2019 Round Up

Attack of the Killer Cockatoo!

Ruth Donnelly in LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT.

I didn’t want to go off for the holidays without posting another blog, particularly since my laptop doesn’t access Blogger the same way my desktop computer does. With everything going on around me right now (long story, boring), I haven’t had a chance to get my thoughts together on anything new I’ve seen. Suffice to say I was pleasantly pleased by A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, though I think the acting honors should be going to Matthew Rhys as the angst-ridden magazine writer, his performance keeps the film from dissolving into sentimentality, rather than Tom Hanks’ admittedly expert impersonation of Fred Rogers.

All of these started out as Facebook posts, but they haven’t all gone to the same pages, so this is really just a wrap-up of things I saw this year that were worth some kind of comment. In addition, I’ve made some revisions and added a few special treats for the faithful. Nonetheless, feel free to skim. There won’t be a quiz.

The Beguiled (1971)

Pamelyn Ferdin discovers the wounded Clint Eastwood

 

Visually, Don Siegel’s Gothic horror is a stunner. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees creates images as good as any in Ingmar Bergman’s color films. The tale of a wounded Union soldier taken in by a Southern women’s school has some great horror moments and fine work from Geraldine Page, Elizabeth Hartman and child actress Pamelyn Ferdin. Clint Eastwood is good when his character is acted upon. All the women want a little Eastwood to call their own, and it’s easy to see why. But when he has to drive the action toward the end, he’s pretty embarrassing. I don’t think he really learned how to act until he got too old to take his clothes off.

The Big Clock (1948)

This is one beautiful machine of a film noir, with its melodramatic twists and comic punch lines carefully set up. I’ve never been a fan of Ray Milland’s, but as long as he isn’t reaching for big emotional effects, he’s serviceable as a true-crime editor trying to get out of a frame-up for murder. The real stars are Charles Laughton — deliciously slimy as his boss, modeled on Henry Luce — George Macready as Laughton’s second-in-command, Rita Johnson as Laughton’s terminally sophisticated mistress and Elsa Lanchester as a scene-stealing artist.  If you listen closely, you’ll catch Noel Neill early on as an elevator operator. John Farrow directs stylishly and cast his wife, Maureen O’Sullivan, effectively in the female lead. Is it an after-effect of watching him in Gilda, or is Macready once again playing a coded gay character?

Broadway Melody of 1940

The script is aggravating because it keeps getting in the way of the musical numbers, and I could do without the operatic renditions of “I Concentrate on You” and “Begin the Beguine.” At least the latter is followed by a swing rendition by the Music Maids, which acts as a palate cleanser. And Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell’s dancing is just sublime. Early on, George Murphy and Powell share a dance duet with some fast footwork, and he looks like a dancer trying to keep up. Astaire has a similar routine with Powell later on, and he makes each move a work of art, like everything he ever did.

Broadway Rhythm (1944)

Even the worst MGM musicals have at least a number or two that’s worth watching. This one has a horrible script that can’t make up its mind what it’s about and Ginny Simms, a big-band singer Louis B. Mayer tried to turn into a star until she declined his marriage proposal. She sings well, but next to her even a serviceable actor like George Murphy looks like one of the Barrymores (and as a dancer, he makes a good Republican senator). Charles Winninger and Gloria DeHaven try to put some energy into the tired material. But the real pull is Nancy Walker belting out “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet,” Lena Horne doing “Brazilian Boogie” (an exercise in cultural appropriation if ever there was one) and “Somebody Loves Me” and Hazel Scott playing a swinging version of “The Minute Waltz.” It seems almost unfair that one of Horne’s numbers is followed almost immediately by Scott’s guest appearance. What mere mortal could stand comparison to those two dynamos?

Crawl (2019)

There’s some great visual filmmaking here, and it's a lot of fun until the characters start talking. Fortunately, that's not often. Barry Pepper manages to invest most of his dialogue with some weight, but can we declare a moratorium on "I never thought it would end like this?" Listen, writers, nobody expects to end up in an alligator-infested basement during a category five hurricane. The only proper response would be, "Ya think?"

Cry Havoc (1943)

Five fabulous women: Joan Blondell (c.) and clockwise (from top left) Fay Bainter, Marsha Hunt, Margaret Sullavan and Ann Sothern

This World War II drama betrays its stage origins with too many scenes set in a dormitory for nursing volunteers serving in the Philippines, and it’s pure Hollywood flag waving. But the cast keeps things moving along. Margaret Sullavan is in charge of the women, and she has that wonderful voice to put a teardrop behind almost every line. Ann Sothern scores as the woman with a chip on her shoulder, Ella Raines is sympathetic as a society girl stuck in the Pacific, Connie Gilchrist is reliably sympathetic as their cook, but Joan Blondell gets the real acting honors as a stripper (“You know what you do to a banana before you eat it? Well, I do it to music.”). The camera follows her as she moves through the military hospital after an air raid, stopping to comfort a dying soldier before taking over a bandaging job. It’s a great bit of acting as she holds in her reactions to the horrors around her, building until her final breakdown.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019)

John Malkovch gives Zac Efron an acting lesson. Whether or not it will take is anybody's guess.

They left out “a little boring.” This Netflix original can’t seem to make up its mind whether it's a Lifetime confessional (“If you think your man’s a serial killer, it’s time to put the brakes on the relationship”), a docudrama or an ironic take on Zac Efron’s image. It’s kind of sad watching him butt up against his limitations trying to play Ted Bundy (a role much better handled by Mark Harmon in 1986’s The Deliberate Stranger and Billy Campbell in Ann Rule: The Stranger Beside Me, a 2003 USA Network film). When the judge played by John Malkovich tells Efron that his becoming a killer was a horrible waste of human potential, you believe he believes it because he’s Malkovich, for goddess’ sake, but he seems a little delusional for all that. One can only hope Mr. Efron paid a lot of attention in the scenes Malkovich steals without breaking a sweat.

