So with all that preamble aside, can Margot Robbie act? Ohhhhh
yes. Yes she can, in fact Margot Robbie, playing a character that none
of us ever got to know except in the pages of a tabloid, is phenomenal
this time around, a treasure of a performance that fully justifies all
of the faith that people placed in her following the atrocity that was
Suicide Squad. Biopics are a dangerous game, as apt to win you
condemnation as they are an Oscar, but Robbie, playing a character
nobody really knows anything about, is exceptional, bringing all the
classless rancor, the bitter devotion to her craft, the wounded
patched-together pride of a victim of nigh-constant abuse, the
serially-unreliable mentality of someone trying to make sense of her own
life, bringing all of it together into a performance that merits the
Oscar nomination that should be (and at time of writing, has been)
forthcoming. It's a career-making performance, comic and tragic all at
once, while still retaining the essence of what the public remembers of
the character, and if that wasn't Robbie performing the
fantastically-difficult skating maneuvers studded throughout, then the
movie certainly fooled me.
I, Tonya, comes to us courtesy of
Craig Gillespie, an Australian director who has yet to feature on this
project, due to his propensity for mostly doing projects that don't look
particularly interesting. The only movie of his prior to this one that
I know anything about is 2007's exceedingly-odd Ryan Gosling vehicle
Lars and the Real Girl, a movie that was effectively a weirder version
of Her, and if you remember Her, that's quite a statement. This one is a
bit more accessable than that one was, but is done in a
fourth-wall-shattering style that emphasizes just how unreliable the
various stories that the characters involved tell of the Kerrigan
incident and everything that led up to it are. The result resembles The
Big Short, or other movies that use unconventional directing techniques
as a tool to emphasize the artificiality of the concepts they're
attempting to get across, and in retrospect, it's probably the only way
to do something like this without turning the entire thing into a
Rashomon-style philosophical treatise, which would be highly unsuited
for the material. It does, however, require a superb cast to be able to
pull something like this off, and fortunately Gillespie has assembled
one. Sebastian Stan, Bucky Barnes from the Marvel films, is utterly
unrecognizable as Jeff Gillooly, an abusive loser who Tonya falls for
due primarily to the fact that she has been conditioned by her
upbringing to expect nothing but abusive losers to be interested in her.
It's deceptively difficult to play a loser on screen, if only because
most successful actors are charismatic, and the camera introduces such
tremendous bias in their favor, but Stan pulls it off, giving us a
character by turns entirely loathsome and yet completely believable,
not a screaming monster but a person whose life is what it was always
fated to be, and whose worst traits go utterly unexamined by himself or
even his victims. But the best performance of all is Allison Janney's,
because she gets to play a true monster. Tonya's mother LaVona,
expertly portrayed by the one-time West Wing alum, is a vile, twisted,
hyper-abusive harpy, an utterly loathsome creature whose every action
and thought drips bitterness and resentment. And yet even here, Janney
puts together a character that isn't just a caricature of an abusive
single mother, but simply a person who is missing parts of their soul,
who acts as she does because she thinks it the only way to properly act.
We hate her all the more because we understand where she is coming
from, and is that not the definition of an excellent villain?
If
it sounds like the theme of abuse is coming up a lot in my description
so far, that is because the movie is rife with it, not sensationalized,
not dialed up to some unwatchable level, but inculcated into its very
bones. The story of Tonya Harding, the movie claims, is a story of
long-term abuse, not always cinematic and violent, and not always
unreciprocated, but always there, poisoning everything it touches until
actions that would seem unthinkable to any normal, rational person, are
perfectly normal and indeed not deserving of comment to the characters
that inhabit this world. Tonya is abused by her mother, by her husband,
by the Media, by the US Figure Skating association which is made to
look, probably with very good reason, like a bunch of classic snobs who
never even considered giving Harding a real shot. Months and years of
brutally-difficult work are rewarded time and again with "stylistic"
point deductions and low-seeded rankings, despite Tonya being an
exceptionally gifted technical skater, the only American woman to
perform a Triple Axel jump. Without ever calling things out explicitly,
the movie effortlessly places you in a mindset wherein anything, even
attacking a rival with a retractable baton, seems reasonable, given that
nobody else is playing fairly either. Moreover, despite everything
I've just finished saying, the movie is also riotously funny at parts,
mostly due to just how stupid so
many of the participants in this little farce of a conspiracy were.
Paul Walter Hauser, whom I've never seen or heard of before, plays Shaun
Ekhart, Tonya's bodyguard, a loser among losers, who fancies himself
some kind of CIA-trained espionage expert while living in his mother's
house and plotting the dumbest caper in the history of dumb capers.
Bobby Cannavale, whom I love dearly, gets the job of narrating most of
this to us as a spray-tanned Hard Copy producer, describing in
breathless glee how dumb the plan to assault Kerrigan actually was, with
one conspirator staking out Kerrigan's training arena for three days,
parking in an empty parking lot, and moving his car around it every
fifteen minutes to avoid suspicion!
Why only for three days? Because that's how long it took him to
realize that Kerrigan was actually training in a different arena
entirely in another state.
Look,
nobody but Tonya Harding herself really knows how much she was or
wasn't actually involved in the assault on Kerrigan, and given the
nature of human memory and rationalization, probably not her either at
this point. And it is certainly possible,
though not much more, that Harding had nothing to do with the planning
of the assault that put her back in the Olympics after her career was
largely over. But for the movie to turn around so far into a story that
is being told from multiple directions, and suddenly claim
authoritatively that not only was the entire prosecution of Harding
nothing but a political witch-hunt on the part of a classist Figure
Skating world looking to finally be rid of her, but that it knows this for a fact
is just ridiculous on its face. I don't demand that all movies
represent nothing but the unvarnished truth, especially when that truth
is open to interpretation, but when the movie's central thesis is that
nobody knows the truth, it's a bit churlish to suddenly reframe
everything that's happening as
the truth because it casts your sympathetic protagonist in a more
flattering light. And if you're going to do that, suddenly pivot from
an unreliable to an authoritative viewpoint on the events in question,
it's probably a good idea not to misrepresent the few actual facts that are
known about the case. The movie's climax involves a tearful court
hearing, where a barely-controlled Harding begs and pleads for her life
after a stern, unsympathetic judge bans her from figure skating for
life. Powerful stuff, if it had actually happened, but it did not. It
doesn't take much research to know that criminal courts have no bearing
on who can and can't participate in Figure Skating associations, and
Harding was never so-sentenced. Instead, after she pled guilty to
obstructing justice in the investigation of an assault on one of her
competitors, the US Figure Skating association banned her for life,
after their investigation concluded that she knew about the attack
before it happened. Call the investigation a witch-hunt if you like,
but please don't make up criminal penalties that never happened, framed
to make your unreliable protagonist look sympathetic, and then wrap yourselves in the mantle of the one true arbiters of truth.
Molly's Game stars Jessica Chastain, an
actress I have famously had little use for over the years (see my
reviews for Zero Dark Thirty and Interstellar for more on that), as
Molly Bloom, but for all my objections to Chastain's typical style of
acting, if there's one thing 2016's The Huntsman: Winter's War taught
me, it's that I had Chastain pegged incorrectly. The problem isn't that
she can't act, the problem is that she can't act seriously.
Her attempts to emote sincerity and seriousness have always fallen
flat to me, making her sound alternately like a marionette struggling to
understand these "hu-man" emotions, or like a petulant seven-year-old
who has been denied a cookie. But give her a film or a situation in
which she's supposed to be campy, or ridiculous, or over-the-top, and
she suddenly becomes a completely different actor. And while Molly's
Game is certainly intended to be a realistic portrayal of a young woman
who simply got caught up in strange events, it's also written by Aaron
Sorkin, of The Social Network and The West Wing (and several other
things we will get to), who has one of the strongest and most
distinctive authorial voices of any screenwriter in Hollywood (yes,
moreso even than Joss Whedon). Sorkin's dialogue, no matter the setting
or medium, has always felt like written dialogue,
like something prepared in advance by a speechwriter, rather than
something people might conceivably come up with and say in a real
setting, and while that's not always a strength, it allows Chastain to
do what she's good at, giving her the sort of snappy, witty, erudite
one-liners that nobody would come up with in the spur of the moment.
The long and the short of all this is that Chastain is excellent in this
film, playing a driven young woman from a hyper-demanding background
who is subjected to the sorts of raving, savagely egomaniacal,
borderline sociopathic douchebags and pressures that are instantaneously
believable as coming from the ranks of Hollywood or high finance.
And
of course, Chastain is not alone. Idris Elba, my man-crush and yours,
plays Bloom's lawyer, Charlie Jaffey, in the typical style of an Aaron
Sorkin lawyer, meaning with wit, erudition, and snappy comebacks to
every situation. As I know several people (Hi, Colleen!) who fantasize
about Idris Elba yelling at them, this movie should provide plenty of
fodder, and Elba is, as he always is, wonderful in the role, though his
American accent this time is about as authentic as my British one.
Kevin Costner, of all people, plays Molly's father, a professor of
psychology and a helicopter parent, whose tough-love-style of
borderline-verbally-abusive behavior is intentionally played in contrast
with Costner's native salt-of-the-Earth persona. I've admitted before
that for all the garbage that Costner has made over the years (and still
continues to make, lest anyone forget Criminal), I've always liked him,
at least in the rare occasions when the director and scriptwriters
manage to get him something to say or do that is within his range.
Sorkin does, and Costner, surprisingly, proves an excellent fit for
Sorkin's stilted style, particularly in a late sequence where he sits
down with his daughter and speaks what, to him at least, is brutal
honesty. And then there's the various shitheads that Bloom encounters
throughout her career, foremost among which is Michael Cera, of all
people, as "Player X", a composite of various A-list Hollywood
celebrities who frequented Molly's games, but apparently primarily based
on Toby Maguire, or so the rumors have it. If those rumors are true,
Maguire should take real care given the tenor of Hollywood today, as
Cera plays this character as an actual raving sociopath, one who admits
that despite all the poker he plays, he actually doesn't much like the
game itself. What he likes, in his own words, is "ruining people's
lives", something he does with Iago-like gusto to everyone he meets. My
old pals Chris O'Dowd (of The Sapphires), and Jeremy Strong (of a whole bunch of crap), take smaller roles as, respectively, a drunken Irish
associate of the Russian Mafia with a heart of gold, and a Hollywood
wannabe/failed Los Angeles real estate agent with seemingly no heart
whatsoever. This is the sort of thing one runs into when one turns in
these circles, it seems. Both are superb, customarily so in O'Dowd's
case, the opposite in Strong's, with O'Dowd managing to inject some real
emotion into one of the oldest cinema character cliches in existence
(the drunken Irishman), and Strong evidencing some of the douchiest
behavior known to man outside of the White House.
You
see, with a voice this strong, this recognizable, it's clear enough to
me at this point that Sorkin doesn't know how to write anyone who isn't
just like himself, an overeducated political and cultural snob (I say
this with some endearment, as I am also an overeducated political and
cultural snob). In shows like The West Wing, which was about a group of
exceptionally intelligent and driven people at the heart of the
political system, this mattered less, as Sorkin wrote his characters the
way we'd like all of our elected officials to act and speak. With The
Social Network, he was again dealing with masters of the universe,
students at Harvard University with spectacular pedigrees and impeccable
contempt for all the lesser creatures of the world. But in Molly's
Game, despite all the high-rollers on offer, the movie is ultimately a
character study of Molly, and to a lesser extent her lawyer, none of
whom should sound the same as one another, and all of whom do, speaking
in this inflappable, ultra-witty style of hyper-stylized dialogue that
just does not exist when we are supposedly dealing with the real world.
Everyone's speach consists of the same one-liners, peppered with
references to high culture and in-jokes that it makes no sense for their
characters to be making. And while I do like movies about smart people
speaking in a smart fashion, Sorkin's voice is so overpowering that he
risks losing the humanity of what's happening. It's hard for us as an
audience to feel sorry or frightened alongside the main character when
the film has spent the entire run-time establishing them as being beyond
such mortal concerns as fright or sorrow. And none of this is helped
by Sorkin, in the last third of the film, giving into his worst habits
and spending a good portion of the movie waxing eloquently about the
injustice of the FBI seizing Molly's assets and fining her hundreds of
thousands of dollars, when in reality (as it turns out) neither actually
occurred. I don't demand all biopics stick scrupulously to the truth
of the matter, of course, but it's a bit rich to turn your film into an
excoriation of the Federal Government for having done terrible things to
poor Molly, when it did not actually do those things.
Yes,
Scott Cooper, a man who never met a screenplay he did not feel needed
to be more on-the-nose, more anvilicious, more filled with trepidatious
pauses and forlorn looks at the camera, a director whose entire
filmography is full of sound and fury and signifies very very little. I
know that many people liked Crazy Heart, the 2009 Jeff Bridges vehicle,
and I even know some who liked Out of the Furnace, but I remember him
from 2015's Black Mass, a movie in which Johnny Depp played a vampire
and called himself Whitey Bulger, and Cooper did everything he could
to disguise whatever else the film might have been about, beyond a
handful of disconnected events that may or may not have had anything to
do with Whitey Bulger. I didn't hate Black Mass, but it was not a good
movie, and Hostiles, for all the differences in tone and theme and
genre, is honestly even more of the same, a plodding, placid film
directly from the Terrence Mallick school of filmmaking. But where
Mallick is at least an interesting visual filmmaker, Cooper has simply
learned that some directors place long, empty spaces between every line
that every actor intones, but has not learned why. The result is a
movie that is stuck in the tonal sensibilities of the worst parts of
recent years, but the genre sensibilities of the early 1990s. Not a
good combination.
What do I mean? Well
consider the setup above. A man who hates Natives is now forced to
escort a Native chief halfway across the country through territories
filled with hostile bandits and Commanche raiders. And yet of all the
many and varied paths that the film could potentially take from here,
the film chooses none of them, preferring instead to simply have Bale
sit stone-facedly in the grass or in his saddle and stare off across the
plains as though reviewing internally the emptiness of his life. I
don't mean the life of the character, I mean the emptiness of Bale's
life having been forced to make this movie. Bale spends the entire film
in an unplaceable monotone that sounds like a Ron Swanson impression,
staring into space blankly as the various other characters he meets
recite ridiculously overwrought lines at him about how dark his soul is
or how dark their own souls are or how dark everyone's soul has become
or how much they wish they understood the meaning of the darkness that
lies within their souls or how they wish their souls were not so dark
but unfortunately they are, or or or or or. I get the desire to tell a
revisionist Western (though the notion is not as revolutionary as Cooper thinks it is), but you actually do have to tell the Western,
not just gesture at the self-evident notion that everyone who dared set
foot in The West was a soul-destroyed PTSD-riddled hollow wreck of a
person, whispering dialogue concerning the darkness that was their souls
at ten second intervals before riding over the next ridge to do it all
over again. The entire film is comprised of nothing but dead-eyed
stares and monotone line delivery, until we as the audience start to
wonder if the problem isn't something more medical than "the sickness of
man". At least when The Homesman acted like this, it had the excuse of
portraying characters that had literally gone insane.
But
heavy-handed as this sort of thing is, I might have forgiven it (might)
if the movie had had the balls to actually follow through with the
premise that the story of the West is truly the story of the Natives,
and that the disconnection the other characters feel has to do with the
horrors they have perpetrated on such people. Unfortunately, for all
its pretensions at telling a revisionist story of modern understandings
of The West, the movie's interest in its Native characters, which as
mentioned before include Wes Studi, the greatest Native American actor
of all time (go watch Geronimo or Last of the Mohicans if you disagree
with that), is practically non-existent. In addition to Studi's Chief
Yellow Hawk, there is his son, Black Hawk, his daughter, his
daughter-in-law, and grandson, and not a single one of these characters
get a goddamn thing to do throughout the entire movie but sit in a
circle and look enigmatically upon everyone else, without saying a word,
and occasionally demurely giving gifts to the white characters and
radiating angelicness. Yellow Hawk himself doesn't get much more to do.
He and Blocker are established as being old enemies, both bad men who
did bad things during the Indian Wars to one another's people, who have
hated one another for years without halt. Yet Studi doesn't get more
than a handful of lines across the entire movie, all of which are calm,
dispassionate requests for Captain Blocker to listen to his wisdom in
terms of how to deal with other Indian tribes, how to deal with his
guilt, or (get this) thanks to
the good Captain for having the common decency to treat him... better?
It's not quite as obsequious as it sounds, but it's not far off, and
this is the only Native character in the film with what amounts to a
real part! Yellow Hawk and Blocker share barely a handful of scenes
together, and then suddenly transform into best friends, with Blocker
telling Yellow Hawk in his own language that he carries a piece of him
in his heart. There is a way that this sort of admission between two
old enemies could work, hell there is a way where it could be profoundly
moving. But it would have to be in a movie that was about
the relationship between these men, while this film is not interested
in being about anyone, least of all the Natives, who are treated here
like the Indian equivelant of Spike Lee's famous Magical Negro
archetype, props for the movie to trigger the spiritual renewal of a
sinful white character who is now redeemed. At least the majority of
the Magical Negro movies out there (Legend of Bagger Vance for instance)
actually involve the black character getting to do something, be it
give wizened speeches or demonstrate his superior ways. This movie
seems to posit that the mere presence
of Native Americans will render you more spiritual and absolve you of
your sins, like the symbols of some holy faith, bereft of the need to
actually do anything.
But let's be honest here, all of
you already knew all of this before opening this review. Of course the
visuals were amazing, they cost over half a billion dollars to produce.
Of course the score is excellent, John Williams is a God. Of course
the lead actors are great, we found that out from the previous movie.
So what do I have to tell you about this
film, as a Star Wars film, and its qualities or lack thereof? Well,
simply put, this is probably the most daring Star Wars film I've ever
seen, one of the most daring major franchise films of all time, purely
because of the decisions that it makes concerning what the movie is
actually about, both in terms of theme and tone, and in terms of simple
plot mechanics. This is commendable, hell in some ways it's downright
revolutionary. But it's also the source of a lot of problems, as some
of the decisions the film makes, ballsy as they are, just aren't good.
Let's get back into the swing of things, shall we? The General's Post Summer 2018 Roundup Ant-Man and the Wasp Alternate Ti...
