A Complete Unknown (2024) Review

rating: *****

the story: A young Bob Dylan navigates his early career while remaining stubbornly true to himself.

the review: While I was waiting for Conclave to make sense, I kept wondering what was going to pop out unequivocally to me as the best movie of 2024, and then I saw A Complete Unknown, and it was no longer in doubt.  I was going to see it anyway; catching up with Bob Dylan has been a hobby of mine for more than a decade.  I had figured out that I loved the guy's music, and I understood his role in pop music history, but it wasn't until A Complete Unknown that I got to see a version of how it played out at the time.

Biopics are a staple of American film, and musical biopics especially, these days, since it's easy to assume that the music itself will sell the movie if nothing else, just waiting for something familiar to start playing.  But the problem with biopics is that they happen to follow a basic template, and any real understanding of the artist or band in question can be lost in the details.  For instance, the other day I watched I Saw the Light, about Hank Williams, and not only is Williams lost in the movie, but even his songs are badly layered in it, so that there's no sense at all about why you should care about any of it, or what Williams meant.  

A Complete Unknown certainly has no such problems.  We catch up with Boby Dylan as he treks over to meet with his hero Woody Guthrie, who's stuck in a hospital trying to rehabilitate, while Pete Seeger basically acts as his ambassador to the world, and in turn, Bob's.  We know his goals, his talent, and his future without even reaching his best-known material, right from the start. 

The movie itself is sort of like the real world illustration of Yesterday's conclusions of what it'd be like if everyone forgot about the Beatles except one guy, who proceeds to present all their songs as if they were his own, so that he amazes everyone with his ability to generate great material.  A Complete Unknown leans on the great material available and sometimes makes it look too easy, until Bob starts running into problems because as it turns out, success or not, he still just want to be Bob, and isn't too keen to fulfil someone else's vision of him, whether it's Joan Baez or a record label or the Newport Folk Festival.

In this era of blockbuster film movie stars have struggled to stay in the picture, and certainly new ones have found it equally difficult to be noticed, but Timothee Chalamet is one of the few to have figured it out, and his Bob Dylan is a truly uncanny accomplishment, both in the music and in general.  Roger Ebert's review of Walk the Line suggested he found Joaquin Phoenix indistinguishable from Johnny Cash, and that's a considerable exaggeration, but in Chalamet's case it isn't.  Possibly this is because Bob Dylan famously isn't much of a singer (the one glaring omission of the movie is failing to acknowledge this reputation).  It really doesn't matter.  This is the central miracle that makes all others possible.

Walk the Line's Johnny Cash is here, as portrayed by Boyd Holbrook in hopefully what's finally his breakthrough role, a true creation is a career that's been floating just under wide recognition for years, including a standout performance in Logan, which like Walk the Line and A Complete Unknown, is directed by James Mangold, who between all those Wolverine movies, these biopics, and other material like Ford v Ferrari, has comfortably settled into one of my favorite and most reliable directors.

Edward Norton, once one of those late Hollywood leading actors but since settled into picking his spots in art films, inhabits Pete Seeger just as if, like everyone else Norton plays, is as comfortable being Edward Norton as it is watching him.  At this point he's the closest we've really gotten to another Jimmy Stewart.  Elle Fanning, Dan Fogler...But the biggest surprise is Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, a true discovery.  Joan Baez fans might quibble, but if A Complete Unknown has to crib from Walk the Line, then Barbaro fills out the June Carter role better than Reese Witherspoon, so effortlessly naturally it's a shock that she isn't already a star.

The film is otherwise Bob being Bob.  I have footage of the Newport Folk Festival where Bob plugs in, so the trash being tossed at him visibly didn't really happen, but the effect is there, and it's Bob dealing with the consequences of being Bob, the way his relationships faulter, the way he can't understand what's so wrong about working on new material while crashing in someone's home instead of, y'know, paying attention to them...It's always the music.  He may be uninterested in detailing his past, but for Bob Dylan, the future is ever full of the music that fills him.

Anyway, for my money, totally fascinating, engrossing stuff.  These are maverick times.  And as always Bob's the bard leading the way.

Live by Night (2016) Review

rating: ****

the story: A Boston gangster is relocated to Tampa and finds unexpected complications in establishing himself.

review: Gangster movies are about as old as Hollywood itself, so well-established that it’s become increasingly difficult for new entries to find any real appreciation. It’s just assumed that everything’s already been seen and done, and if not, The Sopranos was too big a recent phenomenon to worry about what the movies might be doing, too. I think Sopranos spent a little too much time glorifying gangsters, the way Goodfellas did, the exact opposite of how human Donnie Brasco made them, the last time a movie made an impression.

Live by Night opts for an entirely new route. It actually makes gangsters potentially moral authorities.

Yeah. Based on the middle act of a historical trilogy from Dennis Lehane, Hollywood’s favorite author in the first decade of the millennium, Ben Affleck’s adaptation posits an Irish immigrant cleaning up a white supremacist scene by uniting all the undesirables under his empire. He has a black girlfriend (Zoe Saldana), his nemesis is a phony Christian proselytizer (Elle Fanning) and his biggest ally is her police chief father (Chris Cooper). He also wants to replace booze (about to become legal again) with gambling, when no one else sees the wisdom in it.

Like The Godfather, this is a story that doesn’t really dwell on whether or not the basic premise of gangsters is justifiable, but rather whether there is any semblance of honor in what they do. So we follow Affleck around as a hero. His enemies are the viewer’s enemies. His ideas are ideas we can get behind. 

