Marty Supreme (3/5 Stars)

When the Coen Brothers split up in 2019 and made separate movies, it was illuminating what projects each of them chose. Joel Coen, the elder brother, made a black and white adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand. Ethan Coen, the younger brother, made two screwball dark comedies featuring lesbians and starring Margaret Qualley, Drive Away Dolls and Honey Don’t. One could discern if one chose what part of their shared canon came from the more serious dramatic brother and what part came from the more quirky comedic brother. Not surprisingly, you need them both to have that signature Coen Brothers dramatic quirkiness. Hopefully their split is temporary.

The split up of the Safdie Brothers, writer/directors of Good Time and Uncut Gems, is equally as revealing. In the fall of last year, Benny Safdie, the younger, made his directorial debut with The Smashing Machine starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. A few months later, Josh Safdie, the elder, made his directorial debut with Marty Supreme starring Timothee Chalamet. Both are ostensibly sports movies in that they are about athletes. Beyond that they couldn’t be more different and reveal that in the brother’s previous partnership, it was most likely Josh Safdie who was the dominant creative force. Mary Supreme is far more like Good Time and Uncut Gems in writing, direction, and style than The Smashing Machine is. The most interesting thing though is that The Smashing Machine is a better movie and contains what Good Time and Uncut Gems had but Marty Supreme does not: an emotional core and a general point. Or to put it another way, what Good Time, Uncut Gems, and The Smashing Machine have in common is that they ultimately have something to say. Good Time, Uncut Gems, and Marty Supreme are alike in that the stories have the same subject matter and style, they all energetically swirl around morally dubious hustlers in New York City.

What is Marty Supreme about? It stars Timothee Chalamet as Marty Mauser, as an aspiring athlete in 1950s New York City (I think I recognize these streets from where Marlon Brando was shot in the first Godfather movie). Since Marty Mauser looks like Timothee Chalamet, his choices of sports are limited. Here, he plays table tennis, an otherwise obscure sport that is just being organized into international competitions.

Marty needs money for the airfare to get to certain competitions. Unfortunately, for reasons unexplained, his mother wants him to be a shoe salesman (or something) and keeps stealing his money. Also, when he does get to the first competition in London, he does not win and thus does not win the prize money and fame he was counting on. That competition involves a surprise entry by a Japanese player who is his opposite in personality. He is stoic where Marty is epicurean, calm where Marty is frenetic, humble where Marty is egotistical. The movie is at its most interesting when they spar off for the first time. This occurs in the movie’s first hour and Marty loses. True to form, Marty is a sore loser and accuses the other player of cheating.

We think there will soon be some sort of rematch. But this does not happen for a long time. Instead, Marty’s mom steals his airfare money again and Marty spends the next hour and a half on various side hustles trying to get to the next tournament in Tokyo. These schemes all work until they don’t and by the two-hour mark he is no closer than he was at the hour mark. Marty is also a giant asshole (not unlike Robert Pattinson in Good Time and Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems) that pisses off everyone he meets, thereby burning every bridge and effectively ending his dreams by the time his rematch with the Japanese player starts. He wins that rematch, but by then it doesn’t matter whether he wins or loses.

The best thing that can be said about this movie is the characterizations. Any given scene is well-written and well-acted. In particular, Timothee Chalament’s verbal spats with the financier Milton Rockwell (played by Kevin O’Leary), Owner of Rockwell Ink, who may or may not want to be his corporate sponsor, are especially memorable. Marty Mauser also has an affair with Kay Stone (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), wife of Milton Rockwell, and they too have verbal spats. You think at some point Milton Rockwell will find out about the affair but the movie is too busy for that. I hear the Oscars have created a new category for Best Casting. I’m not sure what that really amounts to, but I would think this movie has some sort of edge given all the especially non-movie-star-looking Jewish actors in supporting roles.

The movie is too long to end up where it ends up. If I had to choose the removal of one of the sideplots, I would omit the one about the guy with a lot of cash who gets injured when a bathtub falls on his arm and he sends Marty on a mission to bring his dog to a veterinarian but the dog gets lost when Marty hustles a bowling alley with a black cabbie and there is a conflagration at a gas station, but then they find the dog at a farmhouse across the street the next day but the owner is violently opposed to giving the dog back and so various people die of gunshot wounds in a shocking and gratuitous fashion. This movie would have been better without all that if only because it would have been shorter.

