The Weekly Gravy #106

We’ll start this particular week with an amuse-bouche of shorts:

• Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) – When I first saw Maya Deren’s most famous film a decade ago, I appreciated its striking visuals and symbolic psychodrama, but I only rated it a high ***½; perhaps I struggled with the shocking ending, even though I can’t imagine the film ending any other way. Now I can fully appreciate it as a great film, perhaps a meditation on psychosis, perhaps a reflection of how gender roles stifle women, perhaps a commentary on the vicissitudes of marriage (the film was a collaboration with her then-husband Alexander Hammid, emphasis on “then”). The variety of possible readings is multiplied by the various soundtracks available; I first saw it with Teiji Ito’s score (added during Deren’s lifetime), but today I watched it with a score by Feona Lee Jones, a harrowing string-heavy score which helps to frame the film as a psychological thriller. But whatever you hear, the evocative visuals (the mirror-faced figure, the key-knife juxtaposition, Deren’s own enigmatic presence) remain the same. Score: 88 – ****
• Night and Fog/Nuit et brouillard (1956) – It’s also been about a decade since I saw Alain Resnais’ documentary, in a class on theater and the Holocaust (we also saw Mephisto and Conspiracy); it impressed me considerably then and still does. In just half an hour it manages to convey so much about the Holocaust, mixing horrifying archival footage and imagery with eerily tranquil new shots of the camps as they appeared a decade later. The text by Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the camps, is bitterly knowing, briskly eloquent, and fully aware that no film can truly capture the atmosphere of the camps, only that we must remember what happened and what human beings did to one another, because it can happen again. Hanns Eisler’s score, often painfully ironic, is a perfect fit. Score: 92 – ****
• The Fly/A légy (1980) – This Hungarian short by Ferenc Rófusz (who later made the underwhelming Deadlock) is certainly an impressive feat, depicting the perspective of a fly as it buzzes through a forest, into a house, and into the clutches of, it appears, an entomologist. (It’s a bit confusing; at first the unseen human seems to be swatting at the fly, but later captures it intact, for mounting on a board.) Using what seems to be mostly charcoals and some accomplished sound effects, it evokes the frenetic flight of the fly and its distorted vision of the world (though not with the compound vision flies actually have), and you can feel its desperation as it tries to flee. At only 3 minutes, it doesn’t quite become more than a neat trick, but it is neat. I’m not sure it deserved the Oscar, but I get why it won. Score: 76 – ***
• The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) – I hadn’t been especially impressed by John Smith’s Associations; I won’t say his next short is an unqualified success, but I found it more intriguing. Most of the film is a long take of activities on a street corner in London, with the voice of a director seemingly directing everything, down to the flights of pigeons, in granular detail. He eventually reveals he’s in a field miles away from the action he’s supposedly directing, and we end with a pan around the field, accompanied by the sounds of the street corner. He briefly speculates on the interior lives of the passerby; it’s amusing enough that I wish there was more of it. I’m not sure quite what it’s saying, but the B&W imagery is crisp and it was quite watchable. Score: 67 – ***

Pearl (2022) – ***½

Although not quite as layered as X, having been put together hastily after that film wrapped production, I think I slightly prefer Pearl, maybe because it’s even more inclined to defer the shedding of blood in favor of giving us a character drama garnished with homages to Old Hollywood, one which may or may not explain the events in X that much better, but which gives Mia Goth perhaps her finest showcase to date.

Set in 1918, Pearl (Goth) is living on the family farm in rural Texas with her German-immigrant mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) and paralyzed father (Matthew Sunderland). Her husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell) is in Europe, serving in World War I, and Pearl is unhappy at being stuck on the farm with her stern, disapproving mother and helpless father. She loves movies, dreams of showbiz stardom, and longs to be a dancer. She also isn’t above killing animals with a pitchfork and feeding them to the alligator that lives in a nearby pond.

A budding connection with the local projectionist (David Corenswet), along with a chance at joining a holiday dance troupe, bolster Pearl’s hopes of escaping her dreary existence, but when matters go awry – at least in Pearl’s eyes – she might just start adding human beings to the alligator’s diet. But the kills, when they come, are very much a part of Pearl’s arc, and are played less for sick thrills than for showing how her grip on reality – and morality – is slipping.

