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Review: Sanctuary

SANCTUARY

By Chuck Wilson

The remaining film year isn’t likely to bring an action movie or thriller with turns of plot as exhilarating as those that fill director Zachary Wigon’s Sanctuary, a two-character, one location battle of wits between a sex worker and her longtime client. Already, we’ve given away a plot point, but Wigon and screenwriter Micah Bloomberg make it clear right off that there’s something performative in the way Rebecca (Margaret Qualley) strides into the small but luxurious Denver hotel suite of late 30s-ish Hal (Christopher Abbott).

Hal’s hotelier father has just died and he’s about to take over as CEO, a role for which he may lack the killer instinct. Rebecca is here with a legal questionnaire, but her questions turn weirdly personal  even as Hal seems to be playing a game of his own in his replies. Who’s lying? They both are, or rather, they’re following a script Hal wrote out in advance. He always writes a script for a visit from Rebecca, a dominatrix specializing in humiliation (not intercourse).

The lawyer-client scenario will ultimately lead to Rebecca degrading Hal, quite literally down to his knees, which will excite him sexually. This scene is familiar to them both, but is as intense for Hal as if it’s playing out for the first time.

Is it a good idea for the heir to an international hotel chain to rendezvous regularly with a dominatrix? Hal is thinking not and means this night to be a farewell—he’s brought a goodbye gift. The news catches Rebecca short but as a woman whose entire life is based on intelligent response to sudden adversity, she quickly regroups. Soon, she’s coming at Hal with a new vision for their shared future, one that will lead to a dizzying new series of mutual mind games.

Structured like a play, with colored lights swirling down between acts, Sanctuary is remarkable for never feeling stagey. On paper, the hotel room setting is limiting, but Italian cinematographer Ludovica Isidori (Test Pattern) never seems to shoot it from the same angle twice. Her camera often takes its cue from Hal’s emotional state, which veers into whirligig panic when Rebecca hints at having planted cameras in the room. His dead billionaire father would have asked for proof but Hal goes right to freak out, triggering a scene of destruction that’s both alarming and madcap. It’s a good thing this guy owns the hotel.

It seems a good bet Sanctuary will eventually play on an arthouse double bill with Steven Shainberg’s Secretary, the 2002 Maggie Gyllenhaal/James Spader dom/sub love story. Secretary paved the way for Sanctuary and is surely a weirder, sweeter, and more emotionally complex film. Years from now, Sanctuary may feel more clever than profound, but right now, Bloomberg’s cruelly sharp dialogue is a pleasure to the ear, and Qualley and Abbot a sparring match worthy of the Broadway stage. We hang on their every word but more thrillingly, on their every thought. All night, Rebecca and Hal hurl words and scenarios at one another, until they arrive, abruptly, at a place beyond role play. If revelatory dialogue can be like an orgasm, they share one, and it’s a kick.

 

 

Review: Inside

INSIDE 

     Tell the truth–the last time you broke into a penthouse apartment in Manhattan to steal million-dollar art, you took your cell phone with you, just in case your brilliant plan went awry. You’re smart that way. But alas, Nemo, the thief Willem Dafoe portrays in the cerebral new film, Inside, isn’t as organized, although it could be said that his dilemma will prove to be existential as much as practical. When security systems unexpectedly engage, sealing Nemo inside the apartment as tightly as a pharaoh in a tomb, he will not be able to call for help (and the police never arrive). 

     Director Vasilis Katsoupis, a Greek documentarian making his feature debut, and screenwriter Ben Hopkins, sidestep the big markers of plot logic in favor of immediately narrowing Nemo’s world. A pro, he does not panic. The water and gas are turned off but there’s a decorative wading pool filled with water, and though the refrigerator is pretty empty, there are tins of caviar, and vodka, and for a day or two, that’s sufficient. 

     The freezer is timed to the apartment sound system, which breaks out with the dance song “Macarena” if Nemo leaves the door open too long. This seems to both amuse and insult him, as if the absent owner is mocking his lowbrow tenant. Weeks into his ordeal, a depleted Nemo will bury his head deep into that freezer to relieve the 104 degree temperature that has risen from the apartment’s air conditioning, which swings between the extremes of hot and cold as if to purposefully torture. 

