SYNOPSIS: A throwback to the twisty-turny courtroom dramas of the 1980s and 90s, “Juror #2,” now playing in theatres, sees Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) called for jury duty. Like many people, he has a laundry list of reasons why he shouldn’t have to do his civic duty. Nonetheless, he’s chosen to serve at a high-profile murder trial, one that will test his pledge of being fair and impartial in the jury box.
CAST: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J. K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Zoey Deutch, Kiefer Sutherland. Directed by Clint Eastwood.
REVIEW: Clint Eastwood’s 40th directorial effort is a potboiler, but with the high-minded purpose of examining issues of justice and the price of doing the right thing.
No spoilers here, what follows is the story of the film, but if you want to go in with a blank slate, skip the next paragraph.
Once seated on the jury, Kemp, a man who has pulled his life together since quitting drinking four years previous, realizes that he, and not the accused, is responsible for the death at the center of the prosecution’s case.
That provides the moral dilemma at the heart of “Juror #2.” Kemp’s feelings of self-preservation versus his responsibility to truth and justice hangs over the entire film like a shroud.
Hoult shows us Kemp’s dilemma rather than tell us about it. It’s an introspective performance, one that relies on his anxious exterior and the tortured look behind his eyes. Hoult isn’t flashy, but in his restraint, he paints an effective portrait of a soon-to-be father who is torn up inside.
For the second time in as many months J.K. Simmons, after his bravura work in “Saturday Night,” swoops in and steals every scene he’s in, and then gets out of the way to let Eastwood and Hoult finish the job.
For the most part Eastwood keeps the storytelling taut, allowing Kemp’s quandary to take center stage. It’s not exactly suspenseful, but Eastwood, who turned 94 last May, unfurls the story of conflicted morals in a solidly entertaining, if not exactly innovative, way. The story beats feel reminiscent of the big courtroom dramas of years ago, but Eastwood carefully, and cleverly works his way through moral conundrums to ends up at a restrained, but devastating finale.
“Juror #2” is a little old fashioned, but in all the right ways. Age has not diminished Eastwood’s ability to tell a story, keep the audience engaged and give them something to think about once the end credits have rolled.
“Not Okay,” a new clickbaity satire starring Zoey Deutch and now streaming on Disney+, sets up an extraordinary situation to comment on an all too ordinary social media phenomenon.
Deutch is aspiring writer Danni Sanders. Her photo editor job at the Buzzfeed-esque website Depravity has yet to help her advance to writer status, as her story pitches fall on deaf ears. Aimless, with no friends, she is desperate to catch the eye of Colin (Dylan O’Brien), the coolest guy in the office, even if he is constantly enveloped in a Vape cloud.
She’s invisible, even on social media.
“Have you ever wanted to be noticed so badly,” she says, “you didn’t even care what it was for? You wake up every day thinking, ‘I want to be seen. I want to be important. I want to have purpose. I want to be known. I want to be loved. I want to matter.’”
To find meaning, purpose and maybe get a few extra followers on social media, she concocts a goofy plan to post faked photos from an imaginary Paris trip to glam up her Instagram account. She photoshops herself in front of the Arc de Triomphe, creates a backstory about being invited to a writer’s retreat in the City of Lights and writes captions like, “Starting my morning right. Now where is my baguette?”
But then real-life tragedy strikes in the form of terror attacks around Paris and all of a sudden, Danni goes from zero to hero. Her account is flooded with comments. “I can’t believe you posted that photograph five minutes before the bombs hit,” writes a concerned follower. “I mean, what if it had been five minutes later? Could you even imagine?”
Danni enjoys the attention, and goes with the flow. She “returns” to the United States and her job as a “survivor,” with a new confident attitude and faux PTSD. As her online fame grows, she befriends school-shooting survivor Rowan (Mia Isaac), leeching off the activist’s popularity. Even Colin now finds her the most interesting person in the room.
Her dreams come true, but, she says, “be careful what you wish for,” as her lies spirals out of control.
“Not Okay” is a social satire that takes aim at the curated life of Instagram influencers and the dark side of the artificial fame of an on-line life. The attention starved user who fabricates a story for money or notoriety, is a ripped-from-the-headlines premise, one that frequently plays itself out in one way or another on social media, but it lays the foundation for the character work done by Deutch and Isaac.
