Criticism

Movie Review: ‘The Chaperone’

April 18, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

For Downton Abbey fans, The Chaperone represents a respectable reunion on this side of the pond among 1920s middle-class Yanks. Downton creator Julian Fellowes, 69, adapted the script from Laura Moriarty’s bestseller for director Michael Engler, who will helm the upcoming Downton Abbey movie. The drama tracks schoolgirl Louise Brooks’ first trip from parochial Kansas City to wild Manhattan, seeking fame as a dancer and, ultimately, finding it as a silent movie star. But, while the perky Haley Lu Richardson, 24, twirls through the pretty period drama, bobs her hair and tipples despite the era’s Prohibition, it’s Downton’s Cora Crawley, Elizabeth McGovern, 57, who gets the star treatment. She gives one of her best performances as the repressed, corseted and unhappily married chaperone, Norma.

This is a rare season of movies struggling to depict the belated self-acceptance of ordinary over-50 mothers — from Mary Kay Place’s Diane to Julianne Moore’s Gloria Bell. Add Norma to that category, as a New York-born, Midwestern-raised orphan who did all the right things: loved her adopted rural parents, married the first man who asked and moved from their farmstead to his bedstead without ever posing that central American question: What am I going to be when I grow up?

Norma assumes the path of least resistance as a wife, a mother and a neighbor who tries to keep on the right side of the community’s virulent gossip mill. Having let others make her life choices for so long, through the birth and maturation of two stalwart sons, when her nest becomes empty and she’s betrayed by her lawyer husband (an empathetic Campbell Scott, 57), she’s unmoored.

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So when she overhears that local girl Brooks won’t be allowed to attend a New York dance academy without proper accompaniment, she jumps at the chance. As someone who’s never leapt before, she surprises herself by leaving her husband behind, and looking ahead to carve her own identity in a search for her birth mother while Brooks attends class.

That trip to Manhattan, and Norma’s proximity to the rebellious Brooks, becomes a catalyst for seismic personal change. She both waits to exhale (ultimately dropping her corset) and gets her groove, if not back, then for the first time.

McGovern, who also produced, drove this passion project. Aware of how few complicated roles exist for mature women, and empowered by Downton’s popularity, she’s made an exquisite if slight movie where it’s history’s forgotten character, not the ingénue, that makes headlines, who carries the narrative and wins the day. McGovern is lovely as a fading, self-effacing beauty who always serves herself last. Yet, it’s in the moments when she snaps — at her feckless husband, or the spoiled Brooks — that she reveals the ever-present tension that exists in a woman whose politeness has eased her way in society but has also numbed her to her essential desires. Norma’s slow rise to self-empowerment is every bit as radical as that of Brooks — and hugely satisfying for audiences hungering to see real women, not superheroes, carrying the plot.

[[This review first appeared on AARP.com]]

Book Review: ‘The Crow Girl’

August 1, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The Crow Girl My rating: Four of Five Stars

Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro remains a bucket-list challenge, but in the book world, staring down a 784-page Swedish serial-killer novel may make the reader question his or her priorities: Why have I not yet read The Brothers Karamazov or finished Anna Karenina?

With Erik Axl Sund’s perverse murder saga, The Crow Girl, the pseudonymous authors (a handsome pair of black-clad men resembling Scandinavian metal superstars on the back flap), have created a difficult, twisted, irony-free novel with a wildly unreliable narrator.

The book oscillates between good and evil, a scattered female detective, Jeanette Kihlberg, whose imploding family life is a distraction from her cop work. Meanwhile, Kihlberg finds herself increasingly attracted to the highly intelligent therapist, Sofia Zetterlund, who consults on the case when the sexy shrink is not suffering disturbing blackouts.

[Related: Book Review ‘The Ice Child’]

The novel begins with the discovery of the corpse of a young boy, terribly mutilated and mummified. Another child corpse. Another. But then that efficiency ends. The exposition of the first 300 pages is so tangled, the storylines so many, the incidents of child molestation, incest, and torture so repellant, that even a reader who claims The Girl in the Dragon Tattoo as a favorite book may have doubts. They may be tempted to put this novel aside, question the commitment, pick it up again, review earlier pages for missed clues and sigh, looking at all the appealing, shorter books on the nightstand.

