Meryl Streep has a body of work that speaks for itself and, as she proved last Sunday night from the stage of the Golden Globes, is unafraid to challenge the status quo. But last week while the world formed opinions about Streep as she mouthed off about Donald Trump—She’s an icon! She’s overrated!—I had my eye on someone in the audience.
During Streep’s speech the camera landed on Annette Bening, who, for my money gives the Grand Dame a run for her money acting wise.
This weekend Bening adds 20th Century Women to her already stellar IMDB resume. As free-spirited single mother Dorothea she is, as writer David Edelstein wrote, irreducible. In other words she’s complex, loving yet stand-offish, warm but steely, a hippie who studies the stock market and Bening brings her to vivid life.
It’s that density of character that sets Bening apart from her peers, Streep included. Warren Beatty, her husband and sometimes director says she has, “talent, beauty, wit, humility and grace,” a combination that makes her “the best actress alive.”
Biased? Likely, but the evidence is on the screen. Bening works sporadically, sometimes taking years between projects or taking small supporting roles in idiosyncratic independent films like Ruby Sparks, but her characters are always compelling.
She became a star playing femme fatale Myra in 1990’s con artist caper The Grifters. Gleefully embracing her character’s deviousness, she stole the movie away from vets John Cusack and Anjelica Huston. Then came intricate portrayals of everything from a muckraking lobbyist in The American President and neurotic real estate broker in American Beauty to Bugsy’s tough-talking Hollywood starlet and In Dreams’ psychic vigilante. Each performances is a polished gem even when the movies aren’t as good as she is.
The last of her Best Actress Oscar nods came with 2010’s The Kids Are Alright. At the center of story are Nic (Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), a long time lesbian couple raising their two kids. It’s a happy family until their daughter contacts her biological father Paul (Mark Ruffalo) via the sperm bank.
A scene near the movie’s end displays the complexity of Bening’s work. Nic and Paul sing a Joni Mitchell song at a dinner party. Their wild act is joyful, ridiculous and poignant simultaneously and is a perfect microcosm of Bening’s performance. Bening is unpredictable, sometimes funny, sometimes not, just like real life. It’s her well-drawn character that keeps the basic story afloat with its lived-in, realistic feel.
Less known is Bening’s fine work in The Face of Love, a 2014 film about a widow obsessed with a man who looks exactly like her late husband Tom. Trouble is, she never tells him about his resemblance raising the question, Is she in love with Tom or a memory?
Another question: Is she a selfish conniver, a grief stricken widow or one brick short of a load? The movie allows for interpretation, but regardless of your take, Bening’s performance is so raw and vulnerable it’s difficult to completely condemn her behaviour.
Bening’s name may not always be mentioned in the hushed tones as Streep, but I suspect she doesn’t care for the accolades as much as shattering the clichés of how women are portrayed on film. On that score she is at the top of her field.
The word quirky gets thrown around a lot in reference to character driven indie films. “20th Century Women,” the Mike Mills (the director not the REM guitarist) coming of age story starring Annette Bening and Greta Gerwig, falls under that umbrella, presenting an off beat story of mothers, friends and lovers that luckily never allows it’s idiosyncrasies to become twee.
The film is set during one turbulent summer in 1979 in a creaky old boarding house run by single Santa Barbara mom Dorothea Fields (Annette Bening). Boarders include artsy cancer survivor Abbie (Gerwig) and William (Billy Crudup), a good-looking hippie carpenter with a way with a hammer and women. At the center of the story is Dorothea’s 15-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), a sensitive boy with an unrequited crush on platonic friend Julie (Elle Fanning).
At the cusp of the eighties Dorothea, a “child of the Depression,” finds herself disconnected from Jamie, unsure if she knows exactly how to raise a teenage boy in a changing world. William and the boy didn’t bond so she turns to Abbie and Julie for help. “You get to see him out in the world as a person,” Dorothea saus to Abbie. “I never will.”
Based on Mills’s teenage years, “20th Century Women” is a coming-of-age filtered through the lens of a very specific era. The music of The Talking Heads fills the soundtrack, Abbie’e punk style includes a shock of purple hair and loose-limbed dancing while Julie embraces the feminist principles of the day. In this swirl of art, change and sexuality Jamie enters manhood with a trio of twentieth century women as his cobbled-together family.
