Nosh 183: 'The Gentlemen', 'A Hidden Life' & More

David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

Note: Nosh 184 will arrive Friday, Feb. 14.

APPETIZER (Reviews of The Gentlemen, A Hidden Life)

The Gentlemen

Viewing The Gentlemen is like riding a zip line over a burning pit of scripts at a Hollywood luau. This British show has a blithe, greedy eye cocked to what American studios like. Will American audiences? Maybe it’s too verbal and Brit-hip for U.S. success, though it could flourish in video with subtitles and munchy extras. The core template is vintage Tarantino, as first U.K.-mutated by Trainspotting, Sexy Beast, etc. Director Guy Ritchie, a former Mr. Madonna, cropped this turf before with 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. His subsequent career is an epidemic of derivations: Sherlock Holmes, Aladdin, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Madonna’s beach toy Swept Away. Who needs popcorn in a box when you have it on screen?

The Gentlemen, a silly-putty crime spree both witty and confounding, has gangs of guys. Leading the smartest, and preening his status (as in his weird commercials for Lincoln cars), is Matthew McConaughey. His Yank expat Mickey has cornered the UK black market in marijuana, using hidden, high-tech farms on posh estates. He’s ripe to retire, for a grand price. But England’s other super-rich American, Matthew (Jeremy Strong) wants to take over by cheating. A rich, vulgar publisher (Eddie Marsan) wants his cut. A crew of very stereotyped Asian hoods covets control. And the cool guy called Coach (Colin Farrell), a sort of martial arts Father Flanagan for street toughs, leaps into the action. The suavest player is Mickey’s henchman Ray (Charlie Hunnam). He trades razored lines with Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a hustler who narrates the jigsaw story as a hip franchise pitch (Grant’s Cockney spiels are like a goof on Michael Caine).

As for women, there is heavy use of the “c” word (I don’t mean caramel), including from Michelle Dockery as McConaughy’s  tough, loyal wife. Downton Abbey fans may choke when she (forever the beloved Mary Crawley) is almost raped, and when she fires off the line “There’s fuckery afoot.” McConaughey purrs “I like middle age” and is clearly having fun, though below the level of his heyday triple (The Lincoln Lawyer, Mud, Dallas Buyers Club). This is not a dumb slob party, nor is it so archly clever and brain-gamey as Ritchie seems to believe. When he has Grant evoke “anamorphic cinema” as a legendary heritage, has The Gentlemen earned any right to that evocation? It’s a zingy, fairly entertaining splurge of talent, but the tone is manic, and the projectile vomiting scene shoves us further away from the impeccable English wit of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

A Hidden Life

It opens with famous shots from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, showing Hitler entering Nuremberg for the 1934 Party rally. It should probably open with newsreels of him entering Vienna in 1938, the Austrian-born Führer hailed by joyful crowds whom he, by invasion, has “welcomed home to the Reich.” Austrian farmer Franz Jäggerstätter was present on neither occasion. When inducted in 1943 the devout Catholic refused to take the required military oath to the Führer. In A Hidden Life almost every scene lies close under Hitler’s shadow.  Jäggerstätter’s beautiful Alpine village, St. Radegund, is 45 miles from Hitler’s now-gone mountain retreat above Berchtesgaden. When Franz was taken to Berlin, imprisoned, “tried” and killed, his final months were lived mere miles from Hitler’s huge chancellery.

Geography is crucial because the land, the German Heimat (homeland, roots, tribal memory) saturates Terrence Malick’s  nature-smitten, solemnly paced homage. Glorious crags wreathed in streaming clouds, waterfalls, mills, farmed valleys make the movie seem a Breughel canvas tipping into Bosch (Breughel painted a few Bosch nightmares). Probably few viewers know that the movie also echoes the heroic mountain films of young Riefenstahl, visions that made Hitler choose her for Triumph. In essence, A Hidden Life is a tragic triumph of the will to martyrdom, very sincerely done (sincerity is not a supreme movie virtue – Triumph is so sincerely Nazi, though Riefenstahl was not a Party member).

Even in prison hell, Malick keeps cutting to the exalted peaks and luscious farm, as if we needed extra reminders of what Franz is losing. The lacing of German (public) and English (intimate) speech is artful, but Malick is more a pictorialist than a dramatist. Over three hours he leaves out much. He barely touches on the WWI combat death of Franz’s father as a source of his pacifism. He shows Franz’s chapel-like bedroom but elicits few Catholic thoughts from him. No mention of Franz’s wild youth, when he sired a child “out of wedlock” (having himself been born in that state, to a chambermaid). The villagers are tranced by Hitler, Franz by the land, and the scared, timid Church by its zeal to keep its elegant rococo churches. But there is much time for Franz’s daughters at play, and for farm animals enduring with an innocence almost pious.

