Vox - NYFF 2019: New York Film Festival news and movie reviews https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2019-11-27T15:28:14-05:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/206518952019-11-27T15:28:14-05:002019-11-27T15:28:14-05:00Mobsters, Teamsters, guilt, and salvation: Martin Scorsese’s terrific The Irishman
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<img alt="A scene from the movie “The Irishman” shows Joe Pesci sitting at a bar and Robert De Niro standing behind the bar." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jSRZZnOo3-ES5Iuc0G-Hr0UxW2A=/95x0:5471x4032/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65343793/IRISHMAN_UNIT_FIRSTLOOK_2rev_rgb.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro in <em>The Irishman.</em> | Niko Tavernise / NETFLIX</figcaption>
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<p>Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci headline a long, winding movie that’s well worth the watch.</p> <p id="zDMs3s">Late in <em>The Irishman</em>, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) says that “you don’t know how fast time goes by until you get there,” and there’s just a twinkle of irony mixed into the melancholy. After all, by then, the movie is past the three-hour mark. (It ultimately tops out at 209 minutes.) </p>
<p id="E5C9E0">But that’s sort of the point. Time telescopes in Martin Scorsese’s newest movie, shifting back and forth through decades as old, wistful Frank narrates the tale of his life as a hitman for crime syndicate boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and then for Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino, who has somehow never worked with Scorsese before now). Which of course means the film rightfully will be compared to earlier Scorsese movies, like 1973’s <em>Mean Streets</em> and 1990’s <em>Goodfellas</em>, and not just because of the subject matter; in <em>The Irishman</em>, the director reunites with some of his longest-running collaborators from those films, including De Niro, Pesci, and Harvey Keitel. </p>
<p id="oLQh56">Like those two movies — <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/11/26/20975991/scorsese-career-god-sacred-profane-irishman-netflix-streets-bull-innocence-last-temptation">and all of Scorsese’s work, really</a> — <em>The Irishman</em> is also about guilt, sin, and redemption. But with its lengthy runtime, this one has space to lean in two different tonal directions. <em>The Irishman</em> has both the frenetic swagger of his mob movies and the more contemplative gut wrench of his most spiritual films, like 1988’s <em>The Last Temptation of Christ</em> and his most recent film, 2016’s <em>Silence</em>. </p>
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<p id="VJ0kVu">And the movie has the maturity of an older man’s perspective, an eye cast backward on a full life. It is lively and wry and very funny, but at times it also feels like a confession, a plea for grace, not just from its protagonist but from the filmmaker himself. </p>
<p id="U1sZ0S">Frank’s story is long and packed full of anecdotes that are always terribly fun, if sometimes aimless. This isn’t one coherent narrative as much as the recounting of a life, with the twists and turns life takes that defy tidy storytelling. It’s crowded with the figures who occupied his attention ever since he was a young man finding his way into Bufalino’s good graces. That happens partly as a result of a chance encounter with his union attorney (Ray Romano), who turns out to be Bufalino’s cousin. His work as a hitman and a fixer with Bufalino becomes a gig as one of Hoffa’s most trusted friends and aides, and Frank’s life is intertwined with both men. For a while, they’re on top of the world. And then — thanks largely to the machinations of history — things start changing for them.</p>
<p id="WmKzxh">There’s a lot in <em>The Irishman</em> that evokes Scorsese’s earlier work, from the way characters talk and act and dress to the occasional bursts of bloody violence. (Steven Zaillian’s screenplay is based on Charles Brandt’s 2004 book <em>I Heard You Paint Houses</em>, which details what the real-life Frank told Brandt about Hoffa’s infamous 1975 disappearance; Hoffa was pronounced dead seven years later when his body failed to materialize. The titular “paint” on houses is not, well, paint — though it’s certainly red.)</p>
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<img alt="A scene from The Irishman" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/n8jydBmqeUAQUMaUOrhzU3k8qGE=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19239925/IRISHMAN_UNIT_FIRSTLOOK_1_rgb.jpg">
<cite>Niko Tavernise/Netflix</cite>
<figcaption>Lots of excitement.</figcaption>
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<p id="KNR2FP">In its first act, the film can be tedious, because it gives very little indication of why exactly we’re watching these men do their thing other than Scorsese thinks we should be. (The purpose does become clear, but in a way that will only reward the patient.) The long runtime — clearly part of the appeal of the film’s eventual home being Netflix, where a movie can be as long or as short as you want, especially if you’re Martin Scorsese — means that scenes have more breathing room than we’re accustomed to seeing. Technically, they could be “tightened” up, perhaps by trimming out some of the dialogue or reaction shots, or removing parts that don’t fit into a more streamlined plot.</p>
