PRINCESS ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

Opening this weekend:

Spencer--In 2016 the Chilean director Pablo Larrain gave us Jackie, with Natalie Portman as JFK's shattered, furious widow. It was an impressive, well-made film that seemed curiously lacking in any real point beyond providing Portman with an award-bait role. Now Larrain is back with another portrait of an iconic, history-adjacent young woman suppressing her rage behind an expected public docility. Again, the role is nomination-bait, this time for Kristen Stewart as Diana, Princess of Wales.

The movie calls itself "A FABLE FROM A TRUE TRAGEDY," an elegant way of saying: we speculated freely about real people (which is, of course, true of all historical fiction). It takes place over a Christmas holiday in 1991. Diana is trying to drive herself to the "festivities" of The Queen (Stella Gonet), her already-estranged husband Charles (Jack Farthing) and the whole creepy clan at rural Sandringham House, but she's hopelessly late and lost. "Where the f**k am I?" is her first line, and one suspects there's a double meaning in that.

She's clearly in no mood to spend a second with any of these people except her boys. But as Spencer progresses, we see that this is more than just routine distaste; our heroine is in major psychological distress. Immersed in loneliness, resentment, sexual frustration, bulimia and bingeing, and isolation without privacy, she's teetering on the brink of a serious meltdown. A copy of an old tome about Anne Boleyn on her bedside table doesn't help her sense of well-being. 

Larrain takes his time, and gradually this slow, stately, hushed film, with its keening orchestral score by Jonny Greenwood, begins to generate some juicy tension in a way that Jackie never did. Toward the end, there are moments that could easily tip over into camp (which wouldn't necessarily be unwelcome) if not for Larrain's austere style. It's to screenwriter Steven Knight's credit that he doesn't offer us a hagiographic take on Diana's character; she's clearly a bit of, well, a drama queen, and early on you may find her obtuse tardiness as exasperating as Charles and the other Windsor waxworks do. After all, you may wonder, does she think she's the only person in the world who dreads family holidays?

But as the movie progresses, and we get a feel for the oppressiveness of the world into which Diana was swept as a teenager, her plight makes her sympathetic, and ultimately likable. This has a lot to do with Kristen Stewart. Often on the blank, slack-jawed side, Stewart came to life in 2016 in the somewhat overlooked, eerily sexy ghost story Personal Shopper, and this gothic seems to give her a charge as well; her Diana has a desperate eroticism and a sorrowful, self-lacerating anger so deep it frightens her, and those around her.

For a while it also seems as if the movie will be a pure vehicle, with the other characters mere bit players. But a few of them are permitted a candid scene or two with the Princess: Timothy Spall as an unflappable Equerry in charge of keeping her secure (and compliant); the excellent Jacki Nielen and Freddie Spry as her adored young princes; Sean Harris as Chef Darren McGrady. Best of all is Sally Hawkins as Diana's loyal dresser; their scene, laughing together on a beach, has the feel of a liberation from captivity, for both of them.

BEAR, TRACKS

Opening this weekend:

Paddington 2—As far as I know, this is the first crime thriller about the theft of a pop-up book. The title bear wants to buy the one-of-a-kind tome, you see, as a gift for his adored Aunt back in "darkest Peru." Alas, before he's saved up enough of his pay as a window-washer to make the purchase, the book is filched from the antiques store by a mysterious burglar, and Paddington is suspected of the heist and thrown in jail.

The real culprit—it’s revealed early on, but stop reading now if you don’t want the “spoiler”—is a crackbrained, down-on-his-luck actor played by Hugh Grant, who knows, as Paddington does not, that the pop-up book contains clues to the location of a hidden treasure. So as Paddington struggles to negotiate the perils of prison life and his upper-middle-class adoptive London family searches for evidence of his innocence, the thespian gets closer and closer to claiming the loot.

Michael Bond's beloved bear, with his blue coat, floppy red hat and love of marmalade, has been a mainstay of Brit kiddie-lit since the late ‘50s. Bond, who died this past year (Paddington 2 is dedicated to him) claimed that the character’s inspiration came, in part, from the sight of tagged children on railway platforms being evacuated from London during WWII.

There have been several animated TV series based on Bond’s tales, but the first feature film was a 2014 live-action effort, with a CGI Paddington excellently voiced by Ben Whishaw. That movie had plenty of charm, but it was marred, for me severely, by the introduction of a Cruella de Vil-like villainess played by Nicole Kidman, an obsessed taxidermist who, lacking a specimen of Ursa Marmalada in her collection, wanted to stuff Paddington. This nastiness felt really out of place in the gentle context of the movie.

