Richard Jenkins

THE HUMANS: “Don’t wait until after dinner.”

by
Photo caption: June Squibb, Amy Schumer, Jayne Houdyshell, Steven Yuen, Beanie Feldstein and Richard Jenkins in THE HUMANS. Courtesy of A24.

A family grown apart checks in with each other in The Humans, Stephen Karam’s film version of his Tony Award-winning play. The family, living their separate lives, hasn’t gotten together for a while and it turns out that each member has experienced a significant life event.

The occasion is the first time the youngest daughter (Beanie Feldstein) has hosted a holiday dinner. She and her partner (Steven Yuen) have just moved into a decrepit apartment in NYC’s Chinatown and haven’t finished unpacking.

Her taciturn dad (Richard Jenkins,) and no-bullshit mom (Jayne Houdyshell) have brought the senile grandma (June Squibb), and her lawyer sister (Amy Schumer) shows up, too.

Deadpan humor results from the young’s couple’s blissful obliviousness to how hopelessly dilapidated the apartment is. They are embracing NYC charm but are choosing to overlook the stained and chipped tiles, exposed pipes and wiring, ancient fuse box, and the excruciatingly slow, tiny elevator adorned with male appendage graffiti. The parents and sister take it all in with polite silence.

There are also, of course, the eye-rolling moments of parent-adult child interactions and the well-known quirks of each family member. This all sounds like familiar movie fodder, but The Humans is NOT AT ALL sit-commy.

Big, life-changing things have happened to each family member, and they are about to be revealed. There’s the whispered admonition “Don’t wait until after dinner.” If you need to see a family that should be more depressing than yours, this is your movie.

Richard Jenkins in THE HUMANS. Courtesy of A24.

The Humans was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play.While off-Broadway, the script won the 2016 Obie Awards for Karam’s playwriting and Houdyshell’s performance.

The entire cast is excellent, especially Houdyshell and Jenkins.

The Humans must be the least stagey movie set completely in one apartment. The playwright Karam really uses cinema – this is not a theater performance on video. The camera stares at the apartment’s flaws, and the apartment becomes the seventh character. We hear dialogue off camera – some is atmospheric and some is important and revealing.

The Humans moves from wry to shattering as it authentically probes how we accept our failings and those of our loved ones – or not.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE VISITOR – self-isolation no longer

by

THE VISITOR
Richard Jenkins in THE VISITOR

The great character actor Richard Jenkins was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in last year’s Best Picture The Shape of Water, and we should remember that he also got an Oscar nod for his starring turn in the indie drama The Visitor. Touching on the themes of immigration to the US and the “otherness” of people from the Middle East, it’s especially topical today. Jenkins has the role of his career in The Visitor – a man who deals with loss by isolating himself. He becomes intrigued with an illegal Middle Eastern immigrant, then develops a bond and then reclaims passion into his life.

The Visitor is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pa8NhB1toFM

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE VISITOR – self-isolation no longer

by

THE VISITOR
Richard Jenkins in THE VISITOR

Seeing the great character actor Richard Jenkins again in The Hollars reminded me that everyone should see his starring turn in the indie drama The Visitor. Touching on the themes of immigration to the US and the “otherness” of people from the Middle East, it’s especially topical today.  Jenkins has the role of his career in The Visitor – a man who deals with loss by isolating himself. He becomes intrigued with an illegal Middle Eastern immigrant, then develops a bond and then reclaims passion into his life.

The Visitor is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play ad Xbox Video.

THE HOLLARS: the great Margo Martindale in an unabashed crowd pleaser

by

John Krasinski and Margo Martindale in THE HOLLARS
John Krasinski and Margo Martindale in THE HOLLARS

The indie dramedy The Hollars is the year’s most sure-fire crowd pleaser.  And it’s yet another showcase for the best screen actress working today, Margo Martindale.  Martindale plays the glue that tenuously holds together an otherwise dysfunctional family.  Her husband and two adult sons are each facing both career and personal struggles, and when the mother is diagnosed with a brain tumor, each member of the family starts to crumble.

As the characters face commitment anxiety, job struggles, outright failure and even death, there are lots of laughs.  I saw The Hollars in a theater and there were many LOLs from the audience, some a little delayed as the audience processed, “did he really say that?”.  For example, an oncologist greets the worried family members with a deadpan “Sorry to be late.  I was golfing.”

The actor John Krasinky directs.  He and screenwriter Jim Strouse are economical story-tellers.  The first few vignettes tells us what we need to know about the family members and their relationships to each other.

