I took on the 24-hour challenge of seeing the latest epic films by two celebrated directors (starring two generational acting talents) and filing this review -- and nearly made it ...
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (B-minus) - Paul Thomas Anderson caught lightning more than a decade ago adapting Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice." He tries to duplicate his luck here, but rather than stick with the original story, this movie is merely "inspired by" Pynchon's novel Vineland.
Anderson takes what was an interesting idea of Pynchon's from the 1980s -- the life of '60s revolutionaries who have gone underground -- and transports it to more modern days (albeit an era that still has pay phones), and he injects a repulsive storyline involving militant immigration jackboots and white supremacists, which are not mutually exclusive clubs. The gang of cretins is led by a character actually named Lockjaw and played hideously to the rafters by Sean Penn in what is destined to be immortalized as a classic crossword-puzzle definition of a "ham."
This the umpteenth movie in which the old racist scum has the hots for black women, and Anderson serves up Teyana Taylor as the prize sex object. She plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, who gets a weird sexual charge out of freeing detained immigrants and robbing banks. Taylor (compelling in "A Thousand and One") gets to fire an automatic weapon while exposing her overripe pregnant belly. What she does not get to do is develop this character, who abandons her child and rats out her co-conspirators when caught by Lockjaw.
Perfidia goes into witness protection and leaves the child with the baby daddy, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Father and daughter get new identities and a relocation to California, and 16 years later he's Bob, a stoner who can't remember the code words for the radical group that still exists underground. His 16-year-old daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, above), will turn out to have movie-super-hero skills like escaping from murderers and excelling behind the wheel as if she stole it from a car commercial. (It's the kind of movie where the climactic scene involves three vehicles on a highway where no other car will ever come along, miraculously. Did the $150 million-plus budget run out of gas or extras?)
DiCaprio flashes moments of brilliance, but the mayhem keeps interrupting and forcing him to run around a lot, not unlike the characters in 2021's "Licorice Pizza." (It's also the kind of movie where Bob can literally fall off of a roof, get up and escape his pursuers, miraculously.) The white supremacists are rendered as cartoon villains, who gather in a wood-paneled mansion and worship "St. Nick."
This collage of chaos sprawls across 2 hours and 42 minutes. By the second half, it is nothing more than a glorified episode of "The Rockford Files" (by way of Quentin Tarantino). Penn, ridiculously swole here, infuses his character with physical tics (complete with a distinctive gait) that might immediately take you out of the movie, far too aware that the masterful actor is performing. (He, too, comes off as super-human, walking away from an attack that would obliterate mere mortals. Miraculously.)
Only Benicio del Toro acquits himself here, in a minor role as an immigrant-protecting sensei; his subtle mannerisms during a DUI traffic stop run rings around the hysterical mugging of DiCaprio and Penn. (Just as we recently realized that we were over Josh Brolin ("Wake Up Dead Man"), it is apparent that Sean Penn is well past his sell-by date. Meantime, the talents of Keke Palmer and Alana Haim are just wasted.
"One Battle After Another" is presumably intended to mock and satirize the military-industrial complex and its white nationalist agenda. But Anderson merely fetishizes that evil mind-set while also glorifying the violence of the radicals. (Willa will also gets to show off her skills with an automatic weapon.) I have very little bandwidth left for depictions -- positive or negative -- of Stephen Miller's goon squads, or enlightened Hollywood's useful idiots who purport to skewer the powers that be.
Anderson's film is at times clever, occasionally enlightening, but mostly annoying, stuck in a timeless limbo. The man who gave us pulpy but thoughtful fare like "Boogie Nights," "Magnolia" and "Punch-Drunk Love" (all in a row) is turning into another big-budget hack. The organized chaos that somehow jelled in "Inherent Vice" never coheres in this follow-up run at Pynchon's work.
MARTY SUPREME (Incomplete) - I've not been a fan of the Safdie brothers -- "Uncut Gems" was "messy, overlong," and "Good Time" was "macho bunk" -- but they went their separate ways this year, and Josh Safdie's "Marty Supreme," starring a manic Timothee Chalamet, looked like a fun ride. I made it through 85 of its 150 minutes, exasperated and exhausted from the $7 New Year's Day matinee.
As we noted during "Uncut Gems," Safdie simply tries to cram too much into this movie, in which Chalamet plays a ping-pong wunderkind in 1950s New York but mostly spends his time as a broke grifter scamming his employer/uncle, his married girlfriend (whom he apparently impregnated), and a businessman's wife, a faded 1930s starlet played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who is the only cast member who adds a human dimension to a character.
Chalamet is a whirlwind as the smarmy, fast-talking bullshit artist Marty Mauser. He is often sweaty and frantic, and not just in his ping-pong scenes. He is scrawny, with a wispy mustache, and it is difficult to believe throughout that he can swindle the Ritz in London for a royal suite or that his Lord Fauntleroy banter would work on Paltrow's classy dame. The whole thing, despite Chalamet's considerable talents, is a tough sell.
"Marty Supreme" is also dizzyingly violent, with hectic, in-your-face camera work that comes off like the work of Scorsese or Tarantino on even more cocaine. The middle hour goes down multiple rabbit holes, and each time Marty somehow, improbably never gets his ass seriously kicked. The ping-pong virtually disappears for a good chunk of the film. (Marty loses a world championship at the beginning of the film and prepares to avenge that loss the following year in Tokyo, but he does absolutely no training or practice in advance of taking on the world champ. "Rocky" this is not.)
Safdie simply forgot to tell a cohesive story with a sympathetic lead character. At the 85-minute mark, my senses were fully assaulted ('80s new-wave music blares, out of context, on the soundtrack), and I had little interest in finding out what happens to this asshole. I'll end by handing it off to a few reviewers who did gut it out until the end:
William Bibbiani, The Wrap: "'Marty Supreme' ... has no idea how to conclude while saying something — anything — about Marty, his journey or anything else. ... There’s no dramatic throughline that tracks, just desperation and an incongruous conclusion that doesn’t organically follow that despair. ... It observes the destruction in Marty’s wake and shrugs, not because it’s actually sympathetic, but because we’re supposed to be won over by his all-American gumption in spite of his carnage."
Stephanie Zacharek, Time: "It’s about as brash and peripatetic as Safdie’s last feature, 2019’s Uncut Gems, ... but its undertones are nastier, and it’s somehow even more exhausting. ... He’s supposed to be a complex character, but maybe he’s just an unbearable one. ... For Safdie, a movie seems to be just an excuse for a million and one digressions and distractions; he’ll throw anything at the wall to see if it sticks. ... Amorality can be fun, but Marty Supreme has no emotional core -- though it does try to grab us in its final minutes, when Marty is unrealistically redeemed in a moment of mawkish sentimentality."
Roger Moore, Movie Nation: "Safdie strains to keep 'Marty Supreme' moving at an exhausting sprint for its excessive, indulgent two and a half hours. He can’t. Even Chalamet needs a breather. ... But in Safdie’s film, all this expended on-screen energy and effort isn’t edifying or rewarding. It’s just exhausting."
BONUS TRACKS
A clever little nugget in "One Battle" reveals that the hold music for the revolutionaries' secret phone network is Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," the lyrics of which also furnish some of the secret counter-signs memorized by the members:
A rather obvious choice for "Battle's" closing credits is Tom Petty's "American Girl":
No comments:
Post a Comment