A Change is Gonna Come: SELMA

Whatever their individual merits, or lack thereof, Hollywood reflections on the Civil Rights Movement from the likes of Driving Miss Daisy or The Help tend to conclude by putting on a happy face. They’re viewing the tribulations of the time through a historical distancing complex that takes great pride finding history in the past. How terrible racism and its effects, they say. And yet situating a story as vital as a fight for human rights through the view of sympathetic white help, told firmly from a supposedly more enlightened present, provides only uplift. One whose knowledge of history comes only from Hollywood could be excused for thinking the story of Civil Rights is the mission-accomplished post-racism lie sold by the willfully ignorant.

The power of a film like Ava DuVernay’s Selma comes in its restoring to history its devastating immediacy, while refusing to obscure the direct line from then to now. It takes as its subject the 1965 marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. That was a mere 50 years ago, when brave peaceful protesters were beaten by eager police in riot gear, in front of news cameras for the entire world to see. In this film, each blow feels fresh, the bruises still painful. It keeps the focus of a heroic, historic moment rooted in the humane details, presenting key figures as complicated human beings confronting the worst of humanity with hard-fought grace and determination. It’s a film that plays on your historical knowledge – you can’t watch an opening scene of little girls in their Sunday best walking through a church without a sick feeling of dread suspecting their fate – without taking it for granted or softening historical horror with the benefits of hindsight.

Every choice made by the filmmakers is rooted in immediacy and intimacy. They take our usual view of history – of Great Men, Important Speeches, and Big Moments – and restore a sense of the masses to a movement. The Civil Rights Movement was, after all, made up of people, hundreds and thousands of individuals whose collective voice was heard. The marches at Selma may have been organized and inspired by, among others, Martin Luther King Jr, but he needed the passion and commitment of the people who made up the crowds. DuVernay’s film’s most powerful moments are in its crowd scenes, when King (played brilliantly and convincingly by David Oyelowo) is simply one of many marching towards crowds of cops and hecklers, determined to draw attention to their cause.

Placing the crowds and King on similar levels of focus, the film draws a lively and humane reenactment. We come to recognize faces (Oprah Winfrey, Common, Lorraine Toussaint, Tessa Thompson, Stephan James, and more). We can pick them out in the crowds. We know a little of their stories. We see their eagerness, their idealism, their pragmatic planning. Then we see them shoved, hit, shot at, and bludgeoned. Their faces are bloodied as they limp to safety, ready to head out and march again the next day. At its best, Selma is history written with lightening, sharply revealing and an electric burn. It burns for the ferocity of the facts, and the sad recognition in them of so many concerns that linger still. When an unarmed black man is gunned down by white cops who will never be punished, it’s hard not to read echoes of current events in the pain and sorrow on the screen.

Writer-director DuVernay’s previous films were small-scale intimate dramas, tenderly studying the emotional currents between her characters. You can see that skill in Selma’s portrait of King’s relationship with his wife (Carmen Ejogo) and closest advisors (Wendell Pierce chief among them). Not just the easily appropriated, endlessly quotable symbol to which he can so often be reduced, we see King at a recognizably human level. He heads to the streets, ready to face death threats and worse as he delivers sermons with fire and conviction, no matter his private troubles and doubts. But we also see in the small, quiet moments of his life as husband, father, and friend, soft intimate spaces over which hangs the import and danger of his righteous calling.

The film is more diffuse than a biopic, and the time with the supporting cast doesn’t allow for any one standout amongst them. King still dominates the proceedings, drawing focus even when not on screen. He’s a figure of inspiration and conflict amongst everyone, but it’s always clear he’s only human. It’s a picture of a person, and of a movement, that manages to be honest without tearing anyone down. Following backroom negotiations, strategy sessions, and heartfelt speeches between moments of extreme racial tension and sympathetically drawn character moments, Selma is best when it’s witnessing the crisis points of the conflict, and when sitting back with the activists in casual moments of camaraderie, eating, praying, or singing while planning the next move. In those cases, DuVernay makes a film most clearly interested in the human experience first, not just the Big Important moments.

