It just hit me that I’ve kept up this journal for over six months. The last time I tried I didn’t get much beyond six weeks. How things change.
For another example of how things have changed, albeit over a much longer span of time, we have the first film I saw this week…
The World to Come (2020) – ***
In the recent continuum of lesbian-romance period pieces, The World to Come seems to be more acclaimed than Ammonite but less so than Portrait of a Lady on Fire, neither of which I’ve actually seen. But I can say it was less successful to me than Carol or The Handmaiden, perhaps because both of those had far better writing and stronger direction, and were able to balance the emotional reality of the central romance with the melodramatic elements of the story. Here, director Mona Fastvold and screenwriters Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard (working from Shepard’s short story of the same name) seem to be trying to balance a sense of dour realism with one of lush romanticism, and the result doesn’t quite work. But it has a lot going for it regardless.
In 1856, in rural Schoharie County, New York, Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and her husband Dyer (Casey Affleck) struggle to run their farm while mourning the recent death of their young daughter and contending with the growing gulf between them. One day, Abigail sees their new neighbors passing by: Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) and her husband Finney (Christopher Abbott). The two women share a significant look, and before long Tallie comes to visit, her vivacious spirit immediately proving a tonic to Abigail’s depression. They become devoted friends, and as the days pass, Abigail finds herself falling madly in love, until the day comes when Tallie reveals she feels the same way.
But the pressures of their husbands, especially on Tallie from the increasingly abusive Finney, threaten their newfound joy, and when Tallie and Finney abruptly move away without so much as a goodbye, Abigail is plunged into grief anew. When she finally gets a letter from Tallie, who’s now living near Syracuse, she determines to visit, and Dyer, who ultimately wants her to be happy, joins her on her journey. But a happy ending is not on the horizon for anyone involved.
I won’t spoil exactly what happens, but it plunges the film more deeply into tragedy than the story can really support. I can’t help but think that the film would have done better to end with Abigail’s despair at Tallie’s leaving, and the agony of not knowing where she is or why they left. To me, the death of a loved one is less painful than knowing (or believing) that they are alive and there is no way for you to be together. And in an era before modern communications technology, it would’ve been a more truthful ending than the overbearing misery we get.
But the film, at least in terms of the writing, was already on shaky ground. The film is narrated by Abigail through the device of her diary (kept at Dyer’s insistence), and after a while the device wears thin, not helped by the narration itself tipping over into pretentious verbosity; it feels like Shepard wanted to get every word of his story that he possibly could into the script. And the story itself seems to have had its issues, as there’s just not that much in the way of narrative drive until the final act, making the final tragedy seem more contrived; until then, the film isn’t too subtle about the sparks flying between Abigail and Tallie, about Dyer’s sad sullenness or Finney’s toxic chauvinism, but there’s a decided lack of stakes.
When the film focuses on atmosphere and character, it works rather better. Andre Chemetoff’s cinematography is quite striking, thanks to the decision to shoot on film; it can be rather grainy at times, but it adds a depth and glow to the images digital cinematography just can’t match. And the scenery (Romania, it would appear) is impressively grim in the wintry scenes and beautifully lush in the spring and summer sequences. And Fastvold’s direction creates some effectively vivid scenes, from the chaotic snowstorm early on to the sequence where the women share their first kiss, after which Abigail is lost for the rest of the day in her romantic dreams.
And the acting is good throughout, although Kirby is so charismatic and magnetic as Tallie that, even though we totally understand Abigail’s passion for her, she tends to overshadow everyone else. That’s not necessarily Waterston’s fault (nor is the fact that she has to deliver so damn much voiceover), since Abigail is necessarily rather muted and glum until Tallie reawakens her spirit. But Kirby brings her character to life in a way that Waterston (who is quite solid) just doesn’t quite match. As the husbands, Affleck (why was he cast?) is all right as the mopey Dyer, but Abbott, while stuck with a rather overwrought character, is at least convincingly cruel.
Daniel Blumberg’s odd score feels like an amalgam of frontier folk music and free jazz; it’s not entirely congruous but it’s at least interesting. The sets and costumes are solidly done (I love Abigail’s sink, which seems to be carved out of a gnarled log), though I have to say, the houses seem oddly palatial. Maybe that’s just what was available on location.
