Cinephile, geek, holder of a degree in film and television arts. If you enjoy what you read, please like The Critical Reel's Facebook page and follow me on Twitter!
This, here, is a clever little film. How clever, I'm not sure, but clever enough to raise the right sort of questions without answering them. It is a horror movie in which lots of people are killed by mysterious doppelgängers. However, the violence only acts as window dressing. Like its opening text suggests, there is a lot more happening beneath the surface. Buried secrets, hidden meanings, allegories galore. You wouldn't think that possible for a film with so many scares and murders, but Jordan Peele's Us is a thriller that doubles as a parable. It's a machine of fear with something to say.
At the movie's centre is Lupita Nyong'o, that effortlessly beautiful actress who broke our hearts in 12 Years a Slave (2013) and crusaded for change in Black Panther (2018). Nyong'o plays Adelaide Wilson, who, as a child, stumbles into a spooky Hall of Mirrors on Santa Cruz beach in 1986 and discovers something impossible - there, in the darkness, peering into her soul with eyes as large as golf balls, is an exact copy of her. Not a reflection, but a living, breathing duplicate. So stunning is this discovery that she lives the next few years without uttering a word to anybody.
We re-join Adelaide as an adult, as she and her husband Gabe (Winston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and son Jason (Evan Alex), head into the Californian woods to live out their summer at their vacation home. It's one of those cushy, upscale houses, matched only by Gabe's cushy, upscale Mercedes SUV. What he and Adelaide do for a living, how they've acquired their wealth is not important, but trust me, that they are wealthy is.
Us begins very deliberately, and much of the time I wondered if anything significant would happen. Then one night, the lights at the Wilson home go out, suddenly shifting the movie into a gear I had been anticipating. What follows is a rip-roaring series of incidents that herald the emergence of all these doppelgängers, who communicate in squeals, wear uniformed red jumpsuits and wield identical golden scissors.
This is a thoroughly violent movie. The strange doppelgängers lurch about, stabbing and slashing at their counterparts like a horde of weaponised zombies. Bodies are flung from balconies, chopped by propellers, run over by cars. There are lots of frights, as shapes emerge from shadows, characters explore suspicious doors and dark forests when they know they shouldn't, etc. But the doubles seem to have a plan. They're not exactly mindless. It might have something to do with Hands Across America, that tacky humanitarian stunt from the '80s that urged Americans to hold hands and literally form a human chain from one coast to the other.
It might have to do with many things. Peele, who writes and directs, fills his story with tons of symbolic markers, many of which I suspect are red herrings, as if goading his viewers to rack their brains trying to solve his Rubik's Cube of metaphors. I have my theories, but for the sake of those who wish to see Us and formulate their own ideas, I shall exercise restraint.
Peele's first success was Get Out (2017), in which a black man had to deal with the immediacy of complex racism after meeting his white girlfriend's unusual family. This time he seems to be tackling something much broader: the unity of all Americans, regardless of race, gender, class, etc. He's concerned with their differences and what they're prepared to do to suppress them. Whether he succeeds is open to debate. Us is pregnant with ideas but doesn't seem as accessible as Get Out, which may be Peele's point but which also renders many of its intentions confusing. What, for example, is the significance of the rabbits?
I should mention that the movie is also very funny, which counter-balances harmoniously with its gore and intellect. It showcases tireless performances, especially by Nyong'o, who, as both Adelaide and her double, is somehow able to flip a switch to make them equally goofy and compelling. They're two roles that would squeeze any actor to suffocation, but Nyong'o is up to task, and more. She is the lifeblood of a suspense thriller that's smarter than most, more gruesome than some, and certainly more ambitious than any other movie that features cartwheeling killer twins. Us begs us to ponder the very nature of our decisions, both individually and collectively. In ten years, after several more viewings, it could turn into a sleeper masterpiece, the kind of ambiguous cautionary tale born from a history of human mistakes.
Stray Observations
In addition to the rabbits, question also the half-fingered gloves and the possible meaning of "11:11", which repeatedly appears.
Winston Duke is hilarious in this.
I love that Young Adelaide dons a Thriller t-shirt, y'know, since the movie is a thriller and stuff.
Fair warning to whomever reads this: I'm not a happy camper, so lots of mumbling and complaining are forthcoming. I'm going to be that nasty tyke at a birthday party who smashes the cake just to see everyone else cry. I did not like this movie. Not one bit. I don't know if it's because I hold fond memories of the original Dumbo (1941), or because every single second of this new live-action Dumbo is a contrived, boring, predictable mess, from the opening scene of a CGI train chugging across the southern U.S. to the inevitable happy ending where everything is bright and sunny in Disney land. I won't hold it against you if you choose to leave now.
For those staying behind, I shall get on with it. This new Dumbo takes place in 1919, where a travelling carnival is delighted to welcome a newborn elephant into its troupe. But wait, how can this be? His ears - they're huge and disgusting! Poor little Dumbo is mocked as he trips over them. The crowds laugh and hurl peanuts at him. The ringleader, Max Medici (Danny DeVito), wants him gone for good. The only people who care for him are Milly and Joe (a perpetually wooden Nico Parker, and Finley Hobbins). They are the children of Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), who was once the carnival's star attraction before the Great War removed one of his arms.
Milly? Joe? Holt? Who the heck are these people? - you ask. Fair question. The original Dumbo, of course, was an animation about the friendship between two animals. The humans were tertiary, ornamental figures who barely spoke. This remake envisions a story where the humans are front and centre, and Dumbo is a kind of supporting superstar. Naturally, the entire cast is brand new. This might've worked if Ehren Kruger, responsible for the screenplay, had devised a story that was as imaginative and challenging as the original. Alas, it's another old dusty tale of the humble family business taken over by the ruthless tycoon.
The tycoon this time is Vandevere, played by Michael Keaton in one of Keaton's most bewildering and dangerously absurd performances. Vandevere, who runs an impossibly modern circus complex, hears of the infamous flying pachyderm and offers to merge Max Medici's troupe with his own. Max has obviously never seen a movie in his life so can't possibly imagine that Vandevere means to swindle him. Meanwhile, you might've realised how little of Dumbo the Elephant I am mentioning. That is because Dumbo doesn't do anything worth mentioning, except fall from great heights before swooping up at the last second, accompanied by such uplifting music. There is a reason the original ran for only 64 minutes.