<aside id="C2T47M"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Martin Scorsese has spent his entire career searching for God","url":"https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/11/26/20975991/scorsese-career-god-sacred-profane-irishman-netflix-streets-bull-innocence-last-temptation"}]}'></div></aside><p id="1gLguY">But the near-bagginess of the film is part of its initial<strong> </strong>charm. And by the end, it becomes important. <em>The Irishman</em>’s long arc (which involves the use of largely unobtrusive de-aging technology) means the film follows Frank and his associates long past when the movie usually ends, with triumph or failure. The film instead takes a distinct turn away from rat-a-tat plotting and revenge toward a frankly stunning, contemplative movement. The bluster and scheming of middle-aged men eventually gives way to age, to losing people one by one, and to consequences for life’s choices. </p>
<p id="gRyKf3">Suddenly, it becomes very important to realize we’ve been listening to Frank narrate his story. </p>
<h3 id="8WISyx">
<em>The Irishman</em> is Frank’s version of his life’s story — until the movie reinvents itself</h3>
<p id="tY8QsV">For much of <em>The Irishman</em>, the women are at the margins — wives and daughters, always around, rarely saying anything. This isn’t atypical in Scorsese’s work, which rarely centers on women. The worlds he makes movies about are built by men, for men. They see women as beloved and beautiful accessories, maybe tangentially helpful, sometimes irrational irritations. Sometimes, the woman is just the nuisance who makes you pull the car over every hour on a road trip for a smoke break.</p>
<p id="RDG2od">But <em>The Irishman</em> uses Frank’s perspective on the women in his life to remind us that his myopia has blinded him to the truth about himself. One of the stranger parts of Frank’s story is the barely glancing interest — just a line or two — that he gives to leaving his wife for a waitress, and a shrugging explanation he gives to Russell for why his divorce couldn’t possibly be affecting his children. (The two women get along like gangbusters, he says; there’s no problem there at all, see?) </p>
<p id="EO5ouk">Similarly, the role that Frank’s daughter Peggy (played as a child by Lucy Gallina and an adult by Anna Paquin) plays in the film feels weird, for a while. She’s only one of several daughters, but she’s also the one most important to him. She mistrusts Russell, but she <em>loves</em> Jimmy. Scorsese makes a point of directing our attention toward how Peggy watches her father and his associates, taking in what they’re doing and quietly making her own decisions. But she never, at least in Frank’s memory, tells him what she’s thinking.</p>
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<img alt="Robert DeNiro in The Irishman." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/85x-of8s2CYfK7lLXhCe-dzIGYw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19239905/irishman2.jpg">
<cite>Netflix</cite>
<figcaption>Robert De Niro in <em>The Irishman.</em>
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<p id="hBVNdw">So late in the film, when Peggy has stopped talking to her father altogether, Frank asks another daughter (Marin Ireland) to help him reach her. And it’s an eye-opening moment, both for Frank and for us in the audience, who have been watching the story through Frank’s perspective. “You don’t know what it was like for us,” she tells him, visible frustration on her face and tears in her eyes. When he thought he was protecting his daughters, they were afraid to tell him about anything that happened to them lest he mete out swift and excessively violent judgment. And so they were less protected. His perception of himself and of what he was doing for his family didn’t match reality. It was just that: his perception of himself.</p>
<p id="LsbQtS">That realization, with others, starts to nudge Frank toward something like self-examination. And given Scorsese’s long proclivity toward looking for meaning in Catholic symbolism, Frank’s own Catholicism starts to resurface. The movie’s other unofficial theme might be the Biblical injunction that the wages of sin is death — frequently we’re introduced to a person just long enough for their date and means of death to flash on screen — and when your life is defined by helping others meet their death, you start to get thoughtful when you approach your own. The older Frank gets, the more people he loses, the more he watches the men he once idolized fading away, the more he struggles to understand how his life of murder and extortion squares with the possibility of an afterlife. </p>
<p id="SBZ9FD">He breaks bread and drinks grape juice with Russell (in a scene that’s also reminiscent of a famous <em>Goodfellas</em> scene). He tells a priest that he’s not sure if he’s sorry for anything he’s done, and the priest gently reminds him that we can feel sorry or we can <em>choose</em> to feel sorry. We see the rare flicker of his self-doubt and the guilt he feels for acts of betrayal. And when the priest prays with Frank that God will “help us see ourselves as you see us,” there’s a lot riding on that prayer.</p>