I can’t help but wonder if I prefer Carol and The Handmaiden because they found a way to let love win out, a sentiment totally absent from this film. Of course, a bittersweet or even sad ending could’ve worked here, since given the time and place, there was not much chance (barring the extraordinary open-mindedness of their husbands) that Abigail and Tallie could’ve made it last. But as it is, the film pushes itself too far in the final stretch, and it left a bad taste in my own mouth. The most tragic outcomes are not always the most truthful.
Score: 72
MWFF: The Enchanted Forest (1945) – ***
A comparatively rare fantasy film for the time, and from the Poverty Row PRC studio, no less: it’s the story of an old hermit who lives in the titular forest, communicating with its flora and fauna. One day, he rescues a lost child which he begins raising as his own, and the efforts of the child’s mother to locate him are interwoven with the hermit’s attempts to prevent a logger’s intentions to destroy the forest. It’s in color, too – filmed in the Cinecolor process, its success (according to Wikipedia, it was the highest-grossing film in PRC’s history) helped popularize the process to the point where even major studios began using it.
I haven’t read many reviews of it, but what I’ve found tend to be positive; this review in particular praises it for making one believe in the hermit’s special bond with the forest, overcoming its low budget with a sense of genuine magic. It sounds like an all-around hidden gem; add to that my long-standing fascinating with early color cinema, and it firmly belongs here. There’s a DVD edition from the late 90s (which is, of course, long out of print), but it can also be found online.
Having now seen The Enchanted Forest, I won’t go so far as to say it’s a true hidden gem, but it’s a rather intriguing little film, and the comparison to Disney on the poster is, if not fully earned (it’s not on the same level as any of Disney’s features to this point), not totally unjustified either. In many ways, it feels like a live-action Bambi, a film which depicts Nature as pure and good and anything which threatens to upset the balance of life as corrupt and cruel. Not that the film says humanity is inherently corrupt, but that the destruction of forests for profit, the wanton killing of animals, and the assumption that the human is superior is wrong.
Indeed, the film feels surprisingly nuanced forward-thinking at times; at one point, Old John (Harry Davenport), the old hermit-hero, notes that logging in the area “changed the climate” – decades before the phrase “climate change” entered the public vocabulary. And the seeming antagonist of the film, lumber tycoon Ed Henderson (John Litel) actually changes his tune after seemingly losing his grandson, and is a relatively sympathetic figure well before the end; the real antagonist is Gilson (Clancy Cooper), one of Henderson’s subordinates who refuses to accept that Old John might know what he’s talking about when it comes to the spirit of the forest. But even he’s secondary to the real story.
No, the real story is about Old John’s raising of Jackie (Billy Severn), Henderson’s grandson and the son of Anne (Brenda Joyce), seemingly lost in a train crash during a storm but rescued by Old John and his faithful dog Bruno. Old John teaches Jackie the ways of the forest and his philosophy of loving and respecting all that lives there. But he acknowledges that the time will come when Jackie must go into society, hoping that by raising Jackie with love and decency, he will be a force for good in the world. Compared to, say, the tiresomely self-righteous Ben Cash in Captain Fantastic, Old John’s approach seems a bit more sympathetic.
As for Anne, she and Henderson have buried their grief in extensive travel, and she has tried to let the glamour of the high life keep her pain at bay. But Dr. Steven Blaine (Edmund Lowe), who had worked for Henderson and has his own regard for the forest (and for Anne) wants them to help him found a sanitarium in the forest, and thinks that returning to the site of her seeming loss will help Anne come to terms with it. She’s reluctant, but during an analysis session in the woods (only in the movies) she happens to see Jackie at a distance, and he sees her. She can’t shake her certainty that her son lives, and Jackie can’t shake his fascination with “the good lady.” And while Old John is worried at the prospect of losing the boy he’s come to love as a son, the voices of the forest, and some help from his animal friends, eventually bring about a happy reunion.
