The Weekly Gravy #74

Belle (2021) – ***½

(The original Japanese title, 竜とそばかすの姫/Ryū to Sobakasu no Hime, translates to “The Dragon and the Freckled Princess.”)

You may hear Belle described as an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast and assume that the title – the name of the main character’s virtual-reality avatar – is a reference to it. But the truth is a bit more complex on both counts. Regarding the latter, the character’s real name is Suzu, Japanese for “bell,” and this is the name she initially gives her avatar when she installs U, a social media app which plunges the user, with the help of biometrics, into a world where they appear as their inner self – in the case of the shy Suzu, a glamorous singer who’s introduced belting a tune atop a speaker-bedecked humpback whale. It’s only after she becomes hugely popular with other users that she’s redubbed Belle, which is of course the French for “beautiful.”

And as for the story, the Beauty and the Beast aspects are somewhat grafted onto a story about Suzu trying to manage her sudden fame – or at least her avatar’s fame – a struggle exacerbated by the crippling shyness and depression she’s dealt with since her mother died trying to save another child. She’s jealous of Ruka, the most popular girl in class, moons over Shinobu, whom she’s been in love with for years, and only has one close friend, Hiroka, who cheerfully – even gleefully – helps Belle’s star rise.

The Beast, or should I say the Dragon, enters the picture when he inadvertently crashes Belle’s first big concert, being pursued by a group of self-appointed (and corporately sponsored) “defenders” of U, trying to keep alleged troublemakers in line. Their leader, Justin, has a green light which can reveal the real-life identity of anyone in U, and tries to unveil the Dragon’s true identity. He fails, but Belle becomes fascinated with the Dragon, and tries to discover his secret on her own.

Much of the film is taken up with the efforts of Suzu, Hiroka, and the users of U to figure out who the Dragon is (including several false leads) and Suzu’s continuing anxieties over the contrast between her online popularity and her offline unhappiness. Suzu does find the Dragon’s hideout, a castle straight from the original fairytale (apparently hidden behind several layers of encryption), and they do form a bond, but the story otherwise bears only a limited resemblance to the original.

We do eventually learn who the Dragon actually is, why his avatar takes such a form, and why that avatar has so many bruises, but these revelations and the resolution of his story are mostly crammed into the film’s last 20 minutes or so, and fail to pay off satisfactorily or, for my money, very realistically, even allowing for the parameters of the material. The film makes an earnest effort to touch on some very serious subjects, but to me slips into fantasy in a way which fails to do them justice.

But even before then, the film struggles to do justice to all of the story’s moving parts. While Suzu’s own story is fairly well fleshed out, the people around her tend to be somewhat underdeveloped, especially her father, Shinobu, and Kamishin, an eccentric classmate with a passion for canoeing. Frankly, had the film just stuck to how Suzu tried to reconcile her confidence and popularity in U with her anxiety and shyness in real life, it would’ve probably worked better. (It also would’ve helped if U didn’t operate by such fluid rules.)

Certainly what the film does well it does very well. The animation, under the guidance of director Mamoru Hosoda, is frequently striking, with the disorienting digital vistas of U and its fantastical denizens contrasting with the low-key depiction of the real world. It has some unusually good editing, especially when it comes to blending past and present, and some fantastic music, including songs co-written by Kaho Nakamura, who voices Suzu and Belle in the original Japanese version (the one I saw). The voice acting is solid all around; Takeru Satoh is also quite strong as the Dragon and his true self.

At two hours, Belle feels at once a bit too long and a bit too short; it’s hard to tell if the story is overstuffed, or imperfectly condensed from a longer original. It wasn’t originally a series, but with all it tries to do, it might have been better as one. But all these issues aside, it’s an engaging and attractive film, well worth a look for anime fans, and a decent choice for more casual viewers – it’s certainly better than Ready Player One.

Score: 79

The Night House (2020) – ***

CW: suicide mention.

At times, The Night House feels as if it were being written during production, with each revelation and each turn of the story being a surprise to the cast and crew, who were obliged to make do with what the writers handed them. This probably wasn’t the case, but for the better part of the film very little actually happens, and then a lot happens, but most of it comes and goes so quickly that we and the film can barely process it. At the end, we’re left with a lot of questions, not least of which is how much of what we’ve seen is real.

