Movie Review: Like Me

Like Me *** / *****

Directed by: Robert Mockler.

Written by: Robert Mockler.

Starring: Addison Timlin (Kiya), Larry Fessenden (Marshall), Ian Nelson (Burt), Jeremy Gardner (Freddie), Ana Asensio (Anna), Nicolette Pierini (Julia), Stuart Rudin (Henry). 

 

I’ve been sitting with Like Me – Robert Mockler’s debut film – for a few days now, trying to sort through just what I thought of the film. It isn’t a subtle film, and I’m not sure that the message of the film is any deeper than social media is a vile cesspool of human depravity, but I’m not sure it needs to me. While the concept and narrative are thin, Mockler goes over-the-top stylistically – this is a Natural Born Killers inspired fever dream visually. The lead performance by Addison Timlin – which is about the exact opposite of her work as the sweet, quiet Goth kid turned nun in Little Sister from a couple years ago, gets under the skin of this young woman, whose existence seems to hinge on getting likes.

 

The movie opens with Timlin’s Kiya – in a mask, holding a convenience store clerk at gunpoint, and filming the whole thing on her iPhone for upload to Youtube. She doesn’t say anything as she holds him up – and its amusing and creepy to watch him as he flails in front of the camera, not quite sure what to do or how to react even before she pulls out the gun, at which point, he pisses himself. The video draws a lot of attention on social media – of course – and soon Kiya is the talk of the internet. Most people find it funny – while, of course, stressing that they don’t really condone it per se, but it’s funny. One person who isn’t impressed is Burt (Ian Nelson) – an internet troll spewing out hateful misogyny in his response to Kiya’s video. Kiya is smart though – and sees how many “likes” she is getting, and knows she needs to up the ante. This is when she kidnaps a pervy motel owner – Marshall (Larry Fessenden, because if you need a creep in an ultra-low budget horror or horror adjacent film, you are legally required to hire Fessenden). The pair end up kind of, sort of bonding – and their drug fueled road trip gets stranger.

 

The film is obsessed with over-consumption – of all kinds. Mockler shows the audience, in graphic, sickening detail people eating junk food - nowhere worse than when, shortly after they meet, Kiya ties Marshall to a bed, and then force feeds junk of all kinds. The message is clear – this is sickening and disgusting, but so is everything being done online, which is over-consumption of a different sort.

 

Timlin really is terrific as Kiya – there is a blankness to her performance, as Kiya is someone who just doesn’t quite connect with people. She is an outsider, who wants to be a liked and loved (at least online), but cannot connect with people in any normal fashion. That is what ultimately connects her Marshall – an outsider of a different sort. Their connection makes up the dramatic heft of the movie, and it works, because Timlin and Fessenden work well together, and go to dark places as well. The biggest problem with the movie is probably the Burt character – who as played by Nelson is a one-dimensional, alt-right troglodyte – and not even an all that convincing one (sorry, but I don’t for a second buy that Burt would get THIS big on the internet). He is supposed to complete a sort of outsider triangle of the three characters – you need to have people like Kiya, like Marshall and like Burt, or else this sort of thing on the internet doesn’t work – it doesn’t get pushed this far. If you torment a store clerk on the internet, and no one is watching, did it even happen? But Burt as conceived and performed never really becomes anything deeper than a meme.

 

As a director, Mockler basically goes madly over-the-top, from pretty much the moment after the opening sequence in the convenience store, and doesn’t slow done. I bet the style will turn many off – or just give them massive headaches – but as someone who loved Oliver Stone in the 1990s, I quite liked the go-for-broke style here. Besides, indie movies have become fairly tame visually – they all look and feel the same. Mockler is showing even on a small budget, you can go mad visually.

 

Like Me is far from a perfect film – but it’s a fascinating one from beginning to end, shows that Timlin should be getting better roles, and marks Mockler as a director I want to see what he does next, You may up hating it – but it still deserves some attention.

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Movie Review: Thoroughbreds

Thoroughbreds **** / *****

Directed by: Cory Finley.

Written by: Cory Finley.

Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy (Lily), Olivia Cooke (Amanda), Anton Yelchin (Tim), Paul Sparks (Mark), Kaili Vernoff (Karen).

 

Thoroughbreds is a thrilling about a couple of affluent, perhaps sociopathic teenage girls that was written and directed by Cory Finley – who is amazingly making his directorial debut. Finley knows his material well, and doesn’t make the mistake that many first timers do in terms of trying to do too much or overloading on style for style’s sake. Make no mistake, Thoroughbreds is a very stylish film – but it’s one that is keenly attuned to its characters and themes. This is a cold, calculating thriller, punched up initially with witty banter, which only makes what follows all the more disturbing.

 

The film is set in a very affluent area of Connecticut, largely within the walls of mansion where Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) lives with her mother and stepfather, Mark (Paul Sparks). We first enter this home to see her tutoring Amanda (Olivia Cooke) – and they two girls are as different as can be in appearance and demeanor. Lily is put together prim and proper, and Amanda looks like a mess. Amanda is direct in a way that’s initially off-putting for Lily, who finds her weird. The two girls were once close friends, but have gone their own ways in recent years. They are getting back together, because Lily is so perfect that she graduated her prep school early, and returned home, while Amanda is awaiting trial for a disturbing incident involving her horse. Their friendship sparks when Amanda witnesses Lily interact with Mark for a few seconds of seemingly innocuous conversation, and immediately senses (correctly) that Lily hates her stepfather with a passion. Eventually, the pair decide the best thing to do would be to kill him. But how?

 

The film is split up into chapters – complete with title cards (they’re not really necessary, but do break up the action). The opening scenes are the two girls feeling each other out. This is probably where the comparisons some have made to Heathers comes from – because these exchanges can be witty and funny – especially when Cooke is delivering direct, acid tongued one-liners, which she does brilliantly. In these scenes, Lily seems to be the more normal of the two – but she’s sizing everything up. While we sense from the get go that Amanda may be a sociopath – she says early on she has no feelings at all (other than hungry or tired), but has become gifted at faking them (something psychopaths excel at). Lily suffers from something else – but certainly something – and is just as gifted at reading others as Amanda is, and better able to manipulate them that her “weird” friend.

