Listen Up: SHE SAID and WOMEN TALKING

“Everything is sex, except sex, which is power.” — Janelle Monáe

Never underestimate Hollywood’s ability to turn any true story into a movie, even, or maybe especially, its own scandals. How quickly the shock of the new turns into the grist for the content mill. Here it’s She Said, a dramatization of the reporting of the 2017 New York Times story that exposed the decades-long abuses of producer Harvey Weinstein. That he was a bully and a bad boss had been widely known the whole time. Whispers of his sex crimes floated, too, usually on the margins of gossip reports and blind items. But it took this reporting, and others, to break a culture of silence around such shameful practices. This then became one of the first sparks that lit the #MeToo fire, a rolling bonfire of stories outing predatory men in a variety of industries. I wish we could, five years later, point to something more systematic that’s changed other than the ousting of various bad men from prominent positions they held. Still, that’s better than nothing. What we have with this new movie, from director Maria Schrader (Unorthodox) and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida) could’ve easily been a major Hollywood studio simplifying the case and building to a false triumph. Instead, it achieves a kind of unsettled cumulative force. Gathering sources, fact checking, finding corroborating evidence, and eventually clicking publish has a certain tension, and knowing it is only one step toward justice and not justice entire.

There’s definite inspiration from Spotlight in She Said. There’s the just-the-facts approach to interviews and collecting information. There’s the flatly honest glimpses into the home life of reporters. There’s the tone and style—serious, direct, plain, with accumulative force—much like the reporting it portrays. But where the former movie took a story an audience knew the general outline of, and used the specifics of the procedural undertaking to draw deeper understanding as the layers of secrets were peeled back, this one seems to proceed from a point of assumed knowledge on the part of the audience. Some of the names that are dropped and stories that are referenced are mentioned as if we already have that understanding. But there’s still that sense of unfolding discovery, as two reporters (Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan) are tasked by their editor (Patricia Clarkson) of getting the story in publishable shape. The sleuthing elements make for a sturdy, simple studio drama, with lots of talky sequences, some flatly expositional and others with a bit more personality, bringing to life something like a convincing portrait of the import job it reenacts.

Because a good journalism movie is also a detective story, it’s notable that the movie starts with the assumption that the guy who is suspected of committing the crime is absolutely the one who did it. The tension becomes not so much learning new information about the story—although impactful one-or-few-scene performances from Jennifer Ehle and Samantha Morton, along with Ashley Judd as herself, go a long way to dramatizing the pain of their persecutions—but the moral weight of asking the women confiding in them to go on the record. Mulligan and Kazan, inhabiting casually credible portrayals of working mothers, feel acutely the potential pain they’re leading these victims toward, and the sensitivity needed to get them to all agree to take uncertain steps toward outing their powerful victimizer. Its best scenes are ones that drive relentlessly into the process of doing so, in tandem with running through the necessary steps to draft, approve, and fine-tune a major article. The newsroom scenes of shop talk and phone calls and long meetings is a fine conclusion to all this hard work—and the final shot, of a cursor hovering over a button, makes an interesting counterpoint to the whirring presses of newspaper movies past. It’s a culmination of hard work that’s deceptively simple. What happens next is more difficult.

An even talkier exploration of this sort of abuse, and the consequences of speaking out, is writer-director Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. It’s set in a repressive Mennonite community—a few families on a secluded stretch of farmland—where the men keep the women uneducated and under their control. The story starts with the men off to town, leaving the women alone and able to discuss the sexual abuses to which they’ve been subjected. We see haunting flashbacks—quick cut images, really—of bruises on thighs, blood on mattresses. It is upsetting material handled with a soberness and lack of exploitation. Thus Polley keeps most of the film’s action to one meeting where the women gather to talk out their options. Should they stay and fight? Should they stay and forgive? Should they leave? There are few easy answers, and little agreement, at the start. Polley’s filmmaking is typically engaged with such questions, like her best work, autobiographical documentary Stories We Tell which most explicitly sees the ways in which people can thrive on false assumptions about themselves and those around them. That, too, sees the benefits of exposing the truth and talking it out. So here the women are in pain, expressed in different ways, and stand up the arguments that flow from these perspectives.

Throughout, there’s a collection of great actresses—Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Frances McDormand, Sheila McCarthy—ventriloquizing differing points of view, talking points brought to life. They’re partly real, convincing people, partly imagined inhabitations of their thorny debate. Adding to this incomplete sense of reality, the movie is shot in a sickly digital pallor—a super-wide frame with a stretch of wan color correction that seems to bleach out all sense of specificity. It feels like a well-cast experiment, in unforgiving digital that washes out the light and leaves the figures in the frame stranded in a smudge of pale fuzziness. It convincingly makes what could’ve been pastoral, and maybe even a rural ideal on the surface, into something that looks as uninhabitable as an alien planet. This emphasizes both the discomfort of their position, and the difficulties of seeing a way out. But it also emphasizes the conceit of it all—a sense of otherness and remove that heightens the dramaturgy and flattens the debate. I found myself wishing the movie was as powerful as its subject matter and, though it is respectful and an engaged intellectual exercise, the form and function never quite click into place for the transcendence of purpose for which it’s searching. Still, as reality continues to prove, there’s value in the talking, and we’re better off not letting such abuses fall under the powerful protection of silence, even if the results are imperfect.

