Argylle (Matthew Vaughn, 2024)

Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O'Hara, Henry Cavill, John Cena, Dua Lipa, Samuel L. Jackson, Ariana DeBose, Sofia Boutella, Richard E. Grant. Screenplay: Jason Fuchs. Cinematography: George Richmond. Production design: Russell De Rozario, Daniel Taylor, Film editing: Col Goudie, Tom Harrison-Read, Lee Smith. Music: Lorne Balfe. 

A time- and talent-wasting spy spoof that was a perhaps well-deserved box office flop (which probably means it will emerge as a cult film someday), Argylle features Bryce Dallas Howard as Elly Conway, the author of a series of spy thrillers that have a way of predicting actual occurrences in the world of secret intelligence. She's tipped off to the peril this puts her in by Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell), a real-life espionage agent, and a manic series of revelations and counter-revelations ensues. Henry Cavill plays the title character, a James Bond clone with a flat-top haircut that would have offended Ian Fleming's Bond as much as a stirred martini. 

Vice (Adam McKay, 2018)

 

Vice (Adam McKay, 2018)

Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Alison Pill, Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk, LisaGay Hamilton, Jesse Plemons, Bill Camp, Don McManus, Lily Rabe, Shea Whigham, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Tyler Perry. Screenplay: Adam McKay. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: Patrice Vermette. Film editing: Hank Corwin. Music: Nicholas Britell.

Vice got me to thinking that maybe Hannah Arendt got it wrong: It’s not the banality of evil but the mediocrity of evil. Dick Cheney, at least as Adam McKay’s screenplay and Christian Bale’s performance present him, was initially a vehicle for the varying ambitions of others: his wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), and George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell). Cheney was like a liquid that flowed into the channels they provided him, helping create the Republican Party that would be shaped into its current form by Fox News and Donald Trump. Bale portrays Cheney as the silent menace we know from newsreels, ready to snap at any plausible idea, from redefining presidential power to making war on Saddam Hussein to sanctioning torture. But he begins as something of a naïf, not even sure which party he belongs to, and even asking Rumsfeld what the Republicans are for, which provokes gales of laughter from Rumsfeld. The problem with McKay’s film, however, is that despite Bale’s remarkable performance, Vice is overlong and confused, wavering from straight behind-the-headlines dramatization to satiric bits like a waiter (a cameo by Alfred Molina) serving up Republican agenda items to a tableful of fat cats. The narrative is chopped up with flashbacks and time jumps, and even includes an occasional narrator named Kurt (Jesse Plemons), whose identity is withheld for most of the film to provide a small but essentially pointless surprise. There’s even a bit in the middle of the final credits, in which a contemporary focus group comes to blows over the film's “political bias.” I share McKay’s obvious bias, but I wish he didn’t wear it so proudly.

Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

Roman Griffin Davis, Taika Waititi, and Scarlett Johansson in Jojo Rabbit

Cast: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Scarlett Johansson, Taika Waititi, Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Alfie Allen, Stephen Merchant, Archie Yates. Screenplay: Taika Waititi, based on a novel by Christine Leunens. Cinematography: Mihai Malaimare Jr. Production design: Ra Vincent. Film editing: Tom Eagles. Music: Michael Giacchino. 

Taika Waititi's brilliant, queasy comedy Jojo Rabbit might be seen as a parody of the feel-good movie -- the ability to tack a happy ending on even a story about Nazism. Not that the end of Jojo Rabbit is, objectively regarded, happy. We're left with Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) and Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) as street orphans in a defeated Germany. But they're dancing, which is what Elsa wanted to do when the war ended, and that kind of makes everything right. Fortunately, our awareness that the film is a fantasia on dark themes, belonging in that category of movies like Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) that fuse fairy tale elements and a childlike vision with real world horrors, is set early on, when we discover that Jojo has an imaginary friend, none other than Adolf Hitler (Waititi). And that the brutality of Nazis is being caricatured by actors like Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson. Jojo is a naïf in a hard and horrible world, which we see through his innocent eyes, just as we see Wonderland (a place of lunacy and cruelty) through the innocent eyes of Alice. It takes nothing away from the fine performances of young Davis and McKenzie, or from the darkly hilarious ones of Waititi, Rockwell, and Wilson, to say that the heart of the film, giving a performance that took my breath away, was Scarlett Johansson, who made beautiful sense of a role that shouldn't have worked at all: Jojo's mother, the secret resistance worker who tolerates her son's adulation of the Nazis while at the same time hiding a young Jewish girl in the walls of their house. We see her through three distinct points of view: Jojo's, Elsa's, and another that gradually becomes our own, and the outcome of her story, when these points of view finally merge, is heartbreaking even in the midst of the caricature of the real world that the film presents. The audacity of Waititi's movie has been likened to that of Life Is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1999), a movie I hated, so I can understand the critics who thought Jojo Rabbit went too far, that it didn't cohere, but I can't entirely agree.  

Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)

Sam Rockwell in Moon

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Dominique McElligott, Rosie Shaw, Adrienne Shaw, Kaya Scodelario, Benedict Wong, Matt Berry, voice of Kevin Spacey. Screenplay: Duncan Jones, Nathan Parker. Cinematography: Gary Shaw. Production design: Tony Noble. Film editing: Nicolas Gaster. Music: Clint Mansell. 

