Movie Review: War of the Planet of the Apes

War for the Planet of the Apes **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Matt Reeves.

Written by: Mark Bomback & Matt Reeves based on characters created by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver.

Starring: Andy Serkis (Caesar), Woody Harrelson (The Colonel), Steve Zahn (Bad Ape), Karin Konoval (Maurice), Amiah Miller (Nova), Terry Notary (Rocket), Ty Olsson (Red Donkey), Michael Adamthwaite (Luca), Toby Kebbell (Koba), Gabriel Chavarria (Preacher), Judy Greer (Cornelia), Sara Canning (Lake), Devyn Dalton (Cornelius), Aleks Paunovic (Winter), Alessandro Juliani (Spear), Max Lloyd-Jones (Blue Eyes).

 

I’m hard pressed to think of another blockbuster series of recent years that is better than the new Planet of the Apes films have been. Each film is distinct from each other – not just recycling what has come before, but expanding it, and continually building upon it, taking the fall of humanity and rise of ape as seriously as you can in a blockbuster trilogy like this without taking it too seriously. I still that the second film – Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – is probably the best of trilogy – it certainly is the most action packed and viscerally exciting, and has the best mixture of human and ape characters – but the first film – Rise of the Planet of the Apes – was perhaps the most emotional (it certainly was the most heartbreaking) – and both lead brilliantly into War of the Planet of the Apes, which caps off the trilogy in a brilliantly. All three films represent blockbuster filmmaking at its current best.

 

The infighting between Apes that made up the plot of the second film has pretty much been resolved. Caesar (Andy Serkis) and his apes are trying to live in peace in the forest – but humans just don’t seem to want to allow that. The opening sequence involves an army searching for Caesar’s hiding spot – and coming very close to it. The apes fight them off – and take a few prisoner. Caesar, trying to show that the apes are not savages, allows them to go free. That ends up being a mistake, and soon more soldiers – this time led by the Colonel (Woody Harrelson) return – and kill some of Caesar’s family. As the apes ready their next move – hopefully to a safer place – Caesar plots his vengeance on the Colonel. If only a few trusted allies, he sets out to find his enemy.

 

War of the Planet of the Apes wears its influences on its sleeve – it’s clearly a war movie in many ways, and it takes its lead mainly from Apocalypse Now and other Vietnam war movies (strangely enough, Kong: Skull Island did the same thing – this one does it better). Harrelson’s The Colonel is clearly based on Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kurtz – the gleaming bald head, the way he shaves it, the insane ramblings (this Colonel’s ramblings form a more coherent thought pattern than Kurtz’s – I think, anyway) – and Harrelson clearly relishes playing the bad guy here. As Caesar, Serkis is once again at his best (for better or worse, you’d be hard pressed to find a more influential performer in modern blockbusters than Serkis – who has already plays Gollum and King Kong for Peter Jackson in motion capture, but does career best work in this series). The special effects that allow the apes their expressiveness is quite honestly astonishing – and allows Caesar to become a more complex character here than he was before (in Rise he was more of a victim who fought back, in Dawn he was the principled leader – here, he is a leader, who makes mistakes and puts his own feelings above all else selfishly – and yet, he maintains the hero of the film in part because of how aware he is of his own shortcomings).

 

In many ways, director Matt Reeves has stepped up his filmmaking game here – the cinematography by veteran Michael Seresin is great, integrating the special effects in with the surroundings – the lush green forest that is made to feel like the jungles of Vietnam in those old movies, the cold blinding snow, the horrible prison camp of the last half. So many modern blockbusters who rely heavily on CGI (like, undeniably this one does) end up looking almost like a candy colored cartoon – this series has been an exception from the start, as it’s blended everything together well. The film goes long stretches with little to no dialogue – it almost exclusively stays with Caesar throughout, and many of the apes cannot talk – but communicate in sign language. Michael Giacchino’s brilliant score, does some of the emotional heavy lifting in those sequences, without laying anything on too thick.

 

Each film in this series work on its own terms – it doesn’t repeat what came before, but instead deepens it. As a trilogy, the whole is even better than the sum of its parts. Most Hollywood blockbusters don’t have room for ideas – let alone, allow themselves to address the darkest parts of our humanity (from the first film on, we’re clearly on the side of the apes, not the humans) – but this series went there, and did it with style and intelligence. They’re also three amazingly entertaining films. Modern day blockbusters don’t get much better than this series.