Body Talk: MEN and CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

Screenwriter Alex Garland is steadily building a directorial career of high concept genre projects interested in showing misogyny as a social prison we desperately need to escape. There’s the tech bro compounds in Ex Machina and Devs, and the lonely toxic wilderness of Annihilation, all twisted around a need to control and objectify and watch as the victims either are subsumed or seek revenge. Chilling stuff. His latest goes one step further into making his meaning quite literal. It’s called Men. Enough said, right? It starts with a woman in mourning. She asked her husband for a divorce and he almost immediately jumped to his death. A shocking start to a movie, to say the least. She (Jessie Buckley) is off to the countryside, where she’s rented a house in a tiny village. She’s going to be by herself a while and recover. That’s the plan, anyway. Alas, the village is seemingly entirely populated by creepy men of one sort (insinuating landlord) or another (unctuous priest) or another (bratty teen) or another (naked drifter). She encounters them (all played by Rory Kinnear in a procession of wigs) one after another. This is not the trip she needs. Garland makes good use of the rural quiet and empty natural spaces. When a silhouette suddenly stands at the end of a tunnel and runs toward our lead—and us—it’s frightening. Same when the nude drifter is suddenly lurking behind her, peering unnoticed in a picture window, or when the priest somberly listens to her testimony of trauma and priggishly asks: you must ask, why you made your husband kill himself? Yikes.

The tension builds until a long, gory, completely fantastical climax. Here Garland’s tight, atmospheric little horror movie nosedives into allegory its metaphorical scaffolding can’t support. There are three great shivers-up-the-spine moments, but then it becomes a morass of soupy, bloody imagery that stretches itself in an elaborate symbolic gesture that makes a rather simple point early and often. It’s not difficult to clock its pseudo-religious folk horror intensions from the start. What happened to her husband? A fallen man. What does she do when she arrives at her rental home? Eats an apple from the tree. She’s surrounded by verdant garden imagery. So it’s a movie about sin and consequences, who begets them and who gets blame. I like all of that, but Garland never gets any deeper than the peel, leaving the core untouched. Once we’ve gotten the sense of Buckley’s emotional state, an impressively on-edge performance, and seen an increasingly unsettling creepiness in every encounter—both overtly upsetting and sinister underlying subtext—the ground is set for a fascinating freak out. Instead, Garland only provides a tedious unfolding of symbolism that’s, by the end, somehow both easy and inscrutable, as one toxic man births another and another and so on until the end of time. And then woman inherits the earth.

Leave it to David Cronenberg to make the truly upsetting, and atypical, horror movie of the moment, all the more unsettled for playing like a gross drama, never stretching for obvious scares. He hasn’t made a film in nearly a decade, and not one so overtly engaged with the body horror of The Fly or Videodrome for longer than that. This new work is a relaxed and confident idiosyncratic vision, an old master showing us how it’s done. Crimes of the Future is a sickly melancholy movie that looks about at our current states, imagines a dim, dirty, empty future, and feels queasy. We’re evolving to survive on trash, to digest garbage and call it sustainable sustenance. That’s quite a provocative thesis for this fascinating and disgusting movie, a picture of bodies in revolt, and revolting bodies cut open. In this future world, humankind has stopped feeling pain. This has led to surgery becoming a form of entertainment—“Surgery is the new sex,” one fan purrs—with performance artists willingly getting outré and novel plastic surgeries—new gills and folds and flaps and ridges—for the benefit of appreciative audiences. One scantily clad man whose body is covered in decorative ears dancing somberly to pounding club beats in a dank basement proscenium is typical of this new art scene. We meet characters who propose to shock people with an autopsy, and others who fear what all this messing with physiology might mean for human evolution. Either way, it’s a grim vision of attempting to control others’ bodies, and one’s own, and the futility of it in the face of biological inevitabilities and vulnerabilities. Maybe society is as doomed to decay as we are? How grim.

