A sixth grader learns a difficult lesson

 

   Inspired by his own New York upbringing, director James Gray returns to the 1980s to explore the trials of Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta), a sixth grader at PS 173 in Queens, New York. 

    Gray goes to great lengths to achieve period authenticity as he tries to deal with a big subject while telling a small story. 

     The big subject: White privilege. Paul bypasses trouble with the police, something a Black friend (Jaylin Webb) can’t do. The small story: Almost everything else in the movie.

    The movie works best when Gray keeps things episodic and loose. Early on, he establishes the environment at PS 173. Paul's teacher (Andrew Polk) conducts his class in an authoritarian fashion that none of his pupils seems to take seriously, including Paul who draws a caricature of him.

   Paul is drawn to Johnny, a Black kid who's repeating the sixth grade. Johnny intuitively understands that the system doesn't favor him. He makes no attempt to conceal his contempt for it. He wants to work for NASA but finds no encouragement for his dream.

    Gray creates a working-class Jewish milieu that isn't often seen in popular entertainment. Paul's home is a scene of fractious exchanges, overheard conversations, empty bromides, worry, and casually expressed racism.

    Anne Hathaway has a nice turn as Paul's mother, who also happens to be the head of the PTA. A tightly wound Jeremy Strong plays Paul's dad, a plumber with a bad temper and little interest in his son's lofty ambitions: The kid wants to be an artist. 

    Paul's older brother (Ryan Sell) tries to torment his younger sibling. 

    The movie delivers a message of encouragement through Paul's grandfather (Anthony Hopkins), who provides the movie's moral and emotional center. One must be a mensch, which in this case means speaking out against injustice. 

     Grandpa understands Paul in a way his parents can't. He gives him a toy rocket, which the two fly together He also  provides the boy with a set of oil paints, thus endorsing Paul's arty ambitions.

    Gray unspools the rest of the family dynamics throughout. Paul's grandmother (Tovah Feldshuh) fled Ukraine, met grandpa in England, and traveled with him to the US, escaping the pogroms and antisemitism that plagued much of Eastern European Jewry.

   The big shift in Paul's young life happens when he and Johnny are caught smoking a joint in the school bathroom. Paul's outraged parents decide to enroll him in the same private school his brother attends. Paul is forbidden to see Johnny again. Grandpa picks up the tab for the new school. 

   As it turns out, the school is a favored institution of Fred Trump (John Diehl), father of … well … you know who. Trump's daughter Maryanne (Jessica Chastain), a US judge, speaks to a school assembly, serving up an easy irony: A person raised rich tells kids what it takes to succeed.

   Fed up with his home life, Paul convinces Johnny to help steal a computer from his new school so that the two can sell it and flee to Florida, a pipe dream that brings both boys into contact with the police, something that probably will ruin Johnny's already threatened future.

    Paul learns that it’s possible to encounter bigotry for being Jewish while also benefiting from societal assumptions about being white. Johnny gets no such benefit of the doubt and presumably never will.

    In one of the movie's softer exchanges, Dad explains how he got his son off the hook with the cops. He acknowledges that Johnny will be treated unfairly. Life is unfair. That’s it. Move on with your life.

    We don't know how Paul will internalize this message and what it will mean for his life going forward. Perhaps Gray wants us to speculate but a few hints might have been helpful.

    Gray overreaches by trying to tie Paul's woes to a major shift in the country, which is about to enter the Regan years, a rightward triumph that helps push the door open for today’s roiled climate. 

    Those familiar with Gray's work (Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z, Two Lovers, We Own the Night, and The Immigrant) won't be surprised to learn that the director avoids nostalgic indulgence, opting instead to allow rough edges to show.

    Gray bravely tackles the inadequacies and limitations of his characters but the resultant film also feels somewhat limited, a narrow gauged personal tale. Rough edges don't always add up to a larger truth.

      Oddly, I found myself more interested in Paul’s emotionally stunted father than in either of his sons. Strong’s character seemed a more intriguing embodiment of the painful contradictions Gray lays out than anything we learn about one more kid who aspires to be an artist. 

      And Johnny's story? That could be a whole other film. 

       

'Ad Astra' proves weirdly involving

Brad Pitt travels deep into space -- both inner and outer.

Director James Gray's Ad Astra qualifies as a true oddity, a movie that manages to be both interesting and not entirely successful at the same time. Gray, who has made movies such as The Lost City of Z, Little Odessa and We Own the Night, this time dreams really big, setting his story amid the deep emptiness of space.

As astronaut Roy McBride, Brad Pitt takes a journey to Neptune where he must, roughly in this order, find the father who left him so that he could galavant around the galaxy, stop a powerful electric surge that has sent lethal shock waves to Earth, and, perhaps most importantly, commune with his emotionally wounded inner self so that he might finally be able to connect with someone else.

Pitt provides an offscreen narration in which he reveals Roy's thoughts, which come across as a dissertation on isolation; Roy tells us he's cut off from everyone. He does, however, sometimes confide with an unseen psychologist (an off-screen voice) who conducts a series of psychological evaluations. Roy generally passes -- although you might be tempted to think his answers feel a little too practiced, the speech of someone who's unable to connect his emotions to his thoughts.

