Broadly delivered satire buries 'Digger'

 

   Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Digger dances on the knife’s edge between farce, satire, physical comedy, environmental pleading, and silliness, all sketched in broad comic strokes that border on self-parody.

    An unrecognizable Tom Cruise portrays a bloviating oil baron who dwarfs the other characters, turning them into padding that fills an over-stuffed movie that proves heavy-handed as it evokes memories of better out-sized satires. Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Dr. Strangelove comes to mind.

    Cruise's Digger Rockwell finds himself mired in an environmental crisis. One of his Greenland rigs has unleashed a massive chunk of ice that will flood Europe, leaving multitudes dead in its wake.

     Deeply hidden by a major application of prosthetics, Cruise puts on a show, igniting an  outburst of ego, crudeness, and boisterous behavior; Digger becomes a grotesque absurdity, a bully devoted to the aging, incontinent cat that shares  his bed.

     As you might guess, Digger allows Cruise to pull out all the stops, creating a larger-than-life figure who has more regard for profit than for the planet. An unashamed boor, he eventually delivers a super-charged monologue in which he declares himself to be the monster everyone really wants. 

    Rant about global warming if you will, but no one wants a world without heat and transportation, and other comforts reliant on our increasingly ravenous demands for oil.

     The supporting cast includes Riz Ahmed as Ganesh, an environmentalist who breaks the horrific news to Digger. John Goodman signs on as President Compson, a politician suffering from bloated rhetoric and a terminal case of rectal cancer. Michael Stuhlbarg plays the vice president, and Sandra Huller appears as Emma Rockwell, Digger’s half-sister and the head of an environmentally conscious company that Digger finances as a salve to Emma's conscience.

     Sporting a ridiculous Dutch Boy wig, Jesse Plemons plays a character whose function becomes clear as the movie progresses. I mention the hair not only because Plemons looks ridiculous but because, like much of the movie's choices, it seems like an excuse to add another sight gag.

       I won’t describe the trick the movie plays on the audience, except to say that it has a meta quality and revisits the theatricality Inarritu explored in Birdman, a movie about an actor seeking a second wind.

       Crowded with detail, transparent artifice, and more than a few puzzling moments, Digger —written by Inarritu along with Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolas Giacobone — is a no-holds-barred satire that can be seen as a major act of cinematic daring from Inarritu. 

       But Inarritu's proverbial Big Swing results in small payoffs, moments of visual cleverness augmented by Cruise’s centerpiece performance. And for all the movie’s ambition, its most resonant moment arrives during its eerie end credits, not exactly the place where a movie ought to hit its best notes.

    Inarritu injects a few moments of mordant humor — jokes about an answered prayer,  for example — but a  strong cast can’t save the movie from its teeming excesses. Digger suggests that if we remove the protective scrim of illusion, we’ll see the dark truth about who we are and where we’re headed. 

       Fair enough, but Inarritu can’t seem to push beyond cartoonish caricature that fails to pierce the conscience. Too often, it just lands with a thud.

Space travels of an unlikely duo

    On its surface, Project Hail Mary sounds like another large-scale space adventure, a movie in which a lone traveler must save the Earth when a virus threatens to dim the sun. A mysterious microbe known as Astrophage is responsible for this doomsday scenario.

   Fortunately, Earth has hope for survival, albeit a slim one. The future of humanity depends on a molecular biologist -- Ryan Gosling's Ryland Grace -- traveling 11.9 light-years to Tau Ceti, a star that’s immune to Astrophage. Perhaps an antidote can be discovered and brought back to Earth. 

    It's a last-ditch, long-shot effort with no guarantee  of success, but it's the only option.

   Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse) shift away from the usual space-genre tone, bypassing ominous cosmic references and occasionally indulging in sentiment.

    Distinguished by its use of sets and avoidance of green-screen work, the movie has a down-to-earth flavor, even as it vaults toward a distant galaxy. The approach is in keeping with Drew Goddard's screenplay, which immediately confronts Grace with the series of problems that propel the story. 

   When he awakens from his induced slumber, Grace can't remember who he is or how he happened to find himself on a spaceship. Job one: Read the clues that will help him recover his memory.

    Grace seems an unlikely hero. The story begins with him teaching seventh-grade science, after having been rejected by scholars for advancing a thesis the scientific establishment scorned; i.e., that life needn't be water-based. Grace's brilliance was mocked.

     Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller) heads an international organization that recruits Grace for the Hail May Project. Eva admires the fact that Grace is willing to think unconventionally, even if others don't accept his conclusions. 

     So, Grace enters deep space, quickly learning that his companions on his voyage had failed to awaken from their induced sleep. He becomes the solo savior of his planet.

     Well, not quite.

      En route to his destination, Grace encounters an alien ship on which a creature he names Rocky also has been traveling.

     James Ortiz does the voice work for Rocky, filling the character with innocent charm and making the most of the way Rocky struggles to understand a new language, sometimes to comic effect.

