VICE (2018)

There may be no way to make a movie about Dick Cheney, mainly because he's probably the most secretive politician in history, but also because to be true, he's impossible to humanize. Adam McKay, the writer and director of Vice, certainly pulls no punches in going after him. There's no ambiguity as to where Mr. McKay lies on the political spectrum, and nothing up in the air about his lingering anger toward the administration Cheney led and the heap that Cheney and his cohort left the country to clean up. The thesis of the movie, essentially, is this:



A completely valid approach, but also not a particularly challenging one. I voted against Cheney both times. I know he's a monster. Convince me he's a human being.

McKay graduated from SNL and goofy comedies like Anchorman to make The Big Short, a fascinating ensemble film which detailed the collapse of the housing market that Cheney partially oversaw. That movie, like Vice, mixed straight-faced social commentary with academic narration and acidic satire, but in taking essentially the format of a heist movie, it put human faces on its protagonists of varying moral sensibility. McKay particularly coaxed unique performances out of Christian Bale, as an eccentric math whiz, and Steve Carell, as a disgruntled stock market player who, the economy be damned, feels he's owed.

Though Bale and Carell turn up again here and give laudable performances, the humanity is missing. I suspect that McKay's collaborator on The Big Short, Charles Randolph, provided the conventional frame that gave its epic story shape, while McKay provided the acidic humor and righteous rage. Here, from a script he wrote by himself, McKay only has the acid.

He tries to apply the same explain-it-to-me-like-I'm-a-six-year-old method of The Big Short, having a working-class father named Kurt (Jesse Plemons) narrate Cheney's story from beginning to... well, near-end. We get a glimpse of Cheney's early years, a couple of his DUIs, his failure at Yale, and his being saved by the sternness of his dedicated wife Lynne (Amy Adams, wasted), who is played as more of a Lady Macbeth figure than I imagine the real Lynne Cheney is. We see his solidifying of power as he works his way from chief of staff to then-Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (Carell, hilarious) to Wyoming Congressman for 10 years, to Secretary of Defense, to Vice President.

The early scenes are a bit of a yawn, since the movie doesn't get to its red meat until the Bush years. It's then that we see the Cheney we know: scheming, gaining influence, consolidating as much power as he can in the Vice President's office, to the point where he's ordering planes to be shot down on September 11th without the President's authority. Since Cheney is all skill and no personality, there's really no point to the setup. There's no spark to his relationship with Lynne other than their collaborative scheming, which I suppose is the point.

The only moment where Mr. Cheney registers as a human being is his defense of his daughter Mary (played well by Allison Pill), who came out of the closet shortly before his run for the White House. It's Dick who defends her--against a casually apathetic George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell, grinning and empty) and against the ambitious Lynne--and his defense withers away toward the end, as he throws Mary under the bus to make way for his older daughter Liz (Lily Rabe) to run for Senate as an opponent to marriage equality. This turnaround could have sparked a real human conflict in the Cheneys, but either McKay isn't interested in it, or the Cheneys just aren't all that complicated. I think it's the latter.

Christian Bale is magnificent in his impersonation of Cheney, not only in his embodying of each mannerism but in his endowing each facet of Cheney's persona with its own purpose. He and McKay have rightly noticed that Cheney's odd way of speaking--in low tones with frequent pauses--demands that his audience listen closely and pay attention, and endows whatever he's saying with a certain gravitas. That was Cheney's game, and Bale gets it.

But how do you make a movie about someone who isn't there? McKay struggles in compiling a subject out of the elusive Cheney. The only real path he has to follow is the audacity of Cheney's ambition and the lengths he goes to in order to grabbing power. To McKay's credit, he still manages a few surprises here: the best scenes are of Cheney's days in the Ford Administration, in which he discovers disturbing loopholes in the limits on the President's power with the help of a young lawyer named Antonin Scalia (Sam Massaro), and of his early days in the W. Bush administration, in which he is constantly amassing influence, bypassing rules, and confirming his general omnipotence with the help of Rumsfeld, lawyer David Addington (Don McManus), chief of staff Scooter Libby (Justin Kirk, slimy), and deputy Sec. Def. Paul Wolfowitz (Eddie Marsan, also slimy). It's in these scenes that the movie feels authentic, and we see to the core of Cheney's opportunism and nihilism.

