Movie review by Greg Carlson

Almost relegated to the trashcan of history and the file drawer marked for popular cultural ephemera, the audio and/or video recordings of the industrial musical are properly dusted off and polished to a state of splendor in Dava Whisenant’s “Bathtubs Over Broadway.” The first-time feature director, who earned the Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Filmmaker at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, follows longtime David Letterman staff writer Steve Young on his dogged pursuit of increasingly rare LPs of fully-produced, brain-melting shows promoting the corporate images of giants like Coca-Cola, Ford, General Electric, and Xerox.

Young’s crate-digging prowess developed as he unearthed the ridiculous gems and curiosities used as fodder for the long-running “Dave’s Record Collection” segment of the talk show. Even as the most far-out titles were ripe for on-air ridicule, Young was magnetically drawn to the souvenir and “internal use only” collectibles that were also commonly marked “not for broadcast” or “not for commercial use.” Whisenant enthusiastically conveys both the thrill of the hunt and the endearing excitement with which Young approaches fare like G.E.’s 1973 “Got to Investigate Silicones.”   

That’s just one terrific example, but of the productions highlighted in the film, perhaps none can top American-Standard’s incredible “The Bathrooms Are Coming!,” Sid Siegel’s phantasmagoric ode to the luxurious offerings of the company’s 1969 fixture lineup. Fellow deep divers like Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra and Don Bolles of the Germs are quick to praise that recording’s unforgettable je ne sais quoi, and it’s difficult to disagree when you hear lyrical firestarters that begin with “My bathroom is a private kind of place…” In one of the movie’s many treats, Whisenant and Young go one better, investigating the show’s surreal vignettes and connecting with original “Bathrooms” performers.

Fans of Letterman will appreciate how Whisenant’s profile of Young coincides with the end of the “Late Show with David Letterman” in the spring of 2015. The filmmaker uses the program’s curtain call as Young’s own midlife turning point and pause for self-reflection. The bittersweet farewells to colleagues as Young packs up his desk ripple out to appreciators of American broadcasting history in the audience, and Whisenant (who edited several dozen episodes of “Late Show”) probably has enough material to pursue another feature film examining the end of the Letterman era of nighttime entertainment. Letterman, one of several executive producers of “Bathtubs Over Broadway,” appears briefly in the movie.

Whisenant emphasizes the ways in which Young’s quest have led him to meaningful interpersonal relationships and a sense of avocation that transcend his work as a writer of television comedy. Capturing interactions with well-known performers like Chita Rivera, Florence Henderson, and Martin Short, as well as other meetings with writers like Sheldon Harnick and Hank Beebe, Whisenant — through Young — communicates a commanding level of earnestness and respect for work that we previously thought was disposable. That surprising discovery, accompanied by the implication that one person’s art is another employee’s moldering memento of a 1965 Seagram Distillers distributor meeting, turns out to be the movie’s affirming heartbeat.

“Bathtubs Over Broadway,” with Whisenant and Young in person, will be featured as the opening night showcase of the 2019 Fargo Film Festival on Tuesday, March 19 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are available now at the Fargo Theatre box office.     

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Director A.J. Eaton’s rock star biography “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” checks all the boxes of the lion-in-winter music documentary. Crosby’s clear-eyed laments for heady days of monumental drug consumption simultaneously see him twinkle with pride and blush with regret as he recounts his unbelievable adventures. As the irreplaceable C of CSN and CSNY, Crosby parlayed his early stardom as a founding member of the Byrds into an odyssey of legendary Pacific Coast songwriting and performing. A quintessential symbol of the countercultural movement championing peace and love, Crosby possessed the uncanny ability to land in several of the right places at several of the right times.

