Romance

The Lobster: Looking for Love as the Clock Ticks Down

Jeremy BeckReviews
Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in "The Lobster"

Early in The Lobster, the deadpan, depraved, deeply romantic black comedy from Yorgos Lanthimos, a woman discusses the unsuitable hypothetical couplings of various animals. She notes, for example, that a wolf and a penguin could never live in harmony. “That would be absurd,” she scoffs. Fair enough. But when it comes to Lanthimos, absurdity is relative. The Greek director’s prior film, Alps, followed a four-person troupe of bizarre ambulance-chasers who waited for people to die, then impersonated the deceased for the bereaved’s benefit (in return for a fee). Before that he made Dogtooth, a nightmarish study of three home-schooled teenagers who had no names, learned a false language, and regarded house cats as ferocious beasts to be decapitated on sight. Dogtooth was consistently fascinating, Alps intermittently so, but both depicted their human grotesqueries so persuasively that they were easier to admire than adore. The Lobster is different, even as it’s more of the same. It retains the hypnotic surrealism of Lanthimos’ earlier work, but it also possesses something even more startling: a heart.

All of Lanthimos’ films operate on multiple levels, working as tidy, intimately scaled pieces of off-kilter esoterica while also asking big, loaded questions about social customs and human relationships. Here, he’s exploring the freighted topic of love. That’s hardly a novel hook for a movie, but The Lobster is less interested in defining love than in examining how we view it as a symbol of status. And so it inquires: Are married people truly happy? Are single people really alone? When we claim that we are in love, what do we mean? Is coupledom a shield against the sadness of isolation, or is it a prison that suppresses freedom and individuality? And if you get caught masturbating, shouldn’t you be forced to stick your hand in a burning-hot toaster? Read More

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Carol: As Society Frowns, True Love Blooms

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett star in Todd Haynes's "Carol"

Carol is the new film from Todd Haynes, though perhaps I should have preceded that factual nugget with a spoiler alert. Over the past two decades, in features such as Safe and Far from Heaven (both starring Julianne Moore) and in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (with Kate Winslet), Haynes has established himself as America’s preeminent chronicler of the tragedy of feminine domesticity. He makes movies about putatively happy women who are nevertheless battered by normative prejudice and suffocated by societal constriction; his heroines, visibly content to onlookers, are secretly trapped by a lack of mobility and an absence of true freedom. Given this, you may anticipate—perhaps “dread” is the better word—that bad things will happen to the women in Carol. But while the characters here do endure their share of misfortune, what is stunning about this remarkable, enormously empathetic film is how life-affirming it is. A work of raw, pure emotion, Carol testifies to the power of human compassion, even as it also unflinchingly depicts human ugliness. It breaks your heart, and then, in startling fashion, it puts it back together again.

Based on a Patricia Highsmith novel called The Price of Salt, the movie’s title is somewhat deceptive. Yes, one of the principals is named Carol, and it seems only logical to christen the film after her, given that she is played with luminescent magnetism by Cate Blanchett. Yet the movie belongs equally to Therese Belivet (an extraordinary Rooney Mara), a twentysomething woman with a pageboy haircut and wide, hazel-green eyes. When we first take stock of Therese (the year is 1952), her life seems perfectly satisfactory. She has a steady if thankless job at a Manhattan department store, she has secured the romantic attentions of a good-looking man (Jake Lacy, from The Office and Obvious Child), and she has a fairly healthy social calendar, sneaking viewings of movies with friends in a projectionist booth and occasionally grabbing beers with them at a local bar. She appears to be on the fast track to a life of security, comfort, and contentment. Read More

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Brooklyn: Welcome to the United States. Now Start Your Life.

Jeremy BeckReviews
Saoirse Ronan, center, as an Irish immigrant in John Crowley's soaring "Brooklyn"

Brooklyn is a movie about an immigrant seeking a modest life on America’s rocky shores. In these tumultuous times, that alone makes it an interesting artifact. But while it is a thoroughly global production—it was directed by the Irishman John Crowley from a screenplay by the English writer Nick Hornby, adapting a book by Irish novelist Colm Toibin, and it is being distributed here by the American studio Fox Searchlight—it is not concerned with current political or social issues. In fact, it has little interest in contemporary complexities at all. On the contrary, Brooklyn—with its period setting, its classical warmth, its swooning simplicity—is proudly, almost brazenly old-fashioned.

