A calamity of inspiration and ingenuity, along with banality and over-indulgence, Gore Verbinski’s chilly, Euro-malevolent A Cure for Wellness is the tonal opposite of the brash, giddy Americana of his previous feature, The Lone Ranger, but they are undoubtedly kindred spirits. Three years after having written it, I remain wracked by my review of that earlier film, lost as it was in its own incredulous eccentricities and tonal spasms that destabilized it to its very core. But I now suspect that I and other reviewers were as misguided as the film was, and I now appreciate The Lone Ranger – at great cost in cognitive-dissonance to myself – as not only an undeniably peculiar blockbuster but a boisterously, almost radically singular one. Not a film as compulsive, fanatical, and personally tormented as, say, Speed Racer, to name the reigning misunderstood blockbuster of the past decade, but the rare tentpole that stands up in the name of individual vision even in the face of individual blunder. A Cure for Wellness similarly missteps all over the place, but it is also a riposte to corporate homogeneity, the caliber of visionary medium-budgeted film that used to populate the multiplexes off and on but is now nearly extinct. Situationally, then, A Cure for Wellness often feels like a sudden discovery, a giddy “they spent how much money on this?” curio that suggests Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean good faith will never run out. Continue reading
Review: A Cure for Wellness
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Early on, James Franco’s ostensible-lark The Disaster Artist seems oddly generous, even generative, with its themes, as though willing to interrogate questions ranging from auteurism, to film-set camaraderie (or lack thereof), to intentionality, to interpersonal relationships and the cost of friendship. In other words, director-actor James Franco’s film adaptation of Greg Sestero’s tell-all book about the making of the cult anti-classic The Room has ideas both for and about Tommy Wiseau, director and star of The Room and all-around human enigma, here played by Franco as well. Which means that it escapes, at least for a duration, the obvious narrow corridor of an in-joke about a film that is, itself, a joke. The early-goings flare with at least mild possibility. They glint with shards of not only genuine cinematic joie de vivre but dueling absurdist tragedies. One tragedy, Sestero’s, is a modern day James Dean story of a rebel with a cause, and the other is of a man who at least believes himself to have a cause. 
Stan-up comedian Kumail Nanjiani plays a somewhat fictionalized version of his real self in the breakout romantic comedy of 2017, The Big Sick, a film with the disheveled, low-key vibe of a personal anecdote, a story you tell to your friends about how you and your partner met. How they, in this case Nanjiani and his wife Emily Gordon (fictionalized and played by Zoe Kazan here), come across one another at Kumail’s stand-up show in Chicago. When? Sometime after the Pakistani-American Kumail has feigned interest in and given up on numerous potential planned-marriage partners from his parents Azmat (Anupam Kher) and Sharmeen (Zenobia Shroff). And sometime before Emily contracts a life-threatening disease that inadvertently forces Kumail in the hospital, after their break-up no less, to sign her into a medically-induced coma. 
The lion’s share of films about racism tend to denature race’s own construction, neutralizing its existence in time and space as a material-but-conceptual reality that is institutional and structural in nature. They miss that racism is assembled, modeled, fashioned, and implemented rather than simply felt or present as an assumption. But even films aware that race is constructed often neutralize its instability by fleeing from its paradoxes: that race is arbitrary yet all-encompassing, fragile yet galvanized, collapse-able and implacable in one. These films empty race out of its peculiar qualities, favoring one of two constructions that overlook the dialectical rather than dichotomized nature of race as material and ideological in one. In the first construction, they may consider race as a simple accident that recuses the film from having to critique democracy wholesale. They consider the material presence of racism not as a symptom of a democratic syndrome that begets race but as an addendum, alternate, or holdover that democratic theory has not successfully stamped out, not for want of trying. Racism becomes a rogue insurgent in democracy and America rather than a foundational element. Alternately, films may define race as a more immanent problem for America, but only as husk of abstraction, a foundational accident in American democratic theory but one which plays out purely at a theoretical rather than material level. Thereby, these films do not have to expose and express the way race is reified in practice. They dare only to understand democracy as a concept, not as a material and temporal process. 
Notionally a point of departure for playwright-turned-writer-director Martin McDonagh after the just-dandy In Bruges and the eccentric but flippant Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri not only turns McDonagh’s wandering eye to America – either Middle American or the South, depending upon your placement of the pointedly liminal Missouri – but to a deepening of themes, a reckoning with untouched subjects and untapped potentials. The story of an implacable mother, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), who erects three incendiary billboards chastising the local police for their failure to solve the rape-murder of her daughter, Three Billboards is, as we say, going for it. At the same time, I’m not entirely sure the film does go for it, which is where its problems commence.
