Can she survive the loss of her fortune?

 

    Whether F. Scott Fitzgerald actually said "the very rich are not like you and I" or some approximation thereof, the words seem to have lodged themselves in the popular consciousness.

   The new movie, French Exit, suggests yet another twist: The very rich are not like you and I -- even after they lose their money.

   Based on a novel by Patrick deWitt who also wrote the screenplay, French Exit tells the story of Frances Price (Michelle Pfeiffer), a Manhattan widow who has spent her entire fortune and has been told by her accountant that penury awaits.

   Ill prepared for a life without funds Frances tells her accountant that she never planned to outlive her money. 

    After selling her remaining belongings, Frances and her son Malcolm -- Lucas Hedges as a young man whose every gesture suggests defeat -- head for Paris. A friend has loaned Frances an apartment in the City of Light.

      Frances might be thinking of killing herself. Why else would she wantonly spend the money she collected selling off the contents of her New York apartment? She seems dedicated to reaching the end of her rope.

    But that's only half the story. Under the direction of Azazel Jacobs, the movie morphs into a collection of eccentricities, many found in the person of Francis, who's played by Pfeiffer with a mixture of rue, raised eyebrows, and shrugging indifference to the pain of others.

    Not long after arriving in Paris, Frances and Malcolm dine in a restaurant where they're served cold omelets. Eager to leave, Malcolm requests the check. A waiter makes a show of ignoring them.

Frances's response: She sets a table vase containing small flowers on fire. 

    Pfeiffer takes full advantage of the showcase, proving herself a master of understated sarcasm and of unjustified nonchalance in the face of extreme adversity.

     But, oh, those eccentricities just won't quit.

      Danielle Macdonald turns up as Madeleine the Medium, a fortune-teller hired by Frances to conduct seances so that she can communicate with her late husband. 

      A terrific Valerie Mahaffey tempers a comic turn with sadness as a woman who befriends Frances in Paris.  Isaach De Bankole appears as a private detective who's hired as part of Frances's effort to locate the pet cat she has smuggled into Paris. The cat has run off.

   According to Frances, the cat embodies the spirit of her late husband Franklin and, thus, is called Little Frank. This, I hope, explains the earlier-mentioned seances.

   For most of the movie Malcolm remains a drip who abandons his fiancee (Imogen Poots) to move with his mother to Paris. He’s a young man locked into dependency on an unreliable mother. 

    Frances's morbid and mordant ways seem to have infected the proceedings which build toward a near farcical assembly of all the characters in Frances's borrowed Parisian apartment. 

   French Exit can be amusing, but spending time with these characters also can feel enervating. Despite some last-minute attempts to open emotional doors, the characters live in a movie that feels apart from us — not, as I said at the outset, like you and me.

    Put another way, the characters in French Exit aren’t weird enough to be inescapably interesting or likable enough to spend much time caring about.

  

 

Shattering movie; shattering performance

     Anthony Hopkins is now 83 years old.

   That might not be especially relevant in reviewing a new movie starring Hopkins, but in the case of The Father Hopkins's age  gave me pause.

    It's nearly impossible for me to write about The Father, a story about a once competent man being overtaken by dementia, without wondering how much of the role Hopkins had to internalize. 

   How could he play a character named Anthony who's losing his grip without wondering whether he might encounter a similar fate?

   This is not to say that the Anthony in the movie is the Anthony Hopkins of real life, only that I couldn't watch The Father without wondering what emotional toll Anthony, the character, might have taken on Anthony, the actor.

   Adapting his own play in collaboration with Christopher Hampton, writer/director Florian Zeller has made a movie of shattering power. How awful to lose one's self -- or even to worry about the prospect as age advances.

    But the questions don't stop there: If the self -- strident and full of itself -- can be so easily vanquished, what was it in the first place?

    Olivia Colman portrays Anthony's daughter Anne. We quickly learn that Anne has decided to move to Paris to be with a new lover. As a consequence, she won't be able to look after her London-based father.

