"Mudbound"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

It's almost impossible to write about Mudbound without mentioning the way it has been released, because almost everyone who sees it will do so on Netflix -- at home, on the relatively small screen of their normal TV set, which will be calibrated as they always have it (meaning, almost certainly, poorly), using whatever sound system they always use.

That's the way I saw it, having missed its very short theatrical run in L.A., when it played in a handful of theaters for a few days in order to qualify it for the Oscars. It was, as they say, "dumped" in movie theaters, on its way to Netflix, where it is marketed as a "Netflix Original Movie" despite having multiple production credits.

All of this is a real shame because Mudbound deserves to be seen in a movie theater, with a projector that has been professionally calibrated, with speakers that can handle the intricate sound design, with a big screen that helps immerse you in the story and -- most importantly -- without the distractions that inevitably crop up when watching a movie at home.  I've yet to find anyone, even the rarified few with a dedicated home theater, who can resist the temptation to do something other than keep focus on the movie while watching at home.

A movie theater limits your choices to maybe three: watch the movie, fall asleep, or leave.  You give yourself over to a movie, its plot and its creative ambition when you watch a movie in a theater.  Not so at home, no matter how dedicated or sincere a viewer you are.  (Don't believe me?  How many times have you "held it" in a movie theater versus pressing pause to take a bathroom break?  The pause button doesn't just freeze the picture, but interrupts the narrative flow that a movie is designed to have.)

This all matters to Mudbound because it's a marvelous, absorbing, well-told and emotionally wrenching film that you might easily -- based on the marketing -- mistake for a "good-for-you" movie about race relations, when in fact it's a tremendously complex tale that is sprawling and visually magnificent.  All of these things feel diminished in the living room.

Its story begins when the world is embroiled in World War II but the U.S. has remained safely distant.  Around the time the Japanese invade Pearl Harbor, Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke) reveals to his wife Laura (Carey Mulligan) that he has bought a farm on the Mississippi Delta, and the family is going to move there.  Laura and Henry have a complicated relationship, with the additional wrinkle of Henry's brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), who seems to have a soft spot for Laura, and she for him.

The family, including Henry's unrelievedly racist and always demoralizing Pappy (Jonathan Banks) moves. Jamie enlists. And Henry turns out to be a terrible businessman, whose savings have been swindled by a man who said he would rent them the big farmhouse but had no intention of doing so. The McAllans are forced to live in a ramshackle cabin, not far away from the Jackson family.

The Jacksons are sharecroppers who face the same plight as black Americans have for centuries: White people aren't going to do right by them.  They know it.  But still they try, and they all have dreams.  Father Hap (Rob Morgan), mother Florence (Mary J. Blige) and their children, including Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) don't know what to make of the McAllans, who are working the same patch of land they have been tending to for years.

Ronsel goes off to fight in World War II, as well, and while life on the farm continues in its unrelentingly harsh, bleak way for both the McAllans and the Jacksons, the matriarchs of each family show particular strength, and turn to each other begrudgingly for support, while Henry and Pappy seem to find ways to make it more and more difficult.

If Mudbound has a real flaw, it's in the lack of focus its middle section has -- it moves back and forth between stories about the Jacksons, the McAllans, Ronsel and Jamie, but never quite emotionally connects them rather than hoping we'll continue paying attention through to its third act.  It's a dramatic flaw that's heightened by being forced to watch it at home instead of in a movie theater.

When Ronsel and Jamie return, Mudbound becomes supremely confident, leading to a final third that is unnervingly good.  Director Dee Rees, who wrote the film with Virgil Williams, pulls together all of the elements that have seemed so scattered -- character traits, small plot points -- for a shocker of a climax that packs a wallop.

Though that ending is softly hinted at in Mudbound's very first scene, Rees wisely hides the meaning of a couple of key lines until near the very end.  Her dramatic sensibilities are enormously aided by beautiful cinematography by Rachel Morrison, which captures the scope without seeming overly prettified, and the thoughtful and careful editing of Mako Kamitsuna.  The technical side of the film is so good that it strengthens the film even when the energy flags.