The scenes you’re likely to remember aren’t violent or bloody, but charged with emotion, like Pearl’s confessional monologue (done mostly in a single take), or Pearl’s dance audition, which develops into an elaborate vaudevillian fantasy before returning to dreary reality, or her confrontations with her cold, intensely Lutheran mother (who understands more than we might guess), or her relationship with her father, who hears and understands but can do no more than widen his eyes desperately – and he has reason to.

Pearl is filled with allusions subtle and overt alike. There’s a scene with a scarecrow which clearly evokes The Wizard of Oz (until it goes very much in its own direction). When Pearl traipses around the barn, regaling the animals with her dreams of glory, you half expect her to break into “If I Were a Rich Man.” Likewise, although I haven’t actually seen all of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Pearl’s showbiz ambitions and the growing desperation behind them bring that film to mind, especially in the scenes where she widens her eyes and smiles her biggest smile – wanting so badly to charm but only managing to unnerve.

The film also has ample nods to X, most notably the scene in which the projectionist shows Pearl A Free Ride, one of the earliest surviving pieces of hardcore pornography, and discusses his own pornographic intentions. Since a good 60 years remain between the end of this film and the beginning of X, we’re left with not a few questions as the credits roll – and for my part, I’d like to see at least a little of how Pearl and Howard sorted out a life together after what happens in this film. But then, I’d be happy if West and Goth pulled an August Wilson and did one of these films for every decade of the 20th century, tracing the evolution of porn alongside the arc of Pearl’s and Maxine’s lives.

Of course, after the credits there’s a quick promo for MaXXXine, probably coming next year, which is set in 1985 and follows on from the events of X. I’ll be glad to see it. (For this and other reasons, I really recommend sitting through the credits.)

While West wrote X on his own, he co-wrote Pearl with Goth, the result being a film which really foregrounds her performance, which was excellent in the previous film but which had to share the screen with a larger ensemble cast and a greater emphasis on traditional horror beats. Here, the smaller cast is partly justified by the social isolation mandated during the influenza epidemic, with clear nods to the COVID era (including the wearing of masks), but it also helps to underline the smallness of the world Pearl longs to escape.

To be sure, it’s a colorful world, with Eliot Rockett’s vivid cinematography, Tom Hammock’s production design (that wallpaper!), and Malgosia Turzanska’s costumes (especially Pearl’s blood-red dress) combining to give us a wonderfully vivid and varied palette, reminiscent of Douglas Sirk’s brilliant melodramas (there’s a trace of Written on the Wind‘s Marylee Hadley in Pearl), while the lovely score by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams is lushly nostalgic, going suitably overripe when matters curdle into out-and-out horror.

And while West’s direction and the script are solidly above average, it’s the performances which seal the deal. Obviously, it’s Goth’s show, and she relishes the heightened moments of giddy joy and harrowing anguish, but the centerpiece of the performance is that confessional speech, in which Pearl lays out her resentments of everyone around her and her awareness of her own amorality. It’s an obvious showcase for what Goth can do in a minor key, but she absolutely justifies it.

Wright holds her own as Ruth, who has her own resentments but, as she admonishes Pearl, is trying to make the best of what she has. She’s an effectively forbidding foil throughout most of the film, and when she gets to play additional notes, she does so with sincere anguish. Corenswet is suitably charming as the projectionist who seems to understand Pearl better than her family (seems being the key word), Sunderland provides an effective facial performance, and Emma Jenkins-Purro provides an amusingly wholesome counterpoint to Pearl as her sister-in-law Mitzi.

All in all, Pearl is a very fine juicy melodrama, just gory enough to satisfy horror fans, but grounds its horrors enough in its central character and boasts enough visual style to appeal to a wider audience. Recommended.

Score: 84

Moonage Daydream (2022) – ***½

On an objective level, Moonage Daydream is an impressive achievement. Brett Morgen and his team took a huge amount of archival material spanning the better part of David Bowie’s life, from photographs to concert footage, from music videos (and outtakes from those) to clips of his film work (and clips of other films), from what might’ve been home videos, or maybe documentaries, to television and radio interviews, and woven these images and sound together, along with some additional animation and, I suspect, some enhancements of the vivid colors already on display, into a formidable whole that tries to capture the essence of Bowie as an artist and a human being without adhering to any of the standard documentary tropes; no talking heads (or Talking Heads, for that matter), no informative text, no new narration, and, despite the broadly chronological arrangement of the material, no clearly defined structure.