That the film does work, albeit only at the mid-*** level, is mainly due to the craft on display, which is of a high standard, and to Rebecca Hall’s performance, which is also of a high standard – not quite on the level of her brilliant work in Christine, or her moving work behind the camera on Passing, but effective enough to lend legitimacy to a somewhat vaporous story.

Beth Parchin (Hall) is a teacher trying to come to terms with the suicide of her husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), who left a note saying “You were right. There is nothing. Nothing is after you. You’re safe now.” Despite the entreaties of her colleagues and neighbor Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall), she spends a great deal of time alone in the lakeside house Owen built – the kind of house with so many huge windows that you can’t help feeling exposed and vulnerable. Beth begins to have what seem to be incredibly vivid dreams of Owen reaching out to her from beyond the grave, but these may simply be the result of her heavy drinking.

However, she begins to find evidence that Owen was hiding a great deal from her – photographs of women who resemble her, plans for a house whose structure mirrors their own, books on the occult, and finally a half-finished mirror-house hidden in the woods on the other side of the lake. Eventually, we more or less figure out what’s going on, but it’s the sense of dread, the atmosphere of mystery and doubt, that really commands our attention. Many horror films falter when they try to quantify their mysterious elements, and this is no exception.

I won’t dig too much into what happens, because if you’re at all inclined to see the film, you might as well not have it spoiled for you, and because the film’s missteps towards the end would frankly be tedious to spell out. It falls into the trap of explaining enough to muddy the waters, but not enough to clear them again – but also not enough to really bore us, so we can at least be grateful for that. But even before then, it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re seeing a deliberate attempt to spin a feature film out of as little story as possible, relying on the actors and filmmakers to fill in the gaps.

Hall’s performance has been widely acclaimed, and although it’s not seamless – some of her incredulous laughter and shocked gasping feels like, well, acting – she effectively embodies Beth’s pain, the anger and desolation, the mounting frustration as she learns more about Owen’s secret life, finding more questions with every answer. And she’s surrounded by a solid supporting cast, including Sarah Goldberg as her closest friend, Curtis-Hall as the sympathetic neighbor, and the great Stacy Martin as one of the mystery women Owen photographed. She doesn’t get enough to do, but short of doubling her screen time, that’s inevitable.

And the film is certainly well crafted on a technical level; director David Bruckner brings the loneliness and mystery of night to reasonable life, helped by some very good sound design, Elisha Christian’s moody cinematography, and Ben Lovett’s eerie score. There are a handful of really first-rate moments of atmosphere, but ultimately, they serve to remind us of how little substance there actually is behind them. That’s almost fitting, and I wouldn’t necessarily call the film a bait-and-switch – but I’m also not sure it knew entirely what it wanted to be.

Score: 70

The Souvenir: Part II (2021) – ****

At the end of my laudatory review of The Souvenir, I noted “a sequel, provisionally entitled The Souvenir Part II, is in production. I look forward to it.” Well, two and a half years and a few hiccups (namely Robert Pattinson having to leave the film because of scheduling conflicts with The Batman) later, it’s here, and I’m glad to say it’s just about as good as its predecessor. Maybe the story doesn’t carry the same sheer empathetic weight – the pains of a toxic relationship are a bit more universal and visceral than the struggles of student filmmakers – but it more than compensates through the beauty of its imagery, the sophistication of its meta-narrative elements, and the strength of its performances.

In the first film, Julie Hart (Honor Swinton Byrne), a film student from an upper-class background, formed a relationship with Anthony (Tom Burke), a mysterious young man who claimed to work for the British Foreign Office and manipulated her throughout their relationship – mainly, we learn, to pay for his heroin addiction. At the end of the first film, he dies of an overdose, and the whole experience serves to open Julie’s eyes to the complexity of the world and to her own naivete.

