QUICK REVIEWS: The Overnight and Loving Vincent

The Overnight

(watched on Netflix, twice)

Halfway though The Overnight one could easily mistake it for a horror movie, but it's really just a perfectly-drawn comedy of modern social anxieties.  Adam Scott ("Parks and Recreation") and Taylor Schilling ("Orange is the New Black") play Alex and Emily, a young couple with a young son who have just moved to a trendy L.A. neighbourhood.  A chance meeting with Kurt (Jason Schwartzman), a weirdly forward local dad, leads to a dinner invitation at Kurt and his wife Charlotte's home... and it's all just a little too perfect.

The house, designed by Kurt in a fashion of Charlotte's childhood home, is huge, and gorgeous.  Charlotte (Judith Godreche) is beautiful, charming, and so very French.  Kurt distributes water filters to central Africa, can speak multiple languages fluently, and blows Alex and Emily's mind by serenading their son to sleep in a matter of minutes.

For a while this hip couple is just too perfect, but it's to The Overnight's credit that it never really tips its hand as to what exactly is going on.  Is this Alex and Emily's dream scenario, making friends with a cool, new couple that's oh so Californian?  Alex is fully into the ride, but Emily grows increasingly suspicious that there's something "swingy" in their new friends' agenda.

Directed by Patrick Brice and produced by Adam Scott and Mark Duplass, The Overnight has that light, bubbly improvisational quality common to the "mumblecore" genre.  Shot in twelve days, well, nights between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., you can really feel how the great vibe of the cast coalesced into something special.  Scott and Schilling have this lovely, very real chemistry, marked by your usual insecurities but never overplayed.

Schilling is probably my favourite of the cast, bringing that same vague unlikability and privileged anxiety of her "Orange is the New Black" character.  It's a difficult role, because she's the wet blanket, but at the same time that background voice of reason.  So when her own issues pop out it's not a matter of "ha ha, you dumbass", you actually feel for her.

Special acknowledgement also has to go to Jason Schwartzman, who has a similarly difficult role.  Kurt carries Schwartzman's perpetual-smarminess, but simultaneously manages to be genuine in nearly superhero fashion.  He (almost) always has the right words for every occasion, for every negotiation, and it's wonderful to watch.

What I particularly liked about The Overnight is that it's not safe.  It's so impressively frank about relationships, and sex, and despite being raucously funny at points it has very few cheap laughs.  Everything feels earned, and that's so rare in a comedy, especially one that deals with real, flawed characters.  

Loving Vincent

(seen at The Odeon in Victoria, playing now)

It's pretty uncommon when a film is made using specialized techniques that are labour-intensive and technically-complex and it doesn't turn out hampered or somewhat neutered by those techniques.  Sometimes it works, say, with Linklater's Waking Life or Sokurov's Russian Ark.  But most of the time the result is something like Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's Loving Vincent, a nearly-Herculean accomplishment of artistic effort that doesn't really work as a "film".

The trick with Loving Vincent is that every single frame (heh) of the film was actually painted, by hand.  Using Van Gogh's paintings as inspiration, over five-thousand painters painstakingly created over an hour and a half of film "frames" as footage which was assembled into a narrative.  Almost every scene, and character, and location, is based off an actual painting.  Rotoscoping (which also fuelled Waking Life) was clearly used to assist in the animation, but each frame was still individually painted.

The results are truly impressive, and there's no question that Loving Vincent is a beautiful film that's an interesting watch.  The insertion of animated characters, blowing trees and twinkling stars into statically-designed canvases is fascinating at times, weirdly akin to those old "King's Quest" games where players walk in jerky fashion over colourful, static digital backgrounds.  

But there's two problems with the film.  Firstly, the narrative itself, which follows one man's investigation into the very recent death of Van Gogh, isn't particularly interesting.  It plays something like a murder-mystery, our intrepid (but fallible) hero plying the locals for information, slowly coming to the conclusion that Van Gogh didn't kill himself but may have been shot.  It's loosely based on real-world events, and all comes about as pretty plausible, but spends so much time with the investigation that I never really felt like I actually learned much about the painter himself.

Secondly, and I guess this isn't exactly a second complaint but more of a result of the first, Loving Vincent's gimmick of being entirely handpainted is just that... kind of a gimmick.  It's not used to illuminate the narrative, or produce subtext, or at least not in any way that I could detect.  Understandably, a project of the order that Kobiela and Welchman (and their legion of painters) undertook was massive, so it's hard to fault them.  Rather I'd just argue that attempting to suture Van Gogh's static works, which have meaning and power all to themselves, with any kind of narrative that actually incorporates the painter himself was difficult in itself.  

Now, take all this with a grain of salt, as reviews for Loving Vincent have been nearly unanimous in their praise.  I think if you're interested in the history of art, or in films that take technical and aesthetic risks, it's a perfectly interesting film.  For me it was lacking something of a soul, something to engage my emotions.  

