The Voracious Filmgoer: 1/1/25

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

One for Them: THE BRUTALIST

Architect László Tóth is in the great tradition of Governor Willie Stark and cult leader Lancaster Dodd and conductor Lydia Tár. He’s a fictional life invented to tell us about his times. The Brutalist, like All the King’s Men and The Master, borrows the structure of the epic biographical picture to sweep us into the middle of the 20th century and interrogate something dark and beautiful and true about the ways in which an era transforms a man and a man transforms his era. Like The Master and TÁR, it builds into its structure a heavy seriousness and sense of formal play. Director Brady Corbet, who also co-wrote with partner Mona Fastvold, starts with an overture and ends with an epilogue, throwing a 15-minute intermission into the middle of a three-and-a-half hour experience shot on VistaVision film. Loading the enormous experience up with the throwback textures signifying importance, he gives it a sense of grandeur and detail in presentation that extends to the precision of its writing and framing. Here’s a sweeping historical fiction about art and commerce and politics and man’s capacity for cruelty—both intimately, and globally—colliding in the life of one man.

It’s a mid-century Americana epic as an inverted Ayn Rand parable, in which the troubled genius man does not selfishly retreat from society, but imposes his artistry upon the very landscape of society as an act of transformation and, maybe, generosity in taking his pain into imposing beauty built to last. Here’s where genius is put into the fleshy stuff of fallible men, where individualism is paradoxically built into the foundation of the totemic and impersonal, where wealth corrupts passions, and passions corrupt souls, even while reaching for transcendence. Three-and-a-half hours is a long time to contemplate these big ideas, and the movie’s reach and scope is matched by its bustling incident and hustling modes. It never feels long. (I would’ve sat there for a few more hours if it remained so compelling.) It feels immense and dense, worth wandering around in, being pulled along with, and left puzzling over its dimensions and implications. Corbet makes full use of every connotation of the title. It’s brutalist as style, the blocky concrete edifices of post-war European architecture, a reaction to earthshaking tragedies transformed into something solid and imposing. It’s brutalist as an adjective, implying cruelty, violence, a lack of feeling.

We follow Tóth (Adrian Brody), a Holocaust survivor who leaves a wife (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy) in Hungary as he immigrates to America, promising to send for them. He struggles in Pennsylvanian poverty—taking odd jobs with an assimilated cousin (Alessandro Nivola), later shoveling coal—until he happens to fall in with a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce) who learns this immigrant was once a brilliant, celebrated architect. He offers to bankroll a dream project, a seemingly fortuitous idea that grows only more complicated and fraught. The movie smartly moves with the deliberateness of a detailed character drama against the backdrop of ambition and ego and historical context. Thus begins an entwining of two families’ personalities and stories—haves and have-nots, privileged and impoverished, the tragic and the thriving. It’s as full of stark contrasts as the structure slowly building over the course of the film. The Brutalist architect and the brutal capitalist, each inflicting their brutalities through whims and wills altering their surroundings, leaving marks on the social and visual fabric of the nation. Here’s a movie about how tragedies personal and political—even, and especially, as they double up—write themselves onto our world and reshape our landscapes, leaving statements so obvious they become inscrutable.

The performers inhabit sequences of supple complexity and densely ambiguous beauty; it’s carried along by a fine filmic sense and a well-blocked interest in coaxing evocative realism around theatrical flourishes and sturdy, slippery visual metaphor. They start to feel like real people, and yet freed by its fictional biopic dimensions, it’s able to become all the more iconographic and symbolic. Corbet’s directorial efforts have so far been a series of solemn fictional biographies like this. His eerie Childhood of a Leader is an imagined origin for a dictator. His Vox Lux is a prickly, provocative tale of a teenager surviving a school shooting and then using that attention to become a troubled pop star. Those films are similarly stately and told in chapters and build with inevitable structures to clear theses. The Brutalist is a magisterial capstone to this trilogy, evolving those preoccupations and styles into something even more rich and transporting and novelistic in incident and detail, yet as showy and satisfying as the most enveloping moviegoing experiences.

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Pride Rock and Prejudice: MUFASA: THE LION KING

Mufasa is actually pretty interesting as a Barry Jenkins movie. It’s about community and family forged in opposition to societal pressures to segregate and denigrate. It’s about parents and children pulled apart and finding their ways back to a sense of normality. It’s about the power of legacy, and the cyclical echoes of generational struggle. It’s about a young person trying to find his way in the world, defining himself both with and against what the world tells him he should be. So it’s definitely of a piece with the thematic preoccupations of the director of tender dramas Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk and his broader, metaphorical Underground Railroad. It also has some of his visual interest in a camera that’s motivated by its subjects' movements, joined to their physicality and their interiority. It has some of those Demme-style head-on close-ups and supple, floating motion through its sun-dappled production design. It’s a Jenkins work through and through. You might have to squint a little to see it in this movie, and might miss it if you weren’t prompted to be on the lookout, but there it is nonetheless.

