Don’t Look Up (2021) [R] ****

An edited film review by Vince Mancini for UPROXX on Dec. 18, 2021.

Don’t Look Up, from Vice / The Big Short director Adam McKay, is a well-intended satire, about how American politicians and tech titans wouldn’t be able to stop being venal and self-interested long enough to save themselves, even if there was a comet heading straight for Earth. Think Armageddon in the style of Veep.

While McKay, who began his career as a director of goofy comedies, like The Other Guys and Stepbrothers, still knows how to structure a joke, his sensibility often feels too dated for a cutting satire of modern media. Don’t Look Up is a strong idea (with story credit to McKay and journalist David Sirota), and lots of the individual jokes work, but at times it gets so caught up trying to make fun of so many different things that it seems to lack an internal logic. Satire in and of itself isn’t quite a story.

Jennifer Lawrence plays Kate Dibiasky, a doctoral student with severe art bangs who discovers a massive comet (a planet killer, as it’s described later) late one night while singing along to Wu-Tang during her shift manning the Subaru telescope. Dibiasky, who feels very much like a middle-aged white man’s idea of cool hipster, eventually alerts her Michigan State Univ. doctoral thesis advisor, Dr. Randall Mindy, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a dowdy beard and enjoyably dorky Midwestern accent. Together they make the rounds, trying first to inform the government, then the public, all in an attempt to get someone to do something about it.

Their tour takes them first to Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, head of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which a title card informs us is a real office that actually exists. Rob Morgan plays Oglethorpe, an enjoyably idiosyncratic character who probably deserved more screen time than he gets.

McKay pulled this same sort of fourth-wall-breaking shtick in Vice and The Big Short, and I do enjoy it, within reason. It makes sense to be clear that the Planetary Defense Coordination Office is a real thing, because it sounds like something this kind of movie would invent (the Subaru Telescope is apparently real too, maybe that could’ve used a title card). The bigger issue in Don’t Look Up is that there’s a kind of dissonance between its extremely on-the-nose elements (aping the font and color schemes of MAGA hats and posters) and its unnecessarily fictionalized ones. In a scene in which a social media consultant discusses the engagement Mindy and Dibiasky received during a morning show segment, real social media platforms are all bowdlerized as VroomVroom, Friendlink, Rabble, and Diddly, in a way that feels almost deferentially courtly. Why not just say Facebook and Twitter? McKay doesn’t seem like a guy afraid of offending Mark Zuckerberg.

And again, those site names don’t really land as jokes, partly because they feel like parodies of sites from five or 10 years ago, not ones five or 10 years from now. For a director who clearly loves shooting montages of memes and tweets, McKay doesn’t seem to have that solid a grasp of what makes a great tweet or meme (in fairness he does do clickbait headline parody quite well).

By contrast, the hosts of the morning show on which Dr. Mindy and Dibiasky appear are played enjoyably, by Tyler Perry, who for all his corniness as a writer/director is still a pretty damned solid comedic actor, and Cate Blanchett, in a set of unnaturally white veneers and over-the-top TV makeup that somehow still make her look hot. She plays a sort of fake-dumb-blonde, cosmopolitan rich girl getting her bag on TV, as a satire of Laura Ingraham, Greta Van Susteren, Megyn Kelly, Stacey Dash, Martha MacCallum or Kayleigh McEnany.

Meryl Streep is similarly great as President Orlean (a callback to her playing Susan Orlean in Adaptation?), a sort of careerist hybrid Trump/Kamala more worried about the midterm elections than she is about the impending apocalypse. Her chief of staff is her dopey son, played wonderfully by Jonah Hill in what feels like a combination of his Inside SoCal character from SNL (Dad, it’s just a kicker) and his own clean and rad and powerful emails.

Just when it seems like Dibiasky and Dr. Mindy have finally gotten the president to act, she gets sidetracked by Peter Isherwell, a robotic tech tycoon played by Mark Rylance in another solid turn, as a character who’s clearly a riff on Jeff Bezos, with shades of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. The whole story turns on this shift, from the president’s decision to go with Isherwell’s pie-in-the-sky plan to not just deflect the comet but get rich from it, rather than follow the recommendations of scientists. It’s the defining shift of the movie, and also kind of where it falls apart.

President Orlean becomes not just a careerist, but a pseudo-climate denier, with her new slogan, Don’t Look Up urging supporters to ignore the reality of the killer comet. It’s easy to see what point McKay is trying to say here, about leaders putting profits ahead of saving the planet and treating a global crisis as just another geopolitical game, but plot-wise it doesn’t quite track. Ariana Grande, playing a fictionalized version of herself, has a come-to-Jesus moment and tries to help get the public to care, releasing a song about how she wishes she’d listened to the scientists. Aside from her character being vaguely sketched, science is real feels like the kind of yard sign liberalism McKay is normally above. More broadly, individual characters’ motivations and story arcs get short shrift in favor of trying to lampoon as many things as possible.

The classic Hollywood idea was that a global crisis would force an end to our petty squabbling, as seen in movies like Armageddon and Independence Day. This was probably based on the general cultural takeaway from World War II, that when the chips were down, we’d eventually come together and kill the fascists. (the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: ‘We will not go quietly into the night!')

Now that we’ve seen plenty of crises that seem to have the opposite effect, factionalizing the populace, polarizing our experience of objective reality and seemingly driving everyone insane, it has manifested in our fiction. Children of Men and The Leftovers saw its characters slide into magical thinking, hostility, and cultism in response to societal upheaval, borne out in real life with things like QAnon and people getting really into crystals.

