MovieMonday: The Irishman

This is the latest, and possibly the last, mob movie from Martin Scorsese, and it's very well made.
 As we have come to expect from the director,  The Irishman has a strong script, excellent cinematography and fine editing.

The acting is particularly distinguished, and its three major cast members all play against the types that made them famous in their early careers

-- Robert De Niro, whose breakout roles were as crazy men in two earlier Scorsese movies (Mean Streets and Taxi Driver) is the title character, Frank Sheeran, a Teamster who works for decades as a mob enforcer and hit man.

-- Joe Pesci, a reckless mafia wannabe in 1990's Goodfellas, now plays Russell Bufalino, the capo of a Pennsylvania crime syndicate; Bufalino is a very careful man who never gets his own hands dirty but presides over all manner of criminal activity.

-- Al Pacino, the very buttoned-up Michael Corleone of Francis Coppola's Godfather movies, here portrays Jimmy Hoffa, a vulgar man of galloping ego who, in this telling, is assassinated by Sheeran at the direction of Bufalino.

The source material for the script is a 2004 book published after Sheeran's death and based on interviews in his final years.  (A Vanity Fair article this month and a second book, both inspired by the movie, challenge many of the claims in The Irishman.)

A typical mob story -- at least in the period between the first  Godfather  movie and the last Sopranos episode -- would juxtapose the professional and personal lives of made men.  And, to be fair, this movie has a couple baptisms and a funeral, plus a minor character, a daughter of Irishman Sheehan, who appears now and then with a solemn stare that acts as a sort of external conscience. 

BUT.  At heart, this is a rundown of a man's career on the far side of the law.  Sheeran is a loyal agent, an Irishman trusted by Italian mobsters.  He's involved with the sabotage of another union's challenge to a Teamster local, the killings of various inconvenient characters, battles between Teamster factions, and even the provisioning of weapons for the failed Bay of Pigs effort to overturn the Cuban revolution and reopen the Havana gambling casinos, which, per the story, were financed by Teamster pension funds before they were seized by Fidel Castro.

When Teamsters national president Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino) appears, he offers a complete contrast.  He does not keep a low profile.  He calls people "cocksuckers" and evidences a growing disdain for the Italian mobsters with whom he does business.  He also grows to hate Robert F. Kennedy, the early 1960s attorney general who takes out after organized crime.   "That cocksucker Kennedy has got his nose up my ass whatever I do," he complains.

Eventually Hoffa spends several years in federal prison ("goes to school" in mafia parlance) and comes out determined to regain the Teamsters presidency.  "This is MY union," he says repeatedly.  He's angry at the No. 2 guy who has taken his job and at an ungrateful president whom, he says, the Teamsters helped get elected.  There is a hint, not explored, that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy.

For Bufalino, who goes to some lengths to avoid attention, Hoffa gets to be too much of a problem.

Over the years, Sheeran does as he is told and, if he is uncomfortable, he does not show it.  He has regrets, yes, but the work he has done has bound him to what he probably would regard as a manly self control.  This is subtle acting by De Niro, hard to carry off but very effective, as usual.

The story is bracketed by hints of its provenance, starting and ending with scenes of the Irishman, alone in his 80s and living in a wheelchair in a senior citizens facility.


Notes


Through some computer-generated ju jitsu, De Niro looks age-appropriate as a Teamster selling sides of beef off the back of his truck in the late 1940s and also in his wheelchair at the turn of the century.  Sounds strange, but it works.

-----  

The release of The Irishman in theaters has been unusual, and perhaps for several reasons.

At 3.5 hours, it is much longer than a typical film.  This may be because Scorsese wanted to cover most of the moments in the book in order to support the thesis that Frank Sheeran was a credible witness when he admitted killing Jimmy Hoffa.

It's possible the proposed length of the movie may have dampened studio interest in funding the production.  Or maybe there was concern that the film would have limited international appeal -- that people outside North America would not care about a story whose hook was what happened to Jimmy Hoffa (who that?) 45 years ago.

Either way,  it's not entirely surprising that Netflix, which is trying to position itself as an originator of quality content, was the outfit most willing to write a $175 million check for a Scorsese production.

In fact, the streaming service designed a theatrical rollout that seems aimed mostly to build interest in watching the film on television at home.