I haven’t even gotten to the subplot about Marty knocking up another man’s wife, Rachel Mizler (played by Odessa A’Zion) and her being like eight months pregnant during some of the more violent scenes about the dog. But what does it matter? What was the point of this movie?

It is not that I am discouraging the subject matter. Good Time was about a petty criminal, but then he met someone even stupider than he was and by the end of the movie, it felt like he had turned a corner. Uncut Gems, though the main character was reckless and adulterous, had an ingenious scheme to turn himself and his gambling debts around. It was exciting to see him try to pull off. What is the redeeming value of Marty’s story? Josh Safdie misses his brother. Benny may have been able to come up with something.

The French Dispatch (5/5 Stars)

 

The masterpiece train keeps on rolling. That makes four in a row from Wes Anderson and the machine, an ever expanding cast of remarkable actors, production designers led by Adam Stockhausen, musicians led by Alexandre Desplat, costumes by Milena Canonero, etc etc. This time, Mr. Anderson, writer/director, spins an appetizer and three course meal of the fictional Ennui-sur-Blase, France in the form of a travelogue and three stories of the French Dispatch, a fictional satellite production of the fictional Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun.

This movie is delightful. I came to that conclusion about two minutes into the feature when the movie takes about a twenty seconds to film a French waiter stocking a tray with an assortment of apertifs, confections, and hors-d’oeurvres for delivery to Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (played by Bill Murray), editor of the title production. Like Wes Anderson’s best work, there is a loving attention to the detail here that most movies lack the ability to attempt.

The French Dispatch is in a newspaper but is not really news. It tells offbeat stories about curious people. It is a pleasant diversion about a small corner of the world that nobody in Kansas would likely visit. I believe that would be the whole point. There are many small things in life that lack formal importance, but as an antidote to the daily grind, are essential to living well. This idea is voiced with beautiful particularity in the third story by writer Roebuck Wright (played by Jeffrey Wright) when he is asked why he devotes so much space in his articles to the experience of dining. If you could have dinner with one person, living or dead, who would you choose? You could do much worse than a curated evening with Wes Anderson. (Actually you can choose this, but without the Wes, he curated a version of pullman dining on a British Train. https://www.belmond.com/trains/europe/uk/belmond-british-pullman/search-results. Tickets are around $600, give or take).

The danger of the Wes Anderson experience, as evident in his first fifteen years of making movies, is that his upper class tastes can come off as tone deaf or snooty. He has by and large avoided this pitfall in his last four great movies by focusing not on the rich people, but the servants, artisans, (dogs) that cater to them. It is a delicate balancing act to be sure. Since Wes Anderson is so very much rich himself (I highly suspect), to speak for the poor could easily come off as presumptuous and contrived. He avoids this by showing an unsurpassed appreciation for the artistry, whether it be a lobby boy attending to his duties in a hotel, a boy scout troupe leader searching for his charges, or a dog looking out for his master. Wes Anderson merely supposes, rightly I believe, that the people who curate his experiences care about their art in a manner that is separate and apart from the status of the ultimate consumer. Do such people like the celebrated police chef Nescaffier (played by Steve Park, yes that Steve Park from Coen Brothers’ movies like Fargo and A Serious Man), exist. They must. If they didn’t, how could there be so much beauty in the world?

To consider Wes Anderson’s movies chronologically, is to witness a writer-director become increasingly competent and confident in not only his distinct cinematic voice but the very tools of cinema. The French Dispatch is notable in its sheer amount of sets and cinematography techniques. To take one example, the first story, is a news article by J.K.L Berenson (played by Tilda Swinton) that turns into a lecture, which narrates a story of a psychotic inmate named Moses Rosenthaler (played by Benicio Del Toro) who might be a genius of modern art. The lecture is in color, but the story with Moses is in black and white, until of course, it isn’t. That is, Wes Anderson is not just using black and white because he wants to be artsy, he is doing it to make important scenes in the story “pop” with color. There are several of these moments in this movie whether it be a first glimpse of a fresco, the taste of a delicious apertif, or the blue eyes of Saorise Ronan, and the effect is undeniable. The realm of moviedom has not seen an artist with such innovative control of film, as a medium, since Oliver Stone was at the height of his creative powers in the early nineties (see JFK and Natural Born Killers). Add to this is Wes Anderson’s interesting use of foreign languages (In the second story, that concerns itself with insufferably woke university students, all the boys speak English, and the girls speak French with subtitles. To be clear, they are all speaking French, Wes is just being interesting) and his absolute refusal to shoot anything resembling a conventional action scene (a prison riot is shown in freeze frame, a car chase turns into a cartoon).

