I haven’t seen director Sebastián Lelio’s 2013 Chilean original, Gloria. But Gloria Bell, Lelio’s 2018 remake of his own movie, is strange and interesting on its own.
Gloria Bell is not a typical Hollywood movie. Screened at Hollywood’s ArcLight Cinemas with a director Q & A afterwards, I didn’t know what to expect other than what I had seen in the lively trailer and what the poster implies.
Gloria Bell is less jubilant than its advertising. With dark, strange and wordless scenes and interludes, the movie’s mostly pictorial. A hairless cat that’s a thousand times more involving than the cat in this weekend’s hit movie, the lifeless Captain Marvel, wanders in and out of the leading character’s life.
What Gloria says to the cat doesn’t amount to much as it’s more about what the cat represents. This is what Lelio (Disobedience), directing his own movie over again for leading actress Julianne Moore (Catching Fire), carefully threads throughout the remake. The result is uniquely unusual, comical and quietly satisfying.
Popping prescription drugs the audience never learns more about, smoking tobacco and marijuana and drinking every type of alcoholic beverage in almost every life context you can imagine, fiftyish Gloria’s more than a little exhausting. She clearly lives in her own world, ugly cat intrusions and all, while making ends meet in Southern California and going dancing at a disco frequented by people her age and up.
But don’t make the mistake I did if you choose to see this strange, contained little picture and think that Gloria Bell centers upon Gloria at the disco. It doesn’t and I almost wished it did. Instead, it’s about what draws her there.
Or, rather, Gloria Bell‘s about what she draws from within herself. This is not an easily accomplished task for the insurance claims agent nor is it an easily examined aspect. But what makes the movie sing to the extent it does (and this is neither like an opera nor an operetta) is its honesty about self-discovery through music.
Of course, this may explain why Gloria Bell comes off as cold and complicated, which mirrors the mysteries of music. From her solo sing-along to Olivia Newton-John’s hit single “A Little More Love” to tunes by Paul McCartney, Earth Wind & Fire and Air Supply’s pleading “All Out of Love”, the alternately self-caring, self-absorbed mother, ex-wife and daughter invests herself in favorite songs. Isn’t this true for anyone seeking a few minutes of romanticism or at least a dash of romantic love in sometimes lonely lives?
Gloria is far from sympathetic. Like most people, she can be painful to be around and she tries too hard. This is what sometimes makes Gloria Bell harder to watch, as it cuts close and doesn’t strive to make the audience laugh out loud, though that’s exactly what happens. She’s a bit of a lush, though she maintains control. She seeks too often to get stoned. She badgers and lays unearned guilt trips on her kids, driving one of them far, far away. Her family scenes are agonizing, dreary and pathetic.
When a man (John Turturro) she meets at the disco discloses that he’s had surgery to get thinner, she laughs at him. She’s so self-absorbed that she hijacks her son’s birthday party, humiliates her daughter and neglects her new main man. Honestly, it’s little wonder she ends up being terribly lonely in Las Vegas, even as Turturro’s ex-Marine entrepreneur wins her over and keeps at it.
But this small film about one lonely human’s discreetly epic quest to be alive, with pills, eye drops and, centrally, a self-made playlist through which she nourishes her sense of life, sneaks inside like that darn cat. It isn’t grand. It isn’t romantic and this is not likely to be your favorite movie this year. But, like Wild, Demolition and other strange slice of life pictures intended to make you think twice and ultimately go for broke, Gloria Bell makes you listen and look while it makes you think and feel.
In a scene toward the end, with a single, pregnant pause on the dance floor, Moore as Bell captures that moment when the consequences of life’s choices catch up — and the next moment when you choose not to let what matters go.
The ArcLight’s interview with director Sebastián Lelio was as lame as ever — USA Today‘s Claudia Puig seems like a nice person but she’s an inadequate and obsequious interviewer — but Lelio was able to express his thoughts on the film. He rightly describes Gloria Bell as a “mundane slice of life” while also sharing that he sought to differentiate each performance so that the audience feels like they’re watching people, not characters.
Mission accomplished as Michael Cera, Holland Taylor and others as Gloria Bell’s family are pitch perfect and so is the outstanding actor John Turturro who creates empathy, chemistry with Moore’s character and shock. Also look for Brad Garrett, Rita Wilson, Sean Astin in a cameo and Jeanne Tripplehorn. Lelio, who surprisingly made an excellent defense of casting regardless of pressure groups, strikes me as too tidy in his directing. But he shows real cinematic potential.