The film falls into some conventional docudrama patterns, like unnecessary time-stamped text and a few clumsy integrations of full names and position statements, orienting the audience at the (brief) expense of immediacy. So, too, the scenes in the White House with LBJ (Tom Wilkinson) or the State Capital where George Wallace (Tim Roth) growls and spits slurs, sequences which sit at a remove from the street-level interest. But when the story and the filmmaking sits powerfully close to the planning and the protests, it is too vitally alive to be held back entirely by such predictable based-on-a-true-story message movie moments.

Bradford Young’s cinematography finds glowing skin tones in cozy interiors that crackle with dimly-lit beauty reminiscent of Gordon Willis. But then we head outside with the protestors, where under the bright light of the sun, angry, violent racism must inevitably meet non-violence. The emotions of real people who somehow muster the courage to put themselves in harms way for what they believe are beautifully realized in a present tense, shorn from the usual feel-good conclusions. This is a hard-hitting view of these events, sympathetic and inspiring, but also pragmatic and clear-eyed about how hard-fought the battle, how real the accomplishments, and yet how ongoing the conflict.

The Baked Sleep: INHERENT VICE

Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice is a gumshoe tale with pothead logic. Beginning, as all private eye stories do, with a beautiful girl (Katherine Waterson) showing up unexpectedly in a P.I.’s office with a strange tale of dastardly deeds in need of uncovering, Doc, our detective protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix), lights a joint and gets to work. What follows is a druggy wading through 1970 Los Angeles, a stoned stumble through a hazy maze of clues and complications. Around every corner is a funny-named character (like Shasta Fey Hepworth, or Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen) played by a recognizable face in frames dense with vintage detail. Soon a simple situation about a potential financial scheme becomes more about real estate shenanigans (a la Chinatown), a few missing persons cases, a shady transnational syndicate, and maybe more.

Doc’s investigation proceeds as a procession of dialogues as he hunts down the truth. He’s a shaggy hippy ambling into clean-cut offices, hotels, homes, restaurants, and police headquarters, then back to his beach-side hovel to ponder the things he’s heard. It’s the culture clash of 1970, between the square-jawed Americana establishment and the relaxed, politically engaged counter culture, rattling down a dimly understood paranoid logic. Phoenix gives his character a great listening look, holding a mostly invested and intrigued P.I. poker face. He’s always leaning forward – listening closely – or settling back – luring secrets with a confidant’s confidence. And yet he’s also walking about with a perpetually furrowed brow, confusion wafting over every encounter as his pot smolders nearby. He’s like a more purposeful Jeff Lebowski crossed with a high Philip Marlowe.

He may be a bit confused from time to time, sometimes seeming totally adrift in a sea of details and strange asides. But he’s on the case, moving forward, scribbling notes and puzzling over new discoveries as everyone he meets shovels exposition of varying relevance at him. He talks to his aunt (Jeannie Berlin), his assistant (Maya Rudolph), his lawyer (Benicio Del Toro), a cop (Josh Brolin), an ex-con (Michael Kenneth Williams), a masseuse (Hong Chau), a potential widow (Jena Malone), a musician (Owen Wilson), a deputy district attorney (Reese Witherspoon), a dentist (Martin Short), a real estate mogul (Eric Roberts), and more. Most appear for only a scene or two. Some contribute valuable new information to move the mysteries along. Others simply add to the flavoring, an offbeat, mellow, and bumbling vibe. They’re whole eccentric beings conjured up to be wonderfully oddball cogs in a fuzzy mystery machine slowly growing clearer.

