Broadway Rhythm: WONKA and THE COLOR PURPLE

Those drawing connections between the current ongoing collapse of box office for big-budget Hollywood efforts in overfamiliar genres and the similar moment in the late-1960s might be chuffed to find Warner Brothers looking around at properties they own and asking: can we make that a musical? If we really are in a late stage for the current studio system, like 60 years ago, it should be little surprise to see the return of the big, corny backlot song-and-dance show. The modern twist is that it’s not in and of itself representative of said bloated, over-tapped genres, but instead harkening back. They’re simultaneously reviving old forms of showbiz while wringing more material out of old ideas the studio owns—plunging into their vaults to re-exploit old hits, making new ones while driving some business into catalog titles, too.

So it goes with Wonka, a prequel to Roald Dahl’s classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That book tells how reclusive chocolatier Willy Wonka lets a group of children tour his fantastical factory—and watches as their obvious personality defects lead them one by one to ruin. That book, with its wicked dark humor and vivid imagination, has already been adapted twice over—in 1971 starring a mercurial Gene Wilder dripping with droll Dahl dialogue, and in 2005 starring a pasty Johnny Depp in a full Tim Burton spectacle. This new movie puts twiggy it-boy Timothée Chalamet in the title role as a dewey-eyed dreamer who hopes to open a chocolate factory. That the fact he will is a forgone conclusion does little to dim the movie’s underdog spirit is due to his off-kilter charm. He never quite settles comfortably into the singing and dancing required of him, but squint a little and the boyish discomfort—the hey-that-jock-isn’t-so-bad-in-the-school-play attitude—goes a long way to charm.

The movie around him is working overtime to sell the high-spirited whimsy, too. Writer-director Paul King, he of the agreeably twee Paddington pictures, has a suitably British style that fusses with the magic and mischief in a perfectly puffed-up sense of its own twinkling wryness. There’s a discount Dickens to the setup, as Wonka finds himself in preposterous debt to transparently scamming boarding house proprietors named Scrubitt and Bleacher (Olivia Colman and Tom Davis). And he can’t pay them back by selling his marvelous, scrumptious magic chocolates because of the city’s cruel candy cartel and their ruthless rules. (Crooked cops (Keegan-Michael Key) and priests (Rowan Atkinson) keep the shops in line.) This is all fine and funny, and King keeps the plates spinning with a game supporting cast (Jim Carter! Natasha Rothwell! Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa!) giving swell theatrical performances. It has a bit of the cruel-and-clever blend you’d expect from a knockoff Dahl (for the real deal you’d have to go to Wes Anderson’s brilliant short film short story adaptations, dumped unceremoniously on Netflix). But Wonka’s makers can’t help but mix that bitterness with heaps of sugary sentimentality that lets you know it’ll be all right. The look is primary colors and rounded edges, fake snow and smiles, even when businessmen plot murder and pay off police with pallets of chocolates. The knowingly fake stages and pleasant melodies and soft choreography all adds up to something sweet enough to pass the time.

Warner Brothers also has a bright, backlot-looking musical of The Color Purple in theaters now. It naturally shares its plot’s structure and events with Alice Walker’s novel, and the 1985 Steven Spielberg drama that made Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey stars. This new film version is not nearly as powerful, but it has some merit. It takes the Broadway adaptation as inspiration, and it is admirably tough material from which to draw such danceable exuberance. The story follows an impoverished young black woman in early-20th century southern America as she’s separated from her sister by her cruel husband. As the decades pass, she learns about her own interests and desires and is slowly able to assert herself against the tides of abuse her family and her society push upon her. This is strong stuff about sisterly bonds and the triumph of the human spirit, and, by the end, a kind of radical forgiveness. I am not made of stone; tears welled up in my eyes during the final communal energy of a cast clad in white, raising their hands to the heavens, declaring a moral and spiritual victory as one. It makes its case loudly and broadly, with little of the nuance of a more sensitive drama, but all the obvious stage power of a big, belting one.

