The Pope-ular Vote: CONCLAVE

Conclave has the soul of a paperback thriller in the trappings of a prestige drama. Now there’s a fun mix. It reminded me of the days in which you could see a John Grisham book turned into a Francis Ford Coppola movie, or a Tom Clancy turned into a John McTiernan, and so on. It’s a welcome throwback to when pulpy mass market bestsellers were regularly given glossy production design and an excellent ensemble cast when sent to the big screen. How better to accentuate the compelling page-turning reveals dropping with regularity at the end of each chapter? Shine them up with the best craftsmanship Hollywood can offer, elevating the airport thriller into something of a reliable cinematic treat. It’s all smooth surfaces and gripping suspense. (And so much better than today’s usual fate for such fare: televised bloat.) So it is here with Conclave, in which Robert Harris’ book becomes a film of fine pleasures and genuine surprise that moves quickly and satisfactorily through a maze of character actors in a knotty plot of twists and turns. It’s set almost exclusively in the sequestered vote for a replacement to a freshly deceased Pope. The movie has a fine, clinical sense of procedure and process as the Cardinals gather in backrooms, angling for power and agitating for votes. This sets a sturdy structure for an engaging drama. The Conclave is overseen by a doubt-wracked dean (Ralph Fiennes), who just might crack under the pressure as he investigates the best path forward. Among the passive aggressive group are the likes of Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Brian F. O’Byrne, as well as Sergio Castellitto and Lucian Msamati and a hundred more background figures, including some nuns led by Isabella Rossellini who flutter in the margins. From the leads to the extras, they’re a group with great faces and voices, and they stalk the frames with authority, circling each other as they fall into various factions.

The film moves with steady deliberation and a good feeling for subtle details in broad strokes. The ensemble of Cardinals has great shorthand gestures and fleeting expressions that speak volumes about their leadership styles and religious disputes. The small character touches are also telling, like a man most stringent about a return to the old ways whom one can spy vaping in some scenes. In the Conclave are the hard-liners like him who want to take Catholicism back to the days before Vatican II, or maybe the Counter-Reformation. Then there are the more liberal officials, who want to continue opening up the faith for a more open-minded and loving expression of the Gospel. And then there are those who’d just love to get the Papal power for the prestige, the wealth, or maybe the impunity. Or at least they’d like to align themselves with the one who’ll take the job. Enrobed in their red cloaks and ensconced behind locked doors, the situation grows tense with suspicions and secrets as they press on through rounds of voting. It’s a devilishly good place for drama—and if you’ve seen Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope or Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, you know it’s a pretty reliable one, too. Here director Edward Berger, whose All Quiet on the Western Front was a similarly austere (if less successful) experience, uses a fine eye for luxurious Vatican architecture and well-pressed vestments to emphasize the enormity and import and symbolic messaging of the men’s task. He uses a stinging score to keep the suspense strung tautly beneath their snappy exchanges. He finds pleasingly obvious imagery to accentuate his clear thematic ambitions. And he lets his actors dig into their high drama borne out of a conflict between their theology and their ambition. They’re angling toward crises of faith—in the church, if not in God—as secrets are spilled, prejudices aired, and individuals’ Papal dreams are spoiled. Must we forgive them? They know what they do.

In or Out: CLOSET MONSTER

Oscar witnessed a brutal assault when he was a child. A teen was attacked by a group of bullies behind the elementary school. The local news called it a hate crime. When he asked his father why it happened, his old man replied, “He was gay.” As that information sank into the boy’s malleable brain, still reeling with shock over seeing such violence first-hand and not entirely sure what “gay” even means, his father leaned over and tousled his shaggy blonde locks, saying that’s why he should get a haircut. This cements gayness as a danger in his young mind, as something for which you can be targeted. It’s coded and confusing. The times may be a-changing, but curious people wrestling with their sexuality can still too often feel shame, self-loathing, and denial. By the time Closet Monster catches up with Oscar as a high-school senior (Connor Jessup, fresh from a heartbreaking performance on American Crime; he was a troubled teen wrestling with identity there, too), the baggage of his early understanding of what it means to be gay hangs heavily on his burgeoning same-sex attractions.

