A disappointing 'Ella McCay'

 

 If you have fond memories of Terms of Endearment,  Broadcast News, and Good As It Gets, you've probably been looking forward to a new movie from director James L. Brooks. 

  No slouch as a writer/director, Brooks not only directed the three movies I mentioned, he also played a role in creating the landmark TV comedies, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi.  Additionally, he's known as a creator and developer of The Simpsons.

 Ella McCay is Brooks's first movie since 2010's How Do You Know, which wasn't greeted with much enthusiasm. Still, as an admirer of Brooks's ability to create memorable characters in movies that hit plenty of strong notes, I was hoping for a bullseye.

  Aside from enjoying the always-welcome presence of Albert Brooks -- this time as a governor who resigns his position to take a job as Secretary of the Interior -- I spent much of Ella McCay fighting off disappointment. I expected a movie that spoke to the moment, and found one that seemed to have been taken from the day-old cinematic shelf.  

   Set in 2008, the movie gives a major role to Emma Mackey (Netflix's Sex Education). Mackey plays the title character, an amped-up policy wonk. As  a 34-year-old lieutenant governor, Ella lands the governor's job when Brooks' s character departs for Washington. 

   If you're looking for intermittent displays of charm, Mackey's performance may hit the spot, but the character she's playing didn't strike me as intriguing  enough to carry the film past Ella's commitment to   political pablum: She wants to help mothers and children.

   Perhaps to add some conflict, Brooks adds wrinkles involving a misuse of government property and the brewing jealousy of Ella's increasingly bitter husband (Jack Lowden). The owner of a pizza restaurant, Lowden's Ryan begins to resent his wife's success.

  A promising supporting cast can't put much spring into Ella McCay's step, either. Jamie Lee Curtis signs on as Ella's no-nonsense aunt, the woman who raised her. Woody Harrelson portrays Ella's philandering father, and Kumail Nanjiani plays Trooper Nash, the state cop who becomes Ella's loyal driver.

   Spike Fearn appears as Ella's brother Casey, a computer genius who's trying to win back the woman (Ayo Edebiri) he didn't know how to court. Brooks resolves the relationship a little too easily.

    Despite a variety of complications, the comedy often flatlines. We never learn what state Ella is governing, and her work as governor often plays second fiddle to her personal issues: coaxing her nerdy brother out of isolation, visiting her aunt, or dealing with her husband.

     No more need be said: My heart sank for Brooks, now 85, and for myself; I was hoping that Ella McCay would serve as a sparkling addendum to a strong career. What I got instead was what an admired editor I knew used to say when confronted with something he found wanting: "a tepid potato."

The war-scarred life of a British poet

 

    Few filmmakers are as deeply versed in sorrow as Terence Davies, the British director of such films as Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, and, more recently, A Quiet Passion. 

  A cinematic essayist and poet, Davies never entirely forsakes narrative but often transcends it, giving his work a reflective quality, the emotional weight of living as transients in a time-bound world. Davies knows the grief of understanding that time ultimately swallows us all. Davies’s films can be seen as invitations to mourn.

      On its surface, Benediction -- Davies's latest film -- might be called a bio-pic -- and in some respects it is. The movie tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, a poet whose conscience and outrage was formed in the trenches of World War I. 

    Struck by the brutality and barbarism of war, Sassoon deemed himself a soldier whose duty included preserving the lives of other soldiers. To make his point, Sassoon issued what he called A Soldier's Declaration. He withdrew from the fight in1917.

     A decorated soldier, Sassoon wasn’t a pacifist. He argued that young men were being sacrificed to a policy that needlessly prolonged the bloodshed. The politicians had made dying on the battlefield pointless.

    Davies deals with Sassoon's life as a morally outraged soldier and, later, as a disaffected poet and gay man who suffered disappointment and rejection in his personal life. 

    Jack Lowden portrays Sassoon as a young man and Peter Capaldi portrays the aging, embittered Sassoon. 

