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I’ve been hearing about Robert Zemeckis‘s Welcome to Marwen (Universal 12.21) since last summer. It opens on 12.21 (19 days hence) and I haven’t heard zip about screenings.

We all know the drill: It’s about the true saga of Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell), a photographer and model builder who was attacked 18 years ago by a group of neo-Nazi ruffians. (Hogan camp went to a blue-collar bar and brilliantly mentioned being a cross-dresser.) He suffered severe brain damage and a near-complete loss of memory, and had to re-learn how to walk and speak. As a form of therapy he created a small-scale, World War II-era Belgian village which became a kind of alternate-universe environment for the guy.

Formerly called The Women of Marwen, pic costars Leslie Mann, Merritt Wever, Janelle Monae, Gwendoline Christie, Diane Kruger and Eliza Gonzalez.

The script by Zemeckis and Caroline Thompson is based on Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg‘s 2010 documentary about same.

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I first saw Kenneth Lonergan‘s You Can Count On Me, probably the best written and most affecting sister-brother drama I’ve ever seen, at the January 2000 Sundance Film Festival. I was especially touched by Mark Ruffalo‘s lost-soul character as he resembled my younger brother Tony, who died of an accidental Oxycontin overdose in October 2009.

Two months later I read a couple of reviews of Lonergan’s just-opened The Waverly Gallery, a “memory play” (i.e., one without much of a story). It’s about Gladys Green, an 80-something art gallery manager and woman attorney coping with the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease, and how this burgeoning condition affects her daughter Ellen, son-in-law Howard and grandson Daniel.

Lonergan based it on his grandmother’s deterioration from said disease. The great Eileen Heckart played Gladys to great acclaim; Josh Hamilton played Daniel.

Freshly attuned and excited as I was about Lonergan back then, I remember saying to myself “jeez, where the hell can you go with a play about Alzheimer’s?” I couldn’t imagine anything but a downward trajectory. The family in question can only do their best and tough it out until the end. Especially if they’re determined to not put the Alzheimer’s sufferer into assisted living, which (be honest) is what many if not most families do these days.

Lucas Hedges, Elaine May in The Waverly Gallery.

Then again there’s always the nourishment to be had from Lonergan’s excellent writing along with the fact that The Waverly Gallery is a kind of dark comedy.

My initial conclusion was that since there’s nowhere to go with Alzheimer’s plot-wise, the only thing Lonergan could do is somehow persuade the audience that this horrid, godawful disease is a metaphor for the selective memories and occasional delusions that affect all of us from time to time.

How would he do that? Play it dead straight. Recreate this sad, ghastly experience as closely and sharply as he could, get excellent actors to make the characters come to life, and don’t throw in any kind of fake-bullshit upbeat ending.

18 and 1/2 years later or more specifically last night, I saw a revival of The Waverly Gallery at the John Golden theatre on West 45th. I was deeply impressed by Lonergan’s writing, as I knew I would be. And by Elaine May‘s feisty, sharp-as-a-tack performance as Gladys — the last time she was on Broadway was 58 years ago in An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May. (Which was also performed at the John Golden theatre.) And by Lucas Hedges‘ performance as Daniel. And Michael Cera‘s as Don, a not-very-talented painter whose work Gladys hangs in her gallery, and David Cromer‘s as Howard.

I don’t know what to say other than it’s very well done. There was never a second in which I didn’t feel fully engaged and fascinated, and generally delighted to be in the company of all these talented people, director Lila Neugebauer included. This is what a first-rate theatrical sink-in can and should feel like for the most part, I was telling myself.

I just can’t honestly say that I was blown away, but how many times does a stage play manage that?

For The Waverly Gallery isn’t so much a “play” that begins at point A and ends at point C or D, but a meditative memoir that says “you may think your life sucks but wait until you have to deal with a grandmother who’s losing more and more of her mind until there’s almost nothing left, and then she’s deep in the dungeon from which there’s no returning.”

And yet The Waverly Gallery is a seriously composed experience that reminds you of reality in a hundred different ways with a hundred little shoulder taps, and which echoes all over the place.

I’m taken with the following line from Ben Brantley’s 3.23.00 N.Y. Times review: “The language itself ranges from the careful elegance of Daniel’s monologues to lines that find the startling patterns and potency in the rambling speech of senility.”

Thanks so much to David Pollick for helping me with the tickets. The seats were excellent — row G, 102 and 104.

“Trust love all the way” is the marketing slogan for Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk (Annapurna, 12.14). I’m sorry but I regard that advice as a bill of goods.

Boil the snow out of Beale Street and the basic idea is this: Life is unfair and sometimes cruel, especially for POCs in ’70s Harlem and double-especially when a fraudulent rape charge lands poor young Fonny (Stephan James) in jail, leaving his pregnant young wife Tish (Kiki Layne) and their respective families (including Tish’s mom, played by Regina King) trying to somehow clear his name.

