BLAME IT ON THE WEATHERMAN

Check out my review of the new WWII drama Pressure...

...online at Phoenix Magazine. Have a great weekend everybody!

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.

TOXIC CLOUD; TOXIC FRIENDSHIP

Now streaming...

White Noise--Noah Baumbach's adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel begins on the quaint campus of College-On-the-Hill, where mortality-haunted "Hitler Studies" prof Adam Driver lives with his wife Greta Gerwig and their talkative but deadpan blended brood. His wife's pill usage and other academic-life worries are intruded upon when the collision of a train with a tanker truck and the resulting "Airborne Toxic Event" requires the family and their neighbors to flee and take refuge in summer camps, Chinese restaurants and other makeshift shelters. Baumbach's style here seems to pay homage to other directors; the early college scenes suggest the twee formality of Wes Anderson, there's a big dose of the Close Encounters-era Spielberg later on, a hint of Jason Reitman's Juno here or of David Byrne's True Stories there. 

The movie feels large and consequential; there are many funny and fascinating passages, and the '80s period look is colorful. But while the story's elusive ambiguities are intriguing for a while, they gradually start to get irritating, particularly when it moves from the epic-scale first half to the more personal and anticlimactic second half. Still, the cast is strong, Driver is paradoxically both commanding and neurotic in the lead, and Gerwig is a doleful, troublingly erotic presence--at one point Driver's colleague Don Cheadle observes, accurately, that she has "important hair." 

The Banshees of Inisherin--Colm and Padraic live on a bleak island off the coast of Ireland in the 1920s. Artillery fire from the Irish Civil War can be heard from the mainland, but the islanders pay it less attention than they do the trouble that arises when Colm, a fiddler played by Brendan Gleeson, abruptly stops speaking to and socializing with his lifelong companion Padraic, a dairyman played by Colin Farrell. Colm admits, bluntly but without rancor, that he simply finds Padraic intolerably dull, and doesn't want to waste any more time drinking and talking with him when he could be working on his music. He'll still chat amiably with the other islanders, but something about the very presence of the dear, baffled Padraic seems symbolic to Colm of his life being squandered on triviality, and he'll go to extremes to reject it.

The great Martin McDonagh was really on to something here; it starts out as one of the most original, grimly funny and painful takes on friendship in some time. But as the conflict escalates, it's as if the writer-director remembers he's the Martin McDonagh of films like In Bruges and plays like A Behanding in Spokane, and feels obligated to take the story in a gruesome, Grand Guignol direction. It throws the balance off here as it didn't with In Bruges; it sours the movie's comic side and feels psychologically reductive to its tragic side.

Even so, Gleeson and (especially) Farrell are both sublime, as are Kerry Condon as Padraic's sensible sister and Barry Keoghan as his hapless backup friend. McDonagh narrowly missed making a masterpiece here, but these performances are not to be missed.