So it’s interesting. Of course, the cast is pretty interesting. Brendan Gleeson’s also in it, Titus Welliver, guys who’re natural fits for this kind of movie. Clark Gregg is there, too, Sienna Miller. Fanning continues to be an inexplicably mature youthful screen presence, in perhaps one of her best roles. Affleck himself never goes out of his way to put the spotlight on himself. If anything, he’s finally found a role that allows him to be the star but also the casual screen presence that saw his best early material (Good Will Hunting, Shakespeare in Love), which often found him in supporting roles.

This is the sort of movie that doesn’t feel like it should be a big deal. But perhaps is for that very reason. It leaves a better impression that way. By not trying to be so impressive, it is. In an era bereft with flashy material, large and small, it’s a welcome digression.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

rating: ****

the story: Sisters attempting to handle the illness of their mother find unexpected solace in a magical creature.

review: So, my niece has become positively obsessed with My Neighbor Totoro in recent months.  My relationship with the works of Hayao Miyazaki is not perfect by any means, but thanks to repeated viewings of Totoro, I think I've finally found the movie that at last helps me see the magic that has helped him become the Japanese version of Disney.

It's perhaps worth noting that the version of Totoro I've been watching is a Disney product, the 2005 English translation with Tim Daly as the dad and sisters Elle and Dakota Fanning as Mei and Satsuki, respectively.  Mei's the younger of the two and responsible for all the best moments in the movie, including and most importantly discovering Tororo in the first place.  Totoro, unlike virtually everything else I've discovered in Miyazaki movies, is a harmless, lovable giant ball of fur.  Miyazaki appears to my untrained eye an animated disciple of the peculiar, post-WWII, Godzilla-fueled purveyor of monster imagery in modern Japanese pop culture.  The wider anime and manga material around him doesn't really match his depth or ambition, which is probably half the reason Miyazaki began to stand out in the first place, but curiously Totoro is more like that stuff than his typical work.

Besides Totoro is the Catbus, which is also entirely innocuous and unquestioningly helpful in Mei's adventures.  Mei and her sister get to be typical little girls for most of the movie.  They move into a new home at the beginning, and their first discovery is the presence of soot sprites (or gremlins), which Mei eventually tries to capture with an enthusiastic handclap (no luck, alas, just soot).  They moved to be closer to the hospital where their mother has been recovering when an undisclosed illness.  My only real criticism of Totoro is the ill-defined nature of the mother's predicament.  It's tough to compare with something like A Monster Calls, which tackles a similar story with far more gusto. 

But clearly there's whimsy and fanciful spirit in Totoro that A Monster Calls can't match, either, a perfect encapsulation, in some ways, of childhood, of its inherent magic, that even Disney and Pixar have never been able to capture.

So maybe in time I'll forget my quibble.  My Neighbor Totoro might be an unqualified classic.  Hail Miyazaki!

The Beguiled (2017)

rating: ****

the story: A Union soldier ends up resting in a house full of Southern belles.

what it's all about: The story began as a book (1966's A Painted Devil by Thomas Cullinan) and then a Clint Eastwood film in 1971.  Sofia Coppola turned it into her sixth feature film in 2017.  It seems befitting for the director of The Virgin Suicides.  And also the star of Miss Julie, Colin Farrell.

Critics seem to have dismissed it as a mostly unnecessary duplication of Eastwood's film.  This is odd, as Eastwood's film really has no lasting cultural legacy.  You can tell when critics can't come up with a better way to dismiss a movie when they start referencing stuff they probably had to research in order to talk about, or otherwise material the general public has never heard of. 

At any rate, I think, as a movie layman, that The Beguiled works quite well, especially in relation to Coppola and Farrell's back catalog.  Coppola's first movie, The Virgin Suicides, was about a brood of sisters who, ah, beguile the neighborhood boys who can't understand what happens to them.  Farrell and Jessica Chastain matched wits in Liv Ullmann's Miss Julie, a 2014 adaptation of the August Strindberg play; it's Chastain who dominates Farrell in that one, although there ends up being a fair amount of blame to go around in how it ends.

Likewise, Farrell is both criminal and victim in The Beguiled.  His Union soldier can't help but exude charm amongst the women he becomes surrounded by, and he leads basically all of them on.  But this ends up backfiring on him when he chooses one of them and by default betrays the rest of them, which leads to...ah, well, nothing good. 

The women are led by a few heavy hitters: Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, and Coppola veteran (she appeared in Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette) Kirsten Dunst.  Between Kidman's and Dunst's characters, Farrell has the most trouble.  He arrives at their doorstep with an injured leg, and reinjures it when Dunst sends him tumbling down a stairway.  Kidman makes the decision to amputate it, believing she has no other choice.  Farrell interprets it as a spiteful gesture. 

In Miss Julie, it's Chastain who becomes totally unhinged; in Beguiled it's Farrell (I kind of wish it had been Chastain, rather than Kidman, who played the matriarch, for that reason alone).  It occasions his best scenes in the movie, anyway.  Kidman channels her Cold Mountain performance; Dunst is again her classic shrinking violet, a role that thrust her to prominence early in the millennium (the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, where she portrayed Mary Jane Watson), and as in her previous Coppola collaborations, she again finds new ways to present it.

The story itself must be considered fascinating.  Even if you fault Farrell for his fate, you can't say it's justified.  In some ways it seems a rebuke from Coppola for the exaggerated emotions running rampant today.  And it can't be a mistake that it's a Civil War drama, in an age where the United States seems to be teetering on schism once again. 

It's a contemplative drama well worth relishing, and a sobering reflection on the battles of the sexes.