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.
Photo caption: Adam Driver and Matt Damon in THE LAST DUEL. Courtesy 20th Century Studios.
Based on accounts of the last medieval trial by combat, The Last Duel is both a thriller and a thinker. Director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, The Martian) brings alive medieval superstition and savagery, and embeds an exploration of the power dynamics within feudal society, especially for women.
The setting is France in the 1380s. Jean (Matt Damon) and Jacques (Adam Driver) have been born into the nobility as squires, which means that they serve as mounted, armored warriors and can own land and castles supported by their very own peasants. Jean is later promoted to the higher title of knight. That puts Jean and Jacques in the elite one percent, but they are totally subservient to the region’s count, Pierre (Ben Affleck), who in turn owes the same absolute fealty to King Charles VI (check him out on Wikipedia).
Jean is an impressive fighter, but not very strategic. He’s a dunderhead, devoid of any social or political skill. Jean has married the beautiful and intelligent aristocrat Marguerite (Jodie Comer), whose father had fallen out of royal favor. Try as she might, Marguerite is only moderately successful in helping Jean from bulling his way through life’s china shop.
Jacques is a canny smoothy, with a rare business sense and charm that melts the ladies. Those financial smarts, along with his appreciation for culture, makes Jacques a protege of Pierre, the count. Pierre favors favors Jacques over Jean, who resents it.
Finding Marguerite alone at home, Jacques rapes her. When Marguerite accuses him, Jacques denies it. Jean presses the case, which culminates in the film’s titular trial by combat.
Ridley Scott tells the story first from Jean’s point of view, then from Jacques’ and, finally, from Margeurite’s. Unlike in Rashomon, the three versions of what occurred don’t diverge much from each other. Instead, we see how Jean and Jacques, who both adhere to the code of their class, see themselves. Jean really thinks that he is a good husband. Jacques, although he has forced himself on Marguerite without her consent, really doesn’t think he has committed rape. (They have their Code of Chivalry, but it sure isn’t very chivalrous.)
Jodie Comer in THE LAST DUEL. Courtesy 20th Century Studios.
We learn that, in 1300s European legality, rape wasn’t even a violent crime against the woman, but was a property crime against her guardian; (she was essentially the property of her father or husband). Ridley Scott slyly emphasizes this when he shows Jean’s reaction to an equine assault on his favorite breeding mare.
Margeurite’s insistence on bringing the rape charge publicly is a major problem for both Jean and for Jacques. It’s also an annoying inconvenience for the count, the king and the Church, who would sweep it under the rug. Jean thinks that he cleverly found away around the cover-up, but he overlooks one disturbing factor – if he dies in the duel, Marguerite will be immediately burned at the stake.
The performances by Comer, Driver, Damon and Affleck are all excellent. Harriet Walker is very good as Jean’s mother, a role which seems at first like a stereotypical stereotypical shrewish mother-in-law, until we learn of her own complicated journey navigating a world where men are unaccountable.
Scott shows us some savage medieval battles to prepare us for the final duel. Warfare at the time was desperate and brutal hand-to-hand butchery, within a sword’s length, like fighting in a phone booth. To stab, slash or impale an opponent, a combatant needed to find an unarmored body part. The jousting in The Last Duel seems especially authentic.
The Wife didn’t want to accompany me when I described it as the “medieval rape movie”; I should have said it’s the “trial by combat movie”.
I was late to The Last Duel, catching up with it several months after its summer 2021 release. Due to the distributor’s blustery publicity campaign, I had underestimated it; it’s one of the Best Movies of 2021, The Last Duel is streaming from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, HBO and redbox.
Photo caption: Lady Gaga and Adam Driver in HOUSE OF GUCCI. Courtesy of MGM
Lady Gaga and Adam Driver shine in House of Gucci, a story of sordid behavior among the rich and famous, “inspired by true events”. Driver plays Maurizio, the feckless scion of the famed Gucci clan. Lady Gaga plays Patrizia, the humbly born striver who snares Maurizio as a husband. In filmmaker Ridley Scott’s telling, the conniving Patrizia molds the charmingly goofy naif into someone with the wherewithal to screw his relatives out of the business.
This is Shakespearean family treachery – and Patrizia will learn the price of turning someone into a cutthroat. Lady Gaga is once again (A Star Is Born) absolutely magnetic on-screen. Driver makes the character of Maurizio very, very interesting as he evolves into (almost) what Patrizia wants him to be.
