Many moons ago, I took my very first trip to Europe—a exhaustive coach tour of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland that was not really meant for a naïve 22-year-old woman. I was variously sexually harassed, put upon, and regarded with weird suspicion, but the experience led to my enduring fascination with Ireland. Beyond the outsized public relations triumphs that have made the Irish an adored subculture in the United States, my real-world encounter with a tank moving along a parkside road in Dublin pipped me out of my sheltered, suburban shell and made me want to know how the painful, violent story of the Irish people had so transformed into the harmless Irish mythology peddled to me every March 17th.
I read many books and watched many films dealing with the potato famine, the 1916 uprising, and most especially The Troubles, which made the news regularly during that time. In the latter case, the narrative centered on Northern Ireland and the violent battles between those seeking a united Ireland and the occupying British troops and their loyalist Irish supporters. The Republic and diaspora communities usually only showed up in the periphery from time to time, remaining a gray area in my knowledge. Thus, when I heard about first-time feature director Luke Hanlon’s new film, The Troubles: A Dublin Story, I saw an opportunity to learn something that could connect up with my tank sighting all those years ago.
Hanlon, who grew up in public housing in Dublin’s Northside district, had the idea that became The Troubles: A Dublin Story on his mind for decades. He knew republicans in his neighborhood, ordinary people who took up the cause of a united Ireland for various noble and selfish reasons. Like me, he wondered why the Dublin story had not been told. Pulling together the miniscule sum of €15,000 and stretching it with strategies Hollywood’s Poverty Row directors would have appreciated, Hanlon realized his vision.
Hanlon erases any thoughts of leprechauns and shamrocks by dropping us immediately into the savagery of the conflict. Someone is being held by some “hard men” for interrogation. Things aren’t going well for the interrogators, prompting one of the men to pull out his handgun and disappear to do whatever he feels is necessary to deal with their prisoner. The unfortunate man could be a loyalist infiltrator or a republican who broke some unforgivable rule; we’re sure that whichever he is, he’s not going to get out of the situation alive.
We soon see protests in the streets of Belfast and then a TV broadcast announcing the death of Bobby Sands, the most famous of the republican prisoners in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison to join the hunger strike designed to force Margaret Thatcher’s government to declare them political prisoners. This emotional moment galvanizes Sean (Ray Malone) and Frank (Adam Redmond) Shannon, brothers born less than a year apart and jokingly called the Shannon twins. They contact Declan (William Delaney), known to be a member of the Provisional IRA, and say they want to join the fight. In due time, they are brought into the IRA and given small assignments to gauge their effectiveness.
Hanlon is careful to depict the world Sean and Frank inhabit. They have been in trouble with the law, but that doesn’t seem to be an uncommon situation in their economically depressed neighborhood. Frank lives in their childhood home and cares for their father (Philip James Russell), who is suffering from dementia and physical disability. Sean, the more wayward and hot-headed of the brothers, marries Marie (Sarah Hayden), a pretty, red-haired colleen, and fathers a couple of children with her. He really seems to care about his kids, but he abuses Marie physically and psychologically.
At long last, the brothers are issued guns and ordered to rob a post office to help fund the cause. Sean slugs the clerk behind the counter, but as luck would have it, a police car stops by during the robbery. Sean looks for a way to escape, using the clerk as hostage to facilitate their getaway, but Frank obeys the orders of his IRA superior on the scene and surrenders. Their two-year prison terms legitimate them with their IRA comrades, that is, until Frank strikes up a romance with a Belfast woman (Sophia Adli) who tends bar at his local.
When governments refuse to heed the wishes of the oppressed and disenfranchised, terrorism seems inevitable, but such freedom fighting provides cover for psychopaths, sociopaths, and opportunistic criminals who have no real understanding of or interest in military discipline. Sean and Frank are assigned to shoot out the knee of one of their more feckless comrades when he is caught selling a small quantity of drugs—ludicrously they ask him if he wants to take his pants down so the bullet won’t pierce them—but then Declan falls in league with a notorious drug dealer who has the money to pay an American businessman who has arms to smuggle into the country. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the saying goes, but this type of behavior only confirms that principles and loyalties are conveniences, not convictions to such people.
Sean’s vision of the struggle is as a game of Mortal Kombat, an outlet for his aggression that becomes intoxicating and poisonous to his marriage. Frank seems like a true believer, but experience hardens him and the long arm of the Provos reaches far into his personal life and destroys any chance that he will have anything other than the movement to call home. One need only recall the Real IRA, whose members refused to accept the ceasefire in 1998 with the coming of the Good Friday Agreement. The armistice left them at loose ends, with their criminal activities too lucrative to abandon.
Hanlon’s ingenuity in finding the perfect locations and even scrounging up a tank from a former member of the military who instructed him and his cast on how checkpoint operations were conducted lend much to the film’s realism. The script has a very lived-in feeling, with no holds barred. When Marie tells Sean that she hates him, the venom practically spews from the screen. Casting the blond-haired Redmond and the dark-haired Malone as the mismatched brothers was a bit Woodward and Bernstein, but those actors and the rest of the cast are excellent at helping us experience the ordinariness of life in the shadows. The script is well rendered, and the surprise ending puts a point on the unsavory nature of injury and retribution.
Director: Denis Villeneuve Screenwriters: Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve
By Roderick Heath
Two and a half years since the first part of Denis Villeneuve’s bifurcated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic was released, the second comes charging out of the deep desert of current cinema-going, that vast and dread wasteland left to us by Hollywood. The first part came out amidst the throes of the COVID pandemic, managing to make a decent box office showing despite all that whilst gaining most of its viewers on streaming. Hardly the natural habitat for a pricey, spectacular science fiction epic, but it still made an impression on a mainstream audience plainly starved for big, ambitious genre filmmaking that doesn’t treat us all like eight-year-olds: if any property caught the first ripples of changing zeitgeist of that moment, more apparent now as the superhero movie craze rapidly wanes, it seems to have been Dune. An ironic fate for a movie adapted from a 1965 tome long described as unfilmable, with the previous example of David Lynch’s 1984 version usually offered as horrid warning for the unwary. Props to Villeneuve: for all my lack of passion for his vision in general and the way he applied it to Herbert’s story, he certainly seems to have pulled off a truly impressive feat in selling such an odd, byzantine story to a multiplex audience. This was particularly clear when I settled down to watch the second instalment, this time in the proper temple of a movie theatre, surrounded by a crowd of all ages. Doubly impressive given that the choice of splitting the book in half left the viewer at an important but unsatisfying dramatic juncture, but with the hook planted deep.
The upside of that choice was that much of what distinguishes Dune as a piece of fiction comes to fruition in its later portions. Those were portions that, for all its very real qualities, Lynch’s film couldn’t help but garble when trying squeeze it all into a workable whole – at least, once the Di Laurentiis editing was applied. The novel’s basic narrative structure of a young protagonist’s fall and rise, with the kind of messianic meaning behind his rise that’s long since become a mainstay of modern quasi-mythic storytelling, gave a solid narrative backbone to a tale that snakes and coils with weird and alien purpose in both key concepts and marginalia. So the second part of Dune was always going to be an intriguing proposition: having promised the audience the prospect of seeing Paul Atreides make common cause with the Fremen to avenge themselves upon the evil Harkonnens and win back control of the planet Arrakis, now they can be asked to wrap their heads around the novel’s most bizarre conceits running the gamut from high science fiction to far-out mysticism, from sentient unborn children to space-navigating mutants. Except that…well, I’ll get to that.
Dune: Part Two opens with confidence, at least: Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) are being escorted to a Fremen underground city or ‘sietch,’ dodging and slaughtering Harkonnen soldiers sent out to hunt them down. At first they find themselves objects of suspicion and hatred as outsiders, especially as Paul has killed the Fremen Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun) in the duel that capped the previous movie. But both Atreides soon find their place amongst the Arrakeens in their different capacities. Jessica is asked to replace the sietch’s dying Reverend Mother, one of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood Jessica was trained by and who inculcates the populace with religious doctrines and prophecies whilst actually purveying social control and selective breeding. Paul for his part determines to school himself thoroughly in Fremen ways and prove a valuable fighter. Sietch elder Stilgar (Javier Bardem) is already thoroughly convinced he is the prophesised leader who will lead the Fremen to Holy War, whilst young warrior Chani (Zendaya), daughter of the murdered Imperial biologist Liet Kynes and a Fremen, maintains a sceptical attitude and wants more practical approaches to ridding their planet of the Harkonnen yolk despite her strong attraction to the young stranger.
Their disparate viewpoints of the same goal at least temporarily intersect in the form of Paul, as he proves not just a good fighter but a wily tactician and an object of increasingly fierce veneration by his fellow ‘Fedaykin’ or elite Fremen warriors, offering the promise of unifying all the Fremen tribes and unleashing them in a grand spree upon the universe: the Fremen look to him as the “Mahdi” and the “lisan al-glaib,” deliverer figures distinct from the concept of the “Kwisatz Haderach” that the Bene Gesserit have been breeding, although the distinction is never elucidated. As a Reverend Mother, Jessica helps further the cause by proselytising to deepen the apparent fulfilment of the prophecy, but the act of drinking “the Water of Life,” a by-product of the infant sandworms that infest Arrakis that works like intensely purified spice, to become a Reverend Mother has the unintended result not just of opening Jessica’s mind to being filled with the memories of other Bene Gesserits, but also her embryonic daughter. Meanwhile, the Emperor of the human universe (Christopher Walken) nurses his unease after having arranged for the Harkonnens to wipe out the Atreides; his daughter Irulan (Florence Pugh), also a pupil of the Bene Gesserit leader Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), starts to tease out the truth of this discomforting plot. Mohiam in turn encourages Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), increasingly irate over his kinsman Rabban’s (Dave Bautista) failure to bring the Fremen to heel, to instead place his vigorous but insane nephew Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) in charge of the suppression.
For about its first third, Dune: Part Two rolls on with a force and purpose that suggests it really knows what to do in picking up midway through a narrative, and, moreover, seems to have liberated something in Villeneuve stymied by his earlier Hollywood ventures. There’s a strong early action sequence as Harkonnen soldiers, hunting Paul, Jessica, and Stilgar’s warband, have the tables turned on them despite their attempts to take refuge on a high mesa: Paul takes out a soldier but leaves his back vulnerable to another, only for Jessica to fall on the enemy and beat them to death. The mixture of emotionally volatile frenzy and suspicion of the Fremen towards the two is deftly depicted, setting the scene for the difficult journey that lies ahead. Similarly potent in staging, if a tad illogical, is an action sequence where Rabban, losing his cool, leads his soldiers into an ambush in a sandstorm and finishes up fleeing before Paul back to his ornithopters, barely avoiding being slain by a Fremen assassin during the wild escape. Why Rabban and his people don’t have infrared scopes, or future version of such, for such actions is left vague, but the staging of the scene is certainly effective, with the punchline being Rabban’s expressions of shock and profound disquiet as he comprehends just how fanatical the force he’s opposing is.
The strong early portion of the movie culminates in the vital mythopoeic moment when Paul first dares to ride one of the colossal sandworms, a feat he needs to complete as part of his initiation as a Fremen, but which proves another building block in his growing mystique, when he uses a worm-attracting ‘thumper’ and draws in a truly colossal worm that he manages to steer. This sets the scene for a marvel of special effects entwined with dynamic camerawork and staging to intensify the desired immersive effect, describing vividly the fantastical notion of snaring hold of and being dragged along on the back of an enormous, primeval beast as it cleaves through the desert sand. This in turn sets up the most impressive of the movie’s visuals, the moment when any fan of the material will be anticipating, when the Fremen warriors ride into battle on the backs of the worms, crashing through hordes of Harkonnen and Imperial soldiers in an awesome vision of primal power and animal will overwhelming even the most fantastically advanced human protection.
Rather than carefully slice up and feed portions to the audience promising the evil still lying in wait for the Atreides and the Fremen, however, the narrative shifts focus to the Harkonnens for a long chunk of the movie, stalling the pace in a manner the entry never really recovers from. Villeneuve wants to make a real impression of the menace of Feyd-Rautha, as opposed to the glimpses of Sting looking bug-eyed in leather shorts in Lynch’s take, even if this version ultimately, similarly emphasises the character as villain beefcake. So we get an introduction of Feyd-Rautha with his latex-clad concubines, casually slicing throats of luckless underlings, in scenes that look like they were designed for a particularly fetishistic mid-1990s fashion mag spread. Despite the (relatively) cooler tone of Villeneuve’s filming and the acting by Skarsgård and Butler, they’re actually even more cartoonish than the takes on the Harkonnens than in Lynch’s film, sapped of all their intellectual as well as physical pith and ruthlessness, leering, growling, raping, and butchering at whim. Villeneuve and Spaihts make Feyd-Rautha a sort of melding of wicked Roman Emperor traits – crazy and capricious like Caligula, fond of gladiatorial combat like Commodus, a matricide like Nero. But the aspect that Lynch emphasised, in a motif he would go onto reiterate much more intricately in Mulholland Drive (2000), that Feyd-Rautha is Paul’s dark double, the projection of his id made flesh, and the alternative casting in the matinee idol of political theatre stakes, is utterly beyond Villeneuve’s literalist sensibility.
Similarly, the Baron’s peccadilloes have been given a slight updating and upgrading in grotesquery – where in the books he had a penchant for sadistically raping and killing young men, here he’s glimpsed with a stack of mangled pubescent girls in his chambers. Villeneuve returns to the images of Skarsgård swathed in fake fat and swimming in glistening oil-like fluid after enjoying rapine and murder, to make sure we know these are not nice people. The “black sun” of the Harkonnen’s home planet Giedi Prime is exploited as an excuse to desaturate the exterior sequences to a virtual black-and-white palette, increasing the fashion spread-gone-evil aesthetic, and Feyd-Rautha goes into gladiatorial combat with some luckless Atreides captives with his guard of genetically engineered mutant men as backup. To be fair, some of this is striking and effectively nasty, reminding the viewer that a universe ruled by the Harkonnens would be a nightmarish hellscape, and indeed one where they’re tolerated is already too close to that status as it is, in this future that’s regressed politically into feudalism. Not that Villeneuve has anything to say about that: it’s just a vaguely techno-Ruritanian backdrop for the plot, a convention Herbert took from classic space opera, converted into an actual idea and conceptual frame, gave birth in turn to a generic convention via the material’s children like Star Wars (1977), and now isn’t going to be converted back into an idea.
Perhaps the most prominent victim of the adaptation’s choices and priorities is Herbert’s most bizarre and memorable creation of the early books, Paul’s sister Alia, who in the book is born as a fully sentient and cognisant Bene Gesserit. Regarded as an “abomination” by Mohiam for that reason and created contrary to all Bene Gesserit precepts, Alia plays a vital role in how the climax of family revenge plays out, presented as a mere vulnerable child to the Emperor and Harkonnen but able to kill Harkonnen with poison. The grown-up Alia is even more fundamental to the two follow-up novels, where she becomes the lover of the resurrected Duncan Idaho but is later possessed by the transmitted consciousness of her grandfather the Baron. Villeneuve keeps Alia to mere glimpses of her in a foetal state within her mother, having psychic conversations with her, and a brief appearance, in one of Paul’s prescient vision, of Anya Taylor-Joy playing the adult Alia – which is, admittedly, very apt casting. It’s not that surprising that Villeneuve would avoid the awkwardness of trying to realise the young Alia as a fully sentient and deadly toddler (although the very young Alicia Witt managed to play her in Lynch’s version to some effect), as well as trying to pare back the extra clutter of characters. But the fact that she’s absent but the narrative shoehorns in Lady Margot Fenring (Lea Seydoux), a scheming Bene Gesserit acolyte who seduces Feyd-Rautha to get pregnant by him, makes that excuse feel a bit flimsy. I felt like Alia’s absence was more intended to remove some of the eccentricity and the complexity from the work: she’s too definite a presentation of Herbertian strangeness and provocation to sit easily with Villeneuve’s efforts to demystify Paul and render the story into a more standard parable for the dangers of fanaticism and power politics, as well as something likely to make the current mass audience uncomfortable.
Villeneuve’s cachet as a filmmaker to date – at least since he left behind French-Canadian art cinema for the heady climes of Hollywood – has been applying a formidable but facetious layer of stylisation to movies that proceed with highly programmatic and even banal dramatic beats. As made plain enough in previous films like Prisoners (2013) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Villeneuve has a love for diffused lightning, heavy filter work, and other atmospheric visual textures that recall the grand old days of Hollywood high style cinema from the 1980s but with a more contemporary spin. And, yes, compared to the sleek, almost painfully coherent and featureless style of CGI delivered to us by superhero movies in the past few years, Dune: Part Two does suggest new paths for contemporary visual effects to take. Villeneuve wields such texturing here, enabled again by cinematographer Greig Fraser, with intent to enrich the narrative with some sense of connection in the imagery – the way, for instance, he pays attention to the flicker of erupting fireworks penetrating the cavernous interiors of the Harkonnen citadel where Feyd-Rautha walks rhymes with a later moment when Paul and Chani spy the strobing light from artillery unleashed upon a Fremen sietch, marking the coming of Feyd-Rautha’s wrath to Arrakis.
Villeneuve meanwhile swathes Ferguson so often in cosmic chadors, hoods, and jewellery, and painted over with cabalistic lettering, that I started to wonder if he was indulging some sort of atavistic fetish, but decided that’s too interesting for him. This, even as Jessica’s role is minimised, with some of her dramatic function handed over to Chani. Villeneuve and his special effects team are sparing throughout Dune: Part Two, an episode where the source material was always going to offer up manna to the visually-oriented filmmaker. The desert filming is more effective in this movie than its precursor, with Fraser allowing more colour and texture to certain shots, the sands of Arrakis sometimes bleached and cheerless, other times permeated with lush ochres and governed by skies as blue as the eyes of the spice-gorged Fremen. And yet there’s something fascinatingly inert about the bulk of Villeneuve’s imagery, for all its polish and conceptual grandeur. There’s nothing expressive about it. Except for flashes here and there I gained no real feeling of entrance into a grand fantastical universe, but like that universe was being conveyed in the language of the kind of crisp digital gritty-pretty gloss of video games and AI-generated artworks. Only the repeated image of the titanic worm charging through the sand, one Villeneuve knows is dynamite and repeats at the very end, wields a truly arresting sense of might and transcendent power. A feeling of detachment permeates the film as a whole, and it stems from a more fundamental problem of attitude than simply to Villeneuve’s hyper-fussy aesthetics.
As an adaptation of a book, Dune: Part Two proves a crushing disappointment. Instead of Harkonnen’s comeuppance coming from an unexpected, mildly shocking and memorable place, it’s accomplished in the film in the most desultory terms. For any fans of the novel and its follow-ups hoping for more of the essential detail to make the cut this time, there is still no mention of the Butlerian Jihad or the Spacing Guild, or so much of the book’s imaginitive infrastructure. Just exactly why the spice is so important to this fictional world is left so fuzzy and poorly described that I’m not really sure anyone watching either part of Villeneuve’s diptych and who hasn’t read the books will have any real idea of it, beyond being a quasi-magical MacGuffin. The process of extracting the Water of Life from a young sandworm is shown in well-filmed detail, but the actual connection between the worms and the spice isn’t elucidated, and so the way it’s deeply wound in with Paul’s apotheosis is utterly garbled. The revelation that Jessica is actually Harkonnen’s daughter is dropped with all the grace of a soap opera. It’s always a delight to see Walken in a film and yet he’s oddly ineffectual as the Emperor: Villeneuve seems to have wanted him to embody the haunting, exhausting nature of vast power, rather than mere malice, but the necessary sense of a Machiavellian nature operating almost in spite of itself never comes across, partly because, well, Walken is getting a bit old. The crucial exchange between Paul and the Emperor in the climactic confrontation, when the Emperor coolly informs Paul that his father Duke Leto’s humane streak was exactly his weakness, fails to land as sharply as it should because Villeneuve doesn’t seem to have any clear emotion he wants Walken to express beyond the quality of being Walken.
More conspicuously, Dune: Part Two might well be the apotheosis of an increasingly depressing trend in modern genre storytelling where it’s assumed that underlying subtext or real-world blueprint of the generic metaphors are in some fashion the “true” meaning of what’s going on, and therefore anything that breaks down the distance in terms of interpretation is only dispensing with a nicety. In this paradigm genre storytelling only exists to sell ideas and messages to the great unwashed. Whereas the great power of genre metaphor is precisely the way it generalises, transforming aspects of reality into functional abstractions that can change and develop other meanings over time. In specific terms of Dune: Part Two, this means that Villeneuve has done his absolute best to ensure that we all know that Herbert’s story is a metaphor for oil dependency and the Fremen are not a future race eight millennia and millions of light years removed from us with retained aspects of the cultures that fed into their identity, but slightly coded representatives of Middle Eastern and other hard-done-by populaces. Leaving aside the faintly racist absurdity behind the assumption that a horde of Arabic people were just itching to up sticks and shift holus bolus to a whole planet of desert to hang out on, Villeneuve and Spaihts ram home the similarity to contemporary problems by inventing a new aspect to Herbert’s Fremen society by referring to certain sectors of the Fremen as “fundamentalists,” a word not used in the book and with no equivalent either. The Fremen in the book had their own, peculiar culture and interpretations of the religious ideas common to the Empire as disseminated by the Bene Gesserit, but they weren’t bumpkins. Villeneuve on the other hand subdivides them, between those who are bumpkins and those who, as represented by Chani, are more cosmopolitan (the film elides the fact that Chani herself is the product of personal and cultural mating, too). The film portrays Stilgar as a zealot and gullible stooge for the messianic project, rather than the serious and stalwart warrior in the book, now the kind of true believer who sees even Paul’s casual denials of being the Mahdi as proof he is – moments that, at least, give the film some of its few moments of ironic levity.
Chalamet, to his credit, grows nicely into the role of Paul in his second outing: if he didn’t wield a newly voluble and mature intensity as Paul takes command when confronting the Fremen elders after drinking the Water of Life, the film would fail entirely, but he delivers, even if he’s still not exactly the second coming of Kirk Douglas when whipping up the Fremen for battle. The completeness of the character’s transformation from the gangly manor-born whelp of the first film to the coldly victorious warlord by the end of the second is most coherently conveyed by his presence. The script however lets him down in too many ways. Whilst Paul isn’t displaced in narrative function, exactly, the film disengages from his experience when it really needs to be weaving its way deeply into his viewpoint to put across his blend of increasing desperation and hardening purpose as he sees every choice being cut off through his burgeoning powers of foresight. Villeneuve leans on the one, repeated image of people writhing in agony from the starvation incurred by what he might unleash. There’s no meditation on Paul’s accruing of hardened battle experience and emergent tactical genius, the edges he’s been gifted by being schooled by master warriors combined with the vulcanising heat of his experiences to create a truly formidable leader. Part of this stems from the highly truncated timeframe: in the book this took years, during which time Alia was born and grew, and Paul and Chani had a child who was killed by the Harkonnens. Paul’s prescient visions are boringly filmed and conveyed, and the crucial moment when he dares to grasp his destiny and drink the Water of Life is arrived at, and passes, without any real sense of climactic punch or truly dramatic meaning. Villeneuve’s lack of engagement with the quasi-mystical aspect is of course deeply connected with his general disinterest in the story’s more psychological, mystical, and symbolic aspects, and indeed his desire to have his messianic antihero cake and eat his interrogative parable about religious manipulation too.
Indeed, this reveals Villeneuve’s lack of real imagination underneath the superficial prettiness and conceptual indolence of his pictures. All he gives us is Chalamet staring at his hands and mumbling something about all the alternatives he can see now. Paul’s romance with Chani is also a victim of the fudging: if Chalamet and Zendaya have any chemistry, I didn’t see it, and as a result a love affair that’s supposed to root Paul to the present and upturn Chani’s sense of identity and loyalty remains a stillborn affair, a segue into fodder for the actors’ TikTok fans. Villeneuve and Spaihts moreover go a little further in imposing their own ideas of modernising upon Herbert’s text in a way that feels spasmodic and tacked-on, particularly in the attempt to refashion Chani into a sceptic towards Paul even as she falls in love with him and helps coach him during his initiation period. Zendaya is certainly evolving into a strong actress, and whilst I scarcely bought where this take on Chani insists on steering the character, I admired Zendaya’s attempts to make it palpable with her increasingly troubled and finally furious and agonised visage lending a note of emotional immediacy to the very end that the film otherwise lacks. Josh Brolin returns with welcome, grizzled gravitas when Gurney Halleck is revealed to still be alive and working with a squad of outlaw spice harvesters and smugglers, but his return to the fold isn’t conveyed with any drama in staging: Villeneuve simply reveals him amongst the ranks of smugglers. But Brolin is a canny actor, and he sells the moment of Gurney and Paul’s reunion, with a flash of authentic, potent emotion. Bautista is required to rant a bit. And Pugh, well, there’s not much she can do with a thankless role.
There’s something extraordinarily inefficient about the way the film unfolds, too. To be fair, Villeneuve seems to be trying to maintain something of the novel’s stately, careful progression towards ends that are literally preordained, and relative lack of described physical action. But the very guiding principle and pleasure of the book is the way each chapter is presented as a kind of intellectual chess match between various characters, where the conversations are forms of warfare by other means “I can kill with a word,” Paul declares at the end of a novel where words have been weapons right along – and where the battles in turn are laced with their own kind of dialogue, as in Paul’s final duel with Feyd-Rautha when he tries to understand the importance of his choice of costume. By contrast, here the dialogue exchanges here are bland and expository. The flaccidness of the script is underlined when it forces Zendaya to repeat her immortally clumsy opening line from the first film, slightly modified now in conversation with Paul — “Arrakis is so beautiful when the sun is low,” like she’s writing copy for a tourism advertisement rather than trying to convey one great source of passion in her life to another. Despite splitting the book and the second part being over two and a half hours long, the narrative never shifts into a higher gear. Excessive emphasis is given to aspects like Gurney showing Paul, Stilgar, and other Fremen leaders where he hid the Atreides stock of atomic weapons – which seems present mostly so Villeneuve can nudge the viewer with extra promise of an anti-nuclear parable as well as an anti-colonial and anti-Jihadist parable. And, worst of all, the rather curtailed final battle arrives as more than a bit of an anticlimax, as the grand vision of the worm-riding Fremen comes and is then disposed of.
But where Dune: Part Two subtly but cumulatively really derails the story is in how Villeneuve wants to have his messianic antihero and his sceptical, anti-zealot message too. Herbert’s book certainly comments on the way mythologies are constructed and used by both power and oppressed populaces, but ultimately the narrative hinges on the way it transmutes the desire for religious iconography, and figures who fit into the classical understanding of the word “hero” rather than its devolved modern usage, for a science fiction setting. Lynch’s Dune settled for purveying the ascension of Paul to virtual godhood as a cheeralong journey, robbed of its darker elements, but at least Lynch really got behind that, delivering his action climax with the enthusiasm of a classical war movie, and leaving off with a vision of the miraculous that wields nagging power, cutting to black from the awesome, Cecil B. DeMille-meets-Frank Frazetta vision of rain falling upon Arrakis and the Fremen hordes. Villeneuve won’t commit to dark revelry nor high tragedy nor roaring craziness. Paul is in some ways a false messiah for the Fremen, but also a very real one, and his coming to a certain extent only rides the wave of their worldview and capacity, which is, again, the product not of our world but of a futuristic realm where the religious and the scientific have long since fused back into a curious new singularity of outlook. The Fremen are inseparable from their faiths and warlike talents, and Paul soon learns to his chagrin that his revenge is inseparable from the unleashing of a tide of human potential, both glorious and horrific: no matter what he does in this regard, the tide will be unleashed, because it has been pent up too long, a phenomenon so often glimpsed in history when stable tyrannies end. The later books in Herbert’s cycle make it apparent that Paul resisted the ultimate choice which his son Leto II fatefully makes, to become a practically immortal human-sandworm chimera and strangle all human ingenuity and progress for millennia until the right moment comes to let it loose in a fresh torrent.
In Villeneuve’s filming, this all falls by the wayside so he can have his simplified take on the story in a way that sets out to court current-day collegian clichés about colonialism and capitalist exploitation and white saviours. The script refocuses Chani’s role in the story, in itself not a bad idea as she’s essentially only the hero’s love interest in the book, to make her at once Paul’s lover and vital helpmate – she helps train him in the ways of desert life – but also a bulwark against complete acceptance of his emergence as leader, turning her scepticism on the idea of the Lisan al-Glaib and Paul’s embodiment of it as an outsider. Again, this does flesh out something in the book, but which was more Jessica’s role, as both Paul’s guide but also an increasingly dubious figure – embracing her Bene Gesserit status means detaching herself to a degree from Paul’s project. By the movie’s end Chani turns her back on Paul as he ascends to the throne by marrying Irulan, ranting that she still wants free her people and that “This prophecy is how they enslave us!”, when, point in fact, it allows the Fremen to brutalise the rest of the human universe. It’s understandable that Villeneuve and Spaihts want to open up at least some distance between themselves and the book’s implication that everyone in the end is a servant to some kind of system, be it political, biological, social, religious, or fate itself, Paul as Kwisatz Haderach most of all, even whilst aiming for the lesser of myriad evils.
But it feels, like so many things today, more like a sop to contemporary progressive youth self-congratulation: I reject bad, therefore I am good. Moreover, Chani’s choice of flight is finally less an act of principled conscientious objection, but a peevish refusal of romantic compromise, as opposed to the book’s ironic last lines where Jessica and Chani, whilst locked in their nominal roles as mere concubines, will be remembered historically as wives, thus achieving their own subversion of the hierarchy much as Paul turns the imperial power structure against itself for his own ends. Herbert’s ahead-of-the-curve feminism was fascinatingly articulated through a reactionary future patriarchy, another potentially rich disparity that never gets explored. For all his trumpeted efforts to retain the darker qualities of Herbert’s concepts, Villeneuve ultimately swaps the cop-out of Lynch’s version for a different kind of cop-out, an indulgence of moral sentiment with political dimensions appended to a work expressly about how circumstances can sometimes refuse such indulgences. And this failure of nerve helps douse the secret fire of the story it’s trying to tell, keeping it arm’s length from its heroes’ experiences of moral terror as well as the flush of well-earned victory and the exaltations of quasi-transcendental experience, mastery of time and space at the price of peering into its dankest abyss. Villeneuve manages here what he also inflicted upon Blade Runner, sapping a property that runs rich and deep with poetic vision and rare imagination and imposing the most literal meanings upon it, even whilst affecting to maintain the façade of fidelity.
The many worlds where narrative cinema can take us is one of the form’s most attractive features. We can see what life on Mars might look like if we ever set up shop there (The Martian, 2015), dodge a dragon in a gold-filled cavern (The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, 2013), feel the excitement of high-stakes gambling (Molly’s Game, 2017), or have a thrilling adventure circumnavigating the globe (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1956). We can thank the many directors, actors, cinematographers, and stylists of all sorts for the way they create the visual environments in which we can immerse ourselves.
This all starts, however, with the word. The films I mentioned above were all adapted from books, the vehicle that has nurtured our need to stretch our experiences and imagination for centuries. As a writer myself, I am acutely aware that what I see on screen is an exercise of the writer’s craft made visible. So, my view of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, adapted by the director from Japanese author Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, definitely is colored by their choice to have their main character make his living as a screenwriter.
We meet Adam (Andrew Scott) in his apartment on the 27nd floor of a boxy, nondescript building somewhere in London. He is trying to write a script on his laptop, but nothing is coming. He lowers the screen, looks through a few old photos, and goes to his refrigerator to grab some leftovers when a fire alarm sounds. Clearly well practiced at high-rise evacuation procedures, he heads down to the street and crosses the road to look up at the building. He sees someone looking back at him from another apartment.
Returning home after the false alarm, Adam gets a visit from the figure he saw at the window. Harry (Paul Mescal), apparently the only other tenant in the building, offers him a slug of whiskey from his half-empty bottle and a chance to hang out or possibly hook up for sex. Adam begs off, but the connection has been made. The next time Harry comes to Adam’s door, he is invited in for oral sex. The men talk afterward, with Adam having trouble using the now preferred term “queer,” which he always found derogatory. Adam is an older gay man who lived in the shadow of AIDS and who hasn’t considered fucking anyone for ages for fear of dying. Harry’s arrival reawakens Adam’s interest not only in sex, but also in companionship and the possibility of love.
We learn through a conversation he has with Harry that Adam’s parents were killed in a car crash when he was eleven and that he is trying to write about them. To that end, he travels by train to Croydon, in South London, to the home in which he was raised. To his astonishment, he finds his parents living in the home, looking exactly as they did the year of their deaths. So begins a series of visits between the three of them during which Adam’s career, sexuality, and the manner of his parents’ death—they know they died—are discussed.
Yamada’s novel carries on his culture’s time-honored tradition of ghost stories and was made into the 1988 horror film The Discarnates by director Nobuhiko Obayashi. While most such Japanese stories take for granted the existence of ghosts and advance in a conventional horror/eerie fashion, Western takes on hauntings like All of Us Strangers tend to the psychological.
Even before we get to Croydon, we can perceive the film’s otherworldly patina. It’s hard to believe that a large apartment building like the one Adam and Harry inhabit would be so empty. At the same time, the environment Haigh creates goes beyond a simple haunting. If we remember that in Jungian psychology, the house is the symbol of the self, then it would appear that Adam is not at home with himself. All is provisional, isolated. And who set off the fire alarm? Perhaps an obviously lonely Harry to see some of his neighbors. It also is entirely possible that it was an internal trigger by Adam himself signaling that some neglected part of his psyche is ready to be tended to.
Director Andrew Haigh is entirely upfront about how personal All of Us Strangers is to him. Haigh envisaged Adam as something of an alter ego, a middle-age gay man and screenwriter. He cast Jamie Bell and Claire Foy as Adam’s parents because they reminded him of his parents, and he filmed the scenes between these characters at the actual home in which he was raised. Thus, the ghosts he conjures exist as avatars of remembrance, psychological need, and emotional honesty.
Throughout All of Us Strangers, Adam flashes back repeatedly to the night he learned that his parents died, suggesting that he may still be suffering trauma from the loss. He even tries to prevent them from going to the party from which they would never return. Foy and Bell completely inhabit the roles of caring parents caught in time and trying to give Adam what he needs. They seem so natural in their affection and actions, making the homecoming scenes both comfortable and impossibly poignant.
Adam gives himself the chance to share aspects of his life and personality with them that they never lived to know. He beams with pleasure when they are impressed that he is a writer, a career they never would have guessed he would pursue. Importantly, he sits down to have a talk with each of them separately about being gay. His mother, inquiring as to why he hasn’t got a girlfriend, is shocked when he says he is into men. Foy expertly runs through the mother’s emotions of anger, fear about his vulnerability to AIDS, and clichés about homosexuality being a “lonely life.” Adam says people don’t really say that anymore and that things are different, but, in fact, his life is lonely. His father reveals that he suspected that Adam was gay and being bullied, but never raised it with him because he confesses he probably would have picked on his son if he were one of his schoolmates.
Adam’s relationship with Harry is one of the best depictions of modern romance I have seen in a long time. Haigh says he has filmed a lot of sex scenes, so he knows how to modulate the pair’s first hook-up to be sexy, but still tentative, as first encounters normally are. The men grow in their mutual familiarity, keeping their love private for a time, but eventually bursting out into the world in a dark, color-saturated disco. (Indeed, cinematographer Jamie Ramsay bathes Adam’s world in glorious color—reds, blues, lavenders, golds—and the bright, suburban hues of life with his parents.) The sensuality of dancing, of being surrounded by sweaty bodies and physical closeness, is something Adam basks in like a ritual bath. Scott and Mescal are exceptionally good, their chemistry and understanding of the dynamics of falling in love fully realized in their performances.
We are not at all surprised that Adam wants to introduce Harry to his parents—but only he can see them. When he breaks into his childhood home to find them, he crosses a line. The next time he sees his parents, they tell him that he needs to stop coming around for his own good. His tearful pleading with them that he needs more time is heartbreaking. But since Adam dreamed them up in the first place, he is really telling himself that he has done the work he needed to do to climb out of his shell and connect to the rest of the world.
Haigh’s variation on Yamada’s title underlines that, in a sense, we are all strangers, imprisoned in the only mind we can hear. Reaching out requires some courage and boundless amounts of empathy for others and ourselves. All of Us Strangers has a surprising ending that blends our experience of real lives and feelings brought to the screen and the strange prerogatives of writers to do with their characters what they will to resolve whatever issues they choose to raise. In the final analysis, Haigh affirms that “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
By now, most people who follow cinema know that Jonathan Glazer’s latest movie, The Zone of Interest, is a Holocaust film named for the designation the Germans used when referring to the Auschwitz extermination camp and adjacent areas, as well as for the 2014 novel by the late British author Martin Amis on which it is very loosely based. But the phrase “zone of interest” can also be applied to the endless fascination that artists and the larger cultural community have with the Holocaust. It is the ultimate evil of human nature and the very definition of conflict, which dramatists need to engage their audiences.
But what if the Holocaust were viewed as a slice of life? Papa gets up in the morning, gets into his work clothes, leaves his raucous household in the capable hands of his wife and servants, and heads off to commit state-sanctioned murder on a massive scale. How would this treatment of a mind-boggling crime against humanity affect those whose daily lives aren’t so different from this one?
This is the approach Glazer has chosen to depict the lives of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, their five children, and the associated members of their staff and community of Germans in the East in the year 1942. Filmed at Auschwitz primarily in an accurate reconstruction of the villa the Höss family occupied, Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal eschewed traditional shooting techniques. They instead operated static, hidden cameras that could be manipulated remotely and used natural light whenever possible, turning the tables on those in power by putting them under surveillance instead.
Glazer immediately attacks our comfort zone with his opening: a black screen and a haunting, dissonant overture that lasts longer than we expect it to. He seems to be commanding us to pay attention, to be aware that something out of the ordinary is going on. Then he switches to the most homely scene imaginable: the (as yet unidentified) Höss family picnicking and swimming, with trees lining the riverbanks and covering the gentle slopes in the background. Once home, Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) lay in their twin beds and talk about making a return trip to an Italian spa, with Hedwig cooing about the pampering she received and the nice couple they met. Rudolf promises to take her but can’t say when. She retorts with an “oink,” and the pair snort at each other playfully.
The next day, we finally get an idea of where we are and what is happening on the other side of a wall topped with barbed wire that forms one side of the Höss compound. Rudolf, in full SS regalia, gets a surprise birthday present from his family—a beautiful wooden kayak. After he examines the boat appreciatively, he mounts his beloved horse and rides about 10 feet to the entrance of the concentration camp as Hedwig waves her infant daughter Annagret’s hand at him and babytalks “Bye, Daddy.”
As Hedwig and the baby enjoy the flower garden, we see a Jewish slave pushing a wheelbarrow along the length of the camp wall to the front door. A maid takes pantry provisions from him, and Hedwig grabs two sacks he brought. She sends one of the servants upstairs with one sack and empties the contents of the other on the dining room table, allowing all the servants to take one item each. Then she goes upstairs and tries on the contents of the other sack—a full-length fur coat. Finding a lipstick in one of the pockets, she tests the color on her hand and her lips. Deciding that she likes it, she puts the tube in her vanity drawer and rubs hard with cold cream to remove the red marks from her hand and lips. She sends the coat out for cleaning and repairs to the lining.
Another day in hell for the camp prisoners. Another day in paradise for Hedwig. The house-proud “Queen of Auschwitz,” as Rudolf has nicknamed her, is living in a style far beyond her wildest dreams. She has servants whom she rules with an iron fist, threatening one with having her ashes scattered across the countryside in a fit of pique. She views the life-or-death selection process her husband oversees as a trip to the store, asking him to look for chocolate and other sweets that might be on the transport. The wives of the other SS officers commiserate with her over coffee about the treasures the Jews provide, such as a diamond concealed in a toothpaste tube. “I’ll have to order more toothpaste,” one of them half-jokes.
I can easily describe the actions in the film, but the visceral horror of The Zone of Interest is something that can only be experienced by watching each scene carefully. Very little is explicit in the film. We know what we are seeing through previous knowledge, inference, and visual clues that might be overlooked in another film. For example, the Höss family is hosting a children’s party in their vast garden. As the children play, a cloud of smoke moves in a line across the top of the camp wall—yet another train transporting victims to the slaughter. The ripped lining in the fur coat Hedwig has stolen likely signals that she tore into it looking for hidden valuables, but we are refused such visual confirmation.
Glazer lets us see the camp wall, the tops of the prisoner barracks, smoke, and the smoke stacks of the crematoria, just as the Hösses and their guests would have. We also hear guns and terrified yells. All of this is background for the Nazis who are moving up in the world professionally and personally. Their success is what matters to them, however it comes about, and if they have to live near and work in a human abattoir, well, that’s the price of admission to the good life they are willing to pay.
Washing has an important role in this film, and it almost always involves contact with Jews. The lipstick Hedwig steals once touched a Jewish woman’s lips. Rudolf has sex with a Jewish prisoner and washes himself very thoroughly, perhaps to keep Hedwig from smelling sex or perhaps for some other reason. Rudolf takes a couple of his children out in the kayak, and when they stop to swim and fish, they are inundated with the ashes of cremated Jews. The frantic scrubbing the Höss children undergo is bewildering and painful to them. Is all this washing for fear of contamination by Nazi-defined human vermin, or is it something else?
As for the other members of the Höss family and household, the frequent sounds of gunfire and screams, the ever-present glow of the crematoria chimneys, and the choking ashes floating in the air take their toll in a variety of ways. Annegret cries constantly as her nanny ignores her and drinks herself numb. Five-year-old Hans (Luis Noah Witte) plays war, and teenage Klaus (Johann Karthaus) locks his brother in the greenhouse and laughs at Hans’ distress at not being able to escape. Heidetraud (Lilli Falk) walks in her sleep, imagining she’s feeding sweets to someone. Hedwig’s mother (Imogen Kogge), visiting her for the first time at Auschwitz and in awe of the beautiful home and “garden of Eden” her daughter has made, is awakened at night by the glowing chimneys and flees before the next day’s sunrise.
Glazer, Żal, and sound designer Johnnie Burn make some interesting choices to provide contrasting views of their subjects. The terrifying sounds of the camp are mostly ignored by the camp overlords and their families. Rudolf helps Klaus tune it out when he teaches his son to identify the sound of a bittern, part of the heron family, as they ride their horses along a river where the shrieks from the camp are especially loud. The only clear dialogue we get from inside the camp is heard by Hans, too young to understand how to not know what he knows. He hears a guard preparing to drown a cowering prisoner for fighting over an apple and says to himself, “Don’t do that again,” a message meant perhaps for the prisoner or maybe for himself. Actual details about the final solution are communicated clearly only in meetings Höss has with crematoria engineers and the peer commandants he has been chosen to lead from a new posting in Berlin. Yet, even in these official discussions, human beings are considered “loads” that must be fed into the ovens and disposed of in an efficient manner.
One startlingly unique shooting style Glazer and Żal employ involves infrared cameras filming in black and white. This technique is used to capture a teenage girl from the village placing apples where the slave workers can find them. This inspired choice shows how the beauty and color Hedwig and her ilk so enjoy have gone out of the world for the victims of their hatred and sympathetic villagers who still cling to their humanity. At the same time, it evokes night hunting for the modern viewer, heightening the danger she faces by this act of kindness.
Since Glazer focuses intensely on Rudolf and Hedwig, the performances of Friedel and Hüller warrant a close examination.
What sort of a man is Rudolf? Friedel plays him as more enigma than anything else, which does much to bring Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil to mind to describe this film. I have a lot of respect for the acuity of Arendt’s observations, but I take issue with her application of the word “banality” to the Holocaust, particularly when it applies her perception of Adolf Eichmann as a mindless bureaucrat to people like Höss. Höss is portrayed as intelligent and ideologically correct enough to climb the ranks to command not only the largest of the concentration camps—the size due to his ambitious expansion plans—but also all of the camps run by the Third Reich. Rudolf was reportedly a cold-blooded, hands-on killer earlier in his career, but Friedel hides this side of his character. Here, Rudolf seems like a loving father who reads to his daughters at night, a good companion to his wife, and well regarded by his fellow SS officers. One scene shows him talking to his horse on the eve of his departure for Berlin; this scene represents the only time we hear Rudolf say “I love you.”
His deeper depravity comes though chillingly during a late-night phone call with Hedwig. He eagerly shares his excitement that the deportation of up to 700,000 Hungarian Jews for extermination and slave selection will bear the name Operation Höss. When Hedwig asks him who he met at the reception he attended, he says that he really didn’t give it much thought because he was trying to work out how to gas the guests in the challenging, high-ceilinged room. Friedel portrays a man who could be a senior manager in any large company today, diligent and obsessed with his work, a family man, patriotic, and narrowly focused on these concerns.
