NORTHMANThe Northman To begin with, not too many movies these days feature dialogue in Old Norse and “chapter’ headings in Runic letters, so The Northman initially deserves some special attention, if merely as a curio. My knowledge of ancient languages is limited to Latin and Anglo-Saxon, so the Old Norse of The Northman, to make a bad joke and mix a metaphor, is Greek to me. On the other hand, in a movie where characters hiss, howl, bark, scream, and whisper most of the dialogue, the subtitles for Old Norse, paradoxically, provide most of the clearest and most comprehensible speech in the film. Beyond linguistics, the movie also shows what appears to be an accurate picture of the Vikings, whose power spread all over Northern Europe for something like three centuries, embarking on amphibious landings in the British Isles, conquering an impressive amount of territory. As one would expect, they do a great deal of their traditional raping and pillaging, a Viking specialty, and demonstrate further cruelty when they pack a crowd of their victims into a kind of oversized thatched hut, then burn it down. Most of the plot revolves around their enslaving a number of their captives, who are set to work rowing the long ships, building structures, and suffering. Allegedly and very vaguely a kind of Ur-Hamlet, the film shows a very different protagonist from Shakespeare’s hesitant, indecisive, introspective hero, here named Amlith (Alexander Skarsgård), who also suffers the murder of his father and the betrayal of his mother (Nicole Kidman). After a Viking raid destroys his town and murders most of its inhabitants, he decides to allow himself to be enslaved so he can wreak revenge on his captors and his betrayers. That revenge perfectly suits the general bloodiness of the movie, resulting in a multitude of stabbings, slashings, decapitations, and a quite graphic evisceration, pretty much something for every taste. The general picture of life under Viking conquest in the ninth century seems quite authentic—violent, dirty, dangerous, and generally most uncomfortable, nicely foreshadowing Hobbes’s famous dark judgment of human life as nasty, brutish, and short. It also includes a good deal of puzzlingly extreme behavior, as when characters don wolf and bear skins, growl and shout before attacking, proclaiming that they are the animals whose fur they wear. In another strange scene early in the movie, young Amlith and his father strip naked, crawl in some sort of cave, and drink blood under the direction of a shaman played by Willem Dafoe in his best high hysterical mode. That bizarre and essentially pointless exaggeration, accompanied by its usual screams, grunts, and howls, sums up the general tone of the work. Oddly, for a work grounded in a bleak reality, the movie ends in something like pure myth. With all the action and conflict, however, there is rarely a dull moment in The Northman, but there are a great many unpleasant ones.

 

THE SCOTTISH PLAY

 

          In the course of many years spent in the dark, I have reviewed a considerable number and variety of Shakespeare movies.  If memory serves, I have seen, in no particular order, one Much Ado About Nothing, one Henry V, one Merchant of Venice, two Richard IIIs, one Romeo and Juliet, three Hamlets, one Tempest, and one Titus Andronicus.  Those productions mostly earned praise from critics and a few even deserved it (Shakespeare always makes film reviewers feel intelligent).  Despite their source material, however, the various adaptations achieve a decidedly mixed success.

          Probably since Orson Welles directed Julius Caesar in modern dress, a great many filmmakers (and stage directors for that matter) seem determined to set their productions in a different time from Shakespeare’s, perhaps to allow for unusual interpretations, perhaps to appeal to modern audiences, perhaps to show their ingenuity, maybe just for the hell of it.  The most famous play in the canon, Hamlet, not surprisingly, has undergone the widest and often most unusual adaptations

          After earning embarrassingly ecstatic reviews for his stagey, dull production of Henry V, essentially a filmed play, Kenneth Branagh moved ever upward in what has become a long and successful career.  His Hamlet, in which he played the title character, completely reversed the method of his previous play, setting the action in a 19^th century royal court, with lavish costuming, elegant decoration, and  a cast studded with stars.  At moments, in fact, the play looked as if every actor in Hollywood landed a part, including such surprising choices as Robin Williams and Billy Crystal; when Jack Lemmon appeared I wondered for a moment if he was going to reprise a previous role and do Grumpy Old Danes.