     A man of action, Nemo begins using a knife to dig through the huge wooden front door. That door will prove impenetrable, but as an object, it is textured and beautiful and the warmest sight in this sleek, minimalist apartment. In work that deserves to be remembered at awards time, production designer Thorsten Sabel (Cloud Atlas) has created a space for the captured thief that suggests a homeowner living in service to modern art and willing to sacrifice comfort for its proper presentation. Art aficionados will want to lean close to study Inside, which features new and recreated work by modern artists such as Egon Schiele, Petrit Halilaj and Cinthia Marcelle. 

     Nemo came to steal three Schiele portraits, but only found two. In an unnerving sequence that made my heart beat a little faster, the third painting surfaces, and for a moment, it seems like a clue to an escape route. Instead, the find triggers a deeper unraveling of Nemo’s psyche. Trapped for months, he is losing it. The process, as the brilliant Dafoe reveals, is occuring in time with the deterioration of his body. Nemo also discovers an old manuscript he begins to read aloud, the meaning of which I couldn’t quite parse but which shifts him toward a kind of exaltation. 

     An art thief who truly loves art, and who drew as a boy, Nemo begins sketching soon after he’s trapped, first in a notebook, and eventually, on the walls. The thief is finally making art of his own, even as his increasingly desperate effort to build a tower made of furniture and detritus as a ladder to a possible rooftop escape leads him to pillage the masterpieces he would have once wanted to steal. 

     It’s a testament to Dafoe’s soulful intensity that we continue to worry over Nemo even as we realize his story isn’t likely to lead to a resounding or fully satisfying finale. That may disappoint some, but between the sketches, the tower to the sky, and the bony outlines of Nemo’s sunken body, Inside suggests that we’re witnessing the creation of a living art installation, one composed, in equal measure, of pain and hope. 

Chuck Wilson

Review: Cocaine Bear

COCAINE BEAR

Once upon a time, circa 1985, there was a beautiful black bear that lived in a national park in the state of Georgia. One day, strange brick-like objects fell from the sky and burst open, exposing a white powder the bear could not resist eating. In the real life version of this tale, ingesting the white powder (35 pounds of it) caused the 175-pound beauty to die of a drug overdose, but in Cocaine Bear, actor-turned-director Elizabeth Banks’ gleefully gory, naughty but tame horror comedy, the bear turns into a marauding beast with one goal: finding more coke.

This is not a film Nancy Reagan would have screened for Ronnie at the White House, especially after seeing the part, early on, when two 12-year-olds (Brooklyn Prince and Christian Convery) dare one another to sample (by taste) the cocaine they find in the forest while ditching school. Dee Dee and Henry will quickly spit out the foul tasting powder but Banks (Pitch Perfect 2; Charlie’s Angels) and screenwriter Jimmy Warden have made their point: this is a movie that isn’t afraid to offend in its quest for a belly laugh. Those two kids, in fact, will turn out to be much smarter than the hapless adults who follow in their wake, a fair number of whom will end up missing an arm or a leg after making the mistake of coming between the bear and the various bricks of cocaine strewn throughout the forest.

One part Jaws and many parts Snakes on a Plane, Cocaine Bear is talkier than it should be and peaks with a virtuoso mid-film scene of carnage, but an able cast do their best to keep us amused in between kills. The great Margo Martindale, with her gift for suppressed grievance, has a grand time as an embittered Park Ranger who plans to spend the day wooing a moronic animal rights activist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), only to see that dream waylaid by the arrival of Sari (Keri Russell), who’s looking for her daughter, Dee Dee, and her friend, Henry. (Russell’s husband, Matthew Rhys, plays the parachuting drug runner in the film’s prologue.)

Meanwhile, a St. Louis drug lord (Ray Liotta, in his final role) sends his sad-sack son, Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), and trustworthy fixer, Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to Georgia to retrieve as much dope as they can find. A Missouri detective (a marvelous Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) follows, although he’s distracted with worry for the newly acquired shelter dog he had to leave behind. (He didn’t expect to care so much.)

Ehrenreich, whose career has taken some hardscrabble dips (Solo: A Star Wars Story) since his dazzling performance as a trick-rope twirling cowboy in the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, has a sly first scene here, but he can’t do much with the rest of Eddie’s story, which mostly finds him walking through the woods with Daveed in search of lost coke. A grounding presence, Jackson presents Daveed as a drug lord’s muscle who is nevertheless open to the idea of being a better man. Mostly, the two men walk and walk and walk, and play straight men to “Stache” (Aaron Holliday), a punk kid who knows where a duffle of cocaine is hidden. Stache is a fool and a philosopher and Holliday, a relative newcomer, proves adept at jazzing up the dullest storyline in the film.