Movie Review: To the Bone

To the Bone ** / *****

Directed by: Marti Noxon.

Written by: Marti Noxon.

Starring: Lily Collins (Ellen), Keanu Reeves (Dr. William Beckham), Kathryn Prescott (Anna), Liana Liberato (Kelly), Carrie Preston (Susan), Alanna Ubach (Karen), Lili Taylor (Judy), Brooke Smith (Olive), Ciara Bravo (Tracy), Retta (Lobo), Hana Hayes (Chloe), Alex Sharp (Luke), Rebekah Kennedy (Penny), Maya Eshet (Pearl), Joanna Sanchez (Rosa), Lindsey McDowell (Kendra).

 

I have a feeling that when writer/director Marti Noxon decided to make a film about anorexia – based, in part, on her own experiences dealing with the disease, that she had a long list of things she didn’t want her film to do, in order to avoid the pitfalls of a TV-Movie-of-the-Week or a “very special” episode of a well-meaning family sitcom. This is admirable to be sure – but watching the film, it felt like the moving was trying so hard not to be the clichéd version of this story, that it never really figured out what it really did want to be. The movie throws a lot of terminology about anorexia around, and seems to stress over and over again that there is no one root cause, and no one way to deal with it, etc. But then it doesn’t really show us anything. The brilliant doctor who treats the houseful of patients dealing with the disease (played by Keanu Reeves) doesn’t really seem to have a plan in place at all in terms of treatment. Again, he’s very confident about what won’t work, but doesn’t really know what will.

 

The story centers on Ellen (Lily Collins) – a 20 year old woman, who has been suffering from anorexia for a while, and been in and out of treatment for years, but isn’t getting any better. Her father is at work all the time (literally, it seems, as he never appears in the movie), her mother (Lily Taylor) came out as a lesbian when Ellen was 13, and has recently moved to Phoenix after yet another breakdown. Her stepmother, Susan (Carrie Preston), talks non-stop, and can be annoying – but she really does care, and she really does her best to try and help (at least it seemed like it to me – the movie, I’m not so sure sees her the same way). Ellen, reluctantly, agrees to go into another in-patient facility for treatment – this one in a large house, staffed by nurses, with a total of 7 patients, and run by Dr. Beckham (Keanu Reeves) who treatment seems to be a mixture of touch love and praise, and not a whole lot else.

 

It’s at the treatment facility that things start to go a little sideways for the movie. Ellen meets Luke (Alex Sharp), an anorexic ballet dancer, who is well on the way to recovery – and he becomes a kind of annoying cheerleader, prodder and romantic interest. His romantic gestures are creepier than anything else, and his constant insistence on Ellen doing what he asks is annoying. The rest of the patients are ill-defined, and just kind of there – which doesn’t help when the film tries to milk one them for a big emotional payoff in the third act.

 

The writing tries to mix in some humor along with the all more serious stuff about anorexia, and it’s probably the best part of the movie. Lily Collins is best here when she gets to be sarcastic and downright bitchy – she has got a killer look in her eyes able to cut you down to nothing with a glance. But Ellen never really comes into focus as a character. The screenplay throws out a lot of stuff about just how dysfunctional her family is – and then pretty much has the doctor dismiss it all as irrelevant. Ellen is said to be feeling guilty about her artwork – that may have contributed to another girl killing herself – but that never really comes into focus, much like everything else in the film.

 

I don’t doubt the intentions of the people behind this movie – who wanted to address a serious issue in a way that wasn’t maudlin or preachy, but was actually entertaining. But the gap between their intentions and the results is just too wide to make To the Bone all that successful.

Movie Review: The Little Hours

The Little Hours ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Jeff Baena.

Written by: Jeff Baena.

Starring: Alison Brie (Alessandra), Dave Franco (Massetto), Kate Micucci (Ginerva), Aubrey Plaza (Fernanda), John C. Reilly (Father Tommasso), Molly Shannon (Sister Marea), Fred Armisen (Bishop Bartolomeo), Jemima Kirke (Marta), Nick Offerman (Lord Bruno), Lauren Weedman (Francesca), Paul Reiser (Ilario), Adam Pally (Guard Paolo), Paul Weitz (Lurco), Jon Gabrus (Guard Gregorio).