The best parts of Ad Astra involve the set pieces that Gray stages with excitement and surprise: These include Roy's free-fall from an antenna that has been constructed at the atmosphere's outer limits, a chase sequence involving rovers on the surface of the moon, and a mission in which Roy and a colleague answer a distress call from a crippled vehicle.

En route to Neptune, Roy makes stops on the moon and on Mars. On Mars, he learns more about his father's fate from Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga), the woman who manages the space outpost.

Along the way, Gray offers commentary on the commercialism of humanity's great adventure. The moon, for example, boasts a dreary mall. No wonder Roy's outlook feels mired in futility: He does his duty; he's calm; his pulse never rises above 80 beats per minute; he screws up relationships; he makes mistakes; he's miserable.

Liv Tyler, who I believe never speaks, is used to suggest Roy's failures with women, but she's more like a vapor than a physical presence in the movie.

You should know that Roy's father -- presumed dead for years but possibly still alive on a spacecraft that floats above Neptune -- is played by Tommy Lee Jones, a bit of casting that tells us that Roy's journey to find his rogue dad needs a lalapalooza of a payoff. It's the dynamic Francis Ford Coppola set up in Apocalypse Now when he sent Martin Sheen up a river in search of Captain Kurtz.

It takes guts for a filmmaker to give his film such singular focus; we're being set up to be blown away should Roy and his father ever meet. If we're not ... well ... let's just say, it's not a good thing.

I'm simplifying Roy's story for the sake of brevity, but -- in the end -- it doesn't prove especially complex. The movie's message (it has one) puts an aphoristic gloss on its promise of something vast, cosmic and mysteriously profound. We're set up to expect Kubrick and Gray gives us daddy issues.

Still, I found myself breathing the thin air Gray creates and moving along with a movie that takes us on a trip that's weirdly arresting -- at least most of the time. Hey, as we're always being told; it's not the destination but the journey that matters.

Gray splays Roy's inner voyage across vast spaces, turning his movie into a metaphor with mythic and psychological overtones centering on absentee fathers (take that where you will) and what it means to be a man. You'll have lots of opportunities to study Pitt's face, as Roy burrows deep into his own psyche. Pitt pulls it off.

I can't say too much more without spoilers, but it's possible that Gray may have made a space adventure that can be read as a critique of every other space adventure, as well as of our desire to watch them. This is either brave or a little crazy -- or some mixture of both.

All I can say is that when I emerged from the auditorium where I saw Ad Astra, the lights in the corridor seemed to emit an eerie glow. Ad Astra teeters on the brink of something awe-inspiring without quite falling over. Can a movie be "nearly" visionary?

Hitchcock/Truffaut, an illuminating duo

A documentary that takes us inside the mind of a master.

Most serious film lovers are familiar with Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book first published in France in 1967. The book offered a meticulously edited version of a week-long conversation between two very different directors, Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut.

In this essential volume, Hitchcock not only reveals his ideas about cinema, but engages in detailed discussions of how he achieved some of his most notable effects.

Unlike many books, Hitchcock/Truffaut can be opened almost anywhere and still yield abundant rewards. Credit Truffaut -- who began his career as a critic for the vaunted French publication Cahiers du Cinema. Truffaut venerated and understood Hitchcock, and was intimately familiar with his work.

Now comes director Kent Jones's documentary of the same name, another essential work that either will serve as a welcome amplification for devotees of the book or an introduction to it for cinema newbies.

Using segments of the recorded conversation between Hitchcock and Truffaut, well-selected clips from Hitchcock's films and commentary by a variety of current directors, Jones has assembled a film that deserves to become part of every film lovers collection.

Happily, those commenting on the films are not the usual suspects, aside from director Martin Scorsese, who always adds something valuable to any film about film in which he appears.

Jones also includes insights from other directors, notably James Gray, David Fincher, Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Schrader.

Of course, few can do a better job of describing Hitchcock's work than Hitchcock himself, and he does so with the kind of candor and generosity that he might only have been able to achieve with another filmmaker.

At the time of the book's initial publication, Truffaut hoped that a comprehensive look at Hitchcock's work would help change the view that some held of the "master of suspense." Truffaut believed that in the U.S., Hitchcock was regarded as a talented entertainer who made commercially successful thrillers. No more.

That view seems remarkably dated now: Few knowledgeable filmgoers would dispute the inseparability of Hitchcock's visual and narrative mastery, and most of us are willing to acknowledge that art and commerce needn't be irreconcilable enemies.

It's encouraging to hear a new generation of filmmakers talk about what they learned from watching Hitchcock's movies. Gray marvels at the perverse genius of Vertigo, for example.

But perhaps the best thing about Hitchcock/Truffaut is that it reaffirms what it means to take a serious approach to film -- not pompous, overly academic or self-impressed, but one that delights in rich analysis and deep appreciation.

As a result, Hitchcock/Truffaut provides us with abundant and durable pleasures.