Biopic

Saturday Night: Kvetch Comedy

Jeremy BeckReviews
Gabriel LaBelle in Saturday Night

Jason Reitman likes two things: chaos, and smart people overcoming it. Aaron Eckhart’s amoral lobbyist in Thank You For Smoking, Elliot Page’s arch teenager in Juno, George Clooney’s slick consultant in Up in the Air—they were all sharper than everyone else, and their superior intellect helped them navigate sticky situations. So it makes sense that Saturday Night, Reitman’s brisk and entertaining and somewhat dubious recreation of the inaugural production of Saturday Night Live, centers on a brilliant young man ensnared in a thicket of logistical complications. Can our clever and resourceful hero somehow beat the odds and get the show ready for air?

You surely know the answer to that question, even if the abbreviation “SNL” is somehow foreign to you. Reitman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Gil Kenan, has structured the movie as a ticking-clock thriller, but it really unfolds in the language of the underdog sports drama. The cast and crew of the show’s production resemble a ragtag batch of hotheaded athletes and quirky assistants, a fragmented bunch whose clashing egos and disparate abilities must be marshaled by the beleaguered head coach into a unified team. The putative suspense derives from whether this unruly squad can put aside their differences and assemble a functional variety hour—can score a goal, as it were—before the final buzzer that’s destined to go off half an hour before midnight. Read More

Read more

Ferrari: Race for Impact

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adam Driver in Ferrari

Is Michael Mann secretly a conventional filmmaker? The auteur is renowned for his bracing sense of style—the sleek digital photography, the dreamy music, the propulsive momentum—but he often wields his technique in the service of familiar, fact-based narratives. There’s nothing wrong with this; Ali is a solid sports movie, while the underrated Public Enemies bristles with an electricity that belies its stature as a docudrama. Now comes Ferrari, a serviceable picture that can’t help feeling disappointingly ordinary, lacking Ali’s personal depth and Public Enemies’ invigorating… well, drive.

To the movie’s credit, it unfolds over a narrow period of time, disdaining the swollen hagiography that afflicts so many biopics. The brunt of its action takes place in 1957, when Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is facing a reckoning in both his personal and professional lives. On the home front, his already-strained marriage with his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz)—still grieving the death of their son, who suffered from muscular dystrophy—is at risk of collapse, given that he’s struggling to continually conceal the existence of the boy he fathered during World War II with his mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley). And in his business, he’s receiving reports of unprofitability and a corresponding erosion of the Ferrari brand—a diminution he hopes to reverse by winning the Mille Miglia, a race that (in case your grasp of Italian is even worse than mine) runs 1,000 stressful miles and carves through the country’s public roadways. Read More

Read more

Napoleon: Till Death Do Us Bonaparte

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joaquin Phoenix in Napoleon

Great-man biopics come with their own prepackaged one-word titles—Oppenheimer, Elvis, Mank—so it isn’t as though Ridley Scott calling his new movie Napoleon demonstrates a criminal lack of imagination. Besides, what were his alternatives? A 1987 miniseries was titled Napoleon and Josephine: A Love Story, but while Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) and Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby) are indeed the two principle characters of this grand, unwieldy epic, they are far from the only figures that have captured Scott’s interest. A more accurate summation of his narrative and thematic concerns might have read, “Napoleon and Josephine and cannons.”

Essentially, Napoleon is two movies in one, and they aren’t so much at war with each other as independent from one another, like separate regiments tasked with fortifying distinct strongholds. As one would anticipate from a Ridley Scott picture, one piece centers on Bonaparte’s military exploits, with large-scale battle sequences and imperial consequences; it’s pretty good, if flawed. Less expected, though perhaps not shocking following the nuanced gender dynamics of Scott’s The Last Duel, is the film’s study of Napoleon and Josephine’s marriage, with all its kinks and complications; it’s pretty good, too. Yet despite its discrete qualities, Napoleon amounts to less than the sum of its pretty-good parts, resulting in an impressive-looking production that’s as predictable as it is entertaining. Read More

Read more

Priscilla: Can’t Help Bawling in Love

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla

It takes roughly 15 minutes before Priscilla announces itself as a Sofia Coppola movie. Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny), a meek 14-year-old American girl living on an army base in Germany, has just shared her first kiss with Elvis Presley (Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi), possibly the most popular musical artist on the planet. As she glides down her school hallway—oblivious to her surroundings, deep in the swoon of adolescent love—“Crimson and Clover” flares to life on the soundtrack. The year is 1959, nearly a decade before Tommy James yearned for a girl he hardly knew to come walking over, but Coppola has never let anachronisms get in the way of emotions. Priscilla is hopelessly smitten, and Priscilla represents Coppola’s attempt to capture both the purity of her rapture and the agony of its inevitable deflation.

Strangely, this blissful sequence is something of an outlier—a fleeting moment of canny cinematic imagination in a picture that is broadly functional and orthodox. It’s weird, because conceptually speaking, Priscilla’s pairing of artist and subject seems ideal. Even setting aside her filial connections to Hollywood royalty, Coppola has long been fascinated by celebrity, having considered it through the various lenses of middle-aged ennui (Lost in Translation), historical opulence (Marie Antoinette), and vicarious obsession (The Bling Ring). Yet where those movies all hummed with vivacious technique and energetic style, Priscilla is oddly conventional. Apart from some sharp music cues and a few arresting images (such as a woman walking down a corridor bathed in red light), it feels like anyone could have made it. Read More

Read more

Golda: Funny, She Doesn’t Look Shrewish

Jeremy BeckReviews
Helen Mirren in Golda

Was Golda Meir a brilliant stateswoman or a power-hungry extremist? A crusader for justice or an enabler of discrimination? You’ve likely already made up your mind on such matters, and even if you haven’t, Golda is unlikely to inform your opinion. Directed by Guy Nattiv from a script by Nicholas Martin, it is a thin and meager picture, providing little insight into its subject beyond a vague intimation of her tenacity. If it defies Truffaut’s maxim that war movies inevitably glorify battle, it does so by virtue of being boring.

Not bloated, though. To its credit, Golda doesn’t try to contemplate the entirety of its heroine’s life; its 100 minutes contain no flashbacks to her childhood or formative sequences depicting her political ascendancy. Instead, the screenplay adopts what might be called the Lincoln approach, attempting to build a sweeping character study by chronicling a single famous event. That would be the Yom Kippur War of 1973, a 20-day conflict in which Israel reeled from a two-pronged attack initiated by Syria and Egypt. The theory of the movie is that, by showing us Meir’s behavior in the face of this catastrophe—her keen intelligence, her dry wit, her steely resolve—it will turn a narrow slice of history into a rich and evocative portrait. Read More

Read more