Hüller’s performance, though compelling, is less layered. Her Hedwig is the perfect embodiment of the ideal German woman, focused on kinder, küche, kirche (children, kitchen, church), though any religion other than National Socialism is completely absent from the film. Her crazy hairstyle (both Rudolf’s and Hedwig’s hairdos are done to match pictures of the actual people) reveals a tightly wound personality who tolerates frustration very poorly. She seems like someone who has fought for what she has her whole life, like a Mother Courage pushing heedlessly through every circumstance, and is convinced that their living arrangement is doing nothing to harm her “strong, healthy, happy” children. Does Hedwig really feel the enormity of what is happening on the other side of the wall? The posture Hüller adopts for her, as though carrying a burden on her shoulders, might suggest that she does, but on the whole, Hedwig seems like a one-dimensional monster whose greed is her driving impulse. Little is known about the real Hedwig Höss, so this depiction seems like another example of demonizing mothers for fun and profit and the only questionable choice in an almost flawless movie.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the remarkable score by Mica Levi. Imagine the stargate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the otherworldly music of Romanian composer György Ligeti that scored it and you’ll have some idea of Levi’s mélange of electronic and choral music that gives voice to the suffering millions of Auschwitz. Glazer uses her score sparingly, however, in attempts to foreground the murdered at moments when we may be lulled by the mundane screen action. (I highly recommend you watch through the credits to listen to her audaciously beautiful score in its fullness.)
In the end, a final, puzzling scene takes place largely in the present. I’ll leave its meaning to your own interpretation, but observe again that it revolves around cleaning. We might want to wash our hands of the filth, of the Holocaust, of our own unknowing callousness in the face of the suffering others endure for our convenience, but the stain remains.
Director: Martin Scorsese Screenwriters: Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese
By Roderick Heath
For all his capacity to make nice with the mainstream when it suited him, and all his latter-day stature as one of the grand old men of American film, Martin Scorsese has never been an entirely comfortable or readily domesticated filmmaker. Indeed, Scorsese’s personal definition of an artist, like that of many others, certainly includes the presumption sooner or later they must take the chance of doing something the audience doesn’t want to see or hear, to push us into a place we don’t want to be, to ask questions we don’t particularly want to think over. Scorsese remains challenging in a way that plainly infuriates certain viewpoints on the meaning of cinema. His status, bought with risk-taking, comes with the price of not quite sitting so securely from a vantage on movies as a popular entertainment, or from those wielding an arithmetical approach to the moral and cultural value of art. Scorsese’s filmmaking, whilst grown more grave and rigorous in the past decade, still has a vitality that belies his age, galling in the way he still seems to so easily dovetail seemingly warring aesthetics in a way that so many who follow and imitate him can never quite nail. All of that’s neither here nor there when it comes to actually adjudging an individual film, where it’s only the frames bracketed within the running time of the reel, physical or digital, that actually matters. Supposedly.
The most depressing thing revealed by much contemporary cinema debate nonetheless reveals the degree to which many still really look at art through the prism of the morality play, in both its medieval origins and its Victorian era refinement – the idea that a work of art’s job is to instruct us in how to be good and what being bad looks like, and indeed that the work of art itself must grow from rhetorically untainted soil. Meanwhile Scorsese’s fondness for antiheroes and villains-as-protagonists has undoubtedly meshed in strange ways over the past fifty years with the zeitgeist. Some people identified with the likes of Travis Bickle or Henry Hill or Jordan Belfort, apparently because the films about them didn’t tell us with sufficient firmness that such people are not nice and one should aspire to be like them. Art can of course be moral in outlook, and dramatic art almost always is, on some level; indeed, often most moralistic when indulging portrayal of the most amoral ideas and impulses. Scorsese is in truth a relentless moralist, but also a realist and ironist. Realist in the literary sense, rather than realistic – Scorsese’s cinema has long been plugged into the same realm of magnified, semi-hallucinated reportage of life in the raw as Emile Zola or Fyodor Dostoevsky, struggling constantly with the study of human existence as the coexistence of physical, mental, and spiritual struggle.
Only a moral imbecile, for instance would look at the way Scorsese portrayed Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and think it a portrait of a figure to be emulated, but some did, or, at least, so I am told. Fair enough: even I wasn’t above feeling the seductiveness of what it portrayed, how easy it was to watch Belfort’s antics and figure, well, what the hell, I’d rather be doing that than cleaning toilets for a living. In the flux of existence, transgressive and hedonistic urges might indeed be as worthwhile as saintly ones – a problem Scorsese constantly wrestles with, because he refuses to take the easy way out. Such things are appealing because, well, they’re appealing. And that was the entire point of the thing. There are hell of a lot more people who want what Belfort offered than what Silence (2016) depicted the suffering and saintly amongst us must contend with. The Wolf of Wall Street proved both an apotheosis of and salutary farewell to the finest pitch of Scorsese’s bad-boy furore before entering what has seemed like a more meditative and measured late period. Silence, I Heard You Paint Houses (2019), and Killers of the Flower Moon have all revisited particular themes, reflexes, and to a certain extent stories in Scorsese’s oeuvre, but reiterated them in a more particularly demanding, deliberating manner. The high modernist bite persisting in Scorsese’s touch belies what could be taken otherwise for his transition into a career phase not unlike that of David Lean around the time of Ryan’s Daughter (1970) – hitting a new pitch of art infused with a leisurely, epic, autumnal sensibility that doesn’t obscure how biting and angry about human nature in general his perspective has become, but facing popular rejection and generational incomprehension for things that have little to do with actual achievement or intention. This might only be exacerbated by Killers of the Flower Moon’s great cost versus its weak box office (notwithstanding the diffusion factored in by being financed by a streaming entity, Apple Original Films), which at this point seems to be an accepted price for anything like artistic ambition and quality in moviemaking.
Killers of the Flower Moon depicts a fascinating, disturbing, deeply galling piece of history – the Osage Nation murders of the early 1920s. Those murders was motivated by the vast wealth that suddenly flowed to the Osage people when the nominally worthless land they’d been shuffled onto by history suddenly proved to contain vast tracts of oil. A ruthless cabal of whites decided to grab as big a chunk of that sudden fortune for themselves as possible through a campaign of targeted conniving, marriage, and assassination that made Shakespeare’s Richard III or Robert Graves’ Livia look like dainty amateurs. The intermediary source is David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book on the murders, whilst the title for both that book and the film comes from a poem written Osage writer Elise Paschen. One of the more unexpected touchstones for the now-aging ranks of the cadre once dubbed the “Movie Brats” has proven to be Mervyn Le Roy’s The FBI Story (1959). A slick and colourful film made with the close cooperation of J. Edgar Hoover, who reportedly compiled one of his infamous dirt files on Le Roy to keep him on a tight leash, The FBI Story condensed, in story and stylistic terms, a generation’s worth of other crime-themed movies, and, in historical terms, the actual cases that helped build the FBI’s reputation. Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015) expanded on the spying case that provided Le Roy’s film with its climactic episode. Now Killers of the Flower Moon sees Scorsese also expanding on a portion dealt with in that film in with a string of murders of members of the Osage nation in rural Oklahoma – although technically it was the Bureau’s precursor, the Bureau of Investigation, which tackled the crimes.
The differences in treatment are notable. Le Roy’s film, which charted the history of modern, maturing American through the lens of the FBI’s simultaneous fruition, began its episode dealing with the Osage killings in jokey fashion, noting the amusing excesses of the suddenly enriched Osage, like one man who had a personal telephone exchange installed in his house. That kind of jocular, patronising attitude dates the film, as do other aspects. But the tricky quality of judging such a film too quickly on that count lies in the way Le Roy’s work feels strongly rooted in the soil of the time: it’s a work of nostalgic filmmaking in a manner we’re far more familiar with today, casting its mind back along about a forty-year arc like most such movies do, contemplating the social shifts of the US as well as the advance of procedural investigation, evincing an interest in the past but also a sense of its necessity as a path to the present. Whereas Killers of the Flower Moon, whilst casting its eye back to the same moment in time, betrays a present tense groaning with a sense of futility and pain and disillusionment. The FBI Story was itself the cinematic offshoot of an already-established approach to mythologising the FBI’s stature via media dramatization, with The Lucky Strike Hour, a radio show having dramatized cases including the Osage murders since the 1930s.
Killers of the Flower Moon closes the loop by ending with a pitch-perfect burlesque of the radio show, utilised to offer an epilogue for the drama in a more unusual manner than the usual title cards saying who did what next, as well as by implication offering a sly and moving critique of what all such life-into-art transmutations risk. The current, vast cult of true crime documentaries and dramatizations across many media forms, including podcasting as the modern equivalent of that kind of radio show, owes much to the way Scorsese and generational fellow Francis Ford Coppola brought the old template of the gangland thriller up to date and crossbred it with the nonfiction bestseller breed. Scorsese opens Killers of the Flower Moon with a rite of mourning and accounting for the Osage, who have been forced from territory to territory with the advance of the colonising project before coming to a reservation in Oklahoma that seems unfruitful, but which they’ve decided to defend as a last redoubt. The discovery of oil on the land is visualised as an eruption from the earth that coats young men in black ooze as they gyrate in ecstatics, as if engaged in a rite at once primeval but also entirely novel, communing with the stuff of the earth giving up its bounty with what could be seen as ironic randomness or some sort of cosmic reapportioning of justice. Both interpretations are mooted during the film, with many seeing the sudden, astounding wealth of the Osage people as inherently absurd and unfair, and by them as a gift that will inevitably come with twinned edges. A fake newsreel lays out the result, with the Osage, now the richest people per capita on Earth, flaunting their wealth in ironic inversion of the usual presumed relationship of such people to the larger populace, dripping with jewels and ferried about by chauffeurs.
At least, that’s the headline version. In reality many of the Osage linger under appointed state-appointed guardians in case they’ve been declared incompetent for some reason or another, including Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), who, along with sisters Minnie (Jillian Dion) and Anna (Cara Jade Myers), and cousin Reta (JaNae Collins), is one of the major beneficiaries of the oil wealth, but has to patiently face up to her guardian, Pitts Beaty (Gene Jones), to ask for cash. Scorsese contrasts the storytelling of the newsreel with its visions of jaunty wealth with a cold montage of Osage people laid out dead, having all succumbed to some illness, and one young woman found dead in a river, all left uninvestigated. This litany is punctuated by a more overt and startling moment of violence as a young Osage woman is gunned down on her front lawn by her husband as she wheels her baby in a pram, before the scene is made to look, at least cursorily, like a suicide. Here Scorsese sets in motion a sense of history laid out on two levels – the newsreel’s depiction of merry communality and ironic good fortune, the stratum of media reality and popular lore, giving way to something more personal, tragic, the cold précis of a ledger of intimate reckoning, with Gladstone’s Mollie reciting the names of the dead. This montage is followed in turn by Mollie visiting her guardian, who happens to have a picture of a mounted Ku Klux Klansman in heroic posture hanging on his office wall, having to describe herself as “incompetent.” Lily puts up with Beaty’s paternalistic authority with a slight, indulgent smile, treating it as just another of life’s absurdities, but much later on a return visit that slight smirk gives way to hollow recitation in a situation that kills the soul long before it kills the body.
Leonardo DiCaprio, in his sixth collaboration with Scorsese, pays Ernest Burkhart, just returned from the Great War where he served as a cook and weathered a ruptured stomach. He travels to Oklahoma to a welcoming hearth: his uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro, in his tenth) is a prosperous cattle rancher who lives cheek-by-jowl with the Osage and is a local eminence, bridging communities and trusted by all. His uncle, who cajoles him into calling him King, also quizzes Ernest with purpose, vetting him for incorporation into his unfolding project of marrying his family fortunes to the Osage: Ernest’s brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) is already working for him. Scorsese surveys the environs of the Hale ranch with an eye evoking the homesteads of Giant (1956) and Days of Heaven (1978), the house eloquent of the pretences of transplanted Victoriana amidst the rolling hills and pastoral recline. All three films are built around questioning that kind of stately pretence plonked down amidst the nominal freedom of the range, if with varying degrees of sharpness, with the implications of exterior and interior, outsider and insider, concepts charged with rigidity and yet constantly in flux on the landscape. Oklahoma, the land of Cimarron and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s folksy fancies. And the Tulsa Massacre, an event contemporary with the killings, bespeaking the reality of social contest and fulminating jealousy infecting a heartland state in the decades after the frontier’s closing.
Hale’s carefully leading questions directed on Ernest establish his proclivities and general suitability for the role he has in mind for him, which he nudges him towards by giving him a job as a taxi driver for Osage personages, including, most fatefully, Mollie. The streets of Fairfax, the largest town in the county, have become a thrumming space packed with labourers, opportunists, and sundry blow-ins all looking for a slice of the prosperity, the luckiest recipients of which expend it on whims like staging car races up and down the unpaved main drag. DiCaprio plays Ernest with his familiarly handsome mug ruined by his character’s habits of discomforted bewilderment, his mouth usually pulled into a bowed rut reminiscent of an expressionist horror movie golem or Edgar G. Ulmer’s Man From Planet X (1951). Ernest only starts to bloom with anything like levity and charisma when he sets about trying to charm Mollie, whilst Mollie gently teases Ernest with Osage epithets, including labelling him a coyote. This connection between the two enables at least two concurrent projects: whilst Ernest is prodded towards romancing Mollie with a definite purpose to marriage by his uncle, and the chemistry they have is felicitous towards that end, Mollie knows well Ernest wants her money, but accepts that as par for the course.
What she wants from him, beyond simply latching on to a good-looking man, isn’t stated, but is hinted. At one point in their courtship Mollie gifts Ernest a huge Stetson hat, a gesture at once touched with a hint of the ridiculous, as Ernest hardly seems the tall-in-the-saddle type, but also riven with encoded desire and ambition. Mollie tries to recreate Ernest in the image of the man she would like him to be, and what the culture around them would have him be, the image of the upright cowboy in both the personal sense, the strong and noble pretence, and something more practical and bound up with what Mollie and her many sisters want – marriages to white men, with all the advantages in assumed status and hoped-for protection that can bring. With, of course, the lurking, wicked corollary that this ambition instead gives Hale inroads to his own project of slowly but surely killing off everyone standing between him and a great fortune. Ernest’s romancing of Mollie ironically echoes the other, darker project, as a human ritual laced with small flourishes and signals, little give-and-takes, implications and minute power exchanges, albeit in this realm expressed in shows of affection and proofs of intent, where Ernest’s job is to keep nimble in the face of Mollie’s amused cynicism as she prods him, interested to see how he will react.
The key moment of the courtship is an extended interlude in Mollie’s kitchen where the two share a passion for good whiskey and Mollie encourages Ernest to be silent and honour and enjoy the sound of a storm raging outside, rain falling upon the land and the roof. A moment laced with intimations of the sublime, with Mollie trying to sensitise the perpetually ill-at-ease Ernest to the natural world that’s vital to her and her fellow Osage. Earlier, during his briefing sessions with his uncle, Hale warns Ernest about the tendency of outsiders to ramble on in the face of the Osages’ taciturn temperament, in what the Osage call “blackbird talk,” a warning that here gives way to Mollie’s solicitude in teaching Ernest the value of quiet, but also ironically sets up, much later, the methodology of the law enforcers who swoop upon Ernest. The falling rain is also eloquent of a drama that’s written in elements, rhyming with the oil spurting from the earth and, later, the fire and blood unleashed upon it.
Scorsese’s cinema has long played intricate games with genre, often cross-hatching the familiar templates of commercial film with the intricate messiness of real-life narratives, playing his own cinephilia off against his sense of the actual and authentic, a concern tackled most overtly in the clash of lush artifice and shambolic realism in New York, New York (1977). Killers of the Flower Moon extends this sense of fruitful tension most notably in its peculiar coda, whilst the rest of the film plays out on a generic and thematic faultline. The essential conceit of Killers of the Flower Moon is that whilst the setting is that of a Western, the film itself is another Scorsesean gangster movie, following a similar template to Goodfellas (1990) in tracking the fate of a young and deluded goon drawn into a criminal enterprise, imagining himself to be on a path to the good life, but who finally faces up to the shell that is his life and pays for it in perpetual exile from what small paradise he had. As a portrait of the agonies of marriage it’s a muted follow-up to Raging Bull (1980) and Casino (1995), charting an arc that is nonetheless also about losing a version of Eden through obeisance to darker masters. What’s most unexpected however is that out of Scorsese’s other films the one it feels like on a deeper level is The Age of Innocence (1993), as a clammily intense portrait of love as a cross to be nailed to, a tale in which Mollie is at once tragic heroine and sacrificial lamb. As a follow-up to I Heard You Paint Houses, Killers of the Flower Moon enlarges on its concerns, particularly the march towards an endpoint of reaping what one sows.
Scorsese stages Ernest and Mollie’s wedding as, on the face of it, an idyllic display of fertile personal and cultural fusion and a display of the American ideal, the rites of the Osage and those of the whites in harmony, the music and dancing capturing even people we will later learn are unconscionable thugs in seemingly joyous celebration. Ernest and Mollie reel in giddy joy. Hale stalks through the crowd to console Minnie, nominally a venture of amity but one that makes him seem as focused as the shark in Jaws (1975) on prey. Minnie is married to the quietly decent and canny Bill Smith (Jason Isbell) but is feeling ill and haggard: Hale promises Minnie medical aid and anything else she needs, before performing an Osage invocation for her, displaying his prowess with both the nation’s language and ritual, as Scorsese’s camera swoops up and back from the curious display and surveys the celebration in full swing. Hale personifies the two-faced aspect of the scene with his affectations of playing the multicultural patriarch, stepping between expressive modes and playing the ideal neighbour. It would be fair to say that Hale is an Olympic-level virtue signaller and hypocrite, the kind who’s mastered Osage custom purely to grant himself leverage, a man who knows how to project a veneer of folksy feeling whilst concealing a soul that surely looks like Goya’s painting of Saturn eating his children. But De Niro’s performance invests Hale’s act with another level of implication, hinting at the way Hale sees himself with however many layers of deception applied to both self and others, as both midwife and officiating priest for the transfer of civilisations, offering the Osage up as sacrifices to his own particular god, which could be called mammon, or empire, or progress, or all of them wrapped into a holistic bundle. Hale appoints himself overseer of the Osage’s fate, which he expresses through good works, but also claims a direct right to trim the branches and make himself the stem.
This quality of Hale’s is later inverted in a scene that sees the mask that conceals the true dynamics of power and control slip properly for the first time. Hale summons Ernest to the Fairfax Masonic Lodge to chastise him for his more foolish dealings which threaten to bring the attention of the law a little too close to the working parts of Hale’s project: Hale makes Ernest prostrate himself on a lectern and beats him with a paddle as punishment for his blundering, a spectacle of raw domination and humiliation painted with hues of evil comedy. Otherwise Hale talks in obscuring terms in regard to drawing Ernest along with his plot for much of the early phase, utilising phraseology like “That’s something a man can work with.” Hale’s ruthless insight sees the potential even in the fact that Anna carries a gun for self-protection, nominally making her a tougher customer, as another potential method to clear the path as “One day she’s gonna pick a fight with the wrong person.” The festive togetherness of the wedding segues more immediately into a scene highlighting the thorny commingling of social, sexual, and familial dynamics, as Mollie and her sisters and their various boyfriends, husbands, and relatives gather in what seems on the surface like a humming hive but where the various strands of unease are very quickly pulled taut, from racist elders sitting in glum quietude until slight provocation draws out cries of “Savages! Savages!”, and a boozed-up Anna is easily infuriated when her beau Byron resists being claimed as her man and instead makes a show of flirting with a younger girl, sparking Anna to pure rage. Meanwhile the girls’ mother, Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal), lingers in an undefined state of sickliness, still bestowing maternal love on her offspring whilst holding aloof from the outsiders who move through her life. Lizzie perceives the imminence of her death in the form of a hallucinated owl that struts into her bedroom and caws. Shortly afterwards, Anna is found dead, shot in the head and left to decompose in a gully.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a film preoccupied by death, not simply in depicting murder for profit but in a more pervasively, spiritually angst-ridden fashion. Evidently Scorsese is starting to feel the weight of the years, and it’s a concern he invests as deeply here as he did in I Heard You Paint Houses, but with different emphases. He returns to the ecumenical reflexes he previously exercised in Kundun (1997), a film he echoes in the film’s opening and closing, seeking out the spiritual expression of the Osage as a counterpoint to the crime and mayhem. The owl Lizzie envisons is a harbinger of death in her culture that is ironically something palpably alive and strangely beautiful: later Mollie glimpses the owl when she too starts to drift on the outer shoals of life. The owl is something that comes with promise in that fierce liveliness, however, a promise reiterated when Lizzie expires and has a vision of elders visiting and leading her off into pastures beyond. Such visions portend death as a relief from the sweltering straits of being alive when you’re a member of an assailed nation. The spiritual life of the Osage is fertile and vital, for all the battering they’ve taken: Mollie making Ernest listen to the storm and respect its force contains an element of worship; later, in a wry aside, Ernest, who’s claimed he’s Catholic, makes a mistaken gesture when he goes to church with Mollie at the Catholic church many of the other Osage belong to without any apparent tension with their more traditional faiths, both of which Ernest remains largely oblivious to.
Ernest’s genuine affection for Mollie and the children he has with her never impedes his greedier impulses, which he works out by participating in nocturnal robberies of cashed-up Osage and arranging frauds with an assortment of local chancers, losers, and petty criminals, including Byron and Blackie Thompson (Tommy Schultz), who Ernest arranges with to steal his car to claim insurance money on, only for Blackie to get caught and locked away for the theft. This is the misbegotten scheme that brings down Hale’s wrath on Ernest when he gets wind of it, because Hale wanted Ernest to commission Blackie and others into helping with some killings where the slower, subtler methods aren’t possible. Particularly galling to Hale is the way Bill Smith, after Minnie’s death, marries Reta and so remains a major impediment to the oil rights coming into Ernest’s hands, not just in terms of legal succession but because he has a growing inkling of what Hale and clan are up to. The felicity of killing both at the same time drives Hale and Ernest to track down explosives expert and thief Acie Kirby (Pete Yorn), and commission him to blow up the house Bill and Reta share. Hale also has his eyes on collecting the insurance he’s taken out on his friend and neighbour Henry Roan (William Belleau), an Osage man who’s inclined to depression and was once married to Mollie in a tribal ceremony when they were teenagers. Making sure Henry doesn’t kill himself before the policy comes due and then arranging his timely end is a fine art Hale charges Ernest with, perhaps counting on the faint flickers of jealousy the news about their marriage stirs as well as threatening his inheritance. Ernest hires John Ramsey (Ty Mitchell), a wanted criminal reduced to working at a moonshine still, to get close to Henry and then shoot him in a way that will look like suicide, but Ramsey instead shoots Henry in the back of the head and sticks Ernest with the gun.
The villainy in Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t as spectacular as, say, the orgiastic climes of self-indulgence glimpsed in Casino or The Wolf of Wall Street, largely because the fortune in play remains a goal that never quite arrives for the conspirators, any more than it does for the “incompetent” Osage, which is why Ernest has to satisfy his urges with his robberies and subsequent sessions of frenzied gambling and drinking, scenes of dissolution that are more pathetic than passages of a great sinner. These killers are a bunch of half-smart – and often not that much – thugs and pirates living on the fringe of a state that’s replete with chaotic communities and drifting populaces, operating at a safe distance from Hale, who deploys Ernest as his agent and sometimes counts upon, or gets lucky in regards to, Ernest’s sense of personal antagonism with Henry Roan, as a supposed rival, and with Bill Smith, who is the man Ernest would like to be thought of, the decent interlocutor between white and Osage communities, which helps Ernest overcome any qualms about seeking their deaths. Meanwhile Hale, as one of his charitable good works, arranges for Mollie, who is diabetic, to receive doses of the new-fangled medicine called insulin: two local doctors who are also brothers, James (Steve Witting) and David Shoun (Steve Routman), give Mollie her doses. Not at all coincidentally, the Shouns also performed a clumsy and inconclusive autopsy on Anna. Eventually, as Mollie’s health starts to fail, she insists on Ernest alone collecting her insulin doses from the train. She also makes a play to find out what’s going on by hiring a private detective, Bill Burns (Gary Basaraba), only for him to seemingly vanish, Mollie unaware that Ernest and Byron beat him up and ran him out of town, whilst another representative the Osage commissioned was knifed to death in the street.
Killers of the Flower Moon extends the great overarching themes of Scorsese’s oeuvre, of which not least is the thesis that American history is particularly rich in gangster stories not just because of the common genre theme that organised crime can be taken as merely a particularly refined version of capitalism, but because the country itself has roots in gangs – knots of clannish identity and conspiracies seeking enrichment by any means necessary, with something like true order and just authority only slowly gaining form and often painfully imposed. Gangs of New York (2002) dramatized that idea in the most immediate and literal manner. Killers of the Flower Moon also presents a partial, deeply ironic inversion of the depiction in Silence of people contending with being immersed in an alien place and culture and forced to abide by new ways whilst trying to hold on to a sliver of private identity, with the Jesuit Portuguese in that film swapped for the Osage. Henry Roan, perhaps the most perfectly tragic figure in the film, is beset by what he describes as melancholy as he moves through life with an affect of bland neighbourliness hiding deep lodes of anger and shame he’s driven first to act out with fists on the butcher, Roy Bunch (Joey Oglesby), he thinks is having an affair with his wife, and on his own person, with liquor and suicide attempts. Hale’s act of false fellowship and empathic counsel is at its most appalling with Henry, and he notes to Ernest whilst pointing at Henry’s knocked-out-loaded body prostrate on the floor of his parlour, “I take care of him because he’s my neighbour and my best friend,” before amending this to a more precise summary, “That’s twenty-five thousand dollars laying there.”
Killers of the Flower Moon also arcs back, through the choice of period, to a place close to where Scorsese started with Boxcar Bertha (1971), in the milieu of a backroad-and-byroad Americana, the “old, weird America” when it was a rough and ready place where the raucous liveliness was part and parcel with its darker boles of cruelty and iniquity. A haunted wonderland with relics like sepia-tint photos of men posing on tinsel moons, tacked-together automobiles with shiny brass carving a path up dusty streets, labouring oil wells churning up money, Osage people coming to get married in splendid regalia, blues warblers infusing sullen evenings, and silent Westerns skittering upon movie screens. As he touched on in the opening of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and again in New York, New York and The Aviator (2004), Scorsese finds in this era roots for the whole modern infrastructure of American dreaming, growing out of sullied soil. One of Scorsese’s slyer flourishes throughout comes in casting musicians like Isbell, Yorn, and Sturgill Simpson, a neorealist-like touch with an eye to capturing some aspect of authenticity, being used to performance but not acting, the raw stuff of Americana locked in their strong, interesting but non-Hollywood features. In some ways Killers of the Flower Moon could be in fact described as a feature-length extrapolation of the tragic finale of Boxcar Bertha, which saw its radical hero nailed Christ-like to a boxcar, a sacrifice to power and greed, and a scene that declared, in Scorsese’s cinema, the death of such heroes – from then on he looked for the avatars of profane humanity caught between yearnings for whatever form of transcendence they understand and dark temptations, usually suffering from their incapacity to tell those things apart.
Mollie is the most obvious avatar for the Christ-like figure, betrayed and suffering at the hands of the unrighteous, where Ernest is an avatar for Judas, squirming as he reaps the fruits of his treachery, which eventually includes losing a child to illness and his marriage, when he fatefully declines the chance to fully and truly purge himself of his wrongdoing, an act linked to the Catholic idea of confession as well as legal and emotional concepts of it. Isbell and DiCaprio share another of the film’s more quietly vital scenes as Bob and Ernest face off after an apparently convivial dinner for the sisters’ sakes, Bob unveiling his contempt for Ernest and prodding Ernest to drop his own dissembling, with Bob positing, “You aim to kill me – or is that your big brother’s job?” Soon after, at Hale’s urging, Ernest gets down to arranging for Acie to blow up Bob and Reta’s house. The thunderous blast shatters the windows of Mollie and Ernest’s house and stirs the neighbourhood to a frantic rescue effort in the chaotic rubble of the couple’s home: a mangled Bob screaming out for someone to shoot him contrasts the uncanny sight of Reta seemingly laid out untouched on a piece of undamaged flooring, only for the back of her head to prove missing when a rescuer lays hands on her. This act of pure terrorism drives Mollie and a deputation of Osage leaders to Washington to beg for some sort of federal intervention, which does finally arrive in the form of a brace of BOI agents led by Tom White (Jesse Plemmons), whose knock on the door one day seriously rattles Ernest.
One could be a little sceptical that Killers of the Flower Moon in both length, at three-and-a-half hours, and cost seems closer to something like Ben-Hur (1959) than the kinds of ruthlessly pruned and shaped noir films Scorsese evokes – one could note that Anthony Mann, with Border Incident (1949), and John Sturges, with Bad Day At Black Rock (1955), knocked over similarly barbed portraits of racism and crime in much less than half the time. Scorsese certainly has tapped the prestige hunger of the nascent streaming services for all they’re worth, and more power to him. Nonetheless, Killers of the Flower Moon articulates a certainty that the devil really does lie in the details, and the complexities of the story being told, which keeps twisting in startling directions even when the hammer of the law finally seems poised to come down on the conspiracy. Killers of the Flower Moon still comes with displays of Scorsese and constant collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker’s, familiar, thrilling editing work. The allure of stolen goods and acts of piracy for Ernest and his confederates is registered in stroboscopic cuts, delivered as brief respites from the otherwise mercilessly measured pacing in a manner that mimics the occasional flashes of relieving spiritual vision, but, ironically, without the same lingering substance: all wealth, all enrichment, passes through the gullet of the style in brief spasms. Robbie Robertson’s final score for Scorsese before his sad passing provides sinew for the drama with its quietly propulsive, pulsing method. The intricacy of style is its own justification but is also wound tightly with the thematic concerns, even if perhaps it might still have benefited from a little simplifying here and there, especially considering that it’s not a docudrama despite solid roots in Grann’s book (Ernest, for instance, didn’t serve in World War I), and some of the secondary characters are brusquely introduced only to prove important later in proceedings. But that’s such a weak criticism I feel dull making it. Just about the only false note in the film’s period detail comes when one of the Osage elders drops the word “genocide” in an anachronistic manner, an awkward sop to contemporary discourse. But the scene around this is valuable as it offers a practically unmediated window into the actuality of Osage voices.
Plemmons brings a subtle shift in the gravity of the film when he enters it without displacing the core drama, playing in White a law enforcer who’s still reasonably young and forthright, but who already suggests lodes of witnessed evil that’s left him with no illusions whatsoever about human nature. Much of Killers of the Flower Moon’s last third depicts the sheer difficult of getting convictions in such a case: spotting the men behind the murder plot isn’t that hard – anyone who’s ever read a detective novel could spot where the streams of income are all being channelled with the many deaths – but chipping away at the various personnel involved demands carefully applied pressure. Hale tries to cover his tracks with expert gangland art, by arranging for the death of Acie and trying to kill off another minion, Kelsie Morrison (Louis Cancelmi), a lanky dipshit who at one point proposes adopting two part-Osage children only for his lawyer to comment it sounds like he’s planning to murder them, and who instead gets captured after gunning down a cop. (I was struck by some similarity to the figure of ‘King’ Hale to King Cutler in Cecil B. DeMille’s Reap The Wild Wind (1942), also a scheming potentate specialising in murder and conspiracy – Scorsese surely knows the film well enough, but I also wondered if the characterisation in that film, complete with the name, was influenced by the echoing cultural memory of the case.) White’s fellow agents hover around the county undercover, with one posing as an insurance agent who writes policies for Hale, another a Native American, John Wren (Tatanka Means), who makes connections around the locality.
Despite this the narrative pointedly avoids becoming a standard investigation tale, as the agents hover around the edges of the conspiracy. At one point White peers on during a charged moment between Hale and Ernest as the former presses the latter to sign a document that will ensure the rights that have devolved upon Mollie and him will go to Hale if he dies, effectivelly giving his uncle power of life and death over them both. White is oblivious to the material of their talk but readily perceives the import of it. This scene again sees the communication by inference in play, from two different sources. The film’s few moments of anything like heroism are indeed moments from characters who cease dissembling, including Bob’s earlier provocation of Ernest, and the moment when Bunch refuses to heed Hale’s “friendly word,” actually an attempt to manipulate him into fleeing and thus look guilty of Henry’s murder, telling him bluntly, “You’re not my friend – take my chances in Fairfax.” Despite such momentary salves, the governing principle of the film remains the way it forces the viewer to cohabit with Ernest in all his cringing, spineless pathos.
Mollie, who is nobody’s fool and repeatedly takes self-mortifying steps to try and get something done about the epidemic of death hitting her people, is eventually immobilised and sidelined as the Shoun brothers, with Hale’s backing, give Ernest a vial of an obscure drug to add to Mollie’s insulin, “To slow her down.” Mollie’s very flesh becomes a weapon used against her, a weight to sink her with, reality losing shape to the point where when Hale comes to visit her she’s not sure if he’s real or a conjuration of her imagining. Through all the mounting casualties of Killers of the Flower Moon, the main source of tension is whether or not Mollie will survive her ordeal, played however not as a source of suspense and more as a kind of physical and spiritual wrestling much with existential dread refined to a pure elixir. Thankfully, Mollie is eventually found in her house close to death by Wren and another agent, who rush her to a hospital, and is quickly returned to health. Gladstone had a difficult task in inhabiting Mollie, the innocent in the drama who does nothing to invite such torment: it would have been easy to offer her up as a hapless naïf or walking, talking symbol, but Gladstone helps give her substance far beyond that with her shows of sly humour and loving, mixed with a coolly self-sufficient equanimity at the outset, quelled by abyssal grief and then physical degradation.
Scorsese’s filmmaking – working with production designer Jack Fisk, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto – makes the most of the film’s large budget: every image glows with subtle, rigorous craftsmanship and expressive intent. The film nonetheless loses something in moving from big screen to the small, not in terms of the expansive visual aspects but rather in the sense of intimacy, of the drama of both body and soul registering on the sodden skin and hollowed eyes of Mollie and the ever-deepening ruts that mimic facial features on Ernest. Perhaps the film’s best scene, and a highpoint of Scorsese’s career as a manipulator of cinematic effect, comes at one of the subtler dramatic junctures, but one that Scorsese and his collaborators turns into a small aria of visual and aural expression. The BOI agents, gathered for a nocturnal meeting on a hillside close to Hale’s property, see fires blazing and realise that Hale is burning his fields out, his ranch hands working to keep the fires sustained and consuming. The spectacle at first sparks a wry realisation from the fake insurance agent, as he realises Hale intends to claim the fire insurance policy he filed with him. Meanwhile Ernest and Mollie, in their neighbouring house, see the fire as shimmering, infernal shades cast on the windows – Schoonmaker cuts from the prostrate and haggard Mollie to her view of the firelight and then to Ernest gazing out, subtly distinguishing the meaning of the menacing spectacle for each of them, before shifting to hallucinatory visions of the working ranch hands amidst the licking, swirling fire. All scored to Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground,” a vintage blues number that, in its surreally slipping textures, artful and purely expressive of its era but also escaping it, otherworldly and primal.
This scene again recalls Days of Heaven where a crucial story pivot occurred during a brushfire around the homestead, but where that scene was highly dramatic, Scorsese and team wring this version for different effect – rather this is a season in hell. The essential idea, that the characters realise they’re lingering in a perdition of their own founding, is easily grasped, even obvious. But the illustration of it wrings it for transformative epiphanies – the shift from a hint of comedy to an invocation of the truly nightmarish, the weaving of the visuals and music creating a poetic register invoking a past time but making not just the period atmosphere but the moral and emotional climes utterly palpable. It is also the sequel and inversion of the earlier scene of the couple listening to the rain, the exchange of elements containing its own meaning – what Mollie offered Ernest was inextricable from the life-giving natural bounty, where Hale extracts every morsel of life with fire and leaves only a desert. Ernest elects this moment to try the additive he puts in Mollie’s insulin on himself, pouring some in his whiskey and sinking in hazy fever sweats. The nadir of the drama, for in the next scene the BOI agents swoop on Ernest as he sits in a local pool hall and bustle him away for a long session of interrogation, where Ernest finds blackbird talk hard to hold off.
Even when White and crew move on Ernest and others in the gang, the drama becomes no less tangled, no less exhausting in the squirming and stymieing, partly thanks to the formidable lawyer Hale hires, W. S. Hamilton (Brendan Fraser). Hamilton manages to suddenly divert the first attempt to get Ernest to testify in court with a calculated show of theatrics, and later Ernest, after being briefly delivered from the law’s clutches, is brought before the grandees of the white community of the Fairfax district. This proves a subtler but no less intimidating and humiliating experience for Ernest than his uncle’s beating of him, as Hamilton and others browbeat him into not only showing his communal and family loyalty but also convincing him to say that he was “tortured” into a false confession. Ernest ultimately faces the choice of which of his families to save, and after his infant daughter dies from an illness he finally turns against Hale because now he wants to be home with Mollie and his other kids, cueing a confrontation between the two men through prison bars laced with new dimensions of veiled threat and fresh resistance. But the process of exposing the reality of the crimes, including the testimony of Ernest and others, sees ambiguity turn to hard fact, leading to the final confrontation of Ernest and Mollie. As in I Heard You Paint Houses, the ultimate act of repudiation and devastating moral judgement comes from a woman, with Ernest left to blink bewilderedly at just how quickly he went from being a man with a personal mythology of protecting his family to a doomed exile and imminent jailbird.
The coda finally leaves behind the personal drama behind in an ingenious way that also returns to the early motif of rival ways of remembering and narratives, as Scorsese shifts into his recreation of the Lucky Strike Hour episode, tweaked to deliver a more general kind of postscript informing the film audience what happened afterwards. Scorsese depicts the staging such a show, with sound effects created live and actors switching between character voices, with a sense of both the inherent humour value in seeing what’s only supposed to be heard and the dated brand of hype it extols, and also some admiration in the crispness of the storytelling. Underlying this, a cool regard for the tension between this form of instantly mythologised reportage and the story as it’s been portrayed in the film before it, the transmutation of messy, agonising history into a simple morality play littered with archetypes. Justice itself offers mixed solace, given that neither Hale nor Ernest died in jail, although both seem to have finished up as pathetic remnants, particularly Ernest who ended his days broke and living with his brother.
Scorsese saves the most considered blow as he himself, in the guise of the radio show’s producer, steps forward to read out the funeral notice for Mollie who despite all succumbed to her diabetes in 1937, her role in the drama of the murders unmentioned for whatever reason. That Scorsese performs this gesture himself amounts to noting that all this too is only another angle on a past, returning to narratives and histories that are twinned but never quite meeting, the mass media mythos and the legacy of violent crime still felt by a community, leading in different directions. The last shot offers a stunning antistrophe by shifting to another way of remembering and reckoning, an Osage memorial ceremony filmed in a superlative crane shot that rises and rises until the ceremony is beheld as a sworl of geometry. Here Scorsese harks back to the quasi-abstract reflexes in Kundun, and with the same aim – to try and visualise a sense of cultural and religious balance, expressed in visual geometry. It is, at once, a rite of mourning, and a proof of endurance. Killers of the Flower Moon meditates on James Joyce’s famous line from Ulysses when he commented that history is the nightmare from we are trying to awake, and offering a codicil: one should not mistake awakening for a chance to forget.
It feels obvious, even inevitable, that at some point Ridley Scott would make a film about Napoleon Bonaparte. As subject matter it sees him circling back to where his feature film career began with 1977’s The Duellists, an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story which explored the particular zeitgeist of the Napoleonic era through a microcosmic example of human absurdity. Now Scott returns to the era with all the muscle of experience and budget he’s accrued in the intervening forty-six years. It’s also odds-on that any filmmaker tackling Napoleon as a subject will find themselves compared to him at some point. The director of a film shoot and a military commander have their similarities in marshalling and focusing massed human and technical resources as well as perceived requirements of vigorous personality and authority, and the kind of artistic personality drawn to studying a personality like the Emperor’s may, onlookers suspect, already be inclined to feel glimmers of self-recognition. The Duellists saw Scott offering the first of many genuflections to Stanley Kubrick with a movie made under the immediate spell of Barry Lyndon (1975), but which, subtly and simultaneously, carved out his own niche with very different storytelling rhythms, setting the scene for Scott’s long, violently uneven, yet eternally fascinating and restless career. And of course Kubrick himself wanted to make a film about Napoleon.
Napoleon has, of course, already attracted many and varied movie portraits over the years. Standing above all is Abel Gance’s mammoth 1927 film, a pinnacle of cinematic vision attached to a romanticised portrait of a boding Homeric hero, dusted with the gilt of destiny, even as human pettiness and the illusive power of his own vast dreams, and those others pin upon him, reach out to promise eventual ruin. Clarence Brown’s Conquest (1937), which sported Charles Boyer as Napoleon and Greta Garbo as his lover Maria Walewska, saw the man as a smouldering crusader eaten up by the temptations of megalomania. Sacha Guitry’s Napoleon (1955) presented a sardonic swashbuckler out of place and in revolt against a world of politicking that eventually brings him down. King Vidor’s version of him, inhabited by Herbert Lom in War and Peace (1956), was a swaggering imp for whom martial glory is a religion, and the realities of warfare enacted on the level of blood feud he encounters in invading Russia prove at first humiliating and then relentlessly, ruthlessly tragic. Rod Steiger’s characterisation in Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970) saw the genius of war and politics inseparable from a cast iron-hard chunk of ego and the nurtured volatility of a cantankerous brat, the need for constant, provoking movement in his mind sometimes meshing properly with gears of effect and sometimes grinding awfully, even as his body begins to let him down. Ian Holm’s edition in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) was the ultimate takedown based on certain psychological theories, presenting him as a literal and figurative small man expressing his frustration and inferiority complex through a passion for the theatre of violence: “Little things hurting each-other – that’s what I like!”
That Scott would not make a film about old Bony at all like Gance’s should be no surprise, but what’s most initially unexpected about his Napoleon is that it’s not really like any of the others, either. Scott’s Napoleon stands in defiance of expectations of what a modern, big-budget prestige film or TV series recounting popular history should act like, when the pseudo-analytic self-seriousness and instant tabloid news-to-profound testament approach of the Peter Morgan school of writing has inflected an entire era of such fare. Rather than revisiting the straightforward martial tragic-heroic pitch of Gladiator (2000), the film that brought Scott back to Oscar-garlanded glory after one of his periodic adventures in distractible genre-hopping, or the ambitious and rarefied mix of old-fashioned epic and new-fashioned flux found in Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Napoleon is an extension of what Scott’s been up to in his late phase, which I trace to starting with American Gangster (2007), to which his Napoleon has no small number of similarities. Like that film, it follows the rise and fall of a cunning but amoral man who, seeing a vacuum of authority, decides to fill it. Like The Last Duel (2021), it mercilessly dissects and mocks the historical action man mythos Scott did so much to exalt in Gladiator. Like House of Gucci (2021), it’s an oddball blend of true crime detail deployment and distorting dark comedy, a portrait of egos and appetites and fractious love-hate expressed through the nominally serious business of business. It even nods back to his revisionist recounting of the legends of Robin Hood (2010) and Moses in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), seeking new facets left unexplored by earlier versions and an equally new sense of what such figures mean in terms of the cultures that produced them versus our culture today.
Scott casts Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon, a clear move to reunite a winning team: Scott helped boost Phoenix to stardom with Gladiator, and whilst Phoenix is nearly as old now as Bonaparte was when he died, as an actor he always seems to retain some perpetual aspect of the childlike, playing as he so often does insular weirdoes and volatile antiheroes. It’s a quality Scott puts to work with calculation in Napoleon, to sap the eponymous man of the mystique imbued not simply by his achievements but the layers of mythologising and propagandising that started to work even before he became France’s political as well as military commander with a conscious effort to make him a larger-than-life personage. That Scott has this in mind is made very clear when he notes Jacques-Louis David (Sam Crane) sketching out the scene of Napoleon’s crowning as Emperor whilst it’s occurring, leaving out the mischievous, tall-poppy-felling details Scott invests, like Napoleon discovering that the crown he tries to put on his own head won’t fit over the wrought-gold laurel wreath he’s already wearing, and tries to smoothly pass it off as a choreographed move. This is entirely in keeping with some of the more sarcastic observations of the time, like one of Napoleon’s acquaintances who saw David’s painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps and commented “It looks as much like him as I do.”
Later in the film, when Napoleon meets Tsar Alexander (Édouard Philipponnat), the young and seemingly malleable leader of Russia in a peace overture, Napoleon rattles off an anecdote about a witty remark he’s supposed to have made, only for Alexander to recognise it as a fairly common piece of military folklore, one that’s found in Napoleon a suitable figure to drape itself on, and someone entirely willing to claim it as his own brilliance. The basic proposition of Napoleon is that the man himself wasn’t that much better, nobler, pithier, or more efficacious than contemporary politicians, but he had better taste in self-propagandising. A tension lies in this, of course: recounting the life of a man at once celebrated and reviled as conqueror and liberator, thief and fount, tyrant and hero, murderer and champion, demands contending with those conflicting visions. Scott has plumbed this territory before. His 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) approached the sharply, almost surreally contrasting viewpoints on Christopher Columbus as visionary world-expander and brutal emissary of nascent colonial exploitation. Scott illustrated the schism through one of his familiar duellist figurations – dubious history, perhaps, but it captured something dramatically meaningful as idealist explorer and cynical profiteer battled on the cusp of a new epoch and continent.