The film has copious period pleasures – cars and fashions informing characters’ stations, music drifting in over radios and record players, a grainy, vivid, sunny orange and yellow color palate shot in gorgeous time-appropriate cinematography by Robert Elswit. Anderson’s too good a filmmaker to let a scene go to waste, every shot informed by a groovy sense of place and space, as clear as anything in his Boogie Nights or There Will Be Blood. There’s always some bit of visual cleverness emphasizing how lost Doc, and we, are in the mysteries at hand. Angles will cut off characters’ heads, hiding their identities from us. Voices will float in from out of frame. Missing time – when our detective is bumped unconscious by an unseen bludgeoner, say, a common trope – is never satisfactorily filled in. We even have a narrator (Joanna Newsom) whose sweetly voiced information is always pleasant but only occasionally helpful.

This is all low-key, low-stakes, loose genre doodling, but what’s often quite transporting about the whole experience is how successfully Anderson puts the audience in the protagonist’s stoned headspace. It’s full of the usual puzzles of detective fiction of its ilk. But the more I struggled to put the pieces together, the more the plot seemed to slip away. Then, suddenly, it falls into place, resolved in some ways, but with loose threads dangling still. It’s a puzzle where the pieces don’t quite fit, even though all the characters seem satisfied enough to move on with their lives, case closed. It’s a detective movie that hits all its marks, but takes enough cues from its stoned lead to leave a drifting fog of lingering confusion in its wake. At one point Doc asks Shasta, “Inherent vice? What’s that mean?” To which she replies, “I dunno.”

Once, Twice, Three Times a Taking: TAKEN 3

Taken 3 is the least in its series, which in turn has been among the least of star Liam Neeson’s recent spate of action roles. Unlike his good to great films of late (The Grey, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Non-Stop), these movies are only about how many people Neeson’s Bryan Mills, an ex-special ops guy with a particular set of skills, has to kill to get a member of his family back from the bad guys. The first had a single-mindedness that worked for it more than not, especially if you can ignore its uglier vigilante tendencies. The second wasn’t even that good, but at least had its moments of committed goofiness, like grenade-based echolocation. This third time around, it’s just lazy, requiring bigger jolts to get less effect. Now he has to kill a whole bunch of people just to feel better about losing a loved one, this taking being of a more permanent kind.

After much throat-clearing exposition, Mills discovers the murder of his ex-wife (Famke Janssen, turning up for a cameo that’s half corpse). He just got back to his apartment after buying fresh bagels and finds her dead in his bed, bloody knife left dripping nearby. The cops aren’t far behind. Naturally, they think he did it, so he goes on the run to clear his name, protect his now-college aged daughter (Maggie Grace), and find the people responsible. As the detective on the case and on the chase, Forest Whitaker, who hilariously eats the fresh bagels out of the active crime scene, interviews the ex-wife’s husband (Dougray Scott) who asks if this has to do with those two times Mills got caught up in nasty business overseas. Whitaker’s reaction to the question is so underplayed to be nonexistent. It’s like he hears about suspects’ serial vigilante killing sprees everyday. Maybe he’s seen the earlier movies too.

Neeson spends the entirety of the movie on the run in a sleepy riff on The Fugitive. The reasons for this are protracted and stupid, easily the stupidest plot co-writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen have yet concocted. It’s not just absurd. I could handle that. It’s wholly unnecessary. Neeson flees the authorities, pursuing his own sense of justice despite A.) a solid alibi, and B.) almost immediately discovering video evidence that, if turned over to Whitaker, would point cops directly to the real baddies. I mean, I know Neeson’s the best of the best, but wouldn’t he rather clear his name and let the police arrest the clearly guilty bad guys? I guess he prefers the collateral damage implied in a reckless chase down a freeway, an explosion on a college campus, and a shootout in a skyscraper. It makes it hard to disagree when, late in the game, Scott turns to Grace and says, “Your dad’s a homicidal maniac!”

