THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Makeup: B+

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is not garnering a lot of attention or box office receipts, and to be honest, it’s not all that much of a surprise. Even setting the quality of this film on its own terms aside, what possible relevance could Tammy Faye Bakker have to the current culture, easily forty years after the peak of her cultural cachet, and fourteen years after her death? Does anyone under the age of forty even remember her? I barely do, and even that’s only because of the famed cult documentary of the same name that was released in 2000, programmed as part of queer festivals, and focused far less on Jim Bakker and quite a bit more on her pointed support of the queer community—something I only learned from that documentary film, at the age of 24.

It may seem like a leap that this film brought to mind the recent Aretha Franklin biopic Respect. That film, also on its own terms, is no better or worse than The Eyes of Tammy Faye, but, crucially, it does far more easily justify its own existence. Aretha Franklin passed away far more recently (2018), her life’s work continues to have a profound impact on ongoing art and culture, and we can safely assume it will continue to for decades to come. None of these same things can be said of Tammy Faye Bakker, whose cultural influence at its peak was niche at best, and for the later years of her life she was unfortunately the largely unfair target of ridicule. This would have been due to her notoriously clownish makeup, the stereotype of her constantly crying, and just her general loopiness—which this current film suggests was largely due to prescription drug addictions.

The 2000 documentary set out to humanize her, and it did a pretty good job of it. This new, narrative film version of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, as directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick), clearly has the same intention. But, in 2021, how much does it even matter anymore? In 2000, Tammy Faye was still alive and vry much active; she was indeed an active participant in the filming process. What all this boils down to is, the current film is not just too little too late, but it is definitively redundant. You’d be far better off just seeking out. the original documentary—which, incidentally, is officially credited as the source material.

None of this is to say that this The Eyes of Tammy Faye is without any redeeming value, however. There’s always the unfortunate fact that more people are interested in narrative features than they are in documentary films—that documentary earned all of $1 million at the box office, after all, although the fact that the current film has earned all of $1.5 million 10 days into its run isn’t painting the greatest picture either. On the other hand, like it or not we are in the streaming era, and a fair number more people will will likely see it that way soon enough.

The best thing about this movie, actually, is the acting. Well, although Andrew Garfield has proved capable of greatness in many other parts, he is merely serviceable here as Jim Bakker, donning his own slightly distracting facial prosthetics and varied and evolving hairstyles through the many years this movie covers. Jessica Chastain, however, is legitimately impressive as Tammy Faye, somehow transcending the truly ridiculous amount of makeup and prosthetics. In fact she disappears into this part in a way she arguably never has before, achieving the aforementioned goal of humanizing the woman she plays.

It could even be argued she's too good at it. There are side-by-side stills at the end of the film, showing the actors playing their parts next to the real people they played. It's only when Chastain is seen up next to the real Tammy Faye that it's a little jarring. After sitting through that entire 126-minute movie, it becomes clear that Chastain actually dialed it down: Tammy Faye Bakker, to put it as sensitively as I can, was a truly nutty lady.

And the story we are privy to here, details the rise of the Bakkers as televangelists, their public marital problems, and their deep-dive fall from grace when Jim Bakker was indicted on charges of fraud, thereafter even serving a prison sentence. There are even allusions to secret gay affairs on the part of Jim, although the movie us never really straightforward about them. All we know, based on this movie anyway, is that Tammy Faye was along for the ride, largely oblivious, or perhaps more accurately, wilfully ignorant. The two are both massively materialistic, using their televised "ministry" as an excuse for their excesses, which build up in some ways independent of each other.

I enjoyed The Eyes of Tammy Faye for what it was, but still found myself wishing it were better. It could have been improved by, say, making direct connections between the lives of these two personalities and what the far-right in America has become today. But this movie isn't interested in that; it just wants us to be interested in their story, and to be impressed by the performance of it. I can give it that much, at least—and it's worth mentioning that Cherry Jones is also excellent as Tammy Faye's mother—but, in the end, it's still just not quite enough.

A great performance, still no substitute for the real thing.

Overall: B-

DEAR EVAN HANSEN

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C+
Music: A-

Dear Evan Hansen is the perfect movie for people with no critical thinking skills. Anyone who sees this movie and then wonders how the Broadway play on which it’s based was a huge success has evidently never met your average mainstream audience. People want to be entertained, and hear great music, and to be moved to tears, and this movie offers all of those things. I mean, I cried too.

