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. 

Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve, 2023)

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Léa Seydoux, Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling. Screenplay: Denis Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, based on a novel by Frank Herbert. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: Patrice Vermette. Film editing: Joe Walker. Music: Hans Zimmer. 

Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)

Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, James Norton, Chris Cooper, Louis Garrel, Jayne Houdyshell. Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, based on a novel by Louisa May Alcott. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Film editing: Nick Houy. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

I didn't read Little Women as a child: Boys didn't read "girls' books" back then. And when I finally read it -- out loud, to my daughter -- I found it a little stiff and starchy. But it has made for some very good movies, particularly the 1933 Katharine Hepburn version directed by George Cukor and the 1994 Winona Ryder version directed by Gillian Armstrong. Somehow, I don't think we'll be calling this 2019 film the Soirse Ronan version, but rather the Greta Gerwig version. As writer and director, Gerwig has developed a complete and insightful view of the Louisa May Alcott novel, one that takes into account what was always present in the novel but brings it into the light of the 21st century: the changes in the roles and attitudes of women. By rearranging the chronology of the novel and structuring it around the development of Jo March (Ronan) as a writer, Gerwig has accomplished two things: She has allowed the other March sisters to share the spotlight that Jo hogged when she was played by Hepburn and Ryder. She has also revealed the rather sentimental endings of the other films as what they were: contrivances designed to please moviegoers, as they did readers, more than to reflect actual life. By establishing in the film that Jo is accommodating the desire of her publisher (Tracy Letts) that the heroine of her Little Women not remain a spinster, Gerwig is able to go a little bit over the top in the film, bringing back Prof. Bhaer (Louis Garrel), with whom Jo broke off over his criticisms of her writing, for a giddy reunion and wedding to Jo. This is all staged with the kind of unabashed sentimentality, including a glimpse of Jo's very improbable school, in which all the sisters and their husbands are the instructors and the curriculum includes fencing, that can't be taken with a straight face. We are meant to sense that the real Jo March might well have remained a spinster rather than capitulate to, as she puts it in the movie, "people saying that love is just all that women are fit for." It's also an ending that wouldn't have worked if Gerwig and her performers hadn't created characters that have a little more body than the source gives them: Timothée Chalamet's Laurie isn't just the slightly odd young man he is in the book (and in the performances of Douglass Montgomery and Christian Bale in the earlier versions), but rather spoiled, dilettantish, and probably alcoholic. Florence Pugh deserved the Oscar nomination she got for bringing more than just flightiness to the character of Amy. Even Beth (Eliza Scanlen) in this version is more than just the saintly innocent who dies young, and we have Gerwig's script and direction for allowing them to blossom rather than being overwhelmed by Jo, good as Ronan's performance is. I can't quite subscribe to Anthony Lane's comment that her Little Women "may just be the best film yet made by an American woman," which hardly seems fair to the work of directors from Dorothy Arzner to Ida Lupino to Kathryn Bigelow and Kelly Reichardt, but it's certainly a provocative and sometimes audacious triumph. 

Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)

Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name

Oliver: Armie Hammer
Elio: Timothée Chalamet
Mr. Perlman: Michael Stuhlbarg
Annella Perlman: Amira Casar
Marzia: Esther Garrel
Chiara: Victoire Du Bois
Mafalda: Vanda Capriolo
Anchise: Antonio Rimoldi
Mounir: André Aciman
Isaac: Peter Spears

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenplay: James Ivory
Based on a novel by André Aciman
Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Production design: Samuel Deshors
Film editing: Walter Fasano

Nobody dies or gets beaten up in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name, which makes it something of an advance on previous Oscar-nominated films about same-sex relationships such as Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) and Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), which carried the implicit warning that being gay is dangerous. On the other hand, that's because the film's characters are people in a supposedly tolerant milieu, an haute middle-class academic family, not cowboys or residents of housing projects. Otherwise, we're still dealing with sexual "deviance" and its societal consequences, which in Elio's case include a sensitive and well-meaning Talk from his father, a phone call in which Oliver announces that he's going to marry a woman he's been seeing for a while, and an extended closing shot of Elio weeping into the fireplace. Don't get me wrong: I like Call Me by Your Name, in which Guadagnino and his handsome, skilled actors beautifully sustain a mood of sexual tension throughout the film. The problem I have with it is that it seems compromised by what its producers and director believe a mainstream film is allowed to show audiences these days. Put it another way, if the characters in the scene in which two people consummate their relationship were male and female, would the director have panned away from the bed to a window for a lingering view of a tree? That's a cliché as old as movie love scenes, redolent of a bygone era of censorship. So instead of watching even a discreetly filmed moment of sexual congress, which we've grown used to in "straight" movies -- all deftly angled closeups of apparently nude bodies and orgasmic faces -- we're treated like easily shocked children. It's especially noticeable after the director has already taken the usual discreet approach twice in scenes in which Elio has sex with Marzia. Reportedly, James Ivory's Oscar-winning screenplay specified full nudity and more explicit sex in the scenes with Elio and Oliver, but Guadagnino shied away. The result is a kind of emasculation of their relationship, turning Call Me by Your Name into all foreplay and no climax.

Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017)

Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf in lady Bird

Lady Bird McPherson: Saoirse Ronan
Marion McPherson: Laurie Metcalf
Larry McPherson: Tracy Letts
Danny O'Neill: Lucas Hedges
Kyle Scheible: Timothée Chalamet
Beanie Feldstein: Julie Stefans
Sister Sarah Joan: Lois Smith
Father Leviatch: Stephen Henderson
Jenna Walton: Odeya Rush
Miguel McPherson: Jordan Rodrigues
Shelly Yuhan: Marielle Scott

Director: Greta Gerwig
Screenplay: Greta Gerwig
Cinematography: Sam Levy
Production design: Chris Jones
Film editing: Nick Houy
Music: Jon Brion

Maybe it's not the "female 400 Blows" that Greta Gerwig reportedly wanted to make, but it'll do until that comes along. We could only hope that Gerwig has something like François Truffaut's "Antoine Doinel cycle" in the works. It doesn't have to be the "Lady Bird McPherson" cycle, either, but just more sensitive, intelligent films about family and environment, capturing the essence that she caught of growing up in Sacramento. And I hope that if she does, she'll find more roles for the wonderful Laurie Metcalf, whose nuanced performance as Lady Bird's hard-working, hard-bitten mother, skeptical of anything that smacks of overreaching one's station in life, to my mind easily outshadows the performance that beat it for the supporting actress Oscar. Not that Allison Janney wasn't terrific in I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie), but her role was one-note when compared with the subtleties that the part of Marion McPherson demanded -- and Metcalf supplied. I also found myself thinking about a movie that stars Gerwig but which she didn't write or direct, Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan (2015), and realizing how movie formulas can either sustain or cripple a film that tries to reach beyond them. In Maggie's Plan, Miller tries to make a conventional domestic comedy rise above its conventions, to infuse its sometimes over-familiar comic situations with a bit of poignant realism. She fails because she's not willing to let her characters transcend the situations, to surprise us. Lady Bird is equally formulaic: It's essentially a coming-of-age teen comedy, something we've seen before. But Gerwig and her performers flesh out the characters into something more plausibly real than the genre demands.