Reflections on iconic films of last year

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE: The film’s simple message about the importance of family drew criticism for being predictable and a letdown after the elastic mayhem that led to it. The thing I didn’t understand is how you lose money running a laundromat, especially if you own part of the building. The cast in Everything Everywhere All at Once work is interesting. Michelle Yeoh is enormously charismatic, we see the return of Ke Huy Quan after these many years, the welcome antics of such disparate talents as Stephanie Hsu, James Hong, Tallie Medel, and Jenny Slate, even the pungency of Jamie Lee Curtis as an embittered IRS flunky—these add up to something new when set against the backdrop of franchise sequels, reboots, and the current mirthlessness of American filmmaking. The humor, though, is silly and second-rate. The googly eyes, the talking raccoon, the pet rocks at sunset, the send-off of 2001: A Space Odyssey—all those work against the cast instead of with it. There should be a moratorium on 2001 parodies at this point, and writer-directors like Kwan and Scheinert should know that. In a film that is, in the end, really about adult regret, these juvenile ideas from sketch comedy and music videos one after another reveal themselves as distractions. If the multiverse needs that much flailing and tinkering to come out the same as it always does, then I don’t believe in it and don’t need it. The Ramones understood this universal truth better than the Daniels: “Second verse same as the first.”

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT of course originated as a German novel written by Erich Maria Remarque about World War I published in 1928. It follows the journey of Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) on the Western Front of World War I. This film is a thorough treatise on the cyclical, streamlined lethality of war and the machinery that supports it, from its opening shot to its last, a stunning achievement from its director/co-writer Edward Berger. The depiction of the cycle through the military lives and experiences playing out directly onscreen serves to make the point that much more impactful than any overt anti-war dialogue or speech. We see Paul go from bright-eyed and enthusiastic to very sullen with a sunken and haunted face. It is through his appearance that viewers are physically shown how war makes monsters of men. Berger’s craftsmanship in this film is striking, turning the horrors of war into a visceral experience. Berger does this not just through gory battle scenes, but taking us through the full process of war, from the frontlines to the negotiating tables. It also touches upon the lasting legacy of war as we see how the insistence of the winning French side on humiliating the Germans will inevitably lead to the next Great War we all know followed soon after. The editing and cinematography serve the film’s message well, working in perfect concert and making the experience that much more impactful. Daniel Brühl’s Matthias Erzberger is keenly aware of the staggering loss of life, patiently trying to guide political leadership toward a ceasefire, keeping in reserve his desperation, aware of the stark reality that Germany has already lost. It’s a position that has yet to sink in for many of those around him. As the film’s end title cards remind us, WWI was fought over patches of ground hundreds of yards wide, with either side hardly advancing their position across the course of war. 

BABYLON: This end-of-cinema epic starts by dramatizing the old joke about the man who cleans up elephant shit at least being in show biz, a literalization of La La Land’s contention that the audience likes crap more than jazz. The idea that we need Damien Chazelle to tell us that movies “meant something” and are not a “low art” is absurd, a sure sign of a disconnection from the reality of the lives of film fans across the world. Maybe Chazelle never meets any of these fans. As a murky Mad magazine fold-out comedy, Chazelle’s movie achieves a sort of grandeur in evoking a silent era that is reminiscent of Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger. It does this by imitating the work of filmmakers from the generation immediately before Chazelle’s, lifting ideas and scenes from Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro, Baz Luhrmann, even Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza. But it pretends it’s not doing this, claiming instead that Singin’ in the Rain is its touchstone, going so far as to reproduce the predecessor “Singin’ in the Rain” musical number from The Hollywood Revue of 1929, as if that is some kind of deep research. Its real cohort is disgruntled movies like The Big Picture, Under the Silver Lake or The Disaster Artist. Like Babylon, they are about the impossibility of achievement in Hollywood filmmaking, made by callow writer-directors who have tasted success and are afraid the supply is running out.

 

BLONDE: Australian director Andrew Dominik takes on 1950s American icon Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, miscasting Ana de Armas as a Marilyn ripped from the pages of Joyce Carol Oates' novel. The film is like Babylon in the way it demeans and befouls everything it touches, but Dominik is meaner and more lowdown than anything Damien Chazelle has ever encountered, including Tobey Maguire. Dominik’s Hollywood, unlike Chazelle’s, contains the pulsating viscera of surgery footage and has no love for the movies at all. That’s because Dominik is dead certain he is a better filmmaker than anyone Marilyn Monroe ever worked with. Blonde is a brain-damaged movie but, unlike Chazelle’s, it doesn’t induce laughter or pity. If this film had been directed by Andrea Dworkin it would still have been easier on men and on humanity. Specific dissections of “the blonde” are not new in the cinema. As out-there a director as Larry Buchanan made one Monroe biopic (Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn, 1989) and there was an Australian actress in the 1970s named Linda Kerridge who specialized in Marilyn imitations and seems to have lived as if she were Marilyn herself. I saw her playing Richard Lewis’s neighbor in an obscure movie called Diary of a Young Comic (1979) that it was way better than Blonde.

