FERRARI: his racecars are easy, his women are not

Photo caption: Penelope Cruz in FERRARI. Courtesy of NEON.

Ferrari takes place in 1957, when the groundbreaking auto racing figure Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) faces two crises at age 59. To attract a partnership with a larger automaker and save his company, Ferrari must win a famous road race. And, he must navigate the demands of both his wife and his girlfriend. The racing thread and the domestic thread combine to make a well-crafted, satisfying film.

Unconventionally, in Ferrari, Ferrari’s illicit relationship is anything but an exciting dalliance. Ferrari lives in the quiet countryside with his girlfriend Lina (Shailene Woodley) and their nine-year-old son. They live in modest domesticity, and Lina is supportive and generally undemanding.

Ferrari’s wife Laura (Penelope Cruz), on the other hand, is a volcano ready to blow at any moment. We learn that a tragic loss has devastated Enzo and Laura’s marriage, and Laura lives somewhere a simmer and a full blown rage. Complicating matters for Enzo, Laura is his business partner and must sign off on any Ferrari company decisions. And he must return to their Modena apartment on each workday morning.

The one thing that Lina asks for – that her son get his father’s surname – is the one thing that Laura forbids.

Driver, playing a character 20 years older than he is, is very good, and so is Woodley. It is Cruz, however, who has the juiciest role, and she knocks it out of the park. Cruz is outstanding when Laura is bitter or blazing, but beyond superb in a quieter scene where she reflects on the previous family tragedy.

I find auto racing to be the most boring of sporting endeavors, but director Michael Mann thrilled even me with the racing segments. Of course, Mann does know how to make a big, compelling movie (The Last of the Mohicans, Collateral, Heat, The Insider, Ali, Public Enemies).

Ferrari is a pretty good movie, most watchable when Penelope Cruz is on the screen.

OPPENHEIMER: creator of a monster controlled by others

Photo caption: Cillian Murphy in OPPENHEIMER. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Christopher Nolan’s epic masterpiece Oppenheimer is a thrilling, three-hour psychological exploration of physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), who was brilliant enough to lead the development of the first atomic bomb, but could not grasp that he would then lose all control on its use.

Oppenheimer was a prima donna, but the team he assembled of star academics (31 of which had won or would win their own Nobel Prizes) was filled with prima donnas. Both a natural leader and manipulative, Oppenheimer was smoother, more practical and less politically naïve than the other scientists. But he was no match for real practitioners of politics. One character reminds him, genius is no guarantee of wisdom. The smartest person in the room makes a mistake in thinking that he can ALWAYS outthink everyone else.

Cillian Murphy, with his searing eyes and prominent cheekbones, is an actor with a striking appearance and presence. He’s always good, but he’s not the guy I would immediately think of to carry an epic; but this is Murphy’s sixth movie with Nolan, and Nolan knew that Murphy had the chops. Looking unusually gaunt, Murphy becomes Oppenheimer as he ranges from arrogant self-confidence to a creature in torment. It’s a magnificent, career-topping performance.

Himself a practitioner of the empirical, Oppenheimer, could not conceive of or understand the arena of public opinion, where lies and fear can triumph over fact and virtue. Robert Downey, Jr., in a great performance, plays Oppenheimer’s foil Lewis Strauss, a man who understands influence, political positioning and spin.

Nolan’s screenplay is based on the Oppenheimer bio American Prometheus. The mythological Prometheus brought fire to human, and was punished by the gods with perpetual torment, specifically by an eagle, each day of eternity, eating his liver anew. Oppenheimer gets the heartache of being victimized by the communist witch hunt of the 1950s and the nightmare that his monstrous creation is in the hands of those less ethical, less smart and less virtuous than he.

The Manhattan Project, the mastering of all the scientific and technological challenges in developing the first nuclear weapon, in a race with the worst villains in the history of the world – that’s fodder for an epic movie in itself. Yet that’s the backdrop to this psychological study. Together, the stories of the Bomb and Oppenheimer make for a movie that’s an astounding achievement.

The stakes could not be higher – not just life and death, but life and death on a heretofore unimagined scale. Not to mention the primary goal of stopping the Nazis. And the survival of the planet itself.

At the time, physicists could not rule out the possibility that a nuclear reaction would continue until it incinerated the atmosphere. In Oppenheimer, the scientists calculate a “near zero” chance of destroying the entire planet, giving serious pause to the scientists and alarm to lay people.

