Wicked Little Letters: Hilariously entertaining

Wicked Little Letters (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for relentless, breathtaking profanity and vulgarity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.5.24

You’ve gotta love the cheeky epigram with which director Thea Sharrock opens her mischievous little film:

 

“This is more true than you’d think.”

 

When the newly arrived Rose (Jessie Buckley, right) first moves into the house
adjacent to where Edith (Olivia Colman) lives with her parents, they get along
reasonably well. Alas, that isn't destined to last...

Indeed, the vast majority of Jonny Sweet’s script is based on actual events ... including a couple of details that you’d swear he fabricated. The biggest shift from reality lies in the multi-racial casting, which makes the story more entertaining for us modern viewers.

The setting is the seaside town of Littlehampton, in the early 1920s. Sharrock and Sweet hit the ground running, with prim and proper Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) in the midst of an escalating feud with vulgar and earthy Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley). Their hostility is exacerbated by the fact that their front doors are inches from each other, and their row houses have a common wall (which does little to mute the, um, enthusiastic late-night noises that emanate from the bedroom Rose shares with her lover).

 

The close proximity becomes even more uncomfortable due to shared toilets and baths.

 

Edith, last in a massive line of siblings, still lives with her parents, Edward (Timothy Spall) and Victoria (Gemma Jones). The former is a fire-and-brimstone authoritarian and emotional abuser, a role that Spall plays with terrifying ferocity. Whenever Edith fails to toe some behavioral line, she’s sent to her room to copy Biblical passages 200 times.

 

Edith’s mother long ago gave up trying to change this dynamic, and now meekly refuses to intrude. Jones makes the woman so withdrawn, that’s she’s practically insubstantial.

 

Buckley, in great contrast, throws everything into her performance as Rose, a rowdy Irish migrant with a cheerfully foul mouth that unleashes breathtaking profanities, while enjoying life to the fullest: often in the local pub, smoking, drinking and being the life of the party. Buckley is a total hoot: as much a force of nature as her character.

 

But although unschooled, Rose isn’t stupid. She’s also a sharp judge of character.

 

Her boyfriend Bill (Malachi Kirby), calmer and loyal to the core, loves to play his guitar while paying close attention to local doings. Rose’s young daughter Nancy (Alisha Weir) is a sweet adolescent who adores her mother, and has bonded tightly with Bill.

Women Talking: A grim yet crucial conversation

Women Talking (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, and too generously, despite considerable dramatic intensity, sexual assault, bloody images and profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

A dozen women, of all ages, gather in the upper loft of a massive barn.

 

This feels like a small farming community, and they’re dressed plainly; there’s no sign of modern conveniences. It could be one, two, even three centuries ago.

 

Forced into an impossible decision, the women from two families — from left, Mejal
(Michelle McLeod), Greta (Sheila McCarthy), Neitje (Liv McNeil), Mariche (Jessie Buckley),
Salome (Claire Foy), Autje (Kate Hallett), Ona (Rooney Mara) and Agata (Judith Ivy) —
contemplate a pair of equally life-changing options.

The meeting is prompted by some sort of crisis. But that’s only a catalyst; unhappiness, frustration and even fury have been brewing for a long time. The men in this community have been intolerable for too long, and the women have convened to consider their options: do nothing, leave … or stay and fight back.

A vote is taken, with every female community member weighing in. Because they’re all illiterate, they merely mark an X beneath one of three pencil drawings depicting each option. Their “schooling” has been solely Biblical and heavily evangelical, their compliance dictated by verses burned into their brains.

 

The vote proves a tie, between leaving or fighting back.

 

This small subset of women — from three families — has been tasked with weighing the options, considering consequences, and breaking the tie.

 

Director/scripter Sarah Polley’s moody, expressionistic adaptation of Miriam Toews’ critically hailed 2018 novel is a quietly somber affair that leans toward fable or allegory, but in fact is an explosive shot across the bow of all predatory male behavior.