The story is too good for a phony sheen to stop it entirely. The performances here overflow with energy, through pain and pleasure alike. Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson, and Danielle Brooks are a formidable trio of voices and personality, emoting through each note with huge melodic crescendoes and propelling each spoken line with the expression to carry it to the back row of the highest balcony. (The skilled supporting players here—from Colman Domingo to Halle Bailey—pop with the same sharp shorthand dramatics.) It helps, I suppose, that Marcus Gardley’s screenplay is generally averse to subtext—it’s all right on the surface. That makes it a good match for the obvious emotional exposition of the musical numbers faithfully recreated as stage-bound, even in flight of dream ballet fancy. Director Blitz Bazawule cuts cleanly and stages with broad blocking. Every shot, in songs and straight scenes alike, is a posed snippet of theatrical choreography. And it’s all so brightly, evenly lit in images scrubbed an uncanny digital shine, that it sparkles with its fakery even as its story works hard to sell the darkest realism. That mix of the deep and shallow, the smooth and the tough, makes it an uneven 140 minutes. But the story itself has such undeniable force that the whole movie gets pulled toward tears anyway.

Sons and Daughters: MINARI and THE FATHER

There’s something tender and tenuous at the heart of Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, embodied in the central presence of an adorable little boy (Alan Kim) with a heart condition that could lead it to stop beating at any moment. He’s the son of recent Korean immigrants to the United States, where they’ve recently moved to Arkansas chasing the dreams of a father (Steven Yeun) who hopes to become a farmer. That his wife (Han Ye-ri) isn’t exactly on board is part of the family tension here, and the son and his sister (Noel Kate Cho) seeing it all gives the film an added layer of innocent curiosity, and impish bemusement. This isn’t the standard immigrant tale of the cliches that your head might autofill—no hardscrabble urban life or tenement tensions. Here is a small, intimate, closely-observed picture of family life and farm chores, loneliness and isolation, big dreams and comfortable homeland traditions. There’s something quintessentially American about this construction, some Steinbeck to its run-down farm home and acres of fields, and the honest toil it requires and toll it takes to make do and get by. The tensions here are not drawn out in easy ways a more familiar approach would take.

The film is small and sensitive, quietly imbued with a generosity of spirit in its wide open spaces. Here we sit with the plucky youngster’s medical issue, or the honey-coated small-town prejudices that threaten to spill over, or the plight of a wily mother-in-law (Youn Yuh-jung) flying in with her stubborn ways and fragile body and only sort of what her grandchildren think they want in a grandmother. This is a young family, and we see their growing pains—the displacement, the disagreements, the cross-purposes. Chung is a patient and compassionate filmmaker, whose great insight is to view each character’s perspective with understanding. We see the ambition of the father and the reticence of the mother, the tough exterior and sly glow of the grandmother, the chipper ups and downs of the children's lives. Best of all, the film doesn’t build to false crises or manipulative plot turns; it resits expectations in a pleasant way, always a little bit better than the movie you fear it might become. Instead it gently sits by as lives are lived, and a family puts down roots. No wonder a central metaphor is a divining rod; they're looking for a purpose to bring them together and guide their paths through the enormity of their potential. 

On the other end of family life is Florian Zeller’s The Father. It’s about an older family—an aging patriarch slipping into dementia (Anthony Hopkins) and his middle-aged daughter (Olivia Colman) who tries to help him as what was once clearly a formidable intellect disappears. He lives in his own flat in London, and his daughter needs to hire live-in help. Or maybe he’s moved into her flat, and she needs to hire day help. She’s married. Or maybe divorced. Or maybe moving to Paris. To the old man, every day seems much like the same. And some days are the same day. Time seems to loop back in on itself and he meets events coming and going. And one day, early in the film, his daughter walks in played by Olivia Williams instead. (That not only are her looks almost, but not quite, Colman’s, but the performer’s name is, too, adds to the layers of confusion.) Details shift. Connections drop. The man’s forever looking for his watch or tea, puttering around, opening doors that are sometimes leading to slightly different rooms. He’s living his own personal Exterminating Angel, that classic surrealist Buñuel film in which a dinner party’s guests are forever getting ready to, but never actually quite, leaving the house.

