Work Out: THE BUBBLE and RIEN À FOUTRE

Wasn’t it stupid to try to make a big movie during a pandemic? So says Judd Apatow’s The Bubble, a big Netflix movie made during the pandemic. Aside from that central uneasy irony, the whole thing’s a bust. It’s a long, loosely-structured would-be comedy with really only the animating anxious confusion of life during COVID and free-floating anger at a flailing studio system hanging the shambles together. The picture takes place in a palatial hotel in the English countryside in the pre-vaccine phase of our current crisis. How strange to see that time so far in the rearview already, and yet still we muddle on. Nonetheless, it forces the fictional studio in this movie, in the midst of mounting the $100 million-budgeted production of the too-chintzy-to-believe Cliff Beasts 6, to lock its cast and crew in an isolation bubble. There’s a lot of wincing goofiness at the top as the cast assembles in masks for temperature tests, nasal swabs, and a two-week quarantine. And then they’re off, with sequences alternating between broad goofs on Hollywood egos and studio politics in front or behind the scenes, and even broader chafing against the COVID protocols on the other.

There’s much silliness made out of clashing actors—pompous leading men (David Duchovny), mumbling self-serious thespians (Pedro Pascal), ditzy leading ladies (Leslie Mann), lifestyle-brand floggers (Keegan-Michael Key), flailing aged ingenues (Karen Gillan), and a social media star (Iris Apatow). That last one has to be the funniest, with Apatow’s younger daughter nailing the spacey cadence and passionless dancing of a zoned-out TikTok influencer. (That her manager mom is played by the equally zonked-out, wide-eyed Maria Bamford makes perfect sense, and made me wish the she was in the movie more than her fleeting appearance. Maybe the whole movie should’ve just been about them? Hey, still could do a spin-off, right?) There’s also Fred Armisen as an indie director failing in a franchise, Peter Serafinowicz as the harried producer, Kate McKinnon as the heartless executive, and a host of other bit roles filled out by interesting or amusing presences like Maria Bakalova, Rob Delaney, and Daisy Ridley. Much is made out of safety zones, face shields, and positive tests, but just as much tepid farce about cooped up celebrities and harried crew members falling into hook ups and drug use and so on. Any sense of life outside this bubble fades fast, leaving the wasn’t-that-a-time material stale and distant and empty.

Apatow is always at his best with character portraits—Knocked Up, Trainwreck, The King of Staten Island—and less adept at the problems of the rich—This is 40. Yet strangely he’s done a great look at showbiz loneliness before in his best film—Funny People. Maybe it helped that it was set in the world of comedy, from stand-ups to writers to movie stars. He understood how to communicate the loneliness of life in this kind of success, and the yearning for a big break from those on the lower rungs. Here, in The Bubble, there’s no such understanding of how these enormous spectacles are actually made—scenes in the green screen spaces or with special effects handlers are weird guesstimates, scenes of the movies-within-the-movie don’t even rise to the level of convincing satire. and there are few attempts to make the characters people instead of caricatures. That leaves the movie with empty farce that does nothing but remind you that there’s still a novel virus tearing through our world and an unfunny movie about the problems of a bunch of fake people in rarified circumstances isn’t making the comments it thinks it is.

That’s not to say it’d be too early to make fun of Hollywood excesses against the backdrop of a global pandemic that’s still killing thousands a day. But the movie’s too scattershot to land its punches with any verve, and the screenplay is so dramatically inert and tepidly shot that it’s two pretty flat hours that crawl by. Besides, the characters are so excruciatingly thinly drawn that there’s nowhere for it to go, anyway. When the leading lady has her hand shot off by an overzealous security guard, well, I guess that’s just par for the course. There’s no sense of escalation to the silliness, so by the time we get there, it’s just one more thing. I don’t doubt Apatow’s genuine dissatisfaction with the soulless Hollywood machinery churning out stupider product in the midst of a fraught time. However, the movie isn’t built to bolster that claim, instead finding at most mild amusement as his cast of personalities bounce off of each other, and then frittering away any attempt to add it all up. This manages to make Apatow’s movie simultaneously a howl of frustration and a whine of privilege. The extent to which the movie’s aware of that fact is dialed up and down seemingly at random. How frustrating. It asks: how dare a studio give these people a lot of money to make something this stupid at a time like this? Ditto.

