The Good Liar: Not What I Thought, But Better

December 13, 2019 by jess Leave a comment

The Good Liar, a film written by Jeffrey Hatcher & directed by Bill Condon. 2019.

Spoilers

Ya’ll thought this was going to be a Knives Out review, didn’t you? Yeah, me too. I mean, I’ve got that draft open and waiting, but then I stopped by the theater again for no really good reason, and ended up seeing The Good Liar. And let me tell you, I genuinely can’t stop thinking about it. So Knives Out will have to wait.

Like a true millennial in 2019, I decided to see this movie based on one small, square ad promoted on Instagram. Look, you put Sir Ian McKellen and Russell Tovey in one movie together, and that’s all I need to know. I’m there. The algorithm clearly knows how to get me. I didn’t even search up the full trailer, I just went.

Because of that, I had no clue what to expect. From the tiny trailer I watched, I gathered it would be a good-natured caper that turned into a battle of wits between two equally-talented and cunning cons-people.

And, I mean, it was, but it was also so much more.

We got a survivor story! A WWII story! A female character finally making peace with her past story! A rapist getting a comeuppance story! And I thought it was just going to be a crime thriller!

We got kick-ass elderly representation. We got queer representation. We got strong, well-written female representation. We got so much more than that small trailer could have ever hinted at. And I loved it.

Look, was it the best movie? No. Honestly, as a crime thriller, I think it fails. The plot is slow. The thefts – which take up a good portion of time onscreen – involve less running and more limping, less sneaking around and more manipulating conversations while sitting around a table holding large calculators.

Which is so unbelievable, by the way. Who does their banking like that? With their entire account in a giant calculator? Are there people who really use those? Is that realistic? Is it safe?

I mean, no, I guess not.

But what the genuine heck? I find it so hard to believe a company is actually spending money to produce oversized calculators capable of accessing all of someone’s account data and then spending even more money to ship them out to clients. I just, I can’t. Maybe it’s a British thing. Maybe I’m just so used to mobile banking on my phone I can’t picture the physical equivalent of it.

But anyways, believable plot devices or not, an exciting crime they do not make.

I get it, the title of the film is The Good Liar. With an emphasis on lying and spin and accentuated fluff meant to encourage people to give their money away. I get it, I do. But once the story established that that was the con, couldn’t we have spent time somewhere other than the kitchen table?

It’s not like the actors were incapable of thrilling sequences. Hell, McKellen’s Roy pushed someone into an oncoming train. We got a cliche beatdown in the butcher’s. And Dame Helen Mirren crushed every scene she was in, deftly portraying Betty in such a subtle, controlled way that allowed us to know something was up even as Roy underestimated her character again and again.

Look, I’m a sucker for a good assumed-female-frailty-used-as-a-weapon story. I live for those. And this movie delivered that so, so well.

I wish we spent more time with Mirren’s character. We didn’t need to, of course, because as I said, her acting showed the audience exactly what we needed to know. Of course she knew the guy in the car. That was obvious in her face and huffy departure. Of course she didn’t “take a tumble and fall down” after going off on her own. Those shaky hands held more than a scrape with the ground. Of course she knew what he was doing. You could see it hidden in her eyes every scene they spent together.

She played this part perfectly. It’s funny to read reviews that state Mirren played a damsel in distress with no real influence on the plot, because they’re doing the exact same thing Roy did: ignored her. Wrote her off as useless and unimportant and as an object to be walked over.

Betty tricking Roy is not a surprise ending. Anyone who has ever paid a shred of attention to a woman would have seen her body language saying things her voice didn’t. And I love how loudly this movie shouts: pay attention to female characters!

If you thought Betty being behind the true con was a shock, here’s a tip: women are just as exciting and important to watch. Value their influence on screen and in your life.

But for those of us who figured out quite quickly there was more to Betty than meets the eye, I think the plot could have spent more time hinting at their backstory together. We get hints of Roy’s unsavory past, we know he’s tied to the war in some way, thanks to Russell Tovey’s character Steven. But there’s absolutely nothing to connect Betty to the German backdrop.