The flashiest role – and performance – is Jared Leto’s as Maurizio’s cousin Paolo. Leto is physically unrecognizable in the role – chubby, with the hair of the The Three Stooges’ Larry Fine and corduroy suits of absurdly wide wale. In The House of Gucci, every other character explicitly and correctly describes Paolo as an idiot. Many critics have compared Paolo, as the family’ weakest link, to Fredo in The Godfather; however, John Cazale’s performance as Fredo brought subtlety that was not on the written page, and Paolo is written to be a full-out buffoon. Leto is very funny, though.
Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons are excellent as the Gucci generation that built the business. Pacino’s Aldo (Paolo’s father) is a shameless hustler and Iron’s Rodolfo (Maurizio’s father) has reinvented himself as a patrician recluse.
Although it’s a smidgen too long, I was entertained by The House of Gucci. But The Wife, even less tolerant of long running times than am I, was bored and disgruntled by what she saw as a lack of redemption.
(For some reason, I keep calling this movie “House of Pizza” after the legendary San Jose joint.)
Photo caption: Adam Driver in ANNETTE. Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios.
You’ve never seen anything like the much ballyhooed art house musical Annette, and there’s a reason for that. At its best, Annette is a passionate and inventive pop opera. At its worst, it’s a cinematic death march – a noirish Umbrellas of Cherbourg with a spooky puppet baby.
Annette is a musical, written by Ron and Russell Mael of the art pop band, the subjects of this year’s fine documentary The Sparks Brothers. The Maels wrote and perform the songs, and appear in the movie.
Henry (Adam Driver) is a successful cult comedian, and Ann (Marion Cotillard) is a star opera soprano. They are newly in love, becoming a darling-of-the-tabloids celebrity couple, and soon marry and have a baby daughter Annette. Then there are warning signs that the relationship will turn dark, and a tragedy ensues. Then things get very weird, up to an intense final scene in a prison visiting room.
Annette begins with a thrilling uninterrupted shot of Spark performing the song So May We Start, with the Maels joined by the cast in street clothes as they leave the studio and walk Los Angeles streets, transitioning into their costumes and characters. This is followed by the equally wonderful song We Love Each Other So Much and a montage of romantic passion. All promising, but then Annette plunges off the rails.
Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard in ANNETTE. Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios.
The baby Annette is played by a puppet, which the actors treat as if it were a real baby. The infant puppet is extremely creepy, reminding me of the hundred-year-old dolls that freak out The Wife and me when we watch Antiques Roadshow. The toddler puppet is less unsettling, but still distracting for me.
The character of Henry is tormented by inner demons. Henry’s belligerent stage persona is intentionally provocative, and he performs in underwear and a bathrobe. He revels in being a public Bad Boy, but there are plenty of warning signs that it’s not just all an act.
Adam Driver is effective playing Henry, who is selfish, unpleasant and more than a little scary. But the screenplay lets him down. Annette is really about Henry, an unsympathetic character who is just not interesting enough. He’s no Iago. He’s no Travis Bickle. Just an asshole who stains the lives of others.
Cotillard, on the other hand, doesn’t have to do much to except sing beautifully and be angelic. Simon Helberg is also very good in the other significant role.
The most startling performance is by five-year-old Devyn McDowell, who replaces the puppet as a live-action Annette in the final scene. McDowell, who was singing on Broadway at age four, is a revelation in a nose-to-nose vocal duel with Driver. She’s already a great singer and a superb actress. Wow.
Annette was directed by Leos Carax, the wildman of French cinema, who made the spectacularly weird Holy Motors. Carax gets the weirdness right in Annette, especially in a nightmare Ann has while napping in the back of her limo. But he can be blamed for the puppet and the pacing, which becomes tiresome.
The Maels are cinephiles who were frustrated when their film project with the great French auteur Jacques Tati was aborted in the late 1970s. Two decades later, they invested six years working on a Tim Burton movie that didn’t happen. Now they have written a film that not only got made, but that premiered as the opening film of the Cannes Film Festival. Good for them.
The critic Jason Gorber had it right about Annette when he noted, “Twenty minutes of terrific cobbled to two hours of tedium may not be to everyone’s taste“. Annette begins and ends stirringly, but, overall, it’s a trudge with a flawed screenplay, bad pacing and that unfortunate puppet baby.
Noah Baumbach’s family dramedy Marriage Story,
one of the very best films of 2019, traces two good people who care for each
other at the end of their marriage. It’s
a heartfelt film about a personal tragedy that has some of the funniest moments
on screen this year.
Charlie (Adam Driver) is a theater director and Nicole
(Scarlett Johannson) is an actress.
