Persons of the Jewish Persuasion, Take One.

Indignation

(2016. Written for the screen by James Schamus, based on the novel by Philip Roth. 110 minutes.)

Yes, this is the film that has the single fifteen minute all-dialogue scene in it, and we will get to that eventually.

One of Roth’s later novels, it was published in 2008, but the story takes place in 1951. So Roth is looking back at the past and the attitudes of the time. A lot of the thinking of the time he gets dead on right, and he realizes times have changed. But there is at least one set of attitudes that he still believes in that are horribly dated and Schamus still sticks with.

Marcus Messner is a young Jewish man in New Jersey who is going to Winesberg College in Ohio. One of his relatives, who seems to have wandered in from a Woody Allen movie, asks him if he can get Kosher in Ohio. The college, as many of the time were, is culturally conservative. Marcus does not fit in. He actually wants to study! He does not go out for any sports, although he played in high school. He doesn’t even want to join the one Jewish fraternity on campus.

He works in the library and notices a blonde girl swinging her leg. He’s fascinated and gets up the nerve to ask her out. She agrees.

At the end of the date they park on a dark road and, this being 1951, Marcus assumes a little necking and petting (ask your grandparents) may happen. But Olivia opens his fly and gives him a blow job. From the look on his face it appears he is no idea what it is.

Suddenly she has the reputation of being a slut. Very early fifties attitude; you should see the first scene with Wendy in Porky’s II (1983) in which she explains how easy it is in the fifties for a girl to get that reputation. The attitude still hangs on. O.K., but then we learn that she has had an emotional breakdown before she came to the college. And she later has another one and is dropped from the college.

What we have here is the very, very fifties attitude that if girls want and have sex, they are psychologically disturbed. See Natalie Wood’s Wilma Dean Loomis in the 1961 film Splendor in the Grass for one of the classic demonstrations of that.

That was the attitude of the time, and Roth still believes it. And it appears that Schamus does too. It would have been easy for Schamus to undercut the idea. Elia Kazan does it as the director of Splendor. When Wilma comes out of the hospital she does to see her high school love Bud. He has now married a woman we have not meet, Angelina, played by Zohra Lampert. As Lampert plays her, she is smarter and sexier and more adult than Wilma. A lot of viewers, particularly the male ones, thought Bud was better off with her.

In the opening scene of Indignation the camera comes up behind a grey-haired woman, who looks directly into the camera. As the movie progresses, we realize she is the older Olivia. The movie comes back to her at the end, but we don’t get the closeup. Schamus could at least given us her smile. Or found her at a younger age with her husband and kids. I just don’t buy a movie in 2016 that insists the sex will drive you crazy. Well, automatically drive you crazy…

Oh, wait, what about that fifteen minute scene? I have not forgotten about it. If the script is dated in its attitude toward sex, it is very perceptive dealing with the anti-Semitic attitudes of the time.

At one point Dean Caldwell calls in Marcus for a chat. Dean Caldwell is concerned about Marcus. Why didn’t he put on his family background that his father is a kosher butcher? Well, Marcus thought just a butcher is enough. Why didn’t he put down under religion that he was a practicing Jew? He doesn’t practice. And so on.

Each of the Dean’s question is understandable (for the time), but to Marcus they all sound anti-Semitic. Schamus manages a beautiful balance between the attitudes of both characters, even as Marcus’s indignation builds. Logan Lerman’s performance as Marcus is one of his best, and Tracy Letts (not only a good actor, but the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 2008 play August: Osage County) is perfect as the Dean.

We get another great performance in another great scene in which Linda Emond as Marcus’s mother insists he have nothing more to do with Olivia, but not for the reasons you might think. And Letts gets another great scene late in the picture in which he explains to Marcus how Olivia came to the college and what has happened to her. That could have been another place where Schamus could have undercut Roth’s fifties attitudes, but alas it’s not.

Persons of the Jewish Persuasion, Take Two.

Café Society

(2016. Written by Woody Allen. 96 mintues.)

