"Thelma"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

Pay attention in the opening scenes of Thelma, and see if you can spot the scam. You'll know it once it happens. You may even recognize it while it's happening. But the setup, the way the scammers hook 93-year-old Thelma Post into sending them $10,000 in cash, is convincing.

How do "old people" not realize they're being scammed? The same way you might fall for the big lie while you're watching Thelma. And that's sort of the point: Yes, Thelma is old, yes she spouts funny malapropisms, and no, she doesn't entirely understand how a computer works.

Do you?

The phone call Thelma gets sets her off on a grand adventure. It's tempting to call it a minor adventure, but anyone who lives in L.A. will know that Thelma covers a lot of ground in her quest to get that money back from the bad guys who conned her into giving it to them.

Played by 94-year-old June Squibb, Thelma is the widowed grandmother to Danny (Fred Hechinger), a Gen Z slacker who makes Gen X slackers look like overachievers by comparison. He's the one who unwittingly gets the action of Thelma rolling, and though he doesn't have a clue how life works, he's a doting grandson who prefers her to his parents—including Thelma's hyper-attentive daughter (Parker Posey)—and will do anything he can to help her.

Except, here's the kicker, the real crux of Thelma: She doesn't want his help. She doesn't want anyone's help. And she's not just stubborn. She knows she's old, but after such a long life, doesn't she get to live what's left on her own terms? This struggle for independence is what drives Thelma and gives it deeper meaning than a simple granny-with-a-gun tale.

In addition to Danny, her friend Ben, played by the late Richard Roundtree in his final role, wants to help Thelma. She only wants his electric scooter. But pretty soon they're gallivanting around the San Fernando Valley together, doing their best to stay one step ahead of her family.

It's a delightfully silly and thoroughly absorbing romp, one that recalls the more character-driven goofy comedies of the 1970s and early 1980s like 9 to 5 and Melvin and Howard, all held together by Oscar-nominated June Squibb, now in her third decade of a late-in-life career (her first on-screen role came when she was 56, her first movie role when she was 61). She's droll and straightforward and no-nonsense, a real character in the best sense, a character who feels complete and complicated.

And she is. That's the best part about Thelma. Sure, the jazzy score that could have come from a 1970s caper is fun, and all the performances—especially Hechinger—are top-notch. But it's Thelma's humanity that drives this film, even through it's more preposterous action-driven sections. Toward the end of the movie comes a gentle, human-scaled little scene that takes place on a park bench as Thelma talks to her grandson. Their exchange does something entirely unexpected in a film that has, by and large, lived up to our expectations to that point—it knocks the wind out of you. When I saw Thelma, the packed theater fell completely silent except for some uncontrollable crying jags.

Which isn't to say Thelma is sad or depressing or troubling. It's none of those things—well, maybe a couple of those things, though tangentially. The reason for the emotional response was ... no, on second thought, you'll need to see it yourself to find out. If you do, you'll discover that Thelma is big-hearted, effortlessly entertaining, and, in the best ways, as much a surprise as the woman herself. 

Viewed June 23, 2024 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Tuesday"

  ☆☆☆½ 

Too many movies barely have enough ideas to sustain a scene, much less a full-length feature film, so it seems a little unfair to fault Tuesday for cramming too much into its 111 minutes.

There is so much that works so well in this film, a true flight of fancy that manages the impressive feat of grafting a magical fantasy onto a grounded story of death, grief and denial. In an unexpected dramatic turn (not her first, though you'd never know that from the marketing, though her first that's this aggressively downbeat), Julia Louis-Dreyfus gets a lot of credit for helping the audience navigate some tough transitions between human drama and increasingly surreal fantasy.

She plays Zora, the mother of a terminally ill 15-year-old named Tuesday, who is played perfectly by Lola Petticrew, a performer nearly twice the age of the character. Lola knows she will die of her unnamed disease, and Zora is in utter denial—not just of her daughter's mortality, but of the ways it has forced her to change her life as a single mother in London.

Lola is certain of her impending death because she's been told to expect it by none other than Death itself, in the form of a filth-covered macaw who can shrink to the size of a pea or grow to the height of a giant, and whose eternal job it is to appear to the doomed and cause their demise. The macaw speaks in a gruff, low voice, which is memorably provided by Arinzé Kent.

But Zora is not about to allow Death to take Tuesday, and when the bird presents itself to her and says, "Madame, you need to say goodbye to your daughter," Zora makes a dramatic and violent decision. What she does propels the rest of the film, and takes place against an odd and malevolent backdrop. Even as Tuesday and Zora grapple with the mother's decision, the world they live in seems headed for an apocalypse.

