Once Within a Time

By the time Mike Tyson turns up as “the Mentor” in Once Within a Time, the phantasmagoric new strangeness by Godfrey Reggio, you might want to know exactly how Reggio directed Tyson — what he told Tyson about the character he was playing and the gestures and expressions he was making. Reggio, most famous for his Qatsi trilogy begun by Koyaanisqatsi in 1982, has said that Tyson didn’t actually need much direction. He, at least, understood what he was doing there, though we might not. 

But I’m not here to poke fun. Once Within a Time is the latest (perhaps the last) in the 83-year-old former monk’s forty-year mission to make cautionary visual/aural tone poems about what humans are doing to a perfectly good planet. Greta Thunberg is represented as a paper mask, as of course she is. She and Mike Tyson might typify two different approaches to living, or maybe not. Tyson’s casting as a Mentor who instructs children how to build a new world on the ruins of the old might signify that Reggio believes that anyone — rapists of the earth, rapists of women — could conceivably redeem themselves and play useful roles in evolution.

But of course Once Within a Time can’t be held to a strict ecological reading, or any reading. I doubt Reggio (who co-directed with longtime editor Jon Kane) sits around watching other people’s films, but his movie, let’s say, resonates with the work of David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Shinya Tsukamoto, and more. You could groove on the sounds (Philip Glass, who goes all the way back to Koyaanisqatsi with Reggio, contributes another noodly-doodly score) and images, let it all wash over you, and not bother with a scene-by-scene assessment of meaning at all. Perhaps Reggio might prefer it that way. If it means nothing to you, it means nothing (and you’ve only spent less than an hour on it). If it speaks to you, either bluntly or slant, it might do its most enduring work as an allusive experimental fable.

I don’t feel like writing a blow-by-blow of what “happens,” and you don’t feel like reading one, trust me. Some of it, fixated on children or primates gazing at the camera, has ties to Reggio’s previous effort, 2013’s Visitors. A credit near the end tells us the film was “handmade in Brooklyn,” and it does have that quality of having been tinkered with, either digitally or in real space. There’s no dialogue — not in recognizable English, anyway. Various figures — Iranian composer Sussan Deyhim as “Mother Muse,” a “Nonsense Man” who looks like an apple, spirits and robots — do their duty-dance with the death of the world. Smartphones appear as diabolical screens reflecting false existence back to us, at one point forming a black-brick road followed by an Adam and Eve.

Some critics don’t like what they read as Reggio’s preaching and hypocrisy (using the same technology he demonizes, etc.) He certainly isn’t in it for the money, and his brand of film assembly has, for the last twenty years or so, needed Steven Soderbergh in its corner as an executive producer or “presenter.” (Reggio has always enjoyed benefactors: Francis Coppola presented Koyaanisqatsi, and he and George Lucas shepherded Powaqqatsi.) Once Within a Time seems aimed at kids, and a good deal of it has a joyful, searching quality. This time out, Reggio seems to acknowledge that the end of life as we know it doesn’t have to mean the end of life full stop, that there might be a next chapter only the youngest of us might read. Or it might be all devastation and charred flowers. We don’t know, and neither does Reggio, who seems to shape these things more as questions than as answers anyway. 

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

The writer-director Wes Anderson loves storybooks, and he loves theater. He has combined the two forms into his own distinct, deadpan-symmetrical mode of cinema since the beginning. The latest example is The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar along with three other short films which, like Henry Sugar, are based on short stories by Roald Dahl: The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison, all now streaming on Netflix. (I imagine Criterion will put out a Blu-ray eventually.) 

Henry Sugar, at 39 minutes the longest of the quartet, stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the eponymous non-hero, who teaches himself the art of “seeing without eyes” so that he can make a killing at the casinos. Like a lot of Anderson films (including Asteroid City from earlier this year), Henry Sugar unfolds within and without multiple levels of presentation. Old Roald himself (Ralph Fiennes), who shows up in the other segments as well, tells the tale, as do a doctor (Dev Patel) and Henry himself. Sets are pulled aside or uncouple to reveal other sets, and the characters (including Ben Kingsley as the guru who imparts the seeing-without-eyes procedure) mainly face us straight on and narrate.

