French Exit
It’s officially been a year of the Primal Stream, my little glimpse around at what all is available to view and experience until going back to the movies safely is an option available to everyone out there. It’s a wild and weird milestone, and I’m happy to do so even as I deeply miss the experience of seeing a movie with a crowd who is feeling it. Stay sane, stay safe, and keep your head above water, emotionally. Vaccines are becoming more and more available. The drive-ins extend their nurturing, funnel-cake-smelling arms. Take care of yourself and others.
Below are a couple of streaming recommendations. As always, visit past issues of the Scene for many more titles: March 26, April 2, April 9, April 16, April 23, April 30, May 7, May 14, May 21, May 28, June 4, June 11, June 18, June 25, July 2, July 9, July 16, July 23, July 30, Aug. 6, Aug. 13, Aug. 20, Aug. 27, Sept. 3, Sept. 10, Sept. 17, Sept. 24, Oct. 1, Oct. 15, Oct. 29, Nov. 5, Nov. 11, Nov. 26, Dec. 3, Dec. 17, Jan. 6, Jan. 21, Jan. 28, Feb. 4, Feb. 11, Feb. 18, Feb. 25, March 11, March 18, March 25.
French Exit in theaters, streaming TBD
A magical-realist swoon into an impeccably overstuffed couch, French Exit is a film about empathy and kindness for the extremely wealthy, and as such your mileage may vary. At its center and as its foundation is an exceptional Michelle Pfeiffer performance — she is Frances Price, facing down insolvency after a life lived with money as a set of bowling alley bumpers for all occasions. Now, fleeing New York society with her manchild son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges), she’s trying to start anew with a kindhearted friend (Valerie Mahaffey, who almost steals the whole film away) and a petulant cat with a secret. It’s not as scathing as Molière or as weird as Buñuel, but it is suffused with a genial kindness and clever turns of phrase — this film could soothe a troubled soul or stir up revolutionary fervor. And ultimately, it is about leaving privilege, nonsense and insularity behind and finding the kindness of the collective. Respect, as always, to Danielle Macdonald, who turns a three-scene character into a low-key triumph.
Zack Snyder's Justice League
Zack Snyder’s Justice League via HBO Max
There’s a metaphor lurking at the center of this four-hour behemoth, wherein Zack Snyder — being able to finally complete the film he walked away from after studio battles and personal tragedy — allows the country to confront the horrors committed in our name during the Trump administration. The official record, a cobbled-together monstrosity of shifting tone and ideology, is subsumed by a sadder, more sincere truth, buried and brutalized, that was always there, just hidden behind contractually mandated smiles and jokes. No wonder Ray Fisher was so pissed.
The 2017 Justice League — a Frankenstein’s monster created by the now-disgraced Joss Whedon and a gang of Warner Bros. execs — was, like far too many films that traffic in comic book IP, a bunch of CGI mush that occasionally came alive with a smart line or a striking image. Far too often, it just looked and felt like everything else. So know that this reconstruction/restoration/resurrection doesn’t look quite like anything else right now, using vertical tableaux (why not let cinema redefine the Academy ratio, especially since TV has stolen the wider cinemascope ratios for itself?) to tell its story with a mythic resonance that feels visually correct. If this were to get a screening at the Opry Mills IMAX, filling that whole 1.4:1 screen, I would absolutely buy a ticket. And all the people making videos online about how to “fix” the intended aspect ratio of someone whose vision they’ve been clamoring for these past four years are absolutely missing the point.
At his best (everything with Russell Crowe in Man of Steel, much of Watchmen, the Dawn of the Dead remake), Snyder has a grand style that lends itself to big emotions and kinesis. At his worst (300, a film I actually booed in the theater), he crafts edgelord screensaver collisions between Maxfield Parrish and Tom of Finland. So of course there’s a Fountainhead joke buried in the opening chapter. (There are six chapters, as well as an epilogue that almost kills the tremendous amount of goodwill and sincere awe that the rest of the four-hour epic inspires.) And though one of the many enduring lessons taught to us by Dirty Dancing (don’t trust objectivists) remains absolutely correct, Snyder works with a kinder, bruised emotional palette that really does the work of trying to repair what is fractured — not timelines or prophesy, but interpersonal relationships.
During the big final action scene, one of the characters manifests a new power set (nothing new to fans of the comics or TV show, but I was stunned), and it’s suitably awesome in all senses of the word. But it’s also making peace with and paying tribute to the Richard Donner Superman films, which is what every comic-book adaptation has been trying to do in the intervening 40-plus years. So much time is spent on building character (you know, what serialized art and literature excels at). After Victor Stone was reduced to a glorified cameo in the 2017 version, it’s deeply affecting to see what a journey the character goes through. We know who Cyborg is in this version of the film, because we’ve gone through so much of it. And while it’s been said again and again, let’s repeat it: Trying to make a film breezier and more accessible by eliminating the vast majority of its Black characters’ screen time is really gross.
It is impossible to overstate how much of an improvement the Snyder Cut is over the 2017 version. There are issues, as with any film: Immediate big bad/middle-management destructor Steppenwolf’s new render looks like an unfortunate mix of Eiko Ishioka’s sublime body armor from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the overwrought articulated metal frippery of Michael Bay-style Transformers; the whole anti-life equation seemed particularly sweaty (though that is apparently true to the comics); “Song to the Siren” belongs squarely to David Lynch’s Lost Highway; the action scenes might make your attention drift, because they feel like every other previsualized computer fight in every other movie like this. But the final section of the epilogue is a nightmare, both literally and figuratively. After four hours steeping in this story, to end on a setup for something that will never be made but also negates every hard-won victory we’ve seen is a terrible miscalculation. It’s a dream sequence — OK, fine. But it throws the emotional spell the film has been weaving into fucking disarray, and it’s an unfortunate choice. And Jared Leto needs to be stopped.
If people are willing to embrace a singular vision that gets as strange with it as Zack Snyder’s Justice League does, I invite everyone to revisit Ang Lee’s Hulk, which is even weirder and more artistically stylized and even further committed to working out father-son trauma on a grand canvas. (Recall the fifth-act sequence where the Hulk and his father start out in a Sam Shepard-style black-box play and end up devouring energy from power lines and literally battle it out as their conflict imprints itself upon the sky?) But with the exception of the gonzo “Hooked on Classics” montage in It’s A Sin, nothing else I’ve seen this year has said so much with sound and vision as Jason Momoa’s Aquaman returning to the sea, a chorus of Icelandic women giving voice to the quotidian majesty of this aquatic god — this dirtbag drunk who saves lives and smiles upon their isolated village and thinks nothing of his many sweaters, holy relics for the adoring.
