After the winter doldrums a few movies worth watching have arrived. First, but least, Logan: I am not an aficionado of superhero movies which have multiplied alarmingly and appeal to the mentality of teen-age boys, but I was assured by several reviewers that this latest and final incarnation of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine was among the greatest in the genre’s history.
We find Wolverine and Professor X holed up on the Mexican border in a world where mutants are hunted down and exterminated. They are aging, penurious and friendless. Logan drinks too much and is dying of some mutant malady. He earns money by menial means to keep a senile X, a father-figure, in meds.
The plot hinges on the discovery that a mad scientist has rounded up mutant children and is using them as lab rats in an attempt to create weaponized mutant warriors. Logan is implored to save one young such girl who is fleeing her captors. Needless to say he saddles up reluctantly, but nobly, and rides to the rescue in an attempt to get her to the Canadian border and alleged safety.
This is essentially the same plot as the many films about Jews fleeing Nazis, such as “Defiance” and “Schindler’s List,” which accounts for the gravitas that sucked in the critics, but it comes with the usual Wolverine slasher trappings — rivers of blood.
I suppose we should celebrate any film that takes the side of good over evil and of self-sacrifice to protect the weak from the ruthless, but at some point it would be nice if moviegoers could take their drama straight without a chaser of gore.
“Logan” is notable for the arrival of Dafne Keen as the threatened girl who is a feral mute for much of the film’s length. This doesn’t prevent her from stealing the show from two old troupers as seasoned as Jackman and Patrick Stewart. It will be interesting to watch her evolution.
Get Out: Here is a satiric comedy film of astonishing assurance from neophyte director Jordan Peele of the comic duo Key and Peele. It is a wily cross between “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “The Island of Doctor Moreau.”
Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) are a Brooklyn hipster couple. He is a photographer and she is a Wasp princess who is taking him home to meet her parents, a surgeon and psychotherapist. “Do they know I’m black?” he asks. Oh boy, do they, as it turns out.
Their home is in a remote rural location where Chris feels out of place, especially when a weird family reunion or coven ensues. The black servants seem very peculiar. And Chris confides over a phone call to his friend Rod (in a great comic relief performance by LilRel Howery as a TSA agent) that he thinks the mother has hypnotized him, ostensibly to help him stop smoking. To which Rod says, “Get Out.”
As it turns out Rob is right to be suspicious of the motives of strange white folks. Chris should have listened since he is about to become an unwilling lab rat, one of many Rose has brought home to meet Mommy and Daddy. It’s not every comedy that takes on issues like race and eugenics. This does, in hysterical fashion. It is an expertly paced film full of comic asides, mounting creepiness, and a near perfect ending in which, who else, the TSA rides to the rescue.
Elle: I have been waiting impatiently for “Elle” to arrive in a theater near me. The French psychological thriller stars the nonpareil Isabelle Huppert who was nominated for the Academy Award that went to Emma Stone. She was robbed. Since this is the sort of film that has a good chance of never ending up in Podunk, I was delighted to discover it was now available for streaming.
Huppert’s character is a partner in a successful video game company whose products are violent and sexually explicit. She is tough as nails, unsentimental about her sexual desires, impatient with her weak son, professorial ex-husband, and aging mother.
She also has a dark past. When she was ten her wealthy father went on a rampage, killing scores of neighbors and burning down his home as the law closed in. He’s been in prison ever since, and she must live with the stigma of the carnage she witnessed. As if this weren’t enough to make a drama, the real tale soon reveals itself to concern a ski-mask wearing intruder to her luxe Paris townhouse who rapes her and flees.
She calmly cleans up the broken crockery and does not report he crime, perhaps because she does not want to be tabloid fodder again. But she does arm herself when the attacker begins to cyberstalk her. One is left to puzzle out what to make of this icy calm. Is she a feminist icon taking self-reliance to an extreme as in “Enough,” damaged goods — due to her mad father — who thinks she deserves such abasement, or secretly aroused by being violated and willing to prolong the sick game and even turn the tables on her attacker, a heroine who is closer to “Fatal Attraction” or “Basic Instinct?”
