No Man's Land: WONDER WOMAN

Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman is exactly what a big budget superhero spectacle should be. The film is so effortlessly crowd-pleasing you might wonder why others of its ilk make it look so difficult to accomplish so much less. It’s serious fun, a red-blooded adventure and fantastic light show, telling a complete story with no need for prior knowledge and no sense of burdensome teases for future installments. Best of all, it is fully aware and taking advantage of its hero’s iconography and bolsters the action by taking some consideration to the emotional weight of its violence. There’s fun to be had, but it also feels like a full and humane movie, driven by Wonder Woman’s inherent goodness and a sense that she and the ensemble around her are people and not mere action figures. It heightens the stakes, and it helps ground the inevitable swirls of effects. This is a movie about a god, the way all DC superheroes are totemic symbols, but here she is shown not through corrosively crass soulless cynicism, but the bright, pure light of virtue. She is a paragon of self-sacrifice, fighting for what’s right, what’s just, what’s true. All that and in a hugely entertaining popcorn entertainment, too? What a relief.

For Diana (Gal Gadot), princess of the demigod Amazons, raised on a picturesque matriarchal Paradise Island by her Queen mother (Connie Nielsen) who preached pacifism and her pragmatic aunt (Robin Wright) who trained her to be prepared to fight, being good is not a burden. She is the most talented Amazon, capable with sword, shield, whip, and her superpowered strength. We see her first as a little girl, eager to learn the skillful athleticism of the women warriors. Then, as a young woman, she takes great enjoyment in her powers, grinning as she spars in scrimmage battles. She’s ready, although her mother still hopes war will not find them, praying the island will remain hidden from ominous threats from their Greek myth origins. Alas, beyond their magically shrouded hidden paradise, World War I rages. The outside world arrives when an American spy (Chris Pine) crash lands in their bay pursued by a German platoon. The women manage to fight off the invaders and remain hidden from the world. But the soldier’s tales of the War to End All Wars touch Diana’s heart and she must leave with him to save mankind from itself. “They do not deserve you,” her mother says as she bids her farewell. The film is sincere about Diana’s goodness, and does not view her earnestness with skepticism. It is her uncomplicated moral certitude that makes her wonderful, and the world’s broken, ugly combativeness the clear force for evil.

This is a movie about a heroine whose conflict is not the weary woe-is-me moping of recent superhero movies, but a stirring call to action. The problem isn’t an obligation to do what’s right, but a struggle to get others to see the elegant simplicity of righteousness and empathy. Gadot inhabits the role’s decency and determination, anchoring the fantastical backstory in a fully realized person who has an uncomplicatedly genuine sense of goodness and virtue. Upon arriving in the world of early-20th-century London, there is easy humor as the mythological woman is a fish-out-of-water, finding a ruffled dress and corset combo a puzzle. “How do women fight in this?” she wonders. Gadot and Pine play these scenes with unforced humor that neither tries too hard, nor deflates the tension of the picture. Adding in a funny side character (his plucky secretary (Lucy Davis), one of those rare supporting players who gets a laugh with every line) makes the film’s bright touch. So, too, how lightly Diana takes the sexism of a military made up of men (like David Thewlis) who refuse to even acknowledge her presence, let alone allow her to advise. She simply doesn’t understand why they behave so cowardly. Luckily her guide sees her strength and determination and helps her to the front lines. He’s investigating a dastardly German general (Danny Huston) and a mad scientist (Elena Anaya) who’re preparing a devastating new form of mustard gas that’ll kill thousands at a time, and will surely undermine the ongoing armistice talks. This evil must be stopped and the movie becomes a winning soldiers-on-a-mission movie.

As Diana leads a small group of men behind enemy lines in search of the new weapon and its villainous makers, the movie lights up with colorful action. It’s great fun, staged for maximum impact, impressive choreography and strategic splashes of slow-mo built to showcase glowing comic book panel images that pop in the flow of frenetic frames. See her knocking back machine gun bullets with a swing of her indestructible shield, or kicking an enemy combatant through a window while she leaps after him, or using her lasso to take a pack of attackers off their feet. But it’s always driven by her obvious moral outrage. She wants to save a village torn up by German invaders. She wants to protect a group of soldiers pinned down in a trench. She wants to help her new allies end the war. This is gripping retro-pulp fantasy in a sleek style. The action progresses in a logical escalating fashion, drawn from clear conflicts, sharply delineated motivations, and a crisp sense of place and space. A hurtling momentum of crisis nonetheless takes its time to build feeling for and take pleasure in the chemistry amongst its ensemble, allowing each new development in the plot to follow inexorably from the character’s decisions, personalities, and convictions. 

With a steady hand and a light touch, Jenkins directs a full-blooded movie here, wearing heroism sincerely and excitedly, and building full characters to care about. Inspired by over seven decades of comics, Allan Heinberg’s sturdy, clever screenplay allows for plenty of fluid visual fanfares of action, explosions in a vibrant color palate and a quick-paced serial cliffhanger adventure mode. Yet it never loses a sense of humanity, a decision as evident in its concern for the impact of every punch as it is in the lovely little character moments – sweet exchanges, prickly flirtations, charming misunderstandings. Best is how both assets work so perfectly together, like when Diana first arrives in the trenches and is told the soldiers have made no progress in months. The enemy is too heavily fortified behind a vast No Man’s Land. She shrugs off her coat to reveal her iconic battle armor, and steps out of the trench and onto the battlefield ready to fight. The movie need not speak the Homeric obvious, as she strides forward confidently wielding her shield and drawing her sword, the score swelling with the triumphant, moving, exciting anticipation of heroic acts. She is No Man.

