Darkest Hour (2017)

When I saw Dunkirk back in July, I can safely say that at no point in the film did I think to myself, “This movie could use more Gary Oldman.” And yet, here we are, with Darkest Hour as the unintentional other half of Dunkirk, treating at length the only part of the event that Christopher Nolan didn’t recount in full – the homefront. There is probably a very intriguing “Dunkirk Saga” to be crafted from editing the films together, though I think Hollywood’s efforts would be better spent at giving us more films of Oldman as Winston Churchill.

Gary Oldman stars as Winston Churchill, appointed Prime Minster of the United Kingdom after the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) become untenable. Churchill, his wife Clemmie (Kristin Scott Thomas), and his secretary Elizabeth Layton (Lily James) move to 10 Downing Street to prepare for war – or peace – with Nazi Germany as it marches further into France.

It need not be said – for everyone already seems to be in unanimous agreement – that Gary Oldman gives a bravura performance as Churchill. Oldman’s name is being bandied about once more for an Oscar, to which I have to say it’d be about time. As Churchill, Oldman is (as ever) chameleonic, disappearing behind the jowls, the glasses, and the cigars in a performance that is not quite impersonation and certainly far from caricature, though it does resemble an uncanny impression in that Oldman is difficult to recognize in character. There’s something in the eyes, the voice, the stance, yes, but by and large it’s quite easy to disregard the artifice and believe we are watching Churchill himself. And while many times we clamor for a sequel because we want to know what happens next, I’m first in line for Darkest Hour II (“Dark Harder?”) because I want to spend more time in the company of a performance this fine.

The time frame of Darkest Hour is quite tight – less than a month – which is all the more astonishing when you consider what was asked of Churchill in those brisk days. To inherit an office diminished by one’s predecessor, and to be faced with several forms of political and military extinction, with little more than the English language as your principal weapon of defense... well, it’s not for nothing that Churchill’s wife at one point remarks that her husband has “the weight of the world on your shoulders.” A brief telephone call with Franklin D. Roosevelt might seem a moment for the Americans in the audience to feel involved, but it quickly becomes a reminder of how maddeningly unhelpful the isolationist America was at the time and how bitterly alone Churchill must have felt as he stared down the barrel of Hitler’s gun. “It’s late,” he breathes wearily, a sense of hopelessness edging into the film’s middle.

Director Joe Wright is perhaps still best known for directing the first-rate Atonement, so it comes as a slight shock that here too Wright takes the opportunity to revisit Dunkirk – recall, James McAvoy finds himself separated from Keira Knightley by the evacuation. Earlier this year, Christopher Nolan set his exploration of humanized hopelessness and fractured time at Dunkirk, but here Wright treats the event as the tipping point of a global conflagration, an Atlas-like burden which Churchill must shoulder with the full knowledge that the fate of the very world rests upon his response. But Wright is careful to keep his Churchill human, too; rather than err on the side of hagiography, Wright presents a Churchill wrestling with his doubts and willing to laugh at his faults, as when he initially mangles the “V for Victory” gesture.

At the heart of the film is a moment that shouldn’t work as well as it does. Having hung Chekhov’s gun on the wall when he mentions offhandedly he’s never ridden the subway, Churchill takes to the underground and mingles with the people. It feels initially like Screenwriting 101, setting Churchill amongst the proletariat, but the scene works so well that I didn’t want it to end. In that cramped subway car – and the film is, if nothing else, devoutly claustrophobic – Oldman imbues Churchill with such grace, humor, and candor that it’s not hard to believe a nation (indeed, a globe) was charmed by such a charismatic leader.

Darkest Hour is rated PG-13 “for some thematic material.” Directed by Joe Wright. Written by Anthony McCarten. Starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Ronald Pickup, Stephen Dillane, and Ben Mendelsohn.

