Here’s an underrated 2014 romance that most of us didn’t get to see in theaters: The Face of Love.
Annette Bening plays a woman whose husband suddenly dies, and she is plunged into an immediate and harsh sense of loss. She goes on with her life and then is surprised to meet a man who is attracted to her. They begin to date and fast develop a serious bond. Here’s the kicker – the new boyfriend looks EXACTLY like her late husband (both are played by Ed Harris). You know that eventually he is going to find out, and that eventually her kids and friends are going to find out, and that people are going to think this is very weird. Those characters – and the audience – will wonder whether she is in love with this new man – or in love with the image of her late husband.
As one would expect, Bening and Harris both give compelling performances. The scene where the new guy asks her out on a date is especially fun. The Face of Love is a worthwhile watch.
The Face of Love is available to stream from Amazon.
Noah Baumbach’s family dramedy Marriage Story,
one of the very best films of 2019, traces two good people who care for each
other at the end of their marriage. It’s
a heartfelt film about a personal tragedy that has some of the funniest moments
on screen this year.
Charlie (Adam Driver) is a theater director and Nicole
(Scarlett Johannson) is an actress.
They are married with an eight-year-old son Henry. Nicole’s career is taking her to California,
while Charlie’s is anchored to his beloved New York. Adults might be able to manage a bicoastal
relationship, but the kid needs to have his school and his friends in one place
or the other.
The two try to complete an amicable divorce, but their disagreement over the kid’s primary home unintentionally plunges them into a litigation nightmare, with a cascade of stress added by the lawyers and the courts. It’s been written elsewhere, but I need to add that Nicole and Charlie are horrified by a system that is working as designed. There’s a wonderful shot of Charlie and Nicole sitting apart on an near-empty subway car, exhausted, bereft and unable to support each other.
In a masterstroke, Baumbach introduces his lead
characters with each spouse’s assessment of what is so lovable about the
other. Then we sober up when we learn
what prompted the essays.
We relate to both Charlie and Nicole, and Driver and Johansson perfectly inhabit these good folks, slipping into a deeper nightmare with each step in the process. Near the end, the two have the raw argument that they had each been too nice to have before.
I think that the reason Marriage Story works is
that Johansson and Driver can go through their characters’ pain with complete
authenticity while amidst all the funny supporting characters.
Laura Dern and Ray Liotta play top echelon Divorce
Lawyers to the Stars. Alan Alda plays a sage older attorney who has lost
something off his fastball. Dern’s
riotously funny performance is a lock for an Oscar nomination for Best
Supporting Actress. Dern, Liotta, Alda,
Julie Haggerty, Merritt Wever and Wallace Shawn are each hilarious. Azhy Robertson (Juliet, Naked) is very
good as the kid.
At one point, the court appoints a child evaluator to visit Charlie and judge his relationship with his child. Having any stranger parachute into your home, with your parenting rights at stake, would be stressful. Martha Kelly is superb as an especially humorless evaluator, an oddball impervious to Charlie’s charms and oblivious to any of his positive attributes. As things start going wrong, Charlie gets more and more desperate and the scene gets funnier.
Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver in MARRIAGE STORY
Director Noah Baumbach’s screenplay is informed by the end of his own marriage to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. He acknowledges “a connection to the material”, but that it’s not only about his divorce. He is generous enough to write the character of Charlie with self-absorbed cluelessness about his impact to Nicole’s career aspirations.
I liked Baumbach’s first movie The Squid and the Whale, about his own parents’ divorce. But my reaction to all his subsequent work until now has ranged from to indifference to antipathy; “detest” is the adjective that springs to mind. Despite my bias, I gotta admit that Marriage Story is so, so good that it solidifies Baumbach’s place as an American auteur. Baumbach should head into awards season as the favorite for the screenplay Oscar.
A superb screenplay, superbly acted, Marriage Story balances tragedy and comedy with uncommon success. It’s a masterpiece, and among the very best cinema of 2019. It’s a Must See. I saw Marriage Story in early October at the Mill Valley Film Festival. You can find it theaters now, and it will stream on Netflix beginning on Friday, December 6.
