Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

For all its popping visual ingenuity and fecundity, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is one of the loudest and most active movies I’ve ever almost fallen asleep on. The film’s predecessor, 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, left me feeling in my review, “I admire it as a glistening piece of pop art. But its corporate pizzazz chills me a little.” Well, the chill hasn’t gone away. Across, as we’ll call it for short, depends heavily on your having seen the first film, preferably within the last month. Otherwise you may not be clued in as to the new Spider-Man, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), and why Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), a Spider-Person from another universe, takes an interest in the arc of his story.

After an awful lot of weightless jumping, running, fighting and smiting, we’re briefed on the crisis: each Spider-Person’s life must follow certain “canon events,” and for Miles this might mean the death of his father. Does Miles save him? You’ll have to come back next March for Beyond the Spider-Verse to find out. This premise, though, is a neat way to play with the multiverse angle (which, in comics as well as film, has seemed to attach itself to Spider-Man for some reason). Instead of the ‘verse we’re watching not seeming to mean much, since there’re just more ‘verses like it out there, Miles’ verse has depth of feeling, and we care whether he and his nearly-police-captain dad escape the Curse of Police Dads across the Spider-Verse.

One imagines the third film, when it comes, may turn Miles into a metafictional rebel, denying his fate, or the plot that has been written for him. (As a result, Miles may consort well with this film’s best character, Spider-Punk, voiced by Daniel Kaluuya.) That movie will probably have the payoff and pack the climactic punch that’s missing from this middle film. Across is far from bad, but it’s busy as hell, plotwise as well as visually, and it left me a little exhausted. The main villain here is the Spot (Jason Schwartzman), who generates black holes he can pop in and out of. His powers are an animator’s fondest dream, and some of the action scenes flow almost at the speed of thought, creating their own twinkly reality where the Rule of Cool reigns supreme. It’s terrific fun, but there’s about an hour too much of it for me.

At the end, Spider-Gwen marshals a Spider-Army to help her find Miles and restore him to his ‘verse. I’m sure Marvel won’t mind if you buy all the merchandise and comic books related to all those Spider-Folks, too. I fear I’ve been around the block too many times with corporate comics to trust these movies to have anything truly revolutionary in mind. The goal of superhero comics, and now superhero movies and shows, is to keep themselves going until people stop buying. (The DC film universe’s penultimate product, The Flash, currently coughing up blood in theaters while Across the Spider-Verse surged back up to #1 in its fourth weekend, shows that DC hasn’t pulled the plug on this particular iteration of their heroes a minute too soon.) 

These Spider-Verse movies have been gorgeous demo reels for the latest in animation techniques. With the benefit of digital tech, they can evoke the panel-by-panel mode of the comics medium more fluidly than Ang Lee’s Hulk did twenty years ago. Almost alone among modern superhero films, though, Lee’s Hulk movie (which preceded the workaday Marvel MCU movies and their own version of the Hulk) keeps a warm, fond place in my memory. It was about something other than announcing itself as the big new franchise, and the oddities that made it a miss for most audiences endeared it to me. It was pained, exploratory, an art-house film in the glimmering cloak of a blockbuster; it tried to get at something human and resonant. The Spider-Verse movies are less awkward but have less soul. They’re so busy spinning around in their own universes they don’t really engage with our own. 

Master Gardener

There’s an awful lot under the hood in writer-director Paul Schrader’s sedate drama Master Gardener. There’s no easy way into it, so here we go: A lot of the plot scaffolding is just stuff Schrader wants to pick up and look at, as though browsing the shelves of an antique bookstore. Race? Yes, let’s have that. Redemption? Always a winner. Violence? Gotta have a little. Sex? Okay, though let’s shoot it as somberly and chastely as possible. Master Gardener has been called the last panel of Schrader’s “man in a room” or “lonely man” trilogy, following First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), and in a way it’s the happy ending to the (thematically but in no other way connected) saga. 

The plot is just Schrader’s way of arriving at a clearcut romantic denouement. Does it earn it? It depends on whether you feel its protagonist has earned it, or whether “earning” is even a relevant concept here. Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) is a cautious, quiet and conscientious horticulturist who maintains the gardens on the estate of brittle widow Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). He is also a former white supremacist, slathered with neo-Nazi ink that he hasn’t removed, we suspect, because he feels he doesn’t deserve being able to disrobe in front of anyone except Norma. (Their deal is complicated and quietly perverse.) These days Narvel works alongside a crew of people of mixed origins, and has no problem with them. He wound up gardening almost by accident; he turned his former fellow scumbags in, and went into witness protection, which turned out to be Gracewood Gardens.

