Living

Concluding Oscar catch-up: Living is a precise and compassionate reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 drama Ikiru — one of his less typical masterpieces, away from samurai or Shakespeare or noir. Both films tell the story of a bureaucrat, stricken with stomach cancer, who finds it in himself to cut through the red tape and leave something behind. Living is set around the same time as Ikiru was first released, which makes it a period piece where Ikiru wasn’t. Both films unfold less than a decade after World War II, and each society — Living takes place in 1953 London — deals in ways large and small with the lingering shock and horror of the war. In a place that has been bombed near to oblivion, what difference does one playground make?

One act, one word, of kindness, it is said, can make an immeasurable difference. The bureaucrats in this story — inspired by a Tolstoy novella — take the news of their impending deaths with a kind of numb stoicism. In Ikiru, there’s a startling moment when the protagonist exits his doctor’s office and steps out onto the sidewalk; all noise disappears from the soundtrack, until a truck comes roaring into the frame. There’s nothing quite like that in Living, which has been directed by Oliver Hermanus with a subtlety bordering on blandness. Hermanus may have figured, “I’m not even going to try to out-direct Kurosawa.” So, although gracefully lighted (by Jamie D. Ramsay), the film screens in the boxy old Academy ratio. The movie almost apologizes for itself by way of its modest scale and style.

Bill Nighy, as this film’s new dying bureaucrat Mr. Williams, doesn’t have that neurosis, it seems. He doesn’t see himself as being in competition with Takashi Shimura, who played Kurosawa’s fool turned hero; Nighy came up in the theater, where if you think too much about the greats who once sparkled in the role you’re currently playing, you go nuts. So he just approaches Mr. Williams as a man whose juice was squeezed out many years ago, and whose dire diagnosis gives him license to shake the tree a little. But just a little. At first, Mr. Williams contemplates ending himself before the cancer does; then he spends a night out with a guy he’s just met, drinking and singing. In the cold light of day, he realizes that a trio of ladies who’ve been bouncing off the bureaucracy in hopes of getting a playground built point down a more difficult but rewarding path. 

Adapting Ikiru, one of his all-time favorites, Kazuo Ishiguro doesn’t give Mr. Williams too much of an obvious Scrooge arc. Pre-diagnosis, Mr. Williams isn’t particularly unpleasant or domineering, just, as one of his underlings says, “frosty.” And he only thaws maybe a couple of degrees. I imagine some of the people who deal with him once he starts taking the playground seriously might find him prickly, but the fact that his demeanor doesn’t change much adds layers to the performance. Mr. Williams is using his polite but iron imperviousness to get something done instead of to stonewall something getting done. His actions change radically, but he’s still the same dyspeptic geezer nicknamed by his young former worker Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) as “Mr. Zombie.”

Nighy fills out a hollow man who begins the movie in general sadness, is given something to be really sad about, and takes it as an impetus to run counter to his entire career. But the sadness remains, and persists. So do we. It’s a very Kurosawa concern, and Ishiguro honors it: life is just people navigating their private sadness. No exceptions. No one here gets out alive. Ikiru is tough stuff in the Kurosawa mold because it’s bracingly wise about human frailty; so is Ishiguro (author of Remains of the Day), though in a different mode. Kurosawa was much more acerbic, even withering, about the salaryman ethos of the bureaucracy. His office drones would turn you down gruffly. The ones in Living hem and haw and smile politely, but it comes to the same. The new movie doesn’t have any real malice towards the city-hall blockers. They’re all part of the same sad system, and the only one who can short-circuit it for a little while is going to die soon. 

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.

The Fabelmans

If you can take a guy who punched you in the nose and make him look like a hero in a movie, the sky’s the limit. That’s the implication of the last act of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, which tells a lightly fictionalized version of the story of young Spielberg as he gains a passion for movies — watching them and then making them. Here, Spielberg addresses an event that brought him and his siblings great pain at the time, his parents’ separation when Spielberg was 19, and sees it with enough distance to allow both parents humanity. He has made a memoir filled with compassion for everyone except, maybe, for an antisemitic kid who bullies Spielberg’s young avatar Sam Fabelman.

Sam (Gabriel LaBelle) gets the filmmaking bug when a trainwreck in The Greatest Show on Earth scares him. It’s fair to say Sam chases that emotional dragon — trying to recreate for his audiences that same sense of awe and fear — for the rest of his life; he asks for a train set so he can recreate the train crash and feel some control over it. That’s the diagnosis of his free-spirited mom Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a concert pianist. Like Spielberg, Sam partially takes after his mother — the creative part — and partially after his father, Burt (Paul Dano), an engineer — the technical, how-do-things-work part, the nuts and bolts of what gets a film in the can. Mitzi lends Sam his father’s camera so he can film the mini-crash once and just watch it over and over instead of doing it over and over. A director is born.

