The wise and witty Schumer
Starring Amy Schumer. Rated PG
In a sign of the dangerous territory 2 Amy Schumer often treads, the trailer alone for her light new comedy I Feel Pretty has sparked an online backlash.
Fat-shaming, female body-image issues, and the provocative idea that sexism isn’t exclusive to dudes: these are hot-button topics, and ones the self-effacing comedian, as ever, refuses to handle delicately.
The general complaint is that Schumer is too privileged, too close to Hollywood beauty ideals, too close to a healthy BMI to depict herself as someone who can’t get a bartender’s attention, can’t find her size on store racks, and can’t go to the gym without someone asking her if it’s her first time there. Thankfully, the movie plays out these ideas with more complexity, and more body positivity, than the trailer. Schumer has, after all, spoken often about the body-shaming she’s faced in her industry and the unfortunate sexual encounters that have resulted from her own lack of self-esteem. So she is digging at something real here, despite a seriously silly plot, and some even more seriously mixed messages.
If you’ve seen the ads, you know the setup: Schumer’s Renee is racked with a low self-opinion and obsessed about her weight. Then one day she falls off the bike in her Soulcycle class and conks her head. The concussion suddenly makes her feel gorgeous— and acts as a kind of invisible armour against putdowns and embarrassment. The Big-meets Shallow Hal gimmick is ridiculous—and you really wonder if the main character needed a brain injury to free her inhibitions. But it quickly becomes apparent that self-esteem is attractive; if you love yourself, others can love you.
That’s where the film digs into some of its coolest territory. Renee hooks up with a sensitive beardo named Ethan (Rory Scovel), who takes Zumba classes, complains his office is a “boys’ club”, and wonders if he needs to read Maxim more. Funny that in this film about female empowerment, one of its most transgressive characters is the male romantic lead. Just watch the scene in which the newly sexually empowered Renee strips down with the curtains open and the lights on in front of Ethan. The look he gives her is a priceless combo of befuddlement, fear, and horniness.
The plot’s larger, too-long story line is less compelling. Writer-directors Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein make it Renee’s goal to work as a receptionist at a makeup company. (Shoot for the moon!) Her desperate efforts to climb the ladder there, and please its helium-voiced CEO (Michelle Williams), culminate in an ad campaign that cringingly celebrates women’s diversity.
Acceptance at a beauty corporation, and an entry in a skid bar’s bikini contest—are these what female empowerment looks like?
The film’s more real with its most Schumer-esque touches—her inability to ignore a passing ice-cream truck, say, or her willingness to brazenly bare the Spanx that are holding her gut in. In those smaller acts, it feels like—haters be damned—she’s getting closer to liberation. > JANET SMITH
LEAN ON PETE
Starring Charlie Plummer. Rated 14A A British filmmaker takes on the wayward soul of America in Lean On Pete and gets a little lost along the way.
The low-key Lean On Pete, adapted by director Andrew Haigh (45 Years) from a popular 2010 novel by Willy Vlautin, follows the picaresque improvisations of 15-year-old Charley Thompson. Sympathetically played by Charlie Plummer, who starred as the kidnapped kid in All the Money in the World, this stoical, motherless teen has been brought up by a hell-raising, perpetually broke single dad played by Australian Travis Fimmel (who fudges the rural-americana accent).
A fitfully engaged high-school athlete in the poorer outskirts of Portland, Oregon, Charley is looking for more than a part-time job when his daily run is interrupted by a grizzled fellow wanting help behind the local racetrack. The old guy, called Del (Steve Buscemi, playing against type here), is a two-bit rural schemer. Indie veteran Chloë Sevigny also shows up as Bonnie, a former jockey who drinks with Del and sometimes rides his cluster of quarter horses in races that are not always first-class events.
Initially, it feels like Charley will find a niche in this surrogate family, which travels the West Coast racing circuit—especially after fate pulls his own father out of the story. But our tow-headed hero is mostly drawn to the horses, and one particular aging but still handsome creature called Lean On Pete. Despite Bonnie’s warning not to get attached (“They’re not pets!”), he’s shocked to discover that Del might send Pete “down to Mexico”, where they can turn horses into dog food. One night Charley hightails it with the horse, heading improbably to Wyoming, where he thinks his dad’s sister lives. Even that he’s not sure of.
