The Hawks and the Sparrows

                  

The Hawks and the Sparrows, from 1966, is Piero Pasolini's most affable and goofy picture. He thought it was his most fully realized film and his affection for rural Italy is palpable throughout. The movie is a road comedy featuring two innocents: an older man, played by Italian cinematic legend Toto, and his son played by Pasolini's then 17 year old boyfriend, Ninetto Davoli. Toto's placid theatricality is counterpointed with Davoli's amateurish enthusiasm. Aged repose is contrasted with youthful energy. There are enough silent comedy style yucks to assuage those put off by Pasolini's Marxist rhetoric and anti-papal jibes. The film is both a follow-up and an antidote to Pasolini's last film, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. The reverence for Jesus displayed in that film is replaced by an irreverence for Catholic doctrine. 

Toto and Davoli are joined on their journey by a talking crow who later describes himself as a "leftist intellectual". The crow tells the fable of the hawks and sparrows that takes up the first half of the film. In it, Toto and Davoli play two medieval friars who are tasked by St. Francis to spread the word of God to our fair feathered friends. After much comic hardship and frivolity, the pair achieve a measure of success. However, they are shattered when they come upon a hawk preying upon a sparrow. St. Francis urges forbearance in their mission, but Pasolini's point is clear that, despite Christian bromides, man lives in a natural jungle where predation is second nature. Pasolini links these predations to contemporary capitalism in the second half and even has a restaging of Christ routing the merchants and moneylenders from the temple in the medieval section. Taking a dump in a field brings the ire of a local farmer in a sardonic segment that is akin to the populist Marxism of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" in its mockery of private property.

The film ends with the duo, hungry and tired of the crow's endless harangues, endeavoring to consume the critter. A suitable ending to a film where, for once, Pasolini bears his thematic concerns lightly. One of the big plusses to the film is Ennio Morricone's lively score. The opening titles and credits are sung in mock epic style for comic effect. There are a number of sequences, however,  that feel shoehorned in, a cafe scene where tight trousered young men do the frug and footage of the funeral of Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti's funeral, but, on the whole, The Hawks and the Sparrows is a delight. However, the Italian public thought otherwise. This film had the worst box office showing of Toto's career. What does the public know, though, most of Toto's efforts were in wafer thin burlesques of popular films like Cleopatra and were not worthy of his talents. If you enjoy The Hawks and the Sparrows, I'm sure you will enjoy the short film Toto and Pasolini also collaborated on, The Earth Seen from the Moon which is part of the anthology film, The Witches .

Quick Takes, January 2024

 

Adele Exarchopoulos and Melanie Laurent

Melanie Laurent's Wingwomen is an affable heist and female buddy movie. There is very little here that is new, but Adele Exarchopoulos and Ms. Laurent have an engaging, Redford/Newman vibe between the two of them. Pity about the feeble ending. With Manon Bresch and Isabelle Adjani. Streaming on Netflix. 

Tom George's See How They Run attempts to craft a backstage mystery out of the original production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap. Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan are the Mutt and Jeff team helming the investigation. Rockwell is miscast and Ronan is reduced to playing a chipper neophyte. Mark Chappell's script, which wittily plays with the mystery structure, is deficit in exploring character and no rapport is built between the two leads. George's direction is consistently lead footed with split screens used to feeble effect. The talented supporting cast, including Ruth Wilson and Shirley Henderson as Ms. Christie, is underused. The one bright spot is Amanda McArthur's witty production design.

Bill Norton's Cisco Pike, released after much delay in 1972 , was Kris Kristofferson's film debut. Kristofferson stars as a struggling musician who is forced by a corrupt cop (Gene Hackman) to return to dealing in order to keep out of jail. The plot meanders, but the film provides an interesting look at LA circa 1970. Kristofferson shows promise, but I wouldn't call what he does here acting. The main delights of this feckless film are on its fringes where a host of interesting performers and character actors steal the spotlight, including Karen Black, Roscoe Lee Browne, Harry Dean Stanton, Severn Darden, Viva, Joy Bang, Antonio Fargas, Howard Hesseman, Doug Sahm, and Wavy Gravy.

