For the week of August 20th, the superhero comedy Deadpool 2 hits Blu-ray. I didn't enjoy the first Deadpool as much as the rest of the free world did, but I appreciated its flippant attitude about all things superheroic, and I dug its relative economy/brevity (it only has like two scenes, separated by a flashbacks montage). The sequel, however, is a different story. I've read reviews of Deadpool 2 that criticize its more maudlin tone. To wit: ten minutes into the movie, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds, playing Bugs Bunny) doesn't finish executing a bunch of criminal scumbags, and his negligence gets his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin, still better than the material) killed. He spends the rest of the movie earnestly praying for death, only to find a new lease on life when he decides to protect troubled young mutant Russell (Julian Dennison, star of the wonderful Hunt for the Wilderpeople) from Josh Brolin's time-traveling cyborg Cable. Yet I actually valued the instinct to go in these directions. To see Deadpool's façade crack when the people around him start suffering...well, that's fertile territory, dramatically speaking. Except like a minute after Vanessa dies, we cut to the credits sequence, a jokey parody of Bond-movie openers (scored to an original Celine Dion song) that starts poking fun at Vanessa's death. And so it goes until the ending. Deadpool 2 keeps feinting whenever we think it'll grow even a soupçon of genuine feeling. Russell breaks down emotionally because he thinks no one will love him; cut to Colossus shoving electrodes up [REDACTED]'s butt. Cable outlines the pain behind why he wants to kill Russell (think Looper), but only after Deadpool and Co. launch into a speed-round of tired sexual innuendo. And there are many more jokes like that, unfortunately. Look, maybe I just wasn't vibing with the movie. But I suspect I wouldn't like Deadpool 2 even if it didn't try to be funny. It's a weirdly structured movie, a victim to its own "And Then…" pacing until we hit the tension-free third-act wherein the movie shoehorns in some left-field villains we don't care about because it doesn't know what to do with Russell or Cable (the ideal version of this story is like Midnight Run with Reynolds and Dennison, except the movie bizarrely separates these two for most of its runtime). You get why the movie goes glib: it barely spends enough time with any of the non-Deadpool characters to mine any real human connection from Cable's anger or Dennison's one-man charm offensive (my thoughts about the movie aside, I still think Dennison is primed to be the next big thing). I suspect everyone involved with Deadpool 2 is terrified of that kind of commitment. Call me if this franchise ever develops a soul.
Soul is something that Paul Schrader's First Reformed - which arrives courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment - has in excess. So few films deal with religion in a serious fashion that it's bracing when Schrader drops a deeply spiritual film like this. Every scene speaks to theme. Every shot lasts only as long as it's necessary. Even the boxy frame itself (Schrader shoots in 1.33:1 Academy ratio) restricts our perspective to the degree that we couldn't get lost in the image even if we wanted to. Schrader traffics in the same idea, that we all go a little mad when our internal expectations don't match the world around us, and that concept animates the profound guilt motivating his protagonist, Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke, giving maybe his finest screen performance). Toller can't stop flagellating himself for his shortcomings as a man of faith and as a father, and Schrader portrays this active self-abuse in queasily intimate fashion. Whatever spiritual rot Toller feels has become physical, his body shuddering and coughing up blood after years of constant alcohol poisoning (for the most part, Toller drinks only whiskey, and the one time we see him eat it's a few scraps of bread he uses to sop up his morning booze). If anything's keeping Toller alive, it's his earnest (his first name is no accident) belief in active religious service, and even that fails him more often than not. His small church has become a gift shop for bored tourists, Toller's own congregation having largely migrated to a megachurch that's half rock show and half Wal-Mart, and when he does try to offer comfort to a disturbed young man (Philip Ettinger) who believes that humans have already passed a fatal tipping point in terms of climate change, all Toller ends up doing is ingesting the man's paranoia and nihilism like a virus. We sense in Toller, like