When London was under attack

 

   I’ve read that some critics have been disappointed by director Steve McQueen’s Blitz. It’s true: McQueen’s war-time opus has the familiar feel of a well-crafted movie that, at least on the surface, breaks little new ground as it tells a story set in London during the intense German bombings of World War II.  

    Stylistically, Blitz makes no major leaps, but that doesn't mean McQueen, who also wrote the screenplay, hasn't provided a rich, nuanced portrait of London under stress. McQueen's screenplay makes room for admirable and despicable behavior, calling attention to incidences of racism that inflected London, even in a situation that demanded unity.

   McQueen’s screenplay revolves around the bond between a mother (a strong Saoirse Ronan) and her nine-year-old biracial son George (Elliott Heffernan). Marcus, George’s father (CJ Beckford) was deported to Grenada from Britain, leaving Ronan’s Rita and her father (Paul Weller) to raise the boy. Marcus was arrested while defending himself from an unprovoked attack by whites.

   Rita and her dad are “good” Brits, but George can be treated cruelly by kids who won't accept him. Still, McQueen never turns the plucky Hefferman into a victim. The kid has heart.

    The plot begins in earnest when Rita convinced that London is too dangerous for a nine-year-old, sends George to the country where English children were considered to be safe from German bombs. It's painful for her and even more painful for George, who experiences his mother's decision as rejection.

   McQueen has difficulty accommodating the various plot threads. In pre-war flashbacks, we learn how Rita and Marcus met, and the narrative eventually fractures, focusing on Rita’s life in London (working with other women at a bomb factory) and George’s adventures. He jumps off the train en route to the country, works his way toward London, and eventually finds himself being exploited by a thief who evokes memories of Dickens' Fagin (Stephen Graham). 

    This episode may not quite fit with the rest of the movie, but Blitz is no Oliver Twist redux. Throughout, the horror of the Blitz never fades: Firefighters battle chaos and flames, and frightened residents seek refuge in London’s subways. McQueen shows a horrific sequence of flooding in a subway station where residents are sheltering. 

    Poor George; he reaches London but doesn't know how to find his neighborhood. At one point, a noble Nigerian civil defense worker (Benjamin Clementine) takes George under wing, but mostly the kid fends for himself.

   McQueen (12 Years a Slave) takes a moment that has been glorified as a symbol of solidarity, determination, and courage and expands its meaning. Blitz doesn’t trash an important part of the British story, but it widens the lens through which we see it.

  That's a worthy accomplishment.

Too embattled to wallow in grief

Viola Davis leads a strong cast in Widows, a caper movie with plenty of cynical undertow.

In Widows, director Steve McQueen flirts with high-concept formula but never allows it to overwhelm the movie's gritty undertow.

Written by McQueen (Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years A Slave) and Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), Widows wraps pungent characterizations around a caper-film spine. If the plot strains at times, a fine cast and McQueen's scaldingly cynical view of life in Chicago keep the proceedings percolating.

Viola Davis stars as Veronica Rawlings, a woman whose criminal husband (Liam Neeson) dies in the film's barreling, violent prologue. Neeson's Harry and four colleagues are the in the midst of a robbery when they're killed.

Harry leaves Veronica with a pile of trouble. A local gangster (Brian Tyree Henry) claims that Harry owed him $2 million. He's holding Veronica responsible for the debt.

Henry's Jamal Manning also wants to shift to a new kind of crime. He's running for alderman because he believes it's time that he had the opportunity to dip his crust of bread into the municipal gravy that the Irish too long have sopped up. Manning's brother (Daniel Kaluuya) serves as his happily brutal enforcer.

In a related plot thread, Colin Farrell plays Jack Mulligan, the incumbent who's running against Manning. Mulligan is the son of a corrupt former Chicago alderman (Robert Duvall) with a sour disposition and a strong commitment to holding political turf his family has dominated for years.

So how is Veronica going to pay off Harry's debt? As it turns out, Harry left Veronica plans for a major heist that could yield as much as $5 million. Because all of Harry's henchmen were killed in the movie's explosive opening, it falls to Veronica to gather the surviving widows into an impromptu gang, pull off the heist, settle Harry's debt and divide the remaining spoils.

