There are several sunny days in The Zone of Interest and never any clear ones. The exteriors are sharp as woodcuts but white as if seen through a membrane of milk. At nighttime the interiors are lit by spectral circles of gaslight which enclose pale faces in fiery bubbles. Everywhere, in every inch of the house, gardens, and grounds, the air is consecrated by ash.
Rudolph (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) appear happily married. Like Mike and Carol Brady, they sleep in separate beds. We see their children deliver father’s birthday cake and fish in the stream. They only fight when he reveals that he has been assigned to a new post. This would mean giving up their home—the symbol of their upward mobility. Rudolph would no longer live next door to work, which is right over the fence that seals off the garden. He is the commandant of Auschwitz.
The 2014 novel, by the late Martin Amis, boldly hops over that fence to show us the concentration camp, its inmates and its functionaries, from the inside. In the book, Rudolph is a blowhard. Hedwig has little interest in guarding her social capital; she is preoccupied with what would happen if the Germans lose the war. She has an affair with a character who does not appear in the movie: a nephew of Martin Bormann whose entire adult life has been in the shadow of the Nazi regime. Though he perceives that his actions are evil, he knows no other way of living—or of staying alive.
Asteroid City is set in Wes Anderson’s 1950s, as opposed to the ’50s he lived through. (He was born in 1969.) In The Grand Budapest Hotel, the filmmaker flipped through eras like lenses in an eye exam, putting the artist at a safe distance from his subject. The layering in this film does something else; it opens a conduit between past and present and their analogues: fiction and reality. Anderson seems self-possessed; he doesn’t hide behind his vision.
Perhaps the best way to get at it is to say that where Budapest was vertical, as in a monopoly, Asteroid City is horizontal. Anderson’s primary storyline, which involves gifted children, their parents, military brass, and scientific personnel encountering a U.F.O. in the Desert Southwest, and being placed under lockdown for it, is framed by its backstory, which casts that story as a play by a gay writer (Edward Norton) working with an austere ensemble that resembles the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, and this is framed by a making-of television documentary narrated by Bryan Cranston, doing his best Rod Serling—the voice of a cynical yet reassuring authority.
In effect, Anderson weaves together disparate strands of ’50s Americana, from highbrow (Method acting) to middle (anthology series) to low (flying saucers). He has explicitly set the story in the backyard of nuclear peril and in the same month (September 1955) as James Dean’s death: parallel truths that are stranger than fiction. All that makes these strands coherent is the very fact of his weaving. He salvages flotsam from a dream and the dream is collective nostalgia. The pieces fit together almost despite themselves.
In What We Do in the Shadows (2014), Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), and parts of Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Taika Waititi disabused me of a notion I too often have: that unbridled happiness in comedy is going extinct. (In a very different context, this was true of Little Women, too.) To examine that kind of lightning in a bottle too closely is to risk getting burned; the closest I can get to grounding myself is to suggest that he has a postmodern sensibility but not the self-consciousness. It’s a wave he rides, not a note he plays.
Waititi’s new film, Jojo Rabbit, made me happy but it was, well … bridled. Based on a novel by Christine Leunens, the elevator pitch is roughly: Huck Finn meets Anne Frank. When Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) finds out that his mother (Scarlett Johannson) is hiding Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), a Jewish girl, from the Nazis, it frazzles the 10-year-old’s loyalties. Nazism is all he knows: his imaginary friend takes the form of the fuhrer (Waititi), who represents the tug of conformity on the boy’s divided conscience.
The movie itself is a little split. In a nutshell, it’s The Death of Stalin for kids. Like that film—and The Little Hours—Jojo Rabbit puts contemporary words into historical figures’ mouths, which means Waititi has to actively suppress the horrors of the Third Reich and, thus, jumble adults’ sense of historical irony while making the stakes unintelligible for children.
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.
Scarlett Johannson looks no less unworldly under a mink rug, and curtain of splenetic dark hair, than she does wearing nothing but a cell-phone case. She also looks no more of her time. Her talent for radiating an unkillable precocity keeps Under the Skin true to its title. This out-of-left-fielder, directed by Jonathan Sexy Beast Glazer, is an erotic fable in sci-fi drag, and Johannson is a Disney princess in stiletto heels and black leather. (BuzzFeed be derped for whipping me with that image.) More than its star, she is its cynosure. I missed the first few minutes, but she appears to be an alien put on this earth to cruise for men—a Pied Piper for Penises—though her objective is unknown. Rolling down her van’s windows, and coming on to passersby like a street-walking mannequin, she picks up her prey and repairs to her lair, a black-hole bordello where both parties wordlessly strip. To a ritualized drum beat, she marches backward; each man who follows is swallowed by the quicksand floor. As if by hypnosis, his game face remains fixed on Johannson—even as his eyeline sinks. There are no signs of struggle.
