Get in Formation: LEMONADE

Beyoncé’s Lemonade is a masterpiece. The hour-long film, which she directed along with six co-directors including Kahlil Joseph (m.A.A.d.) and Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go), had a surprise debut on HBO this past Saturday, an electrifying and overwhelming event revealing a collision of pop art and high art, music video and experimental cinema. It’s a deeply personal and political film, dense with flowing allusion and lively imagery, smooth dancing and tough subjects, magical realism and serious contemplation, intimate poetry and provocative juxtapositions. Rich and sparkling eclecticism, it draws inspiration appreciatively from a strong tradition of black women artists – Nina Simone, Julie Dash, Kasi Lemmons, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, and more – to create the feeling of its auteur – one of the most famous pop stars of this century – expressing an evolution, a culmination, and a synthesis. She is possible because of those who came before, building on all that got her here.

She began as pop perfection in group Destiny’s Child and in an excellent solo career. With this film she’s delivered her richest and most emotionally and politically engaged work. She continues playing with and sharpening her craft while opening up and revealing innermost thoughts, fears, and hopes. For a celebrity whose privacy is so closely guarded and whose image is so rigorously managed, it feels like nothing less than a revelation. Filmed in a variety of styles, stocks, and aspect ratios, cutting between them with evocative metaphor and a beautifully intuitive coherent structure, it is continual astonishment. Told in poetry, by Somali-British writer Warsan Shire, and song, going track by track through Beyoncé’s terrifically diverse new album of the same name, we follow a woman who discovers her husband is cheating on her.

First she looks dazed in a field while wearing a black hoodie, next giving us a melancholy look from on a stage, then in a bathtub. Then she’s despondent, jumping off a building (echoes of Beyond the Lights?), the concrete turning into an ocean in which she tries to starve herself. Then she gets angry – strutting out of an austere building ahead of a flood, smashing a baseball bat into windows and, later, driving a monster truck over parked cars, the reggae-beat lyrics wondering, “What’s worse, looking jealous or crazy?” She descends into her anger, as the film gathers bewitching horror movie portent, empty parking garages and eerie black-and-white covens coming before fire and long dark red hallways. Each section of the film is marked by chapter headings, guiding us from “Intuition,” “Denial,” and “Anger,” to this lowest point: “Emptiness.”

But she doesn’t stop there. She gets better, grows stronger, reconnecting with her past and with others like her who have struggled with problems of their own. She moves to “Forgiveness,” “Resurrection,” “Hope,” and a transcendent “Redemption,” as forceful dance music, gloomy blues, and jangly country with moody, mysterious imagery transforms into tender melancholy ballads accompanied by more pastoral sights, lakes and fields, sun-dappled solidarity and romance. (This is where her husband, Jay Z, is revealed slowly, in soft light, cuddling. Is this amnesty or are they playing parts?) She finds the power to forgive within herself, as an act of radical self-confident empowerment, and within her cultural context and in her womanhood, finding strength in numbers, a comfort in knowing that it is not her fate to suffer alone or in silence.

We see women throughout, arranged separately in striking tableau – in nature or in empty urban spaces, cheering her on or standing silent – but then increasingly together, until Beyoncé leads them towards a better tomorrow, striding across water, breaking bread together. We often return to the image of black women in angelic white clothing standing at Southern plantations or on beaches at sunset. (Daughters of the Dust is a clear reference point here.) Early on we hear the voice of Malcolm X saying, “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” Later we’re shown mothers of recent victims of police brutality – Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant – staring into the camera as they hold framed photographs of their sons. The personal is political, and Beyoncé is here presenting a personal, professional, and political metamorphosis, moving from profound anger at deep betrayal to a serene hope for the future.

Because Lemonade moves so poetically and intuitively through the stages of emotional healing and political engagement, its rapturous fusion enacts the very reckoning at its core. In the film, Beyoncé inhabits the persona of a woman who has been wronged, who is hurt, and who sees her pain on a historical continuum. There’s profound intersection between images playing off her stardom and off the history of black Americans, like when she stretches out on the Superdome’s field – location of her 2013 Superbowl Halftime Show, and the infamous “shelter of last resort” during Hurricane Katrina. The film turns on an acknowledgement of history and matriarchal lineage, summoning allusion for help upending racist and sexist ideology, allowing love to conquer all. She begins the film deeply wounded, but in exorcising her inner torment, weighing a legacy of ancestral pain, she can emerge whole, able to imagine a utopian vision. She surrounds herself with a community of black women, some celebrity (like Serena Williams, Quvenzhané Wallis, and Zendaya), others not. They stand strong together, support one another, and build a peaceable sisterhood.

Can we build a better future off a legacy of pain? When she intones, “Nothing real can be threatened,” having moved from righteous anger to transcendent forgiveness, launching into a soaring ballad of true love’s transformative absolution, turning the lemons of grief into striking lemonade, it feels like the truth. In the final moments she drops the artifice and cuts in home videos – of her wedding, her pregnancy, and candid dancing with daughter Blue Ivy. It’s a peek behind the curtain, and a stirring expression of selfhood, a perfect conclusion to this interior journey vibrantly and densely expressed. What a wondrous and exciting film, as deeply moving as it is deeply felt, alive with pop’s expressive possibilities and cinema’s irresistible power. It has a beat to dance to, a sensitive emotional narrative to feel, a potent poetic collage of sound and image to get lost in, and an overpowering catharsis as it all comes together.

