Bugged Life: ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA

For those of us who complain the superhero spectacles of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are getting rote and bland, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania acknowledges our complaints with the sight of a supervillain admitting, of the Avengers, “they all blur together after a while.” Credit director Peyton Reed, then, for trying to keep his Ant-Man adventures a little distinct. The first two had their chintzy cross-overs and obligatory mega-franchise stewardship, but also had some panache as flimsy heist movies in which people and objects shrink and grow in clever, silly ways. This one plunges headfirst into a relatively straightforward adventure. Paul Rudd’s eponymous hero accidentally gets pulled into the Quantum Realm with his daughter (Kathryn Newton), his superhero girlfriend, Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), and her parents (Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer). The movie’s just about a journey to an exit that takes them through weird landscapes and kooky designs—talking goo, living buildings, fuzzily CG’d big-headed robot flunkies—on a collision course with an exiled multi-verse hopping conqueror. That’s Jonathan Majors’ Kang, last seen in the pretty fun Season 1 of Loki. This variant of the villain hopes to use Ant-Man tech to escape his sub-atomic prison. The result is diverting enough, a straightforward adventure through computer effects. 

It’s what, in the olden days, might’ve been a stop-motion odyssey through loosely adapted Greek myths or recreations of Jules Verne’s deep dives. Here, though, this weekend matinee approach is given over to Jack Kirby creatures in a vaguely Star Wars-ian side-quest plot captive to the MCU house style of functional blocking and brightly-lit fantasy. It strands likable actors in warehouse-sized virtual environments and has them interact with ping-ponging zaps and splats. The stakes are simple and the emotions paint-by-numbers—Rudd wants to protect his daughter; the rest want to help; the villain schemes and steams. But I found the whole project pleasant enough, at least less of a calamity than certain recent Marvel jumbles. It’s all of a piece, a direct line from beginning to end with a coherent energy and a streamlined style. I especially liked the easygoing heroes’ contrast with the heavy charisma of Majors, who sells the antagonist with enough sturdy screen presence that I won’t mind seeing him pop up in a half-dozen more of these. And Reed is allowed a few fine visual gambits—from a clever no-man’s land of multiplying possibilities that leaves a gazillion Ant-Men swarming on screen, to a reasonably satisfying ant-ex-machina to save the day. Sure, the MCU projects all blur together, but this one’s hardly the biggest failure.

Cold Case: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

I’d love an all-star murder mystery, which makes it hurt all the worse that Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express isn’t a good one. He takes Agatha Christie’s classic novel (to both direct and star as the persnickety, mustachioed, world-famous detective Poirot) and runs it through the handsome, high-gloss, literary-toned approach that served him so well in the past. He has treated familiar stories from Hamlet to Cinderella with the same tone of high-minded, playfully gorgeous, deliciously melodramatic classicism. They’re reverent, but impassioned, heavy and light in the same moment. But somehow the translation to screen for this latest adaptation is stuffy and slow, every emotion muted, every turn and twist of the whodunnit plot bungled and stumbled in a ham-fisted clumsiness that never lets the puzzle pieces click together with pleasing precision. Instead, amid the fastidious production design of a luxury train lovingly photographed in 65mm and cramped tracking shots of beveled glass and ornate décor, he somehow never gets a good sense of the space. The characters are indifferently introduced; the investigation develops in fits and starts; the space is inelegantly portrayed – a jumble of close cuts and overhead shots that hardly gives us a window into the layout. The lumbering film neglects good mystery development at every turn. 

