For the week of June 20th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Jeff Nichols' brilliant Midnight Special to Blu-ray. Since his debut with 2007's spare, haunting Shotgun Stories, Nichols has quietly been establishing himself as the cinematic laureate of the contemporary American South. Nichols, like Cormac McCarthy or William Faulkner before him, has an acute understanding of the South's tribal codes and often contradictory (sometimes disturbing) approaches to morality, whether he's treating the sins of a family as a virus that spreads throughout generations (Shotgun Stories) or using apocalyptic visions to suggest both economic and emotional instability (Take Shelter). In 2013, Nichols' Mud, a breathtaking riff on Huck Finn that looked at fringe cultures along the Mississippi River (and helped solidify the McConaissance), brought him a whole new level of critical and commercial exposure, so it's saying something that as good as Mud is, Midnight Special might be his finest work. It's certainly his most accessible picture, in a lot of ways - while Mud dabbled in some familiar conventions (crime story, coming-of-age drama), Midnight Special is a full-fledged genre picture, a sci-fi thriller, even, about Alton Brown (Jaeden Lieberher), a young boy with fantastic powers that make him the focus of a nationwide manhunt. The government (personified by Girls and The Force Awakens' Adam Driver) wants to study Alton for military and scientific purposes; a religious cult (led by Sam Shepard's calm fanatic) wants to reclaim Alton as their prophetic figurehead; but Alton's father Roy (Nichols' longtime muse, Michael Shannon) just wants to protect his son, and so he enlists the help of his best friend Lucas (a warm, fantastic Joel Edgerton) to spirit Alton across the country for a rendezvous with...something. And it's that uncertainty that galvanizes Midnight Special. You've seen this movie before - boiled down, it's like if Michael Mann directed E.T. - but never in such a spare, understated fashion, which is Nichols' specialty. Sure, he stages a few setpieces (a frightening "attack" on a gas station; a couple of desperate car chases near the climax), but he's more committed to the spaces between the big moments: the resolutely middle-class environs of everyone Alton and Roy meet (even two would-be gunsels remark on how ill-equipped they are for the task they've been given), the darkened hotel rooms that seem to mark Alton's progress through the lower Southwest, the way it feels to be driving late at night with only comic books to keep you interested. Novelist Paul Theroux once valorized the on-the-ground road trip by noting that "everything in between is interesting...[otherwise] you don't see how people live," and Nichols seems committed to that same ethos, to emphasizing the minute, noble humanity along the way. In that spirit, he drastically pares down all the traditional exposition you'd expect to see in a picture like this. We really don't need it (one of the perks of working with familiar genre tropes is they allow you to shorthand content), and without it, our attention moves from plot to character, so we become more focused on the unnerving devotion Roy has for his son (this role allows for a perfect balance of Shannon's two most innate actorly qualities: his vulnerability and his instability), the self-imposed exile that his ex-wife Sarah (Kirsten Dunst, doing some really delicate, subtle work) has entered, the internal toil that this trip takes on Lucas, or the mounting enthusiasm that builds in Driver's character. We come to care deeply about these people, and that compassion invests us in their journey. Only the ending isn't a complete triumph. In trying to visualize a mysterious, otherworldly culture, Nichols and his creative team lose some of that tantalizing ambiguity they've established. What we see is too literal and disappointingly familiar, like outtakes from the Tomorrowland production design. However, the film has built up so much goodwill by that point that we barely register this moment as a stumble, and besides, the real conclusion plays in Sarah's anguished face, or the wordless, remarkable decision Roy makes to buy his son a little more time. Nichols has structured everything in Midnight Special to build to these small physical gestures, and they're reflected in the very last shot which, if you're paying close attention, hits like an emotional depth charge. Along with Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some and Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room, this is easily the best American film of 2016.
