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: chess, drama, Fifties, high-school, romance, rom-drama-faves, Sixties, teenager

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

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?

Mona Lisa Smile (2003) [PG-13] ***/****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net.

Mona Lisa Smile is an exercise in relentless mediocrity - a trite melodrama that raises a number of interesting possibilities, then ignores them in favor of taking the safe path. In the process, it undermines its own thesis of female empowerment, and is guilty of underutilizing a vast pool of talent. Actresses Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, and Julia Stiles are relegated to playing one-dimensional, uninteresting roles in a movie that could easily be dubbed Dead Poets Sorority. If the point of Mona Lisa Smile was to be as bland as possible, it accomplishes the goal.

The movie transpires on the campus of Wellesley College during the 1953-54 academic year. Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts), a new arts history teacher, is excited about the prospect of interacting with a student body comprised of the most intelligent women in the United States. But she is disappointed by what she finds - most of her students view their time at Wellesley as a steppingstone to wedded bliss. They do not deem it to be possible to have both a successful career and a marriage. After all, how would it be possible to have the dinner on the table every night if they're working? Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst) is the biggest believer in a woman's traditional role, and becomes Katherine's most energetic sparring partner. Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles), Betty's best friend, is torn between marrying her boyfriend and applying to law school. Connie Baker (Ginnifer Goodwin) isn't concerned about marriage - she just wants to find a boyfriend. And Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) may be the most sexually liberated of the bunch, but she finds herself harboring a crush on her Italian teacher, Bill Dunbar (Dominc West), who, in turn, is pursuing Katherine.

The Dead Poets Society connection is both immediately obvious and misleading. Despite its manipulative tendencies, the 1989 film contained moments of great emotional power - an element that is lacking in Mona Lisa Smile. With only minor exceptions, everything that occurs during the movie's slow-paced 115 minutes is pre-ordained. If you have seen the trailers, you have seen the film. This is by-the-numbers plotting that takes no chances and offers an obligatory uplifting ending that is neither justified nor credible.

One of the supposed goals of Mona Lisa Smile is to underline the fact that women of the '50s could break out of traditionally defined roles and still live fulfilling lives. As an iconic representation of this new woman, Katherine fails. She is frustrated in her personal life, her career requires compromises she is unwilling to make, and Joan Brandwyn, one of her pet projects, disappoints her. The victory she wins at the end is pyrrhic; careful examination of the subtext might easily lead one to believe that the route to happiness necessitates giving in to tradition and making the most out of it. That's not the message the movie wants viewers to come away with, but, for those who take the time to look, it is there.

Julia Roberts is a fine actress, but she sleepwalks her way through this part, imbuing Katherine with little in the way of charm or passion. The opposite is true of Kirsten Dunst, who goes over-the-top in turning Betty into the most astonishingly one-dimensional bitch to hit screens this year. Julia Stiles shows even less personality than Roberts; her character is easily overlooked and is the most likely to be forgotten. Mona Lisa Smile's bright spots come from Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ginnifer Goodwin, whose performances are on-target and whose characters are interesting enough to warrant more screen time than they are given.

Mona Lisa Smile's director is Mike Newell, whose previous credits include the gangster film Donnie Brasco, the underrated jewel Enchanted April, and the internationally-known Four Weddings and a Funeral. For Newell, this is an inexplicable misstep. He tries his best to fashion an inspirational, feel-good tale, but the lack of compelling characters and the reliance upon formulas makes this movie a late-night cable TV time killer at best. The most likely facial expression to be elicited by Mona Lisa Smile is a grimace. [Berardinelli’s rating: 50/100 (2 out of 4 stars)]

Labels: college, drama, Fifties, Julia Stiles
IMDb 65/100 
MetaScore (critics=45, viewers=70) 
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=49, viewers=70) 
Blu-ray 

Judy (2019) [PG-13] ****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net on Sept. 29, 2019.

When today’s average movie-goer thinks of Judy Garland, the image that comes to mind is that of Dorothy Gale, the girl-next-door heroine of The Wizard of Oz. Few remember the Garland of the 1960s – a pill-popping alcoholic with a self-destructive streak. Her vocal powers diminished by years of self-abuse, Garland was a shadow of her former self by the time she accepted a five-week engagement for a London stage show. Six months later, she was dead of a barbiturate overdose. For this biopic, director Rupert Goold, working from a screenplay by Tom Edge (which, in turn, used Peter Quilter’s play End of the Rainbow as its source material), focuses on early 1969 and the final hurrah of the singer/actress, played by Renee Zellweger, before the curtain came down on her life at the age of 47.

