Jacob's Ladder (2019 remake)

 

Jacob’s Ladder (remake) (2019)

Dir. David M. Rosenthal

Written by Jeff Buhler, Sarah Thorpe, “story by” Jake Wade Wall, Jeff Buhler, based on a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin

Starring Michael Ealy, Jesse Williams, Nicole Beharie

 

 

Since the original JACOB'S LADDER is one of my very favorite horror movies of all time, I can't say I approached this (loose) remake with a lot of optimism; more like morbid curiosity. Unfortunately it doesn't even offer much to be morbidly curious about. It's not bad so much as it fails to ever be even a little good, and the ways in which it fails to be good are mostly pretty boring. It's rarely outright incompetent, but at the same time there's just no evidence whatsoever that anybody involved wanted to be here or had any clear idea why it would be worth telling this story other than to ride the coattails of a more famous movie which still isn't even that famous.

 

That is, anyway, the only reason I can think of that this would be called JACOB’s LADDER. It vaguely echoes some plot elements of the original –the titular Jacob (Michael Ealy, MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA) is an American soldier back home after a foreign war (Afghanistan rather than Vietnam) and gets mixed up with an experimental drug that leads him into a paranoid, hallucinatory journey. Similar enough that you’d probably notice, but not specific enough that they’d have to worry about lawsuits if they just ripped it off. But let’s be honest here, it’s not like someone came up with a brilliant story and just later realized it kind of superficially resembled the scenario for a cult flick from 1990. Obviously somebody picked up the rights to the remake, grabbed some gigging writer (Jeff Buhler, already responsible for THE GRUDGE REMAKE [2020] and PET SEMETARY REMAKE and the screenplay for MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN and THE PRODIGY and recently STUDIO 666) and said “write a story we can title JACOB’S LADDER so that a small percentage of people will watch it thinking it’s the good version, and a handful of horror die-hards will check it out due to a sense of morbid curiosity.” And then when they needed re-writes and the original guy didn’t want to bother, they handed it to a personal trainer or niece or somebody that the producer knew (Sarah Thorpe, no other credits) and just said “try and cut out the stuff that sounds expensive.”

 

This is not the type of scenario that one could reasonably expect to produce great art. But it could still probably be better than this. Mostly the movie as a whole is just sort of drab and pointless, but I guess the script is maybe weak enough to qualify as outright bad, although in a bland way rather than an exotic one. The story itself is built around a pretty tepid mindfuck (and pretty nonsensical should you be inclined to try and ask pissy questions like "wait, if that's what was happening, what have I been watching up til now?") though at least it's a different mindfuck than the original. (I said "different," not "better" although I'll readily admit that the twist in the original is the worst thing about it). The fact that it's very stupid is a problem for a movie this relentlessly dour, but the bigger problem is more fundamental: it fails to ever establish a convincing baseline reality --starting with Jacob and his wife’s (Nicole Beharie, SHAME) pristine, antiseptic home with its demure, compliant newborn (!) who cries exactly once and never while anyone is sleeping-- which renders its later attempts at surrealism a dismal nonstarter. Can't disrupt reality if I never for one second believe in these characters even at their status quo.

 

And it doesn't get more convincing as the situation escalates. Early on, Jacob watches as his brother Isaac (Jesse Williams, CABIN IN THE WOODS --yes, their names are Jacob and Isaac) dies in front of him. Years later, Isaac turns up alive, apparently within walking distance of Jacob's house! And Jacob's response is... mild surprise and annoyance? He basically just drops him off at his house and goes about his business. At no point does he or his wife freak out or seem to find this shocking and inexplicable and demanding of answers. He mumbles something that the paperwork must have gotten mixed up and that's that. And Ealy (who I consider to be a terrific actor, but obviously needed a little more direction here) doesn't help matters with his disappointingly tepid performance. Very quickly, this guy is experiencing totally insane shit, and his reaction never seems to rise above "mildly perturbed." I'm sorry, but putting a five-o'clock shadow on Michael Ealy does not make him look tormented, it just makes him look hotter. And he's already borderline too hot to take seriously in the first place.

 

So yeah, it's a bad script, but it's at least committed to its dumb twist, and could, maybe, have been salvaged by some real directorial flair. But if any director was going to be able to pull that off, David M. Rosenthal --who must be a real charming guy, considering how often in his career he's been able to pull amazingly overqualified casts for completely anonymous DTV genre fare-- ain't the one to do it. The original JACOB'S LADDER is a masterclass in gritty, nightmare-fueled paranoia; this has a perfunctory sort of visual slickness that makes it feel like a gloomy car commercial, and the best it can manage in the nightmare department is that lame thing where someone's face will suddenly distort into a SCREAM mask and they’ll shout "boo!" (a trick I was already mocking as shamelessly unimaginative back when DEAD BIRDS did it like a thousand years ago). Creating a paranoid thriller is all about using the tools of cinema to create a heightened, anxious mental state, and this is just utterly, woefully unable to do it, instead drifting between hacky jump-scare scenes and languid, clunky backstory which is so rigidly built to service the goofy twist that the movie can barely even pretend to be a straight horror movie. Its problem isn't really that it's a lunkheaded cash-in trading on the good name of a classic; it's that it's just kind of boring.

 

Props for the scene near the end where he has sex with the Angel of Death, though. If the whole thing were that eccentric and melodramatic, we might actually have something here.

The Secret of Sinchanee

The Secret Of Sinchanee (2021)

Dir. and written by Steven Grayhm

Starring Steven Grayhm, Tamara Austin, Nate Boyer

 

I watched THE SECRET OF SINCHANEE as a Hail-Mary style random Tubi pick, based entirely on "hey, looks like there's some kind of monster or a giant bird or something on the poster." I knew nothing about it, had no reason to assume it was good, and much reason to assume it was probably garbage. Inadvisable, certainly; self-destructive, probably. But it is the kind of utter recklessness which is my legal right during Half-O-Ween, that magical time of the year when you can watch stuff you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole even in October.

And despite the consistent level of shocking doggerel that I post about here, there are movies even I wouldn’t bother with, and this would normally be one of them. It belongs to a broad category of about nine hundred million indie horror flicks which were seemingly released direct to the internet without a word starting in the late ‘naughts. They all look reasonably professional --mostly since cameras and sound equipment have evolved so much that it doesn't take a tremendous amount of skill to shoot a movie which looks basically competent-- they all have perfectly professional acting…* and not one of them has anything even the least bit interesting in it. Unlike the raucous, anything-goes zero-budget hokum of yesteryear, they feel respectable and responsible and crisply professional, movies that were made at the behest of career councilors, rather than fevered nightmares forced onto the screen by delusion madmen with delusions of grandeur. All of them, I assume, were cranked out by the self-reinforcing cycle whereby streaming services require content --a volume business wherein it doesn't particularly matter what content-- and consequently there's always money available for a first-time filmmaker looking to pad their resume to crank out a bland, mercenary horror flick about whatever, just to prove they can handle bringing a shoot in on time and under budget, and hopefully use it as a springboard to move on to more interesting things. You sell the result to Netflix or Tubi or somebody who buys 'em in bulk, sight-unseen, then they slap a generic title like THE UNDERNEATH or DEMON HOUSE or something on the cover along with a gloomy-looking picture of a scared lady cowering in an all-grey abandoned house, and presto, chango, content has been created. An algorithm has been fed. And there it is popping up when you search for "horror" on Tubi, adding quantity but no actual value to your lengthy selection process. Unless, of course, you take the plunge and just click anyway, at which point, well, you can't say they didn't warn you.