Scott touches on something similar with Napoleon, positing the Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett) as the Emperor’s ultimate nemesis. But Scott resists exalting him as Achilles to Napoleon’s Hector, instead offering Wellington as the revenge of the specifically English kind of snob on a no-class scrub who’s been getting up in everyone’s business for far too long. Indeed, one could say this is precisely Scott’s take on Napoleon: what Wellington did to the Emperor at Waterloo, Scott does with his deflating English scepticism. And yet Bonaparte fits squarely into a mode of hero Scott’s been exploring since Gabriel Feraud and Roy Batty and extending to the likes of Thelma and Louise and Maximus and Frank Lucas – the angry, revanchist antihero clawing a path towards what they imagine is rightful apotheosis and deliverance from degradation, charged with an innate sense of being the rebel angel in a Miltonian universe, but often doomed through failure to think sufficiently and seriously about other, opposing powers and their representatives. Except that Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa do their level best to strip this latest example of any hint of romanticism, whilst still keeping an eye on what he did well.
Tackling a subject as large as Napoleon’s career is, it goes virtually without saying, close to being the very definition of biting off more than a feature filmmaker can chew, just as Alexander the Great’s has proved more than once. Such careers encompass not just dizzying shifts of personal fortune and dramatic attitude for their focal figures, but entire epochs and sensibilities within their thematic gizzards. Tales of ruined and curtailed grandeur understandably resound with Scott: one distinctive aspect of his career has the degree to which so many of his movies have been misshapen by studio interference and editing. Scott’s career has arguably been as much helped by this as hindered: the first reedit of Blade Runner (1982) released in the mid-1990s did much to give him new attention and standing and saw the film promoted from failed blockbuster and cult object to major classic, and the vastly extended version of Kingdom of Heaven similarly enlarged its reputation. Scott, working this time around with the bottomless money pit of Apple’s new filmmaking branch, has finally weaponised this phenomenon, as a much longer version of Napoleon is in the offing for streaming release. The unfortunate side-effect of this sees the theatrical release version is immediately identified as a compromise offering, an incomplete artefact. But this is the one Scott has offered to those who go see it in a movie theatre so damn it, that’s the one I’ll take him up on.
Scott’s opening sequence quickly strikes an off-kilter, aesthetically provocative note, as he depicts the guillotining of Marie Antoinette (Catherine Walker) set to Edith Piaf, a vignette treading the finest of lines between earnest historical theatre and puckish lampoon, the choice of song evoking a sense of linked eras in French folklore and art through creative anachronism. The Queen’s white-painted face and gore-dripping neck are proffered to the crowd: are you not entertained? Some overlap here too with Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), a film that resisted showing the Queen’s execution, and also took strong stylistic licence from Scott’s son Jake’s Plunkett and Macleane (1999). Scott and Scarpa, who also wrote the script for Scott’s highly undervalued All The Money In The World(2017), immediately stake the drama in terms of the French Revolution’s punitive mythos, a pageant of chopped heads and felled, effete aristocrats long since transmuted by retelling from the frightening counter-myth wielded by reactionaries for the following century or so into modern pop culture shtick, in our era of online “Eat the Rich” sloganeering from people who’d get suicidal at the thought of going a week without their smart phone. Maximilian Robespierre (Sam Troughton) is identified as a pompous showboat, who will when the Thermidorian reaction comes around try to shoot himself to avoid indignity only to leave himself with a hole in his face for his enemy to prod with pleasure.
Napoleon is first glimpsed, as he was in Gance’s film, as a man in the crowd, but without the special dint of aloof charisma and potency in reserve. For Scott, Bonaparte is less transcendent warrior-poet than an on-the-make man of a specific moment, a sort of historical entrepreneur who sees a gap in the market and fills it with a needed product, that product being military success. Scott’s fascination for detail in process is perfectly attuned to communicating Napoleon’s cunning as a fighter, illustrated in the first of the film’s major battle set-pieces with a depiction of him leading the assault on the British garrison in Toulon, which he first scouts out personally under the guise of a shepherd. During the assault, in which he takes advantage of the general British disdain for the current state of the French as well as displaying all the technical nuance and effectiveness a well-trained soldierly mind and body can bring to bear, Napoleon survives having his horse shot out from under him by a cannon ball – a jarring, effectively gruesome moment – and after victory digs out the ball from the horse’s corpse as a memento for his mother. Napoleon earns admiring, even awestruck looks from his men, signalling the institution of a reputation that completely inverts the same image of Marie Antoinette being dragged through the cleaved, disdaining crowd: here is popular leadership sourced in success and esteem, the most solid possible basis for political fortune, and the most dangerous.
Expanding on this idea, Scott portrays events usually skimmed or elided in other such portraits, in the way Napoleon first became a political operator as well as military hero, or rather, turned politics into a military arena, in vignettes sketched out with a dark and unexpected comic sensibility. Napoleon’s role in putting down the Royalist Vendémiaire insurrection of 1795 is portrayed with Scott’s unblinking eye for his subject’s unblinking eye: Napoleon’s ripe willingness to use direct, merciless force to suppress the uprising with the infamous “whiff of grapeshot.” For Scott this episode is as important as it is often skimmed over – Gance, for instance, depicted Napoleon’s call to arms and the aftermath but avoided actually depicting it, but it accords with Scott’s greater scepticism and now-familiar interest in systemic acts. Here, drawn from history, is a precisely identifiable moment when one man established himself as a judicious wielder of power, and with a coherent corollary: if his predecessors in the course of the Revolution, in any faction, had shown the same gift, they would have become Napoleon Bonaparte, or some version of him that now fills history books. But that sense of force writes in red ink, sprayed on the Parisian cobblestones.
Later, Napoleon departs for his epic-absurd excursion to Egypt, where the grand spectacle of civilisations in immediate confrontation is described with an ideogram of satiric precision as Napoleon’s artillery resounds in the face of an advancing Egyptian army and a cannon ball clips the peak of a pyramid. Scott depicts the machinations of the Brumaire coup, in which Napoleon, in league with Roger Ducos (Benedict Martin) and Joseph Fouché (John Hodgkinson) and with the help of Paul Barras (Tahar Rahim), deposed the ruling Directory and established himself as First Consul, the first major step towards becoming national dictator. The coup is again delivered as a comic spectacle, drawing humour from the way it paints Napoleon as in his element in bringing his tactical mind to bear and manipulating a situation, making it look like he’s been roughed up by the Directory members with a show of breathless escape, so as to more easily deploy and reassure the soldiers he has waiting to storm the building that they’re in the right. Thus he creates the impression that he is the truest representative and saviour of the Revolution even as he’s actually betraying it and suborning it to dictatorship.
Scott’s admiration for David Lean, most particularly Lawrence of Arabia (1962), is as constant a motif for him as Kubrick. And yet, despite the superficial epicism Napoleon is not a reach for Leanian grandeur, not in theme nor in style. Rather than seeing Napoleon as a would-be titan in the Lawrence mode, doomed by his inability to convert ideals into facts in a corrosive world, Scott characterises him far more like the title character of Barry Lyndon, one of Kubrick’s many fools of fortune cut off from the pleasures of power that can only be wielded by authentic brutes. Feels very likely, too, that Scott has more recent likenesses in political theatre and fury in mind. This is a Napoleon for our era of social media-inflated populists and authoritarians who, partly through design and partly through vagaries of fortune, become lodestones for other people’s passions and prejudices, battle lines drawn between the “us” such figures court and capture, and the perfidy of whichever “them” arouses special ire. The great archaeological enterprise that Napoleon sponsored during the expedition, forming the roots of Egyptology, is noted but also viewed askance, as Napoleon finds himself compelled by a mummy propped up after being dug up. The sight of the ancient, wizened body, a tilt by one society at achieving immortality, taunts a man starting to hear the same siren song, only for the mummy to listlessly lean over under his hard and searching scrutiny; in that end all that’s left is a well-dressed corpse. Scott contrasts this tug of grandiosity with the messy reality of a would-be overlord who has neither house nor nation in order.
When it comes to making this sort of movie, filmmakers have in essence three choices: one is the general explanatory portrayal pitched to those who don’t know much about the epoch and personalities under scrutiny, and hitting each vital beat succinctly. Another is the more impressionistic approach, usually counting some level of familiarity of the general run of events in the viewer and toggling associatively through vivid fragments. Many biopics of recent vintage tend to limit their scope to refine some essence of a famous person’s life, through capturing a pivotal moment or a portrait from a specific viewpoint. Napoleon hews closest to the first approach, but flirts with all three. Anyone going into the film expecting a sober, steady expostulation of history will find it a patchy, frustrating, tonally bewildering affair as it stands. The narrative leapfrogs over the period between Napoleon becoming First Consul and Emperor, and from there to his invasion of Russia in a few scenes, encompassing as that period does all the apparently trifling business of his grand battles for Italy and Germany and Spain, as well as Trafalgar. It’s all enough to make me particularly frustrated that filmmakers don’t do old-school explanatory montages anymore, the kind of technique that can compress great swathes of information and action into brief and dynamic representations.
A lot of political to-ing and fro-ing is noted, with Talleyrand (Paul Rhys) engaging in deft diplomatic manoeuvrings where his master tends to stamp heavily, but without any cumulative sense of contrapuntal meaning. The other personalities of the era, including Napoleon’s brace of legendary marshals and even Talleyrand himself, one of those figures cloaked in delight by generations of political and historical observers, or Fouché, whom Scott ingeniously employed Albert Finney to impersonate in The Duellists, are only vaguely identified, the equivalents, in Scott’s eye, of the kinds of second-tier hoods who comprise the foot soldiers going out to the whacking in a Scorsese or Coppola gangster movie. Later on, Louis XVIII (Ian McNeice) is seen installed in Napoleon’s place after his first abdication, and I felt actively sorry for all the who’s-that-guy? audience members wondering who he is and where he came from. Rahim makes an impression as Barras, the cunning operator who orchestrates Robespierre’s downfall and becomes Napoleon’s mentor in politics before being brushed aside, and the film notes the intriguing sight of General Dumas (Abubakar Salim) as one of Napoleon’s confederates, a Black Haitian (and later father of the writer Alexandre) evincing the first glimmers of new social horizons. The trouble is that after pursuing the political theme early on in the film, Scott seems to feel it exhausts itself once Napoleon becomes First Consul. Or, rather, he transmutes one way of exploring the theme into another.
The focus then falls on one of the most famous yet opaque marriages in history, that between Napoleon and Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), whose course is seen as intimately woven with the general rise and fall of Napoleon’s fortunes and continues to define them even after it’s technically ended, and it’s this marriage Scott and Scarpa identify as exemplifying something about the age as well as the characters locked in it. Joséphine is first glimpsed being released from prison at the end of the Reign of Terror, a pathetic figure with crudely shorn hair and soiled clothes, as if she’s stumbled out of the rehearsal-turned-orgy in Marat / Sade (1966). Soon she’s invited to one of the Survivors’ Balls held for raucous celebrations by those who escaped the national razor, a vignette of lewd and raucous entertainment in a moment of supremely licentious release for those who have survived political terror and still enjoying a moment before the old morality kicks back in. There she encounters Napoleon, whose lovestruck gaze lingers on her until she confronts him for it: all he can do is bleat about his capture of Toulon, something she only gets amusement from at first, but quickly seizes upon her connection with the odd young officer in realisation he could be a star worth hitching her wagon to, and vice versa, given her connections in high society.
Scott trots out the vignette of Joséphine’s son Eugene (Benjamin Chivers) approaching Napoleon to beg for his executed father’s sword, but with a twist that invests this tale with a new meaning. Napoleon moves to oblige the lad, only to be confronted with rack after racks of similarly impounded swords, none of them marked according to owner. Again, in one efficient gesture Scott conveys the nature of the Reign of Terror as leaving holes in the shape of so many dead men persisting only as myths of martial glory and lost legacy, and delivers a punchline wherein Napoleon selects a random sabre to give to the De Beauharnais. It’s both his ticket into Joséphine’s household, and also an ironic self-description, as one sword is as good as another, and he’s the sword currently being offered: Napoleon explicitly characterises himself elsewhere as merely a handy sword. Joséphine sits and talks with Napoleon, and, making her play, calmly opens her legs invitingly to him, in a gesture that’s as much a challenge as an act of seduction. Later, Joséphine weighs up her feelings in with her chambermaid, and quickly concludes that whilst her affection for him is much less than his for her, she cares enough for him to go ahead with a union that becomes for both a perverse thicket. Like Gance, Scott sees Napoleon’s swooning ardour for Joséphine as part and parcel with his most fervent conquering zest in the opening phase of his career, but in a completely different way. Their union delivers wealth and splendour, as Joséphine swans through swank abodes that become the trappings of high office and joins her husband in the forbidden delights of fucking in once-royal beds. Napoleon enjoys the servicing of his raw lust, which manifests on a virtually infantile level, as he inveigles her to congress with childish noises and prostrate her for jackhammering sex sessions.
Such episodes ram home (sorry) Scott’s scornful take on the macho warrior ethos he offers Napoleon as exemplifying (which might be rather unfair in this case, as being bad at sex never seemed to be one of Napoleon’s problems, given the historical record of Napoleon’s relations with his second wife Mary-Louise) in a manner that clearly extends The Last Duel’s concern with such things. At the same time it twists away from that film’s straightforward and blistering sense of historical righteousness towards something more ambivalent, if still with an eye for the egregious. Joséphine is every bit as wayward and lusty a personality as her husband, and the tug of war between their mutually complicit egos and anxieties defines their marriage, to the point where Napoleon storms home to France, leaving his army in Egypt in the lurch, after hearing about Joséphine’s affair with hunky young officer Hippolyte Charles (Jannis Niewöhner), and her dalliances become the stuff of proto-tabloid news feasting. Napoleon returns to his home with Joséphine only to find her out for the day, further stoking his rage and leading him to dump all of her belongings out on the front lawn. Joséphine becomes panicky upon seeing this on her return, and the night and following day become an extended playlet of ritualised domination and submission amidst a stew of fierce and contradictory feelings, first with Napoleon fiercely extracting expressions of undying fidelity and respect, and then her from him: “You are nothing without me” is a catechism each makes the other repeat in turn.
This part of the film, which continues the playful, satirically skewed aspect of the film’s take on the historical record, is nonetheless very much central to what Scott’s take on Napoleon is aiming for, a quest that traces the outlines of the old canard that “behind every great man is a good woman,” tested and smelted and recast as a similar but distinct idea, one that traces out the way ambitious, spiky personalities seek same with all the potential and pain that can result. Napoleon’s subsequent confrontation with the grandees of the Directory, who try to criticise him for abandoning his army in Egypt, sees him fiercely turn the tables in noting their incompetence and mismanagement, rattling off a series of denunciations concluding with, “And I’ve just learned that my wife is a slut!,” one of the most unexpectedly hilarious lines in recent cinema. Moreover, it nudges the connection of the course of the marriage to the course of Napoleon’s career, suggesting Napoleon’s conviction that both Joséphine and France are inconstant lovers easily distracted by louche poseurs and needing his firm rod to keep both in line, but to which he remains fatefully tethered. Or, from the opposite perspective, that Napoleon is at once a gallant deliverer and petty thug for both. Joséphine plays her part right down the line, up to and including falling on her metaphorical, matrimonial sword for the good of the nation, and she retains a quality that refuses reduction, unlike the other players in the drama, to organs of Napoleon’s will and ego, and that’s precisely because he does actually feel something for her. But those feelings are not simple or reassuring.
The fascination for the political apparent in the personal is one of Scott’s recurring points of obsession and inquiry, and he nails the fascination for such dynamics in these portions of Napoleon. Napoleon readily confesses his affairs after reacting with specially aggrieved passion when he finds Joséphine has been doing the same: the old double standard, of course, except that the couple talk about it all during their long session of dirty laundry-airing that becomes a vital ritual in their evolving relationship. The idea of a Napoleon who’s a total cuck is a neat provocation to the current cult obsessed with masculine esteem, but the film gropes through that to another, more substantial perspective: the reason these two people are locked together by fate and emotion is precisely because they’re not normal, or “relatable” as the awful current phraseology has it, even if they are still nonetheless very human. As Joséphine’s incapacity to conceive a child threatens the Bonapartes’ proto-dynastic ambitions, however, her position becomes increasingly endangered, and finally Napoleon feels obliged to divorce her. The divorce comes in a ceremony that becomes a second, rather more gruelling act of public theatre after the coronation they shared in together, this time a stew of sardonic disbelief and squirming frustration, with Napoleon dealing a quick slap to Joséphine’s face in trying to get her back on message, the film’s most grimly amusing contemplation of personal life and statecraft fused in a sickly dance.
The lead actors are at their finest in these scenes, Phoenix’s smouldering, frustrated Napoleon matching Kirby’s mesmeric evocation of an intelligence that doesn’t quite mesh as much as Joséphine would like to think with her emotional identity: both are undone by their needy and compulsive streaks and the way neither quite has a substantial identity without the other. Late in the film, during Napoleon’s first deposing and exile, Alexander visits the ailing Joséphine out of nominal gentlemanly courtesy and furtive intrigue, but with the subtext that Joséphine’s bed, or heart, or more nebulous domain of kingmaking talent, or all at once, are further battlegrounds these conquering overlords need to compete upon and test themselves against. Earlier, and in stark contrast, Napoleon’s mother Letizia (Sinéad Cusack) sets about attending to the dynastic problem by arranging for her son to sleep with a selected and willing partner, to find out whether her lad is shooting blanks in the boudoir if not on the battlefield: he quickly gets the appointed concubine knocked up, opening the door to the divorce. This hints heavily at where Napoleon gets his tactical zest and hearty absence of any kind of sentimentality, but also signals Letizia operates with a clearer head than her son, at least in terms of what she’s aiming for and how to get to it. It’s a pity Cusack’s mommy dearest doesn’t appear more in the film. Once the divorce is done, Napoleon promptly weds the young and eager Mary-Louise (Anna Mawn), with Napoleon greeting her and swiftly leading her on to the bedroom: sex is what they’re both here for, in several senses.
The side of Scott that retains skills honed in making British television and the tradition of the docudrama – a facet of the director that has long sat in tension with his florid, decorative, world-conjuring side – has come to the fore repeatedly in his career, underpinning the woozy blend of reportage and you-are-there sturm-und-drang of Black Hawk Down (2001) and more completely on American Gangster. Napoleon seems like a perfect fit for this, and yet again Scott demurs. Instead, Napoleon proves to actually be an entry in a style of historical film that doesn’t get made much – generally because it’s proven highly unpopular with audiences and a zone of confusion for critics – and also peculiarly British. A style exemplified by the likes of Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976), Hugh Hudson’s Revolution (1985), Plunkett and Macleane, Julien Temple’s Pandemonium (2000), and much of Ken Russell’s oeuvre – one could also nod to the likes of Richard Lester and Monty Python for more outright comedic variations. Unstable films where the familiar impulses of such movies, springing from the moment of the 1960s counterculture and later promising and blending with the impulses of punk, with their fascination for famous historical personalities and realism in recreating milieu, sit cheek by jowl was a sense of the ridiculous, located in awareness of disparity in viewpoint, and skit-like, semi-satiric attitude, with attempts to connect the modern sensibility with the period with aspects of ironic juxtaposition and poetic licence that tries to dig to something truer than what mere fact can convey.
It makes sense that Scott would have some sympathy with that style, coming as he did out of the same era and sensibility that shaped the likes of Russell and Richardson, at once finding themselves heirs to a cultural and artistic tradition and also rebels against it, looking for the down and dirty amidst all the gilt and froufrou, the proof of continuity in human nature even as history moved from veiling its primal impulses to letting it all hang out. And whilst he’s long seemed more of a straight arrow than the likes of Russell, in fact it can be said that Scott’s oeuvre has long been defined by the peculiar, personal spin he put on that kind of artistic sensibility – that he might even have always been the most sophisticated exponent of it. That’s most overt in the arch blend of genres and styles in Blade Runner in particular, veering as it does between sci-fi and noir, classical and futuristic, the exalted and the fetid, all putting the punk in cyberpunk, and elsewhere in his career he’s been fond of such juxtapositions, if usually in more subtle or purely stylistic ways. Napoleon is a long way from being as bold in its juxtapositions of technique and tone as The Charge of the Light Brigade or Savage Messiah (1972), but a sense of common roots nonetheless keeps bobbing to the surface. Scott boils down Napoleon’s march on Moscow to a spectacle of self-defeat, with the Emperor inheriting the hollow trappings of Alexander’s authority, and a deserted city he can’t even claim credit for burning down.
That Scott is also thinking back to his debut is palpable in places throughout Napoleon, recreating the method apparent in The Duellists for recreating historical milieu, particularly the hollowed-out environs of the revolution-pilfered great houses and institutions, and even recreates some shots here and there. Scott dismissed Waterloo before making this film, and as a great admirer of Bondarchuk’s movie the temptation to a little cackle of contumely is hard to resist, in noting how Scott fails to match that film’s pungency as both war spectacle and character sketch, even if he is aiming at something quite different. Nonetheless the two grand battle sequences, the first depicting Austerlitz, the second Waterloo, that subdivide the drama, are two of Scott’s greatest feats of filmmaking, as he tries to encapsulate the complex ebb and flow of action in those battles as units of expressive and coherent diagramming, particularly in the contrast of Napoleon expertly suckering in his foes in the first battle and flailing surrendering to his own macho mythos as well as Wellington’s traps in the second. Austerlitz is illustrated with particular verve, Scott wielding watchmaker precision in the outlay of cause and effect, capturing Napoleon’s capacity to see through the superficial chaos of the battlefield to both see and wield designs amidst it all. The battle climaxes with the infamous shelling of the iced-over lake the luckless Austrian and Russian soldiers try to flee across, the climax of Alexander Nevsky (1938) recast from heroic consummation as nature conspires with great leader to swallow the alien host, to a supervillain’s wickedest flourish of contempt for a defeated foe.
Simultaneously registering as both problematic and fruitful, Scott’s Napoleon emerges as feeling like two or three different movies, each competing for primacy – the post-punk satire, the intimate portrait of a weird power couple, and the epic war movie delivered with all of Scott’s most earnest and technically dynamic impact. Episodes of ribald humour graze against straight-faced depictions of brutal combat and fastidious politics. In this regard Napoleon recalls his Robin Hood, which had a similarly, internally divided and clashing structure, albeit an interesting one that disassembled the Robin Hood legend to then resituate it at a junction of real history and folklore rooted in specific cultural soil, recasting the famous hero as the epitome of plebeian English liberty fighting bullies foreign and domestic. Napoleon by contrast never quite finds a way of negotiating its disparities of portrait: if it applied a formal device, like what Christopher Nolan tried (if badly) in Oppenheimer (2023), or indeed as Scott did in The Last Duel, to establish the notion that Napoleon looks like a completely different person from different angles, that might be fine.
Napoleon’s career contains multitudes enough for any biographer – the man who brought French Revolutionary ideals and political liberalism to European politics also stole and conscripted mercilessly, the champion of liberty also tried to toss the Haitians back in chains, and the urges that pushed him to such irreconcilable ends, again usually elided or oversimplified in film takes, cry out for a substantively engaged portrait. In a lot of ways this Napoleon settles for the least interesting version of the man that can be offered. But, again, that might be partly mistaking what this Napoleon wants to be, which can be summarised most concisely as a portrait of power as inherently absurd, especially when completely invested in a person, even if the results of it being wielded are anything but funny. Napoleon Bonaparte is just the historical vessel the thesis is poured into. The film ends with Napoleon, sitting out his exile on St Helena with his two daughters, dying whilst writing his memoirs – Scott films the silhouette of the man wearing his signature hat slowly keeling over, mimicking the dried-out mummy he gazed on earlier.
Here lies both ultimate absurdity, the great conqueror just another uniform without a body to hold it up anymore, at once a sight of pathos, but also one from which the contrived mystique is allowed to escape and haunt history evermore. Scott might well feel some empathy there, as that’s also the kind of immortality the artist plays for, to leave behind traces of themselves in the works they have wrought. The final tally of the dead from Napoleon’s battles and campaigns that rolls afterwards plays as a miniature self-critique of the list of terrorist actions at the end of Black Hawk Down: from cautionary tale about inaction to cautionary tale about too much action. Napoleon is a big, woozy, unusual film that’s never less than extremely entertaining and absorbing even when it’s also being extraordinarily frustrating. As a biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, it’s a haphazard affair; as an extension of Scott’s late career obsessions, an ironic study in being human even when affecting to transcend that state, it’s something like a triumph. Whatever else one might say about Scott as he keeps pushing back the horizon of his career in defiance of his age, Napoleon is a film that refuses to conform to clichés about a filmmaker’s autumnal phase – compared to the way that, say, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) exemplifies that concept, for all its excellence. The messiness of Napoleon is a by-product of its wayward ambition, and in that regard, yes, Scott earns comparison with his subject.
The other half of a one-time-only marketing synergy event that drove both it and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie to vast profitability in mid-2023, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer has an aura of special aptness, even inevitability, as an extension of Nolan’s oeuvre. Oppenheimer sees Nolan delving back into the same epic World War II climes as Dunkirk (2017), safe grist for prestige filmmaking whilst allowing Nolan to apply his particular branded aesthetic to material pitched right at a particular cusp, still powerful enough to be common folklore, whilst also taking on the lustre of an immediate past slipping into legend, ripe for the benefits from being defamiliarised with his specific style. With Oppenheimer Nolan swaps out the survivalist exigencies of Dunkirk’s focal point, on the common-as-muck soldier’s perspective on events of grand magnitude, for one that feels closer to Nolan’s heart as a filmmaker so often concerned with conceptual largesse and variably antiheroic protagonists whose drives and distorted perspectives can scarcely be understood by the world and its whims, and whose solutions to problems often beget new problems. For Nolan Oppenheimer’s success was a particular vindication after he broke with his former stalwart backers at Warner Bros., following his anger at their treatment of his 2020 film Tenet, an absurd if mildly enjoyable sci-fi thriller hodgepodge.
Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), held by many fans to be perhaps his best film, is indeed his only movie to completely dovetail the aspects of his creative mind – the historian battling with the modernist, the fabulist with the realist, moralist and systemic analyst, the conceptual artist with the clever showman. But Oppenheimer’s subject matter also comes close in its way to offering a unified field for Nolan’s preoccupations. The Prestige’s idealised, fictionalised vision of Nikolai Tesla as a man opening up frontiers of reality-reshaping technology gives way to Julius Robert Oppenheimer as a figure guarding another frontier, the stropped and chagrined prophet of the atomic age contrasting the much-beatified, grandfatherly eccentricity of Albert Einstein. Aware of this disparity, Nolan makes conversations between Oppenheimer and Einstein (Tom Conti) dramatic linchpins, including providing the very end: early in the film Oppenheimer dismisses Einstein as a genius who nonetheless shrank back for the implications of his discovery and so long outlasted his worth, only to find himself in a similar state by tale’s end, both men cringing before the fruits of their intellectual efforts and the dubiety of the world’s reception of them. Oppenheimer is also, as tacky as the comparison threatens to sound, an extension and variation on Nolan’s take on both Batman and the Joker, living out the arc summarised by the famous line from The Dark Knight (2008), “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” illustrated, or so Nolan plainly feels, this time with direct, drawn-from-life acuteness.
A brief biography of Oppenheimer could also serve as a synopsis of the movie, but there’s a lot about the man we don’t learn at all during its three-hour runtime. Oppenheimer was the son of a German-Jewish father who migrated to the United States and made a fortune as a textile importer, and a mother who was a painter – the practical and the artistic were to remain poles of Oppenheimer’s rarefied genius in rich and contradictory ways. Oppenheimer, born in 1904, proved a gifted student with talent in many fields, and after recovering from a bout of colitis as a teenager – which, to recover from, he and his family visited New Mexico for the first time, giving him a love of the region and of horseback riding – he studied chemistry at Harvard. Through the 1920s and ‘30s Oppenheimer was a prodigious student and teacher shuttling between Europe and the US in various scientific fields until he latched onto the emerging field of quantum physics, a period in which he met with many leading figures of physics and some future collaborators and rivals, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller. Nolan’s vision of Oppenheimer carving paths through the illusions of physical reality through to its inner mechanics rhymes with his own approach to storytelling, seeking out new substructures to weave the essential melodrama cues around.
Nolan adopts an initially odd framing device to delve into Oppenheimer’s life, recounting it partly from the perspective of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), a former head of the Atomic Energy Commission angling for a place on President Eisenhower’s cabinet in the late 1950s, but who finds his thorny relationship with Oppenheimer coming back to haunt him. Nolan differentiates between past and present and also Strauss’s perspective and a more neutral one by swapping between black-and-white and colour, in a manner reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s J.F.K. (1991) and Nixon (1995) (and Stone was briefly interested in filming this movie’s official source material, the biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin). But where Stone used his stock shifts to render his sense of perspective unstable, with fried-in-cocaine-batter impact, chaotic and palpitating in aesthetic effect, Nolan is for better or worse more methodical and prosaic in intent. Eventually it becomes clear that Strauss is highly paranoid about Oppenheimer and bears him a deep-seated grudge stemming back to various slights, including mocking issues he raised during a Senate testimony, and for allegedly turning Einstein against him when both men were working for Strauss in the late 1940s. The viewpoint shifts to Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) to recount his excitable student days at Cambridge, when his perverse, tunnel-visioned streak led him to try poisoning his teacher at the time, Patrick Blackett (James D’Arcy) by injecting an apple with cyanide, only narrowly avoiding a calamity when Blackett introduces him to Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and he pretends to see a worm hole in the apple.
Later Oppenheimer encounters Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer), later to be charged with heading the Nazi atomic bomb effort, and strikes up a friendship with fellow American physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz), who, at least in Nolan’s portrait, practically incarnates the more earthy and Jewish side of himself Oppenheimer denies as suave man of the world. Oppenheimer returns to the US and splits his time between teaching at Caltech and Berkeley, working at the latter alongside the Nobel Prize-winner Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett). Lawrence’s cagey sense of politics contrasts Oppenheimer’s embrace of left-wing causes, even as he’s criticised by many in his social circle for remaining aloof from the Communist Party, unlike his brother and fellow physicist Frank (Dylan Arnold), psychologist lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), his eventual wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), and friend Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall). As nuclear fission abruptly becomes a practical reality, as well as the notion it can be used to make bombs, Oppenheimer is initially excluded from Lawrence’s circle discussing the matter with intent, but is later approached by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), an army engineer who recently completed building the Pentagon, as he looks for a scientific leader for the Manhattan Project, the US effort to build an atomic bomb in urgent rivalry with Nazi Germany. Groves quickly realises Oppenheimer has just the right mind and personality to oversee the project, and at Oppenheimer’s suggestion, the Project sets up shop in the sparse surrounds of Los Alamos, a part of New Mexico he knows well.
Nolan takes pains to capture something of Oppenheimer’s mercurial brilliance, as well as a sadomasochistic streak suggested by the poisoned apple episode, an inchoate need for punishment that he later turns on himself, with vignettes that confirm his unexpected gift with language, able to learn enough Dutch to give an entire lecture in it in a few weeks when visiting the Netherlands, and to read one of the defining texts of his life, the Bhagavad-Gita, in the Sanskrit. We get snapshots of the heady climes of academia in the 1930s, a hotbed of both radical sympathies and, well, hot beds: Oppenheimer and future wife Kitty flirt up a storm even as she professes to being still married. Oppenheimer’s passions converge as Tatlock gets him to read a passage of the Bhagavad-Gita whilst she screws him – and, of course, it’s the “I am become Death” passage he picks out. This moment is peculiar, and crucial for the way Oppenheimer sees Nolan trying to open up new ground for himself, and the ways he fails it at. Nolan lets some adult sexuality into his oft-airless and emotionally sublimated creative palette – this is, after all, the guy who explored a dream realm without any hint of the erotic in Inception (2010) – and affects to set in motion a motif that sees a connection between the creative and destructive urges manifest in Oppenheimer’s work, although really he goes nowhere with that motif. On another level, it’s a bit silly, making me think of Young Frankenstein (1974) when a bit of good rogering wrings pristine operatic arias out of Madeline Khan. Nolan’s touch of the erotic is also stilted and carefully posed – dear lord, Florence Pugh’s breasts! – as well as the attempt to humanise these people, considering he’s dealing here with two randy, messy, nonconformist intellectuals who share, in their different fashions, a self-immolating streak.
Also, Oppenheimer and Tatlock’s relationship proves to be an exact model for Nolan’s recurring conceit of man haunted by a former lover whose death he feels complicit in, as previously described in Memento (2001), The Dark Knight, and Inception. But the real meat of Oppenheimer as a narrative is Nolan’s preoccupation with the tension between Oppenheimer’s stature as leader of a great national mission of war and the mistrust turned on people like him – those with a confluence of progressive political opinions and Jewish names – held in check in a marriage of political convenience but soon enough allowed to play out as the Cold War takes hold. Oppenheimer can be characterised in this theme, and in common concern with winning award season favour, as a kind of spiritual sequel to Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game (2014), and whilst Oppenheimer’s personal peccadilloes didn’t let the establishment destroy him as thoroughly as Alan Turing’s did, there was a similar logic to both men’s careers, as savants whose talents were utilised and then cast aside once they weren’t needed any more and the communal action of the war gave way to new fiefdoms of the square insiders re-erecting fences against the unruly outsiders.
What’s most telling about this film’s approach to that idea is however the lengths it goes to to deny the similarity. Nolan charts in incessant, frenetic detail Oppenheimer’s grazes with security protocols and enforcers, like Boris Pash (Casey Affleck), a serpentine army intelligence officer with a perfect, personal hatred of Communists, to whom Oppenheimer lies in an effort to cover for his friend Chevalier, in the kind of stumble his foes make the most of in his efforts post-war to destroy him. Hysteria kicks in once the Soviets start detonating their own bombs, and one member of the Los Alamos team, Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham), is revealed to have been funnelling secrets to them. The film eventually draws out Teller (Bennie Safdie) as a particular Judas figure, with his greater interest in developing the hydrogen bomb, or the ‘Super’ as the Manhattan Project honchos start to call the idea: Oppenheimer goes out of his way to accommodate Teller in letting him pursue the idea to avoid having him walk out. But when Oppenheimer starts resisting actually building it as needless and dangerous escalation after the Soviets develop their own bomb, Teller’s frustration, a frustration Strauss shares as head of the AEC, as they see a need for a new edge over the Soviets, is eventually expressed before a review board looking at cancelling Oppenheimer’s security clearance.
When I was a small boy my father had some reprinted front page editions of old newspapers including one reporting the ‘Trinity’ test, featuring the famous images of the test captured in fractions of seconds I poured over with deep fascination and disquiet – those protoplasmic bulges of energy expanding and congealing in the initial phase of ignition, captured in strangely textured black-and-white, a medium I associated as most of us do when young with things that are antique and safely bygone, but yet with colour seeming to want to burst out along with the atomic hellfire that would within moments of the photos being taken plume high into the sky. Those images capture an event at once awe-inspiring and terrifying, as, for the first time, human ingenuity worried around the very edges of stable reality and physical existence – and, indeed, as the film dedicates some time to noting, the possibility that the fission process might just keep going and fry up the entire planet’s atmosphere wasn’t entirely discounted up until the ignition of the Trinity bomb. Nolan bends the historical record a tad by having Oppenheimer take Teller’s calculations which suggest that possibility to Einstein – he showed them to someone else, but Nolan can’t resist the idea of Oppenheimer, for all his bravura as the next generational chieftain, running back to daddy Albert for reassurance.
Other films and TV series have tackled this material before, of course. The mystique of the Manhattan Project and its leader permeated 1950s science fiction. For instance, Gene Barry’s Dr Clayton Forrester in Byron Haskin’s The War of the Worlds (1953) is a thinly veiled version of Oppenheimer, complete with similar biographical details and stature as scientific hero, and a figure who is finally left roaming around shattered cities amidst an apocalypse, desperately seeking spiritual and romantic recourse as the age of “super-science” brings down deadly rain, in what amounts to the most ingenious and vivid picturing of the mental landscape of those who lived through the birth of the atomic age. More directly, the 1980 BBC series Oppenheimer and two rival productions from 1989, the feature film Fat Man and Little Boy and the telemovie Day One, depicted Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project in varying levels of depth. Fat Man and Little Boy featured Dwight Schultz as Oppenheimer and Paul Newman as Groves, and was directed by Roland Joffé, then still riding high as the maker of the prestigious hits The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986). His film actually went into a lot more depth and effort to make the problems of building the bomb coherent than Nolan’s does, as well as considering the culture and ethical arguments of the team of scientists who worked on it. But that movie had its own serious problems, including an awkward attempt to personalise the danger of the bomb for the project team by casting John Cusack as an everyman scientist who gets fatally irradiated, based on events that happened well after the bomb’s first uses.
Not many people remember the 1952 film Above and Beyond, a biopic directed by Melvin Frank and based on the memoirs of Paul Tibbets and likely the first film to actually depict the Manhattan Project. Robert Taylor played Tibbets, the US Army Air Force pilot whose job it became to actually drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In the film, Tibbets is ushered into a meeting with a superior, handed a disconnected bombsight button, and presented with an question that is supposedly abstract, but both men know very well that given the job they’re doing and the age they live in, surely is anything but: would he push the button if he understood that by doing so he could end the war, but at the cost of killing 50,000 people. Tibbets, after musing for a moment on the question, decisively presses the button. That scene often jumps back into my thoughts, not least as the most potent possible real-world example of the kind of “trolley problem” moral question that’s usually presented to us in far more benign terms – in some classroom, or even in an online meme, but which more usually we tend to skate around in the name of a more free-floating humanism. What’s most striking from today’s perspective about this scene from Frank’s film of Tibbets’ story is the complete lack of conscientious handwringing, sourced it feels in the far greater proximity, culturally, historically, and philosophically to the war that produced it. Tibbets, in short, chose his side, come what may.
That can of course be seen as stemming from the way the film obviously was made in the afterglow by the victorious, but there’s something truly galvanising and perturbing there, reflecting the way war, much like a black hole, distorts all moral gravity, but a certain calculus remains in play. Things that would seem utterly unthinkable to an ordinary person at other times seem entirely natural, even inevitable. And war is another country, unknowable and scarcely mappable for those living outside its borders of imperative. That’s an idea Oppenheimer tries to engage with, but finishes up fumbling timidly, much as it does with Oppenheimer himself and his plainly complex feelings about his great achievement. Nolan, to his credit, does try to get at some disparity in our way of thinking about those things, when Strauss accuses Oppenheimer of manoeuvring so his name would be associated with Trinity, great moment in science, and not Hiroshima, terrible moment in history. One of Nolan’s more coherent and pervasive points iterated through the film comes as Oppenheimer and his fellows repeatedly confront the problem of not being able to predict everything, such as the possibility of unstoppable chain reaction: the only real proof, the only way of knowing, can come through the successful detonation of atomic bombs, both in test and in war. And this is bound up with the way the bomb is as much a weapon of spectacle, the ultimate blockbuster attraction, to instil fear and caution in the enemy, as it is one of actual military application – perhaps really far more so.
Nolan quickly puts in motion his by-now very familiar stylistic ploy of trying to relentlessly push his narrative forward with a combination of fast editing and high-pressure music scoring, as if, in much the same way Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project weaponises theoretical physics, he’s weaponised the artistic style of Godfrey Reggio’s poetic documentary Koyaanisqatsi (1983), in mimicking the way its propulsive Philip Glass score entwines with visual flourishes, mimicked here in shots like surveying a row of jutting nuclear missiles in quasi-abstract profile. Although this time his regular collaborator Hans Zimmer has been replaced by Ludwig Göransson, the score still comes in the same constantly ratcheting style that gives the impression we’re reaching the end of some ticking bomb countdown with every few minutes of screen time, even if we’ve only been watching a bunch of scientists talking. It’s this ploy that’s key to both Nolan’s success and my own deep distrust of it: Nolan’s films so often feel like extremely long trailers advertising themselves, and Oppenheimer is no exception even with its more measured qualities. Breaking down the elements of Oppenheimer reveals it as actually a very safe and familiar type of biopic, complete with furnished antagonist in a manner that reveals not much has changed in this realm of award bait since William Dieterle’s The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). That film pitted Paul Muni’s heroic, visionary Pasteur against a fictional antagonist meant to represent the hidebound medical establishment of the day and general resistance to changed thinking. Strauss serves basically the same function here, but reiterated in a manner closer to Nolan’s take on the Joker as a vengeful schemer playing multidimensional chess, working to destroy Oppenheimer with backroom machinations. Strauss is also used to introduce more accusatory comments on Oppenheimer, as exemplified by that line about being remembered for Trinity and not Hiroshima, but on the proviso that they’re emerging from a poisoned well.
So, much of the film, particularly the last, post-Trinity third, is dedicated to portraying the method of that destruction, mostly played out in a security review hearing in 1954 that resulted in Oppenheimer losing his security clearance, with Oppenheimer sitting through a relentless process of humiliation and disavowal, some of it delivered however guiltily or conditionally by colleagues like Groves and Teller, and the aggressively slanted grilling of prosecutor Roger Robb (Jason Clarke). Nolan strongly hints that all of this can be seen as Oppenheimer’s personal, endured punishment, a caning he takes to expiate his own lingering feelings of distress and guilt, a process that will one day lead back to renewed stature as a maltreated hero: Oppenheimer’s multidimensional chess is better than Strauss’s. This is easily the worst part of Oppenheimer, grinding on and on for little actual result and using up a great hunk of screen time, coming on with Nolan’s stylistic cues assuring us constantly that we’re watching some kind of taut and compelling political drama here, with secrets within secrets to be uncovered when really we’re seeing the writer-director doing his absolute level best to win an Oscar by marrying biopic conventions with his own method for making everything play like a high-pressure thriller.
The standard critical phraseology for Nolan’s storytelling method here is to say it’s like a mosaic, accumulating piece by piece into a finished picture. But Nolan’s choices, as I often find with his films, often strikes me more like an act of covering over than revelation; Nolan deploys detail in a way that feels like an avoidance of meditation, and he’s a filmmaker who somehow manages something entirely counterintuitive in the way he constantly chases pace and snappiness but at the cost of genuine efficiency. The choice of telling a chunk of the story through Strauss’s eyes also allows Nolan to deliver a great deal of exposition under the guise of one character’s slanted opining, particularly in Strauss’s laboured exchanges drawing out details with a fictional staffer played by Alden Ehrenreich, who gradually realises what a shit Strauss is. The emphasis on Strauss’s conniving also gives Nolan an excuse, firstly, to avoid more generally reckoning with the way the 1950s government establishment turned on Oppenheimer and his ilk as part of the general Red Scare moment, and also to not otherwise devote his copious running time to offering a more in-depth portrait of the Los Alamos scene and its players. The startling roster of familiar and talented actors trudges by in blink-and-miss parts, names out of scientific legend like Heisenberg and Bohr and Fermi (Danny Deferrari) and Einstein, and other, less famous but historical interesting personages like Lilli Hornig (Olivia Thirlby) and J. Ernest Wilkins Jr (Ronald Auguste), filling out the margins and given one or two lines of dialogue.
At least one of these slightly bewildering semi-cameos proves germane: Rami Malek as David Hill, one of Fermi’s colleagues glimpsed hovering wordlessly around Fermi when he shows Oppenheimer his atomic pile and later when he tries to get him to sign a petition against the bomb’s use. This proves to be another cheap suspense-generating device, as Hill’s name is mentioned because of that context as a likely witness for Strauss’s benefit during his confirmation hearing, only for Hill to testify with brutal directness about how the scientific community came to despise Strauss for his vindictiveness: we know it’s serious when Freddy Mercury comes to the rescue. Another use Nolan has for the emphasis on Strauss’s plotting and Oppenheimer’s masochism is to avoid engaging too deeply with the protagonist’s psychological reaction to his accomplishment and new discovery of moral terror, a burden indeed for a man who previously looked upon his own brilliance and fascination with the most elusive textures of existence as both equally benign. Surely Oppenheimer must have been in a unique position as the man who feels a touch of the godlike in his act of creation, an emotion implicit in his legendary private quoting of the Bhagavad-Gita when the Trinity bomb was ignited, but which saw him rather shrink back from that horizon, his humanity instead forced as new truth upon him.
But as with Dunkirk’s fussed-over recreations of a historical moment defined by chaotically unmoored humanity, Nolan works around having to engage convincingly with any sense of milieu: only men in suits standing around hashing out big issues interests him as focal points for his fast, fleeting exposition. To be fair, Nolan tries to stretch the limits of his usual veneer of clipped, chic, slightly abstracted imagery with some expressive risks – indeed, arguably the best, or at least the most arresting moments in the film spring from this. The first comes when Oppenheimer, trying to deliver a victorious speech to the Los Alamos crew after the Hiroshima bombing, starts imagining in the results of the bombing as impacting upon the people around him – brilliant light scorching the skin from a young woman’s face, the cheers of the crowd becoming Jovian thunder ringing in his ears, and everyone present vanishing as if scorched from existence. The second is a similar but far more intimate moment of conjured envisioning, as Oppenheimer is forced to speak about his sporadic affair with Tetlock in front of Kitty to the security tribunal, and the image of Tetlock welded naked to his lap momentarily fills everyone’s mind. Both of these moments wield flashes of the hallucinatory to tray and convey the headspace of the characters, with the former particularly vital given the earlier musings upon the gap between theory and reality: Oppenheimer has more than a little notion of what exactly an atomic bomb going off over a city entails, and he can apply that to his surrounds with a sense of horror, but still only abstractly, an anxious clawing at the mask of things.
