Wuthering Heights (4/5 Stars)

I “read” Wuthering Heights in high school, and I make sure to put that in quotations because my lasting impression of the book was incomprehensibility. I have an idea of what made it so. I vaguely remember my teacher (forget which one) remarking that there was an original Welsh version (or something like that, maybe English still but a lot of Welsh words) and it was easier to read the translation to modern English version. But I never got around to reading the newer version, and indeed never got all the way through the incomprehensible version I had started reading. Not many books in my life have defeated me, but I was young, and this one did.

I wonder if I would have more luck giving it a try today. I also recall trying to read “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen in high school and not getting past five pages, the dense and high falutin language intimidating my pubescent mind. But ten years later (more or less), after much practice in reading, I was able to manage with pleasure what had frustrated me before.

So, could I read “Wuthering Heights” now? Maybe. It isn’t high on my list though. And having seen this movie, I’m not more inclined to read it than before. You see, I know this movie is way different than the book, it has to be given the way it has been approached. And part of me, well, I kind of like the idea of thinking that the book is more or less like the movie I just watched. Because that would be kind of awesome.

We can make a list of what is different from the book and by the end of this list, we will have to conclude that it is not fair to judge the movie by its faithfulness. The writer/director Emerald Fennel has clearly committed to her own vision, drawing inspiration from the novel, and nothing further.

We can first posit on our basic understanding of romantic literature of the 19th century that the book contained depictions of the English moors as they were and the people who inhabited them at the time. That these people acted within the typical bounds of typical people and when they acted eccentrically, they acted within what was deemed eccentric for eccentric people. That they had at their disposal those materials, costumes, and furnishings that one could purchase around that time. In other words, the book confined itself to the bounds of realism.

Where to start with the movie. Let’s start with the casting. In the role of Nelly, a female companion to the daughter of the Lord of Wuthering Heights, is Hong Chau, who is Chinese. The character is Nelly is not Chinese in the book. This movie uses color blind casting in two main roles (The other role is Edgar, one of the lesser angles in the Love Square, is the Actor Shazad Latif, who is mixed race English/Pakistani). These choices continue to prove the rule of color-blind casting, which is, in a story where race/ethnicity does not matter to the plot (usually because in the world of the story, everyone is of the same race, Wuthering Heights being no exception) it doesn’t matter what what race/ethnicity the actors are. Hong Chau, the actress, is well cast as Nelly. So is Shazad Latif.

Then there is Margot Robbie who would be the ideal choice for Cathy (one of the greater angles in the Love Square) fifteen years ago. She, at 36, is I believe playing a 20-year-old or something like that. It is a bit like Audrey Hepburn, at 32, playing Holly-Go–Lightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s who was 18 or something like that. Then there is Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff (another of the greater angles in the Love Square), who does not look like he belongs in the 19th Century at all. He is a male model from the 21st century. If you don't know what he looks like, take my word that he was perfectly cast as Elvis in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla.

I mentioned a Love Square. My basic understanding of the plot in both the book and movie is that Heathcliff and Cathy fell in love as children, but since Heathcliff was poor, Cathy married the rich guy next door, Edgar, but then Heathcliff leaves and comes back rich, and to torment Cathy and/or make her jealous, he becomes engaged with Edgar’s ward Isabella, played here excitedly by Allison Oliver, who is nearer to the correct age, race, and level of beauty than anyone else. Because these people are gorgeous, and adaptations can do what they want, Emerald Fennel has them engage in the very act of adultery (dare I say, the sex itself), which I’m pretty sure wasn’t in the book because I think I would have noticed that in high school. So the brooding, yearning, and unrequited love of the book is now brooding, yearning, and very requited, though still tragic. I bet that this is a more entertaining way to tell the story.