<p id="twudWt">An aging filmmaker with a long, rich, full history of examining crime and sin and death might rightly land on these themes at this point in his career. The final minutes of <em>The Irishman</em> contrast starkly with the start of the film, because that is how our lives play out. What matters at the end is who we loved and how we loved them, and whether we treated them like they mattered. And the film leaves open the question we all face: If we messed that part up, what, in the end, was life really worth?</p>
<p id="HtsY40">The Irishman <em>premiered at the New York Film Festival on September 27. It will open in limited theaters on November 1 and premiere on Netflix on November 27.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/27/20887589/irishman-review-netflix-scorsese-deniro-pacinoAlissa Wilkinson2019-09-13T16:00:00-04:002019-09-13T16:00:00-04:00The ferocious, chilling Parasite is an essential thrill ride about social inequality
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<img alt="Park So-dam and Choi Woo-sik sit close to one another on the floor of a bathroom while each stares at their phone in the movie “Parasite.”" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YGftksYaWHbvICr7s5NM-f-BgC0=/143x0:943x600/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65242100/parasite3.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Park So-dam and Choi Woo-sik in <em>Parasite.</em> | Courtesy of TIFF</figcaption>
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<p><em>Snowpiercer</em> and <em>The Host</em> director Bong Joon-ho reaches the peak of his game with a new must-see horror masterpiece.</p> <p id="huvf9x">The upstairs-downstairs construct — in which the literal levels of a house demarcate the differences between the wealthy and those who serve them — has long worked as shorthand for class division and struggle. (See: every British period drama, ever.) The “upstairs” people are comfortable, happy, and prefer to be oblivious to what’s going on “downstairs” with the hired help, who do their work and live their lives invisibly alongside.</p>
<p id="BVlva5">In <em>Parasite</em>, Korean horror master Bong Joon-Ho (<em>The Host</em>, <em>Snowpiercer</em>) draws on that visual metaphor for a twisty, pummeling thriller that’s among his best work. It’s thematically familiar territory for Bong; his films always pair heart-stopping and imaginative terror with humor and a healthy dose of raging at inequality. <em>Parasite </em>feels in many ways like the culmination.</p>
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<p id="Wch0xi">That’s partly because Bong is working at the top of his game, constructing with his cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo a world where drastic shifts occur between the insides of houses that don’t just signify changing living conditions but the interior state of the inhabitants. Everything on these characters’ insides shows up outside, too — and that may be why their world is in chaos.</p>
<h3 id="OIOnZN">
<em>Parasite</em> is a tale of two families in a symbiotic relationship</h3>
<p id="2iQwfq">It’s not wise to say too much about the plot of <em>Parasite</em>, because its jarring left turns are what make it so pointedly critical of the vast inequalities in its world and, perhaps more importantly, the inability of the haves to recognize how their lives affect the have-nots.</p>
<p id="QrsYk0">But it starts out like a satirical story of grifters — specifically, the Kim family, who aren’t poverty-stricken yet but are definitely headed that way. The four of them, two parents and two university-aged children who can’t possibly afford university, live in a dingy apartment that’s half below-ground. They have to peer out their high windows to see what’s happening on the sidewalk directly outside. The Kims scrape to make ends meet, folding pizza boxes to earn a little cash and running around the apartment chasing wifi signals from the coffeeshop next door. When the fumigator comes by to spray the streets, they open their windows, hoping to kill some of the vermin that live in there with them.</p>
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<img alt="A scene from Parasite, in which a family is folding pizza boxes." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dtLmVFJNNYvn2nUktz9q3m1E9E4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19196935/parasite1.jpg">
<cite>Courtesy of TIFF</cite>
<figcaption>The Kim family folds pizza boxes in their apartment for cash.</figcaption>
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<p id="DJpvNF">One day, son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) is given a great opportunity: His friend is leaving a job tutoring a wealthy teenaged girl in English and would like to recommend Ki-woo in his place. Ki-woo agrees, introduces himself to the Park family as “Kevin,” and starts tutoring Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), who promptly falls in love with him.</p>