I should say for those expecting something along the lines of American History X that Schrader doesn’t care that much about the particulars of Narvel’s grotesque past life. It’s just something Narvel is trying to block out, just as Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter fled from his own past as an Abu Ghraib torturer. And it throws a wrench into Narvel’s relationship with Maya (Quintessa Swindell), Norma’s grandniece, whom Norma wants Narvel to take on as an apprentice in the gardens. Instead, Narvel and Maya are drawn to each other, though we sort of have to take their attraction on faith. (We almost always have to, with Schrader. There’s little humor or warmth between the two, just shared pain and guilt.) The rest of the movie becomes about how their relationship will clear the obstacles Schrader tosses in its way. 

After one film that ends on arguably a note of sheer fantasy, and another that ends on a guarded note of hope, Master Gardener finally works towards a pure Hollywood ending — no bleakness, no need for Narvel to have that Pickpocket separateness. That Schrader chooses a former racist killer to enjoy this happy-ever-after is Schrader’s way of poking the culture-war bear this time. But like any thorny artist, he loves to disappoint people, or, more generously, he wants to give us what he wants, not what we want. Do we want this couple to be happy? Quintessa Swindell brings some delicacy and grace, and Joel Edgerton works earnestly and honorably with what he has — the fact is, Narvel isn’t always coherent as a character. Schrader may be saying no one is coherent. 

That may be. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t curious about how someone like Narvel can just shut off a lifetime of hate (we’re given bits and pieces of the incident that led to his turning on his old racist crew). It does come as a relief that the plot has nary a whisper of threat from Narvel’s former associates. He visits a case agent, who changes from a weary Esai Morales (who’s quite good) to a smarmy Rick Cosnett. Mostly, through gardening, he “believes in the future.” Master Gardener is compelling in that arid, immaculately composed late-Schrader mode, and is satisfying on a metaphorical level, but Schrader may have miscalculated by making his lonely man such a hot button. He’s saying that if even the lowest of the low can find redeeming good work and love (through tending a garden — very Chance Gardener of him), anyone can. If only Schrader’s most infamous creation, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, had had a green thumb.

The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has launched any number of adaptations, variations, and permutations in the 205 years since it was first published. The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, a modern-day riff on the story, may be one of the more touching — up to a point. A first feature by writer-director Bomani J. Story, ABG&HM is bound to be derided as “woke” by a certain contingent, though none of the Black characters in it is especially heroic or faultless, least of all Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a student at an advanced high school. 

Vicaria rattles off elements and scientific facts, and Hayes lets us share how good it feels to Vicaria to be in control of something. Her home life is gutted though (barely) functional, her neighborhood is infested with crack dealers and the resulting violence, and the (white) authority figures who enforce the rules in school and on the streets won’t help her. I believed very quickly and completely in Vicaria as a brilliant girl who may also be missing a few pieces psychologically.

Vicaria’s mother was shot to death years ago, leaving behind Vicaria and her father (Chad L. Coleman), who buys crack from the cold-blooded local dealer (Denzel Whitaker) when he’s not working two jobs. The movie is matter-of-fact about the misery it shows us, and is also willing to sketch in some genuine warmth between family. The portrait of a bleeding community feels full and lived. To complicate things, Vicaria’s brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) has recently been killed by the cops. Vicaria steals his body — not the first corpse she’s squirreled away, we learn — and decides to test her theory that death is a disease and can be cured.

This angry Black girl’s monster isn’t just the re-animated Chris; it’s rage itself, which Chris seems possessed by, and by the need to act it out. Fury flows through the monster’s veins as much as the electricity Vicaria uses to jump-start him. (When he strangles people, he leaves deep, ugly burn marks on their flesh.) Bomani J. Story uses Frankenstein to tell a tale about how anger and desperation can napalm the innocent and guilty alike. Chris wreaks havoc on cops and criminals — destroying the world that destroyed him — and we get the impression he’s acting as much on Vicaria’s wishes as his own. Her name probably sounds like “vicarious” for a reason.

