The Wild Robot
THE WILD ROBOT
Upon leaving our screening of The Wild Robot, I asked my favorite 10-year-old what she thought of the film, and she answered that it was one of the best movies she'd seen in her life. If I ever choose or am forced to retire from weekly reviewing, I hope this smart kid becomes my replacement, because as family-friendly adventures go, writer/director Chris Sanders' animated outing is one of the best I've seen in my life, too.
It's not merely that this DreamWorks Animation release– an adaptation of the first installment in author Peter Brown's book series – gives you practically everything you could want from a work of its type. It's that the film delivers these goods with about twice the vigor and effectiveness we're generally exposed to, and that includes movies by the reliably inventive Sanders himself. (His three previous writing/directing features were Lilo & Stitch, The Croods, and the original How to Train Your Dragon. Not a bad little trifecta there.)
You want funny? The Wild Robot is hysterical, its comedic scenarios frequently meaner than you'd expect, especially in its death-themed punchlines – most of which are delivered by infants. You want touching? Sanders' outing will wreck you, proving its advance praise as The Iron Giant meets WALL·E with a Planet Earth vibe wasn't mere hyperbole. You want beautiful? This thing is freaking gorgeous, its visualizations of soaring flight and lush forests and a tree trunk exploding with butterflies steadfastly refusing to leave my brain. Like my young friend, I watched nearly all of Sanders' film in a state of grinning, open-mouthed rapture, and the only thing that would've made us happier, we agreed, was watching it all over again the instant it finished.
Like many similar adventures, The Wild Robot is a fish-out-of-water tale – the fish, in this case, being the human-sized robotic assistant Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o). Washing up on a deserted island following what we later learn was a cargo-ship accident, Roz has one programmed mission: to assist whomever needs her help with whatever chores they assign. Unfortunately for Roz, the wildlife denizens not only don't need her help, they don't want it, reflexively fearing this hulking metallic monster with the chipper computerized voice and inability to take a hint. Yet Roz finds her purpose after accidentally crushing a nest of bird eggs (seriously, so much death!) and sparing one orphan – a gosling runt who latches onto the island misfit and considers her his mother. As you might anticipate, and with a wily fox (Pedro Pascal's Fink) serving as comic-relief sidekick, The Wild Robot consequently details Roz's attempts to raise the foundling, whom she names Brightbill, and teach him to survive in the wild and eventually fly. It's hardly a spoiler to say that she ultimately succeeds. What I absolutely didn't anticipate was that Roz would succeed with roughly half the movie still to go.
As befits a family entertainment with many a big-eyed bird and mammal, DreamWorks' latest animation boasts no end of cute. What I loved was how routinely, almost perversely, Sanders upended the cute. From the moment she introduces herself to the local fauna, employing her “learning mode” to discern the creatures' distinct languages, the natives treat Roz abominably, pelting her with sticks and stones and absconding with her necessary equipment. The baby animals may talk with helium-voiced adorableness, yet given that their most common utterances are along the lines of “Are you gonna kill us?” and a cheerful “Guess we're gonna die!”, their salient shared trait is hardly “endearing.” Catherine O'Hara voices a wary, exhausted opossum with seven demanding charges; her mood lightens when an off-screen shriek suggests she's down to six. (When the child reveals herself as unharmed, Mama Opossum utters a wholly unconvincing “Oh ya-a-a-ay.”) The Wild Robot's four-legged and feathered beings accept cruelty and dying, and the food chain itself, as matter of course, which scrapes off much of the material's inherent sentimentality. Even Brightbill (Kit Connor) instinctively understands that leaving the island, and his “mother,” is something he simply has to do, so there's no undue hand(wing)-wringing about his exodus. Not from the kid, at any rate. For Roz, it's a whole 'nother story.
I'm a little heartbroken knowing that Lupita Nyong'o will never receive the acclaim (and awards) she deserves for this performance. At first, and as programmed, Roz is relentlessly, almost oppressively high-spirited. She's so determined to be of friendly value that she alienates everyone she encounters, and Nyong'o's factory-fresh readings are both charming and offhandedly riotous. (This dramatic powerhouse is so rarely allowed to be loose and funny on-screen that you have to go to Nyong'o's Hot Ones episode to find her similarly upbeat – and even then, understandably, she's made to cry.) Yet as Roz's island stay causes an expansion of her programming, with the 'bot not merely learning about but feeling familial bonds and maternal concern and love, Nyong'o adds unmistakable richness and warmth to her line deliveries without ever sounding precisely human. Amid a bevy of sensational turns by Pascal, Connor, O'Hara, Bill Nighy, Mark Hamill, Stephanie Hsu, Ving Rhames, and others, Nyong'o's vocals are the ones that could rightfully be called transcendent. Were Sanders' work void of visuals and performed simply as a radio play or podcast, its star would still likely leave you in tears.
