Friday's Old Fashioned: The Glory of Sport (1948)

The 1948 Olympics, both Winter and Summer, back in those days when they took place in the same year rather than in two-year intervals, were the first Olympic Games since 1936, the 1940 and 1944 editions called off on account of WWII. You might think, then, that director Castleton Knight’s official documentary of the Games of the XIV Olympiad would linger over this fact. Really, though, aside from opening invocations about competing in the name of peace, as well as recounting the entrance of France, America and England, back to back to back at the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies, never mind the conspicuously unmentioned absence of Germany and Japan, “The Glory of Sport” is not inclined to address this head-on. Indeed, as if seeking to reset The Games in the wake of war, it begins by going back to the beginning, images of the Parthenon and imagining the torch relay, which was invented by Nazi Germany, as staged by the Greeks for the Ancient Olympics, as if reframing the ritual like it belonged to the Gods rather than the wannabe ones. The staging of this sequence, with dramatic narration, resembles a Biblical Epic from the 1950s, which is a whole new look for these Olympics Movies. Part of me wonders if Knight’s entire movie might have been wise to maintain this Biblical Epic veneer, in fact, given the more modest ambitions of what ensues.

“The Glory of Sport” does not crosscut between the Winter and Summer Games but recounts them in order, the Winter version in St. Moritz followed by the Summer version in London. Some of the most striking footage here is of the alpine resort town in Switzerland’s Engadin Valley, a reminder of when the Winter Games, still in their infancy, felt more like “a chilled, charmed kingdom somewhere over an Arctic rainbow,” to borrow William Oscar Johnson’s quote. The quaint Olympic Stadium is nestled at the foot of a mountain, most of the events take place outdoors, right alongside big banks of snow, like the primitive-looking Skeleton race which is literally just a chute carved out of the snow. And while I logically grasp why the latter can’t be the case anymore, it is nevertheless hard not to argue that it is more aesthetically joyful. 

The events, however, like most of the events chronicled at the Summer Olympics, are mostly packaged like a newsreel of the era, with accompanying voiceover. There are thrilling moments, certainly, contained within, like the skeletons going up and over the infamous Shuttlecock corner or how Knight manages to transform a seemingly staid Equestrian event into something thrilling through nothing more low angles and dramatic music, but more often than not these recounting of events merely seem to exist as visual stat keeping. By no means does “The Glory of Sport” want to recycle the sort of propaganda peddled by Leni Riefenstahl for the 1936 Games, but Knight’s approach remains a far cry from films of the future, like “The Melbourne Rendez-vous” (1957), carved predominantly out of humanity and the innate drama of specific moments. 

When Knight does locate those moments, they are expectedly transcendent. The myriad heats of the Men’s 100m dash, all in lockstep, begin to blur into a dull stew until, for the final, he suddenly slows down and lingers over the silence before the starting gun while the musical score (by Guy Warrack) opting for frenzied woodwinds for the hammer throw transforms an oft-overlooked event into something like athletics meteorological event, a metal ball attached to a steel wire as a muslin sock. At an Equestrian event, a rider falls of his horse and tries, unsuccessfully to retrieve it, momentarily transforming The Glory of Sport into The Principles of Comedy. Best of all, though, is a crash during the cycling road race where two fallen cyclists argue. The camera’s position, far back in a long shot, wrings humor from this moment too, the two men bickering as bicycles keep passing in the background. Oh, but when the movie cuts to one of those peeved competitors sitting under a tree, defeated and forlorn, the humor gives way to heartbreak. 

Pitch Meeting: Goldfish

You have probably seen the story, the one about goldfish being deposited into lakes and growing to sizes seemingly impossible for small specimens mostly known, perhaps, for being starter pets of children who generally forget they even have them in the first place. If people are being cautioned against this, I thought, then perhaps it is time for a cinematic cautionary tale, a la the 1980 horror movie “Alligator”, which memorably warned us against flushing alligators down the toilet. And so. 

I thought about young Raina Shockley in Judson, Ohio improbably winning a rigged carnival game where she somehow manages to land a ping pong ball in a fish tank, winning the goldfish swimming therein. A burgeoning environmentalist, however, and not wanting to keep a goldfish cooped up in one of those scrawny tanks, she decides of her own volition to release the itty bitty freshwater fish into nearby Buttle Lake, bidding it a fond farewell, to live its best fish life. A sweet moment, however, grows ominous as the camera pulls back to reveal the nuclear reactors bellowing smoke just behind the quietly lapping water.

Flash ahead a couple decades and Raina (Abbi Jacobson), having grown up to be an ecologist and having not been to her hometown in years due to Reasons To Be Written Later, is reluctantly summoned back home by a Fish & Wildlife Service Agent Gary Hadwin (Burl Moesley) after strange doings out at Buttle Lake. On what seems like a routine excursion, Gary is eaten alive by a goldfish the size of a 1980s Buick Station Wagon, which follows Raina ashore, improbably able to breathe on land (“like the Northern Lodgepole,” observes Raina), and flaps away.

Raina and Judson Sheriff Joe Wheed (Michael Shannon) are then forced to pursue this nuclear waste-fueled goldfish as it flaps from lake to lake, wreaking havoc along the way, seemingly bent on reaching Lake Erie, and seeming to recognize Raina. “That’s impossible,” says Sheriff Wheed. “Everyone knows goldfish have no memory.” “That’s a fallacy,” explains Raina. “They have memory up to five months. And if its memory was nuclear powered, there’s no telling how far it might go back.”

Their pursuit, meanwhile, is complicated by the unwelcome presence of both Howard Faberghanz (Kevin Corrigan), president of the local Nuclear Power company who claims he is just here to make amends to the community but secretly wants to sell the goldfish to a Detroit fishmonger for a hefty price, and Stan Jervis (Bruce McGill), calling himself the best big game hunter in the Midwest until it becomes clear he just works the gun counter at the local Cabela’s.