Now, I’ll acknowledge here Glazer’s inversion of the “male gaze,” which has gone from being a valid critique of how women are objectified in the media to an inside joke between coy filmmakers and freshman film theorists. When one has a beautiful woman bear her bounty only to shame the audience for wanting to see it, the brain is not the organ one is attempting to arouse. I see a potential glint of self-serving self-righteousness—the blood and butter of revenge fantasy—in Skin, but it isn’t as exposed as Johansson is; and, as with a similar reservation I had about Blue Is The Warmest Color, I think any smugness is ultimately transcended because the ironies go past any specifically feminist interpretation into something ungendered, apolitical. This unalloyed art-house film is not so baffling if one accepts that its content is not the “story,” or the invisible field of sci-fi reference—with allusions to The Man Who Fell to Earth, etc.—that suggests a context for the action. The content is Johannson’s psychological journey from victimizer to victim; the mystery is in the tragic inevitability with which her arc is freighted. Glazer’s ornate austerity, like the musique concrète blocks he drops, only weighed me down when Johannson’s journey forked off onto a byroad—such as during a scene at the beach that was rather more vague than ambiguous.
But I don’t mean to suggest that Glazer has only one note to play. Under the Skin is remarkably compact for all that it synthesizes, and the gestalt works on its own as a breath of cool atmosphere. In movies, less often really isless; but this one, with its Scottish frugality—it was shot in and around Glasgow—darts past those movies whose makers believe they’re commenting on clichés by distilling them. It is countryside and cobblestone: a modern city built over Brothers Grimm ruins that have their own secret life—an immanence. Shooting surreptitiously, Glazer mulls over the surfaces of daydreams on hard faces which aren’t locked but aren’t open; this is an outsider’s view, and the guerrilla footage adds a layer of irony, of intangibility, to the incomprehensible fullness of all strangers, with the added amplification of kaleidoscopic effects that evoke silent films about rural emigrants in big cities. It is the sheer volume of life in public spaces that puts Johannson in a headspin; she lives in the safety of shadows, in the cockpit of a van that whirs like the bridge of the Enterprise. Real life gives the film texture, a counterpoint that Air Doll—another poetic fable about a woman feeling the weight of her flesh for the first time—lacked. (Why do allthese women-on-the-verge films seem to be directed by men? Now there’s a gaze worth looking into.)
In the most intriguing scene in Her, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a writer, lets a woman into his apartment who has been summoned by Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), the operating system he has purchased and fallen in love with. The entrant has volunteered to be a “surrogate”: a flesh bridge between the writer and his lover in the cloud. (The substance of the gulf she spans is open to debate.) For foreplay, the surrogate lip-syncs sweet nothings that Samantha broadcasts from unseen speakers; she caresses Theodore’s body in a way that Samantha—vexed by her handicap but not stifled by it—cannot; and that elusive property of his—flesh—squirms at this virtual reality: this disconnect between body and soul: these two eyes that can be beheld and yet fail to hold his beloved’s infinity of ones and zeroes. (Maybe, with this conveyance as her sole intention, they fail to convey anything at all, least of all their owner’s soul.) Shame-faced, Theodore apologizes to the crestfallen woman as he edges her out the door; his cross-platform relationship remains unconsummated, at least in physical terms. As soon as she’s out of sight, the surrogate wails about having failed the couple, avowing her love for them as if she was part of their relationship and not just an accessory to it. She’s a creature to be pitied, as is any accessory that has fallen out of use.
