Period Piece

The Lost City of Z: Unwelcome to the Jungle, But Pressing On

Jeremy BeckReviews
Charlie Hunnam in James Gray's "The Lost City of Z"

The soldier finds the mission underwhelming. Sure, he once trained with the Royal Geographical Society, but that was ages ago, and he barely remembers his studies. Why should he be the one tasked with mapping the border between Brazil and Bolivia? He’s a warrior, not a surveyor. Yet by the end of The Lost City of Z—the grand and grave historical epic from James Gray—the soldier’s reluctance has transformed into obsession. This touching, tragic film chronicles its hero’s gradual descent into something like madness, even as it acknowledges the nobility of his pursuit and the dignity of his character.

For all of the death and misery that it uncovers, The Lost City of Z is not exactly a downer. Gray, once known for his gritty thrillers, has of late developed an odd and interesting talent: He can make human suffering seem strangely beguiling. His Two Lovers put Joaquin Phoenix through the emotional wringer, but it also recognized the thrill of newfound romantic attraction. And while The Immigrant essayed the challenges facing Marion Cotillard’s woebegone traveler with unflinching directness, Gray’s lustrous craft shaded her predicament with tenderness and hope. Now with The Lost City of Z, he examines the ecstasy and the agony of mania—the fanatical need to prove yourself, no matter the mortal cost. Read More

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Free Fire: Shots Squeezed Off, Insults Catapulted

Jeremy BeckReviews
Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Sam Riley, and Michael Smiley in "Free Fire"

Near the end of David Mamet’s Heist, two rival criminal factions engage in a shootout on a pier. It’s a fairly unremarkable scene, except that standing in the crossfire is Bergman, an irascible fence played by Danny DeVito. As the bullets whiz past him, Bergman transforms from a tough-talking hoodlum into a conciliatory wimp, yelping in protest, “Put the fucking guns down, let’s just talk!” Free Fire, the latest whatsit from the English auteur/weirdo Ben Wheatley, essentially extends this bit of off-kilter gunplay to feature length. It assembles a motley crew of hooligans, junkies, and reprobates, then sets them loose on one another in a display of inept savagery that’s more pitiful than lethal.

That phrase might also describe Wheatley’s prior films, which have relied on showy extremism to enliven themes and narratives that are fundamentally banal. These include Kill List, a glum study of blue-collar ennui that morphed into a grisly and tasteless horror movie, and High-Rise, an initially fascinating but ultimately unwatchable satire that squandered a terrific cast in favor of incoherent montage. (I haven’t seen A Field in England, but Variety assessed it as combining “imagination-teasing ingenuity” with “a startling lapse in basic storytelling competence”, which seems to fit.) Qualitatively, Free Fire represents a dramatic improvement for Wheatley, but what’s most interesting is how he’s improved. No longer straining to confound audiences with his avant-garde brilliance, Wheatley has instead chosen to wield his gifts for the old-fashioned virtue of entertainment. Free Fire has little heart and even less depth, but compared to the arduous nature of Wheatley’s past works, its breezy emptiness is oddly refreshing. Read More

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Silence: Keeping the Faith, But Losing His Way

Jeremy BeckReviews
Andrew Garfield and Yôsuke Kubozuka in Martin Scorsese's "Silence"

There are passion projects, and then there’s Silence, an enormous undertaking that the 74-year-old Martin Scorsese has been trying to make for more than a third of his life. Instantly announcing itself as a Very Important Film—it opens on a black screen to the chirping of crickets and croaking of frogs before the noise suddenly cuts out, rendering the title card eponymous—it is markedly different from the director’s most popular works. There are no avaricious gangsters, no amoral sinners, no Rolling Stones songs, no De Niros or DiCaprios. Independently, this stylistic departure is by no means problematic; filmmakers should hardly be expected to pigeonhole themselves within particular genres or methods. But Silence’s dissimilarities to the rest of Scorsese’s oeuvre go beyond topic or setting—other features that typically attend one of his productions are also absent. There is, for example, no joy, no humor, no entertainment, no energy. When viewed from a long distance, Silence reasonably resembles a hugely ambitious, sporadically staggering work of art. Only when you get up close and try to engage with it do you realize it’s the worst movie Scorsese has made in several decades.