The animals, trained by Earl Johnson and Curly Twiford, are quite an impressive supporting cast. There’s the trusty Bruno (a German Shepherd, I think), the clever raven Blackie (played by the problematically named “Jim” the Crow), Nanny the goat (who helpfully provides milk for the infant Jackie), Mr. Green the meteorological frog, Tom the mountain lion, and an assortment of other critters, all of whom seem quite well managed. The film doesn’t lean too heavily upon their antics, which is all to the better.
But the humans are, if not extremely memorable, generally possessed of the proper spirit. Davenport is the best by far; he makes Old John wise and warm, knowing but not embittered, in harmony with the forest and its creatures but quite capable of dealing with his own kind when necessary. He keeps the right balance of whimsy and sincerity throughout, and if I wouldn’t say I was truly transported by his communion with Nature, but it worked well enough. Severn is a bit cloying (his diction is a bit too practiced), but Joyce and Lowe are adequate enough. Kudos to the film for not pushing their potential romance very hard, though the way the male characters talk to her has more than a whiff of condescension.
The technical qualities of the film are trickier to judge, owing to the rather low-quality upload I watched; the DVD might at least be better looking, but it would be nice if even a modest restoration were possible. The Cinecolor process would hardly have captured “all the glorious color of Nature’s Wonderland,” but the washed-out, muddy version of the film I saw certainly wouldn’t have done Marcel Le Picard’s cinematography any favors. I was able to better appreciate the uses of sound and music, especially the ethereal voice of the forest, the songs sung by an unseen choir (again, shades of Bambi) and the loggers’ song early on, which might well have been influenced by “Heigh Ho,” although it’s a far darker piece.
The Enchanted Forest is far from great, with an ending that’s too abrupt to be satisfying, a lack of really noteworthy acting outside of Davenport (though even he can’t make the odd speak-singing bits come off), and not quite enough imagination in Lew Landers’ direction to make it truly magical. But it’s a nice little film with a good message, a good heart, and just enough to set it apart from the rest of what Hollywood was doing at the time to make it worth checking out, at least for the curious.
Score: 73
Telling Lies in America (1997) – ***
In between writing a film widely regarded as one of the all-time worst (Showgirls) and a film that is one of the all-time worst (An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn), Joe Eszterhas wrote a legitimately good script that made a rather good film, which of course received none of the notoriety of Showgirls or Burn Hollywood Burn, even if out-grossed the latter…making a little over $300,000 to that film’s $60,000. Despite its own strengths and a very solid cast including a few soon-to-be stars, it remains quite obscure. So it goes.
In 1961 Cleveland, teenage Hungarian immigrant Karchy Jonas (Brad Renfro) idolizes local DJ Billy Magic (Kevin Bacon). In an attempt to boost his own ego and impress his crush, co-worker Diney Majeski (Calista Flockhart), Karchy forges testimonies from his classmates to earn a place in Billy’s “High School Hall of Fame.” Billy sees through the con, but impressed by Karchy’s seeming skill at lying, offers him a job as his gofer. Karchy revels in the job and its perks, especially driving Billy’s shiny red Cadillac, but the cracks in Billy’s slick façade start to show, especially when the record promoters start handing Karchy little envelopes to give to Billy. The authorities pressure Karchy to tell them about the envelopes, lest he and his father (Maximilian Schell) have their applications for citizenship rejected, and Karchy finds himself learning some hard lessons about integrity and honesty.
One of the smartest things Eszterhas did here was take a page from von Stroheim’s book: “The difference between me and [Lubitsch] is that he shows you the king on the throne and then he shows you the king in his bedroom. I show you the king in his bedroom first. Then when you see him on the throne you have no illusions about him.” The film opens with Billy arriving in Cleveland by bus, checking into a cheap motel, spending the night with a prostitute, going into the radio station the following morning and asking the manager (an old colleague) for a job. His slickness fades. He says to the manager, “Don’t make me go through this,” and only when he secures a spot does the charm return. But we already know what’s behind the grin, the “slanguage,” and the flashy appearance.
