Movies

ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED: justice by erasure

by
Photo caption: Nan Goldin in ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED. Courtesy of NEON.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a profile of photographer Nan Goldin and her leadership of Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN), the advocacy group seeking to punish the Sackler family for profiting on the addiction and overdose carnage from oxycontin. Purdue Pharma, a privately held company owned by the Sacklers, intentionally oversold oxycontin to doctors and misled the public on its addictive qualities. The saga ended up in bankruptcy court because the Sacklers drained the profits from Purdue Pharma before it could be forced to reimburse its victims.

It’s unusual to have a public controversy so without nuance – the Sacklers are clearly bad people who acted badly and irreparably injured thousands of others. As a result, we aren’t bothered when Nan Goldin, an addict in recovery herself, evenly says, “It’s personal. I hate these people.”

Up against a malevolent, heavily-resourced corporation, PAIN inflicted pain on the Sackler family by turning their own philanthropy against them, shaming major art museums into refusing gifts from the Sacklers and even removing the Sackler name from the buildings and galleries they had sponsored. The museums were the institutions with the very highest profiles: the Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, [British] National Portrait Gallery and even the Louvre. To make things even more uncomfortable for the museums, Goldin’s own work is in the permanent collections of some of these museums.

A PAIN action in ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED. Courtesy of NEON.

PAIN’s actions were themselves works of performance art, often involving PAIN members feigning death en masse, surrounded by prescription bottle. To reflect Richard Sackler’s self-damning email that greedily rejoiced at the “blizzard of prescriptions”, PAIN members created a confetti blizzard of prescription slips in a major museum atrium.

The beginning and end of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about a third of the film, follows Goldin and PAIN’s campaign against the Sacklers. The rest of the film is the self-narrated life story of Nan Goldin, much of it illustrated by slide shows of her photos. Goldin became a key figure of the New York avant garde of the 70s, 80s and 90s, and she has led a colorful and oft turbulent life. There’s a major focus on the story of her older sister Barbara, and how the two reacted to their family by rebelling against conformity.

The bottom line is that I found the shaming of the Sacklers much more engaging that the Nan and Barbara Goldin story.

In the highlight of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the Sacklers on Purdue Pharma’s corporate board must themselves sit for two hours and listen via Zoom to the testimony of their victims, including one harrowing 911 call.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed was directed by noted documentarian Laura Poitras, Oscar winner for Citizenfour. The film has been included in various critics’ top ten lists and is a contender for the Best Documentary Oscar. It’s good, but I’ve seen better docs this year.

MADOFF: THE MONSTER OF WALL STREET: adding some jawdroppers to a familiar story

by
Photo caption: Bernie Madoff in MADOFF: THE MONSTER OF WALL STREET. Courtesy of Netflix.

Netflix’s documentary Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street is a pretty good watch. Most folks, like me, thought they understood the now 15-year-old story of Madoff’s house of cards collapsing at the same time as the 2008 mortgage meltdown, ruining hundred of investors, including pensioners and non-profits. But Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street contributes a comprehensive perspective and some jaw-dropping nuggets, to wit:

  • How the SEC whiffed MULTIPLE TIMES, even when the case was giftwrapped for them by a credible Wall Street expert;
  • The moment when the SEC and FBI learned that the fraud was not in the millions, but in the TENS OF BILLIONS;
  • How Bernie Madoff banned his own sons from the separate office in which the fraud was committed;
  • How Madoff concealed the fraud in plain sight with brazenness alone;
  • The one zillionaire investor who must have known about the Ponzi scheme and kept bailing Madoff out; and
  • What happened to the main characters in the saga, including Madoff’s family and confidantes – it is operatic.

We benefit from Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street‘s comprehensive look at the scandal because our knowledge of it come from the news coverage at time of his arrest, which focused on the plight of Madoff’s victims. That’s a key part of the story, but it helps to (in my case) learn that Madoff’s stature was earned by his building two entirely legitimate Wall Street businesses, co-founding the NASDAQ and becoming a sage adviser to the SEC. It also helps to revisit the scale of his fraud (the largest Ponzi scheme in world history) and how it differed from other Ponzi schemes – NONE of his victims’ money was ever invested.