His instantly recognizable locks and mustache now snowy white, Crosby carries eight stents in his ticker and claims on camera that the next heart attack will surely take his life. But despite diabetes and declining overall health, he candidly and poignantly admits his hunger for more time. Eaton, with a major assist by producer Cameron Crowe, treats viewers to a personally guided tour of Crosby’s Los Angeles, and the tactic — which includes a spine-tingling stop outside the gate of the house where Crosby, Stills & Nash first took flight — electrifies pop music fans as much as any of the judiciously selected archival shots, like an excellent rarity showing papa Floyd Crosby at work as a cinematographer.   

Eaton’s approach, which heavily favors intimate close-ups as a contemplative Crosby unburdens himself, largely skips newly-collected content from the cast of famous figures most important to Crosby’s development. Opting instead for old talking-head clips to fill in key spots, Eaton sticks to a very specific kind of tale, passing over narratives involving Crosby’s children. Longtime spouse Jan Dance does enter the spotlight on occasion, and Eaton extensively covers Crosby’s significant relationships with Joni Mitchell (a rich section that provides one of the movie’s many highlights) and Christine Hinton, two of the three women who inspired parts of “Guinnevere.”    

A refrain of “how did I survive this?” propels other forays into the darkness. While the specifics of 1982 and 1985 arrests flow together, Crosby’s more-than-once rock-bottom drug and/or weapon charges extended all the way to 2004, when another bust was added to the record. News footage reporting on the nine months Crosby spent in Texas state prison draws serious gasps, but Eaton has an even bigger shock in store: the disastrous final performance of Crosby, Stills & Nash at the 2015 National Christmas Tree Lighting. Their off-key, out-of-tune butchering of “Silent Night” (which, at least, CSN did not choose) is an awful and embarrassing sunset on a career that includes masterworks like “Helplessly Hoping,” “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and “Teach Your Children.”  

Eaton elects not to dive too deeply into individual song histories, with “Ohio,” and the rawness that surrounds it to this day, standing as the most notable exception. The director uses a clip of Crosby’s infamous questioning of the Warren Commission report on stage at the legendary 1967 Monterey International Pop Music Festival to illustrate how his divisive and strident positions would alienate Crosby from his closest collaborators. The whole film, in fact, skews heavily toward an elegiac mournfulness that marvelously erases any and all of the punchlines depicting Crosby as an out-of-control, substance-abusing has-been, replacing them with a more complex — if deliberately incomplete — portrait of an enormously talented artist.   

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Documentarian Penny Lane adds another entertaining movie to her filmography with an inside look at the recent rise of the Satanic Temple. As a movie experience, “Hail Satan?” often lives deliciously. The film might even turn out to be a prime recruitment video for the organization co-founded in 2013 by onscreen imp/spokesperson Lucien Greaves. TST is the perfect subject for the witty and insightful Lane, who detonates truth bomb after truth bomb in a campaign to highlight the group’s unrelenting quest to expose hypocrisy and double standards and politically engage opponents of the separation of church and state. Unlike previous “devil worship” outfits, TST’s deliberate activism and community engagement far surpass the showmanship and self-promotion of Anton LaVey.

Lane’s focus on several of TST’s provocative operations takes precedence over any in-depth historical account of Satanism, but the filmmaker does make a little bit of room to consider the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1980s, in which hysteria over purported ritual Satanic abuse and deep fear of the occult destroyed the lives of innocent people wrongfully accused of molesting children in their care. The most well-known example, the McMartin preschool trial, has been deconstructed elsewhere, but Lane effectively contextualizes the phantom conspiracies that scapegoated everything from Dungeons and Dragons to Motley Crue and other heavy metal acts that could be unmasked by playing their records backwards.

And speaking of goats, Lane squeezes every drop of blood from TST’s battle to bring the towering statue of Baphomet to the same public spheres occupied by Ten Commandments monuments in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Based on the illustration by Eliphas Levi, the striking 3000-pound bronze by sculptor Mark Porter quickly became the primary symbol uniting those who would challenge the likes of Tea Party conservative Jason Rapert, who serves District 35 in the Arkansas State Senate. A walking caricature, Rapert makes for a broad villain based on his sponsorship of a bill allowing for a stone marker similar to the ones popularized by Hollywood producer Cecil B. DeMille in a publicity stunt to drum up ticket sales for the 1956 Charlton Heston movie.

