Period Piece

Loving: Found Guilty for Finding Love

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as a real-life couple in "Loving"

Loving is a very pleasant American movie about a very unpleasant time in American history. It tells a story of adversity, perseverance, and ultimate triumph, and it proceeds in a rigorous straight line, with minimal eccentricity or embellishment. This is perhaps to be expected, given that Loving belongs to a specific subgenre: the earnest and well-meaning docudrama. But it is also something of a surprise, given that its writer and director is Jeff Nichols, whose previous films (Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special) were largely off-kilter and opaque. Nichols tends to focus on odd protagonists—a delusional laborer, a wandering gangster, an alien boy—but even more central to his filmmaking are his disdain for convention and his gift for unpredictability. Yet anyone with access to Wikipedia could comfortably predict how Loving will play out.

This does not make it bad. On the contrary, it can be satisfying to watch a familiar story unfold on screen, particularly when it is well-told and well-acted. And of course, the movie’s theme—that stoic decency can defeat senseless bigotry—is a worthy one, equally relevant now as when the events of the film took place. Still, the challenge for Nichols is to make Loving stimulating as a piece of cinema as well as a lesson in history. Given his meat-and-potatoes approach to this material, it’s a marvel that he even half-succeeds. Read More

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Allied: Sex and Spies, with a Side of Suspicion

Jeremy BeckReviews
Marion Cotillard and Brad Pitt are spies with secrets in "Allied"

Beautiful, enigmatic, tantalizingly seductive, brimming with feeling—am I describing Allied, or Marion Cotillard? Is there a difference? Robert Zemeckis’ World War II thriller has much to recommend it—slick pacing, gorgeous costumes, a taut script by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight—but the unequivocal highlight is Cotillard’s hypnotic performance. At once exquisitely graceful and nakedly emotional, the actress effortlessly commands your attention whenever she’s on screen. The only problem with Allied is that she isn’t on screen nearly enough.

A handsome period piece, Allied opens in blinding sunlight, as a lone solider parachutes into the deserted sands of French Morocco. This is Max (Brad Pitt, holding his own), a Canadian intelligence officer on a mysterious assignment. He slips on a wedding ring and makes his way to Casablanca, where he locates his wife, a socialite named Marianne (Cotillard), who in actuality is neither a socialite nor his wife. Instead, Marianne is a fighter for the French Resistance—she and Max, who have never met before, have been tasked to pose as a couple while carrying out a dangerous mission. Knight’s script initially leaves the details of that mission murky, though we know the stakes are high and the odds are low; when Marianne asks Max to estimate their chances of survival, he tersely replies, “60-40. Against.” Read More

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The Handmaiden: Don’t Trust Anyone, the Help Least of All

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kim Tae-ri is a servant with a secret in Park Chan-wook's amazing "The Handmaiden"

Murder, deception, hot sex, cold death, severed fingers, poison cigarettes, vials of deadly blue liquid, monsters lurking in the basement—The Handmaiden, the exquisite and electrifying thriller from Park Chan-wook, has it all. A fire-breathing romance wrapped inside a stately period noir, it is simultaneously gorgeous and grotesque, a rampaging id colliding with a meditative superego. That may sound contradictory, but The Handmaiden doesn’t need to choose between beauty and excess. Over the course of this serpentine, deliriously entertaining film, excess becomes beauty.

Nothing about this frenetic, fastidious movie is traditional or predictable, except perhaps that it feels like the logical next step of Park’s career. Deemed a provocateur ever since he crashed onto the cult scene with Oldboy, Park has taunted and delighted audiences with his singular combination of immaculate craft and utter debauchery. For me, Oldboy strayed a bit too far toward the latter (I’ve yet to see the other two films in his “vengeance” trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance), but he smartly tweaked his formula with Thirst, a warped love story that used vampirism to explore the insatiable need for human connection. Then came the terrific Stoker, a cold-blooded tale of Gothic horror that Park set in the sweltering heat of the American South. Now he returns to his native South Korea, but while The Handmaiden finds Park going back home, it demonstrates that his virtuosic command of cinematic language is more vibrant than ever. Read More

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Hacksaw Ridge: In the Shadow of Death, Bearing Witness, But Not Arms

Jeremy BeckReviews
Andrew Garfield is a pacifist at war in Mel Gibson’s "Hacksaw Ridge"

Early in Hacksaw Ridge, a jittery blood donor attempts to impress a pretty nurse with a spectacularly cheesy pickup line. Yesterday, when she jabbed a needle into his arm, was the first time they’d met; today, he insists that he needs a transfusion because ever since he saw her, his heart’s been beating so fast that he’s nearly out of blood. “That’s pretty corny,” she responds, but when he asks if that makes it bad, she blushes and continues, “I didn’t say that.” Hacksaw Ridge, the fifth movie directed by Mel Gibson, is also pretty corny—OK, it’s very corny. It is also sappy, grandiose, and preachy. Does that make it bad? Not by a long shot.

That aforementioned blood donor is Desmond Doss, played as an adult with sly, aw-shucks charm by Andrew Garfield. We first meet him as a boy (portrayed by Darcy Bryce) in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where he roughhouses with his brother before inadvertently knocking him unconscious. Fearing for his sibling’s life, the young sinner slumps into an adjoining room, where he gazes at a crude illustration of a murder, ornamented with the text of one of the Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill.” This blunt, didactic sequence quickly establishes two things: one, Doss will grow up to be a deeply religious pacifist, and two, Gibson has no use for subtlety. Read More

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The Birth of a Nation: Black Men Fighting Back, Then and Now

Jeremy BeckReviews
Nate Parker in the complex, controversial "Birth of a Nation"

No movie exists entirely within its own bubble, but the clamor surrounding The Birth of a Nation is so loud, it’s threatened to silence the actual film. When it premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, The Birth of a Nation was hailed not only as a good movie—it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award—but as a timely and potent corrective to the monochrome of the Academy Awards, which were squirming through the second consecutive year of #OscarsSoWhite. But in August, reports surfaced that Nate Parker, the film’s writer-director as well as its star, had been charged with rape in 1999 along with Jean McGianni Celestin, who shares a story credit with Parker. In 2001, Parker was acquitted (Celestin was convicted, but the verdict was overturned on appeal); then, in 2012, his accuser killed herself. This tragedy—combined with the fact that the film features a rape whose accuracy has been questioned—ignited a firestorm that has engulfed the picture, resulting in boycotts, short-circuited interviews, and a marketing campaign that could charitably be described as tentative. Both the breadth and the volume of the rhetoric surrounding The Birth of a Nation‘s release make it challenging to look past the movie’s context to see its content.

Yet here we are. By which I mean, my job as a film critic is not to analyze The Birth of a Nation’s Best Picture prospects, nor is it to reconcile Nate Parker the person with Nate Parker the artist. (It is certainly not to determine the validity of the sexual assault allegations against Parker or to assess the prospect of causation with the alleged victim’s suicide, tasks for which I am wholly unqualified.) It is instead to evaluate this movie as, well, a movie. And on that score, perhaps the most interesting thing about The Birth of a Nation is how ordinary it is. What we have here is a prototypical biopic, alternately stimulating and stultifying. You’ve seen movies like this before, which means you are much more likely to remember this one for what it represents than for what it contains. Read More

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