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.

Poor Things (4/5 Stars)

 

It would be understandable if you thought of Director Yorgos Lanthimos as a satirist. His movies (“The Lobster”, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”, “The Favourite”) feel like satires. But to be a true satire, the movie has to comment, through comparison or metaphor, on reality or something akin. That is for something to be a satire, there must first be a real-life subject. WIthout that subject, the art can’t be satire. 

“The Lobster” and “The Kiling of a Sacred Deer” dealt with situations that never existed and people that never will exist. “The Favourite” took its inspiration from the real-life monarchy of Queen Anne of England, an accident of history that thrust the guardianship of a nation-state upon a woman who had lost 17 children in the space of 11 years to miscarraige and infant mortality. It could have worked as a comment on the absurdity of a political system based on hereditary rights, but Mr. Lanthimos seemed to take no interest in the story’s historical significance. Instead, it was a great movie about “mean girl” backstabbing.

Which brings us to “Poor Things” , his latest endeavor, a movie that seems like it is commenting on our world, but has its satiric power undercut from the fact that it appears to take place in an alternate universe. Like his other movies, it is probably best to not think too much about what it might mean. Yorgos is doing something weird and is doing so in a very competent and fascinating way. Just take it as it is.

Where and when does this movie take place? That is a paramount question you may be asking yourself. There are certain identifiable landmarks. The places are given European names: London, Lisbon, Paris. The characters dress in prudish aristocratic suits and dresses sort of like it might be the turn of the 20th century (circa 1900ish). Certain set pieces, like the medical auditorium where surgeons can watch whatever new operation may be the next big thing, are associated with that time and place. 

But this is not the turn of 20th century Europe. There are strange scientific inventions that were not there back then and indeed would be new today. It’s sort of like Steampunk, but not even that. The color scheme is more vibrant and varied than Steampunk as it pertains to the landscape, makeup and the costumes. (All three categories just won Oscars and you will understand why). In one scene, a band in what would pass for a normal upper class ballroom plays music with discordant make-believe instruments. 

Perhaps the best example of the weirdness of the time/place conundrum is how the characters speak. Again, they wear the tuxedos and dresses of upper class British socialites and speak with upper class British accents. But they also curse like sailors, like all of them. In fact, it is interesting how they go back and forth between the two. They will start off a conversation as if they are in a Merchant and Ivory film, get frustrated and drop a bunch of “F” bombs. Noone in the history of the world speaks like this. It is weird. And boy, you should see them dance. You won’t forget it.

The conceit of the movie is that this mad scientist, Godwin Baxter (played by Willem Defoe) comes upon a pregnant woman who has just attempted to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. The woman died but her unborn girl was still living. For reasons I couldn’t really understand, he performed the following experiment: he transplanted the brain of the daughter into the skull of the woman, and then, via an experiment that directly alludes to Frankenstein, he brought her to life and named her Bella Baxter. So, this person is both her daughter and her mother. Now Frankenstein was a metaphor for man’s relationship with God and the rights and obligations between the two. I have no idea what this mother/daughter relationship could be a metaphor for. I expect it may just be weird.

What you have then is a situation in which Bella Baxter (played by Emma Stone) is essentially an infant mentally in the body of a full grown woman. This provides the opportunity for some throw-down acting by Emma Stone who spends the first part of the movie doing a great impression of my infant son Hiro. Then, in that great tradition of “fish-out–of-water” movies, Bella goes into the world and confounds society with her childlike questioning of how things are. The movie does some shallow exploring of wealth inequality and scientific ambition, but settles down on its primary topic: Sex and men’s obsessive desire to possess women. Her first paramour Duncan Wedderburn is driven to madness by her free spirit. He is played by Mark Ruffalo who is increasingly funny in the movie as he more and more loses his mind.

This movie is notable due to the sheer amount of vulgarity present in it. Not only is there much cursing as noted above, but there is also quite a lot of nudity and sex. There have been more vulgar movies for a very long time, but I don’t think there has been one as vulgar as this one that has garnered so many Oscar nominations. It has been noted that taboo subjects in general society have changed. What we once considered “grown-up” categories: sex, violence and curse words are now commonplace. Instead, we shy away from the “n-word” and other racial epithets for fear of society’s retribution. This occurred in my life-time. Remember “There’s Something About Mary” in 1999. That was a shocking movie. “Poor Things” has ten times the vulgarity of that movie. And Emma Stone won the Oscar. As a result, there will be legions of young women interested in acting who will watch this movie and consider her performance to be a normal thing.