    Moving between Sassoon's youth and his later life, Davies creates moody scenes, sometimes punctuating them with real war footage, each a small plaintive statement. So many gone and for what?

    Sassoon's rejection of combat was followed by an enforced stint in  mental hospital where he met and developed deep feelings for Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), another poet. Ordered back to the front, Owen had the misfortune of being killed on the battlefield a week before the war-ending armistice was signed. 

    Davies devotes considerable attention to the gay circle in which Sassoon traveled after the war. In addition to popular entertainer Ivor Novelllo (Jeremy Irvine), Sassoon had relationships with socialite Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch) and actor/theater director Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth). 

    A gay man himself, Davies idealizes little about gay life in the 1920s and '30s. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain during most of Sassoon's life but the small gay community Davies depicts was no blissful haven. Cruelties were not uncommon and many of the characters unleash  them with lacerating wit.

    Sassoon eventually married. He found a woman who had no illusions about who he was -- Kate Phillips as a young bride and Gemma Jones as Sassoon's older wife. Perhaps Sassoon felt marriage would give him respite from the whiplash ferocities of life among the gay social elite or maybe he was looking for stability.

    Lowden has the easier task of portraying the young Sassoon. Capaldi must play a mean-spirited poet who battles with his son George (Richard Goulding). An aggressively skeptical George wondered about his father's late-life conversion to Catholicism; Sassoon evidently believed Catholicism might help him find  permanence in a world full of kaleidoscopic shifts.  

  It's always dangerous to look for the creator in the creation, but many have suggested that Davies, or at least part of himself, resides somewhere inside this story. I’m not sure it matters.

  I can't say that Davies brings Sassoon fully to life as a writer but as has been the case with much of Davies work, Benediction is at its best when it tries to hold the ever-vanishing past close, fixing it in art and memory. A futile pursuit perhaps but Davies imbues it with elevating sadness and beauty.

 

      

     

Wrestling for family and fame

Fighting With My Family uses a regional British accent to freshen its formula.

All sports movies -- even those that have more to do with showmanship than competition -- follow a familiar template. An underdog beats long odds to wind up exulting in a triumphant moment, usually one involving a championship. Such movies serve a dual purpose. First, they're meant to entertain and second, they provide inspirational reassurance, something along the lines of, "Hey, if I can do it (whatever 'it' happens to be), so can you." Many of these movies bolster their credibility with early-picture declarations that they are based on true stories.

Fighting With My Family, the latest such endeavor, takes place in the world of professional wrestling, where "competitors" execute choreographed moves designed to keep each other from getting killed or maimed.

All such movies struggle to find an element that adds flavor to the formula and Fighting With My Family follows suit. In this case, the movie's idiosyncracies derive from its focus on a downscale wrestling family that lives in Norwich, England. The Knight family has pinned its hopes on a dream, that at least one of them will ascend to WWE ranks.

Toward this end, Saraya (Florence Pugh) and her brother Zak (Jack Lowden) travel from Norwich to London to audition for a Florida-based program that trains wrestlers for the WWE. To move on, they must impress Hutch, a talent scout played by Vince Vaughn in a role that allows him to crack the whip, both verbally and physically.

To borrow from another hoary genre (military training movies), Hutch becomes a kind of drill sergeant; the aspiring wrestlers, his raw recruits. Vaughn's Hutch doesn't believe in letting wash-outs down easily. He tells them their dreams have reached an unceremonious conclusion. End of story.

A basic tension emerges when Saraya -- who later takes the wrestling name Paige -- makes the cut and her hard-driving brother doesn't. The fates of brother and sister are determined less by physical ability than by what Hutch deems that "special something," the capacity to win over a crowd that enjoys vocal rejection as much as enthusiastic acceptance. Put another way, wrestling fans would just as soon jeer as cheer.

Dwayne Johnson -- a.k.a. The Rock -- once staked out his turf in the world of professional wrestling. Johnson served as one of the movie's producers and makes brief appearances that may have been intended to add some mega-wattage to a lesser known cast.

