Yesterday I tried to elaborate upon my positive Telluride reaction to Sam Mendes‘ Empire of Light (Searchlight, 12.9).  Toward the end of the comment thread Rosso Veneziano replied as follows:  “I respect your take but the general consensus is that the movie is bad. 58 on Metacritic, 47% on Rotten Tomatoes…and that means rotten. It’s not just critics at Telluride — the TIFF reviews were even worse.”

HE response:  You first have to remember that many if not most of the critical elite are not standing on the same terra firma as the rest of us.  In more ways than one they’re living on their own frilly planet.  Every consensus opinion that emanates from this bunch has to be filtered through this basic reality.  Most of them are not of this earth.

Trust me — they’re dismissing Empire of Light because they’re unable to buy the curious but ultimately poignant romantic bond between the two leads, played by Michael Ward and Olivia Colman.  (If Ward’s Stephen character was played by a non-POC, the reactions would be quite different.)  I myself was skeptical of this dynamic going in, but the fine writing, acting and overall period swoon effect, which is partly if not largely due to excellent production design plus Roger Deakins‘ handsome cinematography…all of this won me over.

Filmmakers are generally required to depict POCs with a paintbrush of presentism these days (i.e., presenting them according to contemporary sensibilities), and many critics, knowing this, will get all riled when a Black character is presented “incorrectly” within a period film. Many elite critics see themselves as white-knight figures whose task is to bestow dignity or even majesty upon characters of color.

Ward’s performance will never be criticized, of course, but there’s no dodging the fact that he’s a handsome actor of considerable poise and charisma playing a decades-old period character in a film written and directed by an older white man. (Not unlike Mahershala Ali in Green Book.)

And there’s a fascinating violent moment in this film, by the way, that I haven’t mentioned. Racist skinhead goons are lurking on the fringes of this story, and early on a few of them are taunting Stephen on a sidewalk, and one strikes him with a head slap. And what does Stephen do? He does the smart thing by ignoring the attacker as he continues to walk away. He knows these animals are looking for an excuse to beat him senseless, and he doesn’t give them that.

A violent moment such as this runs against the presentism aesthetic. A Black man of today would never ignore or cower from an attack of this nature if it was depicted in a present-tense film.  Our post-George Floyd mythology demands a greater measure of defiance and dignity.  And yet Mendes, adhering to the ugly reality of things in rural 1980 England as much as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza was truthfully immersed in the Los Angeles culture of the ‘70s, does the stand-up thing.  I know that the instant I noticed Stephen’s reaction to the head slap, I went “wow…that’s unusual but then again that’s Mendes.”

I gradually came to respect Lin Manuel Miranda‘s Tick Tick…Boom (Netflix, now streaming). I was even emotionally affected by it in the second half, but man, what a struggle. Mine, I mean.

Based on Larson’s 1990 stage musical of the same name, it’s about Larson himself (Andrew Garfield) struggling and feeling desperate and anxious and needing so hard to get his material produced and seen…to get up and over…he constantly sweats and strains and feels awful about not being a success at age 30, and the movie puts you right into the misery pit with the poor guy, and it’s no picnic, let me tell you.

Tick, Tick…Boom is a “musical based on a musical about writing a musical”, and I’m telling you that the first 20 or 25 minutes of this film, directed by Lin Manuel Miranda, will make you go “oh, no…please, no.” I was in agony. Garfield is pushing so hard, turning on the “charm” and emphatic personality, singing with a not-great singing voice, so much “sell” in his performance…buh-bo-buh-bo-bo!

Art isn’t easy, but watching a poor, exhausted, stressed-out guy trying to make good art isn’t easy either.

But after 30 or 40 minutes of torture I began to settle into the story and I began to feel and even identify with Larson’s pain. I’ve been there. In ’78 and ’79 I was poor as a churchmouse and living in a Soho cockroach flat and trying to get rolling as a movie critic and interviewer, and my theme song was Gerry Rafferty‘s “Baker Street.” (“And you’re cryin’, you’re cryin’ now”) I know all about that agony and fear and desperation so don’t tell me.

