Period Piece

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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The Trial of the Chicago 7: Objection, Dishonor

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jeremy Strong, John Carroll-Lynch, and Sacha Baron Cohen in Aaron Sorkin's "The Trial of the Chicago 7"

The day before Aaron Sorkin’s newest movie premiered on Netflix, his second-oldest TV show rose from the dead: HBO released its West Wing special, reuniting the entire cast for a stage production of “Hartsfield’s Landing”, one of the series’ classic odes to democracy in action. Watching “Hartsfield’s Landing” less than a month before the 2020 election, it felt less like a slice of healthy idealism than an artifact of outright fantasy, a trip to an imaginary world where the civil servants in the White House behaved nobly and responsibly. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is of a piece with The West Wing, seeing as it’s about Great Men fighting valiantly in the face of corruption or indifference. But the orientation has changed. Whereas The West Wing was an ardent, nigh fanatical expression of faith in American government, Chicago 7 represents a more dubious view of the nation’s political machinery. Now, Sorkin’s heroes are fighting the power, not wielding it.

I’m not sure how much to read into this. For one thing, despite his obvious liberal credentials, Sorkin is hardly the most political of artists; he’s more interested in ideals than issues. For another, he wrote his first draft of the Chicago 7 script way back in 2007, so I’m wary of inferring any parallels to the current administration. Still, when an early scene finds the newly installed attorney general, John Mitchell (John Doman), ordering a career prosecutor, Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), to weaponize the Justice Department in 1969 and indict the President’s political enemies, it’s easy enough to imagine a young Bill Barr sitting in the corner, taking notes. Read More

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Unpregnant, The Glorias, and Women Directing Women

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Julianne Moore in "The Glorias"; Haley Lu Richardson and Barbie Ferreira in "Unpregnant"

The COVID-19 pandemic has ruined lives, crippled economies, and paralyzed entire nations, but what has it meant for the movies? The received wisdom is that 2020 has been a lost year for cinema, and there’s a degree of truth to that; I’ve lost count of how many major studio releases have been delayed until 2021 or beyond, and many other films—which ordinarily would have had the opportunity to chase eyeballs on the big screen—were unceremoniously interred in the graveyard that is VOD. But while it’s understandable to lament the movies that this year has taken from us, it’s also important to acknowledge those that it’s given us. The dearth of blockbusters created a cinematic vacuum that was promptly and happily filled by scrappier, less conventional titles: quirky comedies, chilling horror flicks, tender romances, robust actioners. And many of these movies came from a demographic that Hollywood has long neglected: They were directed by women.

Perhaps this has nothing to do with COVID-19; maybe 2020 was already shaping up to be the Year of the Woman even before the coronavirus reached American shores. Regardless of causality, it’s oddly invigorating to survey the year’s best films and to see how many were helmed by women, and with such variety. Consider: the quiet agony of The Assistant and the boisterous fun of Birds of Prey. The contemporary sadness of Cuties and the classical enchantment of Emma. The male friendship of First Cow and the female solidarity of Never Rarely Sometimes Always. (I dissented on both The Old Guard and Shirley, but other critics would surely point to them as well.) Women have always been making good movies, but their collective voice seems to be growing louder now, telling stories of ever-greater urgency and vitality. Read More

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The Devil All the Time: Once Upon a Time in the West Virginian Hellscape

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Holland in "The Devil All the Time"

Late in The Devil All the Time, the relentlessly ugly and obdurately watchable new thriller from Antonio Campos, a young man insists that he isn’t a bad person. This may ring false, given that we’ve already seen him kill several people with a pistol and beat up several others with assorted car parts. But wickedness is a spectrum rather than a point, and the competition for the most despicable character in The Devil All the Time—which transpires in various backwaters of West Virginia and Ohio, including an aptly named town called Knockemstiff—is fierce.

There’s the World War II veteran who, in an attempt to convince God to eradicate his wife’s cancer, crucifies his son’s dog. That wasn’t very nice; maybe he’s the film’s biggest baddie. But is he really worse than the charismatic preacher who systematically grooms and rapes teenage girls? What about the other captivating preacher, the one who stabs his wife in the neck in order to hone his gift for resurrection, only to discover that, whoops, death isn’t reversible after all? And let’s not forget the smiling traveler whose hobby is to pick up hitchhikers, photograph them fucking his wife, and then murder them. These guys make David Fincher’s villains look cuddly. Read More

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