This superfluous running, jumping, shooting, punching, and chasing (all PG-13 bloodless, naturally) would be better off if we could at least enjoy it. But there’s a sense of mercenary profit-based laziness involved, as if everyone did the least they could to get the paycheck by pumping out another entry in the brand. Barely comprehensible action scenes are a perfect compliment to the dumb connective tissue between them. This is director Olivier Megaton’s sloppiest deployment of chaos cinema, quick edits and haphazardly framed shaky cam hiding most effects and many causes in the dimly imagined action. Worst, it obscures how Neeson gets out of most of his close calls. At one point he backs his car down an elevator shaft, plummets several stories, and groans. Then the car explodes, elaborately and with many angles. After an edit, we find he’s on the phone in a different location. How’d he do that? I get the feeling no one knows and, worse, no one cares. I know I don’t.

Turing the Tide: THE IMITATION GAME

The Imitation Game runs through its biopic paces, reducing a Great Man’s life into a series of easily digestible Big Moments. That the true story it tells is of Alan Turing, a gay man whose life’s work had gone underreported because of prejudice, and because his crucial scientific breakthroughs partially responsible for defeating Hitler remained classified, lends it a degree of importance. Although, given the subject’s wide reporting since files were declassified, it’s not exactly breaking new research ground here. Besides, it’s a movie, one intended to interpret a good story into a satisfying entertainment at that. It’s a World War II picture about people crunching numbers on the home front that’s quietly amazed the war was won, at least in the intelligence arena, by a gay man, a woman, and a roomful of math whizzes.

Graham Moore’s screenplay moves along three parallel tracks. It follows young Turing (Alex Lawther), bullied at boarding school and dealing with the first glimmers of his genius and romantic stirrings. It follows a detective (Rory Kinnear) in the 1950s puzzling out Turing’s secrets. The track is destined to end in tragedy when Turing is outed and charged with indecency in accordance to UK law at the time. These fill in the biopic obligations, giving us childhood context and his sad end, but the most exciting track is the WWII stuff. There director Morten Tyldum makes a brisk historical thriller in which Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is tasked with cracking the Nazi Enigma code with a team of mathematicians, cryptographers, and spies (Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, Mark Strong). He recruits some fellow number crunchers, chief among them a brilliant young woman (Keira Knightley) kept out of the official inner circle by sexism.

It’s the kind of sanctimonious based-on-a-true-story film that’s pretty proud of itself for its historical importance, so much so the characters sound like they’ve already read the history books about their lives. It’s full of people simplifying and speechifying for our benefit, extolling the virtues of the Turing Machine while sneering at those who think it’s a waste of money as if it should’ve been obvious in the moment the future importance of the project. Elsewhere, characters say things like, “You can’t say you’re gay, Turing. That’s illegal.” Surely there’s a more subtle or elegant way of getting that information out there. It’s an overdose of explanation.

Turing narrates the entire picture, explaining the context of various incidents in his life, a way of getting inside the head of a character portrayed here as so full of egghead eccentricities he might as well have wandered in off the set of The Big Bang Theory. But a late scene reveals the voice over is a monologue he’s giving to a detective. Why he’d tell his life story there is beyond me. Maybe he’s filibustering. Cumberbatch delivers a clamped down performance so full of ticks and tricks that it’s scarcely believable as a real person. He’s a collection of biographical details never convincingly brought to life, perfect for a movie more interested in Big Moments and important monologues than building characters or crafting a gripping yarn.

But when the movie relaxes its need to explain the importance of its moment in history while following the build-a-biopic kit step by step, there’s some fine acting and some nervous tick-tock energy in its construction. Small moments of human interaction and wartime strategizing are often engaging. The actors are accomplished and, lead performance aside, have warm and lively likable energy. Knightley is the standout here, as a woman with a brilliant mind held back by a patriarchal system out to devalue her. When she shows up to apply for the job, she’s nearly turned away by a man who assumes she’s a lost secretary. Her sunny charm and intelligence give her scenes a heartbeat, much like Goode, Strong, and Dance (a good name for a Broadway law firm, by the way) breath sly grumpiness into stuffy writing.

Turing’s story is interesting, but the movie made out of it is inert, insisting on its own importance with a glossy, technically proficient surface that refuses to engage with the genuinely fascinating ideas inherent underneath. There are some pleasing elements, with a good cast working hard, craftspeople making fine period detail, and a typically excellent Alexandre Desplat score. It’s of minor interest for Anglophiles and WWII buffs, I suppose, but for starting with a tale so dramatic the end result is surprisingly empty.

