Washingtons State: THE LITTLE THINGS and MALCOLM & MARIE

No Denzel Washington movie is all bad because, no matter what, at least it has Denzel Washington in it. His latest, The Little Things, tests the thesis a little. It is a slow, dreary murder mystery that’s yet another movie of cops with flashlights tromping around scenes in which corpses of young women are splayed out surrounded by inscrutable clues and a stringy-haired creeper lurks in the margins as the obvious suspect—or is he? The thing is a procession of cliches — interrogation scenes, press conferences, stakeouts, cat-and-mouse games, solemn autopsies, and crime scene photography, and all the while detectives frown and sigh and triangulate — propped up by workmanlike filmmaking craft from John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side) with nary a surprise. Even the twists arrive with a dull thunk as the plot gears turn. 

 But then there’s a bit of an acting class going on in the center, in which Washington single-handedly puts the entire movie on his sturdy shoulders and almost makes the thing work. He seems to be doing very little—sitting still, talking slowly, moving deliberately. He quietly murmurs his lines. He’s interior to the point of flat. And yet he’s such a confident, capable Movie Star, that even tamping down his megawatt charisma, he holds every frame every moment he’s on screen. We’re told he’s a detective who dropped out the LAPD after a particularly troublesome case. Now his replacement, a buttoned-up serious investigator (Rami Malek), is looking into unsolved murders that point back to that case. It’s a nagging open wound for the both of them. The movie takes its simple stock premise and noodles around a character study at the margins, though we never learn overmuch about these men, and the ultimate question boils unsatisfyingly down to: does a tough case make a tunnel-visioned weirdo out of these guys, or are tunnel-visioned weirdos drawn to tough cases? Either way they pick at the faintest loose ends, pretty quickly zeroing in on a grade-A creeper of an appliance repairman (Jared Leto) who sure seems guilty. He’s so perfectly off in all the right ways; but so, too, is the case against him. What a conundrum. The shame, then, is that the whole lousy project goes pretty much nowhere and takes its sweet time getting there. What remains fascinating is how much Washington can do with so little, and how actors like Malek and Leto work so hard throughout and still have no chance of catching up.

Perhaps John David Washington has an unfair advantage in the department of younger stars hoping to follow in the great man’s footsteps and capture some of that natural charisma. He is, after all, the legend’s son. There’s something totally captivating about his screen presence, and malleable as he can be both full of wily bravado (like in BlacKkKlansman) or suave and coiled (like in Tenet). He’s so close to great. But there’s also a sense he’s not fully done cooking; he has the confident physicality of an athlete, and the soulful stares of a thespian, but he’s yet to have the exact right part to unlock his appeal. Seeing him in Malcom & Marie proves that maybe big meaty theatrical dialogue might get him there yet. The film teams him with Zendaya in a two-hander shot in grainy black and white for an authentic small-scale indie feel. It’s set over the course of a night as a young couple of Hollywood up-and-comers start off bickering and soon end up in a full-blown romantic argument that rumbles and rattles in long tangles of overwritten prose. 

 That the performers are two of the most promising new movie stars to come along in some time carries the movie — small, self-conscious, puffed up — much further than it deserves. Zendaya is a stormy, smoky inscrutable stunner in a gorgeous dress or less as she casually unravels her critiques and complaints about her swaggering, self-important director boyfriend. The film’s first twenty minutes or so are crackling with unspoken resentments and relational misjudgments expertly teased in these tense and sensual performances, the relationship’s flaws tensely embodied in unspoken shifts of weight and design. Alas, unlike the intensity and escalation of a John Cassavetes or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? argument, which are clear inspirations, this film’s bickering and bantering gets awfully tiresome and repetitive, failing to illuminate by minute 80 or 100 more than we’ve groked in the first flush of interest back in reel one. Writer-director Sam Levinson, who pulled off a much better two-hander in the great recent Zendaya-starring Special Episode of his otherwise overripe HBO show Euphoria, here finds moments of tight squirming intimacy, but ultimately can’t keep the novelty from wearing off fast. It becomes a case study of two fantastic performers easily outpacing their material. That it almost works anyway is to their credit.

