Tag: Amy Adams

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CRITICS NIX NETFLIX HICKS! Hillbilly Elegy is a Depressing Mess

Hi, my name’s Chris, and I’m an authentic hillbilly. I grew up on a farm in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee. I watched Hillbilly Elegy on Netflix so you don’t have to.

The film is based on the book by J. D. Vance, which is subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. The book became a bestseller during the run-up to the 2016 election, and became a political touchstone for pundits trying to explain the appeal of He Who Must Not Be Named to the white, rural voters who put the Orange Menace in the White House and the country on what we now know was the road to ruin.

The story begins in Jackson, Kentucky, in 1997, with a tinny voice on the radio declaring: “In an age of prosperity, the American dream seems out of reach.” But here’s the thing: Vance is an Iraq War veteran and graduate of Yale Law School whose Wikipedia entry lists his occupation as “venture capitalist.” He was born into a working-class family, but he’s not exactly someone for whom the American dream was “out of reach.” He succeeded!

Haley Bennett, Gabriel Basso, and Amy Adams star in Hillbilly Elegy, based on the book by J.D. Vance

Maybe that’s why Hillbilly Elegy seems so vacant and shallow. It wants you to have sympathy for the hard lives of these characters, who are all based on Vance’s real family, but it cannot bear to turn its gaze on the deeper question begged by all the scenes of violence, drugs, and squalor — what has gone wrong here? Why are these people so screwed up?

From the start, the dialogue reveals a tin-eared writer. “Where you goin’?” asks the grizzled old redneck.

“Swimming hole,” says teenage J.D. (Owen Asztalos).

“Don’t get bit by a cottonmouth!”

The Grapes of Wrath this ain’t.

A few minutes later, J.D. is getting bullied by three local boys who hold him under the water until he almost drowns. Now this looks more like the hillbilly life I remember! Turns out, J.D. Vance isn’t even from the mountains of Kentucky — he’s from suburban Middletown, Ohio, and the actual hillbillies hate him. His grandparents moved from Kentucky to get jobs in the Ohio steel mills, which are closed now.

Glenn Close as Mamaw

There’s Mamaw (Glenn Close), J.D.’s mom Bev (Amy Adams), and sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett). A nostalgic sense of loss hangs over the family. Two generations ago, they were peasants pursuing opportunity in the big city. Now, they’re the suburban poor with nowhere else to go. Mom did well in school, but got pregnant young and found herself stuck in a cycle of failed relationships, struggling to keep food on the table for her two kids while she’s slowly being eaten away by the opioids she pops for stress. “We were all different in Middletown,” J.D.’s voiceover intones. “Something was missing. Maybe hope.”

And yet, there are no scenes in this two-hour film showing us the good things about rural life. It can be very beautiful, and the rhythms of the farm can be peaceful. Least authentically of all, not once does anyone step foot inside a church.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around grown-up J.D. (Gabriel Basso) trying to juggle career weekend at Yale with his mother’s latest addiction crisis back in Ohio. Much of the actual conflict involves Mom and Mamaw’s access to healthcare, which is the film’s most authentic and relatable aspect.

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck doesn’t shy away from the causes of his Okies’ miseries. It’s the banks that foreclose on the family farm during the Depression, the orchard owners who pay starvation wages for backbreaking work, and the thugs who beat the union organizers into submission. When Bev, fresh off an OD, is kicked out of the hospital because she doesn’t have health insurance, it’s treated as another example of her moral failure, and an inconvenience for J.D., who has to be back in New Haven, Connecticut, for a job interview at a corporate law firm the next day. The real bad guys — the pharmaceutical companies who knowingly marketed highly addictive opioids to a population who are being worked to death by rapacious capitalists — are nowhere to be seen.

Directed by Ron Howard, Hillbilly Elegy is a deeply unpleasant watch. Everyone professes that “family is the only thing that means a goddamn thing,” but they only seem to communicate by shouted insult. The cinematography is indifferent at best, except for the close-up of the heroin needle circling the toilet bowl. The pacing veers between leaden and excruciating.

But it’s the film’s attitude toward its characters that makes it truly odious. It’s always been hard to be poor, but other chroniclers of poverty, such as Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo, left you with an understanding of the systems and people who oppressed the peasants. Hillbilly Elegy‘s ideology prevents it from looking at America that deeply. J.D. saves his mom and gets the job because he’s just better than everyone else. For the people and the way of life he’s supposed to be elegizing, life sucks, and it’s all their fault.

Hillbilly Elegy is showing on Netflix.

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Film Features Film/TV

Vice

Believe it or not, this is Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice


What do you do about a problem like Dick Cheney?

