Movie Nation

I don’t know anyone diagnosed with schizophrenia, but if it’s anything like its visualization in “Words on Bathroom Walls,” it is the quintessence of terror.

Yes, this adaptation of Julia Walton’s YA novel is a warm and fuzzy teen romance, and yes, some of the manifestations of the hero’s illness have more than a hint of “cute” about them. The film is annoyingly burdened with far too much voice over narration.

Maybe that suits someone who’s living and struggling far too much inside his own head. But the Golden Rule of Cinema is “Show us, don’t tell us” and in the name of all that’s holy, don’t narrate our ears off.

But the madness that descends upon Adam, winsomely played by Charlie Plummer ( “All the Money in the World”) would terrify anyone — swirling inky black smoke covering his surroundings, black bile oozing down windows, chem lab class turning into gravity-defying chaos, and every open door an opportunity for The Voice of Your Doom calling to Adam.

His mental safety net is a further manifestation of his condition. He has gang-banger “body guards” (led by Lobo Sebastian, good) in track suits, wielding baseball bats in his mental defense. A raging libido shows up in the bathrobe and underwear clad stoner Lothario (Devon Bostick) full of advice to the hormonal.

And then there’s the real person from the school he’s kicked out of in the film’s opening scenes. AnnaSophia Robb becomes his blonde, romantic ideal, airy fairy sensitive, a dancing hippy vision (“Dalai Lama meets Coachella”) in his hallucinations.

Yeah, all that falls under “cute.” But director Thor Fredenthal (A “Percy Jackson,” a “Wimpy Kid”) and Plummer do a splendid job of maintaining the tension that someone barely clinging to his sanity lives under. This may be a lightweight primer on learning about your illness, struggling with school and family and yet finding love in the middle of all this. But “Words on Bathroom Walls” never lets us forget the “Good Will Hunting moment” in such a life, under such mental pressure, is terrifying.

Stressed but eternally hopeful Mom (Molly Parker) and the new man in her life (Walton Goggins, playing with our expectations, cast against “type”) get “treatment resistant” Adam into a Catholic School and onto an experimental new drug.

Everybody, even a reluctant Adam, is all-in on a last chance senior year, drugged up so that he can get through the day, desperate to graduate so that he can go to culinary school in the fall. Yeah, “stepdad” is a little worried about the kid having access to knives.

Only headmistress Sister Catherine (Beth Grant) is in on Adam’s secret. But she’ll be watching for signs he’s losing it. His parents are in contact with the shrink he’s always talking to (whom we never see or hear). If he can just make it through the year…

Maybe the cutest, smartest girl in school figures into that. Maya (Taylor Russell) is a brutally blunt valedictorian pre-accepted at Duke, running “side hustles” doing rich private school kids’ homework. Adam? He needs tutoring from “the Bernie Madoff of academic fraud.”

And as they hit it off, we wonder, when’s our lad going to tell her his secret? When will we find out hers? And how long before the tightrope of Adam’s existence droops under the weight and he loses it?

The script is a catalog of mental illness similes, all of them revealed in voice-over. “You entire waking life is an escape room with no exit.” It’s “like having a nightmare while I’m awake.”

The romance is understated, slow, with many missteps mixed in with flippant banter. Food and cooking are blended in, as that figures into Adam’s hopes and his greatest fears.

A warm subtext arrives in Adam’s interactions with this new religion that the school exposes him to, all in the confessional with the priest (a twinkling Andy Garcia), who shrugs off the agnostic who sits down and cracks that “the only person who can’t reject you is Jesus, right?”

Whatever precious touches emerge, I have to say “Words on Bathroom Walls” works. The performances are stellar and earn the emotional connection we feel with the characters. The lighter touches — Garcia, Bostick and especially Robb (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), going all Woodstock Stevie Nicks — are a delight.

The fact that this sweet picture is one of the few to reopen cinemas mid-pandemic means it could get a little extra attention. Seeing as how Roadside Attractions, the Witness Protection Program of Film Distribution is releasing it, it can use all the help it can get.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, for mature thematic content involving mental illness, some sexual references, strong language and smoking

Cast: Charlie Plummer, Taylor Russell, Devon Bostick, Molly Parker, Lobo Sebastian, Beth Grant, Walton Goggins, AnnaSophia Robb and Andy Garcia

Credits: Directed by Thor Freudenthal, script by Nick Naveda, based on the Julia Walton novel. An LD Entertainment film, a Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:51

Boy, for somebody who has spent years of his life in cinemas, it’s been an awkward “cold turkey” break.

So what’s new in the experience?

Ticket buying has been migrating to vending machines or cellphone prepurchase. That’s accelerated thanks to the pandemic.

I glanced at the special cleaning gadget they are employing to keep their theaters low risk.

Several theaters on this area are up selling a “private showing,” just you and friends or relatives in the theater with you. Weird.

Staff at this Epic Theaters multiplex is masked, and has no change. Because they want all purchases done by data mining credit card.

