Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry, 2015)

Elisabeth Moss in Queen of Earth

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Katherine Waterston, Patrick Fugit, Kentucker Audley, Keith Poulson, Kate Lynn Sheil, Craig Butta. Screenplay: Alex Ross Perry. Cinematography: Sean Price Williams. Production design: Anna Bak-Kvapil. Film editor: Robert Greene. Music: Keegan DeWitt. 

Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth is about a breakdown. And just by virtue of being about a breakdown, it's going to be a showcase for an actor, in this case Elisabeth Moss, who has made her career by playing young women on the brink. Moss is Catherine, an artist whom we see at the beginning of the film with her eye makeup smeared, so that it looks like she has two black eyes. She has just learned that her marriage is over, her husband (Kentucker Audley) having confessed to an affair with another woman. This blow is added to another, her father's suicide, so that she retreats to a house in the country with her best friend, Virginia (Katherine Waterston), to recover. But companionship and isolation don't help soothe Catherine's troubled psyche, especially when it's violated (from her point of view) by the presence of Rich (Patrick Fugit), a young man who's staying at a neighboring house and feels happy just wandering into theirs occasionally. It gets worse when Rich and Virginia start seeing more of each other. You can guess the rest. The problem with Queen of Earth is that it's not much more than a showcase for Moss, even though Waterston gets some good scenes too. Perry steadfastly refuses to give us much more about Catherine's background than what we can glean from conversations with Rich and Virginia: There are no revelatory scenes from her married life, and only hints at her relationship with her father, a celebrated artist and her mentor, and what drove him to suicide. The ending of the film, too, hints at more than it tells. So what we are left with is a chronicle of disintegration, some artful use of Keegan DeWitt's eerie minimalist score, and a demonstration that Moss is a fearlessly inventive performer. That may be enough for some viewers, but I wanted more. 

Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry, 2018)

Elisabeth Moss in Her Smell

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Dan Stevens, Cara Delevingne, Agyness Deyn, Gayle Rankin, Eric Stoltz, Ashley Benson, Dylan Gelula, Eka Darville, Amber Heard, Virginia Madsen. Screenplay: Alex Ross Perry. Cinematography: Sean Price Williams. Production design: Fletcher Chancey. Film editing: Robert Greene. Music: Keegan DeWitt.

Sometimes the opportunity to watch good actors act is almost the only thing a movie gives us. (That's true, I'm afraid, of a lot of the Meryl Streep oeuvre.) Certainly it's the chief thing the punk-titled Her Smell offers: Elisabeth Moss tearing up the screen as a self-destructive rock star. But we've seen the story before and Alex Ross Perry has nothing novel to give us in his version of it. Moss's Becky Something collapses at the peak of her career, leaving a broken marriage, an infant, and a mountain of lawsuits, including those by her producer, Howard Goodman (Eric Stoltz). She sobers up -- the film doesn't show how -- and retreats into seclusion. But the ever-forgiving Howard persuades her back for a final gig at a concert featuring the many acts he has produced over a 20-year career. Is she strong enough to make it? Her long-suffering bandmates and her ex-husband (Dan Stevens) have forgiven her trespasses, but they still have some doubts about her continued stability. She is something of a head case where it comes to New Agey guidance -- she still, for example, believes in the guru called Ya-Ema (whose real name, someone says, is Alvin), even though he has gone to prison for defrauding her and others. Yet the film has to end with a triumph, and it does. I have no ear for the music in Her Smell, so I can't comment on that other than to say it seemed mediocre, but Moss gives it her all, doing her own singing. But it's her acting we came to see, and that's exceptional.

The Square (Ruben Östlund, 2017)

Cast: Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, Terry Notary, Christopher Læssø, Lise Stephenson Engström, Lilianne Mardon, Marina Shiptjenko, Annica Liljeblad, Elijandro Edouard, Daniel Hallberg, Martin Sööder. Screenplay: Ruben Östlund. Cinematography: Fredrik Wenzel. Production design: Josefin Åsberg. Film editing: Jacob Secher Schulsinger. 

Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or winner The Square is a satire, but its objects are so many -- the art world, public relations, economic inequality, social inequity, smug political correctness, and so on -- that it tend to lose focus at moments when it should be sharpest. Added to that, Östlund indulges his absurdist side so often -- a chimpanzee wanders unexplained through an apartment, an interview is persistently interrupted by the shouts of a man with Tourette's -- that it's often hard to decide what's important in the film. The writer-director has been compared to Luis Buñuel, Michael Haneke, and Lars von Trier, but he lacks Buñuel's control, Haneke's cynicism, and von Trier's cruelty, so that any edge the satire might have is blunted. It's also two and a half hours long -- perhaps half an hour longer than it should have been. Still, it's a film of very funny moments, and a few disturbing ones, and the performances, especially Claes Bang as the museum director hoisted with many of his own petards and Elisabeth Moss as the American journalist who interviews and sleeps with him, are skillfully entertaining.  

Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

Lupita Nyong'o in Us

Cast: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon, Madison Curry, Ashley McKoy, Napiera Groves, Lon Gowan. Screenplay: Jordan Peele. Cinematography: Mike Gioulakis. Production design: Ruth De Jong. Film editing: Nicholas Monsour. Music: Michael Abels.

The Wilsons have met the enemy and they are them. Jordan Peele's Us is a darker film than his Oscar-winning Get Out (2017), more purely a horror film than that satiric horror-comedy, but it's just as assured in achieving its aims, which are largely to scare us while making us think. Peele has said that the movie's theme is the consequences of "privilege," and by making his central characters a well-to-do black family who suffer in part because of their assumptions about the world they feel entitled to, he gives the theme a sharp focus. There is a sci-fi explanation for the encounter of the Wilson family and others with their doppelgängers, who call themselves "the Tethered" and emerge from their subterranean hiding places to torment the privileged surface-dwellers, but it fades into the background of the battle for survival. Lupia Nyong'o gives a brilliant performance as Adelaide Wilson and her doppelgänger, Red, building toward a shocking moment of recognition at the film's end.