June 10—
By Lawrence O’Toole
Palm Springs, CA
Is there an actress who has ever blinked less than Anya Taylor-Joy? Those eyes of hers could stare down an army and they provide an authority–and dramatic anchor–to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road and the fifth installment in George Miller’s post-apocalyptic franchise, that it so very sorely needs. Taylor-Joy’s terse gravity (she can’t have had more than a dozen or so lines to speak in the entire movie) easily allows you to suspend disbelief that this woman would rather lose an arm than surrender herself. It’s a star turn, for sure, and a worthy precursor to Charlize Theron’s performance as Furiosa in Fury Road, and one can easily imagine her in future action festivals of gore, mayhem, and tenacity.
Otherwise, Miller’s Furiosa is more of the same from Fury Road, not that there’s anything wrong with some more of the same: the landscapes of the post-apocalyptic Wasteland are still troublingly stunning, and the assortment of hardware–a kind of ghastly steam-punk, as if the nuclear apocalypse had occurred during the height of the Industrial Revolution–is still unlike anything dystopian dreamed up by any other director. There’s also that awe-inspiring rig, the most terrifying truck since Steven Spielberg’s Duel, blasting and crashing through anything unfortunate enough to get in its way, and Jenny Beavan keeps inventing new forms of baroque biker drag. But there’s a feeling that we’ve been here too much before and that what we’re witnessing is more (or less) of the same. The set pieces now seem standard issue, without any real surprises to them, and the violence, although only occasionally inventive, has become, well, sort of wan.
Mad Max: Fury Road succeeded so well because it was story-driven. Some of the exposition in Furiosa is pretty arthritic. There’s a lot of thumb-twiddling getting the pre-teen Furiosa to womanhood and, sadly, it means less screen time for Taylor-Joy. But the big liability of Furiosa, speaking of big, is Chris Hemsworth as the would-be villain, Dementus. Hemsworth, in the Thor franchise, is the most likable brute in screen memory–a bouncy bodybuilder with a romantic lead’s deadpan, even debonair, delivery. (Think Cary Grant with arms the size of legs of lamb). Outfitted with a prosthetic nose that might have been borrowed from Bradley Cooper in Maestro – and why? – as well as a scruffy biblical beard, Hemsworth just isn’t frightening enough. You half expect him to say to Furiosa, ‘Hey mate, let’s just stop this stuff and have a brew.’ He’s way too lite and he has been saddled with ersatz philosophical musings meant to pass as wit. When what we need is someone to scare the bejesus out of us, the way we were terrified in Fury Road. He’s written as a bit of a pompous (albeit dangerous) fool and keeps talking about “retribution,” which may be the filmmakers’ nod to current political relevance. Noted. But any comeuppance due him from Taylor-Joy becomes a matter of, well, whatever.
Furiosa is certainly, and sometimes eminently watchable, and often stunningly crafted, but you don’t leave the theater feeling wrung out or spent, that you’ve had some kind of sensory-dramatic experience. There is talk of another Mad Max sequel called The Wasteland, but Miller may indeed have reached the end of the road.
Marisa Abela is utterly sensational in the Amy Winehouse biography, Back to Black. She bears a spooky resemblance to Winehouse, but her embodiment is inner. There’s a moment when she’s dumped by her soon-to-be husband Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) in a pub, and you can almost reel from her shock and pain of the rejection. You do feel her pain. Anyone who has ever experienced the incredulousness of being spurned by a lover will experience a diabolical déjà vu.
The film has been dubbed by critics for sidestepping the more graphic nature of Winehouse’s well-documented addiction, as if these critics wanted an Amy Winehouse version of Lady Sings the Blues. But the director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and the screenwriter, Matt Greenhalgh, recognize that Winehouse is much more interesting as a story of creation than it is one of addiction. Abela does capture what Elizabeth Hardwick wrote of seeing and hearing Billie Holiday, that this was “a woman who had never been a Christian,” and it’s one of those few portrayals of a famous performer where the actress slips into the performing persona with an almost preternatural ease. Winehouse brought jazz into rock/pop in a way nobody ever done in modern times and the public, stunned, couldn’t get enough of it – or her. She didn’t seem to care about money or fame, which endeared her bad-girl antics to a public that had never come face to face in the concert hall or clubs with the distressed majesty of Bessie Smith or Holiday.
