The Duke: Larceny with a twist

The Duke (2020) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity and brief sexuality

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.29.22

This is another great one for the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction file.

 

On the very early morning of August 21, 1961, somebody broke into London’s National Gallery and stole Francisco Goya’s painting, “Portrait of the Duke of Wellington.” The carefully calculated crime baffled police, who assumed that the caper must have been masterminded by a professional gang of experienced Italian art thieves.

 

Kempton (Jim Broadbent) promises, after one final attempt, that he'll stop fighting the
BBC over its television license fees. Alas, his wife Dorothy (Helen Mirren) isn't
sure that she believes him...

Four years later, the painting was returned by 61-year-old Kempton Bunton, a disabled pensioner who subsequently confessed to the crime.

That was wild enough … but what happened at Bunton’s subsequent trial was so audacious, that it prompted an amendment of British law.

 

Director Roger Michell’s delightful depiction of these astonishing events, a cheeky slice of gentle British whimsy, is fueled by endearing performances from Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, as Kempton and his wife, Dorothy. Michell, cinematographer Mike Eley and editor Kristina Hetherington deliberately emphasize a retro look, atmosphere and pacing, strongly evoking a sense that their film could have been made during the 1960s.

 

Screenwriters Richard Bean and Clive Coleman compress the time frame, but otherwise present the saga pretty much as it actually went down; they were blessed, during production, with hitherto unrevealed details supplied by Bunton’s grandson.

 

Kempton is introduced as a taxi driver and frustrated playwright — his latest opus is a reimagining of the scriptures with Jesus as a woman (!) — who has long been annoyed by the BBC’s television license fee. His sad efforts to stoke public awareness with a home-grown campaign — “Free TV for the OAP (Old Age Pensioners)” — has gone nowhere; he also has been imprisoned several times, for non-payment of the license fee.

 

(Tossed into Durham Prison for two weeks, for refusing to pay a television fee? Seriously?)

 

Not much later, a wealthy American art collector purchases Goya’s painting for £140,000, with the intention of taking it to the United States. Scandalized by the thought of losing this precious artwork, the British government buys it back for the same sum. Kempton becomes outraged, while watching the resulting press conference on (his illegal) TV, grousing the such a sum could have provided free television to thousands of OAPs.

 

Kempton obsesses over the painting — much to Dorothy’s long-suffering dismay — visits it often, and views it as a tangible example of everything wrong with government spending. He learns that the gallery’s sophisticated alarm system is deactivated during early mornings, so the cleaning crew can work; access can be made via a window in an upstairs bathroom.

 

And — hey, presto! — the painting winds up in the Bunton’s Newcastle flat. He and younger son Jackie (Fionn Whitehead) cleverly conceal it by constructing a false back to a bedroom wardrobe.

 

But now what?

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.

Worth: Not as much as it should be

Worth (2020) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for brief profanity and dramatic intensity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

What price a life?

 

Insensitive and vulgar as that question seems — how can anybody put a monetary value on the loss of a loved one? — actuaries, lawyers and insurance companies routinely do so.

 

A chance meeting at an opera performance allows Ken Feinberg (Michael Keaton, left)
and Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci) to start bridging the divide that has found them
judging the 9/11 compensation fund from strikingly different points of view.

Director Sara Colangelo’s provocative drama, which opens in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, follows the struggle to assess justice and fairness in one of American history’s most monumental attempts to assess “worth.” Max Borenstein’s screenplay is drawn from the 2006 memoir by Kenneth Feinberg, who was appointed “Special Master” of the U.S. government’s September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.

As Borenstein’s script quickly depicts, however, this Congressional act of apparent compassion was — to a great degree — surface gloss. The fund was attached to the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, a $15 billion bailout bill passed just 10 days after the terrorist strikes. The “fund gesture” hoped to “encourage” the survivors of 9/11 victims not to sue the industry into oblivion, thereby — in the words of airline corporate doomsayers attending a key meeting with U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft (Victor Slezak) — preventing a “possible economic cataclysm.”

 

Feinberg (Michael Keaton) is introduced a few days earlier, as he demonstrates the legal nature of “worth” to a class of university students. He’s a number-cruncher and creature of pure pragmatism, believing to the core that any issue can be solved with carefully calculated equations, and that all individuals involved will behave rationally and respect the resulting “tort-style compensation” of such efforts.