Baby Driver (2017)

Poor Edgar Wright – he’s made his first film since The World’s End in 2013, and all anyone wants to talk about is why he famously walked away from 2015’s Ant-Man. Never mind that Baby Driver is in a sense the anti-Ant-Man, a sharp, original, standalone action flick with nary an Avenger in sight (though Jon Bernthal, soon to grace Netflix in a Punisher series, does turn up for the film’s first heist), or that star Ansel Elgort is a kind of anti-Paul Rudd, terse-lipped and fairly fresh to audiences who sat out young-adult fare like The Fault in Our Stars or Divergent. For my money, Baby Driver is the anti-Fury Road, an automotive action film that gets the audience to care about the characters and their world without once repeating a trick from its arsenal amid a series of high-octane, motor-revving driving sequences.

Ansel Elgort stars as the eponymous Baby, a getaway driver in the employ of heist meister Doc (Kevin Spacey), who’s teeing up the trademark “one last job” for Baby. Baby has driven for bank robbers with the unlikely names of Buddy and Darling (Jon Hamm and Eiza González) and for manic muggers like Bats (Jamie Foxx), but his true passion is his music – piped through his iPod and a standout soundtrack – and his girl, waitress Debora (Lily James).

Baby Driver starts out with a bang-up bank robbery, the particulars of which are never seen; Wright instead focuses his cinematic eye on Baby grooving to his tunes and scoping out the landscape before throwing the car into gear and speeding away to the tune of “Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. It’s a clever approach to the scene, which most other directors would have set inside the bank, but Wright wisely takes this moment to introduce us to our protagonist, his methods and movements, before opening up his cinematic toolbox and showing us just what he can do with a barrage of edits, practical driving effects, and some first-rate sound design. It’s an opener that aligns us both with Baby and with Wright; having seen the ample capabilities of both, the audience is primed to care about what they do next.

Wright has always been a master of characterization; Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz created exceptionally memorable characters (aided, I grant you, by the superfluously talented Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), and even Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, though I didn’t much care for it, had a cast of strange rangers that I’ve had difficulty forgetting altogether. The good work continues in Baby Driver, with each “debut” giving us a very clear sense of who the character is and how they’ll fit into the larger world of the story. The exception, though, is Debora, who’s put into a kind of trope role of the pretty love interest until she takes a more active role in the film’s third act; I’d love to see Wright make a film that passes the Bechdel Test, for one, because it’s just about the only thing missing from Baby Driver.

One thing that isn’t lacking in Baby Driver is surprise and the visceral charge that goes with it. The screenplay takes a few unexpected turns, such that my plot summary above only scratches the surface of the places Baby Driver goes. Like the sharpest scripts, Baby Driver winds its pieces back together at the end in surprising ways, resurrecting plot elements long forgotten in order to throw the conclusion into sharper relief, and as we might have come to expect from Wright, lines of dialogue recur and accrue meaning, even if it’s just a sly wink to the audience as characters catch up to the references.

I watch a lot of movies; I tend to like a good deal of them, and I’m perhaps too forgiving of ones too close to my heart. As much as I loved Guardians, Vol. 2 and Wonder Woman, Baby Driver is probably the first must-see movie of the summer by sheer dint of its originality; a superhero movie is almost always kin to every other superhero movie, but Baby Driver feels fresher by being unfettered of any genre conventions. Like La La Land, which toyed with the conventions of a musical romance but never allied fully with that genre, Baby Driver orbits the heist/crime film but inflects it with all sorts of other things for a unique and exhilarating experience. The true mark of a film’s success is the reaction it provokes in an audience, and Baby Driver had me gasping, chuckling, and breathless.

Baby Driver is rated R for “violence and language throughout.” Written and directed by Edgar Wright. Starring Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza González, and Kevin Spacey.

Cinderella (2015)

With Maleficent (mercifully) behind us and a live-action Beauty and the Beast yet to come, we’re in the midst of a live-action reinvention over at the House of Mouse.  While I do have some reservation regarding the overall necessity of the move, I do think that Cinderella acquits itself better than Maleficent thanks to its narrative fidelity and its frankly stunning production value.

In what is essentially a remake of the 1950 animated Disney film, Lily James stars as Cinderella, left after her father’s passing in the care of her evil stepmother Lady Tremaine (Cate Blanchett).  After a chance encounter with her Prince Charming (Richard Madden), Cinderella makes every effort to go to the ball, with a little magical assist from her Fairy Godmother (Helena Bonham Carter).

