When Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s satire of the nuclear age, was released in January 1964, it began with a disclaimer: “It is the stated position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film.”
As journalist Eric Schlosser discovered while researching his book Command and Control, the disclaimer turned out to be wishful thinking. Dr. Strangelove’s central scenario, in which an American general goes murderously insane and orders his bombers to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, was completely plausible. Kubrick created what is arguably the greatest comedy ever by simply telling the truth.
The key to Dr. Strangelove’s success is Kubrick’s tonal tightrope walk between the hilarious and the terrifying. Now, with Don’t Look Up, it’s Adam McKay’s turn on the tightrope.
Michigan State University Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is studying supernovae when she accidentally discovers a new comet inbound from the Oort cloud. Her adviser Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) figures out that Comet Dibiasky is headed directly for Earth. We’ve got six months to stave off utter destruction.
Meryl Streep
Kate and Randall call Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (which, the film notes, is a real thing), and they get a meeting with President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep). To their dismay, the president and her Jared Kushner-esque son Jason (Jonah Hill) are more concerned with the upcoming midterm elections than with saving humanity. When they leak the news to the press, their appearance on a Good Morning America-type TV show hosted by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry is overshadowed by celebrity gossip generated by pop singer Riley’s (Ariana Grande) sex life. The end of civilization is just too big a bummer to get traction in today’s competitive media environment.
It’s obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that Don’t Look Up’s comet is an allegory for global warming. McKay, like Kubrick, has been met with some bad reviews, and it’s true that Don’t Look Up lacks the perfection of Dr. Strangelove. The editing is choppy, and the story veers off into useless romantic subplots.
But what McKay gets right, he gets really right. The earnestness of the scientists trying to save the world becomes their biggest handicap. Legacy admission Ivy Leaguers in government dismiss the threatening discovery because it came from a state school. The elite news media descend on the subject — until the online engagement metrics fade. Most chilling of all is Mark Rylance as Peter Isherwell, a Steve Jobs-like tech billionaire who discovers precious metals on the comet and decides a couple of billion deaths is a small price to pay for propping up his company’s market capitalization.
Don’t Look Up was written before the pandemic, but if anything, the experience of the last two years has made McKay’s point for him; you could replace “comet” with “coronavirus” and the film would still work. When the comet becomes clearly visible in the night sky, Streep’s Trumpian president exhorts her red-hatted followers, “Don’t look up!” I thought about that scene on January 1st, when Memphis set a new high temperature record of 79 degrees. Crazy weather we’re having, huh?
The March sisters: Meg (Emma Watson), Amy (Florence Pugh), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), and Beth (Eliza Scanlen)
For Never Seen It, I convince someone interesting to catch up on a classic (or maybe not so classic) film they’ve missed, then we talk about it. This time around, I got the boss, Anna Traverse Fogle, CEO of the Flyer‘s parent company Contemporary Media, to watch director Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which was 19 on my list of the 25 Best Films of the 2010s. Our quite lengthy conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Chris McCoy: What do you know about Little Women?
Anna Traverse Fogle: Book or movie?
Chris: More like, what is your relationship with Little Women?
Anna: I remember reading the book when I was a fairly young person myself. I was one of those kids who the librarians would laugh at because I would walk up to the librarian’s desk with a foot-tall stack of books. And they’re like, “You’re not going to read all of those, little girl.” And I was like, “You watch me.” I was pretty young, which means both that it made something of an impression on me, and also that I don’t remember it all that well. I remember the characters to some extent. I remember liking the beginning, and I remember it kind of losing my interest at some point. When I was in the earlier portions of the book, I was more like, “These are characters I can relate to.” And then as they got older, I think maybe I couldn’t relate as much. I certainly remember thinking of them — this is a child’s perception — but sort of in the same way that I had a relationship with a character than, like, the Laura Ingles Wilder books. I was not thinking about them critically, but thinking more in terms of who am I the most like. Whose personality traits do I want to be? So I was thinking about it in that very inner kind of way.
Chris: I think for a lot of girls, for a long time, the question of which of the March sisters you’re like was kind of like which of the Hogwarts houses you belong to.
