could not be re-examined by other professionals. The whole town is in on this vile scheme, every doting neighbor can be guilty through complicity or complacency. Death after death, they all know what’s really going on; it’s plain as day, but nobody outside of the Osage feels the burning outrage, and that’s the point of the first half of the movie, to give the audience the same sense of anger and futility.
The majority of the lengthy movie follows our villains plotting their very obvious conspiracy, with Leonardo DiCaprio badly clenching his jaw in every scene as Ernest Burkhart, a WWI-veteran who comes home, becomes a cabbie, and marries Mollie (Lily Gladstone), one of the rich local Osage women. The question for the rest of the movie is whether or not his love for her is genuine or perhaps she is just a means to an end. He’s the lead of the movie and a total dope, a man who unironically proclaims repeatedly, “I love me some money!” Seems hard to read this guy, right? He’s an idiot, and again this might be the point, that this sort of small-thinking man could be the hinge on this entire conspiracy, which results in a lot of Mollie’s family members dying under increasingly mysterious circumstances to consolidate their inheritance. It’s a frustrating and spiritually exhausting experience to watch all these poor characters get murdered, again, so casually and transparently. One of them is staged as a would-be suicide except he’s shot through the back of the head and the gun wasn’t left at the scene. Eventually, the FBI does finally (finally!) arrive in town at the two-hour mark, but by then, I’ve been watching two hours of people dying without a legal stir.
This perspective is best embodied through Mollie, beautifully played by Gladstone (Certain Women, First Cow). When we first meet her, she’s a forward woman who can assert herself and what she wants. Then it all goes downhill after marrying Ernest. She loses damn near every family member she has and is forced to rely upon her husband for support, the same idiot bungling his way through arranging the deaths of her family members. She’s a personal stand-in for the Osage Nation as a whole, as we watch what they have whittled down and bled dry, watching the weight of all this suffering deteriorate their spirits and dignity. This is Mollie, our avatar for tragedy. She’s literally bedridden for a solid hour, and I dearly missed Gladstone’s presence. Since we’ve been aware of the bad deeds of the bad men from the start, much of Killers of the Flower Moon becomes a waiting game of when Mollie is hopefully going to wise up or at least suspect what is happening to her and her family. When will she see Ernest as a more nefarious force in her life, the kind of person you don’t want to solely trust with the responsibility of delivering your life-saving intravenous medicine. It adds to the overall frustrations of watching. Gladstone’s performance rises above whatever limitations her character is stricken with. First off, it’s a powerful performance of immense sorrow; having to watch her pained reaction to overhearing her sister’s skull sawed open for a disrespectful public autopsy is just sickening. The movie lives off this woman’s response to unfathomable trauma on repeat. When she is bedridden and lost in a medical fog, she still manages to communicate her wariness and suspicion through these extra layers of obfuscation.
Robert DeNiro, appearing in his eleventh Scorsese movie, is terrifying as a kindly cattle baron who fashions himself as the best friend of the Osage, preferring to refer to them by their indigenous names and warmly speaking their language. He’s also a monster, a stand-in for American big business and the blood-stained hands of capitalism without morals and oversight. The dramatic core of the movie, besides how far will this go before consequences will at long last germinate, is how can such self-styled men of God commit such heinous acts? How can people justify and equivocate over their own cruel crimes? This question is epitomized in Ernest and his direct connection to Mollie, but it’s also epitomized through DeNiro’s character, William Hale. We have two characters fulfilling the same thematic purpose, which might be the point, but it makes for a redundant narrative experience. DeNiro’s character is so much more interesting than Ernest too, with the full cognitive dissonance of being an avowed man of the people and true ally to the Osage while he’s plotting their demise. DeNiro holds to this homespun, Foghorn Leghorn accent throughout, and I can’t recall him ever raising his voice. It’s a performance where the lasting terror comes through its friendly disconnect. It’s a more impressive performance than watching DiCaprio grimace and mumble through three and a half hours.
Some chastise Killers of the Flower Moon for choosing to tell its story from the perspective of its white perpetrators. I understand from a narrative standpoint and an overall larger thematic point why this was done. Scorsese clearly thinks of his own limits of being the one to tell this story, appearing as a cameo in the coda to provide commentary on how the American morbid desire for true crime and historical atrocities will lead to yesterday’s outrages becoming today’s distilled and de-contextualized “content.” The problem is the movie already feels frustrating as is while we wait for there to finally be some accounting for the ongoing injustices, and centering the entire perspective on only the Osage would magnify this frustration with even less elucidation on the depths of what was happening. Scorsese strips away a lot of the stylistic flourishes and even the electric pacing and editing that we come to expect from his filmography. This is a slow, ponderous movie. It’s meant to provoke outrage. It’s also designed to frustrate, and I suppose I can admire that while also impatiently shifting in my seat and wondering how many of these 206 minutes could have been lost. I feel like a philistine for looking at a $200-million Scorsese movie, while this man is in the late stages of his career and clearly thinking of this reality, and asking, “Hey, can you give me maybe less movie?”
