Maestro (4/5 Stars)

Producer Rick Rubin famously has one piece of advice for artists: make the art for yourself. The audience should come last. And as he explains, this is not because the artist should not care about the audience, but it acknowledges the counterintuitive notion that what the audience ultimately wants is not art about a particular subject matter expressed in a certain way, but the best art. And the best art always is that which is personal to the artist, that means something to the artist. There is plenty of art out there that is made for the audience, and it will be inevitably mediocre, because by its nature it is designed that way. The bigger the audience a piece of art is made for, the less special it will be. 

I bring this up in the context of Maestro because it would appear to me that Bradley Cooper, an actor, who became a director and co-writer with A Star is Born five years ago is taking Rick Rubin’s advice. I’m not sure anyone was demanding a biopic about Leonard Bernstein or necessarily believed that Bradley Cooper (The Hangover, Silver Linings Playbook, American Sniper) would have been the man to do it. This movie seems to exist because Bradley Cooper thought it was interesting and wanted to do it. I generally agree with Rick Rubin that art developed in this matter is usually the best art. I didn’t know all that much about Leonard Bernstein’s oeuvre, conducting or composing (although I have seen Tar and Amadeus) or his personal history. Essentially, all I really knew of him was that he was famous and composed the score to West Side Story. That didn’t matter. I got what I needed to know from Bradley Cooper. One of the best things about following the work of good directors (and at this point, I am going to include Bradley Cooper in that list), is that it generally does not matter what the movie is about. If a movie is made by someone who is highly competent and cares about the work, it will almost always be worth the time to watch it. And the guidance of good artists is the best way to be exposed to new things.

Leonard Bernstein (played by Bradley Cooper) is a man of many talents in the musical world: he conducts orchestras, he composes symphonies, operas, and musical theater, he plays musical instruments. He is also Jewish and a homosexual. He was born in 1918 and entered into the music business in the late 1930s. That would make him right on time to push the cultural envelope by keeping his surname (as opposed to changing it to Burns) but too early to be openly gay. Leonard marries a woman named Felicia Monteleagre (played by Carey Mulligan) who is content, at least at first, to be his beard, his muse, and the mother of his children. Their relationship in all its complications is really what this movie is about. Both Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan affect arresting performances. (Although this isn't completely relevant to whether Carey's performance was good, I was affected by how much she aged in the story-line. After all, Ms. Mulligan is my age and I've always thought of her as being young or generally young.)

Bradley Cooper is a good director. He shows a general competence with the camera in certain flourishes and the choice of different film stock. (The movie switches from black and white to color based on the time period). But more impressive is his choice to set the camera at a distance and to employ long takes for scenes that are especially intimate. One is reminded that we are witnessing the domestic strife of real people and that these scenes are intensely private in nature. They are so well done and the characterization of the people involved so well developed, one wonders how the details got related to the writers. I am told that in addition to the many public interviews both Leonard and Felicia took together or separately, the creators also spent a lot of time interviewing the children. I suppose it would be impossible to really know what two people who knew each other very well said to each other in any particular room on any particular day (there is one especially intense scene that is incredibly specific as to it time/place, it literally takes place during the Macy’’s Thanksgiving Day Parade), but some scenes are likely to have happened in the manner we see it. For instance, the conversation between Leonard and his daughter as to the rumors going around (that Leonard is cheating on his spouse with men) is not something I think a child would forget or misremember.

I think the best comparison to make for Bradley Cooper is Warren Beatty, another actor turned director that starred in the movies he made. Warren Beatty described such dual roles as exceedingly difficult to pull off. He said being a director required a lot of control, whereas being an actor is about letting yourself get carried away. And because the process was such an ordeal, Beatty only made a few movies this way. How many movies will Bradley Cooper direct and star in? We will see, but I am for him not taking as many starring roles in order for him to make more of his own movies. 

The Killer (3/5 Stars)

I wonder who the narrator is speaking to in Director David Fincher’s latest movie The Killer. Usually a voiceover is directed towards the audience, but here the character involved, an assassin played by Michael Fassbender, is not the type of person who would choose to have an audience. Perhaps what we are witnessing is an internal monologue. Perhaps The Killer is talking to himself. 

