We Wear the Mask: EDDINGTON

Over the course of his first four features, writer-director Ari Aster has made a habit of divisive movies, but, love them or hate them, you have to admit he has impressive control over the formal elements of filmmaking. He knows exactly what his movies should look and sound like, and every precise choice builds a coherent whole. Here’s a director in complete command of his craft, each movie a darkly funny, intensely upsetting experience. No wonder it gets people polarized as they stumble out. His first two pictures were solidly in the horror genre, with a possession passed down through the generations of a haunted family in Hereditary and a creepy cult in a folkloric freakout for Midsommar. Those movies built settings that closed in on their characters and thus trapped performances that built on a steady crescendo of madness and howling grief. His third effort was Beau is Afraid, a three-hour movie I often found endless and excruciating, but I’ll also acknowledge that that’s exactly Aster’s aim. Star Joaquin Phoenix plays a clinically anxious man with deep-rooted psychological issues relating to his mother. The entire movie is in his heightened mind as it clenches and extrapolates until its paranoid hallucinations reach a fever pitch of hyperbolic metaphors slipping further from our reality. It’s a movie that’s way more fun to talk about than watch, but it has some big laughs and such fascinating performances and Aster’s vision is so all-encompassing in layers of artifice and anxiety that it’s hard to dismiss. 

Now comes Eddington, perhaps his most straightforward movie and that’ll make it all the more upsetting. It’s a movie about what’s wrong with our modern American society, not in the easy talking points but in the core muck of broken relationships and festering paranoid suspicions. It’s about how often political stances are formed as reaction to personal slights or positive attention. It takes the idea of politics as personal deeper into wounded immediacy. This tendency isn’t new, but is certainly enhanced by the warped fun house mirror of online, a space that’s somehow both real and unreal at the same moment. Characters here are surrounded by screens, reflected in phone cameras and lit up at night by scrolling. Their sense of selves are both shallowly confident and so slippery as to be easily manipulated. But their digital selves and algorithmic diets move into the physical space of the world, and as they roam the dusty, empty streets of their tiny New Mexico town the movie pokes at the performative and the attention-seeking of the well- and ill-intentioned alike. There it finds a shared common void of purpose that leaves everyone floundering to feel important or at least needed. This emptiness is set in a No Country for Old Men-style modern Western, a needling, mordantly funny drama that becomes slow rolling thriller that erupts in violence and watches as characters scramble in its wake. This sense of alienation and division, of being trapped in your bubble and flailing in confused disconnection, is only enhanced by the decision to set the events in May 2020, with a pandemic raging and a public frightened and fractious. 

Tap-dancing on the third rail, the movie finds the town of Eddington’s exhausted sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) deeply ambivalent about the whole COVID precautions thing. He’s clearly imbibing some misinformation. As he’s drawn into deeper rivalry with the town’s mayor (Pedro Pascal), while seeking the approval of his troubled wife (Emma Stone) and avoiding the scorn of his conspiracy theorist mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell), he impulsively decides to run for the office himself. His platform of freedom from masks and business closures grows increasingly conspiratorial itself, making muddled baseless accusations and driving around in a truck covered in misspelled handwritten signs (“Your being manipulated!”) and speakers that broadcast his meandering stump speeches. (It’s an echo of Altman’s Nashville, another movie about an American town in a particular fractious moment.) Eddington is also currently home to: a handful of shop owners and restauranteurs, a black deputy (Michael Cole), a ranting unhoused man (Clifton Collins Jr.), a roving cultish influencer (Austin Butler) who makes hyperbolic speeches about trafficking, a tribal officer on the reservation (William Belleau), a white teen girl (Amélie Hoeferle) who organizes protests when she’s not doing TikTok dances celebrating, say, finishing a James Baldwin novel, and the teen boys (Matt Gomez Hidaka and Cameron Mann) who want to get her attention. They’re all rattled and on edge, growing increasingly suspicious of each other from within their quarantined misinformation inflammation and boxed in by the cinematography that keeps trapping them in isolation, alone together and apart.

Aster develops his plot with his usual deliberateness and an eerie surface calm, while the characters tussle with the complications of pandemic life and fall into conflicts that escalate until they’re out of control. They’re all operating with darkness and denial or just deprivation in their lives, these deep holes they’re desperately trying to fill. But you can never fill emptiness with hollowness. Here are characters who are constantly trying to have the right position, the right attention, the right purpose, and talk all around the big ideas of the moment. Yet for all their talk, they get nowhere, and believe only what they need to cling to in order to survive another day. And they’ll say whatever’s convenient in the moment, scrambling about for ways to provoke a reaction. Phoenix complains the mayor’s being performative, then heads out to his car to film a video for Facebook. The mayor tells his son not to go out with a group because of the optics, then later is blaring Katy Perry at a backyard fundraiser. But this isn’t an easy “both sides” view from nowhere. These are specific characters, and the movie draws a pretty clear moral vision, the end point of all this culture war division and who’s doing the dividing. (It has something to do with the A.I. data center going up outside town, a threat to further drain their resources and give them hallucinations in return.) It sees the powerless reaching for easy answers and sacrificing more of their power in the process. 

