Head Games: THE GREEN KNIGHT

As an Arthurian legend, the English lit staple Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a chivalric stress test. It takes the self-professed weakest Knight of the Round Table, nephew to the King himself, and puts him in a simple supernatural contest that eventually tests his every vice. Thus, it makes sense The Green Knight, David Lowery’s new adaptation of this tale, is down in the gnarled moral complications and ponderous deep sorcery. It authentically inhabits the central tension between the upward pull of virtue and the the downward thrust of temptation. Watching it, so unusually structured, sticking more or less to the progression of events, with some embellishment and changes to the specifics, as laid forth in the 14th century poem and steeped in the symbolism and priorities of its characters’ moral perspective, the film starts to feel like what a medieval poet might’ve conjured if they knew about cinema. Lowery, whose works are so often atmospheric and moody in this particular hazy way, from big stuff like Disney remake Pete’s Dragon (perhaps the finest of its ilk) to intimate high-concept experiments like the spectral time-bending A Ghost Story, visualizes a stately verdant and chilly world, where the medieval muck of mud and blood is already dotted with crumbling buildings and moss-covered brick between vast stretches of pale fields and dark forests. The characters speak in murmurs, intone grave importance, cast spells, recite prayers, and send each other off with symbols and speeches, ritual perhaps grown hollow with the passing years. Arthur, too, is near the end, speaking in a sickly whisper; Sean Harris plays him with teeth hurting and breath cracking. When he stands at the Round Table for a Christmas celebration we can see the respect the Knights and Ladies have for him, but can only triangulate his charisma and power as things of the distant past, already passing into legend.

We can also see how the young man at his side, Gawain (Dev Patel), theoretically in the early heights of vigor and power, can’t quite measure up. Yet. That’s why he takes the challenge put forth by the surprise visitor, the Green Knight, who asks to receive a blow from a weapon, a strike he will repay one year hence. Gawain, afraid of those consequences, beheads the guest, who promptly recapitates himself and reminds all listening of the deadline. A deal’s a deal. The rest of the story involves Gawain diligently following through, trudging north after this magical figure in order to remain a man of his word. Along the way, as Lowery adds details to his laborious journey, including encounters with bandits, giants, and spirits, among others including a seductive Lady and Lord (Alicia Vikander and Joel Edgerton), it’s easy to wonder if living up to his promise is worth the cost. All this trouble just to lose one’s head. Patel makes a marvelous Gawain, handsomely smoldering with a wet-haired puppy-eyed fear and hidden hard-nosed ambition; he can be courageous, but when he is, it’s almost despite himself. He anchors long wordless stretches of dread wandering and enigmatic fantasy in the margins. 

Between the moody visuals and sluggish pace, the film becomes a slowly unfurling episodic parable, or maybe a clammy waking nightmare. More than once, the camera drifts and supernatural events are presented ambiguously. Lowery imbues the proceedings with a sense that the line between reality and unreality, truth and legend, is thinner the closer we get to the climax. And even there, where he adds a poignant riff on the idea of a life flashing before his eyes, you might initially scratch your head about what, exactly, you’re seeing. But it makes a certain intuitive, emotional, moral sense. The movie is so plain about what’s on its mind, and presents violence and sexuality so plainly (that and its narrative tweaks ensure it won’t be classroom viewing), that the big questions it tackles are never lost in the mists of a film that’s both magisterial and base. Can an impulsive young coward grow into a great knight? Can one easily drawn into mistakes learn from them and become a good man? What, in the end, are we to make of Gawain's plight? The questions are left naggingly unresolved in ways new and old here. Besides, we Gawain scholars have been wrestling with it for 600 some years. Here’s a striking reason to return.

