Aliens visit Spielberg again

 

 In a recent interview, Steven Spielberg said that if anyone deserves to have a close encounter with aliens, it’s him. Who, after all, has done more to prompt interest in extraterrestrial visitors with big-screen movies that lend a magical aura to the notion that Earth already has hosted interplanetary guests? For me, Close Encounters of the Third Kind leads Spielberg's alien-picture pack.

    But Spielberg is not a philosopher or, as far as I know, a geek who’s in love with astrophysics; he’s an entertainer and storyteller who operates in the old Hollywood tradition, using his considerable prowess to serve up gripping narratives that have mass appeal. At his best, Spielberg delivers pop-cultural implants that can buoy fatigued spirits.

    This brings us to Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s latest foray into alien visitation, this one brimming with a message that aliens — seen but not freshly imagined — are healers who come to Earth to spread a conciliatory message.    

    The movie tells us that the human capacity for empathy has more to do with evolutionary progress than brute force. We've forgotten how to listen to one another, to feel one another's sorrows. Precisely why alien life forms would want to offer their help to beleaguered earthlings remains unclear.

   There’s little point in arguing against Spielberg’s case, advanced with obviousness in David Koepp's screenplay. But Disclosure Day is more than a lecture; it's a scattered collection of intrigue-laden bits that sing a familiar song: A corporate/military cabal tries to stifle individuals who want to spread the truth about alien visitations. They've been happening since the last century and maybe even before that  -- or so the movie says.

     It’s instructive to note that I’m writing more about Spielberg than about the characters in Disclosure Day. That may be because, aside from Emily Blunt’s portrayal of an aspiring TV journalist who feels stuck in a weather person’s job — the characters tend to be the kind of archetypal figures a schematic story needs.

    The list includes the scowling corporate boss (Colin Firth) of Wardex, the company that insists humanity must be protected from knowledge of alien visitors lest chaos erupt. Math whiz Danny (Josh O’Connor) defects from 

Wardex, having realized that knowledge about aliens belongs to everyone.

    Tag-along characters include Danny's girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), a former novitiate who left convent life. Jane thinks Danny must be stopped because the truth might undermine faith in God, thus rendering life meaningless for believers. Jane conveniently presents an opportunity for Spielberg to accomplish a feat that has eluded others; the melding of science and faith.

     Faith puts man in the center of God’s gaze on Earth, but who’s to say that that gaze isn’t wider than the faithful presume? Put another way, maybe God made ET, too.

    The faults in Disclosure Day are not with the film’s making, but with a screenplay that’s bound to ideas expressed with a heavy hand and which tamp down the movie's sense of mystery. 

    Sometimes, the film seems to rehash familiar Spielberg tropes. Blunt’s Margaret and O’Connor’s Daniel are deeply influenced by signature events from their youths, childhood in Margaret’s case. They've been touched (or perhaps selected) by aliens as possible carriers of the messages. Both Danny and Margaret are being driven by forces they don't understand, but which they feel compelled to follow, shades of the character Richard Dreyfuss played in Close Encounters.

     Early in Margaret’s hectic Kansas City life as a weather forecaster, a cardinal flies through the window of the loft she shares with her partner (Wyatt Russell ). Margaret’s capabilities are transformed. She can speak languages she never studied. Equally important, she can enter the minds of strangers, grasping their feelings with uncanny accuracy. 

   A scene in which Margaret applies her new skills when pulled over by a cop brilliantly brings the matter to life. Delivering dialogue at breakneck speed, Blunt makes the whole business credible. Margaret's abilities go public during a TV broadcast in which she begins speaking in strange clicks. Her colleagues think she's lost it. We take it as a sign that she’s channeling an alien language. 

    The movie’s design features a hand-held alien device Wardex has snagged; it allows people to appear in different places at the same time and to penetrate and manipulate others. Never mind how it works; it also can turn on power when generators are shut down, a universal remote of sorts.

