***/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sean Penn
written and directed by Christy Hall

by Walter Chaw Girlie (Dakota Johson) gets in a cab from JFK to Manhattan, and over the long drive through construction slowdowns and other diversions, she and driver Clark (Sean Penn)…talk. Girlie receives a few lewd texts from her lover, sure, but Clark praises her for how little she’s on her phone in this age of screen intermediaries. He’s surprised again when she wants to know his name: “You are a human being,” he says, and there’s hardly anyone who could deliver this line the way Penn does: free of insinuation or sarcasm, hinting at emotions like gratefulness and even flattered surprise. Penn is one of our great “face” actors. Robbed of tools other performers rely upon, he won an Oscar for Dead Man Walking, where he spent most of his time behind a glass partition, shackled to a table. The four inches reflected in the rearview mirror in Daddio are a better actor than almost anyone who’s ever done this. His persona outside of film has outgrown him in many ways, but I was shocked by how glad I was to be in his company again. Penn’s large humanitarian gestures and vile history of abuse, spotlighted whenever he shares his unevolved and indeed apparently devolving Neanderthal viewpoints on women and consent have obscured his accomplishments as an actor. Perhaps rightfully so. Seeing him on a big screen again made me realize how much I’d missed him in this context–and how much I wish it were the only context in which I knew him.

**½/****
starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Sarah Polley, based upon the book by Miriam Toews
directed by Sarah Polley

by Walter Chaw At the end of the note that opens Miriam Toews’s novel Women Talking, she says that her book is “both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination.” Sarah Polley’s adaptation begins with the same declaration of “female imagination,” and it occurred to me finally, after sitting on the film for a couple of weeks before writing on it (and after reading Towes’s book for the first time to try to better understand my disquiet), that my problem with Women Talking is mainly one of my own expectations of the text. I expected this to be a galvanizing bit of agitprop: a rallying cry and a soapbox. It was an expectation exacerbated by Polley’s intro to the film at its world premiere in Telluride, where she introduced an “army of women” that included 11 cast members and one producer, Dede Gardner, who is the president of Plan B Entertainment, the production company founded by Brad Pitt. Though Pitt, too, is a producer on Women Talking, he was for obvious reasons absent on that stage–the same reasons, I reckon, that led to male characters in the Toews source being pared away for the film. But while it has powerful moments, as any piece of art inspired by a real-life case of mass rape (including the rape of children as young as three) in a closed-off religious cult (aren’t they all?) would have powerful moments, Women Talking is a romantic fantasy told from the perspective of a dreamy male narrator who has a doomed crush on a perfect projection of gauzy, unearthly femininity. It’s mostly my fault for assuming it was something else.

***/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scoot McNairy, Gaby Hoffmann, Jaboukie Young-White
written and directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw It takes a certain level of courage to make a movie like Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, in which at least one, possibly two of the three main characters are so profoundly irritating it would be cathartic to see them shocked into compliant conformity. But that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. It’s a film about mining difficult conversations, asking the right questions and listening to the answers, practicing empathy when it’s absolutely the riskiest thing to do, i.e., when the person you’re trying to empathize with is smart, slippery, and able to push all of your buttons. Relationships, in other words–intimate ones with family where between platitudes and comfortable silences, there can erupt withering indictments and unresolved grievances. I love Mills’s Beginners and 20th Century Women because of their essential kindness, how Mills writes dialogue that’s searching without being grating, honest without being cruel. His characters are looking for the right way to do things, the elegant thing to say at the moment of crisis, but they’re thwarted by unexpected developments and circumstances beyond their control. His films are about navigating choppy waters with only the love of your family to guide you, and they’re beautiful.