Hit Man

“Hit men don’t exist,” we are told a couple of times in Richard Linklater’s perceptive comedy Hit Man. Well, they sure exist in movies, and one of the pure pleasures of this movie is that Linklater sets up the many sit-downs between various assassination clients and “hit man” Gary Johnson (Glen Powell, who wrote the script with Linklater) as theater enacted between people who only know about hit men from the movies. Gary is actually a professor and part-time police tech who gets pulled into going undercover as a hit man to snare folks who are in the market for one. He knows what people expect a hit man to look and act like, and does his job so well that for a long while he puts a lot of murder shoppers away.

For all the talk about and desire for killing in Hit Man, there’s only one (bloodless) death; the film is about pretending, not killing. Hit Man is based rather loosely on a 2001 Texas Monthly piece by Skip Hollandsworth, who also cowrote Linklater’s Bernie from another of his articles. The movie takes inspiration from an anecdote in the article — Gary was approached by a woman in an abusive relationship to get rid of her violent boyfriend, and instead arranged for her to get shelter and other help — and expands it into a romantic subplot when Gary meets the frightened Madison (Adria Arjona). Linklater is one of the last great American directors with the skill and warmth to give us romance we believe in, and Powell and Arjona make an intimate, witty, sexy couple.

If that part of the narrative didn’t work, Hit Man might still be amusing but not nearly as meaningful. Powell weighs in with a compelling portrait of a clever but decent guy, and Linklater is careful not to make most of the murder seekers into cartoons; in their couple of minutes they convey plausible motives, even if we find them abhorrent. (It doesn’t matter if we believe a bitter man’s ex-wife deserves death; what matters is that we believe he believes it.) Linklater loves people, always has, and so Hit Man is a true-crime story concerned with crime being stopped while it’s still only theoretical. Gary teaches philosophy and literature, and is interested in ideas, so he approaches his strange side hustle as “research.” He’s looking for the moment when an idea gets closer to becoming a fact, usually when the client comes out and says plainly what they want and offers money for it. 

Gary is going along smoothly until he meets Madison and they fall in love. She still doesn’t know he’s with the police, and he finds it harder and harder to keep that from her. Some of the resulting suspense derives from familiar awkward situations like being out on the town with your new girlfriend and running into her ex. There’s also the jerky Jasper (Austin Amelio), the precinct’s previous fake hit man, who resents Gary’s supplanting him and turns up as a threat to his cover. Jasper is not entirely wrong; he picks up on something that also bothers us about Gary — that he’s a little slick and smug, and doesn’t seem to share Linklater’s humanist regard for the mostly white-trash folks who try to buy Gary’s services. To him, they are academically interesting but not really people. It’s only Madison — who has her own issues — who seems to make Gary rethink what he’s doing. 

In Linklater’s work, no one is ever all bad or all good. This director works his characters with warm, soft hands, setting the stage for the actors to take over and win our sympathy honestly. As Hit Man starts to wind down, Linklater’s and Powell’s inventions start to outpace the credibility of what we’re shown. That’s why the movie hedges its bets at the start and establishes the events as “somewhat true.” But Linklater knows as well as Gary what the movie-fed audience wants, and he gives it to us (no spoilers). Hit Man ends up being an almost meta investigation into why tropes work the way they do and why they’re essential to stories. Gary has to give his “clients” the hit man they’re expecting or it won’t work. Powell makes Gary, himself, and the movie work terrifically well.

The Zone of Interest

The star of the experimental Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest is sound designer Johnnie Burn, without whose subtle and detailed work the movie would be nothing. The movie, written and directed by Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) and inspired by Martin Amis’ novel, unfolds mostly in and around a nice Polish house with a spacious high-walled garden. The house is occupied by Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), their children, and various servants. On the other side of those garden walls, mere yards away, is the Auschwitz concentration camp, where Höss serves as commandant. 

As you may have heard, Glazer shows us nothing of the prisoners’ suffering. He lets us hear it, at a distance. The sound of the crematorium is a constant death-rumble that we get used to and eventually don’t notice, which conveys the movie’s horrifying point — how human beings, infected with the mind virus of hatred, can learn to live with genocide literally next door and tune out the noises of hell on earth. Thus does dictatorship numb the spirit of those who enforce it. And if you think Glazer’s film is only about a specific atrocity decades ago, you might not be listening. 

