Drama Archives - Page 27 of 120 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Telluride ’15: Spotlight

September 10, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015, Thriller

***/****
starring Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy
directed by Tom McCarthy

by Walter Chaw Michael Keaton's a handsome guy. Not movie-star handsome in the traditional sense but, you know, not a dog. Everyday-guy handsome. Like Gene Hackman or Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino. I think fans responded the way they did when Keaton was cast in Tim Burton's Batman (i.e., violently) because Keaton doesn't look like a superhero. He has an attractively average physique. His chin is soft and that's the bit you see under the mask. But then he puts on the suit and plays the role and you understand that Keaton is who he is for the chaos of his energy. Burton used him as muse before turning to Johnny Depp, I think, because of the mania of his persona. There is no other actor the equal of Beetlejuice. He replaced Pee-Wee Herman in Burton's progression through men-children. He's doomed to eternally be smarter than the characters he plays, and more interesting. He's the boy version of Illeana Douglas. Keaton in motion is a thing of wonder and danger. He's a perfect Batman because Batman's story arc inevitably leads to the place where he's seen as the Superego to Joker's Id–as the opposite side of the same Arkham coin. Keaton is Grant Morrison's Batman. He is the average-looking Warren Beatty. If he were making movies in the '70s, he would be Robert De Niro. There aren't a lot of movie stars I like better than Michael Keaton. He is the embodiment of aspiration and stick-to-it-iveness.

Telluride ’15: Room

September 9, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015

*/****
starring Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen, William H. Macy
screenplay by Emma Donoghue, based on her novel
directed by Lenny Abrahamson

by Walter Chaw If you've read the book, you'll probably like the movie. If you haven't, like me, you'll have some questions. Lenny Abrahamson's Room is about how a child's "plasticity" allows him to better recover from extreme psychological trauma. It's about how the adults in said child's life can aid in the process of recovery by hiding things from him and also letting him know that the reason the adults are better is because the child is a hero, and strong, and an appropriate catalyst for healing. That the adults' mental health is, in fact, the child's responsibility. I'm told the book is not exactly about those things, but then again, it's not exactly not about those things. Many watching the film find in it a redemptive story about a mother's relationship with her child. I find in it a seriously deranged, idealized fantasy in which an adorable little kid is given the weight of the world to carry and does so with no real ramifications for himself. I'd like to see a sequel to this film in which the little kid, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), reveals that he's been keeping roadkill in jars in the storm shelter he's moved into as a surrogate for his lost "room." I think that's the honest version of Room. You can leave comments at the bottom of this review that I will not read.

TIFF ’15: Black; We Monsters; Keeper

September 9, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Romance, Switzerland, Teen, Thriller, TIFF

BLACK
*/****
directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

Wir Monster, a.k.a. Cold Days
**/****
directed by Sebastian Ko

KEEPER (pictured)
***/****
directed by Guillaume Senez

by Bill Chambers My random sampling of #TIFF15’s Discovery programme yielded a loose trilogy of bildungsromane. The most ‘problematic’ of these, as the kids say, is Black, a West Side Story redux set on the surprisingly mean streets of Brussels, where rival gangs of Moroccan and (I think) Congolese immigrants antagonize the locals and each other. Marwan (charming Aboubakr Bensaihi) and Mavela (gorgeous Martha Canga Antonio) meet-cute in police custody. He’s Moroccan, she hangs with “the Black Bronx,” whose name very purposely evokes American ghettos for that soupçon of danger. When he hits on her, she asks him how he’d feel if his sister brought a black man home; Marwan admits there’s a double standard, then reassuringly points out they’re both African. Within days they’re a couple on the DL, whispering dreams of an honest future together. Alas, Mavela becomes inextricably tethered to the Black Bronx when she baits a female member of Marwan’s posse to their clubhouse to be gang-raped, then endures the same torment herself after they find out about her affair with Marwan. Note that the first rape happens offscreen while Mavela’s does not, and though I don’t condone any rape scene, there is something ultra-nauseating about graphically violating the Maria/Juliet figure, like when Edith Bunker endured a rape attempt: It breaks some socio-artistic contract we have with our most wholesome archetypes. It didn’t make me hate her attackers so much as it made me hate the filmmakers.