Then there is the cinematography, makeup, costumes, and the production value. It would seem that at every possible opportunity, Emerald Fennel told her team to just go for it and give her the most indulgent, sumptuous, and opulent option available. I mean, this movie is scrumptious. Look at Heathcliff riding his horse over the moors at golden hour. See Cathy’s RED DRESS make its way through a thick moorish fog. Edgar has a room in his house that has a fireplace made out of plaster hands. There are several scenes where the characters just happen to be doing and saying dramatic things while getting drenched in pouring rain. And on and on.

Forget accuracy. What I want from a writer/director is an idea that is committed too. You can say what you want about this movie being anachronistic or unfaithful, but it is clear that the deviations from realism are features, not bugs, as they say. Emerald Fennel had a vision that was over the top and she has delivered on that vision. To enjoy this movie, you must meet her on her terms. And enjoy this movie I did. As with any good B-movie or guilty pleasure (I could compare this with Road House, sure), the movie cannot be deemed “good” in the standard sense. You can’t be drawn into it like a “good” dramatic movie because so many of the choices that have been made are not serious. But it is Not Boring. And, if you are in the mood to curl up on the couch with a pint of Super-Fudge Chocolate Ice Cream and a full-bodied glass of Cabernet Sauvignon to observe the hot acts of gorgeous people on cold moor nights for a couple of hours, well, I recommend it.

Kinds of Kindness (3/5 Stars)

Director Darren Aronofosky once commented in an interview while on the press circuit for “Black Swan” that the type of acting Natalie Portman was doing in that movie was the kind of acting that actors like doing. (See it and you can see why he was being a little defensive.) Actors want to perform scenes of heightened. The movie crew's job is to facilitate the same. Scenes of heightened emotion may not be easy, but easy is not the point. Ambition requires that the task be hard. Christian Bale doesn’t need to transform his body to play any particular role. Makeup and fats suits do exist. Christian Bale wants to do it.

I can only imagine that this sort of ambition draws actors to the projects of Director Yorgos Lanthimos and Writer Efthimis Fillippou, a pair of auteurs that deal primarily with the bizarre recesses of human behavior. Emma Stone is a seasoned veteran now having starred in several movies. Willem Dafoe returns with her from the latest Lanthimos movie, Poor Things, which was about a recently deceased woman who has her brain removed and replaced with the brain of her unborn child by a mad scientist. Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Hong Chau are all rookies. Jesse Plemons, in particular, is an actor that specializes in being the square white guy in the room. He is flexing muscles here that he doesn’t usually get to flex. Like many Lanthimos projects, Kinds of Kindness is an exercise in stunt acting.

There is a fine line here when it comes to placing strange characters in bizarre situations and watching how they react. If the characters are too strange and the situations too bizarre, then the drama fails because there is no empathetic connection. There needs to be something that the audience can latch onto in order to feel what the characters are feeling.

“Kinds of Kindness” is a three-hour movie composed of three separate stories, one hour each. The actors are the same for all three movies, but they play different characters in each of them. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone are the main characters. The titles of the stories refer to the only character that finds itself in all three movies, a man by the initials of R.M.F. And here you will have a good test of the movie reviewer. If the reviewer claims to understand why R.M.F. is important or what he can mean, then they might just be pretentious windbags. R.M.F., if he is anything, is an inside joke. The stories, for all intents and purposes, are in fact separate stories. They just employ the same actors.

The stories, like Lanthimos' career, are hit and miss. The first hews the closest to reality and thus works the best. The second works until its last fifteen minutes when it gets cold feet and breaks point of view. The third straight-up employs miracles, which have the strange effect of legitimizing what is otherwise utterly bizarre behavior. We will take them one at a time.

The first stars Jesse Plemons in an interesting turn. His character works for Willem Dafoe, but not in any worldly employment. Willem Dafoe orders him and Plemons complies in doing things so specific and disturbing that one would naturally suppose that Plemons is being blackmailed. But, apparently, Plemons isn't being blackmailed. Instead, he is just so needy and pathetic that he can't function without someone telling him what to do.  In fact, this neediness is so absolute that by the end of the story, you may start wondering whether it is Willem Dafoe that has the short end of the stick. And since the movie employs no magic, adheres to its internal logic, and is well acted by consummate professionals, it is inherently interesting to watch.