The performances are likewise terrific throughout, and it is particularly worth noting how effortlessly Mudbound is driven by its two female leads -- Mulligan and Blige -- even while ultimately telling a story that mostly belongs to Ronsel.  In retrospect, it's easy to imagine Mudbound being even stronger by focusing in more intently on Ronsel, but it would have done so at the expense of its setting, which is so vividly and carefully conveyed.

Mudbound is a film that demands to be seen on a big screen, but won't.  It's both a very worthwhile movie, and a rather worrisome sign of the times: There's no way not to be grateful that a movie like Mudbound gets a bigger audience than it might have had otherwise, but its disconcerting to know how small this big and impressive experience will seem to so many.




Viewed January 20, 2018 -- Netflix

Second Thoughts: "Call Me By Your Name”

After weeks of cautious flirtation, of testing the emotional boundaries of each other and their own lives, there's a moment about midway through Call Me By Your Name in which Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) and American research student Oliver (Armie Hammer) make a split-second decision to ride with each other into the town square of an unnamed Italian village.

It's the moment their relationship changes -- and the moment that the film moves from being a sweetly languorous comedy of observation to something that has become so frankly profound it's impacting the way people live and the choices they make in their lives.

How does a movie that is so outwardly lovely manage to exist on so many levels, to become almost a cinematic Rorschach test that leaves some audiences polarized?  I've heard from viewers who are stuck trying to process the age difference between the main characters (which is only seven years in the story and nine years in reality) and from those who criticize the film for being too pretty, too nice, too lacking in dramatic tension. On the other hand, it's become obvious that Call Me By Your Name has left many viewers with the live-altering fervor of someone who has just witnessed a religious event.

Call Me By Your Name has mysteries built on top of mysteries, not the least of which is the way it affects people.  In one of the key scenes in the novel, not replicated in the film, Elio and Oliver visit the ruins of a labyrinthine cathedral, and observe how it's built on remnants of its past, and how every time you think you've gone as deep as you can, there's something deeper.  Maybe that scene wasn't needed in the film because the whole film is that way: Examine one of its surface-level elements and you discover others you hadn't considered.

There is, for example, that spontaneous decision to ride into town.  It's not actually spontaneous.  Oliver has been looking for this opportunity for weeks.  Elio has been searching for it, too.  It comes.  Elio dismisses it with a joke.  And at this point, conventional wisdom says they'll be in love before the montage sequence is through.  But something oddly wonderful happens here, and to understand just how complex it is, you need to go back to the scene just before Elio and Oliver decided to get on their bikes:

Elio's mother (Amira Casar) has been reading him a story from The Heptameron, but the only version she can find is in German.  (This family is remarkably lingually fluid, perhaps itself presaging some other fluidity the film explores.)  The story is about a a knight who is madly in love with a princess, and she with him, and the predicament they face, which comes down to one choice: "reden oder sterben?" Or, loosely translated: "Is it better to speak or die?"

Elio and Oliver never answer that question for themselves, but the question itself matters, not because  it's thematically central to the film, but because for anyone who was alive in 1983 (when the movie is set), "speak or die" must at least unconsciously recall a similar phrase, one that captured the despair, anguish and desolation of gay men throughout the late 1980s and into the following decade, when AIDS ravaged bodies, families and communities: "Silence = death."

And indeed, just a moment later Oliver lifts up his shirt to show Elio an unsightly injury on his otherwise perfect body, a big, black mark that wasn't there just days before.  That's the odd and unexpected thing that happens when Oliver and Elio ride into town, and that moment, tossed away almost casually in the film, moves Call Me By Your Name forward in two remarkable, parallel ways.

In one, the love story is presented simply for what it is: Two souls discovering each other and the beauty, pain, obsession and joy of love. The film can be appreciated solely on that level. But there's no way to ignore the proximity of "speak or die" and the lesion on Oliver's torso.  There is a callous, imperfect, hostile world outside the villa in which Oliver and Elio spend their perfect summer, and it is peeking through.

