David Lowery’s career so far has produced one of the weirdest bodies of work of any young director: the 70s pastiche Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, the surprisingly affecting family-friendly fantasy Pete’s Dragon, and the ambitious occult-psychological study A Ghost Story. His latest, clearly a vehicle for Robert Redford to leave the acting profession on his own terms, has almost nothing in common with those three previous films except casting: Redford appeared in Pete, and Casey Affleck, who plays a police detective here, was in both Saints and Ghost (the latter, however, mostly under a sheet).
Though based on a true story, The Old Man & the Gun takes such full advantage of Redford’s image that the viewer probably assumes that the man he plays, Forrest Tucker, wasn’t at all like the affable old gentleman on the screen. Tucker was a bank robber who spent a good deal of his adult life in prisons, and didn’t quit in his old age. Reportedly, his m.o. was courtesy and a non-threatening demeanor, despite the gun he carried on his jobs. Nobody was ever hurt as a result, and in the opening scene, which takes place in the early 80s, Tucker escapes from a job with police in pursuit and loses them by stopping on the side of the road to help a stranded motorist, the idea being that the cops would never expect someone on the lam to do that. Lowery cagily makes the reason for Tucker’s Good Samaritan act ambiguous, but in the end he charms the motorist, an older woman named Jewel (Sissy Spacek), and they embark on a relationship that seems more informed by some production decision to pair these two 70s icons in their dotage (though Spacek is about 15 years younger) than by the facts of the case. What the movie gains from this relationship is a sense of heretofore untapped possibility in that Jewel doesn’t seem particularly bothered when she finds out that Tucker is a career criminal who has yet to mend his ways. The plot point where Tucker offers to take over her mortgage seems credible enough, in fact.
Too much of the movie, however, is as low energy as its stars’ romance. Affleck’s detective, John Hunt, connects a series of robberies to Tucker in rather short time, but seems as charmed by the genteel robber as Jewel is, and while it doesn’t dampen his determination, it adds a bittersweet tone to their interactions that’s more sentimental than realistic. Less effective is the use of Danny Glover and Tom Waits as Tucker’s equally over-the-hill accomplices. Even when one of them is shot, there’s a fraternal feeling of well-being, as if they all know they’ll be repairing to the nearby bar and grill after the day’s shooting. There’s nothing here with the intensity of Saints, the heartfulness of Pete, or the ambition (no matter how ill directed) of Ghost. It’s a capable but underwhelming work of myth maintenance—not for Tucker, but for Redford.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001).
The Old Man & the Gun home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Xavier Beauvois takes an unusual approach to a war movie. Though he opens on a battlefield strewn with corpses during World War I, his film very rarely addresses the brute terror of warfare. Like Satyajit Ray’s memorable Distant Thunder, it mostly looks at the effect war has on those who are not at war, in this case the French farmers who continued to till the land during and after World War I. Not surprisingly, these farmers tended to be women, since the men were either fighting or already killed, and the special attention that women bring to agriculture is emphasized through action, word, and sensibility.
Actor Paul Dano took on a lot when he decided to adapt Richard Ford’s 1990 novel as his directorial debut. Dano does not appear in the movie, and neither does his significant other and co-scenarist Zoe Kazan, but there’s something of the pair’s storied flair for the quirky and unexpected in both the story and the way they pull it off. Ford’s book takes place in the 1960s, in a backward backwater in Montana, where a family of three has relocated. The father, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), is a golf pro who has given up competition to take a job at a local country club. The town is overshadowed by a mountain that seems to be constantly on fire, a situation that’s the source of a lot of local black humor. The mother, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), is a housewife who, at first, seems resigned to her fate of constant motion for the sake of her husband’s ambitions, which only go as far as his pride. The teenage son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould), is, according to Jerry, destined to be a distinguished football player, though Joe is so unassuming that you can’t imagine him giving or receiving a tackle.
The movies are still conflicted when it comes to portraying LGBTQ individuals, not because the portraits are necessarily difficult to convey with sensitivity and honesty, but because the very act of representation is fraught. Heterosexual cisgender actors and actresses still mostly play the parts of gay, bi, and transgender individuals, and gay, bi, and transgender actors are justifiably upset, to say the least. The titular character in Lukas Dhont’s Girl, a young transgender woman trying to make it as a ballerina, is played by Victor Polster, a cisgender male, and while it’s not central to our appreciation of the movie’s merits to wonder if it might not have been better to have hired a nonbinary actor for the role, it’s difficult these days to dismiss the notion as you’re watching the movie, and that’s an unwanted and, for all intents and purposes, avoidable distraction.
According to Thomas Wolfe, you can’t go home again, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something in the attempt. I don’t know which country the 62-year-old Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski currently calls home—he left his native land for England when he was 14—but since returning to Poland to make films earlier this decade he has come into his own as a filmmaker with a cinematic style and narrative voice that are so distinctive he will soon have graduate seminars dedicated to his output. The movies he directed in the UK were accomplished and unremarkable, and it’s likely he started making movies in Poland—black-and-white “art films” in the old boxy aspect ratio—to rejigger his mojo in late middle age. Ida (2013), his first genuinely Polish film, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Cold War, his second, was nominated for the same award and probably would have won if Roma hadn’t been released the same year. Though Poland has produced some great directors and inspiring films, this pair by Pawlikowski already feel like the last word on the postwar cultural situation in Eastern Europe.
The flaw in the X-Men saga that outsiders can’t quite get past is the mutant pretense that is its whole reason for being. Though the idea of mutants being social outcasts despite their super powers and tendency to use them for good is a powerful one, the kind of poetic license exerted in describing those powers becomes strictly arbitrary after you sample a few characters. It’s as if the creators simply make up an ability that fits whatever story they wanted to tell, and after a while you have so many super powers that there seems little point in extrapolating on them.
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Young people in Japanese and Korean indies often evince a distinct cognitive dissonance, purposely rubbing against the stereotype of the good son or daughter in the Confucian tradition. Those of us who are not Japanese or Korean may feel cut off: Adolescent disaffection is universal and perhaps more acute in a social milieu that distinctly places greater value on family cohesion, but there’s usually the feeling that the filmmaker is trying to make their point by exaggerating certain attributes. Hikari, the narrator of Makoto Nagahisa’s debut feature, is a 13-year old video game addict who has just lost both parents in a bus accident and feels nothing. Actually, scratch that. He betrays some relief, because he obviously didn’t love his parents, and the sentiment may have been mutual—to call Hikari an unreliable narrator would be an understatement.
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