UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (C) - I'm hard-pressed to come up with a more inconsequential movie than this whimsical curiosity, which tells an odd story about Iranians but sets the action in Winnipeg in winter. It's a series of mildly amusing vignettes stretched out to feature length.
I would recount the plot, but I couldn't figure it out -- or decipher whether there actually was a plot. Wikipedia describes it as a film that "blends the seemingly unrelated stories of Negin and Nazgol, two kids who find money frozen in ice and try to claim it; Massoud, a tour guide in Winnipeg who is leading a confused and disoriented tour group; and Matthew (director Matthew Rankin), who quits his unfulfilling job with the seceded federal government of Quebec and travels home to Winnipeg to visit his mother."
There are a lot of turkeys that show up throughout. Sight gags that are as light as air float by and dissipate; it's difficult to remember most of them just hours after having seen the movie. Matthew confronts a rival who has taken his place in his mother's favors. Everything here is deadpan and quaint. It's as effervescent as a Sprite, with about as many calories. It's Guy Maddin meets Jim Jarmusch, but drained of any special quirk and rendered in Persian (and French), for good measure. This one went over and around my head.
WIDOWS (2018) (B-minus) - This female revenge flick has both a ridiculous premise and trite screenwriting, but it is entertaining enough to get you to stick around and see if these gals can pull off a big heist.
Viola Davis leads an overstuffed cast as Veronica, who joins forces with the other widows who all lost their husbands in a robbery gone awry in order to pull off a $5 million job that Veronica's husband had been planning before the men died. A parallel story line involves Colin Farrell as Jack Mulligan, a Chicago-Irish ward pol running for election to the seat held for years by his machine-veteran father (a feisty Robert Duvall) against a black preacher, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry). Manning has a vicious brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya, truly menacing), who is tasked with collecting a multimillion-dollar debt owed by Veronica's husband (Liam Neeson). (Yeah, that's a lot of above-the-title names. Jacki Weaver has a cameo too.)
The improbable set-up is strained further by the paint-by-numbers script, the hack-work of Gillian Flynn ("Gone Girl") and director Steve McQueen ("20 Years a Slave," "Small Axe"). And you may never see a movie that is set in Chicago look and feel so unlike Chicago. The cinematography is antiseptic and the accents and phrasing are random. Farrell, especially, has a tin ear for next-gen Irish pol-speak.
The various story lines are trite -- toxic masculinity; women dependent on the ill-gotten gains of thugs; an average person instantly transforming into a fearless criminal mastermind; and a marriage strained by the tragic death of a son. I was able to predict the maddeningly unoriginal dialogue with uncanny accuracy. The stakes of a local election can't support a convincing narrative. A key plot twist at the end improbably relies on the trope of a pet dog sniffing out a surprise suspect hiding behind a door.
Brit McQueen seems like the wrong choice to tell such a gritty, pulpy tale set in the American Midwest, imposing his auteur sensibilities on a dese-dem-and-dose tick-tock thriller. Somehow the cut-and-paste cast -- including Cynthia Erivo as a bad-ass hairdresser who joins the caper (though Michelle Rodriguez and Carrie Coon are wasted here) -- drag this over the finish line.
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