Tag: Julianne Moore

After the Wedding

Posted on by victorfraga

Isabel (Michelle Williams) is first seen meditating with a group of children on a vastly scenic temple in India. She works for an Indian orphanage struggling to secure sufficient funds. This sets off a divisive plot point that has always been a very common archetype for movies regarding the white saviour in a foreign land, realising the penury its indigenous masses endure on a daily basis. Isabel is considerably not only the ‘saviour’, but a mother to the children, especially Jai (Vir Pachisia), a boy who was discovered abandoned when he was a baby, and taken to care by Isabel.

When a wealthy benefactor has a potential offer to donate to the orphanage, Isabel flies to New York, where she’s uncomfortably accustomed to a glamourised suite and suits with assistants. She meets Theresa (Julianne Moore), the benefactor. Immediately there’s something strange about their exchange. Could it be Isabel’s muted percipience on the luxurious and all too bourgeoisie lifestyle Theresa instinctually exhibits? Could it be the impassive nature of Theresa’s business, and the lack of genuine empathy for a cause which seems to be the only thing motivating Isabel? Yes, those are pretty instant factors that are played too easily on the nose, but there’s something deeper that eventually adds up.

Their meeting is quick and futile, but Theresa questionably invites Isabel to her daughter’s wedding. Isabel attends the wedding only to make a discovery that further unveils a traumatic backstory between Isabel, and Theresa’s husband, Oscar (Billy Crudop), and the bride herself, Grace (Abby Quinn).

After the Wedding is a remake of Susanne Bier’s Danish film of the same title starring Mads Mikkelsen. This version switches the roles, yet tells the same story. The wedding itself serves as a metaphor for drastically committing to life term decisions without truly understanding the principles behind the commitment. Grace inexplicably marries when she truly isn’t ready to, in the same way Theresa, Oscar, and Isabel weren’t ready to be parents at a time of ignorant bliss, and that all pretty much intersects after the repercussions of what transpires during the wedding.

Oddly enough, both this remake and the Danish film aim to tell three different stories and are only really interested in one. One story being the secret the main players discover and how they all emotionally learn to come to terms with it. The second being a more intriguing story on the all too parallel but all too contrasting nature of the Americanised-higher class culture meshing with an American’s refined experience for a culture which serves little to no attention to finding significance to insignificant attributes for happiness. The third being the white saviour of an Indian orphanage.

The drama After the Wedding seems all too contradictory and manipulative. It becomes clear Grace is the key, and ironic mirroring image for Theresa, Oscar, and Isabel. Her involvement in the discovery of a long living secret has her switching personalities, and making decisions that don’t really ever seem realised. And Theresa’s motives, which gradually builds up towards the end, seems all too coincidental and heavy handed.

As a remake, what is After the Wedding trying to say that can be taken by its viewers to an abstruse means? Why include the backdrop of the Indian orphanage other than to convey Isabel’s desensitised perception of Americanised culture (this specifically being rich white people from New York)? Could’ve there been a deeper, perhaps more singular story of the boy, Jai (maybe aim for a mainstream take on an ‘Apu’ trilogy narrative)? And if not, could’ve we’ve just gotten an entire film set on the night of the wedding with no immediate backstory to the main players?

It feels all too polished, strongly relying four very good performances. But what After the Wedding proves as a remake, is its lacking approach for telling a story beyond its original story. Its images and ideas open for intriguing premises that are only there to strike a sentiment already too familiarised.

After the Wedding is in cinemas on Friday, November 1st. On VoD in April!

Gloria Bell

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When I saw the Chilean film Gloria (Sebastián Lelio, 2013) some years back, I was blown away. The story of a 50-something divorcée going out and finding herself sounded like the sort of movie I’d hate… and yet, against the odds, Lelio’s film, particularly its feisty central performance by Paulina Garcia, completely won me over. I recall it having a pretty decent Latin music soundtrack too, culminating in Umberto Tozzi’s triumphant disco anthem Gloria.

Leilo having in the interim carved himself out a respectable international movie career – an Oscar for A Fantastic Woman (2017), an impressive change of pace with the British drama Disobedience (2018) – he’s had the inevitable offer to remake some of his Chilean output for the US market. In Gloria Bell, adding the character’s surname to the title for the remake, he collaborates with sometime Oscar-winning actress Julianne Moore.

So all the ingredients should be there to deliver something very special, whether you’ve seen the original and are going for the comparison or you are coming to the story for the first time here. And yet, somehow, the new film feels flat. It lacks the magnetic quality of the original.

Maybe it’s the difference between Chile, rarely seen on the screen here in the English-speaking world, and the US whose movies have flooded our cinemas. Maybe it’s the 80s’ US disco music on the soundtrack which replaces the original’s far more vibrant Latin selection. Certainly, it peps up at the end when the title song (this time the American version recorded by Laura Branigan) comes on, but it’s far too late by then.

Apart from shifting the story from Santiago to Los Angeles and the heroine from Chilean to American, the story is pretty much identical. So it’s hard to believe the problem is the script adaptation. This even applies to the trailers – the trailer for the original Gloria can be seen for comparison further down the page below the Gloria Bell trailer.

The plot has 50-something Gloria (Moore) go to discos in search of love and eventually embark on a relationship with divorced father Arnold (John Turturro). Cue unflattering, over-fifties sex scenes in which he has to remove a medical girdle he wears round his waste, all very commendable in terms of visual representation of that demographic.

Gloria has pretty much learned to let her grown up kids get on with their own separate lives while she gets on with hers. Her son Peter (Michael Cera) is dealing with an absent partner who has left home for a while to find herself and leave him to bring up their child. Her daughter Anne (Caren Pistorius) is on the verge of moving to Sweden to make a life with a surfer she met via the internet. By way of contrast, Arnold seems to be constantly under pressure from his two daughters who we never see but are constantly making demands of him over the phone.

