Grade: A minus

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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Never Rarely Sometimes Always: A Movie for Women, Defiantly Pro-Voice

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sidney Flanigan in "Never Rarely Sometimes Always"

The stomach punches are both figurative and literal in Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Eliza Hittman’s searing, soaring new film. Pain is everywhere in this movie: in the bruises that color its heroine’s abdomen, in the tears that crawl down her cheeks, in the casual insults and vulgar leering that she silently absorbs. But what makes Hittman’s work special is her generosity of spirit. Her honesty is unflinching; her compassion is revelatory.

When we first meet Autumn (a heartbreaking Sidney Flanigan), she’s performing at a high school talent show, strumming “He’s Got the Power” as a male student from the audience yells out, “Slut!” It’s the first of many indignities she endures, a steady stream of degradation that Hittman presents with crushing matter-of-factness. Autumn is hardly a submissive wallflower; at one point, she avenges an unspecified offense by flinging a cup of water in a boy’s face. But regular humiliation and bodily invasion are nevertheless facts of her small-town life. Whenever she clocks out of her shift as a cashier at a grocery store, she reaches through a screened partition and hands her faceless manager a wad of bills; as she does so, he peppers her wrist with unsolicited kisses. Read More

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Emma: Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Show Me a Catch

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in "Emma"

Jane Austen’s Emma is a comedy of manners, which of course means that nobody in it is actually polite. It may unfurl in high society—the kind where estates have proper names, like Donwell Abbey and Hartfield —but its veneer of decorum is a mere smokescreen, camouflaging base instincts of lust, greed, and jealousy. Its language is unfailingly civil, with a premium placed on honorifics—Mr. Elton! Miss Smith!—but its characters wield words like weapons, brandished with lethal force and sheathed with calculated fury. It’s a frolicsome tale of romance and friendship; it is also blood sport.

This duality can be bracing, but for most viewers it is no longer surprising, given how frequently Austen’s novels have been transmuted to the screen. Her works provide a certain comfort, a warm and familiar blend of sophisticated wordplay, comic misunderstandings, and graceful resolution. This new adaptation of Emma, which has been directed by Autumn de Wilde from a screenplay by Eleanor Catton, respects its author deeply and faithfully. Unlike Clueless, which boldly transplanted Austen’s narrative and themes to the frivolous exploits of mid-’90s teenagers, this Emma is frank and straightforward. You might think that such a rigorous approach would result in the diminution of risk, in an absence of artistic identity or imagination. To be sure, the movie is predictable. It is also magical. Read More

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Little Women: Sisters, Suitors, and Other Nightmares

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, and Eliza Scanlen, in Greta Gerwig's "Little Women"

I keep thinking about the ink smudges. Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Women is a film of boundless beauty, full of ravishing sights and sounds: bright hoop dresses, handsome estates and gardens, Alexandre Desplat’s piano, Timothée Chalamet’s cheekbones, Saoirse Ronan’s eyes. But amid all of this delicate loveliness is a writer who cannot seem to scrub the stubborn streaks of pencil lead from her hands. The primary hero of Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Jo March is the perfect embodiment of Gerwig’s creative spirit—not just because she’s a talented and intelligent artist, but because her work seems to bleed with feeling. Little Women, Gerwig’s second feature following the lightning bolt that was Lady Bird, is a surpassingly elegant movie. It’s also stained with life.

Jo (Ronan), an amateur playwright and aspiring novelist, is one of four mostly grown sisters; the others (in descending order of age) are Meg (Emma Watson), Beth (Eliza Scanlen), and Amy (Florence Pugh). You probably already knew this, seeing as Alcott’s book is beloved, and has previously been transferred to the silver screen four times, with Jo being played by personalities as varied as Katharine Hepburn and Winona Ryder. And so, the question that initially hovers over this incarnation of Little Women—the same skeptical inquiry that lurks beneath any new adaptation of a repeatedly staged classic—is why it needed to be made, why it stands out. Several decades having passed since I’ve read the book or watched any of its prior re-imaginings, I am perhaps not the ideal critic to answer this question. But I have seen this one, and I can say with some confidence that you should herald its arrival not with cynicism but with gratitude. The reason to see Gerwig’s movie isn’t that it rejuvenates old tropes or interrogates long-held assumptions or introduces a literary landmark to a new generation, even if it may very well do all of those things. The reason to see it is that it’s wonderful. Read More

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