Living on the water, I see the evidence of the poisonous litter that never goes away every single day.
Let the cranks rage about losing their Mountain Dew bottles and straws, this nightmare is killing our waterways and getting into everything and everyone.
Here’s a doc that lays that bare. Congrats to The Discovery Channel for making it, airing it, winning and Emmy and making it free to watch all this month.
For an hour or so, I wondered why exactly National Treasure Tom Hanks would take “Finch,” a sometimes cutesy, often maudlin End Times tale pairing him with a robot.
Then he gets to the “telling anecdote,” the tale his character tells to Jeff, the robot of his own creation, a story of the ways civilization ends and the humanity that disappears with it.
So I get it — a pre-pandemic one-hander with a little “Silent Running” here, some “Wall-E” there and the fear that it could go all “Omega Man” at any minute.
It’s a kid-friendly thriller of the sci-fi apocalypse variety, forlorn but engaging enough to sit through. Barely. High stakes, thin on action and heavy on sentiment, it takes “Short Circuit” to doomsday and reaches for tears — here and there — as it does.
In the title role, Hanks is the Last Man in St. Louis, scavenging for food in the still-standing supermarkets, minimarts and theaters, holing up in the factory where he once worked.
Finch tools about in a massive Komatsu dump truck, sings along to “American Pie” (“This’ll be the day that I die!”) and gets around outside in a haz-mat suit, customized to inform him when the UV radiation and simple heat in the atmosphere are more than he could tolerate.
He has a custom-built helper robot, the four-wheeled, silent and basket-equipped Dewey. And he has a dog. Much of their scavenging involves the search for cans of dog food.
Finch and Dewey download books from the company library into his next piece of tech, a walking robot. He finishes it just after the latest supercell passes through the dust bowl that was St. Louis — a city — like the world around it, baked, burned and parched out of existence after the ozone layer gave out.
Coming to life, the machine has questions. “Where is everybody?” And where are those “holes in the sky” that make it “like Swiss cheese,” that Finch talks about?
Finch takes the time to answer those questions. But he knows they need to move on. With this new gadget, he loads a customized RV so that they can all make their getaway. “West” it is. San Francisco.
The robot learns to talk, and sounds like Ukrainian comic Yakov Smirnoff impersonating Stephen Hawking. Later, the voice morphs into the cheery boyishness of Caleb Landry Jones.
Finch gives the robot “four prime directives,” adapting Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.”
“A robot cannot harm a human, or cause a human to be harmed by its inaction.”
Finch frets over Directive Four the most.
“Protect the welfare of the dog.“
As they make their way through the wastelands towards the West, Finch tells stories, urges the robot to imitate him and “take initiative, and tries to give the machine — which chooses to name itself “Jeff” — “some common (human) sense.”
There are perils out there, and not all of them involve the holes in the sky.
“I know you were born yesterday, but it’s time for you to grow up.“
Series TV director Miguel Sapochnik doesn’t fret about borrowing the endless stream of visuals and situations from other “end of the world” tales, from “Omega Man” to “Zombieland.”
There aren’t many dramatic incidents breaking up this road-trip odyssey, and the few that there are are from most every other movie we’ve ever seen in this genre.
Hanks makes a sad, stoic lead. And the robots are “Silent Running” cute enough that we worry for their safety as much as we worry for Finch’s. But maybe not as much as we worry for the dog’s.
With real apocalypses staring down at us in every direction, movies like “Finch” take on a fatalism that they sometimes lacked in earlier eras. The threats are as real as they ever were. But now, we can see that we’ve become too dense to take action to prevent them. That adds a resigned acceptance of the doom we see on screen, and we see coming on the evening news.
So yeah, it’s “kid friendly” in all the usual ways. But how often is the family in the mood for a cutesy bummer of a movie?
Rating: PG-13 for brief, violent images
Cast: Tom Hanks, the voice of Caleb Landry Jones
Credits: Directed by Miguel Sapochnik, scripted by Craig Luck and Ivor Powell. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: 1:55
British singer-songwriter and filmmaker Jeymes Samuel got Netflix money and an all-star cast to make his follow-up to “They Die By Dawn,” a Western that gathers many of the most famous or notorious African American figures of the Old West into one story.
