Strike Three: Brian Helgeland's 42

It’s curious that most American films about baseball, arguably the country’s national sport, have little to do with baseball. It doesn't matter whether you're watching Pride of the Yankees (1942) or The Natural (1984). You never get to fully comprehend what makes the game such a clear mirror of the culture that created it because the movies never want it to be one. Instead, baseball ends up as an inspirational tool to tell tired moral dramas of personal triumph. In The Natural, for instance, based on the 1952 novel by Bernard Malamud, Robert Redford gets to hit a ninth-inning home run to save his troubled team as well as his own corrupted soul. (The original novel, on the other hand, had quite the opposite conclusion.) It’s as though baseball heroes need to undergo their own secular Stations of the Cross in order to reach individual redemption. In Field of Dreams (1989), Kevin Costner gets to heal the emotional and generational rift between him and his dead father by having his dad's spirit come back to play catch with him. In dealing with the scandal of the 1919 Chicago White Sox players fixing the World Series, Field of Dreams (based on WP Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe) airbrushes out of its story the more troubled, uncomfortable aspects of baseball’s past by portraying the participants of the scandal as innocent victims. (The picture even shamelessly features a black journalist talking worshipfully about baseball being the one constant in American life when, in fact, his race was kept out of the major leagues for half the century.) 

Rather than examine how the game has both ignored and led the political and cultural changes in America, most movies about baseball resist the ties that bind the game to the nation's character in an effort to win over the mass audience with stories about heroism. Baseball has certainly had its iconic heroes, from Babe Ruth to Ted Williams to Cal Ripkin (just as it has had its tainted ones, from Ty Cobb to Pete Rose to Barry Bonds), but, in movies, we rarely get to see what sets those individuals apart from the rest of us. There's a desire to make them seem ordinary, as though this contrived egalitarianism would make us identify with them more strongly. One baseball movie that did truly confront the complexity of our celebrity worship, Ron Shelton's bracing Cobb (1994), about the violent and racist clutch hitter Ty Cobb, was ignored by audiences and critics alike (just before, ironically, O.J. Simpson's trial would capture national attention).

Black Panther: Watch the Throne

Danai Gurira and Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther.

Ryan Coogler elevated the debased Rocky franchise with his 2015 Creed, injecting intelligence as well as brio into the narrative of the second-generation fighter who finds a mentor in Rocky. Creed was an exciting boxing movie, a moving coming-of-age story and a satisfying romantic drama with the talented and stunning Tessa Thompson as a bracing match for Michael B. Jordan’s charismatic Adonis Johnson. It was a first-rate entertainment – and Coogler coached a fine performance out of Sylvester Stallone that refurbished his reputation, too.

Coogler’s follow-up to Creed, the Marvel adventure Black Panther, is every bit as good. The Marvel pictures are often mash-ups of comic-book and classical mythology; Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole, adapting the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, mix in a little James Bond, a little J.R.R. Tolkien by way of the Peter Jackson movies, and cleverly seed in some contemporary political references. The story begins by reprising, from last year’s excellent Captain America: Civil War, the death of T’Chaka (John Kani), the king of a small African nation called Wakanda, in a U.N. bombing. Following tradition, before he can succeed his father T’Chaka’s son T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) must best any challenger. He triumphs over M’Baku (Winston Duke), the leader of the mountain-dwelling Jabari tribe, who feels T’Challa is callow and untried. But then another opponent announces himself: Erik Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), a.k.a. Killmonger, the abandoned son of T’Chaka’s brother N’Jobu – killed in a skirmish with T’Chaka and his best friend Zuri in Oakland, California (where he was working undercover). Erik was raised in America and trained as a black-ops agent, and now he demands his right to fight T’Challa for the Wakandan throne. The issue that divided T’Chaka and N’Jobu was isolationism. The discovery of a metal called vibranium has permitted Wakanda to make staggering technological advances, but it has been the country’s policy for years to maintain absolute secrecy about them and have little contact with other nations. N’Jobu urged his brother to join the world and offer to share its vibranium. Erik wants to use the substance to make himself an unprecedentedly powerful leader. Both he and T’Challa have supernatural powers as a result of a forest herb, so in Marvel terms they’re also fighting to carry the name Black Panther.

Stage to Screen: The Father and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in The Father.

Florian Zeller’s play The Father, about an aging man sinking into dementia, opened in Paris in 2012 and premiered in London at the Tricycle Theatre, in a Christopher Hampton translation, three years later. I saw it there and was impressed by it, and by Kenneth Cranham in the title role. The play is a tricky piece of work: it’s from the point of view of André, the father, whose daughter Anne is struggling to take care of him as he quarrels with one caregiver after another, so we experience the world as he does, even when he doesn’t recognize her or her husband (thus the actors who play these parts are sometimes replaced by other actors), even when the information she gives him seems contradictory because his memory is fading and time, as he perceives it, sometimes doubles back on itself. Yet the style isn’t expressionistic, as one might predict; it’s theatre of the absurd that presents itself as realism. That is, each scene plays as perfect realism; it’s the juxtaposition of scenes that doesn’t make realist sense. (Guy Hoare’s lighting, the only element of the Tricycle production I didn’t like, kept violating this idea by bridging the scenes with blinding flashes of light.)  Watching the play, which transferred to Broadway the following season with Frank Langella as the father, I thought of Arthur Kopit’s 1978 play Wings, which is from the point of view of a woman who has had a stroke, and also of fragments of old Twilight Zone episodes and of Pinter’s plays, especially the early ones. The difference between Zeller’s approach and Pinter’s is that Zeller isn’t reconfiguring banal conversation to reveal the cracks underneath in order to suggest the absurdity of human interaction; the cracks in The Father address a more essential – less manufactured – mystery, that of a consciousness coming apart. 

