It’s an “Unlimited Movie Ticket Subscription Plan,” and as theaters evolve into small workforce upscale venues, it makes perfect sense. They’re rolling it out fast, too. By the end of the month it will be in place.
Just saw a trailer promoting it before a screening. $21 a month for Unlimited movie going? Hmmm.
From THR
https://t.co/bHZVK4KIMV https://twitter.com/THRmovies/status/1154579117800472576?s=17
It’s indulgent.
But we knew that. It’s Tarantino. We come for the indulgence.
“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” might be his most self-aware picture yet, a time-burning wallow in 1960s pop culture, fashions and the “magic of the movies.”
It’s also misshapen and meandering, a self-indulgent Inglourious Basterdization of the infamous Manson Family murders. It rarely settles into a style or a tone that works.
And someday, the ghost of Bruce Lee is going to rise up and kick Quentin Tarantino’s ass from here to Hialeah.
What he’s going for here is a drunken, violent mytho-poetic celebration of “The Hollywood Version” of the era and its history, which has informed his films since the beginning. For those of us who show up for “the cool parts,” he provides them, mostly in the form of two old-fashioned, old school movie stars — Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio.
And I went along with this cable mini-series-length saunter through movies and classic bad TV, the long appreciations of the theme to TV’s “Mannix,” Pitt’s drawn out and tame “stunt-driving” through recreations of 1969 LA traffic, the craft of TV acting and the best damned Sam Wannamaker impersonation (Nicholas Hammond from “The Sound of Music”) the movies will ever see.
Tarantino always rewards movie-buffs and junk culture history fans, and he lovingly recreates Cineramadome Era LA, its vintage cars and vintage cinemas, backlots and over-filmed sets and locations from the bitter end of the Golden Age of TV Westerns.
He comically slanders Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) composes a leering love poem to the late Sharon Tate, keeping Margot Robbie’s legs and derriere in the frame (and her dirty feet, the perv) for a lot of scenes which paint her as the very essence of a sweet starlet who might not have ever made it, but would probably have never made an enemy had the Manson cult not slaughtered her, her friends and her unborn child.
But at some point, it’s got to hit you. This movie is a bit of a mess. It certainly did me, and that was a ways before its atonal goof of a third act.
DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, onetime star of TV’s “Bounty Killer,” now reduced to drinking and taking an endless succession of episodic work on other people’s TV shows. A meeting with a producer/talent scout for Italian “Spaghetti Westerns” (Al Pacino) just confirms to Rick, stammering more and losing confidence by the day, that “I’m a has-been, ol’buddy…Washed up.”
“Ol’buddy” here is Cliff Booth (Pitt), a grizzled stunt double who acts as driver, handyman and boon companion to Rick, who has too many DUIs to drive his own Caddy to the set. Cliff is Old Hollywood at its rough and ready best — nimble, skilled, confident, a man with a dark past and a reputation he can’t shake. Ask his old stunt coordinator boss (Kurt Russell) and the boss’s wife (stunt woman and “Deathproof” star Zoe Bell) about that.
Cliff waits on Rick to score him work, bucking up his struggles with self-confidence, his good moments and stumbles on the set of the pilot to a new Western, “Lancer.” Timothy Olyphant and the late Luke Perry play the show’s stars, Hammond’s Wannamaker is the actor-turned-director (and great Shakepearean) who wants to bring out Rick’s very best. He’s not a TV cowboy, Wannamaker assures him. “You’re better than that.
Flitting around the periphery of this post Summer of Love LA movie scene are the stoner/stone-killer butterflies of Charles Manson’s cult — underclad, undergroomed and uninhibited young women — mostly — hitchhiking, hooking, with one waif in particular (Margaret Qualley) getting Cliff’s attention.
Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski, have moved in next door to Rick in the tony Hollywood Hills, and tool around town in Polanski’s 1950s MG-TF. Cliff drives the wheels off a battered VW Karmann Ghia on his way to and from his ruined travel trailer behind the Van Nuys Drive-In, an oil well in his “yard,” an adorable pit-bull his only company.
We’re shown the Spahn Movie Ranch, a favorite location for Westerns, where the Manson Family (Dakota Fanning plays Squeaky Fromme, Bruce Dern is old man Spahn) have set up shop. The film’s few moments of suspense come from the authentic dread of remembering even snippets of this piece of history. There were bodies buried there that no one ever found.