“The Harder They Fall” is a Blaxploitation pastiche of Spaghetti Westerns, resetting the West — brutally violent, lawless and Darwinian by myth — as a largely Black world where whites are train riders or bankers and bank customers to be robbed, or genocidal Army troopers to be massacred.
It demands an open mind — not for the characters and stereotype-smashing casting. As an opening title points out, figures such as Nat Love, “Stagecoach Mary,” Rufus Buck and Bill Pickett? “These. People. Lived.”
But as he fills the screen with an A-list that includes Oscar winner Regina King, Idris Elba, Delroy Lindo, LaKeith Stanfield and others, self consciously and randomly references African American cinema classics, peppers the dialogue with a Tarantino-load of Samuel L. Jacksonisms and layers the soundtrack with reggae, hip hop and R&B, Samuel goes beyond parody and settles on just grating.
Samuel is plenty flippant. He’s just not that damned funny.
From the first moments we see costume-designed, dry-cleaned and pressed characters, gold-filagreed pistols toted by players who, as Our Lord Blackadder once cracked, “ride a horse rather less well than another horse would,” big things and small take anybody who’s ever seen a Western out of this one.
Samuel and his cast lean on “the cool parts” and “cool lines” and upend conventions, sure. But blowing so many details — beyond the intentional anachronisms — is too Sergio Leone Lite even for me.
Jonathan Majors of “Lovecraft Country” and “Last Black Man in San Francisco” is Nat Love, a preacher’s son who survives his parents’ murder, but bears the knife-mark on his forehead of their killer, Rufus Buck (Idris Elba). Needless to say, Love is looking for revenge on “the Devil himself” well into adulthood.
Nat Love’s gang robs Rufus Buck’s Crimson Hood gang, kills a lot of them, and sets up a showdown after Rufus makes his escape from custody.
So we’ve got Nat and his compadres — including old flame, shotgun-armed singer, saloon-keeper and shootist “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz), transgenderish bouncer Cuffee (Danielle Deadwyler) and others — taking on Rufus, Cherokee Bill (Stanfield), saloon-keeper “Terrible” Trudy (King) and company.
Deadwyler, of the indie Appalachian thriller “The Devil to Pay” (Track that down!) pretty much steals the show, a badass born to be under-estimated. Gunslingers?
“I seen faster,” she spits.
Where?
“In the mirror.”
Not a bad bouncer, either.
“Don’t nobody come in here gunned-up or they might could get gunned-down.”
Racial commentary is limited, which kind of misses the point of it all. Just “I seen the Devil, and Rufus Buck ain’t him — he white,” from Lindo’s Marshal Bass Reeves. And a backstabbing sheriff (Deon Cole) is dismissed with “A man like you’d have us all subservient to the end of our days.”
“You gonna just let us get away Dred Scott free?”
The story’s so “Silverado” conventional that “The Harder They Fall” needs its novel casting and soundtrack gimmicks and “Quick and the Dead” gunplay to be the least bit watchable.
Extreme close-ups for the stare-downs, split screen shootouts, oozing wounds and blasted body parts brought to mind the earlier martial arts outings of rapper-turned-filmmaker RZA — a superficial grasp of genre, whistles-and-bells action editing and the like. RZA got better.
I tried to get into the bloody campiness of it all, the anachronisms and all that. But this is a seriously soulless affair, all bullets and blood and no buckskin or satiric bite. There’s nothing wrong with the pitch, the casting (well, some folks need riding lessons) or settings. It’s the plot, the story arc and execution that Samuel screws up. And the details.
That spoils the pseudo-serious send-up he set out to make, and leaves “The Harder They Fall” far short of the parody or even homage it might have been.
