A civil rights movie that perfectly balances history, humor and sentimentality

Octavia Spencer in Hidden Figures

I learned most of my Space Race history from The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman’s excellent epic about the test pilots and first astronauts who propelled us into space. The movie is classic American hagiography, in which a bunch of brave white men risk life and limb for the glory of the flag. It’s mostly accurate, though in adapting Tom Wolfe’s book of the same name, liberties are taken. But even Wolfe’s book, a massive bestseller and over 400 pages long, doesn’t mention the dramatic and important role that Katherine G. Johnson, in particular, had in the success of John Glenn’s historical orbit around the Earth.

Johnson not only made many of the key calculations involved in Glenn’s unprecedented flight (with one done in very dramatic fashion), but she did it as a woman, a black woman and a black woman in 1963. It’s possible Wolfe didn’t know about Johnson. But Margot Lee Shetterly, who wrote Hidden Figures, the book about black women involved in the early space program, has pointed out that Johnson’s role is clearly in the raw records at NASA; it just didn’t make it into either version of The Right Stuff. With the delightful, crowd-pleasing film version of Shetterly’s book, it will be impossible for her to remain hidden in the record.

In the film, Taraji P. Henson plays Katherine G. Johnson, a childhood math prodigy who works in the “colored computer” department at NASA. She carpools with two of her coworkers, Dorothy Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer and Mary Jackson, played by Janelle Monáe. Before everyone owned plastic computers made by IBM or Apple, a “computer” referred to people who did the math. In the early days of NASA, there was a pool of black computers and a pool of white computers. It shouldn’t be surprising that in the early 1960s, the colored computers had limited opportunities for advancement and suffered numerous indignities because of their race and gender.

Katherine is shown to be the meekest and nerdiest of the group, if also the smartest; when Dorothy is asked who of the computers that she supervised (in practice, if not by the title “supervisor”) could handle the math for launch trajectories, she immediately points to Katherine. Dorothy is older, ambitious and constantly fighting for recognition. She’s a little snarky under her breath, but Mary is snarky in full voice. Beautiful and, of course, brilliant, Mary throws out one wise quip after another, but thankfully her smart talk doesn’t get her in too much trouble. Eventually, when she uses her wit carefully, she gets her heart’s desire.

The three women struggle and face set-backs, but except for one brief moment on a blurry black-and-white TV screen, the kind of trouble we’re used to seeing in films like Selma or 12 Years a Slave is wholly absent from Hidden Figures. Numerous injustices and moments of discrimination are shown, but it is the petty humiliation of black women being forced to use separate bathrooms that ends up standing in for the totality of structural racism. This is a PG film after all, and that’s fine: This is a movie about civil rights that you can take your eight-year-old to, and that’s a fantastic thing.

Taraji P. Henson and Janelle Monáe in Hidden Figures

These kids and their parents are lucky, too. Director Theodor Melfi perfectly balances history, humor and sentimentality. Henson, Spencer and Monáe are all wonderful, seamlessly moving from light comedy to deep-and-meaningful drama. This is the bailiwick of both Spencer, who won an Oscar for The Help, and Henson, who was Oscar nominated for The Curious Case of BenjaminButton and has become a star in the high-camp soap opera Empire. Monáe is an R&B star who has only two acting credits (Hidden Figures and Moonlight), but she more than holds her own against her much more experienced co-stars, stealing every scene. Monáe, like Mary, refused to stay hidden.

Hidden Figures

Directed by Theodore Melfi

Written by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi

Starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe

Rated PG

Originally published in LGBT Weekly.

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Glimmers in the darkness

MoonlightI will repeat what everyone else has said over and over again: 2016 was dreadful, and as I write this, it continues to be wretched, with George Michael and Carrie Fisher dying as Donald Trump provokes a new Cold (or World) War. In times like these, with our waking lives enveloped by evil and despair, art can serve to distract, teach and comfort.

As I wrote in my last column, La La Land does that well; its shiny, Technicolor cheer exists in a world outside of any sadness or strife not native to its own story. It’s pretty good escapism, something that very few of the big or the good movies have offered this year. (But not great: It thinks it’s Singing in the Rain, but it’s mostly humming in the shower.)

Usually, when the world sucks, Hollywood gives more than a few great distractions. But not 2016. Zootopia, the blockbuster animated movie, is about racism and eugenics. Captain America: Civil War, the billion-dollar grossing superhero film, is about the vigilantism necessary when government fails. La La Land’s major Oscar competition, Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea, are extraordinary films about sadness and doubt. And Rogue One, the latest Star Wars film, is as dark as night in its explication of the perils of heroic redemptions. (If you have kids, don’t take them.) None of these movies were made with full knowledge that 2016 would be the greatest annus horribilis since 1939 (or possibly, 1914). But sometimes the zeitgeist can’t be stopped, and sometimes that zeitgeist tells us a few things we need to know and shows us some things we need to see.