Don’t Look Up clearly wants to be the comedic, more overtly satirical The Leftovers, but its satire is too backward looking. And whereas The Leftovers was always character-first, Don’t Look Up feels more like a series of sketches. Lots of those sketches are reasonably funny, but they don’t always maintain a consistent logic. [Mancini’s rating: 2.5 stars out of 4]

Blogger's comment: While Meryl Streep did a reasonably good job as President Orlean, I would have cast Alec Baldwin doing his famous blonde comb-over and gotten Brooklyn Decker or Alice Eve to play his well-endowed blonde daughter. But that's just me.

Labels: comedy, drama, Netflix, satire, sci-fi, tragedy
IMDb 73/100
MetaScore (critics=50, viewers=57)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=62, viewers=80)
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Les choses de la vie (The Things of Life, 1970) [PG] ****

NOTE: While there are no actual spoilers in this review, certain elements of the plot of Les choses de la vie have to be discussed in order to make sense of the film, and that discussion borders on spoilers.

On one level, Les choses de la vie is a fairly standard story of that staple of French film, and life in general, the ménage à trois, although the film is rather deceptive about this particular element. The film opens with allusions to a catastrophic event, before finding a couple, Pierre Berard (Michel Piccoli) and Hélène Haltig (Romy Schneider), in bed. As the film progresses, it's implied that they are married, and perhaps married for quite a while, although there is definitely still passion in their relationship. Only later is it revealed that Hélène is not Pierre's wife, but rather his mistress, although given the state of Pierre's marriage to Catherine (Lea Massari), Hélène may be Pierre's more constant companion.

On the structural level, Les choses de la vie is an intriguing viewing experience, since it uses the element of a devastating car crash to avoid using linear time. There are brief seconds inserted into the film that depict Pierre driving at high speed through the French countryside on the way to a meeting in Rennes, 350km southwest of Paris, and we get the distinct impression that his journey will not end well. Director Claude Sautet uses these interruptions in the narrative to offer several vignettes that show us the dysfunction in the two relationships, leaving us with the question of whether Pierre will go back to Catherine, or divorce her and marry Hélène. In fact, this question is uppermost in Pierre's mind as he journeys toward Rennes and, at one point, he even pens a letter to Hélène, the contents of which we cannot know, except indirectly by listening to Pierre. The ultimate outcome of the horrifying auto accident is left until the film's closing moments, although the sort segments shown earlier in the film leave us with little doubt.

While this film is often cited as being Sautet's first film to really connect with both audiences and critics, it's just one of three films often cited as a comeback for Romy Schneider, along with La piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1969) and Cesar et Rosalie (1972) in a tribute to her successful career. Schneider, Piccoli and Massari all give perfectly fine, natural, believable performances. Some critics have identified elements of the film that are superfluous, such as the family flashbacks on the Île de Ré, or the couple with the overheated vehicle that Pierre picks up. However I found them necessary to the film. The idyllic scenes of the Berard family, Pierre, Catherine and their two children, sailing in the Atlantic offshore of the Île de Ré, show that Pierre could have had a perfectly serene, uncomplicated life had he not been a driven architect-engineer, continually dissatisfied with his situation. And the couple with the overheated car are later shown in a taxi, driving by the scene of the wreck and being silently grateful that they were not in the car.

Personally, it’s hard for me to watch films that I know are going to end in tragedy, as Les choses de la vie does. Also, there are subtleties of language in a film like this about relationships that probably do not translate well, so reading the subtitles I am sure I missed something important. The film itself has not aged especially well. Most of the characters smoke cigarettes, and Pierre is a chain smoker. Also, Michel Piccoli (1925-2020) was 44 and Romy Schneider (1938-1982) was 31 when the film was shot in the summer of 1969, so the two are thirteen years apart, although Piccoli looks like he is at least twenty years older than Schneider. This caused me to wonder what she could possibly see in him, which made it hard for me to believe in them as a romantic couple.

Music in films is important to me, and one of the most beautiful things about this film is the haunting melody La Chanson d'Hélène, music by Philippe Sarde, lyrics by Jean-Loup Dabadie and sung by Romy Schneider. Here is the link to the song on YouTube, as part of the soundtrack. LINK

And, finally, Les choses de la vie was remade in 1994 as Intersection, with Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and Lolita Davidovich. The general consensus is that it is not as good as the original. IMDb link

Labels: drama, French-language, romance, Romy Schneider, tragedy
IMDb 76/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=TBD, viewers=86)
Blu-ray
Blu-ray review

Cesar & Rosalie (César et Rosalie) (1972) [R] ****

 An edited film review by Roger Ebert, September 27, 1973.

Someone once said that Yves Montand seemed born to play doomed European leftwing intellectuals. And so he has, most memorably in Z and La Guerre est Finie, and against the type in State of Siege. But nothing in those films could possibly prepare us for the loud, gentle, awkward, jealous, childlike, impulsive Montand of Claude Sautet’s Cesar & Rosalie.

The movie tells a love story of sorts, or a love-hate story, and even if it does lose its way toward the end it presents not one but two unusually good performances: by Montand, as Cesar, a wealthy, scrap-metal dealer with international connections, and by Romy Schneider as Rosalie, the woman who loves him sometimes and lives with him sometimes, but not always at the same sometimes.

