Bloodline: THE NORTHMAN

"Wise sir, do not grieve. It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death." - Beowulf

There’s something tough and believable and ancient in writer-director Robert Eggers’ latest film, the red-blooded, thunderously entertaining The Northman. It’s set in the harsh, brutal world of Vikings, and on the road to revenge, which is harsher and more brutal still. Sure, it has shaman and visions and a warrior who catches a spear mid-flight and tosses it back at his enemy. But its potential Conan appeals are situated in a great sense of reality. If it weren’t such a gleaming work of modern craftsmanship, and harkening back to the great epics of Hollywood’s golden age with its pomp and circumstance in massive landscapes as backdrops to human dramas, one could almost imagine the camera had been plunked down in the year 900. As such, it continues Eggers’ anthropological commitment to historical verisimilitude in vivid genre trappings. Here the thrones and the boats, the swords and the helmets, all have the look of authenticity, and real care given to photographing them in all their textures and design. And Eggers co-wrote with Icelandic author Sjón, together crafting a narrative that plays fair with the historical record even as it’s a work of impressively imagined synthesis. We notice the attention to detail, matter-of-factly presented rigor, and that’s how Eggers grounds the fantastical in a material believability of the past. The film has the weight of a real time and place, and uses it as a stage for its bloody spectacle as a warrior prince (Alexander Skarsgård) is betrayed by a villainous uncle (Claes Bang). The young man flees into exile and slavery from which he vows to avenge his father (Ethan Hawke) and free his mother (Nicole Kidman). Yes, indeed, the film asks: what if Beowulf was also Hamlet? (The prince even shares a name, Amleth, with one whose rotten Denmark  is said to have inspired the Bard.) Turns out the answer is awfully satisfying.

There’s a thrilling sturdiness to the film’s inspirations, and not simply the look and tone of the picture that unfurls historicity. Although Eggers’ films have thus far been well-researched period pieces, they just as importantly draw on a literary tradition from the times. Because they play tonally and structurally like stories from the period in which he’s setting his films, they feel all the more real. It’s not that they’re true stories of a bygone time; it’s that they feel like stories of that bygone time. His debut The Witch drew its woodsy colonial folklore fears from contemporaneous journals. He followed that with The Lighthouse, a two-man oddity which matched its turn-of-the-20th century setting by being a boxy black-and-white modernist freakout in squared-off silent-horror aesthetics. It’s only natural, then, that The Northman is built from the bones of Nordic legends and Old English epic poetry. Its dialogue—spoken in gruff barks and silky growls by a game cast—is built on the sturdy syllabic construction of Seamus Heaney’s translations. Its sense of lineage and honor is all knotty myth. Its structure, though, is pure five-act Shakespearean. It builds beautifully and ponderously, each new act slotting in the next step on the road to inevitable conflagration. It’s at once familiar and strange; like the past, they do things differently there, even if we can recognize the composite materials. It earns our investment by believing fully its own, in confident steady style that rumbles like thunder and proceeds at a deliberate pace.  

Along the way, Eggers conjures battle sequences and murky magic in striking measures. Action plays out in elegant lateral tracking shots through frenzy and violence. An enchantment in the world sneaks in through vividly imagined ambiguities—a prophesying, pale, blind Seeress (Björk); a fortune-telling skull; a woozy psychedelics-induced ritual, and a vision of Valhalla. And the throughline of revenge carries us through a long, bruising and bloody picture set against staggering natural beauty of fjords and fields, cliffs and volcano. The scenes unfold with a heaviness, a bold booming in the bass as details accumulate and our hero gets closer to his goal. The enormous vistas fill up their foregrounds with ominous plotting and intimate vengeance. The project thrillingly splits the difference between folk tale and folk horror, epic poem—brusk kennings and brute strength thematic construction—and family tragedy. It’s a film about blood and bloodlines, about passing on the honor of one’s names and gains, and maintaining in the face of so much wild danger. Not uncritical of the violent impulses, by the end, with its moonlit massacres, lava-dodging swordfights, and love with a beautiful young woman (Anya Taylor-Joy) who just might represent a better future, it clearly inhabits the intoxication and futility of revenge—the nobility and gnarliness of Viking life, and the wonder that anyone survived to tell the tale.

