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Review: “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story” (Netflix; 2024)

22 Wednesday Jan 2025

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Blood Brothers

“Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story”

(Netflix)

NO OTHER series breaks a beating heart in such an unsettling way than the closing episode of “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story” (the latest delivery by director Ryan Murphy, of “Glee” and “American Horror Story” fame). On his own, Murphy re-sensationalized the craziest legal cases of the 90’s in high-society America: “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” and “Impeachment” (on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal). Then, in 2022, with co-creator Ian Brennan, he dabbled in “Dahmer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” which won the titular actor a Golden Globe. For Murphy, it’s seemingly impossible to look back in time without thinking of a dead body, and he makes no apologies that such nostalgia is a vanity affair. “The Menéndez brothers should be sending me flowers,” Murphy boasted to People,“They haven’t had so much attention in 30 years. And it’s gotten the attention of not only this country, but all over the world. There’s sort of an outpouring of interest in their lives and in the case.” Harsh words, and exploitative in their own way. If you already made an attempt to humanize a gay killing-machine like Dahmer, why stop there? The cover art for “Monsters” on your Netflix homepage – the Menéndez bros in an erotic embrace – says it all.

Celebrity gossip aside, the final minutes of “Monsters” go down like vinegar: no catharsis, no resolution. The finale begins with the brothers in their jail cells whereafter they are escorted by armed guards to separate minivans, and when the vehicles divert through an aerial shot, Erik pleads: “I thought we were going to Folsom.” Milli Vanilli’s “I’m Going to Miss You” is playing and the lyrics have taken on a creepy resonance:
“It’s a tragedy for me to see the dream is over/ And I never will forget the day we met / Girl, I’m gonna miss you.” The less stoical Erik begins to cry because he and his brother have been separated. The prison guard could not care less about the inmates’ feelings: “Your brother is going somewhere else.” Case closed. Or is it? Outgoing Los Angeles DA George Gascón has requested new sentences and cited a change in cultural attitudes toward same-sex incest. The tragedy of it all is not only affecting because it’s deeply dark – its eight preceding episodes are even darker – but because it reinforces what the whole Menéndez murder trial represents: the question of human evil, exploitation at the hands of one’s loved ones (especially where primogeniture is at play), and the uncomfortable fact that fraternal incest is a real thing. It’s not a who-done-it – Lyle and Erik confessed to the crime and cried on the stand (later mocked as crocodile tears on “Saturday Night Live”) – but a why they did what they did. The Beverly Hills mansion remains on a sightseeing bus for Hollywood tourists to this day. Apparently, murderers can become quasi-movie stars.

The very subject of fraternal incest still makes GLBTQ+ recoil at the very topic, and the battle of the sexes played itself out in the courtroom: female jurors said “I feel your pain” while males said “Fathers don’t abuse sons, so this is not credible – the so-called “abuse excuse” – though both agreed on life sentences. After 30 years of prison time, “Monsters” renewed re-scrutiny in the case – high-profile defenders such as Kim Kardashian and Rosie O’Donnell have called for their release – and there are thousands of whom found the series intensely moving because queer boys have bullseyes on our backs and are too often targeted by family members. “Monsters” perfectly un-answers the question: what extreme lengths can the victimized be driven – to retail therapy, to sexual masochism, to sexual assault, to murder? – and what, then, qualifies as monstrous behavior. Behind bars, Erik develops a bond with a fellow prison-mate. Erik (played by out actor Cooper Koch) pumps irons, shows off in the shower, and replies defensively to Tony (Brandon Santana) whether he is gay or not: “I don’t even like that word…but I like being around you.”

The episode “The Hurt Man,” a nickname that he gave himself after years of victimhood, is astounding: his defense attorney Lesli Abramson (Ari Graynor) sits with her back to the camera while he details years of abuse; scribbling notes, she says: “[José] was a monster…Lyle feels you had it worse.” The pilot, “Blame it on the Rain,” eases the viewer in with a lavish upbringing à la the grand style of Beverly Hills. The brothers live a life of limousines, bottle service, 25-thousand-dollar tennis lessons (after which they are berated by an irate José), a hard-drinking mother Kitty, and Lyle’s expulsion from Princeton for plagiarism.

