Clint Eastwood (J. Edgar, Jersey Boys, Gran Torino, Sully, Invictus, The 15:17 to Paris) surprises me again with another excellent motion picture. It’s another of director Clint Eastwood’s movies for Warner Bros., which is owned by AT&T. Extremely true to facts about the Atlanta Summer Olympics bombing of 1996, it’s another movie about a persecuted white male. In fact, this persecuted white male was vilified. He was almost destroyed. He was completely innocent. There was no reason to attack him. He was railroaded by the United States government, specifically the federal police known as the FBI (how’s that for relevance).
His name is Richard Jewell.
By titling his movie, sharply written by Billy Ray (The Hunger Games), with the name of the individual unjustly accused, persecuted and ruined by the U.S. government, Mr. Eastwood carefully and unequivocally draws your focus to the one against the mob. Indeed, this unreleased movie’s already being smeared by the Me, Too movement and attacked by the media. Yet Richard Jewell is unassailable in depicting the awful truth of what America’s press, state and public did in fact to Richard Jewell.
Never mind that Richard Jewell‘s uncannily timely, with its scathing indictment of today’s abuse of government power, media sensationalism, entrenched government officials for the status quo who thrive on favoritism and police power lust and puny-minded parasites that live through damaging decent, productive Americans through unsubstantiated claims and arbitrary assertions. That’s all cake icing, itself a credit to Clint Eastwood‘s unwavering vision and sense of justice, peppered here with references to John Wayne, cowboys and real, not artificial, quid pro quo.
The real surprise of Richard Jewell lies in its deft and subtle scope. The taut, sparse and purposeful movie concentrates on Jewell, portrayed by Paul Walter Hauser (I, Tonya) in the year’s most emotional and best screen acting, a flawed, fat man who lived with his mother (fearless and exemplary Kathy Bates), worked as a policeman and private security guard and became an American hero.
But this is also the story of the American South, the son and mother bond, the bond between men who share values, the virtuous cop, the productive American, the lone, self-confident individualist and the few, kind, lonely and courageous souls that move the world. Richard Jewell ties together all of these and more, thanks to screenwriter Ray, director Eastwood and the outstanding cast, and it does this with power, clarity and a thundering strike against the surveillance state and its Big Government control.
That said, Bates and Hauser are joined by Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards…) as a radical government lawyer, Jon Hamm (TV’s Mad Men) as an FBI agent and, in a career best performance, Olivia Wilde (Cowboys & Aliens) as a skanky newspaper reporter. All five major cast members and others, including and especially Nina Arianda as an immigrant from a country where “when the government claims someone’s guilty, that’s how you know they’re innocent”.
Richard Jewell as played by Hauser packs a wallop but it’s loaded and packed with wisdom and lessons. How men comfort one another with affection and without shame. How a mother fears for her son, especially when he’s perceived as weaker and doesn’t look like most people assume heroes are supposed to look. How men who are sons protect their friends, mothers — and total strangers.
Jewell may be obese, kind and slow, and he talks with a Southern accent, yet he possesses a commanding and disarming eye for detail. Over and over, from his astute ability to listen, watch and take note of what’s essential to his sense of awareness of human physicality with particular decency toward people who are physically challenged in some way, the young “rent-a-cop” refuses to disable his powers of observation. It’s what ultimately mitigates the bomb’s deadly impact on the Summer Olympics in Atlanta’s Centennial Park, where he’s assigned to patrol with a mix of local, state and federal police.
But what gave the Federal Bureau of Investigation its reputation for being the federal bureaucracy of incompetence in the 1990s, due to the agency’s debacles at Ruby Ridge, Waco and its bungled and unsolved inquiry into the explosion of TWA Flight 800 10 days before the Atlanta Olympics bombing, seizes the hero’s life. Hamm’s and Wilde’s characters are, in this way, part of larger and corrupt institutions. That they both fan the corruption with fully conscious and fundamental choices is undeniable. They know exactly what they’re doing.
