For the week of February 19th, A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment are bringing one of 2017's best films to Blu-ray: Sean Baker's affecting neorealist drama The Florida Project. Baker's last film was the indie melodrama Tangerine which, I confess, I respect more for its technical conceit (Baker shot the whole film on an iPhone, and it looks terrific) than for the story itself. He doesn't have that problem this time around. Working in rich, vivid 35mm, Baker once against immerses us in the fringes of American society, specifically amidst the strip malls and motels of Kissimmee, Florida. Most people overlook this area - it exists basically for people visiting Disney World - but not Baker, who cares deeply about the transient community that lingers long after the tourists leave. His entrance? Six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), resident of the Magic Castle motel. Like the motel she calls home, the life surrounding Moonee seems in disarray, and pocketed with struggle and grinding poverty. But Moonee's presence leavens much of the potential for misery. Small details - her traipsing through an abandoned housing complex, or watching cows graze in the rain - take on the texture of a great adventure, so closely does Baker let her perspective inform the film's (DP Alexis Zabe keeps the camera at Moonee's height for most of the movie - everything feels mysterious and looming). For a film that shares many similarities with Andrea Arnold's great American Honey, The Florida Project feels lighter and less apocalyptic simply because Moonee doesn't register the grinding harshness around her in the same way. Life's too full of wonders, and when things do get tough, the adults always seem to help her narrowly avoid tragedy. Vide the incredible moment where the Magic Castle manager (a warm, sympathetic Willem Dafoe) completely shuts down a pedophile that gets too friendly with Moonee. However, Baker remains clear-eyed about the world, even if Moonee is too young. Slowly but surely, he starts letting tragedy creep in, mostly in the form of Moonee's mother, Halley (a heartbreaking Bria Vinaite). Halley deeply loves her daughter, but she's mostly wholly incapable of giving any child a healthy upbringing, and her decisions begin dictating Moonee's fate with increasingly frequency (Baker uses this repeated cutaway to Moonee in the bathtub listening to the radio that made me gasp when I realized what he was doing). Moonee's story builds to unendurable sorrow in the film's last thirty seconds, where Baker stages a tonal shift of almost breathtaking audacity. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the moment complicates everything that comes before it. I still don't know if I think the ending works - intellectually, I respect what Baker is doing, but the whole fabric of the movie changes so much (even the film stock isn't the same) that it does break the spell of the preceding hour and fifty minutes. Still, it's a testament to what Baker has wrought that you register thirty seconds like the force of a sledgehammer. I'm reminded of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves or Fellini's great Nights of Cabiria - The Florida Project has the same neorealist force. A major achievement.
And now we come to Mom and Dad. I almost cannot believe people are giving this Z-grade exploitationer a pass. Together, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are the feudal lords of squandering can't-miss genre premises with their almost-total lack of basic-or-even-rudimentary cinematic acumen; much as I love Jason Statham, he alone can't save the Crank movies from pervasive filmic incoherence and rampant racism. Now, with Mom and Dad, Brian Taylor proves he can do bad all by himself. I love the idea, that a digital virus makes all parents try and kill their kids, even if it is equal parts The Shining and The Signal, but Taylor bungles it in a morass of jerky camerawork and hypercaffeinated editing. Worst of all, at only 83 minutes long (79 without end credits), Mom and Dad still feels padded - there are more flashbacks here than in the extended version of The Two Towers. It all builds to the most offensive non-ending I've seen in a good long while. Rarely does a movie feel like the financiers pulled the funding two-thirds of the way through production, yet the abbreviated setpiece (and line) marking the film's conclusion suggests just that. However, I hate to say it, but for Nicolas Cage fans, Mom and Dad might be essential viewing, dammit. He's the dad of the title, and just when you think this is another one of his Inconceivable phone-in performances where he collected a check after two days work, we get a flashback at the hour mark, and CAGE emerges. Narratively, the beat is distracting at best and unnecessary at worst, except it lets Cage destroy a pool table with a sledgehammer while wearing an ill-fitting misfits t-shirts and screaming "The Hokey Pokey." I expect this scene will be on YouTube in five minutes, and you should watch it. Even better is the emotional kicker to the scene, wherein Cage launches into a devastating takedown of his aging body and his many regret, and for like two minutes, you're reminded why he's one of the greatest actors to walk the earth. Only he can screech nonsense about his teenage libido like, "I had a 9 outta 10 kill ratio! 100% sex!" and turn it into yearning desperation; only he can lambast his increasingly pasty and misshapen form and eke out some poignancy about his own struggles with his appearance, and his inability to age gracefully. I sat up straight as Cage bears his soul here, and I suspect a lot of you will, too. And then he's back to barking like a dog and trying to butcher his children. Which, I mean, isn't unentertaining, but Meme-Worthy Cage isn't as interesting as the Cage That Cares. I want more of that latter fellow, and not just in two-minute spurts.