Deutch doesn’t make Danni sympathetic, but somehow makes her actions understandable. Through the performance it is easy to see how this lonely, directionless young woman got caught up in the lust for acknowledgement. The story may be shallow but Deutch’s performance reveals layers.
Contrasting Danni’s wanton ambition is Rowan’s heartfelt crusade for awareness. As a school shooting survivor Rowan is a combustible combination of trauma and anger, and Isaac embodies the earnestness and fear that comes with that lived experience.
“Not Okay” isn’t as hard hitting as it thinks it is. As a breezy look at the social media manipulation it treads familiar ground, but its ingrained sense of humor and performances make it worth a look.
Richard joins host Jim Richards of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show The Rush for Booze and Reviews! Today we talk about the the stylish crime drama “The Outfit,” the college horror “Master” and the “adult” scares of “X.” Then, we learn about the most stylish man who ever lived and the drink named after him.
Mark Rylance is tailor made to play the lead role in “The Outfit,” a new gangster film set entirely inside a bespoke suit maker’s shop. I own up to the stupid joke in the first sentence of this review, but it is true. Rylance astounds as the “cutter”—tailors are best at sewing on buttons and not much else he says—at the center of the action in this twisty-turny chamber piece.
Set in the mid-1950s, the movie revolves around Leonard Burling (Rylance), a former Savile Row cutter who lovingly details the process of making a suit from scratch in the film’s opening voiceover. “This isn’t art,” he says proudly, “it’s a craft.”
Working the front desk is his assistant Mabel Sean (Zoey Deutch), a young woman who has her sights set on a horizon far beyond the tailor shop.
Discreet and meticulous, Burling makes beautiful clothes for his Chicago clients, including members of the Boyle Gang, the heavies who run the neighborhood. “If we only allowed angels in here,” he says, “we’d have no customers.” His services to the gangsters extend beyond making them look good. His store also doubles as a drop spot for the Boyles, a safe place for Richie (Dylan O’Brien), son of the Boyle Gang boss, and the ambitious mobster Francis (Johnny Flynn), to pass messages back and forth.
Burling stays out of the way, rarely makes eye contact with the tough guys and is unfailingly polite. “I don’t judge,” he tells Richie. “I just don’t want to be involved in whatever it is you do.”
Unfortunately, when it becomes clear there’s a rat in the Boyle Gang who may, or may not, be making surreptitious tapes of their criminal activities for the FBI, Burling is drawn into their nasty business.
What unfolds from this point is a whip-lash inducing game of twister as the character’s motivations tie the story in knots. Manipulation, deceit, double dealings and death are the name of the game in this literate, adult thriller. Although “The Outfit” was written for the screen by director Graham Moore, who took home an Oscar for writing “The Imitation Game,” it feels like a stage play. From the minimal sets—the whole thing takes place in two rooms—to the intimate performances and the intricate, wordy script, it is unabashedly and wonderfully theatrical.
An understated performance from Rylance sets the tone for the ensemble cast. His enigmatic character is a sounding board for everyone from the gangsters who cause all the trouble to Mabel, the neighborhood woman who just wants to see the world. The characters fit together like puzzle pieces to really bring this story alive.
“The Outfit” is a small film that is unafraid to rely on the characters and the words and not elaborate set pieces to make an impact. Writer, director Moore has made a film that, unlike how Burling feels about his life’s work, emphasizes both craft and art.
Max Winkler, director of the coming-of-age movie Flower, corrects me when I mention the film was shot in only 16 days.
“Fifteen-and-a-half days,” he says. “I would have done wonders with that extra half!”
Star Zoey Deutch chimes in. “It is not my job to go, ‘I don’t have enough time.’ My job is to figure out a way to make it work and service the story and the character. All I know is that what is important for a movie that shoots for 15-and-a-half days or for six months is preparation and what you bring to the table before the table is set. That is the most important element.”
Flower is a coming-of-age story in reverse. When we first meet the adolescent main character Erica, played by Deutch, she is already jaded by life. Her father is in jail and she is involved in a very dubious blackmail scheme to earn his bail money.
Over the course of time she regains her innocence, flip flopping the usual teen movie formula.