It’s the story of a teenage boy but it is just as much a study of the women in his life, each of whom is unique, interesting and arrive in the film fully formed. No mother or girlfriend figureheads here.
Leading the charge is Bening who heads the ensemble with supreme ease, playing Dorothea as an eccentric but warm presence, a woman grappling with change and the idea her son is growing up too fast.
Gerwig borders on typecasting, taking on the role of the gloomy, sexualized Abbie. It’s a character that seems to fit comfortably in her wheelhouse and then, with no noticeable effort she reminds us why her delicate portrayals of interesting people strike such a chord in movie after movie.
Fanning, the third corner of this triangle, mixes sweetness and ferocity, brewing up a potent cocktail of teenage rebellion.
Structurally the film suffers from the odd hiccup but tremendous performances that feels airy and grounded at the same time bring humanity and empathy to a story that is specific in its time and place but universal in its scope.
To hear Hollywood legendary Warren Beatty tell it, casting Lily Collins as the lead of his latest film happened in a blink.
The movie is Rules Don’t Apply, a nostalgic look at an aspiring actress, her limo driver boyfriend and Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire they both work for. There were no formal auditions for the film, just Beatty’s gut instinct and “the blink.”
“I believe very much in what I call the blink,” says Beatty. “That is the superiority of the unconscious knowledge as compared to conscious knowledge. The knowledge that when we sit and we really give it some thought, the thought we feel it is due. That thought can be misleading when we could have trusted our initial instinct, the blink. I think the unconscious has a lot more intelligence in it than the conscious.
“It was a blink with Lily. I can only say I loved the way she looked. I loved the way she sounded. I loved the way she talked. There was an integrity about her I felt I could believe in this circumstance and at the same time she looked like someone to me who Hollywood would want to exploit.”
Collins plays Marla Mabrey, wannabe movie star and “devout Baptist beauty queen from Virginia.” On the surface the twenty-seven-year-old doesn’t have a great deal in common with her on-screen character but the actress says she understood Marla immediately.
“I could relate to it,” she says. “Starting out acting in Hollywood, very wide eyed, innocent, naïve. Wanting to please everyone. Having my mom there with me. Marla was very adamant and passionate, determined and steadfast. All these things I think I was when I started.”
The actress, who has three movies lined up for next year including Okja with Jake Gyllenhaal and To the Bone with Keanu Reeves, calls working with Beatty a master class in acting. She even kept a journal on set. “I have all these tidbits of information. Things I witnessed that I can now draw on. I would have been a fool not to.”
In particular Beatty taught the star how to think differently about breaking down a script.
“Whenever we would do a scene he kept saying, ‘What are you doing? What is your action? What is your intention?’ At the beginning I read the script as someone who had never broken it down in the way he had, and I’d be like, ‘Right now she’s really emotional. She’s sad. She misses her mom.’ He’d say, ‘Show me what that looks like.’ I can’t because that is an adjective. ‘OK, put it into words. Put it into a verb.’ As soon as I started breaking down a scene based on verbs, it didn’t matter if I cried when it said ‘Marla cries,” because as long as my intention was the same as what her intention was, whatever naturally occurred, occurred. Nothing was fake. Nothing was put on. I think audiences are smart, they can tell. If something seems fake or put on they will not associate with it.
“I soaked in everything,” she says. “Even when I was tired I subconsciously I soaked in everything because I thought, ‘It’s a joy and an honour to be in this situation.’ He could have just picked someone else so I need to take in everything I can.”
“Rules Don’t Apply” star and director Warren Beatty wants you to know that his latest film is not a biopic of Howard Hughes. The legendary Hollywood figure—Beatty not Hughes, although the term could ply to either—has long wanted to make a movie about the reclusive billionaire but this isn’t it. Instead it is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of 1950s Tinsel Town in which Hughes is not the star, just the most interesting character.
Lily Collins plays Marla Mabrey, a Southern Baptist girl with dreams of being a Hollywood star. A contract with Hughes’ RKO Pictures got her halfway there, now she needs to meet Hughes (Beatty) and get a part. Until then Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), a personal chauffeur assigned by RKO escorts her around town to make sure she stays out of trouble. “If you don’t drive them, you can’t keep your eye on them.”
Romance soon blooms, leaving the two in a perilous spot as both their contract stipulate that they won’t become involved with members of the extended Hughes corporate family.
