There is an incredible mystery, roiling, like oil, underneath the surface of Killers of the Flower Moon. It is the oil, however, that breaks through in the opening moments and drenches the Osage people—who happened upon it in their otherwise barren Oklahoma land, the sadistic endgame of the Trail of Tears. Sober-faced men dance around the geyser, emanating gratitude rather than joy. The black gold makes them filthy. They are now rich.
But this wealth came at a cost. David Grann’s 2017 account outlines the damning statistics of the Osage Reign of Terror, which occurred a century ago. The white population did not merely rob the Osages. Some insinuated themselves as trustees of Osage oil headrights and embezzled the fortunes. The tribe had the distinction of being the wealthiest group in America, per capita, while charting an outsize mortality rate. Many were poisoned; bad Prohibition-era liquor was used as cover. The families were then charged exorbitant rates for the funerals. It was a genocide within a genocide.
With one sister shot dead, and another blown up in a terrorist attack on her home, Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) seeks out President Coolidge’s support. Even if she did not know the extent to which the local authorities were fatally compromised, local law enforcement was nearly non-existent at that time. A Pinkerton agent hired by the tribe had already disappeared. In the book, the fledgling agency that would become J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. takes the case, and Grann follows the investigation through the eyes of the fair-minded Agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons). In the film version, directed by Martin Scorsese—who co-wrote the script with Eric Roth—there is no mystery. Mollie’s husband Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the culprit.
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.
When The Godfather became the highest-grossing film of 1972, it spoke to something that weary Americans felt in their bones: that organized crime was just a parallel economy—no better and no worse than the “legitimate” one. The Godfather, Part II cut between Robert De Niro as a de-aged version of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone, and Al Pacino, as Vito’s scion Michael, in middle age. That is to say, it cut between the historically contingent work of building an empire—at a time when crime was the only form of social mobility available to a poor immigrant kid—and how that empire, once established, lost its purpose. Power had become its means and end.
This critique helped secure the movies’ place in the pantheon, and gave an opening to a grandchild of poor immigrants: Martin Scorsese. His breakout picture, Mean Streets, was released in 1973, when the market was suddenly wide open for an autobiographical tale about small-time hoods. But part of the culture, beaten down by Vietnam, Civil Rights, and a sluggish economy, watched The Godfather and saw something else. Rather than thinking that a system comparable to the Mafia was one in need of reform, they idolized gangsters for wearing corruption better. Wiseguys fit right into sex, drugs, and wide lapels. They were corrupt without being ashamed of it.
Almost 50 years on, through the agency of “bad fans” like Roger Stone, this mob mentality of shamelessness has made deep inroads into mainstream corporate and political power—even as the mob’s actual power has waned. The eclipsing of that hard power, and the soft power of its cultural imprint, are both subjects of Scorsese’s The Irishman, which stars Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa and De Niro as his putative Judas. But even themes that large seem reductive in the face of this three-and-a-half-hour American tragedy.
Green Book—whether it intends to or not—makes a virtue of simplicity. I think reasonable people could disagree about the merits of that virtue, or their political value in this kind of movie, especially in this day and age. If, however, you find yourself outraged by Green Book, on the grounds that it is a toxic work that polite society is obliged to cancel, I suggest you log off of Twitter and take a deep breath. It is understandable that people of color would feel patronized by Hollywood, but Hollywood can be a useful ally. For better or worse, it has a knack for meeting people where they are.
Granted, Nick Vallelonga, whose screenplay was “inspired” by his father’s experiences, has the shrewd competence of a Hollywood hack. It’s as if the occupants of the car in Driving Miss Daisy pulled a Chinese fire drill—now it’s an uncouth white driver (“Tony Lip,” played by Viggo Mortensen) pitted against a super-couth black passenger (Don Shirley, played by Mahershala Ali). Not only do they learn about themselves, and each other, but they go on a road trip (through the Deep South, in the innocently early ’60s)!
I think it is wise to set aside the problems inherent in crafting a true story around subjects who are dead—not because it is unimportant, but because it is far from unique to Green Book. Granted, a nightclub bouncer with mob connections, like Tony, seems like a man given to tall tales; his son clearly loved him; and Don, a classically trained pianist, was—if the movie can be trusted at all—a private individual, not given to revealing much of himself. Nobody “owns” history, but it does seem tilted in favor of chatterboxes.
