A wan drama fails to spark

 

    Set in post-Korean War America, On Swift Horses wrings much of the life out of a story about two characters trying to find their places during a sexually repressive American moment.

    The movie begins with Lee (Will Poulter) visiting his girlfriend (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in Kansas while on leave from the Korean War. Lee hopes to return from the war before settling down with Edgar-Jones's Muriel, who agrees to marry him.

     Chances for a successful marriage seem doomed from the start, partly because Muriel ignites more sparks with Lee's brother Julius (Jacob Elordi), who also served in Korea but isn't returning to the Army.

    Director Daniel Minahan creates expectations for a tale about a love triangle but soon shifts gears, alternately following Julius and Muriel as a way of exploring gay issues against a 1950s backdrop.

    When the story moves to San Diego, Lee -- now home from battle -- tries to realize his middle-class dreams and Muriel begins suffocating under the strictures of a life she doesn't want.

    Sexual identity forms the basis of the connection between Julius and Muriel. Julius knows he's gay; he senses Muriel is attracted to women, even though she has yet to act on her desires. For a time, Muriel tries to maintain her image as a typical married woman but soon begins an affair with Sandra (Sasha Calle), a woman who lives nearby. 

    Sometimes playing hooky from her job as a waitress, Muriel also spends time at the track, socking away her winnings, presumably for the marital split she (and we) know will culminate when she begins dipping her toes into the gay world, circa 1950.

      For his part, Julius heads to Las Vegas instead of joining Lee and Muriel in San Diego as he initially had promised. Skilled at poker, he lands a job identifying cheats at a gambling joint. He also begins a romance with a co-worker (Diego Calva), a young Mexican man with more ambition than Lee and a willingness to cut corners. Danger lurks.

     Elordi doesn't seem to have shed the Elvis vibe he brought to Sofia Coppola's Priscilla (2023); his performance -- or so it struck me -- sometimes plays as if it were culled from poses of the 1950s. Edgar-Jones convinces as Muriel wobbles her way into a new life.

    Credit Poulter, whose character is stuck in a factory worker's life, for bringing depth to a role that plays second fiddle to the two main characters.

   Burdened by a structure that shifts between Muriel and Julius, a slow-moving story benefits from the supporting work of Calva and Calle. Either of their characters might have given the movie a more compelling center.

    Adapted from a novel by Shannon Pufahi, On Slow Horses struck me as a wan version of a Todd Haynes  journey into '50s sexuality (see Carol). Minahan pushes a big pile of dramatic chips onto the table but can't cash enough of them in. For a movie fueled by repression, social pressure, and awakening desire, it's a bit of a slog.

     

OK 'Twisters' twirls into summer

 

Quick takes after watching Twisters, a semi-sequel to the popular 1996 blockbuster.

1. Advances in effects have made tornadoes feel more nerve-rattling than they were in 1979. But if you rewatch the 1979 movie, you may be surprised to discover that the effects don’t look hopelessly dated. The new movie's strategy: To convey and underscore tornadic ferocity in Oklahoma's tornado alley and then repeat. After that, do it again.

2. The new edition rewrites one of the original's equations, pitting greedy capitalism (a real estate company exploits tragedy by underpaying for tornado damaged homes) against do-good impulses. Good-guy storm chasers help those whose lives are destroyed by tornadoes. They also struggle to disarm lethal twisters.

3. Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt (as a divorced couple reunited in their fight against tornadoes) were a more interesting pair than Glenn Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones. Powell plays Tyler Owens, a cowboy storm chaser from Arkansas, a subculture superstar who calls himself "The Tornado Wrangler." Powell underscores his magnetism and proves that in movies, a gleaming smile can outdo a tornado. Edgar-Jones, passable.

4. Twisters has been criticized for ignoring global warming as a contributor to increasingly powerful and more frequent tornadoes. Rising temperatures are mentioned, but, hey, this is an aspiring summer blockbuster; it wasn't written by Bill Nye, the science guy.

5. The screenplay toys with another conflict found in the original -- individual creativity vs. organizational conformity; the split allows for the introduction of underutilized supporting characters, colorful individuals who defy corporate authority, Keep an eye out for Sasha Lane and Brandon Perea.

6. If you’re familiar with the original, you’ll notice that director Lee Isaac Chung restates but tries to freshen plot points from the original. An example: A visit to Aunt Meg (Lois Smith) in the original becomes a stop at the home of Kate’s mom (Maura Tierney). I didn’t mind. 

