Supernova (2021) * * *

 

Directed by:  Harry Macqueen

Starring:  Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci

Sam (Firth) and Tusker (Tucci) are a longtime couple taking what will likely amount to a final road trip together.   Tusker is suffering from dementia.   He is himself most days, but has a tendency to wander off and forget things.   These are two men who have been together so long they know each other's rhythms and are beyond comfortable with each other's full being.   Tusker wants Sam, a renowned concert pianist, to perform a gig somewhere in the English countryside and renew his career.   Sam wants Tusker, a writer, to continue writing, but as the illness progresses we find this may not be possible.

Supernova documents in moving and emotional fashion the decision Tusker makes to commit suicide before he doesn't remember who he is or Sam is anymore.   He doesn't want to be a burden to Sam, while Sam fully wants to be burdened.   Or so he thinks he does.   One of the best scenes in the final act of Supernova is how Sam stumbles across Tusker's plans and how they deal with the decision honestly and with scorching truth.   Sam tries in vain to talk Tusker out of suicide, but he knows Tusker won't budge.   

Firth and Tucci are superb.   I'm tempted to say, oh heck I'll just say it...as usual.   Supernova is a basically a movie in which the leads are together nearly all the time and are constantly speaking.   In a short span, we learn their history through dialogue.   We never doubt their love for each other.   In retrospect, the first few minutes may be a mite too talky, but this establishes the comfort these men have with each other.   This makes the final moments so heartbreaking and shattering.   

Are we witnessing a premature end to their life together?   Is Tusker perhaps being too proud?   Or is Tusker being pragmatic while Sam is being romantic?    Is Tusker being selfish or selfless?   Supernova sees things from all angles and the answers can only come from Sam and Tusker.    The film, written and directed by Harry Macqueen, is roughly ninety minutes but could've shaved off about ten minutes to make it even more taut.   But no matter, because the emotional payoffs are so real they seem almost like this is happening to people we know.  

I Care A Lot (2021) * * *

 

Directed by:  J Blakeson

Starring:  Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Dianne Wiest, Alicia Witt, Eiza Gonzalez, Chris Messina

Marla Grayson (Pike) is a con artist looking to be the taker and not the taken in life.   She claims to care a lot, but she really just takes a lot.   Working with a team of like-minded lowlifes, Marla throws unwitting senior citizens into nursing homes, takes over as conservator legally in court, and then loots their assets while preventing family from seeing them.   It's a cold scheme which takes nerve, which Marla has in abundance.   One day, a doctor in on the con (Witt) proposes a well-off elderly patient named Jennifer Peterson (Wiest) to be the next victim of the scam.   Jennifer is a "cherry", meaning she has no family or heirs and has tons of dough.   Marla's eyes widen.   Jennifer is the next innocent woman to be chucked into a nursing home and locked away forever.   It doesn't take long for Marla to realize she did this to one too many seniors, especially when a Russian mobster named Roman (Dinklage) takes an interest in the case.

Roman sends his shark attorney to Marla's swanky office with a proposition.   We give you cash, you give up conservatorship of Jennifer, and maybe you'll live.  Otherwise, things will get ugly quick.  Marla refuses and soon things get ugly like the attorney promised.    How nasty things get I will leave you to discover.   One of the charms of the darkly comic I Care A Lot is seeing how far Marla will go to save her con, while seeing how far Roman will go to stop it, or at least get Jennifer out.  

Pike relishes this role and it shows in her devious smile.   Unlike Pike's most famous role to date in Gone Girl (2014), Marla gleefully displays her sociopathic tendencies for all to see.   She isn't out for revenge against anyone, just enrichment for herself and her partner/lover Frankie (Gonzalez),   If Marla has any Achilles heel, so to speak, it's her obvious love for Frankie.   Roman plays straight to that.  Dinklage and Wiest provide rich supporting performances as people who are not what they seem.   At least Marla lays her cards on the table.   She actually proposes that her way is at least more fair and quasi-legal.  

I Care A Lot almost ventures into absurdity and self-parody when Marla and Roman try to kill the other.   Instead of putting a bullet in someone's head and calling it a day, they set up elaborate plans to make the deaths look like accidents.   But then I Care A Lot rights itself with a couple of late developments you don't see coming.   In a way, Marla gets what she wants at long last...and deserves.  