Much of the movie feels like slice-of-life, afternoon-teatime scenes, or domestic scenes between parents and children, or child to child. About the only dramatic incident happens when Rudolph has to tell Hedwig they’ve been transferred and have to move; Hedwig loves the house and refuses to go. Yet every scene has an eerie tone, an uneasy texture, an insistent backdrop of apocalypse. Not all the intrusions are sound-related. We see one of Höss’s sons trap his younger brother in the winter greenhouse and hiss tauntingly, mimicking the gas chambers. We also see humanity, when one of the Polish servants sneaks out at night with apples and pears she places around the work areas for the prisoners. One time, the servant finds a scrap of paper with music on it, and plays it at the piano (it is a real song composed in an Auschwitz subcamp by prisoner Joseph Wulf).

We’re focused on the sound, but Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal (Cold War) don’t shirk their visual duties. The compositions are pristine yet removed — we always seem to be looking down desolate Kubrickian hallways, or watching people putter around alone inside rooms we wouldn’t want to be in for long. The surroundings aren’t beautiful, they’re nice, in a banal way that underscores the horror. Even Hedwig’s beloved garden is nourished by the ashes of the cremated. Pure beauty is not really possible in this nightmare world. That servant girl’s act of mercy is filmed at night with thermal cameras, making it look cold and ghostly.

The Zone of Interest is less a narrative than an immersive experience. Every scene is there to make the point that, for some people, indifference to others’ suffering comes naturally, and for others, thankfully, it doesn’t. Hedwig’s mother comes to stay at the house, and while she spouts some standard antisemitic views she really isn’t up to being so close to the Final Solution that she can hear and smell it. Without the irrefutable proof of her senses, she can pretend to herself that these are merely labor camps for the war effort and that her daughter and son-in-law haven’t paid for their comfortable life with gallons of other people’s blood. 

And yet the lead actors import some of their own humanity into characters who have renounced humanity. Sandra Hüller’s Hedwig comes from a poor background, and now finds herself in a place where she can dote on her garden (tended by servants she can always have Rudolph take to the other side of the wall if they displease her, and she makes sure they know that) and try on a fur coat stolen from a prisoner. She ignores the carnage like a good German so she can maintain her lifestyle. Hüller puts across the fear underneath all of this without any special pleading for Hedwig. Christian Friedel has a trickier job as Rudolph; he seems to decide to lean into his unintimidating physical presence to suggest an insecure man welcomed into a cult of the most toxic masculinity and determined to prove by his very apathy that he belongs there. We don’t read bloodthirst in him, but the sort of moral vacuity and deadness that live under the famous Nazi quote, “I was only following orders.”

Anatomy of a Fall

Did she do it? For most of Justine Triet’s absorbing Anatomy of a Fall, which won the Palme d’Or and has garnered five Oscar nominations, we hope she didn’t, but we’re never sure. “She” is Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), a novelist born in Germany but, until recently, living in France with her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis). Samuel, it appears, has fallen from an attic window to his death on the snowy ground below. But did he fall or was he, uh, guided? Accident, suicide, or homicide? And does any of this truly matter? Is our fascination with courtroom dramas leading us to look in the wrong direction?

The script, by Triet and her partner Arthur Harari, is an anatomy of something, all right. A mere murder mystery is not on the agenda; the mystery here is the deeper mystery of relationships, how they start, how they endure or fail. Nevertheless, I came to develop a sharp empathy with Sandra’s lawyer and former lover, the graying and mordant Vincent (Swann Arlaud), who knows that it doesn’t matter if his client did it or not, but if he can convince a judge of her innocence. She does not make it easy for him. Nobody in this family is easy, not even Sandra’s young son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), who is almost blind from an accident incurred when Samuel was supposed to be watching him. His near-blindness, though, is not what makes him difficult.