While Zak broods at home, Paige becomes an outsider in a group of trainees in which the women tend to be blondes who look good in bikinis and whose looks are expected to help them.

The movie would have us believe that Paige represents the freakish outsider and the rest of the women are the wrestling equivalent of stuck-up sorority girls. To its credit, the movie later tries to humanize its trio of hotties.

Pugh approaches her work with determination as her performance follows a typical arc through aspiration, self-doubt and final ascendancy.

As Paige's parents, Nick Frost and Lena Headey register well, portraying a couple that survives by staging wrestling matches in Norwich. The movie spells out the pressures put on Paige for her the sake of her family (her triumph also will be theirs) but too easily resolves them. So it goes with a story directed by Stephen Merchant who also wrote the screenplay and makes an appearance as Zac's father-in-law.

As is the case with many formulaic sports movies, too much thought can serve as a spoiler. Why we're supposed to celebrate Paige's triumph in a sport where matches are scripted proves a bit baffling. It probably has something to do with her finally becoming self-confident enough to claim her place in the wrestling world.

Enough. Fighting With My Family earns points for trying to freshen the formula and achieves some success as a crowd-pleasures, but its truest moments arrive during the end credits when Paige and her real family make their obligatory appearance in what has been, to cite yet another sport, a mostly minor-league effort.

A royal rivalry that needed more fire

Mary Queen of Scots can't bring its intriguing ingredients to a dramatic boil.

Mary Queen of Scots tells a story that drips with political intrigue, religious strife, personal betrayals, and even murder.

Despite all that and despite a couple of winning performances from Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, the movie too often fails to bring its many volatile ingredients to a dramatic boil.

The story centers on the rivalry between Ronan's Mary and Robbie's Elizabeth I. Newly widowed at 18, Mary arrives in Scotland from France, where she evidently learned the art of tolerance. Surrounded by her all-male gaggle of courtiers, Elizabeth fears that Mary won't be content to rule over Scotland, but will try to take over her throne, as well.

Director Josie Rourke, working from a screenplay by Beau Willimon (House of Cards), alternates between the 16th-century British and Scottish courts, making clear -- in somewhat interminable fashion -- the contrasts between the two women.

As for those differences: Mary is Catholic; Elizabeth, a Protestant. Mary seems the more natural and fresh-faced of the two with Elizabeth, who contracts a terrible case of the pox during the movie, looking as puffed and powdered as a show poodle.

Ronan brings youth, intelligence and plenty of backbone to the role of Mary. Robbie's make-up threatens to overwhelm her performance, but she manages to allow real feelings to creep through.

In what might be taken as a bow to current sensibilities, both Mary and Elizabeth preside over multi-racial 16th-century courts. There's also gay sex, oral sex and lots of grumbling courtiers, some of whom make an impression, notably Guy Pearce's William Cecil, an advisor to Elizabeth and an all-around stuffed shirt.

James McArdle portrays Mary's hirsute half-brother. Ismael Cruz Cordova plays a gay man who likes to hang with Mary and her crew of gentle-ladies and who also has a roll in the hay with Mary's second husband (Jack Lowden). David Tennant portrays John Knox, a Scottish zealot who rails against Mary's Catholicism and what he sees as her sexual abandon.

For those unfamiliar with British history, the movie makes it clear from the outset how all this back and front-stabbing will conclude. Rourke begins with Mary's impending beheading and works her way back through the story.

Scotland looks far more primitive than Elizabeth's London court but the movie's glamor has more to do with the two queen's architectural hairstyles than with any aristocratic splendor.

And it may be a nod to current standards to suggest that Mary and Elizabeth shared a sisterly fate as the men of their respective courts attempt to push them around.

Mary Queen of Scots doesn't have the musty feel of period-bound drama but it doesn't spring to vivid life, either. So, no hails for this queen.

By the way, and of no relevance whatsoever, I'm waiting for someone to use this title as inspiration for another movie, namely Mary Scot of Queens Tell me you aren't ready for it.