THE NEST

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

I can’t quite decide what to make of The Nest, a drama that seems to traffic exclusively in subtleties, and which only ever hints at something sinister going on. Is this a thriller? A drama? It’s the latter, I guess, but with a couple of twisted turns that are either impossible to explain or simply sailed right over my head.

The is the first feature film by writer-director Sean Durkin since his 2011 cult-escape drama Martha Marcy May Marlene, and it’s both a little more straightforward and a little more mystifying than that one. An entrepreneur (Jude Law) who has spent ten years in the U.S. with his American family moves them back to his native Britain after ten years, chasing opportunity. He buys a gigantic country estate, gets construction going on horse stables for his wife, and plays the part of a good dad to his two children.

Of course, things are a little more complicated than that—although, what I can’t really decide is, if they are complicated enough to make for a compelling movie. To be fair, relatively slow as its pacing was, I found myself compelled by this movie. On the other hand, I truly cannot think of a single person I would recommend this to you. Perhaps you, dear reader? I mean, do what you want.

The Nest certainly has strong performances going for it. Jude Law can generally be relied on, and this is the first co-lead in a feature for Carrie Coon, whose most memorable roles to date have been on television (Fargo, The Leftovers). She plays Law’s American wife, increasingly frustrated with his insistence on uprooting the family yet again, and with his gradual unraveling as his new position in London does not deliver on what he thought to be its promises.

The kids are a bit older, a teenager and a preteen: Oona Roche as Samantha, and Charlie Shotwell as younger Ben. It’s curious neither of them spend any time at all complaining about being moved from New York to London. Are they really that agreeable? The two kids seem largely just along for the ride, although Sam finds a way to get in touch with her rebellious side.

There are subtle hints that there is something about this very old house that is affecting them all, turning them into basket-case versions of their formal selves. The transition is very gradual, and Sean Durkin never inserts anything into his scrip directly to suggest anything supernatural. The closest is one scene in which Coon turns her back, turns back, and a door is suddenly ajar. That’s it. Well, and the fact that her horse has died, and in a truly bizarre later scene, she finds the horse’s buried body starting to stick out of the ground, and starts trying to dig it out again with her hands.

Really, The Nest is just a family drama, and I’m not certain it succeeds on strictly those terms. It’s like it exists just to the left of family drama, one tiny step closer to thriller, but never any closer than that. Richard Reed Parry’s original score is always just slightly sinister in tone, while Jude Law’s unraveling husband and father keeps making misguided mistakes, and Coon’s increasingly fed up wife reacts. In the end, it’s the children who come to the rescue, sort of, as the film’s final shot settles on bemusing ambiguity.

My guess is how much interest The Nest might hold will depend on how versed you are in its pedigree: how much you like the actors, or how much you’ve liked previous films by those who have made this one. With no knowledge of any of that, I cannot estimate how much interest this film will hold. I do have a feeling it might gain greater depth of meaning upon multiple viewings, except I have no desire to watch it again. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like it; I actually kind of did. I just can’t quite figure out why.

Prospects aren’t looking as good as we thought.

Overall: B

Small Axe: LOVERS ROCK

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

So here we get the second of the “five films” that make up the Amazon Original series Small Axe, all of them purportedly about the history of Black experience in England. Just as was the case with last week’s Mangrove, the characters are either Caribbean immigrants, or the children of said immigrants. There’s a curious difference in storytelling, however, wherein last week’s first installment was very much a clear-cut feature-length film at 124 minutes; and this week’s “film” is all of 68 minutes in length, and is much more episodic in both presentation and tone.

It fascinates me that the critical consensus is even more positive for this piece than for Mangrove—which got a rating of 90 at MetaCritic, and this one gets a whopping 95. That puts both of them in their “Must-See” category, and while I won’t dispute that per se, I also won’t be quite as likely to tell people they have to see this one. Then again, to what degree is any one of these meant to stand alone, anyway? They may be called films, but it’s still a series, after all. Granted, they are also not sequels: each film has its own distinct set of characters.

And that’s sort of the thing with Lovers Rock: its characters are comparatively far less distinct. Nearly the entire run time is set at a West London house party in the eighties, director Steve McQueen’s camera lingering, for one extended shot after another, on a thick crowd of Carribean people dancing. I will say this much: Lovers Rock is packed to the gills with fantastic music. Many songs are featured, most of them some variation of reggae but also included are disco, and one particularly prominent track: “Silly Games,” a 1979 single by Janet Kay. That song’s genre, according to wikipedia? “Lovers rock”—apparently a more romantic style of reggae which enjoyed popularity specifically in London in the seventies. I knew none of this. I learned something new today.

And that illustrates the unfortunate issue with my even trying to approach this film with any kind of standard critical eye, actually: I’m an American white guy who was born in the seventies. When it comes to this stuff, what the fuck do I know? I can only assume this film speaks in particular to those who have a life experience with a kind of specificity represented here. To McQueen’s credit, this film does offer a window into this world for outsiders like myself. It’s a fully realized world for sure; I don’t have to fully understand it to see that much.

Lovers Rock is also not much concerned with plot, however. More than anything, it’s an extended vignette, a portrait of a world within a world at a particular time. McQueen does touch on a few dark sides of this world, usually with a subtle hand, such as when Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) walks out into the street after a friend leaving the party, and a group of white guys down the street start making monkey noises at her. This is one of only two times white people are even noticed in the movie. The vast majority of the time, we’re just watching people dancing in the house party, almost like an extended music video.

After some time, Martha is revealed to be the primary character here. She intervenes in a sexual assault taking place in the house’s backyard. She and the man she meets at the party, Franklin (Micheal Ward), are the only two seen in a brief sequence the following morning. We do meet another volatile character in the form of Martha’s cousin Clifton (Kedar Williams-Stirling), a brief and tense conversation between them being the only limited amount of back story given to anyone in the movie.

Even that doesn’t happen until about halfway through. When Lovers Rock begins, we see handheld cameras following several guys moving furniture around, setting up for the party. There are women in the kitchen cooking, and they break out into song, the lyrics later revealed to be from the aforementioned “Silly Games.” Later when the DJ plays it for characters to dance to—McQueen’s camera lingering for quite some time on one couple grinding their groins together sensuously to it—and after several verses, the music stops, but the whole crowd just continues dancing and singing the lyrics on their own, belting it out passionately. It goes on so long it almost gets uncomfortable.

I know people who would watch Lovers Rock and find it repetitive and dull. I felt a little too far removed from its world for it to speak to me specifically, but I still found I could appreciate it. It was always compelling, if occasionally mystifying. In the end, we are told it’s “For the lovers and the rockers.” These are specific kinds of lovers and rockers, maybe not quite the conventional definition many of us have for those words today. If nothing else, Lovers Rock is a great example of how specific representation can still be accessible. The more a piece of art tries to be everything to all people, the more bland and pointless it becomes. This is a film that does not have that problem and is better for it.

Dancing to their own beat: lovers and rockers.

Overall: B

HAPPIEST SEASON

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

Listen, Happiest Season won me over in a way that I truly never expected, even after about a third of the way into the movie. But let’s get the truly negative out of the way first, because we have to talk about that absolute turd of a title. It bears repeating, because I literally keep forgetting it: Happiest Season? What kind of generic-holiday randomized generator title is that? I hate it. It sounds like a spit balled title place holder that no one bothered to replace.

For much of the first half of this movie, I found myself thinking about how great it is to be getting a Christmas romantic comedy that features a gay couple, and how great it would be to have such a movie that is special enough to be rewatchable every Christmas, and . . . this movie is not it. Except, maybe it is? It pains me to say: probably not. But not because it’s not worthy. It’s because the title sucks. It sounds like the title of the holiday episode of a third-tier network sitcom.

So, please. Please, please, please! Forget about the title. Or wait, strike that. Write the title down! HAPPIEST SEASON. Put it somewhere you can reference it easily, lest you fall victim to how forgettable a title it is. Because this film is absolutely worth watching.

Directed and co-written b Clea DuVall, in her sophomore feature film effort, I’m still not convinced directing is her calling. This was my biggest issue with the film early on, that its direction was adequate at best. Sometimes, however, a script can make up for a lot, and the writing here absolutely does that. Granted, I have a specific bias here: as a gay viewer, I can not only relate to the issues related to coming out to one’s family, but in the end, I was deeply moved by this story. As such, I can see a pretty widely varied response among audiences, depending on their own personal experiences. To be sure, anyone with the slightest capability of empathy, this movie will work. But this movie will also really speak to some people in a way it just can’t to others. And I am definitely among those some people.

Luckily, Happiest Season also has a great cast. The gay couple at the center of it are Abby and Harper, played respectively by Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis. They make a believable couple, although I found Davis’s height occasionally distracting. Abbey’s sisters Sloane and Jane are respectively played by an uptight Alison Brie and a rather funny Mary Holland; stepping into the role of the sisters’ parents are Victor Garber and Mary Steenburgen. We even get Aubrey Plaza as one of Abby’s exes, and best of all, Daniel Levy as Harper’s close friend. This movie would not have suffered without a gay male character to throw a bone to the gay men in its audience, but I sure was delighted to see him, and he provides a good amount of the comedy, without ever quite overdoing it.

In fact, Levy’s character John is essentially the heart of the movie, being the caring friend that every decent person deserves. Abby could use a friend of the same caliber, and does not seem to have one; she’s far too preoccupied with keeping up appearances for the sake of her dad’s campaign for mayor of his town. And this is another thing I love about Happiest Season (ugh, that title!): it breezily sidesteps gay clichés from start to finish: no melodramatic histrionics, and no reducing family members to small-minded caricatures. They aren’t even presented as especially conservative, and when it comes to how scary it can be for a person to come out, this is a key point: the family doesn’t have to be conservative for it to be a frighteningly uncertain prospect.

DuVall, to her credit, offers a great deal of empathy for Abby, even as she basically makes by far the shittiest choices, often to the detriment of her partner. But the broader point is that a person must be ready for such a huge step, and this actually fits perfectly with movies about the spirit of Christmas: the spirit of giving and of goodwill. Considering this is a romantic comedy—albeit one that made me cry much more than expected—it’s no spoiler to say that things work out in the end. The predictability here is immaterial; the very real struggle before such inevitably happy endings is what we are meant to understand. And we are still reminded that not every story is so happy, as told by Harper’s friend John. This isn’t his story though; it’s Abby and Harper’s, and Christmas movies must end with uplift. Happiest Season delivers on that front, in more ways than one.

Just be sure to write that title down so you know what to look for when you go looking for it on Hulu.

You’ll be happy you watched it this season.

Overall: B+

RUN

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

In effect, Run is Misery for Gen Z. I suppose that might pique the interest of boomers more than Genzers. Do the latter even know about Misery? They should; it’s a definitively better movie—but, this one is still lots of fun, and to the credit of director and co-writer Aneesh Chaganty (Searching), he gives clear credit to Misery as an influence, with a particular character being a sort of Easter-egg reference to it. I won’t spoil it; you’ll have to catch it while watching it yourself.

For most of Run, there are all of two characters: the protagonist, Chloe, a sickly wheelchair user who is homeschooled—and otherwise excessively sheltered—by her mother, Diane. It’s not really a spoiler to state that Diane is the absolute villain here, and it’s fun to see Sarah Paulson playing such a role rather than as a victim of the many horrors she endures as characters on American Horror Story. Most interestingly, Choe is played by Kiera Allen, a very young actor who happens to be actually a wheelchair user. And while it’s pertinent to note the rarity of disabled actors being cast in parts that are disabled characters, a curious twist in this casting is that Chloe, the character, was not only never meant to be disabled, but presumably, without her mother’s interference, she would actually not be a wheelchair user now at all.

Because Diane, you see, has some kind of mental illness that, I suppose, comes closest to Munchausen By Proxy: in a bent response to a tragic turn of events with her baby delivered some seventeen or so years ago, she is feeding Chloe multiple medications that cause the very ailments she claims they are meant to improve. In fact, the opening title card offers specific definitions to five of them: athsma, arrhythmia, hemochromatosis, diabetes and paralysis. Some of these play into the plot more readily than others, particularly the athsma (with Chloe fighting for breath on multiple occasions), and of course the most visibly obvious one, paralysis. We do see her taking what are at first assumed to be insulin shots, though, and syringes do later play key parts in plot turns, as do the medications Chloe has been told are for the other conditions.

It’s only when Chloe is rummaging through a grocery bag and discovers a bottle of pills actually prescribed to Diane that she begins to suspect something is amiss. Eventually, things like Chloe’s long wait for unanswered college applications start to come into sharper focus for her. Side note, speaking of colleges: Run is set in a small town in Western Washington, although it was filmed entirely in Canada and mostly in Winnipeg, of all places—but, Chloe’s clearly top choice of college is Seattle’s own University of Washington, which gets an almost absurd amount of product placement in this film. I wonder what kind of deal was struck for that?

Anyway, unlike in Misery, in Run the protagonist is not bed ridden through most of the movie; in fact, Chloe is given a pretty atypical amount of agency for disabled characters usually seen in movies. Her mother is still effectively keeping her captive, though, and Chaganty creates very effective, meticulously edited sequences—which he openly states are mostly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan—where Chloe is persistently getting the best of her limitations, the very ones that her mother has created for her. One such sequence with Chloe making her way from her bedroom window around the roof of her house and over to her mom’s bedroom window is especially nail biting.

I’d be curious to hear how disabled people, and wheelchair users in particular, respond to this movie. It’s entirely possible it misses something crucial that my own biases are preventing me from seeing. But, barring that, it strikes me as a step in the right direction to allow a disabled character to exist on her own terms, even in a trashy thriller. Because, lets face it, that’s what Run really is: a trashy thriller. It’s also a very good one, as trashy thrillers go.

It’s also somewhat surprisingly subtle. This is, perhaps, the difference between “thriller” and “horror,” in that horror is much more inclined to go over the top, which Run never does. It traffics less in shocks than in suspense, and it’s better for it. When it comes to new, feature-length content on streaming services in 2020 (this one can be found on Hulu), you could do a lot worse. I enjoyed it enough to recommend it.

A new challenge of wits between daughter and mother.

B+

THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD

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

This is a tricky one. It may come as a surprise to many that I have never read a single novel by Charles Dickens—an oddity that I hope one day to rectify—but it would also come as no surprise that I have seen many film adaptations of Dickens novels. Because, of course, who hasn’t? And I usually enjoy them quite a lot.

This new adaptation of The Personal History of David Copperfield, by director Armando Ianucci (In the Loop, The Death of Stalin), however, leaves me a bit bemused. Well, except for the fact that, in my looking through Ianucci’s past filmography, it seems this is a truly rare director with a consistent record of making movies other critics on average like notably more than I do.

Indeed, although this David Copperfield is a period piece that goes far back in time than his other works, the filmmaking style becomes recognizably distinctive when regarding Ianucci’s filmography. But the thing is, the most interesting thing about this film is its casting of nonwhite actors in several of the key parts, including the title role—and, quite rightly, that fact in an of itself turns out not to be all that interesting at all. It’s not a gimmick, nor does it particularly make any difference.

The character, David Copperfield, is played by Dev Patel, and he fits well into the part. In fact, by and large, I enjoyed the acting all around, and quite like the cast overall, including Tilda Swinton as David’s Aunt Betsey; Hugh Laurie as Betsey’s cousin Mr. Dick; Gwendoline Christie as David’s stern step-aunt Jane; and Ben Wishaw, unusually unattractive as the villainous Uriah Heep, among others. (If you’re wondering about other nonwhite actors in the cast, a perfectly reasonable desire after my calling attention to it, these include Nikki Anuka-Bird as the snobby Mrs. Steerforth; Rosalind Eleazar as David’s friend Agnes; and Benedict Wong as Agnes’s father Mr. Whitfield, also among several others.)

But, acting alone is not enough, and I found this Personal History of David Copperfield to be too frenetic for its own good, the the persistently zigzagging handheld cinematography a constant distraction. I may not have ever read any Dickens, but I understand it to be fairly dense; here Ianucci tries rather too hard to cram too much story into a mere two hours. I suspect it’s a lot easier if you have read the novel, but at the risk of sounding like a broken record given how often I say this, a film should stand on its own merits. I have not read the novel and I found the plotting often incomprehensible, difficult to follow. This plots the entirety of Copperfield’s childhood and young adult life, and the characters are countless.

To its credit, this film does have several visually clever editing transitions, which would be easier to enjoy were the rest of the editing such that I could keep all the characters and the story threads straight. And, although by all accounts the novel is far more serious, the story here is presented as much more farcical, and I will admit to laughing out loud several times. This movie does have its moments. Audiences with a better working understanding of Dickens’s work will perhaps enjoy it the most. For the rest of us, however, this is a lesser work of Dickens adaptation, at best a moderate disappointment.

It’s too bad when great actors are in something that could have been better,

Overall: B-

Small Axe: MANGROVE

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

Here is where the line between film and television is blurred, perhaps in a way it never has before—and also in a way that might just have been inevitable. This has been the direction things have been headed for a while; a global pandemic just hastened certain elements. The hastening might be why its presentation is somewhat confusingly inconsistent: IMDb.com lists Small Axe as a “miniseries,” each installment listed like television episodes. Except that, although one of them clocks in at a mere 68 minutes, most are feature length, and the Amazon Original digital posters for it refer to Small Axe collectively as “A collection of five films.” Indeed, the first three films had their debuts just last month at the New York Film Festival.

So there’s a lot of context to consider with today’s release of the first installment, Mangrove, which happens to be a triumph of filmmaking—a movie with a lot in common with last month’s Netflix release of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, an Oscar-eligible film that certainly has its merits but doesn’t quite stack up to this one. But, I guess, all Mangrove can hope for is Emmys? I mean, setting aside the ridiculous artifice of respective weight and importance between these different awards, still: whatever Mangrove qualifies for, it deserves to win a lot of them.

Mangrove makes incredibly judicious use of its 124 minutes, telling the true story of West Indian immigrants living in the 1960s version of Notting Hill, when it was a neighborhood far removed from what is seen in that other film from the nineties starring Hugh Grant. Much like The Trial of the Chicago 7, which is set within just a few years of the events depicted here, Mangrove is also a courtroom drama—although that is confined to the second half.

This film is very clearly set in two parts, the first half focusing on the Mangrove restaurant from which the title is taken, its West Indian immigrant owners and patrons, and the deeply racist local police force constantly raiding the establishment with no provocation. It gets so bad that the Black community demonstrates, and when they react angrily to yet more arrests without just cause, nine of them are charged with “rioting and affray.”

And thus, because of them getting charged multiple times over the course of several years, it is roughly halfway through the film that Mangrove jumps forward half a decade. There is where the editing in this movie most impresses, as confining the story of something happening over the course of years into a mere two hours is a challenge. Director and co-writer Steve McQueen, who is himself British and set out to tell stories of the Black experience in the UK with this collection, threads it all together with a steady hand. Not a moment is wasted; not once is there a lull.

In fact, much of Mangrove is a bit chaotic. These people are angry, as they have every right to be, and they express their anger forcefully and often. Nearly all the principal characters speak with a strong West Indian accent (close to what Americans would most readily recognize as Jamaican), and keeping the closed captions on—something I always do when watching anything at home anyway—is likely to be helpful.

It’s certainly a fascinating exercise to get a bit of a history lesson on these issues from elsewhere in the world, see how similar they can be to American racial injustice, and how all of these legacies inform what still goes on today. This is, of course, a direct reference to police departments in and their institutionalize racism in particular.

Mangrove is very much an ensemble in terms of its cast, and the performances are excellent without exception. It is made up of relatively unknown actors, the most recognizable of them Leticia Wright, who had played younger sister Shuri in Black Panther (2018). If anyone qualifies as a lead and also deserves specific mention, it’s Shaun Parkes as Mangrove restaurant owner Frank Crichlow, who anchors the story and provides both an anchor and a tipping point for the aforementioned anger. But, these were only two of “The Mangrove Nine,” and that’s not to mention the judge (Alex Jennings) or their lawyer (Jack Lowden) or any number of the other many characters.

What truly elevates Mangrove is its script, which remarkably manages to avoid the kind of emotional manipulation typically expected of films telling stories of this sort. McQueen presents this story entirely without sentiment, letting the facts of the events as they happened speak for themselves. He does give multiple characters pretty powerful monologues that are affecting, but in a way that feels based in reality, and in authentic struggles. This is the kind of movie that illustrates what a long road it’s been and how far we still have to go, and as such commands attention.

Standing up for themselves and leading by example.

Overall: A-

Advance: UNCLE FRANK

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

I really wanted to like Uncle Frank more. I liked Uncle Frank, the character, a lot—which would be thanks to a fine performance in the role by Paul Bettany. This is the guy who plays Vision in the Avengers films, and you’d certainly never realize it to watch him here, as a gay man returning from New York City to his small South Carolina hometown where his pathologically homophobic father has just died.

Frank also serves as mentor to his niece—hence the title—to 18-year-old Beth (Sophia Lillis, perhaps best known as Beverly from the It films), who is now going to the same New York college where Frank is a professor. Thus, the two wind up driving together back south for the funeral, illustrating a sort of familial connection surely many viewers will relate to, especially ones who are either gay, or had a favorite relative who turned out to be gay.

This uncle-niece relationship is easily the most realistic aspect of Uncle Frank, and by far what makes the film most watchable. I found myself moved by it in spite of the films many, many flaws.

Most significant is “Wally” (Peter Macdissi), short for Walid, Frank’s Saudi Arabian boyfriend. No one in Frank’s family knows about him, with the exception of his sister—and, now, Beth. Macdissi, who being Lebanese is at least legitimately Middle Eastern, if not actually Saudi Arabian, gives a serviceable performance of a role that is quite strangely naive as written. I would expect better from writer-director Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under, and much, much more), and this particular script left me wondering if this movie represents an unfortunate yet all-too common late-career decline.

Frank comes from a deeply conservative Southern family, now in his late forties in the early seventies, no less—and still, Wally keeps pressuring Frank to come out to them, insisting that it doesn’t compare to the literally life-threatening fate that would await him had he stayed in Saudi Arabia. “It would bring shame on my family,” he says, quite directly suggesting it doesn’t compare to any possible reaction by a family in the American deep south. Seriously, Wally? He does this even knowing the tragic fate of a young boy Frank had taken an interest in during his youth—none of which makes any logical sense. In other words, Ball’s script makes the mystifying choice of not giving Wally any credit or perceptive intelligence.

Furthermore, the deeper we get into Uncle Frank, the more melodramatic it gets, with detours into dialogue that alternates between stilted and clichéd. Much of what transpires is frustratingly predictable, and reminiscent of more typical gay stories of yesteryear, from a time when writers didn’t know any better. I hesitate to say this film is over the top, but several moments come pretty damned close.

If it has any saving grace, it is the great cast, as Uncle Frank is packed with comfortably familiar faces: Steve Zahn as Frank’s younger brother Mike; Margo Martindale as his mother; Stephen Root as his dad; Judy Greer as his sister; even the always-lovely Lois Smith as his great aunt. We meet all these characters in the opening sequence of the movie, and it has a sort of instantly calming effect: who wouldn’t want to spend some time with all these people together? And for the most part, it is indeed a pleasant ninety minutes hanging out with them.

Much of the ending is rather saccharine, arguably unrealistic in its niceness, a sort of fairy tale that seems to be a little deluded about it being a fairy tale. I don’t mean to sound cynical; I still fell right into the trap of its transparent emotional manipulation and shed a few tears, both sad and happy, for these characters. And to be fair, the entire film is a nostalgic look into the past, and what else is nostalgia besides a comforting revisionist history? Plenty of viewers will find Uncle Frank to be a perfectly lovely experience overall; that does not make it a particularly high quality film. What disappoints me is its squandered potential, as this could have been far better, had Alan Ball bothered with much in the way of nuance. But, this is what we’ve got, and even if much of the script is informed by ignorance, at least in the end it’s of a more blissful sort.

Just like Beth, Uncle Frank is my favorite in an otherwise incomprehensible world.

Overall: B-

Advance: COME AWAY

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

Come Away has a premise that’s hard not to love: Peter and Alice are siblings, and they turn out to be Peter Pan and Alice from Alice in Wonderland. This movie thus becomes a combined prequel to both classic texts.

The pedigree isn’t half bad either, starting with director Brenda Chapman, who directed and wrote the Pixar film Brave in 2012, and has story credit on both Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Lion King (1994). Come Away thus is her first foray into feature-length live action, and she brings the imagination of a longtime animator to the proceedings.

Cast in the roles of Peter and Alice’s parents are David Oyelowo and Angelina Jolie, making for a kind of representation heretofore never seen particularly in nineteenth century London cinema: an interracial couple with multiracial children. Oyelowo has himself noted that “It so happens to be a family the likes of which would and could have historically existed in that time in British history, yet not the norm of what you are used to seeing,” in response to the film getting “review bombed” by bored racists prior to the film’s release. That alone motivates me to support this film.

Except . . . good-hearted as Come Away is, as lovely as its visuals often are, in the end it all just falls a little flat. The central conflict of the story is the death of Peter and Alice’s eldest brother, and how the family copes with the tragedy. Come Away qualifies as a fantasy in its own right, and classic fantasies are no stranger to these types of dark elements. It also presents children’s imaginations as a perfectly reasonable escape from this kind of sadness. And yet, the film could stand to be a lot more imaginative, and it could stand to be more effectively poignant. Instead it resists going too far in either direction.

The children actors, Jordan A. Nash as Peter and Keira Chansa as Alice, are well cast, if almost too precocious in their deliveries. There’s something nearly unsettling in their glowing dispositions, the way they maintain bright smiles the entire time they play, projecting a sort of glossy wholesomeness as they engage in pretend sword fights. And then the direct literary references get a tad weird, such as the “potion” Alice drinks turning out to be her mother’s bottle of psychotropics,

I wanted to be moved by Come Away, or delighted, or better yet both in alternating intervals. The movie is pleasant enough, though a tad sadder than one might desire from it. Not even supporting turns by Michael Caine The Wire’s Clarke Peters can quite lift it up. It’s not a bummer per se, but its charms are oddly muted. It could have been a new sort of fairy tale classic, but at best you finish it thinking: I guess that was fine.

Don’t ask Alice.

Overall: B-

LET HIM GO

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

Kevin Costner seems to be enjoying a bit of a cinematic renaissance in his old age. This is a guy who made several great movies in the eighties—granted, some have not held up as well as we’d like over time—then made multiple straight-up stinkers in the nineties, and as far as I’m concerned, Let Him Go might be the best film he’s starred in, in nearly thirty years. He’s taken a lot of perfectly respectable supporting roles in recent years, though, playing older father-figure types (or just literal fathers), and while a key element of his role here is also that of father, it’s nice to see him again in a lead role in a movie that’s actually worth recommending.

The other key roles are both women who are reliably consistent in their excellence, the co-lead being Diane Lane, as Costner’s wife. George and Margaret Blackledge are an aging couple whose grown son has died from a horse riding accident, and as they still grieve this loss, their son’s widow, Lorna (Kayli Carter), has remarried into a dangerous family from North Dakota. Without warning, Lorna and her very young son are taken to said family, without a word to the Blackledges on their 1960s ranch in Montana, Margaret decides very quickly they will head out looking for them, and bring the child back. Okay, and Lorna too, fine.

The matriarch of this family, Blanche Weboy, is played by Leslie Manville, and as good as Costner and Lane are, if there is any single reason to watch this movie, it’s Manville. She is in all of maybe three scenes, one of them a climactic extended sequence, but in all cases, she commands the screen, and makes for a formidable villain.

Granted, writer-director Thomas Bezucha (Big Eden, The Family Stone) can’t be bothered to tell us how Blanche gained this kind of power over a large family of grown men in 1960s North Dakota. It seems a slight oversight that this movie casts women in three roles key to the plot and in not one single other part: does Lorna’s brothers-in-law have not one single other wife among them? Seems weird.

But, okay, we’ll let that slide. When George and Margaret finally find themselves at Blanche’s house, ostensibly for dinner, the entire scene is riveting—all because of Leslie Manville’s performance, characterizing a woman with a harrowing sense of being just this side of unhinged. In her later scenes the woman treads dangerously close to caricature, but Manville can always walk a fine line with confidence.

What I like most about Let Him Go, actually, is how the story unfolds. The first half is much more of a quiet drama, Costner and Lane playing a couple working through their grief by steadily and stubbornly working against their own self-interests, searching for a child who, logically, would always be left with the mother he’s already with. But, once we meet Blanche, it becomes clear that Lorna and her little boy need help getting away from this family, who intimidate even local law enforcement.

The second time we see Blanche, things get violent—a bit gruesome, even. There’s a pivotal moment that is, fair warning, kind of hard to stomach. It’s not that difficult to see where things go from there, but to this movie’s credit, you’d never guess that’s where it’s headed by its first half. This is a movie that surprises you, and even if the surprises aren’t exactly pleasant, it makes for great storytelling.

Let Him Go sort of switches genres over time, from “western mystery” to “crime thriller.” It’s always kind of a thrill when a film can pull of such a trick without falling apart. And even with its minor flaws, Let Him Go keeps it together. I’d recommend this movie to anyone.

These two don’t know what they’re getting themselves into. And neither do we. Which is great!

Overall: B+