I wasn’t surprised that “Chappaquiddick” didn’t make more of a splash at the box office, despite being one of the best dramas of 2018 and a film that, if it weren’t for the bifurcated political reception it provoked, would surely be talked about as an early favorite for a raft of Oscar nominations.
The movie was picked up on by conservative media months before it got a general release, adding to the perception it’s the rare “right wing” Hollywood film. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This look at the events surrounding Edward Kennedy’s defining moment in 1969, in which he (mostly likely drunkenly) drove his mother’s car into a lake with a pretty young campaign worker inside, Mary Joe Kopechne, who died. Not only was unable to save her despite (he says) many attempts, he failed to report the accident until the next morning, sealing the woman’s fate. The evidence suggests she was trapped in the car for hours, and suffocated when her air ran out.
The film, directed by John Curran from a script by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, does not set out to vilify Kennedy as a heartless fiend. In a masterful performance by Jason Clarke, it’s suggested that he was a man who wore heavily the mantle left behind by his dead brothers, Jack and Bobby, and the expectation that he would run against Richard Nixon for the presidency in 1972.
The true evil occurred in the aftermath, as an armada of loyal Kennedy men descended on the sleepy town to manipulate events with one goal in mind: saving Teddy’s political career. I can think of no better cinematic portrait of the axiom that power corrupts -- for those who have it, seek it or try to hold onto it.
Funnymen Jim Gaffigan and Ed Helms give surprisingly meaty performances as hangers-on of the Kennedy clan who engage in the cover-up. Helms’ character, adopted son Joe Gargan, is the lone voice who begins to have moral quandaries about their actions.
Bruce Dern is mesmerizing as Kennedy patriarch Joe, withered by age and moral rot, who directs the machinations from his repose. Kate Mara has a small but vital presence as Kopechne, who was not just some feminine plaything of male politicos, but a resourceful campaign player in her own right.
There’s a lot of anger, but also a lot of insight in “Chappaquiddick.” It’s a film brave enough to look back at a political scandal from half a century ago that likely altered the course of the presidency, to penetrate the fog of history and render a proper reckoning for a despicable deed.
Bonus features are scant, being limited to two documentary shorts: “A Reckoning: Revisiting Chappaquiddick” and “Bridge to the Past: Editing the Film.”
“Chappaquiddick” is a mesmerizing portrait of evil -- not an evil man, but a deed that remains one of the most black-hearted acts in American political history.
I refer not to the abject cowardice of Edward "Teddy" Kennedy in the summer of 1969, when the Senator from Massachusetts drunkenly drove a car off a bridge into a lake, leaving a campaign worker, Mary Jo Kopechne, trapped inside.
Nor to the fact that Kennedy failed to summon help, walking past houses 150 yards away to instead trudge back to the summer cottage he had just left to call his friends, all married men who were partying with single women like Kopechne. Rather than phoning the police, they scrambled to protect Kennedy’s reputation.
Nor do I even refer to Kennedy returning to his hotel room, where he slept, ate breakfast with friends and failed to report the accident for nearly nine hours. His inaction most certainly doomed Kopechne, who likely survived for hours trapped in the car, succumbing not to drowning, but suffocation as she used up the small pocket of breathable air.
The real evil, the film argues, lies in what came after.
This is an angry movie, but also a probing one. Director John Curran and screenwriters Andrew Logan and Taylor Allen look at how the Kennedy family machine of advisors and lawyers sprang into action to protect a man seen by many as the frontrunner for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.
Arms were twisted, wheels were greased, outright fabrications passed off as accepted fact.
At the center of this storm was Kennedy himself, a flawed man and last surviving son of a political dynasty consecrated with the highest of blessings and laden with the darkest of curses. Played by Jason Clarke in a riveting performance that should be remembered during the next awards cycle, Kennedy is portrayed as someone torn by tidal forces of pride, shame, entitlement and weakness.
“I’m not going to be president,” is the first thing he says after the accident. Kopechne, still struggling for air in a submerged Oldsmobile, had already been consigned to death. Kennedy’s only thought was that his political ambitions not join in her obituary.