The former Vice President of the United States sits at a pivot point in history. He’s the connecting link between the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. He led the team that led the United States into an ill-fated war in Iraq. He was the original architect of the War on Terror, now 17 years old and counting. How do you tell a story that huge, that complex, and that damning, to a popcorn audience in a couple of hours.

Writer/director Adam McKay starts by calling Cheney a “dirtbag,” then gets more specific from there. McKay, former head writer for Saturday Night Live and director of pop-comedy juggernauts like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, is probably the best qualified person to make a movie like this. The Big Short, McKay’s blow-by-blow of the 2008 financial crash, is told with wit, sarcasm, and a whole lot of voice over. Even as a news nerd, I felt like I came out of that film feeling both entertained and like I understood the world better.

Amy Adams (left) as Lynne Cheney.

In Vice, McKay applies the same methodology to Cheney’s life story, but the results aren’t nearly as clean cut. The story opens with Cheney (Christian Bale) getting his second DUI for driving piss drunk in a swerving Studebaker on a rural Montana road. He’s flunked out of Yale for drinking and brawling, and now he’s a lineman, drinking and brawling his way through life as a flowering dirtbag. But his wife Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams) is having none of it. In a crucial scene that will echo throughout the film, she orders her mother out of the room and dresses him down. “Did I choose the wrong man?” she hisses.

Then we cut to 9:30 a.m. on September 11, 2001. It’s the first of many time jumps in this byzantine screenplay. Cheney is the senior official at the White House while George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) is reading My Pet Goat to a room full of Florida school children. When he gives the authorization to Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) to shoot down any civilian airliners in American airspace, he does so in the President’s name. It’s a clear usurpation of authority, but when Condoleezza Rice (LisaGay Hamilton) challenges him, all it takes is one guttural growl to shut her up.

The meat of the story is Cheney’s transformation from dirtbag drunk into the consummate power player. Narrated by Jesse Plemons, whose onscreen identity becomes the setup for one of the film’s most powerful visual gags, the screenplay is anything but subtle. Bale has already won a Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy Golden Globe, and his unlikely performance as one of the great villains of American history is worth the price of admission alone. He’s surrounded by A-listers giving pitch black performances. By the time Adams starts doing Shakespeare as Lynne Cheney, you’ve probably already identified her with Lady MacBeth. Carell and Bale recreate Cheney and Rumsfeld’s creepy chemistry. LisaGay Hamilton makes an uncanny Condi Rice; Tyler Perry doesn’t really resemble Colin Powell, but he does manage to embody the former general’s conflicted countenance when he was put in the position to lie to the United Nations on the eve of the Iraq War.

This has been a season of political films, ranging from Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You on the good end to Dinesh D’Douza’s Death of a Nation way down on the other end. Like Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, Vice kind of flies apart at the end, as if the filmmaker just couldn’t quit while he was ahead. McKay’s fumble is the result of the basic problem with designing a polemic around an antihero — we’re hard wired to see the guy who gets the most close-ups as a heroic figure, even if he’s a war criminal who set his country on a path of ruin. For all his weight gain and intentional ugliness, Christian Bale is still an incredibly charismatic performer. Like Leonardo di Caprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, one might end up liking him, even though he’s clearly a monster.

But while having a charismatic leading man might be bad for the purposes of political rhetoric, it’s great if you’re trying to make entertaining cinema. Vice may be dense, divisive, flawed, and maddening, but it’s definitely entertaining.

Vice

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Film Features Film/TV

Justice League

I’m a big believer in form following function. That’s why my review of the new Warner Bros/DC movie Justice League will reflect the form of the screenplay: a series of bullet points presented without any overall organizing principle.

Justice League Dark: (left to right) J.K. Simmons, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, Ben Affleck, and Ezra Miller

• Justice League is not a film. It’s a clip show. You know, like when a TV show has been on a long time and they want to save money late in season six by having all the characters snowed in together and swapping memories of that time in season two when they fought the bear? That’s what Justice League is like, except you’ve never seen the show before.

• At least our hypothetical sitcom on its last legs had an interesting villain. I’ll take the bear over Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds) any day. At least the bear has a discernible motivation. Steppenwolf is just a mashup of other crappy villains like Apocalypse from the last X-Men movie and that fire-demon thing (checks Wikipedia) Surtur from Thor: Ragnarok. Justice League even lifts the “empty horned helmet clattering to the ground anticlimactically” gag from Ragnarok.

• Oh yeah. SPOILER ALERT: Steppenwolf is defeated. The good guys win.

• Now I want to know what happened with the bear.