If you haven’t noticed, dear reader, I am a critic in conflict. Killers of the Flower Moon has fantastic production values, strong acting, and the importance of staging history as it was rather than how it may be remembered, especially over events long ignored by history. I even admire the choices that are deliberate that make the movie feel less like easily consumed entertainment. It’s a movie that I feel compelled to see a second time before I settle on my eventual rating (a seven-hour commitment). It’s a sad movie, a bleak movie, a challenging movie, a meaningful movie, and an Important Movie about Important Things. It’s also long, frustrating in structure and execution, and occasionally redundant with its characterization and plotting, giving the impression that things have been stretched beyond breaking. Again, maybe that’s the larger thematic point, but then again I might just be stuck in a rabbit hole of excuses to find some justification for my less-than-ecstatic reaction to Killers of the Flower Moon, a movie of strident artistic vision that can also feel like you’re eating your vegetables for three nonplussed hours.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Poor Things (2023)
Poor Things is going to be a lot to many people. It is a lot, and that’s kind of the larger message because ultimately, for all its peculiarities and perversions, the movie is also an inspiring fable about living one’s life to the fullest and embracing the choices that make us happy and content. It’s a feminist Frankenstein allegory as well as an invitation to see the world with new eyes and a fresh perspective, to embrace the same hunger for a life that defines the journey of Bella Baxter from woman to child to woman again. Under the unique care of director Yorgos Lanthimos and screenwriter Terry McNamara (reuniting after 2018’s triumphant and irreverent The Favourite), Poor Things proves to be an invigorating drama, a hilarious comedy, a stunning visual experience, and one of the year’s finest films.
Bella (Emma Stone) lives a life of solitude with her caregiver, a brilliant but disfigured surgeon named Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Defoe), who Bella refers to as “God,” and for good reason. Bella is herself one of the doctor’s experiments. Her body belongs to an adult woman of a different name who killed herself. Her mind belongs to the baby that had lived through its mother’s suicide. “God” resuscitated the body of the mother by giving her the brain of her child. She’s curious and defiant and soon yearns for independence and discovering the outside world. A caddish lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), is drawn to Bella and offers to take her on a grand adventure to parts of the world. She agrees, and from there Bella gets an education on the plentiful pleasures and pains and puzzles of being a human being.
In many ways, Poor Things serves as a fish-out-of-water fairy tale that invites the audience to question and analyze the Way Things Are. Bella’s childlike perspective allows her to strip away the assumptions of adulthood and the cynicism of disappointment. Everything is new and potentially exciting, but she can also cut through the cultural hang-ups and repressive rules of polite Victorian society. This is expressed perhaps most memorably in her embrace of sexuality and the pursuit of physical pleasure. She’s told not to seek out this pleasure except for very specific settings and situations, and this confounds her. Why aren’t people doing this all the time, she asks after an extensive session of vigorous sexual activity. She is a person incapable of shame during a modest time of conditioned shame. This brashly hedonistic reality might prove too morally demented for many viewers uncomfortable with the premise. In context, it is a grown woman’s body being operated by the mind of a child. We are told that she grows and matures as she accumulates her worldly experiences, but the movie keeps it purposely vague how analogous her brain-age might be and whether that maturation is of a pace with traditional aging. It’s a reverse of 1979’s The Tin Drum, a German movie where a child refuses to grow up once he hears the drudgery of the adult world, and so he remains three years old in appearance but continues maturing intellectually and emotionally. There’s a cliche about looking at the world with a child’s unassuming eyes, and that doesn’t necessarily mean only looking at the things that are safe and appropriate for children.
Bella responds with wonder to the many pleasures of being human, but, sadly, it’s not all puff pastries and orgasms. The world is also filled with horrors and injustices, and Bella’s personal journey of discovery is also one discovering the human capacity for cruelty and selfishness. Some of this is a response to Bella wanting to assert herself and independence, as she very reasonably doesn’t understand why all these men get to tell her what to do or expect that they should. At one point, Duncan literally hurls her books into the sea so that she will not continue educating herself. This extends to later in the movie when Bella looks at prostitution in a Parisian brothel as a means of earning a living. Her same sexual appetites, that were enthusiastically encouraged by Duncan, are now paradoxically looked at by the same man as wicked. Absent riches, Bella is treated as a disposable commodity and she’s trying to make sense of why one version of her receives respect and adoration and another version is looked with disgust. It seems that an essential part of maturation is acknowledging the faults of this world and its entrenched systems of thought, but does giving in to these systems make one more human or merely more cynical? Is it a matter of learning or is it a matter of giving up on changing the status quo? These are many of the questions that the movie inspires as we join Bella on her fantastic journey of self-discovery.
