Little Women is an exquisite exploration of family, growing up

Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet in Little Women. Image courtesy Columbia Pictures.

Little Women is simply extraordinary. It's riveting and enchanting, sweet and bittersweet, buoyed by an incredible level of brilliance in nearly every facet. The film is far too good to be described as simple comfort film – it's much too intricate for that – yet it is comforting to watch a film as exquisite and charming as this. 

Based on the eponymous novel by Louisa May Alcott, Little Women centers on the March sisters over the course of seven years in the 1860s. Jo (Saoirse Ronan) is an aspiring writer living in a tiny apartment in New York City. Oldest sister Meg (Emma Watson) is a married mother of two with dreams of wealth and comfort. Amy (Florence Pugh) lives with Aunt March (Meryl Streep) in Paris and wants to marry into wealth to support her family. Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is at home in Concord, Massachusetts with matriarch Marmee (Laura Dern), living a quiet life while fighting against an unspecified condition. The March sisters find a friend in their whimsical neighbor Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) and a patron in Laurie's grandfather (Chris Cooper) as they grow up through times hard and good.

Little Women is a fundamentally excellent film; everything in this film works, and it works to a brilliant degree. There are no glaring flaws with the writing, directing, acting, cinematography, editing, or soundtrack. Every emotional beat is struck with the perfect amount of force to wring out the desired effect. Writer/director Greta Gerwig has created a film that is legitimately outstanding, building upon the existing material to create a lovely, relatable story of family and growing up. 

   

The main drama in Little Women is rooted in the difficulties of both, shown through quotidian anecdotes from the March sisters' childhoods. A day at the beach is nearly as memorable as Amy burning Jo's novel or Meg's wedding to the kind John Brooke (James Norton), with each moment adding more layers to the March family dynamic. All of these small moments in the March women's lives build up to a remarkable portrait of sisters navigating into the confusing world of adulthood, reconsidering their youthful ambitions. The March sisters all have dreams of becoming an artist – whether it be a writer, musician, actor, or painter – that either fall apart or come close to doing so. The film isn't about settling for something short of your dreams; rather, the characters look within themselves to find what matters to them and who they want to be. Amy, Jo, and Meg all go through this process of self reflection and come out of it knowing their course as they establish themselves as adults. 

There's nothing overly complex about the film's storytelling, but Gerwig does something quite clever by jumping between the past and the film's present without clear demarcations. Little Women might start a story in Paris and quickly jump back to Concord to link that specific moment with a memory. Aside from linking the past and present directly, this adds a little verisimilitude to the storytelling. Memories can pop out of nowhere with little provocation, so the film doing the same feels true to life and serves as a subtle method of drawing a closer connection with the March sisters. The audience is living life through the eyes of the family, adding to the weight of the hard times and the joy of the good times. If done poorly, this could alienate the audience by confusing them, but Gerwig handles this beautifully. She shows a talent for guiding multiple narratives and has faith in her storytelling to keep the audience invested despite the frequent time skips.

What's most endearing about Little Women is the decency coursing through this film. There is so much kindness and caring shown by the main characters its impossible to avoid investment in the lives of the March family. Every character has a few flaws to keep them human, yet the flaws never overshadow how much everyone cares for one another. Gerwig doesn't force her characters to do the right things at all times, yet they care enough to feel contrition for their actions and use that to grow into more mature, kinder people. Jo and Amy have the most turbulent relationship of the four sisters, but the film ends with them respecting each other for their wisdom and talents, along with forgiveness for transgressions fueled by immaturity. Adulthood can have that affect on families – the squabbles of the past become less and less important as siblings grow up and find perspective – and Little Women shows how captivating growing up can be.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 134 minutes

Genre: Drama

tl;dr

What Worked: Writing, Directing, Acting, Storytelling

What Fell Short: A bit of drag in the third act

What To Watch As Well: Atonement, Frances Ha

Holy Cats! This Broadway adaptation terrible!

Francesca Hayward and Robbie Fairchild in Cats. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Reason and sanity are not things to be found in Cats. Rather, the loopy, unfortunately and mildly enchanting Broadway adaptation is all things and no things at once. Somehow, despite a brilliant lack of cohesion or basic plot logic, this film drew a bunch of famous folks – Idris Elba! Taylor Swift! Judi Dench! Jason Derulo! – to lend an air of respectability to the lunacy. Perhaps I'm missing something indelible about a show that ran for many, many years on Broadway. Or maybe the film adaptation is the fever dream of ego-driven idiots.