At a time of dramatically increased racism, poverty and misogyny, Moonlight is the most essential film of the year. Barry Jenkins’ triptych about the young life of a gay black man in Florida is about many things: poverty, drugs, filial piety, and, especially, the performance of masculinity. Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes play Chiron as various ages – a boy, a teenager, a young man, respectively – as he struggles to protect, express, and redeem himself. His surrogate father Juan (Mahershala Ali) is a drug dealer, his mother Paula (Naomi Harris) is a crack addict, and his only real friend is Kevin (at various ages Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome, and André Holland), whose confidence, both sexual and social, is magnetic. The film is weirdly and frustratingly timid in its depiction of homosexuality, but that doesn’t detract from its depiction of finding grace in a world of pain.

Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges in Manchester by the Sea

Manchester by the Sea is as white as Moonlight is black, as neither have speaking roles for the other race, but it does similar work by teaching us how to make our way through suffering. Casey Affleck is Lee Chandler, who must figure out how to take over parenting his nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges) after Lee’s brother Joe dies. Lee is already overwhelmed by almost unimaginable grief – it feels very 2016 in that way – and he thinks he is incapable of fulfilling Joe’s wishes and Patrick’s needs. His path is as messy as Chiron’s, fraught with the expectations of duty and manly emotions and parenthood, but Kenneth Lonnergan writes and directs Lee and Affleck to a quiet, bittersweet place of good enough. Both Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea taught me how to see glimmers in the darkness.

Several other of the year’s great films do similar work. Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s masterful and gorgeous adaptation of a Ted Chiang short story about Earth’s first contact with alien life, is about connection and communication, about finding meaning in uncertainty and seeming chaos. Amy Adams is a linguist haunted by the death of her daughter as she tries to decipher the language of the squid-like, tree-like visitors. Natalie Portman gives a more mannered but ultimately epic performance as Jack Kennedy’s widow in the hypnotic Jackie, which details the week following the president’s assassination. In trying to define her flawed yet awe-inspiring husband’s legacy through his funeral, she rages, thrashes and grasps for meaning in meaningless tragedy.

Other People, Chris Kelly’s hilarious and devastating autobiographical first film, is about the year David (Jesse Plemmons), a gay comedy writer, spends caring for his mother (a miraculous Molly Shannon) as she dies of cancer. This sort of thing, David says, is only supposed to happen to other people: What do I do when it happens to me? In Swiss Army Man, Hank (Paul Dano) uses a slowly reanimating corpse (played by Daniel Radcliffe) to create the life he never had but always wanted, literally creating meaning out of death. The film’s power is in Hank’s ridiculous, but profound, creativity.

Several of my other favorite films don’t even bother to seek meaning or lessons beyond their horror. The nihilism of The Lobster, in which those who cannot find life partners are turned into animals of their choice (Colin Ferrel’s David chooses a lobster), is as disturbing as the cynicism of A Bigger Splash, the story of how the idle rich are consumed by petty games and jealousies while the desperate poor languish at the periphery. And Deadpool, the movie at which I probably had the most fun this year, is a comic book film that makes no attempt to be about anything but its own hyper violence and filthy jokes. In that way, it functions in many ways like La La Land, as a distraction that panders to our simplest emotions. La La Land is a hopeless romantic wish fulfillment, and Deadpool is about fulfilling the impossible to fulfill the wish that thorny problems can be solved with perfectly aimed insults, blades and bullets.

2016’s disasters can’t be killed so easily.

Originally published in LGBT Weekly.

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A musical love letter to a fairytale version of Los Angeles

I relatively recently became a Los Angeleno, and among the many lessons I have learned since arriving is that the movies that taught me about L.A. are mostly bold, beautiful lies. I have long known that Hollywood is in the business of pablum, artifice and mythmaking; I’m a film critic, after all. But the extent of the fiction has only become clear to me as I’ve sat in traffic long to understand why road rage murder seems justified; I’ve witnessed the suffering of the city’s garish, inhumane poverty; I’ve met the people who write and direct and enact the lies. We believe the lies because the truth is too much to bear, and we tell the lies out of self-preservation as well as masochism. It seems fitting that as the country slouches toward fascism with a man empowered by reality television that the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture at the next Academy Awards is La La Land, a not-that-great musical love letter to a fairytale version of Los Angeles.

