PITT STOP

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

F1--This Formula One racing drama stars Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes. Sonny is a former Formula One driver with a troubled past and a gambling problem, now living out of his van and racing in the 24 Hours of Daytona and other events. Javier Bardem plays Sonny's old rival/pal Ruben Cervantes, who shows up with a Quixotic offer: a spot as a driver in his F1 team, in support of his hotshot young driver Joshua Pearce, played by Damson Idris.

The great Kerry Condon plays Kate,  the team's technical director, a spirited Irishwoman who's massively unimpressed with Sonny's drawly charm. She and the young hotshot and Sonny clash across the circuit, leaving lots of debris on racetracks around the world.

It's only fair to admit, up front, that racing movies leave me cold. The serious, dramatic ones, like Grand Prix, usually feel overlong and pretentious and humorless; the comic ones, like Speedway with Elvis Presley or Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby with Will Farrell, are better, but tend to inanity.

I realize, of course, that this is all a matter of personal hardwiring; show me a baseball movie, where the stakes are exactly as meaningless, and I'll be on the edge of my seat. Show me a racing movie, and I'm bored and cranky. F1 continues the streak, I'm afraid. More than two and half hours is too long to watch people going in circles.

That said, on its own terms, it's an excellently made picture. I tend to appreciate the director, Joseph Kosinki, because he has an old-school, '80s movie approach, serving up a full credit sequence and pulsing music by Hans Zimmer and rapid-cut montages.

Kosinki is a fine hand at this sort of big-canvas action stuff, having previously helmed Only the Brave and Top Gun: Maverick. His touch is crackling and kinetic, he has an eye for corporate swank, and he's superbly abetted here by the dazzlingly deft editing of Stephen Mirrione, who ought to get an Oscar nomination. The movie is propulsive; for all my eye-rolling distaste, F1 never bored me, at least not when the cars were moving. And that's a lot of the movie.

On the other hand, for all the deft skill and lucid precision of the many racing scenes, the movie doesn't add up dramatically. After the screening I saw, someone told me that they liked how the film showed the degree to which Formula One is a team sport. So it does, but when Sonny acts like a maverick and refuses to follow orders and antagonizes his teammate and ignores his team's strategies, I couldn't tell if the filmmakers wanted me to see him a jerk in need of redemption or a clear-eyed individualist hero cutting through the nonsense.

Pitt has the movie star gift: he's amiable almost, it seems, whether he wants to be or not. F1 takes, you should pardon the expression, a free ride on this, since based on his behavior and not on Pitt's charm, Sonny seems, overall, like a selfish, tactless douchebag. The film's prologue ends with Sonny being asked an existential question; at the end of the film he's asked the same question. He doesn't answer it either time. Neither does the film.

Opening at Harkins Shea:

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore--From her movie debut, in 1986's Children of a Lesser God, Marlee Matlin has been a vibrant presence in movies and TV; captivating, funny, sexy, with a streak of righteous anger balanced by a playful touch of mischief. I'm a fan. But after watching this feature-length American Masters documentary, I realized how little I really knew about her, and how important her story is.

Directed by the actress Shoshannah Stern, it chronicles Matlin's childhood with her loving but unprepared, guilt-ridden parents--she was stricken with deafness at 18 months, after an illness. We get her rebellious, drug-fueled teen years, her abusive relationship with Lesser God leading man William Hurt, her nurturing friendship with Henry Winkler, her prolific movie and TV career, and her sometimes fraught relationship with the deaf community. We learn that she had to pay for her own interpreter when she checked herself into Betty Ford.

I didn't realize the fierceness of Matlin's advocacy; the movie makes the case, for instance, that she's a major reason that closed captioning became standard on TV and videos. Reclined on a couch opposite Stern, who is interviewing, Matlin gives an unassuming account that gets across some sense of the difficulty deaf people have in navigating life, and in accessing information and support, even at this comparatively glamorous level.

ONE THAT GOT AWAY

Opening this weekend...

The Little Mermaid--It may be hard for younger people to understand what a big deal the original Little Mermaid was back in 1989. Disney is now so monolithic that it may be difficult to grasp the degree to which the firm, while still tops in the theme-park world, had become something of a lazy backwater in movie terms in the '80s. Animated features like The Black Cauldron and The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver & Company were profitable enough, but they weren't pop-culture landmarks that characterized childhood for a couple of generations.

With The Little Mermaid, one could immediately sense a sea change (sorry). Later animated Disney flicks like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King became more beloved, perhaps, but that adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen tale set the trend, and the template. When title character Ariel looked toward the surface, opened her mouth and warbled, in the voice of Jodi Benson, that she wanted to be where the people were, she redefined what the word "princess" meant in our culture, and reshaped children's entertainment.

The key, of course, was the musical form. Earlier Disney flicks had songs, some of them classics, but The Little Mermaid was a true musical comedy. The tunes, by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, were charmingly playful, but they also channeled adolescent longing into their fantasy situations. Ashman, who died in 1991 before the release of Beauty and the Beast, didn't know what he started.

