Tag: Toni Collette

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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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I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons in I‘m Thinking of Ending Things.

I recently rewatched an old favorite: Being John Malkovich. The 1999 comedy, written by former sitcom scribe Charlie Kaufman and directed by Beastie Boys video maker Spike Jones, is a surrealist take on the corrosive effects of celebrity culture. It’s a comedy, sure, but that label is somehow too limiting. It’s the height of 90s indie weirdness as a kind of high art.

Kaufman and Jones would reunite for 2002’s Adaptation, which twisted Susan Orlean’s nonfiction bestseller The Orchid Thief into an unrecognizable pretzel. Then Kaufman wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which, in the hands of Michael Gondry, became a film on the short list for best of the 21st century.

Awkward! Jake and Lucy meet the parents, Toni Collette and David Thewlis, in one of the most awkward dinner scenes imaginable.

But after the financial crisis of 2008, Kaufman-esque surreality seemed to go out the window. Arthouse and indie films became much more neo-realistic, in part because the mid-budget movie became an endangered species as studio dollars flowed towards megabudget “sure things” based on recognizable intellectual properties. You know, superheroes.

One of the great side-effects of the streaming era has been giving new life to strange voices like Kaufman, and allowing creativity to take flight. One of the earliest examples of this was Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, a Greek comedy/musical about street violence, which was produced by Amazon. Now Netflix has made a film with Kaufman that simply couldn’t exist in the contemporary Hollywood studio system.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is, like Adaptation, a loose adaptation of a book — this time, a 2016 novel by Iain Reed. Kaufman doesn’t insert himself into the story this time, but then again, Orleans inserted herself into her narrative of the eccentric Floridian swamp ranger, so it was only fair. That being said, there’s very little about this film that is conventional in any sense.

The story starts on a long car ride through a snowstorm. Lucy (Jessie Buckley) is staring out the window, contemplating how her young relationship with Jake (Jesse Plemons) is unsatisfying. They eventually arrive at his parents farmhouse, where she meets his mother (Toni Collette) and his father (David Thewlis), and the family shares an awkward dinner. Then, as it’s getting late and the snow is piling up outside, Jake and Lucy head back to the city. As they pass a small side road, Jake insists on a detour to see his old high school, over Lucy’s objections.

Ice cream? In a snowstorm?

And that’s pretty much the whole plot of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but it tells you almost nothing about the film. It is dense, extremely wordy, and at times stubbornly elusive in meaning. Also, there’s a dance sequence.

Buckley excels in one of the most difficult parts you can imagine. Her character’s identity is elusive and ephemeral. Her name seemingly changes again and again. At one point, she does a full-throated impression of legendary film critic Pauline Kael, reciting passages from her review of A Woman Under The Influence. It’s a stunning technical performance.
Plemons’ performance is exceptional. His vacant Nazi enforcer is often overlooked in Breaking Bad, because it’s just another great performance on a screen crowded with them. Here, his gifts are on full display. He even sings songs from Oklahoma! (What is it with the Rogers and Hammerstein thing lately?)

Did I mention the animated sequence?

Kaufman, who also directed, has constructed one of his strangest scripts. It’s almost Becket-like in its mixture of mundane details and slippery symbology. At times it descends into pastiche, sampling texts as strangely disconnected as David Foster Wallace essays and A Beautiful Mind. I’m not going to attempt to explain its meaning. I suspect the writer(s) would insist the attempt to do it for yourself is the point of the exercise. Nor is it a puzzle movie that will click into clarity as soon as you discover and assemble all the clues, although it does have that aspect. The key question to ask if you’re looking at it from that perspective is, who is imagining whom? In that way, it’s about how we construct our identities, and how fragile our mental houses of cards really are.

As a director, Kaufman is a better than average composer of strange images, but his words do miss the visual flash of Gondry and Jones. Ultimately, I’m not sure I’m Thinking of Ending Things comes together in the way that Eternal Sunshine or Anomolisa does. But I have been thinking about it for a couple of days now. It’s a big, sprawling, uncompromising vision from one of our most talented writers. Just don’t go into it expecting to come out with easy answers.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is streaming on Netflix. 

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Knives Out

Be advised: Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a great movie, and I will fight you.

Notice I didn’t just say “The Last Jedi is a good installment in the Star Wars franchise,” like I would say about a Marvel movie that adequately hits the marks of costumed heroism while setting up the next episode in the infinite saga of corporate synergy. I said it was a great movie, period. Not only does it look amazing — it’s the best-lit Star Wars movie since George Lucas got his USC film professor Irvin Kirshner to helm The Empire Strikes Back — but writer/director Rian Johnson explored and expanded all of the characters he was given to work with by Lawrence Kasdan and J.J. Abrams in The Force Awakens, leaving the story neater and better than he found it. With the much-maligned Canto Bight “space casino” sequence, he did what the middle passage of a trilogy is supposed to do — complicate the morality of the story.