Some Drivel On...Murder at 1600

1997 was not just the year of dueling volcano movies – “Dante’s Peak” and, obviously, “Volcano” – but of dueling White House sex thrillers too. After all, you-know-who was in the White House. Clint Eastwood’s “Absolute Power” arrived first, an adaptation of David Baldacci’s airport rack thriller with a couple coats of auteurist varnish. “Murder at 1600”, which hit theaters a couple months later, is just trash, or at least should be, opening with a comely White House intern found murdered in a White House bathroom. She is the same comely intern we see only moments before splayed out with an unidentified male on the Resolute Desk of the Oval Office, the camera tilting down to the Presidential Seal. If this suggests an Alan Pakula thriller for the Clinton Era, melding “Klute” with “The Parallax View”, forget about it. But then, “Murder at 1600” is never even as tawdry as this sequence suggests. Indeed, the close-up of George Washington’s eyes on the Gil Stuart painting seems to evoke a sort of tsk-tsking, a dressing down of the whole situation, that this is unbecoming of the Presidency and of the Presidency’s house, a mood the whole movie maintains. Virtually taking a cue from its most memorable line of dialogue, briefing White House staff on avoiding the words “woman” and “murder” when discussing what happened, “Murder at 1600” is weirdly prudish, not salacious. 

After the intern is discovered dead, Washington D.C. homicide detective Harlan Regis (Wesley Snipes) is summoned to investigate with Nina Chance (Diane Lane) as his Secret Service Liaison. If the case seems open up and shut, a male janitor seen harassing the dead woman having his button turn up in the bathroom, you undoubtedly know the rules of the road enough to know it isn’t. This button, in turns out, was originally found in the dining room, suggesting the fix is in, and also suggesting the sort of intramural sleuthing that defines “Murder at 1600”, blatant clues like jumbo sized bread crumbs, substantial red herrings, not to mention dutiful adherence to Ebert’s Law of Conservation of Characters which doubles as how high up your name comes in the cast list – that is to say, Tate Donovan as the President’s skeevy son cannot be quite as important as Alan Alda as the President’s National Security Chief. (Spoiler alert!) The latter ties directly back to a brewing North Korean hostage crisis which seems like a backdrop to the murder but gradually becomes paramount, “Murder at 1600” ultimately proving as interested in geopolitics.

“Murder at 1600” itself is almost as sterile as a crime scene, virtually devoid of atmosphere. The prologue, in which some burned out Beltway bureaucrat stands on the street in front of a frightened crowd threatening to blow his brains out, suggests something, at least, a city and its denizens holding on by a thread. Alas, this is just set-up to introduce the superfluous recurring bit about Harlan’s looming eviction as well an opportunity to see Harlan work his semi-ass-kicking magic. Mostly director Dwight H. Little’s style is just stock scenes of Washington D.C. and routine action scenes chopping up the sleuthing, culminating in a White House break-in through the mystical tunnels located beneath 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which is nowhere near as fun as it should be. The concluding face/off brings all the characters onstage together, allowing for a climactic Teddy Roosevelt quote and giving the stand pat President (Ronny Cox, barely there) a chance to stand up, one final underlining of the kind of blasé two-dimensionality defining the entire film.

As Regis, Snipes is given nothing to play, or at least nothing interesting. Initially the character is written as a fish out of water, gawking at the White House interiors as he is escorted through to the scene of the crime, but that mostly falls by the wayside. Harlan’s hobby, meanwhile, of constructing Civil War miniatures is cited as a kind of “therapy” given his occupation, though Snipes never lets us feel the weight of anything much, no matter how deep into the political murk he wades. Even the eviction looming over his head is just comic relief. Lane has even less to play, though she at least evokes an almost infuriated fatalism when her character reluctantly goes rogue by joining forces with Harlan, like she know she’s written her own death sentence, though the plot gives that nowhere to go either. And despite the lascivious nature of the case they are trying to crack, Harlan and Nina are allowed no romantic connection, none, strictly platonic, an odd counterpoint. In that way, then, perhaps Harlan’s hobby is right on. Like “Murder at 1600” itself, he’s a total square.

No Sudden Move

In 1998 Steven Soderbergh adapted the Elmore Leonard novel “Out of Sight” into a crime caper of cool thrills, low-key comedy, and ferocious chemistry between his stars, George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. Tucked in there too, however, was the story of a middle-aged bank robber unable to hack it in ordinary life, adept at getting tellers to hand over envelopes of cash but otherwise unable to keep his head above water in a society ruled by titans of industry. In “No Sudden Move”, then, Soderbergh, along with screenwriter Ed Solomon, essentially fashions his own Elmore Leonard novel for the screen, one giving even more prominence to the plight of low-level career criminals, trying to get theirs only to run afoul of the word and the inevitable way it turns, a familiar fatalism nevertheless given a stupendous droll kick.

As “No Sudden Move” opens, Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle), fresh out of prison in Detroit, is summoned to the barbershop of an acquaintance. Curt walks through the front door, into the backroom and then is immediately directed out the backdoor and into a waiting car, a nifty visual metaphor of underworld and ostensible respectable society’s interdependence. Curt’s mission is to babysit a family of three along with another second-class hood, Ronald Russo (Benicio del Toro), while Charley (Kieran Culkin) takes the patriarch, Matt Wertz (David Harbour), to his boss’s office to retrieve a crucial document from the safe. This all goes wrong, in more ways than one, not only leaving Curt and Russo with a bounty on their heads but trying to acquire the document for themselves to turn a small job into the score of a lifetime.

Though “No Sudden Move” spends much of its first hour withholding information, this is not simply to engender suspense but to put us on equal footing with Curt and Russo. We only ever know as much as they do, unraveling the byzantine scheme right alongside them, while the myriad twists reveal character as much as plot. The house invasion scene is telling, with what we know and what we think we know about this situation and about these people evolving moment-to-moment. When Matt insists he doesn’t have the code to the safe, Charley insists that Matt’s boss’s secretary does and that Matt is, ah, on friendly terms with her. In that moment, Matt and his wife, Mary (Amy Seimetz), exchange looks that signal his adultery which becomes more clear soon enough, just as nominal throwaway mentions of Mary’s son having no clean socks and shots of dishes piled in the sink denote her disillusionment in the role of housewife. 

Even a sequence where the next-door neighbor, Dawn (Katherine Banks), inadvertently interrupts this invasion by knocking at the door is not just for suspense but set-up, a small but revelatory payoff when the movie hints on a forbidden relationship between Mary and Dawn, adding retroactive depth to the looks they exchange in that necessarily terse exchange at the front door. And this, in tandem with Seimetz’s aching performance gradually turns a crime thriller into a slow burning domestic drama too, where the costume design frequently matching the production design (a red coat and a red door) belies how underneath that flawless exterior everything is all fouled up.