Jalmari Helander's Sisu is a Finnish action film set in the waning days of World War 2. A miner in Lapland is left for dead by a column of retreating Nazi soldiers. He proceeds to exact a pitiless revenge. One needs to swallow a certain amount of mythic hooey to enjoy this restrained and largely silent gore fest. Action fans will be rewarded by a well-constructed and, darest I say, elegant slice of carnage. This testimonial to Finnish fortitude augurs that country's embrace of NATO; so back off or beware, Vlad. 

Emerald Fennell's Saltburn is a black comic mashup of Brideshead Revisited and Teorema. Too obvious and not funny enough to be effective satire, the film struggles to find a consistent tone. The intimations of pagan sacrifice and the occult (that sulphureous title) also come to naught. Barry Keoghan fails to bring the menace that emanated from him in The Killing of the Sacred Deer. It's nice to look at, except for the overuse of shadow during Keoghan's "erotic" encounters, and I loved the costumes, but the talented and attractive supporting cast are all adrift searching for their characters.

Mark Cousins' The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a meditative look at the career of the maverick English film producer (The Last Emperor, Crash). As is his want, documentarian Cousins injects himself into the picture; most of the film was shot on a road trip to Cannes Cousins took with Thomas. Since the two men share a passionate cinephilia, the results are fruitful. Those not familiar with Thomas' filmography, particularly the films he produced for director Nicolas Roeg, might want to steer clear,

Alice Winocour's Revoir Paris features Virginie Efira as the survivor of a terrorist attack dealing with the resultant trauma, guilt, and shame. Winocour's supple direction makes this a seamless and effective drama, but the plot's machinations sometimes seem predictable and pat. Still, the film provides a look at an interesting and varied cross-section of Parisian society with ample opportunity for the supporting cast to shine, especially Benoit Magimel.

Virginie Efira

Dragnet Girl

Joji Oka contemplates the virtues of (fido) fidelity in Dragnet Girl

Yasujiro Ozu's Dragnet Girl, from 1933 , is most often described as a crime film. yet it is equally a romantic melodrama focused on a love triangle composed of gangster Joji (Joji Oka), his moll Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka), and the more traditional Kazuko (Sumiko Mizukubo) who works in a record shop. Joji is an ex-boxer and a very low level gang boss who yearns to go straight, especially after meeting the demure Kazuko. He is entranced by her, but senses that the volatile Tokiko is more his match. They vow to do one more job together and then settle down, but the last job ends up as last jobs usually do. Not a tragic ending though, for a shot of the morning light reaching a flower on the window sill ends this silent picture with a note of possible redemption.   

Dragnet Girl is a film saturated with American culture and its depiction in the crime genre. The locales ape those in found American films: the seedy flophouse lair of the gangster, the boxing gym, the pool hall, the jazz nightclub. The men's suits are all Western style and nearly all the poster art (heralding Jack Dempsey and King Vidor's The Champ) in the film hails from the USA. In the film, these are all harbingers of a future that deviates from traditional national culture. The meek and conformist Kazuko personifies the hardworking values of that culture while Tokiko is portrayed as an amoral chippie and grifter. Tokiko admits that she sees why Joji is attracted to Kazuko, a blushing virgin to her whore, and even plants a kiss on her. Despite its sexual ambiguities though, Dragnet Girl is fairly rigid in its portrayal of the superiority of the traditional as opposed the more modern and Western. Ozu three times gives us low angle shots of characters in opposite styles of garb travelling a parallel course, but never do the twain meet.

Dragnet Girl is notable for its energetic camera movement, particularly its use of tracking shots, that stand in contrast to the placid, more meditative style of Ozu's autumnal years. Ozu presents us a collection of grids and snares that serve to trap his characters or provide them a rare moment of intimacy. Ozu cuts away to reaction shots during the fight scenes, playing up not the violence, but the comic potential of those sequences. The sheer audacity and chock full of nuts potency of the mise en scene is enough to augur a classic auteur, but the scenario has unnecessary moments of repetition in its portrayal of all the angles in the romantic triangle. The cast is superb though, with Ms. Tanaka, just at the start of a brilliant career, the heart and soul of a picture in which she is its cynosure. 