THE SECRET OF SINCHANEE doesn't exactly buck the stereotype, but it does feel at least a little more committed than I was expecting. Far from a mercenary effort to churn out content, it's almost a vanity project, a showpiece for producer-writer-director-star Steven Grayhm ("Russ -- Party Boy" in WHITE CHICKS), one of those longtime working actors who has had a perfectly successful 20-year career without ever quite hitting the big times. The surprise here is that his big Orson Welles moment reveals him to be a more-than-capable director, producing something with an unflashy but effective atmosphere, generally strong performances, and steady, intentional pace. It has an old-fashioned vibe, a serious-minded movie for adults without being pretentious or insisting it's about anything other than the pleasure of a good spooky story. With its snowy New England milieu (the lived-in, real-world locations help immensely to give it some weight and texture) and stately, slow-burning paranoid vibe, it kind of reminds me of a low-concept X-Files monster-of-the-week episode, which I consider a good thing. Or of the recent, grievously under-valued THE EMPTY MAN.

Unfortunately, the sturdy direction ends up being in service of a script that never takes off. The plot is one of those simultaneously undernourished and overbuilt things which can be summed up in a single sentence, or summed up in five paragraphs, and nothing in-between will quite work. Suffice to say, then, that it’s about this dude Will Stark (Grayhm, solid enough in a role which mostly just requires him to silently look uneasy) who is forced to move into his recently-deceased fathers’ house, and quickly begins to get mind whammy’d by the sinister forces which were also presumably behind a horrific tragedy from his youth. Grayhm approaches this bedrock-simple setup with a bizarre, almost lackadaisical indirectness, however. The movie maintains a holding pattern, circling becoming a possession movie without actually doing it, for a surprisingly long time, and in the process drawing in two detective characters (Tamara Austin [The Walking Dead] and Nate Boyer [former Seattle Seahawk and US Army Green Beret, DEN OF THEIVES]—both doing unusually fine work to make their characters feels worth investing in), who have a complicated, somewhat resentful relationship but still manage to work together while they gradually, um… It’s a little hard to explain from here. There’s like, this whole thing where someone Will used to know as a child has been murdered, and for some reason the detectives think Will is the killer and he acts sort of suspicious even though we know he’s innocent (unless he isn’t and it’s just not very clear?) and it all relates to this cult who worship an ancient American Indian spirit of death, except that actually they’re the descendants of colonial Satan-worshippers, and they want to kill the last members of a magical (and fictional**) Indian tribe called the Sinchanee, who are described as “a peaceful mixed-race tribe discovered to have a unique immunity to diseases brought to the new world” who were “liberated” when “at the turn of the 18th century, French and Native forces attacked an English Settlement at Deerfield, Massachusetts.” For some reason, this resulted in a situation where “for years, locals have reported unusual paranormal phenomena that to this day…. remain unexplained.” And that scans because everyone keeps getting haunted by this evil little ballerina girl, except that I think she’s Will’s sister who was horribly murdered when he was a child? And also there’s an evil mirror? And a haunted piano?

I honestly have no idea what’s up with any of that, and it’s the main problem with the film: it’s well-directed and well-acted, but this story is a complete mess, cluttered up beyond belief with characters it doesn’t need (the two detective characters contribute literally nothing to the plot, are not even present at the climax, and everything in the movie would have worked out exactly the same if they had not been there) and a jumbled backstory it is completely incapable of making use of (despite the four impenetrable paragraphs of explanatory text at the start of the movie, which are then basically reiterated verbatim by another character in the final act, none of the stuff about the Sinchanee being invulnerable to smallpox or an 18th-century French-and-Indian raid or a secret pagan cult actually end up mattering all that much. There is definitely a cult hanging around, I guess, but I was never clear on exactly what their deal was or why they would want to possess this one dude instead of just killing him. And it never ends up meaningfully altering the basic possession narrative at work here anyway. It would pretty much be exactly the same story if he was just haunted by the ghost of his crazy dad or something. Although at least the masks are pretty boss. Might get back into organized religion if they started handing out badass skull-faced masks on major holidays.).

 And even if you can get past all the clutter, it kind of bungles the structure, puttering about, skirting the edges of a possession story and framing it as a mystery for so long you keep assuming there's gotta be some kind of twist -- but there isn't, it's all bedrock-standard possession stuff, it’s just bedrock-standard possession stuff buried in a haphazard pile of all sorts of mostly irrelevant bric-à-brac, none of which adds enough texture to be worth it. For a while it seems kind of interesting to have two parallel stories, one about this nice guy getting haunted, and the other about the detectives who wrongly think he's a killer, but you'd need them to eventually intersect for that to have any kind of payoff, and since that doesn't really happen, it's all for naught. Instead the whole thing just feels fatty and dawdling, floundering around and throwing out characters and worldbuilding without a clear idea of how any of it could be constructively woven together into a satisfying narrative. It sort of feels like it was originally meant to be a TV mini-series --complete with all the meandering subplots and side characters and time-wasting that format entails in this current cultural moment-- all edited down into one way over-burdened movie, but also not edited down quite enough, because the flippin' thing is damn near two hours long. And there's just not enough payoff here, in terms of whammy or in terms of simple imagination, to justify 115 extremely unhurried minutes.

Still, it’s trying, and for a good half of the movie --when it was still unclear that all this was going absolutely nowhere interesting-- I was pretty into it. If it’s a swing and a miss, at least there was a swing, and that's about the best case scenario for a Tubi blind watch, so I'm inclined to be generous.  

And speaking of generosity, the movie ends with text saying it's part of a project to employ veterans and their families? So even if doesn't land as a horror classic, at least it succeeds as a New Deal-esque WPA project. Homies gettin' paid and all that. Maybe that's the real Secret of Sinchanee?

*One of the great mysteries of our time is the utter vanishment from this earth of that great 80's and 90's style bad acting that was full of enthusiastically alien line readings and brisk energetic nonsense. What happened? Where did it go? Did the dour seriousness of the torture-porn years just kill off our capacity for frivolous artifice? Is this the next step in human evolution, that we're just all gloomy and sober all the time?

** Grayhm is descended from the Weskarini Algonquin on his father's side, according to IMDB, so I'll try not to get too weirded out about his making up a new tribe who are vaguely implied to be magic, I guess? Anyway, at least they're the good guys, and the colonialists are the bad guys, or so the dialogue says although none of that ever really plays out in the story itself.

SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978)

 

SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978)

Dir. Michael Schultz

Written by Henry Edwards

Starring Peter Frampton, The Bee Gees, George Burns, Steve Martin, Donald Pleasance, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Earth Wind and Fire, Carel Struycken

There should be a law.

Once upon a time, some rich asshole bought the rights to 29 Beatles songs from Sgt. Pepper and Abby Road for an off-Broadway jukebox musical, which apparently was a thing people did back then (in fact, this particular asshole, one Robert Stigwood by name, had already done something similar with 1977's SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER). And of course, when he discovered that the docile US population was unwisely willing to tolerate this kind of chicanery, he decided that while he had the rights, he might as well grind out a movie, too. It would tell the classic story of Sgt [sic] Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a four-piece brass band who became beloved during their stint in World War I, and who returned to their hometown of Heartland, USA, to remain popular through the decades until they died in 1958. Then, although the movie is not explicit on this point, it appears their bodies were stuffed and displayed in the local museum along with their magical instruments(?), which is where the story picks up with the grandson of the band's leader, Peter Frampton (The Simpson Season 7 Episode 24), who dresses like the Lawnmower man and has the Bee Gees as a backing band.