Breach (2007) * * *

 

Directed by:  Billy Ray

Starring:  Ryan Phillippe, Chris Cooper, Laura Linney, Kathleen Quinlan, Caroline Dhavernas, Dennis Haysbert, Gary Cole, Bruce Davison

Breach tells the story of how traitorous FBI agent Robert Hanssen was finally captured by his own agency in the early days of the George W. Bush administration.   What makes Breach all the more involving isn't the covert cat-and-mouse game between Hanssen (Cooper) and his clerk Eric O' Neill (Phillippe), a wannabe FBI agent installed to do intel on Hanssen, but how Hanssen is presented as an enigma even to himself.   A deeply religious man; Hanssen was convicted of selling intelligence secrets to the Russians for sixteen years while working for the FBI.   There are moments he clearly had remorse about his duplicity.   He went to church every day, loved his wife and grandchildren, yet sneakily recorded video of he and his wife having sex and shipped the tapes off to friends.   Cooper plays Hanssen as a man full of dichotomies whose inner turmoil is hidden by a stern, grizzled face.   It's quite a performance and it is the glue to holding Breach together.  

We first meet not Hanssen but Eric as he works his way up the ladder to FBI agent.   He is assigned to perform as Hanssen's clerk by Agent Kate Burroughs (Linney), who tells Eric they are keeping tabs on him because he's a "sexual deviant" and they are building a case against him.   Hanssen, an FBI lifer months away from mandatory retirement age, was assigned an "assistant to the assistant director" type of job in a tiny office with no windows.   Hanssen is insulted and he has no qualms about letting his superiors know about it.   Eric quickly intuits the case against Hanssen isn't about his sex life, but about something deeper.   Burroughs then lets Eric in on the real deal:  Hanssen is suspected to be a traitor, but no case could ever be made against him.   

Hanssen is at first gruff and no-nonsense with Eric, but gradually softens towards him because both share similar religious backgrounds.   Hanssen goes to church daily, while Eric only goes occasionally.  Eric is married to Juliana (Dhavernas), who grew up in East Germany and begins to resent Eric's secrecy and long hours away from home.   Breach's biggest weakness is those tired scenes stressing Eric's deteriorating marriage and home life.   We've seen those all before.   

Phillippe is a capable actor in an underwritten role.   Most of the juicy parts go to Cooper, who plays the more fascinating person anyway.   As the movie moves along, we sense Hanssen is dog tired of this game he plays.   Capture may be a welcome relief for him because he can then stop living a double life which has weighed on him for years.   We sense years of being an underappreciated asset to the FBI drove him to his crimes.   Cooper has a countenance that suggests multitudes of possibilities.   He's tough to read and way too smart to be played by a novice like Eric.   Perhaps he lets his guard down because he's sick of having to keep it up. 

Breach moves along briskly, only slowing whenever Juliana and Eric have a perfunctory fight (which is once or twice too often for my taste), but the suspense elements still play well.   We see a Robert Hanssen whose next moves are a mystery to himself and especially to others.   It's as if we hardly knew the man.  

Land (2021) * * *

Directed by:  Robin Wright

Starring:  Robin Wright, Demian Bichir, Sarah Dawn Pledge, Kim Dickens

Edee (Wright) keenly feels unshakable grief stemming from the death of her husband and son in a manner we learn about later.   She is tired of having to deal with life and moves up to a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere.   She has no idea how to live off the land, hunt, build a fire, or repair the dilapidated cabin.   If I didn't know any better, I'd say Edee was slowly trying to commit suicide.   During the brutal winter, the starving Edee nearly freezes to death before being rescued by a kindly passerby named Miguel (Bichir) and a local nurse named Alawa (Pledge).   Edee is brought back from the brink of death, although she wouldn't have minded if she perished, but soon Miguel is teaching her how to hunt, fish, fix things, and actually live.   This friendship is at the heart of Land and its resonance helps sidestep some fundamental plot questions.

