For the week of February 17th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Marielle Heller's winsome drama A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood to Blu-ray. The film - which chronicles the interactions between legendary children's show host Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) and an unhappy magazine writer (Matthew Rhys) tasked with crafting an Esquire profile of Rogers - begins so shakily that you might wonder if Heller made a fatal miscalculation. I love her choice to frame the entire narrative within an episode of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood (in a neat touch, whenever we get an establishing shot, it's done in the handcrafted model style of the TV show), but her lead doesn't strike the same vote of confidence. As we watch Hanks sing to the camera and go through his daily routine (changing from his jacket to his sweater; swapping out his dress shoes for sneakers), we realize a) how still, almost meditative the real Fred Rogers seemed when beginning the show, and b) how uncomfortable Hanks is trying to replicate that stillness. I'd argue that Hanks' nervous energy is just as key to his celebrity as his "America's Dad" status, and you can see him struggling to tamp down his hyperactivity and match Rogers' pace. Happily, the movie improves immeasurably after this opening. While almost everything involving Rhys's Lloyd Vogel is fiction (he's lightly based on the journalist Tom Junod), I can't deny the sensitivity and tact with which Heller and her screenwriters (Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster) use to sketch Vogel's internal strife. For all his success, he's still trapped under a lifetime of trauma: his abusive father (a very good Chris Cooper) abandoned the family during his mother's fatal illness, and Vogel has let the anger he feels inform all his choices. Anyone familiar with The Americans knows how good Rhys is at assaying buried hurt, which makes his interactions with Rogers all the more vital. It isn't just that Vogel will change under the influence of this calm, gentle man - it's that Vogel is so angry he can't imagine anyone who's not, and so he finds himself testing Rogers' placid resolve. And these scenes find the Hanks performance gaining power and force. Not only does he calm down, but Hanks also lets his natural state of agitation simmer just under the Mr. Rogers surface he's concocted. We begin to see how hard Rogers himself has to work to remain measured, and that quiet internal struggle humanizes the icon in a way I never thought possible. The Rogers-Vogel scenes build to a moment as emotionally staggering as it is sonically reserved. During a conversation in a Chinese restaurant, Rogers has Vogel simply be quiet with him for a minute and regard the silence. As they sit, the restaurant's other occupants grow still, and Rogers looks at them - at us, right down the barrel of the camera! - with this unbearable empathy. It hurts sometimes, being yourself, but that's all any of us can be.
From Fox Searchlight comes Taika Waititi's Oscar-winning farce Jojo Rabbit. Here's the reason most Nazi comedies don't work: Nazis might be absurd, but their virulent racism and violence are anything but. As such, it's hard to pivot from Anchorman-esque lampooning of the Aryan Race to direct references of their atrocities. At best, you seem manipulative. At worst, insensitive. Just ask Roberto Benigni and Jerry Lewis some time. So the most frustrating thing about Jojo Rabbit is how close it gets. Yes, writer/director Taika Waititi sets his film in Germany during the waning days of World War II, but it's really set in Taikaland. If you've seen Thor: Ragnarok or his great Hunt for the Wilderpeople, you know that's a place just south of normal and just to the left of serious. It's casual absurdism, and it fits a community filled with Nazis but mostly free of their crimes. The ranking captain (Sam Rockwell, doing his Sam Rockwell thing) is a closeted layabout who adopts an air of cynical, deliberate incompetence to everything he does. His secretary (Rebel Wilson) dresses like the Ricola girl and cares for a gaggle of blonde-haired, cherub-cheeked Nazi clones. The head of the Gestapo is Steven Merchant, for God's sake. And our hero, ten-year-old Jojo Betzler (the winning Roman Griffin Davis) loves palling around with his imaginary friend Adolf Hitler (Waititi, going so broad he's practically an oval). We can laugh at these morons because we don't have to reconcile the horrors of their actions with the onscreen mirth. The whole second act of Jojo Rabbit is, essentially, the comedy version of Anne Frank, as Jojo discovers the Jewish girl (a great Thomasin McKenzie) his mother (Scarlett Johansson, who is as good here as she was terrible in Endgame) has been hiding in the walls of their house. Here's where the movie should succumb to its worst impulses, except Waititi loves outsiders and makeshift families, and the scenes between Davis and McKenzie are some of the best in the film. She's all kinetic energy - equal parts terrifying and sympathetic - and Davis does yeoman's work at letting his Führer-brand distaste for Jews slowly melt into genuine affection. And then the film turns into Life Is Beautiful. Major characters start dying in horrible ways, and the tone slides into something more funereal. All of a sudden, the film's sense of humor feels like a shallow calculation that sits uneasily next to the hangings and shootings and heroic sacrifices that mar the third act. It's the same damn problem: we can't laugh at genocide. Waititi is smart to put so much of the finale on David Bowie's thrilling "Helden" ("Heroes" in German) because if anyone can convince viewers that all this manipulation is worthwhile, it's David Bowie. I just felt sick. Jojo Rabbit might be well made and engaging, but it's also fundamentally irresponsible.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the plot, while frequently bracing and often at least wryly amusing if rarely laugh out loud funny (as is perhaps appropriate, given the underlying subject matter), may take a back seat to presentational aspects and the characterizations in the long run. Jojo Rabbit kind of weirdly reminded me of Wes Anderson's outings, at least in terms of a slightly twee tone and an emphasis on highly stylized performances. There's also an intentionally off kilter feeling postmodernism at play that introduces elements like a montage of archival footage of actual Nazis doing the 'Hitler salute' that plays to the Beatles' German version of 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.' When the film is funny (and it undeniably is, at least in my estimation), it's often almost scabrously so, as in Elsa's mental and physical takedown of Jojo, something that almost plays like one of those 'alternate universe' outings by Quentin Tarantino. Buffoonish portrayals of Nazis in general and Hitler in particular are just kind of de rigeur in the three examples I cite above, but what struck me as really interesting about this exploration of the same underlying conceit is how it's often tinged with an undeniable menace, something that I'd argue is missing in at least two of the three examples I mention (I'd say Chaplin's film probably comes closest to examining the sort of feeling I'm attempting to describe here, but I don't think even it creates the same bifurcated emotional ambience that Jojo Rabbit does). That really gives Jojo Rabbit some of its most visceral impact, especially when things build to a rather shocking climax."