The story deals with a mystery of a murdered man on a snowbound train full of trapped suspects (including the likes of luminaries Judi Dench, Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Derek Jacobi, Olivia Colman, Michelle Pfeiffer, and on and on). Branagh never gets around to cluing us into who is in which compartment, the order of the cars, the timeline of the night in question. Part of the pleasure in a story such as this – understood by Christie and the best of her imitators and adapters – is to follow the clues as they stack up, then hold the big picture in our own heads as the detective tests theories and develops new leads. Here, the screenplay by Michael Green (Blade Runner 2049, a better expensive Hollywood detective story) simply asserts and accrues its mystery’s complications rather than presenting them in a more aesthetically or investigatively satisfying process. I barely had a sense of who the suspects were, let alone where there are on the train or with whom they trade meaningful red herrings. The cast is under-utilized, their star power and screen presence used to substitute or shorthand characterization, the film’s dull crackles of wit and tension carried over as best they can manage as little as they’re allowed. Why such a delicious intrigue is left to fizzle is beyond me. Branagh doesn’t even allow his Poirot more than a somnambulant personality. This prime place for some showboating (and, boy, is he one of our best showboats) is given over to soft, dry cracks and sleepy mumbling. There’s no spark of energy or life here, the big, fancy, unmoving train left stuck in the snow slowly turning away from any inherent suspense and into its own conspicuous metaphor.

Requiem for a Scream: mother!

Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, mother!, is a jangled, claustrophobic freakout, a Polanski-esque picture of domestic tension refracted into close, uncomfortable, intimate horror. It’s about miscommunication, a fundamental flaw in a relationship escalating into insurmountable obstacle as the situation grows into one out of control. The couple at its center live in a dreamy house in the middle of a forest clearing, with no road or driveway or any obvious means of escape. It’s mid-renovation, courtesy of the young wife (Jennifer Lawrence) who spends her days refurbishing the home. The older husband (Javier Bardem) is a writer we see poised with pen at the ready, but who never seems to write a word, or at least at first. As the film moves forward, their parallel mental states diverge, he a seemingly unstoppable obsessive people-person lit up with an almost divine (or devilish, perhaps?) zeal and she an increasingly vulnerable paranoiac understandably unsettled by a loss of control driven by her husband’s paradoxically uncommunicative openness. (It put me in mind of Aronofsky’s other works – Noah married to Black Swan, I suppose.) The film sticks closely, exclusively, to the wife’s perspective, pushing in with uncomfortable close-ups as her face reflects confusion, then stress, then mental anguish, and finally a complete and total breakdown. It’s understandable every step of the way, though seems to add up to less and less the longer it goes. 

The whole thing is shot in grainy, tremulous, shaky, close angles, maneuvering with maximum discomfort. We sit right up close to the boiling chaos about to erupt in this marriage, though the context for the leads’ personalities is sketched simply, hollowly, a clangorous and multipurpose metaphor. It’s clear from the beginning something is dangerously off about the couple, she far too patient and generous for his brooding dismissiveness. How often do we see her earnestly offer plain-spoken assertions of her wants and desires only to be rebuffed by his gruff selfishness? By the time a strange man (Ed Harris) shows up in the middle of the night coughing and smoking and asking if they have a spare room, it’s a sort of darkly funny laugh of recognition – an “of course he would” – to find the husband immediately agrees without consulting his wife. When their unannounced guest’s wife (Michelle Pfeiffer, dripping with the dark comedy of a contemptible houseguest, but oddly underused) turns up at the doorstep, she’s invited in, too. Then their grown sons are ringing the bell and one thing leads to another and it’s like the Marx brothers’ classic stateroom bit ran headlong into Repulsion. Lawrence plays relatable notes of total confusion, a sense of her world spinning out of control while everyone else acts like she’s the crazy one. Why are all these people piling into her house? What’s going on here?

