Glass Onion: Layers of delight

Glass Onion (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for strong language, violence, sexual candor and drug content

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.30.22

Rian Johnson reminded me how much I miss well-crafted murder mysteries.

 

Consider a few classics: Sleuth, The Last of Sheila, Deathtrap, Gosford Park and The Usual Suspects. Each is a blend of twisty plotting and mildly snarky attitude.

 

Tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton, center) and several of his guests — from
left, Claire (Kathryn Hahn), Whiskey (Madelyn Cline), Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr.) and
Birdie (Kate Hudson) — are quite surprised by the identity of their gathering's
newest arrival.

The writer/director garnered well-deserved admiration for 2019’s Knives Out, which — among its many other delights — gave star Daniel Craig an opportunity to craft a memorable character far removed from a certain shaken-not-stirred secret agent.

We all wondered, when Craig’s second outing as sharp-eyed sleuth Benoit Blanc neared arrival, if Johnson could pull it off a second time. So many filmmakers have run afoul of the sophomore curse.

 

Well, not this one.

 

Glass Onion is just as clever — and engaging — as its predecessor. Although driven by a tantalizing whodunit and whydunit, those features almost take second place to the fact that this film is pure fun. At a time when numerous recent releases have run far too long in the hands of self-indulgent directors, this one earns its 139 minutes. Goodness, I wanted it to keep going.

 

Johnson’s fondness for the genre is obvious, and his new film is a loving — and cheekily updated — riff on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

 

The story begins as identical, elaborately carved wooden boxes are delivered to scientist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.), Connecticut Gov. Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), fashion designer Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson) and macho streaming celebrity Duke Cody (Dave Bautista). Editor Bob Ducsay’s sleek split-screen montage reflects the fact that these are (of course!) large puzzle boxes, which the quartet ultimately solves via phone collaboration.

 

Inside: an invitation to a murder mystery weekend hosted by longtime friend and tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), at his private island in Greece. His estate’s stand-out feature: a massive, glass-enclosed conservatory shaped like an onion.

 

Elsewhere, the recipient of a fifth box extracts her invitation via hilarious old-school methodology. (Whatever works, right?) She turns out to be Cassandra “Andi” Brand (Janelle Monáe), co-founder and former CEO of Bron’s tech company Alpha, unfairly ousted — not long ago — via some acrimonious legal maneuvering.

 

Everybody — most particularly Bron — is astonished when Blanc turns up, identical invitation in hand. The detective, unswervingly polite to the core, is embarrassed by having unwittingly crashed the party; Bron sets him at ease. After all, the cunningly conceived weekend will be far more successful if he’s able to outfox the world-famous Benoit Blanc.

The Glorias: A glorious life, inventively told

The Glorias (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated R, for profanity

By Derrick Bang

We’ve long been intrigued by the notion of our Older Self being able to step back in time, and personally reassure our Younger Self that everything will turn out just fine.

 

Gloria Steinem (Julianne Moore, left) and Bella Abzug (Bette Midler) chortle over some
of the reactions to a recent issue of Ms. Magazine.

(Or, alternatively, of Younger Self confronting Older Self with a narrow gaze, and demanding to know what the heck went wrong.)

 

Director/co-scripter Julie Taymor cleverly exploits this beguiling premise in The Glorias, her adaptation — alongside co-writer Sarah Ruhl — of Gloria Steinem’s 2015 memoir, My Life on the Road.

 

Love her or loathe her, one must acknowledge that Steinem carved out an impressively ambitious career, despite humble and disorientingly peripatetic origins. Taymor — an eclectic filmmaker known for her boldly unique approaches to varied projects such as Frida, Across the Universe and her gender-switching version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest — employs different actresses to depict four primary “pivot points” in Steinem’s life.

 

As her defiantly non-linear narrative bounces back and forth in time, these four selves occasionally meet and discuss what has transpired, or will transpire. Such encounters are filmed in dreamlike, soft-focus monochrome, always while traveling, and usually on a Greyhound bus whose windows look out upon a different time and place: an easy metaphor for the notion that life is a journey, with each stop far more important than the eventual destination.