• Another SPOILER ALERT: Superman (Henry Cavill) comes back from the dead in a “we promise, one-time-only, super-special Kryptonian procedure that must involve all of the other Super Friends … I mean, members of the Justice League.” Even though we all know Supes is going to be fine, the resurrection sequence takes up a huge chunk of Justice League‘s running time that could otherwise be used for advancing the “plot.” It’s the most tedious part of a tedious movie.  

• Speaking of which, the scene where the Flash (Ezra Miller) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) dig Superman’s body up from the Kansas graveyard where he’s buried as Clark Kent is probably the most entertaining moment of the film, just for the sheer perversity of it.

• The reason Justice League is better than Batman v. Superman is that there’s more Wonder Woman in it. Gal Gadot coasts on the excellent characterization she and Patty Jenkins created in Wonder Woman’s solo film. At one point, Batman (Ben Affleck) says she should be the leader. I’m totally down for that. But instead, they go for Zombie Superman.

• Henry Cavill is literally the worst person to ever play Superman. He’s not fit to hold George Reeves’ cape.

• Amy Adams is completely wasted as Lois Lane. I hope she got paid well.

• There are occasional flashes of life in swole Ben Affleck’s Batman. It made me feel kind of sorry for him. All those protein shakes for this?

• Of all of director Zack Snyder’s missteps, Aquaman (Jason Momoa) is the worst. He’s the exiled scion of Atlantis hiding in a human village in Norway, but he talks like a California surfer. What about that makes sense?

• Creeping Batman-ization Alert: Aquaman feels abandoned by his mother.

• Steppenwolf’s army of Parademons look like Arthur, the sidekick from the Tick, was assimilated by the Borg.

• The high-functioning sociopaths running the Hollywood studios are uniquely unsuited to making good superhero movies because they fundamentally cannot grasp what is appealing about a character motivated purely by altruism.

• When Aquaman asks Bruce Wayne what Batman’s superpower is, Batman replies “I’m rich.” Wrong answer. Batman should have said “I’m prepared.” Also acceptable: “I’m determined.”

• Since Roger Ebert is no longer around to point out these things, I feel it is my duty to note that at one point, Nazis emboldened by the death of Superman demonstrate their evil by turning over a fruit cart. Google it.

• In my notes, I referred to the McGuffins — glowing energy cubes that convey ultimate power to any creature that possess them — as “Infinity Stones.” In fact, those are the glowing energy cube McGuffins from the Marvel universe. These glowing energy cubes are variously called “the change engine” and “mother boxes” which must be combined to form “The Unity.” Everything in this film is a ripoff, and even the meaningless technobabble is bad.

• Jesse Eisenberg appears in the post credit scene as Lex Luthor, as if to say. “Who’s the lame villain now?”

• Aquaman’s trident has five points.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Arrival

Arrival is unlike any other film you will see this year, and to understand why that is, you need to learn about the man who is one of, if not the, best science fiction writers working today: Ted Chiang.

Chiang’s day job is as a technical writer. He has degrees in both computer science and creative writing. Although he has been active for twenty years now, he has never written a full-length novel, only fifteen short stories and novellas. But out of those fifteen works, all of them save one have been nominated for science fiction’s highest awards, the Nebula and the Hugo, and he has won eight times. (The only story that was not up for a Hugo was 2003’s “Liking What You See: A Documentary”, and that was because he refused the nomination, claiming editorial pressure had compromised the piece.) His 2010 story “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” has been a big inspiration for my own writing.

When I heard director Denis Villeneuve was adapting Chiang’s “Story Of Your Life”, I was of two minds. First, the 56-page novella is a masterpiece, combining a first contact story with an exploration into the natures of consciousness and time. The French-Canadian director’s drug war saga Sicario was one of the films that made 2015 a banner year, and he’s signed up for the Blade Runner reboot, so we’ll get a preview of how he can handle sci fi.

On the other hand, I had deep concerns that “Story of Your Life” would be unfilmable. Hitchcock said mediocre books make the best films, and Chiang is the opposite of mediocre. The story follows Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a gifted linguist who is tasked with trying to talk to the occupants of one of the twelve mysterious, giant spacecraft that appear over seemingly random places across the Earth one fall day in the near future. This is no small task. The pair of aliens, dubbed heptapods because they look like seven-legged squid, have nothing that resembles human writing, and their speech sounds like sperm whales playing with a sub woofer. Unlike, say, Star Trek aliens, these creatures are truly alien. And yet, they came all this way to visit us. Louise’s job is to ask them “What is your purpose on the Earth?”, and then translate their answer. But just to get to the asking part of the program is a seemingly impossible task, since the aliens communicate mostly using bursts of ink they expel from their bodies.

