To Leslie

Playing Oscar catch-up: To Leslie is the sort of small, honest drama that Oscar attention is meant to rescue from oblivion, so it’s a shame that Andrea Riseborough’s Best Actress nomination has gathered a scent of scandal (as I write this, the Academy is looking into whether the grass-roots campaign on Riseborough’s behalf played by the rules). Apart from all that, this is a glum but focused story about Leslie (Riseborough), an alcoholic who frittered away $190,000 of lottery winnings six years ago, alienating many friends and abandoning her young son. Now she drifts from bar to bar, getting evicted from her motel room and going to stay with her now-grown son (Owen Teague), who soon shows her the door as well. She goes to stay with exasperated former friends Nancy (Allison Janney) and Dutch (Stephen Root), and that works out about the same.

Leslie seems incorrigible, but she just needs to catch a break, and she lucks into a room-and-board job at another motel run by Sweeney (Marc Maron), a kind-hearted loner who somehow sees the potential in her. She almost blows that, too, but Sweeney is patient. To Leslie isn’t the miserablist wallow in bad vibes that it may sound like. Just as it’s honest about the ways some people mess up their lives, it’s also honest about people who pull out of the tailspin and do what needs doing, and that’s Leslie’s story. This isn’t the kind of soul-grinding indie drama that leaves the audience with no hope; the script by Ryan Binaco knows there are as many successes as failures in the realm of addiction. 

The secret of Riseborough’s performance here is that she keeps a spark of Leslie’s former, clearer self glowing, even if only dimly during Leslie’s darkest hours. We sense what Leslie has thrown away, and when Riseborough acts opposite the great Allison Janney we get duets of loathing and self-loathing. Leslie and Nancy used to be friends until Nancy watched Leslie drink away most of her humanity. “How mean are you?” Leslie asks Nancy, who still not only holds her grudge but grips it with white knuckles. But Nancy isn’t mean, just heartsick at what happened to someone she loved and, somewhere distant inside, still does. But these are West Texas women with no talent for prevaricating, and Nancy can’t help coming off as bitter, even cruel.

Even by herself, though, Riseborough conveys Leslie’s maddening discomfort in her own skin. Riseborough takes Leslie to almost rock-bottom and gradually lifts her again, without softening Leslie’s rage at those who gave up on her, including herself. What makes her turn worthy of notice most of all is its generosity of spirit. Riseborough always makes Leslie interesting. Leslie is smarter than she sounds, and very keenly aware of how thoroughly she tossed herself in the trash. There are a lot of lesser performances like this in fraught indie dramas every year. Riseborough gives Leslie mordant wit about what a dumpster fire she is, but not so much that she’s just cracking jokes about her failures. Leslie doesn’t like to talk much about the demons that brought her low. Riseborough shows us glimpses of them anyway.

Director Michael Morris doesn’t prioritize his star at the expense of the supporting cast — Maron is quite good playing a decent man, and Andre Royo has the sting of authenticity as Sweeney’s motel partner Royal, an acid casualty who likes to howl at the moon. The movie is underlit by design, until the final scenes, which have an almost tacky brightness that functions as one last humbling detail. It’s just humbling, though, not depressing. We’re not sure exactly what Leslie did in her lost years, but we get enough clues; when she’s still drinking, she hangs out in the bar and eyeballs men who might buy her a beer and a shot in exchange for her body, and we figure she has past experience at that, but we don’t have to watch her debase herself here. (One man perceives what’s going on with her and politely demurs.) 

I don’t feel qualified to assess whether Riseborough’s work is “as good as” that of her fellow nominees, or “better than” other actors who didn’t make the cut. The danger, though, is that the kerfuffle over her nomination will lead viewers to expect a flashier, more forceful turn than she actually gives. That would be unfair, as her work deserves to be assessed on its own merits away from popularity contests or pricey Oscar campaigns or, indeed, the performances with which she is in “competition.” All I know is that she made me believe in Leslie and care about her future, despite Leslie’s acting like a turd a lot of the time until she gets tired of looking in the mirror and seeing a turd. I wished Leslie well and felt better about her chances (and the chances of others like her) at community and purpose and happiness, perhaps for the first time. Highlighting compassionate acting like this, again, is what the Oscars do best.

Videodrome

On February 4, it will have been forty years since David Cronenberg’s Videodrome — his magnum opus about fantasy and control — emerged, like a rash, on theater screens and shortly thereafter withdrew its shingle and closed shop. In the decades since, it has been re-appraised as an important work on display in the Cronenberg museum of images and ideas. Taking the form of a classic noir, the film is less a whodunit than a what’s-it-gonna-do-to-me. The protagonist, Max Renn (James Woods, seldom moister or better), owns and operates a shady indie TV station that traffics in the obscure and the louche. Max is always on the lookout for harder content, and he finds it in Videodrome, a program consisting only of torture and murder (simulated or real? does it matter?). 