Anna: Or which of the Sex and the City girls you relate to. And somehow, once you have identified which archetype of young woman you are, then you will understand other pieces of information that you would like to have about yourself.
Chris: Okay. Let’s do this.
Acting!
135 minutes later…
Chris: Anna Traverse Fogle, you are now someone who has seen Little Women. What did you think?
Anna: I mean, it’s changed me as a person.
Chris: Okay! That’s great!
Anna: It brought back more of the book that I realized was still in my head. Although I don’t know enough that I could speak to the distinctions between book and film. I don’t remember that the book did any of the temporal switching, which I found … I kind of got around it over the course of things. But you know, I’m a sleep-deprived, addle-minded person today. There were a few moments in the beginning when I was like, where are we? Then I clued in. I mostly liked that, but I did find it took a little bit of getting used to for me.
Chris: I think that was the big thing [director] Greta [Gerwig] brought to it, because she was hired to write the screenplay. And when [producer Amy Pascal] read the screenplay, and then saw Lady Bird, she was like, “Yeah, you should just direct it.”
Anna: I thought it ended up working really well — and added texture. It made it something other than just, “Let’s try to do a somewhat faithful adaptation of a much-beloved book.” It made it feel more like something that made sense as a film. That’s not something I think would have worked as well in any other format. In terms of, how do we re-imagine this novel as a film, that, to me, really made it something that felt like a work of cinema, and not like, “Let’s sit around and talk about how I like the book better. Well yes, of course everybody likes the book better. This made them operate more like independent works of art.”
United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson
Chris: You’re gonna have to cut a whole lot from the book no matter what you do. I think the genius of the way she structured it is that you don’t realize what’s gone until it’s over.
Anna: Right. Because you aren’t watching it unfold from beginning to end. It turns it into this kaleidoscopic experience where it’s like, now I’m here, now I’m here, now I’m here. So you’re getting all of these elements, but you aren’t like “Oh gosh, They left out that bit I remember really well from the book,” because it’s coming at you in a different sequence.
Chris: She really handled the transitions so well. I mean, you’re a writer and editor. You know what a hard job that was.
Anna: Yeah, no kidding. And again, this is going to go back to how very long it’s been since I read the book, but I feel like there are some elements of the book that everybody probably remembers that she ended up having to decide, that’s not going to make it into the film because that’s going to take us off into some other direction that isn’t going to work. But I thought in terms of the spirit of the characters, it very much captured each one of their personas.
Chris: The casting just could not be better.
Anna: If you had some mental image of these characters in your head from when you read Little Women when you were 12, these people somehow are them. The casting job has to be really good if Meryl Streep is there, and you’re sort of like, “Oh yeah, this is Meryl Streep.”
Chris: She’s an important character, but not one that you actually see all that much of, relatively speaking.
Anna: She’s not stealing it. Nor does she want to. She’s someone who can be that character.
Chris: Aunt March is so great, and I love how Greta deploys her because this can be a saccharine or at least a very sweet story. But whenever it starts to get too sweet, you get a little bit of Aunt March. She literally one time says, “I’m so sick of this,” and rolls her eyes and walks off.
Anna: Right! If things are getting a little bit too sentimental, and isn’t it great, and they love each other so much and blah blah blah … Well, let me give you some witty rejoinder and caustic remark. And then we can return to what we’re here to do.
Chris: Her job is to take the piss out of the thing.
Meryl Streep takes no guff as Aunt March.
Chris: I personally am a Jo, even as a guy. Because she’s a writer.
Anna: I mean, she is such a writer, and I have to say, perfect for my little literary slash editor slash book junkie heart. Before I was working in media, I did a stint as an undergrad as a very, very low-level helper person at the University Press. All of these things combined to make these scenes of the book creation process so meaningful. When Jo’s locking herself in the attic, as someone who writes, I both understand what impels her to do that, and I can never imagine having a moment in my life when I can give into it. Who has that kind of time, to lock themselves in an attic for several days and write reams of pages? I liked the great shots of all of the pages she’s got lined up on on the floor. And then later when the book is being put through the printing press and assembled and stitched and the cover is being attached to it, I was like …
Chris: Oh yeah! The book-binding montage just killed me this time.