It’s the sort of thing the French, with their appreciation for the awesome complexities of a simple thing like love, do especially well. American movies tend to treat love as a vast magic spell; if you’re in love nothing else matters and you’re surrounded by your own special miracle, etc. And you’re also young, of course. Movies about the loves of older people - Montand’s age, for example - tend to be comedies revolving about absurd domestic situations.

Not here. Sautet gives us a complicated situation and contrives to elevate it to the level of the completely impossible. Rosalie is presented as a character who was in love with David (Sami Frey), but married Antoine when David disappeared without explanation. As the movie opens she has divorced Antoine and is with Cesar, but not living with him. David, the first, younger lover returns and Cesar immediately becomes insanely jealous. He uses all the tricks he can muster to scare his rival off, but succeeds only in driving Rosalie into David’s arms.

But then, well, the passion of jealousy can be attractive at times, and Cesar is an attractive man, all bluff and growl and wounded masculinity. So Rosalie wavers, and then Cesar plays a trump card by buying the childhood vacation home she loved so much. So then she goes back with Cesar, but then she’s lonely and depressed. It’s a classic reversal on a standard romantic theme: Rosalie can’t love the man she’s with, and can’t be with the man she loves. In desperation, Cesar appeals to David to move in with them in the summer home. And after a fashion, he agrees. The two men are caught in a cruel trap. They both love Rosalie, and she loves both of them, but the situation is so psychologically contorted that there’s no happiness anywhere. And it’s even more labyrinthine because, wouldn’t you know, the two men begin to like each other.

All of this sounds more like musical chairs than a Gaelic comedy, but Sautet pulls off a nice erotic juggling act that almost works, all except for the very ending of the film, which seems not only unlikely but perverse. We don’t much care, though, because we’ve had a good time and enjoyed, as we enjoy few things, the way Romy Schneider can make a half-shy smile into the suggestion of unimaginable carnal possibilities.

ENDING SCENE SPOILER: Rosalie and her daughter Catherine left the summer home while David and Cesar were out on a boat fishing. She moved to Grenoble, and Cesar and David stopped looking for her and began living together. Then, after some time, Rosalie drove up to their home in a taxi, got out and the two men saw her out of a window. End of film. [Ebert’s rating: 3 stars out of 4]

Labels: comedy, drama, French-language,romance, Romy Schneider
IMDb 74/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=71, viewers=82)
Blu-ray
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Roger Ebert’s review

 

 

La piscine (The swimming pool) (1969) [R] ****

SYNOPSIS (INCLUDES SPOILERS):

It’s the heat of summer in the south of France. In the foothills overlooking the resort town of Saint-Tropez and the blue Mediterranean sits a villa occupied by Marianne (Romy Schneider) and her current lover Jean-Paul Leroy (Alain Delon), house-sitting for some friends who have gone to India.

The centerpiece of the property, which is surrounded by vineyards, is a swimming pool (la piscine in French) which is where most of the action takes place. Jean-Paul and Marianne have known each other for over two years. They are both writers but Marianne is the more successful; after Jean-Paul’s latest failed effort he has given up serious writing and gone into advertising.

They are lying beside the pool, engaged in foreplay, when they hear the phone ring and their housekeeper says it’s for Marianne. It turns out to be Harry Lannier (Maurice Ronet), an old friend, and on impulse, Marianne invites Harry to come and stay with them for a few days.

Harry is a highly successful music producer who drives a brand new and very expensive 1968 Maserati Ghibli. He’s been a friend of Jean-Paul’s since the latter was a 17-year-old, and he was Marianne’s lover four years earlier. If we use the actors’ actual ages as a guide to their characters’ ages, Ronet (b. 1927), Delon (b. 1935), Schneider (b. 1938), at the time of filming in the summer of 1968 Harry was 41, Jean-Paul was 32 and Marianne was 30. Harry arrives with his 18-year-old daughter Pénélope (Jane Birkin, b. 1946) in tow, a daughter that neither Jean-Paul nor Marianne had known about.

As Pénélope tells Jean-Paul, she had never met Harry; her mother had said he was dead, and now that she’s all grown up he shows up and wants to be a part of her life, know everything about her and take her everywhere. He admits to fawning over her and getting a thrill when people think she is his girlfriend. Clearly his relationship with her borders on the incestuous. She also tells Jean-Paul that Harry doesn’t really like him and thinks he has no talent. She observes that Harry really doesn’t like anyone, but wants everyone to adore him.

As the drama unfolds, Harry clearly wants to rekindle his relationship with Marianne, and Jean-Paul is determined to seduce Pénélope while protecting his relationship with Marianne.

Harry continually taunts Jean-Paul, reminding him that he was Marianne’s lover, that he is more successful in business, and that he has a desirable young daughter. Meanwhile, Marianne watches what is happening, and as Jean-Paul’s interest in Pénélope becomes more obvious, Marianne retaliates by becoming more playful and affectionate with Harry.

Finally, one afternoon, Marianne tells them she needs to go shopping in Saint-Tropez and asks Harry to take her in his Maserati. After they leave, Jean-Paul invites Pénélope to go swimming with him at a nearby beach on the French Riviera. By the time Jean-Paul and Pénélope return, it is dark, Pénélope’s hair is wet and matted, she is holding her bikini and is wearing Jean-Paul’s jacket. It is obvious they have had sex. The dinner, which Marianne and Harry had prepared, is tense. At the end of the meal Harry tells Marianne that he and Pénélope will be leaving in the morning, that if he left her with Jean-Paul and Marianne, her mother, with whom Pénélope lives in Lausanne, would kill him.

