'The Bride!' celebrates its excesses

  It's unlikely anyone will accuse Maggie Gyllenhaal of stinting on ambition in The Bride!,  a wild farrago of a movie that resists classification. 

  Is The Bride! a horror movie or a Gothic romance? Is it a feminist reimagining of movies of the 1930s, particularly James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein? Is it a comedy that pays homage to Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein with a rousing rendition of Puttin' on the Ritz?

  Or, is it a showcase for an uninhibited display of ferocity from Jessie Buckley in another fearless performance?

  As it turns out, The Bride! is all those things, a movie that makes no bones about celebrating its excesses, of which there are too many.

   Gyllenhaal's big-screen gamble doesn't entirely, but her  approach yields intermittent payoffs. Perhaps the genre it mostly resembles is one in which two crazy outcasts tear across the American landscape, eventually finding love.

    Buckley appears in two roles, occasionally interrupting the narrative for portentous speeches delivered by Frankenstein's 19th-century author, Mary Shelley, who inspires a manic outburst by Ida, also Buckley, a Chicago moll who winds up dead in the movie's prologue.

    Enter Christian Bale's Frankenstein, a.k.a. "Frank," who visits Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), a scientist who has been experimenting with reanimating the dead. Poor Frank. He's lonely and craves the companionship of a woman who, like him, was created, not born. He yearns for a soulmate.

     Though she expresses reservations, Euphronious helps Frank dig up the recently deceased  Ida. Employing whizzing, flashing equipment that's heavy on old-fashioned dials and gauges, Euphronious jolts Ida back to life. 

     Initially, Ida, who can't remember her past, hardly seems an ideal partner for Frankenstein, played by Bale with a mixture of sincerity and goofiness, punctuated by occasional bursts of violence, mostly to protect Ida.

    Nothing if not loyal, Frank sticks to his lovelorn mission. He and Ida wend their way across the country, making stops at a roaring Chicago party, a sophisticated New York City black-tie event, and a rural drive-in theater.

    The wandering duo frequently attends movies, all of which star romantic lead Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). As we all once did, Frank learned about romance from the movies.

    Irate Chicago mobsters and a detective duo (Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz) pursue the fleeing renegades, as images of Bonnie and Clyde flash through our collective heads.

   Despite efforts to mask his appearance, Frankenstein can't always hide his stitched-together face, and Ida's tousled blonde hair and blood-red lips are accompanied by an ever-present stain on her right cheek, a souvenir from her reanimation. When it's popularized on tabloid front pages, her look turns into a fashion statement.

      I can't say that Gyllenhaal blends the movie's cornucopia of ingredients into a satisfying whole. She creates a mixed-bag of a movie that dashes across the screen, dazzling with its theatricality, amusing with its satiric fillips, and repelling with splashes of body horror. 

    Eclectic to the max, The Bride! practically drowns itself in movie love as it tries to match Buckley's expressions of unrestrained wildness. Say this, though: The Bride! earns the exclamation point in its title.

       

       

     

Two kinds of grief in 'Hamnet'

  Hamnet, director Chloe Zhao's adaptation of a 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell, takes us into the Elizabethan world where Shakespeare began both his career and domestic life. Perhaps to clarify matters about the title, we're immediately informed that in Shakespeare's day, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable. 

  By necessity, Zhao's grief-laden movie (more to come on that) must be regarded as speculative. As the author of 38 plays, four long narrative poems, 154 Sonnets, and some shorter poems, it's no wonder that the English language's most famous author didn't have time to keep a diary.

  Zhao (Nomadland) builds her story around the marriage between Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley). The pivotal event arrives when the couple's 11-year-old son, Hamnet, is struck down by the plague, shifting the story toward Agnes's inconsolable grief and simmering resentment. 

   Busy establishing his theater, William wasn't around when Hamnet passed.

   On screen, the independent-minded Agnes embraces nature and considers herself inseparable from it. A pet hawk rests on her gloved forearm when summoned to feed. She spends so much time with trees, she might as well be moss-covered. 

   Communing with nature aside and writing with a quill pen aside, William and Agnes had time to have three children, a daughter (Bodhi Rae Breathhach) and twins (Olivia Lynes and Jacob Jupe). 

