LOGLINE: “Kinds of Kindness,” a new, absurdist dark comedy now playing in theatres, reteams “Poor Things” director Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone, in three interconnected stories, detailing the codependency between a man and his eccentric and controlling employer, a policeman whose missing wife reappears, but isn’t the person he remembers and a woman devoted to a spiritual leader.
CAST: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
REVIEW: Director Yorgos Lanthimos follows up the Academy Award winning success of “Poor Things” with another study of the dark side of humanity. The film, “Kinds of Kindness” is a portmanteau, a triptych of tales, each featuring different stories and characters, but the same main cast. Loosely connected, each section deals with some sort of manipulation and falling under the sway of someone who may, or may not, have the best of intentions.
Those expecting a rehash of “Poor Things” or “The Favourite,” the Lanthimos films that edged the Greek director into the mainstream, will have to adjust expectations. This is a return to the, despite the movie’s title, unkind tone of earlier works like “Dogtooth,” “The Lobster,” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” The harder edge brings with it a certain kind of bleak, mean spiritedness that may be entertaining to watch, but not always exactly enjoyable to process as a viewer.
Still, Lanthimos has made a movie that is not soon forgotten.
In a landscape of movies that offer instant gratification, “Kinds of Kindness,” with its unexpected twists and often unpleasant story developments, is one that takes its time to burrow into its audience’s collective consciousness.
To say it takes some surprising zig zags is an understatement, but it’s not simply strange for the sake of being strange. There does seem to be a motive behind the madness of this co-dependency comedy, no matter how impenetrable it may be. Your enjoyment level will depend on your ability to hang on to the mast as the waters get very choppy.
In “Catherine Called Birdy” director Lena Dunham leaves her best-known locale, the gritty streets of “Girls” era Brooklyn, New York, behind in favor of medieval England. Thematically, however, she is walking the same path.
Based on the 1994 novel of the same name by Karen Cushman, the movie follows 14-year-old Lady Catherine (Bella Ramsey), the unruly daughter of a cash-strapped nobleman, as she works to foil her father’s attempts to marry her off to a rich suitor.
Set in a thirteenth century English village that Catherine’s father Lord Rollo of Stonebridge (Andrew Scott) has allowed to sink deeply in debt as he lives the high life, “Catherine Called Birdy” sees the strapped for cash Rollo put his daughter up for auction to the highest bidder. “You’re my daughter,” he says. “If I say that you shall be married, than married you shall be.”
Trouble is, Catherine, who has witnessed six of her mother’s troubled pregnancies, wants nothing to do with marriage and childrearing. She is more interested in the things that any thirteenth century teen might enjoy.
“My truest passions are avoiding my chores,” she says. “Critiquing my father’s horrible swordplay. Disrupting cottage raisings. Causing mischief in the village. And listening through doors I should not listen through.”
She uses her wiles to avoid the altar, finding cunning ways to humiliate her suitors. One by one she scares them off, until Shaggy Beard (Paul Kaye), a wealthy older man who enjoys her manipulations, comes along. “Would I choose to die rather than be forced to marry?” she says. “I do not think either option appealing, or fair.”
Ripe with bawdy humor filtered through Dunham’s feminist sieve, “Catherine Called Birdy” is a period coming-of-age story that, despite the corsets on display, has a modern sensibility. Much of that is due to Dunham’s script, which balances the humor with empowerment, but the real sell job here comes from Ramsey.
In a performance that reveals strength and vulnerability alongside comedic and dramatic chops, the former “Game of Thrones” star not only looks like she just stepped out of a medieval Walter of Durham painting, but she also embodies Catherine’s rowdy spirit.
“Catherine Called Birdy” sags in the middle, but what it lacks in pacing, it makes up for in pathos and charm.
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Angie Seth to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including the wild Ron Perlman flick “This Game’s Called Murder,” the Netflix musical biopic “Tick, Tick… Boom,” the documentary “Brian Wilson, Long Promised Road” and the arthouse sequel “The Souvenir Part II.”
It’s rare to see a “Part II” on an arthouse flick title, but here we are. “The Souvenir Part II,” starring the mother and daughter duo of Tilda Swinton and Honor Swinton Byrne, and now playing in theatres, picks up where 2019’s “The Souvenir’s” coming of age story left off.
In that movie, film student Julie (Byrne) falls into a life-changing relationship with an older, arrogant man named Anthony. His death from a heroin overdose sends her reeling.
