Features

King Richard, Tick Tick Boom, and the Tortured Genius

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Andrew Garfield in Tick Tick Boom; Will Smith in King Richard

Success stories can’t be simple. Presumably, many gifted artists and athletes achieve their goals through little more than the straightforward combination of labor and talent, without facing any daunting challenges or making any personal sacrifices. But who wants to watch a movie about them? Drama requires conflict, which is why rousing tales of ultimate success must contain moments of intervening failure. (Pictures about sustained failure are far more rare, give or take an Inside Llewyn Davis.) Last week featured the premiere of two fact-based films about obsessive geniuses: Warner Brothers’ King Richard, about the father of Venus and Serena Williams, and Netflix’s Tick, Tick… Boom, about the early struggles of the creator of Rent. One teeters perilously on the border of hagiography, while the other is largely enjoyable on its own artistic terms, but both are steeped in the cinematic wellspring of toil, triumph, anguish, and redemption.

Technically, King Richard isn’t so much the story of a genius as that of the man behind the genius(es), though I’m sure if you posed that framing to Richard Williams, he’d dismiss the distinction as one without a difference. Whether this on-screen version of Richard, incarnated by Will Smith with twinkly charm and bottomless gumption, represents a drastic departure from the actual man is a debate best left to historians and biographers. What matters here is whether this Richard is the suitable protagonist of a predictable, rags-to-riches sports picture—whether he is sufficiently separable from the countless coaches and motivators who have preceded him in the illustrious screen tradition of drilling, aggravating, and speechifying. Read More

Read more

Dune, The French Dispatch, and World-Building Great and Small

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Timothée Chalamet in Dune and The French Dispatch

Denis Villeneuve and Wes Anderson are strangely similar filmmakers, even though they make exceedingly dissimilar films. Villeneuve’s movies are grand, sprawling adventures that envision alien life forms and contemplate dystopian futures. Anderson, by contrast, makes tidy, compact comedies whose foremost exotica are their characters’ eccentricities, and which tend to unfold in an unspecified but highly particular recent past. Yet both directors are true artisans skilled in the craft of cinematic world-building; for them, the screen is a coloring book for their fertile imaginations, one that should be sketched in as boldly and minutely as possible. Put differently, Villeneuve and Anderson treat movie-making like a work of galactic creation. One looks to the skies, the other to the soul, but both construct their own universes, packed with detail, whimsy, and awe.

This past weekend was something of a feast for cinephiles, as it brought new films from the two auteurs, both of which the COVID-19 pandemic had delayed for roughly a year. Villeneuve’s Dune, the long-awaited adaptation of the beloved science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert, finds the Canadian literally building a brand new world, one teeming with wonder and innovation. Anderson’s The French Dispatch, meanwhile, is more earthbound but no less profligate in its assembly. Both are natural progressions that reflect their makers’ career-long preoccupations, yet while both are undeniably impressive aesthetic achievements, only one fully succeeds as a piece of dramatic entertainment. Read More

Read more

The Two Faces, and Methods, of Jessica Chastain

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Jessica Chastain in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" and "Scenes from a Marriage"

The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the new biopic from Michael Showalter, is the kind of movie that features a lot of stuff. There are a lot of wigs and mustaches. There are a lot of exaggerated accents, both midwestern and southern. There are a lot of title cards, informing us of the year and location as we race through five decades and across quite a few states. There are a lot of period-specific songs and chintzy costumes. And, thanks to an Oscar-hungry Jessica Chastain, there is a lot of acting.

Which isn’t the same thing as overacting. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Chastain disappears into the role of Tammy Faye Bakker, the popular televangelist who fell from grace in the late ’80s; over the course of the movie, even as the redheaded actor becomes increasingly difficult to recognize under heaps of artificial black-and-blonde hair and facial prosthetics, it’s always clear that you’re watching a performance. But that’s the point. As described in Showalter’s film, Tammy Faye built her following through a combination of sincere sweetness, uncommon pluck, and sheer force of will. In attempting to convey that degree of boisterous charisma, Chastain’s technique is similarly bold and visible. Rather than modulating the part with her usual steely presence, she leans into the eccentricity—chewing over every Minnesota-inflected syllable, cackling with every laugh, turning on the waterworks as tears stream through her heavy makeup. It’s an outsized performance designed to fit a larger-than-life figure. Read More

Read more

Malignant, The Card Counter, and Movies Going All-In

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter; Annabelle Wallis in Malignant

Last Sunday, the critic Walter Chaw tweeted that, because more than 90% of the new movies he watches are “pretty much the same”, he’s more likely to appreciate a film that “just cocks an arm and swings for all it’s worth”. I might quibble with the mathematical accuracy of his first statement, but despite the mixed metaphor, I’m inclined to agree with his second; even when they fail, ambitious movies tend to be more memorable than their cautious counterparts. Chaw presumably had a specific picture in mind, but this past weekend provided multiple titles that refused to play by multiplex rules. One is far better than the other, but both succeed in upending expectations and carving out their own atypical territory.

At the outset—and, in fact, for the majority of its running time—James Wan’s Malignant isn’t especially novel. Despite stemming from a nominally original screenplay by Akela Cooper, it’s another haunted-house chiller that would fit snugly inside the Conjuring cinematic universe that Wan created back in 2013. Its heroine, Madison (Annabelle Wallis, best known to me as Grace on Peaky Blinders), is plagued by visions of a malevolent spirit called Gabriel, one of those shadowy creatures who’s never quite in focus but who looks a bit like the skeleton-masked bank robbers from The Town, only blacker and nastier. In addition to somehow speaking through electronic devices like a demonic Siri, Gabriel seems to be a burgeoning serial killer, and Madison—in an arresting manipulation of the image—periodically finds her mind transported to the sites of his murders, forced to watch his grisly wet work like a helpless, paralyzed bystander. Read More

Read more

Original Screenplay Weekend! On Annette, Reminiscence, and the Night House

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Rebecca Hall in The Night House; Rebecca Ferguson and Hugh Jackman in Reminiscence; Adam Driver in Annette

Some original screenplays are more original than others. Last week, for example, I reviewed Disney’s Free Guy, a jumbled, weirdly fascinating action comedy that prides itself on not being based on any existing intellectual property, then spins an entire film from references to (and rip-offs of) other intellectual properties. I was happy to see Free Guy perform well (it’s now spawning a sequel, naturally), if only because I want studios to keep making original movies. As if by magic, this past weekend featured the release of three such pictures, a veritable bonanza of novel #content. (Technically there were four, but I failed to make time for Martin Campbell’s The Protégé.) None is a perfect film—in fact, all three have considerable problems—but my disappointment is tempered by my enthusiasm for their very existence. I didn’t love any of these movies, but I did love that I was able to watch them.

Of the trio, The Night House is the most conventional, which isn’t to say it’s typical. Directed by David Bruckner from a script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, it’s a ruminative ghost story that’s less interested in freaking you out than pulling you in. Its heroine, a high school English teacher named Beth (a fantastic Rebecca Hall), isn’t just the frightened resident of a haunted house; she’s also a little bit scary herself. An early scene, in which she calmly shames a grade-grubbing parent into stunned silence, reveals her capacity for blunt anger, while a night out with colleagues quickly turns into an unhappy hour where busybodies tiptoe around a powder keg. Read More

Read more