Review: Anatomy Of A Fall

Image courtesy of Neon.

Justine Triet's Palm d'Or winner "Anatomy of a Fall" may have a mystery at its center - less a matter of whodunnit than what happened - but its most intriguing passages involve the decline of a partnership and its effect on a family. The film is a courtroom drama, but the lead character's key interest is not so much what the jury decides, but rather what her son thinks happened.

The film opens on author Sandra (Sandra Huller) taking part in an interview with a younger woman. Not only is the interviewer obviously interested in Sandra's work, but the author seems equally intrigued by the younger woman's opinions. The interview is interrupted numerous times by the sounds of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P" blaring from upstairs, where Sandra's husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis) - a failed writer who has moved his German wife and young son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) back to his rural French hometown - is apparently working on the house.

The blasting of the music seems to be a passive aggressive act. Sandra cuts short the interview and goes to confront her husband, which takes place off camera. Daniel, who mostly lost his sight some years before due to an accident for which Sandra partially blames her husband, returns from walking his dog, Snoop, to find his father lying dead in the snow outside of the home. It appears that he has fallen from an open window in the attic where he was working.

Sandra is questioned by the police and, shortly thereafter, indicted in the death, primarily because the authorities cannot seem to come up with any other explanation for Samuel's demise. They don't buy that he was murdered by someone else, fell accidentally, or committed suicide. Sandra proclaims her innocence, but enlists a lawyer friend, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), to take her case, and much of the rest of the film is spent in courtrooms, where Sandra defends herself against witnesses - many of whom don't actually know her, such as Samuel's opinionated psychiatrist and other forensic experts - and tries to explain why her rapidly declining marriage to Samuel doesn't explain why or how he died.

"Anatomy of a Fall" is less interested in who killed Samuel or why, but instead about the nature of truth and whether we can actually ever truly know someone. Sandra sits on the stand listening to people who don't know her try to dissect her life, but she tells them they are merely grazing the surface. She argues with the psychiatrist, who insists that Samuel's version of the marriage is the true one, and notes that she could hire a psychiatrist who could appear in court and say the exact opposite, based on what she told him. She must also contend with the misogynist prosecutor's harangues involving a past infidelity and accusations of how she castrated her husband, a writer who was unable to produce anything and, therefore, blamed his wife for his incapacity. 

Meanwhile, Daniel listens to the trial. One of the more interesting elements of the film is how the investigators lecture the young boy - who was clearly traumatized by his father's death - on his inability to recall everything he experienced or felt on the day of the death; however, Daniel, who has learned to focus his other senses - namely, his hearing - in the wake of his damaged eyesight - actually gains more insight into the situation as the court case drags on. His final appearance in the court - and his take on a conversation he had with his father some time before when Snoop fell ill - seemingly rattles the prosecutor and judges in the case because he is able to deduce things that they clearly cannot.

Huller, who was so good some years ago in "Toni Erdmann," gives a remarkable performance as Sandra, who seems tightly wound during the course of the trial, but whose intensity results in an outburst during a flashback that involves the courtroom listening to an audio file. 

The film is a slow burn that doesn't exactly wrap up the case neatly - although the action of the story is technically resolved - and that is because Triet and company are more interested in the questions posed here, and it is to the film's benefit that it doesn't pretend to have all the answers. As a result, "Anatomy of a Fall" is a thought provoking film that ranks among the year's best.

Review: Killers Of The Flower Moon

Image courtesy of Paramount.

 

The final line - spoken in a surprise cameo appearance - of Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon" is the most devastating in its summation of how the horrors that the Osage Nation faced during a series of murders that plagued them in the 1920s were nonchalantly swept under the rug. The film's coda - which I won't spoil - is sure to leave some heads being scratched, but it comes back to the question of preventing oppressed people from being able to tell their own story and, instead, allowing that story to be relayed by people who look like those who are doing the oppressing.

