The Fall Guy

There’s a sequence from “The Great Waldo Pepper” (1975) in which Robert Redford’s eponymous Depression-era aviator briefly moonlights as a stuntman in Hollywood, taking hard falls turning him punch drunk, all rendered at a comic pitch. Rather than set the record straight about the stunt people that make so many movies go, 2024’s first big tentpole “The Fall Guy” just wants to give them their due by opting for a comic tone too. The eponymous stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) might get bumped and bruised, even attain one significant injury, but nothing truly hurts, epitomized in a scene where upon crashing through a window, he shakes the broken glass from his hood, drolly waits a beat, and then shakes out some more. No, in concluding with an end credits sequence showing the real-life stuntmen for the movie’s star who is playing the stuntman for a movie star (Aaron-Taylor Johnson), director David Leitch, a former stuntman and stunt coordinator himself, has composed a meta love letter to his chosen profession, and fine by me. What “The Fall Guy” lacks in levity, it more than makes up for with liveliness, like “Bowfinger” but if rather than being a movie about making an action movie “Bowfinger” had just been an action movie.

A prologue introduces Colt doing the dirty work for Tom Ryder (Johnson), and in a happy relationship with camera operator Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), at the top, meaning he can only fall, literally and figuratively when a stunt goes wrong, leaving him severely injured, and struggling to recover emotionally as much as physically. Eventually, he is re-enlisted by producer Gail Meyer, played with great glee by Hannah Waddingham in the key of the recurring Diet Coke in her hand, overcaffeinated and high-strung, to help Jody finish her first movie as a director, a western horror sci-fi hybrid Metalstorm, on location in Australia. Colt helps by getting back behind the wheel of a stunt car, yes, but also by masquerading as a gumshoe to find Metalstorm’s leading man, Tom, who has gone missing, his disappearance threatening to derail the production.

That is considerable plot, two movies at once, almost, and though “The Fall Guy” was written by one person, Drew Pearce, it still emits a by-committee feel, not confusing, exactly, but patchy, not inexorably building bit by bit but feeling both made up on the fly and threatening to unravel. In its way, though, this ragged and wild sensation becomes reflective of the movie within a movie, which is all the time threatening to come undone, not just from Tom going MIA but from various moviemaking snaggles. There is a bravura single take in which the camera circles and tracks with Jody as all manner of people on the Metalstorm production come to her with questions, a comic portrait of a movie director as a kind of trail guide keeping the expedition on task, ultimately as deft in negotiating her own task as Colt is at making a speedboat escape with his hands literally tied behind his back.

Though Colt and Jody can feel underwritten, their impeccable wardrobes more thought out than their backstories, these two gifted performers, nevertheless, provide just enough immediacy to individual moments and their overall relationship to make it work. Gosling deploys his skill for self-deprecation into a quiet commentary on a guy who can’t quite bring himself to confess his own pain. Blunt’s own flair for indignant deadpan, meanwhile, goes a long way in helping sell the push and pull. When Colt cries along to Taylor Swift in his truck one night, it might be a concession to the zeitgeist, but man, when Jody appears at his window, Blunt’s unamused facial expression seems to dress down the zeitgeist as much as it dresses down Colt. And though “The Fall Guy” leans a little too heavily on montages to convey their rekindling romance, these montages tend to go together with making the movie, portraying them as collaborators as much as romantic partners, artistic expression and love going hand-in-hand.

What Pearce’s script lacks, it ameliorates with how its main character’s very particular set of professional skills amusingly intertwines with his improvisatory private investigative work, essentially taking the old critic aphorism about a plot existing to string stunts get together and making it come cheekily alive. “The Fall Guy” sets up myriad tools of the trade and then pays them off, none more ingeniously or hilariously than a prop gun, which for all the winning special effects, just goes to show that sometimes it’s the littlest tricks that resonate the loudest. Leitch honors his own “John Wick” rule by repeatedly allowing us to see stunts in full frames rather than chopped up in the editing room, and though there are some set pieces at night, there are just as many in the light of day, rejoicing in what it has been dreamt up rather than obfuscating. And speaking of collaboration, “The Fall Guy” concludes with a stunt that brings in the entire stunt team and ties the whole movie together, action-oriented proof that one man cannot do it all on his own. 

The Many Faces of Sicario's Emily Blunt

 Confusion

 Curiosity

 Concern

Fear 

Bemused

 Exhausted

 "For the love of GOD..."

