My Policeman (2022)

Score: 2 / 5

Another year, another dull gay romantic drama. Read: gay tragedy. As important and beautiful as these movies can be, most queer audiences -- the kinds who flock to see these films -- had their fill back in the 2000s. Now, two decades later, we haven't come much farther, apparently. One wonders if filmmakers are ambitious to play the heartstrings of awards voters, if they think heartrending stories of closeted gays in forbidden romances are hot topics, or if they themselves just want in on the Brokeback Mountain prestige. I don't mean to decry queer films in general, of course, but only good representation is actually good representation. Thank goodness for this year's Bros, right? But that makes My Policeman feel just that much more tone deaf and disappointing.

An older couple live together, now retired, in a quiet seaside town, each pretty much keeping to him- and herself. Tom (Linus Roache) takes their dog on long walks along the white rocky cliffs, and Marion (Gina McKee) watches wistfully out her windows and putters around the house. Their passionless doldrums are interrupted suddenly when a recent stroke survivor arrives in his wheelchair. The man is Patrick (Rupert Everett), their long-estranged friend, who Marion had volunteered to take in and care for. Patrick seems uncomfortable but grateful, and occasionally tries to bark out resentment from his clenched jaw and barely audible speech. Marion is clearly guilt-ridden. Tom avoids Patrick at all costs. We're quickly launched into their story in vibrant flashbacks, alternating these warm scenes of the past with the dismal, grayscale present.

In the 1950s, Marion (Emma Corrin) and Tom (Harry Styles) meet on a beach in Britain and soon start dating. She's educated and somewhat ambitious, he's humble and dashing and contentedly working-class. Tom becomes the titular policeman soon enough. During their dates, they eventually meet Patrick (David Dawson) in a museum he curates, after he acted as a witness in one of Tom's cases. The trio spend all their time together; often Marion and Tom are hand-in-hand, but Patrick often seems attracted to Marion, who seems happy to encourage their intimate friendship. Until, that is, she espies the two men being rather intimate shortly after her marriage to Tom. 

This revelation of their closeted sexual relationship almost destroys Marion. Nervous and disgusted and heartbroken, she desperately seeks help that won't come back to ruin her beloved husband. The film seems uncertain of its focus: are we meant to sympathize with the frighteningly homophobic Marion, whose prospects at the time are certainly to be ruined and whose love for Tom remains mostly unaltered? Or are we meant to sympathize with Tom and Patrick, doomed under the norms and laws of their country? Tom seems to be in love with both people, but he must lie to Marion to live his truth and he must hide his relationship with Patrick to survive. It's just a lot of the same old shit.

Screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia, The Painted Veil, Freeheld) seems like a natural fit for a story like this, but that doesn't stop this project from feeling like a boring box he's dejectedly checking off. It seems he found inspiration not from his own wonderful body of work but rather from insipid, sentimental claptrap of the likes of Nicholas Sparks; the film founders in its back-and-forth approach between present and past. I found it difficult, though, to be fair, to know if the dialogue was truly as awful as it sounded or if that was the fault of the actors. The older cast is pretty good, although Everett is utterly wasted in his role. The younger cast tries, bless them, and Corrin and Dawson do pretty well to convey the massive unspoken emotional pains of their experiences. Styles is almost unwatchable; sure, he's pretty enough to look at, but his mannerisms and tone feel like a bumbling fool who doesn't know what he's doing. His delivery is monotonous and riddled with unearned angst. If it's a character choice, it makes no sense as the fulcrum of this love triangle; if it's not, it shows his inexperience as a leading man with embarrassing magnitude. Together, the three have no chemistry whatsoever, even as friends. Despite being fairly attractive and the source material itself, of all things, they are mind-numbingly dull to watch.

It doesn't help that director Michael Grandage (who has met great successes on stage) demonstrates no sense of style, vision, or even inspiration in telling this story. Why is it relevant right now, and what is beautiful in the story? There appears to be only minimal collaboration between him and his team. Grandage seems to want a sexy, sad portrait of unspeakable desires -- see the numerous sex scenes that are about as boring and even cringey as the rest of the film -- while Nyswaner wants sentimental romance and the tragedy of regret and wasted time. Cinematographer Ben Davis works really, really hard to marry the two by using contrasting color palettes and some lovely visuals, but there's only so much he can do. Even the editor seems determined to fix Styles's deficiencies by sharply editing around his scenes, stopping us from seeing his painfully forced emotional reactions to the story, which is funny until it becomes annoying.