Michael Reuben expressed a far different opinion in his Blu-ray review, writing that "Midnight Special fails to live up to its promise. Though it might make a terrific pilot for a TV series, as a standalone film it disappoints...Nichols appears to be building to a conclusion that will introduce humanity to a new race of beings or an alternate dimension (or both), but Midnight Special fails to deliver the promised encounter, offering only futuristic tableaux instead of a transcendent sense of wonder and awe. Part of the problem may be budgetary. At an $18 million production cost, Midnight Special is the most expensive of Nichols' films to date, but that sum isn't nearly enough for the kind of operatic effects sequence that Steven Spielberg orchestrated to cap Close Encounters. The bigger problem, though, is a failure of imagination. As Nichols admits in the Blu-ray extras, he did not attempt to conceive in full the 'other' world to which Alton is mysteriously linked. Having made the choice not to explore that alternate reality in depth, he should have left it to the viewer's imagination, offering no more than a glimpse of the ineffable, as he did at the end of Take Shelter. Like The X-Files, which Nichols' film resembles more than it does a Spielberg-style fantasy epic, Midnight Special works best as a thriller generating suspense from the inexplicable and unknown. But as often happened in The X-Files, when the moment arrives to reveal the truth that's out there, Nichols can't satisfy the expectations he's built up so effectively."
The other big auteur-driven title of the week is Terrence Malick's newest, the transcendental (and I'm using that word literally and not as a value signifier) melodrama Knight of Cups, which comes courtesy from Broad Green Pictures. For his seventh film in just over forty years, Malick has turned his attentions to his own vocation: his hero is Rick (Christian Bale), a Hollywood screenwriter living and working in L.A. Even with all his fame and fortune, Rick can't shed the spiritual void he feels at his core, and through his relationships with six very different women (played by Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas, Imogen Poots, and Teresa Palmer), he embarks on an inner quest for some deeper, more meaningful connection with the world around him. Thematically, what Malick is selling isn't all that revelatory - no one should be too surprised with his assertion that sex and money aren't adequate substitutes for moral, creative, and spiritual fulfillment. But the fact remains that if you're at all familiar with Malick, you have a pretty good sense of where this film is going. Beginning with 1978's Days of Heaven (although an argument could be made for Badlands, it remains the most straightforward and earthbound of all his features), Malick has dedicated himself to an Emersonian ideal - the way humanity, nature, and spirituality are inextricably bound together - specifically what happens when worldly concerns (poverty and crime in Days of Heaven; war in The Thin Red Line; colonialism in The New World; family abuse in The Tree of Life; a fracturing marriage in To the Wonder) impede the otherworldly flow of the universe. So it goes with Knight of Cups, and if I have any serious complaint, it's that Malick finally feels like he's repeating himself. Much of Knight of Cups looks and acts like outtakes from To the Wonder (see these beautiful, anguished white people as they whisper and float their way to a greater understanding of the world), and both these films play like B-sides to Malick's more substantial The Tree of Life. It is possible to say something profound too many times, and Malick is running right into that risk. Yet you can't just dismiss Knight of Cups outright. It's too achingly beautiful, for one. Malick's most important creative collaborator of the past decade is DP Emmanuel Lubezki, who shoots the excess and vacuity of Rick's world (and of the 21st Century) with such visual grace - Lubezki gives a strip club poetic majesty, for God's sake. And even though Rick himself is kind of a tortured cipher (that's no fault of Bale's. Great actors often struggle to make sense of Malick's process), the characters around him are often quite vivid, with Cate Blanchett, Brian Dennehy, and Wes Bentley (as, respectively, Rick's ex-wife, father, and brother) bringing an intensity to the proceedings that's reminiscent of Nick Nolte in The Thin Red Line or Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life. More of that passion would be nice. By this point, we know Malick can do metaphysical yearning in his sleep.
