KEITH UHLICH
Rashida Jones and Bill Murray in On the Rocks.
film roundup
City Hall (Dir. Frederick Wiseman). Documentary. Turning his sights on the city government of Boston, Massachusetts—in particular its centrist-in-progressive’s-clothing mayor Marty Walsh—the incomparable documentarian Frederick Wiseman offers up a multifaceted portrait of American politics at a time when corruption, paranoia and distrust seem the orders of the day. Walsh initially comes off as a superheroic figure, showing up in just about every scene, at events ranging from a food bank charity dinner to a veteran’s celebration where he likens his struggles with alcoholism to battlefield combat. Yet as City Hall goes on (this is one of Wiseman’s longest works, at four-and-a-half hours), the calculations of, and the cracks within, Walsh’s persona come more to the fore. As they also do with the government he is at the head of (prepare yourself for the harrowing half-an-hour long cannabis dispensary community meeting). Wiseman’s approach, however, isn’t that of a gotcha! cynic but a healthy skeptic. The necessity of the institution he’s surveying doesn’t in any way mitigate its myriad flaws. And vice versa. [N/R] HHHH1/2 Dick Johnson Is Dead (Dir. Kirsten Johnson). Documentary. Kirsten Johnson follows up her exemplary nonfiction feature Cameraperson (2016) with this playful and moving documentary, available on Netflix, about her psychiatrist father Dick Johnson. As he approaches his mid80s, it seems that Dick, like his deceased wife 10
(Kirsten’s mother), is well on his way to an Alzheimer’s-afflicted dotage. Knowing what’s coming, daughter aims to memorialize father on camera while he still has his wits about him. This includes filming elaborate fantasies of how Dick Johnson could die (a falling air conditioner to the head; a bone-breaking tumble down the stairs) as well as envisioning both his funeral and his ultimate heavenly reward. These knowingly goofy scenes switch on a dime between horrifying and hilarious; they’re cathartic precisely because they imagine the worst as a way of counterbalancing a pervasive, and very relatable, fear of loss. The rest of the film chronicles Johnsons père and fille as they navigate their new parentchild dynamic, preparing for the inevitable with a compassion so achingly specific it eschews easy sentimentality. [PG-13] HHHH1/2 On the Rocks (Dir. Sofia Coppola). Starring: Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans. Laura (Rashida Jones) is a NY mom and writer whose creative block (and general middle-age malaise) dovetails with her suspicions that her husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), is cheating on her. Enter Laura’s playboy father, art dealer Felix (Bill Murray), who semi-playfully stokes her doubts and plots some father-daughter surveillance time to catch Dean in the act—in-between bites of caviar and sips of cocktails, of course. Writer-director Sofia Coppola is working in yet another rarefied milieu, one where stickers touting Bernie Sanders and Stacey Abrams are accorded
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similar preeminence to a Monet “Water Lilies” canvas. It hardly feels like anything consequential can pierce the bubble she’s created, yet the toss-off nature of the film, as well as the nimble performances by Murray, Jones and Wayans, are key to its strange emotional resonance. A profound sadness undergirds the characters’ every action, though they often seem not to realize it. This feels like a tragedy in the guise of a farce. [R] HHH1/2 Time (Dir. Garrett Bradley). Documentary. Garrett Bradley’s superb doc, available on Amazon, focuses on Sibil Fox Richardson, a Louisiana activist, entrepreneur and mother (of six children) who, as a young woman, plotted a failed bank robbery with her husband Rob. Both of them went to jail. She was released after three-and-ahalf years, while Rob was sentenced to 60 years, and is perhaps to be paroled after 20. Though given the inequities of the American prison system, and its treatment of people of color in particular, who knows? The black-and-white feature unfolds achronologically (a good deal of footage is home videos Sibyl shot herself), collapsing decades of ups, downs and in-betweens into a free-floating, soul-stirring tone poem. Richardson herself is an incredible subject—tough and tender, righteously angry, though aware that the best revenge against the powers-that-be is, as she says, “success” in her one driving goal: getting the man she loves home where he belongs. [PG13] HHHH1/2 n