We didn’t need all the establishing scenes of how vile and crooked a person Roy is. Trust me, we got it. What we don’t get is anything that even slightly points to Betty and Roy having spent time together in the past. And c’mon, where’s the fun in that? We want to guess what happens! But we can’t do that without proper foreshadowing, planning, and hinting.

As it stands, the twist at the end is too convenient. It needed setup. I know they wanted it to be a surprise, but I’m certain the script could have given us glimpses into Betty’s background to make the connections ourselves without them explicitly coming out and revealing it early.

If they had only started establishing it sooner, instead of a singular flashback scene at the end, it would’ve been perfect. The movie would have come together. But it falls just slightly flat – and not because the twist is a rape, as a few reviews I’ve seen online have said.

Personally, that rape reveal gave The Good Liar an entirely new meaning. Betty isn’t just another weak female character, and she’s not just another conwoman. She isn’t doing this for fun. She’s a survivor, and she’s stronger than everything in her past.

And you know what? Even after everything he had done to her, everything he had done to other women, and everything she knew he was about to try and do, she still gave him another chance. She gave him a chance to be good for once in his life. She gave him an out, and that means so much to me. She remained, no matter how horrible her past, no matter how much she suffered, a decent human being.

She lost so much, yet still gave him a chance to prove he may have changed. His downfall could have been avoided, but nope, he was going to take her for all she had.

I loved it. I loved the comeuppance. I loved his cockiness getting knocked down. I loved how Betty grew to have a family she can look out for, even after everything Roy had done to destroy her first one. I love how she got a happy ending. That was everything to me. I wasn’t expecting such an emotional payoff, but it was everything I could’ve hoped for.

I just wish we could’ve spent less time through Roy’s lens and more through Betty’s, since she’s an infinitely more interesting character. But there’s something so ironically satisfying in reading all these reviews written by men who missed the point. Like:

The Good Liar Review — *The Good Liar* Review. Source

It’s ultimately about how we wish to portray ourselves? Are you sure? There are a few meanings that can be derived from this movie, but they lean more toward the importance of a woman finally finding peace, or how you can dig your own grave.

And here are a few from user-submitted reviews on google:

The villain doesn’t get redemption? The rapist, murderer, and thief? Doesn’t get a redemption? Oh, the poor soul. Eff off, it’s about time the female character gets an ending worthy of her strength. (And eff off again for calling Steven’s second of screentime patronizing. Get over yourself. Not all media has to be about you for it to be valuable.)

The “point being the scammer is scammered by the scammeree”? Again, maybe give the female character some credit for her agency. Also, you bought tickets for a Rated R thriller. I’m sure there was a comedy you could’ve laughed through instead. But alright.

I agree, there are parts of The Good Liar that are contrived. How did you miss all of them in your examples? Why are you fixated on how Betty was able to actually beat Roy…? Why is that what’s unbelievable to you? Since you weren’t paying attention to her actions: she monitored his past victims & created a profile to fit his ideal mark (the dating pool for seniors in London has to be small enough they’d match eventually), she did have backup in the final confrontation, they just took a bit of time to get out of their cars (plus, she’s not too frail that she can’t be alone to reveal her cards. Geez, give her a much-deserved moment to shine, too) yes, she literally explains that she used the hair sample to match him with his real identity. A beautiful usage of her assumed female role (ah, yes, the “woman of the house” cuts the hair) to gain information. There you go.

These are just too funny to me. Like, yeah, the movie’s writing isn’t the strongest. But Betty being the true winner isn’t what’s weak with the film.

Missing plot setups aside, McKellen and Mirren were both incredible, and we all know I love Russell Tovey. This movie is a treat just to see the three of them acting together.

So, yeah. I wouldn’t say The Good Liar is the best movie I watched this year. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, or anywhere near. And it definitely would have benefitted from a (cough, female, cough) writer willing to spend less time on Roy and more on Betty.

But I can honestly say that I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since I watched it, and that Betty’s 60-years-coming revenge over a man who did her and her family wrong is worth the hour and a half watch.

The Good Liar is in theaters now. See the rest of my movie reviews here.