But McKay doesn't stick with it, probably because there's too much mud to sling. Detailing Dick Cheney's offenses would take the better part of a miniseries. Making hay out of Cheney is similar, I guess, to trying to make any scandals stick to the current occupant of the White House: there's too much. Focus too closely on one infraction and you're ignoring tons of others. Try to cover them all and you spread yourself too thin. Vice's unifying message, if there is one, is delivered in the revelation of Kurt's identity, which is clever but simplistic: at the end, the only thing to take from Cheney's life is that he has no soul, and until recently he had no heart either.

** out of ****

SERENITY (2019): Serenity Now, Insanity Also Now

Serenity is that rare movie that is terrible in so many ways that it's a miracle it exists. On the level of  writing, directing, acting, editing, photography, music, and probably catering, it fails spectacularly. Lots of movies are terrible, but most tend to stem from cynicism and profitability, the need to please too many people at once. Serenity surely accurately represents the vision of its director. No one meddled, no one took it out his hands in the editing room, no one supplanted his message with an audience-friendly approach. This is the gargantuan misfire of one artist, faithfully portrayed on the screen. It derails in the first act and keeps on chugging.

Its $25 million budget is slim considering its production value and cast. Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway must have taken significant pay cuts to work on this film. It's not hard to understand why. The writer and director is Steven Knight, who wrote my favorite film of the 2000s (Dirty Pretty Things) as well as another damn good thriller of the same era (Eastern Promises). He also directed an excellent chamber piece a few years ago called Locke, which took place entirely within the confines of Tom Hardy's car as he drove from Birmingham to London. That movie, no action and all dialogue, was captivating all the way through.

So it's not hard to see why Serenity's two lead actors and six (6) production companies took a risk on Knight. It didn't pay off. But boy, did it ever not pay off.

I'd say that someone along the line should have said no to Knight, but I honestly can't imagine any point at which this film was on track. Most bad movies have a good movie hidden within them somewhere. This one is like a Russian doll of badness; each layer of the plot reveals a new level of preposterousness.

Trailers set the film up as a modern sweaty noir picture. The setting, a fictional Florida Key-like island called Plymouth, recalls Key Largo. The grizzled McConaughey recalls Bogart, or at least tries to, as fisherman-for-hire Baker Dill. (Because every single element of this film has some sort of allegorical significance, I'm sure this name means something, but I can't figure out what.) He makes a living taking rich people out to catch big fish, but has fallen on hard times. There's a big tuna--he calls it Justice--that he's been angling for since he's been there, but he's never caught it: a character point that seems right out of Robert McKee's playbook for How to Give a Main Character Purpose. A literal Big Fish that he's literally trying to catch.

Then his estranged ex-wife Karen (Hathaway) shows up unexpectedly with a proposal. She's married to Frank (Jason Clarke), who's abusive to her and her son Patrick. Patrick, of course, is Dill's son. She's proposing that Dill take Frank out on a fishing expedition and that Frank not come back.

It sounds like your average noir plot, a la Double Indemnity and Body Heat: Femme Fatale comes to the Morally Compromised Hero with a murder plot, Hero is reluctant to accept but does it anyway because of his feelings for/sexual attraction to the Femme Fatale, things spin out of control. Rest assured that Knight has far less up his sleeve than that. There is a genre-bending surprise twist at the midpoint which I won't reveal, but somehow it's less surprising and less thrilling than if the movie had just continued as a regular old noir.

But then again, as a noir it would have been merely awful and not baffling. McConaughey hurls himself into the role with a ferocity that seems to combine his Lincoln commercials at their most arcane with a kind of Nicolas Cage-esque expressiveness. His performance is not good, because nothing in this movie is good, but it's appropriate to the movie's general messiness. Clarke does all that Knight asks him to do, which is to grunt and threaten and snarl, but he's not so much a villainous menace as he is merely despicable. Djimon Hounsou is blameless as Dill's first mate.

Hathaway, who's proven herself a great actor, has no idea what to do with Karen, which is all Knight's fault and not hers. She's introduced as a mysterious possible threat to Dill's relative comfort, but Knight doesn't follow through. That there are no surprises or revelations around her character is probably the movie's biggest failure. It generally has no room for women; the only other female role is a flirty neighbor played by Diane Lane, who can occasionally be seen peering out of windows knowingly, as if there is something else to know.