The Swan (17 minutes) takes on the favored Dahl theme of children behaving terribly to other children. A bullied boy is tied to tracks, threatened with a rifle, and finally made to climb a tree to take the place of a swan one of the bullies killed. Rupert Friend plays the bullied boy as an adult and narrates. Friend also appears in The Rat Catcher (17 minutes), about the time an expert “rat man” (Fiennes) was called to deal with an infestation in a hayrick. Lastly, Poison (17 minutes) considers a man (Cumberbatch) immobilized by a deadly snake slumbering on his stomach, and the doctor (Kingsley) who comes to solve the problem.

Henry Sugar seems to exist on its own pretty well (it was shown by itself at the Venice Film Festival), and the other three share certain motifs: animals, the tension of having to stay absolutely still. It appears that Henry Sugar kicks things off by leaving us with the notion that someone with the power to help others should use that power. The next one, The Swan (I’m going by the order that Netflix lined them up for me to watch), imagines a world where help is not coming, but the afflicted character, says Dahl, never gives up. Then the next two segments offer help when invading animals crowd into the manicured boxes of life in a Wes Anderson film. Ending on Poison (which has been adapted at least twice before, once on Alfred Hitchcock Presents by the Master himself) seems to indicate that it’s important to help even if help may be neither required nor appreciated.

Despite the occasional tension, the filmmaking is becalmed, almost sedate, and assured. Sometimes this sort of Anderson project feels like a challenge he’s issuing to himself: how flat-affect and intentionally artificial can we make this story and still please an audience? And, like so much else he’s made, this series of shorts isn’t going to move the needle for Anderson haters any more than Asteroid City or The French Dispatch did. But those who eagerly await the newest American Empirical Picture will be entranced, as usual, by the toybox sets and the people standing stock still like toy figures inside immaculate compositions (all but Poison, which is shot in widescreen format, are presented in the square Academy ratio). Henry Sugar offers a more nuanced portrait of a man capable of positive change, while the other three have one emotion in common: fear. Are shadows of doubt creeping into Wes Anderson’s well-trimmed matryoshkas of narrative? As he gets closer to his end than to his beginning, his puppet reveries may darken in interesting ways.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of its American release on September 2, Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence seems even more melancholy these days. Its two pop stars turned actors are no longer weaving their magic; David Bowie returned to his home planet in 2016, Ryuichi Sakamoto (who also composed the film’s searching score) left us in March of this year. The movie unfolds during World War II, on the Japanese-held island of Java, where stands a grubby POW camp. The camp’s commander is Captain Yonoi (Sakamoto), slim and elegant and young and beautiful; his English equivalent is the newly arriving prisoner Major Jack Celliers (Bowie), also slim, elegant, young and beautiful. This might be a love story for the ages if not for its setting. Then again, maybe it is anyway.

Though the film opens with a kerfuffle involving a Korean prisoner who apparently tried to have his way with a Dutch prisoner, it’s not so much about repressed homosexuality (although that’s in the mix) as about diametrically opposed forces that have more in common than not. The Mr. Lawrence of the title is prisoner Col. John Lawrence (Tom Conti), who speaks fluent Japanese and has struck up something of a friendship with the camp Sgt. Hara (Takeshi Kitano). These two men reach towards each other, grateful for the opportunity to relate as men and not as soldier/prisoner. I wouldn’t say Ōshima avoids homoeroticism so much as indulges it in a sidewise manner — Celliers grinning as he eats a flower, and so on. Really, the movie pits beauty against brutality, nature against the death machines war tries to make out of men.