The film opens with a rewrite of the opening of Fellini’s 8 ½, in which Marcello Mastroianni’s anxious director is trapped in a haunting, terrifying black and white traffic jam. In La La Land, the traffic jam is in full, glorious color, and instead of writhing in agony as Mastroianni did, the drivers pop out of their cars and giddily perform “Another Day in the Sun,” a paean to up-from-your-bootstraps success in Los Angeles: “Behind these hills / I’m reaching for the heights / And chasing all the lights that shine / And when they let you down / You’ll get up off the ground / As morning rolls around / And it’s another day of sun.” It’s thrilling and funny and adorable, and, of course, a lie, since 99 percent of people who come to L.A. to be stars fail. But that’s not what La La Land is about. The movie is about wish fulfillment smothered in the gooey hooey that we sometimes call the American Dream.

At the end of the number, we zero in on two driver-dreamers, Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling). After growing up on old Hollywood films like Casablanca and Bringing Up Baby, she wants to become an actress, and she’s damn good. A gifted jazz pianist, he’s obsessed with the romance of old school jazz and wants to open a club to preserve that music. They are fueled by nostalgia and pluck, and their courtship is, considering that Stone and Gosling have legendary chemistry, as endearing as any classic romance that Mia watched as a child. As they fall in love, they support each other’s ambitions, and then there are obstacles and fights, and of course song and dance.

Writer and director Damien Chazelle (of Whiplash fame) clearly followed Stephen Sondheim’s advice to hire actors who can sing, rather than singers who can act. Gosling more or less speaks his songs, and Stone dumbs down her actually good voice to match his skill level – until one song toward the end when she’s allowed to rip loose. Neither of them can dance particularly well. Their tap number is cute, but mostly because it reminds you of better dancing from the old Hollywood musicals that La La Land is repeatedly referencing. Justin Hurwitz’s songs and score are cheerful and optimistic, like the film, and they fit perfectly within Chazelle’s sun-soaked, color-saturated postcard shots of Griffith Park, Santa Monica and the Hollywood Hills.

However, with all of Chazelle’s grand aspirations and inspirations – to make something like a cross between Singing in the Rain and LA Story, I think – it’s odd how his scope narrows quickly after “Another Day in the Sun.” The cast is underpopulated, with supporting characters existing only to get Mia and Sebastian to talk when they aren’t together, and Los Angeles becomes a backdrop to a rather standard romance. Chazelle only stages two truly big numbers, the opening and the beautifully bittersweet closing, with the vast majority of the film overly intimate and seemingly muted for such a massive canvas. The film tells two lies, then: Los Angeles is a paradise of opportunity, and the movie is about Los Angeles.

La La Land
Written and Directed by Damien Chazelle
Starring Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling and John Legend
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex

Originally published in LGBT Weekly.

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A masterpiece of the genre

Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea

A few months ago, an acquaintance dismissed an entire swath of acclaimed American films as “sad white people movies.” In the sense that they are about various Caucasians who aren’t happy, sometimes for existential reasons and often for tragic ones; movies like In the Bedroom, The Savages, or Sideways are, yes, about sad white people. (You could also go back to Mildred Pierce, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Ordinary People). Not everyone likes to be challenged emotionally or intellectually in the movie theater, and there’s certainly a thread of whining in some of these movies.

But what these movies do, along with allied genres in the modern novel or on TV shows like Mad Men and Six Feet Under, is show us people who find their way through their grief, anguish, anger and fear. They don’t always do it elegantly or kindly, but the stories encourage a collective understanding and a broadening empathy, and they help us understand our own emotions. Manchester by the Sea, this year’s sad white people awards contender, is a masterpiece of the genre.

Kenneth Lonergan, whose two previous films You Can Count of Me and Margaret, are also sad white classics, writes about grief, family and love with great insight and humor, earning our tears and laughs rather than suckering us into giving them up. In Manchester by the Sea, his protagonist is Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a handyman who is suddenly shouldered with the responsibility of parenting his nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges) after the expected but still agonizing death of Lee’s brother Joe (Kyle Chandler).

The sympathy for Lee is greater than for Patrick, because Lee has suffered more than anyone – and we don’t know why until his divorce from Randi (Michelle Williams) is explained. He doesn’t handle his sadness any better than the average person; he gets into fights when he’s not performing a stereotypical New England stoicism. Even though Lee is preternaturally a good father, his past makes him terrified and resistant, and when he discovers that Joe meant him to take care of Patrick, he balks. Patrick, a self-possessed, witty, girl-crazy 16-year-old, does his best to hold it all together, but he’s 16, and he’s been asked to handle a lot, what with a dead father and a missing, alcoholic mother (Gretchen Mol).

