Reviews

The Trial of the Chicago 7: Objection, Dishonor

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jeremy Strong, John Carroll-Lynch, and Sacha Baron Cohen in Aaron Sorkin's "The Trial of the Chicago 7"

The day before Aaron Sorkin’s newest movie premiered on Netflix, his second-oldest TV show rose from the dead: HBO released its West Wing special, reuniting the entire cast for a stage production of “Hartsfield’s Landing”, one of the series’ classic odes to democracy in action. Watching “Hartsfield’s Landing” less than a month before the 2020 election, it felt less like a slice of healthy idealism than an artifact of outright fantasy, a trip to an imaginary world where the civil servants in the White House behaved nobly and responsibly. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is of a piece with The West Wing, seeing as it’s about Great Men fighting valiantly in the face of corruption or indifference. But the orientation has changed. Whereas The West Wing was an ardent, nigh fanatical expression of faith in American government, Chicago 7 represents a more dubious view of the nation’s political machinery. Now, Sorkin’s heroes are fighting the power, not wielding it.

I’m not sure how much to read into this. For one thing, despite his obvious liberal credentials, Sorkin is hardly the most political of artists; he’s more interested in ideals than issues. For another, he wrote his first draft of the Chicago 7 script way back in 2007, so I’m wary of inferring any parallels to the current administration. Still, when an early scene finds the newly installed attorney general, John Mitchell (John Doman), ordering a career prosecutor, Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), to weaponize the Justice Department in 1969 and indict the President’s political enemies, it’s easy enough to imagine a young Bill Barr sitting in the corner, taking notes. Read More

Read more

Unpregnant, The Glorias, and Women Directing Women

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Julianne Moore in "The Glorias"; Haley Lu Richardson and Barbie Ferreira in "Unpregnant"

The COVID-19 pandemic has ruined lives, crippled economies, and paralyzed entire nations, but what has it meant for the movies? The received wisdom is that 2020 has been a lost year for cinema, and there’s a degree of truth to that; I’ve lost count of how many major studio releases have been delayed until 2021 or beyond, and many other films—which ordinarily would have had the opportunity to chase eyeballs on the big screen—were unceremoniously interred in the graveyard that is VOD. But while it’s understandable to lament the movies that this year has taken from us, it’s also important to acknowledge those that it’s given us. The dearth of blockbusters created a cinematic vacuum that was promptly and happily filled by scrappier, less conventional titles: quirky comedies, chilling horror flicks, tender romances, robust actioners. And many of these movies came from a demographic that Hollywood has long neglected: They were directed by women.

Perhaps this has nothing to do with COVID-19; maybe 2020 was already shaping up to be the Year of the Woman even before the coronavirus reached American shores. Regardless of causality, it’s oddly invigorating to survey the year’s best films and to see how many were helmed by women, and with such variety. Consider: the quiet agony of The Assistant and the boisterous fun of Birds of Prey. The contemporary sadness of Cuties and the classical enchantment of Emma. The male friendship of First Cow and the female solidarity of Never Rarely Sometimes Always. (I dissented on both The Old Guard and Shirley, but other critics would surely point to them as well.) Women have always been making good movies, but their collective voice seems to be growing louder now, telling stories of ever-greater urgency and vitality. Read More

Read more

The Devil All the Time: Once Upon a Time in the West Virginian Hellscape

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Holland in "The Devil All the Time"

Late in The Devil All the Time, the relentlessly ugly and obdurately watchable new thriller from Antonio Campos, a young man insists that he isn’t a bad person. This may ring false, given that we’ve already seen him kill several people with a pistol and beat up several others with assorted car parts. But wickedness is a spectrum rather than a point, and the competition for the most despicable character in The Devil All the Time—which transpires in various backwaters of West Virginia and Ohio, including an aptly named town called Knockemstiff—is fierce.

There’s the World War II veteran who, in an attempt to convince God to eradicate his wife’s cancer, crucifies his son’s dog. That wasn’t very nice; maybe he’s the film’s biggest baddie. But is he really worse than the charismatic preacher who systematically grooms and rapes teenage girls? What about the other captivating preacher, the one who stabs his wife in the neck in order to hone his gift for resurrection, only to discover that, whoops, death isn’t reversible after all? And let’s not forget the smiling traveler whose hobby is to pick up hitchhikers, photograph them fucking his wife, and then murder them. These guys make David Fincher’s villains look cuddly. Read More

Read more

I’m Thinking of Ending Things: Meeting the Parents, Leaving Logic Behind

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley in Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"

An extended, discursive, baffling game of Choose Your Own Metaphor, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a weighty treatise on the universal fear of loneliness. At least, I think it is. Maybe it’s a sad commentary on the inexorability of aging? I dunno. In one scene, the characters discuss the board game Trivial Pursuit, so perhaps it’s a valentine to one of that amusement’s classic categories, Arts & Literature; certainly it’s an erudite picture, given how frequently it name-checks writers like Tolstoy, Wilde, and Emerson.

Whatever his faults, Kaufman doesn’t make movies like anyone else. He also doesn’t seem to make movies that can be understood by anyone else. He’s blessed with such a fertile imagination, it’s almost like his films are acts of intellectual upheaval, as though he’s been demonically compelled to yank his ideas out of his brain and plunk them onto the screen. The human mind is a fragile and chaotic place, and so are his artistic creations, which are governed by passion and inspiration rather than order and logic. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is far from his best movie—that title belongs to either Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both of which he wrote but didn’t direct—but it’s arguably his most purely Kaufmanesque (though Synecdoche, New York might like a word). It waltzes along to its own syncopated rhythms, its synapses firing randomly, unable to or just uninterested in packaging its multitude of thoughts into a coherent story. Read More

Read more

The Old Guard, Palm Springs, and Immortality on Screen

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Charlize Theron in "The Old Guard"; Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in "Palm Springs"

Who wants movie characters to live forever? Plenty of people, apparently, given how many films are made about the undead or the undying. This makes some sense: Reality has yet to discover the fountain of youth, so art has stepped in to fill the gap, allowing us to grapple with the dream (or the nightmare) of life everlasting. But it also presents a unique challenge for storytellers. No picture can fully encapsulate a person’s entire life (not even Boyhood), yet we still expect a certain degree of finality when the credits start to roll. How can movies deliver that necessary closure when their characters’ lives are open-ended?

Last month, two very different films wrestled with this quandary, in decidedly different ways. In The Old Guard, Charlize Theron plays the leader of a band of immortal mercenaries struggling to find meaning in a life of perpetual assassination. And in Palm Springs, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti star as wedding guests locked in an infinite time loop, doomed to relive the same sunny Southern California day over and over. Both movies attempt to interrogate their characters’ predicaments, but only one does so with any real freshness. The Old Guard may be a sturdy and accomplished piece of action filmmaking, but it never truly distinguishes itself from the pictures it’s imitating. Palm Springs, on the other hand, improbably manages to evade the giant shadow cast by Groundhog Day, transforming into a romantic comedy that tickles your brain as well as your funny bone. Read More

Read more