It’s obviously stunning to look at, given Bowie’s own command of the visual aspects of his persona, and even the old concert footage, with its iffy lighting and heavy grain, has a dreamlike beauty. It flows together in what seems to be the way Morgen intended, moving from one source to another as freely as Bowie moved between personas, artforms, cities, and styles. And it sounds incredible, especially in a theater, especially in an IMAX theater, which is how I saw it. It can be raw and overwhelming, but Bowie himself notes that his difficulties understanding the singing of his early idols (he namechecks Fats Domino) only deepened his fascination. In any case, it adds to the authenticity of the experience.

And, while the enterprise was obviously curated with the assistance of the Bowie estate, and as such presents the man in a pretty positive light (we don’t hear, for example, the infamous comments he made in his Thin White Duke phase), we do get the sense that Bowie, while a brilliant and conscious showman, was a fairly genuine artist and human being, one with many interests and the ability to pursue them effectively. (We get tantalizing glimpses, for example, of his stage performance in the play The Elephant Man.)

For the Bowie devotee, Moonage Daydream is an obvious must. I can only imagine which moments will spark profound associations, stir deep emotions, or set their hearts pounding. But as I’m not a devotee (although I’ve been amply impressed by his work, both as a musician and an actor), I have to confess that, after I while, I found Daydream less enthralling than exasperating. Maybe I just had a big lunch and was getting a bit drowsy. But I really do think 135 minutes, given the film’s loose, associative structure, is a bit too much of a good thing.

There are plenty of moments I liked. I really loved the glimpses of Bowie simply being himself – at one point he sees a sign for a wax museum in the middle of, I would guess, the American Southwest, and wonders if it would melt in the desert heat. It’s silly, but in such a human way. And while I’m not entirely sure the clips of various vintage films added much, they were cool to see, especially those from Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (there’s a glimpse of Fyodor Basmanov during the banquet scene which nods to Bowie’s own androgynous aesthetic) and Dreams That Money Can Buy, which I need to properly review one of these days.

But there were times, seeing the clips of the films that Bowie himself made, that I couldn’t help wishing I was watching one of them instead. Moonage Daydream is really pretty good for what it is, and for what it sets out to be. But to see The Man Who Fell to Earth, a truly great film, in IMAX? (Or Metropolis, which is heavily featured?) Now that would be a good use of two and a quarter hours.

Score: 81

I’ll toss in some more shorts before watching a feature or two tonight:

• Themis (1940) – I first saw Dwinell Grant’s abstract short a good 20 years ago as part of the wonderful boxset Treasures of the American Film Archives, at a time when I was especially infatuated with abstract art and early color cinema. It’s still quite a charming little experiment, thanks to Grant’s command of light, color (heavy on the blues, purples, and oranges), and the arrangement of squares, discs, and rods, especially when he makes use of all three dimensions. My only quibble is that he’ll achieve a neat effect, evocative of, say, a violin’s bow or a telegraph key, and move on from it too quickly. Score: 82 – ***½
• Contrathemis (1941) – Well, what else comes after Themis? Here, Grant sticks mainly to two-dimensional forms, and makes greater use of line animation – sometimes to truly lovely effect, with shapes that bring to mind comets, or birds in flight. The often-dim lighting gives it, at times, the feel of Cubist cave paintings. Not quite as colorful or purely original as Themis, but a bit more accomplished. Score: 83 – ***½
• Color Sequence (1943) – More Dwinell Grant. Two minutes of color fields, flickering at an increasing rate. Doesn’t even have a title card, so I’m wondering if it was a finished work, or if only an incomplete print survived. It’s kind of cool, assuming you don’t find the flickering problematic, but compared to what he achieved in Themis and Contrathemis, it feels like a camera test more than a proper film. Score: 64 – **½

And that seems to be all I can find from Grant. I know he made other films, including a commerical for Pepsi (I’d love to see that) and a late film called Dream Fantasies which apparently incorporates live actors and a score by Grant himself, but at present, the only way to see them is to rent them from the Film-Maker’s Coop, which isn’t exactly feasible for me. Hopefully they become more readily available at some point. (Correction: a few libraries have VHS copies of Dream Fantasies. None near me.)

Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) – ***

Since it was already on my mind thanks to Moonage Daydream and since I was on a mid-century Surrealist kick, it seemed the right time to revisit this. Of course, I’d been fascinated by it for years before I ever saw it – a film about the selling of dreams, in color, made in America in the years before a full-fledged independent cinema established itself (at least outside of shorts)? Sign me up. And I had seen it, or at least put it on, a few years ago, but I never finished the review I started. It was time to give it another chance.