Rating: Rated R for strong violence and language
Cast: Jonathan Major, Idris Elba, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz, Delroy Lindo, Danielle Deadwyler, Edi Gathegi, RJ Cyler, Deon Cole, Damon Wayans Jr., Julio Cesar Cedillo and Regina King
Credits: Directed by Jeymes Samuel, scripted by Jeymes Samuel, Boaz Yakin . A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:17
Oscar winning best director and indie icon Chloé Zhao presides over another big budget, huge-cast “All in the Fractious Family” Marvel monstrosity with “Eternals,” an origin story that dates from when the comic book colossus ran out of things to do with its Avengers, et. al.
It’s a derivative, noisy, sometimes-amusing Greek myth-reinventing eye-roller, full of fan-service, inclusion, dry-eyed deaths and “high stakes” that feel like a half-hearted send-up of that idea.
When you put the ’60s weeper (“Don’t they know, it’s) The End of the World” on the soundtrack, you know subtlety isn’t what Zhao was going for.
Overloaded with characters, geographical and temporal settings and exposition, it’s pretty much the generic bore the trailers promised. This could be Marvel’s “Suicide Squad” level bust.
They’ve been on Earth for 7,000 years, a long opening credit tells us and the characters keep reminding us. They’re “not to interfere” with humanity’s progression, we’re told, time and again. We see them interfere, time and again, from pre-history to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
But not when Cortez was going Medieval/Genocidal on Tenochtitlán. Very “prime directive” of them.
Ajak (Salma Hayek) is their leader, the one in charge of their “mission,” the one who talks to “Arisha,” of the space gods called “Celestials,” giants who manifest themselves in modified “Iron Giant” gear and pull the strings in the universe.
The Eternals’ ostensible mission was to kill off the “Deviants” — dragonlike gargoyles who devoured humans from hunter-gatherer days onward. “Eternals” picks up their story 500 years after they wiped them out.
They’ve scattered, with Sersi (Gemma Chan of “Crazy Rich Asians” and a lot of British TV) and the perma-pixie Sprite (Lia McHugh of “The Lodge”) hanging out in London, where Sersi — having split up with Ikaris (Richard Madden of “Game of Thrones” and “Cinderella”) — has taken up with non-Eternal Dane (Kit Harrington).
Druig (Barry Keoghan) is off in South America, Thena (Angelina Jolie) and Gilgamesh (Ma Dong-seok of “Train to Busan”) and deaf-and-mute “Female Flash” Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) are off doing versions of their own thing.
Ajak retired to South Dakota, Ikaris got off to who-knows-where and brainy, tech-oriented Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry of TV’s “Atlanta” and “Godzilla vs. Kong”) has settled down in a same sex couple in the city.
And most amusingly, Karun (Kumail Nanjiani of “The Big Sick”) has been passing himself off as generations of Bollywood stars (explaining away his eternal life/youth) — a century of vampy romances and campy musicals, big paydays with a Man Friday/valet (Harish Patel) at his beck and call.
The Deviants are back, Arisha is not pleased. The world must be sorted and made safe for “this special race” humanity again.
So characters have to get over old grievances, suit up, fly around, shoot bolts or balls of energy out of their hands, conjure up gadgets, wield light swords and shields and get on with the business of killing dragons.
One wrinkle? The Deviants have evolved. Another? An Eternal has lost some of her marbles. A third? Some are questioning “our mission.”
There’s a whole lot of striking a pose, either as a complete Band of 10, or in smaller groups.
Nanjiani delivers laughs as a vain and flippant film star who wants to shoot a documentary of their exploits.
Jokes like “Are you a wizard?” and “Superman!” park the picture right on the edge of (not funny enough) self-aware camp.
Conflicts break out in some predictable, some utterly inorganic (script requirement) ways.
And classic rock, from Pink Floyd to Foreigner, swirls onto the soundtrack. Because that’s what the Guardians of Fanboydom demand.
I liked the next-gen effects, and Zhao keeps the action beats visually coherent, not something you can say about every picture of this genre. The cast is not-quite-“Justice League/Avengers” impressive, but good actors to a one, even if they’re only challenged in the most modest hint-of-human-relationships ways.