Trouble is, one could accuse both of these moments as substituting for dealing more directly with important aspects of the story Nolan is supposedly telling, and highlight something tentative and pretentious in Nolan. He won’t get too violent, too horrible, in conveying Oppenheimer’s imagining of nuclear extermination, lest it violate his aesthetic poise and censorship rating. He drops in the vision of Tetlock screwing Oppenheimer as an adjunct to a more blatantly obvious moment when Oppenheimer is seen as sitting naked before the board during their grilling: get it?! The nudity can be described with that most embarrassing of critical words, “tasteful.” Despite quickly sketching out the free-and-easy quasi-bohemian climes the Oppenheimers met in and belonged to, the film goes out of its way to define them in more traditional, mass audience morality-friendly ways. Nolan nods to Oppenheimer’s louche sex life, which extended to carrying on his affair with the spiky Tetlock after marrying Kitty. That led to him being briefly devastated when she kills herself some time after he breaks off with her, a shock Nolan portrays Kitty as forcefully pulling him out of. Oppenheimer will be punished one way or another for his affairs, and despite the fact that Kitty’s first connection with Oppenheimer is at least nominally adulterous, nonetheless she will be defined as the suffering partner.
Nolan goes out of his way to convince that Kitty is nonetheless a tough and loyal customer watching out for her husband’s back, reacting with blistering anger when she finds her husband still shook Teller’s hand after his testimony to the review board, and alone out of all their friends easily resists and outmanoeuvres Robb. Towards the end, Kitty gets a dose of revenge when she refuses to shake Teller’s hand when everyone’s playing hunky-dory again as Oppenheimer gets a medal from Lyndon Johnson. All well and good, but despite this attempt to portray her vitality, Kitty is actually, barely in the movie, the hymns to her hard-nosed practicality only present as a sidelong affectations: the rhythms and meaning of their relationship remains out of focus. One of the film’s more interesting sidelong moments explores the choice of the Oppenheimers to get Chevalier to look after their infant child as they find they just don’t have the stuff of being parents in them at that point in their lives, a scene that sees Nolan avoiding the usual with surprising felicity.
Meanwhile, Nolan’s emphasis on the distance between the experience of building the atomic bomb and the use of it is an approach that actually makes sense as an extension of the theory-vs-reality disparity that hangs over the enterprise, and with the actual devastation of the blast only recorded for the scientists via documentary footage. Much of the controversy around the film, such as it is, has revolved around the avoidance of showing the atomic bombs exploding, most of it coming from a quarter demanding a sort of atomic blast porn to ensure everyone watching all this knows that, yeah, not cool. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are events that will likely never, and should never, cease to be a topic of argument, standing as they as the most pivotal moments of modern history, when the potential to annihilate our own species and every other suddenly became possible. It exists on a faultline of all moral question, a dark ritual act that cruelly but decisively ended one war and opened the gates to the perpetual fear of another. Most discussions of the bomb want to invoke one, specific viewpoint on its meaning, where Nolan seems to obey Oppenheimer’s own ambivalence: my own problem is that film only investigates that ambivalence in the most skimmed and superficial manner, and nobody ever gets down and dirty in their arguments.
Despite this being a film about extremely intelligent and articulate people, Nolan resists engaging the material on that level. That the scientists who built the bomb, many of them Jewish, did so in a sense of frantic rivalry with the Nazis and an eye to it being used on them, only to find it then used on Japan, is a point raised in Oppenheimer, although again discussed in less depth than in Fat Man and Little Boy, and it raises its own questions: was it better to drop the atomic bomb on German city than a Japanese? Is there a presumption of asymmetry in culpability there – say, the Holocaust versus Imperial Japan’s genocidal rampages in China and treatment of slave labour and POWs, leaving out the question of actually invading Japan? David S. Ward’s excellent 1995 TV movie Truman depicted that President’s weighing of the bomb’s use with one of his friends with a level of attentive seriousness, whereas Nolan only engages with the disparity between Truman and Oppenheimer in an odd scene where the scientist visits the President (Gary Oldman, in one of the film’s more stunt-like bits of casting), only to be quickly shuffled off again when he admits his troubled conscience, with Truman calling him a crybaby behind his back: Truman, like Tibbets, picked his side (for an interesting flipside to all this, I recommend Kihachi Okamoto’s Japan’s Longest Day, 1967, a film that depicts the crucial moment when those shocked out of all patriotic daydreams by the bombings looked on beggared by the fanatics who remain unyielding and eventually choose self-immolation over surrender). And, well, perhaps today the thought of nuclear apocalypse now has some flavour of romanticism compared to being slowly starved and parboiled by global warming.
Nolan feels for Oppenheimer because his own movies often reflect on the ambiguities of heroism, but I’ve often wondered if he has any real idea of the concept, any more than he grasps the nature of terrorism. Nolan’s perspective on sociopolitics has practically inflected an entire era now – such lines from The Dark Knight have sunk into the consciousness of the generation that’s come of age on his movies, and become maxims: oh, how many times people who don’t want to engage with geopolitics have recited that “Some people just want to watch the world burn” line from The Dark Knight in the past 15 years, or that aforementioned “live long enough to become the villain” bit, whilst The Dark Knight Rises (2012) raised the spectacle of the French Revolution redux but copped out of engaging with the political spectres he dredged up. Oppenheimer certainly enlarges upon elements of those films’ concept of strife and terror, but Nolan can’t wheedle his way out of the moral problem he sets himself like he did with the Joker’s bombs. Nolan instead notes Oppenheimer’s opinion that the mere existence of the bomb can be a way of enforcing peace, the notion of nuclear deterrence held in perpetual anxiety by many but also, thus far, one that has arguably had some truth to it: the reality of nuclear weapons undoubtedly helped crank the Cold War to its most perverse and nauseating heights, but also can be argued to have prevented its boilover – a motivating idea ironically shared not just by Oppenheimer in inventing the bomb but by some people who passed on nuclear secrets to the Soviets. The best we get by way of musing on such questions is Oppenheimer mumbling something about hearing Japan was an enemy more or less defeated already. That said, Nolan devotes a chunk of time to depicting Oppenheimer and others arguing the cases for and against the dropping of the bomb with Henry Stimson (James Remar), a scene that tries to fairly encompass the apocalyptic violence already wrought and the politicking involved, including the desire to have tested the bomb by the time of the Potsdam Conference so Truman can warn, and perhaps intimidate, the other Allies with news of the bomb’s imminent tactical use.
Back on the more immediate level, Nolan’s foregrounding of conceptualism in his movies – by which I mean they’re all dominated by some overt gimmick, or concert of gimmicks, based in some scientific or storytelling conceit both within and without the narrative, with perhaps the careful rhyming of the backwards-roving plot and protagonist’s amnesia in Memento is still his most overt example – wields an apparently powerful appeal to an audience reared in an age of being wowed and herded by the products of algorithms. That’s the name he gave to the time-hacking weapon of mass destruction in Tenet perhaps with just that irony in focus, given that film played in large part as Nolan’s sarcastic self-parody under the guise of servicing his brand, with Robert Pattinson’s second-string hero essentially a version of his creator, airily coming up with ideas like using a plane crash to break open a safe. With Oppenheimer the driving concept is more obvious: to play the entire film as a political thriller and dotted with sleight-of-hand flourishes of dramatic emphasis, like the reveal of Malek’s Hill as the man who save the day. And, dare I say it, Nolan’s choice there paid dividends in box office success, as he did succeed in selling the story of a nuclear physicist who died over fifty years ago to a mass audience. He even, in his way, makes Oppenheimer into a sort of superhero: the first time he dons his signature grey suit and flat-crowned hat, after being advised to lose the army uniform Groves makes him wear, is the film’s equivalent of Batman appearing in costume for the first time. There might be some detectable sarcasm in this – some onlookers have taken the film in part to be Nolan’s mea culpa over his role in sparking the superhero movie frenzy, but in this aspect I felt the similarity feels more sourced in a similar sense of a heroic identity being constructed, again with a sense of spectacle as weapon.
The excellence of the film’s cast goes a long way towards making up the dramatic shortcomings. Murphy’s been an actor awaiting his true moment in the sun since his startling emergence in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast On Pluto (2004), although his first work with Nolan, Batman Begins (2005), seemed to stymie his chances as a leading man through playing a fey and creepy villains. He’s entirely convincing recreating Oppenheimer’s burr and mannerisms, easily holding the film together playing a difficult role that doesn’t really have any major cathartic moments and where Nolan never really finds a key to the character, leaving Murphy to instead play like shivering wavelengths on an oscilloscope. Because the film is so utterly determined to keep lunging forward that scarcely any character registers as more than a basic trait, the specifics of the casting mean a lot, and Nolan proves his canniness at that tactic for the most part: Hartnett, for instance, is intriguing playing the kind of role I’d never have expected to see him in, and Safdie, who’s rapidly proving one of the most interesting actors of the age as well as a fine filmmaker, expertly registers Teller’s glum, singleminded gravitas in an almost comical tangent from Oppenheimer’s charismatic zeal. Pugh does a remarkable amount with very little, registering the kind of personality who simultaneously pushes away those who gets close – tossing out Oppenheimer’s gifts of flowers with irritable contempt – but also finds peculiar ways to bind their fates to hers, whilst Blunt, poorly served as she is by the movie, bends it about her regardless. Only Damon felt a bit awkwardly cast to me, making Groves seem like another of Damon’s customary awkward everymen. Downey’s performance as Strauss is well-pitched in the shows of paranoid rage under the surface cool, but I couldn’t separate it from the film’s facetious use of him.
The build-up to the testing of the Trinity bomb and its detonation could well count on many levels as the ultimate Nolan sequence. It’s delivered as an urgent running montage with Göransson’s music ratcheting up the arpeggios, in what has officially become the official movie music for suggesting intellectual and cultural import and life-on-earth surveys, as if the coils of music are the streams of water and thought driving the turbines of human thought and spirit, etc. Nolan’s filmmaking here actually feels nimble and attentive in ways it’s never been before, rounding up such vignettes that feel absolutely true in their undertones of eccentricity, like Teller slathering himself with sunscreen until he resembles some Lynchian grotesque leering at the blast, and Richard Feynman (Jack Quaid) trusting in his car windshield to shield him from the UV. The bomb goes off and Nolan wrings it for every morsel of epic awe and menace he can, Oppenheimer with his goggles on looking like a budding aviator, still clinging to the Earth but about to be flung into space in mind if not body, all sound cutting out as the explosion climbs and the fire boils in the long, floating moment before the shockwave arrives. It’s a great unit of filmmaking for the most part, even if Nolan’s much-hyped practical effects doesn’t really capture the texture of the real Trinity photos. Joffé in Fat Man and Little Boy might well have been cannier in his handling, only showing the reflection of the blast in Oppenheimer’s goggles, instead registering the infernal power and impact on the scientist.
Hard as it is to believe, Oppenheimer otherwise actually made me pine for the days when somebody like Stone actually had a chance of making this kind of unwieldy, expensive modern historical epic, and to which Nolan pays a certain amount of emulation and tribute: Stone, a far messier filmmaker than Nolan and often deeply aggravating as an artist, nonetheless always came at his subjects with a deeply felt and sensed perspective, a feeling for the immediacy of cause and consequence and the furore of personality engaged with larger reality. Even if you never bought into the conspiracy theories in J.F.K., the film nonetheless articulated something far more nebulous but also urgent, as a spiritual portrait of the craziness that both caused the President’s death and became epidemic after it, and the sense Stone had that something went badly spiritually wrong with his country in that time and expressed itself in destroying leaders and fighting vicious, Sisyphean wars. Nolan, by contrast, doesn’t seem to think much of anything beyond the well-trodden – the way the film zeroes in on Clarke’s Robb grilling Oppenheimer, demanding a clear-cut response from him over matters that roil and churn within, eventually proves not Nolan’s stand-in trying to wring some truth from his subject but instead the reverse, a confession of bewilderment before all such matters. It’s very tempting for me to say that Oppenheimer is the ideal film to represent Nolan’s career and the current age in popular culture – detail without depth, aesthetic without art, context without meaning. And yet it’s trying ever so hard to do more, give more. It’s Nolan’s most controlled film to date and perhaps his best altogether, but it’s also one that ultimately demonstrates why I, like Teller with Oppenheimer, would just rather see someone else in his position.
Director: Greta Gerwig Screenwriters: Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig
By Roderick Heath
Future cineastes and cultural scholars – and everyone else in a year’s time – might need to be told just exactly what the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon was, so much like Helen Mirren’s dulcet-toned narrator as sported by Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, I will explain in brief. Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, two big-budget, high-profile films were scheduled for release on the same day in A.D. 2023. Such was the stark schism of the opposition – one, so advertising made clear, a bright, brash take on a very girly property, the other an epic exploration of really serious history stuff directed by millennial males’ anointed god-king auteur – that it formed a perfect diptych of pop cultural stances, aesthetics, and audiences. This became, as so many things do these days, a topic of internet fun, and this in turn evolved into a semi-accidental viral marketing campaign, revolving around the way many potential viewers refused to choose between them, and instead went to see both. The result was propitious for the box office, after a dismal season for both audiences and Hollywood studios whose liberal servings of burned-out franchises and genres met only general apathy. Barbie and Oppenheimer were both big hits, although as to be expected the former proved by far the bigger. You can’t argue with success, as the old saying goes – and yet the very existence of art criticism as an intellectual process is predicated around doing just that – and Barbie’s success might preclude contemplating just what it succeeds at: the film obviously hit home, so what’s the problem?
Personally, I felt it beholden on me to sit out such a phenomenon as the “Barbenheimer” craze, both on general principle, because it was just goddamn embarrassing, and given my lack of great interest in either movie, although I knew well I’d get around to both eventually. So, finally I watched Barbie, and whilst it’s undeniably been a pop cultural phenomenon, what a peculiar one it is. Firstly, there’s the amusing and slightly bewildering fact that one of the biggest financial successes of recent times has been made by Greta Gerwig, the one-time muse of mumblecore, in writing collaboration with her romantic and professional partner Noah Baumbach. To be fair, their last behind-the-camera collaboration, the Baumbach-directed, Gerwig-written Mistress America (2015), is for me by far the best work either has done – indeed, the only time I’ve been able to stomach Baumbach at all. Gerwig debuted as director with 2017’s Lady Bird, and followed it with 2019’s Little Women, both swiftly lauded by a movie culture urgently hungry for an American female director to celebrate, particularly one who, despite her roots in a fastidiously quirky and anti-populist wing of independent film, emerged with a desire to make films with largesse of style and feeling befitting mainstream appeal whilst retaining an artist’s finesse. Lady Bird was a well-done if familiar portrait of a teenaged girl blessed with an outsized if not unjustified conviction of her own anointed destiny, the second a revisionist-tinged take on the ever-popular Louisa May Alcott novel.
The connection between Gerwig’s script for Mistress America and her two films as director was a focus on energetic, self-willed young women with creative spark and a determination to make something of it rather than get sucked down into the vortex of petty relationships. In Lady Bird and Little Women, the price paid for indulging such vision was a painful realisation of childhood’s end and the opening gateway of real adult difficulty, where nobody else gives much of a damn about your talent or ambition, and indeed some might well take delight in destroying them out of spite in the eternal snooker match of individual will and ego – a match that so often feels, at least as it’s often framed, indivisible from male-female relations. Barbie essentially takes up these fundamental concerns too, even as it seems to swap out the human focus of the indie bildungsroman and the classic literary adaptation for a cross-pollinating marketing event and corporate synergy spectacle. The doll known as Barbie was released 1959, the creation of Ruth Handler, whose husband was an executive at the toy company Mattel. Although hardly the first adult female doll created and marketed – Handler found a model for her idea in the German “Bild Lilli” – Barbie nonetheless hit a bullseye with a changing culture in offering girls a figure to project adult roles onto, and their own perception of themselves in those roles, via a fantasy extrapolation of a mid-20th century Californian lifestyle ideal, where the women are tall and glossy, the cars shiny and fast, the houses open-plan, and the men all surf.
Gerwig’s Barbie mythologises this advent in broadly satirical terms at the outset by enacting Barbie’s first appearance as a lampoon of the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and narrated by Mirren. Barbie, as personified by Margot Robbie, takes the place of the Black Monolith and a collection of girls, dressed like Depression-era waifs, joyously embrace the new doll and savagely smash their old, childlike dolls. A broadly amusing opening that nonetheless set my teeth on edge, as Gerwig leans on possibly the most over-used satirical reference point in modern culture, already done to death in a few hundred different ways, and yet has still been lauded by much of the commentariat at the product of a fresh vision. The most interesting and disconcerting thing about the way Gerwig and Baumbach take on their task, which, in their own terms, can be happily seen in Schrodinger-esque terms simultaneously as a sell-out and a heroic grasp at connection with the largest audience deserved and possible. They have not made Barbie the story of the character represented by the dolls: what single character could conflate the legion that is Barbie? Instead, the film is a study of the idea of Barbie, its place in the modern psyche and the complexity of her legacy. Later in the film Handler herself, or rather her inhabiting spirit as personified by Rhea Perlman, is introduced as a sensei for her creation as she faces evolution.
Broadly it can be said the story’s chief objective is to put Barbie as both heroine and concept through all the tortures of cultural doubt before re-enshrining her as that vital expression of modern femininity. Granted, there was inherent difficulty in taking on Barbie, which required some sort of imaginative and conceptual frame being applied to her. Barbie has long had a fictional biography in which certain elements are set despite all the varieties of her marketed over the intervening 60-plus years: her full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts, and her on-again-off-again boyfriend has been Kenneth Sean ‘Ken’ Carson (there was a brief interregnum in the early 2010s when she was paired with an Aussie surfer named Blaine). But Barbie isn’t a figurine that comes armed with some awesome sci-fi or fantasy backstory like the Transformers or He-Man or the panoply of Star Wars action figures I grew up with. In actual function, Barbie is a tabula rasa of projection, identified by her interchangeable identity, persona expressed through lifestyle accessorising. When I was but a lad, Barbie was a yucky girly thing, of course, but also intrigued me. Barbie was so multitudinous, so free, whereas, say, the Transformers were designated, even trapped by their appointed roles and guises. Barbie the film meditates on the double-edged sword that is this scope, seeing that very endless possibility as also a desert of actuality. In terms of modern feminist iconography, Barbie is a taunting figure, at once integral and vilified, the perfect expression of one version of its ideals and the Judas goat of others.
Gerwig casts Robbie as Barbie, a piece of casting so obvious it seems predestined – Robbie has not just the ideal looks but the right cleverness as a performer to simultaneously capture the gleam of beatific self-containment in Barbie’s smile and eyes and the shimmer of panic Gerwig seeks. The film jumps off from similar precepts to many recent movies dealing with porous boundaries between the real and imagined. Close kin is Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s The LEGO Movie (2016), to which Barbie can indeed be taken as a kind of franchise extension – the presence of Will Ferrell in both as closer to a mascot than a comedy actor highlights the connection – in that it takes the messiness of commercial character canons as not something to be glossed over but a source of merriment in and of itself, in an age when arguments over canons are the stuff of both endless fan complaint and urgent intellectual contention. There are nods to discontinued or barely remembered brand offshoots, realised with stunt casting: director Emerald Fennell is glimpsed as Midge, a short-lived pregnant doll marketed by Mattel, and Michael Cera, exiled for some time now as a semi-star whom audiences liked but couldn’t find a niche as a performer, plays Allan, the one non-Ken male in Barbieland (who, as is incidentally noted in the end credits in a manner that’s funnier than anything the actual movie does with him, was featured in vintage advertising starkly and questionably as “Ken’s friend.”) Oh, and Barbieland? Well, it subsists in a sort of Platonic void connected to the Real World in a nebulous way, with travelling between the two requiring a multi-stage, ritualistic commute involving driving and then rollerblading.
Barbieland is the product of the Real World’s collective consciousness, willed into existence and reacting to pressures from the Real World in a barometric manner. Barbies who have been played with too much or in a perverse and destructive manner, represented specifically by “Weird Barbie” (Kate McKinnon), show the wear and tear inflicted by their owners. Robbie specifically plays “Stereotypical Barbie,” blonde and statuesque, the original gangsta, what she herself describes as “the Barbie you think of when someone says ‘Think of a Barbie’” (notwithstanding that a black-haired Barbie was released simultaneous to the blonde one at the beginning; popular proclivity decided which was the most desired). After the 2001 riff, the film segues into an amusingly campy-jaunty depiction of Barbie awakening in her Dream House, waving to all her fellow Barbies, who are actualisations of the many variants put out by Mattel. They all reside in their similar Dream Houses which have no walls and go through the motions of preparing for the day, including showers with no actual water and breakfast with no actual food. The day-glo sprawl is scored with an upbeat anthem by costar Issa Rae, who also plays President Barbie. The Barbies fill every role of government and society, whilst the populace of Kens all dedicate themselves to the mysterious profession referred to as “Beach” – that is, well, hanging out on the beach and occasionally taking the risk of venturing into the plastic surf.
Barbie is at its best here in conjuring a cartoonish, wryly question-deflecting extrapolation of the existence of Barbieland as sustained by the average 7-year-old girl’s imaginative impositions on her dolls, and the fantasy concept of adult life realised through that playing. Far from representing a total rejection of maternal instinct in girls, Barbie and her ilk allow a simultaneous existence as mother and child, constructor of identity and construction, and recognition of how that process is essentially one of a lifetime. The film of course puckishly defies viewers to make any kind of logical sense out of the relationship between Barbieland and reality (if Stereotypical Barbie is perverted by a real-world owner, does that turn her into Weird Barbie? Or does she join with Weird Barbie in a kind of gestalt? Does a new Stereotypical Barbie arise to take her place like a pod person?…okay Rod, stop. Leave it to whichever YouTuber is dedicating themselves to that sort of pondering). But one subtly pervasive problem with Barbie also quickly emerges as the classical Ken (Ryan Gosling), Stereotypical Barbie’s sort-of boyfriend, confronts one of his rival variants (Simu Liu), and the two provoke each-other into having a “beach-off,” repeating the joke a half a dozen times to make sure we catch the likeness to “beat off.” This signals the level on which many of the actual, proper jokes in the film will be pitched on, as well as also evincing its sarcastically reductive take on the Kens as representative boy-men who are really only happy when playing with themselves.
Mirren’s narration explicitly sums up Gosling-Ken in one voiceover line, noting that he “only has a great day when Barbie looks at him.” The irony of this element of Barbie proves to not be an aside but central to the movie’s whole proposal. In Barbieworld the usual pattern of classical masculine and feminine relations – or at least the rhetorical, sentimental, Victorian version thereof as still seems to persist in the mind of the imagined collective grandmothers of today’s women (and Mike Pence) – are inverted. The Kens are essentially pretty, idle objects who only have identity in relation to the Barbies. That’s always been pretty true of the doll line, Ken a perpetually present but emasculated (notwithstanding his infamous lack of anatomy) adjunct to the mystique of Barbie, one whose fluctuations of identity and relevance to her has changed according to the whim of the moment’s messaging. That pattern is continued here when the climax denies any kind of romantic liaison for the pair. The film might have had a certain amount of sport with the inversion whilst also commenting ironically on it, whilst portraying a stumble towards a more egalitarian world in a wryly inverted portrait of modern gender politics. And yet the actual social make-up of Barbieland is kept entirely vague, despite the latter part of the plot hinging on the Kens’ efforts to change its constitution to enshrine male power whilst never defining its version of female power. There’s an odd kind of defensive hypocrisy hiding in here, in a film that might well argue it’s not worth interrogating in that manner, which then raises the question on why it feels the need to comment on such things at all if it doesn’t want to be taken seriously on them.
Meanwhile life in Barbieland proceeds through an endless roundelay of joyous frivolity and wishful thinking, evenings usually capped by dance parties and girls’ nights that inevitably see Ken chagrined to be urged on homeward after failing to woo Barbie. However, Stereotypical Barbie, who I will just call Barbie henceforth, who has already started to mysteriously suffer her feet suddenly refusing to conform to their usual, tippy-toed, high-heel-ready posture, starts randomly expressing morbid thoughts whilst burning up the dance floor. This moment instantly became an online meme, a remarkable feat for a film that is itself almost entirely comprised of harvested memes. This moment for instance replicates a brand of hipster humour already pretty familiar in pop culture. Barbie’s biggest rival at the 2023 box office thus far, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, had a cute cartoon character locked in a prison uttering statements of morbid and depressive import to the chagrin of fellow captives. Granted, modern Hollywood is usually at a long, long lag behind contemporary pop culture mutations, which can literally wax and wane in the space of days, even hours thanks to online life, which means that trying to chase those trends, whilst programmed deep in Hollywood’s DNA, is just about always a losing proposition. Unless, like Barbie, you try to become the Point of Singularity for memes. Almost all of the film’s jokes and flourishes of social commentary depend on some variety instant assimilation factor that’s key to the way memes work. A rhetorical set-piece comes when Gloria goes off in a rant about the impossibility of being a woman, a speech that’s supposed to have the power of radicalising the Barbies but feels like it was accumulated with an AI filter. It reminded me of when I tapped out of Charlie’s Angels (2019), when the film deployed a commonly shared joke on Facebook involving women’s supposed slavish love of cheese.
Anyway: Barbie’s disconcerted new awareness of mortality, dysmorphia, and indulgence of morbid trains of thought drives her into a crisis. She consults with a coterie of fellow Barbies, including President Barbie (Rae), Lawyer Barbie (Sharon Rooney), Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), and Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), and they direct her to Weird Barbie. Weird Barbie, who has a bad haircut and texta scrawl on her face and is usually to be found with legs perpetually splayed in the splits, explains what’s going down: Barbie is being affected by being played with in an unusual fashion by someone in the Real World. Barbie resolves to travel there and contact whoever this person is, and Gosling-Ken sneaks into the boot of her car to tag along. Going through the ritual process of commuting, Barbie and Ken arrive on Venice Beach, where Barbie immediately encounters sexism, being leered at and pawed by various jerky men, including some construction workers who nonetheless prove bewildered and acquiescent when she admits to lacking private parts, whilst Ken boasts of having “all the genitalia.” Both are arrested repeatedly for their odd behaviour and try to adopt a low profile by changing clothes – although the garish new outfits they put on, including Barbie’s hot pink cowgirl outfit, fail badly at the job.
Barbie manages, by forcing herself to settle down and mind-meld with the psyche influencing her, to zero in on a teenaged girl named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), daughter of Gloria (America Ferrera), who works at Mattel’s corporate headquarters, manning a desk that guards the boardroom. When Barbie tracks Sasha to her high school and introduces herself, expecting to immediately set everything in the girl’s mind to rights, Sasha, whilst assuming “Barbie” is some nut, then unleashes a spray of invective against the entire concept and function of her character, concluding with that most would-be devastating of punch-lines: calling her a fascist. The Mattel executives, headed by a gruff but hapless CEO (Ferrell), learn of the arrival of the two dolls and go on the alert, setting out to recapture them and restore them to the fictional realm before, well, something happens. Meanwhile Ken, startled when someone gives him a show of casual respect, soon realises the inverted status he possesses in the Real World. He immediately resolves to nab himself a job that suits his newfound sense of self-importance, only to find that he can’t simply become a doctor or even a lifeguard – the closest thing to Beach he can find – without some sort of qualifications. So, he decides instead to learn all he can about patriarchy and take it to Barbieland, where he can indulge its assumed pleasures without any of its commensurate demands.
Barbie is interestingly confused when it comes to its take on patriarchy, a buzzword it leans on with all the relentlessness of a 14-year-old blogger. It’s something Gerwig and Baumbach simultaneously portray as so intoxicating that it readily subsumes Barbieland, and as a paradigm rooted in things that still must be earned and strived for, which somewhat ironically contrasts the easy-peasy gleam of fantasy achievement in Barbieland. Certainly interesting territory to dig into, but also something Barbie shies away from, instead turning towards a lampoon of blokey obsessions as long parsed by folks on Twitt– er, X: the film crams in jokes about guys who love Pavement and The Godfather and will explain them at length. Of course, I’m not the target audience for all this (then again I don’t particularly like the idea of target audiences; a work of art should theoretically be capable of holding anyone) and indeed I might well be the target, period: am I not an opinionated guy who likes over-explaining things on the internet? But I was less aggravated by the tenor of all this then I was by the obviousness of it, the meme-ness of it. And the problem indeed that keeps prodding me about Barbie and its overall intellectual project, if it isn’t gilding the lily on a biblical scale to call it that, is that it proposes to make a movie about a beloved feminine figure, and makes her story about men. Not simply that, given the plethora of directions it might have taken, it chose to be driven by the clash between the girly things and boy stuff, but in that it makes Barbie herself, and by extension Robbie in playing the role, an inert, hapless, buffeted figure. Barbie gives nothing to the Real World as it’s portrayed, not even getting a chance to spice up the lives of the poor, Beach-less proles of reality. Her greatest dramatic feat is to start crying when she connects with Sasha in the Real World.
Meanwhile the movie farms out all the fun stuff to Gosling. He gets the song and dance numbers, the absurdly intense and inchoate emotions to play, the excitably yammered meditations on the things that stir his fantasies and provoke him to enact them. Certainly there’s a variety of female gazing apparent here, delighting in Gosling and the other actors playing Kens parading themselves in self-consciously hot-silly play. Barbie does by the end come up with a plan to reconquer her fiefdom, but only in a way that exemplifies a particular sexist cliché – women manipulate men through stirring their jealousy and playing upon their emotions, a trap that prove as defenceless before as the women of Barbieland were to their newly, bullishly macho ways. The film does strain to say something interesting about the kind of ultra-macho reflexes of a certain coterie of modern young men as represented by Gosling-Ken in angrily and frustratedly seeking a version of masculinity that rejects need for female attention and yet down deep inside actually represents another hoped-for way of gaining that attention. But to follow the same logic, the movie’s messaging in regards to this about the status of women actually suggests that unless they’re supervising themselves with a rule of rigid iron, women are fatally predisposed to being willingly dominated by men, which is surely not what was intended. Oh, no, wait the movie defines them as “brainwashed” by means unknown. Does any idea let loose in Barbieland just automatically persuade everyone there?
The story of my reaction to Barbie is bound up with the way it utilises two songs – Matchbox 20’s “Push” and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.” The inclusion of the latter song was practically inevitable despite Mattel’s well-known aversion to the song. The company sued the Scandinavian dance-pop band over it back when, officially for infringing their copyright, but in truth more for their insidiously catchy defloration of the doll’s mystique. Aqua’s song plays up the sex object aspect of the doll’s allure, defining her as a “blonde bimbo girl in a fantasy world” with whom one can “touch me hair, undress me everywhere…you can touch, you can play, you can say I’m always yours.” The inspiration for the song came for the band when its members visited an exhibition on camp culture, and they came up with an irrepressibly festive and horny song for the irrepressibly festive and horny late 1990s. The idea that a Barbie movie could come out in 2023 and not include the song would strike most audience members as entirely mystifying if not actively, outrageously disappointing. So the film, as it so often does, has its cake and eats it, sidestepping potential dissonance by including a sampled version of the song by with new, rapped lyrics by Rae.
I can sympathise with the filmmakers and their brand-protecting backers to a degree with this: it might seem a little incoherent to include a song that makes such sport of the character you’re trying to celebrate in a manner that can be readily sold to children, and cuts against the grain of the whole idea that Barbie is more than just a dubious depiction of pulchritude. Trouble is, though, the song is cleverer and more multileveled than the film. In part that’s thanks to singer Lene Nystrøm’s phrasing, which invests a note of pathos to the character: her Barbie is at once appealing and forlorn, alternatively a minxy, celebratory figure and a construction offering thrills she knows and we know are cheap, transitory, illusory, a simulacrum accepted on the path to actually finding a true vessel of desire. This note gives way to the back and forth of her lyrics with fellow vocalist René Dif as the song’s take on Ken, investing it with both its signature call-and-response delight in coupling and a strong hint of role-playing: the song’s Ken and Barbie are adults projecting their mature sexuality onto their childhood avatars.
“Push”, on the other hand, seems like an entirely different kind of musical product, as a rock song from the same period with that genre’s more familiar masculine voice, with singer Rob Thomas voicing the story of an insecure and troubled young man who admits to the dark urge to bully and dominate his lover, recognising the forbidden emotional thrill of asserting power over another. Gerwig uses the song in a peculiar manner, at once sarcastic but also taking the song’s meaning in the most literal way: the Kens sing it to expostulate their project directly whilst affecting intimate crooning in a cold satire on the mystique of the male musician and his pliantly mesmerised partner, until Barbie explicitly encourages her fellows to “pretend you’re interested in the song” long enough to get what they want. Granted, there was something highly calculated about Matchbox 20’s version, affecting raw and edgy expression of verboten feeling whilst maintaining a veneer of slickness in sound and song structuring that made them ideal radio fodder at a time when rock was struggling to hold onto that niche. Possibly too it has some personal meaning for Gerwig – perhaps she associates with some douchey ex, or just annoys her.
But the film’s use of the song has the intrinsic effect of redefining the song in a particularly detestable way, robbing it of any stature in acknowledging that real art usually requires pushing against the comfort of polite society to some degree. That’s not uncommon today when the concept of “poptimism” often exalts upbeat messages and aesthetics and decries the cult of transgression as simply giving professional jerks space to mask and justify themselves. Gerwig tries to have it both ways in this regard: Barbie, despite its occasionally sardonic swipes at a poptimist culture duty-bound to dole out positive bromides, is nonetheless a pure product of it, diagnosing the aggression in other styles whilst wielding its own specific wavelength of passive-aggression. Both “Push” and “Barbie Girl” are then both still actually much more subversive than Barbie as pop culture artefacts. Yes, Barbie put me in the position of defending Matchbox 20, and I’ll never forgive it for that.
More immediately, casting Gosling as Ken was a stroke of genius, at least from a commercial angle, and to a degree artistically as well. Gosling is a rare commodity in current film: an intelligent actor, he’s one who affects a baseline persona of blasé cool that does much to make him popular but which he can play with like a master musician, and his attractiveness to the opposite sex is so potent it has long sustained a sort of imaginative universe of its own not unlike Barbieland. A popular series of online memes from the mid-2010s sported images of Gosling with text mixing feminist rhetoric and romantic overtures, in a simultaneous mockery and indulgence of Gosling’s dreamboat appeal and its destabilising effect on female cognisance. Gerwig knows this well, and as well as anchoring the film with a beloved star wittily cast, she accesses this astral plane of meme energy and adds it to the many others the film consists of. Thing is, Gosling-Ken is the film’s motivating character, both protagonist and antagonist. Ninety percent of the film’s humour, story, and general all-round affectation of good vibes depend entirely on Gosling and his capacity to sell the dichotomy at the film’s aesthetic and thematic heart. There’s something bitterly, hilariously apt about a film that sets out to celebrate a female icon instead chiefly rendering itself a vehicle for a male star’s charisma and comic chops through its constant second-guessing and attempts to be ahead of the curve.
And yet Gosling is also miscast. He readily projects his take on Ken’s mix of boyish eagerness and sullenness when he realises he’s been sucking on the hind teat all his existence, and he sports a decent six-pack. But he’s far too cool and cagey a presence to play a character who’s famous as a vacuous placeholder for masculinity in an otherwise gynocratic universe: he doesn’t just let us in on the joke but smothers us with it. Perhaps the ideal Ken would have been an actor of another age, someone like Rock Hudson or Tab Hunter, experts at concealing their actual identities whilst projecting exteriors of igneous fantasy masculinity and just occasionally letting that actual identity show through with a flash of knowing humour and existential panic. I wondered if Channing Tatum, who’s made a career out of deftly exploiting and mocking his external adherence to a stereotype of good-natured, rather dim male sexiness, might have been a more apt modern equivalent.
Meanwhile the film happily indulges a purely liberal-left feminist fantasy, like its depiction of how it thinks justice should work, with women lawyers appealing to women judges and gaining perfect progressive results. Lawyer Barbie deftly hacks apart arguments about corporations having personal rights, defining that as mere plutocracy, and the Judge Barbie (Ana Cruz Kayne) readily agree. If I was feeling particularly cynical – and I am – I might say this beautifully describes the mindset of online life as it relates to politics today, a world where one can engage in a perfect version of political, legal, and social thought where one does not have to contend with a rival perspective, save to take safe-distance swipes at it. The wish-fulfilment aspect of this scene is worn on the sleeve, and the appeal is obvious enough. Feminism – or at least, feminism in the American political paradigm, which is the only kind Hollywood recognises despite its pretences to speaking to the world – is in a rather glum if hardly defeated place following the striking down of Roe vs Wade by the reactionary-packed US Supreme Court, and indeed has been in mounting convulsions ever since Hillary Clinton was beaten by Barack Obama in the identity politics-as-actual politics stakes, let alone when Donald Trump came along. The entire philosophical essence of progressivism is that it’s supposed to, well, progress, so what is called when change is backwards?
I note this because Barbie is a film that wants to be bitingly ironic, under all the froth and pastels, about the relationship between personal fantasy and social reality, whilst falling into its own trap. The film’s plot extends this concept and problem on multiple levels. When Barbie and Ken finally travel to the real world, Barbie is shocked to find that the existence of her role-model universe has not impacted the real one, and in fact the opposite ultimately proves true: the insidious influence of maleness is especially virulent when released in the un-inoculated climes of Barbieland. I could take this as the film’s most inspired satirical tilt at our contemporary tendency to stay within bubbles of curated content and feedback loops of self-approved messaging, and the way it offers a kind of illusory buttress community that too often proves extremely vulnerable. I’m not actually sure if the film is aware of this element, but I’ll still credit it as such. Trouble is, Gerwig communicates all this through the dramatic version of memes – tropes, many of which, like leering, catcalling construction workers, have a rather backdated feel. It’s satire, but it commits one of the worst potential crimes of satire in being essentially reassuring, taking refuge in familiar caricatures of problems and enemies.
Ferrell’s CEO exemplifies the fuzziness: he’s both a variation on Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy persona with his walrus-like pulled-in chin and forced deep voice affecting an imitation of old-school male authority whilst also mouthing contemporary virtue signalling the film takes the mildest of mild whacks at. I couldn’t help but mentally note that the Supreme Court that handed down Roe vs Wade was entirely male and the one that struck down abortion had four women members, but the film’s finale sports a gag where the Kens are promised some kind of low-down judgeship in a kind of mockery of balance, a touch that’s more than a little insufferable, not least because it feels like it’s running away from the film’s supposed theme, that reality doesn’t always work like it does in ideal universes. Barbie proves then an example of what it proposes to critique, the bubble it wants to bust. On a more artistic level, certainly nothing here is comparable to the way Todd Haynes utilised the Barbie mystique for wicked critical ends in his first, best film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), where he used the dolls to act out the biography of the singer’s tragic life whilst reflecting back at media image-making its own hall-of-mirrors tendency to entrap people within ideals. The undervalued sequel to The LEGO Movie, The Second Part (2019), already meditated with more real insight and real bounce on the differences between boy and girl play, the openness of the latter to incorporating different ways of being as represented by different types of toy compared to the ruthlessly genre-and-gender-dividing tendency of boys. One disappointing aspect of Barbie is that despite literally being about toys, it doesn’t actually have any interest in what play is and what it means for kids. Point in fact, Barbie the movie is indifferent to what actual kids will make of it. It’s made instead for a grown-up audience: mother and daughter duos like Sasha and Gloria very likely enjoyed it together, but kids of the proper age age to play with Barbies will likely squint at the screen in a certain amount of perplexity and wonder why does this movie hate Barbie and everything about her?
What should be the true core of the film’s emotional and thematic energy – the relationship of Gloria and Sasha and the way their mutual encounter with Barbie helps them all transform each-other, isn’t just neglected but basically forgotten in the clumsiness of the second half. Sasha is presented as a veritable caricature of an angry, accusatory teen, one who actively disdains her mother, but by movie’s end they’re reconciled because, well, the movie says so. Eventually it emerges that it’s actually Gloria who’s been playing with Sasha’s old Barbie and thus has inflicted her own adult dubiety on Barbie – this making her in essence a stand-in for Gerwig herself. Gloria herself likes sketching new Barbie concepts at work. Later Sasha tells Gloria she’s weird and wild or some crap, but her concepts as put on paper are banal and merely have oddball names attached. At the climax Gloria offers her singular great idea to the Mattel honchos – Ordinary Barbie, an idea the CEO scoffs at until one of his team tells him it will make money based on some obscure bit of number-crunching, a moment that feels again like a bit of self-reference from Gerwig to the movie’s development, but in context feels entirely limp, almost making fun of its own lack of some genuinely inspired and clever way of resolving its plot and ideas, of wrestling with the difficulty of creation.
Stylistically, Barbie leans extremely heavily on aesthetics borrowed from Wes Anderson, with the deliberately flat, almost cartoon-illustration-like visuals in the Barbieland scenes, and stylised, declarative performing a la Whit Stillman, for whom Gerwig did sterling service as an actor back in Damsels In Distress (2011). Touches like Allan opening a can of whoop-ass on some Kens to give Gloria and Sasha time to pull off an escape, only for the action to fade into the inconsequential background, likewise replicate similar touches in knockabout comedy of the last 20 years. As mentioned, Barbie does at least extend Gerwig’s oeuvre coherently, particularly in its loss-of-childhood aspect. Like the vast number of actors-turned-filmmakers, Gerwig had previously displayed a masterful touch with her cast. The best moments of Little Women, like Jo and Laurie dancing up a storm or the alternations of pathos and fury enacted by Jo and Amy, depended on a precise sense of what her performers could achieve, the way their liveliness can infuse a seemingly staid project and shock it with new life, in a manner I found more effective than its more overt attempts to get openly post-modern in its approach to a well-known work of fiction (Alcott’s openness to a different version of marriage for Jo was more transgressive and relevant today than Gerwig’s snobbery about it). Regardless, Barbie doesn’t have the same precision in performance. The alternations of silliness and sourness in the second half in depicting Ken’s campaign often gave me the feeling of a slightly mismatched rhythm, Gosling called upon to deliver chain-lightning quips in a way that often makes them garbled, almost as if the film kind of wants to hurry past them so we won’t think too hard about what’s actually happening.
I could forgive every topic of tetchy kvetching I’ve brought up here if I found Barbie fun and funny often enough to make it all inconsequential. But the aspects of Barbie that are genuinely fun are disposed of pretty early, and the movie goes on for another hour and a half. I found something kept bleeding the humour value out of it, something beyond the way a lot of its gags are borrowed from other sources. Part of the problem is the awkwardness of pacing and staging the humour I’ve noted. The one really good laugh I got came from the “Depression Barbie” ad that plays when Barbie is at her lowest: whilst it is in many ways only the umpteenth variation on the same joke in the film, it came as such a brilliantly deployed moment of stylistic lampooning that it hit the mark, even if it still comes with the codicil that it plays at making fun of the advertising the movie is actually, ultimately merely a very long version of. Gerwig later stages a song-and-dance number for the Kens where they struggle with their identity, pushing through the conflict the Barbies have stirred them to and arriving back at a point of collective reconciliation only to find they’ve been outmanoeuvred in the meantime.
The battle of the Kens on the beach is a gleefully ridiculous spectacle that doesn’t so much embrace campiness as bunk down, file a joint tax return, and buy a house in Malibu with it, even if it’s that modern, scrubbed-clean, Instagram-filter-esque idea of campiness that has no edge of danger or actual sexuality to it. The subsequent musical sequence, with Gosling leading the other Ken actors – their ranks also include the likes of Kingsley Ben-Adir and Ncuti Gatwa – do much to return the movie to its early, cartoonish style, and indeed it makes me wonder why Gerwig didn’t extend the neo-musical conceit. Given that Barbie is about the five millionth recent movie to betray the influence of The Simpsons TV series, I felt the film ought to have patterned itself more overtly on the “Wild Barts Can’t Be Broken” episode with its climactic musical number of clashing social groups and their articulated gripes managed to perfectly dovetail overarching satire and specifics of character. Instead, the film resolves in interminable fashion, rambling on for some fifteen minutes or so once the actual plot has conked out. The Kens have been outwitted by the Barbies, giving way to a long coda where everyone stands around talking about stuff: Ken confesses the insecurities that drove him to his insurrection, Gloria makes her product pitch, and Barbie is visited by the shade of Handler.
All this leads to Barbie choosing humanity, an assimilation Gerwig illustrates with a reel of home movies from members of her cast and crew – another interesting idea rendered fuzzy in effect, in part because there’s no clear connection between these images and what’s supposed to be happening, and because there’s a thematic incoherence in here the film remains blithely indifferent to. Gerwig insists Barbie must become a real woman for no other reason than its need that to be its ending: surely, it implies, being a real woman must in the end be preferable to being a fantasy one. The nature of Barbie’s transition is rammed home in its punchline as Barbie visits a gynaecologist for the first time before a shock cut to black, the filmmaking equivalent of an ain’t-I-naughty smirk. The point here is plain enough: being a real woman is something that revolves around a basic fact of biological structure (notwithstanding trans experience, but let’s not open up that can of worms), and that basic fact is a gift that also comes with responsibility, a notion that resonates again with definite political ramifications. But this point again floats free of the actual story being told, which has stuck up for the ultimate necessity of imagined ideals in contrast to the mess of reality, and Barbie’s stature as a representative ideal, on top of the fact that the film gives no comprehensible reason why she wants to choose reality, which is presented as antithetical to everyone she is and desires to defend.
