Ambitious, audacious and just a little messy, “Origin,” the new film from director Ava DuVernay, now playing in theatres, is a study of the caste system told through the lens of a writer played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Part biography, part intellectual journey, it mixes the emotional with the academic.
Ellis-Taylor is bestselling author Isabel Wilkerson, who, in real life is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Happily married to Brett (Jon Bernthal), she is considering taking some time off writing and lecturing to look after her aging and ailing mother.
But tragedy and her restless intellectual curiosity push her into exploring how the unspoken caste system has shaped America, and how people are still classified to this day by a pecking order of human classifications. To that end she travels the world and history, making stops in the American South, Berlin, and India to study which groups of people have power, and which do not.
Based on Wilkerson life and the writing of the book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” “Origin” is narrative film that feels stuck between two worlds. The blend of Wilkerson’s biography, mixed with dramatic re-creations of the historical events that feed into her research, is a mix of personal and the political, but it seems as if the film is trying to decide if it is a narrative or a documentary.
Still, the choppy presentation is chock full of thought-provoking ideas. DuVernay, who also wrote the script, crafts a unique movie about connectivity, one that isn’t afraid to swing for the fences. As the film skips through world history and Wilkerson’s life, a portrait of systemic subjugation eventually comes into focus, against a backdrop of personal loss. The film’s two prongs don’t feel like a natural fit, but Ellis-Taylor’s rock-solid performance anchors the film, providing a bridge between the emotional and intellectual.
“Origin” is an interesting movie, one that bristles with the spirit of discovery, but sometimes gets allows lucidity to get lost in its execution.
Depending on what generation you belong to, Leonard Bernstein is either a name from the distant past, a prodigiously talented musician who wrote the music for “West Side Story,” or the subject of a well-loved name drop in the 1987 R.E.M. song “It’s The End of The World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” “Maestro,” a new film written, directed, produced and starring Bradley Cooper, aims to remind audiences of the complicated man who said, “music, it keeps me glued to life.”
The story of gender roles and genius begins in 1943 with Bernstein’s (Cooper) career making debut as a conductor at Carnegie Hall, filling in for an ailing colleague with only an hour’s notice and no rehearsal. The day before he was a talented but struggling musician, living in a cramped apartment with boyfriend David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer). The next day a star is born. He is the toast of New York, lauded on the front page of the New York Times.
At a party he meets Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a Chilean actress with dreams of starring on Broadway. It’s love at first sight and Cooper stages their first night together as a romantic fantasy, a ballet in a theatre that is both beautiful and surreal as it morphs from stage bound to involving Lenny and Felicia.
The couple marry, and have three children, Jamie (Maya Hawke), Alexander (Sam Nivola) and Nina (Alexa Swinton), as Felicia turns a blind eye to her husband’s extramarital relationships with men. “One can be as free as one likes without guilt or confession,” she says to him. “Please, I know exactly who you are.”
She is his muse, a catalyst for his best work, who pushes him to perform with passion but his lack of discretion eventually takes its toll. The couple split, but when she is diagnosed with cancer, he returns to care for her in her final days.
“Maestro” is a tenderhearted tragedy, a movie about a complicated marriage and the push and pull between Leonard Bernstein public and private lives. It is not a cradle to grave portrait of the title character. Instead, it’s an ambitious film that disregards most of the usual biopic conventions to delve into Bernstein’s sexuality, creative genius and his marriage to Felicia, brilliantly played by Mulligan.
Bernstein may be the focus, but the contradictions of his life are best viewed through the lens of his relationship with his wife. With a sexual appetite that rivalled his passion for music, Bernstein is a compelling character, and wonderfully played in a career best performance by Cooper.
Any trace of his “Hangover” persona disappears behind an inch of make-up but this isn’t a performance made from cosmetic prosthetics. Cooper digs deep to get into the nooks and crannies of Bernstein’s life, from his playfulness—“I’ve slept with both your parents,” he jokes when he bumps into Oppenheim, wife and baby in Central Park—to his musical passions, to his warmth and self-absorption.
The performance’s pinnacle comes with a vigorous recreation of Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony in London at the Ely Cathedral in 1976. The nearly six-minute sequence is a powerhouse of performance—Cooper reportedly spent six years learning Bernstein’s moves and conducts a live orchestra on screen—that captures the passion that fuels the character. It is the kind of work that wins awards.