Of course, the film isn’t Billy’s (well, his real name is Dwayne) story, but Karchy’s, because this is a quintessential coming-of-age story, with a lot of the standard tropes deployed: the crush he’s desperate to impress, the date that ends disastrously, the nemeses – namely the popular boy with his own private struggles and the authoritarian priest – and the motley crew of friends who alternately make his school days hellish and endurable, the mentor figure who proves to be all too human, the parent who’s sacrificed to get him into the school he hates and just wants him to do the right thing, and so on. There’s a lot we’ve seen before, and some of it does feel pretty rote.
But the other really clever thing Eszterhas does is inject a note of cynicism into the film’s final scenes, after Karchy has protected Billy in court (not because he still likes him, but because he did the right thing when Karchy threatened to tell the truth about his payola) and the frustrated authorities try to block him and his father from becoming citizens. The judge pulls Karchy into the hallway and gives him an impromptu citizenship test, first asking if he knows the story of George Washington and the cherry tree (he does), then if he knows the story of Washington throwing a stone (or a silver dollar) all the way across the Rappahannock River. He then asks Karchy if he believes the latter story (he doesn’t), and if he believes that Washington confessed to cutting down the tree, and Karchy admits he doesn’t. The judge chuckles and says “Neither do I.”
So the film ends with Karchy and his father reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and embracing, secure in their position as American citizens, as we hear Billy’s voice on the radio once more, now going under the name “Billy Lightning,” now stationed in Kalamazoo, still up to his old tricks. America was built on lies. But after a long enough time, lies become legends, and then myths. That’s just life.
If, in the end, there are a few too many clichés and underdeveloped plot elements for the film to flirt with greatness, it’s still pretty good. The acting is particularly solid; Renfro is just okay as Karchy, but Bacon is great as Billy, perfectly capturing the smooth-operating public face and the amoral cynic underneath. Flockhart is strikingly good as Diney, taking what could’ve been a stock role and showing us both her sympathy towards Karchy and her readiness to call him out on his bullshit, as well as the sense of resigned pragmatism which precludes their ending up together. And Schell, while a bit old for the role (though Eszterhas wanted him to play it so badly he actually handed over his fee for the script to secure him), brings both old-world gravitas and pathos to the table.
As noted, there are some other big names in the cast: Luke Wilson as Karchy and Diney’s obnoxious manager (whom she defends and ends up with), Paul Dooley as the priest who seems to have it out for Karchy (to an almost cartoonish degree), and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Karchy’s nemesis; oddly, we get a scene where Karchy tricks him into confessing his sins (involving self-abuse and violent thoughts about his abusive father), but after Karchy is caught and thrown out of school, nothing more comes of it.
There are numerous little touches presumably drawn straight from Eszterhas’ life, like Karchy’s efforts to pronounce “the” correctly, and the period detail is smartly managed, with the sets and costumes ringing true without ever feeling showy, though with the relatively tight budget, they probably didn’t have the choice to. The soundtrack is quite good as well, including an original song in the style of the era, “Medium Rare,” written by Bacon himself. Guy Ferland’s direction is quite adequate, but it’s the writing and the performances, especially Bacon’s dangerously charismatic turn, that are the real draw here. It’s definitely worth rediscovering.
Score: 75
MWFF: Around the World in 80 Ways (1988) – ***
My rationale:
I’ve always loved the premise of this Australian comedy; a pair of brothers spring their father from a nursing home and take him on a trip around the world…without ever leaving their house! Using imagination and ingenuity they “visit” Hawaii, Las Vegas, Tokyo, and so forth. And the reviews I’ve been able to find have been generally favorable; it helps that I have a pretty high opinion of Australian cinema, which has been responsible for a great many hidden gems, Wake in Fright and Bad Boy Bubby being my go-to examples.
Yet another *** film, and on the lower half of that rating, but when it sticks to that premise, it really is quite engaging. I should note that they do in fact leave the house; most of the ersatz globetrotting actually occurs in their neighbor’s ritzy home and his car shop – justified by the fact that the father and the neighbor were once business partners until the neighbor screwed him over and has been trying to hook up with their mother ever since. And it so happens that the neighbor and the mother are on an actual package tour, visiting the actual places the brothers are recreating with sound effects and some legerdemain; the younger brother is a sound engineer and the older brother is a tour guide with a knack for accents (which proves more than a little cringe-inducing when he pretends to be Hawaiian and Japanese).
