A caustic look at the art world

Sweden's The Square takes us into a world where art and basic human values seem constantly to clash.

You could spend a couple of hours unwinding the many subjects addressed in Swedish director Ruben Ostlund's The Square. Ostlund, who shook up the art-house world in 2014 with Force Majeure, takes on the pretensions of the art world and the split between purported cultural values and simple expressions of humanity. He also tackles class divisions and the way a hopelessly elitist art world pushes itself toward weird extremes.

The Square of the title refers to an art space created outside of a museum of modern art in Stockholm. Inside the space, which actually is quite small, the atmosphere is supposed to be one of helpfulness and toleration, a tiny retreat devoted to trust and caring. Not surprisingly, the world outside the square turns out to be ridiculously corrupt.

Ostlund builds his story around the museum's curator. Claes Bang portrays Christian, a museum executive whose hypocrisy will be exposed as the movie unveils a series of episodes that sometimes amuse, sometimes confound and sometimes seem a little too on the nose to be as provocative as Ostlund may have intended.

If you're the sort of person who believes the art world is hopelessly out of touch with anything that concerns "normal" experience, you'll probably side with Ostlund as he poses a series of arty jokes. The main exhibit at the museum consists of piles of gravel assembled in the shape of small pyramids across a gallery floor. It's silly, of course, but just plausible enough to make us see why visitors to the museum might spend hours trying to tease possible meanings from these piles of rocks.

You may do the same with The Square. The movie is ambitious, scattered, funny, flawed and disjointed.

Say this, though, as the curator of the museum, Bang proves an able ringmaster as he presides over Ostlund's circus of a movie. American audiences also will recognize Elisabeth Moss, who turns up as a TV reporter doing a story on the new exhibit. Later, she climbs into bed with Bang's character.

Post sex discussion between the two characters hardly leans toward sweet talk, degenerating, instead, into an argument about who's going to throw away the condom the couple used. Perhaps a suspicious Christian thinks that Moss's character wants to set him up for a Lewinski-like dress moment. Who knows?

Did I mention that before the reporter and her subject have sex, a chimp wanders through Moss's character's apartment, creating both laughs and consternation? It’s one of the film's several WTF moments.

During the interview with Moss's character, Christian reveals that his major (and possibly only) concern centers on raising money for the museum.

That's not the only money-oriented moment in The Square. At a fund-raising dinner, a performance artist pretends to be a gorilla and winds up terrorizing the guests. This bizarre twist presumably is meant to show how much abuse viewers will tolerate if they believe they’re looking at art. The scene also exposes the ruthlessness that afflicts the art crowd. Under those tuxedos, monsters lurk. The whole scene would have made a spectacularly unnerving short.

Earlier, a couple of hip marketing geniuses persuade the museum’s staff that tolerance and compassion never will draw attention to The Square. To spice things up, they create a promotional video in which a girl is blown up. They wanted to give the project an edge.

Perhaps to knock Christian out of his protected cocoon, Ostlund includes a mugging in which Christian loses his wallet, his phone, and a pair of prized cufflinks. The resultant developments expose his silliness, as well as his inability to get beyond his own preoccupations.

So what to make of all this? Clearly, Ostlund has skills. He's a filmmaker who's interested in morality and responsibility, subjects that need plenty of attention at the moment. But in The Square, he's got so much on his plate that it takes him all of 2 1/2 sometimes taxing hours to unravel the movie's many threads.

As a result, The Square stands as a triumph of ambition that results in a wildly mixed achievement, water balloons dropped by a prankish director on the art world's many targets of opportunity.

A girl fights for her family's survival

The Breadwinner takes an animated look at life in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

The Breadwinner isn't the first film to deal with the plight of Afghan women living under the Taliban (2003's Osama was devastating), but it may be the first animated feature to tackle such a difficult subject.

Irish director Nora Twomey, who co-directed the much-admired The Secret of Kells, takes us to Kabul for a story about Parvana (voice by Saara Chaudry), a girl whose father (Ali Badshah) is arrested for possession of a book the Taliban disdains. The young thug who betrays this peaceful older man has personal motives for his actions. Besides, we get the impression that any book, other than the Koran, would have offended Taliban sensibilities.

Parvana's mother Fattema (Laara Sadiq) and her older sister Soraya (Shaista Latif) don't know how they are going to survive because, as women, they can't even venture into the street unaccompanied by a male relative. This prohibition makes a dangerous ordeal out of such simple tasks as buying groceries or fetching water from the local well.

Early on Fattema, who's also caring for her toddler son, attempts to visit her husband in the forbidding prison where he's being held. She's badly beaten for her efforts.

