Laura Linney

WILDCAT: often admirable, rarely fun

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Photo caption: Maya Hawke in WILDCAT. Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Wildcat braids together the sad life of writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) with several of her iconoclastic stories. Director Ethan Hawke starts Wildcat with a faux trailer for a lurid movie based on O’Connor’s short story The Comforts of Home.   Then he depicts O’Connor thinking up one of her stories and then suddenly shifts from O’Connor’s real life by bringing an O’Connor story to life. Maya Hawke and Laura Linney, who also plays Flannery’s mother Regina, play various fictional characters in the O’Connor stories.

O’Connor herself described writing, not as an escape, but as a “plunge into reality”, a reality many would prefer not to face.

Flannery was trapped in a cultural wasteland where no one understood her work (Milledgeville, Georgia), trapped in the body of an invalid (lupus) and trapped in profound loneliness. Flannery took herself and everything so seriously and made no concession to the social niceties.  At a cocktail party, Flannery could be an epic Debbie Downer. Flannery’s mother (Laura Linney) – so often wrongheaded – is absolutely correct when she suggests, “you might want to consider being a little more friendly “.

Wildcat is a showcase for Maya Hawke’s chameleonic performance as Flannery and as several of O’Connor’s fictional characters. Laura Linney is brilliant, too, both as Flannery’s mother and as several characters in O’Connor short stories (and is unrecognizable in the first vignette).

Poor Liam Neeson – he’s a fine actor who has become so iconic a movie star that, when he appears here as an Irish priest, you can’t help crying, “Hey – that’s Liam Neeson”.

Here’s my bottom line on Wildcat.  Ethan Hawke’s direction is imaginative.  Maya Hawke’s and Laura Linney’s acting are superb.  The core story is one of an unhappy and often unpleasant person.  Wanna sign up for this?

We revel in the art produced by the anguished artist, but would not enjoy being in the company of said artist and her anguish.  The best parts of Wildcat are the staging of O’Connor stories.  The least enjoyable are the scenes with O’Connor herself.

NOCTURNAL ANIMALS: melodrama, squirming and then, finally, Michael Shannon

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Michael Shannon, the only reason to see NOCTURNAL ANIMALS
Michael Shannon, the only reason to see NOCTURNAL ANIMALS

In the would-be-thriller-but-really-squirmer Nocturnal Animals, Amy Adams plays a young woman who becomes infatuated with the romance of being with a starving artist, the sensitive Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). After the romance wears off, she dumps him for a higher testosterone model, the striving businessman Hutton (Armie Hammer). Twenty years later, she has become a successful art dealer with all the trappings of an affluent life, buy plunges into a midlife crisis. At this moment, Edward finally gets a novel published and sends her an advance copy. Shocked to see that it is dedicated to her, she starts reading it and becomes engrosses, which is exactly what Edward has intended.

Nocturnal Animals is the braiding of three plot threads: the story of the doomed romance between the young Susan and Edward, Susan’s current melodrama with Hutton and a reenactment of the plot of Edward’s novel. The novel’s story takes up most of the screen time. It’s a garden variety, but particularly grim, revenge story, with a man (also played by Gyllenhaal) whose family is high jacked in desolate West Texas by a crew of sadistic lowlifes with the very worst intentions. If you’ve ever seen a crime movie, you know what is going to happen to the guy’s wife and daughter. After an excruciatingly long menace-and-dread segment, Gyllenhaal escapes and stumbles into the potential for revenge, guided by the local detective (Michael Shannon).

If you’ve survived the squirming caused by the unremittingly and gratuitously uncomfortable kidnapping sequence, you’re in for a treat with Michael Shannon’s performance, which is really the only reason to see Nocturnal Animals. Shannon doesn’t make any unnecessary movements, which focuses us his piercing and unblinking eyes, which make clear that he is a particularly dangerous man. And, we learn, even more dangerous because he is a man without anything to lose.

Actually, though, Laura Linney is also superb as Susan’s mom, unrecognizable underneath a formidable Dina Merill bouffant. Linney actually gets the one sure thing LOL laugh line in the movie. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is also devastatingly despicable as the most sadistic and loathsome of the thugs. Adams, Gyllenhaal and Hammer are all fine, too.

This is the second movie from director Tom Ford, the fashion designer; it’s nothing at all like the his A Single Man, with its exploration of loneliness, grief and identity repression. Ford’s background in fashion probably informs some jokiness in Susan’s world of overly precious art dealers and silly avant garde “art”. But other than that, there really isn’t any humor to leaven the unpleasantness of the Gyllenhaal story.

The reason that Susan’s dumping of Edward is supposed to be so scarring is overblown, and I’m finding it has become an all too easy screenwriting device. (We’ve come a long way since Alfie in 1966.)

I should note that I think that I do GET this movie, with its layers of revenge and its comments on art. I just don’t think that the payoff is there. Nocturnal Animals will make for a solid $3.99 video rental so you can fast forward until you see Michael Shannon on the screen.

Amy Adams in NOCTURNAL ANIMALS
Amy Adams in NOCTURNAL ANIMALS

DVD of the Week: John Adams

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John Adams:  The most overlooked giant of our Founding Fathers is the subject of this brilliant mini-series.  Adams was a major player in forming the political consensus to seek independence from England, an important (if unevenly successful) diplomat during the war, a key political ally of George Washington’s and our nation’s first Vice-President and second President.  Unique among the Founding Fathers, his day to day activities were frankly chronicled in hundreds of letters to and from his wife of fifty-four years, Abigail.  These surviving letters comprise one of the most essential first-hand accounts of the founding of America, and, of course, also reveal much about the talented but prickly Adams and the Adams’ relationship.

To seal the quality of this miniseries, the Adams are played by the generally brilliant Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney.  Giamatti captures the short-tempered, brilliant political strategist who understands the limits of his own personal popularity.  Linney is perfect as the perceptive Abigail, who often helps John by pointing out that he needs to get out of his own way.

The series also, seemingly alone amid contemporary filmmaking, captures the era.  It was a time when travel and communication took weeks on horseback or months by sailing ship and when smallpox inoculation was by blade instead of by needle.  Day-to-day life is portrayed without romanticism or iconography.  In particular, no one who watches the tar-and-feathering scene will again view this practice as quaintly comical.