Weekend Watch-List: Do's and Don't's
Reviews of "The Wonder," "She Said," "The Menu," and one absolute must-avoid.
Airborne Toxic Event Warning of the Week [insert klaxon sirens here]: When I started the Watch List last year, my tender hope was that this newsletter would A) lead you to a few profound or entertaining or profoundly entertaining viewing experiences and B) serve as a canary in the coal mine of video on demand, warning you when a movie came along that was the cinematic equivalent of carbon monoxide. Dear reader, the canary has died: I have seen “The People We Hate at the Wedding” (1/2 ⭐, debuting today on Amazon Prime) and have gone belly-up in that little cage they hang above the pit. Putatively a comedy, “People” concerns an American sister (Kirsten Bell, above right) and brother (Ben Platt, above left) attending the nuptials of their British half-sister (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) in London; the “joke” is that the Yanks are whiny, self-absorbed jerks with whom we’re somehow meant to sympathize. Bell made loathsomeness entertaining and even touching on her series “The Good Place” – no such luck here. The culprit is a shrill, unfunny embarrassment of a script and slapstick situations that humiliate a lot of fine actors; there’s a dressing room scene early on for which Allison Janney really needs to fire her agent. The one saving grace is Dustin Milligan as Bell’s inexplicable love interest; presumably, he learned how to make terrible people enjoyable to watch over six seasons of “Schitt’s Creek.” “The People We Hate at the Wedding” will be all over your Prime Video home screen for the next few weeks – consider it not an invitation but hazardous waste signage.
Instead, here’s an actual weekend pick: “The Wonder” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, streaming on Netflix), a richly atmospheric drama of science versus superstition set in rural 1860s Ireland. Among other things, it’s a movie that puts Florence Pugh (above) back in period dress, where the actress often seems most comfortable. The “wonder” of the title is a teenage village girl, Anna O’Donnell (Kila Lord Cassidy), who appears to never eat food; she claims to be subsisting on “manna from Heaven.” Her deeply pious parents and a constant stream of visitors are sure that this is one of God’s miracles, but a council of local elders (all of them men) require proof and hire an English nurse, Lib Wright (Pugh), to keep vigil over the girl. The nurse is newly returned from the Crimean War and has other traumas in her past, and she is a steadfast believer in medical science, sharing her skepticism and an exhausted kind of romance with a journalist (Tom Burke) covering the story for a London newspaper. A struggle between faith and fact ensues, with the nurse increasingly isolated as she pursues the truth of the matter. One of the more educated elders hazards a guess that Anna is somehow converting sunlight into sustenance, photosynthesizing her way to sainthood.
The director, Sebastián Lelio, is a gifted Chilean filmmaker (“Gloria,” “A Fantastic Woman”) who lately has turned to English-language projects (“Disobedience,” “Gloria Bell”); in “The Wonder,” he creates an utterly believable lamp-lit society still perched on the edge of the Dark Ages. Pugh has one of her most complex and appealing roles in Lib, who in many ways is a modern woman, flawed, assured, and well ahead of her era. You may find yourself arguing with some of her decisions as the movie hastens to a close, but her essential sanity is never in question. Beneath its satisfying surface mystery, “The Wonder” levels a steady gaze at a faith-ruled culture where the miracles of women are sometimes the only way to cope with the sins of men. Recommended.
“She Said” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, in theaters) doesn’t bother to hint about the sins of men – it slams its fist on the table.
It’s the tale of how reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s decades of rape and predation in the pages of the New York Times in 2017, kicking off the reckonings of the #MeToo era that have gone some way (but not as nearly far as they could) in baring the systematic harassment of women in the entertainment industry and elsewhere. (The Times investigation paralleled Ronan Farrow’s reporting in The New Yorker, which is referenced but not dramatized in the new movie.) Two excellent actresses star, Carey Mulligan as Twohey and Zoe Kazan as Kantor, with Patricia Clarkson as Times editor Rebecca Corbett, Rebecca Lenkiewicz writing the script, and Maria Schrader (TV’s “Unorthodox”) directing.
