Perspective Change: NICKEL BOYS

In just two features, director RaMell Ross has proven himself a distinctive filmmaker with a purposeful, personal style. He has a roaming, poetic eye that alights on small details and from them grows a larger whole. It plays like Frederick Wiseman’s intensity of place through durational observation meeting Terrence Malick’s spirituality of focus. His first feature, documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was a vividly intuitive montage of observation from its subject setting. It’s a portrait of the contemporary South through the lived experience of life in a small, majority-Black, town. The picture is attuned to its own rhythms of insight and awareness, rooted in what Ross would tell Filmmaker magazine was his intention to use his camera to “participate, not capture; shoot from not at.” His new film, a fictional feature called Nickel Boys, is a further extrapolation of that concept, taking the camera into an ever more personal perspective, erasing the distance between character and audience and ultimately using the very form of its making to embody its themes. It starts out seeming like a limiting trick, but builds its own persuasive vocabulary to the point where the act of joining two shots with a cut—the basic foundation of cinema itself—becomes revelatory anew.

Ross’ Nickel Boys is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name, but it’s more of a transformation of that source material. He finds a way to give a movie a similar closeness of identification and fullness of interiority more associated with prose, and that more quotidian adaptations feel incapable of making cinematic. It tells the story of a young Black boy (Ethan Cole Sharp) growing up in Jim Crow Florida. We see through his eyes. Ross shoots the film in first-person, a trick rarely attempted, and almost never so successfully. The quiet boy’s occasional voice comes from behind us. Jomo Fray’s cinematography has the frame see only what the boy sees—bending and nodding; drifting away with his attention; looking at his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), a television, the sky, a mirror, a teacher (Jimmie Fails). At first it seems to deny the film the power of looking at a performance, especially as the boy becomes a young man (Ethan Herisse) and we come to privilege the ways in which we can understand him by seeing him reflected back at us through the ways others treat him. But Ross’ daring gambit starts to pay off as the movie confidently—moving style as substance—finds form meeting function. It denies the basic shot/reverse shot construction and pins us in this one perspective to better rebuild our sense of cinematic grammar with its artful intent.

The story shifts into a harder, more harrowing mode as the young man gets in unlucky accidental trouble with the law and is detained in Nickel Academy, a strict reform school. From here the boy encounters inequalities and injustices as it’s clear the school’s idea of juvenile rehabilitation for its segregated Black students means a curriculum of labor and abuses and no chance for freedom before the age of 18. By placing an audience within the perspective of a person in this circumstance, it gathers an exceedingly powerful point of view, living and breathing through this traumatic experience, and yearning after every glimmer of grace and hope within it. Ross’ screenplay, with co-writer Joslyn Barnes, builds out evocative details with dialogue perched on the edge of poetry, while production design docudrama convincing provides an immediacy of dramatic intention in each new moment of struggle and connection. Frames flow intuitively. And this is also where Ross expertly modulates the parameters of the filmmaking to draw us closer into a vivid explication of its central animating themes and characterization. I feel it’s almost a spoiler to explore how the visual conceit of the film shifts from this point; it’s such a bold surprise that builds to a few key emotional knockouts. At Nickel Academy our main character gets close to another thoughtful young man who becomes a close friend (Brandon Wilson). Suddenly, we see from his friend's perspective, too, and it returns to us the basic shot/reverse shot construction in their conversations. It’s like a breath of fresh air—an overwhelming moment rooted in recognition of the power of friendship, of being seen.