ABG&HM is a fine, wounding drama that occasionally puts on a Halloween costume and gets its hands gory. It’s a hell of a calling card, and Story can take a bow for the seeming effortlessness with which he juggles thematic concerns and sustains an oppressive tone usually in exciting conflict with the snappy filmmaking. But the movie doesn’t hit us as deeply as it might, and it’s easy to see why: We never get to know Chris as a living person — he’s dead right from the start, and the artsy, wordless flashbacks we get of him don’t help. Story may have needed to keep the film to a certain length, and scenes of Chris and Vicaria sharing warm moments may have been sacrificed. So there’s no contrast between whatever he was before and the growling, haltingly spoken monster he becomes. 

Chris’s own family, even including Vicaria, doesn’t seem to have much of an emotional response to his recent death, either (and nobody goes looking for his body, which it’s assumed that someone “sick” made off with) — not even Aisha (Reilly Brooke Stith), who’s carrying Chris’s baby. They all get together for a family dinner that, as I noted above, is a welcome respite from the grimness — but shouldn’t they show a bit more consciousness of who isn’t at the table? (Chris is mentioned a couple times.) I know, I know, Story has more on his plate than grief and its realistic impact; an entire movie could be made (and has been) about processing all the intense, tangled emotions following a loved one’s violent death. Here, Chris’s death isn’t the subject, it’s a delivery system for a premise, and we sort of need to agree to go along with that to get the most out of the film. It’s not perfect, but it leaves me wanting to see more from this filmmaker. It gets our interest and holds it.

Renfield

Of the things we might expect from a Dracula movie, particularly one starring Nicolas Cage as the legendary bloodsucker, the top of that list would probably not be a crime comedy. But that’s what Renfield shapes up as. There are a few decent ideas in Renfield, but they’re left to die of starvation while the plot gives us scene after scene in which gangsters have shootouts with cops or are bloodily dispatched by Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), the immortal familiar of Count Dracula. Renfield is an unassuming-looking British dude until he eats bugs, at which point he turns into Super Renfield and the movie turns into super crap.

After about a century of doing Dracula’s dark bidding, Renfield has sort of a mid-unlife crisis; he feels he’s in a codependent relationship with the vampire. So he attends a support group of such people, and he thinks that by feeding some of his fellow sufferers’ toxic S.O.s to Dracula he can do good and do bad at the same time. But one of those toxic boyfriends turns out to be mixed up in crime, and Renfield’s plan to kidnap him is foiled by a hit man from the Lobo crime family. This, not very long into an 87-minute movie less six minutes of end credits, is where the movie goes badly wrong and never recovers. I’m never unhappy to see Awkwafina, and she’s fine here — none of the cast is the problem, really — but she’s playing Cop Trope #7189, the cop’s cop daughter still sore about his murder by the Lobos, with a side order of tension with her FBI sister. All of this is awful and takes valuable time away from Renfield and Dracula.

A whole dark-comic movie could have been made about the relationship between the familiar and his master, but that’s not what Renfield is truly about. Cops and criminals are brought into it to ensure bang-bang and fight scenes and lots and lots of gore. (Between this and Evil Dead Rise, I’m just gonna say the MPAA doesn’t even care about blood any more. Have as much of it as you want in your movie, you’ll still get an R rating and be able to get a wide theatrical release.) But the idea of Renfield helping his codependent fellows by sending their tormentors to Dracula is lost, and Dracula himself barely makes any sense. Cage is game to give a mint-condition camp performance, but the material just gives him Dracula’s resentment of Renfield to work with. That isn’t enough to make him interesting, or even plausible as a powerful force in Renfield’s life. So Dracula wanders into the sphere of the Lobo family, and a movie that died half an hour ago now lets its corpse fall into a vat of rancid shit.

Speaking of powerful forces, Shohreh Aghdashloo turns up as the matriarch of the Lobo crime clan. The role and dialogue are insults to her, but she still rallies and comes up with a menacing growl to top any vampire’s. When her mob boss and Dracula meet, she purrs “Enchantée,” and he kisses her hand, lingers over her scent (he seems to be sniffing the metaphorical blood on her hand), and says, as genuinely as only Nicolas Cage can say it, “The pleasure is all mine.” That short exchange, showing what great actors can do without explosions of gore, contains the sum total of the Renfield I wanted, something that speaks of dark unslakable desire and ghastly alliances. It’s what it should always have been about, instead of Renfield’s redemption arc and Awkwafina honking insults at people. And a movie this incurious about what the vampire master/human slave dynamic might really be like suffers in every imaginable way in comparison with the fraught relationship between vampire Nandor and familiar Guillermo on FX’s What We Do in the Shadows. Any vampire comedy now has that show to compete with. Renfield ain’t got game.