Oscar Season Lightning Round! (Patreon)

As you know, I try to provide you with High-Quality Web Content (SM) on a regular basis. But it's that time of year, when the mad dash to the finish line of 2018 means I find myself watching 'em faster than I can write 'em up. This will not take the place of longer, more actualized reviews, but here are some notes on recent films that, for one reason or another, don't exactly merit a fuller analysis.

Wildlife (Paul Dano, 2018)

This is a film that was never destined to hit the sweet spot for me, since it stars one of my least favorite actors, Carey Mulligan, and an actor whose work I tend not to like very much, Jake Gyllenhaal. They are showy, mannered actors who never seem to fall into their roles. Rather, they perform as though they were in a World's Strongest Man competition, wanting the audience to observe their actorly effort, every flexed muscle and bulging vein, and afford them the appropriate approbation. 

With Wildlife, Mulligan and Gyllenhaal have found their perfect director, fellow actor Paul Dano. This is an "indicating" film through and through, and it creates a cosy nest for the leads' end-of-the-1950s showboating. Depicting Great Falls, Montana as if it were a meticulously constructed model on some young boy's HO-scale train set, Dano encircles the town with highly symbolic forest fires, all the better to drive home Wildlife's sub-Ice Storm dime store moralizing. Even within these chilly environs, everyone has a fire burning inside.

The fact that the film (very obviously adapted from a novel) is told through the eyes of the couple's teenage son (Ed Oxenbould) merely provides an excuse for the film's heightened moralism, to say nothing of its undue idealism of Father and harsh condemnation of Mother. One might even start to suspect our narrator is unreliable, but none of Dano's choices really support that assumption. So we have another entry in the Me-Generation Backlash subgenre, but one that lets wayward fathers largely off the hook. How utterly contemporary.

First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018)

Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) as the original Mad Man, with considerably less drinking. He's a man of the 1950s, bearing a primal wound (in this case, the death of his young daughter from cancer) that makes him both distant and driven, a strong, silent workoholic desperate to find his existential place in the world while at the same time reverting to a soft-spoken Midwestern form of masculine simplicity when too much is demanded of him, especially by his wife Janet (Claire Foy). His clear exceptionalism is belied by his company-man act, and when compared to his loudmouthed, jackass colleague Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) -- Roger Sterling to Neil's Don Draper -- he is the clear choice for setting boot on the lunar surface. Competent but self-effacing, he is largely content to be the face of the Campaign, and let his personality drift off somewhere in the great black void.

His sons are a frequent irritant. His oldest boy Mark (Connor Blodgett) is aware enough of what's going on to create tinges of guilt for Neil. (The manly handshake he gives his father before the Apollo journey is a Moment.) But younger Rick (Luke Winters) is just a rowdy scamp who gives his mom a hard time. In the image above, you can see him messing with the closed-circuit speaker that Janet is using to listen to Neil's mission at home. Although this is meant to be a minor realistic detail, I couldn't help but find it somehow telling. Rick doesn't care what his dad is doing, or even where he is. This is not only a glimpse of the future (non-)relationship between Armstrong pére and fils, but between Baby Boomers and later generations with respect to the space program. After that "one small step for man," fewer and fewer folks are going to care about "whitey on the moon."

Vox Lux (Brady Corbet, 2018)

Here's a film that should have been a line drive up the middle of my soul. A music-centered movie with original songs by Sia Furler and a score by Scott Walker! Starring Natalie Portman, no less. I sat out Brady Corbet's directorial debut, The Birth of a Leader, but I am deeply ambivalent about the guy as a filmmaker. He clearly has chops, but I'm not sure he has found his own voice away from the worn grooves of Euro-pessimistic art cinema. Stylistically, Vox Lux owes quite a bit to Michael Haneke, especially in its (vastly superior) first half (or Act). There are subtle, oaky notes of Von Trier as well, but there is above all a locked-down control and dispassionate investigation of violence and its aftermath that makes this feel like the most well-appointed Borderline Films production ever. It's not a Borderline film, but it shares with Antonio Campos & Co. that second generation glaciation situation.

Act One is more interesting not just because the "genesis" of the Celeste character is inherently more complicated than her years of decline and divadom, but because Raffey Cassidy's performance is vulnerable and nuanced in ways that Portman's simply isn't. Granted, Older Celeste isn't intended to be a nuanced character -- she's a bit of a pop star cliché by this point -- but Portman plays so broadly, with her New Yawk accent and her facial tics and gesticulating, it's hard to locate the human being underneath. If this is the point, well, okay, but she should come to life onstage, and neither Portman nor Sia's songs are terribly effective avatars for the Celeste phenomenon.

By contrast, young Celeste's tentative acquiescence to the pop star machine, her growing trust (soon violated) by Jude Law's manager figure, and above all her fraught, delicate symbiosis with her sister Eleanor (Stacy Martin), provide Cassidy with multiple emotional gears to explore, and she does so with the subtlety and radiance of early winter. We know things are about to get much, much colder.