          The most inventive, not always necessarily the best, Shakespeare productions that I reviewed include an extremely varied trio of movies.  Richard Loncraine set his version of Richard III, starring Ian McKellen as the cunning, crippled usurper, in a careful representation of the 1930s, employing the context of a Fascist takeover as the means of Richard’s ascent to power, an excellent modern metaphor.  Perhaps signaling his own update, Baz Luhrmann abbreviated the title of Shakespeare’s most famous romantic tragedy slightly to Romeo & Juliet, setting it in the contemporary world, with all sorts of ingenious ways of dealing with the transformation.  Partly because of its urgent pace, partly because of its young cast, the interpretation bubbled with color and youthful energy.  The most daring and unlikely Shakespeare production of them all, however, must be Julie Taymor’s remarkable Titus, a special version of the violent, bloody Titus Andronicus, complete with rape, murders, mutilations, and cannibalism: what’s not to like?  Of all the plays, I would bet the mortgage that this one at least will never be filmed again.

          The strangest of the Hamlet films I’ve reviewed must be the one set in contemporary New York City, directed, with some ingenuity at least, by Michael Almereyda.  Denmark now becomes the Denmark Corporation, whose CEO has died, leaving the familiar problems after his demise.  Like all the other adaptations of the play, this one features a cast of well-known names, including Liev Schreiber, Sam Shepard, Casey Affleck, and Bill Murray.  Murray plays the ghost, who seems to materialize from and then disappear into a Pepsi machine in a corridor of the Denmark headquarters, suggesting a new meaning to the sentry’s line, “For this relief, much thanks.”   The quirkiest touch of all, however, belongs to Ethan Hawke, who spends most of the movie wearing one of those Peruvian (?) woolen ski hats, looking not so much like Hamlet the Dane as Hamlet the Dork.

          The Tragedy of Macbeth, Joel Coen’s latest movie, which he both wrote and directed, represents the latest foray into Shakespeare country, a journey from which he emerges, shall we say, scathed.  As most directors must, he cuts the play ruthlessly, which tends to reduce it to sheer plot, so the protagonist’s ascension to power moves pretty quickly.  He includes the major events, however, with a clever and quite spooky version of the three witches to kick things off.  Denzel Washington plays the title character with some considerable understatement, best shown in the famous “Tomorrow and tomorrow . . .” lines.  Frances McDormand, on the other hand, no matter her history and credentials, seems horribly miscast as Lady Macbeth.  So successful in the semi-comic, somewhat drably realistic parts she played in Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, she lacks the passion, the presence, and the commanding appearance of the murderess; she roams the battlement draped in a voluminous white sheet, regretting her evil and screaming loudly but unconvincingly.

          The most striking elements of the film, however, result from the work of the set designers and cinematographers.  The camera often shows the actors from overhead or poised against the bleak backgrounds of Scotland, emphasizing some of the essential loneliness of the play, of the tragic hero, and perhaps of tragedy itself.  The stark black and white photography is interrupted once, when the soldiers bearing Birnam Wood to Dunsinane cover themselves in branches and greenery before trooping off to battle, with the steady, ominous thump of their march echoing on the sound track.

          The sets reflect a genuine congruity with the cinematography and with the apparent vision of the director.  Austere and empty, lacking decoration and texture, they reduce the action, character, and context to an unusually minimalist state, suggesting a kind of odd purity in the director’s vision.  The castle itself seems stark and abstract, mostly uninhabited, a Cubist construction right out of the Bauhaus, darkly lit, threatening in its shapes and angles and shadows. 

          Coen’s Macbeth, no matter its particular qualities, fits squarely in the long tradition of individuals translating Shakespeare’s plays in all sorts of idiosyncratic manners to the cinema.  As I suggested, that tradition encompasses a wide variety of adaptations, many of them bizarre or simply misguided.  But let’s face it, our greatest poet’s works will survive the strangest, the weirdest, even the worst desecrations, and his plays will continue to enchant audiences and inspire interpreters on stage and screen.  As Dumas remarked, “After God, Shakespeare created the most.”