Souls of Black Folk: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

Barry Jenkins is a filmmaker whose images are sensuous, with his cinematographer James Laxton’s light pulling softly and clearly at the details of people’s faces and bodies, pictures cut together with flowing intuitive poetry. But they’re not weightless in their beauty; they’re heavy with meaning, a substance that is the style. His best achievements — the intimate character study Moonlight, the more expansive relationship heartbreaker If Beale Street Could Talk — use their beauty to bring into vivid relief the soft-spoken, slow-rolling interpersonal dilemmas of the people it puts on screen.The velvety texture of his vision, smooth and speckled, would point to inspirations from Wong Kar-Wai and Claire Denis even if he didn’t name them as such in interviews. It’s something of a shock to bring this aestheticized approach into the tropes of slave narratives for The Underground Railroad, a more than 10-hour adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name. The images are unfailingly beautiful, a painterly prose scrawled with Malickian asides attuned to the rhythms of nature and soulful contemplation, even as the subject matter is grim and gory. One of the first shots is of blood hitting a wooden floor, afterbirth mere cuts away from being buried in a garden. The sprawling and epic historical drama — so long and rambling that it can afford to be drawn intimately and unevenly in broad strokes and pinpoint precise portraiture alike — is full of such fraught and freighted imagery. Here, after all, is the birth of our nation, its original sin, buried with the intent to ignore, but springing up fruit from the poisoned tree. Jenkins is nothing if not aware of the power of his images.

The central focus is on the personal trauma of its characters — a catalogue of slavery’s dehumanizing forms — and the tendrils it snakes through society. Jenkins frames his center of attention with loving weight given to her studied expressions. She’s Cora (Thuso Mbedu), a slave run away from a plantation, northward bound. As her episodic journey takes her through various States — and various states of freedom — she finds herself navigating a variety of responses to White Supremacy. There’s a genteel town where Black and White live side-by-side in a tenuous acceptance. There’s a town where a White couple appears to be helpful to Black plight, but have nefarious ulterior motives. There’s a town where a kindly couple is willing to hide runaway slaves, but only to a point. There’s a prosperous town run entirely by Black people — the series’ high point, featuring some of Jenkins’ loveliest sun-drenched images, the better to signal the power of hope, some compelling speechifying from the cast, and the looming threat of White violence from those in the next town over. At each stop, Cora sees society forming and reforming around the voids left by prejudice, violence, and despair — the damage, the potential, and the inescapability of certain destruction. The story cuts backwards and forwards in time, exploring characters’ histories, their families, and the cycles of pain they endure—while finding time for oases of love and connection, too.

The ramifications of slavery — the long-lasting physical and emotional toll, and its generational traumas — are written across every painful picturesque image. An early scene gives us a point-of-view shot from a man being burned alive, the image blurring, blinking. Jenkins spares us the worst of the violence by taking us inside. Somehow it hurts all the more. It’s a signal as to his interest in enlivening history through literary accumulation of empathetic detail. It extends to the entire rambling narrative and expansive ensemble. Among the panoply of supporting characters, the most poignant and fascinating has to be a young Black boy (Chase W. Dillon) who tags along as the assistant to a slave catcher (Joel Edgerton). Well dressed, and with a poise beyond his years, he carries with him the complicated ways one can react to a dehumanizing state. He’s won some degree of safety, and yet his interactions with the people around him, White and Black alike, carry an ambiguity as to his ultimate allegiances. That such complication is carried in the boyish face — held so eerily placid, even inscrutable — says so much about the ways in which the systems of oppression warp and linger in one’s behavior. Jenkins’ visions of humanity keeps this in sharp focus, staging his patient shots that look straight ahead without flinching as character’s ravel and unravel.

It’s full of decisions: strong and bold. Though the many hours are sometimes a jumble of incident — pokey in the way to which all prestige miniseries these days, even ones with craft of this high level, succumb — it has enough track to provoke and compel, to lose you and win you back over and over. For every striking, compelling moment, there is a languorous, aimless downtime that will come slowly back into focus. By the end, the totality is an enormous and overwhelming whole, rough and rattled despite the patience and beauty on the surface. My biggest point of contention is with Jenkins’ boldest stroke: carrying over Whitehead’s novel’s central metaphor literalizing the Underground Railroad not as a covert trail of safe houses and brave rescuers, but as an actual train chugging along buried deep beneath the ground. He takes it seriously, and has his characters treat it as fact. There are moments of eerie allegory as this sunken place subway avant la lettre comes puffing out of the darkness, staffed by kindly mysterious people of color willing to lend an ear or disappear. (It also rhymes unexpectedly movingly off the first episode's credits' surprising blast of OutKast: “you can’t stop a train.”) But just as often its metaphorical presence strikes me as less interesting than the historical truths it intends to express symbolically. Besides, when Jenkins digs deep into other moments of sideways historical invention, he does so with a specificity and attention to psychological detail that needs no too-clever fantasy to sell its intensity. Still, I’m grateful for his efforts to bring something like honest to goodness filmmaking worth wrestling with to our TV screens, a Decalogue of slave narratives yearning to be free from the ordinary tropes with which we’re sometimes numbed. This is filmmaking that’s alive and provoking, dense with allusion, alive with intriguing figures, heavy with electric pessimism and hard-fought slivers of grace and hope.