If I’ve talked more about ideas and artefacts encircling Barbie more than the film itself, well, my justification for this is that’s what the film itself does. As an actual narrative film, Barbie is so thin as to barely exist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – some of the greatest films ever made, particularly the classic musicals Gerwig sometimes channels in her stylisation, basically float like soft and shimmering clouds of ethereal expression. But those film commune with the ethereal; Barbie gropes through it. The trouble is, Barbie wants oh so hard to be about something, but its about-something-ness trumps what it’s actually about, its own narrative and stylistic gestures barely adding up to more than an extended pastiche and a list of thematic bullet points, self-awareness without a self to be aware of. The nominal plot and characters, the emotional and conceptual sinews of the movie – these are helplessly garbled and sporadic, its cumulative expression of meaning contradictory. All of this is churlish on so many levels, I know. For those who just came to get the sugar rush of bright colours, pleasant nostalgia blended with a light spice of ironic awareness, and the sight of the Kens dancing, I’m sure Barbie was and is sufficient. And the very fact it’s provoked so much response from me certainly indicates that what it attempts is interesting, if only that it makes me more aware of just how tired I am of meta play in current pop culture. It highlights a profound void in that culture despite of, and in fact perhaps because of, its constituent, foregrounded conceptualism, its “cleverness.” It wants to be about reality and fantasy, but it resists realness, and whilst it has much to say about the infrastructure of our fantasies, it remains detached from those fantasies, even scornful of them. And finally this leaves a problem that’s both artistic and business-related: this is a toy that can be sold once, and not again.
Director: James Mangold Screenwriters: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp, James Mangold
By Roderick Heath
Here there be spoilers…
Sometimes, like desperate lovers, substance abusers, or obsessive questers, we cineastes know very well we should stay away from certain things, but can’t. Some journeys have been too long, too bound up with the way we think and see and feel. I’ve been an Indiana Jones fan since I was about five years old, when I first sawRaiders of the Lost Ark (1981) in a cinema on a university campus close to where my family lived and where my mother was studying at the time. It was a memorable occasion because I also saw Jaws (1975) on the same bill, and caught lice from some filthy undergraduate. But enough about my formative traumas. Cut to present day. Long after the successful but divisively received fourth instalment, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Long after George Lucas sold his company Lucasfilm and the rights to all his brainchildren to Disney. That sale is long enough ago, the fruit of it so copious in amount if not so much in quality, that it counts as its own epoch now, including five Star Wars films of sharply declining returns, and a grab-bag of TV series. Indiana Jones was the last of their major properties to tap, and the idea of a fifth film featuring everyone’s favourite archaeological swashbuckler likely gained a new lease of life after everyone was surprised at Harrison Ford’s strong turn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). Even that was nearly a decade ago now.
Trouble was, Steven Spielberg eventually abandoned the idea of making the film himself. That was, to be blunt, the actual end of Indiana Jones. First and foremost, of course, the character of Dr Henry ‘Indiana’ Jones Jr and his adventures were inspired by B-movies and matinee serials devoured through a misspent youth. But Indy, as forged by a gang of filmmakers also including Lucas, Philip Kaufman, and Lawrence Kasdan and extended through his sequels, had nonetheless become Spielberg’s fictional avatar and foremost autobiographical figure. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) contained a wry, teeth-gritted portrait of Spielberg’s disintegrating first marriage and also proved an allegory about growing a social and historical conscience. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) offered at its heart an idealised expression of a father and son reunion, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull saw its hero find himself a family man at advancing age. The personal investment in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull only became more blatantly obvious after Spielberg’s more recent The Fabelmans (2022). The way he and Lucas wound their childhoods and their manhoods, their fantasies and their experiences, into their adventurer’s maturation and aging was part of the inimitable texture of those films.
Without their direct creative participation, only two original, authentic elements remain to testify some of the deeper personality persisting with this extension to the series: composer John Williams, still able to forge a rousing score, and Ford himself, who, at age 80, can definitely say it’s both the years and the mileage. Back when Indy first appeared movie screens were pretty starved for old-fashioned heroes. Today there’s any number of other rock-‘em sock’-em action heroes of many creeds and callings riding on his bullwhip’s tail across movie screens. Even in his very specific line of work now there’s Lara Croft and Nathan Drake as heroes springing out the video game world, whilst still owing everything to Indy. But Indy still has a rare stature, a specificity elusive and taunting to the vast swathe of imitators and inheritors, with his trademark outfit and weapons of choice, his amusingly blended traits of rock-ribbed bravado and intellectual curiosity, of toughness and academic quaintness, his general fearlessness and needling weak points, and particularly his romantic streak, all put him at odds with contemporary taste for strictly delineated alphas and betas amongst macho protagonists, or, at the other extreme, the crowded field of physically impervious but utterly neurotic superheroes. In any event, Indy as played by Ford as an officially and undeniably old man has inevitably left many things behind.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny also arrives during a rather brutal season for blockbuster Hollywood cinema, with tired franchises staggering and dropping to their knees out of breath and out of inspiration, and the whole ecosystem of such movies in dismay. A large part of this undoubtedly can be put down to the damage wrought by concessions to the streaming age: when you know you can watch an event movie in your living room a month or even less after it hits movie screens, then it’s not an event movie. The corrosive effect of so little new, real imagination is also pertinent too. Nostalgia, familiarity, branding – all have been worked until the gears have started seizing up. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) signalled an easy way of wringing the drying sponge a little more by unifying diverse strands of franchise history, but it did so in a clever manner and exploited some conceptual conceits open to a sci-fi/fantasy crossbreed. The price paid has been several of these movies quickly working the appeal of seeing some old, beloved faces crash into some new, mildly liked faces into the ground. Digital filmmaking technology has evoked the spectre of big-budget cinema possibly devolving into an endless succession of intellectual properties and their original component players forced to persist forever, like the filmmaking equivalent of the eternal torture box of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.” Quite a few of these recent flailing movies have also been delayed and heavily reshot at exhausting expense in efforts to mollify multiple voices including presumed audience desire, and finish up looking exactly like the fairground chimeras they are. By all reports, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is one of them.
The Dial of Destiny is for its part relatively straightforward in exploiting that new realm by utilising digital de-aging technology to make Ford look once again like his forty-something self, in a lengthy prologue designed to offer the audience, at least for a portion of the new film, the illusion of an Indiana Jones restored to his glory days. At the very peak and end of his glory days, in fact, as the opening unfolds in 1945, just as the Nazi regime he fought so long and so well staggers on its last legs. This choice is at once salutary and annoying, bespeaking as it does the same assumptions by the Disney-backed Lucasfilm regime that made the revived Star Wars films so initially popular and left them so very quickly left without any steam at all. Star Wars is about Rebels versus the Empire, and Indiana Jones is a hero who fights Nazis – not just Nazis in spirit but the actual, literal Third Reich. At least in this opening portion there is a feeling of unfinished business being laid to rest. The object of contest here is the head of the Spear of Destiny, the weapon used to pierce the body of Jesus on the cross, supposedly a genuine relic of interest for Hitler and mentioned in Campbell Black’s novelisation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, giving this element an aspect of deep series lore as well as a pretext for the usual, thunderous action.
Indy is introduced, in the first of many ideas here rather too obviously recycled from the previous entry, held at bay by his enemies and with face hidden under a hood, as he’s dragged into a castle used as a Nazi headquarters. On the track of the spearhead, Indy is accompanied by his rather less formidable partner in this particular mission, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), an Oxford scholar without any adventurer chops but who still gets himself captured because he couldn’t bear the thought of just leaving his friend to his fate. Indy manages to escape, with the help of an allied bomb that plunges through the castle roof, and after various feats of derring-do and deception, boards a train loaded with plundered art and historical relics, commended by the scar-faced Colonel Weber (Thomas Kretschmann) and with physicist and rocket developer Dr Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) also on board. Voller has already noticed something Indy only learns when he gets hold of the spearhead, that it’s a fake. But something else on the train genuinely thrills Voller: a portion of the Antikythera, a device sources hold to have been invented by Archimedes and capable of using mathematical calculation to deduce where fissures in time will appear. Indy frees Basil, who’s been beaten and tortured by Weber, and during a tussle on the train roof Weber is shot by Basil after accidentally nicking Indy with a bullet. Voller, trying to recover the Antikythera device from them, is knocked off the train by a water pipe. Allied bombers knock out the train’s path and Indy and Basil leap to a safe landing in a river.
This sequence is well-done in most respects, with Mangold mimicking Spielberg’s action style to the utmost, but with a few niggling aspects off to a consequential degree, not least of which is that for people who complained about all the CGI in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, well, here’s a scene that seems to be about 95% digitally forged or enhanced. The de-aging for Ford is convincing as long as no specific emotion is required, and noticeably inexpressive otherwise. One of Ford’s great gifts as an action star, the one that helped make Indy so popular, was his ability to draw the audience in and along with Indy’s spasms of pain, rage, astonishment, and fear during the fights and cliffhangers. But I never asked for perfection in that regard. More aggravating is Mangold’s stop-start rhythm, never quite nailing down the uncanny sense of pace and flow that defined what Spielberg can manage at his height, and indeed, whatever else one might think about his tastes as a dramaturge, something Lucas was particularly canny in fostering in works he produced. The filmmakers repeat the same joke several times, of Indy advancing on to the next car of the train to be confronted by the next bunch of oblivious German soldiers, who seem to be deaf to all the gunplay down the hall. The casting is wearyingly obvious, with Mikkelsen, Kretschmann, and Jones playing exactly the same parts they have in other, recent blockbusters. That can be seen as honouring the old Hollywood creed of character actor typecasting, but that’s a blade that cuts two ways, as it also suggests a lack of any interest in fresh thinking.
When it comes to giving The Dial of Destiny some charge of personal meaning, Ford steps up to the plate. As the film moves forward to 1969, where most of the story unfolds, Ford allows us to see his body, creased and saggy and patently that of an old man if still some sign of fine muscle under it all, in a manner that’s surprisingly honest, even raw. Ford is now making a movie about his own aging process even as the CGI gods dangle the possibility of eternal buffness and beauty before him – a more interesting and potent Faustian allegory of the kind this series has long specialised in than anything in the actual script. The film’s official leitmotif is time, opening with the sound of a ticking clock and returning to it as Mangold notes Indy’s apartment in downtown New York. Later Indy is given a clock by his faculty fellows in celebrating his imminent retirement. Oh, and yes, the Antikythera and fissures in time and all that. Indy is out of place in a city now filled with those damn young hippies with their rock music and their long hair, a note Mangold hits in the blandest and most basic fashion as he has Indy bellowing at a neighbour to turn the music he’s blaring out – The Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour,” natch – down, only to be dismissed because everyone’s spending the day partying, as the astronauts from the recent moon landing are being celebrated in a tickertape parade. Indy shuffles through a day of lame-duck suffering, trying to give a lecture to a bunch of students, whose boredom is comically overwrought in comparison to the rapt attention Indy once commanded of his students, particularly the female ones. Was Indy always a bad teacher only rescued by sex appeal? Why are his students taking his class if they’re so uninterested in what he’s teaching? Why did he leave the leafy groves of Marshall College for this place? He’s put out of his misery when someone wheels in a TV so they can watch the parade, whilst Indy’s attention is momentarily grabbed by a young woman who seems keen and to actually know what he’s talking about.
The young woman proves to be Basil’s daughter, and Indy’s goddaughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). She’s lost her father, who developed an obsessive and destructive interest in the Antithykera, and she comes offering friendly reminiscence and a flash of connection with the past to Indy. Indy otherwise is suffering. His son Mutt has died after joining up to fight in Vietnam – first suggested when Mangold pans past photos of Indy’s father and son next to a folded American flag, which is nicely subtle, but of course it’s reiterated more baldly later – to annoy him, and the grief of that has corroded his marriage to Marion (Karen Allen) to the point where he has their separation papers on his kitchen table. This aspect of The Dial of Destiny is easily its most contemptible, treating the ideal place the last film left Indy in as a chore to be undone, tossed aside for franchise extension purposes and for some easy pathos on the fly, and having gotten wind of it before watching the film, it made me downright mad. But given my ethos of trying to take every movie as something deserving of assessment on its own terms, if not in isolation, I forced myself to move past that. Still: certainly Shia LaBeouf never took off as a star and has gotten in trouble since, but the part might easily have been recast. Meanwhile, with Short Round himself, Ke Huy Quan, having won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) with a performance that showed off amongst other things that his martial arts skills are prodigious, we ought to have had one or both of Indy’s sons in this film, to take on the heavy action lifting and continue the family motif of the series.
Instead, we get Waller-Bridge’s Helena. After initially playing the agreeable, gentle history savant with a soft spot for her dad’s old friend, Helena is eventually revealed to be a character very much like Indy was himself at her age. Or, at least, that’s what the filmmakers want us to say, as Helena is shown to be bit of a bad lot, affecting an attitude of cynical and money-hungry swagger, casting lustful glances at any good-looking dolt that passes by, and trying to sell off the portion of the Antikythera which she steals from Indy rather than honouring her father as she claimed. She also leaves him in the lurch when some goons on her tail barge through, slaying two of Indy’s work colleagues and pinning the crime on him. These goons include Klaber (Boyd Holbrook, basically repeating his role and performance from Logan , 2016, for Mangold), and Hauke (Olivier Richters), who presents the compulsory hulk opponent for Indy but, this time around, our hero just never quite packs enough punch to take down anymore. In one of several highly confused plot strands, these men are working in liaison with at least one CIA agent, but have decided to go rogue in working with Professor Schmidt, one of the crucial scientists involved in the moon landing. Whaddaya know, it’s Dr Voller, a little greyer but still, under the skin, a fervent Nazi. The pseudonymous Voller has used his new leverage with the government to get all his ideological friends assigned to help him get the Antikythera piece back. Klaber’s casual murders upset Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson), a member of the agent team and the film’s stand-in for Cleopatra Jones, or maybe Foxxy Cleopatra, and one who hasn’t been converted to Voller’s renascent fascist credo. She still tries to bring Indy to heel and argues with her nominal colleagues until she’s shot for, well, because the movie doesn’t need her.
Hiring Mangold to take over from Spielberg is one of those choices that seem, on the face of things, to be a safe bet. Mangold has dipped his toe in indie dramas, historical films, biopics, genre revivals, gimmick thrillers, and special effects-heavy franchise films since his directing debut with Heavy (1995). He likely got the job for making Logan, an incredibly overrated film that was nonetheless taken by many as the gold standard for delivering a weathered hero his righteous swansong. Some of Mangold’s better credentials for making this movie might be found in the rigorous period atmosphere and feel for star turns playing iconic figures evinced in Walk The Line (2005) and Ford v Ferrari (2019): the latter film in particular saw Mangold mating technical punch with storytelling and human values with real verve. But Mangold isn’t particularly imaginative as a stager of action scenes, and lacks that special talent for interlacing human matters with the necessary highwire dance of high adventure cinema. He’s the kind of solid, smart, sufficient director Hollywood always needed and needs more of today, but not a visionary, or even, really, a niche expert. He does a cover band job in reproducing Spielberg’s aesthetic, but despite the sharpness of the editing and shooting on display, no scene here takes on the wild and relentless joy of movement achieved in the desert pursuit in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the mining cart ride in Temple of Doom, or the jungle chase in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In fact, there is no special set-piece here despite the many would-be thrilling and very expensive action sequences. A mid-film chase through the streets of Tangiers, for instance, goes on so long I forgot exactly what was supposed to be at stake in it.
Indy’s escape from the goon squad in the midst of the astronauts’ parade comes closest to recapturing the precise conceptual and staging zest of the classic model films, particularly in the conceit of having the action ever so close to the eye of real history. But like the earlier train sequence, this bit peters out somewhere along the line without any grand comic or violent punchline, save the astronauts themselves glancing in bewilderment at the sight of Indy dashing by on a commandeered cop’s horse whilst he’s chased by Klaber and others. This feeling of exasperation becomes even more amplified as the film unfolds through a leisurely, clumsy middle act which, far from repairing the perceived faults of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in that regard, actually doubles down on them, and even gets worse as the film careens towards a splashy, spectacular, yet perversely anticlimactic and borderline senseless climax. Meanwhile the film only goes through the motions of detailing an Indy adrift in the 1960s zeitgeist, taking the laziest route of making him a grumpy grandpa and not someone who, say, has naturally evolved his passion for antiquities and their meaning for humanity into any kind of advocate or activist stance, which would have been in line with his personal growth. Whilst the cultural reference points in the previous films were deliberately cartoonish, they at least had meaning, most particularly in the ironic survey of 1950s in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, with its pasteboard, mannequin-populated, atomic bomb-decimated town and its roaring hotroaders oblivious to the authentic dramas and deep-riven legacies still permeating the brave new world. The Dial of Destiny barely cares about its social backdrop.
At first glance, Helena doesn’t strike me as a bad concept at all – if the filmmakers could decide on which concept of her they want. Given the period and casting choice, Helena might have been characterised as a fiery young radical full of pith and vinegar attitude. But actually she’s entirely indifferent to her generational cadre, her affectation going no further than the rather groovy ensemble with a red velvet jacket and scarf she wears in her early scenes, and her liberated lustiness which, of course, cannot be indulged or illustrated in today’s movie climate, either from the pseudo-feminist perspective of not making her a sex object and fallible before men, or from the reactionary side of not making her seem overtly slutty. So, she will be nothing. Her traits are all over the place, as if the battery of hands involved in writing the script all had a different idea of what she should be. Shoehorned in at one point is the Moroccan gangster Rahim (Alaa Safi), whom Helena apparently promised to marry at some point and now is on the rampage when she and Indy stir things up in Tangiers. This is all played out in the midst of a frenetic action scene, as is just about every effort to characterise Helena, also including random shouting about her gambling debts. Marion’s introduction in Raiders of the Lost Ark was brilliant in the way it immediately outlined her as the ideal Hawksian woman to inhabit Indy’s world, tough, worldly, funny, and, most important, saying much in a considered but still very amusing way. Indy’s childhood nickname for Helena, Wombat, is a charming aside, but the way Helena seems to nurse resentment for Indy in failing to rescue her father from his spiralling obsession and later tardiness in looking out for his goddaughter again deserves some substantial treatment and never really gets it: similarly, her relationship with her own father, again intended to evoke Indy’s with his, is noted but never grappled with. The closest this film gets to the old romanticism, by the way, comes right at the end, between two senior citizens.
The script further pads Helena’s likeness to young Indy by sticking her with a young partner in crime, Teddy (Ethann Isidore), whose backstory is the same as Short Round’s was and is attached in loyalty to Helena. Trouble is, whilst Teddy isn’t as excitable as Short Round was to some people’s annoyance, he is annoying in the opposite way, always acting sullen, impatient, and generally like a lead balloon, present more as a box to be ticked in the narrative doubling and easy plot workarounds, including to be someone whose life can be made a dramatic stake since no-one’s around to be damsel in distress anymore. Waller-Bridge’s casting is one of those choices that can either make or break this kind of film. Casting an actress best-known as a comedy performer had a relative boldness I appreciated, and Waller-Bridge has a spry, off-beat energy that serves her well in the right parts. But here I quickly came to the conclusion she’s rather badly miscast. I dare say she’ll attract plenty of hyperbole henceforth from people sour at the entire idea of her role and presence, and from those with the opposite reflex. But the real frustration is that the film doesn’t entirely know what it wants from Helena as a character or Waller-Bridge as a performer. It wants her to be daring and thrilling, but not too much. It wants her to be a bit naughty, but not too much. It wants her to be a potential replacement for Indy himself, but she just doesn’t have the necessary brand of star energy or sexy charisma, and any contrasting, eccentric backbeat she might have wielded is smothered through incompetence. At least in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull any deficiencies LaBeouf had as a potential successor were kneaded into the story itself, in the fact Mutt was still a very young man with much to learn, his bluster and tough guy act tested and fractured even as his true grit began to emerge.
More immediately, Waller-Bridge doesn’t convince in any form as an action heroine, leading to a downright silly moment when she strips the torn arms off her fab red silk blouse to get down and dirty, but only revealing her pasty posh London guns. I wished the film had taken the different tack of making her more of her father’s daughter, a timid nerd who has to rapidly find her inner adventurer when thrown into Indy’s world, as mooted during her very first meeting with Indy. Indy, Helena, and Teddy, after a lot of dashing about in Tangiers, move on to the Aegean in search of a relic which can give a clue to the location of the other half of the Antikythera, which Basil apparently deduced was lost in a shipwreck. Indy seeks out old pal Renaldo, a great diver, played by Antonio Banderas in a role that defines the phrase “criminally wasted.” Indy, Helena, and Renaldo descend to the shipwreck and retrieve the code-etched tablet, only to find Voller and goons waiting above for them. Voller shoots Renaldo as a warning and Helena elects to go through the motions of translating the code whilst plotting leverage their escape with a stick of dynamite. Once the heroes flee on Voller’s faster boat, Indy identifies the deeper secret contained by the tablet. This sequence nods to several likenesses in the series, but stretches everything out to near-tedium.
Mangold has no feel for the comic aspects of this template, and the script gives little to work with. One or two jokes do land, like the inevitable twist on the old shooting-the-swordsman gag which this time sees Indy trying to pacify a room full of heavies by lashing his whip around, only for everyone to pull a gun and blast away, requiring him to duck with speed. Not much else hits the target however: I lost count of the number of quips that failed to elicit a response from the audience I saw this with. Meanwhile Mangold shoehorns in Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), who’s moved to New York and lives with his extended family, for a scene that teases an interesting note of cultural evolution – Sallah is happy his kids have multicultural awareness – which momentarily makes something of an otherwise awkward and random cameo present for little more than a few easy nostalgia frissons. Rhys-Davies looks even older and far less spry than Ford, even if he seems to still have his singing voice as the refrain heard right at the end suggests. Despite its boldness out of the gate in dealing with the subject, The Dial of Destiny after that does little to really grapple with Indy’s feelings of being too old, too out of the loop to matter, and the ending, which seems to be aiming for a specific resolution, veers away from it in a manner redolent of cold feet. The ideal ending that came into my head for Indy would have been to see him find new stage, some new generation requiring his gifts, his knowledge, the aspects of him distinct from his physicality. But the film’s chosen arc steers firmly away from that.
Indiana Jones as a property is in an awkward position. Indy’s iconic name brand value, and the lustre of all the black ink in the old accounts books, are the sort of thing movie studios love banking on these days – the only thing they know how bank on. But this is one series that can’t be easily rebooted, too dependent on one star actor, the through-line of his life story specifically rooted in both historical setting and essential motifs, to result in any easy hand-off or new beginning. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles already ticked off Indy’s youth in detail. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had trouble weaving a fresh and satisfying narrative around all its compulsory tropes and refrains, but it had many other qualities to compensate. In that regard Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), very much the lightning rod for an increasingly heated war between franchise-reliant filmmakers and easily annoyed fans whose cash is being presumed upon, had the right idea in insisting the imprimatur had to evolve and change or die. The problem with Johnson’s film was that whilst it talked the talk, it didn’t walk the walk, settling for merely reordering and remixing previous ideas and scenes of the series rather than finding new ground, except in the most superficial ways. The Dial of Destiny is less ambitious, but it suffers then from a problem of wanting to get back to basics, and then forgetting what those basics mean.
As for the actual motivating element in the drama, the Antikythera itself, I liked that it was established by Voller as neither supernatural nor science fiction McGuffin as in earlier entries, but simply the product of Archimedes’ mathematical genius, capable of calculating the hidden weak points in reality itself. How the dial is put to actual use however is again clumsily developed. Voller wants to use it to travel back to before World War II and guide Hitler around all his mistakes, to ensure Nazism’s ultimate victory. Such selective travel proves impossible, however, with every fissure leading back to Archimedes’ time, with the scientist himself (Nasser Memarzia) desperate to attract any kind of intervention save his beloved Syracuse from the invading Romans. Which made me wonder why Voller thought he could set it so selectively in the first place: surely if the device’s algorithms are firmly encoded in its workings, someone with his mathematical skills should have deduced that when he was setting it. I might also still argue that the Antikythera, which is a real artefact though its use is still conjectural, has no known connection with Archimedes, and betrays the series tradition of utilising story-driving objects rooted in strong historical, religious, and mythical bases, rather than just being a fancy doodad attached to a famous historical name designed to work the necessary plot for the filmmakers.
The general mechanics of the plot are weak, too, in a way that sometimes borders on the truly excruciating. Indy following Helena to Tangiers requires a prompt from Sallah, entirely depending on his mysteriously good connections; somehow, also, Indy is able to simply catch a plane out of the country despite being a wanted fugitive. Voller and squad are able to locate Renaldo’s boat on the ocean for some reason. Voller’s method for deducing where Indy and company are heading after giving him the slip is a very long bow, and he later simply gets extraordinarily lucky in stumbling across Teddy. An important aspect of the climax depends on Helena prompting Teddy to try and fly a specific type of plane, only to let slip that she knows he’s never flown a plane. And yet Teddy is able to get this one in the air, the kind of smirking absurdity that seems to have stumbled in out a Jerry Lewis movie, and truly makes me wonder what the filmmakers thought they were doing. Even with that aside, the daisy-chain of quests to land the next piece of the puzzle is drawn out and substitutes too often for actual story. Spielberg and Williams proved in the map room scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark that what might have been a dull interlude between action scenes could be turned into an aria of dramatic intensity, weaving music and visuals together to supreme effect. To say that Mangold shows no such capacity for constructing something like that would be being kind. Or anything as majestic and intricate in thematic linkage linked as the twinned shots of the rising mushroom cloud and the lifting alien craft in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
There is at least a nice, fleeting nod to Secret of the Incas (1954), one of the singular early influences on the series, when Indy and Helena find Archimedes’ tomb, lit with sun-reflecting mirrors. A moment like Indy gently taking the gun from Basil’s hand as the timid scholar is stricken with powerful and clashing emotions after shooting Weber, his first act of violence, reminded me that Mangold has a real feel for picking out moments of finite emotional impact, and there isn’t enough of this. A brief flashback incorporated to illustrate a crucial moment shared by Indy, Basil, and the child Helena (Holly Lawton), revealing how wild Basil was being driven by his preoccupation with the Antikythera and the sight of the two father figures Helena had and lost, might have wielded some emotional grace, but instead just slows the film down and breaks up its structure. It shouldn’t be surprising that Ford would prove the best thing about the film, but then again he’s long been underrated, on top of his age seeming to prohibit against him adventuring too strenuously. Nonetheless he has a soulful quality now, and with the help of a few stuntmen and some calculated digital trickery, his Indy still passes muster. But I still felt the film would have been better if he was left a bit more like like John Wayne in his late vehicles, content to sit with a big gun to bring to bear as required and leave the rough-and-tumble to the kids. Again, the film interprets its mission statement with annoying literalness: Indiana Jones films are about Indiana Jones doing adventures, dammit. The Dial of Destiny nonetheless comes on armed with all the production might and gloss that Lucasfilm with Disney’s money behind it seem alone able to wield now, and this gloss almost singlehandedly makes the film a compelling experiment, apparent in brilliantly filmed moments like a hapless diver under Renaldo’s boat seeing Voller’s boat arrive above on the surface before his air hose is cut, and the sheer screen-filling vistas of the finale.
But it’s all for nought without an authentic sense of story drive and some genuine sense of what new world it wants to conquer. Perhaps the lamest element of the whole enterprise is one of potentially strongest: Mikkelsen as Voller. Mikkelsen is a terrific actor, and yet, as he did with his last-minute substitution as the villain in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022), he walks scornfully through yet another icy Nordic bad guy role. The film offers one faintly bewildering moment when Voller quizzes an African-American steward in his downtown New York residence whether he is happy in his nation’s victory in the war, to the steward’s slight demur. This is the sort of moment that reeks of the filmmakers thinking themselves daring and thought-provoking, but what it really provokes is deep cynicism: ah yes, genocidal fascists and struggling racial minorities, always finding the common ground. Voller is otherwise so listless a placeholder villain that I can think of nothing to say about him. He has none of Belloq’s status as the hero’s dark double, Mola Ram’s devilish glee, Walter Donovan’s deceptive charm, or Irina Spalko’s charismatic arrogance. Whilst daring to take different paths is as I’ve said generally a good thing, I couldn’t help but feel the way Mangold and his battery of fellow screenwriters fail to deliver the kind of memorably nasty comeuppance laced with Faustian overtones, that constant series motif, to Voller, betrayed their obliviousness to the kinds of morality plays that underpin the material. I’m not even sure how Klaber met his end: it all gets lost in a churn of stuff happening, something Spielberg and Lucas would never have allowed.
At no point in the film does it feel like Indy’s old spirit is being jogged back to life, no sense of him deciding to grapple with evil and take down new representatives of his old, hated foes: instead he’s dragged along for the ride, often with a downcast and disapproving tilt in dealing with Helena’s antics. Late in the film Indy is shot in the shoulder by the fascists and taken with them on the plane they intend to use to pass through a time fissure. This gunshot is rather more than a flesh wound but apparently rather less than mortal, and seems intended to evoke the one Indy’s father took in The Last Crusade – a wound that was indeed delivered to be fatal but only slowly so, giving Indy time to find the Holy Grail and save his dad. But, in a manner that again betrays reediting and changed intentions, Indy moves between being at death’s door and still strong enough to fight and then parachute jump. Meanwhile Helena chases after the Nazi plane and climbs aboard the landing gear, which would be a fun action movie moment if it wasn’t so obviously fake (and after Shadow in the Cloud, 2021, and Sisu, 2023, hanging off the underside of a plane fuselage has already become the new ultimate movie badass trick — come to think of it, those two movies actually did quite a few things this one tries, but better), whilst Teddy pursues in a stolen plane, ridiculous as already discussed. In what is actually quite a nice touch, the arrival of the planes during the siege of Syracuse by the Romans sees the attackers launching missiles at the aircraft, thinking they’re dragons, whilst Archimedes and his aides rally their defences. Trouble was, here again I could see in my mind how Spielberg would have handled the system of reveals required here for maximum effect.
For Mangold, well, it’s all just laid out, more random buzzes delivered more to the audience’s backsides than their brains. That the neo-Nazis insist on fighting it out with the seaborne Roman horde is incredibly silly. There never seems to be any urgent or immediate hazard to our heroes: Indy even repeatedly points out that Teddy isn’t in any danger, and the gallivanting isn’t sustained or ingenious enough to make this a non-issue. There are no stakes to drive a sense of down-to-the-wire drama: by arriving in this moment of history, Voller’s plan is already kaput. This leads to the amazingly frustrating punchline to all this, when Indy actually meets Archimedes. This is supposed to be the most incredible moment in a lifetime of incredible moments for Indiana Jones, our hero, our beloved movie protagonist and franchise linchpin. Here he is, acting out the ultimate dream of every historian who ever lived, encountering a man he would have read and learned about his entire life, a figure of legend permeating the history of western science. But there’s barely any conversation between them. No revelation, no idea, no exchange of emotion or meditation on time, fate, humanity, anything. Not even some pathos for Archimedes himself who will die at the end of the siege. As a scene I think this concluding encounter is supposed to echo the same flourish of melancholy grandeur as Indy’s encounter with the knight in The Last Crusade, an encounter that, as well as defying nature and the ages, saw Indy meeting his own ironic doppelganger, the anointed knight errant in the Grail Quest. No such likeness is found between Indy and Archimedes, who stares rather dully at the two time interlopers. And this is the worst crime of The Dial of Destiny, far overshadowing all others. It betrays its own, innermost kernel of potential richness. Instead we get Helena sticking herself between the the two men and trying to wave away the moment, telling Indy he has to get himself back in time or he’ll foul things up. Helena seems determined to act out the worst caricature of a common fan complaint, the weakly inserted substitute hero literally inserting herself, telling everyone in loud and certain terms where their proper places are, before punching Indy unconscious to cart him back to the future, somehow wielding enough clout to knock out a man giant bull Nazis and Thugees and Stalinists could never muster.
The film’s coda, with Indy and Marion reunited back in ’69, is the only part of the film that actually made me feel anything: dependent as it is on a direct call-back to the great “Where doesn’t it hurt?” scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, nonetheless here The Dial of Destiny captures some genuine connection and depth, particularly as both Ford and Allen handle the mix of powerful emotions apparent in Indy and Marion with masterful concision, only to be despoiled but another set of awkward gestures, as and Helena accompanies Sallah and his grandkids off for ice cream with a my-work-is-done-here backward glance, whilst Indy for some reason snatches his hat off the clothesline. Not to mention the brusque treatment to the actual resolution of the story. There’s no feeling of discovery, or even rediscovery, but instead an awareness of the filmmakers channelling through the characters their desperate clinging to the last thread of this franchise’s popularity. I never thought an Indiana Jones film would leave me feeling more depressed than thrilled, but here we are. The odd thing is that for its manifold deficiencies and disappointments, The Dial of Destiny is only a very ordinary movie, not a bad one, and only inadequate in being forced to compare itself to some of the greatest movies of their kind ever made. In visual lustre and production heft it’s certainly well ahead of Jungle Cruise (2021) or Uncharted (2022) and some of the other garbage served up in a vaguely similar style in the past decade or so. But it’s also a film that will likely prove the poster child for diminishing returns in modern entertainment, an overstuffed, indecisive, anonymously-made iteration of a property that came roaring out of a moment of supreme revivalist confidence. In archaeological terms, it’s a fake. You can tell by the cross-sections.
2022 was always going to be a rough year for cinema. Ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on production and how movies are consumed were felt all year, setting everything into an uneasy churn. A vast array of strong movies were rudely shuffled off to streaming whilst movie theatres were often left with a drought of big, attention-getting new films to lure people out, and a lot of the big movies that did come out were lacklustre and betrayed the waning grip of recent blockbuster trends. The smaller, quality works that did get release sank without anything to counterprogram against. The only real winner out of it all was Top Gun: Maverick, a vehicle Tom Cruise smartly delayed until it could play to packed and appreciative theatres, and it succeeded in uniting young and old audience members in a single, shared moment. Even if it certainly wasn’t the greatest movie ever made, Top Gun: Maverick proved old-school Hollywood values were the best curative for the doldrums of the moment, especially when the superhero movie is devolving into cluttered and confused pile-ups like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Thor: Love and Thunder. And then right at year’s end we got James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, and just what that will do for mass audience cinema is still playing out.
Things often weren’t that much better in the more officially artistic and serious zones of cinema, with many a movie of strong pedigree and real worth failing to find an audience. It was hard to deny the feeling the brutal financial failure of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans in particular signalled on some level the fatal decline of Hollywood cinema in its purest form as everything falls into the sinkholes of streaming and a pervasive anti-art mood. Threads of common concern nonetheless wove throughout so many films this year. Spielberg and James Gray, two very different filmmakers, nonetheless both meditated on their most intense childhood experiences through alter egos with many points of similarity. The love of cinema as a shared experience and of media capturing as a mode of tantalising, frustrating meaning bobbed up in works as diverse as Ti West’s X and Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun and Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light. The antiheroic artists of Xavier Giannoli’s Lost Illusions and Todd Field’s Tár surrendered their creativity for the allure of power and self-indulgence, only to eventually be destroyed by the verdict of a society they’ve offended. Terence Davies’ Benediction and West’s Pearl both concluded with powerful but diametrically opposed images of faces, one of cathartic emotional release and the other desperately asserted pleasantness covering bottomless madness and horror. In Pearl and Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, a woman crushing an egg invoked shattering of a thin membrane of reality and the mental stability of the heroine.
Stark moralistic comeuppances were visited upon the absurd denizens of a landscape of celebrity, influence, technology, and plutocratic riches, played out in isolated locales, in Spiderhead, Glass Onion, The Menu, Death on the Nile, and Poker Face. Spiderhead and Don’t Worry Darling depicted a sinisterly sequestered community ruled by a charismatic creep played by one of Hollywood’s many current Chrises. Films like You Won’t Be Alone, Avatar: The Way of Water, Ted K, Pearl, and Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon grappled with characters dwelling on the fringe of society, wrenched in diverging directions by urges to both completely escape the world and angrily take it on, feeling the temptations of monstrousness whilst also gripped by strange pathos. Rebels around the same outskirts manifested in the likes of Neptune Frost and Prey and Bones and All. Reclaiming youngsters stolen by representatives of invasive and coercive authority preoccupied Rise Roar Revolt and Avatar: The Way of Water. Lovers trapped with each-other in dangerous zones in Stars At Noon, Emily The Criminal, and Bones And All faced the toughest of possible choices, one partner eventually forced to, figuratively and in one case literally, consume the other in the name of survival. Black heroes used to fending off the surreal reflexes of the real world had little fear taking on more fantastical threats in Saloum, Nope, and Day Shift.
Macedonian-Australian director Goran Stolevski emerged with his debut, You Won’t Be Alone, filmed in his ancestral homeland and its language. Stolevski portrayed, in a hazily folk-historical setting, the odyssey of a young woman, raised in isolation and fated to be claimed by a gnarled witch and transformed into her skin-changing, blood-drinking kind, who nonetheless uses her gruesome talents to insinuate her way back into a village community and make human connections. Over the years she tries on different guises, male and female, young and mature, all the while taunted by her justifiably bitter and misanthropic “mother,” who was once burned at the stake. Stolevski’s ambition was notable, his film operating as a work of magic realism mixed with folk horror elements, using fantastical motifs to explore human perversity and gender fluidity. The overall design was similar in concept if not specifics to fellow Aussie director Rolf de Heer’s classic Bad Boy Bubby. You Won’t Be Alone was naggingly intriguing, but also badly hampered by bluntly mannered filmmaking far too imitative of other models, particularly Terrence Malick, and needed a lighter touch. Stolevski shot it in a constant handheld register replete with aggravating close-ups, so what ought to have been dreamy and mysterious was rendered far too literal throughout, working against some of his finer epiphanies of behaviour. Ana Lily Amirpour’s Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon had a similar basic proposition, likewise depicting a supernaturally gifted young woman roaming at large in the world for the first time with a blend of angry bewilderment and yearning, but did so with an entirely different, and ultimately more successful creative palette.
In what could be considered a matched pair with You Won’t Be Alone of mythopoeic meditations on humanity made by Aussies this year, George Miller returned to the big screen with the fantasy romance Three Thousand Years of Longing, an adaptation of a story by A.S. Byatt. Tilda Swinton, wielding an aggravating accent, played a middle-aged expert in storytelling traditions and interpretations who chances upon a glass jug in an Istanbul shop and releases a long-trapped Djinn. The Djinn, after settling down into the sturdy form of Idris Elba, begins narrating how he came to suffer such a fate. Like much of Byatt’s writing, the narrative was pitched as argument, between academic knowing and artistic ardour, intellect and passion, man and woman, with the Djinn’s narratives invoking a sweep of myth-history, great and doomed loves, and metaphorical import, but all faced down by the academic’s forewarned knowledge of how stories like theirs always play out. Miller applied some clever visual touches here and there, and indulged his penchant for bulbous odalisques, and yet the film as a whole felt strangely uninspired. The story never came close to effectively transferring from page to screen, finishing up a loose assemblage of not-terribly-interesting episodes that often looked like outtakes from Alex Proyas’ Gods of Egypt, taped together by the overarching narrative, which aimed for a note of autumnal companionship that was modestly affecting as the miraculous crumbled in the face of the prosaically modern, mostly thanks to Elba’s elegance as a performer: he alone had the power to make you believe in his wise and ageless Djinn.
With Emergency, Carey Williams followed in Jordan Peele’s footsteps in utilising a classic variety of genre film to explore fine gradations of Black American experience. Williams however bypassed Horror to instead tackle frantic ‘80s comedies like Adventures In Babysitting and Weekend At Bernie’s and blended them with a more urgent and serious imperative. Williams offered the adventure of two young Black pals, one nerdy and circumspect and bound for great things, the other a fun-seeking slacker with a streak of socially aware attitude, who find themselves, along with their Latino roomie, stuck with trying to find help for the young, doped-up, possibly dying white girl who turns up inexplicably in their dorm room, without chancing an uncomfortable, even deadly encounter with authority. Williams, with the help of great performances, managed for the most part to walk the line between jaunty shenanigans and something more pensive and biting. The official point about the way being Black intensifies the danger in certain circumstances was sustained, but also dared to venture into contradictory waters, with the heroes wreaking through their choices mounting dramatic hyperbole where the girl’s pursuing friends and the police were entirely justified in their fierce reactions. All ended fairly well but with lingering notes of trauma and regret, which might have been asking just a little too much of what preceded it.
Directing team Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who scored a popular success with 2019’s class warfare horror movie Ready Or Not, applied their new-kids-on-the-block touch to a well-worn franchise with Scream, a next generation entry that brought back the classic trio of heroes and other familiar faces but then applied a notably ruthless touch to killing a lot of them off, and positing a new core series protagonist, played by Melissa Barrera, who answers murderous insanity with, well, murderous insanity. The directors turned in a slick and twisty episode spiked with jolts of newly nasty violence and some knowing jabs at precisely the soft reboot approach being applied to the film. The lack of Kevin Williamson’s wry sidelong social and genre commentary and Wes Craven’s dynamic staging, despite the newcomers’ competent mimicry, was cumulatively telling, however, as much of the series’ good-humour and humanity were bled out, along with at least one beloved hero. Whilst it seems to have done the trick of revitalising the franchise box office-wise, I’ll likely sit it out from now on.
Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone also blended nostalgia and suspense. Set in the 1970s and deploying an anthropological eye not just for the pleasures of being a teen in the era but also its particular, folkloric dangers, The Black Phone depicted a town being terrorised by a serial killer snatching up young teens in his van and murdering them after holding them captive for a short time. The focus fell on a brother and sister, children of a flailing, abusive, grieving father, both of whom prove to share a talent for clairvoyance in different forms. When the boy is taken by the killer and held in a barren basement, his sister tries to use her gifts to track him down, whilst the boy communes with the ghosts of previous victims who push him to try various means of escape. The film generally stole from the best models (including Stephen King and The Silence of the Lambs) and sustained tension to the end. Extraneous elements however, like the kids’ father and the killer’s dork brother obsessed with the kidnappings, proved a real drag, and the period detail tended towards surface fetishism. Whilst the focus on methodical process as the key to survival was engaging, as the young hero assembled tools both physical and mental to defeat his foe, the denouement still felt like a bit of a cheat: we were meant to go “Ah!” when we saw how it all fitted together, and not think about what it really meant for hero’s supposed growth and rebirth as a badass. Ethan Hawke’s flamboyant performance as the creepily masked killer hovered just on the near side of shtick.
Jessica M. Thompson’s The Invitation cast Nathalie Emmanuel in her first major lead role as a young, broke, lonely New Yorker who, after losing her mother and desperate for family connection, tests her DNA and finds she’s connected with a blue-blooded English clan. Flown over the pond to meet them, she falls into flirtation with a criminally handsome and smooth lord of the manor who seems to hold peculiar status over her family and others. Signs begin amassing that something evil is lurking and that her new bae’s true identity is…well, if you don’t guess ten minutes in you’ll have to hand in your horror fan membership. Thompson offered a story with real potential, riffing on the Dracula mystique by combining it with a sceptical variation on Austenesque romance and contemporary cautionary tale that suggested a worse-case-scenario take on Meghan Markle’s journey, blended with shades of Get Out, Thirst, and The Wicker Man. The result, however, was painfully flat: the himbo Dracula was boring, the attempts to invoke feminist and racial angst too paint-by-numbers, the script cowardly in avoiding any truly dark temptation for the heroine, and the con-job romance overextended. The film threatened to become interesting once major reveals arrived at long last, as our heroine was confronted by the cruelty and weirdness of her potential new mate(s), but then pivoted to become a woke superhero origin story, essentially arguing that if you’re well-grounded in online rhetoric evil shalt never tempt thee.
Stunt performer turned director J.J. Perry helmed the Jamie Foxx vehicle Day Shift, a film with a simple but very likeable genre twist for a premise. Foxx played a middle-aged, down-on-his-luck professional separated from his wife and child and trying hard to walk the straight and narrow. With the corollary that his job, under the cover of being a pool cleaner, is actually that of vampire hunter, extremely skilled at overcoming his prey but with a habit of cutting corners that’s made him persona non grata in the small, covert circle of his trade. The film unfolded in a manner reminiscent of ‘80s B-movies, lampooning buddy cop flicks as Foxx was forced to work with Dave Franco’s wimpy bureaucrat. The story wasn’t always tight – Natasha Liu Bordizzo as an enticing neighbour with a secret suddenly became an important character in the film’s last third with minimal set-up, and as with The Invitation the film had confusingly cavalier attitude to dealing with the ramifications of becoming a vampire. Still it was a good lark all told, thanks to Perry’s excellent action directing and fun performances: any film that features Snoop Dog wielding a cowboy hat and a minigun can’t be all bad.
Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius offered yet another vampire variant, this one intended to perform the thankless task of wedging Jared Leto into a superhero paycheque gig, playing a character known as a canonical Spider-Man villain but pitched here as a tragic antihero. Leto played a sickly savant who seeks out the key to perpetual health only to infect himself with blood-drinking tendencies. Matt Smith was his plutocratic benefactor and fellow invalid who proves rather more eager to accept the taint of vampirism. Morbius again had potential. The storyline had echoes of the classical brand of Universal monster movies with their cursed protagonists, with Morbius forced bit by bit to give up his humanity to defend the few things he loves. Whilst Smith’s performance as the former cripple turned robust and eager monster provided flickers of life, the film as a whole was the most tepid variety of current big-budget sludge: released by Sony not long after the colossal success of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Morbius proved an instantly notorious example of lazy, witless franchise extension, executed in the blandest possible style of CGI-heavy and personality-free filmmaking. Leto’s listlessness in the lead didn’t help.
Anthropoid director Sean Ellis returned with The Cursed, a period-piece horror movie that bypassed vampires and went for a werewolf as its monster of choice, or at least an odd, skinny, hairless variation on the concept. Ellis intrigued initially with his glimpse of a surgeon digging a silver bullet out of a soldier killed in World War I, before flashing back a couple of decades to describe the roots of a bloody curse, when a cabal of landed gentry had a tribe of gypsies slaughtered over a land dispute, only for one of their sons to be transformed into a marauding monster to visit punishment on the locale. The Cursed certainly dangled some interesting ideas, operating as a more class and race-conscious variant on classic wolf man motifs and trying to bring an almost novelistic texture to the complex, intergenerational story. But Ellis’s mannered handling conspired to throttle tension and impact with heavy-handedness at every turn, the overtones of dark foreboding and pinched emotion and grating camerawork becoming annoyingly pretentious for what was in the end a pretty straight-laced genre story.
After a few years in the wilderness, once and future indie horror princeling Ti West suddenly roared back to life and attention with two movies in 2022 and with another to round off a trilogy in the offing. His first release was X, a tribute to the aesthetics of low-budget 1970s horror, particularly Tobe Hooper on a visual level, but with a story closer in spirit to oddities like Curtis Harrington’s retro camp studies and Charles B. Pierce’s backwoods bloodletters. West sent a small unit of would-be filmmakers and stars out to a remote farm, sometime in the mid-‘70s, to shoot a porn film, only to find they’ve become targets for the crazed and sleazy attentions of their elderly hosts, a crusty, devoted husband and his murderous, sexually deviant wife. West’s anthropological and cinephiliac obsessions dovetailed as he explored the confluence of transgressive impulses and art in the context of a mythologised era, and hinted at digging out the roots of the current reactionary spirit in the period’s jagged confrontation of liberated youth and jealous age. But for me the film failed to convince on several levels. The uncertain tone wavered between tongue-in-cheek and pathos. West was big on self-consciously gross vignettes but short on real tension and scares. He had Mia Goth play both the young and heedless and old and covetous versions of the star wannabe, playing the latter caked in make-up, a superficially clever touch that nonetheless robbed the film of its necessary evocation of maniacal fire guttering within an aged frame.
A few months later West released Pearl, a prequel to X again featuring Goth, this time playing the previous film’s killer as a young woman in 1918, the daughter of German immigrant farmers subsisting on the family farm in the midst of war and pandemic. Feeling trapped by a domineering and dour mother preoccupied by anti-German sentiment, and obliged to care for her paralysed father whilst her newlywed husband off fighting in France, Pearl becomes increasingly obsessed with becoming a dancer and escaping her lot. Only trouble is she’s also a budding psychopath who likes killing animals to take out her feelings, and as tensions build to a head blood starts to flow. Pearl arguably had a narrative that was a little too obvious, perhaps inevitably given that we already know from X where things are heading: West reportedly threw the project together on a fit of inspiration and filmed it back-to-back with the other film. And yet Pearl proved not just far superior to X but perhaps the highpoint of 2022’s bountiful horror cinema, a weirder, uglier, more impressively and intimately cruel portrait that managed to subvert a certain style of making-of-a-monster story. West forced the audience to empathise with Pearl’s viewpoint even after making clear right off the bat she’s a fruitloop and that her embittered mother is trying to keep a lid on Pearl’s rising madness, and whilst Pearl’s aspirations and emotions are entirely ordinary, her ways of dealing with them are dreadful. West’s newly vivid sense of style found cunning ways to both invoke classic Hollywood products as extrapolations of Pearl’s role in the great American dream of self-invention, whilst forcibly mating them with a bleak genre story that turned the Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre influence back towards their Geinian roots, whilst also sideswiping The Wizard of Oz with grim sarcasm.
Jordan Peele, now thoroughly ensconced as a pop culture brand, made his third film with the enigmatically marketed Nope, which proved a combined homage to Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and mixed with plentiful, if nebulous, hints of a parable about racial erasure and media voraciousness at play. The heroes were OJ and Emerald, children of a horse rancher killed in a freakish incident, who try to obtain filmed proof that a huge, UFO-like thing is living near the ranch and consuming horses, whilst their neighbour, a more successful showman with a tragic background as a child actor, seems to be trying to bait the thing into becoming one of his attractions. Daniel Kaluuya was wasted as the rather dull hero, Keke Palmer more engaging as his would-be star sister, and Michael Wincott was the grizzled, famous cinematographer they hire to get a shot of the impossible. Peele proved again that’s he’s a real talent when it comes to setting up mystery and tension, building compelling early sequences with a sense of isolation and paranoia punctuated by the thing’s appearances, as well as a barely connected but suggestive flashback to a bloody, haunting event from the neighbour’s past. But Nope also confirmed some of Peele’s lacks: his hints of deeper meaning were eager to be noticed but weakly tethered to his monster movie plot, and his story and character threads felt underdeveloped. The film as a whole had the tenor of an each-way bet, trying at once to solidify Peel’s status as popular artist telling mass audience stories, and as a biting satirist with an outsider’s voice, but finding the two difficult if not impossible to reconcile.
Similarly driven by characters desperately trying to capture filmed proof of the extraordinary, if in quite a different aesthetic mode, Something In The Dirt saw filmmaking duo Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson wearing many hats, including playing their main characters. These were a pair of alienated Los Angeles men, one gay, divorced, and a member of an apocalyptic church, the other an asexual bohemian and with a string of legal and mental problems in his past. This mismatched duo start working in partnership when they behold a mysterious phenomenon inhabiting their shabby apartment building and determine to document it, whilst chasing an array of clues about its nature down metastasising rabbit holes of esoterica. The mix of elements here was basically the same as Moorhead and Benson’s earlier, defining indie films like Resolution and The Endless, blending realistic study of shambolic individuals with mind-bending high conceptualism and a veneer of post-modern knowing, in what ultimately proves a shaggy dog yarn. But it did expand the filmmakers’ creative palette: the real subject of Something In The Dirt was the nature of creative collaboration, the untrustworthiness of mediated reality, and the way paranoid obsession tends to be refuge and torment simultaneously for many people, the relentless pull to investigate and research in an attempt to contain the world’s craziness. The protagonists were pulled together by a shared sense of wonder and ambition but finally, fatally divided by their divergent characters and worldviews. In this regard, Moorhead and Benson delivered a compelling human story that ended on a haunting note of lingering enigma.
Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling proved an unwitting topic of classically bitchy gossip regarding behind-the-scenes squabbles between director and cast, an ironic fate for a would-be feminist movie that cast a beady eye on hazy nostalgia for the alleged certainties of the 1950s via sci-fi allegory. Florence Pugh and Harry Styles played a couple living an apparently idyllic lifestyle as members of a community employed on a Manhattan Project-like secret enterprise sometime in the ‘50s and run along old-fashioned gender rules. Pugh suffers from an increasing certainty something’s wrong, and eventually learns she’s living in a simulated world created by a retrograde cult headed by Chris Pine’s bromide-spouting Svengali. The story had plenty of familiar elements, with nods to the likes of The Prisoner and The Matrix, as well as ironically owing as much to online erotic fiction derived from The Stepford Wives as the original film, as Wilde engaged with the forbidden thrills of submission and delayed gratification, whilst playing it all as a heightened diary-of-a-mad-housewife story. Wilde confirmed she has a strong eye, backed up by Matthew Labatique’s gorgeous photography, and a good way with actors, particularly apparent in Styles’ surprisingly adroit and calculated turn. But Wilde’s attempt at drip-feeding a feeling of emergent unease exacerbated the way Katie Silberman’s script stretched out the game way too long and didn’t wield that much surprise or satirical bite when it did finally give things away. By the time it did, and offered some intriguing complications to the seemingly prosaic metaphor at the story’s heart, the film had already outworn its welcome, and the plot resolutions proved clumsy.
Zach Cregger, a member of the comedy team The Whitest Kids U’ Know, made his directorial debut in a patent attempt to follow Jordan Peele down the rabbit hole as satirist turned horror maestro. The result, Barbarian, was a surprise hit that tried to mix sidelong social commentary with plain, old-fashioned suspense-mongering and freaky, gross-out thrills. Georgina Campbell was the young woman visiting Detroit for a job interview who finds her far-flung AirBnB double booked, and so must share it with Bill Skarsgard’s intense nice guy, with the pair soon confronted by signs they’re far from the only ones sharing the house. Justin Long was tossed into the mix mid-movie as the mystery house’s owner, a sitcom actor accused of rape who decides to sell the property to pay his legal bills, only to also be drawn into the unfolding mayhem. Barbarian started well, with its believably tense and provocative situation and introduction of dank, alarming yet also enticing enigma that bends the characters out of their rational minds, even if Skarsgard tried a little too hard to work his character’s ambiguity. Cregger evinced a strong sense of style. As it played out though, the story turned out to be extremely familiar stuff, with its lumbering monster crone offered as the by-product of generations of diseased abuse, with a weak last-minute stab at investing it with pathos but otherwise simply serving as a standard movie monster, with added attempts to encompass fashionable talking points barely connected to what’s actually going on. Cregger’s desire to keep his ultimate game vague resulted in some ostentatious storytelling shifts in focus and style that had superficial impact but felt forced, and would probably have worked better if deployed in a more classical fashion. By the end the film collapsed in a heap.
Neil Marshall’s The Lair had many of the same touchstones as other genre films of the year, with loud nods to John Carpenter and James Cameron, as well as the glorious old school of creature feature, the kind that sported monster costumes that don’t quite fit properly around the crotch. It also announced Marshall’s determination to get back to his roots circa Dog Soldiers and The Descent. His wife and screenwriting collaborator Charlotte Kirk starred as a badass pilot shot down over Afghanistan in 2017, who discovers an old Soviet bunker inhabited by grotesque chimeric beings. Barely escaping whilst the critters rip apart some hapless Taliban, she takes refuge at a US Rangers outpost, only to suffer siege by the tough and toothy blighters. The Lair lacked the cleverness and deftness of characterisation Marshall once imbued on Dog Soldiers, the acting from an unseasoned cast often broad and awkward, and the last act got a little too frenetic and indebted to Aliens for its own good. And yet, whilst less polished than the likes of Nope or Barbarian, ultimately I found it a more successful film, an enjoyable, pure-hearted tribute to, and example of, the B-movie ethos. That’s largely because Marshall’s craftsmanship and capacity for tackling monster movie thrills with authentic relish proved undimmed. The film also provided a curiously salutary revisit to the director’s penchant for political parable as explored in Centurion, with overt nods to Zulu and the theme of empires fleeing inhospitable lands.
Colin Trevorrow’s return to helming the Jurassic Park franchise with Jurassic World: Dominion was a more straightforward special effects-driven monster movie than Nope, albeit one that also tried a little to shake up the material a little, with dinosaurs now roaming the world at large, fuelling the rise of exploitative black markets. Heroes new and old were pitched in together to battle yet another nefarious plutocrat, this time played by Campbell Scott and supposed to be the same one who caused all the ruckus in the original film, when his attempts at genetically engineering market advantage result in swarms of mutant locusts wreaking havoc. Dominion had real problems, including some jagged editing that hinted at last-minute interference, and some extremely tired plotting, particularly in the downright perverse subplot involving young Maisie Lockwood and her girlboss genius mother-twin, a particularly egregious example of trying to reorientate narratives to be more female-centric in the silliest manner possible. The film was still better than generally painted: the united cast of old favourites and new fixtures interacted well, Trevorrow had fun giving them all a moment to shine, and the action sequences were strong, particularly the wild mid-film chase sequence in Malta.
Parker Finn’s Smile, the year’s biggest Horror hit, like Barbarian prioritised raw creepiness and menacing thrills staged with cinematic largesse over pretentions to deep commentary and parable, although it still built itself around a blatant metaphor for the insidious power of trauma. Sosie Bacon was the dedicated but vulnerable psychiatrist who, after seeing a panicky patient kill herself whilst wearing a hideous fixed grin, finds herself dogged by a malevolent trickster demon that makes clear it intends her destruction in the same way, and her attempts to escape the curse mean confronting the life-defining imprint of her mother’s suicide. Finn’s film was initially intriguing and gained much from Bacon’s impressive, likely star-making performance, even if she was pushed to inhabit extremes of neurosis with near-comical speed. As a whole though I found Smile didn’t add up to much, in part because Finn’s direction was so showy and spectacle-driven that it kept giving the game away, where the story needed a more brittle and deceptively calm setting. Interludes of showy gore and demonic manifestations were overdone, and by the time of the nasty bummer climax, the heroine’s pathos had been outmatched by genre shtick and bumper sticker psychology.
Scott Mann’s Fall exemplified several recent trends in attention-grabbing action-thrillers – just thrust one or two comely young women into a high-pressure survival situation, throw in some grief, trauma, or other just-add-water feels as an identification pretext, and away you go. In this instance, the heroines were two young devotees to the religion of extreme sports, but with one, Becky, turned apostate since her husband died in a rock climbing accident. The other girl, Shiloh, now a rising social media star, is determined to shake her pal out of her grieving torpor, and convinces Becky to join her in climbing a colossally tall, soon-to-be-demolished TV antenna tower in a desolate stretch of the American west, only to find themselves trapped atop it. In order to happen the film depended on the two women being astonishingly reckless and foolish, and the script took refuge in some now-cornball clichés, including a particularly silly narrative fake-out and shock reveal, and liberal pinching from Neil Marshall’s The Descent. Still, Fall remained engaging almost until the end, thanks to glimmerings of a nicely vicious lampoon on influencers spouting pop no-fear bromides, and providing thrills aplenty, as a calling card for Mann that proved him capable of sustaining a sweat-inducing sense of danger in a tightly focused setting.
Baltasar Kormakur’s Beast was almost the same movie, albeit with a different subgenre frame. This time the protagonist was Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) a recently widowed doctor on a visit to his late wife’s home village out in the South African veldt whilst trying to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughters. Attacked by a lion that’s been driven to indiscriminating, homicidal fury by poachers, and left stranded in a rugged stretch of a remote national parkland, Nate was obliged to protect his daughters and try to save his wife’s childhood friend and game warden Martin (Sharlto Copley) from both the murderous animal and the well-armed poachers. The script was, again, just a little too basic and eager to deploy its pretexts before getting down to business, and the lion itself – animated with surprisingly convincing CGI – was presented at some points as an improbably cunning and irresistible force and at others as something a bit more realistic. The strength of the lead actors and Kormakur’s staging, complete with constantly prowling, paranoid camerawork, made it a decent, entertaining survival thriller. Also nice to see Elba playing an everyman type of hero, albeit one who when push comes to shove can still wrestle a lion.
Sam Walker’s The Seed provided an intersection for at least three of this year’s movie strands, blending satire on pushy, queen-bee influencer culture, portraits of young women suffering millennial ennui, and chamber-piece sci-fi-horror. Walker depicted three friends who retreat to a house in the California desert for one girl’s self-promoting fashion shoot, with tensions manifesting in their diverging outlooks even before a meteor shower deposits a disgusting, turtle-like alien life-form in the yard. The creature soon begins asserting an insidious sway over two of the women, infesting their bodies with alien spawn, leaving the third to face some terrible choices. The Seed’s low budget was telling in places, the acting a bit forced, the script dotted with unanswered questions, and the regulation final girl a bit pallid. Still, Walker managed to do quite a bit with not much, applying flecks of very dark humour to visions of icky assimilation and body horror touched with aspects of kinky sexuality, as the alien played at becoming a mind-and-body-melting extra-terrestrial Hugh Hefner.
Speaking of body horror, the style’s progenitor David Cronenberg re-emerged with Crimes of the Future, a film that recycled the title of his 1970 short film attached to quite a different story. This variant was set in an epoch where both physical pain and infection have vanished from the human experience, whilst some people suffer bewildering growth of seemingly extraneous organs, and so self-mutilation is the new art. Cronenberg offered a sardonic self-portrait via Viggo Mortensen playing Saul Tenser, who wows the art scene by making spectacles of getting his aberrant organs removed. The film didn’t so much have a story as recount Saul’s interactions with various scenesters, bureaucrats, militants, and cultists, eventually confronting the possibility that the human race is evolving to live off its own plastic waste. Cronenberg certainly hasn’t mellowed when it comes to drumming up intriguing ideas or ugly-beautiful images, but like quite a few of his late career works it really just kind of sat there on a dramatic level, filled with elements that went nowhere and dotted with clumsily blunt violence, both a portrait and example of an intellectual-artist’s tendency to hide from emotional intensity by taking refuge in conceptualism.
Mark Mylod’s The Menu also took on the uneasy relationship of artist and audience and laced it with flashes of outright horror and blackly comic meditation on one of the year’s most popular themes, in brutally accosting the rich and influential. Ralph Fiennes was Chef Slowik, a titanic figure of the culinary world who invites a select coterie of smug-uglies to his cutting-edge restaurant on an island and treats them to the products of his cult-like operation, only to slowly unveil an intention to kill everyone by night’s end in a banquet of truth and death. Anya Taylor-Joy was the humble escort accompanying one guest, who finds herself doomed along with everyone else unless she can find the chef’s one weak spot. The Menu was engaging on a baseline thriller level although it spurned believability in favour of a kind of nightmare logic that might have been aiming for the Buñuelian but came closer to Grand Guignol camp like Theatre of Blood (1972). The Menu was packed with concerns of potential, particularly in exploiting the curious grip celebrity chefs have on the contemporary bourgeois mind, testing the eternal tension between creative figure, critic, and consumer, indicting the naked classism often lurking behind foodie culture, and considering the mix of sadism and masochism often required by success on the highest level. Like too many films to tread such territory this year, however, the satire (in a script by two former The Onion scribes) was tinny and shallow, sacrificing any nuance or clash of voices to better have its basic, populist thesis, and indulging its elegantly deranged tormentor-avenger to a disturbing degree. The programmatic nature of the story meant no real surprises were in store, which meant that once the punchline arrived, The Menu added up to little more than a sick joke with a self-congratulatory Hollywood player point, in arguing hamburgers for the masses are superior to fine dining for the discerning.
Graham Moore’s The Outfit was another thriller that sought to make minimalist virtues out of production lacks, if in a more intimate and restrained manner. Filmed on a single set, The Outfit’s title was a pun hinting at two aspects of the story, which unfolds entirely within a Chicago bespoke tailoring shop in the 1950s, run by an aging, prudent-seeming English immigrant, Burling (Mark Rylance) with the help of a young protégé (Zoey Deutch). Burling is connected with a big-time gangster who uses his shop as a message drop as well as a source of good clothes. Deutch is playing dangerous games, a gang war seems about to break out, the modest tailor – sorry; cutter – is hiding his own motives, and things come to a head when the gang lord’s son brings a wounded pal there to hide out, forcing secret loyalties to emerge. The Outfit certainly reiterated how a filmmaker can tell a good, gripping story with a couple of rooms and some good actors. As a whole though I found the film a bit facetious, with twists and confrontations piling up to a rather absurd degree, which combined with the cramped setting left it all seeming just that little bit too theatrical and artificial, if still diverting.
Michael Bay’s Ambulance once again revolved around the basic concept of dangerous criminals crammed into a tight locale, if articulated in the exact opposite manner. Bay applied all his formidable technical skill to his remake of a Danish film, which saw two brothers, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen and Jake Gyllenhaal, both raised by a criminal father, staging a bank robbery in downtown LA with very different motives in mind. Their getaway proves disastrous and the duo finish up holding two ambulance medics hostage in their vehicle and careening around LA at speed, looking for any chance to slip the net. The film wedded fraternal melodrama as old as the movies themselves with frantic, absurdist humour and dashing action staging, with Bay making plentiful use of swooping drone shots in the midst of staged chaos. Ambulance saw Bay trying to stay on the cutting edge of Hollywood tech and style whilst also growing just a little out of his perma-‘90s dudebro bliss zone, and Gyllenhaal and Eíza Gonzalez as one of the paramedics gave smart performances. Trouble was, Bay kept spoiling the impact of the dynamic camerawork with his usual incessant and careless cutting, and the overheated dramatics became more exhausting than compelling by the climax.
Special effects maestro Phil Tippet emerged from his back shed with a movie project over thirty years in the making – the stop-motion epic Mad God. This labour of love was a frequently grotesque and surreal vision of a post-apocalyptic future landscape, inhabited by labouring homunculi, misshapen monsters, mad doctors, and warring magicians. As a technical achievement it was practically without equal, and as an aesthetic one undeniably powerful, its rank, ugly, often despairing mood quite palpable but leavened ever so slightly by humour so dark it might count as a black hole. How much it worked however depended on tolerance for the constant stream of hyperbolic violence and sadism, and the opaqueness of its suggested parable, which seemed to want to say something about the cycles of war and environmental degradation but was ultimately more enthralled by its own whacko stream of invention. At its best it was genuinely, peculiarly transfixing as a portrait of a total state of lunacy; at its least it resembled the drawings a particularly talented, morbidly creative teenager might sketch inside their math book cover. Cult status certainly awaits.
10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg made a bold grasp at one of the seemingly poisoned chalices of current franchise cinema, expanding the Predator mythos with Prey. Trachetenberg offered a wisely bold twist in trying to revive the series by shifting to a period setting and deploying a what-if scenario. Prey depicted a young Comanche woman (Amber Midthunder) in the early 1700s who, determined to become one of her tribe’s hunters, ventures out alone into the forest where she encounters both boorish French trappers and something far more dangerous and mysterious. This set-up allowed Trachtenberg to get back to basics in again telling the story of one wily hero who eventually has to take down the alien with smarts and guts, with a new, added gloss of trendy politics with girl power and indigenous perspective exalted. The film was superficially well-executed, with Trachtenberg’s dynamic staging and minimalist special effects matched to determination to tell a familiar story well and patiently, even if failed to offer a convincing-feeling depiction of the Comanche lifestyle, with Midthunder’s performance too calculated as an easily assimilated emblem for millennials.
Chloe Okuno’s Watcher cast Maika Monroe as the flailing former actress wife of a young businessman assigned to work in his company’s Bucharest office. Left alone in their sleek, barren apartment during the day and often into the night, and with dread stories of a serial killer at large and few people she can communicate with, she becomes convinced a man in the opposite building is watching her with evil intent, but can’t convince anyone her concerns are urgent. The basic story here was well-worn, very similar for instance to John Carpenter’s Someone’s Watching Me!, but sought to highlight an implicit feminist theme about being listened to and believed. In those terms Watcher was a little thin, as the script never quite engaged with its characters beyond the obvious – the husband for instance was a rhetorical stick figure – and Burn Gorman was a little too obviously if effectively cast as the inscrutable onlooker. Okuno compensated with a slowly, steadily woven sense of dread and alienation, with a strong feel for the location. Monroe portrayed the heroine struggling to climb out a mire of weak-willed isolation with real class, and built to a properly agonising climax.
Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi was a film with similar precepts to Watcher, likewise depicting a young woman – Zoë Kravitz this time – living an isolated life in a to-die-for apartment and with at least one man spying on her. This time, however, the heroine’s solitude was by choice: stricken with agoraphobia after being molested in her last job, she now works remotely for a rising tech firm, analysing recordings of users of their Alexa-like AI system. When she hears what sounds awfully like a murder being committed, she begins digging to find the truth of it, only to find the trail leading to her employer. Soon she faces not just corporate obfuscation but Orwellian surveillance and hired killers on her tail. But they don’t reckon with either her grit orher intimate knowledge of the tech they propose to corner her with. Following No Sudden Move, one of his most annoying movies, with Kimi, one of his best, reiterated that Soderbergh is by far and away at his best in pulp entertainer mode, trying to invisibly blend thrills with strong elements of social critique. The result was glib in places and cried out for more interest in its perverse marginalia, like the lonely peeping tom who proves to be a nice guy but is only used as a kind of deus ex machina, which some of the film’s influences like Hitchcock and De Palma would have wrung for ripe humanity, as indeed the Soderbergh who once made Sex, Lies and Videotape might have done. That said, Soderbergh worked his most chicly efficient filmmaking to date. Kravitz, as the blowsy, damaged, but wily and quietly badass heroine, gave a strong performance which when viewed as a companion piece to her Catwoman in The Batman felt close to defining a contemporary archetype.
Andrew Gaynord’s All My Friends Hate Me applied a mordant, unpredictable tenor to a study in social and psychological tension by playing it out as a blend of black comedy and folk horror creepiness. Gaynor depicted a former party animal reunited with his posher pals from university over the course of a weekend bash to celebrate his birthday and recent engagement, only to find himself feeling increasingly unmoored and paranoid when he just can’t recapture the old wild spirit. To the extent that the movie eventually proved an elaborate miscue of style it couldn’t escape a cumulative feeling of being excessively arch, and it ultimately shied away from the intriguing depths of character and consequence it wanted to evoke, leaving it to some extent as merely a variation on a particular brand of very British comedy-of-humiliation more often seen on TV. It was nonetheless clever in keeping the exact truth of what’s going on hazy and charged with an off-kilter blend of dread and bitter humour, until the climactic revelations that proved in essence to be another shaggy dog story, but also dared ask a genuinely needling question: what if you’re the worst person you know?
Swiss Army Man auteurs Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert returned with their own particular, more frenetic brand of metaphor-heavy, reality-twisting, post-genre mischief applied to what was actually a minor-key character portrait, exhibited in their art-house hit Everything Everywhere All At Once. Kwan and Scheinert’s film was the tale of a middle-aged Chinese-American Laundromat owner who, faced with multiple personal and business crises being brought to a head by an ornery IRS agent, finds herself plunged into a multiverse-spanning quest connecting her with myriad versions of herself spanning many dimensions in trying to head off apocalypse caused by her disaffected daughter’s embrace of nihilism. As with their precursor film, Kwan and Scheinert tried to present a metaphor for life through the prism of fantasy gimmicks, wu xia tropes, and magic-realist glee, and for a while, at least, the film was a giddy romp. The excellence of the cast, including Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong, and a surprisingly, wonderfully renascent Jonathan Ke Huy Quan, also helped. But the film dragged out every conceit and set-piece to a painful extent, and fell victim ultimately to an increasingly tedious blend of hipster smart-assery and shallow feel-good messaging, trying ultimately to use its po-mo, multi-culti posturing to give a new gloss to well-worn indie film tropes.
Lei Qiao’s The Hidden Fox was an actual, proper wu xia flick that took plain inspiration from both Zhang Yimou’s Shadow, in imitating its smoky-textured and desaturated visuals applied to dazzling, acrobatic fight scenes, and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, with its cast of colourful villains known as the Eight Evils. This gang are introduced in the employ of a corrupt government official seeking a legendary treasure, engineering a deadly duel between two heroes and massacring a village all to clear their way. Ten years later, they’re put on the path to the treasure again and dispatched to an isolated, snowbound locale, only to find someone in their midst isn’t who they say they are. The Hidden Fox had some problems that have beset recent wu xia, particularly overripe performances and a script that only engaged its characters in the sketchiest terms at first and piled on narrative gimmicks in spite of not really being that complicated. Qiao’s fearsome action scenes and great photography made up a lot of ground: this might well have been the year’s best-looking film alongside Avatar: The Way of Water at much less cost, and as it barrelled towards a climax Qiao worked up some of the operatic emotional force the genre commands so easily at its best.
Latter-day Master of Disaster Roland Emmerich tried damn hard to pretend it’s still 1998 with Moonfall, a throwback to his classical brand of big, dumb special effects extravaganzas, albeit this time with a big, dumb sci-fi idea to justify it, proposing that the moon is a gigantic, encrusted alien mechanism that one provoked to action begins causing havoc on Earth and requires some affordable, available movie stars to save the day. Said movie stars included Patrick Wilson as the disgraced astronaut getting his shot at redemption and payback and Halle Berry as his once-and-future co-pilot, backed up by John Bradley, bringing his patented porky-plucky nerd hero into a contemporary setting. The film didn’t just demand turning your brain off but pulling it out of your skull and placing it in a pickling jar, and Emmerich’s touch just hasn’t been the same since he stopped working with Dean Devlin, his movies afflicted by a sterile aesthetic designed to be redubbed with ease for foreign markets. Fair’s fair though – it had just enough headlong, pulp magazine energy and absurd spectacle, delivered with Emmerich’s trademark graphic fluidity, to make me want to play along, particularly as this kind of movie’s been sidelined so long by superhero stories.
It’s long felt possible that the classic high-powered, jingoistic Hollywood action-adventure movie from the ‘80s and ‘90s, still beloved by boys of all ages and from all places but now stuffed away in Tinseltown’s locker in vague embarrassment in favour of superheroes and high-concept IP farming, might find new life outside of the US, much as the Western once did. Indeed, some movies out of Scandinavia in the past few years have already tried it. Australian pulp author Matthew Reilly offered his take, with his directorial debut Interceptor. Reilly cast Elsa Pataky, aka Mrs Chris Hemsworth, as a dauntless but ostracised soldier assigned to a floating command centre for the US’s missile defence system, who finds herself fighting to hold off a glib megalomaniac’s efforts to break in and disable the system, leaving the US vulnerable to nuclear annihilation. Kickboxing, gunplay, and corny CGI aplenty ensue. Reilly delivered a cheerfully cheesy, low-budget attempt to approximate that old school blockbuster vibe, complete with lots of Aussies doing dodgy American accents and a heroine whose Spanish lilt despite being the daughter of a respected US soldier is explained in a passage of ADR. The concoction was flimsy but delivered where it counted, and Pataky’s authentic physicality was utilised brilliantly. Reilly also wove in stabs at hot-button social commentary, including the heroine’s history with sexual harassment and the villain’s desire to cleanse his nation of its fractiousness, that were at once goofy and oddly substantial. Hemsworth made a funny cameo as a dopey salesman cheering on the heroine.
Hemsworth meanwhile returned to playing his most beloved character for Thor: Love and Thunder, a second helping of Taika Waititi’s distinctive take on the Norse god turned Marvel superhero. This time Thor, totally ripped once more and playing the zany wildcard in space adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy, was suddenly drawn back to Earth and forced to confront his ex, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who’s terminally ill with cancer but has also been reborn as a new, female Thor. Together they battle Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), whose sobriquet says it all. Where Waititi’s previous Thor: Ragnarok succeeded in applying self-satirising humour and an ‘80s cartoon aesthetic to fantasy and space opera tropes, Love and Thunder offered a darker, potentially very rich story contending with tragedy and revenge, but also threw comedy at it incessantly, as if scared of getting too heavy for the eight-year-olds with plastic Mjolnirs in the theatres. Waititi waded through his own sticky melange of childish fervour and hipster cynicism, offering up such try-hard delights as Russell Crowe as a hard-partying, plummy-accented Zeus and some screaming, cosmos-traversing magic goats. Waititi’s occasionally striking visuals were foiled and the excellent cast wasted.
Sam Raimi, who helped birth the superhero craze with his first Spider-Man twenty years ago, returned to the genre to helm the MCU entry Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. This one saw Benedict Cumberbatch’s mystic master drawn into a dimension-hopping adventure when he encounters America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a girl gifted with the capacity to leap between realities. America is being pursued through time and space by a mysterious enemy seeking to control her powers, a foe Strange learns soon enough is all too familiar and might well be unstoppable: Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch, turned maniacal and broody after losing her beloved Vision. Raimi got away with surprisingly strong doses of his mischievous humour and invention as well as oddball, morbid imagery, which lacked only, in wielding the full force of Disney-Marvel’s special effects teams, the handmade charm of his early films. Raimi was also willing to countenance a once-heroic character’s downfall with a modicum of seriousness, and sequences like a mystic battle fought with musical notes had just the right crazy energy. That said, a mid-film pause to exploit the dimensional shift for some franchise blurring and nostalgia-baiting just got in the way, and the storyline was in such a rush it failed to make all its hero-journey beats land properly.
Meanwhile, another venerable fantasy franchise curled up like a dead spider, with David Yates’ Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. The third entry in this prequel series saw magizoologist Newt Scamander, his brother Theseus, and sundry pals trying to prevent archvillain Grindelwald from getting himself elected leader of the wizarding world through machinations involving a magical version of a groundhog. Given the lumpiness and lack of focus of the previous two entries, The Secrets of Dumbledore tried to turn things around by pairing screenwriter J.K. Rowling with Harry Potter adaptor Steve Kloves. But this one proved just as awkward, in trying at once to provide a potential capper for a series that was supposed to go much longer whilst leaving the door open for continuation. This meant major storylines were rushed and then given cursory climaxes, and largely displaced by a core plot that tried to articulate a strained commentary on current politics, which might have hit differently if Rowling’s big mouth hadn’t dug her so deep a hole of late. Eddie Redmayne’s Newt had become a bore and Katherine Waterstone’s Tina was largely missing in action, which is a problem when they’re the core heroes of the enterprise, whilst Callum Turner’s nominally more stolid and traditional Theseus iroically emerged as more engaging.
After the calamity that was their previous collaboration, the only place for Jaume Collet-Serra and Dwayne Johnson to go was up, and the returned this year with Black Adam, revolving around one of the more antiheroic figures in the DC comics pantheon. Johnson was the title figure, a magically endowed ancient superwarrior with a grimly wrathful streak revived in the present day to protect his homeland of Kahndaq from an army of slimy mercenaries that’s taken it over for plundering. He’s soon pulled into conflict with a team of more traditionally righteous superheroes called the Justice Society, and all eventually are obliged to battle a descendant of Adam’s ancient foe. Black Adam actually started pretty well with and wielded a decent streak of dark humour, whilst Collet-Serra’s eye really let rip on some spectacular action sequences, particularly with Adam’s initial emergence, set to “Paint It Black.” I also liked the casual approach to introducing the Justice Society, a gang comprised of relatively obscure DC heroes, and setting them and Adam at odds in a story that did actually manage to approximate some of the random craziness of classic comic books. The problem was the film smacked of Warner Bros.’ uncertainty in going for wall-to-wall action for way too long.
I could make many of the same comments about Ryan Coogler’s over-everything Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the inevitable sequel to his zeitgeist-defining 2018 hit. Wakanda Forever sported in Namor a very similar figure to Black Adam, as another formidable antihero defending his nation. In Namor’s case the realm he sought to protect was the aquatic city of Talokan, determined to remain unmolested by a world hungry for Vibranium resources which until now Wakanda seemed to have the monopoly on. With King T’Challa dead from sudden illness and his young sister Shuri forced to step into his shoes, the two nations finished up warring for contrived reasons. Wakanda Forever was certainly a profound mess, jerkily paced and far too long, telling a story that scarcely made sense and with an array of MCU make-work shoehorned in, including introducing the absurd teenage genius Riri Williams, as well as dealing with the obvious and critical damage done to its prospects and narrative clarity by Chadwick Boseman’s death. Attempts at extending the first film’s political edge were even more clumsy and self-contradicting. Somehow though, I found it an intermittently likeable film, particularly in giving Leticia Wright’s Shuri space to evolve as a grief-stricken and angry new hero, backed up with strong performances by a battery of major actresses. Coogler and his megabudget production wielded some amusingly lush visuals depicting the two quasi-tribalistic superpowers going to war: Coogler confirmed at last that he does have an interesting eye, even when it’s at the mercy of CGI slathering and dark digifilm textures.
Simon Kinberg, back to deliver more mediocrity after his X-Men movie, directed The 355, a thrill-free thriller about an array of badass female security agents chasing down a MacGuffin and forced to work together despite their rivalries when caught up in a melange of double-crosses and conspiracies. The film brought together a marvellous array of actresses, headlined by Jessica Chastain again trying to get her action mojo working, and backed up by Diane Kruger, Penelope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o and more. Despite such an array of talent wielding years of accumulated affection, The 355 finished up such a derivative affair, replete with make-work plotting and lumbering action, that I didn’t finish watching it. Anthony and Joe Russo’s hugely expensive streaming epic The Gray Man was slightly better but basically the same cookie-cutter product, this time based on a popular series of airport novels, casting Ryan Gosling to do variation #3.12 on his stoneface-with-slightly-wry-tweaks act whilst playing a criminal refashioned into an omnicompetent assassin, who goes to war with a CIA cabal to save the daughter of his mentor. The film had muscular production values thanks to its absurd budget and sported an entertaining turn from Chris Evans as the smarmy villain, but it was little more than an accumulation of genre clichés and algorithm-based keywords, with a dingy, flavourless look that managed to make every globetrotting location look the same, and no idea how to fit its story and character elements together. If this is what the future of cinema is, I feel deeply depressed.
Just as depressing was Ruben Fleischer’s Uncharted, adapted from the much-loved video game about roguish adventurer Nathan Drake, with Tom Holland playing Drake in a nominal origin story, as the barista orphan falls in with a roguish mentor played by Mark Wahlberg in premium smarm mode and sets out to find a long-lost treasure, competing with various roguish competitors and roguish quasi-love interests. Uncharted pilfered freely from a vast array of classic adventure stories and movies and completely drained them of all hints of life, sex, blood, danger, and excitement, substituting soulless digital photography gloss, boring and annoying heroes, and a ridiculous villain. Holland, Wahlberg, and Antonio Banderas delivered shameless in-it-for-the-money performances. The finale had a potentially entertaining if absurd conceit as heroes and villains battled it out on Spanish galleons dangling from helicopters, but even that finished up a whole lot of nothing.
Aaron and Adam Nee’s The Lost City looked almost exactly the same as Uncharted, with its phony-looking digi-jungles, although it aimed for quite a different spin for its pilfered tropes. The Nees stole the basic proposal of Romancing The Stone – romantic novelist gets thrust into a real adventure – whilst giving it a slight makeover. This time the novelist was Sandra Bullock’s successful but self-deprecating scholar turned hugely popular trash writer. The love interest was a likeably dopey male model who provides the looks for the hero on her book covers and has a secret crush on the author, played with winning fortitude by Channing Tatum. The latter chases the former when she’s kidnapped by a playboy villain (Daniel Radcliffe, amusingly cast but uninspired), to tap her authentic knowledge about an ancient treasure. At least The Lost City proved a mildly spry and painless take on recycled ideas: too much of its humour was that brand of semi-improv yammering that’s everywhere these days, but Brad Pitt was great in a cameo as a he-man adventurer hired by Tatum to save the day only to casually die, and Bullock and Tatum had just enough chemistry to make the rest of it an okay time-waster.
Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent tried a brand of meta storytelling that’s become increasingly popular of late. Nicolas Cage played Nicolas Cage, or rather a version of the popular impression of his career as an earnest but livewire talent cursed with poor judgement, who likes arguing with another, even more caricatured version of that persona that sometimes appears to him, one who likes howling out weird line readings. ‘Cage’, facing career downturn and problems relating with his ex-wife and teenage daughter, wearily accepts an offer to collaborate on a project with an amateur but very wealthy screenwriter, played by Pedro Pascal, who’s a huge fan. To both men’s surprise they become great friends, but Cage is soon warned by some CIA agents that his new pal is an arms dealer involved in a recent, high-profile kidnapping, and is asked to spy on him. The script’s pitch wasn’t entirely original in its ironic juxtaposition of humdrum lifestyle jokes and mutually-boosting buddy shtick against outsized melodrama and genre film canards. Cage however had a high old time simultaneously exalting and mocking his screen persona, and the plot, as well as delivering a suitably over-the-top approximation of buddy comedy shading into absurd action flick, had some fun with the idea of an actor using acting skills as another weapon in the arsenal.
Tom George’s See How They Run also applied a comic and aggressively metafictional approach to a thriller blueprint, splitting the difference between honouring and burlesquing one of the most famous whodunits ever penned, Agatha Christie’s never-ending play The Mousetrap. George’s film had a potentially fun and clever gambit, setting a murder mystery backstage of the play when it was still a relatively fresh hit, and roping in some of its real-life stars including Richard Attenborough, Sheila Sim, and Christie herself, whilst also presenting a smart-aleck spin on the play’s plot. Adrien Brody was the jerk Hollywood director murdered by persons unknown, Sam Rockwell the sleepy, depressed, suggestively named investigating cop Inspector Stoppard, and Saoirse Ronan his bright and eager young assistant. George applied a lot of colourfully stylised jokiness derived rather too blatantly from the likes of Wes Anderson, and one late touch had real potential, as Shirley Henderson was cast a frayed and batty Christie who tries to intervene in a stand-off by clumsily applying her literary art to life. The script otherwise had an awful paucity of good jokes or substantive characters it took seriously enough to lend the larkishness a fulcrum, and failed to gain much momentum from the disparity of fact and fiction because it had no feel at all for reality, so the whole thing only added up to a superficially energetic pastiche.
Munich: The Edge of War was based on a novel by Robert Harris exactly the same as every other Robert Harris novel, with the same basic plot applied to varying historical backdrops. This one unfolded against the 1938 Munich Conference, casting Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain and George Mackay as a young aide who tries to act as mediator between the Prime Minister and a German friend who aims to blow the whistle on Hitler’s conquering intentions. The film was helmed by German director Christian Schwochow, which raised the possibility of a new perspective on this kind of gathering storm tale. It didn’t stop the results from being insipid as a thriller and distracted as a portrait of a much-mythologised historical pivot, punctuated by such obvious touches as casting August Diehl yet again as a nasty Nazi. The movie was only made vaguely memorable by Irons’ crafty, convincing performance as Chamberlain, trying to apply all his diplomatic wiliness to preventing war with earnest motives but also far out of his depth in dealing with authentic evil.
Greg Mottola’s Confess, Fletch revived the wily journalist, alias-happy investigator, and all-round wiseass created by Gregory McDonald and played in two movies in the ‘80s by Chevy Chase. Jon Hamm was an inspired choice for the role, playing a Fletch who’s quit journalism and, whilst living in Rome, gets involved with a Count’s daughter. He returns to the US to help unravel the theft of some of her family’s art collection, only to find himself accused of a murder. Attempts to revisit the appeal of cultish literary antiheroes can sometimes go wrong – remember Mortdecai? – but Mottola was judicious in updating the material and applied a smart, snappy sense of style. Almost to a fault: the comedy didn’t have much time to breathe as it was so determined to speed from one wisecrack and quirky vignette to the next, which meant the film almost outwore its welcome at just over an hour and a half. Still, it was for most of that length an elegant, playful, old-fashioned entertainment, with a script peppered with genuinely funny lines, and a pretty good mystery in an extended lampoon of Chandleresque thrillers.
Kenneth Branagh’s Death On The Nile finally came out early in the year, just a few weeks in fact after his Oscar-nominated Belfast, after being incessantly delayed by COVID and controversies involving several of its stars. For his second go-round as Hercule Poirot, Branagh tackled one of Agatha Christie’s most famous stories, with murder and skulduggery unfolding mostly on a paddle steamer working its way up the Nile. Branagh was bolder this time in suborning the ritual form of the whodunit to his own fascination with formative psychology and cine-theatrical staging. He painted Poirot more overtly as a damaged misfit posing as suave force of justice, and surrounded him with versions of Christie’s characters tweaked to emphasise hidden passions and expose new forces, cultural and carnal, blending to push aside the posh Englishness Christie’s writings mythologised. Gal Gadot was ineffectual as the key victim, but Emma Mackey sizzled as her randy, vengeful sister, and Branagh’s freewheeling direction ticked off influences as diverse as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Bollywood epics. The last scene in particular struck a truly odd and affecting note, and the film, for all its wayward impulses, emerged deeply stamped with Branagh’s personality.
Rian Johnson’s more impudent take on the set-in-stone whodunit template Knives Out proved so popular in 2019 that this year he returned with a follow-up, Glass Onion, this time sending Daniel Craig’s sartorial detective genius Benoit Blanc to a Greek island owned by Edward Norton’s obscenely rich and tasteless tech mogul and his coterie of obeisant frenemies, gathered nominally for fun and frivolity, only to find murder and mayhem ensuing. This time around Johnson reiterated most of the core concepts from the first film in a more inflated and self-conscious manner, including offering a new raft of satirical caricatures seeking to skewer obnoxious species in the contemporary landscape of fame and wealth. Whilst Craig’s Blanc remained an inspired characterisation and held the film together when on screen, and Johnson’s filmmaking has become slick in the extreme, the second helping was far, far less satisfying, and indeed indicative of Johnson’s worst instincts. Johnson’s new mystery, which tried to build a key joke around things being less complicated than anyone wants them to be, still crammed proceedings with busy-work to provide an illusion of complexity, whilst the satire was one-note, and overall the incessant “fun” choked off any actual fun, any chance to enjoy the actors and let the characters and ideas flourish.