The film is an immense, three-and-a-half hour historical drama that occasionally plays like a romance, at times like one of the gangster pictures in which Scorsese has specialized these past 50-plus years, and even a true crime procedural and courtroom drama. At the heart of this story are three stunning performances - two by Scorsese regulars (Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro), and the third by Lily Gladstone in what is sure to be a star-making performance as Mollie Burkhardt, an Osage woman whose family is murdered for the oil on their land throughout the course of the film.

As the film opens, we learn that the Osage had been pushed off the land they originally inhabited and forced to live in Oklahoma. As luck would have it, they landed on a veritable goldmine - black gold, that is - and, naturally, the very people who forced them to relocate now make fast work of ingratiating themselves into the Osage community and marrying their women to be able to get the head rights for the land should their spouses die - a frequent occurrence that the film's primary villain (De Niro's William Hale, a wealthy cattle rancher who has gotten the Osage to trust him) refers to as "bad luck," and not the epidemic that it actually is.

Overnight, the Osage found themselves among the nation's wealthiest inhabitants because of the oil bubbling under the surface of their land. The film is told through the eyes of Mollie and her husband, Ernest (DiCaprio), Hale's nephew, who has returned from World War I and gets work as a driver. Ernest's second job is doing misdeeds for Hale and Ernest's older brother, Bryan (Scott Shepherd), who is married to Mollie's sister, Anna (Cara Jade Myers). 

While reading a children's book on the Osage to learn about the people among whom he is living, Ernest reads aloud the line, "Do you see the wolves in this picture?" In Scorsese's film, the wolves aren't hard to spot and their grisly work is carried out not only in the shadows, but also in broad daylight.

Hale sees an opportunity for Ernest to marry Mollie to secure the head rights for the oil on her land, and while Ernest agrees to go along with this ploy, he and Mollie also genuinely seem to fall in love. In fact, there never seems to be much doubt about this, even when Ernest begins to take part in acts - at Hale's behest - that put his wife's health in danger.

"Flower Moon" is a long historical crime epic that often bears some similarity to Scorsese's best work in that genre - a courtroom scene at the end reminded me of "Goodfellas," as did a series of scenes in which Hale begins to clean up his messes as the law closes in on him by bumping off those with whom he did business. But in terms of tone and style, it also fits in with the director's late work, most notably "The Irishman" and "Silence," slow burn films that deal with matters of conscience. "Flower Moon" could also be considered part of a trilogy - along with "The Irishman" and "The Wolf of Wall Street" - that depict the moral rot at the center of the nation that he calls home.

The film is impeccable in sound and vision, from Rodrigo Prieto's sweeping cinematography and the late Robbie Robertson's score, which is a near-constant thrum, to Jack Fisk's detail-heavy production design. DiCaprio gives one of his most impressive performances as Burkhardt, while De Niro is frightening as Hale, a man who treats those around him like family and close friends, and still orders their deaths when he finds a way to make a profit from it. 

Gladstone is the heart of the film, and her performance is the type that might typically get overshadowed because it is so subtle. She often tells her character's story with her face in the style of a great silent actress. The film is loaded with great bit parts and supporting roles for everyone from Jesse Plemons as lawman Tom White and Tantoo Cardinal as Mollie's mother to a roster of musicians - Jason Isbell, Pete Yorn, and Sturgill Simpson included.

One of the elements that makes "Flower Moon" so powerful and haunting is its depiction of injustice as an ever-present way of life among the white people and Osage living together in Fairfax, Oklahoma. Mollie may be richer than most of the white men in town, but she has to account for her spending to a banker who also happens to be the leader of the local KKK branch and who sits on a jury during a trial involving the film's crooked characters near its end. Hale and his associates discuss the murders of the town's Osage characters as business transactions, and during one of the film's powerful early scenes, Mollie narrates a number of unexplained deaths in the territory, ending each scenario with the words "no investigation."