<p id="3xJsn2">Through some fortuitous events and also some mild-to-moderate lying, Ki-woo soon succeeds in getting the Parks to hire the rest of his family members, too — his sister (Park So-dam) as an art tutor to Da-hye’s younger brother, his father (Song Kang-ho) as chauffeur to the wealthy entrepreneur father, and his mother (Jang Hye-jin) as housekeeper — all without the Parks quite realizing they’ve hired an entire family. Everyone seems happy. Everything is good in the world.</p>
<p id="UMNtmV">Until it all goes very, very sideways.</p>
<h3 id="ONBIWu">
<em>Parasite</em> is an unpredictable, thought-provoking masterpiece about inequality</h3>
<p id="mjryFI">Bong’s films are always hilarious and farcical, almost slapstick and then violent. There are no real heroes but few true villains; people do ignoble things to one another but you kind of get the reason why. Everyone in a Bong Joon-ho film is, at least to some degree, the victim of his or her circumstances. They’re cogs in a much, much larger machine — or to put it another way, just creatures living in an ecosystem they cannot possibly control.</p>
<p id="mcVQJD"><em>Parasite</em> feels like the movie the director has been training to make throughout his entire career. It’s a movie about the ugly, brutal hilarity of modern life, where some people get to live out in the open and others are forced into the shadows, but everyone’s sucking one another’s life blood. The fun in unraveling <em>Parasite </em>is figuring out just who the title is about and why they’re the parasite here. (It seems not entirely coincidental that one of Bong’s earlier breakout hits was the fabulous 2006 monster movie <em>The Host</em>.)</p>
<p id="LBPEVU">The movie serves up a rich stew of caustic wit and catastrophe, and watching the spaces the characters move through is a key to making it all work, from the dingy dirt of the Kims’ half-basement home to the Parks’ spacious and airy house, built as a work of art by a famous architect. The contrast is a stark reminder to the Kims of what they could have and how they assume it would make them feel if they did.</p>
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<img alt="A man whispering into a woman’s ear in Parasite." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rGFtlsLMyVFjpvKqAShfWH-3D44=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19196942/parasite2.jpg">
<cite>Neon</cite>
<figcaption>The Parks live a happy and comfortable life. At first.</figcaption>
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<p id="BkulnB">And yet Bong and co-writer Han Jin-won don’t fall into stereotypes of haves and have-nots<strong>,</strong> either. This is not a movie about how rich people are actually miserable. Whether it’s because of their surroundings or just a coincidence, the Parks seem to live an untroubled and happy existence; their crime is in being so comfortable that they can’t really imagine anyone is struggling. And the Kims are not made saints by their poverty, either. </p>
<p id="HFnNbW">Combine those characters with an unpredictable plot and <em>Parasite</em> emerges as a masterpiece. It’s also an exemplary specimen of a kind of movie that’s proliferated this year — movies like <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/12/20857504/knives-out-review"><em>Knives Out</em></a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/8/21/20807664/ready-or-not-review"><em>Ready or Not</em></a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/10/20858765/joker-review-joaquin-phoenix?__c=1"><em>Joker</em></a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/5/18/18629042/cannes-atlantique-sorry-we-missed-bacurau-beanpole-les-miserables">many, many others</a>, each<strong> </strong>about the mounting gap between the rich and the rest of the world. It’s been a marked trend, and <em>Parasite </em>is one of the finest, probably because Bong knows his way around a visual metaphor (and as the movie goes on, it’s a lot more than just the houses). No wonder the movie won the Palme d’or <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/4/26/18518631/cannes-film-festival-2019-reviews-dates-information-news">at Cannes in May</a>. </p>
<p id="MDydKG">And while it’s hugely entertaining, <em>Parasite </em>is also thought-provoking. By the time the catharsis arrives, you think you’re at the end of the film, but a coda adds a new wrinkle to the whole thing. If a parasite eventually takes over its host, then what will happen to a world where everyone, in some way, is a parasite for someone else?</p>
<p id="4yDbSs">Parasite <em>premiered at Cannes in May and played at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, among others. It opens in theaters on October 11.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/13/20864365/parasite-review-bong-joon-hoAlissa Wilkinson2019-09-13T15:00:00-04:002019-09-13T15:00:00-04:00Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver are devastating in the brilliant, brutal Marriage Story
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<img alt="Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in Marriage Story." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/qKYh-Y9Jo0lrFgGfVRm0hlMrp9Y=/68x0:868x600/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65241668/marriagestory.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver in <em>Marriage Story.</em> | Courtesy of TIFF</figcaption>