Jojo Rabbit: Not a Hitler Movie, a People Movie.

November 9, 2019 by jess 1 Comment

Jojo Rabbit, a film written & directed by Taika Waititi. 2019.

Light Spoilers (not any major plot points)

Contrary to what the trailer and media outrage may have led you to believe, Jojo Rabbit is not a movie about Hitler. Yeah, he’s technically listed as a character. But does a physical manifestation of how deep toxic nationalism can seep into your psyche and how hard it is to separate it from your true self really count as a character?

No. Not to me, at least.

This movie is about good people, and bad people, and all those people in between. It’s about the ones doing the best they can in a situation where others are doing their worst. It’s about the little acts of resistance against larger acts of horror. It’s about the people who choose to be human in an inhumane world.

And it’s about the strength it takes to do so.

It just so happens to take place in Nazi Germany – although a more carefully-constructed, colorful, comedic one than we might be used to seeing onscreen. Part of that is writer and director Taika Waititi’s personal decision to use comedy as an illustrative force, hoping to shine light on very real terrors by aggrandizing the past insanity that maybe some of the world has started to forget, and the other is his choice to focus the film on a child’s rose-colored view of war.

That child is Jojo Rabbit, played impeccably by the young Roman Griffin Davis, a ten-year-old kid who just wants to fit in to this world that doesn’t yet seem scary to him. Without his father in the picture, Jojo turns to his imagination, filling the void with his own version of Hitler, created out of the ideals and expectations his country wants him to embody, a country he doesn’t want to let down.

And oh, how easily do those messages infiltrate his mind. He even calls his best friend his second-best friend, because, of course, the Führer comes first.

But love can still combat hate, even if that hate seems to have wrapped its ugly grasp around the entire world and dug its nails in. And there’s no one more loving than Jojo’s mother Rosie. Played as insightfully as ever by Scarlett Johansson, Rosie is a compassionate, tenacious, peace-loving woman who has witnessed how easily the war has revealed and given a voice to the vile underbelly of her country, and fears her son will become a reflection of it all.

So she does what every parent does best: show him another way to live. She responds to his ignorance with patience, his anger with joy, his hate with love. She is, without a doubt, the heart of the movie. And even though the film takes place through Jojo’s eyes, it’s her story that shapes the narrative.

“What did they do?” “What they could.”

Vividly aware of how easily good deeds can lead to death, Rosie uses every second of her time on screen reminding the audience that your situation doesn’t define you. You define you. Your actions define you, your choices define you, and only you can make those decisions.

Not to quote Captain America, but to quote Captain America: “Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right…When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — No, YOU move.”

Rosie represents the very real humans who don’t let the world rob them of their morality, who do the best they can with the position and privileges they’ve got, and who fight to keep humanity from succumbing to darkness and fear.

Because fear is a powerful weapon. And as Jojo Rabbit shows, when used by people with agendas, fear can tear the world apart.

While Waititi uses whimsical, child-like stereotypes of monsters to illustrate how outlandish a world run on fear is, it’s strong-willed and quick-witted Elsa, played by Thomasin McKenzie, the young Jewish girl living in Jojo’s house, who takes the labels slapped on her by society and uses them to her advantage as best she can.

Jojo is afraid of her, so she becomes scary. Jojo thinks she’s dangerous, so she shows him how right he is. At 15, she’s nothing to mess with. She plays the cards she’s dealt with everything she’s got, and, if Rosie is the heart of the film, Elsa is the backbone.

As the only non-caricatured character, she’s the reminder that, yo, this is serious. Yeah, we’re laughing at Nazis saying “heil hitler” every time someone enters the room, but at the end of the day, she’s not laughing. Six million Jewish people aren’t laughing. This is not a joke.

And McKenzie plays Elsa with such a heavy weight, it’s impossible to forget that while the audience might be laughing at the childish notion that “Jews smell like brussels sprouts,” very real adults have forced very real human beings into very real dark places – hiding in walls, ostracized from society, thrown into concentration camps.

Society did that. And Waititi, with his lighthearted yet heartbreakingly-revealing script, won’t let us forget it.