 

The friendship between the two of the make up the bulk of the movie. There is a lengthy subplot involving them trying to enlist Tim (the late, great Anton Yelchin), a drug dealer, with a statutory rape conviction, who nonetheless is still hanging out and selling pot to the teenagers in the area. Tim is undeniably sleaze, but in Yelchin’s hands he becomes an oddly endearing character – a pathetic guy, with delusions of grandeur, trying to act tougher than he is. He may not be the smartest character in the world – but he’s smart enough to know when he’s outmatched. For sparks, in the other major role as the stepdad, it’s the best work I’ve seen from him (that’s not saying much – he’s awful in House of Cards) – but he’s essentially playing a rich asshole, who gets to keeping being an asshole because he’s rich. The regular rules don’t apply to him – which is true of the girls to, who have grown up in this affluent area.

 

You pick a few nits in Thoroughbreds if you wanted to. There’s nothing overly original about the observation that even in houses that look like that, there can still be this level of malevolence and violence (there is a hint of Michael Haneke to the film, except these characters aren’t as blind to their horrific nature as his characters are). While the climax of the film is brilliantly staged, I do think it comes on a little too quickly, and I’m not entirely sure I buy the reasons behind Amanda’s actions.

 

Yet, those are relatively minor quibbles – ones that only bother me a little in retrospect, not in the moment. Overall, Thoroughbreds is a chilling thriller – one that has more in common with Hitchcock than Heathers, and one that announces a major new talent in Finley.

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Movie Review: A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time *** / *****

Directed by: Ava DuVernay.

Written by: Jennifer Lee based on the novel by Madeleine L'Engle.

Starring: Storm Reid (Meg Murry), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Dr. Kate Murry), Chris Pine (Dr. Alex Murry), Reese Witherspoon (Mrs. Whatsit), Oprah Winfrey (Mrs. Which), Mindy Kaling (Mrs. Who), Levi Miller (Calvin), Deric McCabe (Charles Wallace), Michael Peña (Red), Zach Galifianakis (The Happy Medium), Rowan Blanchard (Veronica), André Holland (Principal Jenkins).

 

It would be easy to nitpick Ava DuVernay’s film version of A Wrinkle in Time to death. The film is deeply flawed in ways that are immediately apparent when you watch it, and grow in your mind as you look back over it. A decade ago, I probably would have cynically written off the film as overly earnest and cheesy – and a decade from now, I may well do the same thing. But at this moment, I had the perfect way of viewing DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time – and that is through the eyes of my almost seven year old daughter, who sat next to me throughout the film, at times astonished by what she was watching, and at other times deeply relating to what was up there. It’s not enough for me to think that A Wrinkle in Time is a great movie – hell, it may not even be a very good movie. But watching her watch the film, and then talking about it after made me grateful that such a film exists.

 

The film stars newcomer Storm Reid as Meg Murry, an unpopular girl, somewhere in the 12-13 year old age range, who is still reeling from the disappearance of her physicist father Alex (Chris Pine) four years earlier. Along with her mother, the two had developed a theory about the ability to travel through space and time – using only your mind. And then, he vanished (gee, I wonder what happened?). One day, Meg meets three interesting women – Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), who is cheerful and a little ditzy, in a lovable Glinda the Good Witch kind of way, Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), who is very wise, but speaks almost entirely in quotes by geniuses, and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), who is basically Oprah spewing her brand of inspirational positivity. Along with her genius little brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) and the boy she has a school girl crush on, Calvin (Levi Miller), she embarks on her own journey across space and time to find her father – going from one amazing planet to the next, meeting one amazing character after another.

 

Some of this works better than others. The special effects in the movie are hit and miss – I have a hard time believing it was a budgetary issue, since this is a Disney film – yet I think we can all agree that a sequence involving a character turning into a giant, floating lettuce leaf doesn’t really work. There are lots of special effects sequences that do however – especially when the movie finally reaches its last stop in the rescue mission. DuVernay relies perhaps too heavily on close-ups throughout the film – it can became distracting at times. The characters are mostly thinly written, and the talented cast isn’t always able to overcome that. Witherspoon mainly does – in part because it seems like Mrs. Whatsit is a role tailor made for her skillset, so she is mostly a delight. Poor Kaling cannot do much with a character than has to end every sentence with the name of a famous writer, and the country they are from. I’d be tempted to write off Winfrey as stunt casting – except because of the nature of what Mrs. Which says, I’m not sure anyone could make the role work better than Oprah does.

 

Besides, the movie stays grounded because of a really good performance by young Reid. It is a difficult role for her to play, one that requires elements of the fantastical, and yet grounded in real life insecurities and anxieties of little girls everywhere. I think this is what my daughter related to more than anything. She’s a sweet kid (and before you think I’m just looking at her through rose colored, parents glasses, let me say that my other daughter, who is 4, is a holy terror, who my wife and I joke we will one day have to visit in prison) who nervously applied to, and had to write an essay to get onto her school’s “Kindness Crew”. This film’s wholly, unironic embrace of kindness and goodness, as well as embracing every part of you – even your flaws – is something we don’t see very often – and we never see directed towards little girls (rarer still, to see it directed at African American girls – but I digress). This is a rare film that was made specifically for her. The elements that make it cheesy or easily laughed off by more cynical people, are exactly why she embraced it.

 

This doesn’t excuse the movie for its storytelling faults, or other mistakes along the way, but it goes a long way to mitigating them for me. When I looked around the movie – in the background – I also saw a world that DuVernay has created that perhaps is as fantastical as the other planets – an idealized vision of our world – perhaps the one created by Warriors like the film described. Yes, I can be cynical – but I find it impossible to be so with this film, which I got to see through the eyes of my daughter who saw something greater than herself up there on that screen – and wanted to be a part of it.

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Movie Review: The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches **** / *****

Directed by: Simon Lavoie.

Written by: Simon Lavoie based on the novel by Gaétan Soucy.

Starring: Marine Johnson (Ali / Alice), Antoine L'Écuyer (Frère), Jean-François Casabonne (Père), Alex Godbout (Paul-Marie), Laurie Babin (Juste).

 

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches is a bleak, black and white drama from Quebec. It is a film that starts out mysteriously, and has those mysteries deepen over the majority of its runtime. Yes, it basically wraps everything up by the end – a little too neatly for my taste – but overall, this is a challenging film about sexual oppression, religion, misogyny and its lasting impact. It is also a stunning film to look at – shot in stark black and white, the film can be brutal and hard-to-watch, but it never crosses the line into exploitation.