With the family fortune at stake and the patriarch’s corpse still warm, can the Thrombeys get a clue?

But that move is only an echo of the most challenging part of The Last Jedi, the characterization of Luke Skywalker. Instead of the gung-ho farm boy ready to take on the galaxy single-handed, he is a depressed hermit who no longer believes his youthful heroics made the world a better place. For a lot of disillusioned Gen Xers who grew up idolizing Luke, this was just a little too real. Johnson shepherded the best performance of Mark Hamill’s career as he rediscovers the heroic heart that still beats within him.

In a just world, Johnson should still be at the helm of Star Wars for the final installment of the trilogy of trilogies, which will hit theaters later this month. Instead, he and his producing partner Ram Bergman reunited most of the Last Jedi crew and knocked out Knives Out in about a year.

If you want to see what the real pros think about Johnson’s abilities, look no further than the incredible cast he assembled, starting with James Bond himself.

Daniel Craig plays private detective Benoit Blanc, who, in the grand tradition of Agatha Christie-derived whodunits sports an absolutely outrageous accent. Instead of Hercule Poirot’s bombastic Belgian, Blanc has an exaggerated Southern drawl, which prompts Hugh Ransom Drysdale (Captain America himself, Chris Evans) to call him “CSI: KFC.” Evans plays the black-sheep grandchild of Harlan Thrombey (Captain von Trapp himself, Christopher Plummer) the wildly successful writer of mystery novels whose untimely suicide on the evening of his 85th birthday party Blanc is hired to investigate.

Captain no more — Chris Evans is the black sheep of the family in Rian Johnson’s new whodunit, Knives Out.

But who hired Blanc? That’s a question that no one, not even the detective himself, knows the answer to. Was it eldest daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), the self-made real-estate mogul? Or was it Walt (Michael Shannon), business head of Harlan’s publishing empire? Or maybe it was closeted fascist son-in-law Richard (Don Johnson) or lifestyle guru daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette). The one person we know for sure it is not, is Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s immigrant nurse who finds herself caught in the middle as the children of the fabulously wealthy family jockey for a share of the inheritance.

Johnson’s script for Knives Out is the kind of thing Hollywood craftspeople like Leigh Brackett and Dalton Trumbo used to churn out on the regular: a tight, fun genre piece suffused with contemporary politics. Johnson delights in pulling the rug out from under you, then leaving you to wonder how long the floor is going to last.

Blanc, the eccentric detective, is a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes, only he has a pair of Watsons in local cops Lieutenant Elliott (LaKeith Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan). As necessary in byzantine mysteries, the dialogue is heavy in exposition. But it goes down easy because all the actors are having so much fun. Craig chews the scenery like it’s a plug of tobacco, while Curtis projects raw, feminine power and Shannon plays against type as a subservient failson. Only de Armas is truly playing for sympathy, as the sole poor person in the cast, who, coincidentally, vomits every time she tries to tell a lie.

What makes Knives Out a meaty murder mystery is its subversive portrait of the American ruling class. They’re all feeding on the corpse of a fortune made by someone smarter and kinder than they are, and their thin veneer of niceness is stripped away the instant an iota of their privilege is threatened. That’s why it’s immensely satisfying when Johnson delivers their collective comeuppance.

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Hereditary

Leo Tolstoy opened Anna Karenina with the line “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

(left to right) Milly Shaprio, Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, and Alex Wolf as the not-so-happy family in Hereditary.

This holds true for the family of Annie Graham (Toni Collette) in Hereditary. In fact, I’d venture to guess that no family has faced similar unhappiness, with the possible exception of Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes in Rosemary’s Baby. The film begins with the family preparing for the funeral of Ellen Leigh, Annie’s mother who just passed away at age 78. Even though she lived in the Graham’s large country home as she descended into dementia in the last few years, she and Annie were not what you’d call close. Annie’s surprised that the funeral for the this “secret and private woman” is so well attended.

It’s clear from the outset that, despite the outward trappings of affluence, this is not a healthy group of people. Dad Steve (Gabriel Byrne) looks perpetually crushed by the weight of his responsibilities. Teenager Peter (Alex Wolf) is a stoner who looks generally unwell, with splotchy skin and a perpetually sweaty demeanor that is especially alienating compared to his well-scrubbed, suburban classmates. Strangest of all is 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Broadway actress Milly Shapiro), who hides behind an unruly mop of hair and makes tiny dolls out of junk and scraps.

