Movie Review: Caniba (2017)

Caniba (2017)

Directed by: Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel.

Featuring: Renée Hartevelt, Issei Sagawa, Jun Sagawa.

 

Even as far as documentaries about cannibals go, Caniba is strange. The film created a stir on the festival circuit when it came out there in 2017 – but pretty much disappeared after that – distributors guessing (rightly) that most audiences wouldn’t want to endure the films 90-minute runtime. The fil doesn’t give anyone what they would expect in a documentary like this – it gives them something entirely different, more immersive, more disturbing, but also perhaps more exploitative. Watching it all, I got the impression that it was precisely the film that filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel wanted to make – but was at a loss to figure out why they felt the need to make it at all.

 

The subject of the documentary is Issei Sagawa – who became famous when, as a student studying at the Sorbonne, he murdered fellow student Renée Hartevelt, raped her corpse, and then at parts of her body. But Sagawa was declared insane and unfit for trial – and sent back to Japan, where he has eked out a living based on his infamy – writing a manga about what he did, starring in specialized pornography, even being a food critic for a period of time. He also has never been shy about sitting for interviews with documentary filmmakers – and this is hardly the first film about him to be made.

 

That perhaps explain why directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor  & Verena Paravel from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab don’t feel the need to dwell on the details of his crime all that much – we get them in onscreen text at the beginning of the film, before the film dives into a current day portrait of Sagawa – now in his 60s, and suffering from diabetes and the after effects of a stroke – he is now dependent on his older brother, Jun, to care for him. What ends up emerging in the film is a warped study of their brothers themselves – Issei admitting he still wants to eat people – and be eaten himself – and Jun still confessing that he doesn’t understand his brothers desires – before showing us his own rather extreme sadomasochistic desires as well.

 

I feel safe in saying that almost everyone reading this will not want to see Caniba, even those with a perverse fascination with the subject matter itself. The directors aren’t as interested in the details of his crime as clearly other filmmakers have been – and don’t really push Issei to explain what he did, or why. For his part, he seems tired of talking about it as well. While he admits that he is a monster, he also doesn’t really show anything resembling remorse either – and the filmmakers don’t push him to. The filmmaking is odd as well – with its relentless closeups of Issei and Jun, sometimes jostling for the frame. It’s off-putting in the extreme – and that’s even before we get to an extended clip of one of the porn films Issei starred in, or a reading, complete with pictures, of his disturbing manga – or the long sequence of Jun self-abusing. Caniba ends up being exhausting.

 

I have to admit watching the film, I often wondered what the point of it was. Why was Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel – clearly talented filmmakers that anyone who has seen their previous film, Leviathan can attest, making this film? In its own weird, fucked up way, the film I suppose humanizes both Issei and Jun – and invites you to think about your own desires – which are likely more mainstream then their own. Yet the film is also an endurance test – even at just 90 minutes – to see how much you can take, and is perhaps so off-putting that few will get what the filmmakers are going for – or want to. For them – and I think that’s most people – Caniba will be little more than a geek show.

Movie Review: April's Daughter

April's Daughter * ½ / *****

Directed by: Michel Franco.

Written by: Michel Franco.

Starring: Emma Suárez (Abril), Ana Valeria Becerril (Valeria), Enrique Arrizon (Mateo), Joanna Larequi (Clara), Hernán Mendoza (Gregorio), Ivan Cortes (Jorge).

 

I am not one of those people who require that every single thing in a movie needs to be explained – I embrace the mystery in certain films, because not knowing the answer – or at least not a definitive answer – makes them a richer experience. What I do require however is that what happens in a movie make a certain amount of sense – at least a sense that someone, somewhere knows what is going on, and that not everything that happens in the movie is completely and totally random, with no rhyme or reason to any of it. Michel Franco’s April’s Daughter doesn’t pass that test – because pretty much everything its main character does is completely and totally illogical, and there’s not a hint as to why she behaves that way. And she is not the only character in the film this is true of.

 

When the film opens, we learn that 17 year-old Valeria (Ana Valeria Becerril) is pregnant with Mateo’s (Enrique Arrizon) child – another 17 year-old. Valeria lives with her grumpy older sister Clara (Joanna Larequi) – who is in her early 20s, in a fancy beach house in Mexico – although neither does much for money. Their mother is April (Emma Suarez) – but she doesn’t live with them, or near them, and whatever she is doing is never explained. Valeria doesn’t want April to know she’s pregnant until after the baby is born – and she probably would have gotten away with it, had Clara not ratted her out – and April comes home, all of a sudden a doting mother. Most of the action happens after the baby is born – it isn’t as easy as Valeria and Mateo thought it would be – especially since his parents essentially disown him – but they are struggling through. Somehow though, April conspires with Mateo’s parents to sign adoption papers giving the baby away (I don’t think you can do that, anywhere, even if the mother and father are minors themselves) – and then won’t tell Valeria and Mateo where their child is. It turns out that April has moved to Mexico city, and is raising the baby as her own – eventually stopping all communication with her other kids, and trying to sell the house from under them. Stranger still, she not only attempts to, but succeeds at, seducing Mateo – and moving in with him. When Valeria eventually does figure everything out – she is pissed.

 

That the movie is far-fetched isn’t really the problem. I could see a movie made of this wacky premise working (it wouldn’t be easy, but it’s possible) – but Franco doesn’t give his actors anything to work with, anything to play with in order to make any of it seem real. Where was April when the movie began? Why does she go months without seeing her daughters? Why, when does come back, does she immediately become overbearing – taking control over Clara’s diet, and Valeria’s pregnancy? Why does no one, ever, call her out on it? Why does she want the baby? Why does she want Mateo? Why does she do her final act in the film? Suarez is a terrific actress – she was last seen in a great performance in Pedro Almodovar’s Julieta, but she cannot play what isn’t there. Nothing April does in the film makes the slightest bit of sense. I suppose you could write Mateo off as a horny teenager, which is why he allows himself to be seduced – you’d have to, because the movie also gives no reasons for his actions – and whether Arrizon is a good actor or not, he comes across here as a blank slate – as does nearly everyone else in the film (Larequi plays Clara as nearly comatose). At least Ana Valeria Becerril makes Valeria genuinely believable – she is a spoiled, naïve kid in the first scenes – and legitimately angry later – all recognizable human emotions and behaviors – the only ones in the film.