When people reach out to make a connection through culture war buzzwords or interpersonal grievances they’re playing a game they’re already losing. It’s a movie about the dangers of not wanting to believe, but being seen believing. Here’s a movie about people who use their speech not as a vessel for ideas but as weapons to wield. An anti-masker just has to disingenuously bark “six feet” to get his adversary to back off. And when your words are just a means to an end, you’ll say whatever gets you the attention you seek. No wonder the result is darkly funny despair and intense violence. They have no core truth on which to build themselves. The movie takes these impulses to extremes, then executes five or six sudden turns in the finale that’ll provoke most audiences into wondering how and if it works. For my money there’s a startling escalation that gives a sense of an ending without a sense of closure. And that’s what makes it feel all the more 2020. 

The Last Laugh: JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX

Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux puts his own Joker on trial and declares it guilty. That makes for a pretty interesting gambit, but awfully hollow results. Still, I admired its commitment to putting the biggest supervillain on the stand to ask its audience: why do you even like this guy? He’s a narcissistic murderer and seeing him in something approaching our reality—in a news show interview, in a courtroom, surrounded by normal folks in a serious setting while looking a clown—has a frisson of discomfort. Such glum intent makes sense flowing from the 2019 origin story that took the usual flamboyant clown we see fighting Batman into something closer to a believable scenario. There he was a street performer on whom abuse had been piled for decades leaving him lonely, harassed, mentally disturbed, and violently delusional. By the time he became a serial killer in a loud suit, dancing down the street caked in makeup, and taking a loaded gun onto the set of a late night show, he was a scary, and weirdly compelling, blend of inchoate ideas about what makes people a danger to themselves and others. That that movie flirted with turning him into a kind of folk hero—Travis Bickle meets Bernie Goetz, fitting reference points for a movie so self-consciously vintage—added to the queasy-making mood. Batman’s most famous foe often has that sort of outlaw nihilistic appeal in other projects. As much as Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger’s Jokers are clearly villainous, there’s also that chaotic charisma that makes them appealing to watch. But Joaquin Phoenix’s emaciated oddity is so pathetic and repellant in Phillips’ vision that it’s hard to square the antihero his film’s world percolates with. Same, too, its feints at moral complexity that just reads as simple sensationalism.

The sequel starts with him in prison, occasionally beaten by guards while awaiting trial. The course of the movie follows that trial, as his lawyer (Catherine Keener) tries to get him an insanity defense, while District Attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) seems to have a slam-dunk case since the Joker himself can’t help but work against his own best interests. It’s in his nature. He’s also in love with a toxic fan, Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga), a psychiatrist with a flair for the dramatic. She’s fueling his delusions with her own. As the movie winds its way through testimony that recaps the first film’s crimes, Joker drifts into fantasy sequences in which he romances Harley through musical numbers set to slow, jazzy covers from the Great American Songbook done up like MGM dream ballets and 70s variety show numbers. As I go through the film’s component parts it sounds pretty good: a prison movie, a courtroom drama, a tragic romance, a dark musical, and all with recognizable comic book names. Yet in practice, the thing is a blend of fascinating and dull. Every choice is striking and theoretically interesting, with lots of neat work with smoke and spotlights in the cinematography and an eerie sound design. But cumulatively the whole project says nothing much. It loses even a loose sense of psychology as it edges closer to growing outsized without ever quite getting there, stranded stylistically stifled between something uncomfortable and small and something more epic and excessive. It simply stretches thinly over two-and-a-half hours, losing a sense of Joker’s complexity in its repetitions and never bringing Harley into as clear focus, despite Gaga’s great look and tone. For some reason, she’s all rising action, and never gets to pop off like Phoenix did the last time around. I kept imagining a Harley Quinn movie as committed to her as the first Joker movie was to him. And I liked the idea of a comic book movie (atypical of that genre as these are) entirely focused on the immediate consequences of the previous one. But, despite the best efforts of the cast and craftspeople, the movie never develops into anything more than an extended epilogue to the first, letting its potential drain away.

Flesh and Blood: NAPOLEON

I wonder how many people know that the saying about history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, is a paraphrase of Karl Marx? Or how many know that he was talking about Napoleon and Napoleon’s nephew’s respective coups? Regardless, the quote was on my mind during Ridley Scott’s Napoleon because the film is at once a large-scale epic of combat and tragedy, and a scrambling farcical comedy of interpersonal pettiness. It seems to be arguing that history isn’t just repeating. It’s always tragedy and farce playing out simultaneously. The one feeds the other; the wheels of time spin forward with the push of the pathetic egos of petulant leaders. Scott’s been on this kick for a while, melding the historical scope of his Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven with the messier stuff of small, fallible human foibles. This preoccupation must’ve started bubbling up with his brilliantly, bleakly absurd 2013 drug-war thriller The Counselor, and he’s continued to ramp up both the humor and the pathos in films more—medieval Rashomon with a bitter satiric edge, The Last Duel—and less—broad schtick ensemble chaos House of Gucci—successful. His Napoleon is among the best of these, balanced on dual intertwined through-lines of its subject’s tactical brilliance and pathetic personal drama.

