VAN FICTION

Opening this weekend at Arizona Mills IMAX...

Nomadland--Frances McDormand is Fern, a widow left adrift after her gypsum mining village in Nevada becomes a ghost town. She wanders the western states in her beloved van, which she calls "Vanguard," following seasonal work, and connects with the subculture of van and RV nomads with a hub in Quartzsite, Arizona. She works cleaning state parks or in the kitchen at Wall Drug in South Dakota, at a beet harvest in Nebraska, at an Amazon facility in Nevada. She makes friends; a fellow nomad named Dave (David Strathairn) might even be a love interest, although Fern is cautious in such matters.

Scripted and directed by Chloe Zhao, this adaptation of Jessica Bruder's nonfiction book feels like a true original, heartwarming without sentimentality, maybe a hair slow but beautifully acted and shot. McDormand and Strathairn are the only two professional actors that I recognized; most of the rest of the cast, including "vandwelling" YouTube guru Bob Wells, use their own names and play themselves, with great warmth and poignancy. This gives the movie the quality of a documentary, but with a movie star presence at its center.

And it need hardly be said that McDormand is wonderful; Fern is another of her classic sensible yet frayed at the edges creations. She gets across Fern's aching sadness at finding herself at such a cosmically loose end, but she also shows us the exhilaration she feels at her independence. Whenever Fern is tempted with an offer of permanence, her instinct is to move on. Maybe when Kris Kristofferson observed that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, Fern's lifestyle is what he meant.

Also opening today...

Minari--Lee Isaac Chung wrote and directed this autobiographical chronicle of a Korean family struggling to start a farm in rural Arkansas in the early 1980s. Dad Jacob (Steven Yeun) is an expert "chicken-sexer" (able to quickly determine the sex of chicks at a hatchery and sort them). He's dragged his family from California to the south, to the horror of his pretty, pious wife Monica (Han Ye-ri), because he wants to start a produce farm specializing in Korean vegetables and fruits for what he perceives as a growing immigrant market in Dallas and Oklahoma City (the title refers to an herb popular in Korean cuisine).

The couple and their two young children, Annie (Noel Kate Cho) and David (Alan Kim) are eventually joined by a mischievous, fun-loving Grandma (Youn Yuh-jung), who doesn't seem to David to act like a grandma is supposed to. There's also a showcase role for Will Patton, as a religiously ecstatic, tongue-speaking farm hand trying to help Jacob realize his dream.

This may be the best film I've seen so far this year; a contemporary take on the early-'30s dramas about ordinary people up against agricultural and meteorological fate, like Murnau's City Girl or Dovzhenko's Earth. As in those films, the antagonists are largely elemental: water, fire, health. But Minari's characters aren't emblematic; they have a psychological subtlety and reality, and their passions and priorities also drive the conflict. The story-telling is simple, but the problems these people have with the land, and with each other, are anything but.

The Mauritanian--The title character, played with disconcerting charm by the Algerian-French actor Tahar Rahim, is Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who was held at Guantanamo Bay for a decade and a half, and tortured, without ever being charged with a crime, on suspicion of having been a recruiter for 9/11 terrorists. Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley are the pro bono lawyers working to free Salahi under habeas corpus, and getting stonewalled by U.S. intelligence. Benedict Cumberbatch is the Marine officer assigned to prosecute Salahi, who finds himself equally stonewalled.

Directed by the capable Scotsman Kevin Macdonald, this is another of the surprisingly large class of political dramas like The Report or Official Secrets or Fair Game, which remind us of the constitutional outrages of the W. Bush administration, as well as the failure of the Obama administration to rectify most of them. Macdonald sets a unhurried pace, and generates a steadily waxing sense of almost Kafkaesque fury and horror. It's a well-acted, compelling movie and it can boil your blood. And it should.

MEDAL HEAD

Opening this week:

  

The Bronze—Along with Race and Eddie the Eagle, this is the third movie in the last month or so about the Olympic Games, and all three are very different from each other indeed. Diminutive Melissa Rauch, who plays the squeaky-voiced Bernadette on The Big Bang Theory, stars in this comedy, which she co-wrote with her husband Winston Rauch. She plays Hope Annabelle Greggory, who finished her routine in Women’s Gymnastics at the Olympics in heroic, soul-stirring fashion, fighting through an ankle injury a la Kerri Strug.