Telluride ’15: Carol

September 8, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2015

**½/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler
screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, based on the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Todd Haynes

by Walter Chaw Todd Haynes movies tend to grow on me. I expect that Carol, his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, will do the same. First pass, though, finds me considering a film adapted by a filmmaker I like from an author I adore as fully twenty minutes too long with enough fake-out climaxes and epilogues that you can almost see the air hissing out of it. Maybe it has something to do with the relative straight-forwardness of Haynes's approach here. Gone are the Sirk shrines that indicate his best work as a modern evocation of the great German expat's lush Technicolor tragedies; Carol doesn't pack the same kind of punch, because it doesn't allow us to access it as allegory. A couple of longing, lingering moments shot through snow-wet car windows and in Edward Hopper-framed hotel rooms (it's Haynes's most Wenders work), as well as a final shot that is the picture at its most evocative and unapologetically Romantic, point to the film that might have been. It could have been a more hypnotic exercise. It could have found a certain lulling rhythm in its longueurs. In Carol, the high stylization of Haynes is evoked mainly in the carefully-affected stiffness of the performances. Highsmith's prose is a delight but, freed of the awful gestalt of its pulsing drive, it proves a tall order for the cast asked to speak it.

Telluride ’15: Black Mass

September 7, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Gangster, Telluride, Telluride 2015

*½/****
starring Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rory Cochrane
screenplay by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth
directed by Scott Cooper

by Walter Chaw I liked Scott Cooper's Out of the Furnace well enough. It's miserabilist poverty porn, but it features an impressive cast doing ugly work, and I was fine with its stock pleasures as a deep genre exercise in the Next of Kin/hillbillysploitation mold. I like Black Mass considerably less. It's a cartoon with a cartoon performance by Joel Edgerton, cartoon makeup for Johnny Depp, and cartoon accents from everyone else, including a miscast Benedict Cumberbatch, tasked with sounding South Boston rather than South London c. 1882. There's a scene early on when the respectable senator played by Cumberbatch, Billy, is at home for the holidays with older brother and star of this show, Jimmy "Whitey" Bulger (Depp), that plays exactly like an outtake from Johnny Dangerously–card-cheatin', tough-talkin' Irish ma and all. It's funny. Unintentionally so, I'd wager, but in any case funny in a cruel way. Edgerton's big, showy, Townie turn as former boy from the old neighbourhood (I should say "NAY -buh–hud") turned FBI agent Johnny is also funny–for the wig, yes, but for the outrageous overacting, too. It's the first time since maybe What's Eating Gilbert Grape? that Johnny Depp has been out-hammed by someone, so at least there's that.

Telluride ’15: Suffragette

September 7, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015

½*/****
starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Meryl Streep
screenplay by Abi Morgan
directed by Sarah Gavron

by Walter Chaw Focus on two scenes. The first, the pivotal moment where evil police inspector Steed (Brendon Gleeson) begs his superintendent for mercy for the brave ladies arrested while violently protesting their lack of the vote. The second, a reflective moment in which audience surrogate Maud (Carrie Mulligan), a fictionalized composite character like Charlie Sheen's in Platoon, reads a poignant book by poignant candlelight. (Seriously, she looks like a Hallmark commercial–it's really awesome.) Steed delivers his spittle-flecked, earnest-member-of-the-ruling-majority-finding-humanity-in-the-struggle-of-the-martyred-heroes speech, whereupon director Sarah Gavron, following up Brick Lane and Village at the End of the World with another IMPORTANT film, shoots a standard long shot down the middle of a stairwell. It doesn't aid the scene. It doesn't even make much sense in the context of the scene. There's no reason to establish their place in that space; there's nothing to be said about the symbolism, as both inspector and superintendent appear to be on a middle-floor level. In fact you can barely see them. It's just a pretty shot. A pretty standard shot. It shows up in a lot of student films and student-photographer portfolios. And when Maud reads a book given her by one of the real leaders of England's suffrage movement by flickering flame in an abandoned church? It's pretty thick, isn't it? Here's the clincher: the way she's sitting and holding the book, the candle is casting no illumination on the pages–but lights her up just perfectly, like a little golden angel. This is exploitation, isn't it?