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a mining engineer at the end of a three-year stint as the solitary maintenance man at an outpost on the dark side of the moon. His only companion is a robot called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), who tends to his every need. The energy corporation for which he works has promised to return him to his wife and small child on Earth when his shift is over, but he has been unable to communicate directly with his family, only receiving recorded messages. Then an accident happens, and the truth about who Sam Bell is comes out. There's an ironic happy ending to the film: "Sam" gets returned to Earth, where he exposes corporate wrongdoing, but the last word is uttered by a Rush Limbaughesque talk show host: "You know what? He's one of two things. He's a wacko or he's an illegal immigrant. Either way, they need to lock him up!" Moon might have been a little better if this satiric note had played throughout the film, but it's solid sci-fi that doesn't depend on flashy CGI and it features a compelling performance by Rockwell.  

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh, 2017)

Sam Rockwell, Frances McDormand, and Zeljko Ivanek in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Mildred Hayes: Frances McDormand
Bill Willoughby: Woody Harrelson
Jason Dixon: Sam Rockwell
Anne Willoughby: Abbie Cornish
Robbie Hayes: Lucas Hedges
Desk Sergeant: Zeljko Ivanek
Red Welby: Caleb Landry Jones
Chief Abercrombie: Clarke Peters
Charlie Hayes: John Hawkes
James: Peter Dinklage
Momma Dixon: Sandy Martin

Director: Martin McDonagh
Screenplay: Martin McDonagh
Cinematography: Ben Davis
Production design: Inbal Weinberg
Film editing: Jon Gregory
Music: Carter Burwell

Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell got the Oscars they deserved: Mildred Hayes's sour persistence and Jason Dixon's stupidity make them just short of caricatures; they needed the nuances provided by McDormand and Rockwell to come to any semblance of life. But the performer who gives Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri the grounding it needs is Woody Harrelson, one of those actors, like John Goodman or the late Bill Paxton, whose presence in the cast could make any movie just a little bit better. Chief Willoughby, the butt of Mildred's billboards, is not the dumb small-town police chief that we (and of course Mildred) first believe him to be. He's a more complex figure, who even achieves a measure of tragic grandeur with his suicide, carefully leaving a note on the hood he puts over his face to tell his wife not to remove it but to leave that to the police, and then leaving behind notes for his nemesis, Mildred, and for Dixon ("I'm dead now, sorry about that") that set the remainder of the film in motion. He gives McDonagh's acerbic screenplay a bit of warmth, though maybe not enough: I found Three Billboards a less satisfying film than the wonderful In Bruges (2008). But like that film, it has a fascinating texture provided by a supporting cast full of skillful players: Lucas Hedges as Mildred's somewhat exasperated son; Zeljko Ivanek as the desk sergeant trying to bring order out of the office chaos ("You do not allow a member of the public to call you a fuckhead in the station house"); Caleb Landry Jones as the advertising manager who gets the brunt of the town's protests and is tossed out of a window by Dixon; Clarke Peters as the level-headed new chief who manages to restore order after Willoughby's death; John Hawkes as Mildred's hair-trigger ex-husband encumbered with an air-headed girlfriend; Peter Dinklage as Mildred's suitor bearing up under constant reminders that he's a "midget"; and Sandy Martin as Dixon's demanding racist mother. There are also scenes that come out of nowhere, as when Mildred, tending the flowers at her billboards, carries on a tender, one-sided conversation with a deer that has wandered into the field and is watching her. In the runup to the Oscars, when it was a contender for best picture, Three Billboards encountered some criticism for not taking more seriously Dixon's treatment of black people, especially since the real town of Ferguson is in the same state as the fictional Ebbing. There's some justice to the charge that McDonagh is being insensitive, but satire is always insensitive. It's not a great film, I think, but maybe that judgment is premature. As Mildred says, "I guess we can decide along the way."

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Both the title and the film are overlong, but it's hard to see how either of them could have been trimmed. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a lingering, subtle meditation on the nature of celebrity set in an era long before the arrival of social media thrust celebrities like Donald Trump into our daily lives. Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck give memorable performances in their respective title roles -- Affleck received a supporting actor Oscar nomination, although his role is surely larger than Pitt's -- and they're well supported by Sam Shepard as Frank James, Mary-Louise Parker in the thankless role of Jesse's wife, Sam Rockwell as Robert Ford's brother Charley, and Jeremy Renner, Garret Dillahunt, and Paul Schneider as various ill-fated members of the James gang. There's also a cameo by former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville as the governor of Missouri who precipitates the assassination. It was only the second feature directed by New Zealander Andrew Dominik, who wrote the screenplay based on a novel by Ron Hansen. There's a bit too much lyric profundity in the screenplay, as in the voiceover by the narrator (Hugh Ross), who tells us about Jesse James: "Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them. Rains fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified." That's a hard description for any actor to live up to, but Pitt does a good job of it in perhaps the best performance of his career. Since the title pretty much gives the plot away, the film wisely concentrates on exploring the characters of James and Ford, who meet when the latter joins the James gang for a train robbery in Blue Cut, Missouri. Ford has worshiped James since boyhood, and in one splendid scene James taunts and teases him into revealing the depths of his infatuation. Ford has memorized everything that could possibly link him to James: They both have brothers whose names contain six letters, for example. This is homoerotic hero-worship at its most intense -- and eventually, most deadly. The movie was filmed in Canada, with superb, Oscar-nominated cinematography by Roger Deakins. The score is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and Cave himself plays the saloon singer who taunts Ford with "The Ballad of Jesse James," which refers to "the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard" (James's pseudonym).