For the week of April 17th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing M. Night Shyamalan's Split to Blu-ray. Look, by this point, you're either a fan of what Philadelphia's favorite son does or you're not, so I'll cut right to the chase: the rest of this review will not be charitable. The best I can muster is that Split is probably his best film since the first two-thirds of Signs in 2002, but that's damning Shyamalan's work with faint praise. He has always been a talented stylist and orchestrator of mise-en-scene, and to be sure, there are moments in this thriller that approach the pulpy intensity of a lesser Brian De Palma venture. Shyamalan and It Follows DP Mike Gioulakis do a great job of hiding menace in and around the edges of the 2.39:1 widescreen frame (the overall polish on screen often belies Split's micro-budget), although their most unnerving trick is to simply hold the camera on their lead psychopath (James McAvoy, delivering the most acting of his entire career, for better and worse) for agonizing stretches before he lashes out. You get the sense that with the right budgetary constraints and a script written by literally anyone else, Shyamalan could become the Alfred Hitchcock of grindhouse exploitation. And therein lies the rub: once again, Shyamalan is so desperate to maintain his auteur cred that he insists on shooting his own deeply flawed source text. Sure, his Split screenplay isn't as transcendently awful as whatever word vomit he deemed appropriate for The Happening, but in some ways, it's more problematic. See, Split hinges on two Hollywood stereotypes that won't die - the lunatic with multiple personalities and the omnipresent threat of sexual violence - and Shyamalan's PG-13 gloss on both somehow makes them more offensive rather than less. Of the two, I guess Said Lunatic comes off the best, given the clear zeal McAvoy brings to his central antagonist (who houses twenty-three distinct personalities, one of which might be a feral monster capable of inhuman physical aggression), but even a performer as charming as McAvoy can't combat Shyamalan's reductive view of mental illness. Shyamalan sees it as a comic-book plot twist, and no amount of armchair psychoanalytics (in the form of some deadly dull exposition courtesy of The Happening's Betty Buckley) can make acceptable the writer-director's perspective. But the bad guy can't just be a killer with multiple personalities; nope, he's got to kidnap a bunch of teenage girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula) that spend long chunks of the film in their underwear avoiding some ghastly attack. The implications are clear, and it's worse because you can sense Shyamalan sees his film as one of feminine empowerment. Taylor-Joy's main protagonist suffered a cycle of sexual/physical abuse that long preceded her interactions with McAvoy, but every time she's supposed to garner strength from her own trauma, Shyamalan's gaze towards his teenage leads turns pervy, and we start questioning his motives. And I haven't even gotten to the surprise ending, which is only a twist in that it makes us reconceive this supposedly standalone adventure as a sequel to what remains Shyamalan's high-water mark. The audience with which I saw the film cheered this moment, and you might, too, but I was a little miffed that the most important character of the film is really someone we don't see until its last thirty seconds. But I dunno: maybe the movie already put me in a bad mood.
Martin Liebman wrote that "James McAvoy delivers a transformational performance in the lead, not saying that as a pun on the movie's title but quite literally in his ability to fully realize any of the several characters he portrays throughout. And it's not just a change in voice or clothes or even attitude or approach. He finds a depth to each of the 'characters,' the purpose they play not just in the story but in the character's life. McAvoy never betrays the revolving door of personalities, refusing to give up on any of them and instead finding their own individual centers within the larger persona in the middle of it all. He's certainly helped by Shyamalan's writing and the foreknowledge of where the character is headed, and why, but the performance is incredibly nuanced, finely honed, and deeply understanding of how the various personalities play individually and collectively alike in shaping the character and driving the film towards its surprise ending and place in the Shyamalan canon."
