Movies

Stream of the Week: HARD EIGHT – the indie neo-noir that launched careers

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John C. Reilly and Philip Baker Hall in HARD EIGHT

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is topping a good many critics’ top ten lists. So it’s a good time to revisit Anderson’s first feature, Hard Eight, a neo-noir from 1996.

In Hard Eight, the down-on-his-luck simpleton John (John C. Reilly) encounters an older loner, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) in a diner.  The 60ish Sydney, who Has Seen It All, takes pity on the 20-something John and offers to help him get some money.  Sydney takes John to Las Vegas and downloads Sydney’s casino expertise.  John becomes Sydney’s mentee, and eventually gains confidence, some financial security and the hope of a non-trashy future.

But, alas, this is a neo-noir and John can’t leave well enough alone.  He starts making some stupid decisions.   He falls for the cocktail waitress (and trick-turner) Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow). He starts hanging out with security guy Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), who turns out to have a scary side.  Soon these folks get themselves into a dangerous situation WAY over their heads.  Perhaps Sydney knows a way out…

John C. Reilly in HARD EIGHT

Hard Eight works largely because of the characters of John and Sydney and the  performances of John C. Reilly and Philip Baker Hall.  Reilly is especially gifted at playing a goofy naif.

Hall is brilliant as Sydney, the wise loner.  We imagine that Sydney has operated in cynicism for decades, but something, perhaps some fundamental, accumulated loneliness, causes him to reach out and adopt John as his protege.  It’s as if Sydney suddenly feels the need to father  someone.  Why does he pick John as his son-figure when it’s clear that John has a limited ceiling?  Is it that John is just available when Sydney gets the urge?

Philip Baker Hall in HARD EIGHT

Paul Thomas Anderson’s career exploded with his next movie Boogie Nights, also with Reilly, Hoffman and Hall.  Then Anderson went on to make Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master and, now, Phantom Thread.  That’s a body work remarkably filled with originality.

Boogie Nights was also the breakthrough movie for both Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Hoffman, of course, was later nominated for an Oscar in Anderson’s The Master after winning one for Capote.

Just before Hard Eight, a 23-year-old Paltrow had a part in Se7en.  But in the two years after Hard Eight, she was cast in Emma, Great Expectations, A Perfect Murder and her Oscar-winning role in Shakespeare in Love.

Jackson had already broken through with his performance as Gator the crackhead in Jungle Fever and defined his career as the iconic hit man Jules in Pulp Fiction.  But Jackie Brown, Star Wars, Shaft, The Hateful Eight and 70 more feature films were still ahead.

By Hard Eight, Hall had been working steadily for 26 years – almost all on TV.  He was best know for his Richard Nixon in Robert Altman’s 1984 Secret Honor.  AfterHard Eight, he went on to roles in Magnolia, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Rules of Engagement, The Matador and Zodiac.  And, in his 80s, he became instantly recognizable as Walt Kleezak in Modern Family.

Hard Eight is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Philip Seymour Hoffman in HARD EIGHT

PHANTOM THREAD: rapturous and witty

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PHANTOM THREAD

Phantom Thread, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, is Paul Thomas Anderson’s rapturously beautiful and unexpectedly witty story of a strong-willed man and two equally strong-willed women.

Reynolds (Day-Lewis) is a dressmaker to the rich and famous in 1950s London.  His unmarried sister Cyril (Lesley Manvilla) runs their home and takes care of business affairs.  On a foray to a provincial resort cafe, Reynolds is taken by the breakfast waitress Alma (Vivky Krieps), and brings her back to London with him.  Barely tolerated at first by Cyril, Alma becomes Reynold’s muse – until she isn’t.

In the movie’s first two minutes, Anderson establishes Alma as vibrant, Reynolds as fastidious and Cyril as commanding.  Phantom Thread is about the three characters’ relative power in the interpersonal relationships.  Alma starts at the very bottom, but changes the power balance in a quite novel way.

