A Trilogy of Nights at the Theater, Weekly Reel #33
I watched three recent film releases in the theater this week, The Woman King, Barbarian, and See How They Run, which I recommend watching in that order.
News of the Week: (I went camping so this post will be short.) I’ll be going to the theater a lot more often in the next few months and be able to recommend, and pass on, the latest goodies. There’s a lot to look forward to: Johnson, Spielberg, Chazelle, Aster, Baumbach, Aronofsky, Guadagnino, Iñárritu, Field, Panahi, McDonagh, Yang, Poitras, Park, Mendes, Hansen-Løve, Polley, Wells, Gray, Schrader (both Paul and Maria), Östlund, and Lars von Trier.
Watch Now
The Woman King (2022, Gina Prince-Bythewood, USA) is a historical epic about the Agojie, an all-female military unit of the Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. General Nanisca (Viola Davis) leads the unit for King Ghezo (John Boyega), who have an uneven relationship. By all indicators, she should have a place on the throne and made sure he had ascended originally. We follow the story of who the Agojie are through Nawi (Thuso Mbedu), a rebellious teen-ager whose father sent her to marry the king. The Agojie instead take her in and train her, like all the other young women that arrived for similar but oftentimes much worse reasons. Under the financial pressures from European slavers, another kingdom, the Oyo, is pressing Dahomey for more goods. (The two secretly steal, imprison, and sell of each other’s villagers into slavery on the side.) During one emissary trip to Dahomey, General Oba Ade (Jimmy Odukoya) requires twenty Agojies, presumable to be used as sex slaves, this time. Nawi is in the group chosen, who go to the port town at the heart of the slave trade but don’t bend the knee. As one can expect, fights between all parties involved dominate the second half of the film.
The word everyone from now until the Oscars will say to describe the film is “powerful.” And it is. It’s the underdog empire up against the evil slavers in conjunction with a bigger neighboring empire. The history isn’t exactly accurate—when is it ever? —but it doesn’t swerve too far out of history and into revisionism, which is rare and fine enough for a studio epic. (I will release a long essay this week on Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, which tells the story of Hurston interviewing Cudjo Lewis, who was captured by the all-female military unit of Dahomey in 1860.) And aside from the hammed romantic sub-plot, the story is slick and effective. The trauma and violence have their earned places. It balances the tension between the ethics of trading slaves or another, less lucrative, export product, which is the first time a Western film studio has told this story from the perspective of the Africans rather than the Europeans. Although Davis is perched as the generalissimo of the cast (along with the prime lead for Oscar attention), Lashana Lynch captures one’s attention far more frame-to-frame and Mbedu goes toe-to-toe with Davis in most scenes.
Depending on the time of year and where it’s released, The Woman King would be a solid save for later. But the theatrical viewing heightened the experience; the middle-aged woman sitting next to me, as well as others around, were audibly sniveling and closing their eyes during much of the third act. Depending on the context—people did the same during Spider-Man: No Way Home lol—this changes the impact of cinema and a great advertisement for theatergoing. So, please go to a cinema near you and watch The Woman King, especially before all the other fall studio films start coming out.
Save for Later
Barbarian (2022, Zach Cregger, USA) starts with a great premise, throws in a couple great twists, but then falters from its own conventional weight in the end. It’s about a woman, Tess (Georgina Campbell), who goes to an Airbnb, at night, in Detroit, to find that the small house was double-booked with a tall white guy, Keith (Bill Skarsgård of the Skarsgård clan). The premise takes a while to warm up, which mostly shows how they agree to stay the night there together, him trying to assure her that everything will be okay. She agrees, but something weird happens in the night. We won’t know what happened until making a connection from the third act. Creeping into act two, Tess, after her interview downtown and without Keith available, comes back to the house and goes in the basement looking for tp. She’s locked in, finds a secret passage, and finds strange things. When Keith gets back, she convinces him to go down the passage but doesn’t come back. She goes after him, does, but then something else happens.
This all happens in the first half. The second half, after the moment above ends, switches its tone dramatically and takes one on a horror film trip with some uniqueness. And once it achieves that first bump, it bumps again later, which ties everything together. But that last bump was the one to knock the freshness off the wagon. The premise from the first bump is the most interesting aspect of the script, which appeared to be reaching a conclusion. But then back to horror. It isn’t enough of a change or fault to make the film unenjoyable, but genre conventions always come collecting whether it works or not. The next five weeks will be an appropriate time to see a good horror film in theaters, so I recommend Barbarian as a solid choice.
Pass
See How They Run (2022, Tom George, USA/UK) is a whodunnit within a whodunnit that turns into a who cares. It stars Sam Rockwell as the veteran inspector solving the murder of a film director (Adrien Brody), who brings along a young constable (Saoirse Ronan). The director was hired to adapt a highly popular Agatha Christie stage-play in nineteen-fifties London, which puts everyone in the theater’s production on the suspect list. David Oyelowo plays the closeted screenwriter. Harris Dickinson plays a young Richard Attenborough. Ruth Wilson is the theater owner. And Moaning Myrtle herself, Shirley Henderson, plays Agatha Christie, another shriller.
The story plays for laughs. Ronan receives the most and Rockwell, who’s usually electric, is somehow flat. Unfortunately, the writer and director conspired to make the story itself a joke rather than inserting them into a cleverly designed murder mystery—as Rian Johnson has shows one how to do recently for the second time—with moments of humanity and stakes. Even though most of these films run too long and the coal burns out, this ninety-eight minute snack is an expensively unrich pastry you’ve had before.
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