rating: *****
the story: An allegorical tale about an imperial outpost and the magistrate trying to keep it moral.
review: Mark Rylance found himself a late-career critical favorite, but until Waiting for the Barbarians I hadn’t really found something to enjoy him in. In it he embodies a gentle morality that’s as magnetic as the forces he finds himself up against, namely villainous roles for Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson.
Depp is particularly interesting, as he tends to be. Lately a pariah in Hollywood, it probably made it all the easier to accept roles like this one, at once the visually flourished look he tends to go for but also the same edge he brought to Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (which I imagine, as he was selecting projects, these two were chosen in quick succession of each other for that very reason, even though their contexts and thus impact are vastly different). And as interesting as he is, he knows he isn’t meant to be the star of this thing, and seems content to take that backseat.
He’s assisted, in both senses, by Pattinson, who shows up late into the movie as a kind of stand-in. Pattinson could not possibly do a better job of picking interesting projects. To see him show up for something like this is a further affirmation that he knows exactly what he’s doing with his career at this point.
But again, it’s Rylance at the core, Rylance for whom the audience is meant to, and easily so, care about, as he stands up to the unforgiving forces Depp and Pattinson represent, apparently losing everything in the process.
And in the process, Waiting becomes a sort of less heavy-handed Lawrence of Arabia, less a story about some interloping hero and more about a man just trying to do the right thing, and all the more effective when he seems to have failed miserably. That’s where Rylance is so easy to depend on, how effortlessly he embodies the role of martyr without being needlessly flashy about it, what makes the whole movie work so well, steeped heavily in an era that seems to have rejected a figure like Rylance, as presented here, could possibly hope to solve anyone’s problems, let alone his own.
I’d like to imagine in an earlier era Waiting for the Barbarians would have been hailed as an instant classic, gotten all the buzz and even the Oscars to prove it. I don’t mind championing it in lieu of such acclaim. Not at all.
I haven't heard of this one. I will have to seek it out!
ReplyDeleteDefinitely.
DeleteYeah I haven't seen this one, either, nor for that matter even heard of it. But your review makes me want to check it out. Pattinson seemed like he would be the complete antithesis of "interesting" when those hokey teenage vampire movies launched him to fame - but you're right, he's had a great career since then, unexpectedly. As for Depp, he used to be a favorite, but like I was telling someone awhile back (before these bizarre allegations about him started to leak out, even), he SEEMS like a cool actor and all...but if you really think about it, how many good movies has he really been in? Not a lot. Maybe this one redeems him a little bit, we'll see. But thanks for the recommendation!
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by. I think in the effort to be very interesting Depp’s lost a lot of time in finding material worthy of him, but he’s done some good stuff. Jack Sparrow was a miracle that shouldn’t be denied. I’m particularly partial to Don Juan DeMarco. I thought, as indicated in this review, that Crimes of Grindelwald itself has remarkable merit, owing in large part to Depp’s role in it. Donnie Brasco seems to have become strangely easy to forget, for reasons I still can’t fathom.
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