Flashbacks give us Cliff’s troubled “history,” a black and white on-set interview with Rick and Cliff doing “Bounty Killer” “eight years” earlier opens the film. And every so often, an ill-conceived voice-over narration (Kurt Russell, again) pipes up to set the scene, or jump us forward in time to the third act.
The first act is filled with long driving sequences that don’t advance the plot, lingering shots of the items in the kitchen pantry, the comfort foods and products and images of Young Quentin Tarantino — who needs a more ruthless editor.
Fake Sharon Tate sits in a cinema to watch her performance in the godawful Dean Martin Bond spoof, “The Wrecking Crew.” And even though we’ve seen DiCaprio injected into a scene from “The Great Escape” in place of Steve McQueen (impersonated by Damien Lewis in an early Playboy Mansion party scene), Robbie’s Tate watches the REAL Sharon Tate in these clips, showing little of the promise Tarantino seems to suggest she had.
For all the detail, this is no more historical than a Marvel movie.
What we can relish here is a relaxed, offhand star turn by DiCaprio, freed from the burden of never winning an Oscar and letting us see a 40something, sweaty “has-been” who goes to pieces when he blows his lines, or is complimented in a whisper by a screen-veteran child star (Julia Butters), wise beyond her eight years.
“That was the best acting I have ever seen!”
Pitt doesn’t need a shirtless moment to summon up a career of easygoing cool leading men, but as he strips it off for a flashback, we can only hope Cliff’s swagger will be enough to get him through the fairytale alive.
As pleasant as their every scene — together or apart — is, the movie is formless, even for a Tarantino picture. The narrative advances like a Netflix series in mid-binge — lurching, stumbling, dragging on and on.
The trailer for “Once Upon a Time…” is far more coherent.
Tarantino may call “Easy Rider,” “The Wrecking Crew” and “Arizona Raiders” his movie inspirations for “Once Upon a Time…” I’d say he was much more into the mass production Westerns and detective shows of the day, the leaden and ironically stilted “F.B.I.”
Tarantino has been unusually thin-skinned about this (mostly over-praised) “ninth film by Quentin Tarantino.” He’s making noises about this, or maybe the next picture, being his last.
Beware actors or filmmakers who threaten “This could be my last movie” before their next one comes out. They’re just inoculating themselves against serious criticism.
“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” isn’t his masterpiece any more than it’s his curtain call.
(Ten Things I Hated about “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”)
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some strong graphic violence, drug use, and sexual references
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Dakota Fanning, Luke Perry, Timothy Olyphant and Kurt Russell
Credits: Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. A Sony release.
Running time: 2:41
Damned data.
You can sit back — if you’re say, Hollywood — and claim that gender discrimination on the screen, behind the screen, writing the stories that fill the screen and signing off on the checks that feed the entertainment beast, “went away” with the culture-shifting movements and legislation of the past 50 years.
And then the hard, naked numbers stare you in the face and show you that’s just not true.
In 2018, 85% of the top 100 movies were scripted by men, 92% of the directors of the top 250 films were male.
Go on down the filmdom food chain — four of five narrators of TV and film are male, one in four lead characters in your typical movie are female.
Put down the data and watch those movies and TV shows. The vast majority of female characters are peripheral. On film and on TV, “the women are in orbit around the men.”
There has been progress. A few years of pro-active hiring practices raised the number of female members of the Directors Guild of America from one or two percent, to 15 percent. A burst, here and there, of “Let’s get more female screenwriting voices on the screen,” more women directors, etc., may last a year or three.
A movie like “Thelma & Louise” comes along, or a “Wonder Woman,” TV shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal” blow up, and the media covering Hollywood use the magic phrase.
“This Changes Everything.” Only it almost never does.
Here’s a documentary that lays the whole problem out, from identifying the injustice to suggesting “action” steps that could rectify it. “This Changes Everything” features a sea of female faces and voices, Oscar winners in front of the camera, shakers and movers behind it, and many, many women who say their careers were curtailed because of the sexism that relegated them to second class citizens in a business that, in turn, passes that status on in the on-screen role models it serves up for America and the world to emulate.