The movie moves forward with those separate but parallel approaches in mind -- the straightforward love story and the more distressing subtext -- and they converge in final moments that are so filled with loss, memory, hope, love and pain that for many viewers (and I'll count myself among them) watching the last scenes of Call Me By Your Name is an experience that borders on traumatizing.

But the idea that there is an unseen, grander force at work that will work against these two men, even if they were able to make their relationship work, still lingers at the edges of Call Me By Your Name.

Not long after their first romantic gestures -- which ends with the suggestion of a trip to a pharmacist -- Elio gets a nosebleed.  Oliver seems unafraid of the blood or the physical malady, just as Elio was unfazed by Oliver's own injury.

Much later, Elio performs some buzzed-about auto-eroticism with a peach, and the movie begins with a scene that in the book was about the lengths to which Oliver would go to prove his attraction to Elio.  The film's exquisite screenplay by James Ivory changes the scene in a breathtaking way: When Oliver discovers what Elio has been doing and offers to eat the peach (which he does in the novel), Elio slaps the fruit away, but Oliver insists.  Finally, Elio breaks down and cries, "I'm sick." And Oliver cradles him and holds him and comforts him regardless.

This deeper, richer subtext to Call Me By Your Name is handled deftly: on the surface, it's barely noticeable.  But it persists, and also works its way into the first moment Elio and Oliver kiss: "We can still be good," Oliver says, physically dissuading Elio. "We haven't done anything wrong."

Any gay man between 40 and 70 knows those words and the feelings they convey, of denying real love, or at least a real chance, for fear of what lingered.  And AIDS, homophobia, the Cold War, Reaganomics, they're all lurking just outside the gates of the Perlman residence, even intruding: the movie is filled with depictions of bodily fluids and discussions of political changes, all the things that will define the years ahead for Elio and Oliver.

Oliver and Elio both see this; they are intensely smart.  They know what is happening in the world. But for now, for these six weeks ... it doesn't matter.

Some (including, it seems, studio executives) have faulted Call Me By Your Name for not having a clear antagonist.  It has an antagonist, indeed: The world itself.  Eventually, it's going to come after Oliver and Elio as it comes after everyone, and what they experienced together may just be a long-forgotten dream after a while.  One or both of them is likely to get sick.  One might become part of the anti-AIDS movement in the '90s.  Who knows?  But the idea that all that is lingering somewhere just beyond the little Italian village is hard to shake.

For now, though, there is no judgment.  There is no strife.  There is only one of the most palpably real depictions of summer in the country I've ever seen.

Truth be told, one of the four times I've seen Call Me By Your Name I watched primarily not to observe the characters but to look at and listen to the backgrounds.  Every image, every piece of sound design in the film puts you right there in the Perlman's home, or on a country road with Elio and Oliver.  The film creates an enveloping sense of being there, which Guadagnino enhances through very long, static shots, allowing the light and sound and feel of the places to work on us.

The physical beauty hides truths, and one of them is right in front of our eyes the whole time: Oliver. The first line spoken about him is, "He seems very confident," and the film is as much a coming-of-age story about young Elio as it is about the handsome American.

Hammer plays Oliver with such easy charm, such massive self-assurance, that there's never a question that a 6-foot-5, blue-eyed beauty will have everything together.  But then there's an unforgettable scene in which Elio tells Oliver what he thinks the American visitor has been doing every night, only to find out how wrong he is.

When, finally, the two lovers must depart, it leads to the most talked-about scene in the movie, between Elio and his father (Michael Stuhlbarg).  It is an extraordinary scene, one that deeply affects people, leading into the very last shot of the movie, which is less merely affecting than shattering, because those unspoken threats and difficult realities that the film has been holding at bay come crashing down, if only for the audience.