Flowing with shock sensation – dripping blood, heartbeats in walls, crumbling architecture – the movie gets schlockier and nuttier as it goes, to the point where the wild sustained climax – I dare not spoil its shape or scope, but, boy howdy, does it take the inevitable progression of its plot to the farthest reaches of its insanity – had me thinking to myself, “what am I watching?” Aronofsky commits to the intensity of it all, building on the foundation of one sparsely characterized couple a muddled outsized allegory. Sure, Lawrence plays pained sweet homemaker, and Bardem plays smoldering artiste, but beyond that small flimsy bit of emotional scaffolding there’s nothing by way of personality or characterization to hold onto. (It’s one of those movies where the characters are unnamed, listed in the credits as simply Man and Woman and so on.) We only have pure shapeshifting symbolism (fitting for our current Mystique) – the twisted progression linking up inevitably with thoughts of domestic violence, societal misogyny, and cycles of abuse (both intimate and environmental), as well as the chaos that can follow in the wake of a tortured artist unable to handle fame. These grand ideas float through, but Aronofsky mostly highlights rattling unease and escalating abstract terror. This movie’s stressful, eventually howling with screams and fire and death in increasingly brutal effects. Aronofsky’s a master at marshalling filmmaking techniques – precise sound design, intuitive cutting, thick filmic cinematography, intense performances – to push buttons, but here it’s at or near its most fruitless. It’s technically dazzling and utterly exhausting.

Divorcing the Mob: THE FAMILY

Luc Besson’s The Family is an odd mix of tones, a dark comedy played lightly with violence laughed off right up until we’re supposed to take it seriously. The premise is a fish-out-of-water goof about a Brooklyn family with a mobster patriarch (Robert De Niro), his mob wife (Michelle Pfeiffer), teenage daughter (Dianna Agron) and son (John D’Leo) put in witness protection under the watch of an FBI agent (Tommy Lee Jones) who begrudgingly relocates them every time good old dad reverts back to mob rage and blows his cover. Their latest stop is in a small town in Normandy, France. It’s clear right away that the family doesn’t fit in. Their first day involves lying (dad’s), arson (mom’s), and run-ins with bullying classmates (the teens’). How to fit in? The FBI’s official suggestion is to throw a barbeque and invite the neighbors. But of course the real danger is the team of hitmen on their trail, sent to kill the four of them by a mob boss who sits in jail because of their testimony. One hitman guns down a family in the opening scene, emerging gun-first out of a cloud of smoke. We know these guys mean business.

And yet this threat sits on the outskirts of the story as the movie concerns itself mainly with the family’s earnest attempts to stay out of trouble. De Niro can’t shake the need to get things done by threatening those who refuse to execute his demands in a timely and respectful matter. His wife scolds him, thinking he’s killed the plumber, but he assures her that he merely broke some bones and took him to the hospital straightaway. See? Better already. He spends his days at a typewriter, writing a memoir of his mob life that Jones gravely informs him should never be published. It’s not about an audience for this patriarch. It’s therapeutic. Meanwhile, his wife and kids try their hardest to live normal lives in unfamiliar surroundings. His wife goes to church, his daughter gets a crush on a student teacher, and his son schemes his way into his school’s black market. It’s a film about a wacky big city American crime family clashing with a slow-paced European country town and all the stereotypes you’d think that implies.

We’ve all been down this road before, including some of the cast. De Niro, so good in so many crime pictures from Heat, Goodfellas and The Godfather Part II to tongue-in-cheek spins on his gangster persona like Analyze This, here plays out a character that coasts on this recognition. He’s the wise guy who may be retired, but he still powers through every situation with intimidation and four-letter words. Pfeiffer, no stranger to being Married to the Mob, has great composed frustration bubbling beneath the surface, a complicated indignity towards her current situation she sublimates into motherly instincts. She even makes food for the agents watching the house. When she finally agrees (after assurances of confidentiality) to let the local priest hear her confession, she seems to surprise even herself by that decision. Jones can do the wrinkled stoic exasperation required of him in his sleep, which he might be here for all I could tell. The younger actors, as mob teens playing out scheming and beatings in otherwise typical teen scenarios, acquit themselves nicely.

