Movie review by Greg Carlson

Another significant 2020 title skipping theatrical release for digital platforms, Josephine Decker’s “Shirley” premiered at Sundance in January, where Decker received a U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking. “Shirley” marks yet another career milestone for the dynamic filmmaker as she moves in the direction of wider accessibility and potentially larger audiences without abandoning the sharpest hallmarks of her breathtakingly personal storytelling techniques. The presence of Elisabeth Moss in the title role adds a layer of appeal to the lushly photographed and handsomely designed re-imagining of author Shirley Jackson’s idiosyncratic life in North Bennington, Vermont.

Decker’s film, with a screenplay by Sarah Gubbins based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel, has been erroneously identified as a Jackson biopic, but the events depicted in the book and on the screen are largely fiction. The messier, blurrier canvas perfectly suits Decker’s gifts by offering a space in which the filmmaker can continue to explore her interests in liminality and artistic/philosophical truth without the encumbrances of the dreary and the mundane. In other words, viewers looking for some kind of historically accurate staging of Jackson’s “life” will not find it here. Instead, “Shirley” fantasizes an intense and sexually charged variation on Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Mike Nichols’ 1966 film of the play.

In real life, Jackson was married to professor and critic Stanley Hyman (a fantastically vain and oily Michael Stuhlbarg), by all accounts a philanderer in frequent pursuit of liaisons with his students. In the imaginary account, Hyman’s academic admirer and fresh Bennington College hire Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman) is invited to take a room in the house Shirley rarely leaves. Nemser’s new wife Rose (Odessa Young), it is quickly decided, can provide domestic “help” (or, perhaps more accurately, servitude) to Shirley while the men are on campus. Decker mines the rich vein of skewed gender expectations, using the period setting to focus viewer attention on so many absurd inversions. Stanley’s jealousy over the literary celebrity — and profitability — of triumphs like “The Lottery” always threatens to boil over.

Moss is nothing short of phenomenal, filling out her performance with a steady flow of poisonously perfect wisecracks, putdowns, and insults that hit their marks like darts from an accurately aimed and effortlessly puffed blowgun. Decker beckons us to follow this unusual guide on a journey deep into the overgrown and tangled jungle of creation and art-making. Rose, it unsurprisingly turns out, is far more suited to Shirley’s mysterious and mystical witchcraft than she is to cooking and cleaning. Is Shirley capable of true friendship or is she too armored, too caustic, too far inside her own tortured processes and alcohol bottles to open up her heart to another human being?

The answer to that question takes up the later stages of the film, and Decker, Moss, and Young all bask in the complexity and ambivalence and eroticism of the dialectics favored by the filmmaker: teacher/pupil, writer/reader, veteran/novice, dominant/submissive. Working on the book that will become “Hangsaman,” Shirley and Rose spend time thinking deeply about the Bennington student who disappeared without a trace on the hauntingly named Long Trail. Shirley says to Rose, “The world is too cruel for girls.” Paula Jean Welden really did vanish in December of 1946, the likely victim of violence at the hands of a man, and she is both doppelganger and ghost — a vivid reminder of an unrealized future.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Natasha Gregson Wagner, known to David Lynch fans for her performance in “Lost Highway,” guides viewers through an intimate but tightly controlled portrait of her iconic mother in “Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind.” Available on HBO following a Sundance premiere in January, the biographical documentary is directed by veteran “making of” maestro Laurent Bouzereau, frequent chronicler of Steven Spielberg projects and architect of dozens of other behind-the-scenes shorts. Joined by producer Manoah Bowman, with whom Gregson Wagner co-wrote “Natalie Wood: Reflections on a Legendary Life,” Bouzereau accesses a huge trove of archival material, some of it never before seen publicly.

In part a response to the lurid gossip contained in books like Suzanne Finstad’s 2001 “Natasha” — reissued recently as “Natalie Wood: The Complete Biography,” with even more alleged revelations about the star’s untimely demise — Gregson Wagner’s account of her mom’s legacy is deeply sympathetic. So too is the film’s treatment of Robert Wagner, the man who raised her after reuniting with Wood for the couple’s second marriage to one another. Wagner, who turned 90 in February, has long faced scrutiny for what he did or did not do the night Wood left their yacht during a Thanksgiving weekend getaway in 1981. On-camera conversation between Gregson Wagner and her “Daddy Wagner,” or R.J., as he is known to friends and family, forms the spine of the chronicle.

