Period Piece

A Complete Unknown: Don’t Judge a Schnook by His Covers

Jeremy BeckReviews
Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown

In the most memorable scene of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, a band takes the stage at a music show and turns to their guitar cases, only to retrieve a cache of machine guns and open fire on their unsuspecting audience. It’s a metaphor for the 1965 Newport Festival where Bob Dylan, beginning his pivot from homespun folk to electric oomph, infuriated the fans who’d clamored to hear the plaintive, stripped-down ballads that made him famous. A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s new Dylan biopic, recreates that historic moment, though it does so with careful fidelity rather than brash surreality. That’s in keeping with the guiding spirit of the movie, which follows Dylan’s early rise and initial backlash while faithfully abiding by the conventions of the genre. In telling the story of the man who revolutionized an art form, it doesn’t exhibit a rebellious bone in its body.

This doesn’t make it bad. In fact, A Complete Unknown is pretty good. It has good music, good actors, good pacing, and good dialogue. (While you’re considering the source, I happen to think I’m Not There is Haynes’ worst picture, but that’s another story.) What it lacks—what it doesn’t even seem to try to achieve—is a sense of majesty or wonder that might befit its subject. It plays the greatest hits without evincing any aspirations toward true greatness. Read More

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Nosferatu: What Dreams May Succumb

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lily Rose Depp in Nosferatu

Bathed in ghostly white moonlight, a man stands in the center of a black roadway lined with forest-green pines. In the distance, he spots the faint outline of a moving object, which he gradually perceives to be a horse-drawn carriage. As the animals gather velocity and momentum, he realizes that he’s about to be trampled. He shuts his eyes and braces for impact, only to realize that the vehicle has magically stopped and angled itself perpendicular to him, its door thrown open, beckoning him into the waiting darkness. And then the coachman calls out, “Did you order an Uber?”

I made that last part up. The vampire mythos, with its lustful symbolism and its gargled accents, is easily vulnerable to ridicule. And there are certainly times when Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’ sumptuous remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 touchstone, dances up to the cliff’s edge of parody. But what rescues it—what turns your stifled laughter into shrieks of horror and gapes of wonder—is that it approaches its material with absolute sincerity, and without a shred of irony or detachment. Eggers, undertaking the perilous task of updating a 102-year-old classic, has of course renovated the silent black-and-white original, imprinting it with intoxicating sound and color. Yet he has not sacrificed any of its elemental power, forgoing the temptation for winking archness and instead operating with brazen, old-fashioned conviction. Read More

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Queer: Another Gay in Paradise

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daniel Craig in Queer

Luca Guadagnino makes movies about lust. William S. Burroughs wrote books about pain. The obvious overlap between those two emotions might suggest a fruitful creative partnership—a provocative picture that marries the writer’s jagged prose with the director’s sensual style. Alas, Queer, Guadagnino’s adaptation of Burroughs’ second novel, is both obtuse and banal, defying comprehension while also courting boredom. It may traffic in addiction, but it isn’t stimulating. It just plunges you into a stupor.

Which might be the whole idea. Being poorly read, I’m only familiar with Burroughs’ work via reputation rather than experience, but I know that he deployed an experimental style designed to mirror his own challenges with substance abuse. To the extent Queer is intended to evoke the perpetual desolation of the junkie, well, mission accomplished I guess? The movie dabbles in purported forms of intrigue—sex, violence, blackmail, journeys in the jungle—but it’s mostly just one long bummer, a sludgy morass of misery. Read More

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Gladiator II: And the Rome of the Slave

Jeremy BeckReviews
Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal in Gladiator II

One of the more memorable lines of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator was its hero’s insistence that what we do in life echoes in eternity. Maybe not, but it definitely echoes in sequels. Gladiator II, Scott’s quarter-century-later follow-up to the Best Picture winner of 2000, takes great pains to (strength and) honor its predecessor—not just by recalling dialogue or by repeating themes (the screenplay is by David Scarpa), but by crafting a story that latches onto the original’s skeleton like a necromantic barnacle. The result is less a mighty statue than a wispy hologram, aiming to resemble its predecessor but struggling to acquire its weight or texture.

The concept of diminishing returns in Hollywood is hardly new, and besides, it seems unfair to ding Scott and Scarpa for modeling so faithfully off of their existing blueprint. After all, what is a sequel but a continuation? Still, in its early going, Gladiator II threatens to develop its own personality, hinting toward narrative independence, if not stylistic novelty. Sure, the first time we see Hanno (Paul Mescal), he’s tending crops on his farm, a symbol of classical masculinity that inevitably recalls Russell Crowe’s Maximus dreaming of golden fields of swaying wheat. But any thoughts of gladiatorial combat or imperial destiny are far from Hanno’s mind; a legionnaire living in the humble province of Numidia, his more pressing concern is the advancing Roman army, led by a brilliant and ruthless general named Acacius (Pedro Pascal). Read More

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Here: This Land Is Yore Land

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in Here

The animating force behind Robert Zemeckis’ work has long been nostalgia. Whether he’s making handsome period thrillers (the underrated Allied), refashioning childhood classics (the dreadful remakes of The Witches and Pinocchio), or interrogating his own work (the demented navel-gazing of Welcome to Marwen), the director can’t stop burrowing into the past. The legacy of Forrest Gump remains the subject of robust debate, but it is inarguably the quintessential Zemeckis picture for how it uses exquisite technique to tell a cornball story that hopscotches across the life of a boomer. Here, which reunites Gump stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, sports an even vaster temporal agenda: Where that 1994 Best Picture winner covered the latter half of the 20th century, this new movie seeks to encompass the entire American experiment.

The ironic conceptual hook of Here is that, while its chronology is extremely broad, its spatiality is scrupulously narrow. The whole film takes place on the exact same spit of land, with the camera never so much as budging (at least, not until the final shot). Initially—I’m speaking according to the passage of history, not the arrangement of events in the movie, whose timeline is scrambled—the location is a pastoral meadow frequented by Native Americans that subsequently becomes an entryway to the colonial estate of William Franklin, son of Benjamin. Roughly a century later, after we spy some bricklayers going about their business, the setting transforms into the living room of a single-family home, with a large triple-bay window that looks out onto the adjoining street. As the story leaps backward and forward in time, it chronicles the events of the various inhabitants of the land and house, observing their commonalities—birth and death, matrimony and separation, stout friendships and domestic fractures—while also charting their spiritual and technological differences. Read More

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