Bob's Cinema Diary: 9/25/20 -- "Kajillionaire" and "The Artist's Wife'

 Kajillionaire

     Kajillionaire is like almost every other movie about con artists except for two things: the monetary stakes are pitifully low and the aspiring felons are strikingly weird. 

     How low? Well, these con artists steal from post-office boxes, dodge landlords, and try their best to avoid being caught on security cameras. If they had a motto, it might be, "The family that cons together has no choice but to stay together."

      And how weird are they?  The Dyne family consists of Theresa (Debra Winger) and Robert (Richard Jenkins), who are the parents of a daughter named Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood). Mom and dad basically exploit their daughter by having her carry out their larcenous schemes.

     Mom tends to be quiet but not entirely without menace. Dad makes claims at knowledgeability and the family's daughter is so obviously depressed and withdrawn that her long stringy hair looks as if it might be weeping. They’re all nervous wrecks.

     Now, I said the stakes were small -- but I was talking only about money. Emotionally, the stakes are plenty high, revolving around a daughter who never has gotten what she needs from her conniving parents.

     I don't know of actors other than Winger, Jenkins and Wood who could have pulled off director Miranda July's foray into the world of Los Angeles down-and-outers, people who live in an apartment adjoining a bubble factory.

     The movie takes a new direction when Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) shows up. Self-assured and as ethically dubious as the Dynes, Melanie is Old Dolio's polar opposite. (And, yes, the movie offers an explanation of how Old Dolio got her name. Let's just say the name alone speaks to unspeakably bad parenting.)

   Every movie about con artists needs a good final twist and Kajillionare has one, but July (Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future) infuses genuine pathos into the lives of characters who live in a world in which everything's slightly askew. 

     And weirdness aside, you may even find yourself feeling something for Old Dolio, a young woman who can’t con anyone out of what she really needs: Love and acceptance.

The Artist's Wife

     Lena Olin joins Bruce Dern in a story triggered by an aging artist's slide into dementia. 

      In part, The Artist's Wife paints a portrait of a cantankerous, egotistical painter who abuses his students and takes the long-standing devotions of his wife for granted. 

      An abstract painter of some repute, Dern's Richard Smythson lives comfortably in the Hamptons with Olin’s Claire. Richard may be long past the starving artist phase, but he's definitely losing his grip. 

     As the story unfolds, Claire increasingly takes over the movie’s center: Claire -- as Richard says -- creates everything about the couple's life, except the art. She’s the engine that keeps their lives running. 

      Claire, of course, paid a price for her marital choice: Living in Richard's shadow meant sacrificing her own career as painter. We're told she had promise.

     Fearing the moment when Richard entirely fades, Claire tries to reconcile Richard with his estranged adult daughter (Juliet Rylance) from an earlier marriage. Richard knows little about the life of his grown gay daughter who has a six-year-old son (Ravi Cabot-Conyers). 

     Although The Artist's Wife creates interest as a piece of adult-oriented entertainment, the movie doesn't click. Claire's brief interest in a younger man (Avan Jogia) seems forced, dementia has been handled better elsewhere and the arc that Claire's story follows proves dismayingly predictable.

     In sum: a quietly disappointing effort.

     

Buddies on the road -- and on the water

A country boy and a young man with Down syndrome team for a fairy tale of an adventure in The Peanut Butter Falcon.

We've all seen enough bromances to last several lifetimes. But that doesn't mean anyone plans to retire a genre that continues to connect with audiences.

The Peanut Butter Falcon arrives in theaters as a buddy movie -- but one with a difference. It teams Shia LaBeouf, as a red-neck renegade, with a young man with Down syndrome, played by Zack Gottsagen, an actor who really does have Down syndrome and for whom the movie was written.

LaBeouf's Tyler and Gottsagen's Zak make a typically unlikely duo. Tyler's on the run from a couple of guys (John Hawkes and Yelawolf) who want to kill him for messing up their crab-fishing business. He's also troubled by the death of his older brother (Jon Bernthal).

To hit the road, Zak must escape from the nursing home where he's being housed, no other placement being available. Zak's roommate (Bruce Dern) helps the young man engineer the breakout that leads to his hook-up with Tyler.

A nursing home volunteer (Dakota Johnson) follows. She's supposed to return Zak to the home. She also adds feminine energy to the generally masculine proceedings, which are heightened by Zak's burning ambition. He wants to be a professional wrestler and dreams of visiting a training school run by his idol, a wrestler who goes by the name of Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church).