Harry then goes out, to see his friend Fred in Saint-Tropez before he leaves. After he leaves, Jean-Paul tells Marianne he also will be leaving in the next day or two. Marianne assumes it is to go to Lausanne to see Pénélope.

Harry comes back drunk and runs his Maserati into the partially-open villa gate. Then he begins an argument with Jean-Paul beside the pool. He tells him that it is over between Jean-Paul and Pénélope and that he’s taking her away in the morning. Harry taunts Jean-Paul about his relationship with Marianne, calls Jean-Paul a spoiled brat who always had to be handled delicately, with kid gloves.

Jean-Paul accuses Harry of being jealous. Harry swings at him, misses and falls into the pool. He reaches out to Jean-Paul for help and Jean-Paul half pulls him out, then lets him fall back into the pool. Harry, cold and drunk with a stomach cramp, cannot get out on his own and Jean-Paul pushes him back in every time he tries to get out. Then Jean-Paul takes his hand, pushes his head under water and drowns him. Then he undresses Harry, leaving him in just his undershorts, as though he stripped on purpose to go for a swim, hides his shirt and pants, rolls Harry back into the pool, goes to his room for a dry shirt and pants and leaves them folded on a table beside the pool.

The police inspector Leveque from Marseilles suspects Harry’s death wasn’t an accident, because Harry had worn his expensive non-waterproof watch in the pool and because Harry’s folded up clothes had nothing in the pockets and no sweat in the fabric, as though they had not been worn. The questions he asks make Marianne suspect it wasn’t an accident and that Jean-Paul had drowned him. He claims that if someone had pushed Harry into the pool, drowned him, then changed his clothes, the result would be the same. By the time the inspector leaves after his second visit, Marianne is sure Jean-Paul drowned Harry.

When Jean-Paul tells Marianne that he is driving Pénélope back to Lausanne, Marianne realizes that Pénélope has replaced her and that her love affair with Jean-Paul is over. She begins to see Jean-Paul in a new light, as the murderer of her former lover and the seducer of his daughter. And then Jean-Paul, believing Marianne has found Harry’s clothes in the woodpile, tells her the story of what happened, and Marianne makes the decision to protect Jean-Paul, to be complicit in Harry’s death, and to send Pénélope home.

And at the Nice airport, Pénélope tells Marianne she doesn’t believe anything that Jean-Paul said, and when she asks Marianne how her father died, Marianne says he drowned, and it was an accident.

The inspector knows what really happened, that Marianne is protecting Jean-Paul, and that if she ever has any regrets or changes her mind, she should come to him and he will reopen the case. In the final scene Marianne plans to leave Jean-Paul, but inexplicably, at the last minute she changes her mind and decides to stay with him.

La piscine, co-written and directed by Jacques Deray, is a masterpiece of flirtation, jealousy, lust and seduction, male competition and a sophisticated amoral view of love in 1960s France. It was the fourth most popular film in France in 1969, partially because former real-life lovers Delon and Schneider were reuniting, bringing a palpable erotic chemistry to their performances, and partially because Birkin’s lover, Serge Gainsbourg, had publicly warned Delon and Ronet in the tabloids to stay away from her.

Although Pénélope has the smallest role, she is the key to this story. While Harry and Jean-Paul are ostensibly friends, the basis of their relationship is hatred, and it is Pénélope who brings that hatred to the surface. In fact, La piscine can be viewed as a take on the Greek Oedipus myth: Jean-Paul (the son) kills Harry (the father) so he can seduce Harry’s daughter.

Alain Delon’s image was solidified by La piscine; Schneider’s was liberated. Though she had been working steadily, she had not yet distanced herself from the wholesome Sissi Trilogy that had made her internationally famous as a child actress in the 1950s. But her performance as Marianne not only announced her arrival as a performer of sensuality and maturity, but led to a career-revitalizing, award-winning, five-film partnership with director Claude Sautet, beginning with 1970’s The Things of Life.

THE CRITERION 2021 BLU-RAY RELEASE:

Taking advantage of its four lead actors' multilingual abilities, La piscine was shot simultaneously in French and English near Saint-Tropez, France, from August to October 1968. The Criterion blu-ray disc offers both the French version and a slightly shorter English-language version (The Swimming Pool: “First Love Never Dies), which had been released outside of France in 1969. For it, director Jacques Deray made his edits based on performances, rather than doing a shot-by-shot re-creation of the French version.

The English-language version contains a brief 20-second alternate ending showing the police inspector and uniformed officers returning to the villa and getting out of their police vehicle. The assumption is that they are there to arrest Jean-Paul, or perhaps both Jean-Paul and Marianne. Deray and his producers added the brief final shot to La piscine upon its release in Spain in 1969, to appease Franco-era censors upset by its morally ambiguous original ending, and the same shot concludes the English-language version of the film.

The blu-ray disc also contains Fifty Years Later, a 2019 half-hour documentary made by Agnès Vincent-Deray, widow of director Jacques Deray, on the occasion of the film's fiftieth anniversary. It features interviews with actors Alain Delon and Jane Birkin as well as screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and Jean-Emmanuel Conil, who wrote the novel on which the screenplay was based.

It also contains a 20-minute interview with scholar Nick Rees-Roberts on the film’s cinematic and aesthetic legacy conducted by the Criterion in which he traces the influence of La piscine on the worlds of film and fashion in the half century since its release.

Finally, there is archival production and promotional footage, and trailers in French and English, and the package has a liner notes booklet with an essay by film critic Jessica Kiang.