But the dialogue is strictly boilerplate — “Druig, I can see you’re upset!” “Know your place!” The “We are family” ethos is Pixar pablum of the “Fast and Fading” variety.
The idea that these aliens from “Olympia” inspired assorted cultures to call them gods and spell their names differently — Sersi becomes “Circe,” “Thena” becomes “Athena,” etc. — wasn’t exactly a great moment in Marvel brainstorming. “Who mourns for Adonais?” anyone?
And as generic as the fights inevitably are, the dead zones between them — with little dollops of Nanjiani/Patel comedy — are excruciating. This picture seems to go on forever.
It’s not like the exposition in this origin story never ends, but it does go on an on, unlike some of the alleged “Eternals.” Whatever “meaning” their deaths convey, Zhao delivers them perfunctorily.
The relationships — a sex scene included — are the only hint that there’s an Oscar winner behind the camera. Much of the time, Zhao is just another Marvel traffic cop, trying to keep the endlessly inter-connected stories straight, the fights and laughs at the appropriate intervals and the fans sated, if not exactly delirious at seeing something “new.”
Let’s hope she has the cash, and the good sense, to never do this again.
Rating: PG-13 for fantasy violence and action, some language and brief sexuality.
Cast: Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Salma Hayek, Kumail Nanjiani, Brian Tyree Henry. Lia McHugh, Ma-dong Seok, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Kit Harrington, Harish Patel and Anjelia Jolie
Credits: Directed by Chloé Zhao, scripted by Chloé Zhao, Patrick Burleigh and Ryan Firpo. A Marvel release.
Running time: 2:37
Maybe.
I’ve reviewed five films on the day before Veteran’s Day. So far (“Eternals” i finally get around to watching tonight.).
Another five tomorrow? Maybe not. But “Nevsky” and “October?” You bet I’m getting to those.
Jim Cummings isn’t subtle in “The Beta Test.”
He mugs, he twitches. His expressions are broad. His banter hurtles, almost out of his mouth’s control. He hits his punchlines a little too hard.
But damn, he’s funny in it.
As a foul-mouthed, increasingly manic Hollywood talent agent, about-to-marry and yet tempted by this mysterious (printed) invitation to a blindfolded, anonymous “no strings attached” afternoon assignation at a swank Hollywood hotel, Cummings is in his element. And he should be. He co-wrote and co-directed it.
The deal is that once this sexual encounter has happened, Jordan needs to cover it up. He needs to know who did the inviting, who he was there with. And hunting for this information turns a wrapped-too-tight hustler into a breathless, sometimes hilarious paranoid.
Wait until he figures out that, as we’ve seen in the movie’s dark and shocking opening scene, that the significant others who learn about this betrayal by their wives/husbands/lovers have a habit of snapping and murdering them — with a knife, a gun, poison. Whatever works.
Cummings (“Thunder Road,””The Wolf of Snow Hollow”) and his co-writing/co-directing co-star PJ McCabe, play fast-talkers in a hyper-competitive agency in an era where clever agents might see the writing on the walls. They’re hyper, motor-mouthed dinosaurs in a collapsing house of cards. Maybe.
That’s why they talk so fast all the time. That’s why they’re at war with the WGA (Writer’s Guild, union). That’s why every agent we ever see depicted on screen — in movies, in “Entourage” — seems about to blow a fuse at any moment. That’s why we’re treated to montages of Jordan blurting “We’re so excited” to every potential client, about every possible “package” and every backend “streaming” deal.
But this purple envelope, this invitation, upended his world. He’s locking eyes with every beautiful woman he sees, dazed and embarrassed all the while. And that’s before he actually goes through with it. That’s before the follow-up uh, notes. That’s before he hears about the murders.
Whatever’s going on, Jordan and his colleague PJ — yes, he’s got the same initials as his character — think it must have something to do with their corrupt business, our corruptible times, “this climate,” post #MeToo, after “Harvey,” beyond social media, something to do with the algorithms in play with whatever the hell or whoever the hell is behind those damned purple envelope invitations.