   Mescal's performance has both cheery and doom-struck aspects, but Zhao focuses more on Agnes, who carries most of the burden of child-rearing. Preoccupied with running The Globe in London, William left Agnes in Stratford. She insisted he go off and fulfill his destiny as a writer, but later came to resent his absence.

   I guess it's a new take, Shakespeare as the workaholic dad and absentee father. 

    Zhao makes the most of the wooded mysteries around Stratford, Agnes's leafy domain. Make what you will of Zhao's fondness for turning dark holes into a motif. Ah, the deep void, the gaping yaw in which undiscovered countries can be found, as Agnes puts it, echoing the line Shakespeare gave to Hamlet. 

    Hamlet, you'll remember,  referred to death as "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns."

   Throughout, we're primed to expect problems. When we first meet William, he's working as a Latin tutor to pay off the debt his irresponsible, glove-making father had accumulated. The looming marriage between William and Agnes isn't greeted favorably by either family. Agnes's brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) seems more sympathetic.

    So what is this movie trying to accomplish? 

    When Hamnet's death scene arrives, Zhao gives full vent to the agony of loss. Garments may be rend both on screen and off as Zhao contrasts two kinds of mourning: Agnes's, direct and visceral, and William's, expressed through writing, the arena in which he presumably could deal with it.

    Jupe's performance as a playful kid who's devoted to his twin sister augments the grief.

   In Zhao's finale, William takes on the role of the ghost of Hamlet's father in the first production of the play. Agnes becomes a vocally avid member of the audience, initially derisive but ultimately understanding that Will grasped the agonies poor Hamnet endured. Dying from the plague was a gruesome ordeal, reflected in the ghost's speech about being poisoned by his brother, Claudius, and recited by William during the movie's recreation of the performance of Hamlet on the Globe stage. 

    It's better written than anything in the movie.

    "The leprous distilment, whose effect

         Holds such an enmity with blood of man

         That swift as quicksilver it courses through

         The natural gates and alleys of the body,

         And with a sudden vigor it doth (posset)

         And curd, like eager droppings into milk

         The thin and wholesome blood."

     Did the death of Shakespeare's son really inspire Hamlet? Having seen a number of productions of Hamlet, I'm dubious. And it's impossible to watch Hamnet without constantly reminding ourselves of what Shakespeare was destined to become no matter how much Zhao grounds him in 16th century realities.

     That's a problem for any movie that brings Shakespeare into view; it must withstand suspicions that it is trying to gain prestige through association with greatness. Hamnet can't entirely dodge such doubts, but Zhao -- particularly in the movie's final scenes -- finds a startling immediacy in Buckley's unadorned grief, revealed finally without the embarrassment of artifice by an actress unafraid to walk out on a limb grown from unbearable pain.

    

    

    

 

A potentially good story wasted

  Put Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in the same movie, and good things will follow. But wait. That's already happened. In 2021's acclaimed The Lost Daughter, both actresses earned high praise for playing the same character at different ages.

  Judging by Wicked Little Letters, a comedy also starring both actresses, the second pairing is far from a charm.

  Based on a true story, Wicked Little Letters transports us to small-town England in the 1920s. Life becomes tense when residents of the coastal city of Littlehampton start receiving a flood profanity-laced letters.

   An Irish immigrant with a young daughter, Buckley's Rose Gooding immediately falls under suspicion. Her staunchly religious next-door neighbor (Colman's Edith Swann) fans the flames of mistrust, pointing to Rose as the culprit.

   Working from a screenplay by Jonny Sweet, director Thea Sharrock errs by serving up the story's big reveal after an hour, leaving 40 or so minutes still on tap.

   Sharrock also relies too heavily on the presumption that audiences will be convulsed by hearing otherwise strait-laced characters spout the profanity found in the letters, which are often read aloud.

   Some of the supporting cast seems stuck in a kitchen- sink drama. Timothy Spall plays Edith's domineering father, and Gemma Jones appears as her cowed mother. 

  It falls to a local police officer (Anjana Vasan) to clear up the mess. Her superiors want her to follow orders, much as her late father, also a cop, supposedly did. They have no interest in seeing a woman take any initiative.