Scorsese's original plan for the film was to tell the story from the perspective of White, the BOI investigator sent by J. Edgar Hoover, but conferring with the Osage nation and DiCaprio resulted in a film that tells the story from the perspective of Ernest and Mollie. The result is a great film that feels authentic and epic in scale, yet intimate in its portrayal of a marriage built upon lies against the backdrop of one of this nation's great injustices. 

It has long been held that filmmaking is a young person's game, and that directors' late work tends to not be as potent as their earlier films. At age 81, Scorsese is still cranking out one great film after another. He has been called the greatest living filmmaker, and it's difficult to argue with this assertion. "Killers of the Flower Moon" is one of the year's best.

Review: Fair Play

Image courtesy of Netflix.

If people still gathered around water coolers - hell, if people even went to offices anymore - "Fair Play" might be the movie they'd be arguing about in that setting. Set in the cutthroat world of hedge funds, the film follows the story of a couple who work at the same firm - but are keeping their relationship a secret due to company policy - and intend to get married.

However, a promotion for one of the characters - which was believed to be in store for the other character - sets the duo on a path of destruction, well, at least the crumbling of their relationship because while one of the pair's star begins to rise, the other's plummets, threatening to take both of them down.

The film begins as a romantic drama set on Wall Street, but by its end it feels as if it's in thriller territory. From the start, it's a bit kinky. Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) are analysts at the financial firm and, as the film opens, they are keeping their relationship a secret from their boss, Campbell (played ruthlessly by Eddie Marsan), but also from their parents.

As the film opens, they are at a wedding, where they sneak off to have sex in the bathroom, despite Emily being on her period. They exit the party looking like, as Luke puts it, they're leaving the scene of a murder. Emily hears a rumor at work that Luke will be named as the next PM at the firm, but she soon finds out that it is in fact she who will take over the high-pressure role.

Luke is obviously disappointed, but at first he acts supportive, although he engages in subtly passive aggressive acts, such as withholding sex or making comments about her not being assertive. He later takes it up a notch by noting that she dresses "like a cupcake" and appears to insinuate that late-night meetings with her bosses have a sexual nature to them.

When Emily attempts to intervene at work by talking Luke up with Campbell for other higher positions, he makes it clear that he is not impressed with her fiance's work. The arguments start to become more unpleasant and Luke begins to engage in self-sabotaging acts - a scene in which he pledges his loyalty to Campbell in his office is even more cringe inducing than that scene in "Swingers" when Jon Favreau keeps leaving messages on a love interest's voicemail - before considering acts that will sabotage both members of the couple.

The film paints a grim picture of this line of work, especially the rampant sexism involved in being in a mostly all-boys club. If the scene in which a group of men tell disturbing college sex stories in front of Emily doesn't unsettle you, I'd be willing to bet that Campbell's response to Emily when she makes a bad call on some stocks likely will.

Does "Fair Play" get a little over the top in its finale? Yeah, you could argue it does. But the great chemistry - both in its attraction and repellant forms - between the two leads is palpable, and the picture keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat as if it actually were a thriller. For a first-time feature director, Chloe Domont shows a lot of promise and exhibits impressive mastery of the form. 

Review: The Exorcist: Believer

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Director David Gordon Green lurches from one iconic horror movie franchise - he directed the three recent "Halloween" reboot films - to another new trilogy, of which "The Exorcist: Believer" is the first entry. Despite a few atmospheric moments in the more involving first half of the picture, I'm not quite sure what possessed - sorry, couldn't help myself - the director to resurrect this saga.

William Friedkin's original 1973 film is one of the greatest of all horror movies and typically ranks high on most lists of the genre's best offerings. Its sequels - which include the interesting but muddled 1977 film "Heretic," the freaky but forgettable 1990 film "Legion" and some 21st century offerings that are not particularly memorable - aren't as bad as the "Texas Chainsaw" ones, but they're not very good either.

Green's film is set in small town Georgia, rather than Washington D.C., where the first film was located, and although we are never told if the demon possessing the two girls in this film is the same one as in the original, we get the sense that this might be a different spirit. The film opens in 2010 in Haiti where a photographer named Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) and his pregnant wife are vacationing. An earthquake occurs and Victor's wife is trapped beneath the rubble. Moments before, his wife had accepted a blessing for her baby from some locals. He is told that either the mother or the baby can be saved, but he must choose.