 

Set in 1930s, rural Quebec, the film centers of Ali (Marine Johnson), a teenage girl, being raised by her father (Jean-Francois Casabonne), shuttered away from the outside world alongside her brother (Antoine L'Écuyer). They are so sheltered, that their father is able to raise Ali as a boy – telling her penis just fell off as a child, along with cutting her hair short, and binding her breasts. But the outside world can only stay outside for so long – as is set in motion when her brother rapes her one day in the woods (I honestly don’t know what to make of the rape scene in the film – it’s quick, and non-exploitive, but I’m not quite sure what to make of the “how” it came about. It almost seems more like it was necessary to the plot, and not overly thought out). When her father examines her one night, and figures out she’s pregnant, that’s when he loses it. He will end up hanging himself, naked, in their house – his body becoming a source of fascination to both teenagers (Frere wonders if his penis is where they came from). And I haven’t even mentioned the strange, Gollum like person chained in the barn that the father refers to as Just Punishment, which Ali will shorten to Juste.

 

The first act of The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches is mysterious, as it locks us into Ali’s perspective, so we only figure things out as she does. Obviously, we know a few things before she does – namely, that she’s a girl (because we have eyes) – and also that her father’s behavior is not normal – from the way he chases off outsiders, to the bizarre religious rituals, to Juste out on the barn, we are far more concerned about his behavior that Ali is – who sees this as normal.

 

His death really is the catalyst for the rest of the story – that will unfold from them, piling on one revelation after another. Johnson is great in the lead role. Her performance is urgent and animalistic, without going over-the-top. She maintains our sympathy, even as more secrets spill out. L'Écuyer is fine as Frere as well – although he perhaps goes a little too far as the film spirals towards it climax, and he tries with increasing desperation to fill his father’s shoes.

 

The film was adapted (apparently liberally, since you cannot hide Ali being a girl in a film like you can in a book) by Simon Lavoie, from Gaétan Soucy’s novel. Like Lavoie’s last film – Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves (that one was co-directed by Marc Denis) – it is a bold, stylistic film, although in a much different style (that film called back to the Godard films of the 1960s with its use of color). Here, he has gone for something much more stark and unrelenting in his use of black and white, and handheld camera work. It gives the film a raw, animalistic feel that perfectly matches its content.

 

I do wish that the film didn’t quite feel the end to tie up every loose end. I was enjoying the ambiguity of the film as it progressed, and I don’t think that wrapping it up with a neat bow was really the only way to go here. On the other hand, the story certainly isn’t over when the film ends – and its anyone’s guess as to what comes next. Overall, I think The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches confirms the potential that Lavoie showed in Those Who Dig Their Own Graves, which is a film I liked, but at nearly three hours was WAY too long, considering it had no real story. Both are provocative and daring stories about Quebec’s past – and moving into the future. Canadian film needs some new blood to in it – and Lavoie has the potential to be great.

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Movie Review: Death Wish

Death Wish ** / *****

Directed by: Eli Roth.

Written by: Joe Carnahan based on the novel by Brian Garfield and the screenplay by Wendell Mayes.

Starring: Bruce Willis (Paul Kersey), Vincent D'Onofrio (Frank Kersey), Elisabeth Shue (Lucy Kersey), Camila Morrone (Jordan Kersey), Dean Norris (Detective Kevin Raines), Beau Knapp (Knox), Kimberly Elise (Detective Leonore Jackson), Len Cariou (Ben), Jack Kesy (The Fish), Ronnie Gene Blevins (Joe), Kirby Bliss Blanton (Bethany).

 

I can easily see a way that a version of Death Wish could be updated, and relevant, for 2018 – but the version directed by Eli Roth is not that film. The 1974 original starred Charles Bronson, as a man pushed too far, after his wife and daughter victims of a home invasion – the wife raped and murdered, the daughter raped and traumatized – Bronson decides to strike back at the “animals” who did this too his family – even if he doesn’t really know who those people are. That spoke to audiences in 1974 – when violent crime in America really was on the rise, and people in major cities were afraid to go out at night. In 2018, violent crime is actually down – the lowest it’s been in decades – but there are places (Fox News, the NRA among them) who still want to make people afraid – it’s good for business. I think a new version of Death Wish should at least address that. But this movie doesn’t really do that – it is basically a feature length version of the NRA tagline “Nothing will stop a bad guy with a gun, except a good guy with a gun”.

 

This time the movie takes place in Chicago, not New York (it’s no coincidence, they’ve picked the most violent city in America), and Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis) is now a surgeon, not an architect (or an accountant, as he was in the original novel). He has a beautiful wife (Elisabeth Shue) and teenage daughter (Camila Morrone) about to go off to college. The same basic thing happens as in the original – a trio of thugs break into the house when Paul isn’t there – his wife ends up dead, his daughter in a coma (thankfully, the movie spares us of either of them getting raped, although the threat is certainly there with the daughter). Paul ends up getting himself a gun, and going out onto the streets to get revenge on all the bad people out there. Two detectives, Raines and Jackson (Dean Norris and Kimberly Elise) try to find out who attacked his family. When Kersey visits Raines at work one day, and sees a bulletin board full of open homicides, he is assured that most of those crimes are gang related – “asshole on asshole” crimes that won’t be solved. But Kersey’s case is different. He doesn’t say why, but then again, he doesn’t need to.

 

The movie gets bloody – as you expect from a movie from Roth. He lingers over one scene of torture in particular, but all of the violence in the film is over-the-top in how bloody and ridiculous it can be. Roth cannot seem to decide if he wants to go full on exploitation and fun with the violence (hell, there’s a scene in which one of the bad guy literally gets hit in the head with a bowling ball) or he wants to make something where the violence hurts – where you feel it in the audience.

 

The original novel that Death Wish is based on is actually very anti-vigilante justice – the novel’s Paul Kersey essentially goes insane, and by the end of the novel is killing unarmed kids because he doesn’t like the way they look. He even wrote a sequel after the original movie came out to make his stance even more explicit (that book was turned into a much better, underseen movie by James Wan in 2007 – although it doesn’t have all that much to do with the novel either). The original movie at least pays lip service to being anti-vigilante as well – the cop investigating the crimes figures out who is behind them, and wants to arrest him – but his hands are tied by the higher ups. No matter what Roth says in interviews about the film (and by the way, whenever I read interviews with Roth, I am always struck by the feeling that I would really like the movie he thought he made – it just rarely matches the movie he actually made), that’s basically gone here. There is one good sequence in the film – a montage of Kersey the surgeon removing bullets from shooting victims, and Kersey the vigilante dad loading his gun that points out the absurdity of the two sides of him), but the film never really delves into that. There are talk radio montages that debate the killings Kersey does – when he becomes a social media celebrity the “Grim Reaper” because of YouTube videos of him in action.