 

ANOTHER NIGHTMARE

          A remake of a classic film noir that appeared in 1947, and based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, the new version of Nightmare Alley moves the work from a genre flick to what the publicity on the book covers always calls “a major motion picture,” i. e., an expensive, big time Hollywood production.  In the process, the movie has accumulated a crew of new stars and a lush look that the old black and white production naturally lacked.

          Bradley Cooper plays Stan Carlisle, one of those enigmatic drifters with a murky past right out of 1930s tough-guy fiction (see The Postman Always Rings Twice), who wanders into a traveling carnival.  Looking for any kind of employment, he lands a job helping one of the many scam artists on the midway, gradually learning various tricks and cons, and more or less accidentally discovering his talent for figuring people out, which results in his ascent from worker to “mentalist,” a person who reads minds (assisted, of course, by a comely female sidekick).

He and that sidekick, Molly (Rooney Mara), start a collaboration that leads them—after a considerable jump in time—to performing their act in a classier venue, a nightclub where, dressed in formal wear, he reads the minds of gullible people in the audience.  Stan moves from the sordid world of the carnival and the glittering vulgarity of the nightclub to an even higher game when he encounters a snooty psychologist, Lilith Ritter, played by Cate Blanchett; she helps involve him in a major fleecing of a guilt ridden millionaire seeking to contact his long lost love, whose death he had in effect caused. 

Like all con men, Stan of course aspires to make one big score and retire on the riches, and the millionaire looks like the ticket to his dream.  He delves cleverly into the past, conducts some inspired research, and spends a great deal of time and energy on creating just the right effect to snare his sucker, and with Molly’s reluctant assistance, sets it all in motion.  Of course, we all know how that will turn out.

Unlike the original film, a black-and-white noir classic, this Nightmare Alley features splashy color and a series of stunning art deco interiors.  It employs its title in some inventive ways, showing a variety of alleys, some of them those impressively decorated corridors, that Stanton Carlisle walks, and then runs through in various states of desperation, before he finds himself moving from the linear to the circular in his progress.  Despite the presence of his lover and assistant Molly, Stan’s journey appears bracketed between two blondes, one the blowsy, sexually generous Zeena (Toni Collette), a performer in the dusty, sleazy carnival, who first befriends him and teaches him some of the tricks of her own mentalist racket; the other is the icy psychologist Lilith Ritter, who occupies the astonishing art deco offices and whose name alone should have served to warn him.  In addition she creates a nice balance, in effect plying her own trade as a “mentalist” and thus matching both Zeena and Stan in falsehood and fraudulence.

Collecting quite a bit of critical praise, for whatever that’s worth, the movie certainly stands out from the usual swamp of superhero flicks that would ordinarily draw big crowds in a non-COVID season.  Its fascinating and often unpleasant subtext of cons and scams, of suckers and cheaters, might best be summarized in the title of a W. C. Fields classic, “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man,” a type who, fear not, never appears in Nightmare Alley.  Despite that truth, an admonition implied throughout the work, its dark 1930s ambience, and its bleak ethos, in these difficult times for film companies and movie theaters, it may even make a profit.  Rarely, it may also deserve one. 

Macho and Sainthood

Macho and Sainthood

Cry Macho

Perhaps in part because of the natural progress of his career and his life, Clint Eastwood seems to be following a kind of pattern in his recent works.  In Million Dollar Baby (2004) he played a grizzled prize fight manager/trainer who reluctantly agrees to help a young woman (Hillary Swank) succeed in a boxing career.  In Gran Torino (2008) he played a cranky retiree from the auto industry in Detroit who reacts badly to the Hmong family who move in next door, but ends up learning something about them and their culture and defending their teenaged boy from the bullying of a gang of dangerous thugs.  Now in Cry Macho he plays, yes, a beat-up old rodeo cowboy who journeys to Mexico to recover his boss’s son (Eduardo Minett) from his neglectful mother.  In the process, of course, he and the boy come to understand each other and create a relationship.