Of course, that doesn’t mean all that much—even Scorsese’s relatively minor works (Hugo, Bringing Out the Dead) tend to thrum with vigor and excitement. But Silence, which chronicles the persecution of Christians in seventeenth-century Japan, is different. Scorsese has long grappled with the weighty themes and thorny contradictions of Catholicism, most notably in The Last Temptation of Christ, his gripping telling of the Crucifixion that concluded with an operatic and highly controversial detour. Yet where Last Temptation was robustly entertaining as well as intellectually fascinating, Silence betrays no interest in narrative momentum. The result is a cruel irony: Here is a film that was unquestionably a monumental labor to create, yet it exhibits no discernible effort to actually connect with its audience. It’s a violation of the very selflessness that Silence preaches; Scorsese has made this movie for nobody but himself. Read More

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Hidden Figures: Black Women Have the Bright Stuff

Jeremy BeckReviews
Janelle Monáe, Taraji P. Henson, and Octavia Spencer in "Hidden Figures"

In the opening scene of Rushmore, a math teacher asks Jason Schwartzman whether he might be able to come to the blackboard and solve an impossibly complex equation. Schwartzman’s character does so effortlessly and receives the adoring congratulations of his classmates, at which point Wes Anderson reveals that the sequence is a dream. Hidden Figures, Theodore Melfi’s sincere and sappy biopic of three black women who worked at NASA during the height of the Space Race, is essentially a feature-length version of this scene, minus the concluding fake-out. It fancies itself a hard-hitting historical drama, but it’s really a frothy, wish-fulfillment fantasy.

And what’s wrong with that? Hidden Figures may not trouble your mind or get under your skin, but it does provide a welcome, feel-good tonic for these troubled times. It insists, with disarming directness, that the evils of prejudice and entrenchment will always succumb to the virtues of hard work and human decency. Its period setting is one of extreme unease (as opposed to now?), but its tone is unabashedly wholesome and reassuring. Read More

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Fences: When the Walls Tumble Down, Resentments Bubble Up

Jeremy BeckReviews
Denzel Washington is a fearsome father in "Fences"

Denzel Washington is a rock. That’s true of both his body of work and his actual body. Physically, he’s built like a finely chiseled piece of granite, with broad shoulders, flinty eyes, and a handsome face that occasionally breaks into a broad, beaming smile. And commercially, few movie stars are so ruggedly reliable. (How many other actors could have carried The Equalizer to $100 million, much less inspired demand for a sequel?) Washington’s consistency is often mistaken for redundancy, given that he typically portrays heroic authority figures defined by their unwavering competence; even when he played against type in Training Day, he was supremely charismatic. But in some of his best roles (Courage Under Fire, Flight), he allows tendrils of doubt and weakness to creep through the façade of proficiency and strength. In Fences, Washington delivers a towering performance that represents the apex of this duality—never before has he seemed so indomitable and, at the same time, so broken.

Which is not to say that Fences is a great movie. In a sense, it is barely a movie at all. A faithful adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning play, Fences’ dogmatic fidelity to its source arguably renders it a better fit for the stage than the screen. The third feature directed by Washington, it consists of a series of dialogue-heavy scenes, the bulk of which could be neatly subdivided into a handful of acts. Action is limited, as is Marcelo Zarvos’ muted score. The majority of the chatter takes place in a single house’s kitchen and backyard, with a few additional locations mixed in for variety. The camera remains relatively passive; when it does move, it does so fluidly via the Steadicam, rather than the handheld style favored by many art-house filmmakers. Read More

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