Can a trans woman go home again?

 

Trace Lysette, a trans actress, takes the lead in Monica, the story of a trans woman who's alienated from her family. The drama is set in motion when Monica is invited by her sister-in-law Laura (Emily Browning) to travel from LA to  Ohio to visit her dying mother (Patricia Clarkson). We assume that, at least on some level, Monica craves reconciliation and acceptance from the woman who kicked her out when she was still a kid. Lysette cloaks Monica's feelings behind defenses that presumably have been years in the making. It's a legitimate acting choice but one that makes the character less intriguing while adding to the frustration that can result from the insularity of director Andrea Pallaoro's approach. Early on Monica reveals a bit of desperation, making repeated calls to a boyfriend who recently dumped her. Late in the movie, she travels to a nearby town for a night of sexual escape. Mostly, she cares for her mother as she tries to adjust to staying in the house where she grew up. She never tells her mother who she is and Pallaoro maintains ambiguity about whether Clarkson's character ever recognizes Monica. Monica springs fully to life when she plays with her niece and nephew, but she seldom lowers her guard. Credit the supporting cast with nice work. Monica's sister-in-law (Browning) and her brother (Joshua Close) may not fully understand Monica but they try to be helpful. Pallaoro finds tender moments but too often, the movie fails to click, perhaps because Pallaoro's insistently muted style (he's not much interested in verbal confrontation) keeps Monica from fully plumbing the expected  emotional depths.

Two reporters dig for an important story

   

 She Said, the story of how two The New York Times reporters exposed the abusive conduct of Harvey Weinstein, effectively dramatizes the ins and outs of reporting a big story in which sources are reluctant to talk and the target of the investigation wields significant power. 

    As the co-founder and the public face of Miramax, Weinstein was a major player in the world of movies, a producer of influence that he evidently used to help those whom he favored and thwart those he didn't.

    For some women, the side of the equation on which they landed depended on how they responded to Weinstein's sexual advances, some made in startlingly crude and even criminal fashion.

    Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) revealed that Weinstein, now serving a 23-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault, had been settling sexual abuse cases with women for years, silencing them with restrictive non-disclosure agreements.

       Mulligan's Twohey seems the more aggressive of the two, more seasoned in pitfalls of pre-#MeToo harassment. Early on, we learn that Twohey wrote stories about women who had things to say about Donald Trump’s behavior. She was dejected when the stories appeared to change nothing.

       Kazan's Kantor gives the movie a steady beat. Despite discouragement, Kantor persists and she shows that reporters can respect the sensibilities of those with whom they deal. Better yet, her concern never seems like an ingratiating journalistic ploy.

      Brief references are made to the home life of each of the women. Husbands aren't upset that their wives are working feverishly, as often happens in such movies. Both women deal with the demands of motherhood. But the movie’s focus remains on the work required to nail the story.

      Of the supporting performances, the always interesting Patricia Clarkson proves an unsurprising standout as a Times editor. Samantha Morton makes a strong impression as Zelda Perkins, a woman who once served as a personal assistant to Weinstein. Ashley Judd plays herself, a prominent show business figure who ultimately went public about Weinstein.  Jennifer Ehle has a nice turn as Laura Madden, a woman who was battling breast cancer when she told her Weinstein story.

     Andre Braugher is convincing as Times editor Dean Baquet, particularly in a couple of scenes depicting terse conversations with Weinstein who tried to derail the story.

     Dramatizing the grunt work of journalism isn't easy. At times, it almost looks as if Schrader has made a movie about cell phone calls -- calls that awaken the women from sound sleeps, calls while walking in parks, calls while walking with husbands, calls that disrupt meetings, and on and on.

      I'm not sure how the problem could have been resolved; besides, the story and its detail have more to do with the movie's success than cinematic flair. 

     We only see Weinstein (an actor) from the back in one scene near the end of the movie but we're made to understand the power that he used to impose himself on women, many of them young and naive.  Schrader includes a real phone call between Weinstein and Ambra Gutierrez, an Italian model, but she wisely creates no scenes in which we see Weinstein committing his crimes.

     That doesn't mean that Weinstein's presence isn't felt throughout. With help from enablers, he abused his position and got away with it -- until some of the women he harmed and two determined reporters helped bring his misdeeds to light.

A small but intriguing 'Bookshop'

It has taken some time, but Penelope Fitzgerald's 1978 novel, The Bookshop, finally has made it to the screen. Spanish director Isabel Coixet (Learning to Drive) casts Emily Mortimer as a widower who opens a bookstore in an English shore town in 1959. The town's establishment -- led by the smiling but arch-tempered Violet (Patricia Clarkson) -- opposes the shop. Violet wants to see the house where Mortimer's Florence opens her bookstore converted into a local arts center. A reclusive resident (Bill Nighy) emerges as Florence's principal customer. In a role that mixes humor with deep sadness, Nighy creates a memorable portrait of a man whose life is steeped in regret. Mortimer handles her role with pluck and intelligence. Honor Kneafsey appears as the opinionated schoolgirl who earns after-school money as Florence's helper. Florence's support for Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita further annoys Violet, reminding us how controversial that novel was when first published. The Bookshop pays the expected homage to writing, reading and literature, but avoids the trap of becoming a celebration of one woman's dream. Instead, Coixet enfolds the story in a series of betrayals and power moves, all presented without undue melodrama. It may be slightly pejorative to call The Bookshop a little movie, but the label fits; it's small like the seaside town in which its set, but it's far from idyllic in outlook -- and that's its saving grace.

