Screen Notes: Annette; Nine Days; The Suicide Squad

ANNETTE dir Leos Carax

Leos Carax's new film Annette is a perfect storm of elements, starting with the collaboration of the musical Mael brothers known as Sparks (subject of the recent Edgar Wright documentary The Sparks Brothers), the inventive, in-camera cinematography with Carax's frequent director of photography Caroline Champetier, and the physical acuity and vocal bravery of the lead performers, Adam Driver (Henry), Marion Cotillard (Ann), and Simon Helberg (The Conductor). The film is being sold as a musical, which it is--a riff on the cinematic artifice of A Star is Born (Liza Minelli, not Streisand or Gaga) and as meta as Singin' in the Rain, though more of a pop opera that comes almost nowhere near a traditional dance number, and is all the better for it. One of the most remarkable aspects of Annette is how the collaboration of movement by Carax, the cast and crew, including a throng of live, essential, performing extras, in fact, constitutes one rather elaborate dance from which the film never relents; Adam Driver's caustic comedian Henry McHenry stalking the stage, or drunkenly climbing the stairs, or driving his motorcycle at night, or cradling baby Annette all feel like choreography that is wholly threaded through every element of production. The songs are hooky while never overstaying their welcome--there are no attempts at scoring "hits" here, which would be long overdue anyway for the incredible, underrated Sparks, but only music in service of the overall momentum of the film. All of this makes for a sort of anti-musical, but not in the same way as something like Damien Chazelle's La La Land, a film I liked quite a bit, which Jonathan Rosenbaum rightly remarked upon for "just how desperate its euphoria is." Annette is playing much more adeptly with desperation and euphoria than Chazelle is capable of, and part of that is a fuller and deeper recognition of what Rosenbaum goes on to point out as true about many of the greatest musicals that characteristically gets overlooked, "which is how much the elation of song and dance is only half of the dialectic that also highlights failure, hopelessness, and defeat." 

Annette is ultimately about the failure and defeat of Henry McHenry, an uber-alt-stand-up comedian appearing in something called "Ape of God," where he stalks the stage in a green robe like a prize fighter, certainly grappling with a sort of "god complex," though more aping a cross between Lenny Bruce and Bo Burnham, invoking Bruce with his holy microphone blessings on the audience and Burnham's whole generation of comedy with his blunt pantomime of suicidal ideation. In one sense, the movie is mostly centered by the suffocating, masculine vibe and murderous trajectory of McHenry, and ultimately lands as a condemnation of the "cancelled stand-up." But there's a lot more at play in Annette beyond being an odd revenge tale of the "me-too" era or a satire of the shallowness of musical theatre culture (see love theme "We Love Each Other So Much"), although it can be read as both. While Carax in collaboration with Sparks is more concerned with addressing the current zeitgeist than in his film Holy Motors from 2012 (definitely near the top of my "Best Films" list from that year), the film is not so easily reduced, also containing elements of a La Llorona-esque ghost story, as well as some strong Pinnochio vibes, and as always with Carax there is the possibility that damn near anything can happen. It's this unpredictability and absurdist sense of possibility that made me fall in love with Holy Motors (and I seriously love it--likely top ten for post-millennium films) and although I wish Annette had more of that same spirit, it still retains that unique ability Carax has to create films that perfectly balance artifice and emotional resonance. Like Holy Motors, Annette also has a healthy, artful disregard for story, though this plays out in entirely different ways in both films. In Holy Motors there is no story, per-se, but the through-line is really a symbolic, poetic one--that of the white limousine, which Carax speaks about as an evocative element that sparked the creation of the film, something that "cannot be looked into but wants only to be looked at." In Annette, the same might be said for Henry McHenry's impromptu paparazzi dance inside of a black tinted motorcycle helmet (also a nod to Driver's state of celebrity in relation to the black-masked Kylo-Ren?), with the story zipping from moment-to-moment with a sense of narrative that refreshingly trims away any tedious exposition, having enough faith in the audience--and, again, it's own artifice--to trust that we will roll with the narrative flow. The unexpected part here, after the rousing and brilliantly Brechtian opening number "So May We Start?" is that the film resists anything like a number that asks "so may we end?" in favor of a more sobering conclusion. 