Labels: crime, drama, French-language, romance, Romy Schneider, tragedy
IMDb 71/100
MetaScore (critics=tbd, viewers=tbd)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=74, viewers=78)
Blu-ray
Amazon
Jessica Kiang essay
Wikipedia
1968 Maserati Ghibli

 

Shadows in the Sun [The Shadow Dancer] (2005) [NR] ***/****

A film review by Richard Strachan for futuremovies.co.uk on Jan. 1, 2005.

In this genial, if clichéd, romantic drama, Harvey Keitel plays celebrated novelist Weldon Parish, who hasn’t written a line in twenty years since the death of his beloved wife and is content instead to live as a recluse in a rustic Italian village. Convinced that signing Parish would be to his company’s great financial success, London publisher Andrew Benton (John Rhys-Davies) dispatches callow junior editor Jeremy Taylor (Joshua Jackson) to convince the writer to take up his pen once more. Smug, sophisticated, yet harboring a secret desire to write himself, Jeremy is soon brought up short by the mercurial Parish and by the relaxed pace of life in rural Italy, and begins to question the direction of his own career when he falls in love with Parish’s daughter, Isabella (Claire Forlani). Little that follows is a great surprise – Jeremy gains the courage to explore his own talent, and in doing so helps Parish deal with his grief and start hitting the keys on his typewriter again. He even gets the girl at the end.

Writer/director Brad Mirman employs a number of stock characters in his script, from the priest who’s fond of a drink or two (played by Giancarlo Giannini), to Weldon Parish himself. Keitel’s tremendous leonine face is put to good use expressing the conflicted, abrasive and boisterous writer, but the character falls into that usual stereotypical depiction of a creative artist – half-crazed and half-inspired, and prone to weeping over his typewriter when forced to confront his inability to write. Most creative artists achieve their success through hard work, but a film about someone sitting in a room on their own, typing, would no doubt be a lot less interesting. We’re also never shown exactly what it is, or was, that made Weldon Parish such a great writer in the first place; apart from a brief glimpse of the dust jacket from his bestseller The Shadow Dancers, we’re left in the dark as to the scope of his literary talents.

The film slips into that American mode, popular since the days of Henry James, of assuming that the European approach to life is more relaxed, more natural, more realistic, while tacitly accepting its off-hand decadence, but it’s a well-meaning portrait of sleepy rural Italy on the whole. The supporting performances from the villagers are funny and natural, and Mirman certainly makes the most of his beautiful Tuscan backdrops. Unobjectionable and quite entertaining. [Strachan’s rating: *** out of 5 stars]

Labels: comedy, drama, romance
IMDb 67/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=47, viewers=70)
Original review 

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Official Secrets (2019) [R] ****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net on Aug. 28, 2019.

Official Secrets disrobes a scandal that received scant coverage in the U.S. media when it occurred some 15 years ago. Although hampered somewhat by a fragmented and procedural structure, the film nevertheless makes a compelling argument that the voice of the citizen in a Democracy isn’t as loud as one might like and it takes a strong constitution to play the role of the whistleblower. With a cast featuring a raft of prominent U.K. actors (Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Matt Smith, Ralph Fiennes, Rhys Ifans), the film examines one 2003 incident from three perspectives: the whistleblower (Katharine Gun, played by Knightley), the newspaper reporters who printed her story (Smith’s Martin Bright, Goode’s Peter Beaumont, and Ifans’ Ed Vulliamy), and the lawyer who defended her (Fiennes’ Ben Emmerson).

The movie opens in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war with both the United States and the United Kingdom doing a fair amount of saber-rattling. Katharine Gun, working as a translator for the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters, a spy agency), is deeply disturbed by an intra-department memo requesting help in an illegal NSA operation to gather intelligence on various UN diplomats for the purposes of strong-arming their countries to support an anti-Iraq Security Council resolution. Following her conscience and recognizing it will mean violating the Official Secrets Act, Katharine copies the memo and passes it onto an anti-war friend.

Two weeks later, the memo surfaces at The Observer, where it comes into the possession of journalist Martin Bright. After consulting with two associates, Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy, Bright does everything within his powers to verify the memo’s authenticity. His published story is initially a sensation but the U.S. government is able to discredit it. That doesn’t stop authorities from conducting an investigation. When Katharine confesses to spare her co-workers from grueling interrogations, she is swiftly arrested. The government, playing hardball, keeps her in a state of uncertainty for months about whether she is going to be charged. Additionally, they threaten her Kurdish husband, Yasar (Adam Bakri), with deportation. Recognizing the desperation of her situation, she contacts respected lawyer Ben Emmerson for representation.

From a theatrical standpoint, whistleblowers make uniquely sympathetic characters, especially in cases like this when their motives appear to be entirely altruistic and/or patriotic (unlike, for example, Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, whose narcissistic qualities counterbalance their likability). Katharine is driven solely by her conscience, risking everything in the naïve hope that she can stop a war. In the end, her efforts are fruitless but she places herself and her husband at risk. Her struggle, which is initially global in scope, ultimately becomes very personal. Having learned everything that has come out in the past 15 years, the forces aligned against Katharine seem pernicious and vindictive.

Gavin Hood, who once touched the A-list when he was pegged to helm Wolverine, has returned to the smaller films that initially got him noticed. Official Secrets is his first project since 2015’s blistering, underrated Eye in the Sky. The multifaceted aspects of the story at times makes it feel disjointed and some of the artificial thriller elements (such as a car racing through traffic to get to an airport and ominous thugs shadowing Katharine) are unnecessary. The movie also bites off a little too much – by having so many characters representing different parts of the story, there’s a sense that some of those mini-narratives aren’t fully fleshed out. It could be argued that the reporters’ segments deserve their own movie.

