Putting a fresh spin on one’s screen persona
Persona — in the sense of the carefully constructed personality of those in the public eye — is a funny thing when it comes to actors. We often go to movies based on a star’s persona: Tom Cruise is the righteous hero who is never wrong, the dear departed Leslie Cheung was the sexual enigma, Fast and Furious’ Michelle Rodriguez is the bad girl. Those personae can bleed over into real life, and if the actor has enough status, real life can bleed over into the movies.
In Suspiria, Dakota Johnson plays good Mennonite girl Susie Bannion who runs off to Berlin during the 1970s to join a prestigious dance school run by the legendary Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton, in one of three roles), which turns out to be a front for a coven of witches.
Suspiria is a singular movie. It’s easy to leave the cinema thinking, “what did I just see?” Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s primary Technicolor gonzo horror classic isn’t the brilliant art it thinks it is, but Suspiria serves up a memorable good time that has two things going for it. First, it’s ambitious and creative in the way few films are brave enough to be these days. Guadagnino has a vision and he sticks to it, regardless of the narrative sag and general bloat of the segments that connect the film’s standout set pieces: the deadly psychic rehearsal, the red-tinged dance performance, the gloriously gory finale. Second is a stellar, all female (!) cast led by Johnson, actively working to erase memories of the agencyfree Anastasia Steele from the treacherous Fifty Shades trilogy and remaking her own persona in doing so. Johnson’s spin on Susie is a carefully calibrated (and professionally calculated) sleight of hand, a performance based on perception and usurping expectation rooted in manipulation and finally embracing one’s own identity. It’s as if Johnson were making a personal statement. Maybe she is.
At the other end of the spectrum is The Mule starring octogenarian Clint Eastwood directing the (true) story of Earl Stone, a neglectful father and grandfather trying to reconnect with his estranged family by smuggling hundreds of kilos of cocaine to Chicago for a Mexican drugs cartel. Eastwood is a filmmaker with as clear a persona as one could ask for — and who seems to be acting less and less with each new film. Eastwood the director’s mastery of storytelling is undeniable and The Mule, though too long, is an efficient dramedy about regret and how it’s never too late to make amends.
Eastwood the actor’s performance as Earl is barely that. His curmudgeonly attitude towards modernity — the Internet is ruining everything, racial, gender and sexual equality are amusing, millennials are always on the phone — is played off as charming, and even DEA agent Colin Bates (new muse Bradley Cooper) reacts with “Oh, grandpa,” wistfulness when faced with Earl’s antics. But the line between Eastwood the filmmaker and Eastwood the man has rarely been more blurred. The combination of his recent offscreen antics, chiefly lecturing an invisible Barack Obama at the Republican National Convention in 2012 and complaining that “everything is racist these days” and his last few films — the problematic Gran Torino, the rah-rah American Sniper — place Earl in a different light.
Is The Mule good entertainment? Absolutely, with several genuinely funny sequences and a warm and fuzzy center about appreciating family while you can. But it’s also a curious demonstration of art imitating life.