Very similar to The Talented Mr. Ripley, but without any of the care, build, patience, intelligence, or style of that flick. In Ripley, we are wary of yet sympathetic to Tom (Matt Damon), the working class nobody who insinuates himself into the shine of the rich and beautiful. When the tanned god Dickie (Jude Law) casts him aside, we feel for Tom. We don’t endorse the sociopath’s actions, but as Tom grows closer to capture, we guiltily root for him. When Tom’s desires draw him into greater malfeasance, against our judgment, we thrill to see if he will actually get away with it.
Here, our new Tom Ripley is Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a modern day loser at Oxford who gloms on to his own Dickie, Felix (Jacob Elordi), a rich kid whose monied and titled family lives in a castle on Saltburn estate. After ingratiating himself with Felix, Oliver is invited to Saltburn where he negotiates Felix’s ridiculous caricature of an upper-class family, his own increasing desire for Felix, and the fact that he is disposable to these people when, like Ripley, he is trying to make himself indispensable.
Unlike Tom, however, we don’t root or care for Oliver. He’s a furtive creep. Even when he overhears the rich kids at school or Felix’s family malign him, our natural pang of sympathy immediately gives way to caution. The guy smells of wrong from the get-go and because of it, we have no skin in the game, either about Oliver’s fate or the cartoon characters around him.
What follows is a wretched flick infatuated with its own provocativeness. It’s not very funny, though it is labeled a black comedy. It’s not very edgy, though it is sexually perverse. It’s not very smart, unless rich people one level removed from The Howells on Gilligan’s Island saying grotesque things is your idea of smart. In Ripley, the rich were dazzling. Any condescension was barely perceptible, and accordingly, all the more cutting to Tom. You can see why Tom wants in and how much it stings. Here, Oliver yearns for a world populated by dolts and cretins, so, who cares?
The picture is also repetitive in the extreme. Basically, every scene is Oliver made uncomfortable until he becomes morose. When Oliver gets a win, another cliché rattling his/her jewelry reminds him for the umpteenth time that HE DOES NOT BELONG.
After running the tired plot into a very tight and boring corner, the end lapses into inanity (SPOILER: Oliver kills them all in a manner a mall cop would suss out as foul play inside of a minute; apparently, the British police force is trained by Magilla Gorilla).
But no one is on to Oliver because it’s a shit screenplay so far up its own ass that it need not deign to generate interest, draw characters, or construct a sensible narrative.
The near-end, where we flashback to Oliver’s machinations previously hidden to us, ala’ M. Night Shymalan, is such a clumsy and pathetic attempt at bringing order to this mess I almost felt for the creator.
But then, I realized Saltburn is from the writer director of Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell), another infantile, impossible crapfest which got the critics to swooning.
When I saw the preview for Alexander Payne’s latest picture, I thought, “Okay. Older father figure. Private New England boys school. Some Christmas break bonding. Not the Baird school, but Barton. It’s Scent of a Woman, with a couple of tweaks.” I was right and also very wrong.
Now, I like Scent of a Woman. It’s occasionally moving, impressively manipulative, and entertaining as hell. Chris O’Donnell is vulnerable and empathetic. And even in a small part, a young Phillip Seymour Hoffman (poor George, “sitting in Big Daddy’s pocket”) resonates.
But the picture is near-obliterated by Al Pacino’s roar and Martin Brest’s complete lack of restraint. Hey, folks, not only are we going on a last hurrah with a blind depressive and his young charge, but let’s make the blind depressive a) do a flawless tango with a complete stranger; 2) have such a “fix-is-in” fight with his family that you feel for the bad guy, Bradley Whitford, the sneeriest of nephews; and 3) drive a race car in the Big Apple!
Hoo-ah!!!!!!
Still, like a Whopper Jr., the flick delights until the inevitable dyspepsia.
Now, the differences. First, without Pacino sucking up all the oxygen, The Holdovers has room not only for a Paul Giamatti as a strict, sneakily populist professor, and newcomer Dominic Sessa, the poor rich boy abandoned to staying over at school for the holidays under Giamatti’s thumb, but Da’Vine Joy Randolph, the school’s cook, who must endure the Christmas break and her own recent tragedy. I can’t commend her performance enough – restrained, clever, surprising, and then heartrending without a hint of stereotypical sass and easy schmaltz. Her sharing of the ins-and-outs of The Newlywed Game with Giamatti is primo.