Anna: It made me wish that, instead of cooking shows, there would just be shows about, “Now I’m going to put together a book and show you how.”
Chris: I would so watch that.
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle (3)
Chris: The only casting that pulls me out of it is Bob Odenkirk as the dad. I mean, he’s great, but …
Anna: The character is a little out of place.
Chris: Nobody cares about the dad. We get to know this group of people as a self-sustaining entity, and then all of a sudden, “Oh, he’s back!”
Anna: Marmee has a husband, and they have a father, and he’s in the house. But he’s a little bit like, wandering over to the corners, like “Where do I fit here after all of this?” I guess that was actually the way it was meant to be.
Chris: Yeah, I agree with that. At one point in my note — you know, I take note, because I’m a pro-fessional — I have “0.0% male gaze” … This is a movie made by women, about women, for women.
Bob Odenkirk as Father March
Anna: You’re probably right that it’s for women. I’d be curious to look at the gender breakdown of the theatrical audiences. I have a sense that if you’re in an opposite sex relationship, probably more women were dragging their male partners to see it than vice versa. Maybe that’s just my assumption.
Chris: I think when I saw it in the theater that I was the only male there. [Laughter] I loved it, though, because it’s such a perfect movie. There’s not a wasted scene.
Anna: I had a few moments where I felt like it almost felt like the actors were clearly people in 2019 speaking the dialogue of people 150 years ago. It didn’t happen very often. For the most part, it felt very natural coming out of their mouths.
Chris: Well, the naturalism of the acting comes from mumblecore. Greta Gerwig came up from the American DIY underground. She was an actress in Joe Swanberg movies. That’s the only thing to really survive from that movement, how the dialogue overlaps. That’s very modern, very Robert Altman.
Anna: I did notice the people talking over each other. It felt very natural. Of course people who happen to be living in the 19th century wouldn’t magically have always waited their turn in line to speak, especially if they’re in a room full of their families. But I think that’s often how our film versions of novels, or just films that are set in quote unquote “the olden days.” You know, I say my nicely crafted line and then give you sufficient air space to say your nicely crafted line, and we just go back and forth. Nobody talks like that. I doubt people ever have. I love the sense that the dialogue really felt like spoken dialogue.
Burn, Hollywood, Burn
Chris: She has fun with it. So many of these classic works, I think when people approach them, they are kind of intimidated by them. They’re like, “I have to have a reverence for this work.” And it sucks the fun out of it. You see that in lit classes all the time. But all these women are having just a blast. It shows in a movie, to me, when the actors are actually having fun.
Anna: I have to think this was probably so refreshing for everyone involved. This goes back to what you were saying about the absence of the male gaze. I’m sure that translated every day they were on set. Like how are we going to put this thing together? I don’t know, but we’re gonna figure it out and we are not being subjected to anybody’s opinion but ours. We don’t have to feel the burden of that set of expectations, and let it play out in the way that feels natural.
Chris: And nobody’s gonna get naked. Timothée Chalamet, who is Laurie, he’s the babe in this movie — the man-bimbo.
Himbo Timothée Chalamet as Theodore ‘Laurie’ Laurence.
Anna: If anything, there is a little bit of the opposite of male gaze there. It’s like, “Okay, yeah here’s this guy. He’s going to be the love interest. But let’s not actually make him too interesting or too engaging.” He always feels a little bit, frankly, not quite up to par.
Chris: He’s a drunken lout for about half the movie.
Anna: Well, there is that. But like once he’s not, he still feels a little bit like he wants to be on their level, but he’s not.
Chris: Yeah, there’s a feeling that Amy settles, even though she says she’s been in love with him the whole time.
Anna: He didn’t always quite realize that. It did feel a little bit like she was thinking, “Okay, well, I guess I need to make something happen. So here’s this guy I’ve known for a long time. I guess it’s kind of in the cards, so here we go.” Jo, of course, is like, “I think I would be perfectly happy never to marry. Well, it’s not perfectly happy, but maybe that’s my destiny. I can accept that, and I can do other things. I could have interesting pursuits, and I can craft a life for myself.” I think having that level of understanding and independence and ability makes it easier for her to forge a path.