Most of the farm labor falls to devoted wife Fani (engrossing Valerie Pachner), who is driven to clawing the earth in agony. To her suggestion that they take refuge in the deep woods, Franz is mute. As Franz, August Diel is appealing and imposing yet says very little. He seems cross-nailed, as an icon of stricken conscience. We humanly regret Franz’s sad fate, yet what movie is best seen from our knees? For cinephiles the bonus is a small, moving performance by the late Bruno Ganz, as a military judge who feels compassion for Franz but knows that the regime demands death (death was its livelihood). In 2007 Jäggerstätter was beatified as a martyr saint by Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Joseph Ratzinger, forced at 14 into the Hitler Youth.

SALAD (A List)

Strong Movies of Anti-Nazi Resistance

With main star, director, year:

The Mortal Storm (Frank Morgan, Frank Borzage 1940), Casablanca (Humphrey Bogart, Michael Curtiz 1942), Hangmen Also Die! (Brian Donlevy, Fritz Lang 1943), Rome Open City (Anna Magnani, Roberto Rossellini 1945), Decision Before Dawn (Oskar Werner, Anatole Litvak 1951), Kanal (Teresa Izewska, Andrzej Wajda 1957), The Counterfeit Traitor (William Holden, George Seaton 1962), The Train (Burt Lancaster, John Frankenheimer 1963), Army of Shadows (Lino Ventura, J-P Melville 1969), The Sorrow and the Pity (Pierre Mendes-France, Marcel Ophuls 1970). Come and See (Alexei Kravchenko, Elem Klimov 1985), The Pianist (Adrien Brody, Roman Polanski 2002), Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Julia Jentsch, Marc Rothermund 2005), In Darkness (Robert Wiekiewicz, Agniezka Holland 2011).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

A lot of World War II propaganda was feeble, not just on the Axis side. Orson Welles regretted lending his Wonder Show stage magic to 1944’s Follow the Boys: “It was a Charlie Feldman effort to make money, and he made a lot (by) showing how brave all the Hollywood actors were to entertain the boys. Disgusting morally. But I’d spent so much on the Wonder Show that the chance to make 50 grand, I couldn’t say no, and also had to give Marlene a chance to make her money. We needed it, but we were ashamed to be in the picture.” (Welles to Peter Bogdanovich in This is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The superb casting and acting in Quentin Tarantino’s films is no mystery, given that the director “called his films ‘completely performance driven’ and in 2012 told Charles McGrath ‘I write good characters for actors to play. I cast actors with integrity, as opposing to trying to just match whoever’s hot with something going on.’ Larissa McFarquhar noticed ‘a point of honor with Tarantino, that he always sits as close to the actors as possible and watches directly, so they can feel the force of his attention.” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

Quentin Tarantino talks to Julia Butters, 10, outstanding in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (Columbia Pictures 2019; director Quentin Tarantino, d.p. Robert Richardson).

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Nosh 182: 'Just Mercy,' Great "Caged" Performances & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Review of Just Mercy)                   

Just Mercy

It doesn’t pay for critics to be jaded, and belittle a movie because it fits a worn, familiar category. That’s a typology trap, a quicksand of presumptive judgment. Still, I admit to wariness before seeing Just Mercy. The title is a tad pleading, with hints of homily. And this is another prison and courtroom drama drawn from facts, about an innocent, condemned man who desperately needs a good lawyer (and gets one). Thus, says jaded reflex: another petri dish for earnest close-ups and speeches, with a niche life on cable television. Well, watch and learn. Also: think and feel.

Just Mercy hits generic marks without sinking into them, because director and main writer Destin Daniel Cretton tells the story with astute focal clarity and patient regard for making lived facts live again. When he puts emotional hooks into you, you don’t feel chumped (they’re clean hooks). There is no hint of budget waste, the Alabama settings shot by Brett Pawlak don’t rely on corn, grits or gravy, and the acting is terrific. Jamie Foxx is Walter “Johnnie D.” McMillian, a middle-aged harvester of pulp wood in the pines outside Monroeville. He had a loving wife and nine kids but was known to have shown interest in a white woman. So in 1987 the local law (virtual shorthand for the White Citizens Council of segregation fame) hustled Walter to the state’s Death Row. This was after cops freaked a forlorn, pathetic con into “confessing” that Walter had killed a white teen girl. No confirming  evidence (indeed the reverse), just righteous Caucasian justice. Local whites felt pretty safe from rebuke. Monroeville, hometown of Harper Lee, takes pride in its To Kill a Mockingbird museum, an image shrine and cordon sanitaire for the town’s racial reputation.