He has in Joaquin Phoenix a perfect co-conspirator for this tone. The actor brings a sniveling underdog quality that’s both charmingly pompous and irritatingly arrogant, and never far from wallowing in self-pitying psychological myopia. He stalks the frame like a glowering child, with a posture that’s somehow simultaneously hunched and puffed-up. He speaks with the half-swallowed bark of a man so deeply insecure he needs to stomp up and down the halls of power convincing himself he belongs. Rarely is swagger so needy. His Napoleon is a man of unchecked ambition and bottomless insecurity. The film takes him from his days as a young solider, through his unlikely rises and falls through the ranks to eventually become Emperor of France, and then sees him straight through his exiles and death. Dramatic scenes are cut like comedy, while the battles are big and booming, bloody and legible. Track the tactics and the players with Scott’s camera and you see the triangulation and bloodthirsty brilliance of the battlefield. (Cannonballs smash through horses. Swords slash through jugulars. Bodies plunge bleeding into the ice.) Then we swoop through the palaces and backrooms where the real intrigue is the scheming and intrigue of power-hungry men (a slew of fantastic character performances) and their unrepentant appetites. When Napoleon churlishly retorts, “I enjoy my meals” as a way of rebuffing accusations of his piggishness, we see the unfurling of an ego and the melding of the personal and political. He never has enough. Later, he’ll fume at an English representative, “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” like he’s a tantruming teen.

He's scary and funny and altogether uncomfortably human. Napoleon’s key romantic entanglement with wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) is shot through with some legitimate tenderness and complicated feelings. But it’s also sloppy and pathetic with heaving, fast copulation and sweaty cuckoldry. His position of imperial power is constantly undercut with his complicated interpersonal ironies—even the famous painting of his coronation, replicated here in flesh and blood, is triangulated with the undercurrents of jealousies and rivalries and unspoken power plays in every darting glance. He’s a man of great power, and great damage, with little control over his immature id. When he at long last has an heir, he holds the crying infant while we hear the rumble of cannon fire in the distance. The personal and political intertwine with foreboding for the future. In each twist of his personal life, we see a reflection of the consequential reign of terror he inflicts on his country. In the scariest, funniest scene, he goes scrambling, tumbling down a flight of stairs mid-coup before returning with the military behind him. He barely collects himself before, staring at representatives from behind drawn weapons, he offers, “Now, then. Shall we vote?” Out of such slights, the world turns, and people die.

Child's Play: C'MON C'MON and PETITE MAMAN

Children, as the old song goes, are the future. But that’s not quite the case, right? The children are also now. They exist in the present, too. And yet to see a child is also to see a future, the potential not just for that person’s life, but for humanity itself. This recognition is one that can drift easily into sentimentality, shaving away the uncomfortable elements of childhood into a purity of progress. Far better to also recognize children’s humanity, in all the mess that implies. Tennessee Williams once wrote that kids are “precociously knowing and singularly charming, but not to be counted on for those gifts that arrive by no other way than…experience and contemplation.” (I might quibble with this quote, too, but I’ll get to that later.) Some movies about children try too effortfully to pile on the experience and contemplation. I usually prefer those that more artfully let young lives take their course.

Writer-director Mike Mills tends to understand this. He’s made lovely films about growing into the person you’re always becoming—a short documentary Paperboys; a late-in-life coming-out in Beginners; and his best, 20th Century Women, a deeply-felt 70s’ ensemble piece about a teenage boy and the various influences in his life. His latest is C’mon C’mon and it has the gentle rhythms and tones of an episode of This American Life. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as a cuddly, bearded, well-intentioned New York intellectual out collecting interviews with children for his public radio program. He goes to Detroit, Los Angeles, and New Orleans with his producers finding participants. How do these kids see the world? How do they see their future? Each kid, in a real interview, gives answers that seem honest in their unfussy plainspokenness, though one wonders if they think it’s also what he and his audience wants to hear: parents just don’t understand, the dangers of our world weigh heavily on them, and so on. But Phoenix presents such an open and earnest listener that it’s clear he draws something natural out of them as their subtle interlocutor. They also talk about their dreams and aspirations, and the real difficulties and obstacles in their way. Phoenix warmly guides them toward comfort in these exchanges, promising nothing more than a sympathetic ear.

