Lady Bird (5/5 Stars)

In one of several great moments in “Lady Bird”, the titular character, a catholic high school senior named Chistine McPherson who has given herself the “Lady Bird”, is speaking with one of her teachers, Sister Sarah Joan, about her writing sample about her hometown Sacramento. Sister Sarah Joan especially likes the writing sample because one can tell how much Lady Bird loves Sacramento. This comment surprises Lady Bird because she does not like Sacramento and has spent much of the movie stating exactly that and how she wishes to go to college somewhere on the east coast, like New York, where, as she says, “culture is”. But, Sister Sarah Joan remarks, Lady Bird’s writing is so specific and detailed. She shows so much attention to Sacramento and aren’t they the same thing, love and attention.

Sister Sarah Joan’s point is amply demonstrated by this movie, which on its surface is about a young woman who doesn’t like her neighborhood, doesn’t feel like she fits in, and wants to move. But the characters are so warmly drawn and the scenes are so wonderfully specific, it is impossible to believe that Lady Bird’s family, her catholic high-school, and Sacramento, all three of which she is trying desperately to rebel against, are not also very close to her heart. She also fights with her mother constantly, but it is the sort of fighting that comes from micro-management, not neglect, and this too the movie seemingly argues, is another type of love, maddening at times yes, but still love.

The greatness of “Lady Bird” lies in its specificity. It is a great counterargument to the prevailing wisdom about how to make and market movies about high school. Most high school movies seek to put characters into certain roles (mean girls, nerds, jocks, and the like), the idea being to appeal to the lowest common denominator. This movie could not be more different. Counterintuitively, in being very true to itself, it has apparently appealed to a large group of people anyway. It is has received an extraordinarily high RottenTomatoes rating and has made a lot of money. This was surprising to me because how many people could possibly relate to a catholic high school girl in Sacramento. Apparently everybody.

“Lady Bird” was written and directed by Greta Gerwig, better known as an actress. Greta went to a Catholic high school in Sacramento before moving to New York for college. So essentially this movie is about her. It certainly feels lived in. I felt like I could especially relate to it because I grew up in the suburbs, went to a Catholic high school, and wanted to leave for New York. I think she got that 100% correct. As important, she got correct how a rejection of one’s upbringing doesn’t necessarily mean a hatred of it. There is a particularly beautiful scene at the end of “Lady Bird” wherein Christine suffering from a hangover from night before, walks into a Catholic church for Sunday Mass and hears a choir singing. Christine isn’t religious anymore but she recognizes the feeling as that of her home and it moves her with feelings of nostaligia and gratitude. This movie, along with the musical “The Book of Mormon”, are exceedingly rare things, love letters from atheists to religious organizations. Greta Gerwig isn’t a believer, but she understands and respects it. It wasn’t for her, but she lovingly pays attention.

Lady Bird is played with perfection by Saiorise Ronan. Her mother is played by Laurie Metcalf. I expect they will both be nominated this year. Also, “Lady Bird” is a perfect candidate for Best Original Screenplay Oscar. I hope Greta Gerwig quits acting and starts writing/directing full-time. She is very good at this.

Manchester by the Sea (3/5 Stars)

Lee Chandler (played by Casey Affleck) works as a janitor in a housing project in Boston. He fixes stuff and doesn’t take shit from the tenants. His boss excoriates him for not taking shit from the tenants. Lee Chandler points out that he’s cheap, he does good work, and he knows about a bunch of illegal stuff the boss does on the side. “So do what you have to do,” he says. Lee doesn’t care if he gets fired. He goes to a local bar at night. Women try to hit on him but he doesn’t respond. He starts a fight later on that night. Lee doesn’t really have a problem with the other guy. He wants to get punched in the face.

There is tragedy in Lee’s past. As the particular nature of it is only revealed half-way through the movie, it is technically a spoiler. But given that it seems to be the premise of Lee’s character and various flashbacks point to a wife and three children that are no longer there, you can take a guess at what happened. My guess was that Lee got drunk and while driving everyone home from a party somewhere he got them all killed in a car crash. I wasn’t too far off.

“Manchester by the Sea,” is the name of the town where this tragedy took place and where the people from his past still live (or are buried). Lee doesn’t visit. And when he does its because something bad has happened, specifically his brother, Joe Chandler (played by Kyle Chandler) is in the hospital. Joe has congenital heart disease and every once in awhile collapses and is taken to the hospital. In the opening scenes of this movie, Joe collapses and dies. Lee goes to Manchester by the Sea where he sees Joe’s friends at the hospital and picks up Joe’s teenage son, Patrick (played by Lucas Hedges) from hockey practice.