Michael B. Jordan is no Gregory Peck as Bryan Stevenson, the black pro-bono lawyer who went down South, saved Walter from imminent electrocution, opened buried evidence, confronted his framers, even got Walter onto 60 Minutes before his cruelly delayed release. Peck’s Atticus  Finch is a fictional ideal, a Southern knight of rectitude. In his more plodding, dutiful way, Jordan reveals Stevenson as a genuine hero. His tense decency and expressive eyes align with Foxx’s haunted, stellar intensity, in a shared purpose that is totally convincing. The excellent cast has Brie Larson as Stevenson’s associate, Karan Kendrick as Walter’s wife, and Rob Morgan as a PTSD war vet who can’t catch a break.

The chaw-down bonus is veteran Tim Blake Nelson. As Myers, the po-boy cracker who framed Walter, Nelson inherits the lowlife mantle of feral racist Bob Ewell (James Anderson) in Mockingbird. But, for all his snarls (“Yew gonna buy me a Coke, first?”) and face deformed by a childhood fire, Nelson’s Myers is a full person, seen with the alert compassion that gives the movie a special grace. In a few small stretches Just Mercy can feel like reading a thick legal brief in a sweaty room. But everyone in the story is entirely alive, and the hum of its truth resonates without hard-squeezing us like Mississippi Burning or A Time to Kill.

Despite my initial resistance, I had to see the film. I’ve admired Destin Cretton since he made the wonderful San Diego short about a bold, boyish dreamer, Drakmar: A Vassal’s Journey. Cretton advanced to the bravura Short Term 12, then its feature-length version, and then lifted Brie Larson and Woody Harrelson with The Glass Castle. Here is more confirmation that his care for acting, atmosphere and complex motivation is instinctively right. Rarely has a true story better earned its ending info scrolls, or gotten so much from a Death Row “last mile,” or topped its closing court scene with the pretty judge chirping like a Dixie belle, “Well, y’all made my job easier today.” Not an easy movie – yet easy to admire.

SALAD (A List)

17 Ace Performances of the Incarcerated

Paul Muni as James Allen in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), Burt Lancaster as Joe Collins in Brute Force (1947), Richard Conte as Frank Wiecek in Call Northside 777 (1948), William Holden as J.J. Sefton in Stalag 17 (1953), Francois Leterrier as Fontaine in A Man Escaped (1956), Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! (1958), Burt Lancaster as Robert Stroud in Bird Man of Alcatraz (1962), Sean Connery as Joe Roberts in The Hill (1965), Paul Newman as Luke Jackson in Cool Hand Luke (1967), Tom Courtenay as Ivan in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1970), Yves Montand as Gérard in The Confession (1970), Robert Redford as Henry Brubaker in Brubaker (1980), Daniel Day-Lewis as Gerry Conlon in In the Name of the Father (1993), Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, also Morgan Freeman as Red Redding and James Whitmore as Brooks Hatlen in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and Sean Penn as Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking (1995).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Kane was an intensive, happy shoot, with only a few mishaps. When rehearsing the scene of Kane rushing down a stairwell after Boss Gettys, shouting “I’m gonna send you to Sing Sing!,” Orson “fell heavily on his left ankle, chipping the bone. The crew called Welles’s chauffeur Miss Trosper. She took him to the hospital in a limousine. The day began to descend to drunken highjinks when Welles started to self-medicate, drinking brandy from a flask. He was ‘not blind drunk,’ Trosper reported, ‘just sort of cute drunk.’ At the hospital, still in costume as middle-aged Kane, his finely crafted makeup began peeling off. When Trosper went to sign paperwork, Orson wheeled away on a rolling binge. ‘With a whoop,’ she recalled, ‘he went lickety-split down the hallway in his wheelchair, scaring the hell out of people.” (With no help from brandy, the stairwell scene is very effective. Quote from Harlan Lebo’s book Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As part of his inspired overhaul of Raymond Chandler’s dated, uneven novel The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman “put Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) into a bachelor pad atop L.A.’s High Tower Drive, a pipe-stem street in a skinny Hollywood canyon. Designed by Carl Kay, the Deco-stucco complex is totally noir, with a separate elevator tower rising to decked flats. A European ancestor is found in Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves: ‘And the whole is dominated by a tall slender tower that blossoms out at the top, after the matter of Italian towers, into overhanging machicolations.”  (From the Elliott Gould/Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) will fetch brownie mix for topless hippie neighbors on High Tower Drive, but otherwise pays them little mind in The Long Goodbye (United Artists 1973; director Robert Altman, d.p. Vilmos Zsigmond). 

