The Unforgivable (2021)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Based on the brief Netflix synopsis, I thought this movie would be one thing. Then, what initially appeared to be a psychological drama turned into an odd mixture of legal and crime thriller, before coming to a head in an ending that took a few too many sharp turns for me. Narrative whiplash notwithstanding, The Unforgivable desperately wants to be a character study of a woman in what is usually a male role. And it somewhat succeeds there, mostly due to the commitment of an always surprising Sandra Bullock. The problem is largely with the screenplay and direction, neither of which seems able to focus on any particular point or use their assets wisely.

Sandy B. plays Ruth Slater as she is released from prison; we learn eventually that she served twenty years after she was convicted of murdering a sheriff. The sheriff had come to her family home to evict Ruth, who was caring for her (at the time) five-year-old sister Katie after their father's suicide. Their mother had died during Katie's birth. Now released, Ruth has to get odd jobs to try and survive while searching for Katie, who had since been adopted and presumably doesn't remember her sister or their childhood trauma. In case you weren't getting the hint, this is a bleak story, and the film consciously leans into its more grim aspects: we cut fairly often, even early in the film before the backstory is divulged, to Katie as a young woman dealing with sudden traumatic flashes, the inciting incident of which is a car crash she survives on the day of Ruth's release. Katie's adoptive parents are worried that Ruth coming back into her life will only make Katie suffer more.

Ruth returns first to her childhood home, isolated and rural somewhere near Seattle, labeled the "Murder House" but now with new inhabitants Liz and John Ingram (Viola Davis and Vincent D'Onofrio, if you can believe it). Catching her loitering outside their house, John invites Ruth in as Liz looks on incredulously, in one of the film's fleeting and darkly comedic moments. Ruth lies until finding out John is a lawyer, then she opens up a bit while asking them to help her find Katie. In this scene, and a few others that follow -- the film doesn't use its own cast very well, though Davis works hard to make her bizarre scenes work -- I found myself confused as to the extent to which we feel sympathy for Ruth. While we're clearly meant to embrace her perspective, the film repeatedly jabs at her privilege or cuts to other characters as they express their hatred or indifference toward her. This lack of focus undermines our relationship to her and stops the film from becoming a meaningful character study; the screenplay doesn't even give us any of her backstory until quite late, making her feel like an entitled troublemaker or a dangerous bitch most of the time. Katie has enough issues, and her new parents' protectivity is fully justified.

It's not just that the director (Nora Fingscheidt, in what I think is her first English-language feature) and writers keep Ruth's past a secret for so long that bothers me. It's that they incessantly tease what really happened twenty years ago through annoying, brief, literally unfocused flashbacks that suggest trauma and hidden truths without actually doing anything narratively or developmentally. It's a cheap trick of storytelling to say, "hey, I've got a secret, and you need to wait another hour before I spill the beans!" If your story doesn't contain enough interest to maintain its audience on its own, don't belittle yourself as a storyteller with this trashy mechanism; just find a different way to tell the damn story.

Oh, and then there's the ending, which showed me in spades that the filmmakers had no faith in their own story. There's the "big reveal" of what really happened to Ruth and Katie, and it's underwhelming (SPOILER: five-year-old Katie shot the sheriff, and Ruth took the blame). But then there's the now-adult sons of the sheriff, caricatures of something between white trash and angry white men. Now that Ruth is free, one brother wants to move on and forget the past while the other stalks her and fantasizes about violence and revenge. Eventually their roles swap, and the mild one turns murderous, and then Ruth gets viciously attacked by the daughter of another cop, and I wondered if this would turn into a cop-hating movie about brutal cops and the violence they beget in their offspring. Which is maybe something to consider in a film, but not in this particular story of a woman looking for redemption.

I wonder if with just a few tweaks in the writers' room (apparently this movie was written by committee, and adapted from a British miniseries) this movie would make more sense. Have a stronger sense of focus or inspiration, or even have any sense of urgency. Perhaps the miniseries worked better with more time to dwell on some of the thematic concerns the story raises? Who knows, because I have no interest in touching this one again. There's really no telling who exactly is "unforgivable," whether it's the deceased sheriff who didn't help children in need, his monstrous sons looking for revenge, Katie's new parents for their overprotection, the Ingrams for their tough love, Ruth's parole officer (Rob Morgan) or even Ruth herself. But I can squarely identify the director and screenwriters here as being unforgivable in their squandering of talent and resources.