When I asked why he switched from the original movie’s setting, Santiago, Chile, to Southern California, he explained that it was Julianne Moore’s idea (she reportedly asked for the remake). Citing LA’s sense of isolation and a certain sensibility, Lelio said he agreed with Moore, who does some of her best acting.
Disney’s new movie musical is a gorgeous sequel to its cherished film Mary Poppins. If you are one of those that loves that 1964 movie, you’re likely to love this movie, too. Neither as sugary as the original nor as bleak, it is, under Rob Marshall’s direction, more purposeful.
Mary Poppins Returns, starring Emily Blunt (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Sicario, The Girl on the Train, Into the Woods) in the title role, is often inviting and entertaining. If you can stand another Christmastime depiction of a sinister capitalist (Colin Firth, The King’s Speech) ala A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, you will enjoy this song and dance film.
Music by Hairspray songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman shapes the movie. With Rob Marshall’s frequent cinematographer Dion Beebe (The Snowman, Into the Woods, Disney’s upcoming live action version of The Little Mermaid), the new Mary Poppins picture pops in every frame.
Like Robert Zemeckis, Rob Marshall (Into the Woods, Memoirs of a Geisha, Chicago) excels at making marvelously, visually arresting motion pictures. In particular, Marshall is able to set the musical to a proper and compelling plot progression. Thus, Marshall makes something of a thin tale (which he co-wrote with others), blending the cast of characters with charming tunes.
Be mindful of what you think of Mary Poppins, however. I don’t consider it one of Walt Disney’s best pictures. Others, such as Bambi, Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp and The Jungle Book, not to mention the forgotten So Dear to My Heart, are better. The sad, sappy qualities don’t age well.
If it wasn’t for Ben Whishaw (Paddington’s voice in Paddington 2 and Sonny in Suffragette) as Michael Banks and Blunt staying in step with the London nanny originated by Julie Andrews, Mary Poppins Returns would feel flat and lack vitality.
As it is, besides its grating anti-capitalism (the Banks sister played by Emily Mortimer is a labor activist), Mary Poppins Returns drags. Add another distracting appearance by overrated Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady, Mamma Mia!, Florence Foster Jenkins, Hope Springs, Into the Woods), who insists on singing in every other movie, and the film is practically puffy in every way. A lamplighter character played by Moana and Hamilton! composer Lin-Manuel Miranda could have easily been cut or reduced.
But Miranda’s laborer is part of the movie’s best dancing sequence. The lamplighters lead Poppins and the Banks children back from the horrid bank that’s repossessing their home. The street workers’ singing and dancing serves to align and seal the movie’s disparate themes, displayed with Impressionism, vibrant early 60s colors and animation and transitions.
Mary Poppins Returns is as traditional as the 54-year-old original and both are based on the P.L. Travers stories, so faith, poverty and altruism are treated as inherently virtuous. And Poppins’ line that thinking too much is bad for you fits this condescending narrative, so expect the joyful and childlike to be rooted in the 20th century’s lowest, most common slogans.
But there’s good casting of the three Banks children, wisdom in childlike wonder (with cameos by Dick Van Dyke and Angela Lansbury) and the best line — when Mary Poppins deadpans after someone asks if she’s sure a bike trip with the kids is quite safe: “not in the slightest” — make Mary Poppins Returns a welcome diversion for child and adult alike.
Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, Hidden Figures) and Viggo Mortensen (A Most Violent Year, Hidalgo) deliver the year’s best cinematic performances as a duo in the unerringly precise, refined and rational Green Book. This outstanding picture, one of 2018’s best three movies with Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Love, Simon, pierces today’s worst and most damaging illusions.
The first third of Green Book focuses on one man, whose name is Tony (Mortensen). He’s a hardworking bouncer from the Bronx with a shady past, rough exterior and a wife and kids at home.
The year is 1962. As with all of these naturalistic movies, context is crucial.
The context of the early Sixties, before the darkness of the late Sixties looms (with one, brief shining moment of man’s greatness in 1969), permeates the movie in subtle ways. Race, sex and class emerge in various scenes as factors for Tony; who he is and who he chooses to be. As a worker, he struggles to make ends meet. As someone who happens to be white, Tony is also by choice ignorant, prejudiced and partially racist.