Not that I'd ever trade that hypothetical version for the one we've got. Because barring a couple of bland acoustic ballads on the soundtrack and one distracting, ultra-manic action sequence – a weirdly unmotivated scene that appears included solely as a sop to fidgety tykes – The Wild Robot seems just about perfect. A wildly imaginative physical comedy (just try not to marvel at Roz's mechanical, problem-solving gyrations) that's also one of its genre's most verbally witty achievements in years, this DreamWorks miracle also manages to be deeply profound, its contemplations on life and our planet and our places in it hitting hard despite being presented with a thoroughly light touch. And maybe as the best news of all for parents and teachers everywhere: My fifth-grade moviegoing companion left our screening thrilled to learn that this movie she adored began as a book series – one that she's now more than eager to read. She ain't the only one.
LEE
In advance of viewing director Ellen Kuras' Lee, I really only knew two things about the movie: (1) that it starred Kate Winslet; and (2) that it was a biographical drama about noted photojournalist Lee Miller, a one-time model who captured some of World War II's most harrowing images, principally those of concentration-camp atrocities. In truth, I also knew that longtime cinematographer Kuras' feature-length directorial debut received a largely tepid response at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival, which perhaps explains its year-later national release. So it wasn't unexpected when the movie opened in the manner of so, so many standard and substandard bio-pics, with our titular protagonist, under considerable and unconvincing aging makeup, recalling her tale – which will inevitably be told via flashbacks – to an apparent print journalist. The surprise was that this writer was played by Josh O'Connor, who not only nearly melted off the screen in this spring's tennis-throuple melodrama Challengers, but whose male co-star in that picture, Mike Faist, played this same sort of thankless, inactive-listener role in this summer's The Bikeriders.
But then Kuras' casting hits just kept comin'. Marion Cotillard, who won the Best Actress Oscar a year before Winslet did, as French socialite and fashion editor Solange d'Ayen. Alexander Skarsgård as Roland Penrose, the British artist who would become Lee's husband. Andrea Riseborough as Audrey Withers, the Vogue editor who would give Lee her career break. Andy Samberg, in a rare dramatic role, as Lee's fellow photojournalist and confidante David Scherman. It's only Kate Winslet's fiercely focused mug decorating the Lee poster … why weren't we informed that this thing boasted a freaking all-star cast? Maybe because the movie proves almost completely uninterested in anyone who's not Lee Miller. For a historical bio-pic, though, that's hardly a damning indictment. The bigger problem is that Kuras and her trio of screenwriters appear so invested in only one side of Miller – that determinism so evident in Winslet's poster image – that the film itself comes off as one-note, and more than a little dull.
To her credit, Winslet does her best to keep us invested even though one scene after another serves the same point: to demonstrate how nearly all of the men in Miller's life – her husband, her Vogue contemporaries, any number of military officials – discourage Lee's career path because she's “only a woman,” and a former model, to boot. Working in the same low-key register of her Mare of Easttown triumph, Winslet is reliably engaging, and kind enough to occasionally raise the interest level of certain audience members by appearing topless, even when the scene is completely immaterial. (Exactly why did we have to watch Roland smothering his wife's naked upper torso with paint, especially considering we're never allowed to see the resulting “artwork”? If advertisers wanted butts in seats, maybe that should've been the poster image.) For most of its length, however, Lee is Wikipedia-grade informational without ever being truly illuminating, and with the unanticipated exception of Samberg, the supporting ensemble is badly misused. I spent much of the movie's first two-thirds wondering why Cotillard ever agreed to this nothing of a part. That she does eventually get one scene demanding Oscar-caliber acting was frankly a relief, but still proved to be a case of too little, too late.
