Margot at the Wedding

Director Noah Baumbach (right) with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black

Jennifer Jason Leigh

Noah Baumbach with Jennifer Jason Leigh

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING                               A-                   

USA  (92 mi)  2007  d:  Noah Baumbach

Another blistering critique of family dysfunction, while The Squid and the Whale (2005) featured a repugnant father (Jeff Daniels), this film features one of the more revolting mothers in Nicole Kidman’s neurotically smug Margot, an upscale New Yorker who perhaps best represents what years of therapy gone wrong can do.  Honest to the point of being compulsive, where she can’t help herself from making snide, overly critical remarks, she’s willing to destroy all those around her in the name of truth and honesty, used like a bulldozer to clear the landscape around her, where her primary purpose appears to be to deflect personal criticism away from herself, completely oblivious to the ramifications of her actions.  She’s brazenly horrible, where her overly grumpy nature around others, exacerbated by the everpresent glasses of wine, lead to despicable family betrayals which she reveals like open sores through her successful short stories.  Of primary interest, due to her literary acclaim, she is actually considered the breadwinner and the voice of reason and success in the family, even though she hasn’t spoken to her more free-spirited sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in years.  They are burying the hatchet, however, as Pauline announces she’s about to be married to the mildly artistic but perennially unemployed musician, Malcolm (Jack Black), who Margot immediately detests and undermines.  More friction and emotional chaos ensues.  Shot on 35 mm using older lenses and natural lighting in underlit darkened exteriors by Harris Savides, this is a savagely dark comedy with only brief traces of humor, which is instead dominated by a foul cruelty that expresses itself in strange ways, like the unwanted string of personal critiques coming from Margot towards her 12-year old son Claude’s (Zane Pais) entrance into puberty with the first emergence of body odor, the strange and cruel neighbors next door who want them to chop down an immense tree that borders their property, claiming the roots are rotting, poisoning their plants, and the disappearance of a well-liked family dog. 

The first collaboration of Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh after their marriage in 2005 (filing for divorce five years later), the film opens with Margot and Claude taking a train from New York to the Hamptons on Long Island, the exclusive territory of The Great Gatsby, which may as well be a journey back to her childhood, as Pauline inherited their mother’s summer home, an idyllic old house on the New England coast, so it brings back a flood of memories and stored up resentments which come to a head almost immediately, where Margot assumes her domineering role as the older sister, showing her true colors when she instantly reveals information told to her in confidence that Pauline is pregnant and intentionally hadn’t told anyone else, as she didn’t want people to believe that’s why she was marrying Malcolm.  Pauline’s daughter Ingrid (Flora Cross) immediately becomes concerned wondering why her mother didn’t tell her, as well as Malcolm who’s somewhat ambivalent about becoming a father, believing this may be the stage in life where he’s not the most important person in the world anymore.  Margot is using the wedding as an excuse to visit an undisclosed lover, a smug popular novelist Dick (Ciaràn Hinds), whose summer home is nearby.  Baumbach is an exquisite writer of believable dialogue, like a screwball comedy writer of the 30’s, but more directly accurate, piercing through the most embarrassing situations.  When Margot is publicly enticed to climb a tree like she did as a precocious teenager, she manages to get to the top but is paralyzed, too frightened to get down, calling in the fire department as if it was an official emergency.  This story reflects a growing unease that people have with each another, revealing how people unhesitatingly poison the waters of the world around them, like opening the floodgates of the obnoxious behavior displayed on opinion-oriented talk radio, disparaging everyone around them while at the same time they somehow attempt to balance a sense of trust and personal honesty with their friends and family, and in this case an all but doomed impending marriage.  Somehow, the more they try to make it work, the worse it gets. 