Darkness Falls: IT COMES AT NIGHT

Trey Edward Shults is a young director to watch. His debut feature was an achingly personal one, and all the better for it. Working on a micro-budget, filming in his mother’s home, and starring his real relatives, the tense dysfunctional-family drama Krisha was deeply felt. A worthy addition to the strangely underpopulated Thanksgiving movie genre, it told a shattering story of an estranged, addict aunt coming to dinner. His confident, expressive filmmaking – a shaking, sliding, swooning camera holding tight to its characters, and deftly suggestive aspect ratio futzing - and unblinkingly harrowing emotional directness made for a most impressive film. Now for his sophomore effort It Comes at Night, he confirms his promise with a similarly claustrophobic character study. This one flirts with genre elements, telling yet another post-apocalyptic tale (we certainly get plenty of those these days) with elegant restraint, quiet intimacy, and a creeping sense of dread. Shults demonstrates a firm hand on tone and style, so much so that even the movie’s quietest moments are freighted with an almost unbearable hushed intensity. It’s a rattling, lingering experience even with almost nothing in the way of overt scares.

We find a family living off the grid in the woods. Father (Joel Edgerton), mother (Carmen Ejogo), and son (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) have just buried a beloved grandfather. The process was difficult. They donned gas masks, took his disease-ridden body into the woods in a wheelbarrow, shot him, and burned the corpse. A plague has ravaged the world, and the family does what it must to survive. They have strict routine, rigorous quarantine procedures, and cling to each other in the candle-lit darkness because they’re all they have. They are survivors. Into this precarious situation arrives another family: a young father (Christopher Abbott), mother (Riley Keough), and toddler (Griffin Robert Faulkner). Shults, cloaking the entire film in heavy paranoia of disease and despair, has made a world where the social order has apparently collapsed, where people care only for themselves and their families. Here we can clearly see how compassion can be a liability and a danger. And yet who can see these doomed stragglers and close off help entirely?

In dark, gloomy, slow frames, Shults make such pessimistic moves seem natural, allowing assistance to be proffered in tentative, circumspect, tenuous ways. These new people are never entirely trusted, but with the nightmarish scenario, the tight-lipped lack of exposition and backstory, and the simmering dreams which approach Harrison’s young man at night there’s an open question as to how much we can trust our apparent protagonists, too. This clenched, small, quiet movie rattles with suspicion and dread. The cast to a person demonstrates painful anxiety barely choked back to keep up the usual conversational friendly niceties and demonstrations of familial love and loyalty. When push comes to shove – a dog barking, a gun locked away, sleepless night terrors, and a Red Door that must remained locked adding up to the measured vice-grip tension softly pulling the narrative trajectory towards inevitable crisis and confrontation – who will endure? And what compromise or cruelty will be needed to stay alive? The film is Romero (Night of the Living Dead without the zombies) and Carpenter (The Thing without the alien) filtered through an extra layer of modern art house affect – sterile, withholding, evocative, still. It’s one of those slow-drip horror movies about how the real monsters are the inability to truly know another person’s mind, and the deep cruelty people inflict upon one another. No surprise there, but as Shults narrows the frame, pressing down ever more intensely upon these characters, the movie finds such an intense commitment to these ideas the effect of its mood is hard to shake.

Run All Night: MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

One of the most remarkable aspects of Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special is just how far it gets without needing to explain itself. In fact, by the time the end credits roll there hasn’t been extended meaningful exposition. Instead we’ve seen a sci-fi tinged on-the-run thriller about a boy and his father fleeing shadowy government forces and heavies from their church’s compound, a chase across the South that charges forward with simmering tension and intimate, methodical strategy. It’s a thriller with respect for the majesty of the unexplainable. With casual magic and mystery, it weaves into suspense tiny grace notes, finding large wonderment in small details, implying more than it says outright. The film saves big reveals for so long, and answers them in sideways intuitive ways. We’re left with more questions than answers in a most satisfying result. It’s tantalizing and evocative, grand filmmaking on a small scale, huge implications left dangling with an ethereal, almost spiritual mystique.