Grief is something which will inevitably touch every life at some point.   Edee's seems to be worse than most.   She is unable to cope with her sister Emma (Dickens) who suggests she see a therapist.   When Edee lights out for the mountains and purchases the cabin, she coldly throws her cell phone in the trash as Emma is trying to reach her.   Edee wants no connection to the outside world.   Is she trying to process her emotions?   Or punish herself?    Miguel is not without his own demons and secrets.   They find they need each other, but thankfully that need doesn't lead to a perfunctory romance.   Edee and Miguel find purpose in each other and a reason to keep on living a while longer.

Land looks beautiful even when depicting harsh elements.   Edee is as physically remote as she is emotionally.   Some can live in such conditions.   Edee isn't one of them.   Is she really even trying?  The desolation of Land in all of its forms is not easy to swallow.   I sometimes felt she was paying such an extreme price for her pain that it was difficult to accept.   Thankfully Miguel and Alawa arrive and restore some sanity.   It's a tribute to Wright, the actor and director, that Land inspires us to care enough to hope Edee finds herself happy again.   Bichir provides warmth and humanity at the best possible time and when we learn his full story he inspires plenty of sympathy.   

Wright tackles the sometimes difficult material with confidence as a first-time director.   It has issues, such as whether Emma believed Edee was dead all this time and how cruel Edee was to her for moving away without a word of explanation.   With that being said, Land is a thoughtful effort with themes many probably wouldn't have the courage to touch.    

The Conversation (1974) * * *

 

Directed by:  Francis Ford Coppola

Starring:  Gene Hackman, Allen Garfield, John Cazale, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Teri Garr, Elizabeth MacRae

Harry Caul's life is a dichotomy.   He excels at surveillance and delivering the goods for his clients, but what is on the tapes could lead to others being hurt or worse.   Six years earlier, his surveillance may have led to the deaths of two people and he is haunted by it.   He records a conversation between a man and a woman in a crowded San Francisco park.   They may be lovers or perhaps conspirators.   We hear the conversation in fragments.   Are they plotting something or are they in the midst of an affair?   As more of the conversation is revealed, the less we learn.  

Caul (Hackman) is an intensely private man whose connections to others is limited.  He has a girlfriend (Garr) who he visits less and less frequently than she would like.   He isn't married, so what is keeping him from forming a relationship with her deeper than a few visits?   He lives alone in an apartment, but is dismayed to find his landlord entered to leave him a birthday present.   The irony of a surveillance expert complaining about invasion of privacy is thick.  

Maybe he has his reasons for not opening up.  When he attends a convention, he brings back some of his competitors and a hooker to his office.   The hooker plays him, he opens up to her, and he awakes to find his recordings stolen.   Caul wanted to delay bringing those tapes to his client for fear of a repeat of six years ago.   His client's shadowy assistant (Ford) seems to be pulling the strings, or worse keeping tabs on Caul.

Hackman speaks very little, as if he is afraid to admit something he doesn't want others to know.   His mistrust of others is seen verbally and non-verbally.   He'd rather hide in a corner than mingle.  The movie doesn't judge him.   We gradually learn he has his reasons stemming from an unhappy childhood coupled with a job he has the curse of being good at but despises. 

The Conversation suffers from a payoff which doesn't match the intensity of the buildup.   Does what happen occur in Caul's head or was it part of a plot?   Is he paranoid or did something really happen?  The Conversation has a surprise ending in which someone winds up dead, but we don't know how or why.   We hear the bulk of the taped conversation in its context, and we are still baffled.   With that being said, the first seventy-five to eighty percent of The Conversation is an involving character study of a man who wishes he weren't involved in any of this. 

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Shaka King

Starring:  Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen, Dominique Fishback, Lil Rel Howery

Judas and the Black Messiah features strong performances in a movie which doesn't keep up with them.  I can't pinpoint why it lacks juice.   Daniel Kaluuya gives an impressively balanced performance of a Black Panther who doesn't simply give provocative speeches, but understands strengthening the Black community is the only way to achieve equality.   Kaluuya's J. Fred Hampton can "sell salt to slugs" says car thief/FBI agent impersonator turned informant William O'Neal (Stanfield) to his FBI handler Roy Mitchell (Plemons).  O'Neal isn't wrong and Mitchell is unimpressed.  Mitchell is under orders from J. Edgar Hoover (Sheen) to have Hampton and other Black Panthers arrested because he sees them as the next radical threat.  

