A Contemporary-Heavy List of Viewings, Weekly Reel #27
I recommend Sofia Coppola’s Civil War drama, The Beguiled, and talk about Bullet Train, a couple Dakota Johnson efforts, Frankenheimer, and pass on a commercial.
News of the Week: after writing seven thousand words on the Bond films, barely making it a quarter of the way through the franchise, I’m having to re-think how these posts will be structured, which will take more time. I will also do additional research because there’s so much to mention.
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The Beguiled is Sofia Coppola’s sixth feature film and best since Marie Antionette, another period piece. It tells a concise, pot-boiling Civil War story, adapted from Thomas P. Cullinan’s novel of the same name, about a wounded Union soldier (Colin Farrell), across enemy lines in Virginia, who receives treatment for his leg injury at a girls’ school ran by Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman). At the school are a half-dozen girls and young women who are waiting out the demise of their Confederacy, hoping for the best but expecting the worse. While the girls are skeptical of the soldier, based on wartime propaganda, Miss Farnsworth takes him in as a hospitalized prisoner. They all become smitten by the soldier because of his easy-going attitude (and because he was an Irish immigrant conscripted for a few hundred dollars rather than a committed Union soldier)—the title of the story coming from the girls competing for his attention. Their conception of him as the enemy quickly goes away as they see him as the only male around. He and a young woman (Kirsten Dunst) fall for each other, but that doesn’t stop the tension with others. The film is a nice, tight ninety-four minutes, a good lesson for the simple three-act dramatic structure. It was filmed, late 2016, and released, summer 2017, during an interesting time in American politics, where two sides became divided to a point where pundits kept referring to it as the worst moment since the Civil War. The film premiered at Cannes; Coppola won the Best Director award—only the second woman to do so. In the USA, critics favored it, but the audience reacted less enthusiastically.
Although the overt connection between reality and the film is the division between blue and red states, it would do a great disservice to not see the film through Paglian glasses of Man and Woman, as historico-literary depictions. Martha runs the school in accordance with Christian tradition and precision, but on this side of a losing war, the plantation house is falling into ruins—the slaves had run away when the getting was good—and the gardens are returning to their original, gnarled state of nature. When the soldier arrives, he uses what energy he can to bring order through fixing the garden and enjoying the company of (who appear to be) non-combatants. In other words, the Apollonian arrow landed on the Dionysian target—enemies of a larger conflict in mankind (some of you may recall my Antichrist review). Because of the uneven ratio of potential male suitors, the women, deprived for years, compete for him in several ways, which, when expectations confront reality, devolves into a more primitive form of nature that no amount of Christian kindness can quell. Coppola is one of the few directors that can film this kind of story, which isn’t dissimilar to her first feature, The Virgin Suicides. Since then, none of her other films have confronted these primordial questions in a meaningful way, which works well when removed from the socio-cultural baggage of a modern setting. You can find The Beguiled streaming on Netflix.
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Bullet Train is another post-Tarantino release by former stunt performer David Leitch, who’s directorial debut was John Wick. In Bullet Train, Agatha Christie meets Hitchcock and cgi Kill Bill on the set of bourgeoise Snowpiercer. Adapted from a Japanese novel, assassins are stuck on a high-speed train together going from Tokyo to Kyoto, who each have competing motivations against one another, except Ladybug (Brad Pitt), a gun-for-hire taking this mission after the original contractor called in sick. Several more Americans made cameo appearances, but a British-heavy cast supplied the film’s wit, especially Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry) and Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). A few Japanese actors provide the moral backbone of the story, Andrew Koji and Hiroyuki Sanada, but seem to be the placeholders for a film needing a traumatic backstory and Japanese characters in Japan. Style triumphs over substance, a Leitch specialty, with fun assassins introduced and killed faster than a Game of Thrones character. Pitt was the marketing replacement for Ryan Reynolds, which becomes obvious as early as the first act. Pitt can do a lot, but not Japanese-stylized Deadpool. The film does an all right job in making sure the ensemble cast has enough of their own space and individual stories without becoming bloated or unsympathetic; but some were merely comic-book action tropes, some funnier than others. Overall, I’ll take it. You know what you’re expecting walking into this movie, and it does just that. I wasn’t upset at the end, which, for a theatrical release, is reason enough for a tepid recommendation. Go to a theater close to you, but no further, to watch Bullet Train, or don’t, either is fine.
