The Hateful Eight, Beasts of No Nation

The creative stasis of Quentin Tarantino is confirmed in the intermittently entertaining The Hateful Eight. My wife thinks he is lost without an Uma, a bitch goddess to build his film around. The Hateful Eight is Tarantino's third straight revenge film based on racial animus and its dramatic core is bloated and redundant. Reality and logic are out the window as Tarantino's racial obsessions are turned (Mad magazine style) into scenes he'd like to see. Fair enough, I think any filmmaker ought to work his or her obsessions out onto 70MM celluloid. But when Quentin's ultimate revenge fantasy is Samuel L. Jackson forcing a racist Southerner to orally satisfy him than I think Tarantino has taken the concept of Mailer's "White Negro" too much to heart.

There is no romantic element as in Django Unchained, just the hateful eights knocking each other off And Then There Were None style. The dialogue contains the usual extended riffs, maybe too extended, but Tarantino remains a gifted director of actors. He utilizes Michael Madsen better than anyone besides Ridley Scott in Thelma and Louise. The closeups of Madsen are the most loving in the film. Tim Roth handles his role with aplomb. Critical opinion on Jennifer Jason Leigh was divided as ever, but I feel her performance is the most memorable one in the film. Like her or not, she is a gutsy performer who seems gung ho to meet every disgusting challenge Tarantino throws her way. Nearly toothless, with blood and chunks of brain matter in her hair, Leigh is without vanity or inhibition. Tarantino does not succeed with all of his players. Walton Goggins is too cartoon like, Kurt Russell is too charming to be a badass, and Samuel L. Jackson's badass routine seems rote this time. Nevertheless, my concept of what constitutes badassdom could be called into question since I am a dadass. 

Ultimately, The Hateful Eight is a horror movie dressed in western garb. Tarantino telegraphs this by opening the film with a shot of a crucifix that seems to belong in Transylvania and not Colorado. The film belongs to that subgenre Joe Bob Briggs classified as "spam in a cabin". Briggs was reviewing The Evil Dead when he coined that phrase, but Tarantino lacks the visual brio Sam Raimi employs in such projects, needed to charge grand guignol flicks to life. Tarantino wants this film to be both a grindhouse entertainment and a racial parable. A whiny cracker and a black superstud are the only ones left standing at film's end: red and blue America remain after the carnage of America's history. A new hope for the future or locked in perpetual struggle? Tarantino does not enlighten us. Compare this to The Assassin, which confronts the moral dilemmas of a revenge narrative, and it looks like Tarantino is treading water here.

Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation

Cary Joji Fukunaga's Beasts of No Nation is a prestige picture that earned my respect, if not my enthusiasm. A mélange of Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies, the film gives us a compelling portrait of good and evil in modern day Africa, but fails to bring its characters to life. Idris Elba is a good fit for the "Kurtz" role, but Fukunaga is unable to bring out his manic intensity as he did with Matthew McConaughey in True Detective. A few moments stand out, particularly a dolly through the trenches reminiscent of Paths of Glory that conveys the squalor of warfare. While the film is competently made and has a moral seriousness that The Hateful Eight lacks, it failed to move me. (3/15/16)

The Martian

                   
Ridley Scott's The Martian is an amiable mediocrity. Scott handles marooned astronaut Matt Damon's exploits on the red planet briskly and well, but crashes amidst NASA's bureaucratic infighting on terra firma. Damon is charming, but the script has him in contact with NASA far too early in the game. Hanks' hysteria is more affecting in Cast Away because he is more isolated.

I think Shawn Levy, the critic not the director of Free Guy, has Ridley Scott pegged about right as a present day Michael Curtiz: an excellent craftsman, but a second rate artist. I was watching Thelma and Louise  the other night and found it still moving, but for every first rate Ridley Scott movie there are more than an equal number of duds like Legend, GI Jane or Robin Hood. Due to its genial handling on the material, The Martian was a hit, but it is not one of Scott's better movies. (3/7/16)

Joy

Jennifer Lawrence in Joy

David O. Russell's Joy strikes me as one of the more underappreciated films of the past year. Not up to par with his best films (Flirting With Disaster, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle), but, like I 💛Huckabees and Three Kings, it is a rewarding, if minor, work. Joy is a feminist fairy tale that alternately critiques and celebrates capitalism (like ...Huckabees) by portraying the life of the title character, the inventor of the Miracle Mop. Jennifer Lawrence is as likeable a presence as always, but doesn't convey enough New York attitude. Russell's hold on his supporting cast is similarly variable. Isabella Rossellini's performance has a more comic tone than that of her onscreen amour, Robert De Niro, for example.

The messy and ambivalent tone of Joy probably didn't help it with critics or audiences, but it is consistent with Russell's polyphonic intent. This is a story told with a variety of voices. Joy's Grandma (Diane Lane) narrates the opening of the film as a female empowerment fable. However, Russell stays with this device only fitfully when he wants to stress Joy's resourcefulness. Russell spends time illustrating the soap operas Joy's Mom (an unrecognizable and brave Virginia Madsen) is addicted to. I don't know if it was snobbery that elicited raspberries to this subplot, but I enjoyed watching Susan Lucci, Maurice Bernard, and other soap stars keep a straight face as they burlesque the already rococo conventions of the genre.

Russell wants to stress the illusory nature of television and how it affects consumers as they gaze upon capitalism's lustrous baubles in the comfort(?) of their own homes. This he magnifies in the QVC sequences which resemble a heightened dreamscape more akin to the mise en scene of a soap opera or music video than the homey realism of the scenes in De Niro's garage. Russell does this because he wants to hold up material wealth as a poisoned chalice. The struggle for wealth ultimately alienates Joy from family and friends. Bradley Cooper's QVC producer warns her that this will happen early on, but it is Joy's acknowledgement of this at the end that marks a mature acceptance of her fate. Her hair is up, teased and styled. She has donned the modern armor of the business suit. Previously, when Joy chopped off her hair, she was asserting her individuality while straining against gender (and genre) confines. She was becoming a business warrior. Eventually, she accommodates herself to the corporate business structure and wears its uniform. She acknowledges the producer's wisdom as a gesture of a onetime comrade, now adversary, who like her does battle in the maw of Darwinian capitalism. 

The ending of Joy is not a particularly happy one. On an economic scale, Joy is a success. She lives in a great mansion with family and hangers on, many of whom are trying to sponge off or swindle her. She has a few loyal friends, but there is no Lawrence/Cooper dance to the altar this time round. I think this film was made more to expand Russell's palette than to please a mass audience. It is an extension of the polyphony of American Hustle and its focus on illusion. People do not meet in Russell's films, they and their agendas collide. 

Russell is one of our best directors because of the quality of his writing, his utility with actors, and his handling of visual space. Adam McKay, in The Big Short, cannot visually express the threadbare nature of the hedge fund firms he wants to depict. Russell frames Joy, hoping to get her foot in the door of a media behemoth, at the very corner of a frame dominated by an ugly blue wall. She is dwarfed by corporate culture, but unbowed. Russell foregrounds too many themes early on and has too much variety of tone for coherence in Joy, but a pulse is discernable. (6/25/16)