It's all about perspective. We see our lead through his friend’s eyes. We now have two main characters, and their relationship to each other, and to their situation, grows and complicates as the movie arrives at an ending that’s as perfectly poetic as it is bluntly true about the long lingering after-effects of living through such violent prejudice. A third visual strand of the movie has emerged slowly in flash-forwards to an adult (Daveed Diggs) researching Nickel Academy in something closer to our present day. He’s shot from a first-person angle just behind him, putting us in a place not unlike that of floating behind the avatar in a video game. At first these glimpses threaded throughout feel like mere differentiation, but the movie saves a late moment of stylistic adjustment for a thunderclap recognition of the motivation behind that choice. It’s another one deeply rooted in the context of character, in the disembodiment of trauma, and in the hope that one day this man will be able to fully see himself and his context. Ross’ remarkable control over his style and storytelling is evident in these deliberate choices. What could be alienating or limiting is instead only richer as the film grows absorbing as narrative and character study without sacrificing the artful ideas behind its enveloping form. How rare to see a movie so unified on every level, and so satisfyingly complete in its intentions and execution.

Rings of Power: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3

I have no defense of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 except that I was once an 11-year-old boy. My adult self sat watching this sequel slightly bored by the shiny, proficient formula on screen. If you’ve seen director Jeff Fowler’s first two Sonic the Hedgehog movies, this will be totally familiar—a simply plotted, gently silly scurry across brightly-lit colorful settings while the super-speedy animated blue hedgehog of Sega video game fame tries to protect his adopted human family, and the world, from the villainous machinations of evil scientist Jim Carrey. These are narratively flimsy, emotionally shallow, predictably told cartoon-logic movies. And yet, sometimes movies like this invite the Ghost of Moviegoer Past to step in and watch instead of the Present for a while. In that spirit, I had a good time. This isn’t even the best Sonic movie—that’s 2 by a nose, a perfectly pleasant pileup of kids’ adventure cliches and a good balance of human funny business. But 3 and the others are movies I would’ve enjoyed as a boy. It has likable leads with a funny ensemble, and a brisk pace with varied and imaginative-enough adventure sequences. This one has an early hedgehog versus motorcycle chase down a busy Tokyo street, and later a fight in a vault with tiles that are randomly anti- or extra-gravity. There’s just enough cleverness there. And then there’s Carrey hamming it up, this time in a double role as the villain and his own grandfather. His antics along with the Sega aesthetics are key 90s throwbacks. Is it any wonder the movie has two of the humans high-five and declare it “best decade ever?”

If the common complaint of the first picture was that it put Sonic in the passenger seat to pleasant live-action family comedy from James Marsden, Tika Sumpter, and Natasha Rothwell, this third Sonic goes the other way. It reduces the humans to glorified cameos and spends most of its time with Sonic (Ben Schwartz) and pals Tails (Colleen O'Shaugnessey) and Knuckles (Idris Elba) on the hunt for an evil hedgehog named Shadow (Keanu Reeves) who escaped containment in a secret base and is rampaging across the world looking for revenge against those who captured him. We get lots of flashbacks explaining why he’s upset, and seeding the ground for his eventual change of heart. (Though weirdly it is unacknowledged how one key character in those flashbacks has to be closely related to a key character in the present.) This series, like Fast and Furious before it, is very good about setting up villains to become sidekicks in future entries. And, better than Marvel lately, knows how to tease a new character in the credits of one entry and pay it off immediately in the next. (And easily incorporates events of a streaming series quickly, too.) This might be the ideal form of the modern franchise: cheap, efficient, reliable quality and return on investment, self-referential and fan-flattering without bogging down in self-seriousness, and exactly as ambitious as its target audience wants. It’ll never be great, but it’s always consistent.  Bring on Sonic 4!

There, Back Again:THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM

Turns out Peter Jackson remains a reliable guide to Middle Earth. Ten years after his last Hobbit movie, he’s now produced The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated movie that takes its narrative from a couple pages in J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices and somehow spins satisfying feature-length story out of it. The two listless seasons of Amazon’s The Rings of Power, which are undeniably expensively made and appealing on that surface level, but are largely dramatically inert, had me doubting that the voluminous prequel lore of this fantasy world was worth mining for more filmmaking. But Jackson isn’t involved in those, and Rohirrim takes full advantage of what he can bring. Here are the Howard Shore themes, as well as the look and pace of his take on Middle Earth, as well as a knowing love of the source material that sets off the right mythopoeic resonances which make it feel suitably epic and involving. This is both familiar and fresh, by dint of giving anime director Kenji Kamiyama the reins. Once I adjusted to the look of Japanese animation, which is here more restrained and subtle in its embellishments than one might expect, I found it plays mostly like Jackson’s Tolkien. That’s doubly nostalgic for both the prose and world building of Tolkien's books and the now-classic flavor of Jackson's original trilogy. The result also has the deep pleasure of seeing hand-drawn animation on the big screen, an all-too-rare sight and one that feels more beautifully classical and hand-crafted. What an unexpectedly good match.

