Archive for category: Reviews

Very hard to watch but a remarkable movie, telling parallel stories of a white family and a black family, coping, struggling in 1940s Mississippi. Life can be very hard (I was reminded of my grandmother’s eking out a living on her farm in West Memphis during the Depression), life can be unfair, and there is both cruelty and kindness in humans. What was most remarkable to me was the balanced presentation: there was good and bad, strength and weakness in almost all the characters. Only “Pappy” was despicable and only the wonderful Carey Mulligan was saintly; the rest were making do as best they could. (Why Mary J. Blige received an Oscar nomination is an artistic, if not political, mystery.) In a year of movies with inexplicable endings, this fit right in; but I suppose after two hours of misery and prejudice in the mud, director Dee Rees felt the viewer deserved a break.

James Ivory’s gay wet dream goes from languorous to tedious about halfway through: how many slow-motion man-boy embraces do we need, or “let’s strip to our trunks and go for a swim”? (I subsequently read of screenwriter Ivory’s disappointment that both male stars had a no-nudity provision in their contracts.) More annoying were the unconvincing attempts to establish the academic bona fides of Armie Hammer and Michael Stuhlbarg’s characters. In fact, Hammer didn’t seem convincing as anything – latter-day Greek god, perhaps? – and Stuhlbarg seemed more Hammer’s younger brother than mentor. Timothee Chalamet was excellent, and the Tuscan countryside was prime Merchant-Ivory territory; but all the subplots and lunches with totally incidental secondary characters reminded me of New Wave cinema but didn’t do much for this story. I was more invested in counting all the cigarettes that got smoked.

The biggest source of mystery here was figuring out which famous stars were playing all the characters. Judi Dench was easy, but her companion was harder: Olivia Colman of Night Manager and Happy Valley. And who has seen Michelle Pfeiffer, who looked fabulous, in years? The scenery was lovely and the romance of a train ride remains vivid. What didn’t work, aside from the farfetched plot, was Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot. He never seemed comfortable in the role, and his constant presence left a gaping hole in the movie. Would a different director have noticed this?

Remarkable for what it was, an artistic portrait of refugee populations around the globe. Among the things it didn’t try to do: identify the causes of the refugee crisis, suggest solutions, blame anyone, show squalor or desperation, or make the audience feel guilty or bad. Like a good artwork, the film presents itself and lets the viewer bring her own thoughts, ideas and preconceptions to the experience. For example, although I doubt this was director Ai Weiwei’s intention, I thought immediately of how American foreign policy has caused or exacerbated almost every one of the refugee situations depicted – the Rohingya of Myanmar being perhaps the only exception. Everyone that Ai interviewed was articulate, fully clothed and seemingly healthy, and Ai’s casual appearance at each location was both lighthearted and a connective thread that brought the movie down to earth. Above all, the physical beauty of the cinematography and the geographic settings softened a story that otherwise might have been hard to sit through for two hours, twenty minutes.