First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018)

First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018)

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Patrick Fugit, Christopher Abbott, Ciarán Hinds, Olivia Hamilton, Pablo Schreiber, Shea Whigham, Lukas Haas, Ethan Embry, Brian D'Arcy James. Screenplay: Josh Singer, based on a book by James R. Hansen. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Nathan Crowley. Film editing: Tom Cross. Music: Justin Hurwitz.

Sometime in the middle of First Man, I found myself wishing that Buzz Aldrin had been the first person to set foot on the moon. Not that Neil Armstrong didn't deserve the honor -- Damien Chazelle's movie makes us certain that he had the right stuff -- but because Armstrong, as conceived by screenwriter Josh Singer and played by Ryan Gosling, is so remote, chilly, and uptight. Aldrin at least had a sense of humor and was a bit of a maverick, but all we get of Armstrong is a grim determination, a sense of duty that the job was paramount and had to be suffered through at the expense of human tenderness. Gosling's Armstrong is death-haunted, emotionally frozen by the deaths of his young daughter and of his fellow pilots and astronauts. We don't connect with him except through his wife, Janet, played by Claire Foy, who endures her husband's remoteness but is powerless to get him to snap out of it. The result is a somewhat depressing treatment of heroism as a kind of dead end, which seems to fit the facts of Armstrong's rather colorless and uneventful later life, and also suggests why he and Janet separated in 1990 and divorced four years later. It's a well-made movie but a curiously unsettling one.

Game Night (John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, 2018)

Game Night (John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, 2018)

Cast: Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler, Sharon Horgan, Billy Magnussen, Lamorne Morris, Kylie Bunbury, Jesse Plemons. Screenplay: Mark Perez. Cinematography: Barry Peterson. Production design: Michael Corenblith. Film editing: David Egan, Jamie Gross, Gregory Plotkin. Music: Cliff Martinez.

Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016)

Sometimes, to appreciate how good a film is you have to imagine how bad it could have been. The conventional way of telling a story is beginning-middle-end, cause-effect-remedy, disease-diagnosis-cure. But if Kenneth Lonergan had taken that strict linear approach in crafting Manchester by the Sea, we would have been deprived of the element of discovery that makes it such a powerful film. To put it this way, Lonergan could have opened with the calamitous event that so blights the life of Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), and then shown the breakup with his wife, Randi (Michelle Williams); his efforts to lose himself in menial work as a handyman/custodian in Boston; the death of his brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), and Lee's return to Manchester; the discovery that Joe has made him guardian of Joe's son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), and the subsequent attempts to arrange his life around that fact. But by postponing the revelation of the terrible event in Lee's life, placing it in a flashback, Lonergan makes it what it has to be: the very center of the film. We want to know what is troubling Lee, why he's so blocked emotionally, and Lonergan makes us wait for the answer, to speculate what it might be. When the revelation comes that he accidentally killed his small children, it probably fulfills what many of us had guessed it might be, so it doesn't come as a brutal surprise but as an elucidation. To put it at the start of the film, including Lee's aborted attempt at suicide, would have turned the film into a sentimental slog toward redemption. But by first showing us the ways in which Lee has responded by hiding away or lashing out at comforters or the curious -- by putting the middle before the beginning, the effect before the cause -- Lonergan focuses on Lee's continuing everyday pain, not on the enormity of what caused it. And then there's the ending: poignant, inconclusive, but at least somewhat hopeful. A conventional ending that provided balm for the pain, a cure for the disease, would have been phony. We may want the film to end with Lee finding some consolation like that of new fatherhood with Patrick, a rapprochement with Randi, even some kind of successful therapy or -- like Elise (Gretchen Mol), Joe's druggie ex-wife and Patrick's strayed mother -- submission into religious faith, but we would be satisfying our desire for a tidy narrative, not Lee's deep needs. Lonergan handles the traditional religious "cure" brilliantly, showing Patrick's discomfort at the evangelical piety of Elise and her new husband, Jeffrey (Matthew Broderick), and his complaint to Lee that Jeffrey is "Christian." Lee reminds him that they're Christians too -- "Catholics are Christians" -- ironically widening the gulf between Patrick and his mother and her husband. Lee's Catholicism is steeped in guilt, an emotion he knows too well and cannot imagine a life without. The strength of a film like Manchester by the Sea lies in its acknowledgment that life is too shaggy, bristly, and spiky to be neatly wrapped up with cures and fixes for whatever ails it.

Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)

With her Mamie Eisenhower bangs and heart-shaped face, Rooney Mara in Carol becomes the reincarnation of such '50s icons as Audrey Hepburn, Jean Simmons, and Maggie McNamara -- particularly the McNamara of The Moon Is Blue (Otto Preminger, 1953), that once-scandalous play and movie about a young woman who defies convention by talking openly about sex while retaining her virginity. It's just coincidence that Carol is set at the end of 1952 and into 1953, the year of the release of The Moon Is Blue, but the juxtaposition of McNamara's Patty O'Neill and Mara's Therese Belivet seems to me appropriate because the 1950s have become such a touchstone for examining our attitudes toward sex. Director Todd Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, adapting a novel by Patricia Highsmith, have done an exemplary job in Carol of not tilting the emphasis toward Grease-style caricature or Mad Men-style satire of the era, or exploiting the same-sex relationship in the film for sensationalism or statement-making. Carol is a story about people in relationships, clear-sightedly viewed in a way that Therese herself would endorse. After asking her boyfriend Richard (Jake Lacy) if he's ever been in love with a boy and receiving a shocked reply that he's only "heard of people like that," Therese replies, "I don't mean people like that. I just mean two people who fall in love with each other." It's this matter-of-factness that the film tries to maintain throughout its story of Therese and Carol (Cate Blanchett), the well-to-do wife in a failing marriage. That the film is set in the 1950s, when cracks were showing in the conventional attitudes toward both marriage and homosexuality, gives piquancy to their relationship, but it doesn't limit it. The story could be (and probably is) playing itself out today in various combinations of sexual identity. The film works in large part because of the steadiness of Haynes at the helm, with two extraordinary actresses at the center and beautiful support from Sarah Paulson as Abby, Carol's ex-lover, and Kyle Chandler (one of those largely unsung actors like the late Bill Paxton who make almost everything they appear in better) as Carol's husband, the hard-edged Harge Aird. The sonic texture of the 1950s is splendidly provided by Carter Burwell's score and a selection of classic popular music by artists like Woody Herman, Georgia Gibbs, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, Patti Page, Jo Stafford, and Billie Holiday.

The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

Leonardo DiCaprio has replaced Robert De Niro as Martin Scorsese's go-to leading man, but he has yet to make his Raging Bull (1980) or Taxi Driver (1976), which many people -- including me -- think of as the peak achievements of both Scorsese and De Niro. The Wolf of Wall Street comes close to being DiCaprio's GoodFellas (1990). Both movies are based on true stories that illuminate the dark side of American experience: In the case of GoodFellas, the mob, and for Wolf, the unholy pursuit of wealth in the stock market. Both are in large part black comedies, full of sex and drugs, and both end in an inevitable downfall. And both have been criticized for excessively glamorizing the lifestyles of their protagonists. Terence Winter's adaptation of the memoir of Wall Street fraudster Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) spares no excess in depicting a life corrupted by unchecked greed, and yet neither Winter nor Scorsese seems able to put the course of Belfort's corruption into plausible shape, the way Scorsese and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi made Henry Hill's rise and fall plausible in GoodFellas. It's a flamboyant film, with entertaining and sometimes frightening performances by DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Jon Bernthal, and Jean Dujardin, but the film often seems to be carried away with its own determination to get away with as much outrageous behavior and language as possible. I would have welcomed a little less Jordan Belfort and a little more Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler), who was based on Gregory Coleman, the FBI agent who finally managed to bring Belfort down. But as in GoodFellas, the emphasis is less on the law than on the disorder.