Bucking the tide in Edwardian England

Virginia Woolf's 1919 novel, Night & Day, has been brought to the screen by director Tina Gharavi, who benefits greatly from actress Haley Bennett's spirited performance as a woman who’s ahead of her time. Bennett's Katherine wants to deepen her study of math, physics, and astronomy but is hampered by constricting tradition and a grumpy father (Timothy Spall) who wants her to marry. Dad's beau of choice: an amiable sap of a suitor (Jack Whitehall) who lights no sparks with Katherine. The closest Katherine comes to romance arrives when she meets Ralph (Elyas M'Barek), an editor who's helping Katherine's mother (Jennifer Saunders) finish a 30-year project, a book she's writing about her late father, a celebrated poet. Nicely mounted and benefiting from a light touch in its opening scenes, Night & Day is burdened by obviously declared intentions about the importance of allowing capable women to find places in male-dominated institutions and, of course, to win the right to vote. After Katherine applies to Cambridge, a university that isn't likely to admit her, we wind up with a message-driven movie that feels as if it's preaching to a contemporary choir. Still, a well-chosen cast and period-piece pleasures shouldn't be discounted. Put another way: Woolf's novel isn't regarded as a masterpiece, but it receives something akin to Masterpiece Theatre treatment nonetheless.

Dinklage gives 'Cyrano' wit, heart, and bite

   Some characters never vanish. Consider Cyrano de Bergerac. The witty, eloquent outsider has been pining for Roxanne  since Edmond Rostand's play debuted in 1897. 

   Feelings of inadequacy keep Cyrano from confessing his love for Roxanne. Instead, he tries to win her for Christian, a handsome soldier who lacks the necessary poetic skills for inspired wooing. Cyrano writes beautiful letters for Christian.

    A variety of versions of Rostand’s play have made it to the screen. Steve Martin appeared in Roxanne (1987) and Gerard Depardieu proved memorable in Cyrano de Bergerac, a 1990 French version. A 1950 entry starring Jose Ferrer and Mala Powers -- the first one I saw -- occasionally turns up on TV.

     Typically,  Cyrano believes that his large nose excludes him from harvesting the fruits of love.  He lives in a world in which appearances matter.

    In director Joe Wright’s addition to the de Bergerac canon, Peter Dinklage makes a smart, cocky Cyrano who believes that his diminutive stature (not his nose) overrules his consummate wit and intelligence -- not to mention his skill with a sword.

      Cyrano, therefore, demurs when it comes to courting the beautiful, brilliant Roxanne (Haley Bennett) -- albeit not without a measure of resentment.    

       The first requirement of  any production of Cyrano: The actor who plays Cyrano must be good. 

     Dinklage proves a worthy Cyrano. An opening scene in which Cyrano banishes a bad actor from the stage brims with gusto and imagination, giving Dinklage the entrance the character deserves.

     Not surprisingly, Wright hasn't neglected the movie's looks. Period trappings are gorgeously rendered and cinematographer  Seamus McGarvey floods the screen with color. 

       All good, but Cyrano is also a musical based on a stage production written by Erica Schmidt, who also wrote the screenplay for the movie.

       Yes, a musical. I didn't mention it earlier because I've hardly thought about the music since I saw the movie.

       The tunes by Bryce and Aaron Dessner (lyrics by Matt Berninger and Carin Besser) can feel almost prosaic, unlike what we might expect to hear in 17th Century France. Perhaps this is because the lyrics are tailored for actors who aren't all singers. Maybe the music had more impact when performed live on stage.

     Whatever the case, the actors sketch their characters with ease and flair. It's the performances not the music that stick.

     Bennett creates a vibrant Roxanne,  a woman of beauty and wit. Ben Mendelsohn earns his villainous stripes as the conniving Duke De Guiche. Kelvin Harrison Jr. winningly portrays a clueless, handsome, and, ultimately, noble Christian.

    Bashir Salahuddin plays Cyrano's friend and confidant, a comrade who appreciates Cyrano's gifts.

     Like its main character, the story endures. It's not for nothing that it has been re-told so many times. Even with its farcical moments and darker turns, Cyrano always retains some charm. 