While the movie chastens him for going along with the elaborate plot to save his career, it does not condemn Kennedy as an irredeemable fiend. Rather, it asks uncomfortable questions about who among us would have followed a similar path, given the titanic expectations for the baby brother of Jack and Bobby Kennedy.
Ted Kennedy was unwillingly anointed as the keeper of the flame for an entire generation of dreamers -- and wanted desperately not to see that torch sputter out on his watch.
Kate Mara plays Kopechne, depicted as an earnest young woman a member of the “Boiler Room Girls,” a group of secretaries and strategists who gave their souls to Bobby’s presidential campaign, and were being urged to sign on for another one. The film, while slinging many barbed arrows, does not dispute the insistence that the party was a chaste one, though there is some suggestion of longing between her and Kennedy, a lifelong philanderer.
Ed Helms is terrific as Joe Gargan, adopted son of the Kennedy clan, the friend who’s always there to clean up their messes. At first Teddy’s most ardent defender, he eventually grows sick of the lies and manipulation. He finally snaps when Kennedy, who was completely uninjured in the accident, dons a neck brace for Kopechne’s funeral. “You’re not a victim, Ted!” he bellows.
Bruce Dern is unrecognizable and piercing as Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of the clan, now grown decrepit in body to match the withered soul. Face twisted into a rictus, barely able to speak or move, he treats Ted as the prodigal son he’d rather not see returned.
When Ted first calls to report his predicament, the elder Kennedy can only croak out one word: “Alibi.”
Other notable cast members include Jim Gaffigan as Paul Markham, Kennedy pal and obedient fixer; Clancy Brown as Robert McNamara, the former Defense Secretary who leads the heavy hitters during the cover-up; Taylor Nichols as Ted Sorensen, speechwriter and PR expert; and John Fiore as the pliable local police chief.
“Chappaquiddick” is a powerful and bracing look at how power corrupts -- not just its exercise, but in its pursuit.
The late 1970s was an interesting time for American cars, and movies.
The 1974 oil embargo, plus new pollution standards, hit the automotive industry like a bag of bricks. Literally within a year or two, big-block engines had almost entirely disappeared from American show rooms, replaced by smaller, more efficient and often bag-over-head-ugly styles. But by 1978 or so, though, Pontiac Firebird and a few other models dared to become loud and large again.
The result was a rolling smorgasbord of modernism and throwback, muscle cars and horsepower pipsqueaks, flashy and forgettable, all occupying the same road.
Watching a movie like "The Driver," you see everything from early-1960s Cadillacs and other aging midcentury land yachts to pre-embargo beasts and newer econo-boxes.
The local movie theater was much the same. The blockbuster era was just launching, but you still had auteurs making small personal films and the burgeoning influence of foreign cinema on American movies.
"The Driver" was Walter Hill's second film as a director after the success of "Hard Times," a boxing movie with Charles Bronson. He adopted a similar spare style for this one starring Ryan O'Neal as a professional getaway driver. I admired it, but it goes too far in its taciturn tone, with its protagonist crossing over from cool reserve to seeming disinterest.
"Less is more" is mantra in Hollywood, but this film could've used a little less less.
One of Hill's conceits is that nobody in the movie even gets a name. O'Neal is simply "the Driver," while Bruce Dern as the rule-bending cop obsessed with busting him is simply "the Detective." This makes for some odd-sounding dialogue, with Dern referring to his quarry as "driver" or "cowboy."
Similarly, the card-playing quasi-hooker -- she lets a rich guy bankroll her lifestyle in exchange for occasional sex -- played by French star Isabelle Adjani in her American debut is simply "the Player." A secondary villain, a gun-happy robber (Joseph Walsh) wearing gaudy octagonal eye-wear is "Glasses"; the woman (Ronee Blakely) who sets up jobs for the driver is "the Connection"; a toothy antagonist (Rudy Ramos) is "Teeth;" and so on.
It's a microcosm of the film's major flaw of withholding too much. If you decline to name the
main character, it makes him more mysterious. If nobody has a name,
everybody talks like an idiot.
But the film has many admirable aspects, and you can see the stylistic flourishes that Hill would go on to display in "The Warriors,""The Long Riders," "48 Hours" and other movies. North of age 70, he's still active today as a producer and writer, and is attached to direct a thriller due next year.
