Stealing Beauty: THE SUBSTANCE

Look what beauty standards can do to a body. The more desperately one clings to youthful beauty, the faster it slips away. It’s not news that Hollywood’s visual appeal can do great damage to its sex symbols who, as their brief moment of youthful beauty fades, often see their careers follow. We know this. But it’s nonetheless a lesson we have to keep learning. No wonder Taylor Swift named her song “Clara Bow,” a narrative about this very cycle, after one of the first It Girls of the screen. You know the story. As critic Farran Smith Nehme wrote in defense of Kim Novak, whose elderly appearance on the Oscars in 2014 led to some sadly predictable snark about her artificially smooth expression: couldn’t we have some sympathy for the pressures one faces in just such a moment? After a career of being known for your looks, how difficult must it be to face the harsh glow of the stage lights, and the viewing public’s scorn knowing we haven’t the cultural space for appreciating the natural changing beauty of age. She must have been “worried constantly that no matter how you looked, it wasn’t good enough.” Don’t they all. With every new generation of stars, we seem to find belatedly, and sometimes posthumously, a new sense of grace and understanding for the plight of the old. And then we turn around and let the cycle grind up the fresh meat all the same. Time will be kinder to them in retrospect, too.

That idea of a fading star doing damage to herself to further her youthful glow is the concept animating the wild and propulsive and insular new horror picture The Substance, a hard-charging work of showbiz satire that builds and builds until it erupts in gore on its way to a creature feature ending that’s both dripping in viscera and in despair. Set in a simple simulacrum of Hollywood, it stars Demi Moore as an aging actress who’s been hosting a fitness program for years. She’s on the verge of getting replaced by a newer, younger host when she turns to an underground experimental drug—a thick neon-green liquid that’s among the most potent symbolic horror concoctions this side of Larry Cohen’s The Stuff—that’ll reactivate her cells and unleash a newer, younger self. There’s a sadness immediately present as we see a woman desperately clinging to a youthful beauty because she has no greater ambition than that. Her talent or artistic endeavors are in the past, if they ever existed, simply because she’s been part of a business that’s made her only business her charisma, her screen presence, her sex appeal. When that’s all you’ve been paid to give for years and years, no wonder it’s all you want. She needs it to maintain her lavish, empty lifestyle. Moore plays this hollowed-out dissatisfaction with a weary resignation. When she meets with her producer (Dennis Quaid)—a sneering faux-cheery objectifier, wiggling a flaccid shrimp as he talks with his mouth full as he tells her she’s too old to keep hosting—she stares at him with buried outrage burning up into ugly agreement. Yes, she thinks, if only she could be young again.

This desire is so viscerally literalized here that taking The Substance causes the fresher body to hatch gorily out of the old. A viscous, bloody birth bursts out of her back until the lifeless shell lies bleeding on the bathroom floor while the new beauty (Margaret Qualley) stands dripping on the tile. It’s not a younger self; it’s a self, younger. The new body is shot like a car commercial—overlit poses while the camera swoops tight along aerodynamic curves in close up. The old one is a husk that’s to be kept hooked up to a liquid diet so the patient can switch between bodies to keep the bodies properly balanced. It soon enough becomes a pointed, physicalized Dorian Gray situation, with shades of Jekyll and Hyde, her split personality drawing her toward inevitable doom. Her self-loathing has been embodied. The more she wants, the less she’ll have. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat, of the similarly bloody French thriller Revenge, certainly isn’t pulling punches here, and isn’t hiding her intentions in subtlety. The movie is broad, blunt, obvious, as funny as it is nasty. Its conceit is pulled thinly over a drawn-out scenario that gets only more gross and explicit as it propels itself toward a grotesque ending. I mean that as a compliment. Fargeat frames it all in a bold style that keeps a steady eye—bright frames, clean digital precision, unsettling symmetries, thunderclap symbolism—as it piles on the absurd complications. It become a movie about a frenzied emptiness, a fractured loss of self that leads to desperate measures in an attempt to find something fulfilling, something whole. It drips with contempt for those who’d use an appreciation for the beauty of bodies as an excuse to reduce the humanity of those beauties—and bleeds sympathy for those bodies discarded when the shallow no longer have use for them. As Swift writes: “Beauty is a beast…demanding more / only when your girlish glow flickers just so…”

