Vindication of the Rights of Woman: POOR THINGS

With Poor Things, director Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his pet themes: freedom and control, society and individualism, intellect and appetite. Within them, the Greek provocateur loves to push buttons and test the boundaries of discomfort. He sets up rigid systems and see his characters squirm under their demands. His international breakthrough Dogtooth is a tragedy set in a worst-case scenario disinformation-based homeschooling setup, while his dreary The Lobster is a depressing world of romantic pressure in which unlucky singles are turned into animals, and his gripping Killing of a Sacred Deer finds eerie body horror revenge inflicted on an alienated nuclear family unit by an unsettling interloper. Even his biggest hit to date, period piece of royal courtly intrigue The Favourite, drips with a devilishly funny satire of politicking and interest peddling within his usual concerns. In Poor Things he pushes his ideas to fanciful Frankensteined abstraction in a steampunk fantasy Europe of an imagined Industrial Revolution past—a little Mary Shelley, a little German Expressionism, a little Tim Burton, a little Jean-Pierre Jeunet. But it’s all of a piece for a work about a revived body stumbling into the world and slowly learning what life is all about.

Shot with his favored fisheye lenses and pushy, panning, zooming, looming cameras—and scored with a calliope-meets-theremin brio—the movie finds a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe) bringing a beautiful corpse (Emma Stone) to life with a mind made freshly tabula rasa. Named Bella Baxter, she flails and stumbles and babbles, trying to master language and motor skills, like a grown woman with a toddler’s mind. It’s quite a spectacle, funny and sad and off-putting and compelling all at once. It might give you a sense of Lanthimos’ approach here that the mad doctor’s new assistant (Ramy Youssef) takes one look at her and gasps: “what a beautiful retard.” The movie gawks and scowls at its characters’ madnesses and eccentricities. As Bella grows into her body, society fills her mind with ideas. She strains against the confines of her experimental status and demands to be let out into the world. There she encounters a variety of men—buffoonish seducers (Mark Ruffalo) and suave cynics (Jarrod Carmichael) and nasty brutes (Christopher Abbott)—who want to have her and control her and affect her and mold her. And yet Bella is so stubbornly, persistently herself that she’s uncontainable by societal standards. She hasn’t been indoctrinated with the shame  she’s expected to feel and stereotypes to which they assume she'd conform. There’s some pointed commentary in the fact that she’s most desirable to the men when she’s at her least capable. The more she learns, the more she confounds their expectations, the more they go mad for her, in all senses of the word. She navigates a series of gross-out gags and slapstick and drama and sexual encounters with a growing awareness and a blissfully inquisitive need to take it all in and understand.

The potentially simple concept is exquisitely elaborated and vividly imagined in all its complications and contrasts. The screenplay by Tony McNamara, who brings some of The Favourite’s charmingly mean ear for dialogue, takes clear delight in running Bella through a crash course in philosophical constructs, a one-woman Enlightenment living the concepts Rousseau and Locke and Hobbes and Voltaire had to merely ponder. And it’s all so fleshy, too, with Lanthimos’ usual preoccupation with bodily fluids and functions, making her a Candide in situations that’d blush with frank vulgarity but in fact give nary a flinch. She likes to copulate as much as she cogitates. But for all the overt mixture of the highfalutin philosophizing and lowdown dirtiness, the movie’s at its most fun as it dances across that chasm. It’s a riot of production design—weird vehicles and elaborate sets—and costumes—all frills and flowing cutaways and cinched edges. And within that, the performers turn loose in masterfully silly eruptions of straight-faced shock and delicate pratfalls and casual nudity. It’s Stone’s show—a stunningly technical and deeply felt play with high drama and fearless comedy. But everyone in the cast joins in the fun. Every line reading turns into candy, and every serious swerve of intellect is chased with a grinning irreverence. Ultimately, this is Lanthimos’ most hopeful picture, embodied with a stubborn, grinning belief that the stuff of life is pleasurable and, though people may be as cruel as they are curious, the right fresh mind is capable of positive change. As Taylor Swift wrote, "we were built to fall apart / then fall back together."

