The Friend

As it turns out, there are a pair of friends in “The Friend,” celebrated author Walter Meredith (Bill Murray) and Walter’s Harlequin Great Dane, Apollo (Bing), both pals of creative writing professor Iris (Naomi Watts). We see Walter happen upon the apparently abandoned Apollo in the movie’s first scene, though we don’t see the dog, segueing instead to a dinner where Walter is regaling friends, including Iris, about finding the massive pooch. Drawing heavily on Murray’s own persona, this scene establishes Walter as a charming raconteur, though by composing the scenes almost exclusively in close-ups of Walter and Iris despite other people present, directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel are also quietly impressing upon us their intimate connection. He might have a trail of ex-wives, but Iris is his soulmate. Soon after, Walter dies and Iris is bequeathed Apollo, which is also the first time we get a look at him. It’s funny, there might not be another actor more capable of stealing a movie than Bill Murray, but even he would have to admit that he’s no match for Bing, those expressively droopy eyes are shrewdly framed to make him look like a movie star.

By all accounts, Nunez’s novel was as much about writing and being a writer. And though McGehee and Siegel’s adaptation includes those ideas by showing us Iris teaching her class, and editing Walter’s final book, and even occasionally playing around with perspective, they often come across underbaked and less essential. The writers and directors prefer to foreground the conventional aspects of the story, a cat person seemingly content living alone in her booklined, rent-controlled, no-dogs allowed New York apartment who comes under the threat of eviction and must decide whether to give Apollo away or a concoct a ruse to keep him as the duo draws closer in grieving Walter together. Despite those conventions, “The Friend” surprises you, with feeling more than narrative twists, like a dog surprised by a porcupine, say, all just a bit pricklier than you might imagine.

Indeed, Walter committing suicide rather than passing away from some terminal disease not only infuses “The Friend” with a slightly darker edge but illustrates and magnifies the mystifying nature of death. Iris’s emotional wound festers throughout “The Friend” and is only healed, in a manner of speaking, via the one meta touch that emphatically works: Iris imagining a conversation between her and Walter over taking his life, illuminating her own reckoning with not knowing him as well as she thought. It’s a fascinating sequence, played not with the heaviness you expect but something closer to buoyancy, two witty friends hashing it out, imagination creating reality, or creating a reality, at least, that she is able to momentarily let herself believe. 

Much has been written about Watts and Bing having cultivated a friendship offscreen in service of their relationship onscreen and you can sense those dissolving walls in Watts’s naturalistic performance, the kind that you know is good because you’re not noticing it. At the same time, Watts is skilled enough to take her character’s scheme of getting Apollo certified as a therapy dog to keep him and her apartment and not overstate the allegorical case that Apollo is her therapy dog. McGehee and Siegel also refuse to anthropomorphize Apollo, never providing subtitles as a window into his thoughts, a la the grieving Jack Russell terrier in “Beginners.” It means the ultimate tension in “The Friend” is between Apollo’s unambiguous physical presence and the more ambiguous nature of his emotional presence, underlined in how Watts strains to have Iris understand what he’s thinking, to make peace with not knowing where he came from. For this kind of movie, it’s an ambivalence as rare as refreshing. 

Paddington in Peru

Like Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant before him in, respectively, “Paddington” and “Paddington 2,” Antonio Banderas is granted a chance to cut loose, have fun, and live a little onscreen in “Paddington in Peru.” Given the nature of his character, treasure hunter and riverboat captain Hunter Cabot, I could not help but have flashbacks to Antonio Banderas in a similar movie, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (2023). There, however, and through no fault of his own, really, just the script’s, he was dour and unforgettable; truly, I could not summon one memory of his performance at all. That’s why given the storyline of the third film in the beloved “Paddington” series in which the eponymous Peruvian bear (voiced once again by Ben Whishaw) and his adopted family the Browns travel to his native land on a rescue mission, of sorts, for his beloved Aunt Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton) only to get mixed up in a search for El Dorado, I could not help but think this third movie in the series as the unintentional yet, nevertheless, delightful corrective to the fifth Indiana Jones movie.

