Drama

Tully: My Queendom for a Nap, or a Nanny

Jeremy BeckReviews
Charlize Theron in "Tully"

Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody are good with words. Reitman’s first feature, Thank You for Smoking, was an acid satire about an amoral lobbyist with the gift of gab; for his next, Juno, he took Cody’s zinger-filled script and turned it into a sweet study of teenage loneliness and connection. But it’s telling that in Reitman and Cody’s subsequent collaboration, Young Adult, the jokes flowed slower as the characters got older, the rapid-fire one-liners replaced by caustic insults and grim observations. The trend continues now with Tully, a warm and thoughtful meditation on family and motherhood that’s less antic but no less resonant. Sonically speaking, if Juno was a clatter of snickers and shouts, Tully is a heavy sigh, the deep breath that you exhale as you collapse onto the sofa at the end of a long, hard, numbingly familiar day.

If this suggests that Tully is a wearying experience, well, it is and it isn’t. Certainly, Reitman and his star, Charlize Theron, articulate the film’s atmosphere of groaning exhaustion with discomfiting clarity. But there is pleasure, too, and not just the satisfaction of watching Theron work. (It is nigh impossible to reconcile the perpetually tired matriarch we see here with the ass-kicking secret agent of Atomic Blonde.) No, the real joy in Tully derives from watching a movie that intimately understands its characters, and that treats them with empathy and generosity. Read More

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You Were Never Really Here: Out for Blood, But Lost in Fog

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joaquin Phoenix as a sullen killer in Lynne Ramsay's "You Were Never Really Here"

Action-packed but not kinetic, stimulating but not engaging, immersive but not intimate—Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here might be described as an anti-thriller. Its plot, which is essentially Taken by way of Taxi Driver, features a handful of genre staples: a rugged but troubled hero, a girl in peril, a cadre of reprehensible evildoers, crushed skulls and buckets of blood. But while the movie hits all of the familiar revenge-narrative beats, it does so in decidedly offbeat ways, preferring to linger in the unsettling spaces that bubble up between the requisite moments of violence and mayhem. It’s less interested in elevating your pulse than in digging under your skin.

This approach has its rewards. You will surely see more exciting movies in 2018 than You Were Never Really Here, but you may not see a more distinctive one, and there’s intrigue in the way Ramsay upends expectations and shows you something creepy and new. But her assaultive style has limitations, too; when viewed from a certain angle, her commitment to jaggedness is less suggestive of a disciplined artist abiding by her principles than of a smug director refusing to entertain her audience. The result is a film that’s easy to admire but difficult to, you know, actually like. Read More

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Beirut: Watch the Terrorists, and Your Back

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rosamund Pike and Jon Hamm in the spy thriller "Beirut"

For a movie purportedly concerned with the strife and factionalism that have ravaged its war-torn central city, it’s telling that Beirut opens with a scene of hobnobbing luxury. The year is 1972, and we’re at a lavish dinner party where the host, Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm), is schmoozing effortlessly with his well-to-do guests. He’s regaling them with some Lebanese history, and while his tale—a loaded parable about uninvited immigrants chafing an entrenched citizenry—may be troubling, his tone is buttery velvet, his face all smiles. It’s a productive dissonance that proves to be an apt metaphor for Beirut itself, a film that strives to be profound and discomfiting and settles instead for being broadly, almost inadvertently enjoyable. As brokered compromises go, the Middle East has seen worse.

The most obvious source of this accidental pleasure is Hamm, who plays Mason with a twinkly intelligence that nicely complements his patented superiority and world-weariness. As sketched in Tony Gilroy’s uneven script—which punctuates that initial soiree with a fatal spray of gunfire before fast-forwarding ten years—the Mason of the present is a classic redemption case, a morose drunkard who scarcely resembles the cheery mingler from a decade earlier. Hamm articulates Mason’s superficial glumness well enough—and it doesn’t get much glummer than mediating labor disputes in a rainy Boston suburb—but he’s better at revealing the smooth operator underneath, the intuitive poker player who once served as one of his country’s top diplomats. Mason, who may be the highest-functioning alcoholic in recent cinematic memory, is too up on his game to be down in the dumps. Read More

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Isle of Dogs: Barking Mad, and Canines Too

Jeremy BeckReviews
Bryan Cranston leads a pack of tender beasts in Wes Anderson's "Isle of Dogs"

In Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, a corrupt and bigoted politician mongers fear to stigmatize a vulnerable class of citizenry, which he then unilaterally deports to a faraway land for the supposed safety of his voter base, despite scientific data demonstrating that this marginalized sect poses no threat to the populace. Also, there are talking dogs.

Anderson’s films are typically too micro-focused to toy with big-picture ideas, but this isn’t the first time he’s dabbled in political allegory; his last movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, smuggled a poignant anti-fascist message inside its candy-colored packaging. The politics in Isle of Dogs are more pointed, the parallels to contemporary figures more easily drawn. But it would be a mistake to reduce this whimsical, stupendously well-made film to its symbolic elements. Anderson’s themes may be partisan, but his exquisite craftsmanship knows no ideology, except maybe perfection. Read More

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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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