Meanwhile Hughes remains an elusive, shadowy figure in Marla’s life. The eccentric businessman is juggling dozens of starlets, who he has stashed all over town, some bankers with $400 million in ready cash and a hostile takeover by his business partners. Hughes’s antics and obsessions with everything from the Spruce Goose to Baskin-Robbins’ banana-nut ice cream, keep the young lovers separated but will the oddball’s behaviour change their lives?
“Rules Don’t Apply” isn’t a biopic—the movie telegraphs this with an opening quote from Hughes: “Never check an interesting fact”—or a farce or, strictly a romantic comedy. For better and for worse it is its own thing, a nostalgic Warren Beatty film that basks in the glow of old Hollywood courtesy of DP Caleb Deschanel and terrific costume and set design. As a look back to what Los Angeles was like when Beatty first hit town it’s an engaging slice of ephemera. Unfortunately, the story and the characters are slightly less engaging.
Collins and Ehrenreich are charismatic, interesting actors who make the most of the moments offered them. Trouble is, the film too often shifts focus. Is it the story of Marla’s ambition, of Frank’s potential get rich quick scheme, or Hughes’s foibles? It’s all that and feels cluttered, as though not all the moving parts are necessary to keep the movie’s engine in gear. It never quite works up the head of steam it needs to commit fully to its farce DNA, but when it works it works very well.
In front of the camera Beatty shines as Hughes, reminding us why he became a movie star in the first place. Confident and bold this is a much different Hughes than we saw in “The Aviator.” Beatty’s take on the character is a broad, often comedic, occasionally tragic look at a man trying to stop both his personal and professional life from unravelling.
Behind the camera Beatty gives us moments to savour. When Marla’s mom (Annette Bening) announces they must leave Hollywood, her daughter hugs her and sweetly says, “I’ll help you pack.” It’s a sly bit of character work, simply staged that tells us that Marla has the strength to cut her mother loose in pursuit of her dream.
“Rules Don’t Apply” is a handsome movie that lives up to its name. The strict rules of romantic comedy, drama and biography don’t apply here. It’s a wistful confection, sometimes frothy, sometimes idiosyncratic, that feels like it might have sprung from the era it portrays.
Richard is mentioned in the Toronto Star article “Warren Beatty remains precise and in control about all things, especially sex” by Peter Howell. Read the whole thing HERE!
“Danny Collins” begins with a flashback to 1971. The title character is an up-and-coming folk singer promoting his first album. His Chime Magazine interviewer is clearly a fan, telling the young singer that soon he would he rich, famous and have more women than he’ll know what to do with.
Collins squirms in his seat.
“Why are you staring at me like that information scares you?”
“Because it does,” sputters Collins.
Cut to forty years later. Collins is a sell out, a Neil Diamond sound-a-like superstar who has become comfortable with the money, fame and women while developing a crippling cocaine habit. As a birthday gift his long time manager Frank (Christopher Plummer) gives him a letter from John Lennon, written in 1971 in response to the Chime Magazine interview. Collins never received the handwritten note, but its content regarding the Beatles’s thoughts on fame, fortune and not letting them affect your creativity, rock Collins.
“What would have happened if I got that letter when I was supposed to?” he wonders. “My life would have turned out different.”
Taking the letter to heart, he decides to change his life. The first stop on his recovery tour? New Jersey, to contact a son (Bobby Cannavale) he’s never met.
Appropriately enough, I guess, for a movie about music the story spends a great deal of time plucking at heartstrings. Sentimental and sappy, the only rock-and-roll things here are the John Lennon songs that wallpaper the soundtrack.
As edgy as Collins’s big hit “Baby Doll”—which comes complete with its own dance—the movie doesn’t ever feel authentic, but Pacino is Pacino and brings a certain charm to the main character. One of the film’s running jokes has Danny asking hotel manager Mary (Annette Bening) out for dinner, only to have her reject his offer. He won’t give up, however, and neither does Pacino. His Leonard Cohen-esque singing aside, he commits fully to the role and fills in some of the gaps with sheer strength of will.
Cannavale and Jennifer Garner, as the long-lost son and daughter-in-law and Plummer also bring considerable charm but make no mistake, this is Pacino’s peacock show. Like the character, the film is ridiculous but has a lot of heart and it’s hard to deny the underlying good-vibe on display.