Triple Threat: KINDS OF KINDNESS

“Some of them want to use you / Some of them want to get used by you / Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused”
— Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”

“This were kindness?”
— The Merchant of Venice (1.3.154)

For anyone worried that Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos was drifting to the mainstream with his awards feted, and surprise box office hits, The Favourite and Poor Things, here’s Kinds of Kindness to most fully expose that bleeding heart of darkness within his works. Not that those other films aren’t wild with vulgarity and explicitness, too, but they were packaged in aesthetically pleasing historical intrigue or flights of fancy, respectively. Kindness is colder, slower, less immediately narratively legible, and without even the slightest hint of appealing character motives. That’s what makes it so compelling, too. One watches it trying to figure it out, and it's structured to keep slipping away. It’s fitting that it begins by blasting the iconic driving synths of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” as the movie is about people used and abused, in darkly comedic and deadpan absurd stories in which everyone is looking for something, and in which reality seems to take on the logic of an inscrutable dream. Lanthimos pins down his characters in clinically precise widescreen frames, and then spins out the surreal plot turns, scripted with his Killing of a Sacred Deer co-writer Efthimis Filippou. He does so with an unblinking, mannered realism, dialing back the style and coaxing underplayed reactions just when the stories are aching for excess.

As the characters wriggle their ways through the emotional and physical pain of their plots, the movie becomes a caustic acid bath of cynicism, watching toxic people give into base impulses, and work their wicked ways. The film is made up of three short films, each nearly an hour long and starring the same ensemble. Each tale would undoubtedly test the patience at feature length, each take a sick joke inside a sick joke that starts strange, grows even stranger, and then ends on its bleakest, gnarliest punchline. The first finds a businessman (Jesse Plemons) totally controlled by his boss (Willem Dafoe) and the old man’s mistresses (Emma Stone and Margaret Qualley), down to the food he eats and whether or not his wife (Hong Chau) will get pregnant. When he finds himself doubting his commitment to his latest grotesque task, his life instantly changes for the worse. The second story finds Plemons as a police officer whose wife (Stone) has been missing at sea. It’s odd enough that in his grief he invites their friends (Qualley and Mamoudou Athie) over to watch their sex tape; odder still is how he reacts when his wife is eventually discovered. Lastly, we find Stone and Plemons looking for a Chosen One at the behest of a cult leader (Dafoe) and his wife (Chau). It becomes a sort of desperate ritual as it goes on.

In each story, the cast is so good at inhabiting these extreme situations of sex and violence with shrugging acceptance that the bubbling surreality is played out quite naturally—subtext and text dancing with extreme literalness, down to the black-and-white flashes of dreams and visions that mingle with their mindsets. These characters are constantly doing acts of a selfish sort of kindness, casually blowing up lives, behaving as dangers to themselves and others. If this were kindness, who needs cruelty? Here’s a movie with a pretty low opinion of human behavior that’s as darkly upsetting as it is grimly funny, in a preposterous string of circumstances held in the grip of skilled filmmakers making each moment count. Lanthimos using the same faces in new roles uses each switch of the narrative to recombine them into dynamics of freedom and control, power and submission, responsibility and individualism. These characters keeps slamming into illusions they’ve created to make sense of lives spiraling out of control—often of their own doing. The bruising absurdism of each accumulates into the sickest joke of all: sometimes the only kindness is to give into the absurdity of your circumstances and hope for the best.

As an aside—how wild is it to think back to 2010, when Stone’s Easy A was a satisfying comedy that confirmed her a star and Lanthimos’ nasty, explicit Dogtooth got a surprise Academy Award nomination for foreign-language film. Imagine telling us moviegoers back then that those two would bring out the best in each other.