Couldn't Kruger have thought of anything better for these characters to do? Not a single one is remotely convincing, with emotions and thoughts of their own. Everyone is a marionette, hoisted by strings, controlled by the devices of the plot, yanked this way and that. We, as the viewers, are forced into feeling. Oh, Dumbo is born. How adorable! Dumbo's mother is declared insane and shipped away. How tragic! Don't worry, the children will save the day. Yay! But wait, Vandevere is sinister! Gasp! His prima trapeze artist Colette (Eva Green) looks like a villain but is actually a real softie who learns to love Dumbo. Aww! You see how it goes. There is absolutely zero room for these characters to behave like human beings, to make decisions that surprise, enchant, inspire. There is no ingenuity, only cliché upon cliché. Everything that happens is a mechanical step toward a robotic conclusion. If you don't think that's sad, just remember how the best Disney movies continue to move us in ways we thought we had forgotten.
Maybe I'm being excessively grumpy. Maybe this new Dumbo isn't so bad, and it simply caught me on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong frame of mind. It's possible. Perhaps one day down the line I will revisit it and give its director Tim Burton a pat on the back. But right now, at this very moment, it fills me with nothing but contempt. No one asked for this remake. The least they could've done was show us why we secretly needed it.
Stray Observations
The song "Baby Mine", which is performed by a character in the movie, is at least 45 years ahead of its time in terms of composition and melody.
It's 1919, people. Could rickety wooden trucks back then really support the weight of fully grown Asian elephants?
There's a scene where Michael Keaton furiously and frantically destroys a command centre. It's one of the most ridiculously stupid scenes I've ever witnessed.
A circus in 1919 adopting progressive Cirque du Soleil policies? Not on your life, buddy.
Michael Buffer's cameo is either misplaced or a stroke of genius.
The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part is proof that it is rare for lightning to strike a movie franchise twice once there has been a change in director. Oh yes, it happens. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) was better than Star Wars (1977). Many, myself excluded, claim Aliens (1986) to be a rung higher than Alien (1979). Unfortunately, The Lego Movie 2 doesn't share such company because it suffers greatly the loss of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who, with a wave of their wands, made the first Lego Movie better than it had any right to be. This time Lord and Miller give way to Mike Mitchell, who is competent and efficient but lacks the zany sophistication of his predecessors. The result is a family movie in name only - the parents aren't gonna have as much fun.
As you may recall, the first Lego Movie was all about recapturing your childhood. The entire animation served a few live-action scenes in which Will Ferrell had to suck it up and realise he's still a big kid at heart. Aww. The Lego Movie 2 is all about learning to cooperate, to work and play together as one happy family. Very sweet. Much of the cast from the original have returned, including Elizabeth Banks as the renegade Lucy (A.K.A Wyldstyle), Will Arnett as Batman, and of course Chris Pratt as the hero Emmet, who is still very much a loser and incapable of anything productive.
Among the newcomers are Tiffany Haddish and Stephanie Beatriz. Haddish voices Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi (Whatever I Wanna Be - geddit?), who rules the galactic Systar System and can take the shape of, well, whatever she wants to be. Beatriz voices the queen's numero uno enforcer General Sweet Mayhem, whose arsenal includes heart-shaped bombs that have baby faces and speak in cutesy voices before exploding. A little unsettling, but okay.
The movie picks up right where the previous one left off. The city of Bricksburg is in ruin following a series of sustained assaults from the gigantic Lego Duplo invaders. One day Emmet receives a vision of impending apocalypse. Shortly after, General Sweet Mayhem arrives, announcing the queen's wedding before abducting Lucy, Batman, Unikitty (Alison Brie) and a few others as guests. Emmet, naturally, is left behind, and so, God help him, embarks on a solo rescue operation.
We are warned that the queen's wedding will make true Emmet's vision and bring about something called Armamageddon (yes, there's a "mama" in there). The apocalypse has something to do with the live-action segments of the movie, which star Maya Rudolph, but how and why shall remain under lock and key.
Along the way, Emmet meets Rex Dangervest, a space rogue with a starship in the form of a fist and a crew composed entirely of dinosaurs. I assure you every word in that sentence is as accurate as I could make it. Rex is everything Emmet is not - macho, confident, physical, witty. He is even equipped with the required Hero Stubble. The two hit it off like long-lost bros. Before long, Batman is en route to becoming Mr. Watevra Wa'Nabi while Emmet and Rex devise a scheme to save the universe.
Okay, that's enough of the plot. The Lego Movie 2, written by Lord and Miller, is supremely satisfactory, if what you want is brisk weekend entertainment for your kids. I suspect the movie will hold little intrigue for anyone older than, say, seventeen. It has a fine story, some genuine spectacle (the early scenes of ruined Bricksburg are imaginative) and many, many pop culture references, of which the best is a certain time-travelling device that has been assembled from parts belonging to other properties, like Back to the Future and Doctor Who.
Ultimately, the whole movie just feels a little light. It has only been several hours since I've seen it but I'm already recalling Liam Neeson's cop and Morgan Freeman's wizard guy from the first one. The queen and Sweet Mayhem are welcomed additions but they lack Neeson's and Freeman' presence and residual impression. Even their comedic timing isn't as sharp. The humour in general is blunter and broader than before. There is less conflict, despite a predictable, somewhat confusing plot twist. Smaller stakes are on the line, perhaps for smaller minds.
Unlike many of the other Marvel movies, Captain Marvel is the result of poor timing and a lack of foresight. That doesn't necessarily make it bad, merely a miscalculation with promising material and a story that could have been so much more. With just about every other chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the overriding story has progressed systematically so that D follows C, C follows B and so on. Captain Marvel takes place about twenty years in the past. It's been ten years since the MCU began. Where the heck has she been all this time?
That's a question the movie only vaguely answers. Captain Marvel has the distinct disadvantage of seeming like an afterthought; it arrives so late in the Marvel timeline that it almost has to hide its own existence. What do I mean? Well, surely if someone as powerful and destructive as Captain Marvel (a.k.a. Carol Danvers) were to descend upon Earth, her presence would be remembered? A news clipping perhaps? Some shaky home video footage? Maybe a pile of rubble where a building once stood? The issue here is that in twenty movies there has been no mention of Carol Danvers, which means whatever happens in this one has to take place off the radar.
The writers have backed themselves into a corner. By having to keep Carol's presence more or less a secret, her contact with Earth and its occupants is extremely limited (except for a scene on a train in which she punches an old lady). The film's climax, which is hardly a climax at all, has to take place in space, away from human eyes. And at the end, she has to find an excuse to disappear for two decades until she is needed again for the upcoming Avengers: Endgame. Captain Marvel is entirely workable and often entertaining, but its imagination is shackled by the very machine that created it.