The veteran actor Jim Broadbent paints a remarkable portrait of Tony, the main character in the British drama The Sense of an Ending, and he makes it look easy. Retired and long-divorced, Tony is entirely comfortable is a solitary life that he has chosen, perhaps not voluntarily, by being so damn selfish and curmudgeonly. In some very funny moments, we learn that he does not suffer fools. An incident revives a brief period of passion in his youth, and he can’t let it go (although we know that he really should). As he plunges on, he unpeels the mystery, layer by layer, and discovers more emotional turmoil than he is prepared to deal with. He learns that we cannot always find closure, especially if it depends on the feelings of others and acts and words with cannot be undone.
As good as Broadbent is, the best scenes are with Tony’s ex-wife (Harriet Walker – who really shines in this film) and the romantic interest of his youth (the irreplaceable Charlotte Rampling).
You are forgiven if, after reading a capsule or watching the trailer, you think that The Sense of an Ending is another 45 Years; after all both focus on a retired British gentleman whose life is rocked by an unexpected call or letter and both feature stunning performances by Charlotte Rampling. But it is not. 45 Years meditates on the power and durability of memories and then shifts into a study of relationships; we see intimacy without the sharing of all truths, and see how the truth can be toxic and destructive. In contrast, The Sense of an Ending explores how emotional detachment is very protective, and what happens when one ventures into emotional vulnerability. 45 Years was Charlotte Rampling’s movie, while she has only a couple of brief, although hard-hitting, scenes in The Sense of an Ending.
The Sense of an Ending played at Cinequest before its theatrical release and was well-received by the audience. I like The Sense of an Ending more than does the critical consensus, perhaps because it’s the best new movie widely released in the Bay Area this week.
In honor of the opening of this year’s Cinequest, this week’s pick is the Danish drama The Hunt from the 2013 Cinequest. Mads Mikkelsen plays a man whose life is ruined by a false claim of child sexual abuse. You’ll recognize Mikkelsen, a big star in Europe, from After the Wedding and the 2006 Casino Royale (he was the villain with the bleeding eye). He won the 2012 Cannes Best Actor award for this performance.
The story is terrifyingly plausible. The protagonist, Lucas, is getting his bearings after a job change and a divorce. He lives in a small Danish town where everyone knows everyone else, next door to his best friend. The best friend drinks too much and his wife is a little high-strung, but Lucas embraces them for who they are. He’s a regular guy who hunts and drinks with his buddies and is adored by the kids at the kindergarten where he works. He’s not a saint – his ex-wife can get him to fly off the handle with little effort.
A little girl hears a sexual reference at home that she does not understand (and no one in the story could ever find out how she heard it). When she innocently repeats it at school, the staff is alarmed and starts to investigate. Except for one mistake by the school principal, everyone in the story acts reasonably. One step in the process builds upon another until the town’s parents become so understandably upset that a public hysteria ensues.
Director Thomas Vinterburg had previously created the underappreciated Celebration (Festen).The Hunt is gripping – we’re on the edges of our seats as the investigation snowballs and Lucas is put at risk of losing everything – his reputation, his job, his child, his friends, his liberty and even his life. Can Lucas be cleared, and, if he is, how scarred will he be? The Hunt is a superbly crafted film with a magnificent performance by Mikkelsen.
The Hunt is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and PlayStation Video.
In the German psychological drama Phoenix, Nina Hoss plays Nelly, an Auschwitz survivor whose face has been destroyed by a Nazi gunshot; her sister has arranged for plastic surgery to reconstruct her face. When Nelly gets her new face, we accompany her on an intense quest.
Writer-director Christian Petzhold is an economical story-teller, respectful of the audience’s intelligence. Watching a border guard’s reaction to her disfigurement and hearing snippets from the sister and the plastic surgeon, we gradually piece together her back story. The doctor asks what seems like a very good question – Why would a Jewish woman successfully rooted in London return to Germany in 1938? The answer to that question involves a Woman Loving Too Much.
The sister plans to re-settle both of them in Israel, but Nelly is obsessed with finding her husband. She does find her husband, who firmly believes that Nelly is dead. But he notes that the post-surgery Nelly resembles his pre-war wife, and he has a reason to have her impersonate the real Nelly. So he has the real Nelly (who he doesn’t think IS the real Nelly) pretending to be herself. It’s kind of a reverse version of The Return of Martin Guerre.
It’s the ultimate masquerade. How would you feel while listening to your spouse describe you in detail to a stranger?
Nina Hoss is an uncommonly gifted actress. Here she acts with her face fully bandaged for the first third of the film. We ache for her Nelly’s obsessive need for her husband – and when she finally finds him, she still doesn’t really have him.