Working among cigarette girls, gangsters and mostly people just like him, which is to say people within an extremely insular ethnic subculture (he’s of Italian ancestry), Tony disdains the Negro workers his wife welcomes into their home. He doesn’t question why — and how many Kent cigarettes — he smokes. He doesn’t challenge a Catholic prayer before dinner, let alone the heavy deployment of religious paraphernalia, from crucifix to church calendar, in his home. He doesn’t doubt the constant speaking of a foreign language in his home — and in the presence of his children — either. Tony is a byproduct of his chosen means and ways, prejudices and traditions; he is 100 percent submissive to the status quo.
As a man, however, and this is why Green Book— like Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Love, Simon— is (very much against the predominant feminist trend) a movie about what being a man means, Tony wants to improve. He may choose to dispense with glass specimens because they are tainted in his deformed mind by Negroes. But he also chose as his lifelong mate a woman who corrects his mistakes and scorns her husband’s ignorance.
Enter a man who lives above a grand and enlightened place, as the movie demonstrates, “created by Andrew Carnegie.”
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In this new and worldly home, where muscled Tony’s solid bouncer reputation yields the reason he’s there for a job prospect not to be taken on faith, Tony meets the first man to actively engage and challenge his mind. This man, Don Shirley, portrayed by Ali in another superior performance, is uncompromising in applying his high standards. Don Shirley asks Tony what he does for a living and, when Tony gives the stock answer, ups the ante with: “In what capacity?”
That Tony steals a pen on the way out of the wealthy Negro musician’s exotic, lavish home suggests that the job he’s seeking — bodyguard and driver to the artist and his band as they tour the American South — may itself pose a character challenge. Mortensen is excellent in the role.
But his performance is matched by Ali’s, which is the more restrained performance. What begins to bridge the gap as the pair travel in one car (with bandmates in another) from Pittsburgh to Ohio and Indiana, where, predictably if you’ve been there, outward signs of racism start showing. Things worsen in Kentucky. They get worse down South.
So why go there?
For the same reasons Don Shirley did, which become clear as Green Book turns its touring pages and chugs along, driving deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast. Through it all, the focal point for Tony is that his boss hired him for his ability, not merely for his muscles. This is new for Tony. Also new is that his new two-month boss does so as a trade — not as a favor, an Italian blood tie or an act of intimidation. The mob muscle, whose financial trouble leads him into a pawn shop, comes to expect something of himself, for a change. As he does, he realizes, as Tony puts it: “Geniuses think.”
The smallest scenes and subtleties of Green Book diverge and converge in fresh and surprising turns and twists. Multilingual Mr. Shirley, whom Tony favorably reports to his wife is as good as Liberace, instructs and tutors his newest and roughest employee.
But he performs on his own terms. Insisting on playing piano on the Steinway brand, with a bottle of whiskey in his room every night, Ali’s Don Shirley is cultured, dark, reserved, remote and mysterious. Like any sophisticated black man (arguably, then and now), Don Shirley gains a sense of mission and empowerment from his burgeoning relationship with the ignorant thug from the Bronx. By the time he plays “Happy Talk” from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific, an interestingly, thematically infused song for Green Book, his overdrinking and Tony’s oversmoking overlap for the stuff of a real, complex and combustible friendship.
Co-writer and director Peter Farrelly (Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary) has a knack for comedy. This is apparent. But this is not what powers Green Book and, notably, the comedy sometimes gets in the way of the film’s best moments. What Farrelly does best is provide the script, cast and photography with an ideal canvas. For example, in one scene, field workers gape in wonder at the black man who emerges from a car being serviced by a white manservant.
The astonished Negroes in the field mark a key and swift transition that unfolds into an emotionally powerful disclosure about Don Shirley. It comes after a visit to Stuckey’s, another act of persecution in Georgia and Tony rambling (as Tony tends to do) about Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio. It comes before references to composers Liszt, Brahms and Chopin, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Christmastime in Alabama and the plot pivot makes a salient point within an already sharp point about the invisibility of man’s sexuality; how people tend to see too narrowly what they wish to see.
With a vodka toast over the legacy of Nat King Cole, courage and incontrovertible either-or of moral choices, Green Book culminates in a two-factor authentication of each man’s pride in his work and the virtue of productiveness. With classical piano, jazz, rock, pop and blues, snow storms, guns, fists and a Christmas miracle, Green Book (executive produced by Ali’s Hidden Figures co-star actress Octavia Spencer) closes with a scene which capturesthe benevolence of Christmas, making this the perfect Thanksgiving movie. Like Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Love, Simon, Green Book, co-starring Linda Cardellini (Brokeback Mountain, Avengers: Age of Ultron) as Tony’s wife, renders a stirring depiction of the reward of being the rational man and the loneliness of being ahead of one’s time.