Schrader's Taxi Driver protagonist Travis Bickle, the potential for great chaos, especially once Toller learns his church's biggest donor is a callous pharmachemical polluter (Michael Gaston, continuing his twenty-five-year streak of always playing the biggest jerk in the room), and we fear what might happen were this desperate, pious man to break. And Schrader doesn't necessarily disagree with the source of Toller's unease. He believes that the world around Toller is dire. That no one cares about honest stewardship. That when experts sound the alarm about the risk we're at as a species, everyone shrugs. Yes, Toller's "solution" evinces a disregard for innocent human life that mirrors those all those institutions he wants to destroy, but as Schrader puts it, if you believe we're all doomed anyways, what does it matter, dying today versus dying in fifty years? That ambiguity makes us culpable, and by the end, Schrader's infected us with a bit of his hero's madness. The best film of the year, by a wide margin.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that the film "is fraught with some pretty intense religiosity, as may be gleaned from its very title, but it may be helpful to understand the film within the context of what some online biographies describe as Paul Schrader's Calvinist roots. The Calvinist tradition is one that emphasizes the perhaps seemingly contradictory dialectic between predestination and divinely offered grace (if you're a believer and are on your 'good behavior,' that is), as well as the 'mediating' power of Jesus. In my long career as music director for any number of Christian and Jewish congregations, I actually had a choir member in an Episcopal parish years ago who was a direct descendant of Huldrych Zwingli, one of the founding lights of the Reformation and an interesting (slight) precursor to Calvin himself. This choir member also interestingly had quite a bit of Jewish ancestry, and we got to talking one day about why she had chosen Christianity over Judaism, and she quite earnestly told me, 'Some people feel like they don't need a mediator — I feel like I do'…Schrader's perceived takedown of some elements of 'contemporary' religious belief and practice is actually rather subtle here, since it's at least partially buried beneath the pure character details of Toller, but it's really in this very personalization that Schrader is able to go for the gusto in terms of exploring personal hypocrisy and honor."
Almost as dire and haunting a look at the human condition is the great AMC miniseries The Terror. The show takes its inspiration from two sources. The first is the historical record. In 1845, the British Navy commissioned an expedition to the North Pole in search of a Northwest Passage; under the command of Captain John Franklin (played on the show by the great Ciarán Hinds), two ships - the Terror and the Erebus - headed north and then promptly vanished (research teams only found Erebus in 2014 and then Terror in 2016). However, just as important to the show as reality is Dan Simmons' 2007 novel, which speculated on the issues, both macro and micro, that led to the journey's failure. As Simmons - and the series - imagine, the brutal Arctic weather and ice conditions might have been the least of the crew's worries. Franklin finds himself unsuccessfully negotiating a breakdown in his command leadership, with Terror Captain Crozier (Jared Harris, giving a stirring leading-man turn) chafing against the perceived incompetence of Erebus Commander Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies, all subtle, buried hurt); and this tension spills over into the ships' crews, who likewise submit to infighting and violence. Food supplies run low, and what tinned food that remains starts to poison the men. It seems both horrifying and expected when certain parties (personified by Adam Nagaitis, who is a revelation as the unhinged Hickey) start advocating in favor of cannibalism. And on top of all that, when the men are at their most dejected, the series introduces...something else on the ice as an even-more insidious menace. One of the series' greatest pleasures is balancing an almost documentary sense of realism with genre thrills. This show is easily the most accurate depiction of ship-life since Peter Weir's brilliant Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, only if you folded in certain key elements from, oh, I dunno, John Carpenter's The Thing. The end result requires a strong constitution, to say the least, but if that marriage of seafaring thrills and monster movie sounds appealing, you're unlikely to find a more bracing television program this year. Highly recommended.
