Along the Spectrum: Recent Movies

Tracey Ullman and Cillian Murphy in Steve. (Photo: Robert Viglasky, Netflix.)

Cillian Murphy and the Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants are a superlative team. Last year Mielants directed Murphy in the beautiful Irish movie Small Things Like These, the best treatment so far of the subject of the Magdalene Sisters, the notorious Irish order that turned pregnant unwed teenage girls into workhorses and then put their babies up for adoption. I loved everything about this film: Enda Walsh’s subtle, precise screenplay, culled from a fine small novel by Claire Keegan; Frank van den Eeden’s moody, delicate lighting; and all the performances, but especially Murphy’s. He plays Bill Furlong, a family man who runs a coal business in an intimate Irish town where the Magdalene convent wields considerable power – they decide which of the local girls gains entrance to their prestigious school. Their backing not only guarantees a better education but guides the students’ path to college and a promising future. So when Bill finds, hiding in the coal bin, one of the girls whose families have dumped them in the convent to sidestep the shame of their situation and she begs him to help her get away, the Mother Superior (Emily Watson) has only to remind him, in a friendly tone, how well two of his five daughters are managing in their school and how much they’re looking forward to admitting the next one in line to secure his silence. (She seals the deal with a generous Christmas tip; this isn’t a prosperous town.) But Bill himself was raised by a single mother, and then, after her early death, by the kind woman she’d worked for as a domestic; he feels his life was blessed by his upbringing at the hands of one brave woman and one with the means and the independence of mind to stand against the social norms of this time and place.

Murphy is obviously a talented actor, but I’ve always found him uninteresting to watch – that he doesn’t bring much to the party. His portrayal of Bill Furlong is typically understated but a river of feeling runs just under all that restraint; it’s an exquisite performance. And he’s even better as the title character of Mielants’ new picture Steve, playing a teacher at a home for at-risk teenage boys in the English countryside that is, he and his colleagues learn in the course of the movie, about to be closed down because it is so expensive to run (government subsidies support it) and serves such a tiny constituency. The boys are loud and rambunctious, prone to meltdowns and brawling, but the staff (Tracey Ullman plays one of the other teachers; Emily Watson is the in-house therapist), who are closely bonded, adore them. They can see past the boys’ acting out and rebelliousness to their intelligence and sensitivity and leadership potential; in one vivifying scene Steve runs through the roster and details each boy’s virtues. You feel that though the cards these kids drew were awful, they’ve been blessed by the staff, who seem to live in the trenches alongside them. So the news that the school, a gracious old estate, has been sold cuts through the drama like a knife

Steve is himself quite complicated: he’s fighting a dependence on opiates. He has a wife and two daughters whom he only sees on his days off, because like all of his co-workers he lives on the premises; taking care of the boys is a twenty-four-hour job, and it requires imagination and extraordinary dedication as well as vigilance and patience. We understand that Steve’s gift for the work is intimately linked to his struggles with maintaining stability in his own life. Murphy’s collaboration with Mielants has unlocked qualities in him other directors haven’t located. (It’s unlucky that his best-known films have been directed by Christopher Nolan, whose is hopeless at coaching actors.) In Steve he displays a dazzling array of behaviors and emotional responses: calm and even-handedness in the face of his charges’ inability to control their impulses; rage at what he sees as the short-sightedness and lack of empathy of administrators (which seems simultaneously justified and unreasonable); desperation and finally despair at the peril that his most challenging student, Shy (Jay Lycurgo), is teetering on the edge of and the tragedy Steve is helpless to prevent. Steve himself sometimes appears to be on the verge of falling apart, yet when we see him with his wife and daughters he reaches a sort of serenity. When the movie is over we don’t feel we’ve had enough of him. We certainly haven’t had enough of Murphy’s magnificent performance.

All of the young actors in the movie do admirable work, but Lycurgo, as Shy, is outstanding. (Porter’s novel is named Shy.) I was also knocked out by Mielants’s direction, which is in cinéma verité style: it’s open-ended yet never feels excessive or out of control, despite the boys’ wild, cascading moods. In one scene, where he veers away from that kind of realism to surrealism, he takes your breath away. Steve didn’t open in theatres (it’s available on Netflix), so it’s in danger of disappearing into the void. Let’s hope that movie lovers discover it for themselves.

Will Arnett and Laura Dern in Is This Thing On? (Photo: Jason McDonald, Searchlight Pictures.)

Is This Thing On?, Bradley Cooper’s first movie since Maestro, his magnificent bio of Leonard Bernstein, is a failure but it’s trying for something interesting. Will Arnett and Laura Dern play a couple of New Yorkers, Alex and Tess Novak, whose separate mid-life crises have knocked their marriage off-kilter and they’ve decided to separate. Tess, a volleyball champ who gave up her career to raise their two boys, is flirting with the idea of moving back to the sports world she left behind but this time as a coach. Alex, wandering the city at loose ends, unintentionally takes a spot at a comedy club’s open mike night and really gets into the idea of translating his personal melodrama into stand-up. (He’s the Mrs. Maisel of the amateurs.) The way Cooper and the other writers, Arnett and Mark Chappell, working from a story by Arnett, Chappell and John Bishop, set this idea up is really clumsy: Alex, emerging from a party high on weed cookies, doesn’t have his wallet with him and the only way he can get into the club is to sign up for one of the slots. And unless I missed it, the movie never bothers to tell us what this guy does for a living, though we learn off the bat that Alex’s college best friend Balls (played by Cooper) is a struggling actor.