But Pacino could not have allowed it. There was simply no space.
Second, Giamatti and Sessa actually grow, and bond, primarily through conversation, revealing a beautifully rendered mutually protective nature. Whereas, Pacino and poor O’Donnell simply pinged from situation to situation, each increasingly absurd, because they were confronted with two legitimate threats.
Third, again, whereas the scorching flames from Pacino’s engine disallowed any real growth, space or time for others, Payne depicts important interplay between or including secondary characters. The heartbreak and frustration of a bullied kid and his mitten choked me up, and after another poor holdover from Korea breaks from homesickness in the middle of the night and is comforted by Sessa, the job was nearly finished. Indeed, the kids in The Holdovers run the gamut – the dumb bully is there, but so too the clueless but tender-hearted jock and the poor youngsters. In Scent, with the exception of O’Donnell, every kid at Baird seemed to be some form of generic, shit heel carnivore or mere prey. Here, Payne delves a little deeper and produces some truly poignant moments.
Last, Pacino had one change to make, from bigger-than-life suicidal howler to a man who wants to live for himself and others. Conversely, Giamatti is seemingly a martinet, but in fact, turns out to be multi-layered. Rather than merely having Giamatti overcome his condescending and authoritarian nature, writer David Hemingson explores several aspects of his personality and past, all of which fill in the puzzle. And Sessa isn’t the only contributor to his growth, which fleshes him out even more fully,
The end of the film is a bit of a surrender to Scent’s need for big dramatic closure, and in particular, one Giamatti zinger is off-kilter and completely out of character. But the sin is venial.
If they are still holding the Academy Awards, I see a slew of nominations, and if you can get some juicy early odds on Da’Vine Joy Randolph for supporting actress, go heavy.
The previews suggest an unrelenting, biting send-up of the idiocy of the so-called black experience as represented in the arts. On that front, the film delivers, though with a stiletto rather than a cleaver. But while the social satire of the film is paramount in its marketing, in presentation, the picture is a sweet and moving story about a family whipsawed by tragedy. It is not lost on the viewer that the dramedy is refreshingly devoid of the stereotypes punctured by the picture. Writer-director Cord Jefferson practices what he preaches, delivering on the traditional at the expense of a caricature he effectively obliterates.
We meet Monk (Jeffrey Wright), a college professor and author in California, as he is confronted by an entitled white undergrad who objects to his having written the title of a Flannery O’Connell short story on the blackboard. Monk explains that as a black man, if he can get over the word that shall not be said, surely, so can she. Our Precious, however, stands in for every vapid girlchild who haunts the modern university, likely cheering for Hamas though they would throw her and her heightened sensibilities off the nearest roof. So she complains. Monk is summarily placed on sabbatical and forced to reunite with his upper middle class family back in Massachusetts and, as with all “going home” movies, things get messy.
Monk is also going through a professional slump, his books fewer and farther between, and not very popular. While attending a book fair, he notices the crowds at another black writer’s (Issa Rae) event, and when she reads a passage from her novel, a tale of domestic hardship told in the patois of the street (“Yo, Sharonda! Girl, you be pregnant again?”), Monk winces. The crowd, however, swoons and applauds the bravery, grit and authenticity.
Furious, Monk writes his own ghetto tale, My Pafology, as a joke and a rebuke. He also creates a pseudonym, and soon, the big publishing houses and Hollywood come calling. He is stunned yet seduced, and in aid of his scam, must adopt the mien of the inner city thug, a character so “real” that he cannot make public appearances because, of course, he is wanted by the law. He negotiates his double life in the midst of rapprochement with his family, with varying levels of success.
I laughed out loud in the theater at least a dozen times, and was thoroughly amused throughout. No one is unscathed, and nothing feels cheap or gratuitous. Most jibes are nuanced, and when Rae and Monk finally go at it, there is no dawning, no lesson. Just an insoluble conundrum that thankfully is not laid at the feet of whitey or oppression or the usual suspects that are part of the grievance mill Jefferson has in his crosshairs.