Adieu Langage, Bonjour Cinema: GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE

How appropriate that a movie titled Goodbye to Language should cast a spell difficult to put into words. It’s a sustained trip, lighting my brain on fire for the duration, then smoldering satisfactorily for days after. Its director is the legendary Jean-Luc Godard, now 84, who has long expressed through his work a deep love of what movies can do, and an eagerly experimental disregard for anything approaching conventional rules of filmmaking. A palpable presence behind the scenes, his guiding hand can be felt in every edit, each gesture, from his cool black-and-white jump-cut debut feature, 1960’s world cinema landmark Breathless, through his increasingly dense essayistic stream-of-consciousness musings – the towering achievement being Histoire(s) du Cinema, a 288 minute inquiry into the very nature of motion pictures.

Goodbye to Language is another pinnacle, a full expression of his idiosyncratic approaches that heads straight into an added dimension: 3D. Every other 3D film you’ll see uses the technology to trick the audience’s eyes into seeing vast depths to the background while the foreground looms closer, perhaps breaking the proscenium in ways that (theoretically) enhance a narrative. Godard uses these illusions, but doesn’t leave them at face value. He plays tricks, experiments. An animating question of the film seems to be, “Didja know 3D could do this?” It’s a film so lively and playful, it’s clear even he was not sure at the start. He lets us watch as he finds out. There’s continual visual astonishment at play here, stimulating and invigorating. With cinematographer Fabrice Aragno, Godard starts from the standard Hollywood setting, like a shot with metal bars, a hand reaching through them, and the fourth wall. But then he stretches, pulling the angles and distances between planes of depth in befuddling and exhilarating ways.

Extra perceptions of dimensionality provide added mind-altering qualities to the visual essay trickery Godard’s been up to for a few decades now. Superimpositions, layered dissolves, unexpected cuts, and off-kilter angles add up to a rough-hewn beauty of a visual experience. Even without dealing with the ideas the images contain, it’s a exhilarating pleasure to watch when 3D throws a title card right into your face, blocking out text underneath, or when a chair, or a dock, or a book is strangely disassociated from its surroundings, hovering neither here nor there in your field of vision. Or try this shot: a woman is holding her iPhone. The camera is perched next to her arm, which comes towards the audience. The phone and the images on it sit in the midground, the reflections on the screen simultaneously pulling deep into and floating out of the background. In every shot, Godard invites you to say goodbye to language and see the world anew on a visceral visual level.

But that doesn’t mean the film is silent or plotless, though the sound isn’t calibrated for clarity and the narrative, such as it is, isn’t entirely comprehensible on first glance. The soundtrack is filled with classical music, loud sound effects, and murmured dialogue. It cuts in and out, switches volumes and sources suddenly, shifting placement in the mix in startling changes. We hear epigrammatic philosophizing, arty muttering, arguments, and borrowed quotations, all the while watching a couple, two couples, sit by the water, lounge naked at home, perform their daily ablutions, have deep thoughts and arguments. At least twice there’s violent death, just off screen. One scene goes back in time to show us Mary Shelley. And there’s a dog, Godard’s pet Roxy, who wanders through several scenes, staring, thinking, playing, being. At one point she’s joined by a contemplative voice over you’d swear was written by Herzog if Monet wasn’t cited.

If this all sounds impenetrable to you, I hate to say I won’t solve the film here. Not on one viewing I won’t. But a Godard film is not a story problem to be solved. It’s for adventurous filmgoers who’ll find the playfulness of its experimentation its own reward. Get drunk on the delights within, and be left marveling at the possibilities of cinema yet unexplored. Godard has made a film that proceeds with its own logic, riffing on 3D’s doubling effect by doubling down on that symbolism: mirrors, repetitions, reflections, two sets of couples, juxtapositions, a dialectic methodical cleverness to forming ideas through interplay of image and sound, layers of references and signifiers. At one point, a man declares that the act of defecation is the only true equality in the world, the camera finding him sitting on the toilet as he speaks, Rodin’s The Thinker versus Taro Gomi’s Everyone Poops.

