Joker: Violence. Murder. Insanity. It’s a Riot!

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joaquin Phoenix in "Joker"

Borne on the waves of controversy and leaving a trail of smoggy fumes in its wake, Joker is arguably the movie of the year. Not the best movie of the year, mind you—not even close. But while the events of this strange and faintly maddening film take place in 1981, in the fictional realm of Gotham City, it is plainly designed to tap into the anxieties of the present moment, to Say Something significant, whether about art, commerce, politics, or society. It screams to be pored over, analyzed, debated; it’s a movie that also feels like the belabored setup for a podcast. Does it glorify incel culture, or is it a pointed critique of toxic masculinity? Is it a scabrous attack on the wealth gap, or an ardent defense of the established social order? Is it a violent fantasy, or a repudiation of violence?

In theory, these are interesting questions, but Joker, which was directed by Todd Phillips from a script he wrote with Scott Silver, has no interest in answering them. That may in itself sound bold; after all, some of the world’s greatest art is open to vigorous interpretation. Yet the great irony of this movie—the gag that surely has its maker imitating its antihero, cackling in high-pitched glee—is how meaningless it is. It feints at profundity, but it does not trouble itself with forming actual ideas. It is less a Rorschach test than a brightly colored finger painting. It splashes the frame with divisive topics—police brutality, mental illness, social unrest, powerful men, victimized women—and then passes off such haphazard daubing for the articulation of genuine themes. To the extent Joker has a philosophy of any interest, it is that it proclaims itself to be interesting. Read More

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Official Secrets: Blowing the Whistle, and Facing the Consequences

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keira Knightley in "Official Secrets"

Three days before I saw Official Secrets, the Washington Post released a story that provided new details regarding a previously filed whistleblower complaint, which alleged that President Trump had made an improper promise to a foreign leader. The whistleblower, a member of the intelligence community, had felt compelled to take action because he believed that Trump’s conduct rose to the level of an “urgent concern”, which appears to be spook-speak for A Big Fucking Deal.

The aftermath of these explosive revelations is currently unspooling on various media: newspapers and their online affiliates, with their wide range of clickbait headlines and weary fact-checks; Twitter, with its armchair policy experts and viral memes; and—the President’s primary source of information gathering—TV news programs, with their ranty guests and exasperated moderators. The pages of history surrounding these events are currently being written; movies dramatizing them will surely pop up in the ensuing years and decades. In a less insane, more cinematically karmic world, this ongoing furor might have served as serendipitous marketing for Official Secrets, a movie which—if you can believe it—involves a civil servant in an intelligence agency who blows the whistle on her government after discovering that it’s engaged in illegal activity regarding foreign countries. Read More

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Ad Astra: Distant Papa, Can You Hear Me?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Brad Pitt in "Ad Astra"

Early in Ad Astra, James Gray’s searching, often astonishing, deeply frustrating new film, a man finds himself sitting alone at a kitchen table. A woman, whom we presume to be his wife, enters the background of the frame and starts to walk into an adjoining room, then stops and tilts her head to look at her husband. At this point, most directors would pull focus from the man to the woman, allowing us to discern her expression, be it pensive, affectionate, or disapproving. Gray, however, keeps his camera trained on the man in the foreground, watching his impassive features as he remains still, refusing to turn and look at his spouse. The woman leaves the room as she arrived, a blurred outline: hazy, indefinite, unknowable.

In terms of plot, this is one of Ad Astra’s least essential scenes. But it’s still a revealing moment, demonstrating both its director’s purposeful technique and his thematic and visual priorities. The man at the table isn’t just the movie’s main character but our sole point of entry. He appears in every scene of the film and conveys its lofty ideas, whether through his wistful demeanor or via one of his numerous, egregiously unnecessary voiceovers; here, he informs us that he is focused on his mission to the exclusion of all else. Yet while Ad Astra aspires to be both a bold adventure and a poignant character study—a somber interstellar epic that explores the mysteries of the universe by way of one man’s scarred psyche—its more accurate embodiment is the blurred outline of that faceless woman. With his customary craft, Gray has made a sweeping study of humanity that, despite its strenuous efforts, never feels especially humane. Read More

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Hustlers: The American Dream, Stripped to Its Core

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu in "Hustlers"

In the midst of issuing a pep talk to his gang of ravenous stockbrokers in The Wolf of Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort equates his sleazy brokerage firm with America itself. “This is the land of opportunity,” he proclaims to the phalanx of slickly dressed, amoral sycophants arrayed around him on the umpteenth floor of a Manhattan high-rise. Hustlers, the robustly entertaining new movie from Lorene Scafaria, is in some ways a distaff spin on Wolf and other Scorsese flicks, seeing how it revels in greed, glory, and excess. But it’s also something of a rejoinder, a reminder that the ever-elusive American dream—in all its triumph, danger, and venality—isn’t just reserved for rich white men, but is feverishly sought by all corners of society. Here, the predatory goons from Wolf have become the marks, and the ornamental women who festooned its various bacchanalia are now the enterprising ringleaders.

Hustlers establishes its dual intentions with its very first shot, a fluid oner that follows Destiny (Constance Wu) as she exits the dressing room at a gentlemen’s club and strolls onto the main floor, along with her comrades in armless evening wear. At first, the tone is one of boisterous enjoyment: The costumes are sexy, the music is catchy, and everyone seems to be having a good time. But when the tracking shot ends and the cutting begins—first gradually, then with greater speed—the cheerful atmosphere begins to curdle, Destiny’s plastered smile occasionally slipping into a grimace as she is (literally) manhandled or (perhaps worse) ignored by her callous clientele. By the time we see her regurgitating half her tips to managers and bouncers, Scafaria has efficiently established the work of an exotic dancer as just that, work: long, hard, and decidedly unglamorous. Read More

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It Chapter Two: The Losers Are Bigger, and So Is the Clown

Jeremy BeckReviews
Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise in "It Chapter Two"

Size matters in It Chapter Two, and that’s bad news for everyone, unless you’re a special-effects technician or Paul Bunyan. Big, loud, and long—but not powerful, memorable, or scary—Andy Muschietti’s follow-up to his 2017 smash hit completes the saga of six misfits and their supernatural battle against one angry clown. But while this sequel flashes forward 27 years, alighting on the members of the self-proclaimed Losers Club as disenchanted adults, its sensibility is distinctly childlike. Dismissive of subtlety and ignorant of tension, Chapter Two stomps around wildly, craving your attention and desperate for your dread. Its creepy clown—named Pennywise, of course, and again played by Bill Skarsgård with streaks of red gashing his pasty-white makeup—may remain a force of malevolent evil, but at times he seems less like the movie’s villain than its spirit animal.

Not that he’s around all that much. In fact, aside from the prologue—in which a pleasant evening at a carnival turns icky and gory, with a paranormal murder preceded by a vulgar, distinctly human hate crime—Pennywise is a nonentity for most of Chapter Two, lurking in the periphery or cloaking himself in other forms of varying ghastliness. It’s an approach that makes some theoretical sense; the clown is such a nightmarish symbol, Muschietti doesn’t want to dilute his gruesome power through overuse. And his solution—to terrorize his characters, and his audience, by subjecting them to a twisted menagerie of misshapen monsters—might have worked, had the director exhibited some grasp of how to transfigure computer-generated phantasms into genuine fright. Read More

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