It is inherently unfair to satirize the past and not just because they are all dead and can’t defend themselves. To be more fair, try thinking of human beings that lived in past times not as older, but as younger. Take the general course of human history and consider that someone in 1000 A.D. would only have their own personal experience plus whatever amount of the past had been written down and taught to them as part of their education. Whereas, a person today, has not only their experience but Wikipedia in their smartphone, which is the entirety of human experience within a Google Search. If we equate age with experience, everyone today is much much older than anyone in the past.

Yorgos Lanthimos perhaps is sending up past times as an absurd place in terms of how it viewed sex. Back then, there were taboos on homosexuality, pre-marital sex, sex between races and sex between classes. You can look at it through our eyes today and consider it all backward and outdated, particularly for the reasons given for the taboos (i.e. religious, nationalistic, racial). But we now know things that they didn’t know back then. For instance, we have ways of telling whether a child is actually genetically related to its father and we know that certain diseases are caused by germs and some germs and not others can only be transmitted through sex. And with that knowledge, we have developed ways to make sex much safer than it was then in the past. If you forget all that, then the world in the past may seem like an absurd place. If you understand that there was an obvious, albeit misunderstood, connection between promiscuity and certain plagues breaking out in society, you would be less judgmental on the value placed in the past on a woman’s virginity or the taboo upon male homosexuality. You wouldn’t want your son to visit a whore or your daughter to sleep with a sailor. You wouldn't know exactly how it might happen, but you knew they could die or go insane (this is what syphilis does). If you were religious, and you probably were, you may conclude by experience that God didn’t like these actions because the people who did them were visited upon by strange and awful maladies.

And hey, if you didn’t consider the above, then “Poor Things” might be a satire. 

The Northman (5/5 Stars)

 

If there ever was a movie that I hoped would make its money back and a whole lot more, it would be "The Northman". This is writer/director Robert Eggers' first medium sized budget movie. His previous movies, "The Witch" and "The Lighthouse" were small independent films. What made these movies special was the attention Robert Eggers paid to historical detail. In particular the dialogue stood out. "The Witch" took place in 17th Century Puritan New England. "The Lighthouse" took place on some non-descript 18th century British Isle. Robert Eggers not only took the time and study to unearth the way people back then would talk, but he also had enough faith in his audience to grasp all the temporally foreign words and phrases. The movies are insular and specific, they feel like you have been fully immersed in another place and time. This generally makes a good movie but almost never one that makes a lot of money. So when I heard that a studio had given Eggers a lot of movie with understanding that this would be an Eggers film, not the latest installment of a franchise, I knew that with would be a potential cinematic moment. And it is. "The Northman" is the most unique action blockbuster since "Mad Max: Fury Road". You haven't seen anything quite like it.

Or maybe you have a dozen times. There is plenty of originality in the movie: the culture and lore of Vikings is explored in depth in all its pre-Christian savagery and weirdness. but the plot should be instantly recognizable and for good reason. The story being adapted is the medieval Viking saga of Amleth, a prince whose father kings is murdered by his uncle who then marries his mother. Yes, this is the same saga that William Shakespeare adapted and modernized (in the year 1600) for his stage play Hamlet. It is well that the plot should be familiar because almost nothing else is likely to be recognizable. The Vikings were the white man's last gasp of tribal barbarity before Christianity fully covered the continent and made its inhabitants, in ideal if not in deed, a loving people. For those white people interested in the triumph of the will, it is fitting that they would look to the Vikings for inspiration. Their culture is not for the faint of heart. Having said that, I believe we can all understand the basic instinct for a prince to avenge the death of his father.