   Thematically, the movie seems intent on showing the commonplace misogyny that dominated the time, but these characters aren’t deep enough to fuel the kind of performances we expect from Colman and Buckley.

  Buckley finds herself in a one-dimensional role that leans heavily on showy displays of pluck. Colman? Well, she's had better parts. 

 In an early scene, Rose coaxes Edith toward spontaneity while the feuding women, still able to abide each other, walk on a pebbled beach. We find few such relaxed moments, perhaps because the characters are often being pushed around by a plot that lays on thick helpings of drama when it's not looking for laughs.

  Sharrock eventually starts speaking the language of caper movies, a tonal shift that may reflect an underlying confusion about what this broadly drawn comedy aims to accomplish. 

   By the end, a promising story has given way to blatant attempts at crowd-pleasing and the hopes I had for Wicked Little Letters had dimmed, faded ink on another set of high expectations.

Bob's Cinema Diary: Nov. 3, 2023 -- 'The Persian Version' and 'Fingernails'

The Persian Version

 

Though light-hearted, The Persian Version deals with serious issues pertaining to fragmented cultural identity and generational disconnection. Say this: Director Maryam Keshavarz isn't afraid to extend her reach. Early on we learn that Leila (Layla Mohammadi) has arrived at a point of friction with her immigrant mother (Niousha Noor). A fully contemporary young woman,  Leila aspires to be a screen writer. After breaking up with her gay wife  (Mia Foo), Leila becomes pregnant from a one-night fling with an actor (Tom Byrne) who's working in a stage production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Keshavarz also tells the story of Leila's mother, a determined woman who willed herself to succeed in America, becoming a business success when her physician husband (Bijan Daneshmand) was sidelined with heart issues.  Mom, the movie's most interesting character, has a backstory. She married at 14 while still in Iran. More complex and demanding than you might expect from a film that strives to leave a feel-good aftertaste, Mom's story could have been its own film. A strong Kamand Shafieisabet plays Mom as a young woman. Scattered as it can be and perhaps with too much on its plate, the Persian Version breaks into enough enjoyable pieces to sustain a 107-minute entertainment.

Fingernails

   Christos Nikou, known for directing Apples, a 2020 festival favorite, has lots going for him in Fingernails, a movie that involves an unwieldy and alarming conceit. 

   In the near future, someone has invented a device that analyzes fingernails to determine whether two people are a love match. Billed as a kind of marriage insurance, the procedure requires ripping out fingernails, a torment Nikou may have seen as the basis for a meaningful metaphor. 

 Stay calm: Nikou suggests more than he shows.

 But let's get back to the movie's strengths, which are concentrated in three names: Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, and Jeremy Allen White, familiar from the hit series Bear. 

  Buckley plays Anna, a vaguely unhappy woman who takes a job with a company that tries to teach people how to love one another before submitting to the test that will determine whether they belong together. 

  A teacher by trade, Anna yearns for something that's missing from her marriage to White's Ryan, a dependable guy who no longer lights the spark of romance in their relationship.

 Ahmed plays Amir, one of Anna's co-workers, a lonely guy who slowly falls for her. The two share experiences helping couples at the Love Institute, a firm presided over by Luke Wilson's Duncan. 

   The movie sets up a conflict between emotional allure and "scientific" verification with Buckley and Ahmed giving performances that ripple with attraction and intelligence. 

   Their chemistry almost covers the contrived nature of the central conceit,  presumably intended to satirize the ridiculous notion that matters of the heart can come with guarantees.

   But the whole fingernail business also can feel like a gimmick that challenges credibility, and perhaps even common sense. That’s how I lean.

Throwing off the weight of oppression

 

   If you were looking for an evening's diversion, it might not occur to you to spend it hanging out with a group of Mennonite women living in an isolated community in a Latin American country.

   Grim, serious, and weighted by patriarchal oppression, Women Talking makes Amish country seem luxe by comparison.

   Forbidding and talky, director Sarah Polley's movie, adapted from a novel by Canadian author Miriam Toews, tells a reality-based story about women seeking libration from a calcified society that hides its sins behind a religious mask.

    And, yes, you read that “reality-based” sentence right. The story inspired by a 2011 event in Bolivia in which seven men from a Mennonite colony were convicted of rape. 

