BOMBSHELL

Directed by Jay Roach. Starring Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, John Lithgow, and Katherine McKinnon.

Already the media is asking questions about BOMBSHELL’s gallery of lookalike actresses and actors: How many prosthetics did Charlize Theron wear in her portrayal of Fox newswoman Megyn Kelly? Did lowering her voice damage her throat? Is John Lithgow’s prosthetic padding more lifelike than Russell Crowe’s in his portrayal of Ailes in The Loudest Voice earlier this year? Etc. This is unfortunate, because that sort of verisimilitude is bound to fail at close quarters. Too often the screen is crowded with a gallery of lookalikes—Chris Wallace, Rudy Giuliani, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Bill O’Reilly, etc.—that comes across as one of those crowded Al Hirschfeld panels of caricatured celebrities. The best we can say is that as caricatures they are playing an amusing game of charades. But “amusing” is not what we’re after, here.

Otherwise, BOMBSHELL switches the polarities of the standard newsroom expose. Recent films like Official Secrets (one of my favorite movies earlier this year) and Dark Water deployed media to uncover scandals and misdeeds. BOMBSHELL turns inward: It’s the Fox News operation that is itself exposed. And I’m not just talking about Roger Ailes’s infamous directive that the Fox anchor women sit at desks whose transparent glass revealed their legs. Ailes’ spectacular fall from grace (?) is by now well known and documented. The same holds true for the bitter struggles of anchorwomen Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlsen against the predations of Ailes.

So, I found myself looking more at the edges of the frame, looking for characters and stories that are not well known. The presence of Kate McKinnon, for example, as a closeted lesbian concealing a picture of herself and her lover under her newsroom desk, is more than a disturbing footnote to this story. While the gender politics play out in the heterosexual arena, it is her character of Jess Carr who must remain silent—concealing not just her sexual identity but her liberal views. Praise must go to BOMBSHELL for craftily inserting this disturbing secondary story, for it points out the fact that the “bombshell” revelations of the doings at Fox News are only part of a much more complicated picture. Behind every desk at Fox News—or any other print and broadcast newsroom, for that matter—there are other stories, like Jess’s, that remain muffled and hidden.

When will those stories be told?

Pardon me now. Emerging from the toxic waste dump of BOMBSHELL, I’m washing my hands. Then I’ll go back to see The Two Popes again. There are secrets there, too. But played out in a rather different arena.

LITTLE WOMEN

Adapted and directed by Greta Gerwig. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Kristen Stewart, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen as the “little women.”

The problem is Jo.

The problem is always Jo.

What to do with feisty, brilliant, restless Jo March?

Louisa May Alcott couldn’t come to terms with Jo. She didn’t want to marry her off. But her readers and her publisher insisted on it. But even though a suitable husband was conjured up, you suspect that Alcott and Jo herself would have none of it. All those sequels about Jo and the kids. Someone else must have written them.

And now the dilemma continues: Who will filmmaker Greta Gerwig cast as Jo? We’ve had Katharine Hepburn, June Allyson, and Winona Ryder... and now enter Saoirse Ronan with a flurry of flounces, jitters, and antic dances. When she settles down for a moment, she turns to the camera and bemoans the plight of women in a professional world. “There’s more to a woman than just a person who loves,” she mumbles.

As much as director Greta Gerwig loves Ronan’s Jo (actor and persona appeared earlier in a film called Lady Bird), you begin to realize she’s not sure what to do with Jo. Solution: scramble the time tense. Regard Jo as a moving target. Begin her story in the present-day and then immediately flashback seven years into the past. Keep her in a slipstream of time and space: One moment, she is an adolescent girl writing her melodramas in the attic; the next instant, a canny business woman haggling with her publisher. Here, she’s at home in Concord; there, she’s moving in to a boarding house in New York. She comes, she goes. Her suitors likewise come and go. Poor Laurie (Timothee Chalomet). The same for the other little women: No sooner do we begin with Meg (Emma Watson), married to a teacher; Beth (Eliza Scanlen), sickly and living at home with Marmie; Amy (Florence Pugh), touring Europe with paintbrush in hand—than we’re hurled back in time to the humble March abode, when the sisters rough-house and perform Jo’s theatricals, run errands to the poor folks next door, and languish for news about their absent father. Beth, in particular, ever sickly Beth, is confounding--alive one moment, dead the next. Then alive again. You suspect she finally expires, impatient to be done with it.

It’s confusing at times. Where are we and when?

I guess there’s nothing really wrong with this game of cinematic musical chairs. The autumnal cinematography by Yorick le Saul is lovely, the music by Alexandre Desplat sprightly and gentle, by turns, and the costumes will earn their own Academy-Award nomination. But I yearned for the characters to just tell their own story rather than be chess pieces moved around willy-nilly in space and time at the whims of the director. Maybe Greta Gerwig, like Jo, had her own reckoning with a producer, who insisted on a reckless piece of time-shifting narrative rather than a good old piece of old-fashioned storytelling.

