Drama

The Old Man & the Gun: Hands Up, Please, This Is a Respectful Robbery

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sissy Spacek and Robert Redford in "The Old Man & the Gun"

Describing Robert De Niro’s vicious mobster in Goodfellas, Ray Liotta says, “What he really loved to do was steal; I mean, he actually enjoyed it.” David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun also follows a real-life criminal with a genuine passion for robbery, but that’s pretty much where the similarities between the two films end. Never one to tackle genre material head-on—Ain’t Them Bodies Saints was ostensibly about lovers on a shooting spree, but it was really just a collage of pretty Texas pictures overlaid by Malickian voiceover—Lowery paints this story’s true-crime elements with a warm, humanist gloss. What would typically play as a gritty thriller—there’s even a cops-and-robbers angle, with an obsessed detective who makes it his mission to capture this audacious thief—instead unfolds as a leisurely character study of aging and contentment.

Mostly, The Old Man & the Gun is a showcase for Robert Redford, appearing in what is supposedly his final role. He plays Forrest Tucker, the felon who, as relayed in the David Grann article that formed the basis for Lowery’s screenplay, robbed nearly 100 banks over a 60-year span, escaping from prison more than a dozen times in the process. That’s quite the rap sheet, but Redford doesn’t exaggerate Tucker’s legend or puff up his stature. Instead, he delivers a sly and twinkly performance, investing this sundance elder with a strange integrity that’s part-pride, part-grace. Read More

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First Man: Making History, One Small Step at a Time

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Gosling shoots for the moon in "First Man".

Just how crazy did you have to be to become an astronaut? These guys clearly must have had a screw loose, because so did their spaceships. At one point in Damien Chazelle’s First Man, as intrepid explorers are piling into a bucket of bolts that’s designed to blast them into the stratosphere, the crew struggles to fasten somebody’s seat belt. The solution: “Anybody got a Swiss Army knife?” That’s right, these are multi-million-dollar missions spearheaded by the country’s greatest minds, yet somehow they’re repairing their vehicles with trinkets from your 10-year-old’s tool kit.

That scene is a blackly comic moment, but it also illuminates the forces that drive First Man’s characters, and its maker. Chazelle’s Whiplash was a bracing portrait of single-minded obsession in the pursuit of perfection; his follow-up, La La Land, was simply perfect, but it also involved artists who dreamed of glory and self-fulfillment. Yet where those movies were taut and intimate, First Man operates on a grand scale, seeking to compress nine years of scientific exploration into two-plus hours of white-knuckle adventure. It’s a monumental undertaking, and for the first time, you can see Chazelle strain, laboring to deliver the epic goods. But he remains a prodigiously gifted filmmaker, and even if First Man lacks the effortless fluidity of his prior works, it also routinely serves up sequences and images that are, literally and figuratively, out of this world. Read More

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A Star Is Born: The Song Remains the Same, But with New Music

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in "A Star Is Born"

As meta monologues go, it’s hard to imagine one more openly symbolic than the speech that Bobby (Sam Elliott) gives in A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper’s sweet and soulful love story. Music, Bobby drawls, is just 12 notes between any octave. “It’s the same story, told over and over, forever; all the artist can offer the world is how they see those 12 notes.” Bobby is speaking about the constraining nature of music—a medium whose potential for variety is virtually limitless, but never mind—but it’s impossible not to read his remarks in the context of this movie, which is a remake of a remake of a remake. The cinematic notes underlying A Star Is Born have already been played. What matters now isn’t their sequence, but their presentation.

And measured against that yardstick, the film is a success. Its story is obviously familiar, but Cooper’s execution of it is spirited and stirring. It rather seamlessly transports the hoary themes of the 1937 original—a classic tale of fame, persistence, and possession—into the complexities of the present day, managing to feel timeless and contemporary at once. And perhaps most importantly, it features high-quality music, including a handful of truly triumphant scenes that help transform its leading lady from a pop phenomenon into a movie star. Read More

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Colette: Carnal Explorations, with a Parisian Gloss

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keira Knightley in "Colette"

Early in Colette, the entrepreneur Henry Gauthier-Villars—better known as Willy, his nom de plume—lays out his plan to publish a wildly popular novel. He conceives of an epic work that’s both refined and ribald, literate enough to appeal to highbrows but sufficiently tawdry to intrigue “the unwashed masses”. Then he pauses, musing, “Maybe it’s the other way around.”

He might be onto something. The issue endemic to many period pieces—this one opens in 1892 and spans roughly 15 years—is a surfeit of gentility, and a corresponding lack of vulgarity, like a catered dinner party with no spice and no impudent conversation. Colette plainly has the handsomeness part of the equation down pat, sporting a luxuriant score, ravishing costumes, and fluid camerawork. What surprises and enchants about this movie, which was directed by Wash Westmoreland from a script he wrote with Richard Glatzer (his late husband) and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is how breezily entertaining it is. Colette is elegant, yes, but it is also funny, sexy, angry, and even a little bit naughty. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko: Gauche is good. Read More

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Puzzle: Falling to Pieces, and Putting Them Together

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kelly Macdonald searches for meaning in "Puzzle"

In one of the few lyrical stretches of Puzzle, Marc Turtletaub’s sensitive and sad new drama, Agnes (the perpetually unappreciated Kelly Macdonald) rides a New York subway car while a blind man stands in the center and sings “Ave Maria” in a plaintive falsetto. Not long after, Agnes is served tea by a woman named Maria, and she points out the oddity that the namesake of Schubert’s piece is now providing her with a beverage. Her tea-drinking companion is unmoved, dismissing the parallel as an act of mere randomness that carries no cosmic significance. Agnes remains unconvinced: “It has to mean something.”

Does it, though? Given the sheer size of the universe, I’m inclined to agree with her partner and hesitate to ascribe any meaning to such an apparent coincidence. But it’s hard to blame Agnes, seeing as her own, private search for meaning is the animating force behind Puzzle, a movie about a seemingly stock figure who suddenly resolves to discover more of herself, and of the world. It’s also hard not to turn the question around and aim it at Puzzle itself. This is an unusually gentle and well-observed film, with a peculiar attention to its central characters and their rhythmic dynamics, but what does it really mean? Read More

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