A CARNIVAL SIDESHOW PLUGGED TOO HARD FOR THE OSCARS

Publicity still for Bradley Cooper in 'Nightmare Alley'

By Dominique Paul Noth

Within the movie industry and even on cable networks there’s an Oscar publicity push for Mexican director  Guillermo del Toro’s latest, Nightmare Alley. And given its acting lineup and movie lineage, no wonder.

Del Toro is the director of films I have admired  such as “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006 combining fantasy and fascist horror) and “The Shape of Water” (elements of fantasy, romance and a creature from the black lagoon that cleaned up in 2018 at the Oscars).

A prolific producer and user of the latest cinematic techniques, he recently turned to co-host duties on Turner Classic Movies pumping how his “Nightmare Alley” corrected a major studio’s wild stab at film noir in 1947 when 20th Century Fox didn’t dare turn its biggest heart-throb Tyrone Power into the chicken-ripping carny disaster suggested in the original novel of the same name.

Given his  delight in the human underbelly and technical mastery of gloomy alley visuals, constant traveling camera and shocking intercuts of humanity’s darkest sides, del Toro had no hesitation in exploring a third-rate carnival and its denizens – in fact, adding to the macabre. The film tries but lacks his usual collision of grim tale with historic resonance, but he has called in some notable acting names to roam this 1940s underworld: 

Bradley Cooper as the central hustler, believing he can outguess everyone, Rooney Mara as his disquieted love interest, Toni Collette as his fortune-telling plaything, Ron Perlman as the menacing carny strongman, Willem Dafoe in a black wig and mustache as the ultimate nasty know-it-all, David Strathairn as the drunken pseudo-psychic who teaches him the ropes, Richard Jenkins as the savage rich guy he wants to fool, and Cate Blanchett as the cool psychiatrist who may outwit him. What a cast! And what a strangely slow and unconvincing movie as we wearily trudge this masterfully-shot endless tunnel of 1940s environments.

The film is interesting, though, in how language and meanings have changed.  Today a “geek” may actually be an affectionate term for a computer nerd.  In the 1940s a geek was the absolute dregs of show biz, a doped up drunk in the carny’s worst act,  hired from town to town to bite the heads off chickens – an almost inhuman being who has driven himself to the bottom.

That’s where Cooper is heading and the story’s ending is telegraphed (which is one reason the 1947 movie was and is so disappointing – the studio couldn’t imagine going this dirty with Tyrone and the audience knows where it is supposed to be going).  Well, 20th Century Fox  has evolved into Searchlight, with the same famous theme song.  The dirtier the stars get, the better.

The suspense in the story has always been is seeing how the Cooper character gets there, from a drifter with a checkered past but tons of good looks and immoral ideas to a smooth nightclub mentalist to an overly confident dapper-dressed trickster who unglues himself.

Del Toro is having a lot of fun foreshadowing and after-shadowing how the Cooper character has a lot of creepiness in his past and built-in weaknesses stemming from his self-confidence. Cooper is unusually metronomic in how he handles character development, almost as if he is peeking at the next page of the script.  

As the overly cool blonde manipulator, Blanchett is a strong but extreme version of herself – likely to be nominated on reputation because she is never bad. Of the other supporting cast, I thought only Dafoe and Jenkins showed anything special.

Now while  I long to see del Toro’s future projects, including a grown-up version of “Pinocchio,” this one is a mere sideshow and not worth the hullabaloo.

ALSO COVERED: 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

THE LOST DAUGHTER

KING RICHARD

DON’T LOOK UP

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. 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.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

 

‘DON’T LOOK UP’ IS EASY TO AGREE WITH AND HARD TO JUSTIFY

 By Dominique Paul Noth

Sickened by our politics? By our cavalier attitude toward climate change? By selfishness during an epidemic? The vapid chatter on TV news and social media?  For those reasons and more you want to applaud director-writer Adam McKay for his angry three-endings take in Don’t Look Up, a title that invites pundit variations such as Don’t Look It Up or Just Don’t Look. It is exclusively on Netflix for now, and that is also a commentary on this star-studded film.

We the American public are the main target as we refuse to believe in the planet-killing comet speeding toward Earth (how the film opens).  We are  the complacent society of couch potatoes reluctant to even look up at the meteor filled sky. We let rich technology gurus, slimy politicians and those TV talking heads reduce major ideas into gotcha balloons or seek a way to make money off disaster.  These privileged movers and shakers  even think they can escape the Earth’s impending atmosphere of climate destruction.