Lane also introduces viewers to a rainbow range of adherents and admirers of the dark side, using their many personal anecdotes to explain the appeal of the group. Especially savvy is the presentation of TST’s seven fundamental tenets, a list of logical, humanist principles that give the Old Testament laws a run for their money. But can the center hold in an organization given to the aggressive questioning of authority and the demonizing of hierarchy? Detroit’s Jex Blackmore partially answers that question, splintering from TST following disagreements over policy in performance art pieces too radical for Greaves and the central leadership.

Blackmore’s breakaway brand of Satanism could fill another feature, but Lane keeps her eye on TST’s media spotlight actions. While the Baphomet sequences dominate, viewers also bear witness to several of the group’s more curious pieces of political theater, from the innocuous (an adopt-a-highway clean-up) to the eyebrow-raising (After School Satan) to the deliberately scandalous (the ribald Pink Mass, teabagging and all, held at the gravesite of the mother of Westboro Baptist figurehead Fred Phelps). Viewers new to TST’s approach to the headline-grabbing values of blasphemy will surely be surprised that members do not worship any incarnation of an anthropomorphic, horned, pitchfork-wielding manifestation of evil, but instead use the iconography to satirize all manner of injustice, folly, and corruption.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

While his Fred Rogers documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” arguably captured more attention than any nonfiction feature released in 2018, Morgan Neville’s other big project, “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” deserves careful examination by anyone who loves movie history. A companion piece to the posthumous release of Orson Welles’ notorious “The Other Side of the Wind,” Neville’s film uses, among other sources, Josh Karp’s 2015 book “Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind” to offer viewers a contextualization aiming to sort out fact from fantasy. But Neville’s movie is also a beribboned box of irresistible petits fours that will be hungrily gobbled by Welles completists.

In the always-changing, ever-morphing screenplay for a film Welles claimed would only take two months to shoot but instead stretched to eight years, an aging film director named Jake Hannaford holds court at his Hollywood birthday party on what will be the last night of his life. Hannaford was played by a game John Huston, although Welles never let anyone, including Huston, forget that he could or should have taken the role himself. The character, of course, is Welles writ large, an amalgam of the wily mythmaker/truth-stretcher and other borrowed and stolen traits the one-time boy genius collected along his fascinating path — including a healthy dose based in part on Ernest Hemingway.

One of the film’s best stories relates the depth of cinematographer Gary Graver’s devotion to Welles, and it operates as a metaphor describing the risks of all-consuming commitment to a mesmerizing guru happy to snare any flies who venture too close to the web. Graver put everything, including his money, physical health, mental wellness, and his relationships with his own family members, on the line to help Welles realize “The Other Side of the Wind.” Graver’s labor was unpaid, and the photographer would take B-movie and porno gigs during the protracted production of Welles’ movie just to make ends meet. The details of the cameraman’s saga make up several it’s-all-true jaw-droppers in the documentary, and Neville doesn’t even have time to get to the fate of Welles’ “Citizen Kane” writing Oscar, which * gifted to Graver.    

Along with Graver, Neville admirably keeps track of a lengthy scorecard of commentators, conspirators, and contributors great and small, including Oja Kodar, Peter Bogdanovich, Frank Marshall, Cathy Lucas, Dennis Hopper, Cybill Shepherd, and on and on. Each functions to connect a few or more of the dots of head-spinning in-jokes, asides, insults, and references Welles made in “The Other Side of the Wind” on behalf, or at the expense, of those in his orbit. Bogdanovich was one of the closest, and the longtime keeper of the Welles flame shares the incredible anecdote of receiving an envelope containing two letters from his mentor following cruel comments made by Welles and Burt Reynolds on “The Tonight Show.” One of the notes was heartfelt apology and one piled on the venom. Welles told Bogdanovich to take his pick.

