Out of Service: THE MENU and TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

In this new Gilded Age, the rich are a fat, juicy target for any satirist. But in fact, the obscenely wealthy hoovering up our resources and headlines are often far more ridiculous than any satirist could invent. It doesn’t take a political cartoonist to balloon their buffoonery; they’re already doing that on their own. Still, it leaves plenty of room for an astute storyteller to put them before us anew and bite with sharp portraiture to draw bitter laughs. That’s the project of The Menu and Triangle of Sadness, two complementary, and similarly half-successful, movies that take service industry jobs as their window into the one-percenters’ transactional heartlessness that’s at the core of so many societal ills. The willingness to diminish a person to their job is a hop, skip, and a jump from not seeing their humanity at all.

Revenge is the dish served in The Menu, in which a high-level chef (Ralph Fiennes) has invited a collection of horrible people to dinner. Each course ramps up the tension as his cultish cooks and servers twist the knife—sometimes literally—by slowly revealing that 1.) the guests are trapped in the restaurant, and 2.) each tiny, artsy, deconstructed course is designed to steadily reveal ever more of their personal foibles and secrets. There’s a smorgasbord of character actors (Janet McTeer! John Leguizamo! Reed Birney! Judith Light! Nicholas Hoult! And more!) for the ensemble as crooked tech bros, apathetic blue bloods, a snooty food critic and her editor, a washed up actor and his embezzling assistant, and a misogynistic foodie realize they’re being led to a slaughter. The one innocent (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a hired date of one of the diners. So at least there’s one person for whom to wish survival. The characters are all thinly sketched, leaning on our prejudices for implied critiques, and that puts a cap on the sick pleasures it could offer.

There’s a lack of specificity in its energy, and its understandings of its characters. It’s like they know they’re posing for a fiction. The chef himself is an unfair Gordon Ramsey riff, what with his employees shouting “Yes, chef!” upon every command as they run around a kitchen and dining area that looks like a cross between Hell’s Kitchen and Masterchef sets. But it’s never clear what his grievance is, other than, as he says late in the picture, that his guests are the kind of people ruining the art of food. The result is a satire that’s pretty clever line to line—one of the screenwriters comes from the world of Late Night talk shows—and works well enough scene by scene. But it doesn’t really add up to much, with a visual style and pace that’s as smoothly stereotypical as its characters. The movie’s ultimately too pleased with its glibness to dig in and mean something of any consequence. I’ve seen lesser Saw sequels with a better sense of social commentary. Shame this one’s so undercooked.

Triangle of Sadness gets off to a better start because writer-director Ruben Östlund knows how to spin up types and let them crackle with specificities. That’s what makes his best film, Force Majeure, so bleakly funny with its story of a vacationing family’s tensions after a mishap at a ski resort reveals way more about deep character flaws than anyone could’ve anticipated. His The Square does a similar thing with incidents set in a hollowed-out, corporatized, faux-transgressive art world. Sadness has a male model (Harris Dickinson) and his influencer girlfriend (Charlbi Dean) bickering over money before they arrive at a luxury yacht. The middle portion of the movie is dedicated to sharply needling vignettes in which they, or the other insanely privileged, preposterously selfish guests aboard the cruise, are blind to the needs of workers around them. Meanwhile, the smarmy customer service mangers wrangle and cajole their underlings to plaster on those fake smiles and never say “no.” All of these scenes are as precisely observed as they are darkly amusing. By the time Woody Harrelson exits his cabin as the alcoholic leftist captain, the movie’s setting up some pretty obvious ideological collisions, especially as he starts trading Communist critiques with a crooked Russian capitalist’s Thatcherite babbling.

There’s always a sleek intentionality to Östlund’s images, and a stately chill that lets the squirming satire scrambling within them twist all the more uncomfortably. That works right up until it doesn’t in this case. The movie builds up a healthy head of steam on its outrage over inequality. That bursts on a turbulent night that sends these rich folk tumbling through vomit and sewage. That’s a pretty hilarious as a fit of scatological schadenfreude. But it’s the film’s endless final third that slowly unravels anything potent about the early going. Set post-shipwreck on a small tropical island, it thins out its class critiques with a reductive tromping through human nature as a struggle to survive. This doesn’t level the playing field, but reverses it in a reductive, and vaguely condescending way. The result is basically a less astute Lord of the Flies with assholes. And then it concludes—or really just peters out—with a limp joke and some inscrutable ambiguity. That’s the sort of ending that not only is unsatisfying in the moment, but retroactively makes the early going feel weaker, too. It misses the mark.