About 13 years later, Victor is living with his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), and has a portrait studio. One day, Angela asks her father permission to have an after-school study session with her best friend, Katherine (Olivia O'Neill); however, the girls instead go into the woods to commune with a spirit - we later get a flimsy reason for why this happened - and reemerge after being considered missing for several days. But something is off about the two girls.

These early scenes are the most effective and the creepiest as Green uses silence and atmosphere to create some pretty decent mood. This, of course, is all for naught as the film's second half is primarily a lot of recycled sturm und drang we've seen before in basically every exorcism movie. Not only does "Believer" not reach the gargantuan task of living up to the original, but it's really not much better than any number of other generic possession movies we've seen over the years.

The film is loaded with problems. For starters, as I'd mentioned, there's no good explanation as to how or why the girls were possessed - or even by whom or what, although this might be explored further along in this new trilogy. Secondly, the film's biggest set piece - during which the parents of the two girls, a former nun turned nurse (Ann Dowd), and some other clergy gather in a house to try to rid the two girls of the demon possessing them - lands with a thud, utilizing the same old tropes one might expect from such a scene (demons saying nasty things to cast doubt on those trying to exorcise them, characters all spouting religious texts out loud, some minor house rattling, etc.) and it all feels like an exercise.

The film's biggest flaw, however, is its criminal misuse of the great Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, whose daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), was possessed in the original film. She is brought on in a legacy character role, but there's little for her to do but drop some pearls of wisdom and come face to face briefly with the demon until reasons that I won't divulge essentially remove her from the action for most of the rest of the film. Not since Marilyn Burns was misused in the awful recent "Texas Chainsaw" film has an iconic character been underutilized in such a clunky way.

Green is a talented filmmaker and he has some abilities as a horror director. I liked the first entry in his "Halloween" saga before the final two chapters kind of got away from him. If "Believer" is the first in a new horror trilogy, it's not starting off on sure footing. Not that the world needed another "Exorcist" sequel - the first is good enough that it stands on its own - but this reboot feels like a missed opportunity.

Review: The Royal Hotel

Image courtesy of Neon.

Director Kitty Green follows up her acclaimed "The Assistant" - a 2020 movie inspired by the Harvey Weinstein scandal - with another tense film about men making women uncomfortable. "The Royal Hotel" bears similarities to such feel-bad classics as Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs" and the unsettling Austrian outback thriller "Wake in Fright."

Green's picture is also set against the backdrop of the outback, where two young American women - Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) - on vacation stop for a few weeks to work at a degenerate bar in a desolate mining town. From the start, the place reeks of danger - the bar's co-owner, Carol (Ursula Yovich), comes off as cranky when she picks the two girls up in her car, but she's the least of their worries.

The bar's owner, Billy (Hugo Weaving), is a fall-down drunk who shocks Hanna when he refers to her by a degrading term upon meeting them, although Liv tries to convince her it's just a cultural thing. This becomes the dynamic between the two women throughout the course of the picture - Hanna is reserved, although for good reason, and gets the reputation of being chilly, while Liv often makes nice - or even flirts - with the bar's primarily male clientele, who are quick with dirty jokes and innuendos, which later take on more sinister forms.

The two girls befriend a young guy named Matty (Toby Wallace), who introduces himself with a dirty joke at Liv's expense. It would seem wise not to trust him, but Hanna and Liv ultimately (sort of) become friends with him, going with him to a local swimming hole and inviting him over for drinks. When he gets a little handsy with Hanna, she realizes her initial instinct might have been the correct one.

However, it's Dolly (Daniel Henshall) who's the primary source of concern for Hanna. He's a creep with a violent streak whom Hanna catches leering drunkenly down the hall from where the girls sleep one night. On another occasion, he becomes increasingly hostile - also while drunk - to an older couple who are celebrating their anniversary at the bar after Hanna refuses to have a drink with him. Even Teeth (James Frecheville), who displays a protectiveness toward Liv, appears to have obsessive tendencies that might be dangerous.