It’s an exceptionally odd film, with more dialogue about physical frailty and moral guilt than you’d expect. Roger Ebert was nonplussed by the war between the movie’s two acting styles — the mumbly, sardonic British and the shouty, severe Japanese. (Bowie said Ōshima micromanaged everything the Japanese actors did, but left the British actors more or less to themselves.) But one of the contrasting forces here is the difference in repression; neither the Japanese nor the British generally have the language to express what they’re feeling, so they sublimate it in distinctly weird ways. (The face of the typical blustery, get-on-with-it British soldier is Jack Thompson as the POWs’ commander, until Yonoi wants to replace him with Celliers.) There’s a longish flashback in which Celliers reveals his secret shame — that he protected his disabled little brother, but only up to a point. The Japanese and the British have different languages, different cultures surrounding shame, and their seeming to share a weird Venn overlap of psychic land, wherein shame is the common subset, is part of the point.

Ōshima lets Tom Conti deliver the movie’s message, that nobody was right and everyone got dominated by brutal authority. (Conti seems to bring that same queasy wisdom into Oppenheimer as Albert Einstein.) The acting is mainly performed at a pitch of extremes. Yonoi and Celliers stare at each other across many kinds of no man’s land. Human connections between the groups, when made at all, are fleeting and almost abstruse. Hara has a bluff, affable relationship with Lawrence; he gets tanked on sake and gives Celliers and Lawrence a reprieve from death, because someone else was tortured into confessing to the offense (smuggling a radio into camp) and, hey, it’s Christmastime. 

Christmas, of course, hits differently in Japan than in the Western world; it’s a secular day meant for families to get together. The final image finds Hara, his smile taking up half the frame, reiterating his yuletide wishes to Lawrence, as per the title. Ōshima probably isn’t saying anything as simple as that Hara and Lawrence, and Yonoi and Celliers, are part of the same family of man. We’re free to imagine how these men might have greeted each other in another time and place. They seem to see themselves in one another, and vice versa. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence acquires depth and emotional scope the more you dwell on it, and it’s very much designed (to be honest, it’s borderline poky) so that we can dwell on it. It gets at the way soul-sickening self-recrimination can be a bridge to someone else’s common guilt. Put a corresponding political layer over all that — Japan and Britain facing their own sins of empire — and we have a true forgotten great film.

The Unknown Country

This is going to be one of those “in a lesser film” reviews, because Morrisa Maltz’s lovely, becalmed indie feature The Unknown Country keeps declining to do things that a lesser film would do. For instance, we meet our young protagonist, Tana (Lily Gladstone), as she hits the road. Her grandmother has recently died, and Tana is invited to the wedding of her cousin out in South Dakota. She stops for gas late at night, and a man filling his truck nearby stares at her creepily. We tense up, expecting something bad to happen. When she leaves the station, the man’s truck follows her. Then it turns off somewhere, and we never see him again. Maltz has evoked one of the many worrisome incidents that can befall a woman traveling alone without amping it up into the melodrama of a lesser film. For all we know, the man was just lost in his own thoughts, not registering Tana at all, and he just goes on his way.

Similar things happen elsewhere in the film, reminding us that someone in Tana’s situation is vulnerable, but not making us watch her endure anything terrible. Now and then, the movie stops and lets one of the people Tana encounters tell his or her story. Morrisa Maltz filmed scenes with some non-actors talking about themselves, giving The Unknown Country the flavor of a fiction/documentary hybrid, as in some of Chloe Zhao’s films. One of these people is a male store cashier who seems overly flirty until we learn he’s not interested in Tana that way — he’s just one of those harmlessly flirty-with-everyone people you sometimes meet. 

It’s good that Tana’s journey is mostly only internally rough on her, because Lily Gladstone — who got some acclaim for Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and, later this year, will appear on many more people’s radar for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon — is a gentle and friendly presence and makes Tana worth following and caring about; we don’t want to see any harm come to her. If her Tana likes someone onscreen, we like them, too. Tana drives, stops at motels (we hear from the owner of one of the motels), hangs out with family or new friends — it’s a road movie dedicated to finding the odd humanity in the people who pass in and out of Tana’s path, especially those who, like Tana (and Gladstone and much of the cast), are Native American.

