Downhill (2020) Review

 rating: ****

the story: A marriage hits a rough patch on a ski vacation.

review: Based on the Swedish film Force Majeure, Downhill is the third film directed by the duo of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Descendants, The Way, Way Back). I haven’t seen Force Majeure. I have no earthly clue why it would be remotely relevant to worry about this when talking about Downhill.

Downhill is exactly like Faxon and Rash’s prior films. It’s a movie about awkward family moments that are both heavy and presented in as light a fashion as possible. There’s unpleasantness, and it might be uncomfortable to watch at times, but this is a legitimate way to make a movie, and is perhaps all the better for it.

George Clooney was the hook in Descendants, coming off arguably the best period of his career (Michael Clayton, Up in the Air). You care about his widower problems because of his inherent charm. You can put up with Steve Carell’s nastiness in The Way, Way Back because you also have Sam Rockwell at his most charming.

And you can cope with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who in Downhill is having the hardest time with a near-catastrophic event, because as counterpoint you have Will Ferrell. Before knowing anything about Downhill I really had no interest in it. I love Will Ferrell, but sometimes it just seems like his films are a Rolodex of every possible context for the same basic elements. Sometimes they work really well, and sometimes they don’t. I thought Downhill was just Will Ferrell in a skiing movie. But it’s actually one of his increasingly rare dramatic roles, insofar as he’s ever overly dramatic in his dramatic movies (which has actually made him refreshing as a comedian who sometimes does drama).

The only problem here is that Louis-Dreyfus comes off as a shrew because Ferrell feels more sympathetic. But that only emphasizes how awkward the whole situation is. If it were a matter of picking sides it would be more difficult. In the original movie the onus is more of the husband’s side, how he apparently obviously abandoned his family in the emergency. But so much emphasis is already on Ferrell before the (quasi)avalanche, and even how the ski resort doesn’t take the event seriously (the best scene of the movie), that it makes it that much harder to side with Louis-Dreyfus as she increasingly freaks out about it. And while Ferrell is not at all averse to showing his comedic instincts, Louis-Dreyfus is, making her even harder to root for.

But as much as I find myself siding with Ferrell, Louis-Dreyfus ends up giving him a generous opportunity to redeem himself, and then at the very last minute (this is how I currently interpret it) there’s a second moment of potential disaster, and it’s Louis-Dreyfus who pulls away....And cut straight to credits!

Even viewed as a Will Ferrell movie alone, Downhill is rewarding enough, but Faxon and Rash once again prove they have a winning formula, however unlikely it seems to be. Miranda Otto shows up in an equally unlikely supporting role, thereby somewhat proving that this is exactly how the movie is supposed to be received.

The Burnt Orange Heresy (2020) Review

 rating: ****

the story: A con artist art critic stumbles on the opportunity of a lifetime.

review: Sometimes titles alone are a hook, which for me anyway if you’re going to call your movie The Burnt Orange Heresy it’s practically irresistible. The other big draw is Elizabeth Debicki, who has also been a standout in Widows and Tenet. Technically she isn’t the lead actor here. Danish actor Claes Bang is (he comes off like a bootleg Cary Grant, where the movie itself feels like authentic classic Hollywood), playing the con artist art critic.

Here’s another movie worth talking about based off how terrible its reviews have been. It’s astonishing how terrible these things can be, so utterly obviously dismissive, because critics know audiences aren’t really going to care one way or another (especially thanks to aggregate websites that arbitrarily grant grades to movies based on the results, which somehow only emphasize how poorly critics do their jobs).

Anyway, this is to say that you don’t have to worry what critics have said about it. Their opinions are worthless.

The results are interesting for the very reason that Claes Bang is himself so hard to care about. You don’t need to care about him. So much of popular entertainment in recent decades has been obsessed with trying to make bad people look compelling, it’s refreshing to let the lead character in one of them suavely unsympathetic, emphasized by the actor himself having the lowest profile of the main cast. You get to see him for what he is, a conman willing to do anything to get what he wants, in an environment that’s considered high brow, and as a result diminishing attacks on the results as part of its message. Mick Jagger is an easy target as the smarmy collector who both facilitates the results and condemns them, Donald Sutherland the reclusive artist who ends up kind of welcoming his doom. 

The only victim here is Debicki, or at least her character, who actually becomes a martyr in her effort to expose the conman, who believes until the clever twist ending that he got away with it. But he absolutely doesn’t. The art world celebrates him, but he doesn’t get away with it, murdering Debicki, Sutherland. History will eventually expose him. 

Anyway, it’s a movie that’s sultry in all the right ways, losing itself in the glamour of the con, the patent romance of filmmaking, of art, and using it against itself.

So yeah, it’s a modern version of classic Hollywood. With a great title.

Ava (2020) Review

 rating: ****

the story: A hitwoman is targeted for elimination by an associate who views her as a liability.

review: Here’s a movie I felt compelled to review based on the idiotic reviews I’ve so far seen for it. They seem fixated on its familiar plot. You can boil even the most innovative plot to something familiar. In this case the selling point is absolutely Jessica Chastain as the title character. Of course it is. To even begin to suggest anything else is to completely fail to comprehend the art of filmmaking.

But if you really want to boil it down, Ava could be called the Jessica Chastain John Wick. What made John Wick so much fun was how it helped viewers see Keanu Reeves as exciting again. Reeves has been pretty good at finding defining roles over the years. He’s got three recognizable franchises under his belt at this point. Ava was never going to be as popular as John Wick, for the same reason that Chastain doesn’t have the same kind of career as Reeves. It’s arguably tougher now than in Hollywood’s golden age for actresses. When it’s gotten tougher for actors in general to stand out in a blockbuster-saturated era (which has actually made 2020 refreshing, with so many blockbusters relocated away), women will especially struggle for attention. You have a few that critics can’t seem to get enough of, and then you have ones like Chastain and Cate Blanchett who more often than not are taken for granted.

Simply put, if this were an earlier era, it’d be a lot harder to say “blah, another Katherine Hepburn movie” (fully aware as I am that even Hepburn could be taken for granted, but the greater point here being Hepburn is a widely acknowledged cinematic treasure, and Chastain is not). The fact that Ava is a Chastain movie is absolutely itself a good enough reason to pay attention.

It’s like the John Wick version of her best movie(s) The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, if anything. As much attention is given to her professional problems (and prowess) as her domestic problems. This is a good year, if anything, for human women action stars, counting Blake Lively’s Rhythm Section. And while Lively is very human in all aspects, Chastain is given no room for doubt in her ability to survive a brutal fight, even if little space is even given how much her background hurts her, and the family she had to leave behind.

So the perceived limitations critics see in Ava are quite calculated. It’s a movie bold enough to let us know what we need to know but not dwell on it, and have flashy elements but not dwell on them.

The other reason I had to catch it was Colin Farrell, who costars as the guy who decides Chastain has become a liability. He shows flashes of real passion, something Farrell usually keeps below the surface. It’s one of his villainous roles, and yet another that also proves his utter lack of vanity, which is what has continually cost him mass appeal (early in his career, for instance, Farrell exhibited few qualms to looking less obviously heroic than his more famous costars, Tom Cruise in Minority Report and Bruce Willis in Hart’s War). It’s a great role at this point in his career.

Chastain’s ally against Farrell is John Malkovich, who gets to have an epic fight scene but also the kind of death that leaves you guessing until the end. Her mom is Geena Davis, and the one weak acting link is Common as her ex-lover. I don’t know why Common is so common.

If the problem is that it confounds expectations, then that’s a very good one for Ava to have. When people get around to appreciating Chastain, it ought to be remembered as the kind of thing only she could pull off.