Yet Miller's accomplishments are unquestionably worthy of a feature devoted to her, and despite an apparent resistance to the photojournalist's complexity, Kuras' film at least comes through in the post-war segments involving Lee's and Life magazine employee Scherman's recording of historic horrors. Much of the movie's dialogue is either overripe or thuddingly prosaic. So it was a blessing, of sorts, to watch the pair simply witness the nightmares in front of them and take the pictures, letting the images speak for the sickness they personally felt. I wish we were given more insight into why Miller chose to strip and pose, for Scherman, seated in Hitler's bathtub – an indelible photo that's as professionally and morally questionable now as it must have been then. But the scene at least underscores the faint little we learn of Miller's personality and ethos from Lee: Get the shot, and let others discern the meaning.
WILL & HARPER
Newly streaming on Netflix, director Josh Greenbaum's Will & Harper is a documentary road trip in which Will Ferrell takes a 16-day, cross-country car ride with his longtime friend Harper Steele, who (as Andrew Steele) spent 13 years writing for Saturday Night Live, and quite a few years after, before accepting her identity as a renamed trans woman. It's frequently a touching, even moving exploration of platonic love, particularly in the face of potentially friendship-ending change, and I applaud both Ferrell for bringing the idea of the film to Steele, and Steele for agreeing to the journey. I just wish that in addition to learning so much about Harper, I wasn't also invited to learn quite so much about Will, because what what I did learn – or, at least, glean from the doc – made me uncomfortable, and not in ways that seemed intentional.
From the start, Harper expresses her hesitancy about visiting so many places where, as a male-looking trans woman of a certain age, she doesn't feel entirely safe: rural diners; Wal-Marts; professional basketball games; Iowa City. Her friend Will says he'll be there to prevent anything untoward from happening, and to his credit, he does. Yet for all of the beautiful scenes of Will asking Harper about this late-in-life change and what it means to her, and for all of the wondrously poignant examples of Harper trying to put her myriad feelings into words for maybe the first time, I couldn't get the film's unseen cameras out of my mind. Why didn't Will Ferrell simply take the trip with Harper without turning it into a film? The simple answer, and it's an admirable one, is that he wanted to open people's eyes, on a national (and perhaps international) scale, to the experience of trans people in this country, hopefully as a way to change hearts and minds. “If Will Ferrell can be okay with it, I can, too!” But this theory doesn't hold water the more you see how those whom Will and Harper encounter are all too aware of the cameras, and consequently, in this 21st century, all too aware of how hideous behavior may be recorded and analyzed.
For the most part, despite their routine use of male pronouns when addressing Harper (terms that they quickly walk back), the people that our Will & Harper leads run into during their cross-country trek are an agreeable lot – perhaps not completely comfortable, but trying. (It's only in next-day headlines and tweets about Will's and Harper's national stops do the bigoted gloves really come off.) But as everyone knows, and certainly two SNL vets do, people act differently on-camera than they do off-camera. Consequently, there's a somewhat sour undercurrent every time Ferrell tries to reassure Steele that she's being welcomed and accepted everywhere she goes. All throughout the film, I couldn't help but wonder how Harper might have fared in that biker bar or that Texas steakhouse were a cinematographer – and some scenes suggest that there were at least two along for the trip – not there to hold everyone accountable. It may be true that Harper got through the proceedings (physically) unscathed. But would that necessarily be true if this were Will-and-Harper the undocumented road trip rather than Will-and-Harper the Sundance-anointed hit? (Dishearteningly, at no point is the subject of movie cameras infringing on bonding time ever addressed.)
Beyond which, Ferrell's natural leanings toward showmanship, or perhaps simply disruption, frequently throw the project off-kilter. I wholly accept Ferrell's love for his friend as genuine, and believe in his experiment's noble aspirations, and even bought Ferrell briefly breaking down in sobs, which I don't think I've ever seen before. But as amusing as his tongue-in-cheek “It's all about me!” mugging can be – and Will's demands that the pals ple-e-e-ease stop at a Dunkin' Donuts are legitimately funny, if overplayed – it oftentimes feels like the constant clowning is detrimental to the hoped-for goal. Why Ferrell's silly, mustachioed disguise as “Bette Midler's former manager” when he and Harper dine at a fancy Las Vegas eatery – an obvious ruse that can only throw more attention on the pair (and the omnipresent cameras)? Similarly, why does he enter that Texas steakhouse in full costume as Sherlock Holmes – which, for what it's worth, is a callback to one of Ferrell's least successful film roles? (On that note: Do Ferrell and Steele ever finish those 72-ounce steaks they're promised to get for free if consumed in under an hour?) Why is Greenbaum's well-meaning doc titled Will & Harper, when it's purportedly all about her? Why doesn't she get top billing? This movie's heart is certainly in the right place. Yet if the film sometimes finds people tripping over their tongues, it also finds Will Ferrell, regardless of his worthy intentions, too-often tripping over his ego.