It’s the newcomers, in fact, who steal Cocaine Bear from the pros, particularly comedian Scott Seiss, who has the good fortune to play a paramedic who must search a blood-drenched park ranger’s cabin for more victims. This scene leads to an ambulance truck chase between bear and humans that is a directorial triumph for Banks, and the sequence most likely to be cheered by blood-thirsty audiences– but it’s Seiss who makes it sing. His reactions, which go from deadpan to full-fledged freak-out, are priceless, and very funny.

The lingering high, as it were, of the ambulance sequence, may be sufficient for moviegoers to forgive a third act that gets bogged down in more walking and more talking and not enough bear. It doesn’t seem a spoiler to say that Liotta’s drug boss, Syd, decides to come to Georgia and take matters into his own hands. Always a team player, Liotta is stuck with an unfunny character whose dialogue has no snap. And Banks and team might have done well by Liotta to edit out the more gruesome aspects of Syd’s final showdown with the bear.

In the end, there is a half-assed setup for a sequel, but since they never made Snakes on a Plane 2 (which I could have gotten behind), Cocaine Bear may not prove as lasting as the real bear that inspired it. The next time you’re in Lexington, Kentucky, take Exit 113 off I-75 and look for the Kentucky Fun Mall. The real Cocaine Bear, long stuffed, and once owned, reportedly, by Waylon Jennings, is there, and ready to greet all.

Chuck Wilson

Review: Babylon

BABYLON

In a movie your coke dealer will love, writer-director Damien Chazelle offers a deep dive into the decadence and depravity of pre-talkies Hollywood. In Babylon, the pantry of the movie star’s mansion contains a range of morphine, opium, heroine and coke org, while orgies are as commonplace as despair. The antithesis of Chazelle’s sweetly melancholy La La Land, Babylon is self-consciously rude and crude–there will be voluminous vomit–and for the first half of its ungainly three hour running time, it creates the best kind of movie high, one generated by the audacity of a filmmaker on a tear.

Chazelle begins with Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a handsome young Mexican-American who’s been tasked with delivering a circus elephant to the hilltop mansion of a silent film star (Troy Metcalf) clearly modeled on the notoriously debauched Fatty Arbuckle. While the elephant awaits an opportune moment to (literally) crash the party, Manny roams, and finds a bacchanal worthy of the Roman Empire in full decline. As the crowd dances and ruts, unashamedly, a kickass band jams, led by Sydney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a brilliant trumpeter, who is Black, and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a fearlessly out queer singer. Both characters, and the actors playing them, deserve more story than they get, and linger in the mind much longer than those who get three times as much.

At the party, Manny makes two life-changing friends: Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a drug-addicted actress who’s never had a role but considers herself a star. “Honey, you don’t become a star. You either are one or you ain’t. I am.” Watching Nellie dance and crowd surf with wild abandon, Manny is smitten for life, and all the more doomed for it. Manny gives a ride home to Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a silent screen heartthrob who sees being a movie star as a calling. Manny becomes Jack’s assistant, and sets forth on a path to becoming a Tinseltown power player.

Jack terms a movie set “the most magical place in the world,” and in a long set piece he probably intended to be zanier, Chazelle and a cast of hundreds head to the desert to prove him right. As a German director screams “Faster! Faster!’ and a band pounds out a beat to go to war by, two medieval armies charge as ten silent film cameras roll. Actual blood flies and oops, a guy dies. This picture will provide Nellie her first role (she improvises to dazzling effect) and Manny the chance to save the production while Jack will manage to kiss the girl, on cue against the setting sun. It will be a glorious day for all. Nellie becomes a star while Manny is hooked on movie set magic.

In 1927, Al Jolson stars in a talking picture called The Jazz Singer, which thrills audiences and sends a blast of terror into the hearts of silent stars like Jack, who’s confident he’ll survive this paradigm shift. His efforts to stay in the game will be achingly played by Pitt. Babylon is a frenetic film but its only real feeling can be found in the silent pain in Jack’s eyes as his new reality sets in.

In a scene destined to be classic, Nellie films her first sound scene on a soundstage where even a dropped paperclip can be ruinous. It’s joy free space that is the antithesis of the noisy, freewheeling desert set of the silent epic in which Nellie made her debut. Later, while shooting a two-bit sound film, Jack can’t help but notice that the set is filled with people who aren’t paying attention, who don’t care. The “most magical place” is no more.

