SHORT PEOPLE GOT NOBODY

Opening in theaters today:

Saltburn--The title refers to the enormous, somewhat faded English country mansion in which most of the movie unfolds. But it may also suggest the proverbial pain of salt poured into a wound, as might be caused by the very sight of such a residence and the class system it represents.

Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a slight, nebbishy scholarship student to Oxford, is befriended by a classmate, the blueblood Adonis Felix (Jacob Elordi), who invites him home for the summer to the title pile of bricks in 2007. Felix's family is a fairly gothic bunch--abstracted Dad Sir James (Richard E. Grant), blithe, cordial Mom Lady Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike) and addled wreck of a sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), along with the sneering biracial American cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe). Carey Mulligan is also around as Elsbeth's nutty parasitical friend Pamela, as is Paul Rhys as the imperious butler Duncan.

Rather quickly, Oliver finds himself enmeshed with each of the family members, and drawn into the intrigues and occasional casual decadence of their isolated and mysterious lifestyle. While Oliver initially seems like an honest but in-over-his-head parvenu, like Balzac's Rastingnac or Faulkner's Ben Quick, we gradually see that he has his own wormy, calculating, opportunistic side.

This is the second feature written and directed by Emerald Fennell of 2020's Promising Young Woman. If it's a sophomore slump, that probably says more about the incisive brilliance and focus of Promising Young Woman than it does about any shortfalls of its own. The fury that charged Fennell's first film was direct and uncomplicated. Seemingly wanting to get across something more subtle and nuanced about class, Saltburn flails around a bit and sometimes feels confused, overwrought, overlong, even borderline campy.

But stick with it. It ultimately adds up to a potent piece of moviemaking, and of storytelling. Shot with hallucinatory garishness by the marvelous Linus Sandgren, the movie brings its setting vibrantly to life; there's none of the comforting stodginess of, say, Downton Abbey to it. Better, Fennell's narrative is involving. Even as we sense the influence of everything from The Shining to Risky Business, we're also pulled into investment in a yarn we haven't seen before. And she doesn't let us down; despite the movie's gratuitous thrashing about, in the end the plot snaps together to a satisfying and fairly devastating point.

Fennell also gets uniformly superb performances from her cast. Probably the wittiest and most endearing is Rosamund Pike, but Barry Keoghan, maybe the single best thing about The Banshees of Inisherin, is spectacular here, giving a tour de force turn in a role that is not only wildly mercurial on an emotional and psychological level, but also required physical fearlessness. Saltburn may end up being most remembered for literalizing a common expression for finding somebody extremely attractive, but Keoghan's draining performance makes a splash. 

Napoleon--Returning to France, uninvited, from exile in Elba, the title character is confronted with a regiment of soldiers he used to command. "I missed you," he tells them, seemingly sincerely. Soon he's back in charge.

Apparently there is some historical basis for this scene; Napoleon is said to have had a fond and comradely relationship with his troops, despite his willingness to get them slaughtered. But to the casual viewer of this Ridley Scott epic, the moment may come as a surprise. Nothing in the movie prepares us for it. Played by Joaquin Phoenix, this Napoleon shows little affection or even interest toward anyone or anything apart from himself, and a certain almost adolescent erotic fixation on Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). In between campaigns, he makes rather unromantic attempts to impregnate her, and reacts with sullen outrage when they don't succeed.

Scott's movie, based on a script by David Scarpa, is largely a pageant of carnage. It begins with a graphic depiction of Marie Antoinette's meeting with Madame Guillotine, then shows us Napoleon navigating the deadly mayhem of the Revolution and the First Republic. It then traces him from battle to battle: Toulon, Austerlitz, Moscow and some of his other greatest hits, culminating, of course, against Wellington (Rupert Everett) at You-Know-Where.

