State of Play / Random Awards 2024 (truncated ed.)

The more movies you watch, the more you realize the Academy Awards are merely a drop in the bucket of film. Even so, I have always loved the Oscars. Because films are movies too and movies need a little glitz, glamour, some searchlights, and giant self-regard. Yet, as the 97th Academy Awards approach, I struggle to remember in the 30-plus years that I have been watching them when they have felt so small, so unglamorous, so inessential. It is not just the wrenching fallout of the Los Angeles wildfires, nor the pall cast by America’s Useful-Idiot-in-chief casting our lot, apparently, with the new Axis of Evil in addition to all the other acts of virulent stupidity. No, it’s the movie themselves. It was a year so uninspiring that for the third time in the last four, I was not even compelled to compile a Top 10 list, underlined in the underwhelming collection of Oscar nominees that not only failed to enter the zeitgeist but seem to suggest, as Matthew Gasda did for his Substack, the Academy Awards have been gamed.

Now that is not entirely a new phenomenon. Before optimization became the trendy buzzword of the tech bros who would change your life (while stealing its pertinent details), studios were always seeking to game the awards system. Mark Harris’s book Pictures at a Revolution is partly about how “Dr. Doolittle” luncheoned its way to a Best Picture nod in 1967 while Miramax optimized its own kind of Oscar movie in the 90s and the aughts and then relentlessly, viciously promoted them. Many of those Miramax pictures were, in fact, just outgrowths of what critic Dwight McDonald once deemed Midcult. In his piece, Gasda quotes McDonald explaining Midcult: “the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity [covered] with a cultural fig leaf.” In other words, rather than focus on making a quality film that might ultimately appeal to the Academy, you reverse engineer it by working backwards from the Academy’s taste. The bigger problem, however, is that now this suboptimal approach to art is threatening to become the American movie industry’s prevailing method. 

In a comprehensive piece for N+1 Will Tavlin guides us through the streaming titan Netflix’s entire history from a mail rental company chewing up Blockbuster to a vertically integrated behemoth that is reshaping, if not ruining, the film industry by putting the cart before the horse, as they say, and working backwards to create movies by harnessing the data of viewers to then turn around and meet their expectations rather than seek to surprise of subvert them. Movies are no longer the end, as Tavlin writes, they are the means to the end, the end being subscribers. Netflix acquires and then keeps them by relentlessly churning out content, ensuring there is always something else on; you can log off, but you can never leave. They produce this content in-house, a la the old studio system but without a genuine commitment to craft, evoking a modern variation of “The Producers” in so much as a rushed, shoddy production can be more beneficial than a thoughtful, solidly made one. Their watered-down movies might as well be television, blurring the line once and for all between the two, an art form intended for the big screen reduced to what may as well be reruns of “Caroline in the City” on a Tuesday afternoon. 

In an interview on Defector’s flagship podcast The Distraction, Tavlin was asked by host Drew Magary if he saw any way out of this predicament. Tavlin cited federal intervention as potentially the best remedy, as it was in the 1940s when the Paramount decrees negated the big studios’ own vertical integration. He seemed fatalistic about this proposition, though, and it’s hard not to understand why, what with an American government currently being run by a plainly stupid philistine who seems determined in his way to recreate Hollywood in the image of the People’s Republic of North Korea. His maniac second-in-command, meanwhile, is upending government agencies in part by firing scores of people and deploying A.I. software instead and it’s easy to imagine a near future where Netflix does the same, cutting out the middleman between data collecting and artificial intelligence entirely. Distraction co-host David Roth took hope that the janky product this type of method is already eliciting might also elicit pushback, an outcry for a true human handprint. Me, I don’t know, my faith in people has wilted significantly the last few years. 

Still, I did not want to end on such a hopeless note. And so, even if I felt just as unmotivated to compile a traditional Random Awards list as I did a Top 10, I had, nevertheless, jotted down a few Random Awards throughout the year that are vintage in quality and did not deserve to sit in the drafts folder forever. There is quality out there, somewhere. Therefore, a truncated Random Awards. 

Random Awards 2024 (truncated ed.)

Her eminence Nicole Kidman appearing live via satellite from her couch to present the truncated edition of Cinema Romantico’s Random Awards.

Line Reading of the Year: “Hoo boy, Lousy Carter, what the fuck?” - Olivia Thirlby, Lousy Carter. In her immaculate drawing-a-blank deadpan and real emphasis of that concluding question mark, Thirlby hysterically encapsulates just what her character is doing in this moment, delivering the eulogy for an eponymous character who never quite believed in the worth of his own existence. 

Best Use of Wikipedia: Rebel Ridge. If using a search engine is typically a lazy storytelling device, in this Netflix (irony!) action-drama, a bunch of small-town southern cops only realizing a few moments too late what they are up against upon consulting everybody’s favorite free online encyclopedia not only turns a reveal into a hysterical punchline but a hysterical evocation of their own laziness for failing to look into things. 

Best Product Placement: Green and Red M&Ms®, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point. A movie not so much about nostalgia as imbuing nostalgia through aesthetic, “Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point” creates a collage of emotions and feelings and sensory memories more than it unspools a narrative, like a slo-mo shot of so many holiday-themed chocolate confectionaries being poured into a bowl. As they were, I felt myself pulverized by flashes of holiday memory, of a gold-colored Anderson Erickson eggnog carton, of the blue Royal Dansk Danish butter cookie tin my grandmother would bring each December, of Holiday Greetings from Budweiser, in one breath laying bare how Christmas is inextricably intertwined with consumerism.

Best Laugh: Nicole Kidman, Babygirl. As I noted in my review, when another character humorously suggests she always assumed that Kidman’s character was raised by wolves or robots, Kidman’s laugh in response sounds robotic, a real live human being chortling in A.I. It’s a vocally fried chuckle on the level of Meredith Marks, which I understand might not mean anything to most of you but trust me, in the space of that laugh, Nicole touches the face of God.

The Ruffalo (most unsung performance in a movie this year): Hailey Gates, Challengers. As Helen, with whom lothario Patrick (Josh O’Connor) goes on a blind date solely in the hopes of getting a place to sleep for the night, Gates’s character is there to emphasize Patrick’s cruelty and provide a counterweight when the woman he really loves, Tashi (Zendaya), unexpectedly appears. But Gates makes all that count so much more by turning her character into a living, breathing human by effusing an insecurity that borders on tragic. It’s truly a supporting turn and the true supporting performance of the year. 