The basic drill is that justice is possible but too often unlikely, and in the end the thing that gets Fonny and Kiki through is love, as in (a) “black love is black wealth,” (b) “love is the fuel of survival, and (c) “despite the hardship and the fact that sometimes life sucks extra hard, love is the key to surviving the brutality of White America.”

Satisfying movies always deliver a sense of justice at the end. The punishing of the guilty, the exoneration of the innocent, he/she gets what’s coming to him/her. Some sense of balance and fairness. “As you sow, so shall you reap” = Michael Corleone at the end of The Godfather, Part II or Zampano at the end of La Strada.

The bold strategy of If Beale Street Could Talk (which I fully respect) is to deny this payoff to Fonny, Tish and their families, and therefore to the audience. And at the same time it offers the “love will see you through if you really trust it” homily, which I regard as more of a bromide.

I’m in no way questioning the message or the metaphor in James Baldwin’s same-titled 1974 novel, and the meaning of Beale Street as a condition, a state of mind, the blues and the history of that, you can’t sing it if you haven’t felt it, black Americans trying to get by and pull through despite a sometimes wicked system.

But If Beale Street Could Talk is fundamentally unsatisfying because people we’ve come to know and care about are handed a shit sandwich at the end. (Or at the very least my idea of one.) Which is why when it slips out of the safety cocoon of industry screenings and award-season events and critical praise and whatnot, Beale Street is going to quietly die. Which sometimes happens with good films.

The bottom line is that people generally don’t pay to see a film in order to share in the eating of a shit sandwich.

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As one who mostly despised the wealth-porny Crazy Rich Asians (my 8.19 review), I’m delighted to read that it’s bombing in China. Variety‘s Patrick Frater and Becky Davis are reporting that John M. Chu‘s formulaic softball satire “will be lucky to score more than $1 million in its opening weekend at the China box office,” and that it’s opened in eighth place.

Is this some kind of China vs. Singapore cultural resentment thing? Are we to presume that Chinese ticket-buyers share my loathing for the obnoxious values and lifestyles of the Singaporean ultra-rich, or for the same reasons I tried to explain four months ago? That sounds unlikely but obviously the lack of interest was profound.

With WHE still stalling on delivery, I bought this from a good-guy reader who works at CBS headquarters on Sixth and 52nd (i.e., “Black Rock”). He left it for me with the lobby security guy.

Alas, such a purchase would fall under the heading of “exorbitant expense” at this juncture.

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Hollywood Elsewhere will be bopping (traipsing?) around Manhattan for the next 11 hours or so. I’ll be attending a William Goldman memorial at 3:30 pm .(here’s my 11.16 obit), possibly dropping by a Warner Bros. holiday party around 5:30 or 6 pm, and then catching an 8 pm performance of Kenneth Lonergan‘s The Waverly Gallery at the John Golden theatre. The cast stars Elaine May, Joan Allen, Michael Cera, Lucas Hedges and David Cromer.

A Bluray of Abraham Polonsky‘s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here pops on 1.2.19.

A well-written, well-honed, humanistic adventure-drama that offers full and absolute respect to Robert Blake‘s titular Native American character, Willie Boy doesn’t cut it by today’s p.c. standards because Blake and particularly Katherine Ross, who plays Willie’s Chemehuevi-Paiute bride, are ethnically incorrect. If he were alive today, the once-blacklisted Polonsky would be experiencing a second political shunning. The p.c. zealots would be saying, “Why didn’t you insist on authentic Native American actors to play Blake and Ross’s roles? It was made 49 years ago, we realize, but still…shame on you.”

The below clip reminds me of what a graceful, agile, first-rate physical actor Robert Redford was when young — he was in the athletic league of Burt Lancaster in the ’50s and ’60s.

“Natalie Portman tips Vox Lux off balance. The simple act of drinking through a straw is turned into an embarrassing megaslurp. Other actors get shouted down. Maybe, however, that’s the point — not that poor Celeste was shoved into the spotlight by a traumatic event but that popular renown, in a saturated age, is itself a prolonged form of trauma, warping the body’s motions and wrecking any chance of equanimity. Lady Gaga, in A Star Is Born, is far more stirring than Portman but also, strangely, more innocent, alive to the prospect of happiness. Brady Corbet’s film rejects that hope, suggesting that no sooner are you born, as a star, than something within you begins to die.” — from Anthony Lane‘s “Vox Lux Bends to the Temper of the Times,” from the 12.10 New Yorker issue.

For all the things that I love and worship about Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, there’s one thing that doesn’t add up and seems increasingly bizarre the more you think about it. Until it all becomes clear.

Roma is a naturalistic family drama, set in Mexico City in ’70 and ’71. The main character is Yalitza Aparicio‘s Cleo, a saintly maid who helps to take care of four kids (along with mama, grandma and another domestic) as well as the family dog. There’s a father, but he’s mostly absent — at work, travelling or spending time with a girlfriend.

