Tag: Rooney Mara

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Nightmare Alley

Bradley Cooper stars as Stan, an ambitious carny who seduces psychologist Lilith (Cate Blanchett), who just might be more dangerous than he is.

The United States won the propaganda portion of World War II by emphasizing the better angels of our nature. Our individual freedoms of expression, rule of law, and economic self-determination were superior to the dehumanizing groupthink of the fascists. Later, this same formula was successfully brought to bear on the authoritarian communists of the Soviet Union. But after the war, G.I.s who were fighting for this vision of ultimate human freedom returned home to an imperfect country of widespread economic inequality, racism, and religion-driven patriarchy, where criminals and liars prospered while good people were ground down by the brutalities of capitalism.

It was taboo to talk openly about such things during the triumphal postwar era, but beginning in 1944 with Double Indemnity, the discontents coalesced into a new kind of crime film. For Hollywood, centering the criminal was nothing new; Jimmy Cagney had made a career out of playing charismatic psychopaths in the 1930s. But this movement, which the French dubbed film noir, was something different. Cagney’s gangsters were self-made men, but film noir rejects the idea that we are masters of our own fate. The noir antihero is not empowered by his dreams, but rather brought low by his ambition. The land of opportunity is full of tricksters and confidence men, but the one mark you can never fleece is the mark within.

William Lindsay Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley was first adapted for film in 1947, during the height of the noir movement. Set in the world of cheap carnivals and spiritualist swindlers, it’s an atypical noir. There’s no tough-guy detective, and the femme fatale doesn’t show her cards until the climax. But its spooky world-building and uncompromisingly bleak vision of humanity resonated with director Guillermo del Toro, who adapted the story as his follow-up to his 2017 Best Picture winner The Shape of Water.

The director has said this is his first film without a monster, but that’s not true. The monster wears the face of Bradley Cooper as Stan, a down-on-his-luck drifter who finds work at a traveling carnival, run by Clem (Willem Dafoe). He is befriended by Pete (David Strathairn), a hard-drinking carny who takes pity on the penniless stranger, and whom Stan instantly betrays by sleeping with his wife Zeena (Toni Collette). Pete and Zeena’s spiritualist act once made them the toast of Europe, but now Zeena fleeces the rubes as a psychic and tarot reader while trying to keep Pete from drinking himself to death. Stan hectors Pete into teaching him the secrets of cold-reading a mark. When Pete finally succumbs to alcoholism, Stan steals his book of tricks and absconds with cute fellow carny Molly (Rooney Mara).

We catch up with the couple in New York, where they’re selling out fancy nightclubs every night with a mix of fake mind-reading and mumbo jumbo. When Stan is presented with a particularly rich mark in the person of gangster Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), he seduces psychologist Lilith (Cate Blanchett) into divulging her client’s deepest secrets.

Cooper, playing a part originated by the great Tyrone Power, is perfect. You might think, because he gets the most close-ups, that he’s the hero, but Stan is under no such delusions. He tells Lilith that he’s attracted to her because “You’re no good, just like me.” The genius of the story is how every step down Stan’s path to damnation is just a slight escalation from his last lie. Blanchett plays the Hitchcockian ice queen you always knew she had in her, while Collette is a Cassandra whose warnings of the ruin caused by misusing the tools of a perfectly respectable con are ignored. Also great are Willem Dafoe having the time of his life as a sleazy but articulate carny and Mary Steenburgen as a grieving mother taken in by Stan’s rackets.

Veering from the grubby midway to the resplendent art deco interior of Lilith’s office, Nightmare Alley is visually ravishing. It had the misfortune of being buried at the box office by Spider-Man: No Way Home and Omicron, but hopefully its well-deserved Best Picture nomination will help bring a new audience to this mini masterpiece of neo-noir. After all, Nightmare Alley’s dark vision of America as a utopia for confidence men and carnival barkers has never felt more relevant.
Nightmare Alley is streaming on Hulu.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

A Ghost Story

Telling a horror story from the point of view of the monster is a time honored method that has produced good results. Think of the endless slate of vampire stories we’ve seen that used this trick, beginning with Ann Rice’s Interview With The Vampire and including the much lamented Twilight saga. Stop motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen once said that his films were “shrines to the monster”. The best movie monsters, like King Kong or The Creature From The Black Lagoon, aren’t evil, per se, but innocent, untamed, and backed into a corner.

