Emma: Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Show Me a Catch

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in "Emma"

Jane Austen’s Emma is a comedy of manners, which of course means that nobody in it is actually polite. It may unfurl in high society—the kind where estates have proper names, like Donwell Abbey and Hartfield —but its veneer of decorum is a mere smokescreen, camouflaging base instincts of lust, greed, and jealousy. Its language is unfailingly civil, with a premium placed on honorifics—Mr. Elton! Miss Smith!—but its characters wield words like weapons, brandished with lethal force and sheathed with calculated fury. It’s a frolicsome tale of romance and friendship; it is also blood sport.

This duality can be bracing, but for most viewers it is no longer surprising, given how frequently Austen’s novels have been transmuted to the screen. Her works provide a certain comfort, a warm and familiar blend of sophisticated wordplay, comic misunderstandings, and graceful resolution. This new adaptation of Emma, which has been directed by Autumn de Wilde from a screenplay by Eleanor Catton, respects its author deeply and faithfully. Unlike Clueless, which boldly transplanted Austen’s narrative and themes to the frivolous exploits of mid-’90s teenagers, this Emma is frank and straightforward. You might think that such a rigorous approach would result in the diminution of risk, in an absence of artistic identity or imagination. To be sure, the movie is predictable. It is also magical. Read More

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The Invisible Man: Touch Me, Not So Easy to Leave Me

Jeremy BeckReviews
Elisabeth Moss in "The Invisible Man"

There’s virtually no dialogue in the first five minutes of The Invisible Man, but that doesn’t stop the director Leigh Whannell from telling you everything you need to know. We open in the dead of night, on a woman lying awake in bed, her partner’s arm slung across her waist like a fleshy chain. Her eyes wide with anxiety, she silently extricates herself from his grasp, then tiptoes through their opulent beachside home, packing a bag and disabling the alarm. She also deactivates the house’s many security cameras, except for one: the feed from the bedroom, which she routes to her phone and keeps glancing at in panic, worried that her jailer might have risen. As she quietly maneuvers toward the exit and her freedom, the tension mounts, with various obstacles—a dog’s dish, a car’s sensor, a looming enclosure—conspiring to impede her escape.

It’s the first of many gripping sequences in the movie, an expertly orchestrated medley of image, sound, and music. Yet beyond highlighting Whannell’s considerable craft, the opening is meaningful for the way it telegraphs the film’s metaphorical intentions. The Invisible Man is, quite simply, a picture about domestic abuse. It examines how powerful men feel entitled to possess beautiful women, resulting in violence that’s both physical and emotional. And it contemplates how such subjugation corrodes victims’ health and self-worth, how it can be toxic and dehumanizing. Also, there’s an invisible man. Read More

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The Assistant: Working for the Man, and the Whole Rotten System

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julia Garner in "The Assistant")

Pronouns work overtime in The Assistant. Characters are constantly discussing the whims and whereabouts of their imperious boss, but they never refer to him by name. “He’s in a meeting.” “I don’t have him right now.” “He wants you on the flight to LA.” They may as well be talking about God. You might know him better as Harvey Weinstein.

But let’s not get too cute. The genius of this sobering movie, which was written and directed by Kitty Green, is that despite its painstaking detail, it isn’t about any particular person. It is instead a searing indictment of an entire ecosystem, a culture of domination, silence, and complicity. Rather than narrow its scope to the exploits and exploitations of a specific individual, The Assistant seeks to shine a harsh light on a prejudiced and predatory industry. The paradox of the film—the contradiction that Green deploys so thrillingly and, at times, frustratingly—is that, while its ambitions are undeniably dramatic, it unfolds with an absolute minimum of actual drama. Read More

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Ranking Every Movie of 2019 (well, sort of)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
That's a lot of movies.

Each of the past four years, the Manifesto has engaged in a fun and ludicrous exercise wherein we ranked every movie we saw that year. It’s always been a profoundly silly column, one that’s more designed to inspire debate than to operate as any sort of official statement of my opinions; for example, it’s provoked heated reactions like “How dare you disrespect Paddington 2!” and “Dude, you ranked Avengers: Infinity War 40 spots below Aquaman, what the fuck?” While I always enjoy getting yelled at on the internet, I acknowledge that these rankings are flawed, because they give the appearance of an ironclad hierarchy that doesn’t really exist. Last year, I ranked First Man 17th and Hereditary 25th; did I really think that the former was significantly better than the latter?

Still, I maintain that a comprehensive year-end wrap-up has its virtues. For one, it serves as a handy recordkeeping function, allowing me to track what I watched and (perhaps more importantly) what I didn’t. It also features a #servicey component: I always include in parentheses, along with the name of each movie’s director and its respective ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, any service where it’s streaming (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.). In theory, this is helpful for readers who have the ubiquitous questions of “What should I watch?” and “How can I watch it?” Read More

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The Best Movies of 2019

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists

Cinema is dead. Long live cinema.

I don’t mean to be glib. These are turbulent times in the film trade. The ever-fluctuating artistic topography that is the movies somehow felt even more precarious than usual in 2019, with industry-wide fault lines cracking into seismic shifts. You’ve heard the cries of panic: about a sequel-saturated marketplace, about a dearth of original screenplays, about viewers watching new films—or, really, digitized reproductions—on their couch (typically via Netflix) rather than in the theater. Sure, some formulas remain sacred; after all, we can still count on Hollywood churning out safe products of hagiography, particularly where musical legends are concerned. (After Bohemian Rhapsody claimed four Oscars in 2018, this past year gave us Rocketman.) Yet there is nevertheless an uncertainty gripping global cinema, a sense of shifting currents and irregular tides. Even if 2020 is set to see Timothée Chalamet play Bob Dylan, I’m compelled to note that the movies, they are a-changin’. Read More

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