Reviews by JxSxPx

James Gray’s passion play of a Polish woman discovering the American dream and its seedier realities and rot is built upon the silent era’s pantomime and impressionistic imagery and the melodramatics of the 40s and 50s. The Immigrant is a ripe film that manages to paper over its occasionally weaker moments, such as thinly written characters or an ending that feels like purple prose, through sheer force of visual poetry and Marion Cotillard’s incomparable acting skills. It’s easy to imagine a variation of this film starring Lillian Gish as the suffering dreamer caught in a love triangle and trying desperately to reunite with her sister.

The Immigrant often recalls Hollywood’s studio era in its towering artistry built around its lead actress’ performance. Cotillard suffers beautifully throughout, think of Joan Crawford expressing emotional torrent while wrapped in furs and you’re close to the filmic language of this film. She plays Ewa, freshly landed and running away from the Cossacks, an immigrant woman with a shady past that is threatened for deportation until she meets a benevolent man willing to take a chance on her. His benevolence is a mere ruse, an illusionary construction that even he half-believes, and Ewa is soon pimped out and the subject of both the character and camera’s gaze, a piercing male gaze that views her as forgiving matron and fleshy concubine.

It is Cotillard’s face and shining, haunted eyes that telegraph so much of the story’s emotional contours and interior fractures far better than the occasionally on-the-nose dialog or occurrences. She’s one of modern cinema’s strongest actors simply for her ability to behave and project with limited movement and no words volumes of detail and texture about her character. As Slant Magazine described it, she “infuses a heartbreaking mixture of dignity, vulnerability, and strength into her latest entr(y) in a gallery of ordinary women under extraordinary pressure.”

It isn’t just a shady, murky past that lingers over Ewa’s delicate frame and possessed, somber face, but the threat of losing her sister. They came over together and her tubercular sister gets quarantined, Ewa makes a promise, more like a near religious vow, to free her sister and reunite in a slice of the American ideal and promise. This is the inciting incident that makes her vulnerable for Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix) and his machinations.

Much of The Immigrant concerns her abuse and near slavery to him as he makes grandiose promises of commerce and the freedom/power it can buy. Ewa wants to free her sister, put Poland far behind her, and start anew but the past is never far enough behind us. It lurks and its traumatizing ramifications manifest in her relationship with Bruno and more sane, lucid romantic flirtations with Orlando (Jeremy Renner), a magician and Bruno’s cousin.

Orlando and his entire subplot are weak points. Not that Renner is bad in the role, no one performs at anything less than optimally throughout, but it’s thinly written material when it comes to him. Ewa becomes less of an agent of her own life, there’s plenty of material suggesting that she sees her relationship with Bruno as justifiable punishment for misdeeds and the cosmos teaching her forgiveness, and more of a pawn between the two men. An early scene where he entertains the detainees on Ellis Island and promises the American dream is laughably on the nose when so much of the film is painterly compositions and articulated through elision.  

Butter never goes as balls deep as it often threatens. It’s shallow thrusts at political satire, race, and conservative middle Americana and its weird folksy rituals. It’s dissatisfying as its climax whimpers out when it should shudder and scream.

I think that’s enough metaphorical sexual talk, but there’s a general point to it. Jennifer Garner’s unholy hybrid of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and conservative Christian housewife is as sexually frustrated as she is personally unfulfilled. These two points often converge, and Butter often questions if what she needs is just a big orgasm to get her to calm down or if political mobility and craven power grabs are her orgasmic expressions.

There’s plenty of funny material to mine here, yet Butter is often surface level with an Obama standee ascending seemingly out of the blue. Then there’s the extraneous material, like Olivia Wilde’s vengeful stripper, Ashley Greene’s rebellious daughter, and Hugh Jackman’s scenery-chewing car salesman/dumbass. Butter wants to use the prism of a butter carving competition to speak out about the near absurdity of political campaigning and politics as a wider topic, but it also wants to be a heavily sentimental tale of hard work and ethics paying off in the end.