Such dollops of unexpected character emerge in the turns of Cheadle and del Toro too. Though racial tension exists between Curt and Russo, that is brought to a low boil as the characters form not so much a friendship as a mutually beneficial partnership, warily keeping one eye on each other and one eye on the prize. Cheadle’s hardened gaze exudes command and trepidation in equal measure, operating predominantly in a white man’s world, walking straight into danger while always figuratively looking over his shoulder. As Russo, on the other hand, del Toro is all comically skeptical facial expressions, as if meeting a sloped world on its own terms, and though the character is cunning, he is also a drunkard. Not a drunken lout, mind you, as the small pours from his flask into coffee cups and the decanters he generously helps himself to at wealthy people’s houses all gradually, wonderfully add up in del Toro’s performance so that, by the end, hanging out a car window, it’s as if every drop of liquor Russo imbibes throughout has finally taken hold and he looks like he’s going to puke up his whole damn life. 

The all-important document, which Curt and Russo do eventually acquire, both is and is not a MacGuffin. We discover what it is, or what information it contains, and though that information hardly matters, sort of summarized in a throwaway title card at the end, it plays a vital role in the emergent story nonetheless. All sorts of little details, like the document, redlining, and so-called urban renewal, are not mere window dressing but vital details that subtly add up to larger world outside the one in which Curt and Russo are trying to ride the wave without capsizing. This is even true of Matt, emerging as a hapless middleman in his own right, concocting an ostensibly life-altering scheme in connection to the same document that leaves him high and dry, his life sentence to the top-down system brought home in a scene where he quasi-confronts his boss by punching him in the face even as he simultaneously apologizes while landing those blows.

A late monologue, recited by an unexpectedly familiar face, might initially come across like so much exposition. In essence, though, he is explaining the Bigger Picture to Curt and Russo even as it goes right over their heads, embodied in the top notch actorly reactions, the way del Toro has Russo just keeps drinking and counting money, like getting paid is all that matters, and how Cheadle has Curt not quite know how to react, like he’s just seen some equation on a blackboard he can’t begin to understand. That lack of understanding, though, is also the ultimate clue. Soderbergh loves his weird angles here, all sorts of tilted shots that are not just for show but deployed in scenes and moments when the character’s world seems most out of whack. The further “No Sudden Move” goes, though, the more that world re-aligns, leading less to some sudden re-ordering of things and then the old order re-establishing itself, which in Soderbergh’s hands feels less like a dramatic A Ha than a ruefully amusing sigh. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Olympics in Mexico (1969)

At two hours and forty minutes, Alberto Isaac’s official documentary of the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics, explanatorily titled “The Olympics in Mexico”, is not quite as long as the more elephantine Bud Greenspan entries in the genre, like the nearly five-hour “16 Days of Glory”, yet just as comprehensive. It not only manages to encompass close to every sport, often in unique ways, it briefly invites us into both the athletes’ village and the International Broadcast Center where the Games are beamed back to various homes around the globe while also briefly digressing on the complementary Artistic and Cultural Olympic Program, a way of promoting Mexico to the world as much as the Estadio Olímpico Universitario. Greenspan, though, prefers making moving history books with dry, omnipresent narration, an approach that Isaac eschews by keeping the narration to a minimum and elucidating through images. Bob Beamon’s world record long jump is first seen in real time, then run back and shown in a slow motion, lingering over what the naked eye can hardly comprehend, before witnessing his famous reaction, falling to his knees and sobbing. The way Isaac recounts the latter, in handheld close-up, so that one moment Beamon is just smiling and dancing and the next he drops right out of the frame, brings to life the sensation of the long jumper feeling the weight of what he’s just gone and done. You don’t need the narrator to tell you the mathematical particulars to grasp the incredibility of his achievement.

“The Olympics in Mexico” begins, as so many of these movies do, with the opening ceremonies, concluding on the multitudinous white doves released as a symbol of peace represented in those five interconnected rings. And boy does Isaac linger over those doves, not just showing them in wide shots but in close-ups, aggressive close-ups, putting the doves right in our face, almost as if trying to make up for never mentioning, never mind not showing, the Tlatelolco massacre in which hundreds of people protesting the Olympics being held in the country were murdered by Mexican Armed Forces just 10 days before those same opening ceremonies. Such oversights trickle down to competition too. True, there are details “The Olympics in Mexico” could not have known at the time, but there is something deeply ironic in the movie noting the plethora of world records that fell by showing us the historic shot put victory of Margitta Gummel, who time later revealed as one of the first East German athletes administered steroids. Oops! To Isaac’s credit, though, he does not shirk the prevalent Black Power protests of American track athletes, even if the narrator never says anything about them directly, where an image of the three African-Americans who finish 1-2-3 in the 400 meters for the U.S.A. in black berets makes them look like Black Panthers. And though see the famous image of 200 meter Gold and Bronze Medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos bravely saluting Black Power on the medal stand, what resonates even more is the slowed down sight of Smith crossing the finish line with his purposeful black socks pulled so high, Black Power as poetry in motion. 

A lot of time is spent at the track, though Isaac mines impressive clips from small moments while also dressing up unlikely events in sweeping drama. The shot of American high jumper Dick Fosbury giving a “Why Not?” shrug to the official he asks to raise the bar to a world record height to take a crack at breaking it captures an athlete in the midst of intense competition still finding whimsy while after the narrator addresses the inherent visual weirdness of the 20km walk event, in which competitors must always keep one foot on the ground, making them look like strange birds, he honors the great drama of the final lap, cutting between wide shots to delineate the pace of the race and close-ups to capture the competitors’ pained expressions, freeze-framing the conclusion for a splendid split-second to let us drink in the runner-up’s stricken face, dipped down just below his vanquisher, laying bare the agony of defeat.

If the walking sequence suggests how Isaac manages to find lyrical flourishes in sports you would not expect, he unfortunately cannot elevate everything. The poetry of basketball and swimming elude him. But by finding another angle of diving, rather than the shots from the side that dominate television production of the sport, placing his camera low and directly behind the platform, he emphasizes just how small and lonely each diver looks set against the enormity of the board. Better yet is water polo, which the wide angles of TV never truly honors, Isaac switching between above-water and below-water close-ups to really bring home the physicality and violence of the game while the whistles this physicality and violence constantly render is edited into a virtual symphony. I wish Isaac would produce all water polo Olympic telecasts! And though “The Olympics in Mexico” briefly evokes the pampered pageantry of equestrian with an aerial shot of the island paradise of a venue, he finds something more as the competition proceeds, where horses sometimes refuse to jump and fight back when they fall. And when heavy rain turns the course into a flooded river, it improbably resembles “True Grit.” 

