8 minute read
Films Soul, Mank and more
from Kutucnu_0221
by aquiaqui33
Visual fireworks and metaphysics from Pixar; old Hollywood dramatised; blues and race in ’20s Chicago…
SOUL Pixar’s latest feature shows the studio very much in ruminative Meaning Of Life mode. It’s as close as digital animation comes to being a mindfulness seminar or a fullblown treatise in cosmology – but don’t worry, it still has a funny talking cat. It’s directed and co-written by Pete Docter, whose Inside Out – a pop-art mapping of theories of the self – was the studio’s most outré to date. In Soul, he sticks his neck out even further.
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Pixar’s frst African-American-themed feature, it focuses on Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a middle-aged Harlem music teacher who feels he’s missed his vocation as a jazz pianist. One day, he gets his big chance to accompany a saxophone legend (voiced by Angela Bassett). But an accident leaves Joe’s soul – a blue glowing bespectacled blob – hovering in a parallel dimension, in a metaphysical premise that winks at Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life And Death. He fnds himself mentoring novice soul ‘22’ (Tina Fey), a wiseacre little tyke, and the two return to Earth in a bizarre body-swap incident, pursued by a character who’s essentially a collection of wiggly lines…
As you’d expect with a flm about a musician, Soul really cares about its score – with Jon Batiste providing a snappy jazz soundtrack to complement Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s gently mind-bending electronica. It shows a dizzying visual imagination, with sequences that mix 3D and 2D, futurism and retro, and it plays gorgeous, outright experimental tricks with colour, light and texture.
It’s a shame that the flm is exclusive to the Disney + platform, as it would be a wonder to see on the big screen. Still, you suspect that its strangeness might have been a liability for multiplex release, its complexity and sometimes arcane wit making for an outright child-bafer: pity parents having to explain the jokes about Jung and chakras. It’s
Mank: Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz and Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies
SOUL
Directedby PeteDocter Starring (voices)Jamie Foxx,TinaFey Streamingfrom December25 CertPG 8/10 MANK
Directedby DavidFincher StarringGary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried Streamingfrom December4 Cert12A 6/10 perhaps not as much fun as Inside Out and not quite in Pixar’s absolute top rank – but it’s a thing of joy and real aesthetic audacity.
MANK According to a controversial theory advocated by critic Pauline Kael, the real creative force behind Citizen Kane was not Orson Welles, but its screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz. Accordingly, Welles – played by Tom Burke – is only a feeting presence in Mank, David Fincher’s portrait of the writer. Gary Oldman plays Mankiewicz, boozy, cynical and indisposed, holed up in the desert under orders to produce the Kane script – which he does via a series of fashbacks to his time around the studios and in the court of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), commonly agreed to be the model for Charles Foster Kane.
This black-and-white Netfix project is unlike anything that Fincher has made – a labour of love, steeped in lavishly baroque visual style. The flm was scripted by the director’s late father Jack Fincher, but if the suggestion is that writers make movies as
REVIEWEDTHISMONTH
MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM
Directedby GeorgeC Wolfe Starring ViolaDavis, Chadwick Boseman Opens December18 Certtbc 7/10 much as directors do, Mank rather disproves the point: a wordy, even over-literary script is brought to life by famboyant direction and heightened acting. Erik Messerschmidt’s magnifcent photography channels Welles’ own visual tropes and other period tropes: even the clouds in the opening sequence feel authentically early ’40s.
But it’s an unconvincing, even unengaging flm. There are endless sour bons mots and world-weary zingers tossed over shoulders, with Mankiewicz characterised as a faneurat-large who seems able to stroll onto any set or into any mogul’s ofce and scathingly, boozily talk truth to power. Oldman gives a big performance – possibly his biggest – but it’s distractingly eccentric, sometimes seeming to parody the old movie shorthand for sophisticated-lush behaviour, with a delivery weirdly reminiscent of the great Hollywood actor Burgess Meredith.
The drama depends on us caring about old studio lore – about bosses like Louis B Mayer and Irving Thalberg, and about MGM’s newsreel war against writer and Democratic politician Upton Sinclair (here’s
MURDER ME, MONSTER
Directedby Alejandro Fadel Starring VictorLópez, Esteban Bigliardi Opens December4 Certtbc 7/10 THE MOLE AGENT
Directed by Maite Alberdi Starring Sergio Chamy Opens December 11 Cert PG 7/10
where Mank is most timely, in its exposé of an older American history of media warfare). But, erudite as the flm is, its picture of old Hollywood is morosely solemn compared to the wit of the Coens’ no less jaundiced versions (Barton Fink, Hail, Caesar!). This is a sublimely executed folly, but short on real pleasure – although one saving grace is Amanda Seyfried’s terrifc performance as Hearst’s actress mistress Marion Davies, crackling with witty, pitiless self-awareness. Mank is made with passion, energy and expertise – yet it somehow feels like a whole lot of cinema, without an actual flm.
MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM Chadwick Boseman, who died in August, was a phenomenal actor – far more than just the star of a superhero movie, however important Black Panther was. Accordingly, he leaves us on ferocious form in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Directed by theatre veteran George C Wolfe, this is an adaptation of August Wilson’s celebrated play about a 1920s Chicago recording session for the legendary blues singer Ma Rainey. While Ma (an imperious, peppery Viola Davis) drives her manager to distraction with her uncompromising ways, her band limber up downstairs, bicker among themselves, exchange nightmare stories about the reality of American racism. Firebrand trumpeter Levee (Boseman) rages against the older musicians’ conservatism while making a silver-tongued play for Ma’s maid Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige) – who’s also desired by Ma.
This is very much a chamber piece, with claustrophobia of the essence, and it doesn’t really beneft from being opened up, frst by a concert sequence, then by some CGI evocations of old Chicago. Instead, Wolfe is more imaginative at taking us inwards, focusing on the minutiae of period recording technology. It’s a fabulously acted piece, with Davis by turns grandiose, caustic and unexpectedly tender in a magnifcent speech about the blues as “life’s way of talking”, and Boseman shifing mercurially through gears of vanity, arrogance, vulnerability, wit and rage. This is an unapologetically theatrical flm, classy and commanding, and with a tart coda that makes a chilling point about black music’s innovation being stolen by white musicians.
THE MOLE AGENT This very engaging documentary from Chile follows 83-year-old Sergio Chamy, recruited as an undercover agent to size up conditions in a retirement home by checking in as a resident. Chamy initially has some trouble getting to grips with the job – especially when it comes to mastering FaceTime – but soon proves a natural, as insightful and empathetic as a good gumshoe needs to be.
The Mole Agent might feel like a put-up job, and you wonder how on earth director Maite Alberdi and her team managed to flm Chamy’s mission without sounding alarms (in fact, we learn that they were already shooting at the home before he arrived). The flm feels at moments like a sly joke – an improbable cross between Deep Cover and The Last Of The Summer Wine. But as you get to know Chamy and his new acquaintances, it emerges as a gentle but profound refection on age, solitude and the need for community – and a very brisk, enjoyable afair it is, with its impish hero always genial company.
MURDER ME, MONSTER From Argentina comes Murder Me, Monster, a cinematic UFO that looks like a genre chiller from one angle, an atmospheric art slowie from another, but from any angle, achieves its own formidable level of WTF-itude. It begins with an image that’s jumpout-of-your-skin grisly, then settles into sombre, contemplative mood – long takes, wide sweeps of desolate landscape, eldritch lashings of pissyellow light – as policeman Cruz (Victor López) investigates the case. The strangeness slowly mounts up – drips of viscous gunk, phantom bikers, Cruz’s boss reciting a litany of exotic phobias… Then the tentacles appear – and while director Alejandro Fadel doesn’t take Lovecrafian crawling chaos quite as provocatively far as the recent Mexican alien-sex-fend drama The Untamed, he still goes to some unmapped places.
The visual imagination is dazzling, and the uncanny mood keeps you on a tantalising knife- edge – until Fadel blows the efect, perhaps intentionally, by jumping into Guillermo del Toro SFX territory. Murder Me, Monster is bewildering, bewitching and not a little infuriating, but it’s utterly its own thing – the sort of hothousehallucinationthat,once it’s over, you can’tquitebelieveyou’vereally
Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman 1984
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