The lukewarm reception of Joy will hopefully shake David O. Russell and Jennifer Lawrence out of the complacency that this bric-a-brac movie is surely the product of, but I want to take a moment to give them points for their sheer, batshit audacity. It’s a pleasure to think about and a pain to write about because it’s so chocked full of nuts that it’s hard to figure out which layers are intended as bullshit and which layers aren’t intended as bullshit but really, truly are. Wading in this septic think tank can put one in touch with the sublime; it’s like listening to an interview with William Shatner. But it can also be exhausting. Joy feels suspiciously like the last few Russell-Lawrence collaborations, but they power through this one as if under a 108-degree fever. They’ve sweat off the emotional weight.
First, the good stuff: This is a movie about a mop. That’s about the best thing I can say about it. I’ve never seen a film, or engaged with any work of art intended for adults, that has put a human face on household products. The mop is a symbol of our modern-day Cinderella’s domestic oppression as well as her ticket to freedom. More importantly, Joy in Joy makes the case that the mop mod she’s invented will shave minutes off your chores. Those minutes add up, and add value to your life. What Joy represents is utopianism on a granular scale: so granular that her ilk is often unfairly overlooked. Viewed through this prism, as-seen-on-TV junk is transfigured. Who knew that one might find an unsung hero behind ped eggs and lint removers and containers of OxiClean? Look deep into the food processor or up a set of knives and one might find the traces of a human being who was trying to make the world a better place. Joy sells her mop on QVC, back when shopping from home was a novel thing, and the film makes it clear that the network stands for something other than late-capitalist malaise. For a tweaker like Joy, it’s an honest-to-goodness platform for ideas.
Russell can make these points, and Lawrence can sell them through her dimples, all while going headlong into butterscotch-and-brown late-’80s kitsch. Their contrarian impulse has swagger, and it’s essentially humane. This is a female-empowerment movie without malice, but also, perhaps, without mental toughness. When one of QVC’s most experienced on-air personalities tries to shill for it, Joy’s mop is a flop, so the inventor decides to get in front of the camera herself. Bradley Cooper, as the slick head of programming, tries to weigh her down with bangle bracelets and gallons of hairspray, but she insists on going before the lights in plainclothes, so the viewers see the aw-shucks in her eyes. Guess what? It works!
Steve Carell gives a captivating performance in Foxcatcher. I doubt whether any actor has worn a false nose so well since Robert De Niro’s got pummeled into cauliflower in Raging Bull. That this beak caps off a man who counted ornithology among his interests is a fringe benefit; that the real John E. du Pont also resembled a bird of prey has a downright sinister serendipity. Moreover, John was a scion—with blood as blue as melancholy—and a wrestling coach; and this led him to bring Mark Schultz, a 27-year-old world champion, into his fold.
The film begins in 1987—three years after Mark (Channing Tatum) was awarded his gold medal in Los Angeles. Wherever he is now, it certainly could use that California sun; he grunts out an inspirational speech for a gray assemblage of elementary-school kids who look too tired to yawn. He trains with his brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), a fellow Olympic gold medalist who is also a wrestling coach at a university. Between the wife, kids, job, and receding hairline, one wouldn’t guess that, in real life, Dave was only a year older than Mark. There’s the suggestion that Mark, affectless and laconic, is developmentally disabled—and that’s off-putting because it plays into stereotypes about wrestlers, and because Mark wrote the book this movie is based on.
Discomfiting as the suggestion is, it seems to be something Mark has in common with John. Their conversation is so spare it could have been written by Hemingway. The wrestler and the wrestling enthusiast are united after Mark receives a call made on behalf of John du Pont—“of the du Pont family.” He’s invited to the chemical heir’s Pennsylvania estate, which is draped in eternal autumn—as if to imply that it’s within John’s dynastic power to prevent the leaves from falling, or any cycle from completing—and invited to join Team Foxcatcher. A sententious patriot, and probably long before it was fashionable (as it would have been then; this is the Reagan era, after all), John wants to train Mark—and Mark wants to win the gold—in the interest of national prestige. John also wants Dave to join, so he too can practice next-door to the dowager du Pont’s thoroughbred ranch. But Dave declines, citing family obligations: an excuse the others can’t much empathize with.
