REVIEW: “King Richard” (2021)

December 3, 2021 by Keith Garlington

(CLICK HERE for my full review in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

Will Smith makes his bid for an Oscar nomination in “King Richard”, a sports biopic about Richard Williams , the father and coach of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams. For some folks (including myself), the description ‘sports biopic’ comes with its own baked-in expectations. Both sports movies and big screen biographies have a history of following all too familiar formulas and relying on the tried-and-true rather than offering something new. I’m not sure “King Richard” offers anything new, but it does tell its story well. And when you have such captivating subjects, sometimes that’s all you need to do.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green and screenwriter Zach Baylin present Richard Williams as a man driven by the scars from his own painful past. It’s what motivates him to push his daughters harder than most; to raise them in their home and off the streets; to encourage them to pursue their dreams and overcome adversity. He preaches conviction, humility, and hard work. He’s determined that his girls will succeed where he didn’t and that they’ll have the father he never had. It’s an obsession born out of love, but an obsession nonetheless.

With the girls in school, Richard hits country clubs around Los Angeles trying to convince local tennis pros to coach his daughters. After class, he practices with Venus and Serena on a rundown city court in a gang-infested part of town. He then ends his day working nights as a security guard. Lost in Richard’s aggressively up-front bravado is his wife Oracene (wonderfully played by Aunjanue Ellis), a stabilizing behind the scenes force who was crucial to the Williams sisters’ success.

Green and Baylin do a good job moving the story forward, and even at 138 minutes, the film never drags. It tracks Venus’ path to tennis stardom that takes the family out of Compton and to West Palm Beach, Florida. It covers their close relationship with renowned tennis coach Rick Macci (a terrific Jon Bernthal). It shows Venus’ decision to turn pro at only 14-years-old. And the movie doesn’t shy away from the inescapable racial component that simmers under the surface. It’s deftly handled by Green whose calculated restraint lets us sense it and feel it ourselves.

I don’t mean this as a knock, but I wasn’t prepared for how good Will Smith is in this. Grizzled and hunched, the star vanishes into the title role, delivering one of the very best performances of his career. Smith thoughtfully channels Richard’s confidence, his eccentricities, and his deeply buried bitterness in ways that never resemble mimicry. He’s helped by the warm and organic chemistry he has with Sydney and Singleton (both great). Meanwhile the film’s secret ingredient is Ellis who (much like her character) often sits in the background but speaks with strength whenever something needs to be said.

“King Richard” doesn’t quite avoid all of the sports movie trappings. Take the final 20 minutes or so which are spent on one long, overdramatized tennis match. It’s something sports movies love to end with – the big match, the big game, the big race, the big fight. Yet this film still maintains enough nuance to separate it from other feel-good crowdpleasers of its kind.

In the end, it’s hard to watch “King Richard” without being inspired, not by the money and fame, but by the fact that Richard Williams’ preposterous plan actually worked. It shows that any family, who’s full of love and deeply committed, can overcome their circumstances and do something great. Of course having two of the greatest athletes of all-time in your family probably doesn’t hurt. “King Richard” is now showing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.

VERDICT – 4 STARS

REVIEW: “Petite Maman” (2021)

December 2, 2021 by Keith Garlington

French filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to her highly acclaimed “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” isn’t the big audacious next film you might expect after a big success. In fact the beautifully intimate “Petite Maman” couldn’t be more different. With its small scope and Sciamma’s delicate touch, this warm and aching fable examines coping with loss and mother/daughter bonds in a voice that should speak viewers to all ages.

The movie opens in a nursing home with an eight-year-old girl named Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) walking from room to room saying goodbye to each of the elderly residents. As she enters her grandmother’s room near the end of the hall she sees her mother (Nina Meurisse) removing pictures from the wall. We learn that Nelly’s grandmother has passed away and they’re there to collect the last of her things.

Sciamma wastes no time earning our empathy as we watch this young girl try to process everything she’s seeing. You can practically see her mind at work as she quietly lays on her grandmother’s bed or as she watches her parents’ sorrow-drenched embrace. And then we get one of the film’s most beautiful scenes as the camera hones in on Marion’s sad face as she’s driving down the road. A little hand from the back seat comes into the frame and feeds her a chip, then another. The hands return with a juice box and finally a warm heartfelt embrace. It’s a sweet child’s effort to comfort her hurting mother.