    Strains of bitterness and guilt underly Anne's worries about her father, a man who constantly makes it clear that he favors her sister, a character we never meet. Anne may be desperate for one last chance at happiness. 

    But wait. Before long, Anne turns up in the person of another actress (Olivia Williams). The story continues as if nothing had happened. The feeling of disorientation jars. Is this real? Are we seeing the world through Anthony's addled consciousness? 

   Identities plant themselves in our minds and then evaporate. Rufus Sewell and Mark Gatiss appear as different versions of Anne's husband.

    Zeller constantly overturns our assumptions. Anthony seems entrenched in his comfortable London apartment. We accept his reality until Zeller makes us wonder whether the apartment is his at all. 

    Later a new caregiver (Imogen Poots) arrives; her presence gives Anthony an opportunity to be flirtatious, imperious, and funny as if he's thumbing through an old catalog to find the personality traits that once defined him. 

   Once you accustom yourself to Zeller's approach, the movie acquires increasing power and its impact grows until we finally realize that Anthony is losing himself, a horrible situation made worse by Anthony's ability occasionally to apprehend the magnitude of the loss. 

    What could be more unsettling -- for the movie's characters and for its audience? I hope Hopkins, who gives one of the best performances of his career, was able to leave this character behind more easily than I could.

    Take that as both a wish and the deepest of compliments.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 7/19/19 -- The Art of Self Defense, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, and Three Peaks

Sometimes, you take what you can from movies. I didn't entirely buy into The Art of Self Defense, but at its best, the movie offers a revealing look at how a charismatic leader exploits a massively insecure person. Ostensibly, director Nick Broomfield's Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love deals with the relationship between Leonard Cohen and a woman many regard as his muse. The documentary emerges as a better portrait of the tumultuous '60s than as a study of a relationship. Finally, I found myself engrossed for most of Three Peaks, a drama about difficulties that occur when a single mom tries to establish a relationship with a new man. I like movies with suggestive moments and minimal plotting, but this one skimps on payoff.

Jesse Eisenberg puts on his full dweeb in The Art of Self Defense, a strange, often implausible movie about an alienated young man who, after nearly being beaten to death, emerges as a dedicated martial artist. Eisenberg's Casey Davies recovers from a mugging, flirts with buying a gun and then discovers a dojo where the sensei (Alessandro Nivola) gradually indoctrinates him into a peculiar form of karate: Certain of the sensei's students are encouraged to unleash maximum brutality. As a study of how a vulnerable person can fall under the sway of a powerful teacher, The Art of Self Defense excels. Eisenberg and Nivola create enough credibility to balance the screenplay's more outlandish elements. On the surface, the dojo ethos of obedience and self-control seems reasonable, but The Art of Self Defense is about more than the way a young man gains self-assurance through the discipline of martial arts. The movie also aims to plumb the worst depths of machismo and the bizarre behavior to which it can lead. Put another way: director Riley Stearns has more in mind than turning Eisenberg into an adult version of The Karate Kid. Stearns creates an austere environment in which dialogue is delivered without much inflection. He never makes it entirely clear when the movie is taking place. At one point, VHS tapes appear, a relic of another time. The movie eventually loses itself in a deluge of extreme behavior that might have been intended to show the brutality that lurks beneath the dojo's proclaimed rigor. The Art of Self-Defense proves absorbing enough, but -- in the end -- Stearns doesn't transcend the peculiar insularity he creates. The movie's most important moment emerges as the kind of joke that would have made a terrific ending for a short film — and, yes, you may see it coming. Fine performances and strangely self-contained world result in a satire more pinched than expansive. With Imogen Poots as a Blue Belt trainee who knows more than she initially lets on.

Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love

Director Nick Broomfield tells the story of the long-running relationship between Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen, both now deceased. Broomfield can't resist telling us that he knew Ihlen and even slept with her on the Greek Island of Hydra. That was back in the early '60s. I guess that counts as a necessary part of full disclosure before Broomfield tackles the story he wants to tell. Love aside, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love turns out to be as much about the unsettling fluidity of the '60s as it is about a relationship. Much of Marianne & Leonard deals with Cohen's career, which evolved from writing novels and poetry on Hydra to singing and performing on the world stage. Cohen got his start as a performer when he shared a song he'd written, Suzanne, for Judy Collins. She recorded the tune but also urged the reluctant Cohen -- he insisted he couldn't sing -- to make the leap to performing. Cohen's singing may not qualify as rock 'n' roll, but that doesn't mean he missed out on the sex and drugs part of the '60s. As Cohen's star rises, Ihlen seems to slip into the background. There are drugs and other women, a six-year-stay in a Buddhist monastery and a late-life battle to recover from financial losses that involved him in a lawsuit against his former manager. Cohen's letter to the dying Marianne proves touching and Broomfield creates a vivid impression of lives that often became unmoored. As for Marianne and Leonard? Even amidst the cultural frenzy of the '60s, their tie — though often strained and tenuous — somehow endured.

Three Peaks

German director Jan Zabeil tackles the problems faced by an emerging family in Three Peaks, a compact drama that takes a single mother (Berenice Bejo), her lover (Alexander Fehling) and her young son (Arian Montgomery) to an isolated cabin in Italy's Dolomite Mountains. Initially, these three seem to get along well, but as the minimal story of Three Peaks unfolds, an increasingly recalcitrant boy becomes more of a problem. He refuses to sleep in his own bed and does his best to undermine his mother's relationship with her new lover, sometimes subtly and sometimes directly. To the movie's credit, Aaron acknowledges that the boy can be a pain, but he’s also understanding about the difficulties the kid faces. Fehling presents all this in an atmosphere of deeply impacted tension and we can't help fearing for the boy when he and Aaron take an early morning hike to the top of one of the three peaks that give the movie its title. The cast handles the movie's conflicts well, although I wondered if Zabeil, in his eagerness to avoid the pitfalls of a movie that could have tipped into horror with a bad-seed aftertaste, didn't wind up with an overly attenuated drama. Three Peaks never quite reaches the dramatic peak that the movie's deliberate pacing and tense interplay seem to promise.

Enter this 'Green Room' at your peril

Some reviewers have deemed director Jeremy Saulnier's viscerally charged Green Room a masterwork of tension and gore, and just as many have praised Patrick Stewart's performance as a snarling neo-Nazi guru who doesn't hesitate to mutilate his enemies -- or have his skin-head minions do it for him. The premise: A financially strapped punk band called the Ain't Rights finds itself playing at a private club in the backwoods of Oregon. It doesn't take long before the band (Anton Yeltsin), Callum Turner, Joe Cole) and Alia Sawkat) understands that it's in way over its head. After realizing that there has been a murder on the premises, the band wants out; the punks and their leader won't allow any possible witnesses to their crime escape. The band is joined by a fellow prisoner (Imogen Poots), something of an independent spirit in this leather-clad hell. There's gore aplenty on the menu, and Saulnier (Blue Ruin) serves it up with grim relish. Sure there's menace here, and pervasive fear inspired by thugs who seem to have created a terrifying world of their own. But Saulnier's stylistic abilities are used to ill effect the more we see of the movie's collection of vicious dogs, box cutters, pistols and other instruments of torture. The movie's motto might be: If it can severed or slashed, by all means do it. Does showing gruesome violence with style make it less revolting? It didn't for me.

Chasing the soul of Jimi Hendrix

Andre Benjamin makes a convincing Jimi Hendrix in John Ridley's look at a tumultuous year in the guitarist's life.

Last year, John Ridley won an Oscar for his 12 Years a Slave screenplay, which he adapted from a memoir by Solomon Northrup.

Given the formal structure of that work, Ridley's Jimi: All Is By My Side -- which he both wrote and directed -- comes as a surprise, a spontaneous-feeling work that focuses on a tumultuous year in the guitarist's life.