Geena Davis, a president on TV, an Oscar winner and a driving force in gathering much of the data we have on the vast scope of this problem, opens Tom Donahue’s movie by remembering her first big screen break. She was up for a part where “She had to look good in her underwear” and Davis had been in Victoria’s Secret catalog.
That landed her in “Tootsie.” “”The very first thing I shot was in my underwear, with Dustin (Hoffman).”
Taraji P. Henson notes how she kept her mouth shut at the sort of subservient “in the hood” roles she was offered at the beginning of her career, how she’s never met a female cinematographer on the set.
Meryl Streep breaks down and critiques her somewhat self-scripted turn in “Kramer vs. Kramer,” trying to make more of a believable character out of someone who didn’t have the same gender as the writer, director or anybody else with authority on the set.
Actress turned #MeToo activist Rose McGowan notes how she can’t watch much of the work she was offered, and wouldn’t advise little girls to, either. She figured out, “This movie is not MADE for you…You see yourself through the eyes of the male camera operator…When I think I’m acting, it’s really the camera just panning across my ass.”
Natalie Portman acknowledges being turned into an object onscreen while footage of her first film, “The Professional,” plays over her complaint.
Reese and Marisa, Tiffany and Cate, Sandra Oh and many, many others echo the sentiment, “We have been ‘otherized’ by men.”
And on and on “This Changes Everything Goes,” a mountain of evidence presented that Hollywood has both had a huge hand in objectifying and marginalizing women in America, and that it practices that marginalization off-camera as well.
Most people will be shocked to discover that it wasn’t always this way. Women writers, directors and stars were consigned largely to the background, beginning with the very expensive advent of sound, when Eastern and Western bankers — all male — provided the money to convert the studios and got both a piece of the action and a big role in providing the direction the movie business went in.
The Depression Era rise of guilds and unions closed more doors, as those who were still working balked at letting women dilute their hiring pool.
But all that data and that history — a 1980s lawsuit to force change is remembered — takes a back seat to the tidal wave of women on and off camera who hammer home the point that as Davis puts it, “If she can see it, she an be it.”
Putting women in meatier roles provides role models for young women to look up to. Why are half the forensic pathologists in America female? Marg Helgenberger played the hell out of one in a big role on TV’s original “C.S.I.”
Davis recalls her archery instructor telling her about how business for teachers like him, and bow and arrow sellers, blew up when the Disney cartoon “Brave” and “The Hunger Games” movies burst on the scene.
You probably don’t need this film to remind you that women have been so thoroughly marginalized or sexualized, even in children’s TV and animated films, that little girls have become “self-sexualized” as early as six by being exposed to this, since birth.
“This Changes Everything” asserts that sexual harassment culture is built on this, and not just in Hollywood — McGowan declares that “there is no human resources department” when it comes to “protecting yourself on the set.”
The gargantuan disparity between male characters’ screen time and lines can be measured, now, film by film, TV show by TV show. There’s an algorithm that can apply the Bechdel-Wallace Test to any film or TV series, proving without a doubt, how included or excluded female characters are in a given project.
Donahue’s film goes down the rabbit hole on a few subjects, which cause the film to drift a bit, almost to the point of mission creep. It tends to lean most heavily on the directing ranks, even though actresses are the vast bulk of its eyewitnesses.
But then we’re forced to consider the careers circumscribed by talented filmmakers simply not being able to get work because the default mode of every network, studio and production house was to not give a Julie Dash or Kimberly Peirce a thought.
I watched Patty Jenkins direct the Oscar-winning “Monster” here in Orlando, got the sense that the producers were doing their utmost to limit her power, and wondered, for years, if she’d ever get another shot at big screen glory. Then “Wonder Woman” came along.
Examples of this have been out there in the open, all along. Maybe this moment and this movie about it will make being ignored or passed over for reasons that have nothing to do with experience and craft rare.
Maybe “This Changes Everything.” One can only hope.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Taraji P. Henson, Marisa Tomei, Meryl Streep, Sandra Oh, Tiffany Haddish, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Rosario Dawson, Mira Nair, Reese Witherspoon, Rashida Jones, Catherine Hardwicke, Heather Graham
Credits: Directed by Tom Donahue A Good Deeds release.
Running time: 1:35
Here we go. Again?
Butler and Jada, Morgan and Piper and Nolte.
You think Danny Huston’s the villain? Maybe?
Was this sequel really necessary?