 

I think much of this undercut though by the fact that unlike the original novel or film, this Kersey actually does track down those responsible for hurting his family. It’s harder to question that sort of justice being meted out against people we know are guilty, and have seen do horrible things. This Kersey is far easier to understand and root for.

 

Willis is probably the wrong actor to play this role – but then again, so was Bronson (originally, the 1974 film was supposed to be directed by Sidney Lumet, and Jack Lemmon was to star – Bronson always said that he thought the role should have gone to Dustin Hoffman – although, Hoffman did a version of it in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs in 1971). Willis is an action hero, so we immediately accept him as a killing machine and a hero. The film is essentially a fantasy version for every civilian with a gun, who knows – just KNOWS – that if he was at that school, that concert, that mall when that asshole started shooting everyone with an AR-15, that he would run in, and put an end to it. There was a possibility that a new Death Wish could reflect on, or at least mirror, the America that exists today. This isn’t that film.

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Movie Review: Red Sparrow

Red Sparrow ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Francis Lawrence.

Written by: Justin Haythe based on the novel by Jason Matthews.

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence (Dominika Egorova), Joel Edgerton (Nathaniel Nash), Matthias Schoenaerts (Vanya Egorov), Charlotte Rampling (Matron), Mary-Louise Parker (Stephanie Boucher), Ciarán Hinds (Zakharov), Joely Richardson (Nina), Bill Camp (Marty Gable), Jeremy Irons (Korchnoi), Thekla Retuen (Marta), Douglas Hodge (Maxim Volontov), Sakina Jaffrey (Trish Forsythe).

 

The fundamental problem that Red Sparrow is never able to overcome is that it is a movie entirely about its plot, and yet its plot doesn’t really matter. You never really feel that all that much is at stake during the runtime, because the movie never really tells you what exactly is at stake. All we really know is a Russian spy, Dominika (Jennifer Lawrence) has been assigned to go to Budapest to cozy up to an American spy, Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) to find out who Nash’s mole inside Russian intelligence is. Since we don’t know what this mole does, or what information he is providing, we never really know what will happen if the mole is exposed. In theory, it shouldn’t matter – it should be a classic McGuffin, in which it doesn’t matter to the audience why it matters to the characters, just that we know it does. Yet, it’s hard to find anything else to hold onto in the movie. It’s a movie that wants to keep you guessing as to whether or not Lawrence’s character is going to sell out her country for America, or whether she’s playing the American spy for Mother Russia. It jerks you around so much that you end up not caring at all. What’s worse, the movie has little in the way of action or suspense set pieces, and with a runtime over two hours, it’s more than a little bit of a grueling slog.

 

Before we even get to all that spy craft, we first have to watch as Lawrence’s Dominika is molded and degraded into becoming a spy in the first place. She is, as the film opens, a prima ballerina for the Bolshoi Ballet – but a horrific injury ends her career. With a dead father, sick mother, and no other job skills – she has no choice but to accept the offer of her Uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts – it’s been a while since I’ve seen a version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya so I won’t go delve into why the film felt the need to have such an obvious character name) when he enlists her to do a job for him. He’s a high ranking intelligence officer, and wants to get close to a very rich man – who had eyes for Dominika as a dancer. All she has to do is get close, and get his phone. Things, of course, don’t play out that way – and she’s given another impossible choice – take a bullet in the back of the head, or go to Sparrow School – which she will call (not incorrectly) Whore School – to learn how to seduce anyone. Find their weak spots, and exploit them. She is apparently so good at this that she’s pulled out early to be sent to Budapest.

 

Red Sparrow is an odd movie. In many ways, it feels like an exploitation movie – this is a movie in which Lawrence is raped, tortured, beaten, stripped and engages in consensual sexual activity as well. The film takes itself so seriously though that all these scenes feel cruel. The elements of the film that could have been made into an erotic thriller a la Brian DePalma featuring Lawrence and Edgerton don’t really work either – as talented as both of them as actors, they share almost zero chemistry. The major sex scenes between the two of them is over is about as much time as the one in Lady Bird – that was the joke in Lady Bird, that the teenage boy finished so quickly – I don’t know what it says in Red Sparrow.

 

What almost saves the movie is the supporting cast more than the leads. I’d watch an entire movie about Mary Louise Parker’s character – the Chief of Staff of a US Senator, who is selling sensitive information. She is drunk the entire time, and a hell of a lot of fun, and the entire extended sequence involving her is easily the best in the movie – the one time when the suspense of the film is truly humming at the level it should. Charlotte Rampling also comes and goes too quickly as Matron – the head of Sparrow School, who emotionlessly tells them that “your bodies belong to the state”. Jeremy Irons and Ciaran Hinds show up as well, so you expect them to do more than they do – but are fine when they’re there. I liked Matthias Schoenaerts’ performance as Uncle Vanya as well, even if his character makes little to no sense.

 

The director of the film is Francis Lawrence, who directed Jennifer Lawrence in the last three Hunger Games movies, and the two clearly have a trusting relationship between director and star. Here, though, they don’t really find the right material. The story goes on too long, and because Lawrence (the director) has decided to direct the whole movie in the muted, depressing tones of a cold war spy movie, with none of the excitement, the film just kind of goes through the motions. Lawrence, the actress, really commits to the role (if not the accent, entirely, which comes and goes). There’s just not much here to make it all worthwhile.   

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Movie Review: Mom and Dad

Mom and Dad *** / *****

Directed by: Brian Taylor.

Written by: Brian Taylor.

Starring: Nicolas Cage (Brent Ryan), Selma Blair (Kendall Ryan), Anne Winters (Carly Ryan), Zackary Arthur (Josh Ryan), Robert T. Cunningham (Damon Hall), Olivia Crocicchia (Riley), Lance Henriksen (Mel Ryan), Marilyn Dodds Frank (Barbara Ryan), Samantha Lemole (Jenna). 

 

There is a scene in Mom and Dad in which Nicolas Cage sings the Hokey Pokey, while destroying a pool table with a sledge hammer – and in the timeline of the movie, this is BEFORE he is infected with a strange virus that makes him – and every other parent – want to murder their children – preferably in some brutal and bloody fashion. Mom and Dad is some sort of strange mixture of satire, comedy and horror – and it the movie begins by being way over the top, and then just tries to top itself again and again and again. In Cage, the film found the only actor who could really pull this off. What’s odd about the film – what I think ultimately makes it work – is that every so often the movie does slow down, to show you another side of Cage’s Brent, and his wife Kendall (Selma Blair) – instead of being just a completely over-the-top bloodbath.