One of the great ironies of Videodrome is that the actual content of the Videodrome programming isn’t the problem — it’s not, in and of itself, harmful to the viewer. It’s just there to lure people — perhaps a certain kind of person not averse to violent fantasizing — and then the signal, which we’re told could just as easily be conveyed in a test-pattern screen, causes hallucinations and, eventually, death. The concept of salacious and/or violently stimulating content as a Trojan horse for something else is borne out by Cronenberg’s own movie, which attracts us with kink and splattery, suppurating Rick Baker special effects and then infects us with its virus of ideas — or at least an invitation to debate them. Unlike Videodrome, Cronenberg doesn’t want to hurt you, just provoke thought.

Following the rabbit hole of clues and sketchy figures, Max gets involved with Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry), who gives advice on the radio by day and indulges s&m urges at night. Nicki is intrigued enough by what she sees of Videodrome to want to be part of it. For Max, she becomes the erotically entreating face of Videodrome, her lips bulging forth from the TV set from which many of Max’s head trips flow. Despite the wild and often unprecedented imagery he puts on the screen, Cronenberg has never been a flashy director, which suits his material just fine. If we’re to understand what Cronenberg is telling by showing, we need to see it, straight on and dead-eyed. No fancy cinematic footwork will do.

Other figures fade into the picture, like gangsters out of the noir fog — mainly media cult types, who study the effects of mass communication and either caution against it or weaponize it. Somewhere in the film’s second half, Cronenberg gets a little lost in the weeds of his own story’s implications. But that’s what makes it art. Cronenberg has famously said that you make a movie to find out why you wanted to make the movie. Videodrome, possibly, stays unresolved for us because it was unresolved for him, and how can something this visually and philosophically tangled be resolved? It can’t. It can only go out on a small frequency and reach the like-minded, who may perceive its unanswered questions as a void they feel duty-bound to fill with interpretation.

Cronenberg began with a disturbing childhood experience with a TV signal that was barely coming in; the (again) unresolved fuzz and hiss of a bad signal, he thought, could have been a dark and frightening program without enough juice to cut through the static. That’s not even a premise, that’s a vibe, and the original tone of young Cronenberg’s unease makes it into the movie. The sometimey signal of Videodrome seems to cast its malefic spell by what it conceals as much as reveals. Sweaty imagination pastes in what the eye misses. Videodrome has a lot to say about the bad romance between eye and brain, mind and body. Cronenberg has taken his childhood fear and built a world of conspiracy around it. Some of it plays as old hat — Cronenberg had just been down a similar paranoid road with 1981’s Scanners — and some of it is an excuse for Cronenberg and Rick Baker to do the Lovecraftian work of imagining the unimaginable. “Long live the new flesh” are Max’s final words, and Cronenberg’s artistic credo. The flesh Cronenberg shows us may be new, but it’s as flawed as the old flesh, because it’s ours. 

Terrifier 2

“I react to the brutality,” wrote Pauline Kael in her review of the brutal El Topo, “because I still associate violence with pain.” Well, Damien Leone’s Terrifier movies are decidedly not for Kael or anyone else who associates violence with pain. For horror-movie fans who respond to the protracted kills in these movies as flashy crescendos, the viciousness is (again in Kael’s words) a turn-on. Terrifier 2, which earned $10 million last fall against a $250,000 budget, ups the ante on the grisly shocks Leone dealt in the previous films in the franchise — All Hallows’ Eve (2013) and the first Terrifier (2016). The films are unified by the star of the show, the silent creeper/killer Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), but can be watched independently. The first Terrifier is a minimalist slasher that exists to send various characters to untidy deaths, but Terrifier 2 is some kind of ambitious work of art within the context of slasher sequels (it even, for Christ’s sake, boasts a musical nightmare sequence).

Art the Clown never speaks or even screams in pain, and when he laughs at his cruel works, he does it silently. He moves gracefully, even joyfully, and often reads as childlike. He’s much the best part of this series; he seems to wear an aura of nightmare logic around himself, bending the world’s reality to his designs. He does too many incredible things in these movies to be a realistic psycho; he seems supernatural, even immortal, and here we learn that he may have emerged from — or at least been predicted by — the sketches of an artist whose brain tumor drove him to madness and suicide. The dead artist left a bitter widow and two school-age kids: Sienna (Lauren LaVera), a gloomy teen who works for months on costumes in her room, and Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), who has a morbid interest in Art. The devilish clown zeroes in on these kids, sometimes accompanied by a little girl who shares his rictus leer and his worship of gore; she exists, probably, in Art’s imagination, or maybe not. The metaphysics of Leone’s movies are far from consistent or coherent.

