A Wife, A Mother, and a Music Instructor
Gone Girl (2014) 3/4
Mystifying, well-planned, precisely curdled, and tantalizingly mercurial, Gone Girl is a stealthy comedy and an absorbing melodrama; a break-all-the-windows plot-twister that retains every jolt from Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster novel, and a work of chilly wit and bleak metaphor that toys with the viewer like a femme fatale with her prey. The perfect date-night movie for couples who dream of destroying one another.
On the day of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne returns home to find that his wife, Amy, is missing. Her disappearance creates a media frenzy, and his awkward behaviour and lies surrounding the marriage implicate him for her apparent murder. As evidence mounts against him, Nick becomes the prime suspect, and Amy’s diary entries reveal the disintegration of a once-happy relationship.
With her serenely cool beauty, Rosamund Pike is a revelation, and deserves to graduate to the A-list with her multi-faceted turn as the privileged, manipulative, calculating Amy, a quintessentially icy Hitchcockian blonde who serves as the unattainable centre of a constantly shifting narrative. Under-utilized after years of standout supporting work, the actress demonstrates versatility with compelling eyes that can instantly switch from innocent to detached. It’s a joy to see her finally seize upon a starring role with total gusto. A Sharon Stone-like breakthrough; Oscar consideration is almost guaranteed.
David Fincher, that dark lord of cinema, wakens an unease that trembles throughout this domestic horror film, and its sinister, brackish atmosphere – dominated by Jeff Cronenweth’s mustard-yellow fluorescent cinematography and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ frigid electronic lilts (like floating on a cotton candy cloud over a shark tank) – is designed to make you squint, recoil, and look closer. Fincher and Flynn attempt to explore the primal marital questions, the way people assume established, familiar archetypes to please, manipulate, and entrap one another. Really, though, Gone Girl is massively entertaining as a stylish, lurid escape to a place you probably would never want to visit in real life.
Gone Girl may get the job done as a dutiful, deliberately-paced procedural, but it never quite makes the splash it could have as a thoroughly bracing plunge. Dread descends like winter shadows, darkening the movie’s tone and visuals until it’s snuffed out all the light, air, and nuance. One of those filmmakers whose technical prowess can make the mediocrity of his material seem almost irrelevant, Fincher relies almost exclusively on craft – and Gone Girl is extremely well-crafted. Yet his art can overwhelm characters and their stories to the point that they fade away, leaving you with meticulous staging and framing, and edits as sharp as razor blades.
Even after the he-said, she-said curlicues of Scenes from a Marriage, the rampant infidelity of American Beauty, and the grisly blood spraying of Carrie, Gone Girl doesn’t feel as dangerous as it should, humming along like the precision machine it is. Ticking with metronome-like efficiency, it’s more slick than sick, too self-conscious about its depravity to be either truly disturbing or disturbingly funny. At the end of the perfect murder – regardless of the vicious, shivery delights – all you’re left with is a corpse.
Amy’s bad because she’s angry, and that can’t compare to being bad because it feels so damn good. Still, Pike expertly mixes a cocktail of hot and cold blood. She is a kiss-me-deadly kind of girl, a poison apple in satin lingerie, the Amazing Amy you could fall for, till death do you part. She raises Gone Girl from exquisitely-made trash to eminently watchable suburban noir, to be enjoyed in sickness and in health.
Mommy (2014) 3.5/4
Uproariously emotional and painfully personal, Mommy is a heart-swelling, heartbreaking, breathtaking piece of cinema: a mature, funny, and tragic mother’s tale featuring real heart-on-sleeve performances that are almost operatic in scale; a story of rare poignancy and insight told with a delightfully nasal Québecois timbre. A film of startling warmth, sizzling sentiment, and suffocating power.
Diane “Die” Després – feisty, sexy, dressing like a teenager in her 40s – is a widow making ends meet with cleaning jobs. Her 15-year-old son, Steve, has ADHD and is aggressively unstable, with boundary issues and an inability to stop swearing, fighting, and touching women. After Steve is discharged from a care facility due to charges of arson, a chaotic and horribly hilarious nightmare ensues: Diane must care for Steve at home. The two befriend a next-door neighbour named Kyla, a lonely schoolteacher who develops an instant rapport with Steve while recovering from a breakdown which left her with a stammer.
Outstanding performances from a trio of regulars create flinty, complex characters that sustain us through a rollercoaster ride between extremes of pain and jubilation. Antoine-Olivier Pilon’s performance as Steve is impressive: when calm, he’s sweet-natured and intelligent; otherwise, he’s agitated, delirious, and entirely out of control. As Kyla, Suzanne Clément is even better; shy and thoughtful and (mostly) unflappable. And as Mommy, Anne Dorval is sensational; she’s a Dardenne heroine, fervent, strained, generous, fragile, and brimming with the kind of force-of-nature parental love that drives one to madness.
Xavier Dolan, the precocious 25-year-old auteur and enfant terrible with four features previously under his belt, is one of the world’s most exciting filmmakers. Mommy, which feels like a quantum leap forward in empathy, is the most accomplished consummation of his pop art aspirations, thematic fascinations, and cinematographic realizations. It comes at you baying and rattling, threaded through with an infectious love of full-throttle melodrama, and flinging its energy right back to the cheap seats – thanks to Dolan’s zippy design choices – yet strikes a considered balance between style and substance, drama-queen posturing and heartfelt depth.
Mixing the brash brio of a Pedro Almodóvar comedy and the deep intimacy of an Ingmar Bergman chamber drama, Mommy is a riveting character-driven film of unbridled brilliance. Its very form resembles Instagram photos or smartphone videos; Dolan and his cinematographer André Turpin employ a square 1:1 aspect ratio, allowing them to frame vertical close-up compositions, known as portrait shots. This screen-shape relates to the Diane and Steve’s restricted horizons, and as Dolan explains, “No distraction, no affectations are possible in such constricted space.”