 Unwilling / Willing

 

Merle Haggard Song

 Reverse Poignant Look Yourself In The Mirror Shot

 Discovery

 Actualization

Surrender

Sicario

As “Sicario” opens, a low rumble pervades the soundtrack, like thunder percolating in the distance. The picture comes up on the Arizonan desert as members of a SWAT Team dart in from screen’s right, a nondescript house their target. That low rumble grows, threatening, menacing and then... It explodes. An ARV smashes through the house’s wall. Shooting erupts. Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), commander of a high-tech top-notch kidnap unit responding to a call, kills someone. But what they find isn’t what they expected. Dead bodies, rows of them, victims of a drug cartel’s vengeance, rot inside the home’s drywall. These thick-skinned agents bend over and vomit. And it gets worse when someone opens a trap door, detonating a bomb, taking a few of the good guys with it. Lucky to survive, Kate sits in the post-blast dust, dazed, and sees a severed arm on the ground. This is American soil but it’s like the opening of “Saving Private Ryan.” The War on Drugs is a nifty label; you can use it in stump speeches; you can put it on bumper stickers; you can say we’re “winning” it or “losing” it or anything in-between. But it’s all distant ambient noise compared to the high-watt screams of this sequence. This, “Sicario” is saying with a punch to the goddam gut, is your War on Drugs.

Working in conjunction with Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay, one that favors keen subtext over explicit speechifying, Denis Villeneuve’s immaculate two hour film feels extraordinarily lean, packaged with nary a moment of dead air. His action set pieces are unfathomably intense, yet no less exhilarating for the way in which he genuinely, inexorably and breathlessly builds tension; he builds and builds and then…releases, quickly and viciously, maximizing the impact before barreling on. And if these and other events are brutal, he never glorifies the violence, giving us just enough sense of the carnage to grasp the enormous real world stakes and then cutting away. And “Sicario’s” photography, courtesy of the impeccable Roger Deakins, repeatedly ruminates in breathless images of the southwestern landscape, such as the red sun cutting through the low hanging clouds like arrows of flaming fire even as machine gun fire pops in the distance, nature’s beauty juxtaposed against the film’s ferocious anger.

Kate is our entry point this story of extravagant governmental murk and mire, enlisted to join a nebulous outfit captained by a guy whose position is vague but clearly high up, Matt Graver (Josh Brolin, effortlessly rendering drug enforcement as dinner theater), introduced wearing flip-flops to a top level meeting, swift characterization that establishes his easygoing familiarity with such weighty derring-do that stands in stark contrast to Kate’s naivety. Played by Blunt with taciturn intensity, Kate is something of a cipher, but that’s deliberate rather than a writing failure. Matt ensures she has no family ties because he wants her to be a social nonentity. The film’s only real pause in momentum is a seeming cut-from-cardboard sequence of Kate going out for drinks that devolves into something horrifying. The horror, however, while conventional on the surface, expresses an existence where every personal relationship retains the possibility of being compromised. To lead her life, you inevitably see the world upside down, evoked in an indelible shot reflected in a coffee table of Kate at a delicate instant.

Physically, Blunt’s performance is rock steady. Her eyes, on the other hand, searching, skeptical, fearful, tell a dissimilar story, one in which confusion merely balloons by the moment; she’s down the rabbit hole. Normally a movie so devoted to withholding pertinent information from its protagonist would be guilty of a cheap ploy to prolong suspense; in “Sicario” it feels spot-on. Cryptic is the language of bureaucracy in this brave new world. Matt speaks in vacuous riddles. You keep waiting for Kate to transform into a fed-up ass-kicker taking names, the requisite unstoppable anti-drug action movie force. That doesn’t happen. The only real knowledge she gleans is the war’s continually moving boundaries. Anything goes.

Those moving goalposts pertain just as much to the movie’s narrative. If Matt seems the big cheese, that is proven partially illusory the more Kate gets to know his ostensible right-hand man, Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro). His intent, his attitude, even his nationality, shift scene to scene, and that elusiveness is personified most in his relationship with Kate, one that persistently re-sets. If you think they’re friends, they’re probably enemies, and vice-versa. Fifteen years ago Del Toro won an Oscar for “Traffic” playing a Mexican cop, Javier, caught up in the War on Drugs on the other side of the border. Alejandro may as well be Javier with a lot more mileage on him. If Javier was hopeful, Alejandro, played by Del Toro with a fiercely inscrutable poker face, is dark and doubtful, and the lines in his face unconsciously evoke the toil this border battle takes.

The “Traffic” comparison is imperative. Steven Soderbergh’s fine film encompassed all aspects of this unwinnable war, from corrupt Mexican cops to DEA agents stuck between a rock and a hard place to the drug war coming home to affluent America. “Sicario” deliberately takes a narrower approach, presenting the front lines rather than the fallout, money poured into the logistics and gear to maintain a fight where the finish line is an omnipresent mirage. One scene finds Kate descending into a drug tunnel beneath the border where yet another harsh revelation awaits. Emblemizing the entire film, she is made to burrow deeper and deeper, hoping to reach the bottom of this crusade, only to find the bottom repeatedly giving way to more layers, more and more, on and on into forever, etc. It's a cynical viewpoint, yes, but from that cynicism emerges a paradoxical clarity, the only kind that can exist in a conflict of such awe-inspiring ethical elasticity. The further she plunges into darkness, the closer she gets to seeing the light.