 

I think Cats is about a talent show in which the winner is reincarnated or something along those lines. Aside from the stars mentioned above are Jennifer Hudson, Ray Winstone, Ian McKellen, Rebel Wilson, and James Corden. Ballerina Francesca Hayward serves as the audience surrogate exploring what tries to be a mystical world of feline majesty. Everyone is dressed like a cat, they have weird cat names and do quasi cat things that are far sillier than ever intended. There are many songs tossed in because this is a musical, including a song Swift sings that is well outside her capabilities. Then everything ends on a rather banal shot meant to mean something important to director Tom Hooper and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Cats is an audacious calamity, wrong on almost every front and on nearly every level. Sometimes the film is bizarre and accidentally enchanting, littered with impeccable scenery devouring by Elba, McKellen, and Wilson. It tries to hit so many tones and have so many layers it misses all of them, dashing through emotions at unimaginable speeds and with no control. Cats is madness with a $90 million budget and a director with no clue what to do with it, the perfect recipe for an expensive cluster best viewed on hallucinogens.

With two hours of screen time to fill though Cats can't keep the insanity rolling. It's in those moments where the film's legitimate incompetence comes to light, bringing the terrible fun to a frustrating halt. Like the CGI, which looks dreadful and incomplete, as if they gave up about three quarters of the way in. Hooper fails wildly staging the musical numbers, most notably in the two renditions of Memory. This is the showcase song, and the film has the very experienced Hudson on hand to sing it. This should be the easiest win for this film, but it ends up completely mucking the whole thing up. The emotions wrought from the song land with a thud, due to a mix of Hooper failing to establish the right tone, strange choreography choices in the second version, and general framing and editing flaws that fail to convey the song's melancholy. Hudson is game and tries her best, but it's hard to succeed when everything around you is en fuego as it is in Cats.

If any one thing kept this film going though, it was the audience at the screening I attended. I've never sat with an audience as splendidly sincere and sarcastic as the one who soldiered through Cats with me. Every little cat pun or dumb, awkward cat movement garnered a wicked groan or one of those “I cannot believe this is happening” laughs. Some folks applauded after a few of the musical numbers – Memory was not one of them – because somehow applause is the only acceptable way to appreciate insanity, even if no one behind it is around to hear it. It was a hoot to watch it with folks, a shared experience that will be difficult to replicate in the future. Too bad this five-star audience had to sit through a one-star film. 

Review: One out of Five Stars  

Click here to see the trailer. 

Rating: PG

Run time: 110 minutes

Genre: Musical 

tl;dr  

What Worked: Audience 

What Fell Short: Everything Else 

What To Watch Instead: Singing in the Rain, Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Richard Jewell a deep character study undermined by politics

Sam Rockwell and Paul Walter Hauser in Richard Jewell. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

What's worrisome about Richard Jewell is how far down the rabbit hole director Clint Eastwood fell. The numerous splendid moments of filmmaking and the brilliance of the dive into the film's central figure is nearly overlapped by a pervading sense of paranoia from the director about bureaucracy conspiring against an average white man. This is Eastwood's millstone, an inability to see the humanity driving the institutions he fears.

Richard Jewell stars Paul Walter Hauser as the eponymous security guard, an unremarkable man who saves hundreds of lives after discovering a bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Despite the act of courage, Jewell's grandiose dreams and odd past behavior draw the attention of FBI agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm), who suspects Jewell planted the bomb himself to become famous. Shaw leaks the investigation to tenacious reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), which instantly turns Jewell from a hero to a villain. With the help of attorney Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) and his mother Bobbi (Kathy Bates), Jewell fights against the forces opposing him to clear his name.

Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray dive incredibly deep into its central character to reveal a man whose shining moment of competence nearly ruins his life. Underneath the hushed voice and abundances of “sirs” is a man with a healthy ego and aspirations for mild greatness as a law enforcement official. Jewell is a legitimate hero who saved multiple lives, but Richard Jewell isn't afraid to show the human side – especially the ego – pushing that heroism. In an era defined by heroes who are so far above human realism they are barely relatable, it is pleasant to see a man's flaws result in an act of courage. To paraphrase an Emerson quote, the difference between a hero and ordinary folk is five minutes of courage, and the film mines a lot from that idea.

The humanity Eastwood and Ray provide for Jewell are not afforded to the forces opposing him. The battle in Richard Jewell is the fight between a decent guy and powerful institutions – government and the media – out to ruin his life, but the humans representing those forces come across as cartoonish in comparison. Shaw's motivations are flat and uninvestigated, his presence more stereotypical than nuanced. The film's portrayal of Scruggs, whose name was not changed for this film, is far more concerning. She's not only depicted not simply as a woman who is willing to sleep with a source for information, but a terrible journalist and even worse human being, celebrating the deaths of innocent people to advance her career. And despite the film's take on her reporting, her article was correct and had additional sourcing the film implies did not exist. 

Neither Shaw nor Scruggs should be a villain in this film. They were two people doing their jobs in the aftermath of incredible act of violence and terror, consumed by a need to rush for truth and information. They were human, yet Eastwood and Ray cannot find that humanity. This is becoming a trend for Eastwood, who took a similar approach with Sully. In both film, the actions of the main characters are impugned by governmental investigation to the point the terror of the initial actions are overshadowed by the bureaucracy. Even if the case against Richard Jewell was untrue, the idea the government overstepped by conducting an investigation is ludicrous. Yet this is the worldview Eastwood presents in Richard Jewell, a fever dream in which good white men are persecuted for their good deeds. These ideas permeate so deep into this film it overshadows some stellar filmmaking. The sequence when Jewell first finds the bomb through the inevitable explosion is filled with brilliant tension worthy of Hitchcock. Eastwood plays with the audience's knowledge that the bomb will go off, throwing in some hints of a timeline to mess with perspective and keep the actual moment of detonation a shock to viewers. That moment should be the film's centerpiece, yet Eastwood gets so lost in the ensuing legal issues the power of that moment becomes window dressing. Richard Jewell is a good film, but Eastwood pursuit of victimhood prevents his film from becoming anything more than that.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 129 minutes

Genre: Drama

tl;dr

What Worked: Richard Jewell, Paul Walter Hauser

What Fell Short: Secondary Characters, Politics, Lazy Foreshadowing

What To Watch As Well: Shattered Glass

Mystery abounds in brilliantly fun Knives Out

Daniel Craig, LaKeith Stanfield, and Noah Segan in Knives Out. Image courtesy Lions Gate.

At the center of Knives Out is a murder most foul. Legendary mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is discovered dead by his nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) the morning after his birthday party. The suspects are Harlan's flesh and blood. Could it have been his daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), or her husband Richard (Don Johnson), or his son Ransom (Chris Evans)? Was it Walt (Michael Shannon), or his wife Donna (Riki Lindhome), or his son Jacob (Jaeden Martell)? Or maybe it was his daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette) or granddaughter Meg (Katherine Langford)? Everyone has a motive and opportunity, and it's up to private eye Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, sporting a brilliantly absurd southern accent), Lieutenant Elliot (LaKeith Stanfield), and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan) to determine what caused Harlan Thrombey's demise.

Saying too much more would ruin the fun writer/director Rian Johnson has with Knives Out. This movie is a blast from start to end, zigging and zagging and zigging again from one deliriously clever twist to the next. Johnson weaves his tale tightly, providing the audience nearly exactly the amount of information to make the final big swerve ending nearly perfect. This is an incredibly difficult trick to pull off in a genre notorious for hiding vital information from the viewer just for the sake of maintaining the mystery. That isn't Johnson's style though. Rather, he employs storytelling and filmmaking sleights of hand to retain a scintilla of ambiguity, just enough to keep the audience from knowing for sure what led to Harlan Thrombey's demise. You could watch Knives Out for days on end to find the little Easter eggs and hints Johnson throws in to throw viewers off. He borrows liberally from films like Rashomon and The Maltese Falcon as little tricks, playing on audience expectations from years of precedent, only to upend the expectations early on because it's far more fun to play with a genre than adhere to the rules strictly.

