May December (Todd Haynes, 2023)

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in May December

Cast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Cory Michael Smith, Elizabeth Yu, Gabriel Chung, Piper Curda, D.W. Moffett, Lawrence Arancio. Screenplay: Samy Burch, Alex Mechanik. Cinematography: Christopher Blauvelt. Production design: Sam Lisenco. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. Music: Marcelo Zarvas. 

The high-concept way of looking at May December is to call it the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal filtered through Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966). But that's reducing the complexity of Todd Haynes's film to a formula, and there's nothing formulaic about Haynes's work, except that his films are often about the secret lives of middle-class women: the woman suffering from a mysterious illness in Safe (1995), the woman with a closeted gay husband who has an interracial affair in Far From Heaven (2002), the woman in a closeted lesbian relationship in Carol (2015). And that his films are sometimes homages to other directors, such as Douglas Sirk in Far From Heaven and Carol. But Haynes centers his work on the unknowability of his characters, who resist giving up their secrets. In May December the actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) tries to get to know everything she can about Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), the Mary Kay Letourneau analogue whom she is set to portray in a movie. She snoops into every aspect of Gracie's life, even to the extent of sleeping with Gracie's husband, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), with whom Gracie had the scandalous relationship when she was 36 and he was 13. But the truth eludes her about almost everything in Gracie's life, from how the relationship between a middle-aged woman and a teenager began to what the status of their relationship is now, 23 years later. (Haynes gives us scenes between Gracie and Joe that Elizabeth doesn't witness.) She finds that even the family gossip is unreliable. So although we get an image of Elizabeth mirroring Gracie, which evokes a similar image of the merging of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann in Persona, we find that it's only an image. At the end, we see Elizabeth playing Gracie as a scene is filmed, and not only is the Gracie she's performing not much like the one we've seen, but the scene requires multiple takes, each one different from the other. It's a subtle and intricate movie, perhaps as much Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) as it is Persona.    

Cookie's Fortune (Robert Altman, 1999)

Cookie's Fortune (Robert Altman, 1999)

Cast: Charles S. Dutton, Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Liv Tyler, Patricia Neal, Chris O'Donnell, Ned Beatty, Courtney B. Vance, Donald Moffat, Lyle Lovett, Danny Darst, Matt Malloy, Niecy Nash, Randall Mell, Rufus Thomas, Ruby Wilson. Screenplay: Anne Rapp. Cinematography: Toyomichi Kurita. Production design: Stephen Altman. Film editing: Abraham Lim. Music: David A. Stewart.

Cookie's Fortune is one of Robert Altman's lesser-known movies, but it's an eminently likable one, a comedy about that familiar literary trope, the dysfunctional Southern family. It's set in the picturesque small North Mississippi town of Holly Springs, which I know well because it was on the way from Oxford to Memphis back when there were no four-lane roads to travel on. In the film, it's a place with no apparent racial tensions: When a black man, Willis Richland (played by the great Charles S. Dutton), is arrested for the murder of elderly Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (a wonderful performance by Patricia Neal), the white sheriff refuses to believe he did it: "I've fished with him," he explains to the skeptical out-of-town forensics expert. Altman and screenwriter Anne Rapp simply choose not to make racial animosity a factor in their story, which is really about how difficult it is to keep secrets in a place as small and as nosy as Holly Springs and its like. Cookie's death is actually a suicide, but her niece Camille (Glenn Close), who discovers the body, chooses to cover it up -- actually eating the suicide note, which is not addressed to her -- because (a) the fact of suicide would cause a scandal in the town and (b) she stands to inherit as the next-of-kin to Cookie, assuming there's no will. (There is, but she doesn't find it in the cookie jar where it's hidden.) Camille enlists her rather slow-witted sister, Cora (Julianne Moore), in the cover-up. But suicide will out, as well as lots of other family secrets. All of this is taking place over Easter weekend, when Camille's production of Salome -- by Oscar Wilde and Camille Dixon, as the poster says -- is being staged in the local First Presbyterian Church, starring Cora in the title role. Cookie's Fortune is a charming film, carried along by a cast that Altman stands out of the way of and lets do their thing.

Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Heather Graham, Don Cheadle, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán, Joanna Gleason, Ricky Jay, Philip Baker Hall, Alfred Molina, Thomas Jane, Michael Penn. Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson. Cinematography: Robert Elswit. Production design: Bob Ziembicki. Film editing: Dylan Tichenor. Music: Michael Penn.

Paul Thomas Anderson's breakthrough film is a reworking at feature length of a short film he made in 1988, and it has the earmarks of what was to come from him as writer-director: complex narratives with large casts, featuring some of the same actors from film to film. It also launched Mark Wahlberg out of his career as a rapper and underwear model into success as a film actor and producer. Wahlberg plays a naïve layabout who gets into the porn business under the screen name Dirk Diggler. He is mentored by the filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) and by the actress Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), who acts as a kind of den mother for the various porn stars under Horner's aegis. The camaraderie of this little company is tested by the passage of time, as the feel-good 1970s turn into the anxious 1980s.

A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009)

A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009)

Cast: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode, Jon Kortajarena. Screenplay: Tom Ford, David Scearce, based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood. Cinematography: Edward Grau. Production design: Dan Bishop. Film editing: Joan Sobel. Music: Abel Korzeniowski.

Maggie's Plan (Rebecca Miller, 2015)

Travis Fimmel and Greta Gerwig in Maggie's Plan

Maggie: Greta Gerwig
John: Ethan Hawke
Georgette: Julianne Moore
Tony: Bill Hader
Felicia: Maya Rudolph
Guy: Travis Fimmel

Director: Rebecca Miller
Screenplay: Rebecca Miller
Based on a story by Karen Rinaldi
Cinematography: Sam Levy
Production design: Alexandra Schaller
Film editing: Sabine Hoffman
Music: Michael Rohatyn

Director-screenwriter Rebecca Miller keeps the comedy in Maggie's Plan in check, so that scenes that might have been hilarious wind up amusing, and scenes that might have been amusing take on an edge of melancholy. In the end, the film feels a bit overburdened by the necessity of working out the titular plan: a career woman who, in midlife crisis, decides to have a child with a sperm donor. That's the contemporary equivalent of the kind of formulaic dilemma that used to spin the plots of Doris Day's movies. As Maggie is going through her plan to inseminate herself with sperm donated by the agreeable, if somewhat oddball Guy, she manages to fall for a married man, John, who is at odds with his wife, Georgette. This leads to a comic scene that I don't think I've ever encountered in another film: Having just inseminated herself, Maggie hears the doorbell and crabwalks her way to answer it, only to have a rather messy accident when she stands up. It's John, of course, there to proclaim his love for her and to sleep with her. We jump ahead three years: John and Maggie are married and have a little girl. But as their marriage goes sour, and we realize that John and Georgette were really meant for each other after all, another plan is introduced: Georgette and Maggie plot to undo what has been done. Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, and Julianne Moore are marvelous performers, of course. But there's something off about Miller's touch, so that the humor is lost in the mechanisms of the plot. The ending kicker, however, in which Maggie realizes that Guy, and not John, is the actual father of the child, is nicely done.

Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)

Jason Franklin, Bette Henritze, and Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven

Cathy Whitaker: Julianne Moore
Frank Whitaker: Dennis Quaid
Raymond Deagan: Dennis Haysbert
Eleanor Fine: Patricia Clarkson
Dr. Bowman: James Rebhorn
Sibyl: Viola Davis
Mona Lauder: Celia Weston

Director: Todd Haynes
Screenplay: Todd Haynes
Cinematography: Edward Lachman
Production design: Mark Friedberg
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Costume design: Sandy Powell