The script crackles. Not only in Monk’s hilarious attempts at playing street, but in the familial slings and arrows between Monk and his siblings and the interplay between Monk and his colleagues. When Monk is solicited by a tony literature award contest to be one of the judges, the courter explains that they needed to add some diversity to the panel. Monk responds, “I’m honored you’d choose me out of all the black writers you could go to for fear of being called racist” to which he receives the oblivious reply, “Yeah. You’re very welcome.”
If it has any flaws, it may be a bit top-heavy on family melodrama over the social satire. But it’s one of best movies of the year.
Obviously, I am overwhelmingly pleased to see a three hour film about a historical figure (and to think, Ridley Scott’s next picture is … Napoleon!) Just the other night, I was having drinks with younger colleagues (I am the last year of the baby boom, I estimate that these folks are late 20s), who were excited to see the movie. I took a pull from my pipe and asked them, “what do you know about Oppenheimer?“ One answered, “the atomic bomb.“ Then I thumbed my tweed jacket and said, “what else do you know about Oppenheimer?“ Neither knew anything further, which makes sense. Yet due to the cachet of Christopher Nolan and the buzz about the film, they couldn’t wait to go see it. One was teaming it up with Barbie for a Barbenheimer, which sounds both intriguing and daunting. But to each their own.
They should not be disappointed. Nolan’s first two acts are so fully realized and lovingly shot, they are nothing less than stunning. And his narrative-hopping from time period to time period is not just for show. Nolan captures the important vignettes that underscore what you will see later. His rendition of the first atomic test is gripping and fraught. I was on the edge of my seat knowing full well that for the denizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was not a good day.
Alas, the third act is a bit clunky. In the end, a bureaucratic and personal feud between Oppenheimer and Robert Downey, Jr. eclipses some of the larger themes of the picture. It just struck me as a little bit beneath what preceded it, as if Oppenheimer’s undoing stemmed from a mere misunderstanding or snit.
I read the book upon which the film was premised, American Prometheus, years ago (and had the honor of being taught a course entitled “Nuclear War Crises” by the book’s co-author, Martin Sherwin). The real Oppenheimer was a bit of a mess. His views on the efficacy, wisdom and impact of the bomb matured, but also wavered, and he could speak with confident enthusiasm and also wary trepidation. He could be thoughtful and also, cooly lethal (he once rejected a poisoning scheme with, “I think we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men, since there is no doubt that the actual number affected will, because of non-uniform distribution, be much smaller than this”).
Cillian Murphy does a beautiful job of working it out in front of us with an internal, searching performance. We see him struggle, not by soliloquy, but by discussion and quiet deduction. Murphy is, rightfully, a lock for best actor (if the Oscars are still a thing next year).
Murphy is ably complemented by Emily Blunt (wife), Florence Pugh (lover), Matt Damon (the glue guy, still Hollywood’s best and least heralded actor, as General Groves), and a slew of others, all solid (Josh Hartnett? Yes, Josh Hartnett has grown up) and of whom you invariably remark, “Damn. Where have I seen him?”
As Oppenheimer’s bureaucratic nemesis, Downey Jr. crackles, though, as mentioned, he is seminal to the weakest aspect of the movie.
Talky, meticulous, massive, yet chock full of the little things, Nolan has made a grand, intelligent epic. I hope it spawns more to come.
When Todd Field’s picture was lauded and criticized by conservatives and liberals alike, I knew it had to be different in a fruitful way. For some, the film is a clear and direct rebuke of privilege and abuse of power (“The film does tell its story in an elliptical, at times confounding way, but that stylistic choice shouldn’t be mistaken for moral indecision”). For others, the director is an apologist (“Field views identity politics as a zero-sum game that seeks to destroy true art”). It’s a shame it took me so long to see it, because no matter where you land, the film is a masterpiece, the best picture of last year.
Strangely, I was reminded of Apple TV’s foray into prestige television, The Morning Show, the first season of which delved deeply into the #MeToo movement and tackled it with nuance and intelligence – until the end, when the show naturally had to bow to more conventional norms, transforming a multi-layered, canny drama into a chest thumping lecture that naturally relegated women to perpetual victims in order to “celebrate“ them. But 90% of that show is grand entertainment that eschews the easy answers and bumper sticker mentality so explicit in drama “ripped from the headlines.”