To date, The Insider probably represents the most compelling whistleblower story to make it to the big screen and, although the subject matter is different, Official Secrets generates in the viewer the same sense of outrage. Likewise, there are echoes of Spotlight in Official Secrets (insofar as investigative journalism is concerned), but the limitations of this movie are made evident by the comparison. Although Official Secrets may take liberties with the historical record, it’s effective as both a drama and a cautionary tale and the lessons it teaches are possibly more relevant in today’s world than they were 15 years ago. [Berardinelli’s rating: *** out of 4 stars]

Labels: biography, crime, drama, spy, thriller, war
IMDb 73/100
MetaScore (critics=63, viewers=73)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=69, viewers=86)
Netflix
Berardinelli’s review

 

The Queen’s Gambit (2020) [TV-MA] ***** (updated January 25, 2023)

A film review by Allison Shoemaker for rogerebert.com on Oct. 23, 2020.

When you read the words Netflix limited drama series about addiction, obsession, trauma, and chess, the first adjective which springs to mind is probably not thrilling. But here we are, and The Queen’s Gambit, Scott Frank’s adaptation of Walter Tevis’ coming-of-age novel of the same name, absolutely demands the use of thrilling. Anchored by a magnetic lead performance and bolstered by world-class acting, marvelous visual language, a teleplay that’s never less than gripping, and an admirable willingness to embrace contradiction and ambiguity, it’s one of the year’s best series. While not without flaws, it is, in short, a triumph. And it is satisfying not just as a compelling period drama, a character study, and a feast for the eyes. It’s also, at its heart, a sports movie wrapped up in the vestments of a prestige TV series. Ask yourself this: When is the last time you fist-pumped the air over chess? Isn’t that something you deserve?

Odds are that Beth Harmon (the remarkable Anya Taylor-Joy) will earn quite a few fist-pumps as people discover Frank and co-creator Alan Scott’s excellent series. We meet Beth as an eight-year-old (Isla Johnson) when she’s left impossibly unharmed - physically, at least - by the car crash that kills her mother. Her father’s not in the picture, so Beth finds herself at the Methuen Home, a Christian school for orphans in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. While there, she develops three things: a friendship with Jolene (newcomer Moses Ingram, excellent), a passion for chess, and a physical and emotional dependence on the little green tranquilizers fed to the children until they’re outlawed by the state of Kentucky. When she finally leaves the school, she’s got those last two things packed in her suitcase alongside a bunch of chess books, a sizable ego, some unexplored trauma, and no small amount of self-loathing. But it’s the game that drives her, sending her both to the heights of the competitive chess world and, increasingly, to her hoard of pills and the oblivion offered by alcohol.

In short, Beth has a lot to handle. Luckily, Anya Taylor-Joy is more than up to the task. Playing Beth from 15 onward, Taylor-Joy gives the kind of performance that only becomes more riveting the longer you sit with it. It’s a turn of both intoxicating glamour and precious little vanity, internal without ever being closed-off, heartbreakingly vulnerable and sharply funny, often at once. Much of the story hinges on when and how Beth is alone - and sometimes she’s most alone when surrounded by people - and Taylor-Joy’s performance is particularly remarkable in these moments. Scenes of Beth alone in her home, in a stranger’s apartment, on a plane, in her bed at night - they all hum with the kind of energy that only arises when one is truly unobserved. In this case, however, she’s creating that energy in a room full of cameras and crew members. That kind of honesty and release is the stuff of acting legend, like Eleanora Duse’s blush. It’s yet another high watermark in a young career already full of them, and somehow she’s never better than when Beth is sitting silently behind a chess board.

We’ll come back to those scenes, but it would be a mistake to assume that Taylor-Joy’s only great scene partner is the camera, gazing from across the 64 squares of the board. Frank and casting director Ellen Lewis assembled an ensemble of heavy-hitters, including the great Bill Camp as Mr. Shaibel, the isolated janitor who introduces Beth to the game, Thomas Brodie-Sangster (as Benny Watts) and Harry Melling (as Harry Beltik) two young men who are first chess rivals, then lovers and eventually allies in the chess world, the wonderful (if underused) Moses Ingram, and actor / writer / director Marielle Heller, who gives a hypnotic performance as the fragile, damaged, compassionate Alma Wheatley, the woman who eventually welcomes Beth into her home. There’s not a dud in the bunch; even the actors who show up for a scene or two at most give performances that feel fully inhabited. It’s a stunner of an ensemble.

And here’s a bonus: they all look incredible. The Crown is rightly praised for its sumptuous, detailed production design and costuming, and The Queen’s Gambit will likely find itself compared to its Netflix predecessor with some frequency. But for all the strengths of The Crown, it rarely showcases the kind of imagination on display here. Costume designer Gabriele Binder, hair and makeup head Daniel Parker, and production designer Uli Hanisch (the latter of Cloud Atlas, Sense8, and Babylon Berlin) do much more than capture the look and feel of the 1960s in the United States and abroad. They use that aesthetic to illuminate Beth’s mindset. When does Beth embrace the wilder aspects of ‘60s makeup? Why, when she’s balancing precariously on the edge and her thick eyeliner serves to make her look even thinner and more fragile. That’s one example of many. It’s incredibly thoughtful and stylish. Consider it isolated breakdown chic.