This movie would not work nearly as well without the fearless performance from Stone (Cruella). She gives everything of herself for this role and rewires the very movements of her body to better portray such a unique elding of a character at so many crossroads. Her early physicality is gangly like she’s learning how to operate this adult body of hers that appears too ungainly, and her expressions are without restraint, as if she’s peeled back every acting impulse to instead find a purity of perception. There is a transparent and transcendent joy in her performance as well as an ache when Bella discovers the awful shortcomings of this world. Lanthimos movies exist in a different world than ours, a cracked mirror universe of deadpan detachment and casual cruelty, so it requires a commitment to a very specific tone of performance. And yet, the requirements of this role work against that Lanthimos model of acting because Bella cannot be detached from this world. As a result, there is the same matter-of-fact reaction to the world but channeled through an idealistic innocence rather than the sarcastic skepticism that can dominate the director’s oeuvre.
The supporting cast contributes wonderfully. Dafoe (The Lighthouse) is a natural at being a weirdo, but he exhibits a paternal love for his creation that is surprisingly earnest. I laughed every time he went into one of his extended wails when he was disconnecting himself from a machine to handle his bodily gasses. Ruffalo (The Adam Project) is devilishly amusing as he abandons all pretense of likeability to play a deeply manipulative but fascinating louse, a character that is almost as transparent about his desires as Bella. His faux elitism is a constant source of comedy. Kathryn Hunter (The Tragedy of Macbeth) has a memorable and sinister turn as the brothel madame who teaches Bella about the nature of capitalism and socialism. Christopher Abbott (Black Bear) appears late as a privileged man from Bella’s past reappearing with his own demands, and his is the most terrifying portrait in the entire wacky movie, an antagonist that’s all too real and scary in a movie given to such brilliantly quixotic flights of fancy. 
Under Lanthimos’ direction, the movie presents the world as an awesome discovery and the lurches into the surreal allow the viewers to see the marvels of existence with the same awe as Bella. The movie feels like it takes place in a science fiction universe of crazy visuals and the avant garde incorporation of past, present, and future. It makes every scene something to behold. This is his most visually decadent film of his career. The musical score by Jerskin Fendrix, a first-time film composer, and it works on a thematic level as trying to discover new kinds of sounds along with the journey of its heroine. However, there are sequences where the music feels like an assault on your ears. While intentional, the detours into abrasive dissonance can make one long for something less experimental and more traditional at least for the sake of your own sensitive eardrums.
Life can be decadent, it can be confusing, it can be ridiculous, it can be heartbreaking, it can be terrifying, but it’s an experience worth savoring and embracing, and this ultimately is the message of Poor Things. Stone is brilliant as she confidently carries us along for every moment of an exploration of what it means to be human, and with an ending that is so fitting and satisfying that I wanted to stand and applaud. For those squeamish from the heavy amounts of sexuality, Poor Things is at its core a very pro-life movie. It’s an inspiration to make you think one minute while making you snort laughing the next. May we all see the world with the voracious hunger and curiosity and boldness of Bella Baxter with her second chance at this one life.
Nate’s Grade: A
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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+
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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
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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
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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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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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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released November 14, 2003:
Without sounding easily amused, this movie really is glorious filmmaking. With Peter Weir’’s steady and skilled direction we get to really know the life of the early 19th century. We also get to know an armada of characters and genuinely feel for them. Russell Crowe is outstanding as Captain Jack Aubrey. His physicality and emotions are expertly showcased. When he gives a motivational speech you’’d understand why people would follow him to the ends of the Earth. Paul Bettany (again buddying up to Crowe after ‘A Beautiful Mind’) is Oscar-worthy for his performance as the ship’s’ doctor and confidant to the Captain. He’’s not afraid to question the Captain’’s motives, like following a dangerous French ship all around South America. ‘Master and Commander ’hums with life, and the battle sequences are heart-stopping and beautifully filmed. It took three studios to produce and release this and every dollar spent can be seen on the screen. ‘Master and Commander’ is fantastic, compelling entertainment with thrills, humanity, and wonder. It’’s grand old school Hollywood filmmaking.
