Tag: Elle Fanning

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The Great: Power Politics as Comedy

Elle Fanning as Catherine in “The Great”

Screenwriter John Rogers, the creator of the cult action series Leverage, recently tweeted “The primary purpose of representational democracy is to protect the rest of us from the whims of insane rich people, be they royalty or plutocrat.”

The Great, a new series on Hulu, is all about the whims of insane rich people — namely, the court of Tsarist Russia during the six-month reign of Peter III in 1762. Peter’s grandfather was known as Peter the Great, who made Russia into a world power during his reign. Peter III was, apparently, just a lucky clod whose major accomplishments were losing the Russian end of the Seven Years’ War and getting removed in a coup by his wife, who would eventually become known as Catherine the Great.

Elle Fanning plays Catherine, whom we first meet as a naive Prussian princess, idly musing about her future husband as she swings beneath an oak tree. But her idealism is in for a shock when she arrives in St. Petersburg and meets Peter (Nicholas Hoult). He begins their relationship by mocking her thoughtful gift to him and threatening to send her back for a better model.

Peter is a real piece of work. Like most people at court, his preferred mode of entertainment is performative cruelty. The example he sets is one of nonstop drunken debauchery, and the depraved aristocrats who suck up to him are more than happy to emulate his bad behavior. At one point, he makes the leader of his armed forces, General Velementov (Douglas Hodge), dance a little jig for his amusement. Later, the general tries to force himself on Catherine, who is only saved when the general passes out from too much sherry before he can complete the deed. “How was your day today?” asks Catherine’s handmaiden, Marial (Phoebe Fox).

“I avoided getting raped,” the empress replies.

“Me too. We should hope they never invent anything simpler than buttons, or we’re all going to be in trouble.”

That’s a good example of pitch-black humor from writer Tony McNamara. The Australian’s 2008 comedic stage play about the life of Catherine the Great landed him a job writing The Favourite for director Yorgos Lanthimos, which earned a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination and, undoubtedly, led to his play getting greenlit as a series.

McNamara revels in baroque villainy. The shy, bookish Catherine is shocked to discover that none of the other women at court can read. (“It sounds dull and time consuming,” says one bewigged noble.) She gets permission from Peter to start a new school to teach Russians the new knowledge bubbling up out of the European Enlightenment. But when the Tsar and the church find out she intends to educate women, they burn the school down. “Women are for seeding, not reading,” Peter says.

That’s the last straw for Catherine, who starts plotting a coup with Marial. Her first noble supporter is Grigory Orlov (Sacha Dhawan), the intellectual finance minister whose incrementalist approach to reform is worn down by Peter’s boorish evil. As the Tsar’s gut-level approach to military strategy starts to cost more lives and treasure (at one point, he insists his soldiers advance through a raging river without boats), more and more courtiers join her corner. Suspicions grow, and the knives come out.

Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult as Catherine and Peter, a married couple plotting against each other in The Great.

If you’re coming to The Great expecting The Favourite: The Series, you might come away disappointed. It superficially shares with its spiritual predecessor the Barry Lyndon look of vomit-stained nobles staggering through candlelit corridors in ostentatious clothing topped by ill-fitting wigs. But a ball scene where Catherine and Peter verbally joust reveals how much this production misses the profound weirdness of Lanthimos’ eye. The conversational gymnastics are there, but the conventional staging robs the scene of the absurdist electricity present in The Favorite’s infamous baroque breakdancing scene.

What saves The Great is a pair of instant classic performances by Fanning and Hoult. Fanning, already a seasoned vet at the ripe old age of 22, absolutely owns the screen. Her cheeks remain flushed like a schoolgirl as trauma hardens her eyes. The first revelation of her true imperial ruthlessness comes when she reveals her plot to Orlov in a speech so steely it causes the older man to flee the room in fear. Hoult plays his ravishing good looks against gleeful evil. He’s like if Tom Cruise was taller — and a much better actor. He’s been good before, but The Great feels like the first time Hoult has really come into his own.

Despite being set in Russia two-and-a-half centuries ago, The Great’s tale of excess and ego in the halls of power feels extremely relevant in these times. The mix of unrestrained hedonism and constant mortal fear among the court is a pointed warning to democratic societies under threat from authoritarian leaders. The point is driven home when Peter declares to a cowed audience of underlings, “I will make Russia great!”

The Great streams on Hulu.

The Great: Power Politics as Comedy

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The Beguiled

Sofia Coppola approaches The Beguiled like an scientist preparing an experiment. The source material—a novel that was already adapted into a 1971 film with Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry director Don Siegel—provided her with an isolated community of women to work with. It’s the waning days of the Civil War, and Miss Farnsworth’s School for Young Ladies holds on by a thread in rural Virginia. Miss Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) is left with only a few charges, girls and young women with dead parents and nowhere else to go. The atmosphere is made ominous by the low rumble of dueling artillery over the horizon, and teacher Edwina Morrow (Kristen Dunst) keeps a spyglass lookout for approaching soldiers.

Nicole Kidman in The Beguiled

One day, while foraging for mushrooms, Amy (Oona Laurence) finds instead a wounded Union soldier. Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) caught a leg full of shrapnel before fleeing the battle and finding a tree to die against. Emily helps the Corporal back to the school, where he collapses. Miss Farnsworth decides the Christian thing to do is to show mercy, so they take the soldier into the mansion’s music room to treat his wounds. Jane (Angourie Rice) says he’s a obviously a rapist in waiting and wants to hand him over to the Confederate army, but Alicia (Elle Fanning) thinks he should be allowed to stay. Miss Farnsworth leads the group in a prayer for the Corporal’s “return to health, and early departure.”