All for their overpriced matinee of a movie from the Witness Protection Program of film distribution, Roadside Attractions.

The movie’s about to start, so phone off time. Just a couple of suburban teens and me to watch a drama about a high school kid coping with schizophrenia.

Here we go.

First rate supporting cast. And kudos to the DP who got images out of that murk. Whoo.

Every business in America has been scrambling to come up with a strategy to survive at least until the current incompetent administration and its state and local level cultists are thrown out or emasculated. Cinemas are particularly hamstrung in this regard.

“No public gatherings” hits the heart of their old business model and breaks it. Even as some reopen with reduced capacity and bigger cleaning/staffing costs, the canaries in the movie exhibition coal mines are showing themselves the most endangered of all.

This second run cinema is, like many, starved of content and basically showing kiddie movies already on video just to keep its doors open.

$50 private showings” aren’t just for strip clubs these days. Plan your socially distanced (sure, right) kiddie birthday party at your neighborhood second run house, usually old, the dumpiest theater in town, with the thinnest and most lax staff.

What could go wrong?

Viggo stars as the gay son his reactionary father (Lance Henriksen) never accepted.

Viggo also directed “Falling” which has hit a few festivals.

It’s British, so naturally it’s classier.

“Hallelujah?” Bit strong, as far as reactions go. HBO next year will let us learn if this movie not many liked could be saved by the guy who made such a hash of it the first time.

A terrorist group, a bank where their money was allegedly “laundered,” a sting that wasn’t what it seemed to be.

“The Andorra Hustle” premieres Sept. 4.

“The Sleepover” is a quick and dirty “Spy Kids” spin where the kids aren’t spies at all. They just miss Mommy and Daddy.

Why? Because over-protective Mom (Malin Akerman) and dorky Dad (Ken Marino) have been kidnapped right under the nose of mouthy middle schooler Kevin (Maxwell Simkins), who was having a sleepover campout with his high-maintenance pal Lewis (Lucas Jaye) in the back yard.

And dang-it-all, tonight of all nights! Fifteen year-old cellist Clancy (Sadie Stanley) was in her “tight jeans,” all-dolled-up to sneak out with BFF Mim (Cree Cicchino) to a “senior” party hosted by Mr. “My parents are out of town, you should COME” that Clancy has a crush on.

Clancy has to lead this not-driving-age quartet from Cape Cod to “the city” (Boston), piecing together clues that Mom, who ISN’T who she seems to be, has left behind, intentionally or accidentally.

“Dude, your mom is into some ‘Da Vinci Code’ stuff,” churps Mim, the life of this party.

Mom won that “over-protective” to the point of “pathetic” label from Clancy because she’s the only teen at Harborview High without a cell phone.

“She thinks social media is where murderers and college admissions departments get their information about you.”

Dad’s a dork because he’s a pastry chef who drives a mini-van, exercising his “dough kneading” fingers as he waits in the car pool lane singing along with Paula Cole to “Where Have all the Cowboys Gone.”

But one viral video of Kevin, a polished, fantastical liar and aspiring boy’s restroom dancer, busting a middle school move, and kidnappers show up, shocking everybody BUT Mom.

“Your wife is a very dangerous woman, Mr. Finch. Or used to be.”

The story isn’t as engrossing a mystery as you’d hope, with “clues” and a pursuit that seem pre-ordained and dumb.

The action beats are a study in creative editing, as Akerman must display action heroine prowess that isn’t her forte.

Hey, YOU try to bowl over security guards wearing a tight slit skirt and high heels!

The comedy hinges on Simkins’ goofy, nerdy lies and Cicchino’s droll, mature-for-her-age put-downs.

There’s just enough here that you can see why Akerman and Joe Manganiello (playing Mom’s “ex,” and a peek into her torrid, action-packed past) would take the parts and the cash. No, it doesn’t have even a hint of “edge,” but most parents want their kids’ entertainment inoffensive.

“Sleepover” is cheerful enough that it passes the time, even as that time passes ever-so-slowly as it stumbles for clues, through a Boston sight gag or two and into the “big finish” that’s more a series of minor busts.

Leave this one to the tween-and-unders.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG, violence

Cast:  Sadie Stanley, Maxwell Simkins, Cree Cicchino, Malin Akerman, Joe Manganiello and Ken Marino.

Credits: Directed by Trish Sie, script by Sarah Rothschild.

Running time:

Timing is everything, and if ever the time was right for a sunny, shimmering, dizzy and diversity-embracing adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” this is it.

Armando Iannucci conjures — the only word for it — “The Personal History of David Copperfield” out of Dickens’ universal truths, and the man’s unmatched ear for dialect and way with words.

Iannucci, who gave us “The Death of Stalin,” “Veep,” ” In the Loop,” and who got his start with the dark, droll and ridiculous “Alan Partridge” TV series with Steve Coogan, does two things “to” Dickens and his eponymous hero here.

