Weathering with You: PRESSURE

Pressure is a movie for people who’d rather doze off in a movie theater instead of falling asleep on the couch in front of the History Channel. It’s a World War II drama about the last three or four days of planning for D-Day. The epic moment is narrowed down to just a few rooms through the limited perspective of the meteorological team. At first they think it won’t be stormy weather. Then they do. The top weatherman is played by Andrew Scott. He has a nice pregnant wife at home and now he’s sequestered with the top brass barking at him to make a call. Is he sure? It’s a prediction. He’s a little worried that they don’t know how weather forecasts operate. He goes against the other top weatherman in the room (Chris Messina). General Eisenhower—a growling Brendan Fraser—looks at him with skepticism, then reluctant agreement that still bubbles up with skepticism. A storm could ruin all their planning and maybe even tip the course of the war. Damian Lewis plays a general whose reaction to hearing about the impending bad weather’s potential for delaying his invasion plans is to rant that they should just start “taking Kraut lessons now!” Scott has a great stiff upper lip and slightly teary eyes that sell the stress of being the naysayer in a situation like this. It’s a movie that, if nothing else, will make you say, yeah, I guess it would be a lot of pressure to tell the assembled Allied Commanders whether or not their closely guarded plans will be stymied by high winds. 

There’s just not much going on here beyond the obvious. First Scott has to argue it’s about to storm and the leaders growl. It’s sunny outside! They begrudgingly respect him when it starts raining a few hours later. A key scene comes late in the picture where Scott has decided that the weather is about to change. Eisenhower yells something like: “You say don’t go when it’s sunny, and to go when it’s storming!” Something tells me the real guy knew a little bit more about how weather works. But here’s a movie that’s desperately stretching to make drama out of its little corner of a massive event. I don’t doubt there was actual drama here, but the movie doesn’t much find it. Going deeper into the actual process of collecting data for their forecasts, instead of glossing over it with montage, might’ve helped. Instead we have little montages of devices and charts followed by broad scenes of flat dialogue and pat, easily resolved tensions. Director Anthony Maras has assembled a fine cast, dressed them in period costumes and set them in convincingly historical rooms. It looks and moves and sounds like a proper prestige picture, all surface polish. But screenwriter David Haig, adapting his own stage play, seems to trust the subject matter to do the heavy lifting. The movie ends with an abridged combat sequence that mostly reminds viewers of Saving Private Ryan’s much more successful balance of the personal stakes in the epic terror of combat in this very historical moment. I wanted to like a talky movie about WWII strategy. But this is a flat foregone conclusion of a movie. 

Sinners: WAKE UP DEAD MAN

Rian Johnson’s third Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, is the least immediately appealing. Compared to the autumnal glow of Knives Out or the summery vibes of Glass Onion, with their pleasing puzzle-box structures to match, this new movie is darker, meaner, scarier, and heavier. It’s set largely in a rural Catholic Church in the middle of the woods during a muddy spring trending toward dark and stormy nights of weather and of the soul. That’ll also guarantee it’ll be the one that simpatico audience members will forever be saying, “you know which one’s actually the best?” I won’t be one of them, but I’ll know where they’re coming from. Here’s where the clever froth of the first two gets weightier, losing none of the sharp social satire while gaining a theological dimension. Its honest wrestling with faith and duty and denial of surface pleasures will resonate with people who tire of cozy mysteries and need that dark chocolate genre packaging of the Gothic. There’s a scene where Blanc asserts his doubts as the clouds blot out the sun, and as his innocent interlocutor loses himself in a spiritual rebuttal the sun returns full force through the stained-glass window behind him. Johnson’s playing in the light and dark more overtly here. The movie’s clearly got souls, not just lives, on the line in yet another expertly organized murder mystery plot. 