So we think we know what’s coming. In the 1930s, Bobby Dorfman, a young Jewish guy with a family straight out of Radio Days (1987), has decided to go off to Hollywood, possibly to work with his uncle, an agent. Bobby keeps trying to see Uncle Phil, who keeps putting him off. So we know we are in for another round of anti-Hollywood jokes from Allen.

We don’t get them, or at least not that many. The Hollywood of this film is gorgeous, beautiful houses, beautiful sunlight. Well, it is shot by Vittorio Storaro, one of the greatest cinematographers of all time.

And Phil does let his assistant Vonnie, take Bobby around and show him the town. Vonnie is cute, shy, and even though she has told Bobby she has a traveling journalist boy friend, Bobby falls in love with her. Well, she’s played by Kristen Stewart, and the collaboration between Allen (as both writer and director), Storaro, and her is phenomenal. Allen has written Vonnie with a lot of emotional detail, which Stewart picks up and all of which Storaro captures every nuance of. Any straight guy would fall in love with her.

Complications ensue. Vonnie’s “boy friend” is Uncle Phil. Look at how and when Allen lets each character know that. Phil shilly-shallies around but eventually leaves his wife. And Vonnie, although torn between Phil and Bobby, decides to go with Phil.

So Bobby moves back to New York.

And the picture begins to fall apart.

The first half is very focused on the love triangle, with Storaro’s lighting and Allen’s Hollywood 1930s’ name-dropping to support the story. The second half goes off in several different directions.

We as well as Bobby have lost Vonnie. Bobby now gets involved with his brother, who is a gangster. They set up a night club, which is gorgeously photographed as Hollywood was in the first half, but it’s not as compelling to watch without the major characters.

The narrator tells us the customers are famous, but unlike the names we hear dropped in Hollywood, they are completely fictional. We feel no emotional connection to them. Bad stuff happens to the gangster brother, but we hardly care.

We sudden find out Bobby has gotten married. Look at the scene introducing the wife, whose name is Veronica. We hardly get a clear view of her. She’s played by Blake Lively, who is not nearly as well serviced by Allen and Storaro as Stewart was. Yes, we know that Bobby is still pining for Vonnie, but it would make it a lot more dramatic if we were just as taken with Veronica as we were with Vonnie.

Phil and Vonnie come to New York for a visit and when we first see Vonnie, she sounds very Hollywood, but is her more adorable self when she meets Bobby. They pine over each other, but agree to stay with their spouses.

In the final scene, they are at separate New Year’s Eve parties, but both staring off in the distance, and we know they are thinking of the other. If the second half of the film had been better focused, we might have been more moved.

One of the problems I had with Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), one of my favorite Allen movies (I am married to one of three sisters and there was a lot of elbowing in the ribs when my wife and daughter saw the film together), was that Allen never gives us what playwrighting teachers call the obligatory scene. That’s a scene that the whole piece seems to be leading to, e.g., blowing up the Death Star in Star Wars (1977). In Hannah it would have been Hannah discovering her husband had been having an affair with her sister.

I think he runs into the same problem here. He could have very easily had a scene where Vonnie and Veronica meet and realize what the other means to Bobby. Steward, Lively, Jesse Essenberg (Bobby), and Storaro could have knocked it out of the park if Allen the writer had given it to them.

It’s Not Her Movie.

Florence Foster Jenkins

(2016. Written by Nicholas Martin. 111 minutes.)

Now wait a minute. The movie is called Florence Foster Jenkins and the character is played by Meryl Streep, considered by many the greatest actress of her day. How can it not be about Jenkins?

As screenwriters, you have to learn who the main character in your script is. To use my favorite example, The Godfather (1972) is not Don Corleone’s movie. It is really Michael’s story. He goes from “That’s my family Kay, that’s not me” to “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

Jenkins was a society lady in New York in the first half of the twentieth century. She does not appear in Café Society, but she could have. Very well-to-do from her first husband, she supported the arts, especially music. She thought she could sing, but she couldn’t. Her second husband, a failed actor, St. Clair Bayfield, paid off vocal teachers, and padded the house at her small concerts with her friends.

