Going in Style
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
More than once, Going In Style tells us “it is a culture’s duty to take care of its elderly.”
If only the film had a funny way of showing it.
Instead, director Zach Braff takes three screen legends on a caper full of obvious writing, cheap slapstick and dressed up sitcom filler.
An update on the 1979 George Burns/Art Carney/Lee Strasberg vehicle, this new version stars Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Arkin as Joe, Willie, and Al, three New York retirees who’ve just been screwed out of their pensions by corporate shenanigans. While Joe is fighting his home foreclosure notice with a smarmy bank manager, the bank gets robbed.
Joe’s impressed with the heist, and unimpressed with the detective (Matt Dillon) trying to track down the thieves, so why not give stickups a try? Let’s face it, even if the guys get life in prison, how long could that be? Because they’re so old! Man, those age jokes just get funnier the more they’re repeated, don’t they?
No, they don’t, and screenwriter Theodore Melfi, fresh off some fine work with Hidden Figures and St. Vincent, hits a major pothole on his road to straight up comedy. Seeing how these three veteran actors play off each other should be a treat in itself, but too much of the leadup to the actual bank job has the trio stuffing whole roasts down their pants at the grocery or sitting around watching The Bachelor. You know, because the thought of senior citizens watching that show is so outrageous!
Lazy.
It doesn’t help that Braff (Garden State, TV’s Scrubs) has all three actors overdoing the aches and pains of aging for most of the film, and only in the final few minutes, when the longtime friends are apparently rejuvenated by their crime spree, do you get the sense of any realistic characters with natural chemistry. The robbery itself, where Braff shows some stylistic flair and an instance or two of subtle visual comedy, seems stolen from another film entirely.
Perhaps even one that was interesting.
Queen of the Desert
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
How many period romances set against the crumbling of the Ottoman empire must I endure in one month?
Current tally: 2, and Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert is the least endurable.
I had been cautiously optimistic about Herzog’s biopic on Gertrude Bell. Nicole Kidman (rarely a bad idea) stars as Bell, a British writer/traveler/scientist/spy who helped shape British policy on the Middle East.
Herzog + Kidman = reason for optimism.
Unfortunately, that math doesn’t really work out.
I’m not going to lie, I had no idea who Gertrude Bell was before I saw this film. Ten seconds on google and I found out that she was an absolutely fascinating human being. It’s crazy. She explored everywhere, climbed everything, learned new languages, informed culture and politics, wrote about all of it, had torrid affairs, never married, and determined the boundaries of modern day Iraq. All in the early 1900s.
That should have been a hell of a movie.
Unfortunately, director Herzog cannot tell this woman’s wildly unconventional story without framing her in the most conventional way possible. She exists exclusively in terms of her relationships – or the absence of a relationship – with men.
We’ll lay that at the foot of Herzog the director, but this God-awful dialog? That’s on Herzog the writer.
Kidman, almost tragic in her earnest commitment to this part, manages to wrestle Herzog’s humorless and hackneyed prose into submission. But Lord, James Franco cannot.
The plotting is no better than the concept or dialog.
Scene after needless scene shows Kidman in the office of one man or another, announcing her plans to do something they don’t need to know about, only to suffer their indignant rebuffs. She responds with obstinate will. Cut to Kidman doing whatever it was those men told her she couldn’t do.
Repeat ad nauseum.
This woman hand-drew the border between Iraq and Jordan – in a time when women couldn’t vote in England. That alone could be unpacked and considered from about 30 different perspectives. There are so many things worth knowing about Gertrude Bell, but all I really learned from Queen of the Desert is that she was, “a woman without her man.”
That’s a real line of dialog. Good God.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdGKbxJHPkk
Frantz
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
No matter how fierce the differences, war can quickly remind grieving families how much they have in common. It is hardly a new sentiment, but one explored with fresh intimacy by writer/director Francois Ozon in the starkly compelling Frantz.
It is just after the close of World War I in a German town still full of prideful contempt for the victorious French. Fraulein Anna (Paula Beer) grieves for Frantz, the fiancee she lost in battle, living with his parents as the three cling desperately to Frantz’s memory.
Enter Adrien (Pierre Niney), a stranger known in town as “the Frenchman.” He visits Frantz’s grave to leave flowers and tears, naturally drawing Anna’s curiosity. Despite initial anger from Anna’s would be father-in-law, Adrien charms the family through stories of his friendship with Frantz, drawing closer to Anna while keeping crucial secrets from her.
Ozon, working with a more traditional narrative structure than in his Swimming Pool or 8 Women, isn’t shy with the metaphors, but has enough storytelling instinct to never overplay the hand. Through mirror images, shifting locales, even something as obvious as the film’s title, Ozon reinforces the emotional parallels while leaning on his stellar lead actors to fully exploit the subtle detours in where you think the film is headed.
Beer makes Anna a wounded soul in limbo, her piercing, curious eyes almost too daring for Adrien to confront. Niney provides the skittish affectations for Adrien’s tentative nature as a man both committed to and wary of his mission.
The film may tease with the promise of a climax more powerful than the one ultimately delivered, but Ozon achieves an artful level of downsizing with his latest. Frantz has a grace and maturity in it’s arc, understated but emotionally satisfying.