Here, she struggles to come to terms with Anthony’s death, reaching out to his parents and going to therapy, but closure eludes her. She decides to try and work out her feelings through her thesis project, changing the premise from a film about working-class characters in Sunderland (practically the opposite of her own experience) to a dramatization of her relationship with Anthony. She faces pushback from her professors, and later from her collaborators, who are frustrated by the fluidity of her approach, but she finishes the film, graduates, moves into directing music videos, and the film ends with her birthday party…and a last meta-narrative touch which works beautifully.

You see, these two films are heavily based on writer-director Joanna Hogg’s own life, with Julie’s apartment being a careful recreation of where Hogg lived at the time. When, in this film, Julie decides to make a film based on her own life, having a replica of her apartment constructed on the film school’s soundstage, it’s so blatantly referential it should fall utterly flat. But it works, because Hogg portrays Julie and the world of student filmmaking so lovingly, and because she acknowledges that Julie has not necessarily found answers to all of her questions regarding Anthony, simply that she turned her experiences and emotions into a work of art. She has something to show for it.

There are scenes in the film which reflect the sheer joyful possibilities of filmmaking. Julie’s classmate Patrick (Richard Ayoade) is working on a musical, a Jacques Demy-ish project which he posits as a valuable contrast to the grim social realism most of his classmates prefer to focus on, and it looks like splashy, stylish fun. Ironically, he struggles with his own temper and is finally removed from the editing of his own film, sardonically noting that he always wanted to be like Orson Welles (whom, coincidentally, Burke played in Mank). Such are the limits to those possibilities.

Late in the film, there’s a stylized, heavily symbolic sequence which might reflect Julie’s film, Hogg’s own projects, or just the aforementioned possibilities of cinema, as we get images evoking film noir, Gothic horror, and something like a minor-key version of the carnival at the end of 8½. I’m not sure if it symbolizes Julie letting go of Anthony, or if Hogg is just reveling in beautifully arranged images with striking production design (Stéphane Collonge’s sets are first-rate throughout), but either way, it’s wondrous to behold on the screen.

Like the first film, Part II looks wonderful, with David Raedeker’s glowing cinematography adding to the memory-play atmosphere, and it’s neatly assembled by editor Helle le Fevre, but they’re working in the service of Hogg’s exquisite vision, both her script, which captures the dynamics of Julie’s classmates and her sweetly doting parents (Tilda Swinton and James Spencer Ashworth) equally well, while naturally depicting Julie’s emotional journey, and her direction, which finely balances naturalism and stylization. (Some realities are inherently stylized.)

It’s also superbly acted, with Byrne deftly navigating Julie’s lingering grief and her struggles to move forward and find her artistic footing, avoiding showy emotions or blank-faced “realism.” Note how she reacts when she invites a classmate home for a drink – with subtle but obvious romantic import – and he reveals that he’s promised to make dinner for his boyfriend. Her reaction is extremely subtle, but her disappointment and even embarrassment are palpable. It’s a lovely turn, building upon her fine work in the first film.

She’s got excellent support from her mother and Ashworth, who’s lovably absent-minded, as well as Ayoade (who, being a director in his own right, can surely relate to Patrick’s frustrations), Ariane Labed as the classmate who plays Julie (or her surrogate) in the film-within-a-film, and in smaller roles, Harris Dickinson and Charlie Heaton (whose roles were originally to have been one role played by Pattinson – a shame, as he would’ve been quite good), and Joe Alwyn, who got the “is that…?” reaction out of me.

Like the first film, it can be restrained to point of frustration, especially early on, and the final scenes are, arguably, a shade anti-climactic. But Hogg’s love for her protagonist and passion for her setting come through so powerfully, and her skill behind the camera transmutes them so effectively into art, that I really don’t mind. It’s another excellent film in a year that’s already full of them.

Score: 89

Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021) – ***

I rate Those Who Wish Me Dead about the same as The Night House, and perhaps both films suffer from a failure to commit fully to their true natures. Where The Night House feels like a piece of psychological art-horror which decays into a half-baked possession thriller (of sorts), Those Who Wish Me Dead feels like a pulpy B-film which is played just a touch too slowly and seriously to achieve its full potential. That’s not to say it’s bad – it’s an okay popcorn film with a few touches of character that make you wish there were more of them. It was based on a novel, which might explain those touches – and some of the crisper bits of dialogue – and reading it would probably be more rewarding than seeing the film.