Then, in 1989, the Cuban-born music producer and wife were gunned down by their sons while sleeping in front of the TV. They entered from the back. What makes Lyle’s cocky reassurance that his baby brother will perform well at his parents’ wake (“He’s a great actor…He did a Shakespeare monologue once,” he tells a grieving friend) is that it’s all such a charade; only days after the murders, the brothers floated the idea that the mafia was culpable. Lyle (actor Nicholas Chavez) hits play on the song “I’m Going to Miss You” by Milli Vanilli, leaving the grieving parishioners squirming in their pews. What an ingenious song-choice – it closes out the aforesaid finale and in ways that carry on a completely different meaning – as Milli Vanilli had their Grammy award revoked after the public learned the German duo had faked their vocals tracks. In “Spree: Episode 2,” the Menéndez brothers are high on drugs and, bathed in Benneton (an important pastel color that Abramson thought would soften their image in the court of public opinion), nearly French kiss at a house party. From there, there was a cocaine-fueled, Rodeo Drive spending spree that made Madonna look like Mother Teresa.

In that last scene, José (Javier Bardem) and Kitty (a chillingly unwarm Chloë Sevigny, as always) are chortling over charcuterie and the great wealth that shark-fishing journey afforded them. In 1989, José Menéndez’s fortune stood at roughly 15 million dollars. Paterfamilias or predator? Only four people know for sure. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that Edgar Diaz, a member of the boy-band Menudo, has recently confessed that he, too, was abused by José. He and Kitty are all piggish giggles as their sons stand angrily apart. At the bow of their privately chartered boat, the brothers stand with all the vengeful pride and remorse that anyone who has a family knows to the core. Lyle, ever the mastermind and manipulator of what is to come, circles back (just like the 90’s soundtrack, and the cultural nostalgia of it all) to his solemn oath: “I will always choose my brother over my parents.” But who, at the bloody end of this frightening family feud, got fed to the sharks?

Colin Carman, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, Colorado and a longtime contributor to The G&LR. His blog on Jane Austen’s fiction can be found at colincarman.net.

Review: “The Great Gatsby”

12 Sunday May 2013

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“The Last Tycoon”

Grade: B+

IN THE AFTERGLOW of a loud, lavish and limousine-laden party – thrown for the sole purpose of winning back an old girlfriend named Daisy Fay – host Jay Gatsby tells Nick, his neighbor and friend, that the past is never set in stone.  “You can’t repeat the past,” Nick protests, to which the consummate self-made man, Gatsby, replies: “Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!”

It’s a crucial difference in opinion and one that captures the American essence of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic “The Great Gatsby,” printed in April of 1925 and foisted on 20120719144128!Gatsby_1925_jackethigh-school freshmen ever since. (The paperback edition, which was already selling more than a half million copies annually, is currently back on top.) The novel’s titular tragic hero is the very emblem of the nouvelle riche and as the lord of Long Island Sound, he’s been catapulted from an anonymous Midwestern existence as a Great War veteran to the mysterious man-of-the-hour.  Lots of Gatsby’s neighbors are in Nick’s ear about whether he’s a killer, a bootlegger, or truly the owner of a successful franchise of pharmacies. Nick is played by the typically neuter Tobey Maguire.

But if Gatsby is the American Dream incarnate, a man who emphatically holds that the past and the future can be bent toward any ambitious man’s objectives, his life plays out as a kind of lonely nightmare. (Don Draper of “Mad Men” is just a reworking of the Gatsby archetype.)  His rosebud Daisy is now a married mother and Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, is one of many looking to expose him as anything but great.  Possessing what Fitzgerald describes as a “cruel body,” Tom is a racist and a philanderer with a married mistress named Myrtle waiting in the wings.  A hostile Tom – I can remember Mrs. Maroney, my high school English teacher, exclaiming “I hate Tom!” – denigrates his rival as “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.”

Now 38 years old, Leonardo DiCaprio fits the role of Gatsby to a (sun-tanned) T.  We’ve watched this actor transform from the cat-eyed androgyne of “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and “Titanic” to the square-headed hulk of “J. Edgar” and “The Aviator.”  Those latter biopics, centered on reclusive and enigmatic men, have prepared DiCaprio well for the role of James Gatz/Jay Gatsby, who roams his stately pleasure-dome likeLeonardo DiCaprio Charles Foster Kane.  As Daisy, Carey Mulligan (“Drive,” “Shame”) is mostly mute, torn as she is between her own flame and the unfaithful husband who provides her a mansion of her own across the bay. Tom is played by the Australian actor Joel Edgerton (“Zero Dark Thirty”) whose blue eyes flicker ferociously back and forth when he is finally confronted by Gatsby in a swelteringly hot Manhattan hotel room.  “Your wife doesn’t love you,” Gatsby tells Tom, “She’s never loved you.  She loves me.”