Word Crimes:THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 and BEING THE RICARDOS

An Aaron Sorkin screenplay comes in one of two modes: too much, and way too much. I love the former, but the latter can clang and grate and scrape across my patience. He’s such a wordy, witty writer, capable of soaring rhetoric and juicy monologues. His ear for embedding characterization in the pithiest of comebacks and most garrulous walk-and-talks is a good match for his interest in high-wire halls-of-power and behind-the-scenes tensions. His characters are often people with inflated egos or self-important positions of influence. He must understand them so well because he’s one of them. When he’s on, he’s one of our best. The too-muchness of his writing makes a perfect match for material. His The Social Network, so sharply perceptive about Facebook’s founding conflicts, balanced with beautifully clinical David Fincher direction, remains one of the finest scripts in recent memory. But when he’s off—taking his tendencies to overwrite his subtext until it spills out as just plain text like in howlingly clunky tone-deaf attempts like media-matters dramas The Newsroom or Studio 60—it curdles fast. When you’re an artist who thrives when high on your own supply, it’s easy to get way too much out of each moment.

Take last year’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. It’s based on the real circus of a court case following protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention that were violently broken up by a bludgeoning police presence. A group of leading leftist activists were targeted by the newly elected Nixon administration to make an example of them. The judge ended up a loony attention seeker who made all kinds of questionable decisions—like ordering Bobby Seale, a leader in the Black Panthers, bound and gagged—while the defendants, many previously unknown to each other, often used the massive press interest in their plight as a soapbox on which to make important points about the state of the country. (They also used it as an excuse to poke prankish fun at the authorities who were in the process of overreaching.) Sorkin sees in this case good reason to comment on our present right-wing lunacies and various social movements protesting them. But he puts too much spin on the ball in each sequence. Characters are practically explaining this connection to us as monologues and jostling debates are carried out with musty pseudo-historical perspective.

Not helping matters, the flat staging from Sorkin as director tends to undercut the few good moments he’s written.With Trial he somehow can’t pull off the courtroom sparring he crafted so well as screenwriter for A Few Good Men's "you can't handle the truth," or the Social Network depositions. Here it’s self-consciously, and badly, theatrical, with a host of fine actors in full showy character mode (Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Redmayne, Michael Keaton, Frank Langella, John Carroll Lynch, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) chewing over flashy phrasing as the camera pushes plainly and shafts of light falls simply and dramatically. One wonders what a better visual sense would’ve shaped out of these lumpy scenes. But then I recall how Sorkin’s shaping of the pages pushes the real events toward big fake movie climaxes that are somehow flatter and less surprising than the actual events. Just when he builds up a head of self-righteous steam and winds up a character to let them go, it rings the falsest. The best scenes are the smallest, and the simplest, where an old pro like Keaton can underplay the overwritten and end up, on balance, just fine. Strangely, for a writer prized for his verbal pyrotechnics, the court sequences are somehow less outrageous and dramatic and hilarious and suspenseful than the actual court transcripts. Those have been used as the basis for a fine animated documentary from a dozen years back—Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10—and are available for free online. Those are the better way to experience the trial.