The monstrous killer doesn’t seem to want anything from Sienna or Jonathan other than to kill them messily, which I felt missed a chance for the plot to be interesting instead of distended. (Terrifier 2 runs two and a quarter hours, a long time to indulge Leone’s bloody showmanship.) Still, anyone who cut their teeth on forbidden issues of Fangoria magazine in the ‘80s, cooing over the color photos of splattery massacres and (even cooler) how the effects were done, will recognize Terrifier 2 as the sort of over-the-top magnum opus we Fango kids always hoped for and seldom got because the MPAA always required horror movies to be whittled down to win an R rating. Terrifier 2 went out unrated, without major-studio backing, and wound up spending four weeks in the box-office top ten. That’s worth paying attention to, even if the film’s particular emphasis on surreally cruel mutilations and hackings requires a loud and receptive audience. If you’ve never heard of Fangoria, you are probably not among that audience.

Some have noted, here and in its predecessor, that Leone tends to linger on the agony of the female victims while giving male victims relatively quick and merciful deaths. I can’t deny that, and I don’t know the following for sure, but women/girls being stalked and slashed is a regrettable but inarguable trope of this subgenre, and by lavishing such attention and fake blood on those scenes, Leone may be (I suspect, perhaps too charitably) parodying or at least commenting on that trope. The violence here goes beyond misogyny; it’s often too cartoonish to be taken seriously, and it’s not truly intended to be associated with real pain. It’s the sort of horror comic, caked over with red crayon, that a spooky monster-loving little kid might come up with. Like Art himself, it seems innocent on some level. It appeals to the part of us that used to engage in verbal riffs on gross tortures when we were kids. Again, if you weren’t one of those kids…

Glass Onion

If, like me, you had the means to watch Glass Onion but for whatever reason had been procrastinating, I advise you to jump on in. This franchise, which began with 2019’s Knives Out, is shaping up to be a perfect delight. (You don’t need to have seen the first movie to follow this one.) The films take their cue from Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the sharp, drawling detective at their center, whose raciocinative acumen narrowly tops his keen sense of fashion. Here, Benoit goes to a private island owned by tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who has sent out puzzle-box invitations to a murder-mystery party he has planned. Of course, the plot is a bit more complicated; the preceding sentence is not to be trusted fully — it describes what happens but, of necessity, omits a lot.

The first sequence introduces us to all the suspects, who know Miles from back before he was really Miles Bron. (Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed Glass Onion as well as Knives Out, assures us that Miles’ similarity to Elon Musk is coincidental.) There’s governor Kathryn Hahn, model/fashionista Kate Hudson and her assistant Jessica Henwick, masculinist YouTuber Dave Bautista and his girlfriend Madelyn Cline, scientist Leslie Odom Jr., and former Miles associate Janelle Monae. We’re led to believe any of them might have a motive for killing Miles. That may well be, but Benoit Blanc suspects the truth is more tangled.

Stories like Glass Onion are hard to review without spoiling them, so that’s about all I’ll say about the goings-on. I would chat a bit about the small pleasures tucked away in the margins, but that would give away all the jokes — the Benoit Blanc films are as much comedies as mysteries. So what’s left? I can praise how it’s told and the tools used. Johnson (who got his start in features with the neo-noir Brick) writes and directs these movies with grace and wit; his camera follows the lead of the script, every move and pan in place to support — or buttress, if you will, a word favored by our courtly Benoit — the tale. And since that tale gets a little convoluted, with an extended flashback, Johnson knows that absolute filmmaking clarity is vital to our understanding.

Glass Onion cost $40 million, a pittance in Hollywood terms today, but has a posh, expensive look. Cinematographer Steve Yedlin, who’s been working with Johnson since Brick, lights the characters warmly as contrast with their cold glass surroundings. His burnished images, wedded to Nathan Johnson’s rich, old-school score, take us to a comfortable past when money was still spent on divertissements for grown-ups and no expense was spared to make everything and everybody look good. If nothing else, the Benoit Blanc movies have an effortless style (wherein a ton of effort goes into making it all seem effortless) that a viewer of a certain age can take in without feeling insulted or visually tricked. The puzzle boxes may look implausible in real space, but these movies tweak reality ever so slightly. It’s still recognizably our world, but with charming little filigrees like a gag-inducing throat spray that presumably offers protection against COVID (the film is set in the first few months of the pandemic). 