The Forbidden Room (2015)

Some of the world’s queerest movies come from Winnipeg and are directed by the straight Guy Maddin. Case in point, this strange assemblage of stories inspired by lost films and co-directed by Evan Johnson. At one point, you’re watching a flashback within a memoir within a fantasy within a dream within a story that’s also a dream within a story. It stars Maddin regulars like Louis Negin and Maria de Medeiros, along with Geraldine Chaplin as The Master Passion, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling and the very handsome Roy Dupuis as Cesare, the sapling jack.

Gilda (1946)

One of the screen's great triangles, but who's at the apex? George Macready, Rita Hayworth or Glenn Ford?

With a romantic triangle that goes both ways, this is one of the queerest movies of the 1940s. You can never quite tell, even at the end, if Glenn Ford is jealous that George Macready is married to Rita Hayworth or that Hayworth has stolen Macready. Harry Cohn put Hayworth in so much schlock that when she finally gets to work with a half-decent script it’s surprising how good she is. She brings the film a wit and energy that keeps it from becoming too sordid, and her dancing in two musical numbers, choreographed by Jack Cole, is a joy to watch.

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)

I don’t know if a perfect comedy exists, but Preston Sturges’ last Paramount release comes pretty darn close. Eddie Bracken stars as a 4F who lets a group of Marines headed by William Demarest convince him to go back to his small town posing as a war hero (just to make his mother happy). As in all of Sturges’ films, the comic timing is impeccable, particularly in the scenes between Bracken and Demarest, and the supporting cast is terrific. Sturges’ physical staging is just as impressive, from the opening shot that tracks from a tap dancer in a nightclub to Bracken sitting alone at the bar to the number of parades dotting the film and the organized chaos of the crowd scenes. In one of his best roles, eternally nelly Franklin Pangborn is the town’s harried event planner.

I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993)

The complete film (with Spanish subtitles)

 

Sarah Jacobson’s short, shot in black-and-white 16mm, is an explosion of feminist punk anger as it follows a young woman (Kristin Calabrese) who starts killing the men who abuse her, from a casual rest-stop pickup (shades of Aileen Wuornos) to a man who poses as a fellow spirit only to reveal himself as misogynistic as her other victims. You can’t get very deep into a character like that in 27 minutes, but you sure can reveal a lot about the culture.

Intruder in the Dust (1949)

 Juano Hernandez domiantes the film but never made it to the cover of the video box.

It’s amazing to consider that MGM and one of Greta Garbo’s favorite directors turned out this searing indictment of racism in the South. There are many marvels in this William Faulkner adaptation: Juano Hernandez’ uncompromising performance as a proud black man in the rural South, the depiction of blacks as living in a hostile country, the terrifying scene in which young Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman, Jr.) exhumes a murder victim’s body and the even more terrifying scene of people gathering in anticipation of a lynching as if going to a county fair. Even more disturbing, the current DVD box, which inadvertently suggests things haven’t changed that much since 1949.

The Killers (1946)

 Two stars a-borning: Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster

With its themes of fate, betrayal and duplicity, this is one of the great film noirs. It’s actually structured like Citizen Kane (1941), with the story of Ole “Swede” Anderson (Burt Lancaster, in his film debut) told through a series of flashbacks by various characters. Lancaster does some pretty impressive work, especially in his first three scenes, in which he has to make a defeated character compelling. As the woman who leads him astray, Ava Gardner is pretty damned good, too (she was always rather underrated). The role made her a star, and you can see it happening in her first close-ups. The whole thing is expertly made, from Robert Siodmak’s direction and Woody Bredell’s cinematography to the polished, professional performances of actors like Edmond O’Brien, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene and Jeff Corey. Miklos Rosza’s score includes the four-note figure that would serve as the theme for Dragnet.

A Kiss Before Dying (1956)

Less film noir than film beige, this tepid thriller follows a young psychopath (Robert Wagner) trying to kill his way into a wealthy family. When impregnating one child, Joanne Woodward (channeling Shelley Winters’ most pathetic moments in 1951’s A Place in the Sun), proves the wrong move, he tosses her off a roof and then starts courting her sister (Virginia Leith), who has too good a head on her shoulders to buy his line for long. Wagner’s idea of how to play a murderous madman is to chain smoke while barely moving his face. Let’s just say, he’s no Bruno Anthony. Mary Astor has a few nice moments as his mother, and George Macready has a great reaction shot when he realizes the man who’s about to marry one daughter may have killed the other. This was director Gerd Oswald’s first feature, but it displays little of the stylization that would mark lower-budget films like 1958’s Screaming Mimi or his The Outer Limits episodes. At least Wagner and co-star Jeffrey Hunter are pretty, but I couldn’t help giggling every time someone introduced Hunter’s character, who has the same name as a popular 1980s gay porn star, because, to be honest, adulthood is vastly overrated.

Ladies They Talk About (1933)

What a strange if often delightful film! Barbara Stanwyck is a gangster’s moll who helps set up a bank robbery. She’s caught, but an old friend turned preacher (Preston Foster) is about to get her off when she has a pang of conscience and confesses. That leads to a stay in women’s prison and the film’s best scenes. The inmates include Lillian Roth, who’s as lively and gritty as Stanwyck and even gets to sing, Madame Sul-Te-Wan as a sassy black woman named Mustard and the delightfully wacky Maude Eburne as a “beautician” whose parlor offered, shall we say, a different line of services. Ruth Donnelly is the assistant matron and in one scene walks around with a cockatoo on her shoulder, which somehow helps keep the inmates in line. There are also two jokes about a lesbian inmate who likes to wrestle and even seems to end up with a wrestling partner to call her own.

Libeled Lady (1936)

Pick your favorite: Myrna Loy, William Powell, Jean Harlow or Spencer Tracy.

 

The sheer expertise of this screwball comedy demonstrates what made the Golden Age of Hollywood so golden. The tight script features two squabbling couples brought together by a newspaper and a lawsuit. They wouldn’t be as likable played by other actors, but the four stars know just how to bring you into their characters’ lives. And Jack Conway’s direction keeps it all moving at a solid clip. You could do a personality test based on whether your favorite is Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, William Powell or Spencer Tracy. I vote for Loy, a master at injecting off-kilter line readings into her role as the sane one. The great supporting cast includes Walter Connolly, Charley Grapewin, Cora Witherspoon, George Chandler and, as a fishing instructor with a rather fluid wrist, E.E. Clive.