One of the key themes is the contrast between the two suites of Madoff offices – with only Madoff himself having access to both. His sleek 19th floor suite housed the two legitimate businesses, was immaculately decorated in black and silver, and primarily staffed with well-educated Jews. The 17th floor, which housed the fraud, was staffed by high-school-educated Italian-Americans, and was a messy warren of cardboard boxes and a DOT MATRIX PRINTER.

Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street is well-sourced with the federal agents who arrested Madoff, his personal secretary and employees of both his legitimate and his fraudulent businesses, and clips of Bernie himself in prison garb, ‘fessing up, We also meet the guy who proved as early as 2000 that Madoff had to running a Ponzi scheme, only to be rebuffed by the SEC five times between 20000 and 2008.

Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street was directed by Joe Berlinger, who has directed some of the 21st century’s very best documentaries – the Paradise Lost series and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. This time, I did not care for his odd technique of using look-alike “actors” in “re-creations”, obviously to fill in for a scarcity of file footage, but it ultimately did not detract from telling a great story. Anyway, hopefully, Netflix will keep hiring Berlinger to make films, which is a great thing.

Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street is streaming on Netflix.

THE WHALE: regret to redemption

by
Photo caption: Brendan Fraser in THE WHALE. Courtesy of A24.

The emotionally powerful The Whale depicts a week in the life of Charlie (Brendan Fraser). The first thing we notice about Charlie is his obesity – his 600 pounds makes getting out of a chair a major challenge, and there’s just no way he can bend over to pick anything off the floor.  Refusing to seek medical attention despite labored breathing and catastrophic blood pressure, Charlie has exasperated his friend/caregiver Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse. He has congestive heart failure, and both Liz and Charlie know that he may be in his last week of life.

He is a grotesque, but unlike Quasimodo or The Elephant Man, he’s a grotesque of his own making. Charlie is grieving from a loss nine years before and is regretting a failed relationship with his child; he has reacted by emotionally eating himself to near-death. He no longer ever leaves his apartment, where he works remotely by teaching a college writing course on-line.

Charlie is a man of immense sensitivity, unusually moved by the sporadic snippets of crude honesty in his students’ writing. He is so sensitive that he is swallowed by grief, and cannot handle the anger of others. Charlie is constantly saying “I’m sorry”, but there are two things that he is decidedly not sorry for – fathering a daughter and falling in love with a man.

Charlie’s sad routine is interrupted by a visit from the young door-to-door missionary Thomas (Ty Simpkins), and then by an appearance from his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), now a seething teen. It’s only a mater of time before Liz brings by his ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton), too. Will Charlie mend his relationships? Will he find inner peace? Will he even survive?

What makes The Whale an exceptional movie is Brendan Fraser’s unforgettable performance as Charlie. He’s not just impersonating an extremely obese person; he’s portraying a complex character- a man who is weakened by self loathing and physical disability, but whose passions and humanity gleam through. Encased in a latex and CGI fat suit, Fraser makes us understand Charlie with his own beautiful and expressive blue eyes and with Charlie’s lurching and plodding.

Fraser has always been an appealing actor, and one of great humor. 25 years ago, the strikingly handsome Fraser used his physicality in The Mummy franchise and, literally in a loincloth, in George of the Jungle. It’s useful to remember that he did a serious art movie, Gods and Monsters, in that period, too.  His build, rangy then, has since morphed into burly, and in last years thriller No Sudden Move, to hulking. 

Of course, Fraser will be nominated for an Oscar, because the actors who vote for awards love performances with major physical transformations. But it’s important not to downgrade Fraser’s performance because of that phenomenon – this is a remarkable exploration into a character’s inner life.

Hong Chau has been doing strong and versatile work lately (Driveways, The Menu); her Liz is an uncommonly good and award-worthy performance. 

Samantha Morton is piercingly credible as the ex-wife.  (Where has SHE been since Minority Report and In America?)

The story is a play by Samuel D. Hunter. Darren Aronofsky, a director known for making splashy, pedal-to-the-metal movies (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) has the artistic judgment to keep the camera in Charlie’s dank, claustrophobic apartment and let Hunter’s dialogue reveal the characters.