“The Olympics in Mexico” ends with the men’s marathon, not just reveling in the winner but the loser too, the ultimate loser, meant in the most exemplary way, John Stephen Akhwari of Tanzania. Shown cramping up midway through the race, he limps to the finish line in a mostly empty Olympic Stadium nonetheless as those remaining cheer him on. As he limps around the track, Isaac cuts wide, framing Akhwari below a digital scoreboard bearing the words MEXICO 1968, a fitting period on a fine film of a fantastic Games. 

Some Drivel On...Goodbye, Dragon Inn

I saw  “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” (2003) for the first time at the Music Box Theatre, as part of their Back On The Big Screen series, celebrating our return to the theater after (the first stage of?) COVID-19. That might sound a little Magic of the Movies™-ish, but despite being set in a movie theatre, “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” has less in common with, God, I don’t know, “The Majestic” than another movie in the Music Box series: “Days of Heaven.” True, “Days of Heaven” takes place almost entirely outdoors and and “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” takes almost exclusively indoors but the spirit of, respectively, Terrence Malick and Ming-liang Tsai’s movies are nevertheless similar. Indeed, a few days after watching “Goodbye, Dragon Inn”, in one of those rare moments reminding you of social media’s occasionally potent value, I stumbled upon a Tweet by Sujewa Ekanayake, director of the forthcoming “The Secret Society for Slow Romance”, observing that “Minimalist composition in movies, where it is one or few characters in a vast, empty landscape, may appeal to us at some level because it reflects the vastness and the silence of the universe.” He could have been talking about both movies. 

Ming-liang Tsai declares his intent immediately with a low-angled shot peering down a dark alley, toward the movie theatre’s exterior, as rain patters the cement. A figure hurries past, dodging puddles, and enters the theater. The camera, though, does not follow him nor immediately cut to an interior shot. No, Tsai holds the shot as-is, inundating us in the rhythm of the raindrops, advising that here, in “Goodbye, Dragon Inn”, the camera will hang on longer than we might be conditioned to expect. Yes, “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” is about the closure – or, temporary closure – of this movie theatre, but it does not explore this in narrative terms. There is no narrative. It is a movie told through images, the framing of them, the editing of them, the choice of where to look and where not to look. It might not be casually inviting you in, as a more mainstream movie might do, but asking you to surrender yourself to it anyway, the overriding purpose of any movie, really, arthouse, mainstream, or otherwise, which is the magic of the movies.

The opening image of “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” is of the theatre’s movie screen, right down front and up close, close enough that we are both aware of the boundary between fiction and reality and how near we are to that boundary dissolving. The next shot is a wide one, of the crowd watching the movie, delineating that boundary more clearly while also summarizing cinema as a communal experience. The third shot is from behind a curtain peering out at the screen, evoking a point-of-view though whose point-of-view we do not know. Perhaps it’s the cashier (Chen Shiang-chyi) we eventually meet; perhaps it’s the Japanese tourist (Mitamura Kiyonobu) who enters the theatre as the movie starts; perhaps it’s the usherette in Edward Hopper’s 1939 painting New York Movie. I mean, why not? We eventually learn the theater is haunted, so why can’t the usherette be permeating this place too? If some have compared that Usherette to the disinterested barmaid in A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, in his book “The Whole Equation”, my man David Thomson sees this woman in a more absolute light, either standing in a paradise or a prison.

“Goodbye, Dragon Inn” feels a little less like a cinema paradise and a little more like a prison, both isolating and aggravating. When the cashier is on screen, Tsai emphasizes her loneliness, tromping with a leg brace that echoes down empty hallways, leaving a steamed bun as a romantic invitation for the projectionist who refuses to appear. When the Japanese tourist is on screen, Tsai comically exaggerates the everyday annoyances of moviegoing in how the character is haunted by ghosts of rude movie theatre patrons past even as his gradually self-evident unsuccessful cruising aspirations underline his lonesomeness too. Two men, meanwhile, watching the martial arts movie on the screen, 1967’s “Dragon Inn”, we realize are in the movie itself, meeting in the lobby afterwards, more melancholy than mirthful, remarking it has been a long time since they have gone to see a movie, seeming to suggest a dreary future where art is inconsequential except to the few who make it. 

We never get a full look at the theatre until after “Dragon Inn” concludes, those stark white lights jarring you out of the dreamworld, making me think about modern theatres and their predilection for immediately transitioning to in-theater music when a show ends, almost as if being made to sit there in silence with nothing but your thoughts is too grave to bear. But there is no in-house music in “Goodbye, Dragon Inn”, just the sound of the cashier’s leg brace and dustpan as she goes up and down the aisles and through the rows, sweeping up what mess there is. It feels as if she has been stranded in the vastness and silence of the universe, the movie theatre offering no refuge at all. 

Summer of Soul

There is a moment in “Summer of Soul” when Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., who up until this point have simply been reminiscing about their performance at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival in Mount Morris Park, sit back and watch that performance. And we watch them watch their own performance. If it sounds tedious, it is anything but, as revealing as it is moving. The subtitle of “Summer of Soul”, “… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised”, has already been disputed, if not outright refuted, by Greg Mitchell, not only noting that CBS and ABC aired primetime specials that same year recounting the event but how the footage shot by Hal Tulchin was not, contrary to the doc’s introductory title card, necessarily buried or forgotten, just never made into an official movie, for one reason or another. Even so, that only two years ago the 50th anniversary of the other 1969 music festival was commemorated with an extravagant 38-CD box set, Woodstock – Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive, while the Harlem Cultural Festival has since 1969 mostly been limited, as Mitchell notes, to a few YouTube clips, it is not a stretch to say one has been limitlessly mythologized and the other confined to American history dustbins. And so in watching Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. watch themselves, they become like most of the rest of us, seeing this for the first time.

“Summer of Soul” was directed by Amir Thompson, better known as Questlove, leader of The Roots and musical director of the current Tonight Show Band, but also a renowned D.J., a profession demanding an ability to dig in the crates, as they say, unearthing music made rare by time and unavailability. In essence, “Summer of Soul” is one enormous act of digging in the crates, combing through Tulchin’s footage and then cohering it into a finished product, one eschewing demarcating exact dates and times, preferring to let organizer and host Tony Lawrence’s joyfully outrageous rotating wardrobe delineate time’s passing instead, and to elicit the sort of sensation conducive to a lyrically faulty memory, where a whole summer in retrospect seems to take place in the space of a single afternoon. 