    The story focuses on the response of the colony's women. Outraged by men who drug them with cow tranquilizers, rape them, and then blame ghosts or demons, the women arrive at a point of decision.

   As a whole, the community's women are divided about what to do. So eight women form a kind of high council of the oppressed, retreating to a hayloft to discuss options that will impact the rest. 

    The women are able to talk frankly because the men have gone to town to bail out the attackers after the authorities intervened. We don't need to see the men because this isn't a movie with two sides: It's a movie about what happens when women no longer can tolerate a soul-crushing system.

   Three choices emerge: Do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The men have given the women two days to decide to forgive them, so the clock is ticking. The faux rectitude of the men’s position —  only forgiveness will be tolerated — needs no further comment.

      Because the men have forbidden the women to learn to read or write, a black-sheep male (Ben Whishaw) has been selected as recording secretary. Whishaw's August occupies an uneasy position vis a vis the community. His mother was expelled for speaking her mind. He left and attended college but returned to become a teacher for the young men in the community. He’s an outlier.

      Frances McDormand, one of the movie's producers, appears briefly as a woman committed to upholding the prevailing order. 

       Mostly, the movie plays as an ensemble piece built around powerful actresses: Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Claire Foy, and Michelle McLeod.

      As the women debate, we learn a bit about them. Mara's Ona, a woman with a dimpled beatific smile, has become pregnant after one of the rapes. August is in love with Ona, but the stern environment isn't exactly conductive to romance.

      Foy's character bursts with fury over the rape of her four-year-old daughter, a rage so powerful it frightens her.

      Few would argue with the movie's message. These women want equality, freedom to express themselves, and faith that isn't used like a cudgel, inducing resignation and despair.

      The last point is important; these are women of faith, influenced by the need to forgive and by religiously inspired pacifism. They don't want to abandon all they hold sacred. They're also reluctant to leave older sons, who may already have drunk the colony Kool-Aid.

      Polley and cinematographer Luc Montpellier cloak the movie's images in weighty browns. The visual environment matches the  strictures under which these women live, making it clear that throwing off its terrors won't be easy.

     Polley's cast embraces the variety of possible responses to the movie's central predicament, although it takes a while to keep track of who's who. And the characters sometimes feel as if they've been reduced to the positions they take.

    But then, in a way, they have been -- by the abuse they've faced. 

   Women Talking might have been more powerful had it been presented on a stage, where it could have benefited from the kind of theatrical electricity that creates its own urgency.

     In the end, though, Women Talking gets under the skin and its shocking story compels. Polley makes us want to escape this stifling, barren world in which obedience has conquered love.

     Put another way, we want these woman to find the new lives they've only begun to imagine.  

     

A haunting, complex look at motherhood

 

    Count me among those who consider Olivia Colman indispensable.

    Colman has played Queen Elizabeth in The Crown and has taken on a variety of other characters in a growing body of work.

    If you can think of a time when Colman’s performance missed the mark, leave a comment. I can’t.

    Colman stars in The Lost Daughter, a film in which actress Maggie Gyllenhaal makes her directorial debut.

    Adapted from a novel by Elena Ferrante — best known for My Brilliant Friend — Lost Daughter establishes itself as a fearless exploration of motherhood with all its deep affections and charged resentments.

   Colman’s performance skillfully embodies the movie's themes without ever asking for sympathy. She creates a character who can be chilly and difficult, an academic capable of insight and cruelty.

   Slowly and in carefully calibrated fashion, Gyllenhaal moves through the story — although not without leaving disturbing traces of an irresolvable conflict. The Lost Daughter isn’t about resolving conflict; it’s about learning to live with it — or not.

    We soon discover that Leda has taken what appears to be a working vacation. She’s gone to a small Italian beach town, ostensibly to concentrate on her work.

    Inevitably, she meets other tourists, as well as a handyman (Ed Harris) and the local bartender (Paul Mescal). 

    An uneasy relationship develops between Leda and Nina (Dakota Johnson), a wife and mother who has traveled to Italy with a small family group from Queens, New York. Nina begins to fixate on Leda as a possible role model.

    Leda shows the ferocity of her independence when, on the beach, she denies a request by Nina to move her beach chair so that her family can spread out a bit. Leda's refusal intrigues Nina, who’s having her own issues with the demands of motherhood.

