F1 the Movie

Like a Hollywood movie studio from the golden age running back a hit formula, producer Jerry Bruckheimer simply re-enlisted the same directing and writing team – Joseph Kosinski and Ehren Krueger, respectively – behind “Top Gun: Maverick” for last year’s “F1 the Movie” and then transplanted it from Naval Fighter Weapons School to the auto racing world of Formula 1. After all, in structure and in spirit, “Top Gun: Maverick” was essentially a sports movie, and so the same formula proves a natural fit in the world of open wheel racing. And if that means you know narratively what’s coming the whole way through, well, there is something reassuring in that, like an F1 driver who knows every turn of every track, when to brake, when to go, what line to take. We’re here for precision maintenance and reliability, not revelation. Not that “F1 the Movie” is wholly unrevealing. I confess, I’m less a connoisseur of auto racing than I am of movie stars and what fascinates me most is not the Formula 1 of it all but how Brad Pitt, who doubles as producer, filters his persona through Formula 1. 

Pitt is Sonny Hayes, a one-time F1 wunderkind who has been wandering in the racing wilderness ever since a terrible crash. After helping a racing team to win 24 Hours of Daytona, carving space for a Shea Whigham appearance that is all too brief, Sonny is called to his adventure in a laundromat, a nice locational touch evincing his nomad tendencies, by Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem), a one-time teammate who now runs a struggling F1 team that his board is in danger of selling lest they win one of the season’s remaining races. Sonny is not just there to drive, of course, but to bump heads with his rookie teammate Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), to fall in something approximating love with team technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), and to be Essentially, “F1 the Movie” is just “Talladega Nights” in reverse, with a hotshot American invading Formula One rather than the other way around, illustrated when Sonny first meets Ruben’s team, walking down the track in long shot, as if emerging from the desert. He might as well be wearing a cowboy hat. This shot made me laugh out loud which I mostly mean as a compliment.

Much of “F1: the Movie” takes place on the track, of course, and Kosinski and his production team, cinematographer Claudio Miranda, composer Hans Zimmer and the sound department create a spectacular series of racing scenes, evincing the on-track frenzy as sensory explosions of sight and sound, music and racing crew chatter and TV commentary and car sound effects all layered on top of one another, furthered in close-ups of the drivers waging all-out war against g forces just in trying to turn the wheel and this all-encompassing, stomach-dropping sensation of speed, of always being one brief moment away from losing control even as the drivers somehow almost always maintain it while navigating their way between cars. And all of it builds to one astonishing final moment that to its immense credit, is less about a narrative result than a feeling, one in which the notion of being out of control seems to loop back around and improbably meet being in complete command, like a dream where you’re running and your feet don’t touch the ground but if you were driving a car at high speed instead. It’s so good that you wish the screenplay did not underline what is transpiring with dialogue. Alas.

If the scenes on the track are sometimes spectacular, those of it are strictly painted by numbers. There is no tension in any of the interpersonal relationships because the characters are all archetypes and because the character of Sonny flouts the single most hard and fast rule: he never changes. He is virtually the same person at the end as he is at the beginning. Chris Stapleton’s song “Bad as I Used to Be” epitomizes it, but believe it or not, Sonny most evokes a Kate McKinnon line when she played Hillary Rodham Clinton back on Saturday Night Live: “flawed yet perfect.” Sonny is vincible, but also invincible, not always right, but never wrong, all brought home in his observation that when you lose, sometimes you win. When he has the winning hand in a game of cards with Joseph but declines to show them to let Joseph win instead, there are no points for exclaiming, “I knew it,” because, of course, you did; we all did; that’s Sonny Hayes. Even the eventual revelation of his perilous physical nature is mostly brushed aside, exemplifying how Sonny spends the whole movie walking between raindrops, and I could not stop wondering if Brad Pitt thinks of himself as someone who walks between raindrops too.

Is Brad Pitt a Titanic Truther?