If it seems weird to you that a filmmaker would start a movie called SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND by introducing a WWI-era band of that name, only to immediately kill them and skip ahead to 1978, strap in, kid, because that will seem like airtight narrative efficiency by the time we get to a British comedian who lives in a van with two robot gimps and obeys the commands of a psychedelic video screen which will ultimately task him with stealing the beloved magical instruments of the original Sgt [sic] Pepper's band, as part of a dastardly plan by a mysterious secret society to utilize the instruments' magical powers to transform the world's youth into mind-controlled automatons in boy-scout uniforms. Meanwhile, the Peter Frampton ensemble must experience a meteoric rise to fame and be tempted by rock and roll excess before the movie forgets about that entirely and they have to go and recover the magical instruments from the secret society's various colorful henchmen.

Or, at least, I'm pretty sure that's the gist of what happens; parts of this story are directly explained via the narration of George Burns (!), (playing a "Mr. Kite," and yes, they will literally play a Benefit For Mr. Kite before the credits roll) but when he's not explicitly describing what's happening on-screen, good luck figuring out what the fuck any of this is supposed to mean. You see, Burns speaks the only actual dialogue in the film; everything else in the story is communicated entirely via the medium of Beatles covers. Which could, in theory, be made to make some sense, I suppose; I don't recall Julie Taymor's 2007 all-Beatles musical ACROSS THE UNIVERSE struggling with basic comprehensibility. But the problem here is that these particular Beatles songs are, by and large, a selection of the band's most specific and direct storytelling, and they are absolutely and unequivocally not telling this particular story. Not one of these songs is, even in the most vague, elliptical way, about battling the evil henchmen of a brainwashing robot cult to regain a suite of magical brass instruments, and yet they are our only means of trying to discern the basic plot of a movie which is, to the extent which it can be meaningfully said to be about anything, about battling the evil henchmen of a brainwashing robot cult to regain a suite of magical brass instruments. 

We are often faced, then, with songs in which only the title or a few tossed-off lines have anything at all to do with what we're actually seeing; witness the bizarre dissociative fugue that occurs as Steve Martin (!) speak-sings his way through "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." It is true that he is playing a character named "Maxwell Edison," and he does appear to incidentally own a silver hammer, but otherwise not a single word from the rest of the song --and everyone in the movie always sings the whole song-- has a single goddamn thing to do with what we're actually watching. The lyrics are our only window into what the story is supposed to be --remember, there's no dialogue whatsover outside of the very occasional Burns narration-- so there's no way to just ignore them, and yet he's singing "Maxwell Edison majoring in medicine / Calls her on the phone / Can I take you out to the pictures, Joan?" despite the fact that there is no Joan, no phone, and not one goddamn thing he's talking about has anything to do with the movie we're watching.

There is a character called "Strawberry Fields," and never mind what a fucking insane name that is for a human, the real problem is that she sings the song "Strawberry Fields Forever". You know, the one which begins, "Let me take you down, 'Cause I'm going to / strawberry fields." I'm, I'm! As in, “I am!” First person singular! Never mind that the rest of the song is meaningless gibberish in this context anyway, you know what character would make more sense singing "I'm going to strawberry fields"? LITERALLY ANYONE NOT ACTUALLY NAMED "STRAWBERRY FIELDS." Good Lord, people, just fucking think about this for just two goddamn seconds before you start shooting it!*

And then, above and beyond all that, there's the crippling issue that the production is set, for no reason in particular, in America, despite the soundtrack of what might be the most aggressively British pop songs in the history of music. The lyrics are constantly talking about Lancashire, "ten-bob" notes, lorrys, getting sacked, and what have you --hell, both Frampton and the Bee Gees are British!**-- and yet the movie absolutely insists that this is a home-grown American affair. It's madness! The movie offers absolutely no explanation about why this at-a-minimum third-generation American band is suddenly singing about Lancashire, and doesn't even appear to notice that it's odd. 

(For the record, though, the funniest mismatch between screen and lyrics is when Barry Gibb, singing "A Day In The Life," looks at the camera and solemnly narrates that he "Woke up / got out of bed/ dragged a comb across my head." He looked like this at the time: 

Yeah, uh, Barry, I think there was probably a little more to it than that.)

Very occasionally, the movie's baseline idiocy bleeds into outright psychosis in a way which is at least visually interesting; a scene where devilish (?) Label boss Donald Pleasence (!!) speak-sings his way through "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" while seducing our boys into signing a record contract*** gradually degenerates into a opulent nightmare Nicolas Roeg would be proud of (the film was shot by five-time Academy-Award nominee Owen Roizman, of THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE EXORCIST fame!). The gaudy, tasteless overkill of it all sporadically brushes up against some kind of giddy camp, although it can also seem weirdly chintzy and small-scale for something so obviously hoping to overwhelm with excess. Still, a few sequences feel frisky and odd enough to entertain; Martin's rendition of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" at least has the benefit of some energetic choreography which the film almost entirely lacks (Patricia Birch, of GREASE [but also GREASE 2] is credited, but the songs are mostly performed by rockers who don't dance). And I guess I'm incapable of not being charmed by seeing Alice Cooper (!) as the head of some kind of mustachio'd brainwashing cult, however little actually comes of it.

Mostly, though, this is a literally unbelievable trainwreck of incomprehensible madness, and rarely even eccentric enough at that to be fun. Mostly it's just exhausting. Even the covers are so strikingly similar to the originals as to hardly feel exotic; every now and then they get a little bold, as when the band gradually twists "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" into some kind of weirdo disco workout, but mostly the result of Frampton and the Bee Gees covering this material is simply faithful reconstructions of the originals**** with distinctly wussier vocals. And the Beatles weren't exactly Pig Destroyer to begin with, so when I say these covers are wussier, you can believe me that you're going to notice. After a while, suffering through George Burns, Alice Cooper, Steve Martin, and Donald Pleasence speak-singing actually becomes a bit of a relief. 

Before the film's release, Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees announced: "There is no such thing as the Beatles now. They don't exist as a band and never performed Sgt Pepper live in any case. When ours comes out, it will be, in effect, as if theirs never existed." Fortunately that did not turn out to be the case; if anything, the opposite is true. Still, despite its relatively low profile in modern times, there's no getting around it: SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND THE MOVIE does exist, and we just have to reckon with that fact. And it is a sobering one. This must surely be the most sobering film to ever be made by people who were most emphatically not sober. 

But lest you start to pity the film for its dizzying ineptitude, remember: it made that Aerosmith cover of "Come Together" a hit. So however much it suffered, it deserved much worse. 

* Also, Earth Wind and Fire are on hand to perform "Got to Get You into My Life." But here's the thing: they're not actually a part of the plot or anything. At one point, our heroes just go to an Earth Wind and Fire show, and hear that one song. I'm not complaining though; at least Earth Wind and Fire get to walk away with their dignity marginally intact, and besides, stopping everything to go to an Earth Wind and Fire show is the only action Frampton and Co. take in the entire film that makes these jokers seem in any way relatable or sympathetic.