 

Franco is clearly inspired by Michael Haneke – he wants to give his film the same kind of cold, detached style, and portray the sins of the complacent upper class, that they will eventually be punished for. But Haneke’s film still make sense – we may not know the precise motivations behind the sending of the videos in Cache for example – not even at the end – but the way the people receiving them behave is recognizably human. Without that, all you’re left with is empty provocation – which is what April’s Daughter is.

Note: In case anyone is wondering why I'm posting this now, it's because I saw it a year ago at TIFF, and normally I hold the full review until the film is released - but a year later, and no release date in sight, I decided just to post it before this year's TIFF. It's the only film I saw last year at TIFF that saw no release.

Movie Review: Disgraced

Disgraced (2017) **** / *****

Directed by: Pat Kondelis.

 

Disgraced is a documentary about the 2003 scandal that rocked Baylor University in Waco, Texas – where one basketball player murdered another, and the fallout that followed that discovery, when it turned out head Coach Dave Bliss wasn’t following the rules. What’s odd is that this really should be a scandal of greater proportions – something talked about as much as Penn State and Joe Paterno, but it really isn’t. It’s likely that many don’t know anything about the story at all. In part, this is because as the movie tells us at the beginning, it’s something the people of Waco don’t talk about – at all. They don’t like to. But it’s a fascinating and troubling documentary, mainly because it gives Bliss so much rope to hang himself with.

 

When Bliss was hired as head coach of Baylor’s basketball team, he already had a successful NCAA coaching career under his belt – but he was taking over a team that wasn’t very good. To help make the team better, he recruited Patrick Dennehy to follow Baylor from New Mexico to Baylor, where he was promised a scholarship and playing time. He also recruited other players – including Carlton Dotson, who would become Dennehy’s friend and roommate – and eventually, his killer – and Harvey Thomas, who according to some harassed and threatened Dennehy and Dotson alongside his cousin, Larry Johnson – so much that the pair of friends went out and purchased guns. It was when they were practicing with those guns out in the desert that Dotson eventually killed Dennehy. A motive has never been established – Dotson has mental health issues – some psychiatrists at first deemed him unfit to stand trial – but his side of the story has never really been established. In a surprise move, five days before trial, he changed his plea to guilty in the hopes of getting a lesser sentence. It was a move that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, since even the prosecution admits that he could have argued self-defense and had a decent change or winning.

 

If that were the whole story, it would be a sad and tragic one. We’ve never seen a story is sports where one teammate murders another one – certainly not at the level of the NCAA in basketball. But that’s all it would be – another tragedy of young men killing each other for reasons we cannot comprehend. But the scandal goes deeper than that. That is because after the murder, the police naturally started digging around. Apparently, Dennehy wasn’t really at Baylor on a scholarship. So who paid his tuition? Who bought him his Chevy Tahoe?

 

As it all threatens to come crashing down, Bliss started scrambling – and wanted to get everyone in line, to lie to the police and the administration to cover his ass. This didn’t sit well with assistant coach Abar Rouse, who started recording his meetings with Bliss. What he gets on those tapes is shocking. Bliss essentially wants to tell everyone that was a drug dealer – and that’s how he paid for his own tuition. Because of those tapes (and bank records) that lie didn’t stick. Since then, Bliss has tried to sell his story of one of regret and redemption – that he did bad things, but learned from them and moved on. Then, in the documentary’s most shocking moment, when he thinks the camera is off, he goes on a rant essentially blaming Dennehy for his own death – and bringing up all the crap he had previously tried to paint Dennehy with. Its clear Bliss is the same piece of shit he was when this all went down.

 

This scandal really should be bigger than it was – it should have rocked the NCAA system more than it did. What’s odd is that other NCAA coaches sided with Bliss, not Rose – essentially saying that what Rouse did by recording Bliss was disloyal, and they would never have an assistant like that. 10 years later, Bliss found another coaching job (he couldn’t before that, because he was suspended). Rouse never did.

 

There are a few reasons it didn’t blow up bigger. For one, Baylor and the NCAA have reasons for wanting to keep this out of the spotlight – and they succeeded. For another, almost no one involved wants to talk about. The list of people involved in the scandal, the murder, the cover-up, etc. who refused to be interviews for the film is long. We still don’t know the truth about what happened in that desert and why – or what led to it. What we do know, as the documentary makes clear, is just what kind of person Dave Bliss is.

Movie Review: Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool

Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Paul McGuigan.

Written by: Matt Greenhalgh based on the memoir by Peter Turner.

Starring: Jamie Bell (Peter Turner), Annette Bening (Gloria Grahame), Stephen Graham (Joe Turner, jr.), Julie Walters (Bella Turner), Vanessa Redgrave (Jeanne McDougall), Frances Barber (Joy), Peter Turner (Jack), Leanne Best (Eileen), Kenneth Cranham (Joe Turner).

 

If you were going to make a biopic of a Hollywood blonde bombshell from the 1950s, you probably could not choose better than Gloria Grahame. At her best, Grahame was a fixture in film noir, and delivered great performances in films like Crossfire for Edward Dmytryk, In a Lonely Place for Nicholas Ray, The Big Heat and Human Desire for Fritz Lang – and her Oscar winning role in The Bad and the Beautiful, directed by Vincente Minelli. Her off-screen life was more fascinating than her onscreen on – she is probably most infamous for apparently sleeping with her stepson (son of her then husband, Nicholas Ray) when he was 13, and then later marrying him. As was inevitable (and still, in some ways is) for bombshells, her career faded as she aged.

 

Unfortunately, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool doesn’t really show us Grahame at all in the 1950s – but instead focuses on the sad final years of her life, before she died in 1981 of cancer. The film is based on the memoir by Peter Turner, a British actor, who met Grahame in the late 1970s, and had an affair with her when she was in her late 50s, and he was in his mid-20s. As a result, the film concentrates more on his point of view than hers – and the result is strange in that the only reason why this story is being told is because Grahame was famous, and yet the movie gives you no real sense of why. You are stuck wondering why you’re watching this story, of these people.

 

The stars of the film are not in the least bit at fault for that. Annette Bening plays Grahame, adding a little bit of a girlish lilt to her voice, but not opting for a straight impersonation, and she really does deliver a very good performance. She is an aging actress in Hollywood playing an aging actress in Hollywood – although Bening has been better able to maintain a career in Hollywood than Grahame did. Her Grahame is a tragic figure – somewhat delusional about herself, and the state of her career (at least on the surface) – saying with a straight face that she would love to play Juliet for the Royal Shakespeare Company at one point early in the film. But she does nail the insecurity as well – the desire to not concentrate or look at the unpleasantness in her life, and live for right now – which is ultimately what may have killed her. Jamie Bell also does fine work as Peter Turner – even if his character is a little bit more standard issue at first, it grows more complex as the film movies along.

