The spaceship has a garden. Somewhere, amid the instrument
panels and the spartan bunks and the anti-gravity suits, there is a verdant room
full of plants, moss, and dirt. It’s as if the astronauts, saddened by the
prospect of leaving Earth behind, insisted on bringing a bit of earth along with
them.
This contrast—between the personal and the fantastical, between
presence and absence, between flowering life and merciless death—is emblematic
of High Life, Claire Denis’ strange,
frustrating, beguiling new film. Part sci-fi thriller, part philosophical
meditation, it is always challenging, often boring, and occasionally
mesmerizing. Read More
Last year, the documentary RBG attempted to honor the extraordinary life of Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, charting her path from able young mind to Harvard Law student to U.S.
Supreme Court Justice to feminist icon to internet meme. It was a
well-intentioned effort that suffered from the usual pitfalls of cinematic
hagiography, struggling to compress 85 years of the life of one of the most
important legal figures in modern American history into a tidy 98 minutes. On the Basis of Sex, the new Ginsburg
biopic from Mimi Leder, takes a narrower approach, homing in on two key periods
in its subject’s life: her challenges as one of the few female students at
Harvard, and her early labors as a litigator striving for women’s equality. Where
RBG’s impact was glancing—to borrow
from Supreme Court terminology, it felt more like a syllabus than a full
opinion—Leder’s film lands a blow with something resembling force.
If the boxing metaphor seems peculiar, bear in mind that,
despite trafficking in bookish disciplines and legal arcana, On the Basis of Sex is essentially a
sports movie. Its heroine, played with poise and pluck by Felicity Jones, is
the proverbial underdog, fighting to rise through the ranks and topple an
entrenched dynasty. Its villains, most notably personified by Sam Waterston as
Harvard’s dean of students, are pillars of the establishment, wielding their
superior resources—money, power, connections—to extend their unbroken streak of
competitive dominance. There are triumphs and setbacks, eager rookies and cagey
veterans, strategic coaching maneuvers and breezy montages. There is even a Big
Game, with a climactic moment designed to be as suspenseful as the final jump
shot in Hoosiers. Read More
Sure, Brexit is bonkers, but should we have expected anything else from England? As the movies of 2018 seem intent on reminding us, this is a nation with a thoroughly absurd history, a vast empire that routinely suffered internecine conflict and insurrection. After The Favourite showed us the ludicrous extravagances of Stuart England, now comes Mary Queen of Scots to take on the Tudors, when Catholics and Protestants were mortal enemies and Henry VIII cycled through queens like a hedge fund manager on Tinder. Of course, Henry died not long after Mary Stuart was born, but as this engrossing and enjoyable film relays, his spirit of monarchial chaos raged on. Read More
For someone whose smile is insured for $30 million, Julia Roberts is often glum on screen, consciously pushing back against the stereotype that she’s only persuasive in cheery rom-coms. But in too many dramatic roles—Secret in Their Eyes, August: Osage County, Closer—the gifted actress overcompensates, throttling down her charisma so severely, only an empty shell remains. So it’s gratifying to see Roberts deliver as rich and complete a performance as she gives in Ben Is Back, where she plays Holly, a woman who’s simultaneously elated and terrified. The source of Holly’s joy and fear is the return of—sorry, no points for guessing—Ben (Lucas Hedges), her son, a born charmer who is also a drug addict. Read More
Early in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, two astronauts frantically attempt to propel themselves back to a docking station by way of a jetpack, their tiny white suits looking like stars that dot the infinite blackness of space. Early in Roma, Cuarón’s new film for Netflix, a man slowly pulls his car into a narrow garage, repeatedly rotating his wheels and pulling in his mirrors to avoid scraping the walls. As parking jobs go, the stakes here are rather less severe, given that the man is seeking to avoid minor property damage rather than trying to cheat death; it’s a scene about a Ford Galaxie, not, you know, the galaxy. But Cuarón’s camera captures the process with the same spooky intimacy, locking on the sedan’s boxy corners and bulky wheels as they swivel to and fro, searching for safety. The director’s craftsmanship never wavers, whether he’s chronicling explorers careening into space or cars rolling over dog shit.
In empirical terms, Roma is a smaller film than Gravity, Children of Men, or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; it doesn’t make heavy use of thriller tropes or special effects, and it doesn’t take place in dystopian or fantastical worlds where humanity’s very survival is at risk. But it shares with those movies a certain philosophical principle, the persistent belief that cinema is a tool for telling thorny, personal stories on a grand scale. In some ways, Roma is a low-key family drama, but if its narrative occasionally verges on mundane, its technique is never less than extraordinary. Read More