Milly Shapiro as Charlie

As for Annie, she is an artist who recreates scenes from her life in detailed miniatures. She’s got a big show coming up, and the deadline pressure—represented by a series of passive aggressive voicemail messages from her gallery representatives that doubles as Hereditary’s only attempt at comedy — is starting to get to her. Soon after her mother dies, she starts sneaking out of the house to attend survivor’s grief group therapy instead of working on the little dioramas of family tragedy that litter her attic.

Annie’s dioramas give director Ari Aster an opportunity for experimentation within his austere style. Almost all of the effects in Hereditary are in camera (or are such artfully produced CGI that it fooled me). Aster uses tilt-shift —a technique from still photography that uses a specially constructed lens to mess with the viewer’s depth perception—to blur the lines between the film’s base reality and Annie’s memories in miniature. The director couples his analog visuals with exceptional sound design, laying his arresting images on a bed of creaks and whispers.

Aster is not obsessed with building a better jump scare. He’s making horror hay out of the dread of family dysfunction and that subtle but unshakable feeling leftover from childhood that you’ve done something wrong that you don’t know about, but you’re about to get punished for it anyway. Secrets and spirits reach from beyond the grave to manipulate the living in almost every scene of Hereditary, in ways that are subtle but, in retrospect, become strikingly obvious.

Toni Collette screams real good.

Hereditary is short on gore but long on general creepiness. What makes it work are the performances, particularly Toni Collette’s commitment to playing a parent whose family is disintegrating around her while her sanity is fleeing. Audiences have talked about how this film stays with them after the credits roll, and I think that’s largely due to Collette’s blood and guts, leave-everything-on-the-screen efforts. There have been great screamers before—such as the mother-daughter duo of Janet Leigh and Jamie Leigh Curtis, for whom the term “scream queen” was coined — but Collette takes it to the next level with a guttural howl from the depths of her putrefying soul. Aster uses her pain as the main ingredient in a unique horror alchemy that is part family drama, part Wicker Man, and part panic attack.

Hereditary

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Krampus Knows You’ve Been Naughty.

The Christmas holiday’s power as an inducer of seasonal affective disorder lies in its rigid family decorum and enforced good feeling. That’s why Christmas movies like Bad Santa, Gremlins, and Die Hard resonate: Their blood and vulgarity ridicule that decorum and the sinking sense of not living up to an impossible ideal.

The horror film Krampus invades the suburbs with blood and shock, but wrapped around that is a disgust with annoyances of the season that isn’t as lived-in. It opens with a slow-motion montage of a Black Friday shopping riot, which segues into our main character’s onstage fight in a Christmas play. The slo-mo isn’t subtle, but it is special. From there, things get less so. Max (Emjay Anthony), a true believer in Santa Claus, has his love for Christmas challenged by the arrival of in-laws and the resulting tension between his mother and father (Toni Collette and Adam Scott). In anger, he rips up a letter to the North Pole and tosses it into the wind, where the mythological German monster Krampus finds it, thus precipitating his family’s ruin.

Krampus, a reverse Santa Claus who steals naughty children, is a perfect premise for horror. Director Michael Dougherty makes the mistake of taking his sweet time getting to his horned monstrosity, alternating between Max’s trite wishes for family togetherness and the in-laws’ one-dimensional idiocy in a slow build to the supernatural. The result is the first half plays like a weaker version of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

Max, played by Emjay Anthony, versus Krampus

Old pros like Scott, Collette, and David Koechner can’t elevate the material. The slow build only leaves those beats for brief, imaginative stops in a German-speaking granny’s animated backstory, and wonderful It Follows-like visuals of Krampus stalking the rooftops. A magical storm descends upon the family, stranding them in their house. The sudden claustrophobia of electricity loss, missing neighbors, and blocked streets is well done. But the film only truly comes alive when the characters visit the attic, and are attacked by a league of wonderfully designed nightmare toys.

This structure won’t matter to the older children the film seems pitched at — the two-dimensional Christmas love-hate will be fresh to them. For their benefit, the film has been denuded of gore that would ordinarily punctuate every monster attack. (Several characters helpfully sink into the snow without blood.) Lovingly terrifying images, from a gingerbread man catching children with a hook and pulling them up a fireplace, to a kid’s slo-mo fall into Hell, will stick in the mind even when the script fails.

I particularly liked the Gremlins-esque gingerbread men’s nailgun attack, a teddy bear with sharp teeth, and a Christmas tree angel with gargoyle wings. The film’s ending also strikes the right horrific note for kids, in the manner of an old Twilight Zone. Dougherty, who has done seasonal horror before with Trick ‘r Treat, is very spirited when it comes to visuals, and when we finally see Krampus up close, he’s a wonderful Guillermo del Toro-like creation. He should have had more to do, in the manner of frequently seen villains like Freddy or Jason. Future Krampus films letting forth the bloodcurdle everyone feels at the group-schmaltz belch of our collective winter holiday should just get right to it.