A new streaming movie that’s actually about what it feels like to work for a living these days is Belgium’s small, well-observed flight attendant drama, Rien à foutre, which can be translated as Zero Fucks Given. With a title like that, and the copious stories lately about belligerent passengers refusing to, say, wear a mask to prevent the spread of disease, you’d think the movie would be a wild, vulgar affair. Going in I was thinking it’d be something like Pedro Almodovar’s deliriously fizzy airplane comedy I’m So Excited by way of Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging’s pandemic satire. But the movie is actually a sensitive little character study about a lost young woman, adrift in the air and on the ground alike as she tries to make do. It’s mostly a pre-pandemic story—though everyone’s in masks in the final scene, a bittersweet way of marking time, to be sure. Its consistent mood of now-what? is spot on.

The focus is simply on sketching the contours of one woman’s life, and finds no build to any false conflict or cheap revelations. No Sundance sentiment or workplace sitcom here. There’s something real and lived-in at the center of the picture. The flight attendant works for a budget airline and is lost to a grinding routine—airports, drinks, clubs, and one-night stands, dating apps and Instagram. She’s making enough money to get by, and she dreams of someday getting better routes to more glamorous destinations, even as she smiles and sells drinks and manages passengers and tries to hit her quotas. She’s not unambitious, but she’s uninterested or unable to achieve liftoff. Even when her supervisor essentially forces her to apply for a promotion, she’s a little put off. She’s happy the way she is. Or, maybe not happy, but it’s what she knows. Even the corporate hoops are mere inconvenience, until they’re not. There are moments where her face fills the frame as a smile passes subtly, slowly from genuine to fake, and you feel her world shift underneath her.

Credit star Adèle Exarchopoulos, then, for keeping the movie aloft. Though filmmakers Julie Lecoustre and Emmanuel Marre, working from a screenplay they wrote in collaborations with Mariette Désert, bring a ring of specificity to attendants’ shifts and downtime alike, it’s the lead who lifts it to the level of engaging throughout. Fittingly, they keep the camera in tight close-ups and medium shots on her expressive face and body language, precise and casual, beautiful and troubled. Exarchopoulos, who made such a memorable presence as a hungry teenager in the lesbian coming-of-age drama Blue is the Warmest Color nearly a decade ago, here again makes a compelling center of attention. She appears to be good at her job—she listens, she’s polite, she endures demands and insults with some grace. But she also drinks—sometimes too close to flights—and has no interest in maintaining relationships. Friendships are restricted to her co-workers and seem to last just the duration of any given stay. Romances are ordered up on apps for a few hours at a time. Eventually, she ends up back home with some family for a while, and we get some added insight into reasons why she feels particularly at a loss to move on. There’s real sadness there. But also love.

And it’s not like she’s only miserable, exactly. Here’s a movie that understands the complicated feelings many young people have today about their work and their seemingly stalled pathways forward. She seems to get pleasures from her lifestyle, and can like her job from time to time, but there’s also that indescribable sense that there’s no clear way to get more out of it, or to escape these cycles. Exarchopoulos, enlivening a quiet charisma sinking under a facade of pleasantries or a layer of sleepy depression, knits these details together into one convincing portrait. By the end, she feels like a real person we’ve gotten to know, and the movie’s lack of resolution or even easy ambiguity feels like we’ve just left her, she and we still wondering what’s next. In a time when employees are looking for work to give them not only meaning and money, but dignity, too, here’s a movie about a woman slowly realizing she’s worth more than they, or she, might think.

Haley's On It: HEARTS BEAT LOUD, ALL THE BRIGHT PLACES, and ALL TOGETHER NOW

Brett Haley films are nice. Not naive. Not simplistic. But kind and gentle in ways that demonstrate maturity and perspective. He’s a fine director of actors. He gets warm, humane performances that are generous, honest, and flushed with the charm of well-observed moments. Lately he’s had sitcom stars — Nick Offerman, Justina Machado, Keegan-Michael Key, Fred Armisen — and rising young thespians — Kiersey Clemons, Sasha Lane, Elle Fanning, Auli’i Cravalho — in the most tender, quiet, open-hearted, dewey-eyed star turns. They’re given the space to do the kind of deeply, casually felt character work in which these familiar faces don’t disappear into their roles, but inhabit them, drawing out a life by playing it uncomplicatedly and imbuing it with inner light. If these films—sweet YA adaptations, or just leaning into the tropes for structure’s sake—drift slightly into formula on the plot level, there’s something too honest about the performances to ring false. Like the acoustic indie pop all over the soundtracks, these films breathe with a feeling of comforting style, while textured enough to tease out rougher edges. These are the movies the post-Fault in their Stars teen dramas wanted to be, but so rarely were.