If the fashions of the 1970s indicate a culture that had given in, the fashions of the 1980s indicate a culture that had given in but was pretending not to have. In the ’70s, couched in disillusionment, people weren’t hypocritical about being hypocritical; Americans indulged in new freedoms that they hadn’t yet learned to be afraid of. This wayward decade seems to be the spiritual home of the director David O. Russell, who turned 16 in 1974: the year that American Hustle takes off. Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), whose chest hair garnishes a leisure suit which is open all the way down to the gut, are two fish grooving in this brave new sea, though their sense of class is informed by an even earlier period; they fall in love over a Duke Ellington L.P.
Russell’s take on the ’70s in America differs greatly from Tomas Alfredson’s view of England during the same era in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Britain’s finest hadn’t just given in—they’d given up. For small-time con artists like Irving, who bilks money out of other small fry by way of bogus loans, and Sydney, who assists him in the imperial guise of “Lady Edith,” this is a period of market expansion—until they get busted by Bradley Cooper in curls, an F.B.I. agent named Richie Di Maso. He takes a shine to Sydney—who still talks like Edith, even if her posh accent is less convincing than the Lady Eve’s—and decides to give the pair a break if they help him snare other criminals; they—Irving less willingly than Sydney—agree to help, and their con spirals out to the highest levels of the Mafia. To Irving’s way of thinking, however, it had gotten out of hand once the trap was set on Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), the mayor of Camden, N.J., whose graft for the cause of a rebuilt Atlantic City reads as corrupt to Richie but, to Irving, looks like the long game fairly played. All the while, Sydney plays them both—and herself, too.
Though very different in style and tone, American Hustle is a caper comedy with quirk baked in like The Brothers Bloom. Both take the idea of con men to Samuel Beckett extremes, and do so with self-awareness plateauing at healthy levels. But, with its roots in social realities, and in movies rooted in social realities—Bloom popped out of Wes Anderson and Fellini; Hustle Altman and Scorsese—Hustle attempts something more daring: Russell doesn’t only want to make a movie in the style of the ’70s masters, he wants to zero in on the sensibility that formed them. As someone whose taste in movies was born in that golden age before my birth, I can’t help but be thrilled by the spirit of his attempt. The big filmmakers of the ’70s were primarily Catholics and Jews—Russell is half-Italian and half-Jewish—and the adoration of Mayor Polito smacks of a certain form of tribalism native to the period. If The Godfather showed that the American Dream was paid for in blood, it also showed an ascendancy from Ellis Island that the sons and grandsons of immigrants could take pride in. Like the student protesters at U.C. Berkeley, their forebears were anti-establishment—but anti-establishment because they had to be. In the flattening of wealth that followed World War II, the ethnic diversity of the middle class boomed; but the aspirations were still hunky-dory Protestant in manner. In Bonnie and Clyde, the youth of a generation said “our turn”; that sentiment then rippled through the generation’s ethnic pockets. This self-identification, which can alas get mawkish, turgid, or worse, gave movies like Mean Streets some of their verve. The American Dream was rewritten in the vernacular.
Sometimes the power of positive thinking seems more acceptable when the people spouting it have been to hell and back. It’s a sympathetic reflex–if they think that will help them get their shit together, might as well let them try. Silver Linings Playbook softens us up with this technique, but the conditioning only goes so far. There’s a precise cutoff point when it goes from indie dramedy to straight-up rom-com; it’s as if Jennifer Lawrence were being replaced by Jennifer Aniston, and Bradley Cooper was being swapped out with, well, Bradley Cooper.
Not to rag on the guy. My main impression of him still comes from The Hangover, which he coasted through like an apotheosized frat boy. He had a leading-man stick up his ass, but none of the charisma that he shows here–a good-humored and sly satire of charisma that blurs it with crazy. The movie starts with his character, Pat, being let out of an institution that treated him for bipolar disorder; he’d caught his wife in the shower with another man, and socked the philanderer hard enough to squeeze a restraining order out of him. And Pat’s wife. So it’s Pat’s mission to convince her that he’s in shape and in control. We all know that isn’t going to happen; it’s just not the nature of the game. But the director, David O. Russell, postpones the inevitable with a vision of working-class Philadelphia that’s all loose screws. Diagnosed or not, everybody’s got something that someone could prescribe a pill for. But it’s not a broadside about our culture of medication–rather, it vindicates a society in which neurosis is the norm. The movie is consciously made in the spirit of the ’70s films of Robert Altman and Paul Mazursky, and even a Scorsese film like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; those directors embraced kooky Americana in all its jaggedness. Russell knows how to externalize mania in a way that layers anxiety upon anxiety–especially in the sound design–and, somehow, the immediacy of Masanobu Takayanagi’s handheld camera never gets stale.