 

The Little Hours is a bawdy sex farce set in 14^th Century shot on location in Italy, with period accurate costumes and sets, but with actors who make absolutely no effort to disguise their modern way of speaking. It tells the tale of sexy nuns, and drunken priests, rich nobles, and their lowly servants and in it, everyone is fucking everyone else at all times. Written and directed by Jeff Baena, The Little Hours doesn’t go for eroticism at all – it shows the silly, funny, goofy side of sex – but it does contain at least an undercurrent of the feeling that something is deeply wrong with this whole setup. It’s a film that I like in concept much more than I like in execution – which kind of peters out about half way through, and despite some inspired lunacy in the final minutes courtesy of Kate Micucci, doesn’t really add up to much. At half the length, this could be inspired – but at 90 minutes, the laughs are too few with too much in between.

 

At the center of the film are three nuns, all at the nunnery, even if they don’t much want to me – Alessandra (Alison Brie) is the daughter of a wealthy merchant (Paul Reiser, doing nothing to disguise his Jewishness – in fact, he may well be playing it up), fallen on hard times and cannot afford a dowry right now. Don’t worry, he says, some people’s calling is the warmth and love of family, but Alessandra will always have her embroidery. Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza) is, well, the same wonderful comic persona Plaza plays in everything this side of Legion – who hates everyone and everything, and some secrets she’s hiding. Only Ginerva (Micucci) even seems like she has any faith at all – but that could just be her people pleasing personality, that makes her tell the Mother Superior (Molly Shannon) everything everyone else is doing. The Priest who oversees the convent is Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly), and he’s drunk on Communion wine most of the time – he blessed it himself, though, so it’s cool. At a nearby castle, servant Massetto (Dave Franco) has had to go on the run when his master, Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman) discovers that he is sleeping with his wife – Francesca (Lauren Weedman – who I would have loved to see more of here). He ends up running into a drunken Tommasso in the forest, and agrees to become the convent handyman – and pretend to be deaf and mute, for reasons the film explains, but really, it’s because it would be funnier. He promptly starts sleeping with both Alessandra – who believes this is a real relationship – and Fernanda – and her buxom friend Marta (Jemima Kirke) – who have ulterior motives.

 

For a while, all of this works. For the most part, everyone is playing the film with a straight face, which makes long conversations about where Massetto spills his seed, even funnier than they otherwise would be. There isn’t much of a plot, but it doesn’t need one – the comic performers are rather inspired, and the whole thing is pleasing goofy. Micucci is, in particular, a highlight stealing the movie from her more well-known co-stars, especially in the last act, where she pretty much goes nuts. There are strange visual gags – a turtle with a candle on his back for instance makes an extended experience – and the appearance of Fred Armisen later in the movie serves to underline just how absurd it is for all these nuns – and their priest – to be behaving this way. (The Catholic Church in America has seen fit to come out against the movie – they’d have been smarted just to not mention it).

 

I know some are going to think that The Little Hours is one of the best – and funniest – comedies of the year, and good for them. But I just didn’t laugh all that much, and although the comedy runs only 90 minutes, it felt much longer than that. When you have a film like The Little Hours, laughter is pretty much all the film offers, so if you don’t find it all that funny, you’re not left with much else to hold onto. I admire what the film was trying to do, it just didn’t get there for me.

Movie Review: Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Joseph Cedar.

Written by: Joseph Cedar.

Starring: Richard Gere (Norman Oppenheimer), Lior Ashkenazi (Micha Eshel), Michael Sheen (Philip Cohen), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Alex Green), Dan Stevens (Bill Kavish), Steve Buscemi (Rabbi Blumenthal), Jonathan Avigdori (Lior Keshet), Yehuda Almagor (Duby), Caitlin O'Connell (Sister Agnes), Hank Azaria (Srul Katz), Harris Yulin (Jo Wilf). 

 

If they’re smart and talented, movie stars often age into fine character actors when they get to a point when they are no longer headlining big Hollywood movies. During the 1980s and 1990s, that was Richard Gere – and while he had some interesting earlier roles (Malick’s Days of Heaven, Schrader’s American Gigolo) there’s a lot in that period that is pretty generic, middle of the road studio fare – the type of mid-level film Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. Yet, as he’s aged, Gere has done well for himself in taking on roles in smaller, indie movies – and has delivered some of his best performances – as the homeless man with mental issues in Time Out of Mind (2014) or as the Wall Street millionaire under pressure in Arbitrage (2012). To that list, you can add Joseph Cedar’s Norman – a film that is perhaps too complicated for its own good, and does feel rather anticlimactic in the end – but in which Gere – who initially feels all wrong for the role, ends up delivering another fine performance.

