1917

Watching the immersive World War I movie 1917 makes for a divided experience: it’s a fine and compelling story, and the level of craft is unquestionable, but the mode of storytelling may hold us at a distance rather than immersing us. We’re in Northern France, and a British general (hey look kids, it’s Colin Firth!) assigns two corporals, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), to go deliver a message to keep a couple of battalions from walking into a German trap. In other words, in the middle of all this muck and death and gore, these two guys are sent off on a pacifist mission — with the added urgency that one of the soldiers who must be called back from the fight is Blake’s brother.

All well and good. But director Sam Mendes (American Beauty and the last two Bond films) has chosen to construct 1917 as seemingly one unbroken shot (with a lot of digital trickery and one blackout). Sometimes this works to plunge us, as well as our two protagonists, into the inferno — we become an invisible third soldier, tagging along. Sometimes we even forget about the technique when the camerawork isn’t so insistently clever and we’re not wondering how many times certain lengthy takes had to be filmed if someone sneezed or blew a line. But some of it feels overextended; the suspense drains away and we’re left to admire the filmmakers (including master cinematographer Roger Deakins and editor Lee Smith) as they strain mightily to accomplish … what? The artifice of the unending take doesn’t connect to anything thematically, and it’s draining.

Chapman and especially MacKay convey grinding exhaustion, which, because of the filmmaking that wrenches us into lockstep with them, we share. They’re not given much space or time to develop personalities, either attractive or repulsive. (If Mendes and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns had chosen to make one of both of them annoying idiots nonetheless entrusted with a great mission, it might’ve been suicidal for the movie, but possibly interesting for a while.) The men are blanks by design: we’re meant to project ourselves onto them. And though Mendes is probably too modern a director to make the heroes stoic and brave, he also doesn’t make them ugly or cowardly. They’re meant, after all, as a tribute to Mendes’ own grandfather, upon whose WWI experience (at least as he told it) 1917 is based. Generally, though, most of the war movies that might occur to you as great films weren’t made to honor a specific veteran in the filmmaker’s family. They were made to illuminate war, not the warrior.

Certain scenes, though lovely in passing or elaborately ghastly, seem to place themselves in competition with Dunkirk or Paths of Glory or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s last two movies. Despite the technique (which Hitchcock’s Rope inaugurated at feature length over 70 years ago), 1917 feels like a regression compared with Sam Mendes’ previous war movie, or warrior-without-combat movie, 2005’s Jarhead. That movie touched on a subject generally ignored by war pictures: the boredom of war, the stultifying existential dilemma of being trained to kill and then being thwarted from doing it. And yet, in the moment, our rarin’-to-go jarhead hero is caught between disappointment that he doesn’t get to kill and relief that he doesn’t have to kill. There’s a lot more to unpack and chew on in a sarcastic, very Gen-X half-satire like Jarhead than there ever is in 1917.

A film, or any work, can be extraordinarily well-wrought and still feel a bit pointless. An abundance of fiddly labor, little flicks of the wrist, all meant to leave us impressed by the challenge of the very doing of the work. Would 1917 work as well if edited conventionally? Well, its technique does give it a hurtling-along quality, a beat-the-clock pulse. And at certain points, we seem to be watching one of the corporals bob along down some rapids for minutes on end, and we feel we’re getting sidetracked from the mission, just as the corporal is. Our impatience becomes incorporated into the suspense. Other times, though, we just feel impatient, and we have to gobble the fleeting hits of poetry or beauty as we run along with the corporals. 1917 uses its technique, finally, not to pull us into complicity with its characters but to deny us pleasure. It’s self-important and ungenerous.

Bombshell

The rousing Oscar-chaser Bombshell dramatizes a case of bad people doing a good thing at the expense of a worse person. The filmmakers surely know that the audience for this movie will have mixed feelings at best about its kinda-sorta heroines — Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) and Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), the Fox News stars who accused the network’s CEO, Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), of sexual harassment in 2016. The film partly runs on the irony that these women, who fit few people’s definition of “feminist,” paved the way for the next year’s necessary #MeToo wave. What’s implied, of course, is that if Ailes the old perv had kept his zipper shut, the women might still be on Fox News assuring viewers that Santa is white (Kelly) or that transgender students shouldn’t use school restrooms (Carlson) — except that it isn’t just Ailes, it’s the entire sexist corporate culture that enabled and cloaked him (up to a point). He’s just one of the biggest beetles on the dunghill.