Much of what I’ve already laid out here are plot points, because they remain every bit as compelling and air-tight as they are on the page.  Unfortunately, what stands in the way of “The Great Gatsby” becoming as great a film as it is a novel is largely due to the direction of Baz Lurhmann, the Aussie director famous for the MTV-style editing and splashy art direction he brought to “Romeo + Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge.”  Those films succeed as great-gatsby-joel-edgertonstagey spectacles – stabbings, solos, cancan lines – whereas the source material here is a more hushed, low-key affair.  (Even the climactic murder, in the novel, is described after the fact and left to the reader’s imagination.) Lurhmann’s hyperactivity is well suited to the gaudy opulence of Gatsby’s high-points – described by Fitzgerald as a “universe of ineffable gaudiness” – but he can’t seem to represent the man’s emotional lows.  It was a mistake to make the place from which Nick narrates his tale a sanitarium, and awfully literal-minded as well to type out some of the novel’s more famous lines across the screen, as if a Power-Point presentation were needed to heighten the drama.  Lurhmann’s touch is really more of a stranglehold.

This is not to say that “The Great Gatsby” doesn’t lend itself to flashiness, especially in terms of the novel’s automobiles which are, in Lurhmann’s kaleidoscopic reimagining of the tale, as gorgeous as the interiors of Gatsby’s wedding-cake mansion.  DaisyTHE GREAT GATSBY CAST FILM IN SYDNEY Fay, back in her Louisville days, had a “little white roadster,” writes Fitzgerald; there’s Tom’s blue coupé and the so-called “death car” that sets the double demise of Myrtle Wilson and Jay Gatsby into motion.  Even Nick frames his libido (or lack thereof) in automotive terms, saying that he is “slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.”  Putting the brakes a bit on Lurhmann’s style would have made this “Gatsby” greater – less tinsel and more teeth.

Note:

I want to thank all of my followers but after two years of writing film reviews for CINEMAWOLF, I realize that keeping a truly state-of-the-art blog is a full-time job and the demands of my professional life prevent me from staying current here, so this is likely my final film review.  You can find my reviews in print in The G&LR and elsewhere.  I wish all of you a long life as grand as Gatsby’s!

Review: “Mud”

06 Monday May 2013

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“Mississippi Moon, Won’t You Keep On Shinin’ On Me”

Grade: A-

MARK TWAIN NEVER forgot the Mississippi.  In 1856, he left Ohio for Louisiana by steamboat, intending to travel on the Amazon.  Fortunately, Twain changed his mind and apprenticed for a Mississippi riverboat pilot and the rest is (American literary) history.  “The great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun,” he wrote in one of his earliest sketches about that river.  Twain would no doubt have found the new film “Mud” from Jeff Nichols – who reportedly asked his cast to read the author while on set – a marvel, rich as it is with local color, narrative density, and feeling.  It’s full steam ahead for Nichols, whose previous films include the little masterpieces, “Shotgun Stories” (2007) and “Take Shelter” (2011).

A coming-of-age tale, “Mud” centers around two boys named Ellis (Tye Sheridan of “Tree of Life”) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland).  American kids don’t really explore the 000020.17055.MUD_Film_Still1woods and streams anymore – there are apps for that now – which is why the boys’ backwoods existence evokes a golden age when childhood was the closest thing to freedom.  Ellis and Neckbone discover a remote island with a boat inexplicably wedged in the treetops up high. There’s a well-executed panning shot – compliments of director of photography Adam Stone – in which the boys first encounter the island’s sole inhabitant, a stranger with an even stranger name: Mud (Matthew McConaughey, in his best starring role to date).  Mud’s too amicable and avuncular to be dangerous – Ellis takes an immediate liking to him – and for a while, the boys shuttle between their families (played by Ray McKinnon and Sarah Paulson as Ellis’s feuding parents) and ornery neighbor Tom Blakenship (a buzz-cut Sam Shepard), bringing Mud the canned food he needs to survive on the lam. Michael Shannon, the star of Nichols’ previous films, is Neckbone’s guardian, Uncle Galen; he’s busy scouring the river bottom for oysters and banging around in the equipment of a deep-sea diver.

But no man, of course, is an island, and Mud’s criminal past connects the boys to a whole host of problems in their tiny Arkansas town.  Mud’s back story is a romantic one: he’s killed the Texas lover of his on-again-off-again girlfriend named Juniper x.MUD_.0426(Reese Witherspoon) who has brought him nothing but trouble.  Driven by what Toni Morrison calls one of those “deepdown, spooky loves” that make one “so sad and happy,” Mud and Juniper are the kind of couple that send restraining-orders as love-notes.  Tom Blakenship blames all of Mud’s trouble on Juniper and, as a ex-military sharpshooter, he comes in handy when the father of Mud’s victim (Joe Don Baker) brings a bunch of hired guns to town to track Mud down.  It’s all in the nonverbal dialogue when Juniper spots Mud (temporarily off the island) from the balcony of her run-down motel; it’s Nichols’ riff on “Romeo and Juliet” with the same collision of eros and violence.

Gender politics, as usual, muddy the waters and the script’s only failure is that its conflicted relation to women and femininity feels, well, Twain-era. It becomes clear that Ellis and Mud are leading parallel lives, for the Huck-like Ellis is crushing on an older girl named May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant) who breaks his heart in the way JuniperIMG_3962.CR2 breaks Mud’s over and over again. Because Ellis’s father is estranged from his mother (the underrated Paulson), he warns his son that all women are snakes, selfish and impossible to please.  “Mud” doesn’t really disavow Ellis (or the audience) of that biblical bunk except for Mud’s corrective, which comes later in the moments before a river-boat shoot-out.  Mud assures the boy that women are worth loving, but is “Mud” really on board?  The film’s women remain archetypal and far-off.

Mud’s island, meanwhile, is a wondrous place; it’s the ultimate man-cave wherein he’s planning his escape by river but also a dangerous place replete with a hissing snake pit (foreshadowed well from the film’s start).  Nichols’ “Mud” is that rare work of art that achieves something tantamount to Twain’s best stories (for adults and children): it reminds you, simultaneously, of what it was like to be a child but also what it’s like to feel – however incompletely – all grown-up.

Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines”

06 Saturday Apr 2013

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“Into the Woods”
Grade: B+/A- (SEE IT)

“IF YOU RIDE like lightning you’ll crash like thunder.”  Those are cautionary words delivered by Ben Mendelsohn, a car mechanic and former bank robber, to Ryan Gosling in “The Place Beyond the Pines.” It’s a worthy follow-up, from director Derekthe-place-beyond-the-pines-dane-dehaan-emory-cohen Cianfrance, to his “Blue Valentine” of 2010 and every bit as grittily realistic and desperately somber.  A peroxide-blond Gosling plays Luke, a stunt biker and drifter who, in an already much-discussed opening shot, walks from his carnival tent to a giant metal cage in which he and two other bikers zip around upside down and sideways. Cianfrance maintains that frenetic pace as Luke is soon reunited with Romina (Eva Mendes) whom he saw the last time he was in town and, unbeknownst to him, impregnated.

Luke vows to pull his life together and support his wife and child but is drawn to the allure of danger and easy money.  Ben Mendelsohn’s character Robin schools Luke in how to rob banks in the Schenectady area, which he does successfully, at least, for a The-Place-Beyond-The-Pines-posterwhile. Gosling’s character is heavily tattooed – Frankenstein’s visage adorns his hand – but all the writing on his neck and fingers belies the fact that Luke is virtually unreadable.  Gosling can play this too-cool-for-school macho role with his eyes closed – we’ve seen it before in “Drive” where there, too, he played another stunt man with a heart of gold – but here, he makes us sympathize with this daredevil turned family man.  “Pines” artfully captures the exhilaration of crime as we watch Luke speed off, heist after heist, to Robin’s getaway truck, which carries him out beyond the pines where the men chain-smoke and count their cash.

Like “Blue Valentine,” “Pines” spans a swath of time – fifteen years, to be exact – and it would spoil the plot to reveal how exactly Luke and Bradley Cooper’s character Avery cross paths except to say that film’s second half belongs not to the criminal but to the cop who stops Luke dead-in-his-tracks.  Avery is the son of a judge (played by Harris Yulin) and a new father himself, and though his life looks honest and respectable in comparison to Luke’s, we find that he’s surrounded by crooked cops (including a typecast Ray Liotta).  Flash-forward 15 years and both Luke and Avery’s sons – AJ (Emory Cohen) and Jason (Dane DeHaan) – are teenagers in the same high school, and here we see the leitmotif of the sins of the father played out as Jason slowly realizes his friend’s father’s involvement in his own family history. ‘Nuff said.

“The Place Beyond the Pines” is driven chiefly by the magnetism of its actors.  This is surely Eva Mendes’ best performance to date, but because “Pines” is interested mainly in men and the patrilineality of violence and regret, she’s forced to bring everything she has to a somewhat trite and undeveloped role.  The same is true for Rose ByrneMV5BMjI5NDY5NTY4MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMDE5ODEyOQ@@._V1._SX640_SY427_ who (dis)appears later in the film as Bradley Cooper’s wife Jennifer.  It’s the singular failure of Cianfrance’s film – and a script by Ben Coccio and Darius Marder – that a woman’s only job is to wait on the sidelines and worry about her man.  AJ is entirely misplayed by Emory Cohen – too “street” for a DA’s son – whereas Dane DeHaan brings real pathos to the part of Jason, a fatherless child who, in the last scene, only wants to feel what his outlaw father must have felt as he drives his motorcycle out beyond the pines.  It’s a lasting image and one of an achingly real predicament: a teenager who, lost in his own grief, can’t see the forest for the trees.