Easily one of my favorites films of this year. May it never be allowed to be Broadway-ized. It's time we recognize that Broadway never made anything that was already good better.

Nine Days dir Edson Oda

I suppose the segue between Annette and the debut feature by Edson Oda, Nine Days, would have something to do with my previous mention of Bo Burnham, most recently having produced the single-location, hand-made Bo Burnham: Inside, which is closer to a feature follow-up to his excellent Eighth Grade than a typical stand-up special, and, like Oda's film, features a number of inventive wall projections. Nine Days also shares a single-location setting, and while the impetus for Burnham's Inside is clearly the forced isolation of the recent pandemic, the locale of Nine Days feels more like a productive limitation or boundary, a creative framework adopted by many working toward Sundance-born or low-budget features, but not always with the success and wide-release potential of Nine Days. I was chuffed to see a film like Nine Days playing at the local cineplex, frankly, since art films that are decidedly relying on a high concept that (unlike The Green Knight) the trailer didn't or couldn't attempt to mask seem rare as cinemas re-open (sadly, met with increasing COVID infection rates on all sides). While Nine Days isn't quite the spectacle of something like The Suicide Squad, it has a complete, cinematic aesthetic that is particularly well displayed in the opening, nearly wordless passages. The task of Nine Days is that it first has to convince you of it's world, which it does effortlessly, and while the day-by-day journey from there has it's hits and misses, the film achieves a grand feel for something with such sparse elements. 

Of course, it's not entirely correct to characterize Nine Days as a single location film. The central house in the film-- a sort of liminal, spiritual space between nothingness and life--is occupied by Will (Winston Duke), a repressed processor of new candidates who is constantly monitoring a wall of "first-person" television feeds, each one their own version of Philip Marlowe in Lady in the Lake (or, for the kids, Hardcore Henry), which constitute multiple production locations, characters, and events that are seamlessly woven into the whole. The ensemble cast is quite good, featuring Zazzie Beetz, Benedict Wong, Tony Hale, and Bill Skarsgård, all drawing convincing characters within an entirely unfamiliar and somewhat undefined framework--no easy task for an actor, especially when something this conceptual could easily stay stuck to the page, but here the performances clearly bring out the quality of the screenplay, also by director Oda. Like Carax's Annette, the balance of the artificial and the emotional engagement is tricky, as we follow the narrative trajectory of these "candidates for life," eliminated one-by-one, like contestants on the most unreal reality show ever conducted, where the host feels so heartbroken over the daily losers that he stages multi-projector theatrical environments to give them a fleeting moment of experiential rapture before sending them into the void. This special "performance space" is hidden inside of a secret door disguised as a filing cabinet, which made me wonder if that was an homage to a producer on the film, Spike Jonze, creator of another memorable secret doorway into the performance space of John Malkovich's head in Being John Malkovich (1999). 

Nine Days is a movie that is occasionally in conflict with it's own lofty concept, and I say that with a great appreciation for what it achieves. Once the "rules of the game" are laid out I lose some interest, and the film gets caught in a space where it has to negotiate what it needs to explain in order to make the narrative work. But, progressively, my interest was held by a contrasting philosophical note that I found compelling, which is that the "rules of the game" don't really matter. That, within the world of the film, trying or not trying doesn't matter. Doing the right thing, or not, doesn't matter, and won't effect the outcome. And, yes, this is a far cry from review headlines I've glanced that label this film as "life affirming!" This reaction may be the impression given off by the truly wonderful finale of the film, which seems to underline all that precedes it as an allegory about the risk and fear around making art, though even that reading lingers a bit in tension with the concept and design of the film. For my friends who have a background in performance or literature, I would love to hear your responses to the film, since it could just as easily have been generated within performance studies spaces and feels rooted in those traditions that we don't often see emerge at the movies in quite this way. And yet, what the finale choses not to show is what stuck with me the most. Nine Days may have some typically twee aspects that will turn some audiences off, but I ultimately appreciated Oda's commitment to the premise and design. The lingering, troubling, and unseen outcome of the film's contest stays with me even more than the outburst of performative joy that we witness as an ending, and the power of the film is it's ability to keep us in that space in-between.