“Is it dangerous?” “Extremely.”

My main critique of the movie is not the movie. It’s not Waititi’s “visionistical” idea. It’s not the cast’s acting. (Definitely not that – they were all stellar.) It’s the audience.

Because you sit there in a crowd that’s laughing at Waititi’s jokes, and not just in the “funny Nazis, they’re outrageous clowns” type of way. They laugh at Waititi’s Hitler, ignoring the fact that as an imaginary character, he’s created by Jojo and therefore represents Jojo’s internal struggle. Hitler throws a fit (a very, very well-acted fit, shoutout to Waititi) and the audience laughs: “haha, there’s Hitler acting like a baby when he doesn’t get his way.”

And maybe it’s just me, but I have no faith the audience is making correlations to the real world. They’re laughing because Hitler is funny. They’re laughing because he’s yelling and screaming and kicking a chair.

But that’s a ten year old kid’s mind. He’s wrestling with what he feels is right and what his entire country wants him to be. He’s learning to stand up against hate. He’s learning to rewrite everything he’s been taught.

And it’s uncomfortable to sit surrounded by people who will laugh at someone standing against society.

Which, I guess, is Waititi’s goal. He wants to make us unsettled enough to leave the theatre, head back into the real world, and use that unease to take a hard look at how we’re living now.

But I just don’t trust the audience is actually seeing that far into his Hitler antics. And maybe that’s just me. Maybe it’s part of what Waititi wants. But I can’t shake the sense that a vast majority of people will watch this film and think, “what a funny movie about WWII” and not once take it as a warning to examine the world around us.

Now, that’s not to say the other jokes don’t land well. There are plenty of intentional comedic moments relying on physical characters that do well to illustrate just how messed up Nazi Germany and those who supported it were. Waititi does a masterful job with this script, and especially so at keeping everything within the line of Jojo’s young naiveity.

We see what he sees. We see more, too, but it’s not in focus. Blurred out war maps on tables, adults talking in the background about things that he isn’t concerned with, they all set the scene and foreshadow the next bits of the plot. Waititi gives us hints of what’s to come, while also remaining perfectly within the realms of Jojo’s childish bubble. If it doesn’t matter to him, we don’t spend time on it.

It’s really well done.

The script is painful, and funny, and powerful, and heartbreaking. You’ll laugh, but you’ll also cry. You’ll feel for the lives stolen from every Jewish person that McKenzie carries onscreen as Elsa. You’ll feel for the citizens stuck risking their lives to remain human while their country fights against them. You’ll even feel for the people who aren’t necessarily good, who haven’t been strong enough to stand up against oppression, but who show there’s still a tiny slimmer of morality hidden within.

There is no savior in this movie. But there is hope. And there is love. And sometimes, as Jojo Rabbit shows us well, those are what keep humanity alive.

Jojo Rabbit is in theaters now.

A Marriage Story Review: Love, Hate, & Heartbreak

October 7, 2019 by jess 1 Comment

Marriage Story, a film written & directed by Noah Baumbach. 2019.

Spoiler-Free

There aren’t many movies in which this Florida girl will spontaneously drop everything and fly to New York alone for. But Marriage Story, starring Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, is definitely one of them.

And I bought the plane tickets before I knew how good it’d be.

“Good” is an understatement, by the way. “Incredible” is closer, but even that falls short. This movie is well written, well-shot, well-paced, well-acted… well, it’s everything. It’s a quality, top-notch movie with top-notch performances from both Johansson and Driver and the rest of the cast.

It wrestles with dichotomy – of cities, of genders, of parenting styles – all without picking a side. Writer and director Baumbach is careful of that. He presents the relationship and the world as it is, dropping facts but no judgement. He develops Johansson’s Nicole and Driver’s Charlie with equal care, forcing viewers to feel double the heartbreak. A “win” for one just means loss for the other.

His script is almost infuriatingly fair; truly, neither character is painted the villain nor the victim. And sometimes, they’re both… both. Baumbach knows audiences come with their own baggage, their own ideas of divorce, and he tries to make the playing field as even and unbiased as he can while presenting them as authentically as possible.