But it’s too late. The Corporal lands in the midst of the women like a sex grenade, and the first to catch the shrapnel is Miss Farnsworth herself. The prim and proper woman who makes a living instilling values in young ladies finds herself overcome with lust while washing the naked, unconscious soldier. She recognizes the danger and makes the music room off limits to the girls, which quickly becomes the most-violated rule in the crumbling school.

Colin Farrell puts the moves on Elle Fanning.

Like in The Virgin Suicides and The Bling Ring, Coppola’s subject is a group of women gone feral. As each of her characters sneak into the Corporals’ room for a little conversation and illicit hand-holding, their relationship to the group changes. Each of these scenes also explores how women of different ages relate to men. Miss Farnsworth offers brandy and conversation, while 18-year-old Alicia wordlessly kisses his sleeping lips. Even the youngest girls understand they’re supposed to dress up for the man, but they don’t really know why. Eventually, bodices are (literally) ripped, and jealousy and anger spiral out of control.

In some ways, the escalating tension and subtly shifting allegiances in The Beguiled resembles the paranoid neo-horror of It Comes At Night. Coppola’s strongest points as a director serve her well. She has an incredible eye for composition, and her work here with French cinematographer Phillippe Le Sourd is beautiful and meticulous. Most impressive is the Kubrickian candlelight photography around the school’s tense dinner table.

Coppola is also top notch with actors, and she has a potent pairing with Kidman, nailing the pragmatism and repressed passion of the Southern spinster. Dunst deftly plays against type as the plain, desperate schoolteacher, and Oona Lawrence is outstanding as the budding tween naturalist whose compassion backfires.

Like a scientist, Coppola is controlling the variables of her experiment. A black slave character present in the original film is absent in this version. Taking race out of the equation keeps the focus on the female group dynamics and sexual selection pressures Coppola wants to pick apart, but setting the story in the Civil War makes the absence of racial tension obvious. Would we be less sympathetic to these ladies’ plight if we saw how they treated their slaves? Maybe. Or maybe, as with Marie Antoinette, Coppola wants to make beautiful images from the grand trappings of fading aristocracy without confronting the exploitation that created them. As it is, The Beguiled is a movie with no good guys or bad guys, just people responding to pressures in strange, but understandable, ways.

The Beguiled

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Film Features Film/TV

Trumbo

As a writer, I’m always suspicious of movies about writers. The protagonist is always hailed as being exceptionally talented but probably troubled. But when our hero is called upon to read his writing that everyone in the film says is so great, it turns out to not be very impressive, because the film’s writer is not as much of a genius as his character is supposed to be. And let’s face it: The life of the writer is not very interesting. It mainly consists of sitting still in front of a laptop and fretting.

But Dalton Trumbo was interesting. He didn’t just sit still in front of a typewriter — he sat in a tub surrounded by booze, ashtrays, and a typewriter. Trumbo won the National Book Award in 1939, got nominated for a screenwriting Academy Award in 1940, joined the Army after Pearl Harbor, and, after the war, became the highest paid writer in Hollywood. He was also, for five years, a member of the Communist Party of the United States, which would come to cost him dearly when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) called him to testify in 1948. Trumbo considered himself a patriot, and thought that HUAC had no legal or ethical right to persecute an American citizen for his political beliefs, so he and his compatriots refused to answer the committee’s questions and were convicted of contempt of Congress. Trumbo became known as the leader of the “Hollywood 10” who were blacklisted and no longer allowed to work with the major Hollywood studios.

Helen Mirren and Brian Cranston in Trumbo

Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo in Jay Roach’s adaptation of the writer’s life, and as you would probably expect, he does a tremendous job. Cranston’s work as Walter White on Breaking Bad has cemented him as one of the best actors working today, and he fully inhabits the role of the too-smart-for-his-own-good leftist with a big mouth and a precision-guided pen. Trumbo wrote scripts the old-fashioned way, buoyed by a heroic intake of scotch, nicotine, and amphetamines, and there is rarely a shot in Trumbo where Cranston is without a lit cigarette curling smoke from a long filter. There’s so much smoking going on that when Trumbo’s fellow traveller Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) tells Trumbo he has lung cancer, it’s completely unsurprising. There are a lot of acting heavy hitters in Trumbo, but the scenes between Cranston and C.K. are by far the sharpest. Hird sees through Trumbo’s prodigious bullshit, but he plays along because he both agrees with and respects the older man. Cranston also gets to match wits with Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper, the arch anti-communist gossip columnist whose column in the Hollywood Reporter reinforced the blacklist. Diane Lane plays Trumbo’s wife Cleo, and Elle Fanning his daughter Niki, both of whom feel the negative effects of Trumbo’s crusade. Other welcome actors include the underutilized Alan Tudyk as Ian McLellan Hunter, Trumbo’s friend who served as a front writer for the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Roman Holiday; John Goodman as hack studio head Frank King; and Dean O’Gorman, last seen as the dwarf Fili in The Hobbit trilogy, does an absolutely uncanny impression of Kirk Douglas

The actors are having such a good time that Trumbo‘s weaknesses in the story department are mostly papered over. Cranston’s huge, humane portrayal is great fun to watch, but he may come on too strong for the overall good of the picture. His confidence never wavers, even when he’s being strip-searched in prison, which means his character never changes. This is a common malady of biopics and historical dramas shared by, among others, Selma. Like Ava DuVernay in that film and F. Gary Gray in Straight Outta Compton, director Jay Roach plays it pretty safe, style-wise, choosing to focus on the characterization. Writer John McNamara’s dialogue gives the actors plenty of material to work with, but he lacks his subject’s talent for structural clarity. It would probably please Trumbo to hear a critic say Trumbo would have been better had Trumbo written it himself.