ROLL OF A LIFETIME

Now in the multiplexes, from Fathom Events:

Merrily We Roll Along--Fanatics of Stephen Sondheim don't need, and anyway wouldn't listen to, advice about whether or not to go see this. Directed by Maria Friedman, the film captures her revival of the musical, starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, that sold out its Broadway run starting in 2023.

With music and lyrics by Sondheim and a book by George Furth, based on a '30-era play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the show recounts the long relationship between three dear friends, composer Frank (Groff), lyricist Charlie (Radcliffe) and novelist and critic Mary (Mendez). The gimmick is that it traces the story backwards, starting in the mid-70s with Frank as a jaded Hollywood bigshot, estranged from Charlie, and working back until we see the trio's callow, idealistic aspiring days in the late '50s. Love, unrequited and otherwise, ambition, neglect, compromise, disillusionment and resentment are all seen in full bloom before we see their seeds being planted years earlier.

The first Broadway production flopped in 1977. But the show eventually developed a devoted cult across several successful revivals around the world, before triumphantly returning to Broadway at the Hudson Theatre under the Brit Friedman's direction (and revisions). The version that opens in the multiplexes this weekend consists of footage shot from three performances in front of audiences near the end of the run in June of 2024, with some close-ups shot during the afternoons. As a result it isn't just a blunt recording of a performance; Friedman's agile, on-point direction makes it a cinematic experience.

Characteristically for Sondheim, the songs explore timeless, often painful human situations in bright, frenetic patter-song lyrics. They're so manically precise that they could seem facile at times, but Sondheim's direct emotional honesty holds glibness at bay. So, here, do the performers. The supporting cast is full of knockout Broadway workhorses, but Groff, Radcliffe and Mendez are all sublime, with Groff bringing a particularly enraptured intensity to Frank.

It's possible that the timing of the shoot also added to the emotional charge of the movie; we're seeing actors at the end of a run, saying farewell to a smash that's also likely to be one of the better pieces of material they're ever going to get to do. The tears we see running down their faces probably aren't just acting.

Now available on HBOMax:

The Family McMullen--At the end of the 1995 indie fave The Brothers McMullen, the debut feature of writer-director Edward Burns, the major characters seemed more or less happily paired off. This thirty-years-later sequel shows us the mess that divorce, death, kids and life in general has made of those well-plotted courses. For award eligibility, the movie played for just one day in the multiplexes in October; The Wife and I caught it here in Phoenix in a theater empty save for one other couple, but now it's available for streaming.

It begins on one Thanksgiving and closes on the next. The host for the first dinner is the long-divorced Finbar "Barry" McMullen (Burns), an apparently successful writer, to judge by his palatial Brooklyn home. Much to his dismay, said home gets invaded after dinner by his relations, like his sad-sack brother Patrick (the likable Michael McGlone), a mawkishly sentimental, piously practicing Catholic who's reluctantly also in the process of divorcing.

Barry's son Tommy (Pico Alexander) then moves back home to pursue an acting career, followed by Barry's daughter Patty (Halston Sage) who has broken off, or at least temporarily paused, her engagement because the fiancé wants to experiment with more sexual partners. She soon meets her first childhood crush, a handsome Greek-American plumber (Sam Vartholomeos) who makes her wonder if maybe the fiancé isn't on to a good idea.

Meanwhile Barry and Patrick's widowed sister-in-law Molly (Connie Britton) plans to sell the  cherished, frozen-in-the-'80s McMullen home back on Long Island; she also crosses paths with an old crush (Bryan D'Arcy James) from her married days. And Barry learns that the mother of her son's new love Karen (Julianna Canfield) is Nina (Tracee Ellis Ross), an old flame of his. If you're guessing that those two re-connect...

...well, you'll just have to watch and see. Driven along by Seamus Egan's sprightly Irish flute score, The Family McMullen is, like the Brothers, extremely low-key and mild, and I found that to be just what I wanted. The characters gently rib and mock each other over a palpable undercurrent of love and an openhearted desire to be decent, and if nothing terribly dramatic, or even terribly farcical, happens to resolve the plotlines, that relaxing atmosphere itself becomes part of the movie's charm.

It may be that The Family McMullen will have particular appeal for those who came of age as moviegoers during the '80s and early '90s. Burns makes overt visual and verbal references to such faves of the era as Moonstruck, When Harry Met Sally and (most hilariously) GoodFellas, and the whole movie, with its crosscutting storylines, its voice-over asides and its use of a holiday as a framing device, seems heavily indebted to Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters. It's grimmer to imagine where Allen's characters might find themselves, thirty-some years later.