Into the Storm: DARK WATERS

You know the legal thriller is really working when the faxing sequence is tremendously suspenseful and exquisitely cathartic. By the time it gets to that point in Dark Waters, the film had its hooks in me something fierce. It’s based on the true story of a lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) who, after years as a corporate attorney for chemical companies, takes on the case of a family friend of a friend, a small-town West Virginia farmer (Bill Camp) whose cows are dying off. He thinks it has something to do with the DuPont landfill next door. Intrigued, the big city legal expert pokes around in the case, and the deeper he looks, the darker the picture grows, until he’s convinced he has mountains of evidence proving the corporation has been covering up the danger of one of its most popular chemicals, and has turned a blind eye to the systematic poisoning of the community around its main factory. Ah, but proving it in a court of law, let alone getting fair settlements for the victims, is another thing entirely. A tense film of determined investigation and slow-boiling righteous indignation, director Todd Haynes fully inhabits the mode required of this sharp film of creeping dread and knife-twisting legal complications. Haynes is a filmmaker always sensitive to his character’s moods and attuned to the ways in which society’s structures affect them. Look no further than his swooning, ice-pick-pointed melodramas like Far from Heaven and Carol, in which prejudice and romance are inextricably tied up, or his underrated Wonderstruck, in which secret family trauma echoes across time, or his cult classic unauthorized Karen Carpenter movie Superstar, in which Barbies play all the roles as both experimental provocation and a soulful evocation of a pop star’s objectification made literal. In Dark Waters, the threats to the environment are slowly revealed through documentation and study, and the pollution oozes as sinisterly and secretly as the ways in which the companies maneuver to avoid responsibility. Shorn of overt message movie sentimentality, the film is grimly clear-eyed about how the struggle takes a toll on the human beings at its center, and is as determined as its lead to see it through.

The deeper it goes, the harder it is to shake. Ruffalo has a perfect exhausted energy, ground down by the system, even as he’s enlivened by his newfound purpose. He goes from being a comfortable corporate lawyer, to needing to pull apart the system from the inside out. He risks losing his good-paying job for daring to question the human costs of the business he once was paid to defend. His wife (Anne Hathaway) and children are sympathetic, but as the years stretch on with little progress, it’s hard to watch the toll it takes on him. How does one fight something so overwhelming, when those paid to ignore the problem can outspend and out-wait your efforts? Haynes understands this human fragility is both the reason for protections against corporate malfeasance, and for why it’s so difficult to make them count. He expresses this in the methodical turns of the story — a piercing stab of dread and regret as each new horror sinks in, and the futility of the attempts to fight it threatens to linger indefinitely — and in the blocking that emphasizes the quotidian lopsidedness of the struggle. One striking moment finds Ruffalo small in the frame next to his boss (Tim Robbins), a tall, imposing presence who is often sympathetic, but also conscious of the effect this hitherto profit-less crusade has on their other chemical-company clients. The shot accentuates their physical differences to highlight their unspoken power differential. Its this soft power of paychecks and workplace dynamics (the shadowy, fluorescent cinematography emphasizing sterile-yet-sickly boardrooms and business dinners as eerily as cattle’s illness) that’s discouragement as much as the overt corporate skullduggery and legal maneuvering. So, too, are the disappointed townspeople who see the dogged pursuit of accountability drag on and on without satisfying resolution, and, besides, doesn’t DuPont bring great jobs to town? (A host of great character performers fill out both sides of the case, with constant well-drawn human interest in the legal tension.) It’s no wonder, caught in the middle, our lead grows tired. Unappreciated, underestimated, under pressure, he’s weary. We see how it’s poisoned him; the only cure is to keep fighting for the truth.