But there’s even more going on; there’s a subplot about the elder brother, Wally (Philip Quast), trying to get money to save his tourism business by cashing in bonds the father has been literally keeping under the mattress for years. And there’s a subplot about the younger brother, Eddie (Kelly Dingwall), trying to woo Ophelia Cox (Gosia Dobrowolska), their father’s nurse, who is drawn into their wacky scheme because it offers her a chance to test her own ideas for healing not only her patients’ bodies, but also their spirits. And there’s also a subplot about Madge (Jane Markey), a neighbor and meter maid who becomes suspicious of the brothers’ activities and tips off the head doctor of the nursing home (John Howard), who also happens to be Ophelia’s fiancée. For a film that barely reaches 90 minutes, that’s a lot to cram in, and a lot of it feels like filler.
It doesn’t help that we never do care all that much about Wally or Eddie; we would’ve been no less invested in them (and probably rather more) had they been motivated simply by their love for their father. As it is, it’s the scenes centering around the father, Roly (Allan Penney), and the mother, Mavis (Diana Davidson), that are easily the most compelling in the film. Quast has his moments, especially when he affects an American accent whilst playing an airline pilot (his tour bus – in the shape of a banana – serves as the plane), and Dingwall is okay, but they’re better at clowning than actually acting. But Penney, with his addled vigor, is a lot of fun, and Davidson is sympathetically exasperated by the buffoonery of the aforementioned neighbor, Alex Moffatt (Rob Steele, an effective blowhard).
Much of the kudos must go to production designer Lissa Coote, who does a fine job crafting the brothers’ ramshackle recreations of Honolulu, Las Vegas, Rome, and Tokyo. And if some aspects of the script (by director Stephen MacLean and Paul Leadon) have aged rather badly, other moments, like the tilts at package tours and the scene where a group of Hawaiian woman stand around chatting and smoking before putting on their best friendly-native act for the tourist, hold up rather well. It’s certainly a fertile enough premise that a remake, one which pared down the subplots and played up the ingenuity of the brothers, would seem well justified.
But even with those caveats, it’s a fun if slight little movie, one with enough genuine charm and invention to make you smile, especially at the end, when everything, unsurprisingly if not too logically, works out for the best – and certainly in a very different way from the other Australian films I cited.
Score: 68
VHYes (2019) – ***
At the heart of VHYes is a young boy with a video camera and two obsessions: filming his own life and recording TV broadcasts which run the gamut from public-access eccentricity to late-night pornography, from true-crime documentaries to network procedurals. Scenes from his life, the broadcasts he records, and his parents’ wedding tape all fight for space on a single cassette, and the greatest triumph of the film is Avner Shiloah’s editing, which blends these elements together, not too neatly, but with enough structure that something like a narrative eventually takes shape, if you want something more than a loving recreation of the late 80s and its television.
Technically, my childhood came about a decade after VHYes takes place (it’s set in the last week of 1987; I wasn’t born until November 1989), but I fully recognized and appreciated not only the specific targets of the film’s satire (Antiques Roadshow, The Joy of Painting, true-crime shows with stylized dramatizations), but also the general atmosphere and aesthetic, which hadn’t changed all that much by the time I was watching TV (how had I forgotten about scrolling listings?). The film was, of course, shot on video (both VHS and Betamax, apparently), but considerable care was taken as to the production and costume design as well. There’s no question it’s a film made with a great deal of heart.
If it were made with a bit more focus, or perhaps just a bit more abandon, it would be even better. But the attempts to give the film something of a story, especially in the final act, don’t really work for me; there’s some attempted reality-bending that neither feels earned nor especially thought-provoking. If you want an exploration of how obsessively filming one’s life can have disastrous consequences, David Holzman’s Diary is much better (and about as short). And given that much of the film is basically composed of comedy sketches, it’s inevitable that some are better than others; in particular, I found the porn parodies wore thin after a while.