This movie marked the beginning of the end of Ryan O'Neal's brief, hot career as a leading man. The same year would see the (wisely) forgotten sequel to "Love Story," followed by a romantic comedy with Barbra Streisand, a sci-fi disaster, and oblivion.
He was dismissed as being too pretty (and blond, a perpetual problem in Hollywood), arrogant and unreliable. I think it was more the classic case of writers and directors not knowing what to do with an actor of considerable skill but narrow range. As the passive, nearly wordless Driver, O'Neal just wanders around looking glum.
(I kept wondering: what if O'Neal and Dern had switched roles?)
Driver passes on jobs that involve a high risk of violence -- "I don't like shooters" is all he'll say -- and refuses to work with anyone who's even a minute late. Yet he's adept at guns and fists when called upon, and seems to operate by his own schedule and rules. The driver is a ronin, a masterless samurai who gives his ultimate fealty to his craft.
(The influences on the 2011 film "Drive" seem pretty obvious, right down to evoking the same era.)
At various times Driver pilots a Trans Am, a Ford big-block sedan, a first-generation Mustang pony car, a hot-rodded 1973 Chevy truck and a late model Mercedes-Benz -- the latter of which he completely trashes during a contemptuous "tryout" for Glasses' gang.
The driving stunts were reasonably impressive for a low-budget film in 1978, though they're a bit dated now. Turns, burnouts, controlled crashes, driving into oncoming traffic, etc. A whole lot of "extras" cars going 25 m.p.h. so the lead cars look fast doing 55. Compared to the jumps and flips in the previous year's "Smokey and the Bandit," it was fairly tame stuff.
The plot is spare as can be: Detective has been chasing Driver for some time now, but can't catch him in the act. He puts the pressure on Glasses to stage a bank robbery of $200,000 with Driver so they can pop him at the meetup. Of course, things don't go so smoothly.
It winds up as a game of chicken, with both the cop and the criminal aware of the setup, but still insisting on playing the game for its own sake.
Adjani is pretty well wasted in the movie, never showing any kind of expression even as she becomes romantically involved with Driver. (We assume; their coupling is only alluded to.) She was not happy with the resulting film, and complained that it stymied her chance to cross over into mainstream Hollywood.
Dern is obviously having a lot of fun, flashing that famous horsey smile and using his wiles to intimidate and needle everyone he encounters, including a by-the-book cop (Matt Clark) who objects to the risks he takes.
Detective's verbosity lies in obvious contrast to Driver's near silence: One's a talker, one's a doer.
The ending is funny and fitting for a heist flick, as the cop trying to con the con man finds himself out of his depth. After a long chase involving a bait-and-switch of the bank money, Detective corners Driver in a bus station with the bag of loot. He opens it to reveal the exchange man (dirty money for clean) robbed them both -- leaving Driver with an alibi and Detective with a career-ending mistake.
He offers Driver the empty satchel, but is refused, then tries to give it to the other cops, and finally just drops it on the floor on his walk of shame out of the station.
It's a wry, dry joke: You don't want to be the one left holding the bag.
“The Hateful Eight” struck many observers as a sharp departure for writer/director Quentin Tarantino, who tends to love freewheeling stories with lots of locations, walk-on bit characters and sudden twists of the plot. “Eight” was essentially a bunch of strangers stuck in a single room for three hours, the tension slowly ratcheting up.
(The blood, however, pools much more quickly.)
But in a lot of ways it’s a return to the form of “Reservoir Dogs,” Tarantino’s first feature film, which relied heavily on enclosed spaces in which violent characters try to make sense of shifting loyalties.
It’s not quite in the top tier of Tarantino films, like “Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.” But it firmly belongs in that second rank, along with “Django Unchained,” boasting plenty of entertaining face-offs and spouted soliloquies. For a three-hours picture, it goes by pretty quick.
The set-up is simple. Eight (for now) people are trapped by a terrible blizzard in a remote Wyoming cabin sometime in the years after the Civil War. They struggle to figure out who is not who they say, who’s loyal to who, and who deserves to be gunned down.
Answer to that last question: all of them, for one reason or another.
They include an infamous bounty hunter who always brings his quarry in alive (Kurt Russell); his current “client,” a foul-mouthed lady gangster (Jennifer Jason Leigh); a proud and decrepit ex-Confederate general (Bruce Dern) searching for his lost son; a black Union officer who’s also turned to the bounty hunting game (Samuel L. Jackson); a former rebel raider who claims to be the new sheriff at the closest town (Walton Goggins); a prissy British hangman (Tim Roth); a near-silent cow puncher (Michael Madsen); and Bob (Demián Bichir), a mysterious Mexican almost completely hidden by his coat, hat and beard.
Various alliances form, natural and otherwise, then break apart. The bounty hunters have an easy affinity for each other, and those on the side of the Confederacy soon square off against the Union loyalists.
Each character gets at least one moment where they step to the fore of the rhetorical stage, but there’s no single protagonist. Perhaps closest is Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren, who gives a long speech that’s notable for both its righteous anger at the injustice of slavery and the absolutely filthy way he goes about gaining some small measure of revenge for it.
“The Hateful Eight” is a long, blood-soaked but engaging dance through Western tropes.
Oh, and don’t forget to keep an ear out for Ennio Morricone’s Oscar-winning musical score.
Bonus features are nothing to brag about. Tarantino is among a number of high-profile filmmakers who are disdainful of participating in promotional material. (Despite the mountains of press they do when their movie is coming out.)
There are exactly two featurettes: “Beyond the Eight: A Behind-the-Scenes Look” and “Sam Jackson’s Guide to Glorious 70mm.”
Hollywood briefly flirted with counter-culture ideas and stories during the late 1960s and early '70s, making films that would later be described as "trippy." Not very many of these movies were especially good, but they often had an outsize effect on influencing future movies and filmmakers.
It's hard not to look at 1972's "Silent Running" and see similarities with the "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" feature films. The use of "drones," or little robot servants, by the space-faring humans would seem to have inspired George Lucas in his robot designs, which he referred to as droids. The drones in "Silent Running" -- at first called simply 1, 2 and 3 but later redubbed Huey, Louie and Dewey -- were portrayed by actors without legs, who used their hands to move around.
The drones aren't particularly convincing as characters, since they lack a definable "face" for the audience to relate to, and don't even appear to have a discernible camera eye. There's something that looks like a large camera flash bulb in the upper right, and they can't even properly talk other than hissing by venting some of their gizmos.
By the time you are reading this, the Oscar nominations will be out and it seems a certainty that Bruce Dern will receive a Best Actor nod for his subtle, powerful work in "Nebraska." The studio system never quite knew what to do with the odd duck thespian, who had leading-man looks and acting chops but naturally seemed to migrate to dark supporting roles. His last Oscar nomination was for 1978's "Coming Home."
Here Dern plays Lowell, the resident botanist on a space mission to preserve the last of Earth's plant life, housed in massive bio-domes aboard several ships. It's sort of the reverse scenario of "Wall-E," where instead of the humans leaving the planet until it's inhabitable again, here the people wait planetside for the flora to be reconstituted enough to be viable on a large scale again.
Sharing an enormous ship with three other men, Lowell is the self-imposed outcast, preferring to spend his time inside the bio-dome forests rather than playing cards and other games with the rest of the crew. He wears long flowing robes instead of the efficient space jumpsuits the others favor, and keeps his hair long and his feet bare. Lowell can't stand the synthesized food the other guys live on, opting for fresh fruits and vegetables he's grown himself.
Though it's never explicitly stated, it seems clear Lowell is a vegetarian. Though there are some animals in the bio-domes, they're there mostly for ecological reasons rather than to be hunted for game.
When the commanders order the domes to be ejected into space and blown up with nuclear weapons, Lowell rebels, killing his crew-mates and faking the destruction of his ship, the Valley Forge. It works for awhile, but eventually the other ships discover him, forcing Lowell to commit suicide -- but not before ejecting the last dome with one of his drones set as its permanent caretaker.