The ending is confounding, but no more confounding than the movie that led up to it. Knight will not let us rest until we know for sure that this movie is an Allegory with a capital A. Without revealing what happens, let me assure you that Knight finds a way to involve video games, The Troops,  one of those news broadcasts where an unseen reporter narrates the ending for us, and a fishing pole on Dill's boat that attaches to the waist of its user in a way that makes the murder weapon in A Clockwork Orange look subtle. There's also a nerdy accountant-looking character (Jeremy Strong) who keeps chasing after Dill and Must Mean Something. And if we ever doubt that this is a Big Meaningful Movie and that he is a Literate Filmmaker who has Read Many Books, Knight packs it with constant allusions to any author who's ever written anything nautical-related. I spotted Shakespeare, Melville, and Hemingway. Coleridge too, I think, and not just that the movie looks like Knight wrote it while in an opium daze.

How many stars do I give this movie? It's one of the most critically misguided movies I've ever seen, but it's not boring. Nor is it a cynical crowd-pleaser, like your average Transformers movie, or Pottersville. When the ambitious project of one artist goes bananas like this movie does, it's usually worth a look. I don't know if Serenity clocks in with the greatest disasters of film history, like Cleopatra or Heaven's Gate or The Exorcist II, but it's not for lack of trying. Only a filmmaker with proven talent like Knight would have been allowed to make a movie this horrendous. I'm refusing to give it a star rating because it does not exist on a scale of good to bad. It is itself, wonderfully, awfully, itself.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (2018), or: Radio Blah Blah

Bohemian Rhapsody, the long-time-coming and troubled biopic of Freddie Mercury by way of his surviving Queen members, has a view of queerness that is firmly entrenched in 1980, around the time that Al Pacino's latent homosexuality turned him into a murderer in Cruising, and Michael Caine's cross-dressing exacerbated his psychopathy in Dressed to Kill. And Bohemian Rhapsody doesn't even have the camp appeal of those two films, but manages in 2018 to be as instantly dated as either. Rated PG-13, when I suppose it just as easily could have nabbed a PG, it treats Freddie's sexuality as an afterthought and--more insidiously--a burden to his bandmates, family, and wife. It seems him primarily as an amusing eccentric, and a musical genius second.

This is, I suppose, the conundrum of any biopic of an artist. The makers of a film like this have the challenge of telling a story that at once embraces its subject's art and offers us something to complement it. I think of how disappointed I was by Ray and Walk the Line, which spoke to its subjects' musical genius with only the most perfunctory addiction/recovery story to round them out. But then I recall the Stephen Fry-headlining Wilde, which was all about Oscar Wilde's queerness with none of his wit. A good biopic, I think, needs to have both the personal and the mythical in balance, and I struggle to think of one that actually works. Freddie has the art, and I feel like he must have the other part somewhere, and that it's been obscured by people who'd rather not tell it.

What we're left with is the only story rock stars ever seem to want to tell: (1) Defiant iconoclast rises to fame with singular talent; (2) Defiant iconoclast creates masterpiece by being defiant and iconoclastic, and gets even more famous; (3) Same rock star is tarnished by excess--whether drugs, alcohol, or ego--and ruins relationships because of it; (4) Rock star redeems himself in epic fashion. It's the story that should now be retired post-Walk Hard, but here it is again. We even have Freddie's stereotypical wet-blanket of a working-class dad, who would rather he "Do good deeds" or something or other instead of being cool and hip and rocking. (The mom is quiet and demure, as if the filmmakers never agreed on a type for her.)

Freddie (Rami Malek) happens upon the small-time band Smile in a college bar and admires them. He introduces himself to Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy). Their lead singer has just quit. He joins them and they form Queen.

The best part of the film surrounds the writing and recording of the title song. These are the only scenes that project any sort of uniqueness on the band; even though the plot is fairly standard, these scenes portray the band's unconventional recording techniques and fierce advocacy for "Bohemian Rhapsody" and refusal to be formulaic. There's a couple of amusing scenes between the band and a producer played cheekily by Mike Myers, who makes a clunky but heartwarming in-joke about the upcoming Wayne's World revival of the song. This feels like the most honest part of the film, probably because it represents the band's version of the story, and naturally the scenes that feature Freddie as one-of-four rather than one-of-one play better. The scene in which Brian May composes "We Will Rock You" is also a highlight, and it really shouldn't be.