You can see the problems inherent in this adaptation. This is a story that revolves around concepts like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and concepts of time that emerge from quantum theory, and you zoned out just reading those words. Indeed, bewildered boredom is an entirely understandable reaction to Arrival. But so is awe and wonder. In my opinion, Villeneuve has accomplished what I thought impossible. Arrival stays true to the revelatory spirit of “Story of Your Life” while excising some of the story’s more difficult concepts (Chiang regularly spices up his narrative with diagrams) and adding a dash of Hollywood razzmatazz. The camera work by Bradford Young is not the equal of Roger Deakins’ masterful lensing in Sicario, but the images are frequently gorgeous. The ever versatile Adams gives a restrained performance as a lonely linguist under unimaginable stress who becomes haunted by dreams and visions as she gets closer to the truth of the aliens’ purpose.

Balancing the head and the heart in a sci fi movie is the ultimate challenge for a director. How do you capture the mind-expanding possibilities of the “literature of ideas” while injecting the all-important emotional ups and downs into the mix? Botching the mix is what kept Interstellar from truly taking off, but Villeneuve succeeds where Christopher Nolan failed, thanks to Chiang’s heart-rending subplot, which I won’t reveal too much of here except to say it’s the key to Arrival’s ultimate revelation. Keep in mind going in that this is not an M. Night Shyamalan puzzle movie, or a whodunit. It’s purpose is to use aliens to get you to think deeply about how language and time shapes the human experience.

Arrival

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Big Eyes

You’ve seen the work of Walter Keane: kitchsy paintings of doe-eyed children staring plaintively out from pastel-colored canvases. Your grandmother probably had one in her kitchen or rumpus room, while the print of Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy was in the formal living room. Keane sold millions of paintings, prints, postcards, and anything else that could hold an image in the ’50s and ’60s and counted Andy Warhol as an admirer. And he was a complete fraud.

Big Eyes is the story of Margaret Keane, Walter’s wife, played by Amy Adams. The film opens just as she has left her first husband and struck out to make her artistic fortune in San Francisco with her daughter Jane in tow. She struggles as a single mother, making ends meet by painting babies and storks on cribs for a furniture maker, until she meets Walter (Christoph Waltz) while the two are selling paintings to tourists in Golden Gate Park. She is immediately smitten with the worldly artist, who had attended art school in Paris, while she is so hopelessly naive that she asks her girlfriend DeAnn (Krysten Ritter) the difference between espresso and reefer. When Jane’s father sues for custody, Margaret hastily accepts Walter’s marriage proposals.

Amy Adams as Margaret Keane in Big Eyes

At first, things go great. Walter’s got a lucrative career in commercial real estate that allows Margaret to stay home with Jane and paint. After being spurned by a pretentious art gallery owner (Jason Schwartzman), Walter hangs his and Margaret’s paintings in a rowdy jazz club, where they are soon noticed by the hep cats. Margaret’s sometimes haunting portraits of children with unnaturally large eyes start selling better than Walter’s conventional French landscapes, and so one day when a buyer mistakes Margaret’s work for Walter’s, he doesn’t bother to correct her. From there, the deception grows. Walter is a great self-promoter and natural entrepreneur, and he finds Margaret’s proto-anime girls easy to sell. Since women can’t be taken seriously in 1956 America, and the money is rolling in, Margaret tacitly agrees to the deception. But lying to the world, and the fact that a man is getting credit for her work, slowly eats away at her.

Tim Burton, who is usually seen twisting reality into new shapes, re-teams with screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who wrote Ed Wood, the 1993 biopic of the “worst director in history” that many consider to be the filmmaker’s best work. Like all of Burton’s work, Big Eyes is meticulously designed, but here it is in the service of transporting the viewer into the mind of a real person in the real 1950s. The colors are vibrant, reflecting the inner worlds of the people who inhabit the lovingly crafted mid-century modern houses. Adams, who was fantastic in last year’s American Hustle, inhabits Margaret fully. You can see it in her eyes when she agrees to go along with something she knows isn’t right, but she knows the other choices look even worse. And besides, who could turn down Waltz at his coolly convincing best? Late in the story, when the situation has deteriorated into a courtroom drama, Burton, who usually at this point in his movies would be throwing all manner of absurdities up on the screen, instead channels the restraint of Douglas Sirk and lets the absurdity of the situation play out between the two great actors.

Big Eyes works because it gets the fundamentals of acting, directing, and screenwriting right. As in music, individual genius is great, but there’s just no substitute for a band with good chemistry.