MARCH REVIEWS IN BRIEF: MOVIES I MISSED IN 2015, PART 1

Being a collection of capsule reviews of some of the 2015 releases watched by the blogger of late during his repulsively elongated catch-up period

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James White (Mond, 2015)

Nothing in writer-director Josh Mond's James White counts as my cup of tea: if the whole "low-budget indie about the life of a 20something New Yorker" wasn't enough of a red flag, along comes "aesthetic vocabulary that steals everything that the late John Cassavetes hadn't bothered to lock down" to murder any and all interest I might have possibly still been nurturing. As always, it goes to show not to prejudge: James White is, handily, the best intimate domestic narrative I saw in 2015, and first-time feature filmmaker Mond has secured himself an instant, high-level spot on the list of young directors whose career I'll be following with passionate interest in days to come. And this is all true even if I'd have to squint a little and lie a lot to call it "unusual" or "challenging" in any slightly useful sense of those words.

The situation is dead simple: James White (Christopher Abbott) is trying as hard as he can to burn himself out on living too fast and too hard, and the exact same time, he has to be the rock-stable adult in the White household, given that his mother Gail (Cynthia Nixon) is rotting away from cancer. This godawful circumstance generates much external and internal recrimination, shouting, teariness, and dare we say it... the discovery of personal strength? (obviously we dare - indie or not, this is an American movie).

The calm, unpretentious intelligence of Mond's screenplay gives James White an excellent foundation to build out on, but what turns the film from a nifty and thoroughly depressing family drama into a masterwork of the realist domestic indie form is the incandescent performances of Abbott and Nixon. The former, 28 at the time of filming, is a face I've seen at least a couple of times without ever registering him; that won't be happening again. His portrayal of James is everything a film like this could ever need: sensitive to the longing and need that animate the character without ever slightly asking us to forgive him or love him or offer him pity that he'd anyway throw out with all due disgust. Abbott impressively manages to frame James's reactions to his mother's illness that make us less sympathetic to the character, even as we completely understand why he feels that way.

Nixon, for her part, is up to something that I'm possibly overvaluing for personal reasons, but strictly objective film criticism is of value to nobody but the robots. Basically, aided by a tremendous make-up crew who suck all the life and fullness out of her flesh, she gives the best performance of a cancer victim I've ever seen in a movie, identifying the exact perfect sweet spot of being too tired to bother expressing how constantly angry she is. She builds the character completely, and only then adds in the material from the screenplay concerning Gail's frustration with James - this is a totally reactive supporting part, as written and as used within the story, but Nixon plays a dynamic, thoroughly complex psychology even within those limitations.

The result of these two characterisations smashing into is a devastating character drama that deserves all manner of respect and awe, even if it's so damn sad that "love" seems right out. The only thing that keeps me from calling it 2015's best two-hander is that it's not actually a two-hander; James has entire plotlines away from his mother. But it's their relationship that animates the film and drives it become one of the year's most unfairly invisible successes.

9/10

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Girlhood (Sciamma, 2014)

I was not made sufficiently aware that Girlhood is kind of a remake of 1995's La haine, or if we don't want to go too nuts, it is a film that exists in the space made possible because of La haine (a massively influential depiction of poor urban youth that triggered an entire subgenre of realist francophone cinema) That's a a descriptive judgment only, you understand; it doesn't make Girlhood any less great (and great it is) and I can't imagine any of its defenders would first and above all leap to radically fresh genre as the thing they liked about it. We are not in uncharted waters, but writer-director Céline Sciamma charts a marvelously sure and certain course.

Anyway, there are two things that makes Girlhood very different from La haine, and having rolled it over in my head for a quite a long while, I think that how one prioritises them explains everything about the kind of viewer one is. For one thing, while La haine is a tale of a multi-ethnic trio of young men operating on the edges of lawful society, Girlhood is about four girls (naturally enough), all of African descent. For the other, La haine is in grimy black-and-white, while Girlhood is in rich color and makes a big point of foregrounding that in its best scenes.