Starring a lesser actor, this could easily have degenerated into cheesy exploitation, bathetic melodrama, or grand guignol splatterfest, but Huppert is so remarkably skilled that every scene is filled with nuance and more depth than the script promises. It is all the more remarkable because last year brought us a second Huppert performance in “Things to Come’ in which she plays an entirely different middle-aged woman facing almost opposite challenges and performing in a completely different key. Every part she plays is a master class in film acting. Her excellence may be under-appreciated because she works with remarkable subtlety and a lack of showy flash. Emma, give your statuette back.
The Sense of an Ending: The film is adapted from a Julian Barnes post-modernist novel I haven’t read. When I wasn’t sure by the end of the film exactly what was up, I went online and found readers of the book were equally at sea and have offered a half dozen competing and increasingly intricate explanations. Is this literature or a game or pin the tail on the donkey?
A modernist trick, famous from books like Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier,” is to employ an unreliable narrator. Little by little we realize the character telling the story has failed to grasp the full import of the events he is describing. This can be fun because the reader gradually sees the truth that the narrator is blind to. But now we have apparently entered he era of the unreliable novelist who himself knows what’s up, but leaves the reader with too few or too ambiguous a narrative to be sure of what he has witnessed. Instead of the sense of an ending, he gets the sense of an enigma.
The always excellent Jim Broadbent plays Tony, a retiree whose attorney wife has long since left him and whose single daughter has chosen to become pregnant before it is too late. He keeps a small unprofitable camera repair shop and lives alone and uneventfully until a letter arrives. It tells him he has inherited 500 pounds and an object from Sarah, (Emily Mortimer) the mother of Veronica, an upper class girl he briefly dated decades ago.
They parted when she went to Cambridge and he to a lesser university. There she met and began dating Adrian, his best friend from prep school, who wrote to say the hoped the liaison wouldn’t bother Tony. But it did, mightily, and he wrote back to say so, implying they deserved each other since they had betrayed him. They never spoke again. The couple married. Adrian committed suicide. It is his diary the girl’s mother has left to Tony. Why?
In the present we watch as Tony tries to get the attorney to secure this bequest from the executor, Veronica, while haunted by memories of their past interaction. It becomes clear that he was deeply smitten with Veronica, but was too reticent to call his passion by its true name. For her part the aged Veronica (Charlotte Rampling) apparently feels her mother should not have left such a peculiar bequest to her long ago beau and refuses to turn over the diary. Why?
At length she agrees to meet Tony, but instead of handing Tony the diary gives him the angry letter he wrote to her and Adrian, preserved for all these years. It is far harsher than he remembered and stands, in a sense, for all the tricks memory plays on us to falsify the past. She says she has burned the diary and bids him goodbye.
He won’t let it rest and follows her around London, eventually discovering she has a middle-aged son, Adrian Jr., who is mentally disabled and cared for in a group home. Though the caretakers believe Adrian was the son of Veronica’s mother and that she is his sister. Why?
In answer to Tony’s further queries Veronica says he just doesn’t get it. He never got it. They part.Tony’s daughter gives birth which brings he and his ex-wife and daughter closer together. Fade out.
So what happened? Did Adrian Sr. or Tony sleep with Veronica’s mother? It has been suggested. Or did Sarah pretend to be the mother of Adrian Jr. to spare her grandson the stigma of a suicidal father or her daughter the burden of a handicapped child? Or is Adrian Jr. the son of Tony whose failure to declare his love cause Veronica to marry Adrian when she realized she was pregnant? And did Adrian’s discovery of the truth that she never loved him lead to his suicide? And was this what the diary told?
This seems the least implausible explanation, which makes the tale a very British tragedy involving class divides and the loss of love because of Tony’s inability to express his feelings, leading to a life choked on British phlegm. But because the author is as reticent and oblique as his character, the audience, like him, is left unsure of what has actually transpired in the past and in mind of Veronica.