In someone else’s hands, when a bit of family drama falls into the legal thriller you’d been expecting, or when courtroom struggles interrupt the family drama you’ve been enjoying, the result might be frustrating. But Triet weaves the two threads together delicately, so that they feel like an organic whole, yet with the two sides occasionally commenting on each other. The argument we hear between Sandra and Samuel, which he secretly recorded and saved onto a USB stick, sounds authentically awful and hurtful, and neither party comes off at all well, which is usually how these things go. But does it mean anything? What, if anything, does it say about motive? And why do both the prosecutor and Vincent sound as though they’re arguing beside the point? The prosecutor’s arguments are grounded in logic, but when are people ever logical?

In this case, so many resentments have built up on both sides, born of insecurity, that when husband and wife look at each other what they see is their own frailty. Anatomy of a Fall uses the legal mystery as a launchpad to scrutinize the people onscreen, who often don’t act according to their best interests — even Daniel has his unrelatable moments, conducting a dangerous experiment on the family dog. (The dog comes through fine; the incident is set up to prove something else, so knowing the dog lives isn’t really a spoiler.) The movie runs well north of two hours but feels tight. Triet has the gift of making even seemingly non-essential scenes or shots feel they’re there for a good reason, even if only as part of the fabric of the story. Like any good family drama, and any good legal thriller, the plot keeps popping off revelations that put a spin on everything we’ve seen.

Sandra Hüller is having quite a season, Oscar-nominated for her work here and also starring in another multiple nominee, The Zone of Interest. Here she walks a thin line between helping us believe in Sandra and keeping it ambiguous whether we should believe her. I never doubted why Sandra may have done anything she did; what I still don’t quite know is whether she did anything, and the movie is no help. A verdict is reached, but the movie doesn’t necessarily agree — or disagree — with it and isn’t interested in selling it to us, either. Hüller is backed up in every corner by compelling co-stars, including Samuel Theis, who makes his only real scene count and resonate with fear and rage. I’m not sure, though, if Anatomy of a Fall is for the kind of moviegoer who needs a clearcut ending where nothing is left for the imagination to dwell on. It’s definitely more for the dwellers, the art-house fans who like their movies to talk to them plain, adult to adult. 

The Boy and the Heron

Much of Hayao Miyazaki’s masterful new film The Boy and the Heron deals with grief, desolation, and the need for a veteran creator to contend with his own legacy. Heavy stuff, but moment to moment, there is such enormous pleasure in the little things that Miyazaki takes care to animate. When the wind picks up, it stirs hair, beard hair, even eyebrows and eyelashes. When people climb into and out of a pedicab, or cycle rickshaw, the conveyance tilts or sinks or lifts according to the weight of the passengers. As wild as the events get, they hold to a rigorous sense of physical realism. Everything in the frame has been thought about — why animate it if it shouldn’t be there? why not animate it correctly if it should be there? — and every frame is dazzling, and sometimes more than that. Some of the images gleam with an almost cruel beauty.

Because of all this, and because of an incredibly dense narrative loaded with bizarre creatures doing irascible, not-always-understandable things, The Boy and the Heron is, like other Miyazaki, the sort of banquet that may strike some as a bit much. Miyazaki will give you more movie than anyone else or die trying. It’s frankly too much for the eye and brain to take in at one sitting. That’s not a demerit in a movie marketplace that frequently gives us not enough movie. But I do advise just going along for the ride, letting the enchanting milieu wash over you, and not getting caught up in “what’s going on.”

What’s going on is that Mahito, a boy growing up during World War II, misses his mother. She died in a hospital fire. Mahito’s dad soon takes up with Natsuko, his late wife’s sister. Mahito and his father move out of Tokyo and in with Natsuko. A gray heron appears to Mahito and claims it can help him find his mother. Mahito is also looking for the pregnant, missing Natsuko. Along the way there are pelicans, and strange little ambling servants and their doll counterparts, and little globes called warawara that ascend from some sea world to the surface world to become human souls, unless the pelicans eat them, unless the master of fire Lady Himi torches the pelicans first. 

