Marlowe (2023) Review

the rating: ****

the story: Private detective Philip Marlowe searches for a dead man.

the review: Some movies get dismissed by critics seemingly without their ever having watched them at all.  I assume Marlowe was simply because it was another Liam Neeson movie in the era of Taken, when he's chosen to star in an endless series of movies of that ilk.  The other reason would be the pointless crusade of the media to protect Old Hollywood by immediately rejecting anything that could possibly evoke it.  Raymond Chandler's Marlowe was of course the character Bogart played in The Big Sleep, one of his Big Three roles alongside The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.  

At its heart Marlowe is of course evoking classic film noire, but not as obviously as, say, the Sin City movies.  It isn't shot in black and white, for instance.  The storytelling beats are all there.  The end of the movie evokes Maltese Falcon, even Raiders of the Lost Ark, making a joke of the whole idea of the maguffin, since the real point was exploring the nasty secrets of Hollywood (apparently no way to make a living making movies these days).  Having recently rewatched The Third Man, I couldn't help but think of Marlowe as more that kind of movie, although of course its inversion, since Third Man famously stars Orson Welles, whom we don't see until about the third act, whereas Neeson is obviously the star of Marlowe and its "third man" is another very capable Mexican actor doomed to be ignored by mainstreatm modern Hollywood (hello, Die in a Gunfight!), who just so happens to sound like Brad Pitt.  The whole point of casting Neeson in a movie like this is to draw on the Taken mystique, to find Marlowe credible in all his story beats.  But Marlowe is otherwise nothing like Taken.  In fact, most of Neeson's Taken movies try to find some interesting variation.  I remember Unknown finding interesting things.  Marlowe has more in common with A Walk Among the Tombstones than Taken.  But critics want Neeson to star in another sad Irish epic like Rob Roy or Michael Collins, or Schindler's List.  Forget that they ignore stellar work in Silence, A Monster Calls.

The director is the reliable Neil Jordan, the screenwriter William Monohan, neither of whose work deserves such casual dismissal.  Neeson has Jessica Lange and Diane Kruger as his dames to kill for, the likes of Danny Huston (born for this role, possibly his best iteration of it, in such a pure state), Alan Cumming, even Colm Meaney, Adawale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (playing the role Dennis Haysbert did in the second Sin City, but a heroic version).

This is a version of classic Hollywood, sure, but the version that was possible to make in 2023.  You don't win any points by claiming "they did it better back then."  There are so many versions of so many stories told over so many thousands of years, you don't win points by stating, "they did it a hundred years ago."  Characters like Marlowe are liable to disappear if they don't resurface every now and then.  Eventually no one will care Bogart played him.  If he's no longer relevant, it doesn't matter.

This is an excellent way to bring him back around again.  If the critics want to contradict themselves and claim there's no point bringing Marlowe back and that it's just another forgettable post-Taken movie for Neeson...It's their loss.  For the art of film, this is everyone's gain.  A movie I was very pleased to press "play" again when there were things I missed.  

Men in Black: International (2019)

rating: ****

the story: A new MiB recruit quickly discovers another giant intergalactic crisis.

review: So, here's the thing: Men in Black (1997) is probably a classic on par with Ghostbusters (1984), but it's somewhat hard to view it as such because Will Smith was just getting started on a decade-long run as one of the most reliable box office attractions of that period, making it difficult to distinguish whether Men in Black was its own entity or, ultimately, just another Will Smith smash hit.  Regardless of whether or not you enjoy Smith two subsequent appearances in the series, this fourth entry then becomes: Does the concept work without him?

I think it does.  Then, I generally like the whole series.  The storytelling has changed over time, notably the attempt to pivot almost entirely to Smith in the third one, at a time when his appeal was actually waning, and his performances were shifting away from the kind he was giving in the first one, which actually served to put more focus on the MiB universe itself, its vision of aliens run amok in all manner of guises.  MiB: International, at the very least, adds to the memorable menagerie with the sidekick Pawny and the Beard Alien.  The Beard Alien is just awesome.

Notably, the stars of the movie, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, are actually reprising an act from Thor: Ragnarok.  Thompson is the lead character here, inhabiting the Will Smith initiate role from the first movie, which a more developed backstory and a more deliberate arc.  Any concerns that the hard focus on her being a woman playing too much into current trends might be redirected to how Smith was presented, including the memorable gag of the decoy white driver.  Which is to say, even that is entirely in-character for the series.

Hemsworth, meanwhile, gets to do what Smith never did, which is to make being an agent seem like a casual thing.  Clearly Smith's J was always supposed to turn out to be a rogue figure, but he was mostly presented as such in relation to Tommy Lee Jones' K.  I like that Hemsworth and Thompson actually reveal their real names to each other, further distinguishing the two versions of the series, where even though we learn J and K's names, those initials will always be how they're remembered.  If this is the only time we experience Hemsworth and Thompson in the series (though it would be interesting to Fast & Furious the series), then at least they leave a mark.

The mole trope seems fairly obvious from the moment Liam Neeson appears.  He plays his part  obviously from the start, but he's here for a supporting role.  Emma Thompson provides one of several pieces of linking material within the series (in hindsight it was a good thing Rip Torn was killed off last movie, since by this one he was, sadly, dead in real life).  Rebecca Ferguson appears as the somewhat requisite femme fatale.

Bottom line: International proves the series isn't entirely about Will Smith.  That's a good thing.

