Clouds: A ray of sunshine

Clouds (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for brief profanity

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.20.20

John Kennedy Toole was 25 when he wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. He committed suicide six years later, having long suffered from grief, escalating paranoia and (very likely) despair over having failed to get his book published.

 

Zach (Fin Argus) and Sammy (Sabrina Carpenter) noodle their way through the first
few lines of a song-in-progress, little realizing where this creative burst will
eventually lead.

His mother found a carbon copy of the lengthy novel in his effects; she, too, struck out with several publishers before Louisiana State University Press accepted the manuscript. The book was published in 1980, became a best-seller and — the following year — won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: a level of recognition Toole was long past being able to enjoy.

 

Zach Sobiech, on the other hand, didget to watch one of his songs become a hit.

 

But only briefly.

 

Director Justin Baldoni’s deeply moving Clouds depicts Sobiech’s final tumultuous year — as a high school senior — after having battled osteosarcoma (bone cancer) for several years. Baldoni’s heartwarming film is a dramatized expansion of an episode of the documentary series My Last Days, which he produced in 2013, and which featured Sobiech.

 

This film’s screenplay — by Kara Holden, Casey La Scala and Patrick Kopka — is adapted from the memoir Fly a Little Higher, by Sobiech’s mother Laura. The scripters have taken a few liberties — shortening the key timeline, adding a bit of dramatic tension and a few “movie moments” — but the core story is quite accurate.

 

Accurate enough, in fact, to have earned the approval of Zach’s family and close friends (many of whom pop up in various background shots).

 

Fin Argus, best known for the TV shows The Commute and Total Eclipse, makes a solid feature starring debut as Zach. It’s a challenging role; under Baldoni’s careful direction, Argus deftly navigates the extremes of stubborn determination — without becoming some sort of overly cheerful poster child for cancer sufferers — and, alternatively, bouts of grinding despair.

 

The family dynamic also feels wholly natural, notably the good-natured teasing and jostling that takes place with older siblings Alli (Vivien Endicott Douglas) and Sam (Dylan Everett), and younger sister Grace (Summer H. Howell). The interactions between Argus and Howell are particularly strong, and one of their later scenes is a killer.

 

The Last Word: How do we wish to be remembered?

The Last Word (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for blunt profanity
By Derrick Bang

Once the characters are introduced, and the core premise established, most folks will be able to anticipate all the plot beats coming in Stuart Ross Fink’s script.

Doesn’t matter. The execution is charming, from start to finish.

Small-town newspaper reporter Anne Sherman (Amanda Seyfried, left) is astonished when
take-charge Harriet Lauler (Shirley MacLaine) barges into the publisher's office and
insists on commissioning — and fine-tuning — the obituary that'll run after her death.

Actors lucky enough to achieve milestone birthdays often are rewarded with the opportunity to play eccentric and/or cantankerous oldsters who leave a trail of shell-shocked victims in their wake: a stereotype that rarely fails to entertain. Indeed, such character portraits often result in nominations and awards. (Just for starters: Maggie Smith, The Lady in the Van; Rolf Lassgård, A Man Called Ove; Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, Grumpy Old Men; Art Carney, Harry and Tonto.)

Which brings us to tart-tongued, obsessive/compulsive Harriet Lauler: a once successful advertising executive whose world has contracted to the confines of her spacious, beautifully appointed — but empty — house, and who now marks the passage of each grindingly slow day with boredom and frustration. And who is played, with waspish delight, by Shirley MacLaine.

The Last Word — terrific title, by the way — finds Harriet adrift in a lonesome existence of her own making: completely isolated from the family members, former friends and colleagues that she has annoyed, offended, insulted or merely exasperated. Whether this seclusion is deserved, is beside the point; our heartbreaking introduction to Harriet finds her at low ebb, MacLaine wordlessly conveying the woman’s hushed despair during a somber montage accompanied solely by soft notes from Nathan Matthew David’s score.

This is by no means the first film to preface its narrative by mining gentle chuckles from a character’s ill-conceived suicide attempt. Goldie Hawn won an Oscar for doing so, back in 1969’s Cactus Flower; poor Lassgård’s similar efforts kept getting frustrated, in the aforementioned A Man Called Ove. The worst part for Harriet, after hospital treatment, is that she’s embarrassed to have revealed a weakness in her unswerving refinement.

But the act also prompts an epiphany, when she happens to glance at a random obituary in the local newspaper. Suddenly concerned about how she’ll be remembered in a few similarly short paragraphs, after her passing, Harriet impulsively decides to control the situation. She therefore hires the young journalist in question — Anne Sherman (Amanda Seyfried) — to write her obituary. Now, while she’s still alive.