Rebecca (2020)

 Score: 1.5 / 5

Last night I watched a movie about Manderley again.

I was so excited when I heard Ben Wheatley was adapting the Du Maurier novel for a Netflix feature film. His work is often so intense, abstract, and disturbing that I could scarcely wait to see what he'd do with the iconic story, especially as it is his first adaptation of a classic. The hedonistic and nihilistic wonder of High-Rise, the fever dream horrors of A Field in England; it would certainly make for an interesting aesthetic when paired with the strictures of psychological drama and Gothic romance in pre-WWII England. And, since the only other noteworthy theatrical feature was in 1940, Rebecca was arguably due for a major remake.

And with an introduction of haunting beauty -- a mansion at night, lit by unearthly light as a woman walks away from us toward the front gates -- and the familiar opening narration, I was enraptured. We then jump unceremoniously then to Monte Carlo, where a young woman (Lily James) works for a darkly hilarious wannabe-socialite (Ann Dowd) while traveling abroad. The atmosphere is utterly escapist, with no mention of the Great Depression but all the sensory pleasures of a gilded Jazz Age, and cinematographer Laurie Rose works hard to make everything feel as old-school Hollywood as possible. The chromatic warmth is shared by the leading players: James, ever the wide-eyed doll thrust into a fantasy, is rescued from toil and social stagnancy by her Prince Charming, Maxim de Winter, played by Armie Hammer in an unspeakably monstrous mustard-colored suit. He summons her for drives along Mediterranean cliffs and even enacts sexual liaisons before suddenly proposing to her and sweeping her away to his estate in England.

Which is where the movie lost me. The aura of fantasy continues uninterrupted as the young unnamed protagonist -- and we -- are introduced to the de Winter home. The artificial color saturation grows, if anything, more pronounced in what eventually becomes clear to be a Gothic mansion. As the narrator becomes more keenly aware of the ghostly presence of Rebecca, the deceased former Mrs. de Winter, the movie continues its warmly lit aesthetic, making the proceedings feel increasingly soapy. Rather than fearing for the safety of our protagonist, or even her sanity, we're only kept in suspense to see what her next costume will be, where another monogrammed "R" will pop up, and if we'll ever see some eroticism between the married couple more than the Hayes Code softcore scene on a French beach.

The only visage not coated in candied hues is that of the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, played by a tight-lipped and ebony-dressed Kristin Scott Thomas in the kind of role she masters. As her dark eyes and skeletal frame slink through halls and doorways, we wonder if she stepped out of a whole different movie, perhaps even an audition for what will surely be Ryan Murphy's follow-up miniseries of a literary origin story to Ratched. But this film, written by committee, hamstrings her best efforts by hewing so damned close to the source material while simultaneously moving along between plot points without fleshing out that same source material.

The most potent power of Du Maurier's novel is in its bleak premise: Am I as good a wife/a woman/in bed as my dead predecessor? But this movie staunchly refuses to dive into that rich mystery, focusing instead on hitting all the recognizable plot points incoherently. When Jack Favell (a wasted Sam Riley) appears in a couple brief scenes late in the film, I vaguely wondered who he was, despite having recently read the book again. And instead of fleshing out crucial moments of character development, the film casts off its secondary talents in favor of a series of bizarre dream sequences with no real purpose. Mrs. de Winter follows Max sleepwalking into the west wing several times, where Rebecca once slept, in a fashion that would make you think he has an enchanted rose slowly losing petals; she later sleeps in a bed with a pattern of green vines before becoming entangled and eaten by a nightmarish Devil's Snare in her own hallway.

These kinds of scenes would have worked if director Ben Wheatley had delivered something akin to his usual fare. Whether he was handcuffed (in velvet, apparently) by Netflix, his producers, or perhaps the daunting idea of adapting the iconic piece, Wheatley's efforts here feel as watered down and inconsequential as a Hallmark adaptation. As the movie leers towards its finale, Wheatley seems more bewildered than I was; his courtroom scenes during what should be the climax demonstrate an ineptitude that borderlines on failure. And then there's the bizarre postlude scene in which Mrs. de Winter confronts a suicidal Danvers on a cliff, and the screenwriters should have been shot; it reminded me of the abject failure of Cinderella (2015) to explore Lady Tremaine's character and thus justify the remake's existence. Personally, I like remakes if only for the critical exercise of considering differing artistic interpretations on a similar work. If this had been a purely straightforward, honest-to-Daphne remake of Hitchcock's brilliant work but in color, I wouldn't have even been mad. But its own aesthetic inconsistencies and inability to make a case for its own existence makes this Rebecca about as haunting as a hangover.