In addition to framing Wagner’s role as the love of Wood’s life, the filmmakers capitalize on their expansive library of content and the colorful headlines ignited by Wood’s contributions to Hollywood history. As a child performer, Wood became the primary breadwinner for her family. Bouzereau and Gregson Wagner show a fair bit of restraint, but it is not difficult to get a sense of the latter’s strong disapproval of Wood’s mother (as well as sister Lana). Fans able to watch Wood grow up onscreen, from “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” and “Miracle on 34th Street” to “Rebel Without a Cause” and “The Searchers” to “Splendor in the Grass” and “West Side Story,” already know the star’s extensive filmography.

Interviews with several high profile friends, including Mia Farrow, Robert Redford, and Elliott Gould, are sandwiched among a handful of curious contributions by people like Natalie’s personal assistant Liz Applegate, who explains that she often worked from a desk in the corner of the master bedroom, with Wood and Wagner between the sheets just behind her.

An even more peculiar inclusion is “Brainstorm” director Douglas Trumbull, who more or less condemns his own skills by insisting that Wood and Christopher Walken, a guest on the boat the night of Natalie’s death, had zero romantic chemistry. The idea, of course, is to pour cold water on the rumor that the co-stars were sleeping with one another. Not surprisingly, Walken was not interviewed for the movie, but does appear in a few old clips. Wagner goes out of his way to acknowledge the elephant in the room, saying, “Chris was there. He, by the way, is a very stand-up guy. A true gentleman.”

Trying to free Wood from the enormous shadow cast by her death is no small feat. “What Remains Behind” doesn’t quite manage the task, but the movie brightens up in sections focused on Wood’s devotion as a loving and involved parent and her efforts to combat the patriarchal inequities of the historically sexist motion picture industry. Even so, the complexities of Wood’s relationships with figures like Warren Beatty, Frank Sinatra, Michael Caine, and Nicholas Ray are downplayed in favor of a shinier and more polished version than one confronting the dark side of the routine exploitation of young women that pervaded, and continues to pervade, the movie business.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The most compelling and powerful idea in Kitty Green’s compelling and powerful film “The Assistant” resides in the network of complicity protecting the predator/stand-in for Harvey Weinstein and those like him. Green expresses, in the microcosmic minutiae of office-life orbit, a detailed picture of institutionalized harassment and mistreatment. Even though the movie’s particular events are set within the film industry, Green’s message is universal: for every man in a position of authority who manages to get away with the horrific behavior of sexual assault, cruelty, and bullying, there is a group of enablers maintaining a rotten status quo.

As aspiring film producer Jane, Julia Garner seldom leaves the frame and grips the attention of the viewer from first scene to last. As the lowly employee who arrives before sunrise to turn on the lights, make coffee, print and distribute reports, and tidy anything overlooked by custodial staff, Jane seems more intern than valued team member. Yet, her willingness to accept this grim hierarchy is instantly recognizable. We don’t need to be told that Jane’s hellish and humiliating servitude is a “rare opportunity and privilege” that hundreds of others would also suffer while chasing Hollywood dreams.

Green, the documentarian whose brilliant “Casting JonBenet” seamlessly traversed the realms of nonfiction and fantasy, wrote the “The Assistant,” and her screenplay carefully parcels out the dialogue that, little by little, exposes an insidious culture and climate. It is, however, the filmmaker’s commanding ability to communicate in purely visual terms that distinguishes “The Assistant.” Jane watches the copy machine spit out an endless stack of anonymous headshots. She tends to the chairman’s young children. She shares an elevator with a famous actor (Patrick Wilson) so used to owning physical space that a clumsy exit dance tells us he didn’t even register Jane’s presence. All three examples speak volumes about the dynamics of gender.

