Lynch/Oz

The line "I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” has become an easy shorthand quote to suggest a character’s old assumptions about how the world works have just been turned on their head. It is the sort of thing David Lynch’s protagonists might say. Maybe they did. I honestly don’t remember if that precise line was included in the super-cuts of Wizard of Oz allusions seen throughout Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest cinematically-themed documentary. However, it should be reasonably safe to conclude Lynch has seen the 1939 classic fantasy and it made some kind of impression on the auteur after watching Lynch/Oz, which opens this Friday in New York.

Evidently, film critic Amy Nicolson and genre filmmakers Rodney Ascher, John Waters, Karyn Kusama, Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead, and David Lowery having been thinking about Oz as an important source of Lynch’s inspiration for some time, because they each get one section of the film to draw their connections.

Frankly, they all make a very compelling case—so much so that Lynch/Oz will have most viewers completely convinced after the first part. However, there are five more sections, which largely repeat the same points. After a while, all the Oz-like motifs in Lynch’s oeuvre, such as the red shoes, mysterious curtains, doppelgangers, and the porous boundaries between dreams and reality, become repetitive. We get it. Lynch definitely alludes to Oz in many of his films. Case closed.

Indeed, Lynch/Oz shares the prime fault of Philippe’s previous documentary, The Taking, in that all his participating commentators share the same opinions and make the same arguments. There are no crazy outliers (as there were in Ascher’s Room 237) or dissenting opinions (as in Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood). It is just the same talking points, repeated five times over. Waters gives it more of a personal spin and Ascher takes a more macro perspective on Oz’s overall influence on American cinema in general, but there are no conflicts in the six analyses Philippe presents.

The Outsider: HBO Adapts Stephen King

DNA evidence has been widely hailed as a tool to exonerate the wrongly convicted. However, in Terry Maitland’s case, it falsely implicates him in a horrific child murder. He will need someone who can think way outside the box to prove his innocence. Holly Gibney from the Mr. Mercedes books and TV series is certainly an unconventional investigator. She sees things others miss, so she might be the perfect detective to stalk the real killer in The Outsider, Richard Price’s 10-part adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, which premieres this Sunday on HBO.

Terry Maitland is a well-liked teacher and coach in his quiet, working-class Oklahoma community, until Det. Ralph Anderson has him arrested and cuffed during one of his little league games for the murder of eleven-year-old Frank Peterson. There is ironclad DNA and eye-witness testimony linking Maitland to the crime scene, but his lawyer, Howie Gold, quickly uncovers physical evidence and video footage placing him in another city at the time of the murder.

It is all quite baffling to everyone, so Gold retains Gibney’s specialized services. Feeling guilty for turning the town against the Maitland family, Det. Anderson joins Gold’s investigation team while on leave from the department. He is not inclined to believe the fantastical, even when Gibney uncovers a string of similar child murders attributed to suspects still proclaiming their innocence, due to similarly conflicting DNA evidence and eye-witness statements. However, his wife Jeannie is more willing to reserve judgment and keep an open mind. She too joins Gold’s kitchen cabinet, after forging a sympathetic understanding with Maitland’s wife, Marcy.

Based on the first six episodes provided to the press (out of ten), it should be safe to say the serial killer at work boasts some sort of supernatural shape-and-DNA-shifting powers—and that shouldn’t be particularly spoilery, since it is a creation of Stephen King. However, the series unfolds with the style and drive of a procedural mystery. Indeed, comparisons to HBO’s True Detective are rather apt. Yet, Price fully capitalizes on the existential implications of a monster that (perhaps literally) feeds on human alienation and misery. These are especially damaged characters, even by the standards of King’s oeuvre.

Jason Bateman’s earnest everyman portrayal of Maitland easily convinces viewers to buy into the character’s predicament, sort of like Henry Fonda in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man taking a detour through the X-Files. Yet, perhaps more importantly, he effectively sets the vibe of mounting dread as the director of the first two episodes. However, Ben Mendelsohn surpasses him when it comes to projecting world-weary angst as Det. Anderson, whose every decision is influenced by the prior death of his own young son.

The Outsider also earns credit for featuring three women characters, who transcend stereotypes and become of equal or greater importance to the story than Maitland or even Anderson. Cynthia Erivo never resorts to cheap ticks or shtick in her endlessly intriguing portrayal of the on-the-spectrum Gibney (radically different from Justine Lupe’s depiction in the Mr. Mercedes series). It showcases her brilliance, a la Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, but also emphasizes her acute vulnerability. Yet, Price also empowers her as a woman, who haltingly explores the possibility of romance with a former law enforcement contact, nicely played by Derek Cecil.

Likewise, Mare Winningham and Julianne Nicholson are consistently devastating as Jeannie Anderson and Marcy Maitland, respectively—two women ironically united in grief. Each woman displays unexpected agency, beyond merely standing by their men. In fact, Nicholson could arguably be considered the Outsider’s lead and central POV figure.

Destroyer: Nicole Kidman Undercover

Nicole Kidman plays Erin Bell, an undercover cop, whose soul has been scarred by the time she was immersive in a violent criminal gang, headed by an unstable charismatic leader. The Scientology jokes just write themselves, right? As a bonus, it also happens to be a good movie, but it is hard to watch at times (or at least it is supposed to be). Bell gets the heck beat out of her badly and often in Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer (trailer here), which opens tonight in New York.