Best Metaphor: American Star, American Star. Granted, the 1940 ocean liner SS America that wrecked off the coast of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands in 1994 and was just lying there to be gaped at for three decades before finally disintegrating and collapsing into the sea last year, might be an obvious metaphor for a hitman (Ian McShane) aging out of that life and life altogether, an anvil dropped on the head more than merely on the nose. And yet, in the conveyance of this metaphor, and the grave resignation with which McShane receives it, that gargantuan nature is itself an apt metaphor for how it made me feel when at movie’s close, the ocean liner just...disappears. Is that the world, I wondered, passing me by? (Don’t answer that.)

2001 Oscar Best Original Song: Revisited

The nominees for Best Original Song at the upcoming 97th Academy Awards include two songs from “Emilia Pérez,” an original Elton John number from the documentary for his Farewell Yellow Brick Road concert tour, “Like a Bird” from “Sing Sing,” not to be confused with (God help us all) “Like a Bird” by Tiffany T*ump, and “The Journey” by Diane Warren from Tyler Perry’s “The Six Triple Eight.” This is Warren’s 16th Oscar nomination, five shy of Meryl Streep’s 21 Oscar nominations, which are 33 short of John Williams’s 54 and 38 short of Walt Disney’s 59. So, Warren has a long way to go to approach the record, but still, 16 is an impressive haul, even if she’s never won, recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 2022 after getting stiffed all those years. Were all her nominations truly earned?

Gees, I don’t know, and I wasn’t about to scour every year to find out. And though I originally intended to go back to the scene of her first nomination in 1987 for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from “Mannequin,” which stood no chance in the year of “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life” from “Dirty Dancing,” well, in my Best Original Song revisitations, I had already traveled back in time to the 80s, as well as the 90s, and so I figured it was time to bring this pointless exercise into the current century. When Warren was nominated in 2001, did she deserve it given what else might have been nominated that year, and whatever did win, should it have, at least if I, and I alone, were the nominating committee? Let’s find out!

2001 Best Original Song Oscar Nominees & Winner (in bold):

“Until...” from Kate & Leopold – Music and Lyrics by Sting

“If I Didn’t Have You” from Monsters, Inc. – Music and Lyrics by Randy Newman

“May It Be” from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – Music and Lyrics by Enya, Nicky Ryan, and Roma Ryan

“There You’ll Be” from Pearl Harbor – Music and Lyrics by Diane Warren

“Vanilla Sky” from Vanilla Sky – Music and Lyrics by Paul McCartney

Of course, we are required to remember right up front that Best Original Song is strictly limited to original songs in whatever byzantine way the Academy defines originality, eliminating old pop hits used in movies which should be a category unto itself but, as always, do not get me started. That means “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star” by Linda Scott in “Mulholland Drive” and “These Days” by Nico in “The Royal Tenenbaums” are ineligible. Add “69 Police” by David Holmes in “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Beat It” by Michael Jackson in “Zoolander,” and Jamie O’Neal’s version of “All by Myself” in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and, as always, my God, what a category. Alas. 

The unexpected box office hit “Save the Last Dance” hearkens back to the glorious era of Julia Stiles: Movie Star just as the movie itself hearkened back to the golden era of the movie theme song with Fredro Starr and Jill Scott’s “Shining Through” which itself hearkened back to (borrowed from) Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” which is going to touch any Gen-Xer’s soul. As such, it takes the place of Warren’s “Pearl Harbor” theme. Sorry, Diane, you’ll have to settle for 15 nominations. 

At the 2014 Tony Awards, Neil Patrick Harris gave Sting a lap dance during a performance of “Sugar Baby” from “Hedwig and The Angry Inch.” And though the 74th Academy Awards might have finally been ready to give Oscars to two African Americans for leading roles, it probably was not ready for John Cameron Mitchell to give Jack Nicholson a lap dance on live TV. But that’s not my problem. I wish it would have happened, and even if it didn’t, “Sugar Baby” from the movie version of “Hedwig and The Angry Inch” still should have been nominated. And in an ironic twist that I think the writer of “Every Breath You Take” could appreciate, it replaces Sting’s “Until...” and knocks him down to three Oscar nominations all-time.

I’ll be honest, I am desperate to give Natalie Imbruglia a retroactive Oscar nomination for “Cold Air,” her contribution to the “Y Tu Mamá También” soundtrack, but then I re-listened to Enya’s nominated song. And while I might contend the LOTR trilogy is terribly overrated (to paraphrase Elaine Benes talking about “The English Patient,” stop telling your stupid story about the stupid ring and just throw it in the fire already), Enya is not. She stays. 

Paul McCartney had earned both an Oscar nomination and a win thirty-one years before in 1970 for “Let It Be.” But do you know who has never been nominated, before 2001 or after? Her majesty Mariah Carey, that’s who, the same woman who remains but one elusive #1 hit away from tying, ahem, The Beatles for most all-time. And while “Glitter” was a cultural punching bag, set those preconceived notions aside and the fact is, “Want You” should have been a hit itself. A #1 hit? Eh, I’m not sure, maybe more like #26, but a hit, nevertheless, and imagine Mariah following Enya at that Academy ceremony. 

Newman’s victory that year was a big deal given his scads of prior nods and no victory to show for it. You can see how big a deal it was in the reaction after his name is announced and I hate to take that away from him. But he has since gone on to win again, in 2010 for “We Belong Together” from “Toy Story 3,” whereas the late Adam Schlesinger was nominated only once in 1997 for penning the title track to “That Thing You Do!,” losing to Celine Dion’s unbeatable Rose and Jack ballad. And so, with the benefit of hindsight, but also with objective analysis vis-a-vis their two songs and every other eligible song, it is absolutely clear in retrospect that the Schlesinger penned “Pretend to Be Nice” from “Josie and the Pussycats” was the real Best Original Song in 2001. [Bangs gavel.]