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<p>Noah Baumbach’s outstanding new film turns divorce into a reminder of love’s many shades.</p> <p id="ZzNUNs">Every marriage harbors the seeds of its own destruction. People who stay married just figure out how to keep those seeds from blooming into chokeweeds. But maybe the reverse is true, too: Every divorce contains, in microcosm, what made the pair get together in the first place.</p>
<p id="xf6zrE">Which is why the seemingly ironic title of <em>Marriage Story</em> is sincere, even affectionate. Noah Baumbach is America’s foremost chronicler of rough-hewn and <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/5/23/15676898/meyerowitz-stories-netflix-review-adam-sandler-stiller-baumbach-hoffman">disintegrating family units</a>, and in <em>Marriage Story,</em> he pries open one divorce to find the beating heart inside. It’s a showcase for stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as much as a triumph for Baumbach, recalling the wry humor and perfect pitch of Woody Allen’s best work, albeit with a touch less self-obsession (even though the couple seems at least partly, and probably inevitably, modeled on Baumbach’s divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh in 2013). </p>
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<p id="XbFqTc"><em>Marriage Story</em> sees the end of a marriage as cause for both mourning and bittersweet comedy. The relationship is changing, but not ending. And the evolution is something to behold. To get a story like this right requires a sense of the comical and the absurd along with the devastating — and <em>Marriage Story</em> delivers. </p>
<h3 id="xjWYnt">
<em>Marriage Story </em>is a funny, heartbreaking, knowing look at both the reality and absurdity of divorce</h3>
<p id="yjdQ9z"><em>Marriage Story</em> plays out like a duet, one we’re just happening to catch at the moment the key is changing and the discord hasn’t quite resolved. The movie begins with us hearing two sides of what seems like a happy marriage: Charlie (Driver) listing out all the things he loves about Nicole (Johansson), and Nicole returning the favor. How sweet!</p>
<p id="g1FnfJ">Except they’re in a marriage counselor’s office, and Nicole is so pissed off at Charlie that she doesn’t even want to read her list out loud, which is gripped in her tightening hands. Nothing in particular, it transpires, is ripping Charlie and Nicole apart, and they’ve almost broken up before; friends in their theater group gossip amongst themselves about whether the split will stick this time.</p>
<p id="0wxv30">It will. Charlie is a theater director and a true New Yorker, and his latest play is transferring to Broadway. Nicole was the star, and although they were married for years, she’s now moving from their home in New York to her hometown of Los Angeles to shoot a pilot. She’s bringing their eight-year-old son with her. And though that could have been just a temporary stay — show business couples do the bicoastal thing all the time — her decision to go finally pushed some long-simmering problems to boil over. </p>
<p id="JRIVgU">The New York-Los Angeles divide is a handy metaphor for the ensuing divorce. They’re two cities that aren’t really all that different, filled with people who have similar aspirations, a common language, and often shared family ties and histories. But New Yorkers and Angelenos alike can list the myriad reasons they can’t stand the other city with very little provocation. (Usually it boils down to the weather, the traffic, and, to quote a running joke in the film, “the space,” as in L.A. has it and New York does not.)</p>
<p id="zmLdfQ">Same for Charlie and Nicole, who through conversations with relatives and lawyers (like Nicole’s hard-hitting attorney, a gloriously high-strung Laura Dern) unpack all the reasons they both got together and fell apart. There’s the meetings with the lawyers, who are far more combative than Charlie and Nicole are with each other; the home visits to determine custody; the family members who side with one or the other; the battles over who will live where, who gets to take what, what the shape of life will look like. Most of the comedy comes courtesy of the Kafkaesque machinations of the divorce industrial complex. Disentangling two lives requires a different kind of enmeshment in a legal and financial system that wants to suck them, or at least their banks accounts, dry along the way — a system focused on someone “winning” the divorce. </p>
<p id="qNul3r">But nobody wins a divorce, just like nobody wins a wedding. Charlie and Nicole are both right about each other’s faults, and both right about each other’s good traits, too. In the middle of their split is still the core of their connection — if not as spouses, then still as partners, of a kind.</p>
<h3 id="x9JZoG">
<em>Marriage Story</em> is almost uncannily authentic</h3>
