Luce
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
It’s appropriate that so much of the film Luce follows the titular character’s preparation for a debate. The film itself seems to beg for audience argument.
Luce is a bit of an American miracle. A boy soldier rescued from Eritrea at 7 by a wealthy white couple, he’s reinvented himself by the beginning of his senior year in high school, becoming the golden child: debate team captain, cross country captain, speech team captain and eventual valedictorian.
A sternly supportive history teacher (Octavia Spencer) raises questions, her goal to help ensure Luce understands that he “cannot F-up.” It becomes the catalyst for a tense, borderline terrifying exploration of identity, preconceptions, race, refined society and who gets to take credit for what.
Kelvin Harrison Jr., so wounded and wonderful in It Comes at Night, holds all these puzzle pieces together as the enigma at the center of a mystery. His turn as the charismatic central figure in this highly polite and scholarly debate is fascinating, haunting and, in rare flashes, painfully vulnerable.
His manufactured persona, his carefully studied sincerity, emphasize an image that’s too good to be true. But Harrison Jr. brings so many additional layers—manifestations of survival techniques, an ability to read his environment and predict everyone’s behavior—that give his character needed complexity. Luce is not just a black student everyone can be proud of, or some wonderful example of how our system can work.
And that’s what makes him scary. So when he executes a history assignment too well—writing from the perspective of a historical figure who suggested violence as a moral response to colonialism—he freaks out a teacher (Spencer, wonderfully righteous) who’d rather he embrace his favored status so she can bask in the glow.
Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play Luce’s socially conscious parents, and the pairing makes it tough to keep your mind from recalling Funny Games, Michael Haneke’s grim picture of affluent familial catastrophe. Whether intentional or not, the casting adds an underlying sense of urgent dread—as does Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s discordant score.
Watts is particularly strong, and the who-knows-what dance she does with Roth as their son plays one off the other adds a queasying rhythm to the mystery.
Julius Onah’s direction sometimes betrays the stagebound nature of the source material. (J.C. Lee adapts his own much lauded play.) Too much is revealed through lengthy monologues and there’s little smooth flow from scene to scene.
But his film teems with provocation and his cast more than meets that challenge. Harrison Jr. in particular is a revelation, an image of a thing that doesn’t exist but is so true you’ll never know if anything else is really there.
Don’t Let Go
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Twenty years ago Jim Caviezel and Dennis Quaid sleuthed across time via a ham radio to solve a serial killer case. But who remembers Frequency?
Jacob Estes might. The writer/director revisits the time loop murder mystery concept with a leaner film in Don’t Let Go.
Estes (Mean Creek – if you haven’t seen it, do so) assembles a shockingly strong ensemble beginning with David Oyelowo (Selma) and Storm Reid (A Wrinkle in Time) and extending through support players Brian Tyree Henry, Alfred Molina and Mykelti Williamson. Together they do what they can to elevate a supernatural thriller too mired in cop movie clichés to take advantage of its unusual premise.
Oyelowo is Detective Radcliff, or Uncle Jack as he’s known to Ashley (Reid), the niece he loves like his own daughter. So when he finds her and both her parents dead, he’s devastated. It isn’t long before he’s receiving phone calls from his dead niece. Together, they try to solve the riddle of her death so they might be able to turn back time.
That’s a tough premise to deliver on without stooping to sentimentality, but Estes rarely makes that misstep. In fact, the film devotes frustratingly little time to the emotional weight of its premise, taking the easy way out repeatedly with cop show shoot outs, ambiguous motives and obvious twists.
Oyelowo (a magnificent actor who needs to choose better projects) commands the screen with a quiet torment that hints at what the film refuses to address: loneliness, guilt, sorrow. Likewise Reid, saddled with far less believable dialog, infuses her character with a believable spunk and charm.
Henry and Molina are criminally underused in a film that’s far too safe and much too rote for its supernatural notes to work. Maybe Estes’s goal was to ground the tale with enough realism to offset the fantasy but he managed to do neither justice.
The result is a blandly forgettable waste of a truly impressive group of actors.
Bennett’s War
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
After nearly an hour of valiantly struggling to find depth in a character written mainly in cleavage, actress Allison Paige does get to deliver the most truthful moment in Bennett’s War.
“The sponsors are all men and I have boobs!”
Writer/director Alex Ranarivelo may have just been trying for funny, but in this drawerful of ten thousand shallow spoons, the line is a self-aware knife.
Sophie (Paige) needs those sponsors for her husband Bennett’s (Michael Roark) motocross team to finally go pro. Bennett had been a promising young racer before he joined the Army Rangers, but the bum leg he came home with carried a warning Ranarivelo thinks we don’t quite get the first three times we hear it.
“No unnecessary risks, or you’ll never walk again!”
Oh, and Bennett’s dad (country singer Trace Adkins) is going to lose the family farm.
So Bennett has to race again, dammit, it’s who he is!
Ranarivelo has made a career out of what are essentially middle school sports dramas for the big screen. The heroes and villains are drawn in the most easily identifiable colors, with the stakes repeated as often as the dumbed down exposition.
There are issues here (the struggles of veterans and/or family farmers) that have merit, but exploring them is not Ranarivelo’s M.O.
The only real surprise is that no one yells “Put him in a body bag!” before our injured hero takes the bad guy down with a surprise move at the big competition.
Wax off.
https://youtu.be/I-wvJY1QIL0