Rather like a geriatric version of the Bridges of Madison County, Eastwood also once again wanders into love, this time with a generous Mexican woman who owns a small restaurant.  The rest of the story unfolds in a reasonably predictable manner, with Eastwood and his companion journeying northward to the United States, encountering numerous difficulties and challenges, some of them violent, along the way.  The film proceeds in a familiar linear series of movements and events, ending pretty much as one would expect.  Slow, sentimental, repetitive, Cry Macho suggests that for all his films, achievements, and yes, years, Clint Eastwood still wants to make movies; it also suggests that, alas, his most interesting work may belong to the past.

 

The Many Saints of Newark

 

          The many saints of the title translate literally from the Italian Moltisanti family, familiar of course from The Sopranos, where Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli), Tony Soprano’s nephew, serves as a kind of surrogate son to the boss of the family.  Strangely, the film begins with a voiceover from the late Christopher, who now and then adds a bit of narrative to the action; he explains that he’s dead, killed by his Uncle Tony (followers of the series will recall that climactic event), and prepares the way for the rest of the movie.

          That rest of the movie proceeds rather like an extended version of a Sopranos episode, only set in a past that suggests something about the future that the viewers already know.  Focusing on the Moltisanti family, the film shows the infighting, jockeying for power, violence, and sexual habits that appear in the original series.  It also provides some history in its treatment of the Mob’s surrender of the numbers racket to the African American hoodlums of Newark, an event that also occurs accompanied by gunfire.   Some intra-family maneuvering and betrayals, plus a couple of shotgun blasts, help establish the personalities of the people who will become familiar in the television show, and also underline the particular viciousness of Anthony Soprano’s Uncle Junior (Corey Stoll).

          Beyond its retrospective look at the people, events, and forces that shaped the original characters, the film also shows the young versions of the adults who will later populate that familiar area in Northern New Jersey. Carmela (Lauren DiMario) appears as a sensible teenager trying to stop the antics of young Tony; John Mugero, the actor playing the young Silvio Dante, simply imitates the stiff posture and downturned mouth of Steve Van Zandt.  

Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini, of course provides the central gimmick of the film; the notion of the son of an actor playing the son of the character his father established should prove irresistible.  Although his school guidance counselor tells Tony’s mother Lydia (Vera Farmiga) that her son is highly intelligent, with good qualities of leadership, the movie shows him as a dumb lout, what used to be called a juvenile delinquent (do they use that term anymore?), a vandalizing punk.  As an actor, he may be adequate, but unlike his late father, beyond some scenes of overplaying, he possesses absolutely no presence on the screen.

Ultimately, the movie seems oddly less satisfying than, say, one of the better episodes in The Sopranos.  Showing the background of the people, their younger selves, must have struck the filmmakers as a great idea, but the reality fails to live up to that idea.  The linear plot, the labored attempts at characterization, and the flat performances of most of the actors all suggests that actually few saints exist in The Many Saints of Newark.

 

 

 

  

In Defense of Donald Trump

In Defense of Donald Trump

Now that the Republican National Convention has painted President Trump with a new brush, we can see him as a different person from the one most of us think we know.  He is, some claim, sweeter and softer, rather like a new flavor of cupcake, and kinder and more compassionate, sort of a Father Teresa.  It’s about time to emphasize a number of other unappreciated qualities he has modestly hidden.  A simple list of some of his words and deeds, in no particular order, should suffice to dispel some of the common reactions to his personality.

At the convention he did NOT mock any disabled people.

He set an example for hard working Americans by taking on an extra job, selling Goya products in the Oval Office.

He may not own a dog, but as the Access Hollywood tape demonstrates, he has expressed a fondness for felines.

He has welcomed several immigrants from Eastern Europe, married two of them, and taken a whole family into his own family.

He has generously contributed a substantial sum of money and provided a good deal of publicity to assist the career of a previously little known young film actress whose work had been limited to a narrow genre of the cinema.

He is a great defender of marriage, has done it three times.

Apparently pro-life, he has fathered at least five children by at least three women; like King David, to whom many Evangelical Christians compare him, in John Dryden’s words, he spread his Maker’s image through the land.