The high-brow-baiting artistry of Paul Verhoeven’s Elle may seem like atonement for the defiantly low-brow American films he unchained on America between 1987 and 1997. But beneath its harsh austerity lies a film as extraordinarily carnal, deliciously primitive, and totally untamed as anything he’s yet directed, a work that shreds pulpy shards of equivocal, morally-grey human desire in every direction. Make no mistake: those wandering into the domain of emotionally-clipped art-cinema must discover that even the highest-raised brow is not enough to protect you from the Verhoeven-touch. Returning after a decade out of commission, the director utilizes art-cinema’s pretensions and impudently explode them, propelling the niceties of French cinema away in a centrifugal mass of uncertainty. A morally flammable film, Elle catches fire because of rather than in spite of its chilly, seemingly-antiseptic demeanor. 
Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman isn’t as multifaceted a multi-character story as A Separation and it cannot match About Elly as an eloquent study of how personal identity is as much a construction by other people as an effusion of your own will. But although, thriller credentials aside, it is a mild retread of Farhadi’s two masterpieces, it is still extraordinarily thoughtful cinema on its own terms, as bold as it is quietly assiduous. As with all of Farhadi’s films, an extremely precise narrative of minutiae manifests multitudes of even more incisive observations on Iranian society more broadly. And while the first 90 minutes are merely solid Farhadi, the apex of the drama – maybe the acme of Farhadi’s career – is a three-character mini-play where audience sympathy, empathy, and desire become malleable clay for a director for whom each moment is a glint of new suspicion or a twitchy shiver of dramatic reorganization. Farhadi has compassion for all his characters, but he treats interpersonal quandary as an abyss of revelation in a drama we must navigate rather than merely watch. His film is a diamond, not because it glistens but because every visual frame or character lens destabilizes the drama and emanates a new image of existence. Or a new point of view, shining with the blinding, brilliant light of its own remarkable negotiation of personal perception, of seeing things anew such that old modes of thought are now futile, permanently disabled, the refuge of the mentally-obliging. The Salesman is a wonderfully pliant creation. It’s also somewhat unevenly sculpted, but we’ll get there as well. 
On the surface, Mother! Is yet another example of a director aiding and abetting their own egomania with an anti-egomaniacal screed, a peculiar form of self-appreciation doled out by a director happy to explore the myriad ways in which directors are oppressive dictators at heart. This would mark Mother! as the latest bastard child of Hitchcock’s self-critiques in Rear Window and Vertigo and Hollywood’s extraordinary propensity to control the terms of anti-Hollywood filmmaking by making films which mock itself. But, to give credit where credit is due, the thoroughly undigestible Mother! erodes even that auto-critical safe harbor. Many films – far too many in the 21st century – retreat into easy mockery and adolescent self-reflexivity, the sort of trivializing reductions and post-modern hipness popular among the Tarantino-generation (although not always Tarantino himself). But, although it never stabilizes into any clear critique – perhaps not although but because it never coheres – Darren Aronofsky’s self-propagating fire of a feature film at least doesn’t treat its self-critique as an excuse to act like it really has any idea what is going on at all within its halls. 
Somehow even less easily theorizable than David Lowery’s A Ghost Story and no less opaque in its horror-adjacent vernacular, Oliver Assayas’ Personal Shopper is ghost story as a polyphonous brew of constantly revivifying altered states and endless self-reconsideration. Although relentlessly frigid, it is a remarkably alive motion picture, provided that life is not a quality of camera motion or character action but a quality of stylistic vanguard-ism and restless thematic wandering, of a film with many competing selves vying for screen-time. It boasts multiple, personal tonal parallel universes, from murderous malevolence to rootless dejection to diaphanous elegance, each a viable film in its own but none enough for Assayas, who refuses to give in to the kind of stability any one mood would require. His film is astonishingly vivacious, but its life essence is not found in a candy-coated palate or schizophrenic, paid-by-the-cut edits but the chaos of modern indeterminacy. It’s found in the creeping tingle that life, like this film, thrives in constant decay and alteration, exists in perpetual erasure, is a veritable momento mori of moments that happened just before but are fundamentally different from the now and cannot be recreated. 
Writer-director Greta Gerwig’s snappish voice and self-confident-but-self-deprecating demeanor – so clearly developed after a decade of starring roles in independent features – lingers over every scene in her directorial debut, Lady Bird, even though she herself does not appear on camera at all. Certainly, Gerwig’s style clearly has antecedents in the Mumblecore movement – Lady Bird really isn’t the case of a truly new voice being cast out into the cinema, although it harbors no pretensions about being one – so perhaps I’m less singularly bowled over by her work her than some other critics. (It brings to mind the fact that few people have actually seen the many films Lady Bird owes a debt to). But with such fearless and sharply articulated characters and a jagged, spasmodic visual and tonal style, the film skitters about and casually subverts any hypotheses audiences may bear about justified or rational character responses to the world around you. Acerbic without being mean-spirited and incisive without dipping its fangs in life-sucking venom, Lady Bird isn’t meaningfully “new” – Gerwig’s perspective in the form of other beings has existed in cinema for decades waiting to be heard – but Lady Bird is a thoroughly great, quietly complicated variation on existing themes nonetheless. 
The Long Take 