PTA MEETING

Opening this weekend:

One Battle After Another--The erotic power of revolutionary violence is the initial theme of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest. Set in a strife-torn, more or less contemporary U.S., it follows the exploits of "The French 75," an SLA-like cadre who liberate immigrant detainees and blow up communication towers and banks and the like.

A French 75 operative known as Perfidia Beverly Hills (the goddessy, imperious Teyana Taylor), finds political mayhem an aphrodisiac; she's desperately turned on whenever her sheepish explosives expert squeeze "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) is about to blow something sky high. Her seditious salaciousness isn't limited to Calhoun, however, but also to her enemy, the reactionary Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn)--there's a loathing sexual tension between them the second they meet, at gunpoint.

Anderson's strange saga, very loosely derived from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (much like There Will Be Blood was vaguely inspired by Upton Sinclair's Oil!) soon fast-forwards seventeen years. The theme then shifts from uncontrolled libido to domestic complacency. Perfidia is long out of the picture, and Calhoun, now known as "Bob Ferguson," is living incognito and raising the teenaged Willa (Chase Infiniti) in an A-frame in Colorado.

Bob learns that he, and Willa, are again targets of the forces of Lockjaw, who's trying to gain membership in an order of wealthy old white guy racists, the "Christmas Adventurers." The French 75 start getting the band back together to protect Willa, but after years of sitting on the couch smoking weed, Bob finds his revolutionary chops are rusty. Besides, he's forgotten all the passwords.

A wild and blood-soaked cat-and-mouse game ensues across the west. Bob and Willa's allies range from radical nuns to a native tracker to Sergio, a relaxed but capable martial arts sensei and immigrant underground railroad conductor played by a scene-stealing Benicio del Toro. The action is often laugh out loud funny, and though the comedy is grim and splenetic, these characters are weirdly endearing.

Partly this is because DiCaprio, Penn, del Toro and others are about as good here as they've ever been. But it's also because Anderson puts them through standard action movie paces--gunfights, rooftop scrambles, interrogations, and one of the more original, woozily effective car chases in some time--but they execute them like real human beings, fumbling in uncertainty. "Tom Cruuuuuise!" Sergio crows at one point, trying to encourage Bob to some derring-do, and it's a funny yet rueful reminder of the contrast between what we're capable of and what the movies have taught us we should be capable of.

If there are real-life revolutionary groups in the style of The French 75 of any significance currently active in this country, I haven't heard about them. But One Battle After Another still has the ring of emotional truth. It all may seem crazy, but it sure doesn't seem nearly as outrageous and improbable as it would have, say, ten or twelve years ago.  Like Ari Aster's recent Eddington, this is a flailing, angry satirical portrait of where we are emotionally right now. But unlike Eddington, it gives us characters we can root for rather than just pity.

Eleanor the Great--Like last year's Between the Temples, this one is about an elderly woman connecting with a younger person, and preparing for a very belated Bat Mitzvah. June Squibb the Great plays the title character, a sassy 90-something widow who moves in with her daughter (Jessica Hecht) in New York after many years in Florida when her beloved longtime roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) passes on. 

Eleanor accidentally wanders into a Survivors Support Group at the Jewish Community Center, and finds herself telling everyone about her experience during the Holocaust. Nina (Erin Kellyman), a young journalism student who's there observing, understandably latches onto it as a great story, and she and Eleanor quickly bond as friends. The trouble is that the story isn't really Eleanor's; it's Bessie's. Eleanor is from Iowa; she converted to Judaism when she married.

It's clear that Eleanor's impulsive act isn't just angling for attention; she's trying to keep Bessie's story, which she never told anyone else, from fading away. Nina is deeply bereaved over the recent death of her mother, and her father (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a famous TV journalist, has been distant from her since the loss. But he takes an interest in the story, and pretty soon poor Eleanor is in over her head.

This peculiar but painfully plausible comedy-drama marks the directorial debut of Scarlett Johansson. Her work is crisp and proficient, but the script, by Tory Kamen, is unsteady; the attempt to pull everything together toward the end doesn't quite come off. None of this, however, is an impediment to the indomitable Squibb, whose fearless, direct performance transcends any shortcomings in the material, as she did in last year's similarly uneven Thelma. And despite the unsavory tension behind the situation, her scenes with the excellent young Kellyman have a sweet hum.

The intriguing film programs at Scottsdale's Western Spirit Museum probably don't get as much notice as they should. The movies are free with museum admission; $10 for just the movie.

The current series is Robert Rodriguez: Sinema Sin Fronteras. The next selection by the Texas auteur, the charming Harryhausen-esque fantasy Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams, shows at 2 p.m. this Sunday, September 28. It's followed by Once Upon a Time in Mexico at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 1; Spy Kids 3: Game Over at 2 p.m. Sunday, October 5; the vampire yarn From Dusk till Dawn at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 8, and the bloody actioner Machete, starring Danny Trejo, at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 22.  

The Spy Kids flicks are great for children; the evening Rodriguez movies are decidedly for grown-ups. Go to westernspirit.org for details.

AGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

Now in theaters:

Thelma--Played by June Squibb, the title character is a widow in her nineties, living on her own in a lovely house in Encino, California. She's intelligent and proudly self-reliant, but she nonetheless falls prey to a scam; somebody claiming to be her beloved grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger) calls up claiming to have had an accident and to need $10,000 fast.

