The Zone of Interest: Horrifying, but flawed

The Zone of Interest (2023) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and disturbing content

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Given the alarming rise of antisemitism and Holocaust denial during the past several years, this film’s arrival couldn’t be more timely. Academy voters obviously thought so, and granted it five Oscar nominations.

 

Rudolf (Christian Friedel, standing far left, dressed in white) and his family invite friends
for an afternoon romp in his wife's carefully nurtured garden, all of them oblivious to
what takes place on the other side of the barbed-wire-topped wall at one edge
of their property.

Director/scripter Jonathan Glazer’s extremely loose adaptation of Martin Amis’ 2014 novel is undoubtedly one of the most chilling and memorably haunting movies ever made: an unusual Holocaust story which — like long-ago radio dramas — derives its power from what it makes us imagine.

Amis based his novel’s cold-blooded villain, Paul Doll, on Auschwitz concentration camp commandant Rudolf Höss; Glazer boldly draws directly from history in his depiction of the actual Rudolf (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), their five boisterous children, and the bucolic setting in which they live.

 

“Bucolic,” only by force of disregard.

 

The year is 1943. Glazer opens his film on a charming pastoral scene, as Rudolf and his family are joined by friends for a riverbank picnic. (Actually, this isn’t how the film begins, but I’ll get back to that.) 

 

Everybody returns home after an enjoyable day of sun, splashing in the water, and convivial conversation. Rudolf and his family live in a charming multi-story villa, their every need tended by quietly obedient young women. Hedwig delights in the Edenic garden she has nurtured behind their home, with the assistance of numerous workmen.

 

Glazer stages these outdoor scenes against the tall, barbed-wire-topped concrete wall that runs the length of their property: the most grisly theater backdrop ever imagined, with unspeakable horrors taking place behind this stage’s metaphorical closed curtain. 

 

(The 40-square-kilometer area immediately surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp was designated by the Nazi SS as interessengebiet: the “zone of interest.” Höss and his family did indeed live therein, alongside the camp.)

 

Glazer calmly, clinically — relentlessly — depicts the banality of the day-by-day Höss family life. Hedwig shows flowers and buzzing bees to their infant daughter. Younger son Hans (Luis Noah Witte) plays with toy soldiers and occasionally beats a toy drum; his sisters Heidetraut (Lilli Falk) and Inge-Brigitt (Nele Ahrensmeier) cavort in the small swimming pool their father built, complete with wooden slide.

 

We can’t call their behavior denial; that’s too easy. It’s actually indifference. While evil comes in many forms, casualevil arguably is the worst.

Oppenheimer: Bravura filmmaking

Oppenheimer (2023) • View trailer

4.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity, nudity and strong sexual content

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.21.23

This is, without question, one of the most ambitiously powerful films ever made.

 

Director/scripter Christopher Nolan’s attention to detail, and his flair for dramatic impact, are nothing short of awesome. Viewed on a giant IMAX screen, the result often is overwhelming.

 

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers veteran Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, left), tasked with
running the Manhattan Project, is constantly vexed by the demands that come from
head scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy).

This deep dive into the tortured life of J. Robert Oppenheimer also boasts a panoply of well-sculpted characters: many familiar by reputation (or notoriety), others just as fascinating. All are played by an astonishing wealth of top-flight acting talent.

Best of all, Nolan’s adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer — published in 2005, and written over a period of 25 years — has the political complexity and narrative fascination that we’ve come to expect from Aaron Sorkin and William Goldman. Jennifer Lame’s pow-pow-pow editing also is terrific.

 

All that said, Nolan does himself no favors with a needlessly outré prologue that blends ostentatiously surreal imagery — representing the anxiety-laden guilt and terror that later plagued Oppenheimer — with Ludwig Göransson’s shrieking loud synth score. It’s much too intentionally weird and off-putting.

 

Göransson’s score and the film’s equally thunderous sound effects remain distracting during the first half-hour, obscuring dialogue while we struggle to absorb the initial character and information dump.

 

Nolan eventually settles comfortably into a multifaceted storytelling structure that cuts back and forth between Oppenheimer’s post-WWII security clearance hearing, held in the spring of 1954; and the June 1959 Senate hearings over whether former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman Lewis Strauss would be confirmed as President Eisenhower’s choice pick for U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

 

The former was a one-sided witch hunt deliberately kept out of the public eye, the latter a headline-generating circus very much in the public eye.

