For the week of February 11th, the Criterion Collection is bringing Alfonso Cuarón's stunning Roma to Blu-ray. I'm sure someone will correct me, but I think there are no traditional close-ups in Roma. We get close; when the film's protagonist, Cleo (newcomer Yalitza Aparicio), goes to the hospital for a pregnancy test, Cuarón holds on her ashamed face as she talks to her doctor. But Cuarón is shooting the entire movie on the Arri Alexa 65mm, and the ultra-wide format makes the standard close-up difficult, if not impossible. Even when Cleo's face occupies the center of the frame, we're still seeing her whole head, the doctor's office behind her, and some light bouncing off the ceiling. We're invited to view the whole tableau as a landscape not dissimilar from the desert in Lawrence of Arabia or the galaxy in 2001. And that conflagration of the intimate with the epic is key to what Cuarón is doing here. Roma's physical scope of this movie is needle-point specific. We follow about a year in the life of Cleo, a maid tending to an affluent family in Mexico City, circa 1971. Long stretches of the film follow Cleo at work: turning off the lights in the family's house before she goes to bed, hanging laundry on the rooftop, cleaning dog crap off the driveway. Yet as with that magisterial "close-up" of Cleo in the hospital, Cuarón gets us to view the mundane in boldly expansive terms. We feel like we're seeing everything in a grand space (Cuarón stages some astonishing deep-focus beach shots where everything is in focus, from Cleo and the family playing on the sand in the foreground to the oil derricks miles away in the ocean), and the extended nature of most shots gives us the freedom to scan the mise-en-scène at our leisure. We might start by watching Cleo tentatively listen to the mother of the family (Marina de Tavira) have a tearful phone call, but then our eyes drift to the reflection off the bookshelves lining the room, or to the family dog jumping playfully in the backyard. So it goes with the devastating moment when she tells her boyfriend (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) she's pregnant as they're watching a movie. Cuarón frames the shot so that Cleo and her beau occupy much of the left side of the frame, except the movie (La Grande Vadrouille) fills up most of frame right, and scattered throughout we see other couples in the theater. We even get a frame within a frame, given how Cuarón uses the bottom of the upstairs balcony to organically crop the image and draw focus back to Cleo. The effect is not unlike eavesdropping in person, our attention racking back and forth between Cleo and the other elements in the theater, until we're almost as surprised as Cleo when we realize her boyfriend has suddenly abandoned her. We were paying attention to other things, and then life got in the way. Everything in Roma works in the same manner: the minutia sweeps you away. Just an astonishing film.
By comparison, James Mangold's racing docudrama Ford v Ferrari can't help but feel almost hopelessly square. Mangold isn't trying to redefine cinema's boundaries; he's presenting a conventional yarn about two best friends (Matt Damon's Carroll Shelby and Christian Bale's Ken Miles) building Ford Motors a car that will compete at the 1966 Le Mans endurance race. The film has a hissable villain (Josh Lucas' unctuous Ford executive), thrilling car races (including the 24 Hours at Le Mans, which occupies almost a full half hour of screen time), and a narrative structure that telegraphs all the film's moves five minutes before it makes them. It will not surprise you that Ford v Ferrari features a gently disapproving wife (Outlander's Caitriona Balfe, who loves Bale's ebullient racer but also wants him to stay focused on family) or a mid-film low point (Miles getting booted from the Ford team) that exists only to make his performance in the third act all the more triumphant. But what may surprise you is just how fun all these conventions are. More than any of the other Oscar 2020 candidates, Ford v Ferrari is the one I find myself returning to most frequently. In its staid, old-fashioned way, it reminds me the most of some Hollywood classic like Casablanca or Rio Bravo. The film has the same kind of effortless confidence and sleek professionalism. Like last year's great A Star Is Born, it's a great movie-movie - Mangold knows the power of the widescreen image and a couple of ace movie stars turning up the charm. As we watch Shelby and Miles brainstorm through the development process, we're reminded how much fun it is to watch people who are good at their jobs. Shelby is the glad-handing pragmatist, but because Damon is such a natural comedian, he turns the character into the wry straight man against Miles' ornery wild card. We forget that Bale, too, is most electrifying when he's playing someone unburdened by life's grand responsibilities, and his approach to Miles exists on the same continuum as Dicky from The Fighter or Dieter from Rescue Dawn. All three are little boys, essentially, who love what they love and can't be bothered to waste time on anything boring. Bale gives Miles this irrepressible spirit. The scene of the year might be the one when Miles brings his son (Noah Jupe) out onto the development course at LAX and muses about the perfect lap: Bale's eyes go wide as he speaks, and all of a sudden Miles could be Peter Pan dreaming of Neverland. Furthermore, Mangold is such a skilled journeyman filmmaker that he smuggles in thematic resonances that I wasn't expecting. The "Ferrari" of the title isn't really the enemy. No, that'd be Ford Motors (personified by Tracy Letts as a petulant, dim-witted Henry Ford II), who's willing to give Shelby carte blanche but insists on compromising his design process until all that remains is inoffensive pap. Try as Shelby and Miles might to make something great, they can't escape the corporate machine, and that subtextual power lends Ford v Ferrari its sneaky power, particularly in the wake of its bittersweet finale. I thought about just how hard it is to create art under the pressures of consumerism, and I think about that idea even more considering that Ford v Ferrari emerged from the sturm und drang of the Disney/Fox merger. Viewed in that context, something like Ford v Ferrari beat the system. Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles would be proud.