And if Questlove undoubtedly could have harnessed this material into one of the great concert films, a la “Monterey Pop”, given the fest’s conspicuous erasure from American histories, he instead makes a documentary, examining rather than simply re-living, to give the fest its rightful due. So, too, does he forgo a superfluous overview of Black American history, rather using the Harlem Cultural Festival to demonstrate what it meant to be a Black American at this time and in this place, and then innately tying those themes to the music. Sometimes the performance renders that connection for him, like Nina Simone holding the park in the palm of her hand, and sometimes he deploys talking head interviews, not around the songs but within them, which further illuminate those songs instead of mucking them up. McCoo and Davis Jr. explain the 5th Dimension was often viewed by radio as not being Black enough, transforming their riveting performance of “Let the Sunshine In” into a manifestation of the Reverend Jesse Jackson at another point in the documentary imploring the crowd to decree “I’m Black and I’m proud.”

Questlove, though, does not limit his interviews to just the festival’s performers. He invites spectators to recount their experiences as well, underlining how the festival was as much about those in the crowd as it was about those onstage. “As far as I could see,” says Musa Jackson, who just a child when he attended the festival, “It was just Black people”, brought home in the movie’s exhilarating colors, where in our modern era of drab movie photography both the predominance of Black skin and the performers’ clothes positively pop. The anecdote of Darryl Lewis, who was 19 when he attended the fest, about he and his friends being, quote-unquote, Temptation guys until they saw the Sly and the Family Stone and then became, quote-unquote, Sly guys is a personal reminiscence making plain the changing demographics and sounds of music. 

Indeed, in “Summer of Soul”, Sly and the Family Stone seem to transcend all boundaries entirely, in their lineup’s diversity (“The white guy is the drummer!” exclaims Lewis), in their psychedelic clothes, in their sound. America has long been in need of a new National Anthem, as much in a melodic sense as a historical one, and seeing them perform “Everyday People” in Mount Morris Park made me realize it should move to the top of the list. “I mean the cat really insecure a little bit,” Jimi Hendrix was heard to say on Woodstock – Back to the Garden, “so they call girls groupies and they call girls this and they call passive people hippies and blah blah woof woof on down the line.” I wrote that quote down when I read it because it mesmerized me so much, a low-key denunciation of categorizing people and walling them off, and it came back to me hearing Rose Stone sing “And so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby”, succinctly, poetically distilling America’s creed down to a single line.

Though given its time and place, at the nominal end of the Civil Rights Movement, the Harlem Cultural Festival sometimes feels like a shining Black American frontier, epitomized in then-NYT correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault recapping her ultimately victorious insistence that the Paper of Record transition to using “Black” instead of “Negro”, there are nevertheless numerous inherent reminders in “Summer of Soul” that not all American frontiers are created equally. I don’t know if it was kismet or simply shake-your-head reality that the moon landing took place one of those Sundays in Harlem, captured for posterity through newsreels in which solemn white reporters interview skeptical blacks. If they can’t understand why a lofty national goal would need to take the form of a moonshot rather than giving aid to struggling neighborhoods, they also see the Cultural Festival itself as their Apollo 11. Not for nothing does Questlove tag this lunar-minded passage with Stevie Wonder’s performance of “Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da Day”, his keyboard solo sounding more cosmic than any Saturn V rocket. Different strokes for different folks.

The music in “Summer of Soul”, though, is not just cosmic but spiritual too. Edwin Hawkins notes that many Black people had turned away from the church, leaving them unsure where to go in the greater scheme, though the documentary argues Mount Morris Park is exactly where they went, gospel music as therapy, to paraphrase the Rev. Al Sharpton in talking about Mahalia Jackson who duets with Mavis Staples on the gospel standard Take My Hand, Precious Lord. Questlove cuts between the performance, conveyed in close-up, like the barrier between pew and pulpit has momentarily been eradicated, where Jackson truly seems to have opened up a channel to Providence, and wider shots of the stage, where Jesse Jackson giddily bounces on his toes behind them, the Reverend as a member of the congregation, and shots of the crowd too, like a young man in thin sunglasses whose jaw gradually goes slack in this stupefied sort of smile, like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. You could watch a hundred concert documentaries and not see so magnificent a manifestation of music as religious experience. 

Space Jam: Dirty Work

(AP) July 27, 2027 – Even with Warner Bros. beaming the newest entry of their “Space Jam” Warner-verse series into the North American night sky on Friday and Saturday evenings so that people could watch from the comfort of their own backyards and through sunroofs if they happened to be stuck in traffic, “Space Jam: One on One” slam dunked the competition to earn $52 million this weekend. Zion Williamson, Bugs Bunny, and Yosemite Sam did not have to say their prayers in stopping the two-week run of the seventh Spider-Man reboot, “Spider-Man: At Great Length”, as king of the box office. This despite earning a 0% critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes for a movie in which Williamson plays the Gopher from “Caddyshack” in winner-take-all game of one on one.

The fifth film in the series was so successful that Warner Bros. immediately announced plans for a sixth, “Space Jam: Dirty Work.” A well-placed source inside the studio says this movie, too, will take place in the Warner-verse, where John McCabe of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” arrives in the town of Presbyterian Church in 1902 to not merely open a brothel, like the 1971 Robert Altman film, but to erect a rudimentary basketball court to spearhead a gambling venture.

In the movie, the source says, McCabe will kidnap various Looney Tunes characters and force them to play daily against revolving teams of miners, gunfighters, and drifters in contests upon which everyone is invited to wager and that, given the timeframe and relative infancy and lack of understanding about the game, are less like basketball than mud wrestling. Fed up, the Looney Tunes make a wager with McCabe, that if they beat his most fearsome lineup (one likely to include Zod, Ursa, and Non of “Superman II”), they win their freedom. The Tunes proceed to enlist Hall-of-Famer Dennis Rodman as a mentor in the ways of getting down and dirty, throwing elbows and bending the rules to your advantage when no one’s looking. 

The late Anthony Mason will also play “himself” as an A.I.

