The Weekly Gravy #126

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) – ***½

The World’s Fair Challenge isn’t so different from looking in the mirror and saying “Bloody Mary” three times – you say “I want to go to the World’s Fair” three times, prick your finger and smudge blood on your computer screen, and watch a strobing video (which we the viewer never actually see). Then, you just wait and see what happens. Other people who’ve done the challenge post videos describing what seems to be happening to their minds and bodies, but it’s pretty clear nothing is really happening – this isn’t Videodrome, after all. It’s just an Internet trend.

But something else might be happening to Casey (Anna Cobb), a teenage girl who seems to have no close friends, a strained relationship with her unseen father, and too much time to be alone with her thoughts and the Internet. And then JLB reaches out to her. He appears to be a veteran of the game, and he wants to serve as a kind of mentor to Casey, whom he claims is in some kind of trouble. But he doesn’t show his face or reveal anything about himself. Until the film does.

Then we see that JLB (Michael J. Rogers) is a middle-aged man, living possibly alone (we see another person only briefly) in a massive house, seeming to have no job or occupation beyond spending time online engaging with World’s Fair Challenge takers. And as Casey seems to be inching towards some kind of breakdown, we have to wonder if he’s pushing her towards it, or motivated by perversion – or just what is going on with either of them.

The problem, of course, is that in this online culture, it’s as easy to communicate as it is to conceal, as easy to share your deepest secrets with a total stranger as it is to lie brazenly to them, as easy to hide your face behind an avatar as it is to share it with the world. The result is the illusion of connection and community, but lonely people like Casey and JLB, people who struggle to connect to the people in their actual lives, find their isolation only deepened and their insecurities only amplified.

The film doesn’t explore these themes in so explicit or linear a fashion. Rather, it moves slowly, offering long takes of Casey and JLB’s monotonous lives, shots of the anonymous suburb where Casey lives, and the rambling vlogs of herself and other, shall we say, attendees of the Fair. It actually takes rather a while for JLB to enter the picture, and longer still before we realize just what the stakes are – and then the film ends on a profoundly ambiguous note, as JLB tells us a story that sounds too good to be true. But given that his attempts to do what he thinks is the right thing have gone so wrong – and this probably wasn’t the first time – it probably isn’t.

Jane Schoenbrun, who wrote, directed, and edited the film on, I would assume, an extremely low budget, is at her best in crafting an atmosphere of isolation, of suburban detachment, of the transgressive lure of games like the Challenge, which promise to take the player out of the tedious bounds of normality into something different – and the scarier the better. And later in the film you feel JLB’s pathetic desperation and Casey’s own dread and disillusionment when he breaks the veil of mystery to try and make some kind of human connection.

On a storytelling level, I think Schoenbrun fares better later in the film, when we have more to latch onto in terms of narrative and character; this is admittedly a matter of taste, as it is with the not dissimilar Skinamarink. I do find myself more impressed by the film on further reflection, however, and bumped my score up from a high *** to a low ***½.

Cobb gives a very solid, unself-conscious performance as Casey, conveying the character’s insecurities and, in her videos, performative behavior while feeling quite natural at every turn. And Rogers, a professional actor (it’s Cobb’s second role and first feature) conveys JLB’s miserable state just as naturally; I saw no “acting” as such in his scenes, only a sad inability to be himself in the real world. And the filmmaking, from Daniel Patrick Carbone’s cinematography to Grace Sloan’s production design (I think just about everyone has a room like Casey’s or knows someone who does) to Alex G’s sparingly used score (including a couple of rather good songs), feels natural, even mundane, but never dull.

I don’t think World’s Fair is a great film, but at its best it’s a worthy take on how so many of us live our lives online, seeking a fulfillment the real world doesn’t seem to provide, finding a lot of fabricated lore and pseudonymous comrades, but not really finding the truth – about ourselves or anyone else.

Score: 77

In Old Arizona (1928) – **½

As the 2022-23 awards season movies into its final month, I decided to reach back – way back – into Oscar history. The upcoming Oscars are the 95th; this film was one of the major contenders for the 2nd. Or so it would appear – there were no official nominees at the time, but a set of nominees was assembled after the fact, and In Old Arizona earned four nominations – Best Production (Picture), Best Director, Best Writing, and Best Cinematography – to go with Warner Baxter’s win for Best Actor. And Raoul Walsh might’ve bristled just a bit at all this; he was to play the role of the Cisco Kid, the role Baxter played to such acclaim, and to direct the film as well, until an accident during production cost him the role, an eye, and full directing credit. Irving Cummings stepped in, and although the finished film lists them both as directors, Cummings alone received the retroactive nomination.