Green said in an interview with Marshall Shaffer that both “Casting JonBenet” and “The Assistant” are about the exploitation of women. In the latter, the protagonist will — against all odds — muster the courage to visit human resources to voice her concerns about the safety and wellbeing of a new hire: a very young former waitress from Idaho personally selected by the big boss and escorted by Jane to the Mark Hotel. The HR interaction that plays out, between Jane and Wilcock (Matthew Macfadyen), is arguably the movie’s critical scene. Their conversation is a tension-filled back-and-forth illuminating the wide berth of tolerance that shields money-makers against credible accusations, and it shakes Jane to the core.

Green’s skillful direction is a master class in strategic elision. Unlike the provocative private office scene between Margot Robbie’s Kayla Pospisil and John Lithgow’s Roger Ailes in “Bombshell,” Green withholds any dramatizations of behind-closed-doors transgressions. Instead, the chairman remains ever hidden from our view in a choice that only intensifies his fearsome reach and underlines Green’s critique of an unjust system. The mogul’s voice (supplied by Joy O. Sanders) is filtered through the telephone, and the sadism and degradation are as chilling to us as the ritual in which Jane writes him emails of apology helpfully wordsmithed by the two young men with whom she shares workspace.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Cinematic depictions of the creative process are as common as they are usually unconvincing. Whether encapsulated in a montage or stretched out over several scenes, images of painters painting, composers composing, writers writing, and rockers rocking are regularly meant to convey to the viewer a sense of awe or accomplishment when the final product is revealed. Frustration and failure can also factor in some of the best films about the struggles of making something out of nothing. “Barton Fink” is tough to beat, and “Amadeus” communicates triumph and defeat with equal brilliance.

Musician Marc Collin’s “Le choc du futur,” one of the handful of South by Southwest-selected features recently included in the festival’s online partnership with Amazon Prime, capitalizes on a modest budget to imagine its 1978 setting amidst the rapid evolution of electronically-generated, synthesizer-based pop recordings in dance and other genres. More precisely, Collin spins a recognizable tale — the burdens and challenges faced by women in an industry controlled by men — to render the details of a moment in time. Collin knows his stuff. The massive wall of equipment that dwarfs the protagonist has been assembled with care and becomes a character in its own right. But one of the most appealing things about the film is that the director is no snob; you don’t have to be an aficionado to appreciate the journey.

The majority of the film’s action is confined to the gear-filled apartment Ana (Alma Jodorowsky, whose grandfather is indeed Alejandro) watches for a traveling friend. Collin eventually visits a few more locations, but “Le choc du futur,” whether by design or by budgetary limitations, tethers our protagonist to the tools of her trade. Ana’s self-quarantine is one of devotion to her craft and is unrelated to the one currently underway. Ana also receives many guests, and each one, like a new instrument added to the symphony, expands our understanding of her character and her objectives.

Collin contrasts Philippe Rebbot’s entitled producer/go-between — whose unwelcome and creepy advances Ana must routinely deflect — with the warmer and more avuncular personality of Geoffrey Carey’s instantly recognizable aging hipster. Carey and Jodorowsky share one of the movie’s best scenes, when he drops the needle on a stack of fresh records to gauge Ana’s reaction. She misses the boat by shrugging off Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop,” but the interaction establishes Ana’s hunger for fresh sounds. Even more rewarding is the sequence in which a vocalist played by Clara Luciani establishes a powerful creative connection, leading to the film’s most sustained depiction of song-building.

Several critics have complained that Collin fails to fully explore the social inequities and gender imbalance that put Ana at a disadvantage compared to male artists who don’t have to deal with misogyny and sexism. But Collin’s more subtle approach rewards us with front-row seats to this highly specific world. One of the most accomplished elements of “Le choc du futur,” which is Collin’s feature debut (he is better known as covers project Nouvelle Vague’s co-founder), is the way it engages in an ongoing conversation on the nature of art and how we consume it as well as create it. Ana’s desire to add her voice as a practitioner is echoed in a closing title that pays tribute to the groundbreaking women of electronic music.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

As alternative viewing strategies for avid moviegoers seeking fresh content continue, the South by Southwest filmmakers who opted to join the Amazon Prime collection have benefited this week from attention that would have otherwise been more limited by the in-person version of the Austin, Texas showcase. One of the best films in the lineup is Rachel Harrison Gordon’s narrative short “Broken Bird.” Crafted with a level of sophistication and storytelling acumen rarely seen in first-time efforts, let alone pieces that begin as film school assignments, Harrison Gordon’s movie is a whole world. It may be only ten minutes long, but the rhythms, characterizations, and thematic interests make “Broken Bird” feel like a richly detailed feature-length accomplishment.