It's notable that as soon as Lowell commits his treason, he begins to behave more and more like the men he loathed. He starts eating the synthesized food, lets his living areas grow unclean, and even takes to zipping around in the little transport vehicles the other crew used to terrorize him in.
Director Douglas Trumball was known as the special effects creator for "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "The Andromeda Strain," contributing much to the look and success of those films. "Silent Running" was an original screenplay by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino ("The Deer Hunter") and Steven Bochco, best known for TV cop dramas "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue."
It's a really kooky script, more an idea for a movie than a fully fleshed-out one. I've never quote figured out what the title refers to -- the fact that the ships operate silently in space? Or that the lonely Lowell traverses the corridors of his doomed craft with no one to talk to?
"Silent Running" has gained cult status as an offbeat, innovative progenitor to late, better sci-fi flicks. The hippy-dippy aspects are badly dated, including some Joan Baez I-love-nature songs that exist as their own parody. (Really? Did anyone ever think that shrill warbling sounded pleasing to the ear?)
I found the film strange and off-putting, but Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was our cinematic obsession with space stories.
"Nebraska" is a movie of pauses and unspoken words. If you were to spell out everything that happens in the film and everything that's said, it wouldn't amount to much. A lot of people might find it rather slow, but they aren't the sort who go to a black-and-white dark comedy/drama from the guy who directed "Sideways" and "The Descendants," anyway.
Their loss.
Although "Nebraska" is a movie of slowness and deliberateness, director Alexander Payne doesn't revel in being so. His takes are long, but don't tarry a second longer than needed. The people speak in few words, the main character in so few he's practically mute. Yet any more dialogue would seem too much.
The plot is ... a non-story. A crotchety old man with some degree of undiagnosed dementia wants to travel from his home in Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, to claim his $1 million prize he received a letter about in the mail.
The "prize" is simply one of those scams where you sign up for some magazine subscriptions and you're entered into a contest. Of course, the letter has dollar signs and says "You are a winner!", so old folks like Woodrow Grant (Bruce Dern) are fooled into handing over their money.
Woody's insistence borders on obsession, to the point he starts walking cross-country to get his money. The police dutifully pick him up and return him safely home every time, but his family's so fed up that younger son Dave (Will Forte) finally agrees to drive him to Lincoln just to put the matter to rest.
Payne and screenwriter Bob Nelson slowly peel back the layers of Woody, a guy who at first seems like a walking joke but gradually is revealed as nothing less than an American icon. Woody came from a small farm, went to war and didn't talk about what he did there, got himself a wife and a business, drank too much and lived a life of quotidian repetition.
Now he's old, his mind is going, his wife and sons are exasperated by his erratic behavior, and basically everyone is just waiting for him to die, including Woody himself.
Dern is just terrific as Woody, a total transformation that we don't even question. With his nimbus of scattered white hair, unshaven face and neck, he looks half a step up from homeless. He walks in a hunched, stiff-legged shamble, as if he were a mummified duck.
While Woody wears the mien of a stubborn loner, Dern subtly reveals the yearning inside him. Woody doesn't really have any use for the money, only able to specify "a truck and a compressor" when asked what he'll buy. What he really wants is to be a somebody, instead of the nobody he's become.
Things really ratchet up when Woody and Dave stop in his tiny hometown of Hawthorne, where the social calendar seems to consist of drinking beer and watching TV, then going to the local bar to do the same in the company of others. Woody casually mentions the prize when asked why he's back, and the locals accept the sham as willingly as did he, turning the town joke into the big celebrity.
Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach) is the local big man and bully, a former business partner of Woody's, who figures he's owed a slice of the pie because ... well, just because. Worse yet, some of Woody's relatives get the same idea in their noggins.
June Squibb shines as Woody's put-upon wife, who obviously decided long ago to give out as much grief as she's gotten out of life. It's a brassy, showy part, and Squibb milks it for every ounce while still remaining believable as a person. I also enjoyed Bob Odenkirk as their older, more settled offspring.
The best scenes are between Forte and Dern, as the dutiful son tries to puzzle out the inscrutability of his father before he falls into the same trap of passivity and obstinacy himself. Recently split up from his girlfriend, Dave quizzes Woody about getting married and having kids. "You must have been in love at first?" "Never came up," is the laconic reply.