They’ve all moved on, Emma’s won an Oscar, and so on and so forth.
Doesn’t seem as gritty and “out there” the second time around.
But hey, who knows? A few new cast members — Rosario, Luke Wilson, etc.
Oct 18, we see what we see.
A soap star of some standing lets her psycho flag fly as a murderously obsessive fashion photographer in “Fatal Fashion,” which was orphaned and homeless as “Deadly Runway” before Netflix took it in.
It’s a chance for Linsey Godfrey (“The Young and the Restless,” “The Bold and the Beautiful,” “Days of Our Lives”) to lose the “neck-up acting” and um, subtlety of daytime drama for a little over-the-top nut-with-a-knife/pistol-packing mama/shove-a-model-over-a-railing mayhem.
Gosh, if only it was that much fun.
Godfrey plays Jennifer Higgens, introduced in a wordless opening as a top New York fashion photographer whose lip-biting and salivating over her latest toy-boy “creation” ends wither her waving a knife at him and his paramour — in the middle of a photo shoot.
How DO you bounce back from that? Well, the California Public School System just might have a job for you! Jennifer winds up running the new “Fashion and Photography” class at Palm Vista High.
And in a flash, she’s “creating” her next obsession. David Doolittle (TV actor Joshua Hoffman) is the bespectacled nerd the bullies pick on. Until he signs up for Jennifer’s class, where she teaches runway walking and photography, with the kids thrift-shopping and reworking clothes for their runway moments.
Except for Caitlyn (Ellen Michelle Monohan). She’s happy doing the clothes, which mean girl clothes-horse Brittany (Heather Hopkins) will throw tantrums over.
David just wants to be a photographer, but Jennifer picks’em for their low self-esteem.
We see variations on this routine — a makeover montage, Jennifer cooing “The camera LOVES you.” And then, something happens.
Maybe it’s the prettiest mean girl in school taking an interest in you. Maybe it’s a modeling manager (Maria Pallas) interested in poaching talent.
“I am NOT obsessed with him!”
That’s a sure sign somebody’s about to get cut. Or shot. Or pushed. Or…
Director Doug Campbell (“The Surrogate,” “Stalked by My Doctor”) tries to tease out Jennifer’s game, running through the basic cable level titillation — she undresses and “lights” her subjects — like an old pro.
Yawn.
Even as we see Jennifer exert some positive influence on wallflowers’ lives, we don’t have to ponder “What are teacher’s motives?” because we didn’t forget the nut-with-a-knife prologue. That prologue also strips away the mystery and seriously dings any chance “Fatal Fashion” has at suspense.
There’s always a little pleasure in seeing a killer plan or improvise her way into covering her tracks, but we only get a tiny dose of that.
When, we wonder, will some parent, model-kid, school administrator or COP get curious enough to do a little Internet search on Teacher Jennifer?
The players aren’t the most charismatic lot, but look at who they’re playing.
Only Godfrey has any fun at all, and even that’s fairly drab, even by TV movie standards.
“I know I can be a little dramatic sometime.”
“‘A little?'”
MPAA Rating: TV-14
Cast:Linsey Godfrey, Joshua Hoffman, T.J. Hoban, Heather Hopkins, Ellen Michelle Monohan
Credits: Directed by Doug Campell, script by David Chester. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:28
Sweet and ever-so-slight, “The Farewell” is a Chinese culture-clash comedy built on melancholy, driven by sentiment.
A family matriarch has lung cancer. But the doctors haven’t told her, just alerted the family. And the family, in China and in America, join ranks to keep the news from her.
Aspiring (and failing) New York writer, Billi (Awkwafina, aka Nora Lum) doesn’t see “Nai Nai” (Shuzhen Zhao) very often. But they’re constantly on the phone, and she’s appalled at what “the family has agreed” to do — lie.
“Chinese people have saying,” her brusque, flinty mother (Diana Lin) explains. “When people get cancer, they die.”
That’s the tone of the picture in a phrase. It’s about death. It’s about the lie. And keeping the first out of your mind while adhering to the second is where the comedy will come from.
A marriage has been hastily “arranged” for a cousin, as an excuse for everyone to gather around their widowed mother/grandmother and say “Goodbye” without letting her know they’re saying their farewells.