 

In the film, Gere plays Norman Oppenheimer, a Jewish guy in New York who runs a “consulting firm” – which is really just him and his iPhone, putting together “deals”. It’s never really clear what exactly he does, how exactly he makes money (he doesn’t seem to make much) – and yet somehow, he finds himself knowing and meeting everyone. One of the people he meets is Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi) – an Israeli politician, who is visiting New York at a difficult time in his political life. He befriends Norman over one long day – as Norman follows him into an expensive tailor shop, and the two talk in a way that feels like it could go South at any minute, but somehow doesn’t. Three years later, Micha has risen in the ranks – he’s now the Prime Minister of Israel – but unlike what we expect, he has not forgotten his “good friend” Norman. His staff wants to put some distance between the two of them – but Micha himself likes Norman – and people know it. Norman uses this as his bargaining chip, as he tries to put together one large deal after another. Norman isn’t doing this for money per se – the deals, even if they were to work, wouldn’t be a windfall for him – but for the prestige of being the guy who can deliver. Norman has to tap-dance to keep all of his lies in the air, it’s never quite clear if he believes he can pull it all off, or if he just wants to be “that guy” for as long as he can.

 

The film was written and directed by Israeli director Joseph Cedar (who made the 2011 film Footnote, about father and son rival Talmudic scholars, which is way more entertaining than that sounds) – and he has a good sense of pacing, setting and tone. The film moves quickly through the various inner circles that Norman finds himself involved in – with the Israeli government, with high finance, with the synagogue board – led by Steve Buscemi – that Norman says he can help save. The tone of the film is strange – comic, tense, dramatic, and in some time, bordering on the surreal (especially when the magnificent Charlotte Gainsbourgh shows up for a few scenes as a government worker – the first time friendly, the second time, not so much). Through it all, the only consistent thing is Gere’s Norman, as he tries to keep everything going.

 

It’s an excellent performance by Gere, all the more so because I don’t think he, or the movie, ever really let us know what Norman is really thinking, or who he really is. By the end of the film, you still don’t really know if Norman is a selfish con artist, or just a guy who really is trying, but got in WAY over his head. The film itself isn’t as good as Gere – the politics of it all is too complicated, and not properly explained – the ending feels like a letdown – and yet Gere himself is never less than great – and makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Movie Review: Despicable Me 3

Despicable Me 3 ** / *****

Directed by: Kyle Balda & Pierre Coffin and Eric Guillon.

Written by: Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio.

Starring: Steve Carell (Gru / Dru), Kristen Wiig (Lucy), Trey Parker (Balthazar Bratt), Miranda Cosgrove (Margo), Dana Gaier (Edith), Nev Scharrel (Agnes), Pierre Coffin (Minions / Museum Director / Additional Voice), Steve Coogan (Fritz / Silas Ramsbottom), Julie Andrews (Gru's Mom), Jenny Slate (Valerie Da Vinci).

 

The original Despicable Me was a pure animated delight. Yes, it wasn’t exactly original to see a movie villain whose heart is melted when he becomes the adopted father of three adorable girls he only got as part of an evil scheme – but it worked. Steve Carrell was great as Gru, the little yellow Minions were hilarious, the girls appropriately adorable (especially the little one, who loved her fluffy unicorn), and the whole thing was wrapped up in an amusing animated package. As far as big budget mainstream American animation not made by Pixar (man, that’s a lot of qualifiers) goes, they don’t get a whole lot better than that. It’s been diminishing returns ever since for this franchise though, that really should end – but of course, won’t. The second film – which found Gru now on the side of good, and of course falling in love (because when you have no other ideas, you give the main character a love interest) was lightweight, and fun – and completely forgettable. The spinoff Minions was loud, annoying and headache inducing – even if I have to admit it was kind of daring to do an entire film aimed at children with characters who don’t speak English. Now comes Despicable Me 3, which finds Gru reunited with his long lost twin brother (because when you really don’t have any other ideas, you give the main character a long lost twin brother).

