Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

I’m a week late to the Multiverse of Madness party, partly because the first time that I saw the new Doctor Strange film, the power went out twenty minutes before the end of the film. After a lights-out impromptu intermission, I got to see the end of the film, and the theater made good with a complementary ticket to return. More to the point, though, I waited to review it because Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was the first time in at least five movies and umpteen television series where I couldn’t wait to watch it again.
 
Put another way, I haven’t loved a Marvel movie like this in a great long while, and after having seen it twice, I’m pretty sure it’s hands-down my favorite Marvel movie since Avengers: Endgame.
 
Haunted by his surrender of the Time Stone and the consequences of returning to life after “the Blip,” Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) finds his world flipped sideways when the literal girl of his dreams arrives. But America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) tells the good doctor that those weren’t dreams – they were visions of his parallel selves. With an army of demons at their heels, Doctor Strange calls in help from the strongest magic-user he knows, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), setting off on a journey across the multiverse.
 
I’ll concede that much of my post-pandemic relationship to Marvel has something to do with not seeing these films in packed, exuberant audiences, but my Doctor Strange crowd brought their moviegoing A-game. They laughed at all the right jokes, gasped in the appropriate places (including a particularly brilliant first-act twist), and hooted and hollered for the cameos. Even my No Way Home crowd was comparatively quieter compared to the raucous atmosphere in which we collectively entered the Multiverse of Madness. This is how one ought to see a Marvel movie; as Tony Stark once said (in Iron Man 2), “Oh, it’s good to be back!”
 
More to the point, though, Multiverse of Madness is such a strong entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because of its unique flavor and its (relatively) self-contained narrative. It’s part of a much larger canvas, true, and if you haven’t seen WandaVision yet, your mileage may vary on Wanda’s part of the story, but director Sam Raimi and screenwriter Michael Waldron keep the film relatively insular. There aren’t dangling plot threads or universe-serving big pictures at play; at its core, it’s largely a horror movie in which Doctor Strange is chased by shadowy distortions of his own controlling personality, while Wanda is dogged by her grief at the multitudes of losses she’s endured.
 
Everyone remembers Sam Raimi as the man who brought us Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man trilogy, but let’s not forget his horror bona fides. And boy howdy, is this Doctor Strange a horror movie. Dutch angles and rapid zooms, jump scares and chase sequences straight out of a slasher film – it’s impossible not to appreciate the Raimi of it all, taking lessons he taught himself in things like Evil Dead and Darkman. Even the most mundane of establishing shots has something distinctively and idiosyncratically Raimi about it; indeed, there are some sequences that look like they were filmed on a GoPro attached to a vampire bat, a shot that practically screams, “Raimi!” What’s more, the film looks and thinks like a comic book. With crossfades and unconventional compositions, Multiverse of Madness feels like it was storyboarded directly from the comics. (Having Danny Elfman, arguably the most influential composer of the comic book movie genre, doesn’t hurt, especially in a symphonic chef’s-kiss of a battle amid the ruins of a parallel Sanctum Sanctorum. If you’ve seen it, you know exactly what I’m referencing.)
 
Benedict Cumberbatch joined the MCU at a time when the shared universe was poised to punch above its weight class. Frankly, he’s almost too good for the role, playing no fewer than five different Stranges, a scant forty days after his second Best Actor nomination at the Oscars. He’s clearly being groomed (if he’s not there already) for the Tony Stark center around which the rest of the Marvel Universe orbits, and he’s deftly up to the task, emotional and scary and all-powerful, without losing the ability to drop a good wisecrack or two. Elizabeth Olsen, though, very nearly steals the show as Wanda, now fully inheriting the mantle of the Scarlet Witch after the events of WandaVision. Olsen has always had fun as Wanda, and it really shows here as Raimi lets her lean into the character’s long history and peculiar physicality, all head cocks and intricate fingerwork (with just a pinch of a Sokovian accent). 
 
