Harriet – 5

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Sorry, I know I’m supposed to feel warmhearted about Harriet Tubman’s story, but the movie left me cold. First, the characters were too, pardon the expression, black-and-white. Second, Cynthia Erivo may have looked like Tubman but was neither inspired nor inspiring enough to convince me. The two supposedly rousing speeches she gave, to abolitionists in Massachusetts and Union soldiers, were flat and left me cold. She was presented as a black Joan of Arc, but I never saw it. Third, the escapes with the runaway slaves, however grounded in historic fact, seemed wildly implausible. Harriet may have made it out on her own, through daring, luck and the kindness of strangers, but the film offered no evidence for her repeating the feat with a half-dozen others, old and young, with an armed posse and bloodhounds on their trail. Janelle Monae was excellent, but the rest of the film was bleached of subtlety or shading.

1917 – 5

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Despite theoretically compressing 18 non-stop hours into a two-hour film, the pace was so slow that I kept overanalyzing  the absurd story. Yes, war is senseless, but if 1,200 lives are at stake, can’t you do better than send a total greenhorn and whomever he chooses off on a horrendously challenging rescue mission? And why do they have to crawl over corpses through no-man’s land when there is an armed caravan of Allied troops driving up the road ahead of them? And when our hero meets this caravan, why is he sent off alone on this crucial mission? And what about the planes flying overhead? Can’t they deliver a message? And why are our heroes loath to hurt the Germans when they encounter them? As other critics have noted, we bounce from obstacle to obstacle like a video game, without any effort at characterization; and this movie competes with Harriet for glossing over how the end zone is miraculously reached. Having Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch in the roles of commanding officers only accentuated the inappropriateness of entrusting our two with anything.

Honeyboy – 5

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Enough already of movies about losers, fathers as bullies and situations that make you scream, just leave, for Pete’s sake. If I want to be miserable I can read the New York Times, I don’t need to spend two hours in a movie theater. The film’s structure resembled Pain and Glory, but that may be giving Shia LeBoeuf too much credit by association. It was undoubtedly cathartic for him to make a movie about his tortured childhood, but it didn’t help me any.

Laundromat – 7

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This is the third “whistleblower” film I’ve seen this week. Whereas the first two – The —Report” and “Dark Water” – were unremittingly serious, Laundromat is a comedy, with Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas hamming it up as Mossack and Fonseca, name partners of the Panama City law firm recently exposed for its tax-evasion and money laundering (hence the film title) practices. Tying the narrative thread is Meryl Streep in a comic role as a small-town widow intent on finding out what happened to the insurance payout from her husband’s death. The movie presents a series of anecdotes illustrating the unsavory tactics of M&F clients – none of which, unfortunately, helped me understand what exactly M&F did. Yes, they created shell corporations in tax havens, but how did that work? What was clear, because the movie came out and said it, is that “they system” allows the rich to get richer through often-legal tax avoidance, and the meek won’t be inheriting the earth any time soon.

Dark Waters – 7

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Mark Ruffalo reprises his role from Spotlight, except this time it’s just him. Although “based on a true story,” or at least a magazine article, it seemed so unlikely that a brand new partner would take on this case just because the plaintiff knew his “Grammer,” and even more impossible that he could conduct the research, discovery, motion practice and trials seemingly by himself. If there was another side to the story – as there always is  – we never got an inkling. Granted, this all simplified and heightened the drama, but the absence of subtlety and strict adherence to formula pushed the film more toward average than exceptional. Anne Hathaway was good as an unusually restrained and supportive spouse.

Marriage Story – 7

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Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver both give remarkably sensitive portrayals of a couple who love each other but can’t get along, and your sympathy slides from one to the other in the world of grey that real people inhabit. Everyone else, oddly enough, is a caricature. This sets the stars apart but ultimately cheapens the movie. Many stretches of the film were painful to watch – undoubtedly Noah Baumbach’s intention but not something I enjoyed. And I didn’t need the blood-letting scene.

Knives Out – 7.9

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As opposed to JoJo Rabbit, which tried – unsuccessfully, in my view – to mix slapstick with serious matter, Knives Out never faltered from its tone: spoof. The whodunit plot clicked into place marvelously, and all the characters got what they deserved , unless you consider the 85-year-old patriarch’s slitting his throat to have been a tad premature. And when I say “spoof,” I don’t mean silly, for there was an undertone of message – as in, being greedy and selfish isn’t the best way to get along with others. Daniel Craig with a Southern drawl set the bar, and all the other actors limboed joyfully under.

JoJo Rabbit – 6.5

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An inventive mishmash of relationships with different, and largely incompatible, tones: JoJo and his friend Yorkie – traditional comic; JoJo and his mother (Scarlett Johansson, why?) – serious and tragic; JoJo and Adolf Hitler – absurdist comic; JoJo and Elsa – sweetly romantic; JoJo and Captain K (wonderful Sam Rockwell) – slapstick; JoJo and Jews – uncomfortable. Indeed, the whole “Hogan’s Heroes” view of World War II doesn’t really work when we see the Gestapo chasing Jews, collaborators being hanged and soldiers dying in the street. (I didn’t like Life Is Beautiful, either, for this reason.)

The Irishman – 7.5

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Robert DeNiro is an emotional black hole at the center of this 3-hour gangster epic. He is the narrator, speaking (to whom?) from a wheelchair in his nursing home, but I never felt anything from or about his extraordinary journey from trucker to hitman to union boss to convict to relic, not from his relationships to his wife and daughters, nor his allegiance and betrayal of Jimmy Hoffa. There are cold-blooded murders aplenty in the movie, with “cold” being the operative word. First, I never saw DeNiro as “Frankie Sheeran.” He was always Robert DeNiro. The twinkly smirk identified the actor, not the character, and I kept waiting for DeNiro the comic over-the-top performer to break out. Second, he wasn’t even remotely Irish. There was more anguish in 20 seconds of Banderas in Pain and Glory than 180 minutes of DeNiro here. You wonder if Scorsese centered his film on DeNiro because they have been friends since they were 16 and the younger DeNiro meant so much to Scorsese’s career, which he was now summing up.

In contrast, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci were wonderful, as the only other characters with any depth of personality. There were scores of others – the credits go on for days – but all of them, especially the wives, are just colorful Post-It notes stuck on DeNiro’s story. The film often plays as a documentary: mobsters are introduced, with their eventual fates superscripted, more for historical “accuracy” than for dramatic purposes. The movie’s structure itself is anti-drama, as the plot rolls on for quite awhile after the main story ends, sort of like life.

Meeting Gorbachev/ Apollo 11

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During my Delta flight to Atlanta I caught up on two notable documentaries of summer 2019, one notable for its narrator, the other for not having one. I am a longtime fan of Werner Herzog’s films and inquiring mind, but not so much that I appreciated his equal billing with the former Soviet leader. Not only did we have to see and watch Herzog’s ponderous interviewing, but when the movie moved beyond “Mikhail Sergeyevich’s” answers we were led by Herzog’s voice-over. Gorbachev played a hugely important and little understood role in world history, and it felt a little uncomfortable to see him treated as a curiosity in a senior-citizen home.

Apollo 11, which boasted unseen footage of the historic 1969 moon mission, was wildly dramatic, even though the story was well known and the outcome was never in doubt. This illusion was aided by the absence of any knowing voice from the present. All the dialogue was taken from contemporaneous TV interviews, tapes of mission participants and the resonant broadcasts of Walter Cronkite, giving a “You Are There” feel to the proceedings. Finally, one couldn’t help but marvel at the still-amazing feat of sending men to the moon, with a small side question of “Who was Neil Armstrong?”