The car radio tells us that the story unfolds sometime after the 2016 presidential election; it speaks of a divided nation. But the nation Tana drives through — from Minnesota to, ultimately, Texas — doesn’t seem divided, which suggests that the division is at least partly a media construct. Tana doesn’t encounter any red-hat wearers; most of the folks she does run across are nice. The Unknown Country is a refreshingly “soft” drama — it doesn’t crank up our emotions, it isn’t needlessly traumatizing. The drama inherent in the loss of family and the regaining of family is enough. The movie is made out of the moments and scenes that would be the first to get edited out of a, well, lesser film. It lingers and observes but is crisply paced and crosses the finish line at barely over 80 minutes. It puts no strain on our patience or on anything else. We relax into it and stay relaxed.

I’ll remember the waitress who talks lovingly about her many cats. I’ll remember the motel owner, and the Korean guy Isaac (Raymond Lee) who keeps Tana company for a day or so, and the wedding of Tana’s cousin, an actual wedding incorporated into the film. (Yet the wedding happens only a half hour in — a lesser film would make the wedding a big dramatic or comedic climax.) I’ll remember that strange guy at the gas station, whose story I almost expected the movie to break off for a couple of minutes and tell. I’ll remember Flo, the 90-year-old go-getter who cuts a rug every Friday at the local dance hall. And I’ll remember Tana, such a kindly and welcoming presence, the sort we need more of everywhere. We need more of this sort of movie, too.

Inside (2023)

To the question of which actor we’d most be willing to sit with solo through a 105-minute movie, Willem Dafoe is as fine an answer as any. The deep-dish survival thriller Inside casts Dafoe as Nemo, an art thief who gets dropped off by his cohorts via helicopter at a deluxe New York penthouse, whose owner, a high-end art collector, is away on business. Nemo is there to snag three Egon Schiele works; after finding two, he tries to skedaddle, but the place’s security system locks him in, and his cohorts panic and leave him. For the remainder of our time with him, Nemo tries to dig, whittle, smash, unbolt, or otherwise dismantle his way free, when he’s not singing to himself, fixing appetizing meals of raw, soggy pasta, spying on a cleaning lady, or starting to lose touch with reality.

We’re not meant to ask why the cops don’t show up when the alarm initially goes off. This isn’t a beat-the-clock thriller. It’s constructed to force Nemo, a failed artist, to confront himself. Thus we witness Nemo’s devolution from crisply hyper-competent thief to shuffling, walking corpse who sings “I’m going to heaven on a hillside” over and over, looking like a bundled-up Howard Hughes. The script, by Ben Hopkins, based on an idea by director Vasilis Katsoupis, works metaphorically but draws yawns narratively; a viewer on Reddit opined that they were expecting a twist wherein Nemo was reduced to a work of performance art to amuse the penthouse owner and his buddies, but no such luck. The artsy doodles in the margins — the references to Schiele and William Blake, as well as the actual art (or copies thereof) on display — just feel like padding. If Nemo were just a good thief who had no particular artistic consciousness, this would be a very short movie.

Which may have been a better deal than what we get. Inside is not an altogether bad film, not with Dafoe girding his loins and throwing his then-65-year-old body into the challenge. (As I’ve noted elsewhere, Dafoe has practiced ashtanga yoga for decades and could most likely run laps around people a quarter his age.) It’s conceivable you could enjoy the film just on the level of watching Dafoe move around, change his posture as Nemo starts losing his bearings, grunt and whistle. It’s a full, and fully physical, performance, and it deserves to be in a better film. To change things up, the filmmakers start tossing in dream sequences or hallucinations in which Nemo is allowed to interact with a couple of people; this almost feels like cheating, though it may have been meant as a reprieve from solitude — for us as well as for Nemo. (At least Tom Hanks in Cast Away had to rely on a gore-painted volleyball for company.) 

Vasilis Katsoupis’ direction is too literal, and not poetic enough, to put across the movie’s ambition to be an art object itself. Given a reality that lingers on mundane problem-solving or physically plausible obstacles, we expect the narrative to be more nuts-and-bolts than it is; instead it slackens, loses its hold along with Nemo. It becomes a statement on how Nemo (Latin for “nobody”) is trapped in a world to which he doesn’t belong, which he can only consume parts of, or destroy other parts of on his way out. So basically Nemo is all of us, scooping beautiful fish out of an aquarium and eating it raw, or building tools while leaving a shambles of his surroundings. It begins to try our patience about forty minutes in, and it still has about an hour to go. I sighed a lot and was reduced to micro-scrutinizing Dafoe’s performance, as it became the only point of interest. To revisit the question up at the top: yes, we would sit with this man solo through a 105-minute movie. But maybe not this one.