Paddington 2 is a major improvement. Directed, like the first film, by Paul King of the marvelous Brit TV comedy The Mighty Boosh, the sequel features lengthy, complex slapstick sequences in the sprit of Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati, executed by Paddington (Whishaw again) with similarly earnest absorption. And its softer and sillier villain hits just the right note, without taking too much of an edge off the picture. It does, after all, contain the line, spoken by a security guard at St. Paul’s, “A nun went beserk.”

And that cast! Returning from the first film are Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi and Jim Broadbent, joined here by the likes of Brendan Gleeson, as Paddington’s tough-guy prison mentor, Tom Conti, Joanna Lumley and Eileen Atkins, billed here as Dame Eileen Atkins, if you please. It’s a testament to the bear’s iconic status over there that that sort of a-list talent could be assembled for a kiddie-movie sequel.

Stealing the picture from all of them is Grant, who turns his no-good greedy ham into a star part. He gets to use a variety of accents and wear cunning disguises—including as that aforementioned “very attractive nun.” He even gets to perform a full Sondheim number.

The Commuter—Liam Neeson plays a 60-year-old ex-cop turned insurance salesman who rides a commuter train from Tarrytown to Manhattan and back everyday. Heading home on the day he gets laid off, baffled by how he’ll send his son to college, he’s approached by a mystery woman (Vera Farmiga) with a proposition—somebody on the train doesn’t belong, she says.

He’s given a false name that the person is traveling under (he isn’t told the gender), and promised that he’ll be given $100,000 if, using his cop skills, he makes the identification for them. In a moment of weakness he takes the down payment, but quickly realizes that the people who have hired him are ruthless killers, and that he’d be dooming their target by making the ID. He also realizes that his own family is in danger.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, the Spaniard behind 2015’s Run All Night and several other Liam Neeson righteous/reluctant killing sprees, this thriller pays obvious tribute to Hitchcock—overtly to Shadow of a Doubt—but is just as reminiscent of the Bruckheimer-style action excess playbook. The plot gets more convoluted, and the action more ludicrously overscaled, as the movie progresses.

But as usual, there’s Neeson at the center of it, with his quiet masculinity and his decency and his pained, sad-faced acceptance of the distasteful duty of pulverizing his enemies—it’s distasteful to him, that is; we in the audience drool for their retribution. He’s an action hero for middle-aged guys who feel ineffectual, and he delivers again here.

On the whole, The Commuter is more fun than many of Neeson’s other massacres. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s generous-hearted: especially in a Spartacus-like climatic flourish, it’s about strangers sticking up for each other.

NEWT ATTITUDE

Also opening here in the Valley this weekend:

The Shape of Water—Sally Hawkins stars in this romantic fantasy from the great Guillermo del Toro. She plays Elisa, a mute foundling orphan with scars on her neck who lives in an apartment over a movie theater in Baltimore in the early ‘60s. She gratifies herself in the bathtub as part of her daily ablutions, then brings food to her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a lonely gay commercial illustrator, before leaving for her janitorial job in the bowels of a sinister research facility.

It’s at her job that she finds love, in the form of an elegantly segmented and finned Gill-man (Doug Jones). The “Amphibious Man” as the movie designates him, originated in a river in South America, where the natives worshipped him as a god.

He was captured by Strickland (Michael Shannon), a repressed, fanatical government agent who refers to him as “the asset” and wants to vivisect him for whatever Cold War advantages his body might yield. Elisa, Giles, her coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and a shady but sympathetic scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg) work to liberate the Amphibious Man, and along the way Elisa discovers her sexual passion for him.

Del Toro claims that as a child, he wanted to see the Creature of the Black Lagoon get the girl. This movie is the result, and it fulfilled that wish for me, too—I can also remember feeling a pang for the Creature’s romantic optimism. So I’m not the fellow to resist The Shape of Water. Like Peter Jackson’s King Kong, it turns a story of unrequited love into a story of requited love.

But if it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, if it all sounds terribly self-consciously whimsical and twee and self-delighted, then I can only tell you that, with as much objectivity as I can muster, it doesn’t come off that way at all to me. Del Toro earns his poetic passages by linking them with robust, gutsy storytelling. If it weren’t for some gore and sexual frankness, it might have made a great children’s movie.

It’s not a subtle film, admittedly; del Toro pushes his motifs, like the color green or the hydrophilic ubiquity of water, very hard. And the characterizations, especially that of Shannon’s furious reactionary g-man, are similarly broad-stroke. But the performances make them real people, and the story takes hold, as a romantic-erotic daydream merged with a period thriller merged with, in the most literal sense, a fish-out-of-water comedy.

Fair warning, though: This movie includes the fairly gruesome death of an animal. In the context of the story it makes perfect sense, and it helps to counteract the movie’s potential sentimentality, but for animal lovers sensitive to such things, this won’t matter at all.

ROBOTS & GANGSTERS & BEARS, OH MY!