The False in Their Stars: ME BEFORE YOU

Me Before You is a polished Hollywood tearjerker, a romantic drama ready to load up the sentimentality necessary to manipulate every last drop from its audience’s eyes. What it doesn’t have is the touch of grit needed to sell its pain. This British romantic drama is smooth and warm, the sort of sturdy, composed, and cautious studio effort that’s a tad too reserved to get the job done, but awfully pleasant as it goes. The movie, adapted by Jojo Moyes from her novel of the same name, is about Lou (Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke), a young woman who desperately needs a job to take care of her poor family. Her dad’s out of work and her older sister is a single mother trying to go back to school. They’re in bad financial shape. So it’s a good thing a job placement service gets her connected with a local rich couple (Janet McTeer and Charles Dance) looking for a caretaker for their son, Will (Hunger Games’ Sam Claflin), who was an active young gent before he was paralyzed in an accident two years prior.

Calling it a romantic drama tips its hand. It is a movie where the characters can’t see what the audience can plainly tell. It’s obvious where the whole thing’s headed. The result is just waiting around for the people involved to catch up and realize what genre they’re playing in: the doomed romance with a medical bent, like Love Story and The Fault in Our Stars before it. At first Will, depressed and unhappily resigned to his quadriplegic status, is prickly and unhappy about his latest caretaker. His home health aide (Stephen Peacocke) is to take care of the bathing and changing. It’s Lou’s job to simply keep him company and make sure he gets regular activity and medication. She’s plucky enough and charming enough that eventually, despite his best efforts, he doesn’t mind having her around. The brewing affection between the two of them is inevitable, but still touching. A great deal of the appeal rests with Emilia Clarke, who plays sweet and adorable, crinkling her face, wearing primary colors and floral patterns, putting on a chipper smile day after day. She’s clearly the ray of sunshine his gloomy outlook needs.

From cautious, tentative friendship to full on flirtation, the relationship becomes meaningful for both. Interestingly, it never quite becomes as romantic as you might suspect, as Will keeps Lou at a slight distance even when they’re at their closest. He feels inadequate, still mourning his mobility, feeling trapped because he can’t move anything below his neck. This has the unfortunate side effect of allowing the movie to treat a person with disabilities as if he’s a diminished person. Some characters ask if he’ll be getting back to work, but he’ll hear none of it. He’s simply too frustrated. No matter how happy being around Lou makes him, it won’t make up for his traumatic injuries. It allows his disability and his depression to become one, and incurable, as if it’s inherently a fate worse than death, while turning him into only an object by which her story of self-empowerment is enabled. Even in its loveliest moments – a spin on the dance floor, she in his lap while the camera is locked on the side of the wheelchair – it doesn’t stop bumping up against what it falsely perceives as limits to his ability to have a “normal” life.

The movie is also hopelessly dreamy about their connection. It asks an audience to appreciate how much better he is when she’s around, and how angry he is about not being who he used to be, while completely eliding some facts of his condition. It’s all too stiff upper lip, with suffering spoken of, but not seen. Coy cuts take us away from the messier elements of his daily life, and the set design keeps him behind closed doors for the real moments of pain and inconvenience. This isn’t a movie about a woman growing to love a man with a disability; it’s about a woman who loves a man despite his disability, as she’s conveniently allowed to skip all the most intense parts of helping him. We’re told he’s in pain, but he never shows the camera. We’re told he’s in a state of despair no emotional connection can cure, and yet there are only hints of such deep depression in his frowning into the middle distance. And then, in climactic moments involving a medical procedure, the scene fades out before the lump in my throat could properly form.

So it’s undercooked around the edges, and warm and gooey in the center. But it’s also slickly produced and attractively photographed to be sunny and bright, covered in soft coffeehouse soundtrack selections and wistful montage. Director Thea Sharrock (who has worked in theater and on the BBC’s Call the Midwife) makes it a rosy experience that can be effective in its falseness. I found myself on occasion sufficiently convinced by the syrupy button pushing, especially in the first half, before its nagging misjudgments start to pile up. Clarke and Claflin have fine chemistry together, and scenes are allowed to sit between the two of them as they draw closer, share space, and play out their maudlin dialogues. I wished it could be more fully fleshed out, and more deeply felt. It’s hesitant to find the real dark corners of its premise, the sharp jabs of pain sanded away until what’s left is a gentle sinking into its watery-eyed finale. But in the surface-minded approach it still manages to whip up enough sympathy for its leads to nearly sell the whole experience.