Obviously, Welles did not live to finish “The Other Side of the Wind,” but the cut that now accompanies “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” into the world allows viewers to decide whether the great auteur has pulled off another of his famous magic tricks. As the ultimate maverick estranged from the studio system that chewed him up and spit him out, the master’s “final” film will be the experimental metanarrative gift that keeps on giving. “The Other Side of the Wind” adds another row of reflections to join with the ones in Xanadu and the Magic Mirror Maze. Its vibrating self-awareness, its doppelgangers, its arch life-imitates-art and art-imitates-life observations, its unwieldy traveling circus vibe, and its mind-bending movie-within-a-movie duality allow Welles to simultaneously mock and indulge in the critically celebrated, sexually-charged, Antonioni-style, European art film.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Shirkers” is title to both an uncompleted Singapore-based road movie starring Sandi Tan that was shot in the summer of 1992 and the autobiographical nonfiction examination of that lost film. With the benefit of time, Tan looks back on her own experiences, constructing a reflective bildungsroman with the requisite excitement, heartache, friendship, loss, and pain one expects from any great coming-of-age tale. As a 19-year-old on the island nation known more to outsiders for being cleaner than Disneyland than for any indie filmmaking scene, Tan joined forces with sisters-in-arms Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique to reach for cinematic glory. But after principal photography wrapped, much older mentor Georges Cardona disappeared with every can of the film.   

How many movies have been lost or nearly lost to circumstances that cause a derailment before a public release can provide closure for the anxious and expectant filmmaker? In some sense, “Shirkers” joins longstanding legends like Jerry Lewis’ “The Day the Clown Cried,” the Sex Pistols in “Who Killed Bambi?,” David O. Russell’s “Nailed,” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Kaleidoscope” (just to name a few) as a broken dream that lives on in the what-might-have-been corners of the imagination. As is the case with Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind” and Morgan Neville’s companion piece “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” the journey almost always looms larger than the destination.      

Tan astutely minimizes the mystery of Cardona, refusing to turn the attention of her story to a narcissistic user undeserving of the starring role. Instead, she investigates the memories of her friends, both of whom were as gutted as Tan by the betrayal perpetrated by Cardona. Like “Rashomon,” each woman remembers unique aspects of the “Shirkers” endeavor that conflict with some of Tan’s thoughts. Ng, without mincing words, accuses Tan of being an asshole. Tan runs with it, examining vintage video that corroborates the claim. That willingness to make a deep dive on pieces of the puzzle that still trigger raw emotions is in keeping with Tan’s collagist, cut-and-paste, DIY, punk rock ethos.  

Tan is nothing if not gutsy, and like so many established celluloid heroes, she might have been practicing Academy Award acceptance speeches in the mirror before making anything of substance. She breathlessly identifies “Rushmore” and “Ghost World” as simpatico with “Shirkers,” juxtaposing rhyming shots to make a case for the hipster credibility of her unfinished opus. Lost synchronous sound recordings and mature judgment guided the decision to leave “Shirkers” a phantom. Like Tan, Ng, and Siddique, we may never know why Cardona robbed his young collaborators of their commitment and hard work, even though a few people acquainted with Cardona offer tantalizing theories.

Along the way, Tan finds a sympathetic sharer in Stephen Tyler, another protege of Cardona similarly mistreated by the movie magpie. Tyler credibly surmises that Cardona’s sense of pride, entitlement, and jealousy partly drove his cruelty. For example, Cardona began to claim that he was the inspiration for James Spader’s character Graham in “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” after Tyler and another mutual friend worked on Soderbergh’s film. “Shirkers” brims with references and allusions to movies that aid Tan as she spins her story. Clips from “Blue Velvet,” “Paris, Texas,” “Heathers,” “Nosferatu,” “Fitzcarraldo,” Singapore’s own “Cleopatra Wong” and many others will be familiar to anyone who speaks the language of cinephilia.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Another stunning work of perfectly placed ellipses and calculated restraint, Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Cold War” is a film filled with images as iconic and austere as its blunt title. A haunting experience of history by suggestion, the movie traces a tragic romance across years and landscapes, relying as heavily on Lukasz Zal’s arresting, monochromatic, Academy ratio cinematography as it does on the sharp editing by Jaroslaw Kominski. Pawlikowski collaborated with both of those craftsmen on Oscar-winner “Ida,” and “Cold War” is a gorgeous companion that is every bit as good, and possibly even better, than the celebrated 2013 title.  

