The Weekly Gravy #62

Last Night in Soho (2021) – ***

I knew going in that Last Night in Soho wasn’t that widely praised; on Metacritic, it’s the lowest-rated film directed by Edgar Wright, scoring a 67 – not bad, but not all that good either. I still hoped it would stick with me more than Baby Driver, which was enjoyable but ultimately rather generic. Time will tell if it sticks with me, but at least it’s a more interesting film, just not a better one. In the basic premise of a modern-day fashion student obsessed with 60s London finding herself drawn into the past through her dreams, it provided a number of scenes which looked great in the trailer, but which never quite cohere into a satisfactory whole.

That student, Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie), possesses second sight, and frequently sees the ghost of her late mother; her grandmother (Rita Tushingham) is deeply concerned about Eloise’s going to London for fashion school, given the family history of mental illness (which afflicted her mother) and the overwhelming, often seedy nature of the city. Sure enough, Eloise finds herself struggling right away, both with predatory men and a mean-girl roommate (Synnøve Karlsen), whom she escapes by taking a room in the home of Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg).

When she falls asleep for the first time in her new room, she has an incredibly vivid dream of 60s London in which she has taken the form – more or less – of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), who’s intent on becoming a singer and is wooed by Jack (Matt Smith), who offers to manage her career. Eloise continues having these visions, watching as Jack forces Sandie into prostitution, ultimately killing her in the very room Eloise now occupies.

As visions of Sandie and the men around her invade her waking hours, Eloise struggles to figure out if Sandie was real, and if so, who Jack was and how to bring him to justice. She suspects a creepy old man (Terence Stamp), whose attitude and behavior are indeed suspicious, but it’s soon hard to say whether the past or the present is the greater threat to her.

Last Night definitely wants to make points about rape culture and the exploitation of women in show business. Even before Jack forces her to sell her body, Sandie is forced to perform in a bawdy routine with skimpy costumes as a Rialto chorus girl, doing little to hide her disgust. Eloise will have ever more visceral visions of exploited women and vampirically exploitive men, but she’s already struggling in the present day, from the overbearing taxi driver she meets first thing in London to her obnoxious classmates.

But without giving too much away, the film doesn’t really stick the landing, either in conveying a message or in telling a story. For my money, the film should’ve focused more on one timeline or the other, and honestly the 60s scenes prove more compelling than the present-day material. The effective period detail and Wright’s obvious affinity for the period make the saga of Sandie more compelling, and her degradation serves as a painful counterpoint to the nostalgic glamour; unfortunately, to make room for the present-day scenes, much of Sandie’s story is reduced to montages, although one of them – where she recites variations of her name to numerous men, all of whom reply “That’s a lovely name” – works quite well.

The present-day scenes are less effective, partly because Eloise gets to do little but scream and run, partly because the nature of her visions is frustratingly inconsistent (are they simply visions, or can they can actually harm her physically?), and partly because of two twists in the third act, one of which renders a solid chunk of this film thus far a dead end, the other of which introduces complexities of character and theme which the film doesn’t have the time to explore; the latter also raises a lot of logistical questions which the film breezes over, but you may already be wondering why no one has called mental health services on the obviously troubled Eloise.

With a running time of almost two hours, Last Night‘s murky structure and repetitive scenes become even more of an issue. Wright mentioned, in the introduction he recorded for the theater I saw it in, how he’d been nursing the idea for some time, and it bears the hallmarks of a long-nursed notion that never quite blossomed into a cohesive story. Wright co-wrote the script with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, but if she helped with the story’s themes, she was unable to smooth out its structure.