It's when the movie dwells on Freddie's excess that it feels disingenuous. There's the standard plot line about the lead singer who gets too big for the band, and the band who resents his going solo. This does happen, and has been dealt with in some thoughtful ways (see Barbara Kopple's Shut Up and Sing, for example, about the Dixie Chicks and their internal troubles after Natalie Maines went political). But this plot thread exists mainly so that Freddie can try to branch out on his own and humbly come crawling back. "I hired a bunch of guys, I told them exactly what I wanted them to do," he says, "and the problem was: they did it. I need you." Sure you do, Fred.

His bisexuality is played mostly as the source of frustration for his wife, Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), who remains his Girl Friday despite his open dalliances. His longtime boyfriend, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech), is portrayed as an invasive presence on Freddie's marriage and on the band. Freddie's attraction to and affairs with men are portrayed disturbingly chastely, as if the movie is afraid to really touch them. That PG-13 movies can feature untold amounts of violence but balk at male-male relationships is certainly partially to blame for this, but it doesn't absolve the filmmakers; even a PG-13 movie can deal with the perils of queerness in the 1980s more honestly than this. A scene in which Freddie is propositioned by a man in a public bathroom is reminiscent of Colin Firth's coming-out scene in Mamma Mia, which was so obscure and suggestive that I couldn't even be sure he was coming out.

AIDS, of course, exists mainly on the movie's sidelines, as, I suppose, it ought to; a movie about Freddie Mercury's genius should spend only as much time as is absolutely necessary on the disease that robbed us of him. (Plus, I'm not really interested in any salient statement on AIDS from filmmakers who fumble with homosexuality to begin with.) Still, its use of the epidemic is as perfunctory as anything else in the film, and fits right into the formula, right down to the scene in which Freddie coughs up blood into a hankie, a trope that should have been retired long before Oh Hello! on Broadway.

To say that Rami Malek isn't really to blame for the film's badness is not to say he's particularly good in it. Malek is a great actor and does fantastic work on Mr. Robot, but doesn't overcome the screenplay or his dental insert. He has a brilliant career ahead of him and though he won the Oscar for this film, he'll be the better the sooner he moves past it.

I know people who've found a lot to enjoy about the film, mainly in its re-creations of live performances, including the Live Aid concert that acts as the film's climax. These are all well-filmed, but there's not much to them that can't be achieved by watching actual footage of Queen performances. The most exhilarating scenes--and there is some exhilaration--already exist, and watching Malek and crew act through them is like listening to a decent cover band.

I don't consider myself an expert on Freddie Mercury's life, but I can't be alone in insisting that there must have been more to him than this. Given that the best scenes lionize the band over him, I have to assume his image is muted by their creative control. There must be both Queen and Freddie Mercury: the legendary band and the unique frontman. This is a movie, alas, about a gravedigger who meets a prince.

* 1/2 out of ****

SUSPIRIA (2018)

Dario Argento's original 1977 film Suspiria is rightly heralded as a masterwork of terror. Its first fifteen minutes are among the scariest I've ever seen, and what follows is a prime example of why Argento, however flawed his overall resume may be, is considered a master of the horror mise en scene. It is all experience. Argento reels us into the darkness with him.

Luca Guadagnino wisely follows the same path with his 2018 film of the same name, though that doesn't mean he takes the same directions. It is a remake of the Argento film, to be sure, but it also isn't. It has the same plot, and then it doesn't. The characters have their parallels, and then they don't. It's a tribute to Argento's work, and then it stands on its own. One could watch both (and should), with either film first, and still appreciate both on their own.

Guadagnino's film is spiritually related, I think, to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre. Herzog's film took the well-known Nosferatu story--which began as a plagiarism of Dracula--and spun it outward to more explicitly address the complex implications, particularly about male dominance. Guadagnino spins Argento's tight 95-minute thriller into a 152-minute meditation on everything around the edges of the Argento film. While Argento ratcheted his tension up to a grisly punch, Guadagnino lets the tension sit and fester, and it never lets up.

The plot is the same, and set in the same 1977 Berlin as the original. Quiet American girl Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) arrives at a prestigious Berlin dance school, fleeing an oppressive fundamentalist upbringing and an abusive mother. The school is run by famed choreographer Viva Blanc (Tilda Swinton) and a strange group of women. But there is some sort of malevolent presence at the school, established when one of the students, Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz), flees from the school, terrified, and subsequently disappears. Susie's audition catches Madame Blanc's attention, and before long she suspects that the women of the company have plans for her that go beyond dancing.

