Review: Hillbilly Elegy

Image courtesy of Netflix.

Ron Howard's adaptation of J.D. Vance's controversial autobiography "Hillbilly Elegy" - which arrived during the 2016 election and led some to proclaim it as an harbinger of things to come with Donald Trump's election - isn't nearly so scandalous as the book that inspired it (I've never read it, but know at least two people who did and had little regard for it), and comes across more as a "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" tale of an Appalachian man who manages to find some success in life, despite his background and formative years spent among a bickering, drug addled "hillbilly" family who hailed from Kentucky, but lived mostly in Ohio.

The picture jumps between 1997 - when J.D. (Owen Asztalos playing the younger version) is living with his drug addicted, semi-abusive mother, Bev (Amy Adams), but is often in the care of his chain smoking, potty mouthed Mamaw (Glenn Close, who eats the scenery and steals the show) - and 2011, when J.D. (the adult version is played by Gabriel Basso) is involved romantically with Usha (Freida Pinto) and trying to get a summer internship with a prestigious law firm while attending Yale University.

However, in the later timeline, J.D. is called home by his sister, Lindsay (Haley Bennett), because Bev has once again OD'd - this time on heroin - and J.D. must find a recovery program for her, all the while attempting to drive 10 hours back to Connecticut the next day for a job interview. 

Meanwhile, the film jumps back and forth in time, so that we see the strained relationship between Bev - a nurse who gets fired after popping pills at work and misbehaving - and J.D., and how the younger version of the lead character ended up living with Mamaw, who inspired him to lift himself up from his dysfunctional upbringing and succeed.

It's a traditional rags to riches scenario that features all the required beats - yes, there's a scene in which J.D. must defend his "hillbilly" background to a table of snobbish Connecticut lawyers, but no, there's not much of the political element from the book, from the descriptions of the frustrations of the white working class in the Rust Belt (which helped Trump rise to power) or the hatred toward multi-cultural Blue America, which pundits latched onto in the book and used as a reasoning for why Trump won.

Ultimately, the film version of "Hillbilly Elegy" is a somewhat generic story of a boy from the hills who comes to the city, finds some success and then must travel back to where he came from to settle some family business. You've likely seen it all before - and, most likely, presented better than it is here. It's not a bad movie - the acting throughout is pretty decent, especially Close, who seems to be having some fun hamming it up a little, and Basso as the older J.D. The film is well shot and works well enough narratively, even if it's a little too familiar.

In some ways, Howard's version of the story is preferable to the one I've heard described about the book - at this point, I don't really need any more rationalizations for the past four years or another profile of a Rust Belt denizen and the reasons why they voted the way they did. Therefore, "Hillbilly Elegy" is yet another tale of opioids, lost dreams and dysfunctional lives in middle America - as such, it's well-enough made, but not quite the political firebomb you might have been expecting.

Review: Mank

Image courtesy of Netflix.

There's an old saying - and a variation of it appears in John Ford's classic "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" - that when it comes to printing the fact or the legend, always print the legend. David Fincher's visually sumptuous new film, "Mank," which sort of chronicles the behind-the-scenes intrigue in the writing of the screenplay for the iconic "Citizen Kane," is a film that follows this mantra, but it's not so much a glitzy picture about the Hollywood days of yore - in fact, it's something else altogether that might take a little time and reflection to really wrap one's mind around it.

Fincher is one of filmdom's great obsessives - much like Stanley Kubrick, his demands on the set involve actors doing hundreds of takes per scene, and his films are often interested in obsessiveness (the 2007 masterpiece "Zodiac") and power (the incredible "The Social Network"). His latest film takes its name from its subject - Herman Mankiewicz, the boozy, aging Hollywood screenwriter and brother of director Joseph Mankiewicz ("All About Eve") who shares the screenwriting credit for Orson Welles' towering 1941 achievement.

As the film opens, Mank (Gary Oldman) is in the process of healing from a car crash and has been taken to a secluded house in the desert to write "American," the original working title for "Citizen Kane." He is overseen by a by-the-book nurse (Lily Collins), who has a beau in the military, and is told that he is not to drink while working on the script, a rule that we know will soon be broken. Mank's wife, referred to as "Poor Sarah" (Tuppence Middleton), pops in and out of the drama, and we quickly learn that she puts up with Mank's antics out of a sense of loyalty and, occasionally, bemusement.

Welles is a presence mostly over the phone for much of the picture - he occasionally checks in on Mank's progress, that is, until a final confrontation between the two that could be seen as slightly ungenerous to American film's arguably greatest director. 

But the emphasis - and most interesting sections of the film - have little to do with "Kane," and more to do with the fraught relationship - told in flashback - between Mank and studio head Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) and his friend, newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), on whom "Citizen Kane" was based. Mank manages to strike up a friendship with Marion Davies (a very good Amanda Seyfried), an actress who was romantically involved with Hearst.