All is By My Side reflects the taste of Hendrix's time, a moment when moviegoers flocked to films that felt as if they were expanding experience, showing what it was like to travel in certain circles.

That immersive late '60s quality and a fine performance by Outkasts's Andre Benjamin make All is By My Side a dizzying introduction to the scene that swirled around the enigmatic Hendrix from 1966-67.

Hendrix was nothing if not elusive: He could be poetic, brutal, childish or daring. A musical genius, he refused classification, but played well enough to reduce the great Eric Clapton to quivering silence during a now-famous London jam session.

Benjamin captures Hendrix's naivety, alienation and charm. It's a performance full of suggestion and charisma, the kind of star power Hendrix learns to use to his advantage. He's the coolest guy in just about any room, and increasingly, he knows it.

It's misguided to think of All is By My Side as a bio-pic. Its scenes emerge and vanish like smoke, re-creating a creative and chaotic pop-cultural aura.

Ridley does, howeover, include biographical elements: Hendrix was discovered by Linda Keith (a terrific Imogen Poots) at a New York club. Keith Richards' girlfriend at the time, Keith sees Hendrix's star potential, something he has yet to grasp.

Keith introduces Hendrix to Chas Chandler (Andrew Buckley), a member of The Animals who's thinking about shifting gears. He wants to manage rock stars. Chandler takes Hendrix to London, where the music scene percolates with energy. There, Hendrix establishes a sometimes volatile relationship with a woman named Kathy (Hayley Atwell).

Kathy loves him, but eventually learns that no one ever will possess Hendrix. Stability may not have been in his nature.

There are great scenes in the movie that seem to come out of nowhere. To open a Saville Theatre concert, Hendrix decides to play Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The expectation is that he'll offend the Beatles, several of whom happened to be in attendance.

But Hendrix is so confident of his ability to claim any song as his own, he proceeds, pulling his bandmates (Oliver Bennett and Tom Dunlea) along with him. It's a daring act of musicianship and bravado, almost a memo to the Beatles saying, "This is what it could have been."

Ridley wasn't able to obtain rights to Hendrix's original recordings, so he had to use substitute musicians. That may explain why we don't learn enough about how Hendrix developed his amazing talent, but Ridely gives the movie a sense of immediacy that makes up for the deficiency.

Hendrix's band was called the Jimi Hendrix Experience: I don't know what sort of legal difficulties might have been involved, but the band's name would have made a better title than All is By My Side.

It's also a fine description of what you'll get from Ridley's drifting recreation of a lost moment: Here for the taking is a Jimi Hendrix experience.

Speed? Yes Everything else? No

I wasn't going to bother with Need for Speed until I realized the movie starred Aaron Paul, best known as Jesse Pinkman, the young man who made meth on TV's Breaking Bad.

Meth. Speed. I thought maybe Paul had found a new drug on which he could pin his career hopes.

OK, I'm kidding. I knew that Need for Speed was developed from a popular Electronic Arts video game, but I'm not kidding about Paul. I wanted to see what he could do on the big screen.

The answer: If Need for Speed is any indication (and I hope it isn't), not much.

Paul plays Tobey Marshall, a blue-collar guy from Mt. Kisco, New York. Thanks to a few contrivances Tobey joins with Julia (Imogen Poots) on a cross-country trip. The goal is for Tobey to reach San Fancisco so that he can compete in a high stakes race sponsored by a former racer named Monarch (Michael Keaton).

Guess what? It's not all about racing. Tobey wants to defeat his arch rival Dino (Dominic Cooper), the immoral rich guy responsible for the death of Tobey's best bud (Harrison Gilbertson).

Dino forces Gilbertson's Pete into a lethal crash during an early-picture race, but the wrongly accused Tobey spends two years in jail for the crime.

