MOVIES VA R I E T Y
TOP PICK OF THE WEEK
Mank In his first movie in six years, filmmaker David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network) hasn’t lost his ability to beguile, fascinate and vex. Working from a screenplay by his late father, Jack Fincher, the director has concocted a superb cinematic portrait of Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), co-writer of Citizen Kane. In 1940, a bloated Mank drunkenly dictates the script to his formidable transcriber, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins). He’s preparing the project for Orson Welles (Tom Burke) to direct, but flashbacks insinuate that Citizen Kane is powered by a personal grudge Mank holds against William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance). Tormented by his tacit participation in a Hearstbacked smear campaign against the writer and liberal California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye), Mank models the megalomaniacal Charles Foster Kane on Hearst. Was Citizen Kane’s origin that simple? Hardly, but you don’t have to buy the theory to dig the movie. Beneath the seductive sheen of Erik Messerschmidt’s black-and-white cinematography lies Fincher’s conviction that Hollywood—like the melting ice sculpture of an elephant at a party Mank attends—should be liquefied for its sins. Mank may not be cheery, but no one goes to Fincher for good vibes. Gleeful pessimism is his drug of choice, and for us, it can be an improbable and exhilarating high. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Netflix.
MANK
OUR KEY
: T H I S M O V I E I S E XC E L L E N T, O N E O F T H E B E S T O F T H E Y E A R. : T H I S M O V I E I S G O O D. W E R E C O M M E N D YO U WATC H I T. : T H I S M O V I E I S E N T E R TA I N I N G B U T F L AW E D. : T H I S M O V I E I S A P I E C E O F S H I T.
ALSO PLAYING Collective When Bucharest nightclub Colectiv burned in 2015, 27 people died—and that was just the beginning. In the following weeks, 37 injured survivors of the fire perished, a loss that led to the exposure of a sweeping conspiracy that had corrupted the Romanian health care system. That scandal is the subject of Collective, a mesmerizing and enraging documentary directed by Alexander Nanau. The film focuses on Catalin Tolontan, a journalist at a sports newspaper who reported on the use of heavily diluted disinfectants in Romanian hospitals, and former Minister of Health Vlad Voiculescu, whom we watch soberly struggle to reform the institution he serves from within. Devoid of didactic narration and expert interviews, Collective trusts that images of horrendous injustices (like a neglected patient’s maggot-covered face) will speak for themselves. The greed, lies and apathy revealed are almost too much to bear, but there’s no turning away from a film this morally urgent, thoroughly researched and beautifully paced. When Tolontan declares, “All I’m trying is to give people more knowledge about the powers that shape our lives,” it’s as if he’s speaking for the filmmakers. Collective is the embodiment of his words—a masterpiece that is both cinematic and journalistic. NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. On Demand.
Higher Love To say that Hasan Oswald’s debut documentary is a snapshot of America’s opioid crisis implies something too quick. There’s nothing snappy about spending 10 minutes cramped in a room of New Jerseyans endlessly shooting
up. The camerawork is graphic and unsteady, and you can feel the lack of control permeating every inch of squalor. Despite this grotesque intimacy, Higher Love finds its more interesting subject idling outside the trap house. We first meet Daryl, a 47-year-old printing press owner and father of eight, trolling dilapidated industrial parks in search of his pregnant girlfriend, Nani. If she’s depicted as one of the opioid crisis’s ceaseless tragedies (her mother died of an overdose), Daryl is one of its memorable supporting characters. You couldn’t script his boundless patience with Nani or his explosions of contempt at how deep her addiction runs. Secondary stories of other Camden residents battling the needle aren’t as layered, though they do reveal untold absurdities of the recovery system, like needing to score one final time in order to receive a suitably high dose of Suboxone for detox. In that light, Higher Love reveals utter extremity becoming dismally banal. For Daryl, the burning question becomes, when is giving up the only rational response? NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On Demand.
Light Years Vermont, 1999: A hot pink lacrosse cap, a fistful of psilocybin mushrooms—things are obscure in Light Years before the actual obscurity even kicks in. The third indie dramedy from writer-director Colin Thompson (Loser’s Crown, It’s Us) employs mushrooms as an informal time machine, transporting mid-30s Kevin back to the first night he ever partook, at 16. The result is a bit like if Charlie Kaufman directed (and interrogated) a Mike White comedy for less than $100,000. Thompson himself quite charmingly plays most characters on Kevin’s trip—man,
woman, young, old—but it’s Russell Posner as Kevin’s loopy, almost telepathically synced best friend, Briggs, that cements the film’s pathos and justifies the flashback in the first place. We’re swept into Kevin and Briggs’ teenage idiolect, borderline nonsense about Burlington rock bands and NBA draft busts to everyone else. But the love wrapped up in their shared language is enough to sustain and choke Kevin for the rest of his life. Even if the superimposed animation of the trip feels more obligatory than valuable and Thompson’s acting isn’t as strong in wholly dramatic scenes, the theme hoists this indie above its weight class. Selective memory is its own kind of drug, and you can always travel back one way or another. TV-14. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On Demand.