Of The Terror, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "while the underlying plot dynamics of [the show] involve the ships getting stuck in the ice and the desperate attempts to either free them or at least try to send out expeditions to get to civilization, the show deals with a whole glut of backstories that involve several major characters...But playing into all of this supposed 'real life' drama is a decidedly spookier element that involves the native Inuit population and a mysterious entity...It's probably too facile to see this...as an allegorical figure standing in for the harsh realities of the region, not to mention as a metaphor for a soon to be dying way of native life, but the miniseries does arguably try to draw some 'ecological' conclusions from this otherworldly figure. I'm not quite sure the show is able to completely organically fuse the real life tragedy of Franklin's expedition with what is almost a magical realist element, but there's still an undeniably visceral mood running through this series that is ultimately incredibly unsettling. An Inuit woman nicknamed Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen) also plays into these particular proceedings, and might be seen as a kind of 'human bridge' to this supernatural aspect. The series might be faulted for trying to stuff a few too many su[b]plots into its story, with a number of crewmen being profiled (more or less, anyway) and everything from relatively primitive medical techniques to not so secret homosexual assignations between various crew members being offered up at various points."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Susan Seidelman's landmark indie Smithereens to Blu-ray. The most surprising thing about the film is that for all its ragged, 16mm-energy, the film not-so-secretly loves studio formula. Yes, Seidelman gives us a portrait of New York's punk scene (circa 1982) that's coated in about sixteen types of grime (this is the kind of movie where it almost counts as a lifestyle upgrade when the heroine gets to sleep in a van), but she's also trafficking in well-worn conventions of the rom-com. Dig it: ambitious free-spirit Wren (Susan Berman, so good you wish this movie made her a bigger deal) with dreams of stardom finds herself torn between idealistic drifter Paul (Brad Rijn) who loves her and the jaded former punk star (Richard Hell) who doesn't. At times, we could be watching a more explicit version of That Girl, given the emphasis Seidelman puts on Berman popping around the Big Apple, trying to make it as best she can. Most striking: Berman's Wren plays like a proto-Manic-Pixie-Dream Girl, all wild energy and aesthetic affectations (she tends to wear sunglasses at night, and we first meet her gluing photocopies of her face around the city) in contrast to Rijn's far more conservative restraint. This is not a bad thing. Seidelman's blend of authentic grit with careworn formula normalizes the former while making the latter seem unpredictable. I'm reminded of the earlier, funkier films of Jonathan Demme, who was a big fan of Smithereens (he even helped convince The Feelies to contribute some songs) and who'd refine what Seidelman does here when he directed Married to the Mob and Something Wild; Demme even reappropriates The Feelies' "Loveless Love" from Smithereens for Ray Liotta's big introduction in Something Wild. You get what made Demme and Seidelman such kindred spirits. They both have this bottomless affection for gaudy pop-culture Americana (in Smithereens' first half-hour alone, Seidelman makes visual references to Coca-Cola, Converse sneakers, Sunday telemarketers, Rice-a-Roni, Cosmopolitan,Marilyn Monroe, and Bedtime for Bonzo), and they're always letting reality puncture their fairy tales in manners most unexpected. See, Wren keeps getting hurt, and the damage always looks worse than we'd expect in an easy rom-com (the first time she removes her sunglasses, we see an ugly bruise that no one comments on). As for Paul, he has a gun that he keeps for "Just in Case" purposes. Sure, it isn't loaded, but it's Seidelman's acknowledgment that city life has little glamour for those on the ground level. Even the whole Manic-Pixie-Dream Girl attitude Wren strikes seems like a suit of armor, an irony façade that keeps everyone around her a little off-balance and less likely to take advantage of her. And it's in this regard that Seidelman goes deeper than Demme. His Something Wild heroine Lulu might also exaggerate her idiosyncrasies to keep from getting hurt, but Demme also loves her too much - after the shocking violence at that film's climax, Demme can't help himself from dropping a "And They All Lived Happily Ever After" dénouement. Seidelman, on the other hand, explodes all her film's clichés just when we're expecting something tidier. It's her larger criticism of the punk scene - this life is unsustainable, and you either realize this and move to Vermont (or is it New Hampshire?), or you let its vagaries destroy you. Smithereens might begin like a farce, yet it ends like a tragedy. Thirty-six years later, that's the feeling that lingers.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that the film has "a good number of very funny moments, but it actually uses the awakening of its star to highlight how a ruthless socio-economic grinder basically transformed the punk idealists into permanent social outcasts. In the final phase of this transformation many of these people lost their lives because they either could not make the necessary adjustment to survive, or simply did not think that the recovery was worth the effort. This truly was a very, very sad cycle. The ugly from the final phase is avoided, but on the other hand there are no attempts to glamorize the inevitable either. (And this is the exact opposite of what occurs in Alex Cox's classic punk drama Sid & Nancy). Seidelman gives Wren plenty of time to deal with her misery and when at the end she finally grasps the exact nature of her reality walks away from her. In other words, the film's primary focus is on the destruction of Wren's idealism, not on her actual journey and physical self-destruction. The leads are good, but some of the supporting actors are definitely overplaying their characters. The seemingly perpetually horny guy that tries hard to convince Wren's girlfriend to have a hot bubble bath with him is especially unconvincing."