It falls to Parvana to devise a solution to keep the family afloat. She cuts her hair, pretends to be a boy and begins to move about Kabul with new-found freedom. She also receives help with her ruse from Shauzia (Soma Chhaya), another girl who has adopted the same strategy as a means of coping with Taliban tyrannies.

The Breadwinner focuses on children but should not be considered a children's movie, even though older kids would do well to see it. It's a harsh story about what happens when fanatics terrorize a culture.

The story also puts special emphasis on the importance of storytelling as a means of helping people to survive terrible conditions. The movie opens with Parvana's father telling her stories about Afghanistan's past and includes a running fable that Parvana tells her baby brother. Parvana's story involves a boy who must try to save his village from the ravages of the evil Elephant King, a tale that roughly parallels Parvana's efforts to help keep her family afloat.

The animation is simple, sometimes involving cut-outs: Twomey's team creates a dusty picture of Kabul as a place where the life of the marketplace hasn't entirely been squelched.

The Breadwinner, which derives from a young-adult novel by Deborah Ellis, affirms Parvana's strength and determination and serves as a moving introduction to what it means for women to live under constraints that serve to subjugate and dehumanize them. Small but powerful, The Breadwinner qualifies as an adept telling of an important story.

A movie that sets off fireworks

Tultepec, a town of about 92,000 people located about 20 miles north of Mexico City, goes crazy for fireworks. This obsession manifests most prominently during the annual celebration of San Juan de Dios, a holy figure who's venerated as the patron saint of fireworks makers. Fireworks, of course, have dual potential: They're beautiful to observe but also, dangerous. Brimstone & Glory, a documentary by Viktor Jakovleski takes us to Tultepec, where residents are preparing two massive displays: The Castles of Fire and the Burning of the Bulls, both highlights of the town's week-long fireworks festival. The peril becomes apparent when we see one town resident who has lost a hand to fireworks. He still helps make them. Early on, one of the young men helping to create a frame for a giant bull that will blaze with fireworks, says that no one who participates in what he calls "the running of the bulls" escapes without burns. The fireworks we see are amazing, and Jakovleski leaves it to us to decide what to make of this town's obsession with lighting up the sky for an event that evidently attracts upward of 100,000 visitors. I wondered why so many risk injury year-after-year, but most of the people we meet accept the town's commitment to fireworks as an essential part of a community event that celebrates local artisans. (A footnote: In December of 2016, after Brimstone and Glory was completed, a massive explosion in a Tultepec fireworks market resulted in 42 deaths.)

Denzel Washington as a savant attorney

Roman J. Israel, Esq. makes room for moments that are so thought-provokingly enjoyable that the movie, which can't be called a success, may be more interesting than movies that would have garnered more praise. Denzel Washington creates one of his more memorable characters, a legal savant whose values and tastes are firmly stuck in the 60s. Washington's Israel sports an afro, baggy-ill fitting pants, and glasses a couple of sizes too big. Directed by Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler), Roman J. Israel, Esq. is at its best when it's focused on this misfit of a man whose heroes include Bayard Rustin and Angela Davis. A key story element arrives early: Israel has spent 36 years working for a famous lawyer. Israel has been the backroom brains for William Henry Jackson, an attorney who knew how to handle himself in a courtroom. Jackson suffers a heart attack and slips into a coma, igniting a plot that brings Israel into touch with a hot-shot attorney portrayed by Colin Farrell. Farrell's George Pierce has been asked to dissolve Jackson's firm, which -- unbeknownst to Israel -- has never turned a profit. Israel also meets a civil rights activist (Carmen Ejogo). She sees past Israel's strange behavior and finds a righteous man. The plot puts Israel into a position in which he must decide how righteous he really is, a development the movie doesn't seem to know how to explore. For roughly half of its two-hour and 9-minute running time, Roman J. Israel, Esq. complies scenes that don't quite cohere. It's almost as if Gilroy, who also wrote the screenplay, can't figure out precisely what he wants to say. He compensates by giving Washington some scorching dialog and with a bit of cinematic daring, even employing some throwback style to evoke a feeling of '60s cinema. Roman J. Israel, Esq. emerges on one of the year's true oddities, a film that stumbles but, before it falls, hits notes you're not likely to hear anywhere else.*
As was the case with Wonder, I had a conflict with the preview screening of Roman J. Israel, Esq. and caught up with the film after its opening.