That is a dangerous label to apply to a movie, one that suggests either snobbish nostalgia (“They don’t make ’em like they used to!”) or sneering modernism (“Old movies are so dated!”). But Brooklyn is neither a strained tribute to pictures of the past nor a wistful critique of the uncertainties of the present. It is instead its own creature: funny, tender, a little bit treacly, and entirely true. At its core, Brooklyn is about nothing more than a woman searching for happiness. Watching it, you will have no struggle finding the same. Read More

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Z for Zachariah: A Garden of Eden in a Land of the Dead

Jeremy BeckReviews
Margot Robbie is the last woman on Earth in "Z for Zachariah"

The apocalypse has long fascinated filmmakers, and no wonder. From the black comedy of Dr. Strangelove to the commercial satire of Dawn of the Dead to the blunt-force survivalism of I Am Legend, the concept of the end of the world yields fertile cinematic soil for eager directors to till. But the marvel of Z for Zachariah, Craig Zobel’s solemn and soulful third feature, is that it isn’t really about the end of the world at all. Certainly, it recognizes the starkness of its reality, but it shows only the barest of interest in exploring the origins of its inciting event. (The sum total of its exposition occurs when a character muses, “Maybe something with the weather patterns.”) Instead, Z for Zachariah uses the apocalypse as scaffolding to explore a genre that is far more cataclysmic: the domestic melodrama. Zobel doesn’t care how civilization collapsed. He wants to know how hearts break.

Not that this lush and expressive film is remotely lacking in ghoulish imagery or toxic atmosphere. From its opening moments, which follow a hooded figure clad in Hazmat gear prowling through a barren landscape, Z for Zachariah silently communicates the calamity that has befallen the planet. That figure is Ann (Margot Robbie, an Australian giving her best shot at a Southern accent), the lone remaining denizen of this unhappy valley that’s located somewhere in Southern Appalachia. Ann’s hair initially appears lank and her face is caked with grime, but this isn’t one of those cheesy uglification jobs, and her natural luminescence quickly shines through because, you know, Margot Robbie. One day, this solitary looker spies John Loomis (a terrific Chiwetel Ejiofor), a civil engineer wandering a dusty road in a comically oversized “safe suit”. He futzes around with a Geiger counter and then, upon confirming that the air is uncontaminated, strips off his suit and lets out a bellow of euphoria, tears streaming down his face; with that, in less than 30 seconds and without uttering a single syllable, Ejiofor makes his character’s agony and ecstasy known. Indeed, John is so excited by having finally found a safe environment that he stupidly wades into a nearby pond without first testing the water, which is, Ann frantically informs him, radioactive. Read More

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Phoenix: Back from the Dead, But Something’s Off

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ronald Zehrfeld and Nina Hoss dance with deception and death in "Phoenix"

Suspension of disbelief is typically a viewing requirement at the multiplex, not the art house. Superhero movies and science-fiction flicks are expected to stretch the boundaries of reality in ways anathema to dialogue-driven dramas and period pieces. Phoenix, Christian Petzold’s electric, implausible anti-love story, is the type of muted, modestly scaled film that you wouldn’t expect to ask audiences to take a giant leap of faith. But it does precisely that, hinging on a conceit that, if rejected, threatens to topple the entire enterprise. If you refuse to accept the cornerstone of Phoenix‘s vertiginous plot, you may struggle to find rapture in its supple technique and vast emotions. But if you surrender yourself, you are likely to become intoxicated by its smoky beauty and limitless longing.

I strongly urge you to try your best, though my urgings are insignificant compared to those of Nina Hoss. A German-born actress best known to American audiences as one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s weary spies in A Most Wanted Man (and also the anchor of Petzold’s sobering Cold War film, Barbara), Hoss delivers a transcendent performance as Nelly, a concentration camp survivor who was shot in the face during the war (in a wise decision, the details of the shooting are never explained), and who begins the film wrapped in bandages. She’s returning to Germany with her friend, Lene (Nina Kunzendorf, perfectly crisp), in order to undergo facial reconstructive surgery. When the doctor asks Nelly whom she wants to look like, she demands that he return her to her original self. “You won’t look exactly the same,” the surgeon warns her, and the subtitles for that line might as well be accented in bold. Read More

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