For the week of May 22nd, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Jordan Peele's satirical horror Get Out to Blu-ray. Get Out has proven to be the sleeper hit of 2017, and for abundant good reasons - this scary, exceedingly funny chiller also happens to be one of the best mainstream films I've ever seen about race in contemporary American society. As Peele sees it, the most pervasive issue that African Americans face isn't overt racism but almost its polar opposite: the woke Caucasian "ally" whose inability to see black people for anything other than a set series of cultural stereotypes drives both races further and further apart. For much of Get Out, that polite disconnect proves agonizing than any monster or ghoul. With one major exception (and more on him later), every white person that Chris (the wonderful Daniel Kaluuya) meets when he and his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams, perfectly cast) visit her family proves unfailingly gracious - Rose's mother (Catherine Keener, as subtly menacing as she's ever been) offers to use hypnosis to help Chris stop smoking while her father (Bradley Whitford, who between this and Cabin in the Woods should make a second career out of headlining socially progressive horror movies) is the kind of guy who insists that he'd "vote for Obama a third time" if he could - but the more they affirm their support, the more Chris (and we) start suspecting that something wicked is afoot. As anyone who saw his great sketch-comedy show Key & Peele will affirm, Peele is a master at creating uncomfortable social interactions, and long stretches of Get Out wouldn't feel out of place on Key & Peele, from Chris's bizarre encounters with the family's maid and groundkeeper (the brilliant Betty Gabriel and Marcus Henderson, who attack their parts with the same relish you can imagine Key and Peele bringing as performers) to the deranged party sequence where family friends (including a dependably bonkers Stephen Root) compliment Chris (and, by proxy, all black people) with all the indelicacy of a breeder assessing a stud horse.
But Key & Peele did more than sharpen Peele's satirical agenda: it offered him a crash-course in moviemaking, which pays dividends here. Anyone who wondered if Jordan Peele could make a horror movie clearly never saw the show's "The Continental Breakfast" or "Family Matters" sketches, and he brings that same vivid sense of place and tone to Get Out. The beginning (where the great Lakeith Stanfield finds himself terrified walking through a tony suburban neighborhood) plays like vintage John Carpenter in terms of its framing and staging (big props to DP Toby Oliver), and the surrealism that runs rampant through the film lets Peele reference both David Lynch (love his deployment of the "Behold the Coagula" video) and John Frankenheimer (that big party scene has a full-scale homage to one of the most distinctive parts from The Manchurian Candidate). My fear is that critics have hyped Get Out so much that viewers might start to pushback against it, so I guess I can try to temper expectations some. As Rose's douchey brother, Caleb Landry Jones is terrible - he feels like he's acting in a different universe, let alone a different movie, and I wonder if Peele liked what he was doing or if Jones simply didn't provide Peele with any better options (I suspect the latter - Jones lards the performance with irritating, Method-y tics that don't fit the more stylized universe around him). And as brilliant as the first two thirds are, I confess that my expectations deflated slightly once Get Out's third act ditches the brilliant Guess Who's Coming to Dinner-meets-Stepford Wives vibe in favor of more conventional horror antics. It's not the very ending with which I take issue, but rather the rote bloodletting that precedes it. Still, Peele is smart enough to redeem many of the conventions (he evinces a Looney Tunes-esque sense of timing and pace in one of the final boss fights, and he has the black hero pick cotton to save his own life). I mean, at the end of the day, Jordan Peele has made an accessible horror movie about code switching, of all things. Along with James Grey's The Lost City of Z, Get Out is the best film I've seen from an American filmmaker this year.
Martin Liebman wrote that "Peele leaves the audience on its toes, crafting a true three-act story that sees Chris pushed through the ringer emotionally and physically alike. His fears materialize, but fears he never could have imagined materialize, too. It's brilliant plotting and storytelling. The movie feels always transformative, unafraid of pushing boundaries and certainly unafraid of making rather big leaps from one style to another, from one layer of commentary to another. The film's balance between keen social commentary and straight action and horror elements give it a very unique flavor. Peele's ability to find that middle ground between cinematic excitement and artful manipulation of the medium to comment on social issues is superb. The film is never too overt, never too covert; it's beautifully balanced between 'fun' and 'smart,' 'edgy' and 'purposeful,' a multifaceted balance that few films have ever achieved."