Fincher has never especially been a political director - films like "Fight Club" and "The Social Network" are seemingly more interested in psychology and sociology than making political statements - but "Mank" has a prescient political undercurrent that makes it fascinating in a timely way. Mayer and Hearst back Frank Merriam - the union-busting Republican candidate - in the race for California's governorship in 1934, while Mank has a soft spot for author and self-proclaimed socialist and Democratic candidate Upton Sinclair.

In a series of scenes that feel as if they could be ripped out of today's headlines, Merriam's Republican backers in the movie studio system craft a series of documentary-style campaign ads that use distorted facts and actors posing as voters to slander Sinclair as a dangerous socialist. As he recognizes Mayer and Hearst for who they really are, Mank's friendship with the two men begins to fray, ultimately leading to two awkward blow ups - one on election night and another at a dinner party, where Oldman - in his best moment in the film - pitches the crowd at Hearst's house on a script about a newspaper tycoon who has sold his soul.

The heart of the film, however, is the friendship between Mank and Davies, especially during an enchanting evening stroll through Hearst's ridiculously lavish gardens, which include a zoo with elephants and giraffes. Mank tells Davies he sees her as a great star of dramatic pictures - and not just a comedienne - while Davies obviously sympathizes with Mank's sensibilities, even if she's not willing to outwardly criticize Hearst, the man who provides her with everything she needs.

So, while "Mank" - shot in gorgeous black and white and featuring numerous dream-like sequences - isn't a typical tale of classic Hollywood, it bears some similarity to such masterpieces as "Chinatown" and "Mulholland Drive," in which vast conspiracies are hinted at, but never completely revealed, and the town is seen less as a dream factory than a battlefield. On the one hand, Fincher might not seem like the filmmaker you'd expect to make this type of picture, but on the other its various obsessions seem to fit right into his wheelhouse.

Regardless, it's a movie of great intrigue, and one that I'll certainly want to revisit at some point soon. "Mank" is less the story of how "Citizen Kane" was made, and more about how life's disillusions, failures and disappointments can occasionally prompt flawed people to make great art. I'd highly recommend this movie.

Review: The Climb

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

For a low budget indie drama featuring two unknowns in the leads, Michael Angelo Covino's "The Climb" is a very funny, occasionally moving, well written and often visually adventurous picture. The film - which chronicles the toxic friendship between two average men over a period of years - features long-held shots and some impressive camera moves, but rather than making its visual elements the focal point, the picture is mostly driven by its performances and the dialogue between its characters.

The film opens on a continuous shot of two men - Kyle (Kyle Marvin) and Michael (Covino, who acts as director and co-writer of the movie with Marvin) - riding bikes up a mountain somewhere in France. The two men are abroad for Kyle's wedding to Ava (Judith Godreche), a French woman, and it's obvious that while Mike is an expert at cycling, Kyle is, well, not so much.

Therefore, it's not until Mike is well ahead of Kyle on the steep incline on which they're peddling that he decides to break some bad news - he has slept with Ava, not just in the past, but even recently. The men's friendship, not surprisingly, takes a dive, and it's not until some time later that they meet again due to tragic circumstances, although a funeral scene quickly devolves into something quirkier involving a fight between Michael and a gravedigger over a union-related issue and an a cappella performance by a group of men.

As time passes, Michael's life falls apart - he drinks too much, he's aimless and seemingly friendless. When he next meets up with Kyle, who is faring better, it's at Kyle's family's Christmas party, where Kyle breaks the news to his disappointed family that he plans to marry Marissa (Gayle Rankin), his girlfriend, whom no member of the family - which includes two sisters and a mother and father played by Talia Balsam and George Wendt - appears to like.

Michael shows up drunk and makes a fool of himself, but not before Kyle's mother gives him a lecture about how one can be a good friend merely by thinking of others' needs before acting selfishly in the name of one's own desires. Several other meet-ups occur between the two men - an ice fishing bachelor party for Kyle that nearly turns tragic, a wedding interruption obviously inspired by "The Graduate," a drunken New Year's Eve celebration in which Michael nearly screws up the friendship again (although he appears to be doing it for reasons he considers more munificent) and several others.

Michael's character can be obnoxious - he's the screwup friend who everyone wants to do better, but rarely does. Kyle, on the other hand, has his own share of flaws - he's easily led, whether it's by Michael or Marissa (who wants Kyle to disassociate himself from his family because they don't like her) - and Kyle even admits, when pressed by Marissa as to why he loves her, that he's in need of someone to give him direction.

"The Climb" is a very well made, often quite funny and even somewhat moving film about two flawed people who see each other very clearly - warts and all - and decide to stick together over a period of years, on the one hand, out of a sense of loyalty, but also because they know each other in a way that others don't know them. 

It features a number of intense moments - but not in the typical way you might expect. The film's multiple heart-to-heart sequences and numerous moments in which we see characters acting in ways that aren't good for themselves or others ring true in an often hilarious, real world manner.