Juror #2

Twelve jurors repair to the deliberation room and take an initial vote on the defendant’s guilt or innocence. All of them seem to lean toward guilt, save for one, “Juror #2,” Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), his trepidation emphasized by the heroic figure he cuts, hands on hips, gazing out a window. It evokes the window motif of Sidney Lumet’s celebrated “12 Angry Men” (1957), though Kemp does not quite evoke Henry Fonda’s Juror #8, the one who insists on seeking the truth. Without spoiling anything, suffice to say that Clint Eastwood’s 40th feature film is not about seeking the truth because it reveals the truth almost straight away. Instead, “Juror #2” becomes something more like a courtroom thriller as excruciating moral dilemma that deftly manages to bring itself to a conclusion without giving a definitive answer to the knotty questions it raises. And even if Jonathan Abrams’s screenplay is cloying enough to make the prosecuting attorney’s name Faith (Toni Collette), and even if it relies on a fair number of plot and character contrivances to keep it running, these are effortlessly papered over not just by the performances (I especially liked how grudging Collette makes her character’s turn away from careerism) but by the 94-year-old Eastwood’s patented just-the-facts filmmaking approach. Essentially, “Juror #2” takes the old E.M. Forster observation that “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” and then ruthlessly dissects it bit by bit, rendering a portrait of a key American institution that ultimately is only as good and trustworthy as the complicated people within it.

Hard Truths

“Hard Truths” begins as middle-aged mother and wife Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) wakes up with a scream, as if exiting a nightmare. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that wasn’t right at all; she’s not exiting a nightmare, she’s entering a nightmare, a waking one that never seems to stop. The global COVID-19 pandemic is not explicitly mentioned in writer/director Mike Leigh’s movie, but it is felt, in the sanitizer on the kitchen counter, and the masks that Pansy wears for medical appointments, and the deliberately sterile nature of her home. More than that, though, it is felt in Pansy’s explosive, all-encompassing rage, and how no one is safe from it, whether it’s a doctor or a dental hygienist trying to help her, or an angry man berating her in a car park, epitomizing the decay of public behavior post-pandemic. On several occasions Pansy deems herself “a sick woman” though this sickness is ever explicated, making me think of a different version of Julianne Moore in “Safe,” lashing out rather than shutting down, a woman who is sick but does not know why, plagued by a deep-seated societal disease she cannot name. 

Pansy spends her days caring for and cleaning up after her husband Curtley (David Webber) and adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). At dinner, Leigh’s camera essentially sits in the fourth chair of their square table watching as Pansy, positioned between the two men, airs an unceasing list of grievances while the two men shovel food in their mouths, hardly even seeming to hear what she says, allowing us to feel the weight of a thousand dinners just like this one. Though Curtley owns his own business, he is neither helpful nor industrious around the home, and neither is Moses, though Leigh is shrewd to present them as both part of the problem and undeserving of such bile. Though Moses barely speaks, that does not feel like a mere character tic but an outgrowth of having been worn to the nub. Even his capping scene feels earned, seen in a wide shot that makes it seem like benevolent deity is giving him a nod by giving him a break. 

Pansy is juxtaposed against her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser who listens to her clients and trades jokes with them, and whose knickknack filled home functions itself as a juxtaposition to Pansy’s sterile one just as her buoyant daughters Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson) differ sharply from the morose Moses. It’s almost too sharp a difference, really, between the two, and though Leigh does try to muddy it up with a conversation between the daughters where neither divulges their own troubles in life, it is never followed up, feeling too much like a loose thread. Austin shades her performance with real depth, evincing a genuine patience of what it must take to share blood with someone like Pansy. A visit by the sisters to their mother’s grave becomes the linchpin of the movie, revealing the hardest truth. Though it’s hinted that Pansy has still not recovered from this death, neither is this presented as the ultimate answer as we are conditioned to expect.

Long before the image in which Leigh casts the shadows of venetian blinds across Pansy’s face, the familiar notion of being locked inside a metaphorical prison, Jean-Baptiste has already summoned this sensation in her performance. It’s honestly remarkable what she does throughout “Hard Truths,” and I feel like even now, weeks later, I’m still trying to digest and process it but that the feeling of it lingers. Pansy’s misanthropy evokes Larry David of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” honestly, the bracing humor almost sneaking up on your, and her myriad meltdowns suggest another Julianne Moore character, the one in “Magnolia,” but Jean-Baptiste is not deliberately exaggerated in the same way, neither comedically nor melodramatically. It’s something else entirely. It’s veracity in full roar. She opens a vein and bleeds onto the screen.

Between the Temples

If “The Holdovers” was merely a facsimile of a 1970s movie, right down to emulating the photographic look of a movie from that decade, “Between the Temples” innately evokes the true spirit of a 1970s movie despite being set in the present. It is character-driven, and those characters tend toward endearing oddballs who all feel like real people rather than mere projections of writer/director Nathan Silver, and rather than calibrating its aesthetic for optimal audience love, it gives zero fucks, determined to tell its story on its own terms. Its May-December romance evokes Hal Ashby’s 70s staple “Harold and Maude,” but despite its own character’s not-entirely-serious suicidal tendencies, it feels closer in spirit to one of Elaine May’s 70s comedies, as the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis pinpointed, not least because of its also-innate Jewishness. Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) might be in his 40s but he’s divorced and living at home with his mom Meira (Caroline Aaron), and her wife Judith (Dolly De Leon), meaning he is living in his moms’ [emphasis added] basement; it’s a Marvelous Mrs. Maisel joke written to the screen rather than told.

Recently divorced, Ben is a cantor who has lost his voice, evoked in the opening scene where he struggles to sing the music at worship, fleeing the synagogue instead, lying down in traffic in a comically pitiful suicide attempt that fails, and then repairing to a bar where he gets drunk on mudslides and then into a fight that winds up with him sprawled on a barroom floor where his grade school music teacher, of all people, Carla Kessler (Carol Kane), appears, looking down on him like an eccentric angel. That’s just a description of some plot, but it also conveys the headlong narrative rush of “Between the Temples,” which despite its conventional arc is rendered to feel as it’s all coming together on the fly. That’s underscored in the camerawork, which isn’t passive, willing to get in there with its characters and mix it up, never more than when Ben unwittingly combines meat and dairy with a cheeseburger in rendered in uncomfortable close-ups that seem to evoke the danger and delight of going non-kosher. 

In addition to his recent divorce, Ben is suffering a crisis of faith, even going so far as to visit a Catholic church and chatting with a priest (Jason Grisell). This scene is at once completely earnest and a little absurd, fitting the tone of the whole movie in which Carla wants to have an adult bat mitzvah and wants Ben as her tutor. Having been raised in a communist household without faith, Carla is seeking to embrace one for the first time. And that pursuit is what helps to bring Ben back around to his own faith, re-embracing his more youthful self, a time when he truly believed, underlined in how he might just be falling in love with his pupil, an adult-aged role reversal that Silver’s script simultaneously acknowledges is odd, if not out-of-bounds, but also earnest. It is all at once wrapped up and blown apart at a Shabbat dinner where tension and confusion and cringe comedy come together where nobody seems to believe quite what’s happening.