Judy’s thesis, which is supported by the facts, argues that the broken woman we see struggling through the late 1960s is the direct result of childhood mistreatment. For illustration, Goold provides flashbacks to the set of The Wizard of Oz. Garland (Darci Shaw), 16 at the time, was put on a forced diet by studio head Louis B. Mayer. She was given amphetamines for breakfast for energy and barbiturates at night so she could sleep. The drug habit she developed during those early showbiz years haunted her throughout the remainder of her days. Garland’s life wasn’t a happy one; consequently, Judy isn’t an upbeat motion picture. It cheats a little to provide the occasional Hollywood moment (the most notable of which relates to a rendition of her signature song, Somewhere Over the Rainbow) but its perspective of the title character is mostly clear-eyed and free of overt sentimentality.

Judy opens in 1968, with Garland performing at New York’s Palace Theater along with her two youngest children, Lorna and Joey Luft. She is a devoted mother but an uncertain provider. With her finances in disarray and her debts mounting, she is evicted from the hotel where she has been staying. This forces her to take her kids to the house of her ex-husband, Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell), and accept a lucrative offer to sing in London. While there, she battles her personal demons while becoming a headache for her handler, Rosalyn Wilder (Jessie Buckley), and the owner of the Talk of the Town nightclub, Bernard Delfont (Michael Gambon). She reconnects with Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), a smooth-talker she previously met in the United States, who becomes the final Mr. Garland. (Historically, he found her body in their rented London home.)

Judy is the Renee Zellweger show. Although the movie isn’t being accorded an aggressive release (and is coming out before the Oscar Season begins in earnest), she is already on many critics’ short list for awards contention. It’s an all-in performance, with Zellweger doing more than merely mimicking Garland. In addition to radically altering her physical appearance, the actress studied film to be able to impersonate her character’s body language. She worked with a voice coach to capture the timbre of Garland’s vocals. Although there are occasions when we catch a glimpse or two of Zellweger, the person we’re seeing on screen is mostly Garland.

By confining events to a limited span in time, Judy avoids the most common pitfall of screen biographies – too much story for too little time. The movie doesn’t feel rushed or compressed. There are, however, sacrifices necessary to this form of narrative. First, huge chunks of Garland’s life occur off-screen and are either only briefly referenced or ignored. Secondly, The Wizard of Oz flashbacks are so intriguing that some viewers may wish the movie had lingered longer in that era. (The predatory Louis B. Mayer would have made an excellent villain for a Making of Oz film.)

Although Judy doesn’t adhere rigorously to the chronology of the main character’s last months, it provides a compelling portrait of the tragic decline of one of America’s 20th century icons. The predictability of the film’s arc is a reflection of the inevitable rhythms of drug and alcohol addiction and abuse. Zellweger’s performance is the glue that holds everything together. Taken in total, Judy is a workmanlike production where any deficiencies in the narrative are easily covered over by the acumen of the actress who can add this movie to Bridget Jones (Oscar nominee), Chicago (Oscar nominee), and Cold Mountain (Oscar winner) on her shelf of personal triumphs. [Berardinelli’s rating: 3 out of 4 stars = 75%]

Labels: biography, drama, Fifties, history, music, musical, romance, Sixties, tragedy

Internet Movie Database 70 

MetaScore (critics=66, viewers=67) 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=70, viewers=86) 

Blu-ray 

Judy Garland (1922-1969) 

The Bookshop (2018) [PG] ***/****

A film review by Roger Moore for MovieNation.com on August 21, 2018.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, the poet said. People don’t like change, we understand it to mean.

If only Florence Green knew the poets as well as she loved novelists, she could have avoided a world of trouble, setting up a bookshop in her sleepy English coastal village in the late 1950s.

Who would have thought The Bookshop would stir so much enmity among the conservatives and those under their thumbs in tiny Hardborough?

Penelope Fitzgerald’s parable about politics and power applied in the most close-minded ways comes to the screen in a lovely, stately and painfully slow film by the director of Learning to Drive and Elegy. Whatever life Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson try to breathe into it, adapter / director Isabel Coixet sucks right out.