The songs are the best thing about the new Little Mermaid too. I hadn't heard Ashman and Menken's tunes in decades, but they shake the movie to life at once, and a couple of new numbers by Menken and Lin-Manuel Miranda, including a rap for Awkwafina as the seabird, are strong as well. Halle Bailey sings "Part of Your World" with an expressive warmth that deepens the lyrics, and she brings a lovely, openhearted wonder to the role that's hard to resist.

The calypso number "Under the Sea," performed here by Daveed Diggs, is a crowd-pleaser again, and Jonah Hauer-King, in the comparatively thankless role of the Prince, rousingly handles his solo tune "Wild Uncharted Waters" (by Menken and Miranda). Melissa McCarthy brings sly humor--but not too much camp--to Ursula the Sea Witch in "Poor Unfortunate Souls."

The film could have used more music, and less filler. This Little Mermaid's director is Rob Marshall of Chicago and Dreamgirls, and he shapes the numbers excitingly--with the help of the Alvin Ailey Foundation, in the case of "Under the Sea"--but he can't do much with the in-between stuff. And there's a lot of in-between stuff; the new movie runs well over two hours, while the '89 original clocked in at well under an hour and a half.

Most of the non-musical sequences are poky, even interminable. This is especially true of the dry-land scenes, shot on a beautiful Sardinian coastline and set in a Caribbean-tinged storybook alternate past that feels much more like an overpriced, ersatz resort. The underwater scenes, with their immersive fanciful glitz, play better, but even they dawdle.

I've avoided most of the "live-action" (though heavily CGI-enhanced) remakes of Disney animated films in recent years. I did see Jon Favreau's 2016 Jungle Book, which was okay, mostly because it didn't stick too slavishly to the '67 film. But the idea of re-doing Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King in slick but unconvincing live action seemed, beyond the obvious profit potential, gratuitous. Fine as the performers are, this Little Mermaid seems that way too.

PAPAL SYRUP

Pope Benny is retiring! For a good read during the upcoming Conclave, you might consider that wacky Papal novel Hadrian VII.

The early chapters of Hadrian VII are set in squalor familiar to the author, Frederick Rolfe. The central character of this 1904 curio (available on amazon) is an English hack writer named George Arthur Rose, a Catholic convert and a washed-out aspirant to the priesthood living in seedy suburban poverty, nursing imperious pretensions of both aristocratic and ecclesiastical grandeur, along with a variety of personal grudges.

All of the above applied to Rolfe, who published under the misleading pseudonyms "Fr. Rolfe" and "Baron Corvo," and who died in obscurity in 1913. He wasn't discovered as an important literary figure until two decades later, when he became the subject of The Quest for Corvo, A.J.A. Symons' admired 1934 "experiment in biography."

But if Hadrian, Rolfe's most famous work, starts like a gritty Grub Street tale, it soon takes off into unexpected splendors. By an alignment of events generously described as providential, George Arthur Rose finds himself ordained a priest. Then, attending at the Conclave, he finds himself elected Pope.

He accepts this meteoric rise without astonishment, and quickly sets about using the Throne of Peter to reform the Church, to confound the rise of Socialism, to remake the geo-political structure of Europe, and, most importantly, to bring a simple, tasteful style of dress and accessorizing back to the Papacy. Hadrian (he takes the name of a previous English Pope) seems to be, to the Vatican, roughly what Jackie Kennedy was to the White House.

At its heart, Hadrian VII is unmistakably a daydream, akin to that of the dowdy woman imagining herself discovered as the next screen goddess, or the bleacher bum pressed into service as a Major League pitcher. It’s an unusually literate and complex daydream, however, from a frustrated and obsessive but talented megalomaniac.

It’s difficult to know whether the self-importance, the naiveté, and the reactionary bile of the politics are meant to be taken satirically or in earnest—possibly Rolfe himself didn’t know. The dense, verbose style and the fixation on Pontifical minutiae make for some exhausting slogs—there are sentences like “They were tolutiloquent in expressing horror at the impiety of mob-rule which had deprived them of the right to military salutes ordained by the Concordat” which make one cry uncle.

But once you get the hang of the self-consciously mannered prose and the nutty worldview, Hadrian becomes funny and fascinating and—especially in the context of the author’s story—touching. But of course it can’t be taken seriously—the premise is about as likely as, say, an Austrian body-builder and movie actor becoming the Governor of California.

Out on DVD today is the Bond movie Skyfall, which won Outstanding British Film at the BAFTA awards this weekend. Slightly surprising, but by no means undeserved—this is a terrific actioner, and the first Bond film I can remember finding at least a little bit moving. It had a remarkable dramatic tactic: Bond fails at almost everything he tries to accomplish here, and you’re left feeling genuine pity for him.