    The dangers of unwanted intrusions are obvious, which partly explains why Wardex renegade Hugo (Colman Domingo) has organized a clandestine opposition to the company and why Danny made off with evidence of horrible abuse of aliens and other solid proofs that of earthly alien existence. Humanity has been deceived.

      Hugo and his team even reconstruct Margaret's childhood home so that she can reconnect with a signature event in her childhood, cloaking the whole business with a bit of pop psychology, something about returning home before being able to move forward.

     Spielberg’s magic touch can be felt sporadically, but too much of Disclosure Day functions as a sci-fi procedural that espouses lofty ideas about how humanity might save itself from conflict, one of which simmers in the background as tensions between the US and Russia mount.

     Don't get the wrong impression. Disclosure is far from awful. It's just not up to Spielberg's best. Spielberg’s undeniable skills are well displayed. Blunt’s performance has a distinctive edge. And, if nothing else, skeptics can giggle quietly, if by the end, they haven't been convinced to take the whole business seriously.

      So, yes, greatness eludes Disclosure, and for all its supposed weighty themes, the best thing about it involves a mismatched battle between a red car and a speeding train. We're talking down-to-earth action that makes the pulse pound in ways the movie's headier aspects don't. Spielberg’s skill at concocting this action wowed me more than the movie's benevolent aliens.

An overloaded 'Knives Out' mystery

  A somber Catholic church in upstate New York provides a gloomy backdrop for writer/director Rian Johnson's third Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man.

   Johnson, who also wrote the screenplay, immediately distinguishes his movie from its predecessors, introducing an unexpected character, a freshly ordained priest who's in trouble with his superiors.

  Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor) has anger-management issues. As punishment for socking a deacon, Father Jud is sentenced to clerical exile at the remote Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude parish.

    It's immediately clear that Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude has taken a bizarre turn. The church's crucifix has been removed from behind the altar, and its priest, Monsignor Jeffrey Wicks (Josh Brolin), quickly asserts himself as a power-hungry nut job.  Obsessive about confession, Wicks can't talk enough about his feverish bouts of masturbation.

   Wicks also preaches a gospel of fear. In his weekly sermons, he selects one parishioner for chastisement, gauging the success of his remarks by how quickly his intimidated victim heads for the door. 

    Although Wake Up Dead Man hosts strains of mordant comedy, it's also a mystery in which the characters become pawns in a game Johnson plays, one involving a tangled plot, excessive complications, and enough red herrings to stock a fishery.

    The parishioners, of course, become suspects after the mystery’s obligatory murder, which precedes the arrival of series savior Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), an ace sleuth who speaks with the lilting intonations of a southern gentleman.

     By the time Blanc arrives, a typically large gallery of actors has already elbowed its way into the proceedings: These include a doctor (Jeremy Renner), an attorney (Kerry Washington), a cellist (Cailee Spaeny) who no longer plays, a local politician (Daryl McCormack), and a struggling sci-fi author (Andrew Scott).

     We also meet the administrator (Glenn Close) in charge of the church’s business and the caretaker (Thomas Haden Church) who has pledged his devotion to her.

     In case the cast weren’t stuffed with enough names, Mila Kunis eventually turns up as a local sheriff who’s skeptical about Blanc’s deductive methods. 

      Fair to say, Johnson’s screenplay offers laughs throughout, and an able cast knows how to mine them, even when the targets loom large. 

      In a semi-serious turn, Johnson also gets some mileage out of the faith vs. reason tensions that develop between Jud and Blanc, who begin investigating the murder together.

     As the movie's most developed character, Jud valiantly tries to conquer his anger with love and compassion. He also struggles with guilt. A former boxer, he once killed a man in the ring.

      O’Connor gives a standout performance, although Johnson wisely provides Craig with a spotlight speech  during the movie’s finale. Blanc calls it his Damascus moment.