Daniel Day-Lewis creates a wonderfully watchable character in Reynolds.  He uses his creativity as an excuse for license to get his way in every regard.  Cyril indulges Reynolds and keeps him in a cocoon.  He says that a distraction at breakfast can ruin his productivity for an entire day.  Anderson heightens the volume of breakfast noises to show how grating the sound of buttering toast is to Reynolds.  It’s very funny.

Reynolds is so obsessive that, when he brings a date back to his place, he DRESSES her instead of undressing her.

The formidable Cyril is as chilly as February in the Yukon.  She is a woman of very few words, but her cutting observations and acid reactions are very, very funny.  The great actress Lesley Manville gets the most out of very brief lines – and, often, a mere silent look.  Manville’s performance is reason enough to see Phantom Thread.

The Luxembourgian actress Krieps (never thought I would write the adjective Luxembourgian) has received much critical buzz.  She is adequate as Alma, but I wouldn’t cross the street to see her next movie.

Reynolds adorns women in impressive dresses throughout Phantom Thread – the costume design is stellar. Anderson’s frequent collaborator, Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead, supplies a beautiful score.  The total effect of visual imagery and music is opulent, so opulent as to remind me of Max Ophuls’ The Earrings of Madame de… and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard.

I saw Phantom Thread at a special SFFILM screening (70mm print!) with Paul Thomas Anderson in attendance.  Anderson said that he set out to make a gothic romance like Hitchcock’s Rebecca.   The kernel of the story was a strong-willed man who becomes nicer when laid low by illness – and his wife prefers him that way.  Anderson said that he was further inspired by the period British films The Passionate Friends and I Know Where I’m Going.

In a very nice touch, Anderson dedicated Phantom Thread to his late friend, the director Jonathan Demme.

Phantom Thread is a beautiful and witty film – one of the best of 2018

THE POST: riveting thriller and revelatory personal portrait

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Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in THE POST

The Post may be a docudrama, but it plays as a thriller and an astonishingly insightful portrait of Katharine Graham by Meryl Streep. It’s one of the best movies of the year – and one of the most important.

Essentially, this movie is about a corporate decision, but master storyteller Steven Spielberg sets it up as a tick-tock, high stakes thriller.  Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Streep) must decide whether to publish the Pentagon Papers at a moment when her company is most vulnerable to market forces and government intimidation.  Nothing less than the American principle of freedom of the press hangs in the balance.

The Post also delivers the personal and feminist transformation of Katharine Graham, learning to move beyond her Mad Men Era roles as wife/mother/socialite andto , for the first time, assume real, not titular, command of a business empire.  And she goes All In on the ballsiest gamble any CEO could make.  To say that Streep brings Graham to life is inadequate.  Streep IS Graham. It sometimes seems like Streep can get an Oscar nomination without even making a movie, but this performance is one of Streep’s very best.

Spielberg surrounds Streep with a dazzling cast.  Tom Hanks lowers the pitch of his voice and becomes the swashbuckling editor Ben Bradlee.  Tracy Letts gives us another fine performance, this time as Graham’s financial guru Fritz Beebe.  As Bradlee’s second wife Tony, Sarah Paulson ignites a monologue with her piercing eyes.

Bruce Greenwood is quite brilliant as Robert McNamara, Graham’s old friend and the architect (and unwilling sta) of the Pentagon Papers. Greenwood is such an overlooked actor, and he’s so reliably good (he was even good in Wild Orchid, for Chrissakes).

The Pentagon Papers was the 7,000-page secret official history of the American involvement in the Vietnam War. Commissioned by then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the Pentagon Papers chronicled the years of bad decisions by the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations and, especially, the deceitfulness of JFK’s and LBJ’s public optimism about the War.  The truth was that the US government knew that the war was unwinnable and that it was only prolonged because nobody knew how to get out while saving face.  The US President in 1971, Richard Nixon, was following the same course, unnecessarily wasting the lives of another 20,000 Americans during his term of office; the ruthless Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger were desperate to keep the Pentagon Papers secret.  A private sector defense expert, Daniel Ellsberg, had access to the Pentagon Papers and sought to have them published, and The Post tells this story, which takes the audience from a jungle firefight into the courtroom of the US Supreme Court.