Mortimer is Mrs. Green, a widowed book-lover who decides the long empty Old House at the end of Hardborough’s main street would be a good location for a bookshop. She could live upstairs and run the shop below, and even the patronizing banker (Hunter Tremayne in a huff) has to admit she’s done her homework.

But the moment she starts to move in the trouble begins. A retiring fish monger suggests his shop would be a better location. Her solicitor (Jorge Suquet) mentions that there are many other properties she could take on. A rake from the BBC (James Lance) who lives there wonders if she’s thought of moving out?

All because the town’s wealthy snob, self-appointed patroness and nothing gets done here without my approval empress (Clarkson) has her own ideas for The Old House.

We’ve all been praying for a good bookshop in our town, she purrs, even as she’s suggesting Mrs. Green would be the perfect manager for her own plans for The Old House — an arts center.

It’s just that Mrs. Green won’t be put off. She had a great heart and enormous patience our narrator (Julie Christie) tells us. She’ll need them.

The story is spun through with promising threads. The biggest reader in town, everyone knows, is the reclusive Mr. Brundish, given his usual dapper turn by Bill Nighy. He informs Mrs. Green, by letter, that he hails the arrival of The Old House Bookshop in this forsaken corner of the world, and promises his support. Sort of. Any time she finds a new work of literary merit she can send it to him by messenger, with a note about it and its price, and he’ll buy it.

She sends him Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and rocks his world.

There are no secrets in a small town, and the only other truly helpful fellow, a fisherman/ferryman, Mr. Raven (Michael Fitzgerald) sends his group of young Sea Scouts to help set up shop. Others assure Florence she’ll need an assistant, and run through the sisters in a populous, needy family until the curly, outspoken tween Christine (plucky Honor Kneafsey) is sent to fill a job Mrs. Green didn’t think she needed.

The era in publishing seems sure to gin up controversy, with Bradbury, Nabokov (Lolita) and others stirring up the world with their words.

But the viper in velvet gloves Violet (Clarkson) is marshaling her forces and hell-bent on getting her way, so Florence will need all the help - and sales - she can get.

There are potent metaphors about provincialism, the inbred intransigence of the ruling class, the temerity of their inferiors, English xenophobia and the like, timely in the Brexit age and the hand-wringing that’s accompanied it.

That, and the characters, are all Coixet can focus on, rarely letting charming or amusing seep into this town where the powers that be have decreed time must stand still until they say otherwise.

Clarkson’s passive-aggressive villainy lets us understand the general malaise, bordering on malevolence, which the locals have absorbed. This outsider is just stirring things up. Mortimer beautifully embodies a Keep Calm and Ignore the Harpy stoicism and Nighy, playing the latest in a long line of kind, remote, thoughtful and dapper eccentrics, adds a warmth the film sorely needs.

Whatever the ethos of the novel, the filmgoer wants to see the light - the hope that the recluse and the shop owner will bond over books, the children’s eyes opened to the wider world, a funny battle of wits and wills over The Old House, a nice comic uproar over Green’s selling copy after copy of the scandalous Lolita.

All hinted at, teased and ignited, only to be snuffed out in Coixet’s still-life direction. Message and metaphor are everything and The Bookshop, with its terrific cast and lovely setting, barely overcomes that burden. [Moore’s rating: 2.5 stars out of 4 stars = 62.5%]

Labels: drama, Fifties, tragedy

IMDb 65/100 

MetaScore (critics=62, viewers=64) 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=55, viewers=63) 

The Founder (2016) [PG-13] ****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net on January 19, 2017.

The Founder, which chronicles the takeover and elevation of McDonald’s by Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), works both as a character study and an examination of how ambition, even when harnessed for the greater good, can result in innocent men with simple dreams being ground underfoot. It’s a case of the age-old struggle of commercialism against idealism that provides us with a prism through which we can look at McDonald’s both as it is today and as it was during the 1950s when it was just beginning.