In a sense, the surrogate is Theodore’s real soul mate. He makes his living dictating personal letters from parents to their children or from one lover to another, and though it’s improbable that BeautifulWrittenLetters.com would generate enough profit for him to afford his spacious loft in a highrise, its thematic purpose is clear: in this world, people outsource their feelings. The surrogate, Theodore, and, presumably, his clients are so emotionally stunted that they can only express emotions ventriloquially. (That lovelorn surrogate is so cyberpunk’d she’s turned on by getting plugged in for a computer.) This movie’s exquisitely designed—and believable—aesthetic for a future Los Angeles is both geometrically austere and cheerfully colorful; it was shot, partly, in Shanghai, with a look inspired by Jamba Juice. But the dead space in each frame indicates that this a padded cell dressed up like a Mac Store. In ’60s art-house imports like L’Avventura, Last Year at Marienbad, La Dolce Vita, and Breathless, the malaise was “alienation”—moneyed indifference alternately led to and resulted from World War II. The director of Her, Spike Jonze, substitutes alienation with the trending buzzword of today: “self-involvement.” (Though the symptoms of the afflictions are very similar, the term implies that individuals now shoulder the blame.) He conflates, however, the self-involvement of creative people (which has probably always been thus, though it may have been muted in those eons of history when survival was too darn time-consuming to trifle with the luxury of self-expression) and that of everyone whose noses are glued to their iPhones because their productivity demands have soared and their attention spans have eroded. There is overlap in terms of the people doing these activities, but a vast difference in motive. Jonze also updates the tone of the art films. Her is a twee jeremiad—depravity is sad and adorable.
This the first of Jonze’s four features for which he has the sole writing credit. His talent is for being a sympathetic observer, not a satirist; Her was made by someone who feels rather than by someone who questions. But there’s an unnerving incongruence between his being dyspeptic about humanity’s future and unwilling to raise his voice. Jonze’s focus on the central love story between Theodore and Samantha, with only fleeting glances at a culture that would sell sentient beings like these “artificially intelligent” operating systems as consumer goods—at a civilization that is stumbling into the dread Singularity—seems to me less like a critique of self-involvement than a symptom of it. To an impatient viewer, these people (and devices) who go on and on about themselves seem like the proverbial frogs in a warming pot; but Jonze seems lovingly invested in these hipsterisms, and it’s hard not to be fazed by his sweetness. When Theodore tells his ex-wife (Rooney Mara) that he’s upgraded sex partners to an O.S., she provides the only voice of opposition that isn’t in the writers’ (both Theodore’s and Jonze’s) own consciences: He’s too self-involved to have a partner he can’t control. It seems we’re meant to take that as a valid observation, but we must take it on faith; the flashbacks to his failed marriage are such nonspecific tableaux that they might as well have Instagram filters on them. (Is Mara as well-adjusted as she seems? If so, she must surely be the lone holdout.) This is where Jonze’s ideas start to need debugging. Though her maturation is poignant, and Johansson’s wide-eyed inflections toggle beautifully between inexperience and assurance, Samantha is unmistakably sentient from the moment she’s installed. Theodore isn’t projecting onto a gadget; he’s dating a teenager.
Iron Man 2 isn’t your daddy’s superhero movie. It’s your granddaddy’s. The steady torrent of wisecracks on the screen is indebted to the ’30s screwball comedies that accelerated newly audible dialogue to supersonic speed; and in this high-grade hybrid the screws are actual screws, and the balls energy-based projectiles launched from our hero’s metallic palm. The quips fly faster than the energy balls. (If our hero has any trouble saving the world, it’s only because he’s out of breath.) This two-hour movie doesn’t linger long—which is a virtue. But it poops out early. The filmmakers are so preoccupied with sequels, spin-offs, and tie-ins that the story neither concludes nor hangs from a cliff but splits like a horny amoeba. Their verbosity is by way of apologizing for the sale. I had a good time, but my ears tolled from all the ringing up.
It’s difficult to describe the plot without mistaking it with premonitions of The Avengers or Iron Man 5, but, this time around, the hotrod homunculus has to contend with two new villains—neither of whom are very super. Iron Man’s not very altered ego—Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.)—faces off with daddy issues while stressing the bejeezus out of his sort-of significant other (Gwyneth Paltrow). Mickey Rourke’s Vanko has daddy issues, too, and avenges his father by way of a string of supercharged Hanukkah lights that he lashes Stark—and several other Formula One drivers—with. This display impresses a skeevy Stark Corp. competitor (Sam Rockwell) who pines for a military contract that Stark refuses to make; the unveiling of Stark’s high-tech suit of armor has ushered in an era of world peace, but Rockwell’s Hammer and Senator Garry Shandling (!) know that peace doesn’t pay the bills. (His name is Hammer, and he really is a tool; since the U.S. ain’t buying, and Iron Man’s off the market, he pawns off his gimcrackery to the Axis of Evil, which, unfortunately, is not the name of a comic-book cadre.)