The Cannes Brûlé Palme

The story goes that on March 29, 1743, King George II stood up during the chorus of George Frederic Handel’s Messiah, prompting the crowd to do the same, history’s first standing ovation. Of course, as James Bennett II noted in noting this for WQXR in 2017, “the reason for that ascendant, magisterial behavior” was lost to time. Was it reverence, restlessness, something else? Who’s to say? Whatever the reason, apocryphal or not, the story is nevertheless instructive. Not simply because the King stood but because everyone did. That might be because as the King does so do you or else, tyranny, in other words, which is the word Jesse McKinley used, or his headline writers did, in a 2003 piece for The New York Times detailing the phenomenon, deeming it “The Tyranny of the Standing Ovation”, where even the most subpar Broadway shows could be labeled as successes simply because they got standing ovations every night. “Now the standing ovation is de rigueur,” McKinley quoted Liz Smith saying, meaning required by etiquette, unofficially expected, cosmically contracted, which is precisely why I am suspicious of so many standing ovations. If the performance moves you that much, then stand, go for it and God bless. But if it didn’t, don’t, otherwise, what does it mean? Squat, that’s what, just a blasé automatic exercise, like the encore at concerts. When I saw Lissie at Lincoln Hall in 2013, she apparently judged our concluding applause unsatisfactory and did not emerge for an encore. If I was disappointed, I was honestly even more impressed. Make it count! 

That brings us to Cannes, the prestigious annual film festival in the south of France. Cannes is essentially a burger topping bar when it comes to standing ovations. What good is a burger if you can’t slap fried mac cheese on top it, or an entire mackerel fillet, or put the burger inside a root beer float, bun and all? Standing ovations at Cannes don’t even register on the applause scale if they don’t last some excessive amount of minutes. At this year’s festival, Matt Damon’s “Stillwater” received a five-minute standing ovation while Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” received a nine-minute standing ovation. But these ovations hardly compare to the Cannes standing ovation record, an absurd 22 minutes for “Pan’s Labyrinth.” Nicole Kidman’s “The Paperboy” earned a 15-minute standing ovation in 2012 which naturally prompts the question of why that splendidly pulpy performance of Kidman’s didn’t earn her a second Oscar. (Probably because these ovations are meaningless.) Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” got a 13-minute standing ovation while his “Fahrenheit 9/11” was the runner-up to “Pan’s Labyrinth” with a 20-minute ovation, two times that seem to suggest the Cannes cronies simply want to come across more liberal than YOU. Leos Carax’s “Annette” received a five-minute standing ovation this year, putting it on par with “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Inside Llewyn Davis”, not to mention “Stillwater”, among others, though “Annette” had something the rest did not.

Kyle Buchanan did an amusing “anatomy” of “The French Dispatch’s” standing ovation, taking us through the entire nine minutes to demonstrate the inherent absurdity of these exercises in deliberate excess. But “Annette’s” Adam Driver, captured for posterity by Ramin Setoodeh, sort of deconstructed the standing ovation in his own way, lighting up a cigarette a few minutes into the applause and then exhaling into the camera’s lens, seeming to symbolically suggest that all this was merely them blowing smoke up his own ass. Just as good, however, is his co-star, Marion Cotillard, glimpsed in the background and reaching a point where, honestly, she just doesn’t even know what to do with her hands anymore, awkwardly rubbing them together like they’re covered in hand lotion with this pursed lips quasi-smile of a guest who is ready for the damn dinner party to be over. 

And that is why even if a photo from Cannes in which the respective fashion spirit animals of “The French Dispatch’s” Timothée Chalamet, Wes Anderson, Tilda Swinton, and Bill Murray clashed so amusingly and mightily that social media memed it into oblivion, the winner of Cinema Romantico’s not-famously un-exalted Brûlé Palme, a variation on Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or, awarded each year to Cinema Romantico’s favorite Cannes Film Festival attendee, goes not to that quartet but the duo of Cotillard and Driver, bless their souls, not so much standing up to the tyranny of the standing ovation as, in true French fashion, casually dismissing it as so much crap. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Hot Rock (1972)

“The Hot Rock” begins with a short sequence of John Dortmunder (Robert Redford) being released from prison and ends with a short sequence of him walking the streets of New York City, having pilfered the stone that gives the movie its title. That suggests a straightforward heist movie, one chopped up into your usual three heist movie acts – decide what to steal, plan to steal it, steal it. This is not “The Hot Rock.” Written by William Goldman, based off Donald Westlake’s novel, “The Hot Rock” is four heist movies in one, with the big heist coming early and going wrong, yielding even more elaborate, if ineffectual, heists melding comedy and suspense so nimbly that at certain points, like a Let’s See What Happens stomach-dropping helicopter ride over the Hudson River and past New York skyscrapers, they ineffably merge. This tone is also meant to epitomize Dortmund, who is at once a master thief and yet constantly in prison, capable of big plans but just as capable of having them go wrong, suggesting a simultaneous swaggering genius and haplessness, though of all the elements here it is Redford’s performance that proves the weak link, not quite ruling “The Hot Rock” out of order but weighing it down nonetheless. 

The rock itself is the Sahara Stone, a precious jewel that belonged to Dr. Amusa’s (Moses Gunn) African nation until it was stolen during colonial times, and then stolen by other African nations, eventually winding up in the Brooklyn Museum. Wanting it back for his people, Amusa enlists Dortmunder and his brother-in-law Andy Kelp (George Segal) to steal it back for his people. All this is laid out in a scene establishing director Peter Yates’s wry approach. Amusa sits on a park bench but a good few feet over from Dortmunder and Kelp so as to talk without appearing to look as if they are talking. It’s not so much that eventually a woman plunks down on the bench between, putting a crimp on their covert chat, because that twist feels expected and Yates never transforms it into the belly laugh it should be, as it is Amusa giving a monologue on the meaning of the stone while staring straight ahead, as if he is talking to no one, this and Dortmunder and Andy only superficially listening, all taking the piss out of the mission’s inherent nobility. It goes to show how the best humor in “The Hot Rock” comes from figurative odd angles, where another movie might not think to look, like a later break-in at a police precinct to recover the stone which explosives expert Greenberg (Paul Sand) has hidden there after being nabbed that becomes less about the break-in itself than the oblivious police lieutenant who thinks he has put down a vigilante uprising. 

This park bench sequence also sets up the movie’s crucial relationship between Dortmunder and Kelp. If the former is insulted by Amusa’s offer of financial compensation, he gets up and walks away, seen in long shot, while Kelp rushes after him and tries to talk him down, eventually returning to Amusa and re-negotiating. In a sense, Dortmunder is the talent and Kelp is his manager, trying to tip-toe the line between keeping his client happy and pleasing the guy for whom his client is working, all brought home in Segal’s ebullient voice, each subsequent setback just a chance to sell his operation that much more. “My guys thrive on challenge!” he exclaims in one scene, looking for all the world like the Hollywood producer Stanley Motts in “Wag the Dog” putting a happy face on a dumpster fire. In one scene, where the crew tries to thwart Greenberg’s father (Zero Mostel), who has his own designs on the stone, they really do go Hollywood, putting on a show in which the movie’s turn toward the frighteningly grave proves to be nothing one more than big got ya. 