It’s too hard to hate either of them; their pain is too real, their situation too complex. Sure, I wanted to smack Charlie on the back of the head a few times, and, sure, I cheered on Nicole as she took steps to control her own future, but I still respected and wished the best for both characters.

A lot of it comes from just how well-acted each performance is. I’m not sure how someone can even pull that much emotion and energy out of their bodies and into a room, but both Johansson and Driver accomplish it. They pour their souls into these characters, and it pays off, big time.

“I can’t believe I have to know you forever.”

Their love, their hate, their heartbreak, it’s all palpable. But for every painful moment stabbing you through the heart, there’s a moment of genuine lightheartedness. More than once, I was laughing while tears streamed down my face.

The comedy isn’t out of place, either, which could have easily happened, given the main topic is divorce. But the jokes keep the story grounded, shaping the world around our characters, painting a realistic picture of how friends and family and careers work when a marriage falls apart.

Like, yeah, life sucks. But it also moves on. And you gotta keep living while it does.

And, oh, the observations this story includes! This film is worth watching for Laura Dern’s critique of gender roles alone. It’s on the nose, but it isn’t down your throat. And it’s perfect.

It’s not the only societal commentary this film includes, either. It’s all there, the age-old NY vs LA rivalry, the coparenting arguments, handling a career with a kid, giving up your dreams for someone else’s. This film captures it all with a knowing eye and an unapologetic voice.

For something that could have been an in-depth, painful study of the mundanity of divorce, you’re never bored. This film is engrossing, and that’s an understatement. You don’t even notice the 2 hours and 16 minutes passing by, because you’re so drawn into the lives of these characters.

The mundanity is still there, just by nature, but instead of glossing over it to focus on the bigger moments, Baumbach celebrates it. In fact, he seamlessly time jumps over the “major” life moments to instead focus on the smaller ones – the car seat not being buckled, the parental bribery in the form of presents, the sly comments from family, the in-between car conversations.

Those are what are important. Those are what shape our characters into the people they are. The small moments pointed out during the trailer’s monologues are the ones this film strives to capture again and again, and, by doing so, allow the audience to create their own ideas of Charlie and Nicole.

“I forgot that’s how it ended.”

The fading out of the scenes every so often – did they make up five acts? I’ll have to rewatch – was a great homage to Charlie’s day job as a theatre director. It really did feel like they were standing on a stage, presenting the story of their lives to us.

But that story is revealed only as it falls apart. Johansson and Driver give stand-out performances, meticulously capturing both the pain, the hope, and the change divorce brings into the lives of the newly-non-married.

The difficult days aren’t forever, and Marriage Story gives us an intimate, heartfelt look at just how true that is.

Alternatively: don’t have kids.

Kidding. Marriage Story releases in theaters November 6th and on Netflix December 6th, 2019.

Marriage Story NYFF Screening — Well worth the flight to NY. First film festival screening in the books!

lost in translation thoughts: you’re not hopeless

September 27, 2019 by jess 1 Comment

Lost in Translation, a film written & directed by Sofia Coppola. 2003.

Spoilers

This is a movie I would have liked to watch 16 years ago when it first came out, if only to see the beauty of each frame on the big screen. But I would’ve been 8, and I know for a fact I wouldn’t have gotten as much out of it as I did now, watching it as a twenty-something.

Lost in Translation is the sort of movie that means something slightly different to everyone who watches it. You can watch this and think it’s about love, or about travel, or about Japan. You can watch this and think it’s about a midlife crisis, or about ennui, or about finding yourself. You can watch this and think it’s about commercialism.

And maybe it’s about all of those things all at once. That’s part of the beauty of it.

Director Sofia Coppola weaves together all these different angles to create a film that’s about anything the viewer needs it to be.

I worried it would be a love story. And I’m sure it is to a lot of people. But I like to think of it as a story about those rare connections between souls that vibe at the same frequency and understand each other at a different level than anyone or anything else.