<p id="D2OndG">Most anyone who’s been in a relationship of any length will find themselves wondering at some point in <em>Marriage Story</em> how Noah Baumbach got hold of their inner monologue’s transcripts. In movies like <em>The Squid and the Whale </em>and <em>Margot at the Wedding</em>, he’s often presented the complications of marriages and divorces and shifting family dynamics as a rueful part of living, part of the dark comedy of existence. In driving a lance straight into this marriage, he opens up the wounds relationships leave for our examination. </p>
<p id="GTGbhD">That’s perhaps why Driver and Johansson’s scenes together are among the film’s most heartbreaking; that moment when someone says something you know they can never take back is gutting. But it’s in their individual scenes that you can really get a sense of how powerfully they’re performing, with ripples of emotion and energy revealing conflicts going on beneath the words they’re still just finding to narrate and re-narrate their lives. When you join your life to someone else, they become part of you, too; figuring out who you are in the aftermath requires looking backward and understanding the past in a new way.</p>
<p id="SA29o0">As their story begins to resolve into its next phase, both Charlie and Nicole have scenes involving musical performances, both of which are backward<strong> </strong>looks at love and its abrasions. The numbers are very different, but they’re from the same show. So <em>Marriage Story</em> tunefully makes its point. Charlie and Nicole’s futures aren’t on the same path, but they’re still parallel, and not only because they have a son to raise together. For a long while, it seems as if their relationship will only end in flames. But it’s just a long moment, a phase in their marriage story, one more song in the show.</p>
<p id="5XU8YU">Marriage Story <em>premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September and played at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, among others. It opens in theaters on November 6 and premieres on Netflix on December 6.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/13/20864335/marriage-story-review-baumbach-driver-johanssonAlissa Wilkinson2019-09-10T15:20:00-04:002019-09-10T15:20:00-04:00The Joker never needed an origin story, but especially not this one
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<img alt="Joaquin Phoenix applying face paint in the movie “Joker.”" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/q8aAFg8tC9wsUCfkZB93bGHBNlU=/229x0:1029x600/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65218486/joker1.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Joaquin Phoenix in <em>Joker.</em> | Courtesy of TIFF</figcaption>
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<p><em>Joker</em> aims to give the infamous supervillain a shocking stand-alone backstory. It’s not nearly as edgy as it thinks.</p> <p id="6SMbq4">Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, is uniquely chilling among supervillains for one very specific reason: He’s never had a definitive origin story. Since his creation in 1940, the Joker has simply been the personification of evil, reinterpreted by various writers to fit the story they want to tell on the page or screen. </p>
<p id="WQmvVC">The Joker’s seeming randomness, his refusal to be limited by any moral code or any whiff of history, is scary as hell. He’s what humans have always feared and fought: evidence of an uncaring universe, one that strikes at random. And personifications of inexplicable, snickering evil have shown up throughout human history, from folklore and legend all the way to characters like <em>No Country for Old Men</em>’s Anton Chigurh, who stalks around with a captive bolt stunner randomly killing people based on the flip of a coin. </p>
<p id="h8xVXm">Like his brethren, the Joker can and will strike without warning, and for him it’s just a game, a bit. He doesn’t believe in anything. He doesn’t want anything more than to watch people suffer. He wants to burn the world and dance in the ruins.</p>
<p id="33kFxS">So to give the Joker a motivation, a backstory, is to ascribe logic to evil and play with fire. And to do so in a world where the Joker’s own motivations for what he does manifest every day through “jokes” — like <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/11/23/13659634/alt-right-trolling">trolling</a> to spread hateful ideologies and <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/16/18266930/christchurch-shooter-manifesto-memes-subscribe-to-pewdiepie?__c=1">shit-posting mimicked in mass-shooter manifestoes</a> — is a way to explain the world we live in.</p>
<p id="60QXyw">Which brings us to <em>Joker</em>, a gritty reimagining of the Joker’s early days directed and co-written by Todd Phillips, who’s spent his career bringing a particular breed of pleasure-obsessed American masculinity to the big screen with successful, unforgettable side-splitters like <em>Old School</em> and the <em>Hangover</em> trilogy. <em>Joker</em> is no comedy. But it’s on a continuum with Phillips’s themes, and it shows his directorial chops; it’s a well-crafted movie. </p>