 

Oppenheimer, present throughout his 1954 hearing, reads a statement that opens the film’s third — and primary — narrative focus: his own life and career.

 

These sequences, as Oppenheimer’ history unfolds, are filmed in glorious 65mm color. (It remains true: Well-crafted film stock still is more satisfying — sharper, warmer, more vibrant — than digital.) 

 

The Strauss Senate hearings — an event beyond Oppenheimer’s control, in which he plays almost no role, although his presence is felt throughout — is shot in grainier black-and-white. The result feels more sinister and mysterious; first impressions of the key players ultimately prove misleading, as Nolan craftily moves his film into its third act.

 

But that comes much later.

The Forgotten Battle: A bleak, riveting war epic

The Forgotten Battle (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated TV-MA, with R-levels of relentless violence and gore, and dramatic intensity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

The World War II experience, as depicted by Hollywood since the 1940s, logically has focused on the involvement of U.S. troops; during subsequent decades, our expanding impression of the Allied struggle against Nazi forces — on the large and small screen — has been augmented by equally absorbing and informative films from our British cousins.

 

Marinus (Gijs Blom), who betrayed his Dutch comrades by joining the German invaders,
finds his beliefs shaken after a telling conversation with a disillusioned Nazi officer.

But very few English-language productions have acknowledged the greater scope of Allied resistance. Rare exceptions include 1977’s A Bridge Too Far, which takes place in September 1944 and gives equal weight to American, British, Canadian, Polish and Dutch participation in Operation Market Garden; and portions of the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, with similar attention paid to Canadian involvement.

No surprise, then, that it has fallen to Dutch filmmakers to properly depict how the Allied/Nazi clash impacted a considerable portion of the Netherlands.

 

Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s impressively ambitious De slag om de Schelde — re-titled The Forgotten Battle, for its Stateside release — is the second most expensive Dutch film ever made, and the money certainly is visible on the screen. This is riveting, old-style, war-era filmmaking, with hundreds of extras populating production designer Hubert Pouille’s jaw-droppingly expansive sets and locations.

 

The overall tone? Quite grim.

 

The story is set primarily in German-occupied Zeeland, the westernmost province of the Netherlands, following the June 1944 Normandy landings and subsequent incremental advance against Nazi forces. As cleverly illustrated by the interactive map that prologues this film, the Allies’ goal is to open a shipping route to Antwerp, in Belgium, to act as an essential supply channel.

 

As summer passes into autumn, the extremely complex script — credited to van Heijningen, Paula van der Oest, Jesse Maiman, Pauline van Mantgem and Reinier Smit — follows subsequent events through the eyes of three disparate (fictitious) characters.

 

Marinus van Staveren (Gijs Blom), a turncoat Dutch volunteer who joined the Wehrmacht in the naïve belief that Germany would improve conditions in his country, is introduced during a furious battle against Russian forces on the Eastern front. Marinus later wakens in a hospital, more or less intact, and comes to the attention of a disillusioned SS lieutenant, who — after having lost both his legs — has learned just how unscrupulous the Nazi concept of “fair” actually is.

 

“If you tell a lie big enough, and repeat it often enough,” the lieutenant laments, quoting Joseph Goebbels, “eventually people will come to believe it.”

 

(Boy, doesn’t that sound familiar?)

 

The lieutenant still has some juice with his superiors, and — in an unexpected act of benevolence — manages to get Marinus transferred away from the front.

The U.S. vs. Billie Holiday: A missed opportunity

The U.S. vs. Billie Holiday (2020) • View trailer

Three stars. Rated R, for strong drug content, nudity, sexual candor, violence, lynching images and considerable profanity

By Derrick Bang

J. Edgar Hoover has a lot to answer for.

 

He’s name-checked but never actually seen in director Lee Daniels’ harrowing study of jazz chanteuse Billie Holiday’s final tempestuous decade, available via Hulu. But Hoover’s spirit hovers over an early back-room meeting that includes Sen. Joseph McCarthy (Randy Davison), Roy Cohn (Damian Joseph Quinn), Congressman John E. Rankin (Robert Alan Beuth), Congressman J. Parnell Thomas (Jeff Corbett) and a gaggle of other sclerotic, racist martinets determined to make America safe for their wealthy white friends and colleagues.