I first discovered his work with 2018’s Hearts Beat Loud, a story of a single father (Offerman) and his teenage daughter (Clemons) who bond over making music during her last summer before college. It sings with its simply dramatized scenes of characters’ connections, a give and take dynamic that’s pure and earnest, and builds with all the prickliness of these specific people. It builds to a moment of ecstatic musical release, and then a well-earned quiet, resigned, wistful denouement. The songs by Keegan DeWitt are wonderful, not too good that they’re unbelievable, but good enough to buy them as earning a small-scale local buzz. And the movie is low-key inhabited by a wise sense of parental perspective, willing to get caught up in a new project, but all-too aware of the looming empty nest. It’s a movie about conversations, softly played and sensitively staged, as characters try to bolster relationships. There are criss-crossing subplots made up of the characters' ensemble of friends and connections (this supplies a bounty of character actors in supporting roles), but the focus is so keenly on the leads and this one liminal moment in a perfectly aimless summer. It builds into a lovely little portrait of a space and moment in these people’s lives—a sense carried over into Haley’s two straight-to-Netflix films of 2020.

First up was All the Bright Places, a serious-minded teen relationship picture that finds a suicidal girl (Fanning) and a bipolar boy (Justice Smith) drawn into a tentative romance. They meet on the edge. And maybe, just maybe, they can pull each other back. Without steering into the gloopy sentiment—which could easily have turned the tricky subject matter dangerous—the movie posits the teens’ connection as both a saving grace, and a suspenseful pause. Fanning, especially, sells the carefully hidden raw-nerve of an image-conscious teen’s struggle to hide her anguish. The whole school knows her older sister died last year. It’s weird when it’s acknowledged outright, but weird to ignore it, too. Her parents (Luke Wilson and Kelli O’Hara) are only so much help. They’re grieving, too, after all. Maybe a sympathetic ear is all she needs. Yet the boy, too, needs more psychological help than a teen romance can provide. The movie is surface soft, but willing to touch the true discomfort of real adolescent trauma. And it’s willing to admit, in ways the John Green copycats weren’t always able, that True Teenage Love is not a syrupy panacea for whatever ailment is crafted into a narrative hook. It instead invests in conversations between teens, parents, teachers, and different combinations thereof, finding unexpected emotional honesty far more appealing than loud cliche.

Even better in that regard is All Together Now, in which there’s no teen romance to speak of. Our lead (Cravalho) simply has no time for that. She’s a hard-working high schooler with her heart set on a college application. She holds down multiple jobs and barely has time to say hello to her mother (Machado) before falling asleep. They’re barely making ends meet, so she has to contribute to the household income. Or rather, the fund for a household, since they are currently experiencing homelessness. Her mother is, luckily, a part-time school bus driver, so they can sneak into her empty one and catch a few hours of sleep each night before her early-morning shifts. This sort of quiet desperation, in which the girl is forced to slap on a happy face and stay busy-busy-busy because she wants to keep up appearances though she has nowhere to go, is charted as a quickly sketched process. We see the logic of her day, step by step. Here’s where she can casually borrow a shower, or part of a lunch. Here’s where she can stash her stuff for a few hours. Here’s where she can rest for a moment without gathering suspicion. It’s difficult enough being a high schooler, juggling friends, hobbies, jobs. Now add the emotional weight of her situation, the pins-and-needles precariousness of their plight. So when kind friends bolster her desire to audition for a performing arts college — what, you thought the star of Moana wouldn’t get a fine original song to perform here? — it’s nice, and we want her to succeed. But the movie isn’t about a pat happy ending. It finds moments of emotional catharsis, and a few big isn’t-it-pretty-to-think lucky breaks by the end, but leaves its final outcome tantalizingly open-ended. Its heart is in the painful connection between a struggling mother and daughter, whose tensions are based in poverty and constrained choices, whose words wound even and especially when love is at its toughest and most raw. Machado and Cavalho’s scenes together crackle with the immediacy of their present-tense crises while carrying unspoken years of baggage underneath every line. So even when a crusty old lady (Carol Burnett) lets her heart melt a smidgen or a drama teacher (Armisen) lends a kind hand or a friend offers a brief respite, there’s a sense that there’s no easy turnkey to solve this poor girl’s deepest dilemmas. It’s moving in what’s becoming the typical Haley way: drawing open emotional honesty out of stories lesser hands would’ve played for predictable surfaces and sentimentality.

Feels Like Taking Crazy Pills: ZOOLANDER 2

You have to be a smart filmmaker to make something so gloriously dumb. Fifteen years after directing, co-writing, and starring in Zoolander, a featherlight and endearingly silly cult comedy about a dim male model caught up in an assassination plot, Ben Stiller has revived his character for a sequel that’s bigger, louder, and dumber. It’s uneven and unnecessary, and takes some time to really get going. But it’s also an admirable sustained effort of Hollywood money and craftsmanship put towards utter nonsense. Absurd and unusual, Stiller strains the limits of the studio comedy for completely unsubstantial goofing around with a ridiculously good-looking and totally preposterous premise. Is it a good movie? That’s hard to say. It barely hangs together at times, overstuffed with story and unconcerned with anything but a wobbly weirdness. But who says it has to be any more than that?

The movie finds Zoolander retired, living, as he puts it, “as a hermit crab” in the remote wintry wilderness of northernmost New Jersey. We’re told in a blitz of fake news footage that shortly after the first movie his wife was killed and his son was taken away by child services. That’s awfully heavy backstory to ladle on such a frivolous film, especially paired with a strange sideways 9/11 reference. But then Billy Zane (playing himself) treks out to convince Zoolander to start modeling again and win back his son from the orphanage. This kicks off an overflowing movie that’s in addition concerned with Zoolander’s equally dim old rival Hansel (Owen Wilson), who has also been retired for over a decade, nursing anxiety over a facial scar and a complicated polyamorous romance with a dozen people, including surprising celebrities and a handful of random people (my favorite: a chimney sweep who lingers in the background of shots). He agrees to join Zoolander on the quest to be relevant in the modeling world once again.

Together they encounter a whole mess of plot. There are professional frustrations with a hotshot hipster designer (Kyle Mooney, hilariously affecting dopey mispronunciations and fumbling confidence), a conniving Italian fashion mogul (Kristen Wiig, wearing Lady Gaga gowns and adding three extra syllables to every word), a suspicious orphanage manager (Justin Theroux, with a powdered George Washington wig slapped on top of dreadlocks), and the looming threat of old villain Mugatu (Will Ferrell, deliriously and wildly campy). There’s also an Interpol agent (Penélope Cruz) investigating the mysterious murders of several pop stars (including Justin Bieber, in a cameo that’s 90% stunt double which serves as the film’s violent cold open) and a search for the Fountain of Youth. There’s a lot going on. The movie feeds exaggerated excesses of the fashion industry into a glossy spy movie’s extremes, inane ornate designs mixed with thundering score, concussive transitions, and a hurtling tangle of conspiracies.

A key early mistake is assuming we care about Zoolander and Hansel as characters, but by the time the plot’s spinning on its crazy way, the movie itself has forgotten that it ever even feinted towards taking any emotional underpinning at anything close to face value. Even as the subplot involving the long-lost son becomes the best part, Stiller knows this is all totally unserious, an elaborate goof. He, with co-writers Theroux, Nicholas Stoller, and John Hamburg, create a reason to stuff the film chockablock with innuendos, misunderstandings, malapropisms, sight gags, cameos, baroquely offbeat production design, wackadoodle characterizations, and more than a few baffling decisions (like making Fred Armisen play a freakish, mostly CGI 11-year-old for one scene). Cinematographer Dan Mindel (of The Force Awakens and other fantastical action films) gives it all a shiny thriller gloss and bright comedy sheen, playing up every absurd detail with a grainy poker face.

Stiller simply lets the unexpected striking nonsense flow. There’s a scene late in the picture where a boy is locked in a clown-themed dungeon with a giant plastic pig face on the wall drizzling lard out of its snout. Elsewhere a car flips over a dozen more times than you’d expect. A former swimsuit model explains she became a secret agent because her large breasts prevented her from graduating to runway work. A ghost serenely explains that she doesn’t care about anything anymore, because she’s dead. A long-secret connection between male models and rock stars is revealed by a music legend who patiently says they’re only separated by two genes (talent and intelligence). Not every joke lands. (An extended bit with Benedict Cumberbatch as a gender fluid model is cringe-worthy.) But with a movie this densely dizzy with oddball ideas loosely held together by a flimsy plot, it’s a pleasure just to be along for the ride. I had a big dumb grin while waiting to see what insubstantial surprise silliness was around the next corner.