The Current War, The Director’s Cut, a strange 2017 movie, finally debuted this fall. It had been languishing in the aftermath of the Me, Too movement that annihilated the movie studio that made The Current War.
The newly released movie, produced by an uncredited Harvey Weinstein (The King’s Speech) and Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver) among many others, features Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water) as George Westinghouse, Nicholas Hoult as Nikola Tesla and Benedict Cumberbatch (War Horse) as Thomas Edison. This should be an amazing movie.
But it isn’t and, after everything but the kitchen sink was hurled at this movie regardless of merit and through no fault of its own, one can only hazard a guess as to why it is not as good as it might have been.
The Current War is not amazing. It’s barely interesting, though it is interesting — how could it not be, given its subject? — and it gets better as it goes along.
Beginning with the sound of winter’s wind as a blindingly white snowstorm engulfs one man in black, depicting a world in white and black in desperate need of color and light, The Current War comes up with a fast and dizzying array of scenes that zip and do not linger. But it becomes clear without proper exposition that Edison in 1880 has arrived “to give light” with a patent application.
Details are hard to make out. Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, working with playwright Michael Mitnick’s screenplay, opted for a hurried first half for reasons that remain unclear. The Current War, which essentially depicts electricity competition within a 13-year span when America had the closest the world’s ever known to having a purely capitalist economy — that is, with some statism but without near-total government control of economics, such as anti-trust law, an income tax, Social Security, Medicare, ObamaCare and control of utilities as monopolies — morphs from man to man contest over electrical currents into a more benign account of both mens’ characters. Like The Founder, The Current War can’t decide where it stands on the morality of a capitalist, let alone capitalism.
Ultimately, it sort of apologizes for their supposed excesses and ruthlessness in the subsidiary character Hoult portrays, Nikola Tesla, whose academic presentation to a small gathering at Columbia College on May 20, 1891 marks a turning point. Immigrant Tesla as the eccentric futurist fits Texas native Gomez-Rejon’s and Pittsburgher Mitnick’s theme that capitalists can do good and bad alike, so the notion which emerges is that capitalism represents both the potential for promoting life and hastening death; it could make peace or it could start war.
This undeveloped theme has certain possibilities, largely unrealized here. By the time the film’s climax comes to Chicago for each capitalist’s presentation to the cronies that control the Columbian Exposition of 1893, both men have compromised themselves to a certain degree, though, arguably, Westinghouse comes off as more principled. The best line of this historically based movie, which plays with the lights and probably the facts a bit too much, is when a question is put to Tesla after he proposes a new idea: “Are you serious?” Tesla deadpans: “Almost always.”
The Current War might’ve been grand. Shannon and Cumberbatch are in fine form as always. Hoult is very good as Tesla. There are glimpses of a vision. But it moves too fast, shows too little and emits the quality of one of those non-fiction programs on a cable channel that dramatizes historical reenactments. Diehard fans of Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla and members of the cast and crew may find something here to appreciate and enjoy. But there’s not enough of a driving sense of purpose to power The Current War.
The 2017 movies were disappointing in general. Having finally seen the last of the Best Picture Academy Award nominees, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, my contention is affirmed. Read my new review of the film here.
As with every movie I see, I wanted to like and enjoy Lady Bird. Unfortunately, it ended up as dull as I’d expected. However, I found more to appreciate than I’d anticipated. I won’t be rushing out to see the next Greta Gerwig film but Lady Bird‘s not the worst navel-gazer I’ve seen. The Blu-Ray edition has merit, too, in the features, especially for those who like the movie.
Among last year’s movies I’ve seen, I, Tonya, also new to home video, is the best of the bunch. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouriand Dunkirk — both available on disc or stream — are well made if lacking, though the latter is more moving and realistic, which to me makes it better. After the overdone onslaught of Marvel’s Black Panther and the overrated Wonder Woman, I am inclined to take a break from comic book movies. I’m continuing to see and write about classic movies and there are more to come. This weekend, I may also see and review a new gay-themed picture called Love, Simon, because the marketing looks like the movie may have an interesting character and story.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Oscar nominations for last year’s movies this morning. The annual awards ceremony, to be hosted on March 4 on ABC by ABC’s late night show host and political activist Jimmy Kimmel, will be the 90th annual Academy Awards. With each passing year, the popular televised ceremony loses its luster.
The show’s glamour is long gone, as whatever eloquence, beauty, elegance, flair and brightness is on display is perpetually, and increasingly, diminished, contradicted and ridiculed by the dim, grotesque and always vulgar mediocrity, bigotry and blankness of its hosts, presenters, skits and clips. The Oscars have become an annual display of groupthink, like a national political convention — rote coronation, bromides and propaganda — as entertaining and informative as an episode of most of the harping on MSNBC or the pap on Fox News Channel. This year’s Me, Too-driven hysteria, compounding the Academy’s bigotry rationalized by its faith in egalitarianism (cloaked in the terms diversity and inclusion) will surely detract from any celebration of the art and science of movies and having made them.