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Nosh 181: '1917' & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Review of 1917)                    

1917

Back when I ushered at the Clark, Bruce Trinz’s great revival theater in downtown Chicago, I noticed a rather fragile old man who often came for the daily double-bills. He preferred comedies and Westerns, yet I once asked if he had seen Kubrick’s stunning World War I movie Paths of Glory. “Just one time,” he said in a frail, papery voice. “It was rather hard for me.” Alfred confided having fought as a Canadian “Tommy” in the trenches, hospitalized after a gas attack. And who was the most famous gas victim (sadly, not fatal) of those trenches? Adolf Hitler, whose payback gift was an even more awful war.

Sam Mendes’s grim and sometimes grisly 1917, elaborated from stories told him by his grandfather, a WWI veteran, tells of two British lance corporals sent as messengers across mostly depopulated but very dangerous ground in April 1917 (the war’s most famous messenger was … Corporal Adolf Hitler). The only two actors with proven star power are at the start (Colin Firth as the puffy general who sends the message) and finish (Benedict Cumberbatch as the haggard colonel who receives it). The one-page message is to two British battalions (1,600 men), set to advance into a salient (wedge in the front line) evacuated by retreating Germans. They don’t know it’s a trap, a deadly new battle line of trenches, guns and grisly barbed wire. As the “Huns” cut the buried phone lines,  personal delivery, mostly by foot, is ordered. A puzzler: since Firth got his new intel from photo “aerials” shot by biplanes (we see some, flying in clear skies), why not parachute the message canister from a plane to Cumberbatch? (Easy answer: no movie.)

Let’s not get hung up on the barbed wire of pesky details, for Mendes (American Beauty, Skyfall, the odd Gulf War movie Jarhead) has a vision to stage, lavishly. One promo pitch is that 1917 was shot in a continuous “real time” take, but I don’t believe it. There are obvious blackout moments and time shifts for cuts, and today’s digital editing has a deft way of fusing continuity. The great unbroken tale remains Alexander Sokorov’s Russian Ark (2002), his dream-poetic streaming of Russian history through St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace/Hermitage Museum.

1917 is a stream of set pieces, and its flowing tensions have an almost seamless effect. As messengers Blake and Schofield, Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay have the vulnerable, patriotic bravery of many privates and junior officers in past combat films, though neither has Lew Ayres’s stunning breakthrough in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Here is a heartfelt saga of courage, endurance and loss. 1917 has been a hit, and if it brings this terrible war that changed history to young viewers who don’t know Ayres from Aerosmith, and for whom the Somme and Ypres and the Argonne are more distant than the space battles of Star Wars, then more power to it.

It’s a moving movie, but a great movie? No. The performances are adroit sketches, never rivaling the best in WWI films (see list below). Scenes often feel like storyboards trundled into place by a team of art directors. Bleached skies create a slightly blue-screen effect (and the one aerial dogfight looks like CGI). But Roger Deakins is a terrific photographer whose shots have depth and impact, like the ruined French village, a lunar deathscape of despair. The touches add up (rats, bloated horses, staring corpses, endless trenches, the shock of ambush), though the abandoned German bunkers are too tidy even for Germans, and many uniforms appear remarkably natty for this muddy, blasted hell.

After you’ve seen the waste and carnage in Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, with WWI colorized back into startling life and death, you might find Mendes’s salute to his grandfather’s comrades a touch glib. He resorts to some quaint devices, with bits that echo chipper, derring-do pages in old English magazines like Chums and Boy’s Own Paper, and also silent films. Schofield finds a bucket of clean, drinkable milk in a war-ravaged barn, and later serves it to a sweet French madonna and a baby in that devastated village (at least there is no iris shot of wistful farewell). Corn is a cereal that movies, even big, sincere movies like this, will never exhaust, but 1917 does pack a punch. 