Lonergan is particularly adept at mixing a sarcastic wit with unflinching emotion, and his writing and direction in Manchester are as smoothly beautiful as they are emotionally pointed. Lonergan made Mark Ruffalo a star – first in the play This is Our Youth and then in You Can Count on Me – and Ruffalo’s mannered, naturalistic, open wound sort of acting is what Lonergan demands. Casey Affleck’s performance as Lee has less quirk, which makes him a better everyman; no one should have to experience what Lee has, and he manages as well as we would. When I cried (four different times), it was because I felt I knew Lee, hoped I could do as well as Lee, but wishing I never need to try.

Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges in Manchester by the Sea

Young Hedges, who has the dual challenges of Lonergan’s quick dialogue and numerous scenes with Affleck in full method mode, is flawless. Williams, arguably the great actress of her generation, has a beautiful, if wrenching scene toward the end of the film that makes her best moments in Brokeback Mountain seem as if they were done for a high school play. Williams excels at playing a sad white woman, and that is not to dismiss her, but to declare how essential she is to American film.

Manchester by the Sea

Written and Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

Starring Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges and Michelle Williams

Rated R

At Landmark Hillcrest

Originally published in LGBT Weekly.

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Enjoy new wonders reminiscent of Harry Potter’s world

Eddie Redmayne in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

When the final book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was published, after the initial excitement of reading the final chapter, fans of the boy wizard and Rowling’s magical world created were also a bit distraught: It was the end. The cynic would have said, “Oh, please. There’s way too much money involved!” Between Warner Bros, which handles the films, and the slew of publishers across the world who made mints on the books and its translations, there were, literally, tens of billions of dollars to be made. But Rowling, at least publicly, isn’t much of a cynic. She seems to love, really love, the world and characters she created, and shortly after Deathly Hallows, she announced that she would start a whole new set of films based around Newt Scamander, the author of a text book Harry and his friends read while students at the wizarding academy Hogwarts. Rowling had released the short, whimsical Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in 2001 to raise money for Comic Relief. The film of the same name, written by Rowling and directed by David Yates, uses Scamander’s mini encyclopedia as a way to expand the wizarding universe to the United States, to the previous century, and to investigate, tentatively and slightly, themes a bit more adult than those of Harry’s adolescent concerns.

The film takes place in New York in 1926 and begins with Newt (Eddie Redmayne) arriving by steamship with a suitcase literally bursting with magical animals he has collected during his travels. His suitcase, like various rooms and tents in the Harry Potter series, is much, much larger than it appears. When one of them escapes – a platypus-like rascal who collects shiny things, like money – the resulting chaos gets Newt arrested by local magic cop Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston). He exposed magic to the local No-Maj, or folks who can’t do magic, while physically harming one, a wannabe baker named Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) who just happened to be in the way.

Tina isn’t just being a good cop. It turns out she’s trying to get back into the good graces with the powers-that-be, including a detective named Graves (Colin Farrell) and the American wizard president (Carmen Ejogo), who demoted Tina after she got into a fight with a witch-hating No-Maj radical (Samantha Morton). Meanwhile, the city is being plagued by mysterious building collapses and explosions, which may or may not be the fault of mysterious international wizard terrorist Grindelwald. When many of Newt’s creatures escape and the attacks get worse, Newt is blamed, Tina is implicated, and fantastical adventure ensues.

The film is fun simply because it reminds us of the Harry Potter world, and in expanding that world, geographically and historically, we are treated to new wonders, some which are Rowlingesque quirky and some which are visually spectacular. The beginning of the film’s second act takes place in Newt’s suitcase, which is a sort of ramshackle wild-life sanctuary, and the creatures are as original and beautiful as anything out of Avatar or Star Wars. Our heroes are broadly drawn as characters but they are endearing: Newt is weird and brilliant and idealistic, while Tina is as ambitious as she is emotionally invested in her work. Harry, Hermione and Ron were only complex and magnetically interesting after repeated exposure. There will be five movies about Newt and Tina, so we have time to fall in love with them.

In Fantastic Beasts, I gave them the benefit of the doubt that they will become more interesting, but I found Kowalski and Tina’s squeaky flapper sister Queenie (Alison Sudol) immediately entrancing. Oscar-winner Redmayne, whose jerky awkwardness is becoming his one-note wonder, is fine and is used well by Yates and Waterston, so brilliant in P.T. Anderson’s Inherent Vice, is also well used, though I wanted her to be more badass, or at least edgier. Tina’s sweetness is a symptom of the film’s flaw. While Harry Potter grew up and Rowling became a much better and more interesting writer over the years, Potter properties are still marketed to children and teenagers. Fantastic Beasts, despite being about adults and careers and adult love, is still a kids movie. It could have been darker and more interesting, but that’s not where the billions of dollars are going to come from.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Directed by David Yates

Written by J.K. Rowling

Starring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston and Colin Farrell

Rated PG-13

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