We begin with a young man named Joe (Jack Bittner), having secured a lease on a room despite being pretty down on his luck. While taking stock of his situation, he realizes his own gift for looking into people’s hearts and minds and decides he’ll be a kind of therapist, selling people dreams. Most of the film is taken up with these dreams, which feature the work of various Surrealists.

First, for a nebbishy office drone (Samuel Cohen), we get Desire by Max Ernst (with music by Paul Bowles), a kind of Gothic nightmare-romance, with a semi-coherent commentary about nightingales and such. There’s lots of smoke and red velvet, and does seem to tie into the man’s sexual subconscious, but it’s rather hard to parse after a while.

Then, for a young woman (Valerie Tite) who wants to sign Joe up for any number of organizations (mostly absurd, like the “Action Committee for the Abolition of Abolitions”) and seems overwhelmed by the pressures she puts on herself, we get The Girl with the Pre-Fabricated Heart by Fernand Léger, a romance between two mannequins related in song (sung by Libby Holman and Josh White). It’s easily my favorite sequence, thanks to the catchy tune, John Latouche’s satirical lyrics, and its witty take on the synthetic nature of modern life.

Next, for the neurotic wife of the office drone (Ethel Beseda), we have Ruth, Roses and Revolvers by Man Ray, in which a group of smart young people go to an experimental film screening where they’re asked to mimic the actions being performed by the man in the film. The results are amusingly ridiculous, but the sequence kind of peters out, and I’m not at all sure what to make of the final image of marching…soldiers? Revolutionaries? (By the way, one of the audience members is a very young Stanley Kubrick; Ruth Sobotka, who also appears in the film, would later marry him.)

Then, for a hood who’s escaped from police custody (Latouche), we have Discs by Marcel Duchamp, probably the weakest of the sequences. The framing device is enjoyable, especially when a policeman walks in, asks the hood (who’s holding a gun on Joe) if he has a license, and when the hood provides one, the cop smiles and walks away. And the minimalist score by John Cage is interesting. But the discs themselves aren’t that interesting (some look oddly like pitted olives), and the repeated images of a scantily-clad woman and tumbling…something convey little meaning.

Next, a blind old man (Anthony Laterie) and his granddaughter arrive in Joe’s office (the hood shoved him in the closet), and while waiting, the grandfather does wire art and the granddaughter plays with a ball which leads into Ballet by Alexander Calder, which shows off his mobiles but is perhaps more interesting for Paul Bowles’ ethereal score. Then, after the grandfather brings Joe out, he sells Joe a dream: Circus, again by Calder, which depicts a circus made up entirely of mechanized wire figures. There’s a lion tamer, a sword-swallower, a strong man, a trapeze troupe, and more, and they’re all quite delightfully executed.

Finally, Joe finds himself without any clients; a man who looks like him waits in the hallway but doesn’t come in. Looking into a tiddlywink left behind by the granddaughter, Joe is pulled into his own dream, Narcissus by Hans Richter (who was the overall director). It’s hard to describe, but Joe is playing poker with some friends and turns blue. They shun him, and he climbs a strange ladder until he finds himself in a room with the “dream girl” who left his life long ago. He comes to the realization that, whether or not what he’s left behind has changed, he has changed; in other words, you can’t go home again. And then his idols are literally shattered. It’s a bit confusing.

It’s a very uneven film. There are some richly crafted images, with fascinating production design that stretches the tiny budget ($15-25,000) and limited locations as far as possible. The colors have faded somewhat, but when they look good, they look quite lovely indeed. It’s got very good music, with Louis Applebaum’s sprightly main score bookending the film and fine work from the other composers involved. It has some interesting sound design, namely the opening scene with the lease agents’ overlapping chatter.

And again, The Girl with the Pre-Fabricated Heart is a real joy to behold: “And just like the movies, a mail-order male/was sent by the gods, direct from Yale.”

But it’s also loose, ragged, often confusing and lacking that unifying purpose that would really tie the framing device and the various dreams together satisfactorily. I get that, with Surrealism, the pieces shouldn’t all fit neatly together. But there are times when Dreams does feel rather sloppy and vague. And there are times when the low budget works against it – it was all too obviously shot without synchronized sound.