<p id="5TuYG5">Meanwhile, the film has courted controversy even before its release, touting its “<a href="https://comicbook.com/dc/2019/08/23/joker-movie-official-r-rating-violence-disturbing-language/">hard-R rating</a>” (even though there’s no such thing) relative to the average superhero film. An <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/DCEUleaks/comments/bpalqm/anyone_got_the_joker_script_leak/">early version of the script “leaked,”</a> followed by stories about it <a href="https://www.slashfilm.com/joker-script/">being continuously rewritten during production</a>, perhaps a sign that it was too edgy for the studio. Early reviews from its Venice Film Festival premiere worried that it was a “<a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2019/08/joker-review-joaquin-phoenix-1202170236/">toxic rallying cry for incels</a>”; it won the festival’s top prize.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="yECxNO"><div data-anthem-component="ratingcard" data-anthem-component-data='{"rating":2.5,"title":"Joker review"}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="aaakyU">The impression it was trying to make was clear: This is not your older sibling’s Joker movie. It’s not even the brooding, frightening<em> Dark Knight</em>, with Heath Ledger’s iconic performance as a truly random Joker. <em>Joker </em>was designed to be darker, even meaner, than Christopher Nolan’s Batman classic, a turbocharged supervillain story where there’s no hero to save anyone. Supposedly it would be shocking, foul-mouthed, not for the faint of heart. It would be — as the film was introduced at its North American premiere in Toronto — “bonkers.” </p>
<p id="aiKsHi">Turns out that was all smoke and mirrors. <em>Joker</em> is a well-made movie, with a killer performance from Joaquin Phoenix, who seems born to play the role. But there’s nothing “bonkers” about it. It has nothing to say about the Joker himself or what he represents, or even about the world in which his brand of evil exists. Go ahead and crack open the movie. It’s hollow to the core.</p>
<h3 id="ODRCIV">
<em>Joker</em> is about a man on the verge of an explosive nervous breakdown</h3>
<p id="QUY5tS"><em>Joker </em>most strongly evokes two Scorsese films, both about unhinged men and both starring Robert De Niro: <em>Taxi Driver</em> (1976) and <em>The King of Comedy</em> (1983). Like much of Scorsese’s work, those two films indelibly imprinted cinema with a particular image of New York City: dirty, dangerous, with a very thin veneer of civilization that’s ready to crack at any moment. Phillips apes that look competently and suffuses it in garish fluorescent lights and eerie greenish glows. </p>
<p id="QkGJ2b"><em>Joker</em> is roughly set right between those two films, in a Gotham City modeled on New York around 1981, judging from movie posters that appear in the background. There’s a sanitation strike on, and the sidewalks are piling high with garbage (and if you’ve ever been in New York on particular pungent nights, you can practically smell them). Rats and super-rats are taking over. Tensions are running high.</p>
<p id="yZ3LIR">In the middle of this world lives Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), who works as a clown and suffers from a neurological condition that makes him laugh uncontrollably when he doesn’t want to be laughing at all. He lives with his ailing mother Penny (Frances Conroy) in a dimly lit apartment building where the elevator doesn’t work, meets regularly<strong> </strong>with his social worker, and takes a lot of medication. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Joaquin Phoenix in Joker." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eS2jat_F_kvbhpomhPUjq52mXjk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19187239/joker3.jpg">
<cite>Niko Tavernise / Courtesy of TIFF</cite>
<figcaption>Joaquin Phoenix in <em>Joker</em>.</figcaption>
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<p id="M6Nw6a">Arthur and Penny spend their nights watching a late-night comedy hour hosted by an old-school comedian, Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). It’s the most obvious Scorsese quote in <em>Joker</em>, made explicit by De Niro’s casting. In <em>The King of Comedy</em>, De Niro plays an aspiring but untalented stand-up comedian named Rupert Pupkin who idolizes a late-night TV host, scheming and dreaming of being put on his show, and eventually kidnaps him in order to make it happen. <em>Joker</em> flips the script, with De Niro playing the comedian whom Arthur, an aspiring stand-up, idolizes. Arthur pretends to be on Franklin’s show in his living room. </p>
<p id="3Pz8Cx">But where <em>The King of Comedy </em>was about how TV turns its most devoted viewers into delusional seekers of the spotlight — and in the end, Pupkin’s buoyancy worked out for him — <em>Joker</em> has darker designs for Arthur. For most of its two-hour runtime, <em>Joker</em> is a parade of humiliation for him. He is beaten up several times by packs of roving punks. His uncontrollable laughter makes him a figure of scorn and disgust. The other guys at work make fun of him. His social worker can barely conceal her distaste for him, which doesn’t much matter anyway since the department is being eliminated by the beleaguered city. He bombs exquisitely at stand-up, then finds himself the nationwide object of ridicule.</p>
