A 1960-era drama based on a Richard Ford novel, Wildlife (IFC Films, 10.19) is about ennui, loneliness and infidelity. It’s set in Montana and is specifically about 30something Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) and her strained relationship with unemployed hubby Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) after he leaves the household to fight a nearby forest fire. The story is mostly about Jeanette’s decision to slip into a diseased affair with an older, Uriah Heep-like rich guy (Bill Camp) and how this traumatizes her 14 year-old son Joe (Ed Oxonbould).
In my 1.20.18 Sundance Film Festival review I wrote that I was “appalled — astonished — by the cruel, self-destructive behavior of this sad 34 year-old woman, and particularly by her decision to invite her son to almost participate in some extra-marital humping with a rich, small-town fat guy while her doltish husband is off fighting a forest fire.
“Yes, the screenplay (co-authored by director Paul Dano and Zoey Kazan) is an adaptation of Ford’s 1990 novel so blame Ford, right? But who dreams up stuff like this? And what kind of mother has ever injected this kind of sexual poison into her son’s life?
“Infidels hide their affairs, particularly from their kids. But Jeanette more or less whispers in her son’s ear, ‘I dunno but I kinda like this balding toad…he’s rich and definitely not your father, and so I’m feeling a bit flirty and thinking about…well, I’ve said enough.’ And the kid just stares at her like she’s some kind of ghoul from a Vincent Price flick.
Later she says she’s miserable and almost ready to kill herself, but that doesn’t negate the earlier thing.”
Well, the night before last Wildlife screened at the New York Film Festival, and lo and behold someone in the audience had the same reaction as I did. Instead of asking a typical obsequious question the viewer voiced displeasure at Jeanette’s behavior. The nerve!
Paul Sharf‘s 10.2 Indiewire story reports that the “audience member” — a guy — “addressed Mulligan and criticized her character for being ‘completely reprehensible‘ and ‘unsympathetic.’ Mulligan’s response was that the guy was man-complaining — that his rigid preconceptions were getting in the way and that he needed to get past himself.
“We’re all too used to only seeing women behaving really well [in movies],” Mulligan said. “When we see them out of control or struggling it doesn’t ring true because of everything we’ve been brought up to understand that women are always perfect and can do anything. That’s an unrealistic expectation of a woman. Seeing real humanity on-screen can be really jarring from a female perspective.”
HE to Mulligan: If Wildlife had been about a youngish mom leaving her husband and young son in order to take a job in another city or whatever, and if the father had soon after decided to not only embark on an affair with an older woman but invite his son to participate in this indiscretion, I would be just as turned off to Wildlife, and so would that guy who complained the other night — trust me.
The ugliness isn’t about being unhappy or depressed or having an affair — that’s normal. The ugliness is in smearing the aroma of adult carnality in some poor kid’s face.
Sharf has described the question as “an unfortunate moment.” Perhaps other New York Film festival attendees will read this story and take heed. Questions for filmmakers have to be kiss-assy at all times.
In his review of Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born, New Yorker critic Anthony Lane says that “ideally, Cooper’s film would end after the first hour,” or “after the first night that Jackson Maine (Cooper) and Ally (Lady Gaga) spend together. They don’t have sex; they just hang out. She gets into a fight, and he buys frozen peas to soothe her swollen hand. He listens to her sing in a parking lot, then drops her off at home, where she lives with her father (Andrew Dice Clay).
“All that’s good about the film is in these scenes, with their clash of the coarse and the delicate, and you can sense the scales beginning to tip. Everything hereafter feels hokey by comparison, not least the swiftness of the heroine’s ascent.
“Like her counterpart in What Price Hollywood?, Ally used to wait tables, but within a day or two she has flown on a private jet and made her début in concert, hauled into the spotlight by her adoring superstar beau and fêted on social media. Before long, she has a recording deal and three Grammy nominations, while Jackson’s contribution to the Grammys is a bit part in a Roy Orbison tribute. Worse, and more ignominious, is to come.
“A Star Is Born is very much a product of our times. Jackson Maine’s problems date back to a wretched childhood, guaranteeing our pity and love, whereas Fredric March and James Mason gave the hero a nasty and dangerous edge. Cooper’s camera crowds the characters, getting in their faces, and the dialogue is determinedly foul with oaths: ‘If you don’t dig deep into your fucking soul, you won’t have legs.’ What?
“In striving to make the whole thing rough and rooted, Cooper slakes our need for the apparently authentic, and yet the story he tells, with its sudden shock of fame, is little more than a fairy tale.”
“Studio 54 may be a traditional rise-and-fall story, but this film has an unusual focus on the period of reflection that tends to follow. ‘We rose and fell together,’ Schrager says, absent any of the animosity that you’ve come to expect from narratives like this one. Remembering the blow-out party the two friends threw at the club on the night before they went to jail, Schrager can only laugh: ‘When I look back at it now, it is so preposterous. What were we thinking?’