Field is under no such pressure or expectation here, and the world he portrays could not be further from the vacuous wasteland of network television. His protagonist, Lydia Tár, is a celebrated orchestra conductor and scholar in the mold of Leonard Bernstein. She is kinetic, committed, urbane and refreshingly unburdened by the fetishization of status and injury so prevalent in modern times. When Tár guest lectures at Juilliard and a student explains to her that he is uncomfortable with the music of Bach given the composer’s status (“Nowadays, white, male, cis composers—just not my thing”), she responds, “Don’t be so eager to be offended. The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity.” The exchange is tense, edifying and epitomizes the generational clash of substance versus fad.
Soon enough, the incident is released to social media, edited to make Tár look as bad as possible, and she must confront the fallout.
Comparatively, it is the least of her concerns. Because in the midst of what should be a minor kerfuffle, a former student kills herself, one with whom Tár had a romantic relationship and then subsequently blackballed. Then, Tár withholds a coveted elevation from her primary assistant, another woman with whom it appears Tar (and maybe the deceased) had been intimate. Soon, all sorts of compromising texts and emails are released. Litigation naturally follows. Dangerously, Tár becomes infatuated with a third young woman, a brilliant young Russian cellist, who she favors with opportunity, losing her the support of her musicians and her wife, Sharon, who is also her concertmaster. Anybody mildly acquainted with the times can see what’s going to happen, except for Tár, who while intensely controlling, is also unsurprisingly unsophisticated (she asks the assistant to delete all of the emails to and from the deceased student, thinking, “well, that’s that!”) What follows is near horror film, as Tár is tormented by omens and assaults both real and possibly imagined.
Her fall is inevitable and painful. In the telling, we are confronted with a person of brilliance who is now being held to account for the excessive exercise of her own power. And while the viewer recognizes the inappropriate nature of what Tár has done, this is not a comeuppance or morality play. Nor is it an expose’ on the indiscriminate butchery of cancel culture.
Rather, the film is a case study of a destroyed career from forces within and without in the context of our modern, rather fevered times, and nobody gets off easy. The student at Juilliard is, of course, silly to be under the compulsion of such a limited worldview, but that is what young people do. Field smartly makes him attractive, a sort of wounded fawn (he clearly has some kind of physical tic as he repeatedly taps his leg in nervousness). Is Tár abusing a weakling? Or is she exactly the kind of person you want your child to learn from? Yes, she pushed back, but in the doing so, there is more caring – for the art and for the student – than derision or triumph. She is trying to get through to him, lest he imperil his own education and love of music in service of a dunce’s worldview. It is not mere coincidence that when he is rebutted by Tár, he casts a misogynistic slur. Old school in the young belly.
Similarly, the student who commits suicide was mentally shaky, as reflected in her increasingly hysterical email and text missives, while the current assistant is also star-struck and needy, always spookily, jealously hovering. Certainly, with intent or not, Tár takes advantage. Not that it would be hard. Dazzled, would-be acolytes would naturally be drawn to greatness. Hell, old Baby Boomers like Filmvetter are equally susceptible.
But in current discourse, the power imbalance is such that Tár has impermissibly utilized her privilege in a manner that is blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah. We’ve all undergone the training and endured the mantras. Like Miranda warnings, they need not be recited here.
Field is clearly interested in more. For example, are individuals who are soft naturally drawn to Tar for less emotional reasons? In the film, these individuals have absolutely no problem in the exchange as long as they are receiving favor. When it is withdrawn, they crumple. And strike. And let there be no doubt, Field certifies the fact of the bargains. In a break-up scene with Sharon (who is also portrayed as more fragile than Tár: when we meet her, she thinks she’s having a heart attack), the latter states that she always explicitly understood the quid pro quo, and only takes offense when Tár violates the negotiated terms of their relationship regarding other women.
Or, does brilliance excuse excess? I mean, fame often does, and Tár is famous, if only in the rarified circles of the classical music community. But she is also demonstrably and uniquely talented, what one might call an international treasure. The powerful and gifted don’t get a pass, for sure, but the loss of her gift is nothing to be sneezed at. And will Tár’s contributions be tarnished in history, like those of Bach, because of her personal failings? Whither the output of so many artists who turned out to lechers, perverts and worse? Must one separate the work from the creator? Isn’t the alternative an obliterative Manichean mindset that fuels the dip-shittery of fundamentalists, right and left? Or must we do everything in our power to exorcise Chinatown from our artistic memory because of the criminality of its creator so as to warn other miscreants of the consequences? And oh, how times have changed!