The doubling comes to a head in the two instances of the year’s best camera move, the one you’ve definitely heard of if you’ve heard anything at all about this film. The two cameras used to capture 3D follow different characters moving away from each other, in total a layered abstraction that’s also two separate shots you can edit between by closing one eye or the other. It’s a moment so head-splittingly novel, I found myself wanting to rewind the film and rewatch it right then and there.

Here’s a movie that gives you image after image, letting you add them up for yourself. Goodbye to Language makes as good an argument as any for the ease with which language and all its history, culture, and metaphor, can complicate what we’re actually trying to tell one another, and that cinema transcends language, moving images making pure ideas. This is, after all, the foundational cinematic idea, of making meaning out of nothing more than what’s in the frame and what’s out of it. Godard puts in his frame images you’ve never seen before.

House Haunters: WOMAN IN BLACK 2: ANGEL OF DEATH

The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is not a particularly outstanding horror film, but it’s a welcome sight nonetheless. For one, it’s not found footage or zombie, the two subgenres well exhausted as of late. It’s simply a handsome chiller, an old-fashioned period piece ghost story that, like its predecessor, continues the revival of Hammer horror. That’s the most welcome sight here. Hammer, a British production company famous for its midcentury monster movies with literary(ish) inspirations and pretty production design – most notably, its series of Dracula movies featuring Christopher Lee – had been dormant for decades. But, with 2012’s The Woman in Black, last year’s The Quiet Ones, and now a sequel to the former, they’re back in the game, putting ghostly happenings in creepy houses filled with British ensembles in period costume. Even if the actual films aren’t all that yet, it’s nice to know a venerable tradition marches on.

Actually, I quite liked the first Woman in Black. It starred Daniel Radcliffe as a turn-of-the-20th-century lawyer sent to a dilapidated mansion isolated in the English countryside. Holed up settling the estate of its last occupant, he was stuck in the house as tides daily turned the marshes into a moat. There, he was terrorized by tropes of the haunted house kind – thuds, scrapes, flickering lights, footsteps, slamming doors, apparitions and screams. It worked, enough that a return visit to the mansion didn’t seem too bad a prospect. Besides, the hook of Angel of Death is pretty great. It takes place decades later, during World War II. A group of children are sent away from London bombing to a makeshift orphanage in, surprise surprise, the very same house that scared Radcliffe so. It’s the perfect opportunity to exploit dread with children in danger, vulnerable people fleeing violence and pain heading straight into the heart of paranormal activity. Creepy stuff.

The kids are staying with two women, volunteers from the city who’ve agreed to travel along and keep them safe. The older woman (Helen McCrory) is a military wife, no-nonsense, completely unwilling to listen to the younger woman (Phoebe Fox) as she insists there’s something not quite right with this place. There are mysterious footsteps in the cellar, creaking floorboards and opening doors, and the younger woman has unpleasant dreams of a bombed out maternity ward full of spectral nurses and flickering bulbs. Not even the hunky pilot stationed nearby (Jeremy Irvine) can help her. One serious, silent, lad (Oaklee Pendergast) has taken to staring intently at the cracked ceiling of the bedroom, and at peeling wallpaper in a grubby old nursery full of crumbling antique toys. It’s unsettling.

The whole thing gets by on suggestion, director Tom Harper and screenwriter Jon Croker providing a feeling of unsettling wrongness, that something horrifying is just off screen. It’s all very pleasingly reminiscent of Val Lewton in its low-tech, non-explicit creepiness. A mix of World War II anxieties and childcare concerns create the chills here. Children are continually in peril, sometimes hurt badly. Threat of wartime injury – no lights after dark for fear of bombing – infects the more ethereal worry. There’s an overwhelming sense that nowhere is safe. It’s a ghost story with historical heft, underlined by the serious, handsome production design that recreates the mansion’s details in a similarly crumbling freakiness. It’s a place dense with bad vibes and jump scares.