Leda

Maryland has provided a gritty, grubby backdrop to productions ranging from HBO’s The Wire to the whole of John Waters’ portfolio, but it may never have looked so enchanted, so freshly peeled from a book of fairy tales, as it does in the experimental indie film Leda. Director/cowriter Samuel Tressler IV, who devoted five years of his life to the project, films in and around the woods and lakes and mansions of a Maryland that passes for Anywhere. The milieu appears to be timeless, though set in a world predating technology. The harshly gorgeous atmosphere (Nick Midwig did the largely black-and-white cinematography) reminded me of Kenneth Patchen’s bothersome verse “Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we’d be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?”

Is anything planning to harm Leda (Adeline Thery)? She seems haunted in general. Her father perished in a fox-hunt accident; her mother fell ill and died before that. Now she drifts around her property, sometimes visibly pregnant, having upsetting visions mostly involving a swan, though an egg also puts in a few appearances, in perhaps the most ominous use of that object since Alien. In Greek mythology, of course, Leda was a Spartan queen impregnated by Zeus; in the form of a swan, he “seduced” her, we are often told, softening the reality of the encounter as rape. (Can consent be freely given to a god, especially one as legendarily concupiscent and sensitive to offense as the king of Mount Olympus?) 

Leda’s cousin (Nicolle Marquez) comes to stay with her and look after her. There is a man who does some picking up around the mansion, and perhaps more. Leda keeps passing into daydreams or nightmares usually having to do with water. She swims in, bathes in, washes with, and at certain points walks on the stuff. Sometimes she stays submerged for so long we hope the actress has good lungs. Such spoilsport thoughts may only occur to those of us who view the film in less than optimal conditions. Leda is ideally screened in anaglyph 3D — the sort that requires red/cyan glasses — with a stereo system that does justice to the enveloping sound process; it has been designed as an immersive art experience. I viewed it in plain ol’ 2D on my laptop and heard it through earbuds — getting the very least of the meat, you could say — but to be honest, this is how most people from here on out are going to watch it. And they’ll have to make do with the no-frills version I saw.

Leda is clearly an audiovisual riff, and a spectacular one; Tressler has an eye, an ear, and a soul for art. The narrative, though, such as there is, tends toward the abstract and sometimes into the opaque. We see the man on the floor scrubbing at a spot. This may or may not signify something other than itself. But the child inside us who’s being told a story wants to know who the man is and what his function in the story is — why is he here? (Eventually we find out, but he still seems like abstracted Man. His character name as per the credits is literally The Man.) It’s the rare but wonderful creation that satisfies on literal and metaphorical fronts; when someone pulls it off, it feels like a magic trick.

Samuel Tressler is not that level of wizard yet, but he’s got 85% of his ducks in a row here. He can set and maintain a hypnotic mood, either soothing or needling — by the way, did I mention the film has no dialogue or even narration? Not a human word is heard, though the nature-driven sound design, with all its raindrops dappling the serene surface of a lake, disqualifies Leda from being a true silent film. Anyway, Tressler goes a long way here on tone and visual/aural poetry. But some of the meanings seem still locked up in Tressler’s heart. This or that image may mean more to him than it could to us. Artists want us to see what they see, but sometimes they forget to set the scene, do the primitive foundational work of the tale told round the fire, and we get lost in a strange landscape that seems very routine and familiar to them, but…

The Whale

Continuing Oscar catch-up: Brendan Fraser is as heartbreaking as you’ve heard in The Whale, an overly literary indie drama in which he plays Charlie, a morbidly obese shut-in and professor biding his time until a heart attack takes him. Adapted by Samuel D. Hunter from his own 2012 play, and directed by Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream), the movie makes its themes (societal rejection, self-loathing, redemption through helping others) very plain — it seems to be written to teach in a college course. It also made me shed a few tears — I may as well be honest about that. That’s due more to the acting, not just Fraser, than to the frequently on-the-nose writing or the unobtrusive but sometimes overbearing direction. 