It’s not just the driven control of her career and others that damns Tár. Field also shows her desire for intimacy, her insistence that the beauty of wanting and being wanted can be replicated and perpetual, and the fear that soon it may not be so, as seminal to her fall. When Tár, who clearly lusts after the new ingenue both physically and artistically, is left in the hotel hallway to dine alone as the cellist goes to meet a young man, your heart almost breaks.
Blanchett is a wonder, confidently grounded yet hunted and haunted, not only by encroaching mores, but her desire for unfettered autonomy. Field portrays her as beset at all sides, and Blanchett gives the performance of a generation (in three different languages, I might add).
A meticulous, thought-provoking modern tragedy, which Paul Thomas Anderson summed up beautifully: “Every detail matters in this film. Nothing is not deliberate or full of intention. It’s directed with such perfectly controlled mayhem and glee by Todd, it’s really hard not to drool as another director. He made a film which for some years was considered a very dirty word, he made an art film. But it’s art that’s not fussy or pretentious. Just razor-sharp, pitch black, and hilarious. A very focused mirror held up to some of the worst of our human behaviors. It’s also a blast.”
In a year when Andrew Dominik thudded with a Hollywood fable, Blonde, Damian Chazelle, who was on a three picture heater for the ages (Whiplash, La La Land, First Man – yes, people, that’s three 5 star pictures), also crashed and burned, bigly and badly. But where you can see that Dominik’s failure was easier to hide in the making, Chazelle’s epic expanse of shit seems so obviously terrible in its awful construction that you hold everyone involved responsible, for any of them could and should have struck Chazelle hard across his face and said, “What the fuck are you thinking!”
The film, set in Hollywood in the silent to sound era, mistakes bloat as grandeur, Looney Tunes-level excess as glory, and crassness as knowing cynicism. Chazelle’s monstrosity has nothing to say or offer though what the picture does provide is a lot, and loudly. Then, unforgivably, it closes with paeans to the magic of the movies, gaudy testaments as they live in the hearts and hearths of the little people. Chazelle has the audacity to attempt to transform two sybaritic simps (up and coming ingenue from the wrong side of the tracks Margot Robbie and drunken leading wreck Brad Pitt, who fared poorly from the silent to the talkie) into the nostalgic wreckage of TinselTown. And if that wasn’t enough, a racial parable is tacked on in the story of a jazz trumpeter who crosses over to the screen (Jovan Adepo). He is given just enough of a story to feel both insufficient and patronizing.
The movie is not a takedown of old Hollywood or an homage or even a madcap celebration of the hedonistic heyday. It’s just a boring, overlong freight train that supplants story and motivation for one spectacle after another, mainly in distractingly dizzying and ostentatious tracking shots. Then, after treating the characters as little more than CGI, they are destroyed amidst an ill-considered lecture about the perils of fame, the fakeness of it all, and the fact that Hollywood, as a Hedda Hopper type (Jean Smart) relays to Pitt, “is bigger than you.” But, she promises, you will … live on … forevah, on celluloid, “with angels and ghosts.”
Retch.
The performances are necessarily cartoons. Robbie, in particular, is obscenely over-the-top and nearly abused. As I said, you don’t care about her, you don’t care about anyone. Unless you care about Wile E. Coyote.
So bad you feel a little sick at the end, following a grotesque foray into the truly seamy underbelly of the town (think Freaks-meets-Carnival of Souls).
This was all done better by the Coens inBarton Fink and a heckuva lot better in Hail, Caesar!
Franklin Schaffner’s (Patton) big-budget adventure/escape flick is competent, professional, well-acted (even if Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman have no interest in playing French people) and occasionally imaginative, particularly McQueen’s dream sequences as he fights solitary confinement and near-starvation. McQueen is the title character, sent to French Guiana for killing a pimp, where he meets the bespectacled Hoffman, a forger whose only protection is the ability to bribe officials. Their relationship deepens as McQueen, the Cooler King of The Great Escape, naturally attempts escape again and again here.
You may like the flick or not, but it is noteworthy for one scene, below. That crocodile has its snout wired shut and sure, it is drugged to the gills, but those are two massively bankable stars messing with a real crocodile. Nuts!