Eventually, Johnson's Eleanor joins Tyler and Zak's brotherhood of two. Reluctantly, she agrees to help Zak pursue his dream.

Shot in the Florida Panhandle, the movie -- a passion project from first-time directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz -- relies heavily on the chemistry generated by a fully committed LaBeouf and by Gottsagen, a natural charmer with a robust sense of humor.

They're playing two characters who are thrown together for an adventure that includes a raft trip and an encounter with a backwoods preacher (Wayne DeHart) -- all spaced over sufficient time to allow LaBeouf and Gottsagen to develop a conspiratorial bond, two against the world.

Peanut Butter Falcon, which avoids gooey sentiment, takes its fanciful title from the name Zak chooses for his wrestling alter ego. The title proves suggestive; this is a movie that isn't afraid of its sometimes goofy appeal.

To fully enjoy Peanut Butter Falcon, it's probably best to set aside demands for total plausibility and accept the movie as a fairy tale about what it means to be young and feel free.

And -- at least to my knowledge -- The Peanut Butter Falcon is the only film in the long history of cinema that includes a scene in which the characters cook a fish, smear it with peanut butter and eat it. That moment, I should point out, marks the only time I felt sorry for anyone in the movie.

Who's wilder, the convicts or the horses?

Matthias Schoenaerts plays a prisoner who learns to train horses in The Mustang.

In the opening shot of The Mustang, a movie about a program in which wild horses help to help rehabilitate prisoners, takes us to the wilds of Nevada where a helicopter is rounding up free-roaming mustangs. Title cards tell us that 100,000 wild mustangs can be found in the U.S. Some are caught and euthanized; others are sent to prisons where inmates are given a chance to train them for sale at auction. The men and horses bond and both benefit from the arrangement.

Almost from the start, first-time director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre makes the connection between an angry inmate (Matthias Schoenaerts) and an especially dangerous mustang.

Alienated and hostile, Schoenaerts' Roman Coleman is pushed by a counselor (Connie Britton) to become a part of a small horse-training program. He begins by shoveling manure, not the most attractive of jobs. But it's clear that Roman's ability to train horses depends on developing his capacity for self-control, which is minimal at the outset.

Initially resistant to any suggestion of reform, Roman accepts his role, although he's stripped of it after he violently attacks the horse with which he'll eventually bond. Enlisted to help during a horse-threatening emergency, Roman regains his spot among the horse-tending cons; he's readmitted to this small group by the grizzled old hand (Bruce Dern) who runs the program with tough love.

Before Roman can connect with the mustang -- he names it Marcus -- he must learn that he can't force contact with the animal; he must patiently wait for the horse to accept him.

Most of the action takes place in a remote prison where a corral has been built for the horses, and de Clermont-Tonnerre doesn't neglect the harsher side of convict life, introducing subplots about drugs, a nasty piece of inmate-on-inmate violence and the tenuous relationship between Roman and his pregnant daughter (Gideon Adlon). She wants Roman to sign forms that will allow her to sell his grandfather's California house so that she can get on with her life. He does his best keep her at an emotional distance, but the screenplay eventually gives him a monologue in which he tries to connect with his daughter and we finally learn why Roman has spent 11 years in custody.

If you're thematically inclined it won't be difficult to identify the movie's interest in masculinity, as well as in exploring the often lopsided equation between freedom and self-discipline. In a telling scene, Britton's character asks inmates to estimate the time it took for them to act on the impulse that led them to incarceration. Roman's answer: a split-second.

The Belgian-born Schoenaerts presents Roman as a case study in anger-mismanagement, a man whose eyes burn with fury and whose inner rage threatens to consume him. He's always on the verge of a physical outbreak and it can be frightening to watch him.

The movie clocks in at a fleet 96 minutes, but like a wild horse, The Mustang bucks from scene-to-scene, mostly skipping transitional sequences that might have let the story feel more fully developed.
That said, there's no shaking the unsettling tension of the situation: brutal terrain, the threat of physical violence and an eerie sense of men and animals confined in a prison that has been plopped into the most open of western spaces.

Drugs and despair in the streets of Detroit

Director Yann Demange grounds White Boy Rick in grim realism.

Illegal gun sales, drugs, gangs, corruption, and injustice.

You can tell from this list, and I've abbreviated it, that the new movie White Boy Rick spends little time traversing feel-good turf. Based on a true story, White Boy Rick plunges into Detroit's economic decay during the free-wheeling 1980s.