The small congregation’s charismatic right-wing Monsignor (Josh Brolin) has been murdered in a seemingly impossible way, and the new, more progressive, priest (Josh O’Connor) finds himself tagging along with Blanc (Daniel Craig) as he tries to untangle the suspects. We have a tense lawyer (Kerry Washington), a drunk doctor (Jeremy Renner), a wannabe influencer (Daryl McCormack), a wheelchair-bound cellist (Cailee Spaeny), a washed up sci-fi novelist (Andrew Scott), a recovering alcoholic groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church) and a scarily strict devout old woman (Glenn Close). The sort of broken people drawn to such a cultish devotion to a cruel man of the cloth are all likely culprits. And the religiosity of the setting matching the apparent irreconcilable facts of the case lend toward much talk of potential supernatural solutions. The movie’s verging on horror at times, and even though it doesn’t tip over into total fantasy, this picture has the series’ gnarliest and creepiest sights. The ensemble of suspects aren’t as finely drawn, and get none of the snappy punchlines we’ve come to expect from this series. They’re all guilty as sin of something, though almost none are guilty of murder. And the intensity of their beliefs means they’re all sweating it out under the glare of their crooked faiths. The tangle of violence and betrayal is weightier than ever. Even Blanc is subdued in the face of it, though his honeyed southern accent remains a delight. Johnson’s clearly finding something dark and searching in our current cultural moment and gets to use the elements of such a dependable genre’s scaffolding to express them. 

State of the Arts: NOUVELLE VAGUE and BLUE MOON

It’s rare to know in the moment that you’re in the middle of an inflection point in the history of an art form. It usually just looks like creative people hanging around. How nice, then, that two new movies about such moments come to us from Richard Linklater. In movies as diverse as Slacker and Dazed and Confused and School of Rock and Boyhood he’s proven himself one of our finest observers of the dynamics of a hangout. It comes in handy in Nouvelle Vague, a movie about the 1959 making of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic debut feature Breathless, an early landmark in the French New Wave cinema of the mid-20th century. That movie is characterized by a breezy spontaneity, with a blend of pop genre shorthand with a man on the run from the law, and formal and narrative innovations like jump cuts and improvisatory location shooting. So it’s a little ironic that Linklater puts a lot of period piece effort into meticulously bringing such looseness to specific recreated life. But the movie is a warm love letter to this style and mode of filmmaking, shooting in textured black and white photography in a squared-off aspect ratio, with fuzzy French language tracks and English subtitles burned into the print in that soft analogue style. 

The story itself, gently draped over the prep, filming, and post-production of the film in question, gives us a Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) who spouts off theories of filmmaking, almost grinning from behind his sunglasses and puffs of cigarette smoke, drawing creative collaborators toward him with a oddly inscrutable charisma while befuddling the more buttoned-up financiers. He’s surrounded by a crew of fellow film critics turned filmmakers, and Linklater affectionately stuffs the frame and fills sequences with actors inhabiting all manner of bold named French film notables of the time. (Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin do an especially uncanny Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.) The cast of characters universally speak in epigrammatic aphorisms, often featuring famous quotes that’ll be recognizable to anyone who has read the many volumes documenting this moment in cinema history. But this isn’t a closed-off picture for the die hards only. It has too much movie love, and a willingness to wave in newcomers and old pros alike to explore this period more. The fact that we know how this whole story turns out somehow doesn’t spoil the fun of seeing it play out. 

For all the focus on his writerly details as a screenwriter, Linklater is underrated for his director’s ability to shift his form to fit the subject. As such, it’s a continual unfolding delight to see Blue Moon feel as comfortably theatrical as Nouvelle Vague is specifically filmic. It feels effervescently like a play, even as its camera and editing takes us cleanly and cinematically through its confined space. It’s a form fitting for a movie about Broadway songwriter Lorenz Hart set entirely on Oklahoma!’s opening night in 1943. Hart was famously creatively paired with Richard Rodgers, who left him behind to work on this Okie musical with Oscar Hammerstein II. What Hart suspects this night, and which we know from the weight of history, is that Lorenz and Hart are old news, while Rodgers and Hammerstein were about to be the great new thing. The former made the kind of light, clever, cheeky patter that lent an air of elegance and mid-Atlantic sophistication to the early 20th century stage. The latter would make the big, sturdy, sweeping spectacle musicals of the mid-century. Linklater’s movie is perched perfectly on this pivot point, and has just the right person from which to view it. This is a story of the muse (perhaps literally, in the form of an ambitious co-ed played by Margaret Qualley) leaving one man, and finding companionship with another, told from the perspective of the man slowly feeling his opportunities slipping away.

Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz in a nearly nonstop monologue at the hotel bar waiting for the after party. He only pauses to take in fleeting dialogue in exchanges with characters who float in and out of his pity party. He’s flirtatious, he’s coy, he’s confessional, he’s vulgar and jealous and an overflowing font of allusions and amusements. He’s living his life like it’s a stage for soliloquizing, and those he interacts with are mere supporting parts for him to practice witticisms upon at best, mere audience for his genius at worst. And yet all this razzle-dazzle verbal dexterity is clearly compensating for deeply felt inadequacies (he's literally smaller in the frame than anyone) and other psychological ambiguities. The entrance of his former writing partner (Andrew Scott) sheds new light on their working relationship, its tensions and creativity, and we watch as one man’s neediness and the other’s kindness push and pull, two orbits briefly intersecting one last time as they’re about to diverge. Here’s the world as a stage where every man must play a part, and his a sad one. But the movie is not a mere sad-clown slice-of-biopic-life. It’s an insightful, melancholic character study buoyed along with a diegetic old school show tunes piano score and a clever, intelligent screenplay, the kind that’s studded with great punchlines that never quite puncture the melancholic core. We know that in a few months he’ll be dead and Rodgers will be better than ever. In some way, he suspects it, too. 

All Those Lonely, Lonely Times: ALL OF US STRANGERS

Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is a palpable portrait of loneliness and the long tail of childhood grief. It’s a film that feels haunted with the intense emptiness that comes from a solitary life. It stars Andrew Scott as a writer just south of middle age who lives alone in a small apartment in a mostly uninhabited new building in London. Though the movie will technically leave this cramped home, in all the really important ways it stays trapped there with him, and within his head. He meets another inhabitant of the building, a troubled younger man (Paul Mescal) with whom he strikes a hesitant romantic interest. They’re drawn together as two loners, clearing their throats to speak like they're unaccustomed to doing so. There’s a sense even as they open up emotionally, sharing stories of their pasts, their coming outs, and their romantic interests, that they’re holding something back. They’ve been hurt before.

The writer is currently working through some of his hurt with an autobiographical project about his parents. He imagines them as they were when he was 12 years old. They were dead before he was 13, killed in a car crash at Christmastime. How awful. Now this writer will sometimes return to his childhood home and see them. Hardly ghosts, they are flesh and blood memories he inhabits, having conversations he wishes he could’ve had, and still could have but for that fateful black ice—reminiscences explanations, apologies, a coming out. The parental presences are projections of the son, but Claire Foy and Jamie Bell play them with full personalities. These aren’t dream parents; they’re not always parroting ideas their now-grown child would hope they’d share with him. They’re real, and unreal. (There's a productively weird cognitive dissonance of seeing actors of roughly the same age playing parent and child, too.) He’s happy to see them, but there’s that spectral distance, too. They’re part of him, and yet not. Here’s a man so used to being alone he holds everything at arm’s length, from that potential new boyfriend to the grief he’s never quite addressed.

Haigh is a filmmaker always so closely attuned to the subtleties of human interactions—the way a shift in information or understanding ripples imperceptibly across a face, and then out across an entire relationship or community. It's in the intimate close-ups and spaces for quiet contemplation. He makes movies in which people sit and talk to each other, revealing as much in their silences and implications as with their conversations. There’s the hookup coupling that tentatively teases the idea of something more in Weekend or the anniversary that teeters on the precipice of a breakup in 45 Years. His works are always careful to conceal and reveal his characters interiority in conjunction with softly naturalistic performances that capture their humanity. He also expert at getting deft, delicate drama out of symbols lesser directors would fumble as obvious underlining. Here’s a movie about a man literally haunted by his grief, and has trouble bringing someone new into his lonely life. That core specificity gives its abstractions their power.

It’s about the disconnection he feels from the world around them, and from some essential part of himself and his past. So of course there’s that huge empty building, and a cozy memory place of childhood memory. The two blur. There’s a mid-80s photo from right before the incident. It becomes a vision of the past with a child actor; it’s also a recreation with the adult. Past and present are joined by the Pet Shop Boys’ swirling synths. That’s a peak of hazy sadness in a movie that’s a most tender, melancholic ghost story. Later, a simple move of the camera swaps one ghostly presence for another, although we might not quite know it until we reflect on it later. The movie builds to a climax of emotional revelation, and nods to the power of love to last. Because the performances are so natural, and the filmmaking so attentive, it gathers considerable metaphoric force. It feels heavy with depressed yearning in every gesture.