This plot is ripe for the kind of terror that Argento did best, but Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich take it to an unexpected, though no less unsettling, place. They expand 1977 Berlin to include its political context, amid the German Autumn, RAF terrorist attacks, and the Baader/Meinhof trials. The setting of a dance school suggests a need for any kind of order amid chaos. The choreography is already set; all there is left to do is follow it. What was a malevolent coven in the original is a bulwark against oppression in the new version, with Blanc as a democratic dissenter against what could be a tyrannical takeover by the dance school's founder, the mysterious Helena Markos, who believes herself to be the reincarnation of Mater Suspiriorum (The Mother of Sighs), one of the three witches said to possess untold supernatural power.

Women possess all of the power in Suspiria, in subtle contrast to the male-dominated authority around them. It wasn't until the movie was over that I noticed that there are almost no men in it. They occupy perfunctory roles with only the semblance of fragile routine authority. The sad-looking man who stamps an East German passport. The two cops who factor into a very funny attempted interrogation scene. Even the Amish priest who delivers the last rites to Susie's mother, in a flashback, is emasculated by the mother's control over the room.

The only male character of note is Dr. Josef Klemperer (Lutz Ebersdorf), Patricia's psychiatrist, who investigates her disappearance. In scenes parallel to the dance school plot, Klemperer navigates a barren and broken Berlin, eventually putting himself at risk to save one girl. His reason for doing so becomes clear as the movie goes on; it connects to the Holocaust and Klemperer's feeling of responsibility for the crimes that men like him committed 30-odd years earlier. Ebersdorf's performance is a mask of tortured duty, a deeply felt embodiment even if you don't pick up on the trick he and Guadagnino have up their sleeves (which--full disclosure--I didn't, until I read some reviews).

The other two triangular anchors of the film are Johnson and Swinton, both of whom are captivating. Susie, merely an innocent protagonist in the original, is fleshed out into a taciturn yet brazen heroine here. Through brief flashbacks we see her fundamentalist upbringing, and how her sheltered childhood and stunted sexuality makes her appropriate prey for Madame Markos--or so we think. Johnson's performance strikes the right note between innocence and cunning, so that by the end we know a supernatural possession has taken place, but just who is the possessed and who is the possessor is left ambiguous. Swinton turns Madame Blanc into a politician of sorts, scheming to gain power within her coven, always keeping a knowing eye on Susie, treating her with a mix of condescension, suspicion, and admiration.

The women of the coven are an idiosyncratic, imposing, and often very funny ensemble, as Guadagnino embeds us in their routine of dinners, rituals, democratic votes; though the logic of it is sometimes confusing, their purposefulness always carries a sinister suggestion with it. I liked the varied personalities of the matrons in charge, particularly Angela Winkler as the stoic Mme. Tanner and Sylvie Testud as the frazzled Miss Griffith. Mia Goth is also impressive as Sara, the first dancer to befriend Susie, and the first to become suspicious of the matrons.

Guadagnino replaces Argento's traditional horror template of buildup and payoff with a constant thread of crescendo and decrescendo leading to a final conflagration. There are moments that hit hard--particularly one early in the film in which one of the more obstinate dancers meets an end that is particularly brutal, even by Argento standards--but the film maintains a quiet dread throughout, punctuated but not interrupted by moments of terror. Thom Yorke's dissonant score, reminiscent of Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood's work on There Will Be Blood, tempers orchestral order with minimalist disorder.

Of course, Guadagnino and Kajganich do get a bit big for their britches; adapting a simple fairy-tale horror film to a very real Cold War backdrop doesn't come without its fair share of pretentiousness. The big climax, though it offers a satisfying turn in Susie's and Mme. Blanc's characters, doesn't quite manage to meld the obligatory bloodbath with the more serious setup, and Guadagnino's occasional camera trickery feels less like a necessary atmosphere and more like a cover for some narrative loopholes. He makes up for this in the epilogue, which offers a subtle statement of what the film has really been about. The last shot is sure to be debated, as it seems to jostle the film out of its previous context. I think that it, in conjunction with the one shot of Susie we see in the middle of the closing credits, reinforces the power of unity in the face of walls that separate us. If Argento's film portrays a force of darkness amid a normal world, Guadagnino's concerns a formidable, though brutal and uncompromising, force of unity amid a dark world.