Light in the Piazza (1962)

Arthur Freed’s final film as producer is a decidedly mixed bag. Some elements seem dated in all the wrong ways — the travelogue shots of Italy, Mario Nascimbene’s score, which relentlessly Mickey Mouse’s the action, and the script that was thought daring at the time but now seems way too middle-of-the-road. In particular, screenwriters Elizabeth Spencer and Julius J. Epstein bend over three ways backwards to make Olivia de Havilland’s marriage to Barry Sullivan seem good, as if arguing over the care of a daughter with an intellectual disability were just a little bump in the road (and Sullivan’s assumption that he can just shove the girl into an institution seems monstrous today). I’m a big fan of the musical, and though I didn’t exactly miss the songs, I really wanted de Havilland to get to say “Love’s a fake,” one of her character’s most powerful lyrics, but the script tries to take a more conciliatory attitude. She’s good (as ever), particularly in the way she modulates her character’s change in attitude about her daughter’s romantic relationship. Her fight scenes with Barry Sullivan as her husband crackle, and she’s got great delicacy in her flirtation with Rossano Brazzi as the young man’s father. But the writers also force the character to talk to herself, and poor Olivia has no way of dealing with such phony writing, so she falls back on the testimonial tone she used to adopt in public appearances. The film’s big surprises are Yvette Mimieux as the daughter and George Hamilton as her suitor. I’ve rarely seen them so animated and believable.

Midnight (1939)

Mary Astor, John Barrymore, Don Ameche and Claudette Colbert.

In this champagne of screwball comedies, Claudette Colbert is a chorus girl stranded in Paris with only an evening gown and a pawn ticket (as one so often is). John Barrymore comes to the rescue as a nobleman who hires her to pose as a baroness and seduce his wife’s boyfriend. Mary Astor is the wife; Francis Lederer the boyfriend; and Don Ameche, looking amazingly sexy dressed all in black, is a taxi driver along for the ride. Even though he reads most of his lines off cue cards, Barrymore mugs so expertly he almost steals the film until Monty Woolley shows up as a divorce-court judge. Mitchell Leisen is best remembered as the Paramount director whose meddling drove Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges into the director’s chair. For that alone, we should thank him. He also had an unfailing flair for visuals (some of his actors’ compositions are worth freezing the frame for) and eliciting performances. With its disguisings, mockery of marriage and the presence of Woolley and Rex O’Malley, the film flirts with the queer (while Leisen’s 1944 Frenchman’s Creek marries it and bears it children).

My Name Is Julia Ross (1945)

One of the best of Hollywood's B movies combines gothic and noir in a twisted plot in which newly hired secretary Nina Foch goes to sleep in her employers' London townhouse and wakes up in a seaside estate with everybody telling her she's really George Macready's mentally unbalanced wife. Dame May Whitty is surprisingly nasty as MacReady's mother, and director Joseph H. Lewis pulls off some great shots. This was a B movie that looked (and sometimes was booked as) an A feature, but then, not every B movie had Burnett Guffey doing camerawork and Jean Louis designing the costumes. I'd love to see a drag remake, where an innocent young man wakes up as a woman.

Our Betters (1933)

Constance Bennett’s beauty usually overshadowed her acting, except when she worked for George Cukor, as she does here. In this pre-Code gem about American heiresses marrying English titles, she navigates Lady Pearl’s scandals as effectively as she handles her Hattie Carnegie fashions (you could do an essay on the impracticality of her high society duds in this film). Anita Louise and Charles Starrett are insufferable as the decent Americans who keep judging her, but Violet Kemble Cooper and Grant Mitchell are a lot of fun as her cronies. Mitchell’s Thornton Clay reads rather gay until Tyrell Davis shows up as Mr. Ernest, the dancing teacher, and sets the screen afire. It’s adapted from a Somerset Maugham play that was lots naughtier on stage.

The Phenix City Story (1955)

Although its 1950s depiction of depravity now seems almost quaint (the film opens with Meg Myles as a stripper who never takes off more than her gloves), Phil Karlson’s gritty film noir is still a pretty powerful condemnation of small-town depravity. It’s hard not to see the parallels to the U.S. today in this tale of how the good citizens of Phenix City (mainly father-and-son lawyers John McIntyre and Richard Kiley) take on local vice lords in Sin City, U.S.A. Of course, Donald Trump doesn’t have a fraction of the class Edward Arnold (in his feature debut) displays as the chief criminal, nor do we have a state governor to call on to help drain the swamp. Karlson shot the film while the story was unfolding and even turned up evidence that helped put some of the criminals behind bars. He also played a bit with the facts, inventing the murder of an African-American child to up the stakes and depicting Kiley’s character — future governor John Patterson, an ardent segregationist — as a friend to the city’s black community.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

One queer school outing.

Timing is everything. Had I seen Peter Weir’s historical drama when it first came out, my neo-Aristotelian aesthetic would have been frustrated by the mystery that’s never solved and a plot that jumps among different characters. Seeing it more recently, with a queer aesthetic, I found the mystery a reflection of the elusiveness of all meaning and was particularly intrigued by the sexually ambiguous relationships. The young Englishmen played by Dominic Guard discusses a group of schoolgirls with his valet (John Jarratt) as if they were sexual objects, but as the young men’s involvement in the case deepens, the relationship does as well, moving from master-servant to bromance with hints it goes beyond that. The film is beautiful to look at — like a French Impressionist painting — with a marvelous score and a particularly fine performance by Rachel Roberts as the proprietress of a women’s college from which three students and a teacher go missing. It’s all about absence: the missing women, the unstated passions, the invisibility of the aboriginal population (even though there’s a reference to a native tracker who’s part of the search efforts) and, if it’s not too much of a stretch, the lack of connection between the colonists  — shielded behind their Victorian architecture and clothing — and the dazzling natural world.

Primrose Path (1940)

The Production Code supposedly made RKO clean up Victoria Lincoln’s novel about a young woman (Ginger Rogers) breaking free of the family business, but you'd have to be pretty dim not to realize that mommy and grandma are prostitutes. Rogers is great in the comic scenes, but she's something of a humbug when things get sentimental. Fortunately, director Gregory La Cava doesn't let that go on too long. As Rogers' mother, Marjorie Rambeau is luminous, while Queenie Vassar, as the grandmother, now seems to be giving Leslie Jordan's best performance.