But more than anything, what is particularly impressive about The French Dispatch is the writing. The movie’s screenplay, which Wes Anderson wrote by himself, is based on four fictional articles by four fictional writers with four different styles. Each story, though all written by Wes, leaves a distinct impression of a unique artistic voice, each one a very good writer in their own regard. I ask you, could there possibly be a movie this year that is more “written” than the The French Dispatch. Have you ever seen a movie, more “literary”. Can we just give him his first Oscar ever for Best Original Screenplay right now?

If there is a criticism to be directed at this movie, it is that there is too much of it, at least in one sitting. I think this movie, or something like it, would make a very good TV show. That is, since each story could stand on its own, you could split the movie up into 30 minutes segments like say Documentary Now, thereby giving the audience a chance to catch its breath between stories. The French Dispatch is an appetizer and three entrees in a row. We need more time to comfortably digest. After all, I haven’t even mentioned Adrian Brody’s brilliant dissection of the economics of modern art, or Timothee Chalamet’s hair, or the fact that I got to see Lea Seydoux naked (worth the ticket price by itself).

Dune (5/5 Stars)

 

Frank Herbert’s epic novel “Dune” has long been the white whale of movie adaptations. After its popular publication in 1965, several filmmakers have attempted an adaptation only for their efforts to more or less fail. Jodorowky had great ambitions but lacked funding. This became the subject of a 2013 documentary. In 1984, director David Lynch successfully produced a feature film of the book, an absolute mess of confusing exposition and fast forward plot which stood as an expensive warning to the impossibility of a coherent adaptation for over three decades. I tried to watch that movie and did not venture past the first twenty minutes. The overarching problem, once solved, is Dune’s greatest strength. Dune is a fascinating, exotic and dangerous world, but in order to tell a story of anything that occurs there, much world-building needs to occur. The 1984 version attempted to accomplish this through voiceover, a tedious succession of name dropping that succeeded in explaining thousands of years of fiction, but not why the viewer should care. Like I said, I lasted twenty minutes.

It is then with considerable acclamation that I report that this Dune, directed by Denis Villenueve, is a coherent and dramatic work of art. Yes, I understood what was going on and the exposition was paced in such a way that it did not bore me. That is not an easy feat to accomplish. I am not about to try to explain the plot in depth here. Like I said, that is a near impossible task, but I can attempt the briefest of outlines: “Dune” is a story about power, a struggle between an emperor which we do not meet, several of his vassal states, a mystical sect, and an indigenous tribe of a desert world that holds the galaxy’s most valuable resource. The emperor sets his vassals against each other to weaken them, and fight and weaken each other they do.

The vassals connive and maneuver against each other in elegant architecture, dressed in impressive fashion and surrounded by distinctive cinematography. There are also very ugly bad guys and gigantic sand worms. The look and feel of “Dune” is an artistic achievement. Denis Villeneuve, I’m sure, is a great part of that process having already made several of the best looking films of the past decade with the great cinematography Roger Deakins: “Prisoners”, “Sicario”, and “Blade Runner 2049”. I half-expected Roger Deakins to be present here, but he is not. The cinematographer is instead Greig Fraser, who I did not know on a name basis before, but whose work I have admired in “Zero Dark Thirty” “Foxcatcher” and “Lion” (He also did this thing I’ve heard of “The Mandalorian” but which I have not seen).

As striking as the architecture, fashion, and cinematography, is the excellent cast which is filled with interesting actors like Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa, Stellan Skarskgard, Javier Bardem, Zendaya, David Dastmalchian and Timothee Chalamet (presently having his breakout moment). It is a truth acknowledged in movies that the best way to procure a great cast is to make each character a main character in the scene that they find themselves in. This is usually done in one of two ways: have an episodic story in which the main characters in each part are not the same actors, or to have a character’s arc begin and completely end within the movie. I don’t necessarily mean kill the character, but good actors that have many different plans and options for work I believe will be more willing to take a bit part in a larger story if they know they don’t have to stick around for the entirety of the production. With the risk of making this paragraph even more of a spoiler than I’ve already made it, I will only say further that I believe it will be difficult for Dune Part Two to have as good a cast as Part One.