Clocking in crisply and efficiently at 85 minutes, “Cold War” wastes nothing, often presenting strings of diabolically economical short scenes to advance the narrative that focuses on musician/composer/conductor Wiktor Warski (Tomasz Kot) and singer/dancer/performer Zuzanna “Zula” Lichon (Joanna Kulig) as they come together and move apart and come together on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Pawlikowski dedicates the film to his parents and uses their names for his two protagonists. So skillful is the filmmaker at communicating in pure visual language, one need not know much about mid-20th century Eastern Europe to understand the challenges faced by artists trapped in the cogs of an oppressive political machine.

Along with the beautiful photography and knockout cutting, Pawlikowski laces “Cold War” with a soundtrack that captures the conflicting moods of clashing ideologies. Beginning with the rural folk and work songs sung by peasants and accelerating through small jazz combos and wild communist transpositions of swinging big bands, the fortunes and misfortunes of Wiktor and Zula are traced as much through the musical arrangements they perform together and separately as any dialogue they exchange with one another. At one exhilarating turning point, the infectious, magnetizing 12-bar blues of Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” instantly pulls Zula from her stool to the dance floor and the bar top.

As star-crossed as Ilsa and Rick, Zula and Wiktor painfully discover that they can’t live with or without each other in just the same way that they cannot live with or without Poland. One bureaucratic official is disbelieving and incredulous when Wiktor petitions to leave Paris to return to his homeland. We understand, even though the decision guarantees something menacing and horrific. Among the many other echoes of “Casablanca” is a shot that mirrors Ilsa’s surprising late night visit to see Rick at the Cafe Americain. As an analogue to Mr. Blaine, Wiktor also happens to be his own Sam. He plays his own placeholders for “As Time Goes By” whenever the longing for Zula overtakes him.  

Some viewers will adore the way in which Pawlikowski collaborates with his actors to create characters filled with the wholeness of familiar humanness, especially when the filmmaker withholds so much of the stuff we would expect in the presentation of a traditional screen romance. The pauses, the fades to black, and the spaces in between are all elisions that arouse deep curiosity, but also inspire us to wonder and imagine all kinds of things that Pawlikowski keeps from our eyes and ears. One of the best gifts of “Cold War” is that we never feel like we have been cheated.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Compared to the Betsy West and Julie Cohen documentary “RBG,” Mimi Leder’s period biographical slice “On the Basis of Sex” is nowhere near as notorious as one might hope, but the hagiographic reverence for Ruth Bader Ginsburg is tempered by enough heart and humor to overcome some of the film’s more predictable adherence to its genre. Like a good law student, Leder focuses on a presentation of the factual and procedural. That choice, similar to Reginald Hudlin’s time- and case-specific look at a pre-icon status Thurgood Marshall in 2017’s “Marshall,” sacrifices some elements of richer and deeper characterization — including the flaws that help us recognize heroes as humans.  

Felicity Jones, trying a slightly odd facsimile of RBG’s Brooklyn accent, handles all the condescension, sexism, and dismissiveness that can be dished out by the likes of white Harvard men in suits, nevertheless persisting when faced with the insufferable bullshit of Sam Waterston’s dean and Stephen Root’s professor. The screenplay, by Ginsburg’s nephew Daniel Stiepleman, makes hay with a few choice shots at the storied Ivy League institution. The chauvinist Crimson jerks are expectedly hissable, which makes Leder’s more subtle and complex take on the ACLU’s Mel Wulf (Justin Theroux, doing a little Alan Alda) one of the film’s strengths.   