Review: “Ginger & Rosa”

29 Friday Mar 2013

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“New Radicals”

Grade: B

IN LATIN, THE words for friend (“amicus”) and lover (“amans”) are derived from the same root – “amo,” which is to love. In Sally Potter’s “Ginger and Rosa,” a film about the highs and lows of female friendship, there is that same slippage between friendship and love. Elle Fanning (“Somewhere”) and Alice Englert play the title roles in thisGinger & Rosa sensitive, intelligent film set in London in 1962.  The adults around them are up in arms about nuclear arms during the anxious days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  There’s the commanding Christina Hendricks as Ginger’s mother Natalie and Jodhi May as Rosa’s mother Anoushka.  They met in a maternity ward during World War II and their daughters have been besties ever since.  They share a bathtub and examine each other’s underwear like water-nymphs; they discuss existentialist philosophy with Ginger quering “Do you think Simone de Beauvoir has a bubbly personality?” and “Do you think there’s a ‘forever’?”

But is there really such thing as a B.F.F.?  Sexuality, integral to Potter’s coming-of-age tale, has the potential to ruin everything between them and Rosa’s sexual relationship with Ginger’s handsome father Roland (Alessandro Nivola) drives an understandable wedge.  ginger-and-rosa09There’s an excruciating scene on a boat – and we feel Ginger’s agony because of Fanning’s precise performance (not to mention her dead-on British accent) – in which Ginger can hear Roland and Rosa’s lovemaking in a room next door. She presses a pillow to her ears to deaden the sounds of sex and betrayal.  The secret affair is another ticking time bomb and the circle of activists and artists that surround her – her gay godfathers (Oliver Platt and Timothy Spall) and Annette Benning as their feminist gal-pal – threaten to find out that Roland is sleeping with his daughter’s lifelong friend.

Political liberals on film are usually portrayed as sexually incontinent, so are college professors (i.e. “The Squid and the Whale,” “Wonder Boys,” “The Life of David Gale,” “Smart People” – okay, I’ll stop there).  According to the movies, our beliefs in love, reform and pacifism must infuse a sex life that knows no bounds. Roland fits this stereotype to a T – “I’m not sure I’m father material,” he under-states – and we want to see him found out. The film’s resolution is rushed and its pace overall plodding.  Roland tells Ginger “You were born radical,” but “Ginger & Rosa” ends on a fairly conservative note with Ginger having learned one of life’s hardest lines: eros trumps philia every time.  This must be what The Smiths were getting at, in “Ask” from 1986, when Morrissey sang: “If it’s not love then it’s the bomb that will bring us together.”

Review: “Side Effects”

17 Sunday Feb 2013

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“Happy Pills”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

IF INDEED STEVEN Soderbergh is retiring from filmmaking with “Side Effects,” his last film will be as perverse a spectacle as his first, 1989’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.”  (The 50-year-old Atlanta native says he wants to pursue painting full-time.)  At 26,Side-Effects-Viral-Site-Jude-Law Soderbergh became the youngest director to win the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes.  He has made more than twenty-five feature films since then, and “Side Effects” is a devious doozie of a psycho-drama to go out on.  It’s also the first good film of 2013.

“Side Effects” centers around a depressed twentysomething named Emily (Rooney Mara) whose husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has just been released from prison after a four-year sentence for insider trading.  “I can get us back to where we were,” _MG_6630.CR2the jailbird pledges, “I promise.” Mara, in a Linda Blair haircut, mopes around their Manhattan apartment, unable to put on a happy face.  When she deliberately crashes her car into a wall, she invites the scrutiny of a British psychiatrist named Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) who offers her a veritable pharmacopeia of anti-depressants.  Halfway through “Side Effects,” Mara finally smiles and it’s the result of a powerful pill called Ablixa. Its side effects include somnambulism, crying jags, and suicidal ideation. Dr. Banks is earning 50 thousand annually as a pharmaceutical consultant for Ablixa, and when he bumps into Emily’s previous doctor (played by Catherine Zeta Jones) at a conference on ADHD, the two swap stories and a few happy pills Jones’ character has at the bottom of her purse.

And just as “Side Effects” begins to look like a critique of our chemical culture, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (who wrote Soderbergh’s “Contagion” as well) twists the plot into something else entirely.  It reshapes itself, in the Hitchcockian mode ofside_effects_still18_catherine_zeta_jones murder and double-crossers, and forces us to shift our attention, and our sympathies, from Emily to Dr. Banks in a maze of deceit and trickery. There is something old-timey about the film’s representation of lesbian women, as duplicitous man-haters, and it’s difficult to discuss further without spoiling the film’s secrets, but the payoff is appreciable.  We can only hope that Soderbergh puts down his paintbrushes and returns to the directing chair before too long.