Meanwhile, it’s a great pleasure to see Benedict Wong back as Wong, now Sorcerer Supreme and stalwart arched eyebrow of the MCU. (To push the analogy, after appearances in Shang-Chi and Spider-Man: No Way Home, is Wong the new Nick Fury?) Amid all the other returning faces, including Rachel McAdams and Chiwetel Ejiofor – though not always in the way you’d be expecting – and a whole host of cameos that I wouldn’t spoil in a million years, there’s Xochitl Gomez as America Chavez. Comics enthusiasts can probably bet that we’ll see some kind of Young Avengers before too long, with Kate Bishop (Hawkeye) and Yelena Belova (Black Widow), and we can only hope that America Chavez is among them. She’s fun and spunky, not unlike Brec Bassinger’s recent turn as TV’s Stargirl, and her multiversal powers open up a whole new portal (pun intended) for future MCU shenanigans. 
 
Within the Multiverse of Madness, America lets us see scores of new worlds, familiar in a sideways kind of way, and much of the film’s second act involves a few surprise appearances facilitated by our journey into the multiverse. And unlike some films I could mention (more on that tomorrow), Sam Raimi holds the cameos at bay, preventing them from overwhelming the movie, even though he must surely hear the audience champing at the bit for more parallel worlds, more cameos, more interconnective tissue. Nay, says Raimi, the focus must be on the story at hand, a tight two-hour superhero horror flick that gives each of its main players a compelling arc. And it’s all done with a magician’s flourish, including one firing of Chekhov’s Gun that is so viscerally surprising and yet perfectly inevitable that I quite literally stamped my feet with glee when I realized how Raimi and Waldron had set the table for a delightfully creepy third act. (All the better that it’s using prosthetics more than CGI, an effect that seems straight out of Darkman.)
 
While I don’t know that I’ll ever love a Marvel movie as much as I love Captain America: The Winter Soldier (a perfect confluence of so many things), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness really is the antidote to the Marvel malaise I’ve been feeling of late. Sure, I gave most of them good reviews, or at least fair to middling, but I haven’t rushed to rewatch any of them. (And indeed my opinion of one in particular has soured – but again, more on that tomorrow.) With this Doctor Strange, I fairly ran to the theater a week later. I should have known; leave it to the doctor to give you the medicine you need.
 

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, frightening images and some language.” Directed by Sam Raimi. Written by Michael Waldron. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Xochitl Gomez, and Rachel McAdams.

Doctor Strange (2016)

Blend Iron Man with Guardians of the Galaxy, stir in a liberal portion of Inception, and season lightly with Grey’s Anatomy, then bake for two hours in the classic Marvel Cinematic Universe formula, and you can imagine something pretty close to Doctor Strange, Marvel’s fourteenth and latest film which introduces magic and interdimensionality into the narrative tapestry of the MCU. While some have used the word “formula” derisively, Doctor Strange is an excellent example of why we don’t fix that which is not broken.

Benedict Cumberbatch joins the MCU world as Stephen Strange, an arrogant and narcissistic surgeon whose fate changes after a grisly car accident ends his medical practice by shattering his hands. In search of answers, Strange travels to Kamar-Taj, where he learns from The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) and her pupil Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) the magic of the mystic arts. As rogue sorcerer Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) breaches the boundaries of reality to invite discord, Strange must choose between his old life and the new responsibilities he learns in Kamar-Taj.

Director Scott Derrickson has to introduce a lot of new things to Marvel with Doctor Strange, and he does a deft job of taking the universe into a new direction. While some of the magical aspects of the film resonate with Thor: The Dark World’s convergences and Ant-Man’s microverse, Doctor Strange is the most overtly mystical Marvel film to date, but a thrilling opener in the Mirror Dimension convinces the audience that this is all of a piece with what’s come before. Derrickson certainly owes a debt to the extra-gravitational imagery of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, sharing with the 2010 film a fondness for bending cityscapes and rotating corridors.

Derrickson also has to shuffle Benedict Cumberbatch into the MCU, and it’s honestly a little shocking that a star this big had to wait eight years to break in. But boy, does he fit right at home. Cumberbatch plays Strange as startlingly unpleasant in the film’s first act (with a particularly brutal one-liner to McAdams, which might be the MCU’s meanest line to date), and his sincerity in scenes laden with special effects goes a long way to selling us on the inherent strangeness (no pun intended) of the film’s conceits.