Here’s a sensitive movie closely attuned to its central character’s predicament, using notes of whimsy – some dark, others light – to animate his internal conflict. He’s an inexperienced and curious young man, artistic, loyal to his best friend (Sofia Banzhaf), bitter about his parent’s nasty divorce, cramped in his small hometown, desperate to get into a cinema makeup program in a New York City college. When he sees a new co-worker (Aliocha Schneider) at his minimum wage hardware store job, he can’t help but notice the young man’s strong jaw line, curly hair, French-Canadian accent, toned arms, strong back, slim waist. The camera cuts to these features as they catch Oscar’s eye. The film feels the attraction, and as Oscar takes it in there’s a roiling in his gut. We hear burbling on the soundtrack as he’s hit by attraction so strong it feels like a body horror eruption, growling and moving under his skin. These are no mere butterflies in the stomach. Oscar feels this curiosity, this heat, as something sudden, unexpected, and painful. He can barely admit to himself that when he sees this young man, he wants to impress, wants to hang out with, and wants to touch him.

When he gets home, his hamster (who speaks to him, and only him, in the voice of Isabella Rossellini) says, “You’re in love.” He denies it. But he certainly won’t resist, as the new co-worker becomes something like a friend. It’s hard to say if this guy is exceptionally flirtatious or just vaguely European, but it’s easy to see Oscar’s happy to spend time with his crush, even if it means ignoring his other friend, or raising the suspicions of his homophobic father (Aaron Abrams, as a sometimes-loving father increasingly a slave to his own problems). He feels so alone in his feelings – isolated from his parents even as he moves between their houses; unable to share his curiosities about sexuality with even his oldest friend; stuck working a job he doesn’t like while waiting and hoping he’ll hear back from the college to which he’s applied – he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s confused, questioning. It’d be easy to say he’s closeted, but that’s not quite the case. He doesn’t even know what he is. He needs time to think, space to explore, permission to find himself. And until he get it, his emotions are going to continue feeling like they’re eating him alive from the inside out.

It’s not quite a horror movie, even as writer-director Stephen Dunn digs into some shocking images as part of his approach. The hate crime in the beginning involves a metal rod, which later appears in a nightmarish hallucination protruding from Oscar’s pants. Even later, at a costume party he’s attending despite his father’s protestations, Oscar vomits, and it looks to him like he’s spitting up bloody screws into the sink. The movie visualizes the boy’s pain on a visceral level with these touches. Although its magical realism can quiver with angst and violence it tends more to manifest in subtle ways, like a rejection letter turning every word on screen – in a note, on a sign, on the walls – into “unfortunately,” and, of course, the talking hamster who is his only respite from deep soul-churning loneliness. Dunn, in a most impressive feature debut, makes the film a dreamy, hazy, deeply empathetic character study, a throbbing, pulsing soundtrack and beautifully grainy cinematography sticking closely to Oscar’s mood. The film’s surrealistic touches aren’t a distraction, but amplification, a dramatic outward bursting of conflict that largely exists burrowing deeper and darker inside him, ready to eventually explode.

Jessup, so good at projecting a deep unspoken yearning mixed with shy determination to avoid disappointment even as he’s frustrated by his limitations, finds great poignancy in his struggle. Oscar is quiet, unsure, struggling to realize his full potential in the usual coming-of-age manner, asking the basic 18-year-old’s questions. Who am I? Who will I be? What do I want? But the context – sexual confusion, social awkwardness, repression, and internalized homophobia – is so tender and so raw, heightening his sense of turmoil. This is a film that understands that these questions are intense, and the adolescent mind interprets every variable through a complicated and dramatic lens. Dunn is smart to keep the movie small, to not reach too far for grander import or flashier melodrama. It’s a movie about wanting a kiss, arguing with a parent, deciding where to go to college, and arriving at a place where you can let go of past trauma. It’s about the monsters you find in your own mind when trying to hide your truth, especially if you’re hiding from yourself.

Smell of Success: JOY

Joy is an inventive young woman with her dreams on hold, a real George Bailey with no angel coming to her rescue. She’s single-handedly holding her family together at the expense of her own ambitions. She wants to make useful things, objects that’ll be admired and owned by everyone, but in reality she’s stuck in a dead-end minimum wage job, having skipped college to help her parents. They’re all just barely getting by. But, when inspiration strikes, she scrapes together her courage and resources to build a prototype of a self-wringing mop. (It’s also machine washable, a nice feature.) This Miracle Mop could be her ticket to success. A capitalist parable as feminist empowerment, David O. Russell’s Joy, loosely based on the real mop’s inventor, is the sort of story we’re used to seeing men enact. Take Citizen Kane, or The Godfather, or countless other canonical classics of business acumen and its costs. But here the narrative is a woman’s, a perspective that’s long existed in this area, but gone woefully underrepresented in movies like this.