This Napoleon isn't boring. It's entirely watchable and well-staged. Scott deploys his forces with the care of a child playing with toy soldiers on his bedroom floor. But it doesn't really hit hard emotionally; something is missing from it. Early on, we see a cannonball splat into the chest of a horse, and the resulting explosion of gore is so obviously computer-generated that, for me at least, it carried little shock (it has this in common with the splatter effects in Thanksgiving, which, exhaustingly enough, I saw the same day). This sort of detached unreality hangs over the movie's horrors, and the same detachment extends to the central character. 

While Phoenix holds our attention with his movie star charisma, it's as if he's working in a vacuum. Except here and there in his scenes with Kirby's drolly unflappable Josephine, Phoenix seems to be anomic, walled off from the other characters by his own narcissistic self-regard. Maybe that's deliberate; maybe Scott is trying to dramatize the Napoleon of Walter de la Mare's unforgettable poem:

What is the world, O soldiers?

It is I.

I, this incessant snow,

This northern sky.

Soldiers, this solitude

Through which we go

Is I.

In any case, the movie has a point to make about the appetite for an autocratic "strongman" leader that seems to inevitably arise in reaction to the messiness of democratic movements. It's a theme which would, admittedly, seem to have a slight smidge of relevance to our current times. It should be noted that, warmongering megalomaniac though he was, Napoleon was also a tremendously intelligent and curious person, which puts him in a very different category than our most notable current would-be Emperor.

CURIE-ING FAVOR

Streaming this weekend:

Radioactive--Debuting in 2002's Die Another Day as a Bond girl, Rosamund Pike has since proven she's more than an English beauty, showing her potent acting chops in 2014's Gone Girl and other roles. But she's probably never had a showcase part quite as juicy as that of Marie Curie, the pioneering, Nobel-winning scientist who discovered radium and polonium and coined the title term.

Adapted by Jack Thorne from a 2010 graphic novel by Lauren Redniss, and directed by Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis, the movie sketches the Polish-born Marie Sklodowska's life in Paris. We see her marriage to Pierre Curie (the fine, restrained Sam Riley); her discoveries and celebrity in partnership with him; her later bereavements and unhappy affairs; her heroic introduction of X-ray technology into field medicine during WWI; her unwitting ruination of her health from long exposure to her own discoveries.

Interwoven with this are free-floating episodes depicting Hiroshima, the nuclear tests in Nevada, Chernobyl; also early efforts in radiotherapy. In general, the movie's take on Curie's legacy seems ambivalent and rather dark.

But its regard for its heroine is strong and unsentimental. Pike creates a portrait of a wary, unapologetically ambitious woman, and gets across an electric sense of brilliance mixed with a passionate nature. She also has a couple of Oscar-clip-worthy scenes of Curie in extremes so intense and emotionally naked that they're almost hard to watch. She's spectacular.

Zombie for Sale--A young zombie (Jung Ga-ram) wanders into a small South Korean town, and ends up in the custody of the nervy, squabbling family who runs the local tow service. He's fond of munching heads of cabbage, and he's on the cute side, so the young sister (Lee Soo-kyung) takes a shine to him. But when it's discovered that his bite has a rejuvenating effect on old men (initially), the family finds itself in a position to make a fortune.

Also known as The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale...

...this light-on-gore horror satire directed by Lee Min-jae is full of screwy, truly imaginative ideas, and delightfully acted by a terrific ensemble--I especially enjoyed Uhm Ji-won as the forbidding pregnant sister-in-law. It's the hip spin on classic zombie shtick that Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die wanted to be. Probably what makes the film so enjoyable is what makes many of the South Korean films that make it to the states, including The Host and Parasite, so much fun: Their hard-edged, even jaundiced, yet somehow still deeply affectionate view of family.

JOE/GIRL

Gone Girl—“I feel like I’m in a Law and Order episode,” says Nick Dunne, as detectives begin to question him about his missing wife Amy, early in David Fincher’s new thriller. We in the audience think so too. In a scene from earlier, happier days in Nick and Amy’s marriage, they give each other the same gift on their anniversary, and Amy says “We’re so cute, I want to punch us in the face.” Here, again, screenwriter Gillian Flynn, adapting her own 2012 novel, seems to be pre-empting the audience.