Conniving cinematic moguls have all the money in the world and never know what they’re paying for. The misalliance between the Wall Street grub and the Soviet Bloc-head threatens Stark’s international armistice and—yada yada yada. This expression of impatience is as much mine as the filmmakers’: Jon Favreau, the franchise’s auteur apparent, and Justin Theroux, the solo screenwriter. (The 2008 prequel enumerated four.) If Iron Man wasn’t played for breezy irony, it would most likely have been because these filmmakers had lost their minds—like most of the recent superhero movies have. A sense of proportion is key. When it makes one feel indignation at a project that one’s working on, that sense can have a poisonous effect on the tone. But this crew isn’t snide or condescending; their tone is consistently sportive. Many of the players are reprising their roles from the first film, and nearly everyone seems to be in it for kicks. Downey acts in the manner of a well-born Bill Murray; his hauteur burbles like molasses. He, Paltrow, and Scarlett Johannson—playing Double Agent Romanoff (the laziest Slavic surname a writer could contrive)—practically race each other to see who can spew smart-talk fastest. (Johannson has a hypnotic hold on innuendo even after it’s left her lips.) Only Don Cheadle—who’s demonstrated more talent in better roles, and replaces Terrence Howard as Lt. Colonel Rhodes—delivers his lines in a way that seems a little too robotic. (Downey looks robotic. He’s absurdly hale for 45, but his playboy’s looks are as integral to the fantasy as the special effects. These stars shine brighter than the glossiest gossip rag.)
Of the newcomers, Rockwell’s festooned in three-piece suits that make him look like a wallflower at a ’70s disco; he’s downgraded from walk to waddle to match his chichi threads. I think it’s an homage to The Wrestler when Stark conks Vanko on the noggin with a folding chair; but I hope Rourke pays homage to that performance by not coasting through the rest of his roles. He Russifies well, but he and Eric Bana (the Star Trek nemesis) ought to form a support group for neglected adversaries. Vanko is a symptom writer’s block rather than a roadblock to our heroes; and when he blows Queens to smithereens, it hardly gums up traffic any more than the daily commute.
From the way most American films perceive Southwestern Europeans, one might think that the Old World has graduated past employment. All its inhabitants are retirees with nothing better to do than paint, write poetry, and—mais oui!—make dirty, dirty, sexy love. This atmosphere of leisure is about the opposite of the low-pressure system that perpetually hovers around director Woody Allen’s Big Apple-centric head. So, when he drops his American surrogates off in Spain for their summer abroad in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, we know they won’t be staying there past fall.
Vicky (Rebecca Hall), the narrator too plainly tells us, is a lover of order and orderly lovers. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), on the other hand, is the soul-searching bohemian, the fatalist. Allen’s schematic vision is clear: Both girls will fall for the same hunky Spaniard (Javier Bardem), and both will have their concepts of love challenged. Allen, going on 73, has made a movie about young lovers taking advantage of their age, and one can clearly see that he’s living vicariously through his heroines’ dalliances. But this isn’t a dirty-old-man picture; it’s one of few Woody Allen movies that seem unlabored. His vicariousness has given his hoary art a whiff of youthful wanderlust. But not totally.
Fans of the director have come to expect his overwriting, which is, of course, a function of his chronic apprehension. In his comedies, it can be a blessing, and in his dramas, a curse. (As he’s aged, it’s begun to blight his comedies, too.) In classics like Annie Hall, his total disclosure is part of the joke, whereas in something like Match Point, his over-delineation is a whapping of “Did you get it? I’m an artist, and this is what I’m saying…” This current film is really neither comedy nor drama: it’s a droopy daydream—a romance novel jazzed up with semi-ersatz questions about the ontology of love. But, although that might seem like a damning evaluation, the picture’s utter disconnection from reality (Vicky’s getting her master’s in Catalan culture!) makes its intellectualized reverie seem somehow grounded. The dialogue, despite its absence of “unimportance”—i.e., any references to popular culture or contemporary society—is, at least, colloquial; and though the voice-over narration often serves as a sort of Venn diagram for Allen’s themes, it evokes a storybook atmosphere, and keeps the viewer from working too hard. Who’d want to when the weather’s so nice and the people are so lovely…?
And the cast really is lovely. Allen makes Hall his avatar. She shares her surname with his most famous heroine, and her strikingly fragile features with Mia Farrow, but her initial prudishness around Bardem’s blunt Don Juan Antonio is pure Allen—and a trifle emetic. She’s soft as butter, though, when her schemas about love start to collapse, and it’s a pleasure to watch her melt. Johansson cleverly underplays her character’s restive ennui, but has a quiet slyness about her when she discusses—but really brags about—her unorthodox sexual practices with Juan Antonio, and his trigger-happy ex, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz).
Movie Monster 