Chosen Dumb: THE DIVERGENT SERIES: INSURGENT

The Divergent Series: Insurgent is the clumsily titled second entry in one of the more recent attempts to spin a series out of a YA dystopia. Its predecessor introduced us to a crumbling future Chicago, the populace divided into a small set of job-based factions – lawyers, farmers, police, and do-gooders – that seems unworkable practically, theoretically, politically, economically, logically, and grammatically. No matter. These YA worlds aren’t so much real fantasy spaces as extended metaphor. Take Hunger Games, with its impactful allegory stew churning with war, propaganda, and inequality, or Twilight, a monster mash dating game cautionary tale. Divergent, on the other hand, is mainly an overheated high school analogy. No wonder the adult authority figures are universally played like patiently exasperated vice principals.

The hero is a teenager who threatens the status quo by being too awesome for any one clique to claim. Last time, our protagonist Tris (Shailene Woodley) stopped Kate Winslet’s evil plan to take over the city, but as a result had to flee to the wilderness, a hidden hippie commune run by Octavia Spencer. This time, Tris and her Factionless buddies want to get enough resources to fight back. But they don’t know Winslet has found a gold box she thinks will clinch her control over the other factions, if only she could open it. Tris, by virtue of being the single most important very special perfect super talent in all the factions, this time with the bar graph to prove it (“100% Divergent!”), is probably the key to opening it. So there’s some conflict for you. There’s not much there, just a reason to run into some chases and gunfights in between conversations with overqualified cast members.

Maybe we should think of this YA series most of all as a sort of Hollywood finishing school. It puts promising younger performers in scenes opposite great veterans who, in turn, get to be on set for only a day or two each. Woodley, along with stoic Theo James, subservient Ansel Elgort, and charm overdrive Miles Teller, hold their own against effortless screen commanding by Winslet and Spencer, Mekhi Phifer, Naomi Watts, Daniel Dae Kim, and Janet McTeer. The screenplay, cobbled together from Veronica Roth’s book by Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman, and Mark Bomback, wisely backs off the flimsy worldbuilding and just lets these talented people do the best they can at selling the nonsense. They lean into the adolescent motivations. It is a story about how it’s totally stressful to be too awesome. They believe it, and that’s half the battle.

Helping out is director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, R.I.P.D.), who moves the camera and provides proficient crosscutting to gin up routine action suspense in the moments when our heroes are forced to flee armed baddies. Later, he does decent work with the swoopy blinking lights and assorted vaguely familiar sci-fi trappings in the interiors. There are special effects moments involving psychological tests – virtual nightmares the must be conquered to unlock the MacGuffin – creating worlds of dissolving buildings, shattering glass, a rotating floating flaming house, and a man who evaporates into silvery fragments. Those are neat, and are tied to Woodley’s performance in some mostly effective ways. A close connection to a female protagonist is what sets Insurgent’s blandness above crushing masculine banalities of other YA competitors like The Maze Runner.

It’s overall an improvement over Divergent, a far more confident and open film, and far more watchable, too. Not only lifeless formula, it often manages to feel like a real movie hobbled by some deeply inconsequential source material. It’s watchable dreck that starts nowhere and spins its wheels, a narrative with nothing to do. Scene by scene it might work, but moments don’t connect or grow or build. The society it assembles only works as a perfect environment for narrativized teen angst, and is as tedious and impenetrable for an outsider as the real thing. If the crux of adolescent problems is the cognitive dissonance between feeling like the most important person in your world and the nagging knowledge you’re not, then this series finds the least interesting solutions.

Like a Villain: MALEFICENT

Maleficent, the sorceress who gives Sleeping Beauty her cursed slumber, is one of Walt Disney Animation’s greatest accomplishments. Frightening and elegant, she has a tall, statuesque presence, high model features, towering horns growing from her head, and flowing dark robes swooshing around her. She glows green with dark magic, and by the end uses her powers to conjure the form of a dragon to fight off the Princess’s chances for True Love’s Kiss. She’s an iconic image. Thus the challenge for Maleficent, a live-action retelling of the story from the sorceress’s point of view. How to fill the role with a mere flesh and blood actor? How to recapture the power of those drawn images, so striking and so fearsome? Luckily, the filmmakers were able to meet the challenge and cast Angelina Jolie, whose high cheekbones, piercing eyes, and elegant silhouette make her an imposing presence when draped in the makeup and wardrobe to match the character’s iconic look. Here her eyes are fierce, her face is sculpted and angular. She’s a perfect fit.