Although with his typical diffidence he has not claimed it, he is no doubt the most ecumenically minded president in history.  In addition to being so warmly embraced and blessed by a flock of Evangelical pastors, a couple of months ago he  made two separate religious pilgrimages, one on foot through a valley of danger, visiting both a Protestant and a Roman Catholic site. On top of all that, interrupting his statement on another subject, he also gave a shout out to the Jewish community, “Yo Semite.”

Think for a moment of what he’s done for the publishing industry, those dozens of books he has inspired, and his consequent support for all those writers.

By courageous example, he has also, in these difficult times, endorsed the makers of hair dye and pancake makeup.

For a man who modestly claims not to read, he has uttered some spontaneous poetry that can only be termed Dadaist.  The disquisition on windmills some time ago and more recently, the showerhead speech, provide unique examples of his mastery of this difficult and often baffling literary genre.  (If you doubt me, read the texts).

Finally, in light of his comments some time ago about how he spent the Vietnam years avoiding sexually transmitted diseases, which as he said was his “personal Vietnam,” we should understand the true depth of his learning: in what must be a reference to the classics, he was actually of course fighting the Trojan War.  Those expensive prep schools are worth every penny.

 

 

 

IRISH AND ITALIAN

IRISH AND ITALIAN

          By now I am sure, anyone at all interested in current cinema knows about the release of Martin Scorsese’s new work, The Irishman.  In addition to all the initial publicity surrounding its appearance, on both Netflix and ultimately in theaters, most of the reviews appear to provide the usual Niagara of superlatives worthy of a Donald Trump rally speech, interrupted only by exclamation points, that generally passes for film criticism these days.

          Based on a book about a real person, Frank Sheeran, who worked for the Mob and allegedly killed Jimmy Hoffa, the movie features a whole compendium of the director’s typical methods, subjects, and themes.  Essentially a voice-over narrative, which Scorsese often employs, the movie proceeds from the reflections of the aged Sheeran (Robert De Niro), now in a nursing home, facing the end of his life.  Complete with a priest who sporadically visits Sheeran, the narrative then constitutes something like a confession, with the narrator returning frequently to his greatest regret, his estrangement from his daughter.  (Perhaps because of his Catholicism, Scorsese likes to use the device of confession, which also explains his attachment to voice-over narration).  Apparently to prevent the work from turning into one long, linear chronology, the director moves scenes and sequences back and forth in time as he follows Sheeran’s career from truck driver to thief to mob enforcer to the confidant and eventual assassin of the labor leader.

          Along with some of the director’s favorite techniques, the cast includes some of his favorite actors; aside from De Niro, who has appeared in so many of his films he easily qualifies as Scorsese’s alter ego, Al Pacino appears as Hoffa, Joe Pesci plays Russell Bufalino, and Harvey Keitel occupies a small role as Angelo Bruno, all actual mobsters in Sheeran’s life and career.  In keeping with its pseudo-documentary style, the film often freezes a frame, showing those men and other gangsters, complete with the dates and causes of their deaths, mostly of course from lead poisoning.

          Along with the frequent movements back and forth in time, the film applies state of the art techniques to alter the appearance of the characters, so that they look the appropriate age in a particular scene or sequence.  Typically, Scorsese also uses the appropriate popular music of each time period as a background and even a commentary on the people, places, and actions.  The clothes, the cars, the interior decoration all match those moments—Scorsese is famously meticulous in the look of his pictures.

          As for the picture itself, despite the hype and the praise, it is actually a very long, repetitive, intermittently dull movie not terribly different from a number of Scorsese’s films, though inferior to several of them; it takes a long time in its elliptical manner to tell its essentially simple story.  If it resembles any of his films in the gangster genre he frequently explores, it seems quite close to Casino, another long, repetitive, overpraised work based on a mobster’s reminiscences.  Its time scheme, its production values, its distinguished cast rescue it from what could have become crushingly boring. 

          Despite that cast, however, the performances generally disappoint, especially those of the two headliners.  De Niro naturally occupies the screen most of the time—it’s his story, after all—but he seems to play almost every moment the same way, with the same mostly impassive facial expression; he confronts almost every situation with a squint, a shrug, a downturned mouth apparently intended to show emotional engagement, but mostly suggests a kind of deadly neutrality.  Pacino, on the other hand, plays Hoffa with an occasionally exhausting excess, remaining on one note—anger—throughout and confined by the picture to a series of repeated scenes, in most of which he flies out of control.