While this film has a feeling of incompleteness with so much background information delayed or left out of the film completely, a bit like entering in midair and having to figure out how to fly, but what it does show in sharply defined characters is revealed in intimate detail, sparing nothing, in a scathing portrait of a maladjusted family behaving like they’ve always done, which is tear each other to shreds.  This is a no holds barred indictment of moral hypocrisy, people who use honesty as a weapon to hold others at bay, which gives them a phony sense of superiority.  What’s unique here is that such self-absorbed adults are behaving so wretchedly inappropriately in front of their own children.  Claude especially is a quietly sensitive kid, played with a beautiful sense of authenticity by Pais, but he’s subject to constant critiques from his mother even over the smallest things, where every detail of his life comes under neverending scrutiny, yet he’s attached to her and loves her, even if she doesn’t know how to love him back, telling him that when he was a baby, she wouldn’t allow anyone else to hold him, yet confesses privately “I think that was a mistake.”  Despite the horrid things Margot says and does, Pauline is basically a forgiving soul and her maternal instincts are more on the mark.  When the inevitable dust up with Margot reaches volatile proportions, the audience is surprised with how quickly Pauline’s anger subsides and her more easy going personality takes center stage.  Jennifer Jason Leigh is luminous in this role, yet her character has a surprising passivity, where her low key nature allows her sister (and others) to trample all over her again, yet she’s stunningly appealing displaying such an open vulnerability.  A unique and refreshingly daring work, always smart and articulate, all the performances feel pitch perfect in this small incendiary chamber drama, like an off-stage Broadway production made on a miniscule budget, offering a great deal more freedom of expression, more bang for your buck, where we may remain haunted afterwards by the wrenchingly expressed unpleasantness of these troubled souls.    

Dead Calm

 

 

DEAD CALM            B+                  

Australia  USA  (96 mi)  1989  ‘Scope  d:  Phillip Noyce

An early film of 22-year old Australian actress Nicole Kidman that made her an instant international star, viewed as a natural redhead before she bleached her hair blond, even speaking with an Australian accent, though it wasn’t until Gus van Sant’s To Die For (1995) that people realized what astonishing range she has as an actress.  Perhaps more importantly, the film is adapted from a 1963 novel by Charles Williams about a couple enjoying a South Seas adventure on a yacht before they intercept a troubled ship in distress, retrieving the lone survivor, altering the course of nature, with none other than Orson Welles securing the rights to the film.  Welles began shooting his own film entitled THE DEEP off the coast of former Yugoslavia in 1968, but like many Welles ventures at the time, couldn’t secure financing, where he was forced to abandon the project after the death of one of his leads, Laurence Harvey, in 1973.  With the assistance of producer George Miller, using the profits obtained from his Mad Max Trilogy to build his own Australian Kings Cross studios, he was able to obtain the rights from Oja Kodar, the widow of Welles’s estate, so long as it was faithful to the original material and wasn’t a commercial Hollywood effort.  However, the film bears a striking similarity to Roman Polanski’s first feature film, KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962), almost entirely taking place on a yacht, exploring the changing psychological dynamic between two men and a beautiful woman, ultimately reduced to a battle of wills, achieving an escalating sense of dread with the wide expanse of the open water becoming an oppressive Shakespearean force that threatens to engulf them all.  Shooting off the coast of Hamilton Island in the Whitsunday Passage of the Great Barrier Reef, beautifully captured in all its glory by cinematographer Dean Semler, the film is a taut little thriller set in an exotic atmosphere of increasing paranoia and dread, becoming one of the better films shot at sea, thoroughly entertaining throughout, showing the deteriorating mental effects of being helplessly adrift, adding further instability from a claustrophobic world caving in on them, with an unusually provocative musical score by Graeme Revell, turning this into an astonishingly suspenseful drama. 

In what amounts to a prologue, we are introduced to John Ingram (Sam Neill), an intelligently reserved career naval officer who is twenty years older than his lovely young wife Rae (Nicole Kidman).  Both are in a state of grief following a car accident that results in the death of their young son, with Rae even more devastated, thinking she is to blame.  Heading off on a seductive expedition to revive their deflated spirits, they seem to have regained a certain equilibrium, with Rae happily swimming in the sea, where this idyllic undertaking seems to have done wonders for them both.   That is, until they eye a ship in obvious distress off in the distance, with the lone survivor rowing furiously towards their ship, where the stranger is Hughie (Billy Zane), supposedly the only survivor from an attack of food poisoning.  As he sleeps off his troubles, Ingram makes a beeline for the deserted ship to investigate, immediately discovering a video log (exactly like they do on Star Trek episodes) that shows their newly arriving stranger is none other than a delusional madman who has killed everyone onboard his mystery ship.  Returning as quickly as possible, he arrives too late, as the stranger has broken his way out of a locked room and taken command of his boat, sailing off in the opposite direction with his wife in tow, leaving Ingram with a broken down vessel and a flooded engine room, with the ship still taking on huge amounts of water, where his immediate goal is to reverse the water intake, pumping the flooded water out of the ship.  Rae, meanwhile, is used as a battering ram by her unexpected guest, knocking her out completely, leaving her unconscious on the deck of her boat, alone with a maniac in charge, who pretends to be normal but loses his patience whenever someone disagrees with him, becoming violently angry, erupting with an unstoppable force, leaving her bewildered about what to do, as she can’t convince him to turn around.  Told the ship is sinking, she’s afraid her husband has little chance of survival.  The cat and mouse psychological game between the two is a bit like Clarice’s prison visits with Hannibal Lecter, as she knows if she sets him off this abominable man is capable of doing anything.     