Intense and explosively fresh, Mommy is a blast of pure cinema, defiantly a movie for the here and now, something immediate and contemporaneous. Moments of great tenderness flare up continually in Dolan’s study of a mother with a boundless fountain of tough love and an inextinguishably toxic affection for one’s child. The trailer-trash humour is superbly transgressive. We ask for filmmakers to take us to difficult places, and while you may have to brace yourself for Mommy, it is a rewarding experience.
In a year when we had upsetting disappointments from Atom Egoyan and Denys Arcand, previously high-flying Canadian directors, and a massively flawed effort from past master David Cronenberg, it’s a treat to see that the most daring and audacious film comes from Dolan, who is on a path to creating one of the more remarkable film careers in this country’s history. Mommy should be a lock for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination, and it may bring Canada its first Oscar since The Barbarian Invasions in 2004.
Mommy has its flaws: the unnecessarily overwritten prologue expounds an imagined near-future in 2015, a “fictional Canada” where a new law allows a parent to consign any troubled child to an institution, and somewhat leadenly introduces the gun in the first act that must go off in the third. It’s indulgently overlong, losing momentum toward the end when it starts to feel like Dolan can’t bear to leave his characters.
But it’s a pleasure to see acting and directing blasting away on all cylinders. Mommy manages to fill every frame with the stuff of life, suffusing every scene with the wonderful horror of being, vividly capturing a range of exhilarating emotions from elation to despair. Two sequences – an impromptu kitchen dance and a shattering montage that evokes the finales of Six Feet Under or Take this Waltz – are among my favourites of the year. It’s Dolan’s finest work yet. Prodigies don’t get much more prodigious than this.
Whiplash (2014) 3.5/4
Harrowing, propulsive, and euphoric, Whiplash is a spellbinding drama about the toxic fallout from rampant ambition and cutthroat perfectionism; a make-or-break movie aimed at those who have ever wanted to be excellent at anything; and a cynical, intense, blood-curdling portrait of geniuses as sociopaths. It’s a cymbal-clashing achievement.
Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller), a promising 19-year-old student at Shaffer – an upscale Manhattan conservatory – has high aspirations: to catch the attention of Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons), its legendarily menacing jazz chair, and to become a hall-of-fame drummer no matter the cost, even if it means flaming out and dying young. Fletcher is demonically demanding of his young performers – he berates, rebukes, denounces, humiliates – while his ensemble absorbs the abuse, determined to impress their impossible-to-please leader.
Whiplash features a pair of performances that eclipse everything around them. Just like the music that drives the film, Teller and Simmons are in perfect rhythm. One must appreciate the sight of two totally dialed-in performers simmering until they boil over. Teller, wonderfully natural in last year’s The Spectacular Now, shows a feral intensity that’s exciting to witness. Deep down, Andrew knows a harsh and merciless fact: debris surrounds transcendence, and ecstasy is found within agony.
Relying on emotional brutality rather than pedagogical instruction, Fletcher is despotic, spouting vulgar epithets, hammering home the notions that “if it’s not flawless, it’s worthless” and “there are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job’.” (Morally, that’s disgraceful; socially, that’s explosive; artistically, that’s sensical.) Few actors could pull off Fletcher’s blend of eviscerating wit and manipulative charm as believably as Simmons does. Simmons delivers every insult with such punctuating tenacity, the audience can feel every seething syllable; his venom-spewing is as hypnotic as Full Metal Jacket’s drill instructor Hartman.
The narrative rarely breaks tempo and breathes and moves like a jazz number, rendering every turn, reveal, and twist of perspective a stupendous showstopper. It just keeps charging forward, imploring you to stay plugged in, keeping you off-balance and adrift. The film’s aversion toward hitting expected beats lends it a rare, welcome edge of danger. Imagine a cross between a David Mamet play and a violent UFC bout, restaged in a music conservatoire.
Writer-director Damien Chazelle, with this expansion of his Sundance-winning short, constructs a fearsome duet between his lead characters. Winner of both Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, Whiplash is an unapologetic, accomplished work of kinetic cinema, delivering a sharp and gripping rhythm and an energy you’re unlikely to see very often. As the film builds to a cathartic crescendo à la Black Swan, Chazelle never misses a beat, and turns out to be a natural-born filmmaker with impressive chops. He’s a true discovery, and now a directorial force to be reckoned with.
Whiplash has a deafening message: you can be a world-class musician, or you can be a well-adjusted member of society, but you can’t be both. In presenting an epic battle of wills between two fanatical artists, one doing everything in his power to painfully make a master out of the other, Whiplash depicts an unusually unromantic approach to music education. It’s about the wages of all-out sacrifice and commitment – the very antithesis of “let’s-put-on-a-show” fluff – and a stunning exploration of the price of creativity and the springboards of inspiration.
Electrifying and resoundingly thunderous, Whiplash is a perverse, inverse, modern Amadeus. The film’s closing sequence is some of the greatest drumming you’ve ever seen; by the credits, Chazelle has demolished the clichés of the musical-prodigy genre, and Andrew and Fletcher have worked out the theory that pressure turns coal into a diamond. It gets a few things wrong, but it aims at, and achieves, an authenticity more exalted and more primal than mere verisimilitude. Sifting through so many compelling layers, you may not even notice the flaws.
Whiplash is virtually guaranteed to send you out of the theater on an adrenaline high, and will undoubtedly be the best jazz movie you see all year. It will also be one of the best movies, period.
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