Perhaps David Fincher is talking to himself here. The Killer is a competent and slick thriller, directed with competence and acted with proficiency, but it is not a crowd pleaser and doesn’t try to be. It follows an assassin whose philosophy does not inspire sympathy and whose outlook does not change in any distinct way. There is no character development in this movie. 

The plot is simple. The assassin botches an assignment. Then, because of his mistake, his agent attacks his hideout in order to “avoid blowback”. Presumably the agent, a lawyer played by Charles Parnell, wanted to kill the assassin, but the second set of killers never have a chance because they don’t attack the hideout while the assassin is home. Instead of waiting, they go ahead and ransack his place and beat up his girl. And then they leave for some reason. Maybe they all thought that the assassin would just go into hiding for the rest of his life.

The assassin doesn’t go into hiding. Instead, he methodically kills everyone involved one-by-one. Is this really necessary? It doesn’t appear that it is. It doesn’t even appear to be revenge. It is presumed in the movie that the attack on his hideout is to be expected since he screwed up the hit. Or if it is revenge, it is totally disproportionate. (What did the taxi driver ever do?) Then, after killing a lot of people, the assassin does not kill a particular character. That basically confirms this movie’s complete lack of any normal sense of justice. The happy ending was not satisfying to me.

 The Killer is well made as all David Fincher movies tend to be. There are colorful locations and at least one intense physical fight. But really, the movie is a lark. It exists but does not need to. I’m not sure it adds all that much to the crowded genre about professional assassins.

Killers of the Flower Moon (5/5 Stars)

In the early 2000s, HBO produced a remarkable TV Series called The Wire, which I could argue is not only the best TV series ever made, but perhaps the best anything ever made in the medium of film. The first scene of the first episode of the first season is a stand-alone vignette: the Ballad of Snot Boogie.

Snot Boogie is a young black man who has just been murdered. A police detective questions a witness as to how it happened. Well, a group of men played a regular dice game, of which Snot Boogie regularly took part in. Snot Boogie was not good at dice and at some point in most dice games, after he lost most or all of his money, he would scoop up the money in the pot and run off with it. Usually he was caught and given a beat down, until one game he was shot in the back and killed. The detective questions the witness: if Snot Boogie always stole the pot, why did you let him play. The reply: “This is America, man. You gotta let ‘em play.”

Per the audio commentary of David Simon, the point was that American society was so rigged and unfair, that it became absurd that its citizens would take part in the hypocrisy of the American Dream, this notion that anyone could make it. That is, if Snot Boogie was highly likely to never win, wouldn’t it be more honest to stop pretending that he could, to simply not allow him to play anymore? That was The Wire’s America. It is also the America of “Killers of the Flower Moon”, except in this case, Snot Boogie gets super lucky and wins the pot several times over. Then, perhaps, to extend the metaphor, Snot Boogie gets shot anyway and his winnings are stolen.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is a bizarre story that could not take place anywhere but the USA. The Osage, a Native American tribe, were conquered by the USA in the 1800s and were forcibly relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma. It was desolate and unwanted land. That much is a normal occurrence in the annals of human history in all societies. What happened next is extraordinary. Decades later it was discovered that the land had oil under it and the Osage struck it rich. The movie informs us that their nation had the highest per capita wealth in the world in the 1920s. Substantial prejudice exists in the society, the Osage need white guardians to sign off on the disbursal and expenditure of their money and the white tradesman in town charge the Osage exorbitant prices, but even so, they are driving the latest cars, wearing 1920s high fashion, and intermarrying with the white populace (money trumping prejudice). When was the last time a conquered people were allowed to get that far? (To name some modern examples, I doubt we are going to see the Uighers or the Rohingya strike it rich any time soon.) Then, in a case study made famous by J. Edgar Hoover’s upstart F.B.I., many of the Osage start dying, some mysteriously and others not so mysteriously, to an extent that indicates the entire outside society is either involved in the murders or willfully blind to them.