 

Keaton is ideal for this role, his feral intensity and smirky condescension operating at full throttle. This master-of-the-universe aura notwithstanding, he certainly isn’t evil; he genuinely believes that he’s doing good, and that the best possible outcome can be achieved if everybody simply acknowledges that he knows best.

 

Such blunt expediency takes its toll; Feinberg relaxes, at the end of each day, by bathing himself in classic opera. We get a vague sense that his rough edges are softened by his wife, Dede (Talia Balsam); we also suspect that she doesn’t entirely agree with his attitude. But Borenstein’s script leaves their relationship badly under-developed.

 

Feinberg and his firm — his chief lieutenant is Camille Biros (Amy Ryan) — gained their lauded reputation as master mediators after chaperoning previous high-profile cases involving asbestos personal injury litigation, and Agent Orange product liability litigation. But those cases developed over the course of years, even decades, by which time emotions had cooled; on top of which, there never was a single “asbestos incident” that snuffed thousands of lives in a blinding flash: a distinction Feinberg fails to recognize.

 

As a result, when he gathers an initial few hundred victim survivors — mere months later — he treats the presentation just like the classroom lecture we witnessed earlier, expecting all participants to be uniformly impressed by his charts and graphs. He’s therefore genuinely baffled — Keaton’s expression radiates total confusion — when the attendees turn on him like a pack of snarling wolverines.

Love and Monsters: Quite a ride

Love and Monsters (2020) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for sci-fi violence and mild profanity

Available via: Hulu

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.3.21

A movie with a title like this, is either going to be a lot of fun … or a stinker.

 

Happily, the former is true.

 

Joel (Dylan O'Brien) finds that his new canine companion is quite useful in what has
become an extremely dangerous world.

Director Michael Matthews’ audacious adventure thriller was the dark-horse candidate for last year’s visual effects Academy Award, and Brian Cox’s team definitely earned their place on that short list. On top of which, this film is far more entertaining than the category winner (Christopher Nolan’s overblown Tenet).

I know we’ve been deluged by “giant monster” movies of late — Godzilla, King Kong, Pacific Rim and so forth — but this one’s different. In addition to the terrific effects, the secondary attraction is Brian Duffield and Matthew Robinson’s cheeky script, which goes a long way toward turning star Dylan O’Brien into a most unlikely action hero.

 

On top of which, local viewers will get a kick out of the fact that some of these events are set in Fairfield, of all places. (Filming actually took place in Australia.)

 

At some point into the future, a massive asteroid threatens to wreak havoc when it hits Earth. Governments cooperatively scramble to successfully destroy it, but the process blankets our planet with a chemical residue that causes cold-blooded animals — bugs, amphibians, sea creatures — to mutate into huge monsters that soon kill off (um, devour) most of humanity.

 

The United States’ few survivors have holed up in underground bunker “colonies” spread throughout the country, which maintain contact with each other via short wave radio. Joel (O’Brien), belonging to one such colony, is something of a misfit. Everybody is kind — they love his minestrone (!) — but he feels useless.

 

He isn’t strong or brave enough to join his older comrades when they go topside to forage for supplies, a dangerous endeavor that often has tragic consequences.

 

Worse yet, he’s the colony’s only singleton; everybody else has paired off. He nurses the memory of his former girlfriend, Aimee (Jessica Henwick), whom he hasn’t seen since they were separated seven years earlier, during the evacuation of Fairfield. He knows where she is — another colony, 85 miles away, on the California coast — but that doesn’t help much.

 

When his colony is breached by a giant ant, with disastrous consequences, Joel decides he’d rather die trying to reunite with Aimee, than spend whatever remains of his life cowering in a hole. And so he grabs a crossbow and a backpack’s worth of supplies, and heads topside. Nobody tries to stop him; they all understand.

 

Needless to say, his quest proves quite hazardous.

The Palindromists: Words fail me (in a good way!)

The Palindromists (2020) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Not rated, and (of course!) suitable for all ages

Available via: Amazon Prime and other streaming services

By Derrick Bang

You can’t get much more fringe, than the subject of this droll little documentary.

 

It’ll be adored by folks who build their schedules around Will Shortz’s challenges as puzzle master on NPR’s Weekend Edition; and by folks who enjoy crossword puzzles; and by folks who get a kick out of anagrams, spoonerisms, Tom Swifties and other forms of word play.

 

Orchestral bassoonist Lori Wike poses with one of her favorite palindromes.

It’d also make an excellent double feature with 2006’s Wordplay.