Consider that something of a miracle considering glimpses of heartfelt, recognizably personal material and approach are fighting their way out of the packaging of a prequel to Disney’s 2019 photorealistic computer animated remake of The Lion King. That nadir of the company’s current cycle of remaking its animated classics was a bizarre heartless photocopy—an often shot-for-shot re-rendering of the colorful and expressive big cat Hamlet that studiously sucked every ounce of life from the original hand-drawn lines. The inexpressive realism of the animals’ faces and understated voice performances continually clashed with the script’s high drama and low wisecracks, and the clunky weight and textures aping nature documentary style drained all oomph and pizazz from the musical numbers. Most everything that’s bad about Mufasa carries over from those original sins. That Jenkins—and usual collaborators like production designer Mark Friedberg, editor Joi McMillon, and cinematographer James Laxton, who are also bending the technology to their will as much as animatedly possible given the corporate constraints—gets so much thematic personality and stylistic touches through the sheer tonnage of mandated CG falseness proves he’s one of the strongest directors working today.

He does what he can to bring more personality into the animals’ expressions—and there’s some real progress there. The cubs are pretty cute. They actually emote this time, and the musical numbers have a better bounce and color—though songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda is operating at about half his usual wit and catchiness. (That’s still considerably more than one could say for songs he didn’t write in Moana 2.) At least the movie’s telling a new story. Monkey Rafiki tells it like a legend to Simba’s daughter Kiara, the name a nice nod to the original hand-drawn Lion King 2. Here’s how Mufasa became the Lion King, and how his brother Scar became a scheming outcast, and how he met Sarabi, the lioness with whom he’d have Simba. It’s sometimes moving, sometimes boring, how it reflects the original with a story of a lost cub wandering in the wilderness and a villainous lion hoping to take control of the pride lands. If it weren’t for the Jenkins touches enlivening the lion drama and generational echoes, it’d be pretty flat. It still is sometimes, as it trudges through the dutiful, schematic plotting of Jeff Nathanson’s screenplay. But then there’s that extra tincture of soulfulness in the performances, a little more life in the staging of the animation. It’s not good, exactly, but it’s compelling to see it wrestle between its disparate elements, from relatively serious, engaged emotions to dull cliche. It’s a collision of intent between the earnest and the frivolous. (Consequently, Timon and Pumba’s more self-aware comic relief has never been more discordant, with references to Disney lawyers and the Broadway show.) As is, it’s an intriguing movie fighting valiantly to rise above the mandated mediocrities.

Monday, January 13, 2025

Note Worthy: MARIA, BETTER MAN,
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Musical biopics tend to work better when they’re working a thesis about the performer in question. It’s certainly preferable to a dutiful recounting of their life story that’s somehow less entertaining than finding the original concert footage and reading their Wikipedia page. In the case of Pablo Larraín’s Maria, the thesis about opera singer Maria Callas is somehow the same as the ones in his dreamy, subjective approaches to Jackie Kennedy in Jackie and Princess Diana in Spencer. The read on each figure is: look, how beautiful, how troubled, how resilient, how tragic. Fair enough. I happen to like those movies’ cramped opulence and grainy wooziness and temporal limits as acting showcases on a pedestal of swirling style. This one’s more of the same. It has Angelina Jolie lip-syncing to Callas’ diamond-cutting voice crackling with lyrical vibrato and tearful tremulousness. The film takes place largely in the singer’s final weeks as she struggles to regain her voice, seemingly wanting to sing more than live. There are also some flashbacks to a moment in her career during which she’s romanced by Aristotle Onassis. (An appearance by JFK hints at a Larraín biopic cinematic universe.) This funeral march uses Jolie’s contradictory qualities as well as any of her best non-Tomb Raider performances—Girl, Interrupted’s mental patient, By the Sea’s troubled wife, Maleficent’s wounded witch. She’s a stunning statuesque figure wielding sturdy charisma and steady fragility. The movie never quite fully activates an interesting narrative around Maria, but it consistently provides a beautiful look—Ed Lachman bringing faded cool colors in shooting a finely upholstered production design—and an enveloping mood. There are worse ways to spend a couple hours than hanging out with a movie star in lovely images that let one contemplate opera music.

An even more obvious thesis biopic is Better Man, an authorized recounting of Brit-pop’s bad boy Robbie Williams’ career so far. He came from a troubled family to join a 90’s boy band, and then go solo. It’s a typical arc from foundational childhood pain to fluke sudden success to sex, drugs, and gossip columns. What makes it atypical is the fact that he’s played here by a CG monkey in a musical that uses Williams’ songs to explain his emotional states. Who’d have thought, watching the recent motion-capture performances in the terrific recent Planet of the Apes films of the past decade, that one day the technology would be put to use for a metaphor of pop stardom? That it nearly works—sustaining its meager insight and mild visual interest for nearly the entirety of a feature length effort—is credit to director Michael Gracey. He gives it plenty of amped-up pizzazz in musical sequences with lots of extras, zippy editing, and fancy camera work. The best is a number stunningly done in a single stitched-together take that flows unblinkingly through multiple vehicles, buildings, and streets as talented dancers (and one animated monkey) hoof it with the right razzle-dazzle. Following up his fun debut feature The Greatest Showman, Gracey’s becoming the go-to guy for fantastical musicals that are more “inspired by” than factual accountings of a real person’s life. This one, though oddly more true, is not as good, because it’s bogged down in so many of the usual rise-fall-rise cliches and dreary dramatic scenes where dialogue expresses what the dancing could do and had done. Gracey’s strength, however, remains his emotional shorthand, which hits all the harder for flying so quickly it outraces its obviousness. It’s just more unevenly deployed here. And there’s only so much novelty to the monkey metaphor before it all feels overfamiliar again. It remains so purely metaphorical, with his simian appearance never acknowledged as real by anyone on screen, that it stretches its insight—he feels like a wild animal, or a trained zoo act—quite thinly. But Robbie Williams made some catchy pop songs, and there’s real earnest wildness here that keeps it from being entirely tiresome. If nothing else, looking at this monkey in all these standard biopic scenes certainly makes the sex part of sex and drugs weirder to contemplate.