That is not to suggest “Paddington in Peru” reaches the level of its predecessors, especially the dazzling second installment. The director of the first pair, Paul King, has departed and with him a true sense of vibrant visual filmmaking, not to mention editing vigor. The style of King’s replacement, Dougal Wilson, does not plod, exactly, but comes across more efficient than effulgent and means the movie isn’t a drag but a little too dutiful, connecting the dots with agreeable professionalism rather than charming pizazz. Despite that, he never over-emphasizes the broad human lessons that Paddington preaches, finding the sweet spot between spelling them out for the kids and marrying them to the narrative for the adults, delightfully conveys one spider-centric set-up and payoff embedded in the three-person (Mark Burton, Jon Foster, James Lamont) screenplay, and more than anything, emphasizes the actors and never impedes on their having a good time. 

True, I might have liked to see Emily Mortimer (replacing Sally Hawkins) get a more of a chance to cut loose as Mrs. Brown, just as I might have liked to see the Brown kids get a bit more involved in the action. But as a (not so) benevolent nun, Olivia Colman mines great comic mileage from her shifty anime-ish eyes (and sings a song that got stuck in my head - really emphasizing those syllables in “Pe-ru”), Banderas has even more fun in a dual role as vainglorious conquistador Lope de Aguirre, like a History Channel re-enactor shading into madness, and then there is Hugh Bonneville returning to the fold as Mr. Brown. The series might undoubtedly be made in the spirit of Paddington’s sunny optimism, but to a smaller degree, it is also made in Mr. Brown’s risk-averse nature giving way to a nascent sense of adventure. And though so many performers in this joyful trilogy have been noteworthy, it is Bonneville that has ultimately left the most lasting impression on me, always hilariously, heroically straining to let that stiff upper lip curl into a devil-may-care grin. 

We Grown Now

“We Grown Now” begins with two young kids and best friends for life Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) dragging a discarded mattress down a corridor of the Cabrini-Green housing project on Chicago’s near north side where they live circa 1992. Eventually they get it outside, where they and some other friends take turns leaping on to the mattress, like a makeshift high jump pit, talking about how they can fly, and filmed in low angled slow motion to make it look, at least for a moment, like they really can. It’s an evocative, spirited opening, deftly introducing the two boys as being of both limited means and unlimited imaginations, finding not just ways to cope or survive but to enjoy their lives. Cabrini-Green became a notorious symbol of American public housing, best remembered cinematically for its decrepit, terrifying presentation in “Candyman,” released the same year “We Grown Now” is set. I don’t know if that’s deliberate, but writer/director Minhal Baig presents an alternate view, the sunlight flooding windows of Malik’s apartment not the golden hues of a thousand Terrence Malick-inspired indies meant to imbue wistful nostalgia but to demonstrate how they make this place their own and imbue it with love and warmth.

Why there is even a sequence when Malik and Eric ditch school, ride the L (public transit > 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder), excitedly look out the window, allowing for a brief impeccable framing of an Over-the-Shoulder Sears Tower shot that made my heart full, and visit the Art Institute. They see Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, but they also see Walter Ellison’s Train Station, evoking two different perspectives and how a day off in Chicago belongs just as much to two kids from Cabrini-Green as it does to three kids from suburban Shermer High. The difference in these two existences, however, is not just the size of their homes but the looming threat of violence, one that plagues the public housing community from within but just as much from those enlisted to protect it. The most frightening scene in “We Grown Now” is police not just knocking on the door but entering the home of Malik and his family, ostensibly to search for drugs. It’s not just the scenario but how Baig presents it in low-angled shots looking up, the police heard but still distant, like teachers on the Peanuts but without squawks, shouting but not explaining.

Yet even as Baig repeatedly yokes the camera to her youthful protagonists’ perspective, she never entirely gets inside their headspace. The conversations between Malik’s mother (Jurnee Smollett) and grandmother (S. Epatha Merkerson), debating whether to pull up roots and move on, have a tender truth (and a tender truth that is magnified by those two performances). But aside from one delightful argument about the 1992 Chicago Bulls, this conversations between Malik and Eric too often feel like supplied talking points from the director. That does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. There’s an argument to be made that a director of a movie should be as present in that movie as the characters themselves. It’s just, given the story Baig is telling, the kind too rarely presented onscreen, I was left wishing that Malik and Eric got to tell their version of it just a little bit more. 

