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.    

Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)

 

Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Frieda Pinto, Wes Bentley, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer, Imogen Poots, Ben Kingsley (voice). Screenplay: Terrence Malick. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: A.J. Edwards, Keith Fraase, Geoffrey Richman, Mark Yoshikawa. Music: Hanan Townshend.

Two films kept coming to mind as I watched Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups: Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975). Fellini's film because the journey of Malick's protagonist, Rick (Christian Bale), through the decadence of Hollywood and Las Vegas echoes that of Marcello's (Marchello Mastroianni) explorations of Rome. Tarkovsky's because Malick's exploration of Rick's life exhibits a similar steadfast refusal to adhere to a strict linear narrative. Most of us go to movies to have stories told to us. Our lives are a web of stories, told to us by history and religion and science and society, and most explicitly by art. We tend to prefer the old linear progression of storytelling: beginning, middle, end, or the familiar five-act structure of situation, complication, crisis, struggle, and resolution. But artists tend to get weary of the straightforward approach; they like to mix things up, to find new ways of storytelling. The modernist novelists like Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner eschewed linearity, and filmmakers have tried to take a similar course. They have the advantage of working with images as well as words. So Malick, like Tarkovsky and Fellini and others, experiments with editing and montage to meld images with language and gesture to probe the psychological depths of human character and experience. The problem with experimentation is that experiments fail more often than they succeed. Some think that Knight of Cups is a successful experiment, but most critics and much of the film's audience seem to disagree, to judge from, for example, a 5.6 rating on IMDb. Knight of Cups spent two years in post-production and there are four credited film editors, which suggests that Malick over-reached himself. For me, what was lost in the process of making the film was a clarity of vision. Granted, the lives of human beings are messy, loose-ended things, but what do we depend on artists to do but try to make sense of them. I think Malick lost sight of his protagonist, Rick, in trying to interpret his life and loves through the film's odd amalgamation of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the Major Arcana of the tarot pack and then overlaying it with a collage of images provided by Emmanuel Lubezki's camera. We glimpse Rick through filters, grasping for moments that will resolve into something substantial about him, his problems with his family and with women. And for all the casting of fine actors like Bale and Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, the production negates their attempts to create characters. In fact, their starriness works against them: Instead of being drawn into the character of Rick or Nancy or Elizabeth, we're removed from them by the familiarity of the actor playing them. I understand what admirers of the film like Matt Zoller Seitz are saying when they proclaim, "The sheer freedom of it is intoxicating if you meet the film on its own level, and accept that it's unfinished, open-ended, by design, because it's at least partly concerned with the impossibility of imposing meaningful order on experience, whether through religion, occult symbolism, mass-produced images and stories, or family lore." But I wonder if that's enough to make an experiment successful. I came away from Knight of Cups knowing nothing more about its characters than I did before I met them.

Thor: Love and Thunder (Taika Waititi, 2022)

 Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi, Russell Crowe, Jaimie Alexander, Idris Elba, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Sean Gunn, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper. Screenplay: Taika Waititi, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. Cinematography: Barry Baz Idoine. Production design: Nigel Phelps. Film editing: Peter S. Elliott Tim Roche, Matthew Schmidt, Jennifer Vecchiarello. Music: Michael Giacchino, Nami Melumad. 

Critics were kind of meh about Thor: Love and Thunder, but I found it one of the less wearying of the entries in the superhero comic book sweepstakes. Aside from the unnecessary episode with the Guardians of the Galaxy, it zips along through the narrative challenges and nicely balances the love with the thunder. Chris Hemsworth is one of the most engaging actors stuck in the action genre, especially when Taika Waititi is giving him opportunities to play the goof. Christian Bale turns Gorr into one of the more complex Marvel villains, and it’s good to see Russell Crowe loosen up and have a ball playing Zeus. I have mixed feelings about Natalie Portman’s performance as Jane: She does a good job playing the diminutive foil to Thor, but I never felt the necessary chemistry in their love affair. Thor seems more enamored of Mjolnir than he does of Jane. I don’t know why Waititi needed to reprise the gag of the actors – Luke Hemsworth, Matt Damon, and Sam Neill – playing Thor, Loki, and Odin, this time adding Melissa McCarthy as Hela; it only overloads an already bloated excursion into Thor World. 

The Death & Life of John F. Donovan (Xavier Dolan, 2018)

Kit Harington and Chris Zylka in The Death and Life of John F. Donovan

Cast: Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jacob Tremblay, Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Ben Schnetzer, Thandie Newton, Jared Keeso, Chris Zylka, Amara Karan, Emily Hampshire, Michael Gambon. Screenplay: Xavier Dolan, Jacob Tierney. Cinematography: André Turpin. Production design: Anne Pritchard, Colombe Raby. Film editing: Mathieu Denis, Xavier Dolan. Music: Gabriel Yared.

I had read some of the reviews, noted the abysmal 21% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, and knew that The Death & Life of John F. Donovan had barely been released in the United States. But how bad could a movie that featured three best actress Oscar winners as well as such celebrated performers as Thandie Newton and Michael Gambon really be? Maybe this was a case of a film that simply went over people's heads and will be rediscovered in a few years to become a cult film. Well, no. This is not an unappreciated gem. It's a mess of a movie about the perils of celebrity, with an embarrassingly off-the-mark treatment of life in the closet, and some uncomfortable echoes of real celebrity secret lives that only add queasiness to the mix. The denouement of the film is sheer hackery: There are two Big Speeches, one by Kathy Bates and the other by Gambon (in a kind of wise old man ex machina appearance), that are supposed somehow to resolve the film's theme, but are only anti-climactic. Is it well-acted? Yes. Kit Harington hasn't quite escaped the aura of Jon Snow in the film, partly because the title role calls on him to be a hugely successful TV star, but he has a looseness and natural delivery that he was never allowed in the fantasy confines of Game of Thrones. Jacob Tremblay, as the young, starstruck fan who becomes a pen pal with Donovan, shows that he really is the capable child actor that Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015) suggested he was. Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon do what they can with badly written roles. It's said that writer-director Xavier Dolan's original cut of the film was four hours long, and that the trimming to the current two-hour length involved jettisoning the work of yet another major actress, Jessica Chastain, so it's possible that some of the incoherence of the film stems from desperate editing. But nothing about the movie really makes me want to watch the director's original cut.

