Films
Marriage Story, Knives Out, Honey Boy
MARRIAGE STORY
A few years ago, Noah Baumbach fell into a groove. His earlier films The Squid And The Whale
and Margot At The Wedding had been wry portraits of families at war. But as the director entered his forties, his films shifted focus onto younger people – in particular While We’re Young and Mistress America, which tapped into a fresh, funny, zeitgeisty spirit. However, Baumbach’s previous film The Meyerowitz Stories
revisited the familial furies of his earlier films, as does Marriage Story, his new film, set around a devastating separation.
The Squid And The Whale, about the fallout from urban middle-class family breakdown, was largely assumed to be based on the rupture between his own parents – novelist Jonathan Baumbach and Georgia Brown, exfilm critic of The Village Voice, who divorced when Baumbach was 14 and his brother was nine. Marriage Story is autobiographical, too, drawing from Baumbach’s own recent divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh.
As you’d expect from Baumbach, there are plenty of witty observations, while some of the wonderful farcical moments showcase his ability to pivot from tragedy to comedy, often within the same scene. Adam Driver’s Charlie and Scarlett Johansson’s Nicole are typical of the bohemian protagonists familiar from all Baumbach’s films; he’s a hip New York theatre director, and she’s the Hollywood starlet whose career he transformed. Somewhat unrealistically, the script has Nicole ditch both Charlie and her artistic cred to return home to LA to make a dreadful TV series, which is where their marriage unravels, with their infant son caught in the middle.
Baumbach’s film is sincere, even affectionate, as it follows this disintegrating family unit. There are flashes of something darker – the machinations of the divorce industry allow for some juicy, scenerychewing appearances by Laura Dern and
Ray Liotta as the pair’s bulldog lawyers. But mostly Marriage Story is a low-key but compelling tale of a conscious uncoupling.
SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME At first sight, this career sketch of Ronnie Wood seems like a Sky Arts primer: not too heavy on archive footage, pegged on a recent interview and just as interested in the multi-instrumentalist’s art as his prodigious musical output. From Oscar-winning director Mike Figgis, who turned his back on Hollywood to make more experimental films like 2000’s Time Code, it seems really rather prosaic. But after a while, Figgis reveals his MO. Somebody Up There Likes Me proves that sometimes less is more. This is a film that benefits from not telling the definitive story of its subject. Arguably, more documentaries would do well to follow Figgis’s example – especially when a subject like Wood has many strings to his bow and an equally interesting number of digressions to his CV.
Chronology, however, isn’t at a premium. Before we get to Jeff Back, the Faces, Stones et al, there’s a revealing clip of Wood in Damien Hirst’s studio, followed by a dark tale of intervention as Hirst recalls shepherding the musician into rehab. Figgis shies away from explicitly stating that the problems faced by Wood’s own father led to his own drink and drug problems – though Figgis does go there in the last 20 minutes or so.
What follows is a series of terrific tableaux, underscoring Wood’s remarkable passage through the last 50 years as a musician. Here he is with Peter Grant, or in eye-opening conversation with Sex Pistols “Svengali” Malcolm Mclaren, jamming with Bobby Keys and Ziggy Modeliste and – surprisingly – at work on his Degas-influenced art, which seems to flow impressively easily.
KNIVES OUT The chance to see an A-list cast knocking seven bells out of each other has become the preserve of Marvel movies, but the attraction of Rian Johnson’s enjoyable murder-mystery is that none of them play superheroes and the only weapon used is wit. It might seem a leftfield turn for the director of the most controversial Star Wars of the new trilogy – The Last Jedi, loved and hated in equal measure for its refusal to pay fan service – but admirers of his early films (Brick, Looper, The Brothers Bloom) will be relieved to see that Johnson’s voice remains as distinctive as ever.
