CINEMATIC Review

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ISLE OF DOGS   ***

Wes Anderson

2018

IDEA:  In the future, the Japanese city of Megasaki has banished all dogs to Trash Island. Defying the censorious government, a boy travels to the island to find his lost pet.

BLURB:  An aesthetic marvel and an exercise in cultural fetishism, Isle of Dogs vividly demonstrates Wes Anderson’s breathtaking artistry as well as his incorrigible ethnocentrism. That the film’s ornately designed, elaborately choreographed visuality is largely constructed from signifiers of Japanese culture makes the two qualities difficult to separate. Is this art of the Western colonizing gaze, or reverent pastiche that tacitly acknowledges the vexed identity of a hybrid, globalized world? Anderson’s brand of hermetically-sealed whimsy muddies the conclusion. Despite its echoing of Japan’s feudal and military pasts and its depiction of autocracy, Isle of Dogs severs itself from the historical world enough that it mostly registers as pure cinematic invention, a fastidious pop-art medley of multiple visual idioms that are reconfigured into something that exceeds national specificity. But if the film makes a case for itself aesthetically – and it must be said that Anderson’s baroque decoupage of split-screens, text, scrolling dollies, and practically cubist organization of space constitutes his most astonishing formal achievement yet – it is less forgivable in areas relating to representational politics. Most egregious is the linguistic divide that neatly cleaves characters into English-speaking audience surrogates and Japanese-speaking Others. It is within this scheme that a white American becomes the film’s driving agent of change. Superficial or not, Isle of Dogs is best appreciated as a dazzling display of modernist aesthetic precision, a surface value befitting a film where culture-as-ornamentation takes precedence.

DOWNSIZING   **1/2

Alexander Payne

2017

IDEA:  In the near future, a technology exists that gives humans the ability to shrink themselves down to five inches, allowing them to live luxuriously while reducing their carbon footprints. Unsurprisingly, the seemingly utopian idea has major pitfalls.

BLURB:  Downsizing exemplifies a kind of original, earnest social message movie currently in short supply in Hollywood, backed by an equally rare conceptual ambition. There is something admirable and refreshing about the unfussy directness of its appeals for altruism, civil responsibility, and environmental consciousness at a time when those things seem to matter more than ever, delivered through a compelling science-fiction scenario that sees hope in human endeavor even as it concedes that our destructive tendencies will, in all likelihood, decimate the planet and possibly the human race. If anything is disappointing about Payne’s film, it’s how ultimately attenuated his speculative (mini)world feels. Logistics and political nuances are more or less abandoned in favor of the film’s broad-strokes metaphor, which considers the wider implications of “downsizing” without really accounting for the operations of the universe in which it takes place. Perhaps inevitably, the myriad rich possibilities of the idea remain largely unexplored, reducing the film to a somewhat gauche tale of a (white, male) individual’s moral education, with an occasional adherence to archetypes that verges on the uncomfortable. Hong Chau at least assuages some of the sourness. Playing the film’s most complex and well-rounded character, the actress makes Ngoc Lan Tran a woman of vital, agential fortitude who resists categorization as either noble victim or enlightened redeemer, and she provides the film with a verisimilitude lacking in its more facile machinations. If it weren’t for her, Downsizing’s clarion call might’ve sounded more like a hollow echo.

THE SHAPE OF WATER   ***

Guillermo del Toro

2017

IDEA:  A mute janitor forms a relationship with a mysterious sea creature being detained at the government research facility where she works.

BLURB:  Like its protagonists, who learn how to live by imitating, internalizing, and becoming cinema, The Shape of Water constitutes an act of mimesis. In ornate fashion, del Toro frames his film as a film, proudly and affectionately emulating the styles and tropes of the classical Hollywood cinema that has fueled his creative passion. The result is a gleaming mash note that pays homage to a variety of genres in an exuberant if unevenly imagined pastiche. In any case, it is unmistakably the work of del Toro’s puckish mind: the writer-director suffuses the generic conventions of his scenarios with a macabre, oddball wit and artist’s attention to visual detail that tend to mitigate the more predictable aspects of his and Vanessa Taylor’s script. What is most delightful, although under-realized, is their mobilization of genre toward (lightly) subversive ends. The monster movie, the romantic melodrama, and the musical become refigured as vehicles for social outcasts, centering and ennobling the kinds of characters who have been historically excluded from the house styles that so enamor del Toro. This would have been more convincing, however, if The Shape of Water itself were more unorthodox. Despite its poignant foregrounding of those marginalized others, it remains stubbornly beholden to the trappings of genre and classical narrative structure, brushing over some of its most outré sensibilities with a factory sheen. Even the wondrously weird interspecies romance, ostensibly the ballast of the film, is overshadowed by busy and routine storytelling mechanics. The Shape of Water is not the sui generis film fantasia it could have been, but it is an endearing, exceedingly well-crafted entertainment that takes after its influences with an infectious conviction.