 

The film isn’t necessarily bad – but it sure the heck is lazy. Everyone involved seems to be going through the motions here. Part of the problem is that as the series progresses, you have to keep finding things for all the new characters you have introduced to do. So here, the plot doesn’t require the minions at all – and so, they are given an entire subplot of a minion revolt, where they walk out on Gru – but have really no idea where to go, or what to do. The main plot doesn’t really involved Gru’s new wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) – or the girls either – so they have to invent two subplots for them – one involving Lucy being insecure about her new role as the girl’s mother, and one involving the little girls obsession with finding a real life unicorn in the forest. Because the movie has to keep cutting away to those plots, the main thrust of the plot – Gru connecting with his brother Dru, who wants to learn how to be a supervillain like Gru used to be (and their late father, unknown to Gru) was – and at the same time Gru trying to capture supervillain Balthazar Bratt, a former child star on a 1980s sitcom, turned into a villain still obsessed with that decade (voiced by Trey Parker, one assumes, because Seth Macfarlane was too busy) feels even thinner than it otherwise would. Much worse though, is those subplots just aren’t very good.

 

To be fair, the film will likely please its intended audience. My six year old daughter told her mother when we came home that the movie was “so funny” – and my three year old sat through the whole thing with nary a complaint. It was their father who looked at his watch and couldn’t believe only 45 minutes had gone by when he thought it was about time for the thing to end. I don’t know what it is about animated franchises not made by Pixar where the creators get lazy. While it’s true that something like the Cars franchise hardly represents Pixar at their finest – the truth is that Pixar did actually reinvent the series each time out, and find no avenues to explore – to bad effect in Cars 2, but fine effect in Cars 3. Despicable Me on the other hand, just keeps churning out the same thing over and over again – and this time, the result was both boring and forgettable.

Classic Movie Review: Fires on the Plain (2014)

Fires on the Plain (2014)

Directed by: Shin'ya Tsukamoto.

Written by: Shin'ya Tsukamoto based on the novel by Shohei Ooka.

Starring: Rirî Furankî, Tatsuya Nakamura, Yûko Nakamura, Dean Newcombe, Shin'ya Tsukamoto.

 

In 1959, Kon Ichikawa adapted the novel by Shohei Ooka and ended up making one of the great WWII movies from Japan’s perspective ever. It is a film about dehumanization, as the Japanese army has already been roundly defeated in the Philippines, but the army refuses to surrender. The few survivors have to make their way across the island they’re on to get to the one stronghold the Japanese still have – that is, if they still even have that. The film follows Tamura, a solider whose unit doesn’t want him – he has TB and they keep sending him to the field hospital, who keeps sending him back until his C.O. tells him to either stay at the hospital or kill himself with a grenade. Somehow Tamura survives, even when his unit and the hospital are decimated, and he’s stuck with various other members, who become increasingly desperate to survive, and do increasingly depraved things – as Tamura attempts to not only survive but also to maintain his humanity.

 

I’m not sure what current Japanese director could be considered a descendant of Ichikawa – but Shinya Tsukamoto is not him. He is mainly known for his ultraviolent splatter films like Tetsuo (1989) – and that is pretty much what he did in his version of Fires on the Plain. Ichikawa’s film is about the gradual dehumanization of men at war – Tsukamoto takes that dehumanization as a given, and makes his film a vision of hell. He draws out the almost comedy of the opening scenes of Tamura heading back and forth from his unit and the hospital, as he is caught in a Cacth-22 – damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. Once the attack on the hospital hits – with explosion and violence – he introduces the two other major characters – a sadistic older man who uses a weak willed younger man as his slave – but then has Tamura by himself for a while. This is an almost surreal, nearly wordless sequence that goes on for quite some time, as Tamura wanders through the land he doesn’t know or understand and the locals who both fear and despise him. The film adds more violence to this segment when Tamura kills a young woman who will not stop screaming – an act that haunts him so much he abandons his gun. Soon though, he has found others to join, and starts his trek across the island.

 

This leads to one of the most violent war sequences you will ever see in a movie. The Japanese have to make their way across a wide open field that is covered by the Americans. They wait until the cover to darkness, yet as the dozens of men try to make their way across, the Americans flood the field with light, and slaughter them like fish in a barrel. It is one of the most horrifically violent sequences I have ever seen in a movie – with limbs and heads flying, bodies being blown apart, heads being ripped open by bullets, and the chaos on the ground – where two men fight over an arm that has been blown off, since they’ve both lost one and they don’t know whose this one is. This sequence is long and intense – but at some point it does go a little too far, tries for a little too much splatter makeup that ends up looking a little false. Until then, it was a great sequence however.

 

The rest of the movie is a further descent into hell. The survivors wander through the island, past countless rotting corpses, many with a sickening look and full of maggots. The original movie is famed for its portrait of cannibalism – and this one will be as well. And like everything else in the movie, Tsukamoto takes it farther than Ichikawa did – at least visually – the better for stomach churning visuals.