Nate’s Grade: A
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
They really don’t make movies like Master and Commander anymore and that is a detriment to every facet of our society. It took three different studios to bankroll this expensive movie, made all the more expensive by being almost entirely set at sea, a very costly and volatile location. In a just world, this would have been the beginning of a cinematic universe to rival Marvel, and the dashing Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) would be as beloved as Captain Jack Sparrow, and children would beg their parents to read the dozen naval adventure novels by Patrick O’Brian. Just imagine lines of children for Halloween eagerly dressed in little admiral outfits with long blonde ponytails. Unfortunately, we do not live in this utopian universe, and 2003’s Master and Commander was the one and only movie we ever got. It received ten Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director for Peter Weir, winning two Oscars for Cinematography and Sound Editing, two of the only categories where runaway champion Return of the King wasn’t nominated. This is a masterpiece and a prime example of Hollywood filmmaking at its best. It’s just as easy to be transported in 2023 as it was back in 2003.
This movie is still effortlessly engaging and enthralling, dropping you onto the HMS Surprise during the Napoleonic wars. Even the opening text starts to get your blood pumping: “Oceans have become battlefields.” The opening act is a tremendous introduction to life onboard an early nineteenth-century ship, giving us a sense of the many crewmen and their responsibilities, as well as the different pieces working in tandem while under attack from a French vessel. The movie is structured as an elongated cat-and-mouse chase between the two ships, with the English trying to outsmart the faster French ship with its heavy cannons that easily outnumber the Surprise. Each stage presents a new challenge. One sequence involves them setting up a ruse with a smaller ship attached with a lantern to trick the French vessel into following the decoy at night. The constant threat of this sleeker ship getting the drop on them and attacking is always present, turning the opposition into a mythic monster breaking forth through the fog. The tests of command and camaraderie lead to important questions over duty and sacrifice. There are several children manning the decks as well, cadets eager to be the next generation of English warriors. It’s a shocking reality to process through our modern perspective, and it’s made even harder when tragedy befalls these youngest sailors just like any of the other crew. The movie is steeped in authentic details and realism that makes you feel like you’ve dropped into living history.
In 2023, Gabriella Paiella wrote a GQ article titled “Why Are Guys So Obsessed with Master and Commander?” noting its enduring popularity with a certain selection of Millennial men (yours truly included). She theorized part of its ongoing appeal is how wholesome the movie comes across, with depictions of positive and healthy male friendships. Even the dedication to service is depicted in a way forgoing jingoism. This is a deeply empathetic movie about men who deeply love one another. The most toxic depiction on screen isn’t one born of masculinity run amok during wartime but more a division in class amplified by superstition. Pity poor midshipman Hollum (Lee Inglebee), a man who cannot make friends with the crew because they disdain his privilege and will never see him as a better or an equal. He becomes a scapegoat for the bad luck of the ship, as they feel he is a “Jonah,” a curse. Poor Hollum, who sees no way out of this dilemma and literally plunges overboard with cannonball in hand, ridding the crew of their reputed curse (the wind picks up the sails the next morning). Beyond this valuable and sad storyline, the men of the Surprise seem so grateful for one another’s company. It’s a guy movie that invites men to escape to the frontier as an inclusive summer camp (no girls allowed!).
By the end of this movie, as we’re utilizing every nautical trick we’ve learned and preparing to seize the elusive French boat, my body was shaking in anticipation. We’ve gone on this journey and gotten to know a dozen faces, and we feel part of the team to the point that we’re onboard too. Seeing any of these men close their eyes permanently is awful. It’s not just keen military strategy and theory being discussed; we feel the real human cost. A small moment at the end, where a young man asks for help to sew the death shroud of his mentor, just hits you in the guts. Even watching poor Hollum processing his final fateful decision is heartbreaking. I still gasp even today watching Doctor Maturin (Paul Bettany) accidentally shot and then have to perform his own surgery. You feel the highs and lows throughout this voyage because the movie has made you care. The sheer adventure of it all is terrific, but it’s the immersive details and the strong character writing for everyone that makes this movie so special. It’s not just a rousing high-seas tale of bravery but also a stirring and empathetic character piece and absorbing drama.
It’s astounding to me that Weir isn’t still one of the hottest working directors. The Australian has earned four Best Director nominations across three decades (1985’s Witness, 1989’s Dead Poets Society, 1998’s Truman Show) and proven he can handle any genre with any style. He’s only directed a single movie since Master and Commander, 2010’s Siberian prisoner of war movie, The Way Back. In twenty years, we’ve only been given one other Peter Weir movie, and that is a travesty. In a recent interview, Weir confirmed he’s essentially retired from directing. If only time had been kinder to this great director. For comparison’s sake, other famous artists that also have four Directing nominations include Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, and Francis Ford Coppola.