     So, if you’re looking for a single reason to see Cyrano, try this: Dinklage's portrayal -- angry, rueful, and sad -- is bound to earn him a well-deserved Oscar nomination. 

     The music may not burn its way into memory, but Dinklage gives Cyrano a taste of bitterness that stings.

Performances elevate 'Hillbilly Elegy'

     What could be more uplifting? A young man overcomes poverty and a host of family issues that include his mother’s self-destructive bouts with addiction. Despite what seem like insurmountable obstacles,  this young man manages to attend college and obtain a law degree from Yale. He ascends,  yes, but he never forgets his Kentucky and Ohio background. Warts and all, he honors his family.

     That's the gist of director Ron Howard's Hillbilly Elegy, an adaptation of J.D. Vance's memoir about growing up among "hill" people who never quite shake their Appalachian roots.

      Howard's  "elegy" distinguishes itself with two strong performances. An unrecognizable Glenn Close plays the family's grandmother, Mamaw. Mamaw embodies the movie's survivalist virtues. Her husband was an alcoholic and her daughter Beth (Amy Adams) has destroyed her life with drugs while floating through bad relationships and lost jobs.  

     But Mamaw refuses to let Beth's son, J.D., throw his life away. She knows pain and suffering but she's as hard as an aging artery and Close turns her into an unapologetic battler.

     When everything else seems to be failing, Mamaw takes over. The wayward J.D. (played as a kid by Owen Asztalos), moves in with Mamaw. She lays down the law, a mighty act of will.

     For her part, Adams gives Beth the volatility that accompanies a life that's constantly spinning out of control. Beth's efforts at conducting something resembling normal life waver between comical and pathetic. 

      The movie shifts time periods, flashing back to the 1990s from the first decade of the 21st Century,  a stop-and-start again structure that can make the story feel longer than its one hour and 56 minutes.

     By the time J.D. heads to law school, he's being played by Gabriel Basso.  He also has an encouraging girlfriend, an East-Indian/American portrayed by Frieda Pinto. 

     On the verge of capitalizing on his law-school bona fides, J.D. is summoned home by his sister (Haley Bennett) because Mom has overdosed. Bennett's character, who married and remained in Middletown, Ohio, has exhausted her capacity to deal with a mother who seems irredeemable. 

     Far from perfect, Hillbilly Elegy, with a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor, calibrates Vance's story for multiplex audiences ready to devour a family tale that gives a full-throated endorsement to tough love, the kind that allows Mamaw to save young J.D.

    The storytelling can be uneven, but to ignore Hillbilly Elegy would mean missing a chance to watch Close build a character from the hard, gravelly soil of deprivation and to experience Adams as a mercurial woman who lights fires that threaten to torch everything her character touches.

Maybe the devil made them do it

     Judging by the characters in The Devil All the Time, some of the folks in West Virginia and parts of southern Ohio are mighty weird, screwed-up in ways once taken for common coin in Southern Gothic literary circles.

    Foremost, there’s religion: Faith has made some the characters in this episodic sprawl of a movie crazy to the point where a self-proclaimed preacher believes he can resurrect the wife he has just murdered and a father, believing that a sacrifice will save his cancer-riddled wife, kills the family dog.
     These are just a couple of the more lurid examples from director Antonio Campos’ cinematic take on a novel by Donald Ray Pollock, who narrates a taxing two-and-a-half hour Appalachian journey that sometimes feels like a near-parodic take on one of Flannery O’Connor’s novels.
      Campos doesn’t skimp on the number of characters who populate his movie, some arriving and disappearing before the story settles on Arvin (Tom Holland), a young man struggling to find his place in this strange, violent world.

      It's possible to regard everything before Holland's arrival as prologue. Arvin’s dad (Bill Skarsgard) returns from World War II emotionally bruised, his faith shaken. He recovers his belief when he marries a waitress (Haley Bennett) and they move into a ramshackle  house on the outskirts of Mead, West Virginia.
    The death of his mother and the resultant suicide of his father put young Arvin in the care of his grandmother (Kristin Griffin). As Arvin grows into manhood, the story also tracks the twisted progress of a serial killer (Jason Clarke) and his wife (Riley Keough). 
        Their MO: He takes photos of his victims having sex with his wife before slaughtering them. She goes along with his twisted plans, although she eventually tires of their murderous travels. 
         A frighteningly intense Harry Melling plays the preacher who believes the Lord will help him resurrect the dead. Mia Wasikowska portrays his hapless wife. 
      Arvin's grandmother adopts Leonora, the daughter of this less-than-happy couple. Eliza Scanlen plays Leonora as an adolescent.

