2022 Film Roundup, Part 3, Weekly Reel #45
Argentina, 1985; Confess, Fletch; Kimi; and Empire of Light
News of the Week: The next installment in my furious rush to see what 2022 had to offer. I thought this would turn out to be a two, maybe three part series, but is now turning into a four, maybe five—why not six?—part series because of all the late oscarbait and foreign film releases.
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Argentina, 1985 (2022, Santiago Mitre, Argentina/UK/USA) is a historical drama depicting the Trial of the Juntas, a civilian trial prosecuting the military governments that ruled from 1976 to 1983. In a coup that deposed Isabel Perón, the first female President of any country, in 1976, the Argentinian military, formally known as the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Reorganization Process), ruled through harsh repressions across the country through a succession of four Juntas. This led to the open use of “disappearing” people under the pretense of national security, suspension of Congress, banning of political parties, and free market deregulation. The U.S. government supported the Juntas (Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave the go-ahead) by granting $50 million in security assistance and selling $120 million worth of military equipment and the training of hundreds of Argentinian military officers to the military. Lame duck President Carter got Congress to cut off the arms sales citing human rights violations but with the election of Reagan came a resurgence of support, especially between the CIA and Argentinian intelligence services, who also worked together in supporting the military dictatorships across Central America.
The Juntas quickly lost public support through their practice of state terrorism, torture, and extrajudicial murder, with civilians, rather than the “rebels” supported by communists and foreign powers cited by the Juntas as being the reason for their measures, being the largest target. In 1983 the last Junta stepped down and allowed for there to be a democratic election, which a social democrat, Raúl Alfonsín, won. Six judges presiding over the newly created National Criminal Court of Appeals took the internationally unprecedented move in prosecuting the previous military Juntas for their crimes. The film begins with the chief prosecutor, Julio César Strassera (Ricardo Darín), receiving the potentially life-threatening task of preparing a case against the nine military officers. He’s aided by Luis Moreno Ocampo (Peter Lanzani), an ambitious young lawyer who grew up in a military family.
Their strategy was to investigate the connections between the officers and local police forces by gathering as much first-hand testimony as possible from those who were captured, tortured, and now willing to speak out. The tension in the first half of the film is the preparation for taking on this mammoth task, which included a lot of hard work in a short time, but also the daily harassment and death threats to the prosecutors’ families. In the film, Ocampo, who was risking familial ostracization, came up with the idea of using himself and other young people to help with the prosecution so that their short, and presumably apolitical, past couldn’t be used against them. The second half is the trial itself in full procedural drama.
The film is a genuine reminder of democracy and its fragility. As opposed to the daily American exploits of “threats to democracy,” Argentina was barely a year into their first democratically elected government when it decided to take on the military, which still held considerable public sway. Americans will learn all the worst lessons by seeing themselves, from both sides of the aisle, like the prosecutors fighting for justice against tyranny. We should resist such false equivalencies, not only because of our substantial support for the Juntas, but also to acknowledge a legitimate democratic threat when they see one rather than being a bogus slogan every four years.
Argentina, 1985 is streaming on Prime Video.
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Confess, Fletch (2022, Greg Mottola, USA) is a delightful comedy that proves Jon Hamm can parachute into any film and be charming. Based on Gregory Mcdonald’s mystery novel with the same name, Confess, Fletch is the third—Chevy Chase starred in the first two in the eighties—adaptation of investigative reporter Irwin Maurice “Fletch” Fletcher. In this story, Fletch finds a murdered woman in his luxury rental NY townhouse the night he flew in from Rome. The detectives, Sergeant Inspector Monroe (Roy Wood Jr., who needs to be in many more films) and Junior Detective Griz (Ayden Mayeri), are skeptical of Fletch’s nonchalance towards finding a dead person. Fletch plays it off as a whimsical hurdle that he could help solve through his journalist background. But that was in his past and now he makes money through writing articles for inflight mags. The reason for his disinterest in a murder case where he’s suspect number one is because he’s looking for his girlfriend’s (Lorenza Izzo, a Chilean actress who’s now known best for playing funny Italians—Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood) father’s stolen paintings, which are believed to be with a Boston yachter and art dealer (Kyle MacLachlan as a Covid-era germaphobe).
Fletch finds a number of simple ways to avoid the detectives’ tracing methods, which Griz naively overlooks. If investigative reporters require persistence in their efforts, then Fletch, and by extension the charisma of Hamm himself, is highly effective. When he is or isn’t on the trail of the missing art, he’s a skilled impersonator, which leads to amusing mishaps. The film takes a massive meta turn when Fletch asks his old newspaper boss (John “Roger Sterling Jr.” Slattery) to look up the criminal record of the real main suspect in the murder case. Hamm and Slattery, the two most charismatic Mad Men actors, reunite for the first time, this time on the bigger screen. Slattery played Hamm’s ostensible boss in Mad Men, who now plays his ex-boss at a different publication in a different film/show. And the two don’t hide this fact when Slattery plays the role as if he was still Roger Sterling.