Opening this weekend:

Spare Parts—A down-on-his-luck substitute science teacher at a Phoenix high school reluctantly inherits the job of advising the robotics club. He finds his handful of students to have talent, ingenuity and heart. They are also undocumented, and have various personal challenges. They enter their low-budget, scraped-together robot submersible in an underwater robotics competition for college students at UC Santa Barbara.

George Lopez plays the teacher—actually a conflation of two guys—in this triumph-of-the-underdogs comedy-drama, based on a true story. Carlos PenaVega of Big Time Rush leads the quartet of guys, all charming, who play the team, with the grownups represented by the likes of Marisa Tomei, Esai Morales and Jamie Lee Curtis as the wry, amused principal.

Directed by Sean McNamara from a script by Elissa Matsueda, based on “La Vida Robot,” a 2005 article by Joshua Davis in Wired, Spare Parts is one hundred percent out of the standard Stand and Deliver or Hoosiers inspirational high school drama playbook. As such, it’s perfectly well executed, crisply paced, energetically acted, with obligatory crises and touches of sweet humor and romance.

What makes it different from other films of this sort is that it puts a human face on the plight of undocumented kids in the US, trying to get somewhere in life, and in some cases—like that of Oscar Vasquez, the main kid here—to serve this country, and blocked by the obtuse idiocies of our immigration policy. At the end of Spare Parts, when we’re shown the real-life outcomes of the team’s stories, it’s hard not to be moved by them. As such, this very conventional movie could help to win the hearts and minds of mainstream audiences.

A side note: The film is mostly set in here in west Phoenix, in and around Carl Hayden High School. But it was mostly shot in Albuquerque—probably thanks to the obtuse idiocies of this state’s production-tax-incentive policy—and it looks it. Just as the U.S. hurts itself economically by shutting out kids like these, so Arizona missed out on some of the economic benefits of this uplifting Arizona story.

A Most Violent Year—The setting is New York, and the year referred to is 1981, a record-breaker for violent crime in the Big Apple. Our hero is Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), who was set up in business by the gangster father of his wife (Jessica Chastain). Abel runs a fleet of fuel-oil trucks which regularly get hijacked, in broad daylight, by the thugs of his business rivals.

But Abel is determined not to be a crooked businessman. His wife, on the other hand, is perfectly comfortable calling on her family connections, especially after their children are threatened.

Written and directed by J. C. Chandor of the impressive All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year seems intended as a stylistic throwback to the crime dramas from around the period it depicts—something dark and brooding directed by Sidney Lumet or maybe Stuart Rosenberg, with cinematography by Gordon Willis or Andrzej Bartowiak. The star, almost certainly, would have been Al Pacino.

The young Pacino is, at least, who Isaac seems to be channeling with his quiet, intense performance; Chastain is perhaps trying for Faye Dunaway. Albert Brooks shines as their long-suffering, ironically upbeat lawyer, a role that might have been played, in 1981, by, say, Albert Brooks.

Chandor gives the story an authentic feel, nothing too hokey or melodramatic, and his revulsion to violence seems genuine. More importantly, his tacit critique of the way other movies in this genre romanticize violence is well taken. But there was something about Abel’s naïve and slightly sanctimonious protestations of purity that I found comical—in the context of his career choice, it’s like he’s a fisherman determined never to get wet.

This engrossing, polished movie is, somehow, both a tease and a scold. As well-conditioned audience members, we want to see Abel retaliate violently against the thugs—the movie seems almost to tremble on the verge of gratifying this wish, yet Chandor is telling us that, at bottom, we’re wrong to want this. He’s right, of course, but the moviegoer’s bloodthirsty heart wants what it wants.

Paddington—Based on the children’s books by Michael Bond, this story of a civilized, courteous, marmalade-loving bear from “Darkest Peru” who winds up in London on the platform at Paddington Station is cute and funny, with first-rate use of CGI, cleverly-directed, Rube-Goldberg-like slapstick, and some good, silly, free-floating gags. Sally Hawkins and Hugh Bonneville are excellent as the heads of the upper-middle-class family that takes him in, and Jim Broadbent, Peter Capaldi and Julie Walters contribute nice turns as well.

The movie is even a little bit touching. Bond claimed he was inspired by the sight of tagged refugee children in the train stations during WWII, and the theme of hospitality to strangers runs through Paddington too, without heavy-handedness.

The only serious trouble into which the movie runs us the introduction of a villainess, a nutty museum taxidermist (Nicole Kidman) who wants to mount a specimen of Ursa Marmalada. This Cruella de Vil knockoff is gratuitous, and a bit overly grim for the tone of the tale.

Still, this strand allows us the sight of Kidman in a blond China-doll 'do, with really chic bangs, plus a good-natured send-up of the star’s ex. So it isn’t a total loss.