These small but meaningful touches can be found all through Sciamma’s swift and compact 72 minutes. Her simple yet full-hearted mothers-and-daughters story may have death as a central ingredient, but it blossoms into a beautiful and poignant blend of reality and fantasy. This fully comes into focus when Nelly and her parents travel to her grandmother’s rustic country home for the unenviable task of clearing out her things. After a couple of days it becomes too much for her mother who suddenly heads back to the city. That leaves Nelly and her father (Stéphane Varupenne) to finish things up.

While walking in the nearby woods, Nelly notices a little girl about her age dragging a large tree limb. She asks Nelly for help and two carry the limb to a hut the girl in building. The next day Nelly heads back into the woods where she meets the girl again. They strike up a conversation and we learn the little girl’s name is Marion. That name is significant, but I’ll let you discover why for yourself. Sciamma soaks us in the girls’ budding friendship, offering a number of charming scenes that are sweet and tender on the surface, but that also explore their deeper relationships with their mothers.

It’s hard to say much more without spoiling the film’s low-key yet enchanting twist. The movie itself doesn’t wait long to show its cards, but it’s still better left for you to discover on your own. Me? I was swept away by the genuineness of its emotions which range from heartwarming to heartbreaking. The simplicity of Sciamma’s storytelling and her unfussy presentation may not stand out in a crowd. But they serve this story perfectly and show us a filmmaker with a grounded, true-to-life vision – one that penetrates your soul and sticks with you for days after watching.

VERDICT – 4 STARS

REVIEW: “7 Prisoners” (2021)

December 1, 2021 by Keith Garlington

Brazilian-American filmmaker Alexandre Moratto turned several heads at this year’s Venice International Film Festival with the world premiere of his piercing new film “7 Prisoners”. Set mostly in the backstreets of São Paulo, Brazil, the film sees Moratto and his co-writer Thayna Mantesso delving into the darker corners of the city and country to tackle some real-world issues that should shake us to our cores.

“7 Prisoners” is a tough-minded movie with a very no-nonsense approach to its subject matter. At the same time, Moratto makes sure that the human element remains firmly front-and-center. He does so through the character of Mateus played by the charismatic Brazilian newcomer Christian Malheiros. Mateus’ story is a painful and (hopefully) infuriating eye-opener that pulls back the veil on the abhorrent practices of slave labor, sweatshops, and human trafficking. These are horrors we tend to turn a blind eye to, mainly because they all too often contribute to our comforts. Moratto sets out to wake us up to the realities of what’s happening in São Paulo and across the world.

The film opens in the rural Brazilian countryside where Mateus lives with his mother and two sisters. They are a loving group but they’ve had a hard life, doing their best to survive with what little they have. Mateus’ mother has labored to provide for her children, but years of low-paying farmwork has taken its toll. So 18-year-old Mateus jumps at the opportunity to go the city and do some contract work to support his family. In the film’s most tender and sobering scenes, Mateus’ mother gives him a new shirt for his trip. It’s hardly anything fancy, but its worth a month’s groceries to them. A van comes by to pick up Mateus and, along with three other area boys, he’s taken five hours away to São Paulo.

Moratto does a great job putting us in the shoes of these four young men. Not only by showing us where they’re from, but also during the van ride through the city. Their wide-eyed excitement as they’re driven through the bustling São Paulo sets us up for the unsettling reality that awaits them.

The driver drops them off at an inner-city scrapyard ran by a man named Luca (played by an excellent Rodrigo Santoro). The shady and evasive Luca gets the boys settled and gives them money to go out and enjoy themselves before their first day of work. But when he collects all of their IDs the next morning, we know this isn’t going to go the way the boys anticipated. In fact it’s much worse. Mateus and his friends find themselves caught in the gears of a modern-day slave system, one that’s driven and protected by people with enormous power.

Moratto’s pacing is near perfect, shrewdly moving the story from point to point while pausing at just the right moments to uncoil the crumbling emotions of his characters. Mateus is especially compelling, caught in a no-win situation and eventually forced to make impossible decisions that will have painful repercussions regardless of what he chooses. To stress the point of his film, Moratto slyly gives us the occasional shot of the city’s bustling streets full of citizens freely walking about their normal days. It offers a sharp contrast to the cruel forced labor happening right under their noses.

With a bold and clear-eyed perspective, “7 Prisoners” offers a brutally honest challenge to a society’s apathy towards some well-documented abuses. Alexandre Moratto does a good job pulling us into his dark and ugly world that’s made all the more troubling by the fact that it’s very, very real. Great performances from Santoro and Malheiros anchor this revealing feature that’s not only a good pickup for Netflix, but a great opportunity for an important story to be told. “7 Prisoners” is now streaming on Netflix.