Chris: She is sort of a proto-modern woman. She’s the one that you can relate to the most from the 21st century, because she wants to have a career.
Anna: That’s not going to be an either/or proposition for her, between having a career and having love interests she pursues. I think in any scenario, she takes the career, if it becomes an either/or thing. That’s not something that was all that acceptable. We talk about the 21st century, but if it becomes an either/or thing between finding someone marriageable or having an interesting and fulfilling career … Well, it is certainly not an assumption for everybody that women are going to necessarily pick the career.
Chris: That’s the point of Amy’s speech. The actress who plays Amy is Florence Pugh, and that speech, “Marriage is an economic proposition,” she plays it to perfection.
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle (2)
Anna: That felt so finely crafted and yet quite believable that that would be coming out of her mouth exactly the way it emerged. It would have been perfect if she had delivered that in any format. It’s something that, if she prepared to send in a letter, and labored over it for hours, she could not have done better.
Chris: That was such a moment of absolute, deep-down clarity. I think she sees herself better than Jo sees herself. For all of Amy’s faults, and you could say that she’s a retrograde or reactive character, but she understands herself better than anybody else in the whole story.
Anna: I mean she seems to be someone who was like, “Okay, look I’m not I’m not at the same level that you know that Jo is, but I’ve got this going for me, and I can make these decisions, and I think I can make this work.” I think that comes along over the course of things. Part of the beauty of that speech is that you’ve seen some of it developing in her, but at that moment you’re like, “Okay. Yeah. This is exactly how she’s thinking.”
Chris: And also, that line Laurie has right before the speech, “What women are allowed into the club of geniuses?” That really rings.
Anna: But in his case, it’s an accidental truth, know what I mean?
Jo and Laurie take a walk in the New England countryside.
Chris: Would you recommend this movie to other people?
Anna: Yeah, I totally would. I had fully intended to see this movie when it came out and didn’t. I will tell you I don’t go to that many movies in the theater, so for me even to have considered the possibility of going is an indication that I was quite interested. Honestly, most of the movies we were going to see in the theater are something in the Marvel universe with my stepson. But yeah, I would absolutely recommend it to really anybody. It’s easy to say that, if you happen to fall into a similar demographic as me, or if you’re interested in feminism, blah blah blah … And yes, this is a movie for you if you just like New England and autumn! It made me really miss living in Massachusetts.
Chris: How long did you live in Massachusetts?
Anna: Only three years. I was in grad school up there, but felt very at home. I lived in the Boston metro area, but it’s so easy to drive into those little towns where the fall is the most beautiful fall you’ve ever seen. There’s just something about that you can’t duplicate anywhere else. There were a few moments where I was like, “Oh gosh yes, I need to go back to New England in the fall.”
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle
I poke my head into my wife’s office and ask if she’s still interested in going to Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again with me. No, sorry. She would, but she’s not as far along with her work as she thought she would be at this point. But it’s okay. I can go on without her.
It’s just an ABBA movie. 114 minutes of ABBA. I can do this.
I arrive at the theater and the pleasant girl behind the counter waves me in. They know me here. I arrive at my seat after the Chevy commercial, but before the trailers are done. Things are looking up! What do I remember about the first one? Meryl Streep’s got a daughter who wants to know who her dad is. Turns out it could be Pierce Brosnan, the handsome rich architect; Colin Firth, the handsome rich banker; or Stellan Skarsgård, the handsome rich sailor. Everybody sings a bunch of ABBA songs and decides nobody cares who the father is because the real father was the friends we made along the way.
The film begins, and I’m reminded that Meryl Streep’s daughter Sophie is played by Amanda Seyfried, whom I believe is secretly a Mark II Emma Stone android. She immediately starts singing ABBA a capella. I take a deep breath and remind myself I’m only here because I couldn’t stomach The Equalizer 2.
Here we go again — more ABBA, more Greece, and more singing in the sequel to Mamma Mia.
Sophie is sending out invites to a grand re-opening of Hotel Bella Donna, and also her mom Donna is dead. Apparently we couldn’t afford Meryl for the 10-years-after sequel.
