Little Women

Little Women does not, for the most part, feel like a current film. Obviously, the Louisa May Alcott book, published 150 years ago, is a classic—and Greta Gerwig has adapted it in full period splendor. It stumbles early on, insecure about how to juggle the host of characters and hops in the timeline, which forces the wandering eye to scramble as it takes in all the Victorian fabrics and wallpapers. Gerwig’s recreation of a Bowery street scene is so thorough that one wishes Jo wasn’t in such a rush, even if slowing down would defy her constitution. But the movie increases in sureness as it goes along.

Though the book is autobiographical, and widely considered to be timeless, it is set in a unique moment of 19th-century American history, when most of the men were off fighting the Civil War, leaving the women to their own devices. And there is another level of specificity, too, that the movie elides: Alcott grew up in Concord, Mass., to parents who hobnobbed with the likes of Emerson and Thoreau. There was perhaps no other place in the country at that time that was as receptive to women with artistic ambitions.

The March sisters, archetypically, each have their own: Jo (Saoirse Ronan) wants to be a writer; Meg (Emma Watson) an actress; Amy (Florence Pugh) a painter; and Beth (Eliza Scanlen) a musician. Their mother (Laura Dern) has a bleeding heart, and donates Christmas breakfast to an impoverished family (the Marches are poor, too, but float on their social clout); and their aunt (Meryl Streep), a realist, milks money and clout for all it’s worth.

Atlantics

Profiling the French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, whose Atlantics won the Grand Prix at Cannes, Maya Binyam observes that the filmmaker “can conscript nearly anyone into a collaborative mode of speech.” “[Audience] members finished at least two of her sentences” during an appearance at the New York Film Festival. Diop, however, “invites the participation,” and extends it to the non-professional cast she worked with on Atlantics, who, she says, need to “know more about the characters than I do.” This theory of collaboration results in fitful bouts of inarticulation, reflected on screen as fever—but also in a peculiar authority with matters beyond the grave.

Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré) is a ghost before he dies. Denied at first four months of wages—earned building a luxury tower that snubs the shanties of Dakar—and then denied Ada (Mame Bineta Sane)—who’s betrothed to a rich man but is the love of Souleiman’s life—he has nothing left for him in Senegal. Ada, one night, finds their hangout empty—green lasers skim the void. “They got on a boat” is the only explanation she needs; we never see it but experience the voyage through her posture in bed: Souleiman’s death is pronounced in a dream. They didn’t make it far enough to be refugees.

If Souleiman presides over the movie like an angel of justice, his haunting passivity has an earthly rebuttal—it animates Sane’s long bones. Ada is no princess and seems irritated by the marriage that will make her a queen. I mistook Ada’s sullenness for petulance, at first, because Diop is in no hurry to explain that, in places where 17-year-old brides are subjected to virginity tests, unspoken but unhidden grievance is the only recourse they have.

1917

Halfway through 1917, Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay) comes to, after a blow to his head, only to discover that the whole world around him is on fire. Thomas Newman’s grand, ambiguous score corkscrews upward; it seems almost to fan the flames this village is writhing in—the medieval edifices humbled by German shells. I can describe no emotion to attach to the grandeur. The lonely foreigner has reason to believe he’s died and gone to hell, or that he’s been there all along; what can this inferno possibly tell him when this is what he was sent to the Western Front to protect? I can’t name the emotion, and yet it is there, surging against interpretation.

1917 wobbles in the no man’s land between humanism and mechanism. It was shot, by Roger Deakins, to simulate a single take, and tells the story in real time. Though Sam Mendes, the director, based it on stories told to him by his grandfather, a First World War veteran, the movie is less a personal journey than it is a guided tour. The Germans are luring the British into an ambush—and the only way to notify the vulnerable battalions is to deliver the news to them by hand. Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) was not picked for this mission out of the blue: his brother will be among the victims, if it fails. That leaves Schofield alone with the bitter clarity that those troops are more faceless numbers for a war that digs uncountable graves.

But it isn’t Schofield’s lot to learn the patriotism that was made stirring in Dunkirk—prelude to the “good” war. 1917 is like Dunkirk deconstructed and straightened out. But it is also a crash course in sensory impressions, with details that flow past like foam down a river: registered but rarely lingered on. The momentum is breathless but its effects are supple—a hand dipped into a cadaver’s wound plays as black comedy; a drunk soldier’s lurches as horror; a hymn rising in a glade as fantasy. When Mark Strong cautions against “men [who] just want the fight,” it isn’t dialogue, it’s texture.