Any movie directed by two of Hollywood’s most able directors, Lasse Hallstrom (The Hundred-Foot Journey, Casanova, An Unfinished Life, Chocolat, A Dog’s Purpose) and Joe Johnston (Captain America, Jumanji, The Wolfman), is bound to be good, right? Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, based on the famous Christmas ballet, isn’t a bad movie at all. Parts of it are wonderfully isolated and restrained. Parts of it are breathtaking and beautiful. Johnston’s arresting visuals and Hallstrom’s gilded storytelling and sense of musical-pictorial grace seamlessly blend at times into a magical movie.
And a movie which begins with a reference to Isaac Newton’s third law of physics promises to be distinctive. With Keira Knightley (Collateral Beauty, a magical Christmas movie in itself) looking like Faye Dunaway and evoking Marilyn Monroe as the Sugar Plum Fairy, The Nutcracker adds an eccentric streak. Indeed, this 90-minute movie tucks in everything from a theme to “trust yourself”, a leading girl (Mackenzie Foy, Interstellar) who’s a budding mechanical engineer, men wearing makeup and Morgan Freeman (Feast of Love) as an eye-patched wise man.
All that and more is stuffed into yet another Disney picture in which the mother has died. Stuffing these parts into the movie somehow puts this otherwise enchanting film into the category of overproduced fantasy (though not nearly as dull as John Carter, The Golden Compass or those godawful Narnia films). The Nutcracker is predictable and strangely chaste. For example, the girl, when she enters this other world at a Christmas party, meets a handsome captain (Jayden Fowora-Knight). Their relationship, which serves as a major plot point, curiously goes flat.
As a story partly depicted in ballet, which comes about in The Nutcracker‘s most striking visual scenes, the storybook style can be both inviting and marvelous. Early scenes of the girl in the new fantasy land depict long, magnificent icicles in a Christmas tree forest where the mystery of a gift from the girl’s late mother deepens and is stolen away. If you know The Nutcracker ballet, and it’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone left who’s never been exposed to this classic score, characters and tale in some way, you know the characters and essential story.
But screenwriter Ashleigh Powell adds an engine, mice attacks, battle scenes, and the grieving father (Matthew Macfadyen). There’s frankly too much of everything and not enough character development for the girl, who climbs rocks in a skirt and never gets the depth to seem anything but distant, detached and really intelligent. The kitchen sink quality creeps in, making the climax and resolution less effective.
“Discipline, order, control” prominently turn out to be the cues for The Nutcracker‘s child-friendly warning against authoritarianism. But the public service announcement-like sensibility in which the STEM-ready girl’s intelligence is sewn into The Nutcracker and the Four Realms undercuts the sense that she’s really present and invested in solving the puzzle. It’s not that Foy makes the girl’s voyage look too easy. The problem is that she looks too often like she doesn’t learn or gain life-changing insights, as Alice purposefully does in Alice in Wonderland or breathless Dorothy does when going home in The Wizard of Oz. There’s music and a mirror but this girl seems to be biding her time.
Still, you get to see Helen Mirren (The Hundred-Foot Journey,White Nights, Collateral Beauty, The Queen, Hitchcock) brandishing a whip amid parts of a beloved ballet remade with the stylized panache of two masterful filmmakers.
Directed by its leading man, Bradley Cooper (American Sniper) and co-starring the singer known as Lady Gaga, billed as Lady Gaga, the new remake of A Star is Born is good. Yet it is also a disappointingly missed opportunity. This is not the best version.
Hitting the main points of William Wellman’s sterling original 1937 film (read a roundup of my reviews of each previous version here), with nods to the 1976 remake, Cooper’s version, adapted by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) makes an impact. Given its essential theme contrasting selflessness with selfishness, which is more relevant than ever before, that’s to be expected.
However, absent certain elements, especially the role of the collective in spreading nihilism and explicitly dramatizing what destroys man at his best, it is also partial.
A Star is Born starts with guitar-playing vocalist Cooper’s banging out hard rock with his band before bingeing on hard liquor while his driver totes him around Los Angeles. The lengthy movie about a man on the way down meeting a woman on the way up recasts the falling star in a clinically correct mental health context. Unless you know how this story ends, look for plot clues.
Spiraling rocker Jackson Maine meets Gaga’s talented, rising singer Ally when she’s done up as Edith Piaf in a bar where men dress and lip synch as women. For her part, Gaga sings with gusto in her signature style, in which she starts singing and veers into belting the tune. As a performer, she conveys both a sense of commitment and a stage presence. As an actress, Lady Gaga is good, not great, as the insecure artist.
