Movie Enthusiast Issue 72: Leftover Thoughts on 2019 Releases

Congratulations to Laura Dern on her Oscar win last night! All that canvassing by David Lynch and the gay community finally paid off. If you haven’t seen Parasite yet—well, what’s the hold up?

Watching

Hustlers (2019)
The premise of Hustlers sounds great on paper—strippers who rip off Wall Street hucksters! What’s not to love? Director Lorene Scafaria has assembled a self-assured heist movie that tries to make it as a message movie in its closing minutes. It reminded me of many a paper I wrote in college, submitted with confidence borne out of my above-average knack for stringing sentences along pleasantly, returned with sparse comments and that most dreaded of professorial verdicts: “A nice paper. B+.”

The success of Hustlers as anything more than a generator of viral content—was the Lizzo cameo strictly necessary?—rests on the strength of the Jennifer Lopez–Constance Wu relationship. An early scene where JLo teaches Wu how to pole dance shows promise. But despite all the plot beats to follow, theirs never quite develops into the chemistry the movie needs to really sell us on the emotional journey it wants to take us on. Keke Palmer, bringing a much more relaxed energy to this movie than Wu, seems to be having much more fun, so why not swap their roles? I’d also rather Scafaria had swapped out every needle drop for something less obvious. Do they even play Fiona Apple in strip clubs?

Uncut Gems (2019)
On paper I should not like anything about the Safdie brothers’ films. Sleazy and chaotic, Uncut Gems understands that the responsible way to open a film with footage of a colonoscopy is to extend the punchline further by having the doctor call the patient back at a totally random point in the narrative to announce that the test results came back positive, a tip of the hat and a big middle finger to A Serious Man.

Like Hustlers, Uncut Gems takes place in a recently bygone New York where any old schmuck can rub up against Big Money and maybe even have some of it rub off, if the will to find a way is strong enough. I am no connoisseur of Adam Sandler films, though my understanding is that he is at his best when asked to perform a variation of himself. Whatever he’s doing here works. This is no easy feat when his character is made to go toe to toe with antagonists all across the spectrum, Kevin Garnett occupying one end, a vaguely Russian and conventionally menacing debt collector on the other, and the disembodied voice of an exasperated auctioneer who sounds suspiciously like Tilda Swinton somewhere in between.

Many seem to agree that the real find here is Julia Fox, playing Sandler’s believably doting, if not compliant, side chick. But let’s not overlook Idina Menzel, finally breaking out in a non-animated film role, as she plays the chick who grew up to be the ruffled mother hen. Menzel’s longsuffering wife knows to leave well enough alone when her husband turns up naked in the trunk of his own car in the middle of their daughter’s high school play. As a testament to whatever it is they got going on that’s keeping this family together, the question of divorce never even comes up. The score, by Daniel Lopatin (previously credited on Good Time as Oneohtrix Point Never), sounds like what a fungal infection feels like, constantly surprising with new symptoms. As with all the Safdies’ movies, you leave with a strange satisfaction and the urge to draw up a bath for a nice long soak.

Little Women (2019)
It is inadvisable to dislike Greta Gerwig’s solid adaptation of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s beloved story of four sisters in Civil War-era New England, and the only movie my grandmother saw last year. Gerwig bucks tradition by starting the movie after the novel’s halfway point, Saoirse Ronan’s rendition of Jo (here something of a composite with Alcott herself) trying to Make It as a writer in a New York that’s as industrially chilly as Louis Garrel’s Professor Bhaer is curiously, mistakenly, French (he’s supposed to be German).

Granted, I’ve heard very little “supposed-tos” about this film, which feels beautifully true to the period while avoiding the Masterpiece Theatre style of adaptation. Gerwig has said she made her crew watch French musicals to get the feel for how she wanted to stage things; it helps that she enlisted actual Frenchmen (besides Garrel, composer Alexandre Desplat and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux) to aid in bringing that certain je ne sais quoi to the project. I suppose we could also include the half-French Timothée Chalamet in this headcount. As Laurie, the wealthy (play)boy next door ultimately spurned by Jo for the homelier Bhaer, Chalamet quivers with thwarted desire up until his fated matching with Florence Pugh’s Amy.