Perhaps surprisingly, the most impressive person in the movie, the real star, turns out to be Joe Pesci.  Totally unlike the scary psychopath of GoodFellas  or Anthony the Ant of Casino, as Russell Bufalino he virtually exudes enormous confidence, even charm, as he attempts to instruct Sheeran in his understated way in various violent behaviors, including murder; somehow he retains a certain likeability throughout the picture, and somehow, with his quiet style he dominates the scenes he occupies.  He essentially outperforms every other actor in the movie, quite an achievement, considering his colleagues in the cast.

Scorsese’s apparent attempt to make the film a kind of epic, a reflection of an era with its own peculiar hero, ultimately fails.  His major figures prove only intermittently interesting, his plot meanders without a good deal of energy, and the focus of it all, Jimmy Hoffa, generally seems a hysterical clown.  Despite the gushing paroxysms of so many critics, great length does not automatically confer greatness itself; size provides no special grandeur.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

          At least since Pagliacci the clown who laughs on the outside while crying on the inside is a most familiar figure, a sentimental cliché, but the much discussed new movie Joker takes that concept a good distance farther.  The title character, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) works for a hire-a-clown agency, where he dresses in a costume and waves advertising signs, entertains children at parties and in hospitals.  A man singularly without joy, he suffers from a neurological problem that causes him to laugh uncontrollably for no reason, a condition that, not surprisingly, lands him in trouble when he laughs in the presence of the wrong people at the wrong time.

          A very different person from the Batman’s notorious adversary, Arthur lives with his disabled mother in a crummy apartment in Gotham City, stamping grounds of course for our old friend the Caped Crusader.  (Among references to other movies, including such disparate titles as Psycho and The King of Comedy, the Batman franchise dominates the plot, with names, people, and events that echo the comic books and the films).  Inevitably his character has inspired much learned commentary on his predecessors in the role; his makeup recalls several of them and his behavior perhaps most closely resembles Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the character as a sort of Iago, in Coleridge’s words, “motiveless malignity casting about for an occasion.”  Since he lacks the compelling enemy represented by Batman, in effect he ends up striking out at any target that attracts him, and some of the attacks are shocking.

          Dogged by bad luck, his disability, and his extremely odd personality, Arthur finds his world increasingly frustrating, another motivation for his violent actions.  Since the comic book script takes his story all over the place, the movie often teeters on the brink of incoherence, with new stories frequently intersecting with Arthur’s daily life and all its problems; he embarks, for example, on a quest for the man he thinks is his father, a man who also becomes a victim of his increasing distance from reality; he may or may not have a girlfriend who lives in the same apartment building; he may or may not join the audience for a late night television talk show.   At times the movie makes it difficult to discern if he is living in the real world or in a fantasy of his own creation; at a certain point the real and the hallucinated world merge and Arthur commits a series of shocking crimes while the city explodes into violence.  His actions, one of them captured on television, inspire riots that serve as the background to what becomes his homicidal insanity.

          Perhaps because of its origin in comic books, Joker displays a kind of drab, muddy color scheme and a consistently squalid setting.  Gotham City entirely lacks glamor and most of the dwellings, especially Arthur’s apartment, look shabby and grimy, needing paint, repairs, cleaning.  Even the talk show that Arthur ultimately appears on—with Robert De Niro playing the host—looks dark and dull, without the brightness and glitter one would expect from show business.

          Although Joaquim Phoenix no doubt deserves some praise for his performance, which must have been a grueling experience, the horrible sound of his endless cackle and the constant closeups of the pained rictus of his grinning countenance grow difficult to endure.  The insane violence of his actions adds another level of disquiet to the film’s subjects and incoherent themes, which somehow manage to be simultaneously excessive and narrowly defined.    

          Perhaps at least partially as a result of the publicity and the debate surrounding the movie, Joker enjoys a record size box office, and apparently its nihilistic themes strike a chord in certain young people, so troubling a notion that some theaters post a security guard in the audience.  Personally, I am not sorry I saw the film, but somewhat sorry it exists for me to see it.