**The Bee Gees were all born in Manchester, although they rose to fame after moving to Australia in their teens.

*** Which, uh, they want to sign, and in fact came here to sign, and never regret signing, so I don't know what's up with the sinister tone here.

**** Original Beatles producer George Martin is on board here in the same capacity, presumably just for the opportunity to spite his old band by exactly recreating the lush production they were so hostile to.

The French Dispatch

 

The French Dispatch (2021)

Dir. Wes Anderson

Written by Wes Anderson, story by Anderson, Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, Jason Schwartzman

Starring everybody

 

You know, it took me a long time to get on the Anderson train. Back in 2012 (good lord, ten years ago!), when I reviewed MOONRISE KINGDOM, I summarized my feelings thusly:

"...despite his obviously enormous talent for cinematic language (everything from camera framing to narrative construction to music), he often cripples the experience with his obsessive desire to shoehorn in his particular fetishes for children’s plays, bathrobes, tents, pajamas, board games, irritating people, etc. Not that I fault the guy for having a recognizable --even iconic-- style; my problem is that once you get past the quirky trappings and arch performances, you often find that there’s not really much else there. Anderson is so busy swaddling his characters in quirks and quips that he forgets to fill in the inside. Consequently, watching his films can be a somewhat hollow experience."

At that time, THE LIFE AQUATIC was the only one of his films I really loved, and since that's the one film that most of Anderson's fans seem to really hate, I just figured I wasn't on this guy's wavelength. There’s something slightly oppressive in his early movies, burdened as they are by lethargic pseudointellectual ennui. THE LIFE AQUATIC leans into that somewhat with a Noah-Baumbach-assisted screenplay that flirts with outright miserabilism --which to my mind makes for a more potent contrast with the whimsical visuals-- but otherwise, I find his early run of films uncomfortably airless and gloomy, and without the psychological depth which would make that feeling productive.* Which is not to say bad, per se, just not really my jam. I could respect the specificity of Anderson’s auteurial vision, but it seemed clear that his work just wasn't for me. And especially after his tendency towards suffocatingly ornate sad boi manchild moping reached its zenith with the infuriatingly dégagé DARJEELING LIMITED and gratingly bijou FANTASIC MR. FOX,** I was ready to cut my losses and move on.

But things change, and to my increasing surprise I've liked and eventually loved pretty much everything he's done since. And it's not because he backed off on the style; if anything he doubled down. But crucially, after the insufferable DARJEELING, Anderson seemed to back away from his previously inescapable obsession with quirky, emotionally stunted bourgeois intellectuals, and the subsequent movies have all been a little less suffuse with mawkish navel-gazing. More important, they have increasingly introduced little flickers of actual conflict (THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, in fact, even sports the vague outline of a thriller plot), which the movies take just seriously enough to give them some much-needed stakes and dramatic punch. It makes them feel livelier and more playful, and consequently the heavy layer of style feels less embalmed. A good example of how a slight tonal shift can make for an enormous difference in the way we react to a film.

Interestingly, none of that does much at all to address my original complaint that Anderson's films are fussily stylized fetish filmmaking with a hollow emotional center. It just reframes that fussily stylized, fetishistic hollowness on a more appealing and entertaining subject, which turns out to be more than enough to get me back on board. I don't know if Ralph Fiennes' affronted comic melancholy in GRAND BUDAPEST is meaningfully deeper than the mopey ennui of the central trio in DARJEELING LIMITED, but I can definitely say it's a lot less annoying. And that puts me in a far more accommodating mood regarding the aforementioned style.

Cue FRENCH DISPATCH, which is probably about peak Anderson. I mean, I really don't know where he could go from here; if it's possible for a Wes Anderson film to be more Wes Anderson-y than this, it's certainly not possible for me to imagine it. Here we see his career-long aspiration to remake the world into a kitschy impeccably manicured diorama reach what surely must be full bloom; every shot, every performance, every set, every word of dialogue, every detail of mise-en-scène has been meticulously crafted until it has no direct connection to reality whatsoever, and instead feels like an artfully constructed living dollhouse meant to evoke the feeling of, though never the actual substance of, a kind of mid-century expat intellectual artistic ethos. Like Tarantino, Anderson has burrowed so deep into his own particular fetishized aesthetics that he has altogether abandoned even the pretense of reality; the movie exists in a fictional French city (“Ennui, France;” great name, no notes) during an extremely fuzzy time period which is expressed entirely through aesthetics rather than history (the film's style cues place the various segments between the interwar period and the early 70's, but their connection to any actual real-life event is so slippery that it’s not even worth trying to pin down). Likewise, some of its characters are vaguely based on real people, but not in any direct way: more like they were adapted from a half-remembered anecdote he heard once at a dinner party, and then thrown into fictional situations which themselves vaguely reflect the works of a mélange of other artists and art forms. We’re accustomed to art which utilizes an element of artifice to try and depict a familiar reality; THE FRENCH DISPATCH entirely reverses that sentiment, using a few disconnected elements of reality to try and conjure a familiar artifice.

And even that is perhaps too direct; it is, essentially, a simulacrum of an aesthetic, a warm nostalgia for something never actually experienced, the world recreated as a pastiche of a parody of a cliché of a rosily-remembered yesterday -- perhaps the inevitable destination of an artist who has always seemed most comfortable navigating his way back to human experience through dense layers of arch signifiers. At any rate, it deliberately puts the maximum possible distance between the viewer and anything remotely resembling lived reality, cheerfully breaking realism (as we see early on, when a waiter climbs a Rube Goldberg machine of stairs with impossible rapidity) or outright abandoning it altogether (as the film's final segment replaces an action sequence with an animated cartoon). And yet, somehow, it doesn't feel entirely like the fastidiously overbuilt novelty that it probably ought to; it feels like an ornate stained-glass window, something blatantly artificial which filters the light of genuine human emotion into its own fussy patterns, but still unmistakably lets it slip through.

And this is especially fitting given the film's loose but unmistakable focus on art itself. What better way to ruminate on the meaning and value of the human creative impulse than to place the artifice squarely in the foreground and let the humanity play out behind its unpredictable refracting surface? To whit, we are presented with three stores (yes, it’s Anderson’s first anthology film!) all connected through the writings of three journalists working for the New Yorker-esque French Dispatch, a highbrow periodical with an eccentric staff (vaguely inspired by real journalists; the film ends with a dedication to “Harold Ross, William Shawn, Rosamond Bernier, Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin, A. J. Liebling, S. N. Behrman, Lillian Ross, Janet Flanner, Lucy Sante, James Thurber, Joseph Mitchell, Wolcott Gibbs, St. Clair McKelway, Ved Mehta, Brendan Gill, E. B. White, and Katharine White.”) The first story finds a wealthy huckster (Adrian Brody, hey, nice to see you’re still alive!) trying to get rich by hyping the art of the incarcerated, criminally insane painter (Benicio del Toro); the second finds a reporter (Frances McDormand) getting a little too personally involved in a quixotic (and somewhat unfocused) student rebellion; the third finds yet another reporter (Jeffrey Wright), invited to sample the Ennui police department’s fine cuisine, instead becoming a witness to a diabolical kidnapping plot.