After much resistance, Arnold is persuaded to come over for a meal and meet Gloria’s family – not only her kids but also her ex-husband. The evening proves too much for Arnold and marks the beginning of the end of his and Gloria’s relationship. Except that, try as she might to cut him off, Arnold doesn’t want it to let her go…

Julianne Moore is on the screen most of the time. Where the original film and Paulina Garcia’s seemingly effortless performance in it felt like a welcome breath of fresh air, however, if you’ve seen the original, this one feels like a pointless retread with Moore failing to add that certain something that Garcia brought. Which is a pity, because on paper this remake sounded like it might be really quite something.

Gloria Bell is out in the UK on Friday, June 7th. Watch the film trailer below:

And here, for comparison, is the trailer for the original 2013 Chilean film Gloria:

Suburbicon

Posted on by victorfraga

Most critics have slammed George Clooney’s latest directorial endeavour, which was universally described by Rotten Tomatoes as a “misfire”. And indeed the film is not without faults. But it’s not a complete disaster, either. Far from that. Despite some shortcomings in the script (which was penned by the Coen brothers) and in the acting, Suburbicon is still fun to watch. Perhaps most importantly, it’s a film with its heart at the place, and a witty take on American “suburban” or capitalistic values.

The film title refers to a supposedly peaceful and idyllic community with affordable homes, impeccable lawns and residents donning immaculate dresses and hairdos. The film opens with images as if taken from a hairy tale homes brochure. And the entire vintage has a charming vintage from the 1950s. It looks like the ultimate concretization of the American dream. George Clooney, however, begs to differ: the dreamlike world slowly descends into a nightmare, as locals become intoxicated with their very own petit bourgeois inclinations and racist views.

Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) is the father of a small family in Suburbicon. One night, the home of the Lodge family is broken into by two sadistic robbers, who proceed to sedate the whole family and to kill the matriarch Rose. Gardner is left to raise his child Nicky (Noah Jupe) with Rose’s twin sister Margaret. Both sisters are played are Julianne Moore. It predictably turns out that Lodge’s relationship to Margaret is far more profound that initially revealed, and that he may have an obscure connection with the local mafia as well as vested interests in the death of his wife. And so the American dream begins to collapse.

Parallel to all this, a black family has moved next door, and they immediately encounter rabid racism from the neighbours. The community erects a fence around their house, shouts profanities and vandalises their property while flying the Confederate flag. The only viable connection between the black family and the white community is the friendship between Noah and their black son of about the same age.

The best moments of the film are with the savvy death insurance agent played by Oscar Isaac (pictured above), who suspects there’s something “fishy” with the claim. Isaac is witty and sadistic, and he finds a very clever way to deal with the situation.

The biggest problem with Suburbicon is that these two narrative strands (the Lodgers and the black family) neither tie together nor complement each other. In fact, they compete with each other. The film would have worked much better without the black family. The very last scene is an attempt to fix this, but it simply doesn’t work. You will you catch yourself thinking: “what the heck?”. Also, Nicky’s character evolves to become the only ray of hope and decency in the story, but Jupe’s performance isn’t strong enough to support such a central role.

Suburbicon is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, November 24th.

Wonderstruck

Posted on by victorfraga

Every single frame of this movie borders perfection. Every angle has been carefully studied, every light carefully tested and every prop carefully placed. You wouldn’t expect any less from the director of Carol (2015), which was voted the best LGBT movie of all times just last year, would you? If you liked Carol (which like me, you probably did), you will probably like Wonderstruck. Yet you won’t be wonderstruck. The movie might make you smile, but that’s about it. While extremely beautiful and elegant, Todd Hayne’s latest is also a little too convoluted for its own sake.

Wonderstruck is a highly ambitious and complex endeavour. It blends many layers: reality, memories, imagination and images of a film within a film. Plus it tells two stories: a boy in 1977 and a girl in 1927. Plus some of the characters are deaf, and the sounds effects don’t always match the visuals. Plus photographs, drawings, stuffed animals, dolls and a giant diorama are an integral part of the story. Plus these are often juxtaposed. Phew! Can you think of any further narratives devices and layers that we could throw in?

Ben (Oakes Fegley) lives in Minnesota, and he has recently lost his hearing due to a freak lightning accident. He flees to New York in search of his parents. Fifty years earlier, Rose (Millicent Simmonds), who’s also deaf and from Minnesotta, runs away from home with the same destination. One million puzzle pieces slowly come together until the two narrative strands inevitably and predictably meet. The problem is that you might be a little bored by the time it does so. Or even a little confused by the myriad of narrative devices, tricks, characters plus a couple of red herrings (or are they just loose ends in this enormous cinematic ball of yarn?).

A great chunk of the film is without dialogue, and there are many references to silent cinema. Haynes sees a strange connection between silent era and hearing disability, which I fail to grasp (as with many other elements of the film). And obsession with New York (which extends from Carol) renders the whole experience somewhat manneristic.

Wonderstruck attempts to blend a multilayered narrative with a puerile and dreamlike language, but the result is a bit clumsy. The film does have gentle and touching moments, but overall it’s not profoundly moving. You might leave the theatre asking yourself: “so what???”

The movie is scripted by Brian Selznick from his own novel written in 2011. And there’s Julianne in a double role. In fact, a lot of things are double in this highly ambitious and self-righteous piece of fiction. Using the majestic ‘Also Sprach Zaratrustra’ (the song from Kubrik’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey) to close your film is a gesture of extreme conceitedness.

Wonderstruck showed in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was been well-received and also when this piece was originally written. Out in cinemas on April 6th (2018), and available for digital streaming on August 6th (2018).