Elijah Wood tackles his Daddy issues
REVIEWS COME TO DADDY
Starring Elijah Wood. Rated 14A
➧ IMAGINE REUNITING with your absent father after 30 years and discovering that he’s Ginger Baker, but worse. That’s the initial premise of Come to Daddy, a fabulously entertaining comic thriller poised somewhere between Alfred Hitchcock and vintage John Waters.
Having made the trek to Daddy’s remote pad overlooking the Pacific (actually Tofino), it takes about one minute of screen time for Norval (Elijah Wood) to realize that the old man is a drunk, violent mental case, embodied by Canuck warhorse Stephen McHattie in a role he’s been perfecting for about 40 years now. The film’s twists and turns eventually bring Martin Donovan into the frame, playing way against type as a man who welcomes the chance to have his fingers dislocated—that scene should prompt the most walkouts—along with A Field in England’s Michael Smiley, evolving into this generation’s Brion James as he adds yet another uniquely odious psycho to his CV. One of his more memorable speeches uses British politician Michael Heseltine as the punch line, almost certainly for the first time since Spitting Image was on the air, and it’s to everyone’s credit that Come to Daddy is willing to throw away such a big moment on something so pointlessly obscure.
Equally heroic is the film’s outrageous violence, which demands the Straw Dogs response out of wimpy Norval, who, we learn, is an L.A.– based DJ apparently discovered by Elton John and who owns one of 20 gold phones designed by Lourdes. “Now there’s only 19,” says McHattie after accidentally on purpose dropping it off a cliff.
Garfield Wilson, Madeleine Sami, and Sunday Service–man Ryan Beil (as a “tittyholic” motel worker) round out a cast that probably couldn’t be much better, while director Ant Timpson makes his impressive feature debut after producing prefab cult hits like The Greasy Strangler. But it’s Wood who deserves the most praise. As a producer he consistently makes far-out choices (Mandy, Color Out of Space), and as an actor he dares to show up with a haircut even worse than his permed Frodo.
THE TRAITOR
Directed by Marco Bellocchio. In Italian, Sicilian, English, and Portuguese, with English subtitles. Rated 14A
➧ FOR ANYONE who wants The Irishman to just keep going comes The Traitor, a satisfying saga from the great Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio, responsible for such ’60s classics as Fists in the Pocket and China Is Near.
Now over 80, the veteran director has tackled terrorism and Italy’s fascist past. Here, he unfurls a massive, sometimes exhausting, 150-minute tale of the Sicilian Mafia. A few baptisms, some weddings, and a whole lot of funerals mark the rise and fall of the modern mob, centring on the first capo dei capi to turn informant, resulting in jail sentences for hundreds of top bosses.
On the face of it, Bellocchio has a good eye for the details of Cosa Nostra thug life, depicting the gold chandeliers and other Trumpian touches in the various mansions cigar-chomping Mafiosi built and lost between 1980 and 2000, when the story begins and ends—with plenty of flashes forward and back in between.
First and foremost, the film benefits from the riveting performance of Pierfrancesco Favino, familiar from such English-language efforts as Rush and World War Z. He plays the real-life
Tommaso Buscetta, our titular snitch. Favino isn’t quite as young or old as Buscetta is supposed to be at various stages, but he does capture his dignity as well as his vanity. (He touches up his grey hair even in prison.) And the actor builds a compelling slow burn as the ex-mobster gets fed up with internecine attacks on his own clan, eventually delivering hard evidence in several “maxi trials” that constitute the film’s dramatic high points, even allowing for a body count that would make Martin Scorsese blush.
As in The Irishman, women are secondary participants at best, despite the strong presence of Maria Fernanda Cândido as our antihero’s Brazilian wife. The movie fudges some facts, such as moving their South American villa from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro—because, well, Rio! It’s also slightly padded out with dream sequences and an on-the-nose visit with a zoo’s caged tiger, although this pays off later, in the courtroom, when mobsters face off like gladiators, from behind bars in the back and bulletproof glass cubicles up front.
The Sicilian insults are worth the price of admission, with the most memorable zinger being “If I hated you, I’d be doing you a favour.” The story drags a little in its U.S.–based coda, but connects some still-relevant dots between crime, law enforcement, and politics. It has other useful insights, too, such as: don’t have phone sex when you know your lines are tapped.
OSCAR SHORTS: LIVE ACTION
In English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
➧ MANY FORMS OF sibling fealty are tested in this gratifyingly consistent batch of scripted shorts, clocking in at roughly 20 solid minutes each.