Homage never turns into parody in Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, a film whose very title alludes to Douglas Sirk's great 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows. Haynes's film is set in 1957, only two years after Sirk's was released, but the sensibility that controls it is very much of an era almost half a century later. Haynes has the liberty to deal with matters that were taboo for American filmmakers in 1955, specifically miscegenation and homosexuality -- two terms that now have an antique sound to them. But his film has the same resonance as Sirk's: Both expose the raw wounds inflicted on people by social conventions, by the desire to "fit in" with what a given community establishes as its values. We like to think of the 1950s as the nadir of American conformity, a society on the brink of having its repressive qualities exploded by the rebellious 1960s, but although Haynes's film is a "period piece," I think it also provokes us to evaluate what restricts us today. We can pat ourselves on the back that we -- or at least the liberal-minded people in the circles in which I travel -- no longer recoil in horror at an interracial couple or find ourselves shocked, shocked that there are people who love others of their own sex. But just as Cathy Whitaker and her circle of friends retreat into an exclusive community, we too often find ourselves falling into a similar trap of smug self-righteousness that won't withstand the cold shock of reality -- like, for example, a presidential election gone awry. Cathy's blithe intellectualized conviction that all people are created equal is tested when she crosses the invisible line between the races. Her frustration at not being able to have a friendship with a black man -- i.e., someone other than the dull suburbanites that surround her -- is mirrored by her husband's inability to make his way out of the closet. But Cathy naively thinks that there's a "cure" for his problem, making it a lesser trial than her own, which she can blame on society. In the end, the beauty of Haynes's film is that he never yields to the temptation to impose a false liberation on his characters, an ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. Cathy sees Raymond off at the station, knowing that she'll never visit him in Baltimore. Frank is holed up in a hotel room with his lover instead of his spacious suburban home, his family life and probably his job now at an end. They are real enough characters that we want to know what will happen to them, but we suspect that there are no stirring triumphs ahead, only a struggle to rebuild damaged lives. Haynes and his team of cinematographer Edward Lachman, production designer Mark Friedman, costumer Sandy Powell, and composer Elmer Bernstein have crafted a 1950s world that's familiar to us from countless movies, but because of the shrewdness of the screenplay, the depth of the characterization, and the brilliance of the performers the film succeeds in making it real. There are stereotypes in the film, like Celia Weston's malicious gossip, but they are balanced by roles that could have fallen too easily into stereotypes -- Patricia Clarkson's best friend, James Rebhorn's doctor, Viola Davis's maid -- yet manage to develop dimensions of actuality. Far From Heaven also does something that very few films inspired by older ones do: It illuminates its source, so that it's possible to watch All That Heaven Allows again with a new understanding of Sirk's achievement.

Starz

The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1998)

Jeff Bridges and Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski

The Dude: Jeff Bridges
Walter Sobchak: John Goodman
Maude Lebowski: Julianne Moore
Donny Kerabatsos: Steve Buscemi
The Big Lebowski: David Huddleston
Brandt: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Bunny Lebowski: Tara Reid
Jesus Quintana: John Turturro
Knox Harrington: David Thewlis
The Stranger: Sam Elliott

Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Cinematography: Roger Deakins
Production design: Rick Heinrichs
Film editing: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke
Music: Carter Burwell

The Coen brothers' movies are usually more in the vein of Billy Wilder's acerbic satire than the affectionately loopy take on the varieties of human eccentricity you find in Preston Sturges's films. But The Big Lebowski somehow manages to have touches of both Wilder and Sturges, with the latter, I think, finally predominating. Or maybe it's just that I find that Sam Elliott's appearance, mustache in full bloom, at the end of the film casts the entire movie in a benign light. (Elliott is one of those actors who can make almost any movie better just by showing up in it.) But what also brings Sturges to mind is the special texture he gave to his films with the use of his stock company of character actors like William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Jimmy Conlin, and the rest. And the Coens have done something similar by bringing in their usual gang: John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, among others. They also make use of such great actors as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore in supporting roles, and how can you not love a film that gives David Thewlis a bit part in which he does almost nothing but giggle? Still, The Big Lebowski would be nothing without Jeff Bridges, our least appreciated great actor, finding the right note for the stoned and indomitable Dude. He takes a licking -- gets beat up, has his rug pissed on, gets beat up again and has his replacement rug snatched from him, has his car stolen, is threatened by German nihilists, finds his car but its windows get smashed, has a mickey slipped into his White Russian, gets arrested and beaten by the Malibu police, gets thrown out of a cab because he objects to the driver's playing the Eagles, goes home to find his apartment trashed, and finally sees what's left of his car set fire to -- but the Dude abides. And somehow in the middle of all this he finds time to go bowling with Walter and Donny and perform something like Three Stooges routines (only funny) with them. It has been labeled a "cult film," but it transcends that label. Everyone who loves it has their own favorite lines: Mine happen to be "That's the stress talking" and "Hey, careful, man, there's a beverage here!" I suppose I also have to mention the contributions of Roger Deakins's cinematography and Carter Burwell's score augmented by T Bone Burnett's invaluable work as "musical archivist," but then everyone covered themselves with glory by working on The Big Lebowski.

Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)

Clive Owen in Children of Men

Theo Faron: Clive Owen
Julian: Julianne Moore
Jasper: Michael Caine
Kee: Claire-Hope Ashitey
Luke: Chiwetel Ejiofor
Patric: Charlie Hunnam
Miriam: Pam Ferris
Syd: Peter Mullan
Nigel: Danny Huston
Marichka: Oana Pellea
Ian: Phaldut Sharma
Tomasz: Jacek Koman

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Screenplay: Alfonso Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
Based on a novel by P.D. James
Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Production design: Jim Clay, Geoffrey Kirkland
Film editing: Alfonso Cuarón, Alex Rodríguez
Music: John Taverner

George Lucas did something shrewd when he prefaced his first Star Wars movie in 1977 with the phrase "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." Deliberately echoing the formulaic "Once upon a time," Lucas emphasized the fairy-tale essence of his science-fiction fable. But other creators of science fiction haven't been so careful, or perhaps have been more insouciant. George Orwell's 1984 was written in 1948, and all Orwell did was set the novel in a year that inverted the last two digits of the year of its completion. He wasn't presenting a literal forecast of actual life in the year 1984, he was serving as a prophet of what was actually present and nascent in his own time: totalitarianism and pervasive invasion of privacy. So 32 years later, we still find an uneasy resonance of Orwell's book in our own times. Similarly, when Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark teamed to write the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968), they weren't necessarily predicting deep exploration of the solar system and encounters with mysterious monoliths -- though I rather suspect they were hoping for at least the first -- but rather speculating on the origins of human nature and consciousness and their relationship to artificial intelligence. Similarly, the dystopian world of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), populated by replicants and traversed by flying cars, is supposedly set in 2019 -- a year now close at hand -- but is also centrally concerned with the nature of humanity in a corporate capitalist society. What I'm getting at is that sometimes science fiction writers and filmmakers distance themselves as Lucas does from any notion that they're commenting on the "real world," but sometimes embrace a specific foreseeable date, with a view to making either a prediction of the way things will evolve or a comment on the problems of their own day. This is why I find Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men such a puzzling film. It gives us a dank dystopian London that resembles the dank dystopian Los Angeles of Blade Runner, and it sets it in a specific time, the year 2027, a world in which human beings stopped bearing children 18 years earlier: i.e., in the year 2009 -- only three years after the film was made. But unlike Blade Runner, it doesn't seem to be telling us anything specific about either a predicted future or the way we lived then. It's a very entertaining film, full of violent action and suspense, with some wizardly work by Oscar nominees cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and editors Cuarón and Alex Rodríguez. The way they handle the film's much-praised long-take sequences, aided by special effects to give the sense of complex action taking place in a single traveling shot, is exceptional -- anticipating Lubezki's work in making the entirety of Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014) seem to be a continuous take. There are also fine performances by Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Clare-Hope Ashitey, and the inevitably wonderful Michael Caine. But what is at the core of the film? Why does the failure of humankind to reproduce precipitate the worldwide cataclysm that the movie presents us? We have fretted so long about overpopulation that it would seem a blessing to have at least a pause in it, in which the world's scientists might take time to resolve the problem, or at least to discover the reason for the widespread infertility. Instead, we have a story that's largely about the mistreatment of immigrants. Why would non-reproducing immigrants, in a world with a declining population and therefore less pressure on natural resources, be a problem? Is it possible that this film, based on but radically altered from a novel by P.D. James, is promoting the extreme "pro-life" view, not only anti-abortion but also anti-contraception? Or is it simply that, as one character puts it, "a world without children's voices" is inevitably a terrible place? The film's failure to suggest a larger context for its action seems to me to by a weakness in an otherwise extraordinary film.

Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)

I remembered only two things about Magnolia from the first time I saw it: the rain of frogs and Tom Cruise's performance. Now it occurs to me that perhaps I should watch some of Anderson's other films again, especially There Will Be Blood (2007), about which I remember mainly the "milkshake" scene, because there is so much more good stuff going on in Magnolia than I remembered. It has that loose, semi-improvised quality that I have come to admire in Godard, while still lavishing all the resources that the backing of New Line Cinema could afford. On the other hand, I think that the abundance of resources may have undermined the film, because it made possible the two things I did remember, the special-effects frogs and the A-list presence of Cruise, at the expense of the detail work that comes to the fore in my rewatching. I'm talking especially about Philip Seymour Hoffman's touching performance as Jason Robards's nurse, John C. Reilly's naive cop, Melora Walters's scattered druggie, Philip Baker Hall's disintegrating game show host, and Julianne Moore's descent into hysteria. That said, I still appreciate both the frogs and Cruise, who lets out the madness that we had only glimpsed before in his work. The performance earned him an Oscar nomination, as over-the-top and supposedly out-of-character performances tend to do. (We would later, in the Katie Hughes era and as his commitment to Scientology came to the fore, come to wonder how out of character this manic Cruise really was.) I think the movie is too long (it runs 188 minutes), and that perhaps some of its segments exist only because of Anderson's commitment to the actors who made Boogie Nights (1997). I'm thinking here of William H. Macy's character, which seems to me like a dangling thread in the fabric of the film -- though it does result in a wonderful scene in which Macy and Henry Gibson compete for the attention of a hunky bartender (Craig Kvinsland). As for the frogs, I refuse to speculate on their "meaning," preferring the reaction of Stanley (Jeremy Blackman): "This happens. This is something that happens."

Still Alice (Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, 2014)

After four previous nominations, Julianne Moore was overdue for an Oscar. I just wish she had won for a more challenging film than Still Alice, a middlebrow, middle-of-the-road movie that unfortunately suggests a slicked-up power-cast version of a Lifetime problem drama. It goes without saying that, with her luminous natural style, Moore can act the hell out of anything she's given: When she played Sarah Palin in Game Change (Jay Roach, 2012) on HBO, she even made me forget Tina Fey's great caricature of that eminently caricaturable politician, and did it without resorting to caricature. What bothers me most about Still Alice is its choice of an affluent white professional, a linguistics professor with a physician husband (Alec Baldwin) and an attractive family, to carry the burden of what the movie has to say about Alzheimer's. Why couldn't the film have been about the effect of early-onset Alzheimer's on a black or Latino family, or someone faced with meeting the bills -- a waitress or a secretary or a factory worker, perhaps? The screenplay (by directors Glatzer and Westmoreland, from Lisa Genova's novel) even shamefully asserts at one point that the disease is particularly difficult for "educated" people. The movie has its good points, of course. Kristen Stewart, as Alice's younger daughter, is a revelation. I haven't seen any of the Twilight movies, but I gather that even those who have were startled by the skill and maturity of Stewart's performance. And the scene in which Alice discovers the suicide instructions left by herself before the disease had progressed is deftly handled, as the disease itself prevents Alice from remembering and following through on the instructions. The film also has some poignancy in the fact that director-screenwriter Glatzer, who was Westmoreland's husband, suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and died from the disease in 2015. But I think the use in Still Alice of excerpts from Tony Kushner's Angels in America, suggesting a parallel between Alzheimer's and AIDS, is unfortunate.