As I said, I will not bother trying to explain the plot. I will merely state that Dune mainly concerns itself with power. There are not democracies or republics present. Just empires, feudal lords, religious cults and native tribes. Frank Herbert seemed to understand the dynamics present quite well. We are somewhat removed from the contours of this world and the behaviors that inhabit it, but part of what makes science fiction fun, is that you can set up your own rules and see how people act within the made up system. Sometimes this is as pretentious as you think it would be and the science fiction element seems to just be a disguise for a straw man argument (say Star Trek or The Twilight Zone). Other times, you get something like Dune, which is so different, it hardly seems to be a commentary on anything on Earth. Earth details may have inspired it, but it is its own thing, content to have its message stay on its desert planet. It has nothing to do with anything else. It is pure escapism, which brings with its own type of pleasure.

Call Me By Your Name (4/5 Stars)

 Elio lives a charmed life. He is the teenage son of a graduate professor named Mr. Perlman and a mother who apparently inherited a Tuscan estate. Every summer the family vacations for three summer’s in an Italian paradise. They eat outside underneath olive trees, food served by the ancient stewards of the estate. There is wine and fish caught fresh from the nearby lake. There are teenage girls in the town that have the care-free summer off as well. Mr. Perlman seems like he is the friends of the most interesting people in the countryside. They come over for dinner and have conversations about highly intellectual topics. Mr. Perlman himself is an expert in ancient languages. Elio’s hobbies are swimming, flirting, and transcribing musical compositions. Really, the hardest thing about this movie is trying to shun the crushing sense of envy one feels while watching it. This looks and feels like the world’s best summer vacation.

The only thing that could possible count as some sort of conflict in this story is a forbidden love situation that also turns out as well as things possibly could have. Mr. Perlman, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, invites one of his graduate students to spend the summer with him as a research aide. This summer it is Oliver, played by Armie Hammer, a tall strapping late twenty-something. Elio, played by Timothee Chalamet, little by little falls in love with him. It is 1983, so homosexuality is still a concern to these particular characters. A 2017 audience will be more concerned about the fact that Elio is underage. This thorny issue the movie deftly handles with something akin to grace.

Most importantly, almost the entire story is told from the point of Elio, which provides the character with a high degree of agency. Timothee Chalamet here provides a sublime performance that has deservedly garnered him an Oscar nomination. It is a tricky feat to pull off, because the character cannot be any more articulate than a teenager and must necessarily convey a certain non-understanding of his homosexual feelings that apparently he was unaware of before this particular summer. He wants Oliver but at the same time understands the awkward position he is putting the older man in. He is also obviously nervous about revealing his feelings when there are so many good reasons why he would be rejected. To count the prospective ones off: Oliver believes it would damage his relationship with Mr. Perlman, Oliver does not have reciprocal feelings for Elio, Oliver has reciprocal feelings but does not believe he should act on them because of either a stance against homosexuality or Elio’s age, or Oliver likes Elio but not in a sexual way because he is not a homosexual himself.

How Elio comes out to Oliver is a tour de force scene of movie directing. Director Luca Guadagnino blocks the scene in front of a World War I memorial in the old Italian town’s square. It is the middle of the day, the square is deserted. The camera watches the action far away in a long shot. Oliver and Elio start the scene talking about the memorial. Elio stays on one side while Oliver walks around it on the other side. Although we hear Elio, we never see his face. The conversation switches from the memorial to an almost existential conversation about knowing things and wanting other people to know about the things you know. Almost nothing is actually said. There are no close-ups. But the amount of information conveyed to the audience is enormous. It is one of the best directed scenes of the year.

The movie’s theme is actually summarized in a scene near the end by Mr. Perlman. In most other movies, such an obvious exposition of “meaning” would not kindly looked upon. But this movie by that time had earned such a speech by living it out in real time for two hours. And Mr. Perlman, an educated and sensitive man, is actually a character well qualified to give it. This is the experience of “Call Me By Your Name” in a nutshell: A lot of scenes handled with grace and sensitivity that would probably crash and burn in offense and awkwardness in less qualified movies.

Not that all romances could be shown in this light. I do not believe a heterosexual romance of this kind would work even with the deftness of the makers of “Call Me By Your Name”. The closest movie that I believe has come to it was “Diary of a Teenage Girl” from 2015. I say that movie was the most similar because it too provided the very rare level of agency afforded to Elio here. However, it still concluded that the older man was not a good person. Is it possible that a movie someday could look on a heterosexual romance like the one seen in “Call Me By Your Name” and conclude that the older man is not guilty of something? Maybe, but not yet.