Friday's Old Fashioned: The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)

“The Great Waldo Pepper” opens in 1926 with its eponymous barnstorming pilot (Robert Redford) dropping out of the Nebraska sky and taking locals, young and old alike, for airplane rides to make a few quick bucks. The jaunty martial music score, Waldo’s flying scarf and Redford’s smile evince Americana, which seems to be furthered when he spends the night on a family farm and regales his hosts about staring down German WWI flying ace Ernst Kessler (Bo Brundin) in the sky so many years ago. Even as Waldo’s telling it, however, the exactness of the details and the heightened nature of Redford’s countenance gives away the game. Sure enough, a few scenes later, in telling the same tale to a local girl, he gets called on the carpet, the story revealed not so much as rubbish as a true tale belonging to someone else. And though eventually we learn that Waldo really was in WWI, he participated as a flight instructor, not a flying ace. And so if barnstorming ultimately proves to be on its last legs, it is not simply Waldo’s livelihood that is being squeezed out but a yearning to turn his self-invented myth into a reality, which marks director George Roy Hill’s adventure spectacle as a kind of tragedy of absurd hubris, one the film itself ultimately proves oddly insistent on embracing rather than skewering.

Even if the opening feels like high times, it quickly becomes apparent how barnstorming is on its way out, as Waldo squabbles with a rival pilot, Axel Olsson (Bo Svenson), though tight circumstances force them to team up, ingratiating themselves into Doc Dillhoefer’s (Philip Bruns) flying circus by concocting daredevil air stunts. These stunts come to include Mary Beth (Susan Sarandon), the girl who comes between Waldo and Axel. She is one of only two female characters, neither of whom are really characters at all, as Mary Beth exists mostly as the sideshow attraction she becomes and Waldo’s sometime girlfriend Maude (Margot Kidder) mostly just exists to spotlight Waldo’s wandering, wayward ways. This is not to criticize the casting practices of director George Roy Hill’s film nor screenwriter William Goldman’s man-centric intentions. No, this might not necessarily be a movie just for boys but it’s definitely just about boys, dumb boys with their heads in the clouds.

In a way, Hill, as director, has his head in the clouds too. If “The Great Waldo Pepper” is nothing else, it’s a vehicle for incredible, indelible stunts, with speedy, upside down flying, barrel rolls, Waldo momentarily bringing the climactic “Flying Down to Rio” airshow to life all on his own, and a person-to-person switch from one mid-flight plane to another. This happens when Mary Beth is enlisted to fly on one of Axel’s biplane wings, first flying right down a city street to rile up the citizens and bring them out on the street to watch. But when she freezes up and will not come off the wing, meaning Axel is unable to land with the plane’s weight thrown off, Waldo goes up in a different plane to rescue her. The sequence lives up to its description, shot in such a way to emphasize the filmmaking’s authenticity, from below and above, mostly forgoing close-ups so that you can literally see them in the air with the foreboding ground far below. It is sensational if simultaneously disconnected from the implied denunciation of death as spectacle, which becomes “The Great Waldo Pepper’s” curious undoing in a conclusion where Pepper and Kessler, working as stunt pilots in Hollywood to make a living, finally face off.

The government bureaucrat, Newt Potts (Geoffrey Lewis), who shows up to keep Waldo Pepper on the ground is not portrayed as villainously as Peck in “Ghostbusters”, but he is clearly a signal of the forthcoming regulation of the sky, what the film, in its wistful looking back, cannot help but see as a more beautiful time. It is a time that these men honestly believe in, epitomized in Kessler’s monologue proving that the story Waldo co-opted as his own was, in fact, real, suggesting an inverted “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, not unlike the climactic dogfight, one fought without guns for the benefit the movie camera that begins as pretend and then turns real too. If it’s a sequence intended as bitter elegy, it is instead wholly consumed by its own romance, concluding not on the ground but among the clouds, the movie itself lost to them too, Pepper and Kessler not plunging to their doom, literal or otherwise, but elevated to a place amongst the heavens.

The Ken Watanabe Godzilla Reaction Shot Variety Hour

When I watched Gareth Edwards’s “Godzilla” upon its release back in 2014, I came away thinking the pointed lack of character was a deliberate harmonization with the movie’s overriding idea that nature restores the balance, reducing man, self-impressed man, to gum on Godzilla’s shoe. That’s what the money line – “Let them fight” – so deftly brought home. And yet, as I casually re-watched the 2014 version of the King of Monsters one recent Saturday over coffee, I was reminded of how the murky monster special effects didn’t really do much for me and how one actor, lack of writerly dimension or not, stood out, inadvertently reshaping the movie’s message.

Ken Watanabe’s Dr. Ishirō Serizawa is affiliated with the enigmatic Project Monarch specifically giving rise to Godzilla, yes, but he is mostly on hand to provide exposition so we understand the scientific gobbledygook necessary to keep advancing the plot. He, and Sally Hawkins’s Dr. Vivienne Graham too. Like, someone will say, “What’s this?” And Serizawa will say: “It’s what caused the meltdown.” And Graham will say: “An electromagnetic pulse. That’s what it's building to. Converting all that radiation until it hatches.” They convincingly, joyfully recount this exposition. But exposition is not all Watanbe does. Consider, for instance, the very first scene in the movie, where we find he and Hawkins in radiation suits as their characters make the initial Bad Discovery that will lead to further Bad Things and get this blockbuster show on the road.

Look at that squint. That is a serious squint that Watanabe’s got going on. And that squint is not only his principal mode of expression but the best detail in the whole movie, over and over again.

Like this moment, when he watches the big, bad creature up to no good, lowering those binoculars so we can properly appreciate his regal squint. I mean, that sort of squint renders Godzilla’s CGI havoc as superfluous. That sort of squint tells the whole story.

When a helicopter spirits another one of our characters away at a dramatic moment, Edwards and his editor cut to this wordless shot of Watanabe squinting up at the helicopter as if they seem to sense no matter how dramatic the moment might inherently be its drama nevertheless cannot compete with Watanabe’s squint.

When the crazy guy is starting to talk sense, Watanabe curiously peers over the top of his glasses, which you might think is him refraining from squinting until.....

.....you realize that, no, Watanabe was merely setting us up, the camera cutting closer so that Watanabe can theatrically remove his glasses to really lay OMG squint on thick. 

Here he’s pointing at a computer screen, a shot which foreshadows, I suspect, our movie future, one where computers are so prevalent that movie scene after movie scene is just characters pointing at computer screens. How can such cinematic stiffness possibly be staged to maximize drama?

By cutting to an actor like Watanabe squinting in reaction at what the computer shows him, that’s how. WHAT DOES THE DATA TELL US, KEN???