The Irishman was released on Nov. 1 at a handful of theaters around the country.  (The nearest to me was in a state college town more than 250 miles away.)  Then, last Friday, the film opened in more theaters.  Two days from now, on Wednesday, it will be available on Netflix.

This six-day teaser run opportunity seems to have caused a number of theater chains just to say no.  Certainly it will be easier and cheaper for people to watch the film in their living rooms or on their computers.

I'd be curious to know how many viewers avail themselves of the Netflix fast-forward capacity to skip past the slow-seeming parts of the movie.  (I'm guessing Netflix wouldn't share such data if it does collect it, however.)

MovieMonday: Pain and Glory

This movie opens with Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas with graying hair and beard) in a therapy pool following spinal surgery and then, as a child, playing by a river while his mother (Penélope Cruz) and her friends wash their family linens.

The story that follows is a series of Mallo's recollections of his life between those two events, and how they sort themselves in his mind.

We learn that the aging Mallo is a famous film director whose professional life is blocked by the pain of the movie's title -- the loss of his mother and physical maladies ranging from the back matter to an ongoing choking reflex.  Said shorter, Mallo is suffering a quiet but real existential crisis.

After agreeing to attend the screening of a 30-year-old film of his, Mallo skips the event, smokes a little heroin (apparently safer than injecting the stuff, FWIW) with the film's star and sets in motion a process of revery and re-examination.

This is not a formulaic movie but one that cuts between current moments and memories.  If Mallo seems to be liking the heroin a bit much, well, he also is gaining perspective. The movie gets more interesting as it goes along.

In some ways, this is a small film, skillfully made but with a powerful cumulative effect.  It calls to mind the famous line from Søren Kirkegaard:  Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

If Pain and Glory shows up in your local art house, it's worth a look.


Notes

Pain and Glory was written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, Spain's most lauded filmmaker, and the lead character has much in common, superficially, with Almodóvar himself.  But the auteur has gone to some lengths, in the movie and associated interviews, to assert that it is NOT autobiography.

The film inevitably gets compared with 8 1/2, another blocked-filmmaker story by Federico Fellini.   That 1963 movie apparently WAS autobiographical and made when Fellini was suffering a mid-career panic over what film to make next.

MovieMonday: Midway

If Midway really was the hot shit it thinks it is, we’d have something to talk about. 

But this spare-no-expense production about the most vital naval battle of WWII merely 

plasters the latest in digital effects over the same war-time movie tropes 

that Hollywood has been pedaling (sic) for decades. 

This is the lead from a not-uncommon review of a World War II movie released last weekend, timed no doubt to attract viewers with Veterans Day on their minds.

Midway is a fairly traditional, patriotic war movie, and it comes from Roland Emmerich, whose most popular film by far was 1996's Independence Day, another fairly traditional movie that peddled war-time movie "tropes" in an imagined life-and-death battle between earthlings and alien invaders.

The last big World War II movie I can recall is 2017's Dunkirk, which was about troops dreading near-certain death and finally being rescued by civilians' quiet heroism at Britain's lowest moment.

In fact, the traditional aspect of Midway feels like a bit of a novelty in the current world of film.

-----

The story here, of course, is the battle of Midway, a four-day naval and air encounter between the United States and Japan that was the pivotal moment of the war in the Pacific.

The story takes its time getting going.  It opens in 1937 Tokyo when a US Naval Intelligence officer, Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson) begins to detect a potential threat in a conversation with a respected Japanese admiral.  Then we see the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, then the retaliatory if symbolic Doolittle Raid of US bombings on Japanese cities and, finally, American and Japanese naval forces planning for a battle that would determine which country's navy would dominate Pacific Islands from the Philippines to Malaysia to Indonesia and perhaps Australia.   And the battle itself.

The movie is studded with famous actors playing the roles of people involved: Woody Harrelson and Dennis Quaid as admirals Nimitz and Halsey, Ed Skrein as fearless pilot Ed Best, Nick Jonas as valiant gunner Bruno Gaido.

Previous war movies did not have one advantage that Midway does:  Computer-generated imagery of the Pearl Harbor attack and the Midway battle.  These are beautiful in a terrible way and interesting to watch.  Midway was conducted across hundreds if not thousands of miles, and in a day before drones or satellites could detect an enemy's locations or movements.  No movie before this has shown with such clarity the squadrons of fighter planes and torpedo-equipped planes bearing down on each other and on ships at sea.