And nobody wants Billi to come. Dad (veteran character actor Tzi Ma) is “drinking again.” Mom seems bitterly resigned. But everybody in family diaspora is SURE Billi will be the one who cracks. She’s emotional, tight with Nai Nai and seriously assimilated.
“In America, you couldn’t do this,” she says, in English, and later in Chinese. “It’s ILLEGAL.”
Needless to say, Billi goes to the “wedding” anyway, the family holds its breath and her uncle takes her aside when they decree she cannot stay in Nai Nai’s flat, and lectures her.
“Be careful,” he says (in Chinese, with English subtitles). No matter what, “You cannot tell her,” he adds. And on and on.
Billi’s endlessly repeated reply (in Chinese, with English subtitles), is “I knowwwww.”
Writer-director Lulu Wang (“Posthumous) lets us know in an opening credit, that this is “based on an actual lie.” The shape of that lie, bending and folding, and on occasion causing the person telling the latest version of the lie to wilt with regret, is the substance of “The Farewell.”
But its values come elsewhere.
There’s Nai Nai herself, an amusing scold, calling her adored Billi “Stupid girl” at every turn, backhanding her weight, matchmaking for her because she seems to need it, insisting on arranging this faux “wedding,” insulting the Japanese bride (Aoi Mizuhara) that young Haohao (Han Chen) is to marry, totally missing the expression in both bride and groom’s eyes.
Think “deer in headlights.”
I adopted the bride, Aiko, as my guide into the movie. Speaking no Chinese, hustled into something that may not be formalized when they get back in Japan, where Haohao’s parents settled, she is the Queen of Good Sports and her reactions to the bickering, the drinking, the weeping and the lying is priceless.
Lin’s embittered mother figure is the soul of the picture; not that sentimental about Nai Nai’s passing, increasingly disappointed in her daughter (Billi has a big lie she’s living, too), resigned to going through all this rigamarole because that’s what “the family” wants.
Awkwakina has a tricky part to play, a woman suffering a sort of post traumatic separation anxiety. She is far more at home giving us sarcasm, sass and laughs than at getting across the subtler shades of grief and regret. The arc her character traverses is more interesting than her performance of it.
“The Farewell” is winning justly-earned praise for its moments (just a couple) discussing the immigrant experience (“You’re still Chinese.”) and one touching anecdote that explains America to those who have never been there.
The film’s real value, I think, is its vivid, fully rounded, warts-and-all portrait of Chinese family life — in America among the expats, and back home. There’s also an East-West comparison that gets at the difference between “family” here and there that is eye-opening.
This family has many fault lines. The city (Changchun) is ugly, dingy and grey. “New” hotels aren’t any better than timeworn ones. People drink too much and smoke too much. Service sector folks are often bored, disinterested and unbending. Too many relatives and strangers want you to compare China and America, even though nobody wants to get into which “war” Nai Nai is supposedly a veteran of (there’s a reunion of comrades scene).
And like the 1993 film this one most resembles, Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet,” we see a lot of food — some cooking, and much eating.
There’s a lot of hype surrounding this movie, some of it warranted due to its relative novelty, and some of the “OK, take a deep breath” variety.
What Wang gives us is an engagingly sentimental story with warmth, compassion and wit, peopled by relatives who, for all their cultural differences, are universal and yet enviable in their devotion to “the good lie” and the quality of life they see as worth protecting with it.
MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material, brief language and some smoking.
Cast: Awkwafina, Diana Lin, Shuzhen Zhao, Tzi Ma, Han Chen and Aoi Mizuhara
Credits: Written and directed by Lulu Wang. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:40
I don’t expect much “Behind the Music” drama in this Aug. 16 release.
Drugs? Sure. Not exactly a feminist band, not “woke.” But not a lot of controversy, just a band that has Aerosmith level of endurance, staying power as a stadium act, their audience has aged. Classic rock may be drifting into bikerland for bands of this vintage.
Still, could be a fun story.
I’m
The set-up is “love triangle” simple — two testosterony guys and a woman who comes between them, trapped on a boat in the middle of the sea.
Roman Polanski launched his career with that scenario, the 1962 classic “Knife in the Water.”
Only that was simpler than simple. The setting was an 18 foot long sailboat, the only weapon on that claustrophobic vessel — a rigging knife.
“Dead Water” — characters use the phrase “Dead in the Water” several times, so plainly they wanted to use that over-used title for it — parks our menage a trois on a 75 foot long Lazzara luxury motor yacht.