In short, director Vince Clemente’s new film will go over big with word nerds. And if you do belong to that rather idiosyncratic group, then you’ve no doubt endured plenty of glazed looks and rolled eyes while trying to explain this passion to normal people.

 

Children generally encounter palindromes at some point during their grade-school years, likely shared by a math or English teacher looking to lighten the mood. Palindromes are easy to define: They’re words or phrases that read identically, forward and backwards. Basic single word examples include TOT, PIP and DAD; common names include BOB, ELLE and HANNAH.

 

It gets more interesting when multiple words are employed to make a palindromic phrase; classics include MADAM, I’M ADAM (supposedly the first sentence uttered in the Garden of Eden); STEP ON NO PETS; WAS IT A CAR OR A CAT I SAW; and my all-time favorite, A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL … PANAMA!

 

The latter points to a key element of the best palindromes: They should be elegant, and make some sort of sense. Raising a smile is even better. Random assortments of words, no matter how impressively long and perfectly palindromic, are frowned upon.

 

Most people abandon such nonsense upon achieving adulthood, but Clemente’s film isn’t interested in most people. Having previously helmed one of the best documentaries to cover video games — 2011’s Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters — I can well imagine his wheels spinning anew, after hearing about the First Annual World Palindrome Championship, which took place March 16, 2012, in Brooklyn, New York.

 

(As it happened, the event was misnamed; although it was indeed the first, subsequent contests have been quinquennial … which is to say, every five years.)

 

Clemente decided to profile the contestants who would vie for the second bout, scheduled to take place March 24-25, 2017, in Stanford, Connecticut. In a gesture of solidarity, host Will Shortz — you just knew he’d be involved, right? — booked this event alongside the less eclectic 40th American Crossword Puzzle Tournament; this way, the palindromists were guaranteed a full-house audience.

 

The resulting film was literally years in the making, in part because it was crowd-funded via Kickstarter; and in part because it took Clemente awhile to interview everybody ahead of time, and then again during the two-day event; and in part because then he needed supplementary crowd-funding via Indiegogo, in order to complete post-production.

 

The result is impressively entertaining — for word nerds, anyway — despite such humble origins.

Love, Sarah: A scrumptious confection

Love, Sarah (2020) • View trailer

3.5 stars. Not rated, and — aside from brief profanity — suitable for all ages

By Derrick Bang 

Full disclosure: I’m a sucker for a well-crafted foodie movie.

 

Particularly one that involves desserts.

 

Having decided to put their new pastry chef to the test, Mimi (Celia Imrie, left),
Clarissa (Shannon Tarbet, center) and Isabella (Shelley Conn) marvel at the
chocolate masterpiece he has prepared.

Director Eliza Schroeder’s Love Sarah — available via Hulu — is a gentle, low-key relationship drama (definitely not a comedy, despite what IMDB claims) set in London’s Notting Hill district. There’s nothing special or unusual in the script — co-written by Schroeder, Jake Brunger and Mahalia Rimmer — which follows a fairly routine path to an entirely predictable conclusion.

Here in the States, these ingredients probably would generate a puerile melodrama on the Hallmark or Lifetime channel. Happily, Schroeder and her cast are much better than that; the narrative may be conventional, but the execution is charming.

 

The story begins on a happy note that quickly turns tragic. Longtime best friends Sarah (Candice Brown) and Isabella (Shelly Conn) are poised to open their own bakery shop. Bicycling across London with the keys to the empty storefront where Isabella eagerly awaits, Sarah is killed in a traffic accident.

 

The world … stops.

 

Except that it doesn’t; it never does. 

 

Isabella, stuck with a business space she no longer wants anything to do with, despairs over trying to break the lease. Sarah’s 19-year-old daughter, Clarissa (Shannon Tarbet), numbly continues her dance training, all passion drained from her efforts. To make matters even worse, she’s dumped by her callous jerk of a boyfriend, leaving her nowhere to live.

 

In desperation, Clarissa turns to her estranged grandmother, Mimi (Celia Imrie), who — also grieving — welcomes the company.

 

Not long thereafter, having had time to process the situation, Clarissa realizes that they need a pathway out of their heartache. She confronts Mimi and Isabella, insisting that they must continue with the bakery plans. “It’s what Sarah would have wanted,” she implores.

 

But Sarah was to be the baker, Isabella protests. Fine, Clarissa replies, so we’ll hire a pastry chef.