But that’s also part of the problem. This scene tip-toes up to the edge of serious only to pivot all the way away from it, epitomizing the whole movie, except that Redford is the kind of actor who is always serious. Indeed, if my first time watch a few years ago of the mostly somnambulant something-or-other “Legal Eagles” (1986) was good for anything, it was to put into perspective how, movie star aura aside, Robert Redford can’t do comedy. “The Hot Rock” provides further evidence. Scenes where his character is purportedly felled by a bad stomach never take humorous flight and in scenes opposite his sister, including one where he is briefly left in charge of her infant, fall flat. This is not even the worst part. Goldman’s screenplay writes Dortmund as someone with high regard for himself only to have that swelled head repeatedly cause him to bite off more than he and his crew can chew, but Redford just plays the part with a swelled head, meaning that he is playing exactly what the movie is trying to parody, emitting an odd sensation of a leading man who might as well be walking around the whole movie with a Kick Me sign stuck to his back.

Who Should Play Kurt Warner's Hy-Vee Supervisor in American Underdog?

Though I’m excited to see Kurt Warner, my native Iowan homey, get his own movie, I have a sneaking suspicion that such a biopic, based off his memoir “All Things Possible: My Story of Faith, Football, and the First Miracle” won’t be any great shakes, less insightful, never mind challenging, than an IV drip of pious sentimentality, like a vacation Bible study version of “The Replacements”, or something, like if the main character of “Hoosiers” was Strap, just without the cornball wit. But perhaps I’m telling tales out of school. After all, as Proverbs says, a prudent man watches a movie: but a fool watches a trailer. And what interests me most about “American Underdog: the Kurt Warner Story” is not predetermining the movie’s quality but theoretically determining who could play Kurt Warner’s supervisor at Hy-Vee. 

Hy-Vee, sort of the Publix of the Midwest, is a crucial component of the Kurt Warner story. After starring at Division I-AA Northern Iowa for a year as quarterback, Warner failed to make a go of it on any professional level of football and was reduced to stocking shelves on the overnight shift at a Hy-Vee in Cedar Falls. In the the recently released behind-the-scenes quasi-trailer we see him standing in the Hy-Vee aisle, longingly gazing at a Wheaties box, which, my God, sometimes a prudent man does watch a trailer. But there is also a scene where he is playing catch with some other stock clerk in the aisle and inadvertently sends that stock clerk crashing through a display, putting into context why the screenplay is credited to David Aaron Cohen, Jon Erwin, Jon Gunn, and Algorithm. And while the IMDb credits list a Hy-Vee Customer and a Hy-Vee Son and a Store Clerk, they do not list Hy-Vee Supervisor, which I believe to be the most critical role here, even more critical than former UNI Coach Terry Allen, to be played by Adam Baldwin in what I can only hope is an appropriate Allen-ish moustache. (Anna Paquin plays Warner’s wife, Brenda, betraying, as Colin McGowan astutely noted, how much we, as a society, have failed Paquin.)

Who should play this imaginary Hy-Vee Supervisor? Well, the obvious answer is Bruce McGill since Bruce McGill should be in everything. But Bruce McGill is already in “American Underdog”! He’s playing Jim Foster, commissioner of the Arena Football League, where Warner improbably rose to prominence, a man who once told Sports Illustrated that his league made sure to eradicate any possible Donald Trumps as owner. Respect.

Hmmmmm. So, who else who could play Warner’s supervisor? Well, Kevin Corrigan should be in everything too, of course. I like imagining him putting down the starry-eyed Warner (“You couldn’t beat Western Illinois and now you’re talking like you should play for the Bears”) and then, happening upon his young charge gazing at the Wheaties box, walking up, putting a hand on his shoulder and saying “Follow your dream, Kent.” “Kurt,” Kurt would say. “Whatever,” Corrigan would say and then walk away. But, a Hy-Vee supervisor with a New York accent? I dunno.

Maybe that’s why we should cast David Anthony Higgins, a native Iowan, who could not only lend Hawkeye State credibility but spiritually call back to his definitive role on “Malcolm in the Middle.” 

Dean Winters might be good because he could ably embody an ex-high school jock, ostensible star quarterback of the Waverly-Shell Rock football team that went 2-7 in 1991, who keeps challenging Warner to passing contests with cans of Chunky Soup. But like those Allstate commercials, I fear Winters might be too Dennis Duffy-ish.

That’s also why we might want to hold off on Jason Sudeikis, despite his Midwestern roots, because he might be too Ted Lasso-y. 

Picture this man as a disgruntled Hy-Vee supervisor lecturing a future pro football Hall of Famer.

Matt Malloy would be fantastic. Can’t you just see him marching around the corner in a huff to find this store clerk lying in the mess of the fallen display, putting his hands on his hips, frowning, exerting his minimal authority to the fullest?

Paul Walter Hauser would be the fantastic opposite to Malloy. He would round the corner with, like, an armful of Captain Crunch boxes to find the store clerk lying in the mess of the fallen display and just sort of sigh and barely wield his minimal authority because he hates this job so much.

But in the end, I suppose, what we really need is an open casting call in Cedar Falls to find the most gangly, unenthusiastic teenager possible, to both improbably stand taller than the movie’s Warner while being his younger, couldn’t-care-less supervisor, the perfect juxtaposition of sorrowful comedy.

The Witches of the Orient

“The Witches of the Orient” takes its name from the Nichibo Kaizuka, a women’s volleyball team established in Kaizuka, Japan that graduated to national team status, representing their country at the 1960 Tokyo Summer Olympics. Of course, witch is a loaded term, replete with sexism and racism, which the documentary lays bare in its opening archival images of an anime show depicting a bewitching woman luring a man into her sorceress trap. It is an opening just as evocative of director Julian Faraut’s approach. This story, in which the Nichibo Kaizuka win an unprecedented 258 matches in a row and a Gold Medal, is the stuff of a thousand sports documentaries providing the middling sweep of a middle school history textbook. Faraut, though, bless his heart, thinks in images, eschewing generic narration to instead illustrate his ideas and themes through scads of archival footage, yielding a refreshing, often moving formal experience. And though “The Witches of the Orient” convincingly argues the team was part and parcel to Japan’s post-WWII rebuild on display at their 1960 Summer Games, in giving a few still living members of the Nichibo Kaizuka a voice, none of whom had ever spoken about their experience before, the documentary transcends their nationalistic cocoon to present them as individuals.