We meet Joy through the eyes of her grandmother (Diane Ladd), a kind and encouraging woman who tells her little granddaughter that she’ll do great things with her life. Ladd narrates the film, giving it a slightly unreal glow, like a heartfelt business biography picture book read with grandmotherly warmth. By the time Joy is a young woman (played by Jennifer Lawrence), she’s trying to run a sprawling, eccentric household with meager emotional and financial support. Her mother (Virginia Madsen) is a soap opera addict who stays in bed all day. Her father (Robert De Niro), a small-business owner long divorced from her mom, was kicked out of his latest wife’s place and moved into the family’s basement. That’s also where Joy’s ex-husband (Édgar Ramírez) lives, unable to afford his own house on a mostly-unemployed lounge singer’s income. They have two young kids who are caught up in this harried maelstrom of chaotic family life, including a condescending step-aunt (Elisabeth Rohm) who offers criticisms but little help.

Lawrence’s commanding performance – her best grown-up role yet – is driven with determination. In the opening scenes of family drama she’s harried, rushing around trying to fix everyone else’s problems – from cleaning up spills and planning kids’ days to ripping up floorboards and working on the plumbing – while trying to make ends meet. Once she decides to try to bring her invention to market, she ignites her frazzled energy into swaggering determination, albeit still cut through with self-doubt and ever-present financial and familial pressures. She’s too motivated to quit, gambling on her skills and talents. As a result, she’ll either end up wealthy or bankrupt. There’s not much room for middle ground in this endeavor. The film is an intimate American epic of domestic chambers and boardrooms, factory floors and TV soundstages, as she tries to get her mop manufactured and selling. Failure is definitely an option, and Lawrence brings a great energy, halfway between self-confidence and nagging doubts, as she strides into difficult situations.

The entrepreneur’s dream is not an easy one. She’s just as likely to be ground under by others who don’t share her vision, or who view her as an easy target. Joy’s story may come from the Shark Tank business school, or Horatio Alger stories, but her lean in isn’t uncomplicated. Russell, working from a script by Annie Mumolo (Bridesmaids), creates a film keenly aware of the razor’s edge, the stomach-dropping plunges into debt as Joy struggles to get taken seriously, gain recognition, avoid getting taken advantage of, and realize her product’s potential. (That Russell fought Mumolo for writing credit on such a story is a sad irony.) Joy finds her family a doubting chorus, and everyone in the business world trying to be a bigger success, a more glamorous person, thinking they can get there through hard work and delusion. A buyer (Bradley Cooper) sees himself as a studio mogul. A wealthy widow (Isabella Rossellini) thinks her inheritance is a measure of her business savvy. Money is essential, but getting it is not a panacea.

Intermingling paperwork, finances, factories, and salespeople with family squabbles and pains, Russell stages scenes with a variety of moving plot parts and competing characters’ motivations in close-quarters drama played at comedy speed. Russell specializes in ragged and heightened amusing melodramas about squabbling families (Flirting with Disaster, Silver Linings Playbook, The Fighter). Unlike his last film, the pretty, but fundamentally phony American Hustle, he keeps Joy’s comic and dramatic incidents spinning through a variety of tempos and film stocks, making its inconsistency its consistency, animating Joy’s sense of hard-charging ambition and precarious insecurities. Intensely felt with a booming soundtrack of unexpected needle-drops and smooth, emphatic camera movements (director of photography Linus Sandgren dancing amongst the lively cast), the unusually unstructured story (a conventional three-act structure told with a loose rambling quality) pushes forward with relentless momentum. I was invested in its medley of tones and terrifically sympathetic hero from her first frame.

Tidily untidy on the surface – with theatrical flourishes, elaborate visual metaphors, dream sequences, flashbacks, cameos, and even a musical number – Joy takes, well, joy in broad characters and boisterous performances, showy filmmaking and layered writing. I found it gripping and moving, an involving business story smashed up against an affecting family drama, peppered with lovely touches – a warm voice from beyond the grave, an exquisite Christmassy sales call montage, a low-key mother/daughter bond over crayons and blueprints, and a dance of fake snow flurries accompanying a strut towards victory intercut with a melancholy flash-forward. It captures the real and unreal aspects of self-mythology, the inherent falseness of singular up-from-bootstraps triumph, and the odd flukes that lead to both setbacks and success.

Joy emerges as a great character, an exhausted woman always with a stain on her blouse from helping others, who decides to become something more, slowly coming alive and into her own in the spotlight. The movie surrounds her with endlessly entertaining complications, and great actors (each a total delight) wonderfully filling in their characters’ eccentricities and peculiarities. Funny and moving, exciting and sad, it sees the promise and artifice of the American dream, and the fortuitous incongruities (like a shopping network in the middle of Amish country) that can lead to accomplishment. It simultaneously celebrates her hard-working attempt to turn her great idea into a big business, and also realizes money won’t fix her family’s problems.