So why isn’t the movie Jenkins’s movie? Because she just does the same thing: sing badly. Over and over and over again. Aside from a brief realization that the audience at a Carnegie Hall concert are laughing at her, she has no arc.

That of course does not stop Meryl Streep from being wonderful in the part, but we do tend to get tired of her screeching, even though Martin has not laid the singing scenes on too heavily. Martin is smart to not let us hear her “sing” for nearly twenty minutes into the film.

So if not Jenkins’ movie, whose is it? It’s Bayfield’s movie, because he is the one doing things. He loves her, although he has a girl friend on the side. He takes care of her. He tries to protect her from people making fun of her. Bayfield is constantly is action, and we watch him to see what he is up to.

He is played by Hugh Grant and this is the biggest and best part he’s had in ten years, and boy, is he up to it.

Early in the film Bayfield needs to get a new accompanist for Jenkins, and the one she likes is Cosmé McMoon. He’s the sanest one of the bunch, and Martin uses him effectively to react to what is going one. He’s brilliantly played by Simon Helberg, Howard of The Big Bang Theory but with a better haircut.

Well, Here We Only See Her Have About One and a Half Lives.

Complete Unknown

(2016. Written by Joshua Marston & Julian Sheppard. 90 minutes.)

I was a huge fan of Marston’s first film, Maria Full of Grace (2004). It shows up in the book version of Understanding Screenwriting in the “Short Takes on Some Good Screenplays.” It is a beautifully structured film about a Colombian woman, Maria, who for all kinds of reasons agrees to become a drug mule.

The first act is her deciding to do it, the second is the trip, and the third is what happens once she gets to New York. Marston wanted the film to be political, but he found his earlier drafts were too political and he kept focusing on Maria and what she was feeling. Maria was a great part for Catalina Sandino Moreno.

Marston’s second feature (he has directed a lot of television) was the 2011 film The Forgiveness of Blood, which I reviewed here and which was simply not as good as Maria. Set in a rural Albanian village, it’s about the teenaged Nik, whose father kills a local property owner. The customs of the village are that the family of the property owner can kill Nik whenever he comes out of his house. Nik eventually gets out of town. The plot is not as dynamic as Maria and the characterization is not as good, and the actor playing Nik is no Catalina Sandino Moreno.

At least Marston and Sheppard are writing for real stars in Complete Unknown. Alice, among her other names, is played by Rachel Weisz, and Tom is played by Michael Shannon. Not chopped liver, either one of them. The hype for the film makes in clear Weisz is playing nine characters in the film, but we really only see her play one and a half, or maybe two. That’s wasting your talent.

We get a montage at the very beginning of Weisz in several of her characters, but that sort of gives away that she is several characters. The problem with that is that then the writers give us a long, long dinner party scene which starts out as though we don’t know she is several characters. In the recent CS interview with Marston he mentions that he intended that long party scene to be the opening of the film. If he had stuck with that, then he could have gotten some mileage out of us trying to guess what is going on. As it stands, we are way ahead of the film.

Toward the end of the party Tom, who is married to another woman, finally, and I mean finally, realizes that he has known Alice before under another name. When he realizes who she is, and what they were to each other, he suddenly seems very stupid for not getting her identity right away.

Tom and Alice go out for a walk, and they talk about how she turns herself into another person. Boy, do they talk. And it is telling us, not showing us, how she does that. The conversation is all exposition, as to opposed, say, the fifteen minute scene in Indignation.

There is one exception to that. On the street they come across Nina, an older woman who slips and falls. Alice goes into her doctor character, then tells Nina that Tom is a doctor too. So when they get to Nina’s house, he has to pretend he is a doctor. We see how Tom can get caught up in the process. Here the writers are showing, not telling. That gives the actors something to work with for a change.

And then it’s back to telling us some more.

No, It’s Not Ex-Machina.

Morgan

(2016. Written by Seth W. Owen. 92 minutes.)