White Boy Rick focuses on three tumultuous years in the life of Rick Wershe Jr. (Richie Merritt) as he moves from a being a wayward 14-year-old with a father (Matthew McConaughey) who traffics in illegal guns to a cocaine peddler to an FBI informant and, finally, to his inevitable identity: prisoner.

In telling Rick's story, director Yann Demange pushes McConaughey into more of a supporting role than you might expect. This time, McConaughey plays a dirtbag hustler with a difference. Richard Wershe Sr. lacks the charm of some of the rogues McConaughey previously has played.

Aware of his mammoth failures as a father, Richard knows he has nothing to give his son, but the tricks of an illegal trade. McConaughey's performance hints at a sad self-awareness that borders on the tragic.

As Demange tells Rick's story, the movie evokes the ragged, jittery style of the '70s, chopping its way through lives that would be utterly empty if not for trouble.

Early on, Ricky falls in with a group of black drug dealers led by Johnny Curry (a quietly scary Jonathan Majors). Johnny's younger brother Boo (RJ Cyler), Ricky's only real friend, brings Ricky into a gang in which he's the only white guy.

For a time, it's all fun and games as Ricky finds friends and family-like ties among a group of black men who have connections to City Hall. Finally, Rick belongs to something -- or thinks he does.

Meanwhile -- and White Boy Rick is a movie of many "meanwhiles" -- Rick's sister Dawn (Bel Powley) wallows in a drug-addicted life that brings her to the edge of physical ruin. Ravaged by crack, her face seems to be rotting right along with Detroit's declining industrial landscape.

Ricky also draws the attention of two FBI agents (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane) who want Ricky to help them bring Johnny down. Ricky's given an impossible choice: Either he informs for the FBI or the FBI will shut down his father's illegal gun business. Family ties win out.

Some of the movie's scenes are given a humorous twist -- few greater than the movie's prologue which finds father and son arriving home from a successful buy at a gun show trying to convince the drug-addicted Dawn to accompany them for frozen custard, a ludicrous and inevitably futile stab at familial normalcy.

But harsh realities overshadow humor, even when it comes from Ricky's grandparents (Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie). Grandma keeps a pistol in her oven.

Merritt, who has no previous acting experience, gives a raw, natural performance as a kid who never entirely sells out his innocence. When Rick begs his father to join him in the drug business, he's not so much acting the thug as pleading for the life of his family and the ability to sustain it the only way he knows.

White Boy Rick isn't a perfect movie, perhaps because it never entirely convinces us that there's anything major to be gained from watching these characters fall prey to their devastated environment. Still, there's something to be said for movies that insist on shining realistic light on society's margins.

White Boy Rick makes a last-minute attempt to criticize the justice system that ultimately betrays Ricky, but the feeling one draws from the movie has less to do with rage at judicial inequity than with the bone-deep despair that stems from watching so many lives swirl desperately before going down the drain.

Sorting through the stuff of life

Nostalgia boasts a strong cast, a willingness to carry some heavy emotional weight and an anthology-like structure. But (and you probably knew there was a "but" coming), the movie plays like a collection of ideas and monologues fueled by a sincerity that isn't quite the same as insight or hard-won dramatic truth. Several semi-linked stories ponder the relationship between memory and the possessions people accumulate over a lifetime. John Ortiz portrays an insurance assessor who puts a price tag on such things; he begins by meeting with an elderly man (Bruce Dern) who's going through an evaluation of his belongings. Next, we meet a widow portrayed by Ellen Burstyn. When her home was destroyed by fire, she managed to save only one thing, a baseball autographed by Ted Williams. The ball was one of her late husband's cherished possessions. The movie's longest segment involves Jon Hamm as a savvy but compassionate trader of collectibles. After his parents move into an assisted living facility, Hamm's character finds himself helping to dispose of the things they've left behind. He also lands in the middle of a tragedy involving his sister (Catherine Keener) and her husband (James LeGros). The movie sometimes confuses the maudlin and the meaningful, proving of interest only for a cast that deserved a more unified and incisive screenplay. Screenwriter Alex Ross Perry (Queen of the Earth, Listen Up Philip) doesn't get the job done, leaving director Mark Pellington (Arlington Road, The Mothman Prophecies) to lean heavily on his actors. Otherwise, Nostalgia comes off as a kind of dramatic estate sale, a look into the lives of characters who are stuck contemplating the stuff of their lives -- and doing it much too literally.

'Hateful Eight' : blood, racial conflict -- at length

Tarantino's overlong and, of course incendiary, foray into the West.