Winkler, the son of television icon Henry (The Fonz) Winkler, says the success of Flower is a testament to Deutch’s handling of the role.
“It is such a fine line to tread, to have that bravado but at the same time the intense vulnerability to know that she is really just doing this to cover up all this intense fear she has.”
The actress, best known for turns in Before I Fall and Why Him?, finds the qualities that make us feel for Erica. Do we care about Erica the blackmailer? Not particularly. But we can care about why she resorts to blackmail and that’s where Deutch shines.
“I was 20 when we shot this,” says Deutch, “which isn’t so far from 17 so I was able to pull and be inspired from my own experiences. … Erica is very frustrated by the world and she is very frustrating. I remember being frustrated and being frustrating to other people for sure.”
Deutch is winning raves for her work as the rebellious and sassy teen — The Wrap called her performance “truly exceptional” while The Playlist christened her as “charismatic, uber-magnetic” — but don’t ask her about her craft.
“The truth is, and the reason you can probably sense my hesitancy,” she says, “is that I find it really pretentious when actors talk about process. The way I talk about it sounds pretentious so I steer away from it. I would rather be self-deprecating than sound like overly precious about the whole thing.”
Flower is a coming-of-age story — in reverse.
She will say that the authenticity of the character came from research and conversation with her director and fellow cast members.
“I did a lot of reading,” she says, “everything from books about female teenage angst and struggle, like Reviving Ophelia. We were always talking about consent and how Erica always relies on her charms and never allows anyone else any semblance of control over her.”
Winkler and Deutch only spent 15-and-a-half days on set but have forged a mutual appreciation for society. “My greatest feeling about this movie is just how brilliant Zoey is in it,” Winkler says.
“There is something really special in pure entertainment,” says Deutch, “and I think Max made something super entertaining and super interesting and super different.”
“Flower” is a coming of age story in reverse. When we first meet the adolescent main character Erica (Zoey Deutch) she is already jaded by life. Her father is in jail and she is involved in a very dubious plan to earn his bail money. Over the course of time she regains her innocence, flip flopping the usual teen movie formula.
Erica lives with her mom (Kathryn Hahn) and the latest of mom’s new boyfriends-turned-fiancées (Tim Heidecker) in the San Fernando Valley. A hellraiser, Erica and her pals Kala (Dylan Gelula) and Claudine (Maya Eshet) target older men to blackmail. When she has enough cash she hopes to buy dad his freedom. Her rebel-with-a-cause life is turned upside down by the arrival of Luke (Joey Morgan), her troubled soon-to-be stepbrother. Luke brings with him a dark secret that could change everything in Erica’s life for better and for worse.
No spoilers here.
The beauty of “Flower” is less in its wonky storyline and more in its effervescent performances. The down ‘n dirty indie—it was shot in just 16 days by Henry “The Fonz” Winkler’s son Max—focuses on Erica’s journey which rests comfortably in Deutch’s capable arms. The actress, best known for turns in “Before I Fall” and “Why Him?,” navigates the film’s uneven tonality, hurtling over its implicit quirkiness to find the qualities that make us feel for Erica. Do we care about Erica the blackmailer? Not particularly. But we can care about why she resorts to blackmail and that’s where Deutch shines.
“Flower” is all over the place. In its quest to be unconventional it covers a lot of ground. It’s part quirky family drama, part rebellious teen comedy and even part “Bonnie and Clyde” but Deutch and cast, including Morgan as sad sack Luke and the always fantastic Hahn, breathe life into it.
There’s a meme that occasionally pops up on my social media pages. It’s a picture of a person slumped over a typewriter, fists clenched, captioned with the words, “Writing is easy. You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.”
Anyone who has tried to put words on a page will understand the joke. Writing at a high level requires a combination of talent, study, life experience and dedication; a folio of concrete and ephemeral elements that can blend easily or remain frustratingly difficult to access, depending on the day.
The story of James Joyce’s exasperation while writing his modernist novel Ulysses perfectly illuminates the writer’s frustrating process. As the story goes, a friend dropped by Joyce’s home to find the author upset that after a full day of work he had only written seven words.
“Seven?” his friend says. “But James that’s good — for you, at least.”
“Yes,” Joyce says. “I suppose it is. I’m just not sure what order they go in!”