That’s what the performances of Kane and Schwartzman evoke too, making strong use of her patented eccentricity and his comic incredulousness. It’s as if their characters are being swept along by a mystifying current, and in the electricity and excitement of it, they are willing to go for the ride and see what’s on the other side. Of course, you can be sure that if Ben has lost his singing voice, he will reclaim it, and even if that’s technically a spoiler, it’s not, not really. Silver scores much of the action to unlikely 60s and 70s Hebrew rock songs, embodying Ben’s inner-tempest, but also going to show the music was in his heart all along. 

Babygirl

How do I phrase this delicately? “Babygirl” begins with Romy (Nicole Kidman), ah, moaning in noisy ecstasy as she and her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), uh, conclude their amorous activity. Kidman’s natural sound effects are so over the top, in fact, that it will undoubtedly prompt a certain of viewer to carp, “C’mon, it sounds like she’s faking it.” A ha! That’s because she is faking it! In the immediate aftermath, she scurries down the hall and, well, shall we say, procures what her spouse could not produce by the light of some seamy footage on her laptop. And away we go, into a movie that might as well exist as something like alternate “Eyes Wide Shut” fan fiction for all the Kidman connoisseurs. Then again, “Eyes Wide Shut” was about a descent into something whereas writer/director Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl” proves to be more of an ascent toward something. Climbing orgasm mountain, if I may be so bold, teasing the rare sunny side up erotic thriller, a fascinating that idea that does not entirely come together. 

So, what does Romy want in the boudoir? Well, for that we need look no further than the rest of Romy’s life. We see her making breakfast for her two daughters in their pristine penthouse Manhattan apartment and running things as CEO of the successful robotics company she founded, exerting supreme control over every facet of her life. Therefore, it stands to reason that what she carnally craves is a lack of control. Enter: Samuel (Harris Dickinson). A new intern at Romy’s office, he ultimately seems less interested in the company than in her, psychologically probing her, laying the groundwork for some sexual gamesmanship, as if that is his real career, going around to various corporate high-rises as an intern and flirting with CEOs.

Dickinson is good in the role, at least up to a point, with a casual, cocky indifference that plays impeccably off the tightly coiled Kidman, suggesting why these two characters might be such a good match in the bedroom. Kidman uses the revelation that Romy was raised in cults to inform her whole performance, evincing a rigid, pre-programmed air, right down to an extraordinary moment during a scene at an office party where Kidman seems to literalize her character’s dream of an automated world by emitting a laugh that sounds like artificial intelligence. And as Romy and Samuel enter into a dominant-submissive relationship, Romy the character and Kidman the performer fuse in a fascinating way, the character and the actor simultaneously leaning into the fear of embarrassment. 

Unfortunately, the character of Samuel never becomes more than something like a manifestation of Romy’s own fantasy, undercutting the ostensible tension that she might be on the verge of blowing her personal and professional life apart. This is furthered in the character of Jacob, who is never a true counterweight, though Banderas wrings incredible pathos from a surprising confrontation near the end. What’s more, the all-important sex scenes, both in turning on Samuel’s, ahem, daddy-like control of his babygirl and how they are rendered so artfully, often existing as mini-music videos, rather than impassionedly uninhibited, seem to suggest a reversion to, if not outright embrace, of Romy’s programmed past, a paradox that either elides Reijn’s script or that she is never able to entirely square. It discolors the happy ending and accompanying would-be empowerment in a strange way, a climax that might mock having it all if it didn’t wind up flattering it. 

Oh, Canada

Paul Schrader’s most recent movie “Master Gardener” was the conclusion to an unofficial trilogy. And if it was the least successful of the three, it still felt revealing, almost entirely eschewing the tedious work of narrative stitching, pruned down to almost nothing but gesture and symbol, as if in his late 70s and in the last couple years in rough health, he didn’t feel he had time left on this earth for anything else but getting straight to the heart of the matter. It makes sense, then, that he would be drawn to adapting the late Russell Banks’s 2021 novel “Foregone” in which aging Canadian documentary filmmaker Leo Fife (Richard Gere) sits for an interview meant to honor and summarize his work only to instead turn the tables on the director, his former student Malcolm (Michael Imperioli), by turning it into something else. Leo, it is explained, popularized a documentary technique in which the subject being interviewed can look directly into the camera while also seeing the interviewer in a monitor above the lens, and so, he insists that his wife Emma (Uma Thurman), sit in the interviewer’s chair rather than Malcolm. Schrader’s mode of confession has always been the diary, alienated men sitting at tables writing in them, but in “Oh, Canada” it becomes the camera and Emma becomes the confessor. 

Dying of cancer, leaving him little time to waste, Leo has little interest in a career retrospective, yearning instead to set the record (his life) straight. And so, each time Malcolm ostensibly cues him up to discuss his career on camera, Leo ignores the question to recount his unmentioned past instead, going back to the beginning in America, when he was married in Virginia with a baby on the way and an opportunity to take over his genteel in-laws’ family business only to abandon them, in a bleak bit of irony using the Vietnam Draft as his excuse to flee his own existence by way of fleeing the country and setting up his second act as a Canadian hero fraud. (Jacob Elordi plays the younger version of Leo.) Schrader does not present the story in a linear fashion, but in a jumble resembling memory, or a faulty memory, flashing back to different eras and places but not in any exact order and recounting these different eras and places in different colors and aspect ratios (different actors also play different characters in different eras). In one bravura shot, we see the older Leo as Gere looking in through the window at the younger Leo as Elordi, virtually bringing the idea of the dream self as the current self and calling into question the veracity of his recollections as much as Emma does, none of which Schrader chooses to clarify.  

Leo being played by Gere is an incisive bit of through the looking glass casting hearkening back 44 years to the actor starring in Schrader’s “American Gigolo”; hearing Gere, of all actors, as Leo wearily lament in voiceover whether a young woman can smell his stale feces renders it doubly profound. Gere keeps Leo preeminently grumpy, never unburdened by what he perceives as the truth, almost more constrained by it. And that echoes nicely off Elordi, a sly turn in which he truly embodies the slippery sense of a poseur. Indeed, the ironically triumphant conclusion leaves redemption twisting in the wind.