After a promising opening premise, the film demonstrates that gathering a stellar cast for a needed assault doesn’t mount to diddly without tight writing, true humor and a good instinct of how to poke fun again and again without becoming boring.  Something McKay was supposed to learn from his past at SNL, but then again today’s SNL is also hit and miss.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence

As the scientists alarmed at how society refuses to accept their  facts about the killer comet, the movie relies on Leonardo DiCaprio (for too many panicked reaction takes) and Jennifer Lawrence (tricked up with nose earring and burnt red hair to look as ugly   as possible for one of the most attractive  creatures on screen). They become the anxious ragers against Establishment indifference and self-serving schemes. 

Rallied against them are Meryl Streep as a female presidential version of Trump, Jonah Hill as her obnoxious son elevated to chief of staff, Cate Blanchett as a  man-eating TV host devoted to making the important look trivial,  and Tyler Perry as her co-host echo chamber. There are also in various stages of opposition Timothee Chalamet as the unpretentious but empty-headed love interest and an extra talented actor, Mark Rylance, who almost escapes criticism as the creepy technological guru (think Steve Jobs crossed with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos). 

Look around if you don’t think this story has truths. The movie insists that we like sheep  will heed the bigwigs’ commands to just step aside, keep our heads down and let the money boys operate. The film is a scream of anguish and a parable for our time – but it is a comedy? Or is comedy passé in our current gridlock?

McKay feels righteous outrage – so several of his films testify  (“Vice,” “The Big Short”). But clever humor is still expected from him, and is sadly thin in a movie where bile rules and an understandable negative view of mankind wins. 

Mark Rylance in 'Don't Look Up'

In a better film Rylance would receive accolades for his constant smile and spooky mannerisms, as would Streep for her ferocious portrayal of a soulless politician. In this film, people I never thought would be boring are.

It’s a strange thing to say about such collected first-rate talents.  You can easily be misled into thinking it all can’t be a waste – the cast alone should put it at No. 1 on Netflix.  Well it isn’t all a waste, not at first, but it comes damn close in two and a half hours. It’s understandable that many of the participants say in interviews that it was more like making  a documentary  than a satire.  That may well be part of the problem.  

We keep agreeing with McKay’s points and long for a reason to like this parade of very expensive special effects and useless diatribes, with constant intercuts to scenes of destroyed or threatened nature. He is trying to make the modern complicated  equivalent of 1964’s “Dr. Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” But director Stanley Kubrick and writer Terry Southern had a spine – a serious fiction novel “Red Alert” that struck them as hysterical to spin off, breaking themselves up with laughter.  McKay has no such anchor, nor the talent to wing his way through this.

Hiring like-minded seriously talented people is desperation, not a substitute for wit and genuine ideas.  That’s why the movie scrambles for finales – not just a stolen kiss between unlikely partners, not a meeting of the good folks for a final dinner, not just a surprise space ship voyaging into disaster.

A word about Netflix and this ever more common way of watching movies. The service signed some pretty big names for this movie to add to its seemingly bottomless mixed bag of exclusive offerings.   I’m finding value in my Netflix subscription by ignoring the entry screens and daily emails  where they push the products they think I would be interested in.  I just push deeper to find my gems – like “Voir” (a collection of movie essays) or movies that will never strike it big but are worth a look like “Proof,” “Passing” and “Tick Tick Boom.” 

The online services are doing with volume what the movie theaters have given up for now (though they may surge into variety again if COVID fears die off).  The online services  welcome blockbuster possibilities while also embracing  slivers of audiences. This broad choice of venues has turned film critics into openly being what they secretly always were – consumer advisers showing you where and when.

ALSO COVERED: 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

THE LOST DAUGHTER

KING RICHARD

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. 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.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

 

CIRCUMSTANCES SHORTENED REIGN OF ‘KING RICHARD’

From left: Demi Singleton as Serena, Will Smith as 'King Richard' and Saniyya Sidney as Venus

By Dominique Paul Noth

Released to film festivals in October and to the general public in November,  King Richard should still be playing at movie theaters but has moved rather formidably to a variety of streaming services (usually for $19.99 rental), confounding expectations given its budget, its star draw in Will Smith  and its bigtime investors.

It should on reputation still  be doing blockbuster business  because of both respectable reviews and a real-life  storyline  many of us remember, perhaps negatively though the results were positive.  It is  how one gruff African American father, Richard Williams – bossy, driven,   endlessly talkative and protective of his children --  confounded expectations in the lily-white world of professional tennis.

Many of us knew the outlines from the 1980s – a determined hustling black father imposing strict regimens on all five daughters (three from his wife’s previous marriage, with suggestions that he had  other families along the way), writing a detailed 85-page  plan for  his two daughter’s  future when they were four and a half and cajoling and wheedling the tennis world into giving his glibness and young’uns  center stage as an opportunity for Venus and Serena Williams – then pulling them from the heady world of juniors as too destructive of their characters. 