Around the time an unhinged Nellie tries to wrestle a rattlesnake, Babylon begins to feel needlessly long, and not even a steady supply of shock scenes can make up for the one-note characterizations of Nellie and Manny. One feels for Robbie and Calva, who make so much of so little and are rewarded with scenes of humiliation for their characters. The film’s final moments, set in a 1950s movie palace, is a daring artistic leap but is wholly dependent on a sweep of feeling that the filmmaker, despite his many gifts, and three hours of razzle dazzle, hasn’t managed to conjure.

Chuck Wilson

Review: Spoiler Alert

SPOILER ALERT

In the new film Spoiler Alert –starring Jim Parsons and Ben Aldridge as two real life men whose marriage was cut tragically short by cancer– the main characters talk a lot, but the movie’s most resonate moments come when the couple, exhausted by illness, simply lie together, taking solace in the familiarity of each other’s embrace. Such moments will likely wring tears from movie audiences, and in turn make it easier to forgive a film with an undercooked screenplay and an oddly remote performance by Parsons.

Directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) and based on television journalist Michael Ausiello’s moving 2017 memoir, “Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies,” the film opens with Michael (Parsons), recalling the night in 2001 when he met Kit Cowan (Aldridge) in a bar. A designer and photographer, Kit is outgoing and confident, two things no one has ever claimed about Michael, a TV obsessive with a collection of Smurf dolls and toys filling his apartment. (Ausiello’s actual Smurf collection is used in the film.) Kit eventually sees the collection in a scene that allows screenwriters David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage to explore Michael’s feelings about the death of his mother from cancer when he was a teen. In turn, it allows Kit to explain why he can’t stop thinking about Michael, even though the two make no sense on paper.

Kit is “premium cable to my network sitcom” Michael declares in one of the many TV references that charm in Ausiello’s book, but land with a self-conscious thud in the film. Parsons, of course, starred in The Big Bang Theory and screenwriter Grant has written for TV shows and acted in many himself, including the culture-shaking “gay” episode of thirtysomething in 1989. So why does so little about Michael’s TV journalist life ring true? Clunkier still are flashbacks to Michael’s childhood, seen as a garish 1990s sitcom, one where he’s a lonely kid with a deceased father and a doting mother who comforts him when kids pick on him for being overweight. These sequences, which ruin the flow of the movie, are just plain bad.

As an adult, Michael is lean, but carries the scars of being, as he tells Kit the first time they make love, a “FFF—Former Fat Kid”. Spoiler Alert is nearly as chaste as a Hallmark movie, which is fine since Parsons and Aldridge have little to no sexual chemistry, but the filmmakers deserve credit for bringing body shame out of the dark and into the light. While love can be healing, the screenwriters seem stuck in the notion of Michael as forever wounded, always tense, and too often joyless, even in Kit and Michael’s best and happiest days.

Parson just repeats the same emotional beats, which is baffling since he did such powerful, nuanced work in the film versions of The Normal Heart and The Boys in the Band. He’s misconceived the character, and Showalter hasn’t helped him find a way back to center. It’s a shame, particularly since Aldridge, who played the “Arsehole Guy” on Fleabag, is such a warm presence.

When Kit gets sick, Parsons and company rise to the occasion, and it’s as if all involved were feeling the real Kit’s presence as they filmed the story’s final scenes. Michael takes his partner and his parents (Sally Field and Bill Irwin) for a beach weekend in New Jersey. A frail Kit is relaxed and happy and Michael shoots video of him blowing bubbles with a child’s toy. Moviegoers who stick around for the closing credits of Spoiler Alert will see a bit of the original video, giving the real man whose life touched so many an authentic gaze that the film itself lacks.

Chuck Wilson

Review: The Inspection

THE INSPECTION

Going to war is frightening, no doubt, but so too, surely, is the military boot camp every soldier must first endure, an endeavor that comes with extra challenges for Ellis French (Jeremy Pope), the Marine recruit at the center of writer-director Elegance Bratton’s stirring autobiographical debut, The Inspection. It is 2005 and 25-year-old Ellis has been living in a New York homeless shelter after having been kicked out of home years earlier by his mother, Inez (Gabrielle Union), for being gay.