 

Despite having been assured by her attorney that she'll be sent to a rehab hospital,
Billie Holiday (Andra Day) is horrified to hear the judge sentence her to "a year and a day"
at West Virginia's Alderson Federal Prison Camp.

By — in this case — removing Holiday from the equation.

 

Not a difficult task, given that her well-publicized heroin habit dovetails nicely with the “war on drugs” championed ruthlessly by U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund, much too young for this key role).

 

The concern — a primary focus of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ screenplay, adapted from a chapter in journalist Johann Hari’s non-fiction dissection of the war on drugs, Chasing the Scream — is that Holiday’s signature song, “Strange Fruit,” is “stirring up the masses” (Black and white, it should be mentioned).

 

And, Lord knows, we can’t have that.

 

Daniels’ film is anchored by star Andra Day’s all-in, absolutely mesmerizing portrayal of Holiday: as astonishing an impersonation as could be imagined, even more so given that this is Day’s starring debut. And yes, to anticipate the obvious question: She does all of her own singing … and her replication of Holiday’s ragged, whiskey-soaked, gravel-on-grit delivery is equally impressive.

 

That said, Day isn’t similarly well served by Daniels’ slow, clumsy film, or by some of the odd narrative choices in Parks’ script: most notably a weird framing device involving flamboyantly gay radio journalist Reginald Lord Devine (Leslie Jordan, as a wholly fictitious character), which sets up the flashback that bounces us to February 1947. 

 

It’s a celebratory evening, with Holiday performing before an enthusiastic sell-out crowd at New York’s Café Society, the country’s first racially integrated nightclub. The audience includes Holiday’s friend and occasional lover, Tallulah Bankhead (Natasha Lyonne); her husband Jimmy Monroe (Erik LaRay Harvey); and worshipful ex-soldier Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes).

 

Backstage, we meet Holiday’s loyal family unit: stylist Miss Freddy (Miss Lawrence); hairdresser Roslyn (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), also charged with caring for Billie’s beloved dogs; trumpeter — and frequent heroin partner — Joe Guy (Melvin Gregg); and saxophonist Lester “Prez” Young (Tyler James Williams, all grown up from his TV days in Everybody Hates Chris).

 

The care and attention they pay each other is genuinely touching, throughout the entire film. They’re far more attentive and compassionate than husband Jimmy: merely one of many examples, as we’ll see, of Holiday’s lamentable taste in men.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: A tasty treat

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018) • View trailer 

Four stars. Rated TV-14, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.28.20

Films with excessively long titles generally should be regarded with suspicion.

 

As two classic examples, nothing can be gained from watching 1962’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? or 1967’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad.

 

As the members of the Guernsey book club watch with varying degrees of amusement —
from left, Isola (Katherine Parkinson), Eben (Tom Courtenay), young Eli (Kit Connor),
Amelia (Penelope Wilton) and Dawsey (Michiel Huisman) — Juliet (Lily James, far
right) bravely agrees to taste the infamous potato peel pie.

Happily, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society — exclusive to Netflix — is an entirely different creature: a solid British charmer from director Mike Newell, who brought us Enchanted April, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Mona Lisa Smile. Scripters Don Roos, Kevin Hood and Thomas Bezucha have fashioned a solid adaptation of the best-selling 2008 book by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows: not an easy task, given that it’s an epistolary novel, composed entirely of letters written between characters.

 

(Actually, the book’s creation is a fascinating story unto itself; curious souls are encouraged to research how Shaffer came to write it … but was unable to finish it.)

 

We meet author Juliet Ashton (Lily James) midway through a cross-country tour to promote her newest book; the setting is 1946, in a post-war England just beginning to rebuild itself. She is accompanied by publisher and best friend Sidney Stark (Matthew Goode), a solicitous fellow with the good-natured patience to tolerate his favorite writer’s occasional whims.

 

Such as her impulsive decision, following the exchange of a few letters, to visit the island community of Guernsey. Her curiosity is piqued by a farmer named Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman), who mentions belonging to a local book club dubbed, yes, the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

 

Her departure displeases dashing American GI Mark Reynolds (Glen Powell), whose proposal she has just accepted (too rashly, we suspect). Even so, he graciously agrees to await her return.