As the husband, Ronald Zehfeld shows us the magnetism that attracts Nina, along with the brusque purposefulness that he thinks he needs to survive and flourish in the post-war Germany.
Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss collaborated on the recent film Barbara (he won the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for his work). About Barbara, I wrote
“Given that’s it difficult to imagine how anyone else could have improved Barbara, I’ll be looking for Petzold’s next movie.”
Well, here it is, and it’s gripping.
The ending of the film is both surprising and satisfying. Several people in my audience let out an audible “Wow!” at the same time.
Phoenix is one of my Best Movies of 2015. It is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, YouTube and Google Play.
The Wife often mocks my taste in obscure or challenging foreign cinema, like the “Romanian abortion movie” and the “Icelandic penis movie”. So I was looking forward to regaling her about the “Ukrainian deaf movie” The Tribe, which sparked much notice at the Toronto and Sundance film fests. Indeed, The Tribe is a singular cinematic experience – both absorbing and exhausting.
Right away, the movie tells us that, although the The Tribe comes from Ukraine, we’re not going to hear any Ukrainian. Nor will we see any English subtitles. It’s set in a residential high school for the deaf, and the entire movie is in sign language. It’s novel for the hearing to experience an entire movie in which we hear only the sound of ambient noises – footsteps, creaking doors and the like – and we know that these sounds are NOT heard by the movie characters.
Writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky also employs fixed-camera shots of very, very long duration. which enhance the feeling that we’re watching something that we haven’t seen before.
At first, The Tribe delivers what we might expect in a teen coming of age film: the new kid in school, practical jokes and high jinks, the boring classroom, the class clown and raging teen hormones. The kids sneak off campus at night to prowl and party. But soon we are shocked to realize that we’re not seeing normal teen rowdiness and delinquency – these kids are operating an organized crime ring!
The Tribe is clearly meant to be a comment on the profoundly rooted corruption of post-Soviet society. Unfortunately, Slaboshpitsky piles on so much horrible behavior and brutality that it becomes distracting. There’s even an unsparing clinical depiction of a back alley abortion in real time; at my screening, I could feel the entire audience, at first frozen and then squirming in our seats. It’s a very unpleasant scene – and meant to be. And after the extreme violence at the very end of the movie, the audience exited with nervous laughter at having endured it.
Two final warnings: Women viewers should be prepared for the squat toilets in the the public restroom – not exactly a travelogue high point for Ukraine. And THIS IS NOT A DATE MOVIE – despite lots of explicit sex, no one is going to want to have sex after watching this!
[SPOILER ALERT – The ending is both a cinematic achievement and barely watchable: all in one camera shot, the protagonist climbs five flights of stairs and commits four individual up-close-and-personal and especially brutal murders.]
The opening scene of the brilliant psychological drama 99 Homes illustrates the life-and-death stakes of our nation’s foreclosure crisis. It’s a topical film, but 99 Homes is emotionally raw and as intense as any thriller. Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is a working class single dad, down on his luck. He loses his home to foreclosure and then must make a Faustian choice about supporting his family. Can he live with his choice, and what are the consequences?
With capitalism, where there are losers, there are also winners who have bet against the losers. Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) has built a prosperous real estate business on legitimate evictions and flips, supplemented with schemes to defraud federal home loan agencies, housing syndicates and individual homeowners. His world view is defined in a monologue about this nation bailing out the winners, not the losers – a cynical, but perceptive, observation.
Director Ramin Bahrani is a great American indie director, with a knack for drilling into the psyches of overlooked subsets of our society – immigrants (Chop Shop, Man Push Cart, Goodbye Solo), industrial farmers (At Any Price) and now the victims and profiteers of the Mortgage Bubble.
As foreclosure inexorably approaches, Garfield’s Nash is absorbed by dread, then desperation and, finally, to panic. His mom (Laura Dern) takes a different tack, settling firmly into denial and then erupting in hysteria. That denial recurs again and again in 99 Homes among those about to be evicted. These are people who have bought homes and can’t believe/grok/internalize that one day they will actually be forced out of them. One of the strongest aspects of 99 Homes is the use of non-actors who have lived through the nightmare. Some of the individual stories, especially one with a confused old man, are so wrenching as to be hard to watch.