I’ve been quite impressed by McKenzie over the last few years, and she does what she can, but Eloise is just too limited and, for the most part, passive a character for her to give a really great performance. She’s believably entranced by the past and terrified by her visions and revelations, but there’s not really a clear arc for her to play. Taylor-Joy is rather better, selling us on Sandie’s brazen confidence in her first scene and spiritual degradation as the story progresses, even if the script undermines her arc as well in the home stretch. Smith and Stamp are effectively arrogant, toxic presences, and Rigg, in her final film, gets some good moments of crusty humor. Michael Ajao also provides a nice note of humanity as John, who becomes Eloise’s closest friend (and lover).

Wright’s direction is effective, at least on a scene-by-scene basis; the film looks and sounds quite good, with excellent sets, fine costumes, vivid cinematography and special effects, and a good soundtrack of vintage songs. The atmosphere is quite well created and the scare scenes are effectively visceral; even in his comedies, Wright displayed a knack for violence. But his best films have a tightness and precision which Last Night could’ve used more of; a film which draws upon the chaos of the human condition must be careful not to become chaotic itself, and that’s what Last Night, despite a lot of good moments, ultimately becomes.

Score: 69

The Wind (1928) – ***½

CW: Sexual assault, mental illness.

Like The Crowd, another renowned late MGM silent, The Wind is strangely hard to come by these days, having never had a DVD release in the States and being long out-of-print on VHS. But my father recorded it off TCM some years ago – with an introduction recorded in the late 80s by Lillian Gish – and I suggested we watch it, feeling that a story of desperation and despair in the face of merciless nature was a suitable, if slightly unorthodox, choice for Halloween. It served, although not as perfectly as it might have, given some of the compromises which keep me from deeming it a truly great film.

Letty Mason (Gish) leaves her home in Virginia to live with her cousin Beverly (Edward Earle) and his wife Cora (Dorothy Cumming) at their ranch in rural Texas. On the train, she meets cattle trader Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love) who takes a fancy to her; at the station, she’s met by Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson) and his partner Sourdough (William Orlamond), who are Beverly’s nearest neighbors (15 miles). As they travel to Beverly’s ranch, Letty experiences first-hand the endless wind which Wirt had warned her about; Lige tells her that “northers” are especially brutal, and drive the wild horses down from the mountains in vast numbers.

Beverly is delighted to see Letty, but Cora is immediately jealous of her. At a community dance, Lige and Sourdough, who’ve also taken a shine to her, both propose marriage; Letty is merely amused by this, but Cora tells her she’ll have to choose one of them. Wirt arrives, barely beating out a tornado which forces the guests into a basement shelter, and asks Letty to come with him. She visits him the following day, and he reveals he’s already married, wanting her only as his mistress. She leaves him.

Under pressure from Cora, and in light of Beverly’s fragile health, Letty reluctantly marries Lige and moves into his cabin on the prairie, but his behavior on their wedding night leads him to realize there’s no future for them; he tells her he’ll raise the money to send her home. As time passes, her nerves are worn down by the endless wind and the sand it blows into the cabin every time the door opens.

One evening, Lige returns to the cabin with an unexpected guest: Wirt, who’d been injured in a storm nearby. Wirt recuperates while he and Letty keep an eye on one another, and when he’s recruited to help round up wild horses during a norther, he slips away, returning to the cabin, where he forces himself on Letty. Afterwards, he urges her to leave with him before Lige returns; she refuses and kills him in the subsequent struggle. She buries his body in the sand outside, but the wind seems to blow the sand away, revealing his corpse and driving her into a breakdown.

Lige returns, bringing Letty back to her senses; he can see no sign of Wirt’s body outside and suggests the wind has a way of covering up such things. Letty tells him she loves him and no longer wishes to leave; when he asks if she’s still afraid of the wind, she replies that she isn’t afraid of it – or anything.

Now, the source material, the novel of the same name by Dorothy Scarborough (which I own), does not end so happily. It ends with these lines:

With a laugh that strangled on a scream, the woman sped to the door, flung it open and rushed out. She fled across the prairies like a leaf blown in a gale, borne along in the force of the wind that was at least to have its way with her.