What I’ve been describing sounds like a pretty good movie, and indeed it is a largely agreeable and watchable one. But it’s an “almost” movie, with its heart in the right place, an ensemble up to the task, a look rich in detail, long on atmosphere and thick with mood. But it’s short on characterization and incident, leaning a bit too heavily on jumpiness and portent. I sat there almost scared, almost involved, almost caring. But it’s a film that settles for almost. It’s striking at times, and quite satisfying on all technical levels. But there’s nothing distinguished or exceptionally worthwhile about it, either. I was pleasantly diverted, but never affected in any way. It plays in one pitch, without much variation, worthwhile only for fulfilling its modest aims for those who enter with low expectations. I liked being back in a Hammer horror world, but it’d be better if something happened within it I could worry about more than superficially.

Bet Your Life: TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT

Belgian writer/director brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are masters of cinema as empathy. Their films are studies of people on the margins, working class people struggling to get by or living with a modicum of comfort they fear will be taken away. With sensitive camerawork and brilliant naturalistic acting, they create small-scale portraits of lives lived in quiet desperation. They’re remarkably consistent. In their every film, from La Promisse and Rosetta to L’Enfant and The Kid with a Bike, there are characters confronted with problems that threaten to destabilize them, the filmmakers showing us with great patience and sympathy reactions and responses. They’re preternaturally attuned to moral questions, watching characters as they try their best to work them out.

In their latest, Two Days, One Night, Marion Cotillard plays a woman whose factory job rests in the hands of her coworkers. She’s been off work for a while dealing with debilitating depression, her husband looking after the kids and keeping the household running. Now that she’s finally ready to return, bringing in her family’s much-needed main income, the bosses have called for a vote. Money is tight, so the employees must decide between their annual bonuses and Cotillard’s job. The first vote went resoundingly to bonuses. Extenuating circumstances have allowed for a revote on Monday. When the film begins, it’s Friday. She decides to use the weekend to visit her coworkers one by one, face to face, hoping to get enough votes to save her job.

The film follows her as she enacts this sadistic game show construct foisted upon her. It’s almost too much for her to bear. We see she cries easily, would rather be staying in bed, and is generally in a bad state. She’s barely able to work again, and certainly not in any condition to be confronted with such a cruel turn of circumstances. Cotillard, in a brilliant performance rich with interiority and psychological detail, embodies the bruised psyche of a woman who has barely clawed her way back to the early hints of an even-keeled emotional state. She moves with fragility in her posture, preemptive pain in her eyes before every encounter. She hopes her presence will remind her coworkers of her humanity, and their own.

The film’s structure takes on a ritualistic movement, confronting each coworker in turn with the moral and economic calculus involved in the vote and seeing their true selves reflected in their reactions. The Dardennes tensely and inquisitively build scenes of confrontation, quickly sketching in working relationships between Cotillard and her coworkers as we hear their reasons, excuses, and evasions. The saddest thing is, the others need their bonuses, often badly, or at least for clear, convincing reasons no less important than Cotillard’s need for her job. In small, but momentous, encounters, each character must confront a crucial question, weighing the ideal collective action against their rational self-interest. What is more important? A bigger year-end paycheck or the continued employment of one of their own?

Simply structured, plainspoken, deeply felt, Two Days, One Night is a tremendous emotional wringer. It pushes a woman into an unbearably fraught condition, and watches as she desperately appeals to others for help. That her employers, the very source of her income and social interaction, have put her in this spot makes it all the worse. As an evocation of the economic construct so many live out on a daily basis – the establishment forcing the working class into conflict with each other, the better to keep them from turning conflict upwards – it’s merciless of plot. We watch this dynamic play out in these characters lives, and the Dardennes bring to it every bit of their humane specificity, charting the emotional terrains of people forced into making big decisions about another’s life. It’s a work of invigorating empathy.