GOLDEN MEAN

 Opening today:

Mean Girls--"It's a cautionary tale..." So the Greek chorus characters Janis and Damian sing to us at the beginning of this musical remake of the well-loved 2004 teen comedy, pared down from the 2018 Broadway version. This may be the secret of Mean Girls, in each iteration: it really is a moral tale with a cautionary point, and the heroine really does go to the dark side.

As you'll recall, Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) is a smart kid who grew up in campsites in Africa; her mother (Jenna Fischer) is a researcher. When she lands at a suburban American high school for junior year, the divisions in cafeteria clique and caste strike her as similar to those in the animal kingdom. She gets sucked into spending lunches with "The Plastics," a circle of glamorous sycophants led by uber-mean girl Regina George (Renée Rapp). Cady agrees, initially, at the urging of artsy girl Janis (Auli'i Cravalho) and big gay Damian (Jaquel Spivey) to serve as a double agent in a revenge plot against Regina. But gradually, of course, the plastic begins to take over for real. 

Or maybe the secret is just that the film, scripted, like the original, by Tina Fey (freely adapting a book by Rosalind Wiseman), is funny and sweet, but not so sweet that it forgets to be, you know, mean. Or maybe it's that most of the songs, by Nell Benjamin and Jeff Richmond, are delightful, and buoyantly staged by directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez, Jr.

Overall, these actors don't have the vibrancy or distinctive personalities of the original film's cast, but they make up for this with terrific musical performing. Rapp brings such a baleful moan to "Meet the Plastics" that she really is a little scary, and Rice shades herself from guileless to conniving very believably. A few vets are around; Fey and Tim Meadows reprise their roles from the first film, and Busy Phillips and Jon Hamm contribute funny bits. The standouts, however, are Cravalho as Janis and Spivey as Damian, both equipped with gorgeous voices and the ability to act while they're belting.

Fey's generous-hearted--and sensible--take on popularity and self-esteem has provided a solid and unsentimental piece of role modeling for teens (and the teens that endure within most adults) for twenty years now. Maybe this movie will extend it for another twenty.

Freud's Last Session--The "session" in question is fictional, or at best nervily speculative--a meeting of the titular psychoanalytic pioneer with the Christian apologist C. S. Lewis. It's September of 1939; England has just declared war on Hitler's Germany, and Freud, who has fled Austria for England with his obsessively devoted daughter Anna, is in the agonizing homestretch of terminal mouth cancer. Irked by Lewis' parody of him in The Pilgrim's Regress (1933), Freud has invited the young Oxford don to his house in London for a civil but contentious chat.

Freud is played by Anthony Hopkins; Lewis is played by Matthew Goode. The direction is by Matthew Brown from a script he co-wrote with the American playwright Mark St. Germain, based on St. Germain's play (which I saw well-produced by Arizona Theatre Company in 2013). The play is a two-hander, but this handsomely-produced movie expands on it with scenes involving Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) and her partner Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour), flashbacks to Freud's childhood traumas and to Lewis' PTSD from the trenches in the earlier war, his eyebrow-raising cohabitation with Janie Moore (Orla Brady), etc.

But the juice in the film is still in the theatrical sparring between the two leads, especially Hopkins as the chuckling, cheerfully furious Freud. He's as lovably cantankerous here as he was as Pope Benedict in 2019's The Two Popes. For his part, Goode is smart enough not to make Lewis saintly or jolly; he gives him an edge of defensive aloofness alongside a deep decency.

It's hard to say which, if either, of the two men's viewpoints St. Germain and Brown are most in symapthy with. Many of us are likely to feel ourselves somewhere between Freud's staunch and bitter rationalism and Lewis' somehow rather half-hearted pose of orthodoxy. But the point of the film seems to be that what underlies both is, at least partly, existential terror, of a sort to which intelligent, intensely imaginative people like these two are particularly subject. Neither strict nonbelief nor strict belief seems to offer much deliverance.

THE NOT-SO-GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY

Interesting imports this weekend:

Opening at the Laemmle in Glendale, CA:

Bronco Bullfrog--Barney Platts-Mills directed this 1969 indie, shot in gorgeous newsprint shades of pale-gray monochrome by Adam Barker-Mill in London's East End, with a cast of nonprofessionals and music by Audience. The story follows Del (Del Walker) and his pals, a bunch of budding if rather half-hearted teenage delinquents.

They commit heinous crimes like sneaking each other into movie theaters and robbing pinball machines to get enough money for "cakes." In one strand of the plot, they reconnect with an old friend, Borstal veteran Bronco Bullfrog (Sam Shepherd), who reproves them for the childishness of their capers and draws them into robbing a freight train.