If Harrison Gordon ever develops this story into a long-form effort, I will be among the first in line to buy a ticket. I would also wish for the same performers, since the actors selected by the moviemaker are perfectly cast. The director’s statement shared by Harrison Gordon on the movie’s website reads, “‘Broken Bird’ follows Birdie, a biracial girl raised by her Jewish mom in a New Jersey suburb, as she spends a rare visitation day with her father while preparing for her Bat Mitzvah. She overcomes her doubts, and decides to risk inviting him back into her life. Birdie confronts what independence means as she steps into adulthood on her own terms.”

Harrison Gordon concludes, “This film celebrates the various worlds and lives we incorporate into our own unique identities. I had to learn to be comfortable in my own skin, and I know there are a lot of young people out there who feel the same way. I hope they can take a measure of comfort from Birdie’s story, and that they see their own strengths through Birdie’s eyes.” While Harrison Gordon pulls many of the details contained within the narrative from her own biography, “Broken Bird” — like all great examples of bildungsroman — locates the universal in the specific.

Indigo Hubbard-Salk (who plays Skylar Gilstrap on Netflix’s “She’s Gotta Have It”) inhabits Birdie with fierce individuality. Harrison Gordon shrewdly resists any overt dramatizations of troubling alt-right politics that would place her alter-ego in the crosshairs of the racist and the anti-Semite. Instead, no matter what our own demographic signifiers may be, we get the humanness of a young person still grieving over the loss of her previously united nuclear family. At a restaurant, Birdie’s father Andre (television veteran Chad L. Coleman, so superb in “The Wire” and several other series) orders her a forbidden soda, and the small, seemingly inconsequential exchange tells us as much about Birdie’s two worlds as the scene in which she has her hair straightened.

Music connects Birdie to her father and to the particulars of her experience, and Harrison Gordon’s song choices ring out. Too many filmmakers misunderstand the function of a well-placed needle-drop in the diegesis, especially when they succumb to the temptation of an unnecessary explanation or lecture. The inclusion here of Nina Simone’s recording of “Eretz Zavat Chalav” speaks for itself. And while the version of “Bad Girls” excerpted in one of the movie’s most powerful scenes is by Penelope and the Dream, the movie’s precise integration of “toot toot, hey, beep beep” from the Donna Summer classic will break your heart.

“Broken Bird” premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and is available to watch online at no cost until May 6, 2020, as part of Amazon Prime’s collaboration with SXSW.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s noteworthy feature debut as writer-director examines, with a degree of precision and deliberateness that would impress Alfred Hitchcock, the actions of a young woman who consumes inedible objects as a way to attain some measure of control in her suffocating marriage to a wealthy man. The disorder, identified in the DSM-V as pica, includes subtypes categorized by the eating of specific non-nutritional items ranging from glass to stones to soil to sharp objects. As a title, “Swallow” reverberates with several meanings — among them an allusion to the protagonist’s potentially harmful ingestions and the indignities she must suffer under the humiliating surveillance of her husband’s parents.

Producer and star Haley Bennett’s performance is career-best work. In collaboration with Mirabella-Davis, Bennett endows her Hunter Conrad with empathy and humanity that will bring even the most reluctant and skeptical viewers to an understanding of the need to feel a sense of accomplishment, even one far outside the realm of cultural appropriateness. The majority of the movie is spent in close and intimate proximity to Hunter. Sometimes, the viewer is invited to her most private rituals, including the collection of small things that Hunter retrieves after they have passed out of her body.

At other times, we see Hunter in the company of others. These scenes are initially marked by the inconsiderate and rude manner in which Hunter is constantly ignored, talked over, diminished, dismissed, and disrespected. Past and present collide in the construction of Hunter as the contemporary equivalent of a mid-century, “trophy wife” homemaker — underscored by the pregnancy that reduces her to a vessel. Entitled spouse Richie (Austin Stowell) may or may not have a mistress in the city, but Hunter is another kind of odalisque: a slave and captive in her own gilded cage.