They know exactly why, too. They are small, petty, foul creatures. This is what makes Richard Jewell rise to the historic (and, I must say, amid this week’s congressional disclosures of evidence of the FBI’s astonishing rot, quite timely) occasion. When the weight of the world goes against the fat security guard and his mother, pushing you to prejudge them as flawed and suspect, it’s the Others, traipsing and gallivanting with fanfare, who are the fraudulent wannabes. It’s Jewell who stands up to scrutiny.
That he does so against impossible fraud, injustice and malice to destroy him is what makes Richard Jewell an elegiac American forewarning. The man who studied maps, logs and Vincent Bugliosi’s outstanding literary case against the butcher of Brentwood, Outrage, is aided by an individualist of law, principle and, as a poster on the wall suggests, loyalty to individual “liberty”. Will their combined fidelity, bravery and integrity be enough to defend against the increasingly powerful state?
Richard Jewell in this sense poetically depicts and pays tribute to heroism while carefully showing you the truth, like Loving, of the cost of constantly fighting the corrupt, insidiously inflating Big Fat Government. It is not easy to watch. It is infuriating. Yet, as Hauser, Rockwell, Ray and Eastwood push you to the brink by making too simple the tale of the one who guarded Americans against an act of terrorism and was persecuted for being honorable, Richard Jewell stirs you to cheer for his stealthily victorious reclamation of self-esteem. This is what makes Richard Jewell one of 2019’s best pictures. This is what makes Richard Jewell, with the woman who raised him, worth knowing as remarkably decent, heroic and larger than life.
Based on a stage play, The End of the Rainbow, Judy starring Renee Zellweger as Judy Garland takes too many falls. This biographical film, directed by Rupert Goold, is relatively innocuous.
Its maudlin theme is that this woman, an astonishing movie star (Judgment at Nuremberg, A Star is Born (1954), Meet Me in St. Louis, The Wizard of Oz, Easter Parade), singer and entertainer whose alcoholism and drug addiction killed her by age 47, was doomed. But Judy is neither dramatized at the proper depth for the caliber of its subject nor does it accomplish a successful depiction of Garland, who married several men including Vincente Minnelli and Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell) and mothered three children, all portrayed here.
Judy’s mixed success is not necessarily Zellweger’s fault. She’s a fine actress with a good record. But she’s either been misdirected, misguided by the script or ventured out of her league playing Garland, whom Zellweger portrays in fragments. Just when you’re willing to go along with the depiction, and there is both resemblance and success in her performance, an overly mannered tic or expression betrays the actress and you’re out of the movie. Judy is telescoped in flashbacks and her final London stage engagement, so end-stage career acts are portrayed. Zellweger (Chicago), singing in her own voice, hasn’t got the pipes.
Domineering movie studio types, a tracheotomy, attempt at suicide, custody battle with Luft over the two kids, poverty, a crush on Mickey Rooney and the chronic need stemming from the child star’s damaged ego to gain intimacy with an audience; all of these, much of it happening off screen, drive Garland’s addiction to drugs and booze. A party at daughter Liza’s, who’d go on to face similar struggles, leads to another marriage to another man that needs and doesn’t satisfy Judy. Addiction’s vicious spiral gets its due.
Judy doesn’t give Garland her due. It’s possible to make a late life movie about her without depicting her in her finest vocal form. Yet Judy gets bogged down in too many disparate segments without any single theme. Her London engagement, for example, becomes the focal point for her swan song, Judy suggests, leading to a climax in which she gains some deeper form of audience bond. This would’ve been more effective, however, with better seeding through exposition.
Oddly, Zellweger’s created more of a smaller-scale caricature of the maudlin caricature that’s been the mainstay of the gay male adoration than a convincing portrayal of a real-life falling star. There are finer moments, especially with a gay couple in an arc that nicely cashes in on the best of Judy‘s subplots and themes. Jessie Buckley (the fireman’s wife in Chernobyl) has a lovely turn as Judy’s main contact during the London show. An actor named Finn Witrock (La La Land, TV’s The Normal Heart) plays one of the men who becomes one of the husbands. Michael Gambon is fine, too, and Judy looks and sounds terrific.