The bizarre thing is Cleo’s odd refusal to clean up the dog poop that’s constantly being deposited on the sheltered concrete driveway adjacent to the main home. Every time Cuaron (who also served as his own dp) shows us someone leaving or arriving there are always two or three loads, and once or twice we see the family car squishing them flat.

Yes, there’s a scene in which Cleo brushes the poop into a waste pan and spot-cleans the driveway with a sanitizer of some kind. But more often we see the loads just sitting there — naggingly, defiantly — and once you start noticing their persistent presence you can’t think of anything else.

And at the same time you can’t help but wonder why poor Cleo isn’t more focused, especially considering a moment in which she overhears the pater familias complaining about how “there’s dog crap everywhere” and especially after she’s sharply scolded by Marina de Tavira‘s mother character (i.e., Sofia) to stay on top of this.

After a while you begin to realize that Cleo isn’t forgetting to scoop the poop as much as deliberately avoiding it. Not angrily but in a kind of “well, I don’t know, not in the mood, maybe not” kind of way. And you start to ask yourself “why?” It’s obviously an unpleasant task, but she knows she’ll incur greater wrath from her employers if she lets the matter slide. And yet she does.

Once you start thinking about the loads there’s almost nothing else that gets into your head. They don’t become the whole movie, but they never go away either. The loads, the loads, the loads…why doesn’t she attend to them more frequently? Does she ever walk the dog?

Then your brain flips over and you begin to wonder if the loads are more than what they seem. Maybe the loads are there but maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re metaphors for family problems that are being ignored, or even broader social problems (i.e., what the street protests are about). Maybe the loads are reminders of those things in life that can never really be fixed or fully understood. Or those nagging spiritual issues that Albert Camus and Rainer Maria Rilke and Carlos Casteneda wrote about.

The Roma poop issue is never resolved, but I swear to God there’s more to it than just “Cleo should clean up more.” It’s an existential quandary of some kind.

I should have streamed Support The Girls last night. That way I’d have something substantial to say about Regina Hall having yesterday won the New York Film Critics Circle Best Actress award. But I probably won’t be able to see it until Sunday. I have to catch Mary Poppins Returns this evening, and tomorrow I’ll be running around Manhattan the whole day.

For the sake of discussion I’m just going to repeat the basics, and offer what others are saying.

I mentioned yesterday that “nobody” had Hall on their top-five Best Actress contenders list, although some critics (including Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn and David Ehrlich) wrote some very positive things about Support The Girls and Hall’s performance last March when it premiered at SXSW.

Magnolia and Ginsberg-Libby offered Support The Girls press screenings last July and August, but it opened two days before Telluride and — this isn’t nothing — it made a grand total of $129K domestic. Not a typo — it made $129K all in.

It would be one thing if the NYFCC had given Hall a special stand-out, we-love-you, keep-on-keepin’-on award, but they gave her their Best Actress award, and that presumably means they felt Hall was better (stronger, more penetrating, more extra-special, more shake-the-rafters) than Melissa McCarthy‘s performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me. Or Glenn Close‘s in The Wife. Or Viola Davis‘s work in Widows. Or even Lady Gaga‘s in A Star Is Born.

Really? Better than McCarthy?

Some are saying that the NYFCC voted for Hall as a show-off gesture, and that it’s (a) partly about looking hip and ahead-of-the-curve and and (b) partly about delivering a huge fuck-you to the Gold Derby prognosticators for sticking to the same five or six Best Actress contenders. I completely agree with this sentiment when it comes to 90% of the GD members having refused to put First Reformed star Ethan Hawke on their Best Actor lists, but I also sympathize with their not having paid any attention to Hall, mainly because I haven’t seen it. (And I’m obviously not proud of this dereliction.)

The L.A. Film Critics Association has been playing this “nyah, nyah” game this for years, handing out awards to eccentric outlier performances as a way of (a) giving the finger to conventional award-season wisdom and (b) trumpeting their own deliberative edge and outside-the-box coolness. Not to mention their totally infuriating foodie thing in which they take a bagel-and-lox-and-cream cheese break in the middle of voting.

I believe there’s something to both motives. I believe that the NYFCC wokers do want to be seen as The Cool Kidz Who Set Their Own Standards and Make Their Own Rules and are Voting Ahead of the Curve.

Indiewire film editor and NYFCC chair Eric Kohn replies: “There is no groupthink to the NYFCC voting process. The rules are right there on the site. Nobody’s ‘using’ any single award for their private agenda. A lot of people genuinely love this movie, myself included — it was on my favorite movies of the year list — and I raved about it way back at SXSW last March. It’s an amazing showcase for Hall’s talents, and a side of her most people have never seen before.”