Netflix Review - Marriage Story (15)

Getting divorced with a kid is one of the hardest things to do. It's like a death without a body.

The Gist: Noah Baumbach wrote and directed Marriage Story, the melancholy tale of theatre director Charlie (Adam Driver) and his actor wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), as they negotiate the trauma of ending their once passionately close marriage. At the centre of the drama is the couple's eight-year-old son Henry, who travels with mom from the couple's New York home, when she shoots a TV pilot in Los Angeles, turning custody into a major issue. Mediation turns into the hiring of divorce lawyers, at which point the relatively cordial proceedings take a turn for the nasty. There's only so long the mutual sense of hurt can simmer, before it reaches boiling, with Henry caught in the middle.

The Juice: Baumbach has form dealing with marital dysfunction - in his 2005 film The Squid and the Whale Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney exchanged vicious barbs as their domestic harmony went horribly sour. Marriage Story is similarly tragi-comic, but demonstrates a greater sense of compassion in a screenplay that is frequently hilarious, occasionally devastating and never less than painfully real. Every character interaction is acutely observed, never better than in a scene of painful comic embarrassment when Nicole's family - who adore Charlie - are co-opted into helping serve the divorce papers. 

A fine balance of sympathy is achieved throughout this Story, with both Johansson and Driver delivering awards-worthy turns that reek of buried emotional turmoil. (That's until they give vent to said turmoil in one of the year's most unforgettably fraught scenes.) The support is sturdy as well, with Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta all playing the scenes of legal wrangling to honed (and sometimes dryly comic) perfection. The precise and unfussy direction is there to compliment performances; the camera lingers on Johansson as she lets the details of her marriage spill to lawyer Dern, or on Driver as he deals with a supremely awkward 'observation' of time spent with his son. And in one telling legal-hearing scene both parties are framed as peripheral to the procedure that's been set in motion.

The Judgement: 8.5/10. The most obvious comparison here is Kramer vs. Kramer. Marriage Story, however, updates the premise by sustaining equal focus on both partners and by delving deep into the effect of the unfolding crisis on each. It'll cut close to the bone for a lot of viewers, but the excruciating aspects are eased by wit, wisdom and empathy - for characters whose only real crime is being fallibly human. With its broken heart on its sleeve, this is as good and as moving a drama as you'll see this year.  

Film Review - Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (12A)

This will be the final word in the story of Skywalker.

And so we come to it - the final episodic Star Wars movie EVER... or at least until things have settled down. That may take a long, long time. 2015's The Force Awakens was largely embraced by the franchise fandom, but two years later The Last Jedi sliced opinion into two irreconsilible halves more effectively than Kylo Ren could have managed with his coolly impractical light-sabre. This time it fell to J J Abrams, writer-director of the trilogy-starter, to pacify the disgruntled, unite conflicting viewpoints, keep the studio executives happy and (most importantly of all) deliver a great film. Talk about being screwed before you begin...

Look, let's not get off on the wrong foot here. There's much to enjoy in The Rise of Skywalker and overall I had a good experience - possibly because I'm not a mega-invested long-time Star Wars fan. But is it the film to pull the trilogy together into a cohesive whole? I only wish I could answer yes...

Plotwise the movie begins with a massive, perplexing leap from what's gone before. A new-old threat has made itself known in the galaxy far-far-away - even while the First Order continues to assert its power - and the surviving members of the Resistance are on a mission to find a thing that will help them locate said threat. Meanwhile the eternally conflicted Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is seeking Rey (Daisy Ridley) either to kill her or turn her to the Dark Side. Planet-demonlishing death-rays are nearing completion, while an effort to swell the good guys' ranks seems to be going unheeded. Basically the nasty is about to hit the galactic fan, while our heroes flouder to respond. The much talked-about 'hope' seems in short supply and they're running on pure resolve.

Okay, let me deal with the problems first, all of them boiling down to narrative issues, most of which were built in by Day One of the Skywalker shoot. This entire trilogy turns out to have been planned with little regard as to where it was ultimately going. The Force Awakens was a joyous re-assertion of the franchise mythology, The Last Jedi (in my opinion) a wickedly entertaining subversion of that same mythos, leading the story off in an intriguing new direction. However a host of fans were incensed by the latter, bitching to the extent that the studio - I'm assuming - insisted on reversal tactics for the final film. Let's put the story back on a conventional track, they decided - re-introduce a classic Star Wars villain, reinstate the conventional lore and recoup the followers we lost last time around. Oh and let's throw in some nostalgic cameos (here's looking at you, Lando) that add nothing beyond naked fan service. That'll set things right. Yeah... or perhaps it'll serve to hash things up completely.

There are two lessons here that movie-makers at this level really should have learnt long since. The first is - have a plan. You know, one whereby individual writer-directors communicate sufficiently for their individual trilogy segments to mesh and where all the key players know, roughly speaking, what end-point they're working towards. Two - once you've struck a course, show the conviction to follow it through. Don't - please don't - pander to fans at the risk of narrative integrity. Decide on your story and then tell it, should the galaxy implode.

The producers of the new Star Wars trilogy abandoned both these rules with the result that The Rise of Skywalker spends way too much time re-setting the story and rushing its characters around the galactic chessboard, while it should be pausing to build on what's already been established. Central players from the previous film are sidelined (presumably due to poor fan response - grrrrrrrrr), while new ones are introduced but not properly developed. Meanwhile developments in certain character relations are hinted at like in previous films, but remain frustratingly unexplored by the end. Story-wise this is - in a way that its predecessors avoided - one cluttered and messy film.