Coen South: DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS

Now that they’ve both made a movie without the other, we know exactly what each Coen brother brought to their 40-year filmmaking partnership. Joel took the somber philosophizing, precision image-making, and stark contrasts for his Tragedy of Macbeth. Ethan took the sprightly, irreverent, and capering plotting with oddball characters and eccentric details for Drive-Away Dolls. Smash the two together and you’d get a typical high/low, light/dark, serious/sentimental, exaggerated/realist Coen collision—a Big Lebowski or Serious Man or Raising Arizona or, you get the picture. Taken separately, we have an almost scientific accounting for the exact proportions each brought to the style. It’s even there in the literary sources within—Macbeth obviously springs from the Bard, while Dolls teases Henry James. Of course that means Joel does the spare koans and quotable soliloquies, while Ethan is clearly the side-winding sentences and idiosyncratic personalities. They each have a distinctive flavor that tastes better together, but separately make for fine filmmaking all the same.

Drive-Away Dolls is the self-consciously goofy side of the Coens, here represented by an erratic Elmore Leonard looniness of a caper that’s quick, slight, silly and strange, and full of clockwork naughtiness, cheerful vulgarity, and matter-of-fact sex and nudity. It’s a backwoods road trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee on the eve of Y2K in which two squabbling lesbian besties (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan) slowly fall in love while accidentally ferrying some pretty wild contraband a few goons are desperate to retrieve. Ethan Coen, co-writing with his wife Tricia Cooke, who also serves as editor here, is out to make a small, scrappy, bisexual B-movie and does it with dashed off delight and grinning desire. Every scene stretches for a punchline, every line chewed off with cynical charm and sneakily sentimental romanticism. He shoots simply, and juggles a small ensemble for maximum snappiness, with tight closeups and terse two-shots. It flatters his loquacious low-lifes and allows for a matter-of-fact build-up of specifics, from a basement make-out party set to a Linda Ronstadt record, to the mismatched thugs who sometimes sweet talk and sometimes punch their way to information, witty pleasantries and conversational roundabouts spiked with danger. (The ultimate MacGuffin reveal is a similar shock, equal parts John Waters and Carl Hiaasen and Burn After Reading.) Each scene is the sort of snappily delivered, sleepily paced oddities that let the figures on screen fizz and pop.

It’s a movie that loves its cast in that way, indulging a certain cartoony exaggeration and gleaming naughtiness. Qualley as a confident sexual dynamo brings a swaggering Texas accent through a Bugs Bunny smirk—her mouth goes off at such an angle that she might as well be chomping a carrot. Viswanathan makes a perfect slowly seduced foil of a friend as her buttoned-up partner in accidental crime. She’s all tight and poised until she eventually unwinds with a good kiss. Their chemistry is prickly and flirty—a center of the whirling chaos and satire that’s nicely off-kilter and inevitably lovely. The rest of the cast—a who’s who of one (or few) scene wonders including Colman Domingo and Matt Damon—is game for the regular bursts of violence and vulgarity, quickly sketching their silly, flimsy types and spicing them up with just enough exaggerated style. And Coen spices up his shaggy script with psychedelic flashbacks out of Roger Corman’s The Trip, references to classic novels and outsider artists, and a beating heart of genuine romance underneath a giggling cynicism. It may not get close to the heights of a Coen classic, but it’s a shaggy good-time genre groove.

On the Case: THE NICE GUYS

The Nice Guys is a good old-fashioned 70’s-style detective movie: loose, swaggering, hilarious, exciting, shaggy, and involving. A big crowd-pleaser of a period piece, it creates a convincing vintage stage on which to play out its antics, which happen to add up to one of the most compelling mystery plots in recent memory. Sharply directed and wittily written, think of it as the faster, dumber (in a good way), energetic pop flip side to Paul Thomas Anderson’s hazy Inherent Vice. It is impeccably mounted and high on 1977 Los Angeles detail. Pants are tight, morals are loose, wardrobes are bright, the oldies are current hits, cigarette smoke and polluted smog fills the air, and a low-level simmer of cynicism is everyone’s emotional baseline. It’s the perfect seedy environment for two low-level mismatched unlikely partners to stumble into a big conspiracy and try to sort it all out, and line their pockets, before the bad guys get worse.