While The Whale is one of the best films of 2022, it has its flaws, especially Sadie Sink’s not-very-textured performance as the daughter (and I didn’t find Ty Simpkins very compelling, either).  The thread about the young missionary Thomas has at least one contrivance too many. Also, the weepy soap opera music cues underneath The Whale’s most emotionally powerful moments are unnecessary, distracting and unforgivable.

The scenes where Charlie is gorging himself are tough to watch.  I saw The Whale at a theater that is essentially next to my favorite French restaurant, and I like to cap a morning movie with a lunch of salade lyonnaise and steak tartare; but emerging from The Whale at lunchtime, I just couldn’t do that.  I recommend this film, but not for a movie/dinner or dinner/movie date.

Nevertheless, this is still one of the year’s best films because of Charlie’s compelling story and Brendan Frazier’s magnificent portrayal.

THE PALE BLUE EYE: Gothic and so-so, except for a great Harry Melling

by
Photo caption: Harry Melling in THE PALE BLUE EYE. Courtesy of Netflix.

The Pale Blue Eye stars Christian Bale as a detective pulled out of retirement to solve a murder mystery at West Point in 1830. He enlists a cadet as his assistant – none other than Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling), in his one unsuccessful year at the Military Academy. Except for Harry Melling, The Pale Blue Eye is not great.

As the two keep peeling the onion, the bodies and more weirdness keep piling up, including a distractingly incredible dive into the occult. Just when the whodunit is seemingly wrapped up, there’s one more twisty Big Reveal. The whodunit is far from thrilling, and the final twist isn’t enough to pay off.

The fine director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Hostiles) frames the whole thing in a Gothic horror patina, but that’s not enough to keep the story interesting. Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s story is a slog.

Christian Bale ably plays his character with world-weariness and just the right hint of slyness. Two of the world’s greatest screen actors, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Timothy Spall, are embarrassingly wasted in underwritten roles. Toby Jones and Gillian Anderson don’t fare much better.

Harry Melling goes big as Edgar Allen Poe, reveling in a southern accent (Poe grew up in Virginia) and the florid 18th century speech. His Poe has the confidence, perhaps from narcissism, that belies his unpopularity with peers, and his lack of accomplishment. And. of course, Melling embues his Poe with a discernible creepiness. This isn’t a big deal IMO, but Melling is made up to look just like a young Poe would have looked, before the mustache and the dissolution.

As a kid, Melling broke through as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter franchise, which he needed to finish in a fat suit because he had slimmed down so much. In the last year or so, Melling has produced some great work in The Queen’s Gambit, Please Baby Please and The Tragedy of Macbeth. Before that, he was the best element of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. He is now one of cinema’s great scene-stealers.

The Pale Blue Eye is streaming on Netflix.

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY: skewer the rich

by
Photo caption: Daniel Craig and Janelle Monae in GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. Courtesy of Netflix.

Writer-director Rian Johnson follows his wonderful Knives Out with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, another satirical drawing room murder mystery with super detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). Again, the rich are skewered and, again, Blanc is overshadowed by a younger female of color. It’s all good fun.

Glass Onion is set on the extravagant private island (think the hideout of a Bond supervillain) of an untethered, narcissistic billionaire (think Elon Musk). The billionaire (a perfect Edward Norton) invites four of buddies from his past (Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Leslie Odom, Jr., and Katharine Hahn) for a weekend house party, plus a girlfriend (Madelyn Cline) and an assistant (Jessica Henwick – whose compelling presence is wasted in this often sniveling role). And Benoit Blanc comes, too, which is fitting because the weekend’s theme is a Clue-like mystery game. Another mysterious friend from the past (Janelle Monáe) shows up; her relationship to the others is complicated, and she puts everyone on edge.

There’s a murder to be solved and a Macguffin to be found. Along the way there are several massive plot twists. Clues dropped early hint that a fortune has been made, not by intellectual talent and hard work, but by manipulation and cheating. Rian Johnson loves to expose treachery among the 1 percent, and here he brings us a classic emperor-has-no-clothes comeuppance.

Knives Out was one of 2019’s smartest and funniest films, and Glass Onion is not in that class – but is still very entertaining. The first forty minutes of set-up are not that compelling, but the pace picks up once the plot twists start piling up and Janelle Monáe takes over the movie.

Janelle Monáe in GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. Credit: John Wilson. Courtesy of Netflix.

