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

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Belfast: The Troubles of Growing Up, Like and Unlike Everyone Else

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Jude Hill, and Judi Dench in Belfast

The opening scene of Belfast, the new film from Kenneth Branagh, announces the movie as both a narrow slice-of-life comedy and a more ambitious historical drama. Following some trivial narration from Judi Dench, the wan colors shift into crisp black-and-white, and the camera glides along a street in Northern Ireland, revealing a homey, intimate neighborhood. (A title card informs us that the date is August 1969.) The mood is relaxed and cheerful; children are kicking a ball around, adults are yammering idly, and everyone seems to know everybody’s name. Yet as nine-year-old Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill) traverses the road and spars good-naturedly with some shopkeepers, this peaceful idyll is shattered by the sudden arrival of armed hooligans. As they snarl threats and smash windows, the camera pivots around Buddy, spinning faster and faster, underlining his vulnerability and panic. What was once bliss has been replaced by terror.

Roughly based on Branagh’s own childhood, Belfast is a noble, enjoyable, not entirely successful attempt to document both sides of this formative coin. It seeks to frame the traditional hallmarks of the coming-of-age picture—the fledgling romances, the quixotically striving parents, the classroom grievances, the petty illegalities—against the backdrop of social unrest and religious conflict. That it struggles to fuse these disparate halves into a cohesive whole is due less to tonal inconsistency than cinematic execution, or maybe priorities. Over the course of a long and uneven career, Branagh has proved himself capable of working on a large scale—I remain a fan of his straitlaced Hamlet, while the operatic thriller Dead Again is arguably his best work—but here, whether because of lack of interest or inadequate filmmaking chops, he fails to invest the movie’s ostensibly sweeping commentary with much energy or clarity. He’s more committed to evoking the particular pleasures and predicaments of his youth with loving detail and misty-eyed nostalgia. Read More

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Eternals: Yuck Everlasting

Jeremy BeckReviews
Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden, Salma Hayek, and Gemma Chan in Eternals

Auteur theory meets its match in Eternals, the strange, occasionally beguiling, ultimately tedious new entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Critics tend to consider movies as belonging to their director, but Disney’s primary interest in property has always been intellectual rather than artistic. This doesn’t mean that the 21st century’s dominant franchise is devoid of personality—just that its cagiest filmmakers (James Gunn and Ryan Coogler among them) operate simultaneously as smugglers and stewards, sneaking in eccentric touches while hewing to commercial imperatives. Hell, the Russo brothers turned the latter Avengers pictures into billion-dollar hits less through innovation than carefully calibrated deference; they served their fans, pleased their bosses, and didn’t make anyone unhappy, which becomes easier when you take so few risks.

Into this minefield of consumer expectation and corporate ownership now steps Chloé Zhao, fresh off of winning two Oscars for Nomadland, and laboring to bring some art-house punch to the multiplex’s most anodyne commodity. It’s tempting to accuse the Marvel machine of squeezing the color out of Zhao’s filmmaking, and to brand her as yet another victim sacrificed on the altar of sequel churn. But Eternals, which Zhao also wrote with Patrick Burleigh (repurposing an original script by Ryan and Kaz Firpo), is too odd and intriguing to be disregarded as the product of studio interference. No, its failings are more pedestrian and predictable; its characters are unmemorable, its plot is nonsensical, and its action is risible. Read More

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Last Night in Soho: Going Back, Going Blonde, Going Bonkers

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in Last Night in Soho

Remember the Swinging Sixties? That blissful English era of artistic revolution, high hedonism, and rampant sexism? At least, I think that’s what it involved; I wasn’t alive at the time, but I’ve consumed enough cultural artifacts from the period to approximate the woozy sensations of decadence and discovery. So has Edgar Wright, a voracious student of 20th-century pop culture whose movies tend to function as tributes to his dilettantish obsessions, as well as advertisements for the breadth of his own taste; his prior film, Baby Driver, was less a heist thriller than a feature-length playlist of classic tunes with vibrant visual accompaniment. Wright’s new feature, Last Night in Soho, initially scans as an ode to the lascivious London of yesteryear, a passionate homage to the pristine past that doubles as a sour lament for the degraded present. But there is more going on here than you might suspect—more ideas, more innovation, more mistakes.

“I like the old stuff better,” says Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), an aspiring fashion designer newly arrived in London from the country. It’s a valid preference—the music that pours through her Beats by Dre headphones includes hits by The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, and Peter & Gordon—that nonetheless carries dubious implications. Nostalgia can be simplistic as well as seductive, and many a filmmaker has fallen prone to romanticizing the gauzy bygone days without grappling with their dark marks and complications. This time around, Wright is smarter than that; Last Night in Soho is simultaneously an appreciation and a reckoning. It conjures a hypnotic veil of old-world glamour, then vigorously pierces it to reveal the rot festering underneath. Read More

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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

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