All Superheroes Go To Heaven: AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

Of all the Marvel Cinematic Universe films so far, the latest, Avengers: Infinity War, is certainly the very loudest. I suppose it has a right to be. Billed as the Series Finale when anyone with a working brain knows it’s merely the biggest Season Finale yet, it’s the culmination of ten years of these things. Ever since Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury stepped out in the post-credits scene of 2008’s relatively compact, swift, and charming Iron Man, promising to introduce that hero to a few others, it’s been an endless string of formulaic origins and meetups. At least the formula – 90 minutes of exposition, banter, and fun with character actors, followed by a 30-minute CGI shooting gallery – remains sturdy enough, and the performances roped in charismatic enough – that it rarely feels too much. They vary in quality. I prefer the looser hangouts where the action has a zing of screwball B-movie appeal (Iron Man 2, Avengers 2, Thor 2, Spider-Man Homecoming) or earnestness (Captain America 1, Black Panther) to the ponderous self-important ones (Captain Americas 2 and 3) with the ones in between tolerable, too. But generally they are completely disposable diversions. I enjoy them, and then they evaporate, leaving only vague impressions and the sense they should bring back Sam Rockwell someday. Infinity War is what all 18 films have built towards, the culmination of many Infinity Gem MacGuffins and Thanos references, as the purple titan himself (voiced with a growl by Josh Brolin, whose likeness stares back at us from soulful computerized eyes) comes crashing down to Earth looking for ultimate power, and two dozen heroes assemble to beat him back. 

This results in apocalyptic sequences as the characters are genuinely frightened for once in the franchise. Their quips pale in comparison to a man wielding an enormous gold gauntlet slowly studded with the glowing powers needed to wipe out half of existence in the snap of his fingers. When a ginormous whirring oval spaceship hovers over New York City, there are ominous stakes as Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) mix worry into their determination. They all want to defeat Thanos – once they’re caught up on his plan, that is – but aren’t sure how to go about doing it. He’s already one of the galaxy’s most powerful beings, with an evil plot nigh incomprehensible in its universe-wide genocidal scope. What are a bunch of plucky knockabout do-gooders going to do in the face of that? Still, this is a Marvel movie, and the jokes fly fast and frequent, and, as directed by the Russo brothers and scripted by series’ regular writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, ably balances the tones. It also shuffles a massive cast in interesting ways, letting characters hitherto separated by time and space collide in fun exchanges and tenuous team-ups in bright, clear, IMAX cinematography.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it leans on its best features – letting Spider-Man (Tom Holland) earnestly tag along behind Stark and Strange, and ceding all of the film’s galactic plotting to the winning combination of the Guardians of the Galaxy (Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, et al) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth). (They are the funniest and, funnily enough, the most emotionally engaged, too.) It’s something of a screenwriting and editing marvel (oh, pun not intended, believe me, but now I’m sticking with it anyway) to keep something like 30 major speaking roles – all major players in their respective realms – and a couple different tonal modes balanced to such a successful extent. Part of it is the streamlined plot, subplots carried over mostly shunted to the side due to the enormity of the main dilemma, allowing the characters to focus on one goal. Part of it is giving different pieces of the goal to different smaller team-ups: a cosmic crew, an Earthbound squad (led by Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and a stay with T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) in Wakanda), and one travelling between. It’s perfectly engineered to bounce between these groupings of heroes, giving each and every one a crowd-pleasing entrance and perfectly timed laugh line or action pose throughout.

These performers have a certain iconoclasm to their positioning in the roles by now, and it’s great fun watching them spar and quip and fight side by side. The action is largely satisfying, too. Not quite as deadening as usual, it has heft and design, some cleverness, and some big, booming consequences (that will inevitably be almost or entirely reversed next summer, but are still satisfying shock in the moment). Best of all are the applause-break splash panel moments – my favorite goes to a thrilling late-breaking electric return in the battle royale finale. It may be a big, dumb, violent cartoon, but improbably Marvel Cinematic Universe productions have accumulated affection and accrued pleasures that outweigh any individual film’s successes and flaws. It’s a high-budget, high-spirit corporate product. It’s blockbuster serialized filmmaking, a massive sporadic television production on the big screen. The only gamble is that we’ll want to see our favorite charming superhero buddies pummeled and bloodied and beaten down to their lowest point yet, and still clamor to see them bounce back again, and again, and again. As long as the movies are this passably satisfying, agreeably diverting, and leave the audience just curious enough to see what happens next, they will. Infinity War, indeed.