It should come as no surprise that writers love to write about writing. Screenwriters have tapped out thousands of pages in an effort to illuminate the mysterious process.
From biopics like The End of the Tour and Capote to dramas like Adaptation and Misery, movie after movie has focused on the various ways words make it to the page in the right order.
This weekend Rebel in the Rye is a glossy look at author J.D. Salinger’s unlikely journey from losing a girlfriend to Charlie Chaplin, to the Second World War, from eastern religion to writing the classic novel Catcher in the Rye.
Movies about writers often feature scenes of typewriters clacking, pages crumpled and thrown in the garbage as authors attempt to whip their manuscripts into something readable. Crumpled loose-leaf is a tangible sign of the work, but does little to explain the author’s thought process.
The movie Genius, starring Jude Law as author Thomas Wolfe, does a good job of showing the very lifeblood that flowed through his veins. The You Can’t Go Home Again author creates exciting wordplay that could be compared to the free-flowing fluidity of jazz.
To illustrate the difference between his work and the more staid style of his contemporary Henry James, he pays a jazz band to play a straightforward, traditional version of Flow Gently, Sweet Afton.
“That’s Henry James,” he says as the players plod along. But as the band heats up, splintering off into melodic tangents, he grins and says, describing himself, “That’s Thomas Wolfe.”
The process by which artists go about their work is near impossible to effectively capture on film, but this scene comes close to explaining what it feels like when the creative juices are racing.
Subtler is Paterson, a gentle look at the life of a poetry-writing Paterson, N.J., bus driver played by Adam Driver.
The poems aren’t for publication, simply a way to express his joy in the beauty and art of everyday life. When his dog eats his notebook he has to start again but learns the writer’s greatest lesson.
“Sometimes the empty page presents the most possibilities.” There is great uplift in those words. The blank page isn’t a hindrance to the work but a canvas on which to create something new. It’s the simplest and most beautiful expression of how art is made I’ve ever seen in a movie.
“Rebel in the Rye” is a glossy look at author J.D. Salinger’s unlikely journey from losing a girlfriend to Charlie Chaplin to World War II, from eastern religion to Holden Caulfield. It’s a long strange trip, but would Caulfield label it phoney?
Nicholas Hoult plays Jerome David Salinger, a young man with a talent for words but a father (Victor Garber) who wants him to go into the meat and cheese distribution business. The sharp-tongued teenager isn’t accepted into uptown New York City society and is too square for downtown. The only things he’s good at are getting kicked out of school and writing.
His talent leads him to Columbia University and the Creative Writing class of Whit Burnett (Kevin Spacey). Burnett recognizes Salinger’s gift but isn’t sure of his commitment to the writing life.
Meanwhile, Salinger is a man about town who begins a tumultuous and ill-fated relationship with Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona (Zoey Deutch), a pairing that begins his journey towards writing his most famous book.
First though, he yearns to get a short story published. Sights set on Esquire and The New Yorker he receives rejection after rejection until Burnett publishes “The Young Folks,” in a small literary magazine.
Salinger gets some notice, a high-powered agent Dorothy Olding (Sarah Paulson) and a healthy disdain of “phonies,” superficial people who talk one way and behave another. “My father hides the fact that he’s Jewish from our neighbours,” he says. “The first phoney I ever met was on my first day.”
At Burnett’s urging Salinger begins writing a book. “Holden Caulfield deserves a novel all his own,” Burnett drunkenly slurs after a night on the town. “Imagine the book you would like to read and then go write it.”
His burgeoning career is cut short, interrupted by World War II. Overseas he continues to write—he storms Normandy with six chapters of what would become the classic “Catcher in the Rye” in his pack—but when he returns to the United States he suffers PTSD and is unable to continue. “I have nothing left to say about Holden Caulfield,” he says. “Nothing left to say at all.”
Spiralling downward, his life is changed when he discovers meditation as a way to quiet his mind. He picks up the story of a troubled kid during the Christmas holidays, finishing “Catcher in the Rye.” The book is an immediate hit, capturing the consciousness of the nation. Salinger becomes a media star but his newfound fame and interactions with disturbed fans people who think they are Caulfield drive him from public life. In his remote New Hampshire home he built walls, physically around his home and mentally, to keep everyone out. “When people become a distraction,” he says, you remove the distraction.” He dedicates his life to writing—something his mentor Burnett was unsure he’d be able to do—but removes the pressure of having to follow up one of the most popular novels of all time by never publishing another word.
