CURRENT EVENTS

Opening today:

The American Southwest--It's hardly breaking news that the American Southwest is full of breathtaking views. But The American Southwest, the generically-titled documentary opening here, is also full of breathtaking views. Written and directed by veteran nature photographer and filmmaker Ben Masters, the movie traces the route of the Colorado River from its source in the Rockies down through the Grand Canyon all the way to its now appallingly dry delta in Mexico.

The overarching point of the film is that humans have, in a very short time, screwed up this great waterway. "From its headwaters to the border, the Colorado is diverted, divided and dammed," says narrator Quannah Chasinghorse, in her measured, lulling tones. "Its water is impounded, evaporated and subjugated." We're also firmly reminded that "The seemingly limitless amount of snow [the source of the river's waters] is actually finite and quantifiable."

It's a compelling, even alarming message, and hopefully a call to arms, but happily The American Southwest isn't a downer to watch, partly because it isn't just gorgeous vistas; it has a lively cast of characters. Along the river's southerly route, Masters, working with partner organizations like American Rivers, Northern Jaguar Project and The Peregrine Fund, gives us passages of truly jaw-dropping wildlife footage.

We see beavers industriously creating their own dams; cuthroat trout struggling upstream to spawn like salmon; a young condor trying to get home after a tentative--and unintentional--early attempt at flight; jaguars marking their mating turfs. Some of these episodes have an amorous flavor: a hilariously frustrated, randy young elk tangling with a wily older rival; a romcom-like courtship between two Mojave rattlesnakes.

My favorite sequence depicted the lives of salmon-flies, swept downstream in their larval stage only to have to fly back upstream as adults to lay their eggs. The scenes of the larva, buffeted around helplessly by river currents beyond their control, may remind some of us of own lives.

Still in the multiplexes:

Caught Stealing--After trying to channel Elvis in 2022, Austin Butler played a beautiful love object with no discernible personality, on purpose, in 2023's The Bikeriders. It's nice to see him playing a guy, just a guy, in his latest, Caught Stealing. He has a nice sympathetic manner as a standard movie hero with a history in this blood-splattered crime yarn directed by Darren Aronofsky from a script by Charlie Huston, adapting his own novel.

Butler plays Hank, an East Village bartender in the late '90s. A functional alcoholic, Hank is haunted by a tragedy which ended his promising baseball career before it started. But he's not a bad sort. He talks by phone to his beloved mom every day as they follow their beloved San Francisco Giants; his sexy girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz) is fascinated by him; and he agrees to cat-sit for his punky neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) when Russ tells him he has to go home to London for a family emergency.

This last kindness is what gets him in trouble; he soon finds himself targeted both by gangsters—Russian, Puerto Rican and Hasidic—and by the cops, in the form of an engaging NYPD detective (Regina King). Gruesome misadventures ensue, while Aronofsky evokes the period of mohawks and studded leather jackets and answering machines and pay phones and car cigarette lighters, and Shea Stadium.

The cast is strong, not just Butler, Kravitz, Smith and King but Griffin Dunne as Hank's boss and Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio, impressively underplaying the deceptively mensch-y Hasidic triggermen. Even Carol Kane turns up briefly, which is usually enough for a recommendation all by itself.

Caught Stealing is ultimately just standard mayhem from the Robert Rodriguez or Guy Ritchie playbook, and I suppose my investment in it was weakened a little every time a likable character got killed off. Butler kept me rooting for him until the end, however. So did the cat.

THE FAMOUS MR. EDDINGTON

Opening today in theaters:

Eddington--Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross in this one. He's the county sheriff of the titular New Mexico town into which writer-director Ari Aster tries to stuff all the nightmarish national rage and misery of early 2020. It's all there, or a lot of it, anyway--disbelief in COVID, anti-mask anger, George Floyd protests and calls to defund the police, social distancing, rampaging social media, talk radio conspiracy rants, a quasi-religious cult figure, even a Kyle Rittenhouse type.

Joe lives in a rural house with his distant, psychologically fragile wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her mother Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), a 24/7 wingnut conspiracy receiver. He, too, is indignantly resentful of the mask requirement and refuses to wear one, even on the job. A wrangle over the policy in a supermarket leads Joe to impulsively announce his candidacy for mayor.

The incumbent, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is Joe's rival in town politics, and also personally; he has a history with Louise. Ted is pushing for some sort of new high tech company to locate in Eddington, despite environmental and logistical concerns.