The cast is excellent, especially Craig and Norton. But the most riveting performance is by the singular Janelle Monáe. The stunningly beautiful Monáe is a captivating screen presence. She’s also demonstrated serious dramatic acting chops in her who-is-THAT? performance in her first feature film Moonlight, and again in Hidden Figures. Monáe’s own music and fashion projects are startlingly original, and her artsy sensibility seems impervious to risk. I say, let her direct a movie if she wants – just get her back up on the movie screen.

Glass Onion looks several times glossier than its $40 million budget. Glass Onion has spent over a week as the #1 film on Netflix, which is excellent because it means that Netflix will likely fund another Rian Johnson movie.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is streaming on Netflix.

BABYLON: “wanton excess” is inadequate to describe this movie

by
Photo caption: Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in BABYLON. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Babylon is a whole lot of movie. More movie than you’re expecting. And maybe more movie than you want.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash) has delivered a kinetic and kaleidoscopic showbiz epic of over three hours, which is visually stunning, ever entertaining and sometimes shocking. Now, is it a good movie?

Set beginning in 1926, Babylon traces Hollywood’s transition from silent film to the talkies by tracing the stories of a mega-movie star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), the ambitious starlet Nelly LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the African-American trumpet prodigy Stanley Palmer (Jovan Adebo) and the sultry Chinese entertainer-by-night Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). The audience largely experiences Babylon from the point of view of Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican household gofer whose abilities as a fixer propel him up the movie studio ladder. Chazelle’s view of Hollywood is as a human-crunching pool of toxicity, that a person must leave to survive with any decency or happiness.

This is also a Hollywood of unsurpassed debauchery and hedonism, which we taste right away in a movie mogul’s house party with lots of bare-breasted women and naked people engaging in sex, kinky sex, and perverted sex. The scene is clearly inspired by Ceil B. DeMille’s orgy scene in the silent The Ten Commandments, which seems quaint in comparison. This scene could have been imagined by Federico Fellini on speed and Hugh Hefner on acid.

Margot Robbie (center) and a cast of thousands in BABYLON. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

“Wanton excess” is inadequate to describe this party scene and much of Babylon. Like the guitarist in This Is Spinal Tap, Chazelle has set his amp to eleven. There’s so much eye candy here that Babylon will cause Baz Luhrman to feel bad about himself.

This is also the most scatological mainstream movie that I’ve seen. There’s projectile diarrhea (from an elephant), projectile vomit (from a person on a person) and urination (both from a woman onto a titillated man and from a man onto himself).

Back to the story. Chazelle shows us the Silent Era Hollywood studios with wall-to-wall outdoor movie sets, simultaneously grinding out comedies, romances and westerns. We see a cast of thousands in a medieval battle epic, and the transition to sound during the period when the technical challenges were so excruciatingly unforgiving that the sound men briefly usurped the control from the directors. Babylon’s characters are thinly-disguised recreations of John Gilbert, Clara Bow, Fatty Arbuckle, Anna May Wong, Erich von Stroheim and Louella Parsons, with some real life figures like Irving Thalberg.

Brad Pitt and Diego Calva in BABYLON. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

If you’re going to cast an actor to play a movie star from the classic era, you’re not going to cast Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Robert Downey Jr. or Bradley Cooper. Just cast Brad Pitt and you’re most of way there in your storytelling – Pitt’s handsome looks are just weathered enough, and he exudes physicality, confidence and insouciance. If you want a Douglas Fairbanks or Clark Gable type – he’s your guy. And, yes, he is perfect in this film.

Likewise, Jean Smart is your gal for a cleareyed, devastating truthteller. Her character’s matter-of-fact Bad News Good News assessment of Jack Conrad’s career may be the distillation of Chazelle’s core message, if there is one. It’s the most compelling speech in Babylon.

I’ve seen actors throw themselves into Wild Child performances, but none with as much abandon as Margot Robbie. It’s a fearless, over-the-top and singular performance. Unfortunately, Chazelle’s Nelly is two-dimensional. There’s not much there except her insatiable grasping for fame and drugs, but Robbie does wring out every ounce of humanity.

