Biopic

Molly’s Game: Shoving All-In, with Her Cards and Her Soul

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba in Aaron Sorkin's "Molly's Game"

Molly’s Game is about an obscenely intelligent drug addict who wields her intellect and verbal dexterity to achieve professional fortune and personal satisfaction. Which drug addict, you might ask? The film’s protagonist is Molly Bloom, the so-called “Poker Princess” who ran outrageously high-stakes games of Texas hold ’em for movie stars, hedge fund managers, socialites, and other reprobates. But scrub the gender-specific pronoun from the description, and we could just as easily be talking about Aaron Sorkin, the uber-literate Oscar-winner who battled substance abuse on his way to becoming one of America’s most recognizable and divisive wordsmiths. It’s easy to see what attracted Sorkin to Bloom, and to perceive Molly’s Game—his crackling, robustly entertaining directorial debut—as a kind of cracked-mirror self-portrait, as well as a flick about a babe with brains.

Yet even if Molly’s Game is in part a stealth vanity project for Sorkin, it also functions as a well-calibrated response to one of the most common complaints lobbed against him: his inability to write strong roles for women. With her sky-high stilettos and low-cut cocktail dresses (“the Cinemax version of myself”), Molly can occasionally suggest a male screenwriter’s fantasy of feminine sexuality—in fact, she makes this very point to one of her clients who pathetically confesses his love for her—but she is too forceful a presence to be reduced to a mere object. Brought to flaring, ferocious life by Jessica Chastain, Molly reveals herself as a number of things over the course of the movie—a manipulator, a visionary, a lamb, a lioness—but in no way is she a minor player. Read More

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Hidden Figures: Black Women Have the Bright Stuff

Jeremy BeckReviews
Janelle Monáe, Taraji P. Henson, and Octavia Spencer in "Hidden Figures"

In the opening scene of Rushmore, a math teacher asks Jason Schwartzman whether he might be able to come to the blackboard and solve an impossibly complex equation. Schwartzman’s character does so effortlessly and receives the adoring congratulations of his classmates, at which point Wes Anderson reveals that the sequence is a dream. Hidden Figures, Theodore Melfi’s sincere and sappy biopic of three black women who worked at NASA during the height of the Space Race, is essentially a feature-length version of this scene, minus the concluding fake-out. It fancies itself a hard-hitting historical drama, but it’s really a frothy, wish-fulfillment fantasy.

And what’s wrong with that? Hidden Figures may not trouble your mind or get under your skin, but it does provide a welcome, feel-good tonic for these troubled times. It insists, with disarming directness, that the evils of prejudice and entrenchment will always succumb to the virtues of hard work and human decency. Its period setting is one of extreme unease (as opposed to now?), but its tone is unabashedly wholesome and reassuring. Read More

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Loving: Found Guilty for Finding Love

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as a real-life couple in "Loving"

Loving is a very pleasant American movie about a very unpleasant time in American history. It tells a story of adversity, perseverance, and ultimate triumph, and it proceeds in a rigorous straight line, with minimal eccentricity or embellishment. This is perhaps to be expected, given that Loving belongs to a specific subgenre: the earnest and well-meaning docudrama. But it is also something of a surprise, given that its writer and director is Jeff Nichols, whose previous films (Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special) were largely off-kilter and opaque. Nichols tends to focus on odd protagonists—a delusional laborer, a wandering gangster, an alien boy—but even more central to his filmmaking are his disdain for convention and his gift for unpredictability. Yet anyone with access to Wikipedia could comfortably predict how Loving will play out.

This does not make it bad. On the contrary, it can be satisfying to watch a familiar story unfold on screen, particularly when it is well-told and well-acted. And of course, the movie’s theme—that stoic decency can defeat senseless bigotry—is a worthy one, equally relevant now as when the events of the film took place. Still, the challenge for Nichols is to make Loving stimulating as a piece of cinema as well as a lesson in history. Given his meat-and-potatoes approach to this material, it’s a marvel that he even half-succeeds. Read More

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Hacksaw Ridge: In the Shadow of Death, Bearing Witness, But Not Arms

Jeremy BeckReviews
Andrew Garfield is a pacifist at war in Mel Gibson’s "Hacksaw Ridge"

Early in Hacksaw Ridge, a jittery blood donor attempts to impress a pretty nurse with a spectacularly cheesy pickup line. Yesterday, when she jabbed a needle into his arm, was the first time they’d met; today, he insists that he needs a transfusion because ever since he saw her, his heart’s been beating so fast that he’s nearly out of blood. “That’s pretty corny,” she responds, but when he asks if that makes it bad, she blushes and continues, “I didn’t say that.” Hacksaw Ridge, the fifth movie directed by Mel Gibson, is also pretty corny—OK, it’s very corny. It is also sappy, grandiose, and preachy. Does that make it bad? Not by a long shot.

That aforementioned blood donor is Desmond Doss, played as an adult with sly, aw-shucks charm by Andrew Garfield. We first meet him as a boy (portrayed by Darcy Bryce) in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where he roughhouses with his brother before inadvertently knocking him unconscious. Fearing for his sibling’s life, the young sinner slumps into an adjoining room, where he gazes at a crude illustration of a murder, ornamented with the text of one of the Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill.” This blunt, didactic sequence quickly establishes two things: one, Doss will grow up to be a deeply religious pacifist, and two, Gibson has no use for subtlety. Read More

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The Birth of a Nation: Black Men Fighting Back, Then and Now

Jeremy BeckReviews
Nate Parker in the complex, controversial "Birth of a Nation"

No movie exists entirely within its own bubble, but the clamor surrounding The Birth of a Nation is so loud, it’s threatened to silence the actual film. When it premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, The Birth of a Nation was hailed not only as a good movie—it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award—but as a timely and potent corrective to the monochrome of the Academy Awards, which were squirming through the second consecutive year of #OscarsSoWhite. But in August, reports surfaced that Nate Parker, the film’s writer-director as well as its star, had been charged with rape in 1999 along with Jean McGianni Celestin, who shares a story credit with Parker. In 2001, Parker was acquitted (Celestin was convicted, but the verdict was overturned on appeal); then, in 2012, his accuser killed herself. This tragedy—combined with the fact that the film features a rape whose accuracy has been questioned—ignited a firestorm that has engulfed the picture, resulting in boycotts, short-circuited interviews, and a marketing campaign that could charitably be described as tentative. Both the breadth and the volume of the rhetoric surrounding The Birth of a Nation‘s release make it challenging to look past the movie’s context to see its content.

Yet here we are. By which I mean, my job as a film critic is not to analyze The Birth of a Nation’s Best Picture prospects, nor is it to reconcile Nate Parker the person with Nate Parker the artist. (It is certainly not to determine the validity of the sexual assault allegations against Parker or to assess the prospect of causation with the alleged victim’s suicide, tasks for which I am wholly unqualified.) It is instead to evaluate this movie as, well, a movie. And on that score, perhaps the most interesting thing about The Birth of a Nation is how ordinary it is. What we have here is a prototypical biopic, alternately stimulating and stultifying. You’ve seen movies like this before, which means you are much more likely to remember this one for what it represents than for what it contains. Read More

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