Dream Horse: A crowd-pleasing winner

Dream Horse (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.28.21 

Nothing beats the triumphant emotional rush of a well-crafted underdog story.

 

Except, perhaps, an under-horse story.

 

Particularly one based quite closely on actual events.

 

You just can't beat the excitement of birth, as Jan (Toni Collette) and Brian (Owen Teale)
discover, when their new foal enters the world.

Welsh director Euros Lyn’s Dream Horse is the feel-good film of spring: a timely reminder of the amazing things that can be accomplished when people unite for a common cause. Scripter Neil McKay, gifted with an already incredible true story, has populated these events with the sort of quirky, colorful, small-town residents and eccentrics who pop up in whimsical dramedies such as Gregory’s Girl, The Closer You Get and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain.

That many of Lyn’s actors are portraying real people, is the icing on the cake.

 

The time is just before the turn of the 21st century, the setting the depressed hamlet of Cefn Fforest in South Wales, fallen on hard times since the closure of its nearby mines. The indefatigable Jan Vokes (Toni Collette) rises at dawn every morning, in order to wash the floors and then work register at a local mega-market; in the evenings, she tends bar at a workingmen’s club.

 

In between, somehow, she looks after her elderly parents and her arthritic husband, Brian (Owen Teale). In her free time (!), as a lifelong animal lover, she raises rabbits, whippets, ducks and even prize-winning pigeons.

 

One evening, she chances to hear a conversation led by club patron Howard Davies (Damian Lewis), while he waxes eloquent about the trials and tribulations — and expense — of raising race horses. Captivated by the notion, despite its complete impracticality, Jan immerses herself in horse lore and pumps Howard for additional information.

 

Fully aware that she’d never be able to buy a racing thoroughbred, Jan opts for the alternative of creating one, by purchasing an undistinguished mare for £300 and installing it in a makeshift stable in her garden. But breeding and then training a racehorse will require much, much more money.

 

Her solution: to enlist the financial support of local townsfolk, via a co-ownership syndicate. On the appointed evening — having mounted and distributed flyers throughout the community — Jan, Brian and Howard nervously wait for somebody to arrive.

 

They ultimately wind up with a motley collection of 23 villagers, each of whom agrees to contribute £10 per week, in service of this wild scheme. Several of these individuals are unemployed and on the dole; others barely make ends meet in their own small businesses. But all are inspired by Jan’s passion, and by the tantalizing notion — however unlikely — of raising and then racing a champion horse.

Limbo: A kinder, gentler look at asylum seekers

Limbo (2020) • View trailer

3.5 stars. Rated R, for occasional profanity

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.21.21

Given the refugee crisis once again developing on the Italian island of Lampedusa, Scottish writer/director Ben Sharrock’s cross-cultural drama couldn’t be better timed.

 

With nothing but time on their hands, a quartet of asylum seekers — from left, Omar
(Amir El-Masry), Wasef (Ola Orebiyi), Abedi (Kwabena Ansah) and Farhad
(Vikash Bhai) — struggle to fill every hour of every long, lonely day.

That said, the well-titled Limbo examines this humanitarian catastrophe in a manner that’s both familiar … and somewhat quirky.

 

Omar (Amir El-Masry) and Farhad (Vikash Bhai) are among a couple dozen asylum seekers “temporarily” housed on one of the remote Uist islands, off the northwest Scottish coast. It’s mostly a soul-deadening waiting game — amplified by Sharrock’s very slow pacing — although part of each day is spent taking outrageously misjudged “cultural awareness” classes taught by a couple of clueless locals (Sidse Babett Knudsen and Kenneth Collard).

 

At other times, these men make a lengthy trek to the island’s lone phone booth, plunked in the middle of nowhere, and take turns chatting with family members in their respective countries. Omar, quiet and withdrawn, has fled the strife in Syria; his parents have safely relocated in Istanbul, while his brother Nabil has remained behind as a member of the resistance.

 

Omar’s prized possession is his grandfather’s oud, which he never lets out of his sight, always carrying its oversized instrument case. Back in Syria, before the country went to hell, Omar was poised to follow his grandfather’s footsteps, as a master of this beautiful, lute-like instrument.

 

But Omar’s right hand was injured somewhere along the way, and he’s thus been unable to play. More crucially, he’s unwilling to play: burdened by a degree of survivor’s guilt far heavier than the oud itself. The occasional phone chats with his mother (voiced by Darina Al Joundi) merely amplify the feeling that he should have remained at his brother’s side, to fight the good fight.