Accounts vary as to whether the novel’s ending was filmed and rejected by the studio, or changed during the writing process; the evidence leans towards the latter, but in any case Gish and director Victor Sjöström (here credited as Seastrom) were quite upset by it, and Sjöström would direct only one more film for MGM before returning to Europe, where he would turn his attentions more towards acting, culminating 30 years later in Wild Strawberries. Gish would continue acting for another 60 years, but at least on screen she would work mainly as a character actress; the coming of sound largely ended her career as a leading lady.

Not that her performances in sound films were at all lacking, but she was a brilliant silent performer, with her large eyes and subtly expressive face; she often seemed to be faintly sad, and sadly self-aware. Certainly Letty is sad indeed, scorned by Cora, lusted after by Wirt, and forced to marry Lige, who means well – mostly – but is something of a childish ass. And, of course, there’s the endless wind, which wears away at her nerves until she can hardly think. Gish must cover a great deal of emotional territory in the course of the story – and the rigors of making the film were apparently considerable – but she does it all extremely well.

But she can’t make the happy ending work, though neither she, Sjöström, or scenarist Frances Marion really try very hard to do so. Lige’s observation about the wind covering things up is an especially obvious bit of hand-waving, and we certainly can’t believe that Letty has spontaneously fallen in love with him, or is no longer afraid of the wind or anything; one might be tempted to read the scene as her real descent into madness, but we’re clearly meant to take it as sincere. I couldn’t.

That’s too bad, since up until that point the film is pretty good. Sjöström’s direction is solid, especially the imagery of a wild horse in the sky, symbolic of the fierce wind, and some off-kilter camera movements to suggest Letty’s frame of mind. The other performances are mostly solid, with Hanson, Cumming, and Love especially effective; Orlamond’s clowning is a bit broad, but he’s fine. The technical aspects are quite solid, with the tornado – depicted almost as a moving shadow – anticipating what MGM would do 11 years later in The Wizard of Oz, and the destructive combination of wind (provided by tied-down biplanes) and sand being effectively managed throughout.

I was never quite taken enough with the film to consider rating it ****, even before the ending, but that sealed it as a solid mid-high ***½, a very respectable film and well worth seeing, but not quite the masterpiece others consider it. It should still be more readily available in a higher-quality version.

Score: 83

Dune: Part One (2021) – ****

I rewatched Dune and appended my thoughts to my original review. In brief, I thought even higher of it, especially in terms of storytelling and sheer entertainment, while being just as impressed by the brilliant craft on display at every turn. I knew this was a great film the first time around, but I needed – and wanted – a second viewing to appreciate it more for what it was than what I wanted it to be. A must – in a theater if you possibly can.

Score: 89

Phantom of the Paradise (1974) – ***

Brian De Palma has never tried to hide his predilection for homage. Films like Obsession and Dressed to Kill are obviously inspired by Hitchcock, The Untouchables directly references Battleship Potemkin, and his remake of Scarface is dedicated Howard Hawk and Ben Hecht, who made the original. And here we have a film heavily inspired by The Phantom of the Opera, openly indebted to Faust, and with nods to German Expressionism. It even features the “spinning headline” cliché, just for the hell of it. But it’s also very much whatever De Palma wanted it to be (he wrote the script as well), and the wacky humor, daydream-like plotting, and eccentric visuals all point to an enthusiastic vision.

Swan (Paul Williams) is a legendary music producer, incredibly gifted but incredibly amoral, and when he hears singer-songwriter Winslow Leach (William Finley) performing the songs from his rock-cantata version of Faust, he wants the music…but he doesn’t want the gangly, eccentric Winslow, and has his henchman Philbin (George Memmoli) trick Winslow into handing over his music, then refusing even to see him, let alone pay him for it. Winslow makes several attempts to contact Swan, but is only beaten, framed for drug possession, and sent to prison for his trouble.