     At one point, Nina’s young daughter is lost along with her favorite doll. Leda finds the girl, calming the girl’s frantic mother. Leda also finds the doll, which becomes the centerpiece of a revealing and provocative turn.

     Leda's most important relationship may be one she can’t dodge, the connection to her youthful self. Leda’s younger days are seen in flashbacks in which an impressive Jessie Buckley portrays Leda as a young mother who’s constantly being distracted by two demanding daughters. She can't get any work done at home.

   In these flashbacks, Gyllenhaal presents a small but telling portrait of a marriage under stress. Leda’s husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) tends to his own career and disappoints his wife in bed.

   At an academic conference, Leda begins an affair with a colleague (Peter Sarsgaard) who greatly admires her ability to translate poetry.

   Work, independence, and sex provide Leda with much-needed fulfillment— but also leave her grappling with guilt about maternal insufficiencies. She reveals herself when she tells Nina that children can be a “crushing responsibility.” Underline the word “crushing.”

    You can spend productive time unpacking the symbolic importance of dolls in the movie but, in broadest terms, they suggest a side of womanhood that Leda both needs and disdains.

    Presented in a plain, unadorned style in which the flashbacks sometimes feel abruptly inserted, The Lost Daughter stands as a courageously truthful depiction of a struggle many women face but which seldom receives on-screen. 

    The movie doesn't indulge in simple or even complicated solutions; it's a challenging look at what it means for Leda to face the consequences of choices that haunt her. 

     Only an actress of Colman's caliber could make this work.

Despair, comedy and Charlie Kaufman

     Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008) baffled many, but it had real pain, insight, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director obsessed with creating a masterpiece. Kaufman's new film, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, displays some of the same existential fatigue that marked Synecdoche. Ditto for the director's 2015 animated feature, Anamolisa.  
    I mention the past to point out that Kaufman knows his way around misery and because he's at it again.
     Some movies never allow a theme to emerge from the slagheap of their narratives. That can't be said of I'm Thinking About Ending Things: This odd, sometimes haunting, sometimes funny, sometimes baffling movie allows many themes to marinate in its dreary brine.
     Among them: mortality, aging, relationships, and the malleability of time. 
     All of this unfolds in a deadpan style that mirrors the internal state of characters who, as the title suggests, are living lives in which happiness and contentment seem as inaccessible as far-off galaxies.
     The aroma of defeat wafts through nearly everything in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, much of which is staged in a car in which two people (Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons) travel through a snowstorm. The car's windshield wipers become a kind of metronome, marking the passing of each gray minute.
     Although it's barely relevant, I'm Thinking of Ending Things does have a plot. Buckley's character -- sometimes called Lucia and sometimes called Lucy -- accompanies Plemons' Jake on a trip to meet Jake's parents, who live on an isolated farm. 
     Even before they arrive at their destination, Lucy wonders why she's wasting her time on a relationship she's sure has no future. Jake is nice. Jake is intelligent. But he's not The One.
     As played by Plemons,  we’re ready to agree with Lucy’s assessment. Jake seems to have accepted the monotony of life on an even keel.
     Both characters are smart, though, and they're not shy about telling each other what they know.
     When Lucy and Jake arrive at the farmhouse, the movie begins its full ascent into weirdness, becoming what might be considered a comedy of despair.   
     Watching Lucy encounter Jake's mother (Toni Collette) and her father (a very strange David Thewlis) leads to the kind of deadpan humor that won't appeal to everyone but which made me laugh.
    Even before this, signs of weirdness emerge: We're talking dead frozen sheep, a story about pigs that were eaten by maggots and, other suggestions that unspeakable horror lurks in the farm's rural isolation.
    At his point, the movie -- which is based on a novel by Iain Reid -- seems as if it might be springing from Lucy's mind as she imagines what life with David (and the inevitable association with his parents) might be like: Grimly comic images pervade a howling snowstorm as Lucy sees Jake’s parents in more youthful stages and in their decrepitude.
    Eventually, Jake and Lucy return to the road. Although the snow has worsened, Jake insists on stopping for ice cream at Tulsey Town, a stand that's inexplicably open in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a blizzard. 
     The ride also includes a discussion of  John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence with Lucy offering a strident takedown of the movie, which some will recognize as Pauline Kael's review of the movie with its particular concentration on the work of actress Gena Rowlands. 
     Is this parody? Is it a dig at reviewers? Is it a comment on the way opinion tends to be absorbed and regurgitated in ways that obliterate individual obligations to respond?
     The evening culminates when Jake decides that he wants to show Lucy his high school, a place where we've already seen images of a janitor mopping up the hallways, watching TV (a movie supposedly directed by Robert Zemeckis), and snippets from a student production of Oklahoma.
     Jake, by the way, is a fan of musicals and these final scenes include a lovely dance duet and a further blurring of identities. Is Jake the janitor at a different stage of his life?
       Throughout all of this, Kaufman insists on giving his movie a feeling in which strangeness has become ordinary; weirdness absent any shimmering sense of mystery.
        What to think? I found myself digesting the movie in pieces. Yes to this bit. No to that. Unsure about something else.  
       I'll get back to you on the way the movie seems to invite interpretation but does little to confirm whatever meaning (or meanings) we might wish to read into it.
       In its overall impact, I'm Thinking of Ending Things accumulates around us like steadily falling snow, leaving drifts of recollected moments from which we must dig ourselves out.
      Good luck and see you when the weather clears.