The bomb needed to be assembled and tested, of course, and the scenes of the fisrt bomb test are harrowing. Imagine putting together an atomic bomb and arming it, with 1940s technology (no robots or laser-precision machining) and THEN waiting out the winds and rain of a fierce desert storm.

There’s an emotionally surreal scene as the Los Alamos team rapturously celebrates the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima – consumed by pride and relief that their work of over two years was successful and that it would surely end the war more quickly; but unthinking about the very real, inevitable and horrific human carnage on the ground in Hiroshima and the threat of nuclear annihilation that the world would tremble under for the rest of time. Nolan shows Oppenheimer leading the celebration, and then envisioning the horrors.

Oppenheimer is visually thrilling, thanks to Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who already has an impressive body of work: Nope, Spectre, Ad Astra, Her, The Fighter, and Nolan’s Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet. Nolan, Van Hoytema and editor Jennifer Lame will undoubtedly be honored with Oscar nominations for Oppenheimer. Ludwig Göransson’s music is pretty great, too.

The cast is deep, and there are many excellent supporting performances in Oppenheimer, including:

  • Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, who doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but becomes a force as Oppenheimer comes under attack.
  • Florence Pugh as a needy Oppenheimer girlfriend. I have not understood why Pugh is trending toward the A-list, but she’s really steamy here.
  • Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, the military commander who job it was, while Oppenheimer was managing a town full of divas, to manage Oppenheimer himself., once observing you’re not just self-important; you ARE important.
  • Benny Safdie as the mercurial Edward Teller, who Oppenheimer keeps inside the tent, so as to not disrupt the Manhattan Project, with autonomy to develop a hydrogen bomb.

Rami Malek is glimpsed, oddly gecko-like, in the middle of the story and then pops up with a surprise near the end.

Mick LaSalle, writing on Oppenheimer, quipped that Gary Oldman “who played Winston Churchill in “The Darkest Hour,” is President Harry Truman here. If Oldman ever plays Stalin, he could do the Potsdam Conference as a one-man show.

Christopher Nolan and his collaborators have made a movie that runs for three hours without a single slow or dry moment, despite spending two hours on nuclear physics. I am confident in predicting that Oppenheimer will receive (and deserve) at least ten Oscar nominations and could challenge the record of fourteen.

ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED: leading man in the closet

Photo caption: Rock Hudson in ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED. Courtesy of HBO Max.

The insightful and often witty showbiz biodoc Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed has an unbeatable leading man – Rock Hudson. From Magnificent Obsession in 1954 through 1962 (Come September and Lover Come Back) Rock earned eight straight years on the list of America’s top ten most popular movie stars. The basis for his popularity was a series of melodramas and romantic comedies that showcased him as the nation’s to heterosexual sex symbol, while he was secretly gay.

Rock’s Hollywood story begins when, as a young Navy vet, he is discovered by the prominent (and sexually predatory) agent Henry Willson, who groomed over a dozen of the beefcake stars of the 50s, many of whom were also closeted gays (e.g., Tab Hunter). Willson gets Rock a contract with Universal and the studio went to to work on re-creating the raw Adonis into leading man material.

Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed unspools the story of Rock’s closeted but vibrant lifestyle, with his decades-long friendship with a Hollywood couple, George Nader (74 screen credits, including the lead in Robot Monster) and Mark Miller. We meet Lee Garlington, Rock’s companion in the early 60s. We hear from author Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City), who joined Rock’s social set in the 70s and kept urging him to come out. We also meet a smattering of Rock’s fellow actors and casual lovers. Rock’s poolside parties resembled a gay version of the Playboy Mansion.

Rock Hudson and Lee Garlington in ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED. Courtesy of HBO Max.

And then Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed takes us back to Rock’s sad finale, as he wasted away from AIDS, early in the epidemic, before there was any real hope from therapeutic medication. We cringe as we revisit Rock’s harrowing kiss of Linda Evans in Dynasty while AIDS-positive – and hear from Evans herself. And we hear of the cruel blow-off by First Lady Nancy Reagan. Isolated by his fear of the AIDS stigma, he still refused to come out of closet, while finally publicly acknowledging his AIDS diagnosis essentially on his deathbed.

While Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed is generally sympathetic to Rock and his closeted plight, it takes an unflinching look at his chain-smoking, heavy drinking, sometimes ruthless ambition and his stubborn refusal to come out.

While the arc of Rock’s life is ultimately tragic, director Stephen Kijak has made Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed very fun to watch by peppering it with clips from Rock’s films. Of course, juxtaposition with the revelations of Rock’s private lifestyle, many, many melodramatic and sexy lines have become hilarious double entendres. The effect of the snippets is poignant as Rock’s story becomes sadder.

Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed is streaming on HBO Max.

OSCAR MICHEAUX: THE SUPERHERO OF BLACK FILMMAKING: a pioneer worth knowing about

OSCAR MICHEAUX: THE SUPERHERO OF BLACK FILMMAKING. Courtesy of TCM.

If you don’t know who Oscar Micheaux is, you should – so watch the documentary Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking. As writer/director/producer, the African-American Michaeux created so-called “race films” – movies made for black audiences from a black perspective during the most shameful years of American racial segregation. Michaeux himself directed 42 feature films DURING Jim Crow.

There’s a lot in Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking:

  • Micheaux’s pivotal sojourn in a cabin in, of all places, the Dakotas.
  • His very personal and hands-on distribution methods.
  • His discovery of Paul Robeson’s on-screen charisma, a full eight years before Robeson’s first Hollywood film (The Emperor Jones).
  • Micheaux’s comfort in portraying that most incendiary topic – interracial relationships. 
  • How he slyly bent rules to avoid censorship.

I have seen some Oscar Micheaux films, and their stories, freed of the White Hollywood lens, are eyeopening. They allowed black audiences to see big screen characters that acted like real African-American – not the degrading stereotypes in Hollywood movies.

That being said, Michaeux did not make “Noble Negro” movies. His work is authentic, and criticized, for example, black preacher-hucksters who exploit religious devotion in the African-American community for their own venal and carnal appetites.

Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking features a solid panel of expert talking heads to explain Micheaux’s place in cinema and in African-American history. The most compelling are screenwriter Kevin Wilmott and University of Chicago cinema professor/TCM host Jaqueline Stewart. 

Animation is used sparingly and effectively, including one inspired segment to Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

I watched Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking on Turner Classic Movies, and it is streaming on HBO Max.

Coming up on TV – the hard to find GEORGE WALLACE

Photo caption: Gary Sinise in WALLACE.

On January 12, Turner Classic Movies brings us George Wallace, with its brilliant performance by Gary Sinise. Sinise captures the character of the driven, morally flexible Alabama Governor, whose political opportunism took him to personify the defense of racial segregation in America. His wild personal journey included presidential campaigns, becoming paralyzed by an assassination attempt, and mellowing in a redemption-seeking epilogue.

Originally a 1997 TV miniseries, this three-hour work was based on the fine Marshall Frady biography and was directed by the legendary John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May).

Mare Winningham plays Wallace’s first wife Lurleen, who succeeded him as Alabama’s Governor, and Angelina Joie plays his second wife Cornelia. Sinise, Winningham and Frankenheimer all won Primetime Emmys.

George Wallace is not available to stream and is rarely broadcast, so set your DVR.

Angelina Joie and Gary Sinise in GEORGE WALLACE

DE GAULLE: a man and his moment

Photo caption: Lambert Wilson in DE GAULLE. Courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.

De Gaulle takes us to a pivotal moment in French WW II history that is no longer well-understood by most Americans. The French Army has collapsed in the face of German invasion, and the fall of Paris is both inevitable and imminent. The French government is considering asking Hitler for an armistice, seeking to end the slaughter and to repatriate its 2 million POWs.  

Charles de Gaulle (Lambert Wilson) is also losing his battle to convince the government not to surrender, but to keep fighting the Nazis from outside France itself, based in France’s colonial possessions. In this moment of catastrophe, de Gaulle is virtually alone in imagining that Great Britain, joined by America’s industrial might, could someday liberate France. It doesn’t help that, for the authoritarian and anti-Semitic French military establishment, Hitler isn’t so abhorrent.

Writer-director Gabriel Le Bomin has focused De Gaulle on only two weeks of WW II history – between June 5 and June 19, 1940. Every minute counts – and the clock is ticking.

It’s a similar approach as in Darkest Hour, where all of the story takes place in May, 1940, as Churchill is facing England’s moment of existential peril. In fact, the Darkest Hour (Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and HBO Max) would complete an excellent double feature with De Gaulle.

The tension is enhanced with a parallel thread – the political crisis has isolated de Gaulle in London while his family, completely out of communication, is scrambling to escape the Nazis in France.

Aloof, shy and an egomaniac, de Gaulle was easily dislikeable. Le Bomin has humanized him by including his most relatable attributes – his relationship with his wife and kids, especially his daughter with Down’s Syndrome.