But there’s a moment when Robert De Niro, as Pat’s book-making father, comes around to Tiffany, Lawrence’s nymphomanical widow, with his trademark puff of the lip and jerk of the wrist, and it’s as if he’s raising a white flag on behalf of his generation. That’s a dramatic way of putting it, I admit, but the movie takes to contrivance like a junkie and its focus-group concessions start to jump out of the woodwork: Oh, I get it, they’ve thrown in some football for the guys and a dance contest for the girls. Even Pat’s family being what’s-a-matta-you Italian seems suspect. To the film’s credit, however, enough good will spills over from the first half to make the betrayal of the second bearable–at least to me. (Bearable–even peppy–but not believable.) Maybe it’s because this is the rare movie where everybody has something to prove and yet nobody has a chip on his or her shoulder. Lawrence comes at us like a juggernaut of tightly wound emotions that clash with Pat’s aloof magical thinking; she may be compensating a bit for the tentativeness of her sylvan heroines, but her drive spills over into the role. Russell, for his part, makes it clear that Silver Linings Playbook belongs to the same chapter of his smorgasbord career as The Fighter; the charm of these bald attempts at inspiration makes one think that maybe he’s been to hell and back.
According to Bad Blake, the fading country-and-Western star in Crazy Heart, a song is good if you think you’ve heard it before when you listen to it the first time. This philosophy seems to be shared by Scott Cooper, who wrote, produced, and directed this adaptation of Thomas Cobb’s novel. It’s less an aesthetic principle than a prescription for playing it safe; but there are certain tunes that play again and again, and the redemption of the down-and-out country crooner always hits that “truthful” note—because in honky-tonk, it’s never auto-tuned.
Bad—who, at 57, leaves his belt unbuckled and putters between gigs at bowling alleys in a ’78 Suburban—is about as “authentic” as they come. He’s a little testy about being outmoded by superstars like Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell)—a former protégé—but Bad’s temper isn’t akin to his stage name. His anger at leaving four ex-wives and a son behind, and his obstinance about making a comeback—which would be a Sweet deal—boomerang at him in unlimited refills of bourbon and unending cartons of smokes. Everybody’s good to Bad but Bad. There’s only one real surprise in the plot—and it’s farfetched enough that it doesn’t feel quite earned—but the plot isn’t what critics and award-bearers have set their sights on.
Enter Jeff Bridges, who makes Bad look good. If Bridges isn’t as flamboyant as other actors of his generation (Pacino, Streep, De Niro, Hoffman, et al), it’s because he doesn’t enter his characters through their pores; he holds them tight, snuggles them—he’s a protective, sentimental actor in the best sense. And his innate combination of skill, generosity, gentleness, and humor is intensely ingratiating. (Even when he played a villain, in Iron Man, his likability couldn’t be subverted.) Sentimentality can be physically demanding. Bad looks like a bristly yeti, but what country singer of his mold hasn’t grown a little mold? Bridges suggests a man who’s given in to the fungus. Poetry punches through fungus, and Bridges’s emotional range is poetic.
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the small-time reporter who helps Bad see the light at the end of the bottle; she’s the one who finally scrapes the grime off Bad’s Chia head. The journalist says that she blushes easily because her capillaries are close to the skin. Everything this woman feels is close to her skin, and the movie overemphasizes her vulnerability. (In one scene, she breaks down after Bad composes lyrics on her bed. She feels unworthy of his talent, and mawkishly assumes that he’ll forget her.) And yet, Gyllenhaal’s eccentricity—her movements are sinuous, like a love-struck stoner’s—suggests that layers of complexity have been battered inward. Her effervescent performance gets at something that the movie itself doesn’t quite.
