Double Deutch: VOICEMAILS FOR ISABELLE and GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS

Here’s an interesting case study in modern movie distribution. Sony has two comedies starring Zoey Deutch this summer. You might recognize her from supporting roles in Zombieland: Double Tap or Juror #2 or Nouvelle Vague or from confusing her with Haley Lu Richardson. She can make for a sweet and believable center of a movie when given the chance. Of her two starring roles this year, one’s in a straightforward romantic comedy with a traditional blend of charm and sentiment. It’s sturdy crowd-pleasing, pushing all the right buttons. The other’s in an arch alt-comedy riff that transposes The Wizard of Oz into a goofy R-rated joke. It’s deliberately niche, a cult item at best. Which one has been sent straight to Netflix via Sony’s deal with the streamer, and which hit theaters through their boutique Sony Pictures Classics label? Both could’ve found an audience on the big screen. But it’s strange to find the broadly appealing picture is the one you can play from the couch right now. 

If you did you’d find Voicemails for Isabelle is a reasonably effective version of its kind. Deutch plays an aspiring chef trying to survive a tough kitchen run by Nick Offerman. She calls her sister all the time to share the details of her life. They’ve done that since childhood since the younger girl is housebound with an illness and lives vicariously through her big sister’s adventures. When the sister dies, Deutch keeps calling, but the number has been reassigned to the new phone of a yuppie (Nick Robinson) who falls in love with the mystery caller. So he doesn’t message her to let her know it’s now a wrong number just to continue eavesdropping on her life. Eventually he has to meet her. From the premise you can already see the broad strokes of where the plot will go—manipulated Meet Cute to dating montages to revelation to reconciliation. The leads are charming with some sweet chemistry. It gives just enough sparkle to the familiar beats. But where the movie really lifts above routine is the sister relationship, fleshed out in early flashbacks and then lingering throughout the movie as a glossy but honest expression of grief and mourning. Writer-director Leah McKendrick has a light and often routine movie here, with pop music and little quips throughout. It tilts toward glossy phoniness, but remains sensitive with attention to the sisters. It’s the most believable relationship in the movie, and hits hard when gone. That makes the lightness of the surrounding movie all the more of an uplift, and a fantasy. 

Far stranger, though, is Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Writer-director David Wain’s penchant for absurdity and vulgarity is an acquired taste. I quite like his loopy rom-com parody They Came Together, commune satire Wanderlust, and his raunchy man-child comedy Role Models. This one isn’t in that league.  Maybe it’s the ugly digital look, and awkward combination of high-concept winking, sitcom punchlines, and occasional violence and flatulence.(Maybe it’s the severe lack of Paul Rudd, the star of all those earlier pictures.) Regardless I found Gail Daughtry more theoretically funny than actually funny, with the kind of humor you watch silently registering the technical forms of the jokes while rarely rising to level of actual enjoyment. Deutch plays Gail, our Dorothy. The red shoes are a tip off. She’s a naive Kansan hairdresser about to marry a dopey guy next door. They jokingly discuss the hoary concept of the celebrity sex pass. He has a crush on Jennifer Aniston. She’s hot for Jon Hamm. Well, turns out the fiancé actually goes and hooks up with Aniston, which really gets Gail mad. When she’s off on a work trip to L.A. her buddy (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) convinces her to seek out Hamm and do the deed. True to Oz, she meets a collection of misfits on her trip: an absent-minded agent-in-training (Ben Wang), a paparazzo whose heart’s not in it (Ken Marino), and a cowardly John Slattery. There’s also a wicked mob boss (Sabrina Impacciatore) and her flunkies. The whole tone is pitched at a preposterous broad shtick, like a straight John Waters. The actors are committed to the straight-faced absurdity, and there are a few real laughs along the way. (I liked the assistant whose only threat is that he’ll “make you sick!”) But it’s so conceptual and airless that it never fully comes to life. 

Let it Shine: SPOTLIGHT

Unadorned filmmaking of burnished and unobtrusive professional polish, Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight is a good example of how little you have to do to create an absorbing movie, provided you have the right story and the right cast. Writer-director McCarthy, who, when not being a terrific character actor, spends his time making nice small character dramas (The Station Agent, The Visitor, Win Win), takes for his material here the true story of the Boston Globe’s 2001 investigation into allegations of child abuse committed by Catholic priests which resulted in a detailed and powerful series of exposés. He, with co-writer Josh Singer (The West Wing), turns this into a movie about people simply doing their jobs, removing all narrative adornments a more conventionally crowd-pleasing picture would require: artificial drama, character arcs, a main character, grand pronouncements, easy symbolism, cheap moralizing. Instead he simply shows us an ensemble of journalists working studiously and methodically, making sure they get the facts right before going to print. They know they’re onto something big, a story of massive importance and moral imperative, but it’s also just their job.