At my most optimistic, I hope that films like Get Out signify the rise of a smarter, more socially aware brand of commercial filmmaking; how else to explain it or Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment's dark superhero adventure Logan. Within Fox's Marvel Universe, Logan is an anomaly. Thanks to Deadpool's commercial success, Logan benefits from the relative freedoms that an R-rating affords, except its intentions couldn't be more dissimilar. If Deadpool took its cues from Bugs Bunny cartoons (but smuttier), Logan is a sober, elegiac drama that's concerned with killing and the implications of being killed. Director James Mangold (whose 2013 The Wolverine helped removed much of the stink that X-Men Origins: Wolverine left on the franchise) sets his film in the very near future, one where most mutants are dead and where Logan (Hugh Jackman, in his finest go as the character) has put his superhero past behind him. But this is no happy retirement: Logan drinks to quell the constant pain he feels (the movie is vague on this point, but Mangold implies that his adamantium skeleton is slowly poisoning him) and looks forward to the days when he doesn't have to care for an addled Professor X (Patrick Stewart, excellent) so that Logan can kill himself with an adamantium bullet. It's this content that makes Logan feel truly adult. We might expect the many scenes of severed limbs and punctured skulls, but we're certainly not ready to watch Wolverine cleaning up the pus from his knuckle blades or Professor X ranting and raving like King Lear, lost in the delusions of a disintegrating mind (and I can't overstate how good Stewart is, especially during the wrenching moments where Xavier's Alzheimer's-like seizures put everyone around him at physical risk). I've long complained about Fox's seeming unwillingness to take the X-Men seriously (from my Days of Future Past review: "the inner lives of superheroes...that would be an exciting stage in blockbuster-movie evolution, and one that Days of Future Past deftly, heartbreakingly sidesteps"), and Logan course-corrects in a big way. Long stretches of this film play like a superhero-inflected Unforgiven or Amour. Vide the moments where - I kid you not - Wolverine struggles to help Professor X go to the bathroom. Even the action sequences give real weight to the violence, particular those in and around the heroes' brief respite at a Midwestern farm.
This laser-focus on character and tone make all the difference. When the plot does kick in - Logan and Professor X find themselves spiriting a preteen mutant (newcomer Dafne Keen, who's a star in the making) from government assassin and mad scientists (personified by Boyd Holbrook and Richard E. Grant, both of whom are fine but nothing more - they're each one or two scenes away from becoming memorable villains) - Mangold never lets us forget that it's the past these characters are fleeing most of all. For much of the film, this is a comic-book movie the way A History of Violence is a comic-book movie, so much so that I wish all of Logan maintained the same quality. As moving and exciting as it is, the film has an ungainly structure that works against it. The economy and grace of that first hour gives way to "And Then..." plotting (And Then there's a shocking death! And Then there's a new, even worse baddie! And Then there's another desperate race against the clock!). All these "And Then" scenes are good on their own, but they lack causal precision (the pacing from the start of the film through an agonizing standoff in an Oklahoma hotel-casino is crackerjack stuff) and reveal a major story flaw: Logan isn't sure if the most important relationship in the film is between Logan and Professor X or Logan and Laura. More than that, I'm loath to say, except that I think we're supposed to linger over Logan's tortured connection to Laura (especially given where Logan ends and its implications for...ahem, future films), and if that's the case, then something that happens at the ninety-minute mark needs to happen much earlier. That said, even these issues speak to Logan's relative high quality. Everything is so good that you kinda can't blame Mangold and Co. for including One More Scene or indulging the dynamic between Logan and Professor X. Comic-book movies like Logan aren't just rare - like its title character, it might be the only one of its kind.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "for now, anyway, this is Jackman's swan song as the character, and it's a suitably elegiac but nonetheless almost celebratory outing that offers a mythic storyline while also providing Jackman more character beats than are typically at the forefront of superhero tentpoles...It's quite remarkable how artfully director James Mangold (who also contributed the story) has assembled the pieces here to craft what is one of the more emotionally devastating entries in the by now almost absurdly burgeoning superhero genre. One of the things that has tended to be make a lot of superhero entries emotionally distant is the fact that the focal character ultimately can't be harmed, let alone killed, but all bets are off in Logan, and not necessarily limited to only that character. There's a definite emphasis on mortality in this film which gives it a really unique (super?) power of its own, and which kind of ironically ends up beautifully humanizing the mutants at the core of the story."