All that said, there is much I love unreservedly about The Rise of Skywalker, to the extent that I'll still want to possess my own copy. The production design, so impressive in the previous two episodes, attains breathtaking heights of beauty here, enhanced by cinematography that's stayed uniformly sharp throughout the whole saga. It all looks so magnificent, the locations so solid and convincing (despite lavish use of CGI), that it's nothing short of a privilege to hang out there, more so with John Williams' evocative themes swelling around you. The cast play out their with similar conviction, whatever the deficiencies of the plotting. Finn and Poe (Oscar Isaac) have forged an enjoyable bromance and Chewie is never less than lovable, while the Rey/Kylo relationship is simply the best reason to watch the movie. The chemistry between these two frenemies sizzles like the dazzling red and blue of their light-sabres and the camera is besotted with them both. No joke - the scenes between this couple are the sexiest thing in cinema this year. 

Add to that the droid action (I can never get enough of BB-8 barrelling around spacecraft and planet surfaces), the masterfully choreographed action and the touching way in which the late Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia is incorporated into the drama and there is a huge amount here that I will gladly dive back into for a second watch.

You know I'm even content with how the movie resolved its central character journeys, while the final shot is a moment of understated perfection. However all of that can't counter the main flaw - a lack of a unifying narrative vision across the three episodes, something which becomes painfully apparent in this final one. That'd be a shameful shortcoming under any film-making circumstances. But with hundreds of top-quality creatives feeling the Force and producing work nothing short of sublime, it's nigh on unforgivable. Frankly the Jedi and the Sith both deserved better.

Gut Reaction: Perplexed and even mildly bored, until the central character dynamic drew me in and the bravura visuals production values swept me away. The whole thing's so flipping gorgeous, I couldn't help but submit.

Memorable Moment: Rey and Kylo's blazing, water-logged showdown. Just damn.

Ed's Verdict: 7/10. Despite how damaged the underlying story structure is, this scores high for how formidably well-made it is in physical terms. Skywalker scales amazing heights of practical film-craft, even while its narrative crumbles.

Film Review - The Dead Don't Die (15)

This is definitely going to end badly.

The Dead Don't Die is the new film from American auteur Jim Jarmusch and bears immediate comparison with Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead. Both are inspired by George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead and its sequels, both are broadly comic and both treat the zombie concept as allegory for various social ills. But while Jarmusch's tale has its morbid pleasures, its chances of achieving the same adored cult status as Shaun strike me as an undead kind of slim.

Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) police the quiet mid-American town of Centerville, where the height of crime appears to be the theft of Farmer Frank Miller's chickens by local recluse Hermit Bob. But stories of the Earth having been knocked off its axis due to fracking activity are all over the news and the sun is going down way too late. There are more serious consequences too when darkness does fall - something very nasty is crawling from the local graveyard and the good townspeople are about to be besieged by undead horror. Cliff and Ronnie, along with fellow officer Mindy Morrison (Chloe Sevigny), have a hellish day ahead, but perhaps they'll have some support from the town's enigmatic new funeral director - Tilda Swinton as the kitana sword-wielding Zelda Winston. (Spot the anagram?)

Anyone expecting traditional levels of zombie-related mayhem here might do well to check out the director's back catalogue. Jarmusch is known for talk-heavy, leisurely paced screenplays, that eschew action for character development. While The Dead Don't Die has moments of vivid flesh-eating gore and a climactic kill-count as high as most movies in the genre, its heart lies elsewhere - in lengthy scenes laced with deadpan humour (no pun intended) and satire that's even more in your face than that of Romero's classic trilogy. Here Jarmusch takes the 'zombies as the ultimate comsumers' idea from 1978's Dawn of the Dead a step further, with the entire zombie hoard representing the ravishment of the Earth by Middle American shoppers. Meanwhile Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) provides a wry and growly commentary on the whole sorry mess, as the one character who has opted out of the modern consumer malaise.

It's an approach that provides intermittent fun. Parts of this film are genuinely hilarious - the Murray and Driver double-act is consistently poker-faced and droll, Danny Glover strikes up an endearing partnership with comic-book store clerk Caleb Landry Jones (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) and Steve Buscemi produces a few real guffaws as the bigoted Farmer Frank. Overall, however, it's too concerned with being offbeat and odd to mesh effectively with the subject-matter. The lack of momentum becomes frustrating and not all the cast embrace Jarmusch's brand of weirdness with equal success. Also the screenplay's indulgence in self-referential humour and third-wall breaking (constant references to the movie's specially-commissioned theme song and its writer are only the start of it) amuse at first, before starting to irritate.

Don't get me wrong - I laughed more frequently and more heartily at this quirky indy take on the zombie apocalypse than at most mainstream comedies. It's just that the writer-director seems to be approaching the subject-matter as a diverson rather than anything more weighty. Even the satire is deliberately spread on thick, so you can't really take it seriously. The Dead Don't Die is worth your time, but ultimately when it comes to z-horror, Shaun's slacker Brit-comedy proved a much more natural fit.

Gut Reaction: Big laughs and awkwardness. A strange combination for a very strange film.

Memorable Moment: A famililar zombie face at the diner...

Ed's Verdict: 6/10. Jarmusch's love for Romero is clear and his zom-com has his moments. But it's not off-centre genre classic for which I'd hoped.