A Slight Case of Murder (1938)

I used to tell acting students the best lesson in how to play farce was watching Carolyn Jones (and later Anjelica Huston) in The Addams Family. No matter how outlandish things got around her, she played everything with a total seriousness that was funnier than most of the series’ more clownish performances. I can now add to the list Edward G. Robinson in this gangster comedy. He’s so earnest as a former bootlegger going legit after Prohibition’s repeal that as things fall apart, particularly with the discovery of four dead bodies in his summer rental, you can’t stop laughing. He’s helped a lot by the usual Warner Bros. stalwarts — Allen Jenkins, Edward Brophy and Harold Huber — plus Ruth Donnelly as his wife, desperately trying to elevate her diction and almost always failing, Billy Halop as the delinquent orphan he takes in for the summer and, very briefly, Margaret Hamilton as the head of the orphan’s home. Director Lloyd Bacon learned comic timing working with Charles Chaplin, though his greatest gift here seems to be knowing when to get out of the actors’ way.

So Dark the Night (1946)

Another of Burnett Guffey's great images.

In a rare leading role, character actor Steven Geray is a French police detective on vacation in a small town. When a series of murders occurs, he sets out to solve the case, despite his personal involvement. Director Joseph H. Lewis and cinematographer Burnett Guffey create some wonderful effects, starting with pristine black and white images before the murders and creating more and more disorienting effects as the mystery unfolds. If you read the camera work right, you’ll guess whodunnit. Oddly, everybody speaks with French accents and occasionally breaks into actual French, which may be a bigger mystery than the murders.

Some of My Best Friends Are… (1971)

Rue with a difference.

This film about Christmas Eve in a gay bar is a trip down the queer-baiting rabbit hole. It has all the cliches of early '70s filmmaking and all the retrograde attitudes of that era. The dramatic scenes are dated and offensive. Just when you think they can't get any more ludicrous, they go even further over the top. With the current revival of interest in effeminacy, the comedy fares much better and is even endearing. And the cast is like something you'd dream while sick: Rue McClanahan as a wealthy fag hag giving Faye Dunaway's best performance (the way she channels some of Dunaway’s more mannered later work is almost prescient) , Fannie Flagg as the coat check woman, Gary Sandy as a hustler who can't admit he's gay, Sylvia Sims as the bar's cook and den mother, Candy Darling as a drag queen who hasn't learned to tuck yet, Gil Gerard as a gay airline pilot and Carleton Carpenter, stealing almost every shot he's in (he doesn't really get any scenes) as one of the nelliest queens. It's funny, insulting and rarely less than totally engrossing.

They Drive by Night (1940)

Almost relentlessly entertaining, Raoul Walsh’s truck-driving drama is really two films in one — a hard-hitting look at the lives of independent truckers like the brothers played by George Raft and Humphrey Bogart and a proto-film noir with Ida Lupino murdering her husband (Alan Hale) to get a shot at Raft — and both are a lot of fun. The latter is a remake of Bordertown (1935), and it was a lot easier to believe Bette Davis killing Eugene Pallette for Paul Muni. Until her final mad scenes, which are a little too florid, Lupino matches Davis’ performance with a lot of help from costume designer Milo Anderson. Ann Sheridan is the leading lady, and her low-key, wise-cracking performance almost steals the film. Then again, I’m prejudiced. Sheridan and Lupino are two of the best actresses never to be nominated for Oscars (Sheridan should have been up for 1942’s Kings Row and Lupino for Ladies in Retirement in 1941 and The Hard Way in 1943).

Tomorrow the World! (1944)

You could subtitle this picture “How Not to Adapt a Play.” The stage version by James Gow and Armand d’Usseau was a thoughtful melodrama about the havoc wreaked when an orphaned Hitler Youth member is sent to live with his American relations, and Skip Homeier was praised for his performance as the child. To get the film short enough for double bills, the writers cut the nuance and kept the preaching. Even more nuance falls to make room for opening up the action to show Homeier interacting with good all-American kids. Then, nobody explained to him that he wasn’t playing to the second balcony any longer. Lard on a score that would be over-the-top behind East Lynne, and the serious social drama turns into an exercise in camp. It’s a rare film that makes Fredric March look stupid, but his falling for Homeier’s machinations while the young actor is rolling his eyes and twisting his face at every opportunity makes the older character (a research chemist working for the war effort) seem moronic. Betty Field, in her movie star mode, comes off best as March’s Jewish fiancée, though I prefer the gritty persona she projected in more realistic films like Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Southerner (1945).

What’s the Matter With Helen? (1971)

Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds queer Golden Age Hollywood.

It's a mistake to view this picture as a horror film. Director Curtis Harrington has done much more effective horrors like Night Tide (1961) and Games (1967). Rather, it's a very subversive film set in 1930s Hollywood and dealing with what the Golden Age movies left out, particularly queerness. Debbie Reynolds (always a much better actress than most credit) and a surprisingly subdued Shelley Winters are the mothers of Midwest thrill killers. They escape their notoriety by moving to L.A. to run a children's talent school. It's really all about Reynolds' search for normalcy and Winters' repressed lesbianism (things don't get crazy until Debbie falls in love with a man). In the middle of it all is an hilarious kiddie talent show, featuring 11-year-old Robbi Morgan doing a weirdly sexual Mae West imitation on "Oh, You Nasty Man!" while her mother (Helene Winston) mouths the song and mimes her gestures in the wings. The supporting cast includes Dennis Weaver, a very sexy Swen Swenson dancing with Reynolds and Yvette Vickers, whose life story would make a much more horrifying film than most of what passes as horror these days.