Also from Universal this week: The Great Wall or: Matt Damon's 47 Ronin. After all the controversy about The Great Wall's whitewashed depiction of Chinese history (hello, Mr. Damon!) or how it's little more than a $150-million propaganda device for the Chinese government, the biggest surprise is how forgettable the whole endeavor is. I mean, this is a movie that presupposes the Great Wall of China was a barrier to keep out a horde of flesh-eating monsters, so how come it neutralizes itself from your memory almost as soon as the end credits roll? It's hard to believe that the great Yimou Zhang directed it, given how impersonal everything feels - your garden-variety Transformers movie has more authorial presence. Part of the problem has to do with scope. This is a big movie with at least five major heroes (Damon and Narcos' Pedro Pascal as European mercenaries; Jian Ting, Andy Lau, and Zhang Hanyu as top Chinese military officials), yet it clocks in at less than two hours. We feel like we're getting the Cliff Notes version, jumping from battle scene to battle scene while Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro, and Tony Gilroy's script struggles to provide anything in the realm of halfway interesting character/narrative motivations. And maybe that latter point proves most devastating. For all the flash and bang, we're getting mired in one cliché after another. Lau's the principled badass; Ting's the skilled warrior whose gender holds her back; and Damon's Han Solo, albeit a grim-faced, uber-serious iteration (why cast this effortlessly charming movie star as a miserable bastard?). We even get the same sneering (human) villain turn from Willem Dafoe that filmmakers default to when they aren't familiar with his more nuanced work in The Last Temptation of Christ or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I'll give this to The Great Wall - it isn't boring, and Zhang's use of color is, at times, as stunning as it was in Raise the Red Lantern or Hero. But this thing either needs to be ten times more respectable or ten times sillier. As is, it's just too in-between to register.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Jacques Audiard's Palme d'Or-winning Dheepan to Blu-ray. As I recall, Dheepan suffered one of the swiftest backlashes to ever befall any Palme d'Or winner; critics immediately started grousing about how unworthy a recipient it was. I don't know what movie they thought they saw. Audiard has made another masterpiece, one that's moving and scary and deeply sensitive about the human experience. Specifically, Audiard looks to Tamil Tiger Dheepan (non-actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan, a former Tamil Tiger himself), who flees the violence of the Sri Lankan Civil War when he immigrates to France. From the jump, Dheepan's new life presents him with challenges he never expected; he's traded senseless killing for life at the poverty line, and in order to fool customs, he's living to two fellow refugees (Kalieaswari Srinivasan and Claudine Vinasithamby) masquerading as his wife and daughter. But as we follow Dheepan (which isn't even his real name - he's using a dead man's passport) and his makeshift family through the perils of the immigrant experience...well, perhaps more than that, I should not say, save this: Audiard is a smuggler, and what begins as one story turns into another. If you're at all interested, avoid any other reviews and trailers - many are a little too free in revealing the film's secrets. Not that any vampires show up, but I'd actually equate the experience to an art-house riff on From Dusk Till Dawn. We think we're watching a neorealist drama in the vein of Bicycle Thieves or The Kid with a Bike until we find ourselves in very different territory. And maybe it's that sudden shift into genre that bothered people, except Audiard has always been a high-toned purveyor of genre thrills. His The Beat That My Heart Skipped was a slightly classier remake of James Toback's pulpy Fingers, while his great A Prophet put a vérité gloss on The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption (hell, his Rust and Bone is a star-crossed lovers tale so populist it unironically scores its most moving moment to Katy Perry's "Firework"). In that regard, what he's up to with Dheepan is no different, and I found the merge of high and low culture here especially bracing. It gives the immigrant story a tragic grandeur that I've never seen before - Audiard is arguing that this struggle doesn't just deserve our sympathy but also our full-throated attention, and to the same degree with which we enjoy a blockbuster thriller.
Svet Atanasov noted that he "think[s] that the film is most effective as a myth-buster. The fighter's journey from Sri Lanka to Paris makes it crystal clear that European immigration authorities simply cannot properly vet the people that are entering the continent because contrary to official reporting there are no reliable mechanisms that can provide them with proper information. Once in the European Union the immigrants then quickly become part of a second (or even third) class of residents who become detached from the values and culture of the state that has allowed them in, typically by being permanently isolated in large ghettos where crime is running rampant. The film also confirms that at least in France there are already too many ghettos that are fully controlled by local and ethnic gangs because they are too big for the authorities to confront. Sadly, instead of raising a big red flag and delivering an urgent warning that France has entered a self-destruction mode, Audiard ends the film with an utterly disappointing feel-good segment that almost completely destroys its credibility. It literally attempts to defend the hypocrisy of the elite European politicians who have been trying hard to sell the idea that by uprooting people and permanently relocating them to a different part of the world they are solving their problems, while quietly and diligently serving the interests of powerful business and political players with dangerous global agendas."