DOMESTIC VIOLENCE; THE MOODY BLUES

Opening today:

The Housemaid--Desperate for a job, Millie, played by Sydney Sweeney, applies as a maid to a rich young housewife and Mom, Nina, living in a spacious Long Island manse. At first Nina (Amanda Seyfried) is impossibly nice, friendly and welcoming, but within a day of starting the gig, it's clear she's given to scary acting out. Her hubby Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) is both hunkalicious and solicitously apologetic for his wife's behavior, while their daughter Cece  (Indiana Elle) is aloof, to say the least. There's a creepy groundskeeper (Michele Morrone) skulking around as well, glaring at Millie but not speaking.

Also, the door to Millie's snug little A-frame garret bedroom locks from the outside, not from the inside.

All of this would be more than enough for most people to see that they should get the hell out while the getting is good on day one. But director Paul Feig and screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshire, adapting the smash 2022 novel by Frieda McFadden, give Millie understandable reasons to stay in her place. Both Nina's outbursts and the attraction between Millie and Andrew escalate.

This feels something like a contemporary spin on the "hag horror" classics of the '60s, like Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and also of later domestic thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Single White Female. Feig tightens the tension skillfully and then, in the last third or so of the film, executes a pretty good twist.

It's probably a hair longer than it needs to be, and it's hard to say how much scrutiny the plot logic could bear. But it's a polished production, the three leads are improbably pretty, and the rip-snorting gothic comeuppances of the homestretch are satisfying. I understand it's hard to get good help these days, but on balance, this Housemaid gets a good letter of reference.

Then again, before I start complaining that The Housemaid is too long, maybe I should consider it in comparison to...

Avatar: Fire and Ash--On the long list of James Cameron's strengths as a filmmaker, knowing when to quit is notably absent. Toward the end of Cameron's 1994 True Lies, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis kiss while a mushroom cloud erupts in the distance behind them. Most directors would grasp that this meant the movie was over; Cameron insisted on one last grapple on a harrier jet. He's like a little kid who wants to keep playing army when it's time to go home for dinner.

This trait--and I'm clearly in the minority for considering it a weakness--reaches an apex in this third Avatar epic, Avatar: Fire and Ash, which runs to well over three hours, well over an hour longer than Citizen Kane. It's the next clash between exploitative colonizing humans and the Na'vi, the tall, tailed, blue, holistic, new-agey inhabitants of the lush, idyllic distant world Pandora. I'd say it was the climactic clash, but apparently two more sequels are planned.

As someone who liked but didn't love the first Avatar, back in 2009, and also as one who tends to get grumpier the longer a movie runs over two hours, I must admit I wasn't the ideal target audience for this. So perhaps it carries extra weight when I say that I found it...well, too long, certainly, but still a compelling sci-fi spectacle, loaded with grand scenes that recall sources as venerable as the New and Old Testaments.

The dialogue isn't poetry ("Dude, they're fighting!") but the dialogue isn't the point; the shimmering, immersive visuals and mythic yarnspinning are what the movie is for. In the last hour or so I was fully invested; I wanted to see the good guys win and the bad guys lose.

Among many others, Sam Worthington, Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver--particularly good as a starry-eyed young Na'vi--lend their voices and motion-capture presences to the movie; Giovanni Ribisi, Jemaine Clement and Edie Falco are amusing among the humans. But easily the most striking performance is by Oona Chaplin as Varang, a hissing warrior Na'vi who sides with the earthlings against our heroes. She's fierce and seductive.

The Na'vi always remind me of blue-skinned Anne Coulters; nevertheless they have a certain glamour and sexiness. My favorite Na've trait was their ears; I love how they move expressively when they speak, or even change expression. If there was an Oscar for best ears, Fire and Ash would be a shoo-in.

TWO JENNIFERS, TWO CLAIRES

Opening this week:

Cake—Jennifer Aniston plays Claire, who lives in both L.A. and hell. She’s scarred from the accident that took her little son’s life and left her horrifically injured. She lives alone, apparently in financial comfort, separated from her husband (Chris Messina) but served by her tirelessly loyal housekeeper Silvana (Adriana Barraza, wonderful in a potentially clichéd, Sancho Panza role).

Claire’s near-constant chronic pain is nothing, of course, compared to her bereavement. She’s retained a sardonic wit, which only serves to keep her distant from her own healing and from those who want to help her. The only help she wants is in securing refills for the bottles of Percocet she has stashed around the house.

The movie, directed by Daniel Barnz from a script by Patrick Tobin, detail’s Claire’s very gradual, very tentative steps toward reconnecting with life. In off-kilter dialogue and quietly abrupt transitions, we’re shown how small encounters—with a teenage runaway, with a possum—prod her back toward reengaging with the world. Eventually she forms a bond with the widower (Sam Worthington) of a young woman who committed suicide, and whose smirky ghost (Anna Kendrick) drops in now and then to taunt her. It’s from this strand that the movie draws its enigmatic title.

Cake has been much discussed lately for the snub its leading lady, who was also its Executive Producer, seems to have received from the Academy. A cynic might point out that it hits many of the points of shameless Oscar-bait for actresses: No glamour makeup, physical disability and disfigurement, booze, pills, numb sex with the pool guy. Aniston doesn’t do full frontal or an accent, but that’s about all that’s left out.