This a well-acted film. Other notable pedal-to-the-metal performances:

  • Li Jun Li soars with sexy charisma in an underwritten part. I want to see more of her.
  • Eric Roberts sparkles as Nelly LaRoy’s venal and opportunistic father, who has reappeared once she is a money machine of a movie star.
  • Tobey Maguire’s performance was perfectly described by David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter as seeking to “out-weird Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker combined.”
  • Sydney Palmer’s trumpet work is downright exciting, I assume that someone other than Jovan Adepo is actually playing the instrument, but I couldn’t determine who from the credits. In any case, Adepo gets props for credible fingering, which is no small thing.

The fine cast also includes Lukas Hass, Patrick Fugit, Samara Weaving, Katharine Waterston, Jeff Garlin, Spike Jonze and, very briefly, Olivia Wilde.

Elements of Babylon are indisputably superb and Oscar-worthy, especially the cinematography by Linus Sangren (Oscar winner for La La Land), the production design by Florencia Martin and the costumes by Mary Zophres (Oscar nominated for True Grit, La La Land and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs).

Is this a good movie? There is an unusually wide range of critical assessments, which average into a a middling 59 score on Metacritic. It’s a gorgeous thrill ride, for sure, but we just don’t care about most of the characters. Some viewers will be just too distracted and exhausted by the freneticism. I think it falls short of being a great movie, but it’s so outrageous and fun to watch that it’s a must see.

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER: consumed by mom

by
Photo caption: Tilda Swinton in THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER. Courtesy of A24.

The Eternal Daughter begins with the filmmaker Julie (Tilda Swinton) bringing her elderly mother (also Tilsa Swinton) for a getaway at an Welsh country hotel. It’s an enormous, sinister-looking edifice, a Victorian building of Gothic design. When the building creaks and goes bump in the night, mysterious figures appear at windows and there’s knocking from supposedly unoccupied rooms, The Eternal Daughter has all of the trappings of a haunted house movie.

Mom and daughter appear to be the only visitors, although hotel staff insists otherwise. They are at the mercy of the hotel’s receptionist/manager/server (Carly-Sophia Davies), who, to a hilarious extent, could not be any more disinterested in her guests’ happiness ,comfort or approval.

Julie’s experience at the hotel is one of persistent dissatisfaction. She wants to work, but the only WiFi signal is three floors above their room, and she has sporadic cell phone service only in one special spot outside. Her requests to get the room they actually reserved and the expected amenities are stonewalled by the receptionist.

Her hot button, however, is that she doesn’t feel that she is bringing her mother any happiness. It turns out that this trip is a birthday treat for her mother, who had stayed in this house as a child during WW II. The mother is serene and uncomplaining, except to object to Julie “fussing” over her. Julie has microplanned every detail, down to lighting the candle on the mom’s birthday cake, but Julie doesn’t think she is doing anything right.

What’s going on in this slow burn? It turns out that writer-director Joanna Hogg isn’t taking us to a haunted house or to a comedy of manners in a bad hotel. This is a psychological drama. Julie is haunted, alright, but it’s by her relationship with her mother, which she’s having a very hard time figuring out.

Joanna Hogg is a veteran director who got the chance to become an auteur at age 59, beginning in 2019 with The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II in 2021.The Eternal Daughter is the third of these highly personal, apparently autographical films, with the Julie character as Hogg’s alter ego. In those films, Julie was played by Honor Swinton Byrne (Tilda Swinton’s real life daughter) and Swinton played Julie’s mom.

All three films are personal, as in specific and decidedly NOT universal. Although I am generally not a fan of naval-gazing, Hogg’s genius as a filmmaker is such that The Eternal Daughter and its siblings, slow burns all, are mesmerizing.

KIMI: an adequate REAR WINDOWS ends as a thrilling WAIT UNTIL DARK

by
Photo caption: Zoe Kravitz in KIMI. Courtesy of HBO.

Steven Soderbergh is very good at making tight little thrillers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In his Kimi, Angela (Zoe Kravitz) is a Seattle techie living and working in her loft apartment during the COVID lockdown, where she and the loft apartment dwellers across the street watch each other being locked down. But she’s not really trapped in her apartment by public health protocols, which have eased – she’s agoraphobic.

Angela works for a big, sinister tech firm that harvesting way too much private information from each of us and that is the basis for the paranoid facet of this paranoid thriller. She believes that she has heard a violent crime, as in an audio version of Rear Window. Now she knows too much, and she’s in danger.

