Grade: A minus

West Side Story: There’s Still Grace for Us

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ariana DeBose and David Alvarez in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story

Is West Side Story Steven Spielberg’s first musical, or his 30th? For nearly half a century, one of cinema’s greatest directors has been concocting robust sequences that bear the indicia of musical numbers: nimble choreography, balletic grace, syncopated rhythm. To survey his most impressive achievements—the vigorous chases of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the rampaging dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, the futuristic mayhem of Minority Report, and countless more—is to witness the work of a filmmaker who applies his craft with the precision of an inveterate composer. In essence, Spielberg has been making musicals for 50 years; West Side Story is just the first one that happens to include songs.

One of the ironies of his new feature is that those songs are virtually the opposite of original creations. Instead, viewers with even a cursory knowledge of Broadway hits will instantly recognize the soaring melodies of Leonard Bernstein and the snappy lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, which (as if you need me to tell you) were repurposed six decades ago by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins into an Oscar-sweeping smash. This familiarity necessarily dilutes the frisson of anticipation that attends any new Spielberg picture—how can Hollywood’s preeminent dazzler dazzle us when we’ve already been dazzled?—yet it also makes a certain sense. Spielberg’s virtuosity as a director lies not in his talent for pure invention (he hardly ever writes his own scripts), but in his gift for wielding the traditional elements of cinematic action—running, jumping, driving, dancing—in exhilarating new ways. Read More

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The Power of the Dog: West for Success

Jeremy BeckReviews
Benedict Cumberbatch in The Power of the Dog

A man in a black hat riding a horse. A woman with a flower in her hair serving a meal. A sprawling ranch, a glinting sunset, a bottle of booze. These are the artifacts of the Western, one of cinema’s oldest and most durable genres. They are also, in the hands of Jane Campion, raw clay to be modeled and molded, reshaped into new forms both beautiful and angular. The Power of the Dog, Campion’s first feature in a dozen years and arguably the best work of her long, too-infrequent career, treats the Western much like the carcass that one of its characters encounters on his dusty travels; it picks its bones clean and then assembles the harvest into a rich, tantalizing story of cruelty, desire, and retribution. It doesn’t so much upend the form’s conventions as weaponize them to reimagine a new kind of movie altogether.

Campion is hardly the first filmmaker to interrogate the complicated history and inherent stereotypes lurking beneath the familiar tales of cowboys and Indians; it’s been nearly three decades since Clint Eastwood deconstructed his own mythos in Unforgiven, and ever since (not to mention before), countless artists have breathed new, investigative life into that same classic carcass. But The Power of the Dog is especially notable for how it wields the twin powers of absence and suggestion. There are no bloody shootouts (nary a gun is even fired), but the threat of incipient violence still looms over its Montana setting like a storm cloud. There is no sex—an offscreen marriage generates no more visible ardor than a few chaste kisses on the cheek—but the screen nevertheless seethes with unconsummated longing. And there is no tin-starred sheriff maintaining law and order, but crime is still very much afoot. Read More

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Dune, The French Dispatch, and World-Building Great and Small

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Timothée Chalamet in Dune and The French Dispatch

Denis Villeneuve and Wes Anderson are strangely similar filmmakers, even though they make exceedingly dissimilar films. Villeneuve’s movies are grand, sprawling adventures that envision alien life forms and contemplate dystopian futures. Anderson, by contrast, makes tidy, compact comedies whose foremost exotica are their characters’ eccentricities, and which tend to unfold in an unspecified but highly particular recent past. Yet both directors are true artisans skilled in the craft of cinematic world-building; for them, the screen is a coloring book for their fertile imaginations, one that should be sketched in as boldly and minutely as possible. Put differently, Villeneuve and Anderson treat movie-making like a work of galactic creation. One looks to the skies, the other to the soul, but both construct their own universes, packed with detail, whimsy, and awe.

This past weekend was something of a feast for cinephiles, as it brought new films from the two auteurs, both of which the COVID-19 pandemic had delayed for roughly a year. Villeneuve’s Dune, the long-awaited adaptation of the beloved science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert, finds the Canadian literally building a brand new world, one teeming with wonder and innovation. Anderson’s The French Dispatch, meanwhile, is more earthbound but no less profligate in its assembly. Both are natural progressions that reflect their makers’ career-long preoccupations, yet while both are undeniably impressive aesthetic achievements, only one fully succeeds as a piece of dramatic entertainment. Read More

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Soul: It’s All About Goals. Or Is It?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jamie Foxx in Pixar's "Soul"

There may not be a venue explicitly called Imagination Land in Pete Docter’s latest feature, but there’s still plenty of innovation and ingenuity. Soul, the new movie from the Pixar standout, is another triumph, an inspired mix of vibrant animation, rich storytelling, and powerful themes. It asks big, probing questions—about life and death, art and commerce, work and pleasure—while also making generous room for ticking-clock suspense and broad comedy. This is a sweeping metaphysical adventure tale, complete with fart jokes.

The signature achievement of Soul is its conception of the Great Before, a vast supernatural laboratory of sorts where human personalities are forged before birth. Advancements in technology have allowed animators to pack the frame with infinite minutiae, but Docter’s approach here is spare and restrained. The realm he’s conceived is gently pastoral, a luminous land of rolling hills, peaceful meadows, and placid lakes. The blue-and-purple color scheme is similarly serene, smoothly shifting between various hues of turquoise and lavender. And the world’s essential openness—its sense of being permanently incomplete—feels not like a failure of vision, but like a gift from creator to viewer. Some fictional environments are overwhelming in their detail. Docter lets you fill in the blanks. Read More

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The Trial of the Chicago 7: Objection, Dishonor

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jeremy Strong, John Carroll-Lynch, and Sacha Baron Cohen in Aaron Sorkin's "The Trial of the Chicago 7"

The day before Aaron Sorkin’s newest movie premiered on Netflix, his second-oldest TV show rose from the dead: HBO released its West Wing special, reuniting the entire cast for a stage production of “Hartsfield’s Landing”, one of the series’ classic odes to democracy in action. Watching “Hartsfield’s Landing” less than a month before the 2020 election, it felt less like a slice of healthy idealism than an artifact of outright fantasy, a trip to an imaginary world where the civil servants in the White House behaved nobly and responsibly. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is of a piece with The West Wing, seeing as it’s about Great Men fighting valiantly in the face of corruption or indifference. But the orientation has changed. Whereas The West Wing was an ardent, nigh fanatical expression of faith in American government, Chicago 7 represents a more dubious view of the nation’s political machinery. Now, Sorkin’s heroes are fighting the power, not wielding it.

I’m not sure how much to read into this. For one thing, despite his obvious liberal credentials, Sorkin is hardly the most political of artists; he’s more interested in ideals than issues. For another, he wrote his first draft of the Chicago 7 script way back in 2007, so I’m wary of inferring any parallels to the current administration. Still, when an early scene finds the newly installed attorney general, John Mitchell (John Doman), ordering a career prosecutor, Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), to weaponize the Justice Department in 1969 and indict the President’s political enemies, it’s easy enough to imagine a young Bill Barr sitting in the corner, taking notes. Read More

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