While I might not have intended to make a joke just there, Doctor Strange intends several, with a brand of humor that is more akin to the quirks of Guardians of the Galaxy than the snappy one-liners of Captain America: Civil War. (The librarian Wong, in particular, reminds one of Dave Bautista’s Drax.) Indeed, for all the high-concept magic and interdimensional strife at play in Doctor Strange, the film is surprisingly funny, lighthearted in the way we’ve come to expect from the MCU. Even characters like The Ancient One have their wry jests, and in that sense Doctor Strange’s sense of humor is more unexpected and therefore more successful. (Humor, after all, relies on the collision of the expected with the unexpected.)

As fantastic as Civil War was, reminding us of all the things we’ve loved about the MCU, Doctor Strange has me excited for the future of the universe, showing what can be done when the film tries something a little offbeat, something new about which the audience might not already have a preconceived notion. With Black Panther and Captain Marvel on the horizon, Marvel is setting up for a few new tricks, but if Doctor Strange becomes a kind of Iron Man for the future (both in setting tone and in installing an iconic star as the figurehead), I’m on board for fourteen more.

PS - Be certain to check out a 3D screening. I can't imagine the film working halfway as well in two dimensions.

Doctor Strange is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi violence and action throughout, and an intense crash sequence.” Directed by Scott Derrickson. Written by Jon Spaihts, Scott Derrickson, and C. Robert Cargill. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Benedict Wong, Mads Mikkelsen, and Tilda Swinton.

Spotlight (2015)

After the credits rolled on Spotlight, I turned to my moviegoing companion and murmured, “That is what I wanted Truth to be.” A few weeks back I took the Cate Blanchett/Robert Redford movie to task for “all the self-congratulation of an Aaron Sorkin screenplay but less of the snappy prose,” and I stand by those words because Spotlight shows us how it’s done, emblematic of everything a journalism film ought to be – taut, gripping, honest, and well-performed.

Spotlight is the horrifyingly true story of a team of Boston Globe reporters (among them Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel McAdams) and their editor (Liev Schreiber) who uncover mounting evidence of widespread child abuse in the Catholic Church. I invoke “horror” because of the dispiriting spiral of abuse the team uncovers, learning quickly that the story they’re working on encompasses as many as 87 priests and systemic attempts to cover up the scandal, which only begins to see light when a beleaguered attorney (Stanley Tucci) organizes a class-action suit against the Church.

The very first thing one notes about Spotlight – and indeed my principal motivation for seeing the film – is the impressive ensemble cast who are bound to be competing against each other when the Oscar nominations are announced next month. There’s not a face on the screen who doesn’t already carry a tremendous amount of screen presence from their previous work, and the only unfamiliar face – Brian d’Arcy James – pulls double-time to make up for the fact that he’s not immediately recognizable. The lot of them are doing award-caliber work with characters that are apparently quite close to their real-life counterparts. Keaton and Ruffalo are immensely compelling, particularly when the two butt heads on the story. The screen crackles when Keaton and McAdams go on interviews together, and it is as ever a delight to see Stanley Tucci in another idiosyncratic supporting role as the self-described only Armenian in Boston.

I had a critique formulating at about the midpoint in the film where I felt the characters weren’t clearly delineated enough, that their narrative places could be interchanged without much compromise to the narrative – that, in short, Spotlight was more about the telling of the story than the tellers. Which, to be fair, in a very real sense it is, but it’s also indicative of the slow-burn approach to the characters taken by director Tom McCarthy (he of Station Agent and an acting turn in Good Night and Good Luck, which feels of a piece with Spotlight). Rather than frontload the characterization, we find out more about the reporters’ motivations as the film unfolds. By the end of the film, and I confess this is a clever move, we’re left to reflect on the degree to which what we learn about the reporters influenced the way they pursued the story.

What surprised me about Spotlight was that there really was no “untold story” that the film exposes. It proceeds about how you’d expect – an investigation begins, details are uncovered, the story is published. (There’s one somewhat surprising historical curveball thrown into the mix, one that contextualizes the investigation in a very profound way, one that reminds you just how long ago all this happened.) What is remarkable is just how compelling this manages to be. And I’m returning to the Truth comparison because Spotlight manages its moral outrage without a sense of preachiness and without ever feeling baggy under the weight of its self-righteousness. Instead, its taut simplicity is its greatest strength, and its exemplary filmmaking ought be seen before the screenings fill up with post-Oscar bandwagoners.