As the documentary opens, the former players who agreed to be interviewed gather for dinner, the camera circling them but not intrusively, more like a fly on the wall, as interested in what they have to say to each other as to us. When they do communicate for our benefit, it is not through typical talking head interviews but in voiceovers, ones which Faraut lays over top of everyday images of the women: riding a bike through the rain to the grocery store, taking a bus and staring out the window, coaching volleyball practice. This, in tandem with the kind of stream of consciousness speaking style, like Faraut is just letting them go rather than asking a series of questions, wonderfully lives out the idea of getting lost in memory while life goes by. 

The women were not simply volleyball players; they worked by day in a textile mill in Kaizuka before practicing late into the night until that practice was deemed satisfactory, and then waking up the next morning and doing it all over again. To illuminate this idea, Faraut rhythmically cuts back and forth between footage of workers inside a textile mill and the players practicing volleyball, the two seemingly disparate acts bleeding into one another with a kind of Wax On Wax Off poetry. Despite such lyricism, some of the other uncovered footage also makes plain the brutality these practice sessions, the squad’s coach, Hirofumi Daimatsu, launching volleyball after volleyball, like a human batting machine, at players as they slide left to right and back again, over and over, trying to dig each ball before it hits the floor. It resembles an unrelenting game of dodgeball in which no one is ever considered “out.” The players admit they questioned such intensity at the time, and the relentless savageness of this passage might make you wonder where such high-level sport is worth it, though “The Witches of the Orient” being afforded the passage of time means these interviews are reflections rather than instant reactions, informed by matter-of-fact perspective. One former player notes that after volleyball, she never really felt tired again.

If this passage of endurance and exceptionally hard work effectively counteracts the supernatural notion of their Witches of the Orient sobriqu, Faraut wades into the mystic elsewhere. The Nichibo Kaizuka’s key triumph over the Soviet Union at the 1962 World Championships begins with basic black and white newsreel footage before segueing to the game itself, which Faraut intercuts with images from an anime fantastically reimagining the same contest, the electronic music score by Jason Lytle rendering it not suspenseful but coolly thrilling, a sequence dramatizing how a volleyball team was elevated into the realm of mythology. For the conclusion, however, at the 1964 Olympics, Faraut noticeably keeps the heightened anime interpretations to just the crowd and the announcers, presenting the Japanese team itself as live and in color. That Gold Medal, it was no myth; it was the real thing. 

The Courier

The opening of Dominic Cooke’s “The Courier”, in which a Soviet intelligence Colonel, Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), begs a couple of American tourists to deliver a letter to the U.S. Embassy partly injects a few thrills right off the bat, yes, but also foreshadows Oleg’s dependence on ordinary folk to get information to the West to hopefully prevent nuclear catastrophe. Ordinary folks like Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch). A gregarious British businessman, the first time we see Greville we hardly even see him at all, just his feet, or his golf shoes to be exact, on the green with a few clients, cracking wise. Of course, his missing a putt on purpose to help seal a deal might be shrewd business but it also demonstrates a penchant for subterfuge, one that will come in handy when he is unexpectedly summoned from the living room chair where he prefers to settle in after a day’s work to take a phone call that will change his life.

“The Courier” is set against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and while we do glimpse Khrushchev in an early scene giving a fiery speech to the hordes, director Dominic Cooke’s movie does not retell this U.S./Soviet standoff through the eyes of the major players but key players in the background, those more likely to watch the events unfold on television, to somehow feel the importance but not necessarily the immediacy, like it’s a world away. Indeed, when Greville sits down to lunch with Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan) and Dickie Franks (Angus Wright), officers of the CIA and MI6 respectively, the way Cumberbatch plays the moment mirrors his earlier drink with clients. When his counterparts, however, explain why they are really there, to use his business as a cover for being courier to Oleg, sneaking information out of the Soviet Union and to British intelligence, the camera shifts from head on to the side and seems to lose Greville in the shadows.

At first, as Greville goes back and forth, and Oleg comes to London, the spycraft seems simple, if not carefree, underlined in a montage set to Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.” But when Greville thinks his mission is complete, Emily asks him to go back in because the nuclear threat is worsening, an indelible scene where Brosnahan’s mellowness suddenly, perceptibly shifts as she impresses upon him the global danger of what’s about to unfold and how it could harm him, his wife, his children. If she’s not necessarily wrong, there is nevertheless something manipulative about this moment, which Cooke does not let pass unnoticed by highlighting in the face of Franks in close-ups, like he can’t believe she’s going there. 

There are familiar elements to the genre that Tom O’Connor’s screenplay, alas, cannot evade, like trouble on the homefront. Still, as Greville’s wife Sheila, Jessie Buckley brings a refreshing dignity to the part. She is not just his shoulder to lean on and she is not just weepy-eyed when he keeps abandoning his familial responsibilities for reasons he cannot share; Buckley ensures we sense a line being drawn in the sand between the two, putting into stark light the whole business (about country or friend). Greville, meanwhile, is set up as a drinker and carouser to lend credence to the script’s feint that Sheila thinks he is having an affair, though “The Courier” never really sees it through and Cumberbatch is playing boisterous more than lecherous. At the same time, however, Cumberbatch and Ninidze deftly evince a surface level friendship almost imperceptibly giving way to fierce loyalty so that Greville’s bravest decision, choosing to help Oleg flee the Soviet Union, seems to rise from within Cumberbatch, as opposed to merely being the product of a dramatic moment in the screenplay, while their moved yet mournful demeanor in a scene where they stand and applaud at the Bolshoi casts it as nothing less than a last supper.

It is a last supper because it precedes Greville being imprisoned after unsuccessfully attempting to help Oleg escape the Soviet Union. Here, however, is where Cooke’s penchant for aesthetic flourishes, weird angles and eerie shadows, catches up to him, transforming what should be terrifying into a lengthy passage too arty for its own good. Cumberbatch, at least, is up to the challenge. There is a vacancy in his eyes throughout, rhyming with the strange sight of his shaved head, suggesting what confinement will do to a man. Even better, though, is the sequence in which he enters prison, like an inverse of the end of “Captain Phillips”, where rather than the pressure of the entire ordeal suddenly, innately spilling out of him, Cumberbatch plays  not with panic or even fear but a dazed sensation suggesting the sudden paralysis of life as you know it being gone. 

Gone For a Few