From Arrow Films comes a new restoration of Richard Kelly's 2001 debut feature Donnie Darko. This singularly unclassifiable beast remains the best thing Kelly has ever made. It's a mélange of teen drama, cultural satire, horror thriller, and sci-fi mindbender that focuses on the title character (Jake Gyllenhaal), a disaffected teenager who begins receiving cryptic, disturbing visions (many of which center around a horrifying, six-foot-tall rabbit named Frank) that seem to tear at the very fabric of time itself. All that, and still Donnie has to navigate the various indignities that accompany high-school life, indignities both traditional - squabbling with his family (the wonderful trio of Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jake's real-life sister playing his on-screen sister), falling for a girl (Jena Malone) - and far less so - the insidious presence of an irritatingly upbeat motivational speaker (a very funny Patrick Swayze). None of these elements are all that original on their own (often times, you wonder if you're watching Carl Sagan writing with Stephen King), but Kelly's interweaving of them still impresses, particularly if you were about Donnie's age when you first saw the film. The genre elements all work (this movie pops effortlessly from funny to scary to provocative to satirical), as do the more outré choices, most notably Kelly's decision to set the film in and around the Dukakis/Bush Presidential election of 1988 (Kelly was a teenager in Richmond, VA, at that time, and his recollections of the time ground Donnie Darko in material both specific and universal). However, Kelly's biggest innovation - the distortion of the space-time continuum – proves the film's most enduring element as well as its most frustrating conceit. Every viewing of Donnie Darko proceeds as follows: it makes perfect internal logic, and then Kelly begins deliberately withholding information to pull off the mind-f**k ending. As such, you're left with dozens of potential interpretations, but you can't help but feel like the movie hasn't played fair, like Kelly only achieves this feeling by crippling the narrative. Case in point: the longer director's cut restores much of this connective tissue and is far less effective for it because Kelly's actual explanations are so mundane. Still, as first films go, it's a doozy, and I'm still waiting for Kelly to deliver on its promise (to all Southland Tales fans out there - without the phenomenal Sarah Michelle Geller and Dwayne Johnson performances, the theatrical cut would be a Battlefield Earth-level boondoggle).
Somehow, I'd missed Penny Marshall's 1992 hit A League of Their Own, so Sony's new twentieth-fifth anniversary edition gave me the opportunity to rectify that omission. I'm glad I did. A League of Their Own feels like a classic, a sports comedy that's about twice as smart as you might expect. This film takes us back to 1943, where, as part of the WWII effort, Cubs owner Walter Harvey (a predictably hilarious Garry Marshall) started a female baseball league to keep the sport going (and the revenue flowing) while the male players went off to war. Our entrance point to the new division is the Rockford Peaches, specifically the sibling rivalry between skilled catcher Dottie Hinson (the great Geena Davis) and her less talented younger sister - and team pitcher - Kit (Lori Petty). See, Kit was only offered a position in the league because the league's talent scout (Jon Lovitz, doing his Jon Lovitz thing, and oh so well) wanted to sign the far more pragmatic Dottie, and both Davis and Petty do such an expert job of letting that original sin, as it were, inform their characters' arcs. If it were actually 1943, people would call A League of Their Own a women's picture, a label that's always seemed a little condescending to me, especially since A League of Their Own's strengths come from how seriously it takes the problems separating Dottie and Kit. And not just them - for all intents and purposes, Marshall treats the film like it's her Howard Hawks hang-out picture, devoting equal screentime to the other members of the team, regardless of their respective star power. Davis and Petty are more than happy to cede the screen to Rosie O'Donnell's sassy third-base(wo)man, Megan Cavanagh's painfully shy hitter, Anne Ramsay's level-headed first-base player, Bitty Schram's right-field/field mother, or Madonna's sexually liberated center fielder (another welcome treat - how funny and engaging Madonna is, and how comfortable she seems being in the background). The biggest surprise of all might be that top-billed star Tom Hanks is neither the main character nor a romantic option for Davis' character. As the team's disgusting, alcoholic reprobate of a manager, he creates a comic wild card that's equal parts Bill Murray and W.C. Fields while never threatening to overwhelm the movie - you get the sense that Hanks is beyond relieved to misbehave from the sidelines instead of serving (as he so often does) as the default moral exemplar. If we're calling A League of Their Own of its own a women's picture, then it's a great one, on par with George Cukor's The Women and Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce. Matter of fact, I'd be tempted to call A League of Their Own a near-perfect movie (it really is that good) if it weren't for Marshall's decision to bracket the film with a terrible frame narrative that sees a seventy-something Dottie reuniting with her former teammates at the Baseball Hall of Fame's All-American Girls Professional Baseball League exhibit. Ignore, for a moment, that these scenes don't even approach the spark of the 1943 material, or that Marshall recasts all the main characters with older performers (we don't even get the pleasure of spending time with people we've grown to love). What's really galling about the frame is that it ruins the narrative economy of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel's script. This is the best thing they've ever written, and I attribute that quality to their facility at getting in and out of scenes, not least with what should be the ending: Dottie quits baseball for the best of reasons, but as she watches her team rejoice at the season's end, she displays this ineffable longing that we know will never leave her. The frame distends this perfect, silent moment and makes explicit everything that Marshall, Ganz, Mandel, and Davis underplayed so beautifully. That said, the good stuff is so transcendent it's worth MacGyvering a viewing - start five minutes late and end five minutes early.