David Lowery’s new film, A Ghost Story, makes the monster the protagonist. The big question it puts forward is, what does a haunted house look like to a ghost doing the haunting? Lowery’s answer is: It looks pretty darn sad.

It’s not fair to Lowery or the film to reduce it to the terms of genre, which it resembles only superficially. But it does serve to highlight the depth of Lowery’s achievement. A Ghost Story is not a Paranormal Activity parade of jump scares and spooky sound effects. It is, instead, a meditation on deep time, on the impermanence of all things that seem permanent, and the recurring cycles of human experience that ultimately connect us all.

Our two nameless protagonists are Casey Affleck, a musician struggling to write the perfect song, and Rooney Mara as his wife, a young professional paying the couple’s bills. Like any couple, they have their ups and downs, but they seem genuinely happy with each other. Rooney wants to move out of their cozy but aging suburban home for something nicer, but Casey wants to stay. He feels a sentimental attachment to the old place where they had so many great memories. But before their conflict can be resolved, Casey dies suddenly, leaving Rooney on her own.

To his presumed shock, Casey comes back as a ghost. And we’re not talking about a CGI-heavy Pirates of the Caribbean ghost. Affleck spends the bulk of the movie under a long sheet with eyes holes cut out of it. That’s the kind of conceit that could either instantly crash and burn or elevate the project. In this case, it is the latter.

Casey’s ghost is trapped in the house he didn’t want to leave. He watches his wife intently until she moves on. Then, he watches the long, long years roll by as new families move in, live their lives, and leave.
Stuck under the sheet, Affleck becomes a figure model, little more than a prop for the rest of the film to revolve around. But it’s brilliant and poignant. Mara does most of the dramatic heavy lifting, including a virtuosic performance in an excruciating, long scene in the kitchen that has been dividing critics since A Ghost Story’s Sundance debut. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo proves a perfect fit for Lowery’s lyrical vision. Emotionally, A Ghost Story is a raw and unguarded. It’s only 92 minutes long, but it’s an extremely intense viewing experience that will stick with you (dare I say, haunt you?) long after the sheet drops.

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Film Features Film/TV

Carol

Director Todd Haynes excels at portraiture. From Julianne Moore’s terrified housewife in Safe, to his sextet of competing portrayals of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, Haynes has proven himself among the best at drawing character through social context and subtle gesture. Early in Carol, Haynes gives us a little primer on his methods. New York shop girl Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) is hanging out in a movie theater projection booth with her beatnik friends. She asks aspiring writer Dannie (John Magaro) why he is taking notes about the movie they’re watching. He replies that he’s writing down the difference between what what people say and what they really mean.

Carol opposite Mara.

In a way, the repressed 1950s is the perfect era for Haynes’ sensibilities. He’s had great success with the setting in 2002’s Far from Heaven, but stumbled when he tried to operate in the decadent 1970s in his glam rock fantasia Velvet Goldmine. Like Far from Heaven, Carol owes a lot to Douglas Sirk, the director of 50s melodramas like Imitation of Life whose obsessively stylized images and heightened emotional landscapes earned him a sizable cult in the post-Stonewall era. But Carol, with its intense focus and and ability to address subjects that Sirk could have never gotten away with, transcends its influences.

Haynes trades Moore, with whom he collaborated on Safe and Far from Heaven, for Cate Blanchett, who gave the best Dylan in I’m Not There. Blanchett is among the best actresses working today, and Carol, the upper-class New Jersey housewife she inhabits under Haynes’ tutelage, is among her greatest creations. Carol is the kind of North Atlantic blue blood who pronounces tomato “tom-mah-tow,” but by the time we meet her, she has already transgressed polite society by having an affair with her friend Abby (Sarah Paulson). Her marriage to the gray flannel-suited Harge Aird (Kyle Chandler) is kaput, but there’s the matter of custody of their 4-year-old daughter Rindy (played by twins Sadie and Kk Heim) that must be resolved before their divorce is finalized. That’s when she happens to meet Therese, who is working in Haynes’ exquisite recreation of a grand 1952 department store decorated for the Christmas season.