Incidentally “Baker Street” is a much catchier and more arresting tune than anything in Larson’s Tick Tick score. Sorry.

Friendo to HE: “I hate all of the people in this thing. People don’t talk like this in real life. It’s very 2021. They’re all talking in woke-speak. It’s the modern left’s idea of the perfect sensitive person movie, Except nobody will give a single shit about it.”

HE to Friendo: “I groaned when Susan, his LatinX-woman of color girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp), left him because he’s too consumed in his work. Earth to Susan: All creatively-driven types are consumed by their work. It goes with the territory. The real loves of Larson’s life were, of course, his music and Stephen Sondheim.

Friendo to HE: “I felt badly for his plight but this script is just terrible.”

HE to Friendo: “And for all of it, we don’t get the grand payoff that is Larson’s Rent….Rent is years away when the film ends. I took Jett with me to see Rent at the Nederlander when he was eight or thereabouts, and he wasn’t a fan.”

9:30 pm: A for vision, A for speaking comic truth, A for Leonardo DiCaprio’s explosive acting in two temper-tantrum scenes and….uhm, somewhere between a B-minus and a C-plus for execution.

Very ballsy and bold Strangelove-like satire that feels like an extended, gargantuan, improv-y, effects-laden SNL super-skit about massive self-delusion & self-destruction, and yet oddly inert in certain portions. But not entirely.

Because at the same time it’s really out there and righteously wackazoid, and it works now and then.

A crazy-ass Covid and climate-change comic allegory, for sure. It says the right things, totally eviscerates the right and especially the dumbfuck denialists.

It hits the mark a few times, and as broad apocalyptic satires go, you certainly can’t say it doesn’t swing for the fences. Leo really nails it in two screaming scenes (as noted), and it ends with a kind of hand-holding family whimper scene that I responded to.

I can’t in all good conscience say it’s “Casey at the Bat” because it’s really, REALLY saying the right & necessary things, and I loved it for that. But it felt strangely off in a way that I found head-scratchy. But (yes, I’m repeating myself) I loved what it was saying. Call it a ground-rule double with issues.

That said…

Last night I streamed Woody Allen‘s Rifkin’s Festival, and I’m afraid I can only echo what critics who caught it during last September’s San Sebastian Film Festival said in unison — it’s a bowl of mild, occasionally prickly porridge that’s simply not good enough. I wouldn’t call it a waste of time, but it certainly won’t enrich anyone’s appreciation or contemplation of their all-too-brief time on this planet. And that’s too bad.

Shot in the summer of ’19 against a simulation of the San Sebastian Film Festival (which actually happens in September), it’s a pallid, lamenting, ummistakably dreary sitcom about being cuckolded while shuffling along with a septugenarian sourpuss attitude. It putters and schmutters with occasional dreamscape tributes to classic ’60s cinema (Fellini’s 8 1/2, Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Bergman’s Persona and The Seventh Seal), which fit into the milieu, of course, but in a decidedly tired, “no longer part of the world” way. The film never bores but never really turns on the current. And I’m sorry for that.

It’s about Mort Rifkin (Wallace Shawn), a crabby 70something Jewish gnome from Manhattan who used to teach film, and his having accompanied Sue (Gina Gershon), his fetching 40something film publicist wife, to the festival, and how he immediately senses a current between Sue and her top client, a younger, mildly pretentious director named Philippe (Louis Garrel).

Rather than skulking around and seething with suspicion, fortune smiles when Mort visits a beautiful 30-something doctor named Jo (Elena Anaya) and promptly falls head over heels. No, Mort doesn’t make any overt moves (thank God!), but he does get involved in her turbulent marriage to a tempestuous artist Paco (Sergi López, whom I haven’t laid eyes on for a good decade or so). Mort talks to Jo (and to the audience) about working on an ambitious novel, but if you haven’t written your big novel by age 77 you should probably hang it up.

Vittorio Storaro‘s cinematography constantly glows. Every shot of San Sebastian is luscious and inviting.