*** 1/2 out of ****

TALES FROM THE HOOD 2 (2018)

I wish somebody would give Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott a budget. Modern horror filmmakers like Mike Flanagan and David F. Sandberg have shown that a lot can be done with a little, but with Tales from the Hood 2 has a production value on the level of a basic cable movie. With a little bit more, it really could have been something

It's a shame, because Cundieff and Scott really do deserve better. They're returning for a sequel to one of the most underrated, socially relevant horror films of the 1990s: an anthology that's a melding of bite-size EC Comics-style fables with honest, complicated, and important themes of racial inequity and social justice. It confronted some facets of racism that are often ignored in pop culture, the most memorable being the segment featuring Corbin Bernsen as a racist southern Congressman whose apocryphal art comes to life and attacks him.

The sequel has some of that urgency, and isn't afraid to confront some uncomfortable topics. Cundieff and Scott take on the military-industrial complex, the rise of A.I., gentrification, cultural appropriation, and voter suppression, but their main target, as in the first one, is Black indifference. It's worth noting that in both films, many Black characters get their comeuppance as well as white ones: the original's first segment memorably skewered a complacent Black cop who stood by as his white partners murdered a social activist. The sequel's final segment, about a similarly complacent Black Mississippi Republican, takes the same aim: that the fight for equality requires the vigilance of all People of Color, and that there is no room for playing along with the oppressor.

The clever writing and earnest acting are almost enough to make up for a laughably amateurish-looking production. The opening credits sequence, a CGI animation worthy of a mid-'90s PC game, doesn't bode well; neither does the wraparound sequence, boasting Keith David as a sinister strategist hired by a government contractor to develop an A.I. law enforcement device. The wraparound has its funny moments, and its social message is relevant, but the connection to the stories is tenuous, and David may as well have shouted "Hey! I'm the Devil!" at his first appearance.

Except for the last one, the stories lean heavily on humor more than horror, where the first film was primarily macabre with dark humor around the edges. It unfortunately puts its two best segments first and its longest, most ponderous one last. The first story, about a clueless white girl who visits a "Museum of Negrosity" to steal a gollywog doll for her collection, is supremely nasty, with an especially wicked punchline. The second, about a couple of gang members who kidnap a TV psychic to find out where their dead rival hid some money, is silly but still enjoyable, anchored by a sublimely goofy performance from Bryan Batt as the semi-charlatan psychic.

The last two tackle issues that are more serious than the previous, but stumble in maintaining their comic-book narrative. The third, about a duo of date-rapists who get a surprise, starts interestingly but ends abruptly and predictably. The fourth, castigating a comfortable Black man whose money and vote go to a race-baiting politician, had the potential to be the movie's most captivating story, but instead it's only the most thuddingly self-important and preachy, portraying a post-Jim Crow South and a Colonel Sanders-like politician that are more cartoonish than haunting, and utilizing the specter of Emmett Till in a way that is, while respectful, more than a little contrived.

The triumph of the original Tales from the Hood was that it got the tone just right: it was both a spooky, rousing, entertaining comic book film in the vein of Tales from the Crypt and the old Amicus films of the '70s, and a serious exploration of racial injustice. I'm convinced that if Cundieff and Scott had been given a proper production, they could have emulated it again. All the pieces are in place otherwise.

** 1/2 out of ****

THE SNOWMAN (2017)

A young boy who lives with his mom in what appears to be the set for The Thing from Another World prepares for a history lesson from his Uncle Jonas, who comes to visit every week. Uncle Jonas drills the boy on key historical dates, then whenever the boy gets one wrong, Jonas hits his mom. It's what education professionals would call "20th-century learning," and what Betsy DeVos would call "proficiency." Then the boy finds Jonas and his mom in bed together. Mom tells Jonas, "He doesn't know you're his father." At least one more traumatic childhood event happens. The opening credits roll.