Get On Up: Shot in the Arm

Get On Up, the James Brown biopic, is full of life, most of it supplied by Chadwick Boseman, the remarkable actor and dancer who gets down Brown’s startlingly kinetic presence. Boseman didn’t make much of an impression as Jackie Robinson in the bland 42, but he’s mesmerizing as the charismatic and tyrannical Godfather of Soul. Brown’s sense of himself as a one-man band whose fellow musicians – and wives - he sees as no more than necessary echoes of his presence alienates everyone around him, even, eventually, his best friend and loyal colleague Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), who sticks around longer than anyone else. But his musical inventiveness is as outsize as his personality. The musical numbers, directed with a great deal of skill by Tate Taylor, do exactly what they need to do: they replicate the excitement of seeing James Brown.

Captain America: Civil War – A Situation Pointed South

Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War.

If you had told me in 2011, after I had just seen Captain America: The First Avenger, that not only would Steve Rogers become one of my favourite superheroes, but that his third sequel would be the absolute gold standard for all superhero movies to follow, I would have laughed in your face. Who gives a crap about Mister Stars and Stripes and his magic shield? But you should cut me some slack – in 2011, there was no way to know yet that Marvel’s plan to dominate the comic book movie market would be such a grossly profitable global success. Captain America: Civil War is pretty much as good as it gets – and I don’t mean that in an equivocating, “we’ll take what we’re given” kind of way. I mean that the ensemble superhero movie has never been done this well before, and likely won’t ever be again. For Marvel and the world of comic book cinema at large, Civil War is a triumph.

The Grand Experiment – Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War

Josh Brolin as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War.

Note: This review contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War.

In the production logos that precede Disney and Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, the “io” in “Marvel Studios” slowly morphs into the number 10, signifying the real-life decade that has passed since Iron Man was released in 2008, when this whole “cinematic universe” experiment began in earnest. It is not overstating things to say that this process, whether or not you’ve enjoyed following its peaks and valleys, is unprecedented in cinematic history, and that fact in itself anchors Infinity War in a sense of tangible accomplishment. Much ballyhoo has been made about the fact that the film doesn’t make a lick of sense if you haven’t seen the Marvel movies leading up to this (and if you haven’t, then what exactly is driving you to buy a ticket for this one?), but that attitude belies the mind-boggling time and effort that has gone into setting up these dominoes, so that this film can concern itself primarily with knocking them down. Experiencing the setup is worth it, because Infinity War is nearly three hours of pure payoff.

Us: Cheap Stuff

Lupita Nyong'o, Evan Alex, and Shahadi Wright Joseph in Jordan Peele's Us.

The first few minutes of Us, written and directed by Jordan Peele, before the opening credits are spooky and unnerving. A little girl named Adelaide (Madison Curry) wanders away from her family on the beach in Santa Cruz; she’s drawn into a fun house where she sees her mirror image – only the twin is facing the other away. This Magritte-like image is startling; it’s also the best thing in the movie by far. As soon as Peele catapults us some three decades into the future, where grown-up Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is back in Santa Cruz vacationing with her own husband (Winston Duke) and kids (Evan Alex and Shahadi Wright Joseph), and the home they’ve rented is invaded by malevolent, scissors-wielding replicas of themselves, Us sinks to that lowest common denominator of horror devices, a series of jump scares.

Underappreciated Performances from 2014: A Selection

Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man.

It’s in the nature of movie awards to underscore the work that’s already receiving a glut of (often unmerited) attention and neglect the worthier achievements that slipped by unnoticed. And these days, when there’s so little difference between the movies that get nominated for Academy Awards and the ones that are recognized by critics’ groups, there are fewer chances than ever to bring fine neglected work into the limelight. Since more than any other element in movies, it’s the acting that excites me – and since no movie year, however dim in other respects, is without its long list of impressive performances – the sidelining of deserving actors during awards season always puts me in a funk. Of course, some of the actors who win praise deserve it, like the Oscar-nominated actors from The Imitation Game, Wild, Boyhood and The Theory of Everything. The ones showcased below deserve it too, however, and weren’t so lucky. Since I reviewed some of the performances I liked best on Critics at Large in the course of the year, I won’t recycle my impressions of Al Pacino in The Humbling, Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner, Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis in Get On Up, Keira Knightley in Begin Again, Jessica Lange in In Secret, Mia Wasichowska in Tracks, Agata Kulesza in Ida, Kenneth Branagh in his own film, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Annette Bening in The Face of Love, and the three stars of The Last of Robin Hood (Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon and Dakota Fanning).

This Movie's Got Sand: Gods of Egypt

Gerard Butler in Gods of Egypt.

I don’t know the exact moment Gods of Egypt won me over. It might have been when Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) awakes amongst the remnants of last night’s orgy and we see that, like all gods, he’s twelve feet tall, with a giant-sized Jacuzzi to match. It might have been when it became clear that Gerard Butler (as desert god Set), in true Connery fashion, was going to make no effort whatsoever to mask his Scottish brogue. It might have been when we meet Ra (Geoffrey Rush), god of the sun and father of creation, who chills on his celestial catamaran, pulling the sun on a long chain over the edge of the flat, disc-shaped earth (and occasionally firing off a casual bolt from his laser spear at Apophis, the ever-encroaching demon-worm of chaos, represented by a cloud of swirling teeth and smoke). Or, honestly, it might have been watching the trailer, long before I sat down for the main event, which promised a perfect storm of unconscionable casting and absurd CG shenanigans, and delivered to a degree I never dared hope was possible. If those late-winter blues got you down, there is truly no better cure than a flamboyant, excessive, cocksure trashterpiece like this.