Into this project arrives his precocious grade-school-aged nephew (Woody Norman), left in his care as the boy’s mother (Gaby Hoffmann) has to see to the institutionalization of the boy’s troubled father (Scoot McNairy). Phoenix clearly loves his nephew and wants what’s best for him. He’s delighted by his creativity and impressed by his thoughtfulness. But he’s also worn down by the daily demands of child care and tending to the emotional needs of a boy still learning how to regulate himself. (He also has some ritualized flights of fancy that can grate on his caretaker.) The movie is patient with both characters, allowing them the space to challenge each other as well as grow in mutual understanding. That makes for a small, delicately crafted movie perched on the same soft-spoken NPR assumption that it’s worth hearing what others have to say. It has not a perspective so much as an attitude, stubbornly sentimental and loaded with references to books and art spoken and shared reverently by its cast of characters. In simply observed black-and-white frames, the film blends documentary and fiction for a small, close story of cross-generational understanding. And in this style it finds a real familial warmth and charge in the scenes between Phoenix and the boy, a tentative and tender forging of meaningful memories in fleeting everyday moments. It doesn’t push to make its child characters beyond-their-years clever, and resists turning anyone into a mere symbol. This can sometimes give the movie a meandering focus. But at its best, it has the observational insight to simply let its performances play out and develop in something close to life-like dimensions.

An ever more delicate and mysterious vision of childhood is Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman. It proceeds like a fragile spell, a magic trick, a fable. And even that doesn’t do justice to the ways in which its fantasy just happens, casually, without fuss, with barely a flicker of the unreal. Sciamma’s films—the observational likes of Water Lilies, Girlhood, and Tomboy forming a triptych of perspectives on formative years in lives of young women—are typically cast in a realist light. Here she uses the same techniques to make a film built entirely out of a high concept, but anyone watching a random clip might never guess it. A little girl goes with her parents to a small house in the woods, the home of her recently deceased grandmother. The adults have the task of cleaning out the place, which gives the kid plenty of time to occupy herself. She wanders off into the yard, through some trees, and arrives at what she thinks is the neighbors’ house, where there’s a little girl her age inviting her to play. There’s something sweet and real about how a child can just make a friend, form a bond, in a blink of a simpatico eye. What a viewer will notice right away is that the girls look suspiciously alike. (They are played by twins, so that explains that.) Their houses, through subtle cues of set design and prop placement, are similar, too. As the girls meet in the woods for playtimes multiple times, it’s clear: the daughter has made friends with her own mother as a child—her petite maman.

One could imagine this twinning time-travel conceit in lesser hands heading for antics or silliness—maybe The Parent Trap by way of Back to the Future. Sure, if done right, that could be fun. But Sciamma approaches this picture with supreme restraint and total straight-faced matter-of-fact seriousness and commitment. She’d understand that Tennessee Williams shortchanged a child’s capacity for contemplation. In the faces of the two girls at the center of this film, she locates all the gentle severity of such an occurrence. As they realize their relationship’s time-bending qualities, they ponder and reflect on what it might mean. The future mother looks into the face of a child she now knows she’ll have, and can learn when, exactly, her own mother will pass away. The younger (if one can call her that) can now see concretely the tangible childlike qualities that surely still sit buried within her mother. Together, though, they just are who they are. Sciamma lets them be, playing politely and sensitively together as little girls can do—tromping through the woods, making plans for little imaginative games and skits, plotting the best way to get a sleepover. There are moments nestled within these quotidian affairs, though, that catch one’s breath in a simple, hushed expression of fantasy cross-generational connection. Typical of its effect is a gift from the future—music played on a pair of headphones we don’t hear, but the girl in the past hearing this unknown song out of time smiles an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile at the sound, a private preview. Most striking, though, is a softly murmured admission from mother to child—I’ve always wanted you. Here’s a movie that appears to do very little—and accomplishes so much. It respects a child’s capacity to take things as they are, and to engage in a sense of wonder that’s perfectly natural—deep thinking taking place in growing minds.

Brute Force: YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

So often revenge movies pretend to deal with its subject’s immoral consequences while dutifully revealing pleasure in action, action, action. It’s often self-defeating, albeit with a sick gratification as a kick of gore or a squib of blood acts as catharsis the movie might later have us question, however feebly. In the case of Lynne Ramsey’s You Were Never Really Here, though, it’s all consequences. She presents a typically grim and determined tale of a sad man of violence trudging his depressed mind, wounded soul, and lumbering body into an act of righteous chaos – saving a Senator’s daughter from a sex trafficking ring. However, we are spared the gory details, the explicit nastiness, the violence perpetrated to and on behalf of victims. It all happens off screen. The dripping wounds are seen only after the damage has been done. The centerpiece is the man (Joaquin Phoenix), a blunt force instrument whose shaggy beard, deliberate gait, and shlubby dress indicates a more normcore than hardcore action hero, proceeding through the villain’s lair room by room, hammer in hand. The camera cuts, fracturing the diegetic soundtrack as the view changes from one security camera-style angle to another, the bludgeoning already in progress if not finished. An anonymous threatening man is mostly or completely crumpled on the floor and out of the corner of the eye you can spy our protagonist slumping his way to the next obstacle.