'Wonder' has lots of YA appeal

Because of scheduling conflicts, I was unable to attend an advance screening of Wonder, the big-screen adaptation of R.J. Palacio's 2012 YA novel. Directed by Stephen Chbosky and starring Julia Roberts, Wonder tells the story of 10-year-old Auggie (Jacob Tremblay), a boy born with facial deformities. Roberts portrays Auggie's mom, a caring mother who decides that it's time for Auggie to leave the protected safety of home schooling and attend school with other kids. Owen Wilson appears as Auggie's dad, a father who thinks it's a mistake to expose Auggie to the bullying and ridicule that surely will taunt him, even in an upscale New York City private school. The Pullman family, of which Auggie is a member, lives comfortably in a Brooklyn brownstone. No arguments about money in this household. Wonder touches many bases. Auggie's older sister Via (Izabela Vidovic) tends to be neglected by her parents, who are consumed with Auggie's welfare. Via has her own problems: Her best friend (Danielle Rose Russell) stops speaking to her at the beginning of a new school year. Julian (Bryce Gheisar) becomes Auggie's chief tormenter; Jack (Noah Jupe), a scholarship student who's not sure he fits in either) befriends Auggie. Mandy Patinkin portrays the school's understanding principal; Daveed Diggs appears as one of Auggie's teachers, and Nadji Jeter plays Via's boyfriend. The performances are all up-to-snuff in a movie that explores real issues in an idealized environment. Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) engineers the story to jerk some tears and provide hope. Wonder qualifies as worthy YA fiction. I saw it at a showing that was full of kids, who seemed involved in the movie's every turn, but as an OA (old adult), the movie struck me as a bit of an after-school special -- albeit one emboldened by marquee names and an estimable message; i.e., that we never can be entirely sure we understand why people behave as they do.

Get thee to a nunnery -- in Tennessee

Novitiate explores the interior life of a devoted young woman, strains in the Church and the way of life in an isolated convent.

The time: 1964. The Sisters of Blessed Rose convent in Tennessee are so isolated they don't know about reforms taking place in their own church. Pope John XXIII and Vatican II have begun the difficult process of opening the Church to views that are foreign to some of its older clerics, especially Reverend Mother (Melissa Leo), the nun who presides over Blessed Rose.

Although director Maggie Betts focuses most of her attention on an aspiring nun (Margaret Qualley), Leo's Reverend Mother casts a long and sometimes harsh shadow over the proceedings in Novitiate, a movie about young women whose ages (most are in their teens) make it difficult for them to be as somber as their new surroundings.

Some of the questions that Betts raises about the Church and its adherents can feel imposed on the story, but Betts' filmmaking has a controlled assurance that keeps us locked into her movie in much the same way as the movie's nuns are cloistered in this fictional convent. We may not know why we're there, but, then, neither do all of these young postulates.

Leo's character justifies her strict, sometimes punishing methods by insisting that aestheticism, discipline, and penance provide a proven path to God. The penance Reverend Mother favors can seem indistinguishable from abuse.

When pushed to temper her views, the Reverend Mother feels betrayed. She has devoted her life to behavior she sees as righteous. With the Church insisting on loosening the reigns, Reverend Mother's choices no longer make sense.

Reverend Mother is also disturbed that a patriarchal church can dictate what's appropriate for its female devotees. They'll no longer be required to wear habits.

Novitiate, the movie that contains all this turmoil, revolves around young women who are trying to understand their relationship to Jesus. They're eager to do the Church's bidding and marry Jesus but their love is touched by large amounts of teenage romanticism and inchoate longing.

Qualley's Cathleen was attracted to the Church at an early age, after having been taken to mass by her mother (Julianne Nicholson). No great believer, Nicholson's character views her daughter's entry into the convent as a tragic mistake.

So why does Cathleen want to become a nun? Her background may have influenced her decision. Cathleen's father (Chris Zylka) cheated on her mother before walking out on the family. Moreover, Nicholson's character doesn't seem able to provide her daughter with some much-needed stability.

Betts stops short of suggesting that Cathleen's decision derives entirely from her upbringing. Her commitment seems to arise from a mysterious place even Cathleen doesn't fully understand. Could her's be a case of true and abiding faith?

Betts doesn't take a judgmental attitude toward the nuns, especially the young aspirants. Cathleen and her fellow novitiates are being trained to combat their desires in order to focus entirely on God. That's a lot to ask of hormonally active teenagers, and not all the novitiates are sure of their calling. One young nun says she joined because she was inspired by Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story.

The key question posed by the movie -- and embodied in Qualley's luminous performance -- is whether the attempt to find a path toward God requires squelching kindly impulses, as well as the desire for physical human contact?