A major theme of Bombshell, and something that eventually bites Roger Ailes in the ass, is the importance of narrative. Fox News addicts, we are told, prefer certain narratives that either frighten or titillate, and if a story does both, that’s your lead. Another irony is that the women provide the foundation of Ailes’ undoing, but it’s a more powerful man — Rupert Murdoch (Malcolm McDowell) — who seals the deal. It’s not that Murdoch cares all that much about the lupine culture that treats women like interchangeable blonde heads atop interchangeable tight bodies. It’s that Ailes, facing allegations from dozens of female employees, has not gotten out in front of the story. Ailes thinks he can just harrumph and lawyer up, but the world that used to close ranks around reptiles like him seems to be closing up shop. He who lives by the narrative dies by the narrative.

Theron and Kidman, as well as Margot Robbie as the fresh-faced composite character Kayla Pospisil, use every tool in their belts to make us care about the one-time faces of bigotry. (Post-Fox, Megyn Kelly continued to be awful on her NBC morning show; her defense of blackface in Halloween costumes was the last straw for the Peacock, who sent her on her way in October 2018.) Bombshell doesn’t present these women as entirely innocent or blameless (we see a snippet of Kelly’s “Jesus and Santa are white” moment), but we do see them through the eyes of less powerful others, like Kate McKinnon’s character, who works on Bill O’Reilly’s show — which would seem a cruel enough fate — and is also a closeted lesbian and Democrat. Why would such a woman work in the conservative lions’ den? As she puts it, she applied everywhere else, and only Fox hired her — and now that she works for Fox, no one else will hire her. The comedic whirlwind McKinnon dials her energy down to a nervous buzz and files what is, for me, the most painful out of all the performances. Some of the other women, like Allison Janney’s Fox lawyer Susan Estrich, manage to smuggle in subtle signs of disgust at what, as women, they are asked to do.

Jay Roach and screenwriter Charles Randolph seem to know they can’t end a story like this on a note of triumph. It is, after all, the story of a big fat shark taken down by smaller sharks, and those smaller sharks will still eat you. Kidman and especially Theron keep us engaged with their characters’ struggles while maintaining a certain coldness. What they’ve had to do to hold on to power, or what they know as power, has roughened their souls as well as their knees (and, the movie whispers, being numb of soul may be an advantage in rising up the Fox News ladder). Margot Robbie, whose Kayla has drunk the Kool-Aid, rips out Kayla’s guts near the end and shows us the emotional carnage wrought by Ailes and (crucially) many, many men like him. Has the ideology Kayla learned so well from Fox News been challenged for her by the experience? Who knows? Who cares? These women may be awful, or in training to be awful, but if we can’t even agree that nobody regardless of their politics deserves to be raped, then we can’t even agree.

Knives Out

Rian Johnson’s amiably masterful Knives Out has been a surprise sleeper hit in the past few weeks, and I think I know why: It takes a lot of tensions and absurdities of today and turns them into a comforting evening’s entertainment. The genre is murder-mystery, and the tone is somewhere between wicked and tongue-in-cheek, but the message is an odd partner to all that: “Kindness will win.” Beyond that, I owe you the courtesy of saying practically nothing about the plot, other than that wealthy mystery-novel writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) dies under suspicious circumstances and there are many people who could be responsible.

Except there aren’t, because we see fairly early on how Harlan died — except for the parts we don’t learn about till later. Harlan’s family comes to his mansion for his 85th birthday, and all of them are terrible. His grim-faced daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her sleazy husband (Don Johnson); their black-sheep son (Chris Evans); Harlan’s saturnine son (Michael Shannon) and his racist wife (Riki Lindhome); Harlan’s GOOP-like daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) and her performative-liberal daughter (Katherine Langford). Harlan’s only friend is his personal nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas). When Harlan turns up dead, someone calls in the famous detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), and we’re off.

Johnson writes and directs with speed and clarity; this thing ticks along beautifully. The dialogue, especially that which has little to do with the mystery and everything to do with establishing character, is sharp but juicy enough to push this into the arena of comedy. The character work is as crucial as the mystery plot, because Knives Out doesn’t, as you’d think, center on the grandly hypothesizing Benoit Blanc (though oh what fun Daniel Craig has with the accent, the intonations, the expansive wave of a cigar). It focuses on Marta, who has very real motives, rooted in current pain, to do what she does. Benoit finds her so trustworthy — for she literally cannot tell a lie, or else she’ll vomit — he enlists her as his Watson.