OIL RICH

A couple of gems open in the Valley this week:

Loving Vincent—The producers stake an unusual claim for this Polish-British animated feature, six years in the making: that it’s the first completely oil-painted movie. Each of its 65,000 frames, we’re told, was meticulously hand-painted by a team of more than 100 artists, working over the previous frame’s image, all in the style of Vincent Van Gogh.

A documentary about the making of this quixotically crazy endeavor would be fascinating. As with Claymation back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, if you let yourself think too long about the labor you’re witnessing, you can start to feel overwhelmed and it can throw you out of the movie.

Happily, the movie itself isn’t just visually breathtaking, it’s also an engrossing little historical drama, well-acted by the Brit voice cast in a naturalistic manner. The story is set in 1891, the year after Van Gogh’s death, and centers on Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), the young man in yellow from the famous portrait. Armand’s postmaster father Joseph, another Van Gogh subject, tasks his son with delivering a final letter from the genius to his brother Theo.

Armand travels from Arles to Paris, and then on to Auvers-sur-Oise, where Vincent died. Initially annoyed by the errand, Armand becomes increasingly fascinated as he delves into the mystery of Vincent’s death.

The directors, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, working from a script they wrote with Jacek Dehnel, use Armand’s investigations to paint a portrait (if you’ll excuse the expression) of a truly loving Vincent. He’s beset with terrible emotional sufferings, certainly, but he’s sweet-natured and ecstatic in his visionary raptures.

But the thrill in the picture is seeing those immortal images brought to life. In the opening minutes alone, we get the Café Terrace, the Zouave reclining against the wall, Lieutenant Milliet, and so on, gliding easily into each other in service of the narrative.

I suppose there are cultural purists out there who might find using the works of one of the great figures in European art as, essentially, a storyboard, to be a crass, literal-minded stunt. But I was enchanted by this gloriously low-tech labor of love, both for Van Gogh and for the possibilities of the cinema.

Professsor Marston and the Wonder Women—There’s something delicious about the knowledge that the furious accusations of mid-century anti-comics crusaders were, in at least one case, quite right. Wonder Woman, who debuted in 1941 in what would become DC Comics, really was rooted in fantasies of bondage, dominance and Sapphic power.

And not just fantasies, either, but realities. As we’re told in this amusing chronicle, the creator of the character, a Harvard-educated psychology professor named William Moulton Marston (writing under the name Charles Moulton), spun the Amazon by blending traits of the two women with whom he lived—his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and Olive Byrne, a student and assistant who became the third member of their marriage.

It’s likely that the writer-director Angela Robinson (Herbie: Fully Loaded) has heated up the story a bit. But there are true elements that trump fiction, the juiciest being that before his comic-writing days, Marston was one of the developers of the systolic blood pressure test that led to the polygraph—in other words, he invented the Lasso of Truth in reality before he gave it to his heroine. As an adolescent in the ‘70s, watching the Lynda Carter TV version of Wonder Woman, I always found the Lasso of Truth shtick distinctly erotic; now I’d guess that Marston did too.

This movie’s historical accuracy is debatable, and some chapters work better than others, but Robinson has, any case, crafted maybe the wittiest and sweetest cinematic menage a trois in recent memory. Those looking for graphic sex will be disappointed—the threesome scenes, which involve a lot of dressing-up in theatrical costumes, are too tame and discreet for a Cinemax soft-core flick from the ‘90s. But something about their good-natured naïveté makes them sexy.

The charm in Professor Marston and the Wonder Women comes in the deadpan delivery of earnest dialogue by glamorous actors like Luke Evans as Marston and waif-like Bella Heathcote as Olive. There are nice supporting turns by Oliver Platt as early comic peddler Max Gaines and Connie Britton in a peculiarly flirtatious turn as early comic critic Josette Frank. We also see JJ Feild as fetish costumer Charles Guyette, here shown decking out Olive in a get-up very similar to Wonder Woman’s.

But the standout is Rebecca Hall as the brittle, unflappable (well, almost unflappable) Elizabeth. Her readings give a sharp edge even to lines that don’t have one built in, yet she somehow infuses them with a palpable undercurrent of love and emotional directness as well. I hate to resort to it, but indulge me: She’s a wonder.