Norsing Around: THOR: RAGNAROK

There’s not a lick of suspense to be found in Thor: Ragnarok, as weightless and mild-mannered as a superhero space epic can be. It’s partially because of its dedication to being a breezy lark. But it’s mostly due to its position as yet another widget dropping into the Marvel Cinematic Universe machine, every interlocking franchise entry continuing the pattern of containing endless forward momentum with little actual progress. The whole endeavor, diverting though it may be, is always moving to the next one, and the next and the next, with no time to shape its characters’ or settings’ development into anything more than whatever is convenient to serve up the latest flavors of fun lightshow action and design. That is how you end up with a movie that places beloved Norse God Avenger Thor in direct confrontation with the end of his home kingdom Asgard, an apocalyptic vision of Ragnarok coming true, and yet it feels like nothing is at stake. A people, a realm, a dazzling digital vista, might burn up into nothingness and there’s no danger. It’s too busy staging striking electric-day-glo Jack Kirby-styled CG adventure and lovingly holding on eccentric character actors in scene-stealing supporting roles. There’s plenty of fun to be had, but it adds up to the usual fleeting charms tied together with a climactic conflagration cliffhanger.

Like all the best of the MCU movies, the filmmakers behind Ragnarok make sure the production design is aesthetically pleasing in color and scale and the typical quipping script is handled with the peppy fizz of comic timing. The story features Thor knocking about space in lengthy sequences that team him up with a variety of lovable rouges and charming weirdos. It’s a nesting doll of buddy movies, director Taika Waititi taking the same loose, sweet, half-mumbled, aw-shucks delivery of his What We Do in the Shadows and tying it to the bombastic fish-out-of-water silly contrasts that are the Thor movies' stock in trade. It hardly matters that the plot’s engine is the God of Thunder’s long-lost older sister (Cate Blanchett) kicking him out of the family home, causing him to wander the cosmos in exile collecting a team that can take her down. What it really is up to is providing an excuse for colorful, half-funny/half-exciting set-pieces. That’s entertaining enough. He pals around with his slick trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston); he gets his feathers ruffled by Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch); he gets captured by an alcoholic swaggering-cool bounty hunter (Tessa Thompson, who should have her own spinoff); he is forced into gladiatorial combat by a trash-planet’s loopy ruler (Jeff Goldblum, delightful with every word); he befriends a soft-spoken rock monster (Waititi); he is knocked about by Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). It’s all fun and games, Thor so elastically invincible he can slam through walls and bounce back swinging, yet so mellowed by his many heroic deeds in the past that he now rides a chill pleasant vibe. He's in on the joke.

There’s a knockabout slapstick tone to the action that integrates the massive IMAX-sized spectacle and the little filigrees of personality allowed to the players involved. Waititi is given the space to build a massive painterly slow-mo vision of warriors atop winged horses diving toward a storm of arrows, and also let Thompson’s Valkyrie sparkle with a twinkle in her eye and a soft sway in her step. It has an enormous battle on a rainbow bridge for the fate of Asgard, and the soft splat of a body hitting the ground with a pratfall plunk. It has a concussive battle between a God and a monster – friends turned foe for the amusement of a rascally side-villain – and enough room to let Goldblum bring down the house with an arc of his eyebrow or a self-amused stammering surprise delivery of a wry line. (He confronts a captive with a seeming reprieve with a line bearing a stinging tail: the good news he’ll be spared…“from life.”) It’s all of a pleasant diverting piece, from the gleaming fake vistas – though why, in a movie with convincing mythological kingdoms and neon-landfill planets, a field in Norway is the phoniest setting is beyond me – to the likably bantering leads and every slick glowing digital swooping adventure sequence in between. There may be precious little there there, but at least the frivolity is enough for an entertaining couple of hours of shiny pictures, charming people, and a synthy noodling Mark Mothersbaugh score. Though it's fleeting and disposable, it's a successfully playful and tossed-off version of ingratiating Marvel bombast.