Baby Boomers will appreciate being transported back to quaint 1971 technology: typewriters, one-page-at-a-time Xerox machines, rotary pay phones, real typeset and ink presses.  (And cigarette smoking in restaurants and cigars in the workplace.)

I’ve also written an essay on some of the historical figures and events depicted in The Post: historical musings on THE POST.

The Post is worth seeing for Streep’s performance, for the history (incredibly important at this moment in the nation’s history) and for the sheer entertainment value.  One of the year’s best.

 

historical musings on THE POST

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Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts and Tom Hanks in THE POST

Watching The Post kindled some thoughts on the historical figures depicted in the movie.

Fritz Beebe, played by Tracy Letts in the movie, was a valued business advisor to Katharine Graham. Decades later Katharine Graham told Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air that Beebe made a half-hearted argument against publishing the Pentagon Papers; his intentional lack of forcefulness gave her the space to make the decision to publish. This dynamic is captured perfectly in The Post.  In the same interview, Katharine Graham gives her own version of the Pentagon Papers publication by the Washington Post; the movie hews closely to this account.

Watching Bruce Greenwood’s fine performance as former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reminded me of the Errol Morris documentary: The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. In 2003, Morris got McNamara to sit in front of a camera and spill the “lessons learned” from his Vietnam War mistakes. It was an exercise in confession for McNamara. But when listening to McNamara’s “if we had only known then…”, I kept remembering, enraged, that we DID know then. And the Pentagon Papers showed that McNamara, especially, knew most of this stuff then. I have never been so infuriated leaving a theater.

Now Tom Hanks in The Post and Jason Robards in All the President’s Men are wonderful as the swashbuckling editor Ben Bradlee. If you want a dose of the real Ben Bradlee, search YouTube for “Ben Bradlee Charlie Rose” – you’ll find a 53-minute 1996 interview with Bradlee, including his first-hand account of the Pentagon Papers episode.

If you perform a Google Image search for “ben bradlee antoinette pinchot”, you’ll find the real photo of Ben Bradlee and Antoinette “Tony” Pinchot Bradlee with Jack and Jackie Kennedy.  In the movie, Tom Hanks and Sarah Paulson are Photo-shopped into the picture in the Bradlee’s Georgetown townhouse.

Daniel Ellsberg (portrayed in The Post by Matthew Rhys) is still around and has written a new book. Last month, Ellsberg agave his own Fresh Air wide-ranging interview, in which he detailed the painstaking process of Xeroxing the 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers one page at a time and cutting the “Top Secret” off each page with scissors.

And to nitpick, here’s the one historical inaccuracy that I could find in the movie – some New York City hippie protester in 1971 gives Mario Savio’s famous “bodies on the gears” speech, which Savio actually delivered seven years earlier in Berkeley .

I, TONYA: we can laugh, but must not judge

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Margot Robbie in I, TONYA

The riotously funny docucomedy I, Tonya relives the tawdry story of figure skating star Tonya Harding, brought to disgrace when her supporters injured her competitor Nancy Kerrigan.  Margot Robbie (significantly glammed down) is exceptional as Tonya Harding.

Harding, of course, came from scruffy working class roots in Portland.  With disadvantages of class and poor education,  Tonya was unequipped to navigate a world dominated by middle and upper classes.  In I, Tonya, she refers to herself as a redneck and acts like trailer trash – really unapologetic trailer trash.

But I, Tonya adds another level to Tonya’s story.   In I, Tonya, Tonya’s mother LaVona (Allison Janney) is more than a driven, severe stage mother – she’s unrelentingly abusive, both emotionally and physically.  To make matters worse, Tonya escapes LaVona’s perpetual nastiness by running away into the arms of Jeff (Sebastian Stan) and his chronic domestic violence.  At one point, Tonya reflects, “All I knew was violence“.

