CRITICS
Alison Willmore on Mulan … Kathryn VanArendonk on The Boys … Helen Shaw on Coastal Elites.
memory. Mulan, the latest of them, follows in the footsteps of 2019’s Aladdin ($1.05 billion at the global box office) and The Lion King ($1.65 billion), which were less movies than re-creations, proof that years of film advancements and increased resources could be used to make something much worse than the original it was attempting to remind you of. In comparison, Mulan has more going on in terms of creative vision and getting beyond the lure of nostalgia, though it may be the most calculated venture of them all—less Disney eating itself and more the company trying to eat the world. It’s a saga that, oddly, feels as if it owes as much in its reference points to something like Zhang Yimou’s Hero as it does to anything else.
It even shares some cast members with that 2002 film—Donnie Yen, who plays Mulan’s regiment leader, Commander Tung, and Jet Li, who’s the emperor—while longtime Zhang collaborator Gong Li has been given the part of a fabulous but ill-served
witch named Xianniang. Director Niki Caro doesn’t have an aptitude for fight sequences, which get cut to bits in a way that dulls all momentum, but her use of color and wide vistas does provide a sense of sweeping scale. Mulan shares some of Hero’s unapologetic nationalism, too, displaying a painstaking reverence for the state, which it struggles to square with a character who chafes against her lot in life. Mulan isn’t the silent, delicate, biddable girl her community and, more pressingly, the local matchmaker (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Cheng Pei-pei) expect her to be. She overflows with Chi, “the boundless energy of life itself,” which the movie treats as akin to the Force.
Her father, Hua Zhou (Tzi Ma), confesses in voice-over that he has been reluctant to tell his daughter to dim her light for the sake of conformity, though eventually he does just that, chastising her, “Chi is for warriors, not daughters. Soon you’ll be a young woman, and it’s time for you to hide your gift away, to silence its voice.” Instead, she takes off in the night with his sword and armor and journeys to join the army preparing under Commander Tung to fight the Rouran invaders, nomadic warriors led by Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee), who want revenge or maybe gold or whatever. Mulan has to conceal her gender from her comrades, among them the fetching Chen Honghui (Yoson An), who’s so barely a love interest that their relationship’s romantic apex is a lingering handshake. More confusingly, given where Mulan is, she feels the need to downplay her martial-arts talents as well, until they inevitably come to light during a training bout she seems to expect to be scolded for.
Mulan feels terrible about lying, but she doesn’t seem to feel any anger about the forces that require her to lie: the ruler who demands human tributes from every family, the army that would refuse to have her despite her gifts because she’s a woman. All bitterness is outsourced to Xianniang, who is positioned as a kind of dark parallel to the movie’s heroine—a woman whose wielding of Chi made her an outcast and led her to align herself with Böri Khan, who has promised her acceptance in exchange for her servitude. Xianniang can shape-shift, turn into a hawk, fight with incredible skill, and stalk around in an enviable scalecovered outfit, and in any other movie she and Mulan would end up joining forces to battle for a changed world. But in this one, she is turned into a tragic fool, while Mulan proves that by devoting herself to those in charge and constantly apologizing for her own gifts, a woman can indeed be welcomed into the ranks of those in power—on a case-by-case basis, of course.
Mulan is a dour drag as a work of art and entertainment, an empty if occasionally impressive spectacle propped up by some incredibly clunky writing. The screenplay is credited to Lauren Hynek, Rick Jaffa, Elizabeth Martin, and Amanda Silver, and if someone were to drink a shot every time a character mentions “honor,” they would surely die of alcohol poisoning before the credits roll under a new recording of “Reflection,” by Christina Aguilera. But the film is a fascinating cultural object: an attempt to meld reflexive American corporate girl-power tendencies with perceived
Chinese values. The 1998 Mulan famously bombed in China, with a Beijing interviewee bemoaning to the Baltimore Sun at the time, “She’s too individualistic. Americans don’t know enough about Chinese culture.” Maybe this new film, coming out in reopened Chinese theaters while being released as a $29.99 premium rental here, will perform better. Then again, maybe it won’t, because trying to reverse-engineer what another country wants from the outside is an inexact and entirely depressing way to make movies.
superhero girlfriend, then this is not and will never be your show. For everyone willing to jump onboard with that mentality, though, The Boys has one of the most bracing, uncomfortable, and piercing points of view currently on TV.
By now, there’s a hearty tradition of gritty superhero stories. I wrote in my review of The Boys’ first season that the concept of dark and twisty superheroes itself has become rote enough to have totally lost its luster. It’s no longer exciting to point out that superheroes are probably bad; Watchmen broke that ground decades ago. But The Boys—both the original comic and especially the TV adaptation—is the most interesting and trenchant update of the idea that I’ve seen, and the show ups the ante on all of its most suggestive ideas in season two.
