Tag: Carrie Coon

Widows (2018)

Sexism, racism and corruption get mixed in with crime drama in McQueen’s electric heist film

Director: Steve McQueen

Cast: Viola Davis (Veronica Rawlings), Michelle Rodriguez (Linda), Elizabeth Debicki (Alice), Cynthia Erivo (Belle), Colin Farrell (Jack Mulligan), Brian Tyree Henry (Jamal Manning), Daniel Kaluuya (Jatemme Manning), Jacki Weaver (Agnieska), Carrie Coon (Amanda), Robert Duvall (Tom Mulligan), Liam Neeson (Harry Rawlings), Jon Bernthal (Florek), Garret Dillahunt (Bash), Lukas Haas (David)

A getaway goes wrong and Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) and his criminal gang all wind-up dead and their loot burned up. Their last job was cleaning out the election fund of gangster-turned-electoral-candidate Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry). Manning believes he’s owed a debt by Harry’s widow Veronica (Viola Davis). On the hock for millions, Veronica has no choice but to recruit the widows of Harry’s gang to help her pull off the next job Harry planned: cleaning out the campaign fund of Manning’s electoral rival Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell).

Adapted from an 80s British TV mini-series, Widows has been run through Steve McQueen’s creative brain, emerging as a compelling, beautifully shot crime drama mixing social, racial and gender commentary with blistering action. It takes a traditionally masculine genre – the crime caper – and places at its heart a group of women motivated by desperation and survival rather than the lure of lucre.

What’s particularly interesting is that none of these women fit the bill of the sort of person you expect to arrange a daring heist. Viola Davis’ Veronica is a retired teachers’ union rep; Elizabeth Debicki an abuse victim, treated terribly by her husband and selfish mother; Michelle Rodriguez a shop owner desperately trying to give her kids a chance, despite her husband’s reckless gambling. Even the driver they hire, played by Cynthia Erivo, is a hairdresser and babysitter. These women are a world away from the ruthless criminals you’d expect to pull off this kind of operation.

It’s probably why they are routinely underestimated and patronised by men. Veronica is advised clear her debt by selling either everything she owns and disappear. As with the rest of the women, the world expects her to put up and shut up. These are women defined by their husbands and the expectation that their needs are subordinate to others’. Debicki’s Alice is all-but pushed into escort work by her demanding mother, while Rodriguez’s Linda is blamed by her mother-in-law for her husband’s death. But these women have a steely survival instinct that makes them determined and (eventually) ruthless enough to take this job on.

Davis is superb as a determined and morally righteous woman, whose principles are more flexible than she thinks. She efficiently (and increasingly sternly) applies her organisational skills to planning the heist, pushing her crew to adapt her own professionalism. Davis wonderfully underplays Veronica’s grief, not only at the loss of her husband but also the recent death of her son (shot by police officers while reaching to answer his phone behind the wheel of an expensive car – in front of a wall of Obama “Hope” posters, a truly striking visual image).

Her co-stars are equally impressive. Debicki has mastered the mix of vulnerability and strength behind characters like this (how many times has she played suffering, glamourous gangster molls?). Her Alice gains the self-belief to push back against those exploiting her. Rodriguez beautifully balances grief at the loss of her husband with fury at the financial hole he has left her in. Erivo gets the smallest role, but makes Bella dry, loyal and sharp. All four of them use the way men underestimate them – seeing them as widows, wives, weak or sex objects – to plan out their heist.

The reversal of gender expectations crosses over with the social political commentary McQueen wants to explore. This sometimes works a treat: the flashback to the shooting of Veronica’s son is shockingly effective. But the film’s dives into the Chicago political scene and the deep class divisions in the city don’t always have the impact they should. There is a marvellous shot – all in one take, mounted on the car bonnet – as Farrell’s Mulligan travels (in a few minutes) from a photo op in a slum back to his palatial family home, emphasising how closely extreme wealth and poverty sit side-by-side in America.

Both candidates are corrupted in different ways. Jamal Manning – a knife behind a smile from Brian Tyree Henry – is a thug talking the talk to line his pockets. Farrell’s Mulligan has more standards – and you wish for more with this fascinating put-upon son part on-the-take, part genuinely wanting to help. His domineering dad – an imperiously terrifying Robert Duvall, who wants to backseat drive his son in office – demeans his son, shouts racial slurs and bullies everyone around him. Politics: your choice is the latest off-spring of a semi-corrupt dynasty or a literal criminal.

But the film doesn’t quite find the room to explore these issues in quite as much detail as you feel it could: it’s a strong hinterland of inequality, but you want more. McQueen however, does have a gift for unique character details that speak volumes: the women’s operation is shadowed by an electric Daniel Kaluuya, as Manning’s calm yet psychotic brother, who listens to self-education podcasts on Black history and shoots people without a second thought. He, of course, underestimates the women as much as everyone else. That’s as much of a political statement as anything else: none of the men in this film seem to even begin to think that they could be in a world which is truly equal.

The film adds a late act reveal that doesn’t quite work – and the film as a whole is trying to do a little too much – but it’s a confirmation of what a gifted and superb film-maker Steve McQueen is. McQueen shoots even conventional scenes in unique and interesting ways – check out his brilliant use of mirrors throughout – uses editing superbly to set tone and is brilliant at drawing the best from talented actors. Widows is crammed full of terrifically staged scenes and gallops along with pace and excitement. It’s a fine example of a great director turning a genre film into something deeper.

The Post (2017)

Hanks and Streep bust Watergate in advance in Spielberg’s too dry The Post

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Meryl Streep (Katharine Graham), Tom Hanks (Ben Bradlee), Sarah Paulson (Tony Bradlee), Bob Odenkirk (Ben Bagdikian), Tracy Letts (Fritz Beebe), Bradley Whitford (Arthur Parsons), Bruce Greenwood (Robert McNamara), Matthew Rhys (Daniel Ellsberg), Alison Brie (Lally Graham), Carrie Coon (Meg Greenfield), Jesse Plemons (Roger Clark), David Cross (Howard Simons), Michael Stuhlbarg (AM Rosenthal)

There are few things newspaper journalists like more than old-fashioned films about the glory days of the press, showing journalists to be uniformly noble, upstanding, seekers of truth. There are few things Hollywood likes more than films the feature Streep and Hanks and/or are directed by Spielberg. As such, it’s not really a surprise that The Post received laudatory reviews, or that it crept into the Best Picture list of 2017 (it only got one other nomination, inevitably for Streep).

The film covers the Washington Post’s decision in 1971 to publish details from the Pentagon Papers, originally leaked to the New York Timesby former Defence Department official Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys). The papers detail the American government’s deceptive public messages on Vietnam, a war they knew to be unwinnable for almost ten years. The Nixon administration has blocked publication in the New York Times, but when the Post gets the same papers, owner and publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) have a difficult decision to make – suppress the truth or publish and face crippling legal penalties that could destroy the business.

The Post is quite similar in some ways to Spielberg’s far more successful Lincoln – a po-faced history lesson, told with panache, but essentially a dry civics lesson which draws some neat, but a little too on point, parallels with current events. Certainly it’s clear whom we are meant to be thinking of when the camera shows a shadowy Nixon in long shot from outside the White House, ranting into a phone in the Oval office late at night (admittedly, in a nice touch, the film uses the actual audio from Nixon’s Oval Office recordings). The parallels between press freedom and the spin of politics (or the charges of Fake News flung at any story the powers that be don’t like) are pretty clear. They are also pretty obvious.

