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.

PHANTOM VENICE

Opening today:

A Haunting in Venice--Kenneth Branagh returns as Hercule Poirot in this gothic, which he also directed. It's 1947 here, and the vain, dapper sleuth with the elaborate mustache has retired from detective work in gradually reviving postwar Venice. He's pulled back into the game by his old acquaintance, mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), who asks him to debunk, if he can, a supposed clairvoyant (Michelle Yeoh) at a seance after a Halloween party in a beautiful but decaying palazzo.

The seance is intended to conjure the ghost of the daughter of the opera singer hostess (Kelly Reilly), drowned the previous year, but the palazzo has a sinister history beyond this; it's supposedly cursed and haunted. The nonbelieving Poirot naturally is buying none of it, but his skepticism is rattled by the unsettling events of the evening, which include an attempt on his own life.

This is Branagh's third lavish outing as Agatha Christie's elegant gumshoe, after Murder on the Orient Express in 2017 and Death on the Nile in 2022, all three of them scripted by Michael Green. Though Green borrows a few memorable elements from Christie's unusually nasty 1969 novel Hallowe'en Party, Haunting is essentially an original tale; in his amusing preface to the tie-in paperback re-issue of Hallowe'en Party (published under the movie's title), Green preemptively braces himself for the lambasting he's expecting from the hardcore Christie faithful for the movie's liberties.

I've been a Christie reader since high school, and can only say that much as I enjoy her work, I certainly don't regard it as sacred and inviolate. So Green and Branagh's alterations--made with the blessing of the Christie estate--bothered me not in the least. These include changing Ariadne Oliver, Christie's apple-addicted semi-autobiographical alter ego, into an American as a showcase role for Fey, who's a nervy, mischievous hoot and a fine foil for Branagh's sober Poirot. At one point she lets out a scream that could make Fay Wray proud, too.

The rest of the cast--including Reilly, Jamie Dornan,  Riccardo Scamarcio, Camille Cottin, Emma Laird, Ali Khan and Jude Hill, the kid from Branagh's Belfast--all commit to their skulking and lurking and exchanging of pregnant glances, and Yeoh really lets it rip as the medium. The sumptuous, shadowy palazzo setting, designed by John Paul Kelley and shot by Haris Zambarloukos, is properly both gorgeous and claustrophobically oppressive.

I'm generally very dense at whodunits, but about three-quarters of the way through A Haunting in Venice, I correctly guessed who the culprit was. Still, there were plenty of cunning revelations in the story that I didn't see coming. I don't think the mystery is as central to this picture, anyway, as the woozy, nightmarish atmosphere. In many ways this film seems to owe less to Christie than to Don't Look Now, Nicolas Roeg's great Venetian fever dream of 1973.

Despite the sly, enjoyable old dark house trappings, Branagh and Green decline to tip the material into overt camp. Green's literate dialogue--there's even a quick throwaway cribbing from Love's Labor's Lost--allows Branagh to deepen Poirot's response to the situation into a faith-versus-reason internal conflict, without letting the movie slide the other way into pretentiousness. I found Branagh's performance moving; he presents a convincing long dark night of the soul.

CASTE OF CHARACTERS

Opening this weekend:

Monkey Kingdom—Maya, the heroine of this newest animal film from Disneynature, is very much a Disney Princess. Cinderella, to be specific. She’s a “lowborn” in a troop of toque macaques living in the ancient ruins at Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka. The “highborn” sisters who get to enjoy the warmer upper branches and the riper fruit are a trio of lividly red-faced hags who freely swat babies not their own and bare their formidable fangs at any would-be social climbers.

In other words, they aren’t kidding with that title. Monkey Democratic Republic this isn’t.

As the narration, spoken by Tina Fey, informs us in the opening minutes, macaque society is an old-school hierarchy with well-defined social roles and very rare opportunities for upward mobility. The story follows Maya as she takes up with Kumar, an attractive but decidedly not-alpha male who is soon driven off by top monkey Raja and his goons, leaving Maya as, alas, a single mother to her shriveled, embryonic-looking, and outrageously cute male infant Kip.

Perils and hardships for the troop follow, one being a rival troop led by “Lex,” a classic Disney villain with a scary, fangy, battle-scarred face. Lex’s gang forces “our” monkeys out of their ruins and into temporary exile in a nearby urban area to raid markets and other human habitations. The troop’s attempt to regain their turf gives Maya and her family a chance at a better social role.

Obviously this isn’t, in the strictest sense, a documentary; as with most nature films the story had to be shaped out of the material the filmmakers were able to obtain. And in some cases—especially, here, in the scenes of the monkeys in human settings—it seems like it must have been, if not staged, at least set up in advance to some degree.

But, as with the two other Disneynature features I’ve seen, 2011’s Chimpanzee and last year’s Bears, no amount of Disney-style jocularity and cutesy narration can detract from the astonishment of Monkey Kingdom’s footage. The directors, Brits Mark Linfield and Alastair Fothergill, captured not only intimate shots of simian society—including jaw-dropping underwater sequences of the monkeys swimming like champs in order to harvest lily-pad seed pods—but also terrific scenes of sloth bears, hornbills, a mongoose, and scorpions carrying around their hauls of winged termites like shoppers on Black Friday.