Ellis may not have a home, but Bratton is careful to show that he has a community of queer outcasts holding him up, including Shamus (Tyler Merritt) an elder who’s heartbroken at Ellis’s decision to join the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military as a way of escaping a no-option life– being young, Black, gay, and forgotten. In telling an enlistment story, Bratton is working familiar terrain, but his attention to the nuances of Ellis and his world bring to it a new vitality, as when Ellis, in his ragged jeans, boards a metro train to go visit his mother for the first time in five years. He sits near a Black trans woman and a Black gay man, both dressed to the nines and fabulous, and both of whom shoot him looks of love and power, as if to say, “Don’t give up. You’re fabulous, too, right this very minute.”

As Inez, who is based on Bratton’s late mother, Union is revelatory, bookending the film with an intense and textured portrait of a woman so bound up in her own obsessive regret and bigotry that she can’t embrace the one person who loves her. Inez chain smokes, with the cigarette held up tight in that old-school way, as a shield from all that makes her nervous. In her apartment, with Ellis outside the front door, and later, in her car before a big event, Bratton and cinematographer Lachlan Milne (Minari) capture Inez alone, boxed in, thinking hard on what to do and how to be, as if it’s been forever since anyone knocked at her door or since she stepped out into the larger world. Inez works as a prison guard, and in her own life and spirit, there are metaphorical cells, filled with physical clutter and mental anguish.

At boot camp, Ellis has trouble keeping up with the physical demands of training but just as he’s making a breakthrough, his fellow recruits realize, in the most humiliating way possible, that he’s gay. With the tacit blessing of their training officer, Gunnery Sgt. Laws (Bookem Woodbine), three of the men beat Ellis. Buoyed by the friendship of Ismail (Eman Esfandi), a Muslim recruit suffering abuses of his own, Ellis doesn’t give up. Over time, he finds solace in the quiet support of his drill sergeant (Raúl Castillo) on whom the young recruit will develop, perhaps inevitably, a crush.

With its training montages and third act shifts of heart among the enlisted men, The Inspection has a familiar storytelling arc, but its rewards lie in the empathy and egalitarianism Bratton brings to his characters, major and minor, including his villainous sergeant and those recruits who don’t have much dialogue but who change, nevertheless. You can see it in their faces.

Pope, who was a sensation as Jackie Wilson in One Night in Miami and is revered on New York stages, is marvelously mercurial. Ellis often looks sunken and lost, but when Ismail is struggling and near collapse, Ellis rises up, growing taller in the room and within himself. No one version of this man arrives at Marine boot camp, but the best one departs.

Chuck Wilson

Review: BROS

BROS

Jammed with quotable one-liners — “You’re like a grown-up gay Boy Scout and I’m like whatever happened to Evan Hansen” — the new romantic comedy Bros is happily and certifiably queer, and as a major studio release, now playing at multiplexes all across America. But will it still be playing there a week from now? Time and box-office will tell, but here’s hoping moviegoers in cities big and small show up on date night to cheer for Bobby (Billy Eichner) and Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), two Manhattan men who meet, create sparks, and proceed to do their best not to fall in love.

Trying hard not to fall in love is a gay guy thing, and Bobby, a raucously caustic (some would say bitter) podcaster who celebrates queer history, and Aaron, a quiet (some would say dull) estate planner, have it down pat. After attending a dinner where all his friends are in couples or throuples, Bobby goes to a club party for a new app called Zellweger, which is dedicated to men who’d rather talk about actresses than have sex. There, while nursing his drink like it’s a sippy cup, Bobby locks eyes with Aaron, who’s on the dance floor, shirtless, crazy handsome, and soon standing awkwardly by his side. Bobby, ever smooth, says, “I hear you’re boring.”

Right from the start, director Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and Eichner, who wrote the screenplay together, zero in on the ease with which men dating men invent their own forms of etiquette. After finally conversing properly at the club, Aaron has to abandon Bobby because he already has hookup plans. Weeks later, Bobby joins Aaron in a three-way with another couple but in the midst of it all wants to go home early, a comic setup that would never have happened in the movie universe of Harry meeting Sally. That quickly glimpsed four-way is about as ribald as Bros gets, although the first love scene between Bobby and Aaron might send some audience members to Google with the question: what are “poppers”?