The beauty and effectiveness of Steven Rogers’ screenplay is that we can laugh at misadventures of these folks while deeply sympathizing with Tonya – scarred and shaped by abusive experiences.  The characters all break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience – very effective here.  Rogers and director Craig Gillespie maintain a perfect balance between the laughs and the abuse – sometimes at the same time.  This is the Aussie Gillespie’s best work.

Alison Janney in I, TONYA

LaVona’s spiteful bile is so extreme that it’s darkly funny.  Allison Janney, who is superb as this poisonous woman,  is probably America’s least vain actor. And nobody has ever had a better sense of comic timing.  She made me laugh out loud the first time I saw her, in 1998’s Primary Colors, and she keeps the audience guffawing in I, Tonya.

Jeff’s friend Shawn (a brilliant Paul Walter Hauser), who “masterminds” the attack on Kerrigan,  is so catastrophically stupid that he is unable to comprehend the profundity of his own stupidity.  In the closing credits, we get to glimpse the real LaVona and the real Shawn.

Julianne Nicholson is excellent as Tonya’s hyper-polite coach.  In a very brief role, Ricky Russert brilliantly brings out the glorious combination of panic and idiocy of “hit” man Shane Stant.

Once Tonya has been hounded by the media and suffered complete public humiliation, she faces the camera and says to the audience, “you have been my abusers“.  It’s not preachy or overdone, and this brief moment is crisp and unforgettable.  We have been laughing at her, but who are we to judge this survivor of family violence?

I, Tonya is captivating combination of sympathy and hilarity – and one of the year;s best films.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME: first love in a luscious Italian summer

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Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

Call Me by Your Name is an extraordinarily beautiful story of sexual awakening set in a luscious Italian summer.  The film is gorgeous and magnificently well-acted, but flawed.

Each year, the family of 16-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) spends the summer in a villa in Northern Italy.  Elio’s father is an American professor of ancient Greek and Roman culture, and each summer he invites a different grad student to live in their villa and work on scholarly pursuits.  In this summer of 1981, that lucky grad student is the 26-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer).  Elio is attracted to Oliver, who is a closeted gay man. Oliver is attracted to Elio, but initially resists Elio’s overtures.  What follows between the two of them is an enthralling and authentic exploration of first love.

Timothée Chalamet is really perfect as Elio, a musical prodigy who is beating off the girls with a stick.  Even really handsome and talented 17-year-olds have some awkwardness, especially while they’re trying too hard to be cool.  Chamalet captures that perfectly, along with the obsessive longing of a first romance.  (Chalamet is also in Lady Bird, where he plays the dreamy kid who plays in a band, the object of Lady Bird’s desire.)  Armie Hammer is also superb as the more worldly Oliver, whose external confidence masks inner conflicts.

Timothée Chalamet in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

The story of the two main characters would have made a perfect film, but famed screenwriter James Ivory adds some distracting implausibility with the other characters.  First, there are Elio’s impossibly cool and understanding parents (Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) who practically push their teen son into the arms of an older man; nobody has parents like that, especially TWO of them.  (And, yes, I did understand the dad’s motivation, made almost explicit in his final monologue).  Second, Elio hurts the feelings of a girl (in a way that almost every male has hurt some girl).  Later, she forgives him and it’s all made to be okay.  This is just too convenient for Elio, and I didn’t buy it.

And then there’s one of my own movie pet peeves.  I generally despise musical interludes in movies, when the dialogue is suspended and a song is played over a montage of imagery.  This usually indicates a lack of imagination in the story-telling.  A movie gets negative bonus points from me when the music is an insipid pop ballad.  In Call Me by Your Name, there are two such Euro-pop interludes.