Such as it exists, Butter exists in a phantom zone where the sentiment ruins the bitter, better parts of the movie. At least Garner delivers her tightly wound performance without a hint of irony or self-awareness. It’s a solid reminder of what a capable comedic actress she is as she’s all but wasted in numerous barely-there supporting roles. All she needs is an Election of her own to really go full-scale Tracy Flick monstrous and demonstrate her skill set.   

Big, perfunctory, and obviously reaching for the lofty heights of Martin Scorsese’s gangster epics or Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series, American Gangster is the bloated sight of a former master coasting. Here is a wannabe prestige epic about a real-life figure that coasts along an unearned sense of import without providing any memorable images or excavation of its characters moral weight. There are bland poses made towards trying to contort Frank Lucas into a symbol of upward mobility and American “can-do” spirit but contrasting him with Richie Roberts just unintentionally glamorizes the gangster to the point that his violence becomes defanged.

Hell, I just watched American Gangster and I’m having a hard time conjuring much of it back up in my memory. Ridley Scott circa Alien or Blade Runner would’ve turned this into a memorable affair, but present-day Scott is all veneer without atmosphere. His films deflate from the mind soon after the final credits roll. Do you really remember much about Alien: Covenant or The Martian?

Scott’s choice to make Richie and Frank two sides of the same coin is borderline inane. Sure, Frank Lucas is a stone-cold killer, selling heroin in his neighborhood, and coopting soldiers’ caskets to sneak his illicit goods in, but Richie is going through a rough divorce and is maybe not the best father to his kid. Some of this story is completely fabricated and it sticks out like a sore thumb which one it is. These men are not somehow spiritual brothers and trying to force the strange detours of their life stories into a digestible framework doesn’t do them any justice.

It doesn’t help that Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe appear disengaged from the material. Washington has gone deep into villainy before, but he somehow plays Lucas as too noble or too beatific. One never gets the sense of danger he brought to Training Day or the complete transformation into amorality he brought to Fences. Crowe just appears dyspeptic. Where is the transformative work he brought to L.A. Confidential or The Insider? He was far better in another bloated Scott vehicle, Gladiator. (Please read that in full drunken Elizabeth Taylor at the Golden Globes voice.)

Supporting players bring more color and fire with Josh Brolin going full cartoon as a crooked cop, Cuba Gooding Jr. in full ham as a rival gangster, and Ruby Dee glides through the film bringing decades of experience into a small role that nearly salvages the wider film at various points. Dee has several small but powerful moments, including a glower while exiting a church that’s reactive, silent acting at its finest. Her greatest moment is the towering slap and threatening to abandon her child where she scorches the earth with her gravitas and controlled rage. She is not only exerting her right to be heard by her son but asserting her authority. Dee’s screen time is minimal but what she does with it is the art and magic of acting at its finest.

Late career Oscar bait this is not. Or maybe it is, but it’s not a successful gambit like The Departed, Scorsese’s late-career Oscar make-good that’s also a wildly entertaining film. American Gangster exists, I know I watched all its near three-hour running time, but I’ll be damned if anything other than boredom and incredibility managed to linger in my mind.

More of a director trying on Hitchcockian suspense and seeing how it fits than a film noir, Experiment in Terror strikes curious poses as it lumbers towards its ending. Far too protracted to keep the suspense going, Experiment in Terror in an experiment alright, but mainly one of the “woman imperiled” variety. Much of the story is game of cat and mouse between rigid cop Glenn Ford (who else, really) and psycho killer Ross Martin with Lee Remick and Stephanie Powers functioning as collateral damage and tantalizing bits of temptation.

This would all converge into something better if the damn thing just didn’t drag itself out for so long. At two hours, it can’t justify its bloated running time, and a lot of it loses tension as it feels like wheels spinning in the mud before the eventual showdown. It doesn’t help that Ford’s once again a blank good cop with little antiheroism in him, and he’s outshone by Remick’s petrified bank teller.

There’s nearly something subversive about how Experiment in Terror lays bare the voyeurism of so many crime sagas and psychological thrillers. Remick’s character beomes a mere reactive agent to the men around that willfully throw her into dangerous situations to fight their battles for them. She’s a prop just as often as she’s an autonomous character and you’re tempted to think of all of this as an autodidactic critique of the male gaze and cinematic voyeurism.   

