I join CTV NewsChannel anchor Angie Seth to talk about the feel-good “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” the music documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” and the drama “Where the Crawdads Sing.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
“Where the Crawdads Sing,” the Reese Witherspoon-produced movie, based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Delia Owens and now playing in theatres, is a bildungsroman. That may sound like the name of a frenetic Hobbit wedding dance or a syrupy-sweet Klingon dessert, but it’s actually just a fancy word for a study of a person’s formative years or spiritual education. Ripe with themes of abandonment, solitude and, ultimately, independence, the movie is a unique coming-of-age story that covers spiritual growth and more earthy concerns.
Set in and around the small North Carolina town of Barkley Cove, the story focusses on Kya, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones. Abandoned as a child (played by Jojo Regina as a youngster), she raised herself in the nearby coastal marshlands. Nicknamed “Marsh Girl” by the locals, she is almost completely isolated. With no formal education, she learns to survive by observing the marsh wildlife.
Resilient and clever, she says, “The marsh taught me how to survive, but it didn’t teach me everything.”
When her head is turned by two young men from town, the kindly Tate (Taylor John Smith) and chauvinistic football star Chase (Harris Dickinson), she enters an unfamiliar world. Regarded with suspicion, laughed at and harassed, her life takes a dire turn when Chase turns up dead. Charged with murder and facing the death penalty, Kya must draw on all her experience to endure.
“In spite of everything trying to stomp it out,” she says, “life persists. Where out yonder, where the crawdads sing, the marsh knows one thing above all else; every creature does what it must to survive.”
“Where the Crawdads Sing” is a lot of things. It’s a love triangle, a murder mystery, a story of overcoming the odds and yet, none of it really sticks. What could have been a steamy Southern Gothic, ripe with sex and death, is, instead a sleepily paced melodrama that doesn’t deliver on the premise of female empowerment promised by the film’s intriguing lead character.
Kya could have been an electric, autodidactic character, persevering against overwhelming odds—abuse, heartbreak and abandonment—to blossom spiritually. Edgar-Jones conveys some of that through her wide-eyed performance, and her intelligence is obvious, but the resilience needed for Kya to survive and thrive is lacking.
Without a galvanizing lead character, the heart and soul of “Where the Crawdads Sing” is lost, leaving behind warmed over intrigue and melodrama.
“The Little Things,” a Los Angeles-set crime drama now available in select theatres and on PVOD, features a trio of Oscar winners in a dark story that shows the soft underbelly of the glamour capitol.
Set in 1990, pre-DNA testing, this is a story of old-fashioned police work. Wits, stakeouts, payphones and bleary eyes are their tools. Obsession and black coffee fuel them.
Oscar winner number one Denzel Washington is Joe Deacon, a deputy sheriff in small town California, whose job as a big city detective is long in the rearview mirror. When he joins strait-laced LAPD detective Sgt. Jim Baxter (Oscar winner number two, Rami Malek) on the hunt for a serial murderer, they focus on Albert Sparma (Oscar winner number three, Jared Leto) an off-kilter character they suspect is the killer. Turns out, their case reverberates with echoes from Deacon’s troubled past.
“The Little Things” sets up an interesting mystery. The SoCal setting resonates with an eerie Golden State Killer sun-dappled vibe and there are enough cryptic clues to keep you—and Deacon and Baxter—guessing. Washington and Malek play an odd couple, brought together by their shared obsessions, and Leto is suitably sideways to lend an aura of menace to his character. But, taken as a whole, the elements feel let down by the climax of the story. No spoilers here, but Baxter’s behavior in the minutes leading up to the film’s resolution don’t feel authentic, as though they are not driven by the character and what he would do in the situation. Instead, the ending feels informed simply by the need to wrap up the story in a dramatic way.
It’s too bad because most of what comes before is quite good. Deep characterizations, worthy of the trio’s Oscar wins, help set the scene. Writer and director John Lee Hancock avoids the visual clichés of most Los Angeles sets dramas; there’s palm trees, but no Hollywood highlights, just rundown motel rooms and skid row streets. It all adds up, until Baxter’s inexplicable decisions (AGAIN, NO SPOILERS HERE) take the viewer out of the story.
As Deacon says several times in “The Little Things,” life and, in this case, storytelling are all about the little things, the details that come together to tell the tale. Hancock gets most of the little things right, but not all.