Wander Darkly Adrienne and Matteo (Sienna Miller and Diego Luna) are not-sohappy new parents. They fight at home, at parties, in the car…until a head-on traffic collision cuts their final argument short. This propels Adrienne into an out-of-body experience, trapping her in a limbo where she’s forced to silently and invisibly observe the paramedics fail to revive her, and her subsequent funeral. And then she wakes up. She’s not dead, but she’s convinced she is, triggering an existential crisis that causes her to reflect on the truth behind her relationship with Matteo. This is the point where the film becomes visionary, evoking dreamy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-esque reveries across memory in order to pinpoint where their love began to fade. In these retrospective journeys through the most salient events of their relationship, Adrienne and her imagined version of Matteo communicate frankly about their ups and downs—something they struggled to do in the real world. Reminiscent of a less esoteric She Dies Tomorrow (another three-star 2020 release), this confident direc-
torial debut from Tara Miele is a psychological probe into the ways we reckon with trauma, effectively blurring the malleable lines between reality and memory. R. MIA VICINO. On Demand.
Sound of Metal If a noisecore drummer loses his hearing, should anyone care? Sound of Metal presents a remarkably empathetic portrait of that rare beast—the working hardcore percussionist committed to sobriety and a girlfriend/bandmate—yet shows just a taste of the goodish life Ruben (Riz Ahmed) and Lou (Olivia Cooke) share while touring in a cozy Airstream before his sudden loss of hearing tears their plans asunder. While the plotline might seem eerily similar to the 2004 indie flick It’s All Gone Pete Tong, this story isn’t about punishing hubris. Ruben, unlike Pete Tong’s superstar DJ, has already dealt with his substance-abuse issues at the film’s start, and he tries his damnedest to embrace the silence suggested by deaf guru Joe (Paul Raci) at a cultish American Sign Language camp. Unable to abandon his eterna-gigging life plans, our hero neither hears nor listens to the increasingly gloomy diagnoses en route to affording the semblance of hearing promised by cochlear implants, which prove a maddeningly false tease. This directorial debut from The Place Beyond the Pines screenwriter Darius Marder exploits next-gen soundcraft and Ahmed’s electric vapidity to its best advantage while ignoring moralistic conventions, but there’s a troubling condescension pegged to the protagonist’s chosen genre and instrument. Would a talented singer-songwriter be so blithely expected to accept medical practicalities rather than further damaging health in pursuit of doomed passions? Would Beethoven? At the end of the day, this is an expertly crafted labor of love championing the abandonment of dreams. What’s the sound of one hand clapping? R. JAY HORTON. Amazon Prime.
Zappa Possessed of an abstruse, willfully difficult muse that bled impossible time signatures and dark humor into even the most approachable sections of his daunting discography, Frank Zappa effectively evaded commercial success until late-life novelty single “Valley Girl” inexplicably cracked the charts. But his fame as an iconoclastic counterpop-cultural figure somehow still burns bright a quarter-century after his 1993 death from prostate cancer at the age of 52. How, exactly, did an avant-rock misanthrope best resembling a cross between social activist Abbie Hoffman and Beaker ever end up becoming one of The Muppet Show writers’ dream guests anyway? Zappa, the long-awaited doc that began streaming Nov. 27, doesn’t much care and may be offended by the question. While nearly all authorized rockumentaries shelve criticism of the man for access to the music, Zappa leans into the infernal bargain with generic platitudes and overtold anecdotes scattered throughout 120-plus minutes of performances, interviews and home movies—family keepsakes plus the artist’s own experimentalist collages—stitched together from the evidently overflowing estate vaults. It’s all sure to be a treat for fans and seems fitting tribute to a largely unknowable polymath whose creative oeuvre, which includes a stint writing greeting card copy as a teenager and a final turn as a symphonic composer, survives largely through sarcastic quips and critical reputation. Still, so much of his life story—growing up near a chemical weapons plant, arrested for recording a fake sex (audio) tape, signed by a distracted label rep hoping for a white blues band—feels sufficiently compelling if only the nonstop miasma of footage would get out of its own way. NR. JAY HORTON. On Demand.
Willamette Week DECEMBER 9, 2020 wweek.com
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