The Golden Globes, a cocktail party hosted by fawning junketeers, are an iffy barometer of their more formal non-counterparts, the Academy Awards, and so I hesitate to draw too much from a result of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association naming Brad Pitt Best Supporting Actor for “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.” But still. If this next month is just a predictable, inexorable march to Pitt’s first Oscar (not to mention Laura Dern’s, who earned the Globe for Best Supporting Actress), I’m here for it. I did not do a Favorite Performances of 2019 list this year but Pitt would have been near the top, maybe at the top, giving a supremely, innately physical performance as Cliff Booth, befitting the character’s stunt man nature, evincing this almost preternatural ease in his body, going from cool swagger to sixty in the blink of an eye. Pitt’s past due for his Academy Award and I think it’s a fine time for it to finally be his Time.

But wait! What was that Mr. Pitt said in his Globes acceptance speech? Let’s check the tape. “I also have to thank my partner in crime, LDC.” (We’re calling Leo ‘LDC’ now?) “He’s an all-star. He’s a gent and I wouldn’t be here without you, man. I thank you. Still, I would have shared the raft.” This, as astute Internet users quickly pointed out, was a reference to the former Box Office Champion of the World, “Titanic” (1997), where Leo – er, LDC’s – character perishes in the icy North Atlantic when he deduces, his mind perhaps clouded by said icy water, that there was not enough room on the door-as-makeshift-raft for both he and Kate Winslet’s Rose.

This, of course, is the Internet’s foremost cinematic conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy theory  prominently flouted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist who spends significant time in his areas of expertise combating so many tinfoil hat wearers, the kind of people who prefer elevating conspiracy theories simply because it makes them feel smarter than so many would-be sheeple. And that’s precisely why deGrasse Tyson peddling “Titanic” Truther flimflam has always perturbed me so much. Like, say, an astrologist telling an astrophysicist he just doesn’t get it, we cinephiles are forced to endure deGrasse Tyson ignoring aesthetics in the name of artistic truth to cherry pick scientific inaccuracies to ensure we all know he’s smarter than us. Bo-ring. And so I wondered, does this mean Brad Pitt is a “Titanic” Truther too? Will I have to root for Joe Pesci?

I don’t think so. Pitt’s line and Leo’s giggly reaction suggested something less than smirking superciliousness and more like a simple inside joke between co-stars. And besides, if Pitt’s Cliff Booth and Leo’s Rick Dalton had, for some far-fetched reason, wound up stranded in the icy North Atlantic I have no doubt they would have staked out that makeshift raft for themselves, while taking swigs from the margarita pitcher they had managed to pack while abandoning ship, and sunk straight to the bottom, whining about steerage scum the whole way down, just going to show once and for all that the scientific principle of buoyancy is no match for overbearing male wiseasses.

Allied

If every story, as some will tell you, owes a debt, in one way or another, to Shakespeare, perhaps every movie owes a debt, in one way or another, to “Casablanca”, even if “Casablanca” owes a debt to “Algiers.” After all, the themes of Michael Curtiz’s B movie cum masterpiece are tenfold and everlasting, its performers embody the definitive combination of Movie Star and Actor, and the movie itself is as funny as it is sad as it is moving as it is suspenseful as it is timely, then and now. Last year as modern an enterprise as Tom Cruise’s indefatigable “Mission: Impossible” franchise quoted “Casablanca”, going so far as to name its principal female character Ilsa and re-imagining the relationship of “Casablanca’s” romantic principals as a pair of spies whose intentions continually shift. Robert Zemeckis’s “Allied” borrows that idea of two spies in a heated romance whose intentions continually shift and takes it back to “Casablanca’s” WWII era, creating an old world melodrama with glimmers of modernity. It’s a spirited thriller fashioned with impeccable craft, with set designs that seamlessly honor classic Hollywood backlots even as they make way for more new-fangled special effects, and a taste for set pieces rendered with so much delightful verve that it doesn’t matter as much as it might have that “Allied” fails to completely come off.