But then, although Walsh never did receive an Oscar nomination, he was a major director for the next 35 years, directing films like The Big Trail, High Sierra, and White Heat. Cummings stayed busy for most of the next 20 years himself, but few of his films are very well remembered. Nor, outside of Oscar devotees, is In Old Arizona itself, although it has a place in film history as the first talking picture shot outdoors and one of the first major sound Westerns.

Indeed, from the very start it makes ample use of sound; an overture features the song “My Tonia,” the opening shots feature the bells of a village church, and throughout the film we get singing (a lot of it), the sounds of braying donkeys and squealing pigs, the cries of a baby, and a lot of other sounds that serve mainly to show that yes, the talking picture was capable of capturing the full spectrum of natural sound. But there’s also the dialogue, the sound of horses, and the gunshots to consider, which do go towards telling the story at hand.

1898. The Cisco Kid is the most wanted outlaw in the Arizona Territory, and womanizing Army sergeant Mickey Dunn (Edmund Lowe) is assigned to track him down. For whatever reason, there’s no portrait or description of the Kid circulating, and the Kid is able to visit a barbershop and hear the locals talk about forming a posse against him, and even shoot the breeze with Dunn when he comes in for a shave, with no one the wiser until he’s safely away.

Maybe it’s because the Kid is something of a gentleman, refusing to rob individuals, only banks and other organizations, even reimbursing the barber for the money he’d lost in the Kid’s latest heist (without revealing his identity, of course). But that’s enough to earn the loyalty of his lover, Tonia Maria (Dorothy Burgess), who’s introduced shooing another man out of her house. And while she makes a show of her devotion when the Kid arrives, when Dunn enters the picture, she’s quite ready to jump into his arms and go off with him – and the $5,000 reward for the Kid.

Since this is based on a story by O. Henry (“The Caballero’s Way”) it’s no surprise that everything ends in a bitter twist of fate – but one which wouldn’t have been possible just a few years later, thanks to the moral dictates of the Code. It may come as a surprise, however, given the generally light tone of the film up to that point; perhaps because of the primitive technology available, the film is far more focused on casual character scenes than action, and most of those scenes are full of wisecracks.

Since Lowe was best known for playing Sgt. Quirt in What Price Glory?, the role of Dunn was presumably tailored to his proven skill at playing a smooth-talking, opportunistic, sardonic flirt, who talks with a Noo Yawk accent (“girlie” becomes “goilie”), is introduced playing craps, and seems to forget about his mission when the opportunity arises to wax poetic about New York or just hit on the nearest woman. It frankly makes it even easier to root for the Kid, and it’s already hard to understand why Tonia Maria is not only disloyal to him, but quite ready to betray him for cold, hard cash.

But there’s a lot here that’s hard to understand or believe, whether it’s the convenient contrivances that keep the Kid one step ahead of his enemies, or the accents Baxter and Burgess affect, or the stilted early-talkie acting on display (perhaps this is why so much of the film is a comedy; it was easier to ham it up than play it straight), or the relatively abrupt ending after 90 minutes of poky pacing (you could easily tell this story in an hour – with songs).

That said, it has its rewards for the indulgent viewer. Baxter, despite his overly broad accent, plays the Kid with considerable gusto and verve, making him a charming rogue – but he’s also solid at playing the experienced bandit, who might not go out of his way to shoot a man but will if he has to. Lowe plays Dunn with well-honed smugness that compensates – somewhat – for the script making him no kind of match for the Kid. Burgess is spirited, if not very good, but Soledad Jiménez, as loyal old Tonita, brings an authentic spirit to her scenes.

It’s not that well directed or written (although I appreciated a few pre-Code touches, like the ham and eggs burning on the stove while the Kid and Tonia Maria get friendly), but there are moments when Arthur Edeson’s cinematography works, especially when framing the dramatic scenery; the soundtrack is quite impressive for the time, and it’s odd that the sets weren’t also “nominated,” given that they’re rather well done. I can’t readily recommend it as entertainment, but it’s an undisputed part of cinema history.

