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.

Music from the fringe

Michael Fassbender spends nearly all of Frank -- an oddball movie about an avant-garde rock musician -- wearing a giant head made of papier-mâché.

The head seems like the kind of amusing stunt David Byrne might have attempted back in the halcyon Talking Heads days, except for one thing: Frank never removes the beach-ball sized orb, even during what seem like normal conversations with his bandmates.

The look of the head is interesting for its near parodic ordinariness. The artificial head boasts a modest haircut, large blue eyes that look as if they might have been appropriated from one of those annoyingly wide-eyed Margaret Keane paintings and a perpetually open mouth.

Director Lenny Abrahamson and Fassbender use the disguise without undue flourish, a wise choice because it's weird enough without being italicized.

The band, by the way, is called Soronprfbs, an unpronounceable name that suggests that this group of musicians couldn't care less about how their music is received.

The story focuses on Jon, a keyboardist played by Domhnall Gleeson. Jon joins the band by accident after the group's keyboardist attempts suicide.

Jon soon finds himself spending almost a year with the group in a secluded hideout where Frank inches his way toward Soronprfbs' first album.

The rest of the group is far from hospitable. Maggie Gyllenhaal appears as Clara, a woman who plays theremin and who makes no attempt to conceal her contempt for Jon, whose often cheery voice-over narration creates an ironic counterpoint to reality.

The group also includes the band's manager (Scoot McNairy), a drummer (Carla Azar) and a French-speaking bass player (Francois Civil) who also loathes Jon and regards him as a smiling no-talent.

The movie breaks its isolation when Jon arranges for the band to perform at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, a spawning ground for cutting edge bands.

Not surprisingly, Frank is ill-equipped for a coming-out party, and Gyllenhaal's Clara seems to view the entire idea of "entertaining" as a sell-out.

I've read that the movie is a riff on the real-life experiences of co-writer Jon Ronson, who wrote the screenplay with Peter Straughan. Ronson evidently worked with Chris Sievey, a British musician and comic who died in 2010. Sievey created a character named Frank Sidebottom, who wore a head very much like the one donned by Fassbender in the movie.

You don't have to know anything about that backstory to appreciate Abrahamson's movie, which deals with the fragility of genius in a way that can be quietly funny.

Jon attempts -- rather foolishly it seems -- to bring Frank's talents to a wider audience, something that takes its toll on Frank and leads to a finale that's mildly redemptive and touching in a bittersweet way.

A lesson in one-sided argument

Won't Back Down stacks the deck in favor of charter schools.

Want to know why your kid can't read?

The answer is simple: It's because teachers receive pensions, have job security and are represented by a union that doesn't give a damn about students.

That's the not-so-underlying message of Won't Back Down, a drama that attempts to applaud the efforts of two women -- a mom and a teacher -- to establish a charter school.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Jamie Fitzpatrick, a lower-class Pittsburgh single mother who's trying to get a better education for her dyslexic daughter (Emily Alyn Lind). When Jamie's efforts to work within the system -- attempting to switch classes -- hits a wall, she enlists the help of Nona Alberts (Viola Davis), a teacher whose son also is having learning problems. Nona's on the verge of being beaten down by a system that doesn't demand enough from either teachers or students.

It's not easy to make a balanced film about the process of starting a charter school, and it's quickly apparent that Won't Back Down isn't going to try. The movie's playing with a stacked deck. This one views school boards, educational bureaucracies and unions as impediments to attaining educational nirvana. And woe to the teacher who might give a moment's thought to salary or job security.

Most of the movie focuses on Jamie's persistence. She works two jobs (one as a bartender, the other selling used cars) and begins to devote all her spare time to turning Adams Elementary school into a charter. She also has a brief and mostly pointless flirtation with one of the school's better teachers (Oscar Isaac), a product of Teach for America.

Davis's Nona has struggles of her own. Her son Cody (Dante Brown) has been deemed a slow learner, and she and her husband (Lance Reddick) have hit a bad patch.

The rest of the cast includes Rosie Perez (as one of Nona's fellow teachers); Holly Hunter (as a union official); Ving Rhames (as principal of a charter school); and Bill Nunn (as the principal of Adams Elementary). Hunter portrays the only union-oriented character who expresses a modicum of doubt about her position.

Right from the start director Daniel Barnz , who co-wrote the script with Brin Hill, makes it clear where the movie's sentiments lie. He quickly introduces us to a teacher who seems to be more interested in texting than teaching. Will she give Jamie's daughter a little extra help? Not if it means staying after 3 p.m.

There's no faulting the main performances. Davis is incapable of giving a bad performance, and she's expectedly convincing as a teacher who wants to rekindle the spark that originally drew her to classrooms. Davis's ability to play life-sized characters serves her well here, and she's able to suggest some of Nona's conflict about turning against a few of her colleagues.

Gyllenhaal's performance as a determined woman has lots of spark, but her character has as little appreciation for nuance as the one-sided script.

For a drama about education, Won't Back Down spends too little time in the classroom. In one welcome scene, Nona fires up her class, but for the most part, the classroom becomes a backdrop for a drama that seems more interested in celebrating two strong women than in tackling complex educational issues.

Look, I have no idea about how to fix the nation's public schools, but I'm willing to bet that if all teachers' unions vanished tomorrow, American education wouldn't suddenly turn some magical corner.

Oh well, you can read about educational policy elsewhere. What I'll say here is that Won't Back Down makes an elementary mistake: It puts its reading of the issues ahead of any deeper exploration of character.

'Hysteria': The vibe isn't good

Hysteria tries to take a breezy approach to a 19th Century story about the dawn of a new consciousness in female sexuality. Put more succinctly, Hysteria is a comedy about the invention of the vibrator. Director Tanya Wexler pokes fun at the Victorian propensity to put a mask of acceptability on physical pleasure. To make the point, the movie includes a variety of brief scenes in which a strait-laced physician brings various women to climax by providing manual stimulation. As it turns out, such physicians, who perform their work with detached precision, experience an unfortunate occupational hazard. Call it hand fatigue. For them, the vibrator is a godsend. Hugh Dancy plays Mortimer Granville, a doctor who lands a job working for Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), a physician who specializes in the aforementioned hand therapy. Dalrymple introduces electricity into the proceedings after he discerns another use for an electric feather duster his roommate (Rupert Everett) has invented. No story can run on vibrators alone, so Pryce's character has been given two daughters (Felciity Jones and Maggie Gyllenhaal). As it turns out, Gyllenhaal's cheerfully independent character operates a settlement house for impoverished women. The screenplay introduces a bit of romantic rivalry involving Dancy and the two daughters, but it doesn't amount to much. I read somewhere -- can't remember where or I'd happily credit the source -- that Hysteria is supposed to play like Masterpiece Theater with vibrators. It's a nice description -- and I wish it actually were true. Such a movie might have been funner, cheekier and more satirically relevant.