 

Juliet’s arrival in Guernsey is greeted with enthusiasm by Dawsey and the other book club members: Eben Ramsey (Tom Courtenay), Amelia Maugery (Penelope Wilton) and Isola Pribby (Katherine Parkinson). Juliet soon learns that the “Society” was concocted during the early days of Guernsey’s German occupation, as a fabricated justification for breaking curfew (briefly revealed in a flashback prologue).

 

Needing to maintain the charade in order to satisfy a Nazi chaperone, the Society continued to meet on a regular basis. Even after their “minder” grew bored and stopped attending, the group realized how much they valued a book’s ability to whisk them away from what had become a bleak and brutal existence.

 

Greyhound: A suspenseful sprint

Greyhound (2020) • View trailer 

Four stars. Rated PG-13, for war-related action, dramatic intensity and fleeting profanity

By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.14.20

It’s a shame grim, real-world events kept this film from traditional theatrical release, because it would’ve been a breath-held, edge-of-the-seat nail-biter.

Krause (Tom Hanks) constantly worries that his inexperience as a wartime
 commander may not be up to the challenge of safeguarding the 37 convoy ships
 under his care.

Although certainly just as suspenseful when viewed at home — via its sole release on Apple TV — director Aaron Schneider’s Greyhound definitely isn’t as intense. Agitated viewers might even hit “pause” on occasion, to quell racing hearts, and you certainly can’t get such relief in a movie theater (which is as it should be).

 

Schneider’s approach is a clever blend of old-school “dire odds” war drama — in the mold of 1961’s The Guns of Navarone and 1968’s Where Eagles Dare — augmented by up-to-the-minute CGI effects. The pacing is taut; Schneider and editors Mark Czyzewski and Sidney Wolinsky don’t waste a second of this crisp 91-minute thriller, which gets the job done and then gets off the stage.

 

Schneider, a veteran cinematographer-turned-director, also has an unerring sense of camera placement, and the careful use of tight close-ups to heighten the drama. Star Tom Hanks has long been adept at taking advantage of such moments; he’s far better than most, at the nuance of wordless concern, flashes of doubt, and grim resolve.

 

Hanks also chooses his projects with care; he’s even more prudent with the ones he elects to script. This is only his third feature writing credit — after 1996’s That Thing You Do and 2011’s Larry Crowne — and his first adaptation. Greyhound is based on popular nautical author C.S. Forester’s 1955 naval thriller, The Good Shepherd, and Hanks’ approach is quite faithful (if unable to match, in such condensed form, the character depth found within the 322-page novel).

 

At the risk of stating the obvious, Forester’s title is far superior — and symbolically apt — than Greyhound. I cannot imagine what Hanks and Sony were thinking.

 

The year is early 1942, a few months after the United States has officially entered World War II. Allied UK forces and the Soviet Union are in constant need of supplies, which must be delivered by sea convoys via the Atlantic Ocean. But the route is patrolled constantly by German U-boats; the most dangerous region is the mid-Atlantic gap dubbed the “black pit,” where ships are out of range of protective air cover.

 

Jojo Rabbit: A cheeky masterpiece

Jojo Rabbit (2019) • View trailer 
Five stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, disturbing images and violence
By Derrick Bang

You’re unlikely to see a more audacious film this year.

The slightest misstep — the most minute mistake in tone — and director/scripter Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Christine Leunens’ Jojo Rabbit would slide into puerile bathos or unforgivably heinous poor taste.

Having just discovered that a young woman (Thomasin McKenzie, as Elsa) has been
concealed behind the wall of an upstairs bedroom for an unknown length of time,
impassioned Hitler Youth acolyte Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is uncertain how to
handle this potentially dangerous situation.

Such a delicate tightrope walk … which Waititi maneuvers with impressive grace, skill and cunning.

Along with his unerring handling of a note-perfect cast.

Satires about Adolf Hitler are rare, and for obvious reasons; the very notion is an artistic mine field. Charlie Chaplin pulled it off, with 1940’s The Great Dictator; so did Mel Brooks, with his Oscar-winning script for 1967’sThe Producers. And now we have an even more daring and impudent skewering of the dread Teppichfresser.