 

Still, as directed by Paul McGuigan, the films structure of cutting back and forth in time and place over just a few years can be somewhat confusing – and I don’t know how much the story of Peter’s family drama really adds to the film – despite a fine turn by Julie Walters as his mother, who acts as a caretaker for Grahame. The film as a tragic inevitability to it, that make even the drawn out closing scenes not hit as hard as they should.

 

Ultimately, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool suffers from being a portrait of an interesting person, at not their most interesting time of life. The film doesn’t seem to want to embrace the camp value of something like Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Bette and Joan – but it also doesn’t hit the sad undercurrents of that show either, about being a star, and then aging to the point where you are rejected, and how much that hurts. It’s just kind of there – with two fine performances at its core, but no real reason for being made.

Movie Review: In the Fade

In the Fade **** / *****

Directed by: Fatih Akin.

Written by: Fatih Akin and Hark Bohm.

Starring: Diane Kruger (Katja Sekerci), Denis Moschitto (Danilo Fava), Numan Acar (Nuri Sekerci), Samia Muriel Chancrin (Birgit), Johannes Krisch (Haberbeck), Ulrich Tukur (Jürgen Möller), Ulrich Brandhoff (André Möller), Hanna Hilsdorf (Edda Möller).

 

Fatih Akin’s In the Fade is neatly (perhaps too neatly) divided into three sections exploring the aftermath of a bombing that leaves a Turkish immigrant in Germany and his young son dead, and his German wife, Katja (Diane Kruger) in a deep state of grieving. All three sections fit neatly into one genre or another, which is perhaps why some have suggested that In the Fade is an overly simplistic film. I don’t think it is – I think Akin is using the genre conventions at each stage as a way to keep the audience engaged, and uses it as a jumping off point to dive deeper into some more disturbing elements.

 

It doesn’t take long for the bomb to explode in the film. After a brief opening scene – shot on a cellphone – capturing the prison wedding between Katja and Nuri (he went there for dealing drugs), the film jumps ahead in time to show Nuri made good – he’s now an accountant (as an accountant, yes, I am bored by the fact that every time a movie needs to show someone is boring, they make them an accountant, but whatever). She drops off their son Rocco with him, and heads to the spa with her pregnant friend. When she returns, the building is a smoking ruin of rubble – her husband son dead.

 

From then on it’s one indignity after another that Katja has to endure during the investigation. The police want to look into his past as a drug dealer – and whether it really was in the past – or perhaps his religion had something to do with, yes? Her mother has the same sort of misguided, misplaced bias against her Muslim husband as well. His parents aren’t any better either – saying perhaps the cruelest thing imaginable at the funeral. She sinks into despair, and ultimately drug use, and entertains thoughts of suicide. Then – partly because of an ID she herself made of a strange woman she saw before the bombing – a couple is arrested and charged with the crime. They are a married couple of Neo-Nazis, targeting immigrants. The second act is all about the trial – and the farther indignities that Katja has to endure, hearing about the injuries her son suffered, having the defense attorney (who is perhaps the most evil character in the film) question everything, in the bluntest, cruelest way imaginable. The third act (spoiler warning, I guess), is in the aftermath of the crime – when with nothing left, Katja has to decide whether to take things into her own hands.

 

Diane Kruger anchors the film – she’s in nearly every scene, even the courtroom scenes when she isn’t saying anything, but has to suffer through anyway. This is the German-born Kruger’s first film that she made in her native country (she speaks German in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds) – and it is the best work of her career so far (she won the Best Actress prize at Cannes last year, and it was a deserving win). She does an excellent job at tracking Katja’s deteriorating mental state – her decent into depression, and the brief interludes in which she may come out of it, only to be slammed back again. She is great in the film, and she keeps the whole things grounded, even as the plot threatens at times to go over-the-top or get ridiculous. This is, in some ways, a revenge story – a Death Wish for modern Germany, that also has relevance elsewhere, as the we have seen the rise of Neo-Nazi violence in many places.

 

Kruger’s performance is key in another way as well. As the white, blonde woman she is the personification of the type of person that Western audiences are easily able to identify with. But her story makes you wonder – at least a little bit, especially in the end – if our reaction would be the same if she wasn’t a blonde, white woman from Germany. Akin is a Turkish immigrant to Germany himself – and his film, at their best, has done an excellent job of showing the tension of being an outsider in Europe, and feeling like that. This time he made a film centered on a German woman herself – but it makes you wonder – and one we fully sympathize with, right up until the end of the film. But what if the story was about Nuri, doing the same thing to avenge his son and wife?

Movie Review: Walking Out

Walking Out *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Alex Smith & Andrew J. Smith.

Written by: Alex Smith & Andrew J. Smith based on the short story by David Quammen.

Starring: Matt Bomer (Cal), Josh Wiggins (David), Bill Pullman (Clyde), Alex Neustaedter (Young Cal), Lily Gladstone (Lila).

 

Walking Out is a survival tale about a father and son who go hunting – and then things go wrong. You could compare the film to something like the Oscar winning The Revenant, but in a much more low-key way than that film. That doesn’t make the film any less harrowing – in fact, in some ways, that helps the film hit even harder, because it’s not as obsessed with its own importance. It is the type of film I think of when I hear that Hollywood never makes films for middle-American (the “real” America so many conservative pundits call it), because it is a film about that area - it is set in Montana – and is about the legacy of fathers and sons. It is perhaps a sly critique on gun culture – but not an overt one, and it certainly doesn’t look down on hunting culture at all. It is about respect for the wilderness, and the animals you are hunting – not about the glory of killing (the people in this movie would hate trophy hunting for example). It is in many way a quiet, subtle film – and remains so even after things go wrong.

 

The film stars young Josh Wiggins as David – a 14 year old kid, who lives with his mother in Texas, who once a year travels to see his father, Cal (Matt Bomer) is Montana to go on a hunt. David loves his father, and wants to connect with him, but isn’t much of a hunter. He’s okay hanging around his father’s remote cabin, and shooting at birds – but doesn’t much like the idea of heading out in the Smoky mountains for days on end to hunt moose – a certain moose in particular that Cal has been tracking for weeks. Still, Cal was 14 when he shot his first moose – which we see in a series of flashbacks, featuring a young Cal (Alex Neustaedter) and his own father, Clyde (Bill Pullman) – that will inform much of what we see throughout the film. They stalk the moose – but things go wrong, and they end up looking for a different animal that takes them off their previous route, and brings them in contact with a mother bear and her cubs. The second half of the film features David having to carry his father out of the wilderness.