There is a level of energy about this movie that is on some level of badass. We get to witness a Vikign coming of age ritual wherein Young Amleth joins his father King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke, doing well) and the town shaman (Willem Dafoe) in some Viking version of a Native American sweat lodge. We get to witness the pre-battle fireside rituals of the berserkers in which they obtain their trancelike rage. We get to witness an actual Berserker raid in which unarmored Nordic men terrorize and butcher a hapless Rus village. We get to witness a Viking proto sport called Knattleikr (translates as "ball game") in which men with clubs try to hit a pole with a ball while also hitting each other until one is left standing. We get to watch a swordfight in a Volcano. This is exhilarating stuff, and amazingly, historically accurate.

 Amleth is played by Alexader Skarsgaard, a very tall and muscular Nordic actor. I got some real Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian vibes from him. The love interest of Amleth is Olga, a slave from the Rus village he attacked. She is a cunning survivor played by Anya Taylor-Joy. Eggers fans will remember her from The Witch. She has a face and presence that belongs in movies about the distant past. Other familiar faces show up: there is Willem Dafoe from The Lighthouse and Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie is minor roles. An actor new to Eggers and exceptionally suited to his type of material is Nicole Kidman who plays Amleth's Queen Mother. There is a subtext in Hamlet that is hinted at in some adaptations. That subtext is brought out in full in The Northman in an exceptional scene that twists the story right round.

It is disheartening that "The Northman" had an underwhelming record at the box office. Hopefully the VOD marketplace will make up for it. I very much want artists like Robert Eggers to be successful, not just for their sake, but for other artists like them. It is hard to make movies about the distant past. If these movies are made at all, there seems to be this overwhelming urge to twist the motivations of the characters in some inauthentic way so that it will not offend modern sensibilities. Viking culture is not so different from other pre-Christian cultures. In particular, I believe it has much similarity with polynesian culture. Both peoples were seafaring (and thus exceptionally tall people), had warrior classes, and volcanoes. But imagine if you wanted to make a movie like "The Northman" about a non-white group of people. I'm not sure it would be allowed (Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is the exception that proves the rule). However, if artists like Robert Eggers made money, I don't see why there couldn't also be an artist who has an idea for a badass movie about the Maori. I would love to see that. Right now, all we have is Disney's Moana. 

Spider-Man: No Way Home (4/5 Stars)

 

Making that sweet sweet corporate lemonade.

Right at the top, we should talk about the writing of this movie. Our screenwriters are Christ McKenna and Erik Sommers known for some of the best episodes of Community, the first two Marvel Spider-Man movies and the Jumanji reboot. What these two excel at is synthesis and adaptation, the ability to take existing material and turn its seeming limitations into features. The intellectual property of Spider-Man is in a unique place in the realms of moviedom due to the odd financial position of its corporate parentage. Way back in the day before Marvel created its own universe with Iron Man (2008), it was licensing its characters to other movie studies. Its most popular character, Spider-Man, was licensed to Sony, whose first movies in the deal included the Sam Raimi trilogy in the early 2000s that featured Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man and such villains as the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), and the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church). These were enormously popular movies, but as soon as Raimi and Maguire seemed to be done with the franchise, Sony rebooted it with Andrew Garfield in the title role, Marc Webb directing, and such villains as Rhys Ihfans as the Lizard and Jamie Foxx as Electro. That is, Sony didn’t continue the story, they restarted it. In the first Andrew Garfield movie, Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider etc.

Why? Well two reasons. First, Sony’s contract with Marvel allowed it exclusive rights to make Spider-Man movies just as long as they made at least one Spider-Man movie every five years. Second, Spider-Man’s defining feature is that he is an endearing teenager going through everything for the first time. These two factors combine in Peter Parker getting bitten by a spider in a new blockbuster movie every ten years or so. In 2018, someone at Sony had the great idea of meeting their corporate largess in story-form head on. The resulting animated movie was Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, which explained the multitude of variations of Peter Parker’s story over the years with the pseudoscientific application of a physics theory called the multiverse. The idea being that there are a multitude of universes and that there is a Spider-Man for each of them ranging from the traditional Peter Parker-Spiderman to Miles Morales as Spiderman (Peter Parker, but black) to Gwen Stacy as Spiderwoman to Peter Porker as Spider-Ham (a spider that was bitten by a radioactive pig) etc. This worked so well, that Marvel used the multiverse as a plot red herring in Spider-Man: Far From Home, and now in Spider-Man: No Way Home fully engages with it. There is indeed a multiverse and it includes all the villains from the Sony franchises of the last twenty years and...all the Spider-mans.