Ramsey’s project of subjective interiority – voiced earlier with the child’s eye miserabilist whimsy in Ratcatcher and sorrowful red jolts of maternal nostalgia blending into trauma in We Need to Talk About Kevin – finds perhaps its finest expression here. Her loose adaptation of Jonathan Ames’ slim novel of the same name is a story about hurt people hurting people, as a haunted and wounded soul finds what little meaning he can in his off-the-books thuggish private investigator jobs. He can break skulls better than he can repair hearts, or his own mind. Ramsey sticks closely to his perspective, pinning him into precise frames of methodical routines, and intuitive flash frames of flashbacks jangling sparse evocative backstory of an abusive childhood (his elderly, ailing mother (Judith Roberts), similarly abused, lingers with him still) and vague military deployment overseas. Jonny Greenwood’s droning score filtering through the impressionistic, swirling sound design matches Thomas Townend’s cinematography of grainy glossy surfaces chopped into slices and fragments by Joe Bini’s deliberate, artful edits. At the center of it all is Phoenix’s taciturn bear of a performance, a grit-the-teeth determination with sunken, distant gaze and pained expression. He wears the burdens of his life’s trauma on his slumped shoulders. Even if and when the rescue of the angelically delicate lost girl (Ekaterina Samsonov) is within his reach, his sadness isn’t lifting any time soon. He moves through noir-ish developments as if underwater, the film's style treating him like Lee Marvin in Point Blank if he were a scraggly depressive. The picture as a whole casts this spell, a sort of artful pulp burned down to its bones that threatens to feel slight, but instead lingers like a hazy cold.

Crimes and Misbehaviors: IRRATIONAL MAN

Once you open the door to a little lie, you live in a world full of reasons to lie. At least that’s a philosophical perspective a depressed professor tries to explain early in Irrational Man, Woody Allen’s latest film. The academic doesn’t really believe it, and that’s not just because he disagrees professionally. He’s not sure he believes in anything at all, having a reached a point of real and deep psychological despair some point before arriving on campus to start his new teaching position during a sunny summer term. At the film’s core is this man’s search for meaning, a solution for his melancholy impotence, creative and otherwise. He finds it not in drinking or flirting with a pretty student, though they’re sickly good stopgaps, but by deciding suddenly and forcefully to commit a perfect crime. He thinks he's smart enough to get away with murder. Once he’s allowed himself to think about it, he’s in a world full of reasons to transgress.

This is hardly the first film from Woody Allen to consider existential crises, the cruelty of mankind, and the cold possibility of evil going unpunished. (See: Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Match Point, and so on.) But in the breezy drama he makes of it this time sits one of its bitterest expressions. Those interested in biographical criticism will surely find it noteworthy to point out that Allen made this film after renewed scrutiny on his personal life and alleged crimes. Irrational Man makes its professor a source of scorn and gossip, who clings to his sense of self-righteous self-justification, and who ultimately must pay for his hubris. If this is to be read as an expression of Allen, it’s a self-loathing statement. But it’s not a poisoned or stunted film. No, he’s up to his usual lively artifice.

Like so much of his recent output, the film plays like a draft, another sketch of ideas and themes he’s obsessively working over, varying the tone and plot, but flowing from a consistent voice. Here he is once more with the American songbook score, white Windsor font credits, and characters cloaked in the brisk patter of stuffy East Coast midcentury pseudo-intellectuals that maybe only ever really existed in this precise manner in the world of Woody Allen movies. Indeed, here the characters are signifiers in an intellectual exercise, but what a fascinating, dryly nasty little work this is. There’s an extra sting to thinly imagined characters as an expert cast enlivens arch wordiness and cinematographer Darius Khondji (in his fourth collaboration with Allen) creates bright tableaus pinning them in. The result is like a frustrated English major turned half-hearted gag writer punched up a minor forgotten Hitchcock concept.

What lets the picture breathe is ultimately the cold jazzy syncopation of dueling narrators, puncturing the depressed professor’s murderous ideas with the naïve beaming lights of a student. What starts as a typical vaguely queasy older man/younger woman relationship is played for its inappropriateness, and is made to seem wrong as a factor in the plot. We meet the man (Joaquin Phoenix, draining potential ticks from the dialogue with a flattened affect) as he arrives on campus just about ready to kill himself. The woman (Emma Stone, as cheerful as ever) is in his class, and responds eagerly to his praise. When they first embrace, Khondji finds them in the reflection of a funhouse mirror. There’s no denying the warped relationship now, especially as the clearly troubled man soon begins secret murder planning and everyone around the woman – her boyfriend (Jamie Blackley), parents (Betsy Aidem and Ethan Phillips), and chemistry teacher (Parker Posey) – advises her to keep her distance.