 

The film is beautiful to look at – and remains so even after the horrific incidents of the halfway point. Director brothers Alex and Andrew J. Smith and their cinematographer Todd McMullen have a sort of reverence for the mountains, and their snow covered beauty. These are harsh, unrelenting conditions, and the film knows that well – but it never loses site of the beauty of it all.

 

The film is ultimately a tale of fathers and sons – and that hunting trip in which both of them become men. But in both cases – with Cal and his father, and then David with Cal – they do so in a way that their fathers never planned on. These are hunting trips the sons will remember for ever – just not in the romantic way the fathers probably thought they would.

 

In its way, the film is a subtle critique of gun culture – a culture in which guns are ubiquitous and have power that must be respected, but are placed in the hands of children who do not quite understand that power yet (they will). It’s not an anti-gun screed in any way – certainly not an anti-hunting one – but a subtle call for them to be treated with respect – and that goes beyond showing them where the safety is.

 

The movie is harrowing, yes, but it never becomes overly bleak or dark or depressing. It is in its way a quietly inspiring film, even as sad as the film gets. It’s not a film looking to blow you away with its camera work or its grimness or its violence – it works its way in in a quieter, more profound way. By the end, you may just be surprised by how much the film ultimately moves you.

Movie Review: Jane

Jane *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Brett Morgen.

Written by: Brett Morgen.

 

The discovery, in 2013, of over 100 hours of footage of Jane Goodall during her time in Gombe in the 1960s – thought lost forever – is the basis for Brett Morgen’s documentary Jane. He was clearly the right director for the material – as he’s proven with The Kid Stays in the Picture (with Nanette Burstein) about Robert Evans, the best ever 30 for 30 Documentary June 17^th, 1994 – about a very busy day in sports news, and no just because it was the day O.J. went on that chase in the white Bronco, and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Morgen is incredibly skilled at taking hours and hours of footage, and editing it together in a way that makes it all flow, given it broader resonance. Having Goodall herself still around to narrate the film helps too – it allows her to expand on the context of what we’re seeing, and why it was so groundbreaking. Add in Phillip Glass’ best score in years, and you really do have one of the year’s best looking and sounding docs. My only real complaint about the film – which does mar it somewhat – is that someone decided that the film had to be a fairly typical biopic about Goodall’s life as well – forcing the material into a direction that isn’t quite as interesting as the footage itself.

 

That footage was shot by Hugo Van Lawick – assigned by National Geographic to go out and film Goodall after she had already been in Gombe for a while – and was making remarkable discoveries. The footage is stunning and beautiful – and looks amazing, not something you really expect when it was shot more than 50 years ago, and has been “lost” for most of that time. The colors are glorious, and you understand by Van Lawick is considered one of the best nature photographers in history.

 

The film though is – and rightly so – mostly Goodall’s story. And it is remarkable when you consider that when she went into the jungle to try and observe chimps, she was a 26 year old secretary, with no scientific training, who was afraid of the chimps because she didn’t know she was supposed to be. Yet, she was able to observe them, in part because, she just didn’t go anywhere – they got used to her. Her journey from an untrained secretary to one of the most justly celebrated scientists of her era is remarkable. It is the stuff of Hollywood dreams of when they set about making a biopic.

 

And perhaps that’s why the material is ended up being shaped that way, especially as the film goes along. It’s odd no one has thought to make a fictionalized biopic of the woman – she’s certainly less controversial than Diann Fossey, who was the subject of Gorillas in the Mist (1988) with Sigourney Weaver (although, perhaps that project was greenlit because of Fossey’s murder a few years before, making her even more famous than she already was). The film is able to draw some fascinating observations from Goodall about her life – and how she learned a lot about herself from her time with the chimps – especially as it relates to be a mother (one wonders if a man would be asked this question, but Goodall seems comfortable with it, so whatever). The film foregrounds the budding romance between Goodall and Van Lawick, and later their son, Grub. Personally, I would have liked more on the chimps, and what was there – and less shots of the modern Goodall, who is clearly invaluable to the film, but also interrupts the visual flow of the film.

 

Still, it’s hard to complain about Jane – which features remarkable sights and sounds throughout, and really does tell a fascinating story – even if it’s one we’ve heard before, it’s not one we’ve seen quite this way.

Movie Reviw: Rat Film

Rat Film **** / *****

Directed by: Theo Anthony.

 

I often complain that too many documentaries use the rather boring point and shoot style – filming interviews with various talking heads, and mixing them with archival footage in a style that is basically interchangeable from doc to doc – even good ones. Once in a while though, we get something truly unique – and Theo Anthony’s Rat Film certainly qualifies on that level. The film is an 80 minute look at the rat problem in Baltimore – both historically, and in the present, and is a strange mixture of styles and tones, going from deadpan humor, to the surreal, to the tragic, and back again. The film is a tone poem that gets at something real about the city it documents. As one of the exterminators says in the film – Baltimore doesn’t have a rat problem, it has a people problem.

 

That statement, is probably the thesis of the film. Rats are inevitable when you cram this many people into this small of a space, and have rundown buildings, and garbage buildup all around. The rats are going to come. The film documents the historical way that Baltimore first dealt with the problem – including block by block maps by Kurt Richter, who mapped out everywhere rats went, to better able to deal with them. There’s also some other, strange details in the film – like the opening, where we see a rat try and escape a City of Baltimore Garbage Can – rats can jump up to 32 inches, the City’s cans are 34 inches. That rat isn’t getting out.

 

Watching Rat Film is an odd experience, as you never quite know where the film is going to go next. There are scenes literally from the rat’s point of view in the film – virtual reality simulations for example, and then Anthony will veer off to the various, creative ways the residents of the city deal with rats themselves. If they weren’t rats, you’d likely call some of what they do cruel – and maybe it is – but they all have to some way of dealing with it.

 

What emerges over time though is a portrait of this city which is forced to deal with the rat problem, mainly because of class and race issues. Eventually, everything comes back down to that, and always will unless people actually want to do something about the problem. They don’t. Rat Film is an odd film – I almost don’t know what else to say about it, because it is so strange – but it’s certainly one of the most unique docs of the year – and a film that will likely last in your mind after most docs have vanished. Seek it out.