New Chick Flick

New Chick Flick

          Always happy to jump on a bandwagon, the reviewers now crow about the new wave of liberated women in contemporary cinema, perhaps another, more positive spin on MeToo.  The gushing over Wonder Woman  somehow omitted to mention that the movie was really just another superhero flick, dependent on the usual stunts, pyrotechnics, and computer generated images, as much a silly comic book as any of a dozen of its predecessors—the Batman franchise, the Iron Man franchise, the Spider-Man franchise, etc., etc.  A comic book is a comic book, a superheroine differs not at all from a superhero, and given the wondrous technology of contemporary cinema, anyone of any sex can spin and fly through the air, shoot out thunderbolts, battle monstrous villains, and wear a distinctive costume: big deal.

          With a good deal less fanfare and very little in the way of the fabled magic of the cinema, a couple of recent films further demonstrate the penetration of women and their roles in today’s movies.  Both Widows and The Kitchen show strong, independent women taking over roles that formerly belonged to men, specifically for most of them, the men they married.  Though based on quite different sources, they share a surprising similarity of subject, tone, and theme.  Oddly, however, in both films the women, generally represented as smart, tough, and resourceful, are also, not to put too fine a point upon it, criminals.  They steal, they kill, they destroy: what’s not to like?

          In Widows four women whose husbands, a group of thieves embarking on a big caper, are incinerated when their scheme goes terribly wrong, decide to finish the uncompleted job.  One of them finds her husband’s detailed map and designs for the robbery and decides to enlist the other widows in a scheme of their own.  They then follow the usual patterns of the big caper flick—casing the home of their quarry, a corrupt, mobbed up Chicago politician, assigning specialized tasks to each suitable member of the quartet, meticulously checking on bodyguards, security devices, schedules, etc., figuring out precise locations and timing, in short practicing all the methods of the form.

          The film then shows the actual robbery, which unsurprisingly escalates from a meticulously planned operation to a series of violent confrontations, shootings, and even a death.  In keeping with the traditions of the form, the action naturally enlists the audience on the side of the perpetrators, so the viewers in effect must root for the bad guys, one of the great paradoxes of so many crime movies.  The genre, whether featuring men or women, appeals to the spirit of criminality in all of us.

          Following a quite similar pattern, The Kitchen also features a trio of newly independent women carrying on the activities of their spouses, though in this case, the husbands have been incarcerated.  The title refers to the area of the West side of Manhattan known for generations as Hell’s Kitchen, a tough, largely Irish community, but also perhaps to the kitchens that the women leave in order to embark on their own criminal enterprise.  Bitter about their treatment from the Irish mob that controls the streets of their neighborhood, the women seek more financial support from the mob leaders, and when the crooks reject their requests, resolve to take matters into their own hands.

          That decision involves canvassing the neighborhood shops, informing the owners that they will now collect the protection money and provide the service that the mob never did.  When the local gangsters get wind of the development, a small war breaks out, and of course, the women eventually win it, then go on to bigger and better sources of income and power.  The two main characters, played by Melissa McCarthy and Tiffany Haddish, undergo some major transformations, approach the brink of an internal battle, but eventually settle for equal shares of territory, money, and power.

          The most impressive actions of both movies, more powerfully emphasized in The Kitchen, demonstrate a shocking propensity for violence.  The armed robbery and shootings of Widows follow a relatively logical path from the intricate planning to the execution of the scheme, an understandable result.  In The Kitchen, however, the women carry out a whole series of murders, most of them in cold blood, and come to enjoy the process as well as the profits; the movie really suggests a whole new level of viciousness for the chick flick, no longer a vehicle for romance and light comedy, or even for costumed superheroines performing acrobatics, but now a perfectly functioning addition to the long, crowded genre of crime film.  As they used to say, sisterhood is powerful, now it is very powerful.

