Quick takes on 5 films

I don’t get the hype behind The Shape of Water. Beautifully shot and wonderfully acted (as I noted a couple years ago on Maudie, Sally Hawkins is incredible), the story is neither fresh nor exciting. Any life-long sci-fi lover has seen this story before, in much the same way. Elisa is an intelligent but mute woman, working as a cleaning person at a government facility during the Cold War. When a mysterious water creature/man is brought it for study, she befriends him and hatches a plot to free him. Once out and in hiding in her apartment, they begin a love affair. There are a lot of wild leaps here (I understand Elisa is mute and her best friend is a homosexual, but she seriously has never found someone that “understood her” before this creature showed up?) and I just couldn’t suspend belief enough to get through it, even as a magical science fiction film.

Another dud that strong actors can’t save is the newest film version of the beloved classic novel Fahrenheit 451. This one stars Michael B Jordan and Michael Shannon (also in the above The Shape of Water), and I’m fans of both, but their talents are wasted here. If you don’t know the story, this one takes place in a near-future dystopian society where reading (and basically free thinking) have been outlawed, with all books and art being burned. Montag is a young hotshot who has grown up in this world and knows no better, but eventually he becomes curious about the books he is destroying and begins to save some to read, and then seeks out the resistance to give them aid. It’s a slick looking film but is a poor movie in all other aspects. The story is disjointed and choppy, with gaping holes in the plot and story threads that never get developed. Why was reading outlawed? Obviously for control of the people, but other reasons are hinted but never explored, such as an over-correction for extreme political correctness. Really off film which is just too bad for such a great book.

After the duds above, I couldn’t have found a more redeeming film than Lady Bird. A beautiful coming-of-age movie, its stars Saoirse Ronan as a very typical high schooler in the early new millennium. Christine, or “Lady Bird” as she has decided to call herself, has a lot of “millennial” traits in her, even though the film takes place in 2002, making her closer to my generation than my son’s. She is a bit aimless, not having her license yet and being forced to get a job by her mom, and seems to be bit entitled too as she isn’t very understanding of her family’s plight. She is going to an expensive catholic school which her parents can hardly afford, with a strong willed, passive-aggressive mother (Laurie Metcalf in a career-defining role) with whom she constantly butts heads. Lady Bird wants nothing more than be free from her parents and go to school far away from home, but as most teenagers do, she wants freedom without responsibility, and paradoxically still wants to fit in with the cool crowd at school. She says things that aren’t true and does things she doesn’t want to in order to be “cool” while alienating her true friends. While watching it and even while writing about it now, there were times when I thought to myself this is the kind of movie I would typically loathe, because it sounds pretentious and entitled, but in the end, it doesn’t come off as that. It is just a girl, like many young people, trying to find her own place in a crazy world. A very moving and powerful film.

Red Sparrow was much hyped before release, but not reviewed well when it hit. It’s a spy thriller with a female lead, Jennifer Lawrence as the Russian Dominika Egorova. She is recruited into Russia’s “sparrow” program, which teaches good looking young people to use sex to get close to their targets for information. She ends up developing a connection with her American target, and becomes a double agent for the USA. There’s a lot of intrigue and some good spy moments, but the plot is almost too convoluted (even for a spy film) and sometimes the viewer is left wondering what exactly is going on, and not in a good who-done-it kind of way. Plus, some of her “training” in the sparrow school is only there for shock value and lends nothing to the plot. Overall, I don’t think it is as bad as some of the reviews say, but it isn’t great either. Lawrence is definitely captivating as the lead.

A movie that did, however, live up to the hype, is Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, about a woman, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), who is seeking the person who raped and killed her daughter. Seven months have gone by without any real leads, so to light a fire under the police department, she rents out billboards calling out the sheriff, Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). Bill is a good man who wants to solve it, but it really is a dead end case, and Bill himself is facing his mortality in the final months of pancreatic cancer. Mildred is a sympathetic character, but it is hard to really like her in the first third of the film, as she is a royal bitch to everyone she comes in contact with. The star of the film is Sam Rockwell as deputy Jason Dixon, a rough-around-the-edges cop with an attitude, who skirts the law and seems like a bad case, until you get to know him better in the latter parts of the film. Part drama, part dark comedy, this is an enthralling, at times tense, and altogether beautifully written movie.