Telluride ’15: 45 Years

September 6, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2015, UK

***½/****
starring Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay
written and directed by Andrew Haigh

by Walter Chaw Andrew Haigh's 45 Years turns on a fifty-year-old mystery that resurfaces in the week before the 45^th wedding anniversary of Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay), causing the couple to reassess what they know of each other and their place in their relationship. It's a slow unravelling, and Haigh trusts his cast to a laudable extent. In the film's best, most visually interesting moment, he has Kate look at slides projected against a sheet in the extreme foreground. Kate herself, visible to the left of the sheet, is crammed into the eave beneath a slanted attic ceiling. Her interpretation of what she's seeing dawns on her face–creeps across it like shadows pulling back across the course of a day. It's an extraordinary moment in a film full of them. Look, too, to the scene immediately following when Kate picks Geoff up from some afternoon event, and how she holds the steering wheel while he rails on about exactly everything that isn't important. The very definition of an actor's workshop and a character drama, 45 Years attacks the idea that things get easier as you get older. Geoff's toast at their anniversary party speaks to how when one gets older life provides fewer big decisions, so all one's left with is regret at the big decisions already made. In many ways, the film is about that sort of nostalgia. In many others, it's as bitter as Make Way for Tomorrow. Imagine that film, or Tokyo Story, without children.

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

August 14, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

***/****
starring O’Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw Exhilarating until it turns into a “Behind the Music” special, F. Gary Gray’s N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton (hereafter Compton) is most affecting for just how timely are its self-aggrandizing tales of police brutality and racial profiling. Amid a sequence that reprises the Rodney King tape, it occurred to me that we’re talking about something that happened almost 25 years ago; all we’ve done in the time intervening is lengthen the list of martyrs and sites of atrocity. Progress that a movie that deals as directly as Compton does with race and the police exists in any form, I guess, but it’s cold comfort in the face of what feels like a treadmill built on a Moebius strip. Call it a national farce and a tragedy that what is obviously an auto-mythology plays so much like objective, sober documentary and evening newscast. God bless America.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)

August 14, 20152015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical

***/****
starring Bel Powley, Alexander Skarsgård, Christopher Meloni, Kristen Wiig
screenplay by Marielle Heller, based on the book by Phoebe Gloeckner
directed by Marielle Heller

by Angelo Muredda “Everything looks totally different to me now,” announces brand-new, card-carrying adult Minnie (Bel Powley) towards the end of Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl, based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel about her coming-of-age in 1970s San Francisco. It’s an old sentiment, practically a requirement of the bildungsroman, but credit ought to go to both Heller and Powley (in their respective feature debuts) for making it seem relatively new in the context of Minnie’s story. Deservedly lauded at Sundance for its frankness and non-judgemental approach to female and young-adult sexuality, the film impresses on its own terms as a solidly constructed character study of a mercurial, still-forming artist, told with a straight face despite the period eccentricities.

The Fisher King (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 4, 2015****/****, 1990s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Amanda Plummer, Mercedes Ruehl
written by Richard LaGravenese
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Bryant Frazer New York City is cast against type in The Fisher King, where it plays an urban fantasy realm complete with castles, towers, villages, and wilderness. Kings and queens look down from their lofty aeries on the dirty streets below, where peasants defend their hard-won territory against barbarian hordes. Imposing forests of skyscrapers jut up from the concrete, cave dwellings yawn open at the base of the Manhattan Bridge, and the city’s homeless specialize in ad hoc musical theatre. The Holy Grail may be hidden in a fortress on the Upper East Side. And there are no dragons in New York, but the Red Knight is a motherfucker.

The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 3, 20151970s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection, West Germany

Merchantfourseasons1

Händler der vier Jahreszeiten
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla, Hans Hirschmüller, Marian Seidowsky
written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

by Jefferson Robbins When beleaguered costermonger Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmüller) shouts his wares in the courtyard well of a grey Munich apartment block, he might as well be shouting into the void. Although his singsong calling of the prices of fruits is mesmeric, it summons practically no customers. Blocky and straining against his own skin, Hans has been humiliated all his life, and the manner in which he makes his livelihood is a further humiliation in the eyes of his family. The word used for “livelihood” in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons is the German noun Existenz. Clearly, it has multiple edges.

Tangerine (2015)

July 24, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor, Karen Karagulian, James Ransone
written by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
directed by Sean Baker

by Walter Chaw Tangerine acts like, sometimes even looks like, a Fassbinder film. It's a relational melodrama, a social allegory, an outsider text presented with seriousness and formalism that distinguishes itself with its energy and a willingness to address taboo unadorned. It's not a masterpiece, but it is a rarity: one of those glimpses into another culture obsessed with ordinariness, mendacity, and universality. Tangerine has the urgency of another generation's independent cinema. It doesn't play like a calling card, although there are moments, most of them coming in the final third of the film, arranged with a careful, painterly intentionality. The picture plays for all its narrative looseness (and then conveniences) like an opinion urgently held, urgently shared, but repeated so often that sometimes details are neglected in the retelling. It reminded me a lot of Nir Bergman's little-seen gem Broken Wings, which takes place in a very particular time and place (Haifa during the height of suicide bombings) yet is really just about a family. Broken Wings is not a masterpiece and neither is Tangerine, but both are important in the same way.

Irrational Man (2015)

July 24, 20152015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Jamie Blackley, Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Parker Posey
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There’s an odd, mean little movie kicking around in Irrational Man, if you can sift past the tired bromides about love and continental philosophy to find it. The fifty-first feature from the not-so-venerable Woody Allen reads like a work of sloppy automatic writing given some surprisingly rich shading by an alert, unpredictable performance from Joaquin Phoenix and the steady hand of Allen the director, who once again proves he’s as efficient at handling the near-screwball mechanics and black pitch of crime pictures as he is inept at romantic comedies. A nominal May-December romance about an aging fusspot granted a new lease on life by a twentysomething sunflower, Irrational Man is a far more disquieting film than its marketing would suggest–if not a confession of the director’s real-life pathologies, then one of the most incisive profiles of a sociopath ever tucked into the back of a dark comedy.

Southpaw (2015)

July 23, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Naomie Harris, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Kurt Sutter
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw TV-writer Kurt Sutter breaks into feature-screenwriting by amalgamating Taxi Driver with Raging Bull in a movie that has the distinction of being not only the second film of 2015 with Fiddy Cent in it for some inexplicable reason, but also the second film that Jake Gyllenhaal shares with a little slow-motion girl on a trampoline. Southpaw has the distinction, too, of being the second picture in a row following Nightcrawler that is absolutely not the equal of Mr. Gyllenhaal’s performance in it. Antoine Fuqua’s latest is a rote, by-the-numbers sports melodrama that ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions, meaning that although it’s shooting for Rocky and Requiem for a Heavyweight, it ends up as Real Steel. It wants to be gritty like the American ’70s, see, but if Disney made ultra-violent boxing movies, this is exactly what they’d be like: dead mother and all. The real wonder of it all is that Fuqua manages to match every one of Sutter’s overused sports clichés with an overused Scorsese homage. That’s the real toe-to-toe slugfest, sports fans.

Limelight (1952) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 20151950s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, Music, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Charles Chaplin, Claire Bloom, Sydney Chaplin, Nigel Bruce
written and directed by Charles Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer The opening titles of Limelight describe the film modestly but self-consciously as “the story of a ballerina and a clown.” The clown, of course, is Chaplin himself, playing a faded superstar of the stage named Calvero. The ballerina is Chaplin’s own discovery, Claire Bloom, playing a beautiful and earnest young dancer. The story is about their relationship–how a washed-up old comedian takes a despairing young performer under his wing and gives her the confidence to become a great artist, even as his own career fades into irrelevance. The main dilemmas facing Calvero–his steadily advancing age and the fickleness of his public–were the same ones that bedevilled Chaplin at the time.

The Gunman (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 7, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sean Penn, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Don McPherson, Pete Travis, Sean Penn, based on the novel The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette
directed by Pierre Morel

by Bill Chambers Sean Penn seems like the last guy who would walk into his agent’s office and say, “Give me the Liam Neeson™,” because his work doesn’t operate on that kind of cynicism. Even I Am Sam, in which he courts an Oscar by playing mentally-challenged, fits neatly into a career whose primary auteurist concern has been the sanctity and fragility of daughters’ lives (see also: The Crossing Guard, The Pledge, 21 Grams, and Mystic River). So it’s reassuring, sort of, to see him use The Gunman as a pulpit for his humanitarian concerns (presuming I’ve correctly extrapolated the political firebrand’s credited contribution to the screenplay), but there is a disappointing transparency to the character, as if he’s afraid that reinventing himself too much in the Neeson mold will reveal, God forbid, a desire to stay popular in a profession he has threatened to quit numerous times. In The Gunman, one of our most transformative actors–a guy who as recently as 2011 turned himself into the spitting image of The Cure‘s Robert Smith and affected a childlike drawl for the length of a feature–comports himself with a tedious self-seriousness, makes time to surf, and smokes way too much to be a credible action hero. He’s Sean Penn in all but name, and he’s kind of a drag.