As the story begins we hear the muffled sounds of an Amber Alert on an old TV in a shabby motel room. A boy (Jaeden Lieberher) has been kidnapped. He’s in this room with his captors, a situation diffused of immediate danger to him as it’s slowly revealed he has been taken from a fundamentalist cult and its pastor (Sam Shepard) by his biological father (Michael Shannon) and a friend (Joel Edgerton) determined to take him to freedom. They travel under the cover of darkness, move quickly, and meet up with collaborators (including Kirsten Dunst) for daylight respites. They’re under a tight deadline involving coordinates and secret messages. They’re moving him to a better life, following mystery directives we slowly come to understand. Nichols maintains impeccable tension in this cloud of ambiguity by keeping close attention on the specificities, the small details in the process of fleeing across state lines.

The film works through a confident and relaxed focus on the hows, not the whys, allowing its later leaps to feel more intuitive and excusable. Steady shots take in precise steps taken to avoid detection, lingering on the clack of a gun being loaded, the stretch of swimming goggles perpetually protecting the boy’s eyes, the engine noises in various makes and models of vehicles, the snap of headlights disappearing on a dark Texan road in the middle of the night. The danger sits in the risks the boy’s father is willing to take to keep him from agents (like Adam Driver) and other governmental forces who seek to claim the boy for further study (echoes of Spielberg’s Close Encounters and E.T. and Carpenter’s Starman), and the church’s flunkies (Bill Camp and Scott Haze) who are out to capture him for the purposes of exploiting his gifts. Science and religion both attach grand meanings to massive unknowns. Fear and tension is in the doubt about what’ll happen if his father fails. The stakes are clear.

Nichols, whose work including the powerful mental illness nightmare Take Shelter, laconic family tragedy Shotgun Stories, and boyhood crime-fable Mud shows a gift for patient, empathetic, and self-assuredly paced stories, approaches Midnight Special with his typical good judgment. It’s not a loud or flashy sci-fi adventure; we don’t get genre efforts this confidently circumspect, beautifully restrained everyday, certainly not bankrolled by a major studio. He trusts silence, stillness, while still ramping up the thrills when called for. He reveals what we need to know through action, tells us about character through behaviors. This is a beautifully photographed (by Nichols’ usual cinematographer Adam Stone) and contained movie – set in stolen cars, cheap motels, tiny command centers – gathering suspense and sweep off the back of small emotional exchanges and intimate interpersonal investments.

It helps that the cast does fine work across the board, performers who can sketch in pain and determination with a glance, or a few well-chosen lines. It approaches Cormac McCarthy territory in some of its terse dialogue in dusty landscapes, sharp and expressive for their brevity, people who can’t risk feeling too much lest the crushing weight of their actions’ enormity – embodied in the wide open spaces around them – stops them cold. Shannon looks at his boy with such tenderness and caring, while charging forward with single-minded drive to protect him at all costs. Edgerton’s blind loyalty is quiet competence. Dunst’s maternal energy manifests itself as submerged worry pushed into protective energy, while young Lieberher has a serene otherworldliness that makes incredibly clear the uneasy extrasensory gifts will lead this road-trip to an ending no one understands. They just know it must be done.

What, exactly, are the powers of this boy at the center of so much drama? They remain beautifully vague. He can hear radio and satellite signals, is affected by sunlight – hence another good reason for night travel beyond hiding from authorities – and occasionally his eyes glow with eerie blue light. We’re told that to look into this illuminated stare is to see glimpses of a better world. Could there be a more lovely, forceful, intuitive metaphor for the lengths a parent will go to protect a child? They see overwhelming hope in his eyes. It’s a movie about parents protecting a child from the world and helping manifest his gifts, even if they don’t understand them. It’s about support for the boy’s future, wherever it may take him. It’s about the pain and profound contentment of caring for a child – a key moment finds Shannon telling his boy, “I like worrying about you” – and the difficulty of letting that child make his own path. The film’s powerful conclusion brings this metaphor to stirring heights, conjuring Amblin awe and blending it with an unearthly melancholy.

