Bob's Cinema Diary 6/23/20: 'Babyteeth,' 'Wasp Network,' 'Daddy Issues'

Babyteeth 

Talk about a parental nightmare. Your 16-year-old daughter falls for a 23-year-old drug user without a home. He's tattooed, sports a mullet, and doesn't seem to give a damn about anything. His name is Moses. That's the set-up for director Shannon Murphy's Babyteeth. But wait. There's more. Milla (Eliza Scanlen), the teenager in question, is no ordinary kid. She's got terminal cancer. So Milla's parents (Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn) face a problem. How do you say "no" to a kid who can't ruin her future because she doesn't have one?  Another teenage weepy about a kid with a terminal disease? Not exactly. Working from a screenplay by Rita Kalnejais, Murphy adds whimsical stylistic flourishes and enough emotional realism to upset expectations. A pianist who abandoned her musical career, Mom is about to drown in deep emotional waters. A psychiatrist by trade, Dad is so overcome with trepidation about what looms that at one point he gives himself a shot of morphine. Parental performances are strong but the movie belongs to Scanlen and Toby Wallace.  Wallace gives Moses lots of rough appeal. You never doubt that a good kid lurks beneath Moses' bad-kid surface. Babyteeth is the kind of movie you might approach with dread, but one that turns out to be more creative than you initially might have imagined. None of the characters want to be boxed-in by cliche. If Scanlen's name rings a bell, it might be because she played Beth in Little Women, one of last year's best-received movies.

Wasp Network

If you're looking for a good movie by director Olivier Assayas, you might want to try 2005's Summer Hours. I wish the same could be said for Assay's latest, Wasp Network, now showing on Netflix. Having already teamed with Assayas in 2010's Carlos, Edgar Ramirez plays a Cuban who in the 1990s leaves his wife (Penelope Cruz) and daughter to defect to the US. As we later learn, Ramirez's Rene Gonzalez is part of a Castro-conceived program to infiltrate Miami Cuban circles that carry out oppositional activities against the regime. A muddled narrative brings the so-called Wasp Network program to light, introducing two additional characters. Gael Garcia Bernal portrays team leader Gerardo Hernandez and Wagner Moura portrays a slick operative who takes a Cuban-American wife (Ana de Armas). Assayas seems to be aiming for epic scope, but can't put the pieces of the movie together in a way that staves off confusion. Although she doesn't get as much screen time as the men, Cruz makes a strong impression as a woman wounded by her husband's defection and betrayed by the revolution she avidly supports. The same goes for de Armas, another woman whose life becomes collateral damage as the plot unfolds. The performances are all strong, some of its scenes connect and the movie looks great, but Wasp Network registers as a misfire from a fine director and an extremely good cast.

Daddy Issues
Henrietta (Kimberley Datnow) moves from London to Los Angeles when she's summoned to join the board of her late father's firm. It seems that Henrietta -- who aspires to be a stand-up comic -- once lived with her dad and attended school in LA. That’s convenient because Henrietta has friends from back in the day, which means the movie has a supporting cast. Alice (Alice Carroll Johnson), one of Henrietta’s old pals, tries to convince a small group of reunited friends that she's a successful talent agent. In reality, she's a gay woman trying to make ends meet by providing non-sexual companionship for a benevolent Sugar Daddy who misses his late wife and only seems to want someone with whom he can watch TV. When Henrietta moves into her father's LA house, she learns that Nolan (Tanner Rittenhouse) also lives there. He works for dad's company and developed a relationship in which Dad became a kind of mentor. Henrietta's attempt to reunite with an old boyfriend goes nowhere. Director Laura Holliday never convinced me to care about any of this or to believe that Henrietta had real comedy chops. That would have been fine had Daddy Issues been a movie about the difference between wanting to do stand-up and actually pulling it off. Somewhere, there’s a movie here, but no one seems to have found it.

This gang battles long odds

The True History of the Kelly Gang is a bit of a jumble, but it's not easy to shake off.

A man-child sprung from an abusive boyhood, Ned Kelly became an outlaw legend in Australia. Kelly also became the subject of author Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The True History of the Kelly Gang, source of a wild-ass movie of the same name.

Working in an appropriately feverish style, director Justin Kurzel has made a movie that’s difficult to digest — and maybe that’s its greatest virtue. Kurzel's "true history" brims with stylistic embellishment, unvarnished brutality, and unfocused passion.

As the adult Kelly, George Mackay (1917) gives a scowling, fiery performance. Mackay's Kelly is pushed into violence through a mixture of what might be psychopathy, conviction, and horrible circumstances. Like many of the Irish in British-ruled Australia of the mid-19th century, Kelly was born into an oppressive, impoverished world.