The result of McCarthy’s approach is an inspirational story about journalism at its finest boiled down to tense scenes of research, interviews, and fact checking. This is a procedural about workaday reporters doing the best they can, a movie committed to being something like an accurate portrayal of the daily grind of a noble profession done right. The Globe’s editors (Liev Schreiber, John Slattery) task the in-depth investigative reporting “Spotlight” team (Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d’Arcy James) to take a closer look at a small court case involving a tenacious lawyer (Stanley Tucci) suing the local Catholic Archdiocese on behalf of clients who were abused by priests. As the reporters track down sources and gather archival background information, they discover a pattern of priests pulled from parishes under suspicious circumstances and quietly reassigned. It’s a clue that something’s rotten, and as a number of victims agree to interviews, it’s clear they’re about to uncover a devastating conspiracy of abuse and cover-ups, staggering in scope, heartbreaking in depth.

Every step of the way, these men and women make sure to get every detail right, to ensure the story is airtight. They’re working in secret, trying to avoid raising the suspicions of local Catholic officials who form an integral part of Boston’s civic and philanthropic society. Some lawyers for the church (Billy Crudup, Jamey Sheridan) are suspicious, refusing even to corroborate basic details. As the undeniable facts of the case start to add up, the journalists are even more driven to follow facts, beyond assumptions or pre-existing worldviews, into the simple, pure, disturbing truth. McCarthy simply sits back and lets the actors go to work in a movie of conversations – cautious interviews, heated arguments, tense debates, tricky negotiations – as the reporters struggle to get a handle on the story’s reach and implications, as well as deciding how best to break the news to the people. It’s unshowy. The blocking is simple, the editing briskly functional, the photography bright and clean. The filmmaking is so uninsistent, Howard Shore’s score, which would seem sparse in any other film, sounds overbearing. The focus is only on process.

The performers are subtle, natural, inhabiting real people whose day jobs are a combination of craft and calling. Keaton sinks into a tired newsman’s humble fortitude, McAdams carries quiet confidence, Ruffalo leans into inquisitive doggedness, and d’Arcy James wears sturdy moral force. There are no heroes, just normal people patiently doing what they must to root out hidden facts. Here’s a movie about nothing more than the value of a job well done. The job in this case just happens to be one that uncovered one of the most significant news stories of this century. A telling moment comes when September 11, 2001 rolls around, sending the newsroom scrambling in the wake of that day’s tragedy. It pushes the Spotlight team’s work on the backburner, and yet McCarthy treats this huge moment of recent history as a background detail. It’s a moment of world-changing impact, sensitively and appropriately somber in its portrayal, but the decades of spiritual and sexual abuse uncovered by their investigation is just as monumental.

Aside from one poignant montage set to “Silent Night,” featuring what has to be cinema’s most moving and upsetting Excel spreadsheet-making scene, the movie doesn’t push buttons. It speaks as clearly and directly as its characters, knowing the details will speak for themselves. It knows the actors are dialed-in to both the import of their characters’ jobs and the processes of doing them. It has faith in the inherent compelling nature of carefully piecing together a news story, trying to be fair to subjects, and do right by the people of the world by telling the truth. Spotlight may not be quite as richly rewarding a cinematic experience as other great newspaper movies like All the President’s Men and Zodiac, but it belongs on the same Journalism 101 syllabus. Scene by scene, line by line, McCarthy finds a quietly gripping approach, building to a low-key finale both triumphant and daunting. The article has gone to print. But the work continues.

Quick Look: THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU

Screenwriter George Nolfi, who has worked on a couple of superb genre films, namely The Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean’s Twelve, makes his directorial debut with The Adjustment Bureau, a film that casts such a fragile spell that it could be easy to dismiss. After all, this is a movie that unashamedly declares itself to be about true love, free will, and destiny. Furthermore, it posits that Fate is controlled by a group of dapper men (in fedoras!) that takes orders from a mysterious “Chairman.” It’s a sincere romance with a light touch of sci-fi that’s perpetually poised on the brink of silliness, but it never quite topples over. I found it to be an involving film of modest charms. Matt Damon is an ambitious politician who has just lost his race for the U.S. Senate when he has a chance encounter with an alluring stranger, played by the lovely Emily Blunt. In this brief scene, Damon and Blunt set off crackling sparks of flirtation during their brief moment together. She’s a rising star in the dance scene. He’s an established politician. Their conversation is part debate, part duet. When they meet again the next day, the Adjustment Bureau (with members including Mad Men’s John Slattery, the underappreciated Anthony Mackie, and the distinguished, grave Terence Stamp) steps in. You see, this couple may have fallen instantly in love, but they aren’t meant to be together. When Damon stumbles upon the Bureau at work, they eventually let him in on the secret: if he sees that woman again, both of their dreams die. The movie’s plot unfolds as a romance with a rattling tinge of paranoia with crisp cinematography from the great John Toll. Damon and Blunt are charming, and the sight of noir heavies walking into a modern political romance tickled me. I also found myself enjoying the exploration of the notions of predetermination and free will, even though the ending feels like a cop out and the Bureau ends up being never more than vaguely menacing ciphers. Ultimately, disappointingly, it feels thoroughly disposable, with plenty of loose ends twisting in the breeze, but it’s also a comfortable way to pass the time with a little bit of romantic, philosophical, earnest sci-fi goofiness.