“The Beta Test” is a wired, wound-up and instantly-hip/instantly-dated Hollywood riff on relationships — romantic, business and otherwise.
There’s overreach here, a Big Message that feels a little Western Union in a Grindr/Instagram age.
The technique — rapid fire patter of the “Ni Hao...the hell are you?” to a Chinese mogul (Wilky Lau) variety, 360 degree camera pans to illustrate Jordan’s increasingly unmoored state after wondering just what he’s gotten himself into, more and more frantic-antic encounters with people who might be that one-afternoon-stand — can be wearing. And the technique doesn’t whizzbang over the simple plot all this “story” is lathered onto.
But our invitation is to just go with it, go with Jordan as he plunges does that rabbit hole. Sure, as his increasingly leery fiance (Virginia Newcomb) notes, “It must be exhausting, pretending to be you.” Because it kind of is, as is “The Beta Test.”
Cummings? Whatever message they go for here, he and McCabe have polished off a pretty good/pretty exhausting 93 minute audition for that “Entourage” reboot.
Rating: unrated, violent, sexually explicit
Cast: Jim Cummings, Virginia Newcomb, PJ McCabe, Wilky Lau
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:33
“Marionette” is a perfectly-gloomy but overly-subdued Scottish thriller pretty much wholly undone by a contorted “twist” that derails its third act.
Dutch director Elbert van Strien, remaking and expanding on a short film he made, rounded up a decent cast and shot in Blairs, Aberdeen in late fall for atmosphere. But in turning this evil-child-controls-his-shrinks’-life thriller into an exploration of religious determinism, he over-reaches and turns a low-heat drama into something approaching nonsense.
It’s a mystery about “what happens next,” and a disturbed, curly-mopped child (Elijah Wolf) who seems to control it, or at least has advanced knowledge of what his new psychotherapist (Thekla Reuten) is about to experience.
And Dr. Winter, judging from the ranting therapist (Peter Mullan) we’ve seen immolate himself in the film’s opening scene, is sure to “go through some things.”
Winter’s left her work in upstate New York for a job at Victoria Clinic in the overcast gloom of Scotland for reasons she doesn’t want to share.
“I like rain.”
The serious-minded 40ish Winter tackles her predecessor’s patients. And one of them quickly and thoroughly gets under her skin. Manny (Wolf) is a dead-eyed child of 10 or so who frantically, angrily draws dark scenes of death and destruction — floods, drownings, car wrecks.
“No one likes what I say,” he deadpans, “because of what I can do.”
What can he do?
“Make things happen.”
What can you make happen?
“You!” That’s right, Doc. “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be here.”
When Winter rolls up on a car wreck in the damp Aberdeen night, she gets a clue that this little creep either foresaw it or caused it.
As she digs inter her predecessor’s notes, Winter starts to fret over her flashbacks to the married life she used to have in New York and ponder how much control she has in this new relationship (Emun Elliott) she’s slowly slipping into at the Scots book club she’s joined.
That’s where the great theological discussion that van Strein aims for is suggested — a heated debate over free will or if “we’re marionettes in some sadist’s fantasy — the existence or non-existence of God and the like.
Any movie with Scotland, Peter Mullan, pubs, a swarthy romantic lead with a wooden sailboat and a Great Mystery of Life book-club subtext has my attention. But “Marionette” is too obvious, too convoluted, too tame and entirely too slow to get going.
Reuten (“Red Sparrow”) makes an interesting lead, but not a particularly compelling one.
Still, you’ve got a great candidate for the lead in a “Children of the Damned” remake, man. DO something with him. There’s little here that thrills, frightens or alarms.
Every move on this film’s chessboard isn’t pre-ordained, but is given away well before its payoff.
We know who we’ll hear a warning from, who will be put in jeopardy and who among the clinic’s staff (the great Scots actor Bill Paterson) either “knows” something or “knows” nothing will be the skeptical stick in the mud.