Speaking of great genre actors: I don't think I've ever seen a bad performance from Robert Mitchum. Even in bad films, he's electric, and give him a good part? There's no one more magnetic. Well, Shout Factory's release of Farewell, My Lovely is a very, very good part. Mitchum has such a naturally hangdog, fatalistic persona that I can't believe he'd never played iconic P.I. Philip Marlowe before (although his Out of the Past protagonist definitely shares some similarities), but whatever the hold-up, I'm glad director Dick Richards finally made the connection. This 1975 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1940 novel merits comparison with the best of the noir genre. Here, Marlowe starts looking for a missing girl and eventually wakes up next to a dead body and far more troubles than he initially suspected. As thriller plots go, it's a great one, made all the richer by Mitchum's wry, cynical delivery; even when things get really dark, Mitchum suggests a kind of bone-dry acceptance of the corruption around him, and of the cast of eccentrics that includes Silvia Miles, Harry Dean Stanton, Charlotte Rampling, and a great Jack O'Halloran. Part of what I find so remarkable about the film is how it embraces its antiquities. By 1975, Hollywood was churning out noir that was much faster and meaner than anything in the 1940s or 1930s (something like Taxi Driver is way more reflective of the 1970s house style), yet Farewell, My Lovely gets that sadness, that fundamental moodiness, that made the earlier noir classics sing. One of Mitchum's best performances and his best films. The only downside, as it were, is the presence of the other big Mitchum-as-Marlowe feature: Michael Winner's 1978 version of The Big Sleep. Chandler's 1939 novel is one of the detective genre's most enduring reads, and the 1946 Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall vehicle might be Howard Hawks's most entertaining picture. Certainly, it's a lot to live up to, and Winner compensates by not trying at all. He brings such a leaden approach to pacing and tone (it's hard to remember, watching this, that Hawks's iteration functions like a screwball comedy), and he couldn't care less about the story's famous incomprehensible plot. Mitchum is great, but he always is. Still, just think of this Big Sleep like a Blu-ray special feature that you never have to watch. Farewell, My Lovely is the real winner.
A year after he released the excoriating, viscerally uncomfortable Husbands and Wives, filmmaker Woody Allen borrowed the noir genre himself for far lighter purposes with the engaging comedy Manhattan Murder Mystery. 90% of why this movie works comes from Allen's central pairing: we have Allen and Diane Keaton sharing the screen as co-leads for the first time since 1979's Manhattan. Yet their chemistry here more recalls Annie Hall. As Larry and Carol Lipton, Allen and Keaton could be an older, reunited Alvy and Annie, now happily married (mostly) and settling into bland domesticity. The two are so much fun together that even a little murder can't dampen the mood; after their elderly neighbor (Lynn Cohen) dies, Carol immediately suspects foul play, and she harangues Larry into becoming the nebbish Watson to her excitable Holmes. If Agatha Christie used to specialize in "cozy" mysteries, then Manhattan Murder Mystery is even more laid back than that. It functions as the cinematic equivalent of a well-worn, infinitely comfortable sweater, and Allen has zero compunctions about interrupting the mystery with extended detours to Larry's day job (book editor to Anjelica Huston's seductive writer) or Carol's restaurateur ambitions (a scene where her and Alan Alda check out a potential restaurant location is my favorite thing in the movie - it's as magical as anything in Manhattan). That said, we don't mind because the jokes are so funny, and the vibe is so chill. And kudos, too, for Allen's canny appreciation of his female star. This is one of Keaton's funniest performances, and Allen is smart enough to play the straight man and let Keaton steal all her scenes. Manhattan Murder Mystery is one of Allen's least substantial pictures, but I mean that as a compliment. We need trifles this likeable.