 

As soon becomes clear, as the ensuing discussion unfolds, this community’s men have — for generations — been cruelly abusing these women physically, emotionally and spiritually. They’ve been raped in the dead of night, regardless of age, after being rendered unconscious by a livestock anesthetic spray.

 

Confronted, the following morning, by the bruised and often bloody results of these late-night assaults, their subsequent anguish has been dismissed — by the men — as the work of Satan, ghosts or “wild female imagination.”

 

This has continued for generations, the women often giving birth to boys who grow up to become men groomed to subsequently rape their own younger sisters.

 

The immediate emergency has been prompted by a failed assault attempt; the attacker was witnessed by potential adolescent victims Autje (Kate Hallett) and Neitje (Liv McNeil). They’re mostly silent during these proceedings, braiding each other’s hair into an intertwined bond, and — unexpectedly — occasionally supplying remarkably perceptive observations.

 

The perpetrator was caught and arrested; all of the community’s men have left to post bail in the nearby town. When they return with the accused, it has been made clear that the women will be expected to forgive him, according to “God’s way.”

 

Hence, the dilemma.

The Courier: Suspenseful espionage saga

The Courier (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated PG-13, for violence, dramatic intensity, brief profanity and fleeting nudity

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.14.21

The more I learn about early 1960s Cold War posturing, and Nikita Khrushchev’s volatility, the more frightened I get in hindsight.

 

Thank God, the adults in the room remained calm and rational.

 

Once Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch, right) agrees to become a spy for MI6,
his initial meetings with Soviet military intelligence Col. Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze)
are the stuff of total anxiety. Over time, though, Wynne blossoms and embraces his
clandestine role.

Director Dominic Cooke’s The Courier, opening today at a theater near you, is adapted reasonably faithfully from actual events; the result is an absorbing slice of old-style British espionage cinema. Cooke’s tone, Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography and Suzie Davis’ impeccable production design strongly evoke classics such as The Ipcress File and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold; indeed, at times this film feels as if it had been made during the same era.

 

Events begin in July 1960, when Soviet military intelligence (GRU) Col. Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) — gravely concerned about Khrushchev’s plans regarding Cuba and nuclear missiles — impulsively approaches a pair of American students on Moscow’s Moskvoretsky Bridge; he hands them a packet of documents and insists they be delivered to the American Embassy.

 

The two young men oblige.

 

In London, we meet business consultant Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley). He exudes aptitude and refinement: the sort of cultured, impeccably dressed British chap who’d smoothly navigate a deal over drinks at a gentlemen’s club. 

 

Cumberbatch makes him the epitome of ordinary: happily married, satisfied with his profession, at ease with life. Wynne isn’t overly intelligent, his dyslexia having hampered formal schooling, but he seems to have made peace with that.

 

In short, Wynne is just the sort of fellow who — thanks to his frequent international business trips — would make the ideal undercover agent, because the Soviets wouldn’t look twice at him.

 

Which is precisely what MI6 operative Dickie Franks (Angus Wright) and CIA agent Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan) propose, to the utterly astonished Wynne. More precisely, they want him to act as the courier conduit to the information Penkovsky wishes to supply to Western powers.

 

Franks and Donovan appeal to Wynne’s patriotism, while also stressing how extremely valuable Penkovsky’s intel is.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things: Why did anybody begin???

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) • View trailer

No stars (Turkey). Rated R, for profanity

By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.25.20

2017’s Mother! was the most boring, insufferably pretentious twaddle I’d seen in years. 

 

I figured a long, long time would pass before something similarly overblown arrived.

 

When Jake (Jesse Plemons, far left) brings his girlfriend (Jessie Buckley, standing) to
meet his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis), their "friendly dinner" quickly
turns increasingly peculiar.

Wrong.

 

Writer/director Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of novelist Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things — debuting on Netflix — actually is worse.