"The Climb" isn't just very good due to its impressive visual style, strong performances, writing or humorous set pieces, but also because we can recognize someone we've likely once known in its lead characters in a way that feels authentic. The two frenemies at its heart are, arguably, bad for each other, but rely and depend on each other in a way that makes "The Climb" engrossing. The film was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival - and it's easy to see why. 

Review: The Dark And The Wicked

Image courtesy of RLJE Films.

Bryan Bertino's "The Dark and the Wicked" starts out promisingly enough, but it's soon clear that the film has nowhere to go, eventually devolving into a series of derivative and repetitive events that become gorier and nastier as they go along, but simultaneously less interesting and not particularly frightening.

The film's early scenes are goosebump inducing enough. On a desolate farm in the middle of nowhere, an older woman (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) tends to her ailing, bed-ridden husband and oversees the daily chores. Something is amiss. Bells clang in the night, the herds of goats seem frightened and something appears to be lurking on the perimeter.

The woman chops carrots - in that type of up-close manner they love to do in horror movies that I've come to loathe - on a cutting board and hears the scrape of a chair behind her. She turns around and the chair - but nothing else - is facing her. Like I said, something seems off.

The woman's two grown children - Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) - arrive to help out, but end up providing little help at all. Then, something horrifying and devastating happens - and the siblings are left wondering what to do. Meanwhile, strange phone calls take place, people show up at the house and then later claim they were never there and Louise has a scare in the shower.

All of this could have made for a creepy horror movie - especially after the eerie, well shot and atmospheric opening scenes, but "The Dark and the Wicked" becomes more dull as it plods along. A home nurse gets into the mix as well as a priest and some other characters, but they are there for obvious reasons - mostly to suffer or contribute to the mind games. 

One of the problems involved in the picture is the seeming lack of logic to why anyone behaves the way they do, or what exactly is tormenting the characters in this film - or why. As the film gets bloodier, it becomes less interesting, and the gore seems to be there to try to keep horror movie fans from abandoning the picture altogether. The final scene provides no further clarity and goes out more with a whimper than a bang.

I'm sure the movie is meant to capture the mood of the horrors of a family witnessing death, but there are likely more compelling ways to do so - within the confines of the horror genre - than what takes place here. This is a good looking film with a director that seems to have a mastery behind the camera, so it's a disappointment that "The Dark and the Wicked" offers so little else otherwise.

Review: The Craft: Legacy

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

In terms of unnecessary sequels to movies that weren't that great to begin with, "The Craft: Legacy" is actually somewhat interesting for its first two-thirds before deciding on a plot line that is marginally foreshadowed, but not really developed, and among the less interesting routes for the picture to go, considering the other elements at play in the earlier scenes.

Yes, the film is a follow-up, of sorts, to the 1996 movie "The Craft," which starred Neve Campbell and Fairuza Balk, and includes a similar dynamic - four girls who are budding witches, although while in this case they also have one Black member of the entourage, they also have a transgender member. At first, the picture attempts to address modern societal issues in a manner that comes off as a little forced and awkward, but then eventually becomes intriguing.

Basically, the film involves a teenager named Lily (Cailee Spaeny) traveling with her mother, Helen (Michelle Monaghan), to move in with her mom's new beau, Adam (David Duchovny), an author whose specialty appears to be masculine frailty, or something like that. He lives with his two strapping teenage sons and a younger, more sensitive boy. 

The most interesting plot thread in the film involves a jerky high school boy named Timmy (Nicholas Galitzine), who ridicules Lily in front of her new classmates after she has her period in class - a nod to "Carrie," perhaps? This prompts three girls in her class - Lourdes (Zoey Luna), Frankie (Gideon Adlon) and Tabby (Lovie Simone) - to befriend her and share their secret with her: they're a coven of witches. The reason they chose Lily is that they can sense the powers she holds - which are displayed when she flings Timmy across the hallway accidentally after he harasses her.

The girls break into Timmy's house and put a spell on him, which - in the film's funniest ongoing gag - leads to the asshole jock character becoming "Woke Timmy," whose sensitivity and newly progressive stances shock the rest of his classmates. But what is at first an amusing gag becomes something more serious when Timmy makes a confession to the four girls - and the question of "consent," in this case how Timmy is being forced to behave in a manner without his permission, comes into play.

There's some interesting stuff to be found here, especially as Lily begins to somewhat selfishly consider to what purpose she wants to use Timmy, versus his true nature, which is revealed in his confession. There are several other plot threads that weave throughout the film during its first two-thirds - including a scene featuring an extremely creepy case of sleepwalking.

Unfortunately, the genre plot devices kick in toward the end, and a plot thread previously unbeknownst - but somewhat hinted at - emerges and the film goes in a completely different direction, and one that's not as interesting as all that's gone on before.

There's also a finale twist involving Lily's family tree, although it's pretty easy to see where it's going from the moment it's mentioned, that could open the door for a third "Craft" film. If there is one, I'd suggest the filmmakers stick with the interesting thematic elements of the first part of "Legacy," rather than going all in for yet another genre exercise.