Ten-and-a-half-year-old Jojo Betzler (precocious Roman Griffin Davis, in a stunning acting debut) is introduced as he stares at his reflection in a mirror, dressed in Nazi finery. “Today you join the ranks of the Jungvolk!” he proudly tells himself. “You are in peak mental and physical condition. You have the body of a panther, and the mind of … a brainy panther. You are a shiny example of shiny perfection!”

The setting is the quaint (fictitious) town of Falkenheim, Austria, years into the repressive Nazi rule. Although all signs point to the war’s imminent conclusion, the naïve and credulously gullible Jojo has waited to be old enough to embrace the pervasive propaganda against which he has grown up, by joining the Hitler Youth. He and best friend Yorki (Archie Yates, endearingly cherubic) are tremendously excited by the weekend of “training” that will transform them into hard-charging Nazi warriors.

Except that things don’t quite work out that way. 

The training camp is overseen by the wearily cynical Capt. Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), who’d prefer to lead men to “glorious death” at the front, rather than shepherd “a bunch of little titty-grabbers.” He’s assisted by loyal acolyte Freddie Finkel (Alfie Allen, late of Game of Thrones), far more faithful than intelligent; and Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson, whose deadpan slow takes are to die for), ever-willing to accept and spread the most absurd Nazi myths.

Trouble is, Jojo’s inherently sensitive nature is completely at odds with the Nazi “Aryan ideal” he’s so desperate to mimic. The crunch comes when, as the youngest and clearly most intimidated boy in the group, he’s ordered to demonstrate his ferocity … by killing a rabbit.

Mudbound: Superb character study

Mudbound (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for dramatic intensity, disturbing violence, profanity and nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.12.18

This film likely hasn’t been on most folks’ radar, given its unconventional distribution.

That needs to change.

As their friendship develops, Jamie (Garrett Hedlund, right) insists that Ronsel
(Jason Mitchell) ride alongside in the front of his truck, rather than — as local custom
demands — back in the bed. This "familiarity" will not go unnoticed.

Director/co-scripter Dee Rees’ compelling adaptation of Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound boasts impeccable acting and a narrative too infrequently addressed these days: humble people just trying to get by. Rees’ film shares these sensibilities with classics such as the 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and the 1941 adaptation of Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley (both directed by John Ford).

The all-important distinction is that Jordan’s saga gets additional dramatic heft from its depiction of the wary, prickly dynamic that passed for “race relations” in the post-WWII Deep South. Recent films addressing issues of race — 12 Years a Slave, Selma and Birth of a Nation immediately spring to mind — have concentrated on momentous individuals and/or points in history; it’s refreshing to experience a much more intimate, carefully sculpted depiction of jes’ plain folks.

Some of whom, it must be noted, are capable of unspeakable behavior.

Rees and co-scripter Virgil Williams adopt Jordan’s alternating narrative voices while introducing us to two families: the McAllans and Jacksons, both struggling on a remote, hard-scrabble cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta. It’s the winter of 1946, with flashbacks filling in crucial pre-war details.

Monsoon-like rains occasionally turn the entire farm into a dispiriting swamp of mud.

We meet Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke) and his younger brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund) as they dig a grave for their recently deceased father, trying to complete this task ahead of another impending storm. Subsequently easing the plain wooden coffin into the grave proves too much for the two men; Henry requests help from their tenant farmers, the Jacksons, as their wagon ambles along the nearby road.

This request elicits palpable tension; we’ve no idea why.

Answers emerge via lengthy flashbacks.

Darkest Hour: A shining achievement

Darkest Hour (2017) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and war sequences
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.29.17

Even knowing the outcome, thanks to the obvious historical record and ongoing pop culture reminders, director Joe Wright and scripter Anthony McCarten maintain a remarkable level of stomach-clenching suspense during every moment of this enthralling drama.

As Elizabeth Layton (Lily James) pauses attentively, Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman)
parses words in order to place the desired emphasis on what will be one of the most
important speeches of his career.

Scene by scene, amid political clashes and confrontations, we endure palpable panic: Are our memories faulty? Will it all go wrong?

No, of course not. But the total, we-are-there immersion is quite impressive.