So what’s the problem? Well, nothing, if you have no interest in looking beyond superficial concerns. I guess I won’t begrudge you that, if it’s the choice you make. More power to you, I guess. But while the characters in this story are supposedly working through their grief and learning to conquer their anxieties, it's all based on an endless cascade of lies, and people doing what are bizarrely never quite presented as such but are objectively horrible things to each other. One would not be too far off the mark to call this movie unhinged.

Except, it's never presented that way, nor does it ever really feel that way. You only get there when you stop to think critically about what's going on. In the meantime, you're being moved by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul's original music and wowed by Ben Platt's voice.

But, okay, let's back up a little and talk about Ben Platt, because there are actually a lot of criticisms of this movie that I feel are unfair. As in, although Platt originated the title role of a 16-year-old when he himself was 21, he still plays the same role in the film adaptation at the age of 27. To that I say, who cares? If we can literally celebrate 32-year-olds playing middle schoolers in the Hulu series Pen15, why is this such a big deal? People are acting like Ben Platt as a "grown man" in this film is outrageous casting, and I did not find it the least bit distracting. Furthermore, Kaitlyn Dever as Evan's love interest Zoe is 24 years old in the part herself, and that fact is getting far less press.

Honestly, the performances matter far more to me than the actual ages of the actors, as long as they're still young. (Although to be fair, in the hands of the right director, even someone far older in the part could have worked. It's all in the handling.) And while some are saying Platt is overdoing his performance, the character of Evan is someone I relate to on a viscerally personal level. So much of his high school experience, his social anxieties, brought me right back to my own remarkably similar experiences at the same age. He takes many medications for these things, as does at least one other student he gets to know a little, and I found myself wondering what medications I might have been given had I been born twenty years later.

Well, maybe none. Evan's disorders are often manifest in very physiological ways, and my own problems in my youth, rooted in childhood traumas, were better served with therapy than with medication. And this actually is relevant to the film, because that brings me to the other truly legitimate criticism of Dear Evan Hansen, which is how it characterizes mental illness. Every "breakthrough" Evan makes is as a result of bizarrely fated circumstances, and his use of medication is presented as one of the many things that otherize him rather than as a genuine solution to any of his struggles.

Then there's Connor. I haven't even mentioned him yet! He's the emotionally unstable classmate who committed suicide after randomly signing the cast on Evan's arm, with a letter Evan wrote to himself still on his person after he snatched it from a school printer Evan printed it to. It convinces Connor's parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino, both great in what are ultimately thankless parts) that Connor had friends after all, and in his social panic Evan goes along with their assumptions, creating a fantasy relationship he had with Connor to make Cynthia and Larry feel better in their grief.

And I kept thinking about Connor, over and over, through the vast majority of Dear Evan Hansen—he's the character completely swept aside, in favor of some fantasy construction of him. With hints of his true personality sprinkled in here and there, perhaps director Stephen Chbosky felt that we were given a full picture of who he really was. But, Connor is really given the shaft here, all the "real" details about him amounting to nothing more than a ghost, in favor of an exponentially larger amount of time spent on the fiction of him. Evan convinces Connor’s parents that he had some secret life of fulfilling friendship, that he was capable of real connection with his peers. Except we never see that actually happen, because it all exists as a deceitful construction built by Evan. The closest we ever get is a brief home video of Connor singing and playing guitar. But, as far as we know, Connor really was the awful shit he seemed to be in the few scenes we see of him when he was still alive. Either way, Connor is never given fair representation in this movie.

And sure, the movie is about Evan rather than Connor, except Evan uses Connor to make it so, and in the process quite elaborately emotionally manipulates an entire family. Evan's own single mother is played by Julianne Moore, easily the best thing in this movie, unfortunately absent too much of the time because she is an overworked nurse constantly taking on extra shifts. She even gets one song near the end, and it's a moment at which tissues should be handy.

I do have to wonder, would Dear Evan Hansen work even as well as it does if it were not a musical? An odd thing to ponder, because you wouldn't expect people breaking out into song about anxiety and grief to make it better—but, it really does. The songs are wonderful, and almost certainly are the reason the Broadway play was so successful. Watch this movie and then try imagining the exact same story as a non-musical stage play. You'd be ready to slit your own wrists by the end of it. As it is, the music serves a dual purpose of keeping you engaged with the story, while also distracting you from how truly fucked up the premise is. As long as you give in to that distraction, you might leave with the delusion that this movie is actually great.

Connor has good reason to be pissed, I’m on his side!