Review: “Any Day Now”

20 Thursday Dec 2012

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Any Day Now

“My Two Dads”
Review: C+ (RENT IT)

D-DAY WILL likely take home the Best Actor Oscar (again) for playing the president on the penny, but don’t count Alan Cumming out.  Sure, the Scottish actor’s singing is ghastly in “Any Day Now,” but he gives it all he’s got and “Any Day Now” is better for it.  Directed by Travis Fine, the narrative centers on a male couple fighting for custody of a teenage boy with Down Syndrome.  Meet Marco (played by first-timer Isaac Leyva); he lives on a steady diet of donuts as his junkie mom turns tricks just out-of-view.  He wanders the City of Angels, clutching his doll and gazing up at a metropolis terrifying indifferent to whether he lives or dies.

7262904006_fb0ef51a57Thankfully, Alan Cumming steps in as Marco’s guardian angel.  As the tough-as-nails Rudy, Cumming is a drag performer and Marco’s neighbor inside a grimy apartment building.  Once Marco’s mom is carted off to the slammer, Rudy begins to care for the boy and soon turns to his new boyfriend Paul to help him gain custody.  Paul is played by a rather bland Garret Dillahunt (“Raising Hope”); his wig is even worse than Cumming’s, especially in the scene where he shoots hoops with his lawyer boss and it begins to peel off his head like road-kill.  Frances Fisher is a somewhat sympathetic judge who upbraids Rudy and Paul for lying to the court and masquerading as “friends” to keep Marco.  But that’s where this film’s strength truly lies: it’s a reminder that things haven’t changed all that much since the 1970s in terms of gay parents and their rights.  Paul is canned for not staying in the closet; Rudy is routinely harassed by cops and strangers on the street.  “That’s discrimination,” Rudy protests. “That’s not discrimination,” says Paul, “that’s reality.”

We’re meant to root for Rudy, Paul, Marco as an island for misfit toys and the directorMV5BMjE0MDI5MjAyMF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwOTIyNjQ4OA@@._V1._SX640_SY457_ does a fine job at eschewing sentimentality; still, “Any Day Now” feels a bit like a movie-of-the-week with predictable courtroom scenes to play out. Yet Cumming commands your attention and he’s a diamond in an otherwise rough little picture. A smart, activist film still needs to be made about gay adoptive parents and their struggles but this isn’t it.  Maybe not “Any Day Now” but it’s coming – one can hope – someday soon.

Review: “Anna Karenina”

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

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Anna Karenina

“To Russia with Love”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

IN 2011, THE WORST movie on the experience of shame was “Shame,” a prurient and pathetic mess of a film on the putative perils of sex addiction.  In 2012, the best film on the psycho-sexual nature of shame is “Anna Karenina,” Joe Wright’s third adaptation of a literary gem (after “Pride and Prejudice” and “Atonement”) with an exquisite Kiera Knightley again front and center.  If you liked Jennifer Lawrence as Tiffany in “Silver Linings Playbook” and her feminist refusal to feel ashamed of her hyper-sexuality, check out her literary antecedent: Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, the Mary Magdalene of St. Petersburg. In her new book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain writes that shame can be socially useful.  In one study, participants looked more kindly upon those visibly embarrassed by driving away from a car accident or spilling coffee on someone.  Shame signifies a concern for others.

Anna Karenina_004-001.rBut shame can be socially disastrous as well.  “I’m not ashamed of what I have done,” Anna tells her lover Vronsky, having left her husband for the dashing young Count, “Are you ashamed for me?” The Count, dressed ironically in white throughout the film, is played Aaron Taylor-Johnson. He has seductively large, wet eyes and a handle-bar mustache; he’s under the thumb of his imperious and unkind mother (Olivia Williams).  Tolstoy tells us that a “hot blush of shame spread all over [Anna’s] face” for “she knew what had stopped her, knew she had been ashamed.”  The cuckolded Karenin, meanwhile, is a repressed fellow who surprisingly never rages against his wife for her adulterous passion.  He’s played by Jude Law in collars appropriately buttoned up to the chin.  Tolstoy writes that Karenin refuses to feel jealousy because of its shamefulness: “Now, through his conviction that jealousy is a shameful feeling, and that one ought to have confidence, had not been destroyed, he felt that he was face to face with something illogical and stupid, and he did not know what to do.”  But that’s precisely Karenin’s problem and why he’s so undesirable to his wife: he refuses to feel anything.