Movie Review: Thelma

Thelma **** / *****

Directed by: Joachim Trier.

Written by: Eskil Vogt & Joachim Trier.

Starring: Eili Harboe (Thelma), Kaya Wilkins (Anja), Ellen Dorrit Petersen (Unni), Henrik Rafaelsen (Trond), Grethe Eltervåg (Young Thelma).

 

If you can imagine Stephen King’s Carrie directed by Ingmar Bergman, who can get close to seeing what Joachim Trier is going for with his film Thelma. This is a horror story, about a teenage girl with psychic powers in the first throes of love and lust, and who naturally loses control over everything, without really realizing it. The first scene in the film sets things up so we know this isn’t going to be a typical story, as a father and daughter (around 6) go plodding through the snowy forest. The father sites a deer and raises his rifle – his daughter is transfixed by the deer – and doesn’t realize that her father has changed his aim, and is now pointing the gun at the back of her head. Eventually, we will figure out why.

 

But most of the action takes place in the present – where Thelma is a college freshman, away from her parents for the first time. We assume that they are just a little strict – they get nervous if she doesn’t immediately answer their phone calls, and know her class schedule better than she does – and even comes down to stay with her, in her apartment, on a weekend. The whole family is religious, and while it doesn’t seem to be the fire and brimstone type Christianity of Carrie, it is quietly strict. Things seem to be going okay with Thelma – she’s lonely, but smart – until she becomes friends – and then more – with Anja (Kaya Wilkins). Whatever has been lying dormant in Thelma is suddenly not dormant anymore.

 

On the surface, Thelma is a genre film – a horror film going over some well-worn terrain, combining the coming-of-age, sexual awakening of a teenage girl, and unleashing of her power upon those around her. Trier, however, takes this story seriously (perhaps a touch too seriously – I’ll get to that), making a film that really does look at this young woman, her faith, her sexuality, her family, her past and letting it play out as naturally and realistically as it can, given Thelma’s powers. None of the deaths or action is played for thrills at all. The film ends up, perhaps, where you expect it to, but it takes a different, more serious route there.

 

This approach mostly works for me – but left a few nagging complaints for me. For one, I don’t think Trier needs to spend as much as he does showing Thelma playing detective looking into her family history – savvy audience members will get there before the film even starts, so move it along. As well, it always bugs me a little – just a little – when filmmakers making a genre film seem to think that theirs is “above” the genre, and therefore doesn’t want to offer any of the baser pleasures of the genre. Carrie is a masterpiece of its kind, has a lot to say about its subject – but doesn’t hold itself above the genre. Same with Raw. Thelma wants to cloak some of those genre trappings behind a prestige sheen.

 

Still, that’s a minor complaint – and something that didn’t bother me much when watching the film. This is an engrossing film, and one that is expertly directed by Trier – more than making up for his thuddingly dull English language debut Louder Than Bombs a few years ago. Eili Harboe is terrific in the lead role as well, delivering a sympathetic performance, even as the film goes along, and she starts making increasingly questionable choices. She slowly reels you in, as does the film. I just wish Trier had loosened the reigns just a little bit – and let the genre loose.

Movie Review: My Friend Dahmer

My Friend Dahmer *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Marc Meyers.

Written by: Marc Meyers based on the book by Derf Backderf.

Starring: Ross Lynch (Jeffrey Dahmer), Alex Wolff (John "Derf" Backderf), Anne Heche (Joyce Dahmer), Dallas Roberts (Lionel Dahmer), Vincent Kartheiser (Dr. Matthews), Tommy Nelson (Neil), Harrison Holzer (Mike).

 

As almost any film about Jeffrey Dahmer would have to be, My Friend Dahmer is not an easy movie to watch. This is a movie that ends with Dahmer still at the age of 18 – a few weeks after high school ended - his first victim just getting into his car. He would claim 16 more victims in the next 12 years, before he was arrested – his crimes, because of their brutality, and because they involved cannibalism, and perhaps because they involved homosexuality (something that may allowed them to go undetected, as the police didn’t seem to care much about that community in the 1980s). There is not a lot of violence in My Friend Dahmer – he does some icky things with roadkill, but it’s not graphic, and he kills a fish, but again, it’s not really graphic. The film is hard to watch mainly because we in the audience know just how deeply disturbed this teenager is – and no one else in the film seems to notice. They think he’s weird or strange, but they mainly ignore him – so lost in their own worlds, and own problems to notice this kid. You could barely call him an outcast at school – he was more like a ghost no one really noticed. The film is mainly about his senior year in high school – the brief friendship he had with another student, who years later would go on to make a graphic novel about that time, that would be adapted into this movie.

 

Ross Lynch (probably in an effort to distance himself from his Disney show Austin & Ally) plays Dahmer as a lanky, silent, unknowable kid. If he’s not being picked on in school, no one notices him as he silently plods down the hallways at school, not unlike Frankenstein. At home, his parents don’t have much more time for him. His mother, Joyce (Anne Heche), clearly has a mental illness herself, and his downtrodden father Lionel (Dallas Roberts) is exhausted from dealing with her, and his job. He is the only one who realizes something isn’t quite right about Jeffrey, but just thinks its shyness – not anything more than that. Perhaps in a desperate, last ditch effort for some sort of attention, Dahmer starts acting out at school – throwing “fits” – acting like he’s having seizures, or just yelping and making noise. This draws the attention of Derf (Alex Wolff) and his friends – who take Dahmer as their “mascot”. They think he’s hilarious – only gradually realizing he’s more damaged than they thought. Then, it’s not so funny.

 

The movie, smartly, doesn’t make the case that any of these things are the reason why Dahmer became the serial killer he would become – although it does make the case that it didn’t really help. Dahmer is suffering from whatever he would always suffer from at the outset of the movie, and while it gets worse throughout the film – as does his burgeoning alcoholism – it’s not really the reason any of this happens. The movie drops in some hints and reference from those of us who know more of the details about what Dahmer would do (like the scene where Dallas Roberts, in a sad attempt to bond with his son, gives him the barbells he will use to kill his first victim).

 

Ross is very good as Dahmer – even if the performance is a little one note by design. Dahmer, like all psychopaths, lack the ability to feel empathy or sympathy, or really much of anything – and here at least, he hasn’t really learned how to fake it. He is hardly a charming psychopath – everyone thinks he’s weird – but he flat and emotionless more than anything. Wolff is quite good as Derf as well – a typical, idiot teenager who thinks stupid, and to be honest downright mean and cruel, things are funny, without registering them as that way. A turning point for him may well a scene at the mall – where he has taken up a collection to get Jeffrey to “Do a Dahmer” – and he takes it so far that all of a sudden it doesn’t seem to so funny anymore. If you think you’re laughing with someone, and not at them, make sure they’re laughing too.