Joker

I happened to see Joker the night before the Academy lavished it with 11 nominations, including Best Actor, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture. This is already an infamous decision—every decision the Academy makes is infamous, as soon as the internet hears about it.

If one takes a generous view, the movie is being rewarded for “making a statement.” If, however, one’s generosity is running a post-holiday deficit, one might wonder if the industry would have bankrolled this “statement” had it not come gift-wrapped in I.P. And one might also wonder how much brand recognition was responsible for the movie’s instant notoriety—free publicity!—and box-office success. In other words, what the industry is honoring is not the film Joker itself, but their own business model.

What is the statement? “Everybody is so awful these days. It’s enough to make you crazy.” The film rues the cutting of social-welfare programs but seems to indicate that they don’t work. Gun control? Well, the talk-show host played by Robert De Niro would probably still be alive if the building he worked at had metal detectors. Rich people are social parasites but the poor people who oppose them are idiotic gangs of violence-mongers.

Marriage Story

If love is a battlefield, divorce must be total warfare—with lawyers cast as the generals and ex-lovers as the grunts. I hesitate to drag the analogy into a proxy war, because if one relinquishes parts of one’s private life as a chit in a litigious game, who is the proxy for whom? This question is central to Marriage Story, which reflects on how marriage and divorce are part of the same campaign. But those things fit neatly into a zero-sum mentality; the substance that vouchsafes their continuity refuses to play that game.

For no good reason, I haven’t kept up with Noah Baumbach. The last film of his that I saw was Greenberg (2010)—on which he collaborated with his then-spouse Jennifer Jason Leigh, who costarred with then-ingenue Greta Gerwig—and, well, the spoiler-not-spoiler for this movie is that Leigh and Baumbach’s marriage didn’t work out. (Gerwig is his current partner.) But Baumbach’s amusement at his own suffering precludes, with perhaps one conspicuous exception, self-pity. Roman à clef point-scoring belongs to the world that he’s critiquing, so his wry detachment scans as civility. Yet the wall he builds is never more effective than when Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver tear it down—and expose it for the scar tissue that it is.

Baumbach’s tone may be a necessary component of the film’s bicoastal milieu, where privilege is checked like Louis Vuitton bags. Though Charlie fled Indiana to be an Off-Broadway director, and never looked back, Nicole is L.A. showbiz, born and bred (her TV-star mother, played by Julie Hagerty, not only drank that Kool Aid, she downed it with a shot of wheatgerm), but gave it all up to act in Charlie’s plays. He belongs on the East Coast, she on the West; their shaggy son Henry (Azhy Robertson) is stuck in between.

The Farewell

There is sometimes a tone of moral instruction on This American Life that leaves me cold—perhaps because the role of the storyteller and the role of the interpreter are folded into one. On occasion, segments that are useful for children may seem like humanist sermons to adults. Ambiguities are extracted and brushed into life lessons: smooth little gems of wisdom.

Lulu Wang’s The Farewell originated as an autobiographical sketch on the public-radio show; and, at times, it cranks out exposition as if introducing the audience to the concept of multiculturalism. That being said, the story is so elemental that if terms like “dramatic irony” didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent them. Billi (Awkwafina) moved to the United States at an early age. When she discovers that her grandmother (Zhao Shuzhen) is dying, she returns to China to say goodbye but learns that it is customary to withhold terminal diagnoses from elderly relatives. Thus, the family reunites to grieve behind Nai Nai’s back, while she is chipper as ever.

The movie satisfies a genuine curiosity to see some semblance of ordinary life in China. Billi’s Americanized sensibility seems, at times, manipulated to pitch the point of view to that of a well-meaning if ignorant tourist, but Wang’s similarly well-meaning (and perhaps necessary) didacticism finds balance with her talent for observation. She is casual with regard to Billi’s father’s latent alcoholism—an old habit dressed up as his family tradition. Billi’s mother, on the other hand—played by Diana Lin with just a spritz of vinegar—has less patience for such traditions and is implied to have been the driving force in moving the family abroad. But she returns to form as well, putting her soused husband to bed like wet socks into a dryer.