It’s most centrally and effectively a show about superheroes, capitalism, and consumer culture. Homelander (Antony Starr), the Captain America knockoff and leader of the show’s Avengers-style superhero team, the Seven, is the character most invested in maintaining a shiny superhero public identity and is also among the series’ biggest, scariest sociopaths. Season two introduces a new member of the Seven, Stormfront (Aya Cash), who swiftly undermines Homelander’s popularity, delivering what feels like authentic humanity in the heroes’ stilted press appearances. For anyone well versed in the darker online message boards, however, the slow reveal about Stormfront’s true motives will come as little surprise. (On this show, “most sociopathic” is a title with a lot of competition.)
The difference with The Boys is that while the heroes fight one another with familiar superpowers, they are all even more obsessed with soft power: Who has the better brand? How is this unexpectedly tough interview with Maria Menounos going? When the Deep (Chace Crawford) joins a Scientology-esque church and starts rehabilitating his image, it’s not through impressive feats of world-saving derring-do; it’s through a vulnerable sit-down interview with Katie Couric. The show is smart about media and the all-powerful impact of a Q Score, and it’s even better at thinking about how the soft and hard powers wielded by these characters combine into a truly combustible, terrifying cultural hegemony.
In fact, The Boys is so good at the specifically horrible contours of its awful superheroes and their corporate overlords, Vought International, that its storytelling about the Boys themselves is a bit of a letdown. Don’t get me wrong: Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) are completely effective as the sort-of leaders of a ragtag bunch of nobodies who’ve made it their mission to uncover the gross truths about Vought. But you get the sense that the show’s most baroque bits of nightmare fuel, both physical and mental, are reserved for the Supes. The Boys do their best to pull off the usual desperate plots to find worldshattering information that will change everyone’s minds about heroes forever, but it feels as if they’re there mostly to help us register how fucked up everything is. Did I mention the exploding heads? It’s all pretty fucked up.
Guts and a defiant lack of glory aren’t usually my bag, but The Boys does them with such gusto that I didn’t mind them that much. If it were purposeless blood splatter, it’d be easier to just turn it off, but the violence is tied to such a convincing critique of media image-making and corporate control that I was willing to endure the carnage.
Only two things can pull me out of The Boys and distract me from its otherwise compelling worldview. One is absolutely within the show’s power to change: the episode run times. There’s no need for multiple episodes that clock in at 67 minutes. Not only is this an endurance test for viewers, it unquestionably undermines the show’s effectiveness. With some punchier plot beats, some more deliberately chosen “Here’s why I’m sad” heart-to-heart moments, and a willingness to sacrifice one level of plot twist for the sake of overall tightness, The Boys could achieve a rhythmic precision to complement its aesthetic maximalism.
The other thing I can’t help but be distracted by is something The Boys can’t really avoid: The show is at its best when it’s a critique of overwhelming corporate power, and it’s paid for by one of the biggest, most powerful corporations on the planet. Every promotion for The Boys is also a promotion for Amazon Prime, and its success is a win for Jeff Bezos, a guy so wealthy and powerful he almost writes himself as its ideal villain.
Like it or not, though, there are only a few places where a show like The Boys can get made, only a few companies funding TV production with the money necessary for a series of this scope to exist. So maybe there’s something underhanded and subversive about The Boys’ streaming home, as if a cultural bomb had been smuggled into the very heart of Amazon’s inescapable brand. But I also couldn’t stop thinking about Stormfront, the new season-two character who becomes popular by publicly voicing criticism of Vought. Ultimately, she’s its property; her popularity only shores up Vought’s foothold in the market of audience appeal. So while I like The Boys, and the elements that ring truest for me are those that speak to corporate greed and exclusionary visions of power, I also can’t help but wonder if Bezos watches the show and what he thinks about it.
It’s theatrical in its execution, too. The filmmaker Jay Roach directed this microanthology—five 15-or-so-minute speeches delivered straight to camera—and you would think at some point that the logic (and magic) of TV would have dominated the result. But no, HBO polish aside, a monologue always smells of the stage. Venues large and small have been releasing tons of this material, all of it made in quarantine. Actors did this sort of webcam performance for the Public’s own The Line; the 24 Hour Plays folks have released more than 200 in their Viral Monologues series. It’s been about six months of watching Zoom and forcefully reminding yourself that all of us are doing a lot with very little.