But what’s this? A flashback to 1979! Donna’s a Dancing Disco queen and also valedictorian. It takes me a minute to figure out the connection, because young Donna is played by Lily James, who doesn’t in any way resemble Meryl. In lieu of a valedictorian speech, Donna sings “When I Kissed the Teacher,” which I have to admit is thematically appropriate. Just so happens that I stumbled across a marathon of Leonard Bernstein’s Omnibus on Turner Classic Movies last night, and watched an episode where the great composer takes a deep dive into the history of American musical comedy. The form originated in the late 1860s when a theater troupe and a minstrel group were both stranded in a town with one theater, so they took turns performing scenes and songs. People ate it up.
The guy who wrote West Side Story would have despised this movie. Bernstein said the key to a good musical is that the songs must advance the plot and illuminate emotions, creating artistic unity. In Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, things just kind of happen to provide excuses to sing listlessly. These renditions are so flat and lifeless, they make the original versions sound raw and edgy. Even the subtitle, “Here We Go Again,” sounds drained of energy.
Everyone is very sad that Meryl is dead. I haven’t seen a production scramble to maintain its dignity after a losing its star since Charlton Heston played hardball with the producers of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. But they got the last laugh. He showed up at the end.
Did I mention the Hotel Bella Donna is on an island “at the far end of Greece”? That’s how Young Donna describes it as she sets out from Paris on her postgraduate transcontinental insemination spree. The first guy she meets is Young Colin Firth (Hugh Skinner). You can tell he’s a punk because he shops at Hot Topic in 1979. The Busby Berkeley-inspired production number of “Waterloo” he and Allen perform with a horde of French waiters dressed as Napoleon is pretty much the high point of the picture. Then it’s on to the ocean, where Donna ends up with Young Stellan Skarsgård, (Josh Dylan), on board his yacht The Panty Dropper. At least I think that’s what it’s called. I dozed off for a while. Finally, she meets Young Pierce Brosnan (Jeremy Irvine), and they cohabitate in a rustic farmhouse. In the barn is a powerful black stallion—which is in no way a sexual symbol—that Donna must tame.
The blonde guy’s obviously the father, by the way.
What’s weird is, in the ABBA Universe, the Greek economic crisis of 2009 still happened. And Cher is there, but she looks like Lady Gaga, and is absolutely murdering “Fernando.” Then, just as the film goes full Beneath the Planet of the Apes, it hits me: Donald Trump is not president in the ABBA universe. That’s why everything seems so aggressively pleasant.
Lesson number five in Yale history professor Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century is “Remember Professional Ethics.” Snyder writes, “When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitment to just practice becomes more important.”
Few people have ever accused Hollywood of having “professional ethics.” Long gone are the days when Dalton Trumbo would write a patriotic paean like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and then get hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee for his troubles, or where John Sturges could condemn Japanese internment with Bad Day at Black Rock, or where Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford could star in All the President’s Men and make it one of the biggest movies of the year. Nope, these days it’s all $100 million toy commercials and fascist dreck like 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Do successful filmmakers have a duty to the Republic? Don’t make Michael Bay laugh into his Porsche collection.
This is why, even if The Post wasn’t a rip roaring great movie, it would still be a remarkable presence in the theaters of 2018. At age 71, with an estimated net worth of $3 billion, Steven Spielberg didn’t have to make this movie. Producer Amy Pascal, former head of Sony, didn’t have to pony up for a script by struggling screenwriter Liz Hannah about Katharine Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post in the Watergate era. Who in their right mind would do such a thing when My Little Pony is just hanging there, ripe for transformation into a cinematic universe?
Maybe they did it because The Post is the movie that needs to be made right now. Maybe that’s the same reason Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks signed on, as Graham and Post editor Ben Bradlee, respectively.
Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep lead a star-studded cast in The Post, Steven Spielberg’s remarkable new film about the release of the Pentagon Papers
Hanks has another potential reason: He’s an obsessive typewriter collector, and the newsrooms of 1971 would be like Candyland for him. Dial-up phone fans will also be in heaven for the 116-minute running time. So will political junkies and actual patriots who value the First Amendment, the separation of powers, and representative democracy.