“Girl Most Likely,” a dysfunctional family comedy starring Kristen Wiig, Annette Bening and Matt Dillon, proves that you can take the girl out of New Jersey, but you can’t take the New Jersey out of the girl.
Wiig stars as Imogene, a wannabe New York playwright. Years before she won a prestigious award but the promise of a distinguished career in the theatre evaporated, leaving her with a cheating boyfriend, some high society friends who sneer at her behind her back and an inferiority complex.
Hitting rock bottom she’s forced to move back home, to Ocean City, New Jersey with her eccentric mother (Bening), younger brother (Christopher Fitzgerald) and assorted boyfriends (Dillon) and roomers (Darren Criss).
Living with mom stirs up some old memories, reveals some new truths and makes her more determined than ever to get back to the bright lights of NYC… if she can find a way to break free of her roots.
“Girl Most Likely” is a frustrating movie because it comes so close to being a home run, but doesn’t quite make it to home base. Co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini have assembled a great, charismatic cast but given them a script that relies on quirk rather than depth to make its point.
Narcissistic characters can be fascinating on screen—think “American Psycho’s” Patrick Bateman or Gregory Anton from “Gaslight” or even “The Princess Bride’s” Vizzini—but the psychological issues that drive them have to resonate, or at least be apparent and that’s where “Girl Most Likely” fails.
It’s a narcissistic cesspool played for laughs without ever really giving us the dark background that feeds the self-absorbed behavior on display. There are hints along the way but they are over shadowed by a plot that relies on idiosyncratic twists, like a brother who specializes in mollusk protection methods and a mysterious stranger who may, or may not, be an international spy.
Paring down the eccentricity and upping the realistic elements of the story would have allowed the performances to shine brighter and made “Girl Most Likely” a more satisfying movie.
There is no small amount of irony that the man who wrote Under My Thumb and Some Girls, songs reviled by women’s groups everywhere, is one of the producers of a new female empowerment movie starring Annette Bening and Meg Ryan. Mick Jagger, perhaps atoning for past lyrical crimes against women, was one of the money men behind The Women, a loose adaptation of the Clare Booth Luce play and hit movie.
The names are the same from the 1939 film (which starred Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford in the roles now taken by Ryan, Bening and Eva Mendes) and the general idea is intact but the story of a wealthy woman who discovers her husband is having an affair with a Sak’s Fifth Avenue perfume counter attendant has been tweaked and brought forth into the twenty-first century. Gone are the Countesses and dude ranches of the original; in are lesbian characters (Jada Pinkett Smith), expensive clothes and one-liners geared to appeal to a female audience. There’s also been a philosophical shift. The original exposed society women as catty and shallow whereas the new girl power vision celebrates female friendship, eliminating most of the cattiness—although the odd slyly mean remark like “There’s a fine line between an outfit and a get-up…” slips through.
Now that studios have finally figured out that it’s not just teenage boys who pay to see movies, more and more films are being aimed at a female audience. Sex and the City and the The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, both recent movies that dealt with female bonding and friendship, were just the first shots across the bow. Apart from its female demographic The Women hits another, usually neglected, target audience: older women. This movie is aimed at the mothers of the teens and young women who flocked to see the Sisterhood sequel and the adventures of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte.
From its opening joke about marked down shoes the film is so unconcerned with a male audience it goes so far as to not include one single male character. There aren’t even any men in the crowd shots. Estrogen rules in every frame of the film.
Director and screenwriter Diane English (best known as the producer and writer of Murphy Brown) hasn’t exactly improved on the original, but she does keep things going at a sitcom-like pace, peppering the action with so many jokes—only about half of which actually land—that the whole thing could best be described as amiable rather than good.
The main cast—most veterans of light comedy—are as amiable as the script. High points include Candice Bergen, who continues her run as the summer’s reigning cameo queen, and her effortless way with a one liner. As in Sex and the City she has The Women’s best line with, “Such a bad facelift… She looks like she’s reentering the Earth’s atmosphere.” Also delightful is Cloris Leachman as the crotchety house keeper prone to admonishing her boss with sayings like, “Keep your Wonder Bra on…” While the dialogue isn’t exactly as elegantly snappy as Luce’s words, these two old pros deliver their zingers effortlessly.
The Women doesn’t have the naughty edge of Sex and the City or the youthful exuberance of the Sisterhood movies, but it shares common ground with those pictures in its heartwarming message of friendship and empowerment.
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