Such egg-headed theories are not to be found, though. Scenes stretch out and wait for a judicious edit that never comes thus robbing them of their potential impact. Remick’s possible arousal over being choked and threatened whimpers more than it moans due to a sense that the scene proper ended and yet there it is, still going. Any deeper points feel buried under the rubble of too much.

Not that all suspense thriller should be 100 minutes or less, some need that extra breathing room just for their sheer narrative heft, but there’s a reason so many of them are lean and mean. It’s better to punch quick, hard, and fast then it is to show off your flashiest moves then spend a lot of time pacing before doing them again. Experiment in Terror would have done well to remember that.

While watching Columbia Noir on the Criterion Channel, I found that Murder by Contract snuck up on me with the biggest punch. Lean, mean, and enthralling, Murder by Contract is a nasty little B-movie that attacks you with more artistry and firepower than some of its more stuffy, canonized siblings. There’s an air of cool here that wouldn’t be replicated again until Le Samourai, Jean-Pierre Melville’s neo-noir.

There’s also a clear line between this and something like Taxi Driver as the main character isolates himself, commits to a vigorous training regime, and develops an ideology of the world needing purifying in some manner. The difference is that Taxi Driver’s character operated from a perverse viewpoint that placed him as the hero of his narrative. The heir apparent to the lone rangers of numerous westerns. Murder by Contract views its character as a near android who calculates and keeps his emotional displays to gross misogyny if he exhibits any emotions at all.

Murder by Contract has us watching a control freak deal with his plans failing and the cracks in his remote exterior are fascinating to behold. We’re both repulsed by him, fearful of what depths his lack of conscience makes him capable of, and grossly fascinated in watching what he’ll do next. There’s a preternatural calm to this character that is unnerving to an extent that noir’s various hoods and femme fatales never quite reach.

The first chunk must be endured before you get to the good stuff in The Lineup. Based on a popular TV show of the era, director Don Seigel is clearly enamored with his bad guy more than he is with the stoic cops from the small screen. Why shouldn’t he be when he’s played with typical live-wire intensity and unpredictability by Eli Wallach? I’d rather watch Wallach behaving badly than Marshall Reed performing on autopilot.

Once the generic opening is over The Lineup gets good and weird. Wallach and Robert Keith make for a fascinating duo with Keith all gentlemanly killer to Wallach’s loose cannon. They talk at length in a manner that clearly paved the way for Quentin Tarantino and just as quickly turn deadly and serious. Watching them threaten a woman and child over a stash of heroin hidden in a doll is the best of noir’s descent into the demimonde.

The rest of the film, again the part that must bring in the TV players, plays things too safely. We must restore order, of course, but you spend a lot of time rooting for these two to behave badly. When it all comes crashing down in a high-speed chase through a developing freeway, The Lineup manages to convince you that there’s a diamond in the rough. If there’s no more perfect symbol for the film than the under-construction freeway that’s incomplete with a car teetering on the brink, then I don’t know what else it would be.  

I can’t quite claim this one as lost curio of the noir era, but there’s still some sweaty sexual neurosis and a leanness to the narrative that’s refreshing. That doesn’t paper over The Burglar’s messiness, like a sexual assault of Jayne Mansfield that’s disturbing now, and I can’t even imagine how it played in 1957. The Burglar is a small-time heist film that quickly unwinds into backstabbing, tragedy, and a sense of confusion over how the improbabilities piled up this high in the first place.

Dan Duryea leads a gang into a low-rent jewelry heist that is successfully pulled off. When the heat comes on, Duryea suggests that they lay low. It’s a smart idea that no one can seem to stick with as Martha Vickers and Stewart Bradley manage to find the gang, split them up through seduction, and nearly pull the whole thing down when the cops cannot. I bring this up because this gang just goes parading around in public like the fuzz isn’t breathing down their necks, including Mansfield in a holiday.

The story is simple and, frankly, not enough to justify the meager running time. The Burglar feels too often like time is being stalled as the next setup is slowly unfurling. At least Duryea and Vickers manage to liven things up with their sweaty and sultry presences, respectively. Naturally, they’d played these types of parts of before in better films, like Scarlet Street and The Big Sleep.