Amazingly, all three vignettes (and two much shorter ones which form something of a framing narrative) are pretty great. Man, what was the last anthology you could say that about? The student rebellion feels a little slighter than the other two to me, but maybe it’s just because I’ve never seen any of Godard’s “revolutionary period” films (LA CHINOISE, TOUT VA BIEN, etc) which it’s obviously riffing on. In the other two sections, though, Anderson seems unstoppable. In the first, Benicio de Toro proves an inspired addition to his stable of actors, bringing just a hint of live-wire danger to Anderson’s quaint little world***, and balanced to utter perfection by steely Lea Seydoux as his domineering model/muse. The episodic nature ensures things stay brisk, and the jokes are varied and sharp, ranging from egghead meta-humor (the actor who plays the young version of del Toro’s character [Toni Revolori, “Marvel’s Flash Thompson”****] physically enters the frame with del Toro to symbolically hand the role over) to out-and-out slapstick (there’s a wheelchair fight which is probably second only to BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY) all in the service of a sublimely delivered shaggy dog story about an inconveniently located fresco. Highly delightful, note-perfect stuff.

It is, however, the final segment that really lingers with me; not for the plot, necessarily, which is a silly, twee little lark and marks one of the few times the movie strays close to being a little too cute for its own good (the animated sequence, obviously riffing on Tintin comics, has the unfortunate effect, also felt in GRAND BUDAPEST, of defanging a potentially exciting sequence rather than complementing it), though it all looks too breathtakingly ravishing in high-contrast, ultra-manicured black and white to stick in the craw. No, the key here is its central performance, which finds Jeffrey Wright as a loquacious, openly gay reporter (with shades of James Baldwin[!]) reflecting back on an incident from his early days. The story is a silly thing, but Wright’s performance isn’t. He’s fucking phenomenal, taking one of Anderson’s characteristically chatty intellectuals with a melancholy side and going way beyond the material to turn it into something profoundly rich and rewarding.

There’s a moment where he’s been sitting in jail for a few days, having been busted in a raid on a gay club. Bill Murray’s editor character comes by to bail him out and offer him a job, and he’s so moved by this unexpected good turn that he sheds a tear, to which Murray returns with his monotone catchphrase, “no crying.” It’s a good scene in itself, but Wright is so spectacularly emotive that his performance fleshes the whole incident into something much deeper. Without him saying a word about it, we suddenly get an insight into the true plight of this fast-talking caricature. He’s black, American, intellectual, and gay, far from home without any real prospects, an outsider everywhere on Earth, maintaining a charming façade which no one even cares enough to probe beneath into the vast gulf of loneliness that underlies his confident pose. The tiny gesture of goodwill and kinship he gets from this eccentric old white man is maybe the first unsolicited bit of kindness and help he’s received in years, the first time he doesn’t have to just pretend to be happy, and all he can think to say is “thank you” – but that line is loaded with so much pain and relief and naked gratitude, and then the simultaneous realization of how pathetic it is that such a small things means this much to him, and the profound hurt that comes rushing back to him in even that microsecond of vulnerability where he’s let his protective persona down… it’s two words, but it contains all that and much more. It’s still a deeply affecting gut-punch even recalling it now, weeks later. Wright is an actor I’ve seen in plenty of things, and he’s always professional, but this is a whole other level: an astounding performance, funny, complex, and heartbreaking without giving even an inch on the silly, mannered quality which is essential to Anderson’s work. A masterful comedic performance, with an underlying of pathos that deepens the comedy, all within the bounds of a very specific and distinct character totally unlike any other I can think of. And all that, in one segment of an anthology film which isn’t even directly about him, and with a framing narrative on top of it!

It's Wright who really takes this thing to the next level, (he’s working with Anderson on his next film too, thank god!) but the fact that the movie is capable of receiving a performance like that without getting swamped by it says something about the surprising sturdiness of a work that might superficially seem like a whimsical little bauble. Anderson’s tetchy fetish for a particular visual style is imminently parodiable, and sometimes seems a little limiting (maybe even self-limiting; I think it’s telling that even with an exciting car chase sequence he seems unwilling or unable to engage with it on an unironic level*****) but his core fundamentals have only gotten stronger. There’s a sequence here where Wright wanders through a maze of different rooms in a sprawling, impossibly labyrinthian building in what appears to be one long take with the camera gliding seamlessly around him to frame each new location with casual eloquence. And I mean, in any other movie, we’d have spent 2,000 words just talking about that. Anderson may be a little rigid, may be a little formulaic, but you can’t argue with the pure mechanical precision required to pull something like that off and make it look easy. And the way that messy human emotion spills through the cracks of his ossified style is too precise to be accidental; this is clearly the work of a artist who is not simply hiding behind a defensive wall of protective aesthetics (like Wright’s character!) but one who is using those aesthetics to refract emotions. To focus them, distort them, filter them, perhaps, but nevertheless to use the miracle of artifice to clarify something very real. It’s kitschy, maybe; frivolous, perhaps, insufferably whimsical to some. But it’s not hollow.

And what else is art supposed to be for, anyway?



* All this, I should, mention, ignores his debut BOTTLE ROCKET which is so clearly an outlier within his filmography that it doesn't feel like a useful point of comparison.

** Particularly galling given how frisky and savage the beloved Roald Dahl book it's ostensibly adapted from is. I adore Dahl and freely concede that my hatred of the Anderson’s wussy adaptation possibly blinds me to the movie’s quality as a separate artistic object.

*** Really a first for Anderson; he’s worked with tough guy actors like Bruce Willis, Gene Hackman, and Harvey Keitel (!) in the past, but this is surely his first character who seems able to back up his bluster with actual menace. He’s not just a gruff teddy bear, he’s an actual unbalanced murderer. Also, while I have you down here, I just want to remind you how hilarious it is to imagine a deeply unimpressed Gene Hackman just spending every single day on ROYAL TENNENBAUMS relentlessly bullying fancy-pants little Wes Anderson until the guy was scared to even come into work. I mean, obviously, bad behavior, sure, but in this case objectively comedy gold. In fact, Wes Anderson should really make a movie about it. Get Hackman back out of retirement to come play himself and make Anderson suffer through the whole thing again to create the greatest movie ever made.

**** Whatever that means. I thought The Flash was a DC thing? Who knows anymore.

***** Though this is the first Anderson film which has some noticeable stirrings of actual horniness, to its immense benefit. But I guess you can’t really make a pastiche of French cinema without some horniness, so maybe he had no choice.

Miracle on 34th Street

 

Miracle on 34^th Street (1947)

Dir. and written by George Seaton, Story by Valentine Davies

Starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn, Natalie Wood

 

Is it possible to be both a universally acknowledge classic and still misunderstood and underrated? I submit to you that MIRACLE ON 34^TH ST (the 1947 version, obviously) is exactly that. You’ve probably seen it. Along with the 1951 Alastair Sim SCROOGE and IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, (and maybe throw in the actually-not-very-Christmas-heavy WHITE CHRISTMAS) it’s one of the few movies from the first half of the Twentieth Century which is still required Holiday viewing for many people, myself certainly included. And of course, it’s easy to see why: it’s a delight through and through, charming, whimsical, and, it must be said, exceptionally funny. Not just in the polite, slightly patronizing way we often talk about classic old comedies, where you acknowledge that I’m sure it was very funny back then; no, to this very day, even after watching it dozens of times over the years, I still frequently laugh out loud.