The best of the bunch in this future art scene is a performance artist (Viggo Mortensen) who is literally growing new and unusual organs inside his body, and then his surgeon (Léa Seydoux) cuts them out on stage. What an act! The surgeries, of course, happen without anesthetic, and with the use of a complicated mechanical sarcophagus that’s full of intestine-like wiring and run with a fleshy remote. The reception afterwards features the organ of the day on display. It gives new meaning to the typical artist small talk: so, what are you working on? It’s not difficult to see this as metaphor for Cronenberg himself—a master at contorting the human body for his horror films, here confronting the material that made his name, wondering if he has it in him to pull another out for our amusement. Mortensen grunts and coughs and moans, staggers and limps, is clad in black with a hood pulled low in public and a cloth over his mouth. He cuts a figure like one shambling straight out of a Universal monster movie. The sound of a fly buzzing sometimes follows him around—one wonders what this movie smells like. He’s fascinating because he’s not one simple metaphor—he’s an artist gestating new and unusual ideas, ripping himself open for an audience’s judgment; he’s an aging man whose body is changing in uncomfortable ways, a fact over which he has little control; he’s a tortured man who isn’t sure if he should change with the times. He has further entanglements that are unfolded as the movie proceeds, but the core is his artistic and romantic relationship with his surgeon. There’s a queasy scene where they bond, cuddled up, for some mutual self-harm. In a world without pain, what does it mean to feel?

Here’s a film full of rich and puzzling characters—a grieving father with some sick plans (Scott Speedman), a bureaucrat who wants to set up a new organ registry (Don McKellar), his assistant who is twitchily drawn to this underworld (Kristen Stewart). Throughout there’s a sense of a society in flux, fluid definitions of what’s expected and where to go next. All are in some kind of discomfort. Some take pleasure in that state. It’s a film of open wounds and tumorous growths, of slippery internal organs and gooey foodstuffs, of sticky drool and singed skin. It’s a gross world. People buy skeletal chairs that adjust their spines to better digest meals. They gawk in backroom surgery shows. Their bodies are who they are. It’s matter-of-fact, though by the end it’s small comfort to know some sights will still shock them. Cronenberg’s vision here is one of a future driven by this sense of biological change, a world caught mid-shift, where new generations may be inheriting the garbage of their ancestors and irrevocably changed by their bodies’ attempts to process it. What a haunting idea of sins of the old inescapably passed on to the new, physicalized and embodied by the grotesqueries we see. But what hope we find in the beauty of the human body, and its capacity to survive even this. By the end, the story is even edging toward an epiphany—man’s capacity to make peace with his body, and embrace what it needs. The film moves with Cronenberg’s typical icy deliberateness, the better to ruminate on these themes and wonder about these characters. It’s complicated and unresolved, alive to the protrusions and pustules of messy life.

Last Call: I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS

Charlie Kaufman’s exhilarating and exasperating I’m Thinking of Ending Things begins with a sustained sequence of skin-crawling social discomfort, and it only gets worse from there. It’s a brilliant nightmare. The film conjures a psychologically claustrophobic vice grip and proceeds to send it in twists, twists, twists. With each moment it tightens, almost unendurably, as the tension grows. The emotions are hyper-focused, but the details start slipping. At first it’s two people in a car, a long snowy trip. She (Jessie Buckley) tells us in voice over that she’s thinking of ending things. Not a great start. He (Jesse Plemons) is her boyfriend. They’re driving to meet his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) at their far-off farmhouse. It’ll be her first time. So that is understandably tense. It’s worse when they get there—right at sunset, eerily quiet, snow threatening to turn into a blizzard, animals dead by the barn. Life’s hard on a farm, he says. Then there are the parents: awkward, nervous, needling, full of ticks, both over-accommodating and passive aggressive. It’s all a bit much. And this is before the young woman’s name starts casually changing, and then everyone seems much older all of a sudden, and how much time has passed? And wait, wasn’t she a poet? Or a painter? Or is that a physicist or gerontologist or cinephile? The longer we stay in this house, the cuts grow disjunction between details—a dog here, then there, then…where? Does it seem that the living room is also a hospital room, at the same time? Lukaz Zal’s chilly camerawork and Robert Frazen’s sharp editing are hyper-focused on Molly Hughes’ precise production design — every kitschy prop placed just so — but slips, elides. It’s like one of those nightmares where you’re in a familiar place that’s simultaneously unfamiliar.

It makes perfect sense, except when it doesn’t. It’s strange, except when it isn’t. In typical Kaufman fashion — screenwriter of Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s clever reality-bending wiliness, and writer-director of the dizzyingly existential Synecdoche, New York — the film is a construct meant to jolt us into contemplation, making its rabbit-hole philosophical rumination vivid, tactile. The longer it goes on, the more we realize we’re trapped with these people, straining to figure them out, squinting to reconcile the slow drip of strange details, stylistic flourishes, strange in-jokes, dazzling monologues, creepy Lynchian asides, long dark roads to nowhere, Oklahoma!, Pauline Kael, horror movies, snow tires, milkshakes, A Beautiful Mind, David Foster Wallace, a shuffling janitor, rapidly aging parents, mental slippage, enervating couples’ arguments, stilted silences, and an animated pig. In the end it’s about the inevitability of age, decay, and death, the uncertainty of life, the strange dysfunctions we pass on to those around us, and the sad slow process of realizing we can’t ever really know anyone. The road there is obsessively detailed, the plot at once baroque and skeletal, the performances ice-pick perfect and tightrope dazzling, while the emotions get razored into the fabric of reality itself, leaving all frayed. And somehow the whole thing is both intuitive and inscrutable. In other words, it’s a Charlie Kaufman picture.