Zellweger does justice to ‘Judy’

Judy isn't great, but Zellweger's performance carries the show.

Judy, a drama about the final months of Judy Garland's all-too-brief life, turns the iconic entertainer into a kind of prisoner of her pubic image. Garland's life fell prey to studio tyrants, drugs, bad marriages, and her own need to connect with audiences. Judy already is being hailed as an Oscar showcase for a transformed Renee Zellweger. Fair enough. Judy derives most of its power from Zellweger's performance.

Based on End of the Rainbow, a musical play by Peter Quilter, Judy survives a series of sometimes wooden flashbacks and an overly familiar story arc to reach an emotional conclusion that pays tribute to Garland's enormous capacity to entertain while recognizing the deep sadness that could pervade her life.

I don't think it qualifies as a spoiler to tell you that the movie's finale involves a deeply felt rendition of Garland's signature tune, Over the Rainbow. If you don't see that coming when the movie enters its third -- and best act -- you probably need to see more movies.

Set mostly in 1968, the story places Garland in a swirl of trouble, notably a battle with former husband Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell) over custody of their two children. Garland loved her kids but she couldn't give them the stability they needed.

Problems constantly threat to drag Garland down. Broke and hardly in demand, Garland takes a job in London to play the Talk of the Town nightclub. Not surprisingly, her appearance is marked by difficulties: She refuses to rehearse; she drinks too much; she can't sleep; she barely makes it to performances on time, and in the middle of all that, she decides to marry Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), her fifth and last husband.

It's obvious to us, if not to the love-starved Garland, that the marriage will be brief and bad.

In London, Rosalyn Wilder (Jessie Buckley) receives a tough assignment; she's supposed to look after Garland, who misses few opportunities to test Rosalyn's ample patience. As the impresario who brings Garland to London, Michael Gambon is given little to do aside from looking dyspeptic and skeptical. Underutilizing Gambon must always be regarded as a mistake.

In the flashbacks to her MGM days and The Wizard of Oz, Garland (Darci Shaw) finds herself in painful encounters with the tyrannical Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery), the mogul who controlled her with threats and humiliation. Garland eventually claimed that Mayer groped her, as well, something the movie hints at.

An effort to acknowledge Garland's importance in gay culture feels both necessary and yet forced. Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira play a gay couple who meet Garland when she's leaving Talk of the Town after a performance. They wind up taking her to their apartment. She's lonely and their company proves welcome.

The two fans also figure in the movie's appropriately sentimental ending, which suggests that the only true love Garland ever experienced (aside from that of her children) was given by audiences.

Aided by prosthetics including a false nose, Zellweger's performance gathers the necessary force. A collection of tics, outbursts, displays of sincerity and vulnerability create a character who spent a lifetime taking morning pick-me-up drugs that she would counter with late-night sleeping pills.