COCO   ***1/2

Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina

2017

IDEA:  When Miguel is transported to the Land of the Dead after feeling stifled by his family's age-old ban on music, he sets out to find his musician great-great-grandfather and uncover the truth of his heritage.

BLURB:  Coco is so overflowing with heart, energy, ingenuity, and rich cultural detail manifested in dazzlingly intricate audiovisual detail, its scene-by-scene effects are intoxicating. Never mind that it hardly counts among the crispest or most elegant storytelling in the Pixar canon – the film achieves its formidable power through its deeply realized, tangible evocation of Mexican traditions expressed in a celebratory riot of color, music, and pathos. Coco feels like a homegrown product, not an American studio film appropriating cultural signifiers or exoticizing from an imperialist distance, and this makes all the difference. Its effulgent depiction of Día de los Muertos emphasizes not only the spectacular festivity of the holiday but its central importance as a cornerstone of ancestral memory, as an honor to loved ones who have died, but have not been lost. By embroidering song so pervasively into its genealogical journey, the film testifies to music as one of the preeminent channels for memory, along with the photographic arts that also so preoccupy the story. Coco adds the medium of animation to that mnemonic group. All of its myriad loving representations – quilted into a tapestry that unites folklore and 20th-century art with the narrative logic of telenovelas – blaze across opulently designed frames, their essences transmitted to us just as decorated ofrendas and musical heirlooms summon absent people and places. At a certain point, Coco’s overstuffed plot and compulsory heartstring-tugging begin to feel less like symptoms of a kids’-film formula and more like signs of a culture’s vibrant, uncontainable spirit.

THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI   ***

Martin McDonagh

2017

IDEA:  Exasperated by the local police force's failure to turn up the culprit in her daughter's rape and murder, an aggrieved mother rents out three billboards calling out the injustice and proceeds to take matters into her own hands.

BLURB:  There is an undeniable catharsis in watching a splenetic, vengeful Frances McDormand lob Molotov cocktails, both literally and figuratively, at the face of systemic injustice. Her Mildred is an avatar of social outrage boiling over into implacable bellicosity, and she functions as the unfiltered mouthpiece for a disaffection all too familiar to a contemporary American populace. Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri is a channel for the righteous fury she epitomizes that is designed to both stoke and gratify audiences’ own anger about broken justice systems and critically assess the role of such anger in combating them. McDonagh’s irreverent and incendiary handling of the subject matter, however, makes it best suited for the former. The unapologetic coarseness of his dialogue, liberally peppered with epithets, simultaneously rabble-rouses and provides an outlet for so much pent-up frustration. We are thrilled by Mildred’s crusade because it enacts the reckoning with institutional corruption that doesn’t happen in real life; the noxiousness of the law enforcers she has to contend with exacerbates our desire to see her burn it all down. But McDonagh is also rightly (and none-too-subtly) arguing that fire should not be fought with fire, an important maxim to heed but perhaps a challenging one to embrace in the tinderbox of racial and sexual hostilities he’s conjured. Three Billboards etches a complicated moral terrain – decency seems to have atrophied across the board in Ebbing – but McDonagh’s predilection for glibness often makes the film more scabrous cartoon than incisive social study. Still, he delivers salient points about a volatile American climate, and satisfyingly allows strands of forgiveness and atonement to float up from the muck.

THE SQUARE   ***

Ruben Östlund

2017

IDEA:  The chief curator at a contemporary art museum in Stockholm finds his life unraveling after he is robbed just outside the institution.