Hey, if you need product placement money to make the movie, there’s no shame in that. Name the make of the boat, show it off to good effect, especially in the closing credits.
Casper van Dien (of “Starship Troopers”) plays a hard-drinking jerk of a trust-fund-baby orthopedic surgeon, ready to help his just-mustered-out Marine captain pal “Coop” (Griff Furst of TV’s “The Magnificent Seven”) lose a little PTSD with some time on the water.
Coop’s TV-reporter wife Vivian (Brianne Davis of TV’s “Six)? She’s the atom on board, tugging at these two free electrons, setting off a competition that, well, maybe the screenwriter should have developed a bit more fully.
Because wasting an hour on poker, boozy reminiscences and — I kid you not — a drunken game of “Truth or Dare” — may establish that Coop’s tense, wrapped-too-tight and stressed, that John the surgeon is trying to set him off, and that Vivian is the object of desire and jealousy for them both. But we know that the moment they all climb aboard in the U.S. Virgin Islands where John bought the “Bella Would.”
Bad puns are standard issue when it comes to boat names. I’ve owned a “Tranquil? Aye-Sir!” and “Over-Easy” and “Sail La Vie” (already-named, bought used, and it’s bad luck to rename a boat, even if it’s a stupid name). “Bella Would” is a pun on the famed Marine Corp WWI Battle of Belleau Wood in France.
John was best friends with both Coop, and Coop’s fellow Marine and older brother Danny, who is dead. So, it’s a tribute?
Anyway, things get weird, motives get murky, and then Judd Nelson shows up for a little third-act melodrama on the high seas.
“Dead Water” is all about the gin-clear Caribbean, although the picture is depressingly cabin-bound for most scenes.
There’s a smattering of decent tough-guy banter.
“You can eat your words, or you can eat this bar.”
“What are you, just a one-bullet Marine?”
And there’s amusingly clumsy foreshadowing in a few other exchanges.
“You ready for a weekend that’s going to change your life?”
“It’s not going to be a ‘three hour tour,’ is it?”
The characters have a somewhat psychotic idea of what constitutes “no harm, no foul.” Pranks have a lethal edge. Violence hangs in the air, although we can’t for a second think the surgeon would be stupid enough to test himself against a Marine.
But I brought up the boat size difference between “Dead Water” and “Knife in the Water” for a reason. It may make more sense, realistically, to separate characters for private conversations, seaway sex and scheming at sea. Nobody really knows what the other people are doing, what they’re capable of.
But the movie wastes most of its run time giving us tours of the boat, Zodiac (dinghy) rides and frittering away the tension that’s supposed to rise and rise with these three trapped in close quarters.
No wonder they needed Nelson. It’s just that his very presence — spot-on as his performance may be — is a cop out, an admission of defeat.
“Dead Water” has all it needed to create suspense and grim, up-close-and-personal conflict. Why throw him in there for the third act?
Because the movie’s comatose until he shows up. Not that the cast is bad, but the characters are blandly sketched-in, perfunctory “types” in a claustrophobic setting that promises us a better movie than director Chris Helton delivers.
Still, if you’re boat shopping, at least it’s better than the online videos at the boat builder’s website. “Dead Water” still sinks more than it swims.
MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence and sexual content
Cast: Casper van Dien, Brianne Davis, Griff Hurst and Judd Nelson
Credits: Directed by Chris Helton, script by Jason Usry. A Saban Films release.
Running time: 1:32
There’s a nasty musical joke that runs through “The Mountain,” Rick Alverson’s morose tale of The Last Lobotomy Doctor and his newly-hired photographer, driver and wingman.
Andy, played by Tye Sheridan with a single facial expression, from start to finish, grew up in the home of a German-born skating coach (Udo Kier) who liked nothing better than to drink and watch “Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall” on the television.
Como’s music is the joke. It turns up again, here and there, within Andy’s world in Alverson’s deflating psychological odyssey. Because if there’s a musical allegory for the childlike, catatonic state Dr. Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum) leaves his patients/victims in, it would have to be the easy listening sounds of Como crooning “Home on the Range.”
“The Mountain” is Alverson’s most accessible film, and if you know “The Comedy” and “Entertainment,” you realize how little that statement says. He’s an obscurant writer-director who concocts discomforting movies of arty pretense and acting intensity.