And it’s also not Splice (2009), or Hanna (2011), or Lucy (2014), or Strangers Things (2016) or, if you want to go back further, Young Frankenstein (1974) or Blade Runner (1982). Yes, it’s about scientists tinkering with life, machines, and DNA and something going wrong.

I’m not a big fan of those kinds of movies (I have not seen half the ones in the previous paragraph; I got the list from the IMDb message boards), but I do see one from time to time. This one I picked because the screenwriter, Seth W. Owen, is the nephew of a longtime friend of mine who passed away earlier this year. I have never met Seth and we have not discussed either this film or screenwriting in general, so I can’t give you any backstage stuff. None of the Owen family wit shows up, either because Owen did not put it in or it got cut out. Very often that kind of thing gets “developed out” of a script.

We begin with Lee Weathers, a risk-management consultant from “Corporate,” who shows up at a research facility out in the woods. She’s there to evaluate Morgan, an artificially conceived “person” who has gone a little funny in the head and gouged out the eye of one of her keepers.

The first half of the movie is mostly technobabble. As I have told you I don’t know how many times, you do not need as much technobabble as you think you do. The classic example is Back to the Future (1985): how does time travel work? Easy: a flux capacitor. The great Toby Jones plays Dr. Zeigler and he has to deliver most of the technobabble. He tries hard, but there is nothing for him to play in the speeches. Watch him try to find something, anything, to play.

The same thing is true with most of Owen’s other writing, which might not be so much of a problem if this were a standard B movie. But the film is produced by Ridley Scott’s company and directed by Scott’s son Luke, so they have a cast that includes Jennifer Jason Leigh (at least she gets to work with her gouged out eye), Michelle Yeoh, and Paul Giamatti. Owen gives Giamatti a great show-off scene, but could have given the others a lot more to work with. (I can’t help but think those actors took the parts as a favor to Ridley Scott so he might cast them in one of his big movies.)

So the first half of the movie is technobabble, and the second half is Morgan running amuck, killing off the various members of the cast, both stars and non-stars alike. Like most films of this kind, it gets very repetitive.

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT.

I try to avoid giving stuff away (see the review of Hell or High Water in the last column), but I am going to break that rule here. In virtually every review I have seen of the film, there is a mention of a big plot twist that most people will see coming early on. I don’t think we would necessarily get it just from the script, but Scott has drastically misdirected Kate Mara as Lea Weathers. She comes across so cold and mechanical that we very quickly catch that she is an android too. I caught it when Scott has her on one side of the class enclosure facing off with Morgan on the other side. They are just too perfect a match. If you are setting up a big twist like this, you need to disguise it better.

If you are making a genre film like this, then you not only have to know the rules, you also have to figure out what you can do that nobody else has done. Fans of the genre will appreciate that. As will regular filmgoers.

Based on the Giamatti scene I am sure Seth Owen will do better.

Good Bye Jane, and Maura, and Korsak, and Angela, and…

Rizzoli & Isles

(2016. Final season, various writers. 60 minute episodes.)

I was a little surprised when I checked the index I keep for this column that I have only written about this show three times. When I checked the column item I wrote on the pilot back in 2010, I realized I had not been taken with the show at the start. The relationship between detective Jane Rizzoli and Medical Examiner Maura Isles was unfocused, for reasons you can read about in the item. I was particularly unimpressed with the supporting characters. I wrote, “Rizzoli’s mom is simply a pain in the ass, which is a criminal waste of Lorraine Brocco.” About another character I wrote, “The older cop…just sort of sulks around the edges.”

I have watched the show regularly since it came out and grew to like it. The Jane-Maura relationship came into focus and developed nicely. Brocco’s Angela was still often a pain in the ass, but she became a much more well-rounded pain in the ass, and definitely not a waste of Brocco.

One of the great examples of developing a supporting character was “the older cop,” Vince Korsak. Korsak was given a backstory about his multiple divorces. His relationship with Jane, his partner, was never a romantic one. It was something unusual: a deeply felt friendship between two co-workers. Even in shows with more depth, you don’t see that kind of relationship that often, if ever. He was beautifully played by longtime character actor Bruce McGill.