What Back To Black chooses to do is look at the wellsprings of Winehouse’s artistry which, for many if not most great artists, is emotional pain. Her tortured torch songs touched upon a rawness we rarely experience, as in “You Know I’m No Good,” (which, inexplicably, is her only famous song we don’t get to hear in the movie), and her messy, out-of-control life inflamed that exposed tenderness even more. The core of torch singing and, somewhat, of the blues is unrequited love at its most stygian. Back to black. To quote Billie Holiday: “Love will make you do things you know is wrong.” And this was the juggernaut of Winehouse’s depths of despair. While the film may whitewash the behavior of her cabbie-father (Eddie Marsan) and sentimentalize her relationship with her grandmother (a wasted Lesley Manville), it’s the relationship with Fielder-Civil, who introduced her to hard drugs, and the abject loneliness she felt when he was gone from her life that’s the real story here. And in the Olympus of blues singing, she carried the torch from Bessie Smith and Holiday to us.
For anyone wanting a more “objective” view of Winehouse’s life there’s Asif Kapadia’s deservedly award-winning 2015 documentary, Amy. But Back To Black is not and does not mean to be a biographical retread of the documentary. The documentary gave us Amy’s story, factually; Back To Black and Abela’s extraordinary performance gives us her black and broken heart.
If you're a film buff and love movie reviews, then you’ll want to subscribe to The Perils of Pauline on Substack. Dive deeper into the world of cinema with thoughtful analysis and critique, and provoking discussions on the art of filmmaking—and join in the conversation!
UNSEEN AND UNSUNG
Now streaming on the Criterion Channel is a rare opportunity to see Ingmar Bergman’s first two films, Crisis (1946) and A Ship Bound for India (1947), both hardly ever shown in repertory and both recently restored. Bergman, who directed and wrote the screenplays for both, based on plays, had yet to discover his own style, or to write an original script of his own. Both films capture the depressed European postwar mood, and while Crisis, essentially a somewhat sentimental melodrama about an errant mother (Marianne Lofgren) who blows into a small town and reclaims her grown-up daughter (Inga Landgre) from the woman (Dagny Lind) who raised the daughter, might be missable, it still has themes–faith and sacrifice, suicide, physical and emotional pain–that stir our interest.
A Ship Bound for India is another matter entirely, and you can see the beginnings of the development of Bergman as an artist. Despite an awful musical score (the same with Crisis), it has a truly haunting quality. A Ship Bound for India, which had the terrible title of Frustration for its U.S. release) relates the tale of a humpbacked son (Birger Malmstein) in primal conflict with his unforgiving sea-captain father (Holger Lowenadler), now reduced to low-paying salvage jobs. The father, who discovers he is going blind, has brought home a part-time prostitute, Sally (Gertrud Fridh), from a seedy vaudeville house while his long-suffering wife (Anna Lindahl) looks on.
Some of the style of A Ship prefigures Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) when, a lot of people agree, Bergman really came into his own and was the first film he shot with Sven Nykvist. (The American title was the suggestive, and totally misleading, The Naked Night.) A Ship’s love scenes have a similar adult quality, and the settings–a barge, the tawdry vaudeville house, a shabby boarding house–have the right gritty feel. The cast, too, especially the towering Lowenadler as father, Malmstein as the tortured son, and especially Fridh at her young, loveliest self, draws you easily into the film’s stark emotional landscape. Told (in a most original way) in flashback after the son has spent seven years on the Seven Seas (the title refers to a longing to be in a faraway place) felt by three main characters, A Ship may be Bergman’s only truly buried treasure.
If you enjoyed this modern take on film criticism then you can let Perils of Pauline know their movie reviews are valuable by pledging your support on Substack.