Kinuyo Tanaka

I Love Melvin

Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds

Don Weis' I Love Melvin, from 1953, is a lightweight, but pleasant MGM musical comedy. Debbie Reynolds plays a little-known Broadway hoofer featured as a dancing football in a concoction entitled "Quarterback Kelly". She meets cute with Donald O'Connor, playing a Look magazine gofer who is hoping to break into the ranks of the magazine as a photographer by serving as an assistant to a soused lensman played by Jim Backus. Romantic complication ensue, especially because Reynolds' father (Allyn Joslyn) prefers Reynolds other suitor, a stiff, but rich suit played by Richard Anderson. Una Merkel plays Reynolds' mother and Noreen Corcoran, who was later featured on TV's Bachelor Father, plays her younger sister. The film seamlessly mixes Technicolor location footage from New York with footage shot on the MGM backlot in a picture that arrives at a happy conclusion in a brisk 77minutes. 

The very breeziness of Weis' direction is the key to the film's success. Even when the jokes fall flat, such as O'Connor's awkward attempts to buss Reynolds, it is on to the next bit. The film was an attempt to capitalize on the success of the previous year's Singin' in the Rain, albeit on a more modest level. Gene Kelly is nowhere to be found, but O'Connor was hired out from Universal in the hope that commercial lightning would strike twice. It was not to be. I Love Melvin's songs, by Mack Gordon and Josef Myrow (most famous for "You Make Me Feel So Young") are second rate and have not stayed in the collective memory. The dance sequences that feature the two leads are fun, but O'Connor was more suited to the role of second banana. Still, this picture is a better display of his talents then the Francis the Talking Mule pictures. The decline of studio musicals was fatal to both Reynolds' and O'Connor's careers. O'Connor tried to shift to more dramatic fare with a Buster Keaton biopic, but the public wasn't buying and guest shots on TV beckoned. 

Reynolds fared a teeny bit better. Public sympathy for her after she was dumped by Eddie Fisher (for Elizabeth Taylor) helped a little, as did her versatility and trouper's chutzpah. Still, she was old hat after the rise of the Beatles. I was amused reading Colson Whitehead's superb Harlem Shuffle when one of the rougher characters in the book expresses a desire to see The Unsinkable Molly Brown because of his affection for Ms. Reynolds. All in all, though, Ms. Reynolds cultural visibility was minimal for generations born after the baby boomers. I Love Melvin stands, along with Singin' in the Rain and Albert Brook's Mother, as one of the better vehicles for her talents. I was a little worried when the picture started with a glamorous production number that ends with fading MGM matinee idol Robert Taylor pitching woo to her. Reynolds was about twenty at the time and was more suited to being the girl next door than a gilded glamor puss. Luckily, this is a dream sequence, one of three in the picture, and Reynolds is revealed suitably as a spunky chorine; just like in Singin' in the Rain. 

Weis' efficient direction serves her well, as it does the supporting cast. Merkel and Joslyn sink into their roles comfortably and Richard Anderson is less wooden than usual in a thankless role. Ms. Corcoran is adequate in the juvenile role, though I would advise viewers wanting a bathroom break to take it at the beginning of her saccharine duet with O'Connor. Jim Backus shines in the comic relief role. One can see why he rose up the ranks of supporting actors in the coming years. I Love Melvin is a B musical from MGM, but it boasts some A technical features, particularly Harold Rosson's cinematography and Cedric Gibbons' art direction. The film is an interesting example of Hollywood product placement as the numerous Look magazine covers all seem to feature MGM stars (Spencer Tracy, Lana Turner, Lionel Barrymore). What stays in the mind about the picture are its zany production numbers, none more so than its football number in which Ms. Reynolds (and her stunt double) are tossed via harness around the set to riotous effect.