After seeing the Rifkin’s Festival trailer last September I wrote that casting Wallace Shawn as a dismayed romantic protagonist is not what anyone would call audience-friendly. Shawn is pushing 80, for God’s sake, and the size of a Hobbit. By any semi-realistic biological standard he’s “out of the game.” It would be one thing if, say, Allen had cast the 75-year-old Steve Martin as a WASPy version of Mort. But it’s completely impossible to accept a bald Bilbo Baggins as a hormonal stand-in, and especially one who walks around with his mouth half open all the time. It was difficult enough to accept Shawn as Diane Heaton‘s ex-lover in Manhattan, and that was during the Carter administration.

I wrote that Shawn’s character “would naturally feel wounded and disoriented by Gershon’s temporary infidelity, but it’s all but impossible to relate to him in this context. My first reaction was that this is like John Huston casting Lionel Barrymore in the Humphrey Bogart role in Key Largo.”

I’ve been saying this for years, but if the 84 year-old Allen intends to keep churning them out he needs to work with a younger writing partner — some 40something whippersnapper who could punch up the material and lend a certain 21st Century edge. There’s nothing diminishing about such a scenario. Allen worked with Marshall Brickman on Annie Hall, after all, and with Douglas McGrath on Bullets Over Broadway.

Lewis Allen and Richard Sale‘s Suddenly (’54), a thriller about an attempted Presidential assassination, runs only 82 minutes with credits — a very tight ship.

Frank Sinatra plays John Baron, possibly the most talkative and emotionally exposed psycho hitman in movie history. His best moment is a confessional speech that begins around 50:25…a bit that ends with Sinatra walking right up close to the camera lens and staring straight into the audience. (Here it is.) His death scene is great also; he’s almost weeping as he whimpers “no…no,” dejected and heartbroken. John Hurt‘s Caligula died the same way in I, Claudius.

Sterling Hayden to yours truly, sometime in late ’78: “We shot it in early ’54. before Sinatra won the Oscar for From Here To Eternity. So during filming he was still ‘down’ in a sense. But he still had the old kezazz.”

It’s been 17 years since I last saw Rafi Pitts‘ Abel Ferrara: Not Guilty. The kids and I caught it at the 2003 Locarno Film Festival. Six years ago a trailer popped up. The film also appeared on YouTube that year, but I somehow missed that fact. Anyway, here it is — shot in ’03, 117 minutes, worth a looksee.

Not Guilty doesn’t attempt an in-depth probing of Ferrara’s career and aesthetics by the usual means — searching questions put to the director, a comprehensive array of clips, talking heads offering insightful assessments, etc. Pitts just follows Ferrara around New York — shooting the shit, filming some kind of music video, visiting and hosting friends, talking to women on the street, tossing off anecdotes about Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe (the stars of Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, King of New York and New Rose Hotel) — and lets him be himself.

“‘I knew that an interview situation wasn’t going to give us any new information about Abel,’ Pitts told the Pardo News, the local festival rag. ‘The best thing was to show him how he is. The film is always from his point of view. He’s always in the shot.’ And it’s a cool ride. A wonderfully messy, slipshod, organically alive New York runaround.

“The festival program notes on this film describe Ferrara as ‘deranged,’ which I think is a little harsh. He comes off as a nutter, all right, but one deserving of respect. What comes through is a portrait of an anarchic creative teenager with the soul and finesse of a 51 year-old.

“A gnomish, stooped-over figure with longish graying hair in a leather jacket and a pink New York Yankees baseball cap, Ferrara is full of hyper, rambunctious energy. He plays guitar and piano (not too badly) and he loves to tell stories in one of those fuck-this, fuck-that Manhattan voices we’re all familiar with.

“An actor friend observes at one point Ferrara tends to do four or five things at the same time, and each one with distinction. It’s clear he likes to solve creative problems by immersing himself in chaos and sorting things out as he goes along.

“It’s also clear he knows from movies, and precisely what’s good and what’s not. He’s goes into a kind of frenzy when he’s working, and you can see why certain films of his (Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, certainly) work as well as they do and why, at the same time, constipated producer types might feel a little intimidated by him.

