Bob's Cinema Diary: 2/5/20 -- 'Two of Us,' 'Bliss' and 'The Right One'

Two of Us

 Barbara Sukowa and Martine Chevallier  play aging lovers in Two of Us, director Filippo Meneghetti's look at a love that struggles to shed its secrecy. The two women live in adjoining apartments. Chevallier's Madeleine, called "Mado," resists uprooting her life and moving to Rome with Sukowa's Nina. Such a move would mean announcing her gayness and changing the emotional calculus that allows her to maintain her relationship with her grown children. They don't know she's gay. Early, on Madeline tells Nina that she's willing to sell her apartment and move to Rome. But she falters when it comes to informing her children. The movie's principal development involves Madeleine's health. After Madeline suffers a stroke, her daughter Anne (Lea Drucker) takes over her care. Madeline's son (Jerome Varanfrain) grows increasingly impatient with what appears to be Nina's intrusive efforts to remain in Madeline's life. The children think their late father was the love of Madeline's life. The arrival of a caregiver (Muriel Benazeraf)  prompts Nina's  to push Benazeraf's character aside so that she can fulfill a role that reflects the reality of a long, mostly satisfying relationship. We wonder whether Madeline, who has lost the ability to speak, will play a role in deciding the outcome. The movie has as much to do with Nina's ability to function in a climate of secrecy as with the love the two women share. That makes Two of Us a touching reminder of the toxic complexities that result when secrets are kept.

Bliss

Owen Wilson joins Salma Hayek in a story in which two  down-and-out Los Angelenos  enter an alternate reality that resembles the ultimate vacation destination. Or maybe that alternate reality is the real thing. Or maybe you won't care which is which. The story begins by introducing us to Wilson's befuddled Greg,  a man who messes up at work, accidentally kills his boss and then takes to the streets of Los Angeles. Divorced and at loose-ends, Greg seems unable to connect with his daughter (Nesta Cooper), a young woman who keeps trying to salvage her relationship with Dad. Initially, Hayek's Rita charges into the movie, telling Greg that she can free him from any suspicion that he may have murdered his boss. Rita's powers to tinker with reality apparently stem from crystals that she ingests and which she eventually shares with Wilson's Greg.  Rita explains the movie's various developments to Greg, but director Mike Cahill's movie never makes much sense and winds up as a ragged, lunging attempt to engage questions about the nature of reality and meaning that have been better addressed in other movies. Matrix enthusiasts can rest easy.

The Right One

If there's anything to be discovered by watching The Right One, it's that actress Cleopatra Coleman has the requisite humor and charm to hold a movie together. Of course, romcoms aren't solitary affairs: It takes two to tango. The second part of director Ken Mok's  ostentatiously quirky romcom revolves around Nick Thune, who's stuck playing Godfrey, a shape-shifting character who assumes various poses throughout the movie: a singing cowboy, an effete art critic, or a hard-rocking DJ. For reasons that aren't clear, Coleman's Sarah is attracted to Godfrey and pursues him without even knowing his real name. She's a writer and aren't all writers fascinated by oddballs? Godfrey reluctantly becomes involved with Sarah, allowing her to visit the many characters he plays. The plot strains to tell us why Godfrey can't simply be himself. All of this amounts to little, aside from providing each actor with an opportunity to showcase something: Thune, versatility; Coleman, snappy charm. But both are stranded by an implausible story that, rather than reaching a crescendo of love and acceptance,  sticks a flat ending. With Iliza Schlesinger as Sarah's obnoxiously self-absorbed editor.

Julianne Moore rings true in 'Gloria Bell'

This remake of a Chilean movie celebrates one woman's ability to stand alone.

By day, Gloria Bell works for an insurance company. At night, she likes to go dancing, maybe because crowded, throbbing dance clubs give her sense of being with others -- even though she's still alone. Gloria has two grown children and has been divorced for a dozen years. She's lonely but not enough to accept the company of a hairless cat that insists on finding its way into her apartment.

If all this sounds familiar, it's probably because you saw the 2013 Chilean movie Gloria, which was directed by Sebastian Lelio. Lelio has remade his movie with an American cast, substituting Julianne Moore for Paulina Garcia, the actress who played the title character in the original, which simply was called Gloria.

Lelio gives the title a surname and moves the story to Los Angeles, where Gloria Bell spends her time studying yoga, taking a shot at laugh therapy and trying to keep up the spirits of a work friend (Barbara Sukowa) who fears the pending loss of her job.

After Lelio introduces us to Gloria and gives a glimpse of her alienated life, he brings her together with a guy she meets at a club (John Turturro). Having been divorced for a year, Turturro’s Arnold seems like a great match for Gloria. He's considerate, has a fun job (he owns an amusement park where people play paintball) and makes a pleasing sexual partner.

