Movies
In places, Marriage Story has the same vibe as Woody Allen's Interiors, in the sense that it showcases a director reaching just out of their comfort zone in a self-conscious attempt to make a Great Movie, and visibly straining in the process. The scenes unfold in artfully restrained long takes girded with stately camerawork focused on blood-letting performances—it's practically begging the Bergman Scenes from a Marriage comparisons, but here I am making the Allen-compared-to-Bergman comparison, so... I dunno. It's all just so deliberate and airtight, and all of its biggest flourishes feel like Baumbach sat down and said, "Now here's where I have to write an epic, ugly argument," and "Here's the big courtroom scene," and "This is the place where I put in the monologue about gender inequality," etc. With apologies to Baumbach, who it seems has very much lived this in real life, there's nothing of the spontaneity and molten hostility of the great "marriage on the rocks" films, i.e. Before Midnight, Allen's own Husbands and Wives, and the like, settling instead for grand gestures that approximate the form of these movies rather than coming up with a living document of its own. Which is not to say that this movie isn't good—it is! Very good at times! Johansson and Driver give top-tier performances, the writing is the bleeding-edge sharp typical of all Baumbach movies, and the movie is both hysterically funny and achingly sweet at times. But all of the best material occurs when the movie untenses its shoulders and unbuttons its collar, so to speak, and forgets about its ambitions: a lengthy comic interlude involving an accidental knife wound, a handful of scenes involving the screwball-paced casual sniping of creative-types hanging out with one another—basically, when the movie is content to be another Baumbach feature rather than trying to be the Baumbach feature. Unabashedly love Driver's character's barely reigned in contempt for driving, though—solidarity, brother. Grade: B
A lot of people have already noted that the romantic half of this movie is a lot less interesting than the "I'm a disembodied hand trying to claw my way back to my body" half. Fewer people have mentioned that both halves are basically in the service of nothing but some melancholic mood piece fluff—the whole movie cross-cuts between these two timelines until we basically get to the inevitable reunion and then... that's basically it? There's a coda that makes a callback to a significant moment earlier in the film, and then there's a revelation about the protagonist's childhood. But the movie never gave me any reason to care about any of this. Maybe there's a metaphor here, but I dunno, I didn't see it. That said, the animation is amazing, and I am very partial to the hand's whole "Steadfast Tin Soldier"-esque journey, which is both familiar and strange in some delightful ways. Grade: B
I appreciate that a director with the stature of Linklater has been consistently willing to work on projects that defy conventional ideas of "importance." Where'd You Go, Bernadette isn't really the kind of movie people are mourning when they talk about the shrinking space for mid-budget films in the modern studio landscape, but it is absolutely the kind of movie most in danger of going extinct from this economic reality: crowd-pleasing, sentimental dramedies without much by the way of thematic ambition on their minds, imperfectly scripted but impeccably acted—you know, like We Bought a Zoo and that kind of thing. This is basically Linklater's We Bought a Zoo, only a little better because it's animated by a typically great Cate Blanchett and a ridiculously watchable Bill Crudup, as well as some pretty interesting material regarding architecture and mental health on the fringes of the plot. It's still a little goofy in places, and the last thirty minutes or so don't work in the slightest. But I had a good time with a lot of the other pieces here. Grade: B-
It doesn't quite have the bite of some of the previous Dardenne brothers movies (side note: what's up with Kid with a Bike being virtually ignored in the end-of-decade lists? EXPLAIN, film critics community!), but The Unknown Girl is still an engaging little gumshoe movie with its boots planted in the textures of the Dardennes' social realism. I enjoyed it. Grade: B+
It's clear that Scorsese and Co. put a lot of time into archival research, assembling this movie from mostly preexisting footage, some of it rarely seen before, others from better, more lively documentaries. It's fine that the movie is never as live-wire as something like Dont Look Back, because how could it be? The new interviews the movie gets—with old folkies like Joan Baez and some pretty obscure characters like the (extremely enthusiastic!) studio tech who helped record Highway 61 Revisited, as well as the man himself—are decently candid; Baez in particular is upfront about the extent to which Dylan personally hurt her with his erratic mid-'60s behavior, which is a perspective that's not often explored in the "Dylan goes electric" mythology, and I'll be honest that watching this documentary was the first time it occurred to me that I'd probably be a lot more fun to hang out with Joan Baez than with Bob Dylan. In fact, in general the movie walks a decently impressive tightrope between taking seriously the reasons why people felt betrayed by Dylan's abandonment of the folk revival scene while also not denying the small-minded stodginess that underlined a lot of that reaction, too. As a PBS-style piece of informative filmmaking, it's a great introduction to Dylan's early career, with enough obscure/new info sprinkled in to keep the veterans happy. As a piece of cinematic art, it's nothing special. Grade: B
Television
Netflix Bloat is a real thing, and it's a shame to see it happen to my boy Errol. At its core, Wormwood is a classic Morris piece in the vein of The Thin Blue Line about epistemology and the hall of mirrors one walks down when you challenge the modern authority state for the truth—this one centered around the officially accidental death of CIA employee Frank Olson that was not unlikely an assassination on the part of the CIA. It's a gripping premise and yields some fascinating material, especially in its first and final episodes; Eric Olson, Frank's son, is the sort of tragic hero at the center of this series, whose quest for the truth is bound to be confounded by the tenacity of the powers that be in keeping an air of ambiguity, and Morris does a good job of showing just how broad a net "the powers that be" actually is, especially in the final episode, where Seymour Hersh, in a completely bananas interview, basically tells Morris to his face that he knows what Morris and Olson want to know but that he won't out of a commitment to standards of journalistic integrity—which of course raises all sorts of fascinating and bitter questions about the true purpose of journalistic standards and the extent to which they truly are capable of speaking truth to power. So that's all great. BUT. There's absolutely nothing here that warrants a six-episode, 256-minute miniseries. This would have been a great feature film, but at the length that it is, it's too long at least twice over, and large stretches of time are padded out with redundant and somewhat extraneous reenactments, seemingly just for the purpose of making this long enough to be a series rather than a rich feature. At times, Wormwood even becomes something I never thought I'd say about a Morris project: tedious. It's super unfortunate, because there is some terrific stuff here. Grade: B-
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