NEW TO NETFLIX: The Bad Batch and 1922

The Bad Batch

So, I haven't seen Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Midnight; despite its indie-darling appeal it's always been one of those "oh hey, yeah, this one is supposed to be good OH WAIT *insert stupid sci-fi/horror thing I can laugh at here*" movies that sits on the edge of my viewing periphery.  But the trailer for her follow up The Bad Batch was intriguing for a bunch of reasons... I've always been a sucker for postapocalyptic things of all kinds, it had Jason Momoa (Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones) and Keanu Reeves in it, and gosh damn that track is slick.

The film is set in some ostensibly dystopian America where a bleached dry chunk of Texas hinterland has been established as a sort of prison zone where society's unwanted are simply dropped off at the gate and basically left for dead.  Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) a teen blonde whose "F.U." cap pretty much emblemizes her attitude, is barely there for a couple of hours when a couple of locals from a local gang snag her and summarily take an arm and a shin for dinner.

Arlen escapes with anticipated cleverness and brutality and somehow makes her way to a competing town called "Comfort", a sort of permanent Burning Man inhabited by undesirables ruled by a creepy benefactor (Reeves).  A few months pass and an enraged Arlen makes her way back towards the cannibals, finds one in the desert, and shoots her in front of her child Honey (Jayda Fink).  Suddenly somewhat remorseful, our heroine (?) takes the child back to Comfort... not knowing that Honey's father is the supremely badass Miami Man (Momoa).  

I won't summarize much past this other than to say Arlen and Miami Man eventually meet up and it's curiously more affecting than I thought it might have been.  The trailer and the appearance of a "VICE" logo at the film's opening credits made me think The Bad Batch would be more cheeky, maybe overly self-aware of all of its hipster trappings, instead Amirpour plays everything pretty straight and it's quite refreshing.  

That said, it's a difficult film to recommend.  It's not flashy, and there's almost no action, so people expecting something like Mad Max are going to be bored, and at the same time what subtext there is to be found is not really interesting enough to watching it for its social or political implications.  There's statements made about morality and redemption, and a great quote from Arlen about wanting to "be a solution to a problem" but when it was over I felt myself expecting something more.  

1922

This little Netflix production is maybe one of my favourite viewing surprises of the last while, a tense and surprisingly meaningful little ghost story that gets better as it goes along.

It's 1922 on a small farm in Nebraska surrounded by cornfields.  Wilfred and Arlette James (Thomas Jane and Molly Parker) are facing a rapidly dissolving marriage; Arlette, essentially a city girl, wants to sell the farm and move the family to Omaha, a plan the more conservative Wilfred refuses to even acknowledge.  Divorce comes up, things get heated, and Wilfred convinces their son Henry (Dylan Schmid) to kill Arlette and shove her body down the well.

Don't worry about the spoiler, as 1922 is entirely about the consequences of the murder: guilt, regret, despair.  The film becomes a sort of ghost story, but unlike most recent ghostly fare (which admittedly I've avoided for the most part) it focuses on the ostensible villain instead of the usual gaggle of suburban family members.  Sure, there's the usual appearance of gross and scary things, but they're almost inconsequential to what's actually going on in the protagonist's head.

I say "ostensible villain" when referring to Wilfred because 1922 forces us to some degree to sympathize with his plight.  Initially he's something of a monster, coercing his son to hold his own mother down while Wilfred cuts her throat on the marriage bed, then flinging her body casually down the well... but as the misfortunes and anxieties and regrets pile up, it's pretty hard not to feel for him.  

This is obviously a difficult task, and would be impossible if not for a couple of things.  Firstly, Thomas Jane is marvelous, his face craggly and sunburnt, his look perpetually sour and yet at the same time so very much human.  

Secondly, ghost stories often just sort of sit on their own as genre exercises, but 1922 can be read as a sort of elegy for a disappearing way of life.  Wilfred is essentially conservative, rural America personified, a moral man in his own ways, a hard worker who believes in his land and (ironically) his family, who watches his more progressive wife tear that family apart.

It's to the film's credit that it doesn't demonize his beliefs or sympathies.  Watching the farm literally fall apart around him is shockingly tragic, because in our minds we know that a hundred years later (the title is a pretty good marker that we're supposed to correlate the film's events with that of our contemporary reality) the rural American way of life is in steep decline and - for those in the midst of it - it's a truly horrific experience.

I was pretty broken at the end of 1922, emotionally exhausted.  It's not a pleasurable film (even if it's wonderfully shot and paced), but something more powerful, and I think that even people who aren't into horror but like an "interesting" film with some cultural punch will get something out of it.  

It makes me even more curious to read King's novella.  His obvious (and public) liberal leanings are often foregrounded in his works, but typically his conservative characters are over-the-top stereotypes... Wilfred is not one of these at all.