If Spielberg had attempted to make The Fabelmans at his manipulative-sentimental peak in the ‘80s, it would probably have been disastrous. His parents would still have been alive, and a concern over hurting their feelings held him back for decades. The way Spielberg portrays his parents now is far from unflattering or warts-and-all, but it’s not adulatory either; he gives them their due as human beings trying like hell to be good spouses and parents. There’s nothing like the shrill discord between Richard Dreyfuss and Teri Garr in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which one parent has to leave the family to follow happiness. But a man in his thirties directed that, and a man in his seventies has directed The Fabelmans, which allows that the frequently suggested path of seeking one’s bliss, whatever that might do to one’s relationships, is not easy.

Spielberg gives us a few fun, amusing montages showing young Sam making westerns or war pictures, but they don’t seem central. The Fabelmans uses the filmmaking sequences to bring out the theme of compassion through one’s art, and that isn’t confined to movies. Spielberg’s handling of the kid who punches Sam is interesting and worth discussing. Filming his senior class’ “ditch day” at the beach, Sam could easily make the kid look foolish, but instead the camera lingers on the kid’s shirtless virtuosity at the volleyball net. After the movie screens for the class, the kid, upset, doesn’t understand why Sam filmed him so iconically. Sam doesn’t either. Sometimes the camera knows what it likes, and sometimes it likes bullies. The script by Spielberg and Tony Kushner has these sorts of ambiguities running all through it.

Spielberg’s direction is clean and free of unnecessary motion. He takes a page from John Ford (wonderfully embodied here by David Lynch), who crustily advises young Sam to pay attention to the horizon in his shots. The horizon’s placement, as the director of The Searchers knew, can lock in a thousand words in one image, and Spielberg does likewise here. In The Searchers, the famous last shot contains John Wayne in a narrow frame formed by a doorway and the horizon, suggesting his character’s ethos is better off boxed up or buried. Spielberg turns the horizon into a quick visual joke that nonetheless tilts up to offer Sam the sky and all its limits. It’s a generous, smoothly rendered work, among Spielberg’s best.

Women Talking

If you only have two choices, how much choice do you have? That’s one of many questions raised in Women Talking (opening in the U.S. on December 23), a dialogue-driven drama about a group of Mennonite women trying to decide what to do: fight or flee. It’s recently been revealed that some of the men in the community have been dosing some of the women (and girls) with cow tranquilizer and raping them while they’re unconscious at night. The men responsible have been taken away, but they’ll be out on bail soon, and will come back to the colony — and to the women. Three initial choices are laid out for the women: Do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The last two options finish in a tie, so eight of the women discuss whether to stay or go, and before long the notion of staying recedes into the distance.

Women Talking is the third narrative feature directed by Sarah Polley (Away from Her, Take This Waltz), who seems drawn to material that shows people in all their unlovely complications. Bur her gaze is warm, not cold, and here she simply provides a space for the frequently voiceless to speak. What’s compelling about the drama, aside from the ticking-clock structure and the ghastly situation itself, is the various women’s responses to the assaults and to the realities of the aftermath. If they don’t forgive the rapists, they will be denied entry to Heaven. If they do forgive the rapists, how can that possibly please God? Why didn’t He stop the violence in the first place? And so forth.

The movie, as well as the Miriam Toews novel it’s adapting, is based on an actual incident in a Bolivian Mennonite colony in 2011. Questions of faith are prominent in the women’s discussions, but don’t really dominate. Some of the issues, I guess, would be brought up in a less devout group of women. One particularly bitter abuse survivor, Mariche (Jessie Buckley), angrily asks another woman in the group why the assault seems to have affected her more than the others. It might seem an uncommonly callous thing to ask until you learn that Mariche is routinely beaten by her husband. The violence inflicted on her has blown out a large chunk of her ability to empathize with others’ pain. Not every victim is as kindly and “nice” as some would like them to be, and Polley knows this and shows it.

Those with the patience to sit and listen will be rewarded with some top-notch performances; Polley even gets a subtly warm turn from Rooney Mara as Ona, whose encounter with a nighttime rapist has left her pregnant. Ona is also sweet on August (Ben Whishaw), a young man from an excommunicated family who has come to the colony as a teacher for the boys. (The girls aren’t taught to read or write.) I kept expecting August to turn out to be slimy, but no, Polley does believe “not all men” (a character even says it). Her film privileges women but is more concerned with what they choose to do with the information they’ve been given. One survivor has changed their name from Nettie to Melvin, and doesn’t speak to anyone except the children; a whole fascinating movie could be made about Melvin (played by trans nonbinary actor August Winter). 