Johnson fortunately carries over the mystery genre tradition of the terribly wealthy family being terrible. The characters (and cast by extension) in Knives Out are an absolute hoot, dropping bon mots and retorts with the perfect amount of spite and malice. They are designed to be perfectly detestable, wrapped up in their world of wealth yet trying ever so hard to think they've earned anything despite starting at third base. It is so, so much fun watching these folks squirm during Benoit Blanc's interrogations or realize everything they'd planned for in life has gone to pot. The Thrombeys deserve the worst, and yet there is something sad about the entire affair. The film depicts a family that long ago gave up on ever actually liking one another, effectively waiting for their patriarch to die to inherit their slice of Harlan Thrombey's millions. Johnson's sense of humor doesn't completely cover the sadness of that scenario; avarice tore the Thrombey family asunder and nothing can ever repair that lost connection. Harlan Thrombey's legacy is a family with motive to murder him, which is both tragic and apropos for a genre dedicated to greed.

It is easy to read the tragedy in Knives Out, but Johnson and company are far, far more interested in putting on one helluva show than reflect on the sadness of being. This is one of the most purely fun films to come out this year, balancing entertainment with a fun little mental puzzle to keep viewers enthralled and engaged in the action on screen. Almost everything works about this film – from the writing and directing to the casting and right into the spacing, lighting, and even costumes. Every little thing in this movie means something, every frayed thread on a sweater or confused memory leads to something big and interesting. Knives Out is a piece of exquisite filmmaking that never fails to entertain its viewers, which is about as high of praise as a film can get.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 130 minutes

Genre: Crime

tl;dr

What Worked: Script, Acting, Daniel Craig's accent

What Fell Short: One reveal is a little too obvious

What To Watch As Well: Brick, Murder on the Orient Express

Action falls short in Charlie's Angels reboot

Ella Balinska, Kristen Stewart, and Naomi Scott in Charlie's Angels. Image courtesy Columbia Pictures.

Some credit is due to the new incarnation of Charlie's Angels for being somewhat different than the eponymous television series and recent movie franchise. This new version uses the previous versions as a launching pad to tell a contemporary story about surviving and thriving in a male-dominated world. But there's little else beyond this worth writing home about, as the positives are often undercut by a film with a lot of nagging gaps and unmemorable action sequences. Charlie's Angels isn't a bad film; it's just incomplete.

Charlie's Angels stars Kristen Stewart and Ella Balinska as Sabina and Jane, two agents in the international Townsend Detective Agency. Sabina and Jane are assigned to protect Elena (Naomi Scott), a brilliant programmer turned whistleblower against her boss Peter (Nat Faxon). Elena wants to inform company owner Alexander Brock (Sam Claflin) about a potentially lethal flaw in their new product, but the situation quickly becomes dangerous, leaving the three alone with a new Bosley (writer/director Elizabeth Banks) to investigate what went wrong. Meanwhile, the original Bosley (a wonderful Patrick Stewart) is just starting retirement, but becomes suspicious about potential wrongdoing in his old organization.

Charlie's Angels has some wonky bits that course through the script. There's a twist, and a twist upon the original twist, and neither twist is developed particularly well. Rather, they come across as inorganic to the narrative, existing for the sake of existing because fulfilling the first twist violates one of the film's reason to be. Eliminating the thematic dissonance that first twist brings, the film telegraphs both twists poorly, missing an important beat or two in the order of presentation, as well as a flashback that does not fit the rest of the film.

Generally it seems like there is a scene or two that is missed to tie this twist together. The rest of the film has this feeling too, that there's just something incomplete about Charlie's Angels. Where this strikes most is in the film's character arcs. Banks' script is missing a few key moments of growth in the relationship between Sabina and Jane, with the film jumping from mild hostility to emotional dependence without tying the two elements together. There's not a moment where the two depend on each other, including the action sequences where it would fit naturally to have such a moment. The issue falls with a script that tries to wring so much out of the two-hour run time it can't find time to connect the characters, sequences, and intrigue into a cohesive unit. Charlie's Angels would be a better film with either more time to develop the characters and story or removing some elements in favor of a more linear plot.

The film's script is imperfect, but it's not a bad baseline for the film to build on. Banks has a lot of fun with Charlie's Angels as a concept, creating a fascinating world with a female-oriented spy agency can infiltrate all aspects of society. Female unity is a key theme for this movie, with women uniformly looking out for one another through dangerous situations and chauvinism both brazen and subtle. Sabina is also a fantastic character, a queer lead unashamed of her broad sexual preferences and yet does not fall into the bisexual trope of being overly flirtatious. Sabina is written well and performed even better by Stewart, who expresses more zest and glee than usual while tossing in some pretty solid line deliveries. At the least Banks has a strong sense of humor, writing in some solid little quips and a keen understanding of exactly how long to let a running joke go before cutting it off.

Banks is very good as a comedic writer/director, but her action chops need work. Charlie's Angels suffers from uninspired action sequences that lack excitement and panache. There's nothing awe-inspiring or innovative about the fights on screen, nothing to thrill audiences or give them their money's worth. Even the comedic fight scenes involving Elena fall short, a missed opportunity for the film to showcase a little slapstick. Banks' innate sense of humor keeps Charlie's Angels from failure, but the lack of action and inconsistent character development dooms the film to mediocrity.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 118 minutes

Genre: Action

tl;dr

What Worked: Kristen Stewart, Patrick Stewart, Humor

What Fell Short: Character Development, Action, Plotting

What To Watch Instead: Charlie's Angels

Last Christmas charms despite multitude of flaws

Emilia Clarke in Last Christmas. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

On many, many levels, Last Christmas is a bad film. It does so much wrong when it comes to writing, plotting, comedy, and tone, coming out as a weird, awkward film that basically rips off a Charles Dickens classic. And yet, for some reason, I kind of like it anyway. Maybe it's due to the seasonal milieu, or the George Michael soaked soundtrack, or perhaps a charming lead performance that lifts the film up just enough to make it work, kind of.

Last Christmas stars Emilia Clarke as Kate, whose aspirations of a singing career have yet to take off. Instead she spends her days working as an elf at an all-year Christmas shop for the stern Santa (Michelle Yeoh), spending her nights couch surfing, angering her friends, and hanging around local pubs. All the while she does her best to avoid her mother Petra (Emma Thompson, who co-wrote the film), father Ivan (Boris Isakovic), and sister Marta (Lydia Leonard). Her life changes after a chance encounter with the charmingly happy Tom (Henry Golding), who inspires Kate to turn her life around. As Kate begins to regain her sense of place, her relationship with Tom becomes a skosh more complicated than expected.

Why is the relationship so complicated? It's the result of a big old swerve in the third act in which Last Christmas takes the most literal interpretation of the opening line to the eponymous song. It is a remarkably ludicrous twist, such a silly little idea it's unclear how Thompson and writing partners Byrony Kimmings and Greg Wise got this film made. And it gets even more ridiculous when they and director Paul Feig try to justify the logic behind this last-act reveal by ripping off a 20-year-old David Fincher movie. The whole thing is madness, and I sort of love that the filmmakers made a film with such a brilliantly misguided premise. 

 

The rest of the film's flaws are far less fun. Last Christmas has a plethora of problems hosted within its script. The most basic is an overload of exposition, particularly when it comes to Kate's depiction of her family. She rants often about her dysfunctional family, yet what the film shows is more kooky than properly broken, which undermines the inevitable family reconciliation in the final act. The film's tone is wonky as all heck, as if the script pulled pieces from other movies and Frankensteined them together with some holly and tinsel. There are so many montages of Kate apologizing for being awful it undercuts her emotional voyage because all her apologies feel far too easy because they're consolidated into montages. Even with that consolidation there remains a slew of plot holes and dropped storylines that make the film feel generally incomplete, like Thompson and friends had an idea but never got around to fleshing it out fully. Last Christmas can't even end right, eliding right over an effective climax for an unsatisfactory finish.

Last Christmas has a few more subtle annoyances to go along with the blatant problems. The filmmakers shame the hell out of Kate, chastising not just her evenings out and mornings after but even her dreams of becoming a singer. The film does a passing attempt at addressing the wave of anti-immigration fervor and LGBTQIA issues but doesn't really connect on either front. The former is undermined by a racially tinged punchline by Petra. The latter is the addition of an incredibly chaste lesbian relationship without depth or proper narrative payoff. Like the rest of Last Christmas, the ideas are there but the execution is all wrong.

Yet despite all those issues there is something ultimately kind of endearing about this movie. If Last Christmas hits one's feels, it hits them because below the chaos is a basic enough story of a person trying to find the good inside herself. Feig, Thompson, and the rest of the filmmakers get this one bit of storytelling correct, and Clarke does her best to charm the audience into finding value in her character's redemption. This might be the film's one real saving grace, and it's just enough to make Last Christmas a bit charming, warts and all.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 102 minutes

Genre: Romantic Comedy

tl;dr

What Worked: Emilia Clarke, Michelle Yeoh

What Fell Short: Writing, Directing, Twist

What To Watch Instead: About Time

Messy Jojo Rabbit misses the sweet spot between farce and gravitas

Taika Waititi and Roman Griffin Davis in Jojo Rabbit. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

Jojo Rabbit is a mess, albeit a mess made with affection and care. Writer/director Taika Waititi sometimes gets across some of the points he wants and landing a couple of effective punches, but ultimately cannot maintain the gravitas he wants and needs. Jojo Rabbit is disappointing, but in a fairly interesting way. 

The film stars Roman Griffin Davis as the eponymous Jojo, a 10-year-old wannabe Nazi living in a quiet German village with his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson). After an incident with a grenade ends his dreams of serving Hitler, Jojo volunteers to work around town for the insouciant Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), his assistant Finkel (Alfie Allen), and Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson). Jojo is prone to an active imagination and many misperceptions about the Jewish people, which are spurred by frequent conversations with an imaginary Hitler (played by Waititi). Jojo's life shifts dramatically once he finds the young Jewish woman Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding from the Nazis in his home. Elsa's presence begins to shift Jojo's perspective on everything he knows, just as the war winds down and his village succumbs to chaos. 

There's a fair amount going on with Jojo Rabbit, and Waititi does pull some of it off. The film is fine as a coming of age story, even though the main character is a stone's throw away from being a Nazi. There's a nice little theme about finding heroism in the small moments, whether it's secretly placing anti-Nazi propaganda around town or expressing oneself amid tyranny. Waititi has some good points about how little effort it takes for outright stupidity to evolve into commonplace evil; it's easy to make fun of folks who believe Jewish people have horns, at least until they start slaughtering them based on that belief. The film's farcical nature cuts deepest with this point, due in part to the timeliness of such ideology. 

It's difficult for films to shift between absurdity and seriousness given how far the gap is between the two. Waititi, to his credit, sometimes succeeds at doing exactly that. One sequence in particular, a sequence where Jojo Rabbit takes a “heil Hitler” joke and turns it into a menacing moment for Elsa, is quite striking. It's a really stunning moment in which the films reminds viewers the initial the joke comes from a rather dark place and comes with terrible consequences. When Jojo Rabbit makes contact with its target, it hits with precision and force. But the film's batting average is right around the Mendoza line, failing more often than not to square up on those little moments of insight. The final battle scene, the moment when Jojo witnesses the consequences of his dreams, lacks the effectiveness found in the far smaller moment below. It's more silly than stern, suffering from the Life is Beautiful problem of taking an atrocity too lightly. 

The biggest issue with Jojo Rabbit is Waititi himself. His imaginary Hitler shifts the film's otherwise absurdist tone toward twee and cute, adding more layers to the film's constant tonal shifts. The violence meant to jolt the audience loses its effect because the tone is already too far above the grand for viewers to land in the midst of the horror. Having Hitler as an imaginary friend is the film's selling point, yet it's a joke doesn't go anywhere of interest. And his Hitler isn't an interesting take on the character; Mel Brooks took a similar approach around 50 years ago to much greater effect. Making Hitler flamboyant is also an easy choice, a simple way of converting a horror villain into a silly little thing. Jojo Rabbit has a lot of these uninspired decisions as lazy shorthand to the audience. Captain Klenzendorf's motivation for casually ignoring Nazism starts off as a really interesting study of a warrior no longer allowed to fight, but ends up as a gay joke. The soundtrack is uber literal, ending with the most obvious David Bowie song imaginable because lazy thematic resonance. This film is, or at least should be, more interesting than these choices. It should challenge the audience more often than it does, give them room to reflect a little about why they're laughing at the jokes. Jojo Rabbit ultimately loses its focus and can't deliver the knockout punch it winds up to strike.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 108 minutes

Genre: Comedy

tl;dr

What Worked: Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, Some Themes

What Fell Short: Taika Waititi's Hitler, Tonal imbalance, Banality

What To Watch As Well: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Producers

Confusion reigns in beguiling Lighthouse

Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse. Image courtesy A24.

