Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
When the island's dormant volcano begins roaring to
life, Owen and Claire mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs
from this extinction-level event.
AWESOME MOVIE & MEGA SURPRISE - FIRST REFORMED (2018) - FILM REVIEW
Yet in the moment I deliver that unstinting endorsement,
I feel compelled to add that this is a very special film for a certain,
inevitably rather limited audience. In line with other Schrader movies,
but perhaps more so than any, it defines itself against many of the central assumptions and conventions of most mainstream moviemaking.
First Reformed (2017)
A former military chaplain is wracked by grief over
the death of his son. Mary is a member of his church whose husband, a
radical environmentalist, commits suicide, setting the plot in motion.
Director:
Paul SchraderWriter:
Paul SchraderStars:
Amanda Seyfried, Ethan Hawke, Cedric the Entertainer
In his seminal 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (written
at age 24, two years before he turned from film criticism to
filmmaking), Schrader noted that, “The many statements [Robert] Bresson
has made in interviews and discussions, properly arranged, would
constitute an accurate analysis of his films (a statement which can be
made of no other filmmaker to my knowledge)….” It’s an astute remark,
but one which Schrader perhaps now should amend to include himself.
In
recent times, and especially since “First Reformed” debuted at the
Toronto Film Festival last fall, the writer/director has spoken about
his work in numerous interviews and discussions, and his comments—which I
encourage interested readers to seek out—are invariably as stimulating
and insightful as they are candid.
While many artists take pains
to disguise the influences on their work, Schrader jovially confesses
his, and says that the important thing is not to avoid stealing from
others but to do it intelligently and strategically. From one angle,
“First Reformed” is an unreformed film critic’s tour through a strain or
tradition of art-filmmaking that molded him, as well as a tribute to
masters including Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Dreyer and, of course, Bresson.
Brought
up in the Christian Reformed Church, a strict Calvinist denomination,
Schrader was raised without movies but became enchanted with their
forbidden pleasures when he encountered them. Later, in discovering
Bresson’s “Pickpocket,”
he was electrified because “I sensed a bridge between the spirituality I
was raised with and the ‘profane’ cinema I loved. And it was a bridge
of STYLE not content.”
That last point is crucial. Schrader
continued, “Church people had been using movies since they first moved
to illustrate religious beliefs, but this was something different. The
convergence of spirituality and cinema would occur in style not content.
In the How, not the What.”
The idea of spiritual meaning
expressed in style is deftly encapsulated in the first shot of “First
Reformed,” a neat synecdoche for the whole film. The camera tracks
slowly forward as it gazes up at the stark white facade of an
18th century church in New York State. The building’s elegantly
restrained colonial architecture, the gray sky, the stately camera
movement and music all convey an austere gravity, which, together with
Schrader’s use of Academy ratio (inspired, he has said, by Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida”), point us back not only to an earlier era of American religion but also to such European cinema models as Bergman’s “Winter Light” and Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest.”
With his angular frame and ankle-length black cassock, the church’s
pastor has a similar iconic starkness. The Rev. Ernst Toller (Hawke) is a
troubled man. The congregation that faces him from the church’s spartan
pews is minuscule. At night, alone, he drinks and begins to confess his
misery to a journal (a Bressonian device that Schrader has used in “Taxi Driver,” “Light Sleeper”
and other films). We soon learn what’s behind his agonized countenance:
He was a happily married military chaplain when he encouraged his
soldier son to go to Iraq. The son was killed, Toller’s marriage
collapsed and he was left devastated. His assignment at this
church—which seems to do more business in tourist trinkets than souls—is
equal parts penance and abnegation.
The world’s misery begins to intrude on his own when a pregnant young woman named Mary (Amanda Seyfried)
enlists Toller to counsel her husband, who she believes wants her to
have an abortion out of despair over the world’s future. Michael (Philip Ettinger)
is an environmental activist who may be a congenital depressive but who
also has solid reasons for his pessimism. In a long, striking scene
early in the film, one that reminds us of Schrader’s skills as a writer,
the young man and Toller discuss the ways humanity is rapidly
despoiling the earth and the planet’s bleak future prospects. While the
pastor urges that there are still plenty of reasons for hope, it seems
he may have been influenced by Michael’s words as much as the other way
around.