      Sorry to bombard you with so much plot and so many characters, but that's a bit what it's like watching this twisted soap-opera.

      Anyway, it doesn't take long for the reverend Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattinson)  to show up. Not surprisingly, Teagardin has pervert written all over him: His idea of doing the Lord’s work involves seducing and then abandoning teenagers.  

    Let's just say that The Devil All the Time, isn’t the best advertisement for church-going.

    There's no faulting the performances. Skarsgard proves unnerving as a father of steely, war-scarred temperament. Holland brings humanity to Arvin, who — despite some violent episodes — self-describes as “not a bad person.” We more or less believe him. 

     Clark and Keough make an appropriately appalling murderous duo. 
      To further complicate matters, Keough’s character is the sister of a corrupt local sheriff (Sebastian Stan).
     I haven’t read Pollock’s novel, but in his review in The New York Times, Josh Ritter wrote, “Pollock’s prose is as sickly beautiful as it is hard-boiled.”
     I can’t say the same for the filmmaking here; sans Pollock’s prose, the movie strips the characters to their bare-bones lunacy and becomes a bit of an endurance test, making us wonder just how much of this ruthlessly unpleasant crowd we can take.

     By the end, Campos ties the story’s many threads together,  but to what purpose? In this predator-or-prey environment, it struck me that all of these small-town characters should have reached one inescapable conclusion: Move elsewhere.
    

Veterans marred by combat

A straightforward look at the difficulties of returning home from war.

The problems depicted in Thank You For Your Service should be familiar to anyone who has followed news coverage about the plight of veterans returning from Iraq: high suicide rates, an over-taxed VA, crippling cases of PTSD, limited job prospects and other issues related to re-entering civilian life. I've read that the percentage of soldiers who incur psychological damage after deployment in contemporary war zones ranges from 20 to 30 percent.

Familiarity aside, director Jason Hall (who wrote the screenplay for American Sniper) dramatizes the problems facing veterans in mostly effective ways, focusing on three soldiers returning from Iraq in 2008 (Miles Teller, Beulah Koale and Joe Cole).

The actors are playing lower-middle-class guys whose lives have been radically altered by the intensity of their war-time experiences. Tiller's Adam has difficulty re-connecting with his wife (Haley Bennett) and two kids. Cole's Joe arrives home to discover that his fiancee has abandoned him, leaving him in a state of disconsolate confusion. Kaole's Tausolo Aieti -- a.k.a. "Solo" -- suffers from memory loss and sudden eruptions of violence that ultimately affect his relationship with his wife (Keisha Castle-Hughes).

Emotionally disturbed and mentally addled, Solo becomes involved with an older veteran (Omar J. Dorsey), a drug dealer whose efforts to exploit Solo pull the movie off track, but who also adds another generation of disaffection to the story.

Although these men are combat-tested, they're not too proud to ask for help from a VA that is often too burdened to provide it. The movie, which pretty much skirts political issues, doesn't rail against the VA: The folks who work for the VA are simply overwhelmed by numbers.

A combat incident that saddles Teller's character with guilt weaves through the movie; it's seen in flashback toward the end when Adam meets with the widow (Amy Schumer) of a soldier whose death has become a principal source of Adam's guilt. Equally moving is a scene in which Adam travels from Kansas to Arkansas to meet with Emory (Scott Haze), a debilitated soldier for whom Adam also feels responsible.

Playing a take-charge sergeant, Teller gives the movie's main performance, but he strips his work of any trace of show-boating, something that's true for the entire cast.

Based on a 2013 book by David Finkel, Thank You For Your Service stands as an illustrative example of the kind of fighting that begins once soldiers return home from war: Too often, the battle they wind up waging is with themselves.