SNL Memories are Made of These

The first episode of Saturday Night Live that I remember watching was not an actual episode but its 15th Anniversary special in 1989, demonstrating that even back then the sketch comedy show had a penchant for celebrating itself. Then again, such self-admiration might be earned given its ongoing status as a survivor through the ever-evolving landscape of television, illustrated in its 50th anniversary special airing tonight, and even if its survival was predicated upon, as others have noted over the years, institutionalizing counterculture, an ethos in opposition. Indeed, as we celebrate SNL, let us not forget the show and Lorne Michaels threw Sinead O’Connor under the bus in 1992 even if now they proudly cite it as part of their history, cravenly seeking retroactive credit for it, went yellow belly when Rage Against the Machine appeared in 1996, and buried a Robert Smigel cartoon in 1998 because of its anti-corporate mockery. Their oft-stated notion of anarchy only goes so far.

That does not mean, however, that Saturday Night Live was just flat unfunny nor that it’s only funny through the lens of youth. I remember in December 2018 when my friend Daryl pulled up the Best Christmas Ever sketch starring Matt Damon and Cecily Strong on his phone and showed it to me. It was like being a NASA technician and suddenly waking up to a signal from Voyager 1 beyond the solar system; it’s still out there! Even if you, yourself, have long since stopped paying attention, SNL keeps transmitting comedy, so long as you are willing to tune into its frequency. And that is what I find myself thinking about on the verge of its golden anniversary, the sketches themselves, not zooming out for a 10,000 foot view but zooming in and acknowledging how for 50 years, Saturday after Saturday in fall, winter, and spring, writers and actors and comics have gathered together and tried to figure out how to be funny. They have failed more than they have succeeded, rules of the game, but have still accumulated plenty of hits and sometimes even raised the Home Run Apple.

Daryl showing me that sketch on his phone demonstrates how people now consume Saturday Night Live. When I went looking for the Rock for Michael sketch after watching the “We Are the World” documentary, I found it on TikTok. Not that it’s entirely different than how I consumed it during middle school and high school in the 90s. Though back then you had to literally watch it live or not at all, I would often record SNL sketches to our VCR, sort of the analog era TikTok. And so, I decided to let my mind wander and see what sketches drifted to the top, compiling a metaphysical mixtape to the VHS recorder of my heart.

(Note: NBC notoriously makes it difficult to find SNL sketches via the interwebs, so I will link to what I discuss below in the best form I can.)

That mixtape would include Waikiki Hockey (May 1989), for sure, because I cherish Elvis movies and the infamously wooden host Wayne Gretzky was not a hindrance but help in spoofing them and their own wooden star. Also, RIP Jan Hooks (as Ann-Margret), and RIP Phil Hartman who is totally at his most Phil Hartman here, not called upon to be funny, exactly, merely the glue that melds it all together.

I would include the Dysfunctional Family Dinner (January 1998) starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Will Ferrell, and Ana Gasteyer, released a year-and-a-half before “American Beauty” and a hundred times more profound. 

There would have to be room for the “What Is Love” sketch, which is what I call the Roxbury Guys sketch, the one that concluded the 1996 season and gave rise to the 1998 movie “Night at the Roxbury.” Because really, it isn’t even all that funny, sort of falling apart humor-wise about halfway in, and still, the whole thing gets by, nay, is propelled by Haddaway’s 1993 dance track. There’s nothing else like it in the whole SNL canon.

Well, except for the Emma Stone-led sketch from November 2011 that wasn’t even a comedy sketch so much as an astute embodiment of Adele’s “Someone Like You” as an instinctive tearjerker. 

For our mixtape ode to Weekend Update, let’s honor 50 years of fake commentators with Kate McKinnon as Olya Povlatsky talking about the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013 (I love bleak Russian humor, apparently) and 50 years of jokes with this fatalistic slice of consummate Norm Macdonald (RIP) deadpan from 1997: “This week, Janet Reno charged Microsoft with trying to monopolize access to the internet and asked a court to fine the company a million dollars per day. Analysts say that, at this rate, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates will be broke just ten years after the Earth crashes into the sun.”

Our first mixtape musical guest is Neil Young translating the pledge of allegiance, so to speak, into a thunderous political broadside with “Rockin’ in the Free World” for the 1989 season premiere. Nirvana famously smashed up their instruments after performing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1992 and Win Butler of Arcade Fire smashed a guitar in 2007 and Phoebe Bridgers smashed a guitar in 2021, and rock on, all of them, but Neil Young figuratively smashed a guitar in a way all those other literal guitar-smashings will never know. 

Speaking of political moments on Saturday Night Live. When it comes to sketches of that variety, we tend to think of the obviously political ones, and some of those made true marks, like the spoof of the final Bush/Dukakis Presidential Debate from October 1988 that may as well be, as the kids say, my whole personality. But better than that, there was the Kandahar sketch in November 2001 that satirized the Freedom Fries jingoism of the era with a boldness and eccentric incisiveness rare for the show, and even better than that was The Lost Ending of “It’s A Wonderful Life” (December 1986) in which Bedford Fall becomes a mob like France circa 1789. I have been thinking about that sketch a lot lately.

John Mulaney’s musical-inspired Diner Lobster sketch might be tighter, not least because it sticks exclusively to songs from Les Misérables, but I genuinely prefer Airport Sushi (February 2020), which borrows from all manner of Broadway musicals and gets tied together by The Talking Heads. It’s nothing if not an effective anti-P.S.A. for the state of air travel these days, a semi-surreal answer to Spielberg’s sugary sweet “The Terminal.”

While we’re on the topic of Mulaney’s recurring musical parodies, I suppose it’s time to bring up SNL recurring characters, so many of which, no matter how many of them might have been good to begin with, were destined to run out steam by being run into the ground. If there was one that never did, at least to my way of thinking, it was Mike Myers as Linda Richman, maybe because, taken in tandem with my deep affection for “Seinfeld,” and despite being a Midwesterner raised Lutheran, I have a predilection for Jewish humor. Including the Madonna/Roseanne/Barbra sketch from February 1992 might be obvious, but it’s the exemplar of the show working its guest stars successfully into pre-existing material and the literal surprise Streisand appearance at the end (the story goes only Lorne Michaels knew she would turn up) was one of the moments when a live show truly was. (As a bonus, my favorite Linda Richman discussion topic: “Rhode Island, neither a road nor an island. Discuss.”)

The sketch does not appear to exist online, but here’s visual proof, at least, that I am not making the whole thing up.