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Lady Gaga’s Ally snaps Bradley Cooper’s scruffy, blue-eyed Jack out of his stupor long enough with her theatricality — she descends into the cabaret audience with a rose — for him to notice that she toasts with a martini and two olives. It’s love at first sight.
Or something like it. Whatever else, Jack and Ally share the artist’s curse of chronic self-doubt. Even after grizzled, drunken hunk Jack, who fills every stadium seat with his blend of rip-roarin’ country-rock, charms the club’s drag queens with a down-home song, he apologizes, confiding to Ally that he thinks he “fucked that song up”. This, too, is a clue.
That an insecure star tutors an insecure ingenue and what becomes of both drives A Star is Born. When the movie lingers on their songwriting, it’s hard to resist. Their moment begins in earnest in an empty late-night retail parking lot that’s both indelible to LA and setting for the best scenes in the picture. Here, with no one else in sight, the artists show their humanity through showing themselves. Like in real life, especially in the city of stars.
When Ally answers “me” after Jack asks her who’ll take care of her injury, their character lines are drawn. In the years since the original, it is telling that the tale of a presumably privileged male being crushed while molding the presumably disadvantaged female still captures an audience’s imagination. Gaga grasps the character’s requisite strength through empathy. But Ally’s undeniable empathy starts with herself.
This is emblematic of Gaga’s star persona and best performances. Ally draws upon her own self-care with a father (Andrew Dice Clay) who projects his self-denial; she sees in Jackson Maine what she sees in her father like a mile of bad road ahead. “He’s a drunk,” she observes about Jack early in the picture. The redeemable drunk is central to the story. Ally, too, wants to cash in on the promise of what Jack says he sees in her, so she follows him into the downward spiral.
Featuring Sam Elliott (Grandma) as Jack’s strong-minded older brother, a complicated relationship which is never fully explained, with Anthony Ramos as Ally’s best friend, A Star is Born descends and ascends with a series of pop and rock songs. When Jack and Ally duet on stage that “we’re far from the shallow now”, it underscores that life is made or broken on how one handles hardship.
Cooper inhabits the role, down to the evident pain on his face when he sings his new lover’s lyrics, to the point that his Jackson Maine is the most introverted version of the character. There’s not enough of Jack’s appeal on display, other than flashes of his blue eyes and occasional guitar riffs. His character fades amid mumbling, outbursts and the alcoholic’s constantly oozing skin. He smokes, snorts and gulps his way into oblivion, hiding behind facial hair, rage and music.
Only Ally brings him out. Together, they spontaneously write songs while touring, play with a puppy and get silly, often with looming clues such as Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont in the backdrop. Credit goes to Cooper, Roth and others for the film’s veracity in depicting the scenario that plays out. Toxic behavior, from enabling and codependent action to the tendency toward self-abnegation, let alone the drug use, rings searingly true.
Director Cooper’s first feature film is too long and unrefined; it needs editing. Scenes don’t play out. In fact, they get choppier as the picture goes on. A key plot point never gets developed. Ally’s best friend, amicably played by Ramos, comes and goes without realism.
A Star is Born wraps too quickly and neatly but not without having made that impact. It isn’t the best version, which remains the original, though it isn’t the worst. And while the 1937 picture starring Janet Gaynor and Frederic March is still the best because it depicts with perfection the quality that makes the drunk irresistible, this movie retains enough of the story’s intimacy, depth and poignancy to stir today’s audiences. The seasoned, discriminating movie fan will want more. But for most, while the gushing praise is mostly unmerited, this new version of the classic tragedy will (have to) do.
Incidentally, the show I attended at Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome was unfortunately prefaced by what amounts to an ad for the movie, a creeping and bad trend, which puts the audience in the movie, telling the audience what to think, before the picture begins.
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Gloria Bell is less jubilant than its advertising. With dark, strange and wordless scenes and interludes, the movie’s mostly pictorial. A hairless cat that’s a thousand times more involving than the cat in this weekend’s hit movie, the lifeless Captain Marvel, wanders in and out of the leading character’s life.
But screenwriter Ashleigh Powell adds an engine, mice attacks, battle scenes, and the grieving father (Matthew Macfadyen). There’s frankly too much of everything and not enough character development for the girl, who climbs rocks in a skirt and never gets the depth to seem anything but distant, detached and really intelligent. The kitchen sink quality creeps in, making the climax and resolution less effective.