Emily Blunt's Letter to the Cannes Film Festival

The interwebs are alive with shouts and murmurs of the apparent Cannes Film Festival ordinance that all females must wear high heels on the red carpet, or else. The hella talented Emily Blunt, walking the red carpet on the French Riviera to promote “Sicario”, couldn’t take this footwear B.S. anymore and spoke about it. Twitter erupted. Cannes improbably became more supercilious. And so on. As it happens, Cinema Romantico’s sources were able to track down a letter sent by Emily Blunt’s PR team to the film festival’s directors in advance of her appearance. We have re-printed it below.

Dear Pierre Lescure and The French Association of the International Film Festival,

I hope this letter finds you well. Emily cannot wait to attend Cannes! However, we were hoping you might acquiesce to one minor request. While Ms. Blunt respects your ultra-progressive policy forcing females to wear high heels on the red carpet lest they appear - egads! - un-ladylike, she wondered if you might do her a solid, just this once, and grant her the privilege of wearing flats for the premiere of Sicario. Her back has really been in a lot of pain this last year considering she had to carry Tom Cruise in “Edge of Tomorrow.”

Thanks again!

Sincerely, The Artists Partnership

Edge of Tomorrow

Sarah Vowell once posited that America likes watching Tom Cruise be put through the wringer - and she wrote this in January 2000, long before he infamously besmirched Oprah's fine upholstery. This hypothesis irrefutably holds up when considering "Edge of Tomorrow", Doug Liman's re-imagining of Harold Ramis's elegant time loop comic masterwork "Groundhog Day" as a futuristic "D-Day" where the human race is made to confront to an alien army of tentacled Mimics. They are called this, I reckon, because they are in the process of mimicking the Nazis' European aggressions. Who says you can't repeat the past?

The Cruise version of vain weatherman Phil Connors is Major William Cage, an unctous public relations man whose interest is maintaining and propagating the military brand in the midst of all-out war rather than getting involved in anything literally militaristic. Which is why when his superior officer (Brendan Gleeson, dryly hysterical) assigns him to the front lines of Normandy 2.0, he grins and tries to bribe his way out. Instead, he's arrested, re-cast as a deserter in an officer's uniform and thrown in with a pack of grunts. One minute he's trading exposition with Erin Burnett on CNN, the next he's in handcuffs on an army base tarmac getting kicked in the guts. He's Tom Cruise reduced to our level. Sure, he'll wind up the hero, he has to, after all, but he'll crawl through the mud to get there.

Truly there is something satirically subversive in seeing Tom Cruise, hero, strapped into a Mini Me version of a Jaeger and not know how to turn off the "safety". Even better is seeing Bill Paxton as a mustachoied Kentuckian barking orders and insults at our leading man, as if we are momentarily allowed to imagine an alternate reality where Paxton, not Cruise, is the box office luminary. And "Edge of Tomorrow" is all about indulging in alternate reality.

At the onset of the invasion, one in which the commanding officers in all their hubris have miscalculated and left themselves woefully vulnerable, Cage is killed. But not quite. Rather than saying 'sup to St. Peter, he wakes up back on the army tarmac, being kicked in the guts, his own personal "I Got You, Babe". He's destined, it seems, to re-live the invasion and his own death over and over and over, etc., for the rest of eternity. Until, that is, he meets Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) on the battlefield, a soldiering celebrity, which no doubt would have caused the notable feminist John Wayne to throw a monotone hissy hit. She is nicknamed The Angel Of Verdun, another military history nod and an embodiment of her role as Cage's guiding spirit. She also lived through this endless invasion loop, and has deciphered the secret - by killing an Alpha Mimic, a person gains the power to re-set time. And if they can re-set the time, they can get a leg up on the enemy.

The film is based on a book which itself was based on a video game, and this is extremely evident in the evolution of Cage's journey. He garners strength, physically and mentally, builds his combat skills, and incessantly re-strategizes with Rita. Each time he dies, he begins a "level" anew, until he conquers that level and moves to the next one. It cleverly allows the film to refresh in the moment, even as its overarching narrative is fairly boilerplate. But where "Edge of Tomorrow" significantly diverges from its Bill Murray forefather is in its protagonist's trajectory. If Phil Connors' arc was one of personal redemption then William Cage's is the more commonplace Cruise-esque Becoming The World's Savior. Which is why even in this wearying loop, even with the obligatory second act comedown in advance of the climax, there's a bit too much Spunky Explorer to the performance.

Blunt is the true counterpart to Murray, the film's secret weapon, giving it gravity, suggesting something more Shakespearean than Hollywood. Cruise may be bordering on the Edge of Tomrrow, but Blunt is mired in, to quote the prospective novel of "Sideways'" Miles Raymond, The Day After Yesterday. Yes, she's an action heroine, and yes, Liman's camera repeatedly ogles her in the midst of musclebound yoga as her respective Sonny & Cher trigger, and yes, the script grafts on some blah attempt at romance. But her performance is intense, meditative, emitting a soulfulness I wish more turns in would-be blockbusters would have the guts to try. The character's exhaustion is palpable and suggestive of a different movie lurking just underneath this very good one.

Every attempt made by Cage to "get to know" Rita, she rebuffs, a subtle reminder amidst all the effects and bouts of heroism that no matter how much time we spend in the company of another person, we never really get to know them at all.