And as the finale talks and talks its way into “explaining” all this, tying is up in a “neat” if seriously half-arsed bow, we figure out just who the real marionettes are — sitting through all this, puppets without the chance of a proper payoff on offer from our puppet master.
Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Thekla Reuten, Elijah Wolf, Emun Elliot, Rebecca Front, Peter Mullan and Bill Paterson
Credits: Directed by Elbert van Strien, scripted by Ben Hopkins and Elbert van Strien, based on a short film by Elbert van Strien. A Rock Salt release.
Running time: 1:52
A wonderfully lived-in but melancholy lead performance is the best reason to check out “Curtis,” a simple yet affecting portrait of mental illness starring the Bayou dad of “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”
Dwight Henry has the title role, a Detroit man suffering from schizophrenia, trapped in his one great moment of past basketball glory.
“Were y’all there when I hit the shot that won the city championship? The whole CITY was there!”
Curtis is greying, well into his ’50s and living with his mom (Kalena Knox), whose one wish for him is that he take his pills to keep his madness at bay.
He mutters to an imaginary friend. He likes his beers in a brown bag, and prefers skipping his pills.
He rants that “I should be making MILLIONS,” that “Kobe stole” this and “Larry Bird stole” that, because “I was the best EVER.”
But he’s known and tolerated in the neighborhood. Almost everybody’s heard the “It was FIVE SECONDS LEFT” story about that Big Game, long ago. Curtis is lost in it. And when he meet him, he’s just lost his favorite memento of that night, the ring given to the players on the winning team.
That’s when he meets the one kid in the neighborhood who can’t ball, the last one picked because “Your game is trash,” Dre (Alex Henderson of “Creed” and “Tyler Perry’s Assisted Living”). The kid indulges the old man, listens to him complain about the ring and how it contains “my powers,” and helps him search for it even though he saw the guy who took it from Curtis.
Maybe “the best ever” can teach him how to improve his game?
Writer-director Chris Bailey, a Detroit native, has made an indie drama of modest means and ambitions, the best kind of debut feature — a well-acted and affecting story “about something.”
This isn’t a deep dive into mental illness. But the poignant sketch offered up here rings true. Sometimes, his “I ain’t got TIME for this” mother knows that the only thing that will bring her boy back to himself and the present is a plea.
“Look in the mirror!”
Bailey avoids the traps this story sets up for him, his characters and the viewer. No glib “And that’s the (mad) man who put me in the NBA” story unfolds here. There’s not a lot of “learning,” just a blossoming of empathy from a bullied kid who needs a few physical skills, but more mental ones to get through life and basketball. Can Curtis provide either?
“I done died and come back MANY a time…Basically, on the tree of life, my plum fell off and rotted.”
“Curtis” is just a broken, lost man with a problem and an underage kid who tries to help him get that ring and “my powers” back. That’s drama at its most basic, and with just a couple of incidents of heightened melodrama, Bailey tells this simple story about that simple quest without a wasted moment or a lot of fuss.
Rating: unrated, some violence, profanity
Cast: Dwight Henry, Alex Henderson and Kalena Knox.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Chris Bailey. A 1091 release.
Running time: 1:19
A warning appears on the screen before “A Mouthful of Air” begins, suggesting it might be “upsetting for for people with depression and anxiety.”
And it’s not uncalled for. There’s a disquiet to the film and Amanda Seyfried‘s unsettling performance as the lead, a woman suffering from dangerously destructive anxiety and postpartum depression after the birth of her little boy, Teddy.
Seyfried filmed the movie in between the births of her two children, and looks gaunt and drawn for much of “A Mouthful.” Her character, Julie “Jules” Davis may have a work-at-home career, writing and illustrating children’s books (animated at times in the film). She may dote on her unfussy, smiling baby — over-decorating his room, reading and talking to him incessantly, bathing and walking and playing with him and taking him all in with those big adoring eyes.
But the eyes give away Jules’ unease. She’s weeping. Is it over gratitude and joy at having a perfect child in a loving marriage (Finn Wittrock plays her husband)? She constantly leans on and snuggles with husband Ethan. Is she being unduly clingy? He’s guarded around her. What does he know? What does he suspect? She sees it.
