Bradley Cooper in Maestro
Because I had no reason to return to the article previously, I revisited my review of the original Aquaman yesterday just to make sure I wouldn't accidentally repeat myself, my opinions on both films being largely the same. That's when I noticed that, back in 2018, (1) I wrote about James Wan's DC-superhero saga during a crowded pre-Christmas period that debuted five additional titles; (2) I addressed all six in the order I saw them; and (3) the piece was published on December 23. Whaddaya know? I have six movies to cover this time, too, one of them being an Aquaman – and look at the publication date!
So once again, in order of attendance … .
MAESTRO
A quick caveat to that “in order of attendance,” because I didn't “attend” the first film in my three-day sextuple feature so much as “plop my ass on the couch and watch” it. And for the first hour-or-so of director/writer/producer/star Bradley Cooper's Maestro, which started streaming on Netflix this past Wednesday, I couldn't imagine wanting to be anywhere else.
This is Cooper's long-awaited passion project on Leonard Bernstein, and after a quick peek at the star portraying the music icon in his late-60s (under extraordinarily convincing prosthetics), we're whisked back to New York City in 1943. Bernstein is 25, and has just woken up to a life-changing phone call informing him that New York Philharmonic conductor Bruno Walter has fallen ill and requires a replacement for that afternoon's concert that will be aired live across the country. It's short notice and there's no time for a rehearsal, but would Lenny be up for the gig? Within seconds, Bernstein is whooping with delight, joyously spanking the rear of his lover David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), and, with the camera gliding overhead, dashing out of his apartment and straight into the Carnegie Hall auditorium. It's a bravura sequence delivered with exuberance and go-for-broke visual panache, and for a considerable stretch, Cooper keeps Maestro similarly ebullient.
What makes this semi-surprising is that the film isn't primarily, or even secondarily, concerned with Bernstein's professional accomplishments. Huge swaths of the man's career are left unexplored and even un-referenced; we don't get to see how Bernstein eventually became a massive television fixture, for instance, and if you're hoping for insight into his scoring of West Side Story and other musicals, you'll have to look elsewhere. What Cooper is interested in detailing is Bernstein's decades-long marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), who eventually all but aborted her successful career as an actor to raise their children and serve publicly as Mrs. Leonard Bernstein – the couple's carefully crafted imaged of heterosexual perfection challenged, if not outright mocked, by Lenny's continued affairs with men.
Its leads are so luminously matched here that, for close to half Maestro's length, Cooper's and co-screenwriter Josh Singer's intentionally narrow approach to their titular subject works beautifully. From Lenny's and Felicia's first cocktail-party flirtation onward, the pair bantering like they've known each other for decades, Cooper-as-director expresses the giddy, whirlwind nature of their immediate bond, and as the couple's relationship deepens, you understand instinctively that these people not only love each other, but deeply like each other. Felicia enters the romance with eyes wide open – like all of their friends, she's aware of Lenny's bisexuality – and their happy, nurturing bond initially seems unshakable. It's during a fantasy sequence in which Lenny and Felicia dance with sailors from Bernstein's On the Town, that both the marriage and the movie begin to falter.
Though filled with wonderful moments through the end, the narrative's structure begins to feel intensely limiting, with Lenny continually praised for his genius and free to act as he pleases while the camera focuses on Felicia's inner turmoil and slowly crumbling facade. While Mulligan performs the role with skill, Felicia begins to appear somewhat dimensionless, and excepting one shattering scene of anger (with the slow passage of a Thanksgiving-Day-parade Snoopy balloon outside the Bernsteins' window a cool but too-obvious example of the greatness Cooper is striving for), she begins to feel uncomfortably emblematic of the long-suffering-wife stereotype. Lenny's star continually rises while he ignores his true beacon of light, and so it goes for an increasing unsatisfying second hour of doubt, shame, recrimination, and public smiles in the face of private misery.
Things don't become entirely turgid during Act II. Although Cooper's Bernstein feels more like an impersonation than an internally crafted performance (much in the vein of Renée Zellweger's Judy Garland, and potentially leading to a similar Oscar win), he's dazzling in his exquisite six-minute conducting of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, the one instance in which the movie and Bernstein's incomparable music genius feel symbiotic. And during the film's first half, I couldn't count the number of bits I adored: the priceless re-staging of an Edward R. Murrow TV interview; the salty good sense offered by Sarah Silverman as Lenny's sister Shirley; the heartbreaking closeup on Bomer's Oppenheim as he first meets his romantic rival. But while I was okay with Maestro skimming over significant career passages, I was far less on-board with it morphing into a sudsy, strangely underpopulated daytime drama, albeit one with intimidating professional polish. (As he did for Cooper's A Star Is Born, cinematographer Matthew Libatique photographs the hell out of this thing.) When the end credits roll, you'll notice Mulligan receiving top billing above the guy who plays the title character. That's a lovely gesture. It also feels, rather uncomfortably, like an apologetic one.