The Power of the Dog (2021)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I'm always a little skeptical when one movie sweeps awards and is widely touted as the "best" of the year, and so it took me a while to muster up the energy to open Netflix and finally watch its latest Oscarbait. And now I'm angry that I waited and heartbroken that this one wasn't released in cinemas.

The Power of the Dog is a masterful movie by writer and director Jane Campion, whose films (and miniseries) are usually great anyway. The Kiwi auteur this time shoots her homeland to look like Montana in the 1920s, a bare and beautiful landscape mostly untouched except for lonely, winding paths under rugged hills. Much like the land, the story Campion tells -- apparently adapted from a novel of the same name, for which I'm now hunting -- is bereft of fluff. Uncompromising and straightforward, it centers on the internal lives of a small family on the brink of society, eking out their livelihoods on the edges of what is known. We are given no flashbacks or really much context; any history between characters is mentioned in dialogue and left in the past; instead, we're made to study the faces of these characters in close-up much as we would study a landscape painting, reading paragraphs of detail in the actors' chiseled faces.

Phil and George Burbank are wealthy brothers who run a successful ranch. Upon meeting a widowed innkeeper named Rose (Kirsten Dunst), George (Jesse Plemons) decides to get married, and soon Rose and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) move into the stately Burbank ranch. With George's money, Peter can go to school and study medicine and surgery. Phil, however, is not pleased; his rough-and-tough demeanor and hardworking isolationist attitude have made him the leader of the cowboys, and he sees weakness in his brother's affection. Moreover, he seems to see Rose as a leech on his family's resources, and he hates Peter for his effeminate mannerisms. Even in their first meeting, Phil verbally abuses Peter to the point of Peter leaving the dining hall where he works and Rose crumples into tears; he dominates the atmosphere of any social interaction with sharp words and abject cruelty. Here, he's a wolf in dirty clothes, lashing out at anyone on a whim. Cumberbatch is playing a villain, to be sure, but not as he's done before in The Desolation of Smaug or Star Trek Into Darkness; he's not particularly having fun here, just sinking his teeth into a raw and meaty role for the first time in what feels like ages. I would never have thought of casting him in a Western (August: Osage County was about as close as I expected he'd get to it), but he owns this movie like Phil would.

And while Phil's presence threatens to overwhelm the film, the other characters get a lot of quality time to shine, especially Rose and Peter, who react very differently to Phil's abuse. Rose crumples utterly; as the sex Phil doesn't desire and the leech he doesn't want, she represents an existential threat to him, and so he torments her relentlessly to the point of driving her to suicidal alcoholism and an inability to express herself musically or even verbally. Peter initially hides, a scrawny and limp-wristed kid, before he and Phil strike an uneasy but sudden and intense camaraderie. Doubtlessly feeding into Rose's sense of panic, Phil becomes a sort of mentor to Peter in everything from skinning cows to riding horses, and his influence over the boy remains somewhat mysterious during the latter half of the film. Peter works hard to appreciate and even embrace the rugged masculinity of his frontier foster father-figure, and we increasingly get the idea that Phil's rough exterior is little more than a coping mechanism for unspeakable desires he has long denied himself.

The secrets and desires flying between each character, fascinating in their transparency and fleeting acknowledgments, also inform the aesthetics of the film. Jonny Greenwood's score -- primarily string instruments -- make the sweeping film feel like a chamber piece, one whose notes soar until they zing. You can almost see the ways in which power dynamics shift between characters through the music, and for what is essentially "just" a drama about Western masculinities, the score and color scheme feel increasingly like they could tip into another genre, namely psychological thriller, at any moment. Actually, I'd place this movie in the same vein as American Beauty or Little Children in terms of this kind of tone, and for its acute analysis of American gender dynamics under the constraints of civil respectability. Despite appearing to be a peaceful, relatively uneventful watch, The Power of the Dog is a masterclass in nuance on all fronts, a stunning example of beautiful filmmaking that trusts its audience to do a lot of work in parsing out its delicate, sensuous, emotional strands as if unwinding strings of a rope.