If you’re a fan of good film craft — as all right-thinking people should be — you will flip for The Post. Spielberg may be the best steward of old-school film grammar we have left, and all of the classic virtues are on display. The Post tells the story of the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, which explained in great detail that former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) and the U.S. Government knew that the Vietnam War was unwinnable as early as 1965, a full decade and tens of thousands of casualties before it ignominiously ended. It is that most dreaded of script genres: People talking in rooms without brandishing guns. The practice of journalism is mostly people on telephones, or as film producers call it, slow box office death. There probably aren’t five people on the planet who could have pulled off this story with the same excitement and urgency as Spielberg. What most contemporary directors would take five cuts to accomplish, he can do with a focus pull, such as when Bradlee crashes Graham’s birthday party with urgent clandestine news, and Spielberg meticulously reveals McNamara, the one person who can’t know what’s going on, in the crowd. The director is in complete control of where your eyes are focused on the screen at all times, and it feels great, not intrusive or forced. Information is revealed at exactly the right pace, and dense exposition flows like drawn butter.
Hanks leads a murderer’s row of contemporary acting talent that includes Sarah Paulson as Bradlee’s wife Tony, Bob Odenkirk as reporter Ben Bagdikian, Matthew Rhys as leaker Daniel Ellsberg, Jesse Plemons as Post lawyer Roger Clark, and David Cross as reporter Howard Simons. But it’s Streep who shines brightest. Graham starts the film as a socialite and dilettante as interested in rubbing elbows with the rich and powerful as she is in running a paper. By the end, she walks determinedly out of the Supreme Court to be greeted by a silent phalanx of young women looking to her example of powerful, patriotic womanhood. Streep’s arc is one of the most finely shaded and complex of her storied career. The Post pursues the personal, the political, and professional spheres of life all at once, and its story of putting duty to country and humanity over personal loyalty and professional advancement couldn’t be more timely. I hope this group of artists’ example is seen far and wide in our troubled country.
Sarah Gavron’s new film Suffragette looks and feels like a fresh hunk of Oscar bait.
Now, you might be wondering what exactly “Oscar bait” is. Although noted author and peerless Academy Awards handicapper Mark Harris hates the term and wishes it would go away, Oscar bait is real, but it is seldom spectacular. You’ve seen Oscar bait before. Perhaps you’ve even enjoyed some of it. Maybe you’re an Argo kind of gal; me, I’m partial to animal-centric heart-tuggers like Spielberg’s War Horse. Wikipedia defines movies like these as “Lavishly produced, epic-length period dramas, often set against tragic historical events such as the Holocaust,” that “often contend for the technical Oscars such as cinematography, makeup and hairstyling, costume design, or production design … The cast may well include actors with previous awards or nominations, a trait that may also be shared by the director or writer.”
I might also add that movies like these typify a strain of safe, grade-grubbing, color-between-the-lines moviemaking that’s engineered for mature adults uninterested in or unresponsive to important aesthetic qualities like vulgarity, coarseness, economy, and wit. They also arrive on schedule every autumn. Once the leaves start to turn and the superhero franchises go into hibernation, these simple, proper, “sophisticated” films start showing up in theaters like fashionably late guests trying to class- up a kegger.
At first glance, Suffragette fits the Oscar bait description. At 106 minutes, though, it’s merely a normal-length period drama that’s set in 1912 England. The tragic historical event that drives its story and galvanizes its characters is, thankfully, not World War I; it’s the women’s suffrage movement, a time when many brave women exhibited surprising courage and resilience but were met with patronizing indifference and/or brute force.
Yet in a few key ways, Suffragette struggles against its prestige-picture corset. The production design is shrewd and economical but unspectacular, the cinematography serves up the same gruel-like gray found in any movie about the miseries of early 20th-century factory work, and the makeup, hairstyling, and costume design, while impressive at times, probably isn’t ostentatious enough to garner awards. Nevertheless, there’s a trio of Emmy or Oscar-nominated actors (Carey Mulligan, Brendan Gleeson, and Helena Bonham Carter) knocking heads here, and about midway through the film one multiple-Oscar winner shows up to bless the proceedings.