But making Maleficent the center of this story is not without its problems. In the 1959 film, as in the fairy tale upon which it was based, she’s pure evil, bestowing an awful curse on an infant for her parent’s crime of failing to invite the witch to a party. Maleficent is a force of destruction and looms large over the plot as pure threat, casting a dark shadow over innocent first love, worried parents, and sweet dotty fairies in a colorful Disney kingdom. Maleficent is out to make some changes, moving the title character into the position of protagonist. This isn’t Sleeping Beauty of old. It opens with a narrator (Janet McTeer) telling us about two lands that sit side by side. One is a kingdom ruled by man. The other is a magical forest ruled by no one, the better for fairies, living trees, sprites, and other fanciful creatures to frolic freely. In this forest a young Maleficent lives, carefree until the day a man (Sharlto Copley) appears, tells her he loves her, and then steals her wings.

The man presents the wings to the dying king in order to be named his successor. Now the new king, he has a daughter. She is cursed on the day of her christening by the vengeful, violated Maleficent who lashes out at the man who hurt her by attacking his child. Hidden away in the forest by three largely incompetent fairies (Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville, and Juno Temple, great actresses doing bad comic relief), the baby grows up to be Aurora (Elle Fanning). Something - lingering guilt, perhaps, over hurting a child for the crimes of her father – makes Maleficent hang around, offering unseen assistance to Aurora as she grows, becoming something like a fairy godmother to her. And so, regretting her curse, Maleficent and her raven sidekick (Sam Riley) try to undo it before it is too late. Meanwhile, the evil king is plotting to invade the enchanted forest and slay the sorceress once and for all.

Flipping the script on a classic villain, Linda Woolverton (of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland) has written a screenplay that’s a bit of a mess, but at least finds thorny thematic issues with which to wrestle. Now it is not a fairy tale about unexplained evil and the pat True Love that will conquer all. Instead, it’s a movie about the marginalization of women, in which the king sees both Maleficent and Aurora as pawns in his life story instead of people with thoughts, feelings, and ambitions of their own. Just as surely as Maleficent is wounded for the sake of his promotion, his daughter is cast aside for his peace of mind. In the end, Maleficent made huge mistakes, but it’s the king who is the real bad guy.

That’s all interesting, but if only the film had the patience to stop and wrestle with the ideas. Instead, it’s content to only suggest deeper thoughts as it hustles its way through exposition and character beats with a sense of obligation instead of enchantment. Even the appearance of Prince Phillip (Brenton Thwaites) is a huge non-event, which is at once a hilarious example of the movie’s welcome shifting of gender roles and an example of its half-hearted plotting. I love how it takes a story about a young woman whose fate is decided by her father and her love and makes it a story about misunderstood and victimized women and their complicated relationship with each other, but the movie is simply too frustratingly thin to support these deeper concerns.

While Sleeping Beauty is less emotionally complex, it has a stronger and more direct sense of storytelling. Maleficent has a vague understanding of what a story looks like, but often plays like a series of haphazardly connected scenes. Characters have changes of heart and evolutions of thinking for no other reason than because the movie needs them to do so. Consequently, there is not a lot of momentum here and the film grows mushy and aimless in the center as it spends its time telling us what we need to know instead of allowing it to unfold. The result is a small cast standing against flat, over-lit CGI backgrounds reciting dialogue that sounds like someone left all the subtext on the surface of the rough draft and never did a rewrite to bury it.

At least it fits the general phoniness of everything around them. There is never a sense this fantasy world is real. It just doesn’t look good. Director Robert Stromberg is a visual effects artist making his directorial debut. The picture is filled with competently visualized spectacle, with tree-creatures and strange little fantasy animals wandering around. When Maleficent flies about it’s with a convincing woosh and the dragon in the climax is as big, scaly, and fiery as you’d expect. But the action is repetitive and dull. The environments are stiff and dead. It never feels like a coherent vision of a place or time. It’s just disconnected digital frippery. If it was chintzier, you could almost accuse it of feeling like it was shot in a corner of the Disney backlot. Instead, it just looks like endlessly green-screened busyness. This is the movie’s biggest downfall. On a visual level, it simply isn’t as convincing, as inky dark and richly imagined as its lead performance.