La Macchina Ammazzacattvi

                   

Roberto Rossellini's La Macchina Ammazzacattvi ("The Machine to Kill Bad People) is an obscure and rare Rossellini comedy that commenced filming in 1948, but was not completed until 1952. Rossellini was reputedly not involved in all the endless reshoots, but the picture bears his stamp. A minor film in his canon, it is still a better example of Italian Magical Realism than, say, Miracle in Milan.

What's notable about the film are its fantastical touches. The picture begins with a giant hand constructing a picture book representation of the port town of Amalfi where the action of the story is situated. The narrative concerns a photographer who meets a mysterious character he thinks is St. Andrew, but is actually a more sinister visitor. The visitor grants him the power to use his camera as a weapon of murder. The photographer seizes upon this opportunity to cull the town of its more venal inhabitants. The photographer becomes intoxicated with his new power, but senses he has overreached. He contemplates turning the camera upon himself before discovering the true identity of the supposed St. Andrew and renouncing the dubious gift. The townspeople killed are frozen into the pose they assumed before the camera, to comic effect. The picture is in a different vein than the Neo-Realism of Open City and Paisan, it is more akin to commedia dell'arte. Neo-Realism of that era in Italy owed more to commercial expediency than an adherence to a philosophical tenet.

Nevertheless, some of the best moments of La Macchina Ammazzacattvi. such as the Feast of St. Andrew and the blessing of the fishing fleet, are pure documentary. However, the film holds to no doctrine other than to present human folly. The victims of the photographer's camera, rich or poor, earn his wrath by their greed. They are types, not realistic characters, who are arranged in a farcical morality play. 

Porcile

                
Pier Paolo Pasolini's Porcile (Pigsty), from 1969, is a bifurcated allegorical film that I found to be more watchable than most of the work of the alleged Italian master. The film shuttles back and forth between two narratives. In the modern story, Julian Klotz(Jean-Pierre Leaud), the son of a wealthy German titan of business, aimlessly wanders his family's vast estate. He parries the romantic attentions of his girlfriend, Ida (Anne Wiazemsky), and surrenders to torpor. Things pick up when his father (Alberto Lionello in a Hitler mustache) negotiates a merger with a business rival played by Ugo Tognazzi. Tognazzi is able to negotiate a favorable settlement with the elder Herr Klotz because he has acquired some damaging information; namely that Julian has been having it off with the pigs in the estate's pens.

Pasolini claimed that his casting of French New Wave icons Leaud and Wiazemsky was because, since he was now making films for and about the bourgeoisie (like Teorema), France had a larger bourgeoisie to draw from than proletariat Italy. Pasolini would never cop to surrendering to commercial dictates, but the French duo never gibes with the Italian cast that surrounds them. The lack of chemistry between the duo doesn't hurt the film, Julian, after all, is supposed to be more interested in his porcine friends than Ida, but it does tax the viewer's patience. Lionello and Tognazzi seem to realize, unlike their French counterparts, that they are playing caricatures rather than fully rounded characters. Pasolini hips us to this by often shooting his players in profile and by referencing the acidic satire of the bourgeois by Brecht and Grosz. Lionello and Tognazzi's scenes have a comic rhythm to them that ones with the French duo lack.

Anne Wiazemsky in profile

The thematic gist of this section of the film is one shared by many Marxist European filmmakers of this era (Bertolucci, Visconti, Godard, Fassbinder, etc.); namely that the specter of fascism still haunted Europe despite the results of the Second World War. Fascism, in their view, has secreted itself within the socially acceptable guise of wealthy businessmen like Klotz who amuses himself by playing the "Horst Wessel Lied" on the harp. Klotz's wife speaks longingly of the vacation home in Syracuse they could have had if they won the war. Tognazzi's character is reputedly a Nazi who changed his identity after the war in order to secrete himself and escape paying for his crimes. No wonder the kids end up being indolent pig fuckers. The sardonic energy of Tognazzi and Lionello make this segment become more engaging as it moves along despite such technical mishaps as ridiculously shaky tracking shot down a corridor.