The Lost Daughter (2021)

Score: 4 / 5

A character study of the highest tier, The Lost Daughter dropped with almost no fanfare on Netflix except for those of us who knew it was coming. It's Maggie Gyllenhaal's debut as director, and if that wasn't an interesting enough reason to want to see it, it's got Oscar written all over Olivia Colman's lead performance. But the film is also deeply complex, a sort of puzzle box for the cognitive adult who enjoys linking literary conceits with arthouse filmmaking. This is not the kind of movie that should have premiered on a streaming service -- it deserves a small, stately auditorium and a box of malted milk balls or chocolate covered raisins -- and yet here it is, sure to be overlooked or underseen by anyone unable to stop fidgeting or touching their phone while lounging on their sofa.

Endlessly literary, the film concerns a brief Grecian vacation taken by a middle-aged professor and translator named Leda (Colman). She's alone in the gorgeous resort town, and seems content to be so, walking through the trees down to the beach, reading under an umbrella, occasionally soaking in the sun and water. But, then again, her contentedness might be a bit forced, and it breaks now and again to see straining paranoia underneath. Her reactions to the people around her -- we're forced to watch other sunbathers and attendants along with Leda -- are striking, intense, and often internalized. While people-gazing, she might start to hyperventilate, eyes brimming with tears, before grabbing her book and hurrying in another direction. When another family asks her to move to another beach chair so they can all sit together, she refuses with disdain and almost cruelty before clearly getting upset that they are upset with her.

More than once, I wondered exactly what kind of movie I was watching. By the time Leda stares longingly at another woman (Dakota Johnson) and her young daughter on the beach, I feared this might become a Sapphic romance or even thriller, given the coldly impersonal first half hour or so and Leda's clearly unstable state of mind. Leda's attempts at conversation are uncomfortable, and she looks to be in pain while talking to the hotel caretaker (Ed Harris) and the beach boy (Paul Mescal) in early scenes. We get the impression more than once that Leda is not a reliable narrator, and I would not be surprised if the source novel was also written in first person, much like this movie, because despite the beautiful landscapes, I haven't felt so claustrophobic in a film all year. It makes you want to pause it just to come up for air, out of Leda's suffocating control of perspective. Leda's intense observance of the young mother and child seem triggering to her.

Then, suddenly, just as something weird is going on with Leda, the scene abruptly shifts, and it took me a little while to understand that the main narrative is interspersed with scenes from Leda's days some twenty years earlier, when Leda is played by Jessie Buckley. It's an inspired casting choice, but also a brilliant performance from Buckley as an irritated and overwhelmed young mother to two demanding daughters. These aren't really flashbacks, and if you're not paying attention, you'd think it was all happening in a unity of time, in the (fittingly) Greek sense. But really these are parallel stories that give us a more complete picture of Leda while emphasizing the relationship between motivation, sacrifice, and consequence. Younger Leda is so tired of this family life she apparently didn't want, and she's desperate to escape it to pursue her professional ambitions, which reach a boiling point when a celebrity scholar (the ever creepy Peter Sarsgaard) shows interest in her scholarship.

This is not a movie to watch lightly. The Lost Daughter is relentlessly challenging to watch, a test of emotional endurance not in a tragic or tearjerking way but because of its aggressive strangeness. To the casual viewer, it may appear inert. But if you cut out all distractions and dwell with Leda and the other characters in the moment, the film reveals itself unafraid to be ugly, messy, and often troubling. It will surely spark valuable conversations about "bad mothers" and "bad daughters," the latter of which is largely missing from feminist seminar discussions, but it will hopefully also inspire conversations about this kind of somewhat inaccessible storytelling. This is high art of cinema, and it trusts its audience to do the necessary legwork to keep up. I can't say it's a particularly entertaining film, but it's got one of the best performances of the year and it offers unique and rewarding challenges to its viewers.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

Score: 4 / 5

It's always tough to stomach a new adaptation of the Bard's work. Whether it's Kenneth Branagh's latest diva turn or an indie attempt at sacrificing substance for visuals, filmed Shakespeare often leaves a lot to be desired, at least for this viewer. And Macbeth, no doubt due to its already lean and mean plot, gets adapted more often than most of Shakespeare's work. Most recently, Justin Kurzel's 2015 adaptation was visually stunning but bereft of so much content that it felt more like an undergraduate's capstone than actual theatre. And, when I saw that the new adaptation from Joel Coen (as a solo writer and director, for the first time without his brother Ethan) had a running time of just under two hours, I panicked that it would travel the same, sorry road.

