Movies aren’t better just because they’re sad. Sure, the Oscars tend to favor dramas over comedies, but making people feel bad isn’t an inherent artistic good. As with any other subgenre, the success of depressing pictures hinges on qualities beyond their deflating subject matter: the specificity of the characters, the nuance of the performances, the skill of the filmmaking.
This past weekend saw the expanded release of two small, family-centric movies whose tone can hardly be called cheerful. Both execute their assignment of shaking you up, though only one breaks new cinematic ground in the process. Read More
Miranda Priestly may be the world’s worst boss, but there’s a reason for her viciousness. She’s a genius, a visionary, and she mistreats her employees not out of sadism or malice but because they are impeding her divine greatness. She is unconquerable—or so we thought. The Devil Wears Prada 2, the intriguing and maddening sequel to the 2006 adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s novel, finds Miranda locked in battle—not just for the future of her company, Runway, but for the soul of an entire industry—and she seems to be losing the war. Her chief adversary isn’t a rival editor or a meddlesome underling but a more pitiless, insidious force: private equity.
Eddies of irony swirl around Prada 2, not least that a mercenary brand extension to a 20-year-old property purports to extol the virtues of old-fashioned creativity. But the screenplay, by Aline Brosh McKenna, deserves partial credit for grappling with genuine ideas, rather than simply drafting off of its predecessor’s legacy. Consider the movie’s opening scene, which finds Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), Miranda’s former assistant who fled Runway for more fulfilling pastures, accepting an award for her hard-hitting reporting at the fictional New York Vanguard. At first, such feting of journalism feels horribly self-congratulatory and dated—what is this, Sweet Smell of Success?—but just as Andy’s name is called, she and the rest of her noble colleagues receive a text informing them of their mass firing. She might as well sell that trophy for rent money, if only anyone would buy it. Read More
The tagline for David Lowery’s Mother Mary reads, “This is not a ghost story.” For certain cinephiles, this seems less like an ominous pronouncement than a bizarre statement of the obvious. Of course this isn’t A Ghost Story; that was Lowery’s 2017 experimental drama, which found Casey Affleck standing under a sheet and Rooney Mara stuffing pie in her face. It was challenging and slow, but it rewarded patience, with a remarkable third act that posed provocative questions about love, marriage, societal evolution, and the whole damn human condition.
Mother Mary is similarly ambitious and not nearly as good. But it has its moments, with impressive individual scenes and striking images. It wields its beauty in service of a thin and listless narrative, but taglines and titles aside, “story” has never been Lowery’s department. Read More
It’s a classic meet-cute. He spies her in a coffee shop reading a book. He has to talk to her, so he quickly googles the novel and approaches her with some canned, cheesy material about how much it spoke to him. He keeps stumbling over his words, panicking when she refuses to engage, only for her to startle and remove an unseen AirPod from her left ear. “I’m deaf in this one,” she explains, and he starts to melt, realizing she didn’t hear a damn thing he said, but then she throws him an unexpected lifeline: “Do you want to start again?”
This is the delightful opening scene of The Drama, a bewitching and provocative movie that initially unfolds as a storybook romantic comedy. Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are the perfect couple: smart, attractive, blessed with verbal and physical chemistry. Their courtship checks all of the boxes, in particular a magical first kiss that would be the envy of Jane Austen. It’s now the week of their wedding, and we learn the details of their fairy-tale engagement as Charlie runs a draft of his speech past his best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), who’s so moved he starts crying. Everything is so light and sweet and charming, you wonder if Kristoffer Borgli, the film’s writer and director, somehow got the title wrong. He didn’t. Read More
She’s only made three movies, but Julia Ducournau has already built her own cinematic festival of female suffering and endurance, focusing on women plagued by peculiar conditions. In Raw, the heroine seemed perfectly normal until she was overcome with a genetic craving that compelled her to eat her sister’s severed finger. Her challenges were trivial compared to the lead in Titane, a murderess whose automotive copulations slowly transformed her internal fluids into motor oil. Next to her, the tribulations of Alpha, the 13-year-old girl at the center of Ducournau’s eponymous new whatsit, are relatively prosaic; she just got a tattoo via a dirty needle and may have become infected with a strange virus. This quickly proves to be the least of her problems.
Having seen all of Ducournau’s features, I’m not sure that I’ve properly understood any of them. This is, mostly, a compliment. Aesthetically speaking, the French provocateur is a gifted and fearless stylist, using robust techniques and bold aural and visual flourishes. Intellectually, her works tend to be ambitious and enigmatic, probing thorny ideas but refusing to neatly spell out their themes. This can be vexing, but the inherent tension—the collision between muscular filmmaking and knotty storytelling—is also enveloping. You enjoy getting lost in the labyrinth. Read More