As the new couple sidestep their way into a relationship, Bobby prepares for the opening of the LGBTQ+ museum he’s curating, an evening which allows Eichner to celebrate heroes such as activist icon Marsha P. Johnson, and wouldn’t it be grand if audiences Googled her, too? The supporting cast, highlighted by the wittily combative museum board, is beautifully and fully inclusive, while many of the straight characters are played by out queer actors, including, in a fine turn that grounds the third act, Jai Rodriguez as Aaron’s bro-tastic brother.

Expanding on his manic  “Billy on the Streets” persona, Eichner subtly reveals the vulnerable man behind Bobby’s furious impatience with those who don’t take seriously all that he takes seriously (it’s a big list). He’s dumbstruck that Aaron finds him attractive. It takes him the whole movie to believe it. Macfarlane presents Aaron as a man comfortable with comfort who’s suddenly capsized by Bobby’s humor and intensity. He’s dumbstruck too and scared he won’t be able to keep up.

Despite a steady gig this past decade as a Hallmark movie heartthrob, this is the first real role Macfarlane has had since his fine work in the early 2000s series Brothers & Sisters (the one with Sally Field) and he brings a quiet tenderness to it that Bobby responds to, and moviegoers likely will as well. Aaron beaming with happiness is irresistible.

There are sharp satirical jabs at Hallmark style Christmas movies (listen for the movie titles), but there’s this, too: during a short love scene late in the film, Bobby and Aaron switch roles, sexually. Some in the audience may titter, or not quite absorb what’s happening, but the scene might just stop the hearts of gay men in the audience. It did mine. For suddenly, on a very big AMC screen, two men were having the intimate bedroom conversation many of us have had, the one where the connection is so intense, and the feeling so strong that it’s suddenly no longer important who came into the relationship with “top” or “bottom” labels. One man asks the other to change the sexual template, a moment American movies rarely show. It’s a radical act. Bobby and Aaron both look surprised, as we always are by love. Bros is wonderfully funny, and quietly subversive. Take your parents.

Chuck Wilson

 

Review: BREAKING

BREAKING

  The true story of a bank robber who wasn’t really a robber, the heart wrenching drama Breaking features a moving performance by John Boyega as a Iraq War vet driven to a desperate act, as well as fine work by the late Michael K. Williams as the police negotiator trying to save him. Boyega portrays Brian Brown-Easley, a former Marine Corp lance corporal who walked into a Wells Fargo bank in an Atlanta suburb in July 2017 and handed the teller a note stating that he had a bomb in his backpack.

  Brian is not interested in cash from the teller’s drawer or loot from the vault. Instead, he will demand a wire transfer into his Wells Fargo account from the Veterans Administration to cover a disability check derailed by red tape that the impoverished 33-year-old old feels (with his entire being) is rightfully owed him.

The amount? $892.34

Inspired by a 2018 article by journalist Aaron Gell, writer-director Abi Damaris Corbin, and co-writer Kwame Kwei-Armah, whose 2009 play, Seize the Day, provided Boyega with his professional debut, have written a gripping film that is at its most artful in its prelude, a glimpse of the long sad day that preceded Brian’s decision to take a stand at Wells Fargo.

    The film opens on Brian sitting on the steps of a public building, his face bruised, his clothes disheveled. Here is a man who’s literally been shown the door by the world. Flashbacks later reveal that Brian was handcuffed and thrown to the ground by V.A. guards after he became upset that his disability check had been gobbled up by a systemic glitch that often leaves veterans with no cash and no recourse. The case worker handed him a brochure: “Homelessness and You”.

  Bereft, Brian walks back across the city alongside the noisy Atlanta expressway, talking on his cell phone to his young daughter (London Covington) who lives with her mother. She  adores her emotionally troubled father, and is holding him to an oft-repeated promise to buy her a puppy. She has one all picked out. Brian tries to explain how hard such a purchase will be, but the minutes run out on his flip phone.

  When you’re poor in America, you walk and walk, often right next to the freeway, and you never stop worrying about being able to put extra minutes on your phone.    

  Brian Brown-Easley can’t afford to get his daughter a puppy and the manager of the cheap motel where he’s staying has warned him to pay up or “your shit is mine”. All of this plays out to the mournful strains of a classical cello that begins as a solo played by a street musician. When the music ends, Brian is pacing outside the Wells Fargo, smoking the last cigarette in his pack.