But turn, hellhound, as Macduff says, for this movie took me by blissful surprise. It's not the best version of the play I've ever seen, and it's not always a great movie, but it bravely pushes forward into fascinating new areas and, mostly, succeeds in telling its story anew. Shot in Gothic black and white by Bruno Delbonnel in gorgeous expressionistic sets by Stefan Dechant, the film reads visually somewhere between the nightmare aesthetic of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the foggy grit of seedy L.A. or San Francisco films noir. Add a brooding score by Carter Burwell, and this film is pretty much exactly what I needed to see, cuddled up with a bottle of wine on a cold, snowy winter night while the fire crackled over the hearth.

To start with what we loved, let's start with the beginning. Veteran Shakespearean stage actress Kathryn Hunter appears in an almost blinding white desert, using her famed contortionist abilities to impressive and disturbing effect, growling out the witches' lines in her androgynous voice. She is the one and only witch, you might say, and the film occasionally highlights her acting acrobatics by placing her in relation to herself; one early moment has her standing over a pool of water as he pronounces fortune to Macbeth and Banquo, while her reflection shows two figures, making the trio of myth literal. There are also lovely visual cues to the boundary between worlds, usually heralded by crows (or ravens, perhaps) or still water reserves, as during the brilliant and chilling scene later when Macbeth returns to the witch(es) to learn more from them and their "masters." Hunter appears, too, as another important character usually treated as a cameo or cut altogether, and I love that this inclusion helped showcase her immeasurable talents.

Alex Hassel plays Ross, one of the "other" Thanes in a role more obvious and interesting than I've ever seen, one that plays more intentionally off Ross's fascinating character as one vacillating between loyalty to the crown -- whoever is wearing it -- and loyalty to whatever side will win the power struggle for Scotland. As this film makes him into the mysterious third assassin of Banquo, and it is he who discovers the hiding Fleance before the scene blacks out on him smiling at the boy, there is a lot to unpack there. As intimately familiar as I am with the play, this use of Ross made me want to re-read it again just to find justification or reason for it, because I'd never even considered his character much before, and now he feels like a dark parallel line to Macbeth himself. Oh, and I'd be remiss to say Corey Hawkins wasn't a pretty great Macduff, though I wish the stunted screenplay had given him a bit more to do.

And that, friends, is a segue into the criticisms. This film sounds like a SparkNotes audio summary of the tragedy, not so much like the Bard made manifest. Of course it hits all the beats it needs to, narratively, but for one of Shakespeare's shortest plays, I can't help but begrudge them for slicing his beautiful prose. Further, the players are largely not playing this film as a presentation of Shakespeare, despite the lavishly evocative sets (I thought more than once of Lars von Trier or even Bertolt Brecht) that should have informed a stylized acting technique. They play it as, instead, a deeply inverted chamber piece, grunting and hissing their lines to the point of being nearly inaudible most of the time.

No doubt this style was headed up by Denzel Washington as the titular antihero, whose occasional acting work for the last fifteen years or so has left me repeatedly underwhelmed (with some exceptions, like Fences and Roman J. Israel, Esq., of course). He injects his blasé grunts and typical deadpan "huh" into what should be glorious dialogue, and never allows himself to tip into madness, something that the role absolutely and unequivocally requires. A case could be made that he uses nuance to internalize his madness, but it just doesn't read on screen. Conversely, but also in tandem, Frances McDormand pops in for her limited scenes as Lady Mac, and while she naturally has a slightly wild glint in her eye, she too delivers her performance in atypically understated fashion. It's chilling until it's not, and even her sleepwalking scene felt a little too self-conscious. And then the film gives her death a visual, and that's just something I'm never down with in adaptations of the work.

On the other hand, I really liked the idea of Mac and his wife as an older couple. They are normally played young -- which checks out with his recent battle experience against Ireland and Norway, as well as their profoundly sexual dynamic -- but this time we can more deeply feel her desire to be "unsexed" when she turns toward murder, his lust for power and control as the end of his family line, and of course the weight of his legacy as he ponders "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow." This also makes their attempted murder of Fleance and successful murder of Macduff's son more desperate and cruel. It also makes MacB's murder of King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson), which is fully shown on screen, a shockingly intimate moment, one that feels more like a betrayal of friendship and even kinship rather than simple regicide.

Light thickens, as Mac says, and this is a delicious cocktail to mull over as the snow continues to fall. Get into it, y'all.

