Review: 20th Century Women (2016)

* * * *
Director: Mike Mills
Starring: Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning, Lucas Jade Zumann

Annette, you were robbed. You too, Greta. 20th Century Women opened right at the very end of 2016 for an Oscar qualifying run (playing in just 4 theaters from December 28th to January 5th, and then expanding to a few hundred theaters in January) and I can't help but wish that instead of doing that, the distributor had held it back for a mid-year release this year. With a last minute qualifying run, 20th Century Women never really stood a chance (though it did manage to net one Oscar nomination, for writer/director Mike Mills for Best Original Screenplay). It's too small, too intimate, to be able to make an impact with that kind of release. It's the kind of film that needs a chance to marinate a bit and build an audience, not unlike Mills' previous film, Beginners, which received a June release and for which Christopher Plummer won an Oscar. But art is ultimately its own reward, and though it doesn't have a chance to walk away with the slew of awards it richly deserves, 20th Century Women will nevertheless go down as one of 2016's finest films.

Review: Danny Collins (2015)

* * *
Director: Dan Fogelman
Starring: Al Pacino, Annette Bening, Christopher Plummber, Bobby Cannavale, Jennifer Garner

If it had been released at pretty much any other time of year, I don't know that I would have enjoyed Danny Collins as much as I ultimately did. It's the sort of low in ambition, high in easy sentiment, middle of the road half comedy, half drama that I don't typically have a ton of patience for, but whether it's the dearth of new releases out at the moment, the right mood on my part, or the film's relaxed charm and the fact that it puts on no airs, but this Al Pacino vehicle won me over pretty quickly. It helps that, though the film has its share of stock/cookie cutter elements, it resists (sort of, but certainly to a greater degree than you have any reason to expect it will) delivering the mushy, hugs all around type ending that films like this tend to demand.

Review: Girl Most Likely (2013)

* 1/2
Director: Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini
Starring: Kristen Wiig, Annette Bening

Girl Most Likely to... what, exactly? Certainly not to be the protagonist of a movie that carries itself like its screenplay has been through more than one draft. I'm not sure how so many talented people ended up joining forces for such a bizarre mess of a movie, but here it is. If you're thinking of checking this one out, I highly recommend just watching the trailer because all the funny jokes are there and you get them without having to suffer through the nonsensical and shapeless plot, which is less a cohesive narrative than it is a series of ideas for potentially funny scenarios that never really develop into anything.

Review: Mother and Child (2010)

* * * 1/2
Director: Rodrigo Garcia Barcha
Starring: Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, Kerry Washington

During the first half of its running time Rodrigo Garcia Barcha’s Mother and Child is an almost relentlessly brutal film, its characters defined by the pain they feel and the pain they inflict on others. By the second half, however, those hard edges are softened considerably, revealing a delicately wrought character study about people who are all too human and all too flawed. Mother and Child is a totally riveting character-driven drama carried by three terrific performances.

The Best Picture Countdown #72: American Beauty (1999)

Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening

The cinematic landscape is no stranger to films exploring the dark, kinky underbelly of American suburbia. Sexual peccadilloes, marriages that are not what they seem, the corrupted “American dream” – these are themes so common that they’ve reached the point of cliché. And yet there is something about American Beauty that allows it to stand apart from its predecessors and imitators and which allows it to stand up after multiple viewings.

Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is a man in turmoil. His life looks ideal from the outside: he has the nice house in the nice neighbourhood, the pretty wife and daughter, the comfortable uniformity shared with his neighbours; his life is the personification of middle-class success. He implores us, however, to “look closer.” Behind the respectable veneer is fraud and despair. He gets no respect from his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) or their daughter Jane (Thora Birch), nor does he deserve any. His job is meaningless and his life is slowly ticking away into nothingness. He is (the film would have us believe) the average, miserable suburbanite.

Carolyn and Jane are miserable, too, though Carolyn is so adept at pretending to be happy and perfect that she’s nearly fooled herself into really believing it. While Lester has allowed himself to sink, Carolyn continues to reach, wanting to drag herself up to the next level even if it means sacrificing her humanity. She’s a real estate agent, supporting the family by selling others on the fantasy of life in the suburbs, and the toll that her job takes on her is extreme. In one scene she brutally berates herself for her failure to sell a house, her feelings of low self-worth channelled into a drive to sell, to succeed, to live up to that picture of perfection she’s pushing so hard.

Things begin to change when Lester meets Angela (Mena Suvari), a cheerleader and friend to Jane. In a scene that has since been much parodied, Lester watches as a group cheerleading routine dissolves into a private dance from Angela, who opens her uniform to shower him with rose petals. Lester is a changed man, his morose bearing suddenly replaced by an eagerness to live, to savour and enjoy the best that life has to offer. He gets into shape, he regains his self-esteem, he quits his job – he becomes the man that he has always wanted to be but was too scared to become.

Lester’s transformation has repercussions that affect all in his vicinity. In declaring his own ordinariness and that of those around him to be insufficient, he not only strips away the facade behind which he had been hiding, but he exposes all those around him as frauds. In rejecting Carolyn’s idea of perfection, he destabilizes her conception of herself. In refusing to play by the implicit suburban rules, he disrupts the lives of his neighbours, such as the Fitts family next door. Lester becomes a dangerous figure because he becomes the bearer of truth in the midst of people who feel safe only when ensconced in falseness.