And maybe lust for gold statuary really was the motivation behind Cake. But it’s ridiculous if that perception is really why Aniston was shut out. I’ve always thought she was a very good actress within her range, and this role fits her casual, sensible, unhistrionic style perfectly. A more demonstrative actress could easily have ruined it, but Aniston is touching, entirely convincing, admirable. I don’t know that it’s the best performance of last year by an actress, but I would have put it in the top five that I saw.

The Boy Next Door—Spectacular in—and sometimes out of—a variety of maxi tube dresses, pencil skirts, lingerie and music-video-librarian specs, Jennifer Lopez looks like a million freakin’ bucks in this quickie. I hope she got paid at least that much, because her appearance is the only remotely worthwhile time-killer in the length of this preposterous melodrama directed by Rob Cohen, who has made far more entertaining work.

J-Lo is another Claire, a high school teacher separated from her cheating putz of a husband (John Corbett). Her teenage son is befriended by Noah (Ryan Guzman), the obsequious, six-packed hunk next door, and one weekend when the son’s on a fishing trip with dad she impulsively sleeps with him. She apparently hasn’t committed a felony by doing this—he says he’s nearly twenty, anyway—but even so she almost immediately realizes what a mistake it was. Noah is a twisted stalker, dangerous to her and her loved ones.

For a while The Boy Next Door feels like a Lifetime movie with a bigger star and slightly more graphic sex. But after a while I decided that this was unjust to Lifetime movies. I hadn’t gone in expecting a lost work by Bergman, but I thought it might be hot, kitschy laughs. Alas, once it gets past a few weary double-entendres about Claire’s home-made “cookies” and that sort of thing, the movie is too banal, slow and unpleasant to be much fun even as camp.

Well, OK, I admit that the final life-and-death grapple made me cackle out loud. But that shouldn’t be taken as any kind of recommendation. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a big-studio offering that was quite this embarrassingly inept and lifeless. Lopez is game and committed, in addition to looking sensational, and Ian Nelson has a certain callow charm as her son, but everybody is defeated by the flat direction and Barbara Curry’s implausible, disjointed script.

With dialogue this inane it probably isn’t fair to judge him on the basis of this performance, but Guzman comes across so fawningly that it reflects poorly on our heroine. Cut though this dude is, Claire seems dopey for falling for his sugary come-ons. It’s as if Mrs. Cleaver had slept with Eddie Haskell.

CREEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS

In the middle of Texas Killing Fields, two detectives are examining the body of a murdered young woman, lying half-submerged in the water of the title marshland. Detective Heigh (Jeffery Dean Morgan) observes a fingerprint on her neck, & at the same moment it starts to rain. In a panic, he & his friend Detective Stall (Jessica Chastain) struggle to preserve this crucial clue while pulling the wet, unwieldy corpse onto the bank.

It’s a harrowing, heartbreaking scene, maybe the best in this grim & atmospheric police drama, loosely based on true events & directed by Ami Canaan Mann. It reflects the overall experience of Texas Killing Fields: You get a glimpse of the forces behind the horror, & then the hostile, unpredictable environment shifts, & you’re lost again.

It’s rare for an American crime movie to treat a dead body as something other than a prop, a font of exposition, but the bodies of young women that keep turning up in this small, grungy Gulf Coast Texas city, or dumped in the marshlands adjacent, have a physicality, a wretched weight. The investigators aren’t depicted, in the manner of so many movies of this sort, as casual & business-as-usual around the victims; they’re anxious &, though they speak softly, palpably angry.

The angriest is Detective Souder (Sam Worthington), Heigh’s partner & Stall’s ex-husband. His anger leads him to stupid, counterproductive outbursts of violence, but it also paralyzes him. Heigh wants to explore the link between their victim & a string of others that have been found in the “Killing Fields” nearby, while Souder wants nothing to do with cases outside his jurisdiction, especially on his ex-wife’s turf.

He’s pretty sure that his & Heigh’s case is linked to a sordid prostitution ring in town anyway. Heigh, a haunted ex-NYC cop & a devout Catholic—he murmurs the Hail Mary over a victim—suspects that there’s a bigger picture. Both of them are terrified for Little Anne (Chloe Moretz), daughter of a miserable local hooker (a shockingly haggard-looking Sheryl Lee, of Twin Peaks). Poor Anne seems appallingly tailor-made to join the gallery of victims.

Director Mann (the daughter, as she is probably weary of reviewers noting, of Michael Mann) nails the settings—the town is a muggy, dirty shithole that’s no place to live, let alone die, while the marsh, with its twisted, leafless trees, would have an unearthly beauty if it weren’t so charged with threat. She shows a strong touch with the actors here, too. Worthington, Chastain & especially Morgan are so low-key that it’s almost disorienting at first; they aren’t working from the standard cop-show-acting playbook, even when Donald F. Ferrarone’s dialogue seems to call for it. But their controlled intensity accumulates force.

Mann & Ferrarone are less successful with the police-procedural side of the material; at times I found myself confused, & not in the good way. But there’s an emotional maturity to Mann’s work here which even some of her father’s films can’t claim—an awareness of the reality of human suffering that can without too much pushing be called authentically tragic.

It comes out, especially, in her handling of Moretz, as Little Anne. She strikes me as one of the least smarmily sexualized adolescent girls I can think of in many a movie. Through the other characters, & through her alert, sympathetic, unleering camera, Mann treats Little Anne not as a white trash Lolita but as an imperiled & precious child.