 

More than anything, My Friend Dahmer is a sad movie. The production design captures the depressing side of suburban 1970s – full of dull browns and faded colors. It presents a world in which no one really notices a kid who is clearly damaged – except for the other kids, who cannot put into words what is bothering them, so instead, they simply walk away.

Movie Review: Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Angela Robinson.

Written by: Angela Robinson.

Starring: Luke Evans (William Moulton Marston), Rebecca Hall (Elizabeth Marston), Bella Heathcote (Olive Byrne), Connie Britton (Josette Frank), Monica Giordano (Mary), JJ Feild (Charles Guyette), Chris Conroy (Brant Gregory), Oliver Platt (M.C. Gaines).

 

It’s somewhat interesting that the reason why people will be interested in William Moulton Marston and his two loves – his wife Elizabeth, and their girlfriend Olive – is because he is the creator of Wonder Woman, and those two women and their relationship inspired him – is really almost an afterthought in the film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. Afterthought may be a bit harsh, but it certainly is more beneath the surface than you would expect. If it wasn’t for the frustrating narrative device used throughout the film – and cutting back and forth between 1945, and the years preceding it, Wonder Woman wouldn’t come at all until very late in the film. That’s not a bad thing at all in this case, because it allows you see Wonder Woman emerge slowly out of this relationship. Too much of the rest of the film is too on the nose to be a truly great film, but I appreciated this part.

 

The film takes place in the years between 1928 and 1945. When it opens, William Marston (Luke Evans) is a Professor of Psychology at Radcliffe, trying to get his own theory – DISC (Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance) to take (it never really does). His wife, Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) is smarter than her husband, but has the handicap of being a woman – meaning even though she has done all the same work, she cannot get a PhD – and is basically stuck assisting her husband’s work. Between the two of them though, they make a great team – he’s charming and funny, she is more serious and smart. They do great work together. Into their lives enters Olive (Bella Heathcote), a young student who becomes their teaching assistant – helping them in their research. It’s clear from the start that William is attracted to her, but it becomes clear that all of them are attracted to each other. Eventually, they start living the type of life that many would still look down on today – and certainly would have at that time.

 

What makes the movie is the chemistry between the three leads. The film works best when it leaves them alone enough to engage in various flirtations, conversations – and eventually, sex scenes, that become gradually more kinky. The best scenes are probably the earlier ones, involving an early prototype of the lie detector machine. The trio use it to expose various truths about each other, in scenes that tense and erotic at the same time. These scenes are almost more sexual than the actual sex scenes when they come around.

 

The film is far from perfect. For the most part, I’m tired of the biopic cliché in which we flash back and forth in time – especially when the main subject of the film is in some sort of interview or interrogation looking back on their life (it worked in Phantom Thread, in part because it wasn’t a biopic, and in larger part, because they’ basically serve to make everything more idiosyncratic). Here, William is being interrogated by Josette Frank (Connie Britton) who wants to shut down Wonder Woman, because of all the sexuality and bondage in the seemingly innocent comic book character. It adds nothing to the film overall, and I think underlines everything about the relationship too much. The dialogue also is a little too on the nose as well – Evans at one point is about one step away from saying together, Olive and Rebecca ARE Wonder Woman.

 

And yet, overall, director Angela Robinson does a fine job exploring this unconventional relationship, and how it led to the creation of one of the most iconic and beloved of all superheroes. The film is also fun, funny, incredibly sexy, has three great performances, and looks great. What more do you want?

Movie Review: BPM (Beats Per Minute)

BPM (Beats Per Minute) **** / *****

Directed by: Robin Campillo.

Written by: Robin Campillo and Philippe Mangeot.

Starring: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (Sean Dalmazo), Arnaud Valois (Nathan), Adèle Haenel (Sophie), Antoine Reinartz (Thibault), Ariel Borenstein (Jérémie), Félix Maritaud (Max), Aloïse Sauvage (Eva), Simon Bourgade (Luc), Médhi Touré (Germain), Simon Guélat (Markus), Coralie Russier (Muriel), Catherine Vinatier (Hélène), Théophile Ray (Marco), Saadia Bentaïeb (Mère de Sean).

 

The French film BPM (Beats Per Minute) combines the political and the personal in a way that reminds viewer that the two are forever intertwined, and we should expect nothing different. The film takes place in the early 1990s, and focuses on the Paris chapter of ACT UP – the AIDS organization that, through various means, put pressure on governments and pharmaceutical companies to get treatment to the many people living with HIV, and dying when they got AIDS as a result.

 

The film starts out in macro, showing us the group as a whole, first at a protest when they storm the stage of a government spokesperson, and then in the weekly ACT UP meeting, where the various people involved dissect what happened, and disagree about its effectiveness. It’s clear from these scenes that not everyone agrees on what to do, or how to proceed. Various people start to stand out in the crowd. The group’s de facto leader is Thibault (Antoine Reinartz), who wants to take a more diplomatic approach – reaching agreements with the government and pharma companies in a non-confrontational way. Sean (Nahuel Perez Biscayart) is almost the exact opposite – wanting to push these groups buttons, and force them to do something, and rub their nose in the effects that their policies are having on real people. Sophie (Adele Haenel) is somewhere in between – seeing the value in both positions, but definitely willing to get her hands dirty. While most in the group are gay men – many living with the disease – that isn’t true of everyone. Among the groups other few female members is Helene (Catherine Vinatier), who is there for her 16-year-old who has the disease, which he got through a blood transfusion.

 

A new face, Nathan (Arnaud Valois) shows up, and will change the course of the movie. He gets more and more involved in the group sure – and has a voice – but at first he is relatively quiet. He isn’t HIV positive, which draws some suspicion, but he gradually gets closer to the action. He also falls in love with Sean, and the two men’s relationship forms the emotional core of the film. The last act basically abandons ACT UP to focus on their relationship, as Sean gets sicker and sicker.

 

The film is incredibly dense in terms of its dialogue – particularly in the beginning – and it takes a while to really find your footing in the film, to get to know the characters, and get on the films wavelength. In the earlier going, the film is built around the various meetings – most of which will grow contentious, and arguments are common – and the various actions the group takes. It’s quite impressive how co-writer/director Robin Campillo, navigates these scenes so that you’re not lost in them. I actually liked this part of the film more than the final act. When the focus on the movie switches to the relationship between Sean and Nathan, the film still works, but it’s also more conventional. The point here is to show that the politics in the film are personal – and have real consequences to those involved. It works, but it also feels like other films we’ve seen before – while the first two acts felt like something different, and more complex.