The most striking thing about Cinderella is, surprisingly, the clothing.  I cannot recall ever being as impressed with costume design as I was with Sandy Powell’s work on this film.  (Fun fact:  she’s also the costume designer for my all-time favorite film, The Departed.)  Perhaps some credit is due to the cinematography, but the colors in the film really pop in a way that dominates my overall impression of the film – Cinderella looks spectacular.  The dresses of Lady Tremaine and her daughters very plainly communicate their interior ugliness, doing so with a flair that Powell has described as nineteenth century by way of the 1940s.  Cinderella’s dresses, too, are incredibly vibrant, matching well the Prince’s royal finery.

The film overall has a very polished look which I credit to the very pristine direction of Kenneth Branagh, who does fairy tales with the same elegance he brings to Shakespeare and superheroes.  There are a few nods to both – from Hamlet, both Derek Jacobi and fencing, and from Thor, Stellan Skarsgard – but more importantly, Branagh brings his trademark earnestness to Cinderella.  It’s honestly a little jarring to go from the delightfully revisionist Into the Woods, in which Cinderella’s indecisiveness clashed with Prince Charming’s insincerity, to a film which wholly believes in the happily-ever-after genre tropes.

Despite the well-crafted nature of the film and the strong performances all around, there is still the lingering question of whether there is a need for another treatment of Cinderella which doesn’t really distinguish itself too strongly from the versions that preceded it.  This is, of course, the question asked of every remake at one time or another, and my chief complaint about Maleficent was, you’ll recall, that its contributions to the revisionist project were so uneven that the best scene was the one that took the fewest liberties, so clearly there’s a threshold of acceptable innovation/transgression.  Cinderella succeeds, I think, on the grounds that it steers a very straight course through the familiar elements of the plot in an even and engaging way, but as content as I felt during the end credits there was still the sensation that I hadn’t actually seen anything new.

Now, to be fair, Cinderella goes 180-degrees from Into the Woods by making the Prince more, not less, compelling; where Sondheim’s Prince “was raised to be charming, not sincere,” Cinderella gives us a prince bristling at his royal obligations, more interested in marrying for love than for obligation (subtext that I don’t recall being quite so present in the animated film).  It also recognizes that Cate Blanchett is phenomenally gifted, so Lady Tremaine’s wickedness is played up as well as explored near the end of the film as she monologues about her motivations.

Ultimately, then, I’m in an unusual place with Cinderella.  The creative team responsible have created something that amounts to a very good cover band version of a classic with a few neat solos in the middle there, but there’s a curmudgeonly bit of me that wants to cling to the original because the new isn’t different enough.  Then again, I think of all the children in the theater with me that afternoon, and I realize that for them this film likely is the definitive Cinderella, and I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.  Maybe the better metaphor is that of translation, the act of going from one language (animation) to another (live-action), and it is on those grounds that Branagh’s Cinderella succeeds.

Cinderella is rated PG for “mild thematic elements.”  I suppose that’s due to the passing of Cinderella’s parents and the verbal abuse she endures at the hands of her wicked stepmother, but this is very nearly G-rated material.

Bonus review!  Cinderella is preceded by a seven-minute short, Frozen Fever – a sequel to (you guessed it), Disney’s wildly profitable Frozen from two Christmases ago.  The short finds Elsa (Idina Menzel) prepping the kingdom for the birthday of her sister Anna (Kristen Bell).  Only two things stand in the way – the snowman Olaf (Josh Gad) is trying to eat the cake, and Elsa has a head cold.  The cynic in me thinks that Frozen Fever is a long advertisement for plush toys of the snow-babies created whenever Elsa sneezes, but aren’t they cute?  By nature of being so short, Frozen Fever isn’t long on substance, but it does continue the film’s emphasis on the sisters’ relationship over a romantic one between Anna and Kristoff in a way that is more refreshing than treacle.  The main song “Making Today a Perfect Day” is about as catchy as “For the First Time in Forever” from the main film, though it won’t, I predict, have the staying power of “Let It Go” (either in eternity or in your head).  All told, I’m a bigger fan of Disney’s original shorts like Paperman and Feast, though Frozen Fever is as pleasant as the “Toy Story Toons” we’d been getting for a while there, a fun pit stop with some familiar faces.