VERDICT – 4 STARS

First Glance – “The Outfit”

November 30, 2021 by Keith Garlington

The upcoming gangland movie “The Outfit” sees Academy Award winner Mark Rylance in yet another role that seems custom made for him (I beg you, please forgive the gruesome pun). The film is the directorial debut for Graham Moore who won an Academy Award himself for writing 2015’s “The Imitation Game”. Here Graham and Rylance team with Zoey Deutch to create what looks like a tense and confined thriller. The first trailer gives us a good taste of what we can look forward to.

Rylance plays an English tailor named Leonard who leaves London’s renowned Savile Row for Chicago following a personal tragedy. There he opens up a shop making finely tailored suits for those who can afford them. In his case, most of his clients happen to be gangsters. But as the trailer shows, Leonard finds himself caught up in the middle of a mob squabble and he’ll have to use his smarts if he wants to survive the night. I like everything about this. I looks to mostly take place in a single location and brimming with suspense. Sign me up.

“The Outfit” is set to release February 25th, 2022. Check out the trailer below and let me know if you’ll be seeing it or taking a pass.

Review: “Silent Night” (2021)

November 29, 2021 by Keith Garlington

Camille Griffin’s “Silent Night” is a movie built around a compelling premise and with a great ensemble cast to see it through. Sadly, it’s a movie undone by some needless creative choices and a script that channels its ending well before the final act.

Griffin writes and directs this acidic dark comedy set predominantly at a remote country estate where a group of old boarding school friends come together for Christmas dinner. The weekend festivities are put on by Nell (Keira Knightley) and her husband Simon (Matthew Goode). They have three boys, the rude and dour Art (Roman Griffin Davis of “Jojo Rabbit”), and twins Thomas and Hardy (Gilby and Hardy Griffin Davis). Interestingly, the three boys are the director’s real-life sons.

Within the first few minutes friends start to arrive. There’s the flirty and pointedly snobbish Sandra (a really good Annabelle Wallis) and her aggressively boring husband Tony (Rufus Jones). There’s James (Sope Dirisu) and his young American girlfriend Sophie (Lily-Rose Depp). And there’s the least interesting couple, Alex (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and Bella (Lucy Punch). “Tonight is all about love and forgiveness,” Nell proclaims with both trepidation and uncertainty. Wishful thinking.

It doesn’t take long to realize that this gathering won’t be a joyous occasion. In fact, this is a dismal and toxic bunch whose friendly greetings quickly curdle into tactless insults and impudence. They would actually be fascinating to watch if Griffin’s writing didn’t handcuff them with her strange approach to dialogue. Every character (and I do mean every, including the children) spit profanity like they’re auditioning for a Tarantino movie. I’m not on a high horse, I just can’t figure out the point of it. The movie itself even makes an effort to reference its crude language more than once so it’s clearly an intentional decision. The problem is it feels intentional rather than natural and quickly becomes a distraction.

While the movie sets itself during Christmas, the holiday is nothing more than a plot device to get everyone together. A couple of ungainly gags and the strangely out of place Christmas music is really all the Yuletide allusions you can expect. Instead there’s something far more ominous behind their get-together. It turns out that they’ve gathered on the eve of the apocalypse. A noxious storm full of life-killing poison gas is sweeping across the globe. Scientists warn that inhalation is unavoidable and will lead to an excruciating death. As a result, the world’s governments have sanctioned a pill that will ensure a pain-free demise. It’s all part of their “Die With Dignity” campaign.

As you can tell, the premise leaves plenty for Griffin to explore: moral questions, existential questions, sociopolitical questions, etc. Themes of mortality, government, science, and parenting just scratch the surface. It’s such fertile ground to dig into. Sadly, we have to wade through a lot of upper-crust bickering over petty nonsense to finally reach the point where the movie has something concrete to say. Yes there’s the occasional laughably one-the-nose conversation such as Simon talking to Art about immigration. But for the most part, it takes waiting for the final act to really get into the interesting stuff.

To the casts credit everyone gives it their all. Despite being handed mostly one-dimensional characters, there’s not a bad performance to be found. Knightley, Wallis, Dirisu, and Depp are especially good. But they can only carry so much of the load. While Griffin’s direction is savvy and efficient, her script is full of confounding choices that underserves the characters and squashes the film’s potential. It’s yet another example of a movie that left me wishing for what it could have been rather than enjoying what it actually is. “Silent Night” is set to release December 3rd.