Still, it’s a fascinating attempt at a kind of live-action Surrealist Fantasia, and at just 80 minutes, it’s short enough, and the good parts are good enough (and the bad parts aren’t bad enough) to make it well worth checking out. If only Richter’s later 8 x 8 was available in a comparably clean print.

Score: 75

See How They Run (2022) – ***

It’s obvious why Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is still running in London (Time Out used to list its closing date as “Doomsday”); it’s now The Longest-Running Play in History, an institution to be maintained. But I’ve always wondered how it ever got that far. And I now wonder if The Mousetrap‘s current producers approved of this film, which admits, even if it’s through the voice of an obnoxious character, that the play isn’t really that good – and then confronts the real-life tragedy that inspired the play, suggesting the play itself is an irresponsible work.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The obnoxious character is blacklisted (the year is 1953) American film director Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody), who has moved to London and is working for producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith) on a film adaptation of The Mousetrap. After a party marking the play’s 100th performance, where Kopernick has a fight with star Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson), Kopernick is murdered in the costume shop by a person whose face we do not see.

Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) begin the investigation, and the list of suspects grows quickly as we learn how many people Kopernick managed to upset. Attenborough, he upset by flirting with his wife Sheila Sim (Pearl Chanda). Woolf, he upset by his dissipated lifestyle and his knowledge of Woolf’s affair with his secretary Ann (Pippa Bennett-Warner). But then there’s Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), who was assigned to write the script for the film, who clashed repeatedly with Kopernick and threatened his life. And there’s Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson), the play’s producer, who’s more interested in keeping her play running than in seeing a murder in the theater solved.

Hell, there’s Stoppard himself, though you’ll have to see whether he was getting revenge on Kopernick for his own reasons, or if Stalker is just jumping to conclusions again, as she tends to do, assuming that the last person they interviewed had to have done it. She’s as enthusiastic as all get out, a first-rate textbook officer, but she lacks experience. On this case, she’ll get it.

See How They Run aims for a breezy tone. That much was clear from the trailers, and the tone throughout the film itself is that of a cozy, witty murder mystery. It’s full of in-jokes and references, from Stoppard and Stalker’s names to Stalker’s penchant for quoting films like The African Queen and Brighton Rock, from the gentle deconstructions of the whodunit genre to the jobs at vulgarizing filmmakers like Kopernick. (At times it seems to be taking its cues from Hot Fuzz.)

But in-jokes and references don’t take the place of genuinely strong writing, and Mark Chappell’s script is conspicuously less clever than it wants to be – and without giving who done it away, the final revelations introduce themes rather too heavy for this airy film. It’s hardly unheard of for the culprit to have sympathetic motives, but in this case, the motives are sympathetic enough and the film glosses over them so quickly – utterly wasting Shirley Henderson as Christie herself in the process – that the film’s very lightness works against it.

The cast, at least, holds up their end of the bargain. Rockwell was an odd casting choice; all the other British characters are played by British (or in Ronan’s case, Irish) actors, and his accent isn’t entirely sound, but he gives a game performance as the capable but pitiable Stoppard, who’s lonely, unsociable, and drinks too much, but whose reserve balances Stalker’s eager inexperience. Ronan, for her part, is easily the MVP; she’s charming and spirited, and even her mistakes are endearing because they’re so sincere (and she learns from them).

The rest of the cast are fine, but most of them don’t really get that much to do beyond being a part of the mass of suspects. Brody comes off best; he’s very good at playing a comic jackass who’s self-aware but quite ready to piss off the next person he meets. Oyelowo has fun as the querulous Cocker-Norris, as does Dickinson as the gently pompous Attenborough (whom, I suspect, would’ve chuckled at the portrayal). The rest fill their parts without really standing out.

Tom George’s direction is adequate but undistinguished; there’s some use of split screen that doesn’t quite work, but that might’ve been a conceit of the editors. Given the period setting, it’s no surprise that the sets and costumes are quite good. The writing and acting are the main draws, but aside from Ronan the acting isn’t strong enough to make it a must, and the writing goes awry at the finish in a way that undermines the desired tone. It’s worth a watch if you like the genre, but I’ll just rewatch Murder on the Orient Express next time.

Score: 67

Don’t Worry Darling (2022) – **

I was concerned about Don’t Worry Darling well before it was enveloped in scandal. From the trailer – which I saw many, many times during the summer – I could tell that it had a good cast, a handsomely rendered period setting (with a futuristic twist), and some ambitious visuals…but the trailer also seemed to give away the better part of the story, and the September release date was a red flag; it’s not quite the graveyard of misfires it once was, but for a film of this pedigree not to open later in the year suggested a lack of studio faith.