Carol is at her most vulnerable, looking for a romantic connection she can’t find in her sham marraige. Therese, on the other hand, is agape at life, just trying to make it through her stressful retail day so she can go out and party with her meathead, would-be financé Richard (Jake Lacy) and their friends. “I barely even know what to order for lunch,” she says. Carol’s assurance and status bowls Therese over in a direction she’s never felt before. Soon, they drop everything and, like a lesbian Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, hit the road.

Cate Blanchett

But there’s another Eisenhower-era novel that features a pair of protagonists going on the road: Lolita. Even given the social strictures of 1953, there’s no getting around the fact that Carol is much older and more experienced than Therese, and there are layers of class and social privilege in play in the aristocrat’s courtship of the shop girl. It’s obvious, by the third act, that both women are struggling against internal forces they don’t fully understand.

Ultimately, the prevailing force is identified as love. But Haynes’ vision of love is not the conquers-all variety, but rather “we’ll muddle through, no matter the cost.” It’s a beautiful sentiment, befitting a beautifully constructed film from one of our era’s greatest filmmakers.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Throwback August: Hackers

The internet sucks these days. It really sucks. Did you get to this blog via Facebook? Yes? That is because the internet sucks. Being online in 2015* is like attending a mandatory marketing conference held inside a military boarding school where your only job is to “make content” and “use Helvetica.” 2015 on the internet: fun is dead.

In 1995, Hackers rollerbladed.

But it wasn’t always that way! Join me, if you will, on casual rollerblade ride into the year 1995, when Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller starred in Hackers. In 1995, the internet was made up of forums, wifi didn’t exist, floppy disks were all important and if someone wanted to steal your personal data they would have to hack into the FBI. Hackers were not scary mouthbreathers who wanted to share your Ashley Madison profile with the world. Hackers (or, should we say, “keyboard cowboys”) were cool and attractive teens whose biggest obstacle in world domination might just be their mom!

The film follows well-adjusted computer genius Dade, i.e. “Crash Override”, as he begins his final year of high school in New York City. There, he meets the elvish Kate, i.e. “Acid Burn” (Angelina Jolie), along with a gang of psychedelic weirdos. Dade hangs with the group of burgeoning hackers at their favorite ravey internet cafe, Cyberdelia, where everyone exchanges top secret tips about how to do illegal things. Let us take a moment to grieve how the internet used to be a social activity, back when phone lines connected the world. Anyway. Trouble starts when the Secret Service begins to target the group for crimes they didn’t commit. From there, it’s a race to the finish: to whom do the glittering towers of data really belong?

All Your Base Are Belong To Them

There’s a lot in Hackers that is by-the-book ‘90s flick: a group of underage underdogs unites to outsmart the bad guy (Fisher Stevens as network safety analyst, “The Plague”), managing to have fun along the way. But the script doesn’t feel pat, despite lines like, “There are worse things than death and I can do all of them,” and “There is no right and wrong; there’s only fun and boring.” The visuals also hold up well, despite the obvious camp factor. Imagine a world where a “garbage file” looks like a holographic acid trip. This is the world of Hackers.

Angelina Jolie disrupting your face.

2015’s version of the tech elite is so much less sunny. Tech itself is less sunny. Just compare Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo with Angelina Jolie’s Acid Burn. Lisbeth is the sort of lady who knows what the underbelly of the internet really holds— child porn, hate groups, drugs and maybe occasionally some government secrets. If Acid Burn were hacking today, she’d probably not be on the same team as the boys. And, realistically, no one thinks computer geniuses are hot anymore.

So it is with longing for times gone by that I recommend the cast of Hackers as the best nostalgic group halloween costume for 2015. But first you are going to have to learn how to hack a payphone, you “hapless technical weenie.”

Throwback August: Hackers

*this is the only remaining good site on the internet.