Musical

Joker, Folie à Deux: The Smile of the Century

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joaquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie à Deux

For all its flaws, and it has plenty, Joker: Folie à Deux doesn’t commit the sin of lazily recycling the beats of its predecessor. The first Joker, which Todd Phillips directed to multiple Oscars and a massive box-office haul (not to mention an attendant and insufferable discourse), was a piece of faux provocation; it pretended to have interesting ideas, but it really just wallowed in its self-made sea of anger and unpleasantness. It would have been easy—and, if the opening-weekend receipts are anything to go by, commercially advisable—for Phillips to just run that material back, treating/subjecting viewers to another crude fantasy of toxic resentment and violent retribution. Instead, he and co-writer Scott Silver have radically reversed course, delivering a strange and off-kilter movie that’s part courtroom drama, part jukebox musical, and part twisted romance. (The subtitle refers to a shared delusion.) The incel goons who loved the first one must be livid.

For my part, I am less furious than frustrated. Conceptually speaking, Joker 2 is something of a coup, melding genres and skimming comic-book lore in the service of a fairly original and gratifyingly odd vision. So why is the whole thing such a wan and boring affair? Here is a movie where the hero fantasizes about hosting a late-night variety show with his beloved who threatens to shoot him on stage, then later dresses up as a clown before making his closing argument to a jury. That’s weird! Yet while the production should crackle with offbeat energy, Phillips’ execution is so lackluster that the whole enterprise comes off as limp and half-hearted. Read More

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Middlebrow Christmas: The Color Purple and The Boys in the Boat

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Fantasia Barrino in The Color Purple; Callum Turner in The Boys in the Boat

In critical circles, the term “middlebrow” is wielded as a pejorative, alongside “prestige fare” and “Oscar bait.” The idea is that these types of films—often period pieces, featuring inspirational stories that are based on either historical events or popular novels—are tasteful to the point of decorousness, flattering Academy voters for their refinement without taking real risks as works of cinema. As someone who spent his formative years greedily devouring as many Oscar winners as possible, I maintain a steadfast appreciation for the middlebrow picture; I like The Cider House Rules, I love A Beautiful Mind, and I think Kate Winslet was terrific in both Revolutionary Road and The Reader. That a movie attempts to appeal to a broad adult audience doesn’t automatically nullify its pleasures, especially when it’s well-made and well-acted (and sure, gorgeous period costumes can’t hurt).

Christmas tends to be an ideal time for the release of a middlebrow movie, given that the holiday affords extended families the opportunity to spend two-plus hours in a climate-controlled environment without offending any sensibilities. In recent years, sterling examples of this vintage include Little Women, Mary Queen of Scots, and other period pieces that didn’t star Saoirse Ronan (e.g., Fences). Quality prestige pictures, all! Still, just as I reject the notion that middlebrow flicks are inherently inferior, I also acknowledge that they aren’t intrinsically superior; they still need to work on the levels of storytelling and aesthetics. Along with the Michael Mann biopic Ferrari (which I previously reviewed here), this Christmas brought the arrival of two films that seemed like easy wins for prestige-hungry audiences. But despite their differences in tone and scope, they share a sense of failure—both to inspire and, more crucially, to entertain. Read More

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Elvis: All the King’s Remorses

Jeremy BeckReviews
Austin Butler in Elvis

Can a movie be exhilarating and tedious at the same time? Elvis, the biopic about an American icon (Elvis Presley) from an Australian director (Baz Luhrmann), is a vigorous and exhausting work, 159 minutes of bright lights and raucous noise and extravagant camera moves. It is also oddly boring, struggling to derail itself from the rigid train tracks that most pictures of its ilk travel upon. It has become fashionable, and a bit too cute, for critics to deride docudramas of musical genius as unwittingly earnest reproductions of Walk Hard, the 2007 parody that skewered the genre with John C. Reilly singing ditties like “You Got to Love Your Negro Man.” Elvis is too vibrant and enthusiastic and just plain expensive-looking to be dismissed as repetitive boilerplate. Yet its story—of greatness discovered, burnished, troubled, and exploited—is too typical to be memorable.

Its narrative trajectory may be tiresome, but visually speaking, Elvis is not dull. Never one for restraint, Luhrmann hurtles through his material with aggressive, often excessive verve, stitching together cacophonous sequences with music-video impatience. There are times, especially during the opening act—which finds the louche Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) narrating the film’s events in flashback as he lies in a hospital bed and imagines himself wandering through garish casinos with a drip in his arm—when this hyperactivity can feel overwhelming, like a Broadway production by way of Michael Bay. Still, the movie’s style is consonant with its subject, creating a feedback loop of restless energy. It’s fitting, if perhaps predictable, that Elvis feels most alive whenever Elvis is on stage feeling lively. Read More

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Cyrano: A Nose by Any Other Name

Jeremy BeckReviews
Peter Dinklage and Haley Bennett in Cyrano

In the eighth-season finale of Seinfeld, Jerry and George are again bemoaning their inability to sustain a functioning relationship when the latter seizes on the concept of a “relationship intern”—a way of combining forces and channeling them into a single partnership. “Maybe the two of us, working together at full capacity, could do the job of one normal man,” George hypothesizes. This is a very funny conceit that also bears more than a cursory resemblance to the plot of Cyrano de Bergerac, the Edmond Rostand play in which a disfigured poet invisibly assists a dimwitted beefcake in his pursuit of a beautiful woman. Showing us a hero, Rostand wrote us a tragedy, but the comedy inherent in his premise has proved irresistible for American studios, which time and again—in the 1987 Steve Martin vehicle Roxanne, in the poorly regarded 2000 teen flick Whatever It Takes, in the tender 2020 queer romance The Half of It—have sweetened the original’s heartbreak with dollops of reassuring syrup. Among its many achievements, Joe Wright’s new big-screen adaptation, simply titled Cyrano, honors its progenitor’s abiding despair. It’s a movie full of big, bold emotions—lust and love, anger and hunger, jealousy and solidarity—but most of all, it is profoundly sad.

This isn’t to say that the picture is unduly dour or moribund. To the contrary, Wright has leveraged his considerable technical skill—alongside the contributions of his customarily skilled retinue of artisans—to create a spry and dynamic production, one that retains the essence of Rostand’s text while also updating it with lush cinematic vigor. This isn’t simply a matter of prettifying the screen, though the costumes and wigs (by Massimo Cantini Parrini and Jacqueline Durran) are appropriately fabulous, while Sarah Greenwood’s striking production design imbues the film with a bold degree of theatricality. Special mention must be made of Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography, which combines light and shadow in intoxicating ways; certain dusky scenes possess an ethereal glow as though the actors are being illuminated less by a lighting rig than by the moon. Yet the most obvious change from the stage version is structural: This Cyrano is a musical. Read More

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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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