Which leads me to the positives, of which there are plenty, despite my ramblings. Captain Marvel lives and breathes with Brie Larson, who isn't necessarily scene-stealing but crafts Carol as a hero who is kinda spunky, very tough, and plain likeable. She starts the movie as a warrior for the Kree race, serving under an efficient Jude Law as a member of a special military unit helpfully called Starforce. It's useful to know that the Kree are involved in an intergalactic war with the Skrulls, a shapeshifting alien race known to infiltrate planets via subterfuge.
Soon Carol is experiencing flashbacks of a previous life as an air force pilot on Earth and a super high-tech device that has the capacity to power starships to the speed of light. She learns that the device is on Earth and the Skrulls, led by Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), are after it, which is the perfect excuse to introduce a youngified Samuel L. Jackson as the famed Nick Fury. Through plot points too tedious to explain, Carol and Fury are dunked into a conflict that is not without a few twists and turns and mistaken identities. All the while, Carol embarks on her own mission to reclaim her stolen humanity.
This is a very slick movie, directed by the duo of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, known for their low-key comedy-dramas. The action, though sparse, is thumped up to speed by Larson's effortless charisma and dedication. The visual effects are state-of-the-art, as to be expected. It's a movie that plays light on such weighty topics as memory-loss, displacement and the socio-political ramifications of war, designed, I suspect, to go down more smoothly for the younger viewers. The humour is hit-or-miss. And I wish the fight scenes had been edited with more sanity, though asking for that is an act of insanity in itself.
Look, Captain Marvel is not among the greatest of the Marvel movies. Those ranks are still reserved for the likes of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Captain America: Civil War (2016) and Thor: Ragnarok (2017). Civil War especially transcended the superhero genre by raising its character stakes. Captain Marvel's stakes are child's play by comparison. It exists to bring Carol Danvers into the fold and to help us bide time until our favourite superheroes return in a couple of months. This movie needed to be made seven or eight years ago. It needs to know its place in the big picture. It needs to feel relevant. Is it fun in the tradition of fun superhero movies? Oh yes. But is it relevant the way Wonder Woman (2017) was relevant? I'm afraid not.
The theme of a family broken runs deep through Asghar Farhadi’s movies, and Everybody Knows, his latest, carries on in a grand, if not always plausible, way. This is a movie that begins with much happiness and celebration and ends in speculation and disbelief. That could make for a delicious little thriller, but somewhere along the way, as the movie develops contrivances to drive wedges between family members, it loses interest like a deflating balloon.
As it opens, Laura (Penélope Cruz) and her two kids, Irene (Carla Campra) and Diego, arrive home from Argentina at a picturesque Spanish village for her younger sister’s wedding. There, in a manner not unlike a Robert Altman film or the early wedding scenes in The Godfather (1972), we are introduced to her sprawling family and a number of important peripheral players in a series of scenes that are quite expertly choreographed.
We meet Laura’s older sister, who runs the local store with her husband Fernando (Eduard Fernández). Their daughter Rocío (Sara Sálamo) is somewhat estranged. The grumpy family patriarch, Antonio (Rámon Barea), lives to pick fights with the good townspeople. Paco (Javier Bardem), an old friend of the family’s, oversees the local vineyard with his wife Bea (Bárbara Lennie). Then there’s Paco’s nephew Felipe (Sergio Castellanos), who has a kind of playground romance with Irene and schemes to run away with her. There are lots of little stories going on, but on the night of the wedding, Irene is mysteriously abducted from her bedroom, and suddenly all the threads come weaving together.
Naturally, the rest of the movie deals with the family’s attempts to bring Irene back. The usual abduction tropes apply here: members of the family receive anonymous text messages demanding ransoms and threatening to hurt the poor girl should the cops be notified; the family consults a retired police officer for advice; they scramble about to try and consolidate the ransom money; so on and so forth. The hysteria and panic that sweeps the sleepy village isn’t helped by the fact that another girl was abducted under similar circumstances some time earlier. Could the same perps be at work again?
Everybody Knows uses Irene’s abduction not as a device to generate suspense but as a catalyst to uncover buried secrets about Laura, her family, and most importantly Paco. Old wounds are re-opened, past traumas relived, etc. People start turning on each other as suspicions rise. I can’t give too much away, since the movie holds off revealing the identity (or identities) of the abductor (or abductors) till about the end of the second act. I can’t even reveal the big secret that “everybody knows” as it more or less stitches the entire plot together. But I suspect, if you’ve seen domestic thrillers like this one, and you know that Paco is played by Javier Bardem for a reason, you’d be able to gradually build your own case.
Predictable or not, Everybody Knows showcases the collective might of its cast. Cruz and Bardem, married in real life, play here two childhood friends who fell in love and then outgrew it. Cruz spends about 80% of the film sobbing her precious eyes out, but watch her in scenes of strength. She is quick to present herself as a woman who refuses to be pushed around. She is sly, fragile, protective, formidable, and a bit nasty when she has to be. Bardem responds appropriately to suit Paco’s emotional state at various points throughout the film, but alas, I am again restricted by his role from divulging too much about his performance.
The film is set in the lovely Spanish countryside, in the kind of town where everyone more or less grows up as one family. There’s a lot to relish, particularly the way Farhadi’s screenplay subdues any urges to turn itself into a mindless thriller, but Everybody Knows is a very modest attempt. It is straight-laced melodrama, amped up by its gorgeous scenery and impressive acting. I bought into the characters and their relationships with each other, I sympathised when tragedy fell, but to be honest, when I thought hard about the necessity of the plot, I still wasn’t quite sure why poor Irene was abducted in the first place.
Here, once again, is a Predator movie that is loud, bombastic and utterly preposterous, hanging on a limp plot, hoping we won’t notice. If you thought the plot to the 1987 film was too dumb by half, this one is about half of that. It involves a bunch of loony military veterans, a kid who another character calls retarded, and a hybrid alien that’s basically a metre taller and twice as ugly. It also has such bravado and ingenuity as to name itself THE Predator, even though more than one Predator shows up.
This is a movie built to exhibit aliens, guns and inappropriate jokes, not to solve complex maths equations. The plot, such as it is, concerns a Predator crashing its space pod in Mexico only to be hunted by a larger hybrid Predator for trying to deliver a secret weapon to the humans. Uh-huh. Never mind why or what the secret weapon is. You won’t believe it even when you see it.
The humans, as is customary in monster alien movies like this, are made up of thinly veiled characters who will either defeat the villainous creatures or get slaughtered by them. The hero is Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook), a sniper who sees the Predator at the beginning and is immediately sent by the government for psych evaluations. He is joined by a group of former soldiers, and an exo-biologist (Olivia Munn) who looks like a Maxim cover girl and is amazingly proficient at physical combat.
