By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
Note: Nosh 119 will appear on Friday, Aug. 10.
APPETIZER: Reviews of The
Equalizer 2 and Leave No Trace
The
Equalizer 2
So you are Denzel Washington, now 63, the most
successful black star since Sidney Poitier. You have two Oscars (Glory, Training Day). After recent top-deck
acting (in Fences and Roman J. Israel Esq.), you decide to serve
your bank account and the male side of your fan base by heading back to the
gristle griddle for The Equalizer 2.
After all, The Equalizer (2014)
pulled in $200 million. It, too, was directed by Antoine Fuqua, who led you to that
top actor Oscar for your rogue cop in 2001’s Training Day.
As deadly agent Robert McCall, widely believed to be
dead, you now have a fine new apartment in Boston (not fancy but manly; great
safe room behind the book wall). Your reading program has advanced from
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
(in one volume, but not a graphic novel). Going beyond Eq I’s Russian thugs, you have a wider buffet of kill-or-maim meat:
Turkish devils, a past colleague gone rotten, preppy sex creeps, and a trashy gang
in your new nabe. You miss your late wife, and endure bad news about your best
female friend (Melissa Leo). True, your senior bod, now jowly beyond the facial
level, must demolish buff, brutal nasties half your age, and somehow your lethal
slashings with a small blade make you Satan’s sushi chef. But here is the
bulwark of truth: you are Denzel Washington.
His solemn gravity, his laser gaze, his sunrise smile,
his drill-gun voice, his wise eyes that support every emotion, his looming, big-guy
sensitivity – what does age matter? Stalking and killing with supreme
confidence, Denzel cat-pounces beyond Liam Neeson’s pulpy revenge thrillers.
Old Charlie Bronson is now a cement sack in the storage shed. McCall does have a slightly uneasy Robin Hood aspect.
He helps nice neighbors, high-fives white kids, befriends a Holocaust survivor (Orson
Bean, who turned 90 last Sunday) and mentors a boyish tagger who wants to be an
artist. Fuqua milks every tension, gives every cruncher a sado sting, and really
uses that safe room. His money in the bank is there on screen: Denzel.
Almost all the movie’s merit is in him, nearly all the
shortfall is in the script. Washington turns his lines about a trigger pull
(“Five pounds of pressure, that’s all it takes – five pounds of pressure!”)
into a macho sonata. Meanwhile, scum thugs are left with belchers like “Fuck
you, McCall! Fuck you!” With Denzel in
charge, our pesty doubts about plausibility wither. The climax occurs in a big
beach storm, and any satirical Sharknado thoughts we have are blown
away by hurricane Denzel. Faced by his aura and expertise, vile villains vie (and die) as voluntary victims.
Leave No
Trace
Will (Ben Foster) lives rough and “free” with his
child Tom (a girl: actress Thomasin McKenzie) in densely wooded Forest Park
above Portland, Oregon (main locations were further out, in Eagle Creek and
Estacada). Will has military skills and reflexes, and gives Tom “home”
schooling well beyond gleaning berries and mushrooms. They sometimes enter the bright,
noisy city for supplies, books, etc. Will, a widower and likely war veteran, is
almost a silent commando on a mission to evade society. The most haunted forest
is his mind.
Leave No
Trace director Debra Granik and
writing partner Anne Rosellini, previously creators of the austere Winter’s Bone, again use nature to nurture
and test family love among the hard-living (that Ozarks movie put Jennifer
Lawrence on the map). At 13 Tom is sensing that feral survival with a loner dad
is no future for a smart, budding beauty. The movie gives its quickening tension
an Oregonian, almost Canadian edge. Forest lawmen are tough but decent. Welfare
officials are polite. “Oxi” addiction is mentioned, but wilderness louts and
sexual predators never appear. A big plot development is a sprained foot.
With Foster bunkered in social alienation (war
damage?), the story mainly relies on the translucent feelings of McKenzie, a
fresh, intuitively searching talent. There are lovely scenes of the girl enchanted
by rabbits and bees, and being helped by a maternal woman at a nesters encampment
(Dale Dickey, her worn face a Walker Evans portrait, echoes Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath). This crafted film
has simple speech. Asked “Where’s your home?,” Tom thinks hard and answers,
“Dad.” The ending has a softly wrenching but inevitable rightness. Leave No Trace is like a prayer made of moss.
SALAD: A List
Denzel Washington’s 12 Best Roles
In my
exalted opinion, in order of their arrival:
Steve
Biko in Cry Freedom, 1987; Xavier
Quinn in The Mighty Quinn, 1989; Pvt.
Trip in Glory, 1989; Rubin Carter in The Hurricane, 1989; Demetrius Williams
in Mississippi Masala, 1991; Malcolm
in Malcolm X, 1992; Easy Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress, 1995; Jake
Shuttlesworth in He Got Game, 1998;
Alonzo in Training Day, 2001; Melvin
Tolson in The Great Debaters, 2007;
Eli in The Book of Eli, 2010, and
Troy Maxson in Fences, 2016.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Though
Orson Welles mostly studied John Ford, the film director “who pleases me most
of all is D.W. Griffith … I think he is the best director in the history of the
cinema.” But in a brief meeting after Welles arrived in Hollywood at 24, the
old master was remote and taciturn. “There was no place for Griffith in the
film industry by 1940,’ Welles said years later. ‘He was an exile in his own
town, a prophet without honor, a craftsman without tools, an artist without
work. No wonder he hated me.” Without becoming bitter, Welles would share some
of Griffith’s fate. (Quotations from Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
The
delicious, confectionary musical Funny
Face (1957) ends with Fred Astaire serenading Audrey Hepburn’s with “the
ineffable tenderness of Gershwin’s ’Swonderful.’ Not the pep version by Gene
Kelly and Georges Guétary in An American
in Paris, nor Dub Taylor’s funny sing-along to Doris Day’s radio version in
Crime Wave. In eight swooning turns
the lovers dance across turf to a raft, then float downstream to some exquisite
forever – Monet’s garden at Giverny?” (From the Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Easy
Rawlins (Denzel Washington) displays his dapper side, to face the noir powers
of Devil in a Blue Dress (TriStar
Pictures, 1995; director Carl Franklin, cinematographer Tak Fujimoto).
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