With that in mind, one might think the new Sorkin picture, a behind-the-scenes of I Love Lucy in a moment of high-stakes drama, would pale in comparison to simply watching the still-brilliant original episodes of the classic sitcom. Of course it does. But that’s where I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong that it wouldn’t be fun enough on its own terms. I was quite taken with Being the Ricardos for playing up the ways in which it stacks up historical conflicts into one stuffed week. Lucille Ball is accused of being a communist (which she was, once) at the heights of the Red Scare. Desi Arnaz is tagged as a philanderer (which he was) at one of many periods of peak tabloid power. And, if the sponsors or the network don’t pull the plug for either or both of those scandals, the power couple behind the program are determined to use Lucy’s real life pregnancy for her character, too. (One suit bristles at the idea that it’ll make viewers think about…you know…how that happened. They sleep in twin beds, he reminds.) That Sorkin’s invention places these tricky moments all in the same short period of time—the structure is all showbiz hustle, as the movie starts with a table read and ends with a taping—gives the movie a pressure cooker of competing interests. His script weaves in and out of the various conflicts and keeps the ensemble a plate-spinning act of worries and wants. It successfully cross-breeds the let’s-put-on-a-show zippiness with an earnest grappling with the people behind-the-scenes and What It All Meant.

Sorkin’s brand of pushy cleverness fits a great cast of actors playing performers and other creative types. Here Nicole Kidman becomes a Lucy who’s ambitious, steely, hugely talented, and knows what she wants. She is clearly in charge of the show, and really won’t back down from insisting being a Communist used to be considered a valid option for supporting the workers of the country. Javier Bardem plays Desi as a chipper man constantly tending to his ego, but with real love for Lucy. (He also doesn’t suffer fools, such as one well-meaning producer who tries to convince him he’s the “I” who “Loves Lucy” and therefore the top-billed title character.) His Cuban roots make him a bit more uncomfortable with her politics. (There Sorkin tries a smidge too much for phony both-sides balance.) The main couple is, as on the show, surrounded by a sharp-tongued supporting cast. Nina Arianda’s Ethel and J.K. Simmons’ Fred are great inhabitations with sly side-eyed commentary on, challenges to, and support for the main pair. And the show’s crew features Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, Jake Lacy, Clark Gregg and more hustle through the stages, wardrobe department, and writing rooms. It’s a fine feat that mixes the sort of clever darting dialogue and blunt force messaging that a great cast can sell if Sorkin serves it up well.

There’s a kind of gleaming soft-focus romanticism to its approach, a weren’t-the-olden-days-grand? gloss to the sometimes-reductive smushing of so much social upheaval and conflict into one heavy week. (It spackles it over, somewhat, by having fake documentary talking heads from actors playing older versions of the writers’ room act as a Greek chorus of sorts.) And the writing sometimes tries too hard to make the ideas fit our modern context. Would Lucy really have accused someone of “Gaslighting” her? Nonetheless, it’s has the kind of fizz and pop that’s pleasing to the ear and flies by in a flash. Sorkin’s direction stays out of his writing’s way, and has a fine eye for the difference between on- and off-stage antics. I found it a satisfying and entertaining look at making a show in a time with an actual blacklist bouncing entertainers out of the business for their politics, when sexual mores were tamped down and repressed and not to be discussed, and when women and people of color weren’t to be treated as equals on or behind the screens. And yet, through making one of the greatest television comedies (who doesn’t know the chocolate factory sequence?), here’s a couple that manages to push on the edges of those societal constraints at a time when it could’ve resulted in a show going off the air. Now that’s cancel culture.