Heck, Watanabe is so committed that even when he’s in the background you can still see him squinting.

All these squints were adding up in the back of my mind, mind you, before we got to the movie’s most critical moment in which the U.S. Navy’s attempts to take out the so-called Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism doing prolonged battle with Godzilla has gone awry and left San Francisco in direct danger. But it was the critical moment when all those squints stored up in the back of my mind combined and then crystallized. 

The moment begins when an elite unit is enlisted to go find a nuclear warhead in San Francisco and disarm it. As they do, Admiral Stenz (David Straithairn) watches. 

Once they’ve gone, he turns and walks out of the frame.

He walks into this frame, where we see him moving toward Serizawa, his back to us, standing outside.

From the side, we see the Admiral approach...

...and then ask Serizawa if this Godzilla, this Alpha Predator, really stands a chance against the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism.

“The arrogance of man,” Serizawa explains as the camera pushes in, “is thinking nature is in our control-”

“-and not,” he continues as the camera draws closer still, “the other way around.”

Finally, the camera arrives at its close-up, the eye-narrowing exclamation point, Serizawa squinting into the distance. He says: “Let them fight.” And though he’s technically ceding center stage to the monsters, he is inadvertently, spiritually claiming center stage for himself, his squint overriding any and all CGI, demonstrating the real magic of the movies. Godzilla might be the King of the Monsters, but Ken Watanabe is the King of “Godzilla.”

Cinema Romantico's Cannes Brûlé Palme

The 72nd Cannes Film Festival concluded this past weekend. There were, per reports, possibly up to twenty-nine masterpieces screened. And while Antonio Banderas won Best Actor for “Pain & Glory”, and while Willem Dafoe’s turn in “The Lighthouse” was equally lauded, Taron Egerton nevertheless emerged as pre-Pre Best Actor Favorite for playing Elton John in “Rocketman” because byzantine Best Actor rules dictate that all Best Actor winners come from musical biopics. I didn’t make the sytem, people. You can write your local representative at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

But then, none of that interested Cinema Romantico which, once again, was unable to attend the south of France cinematic carousal because, once again, the only outlet willing to give us accreditation was Horse & Hound. Still, that does not prevent us, just as it never prevents us, from bestowing our non-celebrated, un-exalted Brûlé Palme, this blog’s variation on Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or, awarded each year to Cinema Romantico’s favorite Cannes Film Festival attendee. Last year’s Brûlé Palme was cancelled in deference to Asia Argento respectfully making it real, and there were attendees this year who made it real too. But we didn’t feel like canceling the award in 2019. No, in realizing we’ve only got, what, twenty, thirty good years left of the red carpet not being underwater, we felt like reveling in the glorious silliness of the whole shindig. That’s why, following in the footsteps of past winners such as Kylie Minogue, Bill Murray, and, of course, her eminence, Nicole Kidman, this year’s recipient of Cinema Romantico’s faux-illustrious Brûlé Palme is Marion Cotillard.

Don’t get the blog wrong, we appreciated Margot Robbie flouting red carpet protocol by sporting sequined trousers like a disco Katharine Hepburn, and the blog totally dug Charlotte Gainsbourg making Saint Laurent, of all things, feel like casual Friday at Cannes. But ultimately, it was Cotillard, arriving for a screening of “Matthias Et Maxime” by breaking Cannes etiquette, as Vogue notes, by exposing her abs with a crop top and pair of black shorts paired with, as W advises, a Balmain kimono and leather peep-toe boots that won the Burned Palm of our heart. This was not, however, Come As You Are, a la Sharon Stone’s infamous Gap t-shirt at the 1995 Oscars, product of an emergency rummage through the closet, but Come As You Feel Like It, creating a rift in the fashion universe, walking the red carpet like she was strolling along a south of France beach boardwalk. And no doubt if she was strolling along a south of France beach boardwalk she would have made it look like a wooden red carpet, a multi-purpose elegance, if you will, where she’s half-a-second away from running in the sand or gliding through a swank soiree, so effortlessly, enchantingly blurring the lines between leisure and glamour that she gives hope to all us rubes that fashion transformation is one accessory away.

Wine Country

“Wine Country” gathers a plethora of gifted comic actors, all women, including old Saturday Night Live cohorts Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, and Ana Gasteyer, playing a group of longtime friends who have, as longtime friends will, moved away, though not lost touch, regathering amidst their busy lives and personal upheavals in Napa to celebrate the 50th birthday of Rebecca (Rachel Dratch), a jamboree planned by over-particular Abby (Amy Poehler). This set-up of womanhood and beautiful locations suggests Nancy Meyers. But then, if this was Nancy Meyers, the women would get back in the groove through various emergent love interests. And in “Wine Country”, Poehler, who also directed, working from a script by Emily Spivey (who co-stars) and Liz Cackowski, keeps the proceedings conspicuously male-free. The most prominent male is Devon (Jason Schwartzman), a valet of sorts packaged with the house they rent, who exists as inoffensively vapid ornamentation. When he remarks, self-impressed, near the end, “My work here is done”, the line specifically underscores how he hasn’t changed anything.

No, the only romantic partner, Jade (Maya Erskine), is a woman too, though she’s hardly a romantic partner at all, more a glimpse of the demarcation line of age (and eventual millennial punching bag) for Val (Paula Pell), evocative of how the movie both indulges in and dispenses with rote storytelling. If anything, you wished “Wine Country” dispensed with rote storytelling more. If Rebecca has a semi-turning-50 crisis, and if Abby must come to grips with her fastidiousness, and if Catherine (Ana Gasteyer) is a workaholic who must learn to let go (of her phone), the movie can’t lift any of these into the realm of revelatory nor flippantly turn these narrative clichés on their head, preferring to highlight the repartee and conviviality, like a scene where Val plays, ah, a version of Santa Claus, where the fun stems from seeing just how much all these actors seem to be having fun in the moment.

As a first-time feature film director, Poehler, as first-timers will, has her ups and downs. The opening, as the five women discuss their getaway on the phone, is deftly composed, each frame stacked with background action that implicitly conveys the respective characters’ situations without them having to verbally exposit overmuch. In the climactic hilltop sequence, however, a solid gag demonstrating how sound doesn’t really travel is partially counteracted by how the moment’s apparently imminent danger is never quite made visually clear. Wine country itself, meanwhile, is merely presented in a sterile package of travelogue shots, like a run-of-the-mill Netflix special where some bland so & so goes somewhere idyllic, the landscape less a supporting character, as they say, than scenic filler. In fact, all the characters demonstrate disinterest in the finer points of wine, including an extended sequence with a frustrated sommelier, which contains humor, yes, but also distinct surliness, or notes of bitterness if we want to employ a vino metaphor.