The reluctant duo in a buddy action comedy is filmmaker Shane Black’s preferred dynamic, running through works he wrote (Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight) and directed (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3). But it has never been better expressed than here. One is a private eye hired to track down a missing girl. The other is an unlicensed freelance tough hired by said girl to stop those searching for her. Events go south and get shady, so the two decide to work together to unravel the whole nasty tangle in which they’ve found themselves. Someone (or several someones) else is after the girl, and she has her own suspicious reasons to remain missing. In typical pulpy mystery fashion, the men wander through a story full of clues and qualms provided by an array of eccentric and unseemly types played by an exquisitely memorable ensemble, while the center holds around the electric grumbling chemistry between our incompatible, but secretly super compatible, leads. It’s great fun.

Russell Crowe plays the tough guy. It is one of his finest performances, a lumbering physical presence with light and lithe comedic timing. He carries a Wallace Beery weight and gravitas, growling and tough, a heavy heavy, but soulful and wounded. He’s lonely and a loner, and a little sad about how alive brawling and tussling with bad men makes him feel. Even worse, he starts to feel a kinship with his unexpected partner. He’s Ryan Gosling as more a con man than a P.I., taking sweet little old ladies’ money for easy jobs. (One widow wants to know where her husband, “missing since the funeral,” is; Gosling glances at the urn on her mantle and solemnly promises to cash her check and find him.) He’s a squeaky, lean, scared, in-over-his-head scrambler, getting by with luck and happenstance. But he’s still sharp enough to piece together clues with the help of his precocious potty-mouthed 13-year-old daughter (Angourie Rice) who loves spending time with him, driving him around when he’s too buzzed to do it himself, which is often. He, too, is loath to admit that he’s found a new pal.

Together Crowe and Gosling, playing to and against type (a neat, compelling trick of star power), make a fine pairing – the straight-faced serious guy, and the flailing comic. They’re bickering and bumbling through a rough-and-tumble plot full of gumshoe incident and interestingly loopy interrogations often spilling over into pratfalls and slapstick stuntwork as malcontents, scumbags, and suspects cause trouble. There are gunfights and car chases, and plenty of instances of people falling out windows or rolling down hills. A vast scheme unravels in knots as a large cast (including Margaret Qualley, Kim Basinger, Keith David, Jack Kilmer, Lois Smith, Matt Bomer, and Yaya DaCosta among the recognizable faces) stringing along the various episodes from one clue to the next. Then, with shrewd timing, the story reaches surprising and satisfying roundabouts that spin the investigation off in fresh directions. To even suggest the shape it ultimately takes would be unfair to the film’s brilliantly structured sense of discovery. It eventually involves pornographers, eco-activists, experimental filmmakers, hitmen, Detroit auto execs, and the justice department, arriving at immensely satisfying smash-bang conclusions as every moving part clicks into pleasing place.

A deeply satisfying work of genre fiction, The Nice Guys is an engaging and confident trash beauty, with handsome nostalgia surfaces in slick frames provided by cinematographer Philippe Rousselot polishing a cavalcade of violence, nudity, swearing, and seamy underworld spelunking. All that is mixed in a screenplay flowing with wordy personality and hilarious physical beats, and story unfolding so cleverly that as its bighearted love for its characters’ connection sneaks in sideways it sweetens the suspense with genuine feeling. We want them to crack the case, but also become better people by learning to work with a new friend. It’s delightful even as it is brutal, a hard-charging lark. So fast and funny, driven by charismatic performances and compelling mystery, this somehow manages the trick of making the old new again. It’s at once sturdy throwback appeal and a fresh spin on material that could be tired, but isn’t here. Black’s preoccupations with bantering buddy dynamics expressed through action and intrigue are given their purest, most complete expression. This is a groovy, most completely enjoyable action comedy.