No need, as it turns out. Nick and Amy’s marriage goes south, both figuratively and literally. They both lose their magazine writing jobs, Nick drags Amy from her beloved New York to Missouri to help care for his dying mother, and their relationship goes from punch-in-the-face cute to deeply dysfunctional.

Then she disappears, amidst signs of a struggle in the house. Nick calls the cops, remains flippantly calm during the search, and, perhaps trying not to behave self-consciously like a panicked husband, comes across for all the world like a guy who murdered his wife. People start to exchange significant glances behind his back. Interrupting this strand from time to time are episodes from Amy’s diary, depicting the crumbling marriage.

These are just the beginning of Gone Girl’s twists. After awhile I stopped thinking that we were in Law and Order territory—the plot may possibly be too gothic and convoluted even for that show.

None of which is to say it’s not entertaining. Flynn’s dialogue has punch, and Fincher crafts the scenes elegantly, at a confident, steady pace. His work is broodingly atmospheric without the dreamlike stylization of Seven.

Fincher also gets excellent, witty work from an excellent cast. The revelation here is Rosamund Pike, always lovely but often stuck in conventionally sweet parts; here she makes the most of the unexpectedly ripe, varied role of Amy. But Tyler Perry, Neil Patrick Harris, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, Missi Pyle, Sela Ward and especially Carrie Coon as Nick’s twin sister also give enjoyable turns.

And then there’s Ben Affleck, handling this Hitchcockian leading man role with aplomb. The story hinges, in part, on Nick’s difficulties with public likability, something that Affleck, for reasons I’ve never entirely grasped, understands all too well. Gone Girl strikingly echoes Affleck’s life in the public eye, when you think about it—from the beginning of his ordeal, Nick’s every move makes him look like a smarmy creep. But the worse he looks, the more cameras get pointed at him.

The Joe Show—As the title implies, this documentary chronicles the rise and partial slump of Joe Arpaio, and especially his obsessive relationship with the media. The outrages summarized here—there are others—won’t be news to most informed viewers here in Maricopa County, but they can still boil your blood when seen in the aggregate.

What’s really remarkable about the film is the access that director Randy Murray got to Arpaio and his inner circle. Murray’s camera was present over what appears to have been years, including the 2012 election, and Arpaio and his gang eventually came to speak in front of it with startling cynical candor about their calculated showmanship in manipulating the media to their advantage. Simply on the basis of this footage, The Joe Show qualifies as an important document.

It’s also a slickly-made, wittily edited film about a satire-defying Arizona figure. I interviewed Murray for a Phoenix Magazine story last year, and he told me the same thing that my friend Barry Graham told me after he interviewed Arpaio for Harper’s years ago—that he liked Arpaio personally, a lot. The Sheriff’s almost childlike affability comes through in The Joe Show, and this quality sits uncomfortably with the facts the film presents—that he’s responsible for fatal brutality, banana-republic-style intimidation and the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars. Murray’s film also gets across something that’s less widely understood: Not only has Arpaio been abusive, he’s also been shockingly derelict of his legitimate duties.

What Arpaio’s behavior here shows is that, for all his ignorance and incoherence and delusional bluster, he has an instinctive grasp of how to exploit people’s piggy bigotries and appetite for bullying cruelty. Even when his media flack Lisa Allen and other cronies cringe with embarrassment at something he plans to do, like his “Birther investigation,” he knows perfectly well that it will work with the segment of the electorate at whom he’s aiming.

Allen comes across, by the way, far more repulsively than anyone else in the film, Arpaio included, though there’s also pathos to the exaggerated bonhomie of her manner—you can sense her desperation to make her job and her boss and her department seem mischievous and cute, a misunderstood, well-intentioned part of the normal world of decent people. But Murray’s film shows that it’s not. Arpaio was a grandstanding media whore from the start of his tenure, and with Allen as his pimp, he’s gradually grown into a monster.