You probably saw McGill first as Daniel Simpson Day (nicknamed D Day) in Animal House (1978) and since then he’s played such roles as Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War in Lincoln (2012). Check his whole filmography at IMDb here. You can see why the writers on Rizzoli & Isles took advantage of his talents and developed Korsak the way they did. If you’ve got great actors on your show, write for them.

I wrote in #145 about the ending of a number of shows in the spring. The writers for Rizzoli have done a great job preparing for the end of the series. Korsak has found a great new wife and is retiring from the force. Jane is going to work as an instructor for the FBI. Maura has some medical problems and is moving into writing books. It also looks like Angela is going to end up with a new husband as well. Those storylines were laid out over the season, so much so that the crime-of-the-week often did not get that much screen time. That was O.K., because by now we wanted to watch what happened to the characters we loved.

Because TNT wanted, like most networks these days, to attract a younger audience, they cancelled the show this past summer. Kevin Reilly, an experienced network man, took over running TNT (and TBS) a year ago, and dropping shows is a standard ploy when new executives come in. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, Rizzoli was the highest rated scripted show on TNT, with an audience of 6.5 million. The problems from the executives’ point of view was that many of the viewers were, gasp, older, double gasp, women.

Apparently it escaped Reilly and his team’s notice that CBS has been number one in the network ratings because, not in spite of, many of their shows appealed to viewers of a certain age. Yea, Geezer Power.

Nurse Phinney Deals with Bugs.

BrainDead

(2016. First season, multiple writers. 60 minutes episodes.)

I started a few new summer series this year, but this is the only one I really got into. There were a couple of reasons for that.

First of all, it was created by Robert and Michelle King. You do remember The Good Wife, don’t you? BrainDead is the series they jumped into as they were finishing up The Good Wife this spring, and it is about as different a series as you can imagine.

Yes, it is set in the world of politics, but here it is congressional politics in Washington, D.C. And the tone, for all the wit in Wife, is much lighter. Robert Lloyd, the television critic of the Los Angeles Times, nailed it when he wrote, “The premise has the air of something thought up over drinks—‘Washington’s so crazy, it’s like they’re being controlled by aliens or something’—and developed over a cocktail napkin.”

The aliens in this case are ants, which we learn very late in the series (assuming we are being told the truth) came from a meteor from Russia. At first we think the bugs just crawl into peoples’ brains and make them explode. But then we assume the ants are changing the peoples’ minds and attitudes. It’s a little trickier than that: they are making people more intensely what they were: liberals become more liberal, conservatives more conservative, which is a nice touch.

We follow how the partisanship increases, and we get bogus newscasts that nail it down. We also get the occasional real newscast as a throwaway line about a real person. The Newsroom did that much better because it was set in the immediate past. Here the writers are trying to keep up with the current presidential race, and as good as these writers are, they simply cannot match the whacko reality of this year’s presidential campaign.

Later in the season the writers did not do as much of the political satire as they did in earlier episodes, although I did like a gag where the fetus of a senator’s sister reacts badly every time Trump shows up on television.

The characterization is not as rich as it was in The Good Wife, but as we saw in Morgan, that’s often a problem in sci-fi/horror movies. Tony Shalhoub, who used to be Monk, is entertaining as the right-wing senator, and Zack Grenier, who was the obnoxious lawyer David Lee on Wife, has an interesting role as a man whose health improves because of the bugs.

I said there were two reasons I kept watching this. The second one was that the lead is played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. You may remember from the spring that I was knocked over by her performance as the head nurse on the Civil War drama Mercy Street. She’s just as compelling here, but in a different tonal range.

Winstead has done a number of horror and suspense movies, and knows how to hit just notes of seriousness and amusement, especially in her reactions to the bizarre stuff going on around her. The later was not required in Mercy Street, but it is essential here.

BrainDead was intended as a continuing series, but it never caught on in the ratings. It may have been too smart for the room (pick your own example of that), or their skill at satire was simply not up to Trump’s. If you have a spare thirteen hours some day when you feel like binging, you might want to give it a shot.

[addtoany]

Before You Go