Judy Garland deserves something either deeper or lighter than Judy. This is because something about her stardom and demise has been lost, very, seriously lost and fouled up, since she self-destructed. A scene in which her doctor, giving her an injection as he admits his childhood admiration for her portrayal of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, gets at what this movie needs and lacks.
After skimming the surfaces of her sordid past, which is all Judy ultimately does, he urges her toward proper self-care, an idea rooted in egoism which is only, very rarely properly practiced let alone properly understood. Liza Minnelli, whose thoughts on her mother are very serious, deep and profound, lives and talks as though she gets what egoism means. So does Elton John. Both are addicts and survivors, for the moment, and, like Judy Garland and others such as Whitney, Elvis and Amy Winehouse, they’re stars whose ability radiates.
Judy, to paraphrase the poem that, if realized, gets and keeps you clean and sober, hasn’t the wisdom to show the difference.
The primary problem with the otherwise innocuous, enjoyable star vehicle The Good Liar co-starring Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren is not its main plot twist, which is abrupt and abrasive. The basic flaw in this slick thriller, based on a novel by Nicholas Searle, is that the twist entails a bait and switch. This is not merely in manner and tone. I’ll give a hint as to why the bait and switch breaches reality without spoiling the switch or twist.
A light, jaunty online dating interplay between woman and man (Mirren and McKellen) opens the movie. The exchange occurs to Carter Burwell’s chipper music. The cute and clever messages during opening titles match sounds of typewriter keys as the leads drink, smoke and lie to one another about their habits, facts and lives.
So, The Good Liar opens as a romantic comedy. You think you’re in for a treat by two arch, accomplished actors who are at their best in dry, British roles. Of course, McKellen’s movie career gained steam when he starred in director Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters. Mirren often makes an impression whether as the queen of England, Jon Voight’s ex-wife or Ayn Rand, though her best performances remain in supporting roles, such as the actress in Collateral Beautyor the Communist in her husband Taylor Hackford’s thrilling White Nights.
The fun powers the first half of The Good Liar, which is written by Jeffrey Hatcher, who wrote screenplays for McKellen as Mr. Holmes, which is awful, and for director Lasse Hallstrom’s Casanova, which is delightful. That movie retained its lightness while building suspense and weaving a sense of ominous threat without killing the joy.
The Good Liar does not.
Both characters, McKellen’s white collar con man and Mirren’s suburban London grandmother, are obviously hiding something. Their facial expressions, clever interplay and deliberate movements build audience interest with tantalizing anticipation; you know that lives will change and plot points will pivot and, with these two playing each other, it’s enjoyable. As soon as there’s mention of a Nazi, followed by another mention of Spandau in Germany, and certain, singularly gruesome acts, it’s clear that something more sinister is coming.
In cat and mouse contests in Mirren’s kitchen, McKellen’s boardroom and on walks outside London’s shops and boutiques, webs of deception spin, tremble and take form, catching a number of smaller players, including partners in crime, supposed victims and a mysterious driver in Mirren’s suburban enclave. Things turn sharply amid the interplay, and there’s plenty of play with knowing, witty banter, as the humor reaches a high point with talk of a “windfall”.
Fun gets whisked away as the twist is more like a chokehold. I’d describe the turn of events as more serious than a heart attack but it’s more severe, not merely serious, than that. Condon tends to take serious matters too wispily. Then, Condon takes those minimized matters and he portrays them much too densely and heavily, whether depicting sex research (Kinsey) or the rise of a girl group (Dreamgirls).
But never more than he does here. This dooms The Good Liar, which, for all the pictures and chatter about book burning, Berlin and Nazis, doesn’t bother with the matter of Jews. So goes The Good Liar in a markedly different direction.
This might’ve made for a successful divergence, but not in a movie that for over an hour teases the audience with banter, winks and lightness, inculcating a false sense of what’s going on. Maybe this is The Good Liar‘s point, that the big lie’s a game movies can play, too, though there’s no fun in being played for a chump especially when it’s delivered with preachy lessons taken from political propaganda.
Good movies about achieving a kind of triumphal liberation through outwitting deception, such as Sleuth, Deathtrap, even lighter fare such as Working Girl, Tootsie and Housesitter, ultimately deal in truth. Not The Good Liar, which piles on excessive points to distort reality.
