Bob's Cinema Diary: 8/6/21 -- 'Nine Days' and 'John and the Hole'

 Both Nine Days and John and the Hole demonstrate what can happen when filmmakers attempt to say a lot with what appear to be fairly limited resources. Each film has a sense of minimalism that creates a feeling concentrated sparsity. And, each relies heavily on the performances of relatively small casts. In my view, neither film can be considered entirely successful. Both, however, contain elements of interest with Nine Days emerging as the better film.

Nine Days

No one likely will fault Nine Days for lack of ambition. It may take a while to figure out what's happening, but it eventually becomes apparent that director Edson Oda has created a  world in which souls compete to decide which one will  be born. The souls, each represented by the movie’s characters, are evaluated by Will (Winston Duke), an even-tempered man who lives in a modest house in the middle of an arid landscape. Will, we learn, once was alive but has been consigned to the role of selector. Assigned by whom? The movie never says. The catch: The unselected souls return to the oblivion from which they emerged. Will doesn’t live in a high-tech world: He tracks his choices on banks of old-fashioned televisions equipped with VCRs. Generally unflappable, Will nonetheless is shaken when one of his choices --  a promising young violinist -- commits suicide. Does her death prove that Bill is fallible? Bill operates alone, but has a friend (Benedict Wong) who provides advice -- not all of it welcome. The story revolves around the souls that show up for evaluation. They include Alexander (Tony Hale), a guy for whom life would mean one long chill session, punctuated by beer and buddies.  Other souls display confidence (Bill Skarsgard), loneliness (Arianna Ortiz), and doubt (Mike Rysdahl). The main drama unfolds between Will and Emma (Zazie Beetz), a free-spirited woman who seems like Will's best option. Perhaps because of the early-picture suicide, Will worries that Emma may not be strong enough to survive the world’s brutalities. A late-picture monologue delivered by Duke nearly justifies a movie that doesn't dot every "i” or cross every "t." In other words, Nine Days doesn't always make sense. But if you stick with it, Oda eventually delivers  a poignant conclusion about the pain of loss and what it means to be alive.

John and the Hole

First time director Pascual Sisto seems to be trying to get at something deep with John and the Hole, although I'm not sure what. Sisto tells a simple story: Thirteen-year-old John (Charlie Shotwell) drugs his parents (Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Ehle) and his sister (Taissa Farmiga). He then drags them into an abandoned, half-finished underground bunker. Too steep for them to climb out, the hole isolates the family from neighbors or passersby. Mostly expressionless, John seems like a kid who's conducting an experiment. What would life be like if he took over the household, started draining Dad's money from an ATM, and invited a friend over to play video games. John and his pal also hold one another under water in the family pool, hoping for  visions as they get close to drowning. John only intermittently provides his imprisoned family with food? A separate but apparently related story involves a girl named Lily (Samantha LeBretton) whose mom (Georgia Lyman) reads her a story called John and the Hole before telling the kid that she's on her own.  No rebel without a cause, John simply exists, a teenager who does the unthinkable because ... well ... who knows? I stuck with the movie but never really connected to a story that seems to want to explore the disconnect between adolescents and adults, but does so without offering much by way of edification. There's no faulting the actors but the movie picks up John's hollowness and, in the end, feels far too abstracted to find any real life.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 9/17/20 -- 'Blackbird' and 'The Nest'

The Nest

Director Sean Durkin returns to the screen after a long hiatus. His last movie was  2011's Martha Marcy May Marlene. With The Nest, Durkin travels back to the 1980s for a look at a marriage struggling to survive the upheaval of a transatlantic move. Jude Law  (as Rory) and Carrie Coon (as Allison) star as a husband and wife who have fallen off the same page even before they move to London. She loves their suburban life in the US. He’s too ambitious to be content. She runs a riding school: He's a commodities trader. Rory and Allison have two kids: a daughter (Oona Roche) from Allison's previous marriage and a son (Charlie Shotwell) from the couple's current marriage. Not only does Rory drag his family across the ocean, he soon runs out of funds. He vastly overestimates his ability to persuade his London boss (Michael Culkin) to merge his company with an American firm, a development that ensures that Rory won't be able to  afford the Surrey estate he impulsively rented for the family. Late in the movie, a taxi driver asks Rory what he does for a living. "I pretend to be rich,'' says Rory, who by this time has entered a state of dejected realization: The rungs on the social ladder he's climbing have begun to collapse. As the horse-loving Allison, Coon embodies the emotional volatility of an '80s woman who doesn't always listen to her better judgment. Initially charming, Rory refuses to acknowledge his limitations and, in Law's hands, reaches a state of hollowed-out desperation. Durkin, who has no interest in feel-good sentiment, courageously brings his movie to a conclusion marked as much by exhaustion and defeat as by anything that might be called reconciliation. 

Blackbird

There are few more familiar dramatic conceits than this:  A family gathers for a special occasion only to have soul-wrenching secrets revealed. Blackbird follows such a traditional map but adds a disturbing twist. Mom (Susan Sarandon) is dying of ALS. In response, Sarandon's Lily has decided to end her life. She wants to see her family one more time before drinking the lethal concoction that will enable her to avoid a nightmarish end to an otherwise fulfilling life. As the story unfolds, director Roger Michell introduces us to Lily's family: daughters played by Kate Winslet and Mia Wasikowska and a husband portrayed by an underutilized Sam Neill. Winslet's Jennifer arrives at Lily’s seaside home with her husband (Rainn Wilson) and teenage son (Anson Boon). Lindsay Duncan turns up as Lily's best friend.  Christian Torpe's screenplay boasts finely wrought moments that are well-executed by a fine cast, tense encounters between the sisters, for example. But the screenplay adds a few reveals too many and even a cast this strong can't always compensate for a lack of dramatic crackle. At the same time, Michell eventually finds the emotional power and the deep sadness that accompanies Lily's decision; just because it's the right choice for her doesn't make its irrevocability any less harrowing.

A quirky story about young outcasts

Set in 1977, Troop Zero tries (boy does it ever) to uphold the rights of young outcasts to claim their place in the world, maybe even in the entire universe. Directors Bert & Bertie, a British directing team, build their story around Christmas Flint (Mckenna Grace), a girl who’s an outsider in the small town of Wiggly, Georgia. Christmas's widowed dad (Jim Gaffigan) plies his trade as an attorney, losing most of his cases and seldom being paid for his efforts. Gaffigan’s Ramsey Flint expects his assistant (Viola Davis) to look after his daughter, a task she approaches responsibly but not happily. The plot begins when Christmas makes friends with a girl who formerly bullied her (Milan Ray). She then assembles a group of girls to join the Birdies, scouts who are vying to see which of them will win a chance to record a message that NASA will send into space. The local Scout Master (Allison Janney) reluctantly accepts Christmas's crew as Birdies, labeling them Troop Zero. Lest boys feel left out, Birdie Troop Zero includes Christmas's best friend, Joseph (Charlie Shotwell). Of course, a group of by-the-book Birdies demeans the outcasts. The young actors do well enough and Davis’s portrayal suggests unexpected complexities for a movie that seems to want to be quirky and endearing at the same time. Christmas’s individuality takes a strange form: She’s a bed wetter, which the movie tries (weirdly, I think) to turn into a gesture of assertive defiance set to the tune of David Bowie's Space Oddity. A real emotional issue (grief over a lost mother) rises to the surface at the end, but an over-commitment to quirkiness can make Troop Zero feel like a song played out of tune.