I would have much preferred a version that mined the novel's suggestions and dramatized what Hitchcock could not in 1940: erotic thrills a la De Palma, a Luhrmann's Gatsby-style masquerade ball, a more pronounced necrophilic-lesbian presence, or even an out-and-out ghost story like Del Toro's Crimson Peak. True, perhaps this wasn't the place or venue for that, but this surely could have been entertaining, interesting, or fresh, if not all three. Maybe Mike Flanagan will use this mess to inspire The Haunting of Manderley Hall, which could (and should) do all that and more.

Capone (2020)

 Score: 3 / 5

It was only a matter of time before Tom Hardy tackled Scarface as only he can. With his famous penchant for Method acting, he dives directly into the title role of Capone with characteristically balls-out gusto. True to form, he works unexpected magic in this movie partly due to its focus: we're in the final year of Al Capone's life, the opening text tells us. Hardy peers out from layers of makeup and prosthetics with his piercing eyes, playing the prematurely dying Fonz with the audacity and theatricality we would expect from his old-school style and his larger-than-life character. And it makes for a dazzling, rapturous performance. Hardy belongs to the rare class of actor -- like Marlon Brando or Orson Welles -- who delivers to the beat of his own drum, filtered through his own internal logic, often inaccessible and opaque. It's powerful to behold, but only works in the right context.

Hardy here rots away before us, disguised by the mask he wears and his typically arresting voice. Often unintelligible, he gurgles and grunts his way through this movie, intermittently spitting out imprecise and incorrectly pronounced Italian phrases. Be sure to watch this one with subtitles! It's calculated and chameleonic, to be sure, but this is a far cry from the technical genius of Meryl Streep and Gary Oldman; here it often feels as though Hardy's voice has been wrung through a strainer, filtered through a synthesizer, and then boiled in its own bile. As the necrotic gangster dwindles, the skin peeling off his pallid face and bodily fluids excreting themselves from his shorts, we become increasingly aware of the syphilitic fever raging in his brain. He's far from the fearsome legend he was, but when he handles a gun we see glimpses of his former horror. Most of the movie, however, comprises Hardy chewing an oversized cigar, puffing clouds of smoke, and muttering to himself as he wanders through his Florida mansion. In fact, that's about the length and breadth of whatever plot exists here.

Writer and director Josh Trank (Chronicle, Fantastic Four), despite dubious conventional measurements of "success," will never be less than an original filmmaker. In Capone, he works significant magic that cannot be overlooked, both in his remarkable skills as an old-school filmmaker and in his ability to wrangle meaning and emotional intelligence from Hardy's performance. It can't have been easy to plan this movie around Hardy's antics, but in fact Trank's mastery over the proceedings suggests that this movie was so carefully planned out it might actually be too controlled. Scenes are so choreographed, so beautifully shot (by cinematographer Peter Deming) with unexpected light and movement, so synchronous with sound and performance, and so deliberately cut and juxtaposed with other images or movements that I suspect Trank took Hardy's Brando/Welles inspiration and ran with it. He's not setting up cameras all around and splicing together "good" moments caught at random; he's dancing with his own Black Swan. Along those lines, he ends the film with an amazing sequence in which his storytelling matches the audacious theatricality of his star, erasing the line between reality and fantasy, history and character. I'm guessing that, apart from harnessing the power of Hardy, this sequence is the reason Trank made this movie.

I don't want to take away from the fascinating performance or direction here, but it is worth including that I don't expect to watch this movie again. Challenging and even, arguably, beautiful as it is, it is far from entertaining and less than engaging. Capone never tries to explain, rationalize, defend, or even explore its antihero's past, a decision I fully support. But it also never tries to dramatize anything resembling, well, dramatic. It's 103 minutes of watching a man die, a man who tries to reflect on his life but can't make connections due to his neurosyphilis; a man who still treats his family (specifically Linda Cardellini) and friends (including Matt Dillon) as though he's the pinstriped kingpin who could kill them with a flick of his finger; a man who shits his bed and plays hide-and-seek with ghostly visions in his five-star haunted house. I don't mind a tragedy, or even a bleak exercise in nihilism, but it's difficult to much care for Scarface in any capacity, especially as he's dying with so much suffering.

