‘WONDER’ DOESN’T FACE UP TO ITS PROMISE

By Dominique Paul Noth

Julia Roberts and (behind the prosthetics) Jacob Tremblay in 'Wonder'

The most wondrous thing about “Wonder” is the level of teacher skills and classroom expectations in the sixth grade in what must be one of the finest schools film-makers could find in California.

The second most wondrous thing is how dutifully and simplistically the well dressed kids in the school reflect a stereotype adult concept of good kids, bullies, intervening kids, bullying situations, on-the-spot rethinking  and redemption when confronted by a kid whose face is like a slimmed down version of “The Elephant Man,” technically the incurable Treacher Collins syndrome

The movie is not meant to be a tale of absolute generalities, like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” which posited a perfect liberal household against the issue of interracial marriage.  Underneath it really means to be a sweet uplifting story pretending to real life about how the world should respond to a child whose face was messed up at birth and has evolved into a boy who only finds love within his family and hurtful stares everywhere else. 

Some noted actors are wasted in the effort to reassure him – Mandy Patinkin as a sympathetic principal, Owen Wilson as the hippest loving dad in captivity, Julia Roberts, aging openly into roles of maternal dimension, and newcomer Izabela Vidovic who has the difficult task of making at least one teenager seem normal and nice. 

In what this year seems a Hollywood trend, the good kids in schools are associated with the drama clubs that largely produced the current young writers of these movies. Personally, as a drama club enthusiast, I would like to believe that’s true. But like many things in the movie I feel the vision is from Hollywood on high.

The makeup artists for Jacob Tremblay – a normal looking youngster who is quite effective as the object of so much hate – merit a special award for his looks. They are totally in keeping with what the syndrome can do to a face, justifying why Auggie is so dismayingly stared at (and who among us wouldn’t), realistic enough to fool the audience and help the actor inside, and yet not so frightening that we don’t grow to like and even want to hug the son having so much trouble making connections.

It’s sort of a shame that director Stephen Chboskly (also co-screenwriter) went for students who melt so obviously in sympathy or behave so objectionably even when events and peer pressure are against them. There are also cardboard efforts to make unthinking parents at the school the real villains.

The need for the world to open up to kids like Auggie, who are just kids underneath though Auggie is also shown as a scientific genius, is a good message communicated in extreme examples, tear-inducing moments  and even an extended concluding hallelujah that puts this film on a curious list of 2017 wonders – Wonder Woman, Wonderstruck, Wonder Wheel and Wonder. 

Wonder what word will dominate Hollywood titles this  year?

OTHER RECENT FILM REVIEWS WITH OSCAR CONNECTIONS:
GET OUT

DUNKIRK and DARKEST HOUR

LADY BIRD

THE SHAPE OF WATER

THREE BILLBOARDS

THE POST

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

PHANTOM THREAD

MOLLY’S GAME

Or scroll all Noth's recent film reviews at domsdomain.blogspot.com

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, and a founding figure of the American Theatre Critics Association.  After stints as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, he was also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic on his way to becoming the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with active historic archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

THE WESTERN THAT WANTED TO BE PART OF OSCARS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Christian Bale in 'Hostiles'

If you were near a TV screen in December and then again January, you saw it hailed in its own ads as “the best western since Unforgiven” and star Christian Bale touted as “the new Marlon Brando.”

It’s a movie that tried mightily to be part of the Oscars (ceremony March 4) and failed.

It played many prestigious film festivals last fall and kept delaying its national opening hoping for some deeper praise from the awards givers, while picking up its TV advertising pace.

Finally it went national January 26 of this year – a delay that is also part of the awards game but in this case weeks after first planned.   Several noted films delayed national openings – notably “The Post” and “Phantom Thread” – in hope of standing out from the Christmas crowd. This one was a delay in search of a spark.

Strangely there wasn’t a heavy hostile reaction to “Hostiles” among the reviewers, which ranged from good to tepid, but there sure has been indifference among the public despite the high regard Bale is held in.  As a connoisseur of westerns – which often serve as an open range war for film-makers exploring good and evil, violence and redemption -- I think it is the film’s fault not the genre’s.  I would like to see more good westerns but not so obviously trudging ponderously over established paths.

Also I have been fascinated by Bale’s career and growth since he was a child actor in Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” (1987) through Batman movies and into several recent standouts such as “The Big Short” and “American Hustle.”

But this is straight-on two hours of Bale as suffering stoic, the retiring, brutal but infinitely polite Army captain in the Old West forced to gather up an ever-growing and sometimes slaughtered caravan of soldiers, Indians, pioneer widow and random horseback enemies in 1892.

His special mission involves a hated member of this caravan, Chief Yellow Hawk,  whom he watched kill close friends even as he was equally vicious killing the chief’s clan – both sides adept at massacres. Now he must safely deliver the dying chief to holy ground in Montana. That actor, Wes Studi, a Cherokee Indian famous for playing all manner of Indians with chiseled face and honest simple delivery, is one of the few plusses of seeing the film.

Bale is certainly a convincing one-note conflicted soldier – I doubt there are many actors who could keep us watching every twitch to see if anything important will crop up.  It doesn’t.

Rosamund Pike in 'Hostiles'

The film also has a convincing hysterical extended fit by Rosamund Pike as a pioneer wife who has seen her husband and three children brutally murdered by wildly painted renegades and attempts to bury them with her own hands as she screams the theater into silence.  And after accomplishing those extremes, she subdues into typical western ingénue willing to grab a rifle to help her savior, in this case Bale of course.

Director and screenwriter Scott Cooper clearly wanted to grab the mantle of western as soul redemption – a theme that sticks its head up not just in “Unforgiven” but also “Stagecoach” and “The Searchers,” films this plot strangely emulates.

But those films had a lot more hooks, variety and human connections going for them despite their old-fashioned lack of blood and accurate wardrobe. Making up with blood and accurate hairbraids is not the road forward.  The redemption message, subdued or complicated in the others, juts out of every scene in “Hostiles.”   The values of tight editing seem lost on Cooper.  He relishes every diversion as if in love with the terrain.  

Interestingly there is a bit part as an unskilled trooper for Timothee Chalamet, who was also a passing love interest in “Lady Bird” but got an early dismissal in these films while being Oscar front and center in “Call Me By Your Name.” 

The film expects focusing on Bale will make meaningful a parade of extended farewell scenes. Even those who like westerns may find this parade stupefying. 

“Hostiles” received funding and publicity efforts from a variety of introductory logos (I counted six), so the film can never claim they didn’t try.  But they didn’t succeed, and in this field of competition they shouldn’t.

OTHER RECENT FILM REVIEWS WITH OSCAR CONNECTIONS:

GET OUT

DUNKIRK and DARKEST HOUR

LADY BIRD

THE SHAPE OF WATER

THREE BILLBOARDS

THE POST

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

PHANTOM THREAD

MOLLY’S GAME

Or scroll all Noth's recent film reviews at domsdomain.blogspot.com

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, and a founding figure of the American Theatre Critics Association.  After stints as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, he was also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic on his way to becoming the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with active historic archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.