Still, when VHYes is good, it’s very good, with one of the single funniest scenes I’ve seen all year (the security-system commerical) and a lot of other solid chuckles (“I think this is just a bowl”). At 72 minutes, it’s an easy watch, and it’s a must if the premise tickles your sense of nostalgia – although you can also go down the vintage-commercial rabbit hole on YouTube if you really don’t value your time. Also keep an eye out for some surprising cameos, one of which I didn’t properly identify until the closing credits.
Score: 74
The Midnight Sky (2020) – ***½
My expectations for this were pretty low. The reviews were pretty weak, and Clooney’s last three efforts behind the camera had been a case of diminishing returns; the okay Ides of March gave way to the middling Monuments Men, which was followed by the drearily cynical Suburbicon. So that might explain why I liked it, but the truth is that I didn’t just like it more than those films, but I pretty actively enjoyed it, to the point where I’m modestly surprised by the cool reception it’s received; I’ll readily admit its flaws, but it feels to me like lesser films have been forgiven greater ones.
To be sure, The Midnight Sky doesn’t help its case by inviting comparisons to several previous films. You’ve got shades of Interstellar (the search for a new home for humanity), The Martian (the (initially) isolated protagonist, the cross-cutting between Earth and space), and even a taste of Gravity (the meteor field scenes). Moreover, though certainly coincidentally, it echoes News of the World in the surrogate father-daughter bond that develops between Clooney’s aged loner and Caoilinn Springall’s mostly silent Iris. Indeed, I’ll admit to liking this film more than News, or at least finding its story richer and more satisfying.
Set in a 2049 where Earth is being ravaged by the effects of an unspecified catastrophe, while Clooney remains alone at an Arctic research station, dying of an unspecified disease (possibly kidney failure), trying to contact the spaceship which explored K-23, a moon of Jupiter which might just be what Clooney has spent his whole career trying to find…only there may not be much of humanity left to move there. And in any case, he must let the ship and its crew know that there’s no point in returning to Earth; in one of the film’s eeriest scenes, he steps out into the Arctic night to find the ground littered with dead and dying birds, their wings pitifully beating against the ground, poisoned by the air or frozen to death, but in any case trying to escape the global disaster.
Meanwhile, the crew of the ship have their own issues, including Sully’s (Felicity Jones) pregnancy, a deviation from their intended course which leads them into danger, and their difficulties in contacting Earth…which we know is the result of the catastrophe they remain in the dark about. Their tribulations include another one of the film’s most haunting sequences, in which a crew member is mortally injured and their blood floats about in zero gravity, a startling sight that would be striking if it weren’t so pitiful.
Many of the film’s strengths come more from Clooney’s direction and the superb technical craft on display, from the futuristic architecture which frequently evokes the roots of plants and/or spiders’ webs, to the fine special effects, to Alexandre Desplat’s lovely score (which has a sense of humor when it needs to, just like the film), than from the script, adapted from Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight by Mark L. Smith. There’s some distinctly heavy-handed dialogue and a revelation at the very end which just doesn’t land; luckily, it’s explained so briefly that you can overlook it in favor of the depth of the intertwined journeys the characters take and the polish with which they’re depicted.
The acting is solid, if not quite on a par with some of the other films I mentioned; Clooney strives for an unusual amount of pathos here, playing a sick man buried under a huge beard, and achieves it; Springall doesn’t have a great deal to work with, but she does quite capably with her wide-eyed curiosity; Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Demian Bichir, and Tiffany Boone all have their moments as the members of the ship’s crew, although they don’t outdo the ensemble in The Martian (an admittedly tall order). Perhaps it says enough that they make what should’ve been a cringe-inducing scene (the “Sweet Caroline” scene) charming. Or at least tolerable.
Honestly, for all the faults I can find with The Midnight Sky, I can’t deny that, on a fundamental level, it simply worked for me. And when a film does that, you can forgive it a great many things. Moreover, when a film ends as this one does – on just about the perfect note, given what’s come to pass – it’s hard not to give it an out-and-out recommendation. The NBR’s list not withstanding, it’s not one of the year’s very best, but it’s certainly worth giving a chance.
Score: 83
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