And, then, something cracks like ice, the floes begin to move. Generational incidences of fathers molesting daughters and transforming girls into monsters, of grown men behaving badly in actions stemming from their own childhood traumas, and the solution of one mysterious string of seemingly unrelated killings only opening the door to the next, causes the book to break free from its difficult beginnings.

The psychological underpinnings, gradually revealed by the therapist Sofia, who is herself trying to reconstruct her own personality and history of trauma (“Getting to know yourself can be like trying to decipher a cryptogram,” she says toward the book’s conclusion), drives the action forward and the exploration of characters deeper.

Originally published in three volumes, The Crow Girl is a commitment, a doorstop, and a nearly endless psychological puzzle box that creepily crawls from one dysfunctional arena to the next, leaving clues not like breadcrumbs but like bloody bits of ear and entrails. It’s a novel for the committed Scandophile—or those that should be committed.

This review first appeared in the ‘New York Journal of Books.’

Berlinale Review: Director Mia Hansen-Love wins Silver Bear for ‘L’Avenir’ – Our Rave

February 21, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The Director Mia Hansen-Love wins a Silver Bear for her fifth film

When men hit midlife, they buy a red convertible, maybe a toupee and a gym membership – and often trade in the used wife for a new cookie. In contrast, the wives they cast off cry on public transportation. They contemplate and reject plastic surgery. When the public weeping stops, they may rejoice that that’s a legion of dirty socks they won’t have to bend over and pick up from the floor in the future. Ultimately, there’s a sense of liberation.

In L’avenir (Things to Come), Mia Hansen-Love’s realistic French-language drama making its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the Eden director follows the rhythms of Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert), a married Parisian high school philosophy professor and mother of two grown children. She should be enjoying the fruits of her labor, but then discovers that even when you have your own act very much together your life can still fall apart.

Huppert as Nathalie is about as much of a perfect woman—a feminist role model—as can be seen on screen. She is slim, and in that Parisian way, effortlessly chic. She passionately teaches philosophy—she’s big on Rousseau and the social contract—cooks game hen, arranges flowers, reads voraciously, tersely tends to her increasingly demented and childish mother, and enjoys the company of two children raised with love. As played by Huppert with confidence, control and minimal fuss, Nathalie is capable and brisk, enjoying life within the lines she has drawn over the past two plus decades.

And then Nathalie’s husband Heinz (Andre Marcon) announces he wants to leave, Nathalie’s publisher wants to sex up the covers of the philosophy texts she’s been writing for years, and her children become increasingly self-sufficient. It seems that the social contract she made with the world – that she would work hard and with integrity and be rewarded – has been broken. The movie echoes the 1978 Paul Mazursky film An Unmarried Woman with Jill Clayburgh, although infinitely more dry-eyed. Nathalie faces her future philosophically, navigating the unexpected upset as she would the countless crises of child-rearing or marriage – overcome the trauma, patch the problem and keep moving forward until it hurts just a little less, and then a little less. One day, the sun comes out and you can again feel its warmth on your cheeks, and get traction under your relatively sensible shoes (she is Parisian after all).

[Related: Meryl Streep Praises Hollywood’s ‘New Time of Possibility for Women’]

Writer-director Hansen-Love creates a lovely, mostly sharp character portrait of a capable woman facing a crisis in midlife with integrity. If Nathalie lacks the messiness and warmth of Clayburgh’s suddenly unmarried woman, that’s alright. Not everyone wears their life on their sleeve and the restraint here of Nathalie, and Hansen-Love, is admirable. The drama meanders in the third act, as Nathalie visits a protégé living on an anarchist farm and gets her puff of weed. But what makes it work is that, unlike Heinz, she doesn’t escape her rising sense of mortality by getting lost in the rumpled sheets with a man half her age. Sure, she looks over that cliff, and flirts with a neo-hippie commune – even hugging a donkey at one point – but the movie’s virtue is that, in the end, Nathalie returns to a life that she controls, crisply and philosophically. And, like Huppert herself, never makes one false move.