<p id="50M6U8">The only person who doesn’t despise Arthur is his neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz). But what counts as kindness to Arthur is a few words of small talk in an elevator and a smile. No wonder, <em>Joker</em> suggests, that he eventually cracks.</p>
<h3 id="qm49F3">
<em>Joker</em> is not nearly as edgy or interesting as it thinks it is</h3>
<p id="ejkZq5">Following the film’s North American premiere in Toronto, Phillips said he wrote <em>Joker</em> for Phoenix even before the two knew each other, which seems obvious from the start. Bony, lanky, with a cavernous mouth that releases roars of laughter as his eyes telegraph humiliation and defeat, Phoenix imbues Arthur with a sense of menace even when he’s at his most helpless. His performance is reason enough to see the movie.</p>
<p id="oyMgcR">And yet. The notion that Arthur’s villainy essentially stems from his untended mental illness is troubling enough; evil (and <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/9/16618472/mental-illness-gun-homicide-mass-shootings?utm_campaign=vox.social&utm_content=1565018667&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter">mass shootings</a>) having often been ascribed to pathologies. But what’s even more disconcerting is what <em>Joker</em>’s story suggests about the society into which the movie debuts.</p>
<p id="tG1IeY"><em>Joker</em> rewrites the backstory of one of comics’ most infamous villains to be one of humiliation and scorn; essentially, the movie says, he is bullied into mass murder, beset by a merciless society that he must eventually rally against.</p>
<p id="hKPa7Z">And there’s a larger context for that, in Gotham City. As Arthur struggles with his demons, an uprising is fomenting, with a revolt seemingly inevitable. For most of the movie, we only hear about it in news reports — an “anti-wealthy” movement, one that eventually takes Arthur as its figurehead and Thomas Wayne, the wealthy mogul whose son will one day be the Joker’s arch-nemesis, as the face of its enemy. </p>
<p id="Nuwcvp">Yet it’s not Arthur they idealize, nor his true self they seek to emulate. Actually, everyone hates Arthur. He’s beaten up by a street gang and a trio of Wall Street scum bros, taunted by talk show hosts and random bystanders. That he’s co-opted by a band of people who want to rally around his likeness without knowing who their leader even <em>is</em> seems like a perfect final mixture of triumph and indignity. He’s only good to them for what he represents.</p>
<p id="vNXrTj">And the movie doesn’t seem gutsy enough to try to draw out that tension. Instead, once <em>Joker</em> starts barreling toward its conclusion, Arthur snaps, turning into an angry guy with a gun and violent<strong> </strong>disregard for everyone. The world is against him, and by extension his would-be followers. The world deserves what they’re about to get, whether at his hands or the hands of all the other angry, rioting downtrodden in Gotham City. </p>
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<img alt="Joaquin Phoenix in Joker." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/FACY6kii34XuY-jrcaUIu_BIVBo=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19187243/joker2.jpg">
<cite>Niko Tavernise / Courtesy of TIFF</cite>
<figcaption>Joaquin Phoenix in <em>Joker.</em>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="OnIJjZ">Which turns a supervillain into a kind of folk hero. The personification of evil, in <em>Joker</em>, is now just the flip side of the same morality coin. Certainly, Batman and the Joker have always been presented as yin and yang, order and chaos, protector and predator. But the terror of the Joker is curiously defanged in the film. It doesn’t seem convinced those categories of good and evil, order and chaos exist. Like the Joker himself, it believes in nothing.</p>
<p id="lJaa7a">Though <em>Joker </em>boasts Phoenix’s finely layered performance, it contains nothing as quote-unquote “bonkers” as, say, Sandra Bernhard’s absolutely deranged performance in <em>The King of Comedy</em>. There is nothing unpredictable about <em>Joker</em>, nothing we haven’t seen before, no revelations that shift how we see the world or the story. For a movie that clearly prides itself on its edginess, it is weirdly inert and stolid.</p>
<p id="PQKc6d">I think the Joker — and the legions of readers, audiences, and fans who have found him so spine-chilling from the start — deserved for this stand-alone origin story to have a bigger imagination and a more instinctive sense of what makes him an icon of evil. You can find much scarier, more shocking stuff by <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/3/18527214/8chan-walmart-el-paso-shooting-cloudflare-white-nationalism">casually surfing websites</a> or reading the news. <em>Joker</em> is a tightly directed mood piece with an unforgettable performance at its center, but it’s not much more than a mask, with nothing but banality behind.</p>
<p id="vIM2Cd">Joker <em>premiered at the Venice Film Festival and played at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. It opens in theaters on October 4.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/10/20858765/joker-review-joaquin-phoenixAlissa Wilkinson