His Own Worst ENEMY

Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a troubled college professor. We don’t know the source of his anxiety, but he enters Enemy distracted and a little jumpy, his hair slightly mussed, his posture defensive and slouched. He’s on edge, ignoring calls from his mother and behaving inattentive in his encounters with his girlfriend (Mélanie Laurent). Life doesn’t get any easier for him when he spots an extra in the background of a movie he happens to watch one night. He rewinds and pauses. The extra looks exactly like him. Rattled, he googles his way to the extra’s headshot. Why, he’s identical. Adam calls the actor. They have the same voice. Adam stalks the man until finally he sees him. The actor’s name is Anthony (Jake Gyllenhaal). He’s kind of freaked out about their doppelganger status, too. His wife (Sarah Gadon) suspected him of having an affair, but this is a whole lot weirder.

It’s never clear why the two men are so disturbed. They behave immediately as if they’re in a thriller, skulking about, looking over their shoulders, nervously circling each other. At one point they decide to meet up in a hotel and for a brief moment I wondered if the movie would be about the perils and attractions of dating your doppelganger. No such luck. Apparently Adam and Anthony have seen Arnold Schwarzenegger in The 6th Day or, even better, Tatiana Maslany’s great work on the TV series Orphan Black. The point is, there are plenty of reasons to suspect nefarious somethings are afoot when you’re confronted with your exact duplicate, down to the same scars. There’s some unidentifiable connection there that’s so painfully obvious on a visual level. It remains unanswered, a mystery to them and to us as they slowly freak out while spying on each other. Each even covets the other’s significant other. Both women are similarly proportioned blondes, so I guess the men’s tastes are duplicated as well.

It’s all so very creepy for sure, and the film takes on a nervous, fuzzy vibe that moves lugubriously through waking nightmare territory as reality bends around these men and their mental states. We’re talking full on nervous breakdown, the kind where you hallucinate a naked woman with the head of a spider walking on your ceiling. There’s some undiluted nightmare fuel here. The final sequence, with a sudden shift in the boundaries of all we think we know about the world of the film represented by one very wrong thing is an especially great shock. The film has jolts of imagery that in their suddenness and eerie calm recall the terrifying person stepping out from behind the dumpster in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a far superior film involving doubles and disintegrating reality. Enemy doesn’t go far enough. It kicks up so much unease that’s it’s hard to ignore, but remains so straight-faced and dull that I found myself cherishing it’s surreal interjections all the more for their infrequency.

Director and co-writer Denis Villeneuve (loosely adapting a José Saramago novel with the help of screenwriter Javier Gullón) worked with Gyllenhaal in last year’s Prisoners, a solid dread-soaked missing-child mystery. Enemy has some of the same sustained intensity of tone, but often seems to miss how funny it plays. The Gyllenhaals glower at each other, alternately intrigued and terrified, jealous and repulsed by each other. It’s never clear why they feel the way they feel, their more intense outbursts cause for suppressed snickers, at least from where I was sitting. Only a cameo by Isabella Rossellini, as one of their mothers, seems to have a sense of humor, and even then it’s only funny in the way she appears to puncture the film’s self-serious pulpiness. He explains the doppelganger predicament and she calmly waves off his concerns with a stop-being-so-silly shrug. Maybe this overburdened germ of a good idea would’ve played a bit better with a stronger pair of performances from the lead. Gyllenhaal is a fine actor, but here gives a one-and-a-half note performance stretched across two characters, like a blanket that’s just short enough to leave a limb hanging out no matter which way you contort yourself.

The experience of watching Enemy is not unlike stumbling across a yellowed used paperback with a great cover and a fun hook in the blurb on the back, then actually reading it and discovering a slow slog of motifs and incidents, wrapped up in sensational luridness that’s too little and too rare. Repeated spider imagery runs throughout, from the spider-face woman to a dream of a monstrous arachnid floating over the city and the opening context-free scene of men watching a stripper methodically crush a tarantula under her high-heels. This underlines the ickiness of it all, but doesn’t seem to come to much beyond conflating spiders with women in a way so half-formed it’s neither potent nor offensive. As I left the theater, I overheard an elderly couple solemnly discussing their bafflement. “Seems to me,” the man told his wife, “if you figure out those spiders, you’ve figured the whole thing.”