Borne Back Into the Past: THE GREAT GATSBY

It’s easy to see why over the years some have seen in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby a fine idea for a film. The book contains memorable characters and quotable lines contained in a plot of some intrigue and mystery, romance and regret. It’s not hard to see how it can all be pushed into tasteful melodrama of the kind the movies are so good at. (They’re even better at tasteless melodrama, but that’s not my point yet.) What previous adaptations of Gatsby have failed to grasp, however, is that this great novel needs not a cinematic transcription, but a jolt of cinema itself to play on screen. Last seen in theaters in 1974 directed by Jack Clayton from a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, the story felt stale, stiff and humorless, despite the best efforts of an all-star cast headlined by Robert Redford. This time around, the director and co-adapter is Baz Luhrmann of Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet, and Australia, one a musical and two so broad, vibrant, and melodic they might as well be. He makes films in a style that’s a kaleidoscope of the gaudy, the campy, the kitsch, proudly waving the flag of melodrama while shouting from the rooftops his themes and ambitions. He brings the spark of cinema the story needs to really take off on screen.

Glittering and glowing with colorful period detail and wailing a mix of jazzy standards and anachronistic tunes from the likes of Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey (not to mention a great Charleston-style cover of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”), Luhrmann’s film is bursting at the seams with invention of the kind that illuminates Fitzgerald’s text without subsuming it. Now, I’m of the opinion that adaptations have no particular obligation to faithfully reproduce every aspect of their source materials. But this Gatsby is both faithful to the events, characters, themes, and symbols of Fitzgerald’s, while the telling – structure (mostly) aside – is all Luhrmann’s. It has the wild exuberance of a Gatsby party with all the distance to see how hollow it ultimately is. Using generous amounts of Fitzgerald’s original text verbatim in voice over, dialogue, and on-screen titles, the film maintains a sense of wit and social commentary amidst the colorful party atmosphere and melodrama that bursts forth.

The film, like the novel, uses the character of Nick Carraway as narrator and observer. It’s the height of the Roaring Twenties. He’s moved to New York City for a job on Wall Street and finds himself living in fictional West Egg, procuring a cottage next door to the mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. No one knows much of anything about the man; they only know he throws great parties, wild, packed, affluent parties in which the rich and wannabe rich, the influential and the climbers all rub elbows, drink bootleg alcohol, and dance the night away. Luhrmann, in a more restrained version of the carousing Moulin Rouge! hyperactivity, films these elaborate soirées with exuberance, using his mishmash of music choices and Catherine Martin’s impeccable production design to highlight the glamour and excitement of such an event. Gatsby parties seem fun, but they seem just as meaningless. No one knows precisely why they’re there any more than they know a thing about Gatsby beyond wild rumors. The host, for his part, seems spectacularly uninterested in the spectacle of his own making.

The summer setting is the perfect time for these lengthy nights separated by endless languorous days spent whiling away the hours. Carraway (Tobey Maguire) tells us all about the vacuous, energetic people he meets away from Gatsby’s, including his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan), her brutish old-money husband Tom (Joel Edgerton), his mistress (Isla Fisher) and her husband (Jason Clarke). Carraway starts a flirtation with a famous golfer (Elizabeth Debicki). Sometimes he goes to work. He’s a busy guy, but he’s not really drawn into this world until he meets Gatsby. Luhrmann films the title character’s entrance in a grand, theatrical way that does not disappoint. Gatsby, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, turns in slow motion, raising a cocktail glass in toasting, smirk on his face, fireworks slowly erupting in the sky behind him while the soundtrack and his eyes are lost sparkling in a dreamy blue rhapsody.

I’ll preserve the mystery of Gatsby, his relationships, and his ambitions for those who haven’t read the book. But I will say that as the film goes along, Luhrmann brings a satisfying bitter romance, full of as much sadness as swooning, that slowly builds to a sequence in a hothouse of a hotel room where a crisply edited small party becomes uncomfortably personal until emotions boil over. It’s a lovely luridness of love and death, affairs and scandal, loss and loneliness. The performances are sharply drawn, from Maguire’s Carraway’s starry-eyed wonder giving way to hindsight skepticism to Mulligan’s Daisy’s flat affect and foolish affectations cracking under the pressure of the possibility of remaking her life. And then there’s Gatsby. DiCaprio brings exactly the right combination of irresistible charm and unknowability. He’s slick and smooth, but what’s he up to? He’s sympathetic, but how much do we really know about him? It’s a slippery performance that never feels unmoored as the audience learns more about who he really is.

What’s best about the film is its consistency of vision, a vibrancy that never forsakes the source material while confidently striding forward as its own postmodern construction. Luhrmann freely mixes and matches artistic inspirations, bringing his swooping 3D camera through digital recreations of Jazz Age architecture, energy, and glamorous coarseness. He’s such a big believer in the power of movie magic to evoke strong emotions through gorgeous fakery that he’d never mention the unutterable fact that it’s not always true. He’s too busy making the story burst to life with every trick he knows. For this, Gatsby feels truly cinematic in ways it never has on screen before. It’s lively, funny, and rewarding without suffocating under its seriousness. Through irresistible, shameless visual frippery and vividly colorful melodramatics Douglas Sirk might have been proud of, Luhrmann finds and takes as his own Fitzgerald’s core laser-sharp, gin-dry social commentary. Consider this exchange between Carraway and Gatsby, concerning complicated decorative plans for a small get-together: “Is it too much?” Gatsby asks. Carraway replies, “I think it’s what you want.” Is this Gatsby too much? It's what I wanted.