At the will reading, his brother throws him a curve ball. The will says Lee Chandler will be Patrick’s guardian. This is something Joe although he knew he would die soon, did not inform Lee of because as Lee puts it, “he knows I would have never agreed to it. Being guardian to Patrick necessarily entails Lee moving back to Manchester by the Sea and trying to live with the tragedy. The story is well written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan who treats his subject with patience, care, and good humor. Casey Affleck’s performance is perfect and a scene he shares with his ex-wife, Randi, played by Michelle Williams, is one of the saddest scenes in movies. (Michelle Williams, it is fair to say, is underused in the movie but when she is on screen, she captivates).

As a slice of life or character study, “Manchester by the Sea” is as good as it gets. But its tragic centerpiece calls for something more than a glimpse into the lives of these people. Kenneth Lonergan owes us some theory on what it all means or what the next correct step is in Lee’s life. This the movie does not provide. The tragedy occurred for no particular reason and Lee’s life has no particular lesson to teach us. It’s okay for comedy to be pointless, but tragedy needs something more. Lonergan made me cry a little, he owes me that.  

 Perhaps a good idea would have been to tell two parallel stories. One for Lee and the other for Randi. After all, Randi got remarried and had another kid. How she accomplished that in the wake of the tragedy while Lee couldn’t would be interesting and instructive to see.

The Zero Theorem (2/5 Stars)

‘The Zero Theorem,’ is a much bigger movie in its advertisements. The production design provided by the endlessly inventive mind of its director, Terry Gilliam, after being crammed into a two minute commercial gives off the impression of a visual epic on the scale of his previous works Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Manchusen, and most recently The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnussus. In actuality much of the movie takes place within the main room of a decaying cathedral now inhabited by a recluse named Qohen Loeth (Christoph Waltz). There are a few other set pieces like a workplace and a street and a virtual reality beach, but other than that the locations are quite limited. It is a rather dramatic exercise in how to get as many visually inventive designs within the smallest amount of budget possible. Terry Gilliam is at the forefront of stretching the digital buck to its breaking point.

Unfortunately besides the production design, “The Zero Theorem” is not a particularly enjoyable film and given the absurdity of the production design in relation to the main metaphor of the film, it cannot be considered a good film either.

The film is supposedly set in a futuristic dystopia that mixes the cynicism of Blade Runner with the color palette of Speed Racer. It is a weird futuristic dystopia in that the technology is new and unfamiliar but also far worse than what we currently have today. Everything is way more complicated and far more annoying to use than it has to be. Take the computer/video game console that Qohen Loeth works on at his job. Not only does he have to manually pedal the thing with his feet, but the controller he uses looks like the worst idea Nintendo ever had went and ate all their other controllers. The good people at Apple who have dedicated their lives to making technology non–threatening for the general public should look on this movie with a sense of horror.

Gilliam did something similar to this in Brazil when he used warped technology (airducts to be exact) to actively demonstrate the oppression of a totalitarian government. But ‘The Zero Theorem’ is not a totalitarian dystopia but a consumerist dystopia run by a business named ‘Management.’ It is not at all clear why this business would want to actively oppress its customers with a terrible user experience. For all of this movie’s preachiness about the diminishment of the individual in a corporatized landscape, the most culpable villain here is problem Gilliam himself. He is the one that came up with all these profoundly annoying contraptions and he has a long history of treating human beings as cannon fodder for whims and jokes (see Monty Python).

His main character in this movie is especially pathetic. Played hairless and socially castrated by Christoph Waltz. What he wants is to be a recluse sitting next to a phone in his cathedral where someday he may get a call that will explain to him the meaning of his life. (Movies that dwell on the meaning of life generally give unsatisfactory answers and this one does not disappoint in its disappointment. Management has an answer to why they have assigned Qohen to work on the Zero Theorem, a theory that proves that there is no meaning of life, but again the production design of the movie argues against that explanation.) Qohen refers to himself in the royal first person and claims he is dying. It is a metaphor to be sure, but the metaphor is so obvious that it swallows up the viewer’s ability to think it deep. It is just there and might as well not be because the movie is not persuasive in its arguments.

A lot of things are here that might not as well be. Qohen attends a party with a host that is dressed in a fat tiger costume. There is no particular reason for the fat tiger costume. It is just another in a long list of visual gags that make the viewer titter in a ‘hey what is that doing there?’ vibe but in context are meaningless artistic choices. The character might have well been dressed up as a walrus or a unicorn or not dressed up at all. It does not lend anything to the story. Critics complain all the time about the arbitrariness of huge blockbusters but then give leeway to smaller independent films like this. Well, in my opinion the standards should apply to both. What we see on the screen should not merely be whimsical indulgences? They need to add or complement what the story is about. If this were a bigger film it would be bad. Being a small independent film does not make it any less bad.

There also must be noted that there is a female character (played by Melanie Thierry) that has the sad and far too common fate of having to somehow someway fall in love with an utterly unattractive and much older man. I suppose when you are in charge of a movie’s budget, one of the perks is that you can hire women willing to portray this sort of thing. The honest thing to do though is to make the character mainly interested in money too.