In a bit of movie magic that would have delighted RBG’s husband, Martin D. Ginsburg is played by Armie Hammer. Hammer’s recent and somewhat unexpected turns in “Call Me by Your Name” and “Sorry to Bother You” suggest fairly gutsy instincts by the usually safe matinee idol standards of big-budget players. Hammer’s “On the Basis of Sex” part is far from risky, but as A. O. Scott has pointed out, the actor “has never looked happier,” taking on a supporting role in every sense of the word. Viewed as a portrait of the progressive and, for its era, unorthodox marriage enjoyed by the Ginsburgs — which was delightfully highlighted in “RBG” — “On the Basis of Sex” is catnip. One of the best moments in the film is a touching scene in which Martin comforts daughter Jane after a mother-daughter disagreement.   

While Jones and Hammer remain impossibly gorgeous throughout the years covered in the narrative, Leder maintains an awareness of time not only through the costumes and cars, but by commenting directly on both opportunities and obstacles experienced by women of different ages. In one sequence, Bader Ginsburg and Jane pay a visit to the office of the legendary judge/activist/feminist Dorothy Kenyon (Kathy Bates), whose thoughts are as eye-opening to RBG as Jane’s assertive handling of unwelcome street harassment. Later, in the movie’s closing arguments, RBG will speak to the “radical social change” marked so noticeably by the passing of time.

The biopic-wary should applaud “On the Basis of Sex” for its avoidance of the temptation to cover a longer chronology of Bader Ginsburg’s life and career. In comments to the Hollywood Reporter following the film’s New York premiere, Stiepleman stated that he selected the Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue appeal because it “was the only one” that had husband and wife “fighting in court for what [the Ginsburgs] also created at home, which was real equality.” That parallelism works nicely, and it is just as nice to have Mimi Leder back in the director’s chair. Hopefully we will not have to wait as long for her next feature.         

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The sensational Claire Denis adds another wonderful work to her impressive filmography with “Let the Sunshine In.” An ode to many things, including restless hearts, the frustrations of romantic freedom versus security, the impossibility and ridiculousness of the fantasy sold by the Hollywood romantic comedy, the anxieties of middle age, and several more, “Let the Sunshine In” is foremost a showcase for radiant superstar Juliette Binoche. As the unlucky-in-love Isabelle, a Paris painter who drifts from liaison to liaison with a questionable parade of partners unwilling or unable to make the kind of connection that Isabelle imagines will satiate her, Binoche is fearless.

Instead of manufacturing sympathetic markers to anoint and glorify her protagonist, Denis insists on portraying the self-doubt and insecurities that vex Isabelle. To that end, the presence of Binoche is a bit of brilliance that taunts and challenges the viewer; if Isabelle can’t find lasting, fulfilling tenderness and companionship, what chance do the rest of us have? Denis eviscerates the old adage “if you can’t handle or love me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best,” collapsing or inverting the very notion of what constitutes a woman at her “best” or “worst.” Denis’ clinical detachment somehow makes the “unlikable” Isabelle more accessible and alive.

The men who most certainly play well below Isabelle’s league are a comic bunch of narcissistic assholes and navel-gazers. Denis opens with a sweaty, heaving Vincent (Xavier Beauvois), a piggish and married banker, struggling to climax on top of Isabelle and follows shortly with an actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) who spends more time discussing why he and Isabelle shouldn’t have sex than actually, inevitably, having sex. At the end, Denis sticks the landing with yet another interrogation of amour fou, inserting a just jilted Gerard Depardieu as a quack psychic. The majority of his one scene with Binoche unfolds while the end credits roll.  