The boy grows up to be either the serial killer or the troubled detective; we don't know for sure until the end. Someone in Oslo has been murdering women and building snowmen, not necessarily in that order. Sometimes he builds the snowman first as a menacing portent (if the stings on Marco Beltrami's soundtrack are to be believed). Sometimes he builds them afterward to conceal severed heads and other body parts. He sends taunting letters to the authorities, ominously addressed to "Mister Police," which I assume sounded not-ridiculous in the original Norwegian. Posters for the film bear the tagline "You could have saved her I gave you all the clues," but it should not be presumed that there is a "her" to be saved or "clues" to be given.

The case, as it always tends to in movies like this, falls upon the biggest train wreck of a human being in the police department, a functioning alcoholic named Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender). I can attest that this name certainly sounds less ridiculous in the original Norwegian, since in Jo Nesbo's novel it's supposed to be pronounced "Hoo-leh." Yet the English-speaking cast pronounces it "Hole," like the thing in the ground. How this pronunciation made it through the production I cannot imagine. I know that the director, Tomas Alfredson, is Swedish, so I'm not counting out a Sweden/Norway rivalry.

Hole teams up with a younger detective named Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson), who admires his work (we have to take her word for it). They find that the killer may have ties to a wealthy businessman (J.K. Simmons) who's closely involved in the campaign for Oslo to host the World Cup, and whose obsession with younger women makes him one of the chaster characters in the film.

Meanwhile, Detective Hole reunites with his ex-girlfriend Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her son Oleg (Michael Yates), who sees him as a father figure of sorts. You see, his alcoholism drove them apart, and he's trying to make amends. If you guessed that Hole's complicated paternal relationship with Oleg draws a parallel between him and the killer, then oh boy Mister Police, you really have gotten all the clues.

Mister Police would also certainly see the clues of a troubled production here, even without reading background information on the film. Alfredson, whose credits boast the excellent Let the Right One In and the convoluted but captivating Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, went on record to say that the film was rushed into shooting and that he failed to shoot 10-15% of the script. This would explain why certain sub-plots and supporting characters are dropped, like Chloe Sevigny's inexplicable appearance as two twins. I also got the sneaking suspicion that every time Thelma Schoonmaker (that's right) edited in a shot of a purportedly terrifying snowman, it was to cover up some gap in the footage.

The general malaise that pervades The Snowman does emphasize its few good qualities. I'm usually happy to see Val Kilmer anywhere, so his scenes--as yet another alcoholic cop in a parallel storyline--are somewhat redeeming. I read that he was recovering from throat cancer during filming, which explains why his voice is dubbed. It does not explain why the filmmakers seem to have dubbed his voice without looking at his lips, nor why they hired a Jeff Bridges soundalike to do it. It's also hard to be totally dissatisfied when J.K. Simmons is on screen; even when his character hits the heights of ridiculousness, he's never boring. And I have never before seen a movie so brazen as to try to use Hot Butter's "Popcorn" as a horror theme.

Aside from that, the movie only entertains through its awfulness, which includes but is not limited to a baffling scene in which Harry Hole subdues a character (not the killer, or even a rival) by jumping on them, Chris Farley-style. Fassbender does his damnedest but he cannot make Harry Hole not laughable, especially in a pathetic climax in which at least one character is tied to a chair, because dammit, when a screenwriter wants to tie a character to a chair, he does it.

The total belly-flop that is The Snowman is at the very least an abrupt reminder that detective thrillers, all the rage nowadays, are difficult to do right. A movie like Seven is a rarity, in that it maintains an uneasy balance between gruesome fascination and moral righteousness. So does The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, another Nordic franchise-starter with an American version that was a dud. I don't think we'll be seeing another Harry Hole adventure anytime soon.

* out of ****

Spoiler alert: Oslo gets the World Cup.

mother! (2017)

If the highest praise I can give mother! is that I wish more films like it got made by big studios nowadays, that shouldn't be taken as quite the endorsement it sounds like. It's a film that a studio (Paramount, in this case) would only permit a tested filmmaker to make, and only with bankable stars on a modest budget. In return, Aronofsky has delivered a vision: not always a good vision, mind you, but a vision of something nonetheless.

Critics have claimed, alternately in praise and in denouncement--that the movie is likely to make audiences angry. They're probably right, although it's hard to tell if they mean the graphic scenes of sudden violence or the unconventional storytelling. I suspect it's mostly the second. The previews seem to court horror audiences, or at least fans of the psycho-horror Aronofsky championed with his drug-addiction epic Requiem for a Dream and his tortured-artist drama Black Swan. Those who've experienced the brilliant gut-punch of a coda of Requiem for a Dream shouldn't find much to be truly shocked about here, though be forewarned: mother! features scenes of violence that aren't commonly seen in a big-studio film, or even an independent horror film.