Ray is a fascinating individual - a study in contrasts. Is he an amoral, driven man who will stop at nothing to build his fortune and extinguish anyone who gets in his way? Is he a workaholic who champions the working man and genuinely cares about the product he is selling? The Founder refuses to lionize or demonize the man, showing all facets of his personality - the laudable, the mundane and the detestable. Ray was a self-made man who came into his fortune through a combination of good luck, hard work, and persistence. He was a force of nature who didn’t let anyone or anything stop him - not the bill collectors, the snobs at the country club, or the two naïve brothers who entered into a partnership to franchise their innovative restaurant.

Today, no one thinks of McDonald’s as offering good food. It’s not even especially fast - just ask anyone who has waited for 15 minutes at the drive-through to get their lunch. But, as bad as it may be for the digestive system, it’s tasty and fills a certain craving. That’s not how McDonald’s got started. In the beginning, it was viewed as a restaurant and its creators cared about the quality of the hamburgers, fries, and shakes they were selling. Their goal was to offer their customers a tasty meal at a cheap price with less than 30 seconds to wait between ordering and pickup. It was a concept that revolutionized the food industry and whose reverberations are still being felt more than 60 years later.

Ray encounters the McDonald brothers, Dick (Nick Offerman) and Mac (John Carroll Lynch), in 1954 when they order eight milkshake-making machines from his foundering company. Fascinated by their need for his product, he drives to California to meet them. After Ray samples McDonald’s food (and proclaims the hamburger to be the best he has ever tasted), the brothers give him a tour of their facility and explain their philosophy. Ray is hooked and pushes for them to take him on as a partner so he can franchise their restaurants all across the country. They are reluctant, but Ray is a persuasive man and he eventually convinces them to sign a contract that, despite giving him unfavorable terms, allows him to get started on a path that will eventually lead to his buying out the McDonalds and establishing himself at the top of a major multinational corporation.

The Founder, written by Turbo scribe Robert Siegel, is canny enough to introduce Ray as a relatable sort of guy. Played with exhausting earnestness by the likable Michael Keaton, he seems to fit into the mold of the downtrodden salesman who, through hard work and dogged persistence, overcomes every obstacle life throws at him.  To an extent, that’s what The Founder is about, but there’s a dark side to Ray. He tosses aside his wife Ethyl [played by Laura Dern], turns against his partners (eventually bilking them out of hundreds of millions of dollars), and steals the spouse [Joan Smith, played by Linda Cardellini] of one of his investors [Rollie Smith, played by Patrick Wilson]. Ray is pure testosterone and ambition.

This is something of a change-of-pace for director John Lee Hancock, whose previous films, Saving Mr. Banks and The Blind Side, weren’t characterized by moral ambiguity. Hancock proves more than capable of working in The Founder’s gray areas, although he is immeasurably aided by Keaton’s bravura performance which, although not as nuanced as his character in Birdman nor as sharp as his persona in Spotlight, is the single most compelling reason to see The Founder.

Although the development (some might argue that degeneration might be a more accurate term) of Ray is The Founder’s centerpiece, I was equally fascinated by seeing the nascent beginnings of what has become synonymous with soulless fast food. The McDonald’s of the 1950s was a very different kind of place than what it is today. We see what the restaurant’s creators were striving for and what the place might have been in other circumstances. Ray was more about growing the business than nurturing it. He made a lot of people (including himself) a ton of money but the grand aspirations surrounding the early McDonald’s were lost long before Ronald McDonald was born.

The Founder was originally viewed by The Weinstein Company as a possible 2017 Oscar contender but their meek publicity surrounding the release indicates they had a change of heart along the way. One could argue that Keaton’s performance is worthy of recognition but the movie itself, although smart and engaging, falls short of the greatness one hopes for from Best Picture candidates. Nevertheless, The Founder represents two hours well-spent, especially for anyone with a fascination for complex characters or an interest in the shenanigans that transformed an unpretentious local restaurant into a global force. You probably won’t ever again think of McDonald’s in quite the same way. [Berardinelli’s rating: 3 out of 4 stars]

Blogger’s comment: The Founder is relevant mainly because McDonald’s epitomizes the uncontrolled experiment in nutrition that has characterized America’s fast food industry for the last half-century, and has resulted in the worst epidemic in diabetes and obesity in the world, thanks to feedlot-raised, antibiotic-fed beef, salty French-fried potatoes and an abundance of high-fructose corn syrup. For more on this subject, view Fast Food Nation (2006), King Corn (2007) or Food, Inc. (2008).