Perfectly pleasant, adept, and without a moment of originality, a very nice 2 hours delving into Michael Jordan and his first sneaker contract. You will likely enjoy the movie, and then you’ll never think about it again.
Of note is the easy charm of Ben Affleck as Nike founder Phil Knight, the dogged everyman turn by Matt Damon playing Nike basketball scout Sonny Vaccaro, the wry Jason Bateman (Nike Marketing manager Rob Strasser), and the steely resolve of Viola Davis playing Michael Jordan’s mother. All give superb, professional, wholly unchallenging turns that complement both each other and Alex Converey’s tight, predictable script. Marlon Wayans playing Jordan coach and confidante George Raveling also contributes in a poignant scene where he advises Vaccaro on how to approach the budding star.
On the minus side, this is a movie about signing a basketball player to a shoe deal, and the film doesn’t really find anything particularly insightful about this mundane negotiation, other than Damon’s dawning that Jordan will be a God amongst men. So godly is His Airness that while he is present, inexplicably, we only see the back of his head. Jordan never speaks, which both reinforces the picture’s theme that he is near-deity and serves as a tremendous cop-out and missed opportunity.
I mean, don’t we all want to know what God thinks when negotiating a shoe deal?
Mind you, the script is larded with b.s. Nike’s underdog status in the competition to sign Jordan is poppycock, as is the fact that his agent David Falk (a hilariously entertaining Chris Messina) was hostile to the deal. The dollar amount the young upstart company was allotted to go after Jordan is also understated by half. And Vaccaro never made the decision to breach negotiating etiquette by going over Falk’s head to visit Jordan’s parents in North Carolina, a fiction seminal to the movie.
The mushy camaraderie of this band of Nike visionaries may also have been a bit much. Worse, the truth may have made for a more interesting picture. Per Slate, “Vaccaro, as might be expected, disputes all these other versions of events robustly, saying “Phil Knight’s lying, Michael’s lying more than Phil, and Raveling is insane. All three of them need to destroy me to live happily ever after. Everyone’s trying to rewrite history. It goes beyond Jordan. I am the savior of Nike.’ It seems that Vaccaro, far from being the easygoing, collegial guy the film depicts, had a tendency to burn bridges. He fell out with Raveling in 1991 and was fired by Nike without explanation that same year.’” Now, that’s a guy I want to see a movie about, not the milk-and-cookies, faux cynical but really schmaltzo character Damon cooks up.
Okay. It’s not a documentary – enough of my curmudgeonly nitpicking. There is certainly greater appeal here for others. When I watched Winning Time on HBO – the laughably ridiculous rendition of the Lakers ascent in the late 70s/early 80s at the advent of Magic Johnson – it was hard to stifle a laugh throughout, and my wife and daughter joined in. But they also liked the series more than me. It was set in a milieu and about a subject they knew nothing about and they were more than happy to enjoy it without worrying about accuracy or any hackneyed presentations. Here too, though she found if “Hallmarky,” my daughter dug Air and noted that she didn’t really know much about any of it before seeing the movie.
Also, if you pine for all things 80s, from Cyndi Lauper to Tecmo Bowl to skateboards, run, don’t moonwalk, to Amazon Prime, because this thing is loaded with “Let’s Get Physical” Reagan-era montages.
Treacle and cornpone to its very core, an exercise in nostalgic tedium. Reese Witherspoon loved the book, a story of murder and mystery and coming of age in the swamps of a North Carolina small town. So the movie got made, in exactly the vein and manner of this vacuous and generic interview with the producer.
Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Under the Banner of Heaven) is Kaya, one of a kabillion kids living in the marsh with her abusive father and helpless mother. Soon, the mother ups and leaves (Kaya yells “Mommy, Mommy” but as is the style in this type of Southern gothic turdpile, Mom sleepwalks down the misty driveway, never looking back). Kaya’s siblings soon follow (one of whom basically tells 9 year old Kaya “stay low” to survive just before he abandons her). Then her father splits, and Kaya is consigned to a life alone as the spooky swamp girl. Mind you, for the rest of her life (and when we leave her, she is in her mid-twenties), not one of her siblings circles back to see if, maybe, their little sister is ok. Her serviceman brother does a perfunctory drop-in later, when she is on trial for murder, meaning he was an adult for 12 or so years and couldn’t be bothered.