I guess I’m a Rian Johnson fan — I’ve seen four out of his five movies (Brick, Looper, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and this) and enjoyed them. They are truly ornaments to their respective genres, but they also share a certain regard for decency in surroundings that don’t always reward it. Johnson has, with Knives Out, made a liberal fable disguised as a murder mystery, a fable where the characters run the spectrum between Nazi and SJW, between skeptic and mystic, and like most of us are flawed and complicated. The nice thing about Marta, the movie’s one true hero, is that she’s drawn so skillfully as a selfless person of the type that’s usually incidental to someone else’s story. Harlan’s family, selfish jerks all, envision themselves as the center of their story — don’t we all, though? And Harlan himself, he gets to go out in the most triumphant way a man like him can. But he is the object of the story; Marta is the subject. Ana de Armas’ soft features and Margaret Keane eyes can’t hurt her credibility as an angel among demons. Marta is humble, smart, reflexively compassionate; we gravitate to her. Even the great Benoit Blanc seems a little full of himself.

Given how much the movie pits itself against Trumpism, explicitly in dialogue or subtextually, its success has been heartening (after its third weekend in theaters it was still in the top three). Knives Out speaks for kindness, intelligence, generosity, truth, and sharing the wealth. The way it’s been marketed is a little tricky, though — for one thing, it de-emphasizes Marta, and makes this look like the sort of white-people murder-mystery dinner that might put off the same viewers who would really dig where it actually ends up. On the other hand, it’s going to lure in a bunch of well-to-do white folks, attracted by the delectable promise of a genteel genre piece, only to spit full in their faces. Or vomit, as the case may be.

Rabid (2019)

If you’re going to remake a David Cronenberg film, you’d better not try to ape his ideas, because Cronenberg’s ideas are inextricable from his filmmaking. They are the source of the horror: in much of his work, a disease is a misunderstood monster, just doing what it has to do to survive. Jen and Sylvia Soska, who like Cronenberg are Canadian, have now remade Cronenberg’s 1977 cult favorite Rabid, and they have filled it with their own notions about surgery and transhumanism and fashion. The Soska sisters don’t try to be Cronenberg, but they sure pay tribute to his films throughout their own. Their Rabid, a project that was offered to them and possibly would have been made with or without them, expresses more than anything their deep and abiding love for Cronenberg’s work. As Cronenberg is one of my movie gods, I’m on board with that.

The new Rabid takes off from a premise similar to the original. A woman, Rose (Laura Vandervoort), is badly disfigured in a motorcycle accident. Her case is taken up by a surgeon (Ted Atherton) who applies experimental skin grafts. Rose’s looks are restored; the procedure even smooths out scar tissue from a previous, less extreme accident. But Rose is also left with a craving for blood, and when she feeds off of a victim, that person in turn is infected with the blood delirium. It all boils down to the doctor trying to cheat death (aren’t they always?) by developing this grotesque parasite that perpetuates itself violently. But in the Cronenberg aesthetic, the horror is that this new thing — this new flesh — brought to life is not in itself evil. It just evolves incidentally into a threat to humans. In the Soska playbook, it’s simply one of many things that twist mind and flesh, generally to the detriment of women.

The script, by the Soskas and John Serge, puts Rose to work for a fey, decadent fashion designer. The Soskas seem to liken the fashion world to the moviemaking world: in both, art and transgression are possible — a post-infection Rose produces some tormented gothy dress sketches that her boss flips over — but so are body dysmorphia, drug abuse, and a self-destructive quest for perfection. The Soskas’ interests and emphasis deviate from Cronenberg’s own, but the end result honors his work. There are any number of Easter eggs for Cronenberg fans, such as a wink to the famous “college of cardinals” scene in Dead Ringers, and others I will leave you to discover. Eventually the action leaves the realm of Cronenberg and incorporates elements of, if I’m not mistaken, Re-Animator and John Carpenter’s The Thing. Like many young filmmakers, the Soskas like to pile everything they’ve been obsessing about into the latest film because there’s no guarantee they’ll be granted the keys to another.

Ultimately, Rabid has a warmer center than the original — Cronenberg had to make do with adult-film actress Marilyn Chambers as Rose (he’d wanted Sissy Spacek), and about the most you could say about Chambers was that she was surprisingly competent. Laura Vandervoort brings a lot more vulnerability and pain and spiky anger to Rose, and when the action around Rose gets outlandish, Vandervoort grounds it all in credible female angst. When Rose feeds on a loutish, abusive man, it’s partly you-go-girl revenge, but it’s also pragmatic: a dude this stupid and single-minded makes the perfect prey. Vandervoort doesn’t play it like Zoë Tamerlis in Ms. 45; Rose is driven by her need for blood, and this idiot makes himself known to her.

