"Tuesday," and "The Young Woman and the Sea"

A couple more smaller titles today.

"Tuesday" is one of the odder fantasy films I've seen recently.  It's a sort of existential fable on the nature of life and death, where death is a supernatural talking parrot.  Written and directed by Daina O Pusic, the film is about a terminally ill young woman named Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), whose mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) has been hiding the extent of her own troubles to take care of her.  One day Death (Arinze Kene) arrives for Tuesday in the form of a parrot, who can say a few words and change size, depending on the needs of the situation.  Tuesday is ready to accept her death, but her mother absolutely is not.

I like the portrayal of Death in this movie, as this wild animal that doesn't have a great relationship with humanity after eons of being hated and despised for doing its job, but can be befriended and understood by those who take the trouble.  It doesn't sound like a human being when it talks, but like this elemental force of nature trying to mimic human speech.  The character animation is sometimes beautiful and sometimes menacing and borderline horrific.  I don't think that the allegory entirely works, but it's an interesting way for the filmmakers to engage with the thorny parts of their material, in more cinematic terms.  

I wish that the underlying mother-daughter story between Zora and Tuesday had been more fleshed out.  The actresses are both very committed, and Louis-Dreyfuss in particular is watchable in just about anything.  However, the plotting seemed rushed, and in the end I felt as though I hadn't gotten enough time with them and their relationship - especially at the end.  I wonder if it was a matter of the movie trying to do too much - there's a whole section of the film where Zora learns the value of Death, and Tuesday gets a little lost in the shuffle.  There are a lot of unanswered questions, like why Tuesday and Zora have completely different accents, and how Zora let her life fall apart, which I would have liked to see addressed, or at least placed in a better context.  "Tuesday" deserves a lot of credit for its ambitions, but the follow-through isn't quite there.         

On to "The Young Woman and the Sea," which is a very Disney sports movie.  I don't mean that in a bad way - Disney has built up a solid reputation for inspirational family films, and "The Young Woman and the Sea" feels like a throwback to nostalgic sports dramas like "Seabiscuit" and "The Natural" that don't come along very often anymore.  This is the movie it feels like "The Boys in the Boat" was trying to be last year, but it didn't have a story nearly as good.  Daisy Ridley stars as Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1925.  Directed by Joachim Ronning, who made the Norwegian "Kon Tiki" movie, and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and his outfit, "Young Woman" is expertly engineered to be a crowd pleaser, and I'm honestly a little surprised that its release has been so under the radar.  

This is the best performance I've seen from Daisy Ridley, playing Trudy as an underdog among underdogs.  She's sickly as a child due to measles, and is initially prevented from swimming at all by her protective father (Kim Bodnia) and mother (Jeanette Hain).  Eventually Trudy's stubbornness gets her in the water, and she and her sister Meg (Tilda Cogham-Hervey) are allowed to train with the Women's Swimming Association under Charlotte Epstein (Sian Cliffords), Trudy's first coach.  Other coaches Trudy will have on her path to victory include the combative Jabez Wolffe (Christopher Eccleston) and the unorthodox Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham).   

The script by Jeff Nathanson lays on Trudy's constant battle against expectations pretty thick.  Female swimmers were a rarity in the era, and not taken seriously, but the callousness of the sporting establishment often strains credulity.  However, once Trudy identifies the Channel as her goal, the movie finds its groove.  The dramatization of the historic swim couldn't be better, and all the little subplots with her family and coaches pay off in a satisfying way.  There's absolutely nothing new or innovative going on here, and if you're at all familiar with these kinds of films, you'll be able to predict every twist and turn and dramatic pause in the dialogue.  However, sometimes all you want is an old-fashioned sports hero story, and I haven't seen one this good in a long time.      

---