Tag: Rachel Weisz

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Black Widow: Super-Sisters Doing It for Themselves

Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanov in Black Widow.

First of all, Black Widow should have happened five years ago. It took eleven years — from Iron Man in 2008 to Captain Marvel in 2019 — for Disney super-producer Kevin Feige’s Marvel Cinematic Universe to make a solo super-movie starring a female superhero. In the interim, Warner Brothers filled the void with 2017’s Wonder Woman, the only good movie made from a DC property in a decade. 

Considering how aggressively mediocre Captain Marvel was, it’s especially galling that it took so long for Scarlett Johansson to get her own starring vehicle as Natasha Romanoff From a character standpoint, Natasha is the most interesting of the Marvel A-team. Trauma has always inflected the best superhero origin stories. (Did you know Batman’s parents were murdered in front of him? Someone should put that in a movie.) She was trained from childhood to be an elite assassin and intelligence operative by the Red Room, a secret Soviet super-soldier program notorious for its brutal methods. Somehow, the stone cold killer’s conscience survived the ordeal, and she defected to S.H.I.E.L.D., where she became Nick Fury’s most trusted confidant. Alone among the Avengers as a non-super-powered (albeit surgically enhanced and relentlessly conditioned) human, she feels pain when she gets hit. Thor the space god is cool, but he’s one-note. Natasha’s adamantium-tough exterior hides a broken person, deprived of human connection, riven with guilt for all the “red on my ledger,” trying to balance the books with world-saving good deeds. But she’s always gotten short shrift. During The Avengers iconic Battle of New York, the prototype for all the Marvel Third Acts to come, Black Widow was fighting flying, laser-firing aliens while armed only with a pair of pistols. Couldn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. at least get her an assault rifle? 

Natasha’s emotional potential is realized in Black Widow’s unexpectedly moving cold open. It’s 1995, and she’s living in suburban Ohio with her mother Melina (Rachel Weisz) and sister Yelena (played as a 6-year-old by Violet McGraw). Just as they’re about to sit down for an ordinary, wholesome family dinner, father Alexei (David Harbour) comes home with bad news. Turns out, the family are deep-cover spies, and their cover’s been blown. As the fake family rushes to get to the escape plane to take them to Cuba, Natasha stares longingly out the window, saying a silent goodbye to the closest thing to a normal life and human connection she will ever have. Her family may be fake, but it felt real to her.

Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh as super-sisters Natasha and Yelena in Black Widow.

Fast forward to 2016. (The film itself recognizes that it’s late. Natasha died in Avengers: Endgame, so Black Widow’s story takes place while she was on the lam after the events of Captain America: Civil War.) Yelena (played as an adult by Florence Pugh) is hunting a target who turns out to be another member of the Black Widow program. After Yelena strikes a mortal blow, the dying Widow exposes her to a red gas that undoes the chemical mind control regime the Red Room has imposed on her. Yelena goes rogue, stealing the remaining doses of Widow antidote, and sending them to her estranged, faux-sister Natasha for safekeeping. Instead of spending her downtime watching Moonraker — naturally, Natasha’s an obsessive James Bond fan — she decides to track down Yelena, and the pair team up to kill the Red Room mastermind Dreykov (Ray Winstone) and dismantle the Widow program once and for all. 

With director Cate Shortland at the helm, Black Widow is the best superhero picture since Black Panther. It’s not just an acceptably entertaining Marvel product, but an actual good film in its own right. The second-act action set piece, when Natasha and Yelena break their pretend-father Alexei out of a Siberian prison, stands with the airport brawl from Civil War as an all-time, kinetic highlight of comic book cinema. 

David Harbour as Red Guardian

It’s Johansson’s movie (she’s executive producer), but she leads an ensemble cast. Natasha’s been making life-or-death decisions since she was a teenager, so Johansson plays her with a deep world-weariness. She has zero time for petty bullshit; in 2021, I find Natasha’s emotional exhaustion extremely relatable. Pugh is her kid-sister foil, knowing exactly where to needle to get a rise out of the ice queen. The comic relief is left up to Harbour as the Red Guardian, Captain America’s Soviet counterpart gone to seed, still bitter about losing the ideological struggle with the West. 

Black Widow’s ideology is overtly feminist. It’s a quintessential female gaze movie. The women are sexy, but not subject to a leering camera; the men are either buffoons or sniveling abusers. The stakes and scale are remarkably restrained by Marvel standards. Natasha, a subject of unthinkable patriarchal abuse, is fighting to give other victims the kind of agency she was denied. Left to her own devices, Black Widow doesn’t choose to save the world from xenocidal aliens. Her heroism serves a more practical, down-to-earth purpose. 

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Film Features Film/TV

2018: The Year In Film

If there is a common theme among the best films of 2018, it’s wrenching order from chaos. From Regina Hall trying to hold both a restaurant and a marriage together to Lakeith Stanfield navigating the surreal moral minefields of late-stage capitalism, the best heroes positioned themselves as the last sane people in a world gone mad.

Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Freed

Worst Picture: Fifty Shades Freed

In her epic deconstruction of the final installment of everyone’s least favorite BDSM erotica trilogy, Eileen Townsend called Fifty Shades Freed a “sequence of intentionally crafted visual stimuli” that “bears coincidental aesthetic similarity to a movie … But I believe Fifty Shades Freed is nonetheless not a movie at all, but something far more pure — a pristine document of the market economy, a kind of visual after-image created as an incidental side effect of the exchange of large sums of capital…We literally cannot perceive the truest form of Fifty Shades Freed, because to do so, we would have to be money ourselves.”

Sunrise over the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Best Moviegoing Experience: 2001: A Space Odyssey in IMAX

The Malco Paradiso’s IMAX screen, which opened last December, has quickly earned the reputation as the best theater in the city. During the late-summer lull, a new digital transfer of 2001: A Space Odyssey got a week’s run to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Even if you’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s film a dozen times, seeing it the size it was intended to be seen is a revelation. Also, all lengthy blockbusters should come with an intermission.

Chuck, the canine star of Alpha

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Chuck, Alpha

Director Albert Hughes’ Alpha is a sleeper gem of 2018. The star of the story of how humans first domesticated dogs is a Czech Wolfhound named Chuck, who dominates the screen with a Lassie-level performance. Chuck and his co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee, spend large parts of the movie silently navigating the hazards of Paleolithic Eurasia, and the dog nails both stunts and the occasional comedy bits. Chuck is a movie star.

KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Best Scene: The Family Meeting, If Beale Street Could Talk

Most of Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel is an intimate, tragic love story between Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James). But for about 10 minutes, it becomes an ensemble dramedy, when Tish has to tell, first, her parents that she’s pregnant out of wedlock with a man who has just been arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, then his parents. If you pulled this scene out of the film, it would be the best short of 2018.

Rukus

Best Memphis Movie: Rukus

Brett Hanover’s documentary hybrid had been in production for more than a decade by the time it made its Mid South debut at Indie Memphis 2018. What started as a tribute to a friend who had committed suicide slowly evolved into a mystery story, an exploration into a secretive subculture, and a diary of growing up and accepting yourself.

Ethan Hawk stars as a priest in existential crisis in First Reformed.

Best Screenplay: First Reformed

Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader penned and directed this piercing drama about a small town priest, played by Ethan Hawk, who undergoes a crisis of faith when a man he is counseling commits suicide. 72-year-old Schrader is unafraid to ask the big questions: Why are we here? Is it all worth it? His elegantly constructed story ultimately looks to love for the answers, but the journey there is harrowing.

Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger in Black Panther

MVP: Michael B. Jordan

Michael B. Jordan played a book-burning fireman with a conscience in HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 adaptation and the heavyweight champion of the world in Creed II. But it was his turn as Killmonger in Black Panther that elevated the year’s biggest hit film to the realm of greatness. Director Ryan Coogler knew what he was doing when he put his frequent collaborator in the the villain slot opposite Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, making their personal rivalry into a battle for the soul of Wakanda.

Regina Hall in Support The Girls

Best Performance: (tie) Regina Hall, Support the Girls and Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade

In a year full of great performances, two really stood out. In Support the Girls, Regina Hall plays Lisa, a breastaurant manager having the worst day of her life, with a breathtaking combination of technique and empathy. We agonize with her over every difficult decision she has to make just to get through the day.

Elsie Fisher as Kayla in Eighth Grade

Elsie Fisher started work on Eighth Grade the week after the 13-year-old actually finished eighth grade. She carries the movie with one of the most raw, unaffected comic performances you will ever see.

Emma Stone takes aim in The Favourite.

Best Director: Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous efforts has been bracing, self-written satires, but he really came into his own with this kinda true story written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Everything clicks neatly into place in The Favourite. The central troika of Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as backstabbing cousins vying for her favor are all stunning. The editing, sound mix, and costume design are superb, and I’ve been thinking about the meaning of a particular lens choice for weeks.

Daniel Tiger (left) and Fred Rogers, star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

Best Documentary: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Once in a while, a movie comes along that fills a hole in your heart you didn’t know you had. Morgan Neville’s biography of Fred Rogers appears as effortlessly pure as the man himself. Mr. Rogers’ radical compassion is the exact opposite of Donald Trump’s performative cruelty, and Neville frames his subject as a kind of national surrogate father figure, urging us to remember the better angels of our nature.

