Period Piece

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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Belfast: The Troubles of Growing Up, Like and Unlike Everyone Else

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Jude Hill, and Judi Dench in Belfast

The opening scene of Belfast, the new film from Kenneth Branagh, announces the movie as both a narrow slice-of-life comedy and a more ambitious historical drama. Following some trivial narration from Judi Dench, the wan colors shift into crisp black-and-white, and the camera glides along a street in Northern Ireland, revealing a homey, intimate neighborhood. (A title card informs us that the date is August 1969.) The mood is relaxed and cheerful; children are kicking a ball around, adults are yammering idly, and everyone seems to know everybody’s name. Yet as nine-year-old Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill) traverses the road and spars good-naturedly with some shopkeepers, this peaceful idyll is shattered by the sudden arrival of armed hooligans. As they snarl threats and smash windows, the camera pivots around Buddy, spinning faster and faster, underlining his vulnerability and panic. What was once bliss has been replaced by terror.

Roughly based on Branagh’s own childhood, Belfast is a noble, enjoyable, not entirely successful attempt to document both sides of this formative coin. It seeks to frame the traditional hallmarks of the coming-of-age picture—the fledgling romances, the quixotically striving parents, the classroom grievances, the petty illegalities—against the backdrop of social unrest and religious conflict. That it struggles to fuse these disparate halves into a cohesive whole is due less to tonal inconsistency than cinematic execution, or maybe priorities. Over the course of a long and uneven career, Branagh has proved himself capable of working on a large scale—I remain a fan of his straitlaced Hamlet, while the operatic thriller Dead Again is arguably his best work—but here, whether because of lack of interest or inadequate filmmaking chops, he fails to invest the movie’s ostensibly sweeping commentary with much energy or clarity. He’s more committed to evoking the particular pleasures and predicaments of his youth with loving detail and misty-eyed nostalgia. Read More

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Last Night in Soho: Going Back, Going Blonde, Going Bonkers

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in Last Night in Soho

Remember the Swinging Sixties? That blissful English era of artistic revolution, high hedonism, and rampant sexism? At least, I think that’s what it involved; I wasn’t alive at the time, but I’ve consumed enough cultural artifacts from the period to approximate the woozy sensations of decadence and discovery. So has Edgar Wright, a voracious student of 20th-century pop culture whose movies tend to function as tributes to his dilettantish obsessions, as well as advertisements for the breadth of his own taste; his prior film, Baby Driver, was less a heist thriller than a feature-length playlist of classic tunes with vibrant visual accompaniment. Wright’s new feature, Last Night in Soho, initially scans as an ode to the lascivious London of yesteryear, a passionate homage to the pristine past that doubles as a sour lament for the degraded present. But there is more going on here than you might suspect—more ideas, more innovation, more mistakes.

“I like the old stuff better,” says Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), an aspiring fashion designer newly arrived in London from the country. It’s a valid preference—the music that pours through her Beats by Dre headphones includes hits by The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, and Peter & Gordon—that nonetheless carries dubious implications. Nostalgia can be simplistic as well as seductive, and many a filmmaker has fallen prone to romanticizing the gauzy bygone days without grappling with their dark marks and complications. This time around, Wright is smarter than that; Last Night in Soho is simultaneously an appreciation and a reckoning. It conjures a hypnotic veil of old-world glamour, then vigorously pierces it to reveal the rot festering underneath. Read More

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The Last Duel: He Said, She Said, They Bled, Who’s Dead?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adam Driver and Matt Damon in The Last Duel

Things get hairy in The Last Duel, and not just metaphorically. In this proudly old-fashioned, deceptively intricate medieval drama from Ridley Scott, a fraught marriage faces down a crucible of inequality—social, emotional, and intellectual, yes, but most of all follicular. As Jean de Carrouges, a hirsute warrior in perpetual need of both a paycheck and a shower, Matt Damon is armed with a bushy blond beard and an infested mullet that would make Joe Dirt jealous. Opposite him is Jodie Comer as Marguerite, whose flowing locks are regularly woven into elegant braids or neatly arranged into symmetrical ringlets. Gender disparity is the movie’s primary theme, one that’s tidily symbolized by Carrouges’ flagrant untidiness.

Coyly patient and sneakily stimulating, The Last Duel’s complexity reveals itself slowly, so much so that it initially seems familiar and drab, another of Scott’s ponderous Middle-Age epics. (Other examples include the underrated Kingdom of Heaven, the forgettable Robin Hood, and that one about the entertainer with the sword.) The superb screenplay, which Damon co-wrote with Nicole Holofcener and his bestie Ben Affleck (from a book by Eric Jager), cleaves neatly into three chapters, with each replaying the same series of critical events from the perspective of a different character. The first, which centers on Carrouges, is by far the weakest, though this is less a matter of poor execution than a byproduct of the script’s adroit design. Before surprising us with slippery variations and clever shifts in point of view, Scott and his writers must undertake the functional, somewhat laborious work of sketching out the film’s basic conflict. Read More

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Mank: Citizen, Stained

Jeremy BeckReviews
Gary Oldman in "Mank"

There are two artistic geniuses wrestling for control of Mank, and neither of them is Orson Welles. The first is the film’s subject, Herman J. Mankiewicz, the co-writer of Citizen Kane, which has long been labeled the greatest movie ever made; the second is its creator, David Fincher, the director of a handful of masterpieces in his own right. As played by Gary Oldman, Mankiewicz (for his preferred sobriquet, refer to the title) is an intuitive creature—brilliant, yes, but also slovenly, undisciplined, and erratic. Fincher is none of those things, save brilliant. He is an impeccable craftsman, one who wields his tools with finicky precision and absolute rigor. The animating force of Mank—the fascinating dissonance that’s responsible for much of its power, as well as some of its shortcomings—is the inherent tension between its central personalities. This is what happens when an Order Muppet makes a movie about a Chaos Muppet.

The narrative of Mank is alternately gripping and muddled, but when it comes to technique, no amount of turmoil could ever overwhelm Fincher’s mastery. As a matter of sight and sound, his latest picture is a characteristic wonder to behold. Shot by Erik Messerschmidt (Mindhunter) in luminous black and white, its images nevertheless feel suffused with color and vibrancy, light and shadow playfully dancing with one another throughout the frame. (This is undoubtedly the most beautiful black-and-white Netflix release since, er, two years ago.) The costumes and production design meticulously recreate 1930s California without preening, while the score (from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, naturally) bubbles with percussive urgency yet never overexerts itself. In tone and texture, Mank feels both pleasingly classical and thrillingly new. (Fincher should probably cool it with the phony cigarette burns, though.) Read More

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