A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024)

Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Dan Vogler, Eriko Hatsune, Scoot McNairy, Boyd Holbrook, Will Harrison, Norbert Leo Butz, David Alan Basche. Screenplay: James Mangold, Jay Cocks, based on a book by Elijah Wald. Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael. Production design: François Audouy. Film editing: Andrew Buckland, Scott Morris. 

Timothée Chalamet's fine, inward portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown put me in mind of T.S. Eliot's proclamation that poetry "is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." Eliot went on to add, "only those who have personality and emotions know what it is to want to escape from those things." Chalamet's Dylan is so elusive that others who encounter him are able to find what they want in him. The dying Woody Guthrie (Scott McNairy) finds in him a kind of afterlife or reincarnation. Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) sees Dylan as the future of his kind of modern folk music. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) learns from him that her music needs more bite and bitterness. Elle Fanning's Sylvie Russo (based on Suze Rotolo) discovers an opportunity to nurture, to find a direction in life for a lost lamb. Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) embraces him as a fellow outlaw, someone to "track mud on the carpet." The music business types, of course, see a halo of dollar bills around him. And the film ends with the folkies at Newport denouncing him as Judas. It's to Chalamet's credit that he can play the role so that Dylan looks like a mirror image, a mentor, a companion, a project, or a traitor at any turn. Still, A Complete Unknown is such a conventional biopic that it has to be compared unfavorably to Todd Haynes's more unconventional approach to Dylan, I'm Not There (2007), which employed six very different actors to suggest his multifaceted nature. For in the end, it's the music that matters, not the man. 

Ford v Ferrari (James Mangold, 2019)

Matt Damon and Christian Bale in Ford v Ferrari

Cast: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Jon Bernthal, Catriona Balfe, Josh Lucas, Noah Jupe, Tracy Letts, Remo Girone, Ray McKinnon, JJ Feild. Screenplay: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, Jason Keller. Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael. Production design: François Audouy. Film editing: Andrew Buckland, Michael McCusker, Dick Westervelt. Music: Marco Beltrami, Buck Sanders.

They don't make 'em like they used to do, except when they do, and with Ford v Ferrari they did. This story about spunky underdogs taking on the big boys of the racing world could have been made in the 1930s by Raoul Walsh or Henry Hathaway or any capable action movie director. The difference then would have been that the bad guys would just have been crooks and cheats, whereas in Ford v Ferrari they are bureaucrats, corporate suits stifling innovation and initiative. Even though the title suggests an international rivalry, the key conflict pits "real" racers like Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale) against the bean-counters and marketing M.B.A.s like Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), sucking up to the boss, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts). Granted, there is an international rivalry at work, with the Ford Motor Co. trying to recapture some of its old eminence by taking on Ferrari, the Italian auto manufacturer that has for years dominated the prestigious 24-hour road race at Le Mans. What spurs this rivalry is a loss of face by Ford after being finessed out of the acquisition of Ferrari and then being insulted by Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) himself. Shelby and Miles have not always been on the best of terms -- Miles once threw a wrench at Shelby, and the two have a fistfight in mid-film -- but they get sucked into the Ford vs. Ferrari competition because they both love auto racing and are tempted by the opportunity to build the world's greatest race car. Naturally, it all ends in triumph, but not in the way an old-fashioned movie would: The bureaucrats manage to tarnish their victory. The movie doesn't quite avoid the old clichés: Miles has the usual cute kid and loving wife, with Catriona Balfe taking on the latter role, an updated version of June Allyson dutifully supporting James Stewart in all those 1950s movies. Still, Balfe plays it well, particularly in the scene in which she drives the family station wagon the way her husband drives his race cars, scaring some sense into him. The leads, too, are fine. Damon gives Shelby substance, a taciturn cunning, when he's dealing with the volatile Miles or with the stodgy suits. Bale's Miles has a lean and hungry look that suggests his unpredictability, but he manages to make the character human in his scenes with Balfe and Noah Jupe as their son, Peter. One other difference from the old movies: A director like Walsh or Hathaway would have brought the film in at a tidy 90 minutes or so. James Mangold lets Ford v Ferrari sprawl over 152 minutes, with some inevitable sagging in between the snazzily edited racing scenes.

Logan (James Mangold, 2017)

Dafne Keen and Hugh Jackman in Logan

Logan / X-24: Hugh Jackman
Charles Xavier: Patrick Stewart
Laura: Dafne Keen
Pierce: Boyd Holbrook
Caliban: Stephen Merchant
Gabriela: Elizabeth Rodriguez
Dr. Rice: Richard E. Grant
Will Munson: Eriq La Salle
Kathryn Munson: Elise Neal
Nate Munson: Quincy Fouse

Director: James Mangold
Screenplay: James Mangold, Scott Frank, Michael Green
Cinematography: John Mathieson
Production design: François Audouy
Film editing: Michael McCusker, Dirk Westervelt
Music: Marco Beltrami

James Mangold knows something that James Cameron figured out on the first two Terminator movies and George Miller on the Mad Max series: that if you're putting together a big action movie with superheroes and sci-fi concepts, it's best that you keep the human scale in mind. That's the secret of Logan's success -- and to my mind the undoing of most of the blockbuster comic book movies, even those in the Marvel X-Men series of which Logan is a part. Hugh Jackman's Logan/Wolverine character is a known quantity, and his performances have stood out through most of the films in which he appears. But Logan has never been a particularly human-scale figure: His adamantium superstructure makes him virtually invincible. But he has a troubled past, and in the beginning of Logan he's also physically ill, making him snarlier but also more humanly vulnerable than ever. Holed up in Mexico with the last of the X-Men, Charles Xavier and Caliban, he's just trying to get by, procuring medicine for the nonagenarian Xavier, who has occasional seizures that, because of his telekinetic powers, endanger everyone around him. All of this is the usual fantastic stuff of the Marvel movies, but the humanizing of Logan takes place when he's faced with saving a young mutant named Laura, who has been created in a laboratory using some of Logan's own DNA. And so the story of the declining Logan, the dying Xavier, and the imperiled Laura develops a human emotional content that actually becomes quite touching -- especially as Logan is not at first inclined to acknowledge Laura as essentially his own daughter. Plot complications ensue because of the attempts of the biotech company that created Laura and a handful of other synthetic mutants, who have escaped captivity, to reclaim them by any means necessary. The slam-bang action stuff is well-done but the whole thing would be just routine without the fine performances of Jackman and Patrick Stewart, and especially young Dafne Keen, whose fiercely determined Laura reminded me of Millie Bobby Brown's work as Eleven on the series Stranger Things. This is evidently a great time for very young actresses.