That bitterness, evoked in the 50th birthday, aging women being of the world but not exactly part of it, bubbles below the surface of the whole movie and occasionally seeps to the top in interesting ways. Jade, a server the gang meets at their first dinner, looks at these older ladies having fun like Abbi and Ilana looked at HRC, as if they are rock star elders. Yet later, when Jade invites them to her art show, “Wine Country” turns nasty as the gal pals struggle to make sense of their strange surroundings and these even stranger youths, while the youths are mesmerized by their out of touch elders, taking smartphone photos of them as if they are animals in cages for observation. This scene might be intended as comedy but there is a palpable tension, a genuinely uncomfortable dividing line, so uncomfortable, in fact, that the movie doesn’t really know what to do with it and quickly makes an unsatisfactory exit, preferring instead to chart resolution through the respective emotional hills each character must climb (or, more accurately, descend).

No, “Wine Country” maintains a mostly mellow vibe, which isn’t necessarily a bad idea when you have such a gifted cast and just give them room to riff. Indeed, among the film’s funniest moments is Rebecca’s nighttime, emotionally crystallizing encounter with a raccoon, which is recounted afterwards in monologue rather than shown, perhaps from a lack of visual imagination, perhaps to spotlight Dratch, perhaps both. Whatever the case, Dratch’s patented hysterical frenzy sells the speech completely, concluding with her order to be taken to brunch, declaring “Put me in my finest muumuu!”, a line that made me laugh out loud from her loony commitment to it. The comical high point, however, is Rudolph’s character drunkenly commandeering a microphone at a winery, not from any exact lines, none of which I remember, but simply her convincingly soused energy, the movie’s one moment when it truly feels as if anything is possible.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Battleground (1949)

The “Battleground” giving William Wellman’s 1949 WWII film its title is Bastogne, which is in Belgium, where late in December 1944 the Allied 101st Airborne Division fell under siege from the Nazis in their scurrilous and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to capture Antwerp. The 101st survived this siege, earning the nickname The Battling Bastards of Bastogne along the way, a seemingly readymade movie title in and of itself. But if Wellman’s film opens and closes with the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment in rousingly familiar scenes of military cadence all that comes in-between is surprisingly, refreshingly considered, reflective. Indeed, if mom’s blueberry pie is cited as what they’re fighting for and the great Leon Ames, in a magnificent walk-off cameo, as a Chaplain might remind the 101st that they are fighting fascism, it’s also sort of stunning to note how the scene ends not with him invoking God but him giving each man the space to pray to whoever his respective higher power is. It echoes an earlier moment, just after Rodrigues (Ricard Montalban), a soldier from L.A. ecstatic to see his first snowfall only to cruelly, ironically freeze to death in it. A makeshift funeral is held and Pops (George Murphy) mentions Rodrigues’s belief that every wartime death is “God’s will.” Crucially Murphy’s delivery of this line betrays neither belief nor doubt in that sentiment, just profound respect for deceased pal’s faith. And a full shot of the men paying respects to their fallen man is notable for how no music swells; no, it is just the sound of the wind, a palpable, natural hush that could make one think they hear God somewhere in the space of the falling snow or that they don’t hear anything at all.

“Battleground’s” screenwriter, Robert Pirosh, was at Bastogne, which was why RKO drafted him to write the film, though Pirosh made clear his goal was to tell the story “without heroics, without fancy speeches, without a phony romance.” That’s why characters are heard discussing injuries that might deliver them away from the front, a la Junior in “Platoon”, and in a scene where the 327th is transported by truck to the Ardennes the regiment is exhausted and falling asleep even as the truck bounces them up and down, a far cry from, say, the profane jocularity of “Predator’s” “Long Tall Sally” scene. And when the platoon arrives in Bastgone, they spend the evening in the home of a Frenchwoman (Denise Darcel), pointedly written not as a person but merely an object of affection, passed between the men as they dance and desired specifically by Private Holley (Van Johnson), the spoils of war. Those dishonorable intentions are laid bare the next morning when he openly steals eggs from her, a sequence which is played for light comedy, as if Pirosh is twisting the cliché of hiding out in a Frenchwoman’s home in our guts, American heroes as invaders.

Upon arrival in Bastogne, Luftwaffe bombers flying overhead send the 327th, not to mention the Frenchwoman and the two children she’s looking after, scrambling for cover, Wellman juxtaposing their uplooking faces of fear with the distinct buzz of warplanes and all that such a noise entails. It’s a reminder of old school effects, which were mere sound design and reaction shots, nothing more, which isn’t to say it was better or worse than, say, Christopher Nolan’s terrifying spectacle of Luftwaffe fighters bearing down on gaggles of beachbound soldiers in “Dunkirk”, just different, terrifying in its own way. What’s more, it becomes evocative of the film’s emphasis of the unknown, glimpsed further during the actual siege where the literal fog-shrouded terrain illuminates the figurative notion of the fog of war.

Incoherence is part and parcel to the film’s narrative. We may know well know the particulars of what these men are facing given seventy-five years of WWII scholarship, but Wellman makes plain that these men, cut off from the very information they desire. One scene finds Jarvess (John Hodiak) lamenting that his journalist wife back home knows more about what’s transpiring on the European front than him. There are skirmishes fought throughout the movie with German soldiers, but just as prominent is an air of being in limbo, the 327th forced to march around in secret, dig a hole here only to be told that hole is now meaningless and now they have to go dig a hole over here. They were not a machine, in other words, running roughshod through Europe but a united collection of confused, frightened individuals leaning on one another, fighting through that confusion and fear to still come out on the other side. The siege of Bastogne is inevitable, per the history books, but it rarely feels that way in “Battleground”, its heroes less battering bastards than battered bastards who find the disgruntled gumption to hold on anyway.

5 Possible Luxury Movie Theater Futures

My dream vacation, as My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife knows, is Switzerland. That’s not just because of the Olympic Museum in Lausanne (though the Olympic Museum in Lausanne has amplified the dream). When I was tasked with giving a presentation in sixth grade about my dream vacation and chose Switzerland the Olympic Museum hadn’t even opened! No, the first time, I think, I saw an image looking up from a picturesque, snowy Swiss street at the impressive Alps it became my dream, and that dream has only intensified as I’ve aged and realized my propensity for living life by just watching life go by, which is to say sitting at a Swiss street cafe and sipping coffee and staring up at the Alps for hours and hours sounds like my kinda bliss. You know what doesn’t sound like my kinda bliss? The story last week that a movie theater in Spreitenbach, Switzerland has constructed a VIP cinema where theatergoers willing to pay the price can watch a movie in a double bed, an abhorrent business model that has got me rethinking this whole dream vacation scenario (not really).