Overall: C+

COPSHOP

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

I can’t help but wonder, is Copshop another movie that’s the product of the pandemic? The cast may not be especially small—there are 23 credited parts—but the setting is still characteristically limited: probably 80% or more of the movie takes place at a rural Nevada police station (hence the title). I would guess that at least a third of the movie features only the three leads: Val (Alexis Louder), the cop looking after two criminals in the jail downstairs: Teddy Murretto (Frank Grillo), the man on the run from Bob Viddick (Gerard Butler), the man hired to kill him. Several scenes feature just the three of them, bantering in the jail, Murretto and Viddick in separate cells.

The rest of the cast, ultimately, ultimately serves to up the body count, which is quite high in this film. There’s a lot of gun fights, and a lot of relatively multidimensional characters we’ve spent some time getting to know get dispatched unceremoniously. Given the action-crime genre, I have mixed feelings about this. Director Joe Carnahan is offering a quasi-stylized movie clearly meant to be more fun than gritty, in which case, why bum us out like that? On the other hand, it could be seen as a refreshing change of approach: these people may be characters, but their lives mean something. Something tells me, though, that Carnahan wasn’t thinking too much about that.

It’s not that big a deal, anyway; I found myself having a good time with this movie regardless. In fact, I never did watch a trailer to this movie before seeing it, and only went to see it based on relatively good reviews and a synopsis that made it sound more dramatic than action-packed. As a result, this movie was a pleasant surprise, and exceeded my expectations.

Granted, there is no question that Carnahan is emulating far better directors here, like Quentin Tarantino or Edgar Wright. Or even Shane Black, whose 2016 film The Nice Guys is vaguely similar in tone but lands its humor with far greater success.

In the moment, though, Copshop suffices, and I did enjoy the supporting turn by Toby Huss as Anthony, the unhinged rival assassin who shows up and ultimately wreaks all the havoc that makes this movie as entertaining as it is. As for Gerard Butler, this is the kind of low-rent crime thriller he’s basically typecast to be a part of these days, his very screen presence is generic, and the character of Viddick manages more than one implausible plot twist that made me wonder if he moonlights as an illusionist.

Butler aside, it’s the casting of Copshop that elevates the material at least a little bit, especially Alexis Louder as the unusual choice of a Black woman as the hero in a film of this type. There’s a lot of genuine gun loving in this movie, of course, but that just goes with the territory here. Part of the fun is the confined setting at the police station for the vast majority of the film, much of it with Val, Murretto and Viddick locked behind the bulletproof door to. the jail while Anthony, cracking weird jokes—and Copshop is best when it gets weird, which it honestly doesn’t do enough—as he tries to get in after them all.

Copshop could have benefitted from some polishing, but its minor messiness, even when it gets a little hackneyed at times, is part of its charm. I wouldn’t say anyone should rush out. to theaters to see it, but I still found it well worth my time.

Val is a gunslinging badass,

Overall: B

LANGUAGE LESSONS

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

There’s a turning point in Language Lesson, where the conceit of FaceTime being the singular lens through which we see the only two characters finally becomes secondary, and the narrative comes to the forefront and even becomes genuinely moving. This is mostly due to the winning performances by Natalie Morales and Mark Duplass, the only two people we ever see onscreen, but even that is, ultimately, too little too late.

Their intentions are good, their hearts very much in the right place, and Language Lessons is the latest in the increasing line of experimental cinema borne of COVID lockdowns. Not only are there only two characters in this entire story, but there is only one scene in which they are seen in each other’s physical presence. The rest of the time, watching this movie is a lot like actually being on the video calls so many of us grew weary of months ago—most of us actually stopped using them so regularly that long ago, in favor of still-careful, but more frequent in-person socializing. How many people actually want to experience that again?

Much of the same concerns apply to the other lockdown-related movie released recently, Together, but that movie is actually about living through this pandemic; it’s far more successful at creating a plausible, compelling story within that context; and crucially, it’s about a household of characters who still do interact within each other’s physical spaces. Turns out, this makes a pretty significant difference: the 2018 John Cho vehicle Searching already explored this type of filmmaking, the entire film consisting of computer and mobile device screens, with mixed results at best. And that was well before there was any hint of a pandemic. Incidentally, I gave Searching a C+, and it does beg the question: would I have liked Language Lessons more had it been released then? Or would I even have liked Searching more had it been released now, perhaps with current limitations making it more impressive? Context always makes a difference.

Granted, so does writing, no matter the context, and if not the entire script of Language Lessons, then certainly its premise is its real problem. This movie offers no acknowledgment of a pandemic, but is clearly a product of it—directed by Natalie Morales, and co-written by Morales and Mark Duplass. (Knowing Morales was a writer makes me feel slightly better about a couple of cringey lines referencing “white savior” and even the literal phrase “white shit,” which would have worked even less well had they just been written by some white guy.) Duplass plays Adam, a gay man whose wealthy husband (heard, but never seen) has gifted him 100 virtual Spanish lessons as a surprise gift.

This setup is relatively problematic from the start. For some reason, the Spanish “immersion” teacher is based in Costa Rica, patching in via what looks like FaceTime from abroad to teach these classes virtually. How did Adam’s husband find her, I wonder? And why on earth would he not loop Cariño in on the fact that this is a surprise? She’s just as baffled by what’s going on when the husband sets up the laptop for Adam to find one morning as his surprise first lesson. We are meant to think of the husband as a decent, loving person, but this kind of behavior seems weirdly sociopathic to me.

And then, by the second lesson, Adam’s husband has died in a car accident. And this is ultimately the premise of the movie: Cariño calls in at the scheduled time to find Adam in a stunned daze, and does what she can, from thousands of miles away, to offer support, basically becoming a long distance friend under very strange circumstances. Adam frets about his husband’s family and the employees of the dance business he owns, but does he not have any family or friends of his own? It’s never even brought up, even though over time we learn at least a little about Cariño’s family.

If only Language Lessons took some time with its countless unanswered questions, it might have worked, even if barely. Instead, its half-baked premise, and its stunted character development, are its fatal flaws. It’s understandable that artists should want to find ways to express themselves even under the massive constraints of last year’s pandemic lockdowns, and some of the products of those expressions work, and some of them don’t. Ultimately, most of Language Lessons, the first half of which is packed with unintentional awkwardness, is the latter. It does find its footing, and Morales and Duplass have chemistry, but it takes a bit too long for the narrative to find it.

Hola from the awkward place.

Overall: B-

THE CARD COUNTER

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

The Card Counter is . . . different. Sometimes that’s a genuine strength to a film; sometimes it’s just a neutral fact about it, and I would argue this film falls in the latter category. Thus, it becomes another one of those movies with wide critical acclaim where I watch it and then think, okay, sure, I guess. I understand the critical claim, and also understand why it won’t go far with general audiences.

Take the title, for instance. In the first half of the film, the title character, William Tell (Oscar Isaac), spends a lot of time in voiceover narration, telling us not so much how counting cards works, but how it works for him. We spend a lot of time in casinos, watching him work, aiming for what he calls “modest goals”—he explains that casinos don’t mind card counters, as long as they don’t win too big too often. When asked why he spends his days doing this and virtually nothing else, Tell replies, “It passes the time.”

I could say the exact same thing about how much time I spend going to the movies, and often seeing movies like this one. There’s no better explanation than “It passes the time.” It’s neither particularly painful nor particularly rewarding. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I do have genuine passion for film, and for writing about film. But that passion cannot run at a consistent level of intensity, and it never has. My only point is, I get it.

That’s about as far as my empathy goes, however, because as the film goes on, we learn that card playing in often low-rent, out-of-the-way casinos across the country is just a way to fill the emptiness of Tell’s life, a distraction from his heavy guilt, having been a participant in the abuses documented at Abu Ghraib. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, served eight and a half, and it was in that time he taught himself how to count cards. He had the time, he practiced until he was damned near perfect.

And, the title notwithstanding, The Card Counter is far more about a man reckoning with past sins than it has anything to do with card playing, really. The cards is just the easy self-distraction. Except, Tell comes across distractions in two other human forms: La Linda (Tiffany Haddish, very well cast in an unusual role), the woman who runs “a stable” of gamblers who play with investors’ money and recruits Tell; and the real turning point in Tell’s life, a young man named Cirk (Tye Sheridan). Cirk is the son of another veteran of Abu Ghraib whose tortured memories of what he did ultimately led him to commit suicide; Cirk happens to be at a seminar where a Sergeant from Abu Ghraib (Willem Dafoe) is speaking, and he recognizes Tell.

Cirk plainly naive from the start, with an asinine plan to capture Sergeant Gordo, torture him the way they did the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and kill him. Tell takes a liking to him, and takes him on as a new sense of purpose in his life, intent on helping him settle his college debts and reunite with his estranged mother. This is the bulk of the story in The Card Counter, Tell having invited Cirk to ride with him from tournament to tournament, his expenses paid, ostensibly just to keep him company but having no idea Tell is just saving up his winnings to give to him.

All of this is done with mostly deadpan delivery, something that happens a lot in movies with wide critical acclaim but which I find strangely divorced from realism. Writer-director Paul Schrader is clearly going for, and achieving, a particular tone, but it’s just as muted as the lighting in all these second-tier casinos. It’s easy to imagine a lot of viewers being bored by this movie, even though I found it to be quite unusually well written—the only especially impressive element of its production. Often it’s the other way around, movies with great acting and great cinematography but a crap script. I guess you could say this one flips that script.

I was compelled by it for that very reason, but I’m not especially convinced that you will be, unless you’re an intermittently pretentious film snob like I am. And hey, if you’ve made it this far in this very review, maybe you are!

Schrader goes out of his way to note, in this movie, how the only people at Abu Ghraib who were convicted were the ones in published photographs. This is the injustice that Cirk is convinced he’s crusading to justify: that none of those people’s superiors were held accountable, and instead got to go on with diversified and lucrative careers. We are subject to some flashbacks to Abu Ghraib, which are mercifully few and fairly brief. In these scenes, I found myself thinking about casting. It’s nice to see Tiffany Haddish in such an unusual role as a Black woman; I wish I could say the same for the several actors depicting the Abu Ghraib prisoners, who likely still get saddled with virtually nothing but roles like these. And here they’re just extras: no lines, so nowhere near the same pay scale.

If nothing else, The Card Counter is a fascinating contemplation of moral complexity. Any kind of easy entertainment, it certainly is not—but it has its own certain value.

Well that’s eight down, I guess.

Overall: B

THE LOST LEONARDO

Directing: B-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

If you have any interest in the objectively wild 21st-century story of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Salvator Mundi, and thus go in to the new documentary The Lost Leonardo, you are bound to leave still questioning the authenticity of the painting. This is clearly by design on the part of director Andreas Koefoed, who is amping up the mystery and the absurdity for our entertainment.

I’m not denigrating that approach, per se—it’s precisely why I went to see the movie, after all. (Pro tip: if you want your own space in a movie theater, see a 4:50 pm showing of a semi-obscure documentary on a weekday. I literally had the entire theater all to myself, which was glorious.)

I hadn’t even heard of this paining before I started seeing trailers to this film, which had me intrigued. It also means that literally all the information I have gotten about this story is from this film, so I can’t help but wonder whether that painting—which sold for an astonishing record $450 million in 2017—was really painted by Leonardo da Vinci.

The film gets into all the myriad twists and turns of its story, since its rediscovery in, of all places, New Orleans, in 2005. Eventually it got restored by New York University’s Dianne Dwyer Modestini, who is interviewed extensively, leading critics to claim the restored painting was “eighty percent painted” by her. I know nothing about how painting restoration works so I can’t speak to the validity of such claims. I can say it’s amusing to see someone declare that the painting is not authentic but Modestini simply did extraordinary work replicating da Vinci’s skill, only to cut to her retorting that she’s not as good a painter as da Vinci.

And make no mistake, the journey of this painting between 2005 and 2017 is nothing short of epic. Presumably its journey prior to that dating all the way back to the 16th century is exponentially more so, but we of course have no access to the details of those five hundred years. The fifteen years or so represented her provides more than enough for a full length documentary feature film in which, at one point, people speak with begrudging respect for a wildly successful, cynical marketing campaign by auction house Christie’s. They succeeded in turning a painting of questionable authenticity into a worldwide celebrity in its own right, prompting people to visit museums and take photos of even plainly labeled copies of it. My personal favorite bit is when one of their commercials shows Leonardo DiCaprio, among others, gazing in awe at the painting.

By the end of that painting’s life cycle—or at least its current phase of it—it has become a pawn in geopolitical maneuvering, particularly between France and Saudi Arabia but with historical context that stretches around the globe. This does make the story rather fascinating even to fine art novices like myself; you really don’t need to be a deep appreciator of art to enjoy this movie.

The film has a few design flaws, however, most notably its frequent vignettes of the interview subjects striking dramatic poses or reenacting their serious examinations of the painting, which devalue the documentary form itself. There is no need for that kind of cornball crap, and The Lost Leonardo has a bit too much of it. It’s far better served when it allows the subjects to speak as their authentic selves, as they run the gamut of personality types, one of the more critical ones being especially gregarious.

There’s a subtle tone to this movie that makes it feel a little too much like, say, a low-rent doc on cable television, yet with ironically high production value. The story itself remains a fascinating one, even if they way it’s told here is undeniably manipulative.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

Overall: B

WORTH

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

I very much liked Worth, even though I watched it with a huge amount of cynicism: how much of this is Hollywood fantasy, I wonder? And I mean that in an unusually literal way, because this movie is about as far fro “fantasy” as a genre as it could possibly be—it’s much more of a legal procedural, and an often rather sad one at that. (It has that, as well as its very straightforward tone, in common with 2015’s Spotlight, in which Michael Keaton and Stanley Tucci previously costarred.) What I’m talking about here, more specifically, is artistic license. Would the high-profile lawyer tasked with deciding the amount of money that should be offered the families of victims in 9/11 really be someone with such a deep moral compass?

Maybe he did. Who knows? It’s just that, in the post-Donald Trump age, in the middle of a pandemic in which literally millions of people are willfully ignoring the plight of their fellow Americans, it’s really difficult to imagine. Maybe that’s what makes Worth precisely the kind of movie we need right now. To a large degree, this whole movie is a two-hour lesson in empathy.

Indeed, among the many films that have now been made about or connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that occurred twenty years ago this month, Worth may very well be the best one made to date. It’s far from a masterpiece, it certainly has its imperfections, but it is also unusually affecting and effective. Maybe most importantly, it avoids any of the “disaster movie” trappings of some other films about the event, and moves briskly in the opposite direction. This isn’t about the attacks themselves, but about their long-lasting effectis, particularly the grief of the victims’ survivors.

I realize that makes it a hard sell. This isn’t the most uplifting experience. But, it’s a useful one, and an illuminating one. This movie illustrates how things are at once more complex than they first seem, but also that some solutions are simpler than we might want to admit. If you like more mature, “adult” dramas, this film is a great choice—and a ridiculously accessible one, available streaming on Netflix.

Rare is the film that addresses such sensitive subjects this gracefully. Even the requisite scene in which the 9/11 attacks are actually happening is effectively subtle: Michael Keaton’s Ken Feinberg slowly coming to the realization while riding a commuter train. We don’t even see the planes hit the building, but rather the smoke billowing into the sky in the distance as seen through his train window. Director Sara Colangelo does inject just a few clips of archival footage of the people of New York walking around in the ash of the fallen towers. But, we don’t see the planes hit them, or the towers actually falling. Even twenty years ago, Colangelo seems to understand that we have no need to relieve that collective trauma. We saw more than enough of that stuff many years ago.

What we see, instead, are many vignettes—one of which starts the film—of victims’ family members, talking about the loved ones they lost. It’s true, you’re going to want tissues handy when you watch this. The whole plot of Worth is about Feinberg’s firm, with the help of lawyers Camille Biros (Amy Ryan), Priya Khundi (Shunori Ramanathan) and more, trying to meet a Congressional deadline to get 80% of the potential claimants to sign on to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fun. Feinberg struggles for much of the film, to present the idea to all of these individuals in a way that comes across as empathetic rather than callous.

This leads me to my one burning question that Worth does not answer. Early on, this fund is presented as a necessary contingency to ward off potential lawsuits that could “sink the economy.” How true is that, I wonder? If there were no September 11 Victims Compensation Fund, and a bunch of victims’ families filed suit, against the airlines or the government or whoever, would it really have that cataclysmic effect on the U.S. economy? I suppose, maybe—we already know the terrorist attack events themselves severely hobbled the economy on their own. Still, it would be interesting to find out how plausible that scenario is, this idea that the Compensation Fund was a needed contingency lest the U.S. suffer a crash of the economy. This movie offers no concrete basis for the argument; characters just state it as though fact.

And, to be clear, the plot arc of Worth follows some Hollywood formula, with a bit of standard emotional manipulation. But, in its defense—and this movie is greatly deserving of defense—the most emotionally effective moments were not the ones with a character’s last-minute change of heart, or the triumph of meeting a critical deadline. Instead, it’s the individual stories, about the people who died on September 11 and their families. Worth includes an impressively large number of these details, all of them moving, and we know they still represent but a fraction of the thousands affected.

Feinberg finds a pseudo-nemesis in Charles Wolf (played by Tucci), whose argument is that the way the fund is initially (and for quite some time) designed is unjust. On a basic level, Worth is about the process of treating these people on a case by case basis, as individuals, rather than as numbers—and coming to a point where the fund is, as Wolf puts it, not perfect, but just. Worth is such an effective exercise in compassion and empathy, difficult as it sometimes is, we would all be better off if more of us gave movies like this the attention they deserve.

It’s a lot of talking, a fair amount of crying, and it’s more engaging than it looks.

Overall: B+

SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B

I spent several years actively avoiding superhero movies, which sometimes feel actively designed by Marvel Studios to be a punishment of sorts should you try to venture back into their “cinematic universe” without having seen everything. The thing is “everything” is a lot—and increasingly so as time goes on: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings marks the twenty-fifth MCU film since this universe they all share was created in 2008. It’s pretty tempting to say that’s just too many. Who has time for this shit?