But, within its limited framework, Crazy Heart is a competent, likable film. There’s some zing to the dialogue, and—since T-Bone Burnett served as Bad’s lyricist—an air of authenticity about the score. (Bad’s repertoire indeed reminds me of music I’ve heard before—even Bridges’s sonorous voice.) Cooper doesn’t get as much out of the Southwestern landscapes as I might have liked; the bounteous mesas authorize natives like Bad to indulge in their freedom to self-destruct. But there’s at least one shot that’s been burned into my hippocampus: Bad, sharp and recumbent in the foreground, with the chintzy Christmas lights of a dive forming a blurry constellation behind him. It seems to capture the romance in the rundown, the fleeting perks of the peripatetic barfly. (Bad’s touring life is both Up in the Air in economy class and a domestication of The Wrestler.) Contrast this shot with one of Robert Duvall—as Bad’s loudmouth bartender/cheerleader/buddy—spouting off life-goes-on lyrics in a rowboat, as the camera pulls back, bestowing meaning from above. [Yawns.] But even if Cooper’s circulatory-system lunacy is hardly in evidence, he has a knack for bringing out the heart murmurs of others.
Last week, I asked my friend how he planned to open a stand-up routine he was preparing for. He hopped to his feet in the bustling public area we were in and shouted, “A guy walked into the Civic Association in Binghamton and shot 13 people!” All too often, blunt insensitivity passes for “dark comedy.” My friend, innocently, hadn’t made the distinction; I advised him to change his act, and he did. It’s too bad that Jody Hill, who wrote and directed Observe and Report, apparently received no such consultation.
There’s a kernel of genius in Hill’s idea—using a mall cop (who isn’t Kevin James puttering about on a Segway) to parody vigilantism—but Hill doesn’t turn that kernel into popcorn; he detonates it with TNT. Sometimes the shockwaves push you backward laughing, but sometimes you wonder if Hill seriously thinks he’s making a joke. We open on a flasher running amok at a suburban mall. The chief of security, Ronnie (Seth Rogen), treats the case with the utmost self-importance. For anyone who’s seen Anchorman or “The Office,” this fatuity is familiar; but rather than following convention and making Ronnie a bumbling blimp with a baby brain and a heart that gets more properly aligned as the movie goes on, Hill explicitly has Ronnie inform us that this bully is bipolar and was a child with special needs. Are Ronnie’s pompous delusions of authoritarian grandeur—which he eventually consummates—meant to be attributed to his illness? In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Hill’s acknowledged take-off point, the hero-driven-to-violence is Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a Vietnam vet-cum-Underground Man killer-cabbie; but neither Scorsese nor Paul Schrader, the screenwriter, assigned their protagonist any specific affliction other than the woozy cultural climate of the 1970s.
When Hill brings in real disorders as a jokey pretext for criminal delusion and anomie, one starts to wonder whether the writer-director is in any position to mock the delusional—Observe and Report goes from showing us a pervy goofball opening his trench coat to expose his junk to Ronnie slaughtering a half-dozen junk dealers in front of the adolescent son of one of the victims. The tone is so wobbly that it’s as if the filmmakers had shot each scene from a different draft of a heavily revised—or maybe not heavily enough revised—script. When Ronnie, with his clay-brained brutishness, flashes red lights of realistic menace in this sunny lotus-land, the incommensurability of character and setting is queasily off-putting. Ronnie aspires to be a cop, but for no moral purpose (sane or otherwise); at least Travis Bickle thought he was doing the right thing. Likewise, Scorsese and Schrader provoked one’s empathy and intellect; Hill just provokes your autonomic responses. His shock cuts and hyperbolic effects are hilariously outré, but clever dark comedy they are not.
Because this is only Hill’s second film—following The Fist Foot Way (2006) and a few episodes of “Eastbound & Down,” which he co-created—part of his problem is inexperience. Why else would he turn Dennis (Michael Peña), Ronnie’s doting protégé, into a cold-hearted thief? It makes no sense in character terms, and it throws a wet blanket over an audience primed to like its jerry-curl’d Sancho-Panza-in-Aviators. Even worse, the betrayal scene is staged dramatically; the editing and plotting are often sloppy, but the awkward pathos of this scene is a true depressant. And the word “fuck” is used so many times that it loses whatever teeny edge it retains; trying to wring a titter out of the f-word is a truly desperate stroke in 2009. Hill doesn’t think of Observe and Report as “a disposable comedy … where there’s no greater subtext,” but on the evidence of the film alone, one may think the director very careless both technically and ideologically. According to Hill, “I hope people feel themselves caught up in a Cameron Crowe moment, but the visuals are so fucked-up that it kind of produces a really uncomfortable feeling. Like, people applaud and then they stop: ‘Wait, what the fuck am I applauding? He just murdered somebody.’” The audience I was in seemed to just keep applauding.
Movie Monster 