A Monster Calls (2016)

rating: ****

the story: A boy struggles to handle his mother's battle with cancer, and finds an unlikely ally in a monster.

what it's all about: Full disclosure: my mother died of cancer two years ago.  Therefore, it's incredibly difficult to separate A Monster Calls from what is still an incredibly painful recent personal experience. 

That being said, this is powerful storytelling.  I'd read the book upon which it's based, and though the movie streamlines the narrative, omitting a key character and thus subplot, it packs the same wallop.  The marriage of reality and fantasy is uniquely executed, if anything comparable to the comic strip Calvin + Hobbes, where the two exist side-by-side, so that both are equally true.  The monster is ostensibly the big draw of the movie, but he exists in shadows and so almost completely in the vocal performance of Liam Neeson (admittedly a huge selling point), and so viewers who anticipate a more visceral presentation there will probably end up disappointed, and as such is probably the reason the movie didn't land as successfully upon initial release as critics had anticipated.

And it's a tough emotional experience, too.  It comes on so unexpectedly, Felicity Jones as the mother a supporting character, leaving all the weight on a boy whose journey becomes more apparent as the movie progresses, his need to be "punished" for his reaction to the idea of battling cancer.  Sigourney Weaver is equally subdued as the grandmother, while Toby Kebbell (this is the movie I finally noticed that he's been in quite a few of the movies I've seen lately) as the father who lives a new life in America, a scenario that in another story might have dragged the proceedings down in maudlin fashion, strikes the right tone as the one character most capable of addressing the boy's distress. 

It's the completeness of the portrait (ironic, given the prior acknowledgment that the movie leaves out a crucial element from the book) that helps everything build.  I think it works, I think it's powerful stuff, some truly classic filmmaking, but...

Doubt must linger.  I don't know what it's like to watch A Monster Calls without it being a personal experience.  Is everything truly earned, or am I reading myself into it?  True, this is a problem with every movie, but this one, it seems far more obvious.  So I leave the final review as an open subject.

But I absolutely recommend you check it out to see for yourself.

Silence (2016)

rating: *****

the story: Two Jesuit priests investigate the disappearance of their mentor in 17th century Japan.

what it's all about: I almost regretted having read the book before watching the movie, this time.  Usually, I can't abide people who suggest such things, because the two mediums are two very different creative expressions, and there's no reason to split hairs between them.  They have their different strengths.  But Silence is a particular story, in both prose and film form, where the same thing seems so similar in both forms, you begin to wonder what's lost in translation.  In the book, it's very important what Andrew Garfield's character thinks, and not so much only what he does or says.  Martin Scorsese, surely now and forever a master of filmmaking, knows this, and so there are a few voiceovers meant to fill the void a little, but he also knows that the story means the same thing, in the end, regardless of what is lost along the way.

That's what's truly remarkable about Silence, that it tells such an unexpected story, one that seems totally contrary to established narratives.  It seems to be a rebuke of criticisms on two scores, both in the context of the story, and what commentators today have attempted to say about the Christian faith, too.  It runs counter to everything Hollywood has been attempting to do in recent years.  Scorsese is a famously pragmatic Catholic, and that makes him the ideal adapter of such material.  It abhors mindless reverence, but it also embraces a level of faith totally unknown to most adherents.  How's that for a paradox?

Garfield, whom I know from a few movies (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the two Amazing Spider-Man films), emerges as a new breed of lead actor in it.  At first he seems like the last actor capable of pulling off the "Jesus look," the long hair and beard.  He's made a career of looking young, right?  He doesn't seem to possess the right amount of gravitas.  Yet he and Scorsese use these apparent limitations to their advantage.  His character is meant to be totally self-assured and yet naïve at the same time.  After watching Silence, you'll be convinced that Garfield has found a new archetype.  He seems to have played something similar in Hacksaw Ridge, also released last year, but the results couldn't seem to be more different.  Mel Gibson's movie (it's funny, Garfield starring in the films of two Catholics) is pretty straightforward, when it comes down to it.  Silence is anything but.

Adam Driver continues to be a fascinating discovery in his own right.  My personal experience with him had previously been limited to The Force Awakens and Midnight Special.  Almost more than Garfield, he manages to bring a mature presence to his role, so effortlessly that again you aren't surprised in the least that he and Garfield are leading a new generation of actors.  Liam Neeson, meanwhile, in a supporting role again confirms that he's capable of anything.  Here he seems to contradict everything you might have seen him do previously, in a long series of mentor roles he's done over the years, and no doubt that was a deliberate casting effect. 

Even if you don't care for the religious elements, Scorsese still presents a look at life in Japan in the century before the world had finished expanding.  Japan, in fact, was in the midst of shrinking back, headed toward a period of isolation that would have a perilous effect not just on itself but many other countries besides.  Silence becomes a story of self-justification, the things we tell ourselves to try and make sense of the irreconcilable.  If you find yourself siding with the Japanese over the priests, which is valid, you may still end up wondering if you were right, knowing what was to come.  This doesn't even mean the priests were right, either, but that this was an untenable situation, which Scorsese no doubt meant to parallel secular matters in today's world, too, of Muslims and the West and where things continue to stand between them.

I chose Arrival as my favorite movie of 2016 before having seen Silence, but I'll still stand by that now.  The two movies, however, stand together as among the smartest filmmaking I've ever seen, and that's extremely good company.  Both came from books.  What does that matter?  The story resonates.  That is all.