Meanwhile, back on the flooded ship, Ingram dutifully pumps out the flooded water, where his efforts to repair a sinking ship are remarkable, all done while witnessing a video stream of the former passengers as they squabble with Hughie, becoming especially volatile when they started to make fun of him and stop taking him seriously.  The inside of the ship is a bloody mess, with the dead bodies still floating around, a constant reminder of what Rae is dealing with, as the man is clearly insane.  Attempting to make radio contact with her husband, Rae is able to communicate with Ingram, but she can’t hear him, but can only hear button clicks, where they develop a language of one click means yes and two clicks means no.  She’s relieved that he’s alive and his ship is not sinking, but her troubles are only just getting started, and her panicked guest is overly suspicious of everything she does.  Still, she finds nautical weapons onboard, like a flare gun or harpoon arrows, keeping them concealed for the right moment, as he catches her in the act the first time, only to punch her to the floor, literally terrorizing her at will and seeming to like it, forcing her to accept he’s the man in charge, including raping her, where she’s forced to submit, while in the back of her mind she’s cleverly planning a counter maneuver.  This contentious battle of wills takes on a life of its own, becoming the centerpiece of the film, yet Ingram is facing his own demons back on the other ship, where a storm has knocked out all power, becoming victimized again by surging water intake, trapped beneath the water in a flooded cabin, as both are fighting their own separate battles with death, where Hughie becomes Jack Nicholson with an ax in THE SHINING (1980), an out of control killing machine.  Using a minimalist technique, the acting throughout is riveting, as Kidman’s mousy vulnerability is matched against a demonic monster, while Ingram is up against it in his own travails, beautifully interweaving both storylines, bringing them together by the end, where there is no rhyme or reason to explain why any of this is happening, but viewers are thrust into the middle of it, developing an obvious affinity for the woman in trouble, who is forced to maintain her wits against insurmountable odds, where there is no hope of any cavalry riding to the rescue.  With a perfect title, the harrowing psychological mind games are especially well-played, with long wordless sequences, where you can almost hear viewers yelling at the screen for all the mistakes that are made, yet it’s a compelling adventure that delves into the heart of horror, offering plenty of extravagant eye-candy.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Director Yorgos Lanthimos

THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER                   D                    

Ireland  Great Britain  (121 mi)  2017  d:  Yorgos Lanthimos

Arguably the worst film seen all year, arriving in theaters with a dull thud, lifeless and humorless throughout, with a cruel streak that couldn’t get any uglier, where one is willing to sit through this drudgery with the hope that there will be a last minute twist that somehow puts this in a different light, but that moment never comes.  Incredibly the writers, Efthymis Filippou and the director Yorgos Lanthimos, shared the best screenplay award at Cannes with Lynne Ramsay’s YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, which seems like a ludicrous choice after seeing the film, especially since so many screenwriter accolades were already handed out to his previous film, 2016 Top Ten List #9 The Lobster, which thoroughly deserved the awards for humor and originality.  This film has none of that, but simply feels like two hours of detestable unpleasantry that goes absolutely nowhere.  Don’t believe the overhyped superlatives, as this film should have been called out for what it is at the outset, which is a complete waste of time, yet instead it is awarded with one of the coveted prizes at the most prestigious film festival in the world.  Figure that one out.  Lately Cannes has had a history of making controversial poor choices, but this one tops the list.  "Movie filmed in Cincinnati booed at Cannes".  While this practice is not new, awarding accolades for such incredibly downbeat material is.  This is not an inspiring film and deserves to be walked out on in droves, which sometimes is the only way to send a message.  As described by Michael Sragow of Film Comment, Deep Focus: The Killing of a Sacred Deer - Film Comment:

Lanthimos’s mode of riffing in a stiff, oracular manner can seem compelling and oddly funny, at least for a half-hour or so, even to skeptics like myself. Then we find ourselves following the four stages of aesthetic grief: denial (“No one, deep down, can take this seriously”); anger (“How dare he stoop to killing off the dog just to provoke us!”); bargaining (“If we regard this film as ‘pure cinema,’ it must get better”); and, finally, depression (“No, it doesn’t get any better”). Happily, for aesthetic grief, as opposed to grief, a fifth stage, “acceptance,” isn’t a necessity. We can always walk out of the theater.