“But he’s great with actors and catching excitement on the fly. Bronx-born and quick with a quip, Ferrara loves taking cabs all over town and talking shit with people he runs into. There’s a great moment when he spots a long-legged brunette walking nearby and starts walking after her, making cracks like ‘tall…and that’s not all!’ and ‘those boots were made for walkin’!’

Let Them All Talk (HBO Max, 12.10) is a smart, reasonably engrossing, better-than-mezzo-mezzo character study that largely takes place aboard the Queen Mary 2 during an Atlantic crossing.

It’s primarily about Alice, a moderately famous, sternly self-regarding novelist (Meryl Streep) and her somewhat brittle relationship with two old college friends, Susan and Roberta (Dianne Wiest, Candice Bergen), whom she’s invited along on a New York-to-Southhampton voyage, courtesy of her publisher.

Also tagging along are Tyler (Lucas Hedges), Alice’s 20something nephew, and Karen (Gemma Chan), an anxious book editor whom Tyler takes an unfortunate shine to.

Also aboard is a David Baldacci-like airport novelist (Dan Algrant) whose books Roberta and Susan adore, and who’s far more engaging and emotionally secure than Alice any day of the week.

Working from a script by Deborah Eisenberg and literally shot during a seven-day crossing in 2019, Let Them All Talk features Soderbergh in standard three-hat mode — director, cinematographer (as Peter Andrews) and editor. All I can say without spoiling is that he manages to keep things sharp, interesting and slicey-dicey for the most part. Streep is playing an aloof, mostly unlikable character, Hedges a somewhat gullible one, and Algrant the most amiable.

But Bergen’s Roberta, who’s fallen upon difficult economic times due to a divorce, is the most interesting character by far. It affords Bergen an opportunity to give her best performance in I don’t know how many years. Since Gandhi or even Carnal Knowledge?

Roberta is a frustrated boomer-aged woman who works in lingerie retail and who wants more money in her life. Alas, she hasn’t any economic opportunities to speak of and hasn’t a prayer of landing a rich boyfriend or husband because she’s “old meat” (all the eligible 60something guys, it seems, have 20something girlfriends) and far from svelte. And yet she’s on her game at all times, attuned and thinking and assessing. Plus she has a testy, unresolved relationship with Alice, who years ago used Rebecca’s ruptured marriage as raw material for her biggest-selling book, “You Always/You Never.”

And then her big opportunity comes when something happens that I can’t disclose, and Roberta…let’s just say her life takes a potential turn for the better.

I’m presuming that Let Them All Talk is regarded as a theatrical feature that had to accept an HBO Max debut because of the pandemic, and therefore Oscar-qualifying. If so, Bergen is definitely a Best Supporting Actress nominee waiting to happen. I just wish she’d somehow held onto her Murphy Brown-ish appearance. I only know that when she turned up in Warren Beatty‘s Rules Don’t Apply, my first reaction was “wait…who’s that? I know her but I can’t place her.”

I really liked Algrant’s novelist. A very sharp, no bullshit, calmly transactional character. Savvy, frank, classy. Somewhat resentful, Alice looks down her nose at him but he’s a pro with a good gig and no pretensions.

Question: If a book isn’t working out, what kind of writer would wipe it off his/her hard drive and throw away a printed manuscript? Writers don’t do that. They hold onto the material and use it for something else down the road. Sometimes you can find a new way in…nobody throws half-written books away.

Chan has a good scene in which she tells the story of her long engagement suddenly falling apart. And another when Tyler (Hedges) places his emotional cards face up on the table.

Honestly: How could this highly intelligent 20something even fantasize that Chan would be interested in him romantically? He’s supposed to be, what, 24 or 25? And he thinks that a 30something editor whose job is on the line, who’s trying to keep tabs on Alice…he thinks that this woman might be interested in a little trans-Atlantic boning?

