French Exit (2021)

Score: 3 / 5

Michelle Pfeiffer is one of the best character actors of her generation, usually combining her age-defying beauty with cold, distant cruelty. Naturally, this often eases her into villainous roles, ones that ooze gilded sensuality from balustrades of wealth as she climbs (or descends) steps of social strata. And so is the case in French Exit, a rare comedy that capitalizes on Pfeiffer's unique sense of luxurious detachment. If produced onstage, it would almost certainly be labeled as a farce: its absurd contrivances remind me more of Frank Capra or Noel Coward than of anything in Pfeiffer's list of credits. Even the first episode of Schitt's Creek was more confident in embracing farce than this movie. Apart from Pfeiffer's character, everyone else feels like a caricature meant to swirl around her and inform little of the story or themes apart from the weirdness of her life.

Frances Price is newly broke. A Manhattan heiress and socialite, some years widowed, she has been raising her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) much as she herself behaves. Indifferent to the restrictions of the lives of others, she -- in an early introductory scene -- plucks her son out of boarding school with a rebellious smirk, defying the headmaster and tempting Malcolm to indulge his whims. But she's playful and engaging, probably more with her son than she was in her marriage. Time leaps forward quickly to Malcolm as a young man, swaddled in his privilege (Hedges is deliciously disassociated from his character), secretly engaged to his girlfriend (Imogen Poots). Suddenly -- and this is the inciting incident -- Frances is slapped with the reality that she and Malcolm have blown through their entire fortune.

Of course, that's what happens after probably two decades of living it up without any new income. Frances can't even pay her housekeeper the $600 of her wages. Instead, she starts to crack, drinking her last reserves of good wine as she sharpens knives in a dark kitchen; Malcolm's latent fear in seeing her thus is a wealth of humor for us, but it reminds us that dramatic renditions of this scenario would probably result in some kind of violence. Not so here, where the characters seem to be keenly aware that they are clichés -- Frances drily says as much to her friend Joan (Susan Coyne) -- as sad, rich white people who are no longer rich.

Thankfully, Joan offers her empty Paris apartment to her newly homeless friends, and so Frances and Malcolm embark on the titular French "exit." They take few possessions with them, but they intentionally bring Small Frank, their formerly stray black cat, whose green stare and deliberate movements suggest alarming sentience (spoiler alert: the cat is evidently Frances's husband reincarnated). Paris doesn't seem to fix the relational problems Frances and Malcolm have, but they are soon jolted out of their self-pitying stupor by Madame Reynard (the hilarious Valerie Mahaffey), an eccentric expat who seems to think her own first name is "Madame." Her bubbly energy almost entirely disguises the fact that she is actively reinventing herself, and her eagerness to forge kinship with Frances is endearing when it's not a little cringey. Frances is initially cruel to her, determined to ward off any real emotions, and so when Madame Reynard simply replies, in a voice that only slightly breaks, "I'm ... lonely," she immediately breaks any ice left between the women.

Other, poorer attempts at human connection become the driving motifs of the film, often helped by the production design. Though it seems to take place in the present day, characters often use pay phones or send postcards to communicate, and their stilted language reminds me more of George Bernard Shaw or David Lindsay-Abaire than of real-life speaking patterns. Other characters fly in and often stay in the apartment, including Danielle Macdonald as a sad fortune teller on the transatlantic ship who psychically knew Small Frank wasn't just a cat, a private investigator (Isaach de Bankole) Frances uses to locate Small Frank when he disappears, and even Malcolm's recent ex-fiancée shows up again with her new boyfriend. By the time Joan checks in on her friend and discovers her apartment has become a bizarre hostel, the movie careens wildly toward its simple, silly, and sweet ending. It's not a rollicking comedy the whole time -- although when a seance results in Tracy Letts doing voiceover as Frances's deceased husband, I almost lost it -- but it's got some cool ideas on its mind.

Skin (2019)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Rarely are we given a chance to see true evil change for the better. I don't mean just villainous characters in stories who "see the error of their ways" and are punished, and I don't mean the recent surge of antihero-centered films and shows. I can't think of many other films than last year's Skin that show more clearly that genuine, life-altering change is a tough choice to make, but one that can save lives. And in an era when Nazis and Klansmen are taking to the streets again, few stories are more timely or important than those that reveal the nature of this evil and how we can fight it.

Here we become witness to the real-life story of Bryon Widner (played by a brilliant Jamie Bell), an ex-white-power-skinhead. The main thrust of the story depicts Widner's life in Indiana as a backwoods, almost punk-goth member of a fringe organization devoted to worshipping whiteness. Early, we see his parents (Vera Farmiga and Bill Camp) leading a quasi-religious group of these neo-Nazis in praising their Norse gods and planning to claim a seat in government. They want, explicitly, to "just make them leave," referring to black people and Asians and other minorities they use different words for. It's a chilling scene, especially with the "send her back" chants we heard this year at Trump's rallies still ringing in our ears.

Widner becomes somewhat disillusioned with his gang, but this is where the film is especially interesting. The screenplay and direction never allow the story to enter familiar territory. It's shot mostly handheld with special attention to the grunge and grit of real life. Never sentimental, it churns on from disturbing scene to disturbing scene, not really even allowing us the opportunity to like Widner. Probably because he's just not a good person. We don't need to believe there is a nugget of humanity in there, because really there isn't at this point. When, however, he meets a nice ex-Nazi girl (Danielle Macdonald) and her kids, love for them begins to mobilize his desire to change. This could be a nasty, sickly sweet portrayal of the transformative power of love, but thankfully the film has too much on its mind for that.

American History X this is not. We aren't really allowed into Widner's head, to understand better how and why he changes, or even how and why he was a white supremacist in the first place. That seems to be largely rooted in his brainwashed upbringing, as Widner's parents are essentially cult leaders who emotionally manipulate their flock, inciting violence and paranoia and indignation. And while his desire to change becomes clear, it's never felt. Jamie Bell is almost unrecognizable here, and his performance is muscular and brutal, perhaps nowhere more so than in the shocking tenderness and affection he shows to the young girls who have entered his life.

And while the title may make you think of the film's anticipated morals regarding the colors of one's skin versus the color of one's soul, it most concretely concerns Widner's heavily tattooed skin, which flash-forwards show us he gets surgically removed in excruciatingly painful operations over the course of 18 months. It's a beautiful and agonizing play on the Romantic notion that inherent evil manifests itself in nature, and the pains to which we might go to alter that. It also reveals a fascinating irony in that someone who so loved his own white skin would cover so much of it with dark pigmentation and scarring. So while the film doesn't quite fully flesh out its characters and give us "answers", I'm not sure there really are any satisfactory answers as to why certain kinds of people can be so evil. Skin instead gives us a complex real-life story to consider from a refreshingly antisentimental perspective.