Among his many peculiarities, Kelly wore a bulletproof helmet — inspired by pictures he’d seen of the USS Monitor. His gang sometimes dressed in … well … dresses. Like the western outlaws he resembled, Kelly thrilled and terrorized.

All of this can seem strange to American audiences who either haven’t read Kelly’s novel or are otherwise unfamiliar with Kelly whose life was a study in brutality — both of the rough terrain on which he lived and the violent behavior to which he was driven.

Kurzel doesn’t so much plumb psychological depths as he carries on a flirtation with the motivations of his characters. Kelly loved his mother (Essie Davis), but she had strange ways of returning his love. While still a boy (played by Orlando Schwerdt), Kelly was sold by his mother to an outlaw, Russell Crowe’s Harry Power. Power became a kind of surrogate father to Kelly, whose real father died after serving a prison sentence. Kelly was 12 at the time.

Power alternately introduces the boy to the high life (steak dinners) while encouraging his brutality. Power accepted no one who couldn’t, as he put it, “pull the trigger.”

Looking bearded, thick and unkempt, Crowe appears in an early chapter of the story. When Power vanishes from the screen, Crowe's absence is felt, but not before he reminds us of how good he can be.

The duplicities of the British are deeply ingrained in a British constable (Nicholas Hoult). Kelly's romantic life, such as it was, focuses on a prostitute portrayed by Thomasin McKenzie. Another British officer (Charlie Hunnam) sexually harasses Kelly’s mother in the movie’s early going, part of the movie's attempts to show the strange intimacies between oppressors and the oppressed.

To his credit, Kurzel likes to blur lines. We don’t always know whether to feel sorry for Kelly or be revolted by him. Crowe’s character is down-to-earth but homicidal, and Kelly’s mother proves a mass of contradictory impulses: Love and cruelty among them.

I wasn’t tempted to spend much time researching the real Kelly and the film begins with a wink that subverts any need for pinpoint accuracy. Nothing you’re about to see is true,” we’re informed by a title card.

Kurzel’s feverish approach often left me bleary-eyed, but the director and his cast have hold of something weird, raw, and gripping, a subject they either couldn’t or didn’t want to contain. But even when we don’t quite know what to make of The True History, it's difficult to turn away.

A not-so-innocent children's book

It's interesting that two of the year's more intriguing movies involve elements of horror. Why not? We don't exactly live in times without terror.

Both movies, by the way, drew attention as part of The Film Society of Lincoln Center's 43-year-old New Directors/New Film series. I'm talking about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and The Babadook, both films directed by women.

More about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which was directed by newcomer Ana Lily Amirpour, at a later date. Suffice it to say now that it's an Iranian vampire movie filmed in Los Angeles. I know, you're sick of vampires, but Amirpour's film, shot in black-and-white, is too eerily unnerving to dismiss.

This week, though, we'll turn attention to The Babadook, a movie that's beginning to make its way around the country after its debut on VOD.

Australian director Jennifer Kent accomplished what I'd begun to think was impossible: She's made a good horror movie; i.e., one that doesn't shortchange scary thrills, but is also rife with ambiguity and psychological subtext.

The Babadook involves a children's book about a strange figure named The Babadook. He wears a top hat, and almost always is seen in silhouette. He's scary, ominous and perhaps unstoppable. He's dread personified.

The story begins when the widowed Amelia (Essie Davis) reads this strange pop-up book to her six-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). It takes Amelia a while to realize that the book, which seems to have appeared from nowhere, isn't exactly a cuddly, bedtime tale.

From that point on, The Babadook begins to mix horror with parental frustration while raising troubling questions: Is Amelia losing her mind? Is Samuel a demon child? Is a real demon terrorizing both of them?

I won't say much more about the plot except to tell you that Amelia became a widow when her husband died in a car crash. He was driving her to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. How's that for a large can of psychological worms?

But here's the thing -- or at last a thing -- with which you'll have to come to grips. Samuel is an obnoxious, impossible kid. He's prone to tantrums. He's mildly precocious. And he's dangerously aggressive. At one point, he pushes a cousin out of a tree house.

So naturally, we sympathize with a mother who's at the end of her rope. But Kent shifts that focus after we begin to wonder whether Amelia is losing her grip.

Perhaps all the horror we're witnessing in Amelia's home -- lots of things that go bump in the night -- is a creation of her mind, flowing from her badly damaged psyche.

When it comes to creating tension and keeping us off balance, Kent is no slouch.

But here's where the movie distinguishes itself: Almost everything we see is anchored to the real exasperation of a single mother who's being pushed to limits that are carefully delineated in Davis's increasingly unhinged performance.

I suppose The Babadook can be classified as a haunted-house movie, but it's more than that. It will rattle you and also give you something to think about as it moves toward its provocative and psychologically intelligent conclusion.