I’ve heard it suggested that Pugh, who sells you on her character and her Oscar nomination on the strength and physicality of her emoting, ought to have swapped places with Emma Watson and played Meg. Age discrepancy aside, I don’t see this working. Watson is the perfect one-note actress to cast as Meg, who in Gerwig’s adaptation mostly vanishes into the background and, perhaps as a cautionary note, her marriage. Eliza Scanlen plays Beth with an air of resignation befitting a young actress who knows she’s been cast in a tragical role as a trial run for bigger projects later in life. If my mother’s reports of the post-show chatter in the queue for the ladies’ room is any indication, casting Laura Dern as Marmee was a great publicity stunt for Laura Dern in Marriage Story, an effortless role which, all else considered, I’m still unclear on why we chose as her Oscar delivery vehicle. Guess it was the Virgin Mary speech.

1917 (2019)
1917 is a movie built to impress, by which I mean I spent most of the movie saying to myself some variation of “wow, I wonder how the camera operator is moving that thing.” To the film’s credit, it also lands all its emotional beats. Reader, I—well, I didn’t cry, because I’m a loud crier and it was a small theater, but I got choked up! $10 well spent. On the other hand, I didn’t walk away feeling any more or less enlightened about The Horrors of War or whatever than any other war movie has ever made me feel. If anything though, I did appreciate how the scale of the trenches spoke so much to humanity’s power to interfere with the landscape. We just…did that? (And then we…did it again just to make a movie about it?)

“Time is the enemy,” is the tagline that’s been tacked onto this movie. Unlike Dunkirk, which hits you over the head with a Hans Zimmer-shaped cudgel to remind you how important time is to its conceit, 1917 left me much more under the impression that unbridled technological advancement is the enemy, although I did keep expecting the Iron Chef countdown clock to fade in and out of the corners of the screen to remind us how much time our intrepid heroes have left to deliver their fateful message across the front.

There are three cameos in 1917 by British actors of name recognition. One of them, Colin Firth, apparently dropped in at the very beginning of the film and I totally missed it! All the more surprising, then, to see Benedict Cumberbatch turn up in a film which for 1 hour and 48 minutes I had assumed had eschewed the marquee stars entirely.

A Hidden Life (2019)
I was supposed to write about the new Terrence Malick for publication but extenuating life circumstances prevented me. Alas! A Hidden Life is the most thoughtfully Christian movie to have come out in a while, far less heretical than Silence and more theologically coherent than First Reformed. It’s the story of a martyrdom, with just a hint of “silence of God” sprinkled in, although Malick, mercifully, doesn’t fetishize doubt the way that so many filmmakers do. The surety with which he marches with World War II conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter to his ultimate earthly fate is a wondrous testimony in itself.

A Hidden Life is a welcome return to narrative for people who, unlike me, didn’t see the appeal of Malick’s degenerately edited Song to Song. I’m still more excited thinking about that film and how it uses aesthetic breakdown and disarray to excavate the deepest longings of the souls its characters didn’t realize they have. A Hidden Life uses similar techniques—camera always roving, otherwise straightforward dialogue scenes getting chopped and screwed in the editing room—in service of a more linear story, knitted together in part from Jägerstätter’s letters to his wife Franziska. No Malick film is complete without an Eden, though here in particular I was struck by how Jägerstätter’s idyllic Austrian village requires so much labor from its prelapsarian inhabitants in the upkeep. Some may say the glorious expanses of sky and endless fields of wheat to which we all eventually return are for Malick what God is all about, but that would be to commit the fairly basic Idolatry 101 error of mistaking creation for creator. Malick’s camera is constantly pointing us beyond even the most sublime of natural phenomena. It’s also drawing fairly obvious parallels to the resurgence of authoritarianism in our own times, aided by a series of inserts of footage from Triumph of the Will. As it puts Jägerstätter, his family, and us through the spiritual ringer, A Hidden Life gradually imposes itself on you, like Rilke’s statue of Apollo, asking with a firm look and a hand gesturing at the world: will you change your life?

Knives Out (2019)
Christopher Plummer has been so old for so long now that it feels like my entire life he’s been stunt-casted as Exquisitely Elderly Man with a Secret. His presence looms large over Knives Out, a movie that assembles a cast broad and uproarious enough to leave the actors in Clue quaking in their cleats on the kickball field but then decides, wrongly, it would be more fun as a buddy cop movie where the cop is Daniel Craig’s incongruous, off-rack Poirot and the buddy is Ana de Armas’s depthlessly virtuous immigrant nurse. I kept waiting for a riotous ensemble set piece that never arrived. Instead I got a handful of catfights and political barbs less clever than spats I could observe on my Twitter feed—though I suppose that’s the comparison the filmmakers want me to make. The commentariat seized on Chris Evans’s sweater as the production design choice worth thinkpiecing about. I personally would have chosen the deck furniture from the scene where de Armas is first interrogated; someone give me 800 words on the power of cinema to make you smell 50 years’ worth of accumulated mildew through the screen.