Darkest Hour takes place during a tempestuous several weeks in the spring of 1940: from May 10, when 65-year-old, hard-drinking Winston Churchill is named to replace Neville Chamberlain as the British Prime Minister; to June 4, in the aftermath of the Dunkirk miracle that gave additional weight to Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech in the House of Commons.

Fans of this period in British history are enjoying an embarrassment of riches; we’ve now experienced these events from strikingly different points of view, thanks to summer’s Dunkirk, television’s The Crown and now Wright’s Darkest Hour.

As depicted by McCarten — a double Oscar nominee, as scripter and producer of 2014’s The Theory of Everything — Churchill’s rise to that galvanic speech was anything but assured, and Chamberlain was far from disgraced and impotent, after being shunted aside. He and Viscount Halifax (née Edward Frederick Lindley Wood) remained relentless in their quest for appeasement by offering a treaty to Hitler, even as — particularly as — Western Europe’s countries fell, like a row of dominoes, against the Nazi assault.

And Chamberlain’s influence was considerable, as he still controlled the Conservative half of the House of Commons, all of the members fully prepared — in blinkered, knee-jerk fashion — to vote party over conscience, thereby stripping Churchill of his new position. (And boy, doesn’t that resonate these days, on this side of the pond!)

The political infighting is both fascinating and horrifying, but the film’s true power comes from Gary Oldman’s sublime portrayal of Churchill: one of those rare performances that is so thorough, so all-consuming, that it ceases to be acting. As far as I’m concerned, Wright and McCarten somehow found the means to resurrect Churchill, so he could star in his own story.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women: A few notes shy of wonderful

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for strong sexual content, profanity, brief nudity and fleeting graphic images
By Derrick Bang

Although persuasively acted, sensitively directed and reasonably faithful to established fact, writer/director Angela Robinson’s take on comic book heroine Wonder Woman most frequently feels like a giddy endorsement of unconventional sexual lifestyles.

Flush with the "forbidden" delights of their blossoming three-way relationship, Elizabeth
Marston (Rebecca Hall, left), her husband William (Luke Evans) and their "plus one"
Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote) unwisely fail to consider how their behavior will affect
fellow Tufts University faculty and students.

Goodness knows, the actual saga tops the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction List, as recently revealed via comprehensive feature stories from National Public Radio, Smithsonian Magazine and The New Yorker, along with — most particularly — Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s fascinating 2015 book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Robinson had no shortage of research material, from which to draw.

But while the world’s best-known female superhero has been made the selling point of this unusual big-screen biography — the character’s status having accelerated exponentially, thanks to summer’s smash-hit film — Wonder Woman is mostly incidental to the story being told here. Robinson had other things on her mind.

The saga begins in 1925, as Harvard-trained psychologist William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans) begins teaching a large assemblage of young women at Tufts University. His wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) is a ubiquitous presence, forever perched in the classroom window seat. An equally accredited psychologist and lawyer, she sharply observes — and records, via jotted notes — how the students respond, individually and as a group, during her husband’s lectures.

William and Elizabeth are a prickly but passionately devoted team, in and out of the classroom. He’s smooth, intelligent and seductively persuasive: a silver-tongued orator who’d have made a terrific snake-oil salesman. She’s bluntly combative, judgmental, sharp-tongued and even more ferociously smart. They constantly challenge each other, even as they love and collaborate in numerous endeavors ... not the least of which is the development of a functional lie-detector device.

In class, William’s gaze is drawn to the radiantly gorgeous Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), a senior who becomes his research assistant ... which is to say, she becomes their research assistant. William ostensibly insists that Olive is the perfect subject with whom to explore the active/passive aspects of a “DISC theory” — dominance, inducement, submission and compliance — that he believes governs all human behavior.

In reality, he just wants to bed Olive. Which Elizabeth realizes full well, and about which she’s ambivalent. At initial blush, William’s desire seems a non-starter; the quietly shy Olive, a seemingly conservative sorority girl, is engaged to a Nice Young Man.

Dunkirk: An intense, masterful drama

Dunkirk (2017) • View trailer 
Five stars. Rated PG-13, for intense war violence and occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.21.17

Christopher Nolan doesn’t merely spin a crackling good yarn; he tells it in a provocative, wildly imaginative manner.