“I just don’t know what you’re trying to find.”
“You!”
Writer-director Amy Kopelman, adapting her novel (as she did on “I Smile Back”) uses the sad but hopeful stories of Jules’ “Pinky” character — either read by Jules or animated — flashbacks and cinematic flash-forwards (hinting at what’s to come) in telling this story.
We meet Jules’ earthy, sympathetic and nurturing Mom (a luminous Amy Irving). We hear about the “mentally ill” father who’s no longer in the picture.
And we meet Jules’ psychotherapist (Paul Giamatti).
Because we’ve seen her creating art for the books, Teddy’s room and the elaborate decorations she plans for a bookstore reading. But that precision knife she’s picked up isn’t just for cutting out paper shapes. We’ve seen flashes of an ambulance, her sister-in-law’s (Jennifer Carpenter) bloodstained sweater and the way even their building’s maintenance man (John Herrera) looks at Jules with concern.
She tried to kill herself.
Kopelman never over-explains Jules or her illness, although she does make a modest attempt at “cause and effect.” Characters like Ethan are sketched in, fleshed out gradually, their personas shaped by concern for Jules and fears of her mothering/smothering instincts.
When she over-decorates for a one-year-old’s birthday party and reassures her spouse with “We made it to ‘one!'” that’s kind of a cause for concern.
Her OB-GYN (Josh Hamilton) confesses to now “asking (new) mothers how they’re doing…because of you.”
Her blunt but soft-spoken shrink is all words of warning — “If you fall into a pool and you don’t know how to swim, you drown.”
Her husband quietly fumes “I’m not ALLOWED to get mad at you.”
And her sister-in-law cannot control her “not helpful” fury and judgement over what Jules is going through, because there’s a baby in jeopardy every day Mommy doesn’t take her meds.
“A Mouthful of Air” is a film of disquieting nervousness, our concern about what’s to come — either for Jules or her baby or both.
Seyfried is better at overdoing the “loving mother/loving wife” bit, giving us a sense of the facade Jules knows she must maintain. The thousand-yard-stare of a woman who feels inadequate, lost and damaged is meant to carry the picture, and it doesn’t. Not really.
But it does a good enough job of giving us a helpless outsider-looking-in view of this foundering form of postpartum depression, making us sympathize if never quite helping us understand how this happened to Jules and what those who love her can do — beyond chemicals — to save her.
Rating: R for some language (suicide subject matter)
Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Finn Wittrock, Amy Irving, Jennifer Carpenter and Paul Giamatti
Credits: Scripted and directed by Amy Koppelman, based on her novel. A Sony Pictures Classic release.
Running time:
If this isn’t the way it was, it’s certainly the way it should have been.
“King Richard,” the story of the working class Black man who raised and “created” the greatest players in the history of women’s tennis — Serena and Venus Williams — depicts their controversial, “controlling” dad as a doting father whose research and “eyes on the prize” instincts were unerring as he nurtured them to stardom.
And if nothing else, that flies in the face of the way the (white) sports media vilified the man, a “hustler,” “egotistical” self-promoter whose gauche insistence on his “plan” to make them stars and the family rich seemed more and more unsavory the longer he kept his girls on that “plan.”
Will Smith brings his immense likability to the role in perhaps his best performance ever, emphasizing Richard Williams’ humor, the amusing, grammatically-challenged show-boater/philosophizer and prophet who dominated press coverage of the girls from the day they burst onto the scene and took it over, to well into their ’20s.
It’s a fun performance packed with a Daily Affirmation Calendar’s worth of Richard-isms.
“Fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
“I’m in the CHAMPIONS raising business.”
And, to men’s champions John McEnroe and Pete Sampras, whose coach (Tony Goldwyn) Williams barged in on and arm-twisted into taking on the sisters as a proteges, “One day you’re gon’be braggin’ about the day you met them!”