In the process, Winslow meets Phoenix (Jessica Harper), an aspiring singer who’s auditioning for Swan’s production of the cantata, intended as the opening show at the Paradise, his grandiose new venue. Winslow escapes from prison and attempts to sabotage Swan’s operations, but ends up horribly scarred and presumed dead. He resurfaces as the masked phantom of the Paradise and confronts Swan, who tricks him yet again, locking him into an oppressive contract under the pretense that Phoenix will sing the cantata.

But Swan sidelines Phoenix and gives the starring role to his newest discovery, Beef (Gerrit Graham), and when Winslow finds out, he’s determined to get his revenge. But he’ll learn just how hard it is to defeat Swan, and what price he’ll have to pay for it.

Everything about Phantom screams “cult movie”; it’s far too giddy in its weirdness, too comfortable in its camp, and too cavalier about story and character to have ever been a mainstream success. Maybe it says enough that it was a smash hit only in Winnipeg, because why not Winnipeg? (Maybe the teenage Guy Maddin was a fan.) It’s a bit shocking that it managed to get an Oscar nomination for Original Song Score/Adaptation, but the paucity of original musicals probably helped; it’s less shocking that Williams’ original songs lost to Nelson Riddle’s arrangements of 20s standards for the mediocre The Great Gatsby.

And like a lot of cult movies, one could argue the appeal of Phantom is less about quality than about that brazen embrace of its own nature. Which is not to say it’s a bad film, exactly, just…kind of a mess, if we’re being honest. The script earned a WGA nomination; I have to assume there was very little competition. (Blazing Saddles won.) There are funny lines, to be sure, but it’s De Palma’s direction and the performances which really make them work. And Williams’ songs are better than the script; my own favorite is probably “The Hell of It,” which plays over the end credits, but “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye” is a great parody of teenage tragedy songs and the two-punch of “Somebody Super Like You” and “Life at Last” is enough of a banger to make you wonder if Winslow isn’t being too hard on Beef.

As for the performances, Finley makes for an amusing pathetic schmuck and cuts a good figure in his Phantom costume, while Harper is a suitable ingenue with a good voice (it’s not one of her best performances, but it’s not one of her best characters). But Williams outshines them both; it’s odd to think of the elfin Williams as a villain, but he uses his very mildness as an effective cloak for Swan’s machinations, and I really love the odd faux-English accent he adopts from time to time. Graham is also quite amusing as Beef, even if his particular brand of camp is inescapably dated. (The film is awkwardly dated in several respects, to be sure; there’s an especially cringe-inducing extended bit about Swan’s “casting couch.”)

Above all, there’s De Palma’s sheer enthusiasm, reflected in Jack Fisk’s imaginative sets (like Swan’s absurd desk, shaped like a gold record), Larry Pizer’s clever cinematography, and the madly linear storyline, which plunges into the supernatural so readily that it makes as much sense as anything else – which is to say, not much. I don’t think it’s a great film, or even objectively a very good one, but I fully understand its cult status, and it’s certainly worth seeing to relish the vision that drew the cult in the first place.

Score: 74

Spencer (2021) – ****

CW: Eating disorders, self-harm.

I was 7 when Diana died. I remember hearing about it, of course, and about the outpouring of grief which followed, leading to her secular beatification; I remember seeing her statue at Madame Tussaud’s, set in the middle of a huge circular platform – or so I remember. And, of course, I remember the critically acclaimed film The Queen, about how Elizabeth II responded to her death, and the critically savaged Diana, which did a lot less for Naomi Watts’ career than The Queen did for Helen Mirren’s. Now comes Spencer, and we’ll just have to see what it does for Kristen Stewart’s career – though if there’s any justice, it’ll push her to ever greater heights.