Part of the film’s problem is that, unlike All the President’s Men (where the story covers full investigative journalism and Woodward and Bernstein need to piece the story together against the odds), this film hands everything to the journalists on a plate. It doesn’t even try to put a puzzle or some form of mystery before the viewers. Instead, the history is painstakingly (and drily) explained to give us the context, then each stage of the Post getting the papers is shown in simple and rather undramatic steps. There isn’t a sense – despite Bob Odenkirk’s deputy editor doing a bit of legwork – that the Post needed to work that hard to land the story. Crikey, you can see why The Times (who really did the crack the story) were a bit pissed at the film stealing their glory.

Once the papers are in the Post’s hands, the story almost immediately jumps to one night in which the papers are read and the board and the journalists squabble over whether they can legally publish or not. After that we get a swift coda where everything turns out fine, backs are slapped and the Supreme Court says it’s all good. There just isn’t quite enough drama. In fact we feel like we are watching a footnote, rather than the real story, which seems to be happening on the margins (for starters, the scandal of government lies on Vietnam, how The New York Times broke the story, and the Watergate break-in, a recreation of which rather clumsily closes the picture).

And I get that the film is trying to tell a story about how important a free press is and, yes, it’s great – but despite having a number of characters talk at length about this, I’m not sure what the film really tells us that we don’t already know. Instead it moves methodically but swiftly through events, carefully telling us what happened but never turning it into a really compelling story. Pizzazz for its own sake is not a strength, but a little more oomph in delivery here might have helped.

Alongside this, the film also wants to make points about the struggle of a woman in a man’s world and the institutional sexism (that probably hasn’t changed that much) of many boardrooms. Meryl Streep’s Katharine Graham – having inherited the company after the suicide of her husband – is a brow-beaten woman struggling to impose herself in a room of men whom she feels inferior to. Even this plotline though feels slightly rushed – we have Graham cowering in a boardroom meeting and struggling with paperwork, next thing we know she hesitantly makes the call to publish and is facing down her chief opponent (Bradley Whitford, rolling out another of his arrogant men of privilege). It’s all a bit rushed, perfunctory and all as expected – and Streep can clearly play this sort of role standing on her head.

But then the whole film has this slight comfort job feeling about it – everyone clearly invested in the story and the importance of the film’s points, but clearly without being challenged by the content. By the end of the film we’re are awash with clichés, from newspaper print rolling through old machines, to Graham walking through a crowd of admiring women outside the Supreme Court. The interesting and well assembled cast don’t get enough to do, with many of them feeling slightly wasted, not least Sarah Paulson in a thankless role as “the wife”.

The Post wants to be a big, world-changing film that talks about our modern age. Instead it’s a very middle brow, middle of the road history lesson that flatters to deceive, entertaining enough just about, but immediately forgettable.

Gone Girl (2014)

Rosamund Pike is the Gone Girl leaving husband Ben Affleck in a difficult mess

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Ben Affleck (Nick Dunne), Rosamund Pike (Amy Elliott Dunne), Neil Patrick Harris (Desi Collings), Tyler Perry (Tanner Bolt), Carrie Coon (Margo Dunne), Kim Dickens (Detective Rhonda Boney), Patrick Fugit (Officer James Gilpin), Missi Pyle (Ellen Abbott), Emily Ratajkowski (Andie Fitzgerald), Casey Wilson (Noelle Hawthorne), Lola Kirke (Greta), Boyd Holbrook (Jeff), Sela Ward (Sharon Schieber), Lisa Banes (Marybeth Elliott), David Clennon (Rand Elliott)

In our modern media age, we’ve got massive expectations for how people are meant to behave. With so much of our perception of life filtered through the internet and films we’ve seen, we are reassured when we see behaviours we expect to see, and disconcerted when we see those we haven’t been trained to see. Not distraught enough at your wife going missing? Well you must have done it then!

That’s the problem that faces Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) in this chilling, intricate adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling book. Nick’s wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing in mysterious circumstances, possibly a kidnap, possibly a kidnapping gone wrong. The case becomes a media sensation, but the problem is Nick just isn’t expressive enough, won’t play the role of weeping husband. Instead he’s calm, distant and polite. So naturally rumour swirls that he did it – particularly after more and more manufactured evidence rears up to suggest he might have done. But does Amy have darker secrets than anyone might even suspect? Well to say any more would be a spoiler.