'Party' guests are out for blood

Despite a strong cast, director Sally Potter's arch little movie takes us nowhere we haven't been before.

It concerns me to know that I’ve sometimes felt the way Timothy Spall looks in The Party, a slender black comedy filmed in black-and-white. But even at a shockingly brief one hour and 11 minutes, The Party feels as if it could have been condensed into a 40-minute short as it builds toward a nifty punchline.

Spall, who has never projected so much doom and futility, portrays a British academic whose doctor has given him a fatal diagnosis. Haggard and expressionless, Spall’s Bill seems the personification of pitiless depression.

Joining Spall's Bill in this happily bitter ensemble piece are his wife Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) and a variety of friends: the catty, mordant April (Patricia Clarkson), her bromide-spouting boyfriend (Bruno Ganz), a coke-snorting financial executive (Cillian Murphy), and a lesbian couple portrayed by Cherry Jones and Emily Mortimer.

The group has gathered to celebrate Janet’s appointment to a ministerial post in the department overseeing Britain's health.

The movie revolves around Albee-style insults that the characters hurl at one another while harboring secrets that will be revealed as the movie builds toward its final surprise.

Part of the trouble with movies such as The Party is that they seem to ask us to feel superior to their embittered, pretentious characters while creating few points of real identification.

Directed by Sally Potter, who also wrote the screenplay, The Party's main thrust -- the celebration that goes terribly wrong -- feels awfully familiar. Clarkson deftly delivers her character’s withering lines and Spall convincingly dangles at the end of his character’s rope, but The Party passes without arriving at a consequential destination.

Kingsley, Clarkson elevate 'Learning to Drive'

An odd-couple story built on a woman's search for control of her life.

Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson play an interesting duet in Learning to Drive, a movie about a New York woman who responds to end of her marriage by taking driving lessons.

This may seem like a trivial premise, but during the years I lived in the mass-transit world of Manhattan, I knew many people who didn't drive. Some never even bothered to obtain licenses.

Based on a 2002 autobiographical New Yorker article by Katha Pollitt, Learning to Drive introduces us to Clarkson's Wendy, a woman at an emotional low point in what seems an otherwise successful life.

It doesn't take long for Kingsley's Darwan to enter Wendy's world, bringing with him hope for transformation.

A Sikh who had been a political prisoner in India, Darwan has been granted asylum in the US, and now lives in Queens, N.Y.

Obviously bright and capable, Darwan chooses to support himself driving a taxi at night and giving driving lessons by day because he doesn't want to abandon the beard and turban that help define his identity as Sikh.

As directed by Isabel Coixet (Elegy), Learning to Drive becomes a tasteful (and perhaps overly tame) look at two people from different worlds.

Although this sounds like a formula for predictability and boredom, Kingsley and Clarkson fill the movie with enough convincing life to make Learning to Drive palatable and entertaining.

The reason Wendy wants to learn to drive -- aside any metaphoric value -- involves her daughter (Grace Gummer). Gummer's Tasha and her boyfriend live on a food commune in Vermont. Wendy reluctantly decides that it's time she paid a visit.

As the movie evolves, we can't help wondering whether Wendy and Darwan will become romantically involved, but the script by Sara Kernochan is a bit cagier than that.

About mid-way through the movie, Darwan begins a new chapter in his own life with the arrival from India of his soon-to-be wife (Sarita Choudhury), a woman sent to him for a marriage arranged by his sister.

The difficult adjustment required of both parties could (and perhaps should) have made a movie of its own. Coixet handles this awkward relationship with sensitivity and a sense of realism.

Coixet does an equally good job of sketching the life of an immigrant who has landed in Queens. Economic pressures force Darwan to share an apartment with roommates, some of whom fear discovery by immigration authorities.

As a man of character and principles, Kingsley's Darwan tries to bridge the gap between cultures: one represented by the Sikh religion, which governs his behavior, and the other, by Wendy, who offers increased intellectual stimulation.

For the most part, Wendy is a wreck, an older woman forced to abandon her old life. Divorce forces Wendy to give up the brownstone to which she's extremely attached, move into a new apartment and otherwise accept the notion that she's now traveling without a co-pilot.

Learning to Drive is not a volatile movie or one that requires pressing into anyone's book of memories: all the more reason that Kingsley and Clarkson deserve credit for getting more out of it than a formulaic premise would seem to promise.

'The East' poses difficult questions

Acting and intrigue help elevate this thriller about eco-terrorism.