The film’s writer-director, who has frequently dealt with gay-identity themes, wants to leave the lad’s trajectory wide-open. He’s tightlipped at the best of times, and even when he’s crossing scrubby brushlands on foot with his new companion (he never mounts ol’ Pete), his monologues remain generic. And his encounters, with a couple of overseas-war veterans and then some urban downand-outers (including Steve Zahn), remain curiously unspecific about most things. This gives the largely admirable film a timeless quality, in keeping with those wide-open skies and the American promise of endless reinvention. But this somehow mutes the emotions that should come of age with Charley. There’s a sunset, but no one rides into it.
> KEN EISNER Starring Imelda Staunton. Rated PG
A slightly dour critique of 2
modern Britain is hiding inside this feel-good comedy aimed at the Exotic Marigold crowd. And the filmmakers themselves don’t seem to know it’s there.
Director Richard Loncraine, veteran of much historical drama for U.K. television, assembled an ideal cast for this tale of late-life self-discovery. Diminutive Imelda Staunton headlines as stuffy Sandra, whose businessman husband, Mike (Scotland’s John Sessions), has just been knighted. But at the party announcing her ascension as “Lady Nevershits” (as one wag calls her), she discovers that Mike has been laying another lady.
The family lives in a massive country villa, but Sandra’s only option is to move in with her estranged older sister Bif (Celia Imrie) in a crumbling London housing project. Big sis is a playful bohemian still swinging (both ways) in her 60s, and pals around with unstiff-upper-lippers like pot-puffing Charlie (Timothy Spall) and Ted (David Hayman) and lawyer Jackie (woefully underused Joanna Lumley).
They all meet at a local dance class run by a spunky choreographer (Indra Ové). Turns out Sandra was quite the stepper in her day, although we initially don’t see much of that, given her current grumpiness. She gives a hard time to handyman Charlie, always fixing things at Bif’s place (but not Bif herself), so we know where that must be going. Obviously, Sandra will find her feet moving to a mambo beat—and you know how we all love to see oldies doing the Mashed Potato—but this sketchy subplot must compete with cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and the viral whims of the interwebs.
Screenwriter-producers Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft, younger than their cast, failed to grasp that the film’s central pleasures would (and do) come from relaxed actorly interplay. Instead, we get problem-solving peregrinations and production numbers that feel unrelated to the story, even when they give it a reason to jump briefly to Rome. But, hey: free vacation!
Staunton’s character and hairstyle go through abrupt changes, and there’s little attempt to connect the subplots. There are some interesting and surprisingly vernacular commentaries about England’s changing class concepts and the starkness of postwar life, but these seem accidental. In any case, the movie never locates its own you-know-whats. > KEN EISNER
A documentary by Marc J. Francis and Max Pugh. In English, French, and Vietnamese, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
Any attempt to capture the nothingness 2 central to Zen Buddhism is bound to be as frustrating as holding sand with open fingers. And that’s the kind of aphorism that dominates Walk With Me, a sporadically engaging film about the teachings and followers of Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s peace activism goes back to the 1950s, and he taught comparative religion at Princeton and Columbia universities before returning to his home country in time for Americans to take over the ill-fated anti-communist war from the French. Agitation for nonviolent response eventually saw him exiled to the U.S., where he urged Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out against the war.
The activist monk later moved to France, and after the North Vietnamese army prevailed in 1975, he was again denied permission to go home. He led efforts to help rescue Boat People, and was eventually allowed to visit Vietnam three decades later. Along the way, he’s been embroiled in geopolitical and interreligious controversies, while establishing mindfulness-centred monasteries in the U.S., Germany, and France. He also suffered a near-fatal brain hemorrhage in 2014.
None of that background is even hinted at in this 95-minute documentary from American Marc J. Francis and Brit Max Pugh, who centre their efforts on the teacher’s beatific Plum Village in southwest France. We see daily rituals of devotees as they share simple meals, play music, and engage the world silently every 15 minutes, at the sound of a bell. It also follows a few to family reunions in the States, and a larger group to big cities, where Thich Nhat Hanh gets the rock-star treatment at group meditations. (At one concert hall, he’s slotted between Jackson Browne and John Oliver.)
People watching the new Netflix series Wild Wild Country will have their minds full of the dangers of personality cults. There’s little to raise those concerns here, but also not much to impress the uninitiated with the charisma or spiritual acumen of its subject, whose early writings are read, rather unctuously, by an off-screen Benedict Cumberbatch.
> KEN EISNER