 

For all its failings, Mother! is an obvious allegory that builds to a graspable conclusion. Kaufman’s film offers no such relief in its final act, which grows more aggressively obtuse by the minute. Indeed, he ignores the resolution in Reid’s similarly weird book — which at least partially justifies what has come before — in favor of more eye-rolling stuff ’n’ nonsense.

 

Not 10 minutes into this unbearable 134-minute slog, a little voice in the back of your head will start screaming, “Abandon ship. Now.”

 

Be smart. Pay attention to it.

 

The frustrating thing is, Kaufman isn’t a talent to be ignored. (Sometimes.) His vivid imagination and defiantly non-linear storytelling style exploded with 1999’s Being John Malkovich, brought him an Oscar for 2002’s Adaptation, and demonstrated sheer genius with 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

 

It should be noted, however, that those films found Kaufman working alongside equally outré directors — Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry — who knew how to check the screenwriter’s more ludicrous tendencies. When Kaufman directs his own material — as with 2008’s Synecdoche, New York and 2015’s Anomalisa — the results are unwatchable.

 

As is the case here.

 

Our protagonist and voiceover narrator is an unnamed young woman (Jessie Buckley) who, somewhat against her better judgment, agrees to a day trip to visit boyfriend Jake’s (Jesse Plemons) parents at their secluded farm. She’s been thinking of ending the relationship — she repeatedly informs us, as things proceed — out of, I dunno, boredom, dissatisfaction, whatever.

 

She and Jake chat at length during this initial car trip, as they pass along the bleak and barren Oklahoma countryside. Their conversation rises from the depths of mundane banality, to the heights of philosophical speculation. She’s a quantum physicist — or maybe she’s a poet — or maybe she’s a student with a paper due Wednesday, on “Susceptibility to rabies infection in the sensory dorsal root ganglia neurons.” 

Judy: A faded rainbow

Judy (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, substance abuse, and profanity
By Derrick Bang

This film has moments — quite a few, actually — that are sublime, and not merely due to Renée Zellweger’s mesmerizing portrayal of Judy Garland.

Determined to revive her career with a cabaret tour in London, Judy Garland (Renée
Zellweger) bids what she hopes will be only a temporary farewell to her children,
Lorna (Bella Ramsey) and Joey (Lewin Lloyd).

Everything comes together during such sequences: Zellweger’s performance, scripter Tom Edge’s dialog, cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland’s framing, and director Rupert Goold’s equally sensitive handling of the supporting actors in a given scene. The results are both magical and (frequently) utterly heartbreaking.

If only the entire film could be so assuredly composed.

Such highlights aside, other portions of Judy feel clumsy and ill-conceived: particularly those having to do with Mickey Deans, Garland’s fifth — and most ill-advised — husband. Finn Wittrock’s boyishly giddy performance doesn’t feel the slightest bit genuine, and he tries much, much too hard. Wittrock appears to have been cast for his resemblance to the actual Deans, but that doesn’t get him very far.

It’s quite jarring to see such a false, tin-eared performance alongside Zellweger’s far superior work.

Judy is a distinctly British take on the iconic American film and music star. It’s adapted from Peter Quilter’s play End of the Rainbow, which depicts Garland’s on- and off-stage trials and tribulations during what would become her final series of live performances. She began a five-week cabaret run at London’s Talk of the Town restaurant on Jan. 14, 1969; the results were chaotic, unpredictable, disastrous … and occasionally incandescent, which is why the punters kept purchasing tickets.

That said, late-night cabaret audiences could be brutal; these are far from the refined patrons at concert hall productions.

Zellweger’s all-in portrayal is authentic enough to be frightening. This was Garland at the fragile lowest of low ebbs: twitchy and jittery, her head often bobbing like that of a terrified bird; rambling, dismissive and often incoherent, due to chronic insomnia; beholden to a constant cocktail of uppers, downers, sleeping pills and tranquilizers; and with far too much make-up applied in an effort to conceal a frame so emaciated that it appeared skeletal.