That’s not all. The larger hybrid Predator has a pair of predator dogs, which I’m assuming are alien mutts, since they sport the same hairdo as their master, but for some reason they behave entirely like Earth dogs, scratching themselves and playing fetch.
Okay, I know what you’re saying. The Predator is directed by Shane Black, whose movies have always been a little tongue-in-cheek, a little cavalier. Perhaps it’s not wise to look too deeply into them. But shouldn’t this one at least make sense? At times it feels like a whole other movie was cut from it in the editing room.
Backstories are hinted at but never explored. Plot points are established early and then forgotten. Characters do bizarre things, like breaking the space/time continuum by teleporting hundreds of kilometres in the same scene. The larger hybrid Predator is completely underwhelming. And then, before you can blink, the climactic fight is over and something even more underwhelming happens: a sequel is teased.
After all the fuss over Marvel’s first major female villain in Thor: Ragnarok (2017), the racial intrigue of Black Panther, the absolutely life-draining tragedies that grappled Avengers: Infinity War, it is lovely to once again enjoy an action superhero comedy from which I can leave without having to ponder my life choices. Superhero movies used to be goofy, once upon a time. Now they’re taken more seriously than final exams. Ant-Man and the Wasp is a cheerful reminder that there’s more than enough room for both.
This is the follow-up to 2015’s Ant-Man and it carries along the same energy and charisma that made that film one of the more underrated instalments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Paul Rudd is once again the titular hero, except this time he has to do his superhero business while under house arrest for his role in the events that destroyed a German airport.
Fighting alongside him is Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), the formidable daughter of Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), who has taken up the mantle of the Wasp in an attempt to rescue her mother from the Quantum Realm, a dimension so small the bacteria that live there are the size of hippos. Indeed, much of Ant-Man and the Wasp is about the Pyms’ tireless efforts to retrieve their missing beloved, and Lilly and Douglas create quite a dynamic family unit, one that is penetrated with lots of humour by Rudd.
What’s interesting about the screenplay, penned rather surprisingly by five writers, is the way it uses the Pyms’ mission as the foundation for a plot that could have been written by the Coen brothers, except instead of a rug or a briefcase filled with dirty money, all the characters are trying to get their hands on a laboratory that’s been shrunken to the size of a suitcase. Yes, that’s right – a tiny building on wheels.
The lab houses the device the Pyms are building to slingshot them into the Quantum Realm, but there’s also the stylish villain Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who suffered a freak accident in her youth and can now slip through matter like, well, a ghost. She needs the lab to find a cure for her condition, and the vile Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins) is after them all because he’s the Bad Guy in a Suit and is required to make life difficult for everybody else.
This clamour of characters sets up some of the movie’s more charming action sequences, as when a car chase in San Francisco comes to a dead halt at the famous Lombard Street, or when a well-designed fight scene in a kitchen involves an oversized salt shaker. One of the many joys about these Ant-Man movies is the kick the filmmakers get from turning small everyday objects into larger-than-life monstrosities, including Ant-Man himself (and in one school scene, the movie gets a lot of mileage out of a shrinking mishap).
There are no real stakes at play here. The universe is not about to end. Social politics are not under scrutiny. Heck, a giant ant plays the drums. And yet Ant-Man and the Wasp is a delightful time, because its cast is well chosen and it uses its comedic traits with great efficiency.
I won’t tell you if Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), the Pym matriarch, is found, but I enjoyed the urgency with which the plot moves towards her. It all builds up to a hilarious scene in which Rudd and Douglas hold hands, and then a touching one that moved me more than it should have. Goofy and serious, all at the same time.
There is not a single convincing moment in Two is a Family apart from the performances by Omar Sy and little Gloria Colston, who team up to form one of the more charming parent-child relationships in recent memory.
Sy plays Samuel, a yacht chauffeur in a fancy French beach town who enjoys playing around with lots of attractive women until one day an infant is dumped into his arms by an attractive woman he may or may not have bedded. He tracks the woman to London, where the movie kicks into gear and very quickly develops a crisis of identity.
The baby, of course, grows up to become Gloria (Colston), the frizzy-haired little darling who at once captures our affection. But the plot, which is a remake of the 2013 Mexican film Instructions Not Included, is built upon a network of contrivances and impossible scenarios that conflicts with everything the movie is trying to accomplish.
Take Samuel’s fraught arrival in London, for example. He runs around like a headless chicken, lost in translation, till he bumps into Bernie (Antoine Bertrand), a movie producer who happens to speak French and instantly hires Samuel as a stuntman after Samuel dodges tube traffic like an acrobat to rescue Gloria. Job, new friend, and a place to stay, all within minutes of arriving in a foreign land? Check!
Then there is the movie set Samuel works on, which is commanded by an English director (Raphael von Blumenthal) so out-of-place he seems to belong in a different kind of movie. Every time he speaks you can almost see the screenplay crumbling to pieces out of his mouth.
The apartment Samuel and Gloria build for themselves is equally unbelievable. It looks like an expensive loft that’s been retrofitted by Josh Baskin from Big (1988), with a gigantic stuffed elephant in the corner and a slide that connects the second-floor bedroom to a ball pit on the first. All it’s missing is a trampoline, and maybe Tom Hanks to jump about on it.
But it’s meant to be a comedy! – I hear you scream. Yes, that’s right. I should take everything with a lightness of heart. That would have worked if Two is a Family hadn’t also tried to be a very serious, heart-wrenching drama about broken families and past mistakes.
The core of the plot involves Gloria’s mother Kristin, played by Clémence Poésy, who suddenly reappears after abandoning Gloria to Samuel all those years ago. This could’ve been truly touching if the writers had made Kristin a woman sympathetic to Samuel’s situation, but no, she is instead morphed into a villain who for no real reason seems bent on tearing Samuel and Gloria apart. Alright, fair enough. Let’s say I buy that. Then the film ends with a coda so sickly sweet, so fabricated by the necessity to make us smile, that it undermines everything Kristin tries to achieve just a few scenes earlier.
Two is a Family is billed as a comedy-drama, and in the right hands it could have been one; gentle and tender but also hysterically funny. Instead it is like a bowl of mayonnaise that never emulsifies. And I haven’t even mentioned the extraneous subplots about Bernie’s homosexuality, a curious terminal illness, and a cover story involving Kristin as a secret agent.