Jolie stands in the center of the movie as iconic a screen creation as ever there was. The scene in which the screen darkens as shadows cast by scary green fire flicker over her face as she bellows sinister magic into a crib is genuinely spooky. And yet, Jolie sells her character’s hurt and regret, her elegance and her frozen mask of emotions that slowly melts for the child she has doomed. She’s a sympathetic, complicated creature, capable of glowering harm and glimmering compassion. It’s a great, full-blooded performance in a movie that’s simply not up to the task of working on her level. She’s so good I wished there was enough to the scenes to allow her to really sink her teeth in and chew. She’s big. It’s the picture that’s small.

More Than a Woman: THE WOMAN IN BLACK

There’s a big, scary haunted house in the middle of The Woman in Black, a charmingly old-fashioned horror film. It’s a towering Gothic building with endless candlelit rooms stuffed with seemingly endless bric-a-bracs and musty furniture. The grounds, including its very own cemetery, are overgrown with twisting weeds and long grass. Of course, this is a place the local villagers will not go. It’s quite a ways out of town and when the tide comes in it becomes a small island. It’s dark, creepy, and isolated.

It’s the dawn of the 20th century when the old widow who lives in the house dies with no living relatives. A young, freshly widowered lawyer (Daniel Radcliffe, nicely filling the requirements of his first post-Potter role) is sent away from his toddler son and their big city home to sort out this countryside estate. When he shows up, the greeting is hardly what you’d call hospitable. The village is filled with the kind of small-town horror-movie people who seem nice enough but speak slowly, as if they’re afraid they’ll spill their town’s dark secrets if they didn’t watch their words close enough.

They have reason to look so glum. There be ghosts here. It all has to do with that big creepy mansion on the far outskirts of town, the kind of half-regal, half-decrepit old building at which Very Bad Things have happened. These Bad Things must have something to do with the worrisomely high mortality rate in town. The villagers calmly and forcefully tell Radcliffe not to go to that house, to just turn around and go back home. Even the kindly older gentleman (Ciaran Hinds) and his wife (Janet McTeer) who ask him over for supper can’t help but let their apprehension show through their kindness. But it’s the young man’s job to close the account, so head out into the isolated manor he must.

The satisfying, mostly wordless, centerpiece of the film finds Radcliffe sorting through papers, old letters, and scratched photographs at the house, intermittently interrupted by ominous creaks and mysterious footsteps. Other times a woman in black, the ghost of the title, appears. He sees her through a window, standing in the cemetery. He goes out to investigate and she’s gone. He turns back and sees her standing at an upstairs window. He goes back inside, climbs the winding stairs and finds the room empty. It’s creepy, for sure, but director James Watkins has such a sure hand in staging Jane Goldman’s screenplay (based on a novel by Susan Hill) that he taps into a mournful mood that slowly builds startling moments and an unsettling sense of wrongness into a kind of heavy atmosphere that settles under the skin.

When Hinds offers to return for Radcliffe after the tide recedes later that evening, and the younger man says that he prefers “to work through the night,” it gave me a sinking feeling. It’s a ghastly ghost story trope that worked on me here. It’s not always so enjoyable to wonder why a character won’t just leave the haunted house. Here the emphasis on the decaying architecture of the big old house, the accumulating terror from the likes of cracked porcelain dolls and various eerie wind-up figures, is effective. Much praise is due production designer Kave Quinn, art decorator Paul Ghirardani, and set decorator Niamh Coulter, without whom this candlelit building would seem considerably less haunted.

The film comes from a fairly recently reconstituted Hammer Films, the British studio that made a name for itself churning out horror films of just this sort – by and large patient, suspenseful, and with a whiff of the literary about them – during its greatest prominence from the 1950s through the 1970s. The Woman in Black fits quite well in this tradition. It’s so effectively old-fashioned, in fact, I thought I had it all figured out. It’s a terrific piece of craftsmanship. It was creeping me out, but I had an understanding of its approach and its technique that I thought was keeping me from being truly scared by the film. At one point, when the ghost suddenly appears in a classic jump scare, I heard a loud gasp from somewhere near me in the audience. It took me a second to realize that the gasp had come from me.