The characters are purely cardboard, but at least the cardboard is painted with vibrant colors. The leads are appealing and, though the supporting cast doesn’t pop as much as I would’ve liked, there are still plenty of funny little asides coloring in the details. The FBI minders debate the respective merits of French and Italian cuisine. Two mobster hitmen solemnly debate killing a dog they find at a crime scene. “Boss said no witnesses,” one reasons. The priest asks Pfeiffer to leave church property saying, “Your confession has haunted me all week.” The best moment is a bit of metatextual silliness that finds De Niro sitting in a French theater watching a Scorsese movie in which De Niro is one of the co-stars. It’s not only a sequence of nested winks, but a plot point that (in conjunction with a montage of strained coincidences) kicks off the climax. In the end, it’s a movie about how the family that kills together stays together, or how you can take the man out of the mob, but not the mob out of the man. Or something like that.

For a long stretch, the film has too many plates spinning, if only because it often forgets a subplot and lets it drop away, but the likability of the ensemble and eccentricity of the off-beat plotting keeps the proceedings amiable enough. It’s all cheeky, violent, and with largely slipshod comical stakes until the climax when the action kicks up in earnest. French director and co-writer Luc Besson has always been a director better with creating concepts than fleshing them out. His visual energy carried sometimes-flimsy material early on in his career (like The Professional or especially The Fifth Element). It makes a certain amount of sense that he’s spent the last decade or so working mainly as a producer and co-writer on an astonishing number of projects. He’s serving as a sort of cultural ambassador and mentor for French action filmmakers (Louis Leterrier, Pierre Morel, Olivier Megaton, Chris Nahon) attempting to import themselves to Hollywood. In The Family, France and Hollywood are explicitly bumping into each other and that’s fun, but isn’t explored to its full potential. Besson gives the film a sense of off-kilter energy, but the plotting ultimately feels familiar and a tad too slight, no matter the nice-enough work of the cast and occasional splashes of darkly funny dialogue and visual playfulness. I can’t quite recommend it, but have some appreciation for what it does well.

Barnabas A.D. 1972: DARK SHADOWS

Running for over 1,000 episodes in the late 60s and early 70s, Dark Shadows was a supernatural soap opera about a vampire and his mortal descendents living in a big spooky house on the coast of Maine. The slapdash but committed show has a devoted cult following, the members running the gamut from scary earnest to entirely ironic. It’s easy to imagine that director Tim Burton falls somewhere in the middle. His films have always had a sly approach to the supernatural and a baroque gothic style that suits itself nicely to deathly serious, but deeply cracked, tales of smirking dark fantasy.

Now Burton (surely one of the few working auteurs who is a recognizable brand to the general public) and author Seth Grahame-Smith (his novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has been turned into a big studio release for later this summer) have adapted the show into a feature film. I have no idea how accurately the show’s tone and content have been adapted – I simply haven’t had the time nor the inclination to give it much of a go – but what is clear is that Burton has created a sumptuously imagined film that builds its own crooked world out of a variety of influences. It plays like a Hammer horror film, specifically one of Christopher Lee’s Dracula pictures – he, Lee, not Dracula, has a cameo here – filtered through an American gothic (with additional shades of Washington Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”), all told in a groovy half-camp Burton style.

The story starts in the 1700s when the family Collins leaves Liverpool and sails for Maine. There, the family establishes the seaside town of Collinsport on the back of a productive fishing business. A big beautiful mansion is built and all seems well. But young Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp, of course) spurns the attentions of a servant girl (Eva Green) who turns out to be a witch. And so she puts the Collins family under her devious curses. She conjures a situation that kills Barnabas’s parents and later, her broken heart still smoldering, puts Barnabas’s fiancé (Bella Heathcote, big-eyed and pale) into a trance and forces her to walk off the edge of a cliff. To top it all off, the angry witch turns Barnabas into a vampire, which adds layers of whitish-grey makeup to his face and hands. (When he feeds, bright red dribbles of blood dot either side of his lower lip in a clear reference to Christopher Lee’s vampiric look.) She turns the town against him, and watches as the angry mob locks him in a coffin and buries him deep.