The last sentence was kept well underwraps by Sony and Marvel the past year with much credit to them. I expect now that everyone has seen this movie, it isn’t much of a spoiler anymore. Anyway back to the writing. With great ability, the screenwriters have sorted out the last twenty years of Spider anthology and put together a movie that makes it seem like the whole thing was planned from the very start. Even more so, they end this movie on a note that allows the whole thing to start all over again in the hands of Sony. It is an especially adept way to maintain and extend a giant money making machine. Chris McKenna and Erik Somners deserve to get paid a lot of money.

For the obvious reason, this movie lacks the originality of the previous movies. Like Infinity War and Endgame it feels more like the culmination of plenty of other movies, not something stand alone. It’s a nostalgia tour and one’s appreciation of it would likely be increased or decreased by one’s appreciation of the older movies. For myself, I only saw the Raimi trilogy and the latest Marvel movies (the ones with Tom Holland as Spider-Man) to the exclusion of the Andrew Garfield movies. I’ve become a little more interested than not interested at all in the Garfield movies now.

To illustrate the enduring appeal of Spider-Man one needs only to briefly summarize the plot. Peter Parker has been outed as Spider-Man by Mysterio and is now the subject of intense press speculation. Since Peter is just a humble kid, he would rather not have his private life and that of his sweet Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) intruded upon. So he goes to Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and asks him for a spell that will make the entire universe forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. The spell goes haywire and instead of everyone forgetting that Peter is Spider-Man, people from other universes who know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man are pulled into this one, namely villains from past movies. So now we have the same villains from the Raimi and Webb movies in this one and because Marvel is made of money, you get the same actors coming back too. In an inferior movie, this would result in a simple plot of Spider-Man fighting and defeating five villains instead of one. But here, the story takes a really nice, dare I say, cute turn. Once Peter Parker realizes what all of these villains have in common, in the previous movies they all die fighting Spider-Man, he goes out of his way to try to help them. Why, because he has the ability to do so and as Aunt May says in this movie (and this is the first time it is said in a Tom Holland movie), “with great power comes great responsibility.”

That line is as effective as ever and the context in which it is spoken (different yet the same) speaks to the seeming timelessness of the Spider-Man story. For me at least, it has not yet become cliché, instead I got chills. I made this point before in a different Spider-Man movie review and I think I’ll make it again. As Llewyn Davis said, If it isn’t new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song. The same applies to Spider-Man.

Nightmare Alley (3/5 Stars)

“Nightmare Alley” was directed by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water) and adapted from a novel that had earlier been made into a movie in the 1940s (I haven’t seen it). Ostensibly it is a horror film, but it felt more like the devolving efforts of Tim Burton, that is, much competent and loving attention is paid to the macabre look of the film, the creepiness of carnivals, the moodiness of 1930s-1940s noir style and fashion, but not so much to the underlying emotional landscape. In other words, Nightmare Alley looks like it might be scary, but it isn’t.

The movie looks very good on paper. It has a large talented cast including Bradley Cooper and Rooney Mara in romantic leads, Cate Blanchett as a psychiatrist/femme fatale, Willem Dafoe as an unscrupulous carnival operator. In supporting roles are Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, and David Strathairn. It has great production design and costumes and in general, looks really good. The writing is at its most interesting when carnival techniques are explored. In particular, the David Strathairn character is a mentalist, that is a person who can read other people’s minds (and perhaps communicate with ghosts). Mentalists cannot actually read minds, but like magic in general, sometimes the technique and artistry of how they appear to do so is just as interesting or even more so than the act demanded to be believed. Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) shows up to the carnival as a no-name drifter. He does odd jobs until he becomes involved with Pete (David Strathairn) and his wife Zeena the Seer (Toni Collette). Soon they begin to teach him the art of mentalism. These details, and later scenes in which Stanton Carlisle performs a mentalist show in front of a well-heeled audience in Chicago, are the best in the movie.