It’s not a “likable” film — it’s grim, with some dots of humor — but I don’t think it was meant to be. It grapples with the subject of women in a society where their options are limited, and that subject expands beyond the literal scenario in a Mennonite colony the more we let the story wash around our brains. It’s jarring as hell when a truck drives slowly past the community’s house, blaring the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” over a loudspeaker along with a voice encouraging the colonists to come out and be counted for the 2010 census. In a little touch typical of scripter-director Polley’s method here, the teacher August, who left the community for a while to go to university, sings softly along with the song, which he might remember from his time outside. The movie is built out of little human moments like that. If we’re waiting for the women to stop talking and start doing — as a century of male-steered movies have conditioned us to want — we might miss those moments, and the movie. 

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

It might be amusing to think of Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon as writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour’s idea of a superhero movie — specifically, an X-Men movie, albeit one that begins in a mental hospital and sidetracks to the strip clubs of New Orleans. Amirpour made a splashy debut eight years ago with the moody vampire indie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and followed that with the determinedly cultish cannibal dystopia The Bad Batch. Now she returns with a drifty, digressive fable about Mona Lisa Lee (Jeon Jong-seo), a young woman with mind-control powers. She escapes from the facility she’s locked up in, and falls in with erotic dancer Bonnie Belle (Kate Hudson), who sees how Mona Lisa’s powers can be used to make money.

Some may find Mona Lisa a somewhat thin work dramatically. Aside from a limping detective (Craig Robinson) on Mona Lisa’s and Bonnie’s trail, not much happens. But I think Amirpour means the movie not as a neon-noir narrative (although it is that) but as a commentary on how capitalism drives people to self-debasement. It’s not that Bonnie dances for money, or that Mona Lisa’s power is put to work hypnotizing passersby into draining their bank accounts at an ATM and handing the cash over to her. These things are presented as what must be done to survive. It’s when Bonnie gets smug about it, literally letting twenties and fifties rain on her, that we see she’s become part of the system that holds her down. 

Bonnie has a young son, Charlie (Evan Whitten), who views her as toxic and can’t wait to get away from her. Charlie dances off steam in his room while trash metal blares, and he’s a pretty good artist. He represents the creative urge to run away from the corruptive world and do art in solitude; he’s the hero of the piece, if anyone is. When Bonnie brings Mona Lisa home, Charlie hits it off with Mona Lisa. He doesn’t agree with how his mother is using her. He would rather watch TV with Mona Lisa or draw her — either keep her company or honor her with art. He doesn’t want anything from her. Weirdly, a skanky drug dealer named Fuzz (Ed Skrein), who helps Mona Lisa at a couple of points in the film, looks like predatory trouble but seems to be legitimately taken with Mona Lisa. He only wants a kiss from her, which she gives, knowing that’s all he wants from her. 

The movie is candy-colored and doesn’t press too hard on our nerves. Mona Lisa is potentially dangerous, but she’s not interested in killing anyone; at most she gets people to maim themselves in the leg, even a mean cracker who abuses her in the mental hospital. She only wants freedom, and we want her to have it. The movie is low-stakes but engaging and, with cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski (Midsommar) on board, gorgeous. Other than a trio of dirtbags who corner Bonnie after she has used Mona Lisa to empty their wallets, most of the hostility towards Bonnie or Mona Lisa comes from other women, interestingly. Amirpour, though, lets us understand where that anger comes from. 

Hudson comes through with a sharp turn as a woman whose worldview has been whittled down to the hustle. Bonnie is only a vivid supporting character, though; Jeon Jong-seo takes the lead, and acts largely with her eyes, pools of melancholy in a blank face. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon isn’t interested in the nuts and bolts of the fantasy premise. We don’t know where Mona Lisa’s power comes from or what she plans to do with it once she’s on her own. She’s mostly an avatar of innocence used for corrupt ends, and Jeon conveys that with no fuss. And Amirpour remains a director to watch, picking up scraps of genre and pasting them into funky collages that share elements with a lot of things but aren’t really like anything else. 

Carmen

Ah, Natascha McElhone: It’s been a long time. This wonderful actor has kept busy on TV in recent years, but I find it’s been two decades since I saw her in a movie, the underrated Steven Soderbergh version of Solaris. Now McElhone assumes the center and title role of Carmen, a gentle and attentive film in which her character loses a dead old identity and gains an exciting new one, as well as a community that values her. There are certainly less pleasant ways to pass an afternoon than watching McElhone’s Carmen find peace and joy. Best of all, it unfolds on the beautiful island of Malta, given the glow and hue of Heaven itself by its writer-director Valerie Buhagiar, herself of Maltese heritage.