Zach Baylin’s script takes us through the early teens of the sisters, with Richard handing out biographical “BRO-chures” to tennis club teachers and famous coaches around Southern California, trying to wrangle free or at least affordable tutelage (for a share of future earnings) for the kids the self-taught father and mother had brought up in the game.
Kevin Dunn plays Vic Braden, who compares Williams’ “nobody will take this bet” quest to “trying to create two Mozarts.” Can’t be done.
Richard makes cheesy promotional videos of the girls, then in their tweens, to back up his pitch. And we see him brushed off and laughed off. A lot.
Then Paul Cohen (Goldwyn), coaching the fading McEnroe and current king of men’s tennis, Pete Sampras, takes the bait. We see him clash with King Richard as he tries to remake Venus’s game (she hit from an open stance when the going thought was that “power” in your groundstrokes came from turning your body to the side you were hitting from) and preach the time-tested path — “juniors” circuit, sponsorship, stardom in your teens.
The film shows Williams’ savvy instincts for “keeping them in school,” avoiding the “burn out” juniors tourney grind and being proven right when then star Jennifer Capriati rose to the top in her early teens, and was doing drugs and getting arrested before she was 20.
We see Richard stick to this, battling his wife Brandi (Aunjanue Ellis, solid and fiery) over his controlling high-handedness. And we meet the often-exasperated coaching entrepreneur (these guys run their own “tennis academies”), Rick Macci, given a whimsical and adorable, “You’re KILLING me here” turn by Jon Bernthal.
Macci comes off as willing to endure Williams’ conniving, finagling and bull-sh—–g just to get to the very expensive (to him) finish line with these goldmines in skirts.
Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton play the older Venus and younger sister Serena, two daughters out of five (the others, sidelined in the film, are being pushed to academic excellence Dad insists), tighter-than-tight siblings who endure Dad’s “management” because of the confidence he’s built into them and the trust they have for his instincts.
The kids are so bubbly and upbeat they even spin their father’s efforts to protect all his daughters from hoodlums in “the ‘hood” (Compton) into a running gag.
“Dad got beat up again.”
We see Richard, a night security guard at a down-market flea-market “mall,” take that pummeling, and others, relate anecdotes about his rough, racially-disadvantaged upbringing in Louisiana, and persevere.
I love the lightness Smith brings to the part, making even Williams’ infamous boorishness — partly a pose, the film suggests — funny. Breaking wind to bust up a meeting with potential agents (Dylan McDermott, among them)? Again, if it didn’t happen, it should have.
Director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s (“Monster and Men”) film boils down much of the backlash Richard Williams inspired into the occasional outburst by the two coaches played by Goldwyn and Bernthal, or sometimes articulated by his in the background but just as important wife.
From the way the girls and their dad are depicted, there’s a feeling that the sisters somehow controlled this narrative, or got assurances from Smith to their advantage. The story plays down any racism they faced in clubs and later on the tour. Yes, they had sportsmanship shortcomings later on, but “King Richard” is seen working overtime to “keep them humble,” tamp down the boorish bragging, even his own — well-publicized and not really seen here.
Producer/star Smith’s having a director with little clout and few credits and a screenwriter with almost none also points to “control.”
But that doesn’t hamstring the film. It only ensures the near-hagiography nature of the treatment of its subject. The story arc is pleasantly uplifting, and climaxes at Venus’s well-known and factually solid professional debut, in her mid-teens. And the characters are all likable, with even the villains only lightly villainous.
From watching and reading their saga as it played out, one could only imagine the worst of this “tennis parent” from hell and what he put his kids through. “King Richard” and Will Smith good-naturedly and affectionately upend that.
And as I say, if the story didn’t truly unfold this way, a folksy showboating sage pointing all along to great results and a happy ending, it certainly should have.
Rating: PG-13 for some violence, strong language, a sexual reference and brief drug references
Cast: Will Smith, Aunjanue Ellis, Saniyya Sidney, Demi Singleton, Tony Goldwyn, Dylan McDermott and Jon Bernthal
Credits: Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, scripted by Zach Baylin. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:18
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