Before she can reach her daughter (Parker Posey) or son-in-law (Clark Gregg), Thelma has mailed the money. She's informed that there's little the cops can do, and her family tells her to let it go. But she can't. The theft has threatened her sense of independence, and left her furious, both at the perpetrators and herself.

She goes to see her old friend Ben (Richard Roundtree), who lives in a nursing home. She no longer drives, so she asks Ben if she can borrow his rather snazzy scooter to follow up a lead she's found on the scammer. Though he's horrified at what she wants to do, soon the two of them are zipping along the sidewalks of L.A. in the scooter, Thelma at the handlebars.

The writer-director is Josh Margolin, whose real-life Grandma, really named Thelma, was really targeted by such a scam. Though the real Thelma didn't fall for it, you can understand Margolin's impulse to dramatize such an infuriating, odious plot.

There's a certain raggedness to the movie's middle stretch. Margolin seems so delighted with the image of Thelma and Ben riding to vengeance on a scooter that he may have sacrificed a certain amount of narrative logic to it; it's hard to imagine that they couldn't have contrived a more efficient way to get across town. And Thelma's daughter and son-in-law seem underdeveloped and caricatured, though Hechinger's Danny is endearing. When this goodhearted but coddled and aimless kid in his early twenties bemoans his lack of life skills, plenty of us in the audience can empathize.

But the center of the movie, of course, is June Squibb's performance as Thelma. Now 94, Squibb has been around show business since the '50s--she was in the original Broadway run of Gypsy!--and in TV and movies since the '80s and '90s. She made an impression with her role in About Schmidt (2002) and got an Oscar nomination as Bruce Dern's salty wife in 2013's Nebraska, but this is her first star part.

She handles it with great skill, careful to keep Thelma from getting too twinkly and adorable, and giving her a reflective side. She also has a fine rapport with her costars, especially Roundtree, whose last film this was (it's dedicated to him). His quiet, dignified Ben has, unlike Thelma, accepted his declined status. He insists he likes living in the home, and playing Daddy Warbucks in the production of Annie there.

His idea of aging gracefully is not being a bother or a worry to younger people. In the buddy-picture structure of the movie, this makes him the fretful Danny Glover or Martin Lawrence to Thelma's Mel Gibson or Will Smith; he's quite literally getting too old for this shit.

The comparison isn't strained. Margolin's most fertile source of comedy here comes from shooting and editing the film like any tense urban action thriller; Nick Chuba's driving musical score helps a lot with this. When Thelma has to climb a steep flight of stairs or stand up on a bed to reach something in a high place, it's treated much the same as, say, Tom Cruise's daring feats in a Mission: Impossible movie, and you realize that, in terms of courage and risk, there really isn't much difference.

24

The 24th annual Phoenix Film Festival...

...kicks off Thursday night and runs through Sunday, April 14; check out my short article, online at Phoenix Magazine, previewing the festivities.

PARTY COOPERS

Opening this weekend:

Love the Coopers—The Coopers, and their extremely First-World problems, being:

Dad (John Goodman) wants to leave mom (Diane Keaton) because he’s sick of her putting the concerns of their grown kids ahead of their own relationship. She’s talked him into sticking around for one more picturesque family Christmas in their handsome suburban Pittsburgh home.

Meanwhile, Gramps (Alan Arkin) has bonded with a young diner waitress (Amanda Seyfried) and now she’s planning to move away. Son (Ed Helms) has lost his job, and is hiding it from his family. Daughter (Olivia Wilde), dawdling in the Pittsburgh airport, meets a handsome young solider (Jake Lacy) on his way to deployment and talks him into posing as her boyfriend for the holiday in hopes of avoiding the disappointed, disapproving, worried looks of her parents.

Gee, wouldn’t it be something if two of them actually fell in love?

Middle-class whining about what a drag it is to spend time with your family at the holidays is theme which the movies have pretty thoroughly explored over the last few decades. Indeed, Keaton has already starred in a similar ensemble comedy-drama, The Family Stone, back in 2005. She’s one of the executive-producers of Love the Coopers, so she must like this sort of thing, or at least like the sort of money it can make.

Directed by Jessie Nelson from a script by Steven Rogers (which went into production under the better title The Most Wonderful Time), Love the Coopers is slickly produced and more watchable than it really deserves to be. Partly this is thanks to a Starbucks-compilation-CD-style soundtrack of genteel holiday numbers, including Sting’s lovely version of “Soul Cake.” Partly it’s because of the underrated winter beauty of Pittsburgh.

But mostly, as you might guess, it’s because of the ability of that cast to engage, even with fairly blah material. Along with the above, by the way, the ensemble includes June Squibb as a dotty old aunt, and Marisa Tomei and Anthony Mackie as, respectively, Keaton’s shoplifting sister and the cop stuck with taking her in. This promises to become the most interesting strand—Mackie gives his role a little tension and sting, and he and Tomei have a nice rapport—but it peters out without a real payoff.

There’s also narration, but both the (unmistakable) voice of the famous speaker and the identity of the narrator seem meant to be a surprise until the end credits.