Score: 64

Blonde (2022) – **

Oscar Nomination: Best Actress (Ana de Armas)

CW: sexual assault, abortion/miscarriage, domestic violence, mental illness.

I put off seeing Blonde for a long time, partially to avoid the controversy and condemnation (especially from those who hadn’t even seen it) which greeted it upon release, partially because the reviews gave me little hope, partially because I never got a chance to see it a theatrically, and partially because it’s so damned long – and when I did finally watch it, in the comfort of my own home, I found it all too easy to pause the film and step away – and not because it was too painful or powerful to bear.

Based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, it takes a heavily mythologized look at the life of Norma Jeane Baker, better known as Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas). Beginning with a look at her unhappy childhood, marked by the absence of her father and abuse from her mentally ill mother Gladys (Julianne Nicholson), we soon skip ahead to the 40s, when Norma Jeane first breaks into pictures – and is abused and exploited by the men controlling her career. She also struggles with the growing gulf between Norma Jeane and Marilyn, whom she views as a distinct persona from her true self.

Her career gradually gains momentum until Gentlemen Prefer Blondes cements her stardom. Meanwhile, her personal life remains turbulent, and though she briefly finds happiness in a threesome with Charles Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams), she ends up pregnant and has an abortion, which she regrets. She marries Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), but they soon divorce over his abuse and attitude towards her career. She later marries Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), who’s far more supportive, but a miscarriage plunges her deeper into depression.

By now deep into substance abuse, haunted by period letters from her father (who never comes forward or names himself), resentful of “Marilyn” and the limited view Hollywood has of her, and subjected to an exploitive encounter with John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson), she spirals downward and dies at age 36.

Much of the controversy around Blonde relates to its treatment of sexual assault and abortion, and certainly viewers sensitive to such topics should simply avoid it. For my part, I’ve seen films which depict assault far more graphically and distressingly than Blonde (based purely on what’s seen, the NC-17 rating is excessive), but the problem for me is how little these scenes add to our understanding of Norma Jeane, who is too often a passive sufferer, or to our understanding of the seamy world she moved through. Some scenes, namely the encounter with Kennedy, are so over-the-top as to inspire mere derision.

And setting aside the lack of evidence that the real woman ever had an abortion (though she had several miscarriages), the scenes depicting the procedure are absurdly overwrought, and the repeated presence of a fetus, which during her second pregnancy “speaks” to Norma Jeane and refers to the abortion, is so ridiculous I can’t even take it seriously enough to get mad. (But I do cringe when, given a standing ovation for Blondes, Norma Jeane mutters “For this, you killed your baby?”)

For me, however, these issues are overshadowed by the film’s fundamental dramatic failures. Writer-director Andrew Dominik seems to be channeling Oliver Stone, especially JFK and Nixon, what with the semi-linear narrative, paranoid tone, shifts from color to black-and-white, jagged editing, and use of distorted and/or outright surreal imagery. But where Stone’s films knew what they wanted to say and developed their characters well, Dominik struggles to expand his themes beyond their starting points or develop his characters beyond ciphers.

The points are made early on about Norma Jeane’s crisis of identity, the conflict between her private self and public image, and the abuse she suffered from the men in her life. But they aren’t explored to anything like the depth required to sustain the 166-minute running time, or to justify the harrowing scenes we’re asked to endure.

And while we get precious little understanding of Norma Jeane, we get less of a grasp on the people around her, all of whom come and go with little development and at the whim of the script; once they’re not needed, they might as well have vanished. The actors, especially Nicholson, Cannavale, and Brody, do their best to invest their characters with life (and do succeed to a degree), but the film smothers them in its rambling length and lack of focus.

de Armas does give a wholly committed performance, and in the watching she’s wholly convincing as an approach to an icon and as the complex, often contradictory – fragile yet defiant, intelligent and savvy yet emotionally naive, devoted to her career yet resentful of the toll it takes – character the film creates. The sheer sloppy mass of the film works against her, but her Oscar nomination is quite reasonable (even if she misses my top 5).