Early in the story, one of the sisters (Dianna Agron) leaves the convent because she can't reconcile the softness in her heart with the staunch methods imposed by Reverend Mother. And eventually, even the devout Cathleen can't contain her desires.

Betts leaves us in a state of uncertainty about what she's after: a study of one young woman's search for transcendence or an examination of the wrenching difficulties of changing deeply ingrained values -- or, more likely, both of those things.

Neither of those currents fully satisfies but both provoke interest and absorption.

A boy longs for music in colorful 'Coco'

A Latino cast of characters fills Disney/Pixar's holiday entry. Oh, and by the way, the holiday is the Day of the Dead.

An animated movie built around Mexico's Day of the Dead and a story in which ruthless ambition and murder play pivotal roles? At first blush, such a movie seems like something that might have sprung from the imagination of director Tim Burton, no stranger to blending macabre touches into animated fare.

Not to worry. Disney/Pixar's Coco, which includes what might have been darkly hued ingredients, plants its feet firmly in a colorful world that serves as a backdrop for the movie's foray into Mexican culture. The Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos) may be one of Coco's key events, but the movie puts its emphasis on family ties that extend through generations and, ultimately, serve as a source of strength for the living.

Guess what? The whole thing more or less works. Coco, Disney's holiday offering from Pixar, makes for an engaging entry into the canon of vividly realized Pixar animated features. To say that Coco bursts with visual diversity and color understates the case.

The story centers on Miguel (voice by Anthony Gonzalez), a boy who wants to follow in the footsteps of his hero, a recently deceased but enormously popular singer named Ernesto de la Cruz (voice by Benjamin Brett). De la Cruz became a singing sensation; young Miguel comes to believe that he's the great-great grandson of the venerable de la Cruz.

The problem: Miguel's family has gone into the shoemaking business and has forbidden all musical activity lest such frivolity upset Mama Coco, the shriveled family matriarch who gives the film its title. An explanation of the family's anti-musical stance would require spoilers. All I'll say is that the screenplay provides one.

According to the movie, the Day of the Dead marks the occasion on which the spirits of departed ancestors are supposed to return to mingle with their still-living loved ones. A series of plot machinations involving a trip to a local cemetery finds Miguel headed in the opposite direction.

Instead of awaiting the visits of the departed, he visits them in the Land of the Dead.

Much of Coco takes place in the Land of the Dead, a domain Disney treats as if it had been conceived as an addition to one of its theme parks, a fantastical world dominated by fully dressed skeletons, dazzlingly bright colors, vaulting towers, engaging characters, a busy transportation hub, and a villain who's more pompous than scary.

Miguel hopes his trip to the Land of the Dead will be productive: He wants to meet de la Cruz, receive the great singer's blessing and return home to pursue his musical dreams. But Miguel also meets Hector (voice by Gael Garcia Bernal), a tattered skeletal presence who's on the verge of being forgotten and who may have something to do with Miguel's quest.

Hector is that sorriest of souls. He'll be forgotten because there's no one to put his photo on a family shrine; he won't be able to cross the bridge that connects the living and the dead -- an arching display of marigold petals -- for a visit with his relatives. He'll vanish from his family's records, as if he never had lived.

I can't say exactly how kids will react to a story that makes room for jealousy, ego, and deceit, but I'm guessing that Coco's bright colors and Miguel's unflagging exuberance will stave off any bouts of kiddie fright and depression.

Besides, the skeletons in The Land of the Dead lean aren't immune from cartoonish behavior, coming apart and reconstituting when bones fly in different directions. These skeletons retain the personalities and relationships that they enjoyed in life. They're a lively bunch who give the lie to any notion that an afterlife might involve eternal rest.

Among the "dead" characters, Miguel finds his great-great grandmother (Alanna Noel Ubach). On the living side, we meet Miguel's grandmother (Renee Victor), a woman who serves as the family's enforcer, but who never fails to accompany discipline with robust expressions of love.

I've read that the filmmakers worked hard to incorporate authentic details of Mexican culture into the story and to sprinkle the dialogue with Spanish. Co-directed by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, the movie also includes touches that anchor the story in the Land of Disney, notably a sidekick Xolo dog named Dante that accompanies Miguel on his adventures.

In Coco, Disney and Pixar realize a complex and visually dense world that contains music and musical numbers without being a musical.

The movie may encourage youngsters to ponder the perils of succumbing to the blinding light of celebrity and it shows -- in obviously literal fashion -- that there's much to be gained from honoring and remembering those who have gone before us. And, of course, there's the Disney value that transcends all cultures: pursuing a dream.

How Dickens wrote 'A Christmas Carol'

The Man Who Invented Christmas has a lively spirit.