For those of you who skipped Russian Lit., Tolstoy’s tome from 1877 is aAaron-Taylor-Johnson-and-Alicia-Vikander-in-Anna-Karenina-2 behemoth of a novel on a whole range of topics: love, disgrace, faith, forgiveness, capitalism, Christianity.  Did I leave anything out?  Levin (played by Domhnall Gleeson) occupies a parallel plot in the novel; he’s Tolstoy’s ideal Russian man who, in the novel, says things like “You know that capitalism oppresses the workers. Our workmen the peasants bear the whole burden of labour, but are so placed that, work as they may, they cannot escape from their degrading condition […] And this system must be changed.”  He pursues Kitty (Alicia Vikander) with an open heart, which contrasts Anna’s brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) who betrays his wife Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) with the governess.  At the film’s start, Anna travels to her brother’s home to console her sister-in-law and implores Dolly to forgive her brother.  It’s a foreshadowing of Anna’s own affair with Vronsky and the forgiveness she will seek from her husband and Russian high-society.

AnnaKareninaTitleThe screenplay, which is an exercise in compression, is from playwright Tom Stoppard who had distilled Leo Tolstoy’s novel to the bare essentials. (He’s on sacred ground here: Dostoevsky, Nobokov, and Faulkner all regarded Anna Karenina as a flawless work of fiction.)   The production design is by Sarah Greenwood who hinges all of the action on a stage.  This is a wise move and in creative keeping with the theatricality of Tolstoy’s novel.  It also highlights the performative nature of shame and that as Anna succumbs to her adulterous passions in public, all eyes are on her and her inevitable demise. Dario Marianelli, whose ingenious music for “Atonement” relied on ticking typewriters and pianos, provides another stunning score. Everything should add up here, but this “Anna Karenina” stands, like the stage, at a distance. It’s lovely to look at but somehow doesn’t engage us as emotionally as one might hope.

“I’m a bad woman,” says Anna at one point in the film and we’re not sure whether to pity or praise her.  It all ends tragically, of course, but that’s Anna’s particular cross to bear.  She’s as daring as she is doomed.  Now ain’t that a shame?

Review: “Hitchcock”

09 Sunday Dec 2012

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Anthony-Hopkins-as-Alfred-Hitchcock-on-the-set-of-HITCHCOCK

“Devious Genius”

Grade: B (RENT IT)

2012 HAS NOT been kind to Mr. Hitchcock.  Thirty-two years after his death at eighty, the so-called Master of Suspense has suffered the wrath of HBO’s “The Girl,” based upon actress Tippi Hedren’s spiteful recollections of working for him on the set of 1963’s “The Birds.”  Hedren remembers the man who made her career as little more than a sadistic Svengali who couldn’t keep his hands to himself.  The famous telephone booth scene in which the birds of Bodega Bay bear down on her character Melanie Daniels like kamikaze pilots was, according to Hedren, an opportunity for Alfred Hitchcock to traumatize and bloody her.  But who can say for sure?  A he-said-she-said is far from fair when one of the disputants is dead and gone.  Hedren is not alone in decrying Hitchcock’s treatment of his actors – he infamously treated them like cattle – but she hasn’t just bit the hand that fed her; she chewed it off.

425px-Hitchcock,_Alfred_02That’s precisely the problem with another act of revenge: Sacha Gervasi’s “Hitchcock,” a behind-the-scenes take on the making of 1960’s “Psycho” and the marriage between Alfred (Anthony Hopkins) and Alma Reville Hitchcock (Helen Mirren). It’s as cruel to its subject as last year’s “Iron Lady,” in which another British icon was reduced to a demented old bat, and “Hitchcock” renews the allegations of “The Girl” involving the director’s obsessive control over his leading ladies, his marital aloofness, and dipsomaniacal perversity. As an earlier incarnation of Hedren, Janet Leigh is played – or very nearly mimicked – by Scarlett Johansson who nails the actress’s pursed lips and demure tilts of the head.  Jessica Biel, as Vera Miles, is one of Hitchcock’s discarded muses who warns Leigh that Hitchcock will attempt to direct her on and off the sound-stage.  If Hitchcock found himself fixated on the blond likes of Leigh, Grace Kelley, and later, Hedren, he also found himself possessed by the 1959 pulp novel by Robert Bloch and basis for “Psycho.”  He wakes wife Alma in the middle of the night to make her read a hair-raising passage and, forced to finance the film himself, appears willing to stake his long and illustrious career on making his most shocking film yet. He certainly reaped the rewards: we watch Hitch watch an audience watch the indelible shower scene and scream with horror.  Laura Mulvey, eat your heart out. Hopkins, in a prosthetic nose and tumescent waist-line, is superb in the role, and like “Lincoln,” “Hitchcock” is a less than perfect biopic that stays afloat only because of its actors and one-liners.