Labels: biography, drama, Fifties, history

Internet Movie Database 72 

MetaScore (critics=66, viewers=74) 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=70, viewers=76) 

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Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words (2015) [NR] **** (updated 3JUN2025)

A film review by Rex Reed for the Observer.com, November 11, 2015.

The last time I saw Ingrid Bergman, she was sitting on my living room floor, eating dinner off the coffee table. Some friends on a lower floor had graciously loaned her their apartment while she was in town to consult an army of cancer doctors. I ran into her in the elevator and asked her to dinner; she graciously accepted, and an unforgettable evening was spent in the presence of a goddess. She was warm yet cool, patrician yet earthy, worldly yet unpretentious, beautiful without makeup, and determined to ignore her declining health for a night of fun and music and homemade lentil soup. She was the real deal. She said she was going home to record a pleasant experience in her diary. She was all the qualities on view in Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words, the remarkable new documentary by director Stig Björkman. In short, she was unforgettable.

This is what you got when you met her, and this is what you get in the movie. The camera loved her and she loved cameras. She owned a lot of them and carried them around to record every event in her life, big and small. You see her work behind the camera here, as well as the artistry that won her three Oscars. Compiled from six decades of diaries, archival footage, home movies of family vacations and interviews with her four children and best friends, an indelible portrait of a headstrong, determined woman emerges through the fog of fan magazines and gossip columns to eschew every hint of bogus celebrity or insincerity. Yet there is also an inescapable underlying restlessness born of the insecurity that ruled her life.

Losing her parents at an early age, she longed to shower her own children and three husbands with the affection, commitment and emotional security she never got herself. But she didn’t know how. So by their own admission, she was more of a friend than a mother. She adored her first husband, Dr. Petter Lindstrom, and vowed to never leave him, but she also had a burning ambition, which she admits more than once. It took her all the way to Hollywood, away from Sweden, her husband and baby daughter. Under contract to David O. Selznick, she achieved instant stardom, but her voice on the soundtrack confesses, I’ve seen so much, and yet it was never enough.

Never satisfied with success, and bored by America, Ingrid followed Italian director Roberto Rossellini to Italy for the dreadful hysterics and erupting volcano in Stromboli, sacrificing her marriage and deserting her child to live with another man so far away. One of the most touching moments in the film is Pia Lindstrom’s candor about the traumatizing impact of her mother’s farewell letter.

The resulting scandal dealt a deathblow to Bergman’s Hollywood career, but again she was miserable with the undisciplined way of working in Italian films, so she left three more children behind as she conquered new horizons - in London, Paris and New York. I’ve gone from saint to whore and back to saint again, she says wearily, all in one lifetime. Everyone forgave her, including her beautiful children. She cherished them - beautiful, elegant Pia, her son Roberto Rossellini, and her twin daughters Isabella Rossellini and Ingrid Rossellini. But none of them sugarcoat their resentment over the fact that she was never physically there. Her work always came first.

When she died in 1982, at age 67, they were all there for her, showering her with love, as the rest of us still do. Despite her fame and success, she was shy and insecure and a monument to discontent. A creature of impulse to the end, she was a woman who saved everything - from lace valentines and old passports to Oscars and tear-stained divorce papers. How lucky we are she can share them with us now. She marched to her own drummer, and the beat goes on. [Reed’s rating: 4 out of 4 stars]

Blogger’s comment: Having watched this two-hour documentary four times, as well as Casablanca, Indiscreet, Notorious and Murder on the Orient Express, and having just finished Ingrid’s autobiography My Story, I can say with confidence that if you are an Ingrid Bergman fan, this documentary will be very revealing. Ingrid lost her mother to jaundice at age two, and her father to cancer at age 13. I have a feeling that gave her the understanding that people left, that you couldn't count on them and that you have to live your own life. Because her father was a photographer and filmed Ingrid, she understood that she could make her own photographic memories and keep them with her always, and they would provide roots, and a sense of continuity to her life. One more point, in the documentary Alicia Vikander voices Ingrid herself and it really brings the documentary to life. 