Some of the fierce gush of Miyazaki’s imagination seems borderline punitive. He doesn’t want to give us our bearings in mundane reality (even while respecting the lumpy, creaky physics of the “real world”); past a certain point it’s just chaos. (Miyazaki is said to have appended a statement to a preview screening: “Perhaps you didn’t understand it. I myself don’t understand it.”) It’s a classic love-it-or-loathe-it experience; I can’t imagine someone just shrugging at it neutrally. Miyazaki must set out to show us something we’ve never seen before (or never seen it this way before) in every scene. And he’s got so much plot here, so many pet themes to attend to, that the film runs about two hours, and I hate to say it, but we begin to feel the time. The pacing feels anecdotal; it’s like looking into separate boxes filled with magical things — we don’t feel much continuity between the scenes. This happens, then this happens, then something else happens. (Perhaps not coincidentally, many of Terry Gilliam’s films play similarly.)

Yet The Boy and the Heron, for all its ornery refusal to cater to newcomers’ sensibilities, feels like a work of high devotion and high craft. (Miyazaki and his sixty animators hand-drew every frame; the finished film has some CGI augmentation, as every Miyazaki has since Princess Mononoke.) Some critics seem to want it to be Miyazaki’s swan song, though he has said he wants to make another film — the core of the thing has that farewell-tour vibe to it, an artist accounting for what he’s brought into the world. If you watch it (a second or third time) with that in mind, it might hang together more neatly. But what Miyazaki is doing here isn’t neat, and shouldn’t be. It’s his artistic legacy all bound up with sorrow and bereavement and the impossibility of sensitive souls to live in a cold sharp world but living in it anyway. Why? Because, Miyazaki says, damn it all, it’s worth it. And so The Boy and the Heron is worth it.

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.

Dazed and Confused

Richard Linklater’s third feature Dazed and Confused opened in theaters 30 years ago September 24 — and closed not too much later. It took a while to become the beloved cult comedy it is now, but it’s in the canon — literally, it’s in the Criterion Collection — and the more years pass, the more touching it seems. Watching it as a 23-year-old back in 1994, when it hit video, I didn’t grasp the film’s wistfulness, its borderline melancholia. But it’s there. The then-31-year-old Linklater takes us back to 1976, when he was sixteen, and he gets a great deal of what’s in the air when kids are looking at their last year in high school. I was too young in ’76 to know whether Dazed and Confused is faithful to the details of being in high school then, but it feels authentic. It’s authentic whenever. At the end, when a few of the kids hop in a car the morning after a party to go snag Aerosmith tickets, I guarantee you you’ve been in that car. In 1976, 1986, whenever.

If the movie has a hero, or throughline character, it’s probably the freshman Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), who’s clearly Linklater’s avatar. Mitch drifts through the action, taken under various seniors’ wings. There is bullying and a thriving hazing environment in this small-town Texas community, and some not-terribly-progressive views of sex and women, and Linklater acknowledges that. The senior girls are always chastising the boys for being pigs. Most of Dazed and Confused is a collective portrait, moving from group to group, from pool hall to party to bedrooms where kids just get stoned. (There’s no sex in the film, but a lot of talk about it.) It’s the last day of school, and we follow various kids as they make their way to one party that never happens and then another that gets organized in a hurry.

Despite the bullies, the prevailing mood is fellowship and good cheer. Mitch is due to be paddled as part of the hazing, and Linklater gets that out of the way fast so Mitch (and we) won’t have to spend the movie dreading the paddling. Linklater doesn’t really divide the kids by social cliques. Some of the boys are football players, but that’s Texas high school. Other than that, it seems to be a mix of kids who mostly get along, with weed and beer as their glue. Linklater films the kids hanging out, some of them knowing it won’t get better than this. The moral center of the jocks, Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), Linklater’s other avatar here, even says that if anyone catches him saying these were the best years of his life, remind him to kill himself. But the movie’s vibe is warm and good-natured, and we feel welcomed along with Mitch into the world of the cool older kids.

There’s one thread of plot having to do with a pledge the jocks are expected to sign that they won’t get high. Pink refuses to sign, for reasons he’s barely able to articulate. Nobody gets any big speeches; the most quotable character is ol’ Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey, right at the beginning of it all) with his bit about getting older while high-school girls stay the same age. The way McConaughey plays Wooderson, though, he comes off less a sketchy statutory rapist than a guy who’s still, in his heart, a high-school senior and always will be. Linklater doesn’t rely on dialogue; we fill in the blanks of what’s not said, deducing, for instance, that Ben Affleck’s manically outraged two-time senior O’Bannion is nursing deep regrets and pain that he tries to work out by paddling the living shit out of freshmen.

