Normal

Bob Odenkirk and f(r)iends

Ben Wheatley's Normal combines small town atmosphere, propellant bursts of action, and dark comedy. Bob Odenkirk stars as Ulysses, the newly hired interim sheriff of Normal, Minnesota. That an outsider could take on such a job for a mere two months strains credulity, but Normal strives for a canvas of bent reality rather than realism itself. Soon into the film, Ulysses and the audience begin to feel that something sinister is lurking beneath the prairie home exterior of the little burg. An inept bank robbery reveals that the institution was housing yakuza money and that the whole town is on the take. Ulysses and the two hapless robbers (Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher) must fight off the entire populace. The town is armed to the teeth and Ulysses takes advantage of the firepower in an extremely violent last act.

Normal was written by Derek Kolstad, the writer chiefly responsible for the John Wick series of films. Mr. Kolstad has written a clever script, thankfully more compact than the operatic Wick films. The action scenes contain more of a Rube Goldberg/ Wile E. Coyote element than in the Wick films and are expertly wrought by Wheatley who has previously displayed his action chops in Free Fire and Meg 2. Kolstad gives Ulysses a voice over narration in the form of phone messages to his estranged wife, Penny (geddit). Odenkirk handles the voice overs with aplomb, but this points to the derivative nature of Kolstad's work. Not derivative of Homer though Kolstad is brainy enough to make shout outs to Dorothy Parker, Breaking Bad, and Old Boy. No, Normal is a Coen brothers tribute, grafting the Homeric allusions of O Brother, where art thou? to the high plains noir of Fargo. There are worse formulas, I suppose, but seasoned cinema goers will have seen it all before.

That said, Kolstad deserves credit for creating varied and striking roles for a compact, B movie format and Wheatley has elicited good performances from Mr. Odenkirk, Ms. Jolly, Mr. Fletcher, Henry Winkler, Lena Headey, Jess McLeod, and Billy MacLellan. Manitoba stands in well for Minnesota and the picture gets points for killing off a beloved character actor halfway through the proceedings. Mr Wheatley's psychedelic dynamism meshes well with Kolstad's askew view of his characters, but with limited results. Novel seems more like a project for hire for Wheatley whose best and most personal works remain the films he has directed in his native England: Sightseers, A Field in England, and In the Earth.               

In the Fog

Vladimir Svirskiy at center

Sergei Loznitsa's In the Fog, from 2012, is a harrowing series of vignettes showing Belarusian partisans fighting Germans and Belarusian black shirts during what the Russians term the Great Patriotic War. The film's title points to the ambivalence with which the film regards wartime allegiances. The plot hinges on issues of betrayal and retribution. Sushenya (Vladimir Svirskiy) is a railway worker suspected of collaborating with the Nazis, implicating three comrades who are hung for sabotage. Late one night, an old friend named Burov (Vladislav Abasin) comes calling. Sushenya knows that the partisans have decided to execute him. He is accepting of his fate and walks away from hearth and home with Burov and another partisan.

In the Fog opens with a bravura sequence detailing the hanging. It is a near wordless dolly through the watching soldiers and horrified populace. It firmly establishes that the Nazi's have let slip the three-headed dog of war, terror, and torture. The remainder of the film follows Sushenya and his two executioners as they head into the woods. As often amidst the fog of war, things go awry. The slow burn of the plot is heightened by three flashbacks which illuminates the back story of the principals. The film is based on Vasil Bykaǔ's 1989 novel. A Belarusian author, Bykaŭ specialized in World War 2 fiction. His novella The Ordeal was the basis for Larisa Shepitko's film masterpiece The Ascent. 

In the Fog is terse to the point of absurdity. Danger is always imminent, so talk is cheap. Loznitsa ratchets up the feeling of paranoia by eschewing a musical score. Thus, our attention to the ambient sounds of the film is heightened whether we are listening to the trees rustle, an animal cry or a far off rifle shot. Even if I find the ending fatalistically predictable, In the Fog stands alongside such memorable films about Russian resistance fighters as The Ascent and Elem Klimov's Come and See. 

Confidence Girl

Andrew L. Stone's Confidence Girl is an above average B crime film about a team of bunco artists. This 1952 flick is a tight and compact 81 minutes with nary a rhetorical flourish or flashy camera movement. Stone, ably assisted by his editor wife Virginia, was able to churn out B features that he also wrote and produced for nearly forty years. His hallmark was documentary like verisimilitude utilizing actual locations. If you want to see what the May Department store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles looked like in 1952 then Confidence Girl is the place to start. The police procedural aspect of Confidence Girl reminded me of Dragnet which had premiered on radio in 1949. In fact, Stone's pictures closely resemble the just the facts directorial style of Jack Webb. A cheap, but direct style with which to create cinema. Tellingly, Confidence Girl begins with a speech from the real life LA chief of police, warning the audience to be wary of scammers, flim-flam artists, and swindlers.

Happily, the audience soon is ensconced in the machinations of the film's miscreants. Roger Kingsley (Tom Conway) and Mary Webb (Hillary Brooke), along with a couple of confederates, are lifelong fraudsters, adept at all sorts of chicanery. We witness them pilfer an expensive mink coat from May's and fleece a pawn broker. Kingsley keeps the couple one step ahead of the law by posting as a private detective. He feeds the police just enough info to earn their trust, but not enough for him and Mary to end up in the clink. His access to the police comes in handy when Mary embarks on a career as a medium, packing them in at a nightclub. The reveal as to how Mary appears clairvoyant is the cleverest bit in the script. Eventually, Roger and Mary's scam is intertwined with a murder case. Do the nefarious duo reform in the final reel in order to prevent a tragedy? You betcha, but the flick is enjoyable in its predictability. 

Tom Conway was best known as being the older brother of George Saunders. Conway had similar talents as his brother and a similarly limited range. Thus, he is well cast here as a cad. Conway had a pretty good career, all things considered, with memorable roles in a number of classic Val Lewton films and appearing as the Falcon in a successful serial. Hillary Brooks did not have as stellar a career, but, like Conway, was an effective performer within a narrow range. She is better displaying the hard bitten aspects of her character than her vulnerable side. She is best when mesmerizing an audience as a medium. Somebody connected with Confidence Girl must have remembered her superb turn in a similar role in Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear. John Gallaudet and Jack Kruschen, well remembered by the surviving remnants of my generation who were glued to the boob tube, offer wonderful support as a pair of clueless, yet dogged flatfoots. The MVP of the picture is cinematographer William H. Clothier. His elegant compositions give depth to the minimal production values on display while adhering to the demands of Stone's realism. Clothier would graduate to A films and work with practically every American Western director before retiring in 1973. His most eye-popping work, in which he was required of much more than on Confidence Girl, includes Track of the Cat, The Comancheros, Merrill's Marauders, and Donovan's Reef.