It’s easy to forget given his perpetually looming pop culture status that Batman is another beloved detective hero born just a few years after Poirot. The character made yet another retooled return in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, a film that pushed certain tendencies for the character and his cinematic portrayals to a limit, making him the hero of a long, moody, ‘80s-style neo-noir film. Reeves avoided offering yet another origin recapitulation, and instead portrayed the Dark Knight fairly early in his crimefighting campaign, contending with both Gotham City’s gang lords and the vicious, agenda-driven vigilante calling himself The Riddler, whilst getting involved with thief and demimondaine Selina Kyle, a rival and helpmate in his assault on the underworld with a secret project of her own. I liked The Batman quite a bit: Reeves applied a careful blend of stylisation and realism to a solid, well-told story, creating a slightly cyberpunk Gotham, and his filmmaking was elegant. Robert Pattinson was surprisingly, smartly low-key as a Bruce Wayne who barely has an identity beyond the nightfaring guise he’s constructed for himself, and Kravitz had a sly intensity as a Catwoman with a very personal thirst for justice. Only the overbusy script and occasionally ponderous length got in the way of the film’s total success.
As well as contributing one of his best scores for The Batman, Michael Giacchino also emerged as a director of potential when he helmed a Marvel by-product, the odd little amuse-bouche Werewolf By Night, based on one of the imprimatur’s more cultish and grown-up properties. Werewolf By Night mimicked classic Universal-style Horror movies in form and look, particularly Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat, as it depicted a gang of notorious monster hunters converging at a mansion to participate in a monster hunt to prove themselves worthy inheritors of a magical object called the Bloodstone. Laura Donnelly was the spunky black sheep daughter of the Bloodstone’s old master and namesake, Gael Garcia Bernal the guarded nice guy with a feral secret, and Harriet Sansom Harris had a high old time as Donnelly’s fearsome, fanatical mother-in-law. Giacchino proved himself competent and well-steeped in the mystique of the kind of classic fare he ape, even if the black-and-white photography wasn’t terribly well-attuned to the medium. It’s also a pity the script didn’t learn more lessons from the old B-movie models with their ability to sharply sketch characters in a few minutes, where Werewolf By Night felt like a long prologue for a longer movie that doesn’t yet exist. Still, taken within its self-prescribed limits it was fun.
Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick, which finally hit screens after a long COVID delay, was always going to be a hit, but the degree to which it proved not just the year’s biggest success but an all-time blockbuster took everyone by surprise, casually turning many assumptions of current mainstream cinema on their head. Kosinski anointed Tom Cruise, returning to his career-making role as ace pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, as a logical extension of his fantasy figure status, undimmed by age or compromise, and as the last true movie star. He was thrust into a storyline just about as old as Hollywood itself: the aging Maverick, almost out of options despite being a glory-crusted hero thanks to his penchant for bucking the system, was assigned to train and eventually lead some young pilots for a good old-fashioned impossible mission, requiring him to make peace with the past on the way as he struggles in a quasi-paternal role for Rooster (Miles Teller), son of his old pal Goose and vanguard of the next generation. Kosinski managed a genuinely unexpected alchemy, playing off the mystique of Tony Scott’s slick and silly 1986 original, but also moving far beyond it, turning the sequel into a more general paean to classic Hollywood virtues – showing a beloved star and good-looking people doing thrilling, spectacular things, and tapping it for emotional depth, particularly in the vital meeting between Cruise and an ailing Val Kilmer. As a work of dramatic art I found it a double-edged blade – movies just like it, if not so visceral, came out every other week in the 1950s, and that familiarity was both appeasing and also a little wearisome. The compensation was Kosinski’s cutting-edge style and genuine sense of big-screen spectacle.
Only a few weeks after releasing the biggest hit of the year, Kosinski saw his follow-up Spiderhead more or less dumped. Spiderhead had a reasonably familiar starting point – condemned criminals try to expiate their sentences and their mental demons by signing up to be guinea pigs for a mad scientist’s experiments, in this case being dosed with drugs that can finely control mood and behaviour. But Kosinski’s approach to this concept was to, at least initially, play it as a bright, shiny lampoon on the softly fascistic self-confidence of techie entrepreneurs, playing the beneficent geniuses whilst heedlessly ignoring actual consequences for human beings, and the bromides of online poptimism, before the troubling truth begins to infect proceedings. Chris Hemsworth delivered an inspired performance as the beaming, snazzy, palsy supervisor for the experiment who pretends to be a functionary but is actually the master of puppets, and Miles Teller was solid as one of his subjects, guilt-ridden but increasingly assured in his resistance. The key problem with the film, despite some formidable qualities, was the story was just a little too straightforward to sustain a whole feature, being the sort of thing The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits might once have knocked over in half an hour. Subplots never quite became substantial enough to sustain themselves, the climax didn’t resolve too gracefully, and Kosinski, strong a formalist as he is, doesn’t yet have quite the touch for this kind of off-beat satire.
Following Top Gun: Maverick’s release, the movie event of 2022’s second half was the arrival at long last of James Cameron’s sequel to his epochal 2009 hit Avatar, a release that bore a heavy burden in trying to restore some wonder to the special effects blockbuster and the theatrical experience in general. Avatar: The Way of Water saw Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and their brood of kids forced to uproot from their jungle home when the return of human colonists and their great personal enemy Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who has suffered a curious kind of reincarnation as his mind has been rehoused in an avatar body, sparks new conflict. Taking refuge with a sea-dwelling Na’vi populace and coming to love their lifestyle despite clashes between the Sully youngsters and snooty local brats, the Sullys are eventually forced to go to war again as Quaritch’s vendetta becomes increasingly unhinged. Cameron didn’t really try to do much new in terms of story and theme, beyond a swerve into a different brand of slightly masked environmental hectoring (swapping save the rainforest for save the whales), and shifting to a new locale for his particular brand of lysergic travelogue. Many of the fresh threads involving the conflicted and hybridised identity of the next generation introduced through characters like Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the bemusing child of Dr Augustine from the first film, are destined to carry over into further sequels. The Way of Water came on with such maximalist passion and spectacle that all this didn’t really matter much, with Cameron’s astonishingly beautiful filmmaking woven around a sufficiently elemental story that built to a thunderous action climax that amongst other things provided a greatest hits collection of Cameron’s cinema and retold Moby Dick from the whale’s point of view, reiterating that Cameron has cojones the size of California.
After years of quiescence, Adrian Lyne resurged with the would-be erotic thriller Deep Water. Ben Affleck was a husband who, having made a fortune out of designing weapons tech and now settled into a seemingly placid-to-a-fault life with his wife and daughter. Ana de Armas the wayward, capriciously horny spouse given to having flings and provoking her husband with her shows of messy extroversion, and whose lovers Affleck might be vengefully murdering. Lyne officially adapted the film from a Patricia Highsmith novel, but it was really another derivation of Claude Chabrol’s Une Femme Infidele like his previous Unfaithful. It came wrapped in Lyne’s customary gloss, particularly his penchant for real estate porn matched to softcore sexuality, which, given how neutered recent cinema has been, felt here close to daring. Lyne won good performances from his cast and sustained intrigue in the early portions as just what was going on was left enigmatic, and displayed a good feel for the behaviour, individual and communal, in this pocket of moneyed smugness. But the narrative became increasingly predictable as what was going on became clear and the characters reamined opaque, leaving me with the feeling, as Lyne’s films usually do, that it was all much less than met the eye.
Thirteen Lives was another movie that even five years ago would have been a major cinematic event but this year was shuffled off to streaming. Ron Howard tackled subject matter reminiscent of his Apollo 13, as he depicted the famous 2018 rescue of a team of teen boys and their soccer coach from a flooded cave in Thailand. Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell were cast as the two stoic, experienced cave rescue experts who, after finding the trapped kids by braving dark and swirling hell, had to come up with a way of getting them out, with the whole world watching and little expectation of getting everyone out alive. On a dramatic level, the film walked a tightrope between no-nonsense docudrama and something more expansive. The depiction of the Thai side of things was a bit scanty, sparing only sidelong glances at the politicking and ethnic tensions at play, and despite the title the actual kids were barely characterised, with the emphasis instead falling on the western rescuers. Nonetheless Howard plainly thrives on this kind of intense, detail-based filmmaking, applying formidable technical chops to communicating the danger and pressure of the scenario. He celebrated the same methodical tendency in his heroes, and managed again to make a story everyone knows the ending to thrilling.
Thomas M. Wright’s The Stranger offered a fictionalised story based on an infamous Australian murder investigation in the 2000s, via a Kate Kyriacou novel. Sean Harris did a superlative job transforming himself into a familiar type of rootless, damaged Aussie man, Frank Teague, the chief suspect in a young boy’s disappearance and presumed murder. Whilst fleeing attention and seeking work by travelling to Western Australia, Frank was quickly drawn in by an undercover policeman (Joel Edgerton) posing as a member of a crime gang who offers Frank everything he’s ever needed, a sense of belonging and protection from both the law and his own haplessly antisocial nature. The story certainly had intriguing precepts, portraying a glum and tacky Aussie demimonde, as Wright and the actors worked to portray the killer in his isolate pathos and the cop fraying whilst maintaining his submerged life and mimicking care for Frank that demands a kind of Stockholm syndrome. And yet the film ultimately remained at a distance from the men, failing to convey much complexity or detail to their relationship beyond the obvious, and proving particularly evasive at the end when the hammer fell, so that it didn’t really satisfy as either a stark procedural or a psychological portrait. Wright’s thick glaze of what has now become the cliché aesthetic of dark Aussie crime-themed dramas – creepy music, onerous, cryptic cinematography, and a gawking fascination for inarticulate losers – tried to convince the viewer it’s all something arty and deep.
Baz Luhrmann, never afraid of tackling big subjects and shrinking them down to the negligible, decided to assault one of the most famous and pivotal figures of twentieth century pop culture, with a biopic of Elvis Presley, albeit one that also encompassed a portrait of his crafty, controlling manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker. The thesis of Elvis was the two men were a symbiotic creature, Elvis embodying American synthesis, rebellion, and messy passion, Parker cynicism, commercialism, and a kind of performed squareness in a desperate attempt to stay below the radar, and the two men’s success each foiled and destroyed the other to some degree in a particularly American tragedy. Not a bad starting point, but of course with Luhrmann subtlety was never going to be the point. The best moments came early on as the film surveyed the time and place Elvis rose out of, raising the possibility Luhrmann intended to make a Moulin Rouge!-esque panoramic musical about the melting pot of mid-century American music of which Elvis was the most famous exemplar. Then it settled for being a stock-standard biopic, with a painful bulk of the runtime dedicated to The King’s decline whilst still sanitising his life and delivering the shallowest possible psychological portrait. Elvis in the end felt close to a greatest hits compendium for flourishes stolen from other recent biopics, with only curlicues of Luhrmann’s flashy artificiality for decoration. Tom Hanks was broad but daring and curiously effective playing Parker as a Fritz Lang ogre creeping through neon-lit aisles, but Austin Butler’s lead performance was like a model in a themed magazine photo spread, his speaking voice dead on but his face vacant and evasive in performing, the polar opposite of Presley’s fiercely projected engagement.
After successes with the art-house hits The Witch and The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers made an all-out effort to earn his spurs as a genuine movie visionary playing to the mass market, as he released The Northman, a very loose adaptation of the Danish saga that also inspired Hamlet. The young Viking Prince Amleth, played in full manhood by Alexander Skarsgard, sets out to avenge his father’s murder and mother’s forced marriage to his wolfish uncle. Eggers endeavoured to articulate the worldview of the Vikings through a blend of grimy physicality and stylised mystical visions, the blood-black fixity of Amleth’s purpose punctuated by flashes of something new and redemptive as he falls in love with the Russian witch Olga, played with vehemence by Anya Taylor-Joy, and finds something to fight for other than mindless revenge. Eggers conjured some technically and aesthetically formidable sequences, replete with incidents of cruel bloodshed balanced with folkloric vignettes illustrating a bygone world. But there was something calculated and artificial about the film. On a dramatic level, it was quite straightforward, filching from the likes of Conan The Barbarian and Sergio Leone, and offering lots of blunt violence, whilst posturing as something more thoughtful. Nicole Kidman as Amleth’s mother, who reveals a nasty surprise to her avenging son when they finally meet again, almost shocked the film into something genuinely interesting and off-kilter, but then it resumed its rather blankly macho business. As it was The Northman was an interesting, impressive, but not particularly rich work.
Like Eggers, Luca Guadagnino has repeatedly tried to make unstable concoctions in blending artistic pretence with gritty fare. Not dissuaded by his disastrous remake of Suspiria, he returned to Horror territory with Bones and All, an adaptation of a Camille DeAngelis’ novel about a teenage girl (Taylor Russell) who is abandoned by her father after her inherited, predatory cannibalistic traits start to become uncontrollable. Travelling across country in a bid to find her similarly afflicted mother, she encounters an aging, creepy dude (Mark Rylance) and a young man (Timothée Chalamet) who share her mysterious trait and seek her company, and faces a grinding crisis as her hungers constantly threaten to get the better of her scruples. The material might well have been made a meal of by George Romero or Wes Craven once upon a time, but Guadagnino played it for the most part as a touchy-feely heartland drama about people loaded with pathos in the mould of Drugstore Cowboy or the like, as well as extending the familiar mini-genre of European directors losing their bearings in the American expanse. Bones and All came complete with an insufferably folky gee-tar pickin’ score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for extra lo-fi romanticism, even as Guadagnino loaded the film with gory scenes of flesh-eating, and the film left me wondering just who the hell it was meant for. The collision of tones and impulses failed to cohere in any fashion, and after an initially intriguing start became quite dull. Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, and David Gordon Green turned up at intervals to inject calculatedly weird turns as other members of the “eater” community, and yet the film had nothing at all to say about this community, and it became apparent Guadagnino had only chosen to tackle the material as the theme would wield more shock value than it he’d made yet another movie about junkies or other, more prosaic footloose types.
David Leitch, a director who keeps suggesting real talent without yet finding the right material to apply it to, followed up his hard-edged action flicks John Wick and Atomic Blonde with the wild, fluorescent, comedy-action extravaganza Bullet Train, adapted from a popular manga. Brad Pitt was wittily cast as a blissed-out thief riding on a wave of new-age therapy bromides, thrust amidst a deadly contest on one of the titular transports. Assigned to steal a briefcase, he finds he’s surrounded by assassins both professional and amateur, all being played off against each-other by a shadowy, ruthless Russian crime lord and his offended daughter. Bullet Train was blatant in offering a particularly slick variation on the kind of bouncy, bloody, absurdist post-Tarantino thriller developed by the likes of Guy Ritchie and Joe Carnahan, the kind with character-announcing title cards, whirlwind explanatory flashbacks, and humorously inapt pop ditties on the soundtrack. It was however elevated to the head the pack by the cast and Leitch’s formidable formal gifts, particularly his spryness in staging action scenes and surprisingly precise feel for when to pivot from shenanigans to seriousness and back again. If the film didn’t wield the same visual class as Atomic Blonde, it was more successful in tracking the frenetic crisscrossing of interested parties and building to a madcap climax, and though ultimately way too long, it was more entertaining than it should have been. Walter Hill’s Dead For A Dollar was sort of like Bullet Train’s elderly relative, playing out a not-dissimilar story in a proper Western setting and swapping lightning zaniness for shambling, autumnal verbosity. Ditto Jean Luc Herbulot’s Saloum, which provided an African-set, horror movie-inflected variation on the concept.
One of the few things viewers seemed to agree on this year was that S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR (Rise Roar Revolt) was one of the major movie events. A Telgu-made, Bollywood-style epic, RRR told the interwoven story of two fictional folk heroes, one a policeman working under the British raj in the 1930s, the other a holy warrior sent by a village to find and restore one of its children, stolen by an English governor and his wife, with both men eventually embroiled in the burgeoning independence movement. RRR was praised by lefties for its unabashedly fight-the-western-Man attitude but criticised at home for its appeal to nakedly self-righteous nationalism, making for interesting intellectual incoherence, whilst most just let the over-the-top action and dance sequences crash over them. It was hard not to get the feeling RRR hit a sweet spot of exoticism, supplying things people would’ve ripped to shreds in a Hollywood film doing the same. Although the dance sequences were good, personally I found RRR pretty irritating, with its overbearing style and lousy acting, with Rajamouli dragging out every sequence five minutes longer than it needed to be. With its absurdly pumped and performed machismo, leaping wild animals, and goofy humour, it had the quality of a beer commercial run amok.
David O. Russell’s Amsterdam, the director’s first film since his underrated Joy, chose a similar starting point to his overrated American Hustle by tackling a historical scandal and kneading some of Russell’s favoured brand of shambolic protagonists into the dough. This time Russell’s story touched on an authentic conspiracy from the early 1930s involving an attempt by reactionary plutocrats to manipulate veterans into forming a fascist revolutionary army, via suborning their trusted spokesman, whose fictionalised equivalent was played by Robert De Niro, cast with ironic pep as a salt-of-the-earth heroic patriot. But the story concentrated on three invented figures: Christian Bale’s damaged doctor, John David Washington’s stalwart pal, and Margot Robbie’s bohemian rebel, who find themselves enacting a half-remembered Hitchcock plot on the way to proving touchstones for Russell’s conviction that the whacky outsiders and rejects often prove national saviours. The initial set-up was intriguing, Russell offered a beautifully recreated historical milieu, and there were good flourishes scattered throughout, like a sing-off between Nazi goons and a ruck of Black American veterans. These got lost in the blur of Russell’s penchant for superficial energy and even more superficial showy neuroticism from his characters, and his attempt to balance his native hipster cynicism with a paean to Capraesque heart didn’t so much result in a draw as in a brutal mutual beat-down, manifesting in a terminally overdrawn and clumsy coda. The formidable cast all seemed to be acting in different movies, and only De Niro and Anya-Taylor Joy as an insufferable society wife seemed to be in the right one.
Santiago Mitre’s Argentina 1985 also contended with troubling history, as it depicted events doubtlessly extremely familiar to an Argentine audience: Mitre charted the travails of a state prosecutor and his team of earnest young aides trying to indict military bigwigs from the recently deposed junta for their abuses and tyrannies, despite knowing full well many of their friends are still in power and they have vast reserves of support from the upper classes. Mitre’s approach to the loaded, fascinating material, far from the more allusive and insinuating aesthetics of movies to tackle this milieu before like Pablo Larrain’s early movies or Andreas Fontana’s Azor, offered a very Hollywoodised approach, charting the formation of the team of valiant justice-seekers with jots of comic relief and catharsis between the heavy stuff and punctuating all with a standard inspiring music score. Fair play: it was at least good Hollywood, with smart performances, fleet-footed direction, and some deft blending of recreation and historical broadcast footage from the real trials. Importantly, Mitre achieved a palpable sense of what it’s like to emerge from a repressive state, painting an inherently paranoid mental and political landscape where everyone’s determined to press on but knows full well it could all very suddenly become a deadly trap for the supposed hunters, and noting the ambivalent aspect of the heroes’ final, curtailed success, to keep things getting too cheaply triumphal.
With The Woman King, Gina Prince-Bythewood set out to explore African history with an edge of feminist and ethnographic import, as she portrayed the famous women warriors of the Kingdom of Dahoumey. Viola Davis was cast as a potent but world-weary commander defending the state of John Boyega’s young king in the 1830s and schooling some new recruits, one of whom has an unexpected secret, whilst their country faces conflict with a powerful neighbour and some sleazy Brazilian slavers. Leaving aside the film’s problematic historicism and blatant indulgence of pure crowd-pleasing fantasy, Prince-Bythewood did an initially intriguing and visually impressive job of venturing into a little-portrayed place and period, and pulled off some well-staged action scenes. The movie, which might have made for a thrilling study of a proud but morally complex society as well as a great war story, settled for being a merely decent thud-and-blunder epic that owed at least as much to old-school swashbuckler melodramas like The Black Shield of Falworth as to Braveheart, with its reunions between long-lost family members, and a drippy romantic liaison with a hunky human trafficker in the bargain. Lashana Lynch’s broad but entertaining performance as a tough but doomed warrior was the best feature. Actual African cinema of the year, including Saloum and Lingui: The Sacred Bonds, was in general far superior.
Terence Davies tackled the life and legacy of Siegfried Sassoon, the poet laureate of World War I’s special horror, with Benediction, a long, muted, but intelligent and strongly felt portrait that set out to mostly illuminate Sassoon’s postwar life as the survivor of another besieged community, as a gay man weathering a gilded underground of queer celebrities, including an ill-fated fling with Ivor Novello. Davies, a director I’ve had a lot of trouble warming to and who applied his specific brand of occasional quasi-abstraction and heavily glazed seriousness to a generally intimate and very human story, did very fine work that found interesting ways to weave Sassoon’s work into the film, even if he just couldn’t in the end overcome some of the usual problems of the biopic, including a whiplash-inducing shift from the wartime setting to the peace (perhaps feeling that had already been well-covered by Pat Barker’s Regeneration). Davies was plainly more interested in recreating the waspishly witty but emotionally dangerous world Sassoon moved in before taking refuge in a self-mortifying marriage. I never felt he quite reconciled the two halves of his hero and the story dragged as Sassoon moved from one calamitous romance to another; regardless, the last scene had haunting power.
Tony Stone’s Ted K was a biopic with a very different focus, presenting a study of the infamous ‘Unabomber,’ Ted Kaczynski. Sharlto Copley, who also produced, played the clever and cunning but deeply alienated and aloof oddball who retreated to the woods in his search for a peaceful, modernity-rejecting existence, but felt himself driven to acts of revenge against anyone and everything that provoked him by violating the sanctity of his refuge, contradicted his ideals, or just plain pissed him off. Copley give a superficially exacting performance, and the film was interesting enough as a portrait of Kaczynski’s extreme lifestyle and obsessive pursuits to keep things watchable, giving hints of sympathy for his anxiety regarding technology and environmental destruction whilst clearly showing how maniacal he was in expressing them. But it didn’t add up to much either, as Stone’s mannered direction matched a script that had little to say about Kaczynski beyond portraying him over and over a pathologically lonely and driven kook, whilst evading engaging with his family, who he has constant, percussive fights with over the phone, and his earlier life. Worse still, it pinched from Joker the motif of the whacko outsider courting an imaginary girlfriend, a trite device for working up sympathy in a film that was ultimately way too long.
She Said was officially the year’s most shit-out-of-luck film. German actor-director Maria Schrader’s Hollywood debut was a depiction of the investigation by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) into Harvey Weinstein’s reign of abuse, gradually drawing together the story that led to his downfall. The film’s apparent evasiveness when it came to taking on Weinstein’s in-the-know lackeys and protectors was a lapse both YouTube reactionaries and Twitter lefties agreed upon, and the general audience proved about as eager to be roasted over hot coals as they were to revisit this ground, meaning the would-be award favourite and prestige picture bombed hard. She Said certainly had a lot of problems. Schrader’s approach baldly mimicked All The President’s Men in aiming for a cool, docudrama method, but played more like Spotlight 2. Far too much of the dialogue sounded like an op-ed, sidelong glances at the reporters’ home lives were clunky, as were concluding attempts to convey catharsis, and the film as a whole was badly paced. The story was certainly worth telling, however, and Schrader at least delivered a stinging, accusatory portrait of the legal weaponry Weinstein had in his arsenal. She also placed emphasis not just on the assiduous process of nailing down the story but on the survivors of abuse, particularly the not-famous ones, and their attempts to articulate deep-riven distress and scalding anger in nominally neutral settings. The cast, including Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle, generally gave good performances, but Andre Braugher stole proceedings as one of the team’s solicitous editors, well-practiced at hanging up on bullies.
Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider was another based-on-fact tale of a flinty woman journalist trying to bring down a monster, albeit one executed with considerably more artistic licence. Zar Amir Ebrahami played Rahimi, a journalist (fictional) launching a dogged investigation into the case of the “Spider Killer” (real), a serial killer slaying prostitutes in the Iranian pilgrimage city of Mashhad circa 2000: Rahimi, suspecting the police are uninterested in catching a murderer many think is doing holy work in ridding them of “corrupt women,” eventually goes undercover to try and lure him in. Meanwhile the killer himself, Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani), moves from victim to victim whilst tending his religious mania and appearing the upright family man and war veteran. Whilst Abbasi’s fictional interpolations arguably romanticised the story to a degree in giving it a familiar thriller structure and providing an on-message feminist foe for the killer, he at least did so with real tabloid flare, as the film moved deftly between the investigator contending with an opaque and often openly misogynist officialdom and Saeed’s intimate brutality, which Abbasi didn’t shy away from depicting, and when the two antagonists finally intersected it made for a doozy of a suspense scene. In a year of serious protest and revolt in Iran sparked by much the same topics, Holy Spider was certainly a timely reflection on the nation’s septic psychological state, mordantly noting the connection between the killer and much of the community who share his worldview, even if finally something like justice arrives for him. Ebrahami and Bajestani were excellent.
In the year Jean-Luc Godard died, Neptune Frost, a directorial collaboration for American rapper Saul Williams and Rwandan actor and writer Anisia Uzeyman, set out to prove that the Godardian influence still persists with their singular, freaky blend of sci-fi, mythology, musical, and agitprop. Neptune Frost followed disparate characters uprooted by Burundi’s political and economic turmoil, like a miner who’s recently lost his brother thanks to thuggish bosses, and student revolutionaries driven out of the city by government repression, including an intersex being who becomes the miner’s lover. All converge on a ruined city that proves to be a once-and-future supertechnological enclave, which allows them to hack the online world and bond on digital-spiritual levels, only to invite vicious reprisals. Resembling a blend of Spartacus and The Matrix as remade by a street theatre collective, Neptune Frost boldly tried to encompass many current, obsessive points of concern for the modern youth left, and articulate a boldly radical outlook. At points the filmmakers sustained a rhapsodic flow and vibrancy in their approach, blending hip-hop and tribal musical styles, realism and surrealism, with traditional sequence structuring suborned to this open approach. But the directors weren’t able to sustain that rhapsody, with a lot of clumsy composition and staging, and a script that made half-hearted stabs at complication with subplots that went nowhere, and eventually devolved into speechifying. By the end, whilst feeling the film had tremendous elements, I was more than a bit ambivalent about the whole.
Romain Gavras’ Athena also dealt with defiance and revolt by righteously incited youth, in this case the largely African Muslim population of an outer Parisian tower estate. The block’s denizens are driven to violet and well-planned insurrection after one of their own has been filmed being murdered by what appears to be federal police, capturing police weaponry and fortifying the estate. Athena was punctuated by several spectacular, incredibly choreographed long-take shots, as Gavras aimed first and foremost to thrust the viewer amidst a thrilling, concussively convincing depiction of such chaos and violence, and he did manage to capture through this aesthetic some sense of people left blinkered by rage and grief and rushing headlong at the horns of the bull. As a clotheshorse for his dynamism, Gavras embraced a classical kind of fraternal melodrama, as he pitched the dead boy’s brothers, all emblematic of different factions – a soldier, a gangster, and the leader of the rioters – into more personal conflict. The limitations of Gavras’ approach were as notable as his achievement, all said: characterisation was thin, and the drama, which ought to have encompassed the whole community’s viewpoints, instead rode on the zephyr of a puffed-up macho rage it sought to critique. The film had both too much and not enough story, as when it laboured to contrast righteous revolt with terrorist anarchy, and delivered a confused sting-in-the-tail coda. There’s also something a little grimace-inducing about a film that tries to offers such a beautifully filmed riot. Still, it had real power.
Uptown in setting, focus, and style as far as current French cinema goes, if no less intrigued by the social and human experiments of melting pot areas in Paris than Athena, Les Olympiades, aka Paris, 13th District, saw Jacques Audiard, who counts by now as a venerable elder, confirming his determination to stay true to the current zeitgeist. Co-written with Celine Sciamma, Audiard this time spurned the melodrama he’s known for in exchange for a particular blend of romanticism and acerbic realism, as he concentrated on the travails of a few sexually and socially active young people of diverse backgrounds and contending with the random glories and cruelties supplied by the big city in an age of instant online connection and equally quick hostility and harassment. The black-and-white photography applied a gloss of nostalgic elegance to the intersecting tales of people who didn’t always act that well or smartly, and who sometimes weren’t all that particularly interesting. Audiard nonetheless accepted the challenge of finding beauty and meaning precisely in portraying such disordered people and the way they find even the most temporary safe harbours in a rough modern world. Noemie Merlant stole the film as a mature-age student who experiences and dishes out some of that roughness.
Palme d’Or-winning Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, made a sojourn to South Korea to make Broker. Kore-eda’s story revolved around the Korean phenomenon of “baby boxes,” a modern improvement on the old habit of leaving orphans on the church steps, but with the twist that two men (Song Kang-ho and Gang Dong-won) have a business purloining the odd foundling and selling them to adopting couples. When the young prostitute mother (Lee Ji-eun) of one of the babies comes back to check on what’s happened to it, she rumbles the pair and insists on accompanying them to vet potential parents. Along the way they fuse into an odd family unit, soon augmented when they’re joined by an impudent orphan boy, whilst they’re chased by two cops and gangland heavies. In a fashion familiar for Kore-eda, Broker tackled serious things with a light touch close to a rather old-fashioned kind of sentimental comedy, although a pervasive sense of melancholy and humanist heartache overlay it all as all the characters knew the axe would soon drop. Kore-eda’s flashes of poetry and sheer strength of feeling, aided by Song’s established ability to seem charming and pathetic at once and by Lee’s luminous beauty, made it a fine but not transcending experience, and the clumsy pile-up of plot was mostly adornment for a movie that took a long time to reach an end that tried a bit hard to satisfy irreconcilable desires.
Swedish director Ruben Östlund meanwhile captured his second Palme d’Or at 2022’s Cannes Festival with Triangle of Sadness, a black would-be comedy mocking the silliness of fashion and influencer culture and the grossness of the very rich, and an indulgence of the eternal fantasy of role reversal in a crisis. Östlund’s focal point was a young couple, both models worrying about their careers, taking a freebie voyage on a luxury yacht packed with ponderous plutocrats, only to find themselves shipwrecked and at the mercy of the only person who knows how to catch food, being the yacht’s toilet maid. It seems plain that in anointing this film the Cannes jury were hoping for another Parasite-like zeitgeist lightning rod, and Östlund’s storyline did have Swiftian potential. Potential it remained, as Triangle of Sadness proved one of the year’s most galling pictures. After a couple of striking early scenes, Östlund refused to do much with his ideas, settling for programmatic pokes at his various targets and clichéd oppositions. His gags were laced with a depressing brand of cynicism, particularly in a mid-film set-piece that saw characters get violently ill in rough seas, a spectacle of humiliation and gross-out glee that really only pointed to Östlund’s crass notions of class consciousness. Like Glass Onion, Östlund conspired to draw his presumed audience into a satire of a world he only has the most superficial and populist-posturing grasp on, and whilst he sometimes balanced it all with hints of sympathy for his various avatars, it wasn’t nearly enough. More aggravatingly, it wasn’t even particularly good on a pure filmmaking level, full of longeurs and fumbled staging, and stretched just about every gag and idea well beyond breaking point.
Rom-com veteran Ol Parker offered the parental date movie equivalent of Top Gun: Maverick as he paired George Clooney and Julia Roberts in Ticket to Paradise, a pleasant piece of counterprogramming that cast the two stars as a formerly married couple thrust into close proximity again when their daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) intends to marry a Balinese seaweed farmer (Maxime Bouttier). They plot to bust up a relationship they assume won’t last, only to find their own long-banked fires starting to heat up again. The film offered a basic proposition as a variation on classical screwball stuff heavily indebted to stuff like Private Lives and The Philadelphia Story, including Lucas Bravo as a dopey French lover in the Ralph Bellamy zone and Billie Lourd in the Ruth Hussey part, with a first half dominated by bitchy mutual put-downs and a second by lots of touch-feely exchanges in beautifully photographed Balinese locations. In some ways Ticket to Paradise was the haute bourgeois companion piece and antiverse to Triangle of Sadness, with a similar theme of collapsing barriers and shifting power played out in an island locale, only played out in a completely different key. The script was replete with jokes older than Moses, and made a point of not offering any surprises, settling for letting its stars indulge their chemistry, particularly in a marvellously frantic game of beer pong that becomes an islet of regained adolescence for the characters. I Know Where I’m Going it certainly wasn’t, but then no-one was expecting it to be.
Oran Zegman’s Honor Society was a nominal high school comedy that set out with the honourable purpose of giving Angourie Rice a star vehicle, following in the honourable tradition of everyone from Molly Ringwald to Emma Stone. Rice played Honor Rose, a bright young teen from a working class family who, desperate to escape her grim home town and desperate to be the one anointed by a sleazy teacher for a shot at Harvard he swears he can wrangle for his best and brightest, tries to take out all her potential rivals for the shot by distracting them, particularly the nerdy Michael (Gaten Matarazzo), only to fall for him. Honor Society resembled an array of pages torn out of other, successful teen flicks and pasted together with a fresh gloss of cringe comedy and salving PC canards. Honor Society wanted to be funny and heartwarming and meaningful, but was instead cumulatively rather depressing. At first the film presented Honor as a Tracy Flick type mated with a sort of junior Richard III as she delighted in explaining her methods and expressing her general contempt for her surrounds to the audience in perpetual fourth-wall break. Eventually however Zegman contrived to have her emerge a selfless impresario making everyone else’s lives better whilst choosing not to improve her own, whilst ultimately vilifying another character ultimately revealed to be doing the same thing as her but better, which was interesting morality, to say the least. For an infinitely more honest and affecting teenager-at-school movie, one had to look to James Gray’s Armageddon Time.
Nicholas Stoller’s Bros, written in collaboration between the director and star Billy Eichner, was released with some fanfare as a gay romantic comedy for a broad audience, only to prove that the broad audience wants virtue signalling in superhero movies, not actual gay movies. Bros depicted a pair of verging-on-forty, romantically disillusioned men, one, a loud-but-not-so-proud writer and podcaster who’s opening an LGBTQ+ history museum, the other a hunky but bored estate planner, who, after a flash of attraction in their first meeting in a nightclub, drift into an unsettled relationship. Bros was sometimes genuinely funny, mostly in its many meta sideswipes at gay representation in the recent media landscape, at the various quarrelsome but ultimately loyal tribes within the larger queer community, and the wry portrayal of the more hedonistic if impersonal pleasures in modern gay dating. The attempts to say something more meaningful amidst this, about the lingering anxiety of a generation schooled in harder lessons before things got so hunky dory, was interesting but didn’t quite coexist with the rest of the film, which aped standard rom-com arcs just a little too neatly and with exceedingly bland filmmaking, and its mildly spiky likeableness gave it an oddly dated feel despite the Grindr jokes, like it should have been a modest indie hit circa 2002.
Russell Crowe jumped into the saddle as director again as well as star in Poker Face – not, sadly, a screen adaptation of the Lady Gaga song. Crowe’s Poker Face rather was the tale of some middle-aged pals, connected by their passion for poker, reuniting for a private game at the remote, glitzy estate owned by Crowe’s character, Jake Foley, who’s become hugely rich from purveying internet poker software that proved a great surveillance tool, but has recently been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Whilst Foley plays some mean but purgative party games with his variously troubled friends, and his despairing daughter and trophy wife race for a confrontation, all become targets for a slimy criminal from their past who intends robbing Foley’s extensive Australian art collection. Crowe charmingly employed a great array of Aussie stalwarts, and amusingly if awkwardly paid back RZA for The Man With The Iron Fists by casting him in a cameo as the group’s one American member. Crowe approached the story at hand with meditations on aging, the problems of legacy, and the value of art as a vehicle for creative immortality. Unfortunately it doubled down on the problems of his debut The Water Diviner – a narrative that tried to encompass too much story and too many divergent tones and genre modes, which Crowe’s fidgety, distractible, borderline amateurish directing had no hope of keeping balanced. Poker Face swung wildly between earnest character drama, crime flick, goofy melodrama, and hangout picture, and whilst not even making the 90 minute mark, outstayed its welcome.
Now weathered and grey-flecked, Adam Sandler nonetheless found a new way to extend his early career fascination with sports as a subject for his movies with Hustle. Sandler played a former basketball player whose career was ruined by a car crash and has been making a living as a talent scout for the 76ers: after being patronised by the team’s new boss and inheritor (Ben Foster) once too often, he quits and pursues his determination to make a star of a towering, preternaturally gifted Spanish labourer he beholds hustling on a backstreet Madrid court one night. The main source of dramatic tension was whether the young player has the mental fortitude to play at the top level, as well as Sandler’s hunt for sweet justification. Sandler gave a decent lead performance and the film was modestly enjoyable given the underdog sports movie formula’s hard to entirely screw up. But as the exceedingly generic title promised, Hustle was really just a basic-bitch variant that harvested elements from the likes of Rocky, Moneyball, and The Color of Money. Jeremiah Zagar’s direction was annoying and clumsy, turning great stretches of the film into long montages, and the script was a string of pretexts.
Todd Field returned after a long absence from cinema screens with one of the year’s most acclaimed works. Tár was an epic-length drama about a composer and conductor who falls from the pinnacle of success when a former protégé’s suicide sparks questions about her habits of applying her personal passions to people whose careers she can make or break, a habit she’s busily indulging whilst trying to stage a magnum opus performance of Mahler’s Fifth. Tár was conceived specifically as a star vehicle for Cate Blanchett in the title role, and she responded by filling the role with theatrical bravura, whilst Field dug into the classical music world without dumbing down too much. He also picked at the open wounds of recent celebrity scandals and downfalls and our attitudes towards them. The film started well, with early scenes portraying at length its antiheroine as a great performer before audiences and a brilliant, creative, but also quietly thuggish personality in other settings, and was always interesting, up to and including its odd, sardonic coda. For me though it just didn’t work, with too much evasiveness about Tár’s actions resulting in a film that avoided digging into Tár’s innermost nature and creativity as well as her culpability, and this was in part to avoid making definitive statements about the social and personal phenomena it took on. Field took few stylistic risks, offering an endless string of crisply shot, ever-so-posh environs occasionally violated with calculated eruptions of defiling mess. The film finally had the quality of one very long tease.
Aftersun, the debut film by Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, was an exceedingly modest and allusive drama that proved nonetheless the year’s most critically-acclaimed film, the kind of attention that doesn’t necessarily do such a movie favours. Aftersun unfolded mostly in flashback scenes from the perspective of Sophie, a woman who’s travelled to a holiday resort in Turkey trying to relive and understand a vacation she took there in the 1990s as a child with her divorced, gay father: Sophie toggles between her possibly misleading memories and their camcorder tapes from the trip, trying to fathom the mystery of her dad, who was fighting off some nagging, possibly tragic source of melancholy even as he laboured to provide his daughter with all due life lessons. Wells’ key choice was to keep the causes and results of the father’s moodiness enigmatic, instead fixating on describing an extremely rarefied feeling – the tantalising and troubling process of unpacking treasured formative experiences and finding nested truths, discoveries that seem to have some particular import for the grown Sophie, who’s recently become a mother herself. Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio’s performances had a chemistry and vivacity that gave the flow of scenes charming anchors, as Wells drifted with virtually plotless observing through the locale, keen to the peculiar wavelength of troubled people persisting in a festive place, even if what happens in that place wasn’t particularly vivid or exciting. I can’t say that Aftersun wowed me, in part because the vagueness meant that the obliquely approached emotion became at once blatant and well out of reach, quiet pathos turned into unavoidable spectacle, particularly in the climax as the urge to deliver catharsis became overt but only to the characters, not the viewer. So it leaned on a Queen song to make the link for us. The notion of comparing reminiscence with media records of the events, a strange purgatory only available to we children of this epoch, was potentially very powerful, and yet Wells ultimately didn’t do that much with it, violating the design by privileging the viewer with witnessing things neither camera nor girl witnessed. Also, in certain aspects the film felt just a little too contrived to tug thirty-something film critics by the heartstrings. Still, it was a very interesting debut by a talent of promise.
A more traditional, if still purposefully circumspect, tale of a child confronted by the strangeness of adults, The Quiet Girl saw Irish director Colm Bairéad engaging with areas of rural Ireland where Irish Gaelic is predominantly spoken and so comprised the vast bulk of dialogue, imbuing a gloss of exoticism to a seemingly familiar part of the world. This gesture of representation also aided the film’s thematic pursuits, depicting relations charged with disparities and wounds that are constantly walked and talked around. The setting was sometime in the 1980s, as the title girl, Caìt (Catherine Clinch), one of many children to a slovenly and resentful father and his perpetually pregnant wife, is packed off to live with the mother’s cousin and her husband for a summer whilst yet another sibling is being born. Caìt finds the aging couple ideal parental substitutes as they bring her out of her shell, particularly as they’ve been in stasis following their own child’s tragic death, and the inevitable return home provokes crisis. Clinch had luminous presence as Caìt, who evolves from a tormented appendage to a burgeoning being. Bairéad applied patiently observant pacing and occasional flecks of the poetic and symbolic to evoking the evolving emotional bonds of the characters and their pastoral world, a tad obviously at points but also with a glistening texture of curious and elegiac beauty. The script was also a little too reticent about the innermost meat of the story: hints the girl was a sexual abuse victim on top of everything else charged the story with an undercurrent of menace, and which made the unresolved finale feel just a little calculated, even as it was also undeniably moving.
Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light was yet another movie of 2022 preoccupied by both sad nostalgia and the theoretically redemptive power of art. Mendes’ film unfolded in dreary, rundown 1981 Brighton, centring on a movie theatre of somewhat faded glory that, in a story development that provides a partial backdrop, is chosen to host a regional premiere of Chariots of Fire. Empire of Light was mostly interesting as Mendes’ first real return to the kind of small-scale, ordinary-people study he emerged with on American Beauty, although it also came laden with symbolism in regards to the fallout of the waned, twinned empires of Britain and cinema. Olivia Colman played a lovelorn middle-aged woman with a history of instability working in the cinema: whilst she’s been having a desultory affair with the married twat of a manager (Colin Firth), she has a fling with a handsome, frustrated young Black man (Michael Ward) who starts working alongside her. Disasters ensue, including her having another spiral into self-destructive behaviour and him being badly beaten by some skinheads, but the ultimate pitch was as an affirming tale of healing and rebirth. No film that offers the sight of Colman giving Firth a hand-job in the first five minutes is entirely without entertainment value, but there was aggravating tension between Empire of Light’s low-key story and its pretences as a major-league Oscar bait entry, with Mendes’ customary minimalist-monumentalist visual textures labouring to imbue a degree of arty sweep. The basic thesis, about the kinship of different varieties of outsider, was modestly affecting, and Colman’s brilliant performance was the best reason to watch, even if her character, like everyone else in the film, was given an essentially shallow and evasive treatment. The overall tone was one of treacly pathos punctuated by tacked-on paeans to companionship and the cathartic value of a good movie. It was, in short, the sort of thing that would likely have been far better if it had been at the time it was set by Handmade Films.
Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, never the most cautious and restrained of auteurist voices, resurged after a few quiet years with Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, an entry in the year’s bumper crop of director memoir and self-portrait films, closer in focus to the middle-aged fretting of The Eternal Daughter than The Fabelmans or Aftersun. The filmmaker’s alter ego was Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a former Mexican TV personality and journalist who’s become an international celebrity with his docudrama films. At the pinnacle of success, Silverio is nonetheless gnawed at by uneasy melancholy in the feeling he’s abandoned his country, having moved to the US, and his principles in achieving his status, whilst also haunted by the death of an infant son. By compensation he flits through various fantasies, including conceiving of his son as having simply refused to emerge from his wife’s womb. Iñárritu’s filming was as dynamic as ever, with vivid lensing and roving camerawork, and he approached some weighty concerns, conflating his own uneasy sense of identity with Mexico’s troubled history and relationship with the US, decorated with ineffectual satiric swipes including the purchase of Baja California by Amazon and a Trumpian American president. The greater problem was that Iñárritu was also just as obvious as ever on an artistic level, rehashing such well-worn territory in his many nods to Fellini’s 8½ and a magic-realism-for-beginners style that ripped off his own Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), but with Silverio proving a much less compelling protagonist. After a reasonably involving first half, the film dragged on without any particularly interesting place to go with its self-conscious artifice and half-hearted tilts at self-satire, and devolved to an expression of morbid anxiety. The strongest moments were, in spite of all the showmanship, scenes of intense verbal conflict, between father and son and with a critic character who attacks the script of the film he’s in.
Noah Baumbach’s White Noise and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking had significant differences but also points in common – both were based on highly admired novels and tried to retain as much of those sources’ literary flavour as possible, whether it made sense to in a cinematic setting or not. Baumbach tackled Don DeLillo’s satiric novel, the story of a middle-aged professor of “Hitler Studies,” his pill-popping wife, and their gaggle of kids from many partners, who are all forced to confront their mortality, particularly when a freak accident unleashes a toxic cloud over their town. Where David Cronenberg smartly applied stringent, quasi-expressionist intensity to translating DeLillo to cinema for his Cosmopolis, Baumbach applied a mash-up of stylistic approaches, moving from arch theatricality to the Felliniesque before dipping into weird pastiches of Close Encounters-era Spielberg and the National Lampoon’s Vacation films during the set-piece depiction of panicky escape from the cloud. The actors, including Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle, were required to give studied, motor-mouthed performances rattling off DeLillo’s theses in a clumsily ritualistic way. Baumbach showed his technical chops have become formidable even as his worst streaks finally hatched out like a baby xenomorph, forcing everything to a degree of heightened, insufferably smug stylisation whilst purveying dated satiric targets like academic wankery and the shiny but maddening aisles of consumerism, without anything new or convincing to say about them. For what seems the millionth time in his career, Driver worked his ass off to little effect, whilst Cheadle held his own as his Elvis-obsessed and curious-minded colleague.