From Paramount Home Media Distribution comes a special 4K edition of Shutter Island. The challenge that one faces when talking about the film - which might be director Martin Scorsese's finest, most underappreciated film of the 2010s - is that the whole film hinges on a not-inconsiderable twist. To avoid discussing the twist means avoiding what makes the film really special, so since Shutter Island celebrates its tenth anniversary this month (and since that's a lot of time to have gotten caught up), I'm going to spoil the end. You have been warned: skip to the trailers that follow if you still want to preserve your Shutter Island ignorance. For a lot of viewers (myself included), the first screening of the film can play as a slight letdown. While Scorsese brings his trademark verve to the proceedings (in particular, Thelma Schoonmaker and Robert Richardson do career-best work in the cinematography and editing departments, respectively), it does feel like Scorsese is using a lifetime of cinematic brio to galvanize a shallow beach read. Dennis Lehane's source novel spends a lot of time on atmosphere in telling the story of two U.S. Marshals (played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) hunting for a escaped prisoner on a dark and stormy mental institution, circa 1954, but it loses whatever sociopolitical intrigue it's generated (Lehane invokes HUAC and post-WWII atrocities) during the twist ending, which pilfers heavily from the likes of Fight Club and Angel Heart. You see, DiCaprio's tortured fed is actually the most dangerous prisoner in the facility, and everything we've seen is a carefully calibrated roleplaying endeavor designed to puncture the character's delusions. This reveal plays as way too familiar (and more than a little silly, given the implausibility of an entire state facility using its ample resources for just one person's glorified therapy session), except Scorsese knows he's working in tired conventions. So he makes an inspired choice: he never really tries to hide the ending. The film is loaded with obvious and subtle cues that DiCaprio is unhinged, from glaringly unreal green-screen work (the shots of DiCaprio and Ruffalo talking on the ferry as the movie opens would have looked fake in 1955), luridly surreal dream sequences (Michelle Williams plays DiCaprio's dead wife, and she appears to him in ways more akin to a J-Horror chiller), and bizarre grace notes (DiCaprio interrogates a prisoner at one point who pantomines drinking water). The shock of the novel transforms into a kind of slow-building awareness. Once we figure out where Shutter Island is going, we have the time to ruminate on DiCaprio's ever-spiraling madness. And in that regard, Scorsese has created a piece of subjective storytelling on par with his Taxi Driver or The Aviator. Everything here is so cued into DiCaprio's fractured psyche that even the novel's more absurd turns feel reflective of the protagonist's mental breakdown. We get so invested that what guts us isn't the twist: rather, it's the one-two punch of a climactic flashback and the film's heartbreaking final line. To paraphrase Glenn Kenny, we thought we were watching a movie, and instead, we've been trapped inside a man who can't stop hurting himself. Just a bizarre, tragic masterpiece.
Of this new edition, Martin Liebman wrote that "this is [a] finessed improvement over the Blu-ray, which at even a decade in age still holds up as an extremely good presentation. The UHD's increased resolution handles the material scrumptiously, offering a pleasantly fine level of natural, filmic detail accentuated by a steady, authentic grain structure. The picture is incredibly sharp and finely detailed, revealing a level of intricacy and intimacy that demonstrates what the format is all about. The sense of visual authenticity is quite spectacular as viewers examine facial textures that command the screen with shot-dominant clarity in every close-up. The period attire, including twill suits or police uniforms, showcase amazing fabric clarity and seam definition. The world seen around the film comes to life with remarkable clarity, including a diverse landscape of grasses, rocks, stone, bricks, and concrete, all in varying states of upkeep and decay alike. The UHD is a boon for the film's expert production design. The divergent locales also mean divergent colors. The Dolby Vision color grading brings a new level of tonal accuracy, subtlety, and intensity to the screen, maintaining an authentic feel for every hue but bolstering the palette scene-by-scene with each color dialed in to appropriate depth and detail."