I suppose it would take a woman who went to high school in the ‘70s to make a Dazed and Confused from the girls’ point of view, but Linklater, while kind of staying in his white-male lane, does well by the girls. He gets a vivid performance from Parker Posey as Darla, the senior who adores being sadistic to the freshman girls; he also has a habit of lingering on one girl or another for a few beats so we can sense their boredom or exasperation with the boys — or their interest in them. The wall-to-wall needle-drop soundtrack does a lot of the emotional heavy lifting, giving the whole movie the tempo and mood of a breezy car ride on a mild summer night. It’s a beauty of a film and an instant pick-me-up, but with enough sad insight to recognize that the moments that shine the most fade the quickest.

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I didn’t quite have the right place to get this in, but it occurs to me with a chill that Dazed and Confused is now almost twice as many years past as the year 1976 was when the film came out. It is 30 years old, and when it came out in 1993, 1976 was only 17 years in the rearview (but seemed so much longer ago). 1976 is now, of course, of the Late Cretaceous Epoch.

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.

Sorcerer

When William Friedkin died on August 7, the press of course referred to him in terms of his hits: “the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist.” Friedkin was also the director of 1977’s Sorcerer, a movie he might have preferred to be remembered by. Of all his films, it was his favorite, “the only film I’ve made,” he said in 2017, “that I can still watch.” It ended up being one of his biggest flops, having gone way over budget at great physical risk to the cast and crew; the making of Sorcerer was often as nerve-wracking and nightmarish as the movie itself is. 

Based on the premise of Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear, which also inspired H.G. Clouzot’s 1953 classic of the same name, the film comes close to being a pure-cinema riff on the frustrations of machines and nature and how they are aligned against the will of man. Four men hiding out in a Colombian village are selected for what looks to be a suicide mission: using a couple of broken-down trucks, they must convey old boxes of dynamite, which has leaked highly unstable nitroglycerine liquid, over two hundred and eighteen miles of bumpy, treacherous jungle roads — and the most rickety-looking suspension bridge you’ve ever seen — so that a burning oil well can be blown up, dispersing the fires. The men are Scanlon (Roy Scheider), an American wheelman for thieves, on the run from a mob boss; Kassem (Amidou), a terrorist who targeted an Israeli bank; Victor (Bruno Cremer), a stockbroker who fled jail time for tax fraud; and Nilo (Francisco Rabal), an icy hit-man.

Friedkin and writer Walon Green (The Wild Bunch) introduce these men in pre-plot vignettes to establish what they seek to escape. They are offered a large sum of money by the American oil company to perform this mission. In either film version, I think we’re meant to take the story as a metaphor for how capitalism grinds everyone down, though Friedkin tends to let subtext take care of itself; he gets much more juice out of the central challenges, which pit truck against nature and sometimes against itself. Humans create machines to master nature, but here the machines are jerry-rigged and half-dead, and the jungle is robust, throwing many obstacles in the protagonists’ path. (There are no heroes here.)

The legendary (or if it isn’t, it deserves to be) bridge sequence, in which first one truck and then the other seems to exhale stoically and try its luck over the splintered boards and unlikely ropes of that bridge, can still get us to lean forward in our seats and wince audibly, even though we know that nobody died filming it, and the bridge itself was part of hydraulically assisted movie magic. Friedkin, a master of tension, can make us forget all that. Then there’s the fallen-tree sequence, which inspires a Treasure of Sierra Madre-like gust of sardonic laughter from the hit-man, before the terrorist — who has experience with bombs — figures out a way to clear the path. The physical realism is oppressive, reeking of a sense of futility. The men, feeling every inch of the slow 218-mile drive, strain against the elements to attain freedom, which isn’t guaranteed.