They are married with an eight-year-old son Henry. Nicole’s career is taking her to California,
while Charlie’s is anchored to his beloved New York. Adults might be able to manage a bicoastal
relationship, but the kid needs to have his school and his friends in one place
or the other.
The two try to complete an amicable divorce, but their disagreement over the kid’s primary home unintentionally plunges them into a litigation nightmare, with a cascade of stress added by the lawyers and the courts. It’s been written elsewhere, but I need to add that Nicole and Charlie are horrified by a system that is working as designed. There’s a wonderful shot of Charlie and Nicole sitting apart on an near-empty subway car, exhausted, bereft and unable to support each other.
In a masterstroke, Baumbach introduces his lead
characters with each spouse’s assessment of what is so lovable about the
other. Then we sober up when we learn
what prompted the essays.
We relate to both Charlie and Nicole, and Driver and Johansson perfectly inhabit these good folks, slipping into a deeper nightmare with each step in the process. Near the end, the two have the raw argument that they had each been too nice to have before.
I think that the reason Marriage Story works is
that Johansson and Driver can go through their characters’ pain with complete
authenticity while amidst all the funny supporting characters.
Laura Dern and Ray Liotta play top echelon Divorce
Lawyers to the Stars. Alan Alda plays a sage older attorney who has lost
something off his fastball. Dern’s
riotously funny performance is a lock for an Oscar nomination for Best
Supporting Actress. Dern, Liotta, Alda,
Julie Haggerty, Merritt Wever and Wallace Shawn are each hilarious. Azhy Robertson (Juliet, Naked) is very
good as the kid.
At one point, the court appoints a child evaluator to visit Charlie and judge his relationship with his child. Having any stranger parachute into your home, with your parenting rights at stake, would be stressful. Martha Kelly is superb as an especially humorless evaluator, an oddball impervious to Charlie’s charms and oblivious to any of his positive attributes. As things start going wrong, Charlie gets more and more desperate and the scene gets funnier.
Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver in MARRIAGE STORY
Director Noah Baumbach’s screenplay is informed by the end of his own marriage to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. He acknowledges “a connection to the material”, but that it’s not only about his divorce. He is generous enough to write the character of Charlie with self-absorbed cluelessness about his impact to Nicole’s career aspirations.
I liked Baumbach’s first movie The Squid and the Whale, about his own parents’ divorce. But my reaction to all his subsequent work until now has ranged from to indifference to antipathy; “detest” is the adjective that springs to mind. Despite my bias, I gotta admit that Marriage Story is so, so good that it solidifies Baumbach’s place as an American auteur. Baumbach should head into awards season as the favorite for the screenplay Oscar.
A superb screenplay, superbly acted, Marriage Story balances tragedy and comedy with uncommon success. It’s a masterpiece, and among the very best cinema of 2019. It’s a Must See. I saw Marriage Story in early October at the Mill Valley Film Festival. You can find it theaters now, and it will stream on Netflix beginning on Friday, December 6.
Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce in THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is director Terry Gilliam’s final conquest of the iconic Miguel Cervantes novel. Gilliam has been trying to make this movie for decades, and the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha, which chronicles one disastrous attempt, is a more entertaining movie than this one. Lost in La Mancha can be streamed on Amazon and iTunes.
Adam Driver plays Toby, a film director, in demand for his commercials, who had failed at a Don Quixote film as a young indie director. Now Toby returns to Spain, and tries again with more resources. He finds that the older local man (Jonathan Pryce) in the first film shoot has become deluded that he really is Don Quixote. He also finds that his earlier venture changed the life of a young girl from the village (Joana Ribeiro).
Terry Gilliam is nothing if not imaginative, as demonstrated by his earlier films Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Zero Theorem). Here he creates thread after thread of deluded quests and braids them together. He captures the combination of absurdity and futile earnestness in the source material.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is witty and well-made, but neither Gilliam’s nor Cervantes’ stories make the film engrossing. I saw The Man Who Killed Don Quixote at the 2019 Cinequest, where it was the closing night film.
In Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Adam Driver plays a Paterson, New Jersey, bus driver named Paterson. Paterson is a poet, and, when you think about it, bus driver is a perfect job for someone who eavesdrops and observes, and who needs time to rework phrases in his head. Paterson the movie is a genial, occasionally very funny, portrait of an artist’s creative process.