Le Bomin and Wilson had to meet high expectations on the portrayal of an icon. After all, De Gaulle’s appearance, speech and mannerisms are as familiar to a French audience as those of Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, Jacqueline Kennedy and Muhammad Ali are to an American one.

I wouldn’t have immediately thought of Lambert Wilson for the role. Wilson, known for the Matrix franchise, is handsome and physically graceful. But, for starters, Wilson is tall enough, at 6-2, to play de Gaulle, just under 6-5. Prosthetics and makeup completed the physical transformation. Wilson’s acting craft took him the rest of the way – capturing de Gaulle’s stiffness and the physical awkwardness that some very tall people have.

I streamed De Gaulle on Virtual Cinema at Laemmle.

MANK: biting the hand

Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried in MANK

David Fincher’s Mank is a black-and-white beauty of a film, a portrait of troubled talent in Classic Hollywood.

Mank is a character study of Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) as he pens his Oscar-winning screenplay for Citizen Kane. Mankiewicz was an Algonquin Round Table wit whose misfortune was that he despised the one thing that he excelled at. He was a master writer and fixer of Hollywood movie scripts, but he would rather have been in Manhattan trading bon mots with his peers in the intelligentsia. He particularly the industrial, ultra-commercial and course movie studio bosses and despised their politics.

It didn’t help that Mankiewicz was a raging alcoholic and compulsive gambler (although not a womanizer). He was so hard to handle that Orson Welles essentially imprisoned him at a remote California desert ranch to write Citizen Kane.

Mankiewicz had one unsurpassed idea for a script – the story of media mogul (and frustrated politician) William Randolph Hearst. Mankiewicz had been a frequent guest of Hearst and his companion Marion Davies at Hearst Castle. The problem is that telling this story would piss off the owner of the world’s biggest publicity machine and horrify the movie studio heads who employed screenwriters. And, most poignantly, it would betray Mankiewicz’s kind friend Marion Davies.

Mankiewicz had served as the court jester at Hearst Castle, and the term comes up repeatedly in Mank, most importantly in a cutting remark by Herman’s little brother Joseph Mankiewicz.

The Wife stayed with Mank and finished it, but she advised me that Mank is much more appealing to cinephiles who already know the “inside baseball” of the old movie studio system and the making of Citizen Kane. Indeed, when the likes of Louis B. Mayer, Ben Hecht, Joseph Mankiewicz, Irving Thalberg and John Houseman popped up, it instantly resonated with me.

The entire cast is excellent, but Amanda Seyfried is beyond great as Marion Davies. Charles Dance (coming off his Lord Mountbatten in The Crown) is perfect as William Randolph Hearst. Muckraker-turned-socialist-gubernatorial-candidate Upton Sinclair is played by…(wait for it)…Bill Nye the Science Guy.

David Fincher is one of our greatest directors (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, Gone Girl). Fincher’s father Jack Fincher wrote the screnplay for Mank (and clearly shared Herman Mankiewicz’ acid view of the Hollywood hierarchy), so this is clearly a labor of love for David Fincher.

As a tribute to both Citizen Kane and the Golden Age of Hollywood, Mank is just gorgeous, as beautiful a black-and-white film as any directed by John Ford or shot by Sidney Toler, Nicholas Musuraca or John Alton. Mank’s cinematographer is Erik Messerschmidt (TV’s Mindhunter).

Mank is going on my list of Best Movies of 2020 – So Far. I see Oscar nominations coming for Fincher, Messerschmidt and Seyfried. Mank is streaming on Netflix.

ELLA FITZGERALD: JUST ONE OF THOSE THINGS: gentle genius of jazz

The revelatory biodoc Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things traces the life of the jazz icon.

It opens with the Harlem teenage dancer who was an eyewitness to Ella’s 17-year-old public debut at the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night in 1934. We learn of Ella’s rocky childhood, with the traumas that led her to being incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent and becoming homeless in Harlem. We see the arc of her career, with the initial mentorship of bandleader Chick Webb and the later guidance of producer Norman Grantz.

Her son, Ray Brown, Jr., is on hand to reveal Ella’s family side (with photos of mom pitching to son, both in Dodgers gear).

One of the Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things‘ highlights is a never-broadcast interview in which Ella makes clear her views on race, American racism and civil rights. Markedly clear-eyed, it’s all the more powerful because of Ella’s gentle demeanor.

A Must See for jazz fans, Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things is reverential and by-the-numbers, but it is well-sourced and insightful. It opens June 26 in the Roxie Virtual Cinema.