High Hopes: WILD ROSE and THE AERONAUTS

The year 2019 turned out to be a big one for British director Tom Harper. Previously best known on these shores, if at all, for 2015’s perfectly agreeable modern Hammer horror effort The Woman in Black: Angel of Death, his output this year encompasses two major prestige efforts. At least, that’s how their American distributors have positioned them. The films themselves wear their prestige qualities lightly, and, though they hail from dependably Oscar-y sub-genres and have the glossy handsome look of respectability about them, there’s a generosity of tone and humanity of spirit that enlivens what could be predictable, and makes imminently watchable works. The more successful of the two was this past summer’s small sleeper hit Wild Rose, a film about a scrappy Scottish woman (Jessie Buckley) and her quixotic dream to be a big American country star. It may seem an improbable dream, especially once you see she’s a single mom just out of prison with two kids waiting for her with her mother (Julie Walters). Immediately, a cynical viewer might start slotting the potential storyline into a conventional mode. If she can’t make steps toward her goal, we’re looking at kitchen-sink social realism. If she can, we’re looking at a sentimental rags-to-riches. But Nicole Taylor’s sharp and entertaining screenplay is wiser than that, imbued with a sense of specificity and heart that never steps wrong. It has both heartbreak and hardship, every success hard-won, every setback painfully felt. The result is a movie as warm and wise and true as the best country story songs. Buckley plays the lead as determined, optimistic yet realistic, sparkling and spunky and, yes, a helluva country singer. (The music is wall-to-wall and excellent.) We can see her dream should become true, even if others can’t. She’s charming and talented, but only a half-step ahead of sadness or despair. She’s falling behind fast — bills to pay, kids to raise, an ankle monitor that limits her ability to take advantage of a fluke of good fortune, let alone take a gig. That her mother sternly advises her to give up feels as kind as it is cruel; but so, too, is her wealthy employer (Sophie Okonedo) as she advises her to go for it. There’s no easy answer. Here’s a movie that is an unusually warm and clear-eyed look at what so often becomes behind-the-music cliche or pat blindly-follow-your-dreams foolishness. It understands with poignant, matter-of-fact clarity how difficult in can be to accept a lucky break and turn it into something bigger when you’re starting from a place of such disadvantage. The quotidian struggle, the painful mistakes, and the missed opportunities make the glimpses of success all the more powerfully bittersweet in a movie this vibrant and full of life. It earns every ounce of its uplift.

Harper’s other film of the year, opening just in time for the holidays, is the shallower and yet more visually striking The Aeronauts. It’s a based-on-a-true-story period picture whose commitment to the true story ends with the fact that there was an important hot air balloon experiment in 1862 England. The film really is as simple as it sounds: a pilot (Felicity Jones) and a weather scientist (Eddie Redmayne) want to see how high they can take a hot air balloon. It goes up really high, which, as you might expect for the first time such a thing has happened, gives them all kinds of wonderful views and terrifying complications. It gets cold. There are storm clouds. And how does one land this thing? This is the full extent of the film’s present-tense action, with the characters’ backstories filled in with studious flashbacks that pad out the runtime and give some emotional scaffolding to the awe-struck imperiled figures adrift in the skies. With such a thin story structure, Harper is free to demonstrate a true This is Cinerama or even L'arrivée d'un train level of simple visual power. It’s a case of a wow, look at that thing go! conception executed well, expertly realized and utterly convincing in its blend of practical and computer effects. When on the ground, George Steel’s cinematography has fine, overfamiliar, burnished period piece style, shot in scope with all the finest frippery of mid-1800’s detail in the costuming and production design. But get it up in the air, and the frame opens to full IMAX height, conjuring the most vertiginous filmmaking this side of Zemeckis’ skyscraper tightrope The Walk as they lean over the edge or, worse still, climb up the rigging. It thus builds great tension out of the mere height of the thing, gaping in wonder as the balloon passes through clouds or drifts above a town, or gripping tight as the characters must scramble around the balloon. Because Jones and Redmayne are capable at playing charm and vulnerability, it’s always evident that they’re one wrong decision away from plummeting and they do enough to make one hope not to see such a thing. They hold their own against the immense backdrop of this spectacular view. From such a simple idea comes a movie that’s captivating enough, capable of reminding one that a relatively simple story’s ability to be told on a scale of this enormity is one of the reasons we go out to the movies.