So why can’t I forgive Coastal Elites for being not so good? I think it’s because the show reminds me of things about the form that I hope don’t come back, even though I spend every day missing live performance. Every medium has its own sins, and Coastal Elite’s failures are ones that plague the theater specifically. The way it panders to an assumed New York audience? The arrogant cracks about Nebraska? The hero’s journey from doubt that theater can save the world to joyful affirmation of the form’s total moral domination? Ugh. TV would never.
There is a little burst of very good writing right at the start. (Rudnick has been a deft comic playwright since at least 1991’s I
Hate Hamlet, which was—in a community theater production—my gateway drug.) In that first, best monologue, Bette Midler plays Miriam, a retired teacher and widow, bereaved but fighting for the resistance, mostly through social media. She’s a liberal, a theater subscriber, a New York Times
devotee (“On the Census, when it says ‘religion,’ I don’t put ‘Jewish.’ I put ‘New York
Times’!”), a tote-bag toter. She’s a cliché, but she knows it. Midler gives her a winning, oh-shucks-you-know-I’m-kidding twinkle.
When we meet Miriam, she’s in a police station explaining herself; we eventually realize she’s giving her statement to a cop. Fine, fine, she stole a guy’s maga hat and ran all the way to the Public to escape him. So sue her! She shakes a small fist at Hillary’s unfair treatment, she rants against Trump, she does some light boulevard raillery. “You like the theater?” she asks, leaning confidingly into the camera. Her eyebrows arch. “You like Phantom? So that’s a no.”
Theatergoers, and I shamefacedly include myself, are eager to believe that theatergoing itself is inherently courageous; Rudnick, an old pro, knows just how much we like to be flattered. So Miriam, when pushed to her limit, takes her stand in the lobby of the Public, swearing, “Every ticket is a weapon fighting that bastard!” If the show had happened there, she would have been applauded with smug whoops and hollers. Onscreen, obviously, she’s met with silence. In that quiet, her season-ticket “defiance” reveals itself as absurd and narcissistic. Rudnick seems to have written Miriam as essentially righteous, but simply by moving her onscreen, he and Roach show her as a woman charmed mainly by herself, lost in a terrifying self-regard. Was that intentional? Rudnick’s wry title and Midler’s knowing smarm argue yes; the rest of the show argues no.
The other four monologues are all flat by comparison. Dan Levy appears as an actor auditioning to be a gay superhero, worried that the producers want a kind of flamboyant minstrelsy; Issa Rae is an insulted notquite high-school chum of Ivanka’s (“She’s Dracula with a blowout!”); Sarah Paulson plays a meditation guru who admits she can’t om her way through a Trumpist family gathering in the Midwest; and Kaitlyn Dever is a nurse from Wyoming who has come to help fight covid in New York. Taken together, they reveal that Miriam’s snobbishness is not just a character foible—it’s built into Rudnick’s work. In all the monologues, the flyover states are a culturefree hell from which to escape. Worse, the nurse meets a patient who makes jokes about a coronavirus test. “Well, let’s hope it’s cancer,” the indomitable New Yorker says. The nurse marvels, “People don’t say shit like that in Wyoming,” with a tear in her eye. Sorry, what? People don’t have gallows humor in Wyoming? People don’t joke?
It didn’t have to be this enraging. At one point while watching Coastal Elites, I tried to imagine the same piece run on some theater’s YouTube channel rather than on HBO, and I could envision adopting an appreciative attitude to this kind of keepthe-car-warm material. I have seen some adventurous productions in the shutdown, gorgeous things made on tabletops that punch through the screen. But much of the monologue-based work needs—and has been getting—generosity from the viewer. It needs an audience that is happy to be supportive. Goalposts haven’t just been moved; they are in mothballs.
So the weird thing about HBO’s releasing Coastal Elites is that it props the goalposts back up and moves them farther away. It adds the gloss of a well-resourced shoot: We watch a starry and gorgeous cast, well coiffed, sitting in actual, nonvirtual sets. With those visual markers, we expect a script that has also been polished and buffed. But there hasn’t been time to work out the conversion from in-person to onscreen, how to write Rudnick-style comedy that doesn’t rely on in-the-room responses. Anyone who has seen a show in a too-big venue knows that it can kill a play, that the arrangement of seats or the sound-draining suck of a high ceiling can take a jolly production and make it seem lost and desperate. The HBO glowup does the same thing—it puts a little byus-for-us play in a setting that’s all wrong for it. But on the bright side, it would have been worse to experience it with an audience. Sitting among theatergoers all giving themselves a pat on the back is a good way to get an elbow in the eye. Imagine the fury you would feel if that Wyoming line had gotten even a single laugh. Insufferable! I’d rather go to Phantom.