It’s not her fault that we get so little sense of the arc of her life or career; we jump from her being taken to an orphanage to the early stages of her film career – a jump of almost 15 years – omitting how she came to be a blonde, to get her stage name, or to develop the persona that caused her such distress. It’s just the first of many gaps in the deliberately fractured narrative, and this lack of flow, combined with our inability to get invested in what’s happening, make the epic length feel even longer.

It does have some effective scenes and images; Chayse Irvin’s cinematography is impressive when not undermined by the seemingly random shifts from color to B&W (or Dominik’s overbearing approach), while the synthy score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is quite good in its own right, even if it never really harmonizes with the film itself. But what would? It’s a dreary, alienating muddle, which seems almost to rebuke us for liking Monroe’s films in the first place, given what they cost her to make.

Score: 52

The Man in the White Suit (1951) – ***½

Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, “All right, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote but at a price: you lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”

Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind

If the man were Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness), he might say, “You can have a cloth that will never stain and is so strong it requires a blowtorch to cut, but the textile industry will be made damn near obsolete once everyone’s got hold of it.”

Of course, part of the satire in The Man in the White Suit is that labor and management alike fly into a panic without having even seen the white suit, and the markets start crashing based purely on rumors. It still rings true after 70 years; so much of the financial stability of the world is dependent on the nerves of investors, who are just as human as those of us who find it all kind of absurd – or, like Sidney, aren’t motivated by money but by a genuine passion for scientific advancement.

But if most of his opponents are driven by fear, greed, and short-sightedness – is everyone in the world going to want just one suit of clothes? Not likely – and we’re free to laugh at their scheming desperation as they try to keep Sidney’s fabric off the market, it’s a plea from his landlady, Mrs. Watson (Edie Martin), that opens his eyes: “Why can’t you scientists leave things alone? What about my bit of washing, when there’s no washing to do?”

Right after that, we discover that the miracle cloth decays on its own, and the status quo is soon restored, with his now ex-boss Alan Birnley (Cecil Parker) saying, “We have seen the last of Sidney Stratton.” But then Sidney gets a flash of inspiration, and as he walks into the distance and the gurgling sounds of his laboratory apparatus is heard once more, Birnley adds, “At least, I hope we’ve seen the last of him.” It ends the film on a perfect note.

It’s not a perfect film, or even in my view quite a great one, at least on first viewing; the pacing and structure are a bit shaky – he doesn’t actually get the suit until past the halfway mark – and while it’s consistently clever, it’s not as laugh-out-loud funny as you might hope. (Or maybe it’s me.) But it is a very good film, smartly written (the script was deservedly nominated for an Oscar the same year another Ealing film, The Lavender Hill Mob, won) and very well played by a very British cast.

Of course, Guinness shines as Sidney, a man of devastating principles and dedication, who nearly destroys Birnley’s factory trying to perfect his formula (after one explosion, he quietly says, “It shouldn’t have done that”), who nearly gets himself arrested trying to confront Birnley at his home, who finds himself pursued by everyone as the film nears its climax – never yielding his integrity, even when he has a change of heart.

But he’s well-matched by Joan Greenwood as Daphne, Birnley’s strong-willed daughter, who becomes Sidney’s biggest supporter when she realizes the depths of the industry’s corruption, by Parker as the nervously pompous Birnley, and by Ernest Thesiger as Sir John Kierlaw, the feared captain of industry, a shriveled old man dwarfed by a huge fur coat who will entertain any proposal, pay any price, just to keep Sidney’s cloth off the market. 16 years after Bride of Frankenstein, his comic timing remains deliciously sharp.

One can praise aspects of Alexander Mackendrick’s direction and Douglas Slocombe’s cinematography (especially in how it makes the white suit glow), and Benjamin Frankel’s score is quite good, if not what you’d normally think of for a comedy, but the greatest praise goes to Mary Habberfield’s sound effects, which are at once delightfully silly and, to my unscientific ears, pretty convincing. To quote Calvin and Hobbes, “Scientific progress goes ‘boink’?”

Score: 83

To Leslie (2022) – ***½

Oscar Nomination: Best Actress (Andrea Riseborough)

Some people are their own worst enemies, and despite the best and most generous intentions of those who want to help them, the only hope for them lies within themselves. So it is with Leslie Rowlands (Andrea Riseborough), who won the lottery several years before the film began – a seeming stroke of luck that left her worse off than before, as she descended into alcoholism, reveling in the hedonism money can buy, until the money was gone, her son was being raised by others, and her old friends viewed her as a pathetic disgrace.

The first act of the film follows her as she loses what little foundation she has left; kicked out of the motel she was living at, she goes to stay with James (Owen Teague), who asks her not to drink and to make a plan for her life, but within hours she’s stealing from him and his roommate and getting drunk. Sent back to her hometown in rural Texas, she first stays with old friends Nancy (Allison Janney) and Dutch (Stephen Root), but they have soon had enough of her and her drinking and throw her out. She ends up sleeping outside of a motel run by Sweeney (Marc Maron) and Royal (Andre Royo), and when Sweeney chases her off, she leaves her suitcase behind.

But when she comes back looking for it, Sweeney, having heard about her misfortunes, impulsively offers her a job: she’ll be the motel’s maid for room and board plus a stipend. Initially, she continues drinking and oversleeps most days, but after one bad night where she wanders into her old home and Sweeney must be summoned to get her, she has finally had enough. But even as she commits to sobriety with her characteristic stubbornness, will those who remember her at her worst ever let her live it down?

That the film ultimately – ultimately – pursues a decidedly hopeful angle may mark it as a work of fiction, as the kind of outcome those who’ve known people like Leslie hope and pray for, but don’t often see. But I’m glad it does, because if the film were to end in more suffering and tragedy, what would be the point? We’ve seen films about people who ruin their lives – we may well have seen people ruin their lives, period. An optimistic ending is one of the delights of fiction, especially when it works.

And it does, even if the way it plays out reflects the rather sloppy, rambling structure of Ryan Binaco’s script; at first, the film simply follows Leslie as she bounces from one place to another, alienating everyone she meets, and then follows her and Sweeney as they gradually grow close, with the expected ups and downs, before a pair of painful moments nearly plunge us back into the darkness. Only then, with relatively little time to go, do things start looking up – and arguably the whole third act should’ve been devoted to what gets about 15 minutes of screentime in the film we got.

And to be sure, the story beats do often feel like the tropes they are, with the moments of crisis feeling more like a writer’s idea of conflict than anything real. It keeps the film from being great in my eyes – and yet, it manages to get into the range of very good, and Riseborough is a big part of why.

It’s a shame that her Oscar nomination has been so mired in controversy (although the Academy found no grounds to revoke it), because, based solely on the performance, she earned it. Riseborough is a fascinating actress, the kind of performer who could’ve probably had a respectable career in mainstream films owing to her RADA training, but who has come to embrace her capacity for playing offbeat roles in smaller films, taking her delicate, birdlike appearance (she looks a bit like Carol Kane) in intriguing directions – take her eccentric turn in Nocturnal Animals, her haunted, withdrawn turn in Possessor, or her increasingly androgynous turn in Please Baby Please, which would’ve been a worthy nominee in its own right.

Here, she uses her large eyes and deft physicality – and a pretty solid Texan accent, at least to my ears – to convey all of Leslie’s desperation, to show how readily she lies to keep a fresh conflict at bay, but how easily she slips into aggression and recrimination. When James calls her out on her behavior, she says “I love you so much” over and over, to no avail, turning nasty when it’s clear she’s lost. It’s not that she doesn’t love him, but that she’s too deep into her own addictions to see a way out. Riseborough convinces us of this, and of the way out she does eventually find. It’s an excellent performance.

She’s not alone, though; Maron is especially solid as Sweeney, who wants to help and can’t quite get it through his head that Leslie has to help herself, while Teague is effective as the loving but exasperated James and Royo is bizarrely entertaining as the eccentric Royal, who in his own way might be the most sensible person around. Janney and especially Root are held back by the writing; Nancy has a few too many moments of stock nastiness which clash with the more nuanced depiction of her long history with Leslie, which Janney plays with acrid humanity.

It’s pretty well made in the social-realist manner of most indie character studies these days; the production design is especially solid at depicting Leslie’s run-down hometown, from the dingy motel to her preferred honky-tonk to the abandoned ice cream parlor she spends a night or two in. It’s a decent film, a believable depiction of desperation enhanced by the acting – and worth seeking out to see the performance that ensured its place in Oscar history.

Score: 80