Killers of the Flower Moon was directed by Martin Scorsese and stars, for the first time together in a Scorsese movie, his two main acting avatars Robert De Niro and Leonardo Dicaprio. They play historical figures, Robert De Niro as a man called King Hale an established businessman and philanthropist in the Osage Hills and Leonardo Dicaprio as Earnest Burkhardt, nephew of King Hale, a young man looking for work after his service in the Great War. The third main character is Mollie Burkhardt, played by Lily Gladstone, the Osage woman who marries Ernest Burkhardt and whose family members start and continue to die unnatural deaths. Martin Scorsese has a long and established history of making movies about people not exactly saying what they mean (think of all the Italian gangsters and their way with words) and this comes into play here as well. The characters are inscrutable in a way that perhaps only real people can be. 

We can start with Earnest Burkhardt, whose main attribute is his low level of intelligence. If we can say that the natural Leonardo Dicaprio role is one of ambition and charm (say Catch Me if You Can, The Wolf of Wall Street), this character is decidedly against type. Interestingly, Dicaprio doesn’t usually play uninspiring not-that-bright people, but when he does, they are some of his best roles (Revolutionary Road, Shutter Island). The movie takes a seemingly contradictory stand on Earnest Burkhardt both portraying him as the type of man who would rob at gunpoint, graverob, and coordinate murders of Osage but also one who loves his Osage wife. I assume the source materials bear this out because if it didn’t actually happen, you wouldn’t believe it. I am reminded of reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker which dealt with the enormous decline of violence in the modern era. In trying to explain the same, Mr. Pinker posited that part of it had to do with a sort of moral retardation in past societies. In parallel to a rise in IQs over time from better education, so there was also a rise in moral intelligence. That is, without the direct influence of a type of education that teaches abstract concepts such as empathy or equality between people, you would by default have someone who operates like Earnest Burkhardt. (Empathy is the ability to understand how something may be seen from another person’s point of view. Mr. Pinker suggests that this is an exercise in abstract thinking that a human needs to be taught in order to perform. This is in contrast to literal thinking which is like: I am white. You are red. We are literally different and so different behavioral rules apply.) The best thing that can be said about Earnest is that his disposition makes him predisposed to manipulation and so, given his nature, he may not be entirely culpable as he seems. In one scene, he is so easily manipulated that he fails to grasp that his uncle might be plotting to kill him too. But that is the best thing you can say about him.

Even more inscrutable than Earnest is his wife Mollie Burkhardt. I expect the creators of this movie found far less in the record about what made Mollie tick then the white people who were at some point interrogated by the authorities and cross-examined in court as to their actions. In various parts of the movie, Lily Gladstone’s facial expressions reminded me of the Mona Lisa. Why does she and her sisters marry white men? Is it a status thing? Is she in love with Earnest? Once all her relatives start dying, why isn’t she more suspicious? At some point, it would seem that she would rather be killed by her husband than consider the possibility that her husband would try to kill her. It feels like Scorsese did a decent job of portraying the Osage and the movie’s marketing materials heavily lean on assuring us of that point. Indeed, some of the best parts of the movie are all Osage. The field of the Flower Moon is poetry. The death owls are spooky. The best scene in the movie takes place in a powwow and concerns a moving speech by the chief of the tribe (played by Yancey Red Corn) about the present events and how they will respond to them.

Sitting in on that powwow is the most inscrutable character of all: King Hale. Here is a guy that has lived in the Osage Hills all his life, understands and speaks the Osage language, has made friends with enough Osage to be allowed in the powwow in the first place and is ultimately the mastermind behind a lot of the killings. If Ernest Burkhardt is morally retarded, King Hale is morally deranged. One is reminded of the villain in Chinatown who,when asked why he is orchestrating a particularly nasty scheme, replies without hesitation “The future Mr. Gittes, the future.” King Hale makes a similar argument about the Osage, which boils down to the following: Since they are all going to die someday, there is nothing wrong with murdering them. Then once he is cornered and the truth let out, he somehow believes that society will forgive him. I am reminded of Sam Bankman-Fried, a pioneer of his self-coined “effective altruism,” who seemed to think it was okay to steal from his clients, and that the world would be okay with it, because he felt he was so much better at spending the money. 