BLURB:  Boundaries pervade The Square, a mordant dissection of First World piety in which comically permeable facades uphold the illusion of a functioning social contract. Figured as an insular space of cultural elitism, Östlund uses the world of the contemporary art museum as a metonym for a larger Western condition of myopia and complacency, sharply divided from the economic and geopolitical realities for which it purports to vouch. Borders both material and intangible reinforcing such divisions are subject to Östlund’s merciless dismantling. He punctures the veneer of civility and phony humanitarianism embodied by a progressivist West with exquisite unease, delighting in the spectacular deflation of ego and decorum. In its best scenes, such as a post-coitus tussle over a condom or a performance art piece at a swanky gala that turns violent, The Square demonstrates a resonant, nearly anthropological attunement to contemporary social dynamics. Östlund is fascinated with how episodes of discomfort and frustration surface the most unsavory of human tendencies, how the disruption of habit draws out latent impulses and social tensions that destabilize our ordered assumptions, and make chaos of our behavior. Like so many of its European art house forebears, The Square skewers the pompous airs of a privileged class that prides itself on the suppression of such “disruptive” forces. It is superbly adept at doing this. But there is also the sense that in its (often facile) potshots at postmodernism and liberal conscience, it has fallen into a niche of self-importance aligned with the one it criticizes. Questioning the efficacy of art to effect social change is right – but is Östlund’s film a form of activism, or an indulgent artistic exercise merely flattering the tastes of its own rarefied audience? The wider implications of this are worth interrogating, and if The Square doesn't fully get there, it's at least a crafty and provocative prompt.

LADY BIRD   ***1/2

Greta Gerwig

2017

IDEA:  Lady Bird, a restless high school senior, tries to realize her desire to leave Sacramento and her contentious mother for the east coast.

BLURB:  Through the lens of memoir, Greta Gerwig has taken many of the most timeworn ingredients of the high school coming-of-age film and pressed them into something invigorating and self-effacingly unique. What is perhaps most remarkable about Lady Bird, on top of its rare female perspective and exceptional narrative and formal economy, is how Gerwig inflects so many of her fine-tuned beats with a palpable specificity: to place, to politics, to family life, to language. The film thrums with the fond wistfulness of a reminiscence animated by keenly remembered details on a local scale. Each fragment in its nimble structure is a delicately constructed capsule that registers, despite the inevitable comic exaggeration, as lived experience, shaped by the particular sociality of a milieu ingrained in the characters’ day-to-day existences. While Lady Bird chafes against and antagonizes the conditions of her upbringing, Gerwig astutely shows how they are formative to her all the same, elements constitutive of a perceptive creative identity the film itself exemplifies. Her casually acerbic, beguilingly sidewise sensibility always seems to obviate the possibility of triteness; her scenes don’t so much revolve around dramatic incident as behavioral quiddities, and she mingles flippancy and sincerity with such deftness that her sentiments are hardly able to default to the banalities one might expect from the material. Nick Houy’s snappy editing and a beautifully synched ensemble accommodate this offbeat design with ease. They fill out a portrait of self-actualization and ambivalence that is warm, pithy, and as fully-formed as Lady Bird herself might one day be.

THE FLORIDA PROJECT   ***

Sean Baker

2017

IDEA:  The escapades of Moonee, a six-year-old living at a budget motel on the outskirts of Orlando.

BLURB:  In The Florida Project's vibrant but dilapidated America, the Magic Castle is a cheap motel where the economically disenfranchised take up temporary residence, their livelihoods dependent on the same capitalist apparatus that keeps them in near perpetual destitution. Consumer culture materializes in a vast, meretricious, and inescapable landscape around them, whether it’s endless fields of commodity signs drenched in the Florida sun or infomercials that seem to play on repeat indoors, promising personal satisfaction always out of reach. Sean Baker’s film, a rollicking child’s-eye odyssey spun around a grim social realist portrait, is catalyzed by such tensions. It brashly illustrates an ecosystem where human relations are conditioned and strained by the imperatives of capitalism, where institutional strictures burden poor adults while latchkey children turn their crumbling environs into playgrounds. Layering perspectives in the effort to attune us to a milieu that can be at once fantastical, tawdry, and depleting, the film produces a dissonance that is compelling but ungainly. What Baker’s weaving of mischievous play and indigence has in empathy and verve it somewhat lacks in finesse; the antics, which tend to feel cloying and affected, don’t often sit well with the more nuanced social textures that later drown them out, Baker’s ebullient style frequently risking elegance for blunt impact. It is in that bluntness, however, that The Florida Project also sparks to such memorable life, allowing its most wrenching moments of desperation to transform into anthemic resilience, if only fleetingly.