This may be Andrew Garfield’ strongest cinema performance. Dennis Nash is a decent man incentivized to do the indecent. Garfield takes this good man through an amazing internal journey. Nash is forced to accept the failure resulting from his attempts to do what is right, juxtaposed with the success from conduct that he finds repulsive. Bahrani’s arty shot of the reflection of a swimming pool shimmering in a sliding glass door makes it look like Garfield is under water – which he metaphorically is at this point in the film.
Michael Shannon, one of my very favorite actors, is superb as a guy completely committed to pursuing his own survival/prosperity strategy – no matter that it is based on ruining the lives of other humans. Unlike Nash, Shannon’s Carver has accepted the incentives to act badly and has overcome any qualms about either moral ambiguity or even stark amorality.
Veteran television actor Tim Guinee is remarkable as homeowner Frank Green. Laura Dern is excellent in a pivotal role. The character actor Clancy Brown proves once again that he can grab the screen, even when he’s only visible for a minute or two.
With its searing performances by Garfield and Shannon, 99 Homes is unsparingly dark and intense until a final moment of redemption. It opens on Friday.
In the German psychological drama Phoenix, Nina Hoss plays Nelly, an Auschwitz survivor whose face has been destroyed by a Nazi gunshot; her sister has arranged for plastic surgery to reconstruct her face. When Nelly gets her new face, we accompany her on an intense quest.
Writer-director Christian Petzhold is an economical story-teller, respectful of the audience’s intelligence. Watching a border guard’s reaction to her disfigurement and hearing snippets from the sister and the plastic surgeon, we gradually piece together her back story. The doctor asks what seems like a very good question – Why would a Jewish woman successfully rooted in London return to Germany in 1938? The answer to that question involves a Woman Loving Too Much.
The sister plans to re-settle both of them in Israel, but Nelly is obsessed with finding her husband. She does find her husband, who firmly believes that Nelly is dead. But he notes that the post-surgery Nelly resembles his pre-war wife, and he has a reason to have her impersonate the real Nelly. So he has the real Nelly (who he doesn’t think IS the real Nelly) pretending to be herself. It’s kind of a reverse version of The Return of Martin Guerre.
It’s the ultimate masquerade. How would you feel while listening to your spouse describe you in detail to a stranger?
Nina Hoss is an uncommonly gifted actress. Here she acts with her face fully bandaged for the first third of the film. We ache for her Nelly’s obsessive need for her husband – and when she finally finds him, but she still doesn’t really have him.
As the husband, Ronald Zehfeld shows us the magnetism that attracts Nina, along with the brusque purposefulness that he thinks he needs to survive and flourish in the post-war Germany.
Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss collaborated on the recent film Barbara (he won the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for his work). About Barbara, I wrote
“Given that’s it difficult to imagine how anyone else could have improved Barbara, I’ll be looking for Petzold’s next movie.”
Well, here it is, and it’s gripping.
The ending of the film is both surprising and satisfying. Several people in my audience let out an audible “Wow!” at the same time.
J.K. Simmons deservedly won an Oscar for his performance in Whiplash, the drama about the line between motivation and abuse and the line between ambition and obsession. A young jazz drummer (Miles Teller of The Spectacular Nowand Rabbit Hole) attends an elite music academy (think Julliard) and comes under the attention of a drill sergeant-type of instructor (J.K. Simmons). The teacher-tormentor pushes the kid toward perfection through tough love and, ultimately, abuse. To what extent is the teacher trying to get the kid to excel? And how much of the teacher’s behavior is just sadistic bullying? And how will the kid respond? (The movie’s title reflects both a jazz song and the teacher’s instructional technique.)
J.K. Simmons is a guy whose name you may not recognize, but whose face you will. He has 143 screen credits, most memorably as the of the ironic and supportive father in Juno and Vernon Schillinger, the Aryan Brotherhood leader in the prison series Oz. This is Simmons’ movie; it’s an exceptional performance, that will probably land Simmons an Oscar nomination.
How good a movie is Whiplash? It’s a very good one – taut, and intense. The fact that it’s extremely focused on the two characters and the fundamental questions about their characters is a strength, but also limits it from being a great movie. Still, Simmons, Teller and the unrelenting tension makes Whiplash definitely worth seeing. Whiplash is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixster.
In the Mexican drama The Life After, two brothers are raised by a very unreliable single mom. When she disappears and leaves them on their own, they go on a road trip where the emotional damage she has wreaked on them is exposed. It’s well-acted and well-photographed, but grim and slow-paced. Ultimately, I’m just not convinced that this story needed to be told.