   Grace's alien buddy may look like a leggy rock, but by no means is he as dumb as one. An engineer by trade, he builds a bridge between the two ships. Rocky, we learn, misses the spouse he left on his home planet; he, too, has lost his crew, and, like Grace, he has tried to adjust to being alone.

   The screenplay adds poignancy because scientists on Earth have equipped Grace's ship with enough fuel to reach its destination, but not enough for a return trip. (The ship, by the way, runs on Astrophage, an odd bit of irony.) Additionally, Grace must mourn the death of his fellow travelers (Ken Leung and Milana Vayntrub), both of whom he hardly knew.

     Project Hail Mary is based on a popular 2021 novel by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian, which became another big-screen space adventure built around loneliness and ingenuity. 

     By the time Rocky enters the picture, screenwriter Drew Goddard has begun employing flashbacks to allow Huller's character to develop and to provide additional insight into Grace's pre-flight life. Gosling carries the movie with ease in a showcase role.

     A set piece in which Grace and Rocky try to recover fuel is built for excitement, but other space shots lack the feeling of dark emptiness that can make life feel puny, meek, and insecure.

    Entertaining and involving -- if overly long at 156 minutes -- Project Hail Mary occasionally struck me as silly. Rocky, after all, isn't the most intriguing looking of creatures. I also found the cuteness of the movie's epilogue off-putting, making me think I'd witnessed an adventure that couldn't resist painting a smiley face on its intergalactic surface. 

     Still, Project Hail Mary offers relief from the interplanetary bloviation of other space epics, serving as an antidote to the self-seriousness with which Hollywood usually plies the depths of space. 

     The message also merits consideration: Forget Aliens and its many successors; other forms of life just might turn out to be our BFFs.

      

Nazi lives shielded from Holocaust horror

 

 If you look at the above photo, you'd be hard pressed to know that it's taken from a movie that, among other things, depicts the family of Rudolph Hoss, the long-standing commandant of Auschwitz who built a career on increasing the efficiency of murdering Jews. That indigestible contrast helps distinguish director Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a chilling quasi-adaptation of a novel by the late Martin Amis. 

    I say quasi-adaptation because those familiar with Amis's novel will find something quite different in Glazer's movie. Amis wrote about a variety of fictional characters; Glazer concentrates on Hoss, a real person, his wife Hedwig, and a few other figures. 

  If you're looking for a movie that probes the deep recesses of Hoss's personality, you'll come away empty-handed. Glazer keeps us at a distance from the characters in his movie. He uses few close-ups and often presents dialogue in a way that makes it sound as if we're eavesdropping on inane conversations in the house where the commandant lives with his wife, five children, and a few domestic helpers.

    Glazer opens the film with a long section of ... nothing. No image is seen. Only Mica Levi's eerie disorienting score let's us know the film has begun. This purposeful emptiness serves as an overture that tells us we're about to enter a world that will turn banality -- household chatter, a riverside picnic, kids playing in a swimming pool -- into something horribly bizarre, the pretense of normality in the midst of mass murder. 

     Everything in The Zone of Interest is tainted by what we know is happening beyond the insular confines of the house and its well-tended gardens. We're embarking on a journey into the aberrant; Third Reich domesticity leaves a nightmarish aftertaste, a pill that sticks in the throat and can’t be swallowed. 

     Glazer keeps the horrors of Auschwitz at bay. He suggests them with a constant roar of crematoriums, sprews of black smoke, the occasional pop of gunshots, and intermittent screams, all of which provide a horrific backdrop to lives that are being shielded from terror. Hedwig tries on clothes that were taken from Jewish women who've been gassed, distributing discarded items to her female servants. Just another day.

      At one point Hedwig's visiting mother marvels at the life of ease and status jowithin the Nazi hierarchy that her daughter has attained. 

      I haven't mentioned the actors yet. That's for a reason. We see these performances as if observed from afar  -- if not literally, then certainly on an emotional level. 

       Christian Friedel portrays Hoss as an ambitious martinet. A crop of black hair springs across the top of his otherwise shaved head. He celebrates a birthday in Auschwitz but never seems particularly happy about it or anything else. He reads his children bedtime stories.

      If I said that Hoss isn't happy; it's also necessary to say that he's not unhappy either. When he's told he'll be transferred from Auschwitz, he's upset, but when he learns that he'll be brought back to preside over the death of Hungry's Jews toward the end of the war, he regains the respect of his Nazi cohorts.

        Seen recently in Anatomy of a Fall,  Sandra Huller plays Hedwig Hoss, a woman who knows that she's punching above her social weight. She doesn't want to abandon the privileges living in Auschwitz affords. Huller gives Hedwig an ungainly almost matronly walk and, for the most part, Glazer doesn't allow his camera to dwell on her face; we usually see her in head-to-toe images as she scurries about the house.

        Glazer commits fully to the style he has chosen for the film. He sometimes interrupts the proceedings with visual blank spots that mirror the film’s opening. One of them floods the screen with vivid red, blood perhaps. Toward the end of the film, he leaps forward in time, showing images from Auschwitz, which today is a museum devoted to preserving memories of the horror that occurred there.