Is there good in its lie? The Good Liar‘s makers apparently think so. However, a discerning audience will be neither entertained nor deceived.
Joyfulness is all but gone from Pixar’s Toy Story series. The third sequel to the original 1995 Toy Story with voices of Tim Allen and Tom Hanks minimizes humans this time, trivializing previous themes and ditching, downsizing or upsizing characters to suit politically correct dogma.
I wanted to like Toy Story 4. I enjoyed the 1995 movie and its sequel. I also enjoyed 2010’s animated summer action comedy, Toy Story 3. This is not a bad movie. It contains many elements of the previous pictures’ success, from clever, concise lines to brisk comedy, action and integration. Plot lines make sense, move along and entertain.
For example, toy talking cowboy Woody (Hanks) braves venturing into nature again for the sake of his owner, the child Bonnie. This leads to interesting, humorous and realistic situations in which he’s able to help Bonnie be her best on her first day of kindergarten. The girl gets to make her own new toy out of trash thanks to Woody, leading to a new character, Forky, perfectly voiced by Tony Hale. Cute and irreverent subplots about throwing yourself away ensue.
Then comes the repurposing of a recurring character named Bo Peep, nicely voiced by Annie Potts. Predictably, amid Hollywood’s Me, Too directive(s), the set-piece toy and her sheep, which accompany a piece of furniture intended for a child’s room, transform into superheroes. Toy Story 4 turns the piece of porcelain into a butt-kicking action figurine worthy of the same studio’s Captain Marvel. Only she’s more efficient. By the third time she saves Woody, you may be falling asleep from boredom. The newly butch Bo Peep gussies the franchise with feminism while new toys voiced by Jordan Peele (Get Out) and Keanu Reeves (Speed) serve as other tokens.
Old toys are relegated to cameos. All of this might be fine if Toy Story 4 had a better point. But its theme, which is hard to explore without disclosing key details, runs counter to the series premise. Suffice it to say that commercialism, Toy Story‘s best aspect, is purged. Woody doesn’t get “woke” exactly, so much as toys qua toys get neutered.
Toy Story 4 is as cute and jaunty as the previous movies. At an hour and forty minutes, it’s mercifully shorter than most Pixar fare (Up, Inside/Out, Ratatouille). But it’s driven by messaging, not by imagination. By jettisoning its main cast of characters and their connection to the individual child, the fourth Toy Story loses its capacity to indulge in play.
Purging ‘the devil’ inside is the catalyst in the musical Rocketman. Paramount’s movie about rock star Elton John’s life in songs unfolds in an exaggerated, though not preposterous, recreation of reality complete with dancing, singing and stylized, cinematic theatricality. It’s as bedazzled as you’d have reason to expect it to be.
Rocketman is more intimate than you think, however. More so if you know, contemplate and mine Elton John’s songs and the facts about his life. If not, you may still enjoy the movie, but only if you take it on its terms and none other. Rocketman, like La La Land, may be an acquired taste; this picture (like that other picture, which is 2016’s best picture) is not an overly sentimental or polished depiction of what it means to strive to express oneself as an LA artist.
Like the singer and songwriter’s singular tributes to Marilyn, Diana and his namesake, John Lennon, each destroyed in their prime, Elton John’s musical about his life shows what it means to grind, hurt and “still feel the pain of the scars that won’t heal”, to borrow a line from one of his hit songs. Rocketman dramatizes the brittle, wretched cost of infamy, stardom and fame. It is unyielding in this sense. It is also uncanny.
Screenwriter Lee Hall (War Horse, Billy Elliot, Victoria & Abdul) and director Dexter Fletcher, with Elton John’s apparent endorsement, move through the stages and keys of his life, if not entirely the catalogue of his music (how could they?) with tact, deft and ruthless editing, lighting and stagecraft. The result is sensational. So is Taron Egerton in the lead.
Rocketman takes off as a musical — strictly framed in the subject’s songs — about the whole man. Unlike other movies about real people, this one revolves around more than a streak of egoism.