“Allied” opens on a visually intoxicating sequence of Royal Air Force wing commander Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) parachuting into French Morocco, one that in terms of narrative efficiency comes across rather superfluous; couldn’t we have just cut to him being handed his fake passport? But that’s okay, because it alludes to Zemeckis repeatedly giving us substantial bang for our buck, and his commitment to conviviality, with notes of earnestness, fills the early sequences as Max makes his way to, that’s right, Casablanca, where he rendezvous with Marianne Beauséjour (Marion Cotillard), a French Resistance spy, posing as his wife. They learn to love, so to speak, to carry out an assassination of some requisite Nazis, but they also learn to love on the level, brought home in an extraordinary sequence where they make love in a car during a sandstorm.

This is “Allied” at its operatic best. Why have them simply get tangled up in the sheets of their Casablanca abode when you can wonderfully excise any lilting strings from the soundtrack to instead have the pounding winds and clamoring dust emblemize the roaring passion to which Max and Marianne necessarily surrender, their sex allowed to play out in a more frank manner than the 1940s, a perfect blending of the way movies were and the way they are. Oh, it’s something else. It’s so good, in fact, that it sort of makes the actual assassination in the next scene beside the point, and heck, Max feels that beside the pointness too, because as they get make their getaway he asks Marianne to marry him.

Their marriage, which includes the birth of a daughter during an air raid, a dramatization of action so wonderfully overblown I laughed out loud, is economically introduced as entirely true – until, that is, the turn. That turn was already revealed, per Zemeckis tradition, in the trailer, but feel free, reader, to skip out if you’re cold and would like to stay that way, unless you can guess what’s coming, which you likely can. Max is summoned by a suitably snooty superior (Simon McBurney) who explains they have strong reason to believe Marianne is a German spy and that if they conclude she is then Max has gotta ante up and ice his daughter’s mother. Yikes.

That is not particularly light-hearted fare, it goes without saying, but Zemeckis and writer Steven Knight have no interest in truly psychologically unpacking what his discovery might mean; they are simply interested in using this discovery to generate suspense. Is she a spy or isn’t she, that’s all that really matters, marking it as a disappointingly simple rendering of what otherwise suggests a compelling deep dive into the darkest matters of the soul.

As the question of Marianne’s identity plays out, Cotillard strikes just the right notes, leading us on without leading us on, while Pitt, as he does throughout the entire movie, simply broods, which is made that much more alarming given his instructions by higher-ups to act as if nothing has changed. Granted, his wife’s a spy and that’ll leave a guy stricken. But then again, he is established as some sort of top league agent of espionage and whereas in all instances Cotillard allows Marianne to effortlessly blend, Pitt works so hard to blatantly evince his character’s internal anguish that, frankly, he stands out like a sore thumb. He’s just about the worst spy you’ve ever seen.

At the same time, however, Pitt’s endless moping actually aids the conclusion, not to be revealed, transforming it from plain tragedy to stately battle readiness. Marianne might recede to the side of most of the back half of this movie to make way for the man, but perhaps she fails to receive equal time because whereas her man struggles with the emotional necessities of duty, she remains eternally rock ribbed. And when push comes to shove, the woman’s the one who’s got the chutzpah to do what needs to be done.

By the Sea

If so much of the movie going experience is about escapism then writer/director Angelina Jolie Pitt shrewdly employs that escapism as a weapon against us in “By the Sea.” Her film, explicit in its refusal to explicate, is too long, yet that length feels just right, gradually transforming its otherwise scenic Maltese landscapes intended as the south of France from dazzling to exhausting. The opulent hotel where our central couple spends so much time turns claustrophobic and they smoke so many cigarettes your lungs will start to hurt. Even the picturesque seaside café eventually leaves you wondering if there are any other places to eat. This exhaustion correlates directly to the horse latitudes marriage of Ms. Jolie Pitt and her husband Brad… Er, make that Vanessa and Roland Bertrand.