Parents of younger kids, as well as the many people of all ages who are themselves particularly sensitive to animal suffering and the harshness of nature, should be advised that [spoiler alert!] Monkey Kingdom includes a short scene of a monkey falling prey to a monitor lizard, and another of a monkey dead after a battle. Neither are animals to which we’ve been previously introduced, and both sequences are handled fairly discreetly, but both are potentially upsetting all the same.

These specifics aside, I have to admit that I found Monkey Kingdom, touching and visually spectacular as it is, rather upsetting in general, by implication. The behavior it depicts carries unmistakable echoes of human society ranging from India’s caste system to Europe’s aristocracies to America’s high school cafeterias, and it calls into troubling and depressing question the long-term durability of the human democratic impulse. Monkey Kingdom seems meant to make us smile at how monkeys are just like people. But what I got from it, I’m afraid, is that people are just like monkeys.

THE BEAR, THE FROG, THE PIG AND HER LOVER

Having been out of town for the screening of Muppets Most Wanted, I didn’t catch up with the film until The Wife, The Kid and I took in a matinee this past weekend.

Like all Muppets flicks, it certainly has funny moments, but it seemed oddly overlong and overambitious, with an unnecessarily complicated caper-thriller plot. Some of the songs by Bret McKenzie were good, but there were too many of them, too, and none were home-runs. The human stars are Ricky Gervais and Ty Burrell, neither of whom get enough to do, and Tina Fey, who sings surprisingly pretilly as a gulag commandant.

Half Price Books is running a literary sidekick bracket to coincide with March Madness. Neat idea, but some of their candidates don’t seem quite right to me, notably Pepper Potts from the Ironman comics—shouldn’t a love interest automatically disqualify a character from sidekick status?

IVY BELEAGUER

For the large majority of us who didn’t especially want to go to an Ivy League or other prestigious school, or weren’t up to it academically, or couldn’t have afforded it if we were, Admission is a smooth and pleasant hour and a half. For those who did or were or could have, it might be painful, and compelling, too.

One of the more intriguing elements of this romantic comedy, directed by Paul Weitz, is the inside look it claims to give at the admissions process for Princeton University—the script, by Karen Croner, is based on a novel by Princeton faculty member Jean Hanff Korelitz. If your own college career was ever in the hands of a system this baroque and whimsically subjective, it might make watching this movie that much more maddening.

The heroine is Portia (Tina Fey) a veteran admissions officer who, like her colleagues, has long since become immune both to the plying and the outrage of Princeton aspirants and their families, and is ruthlessly able to stamp “DENY” on their dreams. She loves, or thinks she loves, the life she has with her nebbishy Prof boyfriend (Michael Sheen)—quiet, child-free nights in, reading poetry. She has to endure an occasional awkward visit with her disappointed Mom (Lily Tomlin), the author of an iconic feminist classic who expected more from her daughter than guarding the gate for the elite. Other than that, however, Portia’s life is comfortable.

But of course all this gets yanked away from her, and a wacky new life is dropped in its place. She meets John (Paul Rudd) the adorable head of a “progressive” school in rural New Hampshire, who introduces her to his most promising student, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), a brilliant, sweet, slightly dizzy kid that John thinks belongs at Princeton. Then, when he gets Portia alone, John’s real agenda emerges: He tells her that Jeremiah is her biological son, given up for adoption when she was in college.

Instead of recusing herself, Portia starts trying to steer the process in Jeremiah’s favor. She also, it need hardly be said, finds herself falling for John, and bonding with his adopted Ugandan son Nelson (Travaris Spears), who likes her because, in contrast to the globe-trotting, do-gooding John, she’s “boring,” as he feels an adult ought to be.

This complicated, rather contrived story gives rise both to farcical and to poignant scenes, and the terrific cast gives them punch. Fey’s persona, with her declarative delivery and her self-conscious disinterest in sex, seems to generate a love-her-or-hate-her response in many people. I’m in the former category—she’s fine company here, and strikes some surprisingly heartfelt, touching notes.

Rudd gets to show less of his manic, squirrelly side here in this unambiguous good-guy role, but he’s appealing as always, as is Tomlin. Sheen is a riot as the sad-sack boyfriend; he looks like a melancholic teddy bear with Albert Einstein’s hair. There are good turns by Gloria Rueben, Wallace Shawn, Sonya Walger, Olek Krupa and others, but the real standout is the beguiling Wolff (son of actress Polly Draper) as the wide-eyed, fast-talking Jeremiah. Our investment in the story hinges on his likability—on him seeming, for all his intelligence, like a clueless boy.

Of course, you may find yourself hoping that Princeton doesn’t ruin him. A quiet ironic joke built into the fabric of Admission is what it says about the American sensibility in relation to prestige institutions—the tension between the belief that they’re often essentially meaningless and their unshakeable currency in the American culture of success.

On the one hand, the movie suggests that getting into Princeton is an arbitrary, even corrupt process. On the other, we’re expected to root for Jeremiah to get into the school anyway. We’re told he’d “thrive” there, and he may believe he will, but it’s mentioned several times that he’s an “autodidact,” so you may wonder how much, in purely educational terms, he needs with college at all. I suspect the real reason the grownups want him to get in is simply so that he can put the word “Princeton” on his resume for the rest of his life.