The Boys in the Band (2020)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

The devastating brilliance of The Boys in the Band is back in a big way with its newest incarnation, which debuted on Netflix recently. This production has been lifted directly from its brief Broadway revival in 2018, including its entire cast and director, and though its stagey delivery will surely invite criticism from some, it allows those of us who enjoy the theatre to experience something of what we might see on stage. With most responsible theatre groups still shut down these days, heaven knows we needed something like this. (And of course Hamilton, but that's been on repeat all summer!)

It's one of the defining dinner-party-gone-wrong dramas, and remarkably noteworthy for many reasons. Mart Crowley's original off-Broadway play premiered in 1968 and was groundbreaking for portraying a group of gay men authentically. They weren't isolated, and they weren't a trope: the villain, the victim, the sidekick. They weren't even heroic, which wouldn't happen yet for many years. The entire play explores their lives in a way that, now, feels like a perfect experience dropped into a time capsule: only the next year, which brought the Stonewall riots, changed queer urban culture forever. Not long after, as AIDS claimed the lives of thousands, gay art grew urgent, preachy, tragic, and poignant. Because of the intersection of queer lives, mainstream media, and increasing social justice, it's terribly difficult for most young people today to grasp the revolutionary power of The Boys in the Band, even if it wasn't all that well-received in its day.

But it's still a magnificent drama on its own terms, and as long as we let its tempo, language, and profound truths guide us, this new film works wonders on the screen. Thankfully, director Joe Mantello and producer Ryan Murphy avoid any attempts to modernize or dumb-down the original text, making this film as important (if more accessible) than William Friedkin's 1970 film. The play doesn't need to be topical because it will always be relevant, and the artists here trust the work to stand on its own. With only a few added moments to make this feel less like it was shot on stage, the film takes place almost entirely within one character's apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side. What begins as a not-quite-surprising birthday party turns into a night of chaos as the characters drink, play games, and reveal awful truths about themselves and each other.

Jim Parsons plays Michael, the host, whose recent sobriety is put to the test as he prepares for company. His former college roommate Alan has called and wants to visit, but when Michael tells him he's having friends over Alan won't like, Alan breaks into tears (something the very straight character certainly hasn't done before). Michael allows his friend a brief time to come, but before long the gaggle of gays show up and get a little rowdy. It would be easy to classify this bunch of queens as too campy, too effete, too much; but you'd be forgetting that this was a time that their behaviors -- even their identities, as much as the concept existed then -- were strictly illegal. Once in the privacy of a home, they could finally relax and be as flamboyant as they could not in the "real" world. And does that affect their mannerisms? You bet.

You could say the characters are fairly stereotypical, by today's standards, but that washes away the fact that these stereotypes had not yet been cemented as fundamental to queer representation in art. We have effeminate interior decorator Emory, tortured and hunky former lover Donald (who, it is suggested, is undergoing psychoanalysis in an early form of conversion therapy), artist Larry who prefers to sleep around and his live-in boyfriend Hank who is still married to a woman, and finally librarian Bernard, a hopeless romantic and the only black man. We know that, based on the time period and the verbal cruelty of these queers, before long someone will call him the "n" word. And I nearly forgot the guest of honor: Harold, played by a deliciously wicked Zachary Quinto, the lapsed Catholic and alcoholic riddled with a poisonous mix of vanity and malice.

As the night slowly becomes a nightmare, we're locked in the genius world of Eugene O'Neill and Edward Albee, in a party-hell that is as absorbing as it is repugnant. Its grotesquerie reaches a chillingly quiet climax during a particularly nasty party game in which the men take turns calling the one person they've loved the most and telling them. Revelations spiral out of control and the characters are each given chances to dramatically shine; of course the central issue, a now-cliché MacGuffin in which the one most repelled by gay men is probably gay himself, comes to the fore before all ends with tears. Of course, that's not to deny our own devilish pleasure at watching a member of the hegemony get what's coming to him when he is suddenly at the mercy of those he detests. I read that "schadenfreude" was the most-searched vocabulary word after Trump caught the coronavirus. The same concept is dramatic gold here.