Stream of the Week: ALL THE WAY – LBJ comes alive

Bryan Cranston in ALL THE WAY

Lyndon B. Johnson, one of American history’s larger-than-life characters, finally comes alive on the screen in the HBO movie All the Way. Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Trumbo) is the first actor who captures LBJ in all his facets – a man who was boring and square on television but frenetic, forceful and ever-dominating in person. All the Way traces the first year in LBJ’s presidency, when he ended official racial segregation in America with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

LBJ was obsessed with gaining and keeping political power, and he was utterly ruthless and amoral about the means to do that. His tools of persuasion included deceit, flattery, threats, promised benefits and horse-trading. He was equally comfortable in playing to someone’s ideals and better nature as well to one’s vanity or venality. In All the Way, we see one classic moment of what was called “the Johnson treatment”, when LBJ looms over Senator Everett Dirksen, and it becomes inevitable that Dirksen is going to be cajoled, intimidated or bought off and ultimately give LBJ what he wants.

LBJ was so notoriously insincere that one of the joys of All the Way is watching LBJ tell completely inconsistent stories to the both sides of the Civil Right battle. Both the Civil Rights proponents (Hubert Humphrey and Martin Luther King, Jr.) and the opponents (the Southern Senators led by Richard Russell) must determine whether LBJ is lying and to whom. Each of them must make this calculation and then bet his own cause on his perception of LBJ’s real intentions.

But LBJ amassed power for two reasons – he needed to have it and he needed to do something with it. Along with the LBJ’s unattractive personal selfishness and the political sausage-making that some may find distasteful, All the Way shows that Johnson did have two core beliefs that drove his political goals – revulsion in equal parts to discrimination and poverty. We hear references to the childhood poverty that led to the humiliation of his father, to the plight of the Mexican schoolchildren in Cotulla, Texas, that he mentored as a young man, and his outrage at the discriminatory treatment suffered by his African-American cook Zephyr.

Bryan Cranston brilliantly brings us the complete LBJ – crude, conniving, thin-skinned, intimidating and politically masterful. Besides Cranston’s, we also see superb performances by Melissa Leo as Ladybird, Anthony Mackie as MLK, Bradley Whitford as Hubert Humphrey and Frank Langella as Richard Russell.

All the Way is remarkably historically accurate. It does capsulize some characters and events, but the overall depiction of 1964 in US history is essentially truthful. As did Selma, All the Way drills down to secondary characters like James Eastland and Bob Moses. We also see the would-be scandal involving LBJ’s chief of staff Walter Jenkins, a story that has receded from the popular culture. Vietnam is alluded to with a reference to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which is fitting since Vietnam grew to become LBJ’s nemesis and the national obsession only after the 1964 election.

All the Way was adapted from a Broadway play for which Cranston won a Tony.  LBJ’s 1964 makes for a stirring story, and All the Way is a compelling film. You can stream it from HBO GO, Amazon’s HBO Now,  iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.

HARRIET: story great, movie only okay


Cynthia Erivo in HARRIET. Photo courtesy of Focus Features.

I first watched the trailer for Harriet askance because the Harriet Tubman action figure I saw on-screen didn’t resemble the tiny, revered Tubman in the sepia photos. But that is because of my own skepticism of Hollywood history and my own woeful ignorance of the historic Tubman. The ancient lady in her photos and the historic Tubman are explained in this fine NYT piece Harriet Tubman Facts and Myths: How the Movie Tried to Get it Right. As Harriet’s director Kasi Lemmons says in this NYT article, “You don’t have an image of what she was like when she was actually doing this work in her late 20s, when she was this young superheroine, this completely badass woman.”

Harriet is good history. The problem is that Lemmons doesn’t trust us to appreciate Tubman’s heroism when we see it – a 100-mile solo escape from slavery, guiding 75 escaped slaves to freedom with the Underground Railroad, leading troops into battle to free 700 more in the Civil War, and becoming a thought leader in the abolitionist and suffragist movements. So we have this swelling music every time Tubman does something inspirational. The constant, obvious beatification is distracting.

Tubman is played with convincing intensity by Cynthia Erivo. Erivo was absolutely the best thing about the Steve McQueen film Widows; since Erivo’s character teamed with those played by Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki, the fact that she stole the movie is impressive. Erivo is a Broadway musical actress/singer, and Harriet uses her singing talent as well.

If you’re not expecting great cinema, you’ll appreciate this important and compelling history. Harriet makes it clear why Tubman belongs on the twenty dollar bill.