Earlier this month I wrote that “if there’s been one steady-drumbeat message that has thundered across the Twitterverse for several weeks now, it’s that Pete Docter‘s Soul (Disney +, 12.25) is a truly exceptional animated feature…an emotional, spiritual, jazz-embroidered film so rich and resonant and full-hearted that it deserves to be in Best Picture contention.”

That, trust me, will never happen. Best Animated Feature, sure, but not Best Picture. Because I finally saw Soul last night, and despite an absolute avalanche of charm and energy and whimsical, wild-ass associations, it’s just not good enough. Too fast and busy, too scattered, too all over the place, too hyper. And because it pushes a fundamentally false or at least conflicted concept of life. And because (this is minor but significant) it tries to normalize obesity with the casting of the fattest animated cat you’ve ever seen in your life.

I knew something was up a few weeks ago when Variety‘s award-season columnist Clayton Davis, known for his extra-friendly instincts when it comes to multicultural Oscar bait, tweeted on 11.10 that he wasn’t a Soul fan.

And yet a general impression remains that Soul is a major Pixar creation with a big Oscar future. Some HE commenters have insisted that it should leap over its own category and compete for the Best Picture Oscar. (Hah!) Partly because they love the many winning aspects (heart, humanity, cleverness, abundant energy), but also because it’s about a black character and a black community.

In line with this, the critical response has been, I feel, fairly cowardly. They’re terrified of saying anything even slightly negative about such a film. And so right now Soul has a 100% RT rating and the Metacritic number is at 91%.

This morning I tapped out a spoiler-laden assessment of Soul. I realize, of course, that dozens of critics have already reviewed it at length. But please understand (repeating myself) that my remarks INCLUDE SPOILERS.

But before reading this, here’s Pixar’s boilerplate synopsis: “Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a middle school music teacher, has long dreamed of performing jazz music onstage, and finally gets a chance after impressing other jazz musicians during an opening act at the Half Note Club. However, an untimely accident causes Gardner’s soul to be separated from his body and begin to proceed to the Great Beyond.

“And yet Gardner manages to escape to the Great Before, a world where souls develop personalities, quirks, and traits before being sent off to Earth. There, Gardner must work with souls in training at the Great Before, and in particular a soul named ’22’ (Tina Fey), a pre-spectral spark with a dim view on the concept of life, in order to return to Earth before his body dies.”

I saw Sofia Coppola‘s On the Rocks (A24/Apple, 10.23) about a week ago, and I’ve been waiting for the spirit to seize. But nothing’s happened, and the reason is that it’s fine as far as it goes. I didn’t dislike it and don’t feel the slightest urge to put it down. It’s an occasionally amusing, reasonably decent father-daughter relationship film (Bill Murray, Rashida Jones), but it does leave you wishing it had put a little more on the plate.

It’s a marital-suspicion dramedy (“Is my husband cheating on me?”) served in a faintly bouncy, mildly entertaining fashion…okay, sometimes more than mildly. It looks good, Coppola’s script feels smooth and assured, it looks and feels well produced and has a cool Mexican detour section toward the end (i.e., a visit to Las Alamandas Resort in Jalisco, which is between Puerto Vallarta and Manzanillo) and it’s a little jaunty now and then, which is fine.

But if Murray wasn’t playing the wealthy, soft-spoken, amiably rakish dad, On The Rocks probably wouldn’t work all that well. When Murray’s on screen, it’s a fun film. When he’s not, you’re waiting for him to return. The other two principals — Jones and Marlon Wayans as Jones’ successful husband — don’t have the X-factor. They’re sufficient but Murray is the only one with any real charisma.

The best scene is when a couple of Manhattan cops pull Murray over for driving recklessly in a classic red sports car (Jones is riding shotgun) and…okay, no spoilers.

Honestly? I understand that Coppola has more or less written about her own life on some level and that Jones is the stand-in and all, and that the film is self-portraiture to some degree. I get all that. But On The Rocks would’ve been better if it had been mainly about Murray and if Jones and her possibly unfaithful husband had been a side-plo of some kind.

Incidentally: Murray’s all-white hair looks perfect, but he’s also wearing a partial rug of some kind; his trademark bald spot is missing. That or he’s been to my Prague guy.