The result is a movie that plays out as a plaintive old-fashioned country flavor in a hair-raising low-key sci-fi mode, an usual combination that’s nonetheless comforting in its throwback appeals. It is involving and compelling for what is not said and what is left to the imagination, giving the Big Moments that much more room to excite and entrance. Nichols’ interest in human-scale stories brings great sensitivity to Midnight Special’s thrills and astonishments. The film crackles with intrigue and personality without overly insisting on it. Here he injects genre elements into a patient thriller, widening the scope of its implications only in its final moments, executed with aplomb. He trusts an audience to groove on a delicate metaphor and move with trembling echoes of extrasensory wavelengths without needing it all spelled out. Another fine entry in our recent cycle of vintage sci-fi throwbacks, it, like Super 8 and Tomorrowland, looks backwards and forwards, a timeless reinvention of a sturdy genre storytelling mode.

Bad Fellas: BLACK MASS

Black Mass is a true crime gangster picture that doesn’t have a perspective or opinion on the events it recounts. It is content to grimly reenact backroom power plays and violent hits without caring too much about what it meant to the people involved, let alone using the proceedings as windows into their psyches. Set in Boston during the reign of crime kingpin James “Whitey” Bulger, a man who muscled out the Italian mob to become the city’s main source of organized crime, the screenplay makes clear the ties of neighborhood loyalty. This allowed Bulger to enter a mutually beneficial relationship with an FBI agent who once was a schoolyard chum, feeding information about his rivals while receiving a blind eye to his own criminal enterprises. This, along with a senator for a brother, allowed him to remain untouched for decades.

Director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) and screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth (Get on Up) start in 1975 and work their way to 1995, following Bulger from humble nastiness to king of crime before it all unravels for him. Perhaps assuming the target audience has seen some gangster stories play out before, the film is not particularly interested in the how or what of its characters’ schemes, and is never clear about the nature of his income. Instead, it features tight close-ups and slow zooms highlighting small shifts in negotiations and power plays. The recurring moments are either intimately creepy – Bulger staring down another person with intimidating intensity until they give him what he wants – or violent, with killings telegraphed beyond the point of surprise arriving with nonetheless brutal force. What are we to make of these murders? Only that they’re senseless, I suppose.

A large ensemble of reliable talents slurring through a variety of phony Boston accents keep things watchable and reasonably interesting on a moment by moment basis. Joel Edgerton is a slimy FBI agent too close to Bulger, protecting him from his law enforcement colleagues (Kevin Bacon, David Harbour, Adam Scott, Corey Stoll) and their suspicions they’re not getting appropriately valuable intel for all the damage caused. Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane, and W. Earl Brown are Whitey’s flunkies, who do a lot of the beating and killing, and drop in and out of the narrative. Benedict Cumberbatch is Bulger’s brother, affectionate but precious about keeping his office out of crime. And in this masculine environment of jockeying for power and speaking in deep whispers, a trio of female roles (for Dakota Johnson, Julianne Nicholson, and Juno Temple) exists to provide people who think this whole thing is dangerous but have no way of stopping it.

The proceedings are the sort of surface seriousness that coasts on the appearance of heavy subject matter without actually engaging with the thematic content that could exist under the surface. Cooper’s too interested in directing the logistics of the large ensemble, making sure everyone’s posing in the correct period detail and mushing their Rs into appropriate vaguely Bostonian sounds. The potentially fascinating story of corruption and crime is told through solid craft, Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography finely textured, David Rosenbaum’s editing steadily accumulating mild dread at the story’s most dramatic moments of threat. But there’s never a sense of what all the blood and backstabbing really means for the people involved beyond the simple facts of the case, and no foothold for either a formless “that’s life” truthiness or rigorous moralizing. It goes straight up the middle, ending up nowhere.

The mystery at the center remains the man himself, a presence and an instigator throughout the narrative who somehow remains stubbornly out of focus. How did he first rise to power? What made him the top Irish mobster? What did he think about what he did? We don’t know from this film. Here he seems to emerge fully formed from the shadows. Played by Johnny Depp at his least communicative and yet somehow as, if not more, affected than his Mortdecai or Mad Hatter, his countenance is entombed in artifice. Dead ice blue eyes pop against sickly pale skin, his face remolded out of makeup effects into something that’s always off-putting and unnatural. His Bulger is spooky, moving stiffly, holding his posture rigid, always frowning. He lurks in dark corners, most creepy when he stands hidden in an empty church nook, or when he interrupts a woman reading The Exorcist to calmly, threateningly run his hand along her face and neck.