In rural Montana, veteran smokejumper (a parachuting firefighter who specializes in forest fires) Hannah Faber (Angelina Jolie) is posted to a remote fire tower, where she’s left alone with the painful memories of a recent fire which claimed a colleague and several teenage boys, none of whom she could save. Meanwhile, in Florida, when forensic accountant Owen Casserly (Jake Weber) learns about the murder of the district attorney he worked for, he knows he and his young son Connor (Finn Little) are in grave danger. They hit the road for Montana, hoping to find a safe haven with his brother-in-law Ethan Sawyer (Jon Bernthal), a sheriff’s deputy, survivalist…and Hannah’s ex-boyfriend.

Hot on their trail are Jack (Aiden Gillen) and Patrick (Nicholas Hoult), a pair of assassins in the employ of some unidentified but presumably unfriendly men. They kill Owen, but he has already given vital information to Connor and directs him to safety before he dies. Arthur (Tyler Perry), Jack and Patrick’s superior, orders them to track Connor down, and they decide to make for Ethan’s home, where his pregnant wife Allison (Medina Senghore) is. Before they do, Jack uses flares to start a forest fire, meant to create a distraction from the corpses they intend to leave in their wake (and possibly dispose of them).

Connor runs into Hannah, who’s unable to radio for help owing to a lightning strike. They must hike to safety, but the growing fire, a brewing storm, and the relentless Jack and Patrick combine to ensure a long and grueling journey.

With all these moving parts, and all the well-worn tropes on hand, Those Who Wish Me Dead could’ve used a bit more of the wit we get from the scenes between Jack and Patrick, who are quite brutal and not sugarcoated with quips, but have the natural, relaxed back-and-forth of two guys who’ve been doing this for a while and know all the tricks of the trade. Hoult is solid – his large eyes add to the creepy intensity of the character – but Gillen’s dryly rancid attitude is a particular highlight.

Jolie, on the other hand, can only bring some weary charisma to the role of Hannah, who’s both haunted and devil-may-care (as smokejumpers apparently tend to be); a key early scene has her putting down a few beers, riding in the back of a truck, and opening her parachute so she goes flying in the middle of the road. Ethan doesn’t see the humor in it. (Bernthal is okay, but compared to his genuinely spirited work in King Richard, it’s a forgettable turn). She does have a decent rapport with Little, but nothing truly memorable.

Not that it needed to be memorable, but knowing that Taylor Sheridan wrote and directed the very solid Wind River and wrote the excellent Hell or High Water (and the flawed but well-regarded Sicario), one might expect a little more from this material. Maybe it’s limited by the fact that Sheridan had two co-writers, or was working from existing material, but it works better as a thriller – and an ensemble piece – than as a quasi-star vehicle and/or tribute to smokejumpers. And it doesn’t even work as well as a thriller as it might, perhaps because there’s just too much going on,

It’s well enough made, with good sound, an effective score by Brian Tyler, and a sprinkling of moments (Perry’s one scene, for example) which suggest something a bit sharper and smarter than what we ultimately get. Maybe it’s the sentimental edge, especially around the character of Hannah and the bond she develops with Connor. Sheridan just doesn’t have the right touch for sentiment. Can you imagine sentiment in Sicario? No. But could you imagine a pregnant woman, on a horse, with a rifle in Sicario either? No, and that’s where this film has the advantage.

Score: 70

Snatch (2000) – ****

A bit strange that I’ve gone so long without rewatching what’s supposed to be my favorite film – I forget how long, but it’s probably been close to a decade – but I’d seen it so many times that there was little left to discover. After all, I could probably quote the better of the script off the top of my head, inflections and all. If anything, what I noticed this time around was the use of music; after listening to my CD of the soundtrack umpteen times, I paid a little more attention to just how the music was manipulated to fit the scenes. Always brilliantly, of course, but some play out at length and others only appear for a few seconds.