In another strand, Del meets the lissome Irene (Anne Gooding), two years his junior, and they fall for each other, probably in no small measure because Irene's Mum and Del's Dad so disapprove of the relationship. Their search, together on Del's motorbike, for a bit of privacy becomes the central struggle of the film.

The charm in this blast from the past, now getting a half-century belated stateside re-release, is the undemonstrative affectlessness that these characters display, and which extends to the quiet, doggedly undramatic filmmaking style. When the lads are unloading the freight car and carrying off the boxes, they might be helping Bronco move into a new flat. Del and Irene get cross with each other, part, and then make up with fewer histrionics then most couples show deciding what to watch on TV. Even the movie's few brief eruptions into violence have a curious lack of brutality.

The result is that these inexpressive ne'er-do-wells, softly murmuring their (subtitled) cockney lines, come across as singularly funny and endearing. Somehow their lack of operatics, and the movie's refusal to conform to a cautionary crime movie template--or any kind of template, really--gives these young people a comic dignity.

Opening in the Valley at Harkins Shea:

Charlotte--This animated feature, directed by Eric Warin and Tahir Rana, tells the story of Charlotte Salomon. The gifted artist's brief life was plagued with everything from horrific dysfunction in her depressed, suicide-prone family to unhappy love affairs to, you know, being a member of a high-profile Jewish family in the '30s and '40s in Berlin and later in the south of France during the Occupation. She is now remembered for creating Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?) a narrative cycle of hundreds of paintings, overlaid with autobiographical text, a dazzling and innovative work which survived both her and her Nazi persecutors.

Keira Knightley provides Charlotte's voice (in the English-language version; she's Marion Cotillard in the French version). The story is appallingly, almost unrelentingly sad, but it's also inspiring, and the animation is beautiful.

Opening in the Valley at Harkins Fashion Square:

The Duke--The great Jim Broadbent, who provides the voice of Charlotte's wretched "Grosspapa" in Charlotte, plays the lead in this period yarn, a posthumous work by director Roger Michell. It's a lot more fun than Charlotte. Like Bronco Bullfrog, it's a '60s-era heist movie, with a generous and wryly comedic spirit. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. Michell's direction, employing split screens and jazzy George Fenton music, has a '60s throwback flavor.

It tells the true story of Kempton Bunton, a taxi driver and factory worker from Newcastle who was also a self-educated aspiring playwright, as well as a political crank who campaigned to abolish television license fees for elderly people (he was briefly imprisoned himself for defying the requirement). Bunton turned out to be maybe the most improbable, and least offensive, master criminal in history. In 1961, Goya's Portrait of The Duke of Wellington (ca. 1812) was stolen from London's National Gallery, and authorities deemed it the work of a seasoned professional art thief (the theft is referenced in a throwaway gag in Dr. No).

But as it happened the masterpiece was actually residing, the whole time, in the back of a wardrobe in Bunton's house, and before long the authorities began to get letters demanding a ransom, to be paid not to the thief but to charity. To give away much more of the story would be to spoil some of the fun; suffice to say that Broadbent is flawless and lovable, and has the good sense to act as straight man when Helen Mirren, as his beyond fed-up wife Dorothy, hilariously lets rip at him. The whole cast is fine, but a particular word should be said for Matthew Goode's delicately funny work as Bunton's barrister, who develops a sly affection for his brash, obtusely moral client.

I highly recommend this one. Be forewarned, though: Unlike Bronco Bullfrog, The Duke isn't subtitled, and some of us Yanks might wish it was.

PSAMMEAD, NOT PENNYWISE

Streaming this week on YouTube and other platforms...

Four Kids and It—This British fantasy is based on the 2012 book Four Children and It by Jacqueline Wilson, which in turn was adapted from the 1902 novel Five Children and It by E. Nesbit. Directed by Andy De Emmony, it places the four squabbling kids—two each from either side of a new relationship between their single parents (Matthew Goode and Paula Patton)—on a beach at Cornwall. Here they meet the “It,” otherwise known as the Psammead, a long-limbed, hairy, flatulent, prehistoric sand-troll who can grant them one wish per day, which only lasts until the sun sets.

The wishes are mostly standard kid stuff—to be a pop star, to be able to fly—but they’re pretty well-staged. The kids are charming; the parents are attractive, and Russell Brand wins some laughs as a birdbrained neighbor. Michael Caine voices the Psammead very well; his sensible Cockney tones convincingly articulate the movie’s oft-repeated moral: Be careful what you wish for.

Squeegee—This 11-minute Short of the Week from shortoftheweek.com is a skillfully-made adults-only vignette by Morgan Krantz about an erotic encounter between an executive and a window washer. It's dirty and funny, but also, thanks to the wistful performances of the leads (Amy Rutherford and Blair McKenzie), truly yearning and poignant, especially in these isolated times.