One of the biggest treats this week is Criterion's new release of René Laloux's Fantastic Planet (La planete sauvage). For a long time, the only animation buffs could get a good look at this stunning feature was to freeze-frame parts of the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Cell; at one point, her character watches this film, which existed stateside in cruddy VHS and import copies. Not so anymore. This is a stunning restoration, with startling colors and full attention given to Laloux's carefully wrought aesthetic: working with French artist Roland Topor, Laloux created the world of Fantastic Planet using hand-drawn cutouts put through a stop-motion filmmaking process. And what a world it is! Laloux and Topor are creating in allegorical strokes, imagining a society split between the Draags (think blue giants) and the Oms, human beings who live in subservience to the Draags. After an Om boy forms a unique bond with a Draag girl, the boundaries of society start to fray, and Laloux and Topor draw all sorts of parallels to contemporary (for 1973, anyways) civil rights and pacifism movements. At times, this material plays as a little preachy, sure, but if you're into this kind of film, you won't care. Admittedly, the story doesn't make much sense - it's one of those surrealist, meandering works more concerned with mood and environment than with narrative (big props to composer Alain Goraguer for his trippy, noodling soundtrack) - but Fantastic Planet provides such a consistently engaging visual experience that you won't care. You get lost in the images here.
In his Fantastic Planet, Svet Atanasov wrote that "La planete sauvage is a film filled with symbolism and metaphors about a world divided by flawed ideologies. The Draags' attitude towards the Oms, for instance, clearly satirizes the attitude the Soviets had towards the former members of the Eastern Bloc. Like most of Laloux's other films, La planete sauvage is beautifully animated. Even by today's standards, Roland Topor's surrealist graphics look very impressive. The dangerous Yagam, for instance, is remarkably well crafted, and populated by truly fascinating and original creatures. Alain Goraguer's psychedelic music score is also quite extraordinary. Blending terrific rhythms and sounds, the score is an integral part of La planete sauvage, and at times even a lot more effective than the trippy visuals. La planete sauvage easily allows for multiple, very effective interpretations. Younger viewers will be fascinated by its compelling graphics, while older viewers will be intrigued by the depth of its story, and especially its effective criticism of different social and political subjects."
Finally, we end with Sony's release of the action-comedy The Brothers Grimsby. Star/co-writer Sasha Baron Cohen is one of the most important comedic minds of the last twenty years - his work on Da Ali G Show, Borat, and Brüno helped set a new standard for shock and improvisational comedy - which is why The Brothers Grimsby feels like such an unpleasant betrayal. Unlike those other features, The Brothers Grimsby is not a mockumentary: it, the Ali G movie, and The Dictator have the distinction of being Cohen's only pure narrative ventures. That said, the main difference separating The Brothers Grimsby from every other project Cohen has helped generate is that it's not funny. We have considerable time and talent (Penélope Cruz, Rebel Wilson, Isla Fisher, Barkhad Abdi, Gabourey Sidibe, Ian McShane) on display here, yet the best Cohen could do was a slapdash affair about what happens when the world's greatest spy (Mark Strong, who looks like he hates himself for slumming it so poorly) is reunited with his idiot older brother (Cohen) as they try to get at the bottom of a global conspiracy. The spy elements don't work - unlike, say, Kingsman: The Secret Service (which also co-starred Strong), director Louis Leterrier has no interest in cultivating Grimsby's thriller aspects - which puts the onus on the comedy. And therein lies the problem. I'm no prude when it comes to scatological humor, but there's no greater wit to Grimsby increasingly tasteless content. You get the sense that Cohen and screenwriters Peter Baynham and Phil Johnston were only interested in concocting the grossest possible joke (jockeying for most repellant are the plethora of AIDS gags - Cohen and Co. think nothing's funnier, apparently, than infecting famous celebrities with AIDS - the crassest suck-the-poison-out-of-an-unfortunate-spot riff I've ever seen, or the nauseating sequence where the brothers Grimsby must evade certain death by hiding in an elephant's vagina. These are the jokes, people) without any regard for how it might reflect character or situation. Nor does it help that Leterrier has almost zero facility for staging comedy. He's an action director, through and through, and a pretty good one (say what you will about the films themselves, but his handling of the mayhem in The Incredible Hulk, Unleashed, and The Transporter is top notch), but his high-impact, quick-edit is all wrong for this film, outside of the handful of action sequences (and really, only the first one is any good). The Brothers Grimsby is such an embarrassing misfire that I fear serious repercussions on Cohen's career. He needs to get his mojo back, and stat.