A B-movie trying to wear A-movie clothes -- and not always doing a good job of it.

That's part of what I thought about The Hateful Eight, director Quentin Tarantino's three-hour opus, a Western that was filmed in Telluride, Colorado. Like the so-called road shows of yore, Hateful Eight begins with an overture (Ennio Morricone wrote the score) and includes an intermission.

The movie can be seen in 70mm at certain locations, although the necessity of seeing it that way can be argued. The movie's "prestige" trappings struck me as overkill, a phenomenon not unknown to a director whose seven previous movies have been known to go over-the-top.

As usual, Tarantino plays with structure, but he's decided to go against the Western grain. The snow-covered landscapes of the movie's opening suggest a spacious background, but the bulk of The Hateful Eight takes place indoors.

Tarantino's screenplay revolves around a simple premise: More than a decade after the Civil War, bounty hunters take shelter in a cabin during a blizzard. It doesn't take long before these bounty hunters are interacting with strangers in a high-stakes game not all of them will survive.

Before the movie's done, its characters are given ample opportunity to prove that they've earned the movie's title. They're a hateful bunch, several of them steeped in racism stemming from North/South divisions that haven't begun to scar over.

If there's a main character here, it's probably Samuel L. Jackson's Marquis Warren, a savvy bounty hunter who led a group of black fighters during the Civil War.

Early on, a stranded Warren stops a stage coach to ask for a ride. He's transporting two dead outlaws across the snow-covered hills: His destination: the Wyoming town of Red Rock. His goal: to collect bounties.

The stage coach has been hired by John Ruth (Kurt Russell), another bounty hunter who's headed to Red Rock. Ruth is transporting a murderous woman named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to an appointment with the hangman.

It doesn't take long before another traveler joins the group. Walton Goggins portrays Chris Mannix, a former Confederate soldier and the guy who's supposed to take over as Red Rock's new sheriff.

Once the travelers reach the stage stop -- the oddly named Minnie's Haberdashery -- they encounter more characters: an English hangman (Tim Roth), a cowboy who scribbles in a diary (Michael Madsen), an aging Confederate general (Bruce Dern) and a Mexican (Demian Bichir) who claims to be taking care of the place for Minnie, who's off visiting someone or other.

No one who's familiar with Tarantino's work will be surprised to learn that Hateful Eight includes considerable violence, profanity and racial slurs.

If you thought that Tarantino made his racial movie with Django Unchained, think again. Warren instantly is pitted against southern, racist sensibilities and once again, Tarantino gives the "n" word a workout. Its use here can be piercing, raw and maybe a bit forced: One presumes that Tarantino wants to use the movie's isolated setting to get at what he regards as the ugly, bottom-line truth of racial hatred.

Perhaps, but you'd think by now, Tarantino (who writes his own scripts) would have developed a severe case of "n" word fatigue.

Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson, who has filmed many of Tarantino's movies, don't always find ways to make the depressingly brown interiors of Minnie's Haberdashery all that interesting, and this time, they're stuck in a situation in which talk mostly trumps action -- at least in the movie's pre-intermission segments.

That shouldn't be a problem for Tarantino, whose speciality is dialogue, but there are times when you're a little too aware that the characters aren't exactly talking; they're indulging in Tarantino-speak. Put another way: You can hear the writing.

Now, there are surprises here, so there's not much point saying more about what happens in this God forsaken Wyoming outpost other than to note that Tarantino breaks the movie into five acts, each introduced by a title card.

Know, though, that Jackson seems to be playing a character who's not entirely unlike Jules, the hit man he played in Pulp Fiction; he's whip smart and nasty when he needs to be.

Russell's character specializes in what appears to be misogynistic brutally, punching Daisy when he thinks she's out of line. Leigh spends much of the movie with a bloodied face. Of course, Daisy's no angel, either.

Of all the performances Leigh's feels the freshest, reaching near-demonic proportions. An enraged Daisy is something to behold; she could be a guardian at the gates of hell.

When it comes to color palette, Hateful Eight might be the brownest movie I've ever seen. I'm not sure what that signifies, other than that it breeds a whiff of monotony, a condition not unknown to the movie, particularly as it approaches its intermission.

Intense violence explodes during the movie's protracted finale, generating enough plasma to fill a blood bank before Tarantino brings the movie to its rueful dead-end of a conclusion. These westerners know how to get medieval on one another, to borrow one of Tarantino's signature phrases.