What seems to be the problem is that the movie has no hook. As such, the plot progresses without anticipation and/or suspense. We are presented with Stanton Carlisle, a man with no background, and must take him as he is. As he is a poor drifter, my first inclination is to want him to gain a living. Stanton Carlisle starts learning and performing mentalism, first in an emergency situation and then as real bona fide act. The movie appears to frown upon this, with a character or two making vague suggestions that he don’t get into the ghost part of the business. My first inclination is that I support him in his new venture. Stanton woos a fellow circus performer Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara) and proposes that they ditch the carnival and move their mentalism show to Chicago where they will make lots more money and live in a nice hotel. The movie appears to frown upon this. Bruno, the strongman in the carnival, (Ron Perlman), tells Stanton to stop being so friendly with the girl and that he is watching him. My first inclination is that Molly works for a carnival. She should take this opportunity to make more money with Bradley Cooper, who is nice enough, good-looking and ambitious.

It is hard to say, but I’m not sure the movie was aiming at my first inclinations. I think Guillermo del Toro wanted instead some sense of growing dread that the whole thing wouldn’t turn out so good. If this is the case, I think he miscast Bradley Cooper, who wasn’t giving off “bad guy” vibes at all. Moreover, when things do go wrong, they don’t quite seem to have the proper motivation. Like, I don’t understand what Dr. Lillith Rader’s (Cate Blanchett) motivations are, or why Stanton, if he is assuming she is untrustworthy, would trust her so blindly. I also didn’t get why Stanton starts drinking whiskey after swearing that he never touches the stuff, or after all the inevitable bad things happen, why Stanton doesn’t just start over. I mean, isn’t he at the end of the movie exactly where he was at the beginning. Why are there no options? Why doesn’t he just move his mentalist act to Canada? Perhaps there are explanations but I did not pick up on them.

The movie seems to want to say something about a certain set piece of a carnival show: the geek. This is a guy that goes in front of everyone and bites the heads off of chickens. The geek we see is unkempt, dirty, and wild. I thought for certain he may have a mental disability. Instead, it is explained that he is an alcoholic that Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe) surreptiously got hooked on heroine. (If this is the case though, why can’t the geek speak a language. Here his ability to communicate is limited to grunts and screams.) In this way, the movie appears to be saying that even Stanton Carlisle. who once successfully swore off drink, worked hard, wooed a beautiful girl, and performed as a perfectly fine mentalist, could subsequently become so degraded by life as to become a carnival geek. I’m sorry, I don’t buy that, which ultimately means, that I didn’t get the whole point of this movie. Oh well, they can’t all be winners.

The Lighthouse (4/5 Stars)

“The Lighthouse” is firmly rooted in that David Lynch territory where realism and continuity are sacrificed to effect and mood. What we are seeing on the screen is not so much what the characters are experiencing but what they feel they are experiencing. And what they are feeling looks to be the sailor’s version of cabin fever. There are two men, an experienced lighthouse operator played by Willem Dafoe and his new apprentice played by Robert Pattinson. What happened to the last apprentice that worked here asks Pattinson. He ended his own life, explains Dafoe, after going mad.

“The Lighthouse” was directed by Robert Eggers, written in cooperation with his brother Max Eggers. Writer/Director teams of brothers (Coens, Wachowskis, Nolans) have led to some of the more confidently weird movies in existence. This team of brothers can be added to that shortlist. The Eggers are relatively new. They have only one other mainstream movie (The Witch) which I have just added to my Netflix queue.

There is much to the “The Lighthouse” that makes it a unique experience. To start, the movie is shot in black and white and has a narrow aspect ratio. The time of the story looks like the late 1800s or early 1900s. There is only one location, a lighthouse on a deserted rock. The original score blares ominously, and much delusions of mermaids and pigeons. Then there is the ACTING, which involves much yelling in Irish/Scottish/pirate brogue. The dialect is given special mention in the credits because it is not of this time and seemingly not of this world. Willem Dafoe, not a particularly handsome man, and Robert Pattinson, who I insist does not look normal, successfully inhabit this alien land. They spend much of the time drinking moonshine and colorfully cursing each other.

There is some character background and plot but it doesn’t much get in the way of the weirdness. To summarize, Robert Pattinson is new to the lighthouse, drawn to the job because the wages are higher for work on desolate rocks in the middle of nowhere. Willem Dafoe appears to have been there forever. He is a hard taskmaster, but when a storm grounds all work (preventing the new man from leaving at the end of his tour), and there is nothing to do all day but get piss drunk and dance, the professionalism of the lighthouse suffers quite a bit.