A key image is the film’s most striking shot. (It may very well be among the best shots in Allen’s career.) Phoenix stands at the end of a pier, the setting sun silhouetting him, reflecting off the water in a way that ripples his form. He looks like a ghostly shadow lurking in the middle of a picturesque landscape. He’s a figure unknowable, and as Stone questions how much she really understands about him, he grows all the more unspeakably creepy. By allowing us access to both character’s thoughts, we’re allowed full knowledge neither have. Their conflict, present even when neither is aware, gains an interesting friction. They arrive at logical conclusions for their situations, the film snapping shut with a clanging moral, neatly deployed. Philosophy in action, or philosophy inaction, leads them to unsettled conclusions, the sort of world-weary worldview of an old man who once thought his intellectual posturing could beat back despair but isn’t so sure anymore. Here’s a film that says the only rational philosophy is one that sees those who damage others fall to dooms of their own making.

The Baked Sleep: INHERENT VICE

Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice is a gumshoe tale with pothead logic. Beginning, as all private eye stories do, with a beautiful girl (Katherine Waterson) showing up unexpectedly in a P.I.’s office with a strange tale of dastardly deeds in need of uncovering, Doc, our detective protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix), lights a joint and gets to work. What follows is a druggy wading through 1970 Los Angeles, a stoned stumble through a hazy maze of clues and complications. Around every corner is a funny-named character (like Shasta Fey Hepworth, or Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen) played by a recognizable face in frames dense with vintage detail. Soon a simple situation about a potential financial scheme becomes more about real estate shenanigans (a la Chinatown), a few missing persons cases, a shady transnational syndicate, and maybe more.

Doc’s investigation proceeds as a procession of dialogues as he hunts down the truth. He’s a shaggy hippy ambling into clean-cut offices, hotels, homes, restaurants, and police headquarters, then back to his beach-side hovel to ponder the things he’s heard. It’s the culture clash of 1970, between the square-jawed Americana establishment and the relaxed, politically engaged counter culture, rattling down a dimly understood paranoid logic. Phoenix gives his character a great listening look, holding a mostly invested and intrigued P.I. poker face. He’s always leaning forward – listening closely – or settling back – luring secrets with a confidant’s confidence. And yet he’s also walking about with a perpetually furrowed brow, confusion wafting over every encounter as his pot smolders nearby. He’s like a more purposeful Jeff Lebowski crossed with a high Philip Marlowe.

He may be a bit confused from time to time, sometimes seeming totally adrift in a sea of details and strange asides. But he’s on the case, moving forward, scribbling notes and puzzling over new discoveries as everyone he meets shovels exposition of varying relevance at him. He talks to his aunt (Jeannie Berlin), his assistant (Maya Rudolph), his lawyer (Benicio Del Toro), a cop (Josh Brolin), an ex-con (Michael Kenneth Williams), a masseuse (Hong Chau), a potential widow (Jena Malone), a musician (Owen Wilson), a deputy district attorney (Reese Witherspoon), a dentist (Martin Short), a real estate mogul (Eric Roberts), and more. Most appear for only a scene or two. Some contribute valuable new information to move the mysteries along. Others simply add to the flavoring, an offbeat, mellow, and bumbling vibe. They’re whole eccentric beings conjured up to be wonderfully oddball cogs in a fuzzy mystery machine slowly growing clearer.

The film has copious period pleasures – cars and fashions informing characters’ stations, music drifting in over radios and record players, a grainy, vivid, sunny orange and yellow color palate shot in gorgeous time-appropriate cinematography by Robert Elswit. Anderson’s too good a filmmaker to let a scene go to waste, every shot informed by a groovy sense of place and space, as clear as anything in his Boogie Nights or There Will Be Blood. There’s always some bit of visual cleverness emphasizing how lost Doc, and we, are in the mysteries at hand. Angles will cut off characters’ heads, hiding their identities from us. Voices will float in from out of frame. Missing time – when our detective is bumped unconscious by an unseen bludgeoner, say, a common trope – is never satisfactorily filled in. We even have a narrator (Joanna Newsom) whose sweetly voiced information is always pleasant but only occasionally helpful.

This is all low-key, low-stakes, loose genre doodling, but what’s often quite transporting about the whole experience is how successfully Anderson puts the audience in the protagonist’s stoned headspace. It’s full of the usual puzzles of detective fiction of its ilk. But the more I struggled to put the pieces together, the more the plot seemed to slip away. Then, suddenly, it falls into place, resolved in some ways, but with loose threads dangling still. It’s a puzzle where the pieces don’t quite fit, even though all the characters seem satisfied enough to move on with their lives, case closed. It’s a detective movie that hits all its marks, but takes enough cues from its stoned lead to leave a drifting fog of lingering confusion in its wake. At one point Doc asks Shasta, “Inherent vice? What’s that mean?” To which she replies, “I dunno.”