Set at the royal residence Sandringham House, at Christmastime 1991, Spencer covers a few days in Diana’s life as she struggles with the suffocating pressures of royal protocol and public attention over her souring marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing). Flickers of rebellion and flashes of self-destruction, including spells of bulimia and acts of cutting, only heighten the tension in the atmosphere, and as the quietly overbearing equerry Maj. Alistair Gregory (Timothy Spall) attempts to keep an eye on Diana, she becomes ever more determined to break free of a life and lifestyle she can no longer put up with.

While I think Steven Knight’s script is the weakest element of the film (it’s good, but it’s not as good as the direction or the acting), it does convey, very effectively, the weight of history and tradition. Early on, this is illustrated, in a bit of dry humor, by the apparently genuine tradition of the royal family being weighed before and after Christmas dinner on an old-fashioned scale. Later, Diana will read a biography of Anne Boleyn and have visions of her (played by Amy Manson), identifying with the executed queen who was killed so Henry VIII could remarry. She’ll also have several conversations about what’s expected of royalty – about how much the human being must make room for the royal symbol.

Diana just isn’t willing to do that anymore, isn’t willing to wear her various outfits in their designated order, sit patiently through stifling dinners she can hardly keep down, or watch her sons William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry) forced into activities they don’t enjoy, like pheasant hunting. She empathizes with the pheasants, whom we’re told exist mainly to be hunted. She wants to recapture the happiness of her childhood (her childhood home, next door to Sandringham, has been condemned), and she wants to give her sons what little sense of a normal childhood she possibly can – one of the film’s tenderest scenes has them playing a light-hearted question-and-answer game after everyone else has gone to bed.

All of this comes through at every moment of Stewart’s performance; you never feel like you’re watching her, only seeing Diana, or at least her portrait of Diana. A brilliantly controlled accent and first-rate work from the hair and makeup artists help, but it’s her internalization of Diana’s struggles, the bursts of emotion amidst the performative reserve, that make her work so impressive. She isn’t working in a vacuum; Spall is quite effective as the enigmatic equerry, a figure of gentle tyranny who might just have a heart underneath his formal scowl, Sally Hawkins adds a bit of warmth and life as Diana’s favorite dresser, and all the other performers fill their limited roles skillfully. But this is ultimately Stewart’s show, and she delivers.

Director Pablo Larraín and cinematographer Claire Mathon craft a rather beautiful film; the soft, dreamy lighting makes those moments where reality warps flow all the better. The rituals of royal life are smoothly choreographed, especially the operations of the kitchen under the watchful eye of head chef Darren McGrady (Sean Harris), himself a confidant of Diana’s. But Larraín is especially good at creating an atmosphere of paranoia, a world where everyone knows everything, where the prying eyes of paparazzi are cited as a constant threat, but where the real danger might just be the people around you, whether they’re trying to keep you in line or turning your secrets into gossip.

Steven Knight’s script is solid, but vaguely underwhelming; it feels like it wants to say a bit more about Diana and the royal family than it ends up saying, and the final scenes seem to be reaching for an optimistic tone which rings hollow in light of the tragedy which would follow. It also underlines the film’s equivocal approach to the rest of the royal family, which suggests Knight was being careful not to step too hard on anyone’s toes. The film isn’t pretending to be historically precise—it bills itself as a fable at the very start—and one can excuse some of the obvious inventions on those grounds, but they don’t all come off dramatically; in particular, the Anne Boleyn subplot feels gimmicky. And a late revelation from Hawkins’ character feels like they just wanted to give her more to do (which I can’t complain too much about, as she does it well).

In any case, the film compensates with fantastic production design (it was filmed at various estates in Germany), Jacqueline Durran’s lavish costumes, Sebastián Sepúlveda’s graceful editing, and Jonny Greenwood’s expectedly beautiful score. As a whole, it’s not quite as good as Larraín’s brilliant Jackie, largely because that film had a stronger script with a sharper narrative, but it’s a fine addition to Larraín’s series of unconventional biopics, which also includes his fascinating Neruda. I can only imagine who he’ll profile next.

Score: 87