Labels: biography, documentary, Ferrari, Fifties, filmmaking, Ingrid Bergman, Sixties

IMDb 74/100 

MetaScore (critics=75, viewers=81) 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=98, viewers=72) 

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Ingrid Bergman My Story (mass market paperback) 

Official Ingrid Bergman website 

Wikipedia Ingrid Bergman 

Ingrid Bergman: The Life, Career and Public Image (paperback)

Ingrid Bergman IMDb Filmography

The Imitation Game (2014) [PG-13] ****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net, December 17, 2014.

We as a society tear down what we do not understand. We vilify and destroy people who are different because their differences make us uncomfortable. That message more than any other rings clear in the account of the life of Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) as brought to the screen by director Morten Tyldum (Headhunters). No matter that Turing was the key player in the cracking of the German Enigma code and that his work may have ended World War 2 as much as two years earlier, thereby saving countless lives. Turing was reclusive, antisocial, and a homosexual and those so-called black marks on his character led him to be rejected, prosecuted, and hounded to the point where he took his own life. It's easy to see The Imitation Game as a triumph - after all, Turing accomplished what all the experts claimed was impossible - but it's equally apparent that underlying the triumph is a tragedy. The optimism of Turing's creed - Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine - is counterbalanced by the ugliness of how it all ended for him.

The Imitation Game provides glimpses into three periods of Turing's life as a means of fleshing out aspects of his character. A majority of the running time is devoted to his years at Bletchley Park, where he worked as a code breaker seeking to undermine the German Enigma. The success of his efforts provided the Allies with full access to all secret German war transmissions. As part of a small group of experts that included Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), John Cairncross (Allen Leech), and Peter Hilton (Matthew Beard), Turing served two masters: the military commander, Denniston (Charles Dance), and the man from MI6, Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong II). The 1939-1945 scenes are presented in flashback using a framing device from 1952 after Turing was arrested for gross indecency. (He was eventually convicted of the charge and elected to be chemically castrated rather than go to jail.) Finally, there are more distant flashbacks from the late 1920s that depict Turing (played in these sequences by Alex Lawther) as a bullied student who is beginning to recognize his sexuality and experiencing his first crush.

Benedict Cumberbatch's performance as Turing is spot-on, capturing the obsessive need that defines many great minds facing a monumental challenge. Cumberbatch doesn't portray Turing as a likeable or sympathetic character; his approach is very much warts and all. Turing is cold and awkward around others (the movie finds some comedy in a sequence when he makes a clumsy attempt to win over his compatriots) and more comfortable working with his machine (dubbed Christopher) than with the four humans on his team. Through Cumberbatch's interpretation, we see the brilliance, arrogance, loneliness, and self-imposed isolation of one of the Allies' most unsung war heroes.

The Imitation Game wisely doesn't attempt to provide a detailed explanation of Turing's work. To do so would have forced the movie down a rabbit hole where only the most technically savvy viewers could have followed. Instead, it relies on generalizations, the most important of which is that Christopher represents an early prototype of machines that would eventually become known as computers. (ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose computer, was based on Turing's design.) Instead of using valuable screen time detailing mathematical/engineering problems and solutions, The Imitation Game concentrates on the interpersonal relationships among the team members and how the four men and one woman interact with their superiors.

At one point during the film, Turing and his fellows are faced with an impossible dilemma. One of the first things they learn upon breaking Enigma is that the Germans are massing their U-Boats for an attack on an Allied convoy. The choice faced by those at Bletchley is simple: inform the military of their findings and save the convoy (thereby tipping off the Germans that Enigma has been compromised) or sequester the information so the font of information isn't cut off. Decoding the Enigma messages becomes as much about what to act upon as discerning the truth.

The Imitation Game is a war movie where no battlefields are shown and no guns are fired. It illustrates the important concept that, even in the 1940s, scientists, engineers, and mathematicians fought on a hidden front that eventually changed the tide of battle. Like Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, Turing faced moral predicaments associated with his role. In the end, however, the genius behind all the innovations of Bletchley was destroyed by the pettiness of a society that didn't understand him. The Imitation Game doesn't hide this dark aspect and it makes the production sobering and engrossing. [Berardinelli's rating: 3.5out of 4]

The supporting cast includes Rory Kinnear (as Detective Robert Nock).

Labels: biography, drama, Fifties, Keira Knightley, thriller, WWII

IMDb 80/100

MetaScore (critics=71, viewers=81)

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=77, viewers=84)

Blu-ray