Kimi is an okay paranoid thriller until the finale, when it turns into a superb action movie. It turns out that the tiny, sniveling Angela has some commando resourcefulness in her. The final set piece is like Wait Until Dark on steroids – very tight, very imaginative and very entertaining.

Kimi is streaming on HBO MAX.

STARS AT NOON: needs less sweat and more sizzle

by
Photo caption: Margaret Qualley in STARS AT NOON. Courtesy of A24.

In the atmospheric neo-noir Stars at Noon, it’s the early 1980s in Nicaragua, and wannabe journalist Trish (Margaret Qualley) is learning that one can not always live by ones wits. She’s hoodwinked a magazine into paying her way to write a travel puff piece, while always intending to write a political expose; that article has annoyed the government to the point of revoking her press pass and confiscating her passport. Now she’s broke, unable to pay her way out of the city’s cheapest motel and into the airport, cadging meals from hotel buffets and obsessing on how to procure some shampoo for her increasingly sweaty scalp.

What she has going for her is command of the Spanish language and having learned her way around the country, geographically and culturally. She’s mastered the alphabet soup of Central American intelligence and security entities, each nastier and more ruthlessly repressive than the last. Trish is also highly manipulative and eager to sleep with any man who might help her in any way.

She picks up the handsome Brit Daniel (Joe Alwyn) at his upscale hotel, intending to get a roll in the hay, 50 dollars US and some stolen hotel shampoo out of the encounter. When Trish finds a hidden gun in his stuff, she (and the audience) think he must be dangerous, like a hit man or an intelligence operative. When she finds that he’s also in over his head, she and he have fallen in love with each other.

He’s not dangerous to others – he’s dangerous to be with. She was in desperate circumstance, but now the two of them are desperate for their lives. It’s too late – their fates are now entangled. And they’re going to have to make a mad dash for the border.

Stars at Noon won the Grand Prixe, essentially second place at Cannes, and this must have been because of the jury’s reverence for Claire Denis, the iconic French director, and a glass ceiling-busting female filmmaker at that. As one would expect from a Denis film, Star at Noon is competently crafted, but it’s just way too long at two hours and twenty minutes. Although Qualley and Alwyn spend a lot of that time unclothed and grinding away, I didn’t find their chemistry to smoke. Stars at Noon is too needlessly languorous and not sizzling enough to be a really good movie.

Qualley pulls her dress over her head within minutes of meeting any man; if the director weren’t female, Stars at Noon would face criticism for male gaze exploitation.

Denis also has oddly chosen a sound track that could have lifted from Showtime soft porn.

Qualley with her fidgety energy and her hyper-direct gaze, is perfectly cast as Trish. I first saw Qualley when she jumped off the screen as a Manson Girl in Once Upon a Time..In Hollywood and then in Fosse/Verdon. She has the charisma to carry a movie much better than Stars at Noon.

Joe Alwyn is dreamy enough to make it credible that Trish would fall hard for Daniel.

Photo caption: Margaret Qualley and Benny Safdie in STARS AT NOON. Courtesy of A24.

I can’t say enough about Benny Safdie’s performance as a character credited as CIA Man. His affability makes him all the more sinister. The CIA Man knows that he holds all the cards, and there’s no need to seem like a brute, even if he is going to compel Trish into an egregious and traumatizing act. It’s all business, thank you very much.

I usually think of Benny and his brother Josh as indie directors (Uncut Gems), but Benny has been acting and he has real chops. In Licorice Pizza, he nailed the role of the closeted, charismatic do-gooder politician,

John C. Reilly shows up briefly, wearing a wild 1980s-perm-gone-wrong as the editor that Trish has burned her very last bridge with, and his cameo is hilarious.

I watched Stars at Noon on Amazon, one of the many streaming platforms which offer it.

THE FABELMANS: a mom, a dad and their genius

by
Photo caption: Paul Dano and Michelle Williams in THE FABELMANS. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

In his cinematic memoir The Fabelmans, that great storyteller Steven Spielberg relates two braided narratives – one about the origins of his own dedication to filmmaking and a second about his parents, two people who loved each other but could not be happily married. Both parents were creatives in their way. His dad (Paul Dano) was an electronic engineer in the transistor age who could imagine modern computing. His mom (Michelle Williams) was an aesthete, a pianist-turned-house mom whose exuberance often manifested in song, dance and visual arts. And, importantly, both parents were dreamers who would come to understand their son’s passion.