On the other hand, the depiction of the Italian countryside, with its rustling breezes, orchards heavy with fruit, ancient buildings and  is pure travel porn.  I think that The Wife would have walked out of Call Me by Your Name – not because she wouldn’t have liked it – but to make reservations for a return to Tuscany.  Director Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash, I Am Love) has a gift for making his native Italy unbearably attractive on the screen.  Between the work of Guadagnino and Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), Italy has been well-celebrated in recent films.

Call Me By Your Name is a very good movie, and the core story of Elio and Oliver is great cinema.

THE SHAPE OF WATER: an operatic romance (and it’s inter-species)

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Sally Hawkins in THE SHAPE OF WATER

The Shape of Water is an epic romance from that most imaginative of filmmakers,  writer-director Guillermo del Toro.  The Shape of Water may become the most-remembered film of 2017.

The story is set in 1962 Baltimore. Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is a mute woman who lives in a dark apartment above an aging downtown movie palace.  She and her friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer) work as a janitors on the graveyard shift at a government research laboratory.  The Cold War adventurer Strickland (Michael Shannon), a tower of menace, has captured an amphibian creature from the Amazon and has brought him in chains to a tank at the laboratory.  The male creature, in the approximate form of a human, has dual breathing systems, so he can survive both under water and on the surface; it develops that he also has intelligence, feelings and even healing powers.

The scientist Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) wants to study Amphibian Man to discover how his species could benefit humanity.  Strickland, on the other hand, wants to rush into killing and dissecting the creature.  Strickland is a sadist, who enjoys brutalizing Amphibian Man with his cattle prod.

Elisa is repulsed by Strickland’s torture, and she feel compassion for Amphibian Man.  She starts showing Amphibian Man some kindness.  As Amphibian Man becomes more trusting of Elisa, he feels gratitude for her kindness.  She cares about him, too, first with pity and then with the fondness of a pet owner.  As Amphibian Man’s intelligence and feelings become more apparent, the two become more equal, and their mutual fondness blossoms into passion.

But Strickland’s nefarious plans force Elisa and her supporters into a race against the clock to save Amphibian Man.  And so we’re off on a thriller, with a heist-like rescue and a chase, culminating in an ending of operatic scale.

Now this is a romance that transcends species.  I totally bought into this.  If you can’t, the movie is less moving and much, much more odd.  Romance is often consummated sexually, and this one is, too.

Sally Hawkins is not conventionally pretty, yet del Toro didn’t make Elisa a stereotypical spinsterish ugly ducking.  Elisa is vital, with a rich inner life, a wicked sense of humor and cultural interests, and who expresses herself sexually.  She may only be a night janitor with a disability, but that doesn’t define her.  Elisa’s defiant gaze at Strickland is one of the movie’s highlights.

Hawkins’ performance is a tour de force.  Shannon makes for a formidable villain, especially when he clenches his own gangrenous fingers.  Michael Stuhlbarg, Octavia Spencer and Nick Searcy (Art Mullen in Justified) are all excellent.

Richard Jenkins’s performance as Elisa’s neighbor Giles is very special.  This is a very vulnerable man, with his sexuality trapped in a closet, his growing sensitivity to his own aging and his career as a commercial artist becoming obsolete.  With his episodes of resolute denial spotted with instances of inner strength, both the character and the performance are very textured.  And Giles’ eccentric reactions to the story are very, very funny.

I highly recommend Guillermo del Toro’s interview on NPR’s Fresh Air , in which he discusses many of his choices in developing the story of The Shape of Water, including shaping the character of Elisa and the inspirations from The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  In the interview, del Toro explains that, if this movie were made in 1962, Strickland would have been the hero, the Cold Warrior protecting humans from the alien creature.  Instead of course, the heroes of The Shape of Water are a woman with a disability, a woman of color, a gay man and a commie spy and, of course, a monster.

None of the characters have any reason to envision that white male supremacy, oppression of gays or the Cold War would end, or even be tempered, in their lifetimes.  It’s a graphic time capsule, with the grand movie palace empty, pushing out a sword and sandal epic to compete in futility with the small screen offerings of Dobie Gillis, Mr. Ed and Bonanza.  It’s a world in which the coolest thing imaginable is a teal 1962 Cadillac De Ville.