In “Saria”, two young sisters in the female wing of a Guatemalan orphanage must trust each other and the boy one of them likes in their plan to escape the brutal, prisonlike place. Based on a 2017 event and enacted by real-life residents of a different orphanage in that troubled country, the film from experienced Yank director Bryan Buckley details some of the horrors poor people are fleeing when they mistakenly seek safe haven in the USA.
In Belgium’s elegantly structured, superbly acted “A Sister”, a woman speeds through the night in the car of a strangely menacing man. She grabs a phone to let her sister know she’s all right, although she isn’t. Then the scene replays from the POV of the female police dispatcher who got the call. For the rest of director Delphine Girard’s nail-biting, real-time ride, she (and we) are never quite sure of what’s actually happening in that vehicle.
Two women who’ve never met form an unusual bond in “The Neighbors’ Window”. Here, a weary Brooklyn couple (indie veterans Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller) are grappling with two small kids and another on the way when a younger couple moves into the apartment across from theirs, and proceeds to “christen” every room in the drapeless place. Initially, this Rear Window situation brings out the worst in the older folks, but appearances, as they say, can be deceiving.
Remarkably, in an already unusual group of five filmlets, two were made in Tunisia. “Brotherhood” is from Montreal-based Meryam Joobeur, who goes deep inside a rural Tunisian family to explore the tensions created among devout Muslims by extremist violence. It stars three real-life brothers, already striking for their red hair and copious freckles, reunited when the eldest returns from Syria with a pregnant bride. She won’t remove her burka, even at home. This drives the family patriarch nuts, and we learn some of what drove the headstrong son away—with little of it regarding politics or religion.
Other brothers handle their impoverished setting with amusing aplomb in director Yves Piat’s “Nefta Football Club”. When a brash scooter rider and his younger, soccer-mad sibling encounter a mule that has wandered over the border from Algeria, they’re surprised to find saddlebags filled with drugs. The Adele-loving animal, wearing headphones for the journey, was lost by two older brothers. You keep expecting the worst, but the perfectly judged short (and, hopefully, the program) ends with a comic payoff you won’t soon forget.
OSCAR SHORTS: DOCUMENTARY
In English, French, Korean, and Dari, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
➧ “COURAGE IS GOING to school and learning.” So says a student at Skatistan, an oasis of bookwork and four-wheel fun in Kabul, a place notably hostile to female education. The school is profiled in “Learning to Skate in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl)”, the longest and perhaps most rewarding documentary in a program that creeps toward a taxing three hours.
Things might be safe inside the school, but as U.K.–based director Carol Dysinger points out, there’s at least one suicide bombing per week in the Afghan capital, and the girls still have to be frisked before entering. Dysinger previously spent three years embedded with U.S. and Afghan troops, and her insights on the changing roles of women in that society are potent and occasionally lighthearted.
All hearts are heavy in Yi SeungJun’s “In the Absence”, a hard-hitting look at the 2014 ferry disaster that took the lives of more than 300 South Koreans, mostly students from a single school. With its dark blend of news footage, talks with survivors and parents, and difficult-to-watch rescue footage, the film offers up a metaphor in which nature overwhelms humans, and governments prove incapable of rising to the challenge. (This is not the first doc about the MV Sewol tragedy, and last year’s feature Birthday used it as a background for the shattered characters.)
Trauma is shared in a different way in “Life Overtakes Me”, about a rare but seemingly contagious new disease called resignation syndrome, in which children go into deep sleep from which they cannot be wakened. Most striking is the fact that they are mainly the offspring of refugees awaiting their legal fate in Sweden, where this has been dubbed uppgivenhetssyndrom. The heartbreaking Netflix film follows three such cases, and leaves things understandably unresolved.
More energetic but still marbled with melancholy, “St. Louis Superman” follows Bruce Franks Jr., a Ferguson activist who saw friends and family succumb to gang violence and then decided to run for state office. He won, but he still goes to rap battles on the side. Or maybe it’s the other way around. (“The battles pay better,” he quips.) The half-hour effort is dampened somewhat by a title card announcing that the charismatic Franks has since been sidelined by his own PTSD.
The only truly uplifting entry is “Walk Run Cha-Cha”, about a Los Angeles couple that reunited years after being separated by the communist takeover of Vietnam. Both are now well-paid professionals who assert their grace and individuality through ballroom dancing. Made for the New York Times by Laura Nix (who directed the Yes Men movies), this 20-minute study gives you a romantic respite from a harsh world that seems headed for more trouble.
Viewers should listen to a girl in that opening skateboarding flick, who advises, “Don’t act fragile. This is a place for tough people!”