 

Farhad, something of a cheerful opportunist, assigns himself the role of Omar’s “talent manager.” But Farhad’s surface merriment conceals his own, quite serious reason for having fled Afghanistan. At one point, he impulsively steals a rooster and makes it a pet, naming it Freddie after his favorite musician, Freddie Mercury. 

 

Farhad wants something he can call his own, akin to Omar and his oud.

The Kid Detective: A complicated case

The Kid Detective (2020) • View trailer

3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity, drug use, sexual candor, fleeting nudity and violence

By Derrick Bang

This Canadian import is a droll, slightly tart slice of PI whimsy.

 

That’s actually too superficial a description of writer/director Evan Morgan’s engaging feature film debut. At times, The Kid Detective seems to be taking place in a slightly existential universe not quite our own, where characters drop mordant one-liners without cracking a smile.

 

When Abe (Adam Brody) and Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) realize they're being followed
by a dark sedan, they waver between two equally uncomfortable choices:
attempt to flee ... or confront.

At other times, matters unexpectedly turn real-world serious, and emotions are real-world familiar.

 

It’s an intriguing balancing act, which — for the most part — Morgan skillfully navigates. He’s helped considerably by star Adam Brody’s morose, vulnerable and yet unexpectedly engaging performance as the rather unusual title character.

 

As an adolescent, Abe Applebaum (Jesse Noah Gruman) became a local celebrity in the cheerful little town of Willowbrook, Ontario, thanks to his facility for solving minor mysteries and wacky crimes. His successes resulted mostly from perception and an acute sense of psychology: the way people think and therefore act.

 

Partly out of respect — and likely also out of amusement — the townsfolk even set him up in a downtown office, where good friend Gracie Gulliver (Kaitlyn Chalmers-Rizzato) worked as receptionist. But then she disappeared one day. Despite Abe’s best efforts, and that of the local police, neither she — nor her body — ever was found.

 

This failure leaves Abe traumatized.

 

Now 32 (and played by Brody), Abe works out of the same office, stubbornly solving the same trivial cases — finding lost cats, and so forth — in between hangovers and raging attacks of self-pity. He has become the town joke, barely making ends meet; his frustrated parents (Wendy Crewson and Jonathan Whittaker) clearly have spent years trying to prod him into responsible adulthood.

 

Even Abe’s Goth receptionist (Sarah Sutherland, hilariously condescending) treats him with contempt.

 

Enter Caroline (Sophie Nélisse), a 16-year-old orphan who brings a real case, by asking his help in solving the brutal murder of her boyfriend, Patrick. Although initially wondering if she’s putting him on — we see the wary uncertainty in Brody’s gaze — Caroline is absolutely serious, her wide, guileless eyes radiating sincerity. And, indeed, Patrick was stabbed 17 times (!).

 

To say the subsequent investigation proceeds in fits and starts would be an understatement. Although his intuition remains sound, Abe’s sloppy appearance and occasionally reckless behavior hinder more than help. None of this shakes Caroline’s faith; indeed, she even drives him from one lead to the next — Abe doesn’t have a car — and becomes a de facto partner.

 

My Salinger Year: Book it!

My Salinger Year (2020) • View trailer

3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.7.21

This is a valentine to writers.

 

Director/scripter Philippe Falardeau’s gentle drama — adapted from Joanna Rakoff’s 2014 memoir, and available via Amazon Prime — is as delightful as her book. Imagine a less acerbic take on The Devil Wears Prada, set instead in New York’s mid-1990s literary world, and boasting a truly droll (mostly) off-camera supporting character.

 

Finding it increasingly difficult not to empathize with so many of the adoring fans who
write passionate letters to J.D. Salinger, Joanna (Margaret Qualley) grieves over
the way this correspondence is treated by the author's literary agency.

The charm of Rakoff’s memoir derives from her witty, often self-deprecating glimpse back at her impulsive, fresh-faced younger self. Falardeau maintains this authorial presence by granting star Margaret Qualley (as Joanna) plenty of narration: both off-camera voice-over and, rather cheekily, with occasional break-the-fourth-wall glances at us viewers. Cinematographer Sara Mishara frames her in a lot of tight close-ups.

 

In most cases, so much narration would become a tiresome gimmick, but not here: Qualley is so endearing, so wide-eyed and ingenuous, that we can’t spend enough time with her.