Here’s where Guillermo del Toro’s imagination triumphs. This story could not be told as well in a novel, on stage or in any other artistic medium. It has to be a movie.

This is filmmaking at its most essential and most glorious. Del Toro, along with production designer Paul B, Austerberry and art director Nigel Churcher, create a set of vivid and discrete worlds, each with its own palette. There are Elisa’s and Giles’ dark apartments, the brooding institutional green of the laboratory and the bright mid-century modern domain of Strickland’s family.

This is a beautiful movie.  Between del Toro’s filmmaking genius and Hawkins’ performance, The Shape of Water is a Must See, one of the best movies of the year.

THE DISASTER ARTIST: deluded incompetence makes for successful comedy

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Dave Franco and James Franco in THE DISASTER ARTIST

 

Really bad movies can be so unintentionally funny that they are fun to watch and mock. Such is the case with The Room, which has risen to number 2 in my Bad Movie Festival.  The Room was a vanity project that was written and directed by its star, Tommy Wiseau, with his ravaged face, stringy hair and undeterminable accent. To fully appreciate Tommy Wiseau’s performance, search YouTube for “you’re tearing me apart Lisa!” – or watch The Disaster Artist, James Franco’s hilarious docucomedy about the making of The Room.

The primary element in The Disaster Artist (and the primary appeal of The Room) is that Wiseau is absolutely confident in his own talent, despite no validation from any one else.

Wiseau himself is a mystery. No one knows where he was born, how old he is or how he amassed enough of a fortune to blow six million dollars on making The Room.  He is so psychologically non-functional, he couldn’t have made millions on his own.  His accent betrays an origin someplace between Belgrade and St. Petersburg, even though he ridiculously claims the accent is from New Orleans.

Anyone who has watched The Room will marvel at James Franco’s brilliance in capturing all of Wiseu’s awkward and offbeat mannerisms.  It’s a remarkable, All In comedic performance and the core of the film.

The Disaster Artist is based on the book by Greg Sestero, Wiseu’s friend/muse/roommate, on the making of the movie.  Sistero is played by Dave Franco (and Sistero’s girlfriend Amber is played by Dave Franco’s real-life wife, Alison Brie).  The entire cast, which includes Seth Rogen and Jacki Weaver is excellent.

This is a very successful comedy.  The Disaster Artist is one of the funniest movies of the year.

Note:  The end of The Disaster Artist features a split screen for the very worst scenes of The Room side-by-side with the re-enactments by the cast of The Disaster Artist.  And make sure you wait through ALL the end credits for an encounter between the real Tommy Wiseau and James Franco in character as Wiseau.

Note #2:  Yes, I have turned to The Wife and bellowed, “you’re tearing me apart, Lisa!”

COCO: the splendor of authenticity

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COCO

Pixar movies are known for their exquisite animation.  Pixar movies soar when they have excellent stories (the Toy Story trilogy).  Coco, Pixar’s moving and authentic dive into Mexican culture, soars.

Set in Mexico during Dia de los Muertos, the boy Miguel longs to become a musician, an avocation his family forbids because a musician ancestor once abandoned the family.  He tries to follow his passion, but becomes trapped in the world of the dead.  He must get the blessing of a dead family member to return to the living.  Just when we think we know the score, there is an unexpected plot twist.

The colors of the Mexican town in daytime perfectly capture the look and feel of Mexico.  But the scenes in nighttime and in the world of the dead, explode on the screen, and it’s hard to decide which is the most spectacular.  There’s an overhead shot of the town cemetery on the night of Dia de los Muertos, with the glow of candles from every grave.  The worlds of the living and of the dead are separated by a bridge of flowers made out of marigold petals.  And then there’s Pepita, a giant winged panther in the world of the dead.