Mirabella-Davis uses the central location — a modernist Hudson Valley dwelling designed by architect Robert J. Dupont and filled with perfect touches and objects selected and arranged by production designer Erin Magill — with bold flourishes that emphasize Hunter’s increasingly worrisome isolation from human contact outside the tiny circle of coddled Richie and overbearing in-laws. Richie’s parents, we learn, gave the home to their son and his wife as a gift, a fact which suggests that Hunter is an interloper or pretender who does not really belong as a true member of the family and does not deserve the opulence and wealth surrounding her.

Later, Hunter will establish precarious relationships with others. One, which is performed by the superb, indispensable Denis O’Hare and sets up the shattering final scenes, is best left for the viewer to discover. A seemingly helpful therapist, played by Zabryna Guevara, may not necessarily abide by the ethical standards of her profession, and a hulking Syrian (Laith Nakli) retained by Richie’s family as a sitter/minder/nurse will also upend expectations. These relationships all affect Hunter in increasingly important ways, and while many reviewers have argued that “Swallow” could or should be classified as a horror film, Mirabella-Davis engineers a perfect final shot that suggests there can be light on the other side of darkness.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Sundance 2020 opening night selection and audience award winner “Crip Camp” — now streaming on Netflix — recounts the incredible grassroots movement that ultimately led to the passage and implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law on July 26, 1990. But before that ceremonial milestone, which appears late in Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht’s terrific documentary, audiences are invited to go on a long, strange trip that starts at the location of the title. In 1951, north of New York City, in the Catskills at the foot of Hunter Mountain, Camp Jened began offering summer sessions for campers with disabilities of all kinds.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, the camp developed a permissive and experimental environment largely driven by the era’s countercultural attitudes and fostered by program director Larry Allison. The movie’s first section, which shrewdly introduces viewers to the Jened vibe as if we were arriving on the bus like uncomfortable first-time campers and counselors, is as eye-opening as it is invigorating. Counselor Joe O’Conor says, “I was not prepared for the visual of so many disabled people at one time, and I froze. I became paralyzed with fear. Then somebody behind me pushed me because I was in the way and that forward momentum carried me through the summer.”

Co-director LeBrecht, who began attending Camp Jened as a fourteen-year-old, would bring the fire and energy inspired by the philosophies and experiences of fellow attendees into disability rights activism before establishing a career as a motion picture and theatrical sound designer. LeBrecht is one of the movie’s key personalities, but it is a testament to his filmmaking skills that he and Newnham share the movie’s point of view among a core group of people. The most dynamic of these players is undoubtedly the cosmically-named Judy Heumann, an indefatigable civil rights activist and Jened alumna who did as much as any other organizer to bring about significant and lasting change for members of the disability community.

So much of the dynamism and excitement of “Crip Camp” is communicated through the broad scope of the archival footage that allows Newnham and LeBrecht to immerse the viewer in the past. Daily activities at Jened were memorialized on film and half-inch videotape, often captured by the campers themselves and also recorded in conjunction with the members of the People’s Video Theater. That content is especially vital, as it does more to dismantle stereotypes and break down myths than the well-meaning news reports also excerpted in the film. Newnham and LeBrecht soon turn their attention to the 504 Sit-in that would include, at the San Francisco Office of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the longest occupation of a federal building in United States history, but the soul of the movie lives at the camp.

Some viewers might argue that “Crip Camp” could have been two films: one about Jened itself and one about the activism that happened after the campers left. Summer camp is already a genre unto itself, with hallmarks like “The Parent Trap,” “Meatballs,” “Little Darlings,” “Wet Hot American Summer,” and the classic 1998 “This American Life” episode “Notes on Camp,” to name a few. “Crip Camp” must now be added, with an exclamation point, to that roster. Jened’s real-life teen angst and its participants’ hopes and dreams — from endless makeout sessions to the hysterical aftermath of an outbreak of crabs — are as horny, heartfelt, and human as it gets.