Lo and behold he was right in his expectations, homegrown training and against-all-odds beliefs. They would become the best in the tennis  world.

The movie focuses mainly on teenage Venus and it embellishes several lessons, such as how the father came close to losing his own cool over boys pursuing his teens and only by the grace of a drive-by shooting  escaping the ghetto life he feared.

There is a tendency (probably strengthened here by Serena and Venus as co-producers)  to add too much sugar into these truly moving minority tales of how a strong-willed family insisting on basic values can survive prejudice and privileged expectations to flip the world on its ear.  These  movies, factual and not,  have found an audience – “Hidden Figures,” “The Blind Side” and “The Help” spring to mind. There is a tendency to simplify the lessons, the cheeriness of such families, the villainy of those standing against them.  Here there is at least some effort to  counter the sweetness. .

Smith plays the dad with careful physical restraint but dominance, a quite suitable naturalism, and an appealing but  unshakable insistence on Richard’s way no matter how big the bucks are offered by Nike and the so-called tennis experts.  It’s nice to see Smith, whose main box office oomph has been escapist films, prove his acting ability is not a fluke of personality.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green keeps the movie well paced, the young cast as likable as kittens, the tennis action revealing in rapid cuts from closeups to bird’s eye as Richard prowls around the edges.

Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene

King Richard spends much of its time partly correcting the historical image the country had that this was the ultimate in controlling dads, suggesting that as crazy as his rules and manner seemed they worked – and largely because of the prejudice he had to constantly fight against.

But while Smith will get all the huzzahs, the best acting in the film belongs to Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene (Brandy) his wife – feisty, supportive and insisting on equality – a performance that deserves to be considered at awards time. It is her honesty as an angry truth-telling wife that keeps the film from slipping irretrievably into the sugary side.

Also impressive and constantly expressive  as the young Venus is Saniyya Sidney, who can no longer be regarded as  teenage flash in the pan.  The rest of the supporting cast is both a physical match and quite capable. It’s a fine movie.  Not a great movie.  But a good story.

ALSO COVERED: 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

THE LOST DAUGHTER

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. 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.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

 

‘THE LOST DAUGHTER’ WINDS UP AS LOST OPPORTUNITY

By Dominique Paul Noth

Dakota Johnson and Olivia Coleman
in 'The Lost Daughter'

The Lost Daughter revels in a slowly unfolding character study, pursuing an interior understanding of how motherhood embodies mental danger and why interaction with young daughters can be particularly brutalizing and guilt-ridden.

The film meanders so much trying to make important points through naturalistic behavior that finally audiences have to wonder what the hell is the point? You start out not quite knowing where director Maggie Gylennhaal is going in her debut behind the lens after countless films in front of it. We recognize it is well crafted and thoughtfully naturalistic, but our efforts are not rewarded.

It’s a bit like The Power of  the Dog also on Netflix and previously and favorably reviewed, but “Power” starts out with an interesting milieu of characters and tells its story step by clear step,  rather than obfuscating the opening as the Gylennhaal film does.

“Daughter” focuses on a middle aged professor, Leda, played by Olivia Coleman, enjoying a working vacation on a Greek island, both drawn to and disturbed by a rowdy family of American tourists invading her space.  Almost all is revealed or hidden by the looks among the participants.  

Film patrons may feel misled early when a daughter of the tourists go missing, though we soon learn that it is her missing doll that holds the key to the plot.

Since “Daughter” features Coleman, an excellent actress frolicking with the likes of another excellent actor, Ed Harris, we remain a bit tolerant at the miniature pace of revelations.  The more hypnotic and active understanding comes with a young version of the married Leda in flashbacks. An actress and singer worth remembering, Jackie Buckley, the best thing in the movie,  emerges to fall into the tribulations, erotica and intellectual frustration that the middle-aged Coleman embodies. 

As director, Gyllenhaal does nothing outrageous -- we almost wish she would.  She relies so heavily on naturalistic behaviorism -- at which Coleman and Harris excel – that the viewer feels thwarted in getting under the skin of these characters.  As an aside, we admire Dakota Jackson for proving she can take on a real acting role, again in the behaviorist mold. 

I don’t want to discount the revelations about the self-destruction of intellectual and sensual control that motherhood entails.  But though the film has changed the characters from Italians and devotees of Italian literature (substituting a world of tourism and comparative literature while staying faithful to the pseudonym-named popular author Elena Ferrante), it has kept a lot of the author’s asides and supposedly revelatory ramblings.