Ultimately, Joe remains a problem. Her own problem.

Bless her.

KNIVES OUT: THEY ALL DUN IT! (OR COULD HAVE)

Directed by Rian Johnson with an all-star cast.

I must admit that at first I was mildly surprised at the continuing box-office popularity of KNIVES OUT. The traditional cozy scheme of the body in the library attended by a bunch of suspicious characters is sometimes scorned in favor of the tough-guy noir school of crime fiction. But, when you think about it, the cozy Agatha Christie-style of thriller is just as dangerous as anything this side of Sam Spade. And that’s box office. Both types depend on one core consideration: They all dun it! Or—They all could’ve dun it! Indeed, in Christie’s The Orient Express, everybody DID INDEED DO IT!

Now there’s a sobering thought. Guilt is spread all around, like poisoned jam on toast.

The fact that in KNIVES OUT only one person is ultimately unmasked by detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) doesn’t fool me. The list of suspects are all proven to be potential murderers: Arrayed around the dead body of Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) are his vicious family members, including the manic Joni (Toni Collette), menacing Walt (Michael Shannon), scheming Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), rakish Morris (Don Johnson), and the mysteriously absent Hugh (Chris Evans).

Don’t turn your back on any of them.

Another trope dear to my heart with such doings is the Big Reveal. Yes, gather everybody around the fireplace and the detective will solve the mystery, no matter how impossible or impenetrable it seems. The only problem is, that the explanation is sometimes so byzantine in its complexity that we fall back in bewilderment:

Will somebody please explain the explanation?

And so we have Daniel Craig, having a wonderful time with his southern accent, exposing the culprit in a bewildering tangle of blackmail, adultery, contradictory wills, mysterious footprints in the garden, and a plethora of suspects busily shinnying up and down the second-story trellis. Yes, everybody is having a good time.

Let me add that in the midst of all this rampant villainy, KNIVES OUT gives us a most unexpected pleasure. And that is Ana de Armas as Marta Cabreras, the young caregiver to the murdered man. She’s not just the needed still point around which this mad carousel revolves, but her character is an embattled immigrant, which provides a bunch of not-so-subtle jabs at President Trump.

And yes, she’s a suspect, too. I’m suspicious of her: I suspect that here is a quietly charismatic star in the making.

THE AERONAUTS: FALLING UPWARD

 
Directed by Tom Harper, starring Eddie Redmayne as James Glaisher , Felicity Jones as Amelia Wren, written by Jack Thorne (suggested by Richard Holmes’s Falling Upwards)

THE AERONAUTS is the story of two adventurers embarking on a record-setting hot-air balloon ascent. The year is 1862, Wolverhampton, England. Ballooning is still regarded more as a romantic stunt than as a scientific endeavor to study for the first time, the layers of the upper atmosphere. Within minutes of takeoff and after surviving a dangerous thunderstorm, our intrepid aeronauts find themselves high above the clouds. Suddenly, unexpectedly, they encounter a cloud of yellow butterflies gaily fluttering around the balloon. The contrast between the earth-bound humans struggling upward against gravity and the tiny butterflies, blithely indifferent to such impediments—as if mocking gravity—is delicious. The moment even pauses for a reference to Edmund Spencer’s classic lines about butterflies, “The Fate of the Butterflie [sic].”

[See] the race of silver-winged flies
Which doo possesse the empire of the aire,
Betwixt the centred earth and azure skies...

There will be many more moments to greet our aeronauts, many of them hazardous, but none so delightfully suggestive as how tentative is the engagement of man, nature, and poetry.

Although THE AERONAUTS cites a screenplay by one Jack Thorne, the real impetus of the film is Richard Holmes’ classic account of ballooning, Falling Upwards (2013). In my own conversations with this legendary British biographer of figures like Coleridge and Shelley, I quickly learned that Holmes is a passionate devotee of ballooning and has taken many flights himself. That title, Falling Upwards, is a perfect statement of the two gravities that pull upon us poor human creatures—the gravity that keeps us down to earth, and the “tug” of the skies that tempts us to leave it. “Show me a balloon and I’ll show you quite often a tall story,” writes Holmes. Here is an historian who savors both the pull of facts and the flight of fancy.

Holmes’s narrative and the movie’s storyline chronicle the historic flight of one James Glaisher. He was already a renowned scientist of the upper air when he and his companion, Henry Coxwell, take flight on a voyage that turned out to be a record-setting ascent, reaching an estimated height of almost 35,000 feet, some seven miles above the earth. It was a flight full of wonder and terror. Glaisher and his companion nearly froze and succumbed to asphyxiation in the process, and it was owing only to the dare-devil exploits of his companion, who climbed aloft to release a frozen valve line, that the balloon descended back to terra firma.