This year, the Best Picture nominees mostly match the projections. With one exception, I have seen and reviewed each of the nominees, so I’m including the links here for those who love movies as much as I do. Please note that most of these reviews offer negative or mixed estimates of the Oscar-nominated pictures, though I found Dunkirk compelling, and have not seen Lady Bird, which is also nominated. I think the scathing and timely indictment of America’s Me, Too culture of trial by public opinion, I, Tonya, is one of 2017’s best, possibly the best, picture, though I haven’t seen every major movie.
I am glad that The Greatest Showman, Fox’s flawed but enjoyable box office hit — which had an extraordinarily low 12 percent drop in this week’s box office receipts — and a showcase for two rising and extremely talented songwriters, received recognition for its music with its “This Is Me” nomination for Best Song (though almost any of its tunes are better than anything else I heard last year).
Oscar’s nine 2017 Best Picture nominees, with a link to each review, are:
Get Out a good comedy-horror movie themed to oppose interracial relationships
Misery loves company in writer and director Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which is nearly as thematically bleak, Irish and tragic as his similarly themed In Bruges. That everybody hurts, to paraphrase REM’s hit ballad, is not an original premise. As with In Bruges, immersing in the movie’s setting and subculture capably and sufficiently refreshes the premise, however, leading to a sense that something meaningful is about to happen or be resolved.
And, as with McDonagh’s violent Euro-fable, this violent movie exists to challenge the audience on moral grounds. It is too obvious, pointed and belabored, though the cast of absurd characters, biting lines and mythical pictures keep the audience guessing and wanting to know more. Cinematically, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is less a whole motion picture than it is a Christian morality play detached from reality; homage to its Southern Gothic-Catholic godmother, Flannery O’Connor.
This doesn’t mean it’s without value, as long as you know its purpose going in. Misty pictures and poetic Irish music introduce a story that’s more about a place than a character. The place is in the middle of the country, a stopover, really, as its wisest character suggests, where you go when you don’t know where else to go. Is this the South? The Midwest? Both? Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri does not commit. If it commits to anything, it’s a vow not to vow. It’s downright absolutist in its anti-absolutism.
Leading the way in her ridiculously old Ford station wagon is craggy anti-heroine Mildred (Frances McDormand, as hard, blunt and dour as ever, and it’s sort of sad to see the once-upon Miss Pettigrew confined to this type of role). McDormand (The Good Dinosaur) is a fine actress. The performance can’t conceal that the role exists less as a character than as a means to the ending. Mildred’s a spiteful, old soul. On the one hand, she finds peace in nature, turning an insect upright, crying to a deer and never veering from her mission to get cops to investigate her daughter’s rape and murder. On the other hand, Mildred’s oblivious, even negligent, to the fact that she poisons peace, love and life wherever she goes. Mildred is toxic.
The whole town is toxic, from the mean old mother of a bigoted, bad policeman named Dixon (Sam Rockwell, Cowboys & Aliens) to Mildred’s wife-beating ex-husband, the entire police force and a town midget (Peter Dinklage). Even Mildred’s pot-smoking best friend, who seems to have stepped out of another movie, is morally gray, concerning herself strictly with Mildred’s welfare at the expense of her own. The town’s police chief (Woody Harrelson, Wilson) is as inexplicably ineffective as he is inexplicably popular. The point here is that everyone is morally mixed, gray and, down deep inside, inexplicably dark. Like In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri rationalizes splattering blood because it purports to confer upon us muted rays of hope and light. But nothing in this movie ever feels realistic; it never feels anything but fabled and fictitious.
Stomping around in a blended buzzcut with a snipped off ponytail, Mildred cuts a scowling figure in Ebbing, Missouri, flicking and littering her cigarette butts, accosting children, insulting strangers and doing it with the righteous indignation of a woman wronged. Though the audience eventually learns that there may be more to Mildred’s role in her daughter’s demise than is first apparent, Mildred maintains the moral high ground in a town that doesn’t appear to care about justice, love or life. That it’s all supposed to be hilarious (it isn’t), particularly with the hick cop Dixon as comic foil (who’s as funny as a dying toad), is intended to infuse the elegiac finale.
Amid racism, cancer, attempted murder, suicide and perfectly framed pictures of two characters on two swings overlooking three billboards — with Mildred’s cutely named Southern Charms Gift Store as a kind of weigh station — Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri curves into a gauzy conclusion, cued by a folk singer wailing about the night they tore old Dixie down. I won’t ruin the ending, which, as quaint as it is, never tears anything down. It doesn’t even rip. Like the movie’s dining table (or the insect) being set back upright after a brawl, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri merely provides a fleeting, lyrical reset; more passing observation than examination, trucking right through the middle without letting off its load.
Writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark, brooding horror-comedy Phantom Thread lets you in on its essential theme in the opening shots. Drawings and pictures of elegant women’s clothes from when women wore clothes that accentuate the female figure appear. Then, comes a preview of the point of the movie: a musical note (well, what the audience is supposed to discern as a musical note, anyway) which becomes a loud, irritating audio distortion which can only be described as noise.
Sonic assault fits the darkly comic, ponderous soap opera film. Phantom Thread invites you for its sumptuous designs and treats you to dastardly deconstruction. All this while masquerading as an important movie with something important to show and say about the artisan and his creations, romantic relationships and life. “It’s comforting to think that the dead are watching over us,” one character says as plainly as possible in this frank exercise in depicting an eccentric fashion designer’s days and nights.
This is as profound as Phantom Thread gets.
The lead character, a designer named Reynolds Woodcock, is portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Lincoln, The Last of the Mohicans) in his first role since 2012’s surprisingly good Lincoln. It’s also his re-teaming with Anderson, with whom he worked on the similarly campy and utterly empty 2007 diatribe against capitalism, There Will Be Blood. This time, Anderson (Magnolia) carefully lays out his case against the creator in finer strokes.
The result is as cutting and comical as that other film, intentionally or not. Day-Lewis, in what he says is his final movie performance, is toned down, letting co-stars and the movie’s other central parts — costumes, score, cinematography — shine. And they do, they really do. Pictures from the back of a car traveling to an idyllic hotel overlooking the waterfront take the audience into a new and inviting world of dressmaking and design. The dresses, threading and stitching are lavishly featured in 70mm. Jonny Greenwood’s mostly nonstop musical score distracts from the nothingness as intended. Vicky Krieps (A Most Wanted Man) as a clumsy, young waitress half Woodcock’s age delivers an even performance, portraying a woman who turns good fortune into a wicked, conniving and manipulative act of sadism. Lesley Manville (Mr. Turner) stands out as the designer’s arch accomplice.
Though it touches on sexual perversion and what it means to take advantage of a delusional man of ability putting woman on a pedestal, which might have made an interesting cultural and character study, ultimately Phantom Thread is putting us on. The put-on starts with Woodcock’s syrupy come-on lines to the waif — he removes her red lipstick on a creepy first date with “now, there’s the real you” and later has her caked in red lipstick for fashion modeling — and cascades down from there. Factor Woodcock’s seriously disturbing mother complex into this puzzle, too, and midway through Phantom Thread, you start to wonder if this is another remake of Psycho. But Kriep’s waif, who apparently has no family and nothing else to do, schemes her way to fulfilling the masochist’s unspoken fantasy.
Costumes, transitions and pacing are fine. Harriet Sansom Harris (Bebe on Frasier) does a wonderful turn as a patroness of the arts in a pivotal plot point. Scenes of Woodcock at work, which means thinking, drawing and dressmaking, are well done. A running joke about his intolerance for distraction lightens the mood. But, from the nubile waif’s early reference to the sixtysomething designer as a boy to the final scenes of complicity in sado-masochism as Anderson’s view of romantic love, Phantom Thread‘s master-pupil depiction too pertly delivers its vacant point that, in the end, everyone gets all dressed up with no where to go.
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But it isn’t and, after everything but the kitchen sink was hurled at this movie regardless of merit and through no fault of its own, one can only hazard a guess as to why it is not as good as it might have been.
The show’s glamour is long gone, as whatever eloquence, beauty, elegance, flair and brightness is on display is perpetually, and increasingly, diminished, contradicted and ridiculed by the dim, grotesque and always vulgar mediocrity, bigotry and blankness of its hosts, presenters, skits and clips. The Oscars have become an annual display of groupthink, like a national political convention — rote coronation, bromides and propaganda — as entertaining and informative as an episode of most of the harping on 
And, as with McDonagh’s violent Euro-fable, this violent movie exists to challenge the audience on moral grounds. It is too obvious, pointed and belabored, though the cast of absurd characters, biting lines and mythical pictures keep the audience guessing and wanting to know more. Cinematically, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is less a whole motion picture than it is a Christian morality play detached from reality; homage to its Southern Gothic-Catholic godmother, Flannery O’Connor.
Sonic assault fits the darkly comic, ponderous soap opera film. Phantom Thread invites you for its sumptuous designs and treats you to dastardly deconstruction. All this while masquerading as an important movie with something important to show and say about the artisan and his creations, romantic relationships and life. “It’s comforting to think that the dead are watching over us,” one character says as plainly as possible in this frank exercise in depicting an eccentric fashion designer’s days and nights.