Set well before the narrative of the earlier movies, this story, adapted by Jackson’s co-writer Philippa Boyens and others, finds the Riders of Rohan fending off an invasion. You might remember them from the siege of Helm’s Deep—the spectacular action climax of The Two Towers. This is a couple hundred years before that. The King of Rohan (Brian Cox), the awesomely named Helm Hammerhand, turns down a marriage proposal on behalf of his daughter (Gaia Wise). She’s a classically heroic princess who knows how to ride a horse and use a sword, which will come in handy as war approaches and she’ll be key to their people’s defenses. She’s painted as a cool archetype, which helps fill in the details of her personalty. (She’s also designed like a blend between a Miyazaki tomboy, a red-haired Celtic queen, and an hourglass-shaped anime pinup.) The man her father rejects (Luke Pasqualino) decides he’d rather have the throne than her hand, so he gathers an army and the story proceeds through their clashes. The battles that follow are also a little Kurosawa in their scared villagers and amassing armies. There are also warrior princes and wise elders and magic creatures, and it builds to well-drawn combat and nicely rendered catharsis. This gives it the feeling of an old legend recalled to life. (Even the requisite small number of clumsy fan-friendly references aren't that bad.) It’s all suitably fantastical and epic and makes for a satisfying excuse to return to this world.

Least Wanted: KRAVEN THE HUNTER

I wonder how many awful superhero movies in a row it’d take to put a stop to the genre for a while? After the last few years it sure seems like we might be getting close to finding out. The latest dismal effort is Kraven the Hunter, and although it probably won’t end the superhero genre quite yet, it does seem poised to be the killing blow to Sony’s attempts to make a Cinematic Universe out of solo movies for Spider-Man supporting players. This Oops! All Side Characters approach, born out of a contractual need to have projects in the works in order to keep the Spidey rights in joint custody with Disney, has led to these Spider-Man-less curiosities that ask: what if some of his villains are heroes in their own stories? It works for Venom, at least once and fitfully twice more, and I kind of liked parts of Morbius when it leaned into its comic book monster movie intentions. Even Madame Web had its shambolic charms with oddball energy resulting from a hacked apart and barely reconstituted narrative buffeted by corporate meddling. Kraven is the most dead on arrival, though. It’s just boringly proficient, endlessly setting up future potential that’s never going to pay off. If not in this movie, then when? Looks like never, unless the whole gang is revived for a cheap jolt in a future Deadpool gag.

Kraven is played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a performance that’s mostly nostril flares and ab clenching. He’s the son of a wealthy mobster played by Russell Crowe, who’s given so little meat with which to ham it up that he doesn’t even seem to enjoy putting on a thick Russian accent. (Compare it to his fun Pope’s Exorcist, in which he chows down on Italian with delicious genre delight.) The bad dad takes his son big game hunting, where the lad is mauled by a lion. Through convolutions too stupid and convenient to get into here, he ends up super-powered and dedicates his life to stopping international criminals. Also Spider-Man, eventually, presumably, although he is unmentioned, as is typical with these half-hearted attempts at spin-offs. The movie’s all flatly grey and boringly violent, with eruptions of CG blood indifferently staged as if the whole thing was only turned R-rated on a whim. Kraven’s killings are over-the-top and merciless in the boringly impersonal style of all bad vigilante movies. Kraven himself is as generic as these comic book anti-heroes come. Johnson’s given nothing to play, and the plot is somehow so grindingly predictable and totally cliched without ever caring about its own premise. It slogs from one flat, underwhelming sequence to the next with all the vigor of a sleepwalker doing his taxes.