Tag is almost a movie that is immune to criticism, not because it is good in any way, but because it offers very little outside of what it promises, which is that a bunch of grown men will chase each other across a city. Yet it’s not a total loss, because the actors who do the chasing are very charismatic, and at the end, when they’re sprinting through a crowded hospital, I actually felt a kind of thrilling liberation usually found on the playground.
The movie is inspired by the true 2013 Wall Street Journal article about a group of friends in Spokane, Washington, who have played the same game of tag every May for the past 23 years. But it isn’t simply a game anymore. The men have supercharged their methods so that old-lady disguises and surprise leaps from rubbish bins are considered supremely tactical. It’s become a kind of backyard military campaign, and on a very hidden, deeply infantile level, it seems like a lot of fun.
Unfortunately Tag isn’t as enjoyable, because even though its leading men successfully create the illusion that they’ve known each other for decades, there is nothing else to discover about them. Everything that happens is either a direct result or a direct cause of their game of tag. Even one of their wives, played by Isla Fisher, exists only to adorn the festivities.
Ed Helms is Hogan Malloy, who we first see accepting a job as a janitor even though he has a PhD in medicine. We soon find out his motive: he wants an opportunity to tag his good friend Bob Callahan (Jon Hamm), who is a big executive at the company and is about to be interviewed for the Wall Street Journal by Rebecca (Annabelle Wallis).
And so it goes. The plot is basically a never-ending series of physical gags in which Hogan, Bob and their old pals Chilli (Jake Johnson) and Sable (Hannibal Buress) try to finally tag Jerry (Jeremy Renner), the master of escape who has managed to remain untouched for nearly thirty years. My advice to them would be, if you’ve never tagged Jerry, and if after 23 years you’re still falling over tables and crashing through windows trying to get to him, you need an instruction manual.
And maybe Tag needs a manual as well. Directed by Jeff Tomsic, much of the action’s success stems from the actors, who don’t so much perform as yap their way from one sight gag to the next. Nothing they do or say is all that funny, nothing that happens is all that inspired, and by the end all we’re left to wonder is how many brain cells we’ve lost in a hundred minutes.
But I go back to that brief sense of liberation I enjoyed at the end. There’s something profoundly silly yet utterly charming about watching a bunch of grown-ups run like fools to avoid a simple touch, to abandon all notion of civility in favour of unrestrained fun. I don’t think I would’ve felt that with another cast, but Helms, Hamm, Johnson, Buress and Renner succeed in making me believe they’ve been best friends since childhood, and if you want to deliver a story 23 years in the making, that’s key.
Roger Michell’s Tea with the Dames is pretty much what you’d expect. It is a cordial documentary spent in the company of four utterly charming and gracefully weathered dames of the British Empire, who have spent their lives on the stage and screen and now appear on screen once again to speak candidly over cups of tea.
The ladies are Joan Plowright, who married the invincible Laurence Olivier in 1961 and retired in 2014 when her declining eyesight made acting impossible; Eileen Atkins, who surrendered a career in dance to recite Shakespeare; Maggie Smith, remembered by many as Professor McGonagall from the Harry Potter movies; and Judi Dench, who reached cinema late in life and then gobbled it up.
According to an early blurb, all four women meet regularly to brush up on each other’s lives. This time, they’ve let the cameras and microphones in, an allowance they start regretting before the afternoon’s over.
It’s clear almost at once that they are immaculately private women. Their first conversation is awkward and quiet, with careful side-glances and uncomfortable silences. But as the day draws on and the talking moves from room to room, conversations begin to flow, sporadically prompted by Michell somewhere off-screen.
The women cover nothing of any real importance. Nothing that cannot be read off their Wikipedia pages or learned from old footage. They discuss their early days at The Old Vic, the magic and woes of marriage, growing old, the burden of superstardom. Sometimes they curse and other times they tease one another. You can tell they’ve had these conversations before, many times, and are tired of having to repeat themselves.
But they are tremendous sports, and brighten the camera as only such heroes can. It is precisely that they’ve known each other for decades that makes Tea with the Dames such a fascinating and enjoyable experience. Sometimes we’re not even interested in what they’re talking about, but the language they employ and the humour with which they deliver it endear us to their shared experiences.
They talk a lot about Shakespeare and Laurence Olivier, the way the two seemed destined to work together. Plowright, helped about by crew members, laments being told once that she wasn’t pretty enough to act. Atkins, too, had such difficulties, and in some of her old movie scenes proves the naysayers wrong by resembling the spunky Jena Malone. All four women were young heartthrobs, and it’s almost reassuring to see how age and time may have eaten at their bodies but not their spirits. Smith in particular remains hysterically funny and sharp.
There’s not much else to say about a documentary in which the characters do nothing but talk. I can only express how I felt while watching them, and I think I had a smile across my face for most of it. I certainly laughed a lot. And if you have an appreciation for beautiful, fiercely forthright ladies who know how to command the screen, you will too.
Han Solo, the hero of Solo: A Star Wars Story, has been a mythic figure since 1977. He’s a charming, roguish hunk who plays by his own rules, scoffs at authority and occasionally obeys the commands of his heart. He’s also a character many students of Star Wars love dearly. But I suspect, after watching this new Star Wars adventure, many of those students will want to protest.
This is first and foremost a movie designed for fans of the beloved franchise. It doesn’t have the parts to satisfy the indifferent, except of course in scenes where spaceships swoop around maelstroms and blasters are fired left, right and centre. It’s a story that’s rooted in the history of the galaxy far, far away, and so every little detail matters. Or at least it should.
Solo tells the story of Han (Alden Ehrenreich), from his tortured existence on a tyrannical planet and blossoming courtship with fellow slave Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke), to his early success as a professional smuggler and ace pilot of the Millennium Falcon. It also answers such questions as the birth of his name, how he founded his eternal bromance with Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), and how he completed the famed ‘Kessel Run’ in 12 parsecs. I don’t recall ever asking these questions, or indeed wanting them shown to me in such unimaginative plainness, but there you have it. The myth has been stripped away from the man.
Doesn’t matter. Solo: A Star Wars Story is decent, honest fun. It doesn’t seem to have a care in the world, which is what any successful Star Wars movie should strive for. The plot is more basic than a vanilla sponge cake. The characters are scribbled in from bits and pieces of characters past. Its humour is nothing but second-hand gags. There is not a moment when you fear for anyone’s safety. There are weird planets, obligatory lounge acts and endless battles. It’s a movie programmed to keep you smiling from start to finish.
The battles, of course, are very well filmed and seem to occupy much of the movie’s runtime. Han, desperate to pilot a ship that will allow him to rescue his beloved from the clutches of bondage, teams up with a thief called Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), who himself is working for criminal mastermind Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany).