The eco-thriller The East deals with the often-fraught relationship between conscience and action, inviting us to ponder whether the two ever can be brought into complete agreement.

The movie has the right team to consider such a question. Actress Brit Marling co-wrote The East with director Zal Batmanglij, who directed Marling in Sound of My Voice (2011), an effective and involving drama about life inside a cult.

Marling, who stars in The East and who also starred in the haunting Another Earth, is an unusual actress; she seems to play characters who are both doers and observers, projecting a divided sense of self that's full of puzzle-like complexity.

In The East -- a thriller that focuses on a committed band of eco-terrorists -- Marling portrays Sarah, a woman who works for a company that provides security services to corporations that are fearful of becoming targets for environmental extremists.

Headed by a no-nonsense boss (Patricia Clarkson), the firm seems as concerned about profits as it is about protecting lives and repuations. Not a client? In danger? Too bad.

Ambitious and calculating, Sarah leads a double life. She lives with a boyfriend who doesn't know exactly what she does. He believes she's on a business trip to Dubai while she's actually infiltrating The East, a band that conducts trageted anti-corporate operations called "jams."

Benji (Alexander Skarsgard), the quietly magnetic leader of the group, presides over sessions featuring lots of hugs, some of them dispensed during an oddball game of spin-the-bottle. The group lives in a burned-out shell of house in the protective seclusion of a forest.

Two members of The East stand out. Ellen Page proves entirely convincing as Izzy, an eco-ideologue who wrings all feeling out of her decisions. Toby Kebbell portrays Doc, a disillusioned physician with first-hand experience about the perils of Big Pharma.

The members of The East are smart and not entirely unsympathetic. When they're not "jamming," they attempt to live by authentic communal values, and they seem to care about one another.

They're also Freegans, part of the culture that lives on food discarded before it spoils. They seem to have the courage of their dumpster-diving convictions.

The screenplay pulls Sarah in and out of the group, occasionally returning her to corporate headquarters where she reports on activities of The East.

Predictably, Sarah begins to develop personal relationships within the group, attachments that further fragment her already divided life. We know that Sarah eventually will grapple with confounding moral questions: Where do her sympathies lie? Can she accept extreme measures in pursuit of morally defensible ends? Can harming people -- even obvious corporate villains -- ever be justified? Can there be "revolutionary" action without collateral damage?

Think of The East as a better-than-average political thriller, though not a perfect one. The "jams" conducted by The East aren't always credible, and it would have been interesting to know a little more about Marling's character. Still, The East qualifies as a drama with something important on its mind. That, strong performances and a fair measure of old-fashioned tension separate The East from a crowded thriller pack.

Pain at home; culture shock abroad

TODD SOLONDZ: MORE PAIN AND SORROW

Tim (Dylan Riley Snyder) and mom (Allison Janney).
Director Todd Solondz shook up the indie world with 1995's Welcome to the Dollhouse. In one way or another, Solondz has been making similar movies ever since. It's possible to regard Solondz as a true American miserablist, and his movies -- though tempered with dark humor -- inflict all manner of pain on their middle-class characters. Solondz's latest -- Life During Wartime -- catches up with characters from 1998's Happiness, which (among other things) took aim at the darkest underside of suburban living. In the new movie, the characters from Happiness are transported into the present, although they're not played by actors from the first installment. Ciaran Hinds, for example, replaces Dylan Baker, as a pedophile father. Hinds' Bill is being released from prison during the movie's grim opening sequence. Life During Wartime, a middling helping of Solondz, alternates uneasy humor and unrelieved helpings of anguish. This time, though, the tug of yearning (notably for absent fathers) doesn't feel especially strong. I'm not sure Life During Wartime takes us any place that Solondz hasn't been before; it seems more variation on a theme than fresh discovery. I look for a quick exit from art-house venues across the nation.
LOOKING FOR LOVE IN CAIRO

Alexander Siddig and Patricia Clarkson tour Cairo.
No one is likely to accuse Cairo Time of being misnamed. Throughout this slow-moving look at the experiences of a married woman (Patricia Clarkson) waiting for her U.N.-employed husband in Cairo, writer/director Ruba Nadda allows the city to seep into our senses in ways that sometimes make us feel as if time has stopped. Nadda effectively depicts the ways in which Clarkson's Juliette makes the transition from culture shock to immersion in the city's rhythms. Beautifully photographed by cinematographer Luc Montpellier, Cairo becomes a full-fledged character in the movie. Sad to say, the city proves more interesting than any of the movie's human occupants. Clarkson does the most she can with a character who spends s lot of time alone. Given little to play off, she's left to plumb the depths of her reactions to a series of low-key events, the most notable involving a tentative and largely inconclusive relationship with the owner of an Egyptian coffee shop (Alexander Siddig). Nadda's screenplay tends toward repetition, but the movie sometimes catches us in its sway, much the way an unexpected breeze can dispel the torments of stifling heat -- if only briefly. As one who's not likely to travel to Cairo any time soon, I welcomed this cinematic journey, even as I yearned for some dramatic sparks to fly.