Only when the film explores in Buckley the younger behavior that has created such a mentally agitated but cryptic Coleman does the film and the editing provide some cinematic power.  It’s a long wait for limited satisfaction,  followed by a deliberately did-she or didn’t-she ending.

ALSO COVERED: 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

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. 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.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

 

‘POWER OF DOG’ – THE OTHER KIND OF MOVIE TO PAY ATTENTION TO

By Dominique Paul Noth

There are distinctly different kinds of movies competing for the top prizes like the Oscars.

There are the films fashioned along blockbuster lines in which even good actors are given dialog that announces their intentions (often already revealed by their costumes). The directors use reams of audio sound effects and rapid cinematic cutting to signal the emotions the audience is supposed to feel. Sophisticated computer graphics interface (cgi) speaks volumes to the viewer. Promotional campaigns emphasize the visceral oomph behind the logos. This is not necessarily Marvel films but any mammothly orchestrated enterprise.  

The second category is the subtler movies in which every framing of the content and the landscape reflect a purpose, in which the psychology of the characters and their almost-interaction can be so subtle that we have to pay attention to every line reading and every look, in which the tonal quality of the behavior and the nuances require us to expect meaning in every moment – in which, frankly, the director relies on our input.

(Some of today’s movies, such as "The Last Duel," try to dance between the blockbuster style and the subtler one.)

Strangely many of the second category films are only available through streaming, and hence not just in competition with the best of HBO but in competition with sitcoms, reality shows, serial dramas, and Madison Avenue methods that do not require careful attention and even are programmed so we can visit the refrigerator for refreshments while they unfold.  In home viewership, with many people spread around the couch after a hard day’s work, moviegoers have to give over special attention to compensate.

Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst in
'The Power of the Dog'.

An example of the subtler kind of movie is Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, now mainly available on Netflix. The New Zealand (now Australian) director brings a special sort of attention to her psychological tales and some viewers will assume automatically in the first minutes just who the top dog of the title is at this remote and lucrative Montana cattle ranch in 1925 run by two vastly different brothers.

The obvious alpha dog is Phil Burbank, played by Benedict Cumberbatch as a muscular sarcastic hard-nose cowboy totally at home with boots, castration knives and banjo, literally wallowing in mud and bossing everyone around him with stern looks and harsh words. After 25 years he still calls  his older brother George “fatso” though this fatso, as quietly and thoughtfully played by Jesse Plemons, stolidly walks through the punches unperturbed, sticking to his softer mannerisms and social concerns, willing to court despite his brother’s scorn a neighboring widowed innkeeper, Rose. She is played in engaging suffering by Kirsten Dunst as so meek and fearful of Phil’s barbs that she takes to drink.

Rose has a college age son, Peter, so thin, awkward and effeminate that Phil immediately sees an easy target in Peter’s playing with paper flowers and dissecting animals as, he says,  a preliminary to studying medicine.  As naturalistically played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, there may be more will and determination within Peter than the dominating Phil realizes.

The evolving relationships among these corners unfold so slowly and deliberately that I suspect some viewers may not realize how much is being revealed, so conditioned have they become to movies that tell them how to think rather than trapping them into awareness.

Cumberbatch, already a star player in everything from Sherlock to Hamlet, commands a great deal of pleasure in watching him bend his highly trained British voice and talents to an American taciturn prototype, a deliberately nasty man who hides his intellect within a rustic legend of his own creation, modeled after his late hero, Bronco Henry, the ultimate perfect cowboy in the Tom Mix vein who shaped him -- in some strange shapes, as we slowly learn.

Cumberbatch submerges and refines his skills to totally capture Phil – making him a fierce physical presence as well as a Freudian puzzle, but expert students of his methods will note how exactly he has turned his vocal and sarcastic talents to fit a different mold.  I for one could not subdue knowledge of Cumberbatch’s techniques though I had a lot of fun watching how he did it.

I was more impressed – Oscar level impressed, in fact – by Plemons' unpretentious but touching work as the brother, of Dunst’s skill at making us grip Rose’s fear as well as her clinging niceness and particularly by how well Smit-McPhee lets Peter’s personality creep up on us, and I do mean creep.

All of this is made possible by director Campion’s care and trust in her actors and in letting the subtleties unfold at what many may see as a stately pace as she commits to the place and the tempo of the story.

This is billed in some quarters as a western, but only if films like “Hud” are westerns, only if we recognize that Campion is saying something different about the milieu of the Old West and our attitudes about those times. Something else is going on as the cowboys skin hides and bathe in the creek with Stetsons strategically placed over their X-rated parts.  There are power plays underway, but don’t presume to know who the top dog is in a movie too easy to overlook at awards time. Just don’t overlook it now.

ALSO COVERED: BEING THE RICARDOS

 

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. 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.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.