For the week of March 16th, Twentieth Century Studios is bringing Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life to Blu-ray. For the legendary screen auteur, A Hidden Life caps off the most creatively fecund period of Malick's career; the man who took a twenty-year break between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line has since directed five films between A Hidden Life and 2005's The New World. But that (relative) high yield has come at a cost. With the exception of his masterful autobiography/head-trip The Tree of Life, Malick has struggled to convey the importance of his often weighty philosophical conceits. Movies like To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song play like sketches in search of substance (sometimes the only appeal is watching his transcendental cinematography capture the most mundane of settings, like a Sheetz or a strip club). But A Hidden Life represents both a return to form and a bold new departure. It's as strong as anything he's ever made: A Hidden Life is fully formed in the ways that The Thin Red Line and Badlands are, so expertly does it unsettle the natural paradise that is our planet with human frailties and weaknesses. But for the first time, Malick is using history in a manner more direct than the mythic treatment he gave World War II or the life of Pocahontas. A Hidden Life is, amazingly, a biopic, one that introduces us to Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl, in a performance of unforced grace and strength), a gentle Austrian farmer who refused to serve the Nazis and suffered dire consequences for his social disobedience. There's a way to tell Jägerstätter's story so that we're acutely aware of the mental and physical torment he faced - something like Martin Scorsese's Silence, for example, which foregrounds the guilt and pain that the devout often suffer. But without eliding any of the brutality (a beating received from Jägerstätter's shaking, first-person perspective is especially chilling), Malick foregrounds his subject's heroism. Jägerstätter's resistance tears him from his home and family (his wife is played by the wonderful Valerie Pachner); it also affords him a moral clarity that none of his tormentors will ever approach. It's hard to watch A Hidden Life and not think of Charlottesville, of Heather Heyer, of fascist violation (and Malick reinforces such associations with cutaways to actual footage of the Nazis marching over Europe), but in Malick's transcendent, kaleidoscopic vision, the act of simple goodness emerges, bloodied but unbowed. One of last year's finest films.
Richard Jewell, which arrives courtesy of Warner Home Entertainment, isn't one of last year's finest films, but it's certainly an interesting graduate from the class of '19. It fits nicely alongside The Mule as late-period Clint Eastwood fare that's simultaneously more subversive and confused than you expect it to be. Half of Richard Jewell is a thoughtful character study analyzing Clint's favorite topic: the illusion of heroism. In recounting how Olympic Park security guard (Paul Walter Hauser) alerted authorities to a bomb threat during the 1996 Olympics and then almost faced widespread opprobrium for his suspected involvement, Eastwood favors ambiguity over easy hagiography. Jewell has a lot of good qualities. He's got a sensitive side that he only shows around his mother (a terrific Kathy Bates) and he's more observant than people might admit - Eastwood foregrounds his quiet attention, the way he notices that Sam Rockwell's lawyer loves Snickers bars, or his unease at the backpack that ends up carrying the bomb. But he's also quick to anger, socially off-putting, and a hair away from being the kind of gun nut who shoots up post offices. The brilliance of these sections - and of Hauser's performance, which beautifully reconciles all these different elements into an emotionally coherent whole - is that Eastwood allows his hero to possess a full complexity of character. Whenever we're focused on Jewell, or on his flinty bonding with Rockwell, the movie is as good as anything Eastwood has made since American Sniper. However, the film also tries to cover Clint's second favorite topic: the injustices that result when Society tries to railroad an honest American. Whenever Eastwood lurches into this mode, Richard Jewell just flails. Forget the fact that Eastwood allows the narrative to become politically incendiary in dog-whistle ways (not for nothing, but essentially FAKE NEWS is the Big Bad); it's also tonally simplistic, given that the version of Jewell he offers is more complicated than a hang-dog martyr. Even worse, he ends up ceding too much screen time to Olivia Wilde's venal Atlanta journalist, and folks, the choice proves fatal. I've liked Wilde in other things, but she is so one-dimensionally loathsome (the film intimates that she exchanges information for sex with Jon Hamm's FBI agent because you can't trust the federal government, too, I guess) that you'd expect her to be menacing the Mystery Machine crew. Her performance should be brought before a war tribunal in The Hague - it unmoors the more thoughtful work Eastwood is cultivating. The good outweighs the bad here, but barely.