MIGRATION
If you watched either season of HBO's sublime The White Lotus, you probably gleaned that show-runner Mike White has, shall we say, complicated feelings about tourism. I was consequently shocked to see that, despite director Benjamin Renner receiving a “story by” credit, White was the sole screenwriter responsible for Migration, the animated Illumination comedy that finds a family of wild ducks leaving their New England pond for a winter getaway in Jamaica. With White in charge, you'd be right to expect some fiendishly fowl (sorry) experiences for our feathered clan – a feature-length mystery involving an avian corpse, for instance, or one of the parents embarking on a tryst with a cockatoo. Yet while I secretly prayed for a nonexistent vocal cameo by Jennifer Coolidge, this goofy outing is merely a well-executed lark with all the expected, family-friendly Life Lessons in place, if one boasting funnier second bananas than we're generally treated to.
There isn't much surprise in the personalities, or even the readings, of our intrepid crew of mallards. Kumail Nanjiani voices the nervous-wreck patriarch; Elizabeth Banks is the sensible, far more adventurous mom; Caspar Jennings and Tresi Gazai are the precocious kids; and Danny DeVito is … Danny DeVito. (Actually he's the tykes' lovably grouchy great-uncle, but you know: potato, potahto.) White gives them some smart dialogue amidst the de regueur sentiment and bird puns, but they're hardly novel as either characters or unseen performers. Instead, this release is handily stolen by its fringe creatures: Awkwafina, as a tough-talking leader of a Big Apple pigeon gang; Keegan-Michael Key – who's also doing his current best to steal Wonka – as a weepy macaw prisoner of a masochistic chef; and, most welcome of all, the invaluable Carol Kane as a possibly psychotic heron whose plans for the ducks vacillate between wanting to help them and eat them. I'm officially longing for a mash-up with the new Hayao Miyazuki movie just to hear Kane's and Robert Pattinson's herons attempt to out-lunatic each other.
Making up in visual style what it lacks in invention, the spirited, fast-paced, gorgeously colorful Migration is a perfectly pleasant holiday getaway. I will add, though, that the film is preceded by the untraditionally charmless, obnoxious Illumination short Mooned – a Wile E. Coyote-esque slapstick in which Jason Segel's nefarious Vector shrieks and shrieks while a few Minions pop up in cameo roles. Usually, because I get more than my fill of cineplex previews and big-screen commercials, I tend to show up 15 to 20 minutes “late” for a movie's listed start time. With Migration, I should've made it a half-hour.
AQUAMAN & THE LOST KINGDOM
In director James Wan's Aquaman & the Lost Kingdom – the apparent end of Jason Momoa's reign as the Atlantean superhero, and the definite end to our current, pre-James-Gunn iteration of the DC Extended Universe – the malevolent über-villain Black Manta says some unspeakable things. I don't mean they're particularly horrific or shocking; merely that they're lines that Emmy winner and Tony nominee Yahya Abdul-Mateen II should never, under any circumstances, have been required to speak. Most of the guy's comic-book-balloon dialogue is blandly, witlessly menacing in that “I will destroy Aquaman and everything he holds dear” manner. Yet at one point, in preparing retaliation against Amber Heard's Queen of Atlantis Mera, Abdul-Mateen is forced to bellow, “I'm gonna kill me a dead mermaid!!!” And it was then, not even halfway through the picture, than I sullenly thought that if A.I. was indeed going to one day take over the screenwriting business, so be it. Sentient machinery certainly couldn't do any worse, and unlike Lost Kingdom's credited David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, a computerized author would likely know that you can't kill something that's already dead.
Speaking of already-dead: Aquaman 2. (Ba-dum ching.) I suppose there's some nominal amusement in the odd-couple bickering between Momoa's brash Guinness guzzler (and product placer) Arthur Curry and Patrick Wilson's Orm, even though Momoa's uncouthness seems more labored than before and the most interesting thing about Wilson's half-brother to Aquaman, here, is that he transforms from shaggy-haired and bearded to Wilson-ian preppie in about three seconds flat. Yet even though the overall tone is still less bombastic than the norm, the jokes are no better than the ones from Wan's 2018 precursor, and the effects, if possible, are significantly worse. You can barely see what's happening in the underwater melees, and the land-based CGI was so shoddy that it actually inspired giggling in nearby patrons – and as this was a 5 p.m. screening on Thursday, those were presumably audience members who, unlike this reviewer, actively wanted to be there.