By those standards, “Mountain” is practically a road comedy. Because that’s where it finds its life, on the road.
Andy runs the Zamboni and sharpens skates at the rink where his father works in upstate New York. That ends with his father’s death.
Andy is haunted by memories of his mother, unsent letters to her, visions of how she might be now. She’s in a mental institution, which in those less enlightened days (the early 1950s) was labeled an insane asylum. There were lots of them, even back then.
Andy finds this out when he has an estate sale, trying to get rid of his father’s things. The tall, white-haired fellow who buys Dad’s old pipe tells him, “I knew your dad. I’m Dr. Fiennes. You can call me Wallace. Or Wally. That’s what the girls call me.”
The perfect Jeff Goldblum line is followed by the kicker, delivered in that halting, revealing cadence that is Goldblum’s trademark.
“I was one of your mother’s…physicians.”
That’s all Dr. Fiennes will say about the mother. No, he no longer works “there,” and can’t “get you access to her…But I’m sure she’s…comfortable…there.”
He makes a proposal. He could use an assistant, “somebody to give me a hand with stuff. Take photos.”
He talks Andy through using the then-new Polaroid Land Camera.
Dr. Fiennes, “Wally,” travels pre-Interstate America, stopping into mental hospitals, offering his services, looking to “help.”
Goldblum gives Fiennes a confidence that we frequently see shaken. He has the look of pained recognition, replaced on occasion by a kind of slack-jawed guilt.
He drinks and chases skirts after hours, although Silent Andy isn’t much of a wingman.
Alverson serves up a saga of quiet observation, austere white-walled hospitals and rarely-speaking staff. There’s a library level of silence in most of these places, perhaps a product of Dr. Fiennes’ work.
Lobotomies, basically severing connections in the brain with what amounts to an ice pick punched through the corner of the eye socket, were the psychological profession’s desperate solution to a helpless situation — increasingly crowded mental institutions where they weren’t helping many, and the need to calm, quiet and more easily control the population was paramount.
It’s just that Fiennes, no longer employed at any single institution, merely a freelancer, is practicing a dubious craft that common sense peers and administrators were starting to see as barbaric. The tide was changing on the procedure, something echoed in a not-quite-testy newspaper interview the good doctor gives at one point.
Fiennes knows this, has his own suspicions about what he is doing. And yet, he persists.
Chronically depressed Andy photographs patients after the procedure, sometimes before.
“Read the woman. She’s in distress. I’m going to help her. Now take a picture.”
He chats with them, asks a lot of questions. His instinct is to comfort them. But sometimes, they ask HIM questions, which he cannot answer.
“Why are they screaming? Does it work? Is it dangerous?”
He’s having weird dreams and visions. His conscience is eating at him. What might this road trip be doing to his fragile psyche?
Alverson serves up a lot of slow mo, freeze-frames and arresting angles, capturing Andy’s dreams, melding the disturbing with the familiar. What he’s most familiar with is skaters.
There’s a lovely but quiet and disquieting skating school tribute to their late teacher, a lot of random scenes of Dr. Fiennes flirting with ladies in restaurants, picking them up in bars, in between miles of wintry, wooded roads and an endless parade of hospitals and patients, almost all of whom are women — something borne out by the shocking statistics of the day.
I’ll watch anything with Goldblum in it, and “The Mountain” has its rewards, although no one should be fooled into thinking this is anything but disturbing. Sheridan’s joyless, blank-faced turn just underscores that.
And Alverson has a serious cinematic anti-climax problem. He cannot escape this morbid trap he’s driven us into. He finds grace notes, and eventually a conclusion. But that is preceded by 15 minutes of scenes that walk the movie backwards from where it’s taken us.
Those gripes aside, he’s still made a meditative movie about the fragile psyche, about the fumbling around the Best Minds in Science have been doing for well over a century when it comes to addressing mental illness and the guilt and denial that precede every failed “cure” in the minds of those struggling to implement it.
MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity, adult subject matter
Cast: Tye Sheridan, Jeff Goldblum, Hannah Gross, Udo Kier, Margot Klein, Denis Levant
Credits: Directed by Rick Alverson, script by Rick Alverson, Dustin Guy Defa and Colm O’Leary. A Kino Lorber release.
