David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Wildlife
and Boy Erased
This week, two American families in trouble, with a
smart son at the emotional center:
Wildlife
The 1950s have been retro-packed as a conformity trunk, crammed
with Ike Era “lives of quiet desperation” liberated by Brando, Dean,
Elvis, then JFK. There is a more subtle approach, as in Carol. And now, even more subtle, Wildlife. We briefly hear Jack Kennedy’s voice, but the first Hit
Parade croon-tune doesn’t sound until half an hour in. The struggling Brinson
family’s TV is “on the fritz” in their humble new rental in Great Falls,
Montana. Lovely mountains loom, but so do advancing forest fires, as the
Brinsons crack into crisis.
Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an eager-beaver who loses
his job as golf pro at the club (too chummy, not servile enough for the boss). Pro
golf never welcomed Jerry, and now his hard-trying wife Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) turns
bored and resentful as Jerry can’t find a job (evidently the streetcar
named Desire has dropped this marriage from its route). Watching at the anxious
hub is Joe, 14 (Ed Oxenbould), bright and mannerly, his calm, wise face anticipating how he will look at 40. Jerry, feeling useless as Jeanette becomes
a swim instructor and Joe takes an after-school job at a photo shop, goes away to toil on the fire line for a dollar an hour.
Jeanette and Joe drive up to see the fire, a fiery foreshadowing
of the film’s best sequence.
Jeanette meets Warren Miller, 50-ish, rich in a quiet
way, separated and on the prowl. “He wants to learn about poetry,” she tells
Joe, but Warren’s chosen poem is her pale, lovely body. Over dinner, the portly
smoothie (Bill Camp is superb) launches what you might call elite-Rotarian
seduction tactics as Joe observes, stunned. Warren lifts a toast to “your old
man not burning up like a piece of bacon.” That brings a funny-queasy, David
Lynch shiver, and if it doesn’t revive your old, adolescent thoughts about weird
adults, you’re amnesiac. Actor Paul Dano, who directed (and with Zoe Kazan adapted
a Richard Ford novel), builds surefire tones and moods along with Diego Garcia's softly colored, velvety, faintly nostalgic images (two shots of the bus
station, at dusk and morning, typify his mastery). The story has one burst of fierce
melodrama, entirely earned.
Of the leads Mulligan and Gyllenhaal are remarkable.
Oxenbould is crucial, as the story breathes through Joe’s maturing mind. The
young actor is never cute or off-center or obvious. His fretful, half-aroused, embarrassed
voyeurism echoes Kyle McLachlan’s Jeffrey in Lynch’s Blue Velvet. More delicate and intimately spooky, Wildlife is not a dream world. It delves
into one of the life-shaping crises that come to many young people, in countless
variations of the real.
Boy Erased
As Marshall, a Bible-thumping minister
in Boy Erased, Russell Crowe doesn’t
mind splitting his life between his successful church and running a large car
dealership. But he can’t stand the more testing split in his teen son Jared
(Chris Hedges). Earnest, pensive Jared is gay but fighting it, after countless
warnings of hellfire (the family acts if Satan is venting lava right into their
home). Getting out of his closet is tough; even worse is his dad being so closed.
Wife and mother Nancy (Nicole Kidman) is devoted to them both, and her sensitive
Christian values makes her torn feelings very moving. Kidman, an Aussie playing
an Arkansan, is once again among our most subtle stars. Crowe, now so chunky
he’s darn-near cherubic, seems stuffed by pious bewilderment.
Jared’s shy but deep interest in boys is admitted, with
guilt. Since candid, patient compassion is flagellated by fears of sin, the
“solution” is to send Jared to a “conversion camp,” Love in Action. The action is led by the
Lord’s own drill sergeant, Vic Sykes, played by director and adapter (from
Garrard Conley’s memoir) Joel Edgerton. Sykes, evidently a bit shaky in his own
sexuality, pesters, pleads and bullies. A big, silent boy is driven into
despair. The place is a prison of willfully ignorant therapy, where adolescence
faces the extra torment of a crudely judgmental belief system.
Boy Erased is stretched and stylized for menace, at times like a fright movie. Edgerton, like Dano a
fine actor and now director, lifts it above some routine passages, due partly
to Chris Hedges’s unusually micro-tuned intensity. I thought Hedges was better
as the nephew in Manchester by the Sea
than Oscar-winning Casey Affleck as his grief-glutted uncle. Not great drama, nor
working at Wildlife level, this film
has an intelligent moral compass, magnetized by excellent performers.
SALAD (A List)
17 Outstanding
American Family Dramas
In my order of favor: Paris, Texas (director Wim Wenders, 1984), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962), The Godfather (Francis Coppola, 1972), East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935), The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940), Raisin in the Sun (Daniel Petrie, 1961),
The Best Years of Our Lives (William
Wyler, 1946), Picnic (Joshua Logan,
1956), Shoot the Moon (Alan Parker,
1982), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard
Brooks, 1958), Giant (George Stevens,
1956), Avalon (Barry Levinson, 1990),
Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet,
1988), The Yearling (Clarence Brown,
1946), To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert
Mulligan, 1962) and Our Vines Have Tender
Grapes (Roy Rowland, 1990).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Arnold
Weissberger, Orson Welles’s lawyer in the Citizen
Kane period, was essential to RKO’s embattled defense as publisher William
Randolph Hearst threatened to quash 1941’s most brilliant movie. All was at
stake: “Weissberger suspected that Hearst would not actually go through with a
suit, for fear of having to testify in court about his extramarital
relationship with Marion Davies. One of Weissberger’s colleagues suggested
threatening Hearst with publicly disclosing that, in Mexico, Marion Davies had
covertly given birth to twins. The birth certificate could be produced.
Hearst’s greatest weapon was not a lawsuit, or even the threat of one, but the implicit,
massive threat of using the power of the press to harass the entire film
industry.” Without a Davies scandal, Kane
was released but Hearst vindictiveness undermined income. (Quote from Barbara
Leaming’s Orson Welles: A Biography.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Jackie Brown was a lovingly uplifted tribute to blaxploitation, the
’60s into ’70s genre that made Pam Grier a star, though it often settled for
pulp: “Most blaxplo was opportunistic and transgressive, causing white critics
to shrink into their seats while black viewers had too much fun to care. There
was biracial uneasiness with race-and-rape fantasies (Mandingo, Drum, Goodbye Uncle Tom), a sub-genre of provocation that
Tarantino would later stylize terminally (Django
Unchained). Blaxploitation’s nadir was the Italian parable Black Jesus, a crass conflation of
African political martyr Patrice Lumumba with Christ, starring John Ford’s
black mainstay Woody Strode. As a film historian put it: ‘Valerio Zurlini’s
film was acquired by a small American distributor, Plaza Pictures, dubbed into
English, shortened to play down the Lumumba aspects, and given the American
title Black Jesus.” (From the Pam
Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book
Starlight Rising, available from
Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
The
Renoir-worthy Kansas picnic in Picnic
(Columbia Pictures, 1956; director Joshua Logan, photography by James Wong
Howe).
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