"Nebraska" is not a film for everyone, its rhythms too languorous for people who just want to munch their popcorn and "have a good time." But for those who can appreciate the unhurried unraveling of a mystery, the riddle of the extraordinary ordinary man, it's a delicious dark treat.
"The Great Gatsby" is a production design in search of a movie. It is jaw-droppingly gorgeous to gaze upon, from the actors whose eyes literally sparkle to their handsome clothes, ostentatious homes and gleaming automobiles.
But just like F. Scott Fitzgerald's overpraised novel -- still boring the tears out of high schoolers nearly a century after its publication -- the 1974 movie is beautifully lifeless and unengaging. It's a critique of an age, not a story about flesh-and-blood people whom we can adore or despise. Novels can just be about "a time and a place," but narrative films need to go places.
It has been commented by others that Fitzgerald simply took a timeless story, a love triangle, and set it against the backdrop of the Jazz Age of the 1920s and the nouveau riche who partied carelessly until the great, inevitable fall came.
Actually, if there's one group Fitzgerald finds more contemptuous than the oilmen and stock market dandies who got wealthy quick, it's the snooty Old Money types who wear their wealth like a mark of royalty. Mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby may be a reckless climber, but the book and movie save their sharpest barbs for Tom and Daisy, who think they deserve to dance above any disaster.
Tragedy is something that only happens to the unmoneyed. The wealthy maintain a cocoon by always sticking together. Or, as Daisy puts it to her long-lost lover, "Rich girls don't marry poor boys, Jay Gatsby."
At least Gatsby is ambitious; the Buchanans merely want to keep riding their wave of entitlement.
There have been at least a half-dozen cinematic adaptations of the novel, including a silent film version that came out the year after it was published. There was also a 1949 movie starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field, which I haven't seen.
I think "Gatsby" is a story that works for different times and people of certain ages, but not others. The '49 film must have had some added subtext, coming at a time when the country had just come out of two decades of war and economic struggle. Back then, the 1920s must have seemed like the grand, foolish ball before disaster struck.
The 1974 film has no such timely advantages, and arrived when the people who lived the Jazz Age were growing old and dying. It exists as an artifact, a critical representation of an era that was by then already forgotten.
Director Jack Clayton and his cast seem to have approached the picture
with a very theatrical mindset. Most of the actors deliver their lines
in stiff, diffident formal tones. Robert Redford is almost a total cipher as Gatsby, seeming to come out of his shell of mystery only when he nearly comes to blows with Tom Buchanan (Bruce Dern), the snobbish old-money playboy married to Daisy (Mia Farrow), his former love.
Farrow has a few interesting notes as the hysterical Daisy, who treats life as a party that never needs winding down. She's not a bored rich wife in need of distraction -- her entire life is a distraction. To her, motherhood consists of giving her little girl a hug and compliment from time to time when she happens by with the governess.
"That's the best thing a girl can be in this world -- a beautiful little fool," she purrs.
Sam Waterston doesn't have much to do as Nick, ostensibly the main character and narrator, but that's the way Fitzgerald constructed him: a Midwesterner who approaches the high-living life of rich Long Islanders like a zoologist studying the behavior of exotic beasts in the wild.
I don't really blame Francis Ford Coppola's screenplay, which actually follows the book rather faithfully, right down to the heavy-handed symbolism of the Buchanan's blinking green dock light beckoning Gatsby from across the lake, and the optometrist's bespectacled gaze frowning down on the proceedings from a billboard marking the fork between the old-money enclave and the upstarts.
Rounding out the cast are Scott Wilson and Karen Black as the Wilsons, poor folks who are used and abused in various ways by the Buchanans, and Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker, an amoral golfer and Nick's itinerant girlfriend.
I think what disappoints me most about the movie is that it's so completely bloodless. The characters seem to glide through a world lacking consequences or waypoints, creating their own rules as they go along. That's Fitzgerald's central criticism of the era in which he lived, and it makes for a wonderful-looking but detached movie.
Perhaps the new film arriving later this week can find the passion that eluded this one.