Mind, Body, and Soul: THE SKIN I LIVE IN

The Skin I Live In, a great, nervy thriller from Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, is a film that takes a gut-churning twist in the center with a perverse shock that makes perfect, horrifying thematic sense. It also makes the film incredibly difficult to discuss without spoiling the stark, delirious horror of the surprises. I'm going to attempt to steer clear of discussing it in detail. Instead I'll describe the set-up, talk about tone and theme, and hint at the extent of the gorgeous madness of it all as I try to pick my jaw up off the floor. This is melodrama that starts ever so slightly camp, and then scrapes away any sense of overheated frivolity to become an engrossing thriller that grows steadily more horrifying. It’s an ingenious twisty film of great disturbing depth.

The film begins with a half-imagined, but nonetheless potent, sense of something being very, very wrong and then sets out to deliriously prove that glimmer right tenfold. In a secluded house in the Spanish countryside lives a skilled plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas). We learn that he’s been a part of most of the successful face transplants in the world. He’s respected and talented, but also mysterious. In his home there is a lab where he works growing and testing synthetic skin. His housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) goes about her business, occasionally interacting with the gorgeous patient (Elena Anaya) locked in an upstairs bedroom. Surveillance cameras allow the surgeon and the housekeeper to keep tabs on her. The kitchen has a bank of monitors on a counter. The surgeon’s bedroom has a large TV on which he can view a larger-than-life real-time image of his captive, staring at her sleeping form at night, much as one would regard a beautiful painting.

What’s going on here? Who is this woman? She wears a skin-colored bodysuit. She doesn’t say much. She seems to be accepting of her fate. Is she locked in of her own accord? What is her relationship to these people who are limiting her mobility, restricting her actions, and yet feeding her well, providing her books, clothes, and art supplies. Perhaps she’s being paid to test the surgeon’s new synthetic skin. When he goes away to a medical conference, he presents data on his new breakthrough. When pressed by a colleague to say what, exactly, this skin is being tested on, he’s coy. It’s animal testing, he insists.  

While the surgeon is away, the secluded house receives an unwanted visitor. It’s the season of Carnival. That’s why the housekeeper’s fugitive son (Roberto Álamo) can walk somewhat freely through the streets. He’s dressed in a gaudy tiger costume and insists his mother let him into the house. Bad idea. The psychopathic son spies the imprisoned patient on the screen, ties up his mother to a kitchen chair and heads upstairs to sexually assault the captive. “You aren’t my son!” his mother shouts at him. “I just birthed you!”

When the surgeon arrives at the home and sees what is going on, he fights the intruder off. After all this, I still haven’t arrived at the most shocking developments the film contains. This is mere prologue. The stage is set for further shocks. In the aftermath of this startling violence, the film unravels, flashing back through time to trace the traumas and the terror underlying the current situations. And that’s when things get really complicated. The film has a complex flashback structure that elegantly floats through time, revealing the full extent of the story’s horrors with a clinical series of emotional slices.

We learn the surgeon is mourning the deaths of his wife and his daughter. They died years apart, in separate tragedies that are revealed over the course of the film. He’s been left consumed by mourning and revenge, a cauldron of emotion held in check and funneled into a medicinal drive to control. Could this have something to do with the young man (Jan Cornet) who has gone missing from his home in a nearby town?

The surgeon’s methodical approach to his revenge never wavers, growing eerier with stillness and patient silence. Banderas delivers such a tightly controlled and nuanced performance that mimics Almodóvar’s relatively restrained stylistic approach here. This is a masterfully outlandish film with wild moments adorned with the director’s typically colorful, gorgeous mise-en-scène. Yet there’s such restraint here, a gorgeous exterior of patience that belies the total chaos beneath.

This isn’t a film of traditional thrills and jump scares. It’s the kind of insinuating horror that slips up under the skin and expands, slowly enveloping you with dread from the inside out. It’s a psychological horror film on the subject of identity. Who are you when everything you are on the outside has been taken away? To merely say that the film is creepy and disturbing and the main character is an unscrupulous plastic surgeon is to wrongly imply that the film is some kind of grotesquerie that lingers on bodily harm. No, though the film is fairly explicit, the grotesqueness of the film is solely on the plot level, the thematic implications a red-blooded, twisty destabilizing force inflicted upon the characters that pulls under the audience as well. The horror of the surgeon is his quiet madness. The horror of the patient is – as we learn – her quiet resilience. Banderas and Anaya have magnificent stares, rich soulful eyes that burn holes in the screen and in this film carry the weight of greater traumas than we can even begin to imagine. At times, I found myself squirming in sympathy with the pain on screen.

The film is a intense, stylish, slinky horror film of turbulent sexuality, violence, death, and identity. There’s a fluidity to the plot and the characters (and the magnificent score from Alberto Iglesias) that matches the lush style and creates a stirringly distressing unity of purpose. Like the best of Almodóvar, the film deals in doubles, in lies, in sexual secrets, in familial traumas, but here it feels fresh all over again. It’s a case of an auteur finding striking new ways to work through his favorite themes. I was carried up into the film’s style and, almost before I knew it, I was horrified and moved in equal measure. The final scene of the film is a knockout, a moment that takes the destabilizing twists of the movie’s melodrama and horror to their most moving conclusion. Yes, I found myself thinking then and several other times throughout, not only does Almodóvar go there, but he earns it.