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

Benjamin Millepied and Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder. Screenplay: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: Thérèse DePrez. Film editing: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Clint Mansell.

Overheated melodrama with horror movie elements that seems determined to make ballet into more of a psychological and physical trial by torture than is entirely plausible. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her role as the tormented dancer, and she gets good support from Mila Kunis as her potential rival and Barbara Hershey as her mother. But I found myself laughing at its excesses when I think director Darren Aronofsky, over the top as usual, meant for me to shudder at them.

Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016)

Natalie Portman and Billy Crudup in Jackie

Jackie Kennedy: Natalie Portman
Bobby Kennedy: Peter Sarsgaard
Nancy Tuckerman: Greta Gerwig
The Journalist: Billy Crudup
The Priest: John Hurt
Bill Walton: Richard E. Grant
John F. Kennedy: Caspar Phillipson
Lyndon B. Johnson: John Carroll Lynch
Lady Bird Johnson: Beth Grant
Jack Valenti: Max Casella

Director: Pablo Larraín
Screenplay: Noah Oppenheim
Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine
Production design: Jean Rabasse
Costume design: Madeline Fontaine
Music: Mica Levi

I will give the benefit of the doubt to director Pablo Larraín (born in Chile in 1976) and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (born in 1978) and assume that they didn't know what a thudding sentimental cliché ending Jackie with a reprise of the title song from Lerner and Loewe's musical Camelot would seem to those of us who actually lived through the Kennedy years and experienced the assassination and extended period of mourning that followed. Back then, you couldn't avoid Camelot allusions, even when we were fully aware of the shortcomings of JFK and the Cold War mentality, especially that of his "best and brightest" who were about to lead us into the Vietnam quagmire. Even as early as June 1964, reporter Tom Wicker was trying to evoke a less sentimental vision in his Esquire piece titled "Kennedy Without Tears." This absence of real historical context is a blemish on a well-meaning and sometimes very good film. The very good part is the heroic effort of Natalie Portman to bring together a coherent portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, a woman undone by grief but struggling to keep a family and a legacy together. The best scenes in the film are those in which Jackie, briefly obsessed with the history of American political assassination, waffles between giving JFK a funeral that would rival Abraham Lincoln's and her fears that her husband's assassination might be part of a larger plot. She chooses a grand procession in which she, members of the administration, and foreign dignitaries would walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the church. Then, when Lee Harvey Oswald is gunned down, she calls the procession off and rages at her brother-in-law Bobby for having kept the news of Oswald's murder from her while she and her two small children were making a vulnerable public appearance.  But then she changes her mind again, after LBJ's assistant, Jack Valenti, has already informed the foreign dignitaries, including the very difficult Charles De Gaulle, that there will be a motorcade instead of a walk. "I will march with Jack, alone if necessary," she tells Valenti. If the rest of Jackie were as good as these scenes, it would be a major achievement. Unfortunately, it's blurred by an unnecessary frame story in which she is interviewed by a journalist and exercises an iron-willed control over what he will print, even as she spills the most intimate details of her experiences to him -- a way of launching flashbacks. There are too many lugubrious moments, scenes of Jackie wandering alone through the White House. There's also a rather sententious conversation with a priest in which he and Jackie flirt with existentialist concepts of the meaning of life and death -- even John Hurt, in one of his last film appearances, can't quite bring this one off. There's some miscasting, especially Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy, whom he neither looks nor acts like. But throughout it all, Portman skillfully evokes Jackie Kennedy in voice and manner without mimicry. I have to credit the producers for making a film with a powerful lead role for a woman, but Jackie Kennedy was a more interesting person than this segment of her life suggests. I'd like to see a fuller biopic, perhaps a TV miniseries, that takes in her reaction to her husband's well-known infidelities and carries her through the controversial marriage to Aristotle Onassis and the rest of the Kennedy tragedies. I'll bet Portman could play the hell out of the rest of Jackie Kennedy's life.

V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, 2005)

I'm not sure how Guy Fawkes became a hero and blowing up the Houses of Parliament an admirable political act, but V for Vendetta certainly seems to endorse both of them. (The latter seems especially odd in a movie made only four years after the 9/11 attacks.) I haven't read the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, so I can't comment on the fidelity or lack of it to the source, which is just as well. But the film bears the stamp of most adaptations from graphic novel/comic book sources: an assumption that the viewer will accept the movie's milieu on its own terms, without trying to haul in real-world plausibility. It's easier to do that if you have a cast capable of playing almost anything from Shakespeare to soap opera. So the presence of actors like Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry, John Hurt, Tim Piggott-Smith, Rupert Graves, and Sinéad Cusack goes a long way to keeping V for Vendetta alive. I particularly liked Roger Allam as a rabble-rousing news commentator in the mold of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. I was less impressed with Natalie Portman, whose British accent came and went fitfully and who generally seemed at sea. It may be that the script by Andy and Lana Wachowski called for her character, Evey, to be off-balance through most of the film, but I failed to connect with her performance, which since she is meant to be the audience's point-of-view character is something of a fatal flaw.