Regardless of my qualms about his style or compositions, Aronofsky has created a space where Fraser and the supporting cast — Hong Chau as visiting nurse (and more) Liz, Sadie Sink as Charlie’s estranged daughter Ellie, Samantha Morton in a vivid one-scene bit as Charlie’s bitter ex-wife Mary, Ty Simpkins as drifting missionary Thomas — can sink their teeth deeply into the dramatic red meat Hunter has written for them. Hunter has structured the scenario in a way that seems intended to impress an unseen English professor, but the scenes he writes, mostly two-handers as combative as a ping-pong match, give the actors something to say, do, be in relation to each other. The character of Thomas, for instance, doesn’t make a lot of literal sense, but an actor can find nooks and crannies in it, and Ty Simpkins helps Thomas make emotional sense to us. The movie is in part about running and hiding from an angry, disapproving society, and Thomas advances that theme.

If only the characters, as written, did more than advance themes. The Whale is set in the early days of the 2016 presidential race, to explain, I suppose, why nobody in the movie calls 988 on Charlie, who is quite obviously purposely eating himself to death. Everyone implores Charlie to go to the hospital, as if that would do anything but delay the inevitable. Charlie is a self-made martyr, wallowing in a self-created misery he thinks he deserves, and he wants to die but refuses to until he ascertains that, despite being out of her life for eight years, he has managed to sire a daughter who will rise to his assessment of her as “amazing.” (As written, again, she isn’t that amazing; Sadie Sink makes something wounded and spiky out of her, creates a girl who would like to care but feels it would just lead to more pain.) Charlie is gay, or bi, and torpedoed his marriage when he fell for a male student (of age, we’re told, a night-school pupil older than usual college age). Nobody in the movie has a problem with his sexuality, they just rue the wreckage it created of his family. But the origin of Charlie’s self-annihilating guilt lies elsewhere. 

I don’t want to think too much about the reserves of anguish Fraser had to tap into for his more intense scenes, stationary but still lunging for understanding and honesty. Fraser goes through the wringer here, choking and wheezing and sweating and vomiting. Saddest of all, perhaps, are the moments when Charlie giggles, and Fraser lights up as brightly as he always has, and we see the man capable of simple happiness that Charlie used to be. There’s a wispy suggestion that we’re only seeing Charlie’s body the way he sees and experiences it, and that everyone else sees something else. Fraser transcends the literariness of the concept and the literalizing physicality of the special make-up; we see that Charlie would be a wreck even if he were built like Jack LaLanne. 

Fraser didn’t need to go this far to prove himself as an actor. For many of us, he’d done that more than a quarter-century ago; even in his goofball comedies for kids, he exuded smarts and sensitivity, and millennial fans of his Mummy respond at least as much to Fraser’s generous-hearted portrait of a brave, well-meaning heroic lunk as to anything else. Really, if you think of Fraser’s career as a continually surprising continuum, there’s not much here we haven’t seen before, other than a couple of despairing moments. The Whale essentially is Fraser, the way the play is designed to position Charlie as the earth orbited by various angry moons. It exists to show him off, to serve as his comeback the way Aronofsky’s The Wrestler served Mickey Rourke. Fraser has earned the applause he has gotten and may yet get on Oscar night. And he lifts up his collaborators so they can shout and snarl and shine, too. Ultimately we come away from The Whale warmed by the openness of heart and spirit Fraser brings to it. He gives us a Charlie who has given up on himself but still believes that “people are amazing” — and shades the portrait with the tragedy of a man who refuses to include himself in that judgment.

Tár

Continuing Oscar catch-up: Todd Field’s Tár seems like long, dry homework — it’s a character study of a great artist, Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), who may not be such a good person, and it tips the scales at two hours and thirty-eight minutes — but it’s well put-together, with spaces left open for interpretation. It’s an art object about art, and whether a person who can create or at least facilitate art also owes society good personal behavior. Tár is a revered conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic; she has a book coming out, and she’s about to complete her Mahler project by conducting his Fifth Symphony. 