The story’s stand-in for Spielberg is Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle). We watch as his parents drag him to his first movie. That first film, incidentally, was The Greatest Show on Earth, always in the conversation as the worst movie ever to win the Best Picture Oscar. Nevertheless, it contains a thrilling rain wreck sequence, which definitely left its mark on the young Spielberg. You can draw a line from the train wreck scene in The Greatest Show on Earth and the very young Sammy’s home movie version with a Lionel model train to the final scene in Spielberg’s first real-life feature, the TV movie Duel.

Young Sammy starts making his own home movies, and after the family moves to Arizona, starts enlisting his sisters and his friends in increasingly sophisticated amateur film productions, including a WWII movie with an robust combat finale.

Gabriel LaBelle in THE FABELMANS. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

When the dad gets a job at IBM in San Jose, it’s one too many moves for mom. She misses a friendship that made her husband’s absences bearable, she decompensates and the differences between the two simmer and finally boil over.

The kids aren’t happy in what will become Silicon Valley either. Sammy and his sisters attend Saratoga High, which is thinly disguised as “Grand View High”, and Sammy suffers antisemitic bullying (and I have read about Spielberg’s bitterness at his experience there). Indeed, Saratoga High in The Fabelmans looks like a camp for Hitler Youth.

Although high school is hellacious and his parents split, Sammy survives to try to break into the film industry. Each parent is able to provide support in his or her own way, and Sammy gets some valuable advice from other adults along the way, including one very famous one.

Gabriel LaBelle, who looks like the teenage Spielberg and who is much shorter than the Aryans at Saratoga High, is completely believable as Sammy. While his performance as this specific character is more than adequate, I’m really not hoping to see him as Mercutio or Holden Caulfield or Billy the Kid. And, as befits the title, The Fabelmans is at least as much about the parents’ impact on Sammy as it is about his own actions and inner life.

How many times can you call an actor’s performance a “revelation”? That’s the challenge in describing what will be another Oscar-nominated turn by Michele Williams. The Fabelman family really revolves around the mom – for better when she is the glue that holds the family together through its moves across the US. And for worse, when she experiences moments of instability and then breaks down completely. Williams’ performance (as always) brings texture and subtlety, along with the strong emotions of joy and despair. There’s a moment when the dad, experiencing unrestrained joy, carries her over the threshold of a new house, one that she has been yearning for; she smiles appropriately for the moment, and then the expression in her eyes slightly changes to hint that things cannot be made right, after all. It’s a singular Michelle Williams moment.

Paul Dano excels as the Fabelman Dad, who is trying so damn hard within the confines of 1950s gender roles, but is often confounded by his wife and his own children.

The rest of the cast is good, too, including Seth Rogen, unrecognizable but for his voice. Julia Butters (who stole a scene from Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time..In Hollywood) and Keely Karsten are really excellent as Sammy’s sisters. Judd Hirsch, who is now 87, has a hilarious cameo as the mom’s long-unseen grand uncle, who parachutes in with what amounts to a bizarre pep talk for Sammy. Another great filmmaker, David Lynch, has a priceless and gut-bustingly funny and dead-on cameo at the end as an even more famous filmmaker; Lynch and Spielberg must have been howling with laughter between takes.

Personal digression: The protagonist’s first movie – and the rest of the film – made me think about whether there was one moment in my life that steered me toward my own day-job career in law and politics – certainly there was a zeitgeist of the times in the 1960s, but I ‘ll have to reflect more to come up with a single catalytic moment. For my love of movies, however, there’s a clear spark – seeing movies like Casablanca, Double Indemnity, All About Eve, Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Rules of the Game and 8 1/2 for my sophomore History of Film class at Stanford, along with The Godfather, Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, American Grafitti and other, then contemporary, work by the New Directors in the early 1970s; imagine seeing those 12 movies for the first time within a couple years.

I’ll be adding The Fabelmans to my Best Movies of 2022. It’s peeked out in a few theaters, and I expect a much wider theatrical release after Oscar nominations are announced in late January.