Presenting the facts in a style synthesized and hollowed out from an amalgamation of every gangster picture that came before is one thing. But to plunk a performance like Depp’s in the middle of it – so artificial, so designed, so immediately signaling evil – is strange. It’s an interesting approach, more Karloff than DeNiro, more Michael Myers than Brando. He doesn’t seem like a real person. He looks like he should’ve been featured in Famous Monsters of Filmland fifty years ago. It makes impossible the notion we should take this seriously as a look into the face of real evil that men do. Besides, the movie’s too unfocused to even activate the Nosferatu qualities of Depp’s work. It’s a case of a project with a script, a director, and a lead performance working at cross purposes. It’s too shallow to be a weighty exploration of crime and punishment, too restrained to be pulpy fun, and too unwilling to follow an eccentric lead into a more overtly nightmarish direction. It’s competent enough to work scene by scene, but adds up to a missed opportunity all around.

Give or Take: THE GIFT

Behind The Gift’s unassuming title is a tightly plotted thriller cannily hiding its darkest secrets until it’s too late to look away. It starts with cold trepidation and ends with upsetting nasty emotional wreckage. It lacks the complexity of superior thrillers, but maintains an admirable shiftiness throughout. Australian actor Joel Edgerton wrote and directed this, his first feature, and shows off fine dexterity in his filmmaking, sharp control over a devious slow build for an entirely non-supernatural horror film built on creepy uncertainties and scary implications inherent in human interactions. It traps three characters in a scenario of social awkwardness that grows icy and uncomfortable until there’s no way out that’ll spare all involved.

Edgerton, perhaps tired of the bland leading-ish man Hollywood has tried to force him to play (in forgotten roles in Warrior, The Odd Life of Timothy Green, or Exodus Gods and Kings, or even in good movies like The Great Gatsby or Zero Dark Thirty), here writes himself a choice supporting role as a real weirdo who makes life difficult for a married couple. They’ve just moved into a new town, the husband (Jason Bateman) taking a new job and the wife (Rebecca Hall) running her design business from their new home. It’s a shiny midcentury place with large glass windows forming an exterior wall, the better to be stalked in. When they run into one of the husband’s old high school classmates (Edgerton), he’s an overly ingratiating nice guy, welcoming them to the neighborhood and buying them housewarming gifts. There’s something off about him, the way he shows up unannounced and invites himself into their lives. He’s always around.

Soon details of the man’s story aren’t adding up and, freaked out, the couple breaks off contact. But then their dog goes missing, fish die, and mysterious messages appear. And of course those big glass windows aren’t helping calm fears of someone lurking on the margins of their lives, peeking in with who knows what thoughts running in his odd head. Edgerton makes smart decisions about when to cut into the perspective of which character, allowing us to watch Hall tremble into paranoia as their friendly stalker suddenly seems not so friendly, then Bateman as he blusteringly waves off his wife’s concerns. They’re frayed in ways revealing of their basest instincts, good and bad. We’re also eventually allowed a glimpse of the weirdo’s point of view, contextualizing his actions and directing attention to the sins so-called normal people get away with by using their averageness as cover.

Because the film approaches lurid subject matter with an eye toward the unsettling quotidian details of a person you’d rather not be around, Edgerton finds frightening ideas in simple things that can cause a person to freak out. There’s nothing quite so frightening as waking in the middle of the night to see a light on at the other end of the house, one you’d swear you’d switched off. Worse still, perhaps, is realizing someone’s been in your house, even though nothing appears to have been taken or destroyed. Edgerton’s camera finds typical suspense details like a glow at the end of a dark hall, a faucet running which wasn’t before, or a sudden appearance of an animal inside the frame, with a patient simmer. He lets the scares appear with a sense of effective rhythm, having slow cuts and precise focus pulls reveal dread.

Can you ever truly know anyone? That’s the age-old question The Gift confronts by shifting perspective subtly, revealing information to us only as certain characters discover it. As the plot heads away from what seemed in the opening scenes a predictable path, an evolving understanding of where the characters are coming from makes any chance for easy morality feel slippery. Who deserves comeuppance in this scenario? Who has done the most wrong? And do the ultimate victims deserve their fate? The questions remain tantalizingly unresolved. Ending on a note of slimy ambiguity, the movie questions the ultimate aims of any social interaction, especially in a world where so many may feel a little deception is reasonable to get what they want. It gets there through a disturbing twist, hinging on psychological damage (plus, most upsetting, the implication of even more depravity that may or may not have occurred, a nasty addition). Edgerton commits to seeing his chilling premise taken much further than you’d think it’d go.