Daniel Craig was always a better actor than James Bond allowed him to be. Anyone who knew that will be happy to see him amiably flourishing post-Bond as the suave master detective who, at a loss between cases, sits in his tub playing online mystery games with celebrities associated with mysteries. Craig lifts up anyone he’s sparring with, too; Edward Norton sprinkles some intellectual insecurity onto his not-Elon Musk, and if Netflix had allowed Glass Onion to play longer in theaters the film might have done for Janelle Monae what its predecessor did for Ana de Armas. Monae is terrific, fully popping, at last, as a movie star. All the actors here, really, seem snuggled by the warm camera eye. These movies know that even if a character is an irredeemable murderer, that doesn’t mean they can’t be fun to watch.

The Menu

Who eats the wispy, elite stuff served up by chefs like Ferran Adrià and, in The Menu, by the well-regarded Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes)? Certainly not you and me, unless you routinely drop $1,250 on a meal. No, it’s for the rich and jaded. And the movie aims both barrels at those who have that kind of money, and would spend that kind of money on something that, as Slowik notes, “turns to shit in your guts.” The food doesn’t matter — it’s the status of being one-percenter enough to get a seat at the fancy table. On a mordant eat-the-rich level — though, to be fair, the film is never so obvious as to dabble in cannibalism — I enjoyed The Menu. But if you’ve consumed enough black-comedy horror about snobby gourmets getting their comeuppance, nothing much here will shock you.

Our entry point into this rarefied world is a young couple, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who journey by boat with ten others to Hawthorne, an exclusive restaurant on a private island. Chef Slowik rules his kitchen with military precision; essentially, he puts on a show, acting the way his audience expects a deluxe, eccentric chef to act. Tyler is a big fan of Slowik; the others, including a food critic (Janet McTeer), just buy tickets to the experience as a badge of superiority, or to find the less-than-robust fare wanting because, when you get down to it, most of these people aren’t as refined as they want to appear, and just want to stuff their faces like the brutal gourmand Mr. Spica in this film’s nearest ancestor, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

Margot is not what she seems, and neither is Slowik; they gravitate to each other, carrying similar demons, and Fiennes and Taylor-Joy do their nimblest work opposite each other. Their scenes will play all the better a second time through. Hong Chau is elegantly menacing as Elsa, who deals with the guests using a quiet but deadly politesse (she’s having quite the season — she’s in The Whale and Kelly Reichardt’s upcoming Showing Up). The acting, especially John Leguizamo as a past-it hack movie star and Judith Light as a rich matron in whose eyes we can see the light of hope slowly dying, is top-notch; the director Mark Mylod clearly sets the stage (The Menu could almost as easily be done as theater — it is theater) and gets out of the way so this crew of performers can assemble some fine dishes.

But once you’ve seen what the movie is, you’ve seen the strings, and there’s about half an hour to go in which you wait to see how savage the situation gets. Pretty savage. Anthony Bourdain would have cackled his dark cackle all the way through it. But, again, if your diet has been long on stuff like Cook, Thief and various horror comedies set in restaurants, you’ll most likely see the final course coming; the only suspense is what the ingredients are. The writers, Will Tracy and Seth Reiss, have typed up a doozy, and I can’t fault the showmanship. But I kept hearing in my head the voice of my late friend and fellow horror fan Ken Souza, who would have given the film points for craft (Peter Deming’s cinematography is swanky-creamy throughout) but rattled off like ten different sources it cribs from.

I am a little more forgiving of lapses in originality. As Godard supposedly opined, it’s not where you take it from, it’s where you take it to. And The Menu takes it to a satisfyingly apocalyptic conclusion, the only way, really, for such a nihilist-lite work to see itself out. (I say lite because not everything turns to shit in its guts.) There’s nothing much the matter with it — there’s just not, finally, anything great about it. As satire, it sets up easily hissable Richie Riches without much shading. And the film’s (valid) grumbling about the inequity between classes would have more bite if we got to know anyone on Slowik’s kitchen crew at all. (One is reduced to a loud portion of Slowik’s ghastly performance art; one poses as something else in a somewhat pointless diversion; the rest are as indistinct as most of the maggots in Full Metal Jacket.) The Menu is a competently prepared dish that would like to be thought of, ultimately, as a well-made cheeseburger. But it feels weird on our tongues, like the reconstituted, teleported steak in David Cronenberg’s The Fly. In more senses than one, it lacks taste.