Everyone in Veronica's crew suffers from need. Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) signs on because she's lost her store to rapacious creditors. Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) is one step away from becoming a full-time escort, saved only by the largess of a wealthy financier (Lukas Haas) who makes her his mistress. Amanda (Carrie Coon) has been left with an infant.

Jacki Weaver shows up as Alice's unapologetically sleazy mother, and Cynthia Erivo adds last-minute energy as a woman recruited to drive the getaway car.

A women's perspective gives the movie's crime and political theater a considerable boost. Think of Widows as feminism without speeches, a genre piece featuring female characters with real agency.

It's hardly surprising that Davis proves impressively steely as a woman who misses her husband's tender embraces but proves tough enough to lead her cronies through dangerous terrain. Displaying iron-willed resolve, Veronica takes charge of her gang of widows, no easy task with this group of independent-minded women.

Widows has enough on its mind to keep from becoming one more helping of multiplex fodder. McQueen wisely lets Davis lead the way as a widow who shouldn't be messed with -- even in a world in which felons and politicians often are indistinguishable.*

*I want to reiterate that I welcome comments, particularly those that expand our knowledge about particular films or films in general. But -- and this is the point of this footnote -- I don't publish anonymous comments. Over the years, I've found that many readers have worthwhile things to say and should in no way be reluctant to take credit for their comments. So, sign your name and chime in.

The abject cruelty of U.S. slavery

12 Years a Slave is a powerful and necessary look at enslavement

When I was a kid, we learned that the Civil War was fought over slavery -- sort of. Though acknowledged as a cause of the war, the subject of slavery always seemed muted by more generalized issues: The industrial North vs. the agrarian South and states' rights vs. centralized federal concerns.

Fair to say that slavery didn't come alive as a shocking horror. We read little or nothing about the torments of the Middle Passage, about the cruelties of a system in which people were bought and sold without regard for family connections or about how much of the southern economy was built on the backs of people who were forced to endure humiliation and toil without either rest or recompense.

Movies haven't done much to clarify the picture. From Gone With the Wind to the recent Django Unchained, we've not had a story dedicated fully to describing what the world was like during the time of slavery -- and doing it from the point of view of someone who had been enslaved.

Now comes director Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, written by John Ridley from a book by Solomon Northrup, a free black man who in 1841 was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. and sold into slavery.

Although McQueen has altered some of Northrup's narrative, Northrup's source material gives 12 Years a Slave an authenticity few other historical movies can claim.

This first-person account of America's "peculiar institution" maintains the formality of Northrup's language, but McQueen's images spring to life with troubling urgency.

Built around a solid and moving performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor (as Northrup), 12 Years a Slave hinges on a hideous deception. An accomplished fiddler, Northrup was tricked by a couple of charlatans into traveling with them as a violinist for a circus with which they supposedly were connected.

Once Northrup left his wife and children in Saratoga, N.Y., his fate was sealed. He was drugged and held in a "slave pen" in Washington a few blocks from the Capitol. In order to survive, Northrup gradually learned to hide his literacy (he was an educated man) and to answer to the name a slave trader arbitrarily gave him. He was called "Platt."

Obviously, we're a long way from the devoted slaves of southern fantasy. Mothers and children are viciously separated; brutal whippings are common, as is the sexual abuse of black women. At one point, Northrup is lynched.

His tormentors are driven off, but he's left to hang from a tree, his toes barely touching the ground, a man dancing over his own grave until his then owner (Benedict Cumberbatch) arrives to end his ordeal.

Northrup's life was threatened when he found himself subjected to an overseer's wrath. The overseer (Paul Dano) couldn't abide Northrup's intelligence. Northrup had figured out a way to get his owner's lumber more easily to market. Dano's character -- a man called Tibeats -- deeply resented any initiative on the part of a black man.

After this horrific episode, financial difficulties forced Cumberbatch's character to sell Northrup to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a malicious slave owner who delights in abuse and who is involved in a sexual triangle with his wife (Sarah Paulson) and a slave (Lupita Nyong'o), who also happens to be the best cotton picker on the plantation.