 

Youngest Gloria (doe-eyed Ryan Kiera Armstrong) is enchanted by her irrepressible, irresponsible but flamboyantly theatrical father, Leo (Timothy Hutton), a huckster and charlatan forever keeping his family one step ahead of the previous town’s creditors. Despite the profoundly negative affect this has on his wife, Ruth (Enid Graham), Leo nonetheless inspires Gloria to recognize that travel is the best possible education.

 

Hutton is excellent: totally persuasive as a silver-tongued con artist who nonetheless knows, in his heart, that he’s destined to disappoint all the people he loves.

 

Twelve-year-old Gloria (Lulu Wilson), solemn beyond her years, is faced with the challenge of caring for her mentally fragile mother, after Leo abandons his family. With Ruth sliding ever deeper into chronic despair, Gloria soon understands how important it is for a woman to be able to make her own way in the world, without being beholden to a husband. We see the resolve in Wilson’s gaze.

 

There’s also a telling conversation, when Gloria discovers that her mother had once been a writer and reporter … forced to work behind a male byline. And we realize, from our contemporary remove, that Gloria would grow up to live her mother’s unlived life. (And how often, I wonder, does a child honor a parent in such an unspoken fashion?)

 

Welcome to Marwen: An enchanting riff on real-world drama

Welcome to Marwen (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, disturbing images and fantasy violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.21.18

This story is so delicate and fragile — its approach so unconventional — that the slightest misstep would ruin it.

Because the real world is too frightening for him to confront at most times, Mark
Hogancamp (Steve Carell) finds solace in a miniature community that he populates
with characters he's able to control.

Far more than most films, viewer response will be completely polarized. Some (most, I fear) will dismiss it as gimmicky nonsense. But those who have any experience with gravely damaged souls, and their struggle to find coping mechanisms, can’t help being charmed — even deeply touched — by what director Robert Zemeckis has wrought.

On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was savagely beaten by five men and left for dead outside of a bar in Kingston, N.Y. He was brutalized after foolishly admitting — prudence abandoned due to an alcohol haze — that he liked to cross-dress.

He woke after nine days in a coma, all memory of his previous life completely gone: Navy service, a marriage and family, his talent as a sketch artist, and a descent into homelessness and even brief stints in jail. In a sense, he was reborn at age 38, forced during torturous physical and mental therapy to relearn how to eat, walk and even navigate the minor complexities of an average day.

Proving once again that artists are born, not made — and that if one means of expression is suppressed, another will rise to take its place — Mark sorta/kinda backed his way into an entirely new career: one which, in turn, proved beneficial to his raging PTSD nightmares.

Hogancamp was profiled in director Jeff Malmberg’s award-winning 2010 documentary, Marwencol; he’s now the subject of Zemeckis’ most audaciously innovative drama to date. (That’s saying quite a lot, given that we’re talking about the filmmaker who has pushed multiple narrative and effects boundaries with Forrest Gump, The Polar Express, A Christmas Carol and — most recently — The Walk.)

Zemeckis and co-scripter Caroline Thompson open their film with a literal bang, as we’re introduced to star Steve Carell piloting an Allied aircraft over Belgian skies, during World War II. His plane is strafed beyond repair; he makes a successful crash-landing.

By this point, it has become obvious that Carell looks … not quite right. His features are shiny, his movements oddly jerky. Total disorientation takes hold when we notice that his wrists are jointed, attached to arms that seem a little thin.

Our hero is ambushed by a quintet of Nazis. Death seems imminent, until he’s rescued by a quintet of gun-toting women of varying nationalities, who blow the Nazis into smithereens. They collapse like … well … discarded dolls.

Hidden Figures: The female frontier

Hidden Figures (2016) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.6.17

A film that moves its audience to cheers and applause, as the screen fades to black, is an exhilarating experience for the patrons involved.

But a film that also prompts such a response several times during the course of its story?

When John Glenn (Glen Powell) arrives at the Langley Research Center, he makes a
point of greeting members of the West Area Computing team: from left, Dorothy Vaughan
(Octavia Spencer), Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) and Mary Jackson (Janelle
Monáe, partially obscured).

That’s a rare gift.

Director Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures isn’t merely a crowd-pleasing slice of actual history; it’s also a sly social statement, and a rich showcase for its three starring actresses. Melfi and co-scripter Allison Schroeder have turned Margot Lee Shetterly’s absorbing nonfiction book into an engaging drama that charms and fascinates in equal measure.

More than anything else, though, I remain stunned by the fact that half a century has passed, before this jaw-droppingly amazing story has been brought to our attention. What the heck took so long?

The setting alone is an eyebrow-raiser that somehow missed being discussed in any of my history texts. Much of NASA’s initial efforts during the early days of the space race, playing catch-up after the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1 and several subsequent spacecraft, took place at Virginia’s Langley Research Center, then very much a part of the Jim Crow South.

The campus included a remote, fully segregated arm known as West Area Computing, staffed entirely by African American women — all mathematicians — somewhat dismissively dubbed “computers.” When a group in the larger, posher east end of the center needed numerical verification (basically arithmetic scut-work), a lead engineer — all of said engineers being white and male — would send for “a computer,” much the way a temp secretary would be requested.

Shetterly’s book profiles four such women: Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Christine Darden. The latter has been omitted from this film; the other three have been brought to glorious life, respectively, by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe.

(A quick bit of back-story not included in the script: The World War II-era recruitment of women allowed Vaughan, originally a mathematics teacher, to be hired in 1943 by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA. Jackson and Johnson, also mathematicians, were hired in 1951 and ’53, respectively.)

Moonlight: A heartbreaking coming-of-age saga

Moonlight (2016) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated R, for drug use, frequent profanity, sexuality and brief violence
By Derrick Bang

Some rare, special films — such as this one — are made with a degree of raw intimacy that’s both compelling and painful.

After finding Chiron (Alex Hibbert, right) hiding from bullies in a condemned apartment
building, Juan (Mahershala Ali) tries to get the frightened boy to open up, by treating him
to a meal. The effort is only partically successful, but it is a significant first step.

Director Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is profoundly difficult to watch at times, its depiction of contemporary inner city black life achingly sad, with its focus on one young man’s struggle to surmount his upbringing, his environment and the crushing realization that the world expects him to accomplish absolutely nothing. Can it be true, in the modern United States, that one is doomed from birth?

And yet Jenkins’ intriguing storytelling method — co-scripted with Tarell Alvin McCraney — offers glimpses of, if not hope, at least peace and acceptance. Although coming-of-age sagas are a familiar cinema staple, this one takes an intriguing approach; it was conceived as a drama school project in a class run by McCraney, a playwright and 2013 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient.

Jenkins’ big-screen adaptation is divided into three distinct chapters, reflecting seminal moments in the young protagonist’s life, and with different actors — who resemble each other to an uncanny degree — playing the character as he ages. The film’s atmosphere of authenticity is no accident; both Jenkins and McCraney grew up in the South Florida Liberty City housing project where much of this story unfolds.

The picture isn’t pretty, the experience on par with 2009’s Precious, and graced with similarly powerful performances.

There’s another, equally revealing comparison. 1996’s Sling Blade remains famous as the film that turned its star, director and writer — Billy Bob Thornton — into a household name. That film got much of its power from the narrative’s multiple punches. After its protagonist’s first soliloquy, delivered early on, we thought, Damn, Billy Bob peaked too quickly; there’s no way anything else will come close to that scene’s dramatic intensity. And yet, later, Thornton did top it. And we marveled.

Jenkins achieves the same intensity here.

We meet Chiron at age 9, played by Alex Hibbert: a cowed, withdrawn child bullied by schoolmates because of his small size. This earns him the pejorative nickname of “Little,” and classroom torment isn’t even his major problem; at home, he’s alternately coddled and demeaned by his mother, Teresa (Janelle Monáe), a crack addict whose parental instincts flicker erratically, at best.

Little is “rescued” one day, in a sense, by Juan (Mahershala Ali), an essentially compassionate man who — unfortunately — happens to be the neighborhood drug dealer. But the boy doesn’t know this, and their developing relationship is the first demonstration — with several more to come — of Jenkins’ skill at building a sensitive character dynamic under unlikely circumstances.