There’s not much overt action or conflict in Paterson. Every morning Paterson awakes between 6:09 and 6:27 AM, kisses the cheek or naked shoulder of his girlfriend Laura and heads to the kitchen for coffee and Cheerios. While his bus is warming up, he drafts and edits poems in his notebook until his supervisor appears at his bus. After work, he walks home past old factories and straightens his leaning mailbox. After dinner, he walks Laura’s bulldog Marvin and stops for exactly one beer at the neighborhood tavern. The bus, the bar and Paterson’s time going to and fro constitute the platform for his art: finding material for observation and for crafting and recrafting poems.
The city of Paterson is a perfect setting for this story. Paterson is not a tourist destination, and there doesn’t seem to be much interesting in the place that boasts of its memorial to Lou Costello. But a careful, open-minded observer like Paterson can revel in the beauty of the Great Falls of the Passaic River and find interest in all the dingy places and seemingly ordinary denizens.
Paterson doesn’t share any of his poetry, except VERY occasionally to Laura; in Paterson, he even chooses to quote her a poem from someone else when she asks for one of his. Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), a suitably kooky artist, is impractical and adorable, and obsessed with black and white. She seems as frivolous as Paterson is deep, but he is devoted to her, and she lightens his life and is the unrelenting cheerleader for his poetry.
Paterson is filled with sly humor, much coming from the antics of the regular folks that Paterson encounters, along with Laura’s goofiness. I particularly enjoyed the two guys on bus talking about women they think have hit on them and the knowitall college student posing as an anarchist. At my screening, wry chuckles kept erupting in the audience.
To make sure we’re paying attention (and enjoying the film on other levels), Jarmusch has filled it with patterns, with recurring themes like twins and secrets and with repeated phrases. Paterson meets three other poets – none anything like him – and at the most unexpected locales.
For Paterson to work, an actor is needed who has the charisma to be interesting while acting very passively. Adam Driver is the perfect choice, and he is exceptional. I also really liked Barry Shabaka Henley as Doc, the tavern’s proprietor and bartender.
Not everyone will enjoy Paterson, but I did. A viewer needs to appreciate the juxtaposition of a routine exterior with an artist’s sometimes bursting inner dialogue. I recommend settling in and going for the ride. Paterson is now available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
In Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Adam Driver plays a Paterson, New Jersey, bus driver named Paterson. Paterson is a poet, and, when you think about it, bus driver is a perfect job for someone who eavesdrops and observes, and who needs time to rework phrases in his head. Paterson the movie is a genial, occasionally very funny, portrait of an artist’s creative process.
There’s not much overt action or conflict in Paterson. Every morning Paterson awakes between 6:09 and 6:27 AM, kisses the cheek or naked shoulder of his girlfriend Laura and heads to the kitchen for coffee and Cheerios. While his bus is warming up, he drafts and edits poems in his notebook until his supervisor appears at his bus. After work, he walks home past old factories and straightens his leaning mailbox. After dinner, he walks Laura’s bulldog Marvin and stops for exactly one beer at the neighborhood tavern. The bus, the bar and Paterson’s time going to and fro constitute the platform for his art: finding material for observation and for crafting and recrafting poems.
The city of Paterson is a perfect setting for this story. Paterson is not a tourist destination, and there doesn’t seem to be much interesting in the place that boasts of its memorial to Lou Costello. But a careful, open-minded observer like Paterson can revel in the beauty of the Great Falls of the Passaic River and find interest in all the dingy places and seemingly ordinary denizens.
Paterson doesn’t share any of his poetry, except VERY occasionally to Laura; in Paterson, he even chooses to quote her a poem from someone else when she asks for one of his. Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), a suitably kooky artist, is impractical and adorable, and obsessed with black and white. She seems as frivolous as Paterson is deep, but he is devoted to her, and she lightens his life and is the unrelenting cheerleader for his poetry.
Paterson is filled with sly humor, much coming from the antics of the regular folks that Paterson encounters, along with Laura’s goofiness. I particularly enjoyed the two guys on bus talking about women they think have hit on them and the knowitall college student posing as an anarchist. At my screening, wry chuckles kept erupting in the audience.
To make sure we’re paying attention (and enjoying the film on other levels), Jarmusch has filled it with patterns, with recurring themes like twins and secrets and with repeated phrases. Paterson meets three other poets – none anything like him and at the most unexpected locales.
For Paterson to work, an actor is needed who has the charisma to be interesting while acting very passively. Adam Driver is the perfect choice, and he is exceptional. I also really liked Barry Shabaka Henley as Doc, the tavern’s proprietor and bartender.
Not everyone will enjoy Paterson, but I did. A viewer needs to appreciate the juxtaposition of a routine exterior with an artist’s sometimes bursting inner dialogue. I recommend settling in and going for the ride.