The second story is strong until it commits a perplexing error. It too stars Jesse Plemons as a police officer whose wife, Emma Stone, survived a plane crash and several weeks on a deserted island before being rescued and returned home. The thing is, for whatever reason, Jesse Plemons isn’t sure that the Emma Stone who returned is the same woman who left. He thinks that maybe she is an imposter, perhaps an alien. So, either he is insane or she is an imposter. Because this is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, both could be a possibility and for most of this story, it is fun trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, about three quarters of the way through, the movie switches its point of view from Jesse Plemons to Emma Stone and gives away the game. Like a movie trick that is explained, it loses its luster. Its feels like Yorgos may have gotten cold feet.

The third story stars Emma Stone as a woman who has abandoned her family to work for a religious cult. The cult is obsessed with purity, but not in any scientific way. As an example, to cleanse their sinners, they subject to them to hours in a sauna. Then they lick their sweat to test, based on the taste I guess, whether the purification rite worked. The catch is that this cult is on the search for a great healer of a certain gender, height, and weight, who can cure people just by touching them. This person ends up existing. And if she exists, well maybe you can test whether someone is pure by licking their sweat. As far as I can tell, the cult's plan is to find, kidnap, and imprison this healer on a boat and then, (maybe), sell tickets to visiting sick people. This story does end in a rather satisfying way, whereupon Emma Stone does a cool dance and nothing that took place before matters. Then R.M.F eats a sandwich, which also doesn’t mean anything.

Showing Up (2/5 Stars)

“I’m enjoying my retirement. I get up. I do a little of this. I do a little of that and then it’s time to watch TV again,” says a character played by Judd Hirsch in Kelly Reichardt’s new movie “Showing Up.” And if that sounds exciting, then this is the movie for you. Like all of Ms. Reichardt’s movies, “Showing Up” is understated and slow moving, but holds itself with a strong sense of self-assuredness.

That assuredness borders on the farcical here given the almost entire lack of conflict and/or plot. Our main character, Lizzy, played by Michelle Williams, is a sculptor that has a show opening in a week. It doesn’t appear like it will be that big of a deal. She lives and works in an artistic community and seemingly everyone has some type of show opening at some point. One character named Eric, (inexplicably but capably played by Andre 3000 of Outkast fame) is the sort of person that finds a way to love something about anything. As an example, he mans the kiln at the school and when he burns one of Lizzy’s sculptures, declares that he thinks the burn makes it look even better.

Much of the movie is spent concerning itself with Lizzy’s efforts to get her family to show up at her show and/or bother her landlord Jo (another artist played by Hong Chau) to fix her apartment’s hot water boiler. About twenty minutes into the movie, there was what I thought was a throw away scene when Lizzy finds a pigeon has broken into her house and hurt its wing. This pigeon and Lizzy’s attempts to care for it provide the majority of the drama for the rest of the movie. The remainder of the drama occurs when her family members actually do show up at her show and it becomes readily apparent why the parents are divorced and her brother (played by John Magaro) probably shouldn’t be in public at all. But then the scene deescalates without a big fuss and the movie ends shortly thereafter. It all turns out okay and everyone goes on with their lives.

Did I like this movie? Well, let me just say that it is not on the level of “First Cow.” The sculptures, and other art created in the movie certainly could have been better. Will I see Kelly Reichardt’t next movie? Yeah, I expect I’ll be showing up.