Suffragette‘s weird, bellicose sentimentality is also atypical for Oscar bait. It feels like a byproduct of Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan’s attempts to identify and harness the numerous energies — domestic, political, paternal, spiritual — that powered the movement they depict. Unfortunately, such energies often dissipate when set against Alexandre Desplat’s insufferable, obvious orchestral score. To its partial credit, though, Suffragette is a messy, distracted film that, like its laundress-turned-activist heroine Maud Watts (Mulligan), isn’t sure what exactly it wants to be.
It begins as a lively, idea-heavy drama about the validity of violent revolution, narrows its focus to document the social cost of one woman’s gradual political awakening, and plays around at being a cat-and-mouse detective story for a scene or two before reinventing itself as a gauzy, delicately colored reenactment of a shocking historical accident that had a monumental impact on both the English suffrage movement and suffrage efforts from around the world.
The performances are fine: Mulligan is her usual incredulous, sobbing self; Gleeson assays a half-decent portrait of disgruntled middle-aged compromise; Bonham Carter is tiny and fierce; and rugged types like Anne-Marie Duff shine for a scene or two. But not everyone is watchable. Emmeline Pankhurst, the rabble-rousing ringleader of the English suffrage movement, is played by none other than Meryl Streep. Streep appears for a single scene, but when she delivers her fiery, inspirational balcony speech, she looks like Mary Poppins and sounds like Glinda the Good Witch. Plus, there’s so much crosscutting between Parkhurst’s speech and the British government’s attempts to nab her that what could have been a fun, hammy, Orson Wellesian drop-in is over before it lands.
Such eccentric timing exemplifies Suffragette‘s hyperventilating, wind-sprint-sense of pacing. One minute the camera is darting through crowds at high speeds, barely recording moments of triumph by the women or moments of violence by the police in charge; the next minute it slows way down for close-ups of tear-stained faces, newspaper photographs, and feet.
So is Suffragette Oscar bait or not? More than likely, it’s not enough of anything to matter much.
The American frontier may have closed 130-odd years ago, but in the American mind — especially when it starts daydreaming about the olden days — it remains as open as ever. That’s one reason why, decades after their alleged peak, good Westerns still mosey into theaters every now and then, delighting fans of wide-open spaces, improvised morality, and unpainted wooden outbuildings. The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones’ second film as actor/co-writer/director, is an ornery yet ingratiating straggler in this vein. It’s also a larger, funnier, and altogether sadder affair than his great 2005 debut The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada. There are as many subtle emotional tones at work in a given scene as there are subtle colors visible in its sunrises and sunsets.
Hilary Swank, whose hard, androgynous beauty distinguishes her from safer and more glamorous starlets, plays Mary Bee Cuddy, a pioneer woman from New York whose independence and willpower prevent her from forging the domestic partnership she craves. She remains single at age 31, and in spite of her hard-earned prosperity, nobody in town wants to marry her. Out of either kindness or frustration or some exalted sense of duty, Mary Bee agrees to drive three battered and broken frontier wives from the Nebraska territory where she lives back to Iowa, where they will be packed up and sent back east to recover.
Early in her journey, Mary Bee rescues George Briggs (Jones), a claim-jumping rascal whose personal honor and a $300 payday at the end of the line are the only things that keep him by her side during their brutal, six-week trek. So, off into the wilderness they ride.
The film’s psychic and thematic itinerary is tough to predict. It doesn’t go where you think it might, with the quiet battle between Mary Bee (a reluctantly independent woman who wants to be in a partnership) and Briggs (a reluctant partner who wants to be independent) the most obvious example.
There aren’t many physical confrontations, and what few there are aren’t fair.
The dialogue is rich, direct, and funky (“This is fine cheese, Bob. So why not marry?”). And cameos from reliable miniaturists like Tim Blake Nelson, Meryl Streep and James Spader hearken back to the glory years of character actors compact and skillful enough to spike a film with their own brand of grace or ugliness.
There are audible echoes of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian throughout, from the Indians attired in the clothing of settlers they’ve killed to the strange dance that closes the film, a spasm of drunken movement that ultimately defines Jones’ Briggs as both a vagrant and a gatekeeper.