Fincher’s film is a tour-de-force of deliberately cold, polished looking perfection – which is designed to reflect back the surface perfection of the Dunnes’ deeply flawed marriage. Fincher’s film is in many ways a jet black social satire, using its almost outlandish shocks and twists to involve the audience in that “oh-no-they-didn’t!” way, in the same way that the Dunne media story fascinates the people in the movie.

“What have we done to each other?” Nick asks in voiceover early in the film, and it’s the question the film tackles obliquely: how much of the flashbacks to the relationship we see between Amy and Nick is real and how much springs from unreliable narration from Amy’s diary? Two handsome people living the American dream, but how much of it is an invented or projected narrative? Is their whole life a performance they are living for themselves and for others? Poor old Amy is even already semi-fictionalised person, a parents using her life as inspiration for a beloved children’s book character Amazing Amy.

So when Amy goes missing, the strain on Nick is very different from what you might expect. Rather than being consumed with grief, he feels wearied and dutiful about continuing a performance of a marriage which has long since ended. Nick’s actually too honest for this world – he won’t put on a show of how he is supposed to feel, he can only try not to make too much of a show of what he really feels. The mystery that builds around his and Amy’s marriage is born in this blunt honesty, of someone who won’t be what people want him to be. Of course that doesn’t stop Nick from being selfish or even a whiner.

Fincher mixes this intelligent commentary on society with, to be honest, the sort of bizarre extremism and bunny-boiling antics that make you unsurprised to hear he was inspired by Paul Verhoeven while making the film. It’s a film that shifts gears notably in the second half to become an increasingly gothic horror-thriller. A lot of this is powered also by Rosamund Pike’s excellent performance as Amy, a woman who seems almost completely cryptically unknowable, whose whole life has been a performance, and for whom taking on a series of roles and personalities is clearly not a challenge. Needless to say the person she turns out to be, and what she is capable of, is completely different from what the film leads you to expect.

It’s no surprise that a relationship featuring a person like Amy could go as south as the Dunnes’ has, but then Nick is hardly a saint either. Ben Affleck is just about perfect casting as a sort of All-American charmer gone to seed, a prickly fellow who wants privacy but also partly grows to enjoy the drama that surrounds him, once he works out the game he is playing. Fincher’s deliberately distant, smoothly clean-surfaced film frames modern day aesthetic perfection all round this seemingly dream couple.

The whole film is a nightmare vision of a love match gone wrong, of the after-effects of a beautiful story that has spiralled out into disappointment and everyday mundane life. And that struggle to keep the romance going in the familiar is at least something many of us can understand right? So it’s enjoyable to see that matched up with the freaky, semi-gothic blood and guts the film serves up in the second half, and the almost surreal Grand Guignol plot developments that power that half of the film (shot and scripted by Fincher and Flynn with a brilliant mixture of tension, horror and black comic delight at its extremity).

Like many Fincher films, there are several delightful performances. Pike is a revelation in a gift of a role, Affleck very good channelling his life lived in the spotlight. Carrie Coon is a stand-out as Nick’s exasperated, down-to-earth and loving twin sister. Kim Dickens is authorative and questioning as the police detective investigating the case, and Tyler Perry assured and cool as a hot-shot lawyer. Playing way against type, Neil Patrick Harris is pretty unforgettable as a slightly self-satisfied rich kid still holding a candle for Amy after all these years.

But the main success of the film is the whipper-sharp coldness of its execution, the cool tension Fincher ekes out of every moment, and the violent, Vertigo-ish obsession he gets out of every moment. Gone Girl works because it’s at first a chilling what-if story of a man in a media storm, which becomes a sort of black comedy so extreme that it pulls a delighted audience in to gasp at audacious characters getting away with outrageous things. As a black comic thriller it’s delightful.rela