The Whale (4/5 Stars)

Director Darren Aronofsky is cinema’s equivalent of the phoenix. Every ten years or so he spontaneously combusts in a show of flames before rising again from the ashes. The first time around he started with a basic black & white low budget film called Pi (1998) caught fire with the brilliant and intense Requiem for a Dream (2000) and subsequently burst into flames with the over-ambitiously overly complicated box office disaster known as The Fountain (2006). From the ashes, he pulled himself together with a basic low budget film called The Wrestler (2008), caught fire with the brilliant and intense Black Swan (2010) and burst into flames with the overly ambitious and overly complicated box office disasters of Noah (2014) and Mother! (2017). 

Now in 2022, from another pile of ashes, there is The Whale, a stripped down low budget film based on a play. The whole thing takes place in one house over the course of a single week. Despite its back-to-basics feel, the tell-tale sign of Aronofsky are here, the extremes of the human experience. Our main character Charlie (played by Brendan Fraser) is a morbidly obese man. Like the kind of obese where you wonder what the decision making process was a few hundred pounds ago. The other main interest of Aronofsky (at least for the last decade) is religion and there is a fair portion of this movie dedicated to that as well.

I would expect morbid obesity to be a lonely state of affairs. We get a nominal sense of that here: Charlie teaches remote English and Writing community course classes with his laptop camera off. He orders pizza, but tells the delivery man to place it outside the door so he doesn’t have to show himself. Aside from these examples though, the movie is based on a play, so we get a lot of people barging into his house that normally would not be there. There is Charlie’s nurse Liz (played by Hong Chau) who tells him he has congestive heart failure and will be dead within a week if he doesn’t go to the hospital. There is Ellie (played by Sadie Sink), Charlie’s daughter, a cruel girl who is here to guilt her father into doing her homework. Finally, there is Thomas (played by Ty Simpkins) a door-to-door missionary who, upon seeing Charlie, believes that God sent him there to help. 

 The movie takes place in Idaho but has such a  hostility to organized religion you'd think it took place in Portland. Charlie is fine with the presence of Thomas. However, Liz tells him a few times to get out and never come back. Liz is interesting in this regard. She relates that she was adopted by the local sect, New Faith, but left because they were all self-righteous hypocrites (The local sect is against homosexuality). Liz is Chinese. It isn’t explicitly said but one may assume based on her age and gender that this local sect was adopting children, especially girls, from China because of the CCP’s one-child policy. It doesn’t seem to occur to Liz that she should be grateful to organized religion for having saved her from infanticide. Ellie is a bitch to Thomas, but then again she is a bitch to everyone. The local sect is against homosexualilty true, and Charlie is gay, but that doesn’t stop Thomas from trying to help. Could organized religion help someone in Charlie’s condition? I have no idea, but the problem seems to be large enough that it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try.

Ultimately, Charlie is eating himself into an early grave because that seems to be the plan. Around ten years ago, he left his wife and child to pursue a romance with a younger man. This younger man committed suicide. It is posited that the local sect caused the suicide, although I am unaware of any christian denomination that promotes suicide for homosexuals. Then again, New Faith isn't Catholic. In any event, Charlie has been alone ever since and steadily gaining weight. There are other people in this world that go through similar experiences and they do not end up slowly eating themselves to death. It is not really clear then why Charlie in particular has decided to do it.

Charlie is played by Brendan Fraser. This is the type of role that is so unique it is award worthy simply by being handled competently. I wouldn’t be surprised if Fraser was nominated. I haven’t seen Brendan Fraser in a substantial role since 2004’s Crash. (I did see him in last year’s “Out of Sight” in a supporting role. )You could call it a comeback (and people are) but taking a look at IMDB, it would appear that Fraser hasn’t stopped working during this time. He just hasn’t done anything notable. Well, call it a comeback. 

I recognize Sadie Sink from Netflix’s Stranger Things. I didn’t like her character in that show either. It was nice for Samantha Morton to drop in for a scene. I look forward to seeing Aronofsky’s next film. He should be catching fire on that portion of the phoenix arc by that time which should mean a third masterpiece.