CHOOSING A ‘FAVOURITE’ AMONG ROYAL COSTUME DRAMAS

Emma Stone and Olivia Colman in "The Favourite"

By Dominique Paul Noth

Two lavish bewigged and begowned costume dramas, both steeped in British royal history, vied for movie eyeballs as 2018 closed out and their takes may be similar in their ominous foreboding but quite different in up close versus long distance conflict. 

The costumes and settings are feasts for the eyes.  Yet as cinema I much prefer the macabre and comedic yet deadly court intrigue of “The Favourite” to the somewhat heavy breathing feminist overwriting of “Mary Queen of Scots.”

“Mary” is blessed in the costumes of Alexandra Byrne and strong leading actors in Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Queen Elizabeth I, actors forced to pontificate too much on their plight, which includes being pawns in the machinations of men (which they were) and fabricating queenly philosophy at a manufactured meeting (which they didn’t). 

Both films may send patrons scurrying to the  history books to see how much of the happenings are invented or historically acceptable, and the simple answer is, in both,  basically dialog and events are developed around real characters in eras when court intrigue was the name of the game.  The history is not accurate, the outcomes are at the service of the screenwriters,  but passing attention is paid to the times.

“Mary” is freer with the facts since the basic conflict between two queens separated by space vying for power has long been the stuff of historical speculation and literature.  Did one really try to kill the other? Or did they respect each other’s situation?

Director Josie Rourke handles excellently the production elements but feels freer to suggest the emotional conflict over the factual one, silly dialog like “Only one Queen can understand another.” Her movie succumbs to overwriting and over-explanation, forcing the actors into extended screen time when they should just hit their points and move on.

“The Favourite” in contrast relishes the clumping around of a pudgy Queen Anne with agonizing gout and flighty moods – and sudden bursts of the sad girl lost in duties beyond her abilities yet with absolute power that makes her dangerous.  Olivia Colman plays her full theatrical tilt, like Miss Piggy at the height of anger. But she makes it clear that the queen’s bursts of outrage are related to how over her head she is in the complicated Tory vs. Whigs affairs of state.  The rest of the court has become expert and vindictive in playing on her uncertainties.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos recognizes the real audience grabber in his 18th century romp is the ruthless quest for power over Anne between her ladies in waiting. Rachel Weisz is the high-born established power behind the throne.  Her role is really Sarah Churchill (to be historically accurate) whose affectionate nickname for the queen was Mrs. Morley.

Emma Stone is Abigail, the comely poor relation Sarah takes in to her everlasting regret.  The fight of these two for the queen’s favor – a sexual fight as well as social fight – takes over the film, with little surreal splashes whether gathering home remedies in the forest or splattering blood while shooting not so clay pigeons.

Rachel Weisz turns on the charm during a mud bath
in 'The Favourite'

Stone is constantly intriguing, as nasty and untrustworthy as she has ever been on screen and clearly delighted by the demands.  But the real powerhouse performance is Weisz as the striding snippy Sarah in mannish clothes and overbearing manner, yet capable of pretending sweetness when the circumstances warrant. The details of their battles – who is up, who is down and when – are something audiences should discover for themselves. The director leaves the outcome up to the uncertain manic eyes of Queen Anne herself, overrun by her pet bunnies.

There are powerful music cues as well from composer Max Richter, though he is not nominated.  He adds to traditional lilting English madrigals and chamber music sequences with repetition of a long cello note and a quick percussive tap. It’s a device that builds our tension much like that shrieking violin note in “Psycho.”

The texture of the film and its almost surreal sections -- plus some elaborate character-related dances that push the edge of courtier abilities -- provide an observant eye from the outside on all the double-dealings that pile up inside.

Other current film reviews:
Mary Poppins Returns

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Roma

Vice 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became 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 and 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 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 DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

REMARKABLE MAKEUP CAMOUFLAGES DISAPPOINTING FILM

Christian Bales as Dick Cheney in 'Vice'.

By Dominique Paul Noth

“Vice” admits openly and actually makes a joke about being a liberal’s viewpoint on the life of Dick Cheney.  But even its moments of levity and flippancy – Cheney’s rise to power as a board game, the theory of the unitary executive’s right to torture explained as a restaurant menu, Lynne and Dick Cheney breaking out in a Shakespearean bed scene in case we didn’t catch their similarity to the Macbeths, how his new heart plays a role in the script – don’t make this a comedy.

It lives instead  in-between – an ineffective domestic drama and a not quite social comedy, perhaps to make palatable a swift thumbnail rush through some four decades of American politics. 

Director Adam McKay has created an interesting but hardly great movie with some very good side-role acting – Steven Carell as self-mocking Donald Rumsfeld – and some great makeup artistry, led by Christian Bales’ transformation into Cheney. 