Given 50 years, you’ve gotta dig around the crates and find at least one deep cut. And while Alec Baldwin’s most famous of his innumerable SNL turns is undoubtedly Schweddy Balls, I prefer him as the grizzled marine aboard the Chinese Spy Plane that led the news in April 2001 trying to rally his unwilling compatriots to a sneak attack. Turns out, this one was so unrememberable to everybody else that I couldn’t find it online anywhere. 

For our second musical mixtape performance, I mean, those who know me, who really know me, know: what else is there? Lady Gaga performing “Paparazzi” in 2009 is not just my favorite SNL musical performance; it is one of my favorite things in the history of the world. You can’t often pinpoint the exact moments when your life irrevocably changes, but in this case, the first time the chorus comes in, right there, that’s when my life changed. “The Fame” was a year old, I honestly hadn’t paid any attention, and then I went and bought it the next day and there was no going back.

Lady Gaga closed her hosting gig in November 2013 by playing herself at some indeterminate point in the future as a Manhattan version of the faded starlet Cosmo Kramer lives next door to during his brief stint in L.A., trying to get the apartment handyman (Kenan Thompson, invaluable as always) to recognize her to no avail, having fun with her then-big single “Applause” in a way that becomes, honestly, less funny than legitimately melancholy. If it evoked Gaga’s commitment to a bit, foreshadowing her eventual turn in “House of Gucci,” it also evoked the sensation of a show-ending SNL sketch, that point when Saturday night has bled into Sunday morning, sleepiness overtakes being awake, and you wonder if what you’re seeing is real. 

It’s counterintuitive to close with a cold open, but nothing brings 50 years of SNL home like the Steve Martin-led musical number Not Gonna Phone it in Tonight that kicked off the December 14th, 1991, episode. It essentially becomes a song and dance embodiment of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in “Airplane!” telling Joey that he’s out there busting his buns every night, taking both the show’s familiar 50-year-old criticism of coasting and that the show used to be better at some indeterminate point in the past and then gleefully, playfully, magnificently sending it up. 

Some Drivel On...Blue Velvet

“Man, oh man,” says Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) after waking up from a bad dream. It’s a funny line and an even funnier line reading, a little aw shucks, a little gee whiz, epitomizing “Blue Velvet’s” (1986) hazy dreamworld somewhere between 1950 and 1980, like if George McFly had been pulled from his peeping tom escapades into a psychosexual nightmare. That’s essentially what happens when Jeffrey returns to his idyllic hometown of Lumberton to see his ailing father (Tom Harvey), a wry red herring, as it’s not this familial strife that sets in motion a reckoning but Jeffrey discovering a severed ear in the grass. “It had to be an ear,” writer/director David Lynch would remark, “because it’s an opening.” I suppose that’s true but taken in context with Lynch’s opening images of swaths of black insects buzzing just beneath the finely manicured lawns of small-town paradise, I thought it more emblematic of how Jeffrey essentially puts his ear to the earth to hear the thrum of the underworld below.

Though Jeffrey takes the ear to a police detective (Dean Stockwell), he also blithely decides to open his own faux investigation into the severed organ with the detective’s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) as his co-amateur sleuth, their clue leading them to nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) with whom Jeffrey becomes romantically entwined too. Indeed, “Blue Velvet” is a movie of contrasts and there are none more striking than Sandy’s pink costuming and Dorothy’s blue, the former like a wholesome prom queen, the latter a noirish femme fatale. MacLachlan furthers those contrasts by alternating his persona between a cocky college student back home when Jeffrey is with Sandy and a scared overgrown kid when he’s with Dorothy, no more a child yet not quite a man. In that way, “Blue Velvet’s” most famous sequence, the one in which Jeffrey hides in Dorothy’s closet while sadistic drug dealer Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has kidnapped her husband and child, holding her in bondage, terrorizes and tortures her, becomes nothing less than Lynch’s version of the wardrobe in Narnia, a window into the bewildering, tantalizing, traumatizing world of adults.

The scene is also our introduction to Frank, a character virtually reduced to nothing but animal urges. “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” he screams at one point. And there is something about the way Hopper says this line, just as he memorably barks “Pabst Blue Ribbon” to indicate his beer of choice later. The words don’t come out at the right tempo, or something, bringing to life the character’s terrifying impulsiveness, the way Hopper makes him feel like he’s not acting out instructions in the script but following his own muse. He’s such a big presence, in fact, that his demise feels anti-climactic. He needed to be devoured by a black hole. The antidote to Frank is Sandy, played by Dern with an All-American innocence that is slowly compromised, though not quite shattered. Her unforgettable monologue about dreaming of a world in darkness only for robins representing love to effuse it with a bright light is elevated by Angelo Badalamenti’s score into the realm of a fairytale. And yet, as “Blue Velvet” ends, flowers bloom, robins arrive, spring has come, love has triumphed. Is it real? More than any time in my life, I came away wanting to believe it was.  

Good One

Constructed more out of incident and emotion than plot, “Good One” brings to mind Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy” (2006) in so much as it is about two lifelong male friends, in this case Chris (James Legros) and Matt (Danny McCarthy), taking a camping trip in the wilderness. The crucial difference, however, is that writer/director India Donaldson’s movie is seen not from their perspective but that of Chris’s queer 17-year-old daughter Sam (Lily Collias) who winds up alone in the company of these two men when Matt’s son backs out at the last minute, resentful over his parents’ divorce. Sam harbors resentments about her own parents’ divorce, it turns out, and, in this case, nature proves not a respite from the larger world but an unmasking of it, opening Sam’s eyes in new and profound ways. She dotes on the men, cooking them dinner, and plays referee to their various spats, and yet, just as often seems to disappear from view, such as in a sequence where they briefly mingle with three other male campers, and in another one when she attends to feminine issues behind a tree trunk while Chris and Matt impatiently wait. 

When Chris cites having children as the last step to emotional maturity sitting next to a daughter who essentially takes care of him the whole trip, Donaldson lets the brutal irony quietly sit there on Sam’s face. And that’s where this movie mostly takes place – on Sam’s face. She is rarely allowed to speak for herself, cut off or ignored when she does, and provided no accompanying voiceover to explicate her thoughts, just occasional texts back home to her girlfriend when she’s in cell range. Indeed, what’s so impressive is that despite Donaldson being a first-time feature director and this being only Collias’s second feature film, they possess an implicit understanding of the actor and camera yoked together, how little both need to do and how that dissolves the barrier between them so that it’s as if her internal monologue is silently beamed straight to us. The men prattle on and on, but Sam doesn’t need to use her words to let us hear everything she thinks. 