The Aeronauts radically departs from this basic storyline, even if it thankfully preserves the poetry. Here, Glaisher’s companion in the balloon is a woman, the fictitious Amelia Wren, who brings to the adventure a backstory in which she lost her husband during a previous balloon ascent. Persuaded by Glaisher (here a young man rather than the middle-aged, stolid figure of history), Amelia, like her historical counterpart, Henry Coxwell, proves to be the real hero of this version. As their balloon rises to heights above 25,000 feet, and as she and Glaisher begin to succumb to freezing cold and suffocation, she takes to the rigging in a desperate climb up to the top of the balloon to release the frozen valve line. It’s a spectacular sequence as this dauntless woman saves the day against everything a hostile nature can throw at her.

I believe that despite such changes in Holmes’ historical account, THE AERONAUTS would gain his favor. Holmes in all his works recognizes and applauds the women of science and adventure. If he weren’t such a scrupulous historian, he might have supplied such a narrative as this. Meanwhile, the aerial photography is wondrous, pitting the struggles of the two aeronauts in the tiny gondola basket against the limitless expanses of the darkening blue of the planetary heavens. And never does the movie fail to honor what Richard Holmes calls “the upward possibility” of man’s never flagging urge to fly.

1917

Directed by Sam Mendes. With Dean-Charles Chapman, Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Madden.

1917 opens on an idyllic image of two soldiers, asleep, resting against a tree. The fields around them are verdant, the air quiet. All is at peace. By story’s end roughly twenty-four hours later, all is at peace again. The fields are still green. But now, after the many hazards of a desperate quest, only one soldier takes his rest. He alone has survived within this perfect circle of events. And we now know that these two moments of peace were only respites against the relentless brutality of war and slaughter.

April 1917. Two young British lance corporals are assigned an impossible mission: They are to deliver a message across enemy lines to a battalion readying for a charge. Unless that charge is stopped, the soldiers will be slaughtered. And so, the odyssey of these two reluctant heroes begins. But only one will complete the mission.

Not since The Revenant and Gravity have I seen such a harrowing struggle for survival. And, like both those films, much of the action is captured in uncut shots by a restless, roving camera. That relentless eye sometimes follows the action, sometimes pursues it. It soars above at times for the aerial view, and at other it plunges below for the tight closeup. Its pitiless omniscience takes no sides. All that matters is the story of the soldiers’ race against death as they track a breathless trajectory through tunneled trenches, mortar-scarred fields, barbed-wire emplacements, demolished buildings. How can human frailty withstand the Furies of War?

Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay portray the two soldiers. To them goes our admiration, our respect, our honor. The grit and danger they face is all too real. Making the film must have been an endurance test. It’s as if director Sam Mendes is determined to throw everything at them. George MacKay, in particular, is the one left to shoulder the burden of the rescue mission. When he’s not dodging a crashing airplane, digging himself out of an underground bunker, buffeting raging flood waters, he’s racing madly through the chaos of shot and shell, a broken-field runner thrown to the ground, rising, thrown down again. Again. Again. Only a few moments of respite are granted him: There’s a hushed calm when he fills his canteen with a newly discovered pail of fresh milk; and there’s hushed intensity when he shares a moment with a lone woman and child while hiding from surrounding Germans.

To the great cinematographer Roger Deakins we bow in admiration for the most amazing camerawork of this or any time. There is doubtless some trickery behind the apparently seamless two hours of real-time action. Well, obviously, it’s not real time. Two hours of screen time somehow becomes twenty-four hours of dramatic time. And we can peer closely at the action to try to determine how those long takes might actually be a series of discrete takes. We can do that, and critics and observers are already divining the techniques behind the magic. But the rest of us can only fall back in astonishment.

1917 is destined for several Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Cinematography. The latter is surely a “lock.”

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: TABLE-TOP LIFE

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD Marielle Heller from Tom Junod’s book and staring Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers, Matthew Rhys as Lloyd Vogel, Chris Cooper as Jerry Vogel.

Picture Fred Rogers, alone, in the dark, sitting at a piano. Taping has concluded of a recent episode of his celebrated kids television show, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood (1968-2001). The crew has left. The set is empty. Rogers sits down at the piano. He absently plays a few notes. . . Then, suddenly, he pounds with both hands the lower register of the keyboard. The dissonant crash is startling. Fade out.

That’s about as close as we get to whatever inner discords mark the otherwise sunny and saintly nature of Mr. Rogers.

(He’s already admitted, earlier in the film, that a two-hand crash on a keyboard helps him cope with life’s troubling realities.)