Happily, the other segment that makes up Porcile doesn't suffer from such hiccups. Pierre Clementi stars as a medieval soldier who ends up descending into rape, dismemberment, and cannibalism. A silent Passion Play in reverse, our protagonist ends up being tied to posts and devoured by wild dogs in a bummer of an ending that parallels the one in the modern story. What links the two intertwined stories is beyond me, but they do combine Pasolini's two biggest bugaboos, Capitalism and the Roman Catholic church. What I like about the medieval section is its twisted humor and its absurdly elegant compositions. Pasolini uses the volcanic landscapes more memorably than in Teorema and the cinematography boasts a primeval power. I don't think Pasolini gave two hoots about film technique (or bourgeois notions like characterization), but his subsequent releases would grow increasingly slipshod. Porcile is often a silly film, but it boasts moments of passion and probity that are rare in Pasolini's film canon. 

Society of the Snow

                
J.A. Bayona's Society of the Snow is the third and best feature film based on the story of Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 which crashed in the Andes in 1972. The passengers, mostly made up of a rugby team, were stranded for over two months and had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive. Bayona's film strengths are mainly on the technical level. The handling of the crash and a subsequent avalanche that besets the survivors are handled expertly. The constant use of close-ups, a bane of the current cinema, is for once appropriate here, as Bayona conveys the claustrophobia of the survivors huddling for warmth in the remains of the fuselage. 

What I didn't think succeeded was Bayona's attempt to graft humanistic uplift to this tale of survival. The film's attempts at characterization are haphazard. Only Enzo Vogrincic's Numa and Agustin Pardella's Nando emerge as successful portraits of individuals. The film's attempts to portray the decision to resort to cannibalism as an act of Christian solidarity and self-sacrifice seems dubious to this unobservant Catholic. The ritual of Communion, with its intimations of cannibalism and human sacrifice, is one that sought to channel man's attempts to appease an inscrutable deity with tangible offerings into a spiritual contemplation of mystical union. God gave his only son so we could cease slaughtering our own children (or the spare lamb) in His name. The cannibalism in Society of the Snow is, if you excuse the expression, overly tasteful. The religious angle provides an excuse for visual updates of the Pieta and the Last Supper. It does render the film into suitable family viewing if your Aunt Minnie is visiting. Currently streaming on Netflix.

Showing Up

Michelle Williams and Kelly Reichardt

Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up is a low key drama depicting a few weeks in the life of a Portland based sculptor named Liz played by Michelle Williams; her fourth film with the director. Liz supports herself by working at an art school run by her mother (Maryann Plunkett), so she hasn't completely left the nest. Her parents are divorced, not amicably, and her brother (played wonderfully by John Magaro) teeters on the edge of madness. These factors, along with the deadline for an upcoming show, weigh upon Liz and Williams offers a performance in full grumpy cat mode. 

The stresses that gnaw upon Liz affect her relationship with her landlord and fellow artist, Jo (Hong Chau). Jo seems to be thriving as an artist, in relation to Liz, and this plus a broken hot water heater sets their relationship on edge. The portrait of this relationship, which is in constant flux, is the signal achievement of this film. Reichardt understands the ebb and flow of a friendship which ranges from the kinship of sisterhood to fractious discord.

Not everything in Showing Up is as effective. A subplot concerning an injured pigeon seems unnecessarily symbolic for a neorealistic drama; the necessity of leaving the nest notwithstanding Still, this resident of the Portland metro area must admit that no other filmmaker of this era has captured the bohemian bubble of Portlandia as evocatively as Reichardt does. The art school scenes are set at the defunct Oregon College of Arts and Crafts and capture the counterculture vibe of what may be a bygone day. Reichardt is a studiously modest filmmaker, who I have criticized in the past for her lack of Dionysian abandon, but, in this age of CGI laden extravaganzas of gaseous proportions, her virtues are much appreciated. Certainly, her films always boast impressive supporting players: in this case they include Judd Hirsch, Andre Benjamin, Amanda Plummer, Matt Malloy, James Le Gros, Heather Lawless, Lauren Lakis, and Theo Taplitz.