As for the plotting, it's predictably tied to global-warming issues in a halfhearted attempt to appear relevant. But let's not kid ourselves: DC has obviously stopped caring about this present incarnation of Aquaman, so there's no genuine reason for us to care about Aquaman & the Lost Kingdom, either. Here's hoping for more rewarding times ahead for the DCU and its fans – and for Jason Momoa, who, between Justice League duties and participation in the Fast & Furious series, is too new to screen fame to be hindered by two franchises that viewers have apparently lost interest in.
ANYONE BUT YOU
Instead of sparring would-be lovers Beatrice and Benedick, it's sparring would-be lovers Bea and Ben. Instead of betrothed Hero and Claudio, it's betrothed Halle and Claudia. Instead of a villa in sun-drenched Italy, it's an estate in sun-drenched Australia. Instead of Dogberry, it's a dog who practices yoga, as well as a koala who speaks in subtitles. And instead of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, it's writer/director Will Gluck's and co-scripter Ilana Wolpert's Anyone but You, which easily stands as the funniest, friskiest traditional rom-com of 2023. It's also one of the most inspired takes on the Bard's comedic oeuvre since 1999's Taming of the Shrew update 10 Things I Hate About You, with the added benefit of being unapologetically, wickedly R-rated. The F-bombs and nudity alone would likely have sealed the deal, but really, what Glen Powell does with his tongue in front of Sydney Sweeney's former suitor is so riotously lewd it probably shouldn't be seen by minors without adult supervision.
Although both films were terrific, I was a little worried that we had forever lost Gluck to family fare after the combo of 2018's Peter Rabbit and its 2021 sequel. Yet this talent who might be the most criminally underrated among current comedy directors is back with a gleeful vengeance here, he and Wolpert crafting a cheeky, deliciously complicated slapstick in which Bea's and Ben's friends, siblings, and co-conspirators do their damnedest to prevent the warring non-couple from ruining a wedding. In Shakespeare's play, the “accidentally” overhead conversations lead to Beatrice and Benedick's realization that they're truly in love. In Anyone but You, the conversationalists do such a crap job of faking their planned dialogue that Bea and Ben immediately recognize the scheme for what it is, and decide to act like they're hot for each other for reasons of their own (without, of course, realizing that they're truly in love). It's all just as convoluted as it sounds, and even way-more convoluted than I'm making it sound. (While the parents of one of the brides want Bea and Ben together, Bea's own folks emphatically don't, and invite Bea's ex to the wedding in hopes of reuniting the pair.) But while Gluck can't do anything to enliven the requisite maudlin detours, his movie is still an absolute hoot, because the writer/director demonstrates a gift he's been honing in everything from Fired Up! to Easy A to that underrated remake of Annie: He knows how to make everyone funny.
Working with grade-A insults and disarming sincerity, the astoundingly great-looking Sweeney and Powell are utterly magical together, and their disparate performance styles wind up ideally meshing, her blasé detachment meeting his self-aware machismo to hilarious effect. There is literally no one, however, that you're anxious to escape from here, and Gluck's and Wolpert's script gives the entire ensemble opportunities to shine. Hadley Robinson and Alexandra Shipp are a thoroughly sweet, spiky Claudia and Halle. Rapper/actor GaTa is a kick as Ben's bestie who communes with koalas. There are nicely detailed roles – with jokes! – for Michelle Hurd, Charlee Fraser, Joe Davidson, and Darren Barnet. Bryan Brown, a craggy Australian heartthrob back in the '80s of Tom Cruise's Cocktail, steals scenes as a frequently obtuse father of a bride. And providing a match made in rom-com-history paradise, previous My Best Friend's Wedding co-stars Dermot Mulroney and Rachel Griffiths play Bea's parents, the latter cast as someone whom Bea says “is starting to think she's Australian” – a hilarious touch given that Griffiths, despite the American accent she commonly employs, is, in fact, Australian.
There's dumbness on display here, and obviousness, and legitimate confusion about how much time has elapsed from beginning to end. (I did a miniature double-take when we were told that Bea's and Ben's plot-initiating first date took place three years prior, because I thought it had only been a handful of months.) Yet from the cleverly visualized Mich Ado quotes to the disarnmingly touching romantic declarations to Bea chiding the slightly older Ben for his sadly dated utterance of “Cringe” – damn, when did that one's freshness date expire? – I completely adored Anyone but You. If you see it, and I hope you do, also stick around for the joyous sing-along to Natasha Bedingfield's “Unwritten.” There aren't Oscars for end credits, but if there were, Gluck's film would take it in a walk.