Greg Mottola, director of Superbad and Adventureland, who had a better aughts than twenty-tens, does a serviceable job in allowing the actors to rely on their quips and glances. One gets the impression that this is Hamm’s project from start to finish—he and Mottola gave up part of their salaries to fund extra shooting days. While the film is based on existing IP like most American film projects, Confess, Fletch feels fresh and unique, resembling a trope-filled comedic murder mystery more than anything. Perhaps there will be more Fletch projects in the future, only three of the ten books received adaptations. But the box office receipts may prevent that. Everyone knows this was Hamm’s expensive proof of concept that he can be funny on screen, so that’s what we’ll be seeing more of in the future.
Confess, Fletch is streaming on Showtime.
Kimi (2022, Steven Soderbergh, USA) is a techno-covid-thriller about Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz), a work-from-homer that fixes errors detected by Kimi, a more advanced version of Alexa. Kimi’s company is about to go public, which will earn the CEO (In & Of Itself’s Derek DelGaudio making his feature debut; welcome) lots of money. But he has loose ends that need to be cleaned up first. Angela stays home and uses the pandemic as a crutch to assuage her agoraphobia (brought on by past trauma; the trauma plot strikes again), only allowing physical human contact to come from her multiple-night-stand neighbor. One day, while performing routine software fixes, Angela hears what could possibly be a disturbing female scream in the background of an audio file. After using her hipster (or possibly from papa Kravitz) audio equipment, she cleans up and isolates the human voices, which clearly indicates a man assaulting a woman. As Angela tries to bring this to her bosses’ attention, she finds that this issue goes all the way to the top of the company, which is, in turn…of course…complicated by her past trauma and agoraphobia.
It's surprising that the less experienced Kravitz, who gives an excellent physical performance considering she’s confined to her apartment for most of the film, is the best part of a film directed by an industry veteran and written by David Koepp, one of the most bankable writers/co-writers of all time; a brief list of notable mentions: Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The writing provides a competent skeleton of a thriller that Soderbergh executes just fine, but it feels like a straight-to-streaming film throughout.
Like most films going for critiques of tech-companies, their sociopathic leaders, its profits, etc., Kimi fails to leave anything impressionable beyond “tech guy bad, young female protagonist good.” (DelGaudio was a good choice to make the figure gentle and subdued, but that may have been because Koepp and Soderbergh failed to provide anything interesting for the character to do.) It doesn’t have to deliver a damning criticism of the New Money elite or the lengths their inhumanity will go to ensure profits—a system we know all too well. But using them as a template to play around with is unsatisfying, clichéd, and offers another breezy out for the actual tech-leaders destroying society who laugh at our cartoon distractions.
Kimi is streaming on HBO Max.
Pass
Empire of Light (2022, Sam Mendes, UK) is a giant misfire. This is the first Sam Mendes film he wrote by himself, which may prove to be his biggest cinematic flaw. (His last film, 1917, was co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, while his previous seven films were written by others.) Beginning with American Beauty, Mendes always enjoyed a level of critical attention, and then, with the two Bonds, mass appeal. All culminating in 1917, which, as we’ll see with the following Weekly Reel roundup, set a precedent for modern WW1 films as it grabbed three Oscars from ten nominations.
When one boils down what worked in Empire of Light—Ross and Reznor’s score, Deakins’s cinematography, Colman’s acting, Tildesley’s production design—it narrows the blame to Mendes’s directing and/or writing. The film takes place at a majestic theater called Empire in 1980 on the north coast of Kent. The main cast of theater employees includes Olivia Colman (duty manager), Colin Firth (theater manager), a young new employee (Michael Ward), Toby Jones (projectionist), and a handful of other young Brits. Colman’s character is back from a stint at the mental hospital battling schizophrenia, who is taken advantage of by her boss (Firth), calling her into the office for the (daily?) handy. When Michael Ward is hired, Colman falls for him and eventually forms a relationship with him that changes both of their lives forever…
The Big Problem is the misguided social commentary. Mendes splits the difference between Colman’s schizophrenia and the racism directed at Ward’s character in Thatcher’s white supremacist England. Both are treated with delicate, I mean simplistic and overly banal tropes that doesn’t do much for either in terms of artistic revelation. Then it ends with a shoulder shrug. It was nice to see a premium cinema brought back to life, but even that was half-assed compared to the other films about films released this year.
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