Thelma

Writer/director Josh Margolin based “Thelma” on his own grandmother, demonstrating this connection with footage of her in the closing credits that matches an earlier scene almost verbatim. Even so, this action comedy belongs to its star, June Squibb. She plays the eponymous 93-year-old Thelma Post who inadvertently mails away $10,000 in a phone scam and then sets out with her semi-reluctant suitor Ben (the late Richard Roundtree) by scooter to cut across the sidewalks of Los Angeles, find the perpetrators, and get it back as her grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger) and daughter Gail (Parker Posey) give chase when she goes M.I.A. (The part of Danny is written with more dimension, presenting someone on the opposite end of the age spectrum, still trying to get his life started, but Posey’s performance deftly, comically embodies being caught in the middle, caretaker to both.) Margolin draws a semi-cheeky comparison between the physical obstacles confronted by Thelma and Ben on their quest with Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible” stunts by briefly having her watch 2018’s “Fallout” on television. This is sometimes cleverer conceptually than it is in execution, but it also innately contrasts the idea of Cruise working so hard to defy aging with Squibb’s unsentimental embracing of it. Just as there is something edifying in the manic intensity with which Cruise runs in those movies, so is there something revealing in the way Squibb walks, one foot in front of the other, a careful determination not to go gently into the good night. 

September 5

“September 5” takes place almost exclusively inside an ABC Sports television control room on the eponymous day in 1972 at the Munich Summer Olympics when armed Palestinians took the Israeli contingent hostage. Seen predominantly from the viewpoint of Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), overnight head of the control room, as he and his cohorts are forced to spontaneously adapt, the real-time sensation and fly on the wall aesthetic lend the feel of a docudrama. Indeed, ABC Sports President Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) decrees that their job to “put the camera in the right place and...follow the story as it unfolds in real time. News can tell us what it means after it’s over.” In that way, “September 5” is less about the conflict than the coverage of it, the movie’s apolitical nature intertwined with its taut narrative, constant questions of what to show and what not to show, what to say and what not to say, often posed by the head of operations Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin*). This is effective in so far as it goes but the limited perspective also means the larger idea of the broadcast establishing a dangerous precedent by transforming something grave into spectacle never fully resonates. To his credit, Magaro at least lets that knowledge flood his character at the end, of a new world the characters have all unwittingly entered, one that will have to be made a sense of in a movie called “September 6.”

*I was fortunate enough to see Ben Chaplin in 2018 at The Old Vic in London in Mood Music and my foremost takeaway was wondering why movies could not harness the kind of electricity he emanated on the stage. “September 5” does. 

The Room Next Door

What kind of hospital room has a designer olive green sofa? I suppose the same sort of hospital room that has a view of the Manhattan skyline and a festive floral painting on the wall, the sort of hospital room glimpsed in “The Room Next Door.” I am not nitpicking. No, director Pedro Almodóvar is nothing if not the master of modern melodrama, and though we tend to think of melodrama as an exaggeration of characters, emotions, and situations, in his hands, melodrama is an exaggeration of stuff too. That exaggerated stuff takes on an almost spiritual dimension in Almodóvar’s 25th feature film and first in the English language. After all, “The Room Next Door” is about a terminally ill woman, Martha (Tilda Swinton), who asks an old friend who has just re-entered her life, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), to accompany her to a luxurious rental pad in upstate New York to be take up position in the room next door where Martha plans to take control of her ultimate demise by taking her own life. 

Loosely based (by all accounts, I have not read it) on a Sigrid Nunez novel, Almodóvar is less concerned with the ethics of this dramatic situation, essentially starting from a place of death being a personal situation and a personal decision. Establishing that straight away frees “The Room Next Door” to focus on the morals, of one friend putting the genuine request of the other friend first, an idea that comes alive in Moore’s performance, a true blow burn, fiery but quietly fiery. The emergent investigative subplot with a skeptical detective (Alessandro Nivola) has nothing to do with ferreting out the truth, since we already know it, and more to do with Ingrid defining her own sense of decency and truth. More than that, even, “The Room Next Door” is a contrast of light and dark, of finding the desire to go on when it’s literally hopeless to. 