“Matt Tyrnauer‘s film is resonant because it offers such a reasonable and poignant answer to that question. Tyrnauer, in a roundabout way that never quite tips over into dull reverence, suggests that Rubbell and Schrager weren’t wrong to tilt at windmills and pursue a dream that could never survive the morning. Schrager says that ‘it was fun holding onto a lightning bolt,’ and this film loves him for that. He and his late partner were only at the reins of Studio 54 for 33 months, but we’re still talking about what they did more than 33 years later. So, one imagines, maybe they were thinking that it would all be worth it in the end. And maybe they were right.” — from David Erlich‘s Indiewire review, posted at 12:45 pm.
Steve Rubell, Ian Schrager.
Christian Bale‘s Dick Cheney voice is very close to the Real McCoy‘s. Not to mention that unhurried way of speaking and that look of settled, laid-back corruption in his eyes. Plus the bulky appearance (bloated bod, basketball-shaped head) and hairline. And of course the aging as the film moves along. That’s it — I’m a convert. The downside is that Adam McKay‘s Vice doesn’t open until Christmas, which probably means no press screenings until mid-November.
Director-screenwriter friend: “I know a couple people who’ve seen Vice, and they’re calling it the movie that Oliver Stone‘s W wanted to be. The only weak link is Steve Carell, who isn’t convincing as Donald Rumsfeld.” I told him I’d heard that Sam Rockwell‘s Dubya is more or less a cameo, two or three scenes. His reply: “Just like in the actual administration, Bush plays a small supporting role. While Bale fully inhabits Cheney like DeNiro did LaMotta in Raging Bull, Carell merely does an impression and shtick under conspicuous makeup.”
Late this afternoon a Reddit guy called “u/plowkiller” posted a reaction to a Bohemian Rhapsody screening. He didn’t say when or where it happened, if it did. He claims that Rami Malek attended and spoke before the screening. This apparently young guy could be a studio plant…who knows? But here’s what he said:
“It really was something else. Before the movie started, Rami Malek told us that this is a celebration of Queen and Freddie, and it 100% is. Although, with that said, it doesn’t do it entirely through rose-colored glasses. There’s so many exhilarating sequences, from tour montages to just recording the tracks. But well balanced with all the excitement [it’s a] good look at how Freddie Mercury dealt with his sexuality and other various problems in his life.
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I’m not a clubber or a party animal — far from it. The idea of throwing down $17 for a drink at some over-priced, hard-to-get-into, Shallow Hal hotspot fills me with distaste. I’d rather watch a Bluray or walk the streets of Manhattan or hop on the Yamaha for a late-night spin. But Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54 (Zeitgeist, 10.5), a brilliant chronicle of the greatest and coolest nightclub of all time (and I mean going back to the era of ancient Rome), is so intoxicating that after my first viewing in Park City I was telling myself, “Hmm, maybe I could hit some cool club when I get back to Los Angeles.”
Studio 54 wasn’t just an immersive alternate-reality trip on West 54th near 8th Avenue — it was Shangrila. Swirling sounds, dancing until 2 am, possible sex, cocaine, nocturnal delights, quaaludes, drinks and that pounding thump-thump-BUHMP-BUHMP. Okay, calm down — this is 2018 and you work hard for the money. But oh, to have been a young buck in the summer of ’78 and get waved through by Steve Rubell himself and then run into the levitational coolios (rock stars, journalists, models, authors, actors, producers, politicians) in that cellar-level salon…sniff, snort, stop it, you’re dreaming.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Studio 54 is a fascinating, well-told tale — exciting, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad — that invites you to really sink into a mad Manhattan era (mid ’77 to early ’80) that was a real bacchanalian sweet spot — post-pill, pre-AIDS, sexual liberation and an abundance of cocaine and quaaludes (and the operational assistance of the beloved Edlich Pharmacy).
A few weeks ago it hit me why I’m so affected by Studio 54, above and beyond the nostalgia. It’s because it uses a brilliant up-and-down narrative strategy that works as a metaphor for how briefly youth lasts and how suddenly the best of times can end, and how two crafty fellows — Rubell and Ian Schrager — foresaw and caught hold of a special hedonism in the air, a certain what-the-fuckness that happened at just the right time and in just the right way, and all under the cultural auspices of a somewhat prudish and puritanical peanut-farmer president.
And for the first time ever, Schrager actually pokes his head out, sits down and talks to Tyrnauer about the whole saga, start to finish, no holds barred.
Tyrnauer’s strategy for the first hour is to give you a great contact high with the saga of Studio 54’s success — the cinematic equivalent of dropping a Lemmon 714 on an empty stomach. Then it shifts into wistful melancholy as he relates how Rubell and Schrager struck it enormously rich only to see the whole thing collapse less than three years later. Their version of Studio 54 (it re-opened in 1981 under Mark Fleischman and continued for five years) launched in April of ’77 and closed in February ’80, right after which Schrader and Rubell went to jail for tax evasion.
Schrager recovered and went on to great success as a boutique hotelier; Rubell died of AIDS in 1989 at age 45.
In a recent post about leading Best Actor contenders, I mentioned Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Adam McKay‘s Vice. My only remark was that “you don’t get nominated for putting on weight and wearing great make up.” A fellow journalist and award-season handicapper replied, “Since WHEN? Don’t bet against him.” HE to handicapper: I only meant that appearance and make-up are icing on the cake, and that a noteworthy performance has to come from the innards of an actor or it be not at all.”