The mannerisms that Zellweger employs make sense; they become Garland's mannerisms; her sometimes sharp motions suggest a person buffeted by ferocious gusts of inner turbulence.

Director Rupert Goold makes the most of Zellweger's transformation and the movie also benefits from the fact that Zellweger does her own singing. She's not Garland, but Zellweger works hard to sell Garland numbers such as Get Happy and puts brassy, entertaining showmanship into the musical numbers that she performs.

Make-up and singing aside, Zellweger hits home when it counts. When Garland calls young Lorna Luft (Bella Ramsey) from a London phone booth, Zellweger joins Garland's vulnerability to a level of self-realization that's heartbreaking.

Maybe this small and sometimes limited movie was inevitable. The figure of Garland was destined to dwarf any story about her and that happens here. Judy stands as a portrait of Garland at the end of a rainbow, one in which the promised pot of gold wound up being empty. You wonder whether the woman who had played Dorothy Gale, a character who awakened the dreams of so many, had lost the capacity to wish for herself.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 7/5/19 -- Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am and Wild Rose

A documentary about author Toni Morrison and a raucous feature about an aspiring country singer from Glasgow, Scotland, don't have much in common -- unless you want to see each (in its own way) as a story about a driven, powerful woman.

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

Director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders offers a well-rounded picture of the life of author Toni Morrison in Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Morrison, 88, provides the movie's star power. In a variety of interviews given over many years, Morrison emerges as a formidable presence -- and one who's not afraid to laugh at herself when she deems it necessary. Much of Morrison's early life was spent in Lorain, Ohio, which she describes as a multi-racial, multi-ethnic town with a low level of ethnic and racial tension. But her life seemed to open up when she arrived as an undergraduate at Howard University. What followed her college experience was a career in publishing (she was a successful editor) and, finally, her emergence as a novelist of recognized power. Interviews with author Fran Lebowitz, editor Robert Gottlieb, poet Sonia Sanchez , and activist Angela Davis provide a laudatory environment in which to consider Morrison’s accomplishment. The only references to negative criticism of Morrison's work are presented in brief (and probably over-stated) bits from negative reviews. The movie builds toward a movement by a group of writers who protest the lack of significant prizes (Pulitzers and Nobels) for Morrison's work, an oversight that later was remedied. Morrison won the Pulitzer for her novel, Beloved, in 1988. The Nobel Prize in Literature followed in 1993. What emerges is a portrait of a woman who has spent her life delighting in language and ensuring that she used it without the inhibiting limitations of what she calls "the white gaze." I could have done without Oprah Winfrey's effusions but little in The Pieces I Am detracts from the appeal of Morrison's expansive and profoundly compelling personality. Put another way, it's difficult to imagine that anyone could watch this well-assembled documentary and not want to hang out with the woman at its center.

Wild Rose

The irresistibly raucous Wild Rose begins when its main character is released from prison. Having completed her time in jail,, Rose-Lynn begins pursuing her major aspiration: She wants to be a country singer, an ambition that acquires an air of eccentricity because Rose-Lynn does not have what we might regard as a typical “country” profile. How could she? She lives in Glasgow, Scotland. And maybe that’s part of the movie’s point — at least in an inadvertent way. Musical talent sometimes shatters stereotypical expectations. Early on, few share Rose-Lynn's dream. Her skeptical mother (Julie Walters) wishes Rose-Lynn, who was busted on a drug charge, would settle down and take care of her two children. Rose-Lynn has other ideas. The story unfolds in a somewhat predictable fashion as Rose-Lynn (portrayed by a dynamic Jessie Buckley) marches through the rest of the movie in headstrong fashion, singing and living a rough-edged life. When Rose-Lynn obtains a job as a domestic, her affluent employer (Sophie Okonedo) offers to help propel her career by raising money to finance a dream trip to Nashville. Like many others, Rose-Lynn hopes to be discovered when she arrives in the world’s country music capital. Buckley's performance makes us believe that this is a reasonable ambition for a woman whose credo has been tattooed on her arm: "Three chords and the truth." Buckley's drive keeps the movie hurtling toward a conclusion in which director Tom Harper, working from a screenplay by Nicole Taylor, upsets (at least mildly) the genre cliches that we've come to expect from movies about raw talents on the make and voices that won’t be silenced.