Turturro gives a convincing performance as a man who wants to move forward but struggles to shed the heavy baggage of his former life, namely two needy adult daughters and an accident-prone ex-wife. Will Arnold wimp out or will he assert himself and develop a real relationship with Gloria?

The rest of the supporting cast doesn't get much attention. Michael Cera plays Gloria's son, a young man mired in a failing marriage, and Caren Pistorius portrays Gloria's daughter, a young woman who seems to have found true love with a big-wave surfer.

Lelio stages a painfully awkward scene when Gloria brings Arnold to a birthday dinner with her two kids, her former husband (Brad Garrett) and his new wife (Jeanne Tripplehorn). Things don't go well.

Look, even those who haven't seen the Chilean version will have guessed by now that the point isn't to provide Gloria with a happily-ever-after with a great partner. The script brings her to a point of self-assertion at which she no longer needs a partner. She’s able to dance on her own -- to Laura Branigan's familiar song, Gloria -- of course.

That makes Moore the movie's main attraction, and she's more than up to the task; she gives Gloria Bell soul as she builds toward the inevitable realization that cracks through the wall of Gloria's conflicts.

Add some comedy, and you've got a movie that dances to a beat you've heard before, but won't mind hearing again.

Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil

As every student of Holocaust literature knows, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem remains a book of enormous significance, notable -- among other things -- for Arendt's use of the phrase "the banality of evil" to characterize Otto Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer she saw as shockingly ordinary. Arendt deemed Eichmann a soulless bureaucrat who accepted and endorsed monstrous, genocidal policies, and who helped to orchestrate Hitler's "final solution."

Arendt's observations, first reported in a series of New Yorker articles, seemed to go against the official Israeli and Jewish grain. The Israeli government wanted to see Eichmann as an aberrant monster, a villain worthy of the genocidal crimes he'd help facilitate. Where others saw an examplar of evil, Arendt saw a nobody, a man who believed that in his obedience to orders, he was enacting an impersonal drama made virtuous by his willingness to comply with Hitler's law.

The German-born Arendt arrived in New York steeped in German philosophy and culture. She detested the Nazis, and thought Eichmann should be executed, but she took pains to say that he might be no more guilty than some who were well-situated in the new, post-War German government. She also objected to the show-trial aspects of the legal proceedings that unfolded in Jerusalem in 1961.

Arendt cut her teeth as a political philosopher under Martin Heidegger, a German professor who became known for his support of the Nazis.

As directed by Margarethe von Trotta, Hanna Arendt becomes a study of Arendt's life during and just after the Eichmann trial -- with flashbacks to her growing disillusionment with Heidegger. At one point, she and Heidegger were lovers.

Although Barbara Sukowa, who starred in von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg, looks nothing like Arendt, she manages to capture the writer's authorial courage and her approach to intellectual life with her second husband, poet and philosopher Heinrich Blücher, played by Axel Milberg.

Arendt's view of Eichmann -- who's seen in actual footage from the trial -- was not the only source of controversy emerging from her work. As the movie makes clear, Arendt's detractors also objected to her critique of a European Jewish leadership that often cooperated with the Nazis in hopes of saving as many Jews as possible. To Arendt, this was a form of capitulation that served only to enable the Nazis in their insidious labors.

When I first read Arendt's book, it struck me as a revelation. Looking back from a 21st century perspective, it seems that Arendt may have both right and off the mark at the same time. Perhaps a show trial, a public airing of atrocity on a massive scale, was precisely the right response when it came to Eichmann. If the Israeli government used him to tell a Holocaust story, so what?

However one views Eichmann -- thoughtless nebbish or enthusiastic purveyor of genocide -- he was the SS man in charge of the massive logistical effort that moved European Jewery into death camps.

For her part, von Trotta may be less interested in Arendt's conclusions about Eichmann than in her courage as a writer and independent thinker. Toward the end of the movie von Trotta focuses on Arendt's impassioned speech to her students after she was scorned by her colleagues at Columbia University, where she was a visiting professor.

Despite a strong performance from Sukowa, Hannah Arendt tends to come across as a kind of intellectual footnote rather than an impassioned debate about the sorts of people who carried out the crimes of the Holocaust.

Beyond that, Arendt's post-Eichmann fate -- no matter how unfair or unpleasant -- seems insignificant when measured against the magnitude of suffering caused by the Nazis.

It also needs to be pointed out that there's much more to Eichmann in Jerusalem than the movie -- forced to consolidate and concentrate -- can convey. However you regard von Trotta's film, Arendt's work demands re-visiting -- again and again.