The film opens with a housemaid at a gothic New England pile discovering her employer lying dead in his study, his throat cut in an apparent suicide. The man is Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), a popular writer of crime novels, and the occasion is his 85th birthday party. But
instead of coming together to celebrate his life, his dysfunctional family become even further estranged at the reading of his will, which doesn’t quite go the way his adult children (Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon) and his wider family (Chris Evans, Toni Colette, Don Johnson) are expecting.
Things are further complicated by the arrival of a taciturn private eye, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who has been hired by persons unknown to investigate for murder, even though forensics proved that Harlan died by his own hand. What follows is a terrific piece of pulp entertainment that, despite some often quite absurd and whimsical flourishes, commits to delivering on its promise of an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit. Key to this is Ana De Armas’s breakout role as Harlan’s trusted nurse, the immigrant interloper who becomes the focus of the family’s Trumpian wrath.
MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN When Jonathan Lethem’s novel was first published 20 years ago, everything was stacked in its favour. Edward Norton – then recently Oscarnominated for American History X – was in line to direct and star in the adaptation that shifted Lethem’s contemporary detective story back to the 1950s; a similar milieu to Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential, which had won multiple awards only two years previously. Then, it seems, Hollywood simply got in the way.
Norton’s film version, which has finally arrived in cinemas, will impress fans of leisurely paced, character-driven crime stories; although overly complicated plotting sometimes threatens to undo the strong work otherwise carried out on screen.
This is an elegant, wintry film noir, set in 1957 – at the tail end of a period of transformation for New York City, where a process of intense gentrification masks the ethnic cleansing of black people from areas ripe for lucrative redevelopment. Into this comes Norton’s Lionel Essrog, a lowranking New York private eye with Tourette’s Syndrome (albeit the 15-rated kind, since the most profane cuss word he seems to muster is “tits”). When Lionel’s mentor is murdered, apparently by a local crime syndicate, Lionel sets out to track down his killers. His search takes him off the city’s streets and into its boardrooms of ruthless town planner Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin).
Norton wears his influences on his sleeve: the 1950s gumshoe movies like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon as well as Chinatown. Onto these, he piles a weight of detail and incident, all swirling round a dark and sombre version of New York. It can often feel heavy-going – especially when a subplot involving a beautiful community lawyer (Gugu Mbatha-raw) holds things up. But the film’s narrative flaws are offset by its atmosphere, with a superb score by Daniel Pemberton and evocative jazz from Wynton Marsalis, whose melancholic, ’50s-style arrangement of “Dirty Ballads”, an original song by Thom Yorke and Flea, perhaps sums up Norton’s aesthetic in a nutshell.
HONEY BOY There are plenty of films about former child stars, the most recent being the recent biopic Judy, which ascribed many of the late Judy Garland’s neuroses to her time as the property of MGM studios. Few, however, seek to process exactly what’s going on in a child star’s mind in the heat of the moment, which is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy, a deceptively layered movie memoir that is richer than it first appears.
For one thing, there’s something very meta going on, which isn’t immediately obvious. It begins with Otis Lort (Lucas Hedges), the young, twentysomething star of studio action franchises whose life is about to take a wrong turn. After going on a bender and driving under the influence, Otis is sent to rehab, where, initially, he frustrates his doctors and psychiatrists as a truculent, abusive inmate. A breakthrough is reached, however, when Otis is encouraged to explore his past and write things down, which becomes a letter to his wayward father, an ex-rodeo rider and clown who also managed him as a child.
The letter gives rise to an extended flashback, which is where the film is strongest: Otis is now played by Noah Jupe (actually a young British actor) and his father James is played by Shia Labeouf, whose story this clearly is. But rather than simply acting out a movie brat’s troubled childhood and giving Labeouf free therapy, Har’el’s low-key indie focuses on the warped dynamic of the father-son relationship, one soured by power struggles and strange jealousies as the old man tries to live through his boy while effectively being on his payroll. As a story it’s not terribly satisfying since the whole thing is effectively a rehab recollection, but there are some impressively revealing moments that pull back the curtain on Labeouf’s all-too-public heyday as a self-sabotaging wild child.