The American service members, as is typical in heroic war movies, come across as decent, hard-working team members in pursuit of a dangerous but essential goal.  Some of their dialogue is clunky, true, but honestly, the film sketches out enough broad themes that it has no time for the examination of the interior motivations of individual characters.  (If it did, we could binge watch on our television sets over many seasons.)

In fact, some have said the movie's run time, two hours and 18 minutes, is too long.  I'm not sure I see it.  Earlier this year, Avengers: Endgame ran just over three hours.  Martin Scorsese's new film, The Irishman, is a half hour longer still.



The China Connection

Midway may be the most expensive independent (i.e., not studio-funded) American film ever.  Emmerich's movies since Independence Day have not been particularly profitable, and a good portion of this film's reported $100 million budget came from Chinese investors who presumably believe it can find a good market in that country.

The Chinese influence shows, chiefly in references to Japanese cruelty during its occupation of China starting in the late 1930s.  In fact, the film's depiction of Japanese behavior before and during the war is accurate and, if anything, minimized. 

One other edit may be a little less so.  The original script called for one of the American service members to act "insubordinate" in a minor matter; that scene was removed.    China's leadership does not tolerate insubordination of any kind these days, if it ever did. 


Previous War Movies

This is the third Midway movie.  The first, The Battle of Midway by legendary filmmaker John Ford, was an 18-minute propaganda piece released in 1942 that still can be found online.  After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood joined many other industries to contribute to the war effort.

The second, also titled Midway, was released in 1976 and starred a huge cast of older actors -- Henry Fonda, Charlton Heston, James Coburn, Glen Ford, etc.  It WAS a traditional war movie, and what it lacked in CGI it made up for in a more careful explanation of how US intelligence outmaneuvered its Japanese counterpart and engineered the huge victory.  It's tempting to guess that this release, during the US bicentennial and a year after the withdrawal from Vietnam, was timed to revive American confidence.

Honestly, I cannot recall other gung-ho American war movies.  The prominent Vietnam films were Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July.  After our involvements in the Middle East, we got American Sniper, Zero Dark Thirty, and The Hurt Locker.

If the US has a history of jingoistic rah-rah movies about war, it sure hasn't been during the years when I have been paying attention.    Only superhero films (Avengers: Endgame, anyone?) have good guys v. bad guys stories today.

MovieMonday: Parasite

This South Korean film won the prestigious Palme d'Or prize in May, beating out a Tarantino favorite at the Cannes Film Festival.  Its general topic is inequality, which is trending worldwide these days.  It may find an audience in the US, but its numbers worldwide -- mostly in South Korea but also in Europe and Asian markets -- are relatively much greater.

The writer/director is Bong Joon-ho, whose last film, Snowpiercer, was a post-apocalyptic battle between the haves and have-nots who are last surviving humans.

This movie's plot involves two families.  The Kims and their son and daughter live in a stink-bug infested urban apartment whose windows look out on drunks pissing in the street.  They don't have jobs, but they get by doing side work and using the proximity of their neighbors' routers to connect their cellphones with the internet.

The wealthy family are the Parks, who live in a big, beautiful home on a hill.  The father has an important job doing something, and the mother manages the house with the help of a housekeeper.  There's nothing wrong with the Parks, exactly, but they are more than a little credulous.

When a college-student friend of the Kims' son alerts him to an opportunity to work as an English tutor for the Parks' daughter,  he and his sister forge the school documents he needs to get the job.  Later the Kims' daughter talks her way into the house as an art counselor to the Parks' nine-year-old-son; after a little googling, she explains to Mrs. Park that the boy has much in common with 1980s primitivist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In short order, Ma and Pa Kim displace the Parks' housekeeper and chauffeur, and the family's future looks good.   The comedy-of-manners setup is complete.  But can it last?

The answer is no.  It turns out that two other desperate people have been depending on the Parks, and when those two figure out what the Kims have done,  they are not willing to take the situation sitting down.  Events continue in an increasingly tense and frightening manner that leads to an almost operatic climax featuring kitschy American toys of the sort I haven't seen in the US for many years.  Then comes a resolution that viewers may or may not find convincing.

-----

Film critics perhaps are not keen observers of economic situations, and it shows in scribblings about this film.

