The Good Mother: Relentlessly bad

The Good Mother (2023) • View trailer

NO STARS. Rated R, for profanity, violence and drug content

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

I cannot imagine why someone of Hilary Swank’s stature signed on to something this dreadful.

 

This isn’t merely a bad film; it’s also badly made. Bizarre camera placement. (Who frames a two-shot so that half of one person is cut off?) Wildly inappropriate choices of music, at bewilderingly wrong moments. Frequent night-time and deserted building set-ups so poorly illuminated that it’s impossible to tell what’s happening.

 

After her son is killed in what appears to be a drug deal gone bad, Marissa (Hilary Swank,
right) reluctantly teams up with his pregnant girlfriend Paige (Olivia Cooke), in order
to figure out what actually went down.

That said, I wish cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby had just left the cap on her camera lens, and fully spared us 90 minutes of misery.

Somebody should rip up Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s Directors Guild card; he shouldn’t be let near another film shoot. But his feeble efforts at helming this misfire pale when compared to the script he co-wrote with Madison Harrison: absolutely the most ridiculous, atrociously contrived bit of nonsense I’ve seen in years.

 

None of these characters feels genuine. Not even Swank can breathe life into her starring role. The so-called plot lurches forward only because every key character behaves like an imbecile at all times. 

 

The result is nothing but a string of “jump the shark” moments. On top of which, the plot’s supposed “surprise reveal” is blindingly obvious from the start.

 

Marissa (Swank) is a newspaper journalist in Albany, NY, whose career has stalled in the wake of her husband’s death a few years back. (One wonders why she continues to mourn, given that she later admits he was an abusive jerk: merely one of many details this misbegotten script can’t justify.) As the film begins, she’s shattered by the news that her estranged younger son — Michael (Harrison, in a fleeting acting cameo), a drug addict — has just been shot dead.

 

This comes as no real surprise to Marisa’s other son, Toby (Jack Reynor), a police officer who has been tracking the local distribution of fentanyl-laced heroin, and believes that Michael and longtime friend Ducky (Hopper Penn) were involved. When Michael’s seven-months-pregnant girlfriend Paige (Olivia Cooke) shows up at the funeral, Marissa loses control, believing her to be the “bad influence” in Michael’s life.

 

The two women subsequently reach an uneasy alliance — a moment that neither actress can sell — when Paige insists that Ducky couldn’t possibly have killed his best friend; it simply doesn’t make sense.

 

That evening, Paige goes through Michael’s things and finds a suitcase containing two large baggies of heroin. Just as she’s absorbing the implications, two men break into her apartment; she barely escapes with the suitcase. With nowhere else to go, Paige shows up at Marissa’s house, first hiding the suitcase in the front porch crawlspace; she removes oneof the bags (!) and hands it to Marissa and Toby.

 

To Toby’s obvious concern, the two women decide to play Nancy Drew, in order to a) find Ducky; b) determine if he did or didn’t kill Michael; c) find possible witnesses to the young man’s slaying; and d) figure out who broke into Paige’s place.

 

All while everybody mostly ignores the elephant in the room: Marissa’s return slide into alcoholism. (We cringe every time she gets behind the wheel of a car.)

Da 5 Bloods: A powerful statement

Da 5 Bloods (2020) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for strong violence, grisly images and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.26.20

Movie serendipity can be spooky at times.

Back in the spring of 1979, The China Syndrome hit theaters just 12 days prior to Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island almost-a-catastrophe.

Sheer chance has brought them to the right spot: As David (Jonathan Majors, far right)
watches quietly, his companions — from left, Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), Eddie
(Norm Lewis), Paul (Delroy Lindo) and Otis (Clarke Peters) — find evidence of their
long-ago fallen comrade.

And now, director Spike Lee’s savagely compelling new drama, Da 5 Bloods, debuted on Netflix June 12, not quite three weeks after the callous murder of George Floyd ignited a justifiably enraged movement that shows no sign of slowing. Lee’s message couldn’t be more timely.

His film warrants such enhanced attention. And then some.

Da 5 Bloods — co-scripted by Lee, Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo and Kevin Willmott — finds the reliably passionate filmmaker once again in the infuriated mode that characterized his early career. This isn’t a slyly sarcastic (and fact-based) jab at racist buffoons akin to 2018’s BlacKkKlansman; Da 5 Bloods is a bleak, intensely angry rage-against-the-man diatribe, with a slice of magic realism.

And, yes, a few winks and nods to classic Hollywood. Let’s call it a Vietnam parable by way of 1948’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

The setting and character dynamics may be different, but the message is identical: Greed destroys.

African-American Vietnam veterans Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) haven’t been too successful, since returning to the world. They’re broken men, beaten down by grief, illness, addiction, financial ruin and divorce. And by regret and shame, knowing that — decades earlier — they were forced to abandon their fallen squad leader, known as Stormin’ Norman.

Haunted ever since by this failure (“Leave no man behind!”), they’ve returned to Vietnam, determined to find, and bring home, their former comrade’s remains.

As it happens, though, their motives aren’t entirely pure. Back in the day — shortly before Norman’s death — the squad was tasked by the CIA to deliver a chest of gold bars to the indigenous Vietnamese who were helping the American war effort. But Norman — passionate about his own people, back home — proposed they bury the gold until they could later reclaim it for the benefit of their own communities.