Cinema Romantico has long decried this growing trend of luxury movie theaters. Reserved seating, plush recliners as seats, dinner delivery straight to your plush recliner is an experience designed to entice possible viewers in a market where moviegoing is, relatively speaking, on the wane. Yet an experience designed to make the movie theater more like home inevitably translates to moviegoers treating the movie theater like home. They take off their shoes; they check their phones; they talk. The scourge of reserved seating only makes it worse. When I saw “First Man” the guy sitting next to me kept ordering food to his seat – soda, nachos, Twizzlers. Here was a movie doing all it could to put you, viewer, in Neil Armstrong’s headspace inside a NASA tin can and here was incessant dinner delivery a couple feet over continually pulling me right back out. People, as I have lamented before, no longer want to meet movies on their terms; they want movies to meet them on their terms. Beds inside a movie theater is a logical extension of this trend. And as the old school movie-going experience, as much a meaningful thing to me as living life by just watching life go by, hurtles toward its end point, it got me to thinking about what other tragic way stations we will find on the way to that end point. What are the next frightening frontiers for going to the movies?

5 Possible Luxury Movie Theater Futures

1. Sur La Table® Cooking Class

If plush recliners and snack trays have strained to turn the movie theater into your living room, and if Switzerland’s beds are straining to turn the movie theater into your bedroom, then it only makes sense for the movie theater to try and become the kitchen. Perhaps by way of AMC Movie Theatres synergizing with Sur La Table® to erect AMC Sur La Table® Movie Theatres where you buy a ticket with friends to make Gazpacho while watching the latest JLo rom com or Liam Neeson opus of revenge.

2. Isolation Booth

Ichiran Ramen in Japan has brought solo dining into the mainstream, creating isolation booths where individual diners sit by themselves behind black curtains to devote full concentration to the act of eating noodles. Ichiran has even made inroads into America, opening a restaurant in Brooklyn. Perhaps they can expand to the art of cinema? Granted, a cinema isolation booth would put a serious crimp in the whole Big Screen Experience, but, seriously man, what twenty-tens whippersnapper wants that? No, our Ichiran Cinema Isolation Booths will imagine a more lavish version of a first class airline entertainment, paying exorbitant amounts for, like, a 10 inch screen and all the movie options you want, going out to the theater to watch one movie for five minutes, another movie for ten minutes, another movie for twelve minutes, and then fall asleep.

3. Luxury Cruise

Why just go to the movies when you can sail away to the movies instead?! Marvel Studios in conjunction with Royal Caribbean® Cruise Line invites you to plan your entire vacation around the movies by taking a cruise aboard our sparkling new Royal Caribbean® MCU where 22 luxury movie theaters will screen all 22 “Avengers” movies 24 hours a day in alternating formats ranging from IMAX to 3-D to Smell-O-Vision!

4. Swimming Pool

The swim-up bar, as Punch tells us, began in 1950s Las Vegas with the Sands first creating floating blackjack and craps tables and then the Tropicana building swim-up blackjack tables which naturally extended to bars. These swim-up bars, it turns out, precluded modern places like XS in Encore, a whole damn swim club, named, apparently, the hottest nightclub in the world by Condé Nast. Naturally a byproduct of the swim entertainment industry, it seems to me, should be floating movie theaters. You could watch the latest blockbuster from the comfort of floating chairs and mattresses with tiki drinks served to you by the swimming concession staff. Private cabana rooms can be purchased at an upgraded price for just you and your friends. Coral Cove is a superpool with slides, fountains and fun-filled interactive aqua entertainment where families can take their kids to simultaneously screen the latest box office hit.

5. Spa

Movies themselves might provide spiritual nourishment but what if you’re simultaneously on the prowl for some bodily rejuvenation too? Why then you’ll want to check out our Cinemark Spa & Cineplex, the next level in movie-watching luxury, where filmgoers willing to shell out can enjoy a new release paired with an appropriate spa treatment. Watch “Rambo: Last Blood” while getting a thermal mud wrap, see “The Rise of Skywalker” from inside a salt stone sauna, or allow the new Olivier Assayas film to play tricks on your mind while you detoxify your body with a Mahoosuc Coffee Scrub. Valentine’s Day and Date Night packages include a massage for two paired with the newest generic rom com. In the special Serenity Suite complete with aromatherapy you don’t even have to watch the movie at all.

Some Drivel On...The Spanish Prisoner

Mamet Speak is the phrase given to describe David Mamet’s patented dialogue, whether for the stage or the screen. Most definitions culled from the Interwebs tend to distill Mamet Speak down to its frequent, frequently cacophonous profanity. That, however, sells Mamet Speak short. After all, his 1997 thriller “The Spanish Prisoner” garnered a PG rating, not even PG-13; there is nary a naughty word to be heard. And yet, it is Mamet Speak through and through, that instantly recognizable phonetic prickliness, like when Rebecca Pidgeon asks: “I’n’t it?” How it’s written there is just how it sounds. It is not “Isn’t it?” nor is it “Is it not?” No, she completely drops the ‘s’ and turns “isn” into “in”, the deliberate annunciation emblemizing the rigidity of Mamet Speak. She also recites a line – “Beats workin’” – which is repeated in Mamet’s ensuing film “State & Main”, another hallmark of Mamet Speak, repetition, across his work and within it. “Give him a word!” barks Ed O’Neill’s FBI Team Leader as Felicity Huffman’s FBI agent then barks in lockstep “Give him a word!” What word? What’s it matter? It’s sound and fury signifying everything. And nearly every other soliloquy comes courtesy of the fella – as in, “the fella says.” What fella? Mamet probably. “The fella says,” begins Ricky Jay, “we must never forget that we are human. And as humans we must dream and when we dream we dream of money.” From off camera you hear Steve Martin, in his driest voice, observe more than reply: “Well…..” Well indeed. Mamet the Real Person has become what he’s become but whatever, I missed Mamet Speak.

It’s ironic, then, that a couple years ago, in an interview with No Film School, Mamet stated definitively that movies do not need dialogue. And he’s not wrong, of course. This is an ancient adage not new to Mamet. But even if that sentiment is just as boring as it is true (who wants to a watch a wordless “The Thin Man”?!) it seems specifically untrue for “The Spanish Prisoner”, a movie in which the action is driven entirely by words. In that interview Mamet might cite watching someone else watch a movie on a plane but try watching “The Spanish Prisoner” over someone’s shoulder on a transatlantic flight and see you can tell what’s going on. No, words are the predominant mover and shaker here, which is why Innocent Man Who Ends Up On The Run Joe Ross (Campbell Scott) verbalizes the A Ha! moments, like when noticing a security camera near movie’s end triggers a memory that cracks the case. A more demonstrative shot, granted, could have communicated this too, but Mamet prefers just having Joe say “The security tape” to himself. The most artful shot in The Spanish Prisoner is probably a tilt up from a steaming cup of coffee; every camera shot here is purely functional.