MY OLD ASS
Written and directed by Megan Park, the coming-of-age comedy My Old Ass was filmed, and is set, in the Muskoka Lakes province of Ontario, Canada. I bow to no one in my unbridled love for the Katharine Hepburn/Henry Fonda dramedy, but this location makes their Golden Pond look like a floating garbage island. Unspeakably beautiful and tranquil, even when cinematographer Kristen Correll isn't bathing her images in a warm, magic-hour glow, this is the sort of place that no one in their right mind would ever dream of leaving. That's why it's apparent, relatively early on, that newly minted 18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella) isn't necessarily in her right mind, as she wants nothing so much as to get out of this Edenic locale as quickly as possible. Also an apparent sign of craziness? Following an especially potent dose of mushrooms, Elliott has just met, and has even physically touched, her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza), who has some words of warning regarding her younger self's future.
My Old Ass boasts one of those magically impossible premises I appreciate most: one in which everyone simply (if grudgingly) accepts the lunacy of their situation and goes about their business, no explanations required. We don't need to know how the elder Elliott came into being, or how she was able to drop her cell number into younger Elliott's phone, or how they're able to communicate long after the 'shroom high has worn off. These are simply givens, and Park's script has enormous fun with Stella's 18-year-old version desperately trying to adhere to the advice offered by Plaza's 39-year-old, principally when it comes to avoiding a sweet-faced kid named Chad (Percy Hynes White), a college-age employee of Elliott's family's cranberry farm whose presence, we're told, will lead to misfortune.
Oh yeah: Did I mention that Elliott's family runs a cranberry farm, and has for generations? This information isn't essential to the plot. But I thought I'd add it as yet another reason Elliott shouldn't be so avid about wanting to leave home – a point that My Old Ass astutely addresses. A stop-and-smell-the-roses saga with a refreshingly of-the-moment feel, Park's tenderly spiky tale is across-the-board fantastic, detailing Elliott's last summer before leaving for the big city of Toronto with a clear-eyed honesty that proves an ideal juxtaposition to its otherworldly setup. I wasn't merely happy to watch this story unfold; I wanted to live in it.
Honestly, and despite Chad's “surprise” purpose in Elliott's life being fairly evident from the get-go, everything works here, from the camaraderie between young Elliott and her BFFs (Kerrice Brooks and Maddie Kiegler) to our heroine's sweet-and-salty relations with her brothers (Seth Isaac Johnson and Carter Trozzolo) to her expanding appreciation of her mom, played with tremendous warmth by Maria Dizzia. Twenty-year-old Maisy Stella is phenomenal as the out-and-proud lesbian who begins to question her sanity – and, after Chad's arrival, her sexuality. (She and White share thrillingly spontaneous chemistry). And of course, Aubrey Plaza is joyously deadpan, sardonic bliss, perhaps currently unrivaled among principally comedic actors whose unexpected emotionalism doesn't wound you so much as downright slay you. And although she's funny in both films, albeit under wildly different circumstances, I think it's apparent that Plaza is more clearly in her element in My Old Ass than she ever is in …
MEGALOPOLIS
What are we to do with Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis? I mean that literally: What are we to do with this thing? Laud it for being an impassioned fever dream by one of the greatest filmmakers this country has yet produced? Deride it for being, as it so often is, an ungainly and incoherent mess? Shrink it down to size where it can rest forever as a purely decorative coffee-table book that we'll never bother to open? I haven't the foggiest. I wouldn't have missed seeing, on the big screen, this frequently arresting, always lunatic experiment for anything in the world, even though much of me would love to get those 135 minutes of my life back. But as I mentioned in last week's coverage of The Substance, American movies nowadays need nothing so much as works truly worth fighting over, and Megalopolis certainly falls under that umbrella. The difference is that my lukewarm feelings on the body-horror comedy of The Substance left me antsy for another viewing. My decidedly cooler-than-lukewarm feelings about Coppola's latest left me relieved I'll never have to sit through it again.