Miami Blues (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

June 23, 20151990s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Fred Ward, Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nora Dunn
screenplay by George Armitage, based on the novel by Charles Willeford
directed by George Armitage

by Jefferson Robbins Remember when handheld camera was a technique deployed to signal disorientation, estrangement, and vulnerability and not simply “the way we shoot movies now”? In George Armitage’s Miami Blues, the otherwise-steady camera first comes unhinged when ex-con Frederick “Junior” Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin) orders newly-requisitioned hooker Pepper (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to roll over on her belly, presumably so he can employ her the way male prisoners employ each other sexually. He can’t, though, because there’s something different there, and an afternoon’s purchased pleasure becomes an affair. Armitage’s use of the camera is a punctuation, a chapter break in Junior’s story, reassuring us that while Junior is malevolent and unpredictable, Pepper won’t immediately meet the same fate as the Hare Krishna that Junior (kind of accidentally) murdered an hour before. Still, you should probably worry for her.

Inside Out (2015)

June 18, 20152015, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve & Josh Cooley and Pete Docter
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw Films are objects and their interpretations are subjective. I start this way because there’s a sequence in Pete Docter’s Inside Out that enters an area of, literally, abstract thought–and then later, its characters accidentally spill crates of “facts” and “opinions” and have trouble getting them sorted out again. (“It happens all the time,” they’re reassured.) Someone brilliant once said that the measure of a work is the extent to which it’s examined. Inside Out is destined to be examined a lot and, therefore, deserves a great deal of merit–but for as uncannily perceptive as it is at times, it’s just as often pernicious in its gender stereotyping and establishment of straw situations that betray its core honesty. I’m reminded of Docter’s similarly-flawed, similarly schizophrenic Up, whose prologue is easily among the cinema’s best silent melodramas while the rest of it is missed opportunity, curious under-reaching, and overly dependant on shtick. Docter’s cited Paper Moon as a seminal film in his development. Of his three movies thus far, only his first, Monsters, Inc., deserves mention in the same conversation from start to bittersweet finish.

Run All Night (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 15, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

Runallnightbd1

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris
screenplay by Brad Ingelsby
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra’s Run All Night fulfills every requirement of the Liam Neeson subgenre of elder-vengeance while simultaneously completing the Grumpy Old Men trilogy in an unexpected way. It’s a hollow stylistic exercise that mainly exposes how good We Own the Night was, and while some slight comparisons have been to Phil Joanou’s underestimated State of Grace, really the only thing Run All Night resembles is everything else Neeson has decided will be his legacy since the first Taken movie about seven years ago. What’s most painful, I think, is how consistently great Neeson is at doing this one thing over and over again. He makes it hard, in other words, to stop wishing he’d go back to doing something worthy of him.

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

June 9, 2015****/****, 1930s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Makeway1

****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi, Fay Bainter, Thomas Mitchell
screenplay by Viña Delmar, based on the novel The Years Are So Long by Josephine Lawrence
directed by Leo McCarey

by Walter Chaw Orson Welles famously proclaimed that Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow could “make a stone cry,” and it could, not because of any sentimentality, but because it pinions essential human failure mercilessly. Its tragedy is born not of high melodrama, but of low archetype. It’s any story of a close, loving relationship, a mentor/apprentice relationship, that ends in less shocking than mundane betrayal that is largely preordained and even necessary. What so wounds about Make Way for Tomorrow is that the audience identifies with not only the parents who have outlived their usefulness to society and their families, but also the children who are too busy with their own lives to include them. It puts us in the role of both betrayer and betrayed. The agony it elicits is complex and multifoliate. It compounds on itself. At the end, it’s even a movie about the idea that every love story is a tragedy because if everything goes exactly right, one lover will still die before the other. The film is a passion play in which the audience is Judas as well as Jesus. Make Way for Tomorrow‘s impact is startling some eighty years after its release, and will remain startling another eighty years from now.