They are functional like The Process is functional. The Process is the never-exactly-explained mathematical thingamabob that Joe Ross invents for his vaguely defined Company that will allow his boss and other wealthy benefactors to control the global markets. If it seems like Joe should be guarding this Process with all his might, he nevertheless proves himself something of a naif, allowing people into his orbit willy-nilly, like Jimmy Dell (Martin), a cryptic if alluring businessperson, and Susan Ricci (Pidgeon), who also works for the vaguely defined Company and makes eyes at Joe, all for nothing more than a kind of social longing. It is that very trusting attitude that ultimately proves his downfall, misplaced goodwill in a world gradually shown to be rigged.

That artificial sensation comes through in the film’s aesthetic, which aside from its tropical opening and a few outdoors scenes near the end, feels, frankly, cheap and hastily erected. The office where Joe works feels unbecoming of the supposed billion-dollar empire behind it, and this whole un-lived in feeling trickles down to even the littlest things, like Susan delivering food from bakery to Joe. As they stand in the kitchen, Joe slices the bread, yet Mamet never provides an insert shot of said slicing. The action is off screen; he could be doing anything. Susan’s affection for Joe, meanwhile, is so insistent that it begins to feel forced too, and that inevitably bears out with Mamet not only evincing a worldview of distrust toward humanity but toward love too. Susan’s just a conniving you-know-what, in other words, out to get him.

If Joe slowly unravels the mystery taking shape he also doesn’t quite save himself. No, the knotty, comical conclusion demonstrates he’s had a guardian angel all along, or, more accurately, a guardian god of machine, the surveillance state as both a deus ex machina and a savior, I swear to God, which is the darkest, funniest thing in the whole movie, a movie that dismantles the system as one not to be trusted but also the only hope that we have.

Juliet, Naked

In “First Reformed”, as a Reverend suffering a health crisis and a crisis of faith, Ethan Hawke gave a beautifully modulated performance, conveying a placid exterior meant to mask an anguished interior, understanding that his character’s torment never made itself visible, not until the very end, glimpsed merely in voiceover. In “Juliet, Naked”, on the other hand, as Tucker Crowe, a cult singer-songwriter who has not so much fallen on hard times as fallen off the grid, leaving a trail of divorces and children in his wake, Hawke lets it all hang out. He’s grown his hair shaggy and put on serious paunch, seriously accentuating it with his ratty t-shirts and posture, sort of thrusting the paunch out as he walks, take it or leave it, he seems to be saying, which brings home the way he plays the entire part. He is not someone who’s made peace, necessarily, but who has figured out how to just sort of ride the waves of life, doing so with alternate bemusement and struggle, someone who hardly seems to believe he was this other person so long ago yet simultaneously fesses up to the scars he left. A phone call Tucker makes to the daughter he’s never met is a familiar moment that feels new given how Hawke gives his character an earnest if bittersweet respect for his daughter’s wishes.

We learn about Tucker through the eyes of Duncan (Chris O’Dowd) a professor whose real job, so to speak, is Tucker Crowe, overseeing a Tucker Crowe fan group and running a web site entirely dedicated to their favorite recording artist, not just his music but his personal life and all the attending conspiracy theories. When Duncan receives an acoustic recording of Tucker’s most cherished album – called Juliet, Naked – as the movie opens, the Tucker enthusiast gushes about it online, to which his long-suffering girlfriend, Annie (Rose Byrne), perhaps having just suffered long enough, or perhaps genuinely not caring for the recording, or perhaps both, types a reply of pointed disagreement, peeving her generally inattentive boyfriend. Tucker, however, lurking online, sees Annie’s comment, emails her, and sparks a “You’ve Got Mail”-ish friendship that teases blooming into something more.

This is where we should stipulate that “Juliet, Naked” is based on a book by Nick Hornby, that longtime chronicler of music-obsessed manboys. Yet Hornby did not write the script. It was a screenplay by committee, including two women, beginning with Tamara Jenkins (and Jim Taylor) and concluding with Evgenia Peretz. That’s crucial. If normally Duncan would be the principal character, here he and his boorish behavior take a backseat, moving out of his house with Annie and essentially out of movie too when he cheats on Annie with a colleague whose appreciation for Tucker is more attractive to him than the actual colleague. It essentially moves Duncan out of the movie too, though he tries worming his way back in, never successfully, his late film plea to Annie functioning as deliberate desperation rather than enlightenment, a moment Byrne brilliantly plays not with any kind of creeping reassessment but self-evident truth that she’s already moved on.

If Hawke’s character bears similarity to his own life, in so much as he too has long been grappling with the after-effects of divorce, so does Byrne’s, her career too often marked by mere Love Interest roles where she is afforded one funny line for every four-to-five funny lines of the male lead, if she is allowed one funny line at all. “Juliet, Naked”, however, is Annie’s movie as much as Tucker’s, as if director Jesse Peretz saw this as an opportunity to see “High Fidelity” through the eyes of Laura. Byrne runs with the role, mining pathos from comedy and comedy from pathos, playing Annie not as someone trying to find herself but as someone who already has a solid sense of who she is and now is trying to figure out where she fits into this suddenly brand-new world.

Annie and Tucker’s ensuing relationship is never exactly unpredictable, evinced in his one-song keyboard concert where he is reluctantly re-enlisted to embrace his musical roots, which Hawke at least plays with an admirable sheepishness acknowledging the inherent schmaltz, but neither does it compulsively trend toward neat resolution. Annie and Tucker enjoy one another’s company, and that company makes them happy, but they also don’t submit to the myth that this happiness alone makes them complete. They need space to figure things out, and even as the movie winds up, they still haven’t figured everything out, only found the wherewithal to give it a go, standing, I realize now, in stark contrast to that rigid dictum what’s-his-name, that little green dude, espoused about how you only do or not. Nope, little dude, sometimes there is a try.