This is one of the those movies I would love to hear a director’s commentary for (not that these things are done much these days) because I can only imagine how crazy it was to be on the set with Willem Dafoe cursing up a piratical storm. I bet there are a lot more good stories there.

The Florida Project (5/5 Stars)

Roger Ebert once remarked that the power of movies was derived from their ability to act as empathy machines. A great movie allows the viewer to experience different points of view, different people on different continents and in different periods of time. This movie is a great illustration of that insight. I knew nothing of this world and now I feel like I have spent several hours ensconced in it.

Writer/Director Sean Baker has been making movies for a good twenty years now, but he made headlines big enough to garner my attention a few years ago when he shot an entire movie on an iPhone. That movie was “Tangerine” and to my delight it was a real movie that contained a gimmick and not the other way around. More notably, “Tangerine” was about something I had never seen a movie about: a romantic rivalry between transvestite prostitutes with a subplot about a homosexual immigrant Armenian married-with-children taxi driver that frequented the services of the streetwalkers. Again, as Roger Ebert remarked again, to judge a movie objectively you must divorce yourself from the idea that a movie’s worth is derived from what it is about. You must judge the movie based on how it is about how it is about. The plot of “Tangerine” contains many choices and controversies that most of us would find crazy and petty. However, the characters in the story took the problems seriously and the movie took the characters seriously. I did not agree with what was going on but I understood it and in this way the movie must be judged as a good movie.

“The Florida Project” asks the same leap of the audience, to understand various people on the edge of society that are under stress and not dealing with it in constructive ways. What differentiates “The Florida Project” from “Tangerine” though is that it contains at least one great person among the throng of misfits and sublime vignettes of genuine beauty.

The story concerns the very free range childhood of Moonee (played by Brooklyn Prince) one summer in the cheap motel outskirts of Disneyworld, Florida. For all intents and purposes, Moonee and her mother Halley (played by Bria Vinai) are one step from being homeless. They live week to week in the cheapest of motels called “The Magic Kingdom”. The motel, painted bright pink, is home to those just visiting and those on the outskirts of society. It attracts a certain crowd of people that it takes a large degree of patience to work with. The hotel manager, Bobby, not only takes care of the motel, he in large part takes care of the people who live there. And especially, he takes care of the kids of the not-so-responsible adults that find themselves in such a place. A very interesting and sometimes heartbreaking part of Bobby’s job is the line he draws between people who are invited to stay at the hotel and those who are so far out of the mainstream that they become disinvited.

The sense of place that Sean Baker creates is indelible. If you didn’t know how a cheap motel works and the various sorts of people that frequent there you will have a good idea by the end of this movie. Our guide is Moonee a rambunctious six or seven year old as she finds and becomes best friends with another girl who just moved into the motel across the street, the Purple Castle. They explore the main strip, conspire to procure free ice cream, and generally annoy Bobby. At times I was taken out of the movie by just contemplating how natural is Brooklyn Prince’s performance. I’m not sure what spell Sean Baker cast over the child but he is getting scenes and reactions out of Moonee that seem impossible when one considers the difficulties of working with children.

The enabler of Moonee’s carefree sometimes dangerous childhood is her mother Halley. Moonee’s father is not around nor does Halley bother mentioning him during this movie. Halley is a bit of a free range child as well and the movie’s plot arc has more to do with Halley’s decline in prospects than any substantial change in Moonee. Sean Baker’s treatment of Halley says a lot about his great compassion for his characters. Baker is not defending Halley’s actions, but he does not condemn her unnecessarily as well. Nevertheless when child protective services shows up at the end, the audience understands why they have come and they understand why Moonee and Halley probably should be broken up. As Moonee’s childhood is a happy one and her mother obviously loves her, the actions of the government have more to do with a question of culture than a pattern of abuse. It fairly reminds me of the reasons given by past governments to separate children from indigenous tribal people and put them in government run orphanages and schools. That is, they simply believed the children would be better off. This is a good movie to have an interesting conversation with the people you have seen it with. “The Florida Project” is one of the best movies of 2017.