Regular readers can easily guess that I'm much more intellectually invested in the second of these distinctions, but let's not get to that point so quickly that we ignore what a robust, forceful depiction this is of a type of personal story that gets virtually no screen time, and Sciamma's remove from that story grants her just enough of a sense of detached objectivity that the whole film ends up feeling suitably journalistic even while she drums up an enormous degree of well-earned sympathy and empathy for the lead character Marieme, played to extraordinary effect by first-time actor Karidja Touré, giving a performance with a level of tiny precision and enormous sensitivity that never once makes a special case that we should uncritically love this prickly and difficult character. In the name of all sanity, have led her to an insurmountable pile of offers; instead, 22 months after the film's 2014 Cannes premiere, she still hasn't completed her second feature.

While grousing over that, let me turn to the film's other triumphs, of which it has many: the story of an impoverished loner from the streets seduced by a gang member who can offer family, meaning, and a sense of dignity - in this case, the magnetic Lady (Assa Sylla) - but finds her new life to be just as lacking, in different ways, as her old one, this is not a groundbreaking, revolutionary story. But it's told with a hellacious amount of keen insight for who Marieme is, who she wants to be, and the world which she uncomfortably inhabits, and that gives it a punch that it otherwise lacks. Sciamma and cinematographer Crystel Fournier also mix up their aesthetic just enough: mostly shot in a standard kind of severe docu-realist aesthetic, the film indulges in swatches of bright colors almost unto the point of abstraction just enough to keep the whole thing on its toes. A sequence in which Marieme finds herself swept into a triumphant, life-affirming sing-along to Rihanna's "Diamonds", against a background of pungent teal, is one of the most exciting sequences in recent cinema, and there's plenty more where that came from.

9/10

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Trumbo (Roach, 2015)

There's nothing more relaxingly unimaginative than a biopic of a socially significant artist, and 2015 didn't produce one of those more defiantly unchallenging than Trumbo. We cannot say that this life and times of Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston), one of the most prominent faces to be screwed over by the anti-Leftist blacklist of Hollywood in the 1950s, is unyielding in its truthfulness and accuracy; if nothing else, fellow blacklisted writer Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) is a composite figure of several characters, among various small-scale "print the legend!" impulses in John McNamara's screenplay. But it's a movie you badly wish to be scrupulously factual in every way, because that's the only excuse for it being so profoundly inert.

Trumbo, for those of you who aren't the most steadfast students of midcentury cultural history, was part of the Hollywood Ten, the first group of witnesses cited with contempt of Congress for refusing to play ball with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947; as arguably the most prestigious of the lot, he was perhaps loudest in his protestations, and had the easiest time finding paths to moonlight as a writer for low-budget schlock while working under other names (Trumbo is distinguished among all blacklisted artists for having his work win two Oscars during his time in "exile"). Trumbo wants to pay homage to the steadfastness of his belief, to the craftiness of his solution, to the madness of Hollywood then and always, and it ends up being a generally exhausting and unpleasant whirlwind tour of all kinds of stuff.

In the hands of director Jay Roach, til now almost exclusively experienced in comedies (he's the mind behind Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and its sequels, and I think we can reasonably concur that the same film was his career high point), this is among other things an incoherent mess of tones. Louis C.K. is all ashen po-faced seriousness in a film where Michael Stuhlbarg plays a lightly silly gloss on Edward G. Robinson as a kind of dog whistle for all the Classical Hollywood cinephiles in the house (which, to be fair, is all the audience for a film about Dalton Trumbo); where John Goodman ably plays a terribly misconceived idea of exploitation producer Frank King, in a remake of Ed Wood that we didn't know we wanted, and turned out not to want; where Helen Mirren flies in from the surface of Mars to play right-wing gossip columnist Hedda Hopper as a mustache-twirling villain from a 19th Century melodrama.