Then the scandals broke, and suddenly everyone else was interested. Some of it was totally absurd – it didn’t even look like Harry Styles spit on Chris Pine – some of it was funny (Pine’s now-legendary ennui at a press conference), and some of it was genuinely concerning, like the question of why Shia LaBeouf left the project, and whether Olivia Wilde had acted in Florence Pugh’s best interests, or her own. And then there were the reviews, which seemed to validate my assumptions about the film’s shortcomings.

But there was no way I wasn’t going to see it for myself, and while I’ll try to avoid any true spoilers, I have to say that no, the trailer didn’t give everything away after all. But what it doesn’t give away is hardly worth keeping a secret, because the big twist here manages to be preposterous without actually being that interesting. And from that point on, the film falls to pieces; if the final act were simply illogical, it would be laughable, but the story, characters, and themes are so sloppily drawn as to be pathetic.

Not that it’s very good before that point. It’s clear from very early on that something isn’t quite right with the Victory Project – everything is too good to be true, the founder of the project, Frank (Pine) is treated as too much of a messiah to not be a villain, and the intensely secretive nature of the Project – at which the husbands work all day while the wives keep house and live picture-perfect 50s-suburban lives – is clearly concealing something untoward. By the time Alice (Pugh) is cracking open empty eggshells, seeing a plane crash no one else mentions and a death everyone else denies, it’s just the cherry on top.

The problem is that Alice’s arc, from supportive contentment to open defiance of Frank, is poorly drawn and lacks the emotional momentum or mounting suspense to carry us along. It’s almost as if the scenes were out of order. And beyond Alice, Frank, Alice’s husband Jack (Styles), and to a lesser degree Alice’s friend Bunny (director Olivia Wilde), the characters are barely more than ciphers – Nick Kroll, as Bunny’s husband Bill, could’ve been replaced by a mannequin. Which isn’t to say the main characters are so interesting either.

What do we really know about Alice and Jack, other than they’re a pretty young couple who love to screw? Yes, Wilde succeeded in showing Alice’s pleasure (I’ll have what Pugh’s having), but to what end? If anything, in light of the big reveal, it only underlines how muddled the film’s themes are – as does a last-minute reveal about Bunny, which comes out of nowhere and adds to the heap of wasted potential that is this film. Frank, for his part, is pretty much what you think he is – a charismatic manipulator – but the revelations would suggest he’s something more and the film never remotely gets into that.

It never gets into that much of anything, when you think about it. It does have some good sets and some nice vintage costumes, but I was hoping for a real feast of production design and ended up with a lot of mid-century living rooms. (I’m reminded of Suburbicon, in more ways than one.) Matthew Libatique’s cinematography is good, especially in Alice’s Busby Berkeley-esque fantasies, but those add nothing but some neat imagery. It’s got some intriguing sound design (lots of rhythmic breathing) and a solid score as well. But it all goes for very little.

The acting, for the most part, is fine. Pugh is good – she plays fear and anger well – but Alice is too hazily drawn a character to allow for a truly great performance. Pine is also good, and there are a couple of scenes with him and Pugh that come close to working, because there’s a real charge between them – a charge missing from her scenes with Styles, who was admittedly stuck with a rather weak role, but is never especially convincing or charismatic. He gets a celebratory dance number, which feels less like a character moment and more like a chance for Styles to show his moves. (LaBeouf might’ve been better, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being really strong in the role.)

The material just isn’t there for anyone to do their best work. Writer Katie Silberman did a fine job with Wilde’s delightful debut behind the camera Booksmart, but here, adapting a Black List script by Carey and Shane Van Dyke (whose own track records are pretty bad), she drops the ball, with characters that aren’t compelling, a story that meanders until it falls apart completely, and themes which are at best ham-fisted and at worst indiscernible; I’m hard-pressed to guess what the ultimate takeaway is, though there was room for an interrogation of nostalgia, an examination of infantilizing misogyny, or even just a story of personal liberation, if the person and their constraints were effectively established.

It’s really just a big nothing of a film, failing even to take the leaps in its final act which might have made it hilariously misguided. It is thoroughly misguided, but failures of imagination are rarely fun to jeer. At one point, Frank tells Alice that he expected more from her, which sums up my feelings as well as anything.

Score: 48