Kids, Then and Now

Roman Griffin Davis, Taika Waititi and Scarlett Johansson as child, imaginary playmate and mother in Jojo Rabbit

Early in Taika Waititi’s new film, Jojo Rabbit, the title character (Roman Griffin Davis) walks through his hometown in World War II Germany. It’s a merry gambol as he skips along, accompanied at times by his imaginary playmate, Adolf Hitler (Waititi). Later in the film he takes a very different journey. The Allies are breaking through the town’s defenses, and he darts from one hiding place to another, not just at the street level, but sometimes racing through the basements of bombed-out buildings. His first journey is taking him to a Hitler Youth summer camp where he hopes to become the ideal Hitlerjugend, defending the fatherland from the horrors of Communism and Judaism. The later journey is a return to his home, where he fears the girl he’s come to love, a young Jewish woman his mother has hidden from the Nazis, may have been hurt by the bombing. The difference between those journeys is the story of Jojo Rabbit, an audacious little film that sets out to defang Fascism by treating it as a joke.

That’s not to say the film ignores the threat posed by the Third Reich. When Jojo first discovers Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding behind a wall in his late sister’s room, he threatens to turn her in, believing his government is right in sending Jews to the camps. She blackmails him into keeping silent by pointing out that her discovery will necessarily lead to his mother’s execution for hiding her. As events unfold, that threat turns out to be very real. Later there’s a tense scene as the Gestapo searches the house looking for anything that might implicate Jojo’s mother in the Resistance.

With the exception of a few scenes, Jojo Rabbit is a child’s view of the war. The boy’s embrace of Fascism is a thing of youthful enthusiasm. It’s a game, which scenes with the imaginary Hitler make clear. The Fuhrer romps through the woods with Jojo and at one point turns up in a Native American headdress. Even as he spouts anti-Semitism there’s nothing scary about him until Jojo’s relationship with Elsa makes the boy question his youthful values. Only then does the imaginary playmate become something demonic.

This juvenile approach is a good fit for Waititi’s irreverent, improvisatory humor. This is a man who, with co-writer Jemaine Clement, created what seemed the definitive comic take on the vampire mythos in What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and then topped himself with the recent TV versions, including the funniest beheading since Monty Python dispatched Mary Queen of Scots. He also breathed new life into the Marvel cinematic universe with Thor: Ragnarok (2017), a film that managed to combine galaxy-sweeping action with a tongue-in-cheek approach. Essentially, he’s a master at having it both ways. With the Thor film, he embraced and kidded the genre simultaneously.

He does pretty much the same thing with the wartime thriller in Jojo Rabbit. He’s assembled some skilled comic actors — Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Alfie Allen — to make the Nazis look ridiculous, while also using Scarlett Johansson, in a powerful and very sympathetic performance as Jojo’s mother, Rosie, to underline the more serious issues at hand. Johansson’s Rosie is both a dedicated Resistance fighter and the ideal mother. In one of the few scenes not shot from Jojo’s point of view, she confides in Elsa that she’s horrified by her son’s embrace of Fascism, but she wants him to realize how wrong that is for himself (there’s also a practical reason for that; would you really want to trust a 10-year-old with secrets that could get you killed?). For all the tensions of her Resistance work, however, when she’s with Jojo she’s really with him. She helps get him through his youthful insecurities and often makes him feel they’re the only two people in the world. There’s a particularly charming scene in which she acts out a dance scene, playing both her husband and herself before getting Jojo to dance with her despite a limp from an injury sustained at the youth camp. She’s teaching him to survive, which proves to be a very valuable lesson as the plot develops.

The film has been criticized for not attacking Fascism vehemently enough. I can understand that. In the current political atmosphere, anything short of a full-on denunciation can seem a betrayal. But I wonder if Waititi’s comic derision isn’t a more effective tool, at least cinematically. Yes, he leaves out the more serious attacks on Judaism to focus on childish myths about Jews, but this is anti-Semitism as perceived by a child. The myths are going to have a lot more traction with him and make more sense coming out of his mouth than the faux scholarship used by the Third Reich.

The film has also been accused of showing “good people on both sides,” primarily because of Rockwell’s character, who seems more foolish than evil. I think that’s a little short-sighted. One of the key jokes about Rockwell’s character is that he’s in the closet. It’s subtle but also quite clear that there’s something between his and Allen’s characters, and the places where they’re almost caught are very funny, because they don’t sink to stereotyped effeminate humor. They’re just human. I would suggest that Rockwell’s character is an important part of the film’s moral code. The good people are gay men, Resistance members and Jews — the very people the Nazis are trying to eliminate. Jojo’s transfer of sympathies from Hitler to them is a pretty powerful journey, one you can’t help wishing would happen more in the real world.

 

High school students Eric Deulen and Alex Frost with guns in Elephant; Is this the new normal?

The second episode of The Purge’s second season takes place in the days following a Purge, the neo-Fascist government’s night of legally sanctioned murder and mayhem. It’s a little disorienting, then, to be suddenly thrown back into the Purge. Even more off kilter, the scene is done with a subjective camera in which we fight off men attacking a woman. When she tries to thank us, she realizes, we’re about to kill her, but just before we can strike the first blow, the Purge siren goes off and a title informs us that the Purge has ended and asks if we’d like to continue purging. Ben (Joel Allen), a university student who was almost killed in the last Purge, has been playing a video game. There’s a loud knocking, and he pulls back a curtain to reveal he’s in a game arcade, and another player is waiting to use the game. After a moment of hesitation, he hands the controller to a child. That may be the sickest scene I’ve ever seen on television, and I’ve watched a lot of twisted shit on TV.

There’s a similar jaw-dropping moment in Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant’s film about a school shooting. Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen) are playing hooky, watching a TV documentary about the Third Reich, when a delivery truck pulls up on the street outside. They open the door and sign for a package containing a semi-automatic they had scouted on-line in an earlier scene. It’s that easy. In Van Sant’s film it’s just another detail in the mosaic of high school life he assembles leading up to the climactic shooting.

Elephant is a demanding but mostly rewarding film. Van Sant plays with time throughout. The camera follows various students through the school and its environs on the day of the shooting and then jumps back to the day before to show Alex’s being bullied and then spending the evening with his friend Eric. At times, we see the same event from different perspectives. Nathan (Nathan Tyson), one of the school’s leading football players, walks past a trio of young women who flirt with him casually before he goes off to meet with his girlfriend, Carrie (Carrie Finklea). Later, we play the same scene from the girls’ perspective before they go to the cafeteria. At another point, Elias (Elias McConnell), an aspiring photographer, takes a picture of John (John Robinson) in the hall as a young woman runs by. That scene plays three times, from Elias’, John’s and the girl’s perspectives.