One might draw parallels to our current world. In fact, Almodóvar does, at least in one scene in which Damian (John Turturro), a friend and former lover to both women, notes an overriding sensation of hopelessness in the face of climate change only to be challenged by Ingrid in the face of what she’s seen being at Martha’s side. Given that it’s the only real time this subject is broached, and that Damian never feels as emotionally integrated to the narrative, it plays a little too much like a septuagenarian movie director decrying someone who is, forgive me, woke than a genuine philosophical back and forth. More’s the pity because otherwise, in the colorful world that “The Room Next Door” presents, in its finely calibrated production and costume design, from that olive green couch to Martha’s array of cozy sweaters and comfy looking soft pants, “The Room Next Door” innately expresses feeling comfort and joy in the moment and finding the wherewithal to meet your maker with the perfectly chosen lipstick on your face. 

Is it strange that the most moving moment to me in the whole movie was the one when Ingrid and Martha go to Lincoln Center to see a movie? And Ingrid suggests that, hey, they better go find some seats? If I had a terminal illness, I thought, I would probably want to go see a movie too. And I would probably want to have the best seats in the house.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Little Murders (1971)

Based on Jules Feiffer’s stage play, and marking Alan Arkin’s first feature film as director, “Little Murders,” currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, takes place in a New York City that no doubt exemplifies and amplifies the crime and decay of the 1970s but that also might feel to a modern viewer like a sardonic manifestation of the urban hellscapes imagined by every modern-day conservative and F*x News commentator, filled with incessant gunfire and muggings. Indeed, Patsy Newquist (Marcia Robb) wakes one morning not to birds chirping outside her window but to the sounds of a man being beaten up on the sidewalk just below. She calls the police, but they put her on hold and disconnect the call. So, she goes down there herself and intervenes, only for the beaten, Alfred Chamberlain (Elliott Gould), to wander away in a daze, not even acknowledging her. Once she manages to extricate herself from the same attackers, she confronts him over his cowardice, not that he's interested, telling her off and trying to flee in a hilarious long shot where she chases after him, hollering, “Are you really so down on people or are you just being fashionable?!” It’s a Meet Cute by force, triggering something like a dystopian Neil Simon rom com.

Alfred is a self-described “apathist,” lived in Gould’s hilarious checked-out countenance, and in the character’s occupation. A photographer, he sees the world through his camera lens, and what he photographs is literally excrement, one of merely many examples of satire that goes to the extreme. (“I’ve been shooting s*** for over a year,” he says, “and I’ve already won half a dozen awards,” suggesting how art can’t defeat a dystopia or perhaps suggesting how a dystopia deliberately has no art. Hmmmmmm.) Patsy, on the other hand, is an interior decorator, maintaining fastidious control over her own world as the one outside her door has gone to pieces. Then again, the constant phone calls she gets from stalker breathing on the other end of the line go to show such control is a mirage. Listen to the way she speaks, a comical cacophony at a high register impeccably playing off Alfred’s quieter decibels; she sounds like someone screaming on the inside but screaming on the inside on the outside.

Seeking to instill the same sort of desperate convention in Alfred’s life, she brings him home to meet her family and convinces him to get married. The wedding sequence is a riotous interlude, officiated by the pastor of First Existential (Donald Sutherland, momentarily commandeering the movie just as he famously commandeered “JFK”) not so much mocking the ritual of marriage as deconstructing it as a UC Berkeley Professor might, triggering a brawl that ends with him on the floor but still with a smile on his face, the inverse of Alfred, acceptance rather than apathy. True to his prognostication, their union brings no salvation, undone in the one moment when the movie’s brutal comedy gives way to sheer brutality. This leads to Alfred riding the subway in a bloodstained shirt, bringing to mind Tom Cruise in “Collateral” telling the story of the guy who dies on the MTA that “nobody notices.” That 2004 thriller portrayed violence as the logical outgrowth of humanity’s disconnection, but “Little Murders” concludes on an appropriately, explosively droll note portraying violence as perhaps the only thing that brings humanity together.