The aesthetic of Beth’s inner world is also explored, though to detail what that looks like and what it means is to diminish some of the pleasure (and anxiety) it engenders. Just know that it lends Beth’s struggles a visceral energy that most stories of addiction tend to either take for granted or overplay. And for the most part, that care and thoughtfulness is found in all of the tropes present in The Queen’s Gambit (and there are plenty of tropes - this is a sports movie in disguise, after all). That said, Frank’s largely excellent teleplays do occasionally stumble, particularly when it comes to race (Jolene deserves better) and gender. The latter is a shortcoming shared with Frank’s Godless - both have their hearts in the right place, but are perhaps not as thoughtful or insightful when it comes to sex, love, and the realities of a patriarchal society than they believe themselves to be.

Frankly, it’s hard to get too worked up about those shortcomings thought, especially when the chess starts. The chess! My god, the chess. Like any good sports movie, this character-driven period drama lives and dies by its editing. Editor Michelle Tesoro should go ahead and buy a bookshelf for all the hardware she’s about to pick up for The Queen’s Gambit right now; the chess sequences are all electric, and each in its own way. One will make you hold your breath. Two will likely bring you to tears. Some are funny. Some are infuriating. Some are, somehow, very, very sexy. Each is electric, and Tesoro and Taylor-Joy make them so through skill, talent, and precision. (Some credit here is also due to chess consultants Bruce Pandolfini and Garry Kasparov. I know very little about chess, but somehow The Queen’s Gambit convinced me otherwise and dazzled me all at once.)

Every truly great sports story has not one, but two beating hearts. There’s the sport itself, a game or competition in which the viewer becomes undeniably invested. And then there’s the player or players, someone whose life is much bigger than the game, yet is nevertheless somewhat consumed by it. The Queen’s Gambit has both those hearts, and both are racing. Frank, Taylor-Joy, and company never stop telling both those stories at once, and the result is a fascinating portrait of a young woman fighting to become the person she wants to be, battling for victory and for peace. When her journey brings her to Paris, she remembers the words of a woman who loved her and spends some time wandering museums, feeding her soul with something more than chess. Yet there’s never any doubt that somewhere, in some corner of her mind, she’s got her eyes on the board. What a privilege it is to see that corner and see the world’s beauty, all at once. [Shoemaker’s rating: 3.5 stars out of 4 = 88%]

Blogger's comments and links:

The ending scene takes place in Moscow early in 1968, the morning after Beth defeated Vasily Borgov to win the Moscow Invitational Tournament. She is on the way to the airport to leave Moscow, accompanied by her CIA handler, when she asks the driver to stop because she wants to walk. She walks down the promenade where she knows elderly gentlemen gather to play chess outdoors, and of course they recognize her and clearly they love her. For a girl who never knew her own father, and who had a father figure in the orphanage janitor Willian Shaibel who taught her to play chess, this is fulfillment - to be appreciated, even worshipped in Russia, a country obsessed with the game of chess. The first gentleman to recognize her then invites her to sit down. They set up the chess board, Beth removes her gloves, and the last word of the film is her saying sygrayem, pronounced sy.GRY.em, Russian for Let's Play. LINK

The Queen's Gambit ending explained; the major moments that wrapped up the story. LINK TO CINEMABLEND WEBPAGE

If the ending to the film made you tear up, you are not alone. It made Anya Taylor-Joy cry as well. LINK TO REFINERY29 ARTICLE

Beth Harmon's final word in the film is sygrayem which literally means Let's Play in Russian. LINK TO TRANSLATION WEBSITE

Magnus Carlsen (world chess champion since 2013) breaks down Harmon v Borgov final game from The Queen's Gambit LINK

 

The Queen's Gambit guide to Lexington, Kentucky LINK

Labels: drama, Fifties, high-school, Netflix, romance, rom-drama-faves, Sixties, sport, teenager

IMDb 86/100 
MetaScore (critics=79, viewers=30) 
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=96, viewers=94) 
Netflix 
Allison Shoemaker review 

Soundtrack

 

 

Blogger's comments on the novel:

The Walter Tevis novel of the same name strongly resembles the TV series, especially in the use of dialogue and narration from the novel. However, there are some notable differences (SPOILERS AHEAD). While Beth visualizes games in her head, she does not visualize them on the ceiling of her room. Townes has a much smaller part in the novel, he is not identified as gay and he does not appear at the 1968 Russian Invitational Tournament in the last episode. Cleo, whom Beth meets in Benny's NYC apartment, is an American girl named Jenny in the novel. She is not at the 1967 Paris Remy-Vallon tournament that Beth loses to Borgov. In the novel, Beth participates in the 1968 Kentucky State Chess Championship and loses. In the miniseries she goes to the tournament, has an argument with Harry Beltik in the parking lot and does not participate in the tournament. Jolene does not contact Beth; Beth gets her phone number from Mrs. Deardorff at Methuen. Jolene is living in Louisville. She was a Phys. Ed. major at Kentucky State University and through her efforts Beth goes to a gym every day for several months, gets in shape physically and gets her drinking and Librium addiction under control.

 

Being a visual person and loving film, especially romantic drama and comedy, I have to say that I much prefer the miniseries. Now, if we were comparing a 243-page paperback novel with a 2-hour film it might not be a fair comparison, but we are comparing it with a 393-minute (6hr 33min) 7-part miniseries. If a person read at 37 pages/hr it would take just about the same time to read the novel or watch the miniseries and the miniseries gives a MUCH richer experience. I don't ever need to read the novel again and I've watched the miniseries at least four times - so far.