The Homesman has been praised elsewhere as a feminist Western, but it isn’t, at least not in the long run. It’s something more valuable — a picture of a lost world whose peculiarities still matter. The (mid-)West here is an environment with its own meager pleasures and its own invisible traps. The three crazy women in Mary Bee’s wagon seem to indicate that the biggest enemy is not varmints but a crippling sense of isolation that forces people to stand naked in harsh and howling winds.
About halfway through The Giver, I was reminded of a scene from Tim Burton’s Ed Wood in which Johnny Depp, playing the titular “worst director ever,” has a filmmaking revelation: “I could make an entire movie out of stock footage!” In the case of this adaptation of Lois Lowery’s 1993 young-adult novel, it’s more like: “I could make an entire movie out of color grading!” Although to be fair, there are long passages of the 94-minute movie that feel like stock footage.
The Giver tells the story of Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), a young man coming of age in a utopian community built from the ashes of an apocalypse called “The Ruin.” The creepily ordered community (known as “The Community”) is built on top of a mesa perpetually surrounded by clouds, and its people have no knowledge of the outside world. Indeed, they don’t have very much knowledge of anything beyond their professions, which are chosen for them in a public ceremony (known as “The Ceremony”) where the old, who have no memory of Logan’s Run, are also given “release.” His friends Fiona (Odeya Rush) and Asher (Cameron Monaghan) are given jobs as Nurturer and Drone Pilot, but Jonas is chosen to be the Receiver of Memories. He is apprenticed to The Giver (Jeff Bridges), the psychic repository of all of the memories of the time before The Ruin.
Here’s where the color grading comes in. The first act of the movie is in black and white, because members of The Community cannot perceive color, or indeed anything the The Elders (led by Meryl Streep) deem a threat to order and happiness. But as Jonas is given more and more knowledge of the Before Time by The Giver, his world, and thus the movie, slowly gains color. The colorization accelerates when Jonas decides not to take his daily injections of mind control drugs. As he learns the truth about the perfect world the Elders have built, he comes to understand why the last Receiver of Memories, Rosemary (Taylor Swift), only lasted two months before meeting some unknown but probably really bad fate. When he finds out that “release” is, of course, death, and that a baby named Gabriel who has been assigned to his family is scheduled for release, Jonas sets out to save The Community from itself by escaping to Elsewhere and thus, through some mechanism that makes about as much sense as the rest of the plot, restoring the memories to the people. I’ll let you guess what happens from there, because what you come up with is probably going to be more interesting than The Giver‘s snoozer of a finale.
Director Phillip Noyce is clearly under orders to create the next big teen sensation adapted from a young adult novel, but the material he is working with lacks the depth of Harry Potter and none of his lead actors has the charisma of The Hunger Games‘ Jennifer Lawrence. Supposed hero Thwaites actually has scenes stolen from him by a hologram of Taylor Swift. Bridges, who has reportedly been trying to get this movie made for years, inexplicably speaks in a painful sounding croak, and Streep is, well, Meryl Streep in a Saruman wig.
I have not read the Newberry award-winning book upon which it is based, but it seems that Alfred Hitchcock’s dictum that mediocre books make the best movies holds true. Lowery’s book is meant to be allegorical and universal, but when Jonah actually finds a map marked “Plan For Sameness” that tells him how to defeat said plan, it’s a real Mystery Science Theater moment. It’s also hard to overlook the reactionary overtones as the genetically superior “chosen one” rebels against forced equality, the baby killing bad guys say “precision of speech” in place of “political correctness,” and the promised land looks like a Thomas Kinkade painting where it is inexplicably Christmas all the time. The politics wouldn’t be a problem if it was entertaining — after all, one of my favorite films of the century is The Incredibles, which has an Ayn Rand streak that renders the villain’s motivations incoherent. But The Incredibles delivers the adventure goods, while The Giver can’t execute a simple Hero’s Journey plot for all of the speechifying. Even the central color grading gimmick was more successfully done by Pleasantville 16 years ago. For a film that claims to champion colorful nonconformity, The Giver is depressingly drab.