The sloppiness appears to be deliberate. Cooper wants to keep the weave of the film as loose as possible, so the actors give the impression of improvising. The movie may touch on the subject matter of great marital break-up dramas like Loving and Shoot the Moon but it drifts in and out of romantic comedy, and the tonal shifts keep you interested. Is This Thing On? is episodic and it wants to be casual, but you need a strong screenplay to ground this kind of meandering, and this one is slack and uninspired. You also need a pair of terrific actors, and Cooper’s got only one, Laura Dern, who keeps saving scenes that threaten to fall apart. I’ve been amazed by Dern’s gift for playing dramatic situations with complete conviction, no matter how slight, ever since I saw her on the 1997 episode of Ellen where she showed up as the first woman Ellen DeGeneres’s character falls for after she comes out as gay. The problem is that, despite his background in TV comedy, Arnett is the opposite of casual – he works every scene so fervently that it isn’t pleasant to watch him.

Arnett isn’t the only actor on screen who pushes too hard: Andra Day as Balls’s wife and Tess’s best friend and Christine EbersoIe as Alex’s mother can’t seem to relax either. It’s very odd to watch a movie that presents itself as semi-improvisational yet feels so revved up so much of the time. The biggest stumbling block in American movies is bad writing (often because good scripts get snagged on the hundreds of notes their writers have to navigate from interfering producers), but I’ve rarely seen one that cries out as this one does for a better screenplay. I’m not sure Arnett’s performance could have worked in any case but I’d bet the supporting cast would have been showcased more effectively if the dialogue that comes out of their mouths weren’t so banal. Cooper is very funny as Balls; you want more of him. And Ciarán Hinds has a sweet moment with Arnett toward the end of the picture. The reason to see the movie, though, is that gossamer marvel Laura Dern.

Adam Sandler and George Clooney in Jay Kelly. (Photo: Peter Mountain, Netflix.)

Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, about a narcissistic movie star, has a handsome glitter, courtesy of Linus Sandgren’s lighting, but it doesn’t give the audience much to think about. It’s as superficial as its title character, played by George Clooney, who seems primed to confront the emptiness of his own existence and his lack of emotional interest in the people who spiral around him but doesn’t seem any different at the end of the picture. It’s like Fellini’s 8-1/2 without the existential angst, which makes it sound like a satire, and sometimes it is funny, especially when Josh Hamilton and Patrick Wilson show up in cameos. But Baumbach can’t commit to this kind of heartlessness, so the jokey sections keep melting into sentimentality, and the movie is a weirdly bipolar experience. You probably need someone like the late Paul Mazursky to pull off this sort of thing: his attempt to get a read on Hollywood self-reverence, Alex in Wonderland with Donald Sutherland as a movie director, didn’t really work but it had some marvelous scenes.

Clooney is too good an actor to play a shallow character like Kelly: the script by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer (who has a small part) gives him nothing to draw on but his charisma, so he seems to be sleepwalking. And the emotional center of the film shifts to Adam Sandler, who provides its only depth. He plays Jay’s agent, Ron Sukenick, who has the one genuine revelation in the story – the realization that he’s been acting for years as a true friend to a movie star who doesn’t have a clue what friendship means. This is the second fine performance Sandler has given as an agent; he was wonderful as a sports handler in Hustle (a much better movie). Laura Dern, good as usual, plays another member of Jay’s entourage, his publicist, who figured out a long time ago what Ron has been avoiding facing. Stacy Keach is amusing as Jay’s blowhard father. The starry cast also includes Jim Broadbent, Riley Keough, Greta Gerwig and Billy Crudup as Timothy, the acting-class buddy whom he stabbed in the back, stealing both his girlfriend and the movie role that wound up making him a star. Crudup manages to slip more than one tone and more than one emotional level into his brief time on screen, but the flashback that shows us how Jay betrayed Timothy might be more persuasive and certainly more interesting if the two young actors who play them as young hopefuls, Charlie Rowe and Louis Partridge, weren’t so dull. Either we need to see that Timothy was the true talent and Jay wound up with the career he should have had, or that Timothy was a second-rater and Jay rose to the top because, ruthless as he was, his gifts justified it. Baumbach doesn’t seem to have made up his mind – or if he did he didn’t cast the young men well enough to make his point.

Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. (Photo: Macall Polay, Twentieth Century Studios.)

The idea of centering a movie on the making of a record album is so unusual that Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere piqued my interest, and it seemed that Scott Cooper, the writer-director of Crazy Heart, about a broken-down country singer (played magnificently by Jeff Bridges), might be just the right person to helm it. But Deliver Me from Nowhere, which chronicles the birthing of Bruce Springsteen’s least commercial work, the downbeat 1982 Nebraska, is unremittingly glum, which is an adjective I would never apply to that masterfully sustained record. And dramatically the film is self-sabotaging. Sure, Springsteen’s producer, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), has to convince Columbia Records president Al Teller (David Krumholtz, in an amusing cameo) to stick to the artist’s vision, unconventional and uncommercial though it may be. But Springsteen is such a massive rock star by 1982 – Nebraska came out between The River and Born in the U.S.A. – that no one really gets in his way, so the only conflict in the movie is Springsteen’s rather generalized struggle with his own demons. Springsteen, who’s played by Jeremy Allen White (Shameless, The Bear), is in such a funk for the duration of the film that you never get the sense you’re watching a representation of one of the most imaginative and energetic figures in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. And wouldn’t you think one of the prime requisites for finding an actor to play Springsteen might have been charisma? White is dull, dull, dull. The marvelous English actor Stephen Graham of Adolescence gives a fine-grained performance as Springsteen’s father and Gaby Hoffman brings sweetness to the role of his mother.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movie.