I'm finishing up a couple of last year's late releases. These two titles from new-ish directors were interesting enough that I want to get some thoughts down.
First we have "Wildlife," a memoir about a young man watching his parents' marriage fall apart. Paul Dano directs a screenplay that he and Zoe Kazan co-wrote, their first since 2012's "Ruby Sparks." Ed Oxenbould stars as Joe Brinson, and Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan as his parents, Jerry and Jeannette. It's the early 1960s, and the Brinsons have recently moved to Great Falls, Montana. Jerry loses his job almost immediately, forcing Jeannette to go back to work. Her resentment grows as Joe's pride keeps hm unemployed, until he decided to take on dangerous work as a fire-fighter battling the local spate of forest fires.
This is an old fashioned kind of melodrama, with only a few characters, very simple conflicts, and the filmmaking is largely built around showcasing the performances. And Carey Mulligan's performance is absolutely worth showcasing. We watch her transform from a worried, but supportive housewife, to an angry, frustrated woman who seeks out troubling avenues to express her unhappiness. Crucially, the film makes no judgments as to whether she and Jerry are in the wrong. We see the situation through Joe's eyes, and he clearly loves and sympathizes with both of his parents.
Joe, unfortunately, is also the film's biggest weakness. He's largely a blank slate, and Oxenbould's performance is pretty bland. Next to Mulligan and Gyllenhaal, it's easy to forget that he's even there half the time. Otherwise, the film is pretty solid, if unspectacular melodrama. There's a nice spareness and exactness to the filmmaking, and I like all the subtle period touches that help set a very specific tone and atmosphere. The film feels modern in its inclinations, but never imposes modern values on its characters the way some other films of this kind have.
And then we have "Vox Lux," which is an audacious, showy, flaming wreck of a film. Director Brady Corbet starts out on okay footing, showing us a school shooting playing out, and how this inadvertently launches the pop star career of one of its survivors, a girl named Celeste (Raffey Cassidy). Then we jump ahead several years to when Celeste is in her thirties, and is played by Natalie Portman. She has her own teenage daughter, Albertine (Cassidy), who is being raised by Celeste's long-suffering sister Ellie (Stacy Martin). While preparing for the launch of a major concert, Celeste also has to deal with the media storm around a recent terrorist shooting linking itself to her, and the consequences of living a rock star lifestyle. Jude Law and Jennifer Ehle are on hand as her manager and publicist respectively.
"Vox Lux" is full of little gimmicks that are trying to be clever and insightful. Or maybe they're trying to be provocative and unexpected. It's hard to say. So we watch the full end credits roll run during the opening sequence. So we get chapter dividers with Willem Dafoe's narrator talking about the state of America and the state of Celeste's career. So the whole movie builds up to an extended concert sequence that just keeps going and going, until the movie ends. In interviews, Corbet has expressed his belief that that the films is about Celeste literally making a deal with the devil in exchange for fame. Only two lines of dialogue in a 110 minute film directly address this notion.
And maybe I could have given all of that nonsense a pass if the core of the movie were stronger. Most of it comes down to Natalie Portman's performance as the older, substance-abusing, terribly damaged Celeste. She certainly looks the part, but between her exaggerated accent and her awful behavior, Celeste is a caricature. And with huge chunks of the run time given over to the musical finale and the earlier segments with the young celeste, there's not enough time to build anything more substantive. We can't fault Brady Corbet for ambition, but his experiments with the narrative prove disastrous to any kind of point he's trying to make about the destructive nature of fame. If that is the point.
There may not actually be a point. It's hard to say.
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