TIME OF HER LIFE

Opening today at Harkins Shea (on Amazon Prime October 16):

Time--Garrett Bradley directed this nonfiction portrait of Sibil Fox Richardson, aka "Fox Rich," a Shreveport, Louisiana woman who, desperate for money to keep their clothing store running, tried to rob a credit union branch in Grambling with her husband Rob in 1997. They were caught and went to prison, and while Fox was released after about three years, Rob was sentenced to sixty years, and was still imprisoned two decades later. His wife--and mother of his six children--rebuilt her family's life, but she also worked tirelessly to attempt to shorten this preposterous sentence.

The title has multiple potential meanings. On a social level, it's a reproach against the outrageous "time" for which poor and non-white convicts are disproportionately incarcerated. But it also has a powerful perceptual meaning. Bradley originally intended the film as a short, until she was given hours of Fox's home-video footage covering years of her life, her impressive kids at different stages of their growth, etc.

This material, intermixed with the more current footage Bradley shot, and unified with it in beautiful black and white and with a sprightly, persistent solo piano score, gives the film a powerful sense of refracted time, of access to free-flowing memory, of a whole life seen at once. The feeling, which may sometimes overtake people in middle age, of all the moments of life seeming to constrict into close proximity with each other, is unaccountably captured by this movie.

This trembling, exalted tone-poem quality is worthy of the story's intense central character; with her low, urgent, un-histrionic yet somehow conspiratorial manner of speaking, Fox pulls us into her sense of mission. When she tries to get answers from court officials over the phone, she remains flawlessly courteous, well knowing how counterproductive it would be to lose her patience. But we see the toll it takes on her. We see the quiet worry under the surface of her strong, patient mother. And we see, and feel, her radiant love for her family. This isn't like any documentary you've seen before.

Also at Harkins:

The War with Grandpa--Grandpa being Robert De Niro, as a widower who's become so short-fused and violent that he's a danger to himself and others. He has to move back in with his daughter (Uma Thurman) and her husband (Rob Riggle), thus displacing his snotty grandson (Oakes Fegley) out of his bedroom to the attic. The little crud declares "war" to get his room back, and wacky slapstick ensues.

As cheesy middlebrow family comedies go, this one, directed by Tim Hill from a 1984 children's novel by Robert Kimmel Smith, is by no means the worst you've ever seen,  though the tone is a little artificially lighthearted for the nastiness of some of the pranks. On the shelf since it was completed in 2017, it should wring a few giggles out of your kids or grandkids on a slow afternoon.

But the real interest for an adult moviegoer is, of course, De Niro. How did a guy whose last name has become almost a synonym for "great actor" decide he needed to do this? His costars here include Cheech Marin, Jane Seymour and Christopher Walken--dutifully doing his best "Christopher Walken," of course--and it's fun to see the four of them work together, even in this silly stuff.

But it should be noted that while De Niro maintains a certain dignity, the menace of his Scorsese years has faded, even for comic effect. He comes across like an avuncular pussycat, something like he did in 2015's The Intern. Come to think of it, he came across that way last year in Scorsese's The Irishman, too.

PET PROJECT

Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Crazy Rich Asians and Down a Dark Hall.

Also opening this weekend:

Alpha—This new adventure isn’t just a Boy and his Dog story, it’s the Boy and his Dog story. The original Boy and his Dog story. It’s the seed from which grew Lassie, and Snoopy, and Scooby-Doo.

Well, OK, really it’s a Boy and his Wolf story. It’s set thousands of years ago, on hilly grasslands, among people who chip stones into spearheads, stampede buffalo off of cliffs, and revere their ancestors. Mammoths, wooly rhinos and saber-toothed felines are part of the local fauna.

Separated from his tribe and injured during a bison hunt disaster, an adolescent, Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), befriends a wolf. As they travel together, we see the beginnings of all that will follow: The first fetched stick, the first whistle, the first invaded bed, the first guilt-inducing stare while you’re trying to eat.

Directed by Albert Hughes (half of the Hughes Brothers team that made Menace II Society back in the ‘90s), from a screenplay by Daniele Sebastian Weidenhaupt, Alpha tries for some paleontological and anthropological authenticity. The people speak a (subtitled) language, presumably invented for the movie, though a phrase that sounded like “cara mi” (for “my friend”) kept reminding me of “cara mia,” a favorite Italian endearment of Gomez Addams for his beloved Morticia.

Alpha’s original title was The Solutrean, referring to the tool-makers of Western Europe in the Paleolithic. The change seems wise, not only because Alpha is less obscure but because the Boy/Wolf bonding tale is the true core of the picture.

Inevitably, this story is harsher than the average contemporary kid’s movie—animals die, blood is shed. But it’s only a little harsher. Our hero Keda is given a sensitive nature that seems distinctly modern; his mother says that he “leads with the heart.” He’s reluctant to kill, even in a hunt, and it’s this that leads him to take pity on the wounded wolf, even though the creature was part of the pack that had just tried to kill him. Thus Alpha is, perhaps, not only an origin story for the beginnings of domesticated animals, but for the beginning of thinking outside the box.

In any case, despite a plot full of questionable lucky breaks and softened edges, the movie works. Briefly, I thought it might have a Dog of Flanders-type ending, but Hughes and Weidenhaupt manage a final twist that I admit I didn’t see coming.

The delicate-featured Smit-McPhee, who played Viggo Mortensen’s generous-hearted little son in 2009’s The Road, has just the right callow yet otherworldly look and manner for his role. He’s only upstaged by the wolf, an uncommonly beautiful beast who is credited under the name “Chuck.” The cutaways to the canine’s interested but skeptical facial expressions seem to connect with the audience every time, and it’s touching when the homesick Alpha joins in the howling of a distant pack.

Those of us to whom pets in general, and dogs in particular, are one of the great joys in life may find our imaginations especially stirred by Alpha. The human innovation depicted here, however simplified and romanticized, was one of the chief reasons our species thrived, and certainly a big part of what makes our lives worthwhile.