The word “phoney” looms large in the legacy of J.D. Salinger. His process was a search for authenticity, a journey writer and director Danny Strong seems to have veered away from. The handsome production design and period details bring style to a film that is almost completely without substance. The complex issues of innocence, identity, belonging, loss and connection that Salinger loved and brought to his work are reduced to platitudes. Yes, the World War II scenes effectively showcase the horrors of war but Salinger’s reaction to them feel, well, phoney. Later, when he finally begins to create again it’s because he “learns to write not to show off his talent, but to display what is in his heart.” It’s a line that would have made the real life Salinger red faced and the movie is full of them.
From its on-the-nose title to the standard biopic conventions “Rebel in the Rye” could probably best be described by Caulfield himself: “You never saw so many phonies in all your life.”
“Before I Fall,” a new supernatural thriller based on the young adult novel of same name by Lauren Oliver, is essentially an anti-bullying “It gets better” advertisement stretched to feature length.
Zoey Deutch is Sam, high school senior and along with Lindsay (Halston Sage), Allison (Cynthy Wu) and Elody (Medalion Rahimi), one of a quartet of mean girls. “Till death do us part,” they chant in a clumsy bit of foreshadowing. Best friends, Lindsay says, they’ve “kissed the hottest boys, gone to the sickest parties” and, since grade five made the lives of those they deemed less cool miserable. One such classmate is Juliet (Elena Kampouris), an outsider they nicknamed Mellow Yellow after a long ago camp bed wetting.
On Valentine’s Day the four attend a wild house party but things don’t go exactly as planned. On what was supposed to be Sam’s big night with her boyfriend Rob (Kian Lawley), he gets drunk and flirts with other girls. Worse, Juliet shows up to confront her tormentors. When the situation gets out of control the foursome storm out, piling into Lindsay’s SUV. Minutes later the vehicle veers off the road and spins through the air. All are killed.
Or are they?
The next morning Sam wakes up in her bed with a bad case of Déjà vu. It’s once again Valentine’s Day morning and she seems to be reliving the day all over again. “I feel I’m still dreaming,” she says, perplexed. “Or was yesterday a dream?” Is she destined to relive the worst day of her life over and over? Or can she change her fate? The opportunity to revisit the day brings with it some perspective on the way she has lived her life. Out go the eye rolls, in comes a wave of empathy. “Maybe everything done could be undone,” she says. “Maybe things could change and I could change them. If I had to live the same day over and over I would make it a worthy day… but not just for me.”
Like the time travelling child of “Groundhog Day” and “Mean Girls” (but without Bill Marie or Rachel McAdams), “Before I Fall” is a study of teen angst magnified by a glitch in time. For its young adult audience it will likely raise questions about tolerance, bullying and behaviour. Those for whom high school is a long distant memory may have a harder time finding a great deal of depth in Sam’s revelations.
As portrayed in the film Sam has some edge—she’s not very nice to her sister and ignores her parents—but her journey from sinner to saint might have had more oomph if we had seen more of her terrible behaviour. As it is Lindsay is the true mean girl and yet we’re never really sure what happens to her. “Before I Fall” is a redemption story about a teen who doesn’t seem as much mean as she does moody. Hollywood doesn’t like to make movies where the lead is unlikable but in this case it would have added to Sam’s story of salvation.
Deutch is a likable (perhaps too likable) presence and the story has good and timely messages about bullying, teen suicide and the cause and effect of high school life, but “Before I Fall” needs more edge to be truly cutting. Also, since this isn’t an episode of “Star Trek” I’ll forgive the disregard for the space-time continuum rules.
SYNOPSIS: A throwback to the twisty-turny courtroom dramas of the 1980s and 90s, “Juror #2,” now playing in theatres, sees Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) called for jury duty. Like many people, he has a laundry list of reasons why he shouldn’t have to do his civic duty. Nonetheless, he’s chosen to serve at a high-profile murder trial, one that will test his pledge of being fair and impartial in the jury box.