Carmen has spent most of her life looking after her brother, a dour priest at an ill-attended church. When he dies, another priest is sent for, as well as his sister who will look after him; there’ll be no place for Carmen at the church any more — or so everyone thinks. Carmen hides away in the building, sneaking into the confessional box and listening to the church members’ sins. Instead of sitting in judgment, Carmen offers the people advice, and they take it gratefully. It’s not that Carmen ever leaves the church; it’s that she casts off her former thankless role in it and tries on a new persona, one that may also be capable of love with a young pawn-store owner (Steven Love).

Buhagiar is said to have based Carmen’s story on the life of her aunt, but guessing what events in the film have real-world analogues won’t do much for us or for the movie. Past a certain point, aside from a detour with Carmen on a boat with a less than gracious host, what happens to and for Carmen is what Buhagiar and we want to see happen. The overriding vibe of the film is warmth, from its star and from its setting. After watching ugly people fight each other amid junk and debris in last week’s Samaritan, I was really ready to spend time with Natascha McElhone learning to smile again with a preternaturally soothing backdrop. Soothing — that’s the word for Carmen in general. The complications in the plot (including the new priest’s sister, who shows up at the church before he does) are easily overcome. The film believes in its happy ending(s), so we do too.

This friendly daydream of a movie should be seen by some of you folks who’ve been wanting something like it — it doesn’t have a rating, but I’d put this at PG at most, possibly even G. It’s set in the ‘80s but could’ve been made in the ‘50s. If you can’t stream it later this month, it hits DVD in October. But if you can find it on a big screen within a reasonable drive, Malta will not disappoint you. Neither will McElhone.

Carmen doesn’t say much; she’s not used to speaking (which I guess is what makes her a good listener). So McElhone does much of her work with her expressive face, sometimes her hands or body language. The movie feels like a gift offered to McElhone in kindness, and she reciprocates by conveying a deep kindness herself, made deeper when Carmen finds out she deserves some kindness too. In a lesser movie, Carmen would leave the church altogether, but we see here that, although a lot of her life supporting her brother was drudgery, a lot of it engaged her and gratified her. So why shouldn’t she stay and be herself within the church, improving it from there? The movie is far from Catholic propaganda; from what we see it doesn’t matter what faith, if any at all, is practiced in the building. It’s all about the community seeking wholeness there.

Get Away If You Can

Both the poster and the very title of Get Away If You Can suggest that we’re in for a psychological thriller. On the poster, Ed Harris’ face looms menacingly over our protagonists, embattled married couple Dominique (Dominique Braun) and TJ (Terrence Martin). We might assume we’ll get a love-triangle thriller. In fact, it’s a drama in which the couple try to heed the title’s warning. But are they meant to get away from each other, or from the outside influences that want to pry them apart? Once you get used to what the movie actually is, it’s a low-key indie effort with a perfect, though probably metaphorical, ending. 

Dominique comes from Argentina, and has a sister there (Martina Gusman) who wants her to give up on TJ and his toxic-masculine family and come live with her on her ranch. TJ contends with his surly dad (Harris) and his chip-off-the-old-block brother (Riley Smith), who want him to give up on Dominique and come take over the old man’s tugboat business. All of this is in the couple’s heads when they set sail (on a sailboat bought by TJ’s brother with TJ’s money) for “the Islands of Despair.” Dominique wants to explore the islands. TJ wants to continue on to a warmer, less rocky environment, where he can surf and she can scuba dive. She gets out of the boat and sets up camp on the island, and won’t get back in the boat with TJ despite his pleas.

Get Away If You Can throws in flashbacks to break up the narrative (only an hour and fourteen minutes less the end credits). Each flashback does the work of establishing the angels (Dominique’s gentle but insistent sister) and demons (TJ’s selfish, hostile family) dictating the couple’s actions. A good portion of the film was shot on location on la Isla Róbinson Crusoe off of Chile, and the directors, who happen to be the lead couple themselves (they’re married in real life also), bring back a lot of gorgeous footage that makes the case for why Dominique wants to stay there. After a while, though, we understand that the island, like the ending, is a metaphor. The title turns out to be a well-meaning nudge, not a stern admonishment or, indeed, a warning.

