An arty but remote 'Mother Mary'

    All I can say after watching Mother Mary, a muddled quasi-horror film, is that actress Michaela Coel has one of the most expressive voices in contemporary cinema. In Mother Mary, Coel delivers her dialogue with a whispery authority that masks some down-to-earth bite. If the voice is an instrument, Coel sure knows how to play it.

    So much for the enjoyment I got from Mother Mary, a movie about a American pop star (Anne Hathaway) who travels to Great Britain to have a dress designed by a woman (Coel) who the movie establishes as an important voice in the world of exotic fashion. 

    In desperation, Hathaway’s Mary barges into the life of Coel's Sam Anselm. The two may once have had an affair, or maybe they were close friends, or maybe they shared the kind of relationship a gifted designer might have with her most important client — until, that is, the designer is summarily dropped. 

     Director David Lowery has written a movie that mostly takes place in Sam's barn-like studio, where Mary and Sam engage in verbal sparring before the movie gets around to blurring genre lines and dabbling in symbolism. Lowery even includes a seance and what appears to be an exorcism in which a floating amorphous stream of red is extracted from Mary's body. 

    Of course, the gossamer stream represents more than a color; perhaps it's a stand-in for the conflicted essence of Hathaway’s character and a nod (complete with some cutting of flesh) to the movie's vaguely defined horror aspirations.

     All of this has something to do with Mary's request for a dress in which she feels like herself. She's evidently trying to burst from the cocoon of rock star life; she wants to fully release herself.

     Somewhere after the halfway mark, I gave up trying to determine what Lowery was after. Hathaway wears some showy costumes when the movie flashes back to Mary's concerts, scenes in which Hathaway  sings songs written by Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs.

     I'm sure there will be critics and audience members who find deep meanings in all of this. But Mother Mary struck me as duller than deep, a self-conscious display of arty choices that often made the movie feel too remote to connect. 

    

      

 

Robert Redford plays an aging thief

The Old Man & the Gun creaks along in predictable fashion, but Redford displays wary charm.

There's one compelling reason to see The Old Man & the Gun. The movie stars Robert Redford who says that his performance as real-life bank robber Forrest Tucker is his last. Now 82, Redford has told interviewers that he plans to devote his time to directing and environmental causes. He's also still the driving force behind The Sundance Film Festival.

When I say that Redford provides the only reason to see The Old Man & the Gun, it's because he creates a reliably agreeable portrait of a thief who devotes his life either to holding up banks or escaping from prison, a feat he accomplished 16 times.

Full of wary charm, Redford's portrayal of Tucker arrives sans all traces of malice or evil.

I don't know if that makes sense for the subject matter, but Redford's fans should be able to regard this performance as a pleasing valedictory to great career.

Director David Lowery (Ghost Story), who wrote the screenplay based on a New Yorker article by David Grann, builds Redford's character around a single, disarming trait: Tucker is ultra polite and friendly during his robberies. The people he holds up (bank managers and tellers) all seem to take away positive impressions of this grand larcenist.

The rest of the cast includes Danny Glover and Tom Waits as a couple of Tucker's accomplices.
Sissy Spacek plays a widow who is charmed by Tucker, although she's not ready to abandon her life for him.

I suppose every robber needs a nemesis. In this case, the job goes to Casey Affleck, who appeared in Ghost Story. Affleck portrays Texas detective John Hunt, a man who made it his business to track Tucker.

Despite some nice scenes between Spacek and Redford, The Old Man & the Gun feels like a slightly creaky version of a movie we've seen before. And if this is Redford's last movie, I wish he had been chosen something a bit more challenging.

I feel guilty saying that because Redford certainly has earned the right to do whatever he wants; for me, he's been an exciting screen presence since I first saw him in movies such as Inside Daisy Glover (1964) and The Chase (1966).

I hope, at a minimum, that Redford doesn't give up on directing because a movie world without Robert Redford in it seems like a very bad idea.

This 'Ghost Story' isn't about horror

Director David Lowrey meditates on time, impermanence and the fleeting nature of our lives.

When leaving a screening of A Ghost Story, I turned the wrong way upon exiting the theater. I've been to this particular theater hundreds of times, and should have known precisely where I was. My disorientation told me that the movie had worked on me in ways that I might not fully have appreciated while I was watching.

For the record, it immediately should be stated that A Ghost Story is no conventional horror movie. It's meditative and sorrowful and it risks ridicule by having the ghost of its title walk through most of the movie in a bed sheet with eye holes that have been blackened.
This may sound Casper the Friendly Ghost. Don't be fooled. This ghost has the lonely majesty of a true wraith. The ghost put me in mind of a line from Wadsworth, the one about wandering lonely as a cloud, except this ghost doesn't wander, it's rooted to one spot.

Director David Lowrey begins the movie by introducing us to a young couple (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara). They're in bed in a house that's relatively isolated from any neighbors. The two cuddle, nuzzle and whisper to one another so softly, they might be characters in a Terrence Malick movie.

The next thing we know, Affleck's unnamed character is dead; we see him slumped over the wheel of his car, victim of an off-screen auto accident.

Rooney's character then views her husband's body in a hospital morgue -- or perhaps he was not a husband but the other half of two lovers living together. She gently covers his face with a shroud like sheet and walks out of the room. Lowery's camera lingers. Suddenly, the ghost of the departed character played by Affleck bolts upright. The movie's ghost is born.