The Substance

The titular substance of writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s film is a green kinda goo that comes packaged in a sleek little tube with big black and white lettering that says THE SUBSTANCE, so comically literal that it put me in mind of The Process, the MacGuffin in David Mamet’s 90s thriller “The Spanish Prisoner.” The Substance, though, might work to set up the plot, but it is no mere device. It is the emblem, the idea, the fountain of youth in a beauty tube, inject a little into your body and you become young again. That doesn’t mean the lines on your face disappear, however, or that your gray hair returns to its natural color. No, becoming young again means replicating your cells to create a second version of yourself, a younger one that literally emerges from your body, as the opening image in which one egg yolk magically turns into two evokes. It’s a hell of an idea, and one executed well for a considerable amount of time, though “The Substance” also never quite grows beyond it, stretching its grisly body horror to the breaking point.

No industry is more focused on aging and beauty than Hollywood and so it makes sense for Fargeat to choose it as the setting of “The Substance.” She creates a more heightened version of the Los Angeles that Anna Kendrick created in another 2024 movie, “Woman of the Hour,” where every virtually every encounter is filtered through the lens of misogyny. That lens becomes literal in the fisheye that almost permanently frames Harvey, a television exec played by Dennis Quaid in a state of perpetual leer, who fires the star of his aerobics show, Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), for having crossed the industry’s invisible date line of 50. So, when she learns about the black-market Substance, she naturally views it as the only way to salvage her career, acquiring it in a Los Angeles back alley that effectively underlines how the world at large casts women off for aging and then moralizes when they seek to reverse it.

Despite some requisite gobbledygook, the process of The Substance is straightforward. Upon injecting the serum, Elizabeth alternates between her current self and a younger version of herself, christened Sue (Margaret Qualley), every seven days, no exceptions. If this weeklong boundary is passed, her original body ages at a rapider rate until the switch is made once again, setting the table for Sue to push that every-seven-days-mandate as far as it will go, dooming her older self in a literal attempt to reclaim her youth. And yet, as “The Substance” would seem to gather narrative force, the more its meaning comes unglued from its visual storytelling; by the end Fargeat starts having her characters just literally say aloud what she wants to impart. It’s hard to explain without giving the moment away, but when Elizabeth declares “It’s still me,” it was like getting punched in the face while being hit with a frying pan.

Qualley is mostly excellent, in congress with Fargeat creating a character that does not so much hunger for the camera’s gaze as subsist on it, pointedly absent any other sense of identity, which is effective, if only up to a point. Because no matter how many times Elizabeth is reminded that she and Sue are one, the same person, this idea never comes across, Moore and Qualley never in conversation, and Fargeat seemingly entirely uninterested in exploring that ostensible connection. What’s more, she over-relies on Moore’s real-life backstory to infuse humanity where, alas, there otherwise isn’t any. “The Substance” would skewer an industry, if not a world, that sees no deeper than the surface and, yet winds up only skimming the surface itself, gruesome, and gruesomely spectacular, but in the end, not quite gut-wrenching.

Bob Hope's All-Star Superbowl Party (1986)

Though it’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when the Super Bowl went from merely being America’s biggest football game to a true American cultural event, it really did seem to come into its own, so to speak, in the 1980s, echoing the maximalist era. Indeed, while Bob Hope hosted myriad television specials throughout the 1960s and 70s, he did not host his first Super Bowl-specific special until 1983, followed by two more in 1986 and 1989, the years when his contractual partner NBC broadcast the game. Through the miracle of the internet, you can watch the whole 1986 version of Bob Hope’s All-Star Superbowl Party on YouTube, as I did as some sort of ill-conceived experiment in nostalgia. And it feels of its time in that specific way that so much of Ronald Reagan’s America felt, in which looking toward the future meant looking toward the past. It kicks off with a performance, of sorts, by the L.A. Rams cheerleaders, like a more scantily clad Ziegfield Follies, and includes a nigh hallucinatory interlude in which Hope and Donna Mills of “Knot’s Landing” sing old standards like “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” over NFL bloopers.  

Oh, it makes concessions to the present, like Hope making a few cracks about Vice President of the United States George Bush being in talks to guest star on “Miami Vice,” a pop culture interlude that I confess to not remembering. “What is this,” Hope wonders regarding the H.W. cameo that turned out not to be, “the government or ‘Star Search?’” Oof. Hope also essentially lusts after not just Mills but Miss America herself, Susan Akin, right there onstage in front of a whole television audience and makes a slew of vicious jokes about Boy George that to a present-day viewer are pretty shocking but in 1986 are received the same as deeming Gaddafi as the Don Rickles of the Middle East. I don’t mean to pat myself on the back or to scold with 40 years of hindsight. I merely mean to point out how this is evidence of the way we can and have advanced and evolved as a species. Then again, as the invaluable David Roth has frequently pointed out, our current President’s sense of attitudes, culture, and luxury is perpetually stuck in the 1980s. 

Reagan often talked of a so-called shining city on a hill, a phrase copped from the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, who essentially copped it from Jesus’s Sermon the Mount, and in his farewell address, the 40th President explained his vision in greater detail. “(I)n my mind,” he explained, “it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Let’s put aside debating whether Reagan’s actions lived up to that ideal and admit that it’s objectively a grand vision, imaginative and idealistic. The 45th and 47th American President, on the other hand, is an unimaginative sociopath, and so when he talks about Making America Great Again, I imagine the city on the hill that he sees would be a place that looks an awful lot like Bob Hope’s All-Star Superbowl Party.

Wicked

The stage musical “Wicked” ran two-hours-and-forty-five minutes which is five minutes longer than Jon M. Chu’s cinematic adaption “Wicked.” No big deal, right, except Chu’s “Wicked” is officially titled “Wicked: Part 1,” meaning the first half of the two-part “Wicked” is merely five minutes shorter than the full musical. What could go wrong? A lot, it turns out, as the decision to maximize profits hamstrings Chu from the start. “The Emerald City,” I kept thinking to myself when the characters finally arrived, “seems exhausting.” As if compensating for the fact he has half a story to tell and the same amount of time to tell it, Chu so exhaustively paints all of “Wicked” with this same sensational Emerald City brush that eventually it becomes plain exhausting, like Tegan and Sara’s “Everything is Awesome!!!” in “The Lego Movie” but without the irony. “The Land of Oz wasn’t such a bad place to be stuck in,” Terry McMillan wrote of the beloved 1939 Technicolor musical “Wizard of Oz” in the essay collection “The Movie That Changed My Life.” “It beat the farm in Kansas.” I kept wondering what she would make of “Wicked: Part 1,” if she would beseech the movie gods for a monochrome respite in the Sunflower State.