         

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

          
James Mangold's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is hopefully the last film in the franchise. While not as execrable as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the latest film is tired and feels rote, a pastiche of a pastiche. It is overlong, at two and a half hours, and should have jettisoned one of its four chase scenes. The film has four credited writers, but probably had twelve uncredited ones. It feels overstuffed, yet this viewer finished the film unsatiated. Mads Mikkelsen is always a good fit for a Teutonic villain and Phoebe Waller-Bridge is an improvement over Alison Doody, but Antonio Banderas' appearance feels truncated.

Mangold is a competent action director, but the action sequences here feel workmanlike. I did appreciate the CGI work on the siege of Syracuse and the train sequence. The series has always had trouble replicating the charm of the banter between Karen Allen and Harrison Ford in the first film. Mangold has very little feel for comedy and the father/daughter friction between Ford and Waller-Bridge seems forced. There is no need for repeated cracks about Ford's age. That said, I was impressed with Ford's performance and I am not a huge fan. I've always thought he was a bit constipated as an actor with a narrow scope ranging from macho jerk to officious grump. Here, he has a sense of dignity and self-deprecation that reminds me of John Wayne in Rio Lobo. As for Indiana Jones, though, I'm crying uncle.

The Holdovers

Dominic Sessa and Paul Giamatti

Alexander Payne has always been a dull visual stylist and his films have become increasingly pat and predictable; particularly his latest, The Holdovers. The Holdovers is a vehicle for Paul Giamatti who achieved his greatest critical acclaim in Payne's Sideways in which he successfully captured the feel of middle aged malaise. Giamatti plays another loser here, a bitter Classics teacher named Paul Hunham who works at a New England boarding school in 1970 seething in isolation as his life slides into oblivion. After pissing off his headmaster, Hunham is tasked with babysitting students who are stranded at the school during the Christmas holiday. Also stuck on campus is Mary Lamb (Da'vine Joy Randolph), the black cafeteria manager who has recently lost her son in Vietnam. 

The third wheel is Angus (Dominic Sessa), a troubled student from an unhealthy family background who, quite naturally, resents spending his holiday restricted to campus. The trio bond, spill secrets, and achieve personal growth with the help of their companions. The predictability of such a plot can be satisfying to an audience in a commercial picture like this. but I found it wearisome. Romantic possibilities conveniently pop up for each of the trio. The parallels that David Hemingson's script draws are too obvious: in one example the adults share shots of whiskey while the kids share joints. Giamatti and Randolph are fine, but Dominic Sessa is too self-assured for his role. All the juveniles in the film are too inert, lacking the rabbity energy of adolescence. 

The derivative nature of the plot also irked me. We know that hard-ass Mr. Hunham will lighten up and give his charge a fling, partly because the screenplay has filched the plot directly from Hal Ashby's The Last Detail. Instead of patriotic tunes as ironic counterpoint to the narrative, as in Ashby's film, we get Christmas carols. An incident where a ritzy restaurant refuses to serve Angus Cherries jubilee is a direct crib from the famous chicken salad on toast scene from Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, not a particularly obscure reference. The list of plot improbabilities is so long I don't wish to even address them, but if you haven't seen a film made before 1977, The Holdovers might be serviceable entertainment.

The Boy and the Heron

"The Grannies"

Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron is a late period masterwork from the revered Japanese animator. A fable set during the Second World War, the film is told from the point of view of Mahito, a male adolescent coming to terms with transition and loss. The Boy and the Heron plunges Mahito deep into an unconscious fantasy world which is a reflection of his conscious world. The strength of the film is that its phantasmagoric vision can be interpreted in a number of ways, ranging from a Buddhist perspective on spiritual regeneration to the traditional Freudian take on Oedipal triangulation, that are equally valid and insightful. No work in the director's ouevre has been as fecund since Spirited Away.

Motifs and characters from the film are reminiscent of the director's previous work. The "grannies" could have populated the cast of Porco Rosso or Howl's Moving Castle. One innovation for Miyazaki is the effective use of CGI in the fire sequences. Figures inspired by Japanese mythology, like the trickster heron figure, help guide Mahito in his painful transition to manhood. The film hinges, like all fables do, on simple moral aphorisms: that friends are forged in adversity and love is eternal.