Let it Shine: SPOTLIGHT

Unadorned filmmaking of burnished and unobtrusive professional polish, Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight is a good example of how little you have to do to create an absorbing movie, provided you have the right story and the right cast. Writer-director McCarthy, who, when not being a terrific character actor, spends his time making nice small character dramas (The Station Agent, The Visitor, Win Win), takes for his material here the true story of the Boston Globe’s 2001 investigation into allegations of child abuse committed by Catholic priests which resulted in a detailed and powerful series of exposés. He, with co-writer Josh Singer (The West Wing), turns this into a movie about people simply doing their jobs, removing all narrative adornments a more conventionally crowd-pleasing picture would require: artificial drama, character arcs, a main character, grand pronouncements, easy symbolism, cheap moralizing. Instead he simply shows us an ensemble of journalists working studiously and methodically, making sure they get the facts right before going to print. They know they’re onto something big, a story of massive importance and moral imperative, but it’s also just their job.

The result of McCarthy’s approach is an inspirational story about journalism at its finest boiled down to tense scenes of research, interviews, and fact checking. This is a procedural about workaday reporters doing the best they can, a movie committed to being something like an accurate portrayal of the daily grind of a noble profession done right. The Globe’s editors (Liev Schreiber, John Slattery) task the in-depth investigative reporting “Spotlight” team (Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d’Arcy James) to take a closer look at a small court case involving a tenacious lawyer (Stanley Tucci) suing the local Catholic Archdiocese on behalf of clients who were abused by priests. As the reporters track down sources and gather archival background information, they discover a pattern of priests pulled from parishes under suspicious circumstances and quietly reassigned. It’s a clue that something’s rotten, and as a number of victims agree to interviews, it’s clear they’re about to uncover a devastating conspiracy of abuse and cover-ups, staggering in scope, heartbreaking in depth.

Every step of the way, these men and women make sure to get every detail right, to ensure the story is airtight. They’re working in secret, trying to avoid raising the suspicions of local Catholic officials who form an integral part of Boston’s civic and philanthropic society. Some lawyers for the church (Billy Crudup, Jamey Sheridan) are suspicious, refusing even to corroborate basic details. As the undeniable facts of the case start to add up, the journalists are even more driven to follow facts, beyond assumptions or pre-existing worldviews, into the simple, pure, disturbing truth. McCarthy simply sits back and lets the actors go to work in a movie of conversations – cautious interviews, heated arguments, tense debates, tricky negotiations – as the reporters struggle to get a handle on the story’s reach and implications, as well as deciding how best to break the news to the people. It’s unshowy. The blocking is simple, the editing briskly functional, the photography bright and clean. The filmmaking is so uninsistent, Howard Shore’s score, which would seem sparse in any other film, sounds overbearing. The focus is only on process.

The performers are subtle, natural, inhabiting real people whose day jobs are a combination of craft and calling. Keaton sinks into a tired newsman’s humble fortitude, McAdams carries quiet confidence, Ruffalo leans into inquisitive doggedness, and d’Arcy James wears sturdy moral force. There are no heroes, just normal people patiently doing what they must to root out hidden facts. Here’s a movie about nothing more than the value of a job well done. The job in this case just happens to be one that uncovered one of the most significant news stories of this century. A telling moment comes when September 11, 2001 rolls around, sending the newsroom scrambling in the wake of that day’s tragedy. It pushes the Spotlight team’s work on the backburner, and yet McCarthy treats this huge moment of recent history as a background detail. It’s a moment of world-changing impact, sensitively and appropriately somber in its portrayal, but the decades of spiritual and sexual abuse uncovered by their investigation is just as monumental.

Aside from one poignant montage set to “Silent Night,” featuring what has to be cinema’s most moving and upsetting Excel spreadsheet-making scene, the movie doesn’t push buttons. It speaks as clearly and directly as its characters, knowing the details will speak for themselves. It knows the actors are dialed-in to both the import of their characters’ jobs and the processes of doing them. It has faith in the inherent compelling nature of carefully piecing together a news story, trying to be fair to subjects, and do right by the people of the world by telling the truth. Spotlight may not be quite as richly rewarding a cinematic experience as other great newspaper movies like All the President’s Men and Zodiac, but it belongs on the same Journalism 101 syllabus. Scene by scene, line by line, McCarthy finds a quietly gripping approach, building to a low-key finale both triumphant and daunting. The article has gone to print. But the work continues.