This review originally appeared on VanityFair.com

Berlinale Review: Comedy is Hell, War is Easy in ‘War on Everyone’

February 20, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Imagine if Quentin Tarantino directed Starsky and Hutch and didn’t mess it up with his whole malignant misanthropic, misogynistic look-at-me thing. The result would be John Michael McDonagh’s snort-milk-out-your-nose-funny buddy cop comedy War on Everyone, premiering at the 66th Berlin Film Festival. Michael Peña and Alexander Skarsgard play Bob and Terry, co-dependent corrupt Albuquerque pigs snorting and shooting their way to tumble a supercilious English Lord (Divergent’s posh Theo James) into horseracing, heists, and kiddy porn.

McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary), like his brother Martin (In Bruges), has a virtuosic way with dialogue, interlacing philosophical musings with ridiculous questions like “if you hit a mime does he make a sound?” One of the movie’s greatest pleasures is that it gives Peña, an actor often forced by Hollywood to play roles beneath his skill set (exception: his cop bromance End of Watch, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal), long riffs of dialogue that he spins out like a Howard Hawks cockeyed hero. Finally, he gets to play the smartest guy in the room, not the Hispanic sidekick.

And then there’s Skarsgard, pausing in that career moment before he goes full on studio Tarzan. No one can fault a critic for pausing to salivate over the True Blood star, as he rolls out of bed with his new squeeze (the alluring Tessa Thompson), sweat slicked and gorgeous, in nothing more than a tiny pair of mustard-colored briefs. Here is an actor who recently made a horny boy-man sleeping with an under-aged teen in The Diary of a Teenage Girl oddly appealing if not quite sympathetic. In War on Everyone, Skarsgard plays a bruised beauty with a tarnished badge. Terry’s life plays out to a soundtrack of Glen Campbell songs, underscoring the achy twangy yearning white boy at his core. Terry’s hard-drinking, hard-punching policeman is a Rhinestone Cowboy, a Wichita Lineman. It’s a rueful comedic performance that he pounds out like pavement into something deeper and darker and more touching than your average buddy cop.

The opening sequences of War on Everyone are so furiously fast and funny it’s nearly unimaginable that McDonagh can sustain the pace. And yet he does. When the script eases up on the rapid-fire quips, seguing into hilarious music cues (all that Campbell!) and slapstick violence, it brings its best game. Because these flawed but funny characters have dimension, depth, deep desires and, damn it, cry out for a franchise.

{This review originally appeared on VanityFair.com]

Review: Donna Leon’s ‘Falling in Love’

June 12, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Falling in Love: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery by Donna Leon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To read Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti Mysteries is to fall in love with Venice, a city to which we will never have access because we are only tourists distracted by the gondolas and the rich polenta and the beautiful men. Brunetti is a native married to an aristocrat. He is a thinking man’s detective who rarely carries a gun and uses his brains to solve cases. But the reader suspects it is his wife Paola, a Henry James scholar, who has the bigger IQ. This mystery is heady — about a bisexual opera singer and her violent stalker — and a little anticlimactic as mysteries go. By the time we know who the aggressor is, the story’s interest begins to wane. The on-stage climax after a penultimate performance of “Tosca” is, well, anticlimactic. But to walk the bridges in Brunetti’s shoes, to stop in the cafes and restaurants, and get inside his head as he contemplates his wife and children is as delicious as risotto. He is a man who loves women, written by a woman of empathy and intelligence (the exquisite Donna Leon). One of the things I love the most about her books is the sense of Venetian justice — or lack thereof. While this particular novel ends with a sense of completion, Leon is unafraid to portray a society where justice can be bought, and where the do-right man has to be an expert in bureaucratic subterfuge in order to achieve a sense of balance between right and wrong.

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