For all practical purposes, that is the best recommendation, as this feels like a zombie movie without the zombies.  Someone forgot to make this interesting.  As is, this is a joyless piece of anti-theater, with insipidly dull and emotionally inert characters speaking to one another with no emotional inflection whatsoever, so it comes across as intentionally deadpan.  However, whatever humor is to be found at the outset simply by the absurdity of what we are seeing dissipates over time, making the film something of a disaster in the making, as there is no reward for having to sit through this.  Unlike early Warhol films, especially his films of duration, like SLEEP (1964) or EMPIRE (1965), which surprisingly offer a social commentary, the question always becomes, at what point do viewers develop the fortitude to walk out, as there is no reward for enduring images where nothing happens.  After a certain period of time, you get the point.  Whatever may be the original intent here is undermined by the film’s own twisted pathology, becoming a warped and darkly disturbing attempt to satirize an emasculated idealization of the suburban dream, sucking the life right out of you, where all that’s left is a pervading sense of powerlessness, and a futility to struggle against it.  While one supposes there is an entertainment factor to see how issues develop and resolve themselves, yet this film offers no rewards afterwards.  It’s not like we ever learn anything or gain any insight.  Instead we’re left with a sick fever dream from which there is no escape.  In the life of a successful middle-class physician (Colin Farrell), a single event alters his life, as he loses a patient on the operating table.  Strangely and mysteriously, the physician meets secretly with what appears to be a mentally unstable boy (Barry Keoghan), a kid with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, the kind of person you’d walk away from the first chance you get.  But the doctor invests time and patience, as we learn his father is the one who dies on the operating table, with this kid exacting revenge, claiming members of the doctor’s family will meet the same fate.   One by one they will fall ill, their bodies failing them, until eventually they shut down and die.  All this is explained very matter of factly.

Like some Twilight Zone episode, viewers may attribute supernatural powers to this thoroughly detestable kid, but nothing is mentioned in the film, so whatever viewers imagine likely comes from their own imaginations, as it’s not in the storyline.  Little by little things get worse and worse, as first one kid and then the next succumbs to undiagnosed ailments that can’t be explained, despite thorough examinations from the best minds of the country.  For a physician, whose arrogance has no bounds, educated in science and logic, and his ice-princess wife (Nicole Kidman), living the supposed perfect suburban life, this is more than they can stand, with the doctor browbeating his own kids in an attempt to usurp whatever power controls them.  Again, all of this is done without an ounce of emotion from the kid, though the doctor loses it from time to time, acting on anger impulse, doing his best Charles Bronson imitation, but his threats fall on deaf ears.  The kid has sinister powers.  The dilemma is, if you just go ahead and get rid of the kid, then your own kids are already on a similar path, with no resolution, leaving you in a tough spot.  Doing nothing means everyone except the doctor himself dies.  However, if the doctor takes the life of one of his own kids, that would suffice.  These are the rules of the game.  In the film, having no other choice, everyone plays along, sucking up to this monster, resorting to all manner of horrid human behavior.  Somehow, someway, viewers wonder if there will be an unexpected twist that swoops in and alters the endlessly bleak landscape.  Don’t hold your breath.  The question is whether anything profound may be drawn from this work, and whether putting the audience through the wringer of a torture chamber is the best way to unravel some essential truths.  On both counts, the film thoroughly disappoints.  Initial thoughts that come to mind is this could be an extension of the kid in Lynn Ramsey’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), taking it even further, adding a supernatural element, while another variation is offering a contemporary setting for the Biblical story of Abraham who is instructed by God to kill his only son, Isaac, like sacrificing a lamb. Only when God can see that Abraham intends to obey him, binding his child and raising a knife to his throat, does he rescind his order, satisfied that Abraham has faith, allowing both to live.  In the Lanthimos version, there is no God and there is no justice.  Only a heartlessly futile existence.