 

The film takes a little bit of time setting things up. Brent and Kendall are suburban parents to teenager Carly (Anne Winters) and 10 year old Josh (Zackary Arthur). Like all suburban parents in the movies, they aren’t really that happy – he trudges off to work at a job he doesn’t really like, she is dealing with the fact that her kids don’t need her as much anymore – and her daughter openly insults her. The movie doesn’t waste too much time before some sort of strange outbreak happens – which gives parents the uncontrollable urge to murder their children. Most of the movie happens at the family house – with the kids locked in the basement, and the parents trying inventive ways to get them – and a boyfriend of Carly who gets knocked out repeatedly, but regains consciousness at just the right moments.

 

The film takes more than a few missteps along the way – the biggest may well be in the character of the family maid – an Asian American woman, who is little more than a stereotype, used to add in a little more bloodshed. The film also seems to be hinting at bigger ideas at times, and then backs off to back to the looniness. It mainly works, but there are hints at a better movie than Mom and Dad ultimately ends up being.

 

The film was written and directed by Brian Taylor – one half of the Nelvedine and Taylor duo, whose films include the god-awful Crank films, offensive and violent films in which Jason Statham has to keep his heart rate up or else he’ll die. I hated the Crank films for their nihilism and misogyny – but you do have to admit that the films had energy. He brings that energy to parts of Mom and Dad as well – particularly in the back half of the film, as things spin wildly out of control, and they get some unexpected visitors that bring things up a notch.

 

The reason to see the film is mainly Cage and Blair. Cage can, and will, go wildly over-the-top at all times, and he does so here. But unlike many of his recent films, it works here – there is a reason for it, and the movie requires him to do so. Oddly though, it’s Blair who is more the center of the movie – she’s the one who keeps things grounded. Cage and Blair have a nice chemistry together – particularly in the more serious scenes – like right after Cage destroys that pool table, where the pair of them wonder what exactly happened to their life.

 

Mom and Dad is a demented satire – another look at suburban life, and home empty it can be. It doesn’t really add anything that Hitchcock, Lynch of Solondz hasn’t done – but it’s done it all in such a demented and over-the-top entertaining way that it should become a cult hit – particularly among parents with a black comedic streak. We may not actually want to kill our children, but we all relate to Cage’s final moment here.

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Movie Review: Foxtrot

Foxtrot **** / *****

Directed by: Samuel Maoz.

Written by: Samuel Maoz.

Starring: Lior Ashkenazi (Michael Feldmann), Sarah Adler (Daphna Feldmann), Yonaton Shiray (Jonathan), Yehuda Almagor (Avigdor - Michael's Brother).

 

Foxtrot opens with a knock on the door – on the other side are two military men there to tell Michael (Lior Ashkenazi) that his son has been killed doing his military service. Michael is a successful architect in Israel – a military veteran himself – and yet once he gets the news, he seems to walk through the rest of the first act of the movie in a daze – paralyzed by indecision and fear, unable to figure out just what the hell to do next. Act 1 ends in a shock, and then in act II, the tone of the movie shifts. We are now with Michael’s son Jonathan (Yonaton Shiray) and his unit, who have been assigned a remote roadblock. Not much happens there, there aren’t many cars coming by, and the men are bored. This section is surreal, and more than a little bit funny, as these bored young men cannot quite figure out what they’re doing, or how things ended up so crooked. It’s funny right up to the point when it isn’t anymore.

 

Foxtrot is the second film by Samuel Maoz – coming 8 years after his debut, Lebanon, which was based on his own experiences inside a tank in that war in 1982. In many ways, Foxtrot is a companion piece to Lebanon – Michael is a veteran of the same war, and also haunted by it. He doesn’t suffer from PTSD in the way we would normally expect him to – but he is clearly not being completely up front with everything that happened, and he hasn’t dealt with it. He’s tried instead to become successful, and in doing so, thinks that will just excuse whatever happened in the past – and that if he just doesn’t talk about it, no one will know. He’s wrong.

 

Foxtrot is a more ambitious and better film than his debut – which others liked more than I did (I thought it was fine, but hardly great). Here, Maoz mixes tone very well – the first act is deep and dark, edging, only into its final minutes, into something slightly more absurd. The second act is surreal – a kind of waking dream that turns into a nightmare, complete with dancing, and absurd comedy. Its turn towards tragedy is the mirror image of the one at the end of act one. Maoz isn’t cheating here – but he’s going for something larger. This messed up Israeli family of men incapable of expressing themselves is something larger.

 

The third act of the film is more melancholy than the first two. You can probably guess where the movie is headed in terms of its plot, but it goes there with sensitivity and compassion. The final act is quieter than the first two, and more perhaps more thoughtful – maybe even optimistic, despite the price everyone has paid by that point. It’s really in this act that having an actor like Ashkenazi helps the most, as he’s able to bring a lighter touch to keep this thing from becoming depressing. This is a movie about several generations in Israel – from Holocaust survivors, to modern day Israel soldiers, all of whom are struggling in their own way. The film takes chances, and zigzags throughout – so even if you sense where the plot is going, it’s still fascinating to see it get there. This is a fascinating, bold, funny, tragic movie – and it’s amazing just how Maoz is able to make all those elements cohere together, so that the whole is even better than the sum of its parts.

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Movie Review: Annihilation

Annihilation **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Alex Garland.

Written by: Alex Garland based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer.

Starring: Natalie Portman (Lena), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Dr. Ventress), Tessa Thompson (Josie Radek), Gina Rodriguez (Anya Thorensen), Tuva Novotny (Cass Sheppard), Oscar Isaac (Kane), Benedict Wong (Lomax), David Gyasi (Daniel).

 

I have been sitting with Alex Garland’s remarkable Annihilation for a couple of days now, trying to figure out how best to review this odd, transfixing film. It has been marketed as a genre film – and that it certainly is – it is definitely science fiction, and there are elements of a horror film as well. But it’s a deeper film than most – one that not only encourages but demands introspection on behalf of the audience. The film’s tone is odd from the outset, and it gets stranger the further along it goes. The story hits the beats we expect it to in this type of a film – when a group of people head out into the unknown wilderness, not sure what they will find, you expect them to be picked off one at a time – but not like this. The ending of the film is odd, transfixing and profound. The fact that this is a film from a major studio, being given a wide release (at least in North America – the rest of the world will get it on Netflix, which is a shame – this film DEMANDS to be seen on a big screen, with the best sound possible) is amazing to me. How many wide release films so beholden to the work of Soviet master Andrei Tarkovsky are there?