Zeller’s subtle filmmaking, and sharp script adapted from his play, with laser-focused characterization and casual glimpses of shifting context, puts us in the man’s state without ever quite leaving a grounded family drama; we can catch glimpses of it through the confusion, with just enough sense of the facts on the ground that we can track the events' logical progression. But he can’t keep up, and so retreats into his confusion, faking, or maybe just barely, understanding sometimes, other times breaking down in a fog. Hopkins work is raw and unfiltered, haltingly disappearing into this haze. Colman’s heartbreak and love reads in every gesture. The movie is achingly unflinching in its evocation of this terrible moment, where the curtains are about to be drawn on his life, and his family waits in a pendulous sense of duty and uncertainty, watching him slip away before he’s gone. His fear is palpable, as is his mortality. This is a picture of familial love at a moment of tested strength, and painful to consider. Yet this is also, in its way, a gentle film, kind to its characters even in its terrifying immediacy and sorrowful contemplation.

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.

Singles Mixer: THE LOBSTER

For an intensely sad and cynical movie, The Lobster’s one good idea is awfully whimsical. It imagines a dystopian parallel world much like our own, but which takes a dementedly strong pro-marriage stance. All single people must find a mate; if they do not, they’ll be turned into the animal of their choosing. When we meet sad-sack Colin Farrell – he’s put on some weight to make his hangdog mood look extra saggy – he’s just been dumped by his unseen wife, left to trudge to a singles’ resort with his brother, who had similar misfortune and is now a dog. It’s an irresistible concept, and one sure to provoke good conversation and perhaps some honest self-reflection. I think I’d be a house cat; they’ve all the pampered benefits of dogs with none of the expectations of excitation. (And I like napping in patches of sunshine.) Sadly, the movie’s not as playful as its animating concept might lead one to believe.

When Farrell is asked what animal he’d want to be if, after his allotted time to be unattached, he can’t find a suitable match, he has his answer ready: a lobster. The hotel’s chipper manager (Olivia Colman) finds that refreshing. Most people pick more popular animals. The fields around the hotel feature the occasional rabbit, horse, camel, flamingo, and so on. I found myself wondering who they might’ve been in an earlier life. That’s later, though. First we must trudge through a stay in this sad hotel, where Farrell meets friends like a dopey lisper (John C. Reilly) who would like to be a parrot, and a fussy limper (Ben Whishaw) who’d rather not think about that question thank you very much. There are also potential mates, like a shockingly youthful nose-bleeder (Jessica Barden), an anxious biscuit-chomping lady (Ashley Jensen), and a woman we learn has no feelings whatsoever (Angeliki Papoulia).

The film’s central premise is worked out with misanthropic deadpan. Writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose breakthrough feature was 2009’s memorable Dogtooth, an equally imprisoned and methodical exploration of a locked-in system of perverse human behavior, creates the hotel as the stifling inverse of a mischievous Wes Anderson mood. It has a suffocating rigidity to Thimios Bakatakis’s static cinematography, trapping its characters with either too much or not enough head space, squirming with resigned discomfort like butterflies pinned behind glass while barely alive, wriggling but clearly doomed. The patrons spend their days forced to watch silently as staff acts out skits about the dangers of being alone, and then they get death-marched into painfully stilted dances and awkward chitchat around sad little meals. Once daily they’re driven out to the wilderness on a hunt, told to use tranquilizer darts to shoot and collect loners who’ve escaped the hotel pre-transformation and now live illegally in the woods. Each person caught buys the hunter an extra day before the coupling deadline.

This is distancing movie, slow and repetitive as it watches the sad desperate routines of its characters. A closed loop of behavior operating under cruel impenetrable logic, the rigorous framing drains the characters of agency. They’re trapped in a cruel world, explored by a cold story. It’s tedious and increasingly pointless, wallowing in misery, dispassionately nasty and mean. A dog is kicked to death. A woman is blinded. A man is forced to stick his hand in a hot toaster. For a movie purporting to have cutting or otherwise incisive ideas about relationships – the torture of loneliness, and the desperation it can breed for finding One True Love – it’s too hollow, forced, passionless. The actors speak uniformly in a flat affect, mumbling as they talk past each other, glumly focused on their fate. There’s no energy to their goals. They simply shrug and trudge, hunched over and preemptively drained. Maybe they would be better off as animals. Is that such a tragedy?