Beg your pardon if I’ve confused the two but “By the Sea” readily recognizes that fiction mixes liberally with reality, which is precisely why Roland, an author whose writing process involves drinking and bemoaning how he has nothing to write, borrows from his own screwed up existence to concoct what he no doubt hopes will be a book for people to haul along on their own getaways to the south of France. Content to brood, Roland gets a lot of screen time, often opposite Michel (Niels Aerstrup), proprietor the aforementioned café, who seems so in-tune where Roland is so out of tune. Indeed, Roland, for all this writing frustration, is primarily a spectator to his wife’s seemingly slow withdrawal from society.

Played by Jolie Pitt, so often so formidably charismatic, with a voice of severe timidity, Vanessa opts for isolation at every turn, surrounding herself with Chardonnay and pills. If her husband was once a successful writer now blocked, she was once a dancer of some renown, it is implied, who has essentially been forced off the stage, a la Winona Ryder in “Black Swan”, a nod at the dividing line for female actors when they cross the threshold where studio execs look past them and toward someone youthful. And here you sense Jolie Pitt stricken by that idea, wondering what will happen to her when the know-it-alls find another starlet to glom onto, personified in the film's most loopy yet most consequential storyline in which she and her husband find a conveniently placed hole in the wall of their hotel allowing them to voyeuristically peer through at the young newlyweds on honeymoon next door.

The exceptionally attractive newlyweds are Francois, played by Melvil Poupaud, the original Frenchman In A Jaunty Hat, and Lea, played by Melanie Laurent with, if you'll permit me to say, the most regal tan in movie history. Jolie Pitt – er, Vanessa – is instantly jealous of Laurent – er, Lea – and fearful that Roland will trade in for a younger model. Still, Vanessa can't stop peeping, as if looking at herself from the past, seeing what's coming up behind, knowing her future as a glamorous starlet is in peril. Another director might have been more interested in upping the kinky quotient, and while it gets a little kinky, it’s more content to have our bickering lovers take a time out to sit back and watch, and have us sit back and watch them, two levels of voyeurism happening at once.

Yet by employing the device of a faltering marriage to explore her own rightful insecurities about a woman’s place in Hollywood, Jolie Pitt forces herself to resolve the marital issues, and the resolutions here are less than inspired, coming across like placeholders or less interesting ideas culled from other movies. Rather than exploding into batshit metaphysics, like a latter day Antonioni, it settles for a metaphor in the form of a lonely fisherman glimpsed throughout and a revelation so head-shaking predictable in the wake of an opening hour and change that is so unabashedly content not to give a fuck what you think about it.

It’s as if Jolie Pitt has given these ideas a great deal of consideration but reached no conclusion herself, and so she simply conjured one up out of spare narrative parts. That marks “By the Sea” as a less than successful movie, sure, but there is still something intriguing about it overall. Some have, and more will, discount this as a vanity project, and fair enough, but what is art if not a working through, and Jolie Pitt seems to be working through her own anxieties on screen. And if “By the Sea” does not offer answers to the questions she’s asking, I think it’s because she doesn’t actually have them, which might suggest she shouldn’t have made the movie. But the search is oh so compelling.

The Counselor

If venturing to the theater for maverick Ridley Scott's "The Counselor", it's best to check your expectations at the door. I'm not talking about your expectations as to whether the film might be great, good, bad, or awful - no, I'm not talking about your expectations regarding the kind of film you are about to see. It's a crime thriller in so much as it involves cocaine and gunfire and it's a drama in so much as it features famous actors in showy parts, except it's not really either of those things, not in the traditional sense. And it's not style before substance, though there is an entire Texas-sized buffet of style (people are dressed so well in this film I started to feel insecure), because there is substance aplenty in the form of numerous dense meditations that purposely appear intent on biting their thumb at the ancient axiom "Show, Don't Tell." It's simply less a movie than cinematic metaphysics.