I assumed Master and Commander would still be good to re-watch in 2023, but I was amazed at how quickly I fell back under the movie’s sway so completely absorbed. It’s the kind of movie where everything just feels so natural, so authentic, and so compelling, where the hard work can be too easily undervalued because it all just feels like a documentary. This movie is so captivating and enthralling and every adjective you can devise. It earns them all. Why oh why did we never get a second of these? There were over a dozen novels as source material at the time of the first movie. According to that same 2023 GQ article, the studio head at Fox, Tom Rothman, explained that he was a lifelong fan of the O’Brian novels, having fallen in love with them as a boy. It took the studio chief using his position to get this kind of movie made in 2003, that’s the level of corporate power necessary to circumvent all the naysayers trying to kill this. I guess rather than mourn the lack of sequels I should count my blessings that we have even one. You were too good for this world, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Re-View Grade: A
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Lost in Translation (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released October 3, 2023:
Sofia Coppola probably has had one of the most infamous beginnings in showbiz. Her father, Francis Ford, is one of the most famous directors of our times. He was getting ready to film Godfather Part III when Winona Ryder dropped out weeks before filming. Sophia Coppola, just at the age of 18, stepped into the role of Michael Corleone’s daughter. The level of scathing reviews Coppolas acting received is something perhaps only Tom Green and Britney Spears can relate to. Coppola never really acted again. Instead she married Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) and adapted and directed the acclaimed indie flick, The Virgin Suicides. So now Coppola is back again with Lost in Translation, and if this is the kind of rewards reaped by bad reviews early in your career, then I’m circling the 2008 Oscar date for Britney.
Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a washed up actor visiting Tokyo to film some well-paying whiskey commercials. Bob’s long marriage is fading and he feels the pains of loneliness dig its claws into his soul. Bob finds a kindred spirit in Charlotte (Scarlet Johansson), a young newlywed who has followed her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) to Japan and is second-guessing herself and her marriage. The two strike up a friendship of resistance as strangers in a strange land. They run around the big city and share enough adventures to leave an indelible impression on each other’s life.
Lost in Translation is, simply put, a marvelously beautiful film. The emphasis for Coppola is less on a rigidly structured story and more on a consistently lovely mood of melancholy. There are many scenes of potent visual power, nuance of absence, that the viewer is left aching like the moments after a long, cleansing cry. There are certain images (like Johansson or Murray staring out at the impersonal glittering Tokyo) and certain scenes (like the final, tearful hug between the leads) that I will never forget. Its one thing when a film opens on the quiet image of a woman’s derriere in pink panties and just holds onto it. It’s quite another thing to do it and not draw laughs from an audience.
Murray is outstanding and heartbreaking. Had he not finally gotten the recognition he deserved with last year’s Oscar nomination I would have raged for a recounting of hanging chads. Murray has long been one of our most gifted funnymen, but later in his career he has been turning in soulful and stirring performances playing lonely men. When Murray sings Roxy Music’s “More Than This” to Johansson during a wild night out at a karaoke bar, the words penetrate you and symbolize the leads’ evolving relationship.
Johansson (Ghost World) herself is proving to be an acting revelation. It is the understatement of her words, the presence of a mature intelligence, and the totality of her wistful staring that nail the emotion of Charlotte. Never does the character falter into a Lolita-esque vibe. Shes a lonely soul and finds a beautiful match in Murray.
Lost in Translation is an epic exploration of connection, and the quintessential film that perfectly frames those inescapable moments of life where we come into contact with people who shape our lives by their short stays. This is a reserved love story where the most tender of actions are moments like Murray carrying a sleeping Johansson to her room, tucking her in, then locking the door behind. The comedy of disconnect is delightful, like when Murray receives incomprehensible direction at a photo shoot. The score by Jean-Benoît Dunckel, front man of the French duo Air, is ambient and wraps around you like a warm blanket. The cinematography is also an amazing experience to behold, especially the many shots of the vast glittering life of Tokyo and, equally, its emptiness.
Everything works so well in Lost in Translation, from the bravura acting, to the stirring story, to the confident direction, that the viewer will be caught up in its lovely swirl. The film ends up becoming a humanistic love letter to what brings us together and what shapes how we are as people. Coppola’s film is bursting with such sharply insightful, quietly touching moments, that the viewer is overwhelmed at seeing such a remarkably mature and honest movie. The enjoyment of Lost in Translation lies in the understanding the audience can feel with the characters and their plight for connection and human warmth.
Writer/director Sofia Coppola’s come a long way from being Winona Ryder’s last-second replacement, and if Lost in Translation, arguably the best film of 2003, is any indication, hopefully well see even more brilliance yet to come. This is not going to be a film for everyone. A common argument from detractors is that Lost in Translation is a film lost without a plot. I’ve had just as many friends call this movie “boring and pointless” as I’ve had friends call it “brilliant and touching.” The right audience to enjoy Lost in Translation would be people who have some patience and are willing to immerse themselves in the nuances of character and silence.