I’m still giving On The Rocks a passing grade because it’s pretty good. It never pissed me off or made me feel irritable or bored. I’m giving it an affectionate B-minus. It’s agreeable.

The reviews are correct, the rumors are true: Michelle Pfeiffer has lucked into the best role of her life in Azazel Jacobs‘ French Exit (Sony Pictures Classics, 2.12.21), a sardonic “comedy” with a gently surreal quality around the edges.

Which means that it’s not all that surreal, or at least not to me. A talking deceased husband (Tracy Letts) inhabiting the body of a cat or cryptically conversing with his widow and son during a seance…whatever. What French Exit is really about is dry gallows humor by way of a certain kind of “I won’t back down” resignation. And within that particular realm it’s very, very good.

If you’re going to make a bitter-end comedy with this kind of attitude or philosophy, you need to own it — no excuses or mitigations, no second thoughts, no third-act softenings. If nothing else French Exit is self-aware and highly confident, and therefore by any fair standard a first-rate effort. Is it “funny”? Well, not actually but it’s good company as far it goes. I was smirking. I was never bored. At the very least I was intrigued.

Exit is about Pfeiffer’s Frances Price, a suddenly destitute, formerly wealthy widow in her mid ’60s who decides to move into a friend’s Paris apartment with her extremely passive son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) after learning that her once-ample bank account is all but empty. It’s also about how she does absolutely nothing to save herself. In fact she hurries the inevitable along.

But Pfeiffer really goes to town. She delivers every line with just the right shadings of jaded indifference, except it’s not a cold performance. It’s sly and fetching. You could almost say that Frances is a little bit like the Margo Channing role was for Bette Davis in All About Eve (’50) — a snooty bitch with nearly all the great lines. It absolutely represents a Best Actress Oscar nomination, and perhaps even a win. She’s as much of an assured contender as The Father‘s Anthony Hopkins.

The difference is that Davis was full of bite and gusto in Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s 1950 classic while Pfeiffer is, like, really laid back in Jacobs’ film. So laid back that the only real observation or question about Frances is “okay, she’s having her fun because she really doesn’t give a shit and is comfortable with Parisian finality, so what method will she choose?”

Imagine that all of your money and marketable skills are somehow gone in a flash, and you have around 40K left in the bank. What would the HE community do?

Most of us would probably say, “Okay, I have to find a job or create a new income stream of some kind. The days of monetary comfort and treadmill engagement may be over, but it’s better to live and strive and hope for a better future than to collapse in a heap and give up.”

But a small minority might say, “The good times are over? I’ll have to sweat and struggle and use public transportation in order to survive? Okay, fuck it. Fuck it all. Let’s fly to Paris or Hanoi or Rome, rent a nice pad somewhere, eat well and enjoy the city, and when the money’s gone I’ll off myself with an overdose of heroin or something.”

You could describe the first response as noble or admirable — the classic “when the going gets tough, the tough get their asses in gear” approach that Jane Darwell shared at the end of John Ford‘s The Grapes of Wrath (’40). The second response is basically “if you think I’m gonna stick around while my life gets more and more desperate, you’ve got another think coming.”

Based on a same-titled 2018 novel by Patrick deWitt, French Exit is definitely about the second option. It’s about throwing in the towel, but always with a deliciously baroque attitude, a witty bon mot, a raised eyebrow or a frozen glare of some kind. It may be about extreme detachment but the deadpan nihilism is front and center and loaded for bear.

“You pick a fight with Willy, you are finished.”

But of course, Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) didn’t actually pick a fight with publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst when he wrote (or co-wrote) Citizen Kane. It was headstrong director-cowriter Orson Welles who did that, no? He chose the subject, sold it to RKO, assembled the forces, poked at the hornet’s nest, etc. Mank was just the pithy writer-for-hire who created the structure and made the dialogue sing, and who later won a (shared) Best Screenplay Oscar for his troubles.