Poor Things

Emma Stone

Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things is a amusing, but not particularly compelling, adaptation of Alasdair Gray's novel. The grotesque nature of the book, which concerns the maturation of a female Frankenstein's monster, would seem to be right up Lanthimos' alley, but the film, though salty, has little bite. A mad scientist (Willem Defoe) retrieves the body of a suicide victim from the Thames, implants the brain of the woman's unborn child into her head, flicks a switch and voila: a creature with the mind of an infant and the body of a woman. Emma Stone plays the peculiar creature, Bella Baxter, with great physical gusto, eliciting guffaws with her character's childlike abandon. Upon reaching psychological puberty, she decamps to Paris with a rake (Mark Ruffalo). She soon discards him, finding fulfillment in the sexual and social education she receives working in a bordello. 

The costumes, CGI, and production design make the film's Steampunk look attractive to the eye and the cast performs admirably. Yet, the film carries little excitement. In a fable like this one, there must be a touch of menace to the villainy. Lanthimos directs his male villains (Ruffalo and Christopher Abbott) too broadly. They are so buffoonish that they don't ever seem like much of a threat to the willful Bella in this feminist allegory of disentangling oneself from social strictures. Poor Things is Lanthimos' most crowd pleasing film, but also his most insubstantial.

Maestro

Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan in Maestro

Bradley Cooper's Maestro is an unsatisfying look at the life of Leonard Bernstein through the prism of his relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre. Bernstein was a multi-dimensional figure and Cooper's approach diminishes him. The film flattens the cultural background of his work in its antic rush to illustrate his meteoric rise. Important figures in Bernstein's early career (Jerome Robbins, Serge Koussevitzky, David Oppenheim, Stephen Sondheim, Aaron Copland, Comden and Green) flash by or are name checked with little explanation of who they were or why they were important. I doubt many viewers under fifty will have a clue about this cast of characters. Despite my misgivings about Oppenheimer, it did a better job sketching the supporting characters around its titular genius.

This might not matter if the central relationship of Maestro was compelling, but it is not. The film establishes early on that Lenny was mad about boys, but Cooper treats his relationship with Felicia with a kid glove treatment that gives us very little sense of the give and take of an actual relationship. In the 1950s, black and white Lenny and Felicia are a happy couple with a burgeoning family. Then, one cut later, it's the 1970s, in color, and Lenny is pawing the first pretty boy he meets at a cocktail party. There is no gradation in this portrait of a marriage or any real sense of Bernstein's sexual fluidity. Likewise, the depiction of career highlights, which alternate with domestic scenes in the film, are a nonstop parade of artistic triumphs. Cooper, as in A Star is Born, is more adept with the performance sequences than the domestic ones, but one gets zero sense how quickly Bernstein fell out of fashion. It is one thing to skip the Black Panther cocktail party, this is a film made with the cooperation of the Bernstein family after all, but is dishonest to portray the debut of Bernstein's Mass, which inaugurated the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971, as anything other than a flop. 

The closest the film comes to showing Bernstein's warts is a party scene where he snorts cocaine while his compadres discuss "chickens". There were much more embarrassing aspects to Bernstein's life and I am not referring to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Despite his flaws, Bernstein was a cultural titan, a fact the film barely conveys. Bernstein's accomplishments, like his relationships, are mentioned in the film, but not shown. Maestro is that rare film which could have benefitted from a musical montage sequence.

The most glaring defect in the film is Cooper's performance. I think Carey Mulligan, as Felicia, has been so highly praised because she is so much more convincing than her co-star. Sarah Silverman, as Bernstein's sister, gives the film's best performance because she wills herself out of the film's cluttered background. Cooper is a highly skilled technical actor, but his performance doesn't capture the actual maestro. He captures Bernstein's energy on the podium, but, otherwise, seems too goy and too straight. He fails to capture the mellifluous music of the man's voice and the mincing flamboyance of his carriage. All the rest of Maestro is under sketched cultural and emotional baggage, foursquare and with nary a surprise.