VERDICT – 2 STARS

REVIEW: “House of Gucci” (2021)

November 26, 2021 by Keith Garlington

Ridley Scott’s second movie in as many months couldn’t be more different than the one that came before it. “The Last Duel” was a really good medieval period film that unfortunately bombed at the box office. Since then Scott has gone on to blame millennials, cell phones, Facebook, and so on. Without getting caught up in where he’s right and where he’s wrong, I’ll just say it’s a shame the movie didn’t get a bigger audience and you can’t help but theorize about the reasons why.

His follow-up “House of Gucci” could spark some of the same reaction from the 83-year-old filmmaker. Considering the source material, I always expected the film to be a train wreck. But would it be the good kind or the bad kind? The early reactions didn’t clarify much, and since then moviegoers have pretty much remain divided. Well after sitting through Scott’s nearly 160-minute drama/satire, I’m still not sure what kind of train wreck this ‘based on a true story’ yarn is.

Ridley Scott has been hungry to make a movie about the renowned Gucci fashion house since the early 2000s. If you don’t know the wonky history of this Italian family owned empire, I won’t ruin it for you. Suffice it that greed, betrayal, and even murder all have parts to play in their story. Scott’s avenue into the family’s prominence and eventual disintegration is the relationship between Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) and Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga).

**Image Courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures**

The movie opens in 1978 Milan where Patrizia works in the offices of her father’s smalltime trucking business. Our first glimpse of her shows a woman of ambition who has a taste for attention. Maurizio is the son and lone heir of Rodolfo Gucci (Jeremy Irons made up to look like death warmed over). Rodolfo owns 50% of the Gucci brand while the other half is owned by his brother Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino).

Scott, along with screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna, begin the story by showing the unashamedly forward Patrizia’s pursuit of the bookishly awkward Maurizio. The ailing Rodolfo doesn’t like the budding romance and warns his gullible heir. But Maurizio rejects his father’s wishes (and his future inheritance) and marries Patrizia.

After showing how they became a couple and giving us a glimpse of their early days together, the movie spends the bulk of its time on how Maurizio and Patrizia made their way back into the Gucci ranks. Patrizia drives the burgeoning power couple to the top by first pushing the generally apathetic Maurizio (he’s studying to be a lawyer) into taking on a bigger role in his family’s company. But later, as her lust of fortune and fame fully reveals itself, Patrizia hatches plans behind her husband’s back to pit Gucci against Gucci. And while the couple eventually rises to the top of the fashion house, once the ever naive Maurizio gets wind of his wife’s manipulation, their marriage starts to crumble, much like Gucci family’s once prominent empire.

All of that makes for some batty yet undeniably compelling drama. Up to that point the story bops along at a steady pace and the inside look at this Italian family and their business is both interesting and comical. Scott spends a lot of time digging into the family dynamic and the shifting power structure. But he also pokes fun at the superficiality of their extravagant lifestyle and status. The cast is certainly in on the gag with Gaga leading the way. Parts of her performance is more caricature by design, plucking inspiration from the tabloids and running with it. But Gaga is so committed to details and in-tune with the material that she uses different scenes to rein in her character, revealing an emotional backbone that makes Patrizia real rather than a cartoon.

Driver is also very good. He’s like the straight man in an absurdist comedy. Driver portrays Maurizio as stiff and sheepish, brandishing a thick comb-over and even thicker oversized glasses. He hardly ever gets above room temperature, but that’s part of the character’s strength, especially as he subtly transforms before our eyes. Pacino is clearly having a lot of fun, hamming it up in the early scenes while shattered and defeated in the latter. Jared Leto is a little sketchier. He plays Aldo’s buffoon of a son Paolo. On the other hand, you could say Paolo is the only forward-thinking Gucci of the bunch. Leto goes full…something, burying himself under layers of makeup and latex while doing a routine that can be hilarious yet utterly distracting.

But then we get to the third act which quite literally brings the film down a few pegs. The movie completely loses its footing as it bogs down in scenes dealing with control of shares and majority ownership. Meanwhile Patrizia becomes this impossible to read character. So much so that the the movie doesn’t even seem to know how to portray her. And then there is the woefully undercooked buildup to the big crime. We only get a couple of scenes to show the planning and the crime being carried out. Even less attention is given to the outcome. Just snap your finger and everyone is suddenly in court being sentenced…end movie.

For about two-thirds of “House of Gucci” I was onboard, really enjoying the wackiness of the impervious rich and famous. I was into the film’s central relationship and was getting a kick out of the crazy contrast between both the characters and the performances of Gaga and Driver. But everything comes to a screeching halt in that third act and the movie suffers for it. I watched several people leave the theater during it. I was invested enough to see it through, but I can see why some were ready to check out. “House of Gucci” is now showing in theaters.