Avengers: Endgame

As the title suggests, “Endgame” is not a film unto itself so much as a culmination, the apex of a 22-movie series that began with “Iron Man” (2008). If certain films in the series that have felt singular (like “Black Panther”), and if “The Avengers” films themselves have occasionally included lyrical moments (like the beginning of “Endgame” and ending of “Infinity War”) as well as strong performances, they have nevertheless been comprehensively designed in concert with their Disney overlords as one continual product, a kind of movie franchise as pop art project, as much an ongoing TV show as a movie, where missing one or more episodes can you leave you adrift, with fan service the predominant aesthetic experience. All kinds of movies have easter eggs, but I struggle to recall another movie where characters themselves are easter eggs, like Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), there for roll call rather than any real reason, foreshadowing a movie in which the whole narrative exists to engineer a curtain call.

“Avengers” movies have always been best as cinematic cocktail parties, seeing fine actors hob-knob in spandex, but the preceding “Infinity War”, saddled with an overabundance of characters, too frequently played like a cocktail party interrupted by another round of introductions. As such, the supervillain Thanos (Josh Brolin) offing so many Avengers at that movie’s ending was a blessing in disguise, making the “Endgame” cast list much more manageable for directors Anthony and Joe Russo whose most notable filmmaking flourish is the simple act of blocking, squeezing everyone into a frame, Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) going here and Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) going there and having him folds his arms and having her hangs her arms at her side for a little variation. And that’s fine! The actors are the best part, never appearing burdened by the weight of a $356 million film, emblemized in how Bruce Banner and The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) have merged into Professor Hulk, improbably, wonderfully rendering him as a go-with-the-flow green guy in a quarter-zip sweater.

Robert Downey Jr., meanwhile, as Tony Stark/Iron man is by now as thoroughly familiar with his role as Johnny Depp was with Captain Jack Sparrow, though the former remains completely engaged, perhaps because Stark has never seemed like much more than an outgrowth of its actor’s own personality. If, however, he has often felt like a one-man show even amidst such a gargantuan ensemble, here a comic partner emerges in Scott Lang – i.e. Ant Man – played by Paul Rudd whose own gift for pithiness perfectly matches Downey Jr.’s. Chris Hemsworth, meanwhile, as a pot-bellied, put-out Thor, comically, deftly employs the quest of saving the world as means to get his god of thunder’s groove back. And then there’s Brie. Larson, that is, Captain Marvel. Her character comes across both indispensable and superfluous, barely there, which is a shame because she so expertly, winningly demonstrates the same movie star quality as her eponymous film from earlier this year. The moment in which her character eyes Thor as the latter summons his infamous hammer further evinces her intuitive understanding of how minimal movement and one single, small facial expression can harness the camera’s full power. A single Larson eyebrow raise, in fact, packs more jolt than one more, for old time’s sake, pseudo-climactic action setpiece so hazily imagined it virtually shrinks the otherwise expansive big screen canvas.

The characters’ mission, meanwhile, is a time heist, which isn’t my term but the movie’s, an idea culled from Ant Man’s time in the quantum realm, a plot point mostly unexplained because it is plucked from an earlier movie, one I missed, an example of how classic, concrete, self-contained narrative in an otherwise narrative movie is mostly absent. Nevertheless, they will go back in time to acquire the six infinity stones before Thanos gets them and goes and does what he did (again). If it sounds nigh implausible, these movies have always been jokey, rest assured, as the term “time heist” denotes, and the description by Banner almost approaches the lofty heights of the droll time travel explanation in “Star Trek IV.” It’s so flip, in fact, that other movies are cited as time travel inspiration, including “Back to the Future”, a reference transforming into homage when the characters beam back to actual scenes in previous “Avengers” movies and skulk around to find the infinity stones, a la future Marty McFly invading The Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. If that sequence was the high point of “Back to the Future II”, so too is it the high point of “Endgame”, which has all kinds of fun with these scenarios and even injects a little poignancy by way of Tony Stark’s chance encounter with someone significant from his past where Downey Jr. demonstrates his ability to invite empathy amidst absurdity.

Then again, if this moment suggests time travel as something more than a mere plot device, easy sentimentality is all that emerges, “Endgame” remaining oblivious to the larger questions the time heist intrinsically raises. The “Avengers” movies have always been rife with fundamental ironies, like the diabolical Ultron denouncing humanity’s inability to evolve in a movie struggling to evolve too, and if time travel in and of itself might consist of them boldly going where no one has gone before, it is simultaneously a return to where they have already been, evoking the whole series and portending Hollywood’s future. Early, while Earth is still recovering from Thanos’s destruction, Captain America née Steve Rogers has apparently become a therapist, counseling people to “move forward.” Evans’s air, however, betrays his lack of faith in this advice and “Endgame” itself bears him out, its characters not simply struggling to square with what they’ve lost but furiously working to ensure that what they’ve lost doesn’t have to be, not so much boats beating against the current as actually reversing it. Almost 100 years after “The Great Gatsby” franchise filmmaking, by golly, has found a loophole: they have their cake and eat it too.

keira knightley needs a f***ing cigarette

Dissecting a Scene from A Star Is Born

The pivotal moment in Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born” happens in a grocery store parking lot where his country rock star Jackson Maine and Lady Gaga’s aspirant pop star Ally are talking after hours. If she has not chased him away, she still hasn’t let him in, but then she does when she begins composing a song freeform, harkening back to the moment in the cop bar just before that has led us here when she tells him she doesn’t sing her own songs. She doesn’t sing them not because she doesn’t think they’re good, necessarily, but because she’s afraid of being seen, literally or otherwise. But by singing to him here, now, she’s letting him, and him only, see her, the true her, which he picks up on, perking up, in his own hangdog way, listening.

If Cooper prefers keeping his camera in his actors faces for most of the movie, here the camera is deliberately just behind them, cooling its heels just over their shoulders, as if we are eavesdropping on this private moment. That privacy is underscored by the natural sound design, which is just Gaga singing and the wind blowing, the latter of which the below screenshot almost imperceptibly picks up.

The song she’s singing is, of course, “Shallow”, and she’s creating it on the fly because she’s communicating to him how she sees him. “That’s me?” he says. “That’s you,” she says. It’s hard, however, to make it seem as if you are simply pulling lyrics out of thin air, in the throes of inventing a mind-bending bit of tuneage that in a parallel universe might win an Oscar. Even Joaquin Phoenix couldn’t quite do it with “Folsom Prison Blues” in “Walk the Line.” And Gaga can’t quite do it here, either, especially after she stands up...

...and then imparts how she’d been working on the song and needed a chorus which she conveys by closing her eyes and kind of wrinkling her nose as a means to denote that “Hey, I’m thinking here.”