Their quest leads them to Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), an expert smuggler whose co-pilot is L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a radical droid that walks and talks like a very sassy black woman. She crusades for droid equality, an idea that makes sense today but otherwise rubbed me the wrong way completely. No-one goes to a Star Wars movie for lessons in social politics. At least I don’t.
But perhaps I’m speaking too much like a Star Wars fanatic and not giving enough weight to the positives? Possibly. However, I see no other way to discuss a Star Wars movie, since I’ve spent most of my life with them. They feed into each other and can no longer be judged independently.
This one doesn’t measure up to its predecessors in terms of stakes and depth – and it might upset diehard Han Solo followers who feel they’ve been duped by midichlorians again – but in the hands of Ron Howard it just scrapes through. Am I itching to see it again? I’m afraid not. Not even a little.
About midway through Killing Ground, the debut feature from Damien Power, we realise we’ve been taken for a ride. Here is a dark, bloody, disturbing picture, told out of order, about two scumbag weirdos who skulk around the woods of the Australian outback terrorising innocent campers. Why? Because they can, I suppose. If Mr. Power believes humans harbour within an inherent taste for senseless evil, his two villains here should be studied as specimens. I’m inclined to think otherwise, which makes Killing Ground a bit baseless.
I love a good thriller, and this is a confident and well-made one. But I need to make sense of the violence that happens within. Killing Ground can trace its ancestry directly to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), one of the cruellest and most eerie of films, but what it’s missing is the insanity of Chainsaw’s mayhem. That was a movie about a cannibalistic family in the middle of nowhere, driven mad by each other and the stench of death. The baddies in Killing Ground are neither cannibals nor insane. They are simply despicable, which might be the point, but Power doesn’t put a big enough stamp on it.
The plot traces three stories: one of Ian (Ian Meadows) and Sam (Harriet Dyer), a chemistry-free lovey-dovey couple set to see in the new year in a tent; the family of Margaret (Maya Stange), Rob (Julian Garner), Em (Tiarnie Coupland) and little Ollie; and the two psychos, German (Aaron Pedersen) and Chook (Aaron Glenane). It doesn’t take us long to realise the film is told non-linearly, with Sam constantly looking over at her neighbour’s tent, noticing it’s been vacant ever since she got there. The structure of the narrative sets the scene, and as it unfolds, pieces come together and some questions (not enough) are answered.
The film cedes its promising beginnings when it eventually becomes linear and turns into a run-of-the-mill slasher thriller in which the crazy bad guys pillage, rape, plunder and otherwise make camping very inconvenient for the enamoured couple. There is a shootout, a stand-off, a hostage crisis, some chases (both on foot and on wheels) and a very strange open-ended resolution that hints at a future more uncertain than the present.
And yet Killing Ground is a film with potential. It engendered uneasy feelings in me, with its gruesome depictions of torture and rape, but it lacks that ultimate spark of genius to make me think twice about my next camping trip. Both Pedersen and Glenane are convincing as menacing cavemen, and they share a few scenes in which they openly fret over the dangers of getting caught. But if they were truly mad, if they really believed in what they were doing, they would have flaunted their trophies for the world to see instead of making theirs a clandestine hobby. That would have brought some order to their chaos. It would have upped the stakes because they’d have nothing to lose. And I would have been completely sold.
Dunkirk must be seen the way it was meant to, in IMAX. Only then can the inescapable terror of the events that took place on that lonely French beach in the summer of 1940 be fully inhaled. This isn’t a movie that belongs on an iPad screen. It is built to be absorbed, not witnessed, and when absorbed in IMAX it becomes an experience of terror and claustrophobia, the likes of which I have not seen since Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013). To call this the greatest film of 2017 might be premature, but make no mistake, Christopher Nolan has crafted here perhaps the finest film of his career, one that may very well influence the future of war films the way science-fiction has forever been shaped by Gravity.
Dunkirk recounts the horrific events of the Dunkirk evacuation, in which nearly 400,000 French and British soldiers were stranded on a small stretch of beach, following the Battle of Dunkirk, while seemingly uninterested German bombers dispassionately picked them off in a series of air strikes. Their only route of escape was through The Mole, a narrow architectural protrusion from the shore at which British destroyers could berth and take on the wounded. But how do you successfully rescue thousands of soldiers when the Luftwaffe keeps puncturing your hull and U-boats send torpedoes crashing into your side?
It has passed into legend now, how the Royal Navy dispatched a flotilla of civilian ships to aid in the evacuation. Many civilians opted to pilot their own vessels, ready to brave violent forces they had never encountered before. One of them, Moonstone, is commanded by a laconic Mark Rylance, whose adventure across the English Channel is one chapter of Nolan’s three-chapter narrative structure. Rylance occupies The Sea. The futile evacuations at Dunkirk make up The Mole. An absolutely thrilling aerial dogfight for control of the French skies is The Air. Each chapter begins at a different point in time, gradually criss-crossing at various intervals until they converge at the apex to reveal the whole picture.
But the narrative structure is merely the music sheet. Nolan’s masterful tones and melodies drift off the paper and into the auditorium, so that what we get is a symphony of images and sounds that bring us right into the moments of despair. Dunkirk’s score is composed by Hans Zimmer, Nolan’s frequent collaborator, and this is his magnum opus. The score is dark and unrelenting, filled with thunderous bass lines, crescendos that mimic air raid sirens, and an insidiously omnipresent ticking. It fills the gaps the sparse dialogue leaves behind, creating an atmosphere of dread that threatens at any moment to burst at the seams. It is the pacesetter with which the entire film keeps in time.
I suspect Dunkirk will become a film ripe for technical exploration, and perhaps I will work on a video essay to further analyse how Nolan creates tension in a story that has been immortalised in British history and safeguarded by all who study the second World War. His skill reminds me of comedians who are able pull out old dusty stories from memory, shake them off and turn them into hilarious anecdotes. We know how the story of Dunkirk ends. We’ve read articles. We’ve seen documentaries. Nolan’s Dunkirk does exactly what a dramatic film should do: it eschews traditional storytelling methods in favour of spectacle so that familiar legends seem new. Writing, cinematography, musical score, production design and sound design all come together to create an unforgettable chorus of exhilaration.
But of course Dunkirk is not an enjoyable experience. How could any film about needless death be? But it brings you to a place in time and makes you witness not just the atrocities of war but also its potential for compassionate humanity. We know from history that the soldiers were saved, so there is hope for a happy ending. Unfortunately there will still be five years of fighting before the Allies can claim victory. So in a way Dunkirk is the prelude to a much more troubling period. It is bittersweet. An inverse victory, but a victory nonetheless.