With the exception of his deputy Michael (Micheal Ward) and a tribal cop (William Belleau) from across the county line, Joe is, initially, the most likable of the major characters. But this isn't a high bar. Eddington isn't like Mayberry or Star's Hollow, one of those fictional small towns you might find yourself wishing you could move to. It's full of shifty characters, idiots and creeps. Ted and his allies seem like phonies and business shills. The kids who organize the protests are preposterously self-flagellating. The cult weirdo (Austin Butler) worming his way into Joe's family is repulsive.

By comparison, Joe Cross seems like a decent sort, obtuse and not especially bright but well-intentioned. Phoenix gives him a plaintive, singsong voice and sad eyes, and Aster makes you feel how overwhelmed he is, both by the baffling times he's in and by his own spiritual desperation over the collapse of his libertarian illusions. It may be Phoenix's best performance. 

As the story progresses, however, Joe descends, by disturbingly believable steps, from misguided and angry to monstrous. Aster, who specializes in grueling horror films like Midsommar and Heredity, spares his protagonist here nothing in terms of defeat and humiliation, yet not in a way that allows us the pleasure of schadenfreude. This long film climaxes with a wild, extended, very bloody shootout in the streets of Eddington, as Joe Cross is stalked by a mysterious killer in black. Mysterious to me, at least--is this gunman, who we see arrive by private jet, meant to be an "ANTIFA" operative? An agent-provocateur? A corporate asset? Does Aster intend him realistically? Satirically?

I'm not sure, and in any case, I'm also not sure this frenzied gunfight doesn't drive this amazing movie off the rails a little in its homestretch. Eddington is unforgettable, but it's all too easy for me to imagine viewers who might share Joe's values seeing this persecution of him as a vindication of his despicable actions. Joe Cross is pitiable, but he's no hero.

I DON'T WANT A PICKLE...

Opening this weekend:

The Bikeriders--There are many variations within the genre, but overall, biker movies tend to fall into two broad categories. There are those, exemplified by The Wild One (1953), in which the bike gang is seen from the point of view of mainstream society, and those, like The Wild Angels (1966) or Easy Rider (1969), where mainstream society is seen from the point of view of the bikers.

This new "wheeler" manages to have it both ways. Adapted by writer-director Jeff Nichols from the 1967 book by photojournalist Danny Lyon, the film traces the growth of a fictitious Chicago area club, The Vandals, based on The Outlaws, with whom Lyon embedded off and on throughout the '60s. It's very much an insider's view, focusing less on riding action than on the tempestuous relationship between Johnny (Tom Hardy), the club's founder, and Benny (Austin Butler), his beautiful, stoic, monosyllabic right-hand man. The Vandals begins as a racing and social club--Johnny, a truck-driving family man, is initially inspired by seeing The Wild One on TV--but criminality and ugly violence gradually creep in. 

Wisely, however, Nichols makes a mainstream viewpoint central to the film as well. The story is narrated to Lyon (Mike Faist) by Kathy (Jodie Comer), a respectable young working-class woman who stumbles into a biker bar one night to meet her girlfriend, and is unimpressed, not to mention understandably scared, by what she sees. She's unimpressed, that is, until she gets a look at the angelic Benny at the pool table, and can't keep an infatuated smile off her face. Despite Benny's anomie and recklessness, before long he and Kathy are a couple, and she's in competition with Johnny for Benny's devotion.

The beguiling Jodie Comer's Kathy is the live wire in The Bikeriders. A Brit of course, Comer lays on a Chicago accent as thick as a deep dish pizza as Kathy tells us, in hilariously bemused terms, about both the follies of bike gang life and her own folly in loving the seemingly emotionless, self-destructive Benny. Her sensible, self-deprecating take is pre-emptive to how many of us in the audience may feel, and keeps The Bikeriders from skidding into cornball melodrama.

None of this is to say that the movie's other elements aren't top-notch. It's full of fine performances: Hardy, sporting a sort of buzzy, mild-mannered Brando voice, has a quietly tragic appeal as Johnny. By the nature of his character, Butler is asked to play Benny very close to the vest, but he brings a star presence to the part. Damon Harriman, Boyd Holbrook, Emory Cohen and others are strong in supporting parts, and Norman Reedus drops in as "Funny Sonny," an unnerving representative of a California club. As the frazzled Zipco, who wanted to serve in the Army, Michael Shannon makes his big monologue a knockout.

The Bikeriders is also one of the best-looking movies of the year, stunningly shot in Grant Wood-esque midwestern tones by Adam Stone. Like the biker pictures from the period it depicts, it seems to be made up of images of real people, objects and places, lovingly captured but rock-solid. In our computer-generated era, this is refreshing; for all its brutality, this movie takes the world in a love embrace.