The new film sees Julie attempt to process Anthony’s death by making a graduation movie as a “memorial” for her late partner. As the project moves forward, it’s apparent Julie, who didn’t know Anthony was a heroin addict, is struggling to make sense of his loss. From the beginning her idea is met with bewilderment by her professors who don’t like the script and her producing partner (Jaygann Ayeh) who grows frustrated with her choice in actors.
“The Souvenir Part II” is a quiet, meticulous film about how artists mine personal experience to create art, to find a voice. Swinton Byrne’s Julie develop into a filmmaker, an artist and person who creates her own path. It is a lovely, delicate-but-steely, natural performance that digs deep into Julie’s maturity, personal and professional. It’s a pleasure to see Swinton and Swinton Byrne interact as mother and daughter in the film. There’s an authenticity to those scenes that feels like a warm hug.
“The Souvenir Part II” is based, in part, on director Joanna Hogg’s experience, and drips with complex ideas and emotions. As Julie heals herself, the film hauntingly has one eye on her past while the other looks to her future.
The filmmaking is more about mood than straightforward storytelling. It’s as if Hogg had a question from Julie’s film school classmate Patrick (Richard Ayoade) ringing in her head as she made the film. “Did you avoid the temptation to be obvious?” he asks. She did, and the movie is better and more challenging for it.
American abolitionist and political activist Harriet Tubman led an extraordinary life. Born into slavery she transcended, escaping to freedom before being a conductor on the Underground Railroad and rescuing 70 enslaved people, including her closest relatives. “Harriet” starring Cynthia Erivo in the title role, details her legendary life in a formulaic film that nonetheless inspires.
Set in Maryland, “Harriet” begins in 1849 with Minty (Erivo)—she didn’t take the name Harriet Tubman until later—leaving behind everything she knew, family, friends, her husband John Tubman (Zackary Momoh) to escape the violence and oppression of a land owner who refuses to honour a deal to give her the freedom she deserves. “I’m going to be free or die,” she says as she embarks on an arduous journey across unfriend territory with a team of slave trackers trailing behind. With ingenuity and some divine guidance she makes it one hundred miles to Pennsylvania, freedom and the helpful hands of William Still (Leslie Odom Jr.), abolitionist and one of the architects of the network of secret roads and safe houses that became the Underground Railroad, the escape route many enslaved African-Americans used to access to the free states and Canada. He helps her get established but after a year Harriet feels that freedom without family is an empty experience. “If I’m free,” she says, “my family should be too. I made up my mind, I’m going back.”
That marked the first of many danger-filled journeys that saw Harriet, sometimes in disguise, sometimes carrying a gun, always equipped with courage and resourcefulness, lead dozens of people to freedom.
“Harriet” sometimes falls into overused thriller conventions but the career-making performance from Erivo, who displays a range that spans the absolute hands-in-the-air joy at crossing the border to autonomy to the steely determination when facing down her former oppressor, masks some of the uneven storytelling. Sudden shifts in tone, from harrowing to light, are jarring but the sheer force of Tubman’s personality (and Erivo’s performance) smooth out the rough spots.
Director and co-writer Kasi Lemmons fills also the story with vivid details that evoke the time and place. The use of coded songs as a way to communicate is one particularly effective note that weaves tradition into the movie.
“Harriet” is an historical origin story that, for better and for worse, echoes the superhero origin tales we’ve seen so much of recently. It’s appropriate. Tubman was a real superhero. She is the stuff of legend, a woman who risked everything to fight against a fundamental, moral wrong. The movie that celebrates her life occasionally errs in its excess—it covers a great deal of ground—but the light it shines on Tubman and her accomplishments burns brightly.
Mr. Parker, my grade nine history teacher, believed in learning by rote. Once a day thirty schoolmates and I would assemble in his class and were invariably confronted with Mr. Parker in his black suit dusted with chalk from writing, in perfect script, three chalk boards worth of notes. “Write it down and learn it.” A mishmash of dates and names, his notes were detailed but ultimately did not bring the story to life.
Watching “Mary Queen of Scots,” a new historical drama starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, I was immediately transported back to Mr. Parker’s class.