Unfortunately, Gervasi’s film hardly goes off without a hitch.  Scenes in which1352307244_jessica-biel-scarlett-johansson-james-darcy-lg Hitchcock imagines Ed Gein (Michael Wincott), the real-life basis for Norman Bates, as an imaginary friend (or foe) are preposterous and irresolved.  Even Anthony Perkins isn’t safe; he’s caricatured as a closet homosexual, which, of course, he was, but his importance is squandered when he’s represented, on Hitchcock’s casting couch, as a gay cliché.  As Lady Hitchcock, the director’s confidante and collaborator, Mirren is also superb, but we don’t get a real sense of her motivation nor what she wants from a dalliance with fellows screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston). All dolled up, she asks Hitchcock, unflatteringly squeezed in a bathtub with a wine glass in hand, how she looks and he replies only with “Presentable.”  We get that she is unfulfilled romantically – the pair sleep in separate beds – but beyond that, we don’t really know why the Hitchcocks stay together and the film weirdly leaves out the fact that the couple had a daughter and that Sir Hitchcock was, based on his granddaughter’s account, a loving family man and not the schizophrenic control-freak this film portrays him to be.

Watch out Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Allen, and all ye who enter the Hollywood walk of directorial fame: they’re coming for you and your little wives too.

Review: “Lincoln”

30 Friday Nov 2012

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Lincoln

“This American Life”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ISN’T just a man but a monument.  Meanwhile, the movie inspired by his commitment to ending slavery and the Civil War is a mixed bag, a union, as it were, of playwright Tony Kushner’s talky script and Steven Spielberg’s love of spectacle.  What happens when you pair the intensely verbal with the intensely visual?  Sadly less than the sum of its parts, “Lincoln” is a mathematical equation as tricky to decode as “four score and seven years ago.”

Sally-Field-LincolnOn the plus side, there are the performances.  Daniel Day-Lewis is a titan of serious cinema, from “My Left Foot” to the best American film tragedy of the 2000s, “There Will Be Blood.”  This is a Method actor so focused and unfunny that he makes Anthony Hopkins look like Robin Williams.  He nails Lincoln’s reportedly reedy voice and effortless erudition. Reviewing “A Room with a View” back in 1985, Pauline Kael wrote of the actor: “In some scenes I wished the camera were at a more discreet distance from Day-Lewis, because you can see him acting and you’re too conscious of his black hair and mustache – you suspect he’s made up to be ascetic and all profile.” All these years later, Day-Lewis’ profile finally gets the close-up of its career.

On the surface, the casting of Sally Field as Mary Todd seems questionable given that the actress is eleven years D-Day’s senior, but dress any actor in Lincoln’s chin curtain beard and top-hat – and any actress in a hoop skirt and greasy hair curls – and their ages somehow find equilibrium.  The Lincolns’ youngest son Tad (Gulliver McGrath) is seen before the fireplace, studying pictures of slaves disfigured by their masters’ whips. Mary is agonized over the enlistment of her older son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) into the Union Army while, beyond the domestic, Republican abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) and Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) are busy strategizing how to squash the Southern delegation.  “Lincoln,” at its heart, is not a biographical portrait but a study in political procedure. Seward has hired a group of Falstaffian fellows to cajole members of the House of Representations into passing anti-slavery legislation. The stand-out is W.N. Bilbo (a greasy James Spader) who brings some much-needed levity to “Lincoln” as he struts right through the front doors of the White House and delivers some deliciously salty language.

On the other hand, there are elements that subtract from “Lincoln,” or, at least, oppositional elements at work that make the film wobble like a house divided. Thanks to Kushner, “Lincoln,” inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” limits its scope to the political wrangling involved in the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery and put one more nail in the Confederate coffin.  As the famed1ea284fabeb8cb8df6779196e5615d49b08dcbaafd7f816ff5ce83b6 Civil War historian Bruce Catton wrote, “To save the Union the North had to destroy the Confederacy, and to destroy the Confederacy it had to destroy slavery.”  Given the misnomer of its title, one expects from “Lincoln” a sweeping biopic that begins with the sixteenth President as a young prodigy growing up in a cramped log-cabin on the Sinking Spring Farm in Kentucky and ending with a very bad night at the theatre. The maximalist Steven Spielberg is no doubt up to the task.  So, too, is Kushner, the Pulitzer prize-winner who co-wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s 2005 “Munich” and, oh, just a little play called “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.”  Whether Kushner and Spielberg are a match made in heaven should remain in question.  There’s a palpable tension between Spielberg’s love of the panoramic (i.e. the coast of Normandy, the Atlantic Ocean, space) and Kushner’s theatrical impulse to withdraw to the musty interiors of the White House and other Washingtonian halls of power. Regardless, “Lincoln” is destined to dominate next year’s Academy Awards; they might as well host the ceremony at the foot of Mount Rushmore.

Have no fear: there will be Oscars.