Narrative convenience with little tethering to reality is the order of the day, and this kind of impressionistic approach reaches and apex in the relationship between Duryea and Mansfield. A lot of noir is predicated upon the simmering sexual tension between characters, but The Burglar makes theirs nearly incestual by having her be his ward. Sexual hysteria, both in extreme repression or overindulgence, was a cornerstone of noir and The Burglar dials it up to 11 by having it both ways.

Nothing makes much sense, much of it is purple prose and disjointed, and the whole thing is covered in sweat. Part of me wants to praise the balls to the wall absurdity of The Burglar but it never gives in to its own insanity. Some of it just too damn dull.

Jacques Tourneur was one of cinema’s great second stringers. A director who could make the feeblest budgetary constraints outshine its big budget brethren through sheer force of style and atmosphere. He shined brightest when his films were their darkest – Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Out of the Past. While Nightfall is not up to the level of any of those films, it is a sturdy little crime thriller that offers plenty of pleasures.

The problem isn’t that so much of the plot feels like it was rolled off the film noir conveyor belt, but that it’s main character never fully commits to his emotional downfall or flirtation with amorality. Aldo Ray’s beefy sensitive artist is setup to everything in his corner so his chase from one greedy moment years prior is not energized by noir’s typical sense of danger or domestic stasis gone out of sync. He’s a white hat character that we’re told is a gray but never really see or become convinced by this point.

He’s got an insurance agent on his tail that’s on his side (James Gregory), a beautiful woman (Anne Bancroft), and a narrative that wants to give him a happy ending. A better film noir would fully explore Ray’s opportunist motivations and the ethical quicksand so much of the film plucks him in. There’s still the picturesque climax that places us squarely in the mountains of Wyoming, a nice change of pace from noir’s typically concrete jungle rhythms and imagery, and the solid performances from a game cast to make Nightfall routinely engaging.

It’s just a film that will always a B-lister in comparison to far better work by Tourneur, like the similarly “man haunted by his past” noir Out of the Past.

A reunion of director Fritz Lang and stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame after the previous year’s successful noir masterpiece, The Big Heat, but this one can’t help but feel a bit like a cooldown. There’s plenty of style to burn and a delicious pair of performances to thrill as often as they repel, but something about Human Desire just isn’t quite as compelling. It might have something to do with the wind dissipating from the sails before the final credits roll.

Maybe a better descriptor would be that the train runs out of steam before reaching the station as much Human Desire concerns railway workers. Based upon Emile Zola’s novel La bête humaine, Lang’s film is too stodgy for noir and too mean for literary adaptations occupying a fascinating netherworld where Grahame and Broderick Crawford give two of the greatest performances of their careers as a toxic, tragic married couple. This doesn’t mean Human Desire is a failure as a film, far from it as it’s a solid example of Lang’s craft, but that it’s a fascinating oddity that I strongly admired.

Ford is a bit of stiff drip as Jeff Warren, a Korean War veteran caught in sexual frenzy with Grahame’s complicated femme fatale and the object of affection for a bland good girl (Kathleen Case). While his decency could be properly projected to project tension and inward anger coiled inside a respectable exterior, he seems a bit too levelheaded to the pulpier aspects of the script. He’s essentially the straight man to the crazier, juicier supporting players.

Jeff crosses paths with Vicki (Grahame) while her husband (Crawford) commits a murder on a train. Vicki’s responsibility for the murder is questionable, but her marriage is a portrait of mutually assured destruction and abuse. Crawford’s big lug characters often seemed more bellow than follow-through. Not so here as Crawford’s Carl openly hits and repeatedly hits Vicki, demonstrates a murderous possessiveness, and nearly earns a modicum of sympathy with his pathetic displays of insecurity and neediness. It’s a marvel of acting that Crawford alternates between humanizing his abuser but never apologizes for him.