Then, slowly and then briskly, her life falls apart. Tár, it turns out, has a habit of having affairs with young, smitten musicians, and one of them, named Krista Taylor, has recently killed herself. Legal attention soon follows, it comes out that Krista is far from the only musician to drift into Tár’s orbit, and Tár is “cancelled.” There’s foreshadowing early on, when Tár teaches a class and is at odds with a student who doesn’t respect Bach’s reputation as a womanizer. The student’s response to flawed artists is as valid as Tár’s — most of us choose which real-world actions are dealbreakers for us when it comes to the artists we love. One point of the movie might be that saying there are no dealbreakers can be as limited as saying, yes, there are dealbreakers, things we can’t forgive.

Todd Field keeps a lot of things ambiguous. Tár of course denies any wrongdoing on her part, and she could be lying or she could be on the level. Past a certain point it doesn’t matter. Her name is connected publicly with grooming and sexual predation, and it becomes poison. Most of the film, though — I’d say the first two hours — has little to do with “cancel culture” other than occasional omens. While we wait for Tár’s house of cards to riffle to the floor, we study Tár, a somewhat arrogant and fairly high-strung woman who seems like what can happen when a high-school music nerd gets some power and gets drunk on it, then accustomed to it. 

Tár has a wife, Sharon (Nina Hoss), who plays in Tár’s orchestra, and they share a small daughter, Petra. One day, Tár comes to see Petra at school and pays an intimidating visit to a girl who’s been bullying Petra. Tár assures the kid that she will “get her” if she doesn’t leave Petra alone, and nobody will believe the kid if she tries to tell anyone. This seems like a key moment, almost the sole reason Tár is even given a daughter in the film. Here we see a menacing, will-to-power side of Tár that perhaps young, trusting musicians also saw. Aside from this scene, and one other in the film’s final act, Tár doesn’t seem overtly abusive. She is smart and talented, and other smart and talented people in major cities put her on a pedestal — she’s a woman and gay and excels in a career traditionally dominated by men. Tár has taken advantage of all of that — or maybe she hasn’t. We get glimpses of evidence that, to us, seems inconclusive. It may also seem that way to the Berlin Philharmonic, but Tár has become radioactive and must be cast out regardless.

I don’t think Tár means to say much about the supposed “woke mob” thirsting to ruin the lives of artists by falsely accusing them of salacious deeds. It may have interested Todd Field as a sidebar issue he wanted to explore in the downfall of an artist, but I don’t get the sense that he’s decrying anything. The ambiguity about whether Tár is actually guilty as charged can provoke literal-minded debate, but I suspect Field has a good deal more to say about the creators we lift up and tear down, not limited to churlish-sounding Fox News editorials about woke hysteria. We’re given enough clues, both by the allusive script and by Cate Blanchett’s brittle, richly detailed performance, to deduce that Tár is probably guilty as sin; if not of driving Krista Taylor to suicide, then of other casualties left bleeding on the side of Tár’s road to glory.

That road leads far away from her humble origins as a kid named Linda Tarr. That may sound like a bridge too far in terms of a diagnosis of Tár’s disease. Ah, an artist is driven to the top by the fear of dying anonymous and obscure in her home town. In an alternate universe, is there a Linda Tarr who stayed and maybe taught piano lessons and was never given the opportunity — the rich white privilege — to follow her darkest impulses? Would that person have been happier? Is Tár truly happy? We never see her uncomplicatedly happy. The narrative is full of little hostilities Tár commits — the mini-arc having to do with Tár’s neighbor and her ailing mother shows us how unused she is to normal social exchanges. Tár doesn’t crowd our emotions; it lets us respond how we will. A note of caution, though: the price Field pays for his nonjudgmental, emotionally arid approach is a certain emotional recoil on our part. The movie is intelligent and artful. And we don’t finally give a damn about Lydia Tár or what happens to her. 

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.