The setting is interesting. Most of the action takes place in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the two cities straddling the border, a hot spot in recent pop culture visual arts, but while the location is crucial in spurring along critical portions of the script it is not truly an integral part of the story that Scott and his writer, famed novelist Cormac McCarthy, seek to tell. "Do you know how many people were killed in Juarez last year?" a character asks The Counselor himself (Michael Fassbender.) The Counselor shrugs. "A lot?" he offers. He has no idea. He probably doesn't care. Cold, but the truth has no temperature. Sociology and politics are not the point.

It is also interesting how little of the crime at the quasi-center of the picture is discussed in detail. As stated, it involves the cocaine trade, yet explicit details of the requisite deal gone wrong are not really addressed. We see glimpses of it, snippets intercut with other goings-on, but it never conveniently lays out precisely what is happening and why. It is some event taking place in some other world, far, far away from the people putting it in motion. Crime is not the point.

Scott and McCarthy are more interested in what occurs around the crime. What motivates these people? What is the benefit of such risk-taking? What is the danger? What is the thrill? For the first quarter of the film, in fact, people try talking The Counselor out of agreeing to this criminal act, whatever it may be, and he continually smugly defers. You know what they say, that could never happen to me.

It happens to him, and to his two associates who also enter the deal - Reiner (Javier Bardem) and Westray (Brad Pitt). As characters all three are short on past and personal details, and instead McCarthy establishes them by the lackadaisical way in which they take on the crime and then defines them by the way they react when that crime inevitably goes wrong. Reiner is resigned, yet unrepentant for what his ways have wrought. His end seems as off the cuff as his lifestyle (and hair). Westray is almost humored, as if this is the punchline he's waited for all his life. In fact, he cuts off the typical reaction at the pass, dismissing regret as "sophomoric."

The Counselor, however, being a first-timer, is the one in terrified denial, the one convinced he can wash the sins from his hands with one phone call or one piece of advice. He doesn't realize he made an addendum to his lease on life, nor that this addendum directly influenced his bride-to-be, the ravishing Laura (Penelope Cruz). Ah yes. Laura. Underwritten and rarely present, until her presence is required by the plot and she is shuffled back on stage and then right back off stage.

But don't presume McCarthy has no interest in the female mind for there is another character we have yet to discuss......the arrestingly named Malkina, played by a devil-may-care Cameron Diaz with fingernails to die for and a leopard tattoo that forcefully (heavy-handedly) connects her to a couple precious pet leopards (this is what drug money buys) who are seen hunting in the makeshift Texas wilds as Malkina and Reiner watch from afar over Cosmos. Her presence is consistently felt, even if she often lingers out of sight of the scheming men, though the film returns to her again and again in brief increments suggesting she transcends her appearance as a traditional gold digger. Her final lines, Gold help me, made me think of "Jurassic Park's" Dr. Ellie Satler: "Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth." No, McCarthy may think most highly of women (though he doesn't think "highly" of anyone at all).

Of course, that just mentioned sequence is verbose and sensationally on the nose, and that does not make it rare. After all, McCarthy is a novelist, and so "The Counselor" is chock full of opulent tangents that speaking strictly in a Robert McKee sense are out of place on the silver screen. It's all talk. But then the majority of these characters are all talk. They talk, until they have nowhere to turn, and then they plead. Or just shut up and take their medicine.

Late in the film Rubén Blades suddenly appears on the opposite end of the phone. Frankly, I had no idea who his character was and I still don't. He may as well be Cormac McCarthy himself, laying out in monologue form his theme, how humans are too reluctant (frightened) to admit their actual predicament, their true place in life. Whether you are a goody two shoes, a cocaine cowboy or a Counselor, you cannot know peace without acceptance.

And you cannot see "The Counselor" for its raw, writhing, murky beauty without first accepting what it is.