Just as complicated is Grahame’s ability to keep us somewhere between sympathy for her circumstances, revulsion at her actions, and enthralled with her bad behavior. This is what Grahame excelled at as an actress. She was at home in film noir and indispensable as a femme fatale. Her appearance added to the vibe and overall artistry of any production she was in, and some of her best work was with Lang in this film and The Big Heat. Her sultriness is at its ripest here, and her victim/victimizer character must be one of the best performances in her career.

It is in her and Crawford’s depiction that the sexual frenzy and animal lust so endemic to film noir exposes the rot inside the genre. Shame that it’s Ford’s innocent brought into their twisted back-and-forth that remains the central point-of-view. His character never really seems to lose his barring on the real world as he enters the twisty funhouse of Grahame and Crawford. Frankly, there doesn’t appear to be much internal struggle with his character. He moves through the motions too easily for a story so based in human emotions and base instincts.

Lang keeps a cool, nearly impassive eye on the proceedings, but Ford’s character leaves the film with a bitter aftertaste of a man done in by a “bitches be crazy” plot with a side order of virgin vs whore complex to boot. Compare Human Desire to The Big Heat’s triste on men going to power for purpose with a woman’s manipulations as mere pretense, and it’s no wonder that Human Desire has languished in its shadow. It’s still a fascinating misfire that often approaches near greatness.

Long gone is the muddied politics and visual poetry of Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, which found the titular kaiju providing salvation from humanity as a by-product of his own biological imperative to be alpha over all others. He wasn’t the benevolent protector of humanity as he became in many of Toho’s weirder sequels, but far closer to irradiated rage and psychological scars of the first film. Humanity was dwarfed an impotent to provide help in his presence, and we were mere ants in his battle with MUTOs. Humanity was collateral damage in their warfare.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is more in-line with the weird, kooky, colorful stuff that Toho did to the franchise throughout the 60s and 70s. It’s big, it’s dumb, it’s a ton of fun. Just don’t think too deeply about many of the story beats or images on display, such as a character clearly inhaling a tremendous amount of debris or the ability of several characters to shrug off a radioactive blast and keep moving.

Of course, with a subtitle like King of the Monsters, I doubt a subversion take on the material was what anyone going into it was expecting. Consider my expectations matched as Godzilla battles with/against Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah repeatedly in scenes of CGI overload and ludicrous physics. Who knew such towering beasts could move so limberly or bounce back so quickly?

No matter, I’m probably giving this too much thought. There’s a grand scale to these fight scenes that makes Godzilla: King of the Monsters one of the more visually comprehensible and borderline nihilistic summer blockbusters to come out in a while. We can be told that Godzilla is inherently a benevolent protector of humanity and the Earth’s ecology, but he sure does lay waste to the city with an ease and uncaring that seems to underscore the mythology of the character a near-deist entity.

It is when we focus in on these interesting world-building sequences and scenes of primal carnage and rage that everything works in sublime popcorn entertainment concert. It’s a damn shame that so much of the movie is preoccupied with petty family drama that just isn’t very interesting. There’s Kyle Chandler, Vera Farminga, and Millie Bobby Brown as the broken family with Brown stuck between the ideologies of her two parents and used as an unintentional pawn. Godzilla’s destruction of San Francisco killed their other child in a bit of a retcon to the previous film, causing Chandler to go into hiding with his research, Farminga to become something of an eco-terrorist hellbent on releasing these creatures to cleanse the planet, and Brown stuck in-between.

That’s some thin stuff to propel 132 minutes. Farminga is the villain of the piece, but she’s not a very interesting one. No sooner has she released Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah than she’s blinking at her own attacks and ideology. If she can’t convince us of the justice of her plan, then she’s not a villain worth investing in. Her eventually redemption is more perfunctory than satisfying as is her reunion with Chandler. We know these beats are coming, and they’re just kinda there because they must be.

Everyone involved in more concerned with the glorious spectacle, as they should be. If you’re not going to commit to your “kaiju as gigantic, lumbering metaphor” or “kaijus are actually eldritch horrors and pagan deities,” then just invest fully in their scenes of ever-escalating destruction. Bring on Godzilla vs Kong, coming in 2020. I’m primed for more mindless kaiju-versus-kaiju fun.