 

Still, BPM never feels any less than vital and important, and although the film runs nearly two-and-a-half hours, it never grows dull or repetitive – it earns that runtime throughout, and makes an important statement – not just about the past, but also the present.

Movie Review: My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Dash Shaw.

Written by: Dash Shaw.

Starring: Jason Schwartzman (Dash), Lena Dunham (Mary), Reggie Watts (Assaf), Maya Rudolph (Verti), Susan Sarandon (Lunch Lady Lorraine), Thomas Jay Ryan (Principal Grimm), Alex Karpovsky (Drake), Louisa Krause (Gretchen), John Cameron Mitchell (Brent Daniels), Matthew Maher (Senior Kyle), Keith Poulson (Senior Craig).

 

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea takes a lot of influences – both in terms of its visual look and its storytelling, combines them all together to make an animated film that can sometimes feel patchwork, but it’s always interesting to look at, and entertaining. The film runs a brisk 75 minutes, so there’s not much time to get bored, and while that means the characters are thinly written, the story moves quick enough to keep things from getting bogged down. It’s not a great animated film, but it’s a great first animated film for Writer/director Dash Shaw – a graphic novelist making his transition into the movies. He plays it safe in many ways, just working on making sure everything works. I hope a second film from him will take more chances.

 

The film centers on a high school sophomore named Dash (presumably based on the writer/director, but voiced by Jason Schwartzman in a way that makes him seem like if Max Fischer was animated) – who on the first day of school has a fight with his best (only) friend Assaf (Reggie Watts) because the editor of the school paper, Verti (Maya Rudolph) clearly favors Assaf in more than one way. On a quest to get his permanent record, Dash ends up in the bowels of the school, where he comes across paper work that shows that the school new auditorium – built at the top of the school – has made the whole building dangerously unstable, and that even a small earthquake could send the school off a cliff, and crashing into the ocean. Of course, no one listens to Dash, and of course, that is precisely what happens. Dash has to team up with Assaf, Verti, sophomore class President Mary (Lena Dunham) and a helpful lunch lady (Susan Sarandon) to try and reach the top of the school so they can be rescued, before the whole school sinks.

 

The film is basically what you get if you animated a mishmash of John Hughes and The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno). The animation style is often rudimentary on the surface – the characters aren’t Don Hertzfeldt stick figures by any means, but they aren’t overly detailed either. Shaw does excel in the backgrounds however – often creating intense, flashing room that leave our heroes in striking silhouette. His other influences ranger from old school Nintendo games – the ones where a character stutters across the screen to fight bad guys, but only have one move, to a deliberate reference to A Charlie Brown Christmas. The result is actually quite charming – as if a high school sophomore’s doodle book came to life along with his fantasies of the school being destroyed, and all his enemies being vanquished.

 

I liked the vocal work in the movie as well – even if, for the most part, Shaw seemed to cast people to do things right in the centre of their sweet spot. Still, it works – and the film does as a whole as well. It’s fun and funny, and just as you start to feel the film flagging a little bit, it’s over. I look forward to seeing what Shaw does next – he’s made a very good first film, but I think there’s something more waiting to come out.

Movie Review: Happy End

Happy End **** / *****

Directed by: Michael Haneke.

Written by: Michael Haneke.

Starring: Isabelle Huppert (Anne Laurent), Jean-Louis Trintignant (Georges Laurent), Mathieu Kassovitz (Thomas Laurent), Fantine Harduin (Eve Laurent), Franz Rogowski (Pierre Laurent), Laura Verlinden (Anaïs), Aurélia Petit (Nathalie), Toby Jones (Lawrence Bradshaw), Hassam Ghancy (Rachid), Nabiha Akkari (Jamila). 

 

Austrian director Michael Haneke may bristle at the suggestion that his latest film – Happy End – is a kind of “greatest hits” package of his career – but it’s certainly easy to see why many critics have said something along those lines. There are elements here of films like Benny’s Video, Amour, Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher and The White Ribbon. I say this not as a criticism of the film – like some have – but rather an acknowledgment that Haneke is still addressing his pet themes, and doing it all in one, strange package. While Happy End doesn’t join the ranks of his masterworks (including The Piano Teacher, The White Ribbon, Amour and his best film, Cache) – the suggestion that it’s somehow a bad film from the filmmaker is silly. He is still trying to, and succeeding in, provoking a response from his audience – and technically, the film is quite different from what he has done before – simpler, more pared down and without the beauty that often accompanies his images. He has made a film for the Snapchat generation, and done so using the same kind of style – and odd for a 75 year old, he does it without coming across as embarrassingly out of touch (something the much younger Jason Reitman wasn’t able to do in Men, Women and Children).

 

The film revolves around the wealthy Laurent family who runs a construction business is Calais. The company has seen better days financially – and to top it off, Anne (Isabelle Huppert), who now runs it, has to deal with the fallout of an accident that killed one of her workers, which may have been caused by the negligence of her son, Pierre (Franz Rogowski), who she put in charge of the site. Her father, George (Jean-Louis Trintignant) used to run the company, but is now 85, and started to lose his mind to dementia – and his determined to die before that happens. His son, Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), is one his second wife – the painfully shy and quiet Anais (Laura Verlinden) – and they have an infant son, although he is cheating on his wife with an older woman – who we meet through her lengthy chats with him on Facebook – which are kinky to say the least. All of these people are already fairly messed up – and that’s before Eve (Fantine Harduin) re-enters their lives. She is Thomas’ 13-year-old daughter from her first marriage, who hasn’t been around in recent years. She has been living with her mother – who we see in the film’s opening scenes, in videos that Eve herself shoots on her phone. First, it’s just her mother going through her bedtime routine – but then it becomes darker, as she stumbles around, and Eve admits, in voiceover, to poisoning her mother with pills. Whether she meant to just make her sick, or kill her the film never states – but she does end up in a coma, and Eve comes to live with Thomas.

 

Happy End is a film that refuses to draw the lines between the dots that Haneke is placing throughout the film – you are left in the audience to do that, even more than in Haneke’s other films. None of these characters are innocent – but they are all completely self-involved. Their motivations are often obscured in the film (like, for instance, why Huppert’s Anne is marrying a British banker, played by the short, balding Toby Jones).