Bell is such a haggard wreck, she has become a walking cautionary example for the entire LAPD. When she was young and idealistic, she joined “Chris” from the FBI in an undercover sting operation to take down Silas’s drug-fueled gang of hippie armed robbers. They worked so well together, their cover as lovers became true in real life, at least as far as they could tell the two apart. However, things still turned out badly—really, really badly.

Frankly, Bell never truly got over the fiasco (that viewers see unfold during a series of flashbacks), so when she receives one of the ink-stained bills from the fateful armed robbery in the mail, she is only too willing to dive back down the rabbit hole. Soon, she is shadowing or shaking down Silas’s known associates, only occasionally stopping to pay some belated attention to her resentful daughter.

No kidding, that really is Nicole Kidman on the one-sheet. Obviously, this is not Moulin Rouge. She has taken her share of flak for being “box office poison,” but you have to give Kidman credit taking such a grungy, anti-glamorous, dissolute anti-hero role. She takes worse abuse than Jack Nicholson gets as Jake Gittes in Chinatown. This is a ferocious performance that shows tremendous range and takes her to some very dark places. Honestly, nobody should begrudge her the awards talk. It is such a good performance, it can’t even be sabotaged by the film’s narrative gamesmanship.

Kidman owns the movie, plain and simple, so it is hard to fault most of her co-stars for getting blown off the screen. However, Bradley Whitford (from Cabin in the Woods and the Broadway revival of Boeing, Boeing) somehow manages to briefly outshine her as Silas’s spectacularly sleazy attorney, DiFranco. Tatiana Maslany also matches Kidman’s willingness to glam down and roughen up as Petra, Silas’s former lover, down-graded to errand-running hench-person.

At times, Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi’s screenplay is too clever for its own good, but Kusama always keeps it totally grounded in LA seediness. She makes viewers feel all the city’s heat and grime. She also stages a brutally effective bank robbery-turned shootout. This is some bravura work from Kidman and Kusama that not surprisingly comes with some rough edges. Recommended for thriller fans who take their coffee black and their hard alcohol without chasers, Destroyer opens tonight (12/24) in New York, at the Angelika Film Center and the Landmark 57.

Sundance ’17: XX

Horror movies introduced us Mrs. Voorhees before we ever met her son Jason, as well as Annie Wilkes in Misery, Asami Yamazaki in Audition, and a host of Japanese lady ghosts, with long flowing hair. Horror fans understand better than anyone everyone is a potential serial killer, regardless how vulnerable they might look. That doesn’t leave any room for sexism, but four (or five counting the interstitial animation) women filmmakers will drive the point home in the anthology film XX (trailer here), which screened at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

Jovanka Vuckovic’s The Box is based on a Jack Ketchum story rather than the previously adapted Richard Matheson tale, but the vibes are not completely dissimilar. Thus far, Susan Jacobs has balanced motherhood and her professional work quite well, but while on the train back to the suburbs, she fails to adequately discourage her bratty son Danny from looking in a stranger’s gift box. At the time, he has little reaction, but he permanently loses his appetite thereafter. In addition, he seems to be able to pass along the mysterious malady to other family members.

The Box has a terrific look and feel that sort of brings to mind Todd Haynes’ Carol, but it is by far the better film. Vuckovic manages to give it a fable-like vibe, yet also keep it concretely grounded in its sheltered Westchester (or wherever) world. Natalie Brown is also quite compelling as the distressed mother.

In contrast, Annie Clark’s The Birthday Party is played mostly for gory laughs, but they mostly land thanks to a game cast. About an hour before her daughter’s meticulously planned birthday party, Mary is alarmed to find her husband has dropped dead, so she goes to extreme lengths to cover-up his death. It is a blackly comic one-darned-thing-after-another yarn, but it features Sheila (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) Vand as Carla, the intimidating and ridiculously glamorous housekeeper as a happy bonus.

Roxanne Benjamin’s Don’t Fall is easily the most conventional of the assembled films in XX. By day, a group of campers off-handedly discover some rock carvings, but by night they realize they are not alone out there. Benjamin crafts some atmospheric moments, but we have been here many times before.

Happily, XX ends on a high note with Karyn Kusama’s Her Only Living Son. Cora’s son is about to turn eighteen and he is starting to exhibit behavioral problems—yet none of the teachers or administrators at his school seem to alarmed by his sudden aggression. Of course, we have our suspicions why that will be quickly confirmed. Essentially, Kusama’s contribution is a clever riff on Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, suggesting what might have happened if the pregnant mother had ditched Ralph Bellamy for a real doctor sooner. Kusama steadily cranks up the tension quite insidiously, while Christina Kirk is really quite terrific as the ferociously protective Cora.

Her Only Living Son is probably the best full and discrete installment in XX, but the most distinctive parts are probably Sofia Carrillo’s macabre stop-motion animated wrap-around segments, featuring creepy porcelain dolls and all sorts of haunted house trappings. It is a fairly solid collection, but the first two constituent films go more for feelings of alienation and betrayal or gross-out laughs rather than outright scares. Regardless, the work from Kusama, Vuckovic and Carrillo, along with the presence of Vand and Kirk easily carries the full film. Recommended for fans of horror and the darkly ironic, XX screened at this year’s Sundance, in advance of its February 17^th theatrical opening in select cities, including the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn.