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. 

Prodigal Daughter: FOUR GOOD DAYS

Remember Beautiful Boy? It was an under-seen tough-minded little drama from a few years ago that followed a loving father (Steve Carell) trying to stay supportive of a son (Timothée Chalamet) caught in cycles of using drugs. It fell under the radar, perhaps because it didn’t offer easy answers, and writer-director Felix van Groeningen was totally committed to the repetitive boom-bust of getting clean and then relapsing. The movie made it clear that even a great parent will grow weary from the feelings of betrayal when working with a child to kick a destructive habit, only to watch it all disappear sooner or later with the next high, and whatever calamitous route he takes to get there. That’s a good movie, tough but fair, and attuned to the ways in which having a child in the throes of addiction can be something like living with an open wound. How devastating to find the surprise appearance of a prodigal offspring on your door raises justifiable suspicions that can overtake the unconditional love that always remains. It’s an uneasy truth, and doesn’t make for an easily digestible narrative structure, but it’s real and it hurts.

I say all this simply to point to a new drama in a similar vein. Four Good Days is a mother-daughter story, but follows a similar pattern. Unlike the earlier movie, though, it leans into a broadness of message and hits its beats with a heavy hand. We can always feel the push of writer-director Rodrigo García goosing the emotion with all his weight against the film’s rudder. It stars Glenn Close as a woman who is basically ready to give up on her grown daughter, Mila Kunis. The young woman, we quickly come to understand, has been through the cycles of recovery and relapse many times before, with bad decisions and worse outcomes for her personal life. She’s a wreck. When she knocks on the door, Close, and her husband Stephen Root, barely want to answer it. Close does good work playing a woman who doesn’t know if she can have this relationship go on poking at the psychological wound that would consume them both if they let it. That she can communicate this through thick makeup effects that make her look like a distant relative of Albert Nobbs is further proof she’s a fine actress. Kunis, for her part, has the stringy hair and missing teeth applied just so, a de-glammed work that’s committed, if not always convincing. Together, though, the women raise the potentially (and sometimes actually) cliched to something approaching genuine.

The movie has a thinness of look, and flatness of image — a plasticky digital wanness that makes it look just a step up from a made-for-basic-cable message movie — but is circling the same ideas that made Beautiful Boy so good. Here’s what feels an unwindable situation, as Close is determined to keep her daughter clean for just four good days in order to make her eligible for yet another program. The women have several obvious speeches in a variety of settings, and some harrowing complications along the way, hammering home this obvious point: no matter what an addict does, they are still human. And when you aren’t sure how to go on in a situation that feels so hopeless, somehow, as the new Diane Warren ballad sung by Reba over the end credits says, you do. The sentiment has an undeniable worthiness, and the performances are just real enough to inhabit it. I caught up with the movie the same day I read an article in The New York Times reporting 2020 saw a 30% increase in deaths by drug overdose. How sobering. These movies are speaking to something with which millions of Americans struggle. I’m sure we haven’t seen the last ones attempting to grapple with the implications.

Galaxy Quest: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

Though hardly finished with earthbound heroes like Captain America and Iron Man (and Thor, whose realm is Earth-adjacent), Marvel has opened up a new wing of worldbuilding far removed, in distance anyway, from the cinematic Avengers space we’ve come to know. Trading in superhero tropes for standard space opera stuff (you’ve seen bits and pieces in Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape), Guardians of the Galaxy finds a ragtag group of intergalactic misfits who spend the runtime gradually learning to work together and earn the moniker of the title. It’s often fun, but it also proves Marvel Studios is happy making good movies, but has little interest in making great ones. They’re too homogenous for that. This one goes to the other end of the universe and finds on its variety of alien worlds a plot that moves and sounds much like any other movie in their roster. It has brightly proficient images, appealing goofiness, and personality that disappears once the obligatory CGI chaos takes over.

In typical Marvel Studios fashion, the characters are intriguing and well cast, then swallowed up once routine effects explode and collide around them for far too long. Before then, though, it’s charming to meet a dopey space pirate (Chris Pratt), a likable underdog as the rare human in these distant parts, having been abducted by aliens as a child. He’s after an orb that’ll get him big bucks. Too bad that a rogue green warrior princess (Zoe Saldana) wants the orb as well, and a pair of bounty hunters – a talking raccoon (Bradley Cooper) with anger issues and a sentient tree (Vin Diesel) with only three words to his vocabulary – are after him. They all get thrown in a maximum-security space jail where they meet a hilariously literal red-and-grey brute (Dave Bautista) who joins them when they soon escape in order to keep the movie moving.

They are a likable ensemble working sarcastic asides and zippy punchlines for all they are worth. The group gets drawn into the cosmic MacGuffin chase for the orb, a haphazardly formed team of mercenaries caught between the galactic government and blue-skinned baddies bent on smashing solar systems or something. I don’t know what the villains are up to, other than growling at each other and trying to blow up anyone who gets near them. Good thing the heroes set about making things right through the usual clamor. If you think the strife and conflict won’t make reluctant allies fast friends, you’ve never seen a Marvel movie. At least director and co-writer James Gunn and screenwriter Nicole Perlman seem aware of the best aspects of these things: the odd asides and strange half-campiness in the margins. For a while, Guardians is built almost entirely out of them.

This is a movie that contains humanlike aliens in every primary color, robot prison guards, a deadly glowing purple stone, a whistle-powered arrow, and a deep space mining colony built in the enormous skull of a long-dead cosmic being. It also has a collection of character actors (from Benicio Del Toro to Michael Rooker, Glenn Close to John C. Reilly, Djimon Hounsou to Lee Pace) putting on funny wigs and funnier accents. Aliens tend to speak in British accents – years of genre fare taught us that – but this movie adds backwoods roughneck drawls, airy Euro lilts, and one that sounds exactly like a pleasant, amiable John C. Reilly. Wigs, on the other hand, come in pompadours, elaborate braids, and beautiful baldness. It’s a treat for fans of scenes dense with sci-fi bric-a-brac and actors swanning around having a fun time being there.

And so, with a solid cast and decent goofy sci-fi appeal, the movie gets by on charm and mood, with a relaxed approach to escalating tension by contrasting it with the ensemble’s prickly group dynamics, snappy banter, and appealing personalities. Smart aleck dorkiness sits next to obliviousness of an alien kind. It’s cute. The raccoon gets a little annoying – mostly for the pinched voice Cooper’s attempting – but the Guardians of the Galaxy are charmers. If all the film is intended to do is put out good vibes – an oldies soundtrack played off a literal mixtape doesn’t hurt – and introduce characters for a new franchise, it gets the job done in the standard slick, bland Marvel house style. It’s new sights and fresh faces shot, edited, and mixed like what we’ve seen before. Gunn brings to it his typical queasy mix of tone as displayed in his horror movie Slither and awful dark vigilante comedy Super. He wants us to think Guardians is both serious and silly, with chaste plotting dusted with out-of-place vulgarity, with bloodless bloodshed both joke and hurt. A rough fit, but it’s got a good beat, a bright look, and is still of a tonal piece with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The brain trust couldn’t cook up a fresh storytelling approach to go with its new locales, feeling the need to hit the standard plot beats. It’s a weird concept told in a totally conventional way. You could set your watch by the time the false climaxes, periods of doubt, determined scheming, and tearful emotional conclusions will appear. Then it all culminates in the same old endless rounds of weightless carnage and staggering body count that’s sadly expected and hard to take. The charm and knowingly goofy demeanor disappears as the movie glazes over and goes through the motions with a sense of “this is how we end these” instead of “here’s a natural conclusion to this story.” So here are hordes of anonymous figures slaughtered. Here's a one-on-one fight with the villain that goes on and on and on. Now here’s a ginormous spaceship leveling a metropolitan area. Again. Like last summer. And the summer before that. Marvel is consistent, churning out product with fun diverting detail that disappears once the fireworks start firing. It gets the job done, and I liked it more than not, but it wore me out.