     Watching Wake Up Dead Man, you needn't go very far before bumping into another plot point. All of this rests on a foundation filled with plot and backstory, some of it involving a valuable jewel. 

      Call it a matter of taste, but I found some of the maneuvering tiresome, and the gaggle of idiosyncratic characters can become little more than pawns in a mystery game.

     Early on, Jeffrey Wright turns up as the sensible priest who assigns Father Jud to obscurity. Wright's appearance at the end reminded me how much I missed his presence and the character he plays.

     Johnson, who's often compared to Agatha Christie, clearly has mastered the form he has employed in a trilogy that began with Knives Out (2019) and continued with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022).

     But clever as it can be, Johnson's latest sometimes drags through its two-hour and 24-minute run time, fighting headwinds created by the story's storm of complications.

    

      

       

      

To see or not to see? A critic's dilemma and two reviews: 'Ibelin' and "Lee'

 In the market where I work, two advance screenings sometimes happen simultaneously. This week's viewing dilemma arose when screenings The Wild Robot and Megalopolis were scheduled for the same evening. I chose Megalopolis because a Francis Ford Coppola opus seems a must for anyone who has been reviewing movies for nearly 40 years. Coppola invested $120 million of his own money in the movie and had been talking about it for decades. Never shy about out-sized ambition, Coppola's movie (reviewed on this blog) took precedence for me. Don't take that as any reflection on Wild Robot. As of this writing, Wild Robot boasted a 98 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I'll have to catch up with it.

  Now for the rest of the week: 

 

Ibelin, a documentary from director Benjamin Ree, surprised me. Generally, when cultural critics discuss gaming, they emphasize the way gaming can isolate young people and discourage personal communication. Ree presents an alternative view, telling the story of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man who died of Duchenne muscular dystrophy at the age of 25.  Lonely in reality and increasingly debilitated, Steen sought refuge in the World of Warcraft, where he assumed the identity of Lord Ibelin Redmore. Steen's body may have betrayed him, but online, he became a muscular character with a well-developed sense of compassion. Ree ably depicts the gap between role-playing and reality. Better, though, he shows how the gulf can be bridged, how two worlds ("the virtual" and "the real," for want of better terms) can nourish each other. Using animation to depict Steen's Warcraft journey, bits from Steen's blog, and interviews, Ree creates a moving story about a young man who couldn't beat the odds, but who did something meaningful with the hand he was dealt: He affected the lives of others.

   

Then there's Lee, a movie about the great World War II photographer Lee Miller, played by Kate Winslet. Directed by Ellen Kuras, Lee tells the story of a woman who began her career as a model and fashion photographer for Vogue before convincing the editor of the magazine's British edition to turn her into a war correspondent. You'd think that by now, filmmakers would have tired of structuring films around interviews. Lee doesn't help itself by tying a chronologically presented story to an interview in which Lee answers questions from a character played by Josh O'Connor. The movie begins with Lee's pre-war days in France, where she spent time as part of an avant-garde circle that included the editor of Vogue Paris (Marion Cotillard). In France, she also met English painter Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard) with whom she developed a long-term relationship. The heart of the movie involves Lee's struggle to gain access to the fighting and later, to German death camps, where she took a career-defining series of photographs. It wasn't easy for a woman to break into the war correspondent ranks. When the Brits refused to give Lee combat credentials, she used her American citizenship to access the fighting. On the French and German fronts, Lee traveled with another American photographer Andy Stamberg's David E. Scherman, who worked for Life magazine. Difficult either to pan or praise,  Lee sheds light on an important career, but a cumbersome structure weighs it down. Winslet goes all in on playing a tough, sexually uninhibited woman who refuses to be deterred, but the movie underlines its themes and feels stuck in a biopic ghetto where its story too often feels locked in the past.

Tennis anyone? Or is it something else?