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: HER

Her is a film on parallel tracks. It’s a gentle and quietly chilling sci-fi film; it’s a fuzzy and empathetic romance. It’s interested in abstract philosophical ruminations on the implications of ever increasing entanglement with ever-smarter technology; it’s a sopping sentimental look into mankind’s yearning for a life of truly meaningful connection and beauty. That these tracks come together with something approaching coherence and cohesion, meeting sometimes convincingly in a sweet and whimsical middle ground between these concerns, is due to writer-director Spike Jonze’s ability to find and present the beating heart and core universal insights that sit inside what appear on the surface to be unwieldy and peculiar concepts. He makes prickly unpredictable, but deeply sympathetic and singularly strange stories – about a portal into the mind of a real actor playing himself, Being John Malkovich; about a case of writer’s block that rewrites before our eyes the very movie we’re watching, Adaptation; about a boy who imagines a storybook world in which his emotions are literal monsters to be ruled over, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are – so full of personal and evocative feeling.

With his newest film, he uses science fiction in what has become an increasingly rare use of the genre in its big screen outings. I mean, I love sci-fi about monsters, robots, superheroes, and space opera plenty, but that’s not all the genre is capable of, even if that’s increasingly the only kind that makes it into wide release. With Her, Jonze takes a real concept concerning How We Live Now – the nature of human intimacy in lives increasingly tangled up in smart phones and wearable tech – and layers on some metaphoric complications by imagining a world that’s much like our own, with current trends extrapolated outward. He takes a question one could ask about present day interactions – is cybersex any less an intimate act for being mediated by technology? – and adds a futurist complication. What if the person on the other end isn’t even human? This is no Catfishing parable. In Her, a man depressed in the wake of his divorce upgrades his network – a synced cloud between his computers, phone, and gaming device – to a new operating system and immediately falls in love. He’s not just happy with his purchase. He falls in love with the smart, funny, inquisitive, lively computer voice representing the cutting edge learning and evolving artificial intelligence of his OS.

The man is played by Joaquin Phoenix, often sitting alone in the frame as he talks to the voice of his computer, his eyes lighting up with unexpected energy. He has flesh and blood people to interact with, his neighbor (Amy Adams), his boss (Chris Pratt), and even his ex-wife (Rooney Mara), but still he’s lonely. Speaking to his new digital companion, he’s cautious at first, but the technology soon seems to win him over. It’s just so alive, speaking with the breathy, excited voice of Scarlett Johansson. You might wonder why a computer function would need to breathe at all, but it’s clear that the software is built to grow and learn and speak in a way that’s comfortingly human. No stiff Siri stiltedness here. There are long passages of the film in which the two of them talk, Phoenix and Johansson bantering or exposing their innermost thoughts, which could be lifted out of any film romance barely altered, and it’s startlingly easy to forget for a split second the nature of what is happening. That’s the chilly but humane point bubbling under their interactions. It’s sweet and scary, but tips so hard to the sweet side for so long, it’s all the scarier.

It’s a haunting form of intimacy. He throws himself into the relationship. It is a technological escape from depression and through the process he rediscovers his ability to feel. It’s productive in that way, and he’s increasingly happy with his situation, even shyly admitting to his neighbor that he’s “seeing someone” and “just having lots of fun.” But it was hard for me to shake the awareness that his love is a voice programmed to have all the signifiers of human interaction without anything signified. This is no long-distance relationship with a human. It’s all just bits of code zipping around, learning, evolving, behaving human. (The tantalizing question of how human must a program be before we say it has developed humanity remains hinted at, largely unexplored.) Jonze’s wonderfully humane tone, whimsical and twee without ever becoming too silly, seems to bury this central fact for quite some time, swooning with a twinkly (too twinkly) Arcade Fire score at the romance just as much as Phoenix does. How real is this output really? He rather geekily says research shows OS/human romances are rare, but maybe he’s in one because the input data of his life suggests to the computer that that is exactly what he needs.

Jonze paints the complications simply, subdued under the rosy romantic picture he paints, a soft and warm comfortable environment underneath which sits its colder questioning. It’s an oddity, at once hopeful and pessimistic, saying that even when we become too reliant on technology, it may in the end grow past us to the extent that it’ll know when to leave us. The cinematography suggests this funny futurist optimism, Hoyte Van Hoytema creating imagery that has a pale glow off of the soft pastel colors of shirts – the high-waisted pants are all earth tones that are even softer – and glistening city lights of a world cautiously and convincingly just a few leaps beyond our own. We live in a world of sleek, smooth, curved devices, much like the ones in this film. Everything from the iPhone to the Wii seems soft and appealing with light colors, dulcet tones, soothing beeps, intuitive functionality (some of the time). You can walk into any restaurant and are likely to find a couple sitting across a table from each other, staring deeply into their screens. Her takes infatuation with technology and design to the next level, reveals that, even with some strange and awkward new complications, it can be deeply satisfying and even beneficial for this character. And that’s exactly why it’s so creepy, too.