For all of Epps' obvious evils, we probably learn more about southern society from the parts of the movie involving Cumberbatch's "kindly" Mr. Ford. Ford treats his slaves reasonably well, but he obviously accepts the institution of slavery and has profited from it. He's troubled by cruelty, but not enough to reject the system that allows it to flourish.

At times, McQueen presents us with tableaus that might have been inspired by old photographs, perhaps as a way of establishing tension between what we regard as "history" and the urgency of a drama that appears to be taking place before our eyes. A scene in which Northrup encounters a group of Indians might be the film's most mysterious, groups of outcasts who don't know quite what to make of each other.

In 1853, Northrup finally was rescued and restored to his former life. He was able to write a book about his experiences, and evidently helped slaves escape the South via the underground railroad.

As moving as Northrup's reunion with his family is, it can't (and shouldn't) entirely be enjoyed. The story of slavery isn't really about one man's journey back to his home and family; it's about all those who died as slaves, unconsoled by a loved one's touch, distant from the mothers who bore them and regarded as property in an economy built on acceptance of people as chattel.

McQueen, who previously directed Hunger and Shame, allows room for such thoughts. It's also telling (and more than a little sad) that 150 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a movie such as 12 Years a Slave still qualifies as a rarity.

Into the heart of a soul-destroying obsession

Shame, which has been rated NC-17, explores the depths of one man's sex addiction.

After two exceptionally grueling movies – Hunger and now Shame – it seems fair to wonder whether British director Steve McQueen isn’t trying to test the soul of actor Michael Fassbender.

In Hunger, McQueen cast Fassbender as Bobby Sands, the IRA rebel who in 1981 led a prison hunger strike that resulted in his death. The role, which seemed to blur the line between performance and ordeal, was nothing if not demanding.

In Shame, McQueen puts Fassbender through another wringer. Fassbender plays Brandon, a New York sex addict, whose behavior involves him in a soul-crushing ordeal.

OK, so McQueen isn’t really trying to destroy Fassbender, but he sure knows how to set an arduous physical and emotional pace -- and his actor responds in kind. Shame is a journey to the very bottom of Brandon’s parched soul, and Fassbender holds nothing in reserve.

Shame, which features nudity and explicit sex scenes, has been rated NC-17. But it’s not the nudity or the graphic sex (none of it erotic) that turns the movie into a brutalizing viewing experience; it’s the emotional violence to which Brandon subjects himself and others, as well as the maddening persistence of his compulsions.

This is a guy for whom the office men’s room is a place to masturbate, a man so seized by his sexual urges that he follows women off subway cars, hires hookers and can’t stop watching porn on the Internet.

Brandon is handsome, but also has a kind of ghastly pallor, as if he’s only half alive. When he’s not in the throes of his addiction, he works at keeping his distance from others. When Brandon’s sister (Carey Mulligan) tries to move in with him, his protected world faces a major disruption. Mulligan’s Sissy is a singer whose personal life is in disarray.

At one point, Brandon and his boss visit a nightclub to hear Mulligan’s Sissy sing. She does an agonizingly drawn out version of New York, New York that moves Brandon to tears. It’s not a place he likes to be.

Later, Brandon finds himself attracted to a woman in his office (Nicole Beharie). He takes her to dinner. He loosens up a bit. But when it comes to making love to this woman, he can’t perform. For Brandon, relationships are the enemy of desire. He prefers anonymous sex.

McQueen’s directing style involves holding shots for an exceptionally long time, sometimes photographing conversations from a distance, and using wide-screen spacing to create tension between characters.

Now, you can’t watch a movie such as Shame without taking a walk on the seamy side. If you’re interested in seeing an actor plumb the depths of a powerful addiction, Shame will take you on one of the year’s most disturbing rides.

Whether you emerge from the experience having learned something from Brandon’s torments is another matter. Shame is powerful, but not necessarily profound. It tends to be obvious when it comes to Brandon’s addictive personality and not especially interested in how he might have gotten that way.

Oh well. Shame shows the prolonged agony of being chained to a compulsion. Its unremitting intensity and startling frankness make it stand apart, even if those same qualities do not carry it to greatness.