Nate’s Grade: A
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
I have never done this before in the four years of my re-reviewing movies, but I really just want to quote my introduction into Lost in Translation because I feel like this perfectly sets the scene, as well as giving my 21-year-old self some kudos: “Sofia Coppola probably has had one of the most infamous beginnings in showbiz. Her father, Francis Ford, is one of the most famous directors of our times. He was getting ready to film Godfather Part III when Winona Ryder dropped out weeks before filming. Sophia Coppola, just at the age of 18, stepped into the role of Michael Corleone’s daughter. The level of scathing reviews Coppola’s acting received is something perhaps only Tom Green and Britney Spears can relate to. Coppola never really acted again… So now Coppola is back again with Lost in Translation, and if this is the kind of rewards reaped by bad reviews early in your career, then I’m circling the 2008 Oscar date for Britney.” Besides the unnecessary broadside against Ms. Spears, who I’ve already apologized for with my re-review of 2002’s Crossroads, I think all this holds true. Within three films, Sofia Coppola went from an unfortunate punchline (not her fault!) to Oscar winner and indie darling.
Lost in Translation was my favorite American movie of 2003, so I’m always curious how my then-favorites stack up twenty years later. I’ve softened on American Beauty and Requiem for a Dream, and still consider The Iron Giant, Magnolia, and Moulin Rouge to be excellent. My feelings toward Lost in Translation, upon re-watch, remain mostly the same, though after two decades of watching other slow-burn, character-centric indies and widening my viewing, its highs aren’t quite the rhapsodic high for me in 2023 but it’s still an effective melancholy mood piece.
Lost in Translation taps directly into a universal feeling of yearning for connections in a time where it’s becoming easier and easier to disconnect into our own little bubbles. You don’t have to be stuck in a foreign country to feel isolated or out of sorts, and Coppola uses the external circumstances as a means of reinforcing the emotional isolation and then re-connection of her characters. This is why I brush aside some of the harsher criticisms levied against Coppola’s portrayal of Japanese culture and the locals. This is an outsider portrayal, and I don’t think there’s so much a critical judgment over Japanese culture as being inferior as just being different from what these characters are used to. They are clearly out of their element; it’s not that the culture is weird, it’s that the culture is different (that doesn’t mean there aren’t some overstayed stereotypes here as well). Trying to simply communicate with people that all speak another language is a quick and accessible dynamic to better visualize and articulate disconnect. I feel like this story could have been told from any racial or ethical perspective; it’s about two outsiders finding one another. The racial dynamics are less important. Obviously Coppola’s own personal experiences and outsider perspective in Japan are what provides the specific details with this tale, but I think what makes the movie still so effective in 2023 is because it’s so relatable on a deeper level that it eclipses any specific personal details. It’s about feeling lost and then feeling seen.
The key scene for me happens about seventy minutes into the movie, after Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) have had an adventure with the Japanese hospital system. They’ve become one another’s insomnia buddies, teaming up to explore the city’s nightlife. As they lay side by side in bed during the wee hours, they have an intimate and poignant conversation, and it has nothing to do with sex. “I’m stuck,” she says. “Does it get any easier?” It’s about a young woman asking a middle-aged man for guidance and wisdom and him offering what he can with the caveat that he too is still struggling for his own wisdom. It’s the illusion that at some magic predetermined number of trips around the sun, the mystery of life will somehow become perfectly realized, as if now we can see the grand architectural design. There is no magic number. Everyone is trying their best and making it up as they go, and that’s what this conversation represents. She’s begging for reassurances that adult life will get easier, that she’ll find her footing, and Bob encourages her to continue pursuing her hobbies and passions even if she can’t stand her own art (which sounds like every artist I’ve ever known). Much of his actionable advice comes down to being patient including with yourself. Everybody is in their own way trying their best with what they have. He assures her that the more she gets comfortable with who she is the less things can bother her. It’s a beautiful scene and the reason it works even better is that Coppola doesn’t treat this moment with the gravity it has. It’s not even the film’s climax. Much like real life, when we look back at the exchanges that prove the most formative, we don’t have alarms ringing to better inform us that this is a moment that will have maximum import. We don’t know until it’s over.