Throughout the film, Van Sant picks up snippets of conversation and stray details that capture the students’ problems. The running girl, Michelle (Kristen Hicks), has body problems. Her gym teacher disciplines her for wearing long pants to gym class. When Michelle goes to the locker room, she changes in an awkward way designed to keep the other girls from seeing her body. Nathan and Carrie quarrel about their plans for later. He wants her to find some girls to bring as dates for his friends, but she’s not too keen on letting the other young women be exploited. The lunching trio discuss boys and clothes and going to the mall. Then they all go to the women’s room to throw up what little they’ve had for lunch.

 That last detail is almost too much. It feels like a gag and seems to have wandered in from another film. That’s how subtle most of Van Sant’s filmmaking is in the picture. The cast of mostly non-actors or beginning actors (with effective performances in adult roles from professionals Timothy Bottoms and Mike Malloy) is very natural. It’s like you’re eavesdropping on their lives, and you have to work with Van Sant to assemble the pieces of what’s basically a cinematic puzzle.

That makes for a fascinating journey, but there’s a problem with that kind of construction. It can be very hard to come to any kind of conclusion. Playwrights like Daniel MacIvor and Caryl Churchill have made it work, and it certainly works in short films like Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon” (1943) and Kenneth Anger’s “Fireworks” (1948). Alejandro G. Iñarritu got away with it in 21 Grams (2003) by not revealing how his key characters were related to each other until almost the end. That’s not how Van Sant plays it in Elephant. Once he gets to the school shooting that brings the various characters together as victims or survivors, he has nowhere to go. The film doesn’t so much end as it just stops. It’s hard to tell exactly what could have worked there. You want to see the ultimate fate of the shooters, but almost anything that could happen feels too conventional. Ending with their arrest or escape would seem like something from another film.

There’s also a curious moment before the shooting when Alex gets into the shower and Eric joins him. Certainly, the idea of their going through some kind of purge before the final act of violence makes sense. But then they start kissing, because, as Alex says, “I’ve never been kissed before, have you?” As much as we may think society has grown up in the last few decades, the sight of two men kissing is still heavily loaded. Although in context it’s very sad that this is the only connection these two young men can find, it reads as gay. That would certainly fit with the suggestion that both young men are responding to bullying, but I don’t think that’s what Van Sant is after. He seems to want these two to be no different from the other students (not that being gay makes them less human, but it does suggest a different story). As a result, the scene is inconclusive, and if it doesn’t quite sink the film, it seems almost too much of a question mark to leave with the viewer.

What keeps those inconclusive moments from ruining the film is the powerful nexus of meanings Van Sant has created within the rest of the picture. When Eric confronts the school’s principal during the shooting, he berates him for not supporting him when he complained about being picked on and then adds, “Anyway, Mr. Luce, whatever. You know there’s others like us out there, too.” Through the course of the film, Van Sant has created a world where emotionally absent parents, disengaged authority figures, bullying and bulimia are the new normal, along with violence and the ready availability of firearms. That sense of normality is really the film’s most terrifying element.

Queens

  

 Three queens — Barrow (Robert James-Collier) in Downton Abbey, John du Pont (Steve Carell) in Foxcatcher and Hubert (Xavier Dolan) in I Killed My Mother —

 the good, the bad and the much, much better

When the first season of Downton Abbey originally aired, I told a friend how hot I thought Barrow (Robert James-Collier), the gay footman, was. “But he’s evil,” my friend protested. True, during the series’ first few seasons, Barrow was notorious for scheming to get at anybody he thought threatened to surpass his position in the household. At times — as when he tried to embarrass the new valet, Bates (Brendan Coyle), who limped because of a wound sustained in the Boer War — he was downright vile.

But writer Julian Fellowes contextualized Barrow’s plotting early on. The revelation of his homosexuality came in a particularly painful scene, when he was rejected by the Duke of Crowborough (Charlie Cox), with whom he had enjoyed a sexual relationship until the Duke started courting the upstairs family’s eldest daughter, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery). It was one incident, but it set the stage for the depiction of Barrow's sexuality during the repressive years of the early 20^th Century. Although hardly enough to let Barrow off the hook for his worst misdeeds, it at least explained his excessive concern with his place in the household. As a social outcast, it was all he had, particularly since for the series’ six-season run he never had a love interest.

In the new feature film version of Downton Abbey, Barrow is back. He's risen to the post of butler with the retirement of family standby Carson (Jim Carter) at the series' end. Although the film's principal focus is the turmoil wreaked by the announcement that King George V and Queen Mary will be visiting the Abbey, writer Julian Fellowes has given Barrow a subplot. When Lady Mary asks Carson back to help with preparations, the younger butler decides to take the weekend off and accompanies one of the king's valets, Richard Ellis (Max Brown), on a trip to York. There he's picked up in a bar and taken to an underground gay party. It could be a scene out of a gay pulp novel as he walks in on a large room filled with men dancing and making out, but there's nothing smarmy or exploitative about it. Rather, this is Fellowes’ presentation of what life was like for gay men outside the big cities in the period between the wars. The scene offers the character a rare release and, once again, suggests that he's been more than just the stereotypical soap opera spoiler. There’s a liberated feel to the sequence, particularly in the shots of Barrow dancing joyously with another man, but there’s also a sadness at the shabby surroundings where gay men were forced to hide their desires.

Like the series on which it is based, Downton Abbey the film is a curious paradox. It upholds, even exalts in the notion of class distinctions with its nostalgic depiction of the upper-class Crawleys, living with style and grace on their palatial estate while served by a large staff led by champions of tradition like Carson, Barrow and the housekeeper, Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan). Yet the series itself, with its strong ensemble and the equal disposition of drama between upper- and lower-class characters, dissolves those class differences on a meta-theatrical level. When it comes to playing their roles, suffering nobly or dashing off humorous lines, all good actors are created equal.