SALAD (A List)

12 Really Strong Movies About World War I

Listed in my order of preference:
The Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir directing Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay), Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean directing Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif), Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick directing Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou), The African Queen (1951, John Huston directing Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn), They Shall Not Grow Old (2019, Peter Jackson “directing” real British soldiers), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone directing Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim), The Spy in Black (1939, Michael Powell directing Conrad Veidt, Valerie Hobson), Life and Nothing But (1989, Bertrand Tavernier directing Phillipe Noiret, Sabine Azema), La Grande Guerra (1959, Mario Monicelli directing Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman), Westfront 1918 (1930, G.W. Pabst directing Claus Clausen, Gunter Diessl), Gallipoli (1981, Peter Weir directing Mel Gibson, Mark Lee) and King and Country (1964, Joseph Losey directing Dirk Bogarde, Tom Courtenay).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The Germans of World War I were never more generously depicted than by Dita Parlo, as the peasant mother who gives refuge to fleeing French POWs in Renoir’s La Grande Illusion. Seeing her in that, and in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Orson Welles decided “that she had the dark, European exoticism that he wanted to play the female lead in his first movie, Heart of Darkness.” Growing costs and dark themes scuttled the RKO project, and Parlo never had an American career. (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Orson Welles would work with many exotic European beauties, including Romy Schneider as Leni in The Trial. She “pulls Joseph K (Tony Perkins) into a storage room, drapes a heavy coat over him and vows, ‘I am going to make love to you.’ They slide down a pile of old files and papers, lightning crackles outside and Joseph looks squeamish. Leni asks if he has any physical defects, and then eagerly reveals a translucent membrane on her left hand.” (From the Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

With little combat, The Grand Illusion is the supreme World War I movie, partly thanks to the aristocratic exchanges between Pierre Fresnay’s noble French captive de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and Erich von Stroheim’s German camp commander Von Rauffenstein (France, 1937; director Jean Renoir, d.p. Christian Matras and Claude Renoir).

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Nosh 180: 'Bombshell,' 'Uncut Gems' & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Reviews of Bombshell and Uncut Gems)                    
 

Bombshell
Last week, the March sisters in Little Women. This week, the Fox sisters of Bombshell. That is, Fox News prime star Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), slightly lesser star Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and a young composite figure, the rising Fox vamp Kayla (Margot Robbie). Feral king of the Fox den is Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), founding brain of the cable news hatchery that gradually buried the Republican Party’s moral compass and helps Donald Trump torture the nation. Ailes, who began by manipulating media for Nixon, is the only important male figure in the film. The others are just nice suits and worried brows: Kevin Dorff as blustering Bill O’Reilly, Richard Kind as Ailes lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and Malcolm McDowell as mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Tracing the scandal by which Kelly, Carlson and other angry women overthrew Ailes in a bilious cloud of muck, by exposing sexual predation when they were budding at Fox, Jay Roach’s film often has a hot-cable pulse of breathless, breaking news. It peepholes into network offices and private shames, achieving an authentic aroma of  nausea. Theron’s Kelly, with the most to lose, seeks for a while to stay on board, even after Trump trashes her in his tweet stream. Kidman’s Carlson is the gutsy risk-taker, craving payback (Kidman must have recalled her young role as a local TV news wow in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For). The new dazzler is Robbie, fresh from her luminous Sharon Tate in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. As composite Kayla she gets a queasy turn on Roger’s meat rack. Robbie has the old Harlow and Monroe ability to be vampy without irony (though they winked it more). Kayla’s ambitious evasion of truth cracks once the rumor dirt becomes a legal mudslide and Ailes is fired. No doubt the writers loved giving her a sexy sleepover with the newsroom’s covert lesbian, a Clinton fan.

Bombshell radiates feminist heat. Still, a magnetic villain can take charge, and Lithgow’s Ailes is almost medieval in decay, his huge gut bulging above his walker. He calls himself  “grotesque” and “Jabba the Hutt,” but the ancient Nixonian still wants the pop of making beautiful women squirm and squish for a major TV job. Secretly branding them career sluts, as if by droit de seigneur, brought Ailes a a satisfaction clearly beyond the sexual (never has old, icky arousal seemed quite so dreary). Later the creep feels betrayed and snaps “Glad I’m not in a foxhole with you!,” unaware that his sordid fake-news career is the real Fox hole. The movie gives little attention to the Fox mutation of news, to please its tranced base with a daily dose of dimwit. Ailes is dead and O’Reilly bloviates from a lesser perch, yet the carnival of abuse, of news and women, continues (and Fox is not the only provider). The get-lost  checks given to the fallen men still dwarf the settlement money won by the women.