Inside, Brian’s scribbled threat of a bomb sends the friendly teller Rosa (Selenis Leyva) into a body-trembling panic even as her manager, Estel (Nicole Beharie) calmly clears the bank of staff and customers. Soon, it’s just Brian, Rosa and Estel, and Breaking becomes a chamber piece, with each actor, all of them extraordinary, carving out individual emotional spaces that together form a sense of life’s terrible fragility. All three are persons of color, and have children, and are living for them, each and every moment, despite a world that makes that incredibly hard. Rosa and Estel are afraid of Brian but they understand him.

Outside crowds gather. Brian’s been talking to a local reporter (Connie Britton) on the phone. On nearby roofs, police snipers take position. Eventually, the hostage negotiator Brian demanded arrives. Played by Williams, in his final performance, Eli is a vet, too, and as a Black man, understands all too well what Brian means when he says, “We both know I’m gonna die in here. Nothing out there for me but bullets.” Eli’s bosses are white, and so are those snipers, and there’s a sense that Eli must stave off their growing impatience with the crazy Black guy in the bank, even as works to assure Brian today will be the exception to what they both know is true of the world. 

   If some of the characters outside the bank are fictional, the filmmakers have been faithful to the larger events of the day, although some may wish for more detail in the home stretch. The resolution of Brian’s stand-off with police is abrupt and Corbin is frustratingly skimpy on the specifics of what occurred, as well its aftermath. 

   Ultimately, the impact of Boyega’s performance overwhelms any narrative missteps. It’s richly physical. When goofing for his daughter over the phone, Brian’s face is open and full of light, but out in the world, that same face closes with the intensity of inner worries. So often, Brian looks like the young man that he still is, his body turned in with doubt or as if to protect himself from an expected blow. Those blows came for Brian Brown-Easley in Iraq and Kuwait, and then kept on coming once he was home. Breaking restores honor to a good man. 

Chuck Wilson

Review: Cha Cha Real Smooth

CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH

Twenty-five-year-old actor-writer-director Cooper Raiff has followed his terrific indie comedy, Shithouse (2020) with Cha Cha Real Smooth, a more serious-minded comedy that feels slow at times but is so earnestly intent on seeing its characters through to a fully felt emotional resolution that most will forgive the lack of narrative pull. Raised in Dallas, Texas, Raiff has reported that he spent his teen years attending the bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs of his Jewish friends, which explains both the plot of his new film, and its title, a nod to DJ Casper’s ubiquitous party anthem, Cha Cha Slide.  

     As Cha Cha Real Smooth opens, a 12-year-old boy named Andrew (Javien Mercado) is attending a friend’s New Jersey bar mitzvah. It’s a good party but Andrew can’t take his eyes off Bella (Kelly O’Sullivan), the young woman who’s been hired as the “party starter”. She gets the kids up and dancing. Andrew is smitten, especially after he sees Bella soldier on with a smile after taking an intense and tearful phone call in the stairwell. Andrew tells his mom (Leslie Mann) he’s in love. “Are you sure, babe?” she asks. “Sure, sure?”

     It could be said that Cha Cha Real Smooth never quite tops its pitch perfect prologue, but either way, ten years later, Andrew (now played by Raiff), is a 22-year-old fast food worker who finds a new career as a party starter after saving the day at bat mitzvah he attends with his mother. Raised by a bi-polar mother, Andrew has a gift for reading the room, and for knowing how to inspire people to look past the fears that keep them rooted to their chairs, be they thirteen, thirty, or sixty.

     On this night, he inspires Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), the teenage autistic daughter of Domino (a superb Dakota Johnson), a single mom with a fiancé, Joseph (Raúl Castillo), who’s always away on business. Lola dances and dances some more, which thrills Domino, who has raised Lola all by herself. She’s deeply grateful to Andrew, and invites him to be a friend to her and to Lola. 

     In a remarkable sequence, Andrew is there for Domino when she suffers a deeply personal medical emergency in the middle of another party. Soon, he’s babysitting Lola and having midnight talks with Domino. They kiss, once, but this isn’t a love story. Or perhaps it is. Andrew himself can’t decide. 

     Burghardt, a neurodiverse actress making her film debut, gives a delightful performance, and also one that appears to have inspired a deep level of awareness in her director. When Andrew wonders if he’s tiring her with his non-stop chatter, Lola says that doesn’t thrive on social interaction (as Andrew does) but sometimes likes to lie alone in an empty room. Raiff then cuts to Lola in her room, alone, relishing its space and quiet, and almost seeming to orchestrate it with her hands. The movie year isn’t likely to see another moment as generous and fine. 