The film’s version of 1960s rural poverty is to the real McCoy what the Disney ride is to actual pirates in the Caribbean. You soon suspect the swamp girl is derided by the locals not for her foreign and mysterious ways, or any class condescension, but rather, for her stunning cheekbones, luminous skin, and pearly white teeth.
The entire feel is inauthentic, as if brought to you by Loew’s or Home Depot. The swamp feels more like a fern bar, the town like Smallville, the characters every single archetype you’ve seen before.
We even get Kaya’s ponderous voiceover telling us things we can plainly see, half Marlin Perkins, half Judy Blume.
Kaya grows up and is caught in a tepid love triangle between two disinteresting homogenous actors with the mien of reality tv star brothers who macrame.
Could this be a double murder? Oh to dream!
Sadly, no. Kaya goes on trial for the murder of only Siegfried, not Roy, and perhaps the most boring legal drama in filmic history ensues. The case is so weak, you expect the actor playing the prosecutor to turn to the camera and shrug in apology. Kaya’s defense attorney (David Strathairn) shreds all witnesses with easy politeness, stopping just short of patting them on the head at the conclusion of his cross examination.
With the verdict a foregone conclusion, the reveal (she did/did not do it!) is anticlimactic in the extreme, made worse by the filmmakers’ decision to withhold “how” she did or did not do it.
It’s all clearly too much for director Olivia Newman, who had some TV episodes on her resume’, to handle. She can’t settle in on any one aspect of the story (the disconnect between town and swamp, the thriller, the abandonment and solitude, the love stories) with any depth so we get a steamed, soggy pu pu platter of platitudinous porridge. The fact that the dull screenplay was written by Beasts of the Southern Wild co-writer Lucy Alibar is both confounding and depressing.
In the end, Kaya becomes a big star. Music swells. Crawdads sing. Cursing of Reese Witherspoon’s reading habits follows.
BJ Novak‘s black comedy nicely straddles the line between laugh-out loud funny and acerbically insightful. Ultimately, a culture class vehicle, the film also hits every one of its marks in blue and red America.
Ben Manalowitz (Novak) is a NYC writer who longs to host a hot transformative podcast, a vessel for his views of America. When we meet him, he is so hiply ironic and up his own butt, there’s not a lot to root for. But we do, because he seems adrift and in struggle for meaning. Once you get past all his posturing, he also seems decent, if weak.
Novak’s Ben reminds me of Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath in Girls, a clearly unsympathetic protagonist shown in an unflattering light who still manages to elicit empathy. Novak skewers himself mercilessly (shout out to John Mayer, whose one scene with Novak is a hilarious, ostentatious riff between two “bro’s” that introduces Ben and what he is about with economical precision), but stops short of the cartoonish, offering a balanced portrayal of a narcissistic guy with bite-sized intellectual pretensions who also wants to be a good dude.
When Ben gets a call from a distraught man in Texas telling him that his sister and Ben’s girlfriend Abilene is dead, it takes Ben a minute to realize that she was just one of his many occasional hookups, one who must have told her family that he was her steady boyfriend back in the city. Ben takes an extra beat to see a trip to Texas for Abilene’s funeral as an opportunity to immerse himself in some of the America he waxes so philosophically about. Upon arrival, a hot podcast is born.
Ben is the quintessential fish-out-of-water, and in lesser hands, the film would have had little to say about the cultural divide while maximizing the pratfalls and faux pas of a NYC Jew in shitkicker county. Or, the picture would have jettisoned the funny for deep intonement about the state of our current national fracture, such as it is.
Novak smartly balances both elements while crafting a genuine connection he makes with Abilene’s family. A scene where Ben attends a rodeo is gut-busting, another where he interviews Abilene’s record producer (an impressively soulful Ashton Kutcher) is thought-provoking and intelligent, and the deeper his dive into fly-over country, the funnier and more meaningful the picture becomes. Novak takes hard, amusing, and accurate shots at everyone’s station with a humility that elevates the movie.
The picture suffers just a bit at the end from repetition (a little Ashton Kutcher goes a long way) and a discordant, implausible cherry on the top, but no matter. Very sharp, very tight, highly recommended.
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