In his review of the twentieth-fifth anniversary edition, Martin Liebman noted that "this new release offers no reason for previous owners to upgrade. The one new supplement is fine but hardly worth the cost." However, he previously wrote that the film "effortlessly combines a wide array of elements into one tidy, very absorbing movie about life, love, understanding, friendship, winning, and losing, all through the prism of baseball. In many ways it reminds of a movie like Field of Dreams more than it does more streamlined sports action movies. A League of Their Own uses baseball as a backdrop rather than a subject. It's the frame rather than the portrait, and even as the baseball action sometimes dominates the movie, the ever-present personal drama, character development, and underlying themes remain and give shape and purpose to the baseball and even, at times, heighten the dramatic intensity and energy level of some of the games played. The movie is far more a character study and sturdy drama than it is just a historical recreation of one of baseball's most fascinating eras, though it certainly does the latter just as well as the former, critical in shaping the main themes to the necessary levels. Like Field of Dreams, the movie puts its emphasis on relationships, here not between the living and "ghosts" but using baseball to bring families and friends closer together, to sort out differences and give purpose and definition to life. It's a story of equality, where everyone on the field becomes a critical member of the group, defined by talent, togetherness, and success, and not their appearance (at least later in the movie) or gender, of course. The movie champions good, wholesome ideals as well, stating that sports isn't about the biggest and strongest participants but rather the heart of the players and their determination to perform at the best of their abilities, regardless of what they look like or what stereotypes and preconceived notions say about them. Ultimately, it boils down to seizing an opportunity and finding the courage to not only overcome but to succeed."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is giving George Stevens' classic romantic-comedy Woman of the Year a Blu-ray showing. Of the seven different films that Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn headlined together, Woman of the Year isn't the funniest (that would be George Cukor's peerless Adam's Rib) or the most resonant (Stanley Kramer's didactic-but-beautiful Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), but it is the first, and in the case of Tracy and Hepburn, first impressions last. Ostensibly the story of two journalists - he a sports-loving man of the people and she a high-toned diplomat's daughter - who fall in love but struggle when balancing their relationship with their career ambitions, what lingers are the ways they look at each other. Something about Tracy delights Hepburn, and she's never faster or more eloquent than she is talking to him - it's more an act of performance for a one-man audience. And Hepburn fascinates Tracy. He is normally so solid and reliable a presence, but around Hepburn, he's a wide-eyed kid, terrified and aroused in equal measures. If you didn't tell me that the two fell in love during production, I still would have guessed it. You can't manufacture chemistry like this. And that frisson is enough to power Woman of the Year through elements that haven't aged so well. As winning as Tracy is (always was, frankly), his character here is prone to some racially insensitive behavior that that film expects us to find as charming as Jim's "Not this again" looks in The Office. In particular, he's saddled with a cringe-worthy scene where he slyly mocks a non-English-language speaker for not speaking English. And as lively as Hepburn is, you can't shake the sense that the film wants to punish her a little for being so independent; Ring Lardner Jr. and Michael Kanin's script builds to her being willing to forgo her own interests for Tracy, and while she ultimately gets to keep her status, it's only because Tracy gives her that right. But it's a testament to the film that when these two lovebirds are staring at one another, we barely notice those issues. It figures: they don't notice anyone else.