Perhaps not knowing where to go, the ghost heads back to the home he shared with Mara's character, the place where they loved, argued and worked. His sheet trails behind him like the train of a wedding dress.

After arriving at his former home, the ghost watches as Mara's character eats a pie that has been dropped off by a neighbor as an offer of solace. She devours almost the entire pie, perhaps as a way of trying to digest her grief.

It's impossible to know whether the body under this sheet belongs to Affleck, but if it does, he gives a real performance, showing disturbances to the ghost's mute existence. When Mara's character shows up with another man, enough time having passed for her to consider moving on, the ghost's agitation becomes palpable.

Eventually, Mara's character leaves the home, which then is occupied by a succession of tenants, including a single mom and her two children and a group of people at a party.

In this second group, we meet a man who delivers a dour, extended monologue about the impermanence of everything -- including the entire universe. Everything in our quotidian existences, the stuff over which we fret and obsess, is of little ultimate consequence, he says. Viewed against such a vast panorama, the result of everything is nothing.

You can take this monologue seriously or you can view it as a satiric comment on a sure way to ruin a party by introducing a conversational element that's sure to lower everyone's spirits.

Perhaps to define the world that we're in, we also learn that Affleck isn't playing the movie's only ghost. Staring out a window, he sees a lonely neighbor ghost at a nearby house. They are able to communicate without speaking.

"I'm waiting for someone,'' says the other ghost.

"Who," our main ghost asks.

"I don't remember," is the reply.

This exchange suggests that even the most sharply defined purpose can vanish into the ether of time. This other ghost has forgotten its primary reason for existence, something like when a name we should know disappears into the haze of an encroaching mental miasma. We're sure it's there somewhere, but can't summon it.

More eerie than scary, Ghost Story includes a few typical ghostly activities -- books tossed off a shelf and shattered dishes, but it's not these paranormal stunts that prove unsettling. It's the feeling that we've been unmoored in the sadness of passing eons.

Eventually, Lowrey actually moves about it time, showing us scenes that have or will take place on the very ground where this otherwise nondescript home has been built.

Fair to say that the movie's ghost has something to say about all of us. We're here now. We'll die. Our spirits may cling to a familiar spot, but then we're gone -- not forgotten or forlorn. Just gone.

Viewed that way, A Ghost Story morphs into a cosmic tragedy, a requiem not for one lost soul, but for every one of us fragile beings.

A western in modern dress

Ain't Them Bodies Saints, grounded in Texas, but aiming for something bigger.

I don't know precisely what director David Lowery had in mind when he titled his Texas-based drama, Ain't Them Bodies Saints I do, however, know that there's something about Texas that inspires certain filmmakers to create characters who parcel out their words cautiously, as if they were hole cards to be turned over reluctantly but with no doubt about their ultimate power.

That's the feeling you get watching the characters in Lowery's movie, which moves to the kind of dreamy rhythms that have marked the work of filmmaker Terrence Malick. Lowery doesn't have Malick's grace, but he knows how to tell a story that's grounded in Texas color but which also strives to reach a mythic plane that transcends any specific location. Who knows? Maybe Texas really is a launching pad from which the mythic stratosphere becomes more readily attainable.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints tells the tale of Ruth (Rooney Mara), a woman who has had a long-standing involvement with Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck), a bank robber who loves her more than he loves just about anything. Bob loves Ruth so much, he takes the rap for her in a post-robbery shoot-out that wounds a deputy; Bob turns his 25-year prison sentence into an act of self-sacrifice so that Ruth can remain free.

Bob writes letters to Ruth from his jail cell, and we know from the start that Bob's only purpose in life is to reunite with the woman who has since had his child, a daughter.

Almost all of this happens in what can be viewed as the film's prologue. The real story begins after Bob escapes from jail, returns to the town where Ruth lives and tries to re-enter her life, a goal that we know he'll never achieve because Ain't Them Bodies Saints is less like a traditional drama than an illustrated story book composed as accompaniment for a doleful country tune about ill-fated love.

With Bob on the loose, Patrick (Ben Foster), a local cop -- the very one wounded by Ruth -- adopts a vigilant attitude toward Ruth and her child. She's also watched over by Skeritt (Keith Carradine), who runs a local store and who evidently had a relationship with Bob and one of his running buddies when both were kids.

The key to the film's mystery is embodied in Mara, who plays a woman capable of reflecting emotion off both hard and soft surfaces. Ruth seldom smiles, and she's clearly not to be trifled with on any level.

If pressed, I'd say that Lowery has made a film about fate and tragedy. Ain't Them Bodies Saints opens with a title card that reads, "This was Texas," perhaps a suggestion that the film takes place in a past governed by the logic of a thousand westerns and that something -- perhaps the flinty, uncompromising integrity of its characters -- has been forever lost.

Lowery's dialog puts an emphasis on conviction: When Carradine's character tells a thug who's looking to settle an old score that he'll kill him if he turns up again, we're supposed to know that Carradine's Skeritt means what he says. The man will not die an accidental death.

With its strange musical score, its improbabilities and its hard-scrabble ethos, Ain't Them Bodies Saintsmay be a bit too self-conscious for its own good. And I often wonder whether these kinds of movies depict credible characters or should be seen more as reflections of how filmmakers wish people were.

But if Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a story about tragic love, it's also a love song, sung to characters who pride themselves on looking even the worst possible news square in the eye.