There was a certain way-before-its-time non-binary/intersex thread in Cronenberg’s Rabid — his Rose was left with what read as male and female sex organs in her armpit (!), with which she fed on blood. We see a bit of that in the new film, but since it deals far more organically with a female point of view, the threat is mainly and viscerally phallic. The Soskas’ 2012 body-horror original American Mary showed they had more on their minds than grrl-power snarls and splatter, and Rabid confirms it. It ends on an image comparable to the bleak nihilism with which Cronenberg sealed his film, only with a distinct nightmarish Gilead tinge to it. As in Alien: Resurrection, perhaps the most Cronenbergian (and most underrated) of the Alien films, a woman isn’t even going to be allowed the peace of death if her existence will benefit men.

The Irishman

Martin Scorsese’s late-period masterpiece The Irishman kicks off on a note as darkly funny and devastating as much of the rest of the movie: a lengthy tracking shot through the halls of a Philadelphia nursing home, stopping on the gray, barely breathing husk of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro). Forget the famous, triumphant Copacabana tracking shot in Scorsese’s GoodFellas — this is the cold, bleak truth of a cold, bleak life. Frank, a truck driver turned button man for the Philly mob, swam in the same deep waters as crime-family head Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and embattled Teamsters king Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Before he died in 2003, Frank claimed he whacked Hoffa, a confession in much dispute. I don’t care if he really did it. The Irishman is not about the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa’s death; it’s about the mystery of Frank Sheeran’s life, and that of men like him, who gave up the long-term nourishment of family for short-term security.

At a party honoring Frank, there’s a bit where De Niro and Pesci sit and talk while Scorsese’s camera swings over for a glimpse of Pacino chatting with Harvey Keitel (as another big-time mobster). For those of a certain age who grew up watching these four men, this is like fan-service, or Christmas coming a month early. The Irishman often comes off as a farewell-tour concert, though I imagine all of them (except maybe Pesci) want to continue working — just maybe not all together, like this. The point is that the movie isn’t all desolation and loss; it has many pleasures, including watching younger turks like Ray Romano, Jesse Plemons, Bobby Cannivale, and Sebastian Maniscalco looking like kids on that same Christmas morning, in a daze of disbelief that they get to play with legends. Then you have the nearly silent Anna Paquin as Peggy, Frank’s daughter, who knows exactly what he is, and has since she was little. Peggy is what you look like when you’ve learned the harder, sharper bits of life long before you should. Paquin’s sorrow and anger haunt the film.

Aside from the much-discussed de-aging computer effects that allow De Niro and others to play men ranging from their twenties to their eighties, Scorsese doesn’t indulge much whiz-bang. His stamp is clear and bold, but shots are held longer than you expect, or old men in huge aviator glasses sit and talk, quietly or not, in hotel rooms. There’s no hint of the Rolling Stones or any other Boomer rock on the soundtrack. If Saving Private Ryan was Steven Spielberg’s salute to the Greatest Generation, The Irishman is Scorsese’s much more ambivalent view of them. The message seems to be, Our fathers may have done what they had to do, but that doesn’t make them heroes.

Or villains, either. Mostly, we see men hobbled by their own shortcomings. Pacino gives us a showboating Hoffa, afflicted with short-guy pugnacity and pride; he plays with Hoffa’s vowels like a cat with string, while De Niro nods and reacts or sometimes stammers. By and large, though, Pacino just simmers and seethes. Over-the-top bravura is left to the young men; the old masters at work here, including Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, seem to disregard anything noisy or inessential and get to the point without fuss. The Irishman is reserved, though not repressed. The old gangster violence pops out now and then, unemphatic and casual. A bullet comes for a man the way a stroke or cancer does. Nothing personal, fella, it is what it is.

Like Frank, Scorsese has all daughters. Is there a Peggy in Scorsese’s life, judging him quietly for being off on the set all the time? Even if there isn’t, Scorsese can imagine Frank’s particular purgatory. The women in these men’s lives have been trained, generationally and socially, to stand by the men and not make problems. It takes a Peggy, a woman of the next generation, to say, Hey, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. The Irishman is more about the conflict between Frank and Peggy, even when she’s nowhere near the screen, than it is about Frank’s tutelage under Bufalino or betrayal of Hoffa. The final shot invites debate and analysis. What does it express — hope, or acceptance of what’s coming? Scorsese was idiotically shamed for not giving Anna Paquin more scenes or dialogue, but she makes her presence felt, woundingly, throughout. She, too, is a master, though at 37 far from old. It’s enough that in that final shot, we know that Frank is waiting for one of two visitors. We know for sure only that one of them did come for him. And that’s that.