Let My People Go: EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS

Only a third of the way into Ridley Scott’s 150-minute Exodus: Gods and Kings, I was already feeling like Mort Sahl who, legend has it, impatiently stood up in the middle of the 1960 premiere of Otto Preminger’s 208-minute Exodus and shouted, “Let my people go!” Gods and Kings takes one of the most vital enduring stories in all of world history and literature and tells it in a manner that’s dull beyond belief. It hits familiar beats – Moses’ secret identity, exile, encounter with a burning bush, plagues of Egypt, and parting the Red Sea. But the telling is drained of passion, wonder, or intrigue. The flavorless screenplay is depressingly literal minded, and the characters are flat and thin. Nothing makes an impact, or follows an inner drive. It’s simply one boring sequence after another, not even rising to the level of kitsch DeMille’s Ten Commandments musters at its worst.

Scott is often associated with period epics, but he’s rarely made good ones. When you get right down to it, his best films are either sci-fi pictures (Alien, Blade Runner, Prometheus) or thrillers (American Gangster, Matchstick Men, The Counselor). For some reason, the canvas of historical sweep makes his usually striking set design go flat, even ugly. Worse, he often takes our interest in the main character for granted, as if content with the knowledge most will arrive well aware of who he is and what he did. Scott’s Christopher Columbus and Robin Hood movies suffer the same problem, and Gods and Kings follows suit. It provides cold shots of CGI crowds and crane shots devoid of personality, filling in ancient Egypt without stopping to make us care about what’s happening in it. Every bit of this film is perfunctory, almost apologetically shrugging about its source material’s familiarity.

Playing dress up amidst this boredom is a cast that’s to a person ill suited for what’s asked of them. As Moses we have Christian Bale, who behaves constipated throughout, gritting his teeth and staring in mock awe at the enormity of his situation. Pharaoh Ramses, the man raised with Moses and is now the stubborn ruler who won’t free the slaves at his former brother’s request, is played by a shaved, heavily made-up Joel Edgerton, who appears visibly uncomfortable most of the time. The supporting players are familiar faces (John Turturro, Aaron Paul, Ben Kingsley, Hiam Abbass, Sigourney Weaver) who pose in Egyptian dress and speak maybe two or three dozen lines combined. Funniest is Ben Mendelsohn, whose look here appears vaguely inspired by Michael Palin in Life of Brian. I just felt bad for everyone involved as I felt the pull of sleep tug me lower in my seat.

The screenplay, credited to four writers who’ve done good work in the past, clunks along with dismaying thuds where the drama, the emotion, the excitement, and rooting interest should be. Dialogue is painfully surface level exposition. There’s no “let my people go!” But its equivalent is met by Ramses saying, “From an economic standpoint what you’re asking is problematic.” See what I mean about the boredom? The film attempts to put new spins on old moments and iconography. Instead of talking to a burning bush, Moses gets knocked on the head in an avalanche, and then sits in the mud hallucinating a little boy speaking on the bush’s behalf. It’s certainly different, but I hesitate to call it an improvement. Also reimagined are the gross plagues, now presented in a moderately more realistic manner. Crocodiles attack, filling the Nile with blood, which drives out the frogs, who die and attract flies, which draw the locusts, and so on and so forth.

Scott and his writers get too tangled up in wanting to make gritty origin story detail out of broad archetypes and oft told legend, a blend of modern 3D pyrotechnics and reverent Bible Movie earnestness. What they end up with is neither here nor there, a big waste of time with no sense of character, pace, or atmosphere. There’s just no sense of perspective. They didn’t find a great new angle with which to tell the old story, or have a good handle on some point of view or clear throughline. Character relationships remain half-formed, setpieces are on auto-pilot, and the plot develops for no clear reason other than that’s the way it’s supposed to go. The Bible told them so, except for the parts where the swords and arrows come out and goose the action elements. It’s one big, phony faux-gravitas machine whirring away at one droning pitch for so long it simply sounds like white (very white) noise after awhile. I struggled to pay attention, stay awake, and keep my eyes from glazing over. It doesn’t work as drama. It doesn’t work as spectacle. It just doesn’t work.

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.