Split
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
Yes, Split is the latest from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, and no, you’ll never see it coming.
You know what I mean. And Shyamalan knows you know what I mean. So, while you’re trying to guess what surprise twist he’s got in store for you, a nifty psychological thriller plays out, elevated by a transfixing performance from James McAvoy.
After years of misfires, Shyamalan got his groove back by scaling back two years ago with The Visit, an enjoyable bit of lightly scary fun that amounted to one giant misdirection. With Split, the director himself is the main misdirection, as his reputation pushes you to chase something that may not be there at all.
McAvoy is Kevin, a deeply troubled man harboring 23 distinct personalities and some increasingly chilling behavior. When he kidnaps the teenaged Casey (The Witch‘s Anya Taylor-Joy) and her two friends (Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Suva), the girls are faced with constantly changing identities as they desperately seek an escape from their disorienting confines.
Meanwhile, one of Kevin’s personalities is making emergency appointments with his longtime therapist (Betty Buckley, nice to see you), only to show up and assure the Dr. everything is fine. She thinks otherwise, and she is right.
The split personality trope has been used to eye-rolling effect in enough films to be the perfect device for Shyamalan’s clever rope-a-dope. By often splitting the frame with intentional set designs and camera angles, or by letting full face closeups linger one extra beat, he reinforces the psychological creepiness without any excess bloodshed that would have soiled a PG-13 rating.
Still, it all might have gone for naught without McAvoy, who manages to make Kevin a sympathetic character while deftly dancing between identities, often in the same take. He’s a wonder to watch, and the solid support from Buckley and Taylor-Joy help keep the tension simmering through speedbumps in pacing and questionable flashbacks to Casey’s childhood.
Maybe the best case for this new Shyamalan surprise is the fact that even without the kicker, Split would hold up as a competent, emotionally disquieting thriller. But when you add that final reveal?
I see happy people.
20th Century Women
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Has it been six years since Mike Mills explored father/son relationships and the coming of middle age with Beginners? Insightful, emotionally complex and kind, the film marked Mills as not only a director of substance, but a writer with integrity and wit.
Not that it could have predicted 20th Century Women.
What a joyous conundrum this film is. Set in 1979, the film looks on as Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) maneuvers the troubles of adolescence, societal sea change and his loving if enigmatic mother, Dorothea (Annette Bening).
Too practical and pragmatic for the women of 1979, too independent and wise for her own generation, Dorothea is a woman without a timestamp. It gives her a gravitational pull, drawing the fierce and the unusual to her like satellites.
Those in her orbit – besides her pubescent son – are punk artist Abbie (Greta Gerwig), troubled teen Julie (Elle Fanning), and misplaced hippie William (Billy Crudup).
The cast is uniformly terrific, but Bening is a spectacle. A collector of friends, she’s still a solitary figure, one who looks on the relationships and complications in her life with a strange remove – almost like an anthropologist.
Dorothea is, from her son’s point of view, unknowable. Bening more than manages to embody that frustrating reality of a parent whose behavior seems entirely natural and yet almost alien. And she does it with such charm and humor.
Perhaps the biggest surprise in 20th Century Women is the humor – the film, like life, is peppered with laugh out loud moments that help make even the barely endurable pain of adolescence enjoyable.
Mills falls back at times on a punk rock undercurrent that creates a wonderful energy as well as a thoughtful theme for the time in history and in Jamie’s life. As Abbie puts it, the chaos of punk is comforting because it’s about, “When your passion is bigger than the tools you have to deal with it.”
It’s a line that’s almost too perfect, as this cast is almost too perfect. This seems to be the quiet wonder of Mike Mills: he puts his own complicated, insightful and emotionally generous writing into the hands of genuine talent.
Good call.
The Founder
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
Two brothers, innovators in the food service industry, look on in despair as the sign is removed from above their beloved business. They no longer own their last name because, in Dick McDonald’s words, they “let a fox in the henhouse.”
That fox was Ray Kroc, and The Founder is director John Lee Hancock’s faithful dissection of how Kroc turned the McDonald brothers’ California burger stand into the worldwide behemoth that now feeds one percent of the global population every single day.
Michael Keaton is fantastic as Kroc, as he crafts an intensely driven man who listens to positive-thinking albums and becomes a living testament to the mantra of “persistence.” Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carrol Lynch, respectively – both terrific) had the business insight that was years ahead of its time, but Kroc had the vision, along with the fortitude and dog-eat-dog mentality to see that vision through. Keaton makes him a pathetically fascinating hero, possessed with winning at any cost.
So, an egocentric businessman with questionable ethics stops at nothing to attain a position of incredible wealth and power? Timely.
It is, and Hancock skips the opportunities in Robert Siegel’s script to give his film more teeth. Siegel also wrote Big Fan and The Wrestler, so he knows his way around finding the dark edges of the American dream. Though the rise of McDonalds is layered with very relevant threads (crass commercialism, innovation displacing employment, etc.), Hancock, per his resume (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks) isn’t interested in exploring anything on that menu.
The Founder tells the story, and tells it in fine clinical fashion, but misses the chance to go big time.
Those McDonald boys can relate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH3b6bs8llA