The plot picks up in an exquisitely detailed and beautifully heightened 1972, filled up with period fashions and super-cool vintage music cues to set the mood. (And Lee’s Dracula A.D. 1972 is playing at Collinsport’s downtown theater, a nice touch.) The Collins remain a cursed family. Their fishery is shuttered and the remaining family members are cooped up in the cavernous mansion: the matriarch (Michelle Pfeiffer), her surly teen daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz), her brother (Jonny Lee Miller) and his troubled son (Gulliver McGrath). Also on hand are the alcoholic groundskeeper (Jackie Earle Haley), the new nanny (Bella Heathcote again, some nice visual foreshadowing), and the youngest Collins’s boozy, tragically vain child psychiatrist (Helena Bonham Carter). This is a wonderfully droll cast giving terrific performances that underplay the oddities and eccentricities of the family’s life, which only enhances the hilarious gags and heightened tones. A couple of early dining room scenes have some of the same pacing and likable snap of similar moments in Burton’s Beetlejuice. Also like that film, this one soon becomes a movie in which an odd outsider shakes up the routine of an eccentric family in surprising, supernatural ways.

When construction workers dig up Barnabas’s coffin, they awaken a deadly fish-out-of-water movie as this long-lost relative stumbles back into town and, despite befuddlement on his part and confusion on theirs, wants to help his skeptical kin regain control of the town’s fishing empire. It’s a quest made all the more urgent when the porcelain-skinned C.E.O. of the rival fish company turns out to be none other than the same immortal witch who cursed him two centuries prior. Theirs is a twisted love affair, less love-hate, more she loves-and-hates, he mostly just hates. She’s an exuberantly frisky kind of evil; he’s just puzzled by his surroundings and only wants what’s best for his family and would very much like her out of the way. It’s a juicy hook, for sure, but with all of these other characters interacting with Barnabas as well, and each with their own little subplots of varying importance, the movie’s biggest flaw is its overstuffed qualities.

The movie is overflowing with plot and character in ways that obfuscate a strong central interest, making the whole thing lumpy and often without momentum. What are we supposed to think about Barnabas, a good man and a cursed man who is at once a source of humor and a scary monster? He’s the butt of culture clash jokes, but he also kills (no spoilers) some characters who are quite likable and hardly wholly villainous. The film’s never quite sure what to do with him and if Depp knows, and I suspect he might, he isn’t given the chance to let us in. That leaves this main thread curiously unresolved. But the other characters wander in and out of the film as well, moving in and out of focus. Some go missing for long stretches of time, even ones that are so very prominent to emotional beats of the overarching narrative. Still, I shrugged off such nagging thoughts rather easily, filing them away as an unsuccessful attempt at feature-length homage to soap opera plotting.

Besides, this is a movie with characters that are just plain fun to be around and with a style to luxuriate in. Burton, with the great French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, films it all with a colorful style, genre piece as groovy period piece. Here’s a movie rich in atmospherics both comic and mildly frightening, dripping with a great sense of visual play. I particularly liked a scene in which a person gets their blood sucked while they’re in the middle of getting a blood transfusion. Burton leaves the I.V. bag in the foreground as it slowly then suddenly crumples in on itself like a used juice box.

Some have found Burton’s use of computer-driven effects in recent years to be excessive and, oddly enough, a limit on his imagination. Fair enough, if we’re talking about his Alice in Wonderland, which, aside from a few nice touches, felt more like a generic movie he was hired to coat in a Burton gloss. To me, Sweeney Todd and, to a lesser extent, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory feel just as wonderful as, though certainly different from, his earlier, more tactile, effects work. With Dark Shadows he shows admirable restraint, so that by the time the effects hit the fan, it’s a natural outgrowth of the satisfying strangeness that’s come before, spectacle that’s been very well earned. It’s a film that wears its darkness lightly and falls into a satisfyingly funky groove.