Few things are more boring than watching someone write unless it's watching some think through the kind of problems that can furrow even the most confident authorial brows during the creation of a written work.

Such is the obvious difficulty that confronted director Bharat Nalluri in making The Man Who Invented Christmas, the story of how Charles Dickens wrote his beloved A Christmas Carol.

To accomplish his task, Nalluri presents a series of scenes in which the great author tries out names in search of one that fits a character. He also shows Dickens meeting people in the real world who inspire characters who later appear in his fiction or tossing things about in his study as he agonizes about how to bring his story to its memorable conclusion.

Based on a book by Les Standiford, Nalluri's movie introduces Dickens during a period when, at the age of 31, he already had become famous. But after a trip to America, Dickens -- played in generally cheerful fashion by Dan Stevens -- was forced to deal with a couple of commercial flops, not to mention the high standard of living the author had set for himself.

What to do when sales of Martin Chuzzlewit fizzled? The movie's title, of course, tips us off.

Born of desperation and pressing monetary concerns, A Christmas Carol pushed its way into the holiday canon, a sheer act of authorial will. To show us exactly how this happened, Nalluri takes us into Dickens' study where the author meets and converses with characters who'll appear in the finished work. These "ghosts" or figments of Dickens' imagination (played by a variety of actors) don't always soothe the panic that besets the author as he struggles to finish the work in time to reach bookstores by Christmas.

I don't know if Dickens literally invented Christmas spirit as we have come to know it, but that's the notion that underlies the movie which gives the role of Scrooge -- as he evolves in Dickens' imagination -- to Christopher Plummer. Plummer makes a worthy addition to the gallery of embittered Scrooges who have been brought to the screen by any number of actors. (I still favor Alastair Sim in the 1951 version.)

While writing, Dickens also must attend to his domestic life. Morfydd Clark portrays Dickens' devoted but never subordinate wife, and Jonathan Pryce shows up as Dickens' father, a playful but fiscally irresponsible man who once, to Dickens' lasting shame, did a stretch in debtors prison.

Nalluri handles this difficult period in Dickens' life with flashbacks that build toward a not-so-surprising reveal about the indignities Dickens faced as a boy.

A fine cast of additional supporting actors keeps Stevens from having to fly solo. Justin Edwards portrays Dickens' agent John Forster. Dickens and Forster make a couple of visits to the Garrick Club, a writers' haunt where Dickens sometimes is tormented by another novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray (Miles Jupp). Few things, we presume, buoy a writer's spirits as much as the difficulties faced by a rival.

We also find Dickens befriending and then offending one of his servants (Anna Murphy), an uneducated young woman who nonetheless has a sharp taste for stories.

Simon Callow adds late-picture tang as John Leech, the renowned illustrator who did the artwork for A Christmas Carol.

For all of Nalluri's invention, watching Dickens develop his story becomes a bit repetitive, and those who believe that someone other than Dickens actually invented Christmas may be surprised by the movie's reminder that Christmas wasn't always celebrated with decorated trees, plum pudding and gifts. Nalluri and screenwriter Susan Coyne treat the matter with a throwaway line when a character wonders why Dickens wants to make such a fuss over a "minor holiday."

I can't say that The Man Who Invented Christmas will (or should) hang at the top of anyone's cinematic tree, but, at its best, the movie has a lively spirit that keeps us from crying "Humbug."

On being young, gay and angry

If the makers of God's Own Country had been looking for an alternate title for their movie, they could have stolen Mudbound, not that this British drama has anything to do with Mudbound's foray into racism and the American South. My suggestion involves the movie's commitment to stripping all traces of rural romanticism from the mud-splattered lives of sheep farmers in Yorkshire, England. Set in an atmosphere in which the birth and death of animals can be bloody, God's Own Country tells the story of a romance between Johnny (Josh O'Connor) and a Romanian migrant worker named Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu). Director Francis Lee makes his debut with a movie in which O'Connor's angry young man makes the transition from rough faceless sexual encounters to something more substantial. The supporting cast includes Ian Jones as Johnny's debilitated father and Gemma Jones as the young man's grandmother. Johnny isn't conflicted about being gay, but he seems to be caught in a more generalized form of rage that may have something to do with the mother who left the family and with the hardscrabble life that has become his lot in life. The movie belongs to O'Connor, so convincingly and off-putting sullen that when Johnny offers the hint of a smile, it seems misplaced on his otherwise brooding face. God's Own Country becomes memorable for its unrelenting naturalism and for its refusal to see hearts and flowers where only mud, animals, walled-off human emotions and rare moments of tenderness are able to survive. But survive they do.