Women Talking meanwhile echoed Don’t Worry Darling in offering an explicitly feminist drama through the prism of an isolated, male-dominated and coercive commune, albeit in an antithetical style. Polley’s film was adapted from a novel by Miriam Toews, itself based on an infamous event that took place in Bolivia, involving the organised drugging and raping of women in a Mennonite colony. Toews’s story focused on the aftermath, as a core set of the women debate whether they’re going to forgive the abusers as their elders have ordered, put up a fight, or leave the community altogether. Polley was unabashed in tapping the theatricality inherent in Toewes’ emphasis on the debate between the women, which echoed the likes of 12 Angry Men, with proceedings mostly confined to a barn as various infuriated and aggrieved personalities clash and weave consensus. This was definitely the stuff of high drama, but Polley’s approach was a serious drag. She filmed the whole movie in sharply desaturated and pretentious but not terribly expressive images, failing to create the right kind of atmosphere for the decidedly non-realistic dialogue, as the characters, who we’re repeatedly reminded are virtually illiterate, spoke like public radio audio essayists. The schematic, zeitgeist-courting approach of Polley’s script, with its carefully delineated perspectives including a shoehorned trans character and an unthreatening male ally, didn’t help, and found overly-neat ways out of what should have been the core dread of the choice for the women, between rigid faith and self-protection. Yet again, the powerhouse cast kept it watchable, particularly Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley as the two angriest women who nonetheless had sharply divergent responses to their lot.
Alice Diop’s Saint Omer was another chamber-piece drama laden with hot-button issues, but treated in a more stringent and subtle fashion. Diop’s subject was the trial of French-Senegalese woman (Guslagie Malanga), well-educated and exceedingly intelligent, who has confessed to the killing of her young child, but insists she doesn’t feel responsible. During the course of the trial, her background, the breakdown of her long, odd coupling with an aging French artist, and her curious conviction she was the victim of some form of sorcery that might be a ruse or just another way of conceiving clinical depression, were all relentlessly parsed. Diop’s austere approach to the courtroom scenes allowed Malanga in particular to fixate the screen with a mix of defiant ambiguity and pathos, as the slowly emerging story to grip through its own awful power and evocation of the deepest personal hells, as well as drip-fed hints of the impact of dislocation on her mind. Diop enveloped this with depictions of another woman of the same background (Kayije Kagame), more successful as a writer and academic, whose initial intention to write a book about the killer based on the theme of Medea breaks down through the trial as she’s challenged by raw experience, forcing her to confront in particular her relationship with her own troubled mother. Whilst the doppelganger theme had potential, Diop didn’t offer nearly enough meat with this portion, and frankly I just felt this device got in the way in an obvious attempt to offer the film’s own insta-critique. Also, the climactic scene of the defence attorney’s emotive, didactic closing speech, felt like a veering into a different kind of movie.
Sebastián Lelio’s The Wonder, an adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel and co-scripted by her, Lelio, and Alice Birch, had points of similarity with several movies of the year, as a study of women locked within insular faiths and communities and forced to justify their choices to patriarchal authority, and also made an even more superfluous stab at bracketing its drama with a meta approach. This time, the setting was a village in 1860s Ireland, where ugly feelings still linger after the potato famine: Florence Pugh, restored to her Lady Macbeth hairdo, was Elizabeth Wright, an English nurse employed along with a nun to keep watch on a 9-year-old girl who has supposedly been living for months without eating, in what many take to be a miracle. Wright, a modern mind with hard losses in her past, becomes attached to the girl, particularly as she begins wasting away for unknown reasons, and eventually elects to fight the various parties who’d prefer a dead saint to a live, ordinary girl. Tom Burke was the initially aggravating journalist who proved to have a deeper connection to the locality and its sensibility who becomes Wright’s lover and ally; Kila Lord Cassidy and her mother Elaine were the miracle girl and her on-screen mother. The wonder of The Wonder was that Lelio, equipped with some formidably good acting and cinematography (by Ari Wegner), trod with nuance through its web of oppositions, tackling some expected themes and issues but not belabouring them, whilst also remembering to tell an interesting story with a striking blend of crude beauty and dread that eventually blossoms into something else. Lelio offered most of the characters just a little more sympathy than expected, even as the fetid truth emerged.
Still in a mode of Irish historicism, Martin McDonagh, back in his homeland after his unfortunate American sojourn for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, nonetheless sustained his fascination with physical and spiritual mortification and flailing, internally riven characters with The Banshees of Inisherin. McDonagh reunited Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, stars of his debut In Bruges, as two long-time friends residing on a small, dull island in 1923, with civil war raging within earshot. Farrell’s Padraic is thrust into a state of perplexed crisis when the other, Gleeson’s Brom, suddenly tells him he doesn’t want to be his friend any longer, as he can’t stand Padraic’s blather anymore and wants to devote the rest of his life to writing music to escape a state of gnawing despair. Brom soon proves willing to go disturbing, masochistic lengths to dissuade further communication. Plainly more at home in the setting than he was in Midwest America, McDonagh wove together deadpan, very Irish humour and a darkening Celtic atmosphere of descending fate. What seemed at first to be a gently goofy character comedy instead shaded into a story with tragically symbolic overtones as the small conflict became more clearly intended to mirror the larger. As with McDonagh’s other films, I couldn’t help but find it all far too affected, with his anachronistic, showily foulmouthed dialogue and unpleasantly morbid edge, whilst the film’s overall impact depended on how much you bought into the aptness of the parable, which I didn’t. In compensation, the cinematography was atmospheric, and the performances were lovely, particularly Kerry Condon as Padraic’s more determined sister and Barry Keoghan as an abused local boy.
Probably no other director could have weathered the pandemic in so unruffled and productive a fashion as Sang-Soo Hong, who proved he can defy laws of thermodynamics and produce a movie virtually out of thin air with three films released internationally this year. On the surface, Introduction barely seems to be there, depicting the interactions of a handful of characters over a space of time, filmed in flatly monochrome hues and mostly in anonymous-looking exterior shots (including a story digression to what was supposedly Vienna but likely required no flights), and major story events inferred in the gaps between scenes. And yet Hong slowly accumulated a character portrait of the flailing son of a doctor’s secretary, whose romantic failures, cultural dislocation, and general personal confusion bewilders and sometimes provokes his elders, particularly a respected actor he lunches with, who boozily espouses a life-is-for-living philosophy. Hong’s style was reminiscent of his The Day He Arrives but even more bare-boned, with time and location jumps often hard to parse, forcing the audience to share his characters’ dizzied mindsets.
Hong’s second release for the year, In Front Of Your Face, was less cryptic and rarefied in its dramatic approach, and touched on several themes running through his recent films, including imminent mortality and male auteur romantic guilt, but with a glaze of elusive poeticism. This time Hong’s focal figure was a middle-aged retired actress, Sang ok (Lee Hye-young), recently returned to Seoul after years living in the US, visiting her sister and keeping a rendezvous with a movie director who wants to build a movie around her, and also, as he admits after the compulsory-for-Hong long, lubricious lunch, wanting to seduce her. But she has a secret that makes their yearnings at once more plaintive and pathetic. In Front Of Your Face was chiefly a vehicle for Lee’s remarkable performance, dextrous in portraying her character’s attempts to achieve philosophical peace and snatch onto life, in particular unpicking the director’s motives with as much patience as she can muster as well as a certain determination to get to the point. The central story crux was more blatant and melodramatic than usual for Hong and the film lacked the sly complications of his greatest work, but his digital camera minimalism now again risked colour textures to better essay the thesis contained in the title. A third Hong work, The Novelist’s Film, was released late in the year, but I didn’t see that one, for better or worse.
Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song had points of kinship with In Front Of Your Face, likewise presenting an evanescent romantic tale about confronting grief and mortality where the male lover finally retreats from prospective passion nominally to honour old loyalties but also perhaps through a failure of nerve in confronting such dizzy new extremes. Dale Dickey was the aging widow who’s camped out a lakeside spot in the Colorado Mountains to await the visit of an also-widowed childhood friend, played by West Studi, for what both plainly hope and fear will prove a tryst. Walker-Silverman set out to knit together aspects of Wong Kar-Wai-esque romantic fable and American indie film’s more familiar, modest humanism. The film remained a little aggravatingly vague about its characters in the long haul, its evocation of pathos just a little too studied, and didn’t quite nail the kind of transcendental experience its final episode chased. Elements of deadpan humour provided by a clan out to disinter their father from under the campsite were a bit too cute, but also genuinely funny. Dickey and Studi, both cast for a change as very ordinary souls confronting neediness and the weight of experience, gave remarkable performances, and despite its contrivances the film was an affecting experience that made the most of very limited scope.
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Performances of Note
Ana de Armas, Deep Water Mehdi Bajestani, Holy Spider Cate Blanchett, Tár Rachel Brosnahan, Dead For A Dollar Jessie Buckley, Women Talking Nicholas Cage, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent Catherine Clinch, A Quiet Girl Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin Willem Dafoe, Dead For A Dollar Dale Dickey, A Love Song Zar Amir Ebrahami, Holy Spider Idris Elba, Beast / Three Thousand Years of Longing Yann Gael, Saloum Mia Goth, Pearl Tom Hanks, Elvis Sean Harris, The Stranger Chris Hemsworth, Spiderhead Nina Hoss, Tár Kate Hudson, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin Nicole Kidman, The Northman Zoe Kravitz, The Batman / Kimi Lee Hye-young, In Front Of Your Face Emma Mackey, Death On The Nile Guslagie Malanga, Saint Omer Noemie Merlant, Les Olympiades – Paris 13th District Fatma Mohamed, Flux Gourmet Annie Mumolo, Confess, Fletch Keke Palmer, Nope Elsa Pataky, Interceptor Aubrey Plaza, Emily The Criminal Florence Pugh, The Wonder Margaret Qualley, Stars At Noon Jonathan Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All At Once Sami Slimane, Athena Achouackh Abakar Souleymane, Lingui: The Sacred Bonds Scott Speedman, Crimes Of The Future Tilda Swinton, The Eternal Daughter Wes Studi, A Love Song Harry Styles, Don’t Worry Darling Miles Teller, Spiderhead / Top Gun: Maverick Anya Taylor-Joy, Amsterdam / The Menu / The Northman Donald Elise Watkins, Emergency Leticia Wright, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All At Once Ensemble, Armageddon Time Ensemble, The Fabelmans Ensemble, Hit The Road
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Favourite Films of 2022
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Armageddon Time (James Gray)
One irony of 2022 was that two of its best films were criminally under-seen, autobiographical tales of youth from great Jewish-American filmmakers, although that’s just about where the similarities between James Gray and Steven Spielberg end. Spielberg, even after a few stumbles, is still Spielberg, and Gray doesn’t seem to be able to get the mass audience into a movie theatre if he paid them. Stepping back from his recent ventures into more epic stories with The Lost City of Z and Ad Astra, Armageddon Time was one of the finest films about being a boy of a certain age ever made, with Gray applying his familiar, visually and tonally muted yet graceful and emotionally direct style to a tale laced with flashes of nostalgia but also profound disquiet, in casting his mind back to 1980. Banks Repeta played Gray’s stand-in Paul Graff, who feels the weight of his heritage, of his family’s place in the scheme of things and the expectations placed upon him, and the common troubles of school life, all grating against his nascent rebellious and artistic streaks. His attempts to push the envelope sometimes earn the concussive wrath of his parents, particularly his mostly good-natured but sometimes terrifying boiler repairman father (Jeremy Strong), who locks up his fury until needed for fuel when he senses his son going astray. Gray explored the mystique of family dinners where the Holocaust is a constant, wearing refrain of rebuke, whilst grandfather Harry (Anthony Hopkins) offers hard-won, open-minded wisdom and a gentle sense of humour and connection to the boy that eludes his father and mother (Anne Hathaway), who are necessarily preoccupied with bigger pictures.
Gray’s portrait of period New York was touched with rueful and knowing presaging of the modern era, noting both the lingering schisms of class and race in a supposedly egalitarian, past-all-that era, and the rising tide of a new, triumphalist reactionary spirit represented most sardonically by Fred Trump (John Diehl), Donald’s father, and Maryann (Jessica Chastain), his sister, products and shepherds of elitist flocks who see themselves simultaneously as assailed bastions and encampments of heroic strivers – ranks Paul is eventually obliged to join. Nor does he exempt himself and his clan from playing a part in it all, his elders for their casual racism and himself for his failure to combat it. Armageddon Time was in part another of Gray’s explorations of burdensome connections between family, particularly father and son, crystallised in the astonishing, intimate climactic scene between them. But the film’s dramatic engine went beyond family, depicting Paul’s friendship with another class clown and aspirational dreamer, Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb), a Black kid with an unsettled home life, and the two of them become familiar with the motives other people, sometimes with well-meaning purpose and sometimes with vicious pleasure, to crush the individual spark in the young. Johnny’s fate not only counterpoints Paul’s journey and also, as Gray ultimately diagnoses, becomes a victim of it despite Paul’s best intentions, and his eventual choice to truly dedicate himself to art is informed as much by a sense of accountability as for creative fancy.
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Dead For A Dollar (Walter Hill)
Dead For A Dollar saw Walter Hill returning to the Western genre with obliviously discursive and boldly revisionist attitude, pursuing only his own satisfaction when it came to reviving the brand of tough genre film he cut his teeth on. Christoph Waltz was Borland, the hard-bitten bounty hunter commissioned to chase after a wealthy woman (Rachel Brosnahan), allegedly kidnapped by a Buffalo Soldier, Elijah (Brandon Scott), and dragged off to Mexico, but he soon finds the pair really ran off together after the woman grew tired of her cruel magnate husband (Hamish Linklater). After catching up with the runaways with the aid of Poe’s fellow soldier Poe (Warren Burke) and bringing them to heel, Borland and Poe soon finds themselves forced to make a choice when it becomes clear the husband intends to kill the lovers and anyone who gets in the way, having made a deal with an imperious local gangster (Benjamin Bratt) to get the job down. Hill’s plot referenced a number of classic Westerns in his own particular manner, with a project that tackled the tricky task of at once honouring essential Western motifs – the cross-country pursuit, the thunderous final shoot-out, the panoply of petty tyrants and local warlords and stoic, heroic gunslingers – and also pulling them apart, shifting moral and historical emphases and having fun with clichés whilst never treating the genre’s essential rituals cynically or cheaply.
Hill’s chief fascination was for flashes of nascent modernity in the historical context, rooting each of his characters in authentic period figures who nonetheless cut against the grain of the world at large, populating a landscape where nations, races, and genders are all in flux. The pacing was defiantly ambling and conversational, perhaps to the point of aggravation for some as Hill patently refused to get to the point. But it was precisely this relaxed quality that made the film so deeply pleasurable as a viewing experience to me, as Hill dropped his characters like dice into a cup, rattled them around for a while to enjoy hearing them strike against each-other, before finally tipping them on the table to see what they roll up. Dead For A Dollar was modern and yet defiantly unfashionable, as Hill also seemed to be trying to avenge some of his brutally edited and discarded ‘90s works. The patience came nonetheless laced with tension constantly ratcheting, and when the action finally arrived it hit hard and wild, with Hill emphasising shock and disbelief gripping the dying, the sheer amazement of mortality a discovery one can only make alone and too late. Brosnahan’s marvellous performance as a hyper-intelligent, self-emancipating woman who’s sick of her own compromises and enunciates her motives with professorial precision, played off Waltz’s unusual restraint and coolness as the speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-gun hero who’s tired of other people’s alibis, whilst Willem Dafoe offered colourful support as a rival gunfighter once imprisoned by Borland and eager for a showdown. Hill’s visuals were essayed in pseudo-sepia tones, his starkly fashioned frontier towns and dusty plains only truly enlivened by blotches of red blood.
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Emily The Criminal (John Patton Ford)
A curt, clever, sinuous melding of film noir motifs and contemporary indie realism, Emily The Criminal also wove deft character portraiture with a stinging portrait of contemporary hard times. Aubrey Plaza, so long typecast as an emblematic millennial, at once turned that unfortunate status to her advantage and subverted it with force in playing Emily, a talented artist and former college student now stuck in a menial delivery job thanks to a criminal conviction, the nature of which is left vague until close to the end. Creatively blocked and increasingly exasperated despite a friend’s efforts to get her a magazine job, Emily finds a new world opening up to her when a helpful gesture and some good luck puts her in contact with a criminal gang of brothers recruiting willing foot soldiers to commit credit card scams. Emily proves not just motivated but tough and fearless, occasionally paying for lapses into naivety and incautiousness but resurging with shows of alarming grit and cunning, like in a terrific scene where she’s held up by a pair of frayed scumbags, only to turn the tables on them with clinical and punitive zeal. After venturing out on her own in committing scams, she drifts into a romance with her mentor in the game, a Middle Eastern immigrant who has upward aspirations, but their affair inadvertently provokes a split with his brothers and a deadly contest for their accumulated fortune.
Emily The Criminal’s story sounded in abstract like the stuff of a romp, a dark comedy of self-realisation through larceny, and there is a little of that in there. But director John Patton Ford instead played things very straight. He kept Emily in focus as both a generational avatar, confronted by a ruthless society and cut off from any of the possible recourses someone of her education and background would normally seek, and as an individual. The title’s signal ultimately proves correct, as Emily finds through the course of the story that she’s made for living outside the law, and the flaws in her character that brought her to such a limbo also provide her with the armament to crawl out of it, so long as she can abandon what’s left of her moral scruples and loyalties. Emily’s various encounters with bosses in job interviews, including a cameo by Gina Gershon as a self-congratulatory magazine editor who wants an unpaid intern, stung in showing the forces Emily is up against in trying to extricate herself from the shittiness of working class life in modern urban America and the way the system is so often rigged in favour of those who already have it all. By comparison Emily’s adventures in thievery, including ripping off a sports car and emerging with a bloodied nose and demand for payment, are more physically dangerous but engaging of every inch of mind and body, and Plaza was particularly great in portraying Emily’s renascent confidence and sense of purpose. The climax laid bare both the necessary choices for Emily to finally escape and the awful price for making the correct one, whilst the coda struck a note of wry humour even in its unsentimental diagnosis.
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The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg)
Many films this year, in a movement evidently born of weeks spent brooding in pandemic lockdown, were preoccupied by the uneasy relationship of memory, identity, family, and creativity. Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter took an unusual approach to such concerns, presenting a movie that worked as both a standalone work and as an addendum to her The Souvenir diptych, in again taking up the tale of alter ego Julie and her mother Rosalind, with Julie now in fretful middle age and facing up to one of life’s greatest conceivable pivots. This time Hogg cast Tilda Swinton as both women, who have come to spend a week in a virtually empty hotel out in a gloomy, foggy region of countryside. The hotel was once a great house that belonged to Rosalind’s aunt, where Rosalind spent time hiding out from the Blitz as a child. Julie wants to make a movie about her mother, but contends with insomnia, gnawing anxiety, writer’s block, and the perhaps literal haunting of the hotel. Swinton’s brilliant improvisatory performances were the focal point of the movie, anchoring it in pernickety realism and observational character study all charged with simmering emotional disquiet, even as Hogg wove around her a glutinous atmosphere that paid homage to the great British Horror movie tradition. The opening was lifted from Night of the Demon; much of what followed sustained a mood of fog-shrouded mystery and with creepy flute scoring on the soundtrack that recalled the likes of the BBC’s Christmas Ghost Story specials and the 1989 version of The Woman In Black, and Hogg nodded repeatedly to Kubrick.
All this mostly proved an elaborate aesthetic miscue on the most obvious level, as the real subject on hand was an entirely psychological form of haunting, and led to a climactic reveal that much of what we’ve seen has been imagined for a desperate and pathetic reason. Whilst this could easily have become just another annoying attempt to cloak an arty drama in facetiously borrowed genre movie trappings for hype, Hogg made it work. In part because of the power of the feeling she sought to portray, one that distorts time and reality by pure force of need, and Hogg’s apparent conviction that mere naturalism can’t convey it, and because the aesthetic infrastructure of the ghost story and its symbolic import was an authentic part of her subject matter. Hogg explored the relationship of past to present, noted how ghost stories are how history and memory and its darkest facets conveyed with a sense of place. The haunted hotel extended the interest of Hogg’s debut Exhibition in understanding a building as necessarily a place inhabited but also indifferent to them, with presence and memory sometimes becoming slippery and inseparable things. Another concern was that of modern England’s anxious feeling of losing touch with itself, enacted through Julie’s attempts to understand the past through her mother’s gaze, but contending constantly with the vast gap of attitude and expectation between them.
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The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg)
The Fabelmans shouldn’t have been much of a surprise from Steven Spielberg, even if it was breaching new territory for the director in directly tackling his formative years as a subject after decades of splintered and refracted self-portraits. The film’s general dismissal both by the mass audience and by many critics who should know better (including me before I saw it) took it as ill-timed navel-gazing when mainstream cinema urgently needs seismic shocks. But The Fabelmans proved a film of rare and blindsiding vitality that also expressed the director’s ambivalence as well as evergreen sense of wonder for the art form he’s so often seen as virtually personifying. With a thin sheathe of fictional distance via alter ego Sammy Fabelman and a script co-written with Tony Kushner, Spielberg explored his own attraction to making movies, born of an agreeably traumatising early viewing of The Greatest Show On Earth, as a way of expiating as well as stirring emotion. The bulk of the film was dedicated to analysing the impact of his two vividly different and slowly detaching parents on his art and personality – the generous, good-natured, but insular and nerdy paterfamilias Burt (Paul Dano), a technical wiz engaged with birthing the future by building computers that also incidentally make his family well-off and mobile, and his luminous pianist wife Mitzi (Michelle Williams), the kind of woman who drives herself and her kids out through a tornado-ripped landscape to gain a glimpse of the awesome and destabilising. The artistic urge is rendered as a veritable curse as well as blessing, as Sammy encounters his nutty great-uncle (Judd Hirsch), a former circus performer, who recognises another member of their hapless tribe.
Spielberg dipped into territory that referenced Hitchcock and Antonioni with equivalence as he depicted himself discovering his mother’s affair with stalwart family friend Benny (Seth Rogen) in the background of his family films, editing the footage on one hand to offer private truth and reconciliation to Mitzi whilst also neatly clipping out it all out for general consumption: different cinematic realities coexisting simultaneously. The latter sections contended with teenage Sammy contending with anti-Semitism and bullying, finally baffling and seducing his peers with his unique and powerful capacity to reshape reality. This tug-of-war between life and artistic transformation, crystallising in extraordinary vignettes like the strained David Lynchian smiles detected on the parents’ faces when performing for Sammy’s camera, and a bully jock’s squall of confusion at being transformed into a mythic hero by the same means, confirmed Spielberg’s always known what he’s doing in terms of what he chooses to do and how, his engagement with the American religion of movies also a neutral zone of cultural and personal meeting where everyone has the chance to become everyone else. Nor was the nod to Lynch coincidental, as Spielberg delivered a master stroke in casting his great if antithetical fellow as his singular idol, John Ford, in a final scene depicting rude but consequential mentorship that split the difference between leave-‘em’-laughing punchline and immensely moving statement of gratitude.
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Flux Gourmet (Peter Strickland)
Peter Strickland manages to go from strength to strength without abandoning the rarefied creative zone he’s created, persisting in making movies that unfold in a retro-chic netherworld with increasing confidence and myriad notes of sly perversity. With Flux Gourmet, he turned his own delight in weaving strange textures around a subject of folly and fascination, as he riffed on the pretensions of the art world but with a characteristic twist that had the quality of something out of a dream: the setting was an academy devoted to showcasing practitioners of “sonic catering.” The story, such as it was, centred on a trio recently given a month-long residency, led by the passionate creative mind and ideologue Elle (Fatma Mohamed), and the tensions that begin pulling their successful team apart. Strickland’s conceits extended to having a character who narrates the film entirely in Greek on the soundtrack – he’s a filmmaker hired to document the residency and who also suffers from chronic gut problems – and casting Gwendoline Christie as the academy’s haughty directress, who makes unwelcome creative suggestions to the trio and seduces their one, young male member. Where his In Fabric embraced overt Horror elements, Flux Gourmet saw Strickland returning to the stylised annex of The Duke of Burgundy in portraying an imagined high-end world of institutionalised weirdness, where everything is touched with a glaze of the unsettling but there’s no definite source of menace.
But this time he did so with a wittier and more complete-feeling blend of setting and story, detailing the academy’s preponderance of oddballs, including the infuriatingly self-satisfied house doctor, who eventually drives the filmmaker so crazy as he investigates his gut problems he tries to strangle him when he won’t get to the point. Meanwhile the academy suffers vandalising attacks by a culinary team who didn’t get the fellowship, and directress and artist constantly clash over seemingly minor details that nonetheless hinge entirely on power. Strickland allowed an overt homage to Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating through as well as more pervasive nods to the likes of Peter Greenaway and Mario Bava through. The most intriguing and original aspect of Flux Gourmet for Strickland’s art was the sharply-observed quality of the satire, which nested within and coexisted with the never-never atmosphere, touched with an edge of gleeful caricature, particularly through Elle, who postures as a gutsy feminist from a disadvantaged background but is actually extremely rich and oppresses her collaborators, but also resists all attempts by the institution to dictate their creativity in vehement defence of artistic prerogative. The very last scene brought the tale to an ingenious close as the healing power of both art and good food were applied to one very grateful subject.
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Hit The Road (Panah Panahi)
A near-sublime road movie, Hit The Road saw Panah Panahi, son of Jafar and former assistant to Abbas Kiarostami, making his own debut in a film that travels literally and figuratively across the state of contemporary Iran. The situation was at once simplicity itself but touched with rare mystery and feeling: a family of four – father, mother, grown-up son and pre-adolescent younger son – are travelling across the desert in a borrowed SUV, their journey punctuated by the usual in-jokes and squabbles of a tight-knit clan, but with strange tension apparent in all but the rambunctious younger son, who gets chastised for bringing along his cell phone, which the mother takes pains to bury by the roadside. Eventually it becomes clear that the family have sold their possessions to finance the older son as he flees across the border to seek out better fortunes in Europe. This means engaging with the opaque and sometimes menacing network that helps people making such flights, as well as confronting the pains of their imminent separation which they’re trying to keep hidden from the boy. The family movie across a parched and desolate landscape where the modern world they inextricably belong to sits cheek-by-jowl with primal nature and decaying remnants of classical lifestyles, whilst the film itself shifts with ease from comedy to drama and back again, with flashes of fantasy and musical tossed in.
Whilst Panahi arguably went a little far in also sticking the family with a cute, sick dog whose eventual expiring gives the movie a last sting of low-key tragedy, Hit The Road was largely remarkable in offering one of the best portraits of family in many a year, defined by the disparity between affectations of easy-going normality for the sake of the young son, and the awareness of looming sundering and the plain fact they’re taking a risk that could bring down awful legal consequences if they’re caught. The wise and witty mother who’s fond of singalongs nonetheless finds herself plunged into grief by parting, whilst the father suggests a portrait of a generation of Iranians as he shuffles along on a plastered leg, complains about a rotting tooth, and indulges his kids with a blend of sly humour and distracted melancholy. The younger lad embodies all the heedless energy and bounty of youthful promise, and the elder has wilted under the weight of expectation. Great scenes included an encounter with a gabby bike rider who crashes against their vehicle and gets a lift, a bewildering exchange with a fleece seller and a masked motorcyclist that mark thei entrance into some kind of Kafkaesque netherworld, and what proves to be the ultimate farewell played out in a long shot that evoked Kiarostami and David Lean in its coolly removed portrait of human pathos amidst the boding grandiosity of nature. The older son’s love of 2001: A Space Odyssey rhymes with the younger boy’s dreams of Batman and Superman, all echoing in a spacefaring fantasy as father and son drift away through the stars in a moment of mental release, claiming the right and necessity of dreaming as one things that always transcends the pains of any given place and moment.
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Lingui: The Sacred Bonds (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)
In a strong year for African cinema, Mali’s former tourism and culture minister Mahamat-Saleh Haroun went rogue and offered a beautifully observed and surprisingly gripping drama that must certainly have been a provocative gesture at home but also had accidentally acute relevance outside the country. Haroun’s film depicted a woman who’s spent years eking out a living and maintaining a toehold in society after being shunned by her family for having a child out of wedlock when she was only a teenager, forcing her to make a living incessantly making and selling wire stoves. Now, with her daughter almost grown up, she’s playing the meek and pious breadwinner, seeking her pompous imam’s approval and receiving a marriage proposal from a prosperous but grizzled neighbour. When she learns her daughter is now pregnant, she steadily begins to abandon her pretences and gets down to trying to fund an abortion, which is illegal in the country. This begins a sometimes comic, often excruciating odyssey as they rustle up funds and seek someone willing to perform the operation. But the identity of the father is a secret that will, when it finally comes out, provoke murderous wrath.
Lingui was reminiscent of the kind of slice-of-life social drama that Ken Loach made in his 1990s heyday, although Haroun’s direction avoided that brand of squirrelly, hand-held realism and instead wielded a lush eye for colour and a free-flowing feel for the streets of N’Djamena. This was matched to a sly sense of character, evinced in early scenes as the daughter wandered about in sullen unease, dashing against friends and family like a billiard ball in her quietly distraught and incommunicative state, and when the mother began indulging old vices and shows of her old, cheeky character as she comes to understand the hypocrisy of the world about her and the pointlessness of playing by its rules. Haroun also allowed a stream of gentle humour to flow through all, particularly in portraying women’s witty capacity for getting around arbitrary authority being imposed on their bodies, including the commissioning of a fake female circumcision. This contrasted the pervasive sense of tension and anxiety eating up the two women as they’re driven to desperate ends to get the necessary cash and constant twists of luck help and foil them alternately, like seeing their would-be saviours suddenly netted by a police raid. But the film was really made by its ending, which shifted gear towards a dark, noir-like confrontation and saw the seemingly familiar and friendly streets of the mother and daughter’s neighbourhood became a labyrinthine trap.
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Lost Illusions (Xavier Giannoli)
Not many filmmakers could make a story as ruthlessly cynical as Lost Illusions into a compulsively watchable and ebulliently cinematic experience, but Xavier Giannoli did just with this adaptation of one of Honore de Balzac’s most regarded novels. Lost Illusions followed the wayward path of Lucien, a talented but penniless young poet, illegitimate son to an aristocrat, who becomes the lover of a Countess who worships his talent, and she introduces the young man to Parisian society. After proving a flop in exalted circles, Lucien vengefully turns his hand to becoming a successful journalist in the rough-and-tumble world of newspaper publishing, where everyone’s on the make and everything hinges on confluences of money and power. Whilst the erstwhile hero seems to be on the rise for good as he tries to get his aristocratic parentage recognised, he doesn’t suspect dark forces are conspiring to use him and then break him. Giannoli diverted from Balzac in some crucial ways, as he retained sympathy for his main character, who very often acts like a jerk and participates in a corrupt and corrupting world with increasing enthusiasm, but also has the stuff of an authentic artist in him.
Importantly, however, Giannoli stayed very true to capturing Balzac’s exacting, analytical portraiture of the way his world worked in an era of madcap energy and pervasive expedience. With forceful, Scorsese-like editing and camera gymnastics, Giannoli deftly laid bare, say, the machinations of the gutter press in an era without regulation of what gets written or why, with everything, especially creative art, at the mercy of who can pay the most for a good review or a scathing putdown, or the laborious process of trying to gain a foothold in the aristocracy, where good manners conceal shark’s teeth. Whilst the recreation of the period fervour and flavour were exacting, the story’s relevance in portraying anarchic media and its eager purveyors and the brute power of a public downfall fizzed away. Giannoli cleverly cast actor-director Xavier Beauvois as the hero’s frenemy, a practiced dandy and wit who nonetheless feels real kinship with him in their authentic passion for creation. The last act was suitably desolating as Lucien has everything stripped from him, including his consumptive lover, but where for Balzac it was chiefly an illustrative and cautionary example, for Giannoli it became, ultimately, a crucial episode in the eternal battle for an artist’s soul, and the worth of their creation, however it’s received in the moment, is the only thing that can outlast the empty furore of such a world.
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Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (Ana Lily Amirpour)
A splendidly odd, and oddly splendid, contraption from A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night director Amirpour, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon had a quality that resembled what a modern Val Lewton film might look like. The actual plot came across more like a melange of The X-Files, a superhero origin story, and some 1940s noir film. A teenage Asian immigrant, the titular Mona Lisa (Jun Jong Seo), is first glimpsed lingering in a padded cell in a mental hospital, where she’s pettily tormented by a staff member. The girl, who has mysterious telekinetic powers and is seemingly locked in a catatonic state as well as a strait-jacket, suddenly unleashes her abilities, forcing the bully to wound herself and help her out of her bonds. The girl flees the hospital, finally finishing up adrift amongst the flotsam of contemporary New Orleans, in a nocturnal odyssey punctuated by islets of strange humanity amidst the nightlife. There she becomes friends with vulgar, self-centred pole dancer Bonnie (Kate Hudson) and her young son (Evan Whitten), and is pursued by a determined cop (Craig Robinson) even after he’s had one painful encounter with the girl and her abilities. The oddball relationship of mystery girl, mother, and son became the fulcrum of proceedings as Bonnie uses Mona Lisa and her powers to enrich herself with robbery, whilst the girl and boy form a bond and plan flight whilst her cop nemesis scrambles around town, and hard choices have to be made if anyone is to have a hope of escape.
By contrast with the monochrome style of her debut, Amirpour this time chased a nocturnal mood again but this time with lush colour applied to a quasi-neorealist approach to shooting, roaming the byways of the Big Easy and imbibing its unique mixture of seediness and communality, almost surrendering entirely to charting the vibe of the place . Amirpour often filmed in wide-lensed shots to give everything a looming, fluorescent immediacy befitting the viewpoint of her heroine as she explores this strange new world. As she does so, she evolves from a blankly alien symbol of all that’s strange and threatening about the outsider to a functioning human being who finds people by and large far more eager to help her than torment her, contrasted with Bonnie, a woman who exploits her new friend and often acts in a greedy and obnoxious way, but is also gifted a hard shell by trying to survive and has underneath it all a streak of decency, not entirely revealed until she pays an ugly price for her actions. The film was dotted with some marvellous character turns from names like Hudson, who along with her turn in Glass Onion had an interesting renaissance, and Ed Skrein as a seemingly sleazy but ultimately obliging and protective DJ who plays fairy godmother to the young runaways.
A blend of Tarantino-esque neo-Western, John Carpenter-type supernatural siege drama and a bunch of other trash movie touchstones, the Senegalese action-horror blend Saloum nonetheless forged something fresh and vigorous in blending those familiar influences with concepts and meditations more specific to its native land. Saloum’s heroes were Bangui’s Hyenas, three swashbuckling mercenaries from humble origins who have become folk heroes for their balls-to-the-wall daring and attitude in conflicts across Africa. But they face a truly disturbing reckoning after rescuing a Mexican cartel member from the midst of a civil war, when they’re forced to land their plane near the titular river. Soon they shuffle into a co-op camping ground run by an affable manager where everything seems idyllic, but signs of something truly strange seethe under the surface as well as multiple factions all with their own objectives. One of the mercenaries has revenge in mind, a path that will lead to the delicate balance of place, history, and guardian spirits all toppling into chaos.
Saloum eventually confronted the troubled history of Senegal and neighbouring lands, including the lingering legacy of war and the trauma of child soldiers, as well as more personal crimes, on the way to a surprisingly tragic and sharply moral ending, without turning into a message movie or surrendering its hard-charging genre film cred. The script was intelligent in weaving symbolic elements in with the immediate plot business, as well as being littered with intriguing details, like the Hyenas being able to converse with a deaf girl with sign language learnt when working as miners: the girl herself wants to join the mercenary ranks proves to have the ideal trait to fend off evil spirits who seduce with song. Director Jean Luc Herbulot expertly shifted between tones, both delighting in the infrastructure of an old-fashioned monster-battling shoot ‘em up and swiftly investing his heroes with a titanic aura that gets tested to utmost in confronting otherworldly enemies, whilst also casting a dubious eye on his own emblems of cool. Such as that invested in a gleaming Remington revolver, a hero’s Excalibur-like weapon that’s also a captured trophy from an evil man, and also a dark totem that rots the soul of whoever holds it by constantly whispering promises of empowerment through bloodshed, like Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer. Herbulot’s crisp widescreen visuals and steely colour palette were consistently arresting in shifting between igneous blocking and flashes of folkloric vision, and he actually managed to do something fresh when staging the climactic battle with shapeless demons with oblique and mobile camerawork. Yann Gael, as the most commanding and troubled Hyena, had major movie star presence.
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Stars At Noon (Claire Denis)
The first of two films Claire Denis released in 2022, Stars At Noon was a sharp return to her finest form after the awkward High Life. Tackling a novel by Denis Johnson set amidst the 1980s war in El Salvador, Denis didn’t have the budget to make her film in period, and so updated it to the pandemic era, which she then drew on to capture a pervasive mood of fetid, paranoid, enigmatic anxiety and dislocation. The Graham Greene-esque story revolved around a shambolic former journalist and broken-down idealist (Margaret Qualley), who’s trapped in El Salvador after losing all her sources of employment for writing too many torrid exposes and pissing off too many bosses, and has been reduced to occasional prostitution and other acts of opportunism to make ends meet. She encounters a suave Englishman (Joe Alwyn), who she first zeroes in on as a mark, but the two find they have an arc of authentic chemistry, and drift into a fractious relationship that intensifies when he turns out to be engaged in shady dealings and is just as in over his head as his new lover. Eventually they’re forced to try and flee the country as he’s hounded by shadowy foes and officialdom.
Denis provoked Qualley into giving the year’s most essential performance as the initially insufferable antiheroine, an ideal Denis protagonist at once violating and enshrining every cliché about strong female characters in movies. Her skittish, self-destructive behaviour, incessantly confrontational bent, and frenetic randiness task everyone she knows and even perplex herself, but she also retains a mind that starts snapping into focus as she confronts existential desperation, able to feel her way through the labyrinth of power by pure honed instinct, the one gift she’s gained from her degrading life. Denis, as is her wont, trailed her characters with languorously observational and atmospheric camerawork, alive to fleeting details whilst remaining purposefully opaque about the backdrop of repression, politicking, and espionage her two protagonists contend with, including a cameo from Bennie Safdie as a smarmy CIA agent who talks entirely in pleasantly discursive phrasing, Mephistopheles in a suit. The proper emphasis was on the doomed romance at its core, Denis fascinated by two such characters locked into their folie-a-deux and the rarefied transactions of psychic power between the couple in their long dance to a foregone end, each moving along a continuum between burning passion, pathetic neediness, and stoic resignation, with an ending that gained not spectacular tragedy but the wearying necessity of betrayal.
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Runners-Up:
Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron) The Batman (Matt Reeves) Benediction (Terence Davies) Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi) In Front Of Your Face (Sang-Soo Hong) Introduction (Sang-Soo Hong) Kimi (Steven Soderbergh) The Quiet Girl (Colm Bairéad) Pearl (Ti West) The Wonder (Sebastián Lelio)
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Interesting and/or Underrated
Aftersun (Charlotte Wells) All My Friends Hate Me (Andrew Gaynord) Argentina 1985 (Santiago Mitre) Athena (Romain Gavras) Death On The Nile (Kenneth Branagh) Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi) Don’t Worry Darling (Olivia Wilde) Emergency (Carey Williams) The Hidden Fox (Lei Qiao) Interceptor (Matthew Reilly) The Lair (Neil Marshall) Mad God (Phil Tippett) Neptune Frost (Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams) Les Olympiades – Paris, 13th District (Jacques Audiard) Saint Omer (Alice Diop) Something In The Dirt (Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead) The Northman (Robert Eggers) The Seed (Sam Walker) Thirteen Lives (Ron Howard) The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (Tom Gormican) Watcher (Chloe Okuno)
The 355 (Simon Kinberg) Bones And All (Luca Guadagnino) The Gray Man (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo) Honor Society (Oran Zegman) Morbius (Daniel Espinosa) Poker Face (Russell Crowe) Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) White Noise (Noah Baumbach) Uncharted (Ruben Fleischer)
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Unseen:
∙ 6 Festivals ∙ After Yang ∙ Ahed’s Knee ∙ All Quiet on the Western Front ∙ Apollo 10½ ∙ Autobiography ∙ Babylon ∙ Belle ∙ Blonde ∙ Boiling Point ∙ Both Sides Of The Blade ∙ Bowling Saturne ∙ Breaking ∙ Bruno Reidal, Confession of a Murderer ∙ Burning Days ∙ The Cathedral ∙ Catherine Called Birdy ∙ Compartment No. 6 ∙ Corsage ∙ Devotion ∙ Decision To Leave ∙ Dinner in America ∙ Down With the King ∙ Earwig ∙ The Electrical Life of Louis Wain ∙ Emancipation ∙ EO ∙ Father Stu ∙ Everything Went Fine ∙ Funny Pages ∙ Good Luck to You, Leo Grande ∙ Great Freedom ∙ Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio ∙ Happening ∙ Il Buco ∙ Living ∙ Marcel the Shell With Shoes On ∙ Master ∙ Murina ∙ No Bears ∙ Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris ∙ My Policeman ∙ A New Old Play ∙ Nobody’s Hero ∙ The Novelist’s Film ∙ One Fine Morning ∙ Pacification ∙ Peter von Kant ∙ Playground ∙ Pleasure ∙ Return To Seoul ∙ Sick of Myself ∙ Slash/Back ∙ Smoking Causes Coughing ∙ Speak No Evil ∙ Stonewalling ∙ Turning Red ∙ Unrest ∙ Vengeance ∙ Weird: The Al Yankovic Story ∙ We’re All Going to the World’s Fair ∙ Wendell and Wild ∙ The Whale ∙ Will-O’-The-Wisp ∙
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The Best Older Films I Saw First in 2022
7th Cavalry (Joseph H. Lewis) Artists and Models / The Girl Can’t Help It (Frank Tashlin) The Barbarian and the Geisha (John Huston) Battle of the Coral Sea (Paul Wendkos) Beach Red (Cornel Wilde) The Bermuda Depths (Tsugonobu Tom Katino) Les Biches / La Femme Infidèle / Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol) Black Widow (Bob Rafelson) Cry of the City (Robert Siodmak) Deadly Run (Claude Miller) Fantastic Planet (René Laloux) Funny Face (Stanley Donen) I Live In Fear (Akira Kurosawa) In Harm’s Way (Otto Preminger) Kirikou and the Sorceress (Michel Ocelot) The Last Boy Scout (Tony Scott) L’Age d’Or (Luis Buñuel) The Mangler (Tobe Hooper) Man Made Monster (George Waggner) The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann) Night and the City (Jules Dassin) October: Ten Days That Shook The World (Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei Eisenstein) Prescription Murder (Richard Irving) The Prince and the Showgirl (Laurence Olivier) Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (Guy Hamilton) The Rite (Ingmar Bergman) Run For The Sun (Roy Boulting) Satan’s Triangle (Sutton Roley) The Sin of Nora Moran (Phil Goldstone) They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! (Gordon Douglas) What’s Up, Doc? / Nickelodeon (Peter Bogdanovich)
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In Memoriam
∙ Matthew ‘Meat Loaf’ Aday ∙ Kirstie Alley ∙ Angelo Badalamenti ∙ Jules Bass ∙ Jean-Jacques Beineix ∙ James Bidgood ∙ Peter Bogdanovich ∙ Michel Bouquet ∙ Peter Bowles ∙ James Caan ∙ Irene Cara ∙ Jean-Claude Carrière ∙ Jack Charles ∙ Robbie Coltrane ∙ Kevin Conroy ∙ Bernard Cribbins ∙ Myléne Demongeot ∙ Ruggero Deodato ∙ Louise Fletcher ∙ Clarence Gilyard Jr ∙ Daniela Giordano ∙ Jean-Luc Godard ∙ Clu Gulager ∙ Philip Baker Hall ∙ Anne Heche ∙ Mike Hodges ∙ Bo Hopkins ∙ Marsha Hunt ∙ Artis ‘Coolio’ Ivey Jr ∙ Just Jaeckin ∙ L.Q. Jones ∙ Hardy Kruger ∙ Günter Lamprecht ∙ Angela Lansbury ∙ Ray Liotta ∙ Diane McBain ∙ Stuart Margolin ∙ Yvette Mimieux ∙ Roger E. Mosley ∙ Edson Arantes ‘Pelé’ do Nascimento ∙ Francesca ‘Kitten’ Natividad ∙ Olivia Newton-John ∙ Nichelle Nichols ∙ James Olson ∙ Irene Papas ∙ Evangelos ‘Vangelis’ Papathanassiou ∙ Nehemiah Persoff ∙ Wolfgang Petersen ∙ Leslie Phillips ∙ Sidney Poitier ∙ Andrew Prine ∙ Albert Pyun ∙ Bob Rafelson ∙ Ivan Reitman ∙ Henry Silva ∙ Paul Sorvino ∙ Larry Storch ∙ Venetia Stevenson ∙ Austin Stoker ∙ Jean-Marie Straub ∙ Alain Tanner ∙ Jean-Louis Trintignant ∙ Douglas Trumbull ∙ Gaspard Ulliel ∙ Monica Vitti ∙ ‘Jimmy’ Wang Yu ∙ Fred Ward ∙ David Warner ∙ Dennis Waterman ∙ Yoshishige ‘Kiju’ Yoshida ∙
film freedonia 