From Andy Warhol to Norman Mailer, Marilyn Monroe’s beauty and memorabilia have been the subjects of the creepy, insistent fascination of many weirdos. Dominik, with a big Netflix budget, has outdone them all, without thinking he’s one of them. He treats Marilyn like she’s the Barbie whose head Dawn Wiener tries to saw off with a cleaver in Welcome to the Dollhouse. In Blonde, Marilyn must suffer every kind of sexual predation or betrayal from every man she meets. Dominik reduces each of them to a lowest common denominator of American 1950s manhood, making most of them look like Richard Nixon, including Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), and JFK (Caspar Phillipson, brought back from Pablo Larrain's Jackie). The film ends in a paroxysm of grubbiness, after many scenes of Marilyn puking and bleeding, with men waving at her, their mouths distorted in vulgarity. By then it is impossible to tell if the confusing and confused Dominik is attacking masculinity, Hollywood, or America. Paradoxically it is over the subway grate of his inevitable remake of the white skirt scene from The Seven Year Itch that it becomes clear what’s going on: he’s blowing smoke up our panties.

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN: Martin McDonagh, a writer always trying to be more of a director, starts with drone shots because Ireland's landscape is beautiful, and the film is set in 1923. McDonagh’s greatest strength as director is with his actors. The ensemble here—Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, and Barry Keoghan—are all exceptional in the old Abbey Theatre way. This dark film plays on the enduring appeal of Irish music while teaching a hard lesson, which is that there is a difference between empathy and niceness. Colin Farrell is especially good as a stupid and boring but pleasant man driven to violence by his best friend’s sudden coldness, which is also a form of violence. McDonagh literalizes it through Gleeson’s self-mutilation, while Farrell works himself up like a Hibernian peasant, seeing that Gleeson keeps steelier and gorier. Although Kerry Condon's character best represents the search for freedom, it is Barry Keoghan who adds the most to the movie’s truly unsettling vibe. 

Keoghan, who apparently invoked (unfairly) the wrath of Jeffrey Wells, is one of the strangest actors working today, jerks his performances wildly between “this guy is the greatest actor I have ever seen” and “this kid is getting a little too weird.” Playing a tragic figure in a film of tragic figures, Keoghan works against the distracting drone photography, same as he did in Dunkirk and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. How long he can keep doing that before either insanity or stardom claims him?

TÁR: The best film of 2022. Cate Blanchett delivers the performance of the year in writer-director Todd Field’s superb motion picture, a character study so piercing in its analysis and so precise in its details that many have believed composer-conductor Lydia Tár to be an actual person. Instead, she’s a marvelous movie creation: an artistic genius with a loving daughter, but also a manipulator going crazy. Tár is a rarity in contemporary cinema in that it’s a movie that matters beyond the multiplex, the sort of brainy fare that has inspired almost as many think pieces as straightforward movie reviews. Impressively, the film isn’t pro- or anti- anything. Rather, it trusts viewers enough to allow them to absorb, understand, and appreciate the complexities inherent in cancel culture, in identity politics, and in the perpetual battle to separate the art from the artist. Todd Field’s Tar breaks all the rules of conventional screenwriting. It begins with a long take dominated by dialogue in the service of one image – that of a supremely confident Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett) painting a verbal self-portrait by describing her life as a celebrated conductor. She’s being interviewed on stage by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik and is giving him an unashamedly intellectual rundown. The tone is so elevated and, at the same time, so elliptical that you start to feel as if you’re watching a biographical documentary. Or maybe a filmed live play. 

It certainly doesn’t look or sound like the kind of American movie that gets a cinema release these days. Tár cost $35 million and grossed $6 million; The Fabelmans cost $40 million and grossed $15 million; Babylon cost $78 million and grossed $15 million; Amsterdam cost $80 million and grossed $14 million. To Leslie cost <1 million and grossed $34.000. So for the most part, expect studio heads to crunch the numbers and decide that, while variety might be the spice of life, it’s the same-old same-old that will ultimately save cinema. Cate Blanchett immersed herself in every aspect of Tar’s character: her armouring of arrogance, her joy in the music she conducts, her damaging need to exert power and her vertiginous fall from grace. Blanchett deserved her Oscar for a lifetime performance. Source: thebaffler.com