 

The film stars Natalie Portman as Lena – a biologist, teaching at Johns Hopkins University, who used to be in the military. Her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac) still is – but he went on a mission a year ago, and has yet to return. She has heard nothing from or about him, and has been told he was killed on some sort of top secret mission. Then, he shows up at their house one night. There is something very definitely wrong with him – he doesn’t seem himself, and when he starts bleeding into his water glass she calls the ambulance. They don’t end up at the hospital though – but at Area X. This is where Lena learns of the Shimmer – a strange border that looks just like the name implies. The area enclosed in the shimmer keeps growing, and while you can cross the border into it, nothing comes back. Nothing except for Kane, who is now facing almost certain death? The last group to cross was all military men – so the next group is going to be a group of scientists – all women. They are led by Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a psychologist and also include Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson), a physicist, Anya Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez) a paramedic and Cass Sheppard (Tuva Novotny), another scientist. Lena volunteers to go along as well – their goal is the lighthouse where the shimmer started, but to get there they have to go on a long walk, through dense woods, full of god knows what.

 

I don’t really want to discuss much of what happens beyond this point – it is better to experience that for yourself. What I will say is that director Alex Garland does a marvelous job at keeping every moment of the movie unsettling and disorienting. We are clearly on earth here, yet it almost seems like an alien planet – and one moment to the next, anything is possible. Garland metes out information in the film slowly and methodically. The structure of the film involves Lena being interviewed by a man in a biohazard suit, but also contains flashbacks to Lena and Kane’s time before the Shimmer, which do more than just provide backstory. The visuals, and in particular the sound design – with the strangest, most distinctive score in recent years by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, which contribute to the strange otherworldly tone of the film. What’s also remarkable is how, despite the tone, the actresses all create distinct characters in the film, which keeps things grounded. Cass observes early in the film that every one of them is hiding something – that they have their own, dark reasons for coming into the shimmer – which effects them all in different ways, and changes their perspective.

 

The obvious touchstone here is Tarkovsky’s 1979 masterpiece Stalker (the great podcast The Next Picture Show is doing their duo next week on Stalker and Annihilation – and I don’t think I’ve ever anticipated a podcast more). Tarkovsky’s science fiction films – which also included Solaris (1972) – his best film – are different from most in the genre, as they require us to look inwards, not outwards (Solaris would make a great double bill with Kubrick’s 2001 – they are opposites in many ways).

 

The ending of the film is probably what concerned Paramount the most – what caused them to dump the film into theaters here, and sell it off to Netflix internationally, because they really don’t know what to do with a film like this. It very well may frustrate some viewers – viewers who want to be spoon fed everything, and told what to think, feel and what it all means. I don’t think Annihilation is all that hard to follow, or even interpret – but it certainly demands something on the part of the viewer that some just will not want to give. For those who want something more in their science fiction – something truly unique, Annihilation is a must see. It confirms Garland as one of the most interesting new directors around – following up his great 2015 film Ex Machina (a completely different kind of sci fi film) with something more ambitious, more ambiguous and altogether more remarkable. The film will likely not last long in theaters, but it will be remembered for years to come.

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Movie Review: Game Night

Game Night **** / *****

Directed by: John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein.

Written by: Mark Perez.

Starring: Jason Bateman (Max), Rachel McAdams (Annie), Kyle Chandler (Brooks), Sharon Horgan (Sarah), Billy Magnussen (Ryan), Lamorne Morris (Kevin), Kylie Bunbury (Michelle), Jesse Plemons (Gary), Michael C. Hall (The Bulgarian), Danny Huston (Donald Anderton), Chelsea Peretti (Glenda), Camille Chen (Dr. Chin).

 

I’m not quite sure when major studios forgot how to make great, smart, mainstream comedies aimed at adults but they basically have. Most mainstream comedies have a few laughs, but not much else, as they rely on big personalities and juvenile jokes about bodily fluids and sex to be funny, and they hardly ever are. I assumed from the previews that Game Night would be another of those movies – another film like Fist Fight or Central Intelligence or any number of other comedies that had enough jokes to fill a trailer, but not enough to sustain a movie. Boy, was I wrong. This is the best mainstream, goofy studio comedy I have seen in a long, long time.

 

The basic premise is simple – ultra-competitive married couple Max and Annie (Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams) host a weekly game night for their friends – married couple Kevin and Michelle (Lamorne Morris and Kylie Bunbury) and charming womanizer Ryan (Billy Magnussen), who brings whatever clerk from La Senza or Forever 21 he’s currently dating. They used to invite the couple next door, but they got divorced, and the woman moved out – leaving just her creepy cop husband Gary (Jesse Plemons) behind – who longs to be re-invited back, but isn’t. Things get stranger with the return of Max’s brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) – who is more successful in almost every way than Max, the golden child, who says they should have game night at the mansion he’s renting. This will not be a regular game night though – he’s kicked it up a notch, by staging a would be kidnapping game – where he will get kidnapped, and the others have to find him. So when armed men break in, and kidnap him, the rest of them are not fazed – although, of course, it turns out to be a real kidnaping, and the three couples (this time Ryan with Sharon Horgan’s Sarah – much smarter than most of the girls he has dated) head out to try and find him, only gradually realizing what is really happening.

 

I will fully admit that the setup sounds like it would make for a silly, not all that good comedy – but the film is all about the execution here. For one thing, the film is perfectly cast – particularly Bateman and McAdams who have real chemistry together, and make an unexpectedly great comic team. For another, the screenplay by Mark Perez is actually quite smart, in pushing things past the point of ridiculousness, but still maintaining some semblance of a real world. Oddly, the film takes as its inspiration David Fincher’s underseen, under rated 1997 film The Game, including the sibling rivalry aspect between Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, and takes that aspect seriously enough that you feel it, but not so seriously that it derails the film. Credit also has to be given to director John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who do a lot more than most comedy directors – who seem happy enough to point their cameras at moving stars being goofy and leave it at that. There is a dynamic sequence as a house party that crosses Fight Club with Eyes Wide Shut, and an egg being thrown around that is hilarious, and shot in a way to give it maximum energy.

 

The film never really steps wrong – every time you think it’s going to, it comes up with a new strange way to go, a new twist that sends it off in another direction, while never losing comic momentum. The whole cast is great – each of the couples have their own comic energy that works. Special mention should be given to Rachel McAdams though, who shows once again that in another time and place (say, the 1990s) she would have become the biggest female star in the world, with her excellent comic timing and delivery, she is just endlessly great here and Jesse Plemons, who continues to be one of my favorite character actors working, and here steals the movie with his every line delivery (my favorite? “How would that be profitable for Frito Lay?”).