The pieces are in place for a fiery movie which somehow invokes mild outrage at best.   O'Neal must betray one of his own in order to stay out of prison, causing expected inner conflicts within O'Neal which haunts him the rest of his days.   In the epilogue, we learn O'Neal committed suicide after the premiere on PBS' Eyes on the Prize 2 in 1990, in which O'Neal was interviewed.   Hampton did not have the chance to live until 1990.   He was shot and killed in 1969 following a police raid which was really an assassination.  O'Neal assisted in that murder by feeding information to the FBI about Hampton's every move. 

What went wrong?  Why isn't there three and a half or four stars attached to the top of this review instead of a respectful but underwhelming two and a half stars?   This type of story has been told before as recently as Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2019), in which a confidant and friend of Jimmy Hoffa is forced to be his executioner.   The relationship between Hampton and O'Neal is solid, but not deep.  They aren't together enough to form a strong bond.  The movie might've done better to flesh out the tug of war between O'Neal and Mitchell, who in one scene invites O'Neal into his home and offers him the good Scotch.   Could there be an added dimension to their relationship?  This, however, doesn't develop either.   O'Neal meets with Mitchell and expresses his dismay over being a rat (or worse), and Mitchell has to smoothly keep him at bay or outright threaten him with prison for car theft and impersonating an FBI agent while doing so.   This begins to be repetitive..  Perhaps prison might've worked out better for O'Neal in hindsight

Hampton is fleshed out more as he forges alliances in Chicago with other groups representing the downtrodden, including one with White supremacist leanings.   To Hampton, poor is poor, and that's what they all should be fighting against.   Hampton also is about to become a father and is allowed to be seen as hard-nosed, yet gentler when dealing with his girlfriend (Fishback).   Kaluuya will likely be Oscar-nominated in the Supporting Actor category, but let's face it:  He's a lead and the more compelling person which Judas and the Black Messiah only spends part of the time exploring. 

Happiest Season (2020) * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Clea DuVall

Starring:  Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Victor Garber, Mary Steenburgen, Alison Brie, Mary Holland, Aubrey Plaza, Daniel Levy

The Happiest Season has the feel of a Hallmark Christmas movie except for the A-list cast and the inclusion of a lesbian couple in the forefront.   This rom-com is saccharine, sterile, occasionally involving, and ultimately you are at a loss to remember much about it the next day...or even the next hour.  Fortunately, the plot is easy to follow and everything is neatly resolved in the end.   There is a certain level of comfort in that.   If you expect anything else, you are watching the wrong movie.

The movie begins with a deliriously happy couple, Abby (Stewart) and Harper (Davis) enjoying the Christmas season in their idyllic town.   They kiss, they declare their love for each other, and Harper invites Abby to spend Christmas with her family.   This all sounds delightful and Abby picks out a wedding ring so she can propose to Harper on Christmas Day.   However, and there's always a however, Harper confesses on the ride up she has yet to tell her parents that she is gay.   How to handle this dilemma?   Abby will pose as her straight roommate who wants to spend Christmas with a family since her parents died when she was nineteen.   Abby reluctantly agrees after Harper promises to tell her parents "after Christmas".   Fair enough, but Complications Ensue, as are wont to happen in movies like The Happiest Season.  

One issue is Harper's father Ted (Garber) wants to run for mayor and Harper thinks having a lesbian daughter would kill his chances of winning.   Another is Harper's mother Tipper (Steenburgen), who tries to keep everything classy.  Another is the presence of Harper's former boyfriend Connor, who clearly wants her back and has no clue she is gay, and Harper's secret high school girlfriend Riley (Plaza), who Harper disavowed when their cover was nearly blown in high school.   In a refreshing twist, Riley is not a vengeance-seeking woman scorned, but someone who intuits Harper's real relationship with Abby and lends a sympathetic ear.   Riley is clearly still saddened by Harper's treachery and fears Abby may experience it some day when the chips are down.

There are other siblings with their own problems, which are more easily resolved than Harper's and Abby's, and subplots the movie could frankly do without.   The actors provide as much appeal as they can muster with stock characters, even though Daniel Levy's role as Abby's customary gay friend John is not a million miles removed from his Schitt's Creek's David Rose.   They make us care more than we should, even though The Happiest Season reminds us so much of a Hallmark movie that we keep waiting for the commercial breaks.