Cha Cha Real Smooth is Cooper Raiff’s sophomore feature, which he directed, wrote, co-produced, co-edited, and starred in while only twenty-four years old. He plays Andrew, a recent university graduate figuring out what to do with his life. His college girlfriend went to Barcelona, he moved back in with his mother, brother, and new stepfather. At a bar mitzvah, he’s able to get everyone to dance, which leads to a semi-stable gig as a dance-inducing DJ. Also there, he gets an autistic girl and her mother, Domino, played perfectly by Dakota Johnson, to dance, which opens their isolated duo to the playful enthusiasm of naïve Andrew. The community stigmatizes Domino and her daughter because they see Domino, who’s a young unmarried mother, as a negative influence. Andrew’s attention to the pair leads to a typical romantic-dramedy plot with Domino. The film’s only real problem is relying on one too many obvious plot points. The strength of the film is in Raiff’s confident direction and ADD-electrified screen presence, which Johnson necessarily grounds through her trademark stare-heavy performance and thoughtful movements. Their screen presence together binds most of the film together when Andrew isn’t making his extroversion in every scene apparent. Brad Garrett and Leslie Mann lend veteran performances in roles they seem to have always played (in an effective way). Newcomers Evan Assante and Vanessa Burghardt are promising, especially this being the latter’s debut performance. Apple TV+ liked the film at Sundance enough to buy it for fifteen million dollars, so you can find it streaming there.
The Lost Daughter, in keeping with the now un-official week of Dakota Johnson, is last year’s debut feature from Maggie Gyllenhaal, which she adapted from Elena Ferrante’s novel—and got the screenplay award at Cannes for doing. The story is a psychological drama about a woman, Leda (Olivia Colman as older Leda and Jessie Buckley as younger Leda), on vacation in Greece preparing for her upcoming semester teaching comparative literature at Harvard. At the small beach resort town, a loud Greek-American family is vacationing at the same beach, which chagrins Leda, especially a young mother, played by Dakota Johnson. The young mother is visibly resentful of her duties, which Leda relates to, as we see in her flashbacks as a young mother. Leda’s story of motherhood is dark, but never dips fully into shame or victimization—her name taken from the Greek mythological story about Zeus, in the form of a swan, raping Leda, which results in two extra offspring; Leda in the film also has two children, but this connection to the original story is only mentioned through the Yeats poem, “Leda and the Swan,” in a drunken conversation. Making the overt connection to Leda as victim would diminish the purpose of Ferrante and Gyllenhaal’s depiction of Leda, which is the study of a realistically unlikeable woman—a topic rarely touched by filmmakers in a non-clichéd manner. Colman and Buckley, both earning Oscar noms, brilliantly play Leda and give the character an impenetrable, non-judgmental quality. The lovely Johnson also brings a sensitive approach to her character. Best of all is Ed Harris, who plays a Greek island hotel caretaker—finally out of his usual suit-wearing, lip-puckering seriousness, who likes to party and dance. The film premiered at Venice last year, but right before that, Netflix acquired the domestic distribution rights, so it’s streaming there.
Ronin is one of the final films of John Frankenheimer, a full-artistic-control director known for giving an imprint on the political thriller genre with early Cold War films like The Manchurian Candidate. Then he ventured into thriller hybrids with sci-fi (Seconds), drama (Seven Days in May), war (The Train), motor racing (Grand Prix), and action (Ronin being one of his best—but French Connection II deserves an honorable mention). In Ronin, an older American (Robert De Niro in his last great film as the main protagonist) joins forces with other special operatives for hire to retrieve a mysterious briefcase for an Irish group from a heavily armored entourage. Their mission is in Paris, then Arles, and ends in Paris with many moments of pistol negotiations, double-crosses, and car chases. The rest of the cast is a classic group of acteurs: Jean Reno, Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgård, Sean Bean, and Jonathan Pryce. And even with all this talent, Frankenheimer doesn’t allow any one of the powerhouse performances to steal the show, which is a directorial ring-leading seldom seen today. In what would be Frankenheimer’s final masterpiece, which was co-written by David Mamet and J.D. Zeik, the tension fails to drop at any point. Frankenheimer proves himself, once again, as the master of action thrillers and deserving of a re-watch if you haven’t seen it in a while. You can find it on Prime Video and Paramount+, or, for free but with ads, on Roku Channel, Tubi, and Pluto TV.
Pass
The Audition is a massively-budget, fifteen minute commercial for a casino resort that Martin Scorsese directed, which starred DiCaprio and De Niro as well as cameo by Brad Pitt. The whole thing is a giant troll, the humor being that this directorial-dual-actor combo has been a constant question, so I don’t spend much time on it. (It’s dumb overall.) But it should be noted that these three will be coming out with Killers of the Flower Moon together next summer.
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