Uncut Gems

Unusual opening: from a hellish Ethiopian mine shaft, then (zip) into the colonoscopy probe of Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler). Despite that double dive, Uncut Gems is not deep. However vile, almost everything has the lurid surface wow of Darius Khondji’s imagery, which takes its cue from a big gem. This movie is so hooked on night glitz and vulgar  bling that natural light dies on contact. Ratner is a sports-mad gambling addict, deep in hock. He risks losing his small biz in Manhattan’s 47^th Street diamond district after he illegally imports a raw, massive “black opal” found in that African mine. It’s his collateral to inflate his bets, con an auction house, and offend tough in-law Arno (Eric Bogosian), a macher who calls in his marker by having ugly thugs terrorize Howard. To further cook the madness, Howard loans the exotic gem to his chief client among the sports-bet crowd, Kevin Garnett of Boston Celtics fame (a presence so lofty that he hardly needs to act).

Uncut Gems is pulpy and not PC. Garnett suddenly sees the glitz-stone as his unique, Afro-roots charm, a fairly primitive plot device. Ratner and his squalling family – wife Idina Menzel steams with rage because Howard has a love-hutch mistress (appealing Julia Fox) – is a cliché clot of downscale Jewish stereotypes. F-bombs are heard at every possible opportunity. There is a memorably bad Passover seder, and about equal piety for Howard’s threatened goldfish. Martin Scorsese was a producer, and though brotherly auteurs Benny and Josh Safdie were raised near the diamond zone, and certainly have every right to crop their turf, they flaunt their debts to Mean Streets and Goodfellas. After such riots of excess as Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, De Palma’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Verhoeven’s Showgirls and Aronofsky’s Mother!, why are these 135 minutes of raucous, slumming slam-bam being hailed as bravura?

Because Sandler, showing age marks and a saggy pot, and given many close-ups of sweaty desperation, has left his safety nook as a nice, shallow comedian for (oy vey) Howard Ratner. He achieves some effective sizzles of freak-out and takes real punishment (photo above). But his pleas for pity have the familiar Sandler tone, the draggy vocal timing, the boy-man with infantile insides. In the Sanders fan hive, Oscar talk buzzes. He might get lucky, but I recommend three excellent performances involving keen ambition (two Jewish): young Renee Zellweger as a savvy Hasidic wife who enters the gems trade in A Price Above Rubies (1998); the late ace Robert Forster as an “ice” salesman who flips his game in Diamond Men (2000), and Richard Gere’s superb portrait of a Big Apple hustler hoping to work a mitzvah (good deed) in Norman (2016). The Academy ignored them.  

SALAD (A List)

Remarkable Women in Business

Hard-striving achievers, in order of arrival:
Joan Crawford as waitress turned restauranteur Mildred Pierce (1946 – ditto Kate Winslet’s Mildred, 2011); Jane Wyman as Texas store magnate Lucy Gallant (1955); Jo Van Fleet as bordello madam Kate Trask in East of Eden (1955); Faye Dunaway as star turned Pepsi diva Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest (1979); Maureen Stapleton as hotel owner Lillian Garber in Sweet Lorraine (1987); Melanie Griffith as secretary turned biz wiz in Working Girl (1988); Juliette Binoche as confectioner Vianne Rocher in Chocolat (2000); Queen Latifah as rising hairdresser Gina Norris in Beauty Shop (2005); Meryl Streep as bossy fashionista Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada (2006); Penélope Cruz as chef/manager Raimunda in Volver (2006); Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as the upward Lorkowski sisters in Sunshine Cleaning (2008); Audrey Tautou as couture/perfume genius Gabrielle Chanel in Coco Before Chanel (2009), and Jennifer Lawrence as canny inventor Joy Mangano in Joy.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The most powerful biz-gals of classic Hollywood were gossip news queens Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, whom new arrival Welles slyly charmed until they ripped into Citizen Kane (to please W.R. Hearst). Welles’s pal Joseph Cotten added a touché, after Hopper ran an item linking him to girlish star Deanna Durbin. As Orson told Henry Jaglom much later, “Jo was a gentleman, which makes this story so good. He came up to Hopper at a party and said, ‘Hedda, if you say that again I’m going to kick you in the ass.’ She didn’t believe it. She kept talking about it, and he just came and kicked her in the ass. The last man in Hollywood you’d think would behave that way to a woman!” (From the Welles/Jaglom My Lunches With Orson. By the way, Jo Cotten did have a hot affair with Durbin.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Few European directors loved American Westerns quite like Wim Wenders: “Most Westerns measure lives in miles, and Ernst Wilhelm Wenders came 6,000 miles to make his modern, romantic ‘Western,’ Paris, Texas. Born three month after Hitler’s exit, he would embrace Americam films, songs, vistas, liberties, and led the ’70s German film revival with Werner Herzog and R.W. Fassbinder. His gorgeous art-noir The American Friend led to Hollywood, where Hammett became a studio mothball tired from nostalgia, not ‘the film I had gone to make.’ Some years later, Paris realized his dream on a much deeper level.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Though inevitably shadowed by Joan Crawford’s 1946 Oscar winner, Kate Winslet was a splendid Mildred in the lavish TV remake of Mildred Pierce (HBO/MGM 2011; director Todd Haynes, d.p. Ed Lachman).