The WWII epic Midway (which arrives courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment) isn't very good, but credit where credit's due: it wants to do everything. Within the confines of its 138-minute runtime, Midway offers no fewer than eight different types of war movies. Yes, we get a extended sequence on the Battle of Midway (the pitched battle between U.S. fighter pilots and Japanese naval destroyers), and in those moments, the movie is a dogfight epic that takes its cues more from Star Wars than from Dunkirk. But during that battle, we also get interludes from a U.S. submarine stalking the destroyers from under the surface of the water, and director Roland Emmerich lets the movie briefly assume the tenor of U-571 or something. But that's not all! A scrappy tail gunner (Nick Jonas, because why not) gets shot down but survives, and for a two-minute stretch, Midway morph from a lost-at-sea drama to a POV thriller after Jonas is kidnapped and interrogated. Aaron Eckhart's Jimmy Doolittle gets shot down over Japan and has to trudge through the landscape a laRescue Dawn; back stateside, Woody Harrelson and Patrick Wilson (who gives the film's best performance) try to crack the Japanese Navy's code like a bargain-basement Enigma. At times, the film is deeply sympathetic to its Japanese commanders (played by the likes of Tadanobu Asano and Jun Kunimura); at times, it's as jingoistic to the ol' U.S. of A as any Michael Bay picture. Speaking of Bay: the film's first act is the attack on Pearl Harbor! And overlaying it all is the Top Gun-esque battle of wills between Luke Evans' stern martinet and Ed Skrein's Joisey flyboy who plays by his own rules but gets the job done, dammit. Now, let me stress something: none of these elements are as good as the source materials they're pilfering from, and the junky CGI and hammy acting styles certainly don't help matters (Dennis Quaid is so broad as a rash-inflicted Admiral that I almost wondered if he was playing Quasimodo in a silent movie). But in a weird way, that's also the Roland Emmerich house style. Even his 1996 masterwork Independence Day feels like he put about eighteen disaster and sci-fi movies in a blender and molded the resulting mash into something new(ish). In that regard, Midway is the Golden Corral of movies. Very little on your plate is exceptional, but man, sometimes quantity over quality has a charm all its own.
God bless Shout Factory. When I first saw Gus Van Sant's Gerry back in 2002, I loved it but figured no one else would care, and I was mostly right. Outside of the odd IFC screening, the film disappeared from the public consciousness. For those not in the know, Gerry is almost perversely anti-narrative. Two dudes (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) wander out into the desert for a hike. They walk for a while. They get lost. They talk a little. At one point, one of them inexplicably gets stuck on top of a big rock. That's probably the narrative apex of the movie. They walk some more. At one point, one of them dies. Roll credits, although it's still unclear which one of the two is "Gerry," or if "Gerry" is just slang for messing something up, or if everyone we meet in the film is named "Gerry" AND it's also slang for messing up. You could summarize the incident of this 102-minute film on the back of a matchbook. Yet the opaque, meandering, and deliberately obtuse approach that Gerry is so crucial to its viewing experience. Recall that Van Sant was still riding high off Good Will Hunting's success, and that its commercial appeal belied Van Sant's idiosyncratic instincts: he started as an experimental filmmaker whose biggest influence was Béla Tarr. Gerry, then, was Van Sant's ode to his inspiration. As with Tarr's work, so much of Gerry hinges around the relationship between the viewer and the movie, whether that's frustration or apathy or boredom at the purposeful tedium. Once you realize that you're essential to the film, you start to groove on its rhythms, whether that's Harris Savides' gorgeous cinematography or the rather sly sense of humor Van Sant and his actors lace into most scenes (that rock scene is quite funny, and funnier still that it unfolds in one long take). Now Shout that is offering it as part of its "Select" series, I don't know if the new Blu-ray will net this one any more fans, and I don't much care. I'm just glad to have as close to pristine a copy on home media as possible.