        Abel Gance, the great director of the silent film Napoleon, once said that we should never leave a theater in the same state in which we arrived. If this kind of transformation can be taken as one mark of greatness, Glazer has succeeded. 

          I left The Zone of Interest feeling as if the experience Glazer had created wouldn't wash off easily. By current standards, The Zone of Interest is short, one hour and 45 minutes. But it's also a film that obliterates any sense of time, trapping us in a world where the value of everything feels tainted by a terrible perversity.

         Glazer immerses us in an infected world;  even the flowers in Hedwig's garden aren't immune. They brim with postcard colors. But Auschwitz makes us see them as a sickening mockery of beauty. The roses. I would guess, probably smell of death.

A marriage, a trial, and a complicated movie

 Director Justine Triet must have understood that we've all seen too many movies that try to dissect crumbling marriages. In Anatomy of a Fall,  Triet offers an absorbing look at a rocky marriage but with two major variations: First, the husband in this troubled duo is dead. And second, the wife (Sandra Huller) is on trial for his murder.

 Insightfully written by Triet and her partner in life, Arthur Harari, Anatomy of a Fall raises customary questions about guilt or innocence.  Huller's Sandra and her attorney (Swann Arlaud) contend that Sandra's husband committed suicide. The couple's 11-year-old son (Milo Machado Graner) takes on an important role as the trial develops, but  it's the slow revelation of detail that carries the day.

   Triet wisely tamps down the conventional elements that easily could have defined her movie. Instead, she peels back layers that expose the complexity of a relationship in which Sandra's success as a writer and her husband's failure at the same endeavor caused friction, as did the move that brought them from Germany to a small French town.

    The key to the movie -- which won the Palm d'Or at last spring's Cannes Film Festival -- can be found in Huller's performance, which is deep without being showy. In interviews, Triet has pointed out that Sandra is no angel; the screenplay establishes her as a self-possessed woman who never insists that she was the perfect wife.

   Sandra's fate ultimately hinges on a recording that her late husband made during one of their arguments. He evidently hoped to use it as the basis for one of his stories. 

     The recording becomes essential to understanding the larger point Triet is making: Context changes everything. What might sound abrasive but common in an overheard argument takes on another dimension when it becomes part of a court proceeding.

     Don't fret, the movie doesn't leave us hanging. We get a verdict but the jury’s decision isn't really the point: Triet leaves it to us to pick our way through the messy aftermath of a marriage in which both husband and wife may have thought they were sacrificing too much for the other.

    Anatomy of a Fall isn't a movie for those who want definitive answers; it's for those who are more interested in asking questions as they turn the story this way and that.

       

   

A father/daughter comedy with bite

Toni Erdmann, a telling comedy from Germany.

I saw the German comedy Toni Erdmann some time ago, so I was surprised when checking credits to note that the movie lasted for nearly three hours. I guess that's a good thing because rather than remembering the movie's length, I recalled that it made me laugh, even as it made me wince.

That's because of the way Toni Erdmann made me laugh qualifies as embarrassingly silly. A lot of the chuckles in Toni Erdmann depend on a set of fake, buck teeth, the kind that a decidedly non-funny person might use as a running gag. Only in the case of director Maren Ade's comedy, the teeth become a symbol of rebellious iconoclastic behavior, a liberating display of disregard for just about every situation requiring decorous behavior.

The teeth are worn by Winfried (Peter Simonischek), a slovenly, divorced music teacher who seems to loathe decorum in all of its pretentious forms.

Winfried's grown daughter Ines (Sandra Huller) might be the person who's least amused by her father's intrusive ways. She's working for a German company in Romania, and holds herself to exacting, rigorous standards, even if she's a bit disgusted by the compromises her work requires; i.e., cooking up a massive round of layoffs for an oil company client.

The core of the comedy involves Winfried's visit to Bucharest, purportedly for his daughter's birthday. His gift: A cheese grater. What? You don't need one?

Instead of visiting and returning home, Dad stays. He puts on a ludicrous wig and the false teeth, and makes a preposterous claim; he says he coaches executives in the management arts. Of course, Erdmann looks as if he couldn't manage to find a view in a glass house, which is part of the movie's outlandish approach.

Huller's Ines finds her father's pose appalling -- and, in some ways, it is, a display of callous indifference to proprieties others take seriously.

By the end, it has become clear that director Ade has more in mind than wringing cheap laughs out of a pair of false teeth.

At its best, Toni Erdmann qualifies as a satirical shot at the suffocating conformity demanded in a business world that treats people as disposable, as well as a look at the way a daughter ultimately (and surprisingly) accepts her father's cracked but wily wisdom.

Beyond all that, the movie makes room for a rendition of Whitney Huston's The Greatest Love of All and a sex scene involving petits fours. That's enough for any comedy, especially one in which a pair of fake teeth add some real bite.