The actor scores with a pinpoint accurate monotone delivery, a sly sideways look and a portly imposing walk through 40 years of changing situations. But Bales is right – if he wins acting awards for his fine work, half should go to the squad of makeup specialists helping the actor find a way into the unassuming, unyielding bureaucrat’s rise to supreme power.

The actual Dick Cheney 

The film never answers key questions about Cheney, except to give wife Lynne extraordinary power over shaping him. And here there is some fierce acting by Amy Adams, who cajoles and controls her husband until she realizes he is underneath the controlling force.  Sam Rockwell never sees deeper than a surface George Bush (should that mean there was nothing deeper?).  And Tyler Perry wastes some scenes that could flesh out the tragedy of Colin Powell.

But for audiences it becomes a patronizing film, reinforcing horrors about Cheney that should be commonly known.  Sure it is basically factual and its side journeys and quick flashes about torture, lives casually taken or destroyed, legislation manipulated through test groups, are revealing reminders of the consequences of our not paying attention. The film does make us all feel even more stupid that we routinely elect such people to run and ruin our lives.  But don’t look here for an explanation of why we succumb.

There is a lot of evidence that Cheney saw early on how a simpleton president could be manipulated, but inventing dialog where that happened is not satisfying.  The dialog becomes more a shallow screenwriter’s view of drama than reality as Cheney moves from a hard-drinking dropout to the D.C. power player who rose through Nixon, Ford, Congress, Reagan and the two Bushes to in effect seize control of the country by the height of 9/11.  But quick looks behind the scenes of such power are neatly done, though (I can’t believe I’m saying this) Cheney’s actual motivations aside from power-grabbing are given short shrift.

Indeed, what Cheney did to the nation, the film argues with many facts on its side, is worse than Trump today but somewhat ominous as a direction Trump could readily move in.  The parallels in manipulation of intelligence data, of belief in the superiority of the president over all the other branches of government, the obfuscating of what is going on through the White House levers may continue today but “Vice” is different in one sense.

It suggests that the most likely way to emerge as the most powerful man in the country is to move invisibly and in secret, which is not what goes on today.

All the flash of makeup wizardry and rapid cutting can’t solve what “Vice” dances around.  No one even after this film has a clear grasp on who or what Dick Cheney is.  It doesn’t help to inspect his fall without exploring why we fell for it.

Other current film reviews:
Mary Poppins Returns

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Roma

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became 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 and 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 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 DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

WITH MOVING 'ROMA' NETFLIX DEFIES THE OSCAR ODDS

Yalitza Aparicio as Cleo, the centerpiece of 'Roma'

By Dominique Paul Noth

Describing the methods of “Roma” -- its black and white panoramic vision of Mexican upper middle class living in the 1970s -- could make the film sound artsy and hard to grasp. If so, I have done disservice to Mexican director and likely Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón. (He has also directed “A Little Princess,” “Children of God” and “Gravity.”)

His frozen lush landscapes and architectural framing, his gentle humor through observation,  his planes flying to some distant place, his scenes through or within window panes, his lapping water, his tracking shots and elaborate panning sometimes stitched together seamlessly as if one elegant camera shot;  then the one single long intense camera shot that captures the forensic brutality of a hospital birth – all are totally on behalf of humanity and memory and leave us in awe. 

This film is basically only available on Netflix (there is a huge story in the refusal of most movie houses to let it be part of their Oscar marathons). Watching it at home gave me the sensation the computer screen had expanded to 40 feet in width to capture the vision. There are a few  mystical sidetrips to argue about, but what is cinematically extraordinary is how much of Cuarón’s artistry is at the service of his story and his determination to make us see.  

Cuarón offers society in nonjudgmental relief, but we also are witnessing emotional poetry in such devotion to what happens to house servant Cleo, played by a non-actor who is now up for every acting award in sight.

In his memory fictionalization, Cuarón explores the strange but typical world she inhabits between hired hand and beloved family member.  He makes us rethink our usually politically ingrained view of social classes, since the upper middle class is clearly privileged and complacent yet shares a genuine affection for its Cleo, who by the end is revealed as victim, true hero and essential life force. 

Cleo is played by an ordinary-looking indigenous Mexican native with a radiant expressive face named Yalitza Aparicio.  While I prefer to see a variety of work honored at awards time (lots of people can hit it out of the park at first try on film), this was perfect casting in so personal and challenging an epic. Aparicio is vividly and naturalistically used by Cuarón, who also wrote this memory play about his own upbringing.

The immature lover who impregnates her is more into his martial arts skills than into Cleo, painfully clear as he parades nude around the bedroom before abandoning her.  But Cleo is never berated except by herself for her unwed pregnancy.  The family she serves and whose house she cleans – a controlling wife, an unfaithful physician husband, an ever present grandmother, and four children who dote on Cleo --  assumes full responsibility for her care, though the father’s sympathetic brevity is mere professionalism.