I have never viewed Lost in Translation as some kind of will-they-won’t-they May-December romance, and at no point was I secretly hoping that Bob and Charlotte would get together. This is because they do get together but it’s not a purely romantic connection, although once you start really analyzing romance itself, there are far more complicated and nuanced dimensions to this overly simplified concept, and one could argue this is a romance of sorts but not one about physical passion and infatuation that dominate our association. It’s about two human souls drifting along in life who find a kinship with one another when they need it the most. I never wondered at the end whether they would kiss or have some kind of affair or even run off together, because that wasn’t what was so essential to this dynamic. It wasn’t how far they would go for love, including what would they give up or who would they hurt, it was about each of them serving as a life preserver, something to hold onto during a turbulent time. I truly believe that if they had kissed and had some kind of tawdry love affair that the film would have been cheapened. When Bob carries Charlotte back into her hotel room bed, I never viewed this act as two lovers but of a father and daughter. It’s too easy to just reduce every relationship into a sexual pairing. We all have meaningful relationships with many people who occupy different spheres of our life and our experiences, and our lives could be irreversibly altered without their influence no matter how fleeting our time together may have been. To reduce everything into whether they spark something sexual or passionate is just plain boring.
This was a turning point in the careers of all three of its major figures. For Coppola, it was confirmation of her artistic voice and stepping from the long shadow of her father. She won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for Best Director, only the third woman ever at that time. That’s a big deal. This was a statement film for her and she’s been making very leisurely paced, lushly photographed, somber character pieces since, very Sofia Coppola Movies (her latest promises to highlight the perspective of Priscilla Pressly). She never quite had another movie land as well as this one though 2006’s Marie Antoinette is due for a reappraisal as well. For Murray, it was confirmation that he had real dramatic acting skills that he’d shown flashes of in other movies like The Razor’s Edge and Rushmore, and it earned him his only Academy Award nomination. For Johansson, it was also the beginning of establishing her as an adult actress of serious caliber, and there was a critical stir that she had been snubbed by the Academy in 2004 not just for her role in Lost in Translation but also Girl with Pearl Earring. Johansson had been a steadily working actress since she was a child, and this was confirmation that she was ready to make the next jump. From there, she found a creative kinship with Woody Allen, and Wes Anderson, and even became an action movie star that could headline her own blockbusters. She finally got her first Oscar nominations in 2019, for both Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit, becoming only the twelfth actor ever to be nominated twice in the same year. Murray’s star has fallen out of favor recently from his onerous onset behavior, though he did reunite with Coppola for 2020’s On the Rocks.
One of the stranger post-scripts for this movie relates to Johansson’s singing. The karaoke scene in Lost in Translation is one of the best, and it works on a magical elemental level where the music becomes our means of expression. When Murray sings “More Than This,” it’s hard not to read more into the moment. It’s right there in the song choice. Both actors do their own singing, adding to the fun and authenticity. Johansson would later release her own album in 2008 titled Anywhere I Lay My Head. It wasn’t uncommon for young actresses to moonlight as singers for a vanity project (Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan did this too), but what set this album apart was that it was almost entirely comprised of Tom Waits covers. According to Yahoo, as of August 2009, it had sold only 25,000 copies, which to be fair is twenty-five thousand more than I’ve ever sold, so what do I know? She released one more music album, 2009’s Break Up.
Looking back at my original 2003 review, it’s easy to see how smitten I was discovering Lost in Translation and trying to argue its virtues in my college newspaper. I think I assumed most of my fellow collegians would rather watch raunchy comedies like Van Wilder rather than a slow-burn indie about sad people roaming a foreign city. To this day I still have an equal number of friends who deem Lost in Translation as slow navel-gazing fluff to beautiful and beguiling. As I said before, it’s a mood piece about disconnected people, and I think if you’re in the right mood, or an open mind with the patience to spare, then there’s still something appealing and rewarding about an understated movie about two lonely people finding an unexpected kinship that defies reductive romantic classification. I just experienced something on this level with 2023’s Past Lives. I’m glad that Coppola has kept the final whisper between Bob and Charlotte a secret because it doesn’t matter what he specifically says so much as the meaning of this exchange for the both of them. It’s a goodbye of sorts but also a recognition of one another’s help and compassion. It’s not for us to hear. It’s too intimate. It’s a perfect ending for a film that still proves indelible twenty years later.
Re-View Grade: A-
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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
In the 13 ensuing years since James Cameron’s smash hit Avatar, we’ve debated whether or not the collective consciousness has simply moved on and forgotten what was, at one point, the highest-grossing movie of all time. What cultural dent had it made? Are there really still fans? Was it a fad of the new 3-D, itself already dissipated? Does anyone really want three or four sequels? Then Avatar: The Way of Water was released in late 2022 and it didn’t do as well as its mighty predecessor. Instead of being the highest-grossing movie ever, it’s only the third highest-grossing movie ever with a paltry $2.3 billion worldwide (how can the man even sleep at night?). It’s a lot of the same, both in its big feelings, awe-inducing visuals, and its resurrection of characters, scenarios, and conflicts of before, so you’ll likely find yourself reliving your own 2009 Avatar reaction.