 

   Challengers, the latest film from director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name), thrives on energy -- the energy generated by competition, the energy that ripples through tennis matches, the energy that underlies sexual attraction, and, most of all, the energy of youth.

    Slick to a fault, Challengers pumps adrenalin into a plot that never wanders far from a surface in which the story's conflicts are so clearly drawn they might as well have been marked with chalk lines. 

   Built around a love triangle, Challengers spans 13 years in the lives of three characters, telling its story in flashbacks from a 2019 tournament that builds toward a fierce but ambiguous conclusion. 

   Tennis players Art and Patrick (Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor) renew a long-standing rivalry when both enter a challenger event, a low-grade competition in which A-list Art is supposed to tune up his flagging game. 

    O'Connor's Patrick has spent his life scuffling through a small-time career that has left him living in his car. He's familiar with tennis's lower rungs. You might think of him as a tennis bum.

    Both players are under the sway of Zendaya's Tashi, a once-rising tennis star whose career was derailed by a knee injury. A ferocious competitor, Zendaya eventually marries Art and channels her competitive drives into managing his career.

    Working from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, Guadagnino moves the story backward and forward, picking up fragments of backstory that could have served as pieces of a tantalizing jigsaw but knock the story off track.

     On or off court, Zendaya is the movie's driving force, commanding the screen as the woman who's coveted by Art and Patrick, both of whom are struck by Tashi’s charisma. In a scene set early in the story, Art and Patrick watch Tashi play and invite her to their motel room.

    Tashi initiates a simultaneous make-out session with both guys, unmasking the homoerotic tension that underlies the young men's adolescent friendship. Now 18, they’ve known each other since they were 12.

    From the start, Tashi makes herself into a prize to be earned in a competition between the two young players. During the motel scene, she piques their desire but leaves,  promising her phone number to the one who wins his match. 

   Years pass and the two teenagers grow into men. Tashi marries Art, but Patrick stays in the picture. He may not have achieved Art's level of tennis success, but he thinks he has Art's number — both on the court and in matters concerning Tashi.

    By the time the movie's final match arrives, Art has grown tired of high-pressure competition but worries that failure might cause Tashi to move on. Patrick thinks he has one more shot at the big time. Of course, they have to slam balls at each other in a showdown match. Balls hit rackets with plenty of whack.

    Guadagnino's camera works its way through matches, meet-ups, and closeups, practically insisting that we yield to its power.

    All of this plays against a musical score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that functions like a flashing red light, signaling whenever the dramatic stakes are about to rise.

   Despite a willing and watchable cast and Guadagnino’s directorial star turn, Challengers seldom deepens the immediacy it works so hard to create. Put another way, there's less here than meets the eye.

On being young, gay and angry

If the makers of God's Own Country had been looking for an alternate title for their movie, they could have stolen Mudbound, not that this British drama has anything to do with Mudbound's foray into racism and the American South. My suggestion involves the movie's commitment to stripping all traces of rural romanticism from the mud-splattered lives of sheep farmers in Yorkshire, England. Set in an atmosphere in which the birth and death of animals can be bloody, God's Own Country tells the story of a romance between Johnny (Josh O'Connor) and a Romanian migrant worker named Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu). Director Francis Lee makes his debut with a movie in which O'Connor's angry young man makes the transition from rough faceless sexual encounters to something more substantial. The supporting cast includes Ian Jones as Johnny's debilitated father and Gemma Jones as the young man's grandmother. Johnny isn't conflicted about being gay, but he seems to be caught in a more generalized form of rage that may have something to do with the mother who left the family and with the hardscrabble life that has become his lot in life. The movie belongs to O'Connor, so convincingly and off-putting sullen that when Johnny offers the hint of a smile, it seems misplaced on his otherwise brooding face. God's Own Country becomes memorable for its unrelenting naturalism and for its refusal to see hearts and flowers where only mud, animals, walled-off human emotions and rare moments of tenderness are able to survive. But survive they do.