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Nosh 179: 'Little Women', 12 Best Movies of 2019 & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Review: Little Women)   
                 

Little Women
It opens with a yarn and closes with a book, each written by Louisa May Alcott. The adapter is Greta Gerwig, who directed. Katharine Hepburn (1933) played the high-spirited Jo March most fans remember – fans of June Allyson (1949) and Winona Ryder (1994) have settled into a sullen pout. Gerwig has tossed the top-Kate mantle onto her terrific Lady Bird star, Saoirse Ronan, who again buries her dear Irish accent to play American. Verdict (mine): Hepburn by a pert New England nose, on sheer star power, but it’s darn close and Ronan rules the moment.

“If I were a girl in a book, life would be so much simpler,” young Jo grouches at one point. It’s a good point, for Alcott, a plain gal who had a fretful, workaholic, sexually covert life, simplified herself but also bottled her fierce spirit inside Jo. Ronan uncorks Hepburnian vim as the brainy, endearing busybody, with her own tonic fizz. When she chops off most of her hair, then cries about losing her only beauty feature, it’s silly-sweet because she still looks adorable. The prettiest sister is Meg, who heads fast for maternity and marriage (time to stop thinking of Emma Watson as That Harry Potter Girl, but as her nice, dull catch, James Norton seems fallen from his hunky priest on TV’s Grantchester). 

Quick snaps: Eliza Scanlen is touchingly fated as Beth, the musical sister; full-faced Florence Pugh stands out boldly as sister Amy, art-minded but also deeply sane; Timothée Chalamet, so lean and pretty he looks like the love child of James Dean and a feminine falcon, flits vividly between Amy and Jo; Meryl Streep is rich “old maid” Aunt March, so sparky she is ready to become Dickens’s Miss Haversham at the drop of a wig, and Laura Dern is splendid as the girls’s careworn, deeply loving mother. It is the Civil War era, and sex seems as rare as a Confederate $3 bill. Gerwig sublimates busy teen hormones into fast, overlapping dialog, smooches, funny dancing, lush costumes and superbly 19^th century moodscapes shot by Yorick LeSaux, whose images recall painters like Winslow Homer, George Inness and Eastman Johnson.

“So I thought,” Gerwig has said, “OK, they were people, so we’re allowed to make them people.” No wax dolls here, but some good curls of Victorian posing, dialog true to the book and times, crafty episodes that flow along confidently. Gerwig trips a bit in letting some talk fly off into air, barely heard, and in slippery back-and-forth phases of girlhood and young womanhood. Viewers who haven’t read the novel (even some who have) might get tangled. But the film rallies, surges, wittily handles the issue of Jo’s sudden marriage (Alcott stayed single), and affirms like a joyful piper her zeal to be a free writer. Alcott wrote a lot of minor pulp fiction, but also fashioned a classic novel from her mind and heart. The arrival at movie’s end of Little Women, bound tight and crammed with life, is a wonderful salute to the age of ink – and women ascendant.    

SALAD (A List)

My 12 Best (Favorite) Movies of 2019
A good year! These I reviewed and relished (closing number is the Flix Nosh of that review; just scroll down to find it). 

1. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

An amazingly vital, hip tour of L.A. and the biz, making an epochal turn in 1969. The fairy-tale revisionism at the end is justified by Quentin Tarantino’s most personal work, his most adult art since Jackie Brown. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are fab-dude leads, vulnerable machos. Margot Robbie is the jewel of a foolproof support cast. Even for those not movie-nostalgic at Tarantino level, this should be an abundant entertainment. Oscar, attention please! (161)

2. Pain and Glory

In his most mature and self-searching work, Spain’s masterful Pedro Almodóvar made his own 8½ (he was 68½ during filming). As the body-afflicted, memory-haunted director Antonio Banderas crowns his own career with consummate depth, in a wonderful movie. (176)

  

3. Shoplifters

Six desperate people in a little Tokyo flat, held together by food, theft and ramshackle love. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s marvel is like an Italian neo-realist picture given an amazingly adroit Japanese revamp. A little lost girl is the family pet, in this petri dish of the lower strata. (139)

4. Motherless Brooklyn

More than a rummage of classic noir hooks, Edward Norton’s teeming NYC take on Jonathan Lethem’s novel brings back the ruthless, bursting era of builder Robert Moses. Norton is excellent as the bold but afflicted gumshoe who steps on a lot of night worms (it’s a fecund plot). Here is Chinatown plus The Cotton Club plus … well, a plus all-over. (173)

5. The Last Black Man in San Francisco

A smart, rueful valentine to the golden city, its small but vital black population and Jimmie Fails, seeking his roots in a grand Victorian home steeped in family myth. Fails scripted and stars, directed by buddy Joe Talbot. Their poem of urbanity may well be the most haunting San Franscape since Vertigo. (158)

6. Little Women

The review is above. (179)

 

7. Ad Astra

One of the few intimately dramatic, and yet spectacular, sci-fi films. In his high-tide year, Brad Pitt is terrific as a bold veteran astronaut seeking his lost father (Tommy Lee Jones), a bitter, distant Ahab who scorns Earth. James Gray directed this utterly felt vision of risky connections in deep astral (and mental) space. (168)

 

8. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché

Told superbly, Pamela B. Green’s elegant documentary is about French (then American) movie pioneer Guy-Blaché, an almost forgotten master of silent innovation. She made treasure until the new studio system’s patriarchy shut her down. An astonishing window of discovery. (159)

9. The Goldfinch

John (Brooklyn) Crowley’s daring, tricky, stylish treatment of Donna Tartt’s  big novel about an Oliver Twisty boy, his busted family, a painting, Russian hoods and the wild ways of discordant fate. It’s a neo-Dickensian cake, succulent with flavors that are not too literary. (167)

 

10. They Shall Not Grow Old

A very different epic from Peter (Lord of the Rings) Jackson.  He blew the dust off footage from London’s Imperial War Museum, deftly colorized it and brought back alive the warrior bond, courage and horror of those who a century ago went into the grisly trenches for Britain.  (143)

11. The World Before Your Feet

Jeremy Workman follows smart, amiable Matt Green as, on tireless feet, he visits the vistas, nooks, edges and occupants  of big New York City. The best Apple chomp since 1998’s great documentary The Cruise took its own juicy bite. (142)

12. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

A non-mawkish homage to TV educator and kids’s best chum Fred Rogers. Marielle Heller concentrates the lessons of Morgan Neville’s fine 2018 documentary. Tom Hanks plumbs Rogers’s wise, gentle depth as he helps an emotionally damaged  journalist (fine Matthew Rhys). (178)

Also aglow in the alluring dark:

The Aeronauts, All is True, Amazing Grace, Apollo 11, Best of Enemies, The Biggest Little Farm, Booksmart, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of Turtles, By the Grace of God, The Chambermaid, Diane, Dolemite is My Name, Downton Abbey, Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, The Invisibles, Loro, Meeting Gorbachev, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, Mustang, Parasite, Photograph, Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins, Stan & Ollie, Them That Follow, Tolkien, Transit, The Two Popes, Welcome to Marwen, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, Wild Rose, Woman at War.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is currently tasting the new Paul Masson varieties at a Napa Valley wine cave. He will, if sober, return next week.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Zero Mostel was usually a loud, wild talent, but he could be subtle: “The blacklist cast its shadow again with Zero’s stunning exit in The Front, 1976. As a blacklisted comic he leaves a room, takes a turn – and vanishes. We see the breeze-blown curtain of a high, fatal window. It was his speechless but resonant tribute to his friend Philip Loeb, blacklisted into suicide.” (From the Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

No 2019 film better probed personal life with exciting style than Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria), a consummation apex for director-writer Pedro Almodóvar and star (above) Antonio Banderas (El Deseo/Sony Pictures Classics; director Almodóvar, d.p. José Luis Alcaine).

For previous Flix Noshes, scroll below.