Solo: A Star Wars Story--Fair warning: I'll try to keep what follows free of significant "spoilers," but if you want to go in with no foreknowledge whatsoever, stop reading now.
For those still reading: This one, set years before the events of the original 1977 Star Wars, is an origin story for dashing pilot Han Solo, played back then by Harrison Ford, and arguably the best-loved character in the franchise. When we meet Han, played here by young Alden Ehrenreich, he's a runaway who has fallen into a Dickensian life of street crime on a dreary industrial planet, in servitude to a sort of giant tomato worm (with beautiful diction).
He escapes, albeit at a painful price, and we're shown his first meetings with Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and his beloved spaceship the Millennium Falcon. Han and Chewie fall in with a gang of space bandits including Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton and a little multi-armed dude voiced by Jon Favreau, who are working for odious crime boss Paul Bettany and his beautiful consigliere Emilia Clarke. The gang, along with Lando and a revolutionary-minded robot (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) end up on another crazy, daring exploit.
As an audience member, I may be in an unusually fortunate position where Star Wars is concerned. I've always liked Star Wars, liked it a lot, really, but it was never the gold standard of entertainment for me. Probably because I came to it as a teenager rather than as a child, I never had the emotional investment in the franchise that so many in the generation after me did (and that I have in, say, Star Trek), so I can take pleasure in the movies on their own merits, and if something feels a little off to me, it doesn't seem like a desecration.
Within that context, I found Solo very authentic, and enjoyed it thoroughly. The credited director is Ron Howard, who reportedly took over late in the shoot, after the directing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were fired (they're credited as executive producers). Whoever's work predominates in the finished product, it has that inimitable Star Wars feel, with one possible exception: It's a bit dark, in the literal sense, especially early on. To emphasize the grittiness of Han's background, the initial planets we visit are on the gray, overcast, or even downright murky side. While this is appropriate enough to the story, the loss of some of the color and visual vibrancy we expect from a Star Wars movie mutes the effect a bit.
That's about as much of a criticism as I can muster. Solo is a rambling, rollicking space opera, with all the chases and dogfights and shoot-outs and monsters and double-crosses and noble sacrifices one could wish for, supported by a truly engaging cast.
Ehrenreich, who jumped off the screen a couple of years ago as the cowboy star in the Coen Bros. comedy Hail, Caesar!, is even better here as the cocksure but likable Han. He has a no-kidding movie star's face, and dare I say it, I thought he came across here as less aloof, more openhearted than the young Harrison Ford did in the original film (Ford grew much warmer as an actor as he matured). Ehrenreich and Suotamo, the Finnish basketball player who takes over the role of Chewbacca from Peter Mayhew, generate an easy and touching rapport from their first scene together.
Glover channels the suavity of Billy Dee Williams as Lando, and adds a welcome touch of comic vanity and youthful overconfidence. Clarke has the English hothouse-flower charm that seems to recur so often among the leading ladies in the series in recent years, Bettany's bad guy has an unctuousness that's very easy to hate, and the brash line readings of Waller-Bridge are amusing. Best of all among the supporting cast, though, is Harrelson as the wearily cynical leader of the bandits: In the midst of all this Buck Rogers silliness, he manages to create a complex character.
Part of the credit for this must go to the dialogue, by the father-and-son team of Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan, with its touches of humane anti-authoritarian idealism, little riffs on loyalty and selflessness that pop up here and there as if smuggled in. If the movie was made in the '50s, you wouldn't surprised to learn that the script was the work of some blacklisted writer, toiling behind a front.
Always at the Carlyle--George Clooney, Wes Anderson, Anthony Bourdain, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Tommy Lee Jones, Paul Shaffer, Condoleezza Rice, Fran Leibowitz, Lenny Kravitz, Bill Murray: These are just some of the famous people who gush to the camera in this documentary about the tastefully swanky Deco hotel at 76th Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan. What's striking is how the Carlyle's staff, the maids and waiters and bell captains and elevator operators, and maybe especially the august yet sportive concierge Dwight Owsley, don't really come across as any less glamorous than the stars they serve.
These staffers are asked, from behind the camera, to share juicy stories of what they may have witnessed working at the hotel, opened in 1930 and the haunt of movie stars and rock stars and presidents, of Princess Di and JFK and Jackie O and Jack Nicholson and Michael Jackson and Woody Allen and Warren Beatty and famed resident Elaine Stritch. Again and again they refuse to gossip, citing the place's long-held tradition of discretion. Director Matthew Miele turns their tight lips into a running gag, but the result is that we don't get any really juicy stories in the length of the movie.
Well, Alan Cumming gives an account of how he obtained a nude photo of himself and two other people for an album cover in the entrance of the Carlyle in the middle of the night. And we're told that Our Current President visited the hotel, and was heard to say "This place is a joke." That's about as indiscreet as things get.
Still, this is a well-made, sometimes amusing hour and a half, with some wonderful music (we hear both Bobby Short and Eartha Kitt perform). But it was hard for me to escape the sense that what I was watching was less a movie than a commercial for very rich people. A frequent (non-celebrity) guest tries to tell us that the appeal of the Carlyle, with room rates running in the tens of thousands of dollars, "has nothing to do with money." Rather, she says, it's "the human touch" it provides. Bourdain tries a similarly disingenuous line, noting that the place could probably be even more profitable if the management abandoned its old-school attention to luxurious detail.
Against this is Jon Hamm, who offers a few respectful remarks about the place in a strangely uneasy manner, then snorts when asked if he's ever stayed there. "You could pay for somebody's school for a year," he says. At that moment he became, for me, the hero of the movie.
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