Dance Revolution: THE PROM

If nothing else, The Prom is a testament to the irresistible power of a great schmaltzy Broadway finale. For even though the movie loses its way for most of the second act, when the cast finally gathers as a group to belt out their big cathartic final number, the confetti flying and everyone getting their happy ending and a few bars to contribute to the whole, I teared up, tapped my toes, and felt pretty good about the whole thing. Based on Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin’s chipper stage musical of recent vintage, the movie has been directed by Ryan Murphy, whose usual gonzo go-for-broke faux-camp artificial wildness (the reason his TV work’s promising potential is usually sooner (Glee) or later (American Horror Story) driven off a cliff) is tamped down by the fact he’s not the writer. That’s why his work on The People vs. O.J. Simpson and Pose is his finest to date; he’s a talented technician when he has someone around to keep the narrative consistent. He loves bold colors and broad performances, a camera that glides on greased tracks to push in, fly back, or spin around characters, poking at touchy subjects with a heavy handed light touch in a style that stops well short of the apoplectic opulence of a Baz Luhrmann, but cuts quick and flashy enough all the same. Here the material is his sunniest, most cheerful, most actually optimistic instead of the not-so-hidden cynicism undergirding his previous trips back to high school. It has big “It Gets Better” energy. Perhaps it is because the satire is so mild, and largely contained in the outsized presence of a quartet of Broadway has-beens and never-weres at the center. Here’s Meryl Streep and James Corden and Andrew Rannells and Nicole Kidman — an odd combination — swanning into small-town Indiana hoping to soak up some free rehabilitating social media buzz by coming to the loud defense of a lesbian student (Jo Ellen Pellman) who won’t be allowed to go to prom with her date. The sneering down-the-nose condescension of the stars is good for a laugh, as they steal focus while declaiming that this scene isn’t about them, and the movie sometimes forgets it isn’t, too.

The plot deftly balances their pomposity with chipper prom prep and the small-town dilemmas of being gay in a conservative area, albeit with some recognition that the town wouldn’t homogeneously be opposed (Keegan-Michael Key is a warm-hearted theater-loving principal in contrast to the clenched PTA president, Kerry Washington). The first hour flies along with buoyant good spirts and toe-tapping numbers—a dancy promposal roundelay past lockers and bleachers; a clandestine closeted love ballad; a giddy getting-ready song in an unrealistically bustling mall; a wide-eyed tribute to the transportive and transformative ability of a great Broadway show. And it all reaches a great, sympathetic Act I climax that’s one of those beautiful win-but-lose send-em-to-intermission buzzing numbers. Unfortunately, most of the good songs are in that first hour, and the rest is a drag of tedious character beats that forces one to realize the characters are thin stock types, and the balance of Broadway divas to small-town teens goes a little awry. What are we to make of mean popular kids changing their homophobic ways just because an actor sings jokes about the Bible at them in a food court? It’s a cute number, but elides complications, and builds up the movie’s gleaming theatrical falseness. Still, we’re on our way to a great finale, and the cast is so high-energy, hoofing it well and selling corny theater punchlines. And the heart of the matter remains such a lovely open-faced introductory star turn from a young actress playing a likable girl whose struggles with being out and ignored in her cramped Indiana town resonates through the second act doldrums. I left humming the good songs and remembering the good times. Like a troupe of theater kids, it means well and has a good time, even if it's annoying sometimes.

Family Plot: THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER

Yorgos Lanthimos is out to mess you up. Even if you haven’t squirmed through the Grecian filmmaker’s international breakthrough Dogtooth – an intensely disturbing story of siblings unknowingly held captive by their own parents – or gritted your teeth through The Lobster – a cruel fantasy comedy that many seemed to like, but lost me as it ground a good fanciful premise into pessimistic repetition – you’d know right off that the writer-director of The Killing of a Sacred Deer wants to provoke intense reactions. The film sits on a black screen, soft and dramatic classical music playing underneath. Then: a smash cut to an extreme close-up of open heart surgery. I gasped. Then I squirmed as the shot holds. Then I looked away, repulsed but grinning. Oh, Lanthimos, at it again, up to his audience provoking jolts, his unflinching camera staring. After this startling opening statement, the build up to the next disturbing disruption is a long, soft timpani roll of suspense, the score doing its best to rumble under the imposing blocking and unflinching austere framing which turns every normal Cincinnati street and gleaming hospital corridor into a close cousin of Kubrick’s Overlook hotel. The film is a sustained creepy thriller with tension slowly simmering and clasping underneath every scene. Empty space and cavernous silence in the cold sets and pulsing grainy cinematography leaves room for disquieting suspicions as unfathomable escalating moral and karmic confusion ripples across an already-brittle family’s life.