Towards the conclusion, when Dominique grows a marijuana garden and goes around sporting a headband adorned with dank nugs, while TJ seems to have come to terms with the escape he needs, the movie proposes a castaway, Adam-and-Eve existence in opposition to living according to rich relatives’ wishes, whether paradisiacal or infernal. We’re not meant to take the couple’s choice literally, or subject it to logical scrutiny. We’re just meant to go with it, and the script (also by the directors) subtly works out why certain things don’t work for the couple while other things do. It’s not until Dominique rekindles her creative flame and TJ becomes one with the waves that the door is opened for the ending we want for them.

Is it bad to reveal that a movie has a happy ending? In this case, it may help a viewer get through the difficult early stretch when Dominique and TJ, still under thrall to their influences, seem to hate each other. But it’s just that they’re trapped in a frustrating stasis. Get Away If You Can ends up as a romance, not just a psychological drama (though that, too). You just shouldn’t expect a thriller — say, Ed Harris sends some goons after the couple to split them up, or the couple go through twists and turns and betray each other. It’s not that sort of film; coming as it does from a married couple, it emerges as a personal statement. Never a slouch, Harris delivers a grouchy turn visible even when he’s not around, in TJ’s cowed eyes; Braun and Martin enact a couple in love as well as at war. See it if you can. 

Screwdriver

The minimalist drama/thriller Screwdriver, which starts doing the festival rounds this week, maintains a low, vibrating level of tension for almost its whole running time. Most of the tension is in the face of lead actress AnnaClare Hicks, who invests her character with vulnerability tied into self-hating anxiety. Hicks plays Emily, a young woman from down south whose marriage has suddenly fallen apart. Not knowing what to do, she takes a train to California to stay for a week or so with Robert (Charlie Farrell), a guy she remembers from high school. Robert is married to hard-charging corporate lady Melissa (Milly Sanders); she works at a pharmaceutical company, he does psychological research. It’s not long before we begin to suspect this couple have more on their agenda than simply giving Emily a place to bunk.

Screwdriver is essentially a three-hander — Emily’s estranged husband puts in a brief appearance — that might work just as well as a play. It’s sufficiently cinematic, though; director/co-writer Cairo Smith uses the wide, wide frame to convey Emily’s isolation in her hosts’ well-scrubbed home (between this and the recent Watcher, you may get the impression that white decor hides suffocating repression and control) and, here and there, disorienting jump cuts. Emily is left home alone a lot of the day while Robert and Melissa are out at work (another link to Watcher). When they return home, they seem very interested in Emily — as a person, or as a project? Melissa keeps pushing orange juice (drugged?) onto Emily, while Robert runs psychological games on her in his office.

The performances dovetail together organically; Charlie Farrell, who resembles a cross between Tom Cruise and Bradley Cooper (and uses some of Cruise’s unctuous speech patterns), provides a seemingly laid-back buffer against Milly Sanders’ high-strung, passive-aggressive Melissa. Then they seem to switch roles — he’s menacing, she’s nurturing. All of this reads to us like a concerted effort to keep Emily unsure of her perceptions, her allegiances, her very self. They seem to want to control her — early on, the forbidding Melissa discourages Emily from leaving the house or smoking — and it seems they’ve done something similar in the past. Emily may not be the first wayward young woman they’ve tried to “rehab,” but she may be the last.

Smith and co-writer Mia Vicino keep things ambiguous. The work we hear so little about, other than teasing bits of conversation about some trouble at the office, could be the root of the couple’s treatment (grooming?) of Emily. Or it could have nothing to do with this weird dynamic we watch taking shape. The shrewdly cast Farrell smuggles in a (timely) critique of Cruise and his involvement in Scientology; his patter sometimes has a familiar “Matt, you’re glib” cadence. There’s a fair amount of anti-God talk, steering the fundie-raised Emily towards a different conception of a supreme being. Ironically, the couple find it very important to emphasize to Emily that she’s free and is, in fact, her own god. Of course, they also set themselves up as the authority figures who tell her this.

I’ve avoided using the word “cult,” because, although that seems to describe the ultimate villain here, there’s enough evidence that it possibly isn’t and that Smith and Vicino may have very cleverly caught us leaning the wrong way. Once I let go of that option and started focusing on the drama actually in front of me, the narrative played more smoothly (and more chillingly). Among other things, Screwdriver says that it really doesn’t matter who’s behind the process of rewiring Emily’s head; we can see it happening, and AnnaClare Hicks somehow communicates a woman progressively broken, with the shards pricking her on the inside. Smith keeps his camera on Hicks’ face, monitoring it for changes in temperament and emotional temperature. Screwdriver is a small, underpopulated thing, and a little more sense of Emily’s life before might have helped, but it’s sharp and memorable. And it all leads to one of the most intensely, frighteningly ironic images I’ve ever seen at the end of a movie.