 

The film jumps around a lot – it’s not quite a series of vignettes like previous Haneke films Code Unknown or 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, but it feels like that at times. All the characters are interesting, but the best performances belong to the youngest and oldest of the cast members. The great Trintgnant, now in his late 80s, plays a character very much like his one in Amour (we don’t realize just how much until late in the film). The film examines how someone like him can deal with the things he has done – and he is now looking for someone to essentially do the same thing for him. In Harduin, Haneke has made a real discovery, as Eve is the most complex character in the film. At first, you may feel that she is essentially a female version of the main character from Benny’s Video – a little psychopath, using technology as a way to keep a distance from the things she has done. But as the film progresses, it gets messier than that – she becomes a more complex character, whose motivations are not so clear cut. She would likely fit in with the kids in The White Ribbon, or even the son in Cache, who know the sins of their parents, and punish them for those sins.

 

Happy End has a fairly blunt visual look for a Haneke film – he almost shot it like a TV movie in many respects, from the aspect ratio, to the lighting. There are a few of his great long takes, he is going for something more direct this time. It works for this film, even if I hope he goes from something more akin to some of his other work in the future. Not everything in the film works as well as it should – Haneke’s ultimate point here seems to be that we are all so self-obsessed we do not see the larger suffering in the world, and to make his point, he uses the current refugee crisis. This comes to a head in a climaxing scene – but it doesn’t really work that well. Haneke’s point is stronger when it’s more focused in Happy End – after all, the individual Laurent family members are not just blind to the suffering in the wider world – they’re blind to the suffering within their own family.

 

Ultimately, if Happy End is a disappointment from Haneke it’s only because we’ve become accustomed to him making masterpieces more often than not over the past 20 years. Happy End isn’t that, but even lesser Haneke is better than most filmmakers at their very best.

Movie Review: Hostiles

Hostiles *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Scott Cooper.

Written by: Scott Cooper based on a story by Donald E. Stewart.

Starring: Christian Bale (Captain Joseph J. Blocker), Rosamund Pike (Rosalie Quaid), Wes Studi (Yellow Hawk), Ben Foster (Sergeant Charles Wills), Stephen Lang (Colonel Abraham Biggs), Timothée Chalamet (Private Philippe DeJardin), Jesse Plemons (Lieutenant Rudy Kidder), Rory Cochrane (Master Sergeant Thomas Metz), Jonathan Majors (Corporal Henry Woodson), Adam Beach (Black Hawk), Q'orianka Kilcher (Elk Woman), Peter Mullan (Lieutenant Colonel Ross McCowan), Robyn Malcolm (Minnie McGowan), Paul Anderson (Corporal Tommy Thomas), Scott Wilson (Cyrus Lounde), Bill Camp (Jeremiah Wilks), John Benjamin Hickey (Captain Royce Tolan), Scott Shepherd (Wesley Quaid), Ryan Bingham (Sergeant Malloy).

 

Scott Cooper’s Hostiles is a Western that has so much going for it that ultimately it is able to make up for some of it’s rather glaring flaws. It isn’t a classically structured Western, but rather one that aims to depict the brutality of America at that time in all its harshness. This, it undeniably does, but the film also plods along at a rather slow pace, and at times it feels like little more than a parade of misery. And while it’s laudable that the really wants to give humanity to the Native Americans, it suffers because the Native characters are thinly written, especially when compared to the roles for the white actors in the film. The film is about the slow realization of the main character – Captain Joseph Blocker – that Natives are humans to, and deserve that humanity. If only the film had been able to do more with its Natives characters, it could have been great.

 

The film takes place in 1892, and opens with a massacre of a white family on their homestead at the hands of the Comanche – who want to steal their horses. To do this, they kill the husband, two daughters, and an infant son – leaving only the mother, Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike) alive – and only because they cannot find her. The film than flashes to a group of Army men, taunting and tormenting their latest Native captive. These two scenes make it clear that there is no love lost between these two sides, and brutality is going both ways. Captain Blocker (Christian Bale) is then given his final assignment before retirement. He is to escort chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), and his family – who have been prisoners for 7 years – back to his homeland in Montana, where he can die in peace. It has become clear at this point that the White Man has won the “war” against the natives, so a little harmless PR stunt like this won’t hurt anything. Blocker is deadest against it – so much so that he risks a court martial to try and fight it. Eventually, he gives in, because he has no choice. But he isn’t happy about it – and once out of the army base, he demeans the Chief and his son (Adam Beach) by putting them in chains. Eventually, they will come across Rosalie, still staying in her burnt out shell of a house, with the bodies of her family – clearly suffering from PTSD. They take her along with them, and she slowly comes out of her shock – but the danger of those Comanche is always there.

 

The first half of the film is really where it is at its best – the journey from the base, to the point where they have to deal with the Comanche that killed the Quaid family. From there – about the half way point, things become a little more scattershot, and less effective. The film introduces a killer (Ben Foster), who had previously served with Blocker, and who they are tasked with bringing back to another base to stand trial. Foster doesn’t understand why he is being tried for murder, when all the army does is murder people. There are also side trips to deal with brutal fur trappers, and a final showdown with some people who arrive out of nowhere.

 

To be fair to the movie, it handles these things fairly well. Bale is great in his role, and he is able to show his slow dawning change in him in how he views Yellow Hawk, and other natives – from the man practically shaking with racist rage in the opening scenes, to someone who really does fully respect them, and is willing to back that up. Rosamund Pike is also quite good (even if her “recovery” seems rather quick – especially after the incident with the fur traders). The film looks utterly gorgeous as well. While the film has a slow pace, perhaps too slow given its runtime, it does make the eruptions of violence hit harder.

 

Yet, I cannot help but think that much of the energy in the second half, devoted to these side trips, could have been better served rounding out the Native characters. Wes Studi is a great actor, and he has undeniable screen presence in Hostiles – but the film doesn’t really give him anything to do except have screen presence. Talented actors like Adam Beach and Q'orianka Kilcher – are given even less to do. If you’re going to make a film about the relationship between the White Man and Natives, it would help if both sides are given fully realized characters to play.

 

Still, while that’s an undeniably flaw, it doesn’t sink Hostiles – which really is a fine, modern day Western, which wants to help correct the mythmaking of old Hollywood films. The film was directed by Scott Cooper – who has made four solid films now (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace and Black Mass are the others), but hasn’t yet made a great one. He may well get there one day – but for now, it’s been interesting watching him try.