Spotlight is rated R for “some language including sexual references.” The film contains in the neighborhood of 10 F-bombs and about twice as many scatological expletives. Though no abuse is ever depicted on screen, we do see survivors speaking frankly about the incidents and the emotional trauma thereafter.

About Time (2013)

I’m about to say something extremely significant, and for its significance to hit you like it ought, please keep in mind that Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, and Gravity all came out this year; each of them received a rather glowing review from yours truly.

Having said that, About Time is very nearly (if not entirely) my favorite movie of the year – a beautiful moving comedy that yanks at those heartstrings without losing sight of its own unique sense of humor.

On his 21st birthday, Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) receives some shocking news from his father (Bill Nighy) – the men in the family can travel through time.  After realizing it’s not a practical joke, Tim moves to London to live with depressed playwright Harry (Tom Hollander) and falls in love with Mary (Rachel McAdams) in a plot that is making me weepy just to think about it.

Truly, I cannot do justice in words to just how hard “right in the feels” this movie hit me.  About Time is a story so well told that it achieves greatness by virtue of its innocuous sincerity.  I’m often accused (sometimes by myself) of taking films too cerebrally, of a chronic inability to surrender to being moved by a film, but I can safely point to About Time as the evidence that proves I can still be swept wholly and completely away by the right film.

About Time is that film, offered as a litmus test for true empathetic humanity.  Aside from the obligatory remark of how refreshing it is to see an original, self-contained film that does everything right without gambling on a franchise, About Time handles characterization with a pitch-perfect blend of spot-on casting (especially with the avuncular ethos of Bill Nighy) and brilliant writing from director/writer Richard Curtis, who already won hearts with Love Actually.  Rather than being didactically instructed which characters to care about, About Time allows us to come to love Tim, Mary, and Dad (and even curmudgeonly Harry) as though we really knew them.  Gleeson distills the brand of endearingly awkward into a compelling performance, McAdams is as stunningly lovable as always, and Nighy is the force of nature that is “Bill Nighy” at his best – paternal, charming, and witty.

The performances are all top-notch (what else would we expect from a predominantly British cast?), but what’s truly remarkable is the plotting of the film, which Curtis’s screenplay unfolds without the typical show-off flourishes of most time travel narratives.  Instead of wowing us with sleight of hand, Curtis opts for an exploration of the basic human condition – the search for the meaning of life in finding the love of your life – that just so happens to include time travel.  As a result, the real surprises of the film come not from “wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff” (as The Doctor so snappily put it) but from smart scripting, as when the sideplot involving Tim’s sister develops in the background until its significance becomes foregrounded in a way that’s both surprising and (in hindsight) obvious.  Throughout it all, nothing is wasted, no scene goes by without deepening the characters or furthering the plot.

The greatest surprise, the most fantastic triumph of About Time comes from the astounding emotional resonance the film carries without resorting to the saccharine tropes we might expect from a romantic comedy.  Instead, we get moments of powerful devotion, assisted by the touching chemistry between Gleeson and McAdams, and a brutally slow-burn approach to making the audience cry.  I saw the film with a mostly full house, and the sniffles could be heard beginning an hour from the end; my eyes were on a perma-misty setting I didn’t know I had until the waterworks turned on all the way about twenty minutes to the end, at a point which I could identify precisely if it didn’t spoil one of the most touching scenes in the film.  Suffice it to say that About Time is the film that would move even the stonyhearted Pharaoh to tears – it certainly got me.

With the onslaught of Oscarbait movies coming this month (some of which will probably be very good), I’m holding onto About Time as the movie that moved me the most, which left me physically enervated but emotionally rejuvenated.  Even in a year filled with successful superhero outings like Man of Steel and works of breathtaking artistry like Gravity, About Time has moved into that place in my heart for movies that resonate so profoundly with everything I believe about the world – a movie to which I can point and say, “That’s a movie about the world I live in.”  For those of us looking for that emotionally perfect movie, a panacea for the hopeless romantic in all of us, it’s About Time.

About Time is rated R “for language and some sexual content.”  A topless photograph of Kate Moss is seen in a gallery exhibition, while a few sexual encounters (and their aftermaths) are depicted with no nudity (one does, however, include my new favorite seduction line, which involves the removal of new pajamas).  There is a smattering of strong profanities, and one character is hospitalized with a few cuts and bruises.  Ultimately, a rather soft R.