Joining Tobey on his four-wheeled adventures are his pals Benny (Scott Mescudi), Finn (Rami Malek) and Joe (Ramon Rodriguez).

When Finn leaves his day job, the movie adds some gratuitious nudity to the proceedings. Eager to rejoin his racing pals, Finn shocks his office mates by stripping off his clothes, baring his butt and returning to the world of vroom-and-zoom.

En route to San Francisco, Tobey and Julia are chased by cops and by other enemies who want to stop them.

And just in case you don't think cars are enough, the directors add a Cessna that serves as a traffic reporter for the speeding Tobey and, later, a couple of helicopters.

The action (yes, there's plenty) sometimes seems more like vehicular homicide than racing with overturned cars and fiery crashes that look as if no one possibly could survive them.

Nothing makes a great deal of sense here, and as shocking as it is to say, the movie makes the Fast & Furious films -- at least the better ones -- look like masterpieces.

Based on his work in Breaking Bad, I'm thinking there's more to Paul than Need for Speed allows him show. I hope I'm right.

Precise music, sloppy lives

A great cast does its best to elevate A Late Quartet.

Sometimes I wonder if even Christopher Walken knows where his line readings are headed? Walken, of course, has acquired the reputation of being an actor who specializes in characters who challenge expectation and defy most ideas of normality. But not always. A Late Quartet, a movie about a string quartet that faces a major crisis, provides welcome proof that Walken is not only a highly capable actor, but an extremely sympathetic one. The movie takes the burden of weirdness off Walken's shoulders, something that should come as a relief to both the actor and his audience..

Walken plays Peter Mitchell, the group's cellist and elder statesman. When Peter tells the other members of the unimaginatively named quartet -- The Fugue -- that he has been diagnosed with Parkinson's, troubles begin to threaten the group's 25-year history.

Conflicts quickly arise among the musicians: two of whom (Philip Seymour Hoffman -- as the second violinist -- and Catherine Keener -- as the violist) enter a shaky period in their marriage. To add further complication, professional jealousy starts to poison the atmosphere: The second violinist thinks it's time for him to change places with the first violinist (Mark Ivanar.)

You can tell from a quick perusal of the bold-faced names in the preceding paragraph that A Late Quartet boasts a terrific cast, all of whom are in expectedly fine form.

It's hardly surprising that Hoffman, most recently seen in The Master, gives a strong performance as Robert Gelbart, a husband who believes that his wife, Juliette, is not supporting his quest to play first violin. He's also in conflict with Ivanar's character over the quartet's approach to music, which very much has been determined by the first violinist's highly controlled personality and his preference for technical mastery over free-flowing passion.

The story needed no further wrinkles, but the screenplay has Ivanar's character giving violin lessons to Alexandra (Imogen Poots), daughter of Robert and Juliette. Alexandra harbors a good deal of resentment toward her parents, another dynamic in what turns out to be a script that tries to hit a few too many melodramatic notes.

Director Yaron Zilberman builds the movie around all of these personal tensions, as well as around the group's efforts to master Beethoven's challenging Opus 131.

I know a musician who remained unconvinced (perhaps even bothered) by the fake playing that this talented quartet of actors must attempt. But there's no faulting the cast for the way it inhabits each character.

Hoffman captures Robert's restlessness, volatility and disappointment; Keener excels as a woman who too often has been called upon to become a stabilizing influence on the group; Walken brings a sad sense of resolve to the role of a recently widowed man who's about to lose the skill that has carried him through life. Less well-known than the others, Ivanar more than holds his own.

Zilberman's approach to the material is fairly straightforward, but the screenplay he co-wrote with Seth Grossman, isn't always sure-handed. The story comes dangerously close to farce as the result of an affair that Poots's Alexandra initiates with Ivanar's character.

If you're looking for deep insight into chamber music, you may be a bit disappointed, but the notion that disciplined classical musicians can lead particularly sloppy lives is not without interest, and a screenplay would have to have been awfully bad to defeat a quartet of actors this good.