Lanthimos uses dreary colors to enhance the oppressive mood. Stings of classical music mix with self-amused straight-faced absurdism. One couple is dutifully celebrated in the hotel’s conference room, sent off to see if the marriage will stick with the encouragement that if they have problems they’ll be given children. “That usually helps,” the manager quips. We continue on, counting down the days until Farrell will be made into a lobster. The movie never progresses beyond the basics of its setup, with few complications, escalations, or contradictions to keep things moving along. Instead it just grinds on and on, a deadening effect rendering what starts as wry and shocking merely numbing. Eventually one character flees the hotel and meets a variety of characters hiding out in the woods – a group led by Léa Seydoux that includes Rachel Weisz, who has also been narrating the whole thing in a largely emotionless monotone. Alas, freedom of sorts is shot in the same stultifying icy precision as the hotel, and slumps on for ages in a tiresome slog.

This is the sort of infuriating movie that slowly and steadily drains all interest and inquisitiveness from a killer concept. At first I was leaning in, eager to see an imaginative vision. By the time it lost me, I found myself itching to leave, as one excruciating scene after the next failed to build or move or provoke. It strands charismatic performers in a flat, uninteresting style, punctuating long stretches of dead air with splashes of cruelty and depression. It creates an interesting allegory and proceeds to take care it almost never intersects with recognizable human emotions. It offers only empty futility, distended bleak glibness hoping its heaviness and pessimism get mistaken for profundity. What a waste. At one point a character asks if she could watch Stand By Me, and I wanted to go with her. Later, in the film’s final moments, a man prepares to stab himself in the eyes with a steak knife. By that time I could almost relate.

Fail to the Chief: HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

One of the lousiest films in recent memory, Hyde Park on Hudson is a visually impoverished period piece of little consequence. I could imagine a perfectly fine film to be made out of the story of a 1939 meeting between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the King and Queen of England in upstate New York, but this is most certainly not that film. In the hands of director Roger Michell (he of bland, irritating romantic comedies Notting Hill and Morning Glory) and screenwriter Richard Nelson, the true historical events are turned into the airiest, blandest concoction imaginable. This is a thinly written barely-there 94 minutes, a treacly, atonal disaster that shuffles its ignominious way through a painfully uneventful and unpersuasive series of half-realized events.

Told through the point of view of Daisy, FDR’s distant cousin, the film does its best to skirt around what little is interesting about the story it recounts. It’s a love affair presented without passion. It’s a meeting of heads of state on the eve of global conflict presented without suspense. It’s a weekend in a mansion in the midst of a global depression presented without any reflection of economic or sociopolitical realities. No, it all is treated like the mildest possible farce, a lukewarm sub-soap opera comedy of errors that’s mostly error and entirely comedy free. In fact, in writing the previous sentence I felt bad about tarnishing farce, soap opera, and comedy of errors by even mentioning them in connection to this film, even if only to demonstrate how little it manages to accomplish.

It’s all enough to make one wonder what scared the filmmakers away from actually doing something with their material. As is, the whole thing just sits up there on the screen, inert from frame one. Michell has somehow even coaxed the wonderful, idiosyncratic Bill Murray into this mess, in the lead role no less. He does a passable FDR impression, I suppose, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that the script gives him little to do. Worse still are the film’s attempts to mine some comedy out of the president’s medical problems, framing an early interior moment of guest-greeting with a window in the background that allows the foreground to be interrupted by the sight of the president being carried around the back of the house. Ha ha, we’re supposed to think; FDR can barely walk. How delightful?

The rest of the floundering cast is made up by such generally dependable performers as Laura Linney, who plays Daisy about as well as a shallow characterization with copious terrible narration to recite can be played, and Olivia Williams who wears a nice set of false chompers as Eleanor Roosevelt. As the King and Queen of England, Samuel West and Olivia Colman, adequate though they are, can’t help but pale in comparison to Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter’s portrayals of these people in The King’s Speech. If one were to cynically suppose that this cinematic endeavor was nothing more than a late attempt to draft off of the success of that Oscar-winner of a couple years ago, I would not be inclined to disagree.

As the film drags itself through a seemingly endless runtime, thinking it is finding much humor in a King in a bathing suit or eating a hot dog and much poignancy in a thoroughly unconvincing love affair, the picture begins to take on the distinct feeling of a film with nothing to do. It’s a film without a point of view, without any point at all, come to think of it. With little to say and no reason found to say it, I can’t help but feel that this film is about as useless a film as I’ve ever seen.