There are a lot of characters and variables here, but none land with any impact or develop into anything of interest. For a superhero, Kraven has little distinguishing powers other than strength and agility—a few hints of communication with animals goes more or less unused aside from some flashes of psychedelic dreams of wildlife footage overplayed with runes—and his interactions with other characters are vaguely defined and barely believable. His strained relationship with a singing half-brother (Fred Hechinger) is one thing. But his magical savior, maybe-assistant, potential love-interest lawyer played by Ariana DeBose (this, after Wish and Argylle, further cements the West Side Story co-star in one of the most disastrous post-Oscar runs I can recall) is a total nonstarter in every direction. Even villain The Rhino (Alessandro Nivola) just has few kooky line readings—a couple high pitched chortles and a few gargled threats—to distinguish him from the wallpaper. I preferred the villainy of Christopher Abbot’s hypnotic hitman, who waltzes in at random carrying zen-weirdo vibes as if he meant to end up in Madame Web’s zonked-out tone instead. It’s a movie that’s constantly tossing in new people and places with only the slightest intentions of actually putting them to work. If this is really the last of these Sony experiments, I’ll admit some sick disappointment in not getting the promised team-up movie. Alas, that’s par for the course for the whole endeavor as it is for these individual parts: lots of setups that never get close to paying off. Of course they’d give up on the whole thing before getting something like a conclusion.

The Sense of an Ending: OH, CANADA

Paul Schrader’s films have always been political and spiritual and death-haunted. He is the screenwriter of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead, among others, some of that master’s most doom-laden and theologically minded. As writer-director on his own, Schrader has given us everything from the incisive work of contentious race-relations and union-building as Blue Collar and the sorrowful ecological and religious angst of First Reformed, his late, fiercely philosophical, intense masterwork. His newest film, Oh, Canada, is especially funereal. Here’s a work from an elderly filmmaker who uses his own closeness to death—the 78-year-old’s recent hospital stays have been well-documented—to make a film perched on that precipice. He’s adapting a Russell Banks novel for the second time in his career, after the powerful alcoholism drama Affliction. This new one stars Richard Gere as a terminally ill filmmaker—a famously draft-dodging documentarian—who agrees to an interview for a movie about his life made by one of his former students (Michael Imperioli). The old man is seated in front of an Interrotron, the camera setup invented by filmmaker Errol Morris to allow the interview subject to comfortably stare straight down the lens by using mirrors to put the questioner’s face directly above it. Gere, looking convincingly frail and confused, inhabits this director as he is asked to tell the story of his career. 

What follows is a slipstream of memories flowing into flashbacks. Schrader plays with time as he plays with color and aspect ratio to visualize a man lost in his own times. Jacob Elordi plays the younger Gere, and then Schrader freely mixes between the two actors in the flashbacks, sometimes Gere playing opposite younger actors. He also has Elordi play scenes against Uma Thurman, who plays two roles, one past and one present, as do some other key cast members. As you age, faces and names blur like this. It makes for a film that’s shot within a sense of an elderly man remembering and inhabiting his memories in the same moment. In this man’s confessions of past failures and foibles, the effect is demystifying—showing life is more complicated and less dramatic than the myths that build up around us—and clarifying. He can’t keep it straight, even as he tries to set the record straight. Most Schrader films pull inward even as they move outward. This one goes only inward—politics and business and war and art all caught in the undertow of a man’s life as his reminiscence finds fleeting connections and lingering divisions. It’s not so much a movie of an old man’s regrets. It’s a movie about an old man’s accumulated hypocrisies and misalignments as he realizes, perhaps too late, that these fragments add up not to a unified whole, but a fragmented one. The result is a fragmented movie, frustrating and yet somehow complete all the same.