“I want to get better,” Elton John plainly says at an early point in the film. The rest plays out from there, from his curiosity about his father’s recording of Count Basie and navigating toxic parents to his inner rage — “The Bitch is Back” — and onward. Whether his first kiss from one who sees in him his true self or a colleague’s advice to kill the self you seek to transform so you can become who you want to be, Elton’s ego is central.
Rocketman is explicitly and unabashedly sexual, erotic and meaningful. There’s no catering to Others as in last year’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which delivered songs at the expense of story. This is the tale of a self-made man and, accordingly, this means showing man as a man and this means sex, love and being gay. This is essential to why Elton John shaped his own life.
A duet of “Streets of Laredo” gives that song its due for the first time since Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) borrowed pathos and the title’s phrase; its carefully framed scene gently lays the foundation for the most loving one in Elton John’s life: Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell in a warm, equally perfect performance). But the magic, memory and wonder of Rocketman will depend on your experience of these songs in your life, if any. If you’ve never heard them, you are in for a fabulous treat.
From the spine-chilling discovery and delivery of “Your Song” to deep and abiding love and admiration in Bernie’s eyes, and back around to the ache of a gay man’s (really, any one’s) unrequited love for the unattainable, Fletcher and Hall integrate egoism into Elton’s pain points. Then, they wrap the picture neatly, almost prayerfully, in what matters about the one who was once a pudgy, unloved boy named Reg; that, like Scarlett in Gone With the Wind, the child’s on the outside looking into what’s eluding his life.
Liberation, i.e., tagging, owning and loving himself, through the hard work of achieving intimacy, this is the legacy of Elton John’s music and life, caught with care and attention to detail here. Pardon the bad wigs. Forget that no one can fully recreate Elton John in his signature (nor breathtakingly handsome Bernie Taupin). Everything works to serve the story, not the other way around. This is an awesome achievement. Even Bryce Dallas Howard as the mother shines.
Rocketman, from choreography, photography and every element of design to poignantly, ingeniously conceived plot points such as “Crocodile Rock”, “Honky Cat” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, fulfills its theme that selfishness is virtuous. When someone accuses Elton of being selfish in a climactic scene of dramatized introspection, his response cleverly embeds a rejection of both underlying morality and rendered judgment.
“Real love’s hard to come by, so you find a way to cope without it,” Elton says about drugs and suicidal tendencies coiled in keeping up appearances and faking reality, which nearly everyone pushes him to do.
While Rocketman doesn’t sugarcoat these details, it also isn’t stingy in depicting what it means to save the life which is your own. In lavish and elaborate production numbers, Rocketman shows what Elton John’s done to struggle, melt down, frolic and rise, float and align with his surroundings as he’s propelled to new heights. It revels in the sense of alienation expressed in the song which is its title’s springboard, “Rocket Man”.
Rocketman spins, curves and adorns the extremely difficult, emotional and nuanced art of living. Through a selection of the artist’s songs of life, the immensely watchable and magnetic Rocketman lights up the arc of Elton John’s life, from learning what’s poisonous to embracing himself. You’ll feel elevated, crushed and empowered. You’ll know what it feels like for the man who creates and happens to be gay and trapped by anger, drugs and alcohol for repressing himself. Clarity is Rocketman‘s aftereffect. And it radiates pure Elton John.
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The real surprise of Richard Jewell lies in its deft and subtle scope. The taut, sparse and purposeful movie concentrates on Jewell, portrayed by Paul Walter Hauser (I, Tonya) in the year’s most emotional and best screen acting, a flawed, fat man who lived with his mother (fearless and exemplary Kathy Bates), worked as a policeman and private security guard and became an American hero.
A light, jaunty online dating interplay between woman and man (Mirren and McKellen) opens the movie. The exchange occurs to Carter Burwell’s chipper music. The cute and clever messages during opening titles match sounds of typewriter keys as the leads drink, smoke and lie to one another about their habits, facts and lives.
Rocketman is more intimate than you think, however. More so if you know, contemplate and mine Elton John’s songs and the facts about his life. If not, you may still enjoy the movie, but only if you take it on its terms and none other. Rocketman, like