This also seems to extend to the film’s (and series') handling of social issues. Fellowes does not flinch from depicting the negative side to the treatment of women, LGBTQ peoples and racial minorities during the early 20^th century. In the film, the Crawleys' younger daughter, Edith (Laura Carmichael), bemoans the fact that marriage to a marquess has meant giving up her career as a magazine publisher. As a married noblewoman, her only acceptable job is serving on committees. A Crawley relative serving the royal family reveals that her personal maid is actually her illegitimate daughter. It's probably stretching credibility a bit that the Crawleys, even the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith), accept the fact that the illegitimate child will be their cousin's legal heir, just as they accepted Edith's adoption of her own illegitimate daughter. Through the series, the family was also amazingly open to Barrows' sexuality. Only some of the servants were less trusting. Had it not been for the support of the two lady’s maids, tolerance would have seemed a class-based virtue.

In a sense, Downton Abbey is a fantasy, a look at a world that no longer exists and probably never really did. It's a very entertaining fantasy. Any opportunity to see Smith is to be treasured, particularly when she's matched with a wonderful sidekick-cum-sparring partner like Penelope Wilton, who plays the mother of Mary's late husband. The entire cast is a joy to watch, and James-Collier should be commended for his commitment to his character — homosexuality, rough edges and all. Although the actor has complained about being typecast, he still gives the performance his all, and the film would be far weaker without his presence.

Though some have complained that the film version is just an expanded episode of the original series, that’s not entirely true. There’s a broader sweep to some of the filmmaking that makes big events like the reception for the king and queen and a royal ball suitably impressive. And even without those expanded production values, a return to the series’ virtues is hardly a bad thing. There should always be room in the movies for grace and the delicate playing of expert actors.

Yet, there's also something a little unsettling about the fantasy, particularly in a world where we're seeing the ravages of inherited wealth and where labor has become just another means of exploitation. I wonder how generous we'd be toward the series if it were set on a Victorian estate in Africa or an antebellum plantation in the American South, where the genteel white ruling family would treat their slaves with dignity, help those outside the family estate when they could and weep picturesquely for those beyond the range of their largesse.

Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo and all that makeup in Foxcatcher

Bennett Miller’s 2014 Foxcatcher offers a far more jaundiced view of inherited wealth. The film purports to depict the real-life events leading to John du Pont’s murder of David Schultz, the coach of a wrestling team he sponsored. I say “purports” because the film takes a very liberal approach to facts that ultimately makes it less than satisfying.

The du Pont case is a perfect vehicle for an attack on the privileges of wealth. The man had exhibited signs of mental decay for years. In his 2014 memoirs, David’s brother, Mark, said that du Pont seemed off from the moment he first met him before accepting a job as assistant coach to a team du Pont was sponsoring  at Villanova University. Even before that, du Pont’s one marriage had ended when he physically attacked his wife. In the months leading up to David Schultz’ 1996 murder, du Pont’s behavior had become increasingly erratic. He believed CIA agents were lurking in his mansion’s walls and that David was part of an international conspiracy to murder him. All of this took place eight years after Mark had left du Pont’s employ following the 1988 Olympics.

Understandably, many of the events in the case were streamlined for storytelling purposes. Mark’s various telephone conversations and an earlier meeting with du Pont in a hotel are compressed into a single meeting at du Pont’s mansion. His living arrangements — first at an apartment he rented near Villanova and then in a room in the chalet on the estate’s grounds — became a single stay at the estate, where he has free run of the chalet. In addition, David’s murder seems to take place shortly after Mark’s departure.

All of this could be written off as dramatic license, a necessary tightening of events for dramatic effect. But events are also arranged to create the distinct impression that du Pont’s mental problems spring from repressed homosexuality. As Mark and du Pont become friends, du Pont asks the younger man to wrestle with him in a late-night session during which the film clearly implies that du Pont sexually molests him (Mark Schultz vehemently denies anything of the sort happened). After that, Mark’s behavior begins to deteriorate as he starts drinking, snorting cocaine and overeating so badly that he initially fails to qualify in his weight class at the pre-Olympic trials. His friendship with du Pont disintegrates, and his departure from the estate after the Olympics seems to result from that. With the compression of time between his leaving and David’s murder, it’s almost impossible to see the crime as motivated by anything other than sexual rejection. Du Pont, then, joins a long line of cinematic killer queens, some presented sympathetically, some as two-dimensional plot devices.

I must confess that at times I don’t understand straight filmmakers, particularly when they depict LGBTQ peoples. It’s not that I think only gay filmmakers can depict gay characters honestly. There have been many sensitive depictions of homosexuality by straight writers and directors (like Julian Fellowes’ in Downton Abbey). Nine years before they made Foxcatcher, director Bennett Miller and writer Dan Futterman did a terrific job with Capote (2005), about the famous author’s relationship with killer Perry Smith that led to his writing In Cold Blood. They even gave him a hot partner by casting Bruce Greenwood as Jack Dunphy, the novelist and playwright who lived with him from 1948 until Capote’s death in 1992.

Why, then, did they add a gay element to Foxcatcher that not only cheapens the story, but also obscures the issues related to du Pont’s case? There’s a slight precedent for the invention in a sexual harassment suit brought against him by another wrestling coach with whom he had worked at Villanova. But making sexuality the center of du Pont’s breakdown in Foxcatcher takes the focus off one of the most interesting aspects of the murder case, the way du Pont’s privileged position as heir to one of the U.S.’ greatest fortunes insulated him from any kind of intervention as his behavior grew increasingly erratic.

Nor does it help that two of the leading players seem insulated from the audience. As du Pont, Steve Carell wears a two-hour makeup job to capture the character’s facial contours and performs with dead eyes and a persistent head tilt to the back that creates an almost perpetual sneer. It’s the kind of one note, overly made up performance that wins people Oscar nominations but never really comes across as totally human. That’s particularly disappointing given Carell’s stronger work in comedies like Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). He was more expressive as a puppet in Welcome to Marwen (2018). Channing Tatum, who brings less to the table than Carell, plays Mark Schultz behind some extensive make-up, as well. The plugs used to give him a wrestler’s nose and plumpers that fill out his jaw make him even less expressive than usual.