Reality is at best a concept in The Lighthouse. The film sees it as a thing that possibly exists, perhaps a baseline for comparing behavior, then tosses gasoline onto that otherwise intangible possibility and lights it ablaze. Because, ultimately, whether or not its protagonist can differentiate between what is real and what is in his imagination is irrelevant. Just searching for that dividing line between them is a horrifying, dangerous endeavor that consumes even the sturdiest of souls. 

The Lighthouse stars Robert Pattinson as Ephraim Winslow, a young lighthouse keeper apprenticing under the boisterous Tom Wake (Willem Dafoe). The two must spend a month tending a lighthouse on an island somewhere in New England, with Winslow stuck doing the grunt work for Wake as Wake tends to the light. They survive the month alone, but a massive storm delays their transport off the island. Time becomes impossible to track for Winslow, who begins seeing strange things around the lighthouse, including some rather odd behavior from the mysterious Wake.

Perhaps Wake is not acting so strangely, which he brings up to call out Winslow's loss of sanity. Or Winslow is perceiving the situation correctly; there are odd things afoot on this island and the secret lies in the light. What is clear is Winslow's perspective is unreliable, which puts the audience in a similarly foggy place. Director Robert Eggers (who wrote the film with his brother Max) prefers to keep the audience in the dark, showing Winslow as a hard and dedicated worker, only to tell that he is a drunken, lazy oaf unworthy of trust. What The Lighthouse shows and what it tells are fascinating contrasts that cause the mind to do breakdown a little as it tries to process this conundrum. And it doesn't really matter, because Eggers' focus is on the chaos wrought by isolation and paranoia. Lying underneath every moment is a layer of tension waiting to burst, with Winslow and Wake perpetually a wrong comment or valve release away from snapping. Eggers uses the sound of the lighthouse and the island as a means of increasing that tension, bumping the volume of the diegetic noises to perhaps tease at a slip in control of reality for Winslow. The island is too small to escape from the noises, creating a sense of dread and terror. 

 

The only thing Winslow can rely on is his stormy relationship with Wake. Once the film enters act two and the liquor begins to flow The Lighthouse shifts into a relationship drama between Winslow and Wake. They spend much of the second act oscillating between friendship and fighting, affection and outright hatred, both attracted and reviled by the existence of the other. The most intense moments from The Lighthouse come following the moments of sweetness. Winslow and Wake open themselves up emotionally – Winslow by revealing a dark secret, Wake by showing vulnerability when Winslow derides his culinary skills – and inevitably the other finds a way to utterly decimate the other's feelings. Each feels betrayed by the only one they care about, the cruelty of their words heightening the film's intensity and providing justification for the vitriol they spew at one another. Invectives thrown by a stranger cause minimal harm, but harsh words from a loved one cut to the core of one's being. This is by far the funniest part of the film as well. Pattinson and Defoe have a fascinating patter and ramp up the tenderness and vitriol, with Eggers' script adding nice touches of era-appropriate verbiage. 

The relationship between Winslow and Wake ultimately falls apart as most relationships do when neither person can trust the other wholesale. All Winslow can do is search for the truth about the island and what Wake does at the lighthouse alone at night. Winslow seeks the light desperately, hoping its secrets can reveal some truth about the island. The Lighthouse takes elements of a few myths of the sea along with some Greek stories that serve as an omen for the lost Winslow. Ultimately Winslow's quest for knowledge becomes his downfall, suffering a fate akin to that of the bringer of light onto earth, destroyed by his curiosity and hubris.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 109 minutes

Genre: Horror

tl;dr

What Worked: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, tension, humor

What Fell Short: A little too long in the third act

What To Watch As Well: Jacob's Ladder, The Shining