The lover’s gang, captured on an open field exercising martial arts, is terrorizing in its metronomic obedience.  Yet in the watching crowd, only Cleo can do the acrobatic move they stumble over.  Later it is her lover who inadvertently causes the stillborn birth of their daughter.

Images linger. Parakeets and dogs cavort inside the house.  A lone TV antenna is fixated on the roof. Water gently flows over tiles revealing a daily mopping chore for Cleo even as a plane in flight appears in the sudsy water.   A shopping trip for a baby crib occurs in the middle of a homicidal street riot. A car maneuvering an interior driveway reveals volumes about the grandiose wife and the straying husband, while solid, always present Cleo represents emotional continuity for the children.

This unhurried yet captivating journey – a diorama of society within a simple year in the life of Cleo -- adds layer upon layer:  a forest fire, a riot, murders and a near drowning. Yet Cleo’s life unfolds almost passively as if these are natural moments for people we normally treat as invisible. Cuarón’s subtexts haunt us – flight and space travel, windows and floors, unnoticed beauty in routine vistas, a fire bursting upon an upper class garden party. 

I don’t know if by February 24, the studio industry that dominates the Oscars will overcome its animosity to television streaming services to applaud Netflix for a film of such quality.  “Roma” did provide 10 nominations. But the final decision is a political reality surrounding a film that eschews politics to open our eyes.

Other current film reviews:
Mary Poppins Returns

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became 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 and 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 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 DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

THE LONELY WONDERFUL “BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS”

Saul Rubinek, Tyne Daly, and Chelcie Ross (left to right) share an unnatural stagecoach ride
in 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs'

By Dominique Paul Noth

Often the Coen brothers create stunning hard-to-categorize movies (where would you put Fargo and The Big Lebowski?).  Sometimes they even stay within a genre, which they love to pretend to do, but provide the Coen twists (No Country for Old Men, True Grit).  Sometimes they come a cropper (that for me was O Brother Where Art Thou? and Hail Caesar).  

But often a Coen film is a gigantic uncategorizable pleasure. The brothers are, despite their growing fame, eccentric (or maybe that’s part of the fame).  Some of their films escape reviewer notice and audience attention because they are so difficult to explain and so hard to build word of mouth around -- until the film reaches cult status.

Such I think is The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an exceptional film, both creepy and sad, that should be on most best of 2018 lists. Yet most people have not heard of it unless they are devoted to Netflix and the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, sometimes regarded as the two-headed director. 

“Ballad” collects in six different styles  six Western tales that hint weirdly of many standard Western genres, from the singing cowboy to the wagon train romance to the lonely prospector to the medicine show to the stagecoach ride toward doom, each weirdly unfolding as either a surreal adventure or what we expect to resolve as a  profoundly natural excursion.  The cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel is extraordinary, warm, luxurious and dark when needed. Other production values are exemplary. The pacing and even the cutting are of a piece but shift style and intention in each tale. Some are very short, some are extensive in either dialog or events.

This sort of omnibus film, a collection of stories connected as if from a book, was commonplace in the 1950s and ‘60s with O. Henry short stories and the like, but it has almost disappeared today, replaced by four to six episode TV shows.  In the Coen hands, it is definitely a movie in breadth and it requires an impish knowledge of a range of movie westerns, once America’s most popular movie form.  This encompasses not only the classic ones but the B movie ones that filled the bottom of the bill in the 1940s or dominated television in 1950s series, winding through the modern variations. 

The Old West, this film reminds us, was a minefield playfield of the battle between good and evil, mortality and morality, desert and sky, of shadings in between with different directors bringing different energies and purposes.  There are historic lessons from such classicists as John Ford and Anthony Mann and modernist tics from Sam Raimi – and a squad of clichés from all the horse operas of the past.  Many are borrowed from but the Coens have overlayed the genre with cruel and sad laughter – a style of attack uniquely theirs.

There are many noted actors in the cast, most bathing in invisibility behind costumes, makeup or manners different than the ones they are known for.  Others, such as Tyne Daly, are used for the power they give to conversations.  Some of the more notable are Tom Waits (yes also a song legend), Liam Neeson, Harry Melling as a Shakespearean actor you will never forget and Zoe Kazan as a touching mail order bride on the trail. 

The stories are such that a reviewer shouldn’t give away the endings, but each one lands a different kind of punch, some leaving us staring at the darkest side of life, others offering a comic outreach to heaven.

The only downside of watching this on Netflix (only place it is available) rather than in theaters is I wanted to see if others were racked by the same reactions, carried away in the same places I was. Sometimes that’s the price of solo viewing and sometimes it’s the joy of solitary freedom. 