But even so, I suspect that it seems so effortlessly charming that most folks just take it for granted that it’s simple. When I mentioned to a hip cinema pal that this was my favorite Christmas movie, he kind of rolled his eyes at me. When I protested, he was dismissive: ‘Oh, they think Santa Claus is crazy, it’s like they’re putting Christmas on trial!’ he jibed, insisting the movie is a thin parable about the importance of belief, with all the religious implications for the nominally Christian holiday that accompany such a reading. That is, in fact, exactly where the horrendously ill-conceived 1994 John-Hughes-produced remake goes with the material, ending (SPOILERS for the 1994 version) with a Judge, apparently in a fit of religious ecstasy, suddenly declaring that because a dollar bill has the words "in God we trust" on the back, Jesus is real, and therefore the old man in his courtroom over an assault charge is legally Santa Claus, case dismissed.

As a confirmed non-believer, this isn’t the kind of moral message I’m likely to find especially appealing, and my friend found it very amusing that I’d swallowed this old-fashioned conservative hokum. But I maintain that he is quite wrong, at least in the case of the 1947 version (hereafter, “the good version”). While the topic of belief is definitely in the air, I would suggest that the end result is anything but a simple argument for blind faith. It has, in fact, a remarkably secular outlook, especially for 1947 – but even more so, it has a surprisingly unsentimental, sharp-eyed view of the world. Its genius is to somehow entwine a sardonic perspective on human smallness with a subtly bemused appreciation for our fallible, perhaps even hubristic inclination to imagine that we’re capable of better – and to take both perspectives seriously.

The thing that really makes MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET special is that it is, in a lot of ways, a legitimately cynical movie. It sets itself up as fiercely modern (by 1947 standards), plunging us immediately into the world of a hard-driving executive who is also a single mom (Maureen O'Hara, RIO GRANDE, known for her many on-screen pairings with John Wayne, which makes it odd that her co-star here is named John Payne. Ain’t life too funny sometimes?). In 1947, this was certainly an unusual, perhaps borderline scandalous, situation, especially for a Christmas movie. But the movie does not judge her for it; in fact, it is openly impressed by her tenacity. Sure, by the film’s end she will wind up safely in a heterosexual romantic relationship, with a restored nuclear family. But, crucially, she ends up there on her own terms. Not once does the movie suggest that her life or femininity is stunted by being a tough businesswoman and single mother. Her story has been one of triumph over adversity, and O’Hara is the absolute embodiment of a flinty force of nature, unwavering, indominable, always in control, always thoughtful about how she wants to arrange her life.* And not in a cheesy Hallmark Christmas Movie kind of way, although the standard plot about how the uptight businesswoman finding love with an easy-going small-town artisan would almost certainly not exist without her; no, she is happy, is fulfilled. She enjoys her job, she loves her daughter, she doesn’t need anything else, although right from the start she’s certainly open to the idea of romance, if one comes along that fits into her world. But she can be comfortable in looking for love because she’s confident that she can deal with anything that life could throw at her. The only challenge she has yet to overcome is the idea that life could be anything other than adversity to be beaten.

Which is, of course, the dramatic core of the movie. Friendly, eccentric Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn, THEM!, giving one of the most irresistibly charming screen performances of all time) waltzes into the lives of savvy, driven professionals –tough businesspeople, clever lawyers, canny politicians—and simply stands there, refusing to play their game, refusing to acknowledge that the world is a hard place where only the strong survive. Cheerfully --but resolutely-- refusing to admit that sanity is defined by your ability to beat the other guy. By his very existence, he challenges the defensive posture O’Hara and the rest of the modern world accept as basic common sense.

Of course, he is crazy. Harmless, certainly; likeable, certainly; but nevertheless utterly delusional. The movie loves Kris, but never seriously flirts with the idea that he might literally be a mystical figure. But his delusion allows him to do the one thing that no one else in the movie is immediately able to do: see the best in people. Not that it’s an easy thing to see! Indeed, the movie expects people to be myopic, self-interested hustlers most of the time. Likes them for it, even; respects the funny, sharp-eyed canniness of the conman. But it also believes firmly that deep down, just about everyone would like to do the right thing, would like to be warm and caring and generous. They've just resigned themselves to the fact that they don't live in a world where that's possible. And most still get on pretty well! People live practical lives, learn to enjoy the madcap rat race, and don't spend a lot of time moping about how the world is. The "Miracle" of the title is the way the jolly machinations of one kindly, delusional old man upend that world and get people to actually behave humanely to each other, in the most unexpected way possible: by playing on that very cynicism.

From the money-grubbing department stores that are stunned to discover that putting people before profit actually boosts their business, to the lazy postal workers who end up saving the day by pawning their inconvenient mail off on someone else, virtually every good deed done in the movie is done out of cynical self-interest. In fact, a great deal of the movie's considerable joy is about watching feisty lawyers and salesmen try to get one over on each other, so much so that the movie's abrupt pivot to a cat-and-mouse courtroom drama for the final act feels much more inevitable and smooth than it probably has any right to.

And yet, there's something deeper, too; the "miracle" is that, when these people are suddenly, unexpectedly offered a chance to do the right thing for purely selfish reasons, something else happens. Sure, they do it because it’s the smart move for them, the same thing they do every day. But this time, it also happens to be the right thing, and that surprises them, wakes something inside them, something that they'd mostly ignored or forgotten about. They're glad to do the right thing. It makes them feel good, gives them something they didn't know they were missing.

It's a small thing, really; there's no suggestion that it's going to change their lives forever and they're going to give away all their possessions and become enlightened. But there's something very near magical about the way the cast uniformly seems startled and giddy about finding good inside themselves they didn't expect. When business tycoon R. H. Macy (Hollywood bit player Harry Antrim) is forced to take the stand to improbably testify in support of the sanity of a man who believes himself to be Santa Claus, his first thought is for his own business: he suddenly imagines tomorrow's newspaper headlines trumpeting his abandonment of the old man. This obviously cannot be allowed to happen, and he stammers something noncommittal. But then, pushed by the cross-examining attorney, he's asked to directly answer if he believes "Mr. Kringle" is actually Santa Claus. This time, he doesn't think about himself, but thinks about the kids, and how happy his Santa made them. If this old man is crazy, he doesn’t want to be sane. Suddenly the imperative for self-preservation actually overlaps with doing something genuinely good. And then he answers with confidence: "I do." And he’s not just relieved, he’s elated. He remembers something about himself, a feeling he’d probably just written off long ago as unrealistic sentimentality. But there is it, overwhelming him, real as the nose on his face. It's a moment of serenity in a world which offers so few chances for such moments.

The movie is full of little moment like that, tiny, impossible victories for the human spirit. And for once, they cost nothing – they require no sacrifice, no hard choices. For once, good is just sitting there, waiting for you to take it. You don’t have to worry that the world is going punish you for showing your humanity, you can just give in and see how you like it. Most movie fantasies play on our desires for selfish things –what if I suddenly had power, or good looks, or wealth?—but this one offers a more unusual fantasy: what if I could just do the right thing? Wouldn’t that feel great? It’s not realistic; the movie knows –puts it right out there in the text, even—that you’re going to be faced with a million chances to be kind and compassionate, and you’re mostly going to have to just ignore those options and be practical and do the sensible thing and get on with your life. You can’t give away all your possessions, can’t just drop everything and help someone in need, can’t devote every moment of your life to saving the world. But maybe it’s valuable just to know it’s in you to want to. Life gives you so few chances to just indulge in that fantasy that you can forget, can think that you really are tough and hard and cynical deep down, rather than just pretending to be so you can get by. And of course, you do have to get by, and that’s OK. But MIRACLE ON 34th STREET is a gentle reminder that there’s something better in you, too, even if the world doesn’t give it a chance to fully emerge very often. You never really doubted it. It’s just your silly common sense.