I don’t want to get into a contest between Sorcerer and The Wages of Fear. Both are masterful in their distinct ways, and the Clouzot classic has won (and earned) a spot among the Criterion-anointed canon, while Sorcerer, this surly and downbeat thing that could serve as a comment on Vietnam, got chased out of theaters in 1977 by the post-Vietnam bag of candy nobody knew they’d been waiting for, Star Wars. The writing was scrawled in blood on the wall: Friedkin’s taste for antiheroes or flawed heroes, which had stood him in good stead in his previous two hits, was now as much a thing of the past as Clouzot. Disagreeable main characters eventually found a home on HBO and elsewhere on the dial; they were, by and large, no longer welcome in theaters, though Friedkin kept trying. But he could never quite get behind the heroic code or perfect people doing perfect things. Right up to the end he asked, with his usual impatient tenor, “What the fuck is wrong with us? Why do we do this shit?” and to try to answer the former, he made movies exploring the latter. Sorcerer was maybe the clearest example of his mission, of his question. Give it a shot. 

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.

Asteroid City

In further evidence that our buddies calling the shots at Hollywood studios are all heart, Wes Anderson’s best film in years, Asteroid City — which almost demands to be seen on the big screen — has been trebucheted from most theaters and onto streaming after a little more than two weeks. Anderson uses his old familiar trick of boxing off painful experience, this time through layers of representation, as in his The Grand Budapest Hotel. Our view is that of an audience member watching a movie, and in that movie we see a play, and the making of that play, and its broadcast adaptation for television. It offers far more than can be taken in at one viewing, and leaves itself wide open for interpretation.

As a longtime Anderson fan (Rushmore is a lifetime top-tenner for me) I was left feeling bruised and hollow by his last effort, The French Dispatch. It came dangerously close to just being a parade of hip actors filing onscreen for their one line. Asteroid City is filled end to end with actors, too, but the melancholy that suffuses all of Anderson’s films feels anchored to something real here. Anderson returns to loss and grief over and over, dressing it up immaculately in symmetrical-bordering-on-ceremonial compositions with the actors center stage, or far off to the side, delivering their speeches softly and without much emotion. The success of his efforts depends largely on his cast and whether Anderson has left them enough air to breathe and create and possibly even argue with the aesthetic they’re in.

Here, he does. Everyone here gathers in the southwestern Asteroid City for the Junior Stargazers Convention, and there’s something about filming in the desert that moves artists like Anderson — or Jordan Peele with Nope in recent years — to think about stories and their role in our lives. Wisely, Anderson gravitates to Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson, who play actors playing characters. Sometimes we catch them as actors, most often as their characters. Augie Steenbeck, the character in the play, grieves his wife; Augie’s portrayer, Jones Hall, has his own grief, and on one occasion Jones adds a level of realism to a painful scene that jolts his scene partner — Johansson as actress Mercedes Ford playing actress Midge Campbell — out of character. 

How easily the spell of story can be broken, says Anderson, whose work features pain shut up in pretty boxes, sometimes punching holes out of those boxes. (I’ve always felt that the box-punching was at its most gratifying and loud in Anderson’s first three films, the only ones he wrote with Owen Wilson.) Asteroid City is whimsical on the surface — it features an alien that’s sometimes stop-motion and sometimes a latex suit filled by an actor whose presence is too good a joke to spoil — but the uncanny color scheme draws us in, invites us to look deeper. Eventually the movie states its case plain, in a repeated mantra that may repel some on-the-fencers in the audience: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” which could mean any number of things. 

It’s clear by now, after almost 30 years, that Anderson can’t make movies any other way. He’s never going to make an emotionally sloppy Sidney Lumet urban drama. You dig the cut of his jib or you don’t, and if you don’t, nothing in his films is going to win you over. I’m on Team Wes, but I don’t blame you if you’re not. There’s just too much stuff, even if I like it, that can elicit understandable exasperation. But there aren’t so many American filmmakers with such an immediately recognizable style that we can afford to pooh-pooh one. I’d say he’s earned respect even if he leaves you cold. Asteroid City, though, is a return to the populous but warmer climes of Moonrise Kingdom and Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson’s one-two punch from the early-to-mid-‘10s. Whether you like it or not, Anderson isn’t lost in Wesville yet; he still has stories to tell and emotions to work out through them (though not in them).