Thousands of Allied soldiers wait anxiously on the "mole" — a narrow, kilometer-long,
wood-boarded breakwater that pokes precariously out into the cold waters of the
English Channel — while praying they'll be able to board a rescue ship before being
strafed by Luftwaffe Messerschmitts.

His fascination with nonlinear storytelling began with Following and Memento — the latter ingeniously unfolding both forwards and backwards — and ultimately became too much in Inception (a dream within a fantasy within a head trip within a nod to Orson Welles ... quite overcooked, but audacious nonetheless).

Dunkirk does not succumb to such excess, although some viewers may be perplexed by how its three parallel storylines intersect ... until the penny drops, resulting in a richly satisfying — dare I say exhilarating — A-ha! moment.

This film is a masterpiece: a compelling, ingeniously conceived and choreographed slice of suspenseful, nail-biting history transformed into a thoroughly absorbing drama. Everything connects here, starting with the superlative work turned in by a huge ensemble cast composed primarily of unfamiliar faces and a few high-profile character actors.

Nolan both wrote and directed this stunning slice of edge-of-the-seat cinema, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he also came up with the attention-grabbing tag line: “When 400,000 men couldn’t get home ... home came for them.”

Remember being riveted, in 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, by Steven Spielberg’s 20-minute handling of the Normandy Beach landing sequence?

Nolan ups that ante. Dunkirk maintains that level of suspense and peek-between-your-fingers anxiety for its full 106 minutes. You literally dare not blink during his ticking-clock handling of simultaneous narratives that come together brilliantly, in time for a climax that’s no less triumphant, for our prior knowledge of how the story concludes.

The drama comes from the skillfully sketched, ground-level characters, whose fates we most definitely don’t know, history notwithstanding.

This is a snapshot of a seminal event during the early days of World War II: an incident that began with a ghastly military disaster, but concluded with an amazing miracle that demonstrated anew — here’s a lesson worth repeating — how individual civilians absolutely can make a massive, heroic difference.

Allied: Does love bind?

Allied (2016) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for violence, profanity, fleeting nudity and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.25.16

At first blush, this feels like an old-style WWII espionage drama of the sort whose absence is lamented by longtime moviegoers — such as my parents — who often grouse that They Don’t Make ’Em Like This Anymore.

Shortly after adopting his cover identity as the devoted husband of Marianne (Marion
Cotillard), Max (Brad Pitt) fears that he may have been recognized by a Nazi officer: a
potential catastrophe that requires a quick solution...

Given the French Moroccan setting, stars with the wattage of Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, and a swooningly romantic script that even name-checks Casablanca, one almost expects Bogie and Bacall to come strolling in from the surrounding desert.

Steven Knight is a terrific screenwriter, with solid experience in the crime and espionage genres; his highlights include 2002’s Dirty Pretty Things and 2007’s Eastern Promises. No surprise, then: He delivers a corker of a first act for Allied, and then swings the plot into an unexpected direction that cranks up the suspense.

Unfortunately, things get messy during an contrived third act, which piles eye-rolling coincidence atop unrealistic behavior, the latter from characters who’ve previously been depicted as far too intelligent, to suddenly turn brainless. Cut to a positively eye-rolling epilogue, and the film squanders the considerable good will that it has built.

Seriously, Steven ... what were you thinking?

In fairness, such climactic, over-the-top melodrama also is old-school, so Knight and director Robert Zemeckis obviously knew precisely what they were doing. I’m simply not sure that today’s savvier viewers will be as willing to forgive such theatrical excess, as was the case back in the 1940s and ’50s.

And it’s a shame, because the first 90 minutes are thoroughly compelling, and — yes — luxuriously atmospheric.

The year is 1942, and the film opens as Canadian airman Max Vatan (Pitt) parachutes into the desert outside of Casablanca. His emergency mission, orchestrated by the British Special Operations Executive (BSOE): to assassinate Germany’s visiting ambassador. The groundwork for this mission has been established by undercover French resistance fighter Marianne Beauséjour (Cotillard), who has spent weeks among her Nazi “friends,” waxing eloquent about the beloved husband soon to visit from Paris.

The handsome and affable Max looks and sounds the part ... to a point. As Marianne immediately notices, his carefully rehearsed accent is more Québécois than Parisian, which is a problem: French Moroccans wouldn’t know the difference, but he’d never fool Nazi officials who had spent any time in France.