I realise I haven’t mentioned or talked about the cast. Rest assured, they are all brilliant. I particularly enjoyed Farrier, the ace pilot played by Tom Hardy, who once again proves his eyes are capable of saying what his mouth cannot. Like his performance as the Batman villain Bane, he is a master of subtle expression. But Dunkirk is larger than actors. It is about a dreadful moment in history that invited a miracle and received one. No single performer could possibly hope to upstage that.
Here, at last, is a big Hollywood movie that puts its $150 million budget to work and reaps the returns. All the money seems to have gone into creating the most believable CGI apes the world has ever seen, but, being a war movie, there are also explosions, gunfire, and in a key moment, an avalanche. The skill of all these effects is so superior we don’t even notice them. Instead, we’re trapped by the charisma of Caesar, the chimp that begins as a prophetic militaristic hero and later evolves into a leader with biblical responsibility.
War for the Planet of the Apes is a crowning achievement, not just as a blockbuster to fill multiplexes but as a definitive seminar on the human condition. This is a compassionate film that is bookended by battles and filled in the middle with quietness and reflection. It is often sparse but never empty. There is a certain kind of commendation reserved for movies bold enough to string together extended scenes in which the only dialogue must be read on screen while computer-animated apes gesture frantically in sign language without boring us to tears.
The situation between the über intelligent apes and the equally protective humans has disintegrated into all-out war. Caesar (a phenomenal Andy Serkis in motion-capture) maintains a stronghold in the forest but hears of a land of milk and honey that rests comfortably away from the terrifying gaze of The Colonel (Woody Harrelson), a rogue commander who has had to make horrific decisions in his past and will no doubt have to make more before the movie’s end. The plot is essentially a quest of vengeance, after The Colonel mistakenly assassinates members of Caesar’s clan. But there is a grander scheme at play here. A fight for survival that will determine the balance of power on the planet. It’s all very serious stuff.
Director Matt Reeves, who established the tone of this franchise going forward with 2014’s utterly brilliant Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, approaches the grim material from a place of warmth. I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt so strongly for a character composed of pixels, yet Caesar is entirely gripping as the commander-in-chief of a species destined for peace. In the hands of Andy Serkis, he emerges as a well-worn figure of respect and stature; a keen tactician with a heart of gold and a face chiselled out of strife.
Harrelson is equally impressive as the anguished foe, fearful that a mutation in the disease, which nearly exterminated the human race, will drop him down a rung on the evolutionary ladder. Some humans are already exhibiting sub-intellect behaviour, like the little girl Nova (Amiah Miller), whose presence in the film is a neat little warning that the only way for humans to coexist with the animal kingdom is if our higher thinking is severed.
This is that rare blockbuster in which all the pieces fit snugly together and the entire picture makes perfect sense. It may not be as fresh as Rise of the Planet of the Apes or as emotionally complex as Dawn, but why should it be? There is a magical moment in which Nova crosses a military courtyard to feed undernourished prisoners, in full view of station security, and somehow manages to evade capture. It is a gentle touch, a powerful miracle of war, and one of the best scenes in one of the best movies of the year.
Baby Driver is a slam-bam roller-coaster ride filled with pop tunes, screeching tires, machine guns and, of course, lots of kisses. It’s the kind of heist movie that isn’t so much about the heist as about the people who execute them. They’re a mishmash of assorted character types, some deluded, some tragic, some just plain nuts. But they’re all necessary; the various sections of Edgar Wright’s orchestra from left field. This is a crazy, thoroughly enjoyable movie by a director who’s in full command of his craft and totally revelling in it.
It starts with a bang: A high-speed getaway after a bank robbery. The driver is none other than Baby (Ansel Elgort), a sunglasses-wearing, jacket-loving young chap whose motor skills are so good he makes the Fast & Furious crew look like L-platers panicking at a roundabout. He also has a thing for music. Lots of music. 24/7. Wherever he goes, whatever he does. It is the beat to which his life grooves. There is a lovely moment where he has to restart a song on his iPod because robbers begin a job late, disrupting his rhythm.
Much is made of the soundtrack (indeed, it punctuates just about every line of dialogue, every scene change, every gunshot), but I was more enthralled by the sheer audacity of Wright to marry so many influences into a bubbling cauldron of cinematic delight. Like all his movies, Baby Driver is written with meticulous precision. It draws its narrative from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011). It steals romance from Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Baby has mommy issues, just like Peter Quill from the Marvel movies. And yet none of it feels unoriginal. By rooting the character drama so firmly in the innocence of its leading couple, Baby Driver becomes something uniquely its own. A kind of modern day fairy tale told through a lens of crime.
Kevin Spacey plays Doc, the chauffeured gangster who recruits Baby and orchestrates his devilish schemes; he is reliably intimidating and droll. The two best performances belong to Jamie Foxx as Bats and Lily James as the diner waitress Debora. Foxx eerily blurs the line between acting and real life. His trigger-happy, psychotic thief is so convincingly bonkers I suspect Elgort and the rest turned up to work each day wearing Kevlar. He is the volatile variable Wright flings into the cauldron, content to let him steer the story as he sees fit. Next to him, the vengeful Buddy (a manic Jon Hamm) seems almost domesticated.
But it’s not enough that these characters are broadly drawn and impressive; what they say and how they say it is often what keeps the entire machine oiled. Wright has a knack for words, not in the same way as, say, Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson, but his dialogue has a way of kidding itself. Watch how a conversation in a car about code names and real names becomes almost poetic. Or another in which three bad guys have to wear Halloween masks of Mike Myers instead of Michael Myers. Or how Wright shrewdly slips in a reference to Monsters, Inc. (2001). It’s kinda bewitching.
I have enjoyed all of Wright’s pictures. There’s an energy about them. A certain insouciant charm that runs from the page to the screen. It is clear he is a visual storyteller, a director not content to explain his ideas but to showcase them through cinematic technique. He is the grand puppeteer. He has all the strings. He knows exactly what they do, and not for a second does he ever tug the wrong one.
Spider-Man: Homecoming finally appreciates and sympathises with the duality of Peter Parker. He is a scrawny, geeky, overcompensating high school junior who is ignominiously forced to split his ego in two when a radioactive spider inadvertently gives him a hickey. Gotta hate when that happens. Tobey Maguire played him in the early 2000s to varying degrees of success (I still cringe at the memory of his jazz club soiree). Andrew Garfield took over in 2012 and turned him into a beefcake supermodel. Now it’s Tom Holland’s turn, and to my delight he emerges as the most effective Spider-Man, simply because he gets the role and understands that to be the best Spider-Man, he first has to become the sorriest Peter Parker.
