Opening ThisWeek
The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
Opens Fri., Sept 19 at Guild 45th, Pacific Place, and Lincoln Square. Rated R. 122 minutes.
A suicide attempt, hauntingly staged: Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) walks across a New York City bridge on a pleasant day, and at one point abruptly dodges out of frame. The startled reaction of a passerby tells us where she goes. The rest of the movie is an attempt by Eleanor—and her family, friends, and husband Conor (James McAvoy)—to figure out what happens after she survives her fall. This is the backbone of a film with an earnest disposition and a complicated release history.
The name: It’s explained that Eleanor’s parents are Beatles fans. That’s cute, although it’s hard to understand what the gimmick lends the movie other than gravity-by-association with the Fab Four’s plaintive song. And although Chastain continues her strong run of performances, Eleanor has less meat on her bones than some of the other characters here. El goes to live with the folks, so we see how she’s been shaped by her distracted father (William Hurt), a psychiatrist, and her wine-swigging mother (Isabelle Huppert), who likes reminding Eleanor what she sacrificed for family. Conor has more life: he’s managing a restaurant that is quietly failing, leading to charged encounters with his best pal/head chef (SNL stalwart Bill Hader) and bartender (Nina Arianda). This is happening in the shadow of his celebrated father (Ciaran Hinds), a restaurateur who hangs with the Rolling Stones when they’re in town. Ned Benson, making his feature debut as writer/director, is nothing if not sincere in tracking this grief-sodden situation. More sincere than coherent, perhaps, as a number of scenes seem so much like real life they’re actually pretty stock. And there’s something too easy about casting the great Viola Davis as a professor who doles out worldly wisdom to El along the way.
All this comes with an asterisk. Benson’s project bowed at the Toronto Film Festival last fall as two separate features: The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her and Him. (Am I the only person recalling the 1970s Liz Taylor/Richard Burton TV movies Divorce His and Divorce Hers? I am? Well, fine.) This film is a 122-minute compilation of Benson’s two features. The Weinstein Company has taken pains to let everyone know that Benson assembled Them himself, but its existence is puzzling: Surely the intriguing point of the original project was that the twin movies (which I haven’t seen) reflected on each other from contrasting perspectives. We’re told those films will be released this fall as well, but don’t hold your breath. In the meantime, Them is a less-than-convincing in-betweener. Robert Horton
PFlamenco, Flamenco
Opens Fri., Sept 19 at Varsity. Not rated. 96 minutes.
One of the first films director Carlos Saura made was a short about flamenco, in 1955, and throughout his long career he’s continued to return to dance. He’s probably best known for the ’80s trio of flamenco films he made with choreographer Antonio Gades (Blood Wedding, Carmen, and El amor brujo), all with a strong narrative thread. But more recent films have treated dance and music separate from story, highlighting the kinetic drama without additional narrative. Flamenco, Flamenco (2010) is a series of individual performances reflecting the state of the art form today, from the traditional to the avant-garde.
The structure of the film is quite simple—it’s just a series of numbers, some featuring only musicians or dancers, some more elaborate. Apart from section titles, there’s no description or explanation; the dancing simply speaks for itself.
Instead of filming in a studio or a club, Saura built a platform in a soundstage and filled it with portraits of dancers—some from the past, others a figment of his imagination. Vittorio Storaro’s hyper-mobile camera slides through that gallery and around the performers. We rarely get the feeling that we’re watching from a theater seat. Instead we’re right next to the dancers, sometimes the direct focus of their attention. Traditional flamenco is performed in small quarters; Storaro and Saura have found a way to match that intimate feeling.
The film is rich with stellar performances by some of the most renowned people in the field, including Eva Yerbabuena (who dances a heart-wrenching solo in a downpour) and the teenage El Carpeta (the stage name of Manuel Fernandez Montoya, who rips through the footwork and turns of a bulerias like a fully mature artist). Israel Galvan works in a very different vein, challenging almost every convention in the art form, but doing so from a position of incredible facility. His command of tempo and shape is phenomenal in his solo “Silencio,” where his eccentric timing and unusual choices—e.g., tapping a rhythm on his teeth!—just underlines his total mastery.
But probably the sweetest moment in the film is an appearance by guitarist Paco de Lucia, who died last year. We’re close enough to see his phenomenal technique, but the rapport he has with the other musicians eclipses the pyrotechnics. Like the others who perform with him, we’re just thrilled to be there. Sandra Kurtz
PThe Guest
Opens Wed., Sept 17 at Pacific Place. Rated R. 99 minutes.
Whatever Adam Wingard is drinking, please keep ’em coming. The director’s most recent two features are uneven but brimming with nerve and invention: You’re Next (released here last year) upends the conventions of the home-invasion slasher movie and let viewers laugh through their gasps; and The Guest works increasingly daffy variations on the mysterious-stranger subgenre. In this case the stranger is an Afghanistan vet, David (Dan Stevens, a Downton Abbey refugee), who shows up at the front door of the Peterson home in Small Town, U.S.A. The Petersons have lost a son in battle, and David was with him at the end—indeed, David’s here looking in on the family because of a promise made at the hour of death. Or so he says. How many mysterious strangers can be trusted on such things?