Of course, extensive makeup doesn’t have to get in the way of a performance. Samantha Morton manages to bring Alpha to life each week on The Walking Dead despite playing many of her scenes behind a full-face mask. As David Schultz in Foxcatcher, Mark Ruffalo is also heavily made up while working with a new hairline, 30 extra pounds and a full beard, yet he manages to turn in a fully realized performance. Then again, he’s even done credible work acting through motion-capture technology to play The Hulk in Marvel’s superhero films. He doesn’t get all the acting honors. Vanessa Redgrave may have only three scenes as du Pont’s mother, but she easily creates a strong portrait of the powerful, demanding woman whose withheld affections contributed to her son’s mental problems. Of course, she’s been acting for so long and at such a high level of achievement it sometimes seems there isn’t a script or a director that could defeat her.

Lord knows, Miller tries hard. The filming style that worked with Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s flamboyant interpretation of Truman Capote — slow, long takes with lots of long shots and a washed-out, wintery palette — isn’t as effective when two of your leading players are doing everything they can to repress any level of humanity in their work. As Carell’s du Pont leads Tatum’s Mark Schultz into a life of privileged dissipation — introducing him to cocaine, conspicuous consumption and gay groping — the film seems less a dramatic reinterpretation of a real-life murder case than a slowed-down version of “Boys Beware” (1961), the infamous educational film warning young men about the dangers of homosexuality.

Xavier Dolan and Anne Dorval connect on an almost genetic level in the wonderful I Killed My Mother

It’s a natural rite of passage that many young people outgrow their parents. This can be particularly telling for people on the LGBTQ spectrum, whose discovery of their sexuality often means a rejection of their parents’ heteronormative worlds. That’s the twist French-Canadian writer-director-actor Xavier Dolan brings to the coming-of-age story with his first feature, I Killed My Mother (2009). Written when Dolan was 16 and filmed when he was just 20, the piece is an impressive, often shocking feature debut.

In the semi-autobiographical tale, Dolan is Hubert, a rebellious high-school student who underachieves at school despite showing promise as a writer and artist. His mother (Anne Dorval) is a middle-class drudge who can do nothing right in his eyes, while his father is largely absent, having left wife and child after seven years upon realizing that he just wasn’t cut out to be a parent. Hubert is developing tastes of his own, which makes it hard for him to deal with his mother’s bourgeoise affectations. He’s also come out to himself without bothering to tell her. She only learns he’s gay when she runs into his boyfriend Antonin’s mother at a tanning salon.

Given Dolan’s youth and the autobiographical elements of the story, you might expect this to be a one-sided condemnation of parental failings. It isn’t. One of Dolans’ great gifts as a director — in this and in later films like Heartbeats (2010), Laurence Anyways (2012) and Mommy (2014) — is an ability to capture privileged moments when characters drop their guard and reveal themselves as they really are. He’s movingly generous to his characters and his fellow actors in that. After almost an hour of showing Dorval’s Chantal at her worst, leading to her shipping her son off to a Catholic boarding school so she won’t have to deal with him, Dolan gives her a beautiful moment. Hubert tells her not to bother walking him to the school bus stop, then shoots back at her “What would you do if I died today?” As he walks off, her anger fades and she simply says, “I’d die tomorrow.” It’s a heartbreaking moment. For all their differences, there’s a tie the two can’t escape. That’s what makes their disagreements so feverish.

In early scenes, the fights between mother and son are amazing bits of psychodrama that manage to be both horrifying and very funny. Each knows how to get to the other and doesn’t hesitate to go for the jugular just to score points. Yet they also try. In one extended sequence, Dolan fixes his mother breakfast and promises to have dinner waiting for her when she gets back from the tanning salon. He even does the dishes, but by this point she’s hurt and angry at having to find out he’s gay from a virtual stranger. She invites him to ride with her to the store so he can rent some videos while she’s shopping, then gets angry when he takes too long. The fight escalates to the point that she strands him. That sets the stage for her shipping him off to boarding school.

Like the young Orson Welles, Dolan doesn’t know what you can’t do, so his framing and cutting are often surprising. When Dorval brings home a new lampshade in a ghastly animal print, he focuses the shot on Hubert sitting on the sofa. You see the lampshade in her hands, but not her face. After he forces himself to compliment her, Hubert stands and takes her hand, which suddenly becomes the shot’s focal point. With almost any other director that would be just wrong, but within the context of the scene, it’s very moving. Throughout the film Dolan cuts freely to Hubert’s dreams and memories. Initially some of those shots are confusing, but they all come together in the end. There are shots of a child running freely on a grassy beach that are finally contextualized when Hubert runs away to the same beach near the house where he spent his early childhood at a time when he and his mother always seemed to be in synch.

At other times the filmmaking is almost breathtaking, reminiscent of the early work of Truffaut and Godard. The boyfriend’s mother asks Hubert to paint her office in the style of Jackson Pollock. The sequence is all quick cuts, culminating in the two men making love in a rush of excitement mirrored in the editing. On his first weekend home from school, Hubert goes dancing with a new friend (Niels Schneider, who would go on to play the disruptive lust object in Heartbeats) who introduces him to speed and then kisses him. Instead of staying to make out, Dolan rushes home to share his feelings with his mother in an orgiastic rush of words. It’s a terrific acting feat that once again captures the character’s desperate need to connect with his mother. Dorval gets a similar scene later on when she tells off the principal at the boarding school. Both scenes are thrilling. You may find yourself holding your breath for fear that they won’t pull it off. But they do, and it’s wonderful.

Dolan doesn’t hold back from displaying Hubert’s faults. At times the young man is a little shit. When he goes at his mother, you can see him going too far, and after a while you may want to shake him just to get him to ease up on her. Dolan even lets the boyfriend (the coltish young Francois Arnaud, who’s much more open here than in his later television work) call Hubert out for his selfishness. As in the rest of the film, the scene is a mix of frustration and love. Antonin really cares for this kid, but at times he just can’t put up with him. The much-reviled mother tracks them down and meets Antonin for the first time. When she goes off to take care of her son, who’s wandered off to the beach, the pain in Arnaud’s face is real. For all the friction between mother and son, how can he ever compete with their connection? How can anybody?