"The Royal Hotel" could be described as a thriller, although it's more of a slow burn atmosphere of menace. From start to finish, the film is an exercise in how to maintain a tense vibe through suggestion and small indignities, which when added up go a long way in explaining why Hanna appears coiled so tight. The film's finale is a bit over the top, but it will also likely elicit some cheers from viewers.

Green's previous film, "The Assistant," also starred Garner as a woman being made to feel uncomfortable around men. In that case, the man was supposed to be Harvey Weinstein - or, at least, a character based upon him - and Garner's character was one among many powerless women who worked for a predator. In "The Royal Hotel," Hanna - and, ultimately, Liv - are pushed to the point where they must confront that power. While Green's second film may not be quite as powerful as her first, this is a solid, slow-building thriller in which location, performances, and mood go a long way. 

Review: Flora And Son

Image courtesy of Apple TV.

John Carney's films tend to focus on the creative process - namely, that of creating music with others - and on characters who must break out of their comfort zones to be able to reach creative zeniths and find love. His latest, "Flora and Son," is another charmer - albeit one with more of a potty mouth - that follows this trajectory.

As the film opens, Flora (Eve Hewson) is a single mother in Ireland who enjoys partying at clubs with friends and occasionally bringing home some of the men she meets there. Her son, Max (Oren Kinlan), is a borderline juvenile delinquent case who keeps getting into trouble for fighting or stealing things. Flora's estranged husband, Ian (Jack Reynor), is a frustrated musician who once had a shot at musical success, and blames Flora and Max for his failures.

After Max's latest run-in with the law, Flora attempts to find ways to keep him busy and out of trouble. She stumbles across a guitar in a dumpster and brings it home as a gift, which only leads to a row that involves a lot of things being hurled at Flora that most people wouldn't imaging saying to their parents. We later find out that Max has his own musical passions - namely, using technology to create electronic music; he calls it "ambient" - to try to impress a girl on his block who is typically seen modeling for the music videos of some Irish rapper.

But while Max isn't interested in the banged-up rescue guitar, Flora decides to learn to play and enlists a guitar teacher based in Los Angeles named Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to teach her chords. At first, Flora tells her teacher, a failed musician, that her reasons for learning to play including impressing people and picking up men - she even hits on him, cutting short their first lesson - but she ultimately begins to realize the power that music holds, especially after watching a link Jeff sends her of Joni Mitchell playing one of her most iconic songs.

A friendship blossoms between Flora and her music teacher, and she seemingly has her eyes on a local contest at a pub for local musicians. While the film's one flaw is its portrayal of Flora going from complete novice to songwriter in a seemingly short span of time, there's a lot of fun to be had watching the various characters in the film come together to create music with each other.

First, there's Flora giving advice to Jeff on how to improve the lyrics of a song that he wrote, but could never quite nail; then, there's Flora noticing her son's ambition to write a song to woo the girl on the block, and her proposing to help him shoot a music video. A final sequence in which all three of these characters - plus a few more - get together for a performance at the film's end makes for an emotionally resonant finale.

As a director, Carney's films have all focused on the creation of music and while it might seem that the well would run dry eventually on such a narrow topic, this has yet to happen. "Once" was a lovely, low budget romance that went on to become a Broadway musical and "Begin Again" was a charming, bigger budget film with a similar setup, while "Sing Street" (my favorite Carney film) was a lovely coming-of-age musical drama set in Ireland in the 1980s. "Flora and Son" is another sweet variation on this storyline, but it's also a little cheekier. 

As Gordon-Levitt's character points out, the key to creating great music isn't about necessarily reinventing the wheel, but about using the tools available - the chords - and injecting a part of yourself into it to create something magical. In other words, it's about finding the right notes. "Flora and Son" finds them.