Unlike Strug, however, Hope took the Bronze rather than the Gold, and the injury effectively ended her career. She returned to Amherst, Ohio (“Sandstone Center of the World”), where more than ten years later she’s still treated like a privileged celebrity—her own parking space, free stuff at the mall and the diner, her name on the sign coming into town. Unemployed, she still lives with, sponges off of, and verbally abuses her long-suffering widowed postman Dad (Gary Cole). She’s bitter, selfish, defensive, deceitful and extremely foul-mouthed.

Despite the raunchy, raucous tone, this very plausible story has a poignant edge, and for a while I thought it was going to sink the movie. An ongoing shtick on The Big Bang Theory is the steeliness and bullying threat that regularly burst out of Rauch’s Bernadette, in contrast to her superficial cuddly sweetness. The Bronze starts out as, more or less, a whole movie hinged on this gag, and while it’s funny for a while, Hope seems too mean and unpleasant to hold our interest at feature length.

When her old coach dies, however, Hope receives notice of a sizable inheritance, if she takes over the training of the promising young gymnast Maggie (Haley Lu Richardson), who idolizes her. At first, fearful that her pupil will outdo her and usurp her place in town, Hope blatantly sabotages her, but eventually…

Well, you see where it’s heading. There’s even a love interest, in the form of the talented young comic Thomas Middleditch. The good news is that Rauch shades her characterization from despicable to sort-of-likable gradually and incrementally, and director Bryan Buckley keeps the proceedings lewd and crude throughout. As a result, the story’s potential sentimentality is held at bay, and sure enough, we start to care about, and develop some hope, for Hope.

 Allegiant—As with the high school romantic comedies of a decade or so ago, the futuristic teen dystopias are starting to run together in my head. It takes me a minute to be sure that I’m not mixing Divergents with Maze Runners and Hunger Gamers and Surfers of the 5^th Wave.

Assuming I’m not, then this third entry in the series based on Veronica Roth’s Divergent books—it’s called The Divergent Series: Allegiant on the posters—has heroine Tris (big-eyed Shailene Woodley) and her pals fleeing Chicago, now in a turmoil of summary trials and executions. Beyond the city’s walls they find a toxic wasteland, beyond which they find a force field, beyond which they find a futuristic complex in what used to be O’Hare Airport.

Presiding over this is Jeff Daniels as a scientist who’s been studying Chicago’s various factions, trying to produce a person who is “genetically pure” instead of “damaged.” Talk like this tends to make people uneasy, but the guileless Tris thinks Daniels is a good egg. The hunky Four (Theo James), quickly pronounced “damaged,” isn’t buying it, however.

That’s just the gist of the plot of Allegiant, which is a good deal more twisted, with schemes and betrayals and redemptions spilling out everywhere. The dialogue is quite poor, but luckily it occurs mostly in little pockets, linking together director Robert Schwentke’s big, lavish action scenes. These are reasonably exciting, in their mindless way.

Alongside the pretty youth are some vets, like Naomi Watts, Octavia Spencer and Ray Stevenson. The unctuous Daniels makes a capable if less elegant replacement for Kate Winslet, whose honking American villainy was the best aspect of the previous flicks. Or at least the sexiest.

THE INSURGENT CROWD

Opening this week:

Insurgent—This sequel to 2014’s Divergent continues the saga of heroine Tris Prior. She’s at odds with a bleak—and, to maudlin teenage sensibilities, brilliantly appealing—post-apocalyptic society, in which people are pigeonholed in carefully constructed social identities according to personality type. Those with special abilities, known as “Divergent,” are hunted down by the authorities.

Shailene Woodley, wide-eyed and sad-faced, plays Tris, who is put through one of the nastier movie martyrdoms since Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. She’s gruesomely hooked up to cables and tortuously required to complete five virtual simulations.

If Tris succeeds in passing all of these trials—each of which correspond to the strengths of one of the social factions—some sort of magic box will open and the tyrannical leadership will obtain vast power, or so they think. Meanwhile her hunky boyfriend Four (Theo James) marshals rebel forces, including those of his mother (Naomi Watts), against the cruel regime led by Jeanine (Kate Winslet).

Anyway, that’s the best I can do to summarize Insurgent, adapted, like Divergent, from a Veronica Roth novel (it’s referred to as The Divergent Series: Insurgent on the posters; a third novel, Allegiant, remains). There are a number of exciting action scenes, and some cool surreal flourishes in the simulation sequences. But my favorite element of the movie was Kate Winslet as the gorgeously lacquered, oddly sexy blue-clad villainess Jeanine, with her flat, heartless Midwestern voice. I was thoroughly ready to see Tris get revenge on her.