Killers of the Flower Moon is 3.5 hours long. But don’t let that stop you from watching it. Indeed, there is a great place in the movie to take a break either for an intermission or even for the day. That would be around the two hour mark when the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation show up. (One thing about being stinking rich is that you can tell your problems directly to the President. It doesn’t appear at first that Mollie’s brief interaction with Calvin Coolidge would have precipitated direct federal action, but then again, Mr. Coolidge was historically circumspect with his words.) The agent in charge is played by Jesse Plemons, an actor who can somehow pull off normcore white guy and dangerous at the same time. The F.B.I does its work in a professional and competent way. Actually, it didn’t seem all that hard to crack the case, only a group of people with authority that cared enough to solve it.

Reality (3/5 Stars)

 

I am a long-time fan of the San Francisco 49ers and as I write this review, our quarterback Brock Purdy is being considered a candidate for the NFL Most Valuable Player award. Now, this award, not unlike the Oscars or any other awards given out for movies, have an inherent absurdity to them. After all, football is a team sport in the same way that movies are a team production. A good football team and a good movie comes about from the successful collaboration of a team. With that in mind, one may think it does the team a disservice by elevating one member of it and declaring that they are the most valuable person there. It may make sense if the team was atrocious except for this one guy who clearly was the only one trying, but these awards aren’t generally given out to individuals that took part in losing teams or bad movies. Indeed, the team winning and the movie being good are generally prerequisites to the individuals gaining recognition. So by definition seemingly, the individuals who win these awards that provide nothing but individual recognition do so with lots of help. 

Having said that, there is an obvious way that Brock Purdy is the MVP of the NFL, one which is never discussed, but probably should be. Brock Purdy’s salary this year is $870,000. The other contenders for MVP Dak Prescott and Lamar Jackson are making $40,000,000 and $32,000,000 respectively. Now, it is arguable that Dak Prescott and Lamar Jackson are better quarterbacks than Brock Purdy. But are they $30,000,000 a year better than Brock? Surely not. Dollar for Dollar, Brock is the Most Valuable Player in the NFL by an irrefutable margin. I bring this up in the context of a movie review about “Reality”, an HBO movie that came out earlier this year, because by that logic, “Reality” could be the best movie of the year. It is a good movie that is well produced. It does not feel or look like it was made on a shoe-string budget, but considering what is in it, you may well be correct in assuming that it is one of the cheapest movies HBO has ever made.

“Reality” is a great experiment in fidelity to source material. On June 3, 2017, a Farsi translator working for the federal government named Reality Winner was met at her home by FBI agents. One of the agents shows Reality a tape recorder and makes it clear that the subsequent conversation is being recorded. The resulting transcript, thereafter made public with redactions of sensitive material, became the source material of a play. That play then became the source material for this movie. The interesting thing from both the play and the movie is that they follow the transcript verbatim (except for that one scene near the end in pink). The entire movie takes place at Reality’s house, first outside in the yard and then in a nondescript back room. The dialogue couldn’t be more natural. Indeed, it is literally natural since it is a verbatim adaptation of a recording. It even has all those quirky lines and asides that you would never find in a real movie, unless it is a “Fargo”-type movie that throws in random stuff to seem more real. For example, Reality keeps an AR-15 in her house. It is pink. 

The verbatim transcript is inherently dramatic. The F.B.I agents inform Reality that they have a warrant to search her house and would like to ask her questions, but they don’t immediately tell Reality why. They want to see if Reality will tell them the truth or lie to them. Reality for her part goes along with what is happening without much objection seemingly because she is holding out hope that the FBI aren't here for that reason. If you know nothing about the real life case, then like myself, you may find yourself wondering what this is about, in a good suspenseful way.

Both sides are playing games and it comes out in the words and the performances. Reality Winner is played by Sydney Sweeney. At first, one wonders why an actress as beautiful as Ms. Sweeney is being cast in this particular role. But apparently the real Reality is young, blonde, and does cross-fit, so it is a plausible choice of casting. Given that there has been no money spent on production value, writing, or special effects, Ms. Sweeney, by herself, probably comprises the largest part of the budget. The lack of everything else puts the focus directly on her, most of the time in close-up. Ms. Sweeney rises to the challenge in a way that is generally not asked of her (or most actors) in other projects. It is a very good performance.