Monday at the Movies - February 13, 2012

Welcome to Week Seven of “Monday at the Movies.” Only one movie this week, and right in time for Valentine’s Day, to boot!

Wedding Crashers (2005) – I’d forgotten how funny this movie is, partly because I can see retrospectively how much influence this had on the buddy comedy genre in the past seven years. The premise is simple: Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play divorce mediators who crash weddings in order to score notches on their bedposts, but their plans go askew after they’re invited to the weekend home of Treasury Secretary Christopher Walken, who very nearly steals the movie altogether. But it’s Vaughn who holds court over the entire film; although Wilson is ostensibly the romantic lead in a love triangle with Rachel McAdams and a cusp-of-fame Bradley Cooper, Vaughn nails every line, eliciting guffaw after belly laugh with memorable lines like “You lock it up!” and “You and I both know I’m a phenomenal dancer.” And unlike most comedies, there are very few parts that drag, with each bit character having a specific trait that lends itself to laughs, like the nutty old grandmother or the uncredited surprise cameo of Chaz Reinhold (which I won’t spoil for the three people in the world who haven’t seen the movie yet). Seven years out, though, it’s impossible not to notice the legacy the film has left – the rapid-fire overlapping dialogue (our generation’s His Girl Friday?), the appearance of a star who’s funny just to look at (Walken), the supporting role chaired by a future leading man (Cooper), the cameo from a comedy superstar (Chaz)... the list goes on. Wedding Crashers is one party you’ll want to be invited to – and then crash – again and again.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Monday at the Movies - January 16, 2012

Welcome to Week Three of “Monday at the Movies.” As Sean Connery once said, “I’ll take swords for $200.” And so, in tribute to that quotation, it’s movies that begin with the letter S for this week!

Sherlock Holmes (2009) – After loving A Game of Shadows, I felt compelled to go back and rewatch the first Guy Ritchie film about the sleuth of Baker Street (although my sister claims it’s a consequence of my “man-crush on Robert Downey Jr.”). And having just read A Study in Scarlet – the first Sherlock Holmes book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – I was surprised by how detail-oriented this film is, despite its overall unconventional treatment of Holmes. It’s a fresh take on Holmes, but it’s one that doesn’t do injustice to the source material; small details like Holmes’s violin, Watson’s injured leg, and snippets of dialogue all seem like clever inventions of the screenplay, but they’re all drawn from the source. Downey is superb as the eccentric master sleuth, and Jude Law (of whom I’m not usually a fan) is suitably irritable and a perfect straight man for Downey’s antics. What I especially love about this movie is how well the script holds together, with a delightful reveal scene at the end in which Sherlock pieces together all the elements of villain Mark Strong’s plot in classic Holmes fashion. But the clues sprinkled throughout the film reward repeat viewings, as does Downey’s quirky performance. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I hold him as one of our finest actors, and in this regard he does not disappoint. And that music by Hans Zimmer? First-class – you’ll be surprised that Holmes never had a major theme tune before a few years ago.

Stalag 17 (1953) – I’ve consistently ranked this as one of my favorite movies of all time, and with the holidays just passing it’s a perfect time to revisit this World War II prison camp flick set during Christmas. Director Billy Wilder hands in this fantastic film in which William Holden is Sefton, an American POW suspected of being an informant for the Germans. But as Sefton remarks, “There are two people in this barracks who know I didn't do it. Me and the guy that did do it.” But don’t mistake this for a mere suspense/thriller; Stalag 17 is not your typical WW2 film. The movie is laugh-out-loud funny in moments, dramatically wrought in others, and unfailingly entertaining. And coming from a guy who hates narration, the voiceover work by Gil Stratton as Cookie is top-notch, advancing the plot but nuanced enough to make us wonder how much we can trust a narrator who stutters. The dialogue is snappy, the mystery compelling, and the last twenty minutes addictively watchable. And don’t be too distracted by stars Holden, Otto Preminger, Peter Graves, and Sig Ruman – there’s an ensemble cast behind enemy lines, and each of them gets a moment to shine, from the “At Ease!” newsman to the Grable-obsessed Animal. One final word by way of recommendation – no one who has seen this movie at my recommendation has come back with anything less than complete love for the film. It might not be the most accurate POW film you’ll see, but it’s by far the most entertaining.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!