This situation grows more dire when Mary tells Toller
she’s discovered a suicide vest that Michael has constructed. Does the
activist plan to protest humanity’s destruction by staging his own?
While he grapples with this, Toller faces challenges on other fronts
too. Pissing blood makes him suspect he has a serious illness. His
ecclesiastical superior, the buoyant pastor of a local megachurch (a
fine performance by Cedric the Entertainer), tries to coax him out of
his gloom and enlist his help in planning for the celebration of his
church’s 250th anniversary. That effort begins to stick in Toller’s
craw, though, when he realizes the extent to which it will be run by a
bullying local rightwing polluter for whom he feels the deepest
contempt.
Unless I miss my guess, “First Reformed” will find its least
receptive audiences among those who want either a conventional
psychological drama or a dogmatic exposition of spiritual themes.
Neither is what Schrader’s after. From the first, style as a way of engendering spiritual consciousness has been his primary concern. In a welcome new edition of Transcendental Style,
he writes of creating “an alternate film reality—a transcendent one,”
in which, “The filmmaker, rather than creating a world in which the
viewer need only surrender … creates a world in which the spectator must
contemplate—or reject out of hand.”
Will the film’s most
appreciative viewers be those who know Schrader’s writings, his previous
work and the great films whose influence he freely acknowledges? No
doubt. Yet “First Reformed” leaves its large front door open to anyone
who accepts its invitation to adopt a contemplative stance toward
cinema. For those who do, the film’s peculiar mysteries and beauties
will be evident throughout: in its restrained compositions and uses of
silence and empty space, in the almost liturgical unfolding of its
narrative, in a climactic scene of imaginary flight and a final scene
that seems aptly designed to leave one catching one’s breath, caught in
the very act of contemplating this tale of faith and its worldly
opponents.
And then there’s the solid anchor provided by
Hawke’s performance as Toller. A fine actor from the beginning, Hawke
has been growing exponentially in recent years, and this is his most
expertly, movingly crafted performance yet. It is no exaggeration to say
that he has given Schrader a suffering priest equal to those of Bresson
and Bergman.
Country:
Language:
EnglishRelease Date:
18 May 2018 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Iskušenik See more »Box Office
Opening Weekend USA:
$97,562, 20 May 2018, Limited ReleaseGross USA:
$108,670, 21 May 2018Company Credits
Production Co:
DISAPPOINTING - SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018) - FILM REVIEW
As unnecessary prequels go, "Solo: A Star Wars Story" isn't bad. It's
not great, either, though—and despite spirited performances, knockabout
humor, and a few surprising or rousing bits, there's something a bit too
programmed about the whole thing. It has certain marks to hit, and it
makes absolutely sure you know that it's hitting them. Everything that
you expect to see visualized in "Solo," based on your experience with
previously stated "Star Wars"
mythology, gets served up on a silver platter, from young Han Solo's
first meeting with Chewbacca to Han winning the Millennium Falcon in a
card game from its original owner, Lando Calrissian, and making the
Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs (that parsecs are a unit of distance,
not time, is properly explained at last), to the fact that Wookiees
hate to lose at three-dimensional chess and are strong enough to rip
people's arms from their sockets. We also get to see what some of our
favorites were like when they were younger (Donald Glover's Lando walks
off with the movie). It's fan service of a high order.
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
Director:
Ron HowardStars:
Whether you consider that a bonus or plus will depend on what you
want from a "Star Wars" movie. In some ways, this movie is the antidote
to the sort of "Star Wars" movie that viewers who despised the
prankishly irreverent and oddly introspective "The Last Jedi" seem to
have wanted: one where the payoffs to setups are italicized so that
nobody can miss them, artistic license is subordinated to brand
management, and every reference, no matter how small, that was so
lovingly memorized by devotees of the franchise is placed under a
spotlight for the audience's recognition and self-congratulation.
It's
checklist mythology, but thankfully served up with enough panache to
make the trip engaging. There are also quite a few scenes that fill out
the "Star Wars" universe in ways that only tangentially have to do with
Han Solo, Chewbacca, and other established characters (I'd rather not
say which ones, because a couple of them are genuinely delightful).
These tend to be the most engrossing sections of "Solo" because they
treat your eye to vistas that you probably haven't encountered before,
unless you're familiar with the older cultural sources that the
filmmakers are raiding for inspiration—and even then, director Ron Howard (replacing Phil Lord and Christopher Miller) freshens them up and makes them feel lived-in.