“She Said” is built on the sturdy bones of “All The President’s Men” and it doesn’t deviate from the formula; it relies on our outrage and faith in the hard work of investigative journalism to keep the dramatic momentum rolling. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by “Spotlight” (2015), a movie I can hardly be objective about (I’m friends with some of the characters portrayed in it) but still admire for its refusal to melodramatize the process of reporting the news, but in “She Said,” one often feels the heavy hand of the filmmakers urging us this way and that, telling us what to feel rather than allowing us to feel it for ourselves. (Nicholas Britell’s musical score is lovely but tends to underline the drama like a Sharpie.) At the same time, Schrader and her cast take us deep into the lives of journalists who are also wives and mothers, observing the stresses and sacrifices and tactics employed by many working women to keep their infinite plates spinning in the air. Which is another way of saying that Woodward and Bernstein never had to deal with postpartum depression on their way to the deadline. The screening of “She Said” I attended was packed with young women; when Harvey went down, they stood up and cheered.
“The Menu” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐) , in theaters) has three things going for it: Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy, and a series of haute-gourmand dishes that are ridiculously funny parodies of extreme dining. Mark Mylod’s satire takes place over the course of one night at The Hawthorne, an exclusive restaurant on an isolated island in the Pacific Northwest. The evening’s clientele is a mix of swaggering Silicon Valley tech bros, fading movie stars (John Leguizamo), jaded power couples, a restaurant critic (Janet McTeer), and one hard-core foodie (Nicholas Hoult) and his date (Taylor-Joy). The chef is played with rising venom by Fiennes, and he’s just about had it; what starts as an evening of catering to the rich becomes a revenger’s comedy with echoes of Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover,” but, more pertinently, Buñuel, Buñuel, Buñuel. (See “The Exterminating Angel,” 1962.) The diners find they cannot leave; the dishes (a bread plate without bread, a single scallop perched atop a rock) become more pointedly surreal; violence, class fury, and retribution suddenly appear on the menu. Halfway through the film I realized I was watching “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” with Willy Wonka as a psychopath and Charlie as a professional escort.
The director and writers of “The Menu” have worked on HBO’s “Succession,” and they bring the same cold-eyed amusement to the proceedings; the movie backs into absurdity even as we latch onto Taylor-Joy’s Margot as our representative at the feast. The actress has had a fascinating journey in the past few years, from the preadolescent chill of “The Witch” to the breakthrough of “The Queen’s Gambit” to the harsh doubling down of “The Northman.” She is growing up in public in a way that has warped young women and men before her, but on the evidence of “The Menu” she is holding her own. The chief weapons in Taylor-Joy’s arsenal are her eyes, which may be the largest in the history of the cinema; they back into the uncanny valley even as they pin the fops and fools of “The Menu” to their own pretensions. She and Fiennes share a delirious dance to the death in “The Menu,” but, for all that, the film itself never amounts to more than a scintillating amuse-bouche.
Tivo Alert of the week: 1959’s “Rio Bravo” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) on Turner Classics, Saturday at 5:30 p.m. The first in Howard Hawks’ series of autumnal Western picaresques, this is the John Wayne movie for people who don’t like John Wayne, in part because the focus is equally spread around to Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and Angie Dickinson, the tempest in the movie’s teapot. “Rio Bravo” is long and leisurely, the genre’s equivalent of late-inning Shakespeare, and the plot doesn’t matter so much as the characters’ attitude toward it. As I once wrote: “Tremendous old-school fun and probably the most relaxed western ever made, even with all those guns going off at the end. And, as advertised, it’s the answer film to ‘High Noon,’ made because Wayne and Hawks were offended by the idea of a lawman who has to beg for help. (It should be noted that the Duke once admitted ‘Noon’’s Will Kane was a hell of a part and that he wouldn’t have turned it down himself -- but he was handing Gary Cooper a best actor Oscar at the time, so a little jealousy is understandable.)…
And there’s the sublime moment in the jail, just before the storm breaks, where everyone just sits down and sings. Until then, you’ve almost forgotten you’ve got both a Rat Pack member and one of the better early rock ‘n’ rollers in the cast. If the scene is a contractual obligation for Dino and Ricky Nelson, it works in context as an unforced statement of calm and solidarity. Even Walter Brennan joins in, quavery and enthusiastic. (But Wayne doesn’t, since singing is what the troops do when the general’s waiting for action and, anyway, there’s a chance his singing voice would spook the horses. He smiles, though, and that’s something to see.) One of the songs in this sudden hootenanny is called ‘My Rifle, My Pony, and Me,’ and we are invited to compare these sentiments with the Oscar-winning tune from High Noon, ‘Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling.’ Even a kid can’t miss what’s going on here. Community rises from individual responsibility, not the other way around.”
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