As dynamic as Cooper is, it is Mulligan’s delicate work as Felicia that steals the show. She is a pillar of resilience and gracefulness, as composed as Bernstein is mercurial. Her final moments in the film (NO SPOILERS HERE) are quiet and reserved but devastating. It’s a radiant performance in an already impressive body of work.
When Cooper and Mulligan share the screen their effortless chemistry and the way they look at one another tells us as much about their lives and how they moved through the world as the script. Their dynamics and wonderful performances are invigorating in their portrayal of a creative life, marred and fuelled in equal measure by self-destructive behaviour and fervidness.
“Maestro” avoids most, but not all, of the usual biopic cliches.
It occasionally goes too heavy on expository dialogue to move the story along, is linear in its construction and a scene in which Felicia plunges into a pool, sitting on the bottom to escape trouble at home, is a film staple, but Mulligan, to her credit, makes it work. And while the film doesn’t shy away from Bernstein’s same sex liaisons, it is fairly chaste in the depiction of that aspect of his life.
Still, this is a stylish, passionate movie with just enough depth to both warm and break the heart.
“Priscilla,” a new film from director Sophia Coppola and now playing in theatres, is a bird in a gilded cage story set against the backdrop of loneliness and rock ‘n roll superstardom.
The story begins in Germany, where 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) lives with her mother Ann (Dagmara Domińczyk) and stepfather Paul (Ari Cohen), a United States Air Force officer stationed at Wiesbaden, West Germany.
Her life is changed forever when, while doing homework at a coffeeshop, she is approached by Terry West (Luke Humphrey), an officer stationed with 24-year-old Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi in full-on “Uh huh huh” mode) in nearby Bad Nauheim.
“You like Elvis Presley?” he asks her.
“Of course,” she says. “Who doesn’t?”
Despite her parent’s reservations, Priscilla accepts West’s invitation to go to a party at Elvis’s home. She meets the King of Rock ‘n Roll, who, after inviting her to his bedroom, tells her he’s homesick and just wants to talk to talk to somebody “from home.”
Caught up in the fantasy of having Elvis all to herself, Priscilla falls hard.
The chaste romance continues, with some rules from set by Priscilla’s father, until Elvis is transferred back to the States. With no contact from the singer, Priscilla gets the GI Blues, and keeps up with his life through fan magazines that trumpet his love affairs with everyone from Nancy Sinatra to Ann-Margret. Her mother encourages her to forget about Elvis, to cast her eyes on the boys at school. “There must be some handsome ones,” she says.
When he finally calls, inviting her to come visit him in Memphis, Priscilla enters a world of fantasy, fame and manipulation.
“Promise me you’ll stay the way you are now,” he says to her. She nods demurely, but of course, people change, even when they’re in love.
Based on Priscilla’s 1985 memoir, the movie is told from her perspective. So, unlike Baz Luhrmann’s recent “Elvis,” there are no concert scenes, no screaming crowds. Instead, we see the flipside of fame, the family hours, the downtown as Priscilla is kept sequestered away at Graceland, a school girl living with an immature superstar, because, as Elvis tells her, “the Colonel thinks it’s better if the fans don’t know about you.” It is a world of wealth and luxury but, also one almost completely devoid of true freedom, happiness or contentment.
In Coppola’s episodic structure, Elvis is portrayed as an insecure, manipulative toady, easy to anger, emotionally abusive, a man used to getting what he wants, and calling the shots. He tells her how to dress, how to behave and demands she be available at all times. “It’s either me or a career,” he says when she muses about taking a job. “When I call you, I need you to be there.”
As Elvis’s career demands and drug habit escalates, so does Priscilla’s alienation and growing sense of independence.
In a breakout performance Spaeny, best known for playing a teenage single mother on the Emmy-winning “Mare of Easttown,” goes internal, creating a portrait of Priscilla that relies on what isn’t said as much as what is. It’s the perfect approach to display the loneliness and internal turbulence that characterized her time at Graceland.
The show me, don’t tell me aesthetic of the film isn’t limited to Spaeny’s work. Coppola stages a terrific tableau of Elvis, gun tucked into his belt, taking a photo with a nun, that captures the ridiculous, yet all-encompassing nature of the singer’s fame. More poignant is the image of the eager-to-please Priscilla, slathering on the heavy eye make-up and long lashes Elvis preferred just before going to the hospital to have a baby.