Call Me By Your Name lets everyone watching bring his or her own feelings into that last shot, which gives us time to process the metaphors, to reflect on our own knowledge of what is coming for Elio and Oliver (this is, after all, a memory piece of a film), and on our own lives and experience. We remember what it as to be 17 or 24, and to know how young that is.

Director Guadagnino has said he'd like to shoot a sequel, but please, no, don't.  The whole point of Call Me By Your Name is that it exists in an exquisite, perfect, joyous vacuum.  Its last quiet moments give us time to reflect on that possible future, but also to think about what we, individually and collectively, have lost.

And what we gained, because of course we're here now, older, better maybe, smarter sometimes, and we've gained in some way if not all of them.  But we think about what it took to gain.  What we wish we could go back to.

We think that maybe we will be lucky enough one summer to find an Italian villa where an old woman makes us food every night and we have nothing to do but read and dance and ride our bikes and talk to each other.  And to fall in love.

To be young.

And when you strip away all the allusions and metaphors, all the symbols and literary devices that make Call Me By Your Name such a rich and dense and wonderfully multifaceted experience -- when you take those away, that's what you're left with, why Call Me By Your Name is so impossible to forget.

It reminds us how young we were once, and how willing to love and be loved.  And how when we were, the world was good.  And how when the world was good, we were good.

The first time I saw it, Call Me By Your Name struck me with its brash eroticism, but I realize now that that's not the reason it persists in my heart and in the hearts of so many -- it's because we all long, no matter our age, for one more moment of youthful possibility when who or what we loved would love us back and all would be right in our little piece of the world.

"Faces Places"

 ☆☆☆ 

Faces Places is a comedy for intellectual highbrows, which makes it largely inaccessible to a lot of people who might otherwise enjoy it, but also makes it impossible to fully enjoy unless you're familiar with the shorthand way it talks about cinema and art history.

In large part, it's an adorable little Odd Couple story about two wildly different people who connect with each other over a shared love of art.  There is a smaller part, which deals with some grand themes of memory, loss, death and life, and an even smaller -- but in the end crucial -- part about French cinema and the political ideologies of French New Wave director Agnes Varda, who co-directed this film.

That small-but-crucial part is the element of Faces Places that was least effective for me, and there were large swaths of this brief (88-minute) film that made my mind wander as Varda and her collaborator, a French photographer-artist named JR, mused on Varda's colorful history as one of the French filmmakers who revolutionized cinema a half-century ago.

But those bits -- and the film's assumption you will understand every reference in the movie -- are mostly worth sitting through to get to the film's twin beating hearts.

The first is the wonderfully playful relationship that 89-year-old Varda and 34-year-old JR have; they are joyful, cantankerous, funny and profound as they embark on a journey across France to fulfill an artistic vision of taking massive photographs of people and pasting them on buildings.  Why?  Because, Varda explains, it lets them meet people, and what is art if not connecting with others?

That's one of the most intriguing concepts in the film, which Varda and JR made together, and the connection the two (especially her) seem to have with the people they meet feels real and abiding; by their mere presence, they change the villages they visit.

As they traverse the countryside, though, it is clear that Varda -- despite her seemingly unstoppable energy -- is slowing down.  She can't see very well, she can't climb stairs, and she spends more and more time thinking about the past.

So, the two of them, the old woman and the young man, get in their truck and wander, taking a road trip through some of the less desirable, less romantic locations in France, and they kind of riff off of each other, and that's pretty much all Faces Places is.

It's a sweet and tender look at art and aging, at the way we connect (or don't) with other people and why.  It does dig too deep into its questions, and goes off on some long and rather opaque tangents, one about worker solidarity and one about the unchangeable nature of difficult people.

It's hard to know if they amount to much.  Faces Places is a sweet and entertaining diversion, one that will mostly appeal to those who know contemporary art and appreciate French film history, or who want to get a warm-hearted glimpse at what France is like in places tourists never go.



Viewed January 14, 2018 -- Laemmle Monica

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