Then again, part of what I’ve always liked about this film is just how many moving parts it has, and how well they all fit together. Sure, I can see a few of the rougher edges, a few points where characters make dubious choices for the sake of the story (Brick Top in particular has pretty iffy judgment for a veteran gangster), but you’ve got a boxing promoter and his partner, a jewel thief, an Uzbek arms dealer, the aforementioned gangster, two jewel merchants (one British, one American), a pawnbroker and his partner, their associate, an underworld fixer, a ravenous dog, and Mickey – and that’s just the major characters – and all of them get a chance to shine.

They all have their parts to play in this story, and it’s a testament to how well Ritchie’s script and Jon Harris’ editing work together than we can keep them all straight. There are several sequences which play two levels of action or more against one another – perhaps the best is the juxtaposition of a hare being coursed with Tyrone (Ade) being captured and interrogated, rabbit and man alike facing off against vicious do. Or maybe it’s the sequence, set to “Hava Negila,” where three separate groups of characters intersect, their petty bickering leading them into calamities they never anticipated. Or maybe it’s the whole sequence where a pathetically botched robbery and an unlicensed boxing match which lasts all of one punch are set side by side, with none of the involved parties fully aware of just how bad things are going – or going to get.

But Ritchie’s virtuosity would ring hollow if his script wasn’t so well played at every level. Brad Pitt’s hilarious take on the Irish Traveller bare-knuckle boxing champion Mickey – a man who, whether on purpose or not, can barely be understood – gets the most attention, but my favorite has always been Alan Ford as the ruthless Brick Top, whose regard for pigs would make Arthur Hoggett faint. That said, how can you not love Dennis Farina as the high-strung Avi, or Vinnie Jones as the coolly vicious Tony? How can you not appreciate what Jason Statham is able to do with the role of Turkish – to play a character who isn’t an unstoppable badass but has to rely on his wits to stay alive – and even then, he needs quite a few lucky breaks?

Or what about the double-act of Lennie James as Sol and Robbie Gee as Vinny, trying to play a bigger than ever before, making a total hash of it at every turn? And Ade as Tyrone, haughtily confident but easily distracted? And what about Rade Šerbedžija as Boris the Blade/Bullet-Dodger, perfectly described by Turkish as “bent as the Soviet sickle and as hard as the hammer that crosses it”? Or Benicio Del Toro as Franky Four-Fingers, who brings the most wonderful inflection to his lines – an accent which seems to originate from nowhere so much as a bottle of fresh cream?

And I’m just listing the major characters. There’s also Sorcha Cusack as Mickey’s doting mother, Ewen Bremner as the hapless Mullet, and Sidney Sedin – who seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth – as Pauline, the clerk at the bookies’ who doesn’t flinch, even with a shotgun in her face, and seems more inclined to pity the idiots trying to hold up the place than anything. They all do sterling work, all making the most of Ritchie’s great lines.

If you’ve seen the film, you know the great speeches: Brick Top’s pig speech, Tony’s “dicks and balls” speech, Turkish’s voiceovers, Franky’s rambling speech about Biblical literacy, or Avi chewing out Doug the Head (Mike Reid) for making him come to England. But there’s so much more, much of it dependent on the context and delivery for full effect: “Five minutes, Turkish”; “Will he be all right?” “I hope not”; “Now…fuck off”; “And it’s worth…fuck-all”; “Before zee Germans get ‘ere”; “Need to have a shite!”; “I couldn’t get the binoc-u-lars out in time”; “Save yer breath for coolin’ yer porridge”; “In one sitting”; and, of course, “You should never underestimate the predictability of stupidity.”

Sure, there are nits I could pick about the film, and reasons why it’s no longer quite at the top of my list. It doesn’t have any real emotional depth to it – Turkish and poor stupid Tommy (Stephen Graham) are about as close as we’ve got to heroes, and Mickey does love his mother, but if you’re rooting for them, it’s mainly because the villains are so much worse. And it probably could’ve used at least one well-developed female character (not that Ritchie’s track record in that department is so great). It’s not, if I’m being totally objective, an all-time great film.

But no review is completely objective, least of all this one. And while I might have moved it a few spots down my top 100 list, it’s still very high on the list, still a film I can cherish for all the things it does superlatively well. I may not be terrible partial to the periwinkle blue, but I’m terrible partial to this movie.

Score: 96