 

Having thought about it a little more, let me say the novel provides intellectual understanding; it supports and enriches the experience of the miniseries. The miniseries gives significance to the intellectual understanding provided by the novel. The novel especially helps us understand what is going on inside Beth's mind and body before, during and after tournaments. Also, Beth's relationships with Jolene, Alma Wheatley, Harry Beltik and Benny Watts are developed a little better in the novel. What is absent in the novel? Well, there are very few details about how Alice Harmon, Beth's mother, dies. There's no Cleo at Remy-Vallon in Paris. There's no Townes in Moscow. Also, the novel helped me understand how Beth financed her life, was able to buy out Allston Wheatley's equity for $7,000 and make the mortgage payments, from her tournament winnings. So the novel does have value.

 

There are any number of delightful little cookies in this series. For instance, after Beth is adopted in Episode 2, she accompanies Alma to Ben Snyder's department store in Lexington, to shop for clothes. On the way upstairs to the bargain department she is attracted by two mannequins displaying dresses, before being captivated by the display of chess boards. We learn that Beth likes nice clothes. And after she wins the Kentucky State Chess Championship in October, 1963, she buys the blue dress with her winnings and we see her wearing it when she and Alma go to the Cincinnati Open Tournament. But the other dress, the white and black one? She wears that dress to the U.S. Open in Las Vegas in 1966.

 

Episode 1 "Openings": The film being shown in the orphanage auditorium is The Robe (1953) starring Richard Burton and Jean Simmons.

Episode 3 "Doubled Pawns", 30:39: Beth and Alma are in their hotel room at the 1966 US Open in Las Vegas. Alma is watching a murder mystery on the TV The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). Martha (Barbara Stanwyck) is talking with Sam Masterson (Van Heflin):

Martha: What do you want?

Sam: I think I've got one. I think I've got a gimmick. A gimmick is an angle that works for you. To keep you from working too hard for yourself.

* * * * *

Being a hopeless romantic, I was naturally disappointed with the lack of romance in the series, and so I have envisioned an eighth episode which takes place first in Moscow and later in Lexington, Kentucky. Beth gets out of her State Department handler's cab on the way to the airport not only because she wants to visit the park where the elderly men are playing chess, but also because she and David Townes are falling in love and have agreed to stay in Moscow together after the tournament ends.

So he comes to the park, and after she has finished playing her chess game, which she wins of course, she and David take a cab to the airport, pick up her luggage and find a smaller, less-expensive hotel to stay in. After a few days together seeing the sights in Moscow they board a plane and return to the U.S. Beth invites David to stay with her and eventually they get married.

It turns out that David was not really gay, as he tried earlier to explain to her. He was just confused. Is he bisexual? Who knows?

A Good Year (2006) [PG-13] ****

 

Young Max Skinner (Freddie Highmore) was only a boy when he spent summers with his uncle Henry (Albert Finney). Uncle Henry owned La Siroque, an estate with a chateau, vineyard, tennis court and swimming pool, where Max learned about winemaking, tennis and chess. However, after Max went to university in England, the years went by and he stopped visiting his uncle and La Siroque.

Now Max (Russell Crowe) is a ruthless bond trader in London, walking a fine line between legal and illegal trades, and growing quite wealthy in the process. One day he receives a letter from an attorney in Provence. Uncle Henry has died, and with no will, Max seems to be in line to inherit the estate. But will he maintain the estate and keep vigneron Francis Duflot (Didier Bourdon) and his wife Ludivine (Isabelle Candelier) on to manage the vineyards and produce the wine, or will he sell, as his realtor friend Charlie (Tom Hollander) expects? And when Christie Roberts (Abbie Cornish) arrives from America and claims to be Henry's long-lost illegitimate daughter, is she for real, or simply an enterprising con artist? And, finally, when Max meets and falls in love with bistro owner Fanny Chenal (Marion Cotillard), will he, at last, come to appreciate the legacy his beloved Uncle Henry has left him?

This is a thoughtful, character-driven romantic comedy-drama based on a novel by Peter Mayle, an inventive screenplay by Marc Klein, masterful direction by Ridley Scott, terrific performances from the entire cast, especially Highmore, Finney, Crowe, Bourdon and Cotillard, gorgeous cinematography and a fine musical score. A Good Year is the film that A Walk in the Clouds had the potential to be, so if you enjoyed that earlier film, expect to be thrilled by this one. 

Blogger's note: While critics were generally luke-warm toward A Good Year, my favorite professional film critic, James Berardinelli, embraced it, awarding it *** out of 4 stars. Personally, I award the film **** out of 5 stars.

MILD SPOILER: Toward the end of the film there's a scene with Max Skinner and his boss Sir Nigel (Kenneth Cranham). Sir Nigel offers Max a partnership in the firm or a very lucrative buyout as severance. The only way the buyout makes sense is if it includes a non-compete clause, which means Max could never work as a bond trader again, definitely not in the U.K. and probably not on the European continent either.

"I enjoy making wine because this sublime nectar is quite simply incapable of lying. Picked too early, picked too late, it matters not. The wine will always whisper into your mouth with complete, unabashed honesty, every time you take a sip." (Albert Finney, at the film's 3:20 mark)

Labels: comedy, drama, rom-drama-faves, romance, winemaking     
Internet Movie Database 70/100     
MetaScore (critics=47, viewers=66)    
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=48, viewers=72)
Wikipedia A Good Year (film)
Gordes, Provence, France
Blu-ray