Much earlier, following a deeply unsatisfying encounter with piggish, married banker Vincent (Xavier Beauvois), Isabelle returns home alone, struggling to remove the black, over-the-knee stiletto boots that she so often wears like sexual armor. Tearfully soliloquizing an “Am I with him? Or not?” conundrum awash in self-pity, we glimpse an Etta James sleeve decorating the wall behind Isabelle. Later, Ms. James’ transcendent “At Last” will factor on the “Let the Sunshine In” soundtrack in the film’s most referenced scene, but for now, we are reminded of the stark and ironic contrast between the pain, abuse, and addiction suffered by James and the angelic ballads given flight by her voice.           

Isabelle’s privileged existence doesn’t match James’ suffering, but Denis moves to reclaim “At Last” from its cultural dilution in advertisements for products as unlikely as State Farm insurance and Hoover vacuum cleaners, and in films as far flung as “American Pie” and “Inland Empire.” Isabelle dances with a seductive stranger (Paul Blain, looking all Robert Mapplethorpe) to the song in an encounter immediately following a blown-gasket tirade during an artist retreat (one of the movie’s most hilarious scenes), but we know the fantasy lasts only as long as the three minutes it takes James to sing it. Her lonely days far from over, Isabelle’s love has not, at last, come along.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Helming her feature film debut, veteran theatre director Josie Rourke mounts a handsome but forgettable “Mary Queen of Scots” (no comma) with Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie. Like so many fictions rooted in the political intrigue of royalty, this latest model quickly reveals the same old preoccupation with matters of religious affiliation, sex for pleasure versus sex for the production of an heir, and marriage arranged for advantage. That narrative orientation is a bummer, since this oft-told tale becomes the very thing it aspires to criticize. Even with Ronan’s commanding presence, Robbie’s commitment to prosthetic-assisted physical transformation, and the costume and production design, Rourke’s middlebrow edition is bound for the same dusty shelf where the 1936, 1971, and 2013 versions reside.     

Rourke arguably favors character over the bullet points of key dramatic events, but neither category fruits. Instead of gripping drama, the film sketches a series of decisions, usually ill-advised and often taken following the pressure of petulant narcissists like Mary’s brother, her later pair of husbands, and counselors like John Knox (David Tennant in weird beard) and William Cecil (Guy Pearce also in weird beard). The movie tries out a particularly decadent interpretation of Mary’s first cousin and second spouse Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden), as skillful a practitioner of cunnilingus as he is a brutal rapist. Lowden, wearing a well-groomed Van Dyke, registers above the other onscreen fellows until his (un)timely demise.

Period costume drama can be most entertaining when examined through the lens of contemporary concerns. In one sense, who cares whether Mary and Elizabeth didn’t really meet face to face in real life? Could Rourke have made her version of the conflict work without that scene? Dramatic license is so much a given that discussions of authenticity are as damned as they are damning. Instead, we have a Mary whose Catholicism never appears to conflict with her anachronistically progressive attitudes regarding gender fluidity, homosexuality, and religious tolerance.       

Additionally, a full-length report could be written on the film’s muscular and misleading marketing campaign. The trailer suggests a kind of fantasized two-hander, but Robbie’s weirdly insecure Elizabeth factors far less, and enjoys scant screen time relative to Ronan, than what is suggested by the coming attractions preview. Long before the film was released to the public, writers of both the earnest and clickbait varieties were consulting with academics and historians regarding the inaccuracies baked into Beau Willimon’s screenplay, which is very loosely based on published work by John Guy.

Both the trailer and the posters invite a kind of expected and unsubtle compare/contrast simplification of the two women that steers away from nuance. Back in July, Nate Jones pointed out in “Vulture” that the taglines used by Focus Features in the striking character portraits — “Born to Fight” for Mary and “Born to Power” for Elizabeth — should be reversed. If one of the movie’s thematic concerns addresses the zero-sum realities of claims to the throne, that same set of disadvantages extends to the imagined “friendship” of Mary and Elizabeth. The film steers toward a reading of female leadership inside the patriarchy that says the queens, as fellow female monarchs, could have been allies instead of enemies, but Rourke never quite gets there.