The “color blind” casting underlines the master’s universality. Copperfield’s struggle to escape his past is not a white man’s journey, it is EveryJourney from poverty to gentility. And casting people of many ethnicities highlights what’s already in the book, and easily ignored. He’s not just “the hero of my own story,” we all are. And none of us make that journey alone Every heroine or hero in life and in the novel struggles, tries to make something of him or herself while maintaining dignity and returning to kindness, even when you catch yourself straying from it.

And the co-adapter/director just wallows in Dickens’ words. By framing this within young Copperfield’s similarities to his creator’s biography, Iannucci has created a Dickens adaptation that elevates the writer (if that was possible) to the very top of the list of Greatest in the English Language. This is a Dickens that compares to Shakespeare, not just in characters and emotions and plotting, but in the realm of words.

“She’s a human mangle, that woman!” “What a world of gammon and spinach!” “I regret that I missed the wedding — and the chance to meet you at the peak of your beauty.”

Yes, “The words have skates, and skim away” in this “Copperfield,” a movie that leaps to its feet and sprints away on a carpet of colorful dialect, incisive description and hilariously witty turns of phrase.

“You should write that down,” little David (Ranveer Jaiswal) is told, any time somebody in his orbit says memorable. And so he does.

We see his birth, and see and hear older David (Dev Patel, wonderful in the part) “photo bomb” the moment he came into the world, “narrating” his story as he does.

The nurse Peggoty (Daisy May Cooper) is the first quotable “Dickensian” David meets. His childhood of adoration and love in the bosom of an indulgent mother and a lot of time with Peggoty and her Yarmouth brother and kin, living in a house built out of an upside down boat hull, has David conjuring up stories as soon as he can scribble them down.

But widowed mother’s (Morfydd Clark) marriage to the cruel Murdstone (Darren Boyd), under the influence of his even more-cruel sister (Gwendoline Christie, an epic villainess) hurls David into a life as a child-laborer, working at Murdstone’s London wine-bottler.

“What lies before YOU is a fight with the world,” Murdstone declares.

That puts David in the care of the always-broke, always needing a hand-out Mr. Micawber (Peter Capaldi) and his equally destitute and relentlessly upbeat wife ( his wife (Bronagh Gallagher)

David eventually rebels, rejoins his eccentric, hard-edged aunt (Tilda Swinton) and her daft cousin, Mr. Dick (Hugh Laurie) and is sent off to Mrs. Strong’s (Anna Maxwell Martin) school to become “a young gentleman,” where he befriends the snob Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard) in making fun of their “inferiors,” chief among them the obsequious servant Uriah Heep (Ben Whishaw).

David falls for the ditzy Dora (Morfydd Clark) even as he confides in the more intellectually challenging Agnes (Rosalind Eleazar), daughter of the tipsy investor (Benedict Wong) whom his sister relies on to keep the family estate, which she is manic about maintaining as “a donkey-free zone!”

Yes, there is the occasional anachronism in “The Personal History” — “Wait for it. WAIT for it!”

Yes, there are too many colorful characters, some warm and many venal, to name, all splendidly cast with the full breadth of British character actors — white, black, South Asian and Asian.

And yes, it all works, the funny bits — “I don’t care for whimsy. Sorry.” — and the poignant ones.

Iannucci’s wrangled the novel into a brisk and breezy film, which brilliantly underscores Dickens’ role as a Social Justice Warrior. “Copperfield,” with its callous, entitled and class-obsessed rich — “Your family, are you any one?” — and scrambling, shamed and morally-compromised poor, is “class warfare” from a time before the Fat Cats convinced their lemmings it was a dirty phrase, as dirty as that filthy word “socialism.”

Patel, of “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Lion” and “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” makes the most of this once-in-a-lifetime chance to break free from “Indian” roles, and connects himself with the put-upon but plucky character, and connects this truly universal character with all of us.

Whishaw makes Uriah Heep’s “anti-hero’s journey,” from pitiable and needy to cunning and cruel, a delicious turn.

And Swinton, Wong, Eleazar, Cooper, Clark, Christie, Capaldi and Laurie make their mark on some of the most indelible characters in all of Dickens, with a couple (Laurie and Capaldi) defining them for a generation.

Iannucci’s cleverest touch may be that casting, giving a wonderful cross-section of British acting the chance to say those wonderful words, reclaim Dickens from the “Masterpiece Theater” swells.

His “Personal History” is indeed that, taking “Copperfield” into “as told-to” Dickens autobiography territory. And it reminds us of Dickens the writer, and Dickens The Man in Full — entertainer, storyteller, master of dialogue and dialect, and preacher and advocate for tolerance, kindness and social justice in a world that has always struggled to accept such sermons.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material and brief violence. 

Cast: Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Ranveer Jaiswal, Rosalind Eleazar Peter Capaldi,, Benedict Wong, Bronagh Gallagher, Ben Whisham and Hugh Laurie

Credits: Directed by Armando Iannucci, script by Peter Blackwell and Armando Iannucci, based on the novel by Charles Dickens. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:01