People attending A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD may be forgiven their confusion at encountering a story that’s more about a magazine journalist, Lloyd Vogel, assigned to write for Esquire a character profile of Rogers, than it is about Rogers himself. They’ve fallen victim to the marketing of the film which cleverly conceals this disproportion. And that was my own growing confusion—even consternation—as I watched. For more than half the movie we’re caught up with Lloyd’s personal and emotional problems: He’s not happy with his responsibilities as the dad of a new baby and he hates his dad. The movie seems to have jumped the tracks from Mr. Rogers’ table-top neighborhood, which the film repeatedly references, and entered another reality. We ask questions: Do I care about Lloyd’s problems? Wouldn’t I rather know more about Mr. Rogers? Why is this movie keeping us at a distance from him?

How you respond to those questions determines your take on this film. I predict many viewers will begin to squirm, wondering, Where the hell is Mr. Rogers??? Aside from devoted performances by Tom Hanks, a tense Matthew Rhys, and, particularly, the admirable Chris Cooper, the few scant scenes showing Rogers “ministering” to Lloyd’s anxieties and traumas with a handful of homilies about love and forgiveness and a minutes of prayerful silence while dining with Lloyd—and “ministering” properly describes Roger’s delicate counseling of the man—fail to convince. Lloyd comes away redeemed, newly accepting his paternal responsibilities and forgiving his ailing father’s sins.

I’m sorry. I don’t buy it. We never can get close to a saint, says a character early in the film. We have to be content with a few scenes of him playing on the set of his table-top neighborhood, crouching behind his beloved puppets, performing a piano duet at home with his wife (the music is Schumann’s Bilder von Osten), enjoying a serenade on the subway by fellow passengers, and dispensing crooked smiles to one and all. And, oh yes—there’s his visit to Lloyd’s terminally ill father: “I asked him to pray for me,” Rogers tells Lloyd later.

But what echoes in our ears is that crash of notes from Rogers’ piano.

Even in a table-top world, the dissonance is troubling.

DARK WATERS: THE MAZE AND THE MONSTER

Directed by Todd Haynes from screenplay by Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan (adapted from a New York Times article by Nathaniel Rich). Starring Mark Ruffalo as Robert Bilott and Ann Hathaway as his wife.

When the Greek hero Theseus ventured into the center of a maze, he found a dreadful monster, the Minotaur. There was a fight. Theseus emerged victorious. Now, let’s leave myth behind and consider a contemporary situation: Picture an ambitious young corporate lawyer, Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), crouching on the floor of a warehouse, surrounded by piles and piles of boxes, files, and notes. This is his Maze. At its center he finds something just as monstrous—a beast we know by name of DuPont. There’s nothing mythical about this monster. It’s a chemical giant suspected of manufacturing products that are poisoning hundreds of thousands of people. Our young hero takes up the battle. And the winner is... ?

DARK WATERS is based on the true story of a legal tussle between the citizens of the town of Parkersburg, Pennsylvania and a “minotaur” known as the DuPont company. DuPont owns the town. It employs its people. It’s also devouring its citizens: Its nearby factories are poisoning the livestock, the people, the wells and rivers. Something is in the water. Lawyer Bilott, while shouldering his way through the maze of documents, finds references to a mysterious substance called PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid), which turns out to be a form of ammonium salt used as surfactant in the emulsion polymerization of PTFE. It’s a likely carcinogen.

Its best-known product is known today as Teflon.

It coats our pots and pans, our clothes, our carpets. We eat it, we wear it, we walk on it.

Mark Ruffalo lends his quietly charismatic gravitas to the crusading Robert Bilott. He places his firm in jeopardy when he leads the charge against DuPont. While negotiating the legal procedures, delays, deceptive practices arrayed against him, the town around him is dying. His family life suffers. Indeed, he is succumbing to the ills he is endeavouring to expose.

As the latest entry in films investigating social, political, and corporate corruption—just a few months ago, we had Official Secrets, about a whistleblower exposing a conspiracy behind America’s invasion of Iraq—DARK WATERS wears its heart on its sleeve. There’s no questioning its crusading zeal and its passionate commitment. Like Robert Bilott, it is driven by what amounts to a monomania. We are drawn into its maze and we hate the Monster at its center. Yet, if we pause and pull back for a moment, we might question its black-and-white depiction of corporate corruption. There’s little room for ambiguity. Teflon and its related products are in all of us, and it’s only a matter of time before we all are affected. We’re scared to death. And the movie offers us little consolation.

Later, out of the theater in the daylight, the movie’s dreadful message behind us, we might pause and do some investigating on our own. We can cruise the internet to see if the ills laid at the door of Teflon are based in fact. Warning: If you do this, you find that Teflon is dangerous, that it’s not dangerous, that we don’t really know.

No matter. The Monster bides its time.

Dark Waters opens in Kansas City theatres on Friday, December 6th.