Mark me, I don't think it's a terrible film altogether. The present-day stuff is quite nice, cinematography and production design are lovely, and some people occasionally need a tearjerker and it may as well be a queer one. But the unfocused and derivative screenplay -- which mostly utilizes the perspective of a straight woman effectively spying on the men through diary entries -- makes the whole thing a jumbled, unsatisfying slog. And then there's the rushed ending, which might have been powerful (and a shining moment for McKee and Roache specifically) but ultimately squanders whatever psychological and emotional depths developed for these characters in favor of a slapdash bow meant to make everyone feel tired and sad. We're not allowed to understand the characters in this character drama, and so there's no real reason to care what happens to them after they've all done such awful things to each other.

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

Score: 3 / 5

Sumptuous and sensual, dripping with style, Don't Worry Darling has finally arrived after much tabloid coverage. And it's about as much a mixed bag as you might have expected, though not for the reasons splashed across headlines and news bytes. Its marketing was confusing and related press even more so, but generally it looked like a cross between The Stepford Wives and Black Swan, and for the most part I'd still say that's a reasonable set of correlations to make. It's probably how I'll describe it (if I ever need to) in the future. We follow Alice, a young married woman, as she experiences her life in a desert utopia in the American West. We aren't given much information about why she's there, though she seems to be learning the customs and socializing quickly enough, or even who she is, apart from her obvious and troubling attempts to look and act just like the other housewives in town.

And, much as the town in the film functions in relation to her, the film itself asks us the same question: Why does context matter, when everything is so lovely? And lovely it is! Victory, the name of the town and its mysterious workplace that only men are permitted to enter, is indeed victoriously designed with its perfectly manicured lawns leading up to stunning mid-century modern houses in tasteful colors. Every man in tailored suits and slicked hair, every woman in vibrant dresses and aprons, every adult with a delicious cocktail in hand at any hour. Oldies music plays loudly in every scene, and the camera enhances each color to be warm and polished, almost surreal in hue as if we were watching it all in a Technicolor commerical from the '50s. And that's to say nothing of the evenings, when the men of town return from work to ravage their wives with renewed vigor and go to booze-soaked house parties that would make Jay Gatsby blush.

But of course all is not well in paradise, and who better to carry us on that journey of revelation and retribution than Florence Pugh, cinema's recent golden girl who churns out yet another Oscar-worthy performance. Her character Alice is innately above the town of Victory, and we see her struggling to completely fit in; early on, instead of a colored dress and heels, she waves goodbye to her husband in the morning in an oversized white shirt and recently-sexed hair. She challenges the normative ways men treat their wives and constantly wonders what, exactly, they do at "work" every day. Her nagging suspicions threaten to label her as a nagging wife, and so she dutifully -- if somewhat resentfully -- swims at the pool and goes to dance class and does what the other good wives do. After all, she's not really paying for this lavish lifestyle, and her only real concern is what cocktail to drink next or how to fashion her hair today. Who is she to complain, right?

A plane crashes nearby and no one seems to care. A friend of hers (one of the few women of color) has a breakdown and then seemingly kills herself but nobody wants to talk about it. She tries to visit her husband's workplace and passes out for a full day. Things are weird in Victory, no thanks to the charismatic and mysterious founder Frank (Chris Pine, delighting in playing what amounts to a wicked little cult leader). But this Mad Men fanfiction takes a dark turn when Alice -- and we -- realize what exactly is going on. Even though by this point it was fairly obvious what was coming, I found the "aha" moment to be more of an annoyed groan. If you're going to reimagine The Stepford Wives or The Truman Show, the best way to do it isn't to use the tech from The Matrix. 

So while the plot itself is neither original nor inspired, I don't want to completely villainize screenwriter Katie Silberman, whose dialogue and pacing is actually exquisite. She grapples angrily with a lot of weighty ideas, launching a film that ultimately tirades against the American patriarchy, and while it's no fresh idea, it is a bit refreshing to be reminded that this kind of feminist film is still horrifically relevant. It's okay to rage against the machine because most of us in real life are still under its yolk. Pugh, to her inestimable credit, takes her fiery feminist streak in stride and makes it relatable without dumbing it down; her response to being constantly gaslit into compliance is eminently believable and we want to fight back too.

It helps, in odd ways, that her costar is Harry Styles. I've never much liked his artistry, and here he fully fits the character: vapid, vain, and unwilling to be uncomfortable. He can't stand the thought of his Alice gaining the upper hand in any conflict or in general, and so he resorts to aggressive placations, feigning weakness to garner support, and even asking for professional help when he is at the breaking point. Styles, much like his character, is incapable of reaching emotional depths to match Pugh, and his manner of listening and responding to her is embarrassingly forced. Perhaps it was a conscious acting choice (doubtful), but it's telling that the original casting had Shia LaBeouf in this role, who has a much more intense and raw method of performing that would have created a vastly different atmosphere for this film. I'm glad Styles is the choice in that regard, as he fits the bill, but he's just not got the chops across from Pugh or Pine or even Olivia Wilde herself, who plays Alice's neighbor to great effect.

It's a stunning film, from the genius of Matthew Libatique's cinematography to the sumptuous production design and costumes, and even the heavy score worked for me. It's just that the screenplay, which nails so many things, was inspired by a half-baked, derivative notion that wasn't properly fleshed out. Films like this can work if they're either consciously referencing their obvious source material or evolved enough to be only vaguely suggesting connections with it. This does neither, and so despite the rapturous artistry in it, by the closing credits I felt that I'd been had as much as Alice was.

Dunkirk (2017)

Score: 5 / 5

Who knew Oscar season would start so early? July it may be, but Dunkirk is unquestionably one of the best movies we'll see this year. Shall we begin nomination guesses? Best picture, director, cinematography, sound mixing and editing, screenplay, score, and maybe editing and production design. If it sounds like a lot, it should: This movie is also Christopher Nolan's masterpiece, something I didn't expect after the middling Interstellar.

Hailed by some as the greatest war film ever -- a claim I'd readily argue against -- Dunkirk recounts the awesome drama of the Dunkirk evacuation in France, 1940. Told in three parts that recount the events by sea, by air, and by land, the film weaves its way through time and space with amazing clarity. Ever the auteur, Nolan's command of this picture is absolute, eyeballing the spectacle with 70 mm film and immersing us in the horror from the opening sequence. Immerse, I say, because despite the film's non-linear narrative and wide scope, he places us in the thick of each dramatic twist with intimate visual and aural sensation. Though I didn't see it in IMAX, I would recommend that option, if only to really experience Nolan's vision.

Though certainly the vision alone is enough to make the movie great, Nolan has some other surprises up his sleeve. He cuts away the tropes and trappings of war films to unveil a relatively new subgenre. I thought this was going to be a wartime psychodrama, like The Hurt Locker or Apocalypse Now, but it's more an experiential war movie, one that forces us into its world before letting us emerge changed. Like Zero Dark Thirty or Fury, this picture narrows its scope enough that we can't see everything, we don't know everything, and so we're sitting on the edge of our seat while we absorb the violence, the fear, and the pain. Though, with our three vantage points of trooper, pilot, and sailor, we get more information than in those other examples, we're kept invested by the tight editing and compelling score, ticking away at our nerves like a timebomb waiting to explode.

And explode it does, though not conventionally. Nolan masterfully manipulates events so that our emotional reaction is similar to that of the characters. We aren't on the outside, feeling pity or sympathy; we feel isolated, fearful, and vulnerable too. The notices of imminent doom fluttering down on the town at the beginning are disturbing enough; the fighter planes start swooping overhead and firing at random made me flinch more than once; and when a band of boys find themselves in a grounded ship's hull while enemy troops are using it as target practice, it was all I could do not to scream. Which is exactly the problem for the characters. It's an exercise in intensity, one that makes the most of a mere 106-minute screen time. When the yachts and fishing boats come sailing in to save the day, it's the lone, glorious moment of sentiment in the whole picture, all the more rare because it actually works. I'd compare it to a similar scene in Australia, when the boat filled with children sails through the smoking harbor of Darwin to prove the Japanese soldiers did not win the day.

There's so much more to say about Dunkirk, but let's leave it there for now. It's an amazing film. I'm going again this week and probably will still have trouble being too objective. Do yourself a favor and go see it on the biggest screen available.

IMDb: Dunkirk