     Finding similar grace notes for Andrew proves to be more of a challenge. At 22, grace is elusive, and usually can’t be trusted. Andrew seems to drink too much, which the script never deals with, and the closer he gets to Domino, the more confused Andrew becomes. Is the fiance, Joseph, a jerk? That would make things simple. Andrew could be Domino’s rescuer. 

     Rescue is what he does, after all, or has wanted to do, ever since he saw Bella the party starter crying in the stairwell when he was twelve. When truths about his place in Domino and Lola’s life break his heart, Andrew reaches out to his mother, just as he did when Bella disappointed him, ten years back. We repeat our patterns, and rarely know it. 

    “I want you to do your twenties,” Domino tells Andrew at one point, and in his first two feature films, that’s what Cooper Raiff appears to be trying to do through his characters. Be fully twenty-something. That means Andrew talks too much, takes himself too seriously, and has trouble getting out the door. He doesn’t know about clean exits, so he goes back for one more. He can’t help but double down on the pathos. Which is surely the very nature of being twenty-two. 

Chuck Wilson

           

     

          

Review: Mothering Sunday

MOTHERING SUNDAY

In small roles, Colin Firth and Olivia Colman, two masters of melancholy, bring emotional power to French director Eva Husson‘s sensual yet subdued adaptation of Graham Swift’s 2016 novel, Mothering Sunday.

It is March 1924 and Jane (Odessa Young), housemaid to the Nivens (Firth and Colman), is preparing for a day of leisure. The Nivens are off to a traditional Mother’s Day outing with their neighbors, the Sherringhams (Craig Crosbie and Emily Woof), who, like them, lost sons in World War I. There are many grand houses in this beautiful Berkshire countryside and nearly all of them are suffused in mourning for sons lost in war. Jane, Swift writes in the novel, came to work for the Nivens just after “a great gust of devastation”.

Jane has a secret. On this day, she’ll bike to the Sherringham house to meet with the family’s surviving son, Paul (Josh O’Connor), with whom she’s been having an affair for several years. Jane and Paul know each other intimately but their assignations have been, by necessity, furtive and quick. Today, with everyone away, they’ll have the time and in the estate house, the space to experience something new: full nudity and a delicious post-coital languor. It will also be, most likely, their last meeting. Paul is about to marry.

Husson, screenwriter Alice Birch and the extraordinarily gifted Young and O’Connor, bring a compelling complexity to Jane and Paul’s encounter in Paul’s bedroom: they are experiencing each other fully for the first time but also, for the last time. Each glance, each touch, is fraught with heat and a building sense of loss. This is the golden afternoon of their lives and they know it.

It’s a sensual and fearless sequence. Husson and Birch embellish Swift’s marvelously honest depiction of the journey Jane and Paul have taken in dealing with the messiness of sex, from using birth control in an age when that was uncommon to dealing with the absurdities of "seed" and semen-stained sheets, a byproduct of lovemaking of which maids in fancy houses know more about than most. In the long scenes at Sherringham manor with Jane and Paul, which eventually find Jane exploring the house alone, in the nude, Mothering Sunday is a wonderfully free and frank film, the kind Americans don’t tend to make.

In the novel, Jane is an acclaimed novelist looking back on this day, but for the movie, Birch has created a layered time structure that expands Swift’s vision of Jane’s life to include a romance with Donald (Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù), an academic philosopher who encourages her to write about Paul. In flash forwards to the end of Jane’s life, Jane is played by Glenda Jackson, who is a perfect elder match to Young. This is Jackson’s first feature film role in 32 years. She’s in three brief scenes and brings to them a fullness of being that feels like she inhaled Young’s entire performance as young Jane, an impossibility, to be sure, and a measure of her genius. It’s a thrill beyond measure to have her back on our movie screens.

Mothering Sunday moves in fits and starts and might be too emotionally subdued for some. The film is always gorgeous but the slides forward into time don’t have the emotional resonance of the sequences in 1924 England when Firth and Colman reveal, with haunting precision, the depths of their pain at having lost their son in the war. For Colman, Birch has written astonishing dialogue in which she suggests that Jane is better off for having lost her mother at birth and gotten her “bereavement” out of the way right off. In the novel, and in the film too (in an unspoken, very subtle way), Jane wonders, “Could life be so cruel yet so bounteous at the same time?”

Chuck Wilson