Just as uneven - and as provocative - is Spike Lee's ferocious media satire Bamboozled, which Criterion is hosting this week. Bamboozled isn't close to being Spike's best film. In its portrayal of an American media landscape so racist it ends up turning a neo-blackface revue (starring a very good Tommy Davidson and Savion Glover) into a rating juggernaut, Bamboozled unfolds with, to quote a fellow wiser than myself, all the subtlety of a flying mallet. This is less a film than a collection of sketches. Some hit exactly the mix of hilarious and hurtful that Spike wants to cultivate; Michael Rappaport gives the film's best performance as a white television exec who never seems more culturally insensitive than when he's flaunting his "blackness" over actual members of the African-American community. But some are little more than sound and fury. How else to explain the orgy of violence that concludes this "comedy" (the less said about Mos Def's group of neo-Marxist revolutionaries, the better), or Damon Wayans' tone-deaf portrayal of a mincing "Uncle Tom" so unctuous that he makes Dave Chappelle's white TV anchor seem nuanced? Bamboozled might be Lee's angriest picture, and the thing with anger is, if you don't control it, it ends up consuming you. But the conflagration can be bracing in its own right, and there are moments in Bamboozled that I've never been able to shake. The minstrel revue itself is one of Lee's crowning achievements as a director - you watch it unfold with a mixture of horror and elation, so toxic is the clash between the enthusiasm of the performers (including a great Thomas Jefferson Byrd) and the racism of the minstrel trappings. At the time, I hated Ellen Kuras' DV cinematography, yet now it seems prophetic. Lee and Kuras knew that media was becoming more democratic, and the grainy, vérité quality of the images predicts the kinds of user-generated content we regularly see on YouTube or TikTok. Most importantly, when Spike wants to break your heart, he does so without reservations. The long sequence where Glover and Lee apply burnt cork for their blackface-makeup feels cut from a horror film. Better still is the ending, a five-minute montage of all the ways blackface has permeated popular American culture. As usual, Lee might be angry, and he might be unhinged, but he might be right, too. The definition of an imperfect masterpiece.
All three of the aforementioned films deserve merit for ambition. With varying degrees of success, each strives to challenge and unsettle viewers. That puts them far above Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's lazy, uninspired sequel Jumanji: The Next Level. This is less a film than a corporate action item: the 1995 Jumanji didn't need a sequel, but when the 2017 rebootquel Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle coasted off its light charm and utter inoffensiveness to gross over a billion dollars at the box office, another follow-up was probably inevitable from a profit-margin standpoint. And that sense of financial obligation pervades almost every step of The Next Level. Why are we even back in this world, given that the four teenage leads (Alex Wolff, Ser'Darius Blain, Morgan Turner, Madison Iseman) destroyed the cursed video game, became best friends, and self-actualized at the end of Welcome to the Jungle? Eh, something to do with Wolff missing the group camaraderie and being willing to risk certain death in order to find it again. It doesn't track at all with what we've seen, but hey: anything to get us back in the game at the end of the first act, right? Bobby Cannavale's underwritten Big Bad becomes Rory McCann's underwritten Big Bad (how can someone so good on Game of Thrones be so bland here?), and director Jake Kasdan attempts to gin up enthusiasm by throwing hero and villain alike into a slew of overly digital action sequences that have been pre-vizzed to an inch of their lives. About the only innovation is a new body-switching hook that lets the cast play shuffle a few times with each other's personas, but the results are far more variable than you'd hope. For every nice bit of mimicry (Kevin Hart does a mean Danny Glover, and Awkwafina is pretty amusing playing Danny DeVito), we'll get something uninspired (based on his impression, you might think Dwayne Johnson has never even seen DeVito in a movie, let alone met him) or downright racist (Jack Black playing Blain is...not great). I will give this to The Next Level, though. The film is far more upfront about establishing its sequel bonafides - the post-credits sequence advertises Jumanji: The Final Level in neon lights. It's less an ending than a preview for Sony's 2022 content slate.