The Hollars is really about the journeys of the father and the two sons, with the mom serving as the men’s mirror, sounding board and coach.  But Margo Martindale is so good as the woman who is very wise but doesn’t have the need to let everyone know.  Every second that she’s on the screen, we feel lucky to be watching her.  The toughest job in cinema must film editor on a Martindale movie; it’s gotta be painful to leave any Martindale moments off the screen.

We first noticed Martindale in 2004 as Hilary Swank’s venal mother in Million Dollar Baby.  In Justified, she made the character of the ruthless and crafty backwoods crime matriarch Mags Bennett unforgettable.  Her heartbreaking performance in Paris je t’aime was similarly indelible.  Now age 65, she’s still at her peak.

Martindale is paired with the great character actor Richard Jenkins, who has at least two Oscar-worthy scenes as her befuddled, denial-embracing husband.  As one of the sons, Krasinksy is as appealing as usual.  Anna Kendrick is perfectly cast as the pregnant girlfriend – being nine months pregnant is a vulnerable position from which to watch your partner figure out his life.  In small parts, we are blessed with Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s piercing vibe and Mary Kay Place’s non-nonsense charm.  Josh Groban, of all people, is effective carrying off the role of the ever-smiling youth pastor who is dating one of the sons’ ex.

With all its humor, The Hollars is a weeper. Its ending is sentimental, but not maudlin or phony. I usually resist movie sentimentality, but a movie can EARN a sentimental ending with authenticity throughout, a stellar example being The Best Years of Our Lives. That’s the case here.

The Hollars is a wonderful movie to see with a companion. It looks like its theatrical run is going to fade out. But I predict that the word of mouth is going make it into a video hit once it appears on PPV and the streaming/DVD rental services. A gem.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE VISITOR

by

THE VISITOR
THE VISITOR

The great character actor Richard Jenkins has the role of his career in The Visitor – a man who deals with loss by isolating himself.  He becomes intrigued with an illegal Middle Eastern immigrant, then develops a bond and then reclaims passion into his life.

The Visitor is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play ad Xbox Video.

Killing Them Softly: almost as good as a Sopranos rerun

by

In Killing Them Softly, a low-level gangster gets two hapless losers to hold up a poker game that is protected by the mob.  The mob, of course, brings in an enforcer to put things right.   Perhaps Killing Them Softly would have been a great gangster movie in the 60s, before Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and David Chase raised the bar.  It was a big hit at Cannes, but that crowd may not be used to watching The Sopranos.

We know what is going to happen in the plot.  Fortunately, we have some excellent actors, led by Brad Pitt in a character role as the ruthless and nihilistic mob enforcer.  Pitt’s enforcer brings in a trusted colleague, a hit man from New York (James Gandolfini) to help him out – but the hit man is emotionally damaged from a betrayed romance and can only focus on drinking and whoring.  Richard Jenkins plays an unusually squeamish mid-level manager in the mob.  Scoot McNairy (one of the “house guests” in Argo) and Ben Mendelsohn (the most psychopathic criminal in Animal Kingdom) are especially good as the doomed hold-up men.

As good as the cast is, there’s just not much here.  An attempt to intertwine a thread about the 2008 economic collapse and Presidential election is a misguided device that only serves as a distraction.

Liberal Arts: promising, but hollow

by

I liked so much about Liberal Arts that I wondered why I felt so unsatisfied leaving the theater. I finally realized that the central character just didn’t work for me, making an otherwise good movie into a hollow one.

Liberal Arts is written and directed by TV sitcom star Josh Radnor, who also plays the lead character, Jesse, a college admissions officer in NYC.  Jesse is now 35 and adrift.  He returns to his old college to speak at the retirement of his favorite professor, falls back in love with college life and meets a spirited 19-year-old coed.  As Jesse examines where he is in his life, he is book ended by his world weary professors and by the naive young students that he meets.

That’s a promising premise and the very well written supporting characters provide some funny and thoughtful moments.  Richard Jenkins is brilliant as a man grappling with the end of his career, and Alison Janney has some delicious moments as a very tough broad whose expertise is Romantic literature.  Elizabeth Olsen is very good as the coed, and Zac Efron is downright hilarious as a college age stoner dude.

But it comes down to a main character that has it pretty good, but resists acting like a grownup.  He doesn’t get credit from me for figuring it out at least thirteen years too late.  The movie wants to give him credit for that, and for a “noble” decision that is implausible.

The Wife liked it, though.