Who Let the Dog Out: NIGHTBITCH

Its title suggests it could be some combination of David Cronenberg body horror and John Waters provocation and Universal Monster Movie metaphor. But Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch is, after all, a Marielle Heller movie, and therefore up to something more intimate, contained, and subtle. It atypically speaks its thesis loud and proud, early and often, but does so as a quiet domestic drama indulging the occasional flight of magical realist fantasy. Heller is the writer-director who gave us the warm-hearted A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood—a sideways Mr. Rogers’ biopic via appreciation by watching his ethos warm an unsuspecting journalist’s heart—and the prickly Can You Ever Forgive Me?—a con woman publishing story that balances mordant humor and real empathy for its desperate and unpleasant lead character. Those movies feature strong, specific performances that enliven their characters with nuanced observation of their situations. Nightbitch is similarly wedded to a strong lead performance as Amy Adams plays a stay-at-home mom who starts to suspect she’s turning into a dog at night. It’s an obvious metaphor for motherhood as a time of transformation that can leave a person unfamiliar to themselves. This mother used to be an artist, and now spends her days alone tending to her angelic son’s every need. He’s not a difficult kid; he’s just two years old. Her husband (Scoot McNairy) is often away for work, and when he’s home rarely offers to help, and needs lots of help himself even when he does. We get montages of her repetitive schedule, moments of loving connection with the child interspersed with receptive tasks and building frustrations. She makes mistakes, she harbors resentments, and harbors resentments for the way a mistake—not committing to breaking her son’s co-sleeping habit, say—can get harder to fix the longer she lacks the patience to do so.

We hear her inner monologue full of frustrations and resentments, toward her husband, toward the other moms in her social groups, toward her former artist colleagues, and especially toward herself. It’s a picture of motherly obligations and duties, fleeting satisfactions, and growing depression. She’s in a crisis of self-worth in a life of unbalanced routines. All of this is so precisely noticed and complicatedly enacted—it’s a real, messy, complicated picture of a woman trying to rediscover herself after growing alienated and isolated through the process of giving birth—that the whole dog transformation thing is both too much and not enough. It’s never a full-bore high-concept horror comedy—imagine the cult classic we’d have from the 80s or 90s with this premise, where people would feel smart for saying actually it’s about the conflicted emotions of motherhood—although it’s best in those moments when it emerges as an awkward social moment. Instead, the high concept is rather thinly stretched, mostly playing as separated embellishments of (sometimes gross) fantasy, moments where she imagines a taste of animalistic freedom that matches the burbling bodily transformations that have made her seem different in every way, and which she must reconcile to become her new, best self. Adams is really good at embodying those contradictions and making them work.

Hate Crime: THE ORDER

The Order is a tense and absorbing real-life thriller set against a backdrop of the American northwest, with stunning views of mountains and forests and rivers and farms on which plays out a standard procedural about good men with guns in pursuit of the bad men with guns. This gives it the feeling of a Western, albeit one with machine guns and pickup trucks from its mid-80’s milieu. It’s only fitting for a true crime story that’s about the very conflicts that continue to drive our country’s madness to take on the trappings of a genre that’s always about American identity. This picture finds an FBI agent (Jude Law) investigating the works of a white-supremacist militia. He’s a grizzled and exhausted veteran who rolls into town and soon teams up with a boyish local cop (Tye Sheridan) to start asking the right questions, and some wrong ones. The militia under suspicion is a recent breakaway group from a larger, slightly more sedate hate group. It’s led by a hot-headed extremist (Nicholas Hoult) who’s leading his small band of men in robberies and bombings, leading up to planned assassinations and more. Ominously, there’s a shot of blueprints for the United States capitol tacked up on his bulletin board. I half expected a title card at the end to tell us one of their group would go on decades later to storm it. Or be elected to Congress.