Sorry To Bother You

Best Picture: Sorry to Bother You

Boots Riley’s debut film is something of a bookend to my best picture choice from last year, Jordan Peele’s Get Out. They’re both absurdist social satires aimed at American racism set in a slightly skewed version of the real word. But where Get Out is a finely tuned scare machine, Sorry to Bother You is a street riot of ideas and images. When his vision occasionally outruns his reach, Riley pulls it off through sheer audacity. No one better captured the Kafkaesque chaos, anger, and confusion of living in 2018.

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My Cousin Rachel

Femmes fatales in film are regarded as misogynist for their kneejerk evil but feminist for lacking the doormat and sounding board qualities which define the majority of cinematic female characters. We don’t know whether the title character in the period suspense drama My Cousin Rachel is one, or just a woman subject to the whims of an obsessive suitor. Philip (Sam Claflin), our main character, treats her alternately as angel of light and an exotic figure of suspicion. First we hear about her in letters which imply she poisoned his cousin/adoptive father in Italy, after marrying him. When she arrives, she is gentle and charming, although with a penchant for serving people vats of specially made tea. An offscreen doctor says her husband died of a brain tumor which made him paranoid.

Rachel Weis and Sam Clafin in My Cousin Rachel.

Philip, who heretofore spent his scenes detailing the harm he will cause Rachel (Rachel Weisz), is immediately smitten. An orphan entering his mid-twenties, he notes he has “never seen a woman cry,” and his need for love overrides his caution. Weisz must play Rachel both as a widow getting over her loved one’s death by hanging out with someone who looks like him, and also as a figure of mysterious Italian letters, unexplained horse rides and inquiries about the will. The film’s only problem is Philip’s inexperience and gullibility which, while provoking suspense, are a little repetitive. The family attorney (Simon Russell Beale) and his godfather (Iain Glen, a.k.a. Jorah Mormont, in best unheeded counselor mode) warn him again and again, yet he seeks to woo Rachel with the wealth he will soon inherit. It’s hard to root for someone who only makes bad decisions to further the plot, which weights our sympathies with the possible murderer.

Notably for a period film, Philip’s servants are visible. Outnumbering him, they live lives unconcerned with his affairs, eating, cussing and getting paid all while knowing to steer clear of his drama. (They also find time to ominously sing the British folksong “The Three Ravens”, about birds discussing a knight’s corpse abandoned in a field. I would have preferred The Twa Corbies.)

Director Roger Michell (Changing Lanes, Notting Hill) and cinematographer Mike Eley start with what looks like most British period dramas, but as Philip loses focus, so do they, using objects blocking the frame, rack focuses and a handheld camera to mirror Philip’s mental state. The editing speeds up as things get more intense, and overall the film holds you in suspense. Based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier, it nevertheless is a bit old-fashioned. Du Maurier provided the basis for two Hitchcock films, but not for the one this film most resembles, Suspicion. Because the character of Rachel remains too elusive, the psychology is old hat. We never leave Philip’s viewpoint, and Rachel’s ambiguity is never big enough to let Weisz make a complete portrayal. She suggests a grieving woman constrained by her time and relationships, via half-sentences and shyness. The film is best as a haiku-like sketch of a widow in need of different social norms.

My Cousin Rachel

For a more vibrant period drama suspense thriller, I would recommend Chan-Wook Park’s The Handmaiden, which replaces that director’s appetite for violence with sex. Here Weisz’s “limitless appetite” is alluded to a few times as warning to Philip, but during the only sex in the film she stares at the sky and thinks of England. For a more adventurous movie with Weisz, I’d recommend Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, which segues from a meditation on socialized monogamy into a critique of how everything is socialized. My Cousin Rachel is enjoyable but not ambitious. Its sex is restrained, its deaths hidden. The tactfulness that just happens to beits style is also that of the endless wave of British period dramas that have washed on our shores every year since before I was born.

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The Lobster

Tired of the superhero grind? Ready for something weird? Never fear, The Lobster is here!

No, The Lobster is not an obscure X-Man—although maybe Marvel should look into it. It’s Colin Farrell, and when this dark, surreal comedy begins, he’s not a lobster yet. He’s just a sad, recently single guy named David checking into a hotel. But it’s quickly apparent that this hotel has some special features. For one thing, there’s a rifle that shoots tranquilizer darts hung over the bed. For another, everyone in the hotel is single like David, and they’re all varying degrees of sad about it, because if they can’t find a mate in 45 days, a strange fate awaits. But, as the Hotel Manager (Olivia Colman) says, “The fact that you will be transformed into an animal should not alarm you.”