As is often the case with Tarantino, we're not sure whether he's reading reality or commenting, expanding on and sometimes subverting pop-cultural tropes, some of them his own. Put another way, I can't say I really believed much of anything I was watching.

Besides, volatile as it is, even hate gets boring after a while.

A cracked journey across Nebraska

Bruce Dern's somber performance anchors director Alexander Payne's latest foray into the Midwest.

Director Alexander Payne's Nebraska practically begs to be admired by cinema buffs and critics. To begin with, the movie -- set in bleak towns of the Midwest -- was shot in black and white, a retro move that can be seen as a defiantly bold stroke.

Just as significant, Nebraska boasts a fine and flinty performance from a 77-year-old actor, Bruce Dern. The plus: It's always nice to see a sagging career reinvigorated.

To further add to its cinematic bona fides, Nebraska exudes a sense of wistful melancholy, emerging as a slightly cracked ode to a vanishing America. The story takes place in towns made sparse by the absence of everything from tempting upscale malls to well-stocked big-box stores. The landscapes and towns in Nebraska seem to have slumped into a state of spiritual and material exhaustion.

It's hardly surprising that the characters who inhabit these landscapes can feel similarly depleted.

I guess I'm saying that there's plenty to admire about Payne's latest road movie, but I'm not totally on board with the effort.

Look, Nebraska has significant rewards (Dern's performance, surprising jolts of humor and a quietly moving father/son finale), but the movie also can feel burdened by a sideshow quality that makes some of its characters seem as if they've been imprisoned in a grotesque Midwestern diorama.

The story centers on Woody Grant (Dern), an aging alcoholic who receives a magazine promotion in the mail, and believes he has won $1 million. No longer in a possession of a driver's license, Woody sets out to claim his prize by walking from Billings, Mont., to Lincoln, Neb. Clearly, Woody's running short on mental acuity. He's quiet, withdrawn, perhaps a bit demented, a man whose good old days probably never were all that good.

And that's part of what makes Dern's performance so convincing. He captures the hollow vacancy of a man whose memory has begun to fail. It's as if half of him already has left the planet.

After unsuccessful attempts to talk his father out of a perilous journey, Woody's son Dave (Will Forte of Saturday Night Live fame) decides to drive his dad to Lincoln. Dave knows the "sweepstakes" prize is a bogus come-on designed to sell magazine subscriptions, but he indulges the old man's fantasy.

Maybe Dave hopes that an extended road trip will provide an opportunity to bond with his emotionally remote, sometimes cruel father. Besides, Dave's at loose ends, having just lost his fiancee.

Thankfully, Woody and Dave don't spend the entire movie in a car. They make an extended stop in Hawthorne, Neb., the bleak town where Woody grew up.

Woody's family -- the folks who remained in Hawthorne -- acquires traces of freak-show distortion, particularly his two nephews, bestubbled dolts whose entire conversational repertoire consists of mocking the length of time it has taken Dave to drive from Billings to Hawthorne.

Once word gets out that Woody has won $1 million, the covetous Hawthorne townsfolk cozy up to him. Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), a former business associate, insists that Woody owes him a substantial sum. Just about everyone wants to feed at the trough of Woody's supposed good fortune.

Many of the scenes in Hawthorne are played for laughs as Dave becomes increasingly protective of his father's sad fantasy, a tacit recognition that his father's hope -- though built on a false foundation -- might be all the old man has left.

The movie receives a considerable boost when Woody's wife (June Squibb) shows up in Hawthrone to spew some venom and speak unforgiving truths about the town's residents, both living and dead. Squibb's Kate Grant adds one of the movie's livelier touches, although some of her dialogue can be seen as the kind of cheap trick you'd find in lesser movies: the supposed shock of hearing an older person use profanity, for example.

Forte holds his own, as does an underutilized Bob Odenkirk (familiar from TV's Breaking Bad). Odenkirk plays Dave's brother. As an anchor on a local TV news show in Billings, Okenkirk's Ross seems to have trumped his brother's meager professional accomplishments. Dave works in a stereo store.

For me, Nebraska felt like a backward step from Payne's work in movies such as The Descendants, Sideways and Election. Falling more into an About Schmidt mode, Payne -- working from a script by Bob Nelson -- tries to alleviate some of his comedy's bitter sting with an ending steeped in sentiment.

At times, Nebraska feels as flat and uninflected as the landscape over which it travels, but fortunately for Payne, the movie's small-triumph ending pretty much works. That puts Nebraska in a weirdly incongruous class of its own: It's a dreary crowd-pleaser of a movie.