Cameron’s long-awaited follow-up returns to the alien word of Pandora where our Marine-turned-Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has raised a large blended family with his Na’vi partner, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana, given little to do but cry this time). The first hour of this three-hour blockbuster is establishing the family dynamic with the different kids, including adopted daughter who is… somehow… the daughter of the deceased scientist Grace (both Sigourney Weaver) as well as the human child nicknamed Spider who is the biological son of Quaritch (Stephen Lang), our deceased villain. Nobody seems to stay dead in this series as Quaritch concocted his own backup plan in case of his untimely demise. He transferred his consciousness into a tank-born avatar, and this new Na’vi Quaritch has his own team of Marines in blue-skinned Na’vi bodies. They’re heading back to Pandora for some out-of-body vengeance, and thanks to their genetics, they seem to get a pass from the natural environment of Pandora mistaking them as native.
There’s a lot of set up here, and the second hour introduces us to the coastal community, and it becomes another formula of the outsiders learning the rules and culture of the new setting and integrating, turning enemies into friends, gaining honor, etc. It’s within this second hour that the big environmental message coalesces around whaling, with one Sully son bonding with an alien whale Free Willy-style. There’s a whole hunt sequence that poaches a mother and her calf that’s quite upsetting. The parallels are obvious but subtlety is not exactly one of the storytelling options in the Avatar universe. This is a broad canvas in the biggest sense, so every message will be spelled out very finely and underlined, with character voicing obvious themes and villains practically twirling space mustaches. And that’s okay. The final hour is an action-packed showdown bringing all the characters to account and forcing Jake to face off once again with his old commander.
The visual immersion is outstanding and the real reason to sit still during all three hours of Way of Water. The Oscar-winning visual effects are transcendent, and the extended sequences underwater really captivate and achieve the sense of natural awe Cameron aspires for. It is an exceedingly pretty movie to watch, and the level of high-definition detail is astounding. There’s a tangible realism here even when it’s entirely gangly CGI characters. At no point does it feel like an empty green screen stage or an over-exposed cartoon. The world of Pandora is still interesting and worth exploring, and the coastal aliens with their evolutionary differences makes me excited to explore other corners and communities of this alien world. The story works, and the payoffs work, and each of the Sully kids has a moment to shine, though I kept confusing the two older brothers (where did one of these kids learn to say “bro” every other word?). It’s a bit strange to see and hear Weaver in a preteen alien’s body, but that disconnect is part of the point, as the character feels like a foreigner searching for meaning. Considering the decade-plus delay, the huge scope, and setting up potentially three other movies, I’m impressed that Way of Water even works as well as it does as a sequel. I was able to re-acclimate pretty easily in that first hour.
It’s not revolutionary storytelling but not every movie need be. It follows a familiar formula but puts in the work to make the action meaningful and connected to character and for the emotional beats to resonate. I thought the upside-down sinking military vessel had some striking, terrifying Poseidon Adventure-esque visuals, and the sequence was rooted in the family trying to save one another. With so many moving pieces and characters, the plot can be overburdened and redundant at times (the Sully kids get kidnapped so often they might as well save time and tie themselves up early) but even at three hours it doesn’t feel slow or wasteful. There is a sense of repetition in bringing back so many of the same faces, like literally rehashing the same villains. I wish more consideration was given to the new Quaritch and his own existential journey of the self. Just because you have the brain of this dead evil guy, do you have to follow in his doomed path? That could have been a really intriguing and profound character journey, the cloned Marines bred to be weapons who decide their own identities. That could have sufficed as the entire movie for me. The messages are heavy-handed but effective, though Pandora already had a natural resource that Earth wanted to exploit so I didn’t think we needed a second natural resource that essentially functions as immortality juice. At this point, will the third movie introduce ANOTHER magical resource that cures cancer? Likewise, I hope the next movie doesn’t find us yet another Quaritch (a twin brother!) looking for further score-settling. The ending sets up a larger confrontation with Earth’s corporate elite that will come about with the ensuing sequels, though I would have thought since Way of Water makes a big leap forward in time that Earth’s powerful forces would have already marshaled their unhappy response to being kicked out in the original movie.
Cameron has an innate blockbuster sensibility and storytelling structure; the man just knows how to tell rousing big screen adventures like few others. I didn’t see Way of Water in theaters but I won’t make the same mistake with the many Avatar sequels that will dominates the 2020s. It’s a bit hokey though deeply sincere, and Cameron proves yet again that he should not be doubted on big stages of his own creation. It might take the domestic gross of a small country to make these sci-fi epics of his, but the man delivers like few in the rarefied field of dependable blockbuster artists. There’s going to be an Avatar sequel every two years, so this universe won’t go extinct anytime soon, and I’ll be there waiting too.
Nate’s Grade: B
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