This long middle stretch is where Tuesday tries so hard, and so admirably, to show us the unexpected. It's a shame to say that not everything it tries works, that some of its oddities come across as truly puzzling and often confusing, while others offer up metaphors that don't quite hit their marks.

Tuesday is the rare film that could have benefitted from more screen time, but for its valiant effort and for the astonishing vision of writer-director Diana O. Pusic, it deserves to be seen and even cherished. Not many films try this hard. Tuesday doesn't always fly, but when it does, it soars.

Viewed June 16, 2024 — Laemmle NoHo

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"Hit Man"

  ☆☆☆☆ 

What strange, fractious times we live in, when everything—and, increasingly, it seems everything—can elicit angry arguments and defensive posturing. Take Richard Linklater's latest low-key film Hit Man, which to my mind is just about as enjoyable as movies get. Many disagree. Angrily, defensively, assertively and in no uncertain terms they make it clear: Hit Man is bad.

In fact, Hit Man is very good, though it's got a quirky, oddball approach that fits Linklater's sensibilities, and doesn't care too much if audiences don't vibe with it. Moviegoers of a certain age know that even Linklater's exquisite Before films have met with head-scratching claims of boredom and smug elitism.

Not coincidentally to all this vehement debate about Hit Man is that this laid-back neo-noir comedy, which owes more than a little debt of gratitude and style to Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (a movie that had its own vocal detractors in its day), is that Linklater's film debuted on Netflix with a minor theatrical release. Almost everyone who has seen the film has seen it at home.

I was fortunate enough to see it on the big screen, and Hit Man is a movie that benefits enormously from the theatrical experience. I'm beginning to think that's the crux of the problem, rather than the film itself. In a movie theater, there are essentially three choices: fall asleep (or do something else distracting, maybe involving the person you came with), leave, or watch the movie. Generally, people don't choose the first two options, though there's an exception for everything.

When you sit down and watch Hit Man unspool (or its digital equivalent) in front of you, it takes a little while to get into the film's funny little rhythms, though Glen Powell is immediately appealing as Gary Johnson, an unassuming college professor with the oddest of side gigs: He builds surveillance technology that helps the New Orleans Police Department in sting operations to capture would-be assassins. He goes along on these jobs, and ...

Well, what happens next in Hit Man is the fun. The movie plays best if you don't know anything else.

It plays worst, apparently, at home on Netflix. That's no surprise. If you have, roughly, three options at the movie theater, you have substantially more at home. You can make dinner or talk with friends or check your phone or look up the movie's stars on the Internet or get a pizza delivered or get high or get drunk or cut your toenails or feed the dog or anything else you want that you cannot do in a movie theater, where your attention is focused on the screen. At home, your attention is often focused almost anywhere but the screen.

Hit Man needs attention. It needs thought. Its jokes, which are many, sometimes take a minute to hit. And when its plot finally gets cranking, the movie assumes you have been paying attention all along. The minute Madison Figueroa Masters (Adria Arjona) walks onto the screen and tells her sordid, sad story, you'd better be listening and watching and keeping track.

Hit Man turns from low-key comedy and quirky slapstick into a captivating neo-noir that has all the classic elements, including some unexpected turns and some dark morality.

"I turned it off after 15 minutes because nothing happened." "A weak plot." "Awkwardly stitched together." Yes, Hit Man will seem to have all those flaws if you watch it at home while you're doing other things, or while you're wondering if there might be something different to watch. There's always something different to watch. The temptation to pause, mute or go back to the home screen is strong—especially for a movie like this, that depends on your commitment, that feels more like a character-driven melodrama from the Eighties, something like The Verdict or Absence of Malice that assumes its viewers are not distracted and inattentive.

Back to the film: It's a delight. It rewards patience, and cares enough to have a thematic perspective, even when its relative morality begins to feel questionable—which is part of its beauty. When a film is carefully enough made to make us question the decisions its characters make, that's a film worth watching. And Hit Man is very much worth watching.

Viewed June 12, 2024 — Egyptian Theater

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"Margaret" (2011)

  ☆☆☆☆½ 

In 1999, Paul Thomas Anderson's mesmerizing, confounding, challenging, beautiful, depressing, confounding, polarizing film Magnolia caught the uncertain mood most of the world seemed to be in leading up to the new millennium. That long film might well be called "operatic" both for its grand themes and the way it stops the action every now and then to allow its leading actors a moment to show off their skills, much in the way an aria stops the action of an opera just so we can marvel at talent.

Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret was originally shot six years later, but due to the kind of legal and artistic wrangling that seemingly can only happen in Hollywood, it was finished in 2011. Note that I didn't say "released in 2011," because Margaret was largely never released. For years, Lonergan had been trying to get his film to 150 minutes to satisfy his contractual obligations, finally settled on a 160-minute version, but when he did the studio largely abandoned it, and never giving the film a mainstream theatrical release. Meanwhile, Lonergan continued working on Margaret, and ultimately created a 186-minute "extended director's edition." While available on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming, this version has rarely been seen in theaters.

As part of its annual "Bleak Week" series, the American Cinematheque screened the 186-minute cut of Margaret at the Egyptian theater to a sold-out house. Having at last seen it, the rationale behind the studio's decision not to release Margaret is more discouraging than ever: They denied moviegoers an opportunity to experience an exquisite film, a movie that stands alongside Magnolia as an emotional epic that explores the convoluted inner workings of people just as the world was shifting.

Margaret hits even harder than Magnolia — not an easy task — because it was shot and originally intended to be released just five years after terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center. They did more than destroy buildings; they destroyed a nation's psyche, they made Americans, and New Yorkers in particular, painfully aware of the fragility of life and the ways it's impossible ever to really know what is going to happen next. The next 30 minutes could hold anything, a reality Margaret knows all too well.

Lonergan's script for Margaret contains no characters named "Margaret." The film is named after the poem "Spring and Fall," by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which begins:

Margaret are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

The poem is written as an adult asking a troubled child if the simple act of leaves falling in autumn has left her forlorn, and sad about the state of the world.

Lisa Cohen is this film's Margaret. She is played by Anna Paquin in a performance that should have been nominated for every possible award. Paquin is revelatory as a girl who we meet when she is confident and teasing, flirtatious and intelligent, happy and eager and bright. By the end of the movie, she will still be some of those things, but she will not be many of them. In the sort of incident that could happen anywhere at any time, Margaret is involved (just how, it's best not to know) in a bus accident that kills a woman named Monica. She is played by Allison Janney, who has only one scene in the movie — but it's a scene that must stay with us for the entire duration of this long, complicated film. It does. You've seen heartbreaking moments in movies, but if you haven't seen Margaret, you've never seen the definitive one.

The accident is a devastating, life-changing moment for Lisa, but not always in the most obvious ways. As the film progresses, Lisa has a fraught relationships with her actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron), a math teacher (Matt Damon), a boy who likes her (John Gallagher Jr.), a boy who doesn't really care about her (Kieran Culkin), and a woman (Jeannie Berlin) who was close friends with Monica.

Relaying the rest of the story would be pointless—there is too much of it. One of the many wonderful imperfections of Margaret is how much story it wants to pack into its running time. The extended director's cut runs more than three hours but plays like a movie half that length. Paquin is at the center of it all, carrying the film with such effortless confidence that we sometimes forget we're watching a piece of fiction; Lonergan, who loves working in a naturalistic style, has created a film that's often packed to the edges. It demands and earns our attention, even in some very strange and problematic moments when Lonergan decides to play a piece of music too loudly or adds in voices that seem to be coming from another scene.

These directorial flourishes make Margaret distinctive, but what makes it special and unlike any American movie I can remember seeing is the way the audience never knows from one scene to the next how a character might respond. Scenes change on a dime in this film, and what begins as a happy and carefree moment might end a few minutes later with lacerating anger. In that, Lonergan understands the way most people actually communicate with each other—poorly, haltingly, unpredictably. Watching Margaret is a stark reminder of how little we can ever know anyone else, their motives, or their fears.

This is a glowing film. It knows how terribly we have been hurt — not just by September 11, not just by technology and communication (it was filmed before smart phones but released after they became ubiquitous, which makes for an interesting commentary), not just by each other. Rather, we've been hurt by existence. Like Margaret in the poem, we have seen the world dying; confidence that it will return again does us no good. We are grieving for what we have lost, right now.

In its final moments, as if it hadn't already been clear through its frequent use of classical music, Margaret shows us what it means to be: an opera, maybe a tragedy, maybe a comedy, maybe a little bit of both — I was surprised by how funny the film is, despite being shown at "Bleak Week." In any event, it is bigger than life. It takes a seemingly everyday kind of tragedy and infuses it with wild, raw emotion. Watching Margaret, you'll careen from laughter to shock, from outrage to tearful emotion, sometimes within moments. Lonergan does not shy away from the hard stuff here, but Margaret is never angry or depressing.

By the end of this fascinating and emotionally draining (but not bleak) film, it is very much "Margaret" you grieve for — the girl who can never be innocent again, and the world that can never be innocent again. But still both will revive themselves. They will remake themselves. They will grow again. One way or another.

Viewed June 2, 2024 — Egyptian Theater

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