And maybe that is what love is, but then we enter a territory of the ancient greek’s definition of love, or even the split attraction model, both of which I adore and neither of which our modern world seems to subscribe to. These days, society wants to equate love to romance, to sex, to first dates and marriage and kids and till-death-do-us-part.

If this movie is a love story, it’s not that.

Not to me, at least.

But ignoring the rabbit-hole-inviting analysis of what love is, this movie captures two lost souls with a nuance most films don’t begin to touch. Scarlett Johansson‘s Charlotte and Bill Murray’s Bob inhabit a world entirely their own. And for a brief hour and 45 minutes, they let us in, too.

It’s hard navigating the world you’re supposed to be living in when you operate on a different plane. It’s hard to even want to.

Image result for lost in translation quotes

Charlotte, grappling with where and who she’s supposed to be, is the most impressive and relatable part of the movie to me. (I mean, how could I not relate to the just-graduated twenty-something wrestling with finding some ounce of meaning in her life? That’s literally where I’ve been the past year and a half.)

There isn’t a scene in this movie that doesn’t check the “emotionally-revealing” box. But to me, Charlotte’s are the most interesting. Probably the saddest moment in the entire film is when she’s trying to reach out to her friend over the phone, trying to connect with another human being who maybe, just maybe, understands the feelings she’s afraid to admit to herself, and her friend completely cuts her off.

Charlotte realizes she’s alone. She realizes the journey to finding herself is a personal one. She realizes she may never walk the same path as her friends and her husband. And she realizes she might not even want to.

She confesses it all quickly on the phone, amidst smothered sobs. And if watching her wipe away those truth-spawned tears so her friend doesn’t know how unhappy she’s been isn’t the most moving scene in the entire movie, I don’t know what is.

“I’m stuck. Does it get easier?” “No.”

But that’s not to downplay Bob’s emotional journey, either. He’s certainly going through some stuff. But his future is cloudy while Charlotte’s is unlimited potential, and I enjoy the hope that hers still offers.

And if I’m honest, I’m just not that fond of some of Bob’s actions. I don’t think the film needed his jokes at Japan’s expense. I think the two of them at odds with the city would be just as clearly defined without his degradations.

And while I’m glad Bob didn’t make anything sexual with someone so young, I’m not the fondest of the kiss at the end. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the hug. I just don’t see the need to make such an intelligent and deeply philosophical and personal connection physical.

It’s also slightly discomforting when their ages are taken into account. I know Charlotte is a twenty-something graduate. But Johansson? She filmed this when she was 17. That’s a huge age gap between the two leads.

Which points to a much larger issue within Hollywood itself, but we don’t have time to dissect that here.

Speaking of Hollywood, though, I’m also not too fond of the opening scene. The sheer underwear reminds me too much of movies written by men for men featuring the male gaze ad nauseam. Even Johansson didn’t want to wear it at first, saying: “I really didn’t want to do the sheer underwear.“

But Coppola is a female director, and she had a creative vision, so if any film was going to open up with a woman’s butt in sheer underwear, at least it was one like this.

That’s a lot of negatives about a movie I genuinely enjoyed. So let’s talk more about what I loved: mainly, the cinematography. It’s nothing short of beautiful.

I mean, look at this frame:

Does that not capture just about every mood you’ve ever felt at 4 am in the midst of an existential crisis about the world and your place in it?

Part of it is Johansson, who, even at 17, manages to capture and portray a depth and weight to her character I’m not sure was even originally written in the script.

But part of it is also Coppola, who treats the film’s many silences as negative space, meant to emphasize the thoughts and emotions of each character. Lost in Translation is just as much about what isn’t said as what is.

The ending only emphasizes that. Charlotte and Bob let us into their world for a bit, but it’s still theirs. Those whispered words separate us, remind us that we’re all just a little bit lost at times.

And Lost in Translation reminds you that that’s okay. That you’ll find souls out there like yours. That you don’t have to walk the same path as everyone else—even if you’re having a breakdown at midnight trying to figure out how to fit yourself into their expectations.

To me, this movie is about life more than it is love. But the most beautiful thing about Lost in Translation is how it can be anything you need it to be. Just like life.