Lanthimos directs his cast into performances of carefully modulated awkwardness and softly tripping monotones, their eerie implacability adding to a sense of wrongness that slowly builds. The film demonstrates its own twisted logic step by step as a surgeon (Colin Farrell), his wife (Nicole Kidman), and two kids (Sunny Suljic and Tomorrowland’s Raffey Cassidy) are slowly, subtly, and increasingly absurdly drawn into the plot of an unusual and insinuating interloper (Barry Keoghan, his quietly menacing face miles from the sweet innocence of his Dunkirk role). The young stranger is the son of a man who died on the operating table. The surgeon has tried to show him sympathy, striking up a vaguely paternal mentorship, maybe out of guilt. Big mistake. The boy wants to make the surgeon hurt. Suddenly, this creepy guy is the nexus of mysterious illness that spreads through the family. The kids are struck with paralysis that’s seemingly incurable, and completely inexplicable to a small army of medical experts. It only gets worse from there, including both inducement to murder and an awkward attempt by the boy to get his mom (Alicia Silverstone, never sadder) to watch Groundhog Day with his victim. With no shortage of disturbing emotions and plot developments roiling under every scene that follows, characters squirm intensely under pressure. Lanthimos keeps the proceedings darkly absurd, austerely terrifying, a deeply eccentric mix of the lurid and placid, the preposterous (a halting nervous laughs masking deep horror) and tense ethical quandaries stirring up grippingly sustained suspense. It’s all the more upsetting for being so inscrutable, for offering up no answers other than a desire to see brittle people break, even as they’re forced to confront their mortality, morality, and contradictions therein.

Grin and Bear It: PADDINGTON

Based on Michael Bond’s popular picture book of the same name, Paddington is a movie about a bear cub who speaks English, wears a red hat and blue coat, and likes marmalade. You’d think that’s not a lot to hang a feature film upon. But in a pleasant surprise, the result is easily the best live action talking animal family comedy since Babe: Pig in the City, though that might say more about the usual level of quality in this particular subgenre than anything else. In the movie, Paddington and his bear family are CGI creations that at first look creepily real, more Country Bears than Alvin and the Chipmunks. But once I got used to looking at him and his interactions with a real human world, the more adorable he became. He’s an inquisitive little guy, pluckily charging forward hoping for the best. That’s a good description of the movie, too. It’s a pleasant, affable, likable little thing, funny, fuzzy, warm and goodhearted.

Paddington (Ben Whishaw) grew up in darkest Peru, where he was taught about London by his aunt (Imelda Staunton) and uncle (Michael Gambon). They had become Anglophiles after an explorer (Tim Downie) visited years earlier. After an earthquake destroys their jungle home, Paddington is sent off to London in search of a better life. His aunt lovingly places around his neck a note asking the recipient to take care of this little bear. It’s a softly downplayed immigrant story, with the bear washing up on London shores in need of help making sense of a new place, but with plenty of qualities – a killer marmalade recipe, for one – that’ll enrich the lives of those he meets. There’s some quiet metaphor work going on, especially with the cranky neighbor who worries about bears moving into his neighborhood.

Paddington’s found by a sweet family who take him to stay in their house that appears to be on the same street as the Banks in Mary Poppins. It’s definitely a Poppins set up, with a free-spirited mother (Sally Hawkins), stuffy all-business father (Hugh Bonneville), and a daughter and son (Madeleine Harris and Samuel Joslin) who are having troubles of their own. Then in comes Paddington, an openhearted, open-minded little fellow who quite by accident brings the family closer together. It’s a film that has lots of dependable bits of family film plot mechanics, from the boring dad who’s softened up by the events herein, to the kids who find a friend in a magical guest, to a protagonist who’s thrust into a new world and, despite some difficulties, learns to love it.