The convoluted tale begins in 1561 with Mary Stuart (Ronan) returning to Scotland being raised Catholic in France and widowed at age eighteen. She comes home to a world of intrigue. Her half-brother, the Earl of Moray (James McArdle) would seem to be an ally but holds resentment that he will lose his exalted place as King with her return. She also faces opposition from John Knox (David Tennant), a religious leader who brands the queen a harlot, unfit for the throne.
Meanwhile in England Mary’s twenty-five-year-old Protestant cousin Queen Elizabeth I (Robbie, under an inch of make-up) has a certain amount of sympathy for her long lost relative. The monarch understand what it means to be a woman ruler in a world of men but her advisers, including her chief council William Cecil (Guy Pearce) see Mary as a threat who must be dealt with.
Cue the intrigue and sharpen those axes.
There is a lot going on in “Mary Queen of Scots.” Political backbiting, betrayal, toxic patriarchy, romance, more betrayal and equal parts empathy and cruelty are all on display, making an already expansive story—it spans roughly twenty years—feel overstuffed. Locations, dates and motivations blur as the courtly manipulations pile atop one another, leaving behind a nicely acted film that feels weighted down by an excess of intrigue.
Robbie and Ronan, rivals for the Best Actress Oscar last year, share just one scene, an historically inaccurate meeting that features the film’s best moments. As Mary shifts from pleading for sisterhood to imperiously claiming the crown of England for herself—“I am a Stuart, the rightful queen.”—there is more drama in those few minutes than in the film’s entire middle section.
“Mary Queen of Scots” has some admirable, timely qualities. Colour-blind casting—most notably through the work of Gemma Chan and Adrian Lester—Mary’s attitude toward the gender-fluid minstrel David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Cordova) and the portrayal of Mary and Elizabeth as strong willed women are thoroughly modern and to be commended. It’s too bad the narrative machinations bog down what otherwise is a fine tale of political manoeuvring.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if you want to test a person’s character, give them power. That maxim is fully on display in “The Favourite,” an Oscar hopeful starring Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, as two women vie for the attention of Anne, Queen of Great Britain.
Set in the early 18th century, “The Favourite” begins as England, under the rule of Queen Anne (Coleman), is at war with France. A clueless and vain monarch stricken with gout from gorging on chocolate and cheese, the Queen is haughty in the style of, “Look at me! How dare you look at me!”
The real power behind the throne ismovie notes the Queen’s close friend and confidant Lady Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Weisz). She’s a stern figure equally at home pampering the Queen or ordering a maid to be whipped for any minor transgression.
Life at the castle is a decadent push-and-pull for favour between those who want the Queen to end the war, like Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford (Nicholas Hoult), and those who feel the battle must continue. The battle for power becomes more intense when Abigail Masham (Emma Stone), Lady Marlborough’s cousin and fallen gentry whose father gambled her away in a card game, arrives looking for a job. Put to work as a maid she quickly moves up the ranks, befriending the Queen and aggressively pushing Lady Marlborough to the fringes. “As it turns out I am capable of much unpleasantness,” Abigail snorts.
Broken into chapters like “What An Outfit“ and “A Minor Hitch,“ the film is a wickedly nasty look at the inner workings of a personal coup d’etat. Smartly written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, it brims with court gossip, quotable lines—“If you do not get out I will start kicking you and I will not stop,” sneers Marlborough.—and machinations enough to make Machiavelli green with envy.
Bringing the intrigue to vivid life are the three leads. At the top of the pyramid is Coleman as Queen Anne. Insecurity and imperiousness are the toxic ingredients that fuel her childlike behaviour. Whether she is stuffing her face to the point of vomiting, faking a seizure at Parliament or indulging in her secret desires, she is unpredictable, ridiculous and, ultimately a sad character. Coleman embraces it all, delivering a beautiful, unsubtle performance.
As Lady Marlborough Weisz is cunning and kind, a power player who knows when to hold ‘em, knows when to fold ‘em. She’s icy hot, calm and collected but quick to temper when threatened. Weisz has rarely been this collected on screen, delivering complex dialogue with panache.
As a woman who admits, “I’m on my side, always,” Stone has the greatest range. From scullery maid to titled Lady her character travels the furthest distance and is capable of the greatest villainy.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a strange and beautiful movie, one that has the twilight zone feel of his other films “The Lobster” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” They all feel like real life, but tilted by 180 degrees. With “The Favourite” he has made a revisionist history that comments not only on personal politics but also how political power is open to the whims of who holds it.