No, I think what they mean is that audiences would be reluctant to follow the film once it veers off the traditional horror path and into truly surreal territory. It doesn't matter; Aronofsky drags you with him. The film starts safely in genre territory, then gradually removes the safety pins one by one until before we know it, we've tumbled into chaos. The move from home-endangerment horror to allegorical fantasy is almost not noticeable. Almost.

The two main characters, only known as Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) and Him (Javier Bardem) move into a quiet but gigantic manse seemingly in the middle of nowhere. He's a famous author with writer's block. She, about 20 years his junior, works tirelessly at rehabilitating the house while trying to cultivate his inspiration.

Then a stranger (Ed Harris) knocks on the door. Before Mother can put in a word, her husband has invited the man inside and to stay for the night. For an explanation, the husband only offers nonsequiturs that seem to make sense to him ("He's a doctor"). Then the stranger's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer, who's fantastic) arrives. Then more.

Aronofsky plays out these early scenes with unbending point-of-view terror. He establishes Mother as the keeper of the house, then slowly strips away her control and puts us in her shoes as he does it. The camera (with effective cinematography by frequent Aronofsky collaborator Matthew Libatique) stays tightly focused on Mother's face as it leads us to experience the limits of her ability to protect her house and herself.

There's something not right about the couple staying in their house. The Bardem character seems to invite their invasion unquestioningly. Mother can demand that they leave, but they don't. In these scenes Aronofsky's exploration of what happens when people just refuse to obey agreed-upon social rules recalls Michael Haneke's similarly surreal and violent Funny Games, which also features a couple set upon by two sociopaths who walk into their house, invited, and then refuse to leave. The invaders prey upon their hosts' politeness, knowing that they will not turn away someone in need.

This caretaking duty, of course, falls squarely upon Mother. In Lawrence's performance of a firm but helpless homemaker, as well as Bardem's flawless portrayal of a man completely oblivious to his wife's struggles, Aronofsky captures the catch-22 of the traditional woman's role: she's charged with taking care of everything, including her husband's ego, and takes the blame for everything that goes wrong. As more and more people come to the house, all of them expect her to conform to their wishes, many of them scoffing or excoriating her when she refuses or fails.

It's around this time that Aronofsky's intentions become clear and the movie charges head-on into its audacious, sometimes loony allegory. I won't reveal what it's an allegory for, though Aronofsky has been forthright in explaining it in interviews, and you don't have to squint to see the Biblical parallels at each step. This Mother becomes the perennial mother whose entire life is given over to pleasing thankless children; each guest is a child who asks for more, and more, and more, until the Mother is both literally and spiritually tapped.

It's somewhere toward the end that Aronofsky's allegory runs out of steam; admittedly, it would be difficult to sustain this intended atmosphere for the full third act of a two-hour movie. In early scenes, even though we can still see the metaphorical identity behind the characters, they remain unquestionably human and recognizable, which is why the early horror scenes work so well. Late in the film, Lawrence and Bardem vanish into the allegory and never quite make it back; once we know that the Mother is a symbol and not a person, it's hard to feel anything for her. Even one revolting act of violence, one that you've no doubt heard about by now, fails to make much of an impression, other than that Aronofsky has jumped the shock shark too early.

I still don't know if I'd recommend mother!. I want to praise it for being a film I haven't seen before, but what does that mean? Only that I've seen too many movies and am desperate for something new. I suppose people should see it for the early scenes and how they frighteningly depict the terror a quiet home invasion. And for the scenes in which Aronofsky casually drags the story off of the traditional tracks while maintaining the lead characters simultaneously as allegorical representations and as real characters.

I think I've described the film as accurately as possible; if it seems intriguing, you might want to see it. But I'll paraphrase what Michael Haneke said about his own Funny Games: if you walk out of the film before it's over, you probably don't need it. That might be true of mother! too.

** 1/2 out of ****

Note: There's a film that mother! reminded me of, which also tackles motherhood and the caretaker role and how it holds up amid a home invasion. It's a French film called Inside, it is even more violent than mother!, and it is terrifying.