Dig if you will the pictures in this week’s Screening Room:
Arrival
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Amy Adams is as reliable an actor as they come. Thoughtful and expressive, she shares a tremendous range of emotions without uttering a sound.
With his latest, Arrival, director Denis Villeneuve puts her skills to use to quietly display everything from wonder to terror to hope to gratitude as her character, Dr. Louise Banks, struggles to communicate with visitors.
Twelve vessels have touched down in random spots across the globe: Sierra Leone, Russia, China, United States. Each nation has taken its own tack toward determining the purpose of the aliens. An expert in communication and linguistics, Banks has been brought to Montana to decipher that purpose.
Villeneuve, working from Eric Heisserer’s adaptation of Ted Chiang’s short “Story of Your Life,” whispers reminders of a dozen other alien invasion films without ever bending to predictability. His is a sense of cautious wonder.
Those familiar with the director’s work – particularly his more mainstream films Prisoners and Sicario – may be preparing for the unendurably tense. No need.
Yes, there are armed skirmishes, doomsday predictions and bad decisions, but Villeneuve’s focus and ours is always with Banks, whose struggle to make sense of the situation mirrors our own.
Adams owns a performance that does not immediately dazzle. Banks is a solitary, somewhat morose figure. Her predicament reflects humanity’s – she isn’t using her power to communicate for its true use, connecting.
Villeneuve and Adams toy with your expectations – Adams, because of your preconceived notions concerning her solitude, and Villeneuve through a sly playfulness with time and structure.
This sleight of hand allows the filmmaker to ask questions that are simultaneously grand and intimate. Arrival is a quiet film – not mind-blowing or terrifying or one to elicit a self-satisfied, “F&^% yeah!”
People looking for explosions and jingoism on a global scale need not attend. In its place is a quiet contemplation on speaking, listening and ultimately, the joys that can be found in both happiness and pain. While that may not sound like much excitement, it’s about as relevant a message today as anything I can think of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTNJtEXYsyw
Moonlight
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
How long has it been since a film touched your very soul?
Chances are, its been a few superheroes ago.
Saving the world is great, so is finding love, or cracking the case, funnying the bone or haunting the house. But a movie that slowly awakens you to the human experience seems a little harder to find at the local multiplex.
You can find one in Moonlight, a minor miracle of filmmaking from writer/director Barry Jenkins. With just his second feature (after 2008’s Medicine for Melancholy), Jenkins presents a journey of self-discovery in three acts, each one leading us with graceful insight toward a finale as subtle as it is powerful.
Young Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert) is known as “Little” around his Miami neighborhood, and he’s picked on for being different. Juan, a local drug dealer (Mahershala Ali), finds Little hiding from bullies in an abandoned building, and begins spending more time with the boy, mentoring him while the boy’s own mother (Naomie Harris) is at work or on drugs. Juan and his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monae) eventually get the introverted Little to open up, and he asks what the word “faggot” means.
By the time he is a skinny teenager, Chiron (Ashton Sanders) has taken Teresa as a surrogate mother, and is struggling to keep one friend (Andre Holland) and navigate the expectations of masculinity.
As a grown man in Atlanta now known as “Black” (Trevante Rhodes), Chiron embodies them. He lives as a mix of chiseled muscle and silent, fearsome demeanor when two faces from the past stir up ghosts he cannot shake.
Jenkins adapts Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” with astonishing sensitivity and artful nuance. Simple shots such as closing doors or hands on a sandy beach scream with meaning, and the entire film is grounded in an ache and a longing you will feel in your bones. Jenkins places you in Chiron’s world and lets the important moments breathe, finding universal truth and beauty in the most intimate of questions.
The performances are impeccable, the craftsmanship precise, the insight blinding. You will be a better human for seeing Moonlight. It is a poignant reminder that movies still have that power.
Almost Christmas
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
You know who’s great? Gladys Knight. Man, what a voice. “Midnight Train to Georgia” has to be one of the greatest songs ever recorded.
What’s that got to do with Almost Christmas? Well, Gladys has two scenes it in and she might as well be Santa, bringing a genuine smile each time. So there’s that.
Filling up the film’s other 110 minutes are the favored devices of writer/director David E. Talbert (Baggage Claim, First Sunday): contrived situations, painful dialog and exaggerated storytelling.
At least his heart’s in the right place: home for the holidays.
Family patriarch Walter Meyers (Danny Glover) is facing his first Christmas season since the loss of his beloved wife, so the whole extended clan comes home to Birmingham 5 days out, and the countdown is on. The cliche countdown.
There will be a backyard football game. There will be a dance routine in the kitchen, and there will be plenty of sudden mood swings with tender music ready to cue the sighs and wistful staring that means we’re remembering Mama.
And yes, Glover will say his line about being too mature for this excrement or something.
There’s veteran talent in this cast (Oscar-winner Mo’Nique, Gabrielle Union, Omar Epps, John Michael Higgins, Nicole Ari Parker) but Talbert’s filmmaking is so broadly-drawn and obvious his film earns more groans than chuckles. Everyone sees, hears or walks in on something at exactly the right moment while calling each other by helpful names such as “brother-in-law” (just like at your house) so anyone who came in late can follow who’s who. There are sassy putdowns and sitcom-ready innuendo, plus plenty of notice when it’s time to get serious, like multiple closeups on a bottle of prescription pills…just to make sure we didn’t miss the message that someone is abusing prescription pills.
Almost Christmas plagues a likable cast with storytelling so lazy it gets points for not having a character win the lottery.
Gladys, take me away.