Director Justin Kurzel is a good fit for the material with his interest in man’s capacity for violence and the ways in which aimless men can bond over a sense of duty, misguided or not, that can emerge from its pursuit. (This makes for an interesting companion to Kurzel’s Macbeth, Assassin’s Creed, and True History of the Kelly Gang in its exploration of bloody codes of conduct and grim perspective.) He has a straight-faced somberness of tone and a steady grip on suspense erupting into violence. Here are long, crackling sequences of law enforcement jargon and investigation, jostling personalities behind the scenes of cops and criminals alike, and then the inevitable shootouts and bombings and chases. (There’s also an event that’ll be familiar to anyone who knows it inspired Oliver Stone’s electric underrated Talk Radio.) Kurzel moves the plot with a well-paced progression of clues and escalations, keeping a close eye on the revealing gestures of the performances. Law convincingly plays an older agent who was hoping to slow down, but finds he just can’t stay out of the game. He moves like an old pro, interrogates with a gruff edge, and runs with a hard-charging fervor that had me worried the character would give himself a heart attack. Sheridan is a fine youthful idealist coming into his own, making a fine pair with Law’s grizzled determination. (Jurnee Smollett is a good by-the-book third wheel when they call for backup.) They’re easy to root for. As their Hoult is scarily blank, a void of charisma that nonetheless has other racist young guys enthralled to his promise of a better, whiter America. There’s a sick dread to the FBI’s righteous pursuit of their group, as we know the sick appeal of their target's evil message will continue to linger past this particular flashpoint.

Other People: A REAL PAIN

“Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago—  
…they dwell in us,  
waiting for a fulfillment.”
—Czeslaw Milosz

A Real Pain is a quietly profound little movie. It’s a gentle dramatic comedy with a light touch and a deep well of sadness and insight underneath. Star Jesse Eisenberg, who also confidently wrote and directed this well-observed feature, plays an anxious New Yorker who joins his semi-estranged cousin (Kieran Culkin) on a Jewish tour of Poland. They’re mourning the recent death of a beloved grandmother, who left them money for the trip in her will. The goal is to find her old home, the one from which she fled the Holocaust, a fateful decision that made her family Americans and left her grandsons with a commingled sense of gratitude, grief, and curiosity. The movie follows the pair as they reconnect, wandering through a tour of deep family meaning while accompanied by pleasant strangers—a nerdy Gentile guide (Will Sharpe), a divorcee (Jennifer Grey), an older couple (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide (Kurt Egyiawan). Each stop along the way has them confront all manner of pain—personal, inter-personal, societal, historical—as they try to imbue their trip with meaning that’s so readily apparent in every step. They try to connect with a homeland they never knew, and find a vacation that’s ready-made to expose insecurities, conflicts, raw nerves in their sense of self and their relationship to each other, as well as their family legacy. And yet that makes it sound so heavy, when what we see are charmingly complicated performances of people trying their best to have an enjoyable, meaningful vacation.

Eisenberg films with a travelogue’s eye set against a playwright’s sense of language as he lets scenes play out in teasing dialogues and tense silences, the sort of easygoing chatter of a tour group in landscapes and monuments and hotels, always with the potential for sudden shifts into awkwardness as one character or another is suddenly more vulnerable or less agreeable. His character is the high-strung one, carefully planned and trying to please. Culkin’s is the wild card, an open psychological wound, clearly struggling with grief and imbued with a spiky social conscience, but so filter-less he’ll say anything without thinking, and so open-hearted that he can’t help but feel for everyone and everything. Eisenberg is simultaneously annoyed by and protective of his cousin, while Culkin is both supportive and bickering. It’s a family relationship that feels totally real. The supporting cast fills out the ensemble as well-calibrated accents to the central pair’s concerns while living their own lives. The whole picture plays like a well-observed character piece told with the beauty and concision of a finely detailed, neatly structured short story. It’s ultimately a warm and lovely little movie. The characters make for great company and it’s easy to get invested in their emotional journeys while enjoying their fumbling repartee. And then there’s that sneaky heaviness just underneath that lightness, occasionally stepping to the foreground in moving moments of tender awareness. It’s a sweetly thoughtful movie about how, once you're truly open to encounter the humanity of other people, your heart will never stop breaking.