If for nothing else, this movie is a delicious drama that perfectly captures real lives lived in a time before what most of us can remember. As such, it can foster lively and enlightening discussions about history, politics, and social justice as easily as it can about friendship, love, truth, and the tragedy of our lives. Boasting memorable performances, beautiful production design, and its timeless script, The Boys in the Band ultimately reminds us all that denying and disguising ourselves can only end with pain, but embracing and building each other up allows us to hope.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

 Score: 4 / 5

"I'm thinking of ending things," the narrator repeats several times in the opening scene. The narrator is also the main character, played by Jessie Buckley, and she's sitting in a moving car. Amidst her not-quite stream of consciousness, including memory and hope, judgment and suggestion, her voiceover feels at once sad, bored, wistful. "I'm thinking of ending things," she repeats, seemingly contemplating dumping her boyfriend of six weeks, Jake, the man driving the car. He's taking her to meet his parents for the first time. On a farm. In a blizzard. It's not ideal. I'd think about ending things too, though by this point it's surely a little too late.

"I'm thinking of ending things," she says, framed by the window of the car and underscored by the sound effects of a whistling wind. The lengthy opening scene is entirely within the car. So is the third major movement of the film, when Jake and our narrator leave his parents' farm. These people spend a lot of time in the car and, thematically, get absolutely nowhere. They're trapped in the world of the film and by the film itself; the movie is shot in a tight 4:3 aspect ratio that feels unwelcome and uncomfortable in our days of big-ass-tv digital screenings. Her entrapment in these frames suggests another, darker meaning to her gerund thoughts: suicide. It helps that most of the shots are from outside the car windows, with the whistling wind and thick snowfall. It makes it that much harder to see their faces and hear their voices, which are the only things worth trying to see clearly. In fact, the first we see of the pair is the clearest we see them, in many ways. Things only get more cloudy, more strange from here.

"I'm thinking of ending things," but who is she? We never really know. Her name is, initially, Lucy, but it apparently changes when other people call her other names like Ames and Yvonne and she doesn't correct them. As Jake introduces her to his parents and their conversation develops, details of her life change from sentence to sentence, including how they met, her job, her past. She quotes poetry at length and, in one incredible scene I had to pause during to reference-check, imitates Pauline Kael while quoting her review of A Woman Under the Influence (a film in which that woman attempts suicide) as if she herself is creating the monologue. And she's not alone in this. Jake, played by Jesse Plemons, is apparently such a vapid man that he has essentially no character. Almost everything he says is a reference, a quote, or something he clearly lifted from another source.

Not long after they get to the farm and meet Jake's parents (played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis), the film teeters close to psychological horror. In this haunted house of Americana, each time the parents -- who very much seem to have missed the memo they'd be receiving visitors -- leave the room and return, they jump to a different time in their lives. From dewy-eyed newlyweds to a couple on their deathbed, their aging follow no linear logic. By the time Jake and his girlfriend leave into a night repeatedly referred to as treacherous, we're fully engaged in an organized nightmare; the problem is, we have no access to the organization of it.

And that's really writer/director Charlie Kaufman's modus operandi. But unlike his other films, i'm thinking of ending things is almost inaccessible in its opaque artistry, its tedious dialogue that would require a reference appendix, its bizarre obsession with -- typical for the creator -- an utterly unlikable and deeply introverted man in the throes of agony simply because he's alive and can't cope. Here, I'd argue (based on the conclusion, which I'd rather not spoil but may need to), his main character is in fact much more fascinating than in Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, but then we'd have to discuss the issue of dramatizing mental illness in this way and with this very specific ending. It just gave me the willies, and not in a juicy frisson but in a guilt-ridden way. "I'm thinking of ending things" might be Kaufman's way of trying to end our understanding of his movies.

Of course, I'm sure a repeat viewing would help, especially now that I have a few notes of specific references these characters make. Frankly, I'm not sure I want to watch this hypnotic, bewildering movie again any time soon. It certainly doesn't help that it premiered on Netflix; this kind of experience needs to be seen in a blackened auditorium with absolutely no distractions. Netflix fare has to compete with all manner of food, cell phone conversations, family members interjecting, bathroom breaks ad nauseam, and to combat the soporific comfort of a viewer's bed or sofa and ambient lighting. I'd be surprised if this movie garners many fans, much like the beautiful and haunting I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Then again, Kaufman's work here is clearly a labor of love, and one that manages, despite its unfathomable ambiguities, to carry us along with it by sheer virtue of his control of the craft.

If you've seen it, or read the novel on which it is loosely based, let's have a conversation about it. I'm not at all convinced my interpretation holds all of the water. I'm not sure any interpretation would. I guess that's good, but it's also dreadfully dull in context of this movie. I guess I'd rather end things too.