Free Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow: THE MASTER

Paul Thomas Anderson opens The Master with a long, hypnotic shot of churning waters, a rippling disturbance in calm, blue ocean, the wake of an unseen ship. This image – an image repeated a few more times throughout the film – proves to be a fitting one for two reasons. First, the hypnotic nature of the opening shot leads us into a film about a deeply disturbed World War II veteran who falls into a cult in its early stages of creation and propagation, a kind of slow, enveloping hypnosis. Second, the shot signals a main thematic preoccupation of the film concerning the wake of psychological damage damaged people can leave behind them as they travel through life, a ripple of destruction a person can create, knowingly or unknowingly, for those who come in contact with him.

The two damaged men at the heart of this film are that disoriented veteran stumbling through the scar tissue of conflict in such a way that he can’t convincingly fit into post-war American society and the cult leader who takes him in and attempts to indoctrinate him into The Cause. Freddie, the veteran (Joaquin Phoenix), has emotional pain and exhibits erratic behavior, the roots of which stretch deep into his past. His family has a history of alcoholism and mental instability. As the film begins, we see him sitting on a beach, away from his fellow Navy crewmembers. He’s hacking at coconuts with a machete, molesting a sandcastle woman, and creating makeshift, surely poisonous, booze out of a suspect concoction of beverages and chemicals. Years pass, as do opportunities for jobs and relationships, until he meets Lancaster Dodd, The Master (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Freddie, fleeing the latest group of people enraged at his drunken, inscrutable unpredictability, stows away about The Master’s ship. Lancaster knows a lost soul when he sees one. Freddie is, after all, a possible convert. Lancaster, a man who has a professorial snake-oil salesman charm, introduces himself matter-of-factly as “a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist and a theoretical philosopher…” This would be a laugh line if it weren’t so frightening how fully he believes it and how ready Freddie is to believe it too. Lancaster offers the poor man a place to stay in this growing family of followers so long as he agrees to help out and submit to emotionally distressing “processing,” absorbing, torturous New Age psychological interrogation. And so The Master has found himself a new subject.

Anderson’s film moves elliptically through time, tracking the relationship between The Master and Freddie as the cult grows in power and is on the receiving end of heated questions from contentious outsiders and brave insiders alike. Vivid supporting characters include Dodd’s sharp-tongued, deceptively matronly wife (Amy Adams), supportive son-in-law (Rami Malek) and disillusioned son (Jesse Plemons), as well as several followers and defenders (including a small role for the always wonderful Laura Dern). But Anderson is not interested in simply charting the rise of this fringe group loosely based on L. Ron Hubbard’s early-1950’s group that became Scientology. Though the film has the epic sweep of Anderson’s Boogie Nights or Magnolia, sprawling, virtuosic period pieces, it plays out with the squirmy, uncomfortable intimacy of his ugly-beautiful introverted rom com (of sorts) Punch Drunk Love.

This is what he was doing in his last film, the instantly, toweringly essential There Will Be Blood, but here he’s working with a narrower emotional range. It doesn’t climb to the same emotional heights and precise blending of intimate and epic. This is an epic of mental interiors. The production design from David Crank and Jack Fisk captures the time and place with a precision that appears effortless and seamless. Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s cinematography, in rich, stunning, and rare 65mm, sketches detailed shots that play out in long, meticulously composed takes with locked down angles that occasionally move with a sudden, fluid force. This is an attractively rendered production of emotional ugliness with a focus on both the high minded philosophy and psychology behind these men and the base instincts, dirty jokes and bodily functions that mark them as ultimately only human. Anderson marshals considerable craftsmanship in his capturing of incredible performances from two clashing characters who appear to be complete opposites, but are nonetheless continually drawn together by their shared perplexing, fascinating, mesmerizing intensity of opacity.

Phoenix has a twisted, sickly demeanor here, a way of standing half-hunched, moving with a drunken, hesitantly feral quality to his gait. He twists his face into a confused crumple of painful-looking wrinkles and glowering, deep, penetrating stares. He’s a man burying himself in his physicality. Hoffman, in contrast, has the gregarious regal comportment of a man completely sure in his own certitude. Even when directly confronted about his fanciful dogma that one character close to him admits is “[made up] as he goes along,” he’s fiercely defensive, cruel even to those who admire him the most. It’s easy to see him as a deluded monster, but Anderson and Hoffman create a far more sympathetic portrait than mere damnation. Without exploring this man’s background, we can see what draws people in and what is utterly convincing about his methodology. He pulls in seekers, those yearning for purpose, and gives them the comfort of certainty, no matter the psychological cost.

This is a strong work of filmmaking, a work in which each and every aspect is fine tuned and polished to perfection. But unlike Anderson’s earlier films, exuberant, inviting works, even at their most difficult or foreboding, the film is so perfectly closed off, a dense psychological thicket of characterization and detail. Perhaps the key image is one that finds Freddie and Lancaster in neighboring jail cells, framed with a barred window between them and a wall of bars between them and the camera. Freddie thrashes against the confinement. Lancaster sits patiently, stewing in his anger. Throughout the film, despite their connection, they’re unable to ever truly reach each other and we in the audience can only watch from a distance as they struggle to get there no matter the cost to those in their wake.