The Suicide Squad dir. James Gunn

Let me get this out of the way: James Gunn's new movie The Suicide Squad is a huge improvement on David Ayers 2016 movie Suicide Squad, and that is a very, very low bar to clear. I was prepared for something obnoxious and loud and violent and dumb with Gunn's new whack at this failed property, and while it's comparably obnoxious and loud and violent, it marginally bests it's predecessor through being joyously dumb. Now, there are a few (well, more like two) levels of dumb going on with this version of the Squad, and one weighs the movie down with a particular brand of unfunny, juvenile humor--funny juvenile humor I'm fine with, and some of that occasionally lands in this film, but much of it is seriously unfunny, dependent only on how hilarious the audience finds dirty words, especially the number "69"...and, no doubt, that's a lot of the audience for The Suicide Squad, article or no. The other mode of dumb that the movie embraces involves a giant starfish called Starro the Conqueror which (spoiler) the Suicide Squad battle in the final sequence of the movie, and which I found entirely entertaining and hilarious, nearly to the point of redeeming the entirety of what preceded it. In fact, I kind of wish the movie were called "The Suicide Squad vs Starro the Conqueror," and was entirely about battling Starro the Conqueror. I'd be fine with that. Also, I was won over by one of the film's punchline sequences involving a character called "The Weasel," who is simply very funny to look at, so kudos to whoever designed that inspired, hairy, goggle-eyed bit of grotesquerie. 

I recently read a piece of click-bait that was addressing Gunn's response to Scorsese's criticism of super-hero franchise movies, and in the sad fashion of "anything for a click" content the headline promised a beef, touting Gunn's position that Scorsese was talking trash just to promote The Irishman (you know, Marty Scorsese, who rarely talks movies!), but the content of the article simply reported that Gunn was entirely in agreement with Scorsese, as well as detailing how Gunn has consistently expressed the desire to evolve the product under the giant tentpole of corporate filmmaking. I don't have much interest in defending Gunn or his oeuvre (aside from really enjoying his 2006 film Slither), but I think The Suicide Squad, at least, shows his desire to evolve the superhero genre even more fully than the Guardians of the Galaxy movies (Marvel, not DC, but also directed by Gunn), if only for a handful of sequences. Ultimately, The Suicide Squad is bloated with jokes and violent gags that don't quite land, and leans a bit heavy into a misuse of needle drops--I just cannot defend the use of Johnny Cash, The Jim Carroll Band, or the Pixies in this movie (I'll give him Kansas's "Point of No Return"). But, the movie suffers most specifically from the way it tries to root itself in the real world, attempting to hold weight as an allegory on military presence in South America through the central storyline involving a stand-in fictional country called Corto Maltese. This movie also has a giant shark man who rips soldiers in half. 

So, here's the good news: The Suicide Squad has some genuine fun with the idea of the "squad" or the "crew" right from the beginning, and manages to let the most anarchic and fun character, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), stand apart in ways that also improve upon the lackluster, (though marvelously titled) Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. It doesn't hurt matters that The Suicide Squad also features Idris Elba and Viola Davis--great actors who know the value of fully committing to something that only scratches the surface of their skills (and, in an inspired casting move, the giant shark man is voiced by Sylvester Stallone). There are some great visual gags involving the manufactured hero with mommy issues, Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), and a few other ridiculous, eye-popping moments that allowed me to forgive the movie most of it's overstuffed and mismanaged bits. In the end, there are a few stupendous images involving Harley Quinn and some spontaneous animation, as well as a breathtaking scene inside the giant eyeball of Starro, Quinn finally finding her weapon's purpose--as does the movie--by defeating the monocular kaiju with, perhaps, the most expensive nod to the Bunuelian razor ever filmed.

Un Starfish Andalou