ZOLA (A-minus) - It's tempting to dismiss a movie like "Zola" as a lightweight exploitive romp, but director Janicza Bravo juices this buddy film about road-tripping strippers with a confident visual and aural flair. It's this year's razzle-dazzle summer-blast version of "Baby Driver."
Bravo is blessed with a solid core of four appealing actors, starting with the always watchable Riley Keough, tapping a similar well to the one she drew upon for "American Honey." Like in "Honey," Keough (below, left) plays off a relatively young co-star, Taylour Paige ("Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"), with Keough's batshit-crazy Stefani complemented perfectly by Paige's wide-eyed and overwhelmed Zola.
Zola and Stefani meet-cute in a restaurant, and Stefani convinces a skeptical Zola to take a 20-hour drive to Tampa, Fla., for a lucrative stripping gig. Keough mostly performs Stefani in a sort of black-voice (which apparently is still OK these days?), creating an artifice that steadily builds throughout the movie. Joining the road trip are Stefani's anxiety-riddled boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and her unnamed "roommate" (Colman Domingo), a menacing shape-shifter, with different accents depending on his mood.
It turns out that the roommate is more of a pimp, and Stefani has roped Zola (our reliable narrator) into more explicit sex work than she bargained for. Once that table is set, Bravo reels off the adventure with a rat-a-tat style that would make Quentin Tarantino envious. She has an ear for perfect soundtrack moments that heighten the tension and make the whole screen come alive. And she has a sharp eye for small moments, sometimes dropped casually in the background, that perfectly capture the seedy underbelly of a desperate America on the hustle.
Paige, as Zola, comes off as a bit detached, but that's almost certainly intentional. She is the calm in this storm, and Zola's strategy of not wigging out is a pretty clever survival strategy. Paige lets Keough dominate the proceedings with a whack, desperate vibe, while Domingo's hot-and-cold character echoes them both. It all zips by in 86 urgent minutes, without a need to catch its breath.
FRENCH TWIST (B-minus) - Azazel Jacobs ("Momma's Man," "Terri") never finds his footing in this minor-key black comedy about a woman losing her fortune and using what money she has left to venture off to Paris with her adult son. This is his second mainstream misfire, along with 2017's "The Lovers," which similarly sat flat on the screen and limped to a finish.
This seems like a comeback bid by Michelle Pfeiffer, who has played mostly forgettable roles for the past 20 years since her '90s heyday. Her presence here is quite a distraction -- her different look in nearly every scene is hard not to notice -- and it was hard to get lost in her character and the plot, what little there is of one. I kept thinking, "Hmm, so that's what Michelle Pfeiffer looks like at 60. Son of a gun." This might not be as much of a problem for people who don't have an ex-wife from the '90s who resembled Pfeiffer.
The main problem, though, is the languid pace and the lack of anything substantive at stake. Pfeiffer's Frances is haughty and bitter, still tagged with her connection to the mysterious death of her somewhat famous husband. Her son, Malcolm (a serviceable Lucas Hedges), is quite the mope, who comes off as either abused or somewhere on the spectrum. Or maybe he's just a bored rich kid. He sleeps with a witch on the boat over to France, and that character, Madeleine (Danielle Macdonald from "Patti Cakes"), will return in the second half to help Frances and Malcolm find their missing black cat, who has a stupid connection to the ex-husband. You might bail out by the time the magical realism kicks in.
Jacobs is going for a Wes Anderson style of subdued quirk here, but there is never a grippable entry point for the viewer, and as a result this becomes merely a series of outre vignettes. Valerie Mahaffey (George's crazy girlfriend on "Seinfeld") injects some life in the proceedings as the clingy, ditzy Mme. Reynard. We're supposed to care what happens to Frances as her euros dwindle and her mood turns dark. Pfeiffer does camp it up and show flashes of brilliance -- especially in a scene in which she exacts revenge on a stereotypically rude French waiter -- but this story never coheres, and instead it merely serves to showcase a fine actress announcing her arrival in a new phase of her career.
BONUS TRACK
From the closing credits of "Zola," a throwback amid the pop and rap, "Because of My Best Friend," by the Clickettes:
No comments:
Post a Comment