But I wonder if that is also a price the film is paying this awards season. It’s not even a favorite in the two Oscar categories where it got nominated for the Feb. 24 ceremony, best song and the Coens for best adapted screenplay.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became 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 and 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 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 DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

AWARDS ARE NOT AS FRIENDLY AS AUDIENCES FOR ‘MARY POPPINS RETURNS’

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Emily Blunt and animated friends in 'Mary Poppins Returns'

Oscar News update Feb. 17: 
By announcing Bette Midler as a special Oscar guest, and revealing she will be singing the nominated song for "Mary Poppins Returns," the Oscars have found a backdoor way to correct a clumsy error. The Academy had  earlier announced that none of the nominated songs from "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs," "Mary Poppins Returns" and the documentary "RBG" would be performed during the live telecast Feb. 24, in order to shorten the broadcast's time. (Curiously, the film's star, Emily Blunt, had agree to perform if asked, but Oscars decided she wasn't a big enough name.)

The screams from the Disney Studio and Lin-Manuel Miranda, among others,were clearly heard. Making Midler perform “The Place Where Lost Things Go” forcefully corrects the problem and the quiet word is that now the other skipped-over best songs will be performed, "I'll Fly"  by the documentary's actual end-credits performer, Jennifer Hudson.

By Dominique Paul Noth

The box office grows but “Mary Poppins Returns” is barely mentioned on the current awards lists (but heavily featured in the TV broadcasts).  There is no award specifically for what Disney and director Rob Marshall have succeeded in doing: “Best Hitting of the Hot Spots of Nostalgia and Freshness of Beloved Material for the Flying Nanny.”

But those elements deserve some recognition from reviews, down to the return of the old Disney look of hand-drawn animation for the mix with “real people”; the clever trickery of the bathtub into ocean; the finding of something useful beyond celebrity billing for the guest stars, and the smart way Emily Blunt doesn’t pretend to be Julie Andrews but it is made to do all the things the original “Mary Poppins” did 54 years ago. 

This Poppins, less sugary but mischievously flinty as was the original, sings a lullaby and catchy instructional songs to two resistant but slowly enchanted children.  With perfect posture, she pirouettes in space and then dances as lustily as music hall conventions allow with her admiring lamplighter Jack, played with broad charm and gusto by Lin-Manuel Miranda in his own bizarre Cockney accent that seems a backhand tribute to Dick Van Dyke’s admittedly horrible Cockney in the original.

For this version, there are no dancing chimney sweeps but there is made-up slang jargon specifically for the street-lamp-lighters in a huge production number (one of several places the movie almost stops to admire its own gymnastic invention, though the same could also be said about the original).

Blunt has moments to prove she can do anything Andrews could (and Julie refused to do a cameo, the story goes, because she wanted this to be Emily’s night on the town).  But Emily will probably be washed out of the awards (she actually proves a more versatile actress in the current horror film “A Quiet Place”) because doing everything well may be what audiences expect but it is not a comfortable character thread for acting awards.

There is one such performance, though – Ben Wishaw as the now grown Michael Banks, a young father having the same adjustment problems as his dad in the original.  Director Marshall, Wisconsin born by the way and a former choreographer now the go-to director for splashy movie musicals, not only has a deft way with countless little callbacks to the original. He also gives full weight to the modern widower musing in song over his lost wife, allowing adults in the audience to grab hold of a reason for Poppins to return to help out and for the outlandish comedy in the story. 

Wishaw just won a Golden Globe for his saucy but demanding gay lover in “A Very British Scandal” TV short series, and well deserved.  His quiet anchoring of attention in “Mary Poppins Returns,” against all the special and magical effects, confirms his talent.

About the songs. Almost every one of the originals has become famous – “Spoonful of Sugar,” “Feed the Birds,” “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” among them. Each has something of a counterpart in this film, so it may be years to see which if any survive.  Disney is putting its money and awards attention behind “The Place Where Lost Things Go,” but songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman had the double duty of coming up with winning inserts of their own and capturing the personality of the original.

Van Dyke, at 93, having to wear old-age makeup to look like his original character’s older self, nails the nifty dance steps, but there are only subtle reminders that his character was meaner in the original. That first world of banking at the turn of the century (this tale is moved into the 1930s) deliberately looked a bit crueler and more in need of magic.  The new movie has to work harder to justify the need for magical intervention.

In an elaborate cameo as cousin Topsy, Meryl Streep resurrects her “Sophie’s Choice” Polish accent but this time for roundly comic effect, and Angela Lansbury, an old Disney favorite, re-imagines under Marshall’s gaze the bird woman of the original. 

The movie constantly turns back in on the original (the background music includes snatches of the original songs) even as it pumps to create its own identity.  After a while it is not so much a movie as an intent to not leave any nostalgic yearning untouched, while still trying to carve its own central people and emotions.  It is a clever entertaining cinematic manipulation, but there is no category for that at awards time.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became 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 and 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 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 DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.