Because the Internet doesn't yet provide enough space to recount Megalopolis in full, let's simply say that it's set in a futuristic version of New York City – one unsubtly re-christened New Rome – where visionary artist/architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) hopes to re-fashion the world with Megalon … which, alas, is a magical building material that can alter time and space, and not a debuting character in Transformers One. Cesar consequently butts heads with New Rome's let's-leave-things-as-they-are Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Espositio), and all Hell breaks loose, by which I mean power struggles out of Coppola's Godfather films, lyric imagery out of his S.E. Hinton adaptations, Shakespeare soliloquies, Matrix-y bendings of reality, earnest romance, media satire, and Shia LaBeouf in drag. It's not the best movie Coppola has ever made. (Not by a long shot.) It's almost certainly the most movie he's ever made. Whether you consider that a compliment is ultimately up to you.
If you have genuine interest in cinema's future, Megalopolis is absolutely worth your time, if only for the opportunity to ask: Is this what we're in for? Frequently stunning visuals and hackneyed ideas and loads of recognizable faces all in service to something not much interested in, you know, lucid storytelling and identifiable motivation? Despite the Shakespearean and classic-Greek signifiers, I could barely tell what was happening from one scene to another, and had no idea, until the final minutes, if we were meant to view Cesar Catalina as heroic warrior or monstrous destroyer, or what, really, was at stake. The only character who identified himself as being purely “for the people” turned out to be LaBeouf's, and in a battle for human survival, he's hardly someone you'd want on your side. God knows there are luscious images on display: a tower-sized State of Justice so exhausted by her efforts that she has to rest against an adjacent skyscraper; a kiss between Cesar and Cicero's daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) so romantic that gravity concedes to their lip lock. Yet as presentationally sublime as Megalopolis oftentimes is, I totally empathized with those at my pitifully attended screening who chose to bolt before the halfway point. It's fine for Coppola's decades-long passion project to not be “fun.” What kills the experience is that it's almost never involving, either on thematic or emotional levels. I admired Coppola's verve. More often than not, though, I just didn't care.
Beyond the visual flourishes, was there anything I outright enjoyed? Absolutely. As eluded to earlier, Aubrey Plaza is a hoot, delivering a deliciously outsize portrayal as a devious TV presenter with the unforgettable name of Wow Platinum. (I can't believe Coppola's pal George Lucas didn't already use that for some harlot in his Mos Eisley cantina.) Kathryn Hunter, with that straight-razor voice of hers, is fun in her few appearances as Cicero's wife, and I relished seeing Coppola's real-life sister Talia Shire make a rare movie return as Cesar's mom; at 78, she's lost none of the snap she brought to The Godfather; Part II a full 50 years ago. Driver, the only performer who seems remotely on the auteur's wavelength, acquits himself admirably enough; Coppola's Apocalypse Now castmate Laurence Fishburne reads portentous voice-over narration impeccably; Jon Voight, of all people, gives perhaps the most entertaining performance by existing in some gonzo universe all his own. (It is a shame, though, that we never once get Voight in the same frame as Megalopolis' Dustin Hoffman, which would've made for a kicky 55th-anniversary reunion for the Midnight Cowboy stars.)
And beyond the contributions of the cast, Coppola stages two scenes with such finesse – and, importantly, subtle finesse – that I practically wanted to applaud. (For those wondering, the famed “live actor interacts with Adam Driver” bit from the Cannes Film Festival and elsewhere around the nation isn't happening in the film's Davenport screenings.) One involves Cicero and Julia riding home on a subway, which is a slow-burn masterpiece of misleading focus. The other, more memorable one finds a boy named Sam requesting Cesar's autograph, a scene shot with so much tension and alacrity, and one so beautifully composed, that I found myself holding my breath. This bit takes up maybe 60 seconds of screen time, yet is so thunderously powerful – a giggly jolt of real-world terror – that it's almost as if the Francis Ford Coppola of the '70s never left us. The fascinating yet powerfully unsatisfying Megalopolis suggests that he mostly has. Yet those 60 seconds aren't nothing. He may be 85, but let's hope Coppola has another, less formidable, less flummoxing passion project left it him. Sam's arrival made me think it could be amazing.