But it’s all so sweetly done, and writer-director Paul King brings a kind sense of humor and lovely visual style, from intricate whimsical production design, to Wes-Anderson-esque dollhouse constructions, to clever cutting and crisp wordplay. The funniest joke is also the simplest: no one finds the talking bear strange at all, and treat him like they would a human child. There are amusing sequences in which he slowly destroys his surroundings while attempting a simple task, wrecking a bathroom or covering himself head to toe in tape. My favorite was a chase scene in which the bear floats by a schoolroom studying Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. “Exit pursued by a— ” “Paddington!” The amusing slapstick and cute misunderstandings are bolstered by an undemanding plot and a troop of fine British actors (the leads, as well as Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi, and Jim Broadbent in supporting roles) who kids growing up on this movie will later recognize if they ever catch up on old BBC programming or the films of Mike Leigh.

I’m not sure if a film so sugary English, with nicely small character moments and a charming shaggy tone, needs a villain, but Nicole Kidman plays an ice cold taxidermist about as well as she could. She’s a Cruella de Vil type with a Hitchcockian blonde bob, strutting about wanting to add a talking bear to her collection. Her scenes are few, and of a slightly different tone than the sentimental slapstick culture clash comedy elsewhere, but such pro forma kids’ film villainy is the impetus to finally bring all the characters together in support of the bear they’ve come to love. And by then, I’d also found much to love in Paddington, and was glad to see the film resolve so neatly.

Lights On, Nobody Home: TRESPASS

Trespass is what is known as a bad movie, plain and simple. It’s phony to its core. The movie comes from director Joel Schumacher who has made some good movies and some bad ones over the course of his career. This is definitely a bad one. It’s a home invasion thriller that’s only the slightest mood shift away from being a flat-out comedy. It’s a film of stupid criminals and lousy hostages that keeps inventing new reasons to keep the characters in the same place well past any kind of logic, internal or otherwise.

The movie starts when the rich man (Nicolas Cage) comes home to his wife (Nicole Kidman) and daughter (Liana Liberato). We know he’s rich because we hear the sound of Cage rapidly negotiating the price of a diamond accompanying the opening aerial shot that tracks his convertible down a long winding road leading to their beachfront steel-and-glass mansion that’s tucked away in the forest. Once there, he continues to negotiate while he tries to help his wife make sure their willful teenage daughter doesn’t get to the local bad girl’s house for a party.

The girl huffs upstairs and the husband and wife prepare for their evening, which is soon interrupted by a home invasion. A group of thieves barges in and waves around their guns while barking for security codes. It turns out they know about the diamonds and would really like them. There’s the conflict. It’s a good thing that the daughter snuck out of the house and sped away in a friends car just a scene or two earlier.  

What follows is filled with yelling, whining, cajoling, pleading, and frustrated barking from all of the characters all of the time. It’s monotonous. As the head of the gang, Ben Mendelsohn stalks about while his gang members wander around looking mean, constantly waving around guns that make clickety-clack noises at the slightest touch. These crooks are so obvious that you can size them up in a second, like the henchman played by Cam Gigandet who will pretty clearly end up being the criminal with second thoughts since he gets so shifty eyed in his every reaction shot. Collectively the gang seems to be pretty dumb. They keep changing their demands and producing different threatening objects. It’s like they want to hang around this house for some time.

Have they even thought this plan through? Sure, they have electrical tape around their fingertips, but their masks are so porous I was identifying the actors underneath them almost immediately. And all Cage has to do is start poking holes in their scheme and the characters get to sit around and threaten each other all night. At one point the daughter sneaks back into the house and walks straight into the danger. Why? If she were smart enough to call for help the movie would be over.

Karl Gajdusek’s script does everything it can to keep the movie rolling forward beyond all plausibility. The homeowners are able to take their captors off task with such skill that I found myself hoping for some ultimate ludicrous twist that never materializes despite the ever-growing pile of ludicrous twists and diversions. This is the kind of movie in which the intelligence of any given character at any given time is dependent solely on what the plot requires at that point. These aren’t characters. These are barely caricatures. It’s all one big phony construct. This is barely a film. It’s a feature-length stalling tactic that keeps the characters, and the audience, locked up in this house well past any reason they should be.