I don’t mean to knock Gaga. My God, I love Gaga more than anyone! But in moments like these the actorly holes, like it or not, emerge in her performance. (Could Marisa Tomei have effectively wrinkled her nose? I’d bet yes.) Then again, it doesn’t entirely matter. Because her stock-in-trade is stardom, not acting, which is why when she simply exists on screen, she sets the whole screen on figurative fire. And so, as she crinkles her nose, Cooper tightens the camera to cut out the grocery store sign so it sort of looks like she’s standing on a festival stage, like she actually will later, and as she rips into the full force of the song, throwing her arm forward, twice, she’s in her element, and in that element, no one – that is, no one – is better.

Which is why when she concludes, he looks down, as if needing to gather himself.

Then he looks up with an expression that is almost sickly, as if there is some strange continuum between illness and eurphoria that circles around and meets somewhere. It’s the face of a man who can’t quite believe what he’s seeing.

It’s been a decade now since I started listening to Gaga – a decade and not eleven years because I’m often late to the biggest pop stars – and, for reasons too lengthy and self-indulgent to address here, she metamorphosed from someone who made music I cherished into my heroine. A lot of what’s she done since I’ve adored, and some of what she’s done since hasn’t been my coiffure accoutrement, and I’ve never ever stopped loving her, but, as happens in the arts, other artists come along and, well, “your old music cannot sustain you through a life,” as Nick Hornby once wrote, and so I fell for other pop divas, Little Boots and Carly Rae Jepsen and a host of others. It wasn’t quite like initially encountering Lady Gaga, of course, because how could it be? Except that, selfishly, admittedly, “A Star Is Born”, whatever else it was, which was considerable if also lacking, gave me a chance to sit in that parking lot in Jackson Maine’s shoes and see Lady Gaga for the first time all over again.

A Plea for the Kidman-Verse

“Part of the journey is the end.” – Tony Stark, Avengers: Endgame (2019)

“As if!” – Cher Horowitz, Clueless (1995)

Last week the first trailer for the [editor: plz confirm # of spider-man movies i don’t have the energy to look it up] “Spider-Man” movie, “Spider-Man: Far From Home” was released. Jon Watts’s movie is apparently set in a post-“Avengers: Endgame” universe which simply amazes me because it means, apparently, that the Endgame really wasn’t the Endgame which was the only “Endgame” theory I had all along. And if you thought “Spider-Man: Far From Home” was going to be the Endgame that “Endgame” wasn’t then you were probably surprised when Budweiser doubled down with Bud Light. Indeed, the trailer features a scene in which Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury, sort of “Mighty Aphrodite’s” Greek Chorus for the MCU (Marvel Comic Universe), explains that Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio is from an alternate dimension to which Spider-Man née Peter Parker replies: “Are you saying there’s a multiverse?” Gawd. Whatta move. It made me think of the moment in “Risen” when Joseph Fienne’s Roman military tribune hears of this Jesus guy’s promise of eternal life and mutters “What a marvelous recruiting tool.” The MCU is eternal movie life! It never ever dies! I mean, they really are gonna milk this thing into the year 9595. Movies are dead; the MCU has risen.

I don’t mean to begrudge Marvel fans their “Avengers” love. Truly, I don’t, despite all the pseudo-pithy comments made here and in the past. I saw an old friend from high school post a lovely tribute on Facebook to “Avengers: Endgame” and the twenty-one movies preceding it and how they brought his family together throughout, echoing Maya Phillips's reckoning with the Marvel movie universe at The New Yorker when she wrote how “(t)he narrative worth caring about becomes the story of one’s own interaction with the M.C.U.” Just as I argue for and defend a critic’s inalienable right to an aesthetic appraisal of any film, large or small, and strenuously object to any Rotten Tomatoes-addled eggheads who erroneously contend such appraisals somehow constitute a refusal to “let people enjoy things”, I hold holy a fan’s right to form totally partial, overly emotional attachments with works of art they truly love. I am sometimes a critic, sometimes a fan, just a fan with a little more arthouse DNA, which is why I blog before you today not to say stop this cinematic cross promotion, since you can’t stop what’s already here, but simply ask that if this is to be our present and future then it’s only right to afford fair and equal multiverses.

And that is why, loyal frustrated followers, random, confused readers, and Hollywood, to ask, on behalf of my artsy fartsy acolytes, many of whom are fanboys and fangirls of a different sort, worshiping at the chic altar of another superhero, for a Nicole Kidman multiverse.

Kidman has superhero movie experience, of course, appearing in “Batman Forever” and so why can’t Millicent Clyde take a portal from “Paddington” to there? Millicent Clyde, evil taxidermist extraordinaire, would stuff and mount the Batman and his bird-brained bro and then admire them in her tony London flat while sipping Pimms and lemonade (and telling The Riddler, in that peerless way Kidman can imperiously reproach, that riddles are for children, leaving him to toddle off with his cane between his legs, never to be heard from again). That’s the superhero movie the Kidman Krew wants to see!

Why can’t the darkly transcendental ending of “Destroyer” not really have been the ending but Erin Bell gaining access to the Dogville, Colorado dimension where she proceeds to put us out of our misery by putting Lars von Trier out of his thereby blowing up the von Trier-verse and retroactively wiping our minds of any von Trier movies we might have seen?

Why can’t Suzanne Stone get alternate dimensionally air-dropped into that yacht in the middle of Pacific in “Dead Calm”? Can you imagine Suzanne Stone going toe-to-toe with Psycho Billy Zane?

Charlotte Bless should be in every movie, if only just in the background somewhere.

Why can’t Charlotte Bless move into Stepford? Charlotte Bless v Glenn Close? Yes, please!!!

Why can’t there be a parallel universe where Virginia Woolf is married to Kyle Miller in “Trespass” not simply so we could see Virginia Woolf sagely observing her way through a home invasion but so we could see Virginia Woolf married to Nicolas Cage? WHAT SORT OF BLOCKHEAD WOULDN’T WANT TO SEE THIS?

And what if – go with me here – Dr. Claire Lewicki was, via the Nicole Kidman Multiverse, able to rip a hole in the “Days of Thunder” universe to follow Cole Trickle through to the “M:I” universe to finally, once and for all, settle the score with you-know-who. It’d be like Kerrigan v Harding but for the big screen which sounds to me like a pitch that would make the marketing suits who think creativity is just a synonym for synergy salivate.

Little Woods

Writer/director Nia DaCosta has said her feature film debut “Little Woods” was intended as a contemporary western, an apt description. Indeed, frequent shots of vast North Dakota skies feel, taken in conjunction with DaCosta’s world-building, less evocative of an expansive horizon and new frontier than end of the world. The film opens with Ollie (Tessa Thompson) meeting her parole officer (Lance Reddick), close to fulfilling her obligations after a short prison stint for smuggling and selling oxycontin, but her mentioning a possible job of Spokane is imbued with the air of a pipe dream. It’s less a tangible prospect then a signifier of her burgeoning individuality in contrast to familial duties, her sister Deb (Lily James) having just become pregnant and their family home set to be repossessed by the bank at week’s end, another idea culled from westerns, pitting the individual against the community. And so even if Ollie yearns to flee, she sticks around, threatening to sink her parole by returning to the oxy trade to scrounge up some suddenly necessary cash.