The 355 (2022)

Score: 2.5 / 5

What's weird about The 355 isn't that it's a bit of a mess (it is) or that it's not as smart as it wants to be (it's not). A generic spy-action movie with little on its mind and some surprisingly immature technique behind the camera should make this a big waste of time. But, given the beauty and talent on screen and a rousing feminist baseline, I had an entertaining and suitably diverting two hours while viewing this flick.

As with all the worst of the genre, The 355 begins with a flash drive containing a program that can access any digital system on the planet, and it's in the hands of a crime lord and burgeoning terrorist (Jason Flemyng). At his compound, a sudden shootout creates chaos until a Colombian intelligence agent (Edgar Ramirez) takes the drive and bolts. This most basic of McGuffins controls the entire plot, which is unfortunately written not by film school students as it seems, but by playwright and television writer Theresa Rebeck and X-Men writer Simon Kinberg (who also directed). Enter protagonist Mace Browne (Jessica Chastain), a CIA operative assigned to purchase the drive, who travels to Paris with her partner Nick (Sebastian Stan) for the liaison. The deal goes south quickly when a German intelligence agent named Marie (Diane Kruger) interferes and the crime lord materializes.

All this takes place in the first 20 minutes or less. It's a smash-bang introduction to a globe-trotting adventure, even as it takes us some time to really understand what's exactly happening. We don't really grasp the drive's significance until much later in the film, when satellites drop from the sky and power grids shut down. There isn't much discussion about what exactly the threat is other than a nebulous existential crisis; the published synopsis of the film suggests the terrorists want to start WWIII, but that's not even really a concern in the dialogue beyond Mace saying it darkly to her team. Then we're quickly introduced to the other players, including Mace's former MI6 colleague and hacker Khadijah (Lupita Nyong'o) and Colombian psychologist Graciela (Penelope Cruz) who is inexplicably sent into the wide world to find the missing agent played by Ramirez.

They're all caricatures more than characters, and that is where the movie lost me. Why assemble such a brilliant cast of magnetic stars and then have them running around shooting at each other? The script doesn't know what to do with them in calmer moments, and it's only through the grace and strength of the actors that the film is watchable. Chastain and Stan have almost no chemistry, although their characters are meant to be lovers, but they're at least interesting in challenging typical power dynamics. Kruger is endlessly badass here, and Nyong'o is never less than fascinating to watch, but Cruz and Ramirez are utterly wasted. Cruz, despite her long history of playing strong, independent women, is relegated to being a deer in headlights, constantly cowering and pleading to return home to her husband and children, and it never feels authentic due to casting (not due to her performance). And the movie doesn't even seem interested in showcasing the traffic-stopping radiance of these women until the final act, a black market auction in Shanghai, where they are finally dressed in gowns (or, you know, a velvet jumpsuit) fit for the queens they are. Oh, and it's not until the climax that the film's final star, Bingbing Fan, shows up to join the team. What a waste.

None of the women have particularly deep characters, and the film is content to let their skills define them. This could -- and maybe should -- subsequently inform the action scenes, of which there are many. If they're shallow enough, they better be kicking ass, right? Not entirely, because the editing and cinematography are so opaque as to be often unreadable. Shaky, handheld cameras that are zoomed in far too closely cut out large portions of the clearly intricate fight choreography, and unbearably quick editing makes the elaborate chases and large battles bewildering and even annoying.

Arguably, the screenplay's best inspiration is to take the traditionally male-dominated genre (sometimes with an iconic woman just for "diversity") and transform it into a group of uniformly badass and diverse women taking control from the men who won't stop mansplaining. And there is truly joy to be had in the camaraderie of this "harem" (as the villain calls them), even though Kinberg does his best to squander it. The scene in which the women all come together, shouting bizarrely rancorous dialogue and pointing guns at each other in a stalemate, was staged, written, and shot so awkwardly that I wanted to cry from disappointment. Compare it to one of the film's best scenes -- when after a victory they lounge, drink beer, and swap stories of prior assignments -- and you can really start to see the actresses shine. I want that movie more than the one we got. I'm sure that is the movie Chastain (also producer of the film) set out to make, and it baffles me that it didn't happen. Chastain has crafted an utterly unique career out of starring as intensely feminist characters almost from her beginning to act, and while this movie fits the bill, I don't think I'll ever understand how all the right ingredients ended up tasting so bland.

But it's still a fun time at the movies, and with awards season ending, it's okay to enjoy just for the sake of enjoyment.