Based not only on the musical but on Gregory Maguire’s revisionist novel, “Wicked” is about the unlikely friendship between the Wicked Witch of the West (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda the Good (Ariana Grande) in their youth and eventual falling out spurred by a meeting with the Wonderful Wizard himself (Jeff Goldblum). The Wicked Witch is born as Elphaba, and though she is born green, she is not born bad, her eventual malevolence shaped by her environment, suggesting that somewhere over the rainbow is, alas, a lot like being on this side of it. Indeed, when Elphaba arrives at Shiz University, it may as well be North Shore High School with Glinda approximating the queen mean girl. It’s not just Elphaba who is picked on and marginalized, however, it’s the animal professors, like the goat Doctor Dillamond (Peter Dinklage), a victim of anti-animal policies that fuel the righteous rage of the burgeoning wicked witch. It’s a bit obvious, this metaphor, as is the love triangle with a Winkie Country Prince (Jonathan Bailey), and that might be fine if “Wicked: Part 1” was not also trying to remind us that things are complicated. For so many ostensible shades of grey, “Wicked” feels weirdly black and white.

The moments when “Wicked” manages to eclipse its two-dimensionality are often found in Erivo’s performance, emotionally nuanced in its reactions. Most of all, though, she is physically expressive, all her doubt and fear and eventual anger seeming to well up from within and then pour out in song. This comes through best in a scene at a university dance where Elphaba’s unorthodox dance style feels like an expression of self, even as it comes in for laughter from fellow students, until Glinda steps forward and mimics it not from malice but mutual support, emotionally drawing her close. It’s the best moment in the movie not just for it how wordlessly evokes the turning point of their relationship but for how it far and away most effectively evokes the nature of a musical, to tell its story and define its characters through a musical number. Of course, that it’s a wordless musical number is telling. The songs do not thrill, or at least, they did not thrill me, which I think is important, as I am unqualified to evaluate “Wicked” on its melodic merits even if I know I walked away from watching it with not one lyric, not one melody, stuck in my head. The intended show-stopping number is Elphaba’s “Defying Gravity” and what it, and the rest of the “Wicked” soundtrack, most made me want to do was listen to Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s cover of Jesse Winchester’s “Defying Gravity.”

“Defying Gravity,” frankly, is not helped by how it is chopped up in the narrative rather than being belted out in one shot. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I like it when movie musicals depart from their stage presentation, but in this form, it merely works to underline how “Wicked” repeatedly saps its own sense of drama and forward momentum to elongate its run time, stretched thin. This sensation trickles down most troublingly to the character of Glinda. It’s clear that she’s meant to be more, not just sanctimonious but maybe even a little shifty, and yet, while “Wicked” pierces her sanctimonious bubble, there is clearly more being withheld for Part 2. And it because it does, and because the movie is so long, at a certain point, through no fault of Grande’s own, her porcelain doll-like comicality wears out its welcome. She has nowhere else to take it, really, standing around and waiting like the rest of us for Wicked Part 2: The Search for More Money.

Conclave

As “Conclave” begins, the Pope has kicked the holy bucket. Now Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), Dean of the College Cardinals, must oversee a private meeting of all the senior members of the clergy of the Catholic Church to determine who will be the next Bishop of Rome. Weighty stuff, but Edward Berger’s movie is based on a novel by best-selling suspense writer Robert Harris, whose other works include titles like “The Fear Index” and “An Officer and a Spy,” and so, though “Conclave” might be about the election of the Pope, it is pure pulp, reveling in the finer details of the election process by echoing thriller beats. When gates lower on the windows of the Sistine Chapel locking the cardinals inside, it’s like the gates lowering in the Nakatomi Tower parking garage in “Die Hard.” When Cardinal Lawrence slices through the wax sealing off the late Pope’s quarters to the outside world, it’s like Michael Clayton slicing through the crime scene tape in the movie bearing his name to get into his dead friend’s loft. And the end…well, I can’t give away the end.

Keeping so many cardinals on task is not easy, it turns out, and though “Conclave” is by no means a comedy, there is something wryly humorous in seeing so many men of the cloth cajole and scheme like so many duplicitous operatives on The Hill. Like John Lithgow who as the imperious old Canadian oak Cardinal Tremblay who in his 6′ 4″ height conveys how his character conceitedly stands above it all even as his actions tell us otherwise. There is also Cardinal Bellini, nimbly played by Stanley Tucci as righteous man who doesn’t want the Papacy, but also a self-righteous man who doesn’t want Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) to get the Papacy lest he take the church back to roughly the Dark Ages, and there is Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), the surprise Cardinal, you might say, a Mexican archbishop that no one seems to know and who comes across like a blinding beacon of politeness in a sea of shady operatives. You don’t have to be an old hat at the genre to know Benitez turning up signals a trap door is waiting to open.

Indeed, for all the papal intrigue, and nominal twists and turns of Peter Straughan’s screenplay, there is little in the way of real suspense or even intrigue. “Conclave” feels so orderly, like it’s all been preordained by God himself, as if you can see Him dispensing the narrative breadcrumbs one-by-one. If one Cardinal gets a hefty chunk of the vote, meaning the winds, as Cardinal Lawrence says at one point, seem to be with him, you can be rest assured, they are not, and an October surprise, or whatever colloquialism the Catholic church has for October surprises, is in store. And though these surprises, like the one involving conservative-minded Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), seem readymade to unlock philosophical, even theological, debate, such debate never really materializes. 

“I know you to be a good man,” says Lawrence to the suddenly disgraced Cardinal Adeyemi and we are meant to take that as gospel, no follow-up. It’s emblematic of Cardinal Lawrence’s ostensible crisis of faith, which is mentioned yet hardly materializes in terms of the story, a device with no punch, no follow-through. Instead, Berger relies on Fiennes to carry this crisis in his turn, and he mostly does, hunched, or pitched forward, carrying the weight of it on his back, taking it personally when accused of his own ulterior motives. Even so, Fiennes’s turn ultimately fits in with the oddly restrained conclusion of the movie. Brought face-to-face with the unexplainable, a moment that seems to breach scientific law, if not provide a messenger directly from God, “Conclave” hardly mirrors that realm in its aesthetic, as, say, Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” did. Neither does Fiennes. Together, it siphons away all sense not just of climactic surprise but of wonder, transforming an honest to God miracle into a standard issue reveal.