We meet young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) and his girlfriend and partner-in-crime Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke)
on a mining planet that's completely covered by industrial structures
and runs on forced labor, some of it involving children; the
charcoal-smudged visuals, narrow streets and alleys, and hardbitten
street urchins with English accents add up to high-tech Charles Dickens.
When Han signs up for the Imperial Navy but ends up serving in the
infantry in a pointless campaign where he meets his future smuggling
partners Val (Thandie Newton) and Tobias (Woody Harrelson),
the images of suicidal cavalry charges and muddy trenches are straight
out of a World War I picture like "All Quiet on the Western Front" or "Paths of Glory."
A heist of a fuel train—more like a mountain monorail that seems to
slither around the peaks like a metal snake—evokes an old Western where
cowboys jump from horses onto the sides of locomotives. And so on.
The character of Han Solo was introduced back in 1977 (pre-George Lucas
digital revisions) gouging an old man and a farm boy for as much money
as he could get, then pre-emptively murdering a a bounty hunter in plain
view of bar patrons. Nothing in this film is as daring as those
choices—as played by Harrison Ford,
Solo was a borderline antihero and the only major character in the
original trilogy who had a dangerous edge, albeit one that Lucas and
company immediately began sanding down—and as young Solo, Alden
Ehrenriech doesn't convince as a cocky young pilot and smuggler who's
been prematurely soured by a hard-knock life.
Or at least he doesn't convince as this particular
smuggler. He's likable and does "confident" and "smug" very well, but
if this film was determined to cast an actor who didn't look or sound
all that much like Harrison Ford (which is a totally legitimate and
defensible thing to do, don't get me wrong; a straight-up imitation
would've been awful) it might've been a good idea to cast somebody who
at least seemed as if he could eventually turn into the Han that we met in "A New Hope," as Lucas did when he hired Ewan McGregor
to play young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the prequel trilogy. McGregor
miraculously managed to maintain physical and vocal continuity with the
role's original inhabitant, Alec Guinness,
while still giving his own performance. Ehrenreich achieves that second
thing here, but not so dazzlingly that you forget to obsess over the
first.
Some mysterious harmony ought to occur in a movie
that constantly and very obviously tries to connect with its brand even
as its lead actor does his own thing (mostly; the flirtatious grin is
pleasingly Fordian), but the two impulses seem at odds with each other
here. Was Howard expending so much effort bringing weight, maturity and
sincerity to a movie that was at risk of turning goofy and glib under
Lord and Miller that he didn't have the mental bandwidth left to focus
on the actors? Some of the performers make a strong impression
(particularly the alert and reactive Glover, who McGregors the part in a
big way, and Phoebe Waller-bridge as the voice of Lando's copilot,
L3-37, a robot fighting to abolish machine slavery).
But others seem a bit lost at times. Clarke's character has many
layers, but none of them quite seem connected to each other, and she
comes across as much too nice to do some of the things she ends up
doing. Newton, one of the stars of "Westworld," doesn't get much screen
time, and Harrelson, one of those incorrigible kleptomaniac scene
stealers, doesn't give us anything that we couldn't have gotten from any
other fiftysomething character actor who can twirl a gun, crack wise,
and smirk. Paul Bettany's crime boss Dryden Vos might be the first major
player in a "Star Wars" movie to make no impression at all, but the
actor was probably doing the best he could under the circumstances; he
replaced Michael Kenneth Williams,
who was not available for reshoots and was originally cast as a CGI
character, so he was probably playing somebody who had to be rewritten
on the fly without damaging the surrounding narrative architecture. (A
documentary about this film's production troubles would almost certainly
be more fascinating than the film itself.) Some of the unthinking
racism that damaged “The Phantom Menace” returns here as well—you’ll
know it when you see it—and the longer the film goes on,?the clearer it
becomes that “Solo,” like many a “Star Wars” film before it, is not too
interested in women.
I say all this with lifelong love for a film
series, and in recognition of the challenges this project faced. "Solo"
is in a unique and tricky position. Since taking over "Star Wars,"
Disney has tried to Marvel-ize Lucas' universe, extending the
Skywalker-centric main storyline and filling it out with one-offs that
flesh out stories that are adjacent to it. Whatever you thought of
"Rogue One" as entertainment (I loved it), it managed to concoct a story
with its own internal philosophy, style and feeling, and when you
compare it with "Solo," you realize that a big part of what made it work
was its lack of connection to famous characters who couldn't be killed
off. Except for Grand Moff Tarkin, who was basically a bunch of Peter
Cushing-shaped pixels, none of the major players were people we knew;
most of them were characters we'd never heard of, the grunts and
redshirts of the galactic war, and that meant anything could happen to
them, and that the film didn't have to set aside a certain amount of
space for enacting things we'd heard about but never seen dramatized.
"Solo"
doesn't have as much maneuvering room. It's not the first "Star Wars"
film to visualize the pasts of characters that we'd spent time with in
other incarnations—the prequel trilogy gave us a lot of information
about Anakin Skywalker, aka the future Darth Vader, as well as Obi-Wan
Kenobi, Yoda, Palpatine and others—but it is the first "Star Wars" movie
that often feels as if it exists mainly to supply visuals for scenarios
that fans have long daydreamed about, or read about in "Star Wars"
supplementary texts. And even the greatest of filmmakers aren't likely
to be able to give us images, performances and moments that exceed the
ones we've been imagining forever. The bits that land tend to be ones
that come out of nowhere and that have their own excitingly new
emotional temperature, such as L3-37’s righteous ecstasy when she gets
to free some fellow machines, and her frustration with Lando, whom she
fancies even though he takes her for granted and is, shall we say, not
compatible.
"Solo" is hauntingly effective in a very specific way: it gives you a
strong sense of Han Solo and Chewbacca's friendship: how it formed, how
it solidified, and what it gave to each of them. Now that we've seen
the full arc of Solo's life, the innocent joy of discovery that's
present in every scene between the two of them acquires a sorrowful
undertow. Chewbacca, we learn, was already 180 when he met Han. I'm not
sure about Wookiee years-to-human years conversion, but the sheer amount
of time that the big walking carpet has spent in the universe flips our
perception of the friendship and makes us think differently about "The
Force Awakens," where Han is an old man nearing the end of his run. If
the entirety were as charming and unexpectedly haunting as the
friendship between Han and Chewie, "Solo" might've been a classic. As
is, it’s a frictionless trip down memory lane.
Board the Millennium Falcon and journey to a galaxy far, far away in 'Solo: A Star Wars Story,' an adventure with the most beloved scoundrel in the galaxy. Through a series of daring escapades deep within a dark and dangerous criminal underworld, Han Solo meets his mighty future copilot Chewbacca and encounters the notorious gambler Lando Calrissian, in a journey that will set the course of one of the Star Wars saga's most unlikely heroes. Written by Walt Disney Studios
Official Sites:
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
25 May 2018 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
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Production Co:
HE IS BACK - DEADPOOL 2 (2018) - FILM REVIEW
Deadpool 2 (2018)
Director:
David LeitchStars:
OK, obviously none of that happens, except for Wade blowing himself
up—and if you've ever read a comic book in your life, or seen a movie,
or drawn breath, you know that a superhero film doesn't start with the
hero offing himself unless it plans to undo the damage as soon as
possible. "After surviving a near fatal bovine attack, a
disfigured cafeteria chef (Wade Wilson) struggles to fulfill his dream
of becoming Mayberry’s hottest bartender while also learning to cope
with his lost sense of taste." That's how 20th Century Fox's official
website summarized the plot of this movie when it first came out, which
should give you some small indication of the level of sobriety the
filmmakers have brought to this venture. Even when "Deadpool 2" is being serious, or trying to fool you into thinking it's being serious, there's a gleam in its eye that gives the game away.
The script, credited to Reynolds, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, finds the mutant Deadpool meandering his way to the X-Mansion and joining various X-Men members—including Domino (Zazie Beetz) and Colossus (computer effects plus the voice of Stefan Kapičić)—as they try to protect an alienated, rebellious teen mutant called Firefist (Julian Dennison) from assassination by the Terminator, er Looper, er mercenary-from-the-future Matthew Cable (Josh Brolin, aka Young Nick Nolte Returned, playing his second Marvel character in less than a month).
There are striking similarities between certain, um, elements
in this film and "Avengers: Infinity War"—a fluke of timing, surely;
the movies don't even share a studio (yet). Among them: a thorough
working-out of the old, mostly rhetorical comic book question, "How dead
is dead?" "Deadpool 2" treats the topic about as thoughtfully as it
can, without ever, for one millisecond, seeming as if it might look real
suffering in the eye. As in the first "Deadpool," the backbone of which
was an unexpected cancer diagnosis, Wade and other characters suffer
loss and disappointment, but nothing that can't be fixed or amended
through machinations that are already implicitly promised in the hero's
opening narration. There's some unpleasantness, but the cheeky dialogue
and cheerfully cynical voice-over ensure that we'll never have to
marinate in it. It's just not that kind of film. More so than any other
superhero movie, including the original "Deadpool," this one is the
R-rated comics equivalent of one of those knowingly featherweight Bob Hope and Bing Crosby "Road" movies (for a full list, click here),
in which Hope' and Crosby's fast-talking vagabonds wriggled out of
tight spots through sheer shamelessness and verbosity, pausing to break
the fourth wall and tell the viewer that now might be a good time to go
out for popcorn.
The result feels a bit like a lavishly produced,
superhero- and supervillain-stocked standup comedy special, with fight
scenes, chases and explosions spliced into footage of the hero telling
you about the wild couple of weeks he just had. Reynolds repeats the
original "Deadpool" dynamic of giving the movie at least five times what
it gives him in return, turning neediness, self-pity, desperation and
narcissism into different kinds of comic fuel. There are constant
acknowledgements that you're watching a movie, and a formulaic one at
that (right before the the start of the film's third act, our boy
declares that if his plan succeeds, everybody gets to go home early
because there'll be no need for a third act). There are seemingly
random (but not really) pop culture references, including a comparison
of the melodies of "Do You Want to Build a Snowman" from "Frozen" and "Papa, Can You Hear Me?" from "Yentl."
There's shtick galore, including quite a bit of slapstick with a body
count, plus some retroactive criticism of the Marvel brand's attempts to
be capital-I Important ("We're the X-Men, a dated metaphor for racism
in the '60s!" Deadpool declares, right before a big setpiece). There's
even a protracted bit of mugging near the end that's reminiscent of early Jim Carrey.
I
originally agreed with this site's less-than-enthused review of the
first movie, which was "edgy" in an obvious, trying-too-hard way,
occasionally wearing its "R" rating with all the misplaced pride of a
middle school boy sporting a chocolate milk mustache as if it were a
Sam Elliott-style soup strainer (although—kudos!—the details of
Wade's cancer treatment and sex life with Vanessa were truly unexpected
for a film that expensive). But the array of PG-13 superhero films that
preceded and followed, and that all seemed hypnotized by their own ashy
solemnity to one degree or another, made the original "Deadpool" feel
like a necessary counterweight. The more often I stumbled across it on
TV over the past few years, the more I appreciated it. (The inept and
obvious "Suicide Squad," which came out a few months later, showed how not to do that kind of movie.)
And
there's something to be said for a film that knows what it is, and is
serenely content to be that thing. Except for a few individual lines and
sight gags, a brilliantly over-the-top action-comedy sequence near the
midsection, and some characteristically sharp performances (including
the one by Brolin, who imbues what might've otherwise been a
granite-jawed killer meathead with recognizable humanity) there's not
much to fondly recall here. But since "Deadpool 2" shows no sign of
wanting to rewrite a whole genre with its audacity, we might as well
concede that it does the job it apparently wants to do with
professionalism and flair, and that the faster we end this piece, the
faster you can go on social media and complain about it.
Official Sites:
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
16 May 2018 (Philippines) See more »Also Known As:
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2.39 : 1Did You Know?
Quotes
Deadpool: Doing the right thing is messy. You want to fight for what's right, sometimes you have to fight dirty.See more »
Soundtracks
9 to 5
Performed by Dolly Parton
Performed by Dolly Parton
FIRST LOOK - THE PREDATOR (2018) - TRAILER
The Predator (2018)
When a young boy accidentally triggers the
universe's most lethal hunters return to Earth, only a ragtag crew of
ex-soldiers and a disgruntled science teacher can prevent the end of the
human race.
Director:
Shane BlackStars:
From the outer reaches of space to the
small-town streets of suburbia, the hunt comes home. Now, the universe's
most lethal hunters are stronger, smarter and deadlier than ever
before, having genetically upgraded themselves with DNA from other
species. When a young boy accidentally triggers their return to Earth,
only a ragtag crew of ex-soldiers and a disgruntled science teacher can
prevent the end of the human race.
Written by
Twentieth Century Fox
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
14 September 2018 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Predator See more »Company Credits
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CHARLIZE THERON IN - TULLY (2018) - FILM REVIEW
There
are certain truths about new motherhood that are unassailable. Things
that lodge themselves in your psyche as permanently as the butternut
squash stain on your last halfway decent T-shirt. The bone-deep
exhaustion. The uneasy combination of anxiety and boredom. The pressure
to bring sexy back when it feels like someone has driven a combine
harvester through your nethers. All of which this latest collaboration
between writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman nails with harrowing accuracy.
It’s not exactly new territory. But what makes Tully such a tragicomic triumph compared with the brittle perkiness of films like I Don’t Know How She Does It (2011) and the god-awful Motherhood (2009) is that the film is not afraid to mine some pretty dark thematic territory.
Tully (2018)
This is thanks largely to a towering performance from Charlize Theron
as Marlo, mother of three, including a newborn. Theron has perfected
the dead-eyed gaze of a woman who can’t quite work out where motherly
love ends and Stockholm syndrome
begins. Baby weight and cupcake panic are tag-teaming to smother any
spark of life she once had. Then Marlo cracks, and calls the night nanny
for whom her wealthy brother has paid as a gift.
Enter millennial Mary Poppins, Tully (Mackenzie Davis), an
unflappable free spirit who effortlessly shoulders the burden of
motherhood. Marlo’s connection with her nanny is sudden and profound:
Tully is like a window into her own past self.
The wistful, sometimes melancholic tone of this rueful examination of
parenthood doesn’t blunt the edges of Cody’s acutely perceptive
writing. And it is perhaps no coincidence that Reitman, who seemed
tonally unmoored with his last two films – Men, Women & Children and Labor Day – returns to the incisive form last exhibited with Young Adult, his previous collaboration with Cody and Theron.
Tully is emotionally complex, bleakly funny and only slightly depressing.
A mother of three hires a night nanny to help with her newborn.
Director:
Jason ReitmanWriter:
Diablo CodyStars:
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
4 May 2018 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Aukle Tule See more »Company Credits
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LAD MOVIE - DISOBEDIENCE (2018) - FILM REVIEW
"Disobedience," Sebastián Lelio’s follow-up to his 2017 Oscar-winning film "A Fantastic Woman,"
and his first English-language film, starts with a Rabbi giving a
sermon about free will. He speaks of angels, beasts, and Adam and Eve.
He says, fearsomely, that humans are "free to choose." Then he drops
dead. There's something refreshing about a story so unconcerned with
"subtlety." Put it all out there. Foreground the theme. Underline as you
go. "Disobedience," based on Naomi Alderman's novel (with adaptation by
Lelio and Rebecca Lenkiewicz) is a good old-fashioned melodrama, albeit with a quieter touch.
Disobedience (2017)
The rabbi who dropped dead was Rav Krushka (Anton Lesser), an important figure in the London Orthodox Jewish community. His daughter Ronit (Rachel Weisz),
a New York-based photographer, left years ago. When she returns home,
she walks into the unchanged world of her childhood, looked at by
relatives and former friends with curiosity and concern. She is
rebelliously secular, with long free hair, cigarettes, short leather
skirts. The obituary for her father states that "sadly" he had no
children. It stings. She's been gone so long she had no idea that Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), taken in by her father as a protégé at 13, and Esti, her childhood friend (Rachel McAdams)
have gotten married. There's an awkward moment in the kitchen when she
makes the connection. The shock on Weisz's face is eloquent, although we
don't know the backstory yet.
The eloquence of the performances
is key to the material succeeding, since Lelio does not introduce the
characters, and their connections, in a straightforward way. It takes
some time before you figure out who Dovid is to Ronit, although from
their behavior you can tell they once were close. She forgets herself
and almost hugs him in a friendly greeting, and then laughs when he
recoils from her touch. Dovid and Esti invite Ronit to stay with them
during her time in London. This is playing with fire, since it soon
becomes clear that Esti and Ronit had an adolescent romance, well-known
to the community at the time. Lelio's approach helps us feel we are
thrust into the middle of a very tight-knit community, with a long
shared history. Exposition is always awkward, so Lelio doesn't bother
with it at all. "Exposition" wouldn't be spoken out loud in this crowd
since everyone knows everything about everyone else. Dovid and Etsi
don't yet have children. She is a teacher in a girls school and enjoys
her work. He is set to step into Rav Krushka's sizable shoes. Ronit's
arrival throws everything into confusion.
This is Lelio's third
film in a row about women (the first being 2013's "Gloria"), and he is
deeply empathetic to the ways in which repressive societies put women in
all kinds of impossible double- and triple-binds. In "A Fantastic
Woman," a trans woman fought to be allowed to grieve for her dead lover,
and Lelio's focus on the cruelty of the surrounding world pushed the
film into a nightmare-scape. He dials this back in "Disobedience." There
are no villains. Even the strict culture of Orthodox Judaism isn't
really a villain. The culture is shown as a close one, with many social
benefits, benefits which Ronit—in leaving—has missed out on. With all of
the dramatic and sexual stuff in the film, the best scene may very well
be a group scene early on, when Ronit joins Dovid and Esti's Shabbat,
attended by a small group of Ronit's relatives. The "mood" at the table
is far from friendly or warm, but it's also not toxic. This is a family.
Ronit is a lost lamb, but there is still space for her in the fold. A
lively debate occurs, and when Esti pops in unexpectedly with a cutting
observation, Ronit stares at her from across the table, thrilled. These
all feel like real people, not caricatures. (In this way, it reminded me
a little bit of Peter Weir's "Witness,"
where you could see why Rachel didn't just run away with the cop,
leaving the Amish world behind. You could see why she wanted to stay,
why she had to stay.)
The relationship between Ronit and Esti, past and present, is
clearly the focal point of the film, but Lelio takes his time getting
there. McAdams is miscast, but she does a fine job showing Esti's
burgeoning emotional life, exploding out of her in a rush: it is as
though time stopped for her when Ronit fled the community so many years
ago. But McAdams is so inherently positive. In a 1950s film,
she'd play a perky ingenue. She's wonderful here when showing
mischievous delight sneaking a puff off Ronit's cigarette. But when she
has to show Esti's anguish at being forced to marry in order to cure her
of wanting to sleep with women, she can't get to the depths required.
She knows what the depths are, but she can't get there in the way a Lili Taylor, or Elizabeth Moss, or Natalie Portman
could. But the scenes between Weisz and McAdams are fascinating, each
actress listening closely to the other, paying attention to every
nuance. It doesn't reach the scope of Grand Tragic Romance, but then, it
isn't meant to. These were two women whose normal adolescent crush was
banned. In a way, time stopped for the both of them.
The colors
of the film are subdued and chilly, all blacks, greys, smoky-blues, so
that at times it looks like a black-and-white photograph. It's
beautiful, in a classical and formal way. "A Fantastic Woman" featured
many surreal dreamlike images, but Lelio plays this one straight. So
straight, though, it is sometimes a detriment. It's the kind of movie
where teachers are shown giving lectures which directly comment on the
action of the movie. Dovid and his young rabbinical students discuss
sensuous love and its importance, and Esti discusses "Othello" with her
students. In one scene in "A Fantastic Woman," Aretha's "(You Make Me
Feel Like) a Natural Woman" is prominently featured, and in a scene in
"Disobedience," to break an awkward silence with Esti, Ronit spins the
dial on the radio and stops on The Cure's "Love Song," which just so
happens to narrate perfectly the emotions of the moment. These obvious
choices really stick out.
Pauline Kael observed that melodrama is
"the chief vehicle for political thought in our films," which you can
see time and again, particularly in films made before the 1950s. In
literature, melodrama can come off as overblown, preachy. But cinema can
make melodrama seem not just real, but urgent and relevant.
"Disobedience" could have gone even further in the direction of "Stella
Dallas"-melodrama torment. Some of it comes across as curiously
low-stakes, considering the circumstances. But, in a way, that's
refreshing too.
A woman returns to the community that shunned her
for her attraction to a childhood friend. Once back, their passions
reignite as they explore the boundaries of faith and sexuality.
