A three-part take on family relations

 

  Director Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother offers a trio of short films, each with the texture and open-ended quality of a carefully crafted short story. 

   Avoiding big events and shocking plot twists, Jarmusch smartly explores situations that invite us to consider the unseen past that informs nearly every moment. 

  Jarmusch begins in New Jersey, where two siblings (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) visit their widowed father (Tom Waits), who lives in an isolated home at the end of a dirt road.

   Little is said, but much is suggested. Awkwardness prevails.

   Dad, for example, has a sizable collection of serious books but doesn’t seem particularly interested in ideas. Dad's house is disheveled, suggesting Dad isn't financially flush. Driver's Jeff has sent Dad money. Bialik's Emily once sent funds. When her husband objected, she stopped.

   Jarmusch saves a revealing flourish for the end, and we begin to sense a theme: Family ties persist, but it's unclear how much anyone ever knows anyone else. We feel the strain of situations in which everyone seems a bit trapped by the roles they think they should be playing, or maybe they use these roles as a method of concealment.

  That idea carries into the next episode, which takes place in Dublin. Charlotte Rampling portrays a successful author who's about to be visited by her two daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps). Once a year, they all gather for tea, a ritual the three seem to approach warily. Still, they do as expected.

   A woman of precise expression, Mom has carefully organized the table with carefully arranged small  cakes. We sense she may have been a mother who held her kids to high standards, the kind that result either in intimidation or rebellion. 

   Again the conversations are strained, the performances, revealing. Blanchett's Timothea appears timid and insecure; Krieps' Lilith behaves more freely, yet she lies about her accomplishments and relationships. 

   The last episode takes place in Paris. The discomfort of the previous episodes gives way to a more natural flow. Billy (Luka Sabbat) and Skye (Indya Moore) play twins who meet in Paris after their parents die in a plane crash. 

   Dad was flying a small plane in the Azores. Billy wonders if their parents might have survived had Mom been at the controls instead of Dad. Clearly, the twins have ideas about their parents' personalities. Whatever caused the crash, we sense that Mom and Dad approached life as adventurers.

    Billy and Skye have been apart for a while, but they know each other in the way only twins can. They're relaxed in each other's company, freely expressing affection.

    But did they know their late parents? Mom was white; Dad was Black. The twins let us know that their parents had a penchant for being unconventional, but they're seem to be talking about style. They were, after all, a couple who left the US for what they may have seen as the freedom of Paris.

   We also learn that Billy cleared the apartment where the twins grew up before Skye's arrival: The  mementos of the past have been sent to storage, perhaps to be forgotten. When the twins visit the apartment, it's empty. The emptiness feels poignant.

   Rich in subtexts that illuminate the gap between parents and their adult children, each episode includes a touch that's repeated throughout. Among them: mentions of Rolex watches (real or fake) or use of the British idiomatic phrase "Bob's your uncle," which means something like, "Well, that's that." 

   Father Mother Sister Brother begins with Anika Henderson's rendition of the song, Spooky, a great mood setter for a movie that serves as a welcome antidote for the frenetic rush that characterizes so many current movies, even the good ones. 

   Jarmusch, who hasn't made a film since 2019's The Dead Don't Die, doesn't hurry or dot every "i." He doesn't hide behind ambiguities but leaves it to us to search for the complicated history that underlies each of the movie's mini-dramas.

 

Jim Jarmusch makes his zombie movie

Every now and again, I come across a movie that I watch without being able to form much of a connection. That certainly was the case with The Dead Don't Die, director Jim Jarmusch's belated entry into the world of zombie movies. Employing a cast led by Bill Murray, Adam Driver, and Chloe Sevigny -- all of whom play small-town cops — Jarmusch deadpans his way through a dreary foray to a small town where the dead are popping up from their graves. There's little point making this kind of movie without taking aim at a decaying world. To that end, Steve Buscemi portrays a racist farmer who wears a "Keep America White Again" hat, a take on ... well ... you know. Strange things begin to happen in the tiny fictional town of Centerville and it doesn't take long for the dead to begin chewing on the living. Murray and Driver display little emotion as the movie progresses. Tilda Swinton adds to the weirdness quotient. She shows up as the town's mortician, a woman who also happens to wield a mean samurai sword. At one point, Jarmusch shatters convention. Driver's Ronnie justifies his gloomy outlook by telling Murray's character that he knows things will end badly because he’s read the script. Jim, he says, showed it to him. Oh, I forgot to mention that Tom Waits portrays a hermit who wanders through the woods outside of town and that Danny Glover appears as the owner of the town's hardware store. The idea of riffing on zombie movies, a deadened American culture, global warming, and small-town insularity isn't exactly new. Because The Dead Don't Die was selected as the opening offering of the Cannes Film Festival, I expected a more robust movie -- even if that movie kept faith with Jarmusch's low-key style. The Dead May Not Die, but this movie sometimes feels as if it's in need of life support. Oh well, maybe it’s me. I’ve admired some of Jarmusch’s movies and been unimpressed by others. For me, this one staggered its way onto the negative side of the ledger.