 

We need comedies like Game Night – as ultimately silly and inconsequential as the film is. The film is pure fun from beginning to end – and isn’t the type of comedy that makes you feel silly or stupid about for laughing afterwards. This is great studio comedy – something I thought no longer existed.

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Movie Review: Loveless

Loveless **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Andrey Zvyagintsev.

Written by: Oleg Negin and Andrey Zvyagintsev.

Starring: Maryana Spivak (Zhenya), Aleksey Rozin (Boris), Matvey Novikov (Alyosha), Marina Vasileva (Masha), Andris Keiss (Anton), Aleksey Fateev (Ivan), Artyom Zhigulin (Kuznetsov), Natalya Potapova (Mat Zheni), Anna Gulyarenko (Mat Mashi).

 

Loveless, the new film by Russian master Andrey Zvyagintsev (whose last film Leviathan was even better) is many things at once. It is a film that deepens as it goes along, and becomes a portrait of modernity and technology and parenting, but also of a modern Russian society that is fully of apathy. The government institutions in the film are useless and uncaring – but then again, so are the parents. The film takes place mostly in 2012 – and the annexation of Crimea, and the rising tensions with Ukraine, play out in the background – on news reports, and TV – where they go half listened to or ignored. On one side there is an increasingly intolerant religious beliefs being forced down upon people, and on another side there is status and social climbing. All of these are contributing factor when a child goes missing.

 

That child is Alyosha, and his parents Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and Boris (Aleksey Rozin) are the main characters in the film. Their marriage is all but over when the film begins – they’re trying to sell their apartment, and cannot wait to move on with their lives apart from each other. She’s found an older, richer boyfriend, and wants to move up the social ladder. He’s found a younger, more docile woman, who he has already got pregnant. They argue – loudly – because neither one of them want to take Alyosha – he’d be an inconvenience to them in their new lives, and would just get in the way. Zhenya is openly cruel to her son – saying he cries all the time to strangers looking at the apartment. IF Boris talks with him at all, we don’t see it. Alyosha knows very well he’s not wanted. When he does go missing, neither of his parents notice for two days – they’re busy off in their new lives, and forget about their old one. The police are no help at all, so they reach out to a group of civilian volunteers, who conduct the investigation themselves. This involves a lot of searches of cold apartment buildings, the surrounding forest, and an abandoned Soviet facility that has fallen into disrepair.

 

When the film opens, you think that both Zhenya and Boris are monsters – and to be honest, my opinion of them didn’t really grow more favorable throughout the film. Yet, what Zvyagintsev and his actors have done is to make more human throughout the film. The film doesn’t forgive their actions – but it does show how perhaps they became the people they have become. Boris works for a tech firm, in which he will be fired if anyone discovers he has had a divorce, so he is hoping that a quick divorce, and replacement of one wife and child with another will help. Zhenya is rarely without her phone, and takes many selfies throughout the film (she is hardly alone), and is in a world in which a woman’s primary economic power is still her body – which she uses for own security with her new partner, a rich, lonely man who tags along after her. When we meet her mother (played by Natalya Potapova in a memorable one scene performance), we understand even more why she married Boris in the first place.

 

Loveless is a heavy film – it is an emotional gut punch at times, including one of the most unforgettable shots of the year, where we see just how much Alyosha knows about his parents. It doesn’t get lighter throughout the film (there is only one minor moment of humor - a conversation about a fake wife Boris has with a co-worker). The rest of the film is a document of suffering – much like Leviathan was – and how easy it is for that suffering to go unnoticed, lessons unlearned, and for people to go back to their lives. The end of the film doesn’t off much in the way of way of hope for the future, or that anyone learned from the past. It is a film that once again confirms just how good Zvyagintsev is as a filmmaker – he’s one of the best around at combining the personal and the politic – with devastating results.

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Movie Review: Mute

Mute * ½ / *****

Directed by: Duncan Jones.

Written by: Michael Robert Johnson & Duncan Jones.

Starring: Alexander Skarsgård (Leo Beiler), Paul Rudd (Cactus Bill), Justin Theroux (Duck Teddington), Seyneb Saleh (Naadirah), Gilbert Owuor (Maksim), Robert Sheehan (Luba), Nikki Lamborn (Rhonna), Noel Clarke (Stuart), Daniel Fathers (Sgt. Robert Kloskowski), Florence Kasumba (Tanya), Sam Rockwell (Sam Bell).

 

Director Duncan Jones has apparently been working on Mute since before his first film – Moon (2009) – was even an idea in his head. The film is said to be connected to that one – a spiritual sequel of sorts, set in the same universe, but with completely different characters, etc. It’s odd than that for as long as Jones has been thinking about Mute that the films feels as disjointed as it does. Jones is clearly influenced by Blade Runner – as many sci fi directors are – and it shows in the production design and costumes - although the aesthetic of this film feels a little off – too bright, not dirty enough. This is a noir story in a future setting, but neither of those things seem particularly well thought through here.

 

The film opens with our hero as a child (as many do) – as Leo (who will grow up to be Alexander Skarsgaard) gets into an accident, and his Amish parents refuse the surgery that would have given him the ability to speak. Flash forward 30 years, and he still cannot speak, and now works as a bartender in a strip club in Berlin, where he is dating a waitress, Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh). The two clearly love each other, but she’s hiding something, and then goes missing, prompting Leo to go searching for her.

 

We have a feeling from the start that somehow this is all going to connect with the other story strain Jones is setting up – between American surgeons Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd) and Duck (Justin Theroux), trying hard to be a version of Trapper John and Hawkeye from Robert Altman’s MASH. They are doctors in hiding – there is talk about Americans needing Visas, and turning those who went AWOL in, but it isn’t explained very clearly. The two are charming, but undeniably sleazy – and Cactus Bill is also clearly hiding something – perhaps having to do with his daughter, who he brings to a variety of non-appropriate locations.

 

I don’t know that Jones ever really finds the right tone for the film, and he clearly never finds the right pace for it. The film runs over two hours, but it takes almost half that time before anything actually happens in the film. Skarsgaard is not well served by the screenplay – he is actually quite good in the early scenes, where he is able to communicate how love struck with Naadirah he is simply by the look in his eyes, but he’s less successful as his character has descend into hell, like all noir heroes do, to find out what the truth. Rudd is far better as Cactus Bill, leaning in to his sleazy side, and using his natural charm to get you to like him, even as you know he’s a slime ball. Theroux’s Duck is less successful – he’s just slimy from the start, and I don’t think the revelations that come out about him – and his true motivations – do much except to leave a bad taste in your mouth, as they feel cheap and exploitive.