A thesis about Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is that he’s ultimately unknowable, which could be a cheap trick to wiggle out of telling us anything about the man, but in practice makes his trickster inscrutability itself too vivid to ignore. All the best Dylan movies—Todd Haynes’ kaleidoscopic re-castings in I’m Not There, the self-contradictory interviews of classic verité doc Don’t Look Back—realize this. He’s both completely earnest and totally joking, a brilliant, purposeful writer and a persuasive crafter of public persona. Somehow he’s simultaneously earnestly artful and an impish improviser. He’s deliberately cultivating a mystique, and sometimes just a jerk. Either way he’s a poet and a genius and this movie is more about how people react to him than anything else. And then it pushes back with his own confusion about who others want him to be. That’s nice tension finely dramatized. The sturdy meat-and-potatoes Hollywood craft of this new film quite effectively communicates why people responded so strongly to his work, and why some would feel a sense of betrayal when he went electric. The movie ends with that divisive moment in his career, but begins with his arrival in the New York City folk music scene of the early 1960s, and follows his rise to fame before concluding with him trading his acoustic guitar for that electric one. Mangold, who also co-wrote with frequent Scorsese co-writer Jay Cocks, brings a fine sense of pacing and placing to the events, and fills the picture with loving recreations of the sights and sounds of the time, including tons of satisfying musical performances. It helps us understand how Dylan hit big, and returns to these old classics some of the shock of the new. We see him through the eyes of: folksy singer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who takes him under his wing; sweet college activist Sylvie (Elle Fanning), who falls in love with him; sharp, ambitious Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who’s as much a collaborator and competitor as love interest; and various other music industry types who try to pin him down from managers and programmers to Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). (That means Mangold, whose Cash picture Walk the Line was two decades ago, also has a biopic universe at play.) Dylan himself is played by Timothée Chalamet in a proficient impersonation that also always seems like Chalamet putting on an act. Maybe that’s the point. So is Bob.

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

Clay Time: WALLACE & GROMIT: VENGEANCE MOST FOWL

Behold the return of one of cinema’s greatest villains: Feathers McGraw. He’s a Penguin Most Wanted disguised as a rooster through the placement of a red rubber glove on his head. His last dastardly scheme was thwarted by the bumbling British inventor Wallace and his trusty, capable canine Gromit in Aardman’s claymation classic short The Wrong Trousers in 1993. He’s spent that last three decades imprisoned in a zoo, but at long last he shall have his revenge. It’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, a most pleasing return to the world of these characters—a quaint English droll wit in a cute, squishy model-village design. Nick Park’s perfect cartoon creations remain lovable leads: a tall, toothy, accident-prone dope and a silent, expressive little dog. They’re as classic as any cartoons of the last half century. They’re memorable in their looks—squishy, doughy, with incredible nuance in their eye rolls and blinks—screwy inventions, a love of cheese, tea, toasts, sweater vests, classic literature, and accidentally solving complicated problems with fortuitous Rube Goldberg plotting. Then there’s the soothing sounds of their accents in dialogue with puns that go down easy, and a design that’s squishy and tactile and loaded with sly visual gags.

It’s a treat to be in their presence again. Then add in the deviously silly villainy of their greatest foe. McGraw’s a mute match for the plucky Gromit, and here sets out to turn Wallace’s newest inventions against him. The man’s made a small army of Smart Gnomes, autonomous gardening robots. Convenient when taking the lawn tools to mow the grass and trim the hedges. Quite dangerous when they turn those tools on the townsfolk. It’s a fine feat of complications for a slight, lighter-than-air story, where the entire delight is in the feel and familiarity of the film. It has all of the whimsy and energy of their early classic shorts, and, while never quite matching the zany Buster Keaton-in-miniature zip of Trousers’ model-train action climax, manages to find enough robots and boats and boot-launchers to keep the adventure moving like clockwork. There’s nothing quite like an Aardman movie, with bright and colorful design that feels like it’d squish pleasingly under your touch, embodied in the fingerprints rippling across the clay and the figure’s motions with a light touch and a chunky solidity. And then the charming characters plunge headlong into whimsical conflicts solved through pluck and luck. It’s irresistible.