THE IRON CLAW
The rare case of a depressing movie that needed to be about twice as depressing as it is, writer/director Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw concerns the notoriously cursed wrestling clan of Von Erichs who, in the 1980s, endured tragedy after tragedy while overbearing former-wrestler father Fritz angled to claim “his” professional heavyweight-championship belt. If you don't know the story of the Von Erichs – and I won't reveal any spoilers for the movie here – you might easily enjoy this heart-tugging family melodrama for the well-acted, sensitively directed achievement it is. If you are familiar with the facts behind this unrelentingly sad tale of brotherly love, self-sacrifice, and blind hero worship, your affection for it might feel a tad compromised. Plenty of patrons were sniffling at my Friday-afternoon screening. Yet despite being a notorious crybaby at the movies, I remained dry-eyed, and left feeling a little indignant that our tear ducts were being so aggressively worked over while a complete absence of Hollywood-mandated schmaltz might've let the tears flow without lazy manipulation.
Our protagonist is the Von Erichs' second-oldest son Kevin (the eldest having died in an accident as a child), who is played by Zac Efron with musculature so comically ripped that you sense he'd lose 200 pounds of air if you managed to find a pin thick enough to prick him. Papa Fritz (a fearsome Holt McCallany) knows that between Kevin and his younger brothers (Jeremy Allen White's Kerry, Harris Dickinson's David, and Stanley Simons' Mike), he's got to have some descendant hungry and talented enough to win a national championship. The Iron Claw is consequently about the Von Erich sons competing, always with each other's best interests at heart, to capture Fritz's favor and make him proud, Dad having no compunction about ranking his children in descending order of favorites while at the breakfast table. (Mom, played by a steely Maura Tierney, is barely a presence in her boys' lives, and when Kevin asks if he can talk with her about Fritz's harshness, she brushes him off with a curt “You have your brothers for that.”)
As with Maestro, the movie's first half is its strongest, providing a detailed feel for the Texan surroundings, the brothers' unbreakable bond, and their painstaking pro-sports regimen. It also delivers a lot of necessary humor, as well as a welcome role for Lily James as Pam, the forward-by-necessity gal who ultimately wins Kevin's heart. (Pam's arrival, and her first date with Kevin, gave me the most succinct, cogent argument I've yet heard for the inherent realness behind professional wrestling's preordained fakery.) But once the tragedies begin to mount – beginning immediately after a heartbreakingly beautiful pan on the brothers' faces during a wedding dance – things begin to go south, and not merely for the characters.
This will certainly sound insensitive and exactly what a tight-ass critic would say, but things might've gone better, at least for me, if Zac Efron were a better actor. Don't get me wrong: He's clearly invested in the material and his co-stars, and Efron is certainly reaching deeper than he's been asked to before. The guy is persuasive enough – he just isn't (yet) the sort of performer who can conjure worlds of emotion while expressing next to nothing, and the role of Kevin demands that he express next to nothing. In their far more limited screen time, White, Dickinson, and even the previously unknown Simons can remain absolutely still yet convey everything you need to know about their characters' interior struggles. When Efron is silently sad, he just seems sad, and that hurts a movie in which what Kevin is feeling, at any given time, also encompasses about a dozen additional emotions. Efron doesn't do anything necessarily wrong here. But whenever the worst came to pass – and in The Iron Claw, that happens a lot – the cutaways to Kevin involve him looking constipated with grief while nothing else quietly bleeds out. While Efron gives the part an admirable try, I couldn't help thinking what the nearly inarguably more-soulful White or Dickinson might've done with the role instead.
But enough of me beating up on a handsome movie star who presently looks like an unstretched Stretch Armstrong doll, because Durkin's movie would likely have dissipated without him. An opening title card informs us that what we're about to watch is “inspired by” a true story … a strange claim to make given that “based on” would seem more appropriate. Those with Von-Erich-lore knowledge, though, will eventually witness the truth behind that nomenclature. The Von Erichs' sixth son Chris has been excised from the story completely, purportedly for no one wanting to bring audiences down with the tragic fate of yet another brother. The oft-referenced family curse isn't acknowledged for being, as has been widely accepted, the result of Fritz's decision to portray a vicious Nazi in the ring. (The man's birth name was Jack Adkisson.) And beyond the historical omissions, Durkin (or A24) still appears to want us leaving his film with some feel-good twinkles for the drive home: the promise of impending parenthood; Mom standing up for herself against her bizarrely clueless husband; Kevin finding renewed strength in the presence of his kids' overtly on-the-nose sentiments and pushy cuteness. All of this might help to make The Iron Claw a feel-bad-then-feel-good holiday hit. It doesn't help in making it a better movie.
POOR THINGS
Saving the finest for last, completely as an accident of convenient show times, we end our sextuple-feature analysis with director Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things, which, as I told my mother on the phone this morning, “is kind of like a comedic take on Bride of Frankenstein. You'd hate it.” Certainly, the Ladies of a Certain Age who sat near me during my Friday screening hated it, at least based on their incessant stage whispers that forever began the millisecond that people on-screen stopped talking. But if you're able to see the movie alongside viewers less cluelessly rude than those two, I'll suggest that you might have the time of your life, because Lanthimos' eagerly anticipated followup to 2018's The Favorite is across-the-board magnificent: hilarious and disturbing and thoughtful, and so divinely imaginative that it's hard to believe it's an adaptation (by screenwriter Tony McNamara) of a decades-old novel (by Alastair Gray). Coming from the directorial talent who gave us Dogtooth and The Lobster, this seems like a Yorgos creation through and through, where brain transplants are merely par for the course and pig/chicken hybrids are allowed to flourish as mere background extras.
Because I've likely already tested your patience enough and will have plenty more to say about Lanthimos' crazy-ass achievement in my impending Best-of-2024 article and the Oscars-related articles to follow, I'll keep the plot synopsis simple: Willem Dafoe's facially deformed surgeon Godwin Baxter re-animates the corpse of a recent suicide victim played by Emma Stone by inserting her unborn baby's brain into the full-grown woman's head, and christens her “Bella Baxter.” Bella subsequently embarks on life (in “God's” house) as a grown woman with a barely formed mind, learning to move and speak every day with the aid of Godwin's assistant Max (an endearing Ramy Youssef). Before the equally smitten pair can marry, however, in strolls lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a blatant cad who proposes to Bella that she run off with him on a European adventure filled with sex and mischief and a lot more sex. Bella agrees, telling Max that she'll return in time for their nuptials, and joins the oily lawyer on a disreputable f---fest adventure. Then Bella starts learning things. Then things get really complicated.
Hmm. Guess I couldn't keep that synopsis simple after all.
Nevertheless, as weird and unsettling and explicit as Poor Things can be (those who still hold an unrealistically chaste view of Emma Stone should immediately take to their fainting couches), Lanthimos' latest is an unmitigated riot, and a tremendously moving, satisfying one that, Heaven forbid, suggests knowledge as the answer to life's inherent crises of conscience. Stone performs all facets of Bella's evolution with brilliant economy and intelligence (and joyously unhinged physicality), making it abundantly clear where Bella is mentally during her many stages of post-death development. Yet what keeps her from ever feeling like the mere victim of a mad scientist's folly is Bella's eternal thirst for more, and for understanding more: why people don't masturbate or have sex 24/7; why husbands restrict their wives from lives independent of their spouses; why those with more money than they can ever spend don't share their wealth with the poor. Asking such questions to Duncan, the answer is usually some variant on “Ummm … I dunno.” But Bella keeps asking them regardless, and Poor Things is never funnier than when Bella realizes she's tired of these pipsqueak responses from the dude she's screwing and decides to move on, leaving this formerly dignified man in emotional shambles.
Regarding that dignified man, Ruffalo has never been more hysterical, more physically adventurous and behaviorly adept, than he is here, The actor has hardly been dormant since joining the MCU: he won an Emmy; he appeared on Broadway; he was instrumental (and Emmy-nominated) for getting The Normal Heart to a wide audience. But like Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer, this film reminds us of just what we might've been deprived of while the guy was performing incessant Marvel duties, and Dafoe (another Marvel alum) is a similarly welcome presence, sweetly underplaying a role that could otherwise have been an excuse for scene stealing.
“Otherwise,” that is, without a director as generous and controlled as Lanthimos, who ensures that everyone among an ensemble that includes Margaret Qualley, Christopher Abbot (terrifying here), The Tragedy of Macbeth breakout Kathryn Hunter, and German legend Hannah Schygulla looks equally terrific – even Jarrod Carmichael, who can currently only be believably cast as Jarrod Carmichael. You'll be hearing a lot about the visually audacious, incessantly thought-provoking Poor Things in the coming months, and only partly by me. Jump on-board before the film's awards-related conversation shifts locally to “What's all the fuss about?” After watching Poor Things, you'll know.