But at least they get to choose what kind of animal their undatable selves will be transformed into. Most people choose to become dogs, but David wants to be a lobster, because, he says, they can live for a hundred years. His choice earns him a compliment from the Hotel Manager, who like most of the cast assembled by director Yorgos Lanthimos, is an expert at the particularly British art of getting a laugh by saying emotionally charged things in a detached deadpan.

Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell aren’t monkeying around with love in Lanthimos’ The Lobster.

As if being forced to look for a life partner in a room full of identically dressed, frumpy people dancing to the universe’s worst party band isn’t bad enough, there’s the matter of the tranq dart guns. It turns out, checking into the Hotel is not voluntary. All citizens of The City without a husband or wife are sent there to face the mating ultimatum. Naturally, some run, choosing life in the woods as radical singles. The Hotel’s denizens are led into the woods on periodic hunting parties to track down and tranquilize fugitive singles, who are then dragged back to the Hotel for animalization. Bag a single, and you get an extra day added onto your stay at the Hotel. Some people, like the Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia) have extended their lives indefinitely by becoming ruthless players of the Most Dangerous Game.

Lanthimos’ strange creation sets a similarly dark, humorous tone as Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil. But lacking Gilliam’s extravagant budget, his absurdities are more grounded in the familiar. There’s a lot going on underneath the surface of The Lobster. As it was unfolding, I began to take it as an allegory for the age of internet romance: Social norms that used to be enforced invisibly are now formalized when everyone is forced into the same online arenas to meet people they might be attracted to. Not that the old system of meeting random people in bars produced any better outcomes, but at least it was unmediated by invisible tech companies whose motives we are pretty sure don’t align with our own. David is constantly being pulled by opposing forces which cannot be reconciled, no matter how he tries to adapt. When he’s in the hotel, he tries to connect with the Heartless Woman, because he has to hook up with somebody. Later, when he’s fled to the woods, he meets his soul mate (Rachel Weisz), but they have to go to hilarious lengths to keep their love secret from the radical individualists of the forest.

To call Lanthimos’ film “quirky” is a dramatic understatement. The Lobster is that rare idiosyncratic film that remains emotionally accessible, largely thanks to a carefully honed lead performance by Farrell and some timely help from John C. Reilly as another hopeless schlub on the fast track to dog town. In a summer where theaters are plagued by Batman Poisoning, The Lobster is a suitable antidote.

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Youth

About three-quarters of the way through Italian writer/director Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) and his best friend Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) watch a totally nude Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea) slowly enter a hot tub. “Who is THAT?” Fred says.

“God,” Mick says.

Waiting to meet God is the primary theme of Youth, which recently took home Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor for Caine at the European Film Awards. When we meet Fred, the retired composer is meeting with a representative of Queen Elizabeth, who is offering him knighthood if he will only agree to come out of retirement and conduct his composition “Simple Songs” in a command performance. He refuses, citing “personal reasons.” He and Mick are staying at an ultra posh resort in the Swiss Alps that cinematographer Luca Bigazzi has a grand old time filming. But the constantly excellent food, happy-ending massages, and mediocre entertainment somehow only add to the funereal atmosphere. The name of the sculpture in the hotel lobby says it all: Alpine Prison. Fred has lost his hunger for creation, and thus his will to live.

Harvey Keitel, and Michael Caine in Youth

Mick, on the other hand, is at the hotel with a staff of writers creating his next film, which he calls “my testament.” His love of creation is intact, and that keeps his mind young, even if he can’t get it up for the fetching young prostitute who haunts the lobby.

Beside the ace cinematography, Caine and Keitel’s buddy routine is the best thing about Youth. Mick tries to puncture Fred’s growing cynicism and apathy, while Fred works hard at doing absolutely nothing. Sorrentino’s screenplay bounces the pair off of an unlikely group of well-heeled hotel guests, none of whom seem to be having any fun whatsoever. Fred’s daughter, Lena (Rachel Weisz), endures the dissolution of her marriage. Actor Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano) is sullenly preparing for a role in a historical drama that, when revealed, gets the film’s biggest laugh. The once-youthful superstar footballer Maradona (Roly Serrano) is now morbidly obese, but still mobbed by fans. Veteran actress Brenda Morel (Jane Fonda) arrives late in the action to drop some plot bombshells and throw the most epic fit of the 2015 film season.

Caine glides through the loose collection of vignettes like some kind of ghost who hasn’t gotten around to dying yet. The slow revelation of the source of his pain is masterful and depends almost entirely on Caine’s facial control. Some of Sorrentino’s digressions work, and some of them don’t. The dialogue is occasionally clunky in an English-as-a-second-language kind of way. But as long as Caine and Keitel are around, ogling the young women and antagonizing the bored rich, Youth remains compelling.