SYNOPSIS: A thoughtful retelling of Mary Shelley’s gothic science fiction novel, Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” now streaminng on Netflix after its theatrical run, is an ambitious story of what it means to be human.
CAST: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, Lauren Collins, Charles Dance, and Christoph Waltz. Directed by Guillermo del Toro.
REVIEW: Bold, bombastic and beautiful, Guillermo del Toro‘s “Frankenstein” is an emotionally charged story of father and son, of beauty and beasts and literary romanticism.
Del Toro is faithful to Shelley’s novel. He frames the story as Victor Frankenstein’s (Oscar Isaac) dying confession aboard the ship of an Arctic explorer, keeps Shelley’s empathetic take on The Creature (Jacob Elordi) and allows “the monster” a voice and the language to eloquently describe the heartbreaking tragedy of his life.
(MILD SPOILER ALERT) The most significant change comes at the end as del Toro opts for understanding over nihilism.
The Creature has always been a sympathetic character, but del Toro and Elordi humanize him in a way unlike any other portrayal. The hulking Creature is seemingly indestructible physically, but emotionally he’s a soulful character in search of family and love.
It looks like a Gothic horror movie but can’t rightly be called a traditional horror film. The horror of the story comes not from violence or gore, but from the abuses foisted upon the Creature by Victor his creator, but certainly not his protector. “If you will not reward me with love,” the Creature says to Victor, “I will indulge in rage.”
Victor’s existential quest, fueled by his sense of powerlessness over his mother’s passing, drives him create a life to defy death. In his success, however, comes the ultimate cruelty; the creation of a life, complete with deeply felt human emotions, but one unable to make a human connection.
It’s here, in this philosophical, reflective film, that del Toro amps up the empathy, weaving in notes of hope and questions about existence and one’s purpose in the great big world. The director loves monsters and that affection is infused in every frame of the film.
At 149 minutes del Toro allows himself the time to dig deep. He balances the story’s existential aspects with a touching sequence involving a blind man (David Bradley) who shows the Creature kindness, some adventure, colorful characters and even some superhero style action.
Del Toro’s movie is “Frankenstein” on a grand scale but in its reanimated heart, it is a simple story of father and son, of connections and family ties.
“Saltburn,” a dark comedy of manners starring “Priscilla’s” Jacob Elordi and Academy Award nominee Barry Keoghan and now playing in theatres, is a titillating “Talented Mr. Ripley” style tale of class, position and desire that is not afraid to get weird.
Keoghan is Oliver Quick, a shy “scholarship kid” at Oxford University who doesn’t quite fit in with his classmates. His jackets aren’t from Saville Row, he lacks their social graces and most notably, doesn’t come from oodles of cash.
When the handsome, gregarious and monied Felix Catton’s (Elordi) bicycle get s flat tire on the way to a tutorial, Oliver comes to the rescue and the odd couple become fast friends. Ollie isn’t exactly embraced by Felix’s well-heeled inner circle, who find him coarse, but they become tight, hanging out at the pub when they aren’t studying.
At the end of the term Felix asks if Oliver will go home for the summer.
“Honestly, home doesn’t mean the same thing for me as it does for you Felix,” Oliver says. “I don’t think I’ll ever go home again.“
His tale of woe, of growing up as the only child to a drunken father, moves Felix who invites him to spend the summer at Saltburn, his family’s palatial estate.
“Just be yourself,” Felix says. “They’ll love you. It’s relaxed. I promise.”
Except it’s not. It’s the kind of English country home that makes Downton Abbey look like a shack. Priceless art lines the walls, there are butlers and footmen, mandatory jackets at dinner and an oddball collection of aristocratic family members including Felix’s eccentric, self-absorbed father Sir James (Richard E. Grant), casually cruel mother Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and troubled sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), who tells the newcomer, “You’re just another one of his toys.”
He may be a novelty, out of his depth, but Oliver is drawn to shiny things, the lives of the rich and famous, and will do anything to stay in that privileged world.
“Saltburn” isn’t just a study of the haves and the have nots, it’s a tale of the haves and unchained aspiration. Obsessed with the good life, Oliver will do bad things to get a taste of it.
Keoghan takes risks as the chameleonic Oliver. Whether he is vulnerable, hapless, or a menacing manipulator, the “The Banshees of Inisherin” actor chooses interesting ways to manifest Oliver’s state of mind. There may not be much beneath the surface, other than danger and avarice, but Keoghan, whether he is dancing naked through the grand home or lapping up bath water, keeps the performance and the audience off kilter.
Elordi allows just enough of Felix’s heart of gold to shine through his charming veneer to make the filthy rich character feel a little less dirty and Grant is perfection as the repressed upper-class twit at the head of the family, but it is Pike who steals every scene she’s in. Blessed with the film’s best lines, Elspeth has an off-hand, casual way with a barb that cuts like a knife. When she hears about a friend who has taken her own life, she snorts, “She’d do anything for attention.” These lines are often asides, not central to the action, but Pike makes them memorable.
Unfortunately, director Emerald Fennell, who also wrote the script, doesn’t mine the class satire for answers. She’s content with the black comedy, Oliver’s coldhearted desire and little else. The result is an entertaining film, but a mixed bag. It’s diverting, filled with over-the-top moments and plot twists, but at the end it feels less than the sum of its parts.
“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.
“Deep Water,” the new movie from Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, now streaming on Prime Video, is an erotic thriller in name only.
Neither erotic or thrilling, it lacks the smoldering energy of director Adrian Lyne’s previous work. Movies like “9 ½ Weeks” and “Unfaithful” established him as a steamer of screens, but that was then.
This is now. A better title for “Deep Water” may have been “Cold Water.”
Affleck plays Vic, a retired software developer who made a fortune designing a chip that helps drones locate and destroy targets. He spends his days with his daughter while his wild wife Melinda (de Armas), having grown bored of their routine, entertains herself with a series of very public affairs. For the most part Vic bites his lip but when one of Melinda’s flings winds up dead, face down in their pool, cuckold Vic becomes a suspect and their already tenuous situation comes closer to the breaking point.
Lyne, in his first film in twenty years, seems unable to tease out the tension from the love-hate story, sexual or otherwise. The repeated affair/disappearance cycle gets old fast and Lyne does little to make us care about any of them, Vic, Melinda or her unfortunate boyfriends.
I can say that Affleck has one of the best scowls in movies, but that’s not enough to hang an entire performance on. A Sad Affleck meme come to life, for much of the movie it appears he’s given up, Ben, not Vic. It’s as though he stopped caring after the first reel. Vic should display hidden reserves of resolve but Affleck’s performance is as inert as the film.
De Armas, so wonderful in “Knives Out” and “No Time to Die,” is reduced to an eye-batting subject for Lyne’s male gaze.
A tepid psychosexual cuckold tale with a side of murder and loose ends galore, “Deep Water” wastes its stars in a movie that does not rise to the challenge of exploring the story’s themes of morality, murder and marriage.