All of this unfolds with the aid of a smart, darkly funny screenplay from Alan Ball. The crispness of the script, played out by a cast of actors at the top of their game, is what gives American Beauty its edge over other films like it. However, despite its many strengths, American Beauty is still problematic in its depiction of gender, skewing towards the ultra-traditional and anti-feminist in its narrative progression. The film opens with a wife who not only works but is a more successful provider than her husband and clearly puts her career before her family. Her husband is emasculated, her family is in tatters. As the husband regains control and self-esteem, the wife begins to flail. The ease with which the husband regains dominance in the relationship shows that the wife’s power was never more than illusory – she was in control because her husband could not rouse himself to stop her, but once he wants control back, she proves to be powerless against him. Further, once the balance begins to weigh more clearly in favour of the husband than the wife, the household becomes demonstrably happier. Much of the film’s dark humour comes at the expense of the wife, her desire to climb the social and professional ranks, and her inability to keep up once her husband begins to reassert himself. Though the film ostensibly stands against the complacency of traditional family values, it does in fact reinforce the most conservative gender politics.

Films like this one tend to have a short shelf-life because the things they depict are so firmly grounded in a specific time and place - a specific moment in cultural evolution - that they don’t move along with shifts in the zeitgeist. American Beauty, however, is so perfectly put together that it has somehow maintained its freshness a decade after its release. The message it imparts – be happy rather than complacent, look beneath the surface rather than at it, don’t let other people tell you what you want – remains powerful and relevant and the finesse with which that message is imparted remains just as impressive today as it was in 1999. American Beauty is a film that stands the test of time and one can imagine that 10 years from now it will still be a movie worth talking about.

Review: The Kids Are All Right (2010)

* * * *
Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Starring: Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffallo

The kids are, indeed, all right though the adults are kind of messed up. Lisa Cholodenko's latest film has been much hyped (way hyped), but hopefully its early in the year release will allow it complete the "hype/over-hyped/reconsidered" cycle in time to secure some very well-deserved Oscar nominations. This story of a family and a marriage in crisis is thoughtful, extremely well-acted, and alternates easily between being very funny and very moving.

The kids are Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), two perfectly average suburban teenagers save for the fact that they’re being raised by two mothers. Joni has just graduated from high school and since she’s 18, Laser encourages her to contact the sperm bank their mothers used in order to find out the identity of their donor. Though reluctant, Joni ultimately agrees to do it since it means so much to her brother, and after a somewhat awkward phone call the siblings meet Paul (Mark Ruffalo). When their mothers, Nik (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), find out about the meeting it opens the floodgates for a lot of anxieties, putting pressure on a relationship that’s already at a shaky stage.

When Paul hires Jules to do some landscaping work at his house, things go from bad to worse. With Jules and Paul growing closer (much too close) and him exercising a degree of influence on the kids that she finds troubling, Nik increasingly feels like her family is in jeopardy or, rather, like her place in the family is slipping away. When she discovers that Jules and Paul have been having an affair, the family’s delicate balance is irrevocably changed and all the film's relationships are thrown into a tailspin.

The Kids Are All Right occupies a somewhat odd position pop culture-wise in that it centers on a gay relationship and works to legitimize it in part by highlighting all the ways that gay relationships aren't really so different from straight ones, while at the same time having a plot that hinges on a trope seen in a lot of mainstream films and TV shows and that often serves to reassure male viewers that lesbians aren't threatening because, ultimately, they're just waiting for the right man - a line of thinking which obviously undercuts the idea that a lesbian relationship is legitimate or real. The film thus finds itself in the strange position of being criticized by both the Christian right for being too gay, and by the gay community for being too straight.

In terms of the gay community's response, I do think that the displeasure incited by Jules' affair with Paul is valid given the dearth of positive portrayals of same sex relationships within the mainstream, but I also think this criticism is somewhat misplaced with regards to this particular film. For one thing, the development makes sense in the context of the rest of the story: after two decades together Nik and Jules have grown apart, Jules feels like there’s a power imbalance in the relationship, and she feels like her children are growing up and away from her. Paul reminds her of her kids, he makes her feel useful, and he doesn’t criticize her. Their affair isn’t about a lesbian who discovers that she wants sex with a man, but about a lonely woman reaching out for something familiar and comforting. For another thing, the development really isn’t surprising within the context Cholodenko’s work as a whole. Sexual fluidity and infidelity (and its effects) are consistent themes for her, the only difference is that in High Art and Laurel Canyon women in relationships with men have affairs with women. All Cholodenko has done is flip the script that she typically works with.

Laying all that aside, beneath whatever controversies the film has inspired it is, ultimately, a very good movie. Cholodenko, who co-wrote the screenplay with Stuart Blumberg, gives the characters plenty of room to breathe and allows them to be more than two dimentional drones at the mercy of the plot. There is a richness to the characters, the way they interact with each other, and the way the film approaches them (not to mention the masterful way in which each is played) that makes the film worth multiple viewings. I've really only scratched the surface of what makes The Kids Are All Right worth talking about; there is a lot to this movie and I really don't think I could recommend it more.