-- The plot ... "keeps the finger of blame pointed firmly towards the systematic failings responsible for putting the Kims in the position they're in. . . ." -- except, really, it doesn't except.  There is no  discussion of any "systematic" anything.  There is a family that is rich and comfortable and another family that is poor for some reason but is also resourceful at exploiting opportunities.

-- "Wealth buys you out of the social contract—the need to behave a certain way, to tolerate others. Poverty imposes more rules, limitations and boundaries that if unchecked, will suffocate. There is conflict in this: The wealthy become acutely aware of the inconvenience of empathy. The poor laugh darkly at those who plan for the future."
     This generalization may have some truth, but it's not a truth reflected in this film.  There is no discussion of the sources of the Park family's wealth.  The relationships between Parks and Kims seem straightforward, without condescension on the one side or resentment on the other.  The Kims do not "laugh darkly at those who plan for the future."
      The only hint comes when the nine-year-old Park son who observes that all the Kims smell the same, perhaps because of their basement apartment -- this makes the Kims worry that the Parks will figure that their household helpers are relatives and not four independent contractors who are working in the Park family home.

-- "Suffice to say, the wealthy in any country survive on the labor of the poor, whether it’s the housekeepers, tutors, and drivers they employ, or something much darker. (Papa) Kim's family will be reminded of that chasm and the cruelty of inequity in ways you couldn’t possibly predict."
      Yes, the "cruelty of inequity" comes up in the climactic scene, but if it were a major theme of the story one would expect a talented filmmaker like Joon-ho to have developed it much earlier in the plot.

-----

South Korea has had almost continual economic growth since 1960, but it started from a very poor place.  Over time its manufacturing economy has given way to more high-value production and knowledge work.   South Koreans often are described as the most competitive people in the world -- more competitive than the Japanese and much more competitive than the Chinese.   Relentless competition is hard on people and wears them down.  

MovieSunday: The Lighthouse

There have been many reviews of this historical/mythical/horror film but none that seems to boil the
story down to its essence:  the struggle between two men for control of a great big phallic symbol, one with a powerful light at its tip. (Gee, what could that last be?)

When I saw it, the audience was almost entirely men, plus a few women and who came with husbands or boyfriends.  Just saying.

Now let's talk about the film.

The moment is the late 1890s, a time before sonar, electric lights or indoor plumbing.  The setting is a lighthouse whose beacon and foghorn warn ships away from the shallows near a small island off the Atlantic coast of New England.

Onto the island comes a former lumberman, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) to spend several weeks as the second of two "wickies" who tend the lighthouse.  The lead wickie, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), took up his job after a long career as a seaman.

Wake quickly makes clear that he's the boss and orders Winslow to do the scut work.  Winslow hauls coal in a wheelbarrow, wrestles barrels of oil up and down stairs, fetches water from the well, empties chamber pots, cleans floors and whitewashes the lighthouse exterior.  Over time, he comes to resent Wake, who drinks copious amounts of liquor (gin, no doubt, given the age), shares sea dog superstitions about seagulls and a little about his foreshortened family life.  Late every night, Wake locks himself in the top of the lighthouse, tending its enormous light and refusing Wake any access, which Wake deeply desires.

"The light is mine!" says Wake.

The atmosphere of the story makes that first act more interesting than it sounds.  First, the film is shot in black and white, and in an almost square format, 1.19:1, that has been mostly unseen since the days of the early talkies.  The lighthouse living space after sunset is dim and uncomfortable.  And there are loud, dissonant noises from the pulsing foghorn and roaring boilers that punctuate the natural outdoors in full daylight.

On his last evening at dinner with Wake,  Winslow agrees finally to drink with the other man.  Unfortunately, a major storm the next morning delays Winslow's pickup for an unknown period.  The two men's drinking and and dancing and fighting continue until the gin is gone, at which point they switch to kerosene.  The final act is marked by hallucinatory experiences, disturbing revelations and suggestions of mythic characters from puzzling mermaids to Neptune to Proteus to Prometheus, and, finally, to what seems to be outright insanity.

 The Lighthouse is not the sort of film that will attract a mass audience, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth a look.  Its two actors play very well against each other in a well-managed background of increasing tension.  The filming and technical effects seem just right for the time and setting.

Like virtually every entrant in the now-popular horror genre, The Lighthouse plot contains what feel like several false steps and a conclusion that doesn't exactly add up.  Presumably the point is to invite viewers to decide for themselves what is real and what is imagined.