The agents, played by Josh Hamilton (Terribly Polite White Guy with Glasses) and Marchant Davis (Muscular Black Man) inspire confidence in the F.B.I. They have an agenda but don’t use intimidation tactics to get what they want. Indeed, they succeed in their goals through their sheer professionalism. They are upfront with Reality that the conversation is being taped (if Reality didn’t know that she was being taped, then the evidence acquired in the transcript would probably not be able to be introduced as evidence in a prospective trial) and are exceedingly polite (they treat her animals/pets with care). 

This professionalism allows them to better take part in certain manipulations, all entirely legal. They present Reality with a series of false choices. The agents tell Reality that they have a warrant to search her house and that they are willing to show it to her. They don’t actually show Reality the warrant though. They merely tell her that she can choose to see it. Reality doesn’t choose to see it because, presumably, she doesn't want to let on that this search may be about that reason. The agents tell Reality that they need to talk to her and that they can have that conversation at the house or at the nearby F.B.I field office.That seems straightforward enough unless you understand that Reality has a third choice that isn’t presented: she could not talk at all and seek the advice of legal counsel. Reality “chooses” to have this conversation at the house. The best manipulation is the agent’s statement to Reality that they already know what she has done it and how she did it, so the “what” and “how” do not need to be discussed. Instead, the agents explain, they want to know “why” she did it.

Do the agents already “know” the “what” and “how” of the thing they suspect Reality did? That we will never know. But once a perp starts answering the question of “”why”, no further questioning as to "what" becomes necessary. Implicit in a “why” answer is the admission that the act was done in the first place. For all those interested, “why” doesn’t matter and the agents probably only care about that question to the extent that it answers the question of whether Reality was working alone or in concert with other possible whistleblowers and/or foreign agents. What the agents wanted was an admission from Reality that she did the act in the way they supposed she did it. By the end of the interrogation, they have that admission. These agents are very good at their jobs. All of this, if written by a screenwriter, would be very well written. I can only wonder what the producer of this movie felt like when he first read the transcript. I suspect it would be like finding a puddle of oil seeping up from the ground in a field. There is a clear dramatic arc to the story and it wrote itself. You don’t have to pay the F.B.I or Reality anything for the writing or the rights. It is publicly available information.

The transcript is redacted to remove all indication of what classified information it was that Reality leaked to the press. But we now know what it was: Reality leaked a classified report detailing Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election and she appears to have done it right after Donald Trump fired F.B.I. director James Comey for not publicly stating that this interference did not occur. It is a credit to the F.B.I. that the substance of the leak did not affect their determination to enforce the law of the land. It was apolitical for the F.B.I. to prosecute Reality even though what she leaked vindicated the former F.B.I director. It is a discredit to HBO that it does not follow the F.B.I. 's apolitical lead. A subscript to the movie written by HBO infers a belief that Reality was unfairly prosecuted. Given that Reality committed the crime, the only reason I can see why HBO could take this stance is political. Since the leak confirmed HBO’s politics, HBO decided her behavior is forgivable. 

Write it on the blackboard a thousand times: An open society, that thing that makes the “free world” “free” is not about policy but process. It doesn’t matter so much what the result is, but how one gets there. It matters that the law is applied to everyone equally regardless of the sympathy we may or may not have for their cause. Reality leaked a state secret. Sure, it was not an immature data dump the likes of Chelsea Manning to Wikileaks. She leaked only one article on a narrow topic, but still her behavior is not to be tolerated. One may contrast the way she went about it with that of Edward Snowden who leaked far more information, but took ownership of the leak immediately and described how it was done. This would go far in letting the government know that he was acting alone and that there wasn’t a whole network of moles to worry about. Then Snowden left the country. He knew he had committed a serious crime and had forfeited his government job and indeed his citizenship by doing so. Reality, here, thought she could leak a state secret and keep her career. I hope her actions and what happened to her can serve as a lesson to us all. Just don’t do it.