The glue that would be holding all of this together if it wasn't flying apart at the seams is Cranston, effectively playing a character who was a bit of a self-conscious cartoon in real life as a collection of burly tics and intense passions. Nothing can actually redeem some of the lowest registers of the plot-by-numbers script (I assume Cranston's Oscar nomination was in recognition of not dying of shame when he's obliged to explain Communism to his daughter during a scene lit and staged like an ad for chlamydia medication), but at least the actor's sense of big-throated jolliness throughout helps make some of the more flatly mediocre passages pass by without much fuss.

4/10

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War Room (Kendrick, 2015)

Brothers Alex & Stephen Kendrick, of Georgia, are white fundamentalist Evangelical Christians who have made many a film about other white fundamentalist Evangelical Christians. One of them starred no less a superstar in that community than Kirk Cameron, which tells you what kind of fundamentalist Evangelicalism they're attached to, and I will not suggest what response you should have to that knowledge (that film, incidentally, was the tormented "fire fighting is like praying to save your marriage" domestic drama Fireproof, which I have stupidly not just seen, but reviewed. See, I was punished for my sins). War Room, the brothers' latest - as always, Alex directs, Stephen produces, and they both write - is significant for two reasons: one is that it's their first movie financed like an actual film production by a real movie studio, Sony's Affirm Films branch; the other is that it's their first movie about Black fundamentalist Evangelical Christians, which gives me a moment of doubt. I don't know shit about shit, of course, but I did have it in my head that American Evangelical Protestantism came in some very incompatible flavors, and one of the most apparent variables is the race of the Protestants in question. But that doesn't seem to have gotten in the way of War Room becoming one of the bigger breakout faith-based hits in recent years, even managing the extremely rare feat of taking the #1 spot at the U.S. box office the weekend that it opened (one might cynically note that this was the only weekend in 2015 with a #1 film which grossed less than $10 million).

After all that preamble, how about the film? How about not, for much like the Kendricks' other film that I have stumbled across, War Room starts off from a scenario that ought to be pretty unacceptable regardless of anyone's feelings about the heavy-handed religious content: toxic, dying marriages (the only kind the Kendricks acknowledge, from my limited sample) should be saved by the more level-headed, decent half of the relationship - yes, obviously the wife in this case - making every conceivable excuse for their spouse's shittiness and it's frankly their own fault for having a boorish asshole for a husband, because they should know that bad marriages are God's punishment for not praying enough. I do not care how kind wise old lady Clara Williams (Karen Abercrombie) might be, nor how flowing and poetic her word choices, that's what the kids call "problematic".

Two things make War Room at least tolerable, from different directions. The good thing is Priscilla Shirer's performance as Elizabeth Jordan, the woman whose gigantic dick of a husband (T.C. Stallings) is always yelling and making leering faces at other women. Shirer is a minister, not an actor, but you could never tell; there's a frankness and well-worn quality to her line deliveries and the relaxed carriage of her body that feel like she was born to this, while her actual training gives her the comfort and vocal authority to sell the screenplay's more outlandishly florid, preacherly touches, like the scene where Elizabeth walks through her house, demanding that Satan leave it, culminating in a sequence where she stands in her front yard, in the middle of the night, yelling (bonus touch - she walks inside, and then pokes back out, because she remembered one last thing that Satan had done that she needed to tell him off for).

That's the other thing, the "bad" one - War Room is all kinds of kitschy, in a frankly rather enjoyable way. The whole plot hook, in which suburban bedroom closets are converted into "war rooms" where beleaguered spouses can plan their strategies for prayer-battle, is kind of marvelously batty, especially in a sequence where a pastor is almost bowled over by the residual energy of Clara's war room; the final act, where the film decides that, surprise! it was secretly always an underdog sports movie about a competitive double Dutch tournament all along, is certainly enough to slide things into outright camp. By no means do I want anybody reading this to see it for any reason, but if you happen to have the weird fortune to stumble across it and you can't get out, at least there's some compensating pleasure to be scraped out of it.

4/10