It helps that the cast is without exception terrific, it helps that the script is unshakably lively and funny.** But if the movie is a miracle, it comes out of its unique blend of snarky cynicism and warm humanism, and its certainty in the value of giving people a chance to do the right thing, even if it's only for a moment. I don't know any other Christmas movie which manages to strike such a perfect balance between unsentimental satire and genuine good-heartedness, and maybe no other movie of any kind. No wonder it’s remained so beloved for three-quarters of a century, during which time a lot has changed and much culture has become difficult to relate to. People may not completely understand it, but they can certainly feel it. If it’s a testament to the power of belief, it’s a testament to a very particular belief, and one which I sincerely hope will never be completely extinguished, no matter how much countervailing evidence life piles on the scales: that the world may push us to be callus, but somewhere deep inside, we’d rather be kind. If the spirit is willing, even if the flesh is predictably weak, there is always hope.  

 

Merry Christmas.

 

 

* In particular, O’Hara’s ability to furiously turn away from someone who's angered her is powerful enough to melt steel, and I doubt any human could survive having it used on them. These are just special effects, kids, or poor John Payne would be splattered all over that wall.

 

** Even if pivoting to a courtroom drama and abandoning almost the entire cast in the last act is such an insane thing for any script to do that even one this savvy can't entirely avoid some turbulence, but whatever, it makes it work.

False Positive

 

False Positive (2021)

Dir. John Lee

Written by Ilana Glazer and John Lee, story by those two plus Alissa Nutting

Starring Ilana Glazer, Justin Theroux, Pierce Brosnan

 

I like Broad City quite a bit, so when I heard co-star Ilana Glazer had a horror movie, you bet I was on-board. Frankly, I’m more bullish on comedians making horror movies than the artistes who we have lately allowed to run roughshod with the genre; at the very least, they tend to have a more innate desire to entertain. I mean, it worked out pretty well for Jordan Peel, right? If top-tier satirists are feeling drawn to the horror genre, I’m at least game for it, even if horror-comedies have a pretty uneven track record (and anyway, it’s not like normal horror is exactly famous for its consistent high quality). Plus, we can always use more movies written by women; though horror has never exactly lacked in female representation on-screen, it’s rarer that a female star also serves as co-writer, so that’s a nice bonus.

The pedigree is worthy, then (along with Glazer, we have director John Lee, a longtime trench worker in weird comedy like Wonder Showzen, Xavier: Renegade Angel, and The Heart, She Holler, along with episodes of Broad City and Inside Amy Schumer and such, and also director of PEE-WEE’S BIG HOLIDAY). This time, however, the resulting movie leaves a little to be desired. FALSE POSITIVE (which is not something this review will be) tells the story of Lucy (Glazer), who, along with her vaguely-defined husband Adrian (Justin Theroux, noted former Jennifer Aniston boyfriend, and hey, he was also in MULLHOLLAND DRIVE!) is having difficulty conceiving. Somewhat reluctantly, she goes to see Adrian’s old med school professor, leading fertility expert Dr. Hindle (Pierce Brosnan, Treehouse of Horror XII) who quickly manages to induce pregnancy, but at the cost of the fact that he’s, like, openly evil, and so Lucy begins to suspect that something sinister is afoot, which would certainly explain all the ominous music on the soundtrack.

This is, then, pretty obviously a riff on ROSEMARY'S BABY, if by "a riff" you mean "the exact same movie except with iPads and a way lamer ending." It correctly understands that ROSEMARY'S BABY is about subtle subversion of female bodily autonomy --an important topic which is every bit as relevant today as it was 1968, sadly—but in trying to articulate that theme, it simultaneously lays it on too thick and too tentatively, emerging with a “message” movie whose message is artlessly blatant but also lacks much bite. It grasps the idea of womens’ autonomy being maliciously undermined in small ways, but the only thing it can think to do with that concept is to run through little sketches which demonstrate it. The doctor addressing her husband first and only then turning to the person with the womb. Her theoretically-supportive boss constantly asking her (the only woman at the firm) to pick up everyone’s lunches. Her friends patronizingly blaming her anxieties on “Mommy brain.” And so on, again, and again, and again, and again, and again, each time turning to us to say “See? See?” until at the end the villain walks out and says “My evil plan was to maliciously undermine womens’ autonomy!” and the movie says “What we have just seen is a movie exploring the idea that womens’ autonomy is maliciously undermined” and we roll credits.

Which is not in itself inherently a problem. When you’re as mad as this movie is, sometimes a direct approach is exactly what’s called for, a righteous hammer rather than a delicate ballet. Thing is, though, for a movie this absurdly on-the-nose, it’s also weirdly shy. The story keeps insisting on hints: small moments, insinuations, careless slights and minute faux pas. But since it is also absolutely petrified by the very notion that anyone watching might miss the point for even a single second, it insists on giving you the same tiny hint over and over until it’s sure you’ve got it. Which is to say, every single scene in the movie –every single one-- involves someone saying something subtly disempowering while Lucy looks quietly hurt. Little things, but little things which contain a clear message. All frustrating and –for many women-- probably extremely relatable slights which sketch out an invisible conspiracy every bit as malicious and far-reaching as the Satanic one in ROSEMARY’S BABY, but far more mundane in practice: just a loose affiliation of good ol’ boys who, despite their pretense to the contrary, will never, ever take women seriously. But if the movie convincingly depicts these little moments where the mask slips, it also never escalates into bigger moments, basically just repeating the exact same scenario with the exact same spooky insinuation for the entire none-too-hurried 92 minutes.

The result is basically MICRO-AGGRESSION: THE MOVIE… but played as if it was THE OMEN, complete with bloody hallucinations and ominous images set to music just this side of THE SHINING. That’s a disastrous mismatch, because it refuses to allow us to simply empathize with Lucy over how rude everyone is to her. Everyone is kind of a prick constantly, but the movie’s tone insists that this is a matter of apocalyptic evil rather than a perpetual annoyance. And the very mundanity of the situation makes that hard to square, despite the insistent score (from Yair Elazar Glotman and Lucy Railton, making their feature debut) and the moody, dread-soaked camerawork (by Pawel Pogorzelski, Ari Aster’s guy).

It simply pushes too hard with too little, making it impossible to stay on its side. Whereas ROSEMARY'S BABY was content to let the little red flags add up and speak for themselves, FALSE POSITIVE is functionally incapable of letting things speak for themselves, and therefore strikes a tone of absolutely -- dare I say?-- histrionic panic right from the get-go, making its equivalent emphasis on little red flags completely self-defeating. Despite the quietly mendacious insinuations the movie clings to, there’s no room at all for ambiguity; even if we ignore the aggressively spooky tone and miss the opening few minutes (which flash forward and reveal this will come to a bloody end*), Brosnan is practically twirling his mustache from his first scene. He’s obviously a villain, the film is practically screaming at us that there’s evil afoot, and it assures us this will end in blood from the very start, so we don't ever experience the genuine horror of tumultuous self-doubt that might actually strike a nerve (though obviously that's where the script wants us to go), and instead this lady just seems like a chump for taking the world’s bullshit and looking secretly wounded over and over. She’s so mopey and passive in the face of the movie’s screeching proclamations of doom that eventually we stop feeling sorry for her and start to feel like she’s less a victim and more a passive-aggressive doormat. Which is not the direction you want to push your audience when the whole point –I mean, like, the entire point—is to generate sympathy for pregnant women oppressed by the patriarchy.