We won’t give away the answer to that question, but Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett are clever at playing a certain kind of audience-engagement game. They know they’re working in a cheesy vein of ’80s-style storytelling. They know that we know that, too. So along with generating some creepy suspense and a handful of shock effects, they’re going to chuckle around the edges. It’s a tricky mix to get right, but for much of The Guest Wingard and Barrett hit a giddy note. Super-competent David wants to help the Petersons, to an alarming degree: He befriends adolescent Luke (Brendan Meyer) and stands down some bullies; he allows his hunkiness to bewitch teenage Anna (Maika Monroe); he instantly fulfills surrogate-son status for the dead man’s parents (Sheila Kelley and Leland Orser). The comic timing is right on, and the action scenes are potent.
Wingard may be a smartypants, and he pushes the movie’s climax over the top, but give him credit for getting a lot right. Casting, for one thing. The robotically handsome Stevens is ideal; Monroe looks like a future star; and Kelley and Orser are amusingly recognizable as early-’90s character actors. And the film’s subtext is going to look good 20 years from now, when people consider the pop culture spawned during the War on Terror. Whatever its surface fun, The Guest is also about what happens when you create a monster that spirals out of control. Robert Horton
Life of Crime
Opens Fri., Sept. 19 at Sundance Cinemas. Rated R. 99 minutes.
The best thing about Life of Crime is the cast, a lively combination of character types, scene-stealers, and one slumming superstar. And yet the movie feels like a community-theater walk-through. Despite the tentpole presence of Jennifer Aniston and its roots as an Elmore Leonard adaptation (it shares characters with Leonard’s Rum Punch, which Quentin Tarantino shot as Jackie Brown), Life of Crime is dialed-down and low-rent, lacking the bravado that might boost it a notch or two.
Aniston plays Mickey, weary trophy wife to Detroit bigwig Frank Dawson (Tim Robbins plays the role with greasy bonhomie and a Donald Trump haircut). Petty criminals Ordell (Yasiin Bey, who used to be called Mos Def) and Louis (John Hawkes, late of The Sessions) conspire to kidnap Mickey and collect a cool million off the secret stash Frank’s been skimming from his real-estate chicanery. Ordell and Louis were previously incarnated by Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro in Jackie Brown. Nothing against those stars, but Bey and Hawkes are at least as cued-in to the lowlife rhythms of Ordell and Louis’s haphazard scheme as the bigger-name actors.
Among the problems with this movie is that Leonard’s story has an ironic, Ruthless People-like stall built into the middle of it, which is easier to savor on the page than in a film. Life of Crime’s circa-1978 trappings also pale next to the juicy period blitz of American Hustle. And director Daniel Schechter works in such a modest key that his fondness for actors doesn’t get the structure it deserves.
Other players include Will Forte as Mickey’s lily-livered secret admirer (whose surprise appearance in the middle of the kidnapping leads to a funny subplot), Sons of Anarchy hair-beast Mark Boone Junior, and Isla Fisher as Frank’s conniving mistress. As for Aniston, the film doesn’t make enough room for her particular comic talents—and having to spend part of her role with her face covered by a mask doesn’t help. Hawkes and Bey are the core of the picture, and it would be fun to see them again in something underhanded again—an update of Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, perpetually one step behind the smarter people in the world. Robert Horton
Memphis
Runs Fri., Sept 19–Sun., Sept. 21 at SIFF Film Center. Not rated. 79 minutes.
It isn’t until 20 minutes into Tim Sutton’s movie that we actually hear the music of its main character, an enigmatic blues singer adrift in the titular city. Until then, we hear only the sounds of Memphis interspersed with disjointed snippets of songs, at most a creaky and catchy guitar riff building the slightest bit of momentum and then stopping suddenly. It’s an unnerving way to illuminate a story, but fitting, since Sutton’s protagonist appears to be dealing with creative block, unable to follow past success.
When the music does finally flow, it’s one of the aching songs of Willis Earl Beal, an actual musical outsider (here also named Willis). Subject of our July 9 cover story, now based in Lacey, Wash., Beal has become famous for his recalcitrant ways. Since the success of his debut album, 2012’s Acousmatic Sorcery, he rejected the music industry, dropped his record label, and moved from New York to the Northwest woods.
The Willis of Memphis seems poised to do the same. “Sometimes I wish I was a tree,” he tells two men urging him to get into the recording studio. This is the tension of the film. The larger world, seeing Willis’ “God-given” talent, urges him to make more music. As Sutton’s lingering camera reveals, the city of Memphis is filled with enough spirituality, vice, and love to serve as muse for this reclusive artist. But Willis—who tells us early that it is he alone who willed his success into being—is unable to focus long enough to make new music. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to give God, booze, or women the credit. It’s irresistible to ponder but difficult to tell, since the film offers only glimmers of context.
It isn’t just the shared name and withheld talent here that give this strange film the patina of documentary. Its style is raw and the camera unmoored—jumping indiscriminately, arrhythmically from scene to scene; training itself on nameless characters with unknown motivations; then wandering into the trees, as Willis would like to do. (The meandering, almost serial structure will be familiar to those who saw Sutton’s debut feature, Pavilion, at Northwest Film Forum last year.)
There is also a dip into insanity in a scene with Willis drunk, rolling in the street, screaming. But otherwise Memphis’ madness is confined within the mind of its hero: a disjointed mess containing some true genius, much like this film. Mark Baumgarten