“Priscilla” is a gentle look at a turbulent time. It is occasionally a bit too on-the-nose in its music choices—for instance, “Crimson and Clover’s” “I don’t hardly know her/ but I think I could love her,” is a bit too obvious a soundtrack for their first kiss—but is otherwise a subtle and thoughtful musing on a doomed love affair.
“Dreamin’ Wild,” a new film based on real-life musicians Donnie and Joe Emerson, is a movie that examines failure and success, and the toll each takes on the recipients.
Growing up on a 1,600-acre farm in Fruitland, Washington, population 751, Donnie and Joe (played as teens by Noah Jupe and Jack Dylan Grazer) dreamt of becoming professional musicians. At age 15 and 17, respectively, they took a tentative step toward their goal, recording an album of Donnie’s songs in a makeshift studio on the back 40. Soulful, introspective and melodic, their soft-rock album “Dreamin’ Wild” was released to no fanfare and even less acclaim.
Cut to thirty years later. Donnie (now played by Casey Affleck) and his wife Nancy (Zooey Deschanel) make ends meet playing weddings while Joe (Walton Goggins) has given up the drums in favor of building houses. The flames of musical success are rekindled, however, when a copy of the album is rescued from a delete bin and falls into the hands of an indie label executive (Chris Messina) who believes in the music and wants to reissue the album.
The belated success—“To twist a Brian Wilson phrase,” raves online music publication Pitchfork, “[the album] is a godlike symphony to teenhood.”—uncorks a deep wellspring of emotion in Donnie. “I feel like this dream is coming true but the wrong people are in it,” he says.
Filled with regret at a musical life left unfulfilled, at the life-changing amount of money his father lost investing in his music and the toll his decisions made on Joe, he bubbles over with guilt and shame. “Seems like a lot of things were easier when I was a teenager,” he says.
“Dreamin’ Wild” is a slow burn of a movie, like a song that meanders through verse after verse after verse before getting to the chorus. The leisurely approach allows for Affleck’s trademarked sorrowful inner monologue to shine, to do the heavy lifting. His bittersweet performance pits Donnie’s ambitions against his anxieties, a combustible combo that results to one of the film’s highlights, a heartfelt reckoning between Donnie and his father (Beau Bridges). The scene is a quietly eloquent testament, beautifully performed, to music’s ability to bridge generational gaps and it is a highlight in a film that values understated moments.
Pohlad tells the story on a broken timeline, toggling back and forth between Donnie and Joe’s teen years and present day, creating a complete picture of Donnie’s artistic birth and the subsequent turmoil his commitment to music and his dashed dreams has caused over the years.
Anchored by Affleck’s performance, “Dreamin’ Wild’s” portrait of a tortured artist is like the music Donnie performs in the film; thoughtful, gentle and emotionally authentic.
We all know how “First Man” will end. No surprises there. What may be surprising is the portrayal of its titular character, American astronaut and hero Neil Armstrong. It’s a small story about a giant leap.
Focussing on the years 1961 to 1968 “First Man” introduces us to Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) as an engineer and envelope-pushing pilot. When an X-15 test flight gives him a glimpse of space he becomes obsessed with going further. When his three-year-old daughter dies of a brain tumour he turns his grief inward, throwing himself at work. Becoming a NASA Gemini Project astronaut over the next seven years he fulfils the dream of President Kennedy 1962, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” speech. Alongside Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) and Jim Lovell (Pablo Schreiber), he begins a journey that will take him to the moon and back.
“First Man” is based on one of mankind’s greatest achievements and yet feels muted on the big screen. Deliberately paced, it nails the bone-rattling intensity of the early flights, the anxiety felt by the loved ones left behind as the astronauts risk everything to beat the Russians to the moon, and yet it never exactly takes flight.
Part history lesson, part simulator experience, it doesn’t deliver the characters necessary to feel like a complete experience.
Gosling is at his most restrained here as an analytical man who loves his family but is so stoic he answers his son’s question, “Do you think you’re coming back from the moon,” with an answer better suited to the boardroom than the dinner table. “We have every confidence in the mission,” he says. “There are risks but we have every reason to believe we’ll be coming back.” He is buttoned-down and yet not completely detached. His daughter’s memory never strays from his mind, even if he never discusses her death with his wife, played by an underused Claire Foy. Gosling embraces Armstrong’s fortitude but has stripped the character down to the point where he is little more than a distant man of few words.
“First Man” contains some thrilling moments but for the most part is like the man himself, stoic and understated.