Well, to be fair, these movies work a lot better when thy barely acknowledge the events of the other films, if at all. Thankfully, this is done sparingly in Shang-Chi; a single passing reference to Thanos snapping half the universe out of existence is easily missed if you’re not paying attention. On the other hand, it depends on how you look at it: Ben Kingsley returns for a supporting role here as Trevor Slattery, who was originally seen in 2013’s Iron Man 3, one of the least memorable of the MCU films. Do we need to go back and re-watch old MCU movies to “bone up” now? I would argue no: Kingsley’s part is delightful on its own terms here, even if you can’t quite remember where Slattery originated.

Shang-Chi has a lot of other stuff going for it, anyway. That’s the point I’m getting at, really: my disillusionment with superhero movies seems to be healing a bit, not because the genre is inherently great, but because filmmakers are finding ways to make them better. Instead of movie after movie just adhering to the same tired story arcs, writers and directors are expanding on them. And in the current “phase,” diversity is justifying itself by example. It’s not just one white guy after another anymore—we’re spreading across continents: Black Panther took us to Africa; Shang-Chi takes us to Asia (specifically China). All we need now is a Marvel movie about a Latino superhero with deep familial roots somewhere in South America. Or better yet, an Indigenous superhero.

Of course, much like Black Panther to Black audiences, what Shang-Chi is likely to represent to Asian audiences should probably not be underestimated. Until now, the only high-profile mainstream film in which all of the leads were Asian was Crazy Rich Asians (which, incidentally, came out the same year as Black Panther). A lot of unfair representative responsibility and criticism was heaped on that film, for that very reason. Well, guess what? Now we have Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and it being of a completely different genre notwithstanding, it is an objectively better film.

Okay, sure, Shang-Chi does still get a little bogged down in its climactic battle sequence, far too busy and far too reliant on barely visually comprehensible CGI. (Once again, I find myself noticing flaws in the computer animation, certain that these visuals will look dated within the decade. There remains something to be said for practical effects, or at least practical effects well integrated with CGI touchups.) This movie also literally moves into another dimension, featuring an action sequence on the streets of San Francisco early on, only to later move to Macao and then to another dimension and then never returning. We find ourselves in a world with magical creatures, bat-like demon creatures, and dragons. It lends an air of the traditional fantasy genre, almost more so than the superhero genre. I suppose it’s a kind of mythology either way.

And I am at a disadvantage here, being so little versed in Chinese mythology and folklore. To what degree are the magical creatures we see here authentic to those sources? Black Panther had been famous for its authentically African-influenced design; one would hope Shang-Chi would have similarly authentically Asian influences. A giant dragon that appears in the third act, as well as some truly fantastic and adorably rendered giant Chinese lions, all look very much like what you would typically see in Chinese New Year celebrations. The giant demon soul-sucker, though … that one, I have no idea.

As you might imagine, Shang-Chi features several martial-arts-heavy battle sequences, which bear a passing resemblance to the battles from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and other films of its ilk. This is clearly not an accident, and these scenes are very well choreographed. In fact, they are consistently very exciting, much more so than, for instance, a runaway bus on the hills of San Francisco. And because the title character (played with just the right amount of charisma by Simu Liu) and his sister Xu Xialing (Meng'er Zhang) are the children of both a power-hungry man who has used the magical Ten Rings to live over a thousand years, and a woman from a village in another dimension accessed via a magical forest, their physics-defying movements don’t especially pose a problem.

The story details here are indeed fairly complex, and its team of script writers does an unusually skilled job of weaving them into the plot in a fairly organic way, not to mention presenting an origin story without it feeling like one. We even get Awkwafina as Katy, Shang-Chi’s longtime friend and comic sidekick. In retrospect she doesn’t ever prove to be vital to the story at all, but her presence is always fun. At least this time, as opposed to Raya and the Last Dragon, she is well cast and has good chemistry with her cast mates.

In any event, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is great fun from start to finish, in a way that actually makes me look forward to seeing more movies like it. After I spent several years actively resenting superhero films, that’s saying a lot.

It’s not as confused as they look!

Overall: B+

TOGETHER

Directing: B+
Acting: A
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: A-

I don’t think anyone would be faulted for being skeptical of a two-person movie both set in and directly addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. The movie makes no explicit claim to be about this, but we are still talking about collective trauma, the likes of which we have not experienced on a broad cultural level since 9/11—an event, incidentally, which occurred 20 years ago this month, and about which no particularly successful mainstream movie has ever directly addressed in the same way. A few movies did try, but even those were a few years later, and the public was not especially interested in reliving it.