7. Chung, widely hailed for the indie hit Minari, tries to layer a melancholic tone into the proceedings: Tornadoes can wipe out years of old-fashioned striving in an instant.

8. Some of the set pieces are great, including one in which a movie theater is destroyed, its screen ripped to shreds, thereby hinting at the destruction of theater culture or maybe trying to pit escapist thrills against the real thing, which — of course — is a little weird for a movie in which the storms are artificially created.

9. Chung doesn’t have the kind of sardonic streak that might have given the story more edge. An example: He presents a rodeo as a shining example of Americana, even though it’s disrupted by a tornado. He unabashedly celebrates the open spaces of the American heartland.

10. Do the characters have psychological resonance? Edgar-Jones’s Kate is driven by guilt over losing her significant other during an early picture prologue involving an experiment gone awry. A one-time bull rider, Tyler tells her to ride her fears, not face them. When it comes to motivation, the movie scores a meh.

11. What about the romance between Tyler and Kate? In another wrinkle, Anthony Ramos plays the chaser who lures Kate back into storm chasing but loses the love game to Powell. The movie’s love triangle is rigged; the deck is stacked against Ramos's character from the beginning.

11. Tired of this yet?

12.  Me, too.

13.  All in all, Twisters is a reasonably effective attempt at creating a summer box office storm that delivers what it promises. But a word of caution:  It’s possible to grow weary of getting pounded by tornado after tornado (I eventually did). It's possible, though, that some will see the punishing stream of tornadoes as a virtue, even if the vividly presented storms aren't  likely to boost Oklahoma tourism.

These crawdads sing a lukewarm song

 

    Sometimes I wonder whether there’s anything left to American culture aside from rampant eclecticism. Where the Crawdads Sing, the big-screen adaptation of a best-selling novel by Delia Owens, reaches theaters as an amalgam of storylines and genre gestures.

    In its early going, the movie resembles a Nicholas Sparks romance between an isolated girl and a well-meaning young man. At other times, the movie offers a lyrical appreciation of the North Carolina marshland where much of the story takes place. At still other times, Crawdads relies on a woman's determination to secure her place in the world.

   If all that weren’t enough, the story is interspersed with a courtroom drama in which a country lawyer sheds his retirement to defend the main character in a murder trial that grips the fictional town of Barkley Cove, N.C.

    To work at all, the movie requires an actress who can convey the independence and natural intelligence of its main character.

    Daisy Edgar-Jones more than passes the test: She plays Kya, a young woman who lives alone in the marshlands just outside of town. Edgar-Jones captures the wariness and guile of a woman who has grown accustomed to reading nature’s tea leaves. Kya's a natural naturalist.  

  Abandoned by her mother, father, and siblings, Kya relies on the marsh to teach her how to survive in the world as she finds it during the 1950s and 60s.

    Director Olivia Newman presents the scenes between Kya and her first love Tate (Taylor John Smith) in too-good-to-be-true territory  until Tate goes off  to college and breaks his promise to return to Kya.

   Time passes and Kya takes up with Chase (Harris Dickinson), a young man who looks a lot like Tate but who once was a star high school football player. He regards himself as a town hotshot. Not surprisingly, he's a jerk.

    Kya narrates the movie, early on telling her story to her attorney (a sympathetic David Strathairn). She continues narrating without any specified listener other than the film’s audience.

     With help from cinematographer Polly Morgan, Newman conveys an appreciation for the swamplands, the visual equivalent of the observant quality that helped give Owens’s novel its weight.

      Aside from the two men in Kya’s life, supporting roles include Garret Dillahunt as Kya’s abusive father and a Black couple (Sterling Macer Jr. and Michael Hyatt) who  provide Kya with clothes. She trades the muscles that she harvests for grits and other staples.

      Though set during the days of segregation, the movie keeps racial issues at arm's length, preferring to show how Kya — whom the townsfolk derisively refer to as Marsh Girl — develops as a first-rate illustrator and chronicler of the marsh life that she observes.

       Shifts between courtroom scenes and various chapters in Kya’s life burden the movie. Just as we're getting into one part of the movie, another pops up.

     Produced by Reese Witherspoon, who has taken a major interest in the work of women filmmakers and in women’s subjects, the film should satisfy devotees of the novel

      But unlike its celebrated marshlands, the movie can come across as dry, more a recitation of the novel's events than a deeply felt drama.

     Credit Edgar-Jones for carrying the story through its various stages, but Crawdad’s use of narration provides a clue as to why the movie  doesn’t always work: Where the Crawdads Sing is more a story told than one that lives, breathes and finds its own life.