          One of the differences between the two films may result from their different origins; Widows is based on a novel by Gillian Flynn, while The Kitchen began life as an apparently still running series of comic books.  That movie’s open ending implies more to come, though it doesn’t inspire in me any wish to see a sequel or read the comic books.  Both films, however, demonstrate how far the chick flick has progressed in the empowering of women, proving that they can commit crimes of all kinds as well as any cinematic males and behave with viciousness worthy of any gangster, even without dressing up in a dominatrix outfit.  The scene that perhaps best summarizes the distance the form has traveled amounts to the best pushing-on-old-lady-down-the-stairs act since Richard Widmark’s memorable moment in Kiss of Death.  It must be seen to be appreciated.

         

Tarantino’s Hollywood

          As usual, the praise and prizes pour in for Quentin Tarantino’s new movie,  Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with most of the commenters describing it with the recurring term, “epic.”  If one strictly applies the word to the length of a work, then the movie certainly earns it—Once Upon a Time runs for almost three hours, not an uncommon length for a Tarantino film.  Probably the most overrated filmmaker around—though there is a lot of competition for that spot—he positively drools over excess, which somehow thrills the reviewers, and might explain the overused adjective; in his work, including the present one, epic too often simply means bloated.

          The movie’s once upon a time is 1969, a pivotal year for a number of reasons, ending a tumultuous decade and because of the notorious murders committed by the Manson family, which the director confronts and which in a sense end a particular era for Hollywood itself.  One of its stunning achievements is the director’s reproduction of that period and its setting in Southern California, which has rarely looked so attractive in a film and makes you wish you lived there.  Hollywood characters naturally populate the film: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, an alcoholic TV star on the decline; Brad Pitt plays Cliff Booth, Dalton’s stunt double, best friend, chauffeur-gofer; Margot Robbie plays the doomed actress Sharon Tate.  Crowded with famous faces in smaller roles, the picture also exploits the presence of people like Al Pacino, Bruce Dern, and Kurt Russell, along with less well known performers impersonating some now departed actors.  Rafael Zawierucha plays Roman Polanski, for example, and Mike Moh does a turn as Bruce Lee in a fight scene with Cliff Booth.  (Damian Lewis, who plays Steve McQueen in a brief scene, incidentally, looks amazingly like the star). 

          The movie proceeds episodically, showing scenes and sequences from Rick Dalton’s career, both past and present, mingling the various moments in time.  Throughout the action it provides a kind of history of the popular culture of the late 1960s, with familiar titles on movie theater marquees, snippets of old black and white television shows, even a clever recreation of a scene from The Great Escape where Rick Dalton auditions for the Steve McQueen role, repeating the exact words and movements from the original.  The clothes, the cars, especially Rick Dalton’s immense Cadillac, a great yellow battleship of a car, and in contrast, Roman Polanski’s classic MG, recall a time when automotive styling achieved some distinctive and attractive shapes and looks.

          As usual, Tarantino includes overextended, sometimes quite unnecessary sequences, apparently to exploit the star power of his cast.  In one barely relevant moment Brad Pitt climbs up on the roof of Rick Dalton’s house to repair a TV antenna (remember them?), mostly so he can take off his shirt and display his trim, buff torso to the females in the audience.  Demonstrating a weakness in the narrative, he employs a voiceover by Kurt Russell to provide information about a series of spaghetti Westerns that Dalton, following in the footsteps of Clint Eastwood, makes in Italy to resurrect his career; the voiceover papers over an apparent need to abbreviate yet another long episode.

           In a long sequence Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, goes to a theater showing The Wrecking Crew so she can see herself in the movie as a member of the audience; for several long minutes the camera shows her repeatedly reacting and overacting with glee, looking around, virtually mugging to signify giddy enjoyment.  In one clever twist in an otherwise silly piece of film she watches actual scenes from the picture with Sharon Tate so that the woman playing the actress responds to the person she impersonates.

          With the invasion of the Manson family, whose members appear and reappear throughout the action in usually casual but increasingly ominous ways, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood reaches its perhaps logical climax, which the people and plot have been inexorably approaching throughout the movie.  The director, however, changes history by reimagining the crime, providing an alternative ending to the shocking event that in a sense ended the decade.  As a result, the movie concludes with a final sequence that begins in violence and ends in wishful thinking, perhaps appropriate for both Hollywood and Hollywood.