 

The story begins as Joanna impulsively abandons UC Berkeley’s graduate school, without a formal farewell to her musician boyfriend (Hamza Haq, as Karl), and moves to Manhattan with dreams of becoming a poet (having placed two pieces in the Paris Review). Lacking a job or place to live, she moves in with tolerant best friend Jenny (Seána Kerslake).

 

Joanna makes the rounds, and eventually sits across from Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), who heads her own modest literary agency. It’s a stubborn remnant of the mid-century publishing world, with plush, wood-paneled offices occupied by professionally dressed staffers who still rely on typewriters and Dictaphones, and where agents doze after three-martini lunches.

 

Margaret, needing an assistant, is impressed by Joanna’s enthusiasm. “Be prepared for long hours,” Margaret archly warns. “A lot of college graduates would love this job.”

 

The work load does prove grueling, particularly when Joanna — wholly unfamiliar with Dictaphones — initially can’t transcribe more than two or three words at a time. (I’ve been there; I recall how gawdawful that process was.) But while Margaret is stoic and old-fashioned, her work-related demands aren’t unreasonable; she’s far from the savage martinet Meryl Streep made Miranda Priestly, in The Devil Wears Prada.

 

The “surprise” lands when it turns out that Margaret has long represented J.D. Salinger, whom she — and everybody else in the office — refers to as Jerry. Joanna is tasked with processing his voluminous fan mail, all of which must be answered via decades-old form letters. 

 

All the fan mail then is shredded: which is to say, Salinger never sees it. As he wishes.

 

Margaret therefore is less the reclusive Salinger’s literary agent — he hasn’t published anything since a short story in 1965 (!) — and more his protector. “Never, ever give out his address,” she cautions.

 

Concrete Cowboy: Hard-knock life

Concrete Cowboy (2020) • View trailer

3.5 stars. Rated R, from drug use, violence and relentless profanity

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.14.21

Now, this is tough love.

 

Director/co-scripter Ricky Staub’s impressive feature debut is a gritty, poignant study of father/son bonding, set against a fascinating real-world backdrop that adds even more pathos to the emotionally charged narrative.

 

Fifteen-year-old Cole (Caleb McLaughlin, right) can't begin to understand the horse
culture that absorbs his long-estranged father (Idris Elba), particularly with respect to
the funny hats everybody wears.

The story is fictitious, adapted from Greg Neri’s 2011 young adult novel, Ghetto Cowboy. But the setting is completely authentic, its anti-gentrification message more timely now than ever. Staub and co-scripter Dan Walser make this issue organic to their film, without strident preaching; we understand what’s in danger of being lost here, and — frankly — the threat is repugnant.

 

The story opens on a grim note as Amahle (Liz Priestley), a hard-working Detroit single mother, receives word that her rebellious teenage son, Cole (Caleb McLaughlin, of Strangers Things), has been expelled from yet another school. It’s the final straw, and Amahle is at wit’s end; she knows that Cole is just a heartbeat away from a life on the crime-laden streets.

 

She therefore packs all of Cole’s clothes in two trash bags, drives him to North Philadelphia, and (literally!) dumps him on the doorstep of Harp (Idris Elba), the long-estranged father that the boy barely remembers. And Harp isn’t even home to answer the knock at the door.

 

Nessie (Lorraine Toussaint), a sympathetic neighbor, explains that Harp can be found around the corner, at the Fletcher Street Stables. “You’ll smell it when you get close.”

 

Indeed.

 

Alongside a hard-scrabble collection of similar horse lovers, Harp is a member of the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club (an actual 100-year-old organization, whose modern identity dates from 2004, with a tax-exempt status granted in 2015). The horses are purchased at auction, saving them from likely being killed; the loosely monitored program provides a positive — and rigorous — working experience for local youth who otherwise might succumb to the temptations of the streets.

 

And it’s absolutely the last thing Cole wants any part of. Particularly since his father seems far more concerned about the horses’ welfare, than his son’s. Indeed, Harp even lives with a horse, having built a makeshift stall in his apartment (a thoroughly ludicrous notion, but hey: roll with it).

 

Cole would much rather spend time with Smush (Jharrel Jerome), a ne’er-do-well cousin who acts as a low-level gopher for a local crime baron who’s clearly Very Bad News. This prompts Harp to lay down the law: Cole won’t be welcome — at home, or at the stables — if he dallies with Smush.