 

Jones, it must be said, is clearly a talented filmmaker. Moon remains one of the most interesting sci fi films of the 21^st Century – a film that grows in your mind after it ends, and keeps growing, and his mainstream debut afterwards – Source Code – is as good as studio sci fi normally gets. Here though, it almost seems like he was blinded to the stories flaws, and never really thought through how to make this story – or this world – really work. Everything feels patched together, perhaps interesting ideas in isolation, but they never really come together into anything more.

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Movie Review: Les Affames

Les affamés *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Robin Aubert.

Written by: Robin Aubert.

Starring: Marc-André Grondin (Bonin), Monia Chokri (Tania), Charlotte St-Martin (Zoé), Micheline Lanctôt (Pauline), Marie-Ginette Guay (Thérèse), Brigitte Poupart (Céline), Édouard Tremblay-Grenier (Ti-Cul), Luc Proulx (Réal), Didier Lucien (Vézina), Robert Brouillette (Paco), Martin Héroux (Demers), Patrick Hivon (Race driver).

 

I am constantly surprised by how durable the zombie genre is – how new directors find new ways of exploring the genre, and finding new notes to hit. I don’t necessarily think that Robin Aubert’s Les Affames (The Ravenous) is completely new or different, but I do think he is trying something interesting with the film that marks it as different from most of the Night of the Living Dead (or now The Walking Dead) clones out there.

 

The film takes place in the Northern Quebec countryside, and spends a long time bringing together its cast of characters. When the film opens, the zombie apocalypse has already began, and the film makes no effort to try and explain what happened or why. It also doesn’t waste any time explaining the “rules” of this particular zombie outbreak, because they are the same as every other one we’ve seen in the past 50 years – you get bit, you’re turning into a zombie, it’s only a matter of time.

 

There are a few things that make the zombies in Aubert’s film different from most. Like all right minded people out there, he knows zombies move slowly, but here they are quite the unthinking, unfeeling killing machines we have normally seen. There is something about them that remains at least somewhat human – when you kill them, they do in fact cry out in pain, which is somewhat different. They also seem to cling to some semblance of their former lives – one of the most haunting moments comes with the realization that they are building some kind of shrine out of their old belongings – chairs, toys, etc. They may no longer be “human” – but what are they?

 

Gradually we get to know the characters – including self-confessed nerd Bonin (Marc-Andre Grondin), who is somewhat lonely and regretful that he never had a family of his own in his life – aside from his mother, who is still around. There is Tania (Monia Chokri), who has found her way to this small town, clinging to her accordion – the one thing she has from her old life. The two form some sort of weird family unit along with little Zoe – an orphan who is there as well. There are more of course – a business woman realizing she has lived her life the way she was meant to, not the way she wanted, and a strange pair – an older man, and teenage boy, both of whom made the perhaps fatal flaw of not killing their turned families soon enough.

 

As with all zombie stories, Aubert is more interested in the living than the living dead – and using the genre to explore that. The characters in Les Affames are more downbeat and introspective than most. They do eventually decide to try and leave the ravaged small town countryside for the city – reckoning that the government would be active there (just one of many, small moments that imply a particular hostility between rural and urban areas in Quebec in particular – but also there in wider context as well).

 

We know where the story is going – and it doesn’t disappoint. There is plenty of bloodshed in the film, although tellingly, Aubert lets some of the more major events happen off-screen – we see what leads up to them, or the come down, but not necessarily the act itself. The end of the film, in its way, is both heartbreaking, and somewhat affirming. All is not lost yet.

 

I don’t think Les Affames truly breaks new ground in the zombie genre – but it doesn’t enough interesting stuff that it should be a zombie film on your radar. For those (like me) who eventually gave up on The Walking Dead because of its seemingly limitless nihilism, Les Affames offers something refreshingly different.

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Movie Review: The Final Year

The Final Year *** / *****

Directed by: Greg Barker.

 

I cannot help but wonder if The Final Year – a well-made documentary, that follows around Barack Obama and a few members of his foreign policy team during their final year in office would be as good as it is if Hillary Clinton had won the election in 2016 – as clearly everyone in this movie thought she was going to. The film has back stage access to the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry, UN Ambassador Samantha Power and speechwriter/advisor Ben Rhodes – and occasionally Obama himself – as they go about their work, You cannot say that any of them are completely unguarded – they know a camera is there after all, and they choose their words wisely, but they all seem less scripted than when you see them at press conferences and the like. The filmmaker, Greg Barker, clearly likes all of the people he’s making the documentary about – and more importantly, agrees with them. Had Clinton won, and like-minded people took over the roles, than The Final Year may have look like nothing more than idol worship.

 

But of course, Clinton didn’t win – Donald Trump did – and so the movie, unintentionally, captures something else entirely. There are the earlier moments in the film – when everyone is so sure Trump is going to lose, where Rhodes seems almost smug about the possibility of a Trump presidency – he laughs a little. If Kerry and particularly Powers seem like idealists, Rhodes never quite does – he believes in everything he’s doing of course, but he’s more a political animal. This gets him in trouble early in the film, when a New York Magazine profile about him comes out, and publishes a few choice quotes – in particular ones where he basically calls the Washington press corps stupid. As the film progresses – particularly as it gets to election night – it’s more like watching a slow moving car crash that they didn’t see coming. In the section in the months after the election, everyone seems to be a daze – not quite believing what has happened.

 

We’ve seen this in a few documentaries now of course. I saw it in Get Me Roger Stone, about the former Trump adviser as he celebrates the victory and 11/8/16, which documented people on all sides during election day, and even in the new Gloria Allred documentary Seeing Allred. But to see it from the inside of the Obama administration (or as inside as we’re likely to see) is different.

 

Overall, the film itself is interesting in showing how this sort of diplomacy works – the hard work someone like Kerry has to do in order to negotiate all the deals he did in the last year, or how hard Powers has to fight for her causes in the face of indifference and politics, or how Rhodes has to write the speeches, knowing Obama may change them. It’s interesting to see Obama himself on those stops, and interacting with the people. The film is, in essence, showing us how all of this is supposed to work. What makes it interesting is, of course, that Trump has basically thrown all this out the window – he does whatever he wants, and chaos has reigned during his year in office – no one quite knowing what’s going to happen day-to-day. It makes the film a little more depressing than probably intended – even if you don’t agree with what Obama and his team were doing, because it at least showed them as functional people working towards a common goal. I don’t know what the hell a similar movie about Trump’s first year would look like – but it wouldn’t be this.

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