The Coens sing a weird ballad

Six short films make for a mixed bag in the Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) tackle the West in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a six-part anthology of short films in which breathtaking visual acuity couples with a morbid sense of humor and western mythology gives way to chilly existential horror. The six films -- united because they're presented as part of a book in which they're bound -- suggest crossbreeding between lurid western pulp and tales told around a campfire.

Not all of the episodes are successful and, sorry to say, stretches of the movie are duller than you might expect from the Coens. But this is a Coen brothers film and, as such, demands some attention from those who've been following the Coens since the days of Blood Simple, some 24 years ago.

In the first episode, Tim Blake Nelson plays the title character, a singing cowboy with an aggressively cheerful manner. Nelson's Buster Scruggs is also a killer who guns people down between songs. One of the movie's best episodes, this one also serves as an announcement that the Coens are hell-bent on replacing the Wild, Wild West with the Weird, Weird West.

Other chapters in the Ceon's rueful book include a story about hanging starring James Franco and a bizarre riff on wagon-train movies that focuses on a woman (Zoe Kazan) traveling west to start a new life but meeting with a sorry fate.

Then there's Meal Ticket, the story of a traveling showman (Liam Neeson) who goes from town to town with a legless, armless man called Hamilton, the Wingless Thrush (Harry Melling). Neeson's character sets Hamilton on the stage where he recites Shelley, Shakespeare and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to increasingly sparse audiences. Hamilton's career soon will be undermined by an unlikely new entertainer.

Tom Waits portrays a lone prospector who strikes gold but must fend off trouble.

The final chapter of this blood-stained book takes place on a stagecoach where Saul Rubinek (as a Frenchman), Tyne Daly (as a rigidly upright woman), Chelcie Ross (as the always-necessary bearded old trapper), and Brendan Gleeson (as a passenger who sings a sad song) take their weird ride toward ... well ... you'll have to see the movie to discover where they all wind up.

The Coens have fun with the movie's language, which is florid and overdone, the formal-sounding speech of characters aspiring to -- but not always attaining -- eloquence.

For all the Coens wit and wiliness, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs sometimes feels caught in the pages of the book that serves as its framing device, a dusty volume that may be a sorrowful lament for a world that has been mortally wounded and has nothing left to do but stagger toward the grave.

Creative as The Ballad of Buster Scruggs can be, I'm looking forward to seeing the Coens turn the page.

Robert Redford plays an aging thief

The Old Man & the Gun creaks along in predictable fashion, but Redford displays wary charm.

There's one compelling reason to see The Old Man & the Gun. The movie stars Robert Redford who says that his performance as real-life bank robber Forrest Tucker is his last. Now 82, Redford has told interviewers that he plans to devote his time to directing and environmental causes. He's also still the driving force behind The Sundance Film Festival.

When I say that Redford provides the only reason to see The Old Man & the Gun, it's because he creates a reliably agreeable portrait of a thief who devotes his life either to holding up banks or escaping from prison, a feat he accomplished 16 times.

Full of wary charm, Redford's portrayal of Tucker arrives sans all traces of malice or evil.

I don't know if that makes sense for the subject matter, but Redford's fans should be able to regard this performance as a pleasing valedictory to great career.

Director David Lowery (Ghost Story), who wrote the screenplay based on a New Yorker article by David Grann, builds Redford's character around a single, disarming trait: Tucker is ultra polite and friendly during his robberies. The people he holds up (bank managers and tellers) all seem to take away positive impressions of this grand larcenist.

The rest of the cast includes Danny Glover and Tom Waits as a couple of Tucker's accomplices.
Sissy Spacek plays a widow who is charmed by Tucker, although she's not ready to abandon her life for him.

I suppose every robber needs a nemesis. In this case, the job goes to Casey Affleck, who appeared in Ghost Story. Affleck portrays Texas detective John Hunt, a man who made it his business to track Tucker.

Despite some nice scenes between Spacek and Redford, The Old Man & the Gun feels like a slightly creaky version of a movie we've seen before. And if this is Redford's last movie, I wish he had been chosen something a bit more challenging.

I feel guilty saying that because Redford certainly has earned the right to do whatever he wants; for me, he's been an exciting screen presence since I first saw him in movies such as Inside Daisy Glover (1964) and The Chase (1966).

I hope, at a minimum, that Redford doesn't give up on directing because a movie world without Robert Redford in it seems like a very bad idea.