I think this is possibly one of those "visual metaphors" you always hear about

And yes, that is the point, and it’s not a point the movie is going to let you miss. Like so many A24 movies, FALSE POSITIVE feels unreasonably anxious to dispense with the dull requirements of narrative and genre content so it can get down to the business of loudly declaiming about the ISSUES, about the PATRIARCHY, about how SCIENCE IS A MALE-CENTRIC MALE-OCRACY AND NATURAL CHILDBIRTH IS THE ONLY WAY A REAL WOMAN WOULD EVER BRING A CHILD INTO THIS WORLD. The last of which is a particularly uncomfortable sentiment to espouse so passionately at this exact moment (um, is Ilana Glazer an anti-vaxxer? Seems kinda like it), and unfortunately not one which you can really ignore because due to the movie's terror that you might miss the subtle point that it keeps making in every single scene, it also takes the liberty of just going ahead and stopping everything to have a character give a lecture on this topic, complete with a slideshow of BABIES DEFORMED BY THE CALLOUS, COLDY UNFEELING SCIENCE OF THE PENIS (these appear to be real medical photos, an especially questionable choice). The criticisms expressed here are not exactly unwarranted or without merit, but a youtube slideshow lecture sure is an awkward, clunky thing to have right in the middle of your genre movie, and it's about as subtle as Steven Seagal's speech at the end of ON DEADLY GROUND. And it just feels so desperate. Do they really think that if we didn't understand by the millionth repetition that the cavalcade of little slights ends up leaving the lead character feeling oppressed and gaslit, that explaining it aloud is going to do the trick?

As with so much modern horror (particular from A24), this makes FALSE POSITIVE feel like a PSA first, and a movie --let along a genre movie—a distant second. It's the kind of movie so eager to demonstrate its intersectional right-thinking that it goes out of its way to introduce a disorientingly stereotypical “ethnic” character just so it can admonish itself for being racist. I mean, come on. I hate to use the term “virtue signaling” because it's been co-opted by the absolute worst people on the planet, and hey, virtue is a good thing, and it's fine to signal it, especially if it encourages others to be virtuous. But this smug, handwringing genuflection to the alter of twitter talking points is exactly why this kind of thing irks people. In fact, it makes the very real issues the movie is about feel phony and calculated, self-serving strawmen constructed to score easy culture war points, rather than honest reflections of an imperfect real world. The one-note desperation of the messaging makes the film seem insecure about that very message; surely if they had real confidence in these themes, they would just tell a story and let the message emerge naturally from that, rather than stringing along a skeleton of a plot from a series of pre-planned talking points.

SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING: And unfortunately, it’s not like this is all going somewhere which will justify all the pedantic hand-holding. In fact, it’s not really going anywhere at all. The ending is just kind of small and dumb, and while certainly on-point for the movie’s theme (though no more or less than any other scene) I can’t help but notice that it doesn’t seem to square up too well with the movie that leads up to it. Turns out the big secret is: Brosnan’s narcissistic doctor has impregnated Lucy with his own sperm, and was never going to take her preference for a female child seriously. And I guess her husband was in on it, although he remains a completely murky character and I’m not sure exactly how involved he was in the whole thing. But that’s it, that’s the whole evil secret; there’s nothing supernatural going on, there’s barely even a conspiracy, just some sordid medical malpractice with rapey overtones. I guess she really was a big hallucinating baby after all? I don't see why Dr. Hindle’s self-promoting eugenics program would cause her to hallucinate and black out and shit. And what was up with the sinister safe her husband was hiding? Was that real, and if so, what was in it? Just, like, a letter that said, “I confess that I collaborated with my medical school professor to impregnate my wife with his sperm?” Obviously Lucy has been extremely ill-used, but this seems like awfully small potatoes to have, like, a complete mental breakdown over. I’m not even sure Dr. Hindle (and his sinister henchwoman, played by Gretchen Mol!) deserve to be savagely bludgeoned to death. He definitely needs to lose his medical license, get slapped with a bankrupting civil lawsuit, and probably spend some time in jail, but at the same time, just marching into his office and murdering him doesn’t feel like righteous vengeance so much as the movie anxiously assuring us that, darn it, it sure would smash that nasty ol’ patriarchy right up if only it could. It makes thematic sense more than it feels like it naturally arises out of anything in the story or character. In fact, it really feels most like something they reshot at the last minute when they decided they didn't like their original ending, something that sort of vaguely relates to the rest of the movie, but feels so arbitrary and disconnected that it’s hard to believe this was always where the filmmakers intended the story to go.** ( END SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING.

Anyway, it’s not all bad news; the movie looks great (Pogorzelski gets up to a lot of funny business with mirrors and lighting, probably mostly out of boredom) it has a solid score, and Glazer's expressive face --so great for comedy-- at least nails the nuanced emotions she experiences (over, and over, and over) again. And Brosnan, basically playing his character for velvet-tongued camp, is kind of a hoot. But yeah, "ROSEMARY'S BABY but clumsier and more pedantic and with a worse ending" is not really something the world was in desperate need of. Although it is nice to have a version which wasn't directed by a rapist.*** Oh yeah, right. That. Although I didn't like this movie much, let’s not forget that despite its clumsiness, the very fact of Roman Polanski's continued freedom does prove that it has something of a point. I just wish it were expressed with more verve (and more whammy) than this.

 Also, holy cow, I was going to make a joke in there about director John Lee referencing the 2002 They Might Be Giants song John Lee Supertaster. But then I found out the song actually is about this John Lee, who knew They Might Be Giants through his now-defunct band Muckafurgason! Woah, this movie is directed by John Lee Supertaster! Wild shit.

 

* Man, good thing ROSEMARY’S BABY doesn’t open with her looking at the devil-baby’s eyes and then flash back to “nine months ago,” huh? That would really suck.

** END SPOILERS CONTINUE HERE: This sense that the whole ending got re-shot into vague nonsense is bolstered by what happens with the babies; returning home to her disgusting, unwanted male children, she walks them over to the window of her high-rise apartment and lets them float away, maybe vaguely playing off some of the Peter Pan motifs which have been lurking around. But holy shit, wow, she murders her own children! I’m not sure I’m on this lady’s side anymore! But wait, oh, ok, I guess that was just a fantasy because then it flashes back to her just handing them off to her weird husband and giving all three of them the boot. Still pretty harsh, but more to the point, now we just have two scenes in a row communicating the same basic rejection of her children, and I just don’t believe a writer, even a bad writer, would think that was necessary or wise. My guess is they originally ended with the window thing, which is at least kinda bold and crazy, but then chickened out when they realized that no audience, however pro-woman, was going to be happy seeing the protagonist send two babies to splatter on the concrete fifteen floors below, so they punted and tried to claim it was just a metaphor. But the fact that I don’t really know just emphasizes how muddled this all is.  END SPOILERS STOP

 

***As far as I know