 

The movie is an effective portrait of war as hell. It doesn’t move you like Ichikawa’s film does – mainly because that isn’t what Tsukamoto is going for. He wants to make the most violent, gory, disturbing and violent war film that he can – and he does that. Whether you want to see it or not, is up to you, but I found the combination of art house and splatter films fascinating. It doesn’t quite work, but it’s an experience to witness.

 

Note: I saw this film at TIFF 2014, and at this point, I have to believe it’s not going to get a proper released in North America – so I decided to publish the review I wrote then anyway.

Movie Review: The Beguiled

The Beguiled **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Sofia Coppola.

Written by: Sofia Coppola based on the novel by Thomas Cullinan and the screenplay by Albert Maltz and Irene Kamp. 

Starring: Colin Farrell (Corporal McBurney), Nicole Kidman (Miss Martha), Kirsten Dunst (Edwina), Elle Fanning (Alicia), Oona Laurence (Amy), Angourie Rice (Jane), Addison Riecke (Marie), Emma Howard (Emily).

 

The Don Siegel/Clint Eastwood version of The Beguiled is a fascinating movie – a Southern Gothic horror film really about a group of Southern women in the Civil War who take in a wounded Union soldier, nurse him back to health, project their own feelings onto him, and then torture him when he doesn’t live up to their standards. From the start of that film, you know that Eastwood’s character is a liar and a conman – but it’s not like the women in the film are all that much better, as they gleefully head towards the climax. For the most part, Sofia Coppola’s film follows the same sequence of events – it excises an incest backstory of one character, an interlude that felt rather rape-y and eliminates a slave character altogether (a move that some have criticized Coppola for – but I don’t have much of a problem with, as Coppola herself has said, she isn’t the director to tackle a subject like that). And yet, it’s an entirely different film, with an entirely different tone. Coppola continues to be fascinated by groups of privileged women, hidden away from the world, and the havoc that can cause. The Beguiled is more of a genre piece than she’s done before, but it’s clearly a Sofia Coppola genre piece.

 

In this version, the Union solider, Corporal John McBurney is played by Colin Farrell – who is pretty much perfectly cast in the role. He has, at many times in his career, been cast as much for his physical presence as his acting abilities (in film like Terrence Malick’s The New World or Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, I’d argue, more for the former, than the later) – and he puts both to great use here. He is wounded in the forest, when young Amy (Oona Laurence) finds him, and brings him back to her school for young girls, where the headmistress Martha (Nicole Kidman) can nurse him back to health. Most of the young women have left the school – but there’s a few left, alongside their teacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst). McBurney wants to know if there are men around – there aren’t.

 

Throughout the movie, McBurney subtly reads each of the women, and what they want from him, and responds accordingly. The Siegel/Eastwood version makes everything much more explicit through dialogue, where here, it’s mainly done through meaningful glances. Farrell wonderfully changes facial expressions – softens or hardens it, changes his tone of voice, depending on who he’s talking to. He says little to any of them – promises nothing until late in the movie, and yet they all read into him anything they want. The main female characters are Martha – the one with the complex backstory excises, although Kidman is a brilliant enough actress to suggest so much, with so little – the aging matriarch of the place, who sees McBurney as a potential man of the house. Edwina is the teacher, who is living out her prime “marrying age” with all the men off to war, who almost melts with a few kind words. The oldest student is Alicia (Elle Fanning – adding another great performance in a young resume full of them) – whose teenage sexuality is dying to get out, but doesn’t have an outlet – who sees McBurney as a potential plaything – and a way to turn the rest of the women – both younger and older – into playthings as well. Young Amy may see McBurney as more of a father figure than anything else.

 

The film was shot in a large house in New Orleans, and is the type of film where you can feel the humidity coming off every frame, The cinematography by Philippe Le Sourd (stepping in for the late, great Harris Savides, who shot Coppola’s last two films) is superb. Coppola doesn’t quite go over the top like Siegel did (most notably in a strange montage) – but she walks up to that line. The film is wonderfully fun – especially watching the women as they exchange so much information between them without saying a word. The film works as an extension of themes that Coppola has always explored, and at the same time as a thriller, and at times even a comedy (not a laugh out loud comedy per se – but I did have a smile plastered on my face the entire last act). I said of the original Beguiled that it raises more questions than it answered – and the same is true of this film, which doesn’t really seek to answer anything. In both cases, that’s a strength of the film, not a weakness.