This convenient confluence of events puts the narrative on a clock, an often effective tool for suspense, though DaCosta counteracts much of this nominal thrill with an overly neat plot where every element slides too obviously into place, where every roadblock can be spied from up ahead, and why as the film winds toward its theoretical smuggling pièce de résistance DaCosta just sort of lets it fade from view to focus on the surrounding social context. The latter suggests Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgian brothers who often use suspenseful scenarios to exert significant ethical and moral pressure on their characters to see how they will react, drilling down to find emotional truth. But the narrative tidying of “Little Woods’” otherwise messy situation, removing any complication from decisions Ollie makes, prevents such emotional truth. What’s more, Ollie is written with little inner life and virtually no dimension, a brief line about the kick she got from dealing drugs forgotten as quickly as it is said, and an idea to which Thompson never plays, preferring straight-forward desperation, rendering her character as something like a stressed-out saint.

That lack of an inner life is extra disappointing because the Yvonne Boudreaux’s production design makes the world of “Little Woods” feel so lived in. Set in one of the many North Dakota boomtowns that have sprung up in the fracking industry’s wake, DaCosta and Boudreaux set several scenes at a strikingly impersonal dormitory where workers who have come from wherever hole up and an early scene shows Ollie selling coffee and breakfast sandwiches out of the back of her truck to fracking workers because food, like everything else, has become overpriced. Money is foremost on the mind in “Little Woods”, and not just in terms of the foreclosure but Deb’s pregnancy too, described not as miraculous but expensive, evoking the incisive line of Stephen Karam’s Pulitzer winning play “The Humans”: “Don’t you think it should cost less to be alive?”

That question fuels the conclusion, one involving an illegal border crossing and a dangerous delivery, two events that, like elsewhere, are devoid of their inherent tension. It’s unfortunate, rendering the broader points of socialized medicine and a network of women helping other women in a world where men are conspicuously portrayed as unmindful savages as obvious statements rather than the outgrowth of the film’s own drama, muting their effectiveness. There’s a moment when Deb visits an abortion clinic and, trying to pass off a phony Canadian ID, tells the woman at the desk she doesn’t have her social security card. A look passes over the worker’s face that evinces suspicion about this story but empathy for the position that no doubt sprouted from the need to try and sell this story, a delicate middle ground in a mere moment that the movie overall fails to walk, demonstrating how a split-second, everyday decision can take courage and change someone’s life.

Her Smell

In marrying grunge visionary Kurt Cobain, 90s Riot Grrrl Courtney Love was often seen as an interloper or an interferer, castigated, in that sweeping sort of way, as a witch, of sorts, like she cast a spell on her husband, which was the only way she could have landed him in the first place. It’s a familiar stereotype of famed rockers partners, like Yoko Ono, who blatantly turned the screw with the song “Yes, I’m A Witch.” Stevie Nicks, meanwhile, built her whole extraordinary career off subverting the witch trope. Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), something of a Courtney Love analogue, driving force behind a fictional influential alt rock band called Something She in Alex Ross Perry’s stupendous “Her Smell” is not so much a witch, despite briefly nibbling on the necks of a few peers and calling them “my witches”, as cast under a spell of celebrity. Perry conjures this supernatural sensation in league with sound designer Ryan Price straight away in the opening scene where a night-omnipresent low cacophony on the soundtrack suggests crowd noise until it gradually dawns on you that it’s something else, a pervasive kind of murmur, suggestive of the sound design on David Fincher’s “Seven”, like a creeping sonic stink you can’t get rid of, and in the context of some far-out religious ceremony in which Becky is half-partaking and her goth vibes and her trippy incantations emit the sense of her own negative energy. Indeed, when she leaves the room, this sound noticeably stops; when she returns, so does the rumble.

This sequence sets the film’s tone, a series of five oft-confrontational, dialogue-driven set pieces giving us a front row seat to Becky’s mental and emotional unraveling, as if we are flies on the wall at Nellcôte for the recording of “Exile on Main St.”, stalking through green rooms and recording studios like every person she encounters is another bridge to be instantly doused with gasoline. She flits about accosting her bandmates, her ex-husband and his fiancé, treating her own daughter less like the infant she is than some inhuman rag doll, and exasperating her record label impresario Howard, played brilliantly by Eric Stoltz with simultaneous cool patience and sneaking stress, demonstrating the toll dealing with rock stars takes, where every cigarette he smokes is not a prop but a lifeline. And Perry’s camera, jittery and up close, places us squarely not only in Becky’s headspace but all those stressed-out souls in her orbit, occasional cuts to long shots, which typically recount someone other than Becky, emitting the air of momentous relief.

If it is deliberately repetitive, Moss’s incendiary performance is not, playing the role so high on her character’s supply that she is virtually suspended in the orbit of her own vehement ego, not merely intoning that these mere mortals can’t keep up with her but living it out in the jarring speed of her line delivery and surprising dexterity of wit born out in the script’s dialogue despite her obvious chemical dependency. And for as bracing as the material is there is a surprising rush of joy coursing through the performance, with Moss playing Becky like she’s getting a kick out of swan diving into the gutter, frequently proffering an observation or dry joke so cutting and comical that you will just suddenly feel joy or laughter welling up inside in spite of all the ick you were just feeling. These witty eruptions are sudden windows into what must have made Becky a significant artist and beloved bandmate, just as the film’s concert prologue gives a glimpse of the band’s sonic glory.

That’s all they are though, glimpses, as Perry pointedly forgoes a rise and fall narrative, airdropping us directly into the fall, which is partially provocative but more in the service of truly thrusting notions of redemption under the microscope. When the movie finally cuts away from the harsh lighting of rock clubs and music studios for the airy, earthy tones of Becky’s home, where she sits in pajama pants and a sweater eventually visited by her ex-husband and now adolescent daughter, she might be working toward clemency, but the scene’s sensation is still isolating, underscored by the photography’s chilly hues. By only showing us at her worst, Perry is challenging us to still hope for the best while demonstrating the inherent difficulty of that challenge. That comes through further in the film’s fifth and final stanza, a Something She reunion, in which the claustrophobia and sinister sound design return. Perry mines incredible suspense from the recurring idea of Becky vanishing before shows, the entire sequence resting on a knife’s edge, seemingly primed for an explosion only to unexpectedly bloom into exorcism.