Parker is perhaps the most tragic figure in all the comic universe. Yes, Bruce Wayne lost his parents. Clark Kent phone home. Tony Stark has… well… he has all his billions. But Parker stands upon that great divide; he is a full-time superhero masquerading as a full-time teenager. One cannot give way to the other, and to see Parker attempt to balance atop the two poles of his life is simultaneously exhilarating and heartbreaking. He will miss out on all the proms, sacrifice romance and effectively flush his social life down the toilet while he swings from rooftops and battles mechanical foes. The saddest part: A part of him just wants to be normal again.
Homecoming gets all this just right. It is a tragic story of a young, spritely lad with a heart of gold. The story is told in such a way as to make us think we’re watching the Saturday Morning Cartoon version of an adult action movie, but really it’s a John Hughes drama with flashy explosions, and that’s okay. If we don’t believe Peter Parker’s story, we’re sure as heck not going to believe him when he’s dressed in a skintight leotard.
Holland’s got infectious charisma. His Parker is such a loveable dork we’re unsure whether to hug him or give him a noogie. His best friend is Ned (Jacob Batalon), a fat kid who shares my unbridled passion for Lego and predicts quite accurately that he will evolve into Spider-Man’s “guy in the chair”, y’know, the Q-type figure from the James Bond films. There are other kids in the high school, including the bully Flash (Tony Revolori) and the weirdo Michelle (Zendaya). It’s a bit of a stretch that all these far-flung characters would find themselves on the same school decathlon team, but there you have it.
The team travels to D.C. for a panel tournament and Parker uses the excursion as the perfect alibi to foil the plans of Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), a middle-class blue collar worker who feels betrayed by the country’s wealthy and decides to sell alien technology to interstate mercenaries and mobsters. He’s also fashioned a flight suit that looks like a pair of metallic wings, and favours a bomber jacket with one of those furry collars. One would think he was — eh-hem — a vulture.
In the great pantheon of comic villains, Toomes is among the most impressive. He’s also a man with everything to lose, which, to him, makes his cause just and his motives lethal. I only wish some of his fight scenes with the spider had been shot in a more comprehensive manner. Too often director Jon Watts opts to film energetic scenes in the dark and have them edited as if they’ve run out of footage. I miss the good old days when fight scenes were captured in wide shots, in respect of the stunt performers, and chopped up as little as possible.
No matter. Spider-Man: Homecoming stays true to the idea of its hero. I enjoyed the way the writers turned him into a superhero practically under house arrest. He’s Tony Stark’s ward, except Stark is off doing Starky business and leaves the poor kid in the rather irresponsible hands of his colleague Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau). I admired Parker’s zest for romance (he develops a crush on the leader of the decathlon team, Liz, but later succumbs to the duties of his alter-ego) and his enthusiasm for keeping the streets of New York crime-free. I thought the relationship between Parker and Ned was fun and goofy, in a way that inspires real 15-year-olds to be fun and goofy. This is Spider-Man the way I’ve always wanted Spider-Man to be. Energetic, pithy, irrepressibly tough, and very, very sad.
I swear I’ve seen this movie before. It had the same grumpy old widower. It had the same unhealthy obsession with vintage automobiles. It had the same progress through loneliness to an eventual communal acceptance. In fact it might’ve been the same movie, except I’m pretty sure it starred Clint Eastwood, a man not known for speaking Swedish.
A Man Called Ove, therefore, is little more than old news reprinted onto fresh paper. It arrives with nothing new or insightful, stays for a couple of hours and leaves empty-handed. We are meant to sympathise with Ove, but he’s so impossibly cantankerous, so intent on being morbid that it becomes distracting. Eastwood in Gran Torino was also cantankerous, but at least he had the decency to stand by his conviction that, yes, he really did hate those pesky Asian neighbours and their loud dinner parties. Ove is never really sure how he’s meant to feel about anything — no, not even about his dead wife. His convictions are so tenuous that before long we see the tapestry unravelling; this big old lug, feared by everyone, is really not such a bad guy after all.
Ove is played by Rolf Lassgård, who is not a large man but commands the screen with a large presence. It’s an impressive performance; a story of this sort commands its main character to traverse a cascade of emotions and behaviours. He’s always cranky, which is easy enough to portray, but he’s also furious, regretful, ponderous, stubborn, and in one little magical scene, cheekily playful. We get his character. We just don’t get why he does the things he does.
One of the film’s running gags (?) is Ove’s conveyor belt of failed suicide attempts. His wife Sonja (Ida Engvoll) has just died, see, and he has vowed to join her as swiftly as possible, except, for reasons that only exist in movies of this sort, he keeps getting interrupted just as he’s about to kick the stool, pull the trigger, suffocate, smear his heavy frame against the front of an oncoming train, etc. “You’re absolutely terrible at dying!”, jokes his neighbour Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), which, if you stop to consider it, isn’t all that funny. I think if you’re intent on dying, you’ll die, like that old librarian in The Shawshank Redemption who found a ceiling, a noose, a chair, and death, all in one scene. To have as many as five attempts disrupted as if on cue is simply unbelievable.
The neighbourhood in which Ove lives is populated by the regular roundup of usual suspects: The young couple whose dog is infatuated with soiling Ove’s garden; an elderly pair who’s in constant need of assistance; the overweight layabout who’s twice as friendly as he needs to be; and of course the new neighbours, who move in across the driveway with — yes, you’ve guessed it — two little girls. Children are important in these kinds of movies, because without them the grouchy old fart will never realise what a big softy he is on the inside (there’s even the obligatory babysitting scene in which Ove not only puts the kids to sleep but also tidies up the house à la Mary Poppins). Everyone in his circle exists merely to peeve him and later to celebrate as he rejoins society. They serve no other purpose and provide no meaningful insight to the life of what the filmmakers clearly believe to be a complicated and sympathetic figure.
A Man Called Ove will win few hearts and change few minds. It has strong performances and a winning charisma in Lassgård but doesn’t do enough to break away from the shackles of the genre. I found myself marginally bored in parts, especially when the plot skips back to when Ove is much younger and deep into his courtship with Sonja. It doesn’t gel as cleanly as it should. It doesn’t hit the right notes. Many times, it is simply confused. When Ove attempts to hang himself, it is dark and unsettling. Then when there’s a sudden knock on the door, and Ove grunts and groans in annoyance as he loosens the noose and steps off the stool, we’re meant to laugh ironically. Somewhere in between a vital link is missing.