And here we are now, with Together, a movie that sets its starkly frank examination of a long-term relationship within the context of stay-home orders in the UK, released while the pandemic rages on, and I watched it in a nearly-empty movie theater (literally there was one other person in there besides myself), with a mask on, while the characters onscreen talked about the strain the pandemic is putting on their relationship. For them, the pandemic is in its early stages. They have no idea that I will be hearing about it from them, breaking the third wall and speaking directly to me, fully eighteen months later.

And yet? I find myself stunned by how well Together actually works. It’s not perfect—I’ll get to that—but still, it really, really works. This is a challenge for any movie in which the characters remain within the same space for the full duration of the film in the best of circumstances, but from the opening scene, co-directors Stephen Daldry (The Hours) and Justin Martin, working from a crackling script by Dennis Kelly, have co-leads James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan speaking to each other and to us so effectively, it’s like watching a riveting two-person play.

Again: a play adapted into a movie, in which the setting never changes, rarely works either. This one is not adapted from a play, but the constraint is the same; with the exception of occasional interstitial shots of their neighborhood showing empty streets, the camera never leaves the inside of their house. This is a recipe for boredom, and yet I could not look away.

It would be naive to call Together a reflection of any kind of “universal” experience, except that what these characters go through is quite specifically the same as what millions—billions—around the globe experienced. It does get specific to the UK, and there are moments when Together reads like a personal indictment against the way the UK government handled the pandemic, particularly in the beginning. I’m a little bit more prone to empathy—sure, there is no question that thousands and maybe millions of lives could have been saved had action been taken sooner, but this was also a wildly new experience for all of us, and particularly in the beginning, no one knew for certain what the right choices even were.

It’s with all this as a backdrop that we watch a relationship between McAvoy and Horgan’s relationship evolved, from dread at the prospect of having to spend all their time at home together after already logging many years in which to stoke deep resentments and hatred, to slowly realizing over the next year that they’re in denial about how much they actually still love each other. It’s both sweet and brutal, and what I love about it is how it’s a largely unsentimental love story, one about the machinations of truly long term commitment, rather than the idealism of young love. There is no “happily ever after” here, but rather “maybe we’re not quite as miserable as we thought.”

And, to be clear, a whole lot of Together is quite funny. It’s also at times deeply serious, and, somewhat to my surprise, an effective way to process the aforementioned collective trauma of this pandemic, which we really don’t talk about enough. I found the experience almost shockingly therapeutic.

And yes, at times, brutal. There’s a scene in this movie in which Horgan’s character processes the loss of her mother, and having to say goodbye to her in the hospital over FaceTime while pulled over to the side of the road in her car. The scene is gut wrenching, and I cried. And I cried. This scene unlocked some dormant grief of my own, after having lost my own mother last year. My mom’s death had nothing to do with COVID, but my grief was still affected by it—as was that of anyone who lost a loved one over the past year and a half, for any reason. I didn’t just cry when I watched Sharon Horgan detail the unfairness of her mother dying alone. For a few seconds, I wept. I hadn’t cried like this at a movie in a good twenty years, and never for such a deeply, viscerally personal reason.

It’s easy to imagine Together having a similar affect on many others. This makes it hard to imagine anyone taking my advice to see it. Is it too soon for a movie like this? I would argue it’s not. For me, it was like an emotional breakthrough.

And I haven’t even yet mentioned the stupendous performances of both James McAvoy an Sharon Horgan, who have great chemistry both as vicious bickerers and as a couple rediscovering how much they care about each other. The writing is great, and their performances still elevate it. My one real complaint would be their young son, who exists as a plot contrivance and for most of the film just moves wordlessly around the background of each scene, like an afterthought. The kid, played by Samuel Logan, literally has no lines until just a couple in the last ten minutes or so of the film. Together would have been better off either with a more capable child actor who could be a part of actual character development, or with no child at all and a better reason given for this middle-aged couple to have stayed together so long after their relationship has seemingly soured.

Setting the child aside, though, Together is an incredible construction of compelling dialogue, interspersed with fantastic—if occasionally soap-boxy—monologues. This could have been just a movie about a small family dealing with pandemic lockdowns, or it could have been just a movie about a charismatic couple’s crumbling yet barely salvageable relationship. The fact that it is both should way it down to the point of intolerability, and still it succeeds against all odds. You probably still won’t watch it, and I totally get it, and yet I am compelled to say I can’t recommend it enough.

You won’t believe how hard it is to look away.

Overall: B+