The exploration into Mexican culture is authentic because it is so firmly anchored to the Mexican sense of family.   There are no stereotypes here, and all of the characters look far more Mexican than do many faces on Spanish-language television.  There are many inside chuckles, such as the character of Ernesto de la Cruz perfectly capturing the Mexican singing movie star of black and white films.  There is, of course, the focus on the Mexican version of Dia de los Muertos with its ofrendas and criaturas. 

COCO
Courtesy of ©2017 Disney•Pixar. All Rights Reserved.

The three main adult characters are superbly voiced by Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt and Alanna Ubach.  We also hear the voices of Edward James Olmos, Cheech Marin and Luis Valdez.  The only decidedly non-Latino voice talent is John Ratzenberger, who has still voiced a character in every Pixar film.

Emotionally moving, culturally authentic and visually stunning, Coco is splendid in every way.  Coco is the best Pixar film in years and one of the best movies of the year.

DARKEST HOUR: certainty in a moment of uncertainty

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Gary Oldman in DARKEST HOUR

A less-remembered moment in human history makes for a great story in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, which takes place entirely in May 1940, the period after the German blitzkrieg through the Low Countries on the way to Paris and just before the Dunkirk evacuation.

It’s not always easy today to remember that there was a time when it appeared that Hitler would win WW II. In May 1940, the Nazi empire had swallowed essentially all of Central and Western Europe except for France, which was teetering on the verge of imminent surrender. The entire British Army was trapped, surrounded on a French beach across the Channel.

The UK was both damaged and entirely isolated. Stalin had split Poland with Hitler, and it was over a year before Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. It was also 19 months before Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war.  With no hope of external help, Winston Churchill even publicly contemplated the war being carried on by the Commonwealth nations after the German conquest and occupation of the island of Britain.

in Darkest Hours, Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman in a superb, Oscar-worthy performance) has just become Prime Minister. At the time, Churchill was a 66-year-old who had peaked at forty.  He had been a superstar daredevil in his twenties who squandered his celebrity in a career dotted by Bad Gambles, where he had repeatedly gone All In and lost all of his chips. By 1940 he was well-known for engineering a horrific military disaster at Gallipoli in WW I and for a series of political party changes. Not the confidence-inspiring figure we think of today.

So in this situation, what to do? One option was to embark on what one could rationally conclude would be a suicidal course of waging aggressive war and risking obliteration. Another option would be to negotiate the most favorable surrender with Nazi Germany.  No good choices here.

If Churchill begins trash talking the Germans just before their invasion, is that delusional or intellectually dishonest? Or a moment of inspired leadership?

Churchill’s selection as Prime Minister was forced on the former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his top foreign affairs expert Lord Halifax, and the two were understandably concerned that Churchill might be leading the nation to its (literal) ruin. They lay a trap, but great politicians like Lincoln and Churchill do not let themselves be trapped.

The core of Darkest Hour is Churchill probing for a solution while under the most oppressive stress and pressure. In Darkest Hour, his outsized personality and eccentricities sprinkle the story with humor. Churchill, well-known for consuming a bottle of champagne with both lunch and dinner and working, slugging down brandy and whisky,  late into the night, is shown having breakfast eggs with champagne and whisky. When the King, at lunch, asks him, “How do you manage drinking during the day?”, Winston replies, “Practice”.

Oldman is as good as any of the fine actors who have played Churchill.  Kristin Scott-Thomas is especially excellent (no surprise here) as Churchill’s wife of then 32 years, Clementine.  Lily James (Lady Rose in Downton Abbey) is appealing as the fictional secretary through whose eyes the audience sees the private Churchill. Ben Mendelsohn is very good as King George VI, who has watched Churchill’s career to date askance. Stephen Dillane is particularly good as Lord Halifax,

There is one especially touching, but wholly phony scene with a “poll” in the Underground, but, other than that, Darkest Hour is very solid history.

Joe Wright is a fine director, and, here, has selected a moment in history that has sparked an exceptionally good movie. I saw Darkest Hours with a multiplex audience, which erupted into a smattering of applause at the end.