Spoonfuls of Sugar: SAVING MR. BANKS

It’s no secret that Walt Disney Pictures has been creatively floundering as of late. The past decade saw their animation studio take a confused tumble after the heights of their 90’s renaissance while their live action filmmaking got only the rare hit (Pirates of the Caribbean) between failures both instantly forgettable (G-Force, College Road Trip, Prince of Persia) and unfairly maligned (the fun John Carter and misunderstood Lone Ranger). Despite their considerable charms, Tangled and Frozen alone do not a new golden age make. No wonder they want to cast their corporate eye backwards with Saving Mr. Banks, remembering a high point of creative and commercial success through rosy glasses and the glossiest of Hollywood polish. The movie considers the early 1960s, in particular the preliminary stages of the making of 1964’s Mary Poppins, not-so-coincidentally out now in a sparkling new transfer on Blu-ray. Banks twinkles through script notes, songwriting, and storyboard meetings, largely focusing on Walt Disney’s attempts to convince P.L. Travers, the author of the Poppins books, to sign over the rights.

Travers was notoriously reluctant to turn her beloved writing over to the hands of Hollywood in general and Disney in particular. The movie casts the generally likable Emma Thompson in the role. Her performance creates a woman walking through life in brisk and brittle judgment, but with the inevitable softening always just under the surface of her snapping. In the film’s opening, she has to be talked into flying to Los Angeles to take a meeting with Disney. We hear that her royalties are drying up and so could use the boost of income. That the sign of her financial troubles is her having recently fired her assistant is not necessarily the most sympathetic of hardships is no matter. The movie isn’t about her financial pressures giving her reason to sign the contract. It’s about how a controlling creative type meets another controlling creative type and learns to compromise for the good of creating a classic film.

For this is a movie aware at all times that Mary Poppins will become an all-time classic. When Mr. Disney (Tom Hanks, so well-liked on his own, all he has to do is show up in costume to communicate some of Disney’s showbiz charm) has Travers sit in on development meetings with co-writer Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford), it’s clear that every decision the studio makes that we can recognize from Poppins is meant to be the correct decision. When Travers snaps at the songwriting Sherman brothers (B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman) over a small made-up word in one of the opening lyrics, they awkwardly glance at their pages of music, the camera dutifully focusing in on the word “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” as punchline. Saving Mr. Banks plays upon our knowledge for one of the studio’s crowning achievements – one of the company’s very best films and their best live action effort by a country mile.

Poppins is a movie of such pure delight that it can’t help but rub off on this one a little bit. Filled up with Poppins’ songs and winking references to specific lines and images, Banks and its charming cast carries a residual charge. So what if director John Lee Hancock (of The Rookie, The Alamo, and The Blind Side) shoots the film with very little cinematic inspiration of his own, dutifully shooting the script glossily and anonymously. All the better for Poppins movie magic to shine through. The script by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith very nearly makes Travers into a simple killjoy. Sure, she taps her toes to “Let’s Go Fly a Kite,” but she threatens to cancel the whole project after learning the dancing penguins will be cartoons and not trained penguins. There’s sympathy to be found in her position – after all, Disney is playing a game of semantics telling her the movie will not be animated, and then eventually admitting “not animated” doesn’t necessarily mean “no animation.” 

Travers was so against the frivolity and sugar of Disney, especially when it came to adapting her books, that one imagines having her life turned into a Disney movie could be a posthumous indignity. If she fought so hard to preserve the most important details of her books, imagine what she’d have to say about this movie. It’s a case of history written by the winners, a true story about a woman who feared the company would take a good story, sand off the hard edges, and make it into simpleton schmaltz.  And yet Saving Mr. Banks, for all its borrowed charms in the occasionally repetitive showbiz scenes, works. The screenplay weaves in flashbacks of biographical detail, finding Travers as a young girl (Annie Rose Buckley) in the Australian outback with her depressed mother (Ruth Wilson) and alcoholic banker father (Colin Farrell). These scenes have the emotional charge the fizzy Hollywood storyline doesn’t, and when the film finds sequences in which the flashback past and filmmaking present collide, it’s surprisingly moving. Though a rough correlation between her story and her life is too mushy to work as literary analysis, it makes for fine sentimental cinema.

The film is ultimately about a peculiar paradox that can befall creative types. Travers and Disney are both so committed to their own visions for the project, they do not see the value in anything that varies from what’s already in their heads. They’re stuck talking past each other, unable to use their considerable creativities to compromise. This is an interesting conflict on which to hang a story, especially considering that there’s no reconciliation here. It’s a strange tone for a film to settle upon, on the one hand polishing its corporate reputation while still finding some degree of sympathy for the woman who felt so compromised by Disney. Travers simply softens enough to sign away and Poppins is made more or less as Disney decided. That in real life, she refused to sign over the sequel rights after seeing the film is perhaps indicative this new film concludes slightly sweeter than it should. In the end, I reacted to Saving Mr. Banks in much the same way it portrays Travers at the premiere of Poppins. What it does, it does well. What she finds disagreeable leaves her arms crossed with a face of stone. What she finds it gets absolutely right moves her.