The just-posted Mank teaser is about the trials and tribulations of good old Mank and his frenemy Orson and their mutual antagonist Mr. Hearst….about a truly gifted screenwriter who wrote delicious dialogue and one of the greatest films of all time despite — aye, the rub — a close-to-suicidal drinking problem.

As played by Oldman, Mank is a bleary-eyed, chubby-faced consumer of spirits who stumbles around and occasionally falls down and does all the usual things that theatrically inclined alcoholics do. But — but! — he was as brilliant and heaven-sent as screenwriters come, and oh what a fine fellow when all the ledgers are balanced and the final checks have been cut.

I’m still expecting to do handstands over this thing, but my understanding or absorption of The Great Herman J. is about who he was as a man of prolific letters and visions…words, arias, screenplays…his typewritten soul. Teasers obviously have to be brief and succinct, and all this one does is convey the colorful but unfortunate fact that Mankiewicz was often in his cups.

Was he really this louche, this bleary, this soused? Speaking as a dedicated vodka-and-lemonade man in the mid ’90s and a slurpy Pinot Grigio guy in the aughts until my 3.20.12 vow of sobriety, and speaking also as the son of a witty, functioning alcoholic until the formidable James T. joined AA in ’75, my understanding of the disease is that drunks don’t flaunt it. They do everything they can, in fact, to hide it.

All that aside, nothing thrills me to the bone like a grade-A, 131-minute David Fincher film in the wings. And I love “coming to a screen near you.” Your TV screen, they mostly mean, as a limited theatrical release (which would thrill me to no end) is due for November, but only in the big towns.

The last seven months have been a saga of continual heartbreak, deflation and despair. I remain convinced that Mank will provide a brief respite.

Last weekend I saw HBO’s Bad Education, a somewhat riveting, fact-based drama about a bizarre heist in plain sight. The focus is the infamous Roslyn embezzlement scandal of the early aughts. But I couldn’t get it up when I tried to write about it. This was because I couldn’t quite comprehend the insanely self-destructive acts of administrative thievery that this film is…well, partly about.

It’s also about the generally insane notion that living high on the hog is everything in life, and that all you need to sleep through this kind of brazen flim-flamming is a little vial of denial.

I understand Butch and Sundance robbing banks in the old days. I understand the gangs who stole jewels in Rififi and Topkapi. I can relate to the British thugs who pulled off the Great Train Robbery of 1963. Because they all thought they had a decent chance of getting away with it. Why rob anyone or anything if you can’t escape the law, right? But I can’t fathom how or why a pair of senior school administrators expected to get away with stealing over $6 million from a prosperous school district in Roslyn, Long Island — the largest public school embezzlement in American history.

Bad Education is about Roslyn’s secretly gay and deeply frustrated school district superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) and his assistant superintendent and business administrator Pamela Gluckin (Allison Janney) using taxpayer money to buy homes, travel all over, wear swell duds, drive pricey cars, get plastic surgery touch-ups (although not in Prague) and so on. And then wave it all off when questioned by whomever

When Gluckin’s embezzling was exposed, Tassone forced her to resign and surrender her license. But then a reporter for the school’s newspaper uncovered what she thought was a $250K embezzlement scheme involving both of them. The actual figure was much higher. Tassone had pocketed $2.2 million from school district coffers, and Gluckin admitted to stealing almost double that — $4.3 million.

In ’06 Tassone was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison, although he was released in 2010. Gluckin, sentenced to 3 to 9 years in ’06, was released a year later. She died in 2017. Tassone is living comfortably on a lifetime annual pension of $173,495.

Yes, Jackman’s portrayal of Tassone is slick and sad and altogether engaging, and the role is one of his best-written. But he’s playing an incomprehensible sociopath, and I kept asking myself “who believes they can get away with this kind of pilfering? Stuff like this always comes out in the wash sooner or later. It’s all tracable, all on the books…just a matter of time.”

Cory Finley‘s direction is so confident and smooth that it’s invisible. Mike Makowsky‘s highly arresting script is based on “The Bad Superintendent,” a 9.17.04 New York article by Robert Kolker. I read Kolker’s piece as soon as my viewing ended, of course. Here’s an excerpt: