New movie review: The Long Walk

There was a time in this nation when there would be calls to postpone the release of this film. When a shooting that weighed on the national consciousness – which one this week, you would be right to ask – would be enough for the loudest voices in the country to call for boycotts, bans, or at the very least a moratorium on a movie such as this.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one for moral outrage. I don’t believe in censorship. And, frankly, the righteous indignation meter is so constantly running on full that we live in a perpetual state of crying wolf. What bogeyman is bothering you today? A pop star? A children’s cartoon? An early-education influencer? At a certain point, you have to tune it out because the outrage isn’t real. It’s meant to provoke. It’s meant to steal your energy and wear you down so you’re too exhausted for the fights that do matter.

I mention all of this because if the latest Stephen King adaptation, The Long Walk, is about anything, it is about the normalization of violence and what happens to our humanity when we cease to be shocked by the horrors around us. You have probably seen the moment in the trailer when a young man is shot to death and one character turns to another to say, “I keep hoping that part gets easier.” The response: “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

One of the great triumphs of Francis Lawrence’s film is that the violence never gets easier. Death is never less than horrific, and to the great credit of the filmmakers, every death means something. Lawrence, of course, is well versed in dystopian fiction in which young people are made to play out a sick dance of death for the benefit (and control) of a mass audience, having directed four of the five Hunger Games movies, with another on the way.

The Hunger Games franchise is fun, but it’s glossy, PG-13 YA lit stuff. This is hard ‘R’ because it must be. This is not about cute kids (alright, there’s one cute kid, but his fate is just as horrible as the rest) in an artificial reality. These are young men, mostly 18-25-ish, beaten down by a world that has nothing for them – no opportunity, no hope, no future. Not since a vaguely alluded to war allowed a totalitarian government to come into power and that regime unsurprisingly has tanked whatever economic prospects the people might have.

The only opportunity to improve one’s lot in life: win a lottery to represent your state in The Long Walk, a televised death march, at the end of which the sole survivor receives untold wealth and the granting of a single wish. As for the rest, the luckiest receive a bullet to the head. For others, it’s much worse.

Lawrence and writer JT Mollner (Strange Darling) waste little time in getting us on the road. We meet Ray (Cooper Hoffman), the lucky winner who gets to represent the state where this year’s walk takes place, and his mom, Mrs. Garraty (Judy Greer). Greer is wonderful in the couple of brief scenes we get her in, communicating a lifetime of devastation in just a couple minutes’ screentime. She drops Ray off at the starting line, where we meet a selection of other participants, and we’re off.

Mollner’s script is efficient and effective in letting us know who each of these characters is. Some of them feel stock – this is King’s first novel, after all – but they are imbued with depth and life by a tremendous cast, including Ben Wang as Olson, Roman Griffin Davis as Curly, Charlie Plummer as Barkovitch, Garrett Wareing as Stebbins, Tut Nyuot as Baker, and Jordan Gonzalez as Harkness.

The most important of Ray’s fellow walkers is Pete, played by David Jonsson. You might recognize Jonsson for his incredible turn as the android Andy in last year’s Alien: Romulus. He delivers the performance of the film as Ray’s friend, confidant, and mirror image, offering light to Ray’s darkness, hope to his despair. Hoffman, who is also excellent, and Jonsson have a natural chemistry that carries us through long stretches in which the film gives itself over to the two of them sharing, philosophizing, and simply being there for one another.

Mark Hamill, in his second King adaptation this summer after The Life of Chuck, plays The Major, ostensibly the villain of the piece, though the real villain is the society that permits all of this to take place. He is a suitably malevolent force, commanding a squad of faceless, nameless soldiers who carry out the will of the machine, executing young men for daring to need the most basic elements of survival and humanity.

Many of the things you might expect to happen in this story do happen, but the ways in which they happen are consistently surprising. While some characters start as clichés and variations on themes we have seen before, the story evolves away from the trite and into the specifics of each, succeeding in giving us a cast of characters we truly care about and making it all the more devastating for what we know must happen to them.

But, why must it happen? It happens because society not only allows it but insists upon it. The Long Walk is meant to give viewers hope – you, too, may someday be lucky enough to rise from your station – and pride – look how far the boy from your state got before he was massacred! Early on, we learn that although all of these boys volunteered for the lottery, none of them has ever met a person who didn’t volunteer, which makes a strong point about the illusion of choice under tyranny.

King published the novel in 1979, when it was largely seen as an allegory for the Vietnam War, the draft, and the senseless violence to which the nation was a party. That metaphor holds true enough, but in an age in which we are inundated with violence and death on levels never before imagined, it means something more. Of course, we still send soldiers off to die. We still send weapons to aid in the deaths of women and children in far-off lands. And, we still drop bombs on people we have never met for reasons that are vague at best.

But, here at home, we send children off to school with little more than thoughts and prayers that they will make it back safely at the end of the day. Most of them do. Some of them don’t. One should be too many, but it seems now there will never be enough death to spur us into action. The Long Walk is a visceral examination of the world we have built and a reminder that goddammit, it doesn’t have to be this way.

New movie review: Eddington

You remember 2020. I remember 2020. Eddington writer-director Ari Aster clearly remembers 2020, and his new film does a comprehensive job of capturing the madness of the moment and suggesting the madness yet to come. All the hallmarks are there: mask mandates, social distancing, the George Floyd demonstrations, online conspiracies, etc. Enough to make one say, Yes, I recognize this world and it is ours. But, let’s rephrase the premise.

You know what you think and feel about everything that happened in 2020. I know what I think and feel about everything that happened in 2020. However, based on Eddington, what Aster thinks and feels about everything that happened in 2020 – and everything he chooses to depict in his film – remains a mystery. And, that’s a shame.

The film is not so much a story as an experience, but what little plot there is revolves around Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and his decision to run for mayor against incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Already, the name Sheriff Joe should put one in mind of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Arizona “lawman” and politician who perfectly presaged the Trump era. As multiple characters in the film would tell you, this is not a coincidence.

Sheriff Joe has a wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who each get sucked into their respective conspiracy wormholes. Mayor Ted has a teenage son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), who won’t abide by the lockdown rules. Eric has a friend, Brian (Cameron Mann), the Bernie Bro type who slides so far to the left that he ends up on the right. Austin Butler’s in there, too, as a grifter guru on the periphery of the story. And, there are another half-dozen odd characters who populate the world but mostly feel more like devices than people.

Phoenix is excellent because he is always excellent, here playing a man who can’t seem to understand the direction the world is going but nevertheless is, himself, helping to push it that direction. Sheriff Joe is despicable, he is unquestionably part of the problem, but you almost feel bad for him when he pleads that “one-third of the police department is black” with the handful of Black Lives Matter protestors who gather to mildly inconvenience traffic on a single street in town. It’s not a world he recognizes anymore.

A key question in analyzing Eddington is how much sympathy we are meant to extend to Sheriff Joe or, really, any of the characters, who all act in deplorable ways all their own. By centering the Phoenix character and telling 90 percent of the story through his point of view, Aster does seem to be asking the audience, if not to be on his side, then at least to understand why his side might feel the way it does. It’s as if Aster is saying, ‘Hey, didn’t we all lose our minds there a little bit, and isn’t the new normal pretty strange?’

It’s a gamble, and one I don’t think pays off. It forces the film into a wishy-washy, centrist view of one of the most polarizing times in modern U.S. history. It lacks either spirit or spine, and in being everything to everyone, it ends up meaning nothing to anyone. 

I saw the film with, what I have to assume was, a largely liberal audience that smugly laughed at the dumb sheriff who wouldn’t wear a mask and printed up campaign materials with silly typos. It then seemed shocked and appalled by the brutality of the violence in the film’s final act. No minds changed there. But, I can also imagine the conservative audience siding with Sheriff Joe and believing that when the world is falling apart, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Good guy with a gun and all that.

If Aster is attempting to lampoon us all as a way of bringing us together in the middle, he fails. The movie isn’t deft enough to make anyone seriously reconsider a position or discover some new insight into The Way Things Are. As I said at the top, we were there. We remember. We know what we think and feel. It’s Aster who still seems to be figuring out where he stands, which is fair enough, but asking us all to sit through a 2 ½-hour movie about it might be a bridge too far.

Aster fascinates me as a filmmaker. I quite like Hereditary and find it a winning entry in the now overpopulated subgenre of horror films about capital-T Trauma. His sophomore feature, Midsommar, is absolutely brilliant, one of my favorite films of the past 10 years. Which is why his followup, Beau Is Afraid, left me feeling so betrayed.

Now, it is self-evidently absurd to feel “betrayed” by an artist who owes me nothing, except possibly my three hours back. But, a funny thing happens when you love a filmmaker’s work: You tend to give them a lot of latitude. It’s why being a fan of a filmmaker or band or whatever else can feel so culty. There are those kinds of fans for whom the object of their affection can do no wrong. These are the “Well, actually” folks who would try to tell us the bad thing is good for … reasons.

It is best not to be that way, but when a filmmaker earns my trust, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt. And, so I did for 150 minutes of Beau Is Afraid’s interminable 179-minute runtime. I truly believed Aster was taking me on a journey and would land the plane. Then, it crashed in the most miserable of ways.

I share all of this because it meant I went into Eddington with skepticism that Aster could take on a subject as grand as the COVID-19 pandemic and wrangle it into a richly textured narrative with thematic depth and emotional resonance. Now, having seen the film, that skepticism feels warranted. There are so many threads that lead nowhere, characters hung out to dry, and provocations in place of ideas. I wanted better. Aster is capable of better. He’s proven that before. On the next one, he might have to prove it again.

New movie review: Music by John Williams

Whether you are Gen X, millennial, or Gen Z, John Williams probably wrote the soundtrack to your childhood. If you were to list out the 10 most famous music cues in film history, Williams almost certainly wrote half or more of them. With 54 nominations and five awards, he is the second-most-nominated person in the history of the Academy, behind none other than Walt Disney himself. At 92 years old and still working, his cultural legacy is staggering, almost beyond comprehension. As such, it’s a little more than one can fit into a 106-minute movie.

Director Laurent Bouzereau’s film follows most of the conventions we have come to expect from documentaries of this type. We get a little bit of background information on Williams’ parents – his father was a jazz drummer who worked with the greats; his mother was an actress and dancer; they met on the set of a movie they were both working on. We get Williams’ introduction to performing music, a little of his time in the service, and how he got started in movies. Then, we work chronologically through the biggest movies in his career.

If you watch enough of these types of movies, you’re familiar with the beats. What helps separate out Music by John Williams comes down to two related factors: 1) the “biggest movies in his career” also happen to be many of the biggest and most important movies in the history of the art form; and 2) because of that, the talking-head interviews are a who’s who of film history over the past 50 years. Of course, the best insights come from Williams himself and his greatest collaborator, Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg changed the face of the film industry forever, multiple times, but there is an argument to be made that he does not accomplish this without Williams’ contribution. I had this debate with a colleague earlier today, and I actually came down on the side of Spielberg likely succeeding nearly as well with someone like Alan Silvestri (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) at his side. But, there is not a bone in my body that believes had that been the case that we would have five scores as iconoclastic as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, and Jurassic Park.

These films are full of images we can hear, and that is thanks to Williams. An unknown POV underwater: BUH-BUM. An adventurer running from a boulder: BUM-BUH-BUM-BUHHH. A boy and his best friend flying in front of the moon. We know what that sounds like because of Williams.

Any one of those five films would be the crowning achievement of any other composer’s career, and yet, it is possible none of them serves in that position for Williams because, of course, there is Star Wars. One of the documentary’s truly special moments comes in hearing people describe their reaction to the opening fanfare at the beginning of A New Hope. It is as though Williams discovered fire and suddenly there is light and warmth in the world.

The other major highlight of the film is listening to Kate Capshaw describe Williams playing the Schindler’s List score on the piano for her and Spielberg for the first time. The story brings a tear to her eye – and to ours.

Moments like this will be catnip for fans of film history and fans of these movies, but they also hint at the doc’s great flaw. Every interview, every conversation, every sequence is so geared toward the legacy of Williams’ accomplishments that Bouzereau treats the compositions themselves almost as fait accompli. It sure is a lot of fun to listen to famous filmmakers talk about music we all love, but it would have been more valuable to interrogate Williams’ process of creation. Why does that horn go there? What does this violin solo accomplish? What would one more note here or one fewer note there mean?

The closest we get to this is in listening to Williams talk about his famed five-note composition for the climax of Close Encounters. He shows the camera a music sheet with 20-30 different five-note combinations and points at the circled one, buried innocuously at 15 or 16. That’s the one they used. He then demonstrates the difference a single note makes in the sequence and briefly explains the emotional effect of completing a musical phrase in different ways. This is gold, and I wish the film had space for more sequences like this.

Similarly, there is a good section of the film devoted to Williams’ time as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops, a tenure that proved somewhat controversial due to the perceived illegitimacy of film music. Williams did a lot to break down that barrier, and the film rightly credits him for that specific cultural shift.

These tangible impacts are what the movie needs more of to be fully rewarding. We understand inherently the ephemeral nature of Williams’ work, so deeply rooted in nostalgia for our childhoods and the cultural artifacts we cherished then and still hold dear now. What might give this film some depth is a deeper exploration of that nostalgia. Ultimately, Music by John Williams is like a really delicious cake. It’s sweet and satisfying and you greatly enjoy it as you consume it, but it’s not as nourishing as a full meal.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: The Killer

Michael Fassbender, in The Killer

It would be a lot easier to be a big fan of the collected works of David Fincher. There is nothing controversial in proclaiming The Social Network one of the best films of the 2010s. No one bats an eye if you observe that Zodiac is a top-shelf crime procedural. There is, of course, the cult of Fight Club. The director is famed for his numerous takes, and over the years, his dedication to his process has become its own sort of mythology. I’m very happy for everyone, but it’s also okay to want more.

Speaking of wanting more, enter: The Killer. Fincher’s latest is a sleek little thriller that sure seems to be a lot of fun. After all, who doesn’t want to watch a globetrotting assassin story with Michael Fassbender at the center? Insert your Assassin’s Creed jokes here. The performance is great. The pictures are pretty. There is, however, an emptiness at the film’s core different from that intended by Fincher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker.

The film is nihilistic to a fault, which in and of itself feels a tad “been there, done that” from the guys who made Se7en. But, at the end, this was not the emptiness I felt. Rather, I sensed a thematic void. The movie spends a lot of words – a lot of words; truly, Fassbender’s Killer is almost shockingly loquacious – saying virtually nothing at all. Its defenders would have you believe this is a feature, not a bug, but I’m not buying it.

I have heard the lead character is intentionally dull, that the point is the dullness. This would hold water if not for the fact that when push comes to shove, the unnamed killer pulls out enough Jason Bourne- and John Wick-style tricks to seem sufficiently badass for a college dorm room poster. Indeed, the image of Fassbender pointing his gun directly at you will make a nice companion piece to that Tyler Durden poster your freshman year roommate definitely had.

There is no point in penalizing a filmmaker for an audience misunderstanding his work. It is not Fincher’s fault that Project Mayhem now carries a lot of Proud Boy baggage for those who lack a sense of irony or self-awareness. Still, the director seems to have ascended in the culture to that rarified air where his weak spots are declared intentional satire, and detractors are accused of not getting the joke. Make no mistake, there are jokes, and I get them. It’s just that no amount of humor can cover for what’s lacking underneath.

For instance, it’s very funny that we hear the Killer repeatedly recite a set of rules for pulling off an assassination, then proceed to break every one of these rules and never pull off a successful assassination. But, that’s it. That’s the joke. It doesn’t mean anything that he tells us, in that incessant voiceover, he is one of the best assassins in the world, then proceeds to fail at the one thing at which he’s supposed to be an expert. At best, it’s a weak joke, and at worst, it’s a story flaw.

It gets worse the deeper you dig – and from here on out, spoilers if you intend to watch The Killer – so let’s dig. After the Killer botches the opening assassination, he is targeted for elimination by some other hired guns. Those hired guns show up at his house in the Dominican Republic and badly injure – but don’t kill; I guess they’re not very good either, despite us being told they are – the Killer’s girlfriend. 

We will never learn much about this girlfriend. Her name is Magdala, and she is played by Sophie Charlotte, who is given nothing to do. She’s just a function of the plot, a reason for Fassbender’s assassin to go on, what Tarantino might call, a “roaring rampage of revenge.” Ah, but therein lies the rub. See, one of those rules he lives by is to “fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.” He will spend the rest of the film working pro bono. Again, funny, but empty.

Finally, there is the movie’s most curious choice, one I have not been able to stop thinking about and pondering, ‘Why?’ The Killer does, in fact, kill a lot of people, and every single one of them is a woman or person of color. He is hired by a white, male billionaire to kill another white, male presumably billionaire, neither of whom ends up dead. So, where does that leave us? I see two options.

One, it’s a mistake of casting. The Lawyer (Charles Parnell) doesn’t have to be black. The Expert (Tilda Swinton; we’ll come back to her) doesn’t have to be a woman. The Brute (played by Sala Baker, who is Kiwi) does not have to be ambiguously non-white. Maybe it just happened to work out that way. But, I don’t think so. The famously meticulous Fincher doesn’t leave anything to chance.

This leaves option 2: It’s intentional and meant as commentary. I’ll take a stab at it: When the elite clash, marginalized people suffer. Fine. It is perhaps marginally subtler than Fight Club in its messaging, but there is no more meat on the bone. The Killer represents whatever function of capitalism you wish to rage against, but he’s still fun. He’s still the POV character, and Fincher and Walker position him as the person we’re meant to root for, without reservation.

It is the Tyler Durden problem once more. Fincher, a consummate stylist, simply can’t make the character anything less than cool. With his keto diet, Smiths playlist, and eighth-grade nihilism, he certainly seems like someone who would listen to Joe Rogan. This is a person I know for a fact Fincher hates, but the script and filmmaking lack the restraint of style to make the critique stick.

A quick word on the performances: I will highlight two in particular, though everyone else does lovely work. Fassbender is in nearly every frame of this thing, and he is magnificent, reminding us why we loved him in the first place. Coming off a rough stretch (including The Snowman, X-Men: Apocalypse, Assassin’s Creed, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix, all reviled) and time away from acting to raise a family and race cars, this will be seen as a huge win for the actor. Warmly received and popular on streaming, if not at the box office, we can say that Fassbender is back, and hopefully, he gets more chances to do his thing.

Swinton, meanwhile, anchors the film’s finest stretch. As one of the assassins hired to kill the Killer, she is sitting down to a quiet meal alone in a fine-dining establishment when the Killer takes a seat across from her (along came a spider who sat down beside her). The dialogue is no great shakes, but Swinton and Fassbender sell the hell out of it. And for once, Fincher lets the actors lead, setting his camera down and just watching these two great performers work together. I could have watched 90 minutes of just this scene, but alas, there was more to be done, none of it equalling these heights.

Ultimately, maybe I’m not criticizing the movie Fincher made so much as the movie people will see. But, you would think the guy who made Fight Club would have learned to be a little more careful with his aim. As the Killer would know, the ricochet can be brutal.

New movie review: Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

Albert Brooks (left) and Rob Reiner, in Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

“You think I see two roads.” – Albert Brooks, in Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

Albert Brooks has been with me my whole life. I can’t say what the first thing I saw him in would have been, but I know it was early. It could have been The Simpsons, where he made his first guest appearance in 1990. Maybe it was The Scout, a 1994 baseball movie that would have been on the shelf at the video rental store at the exact moment in my life that I was watching every baseball movie in existence. The true beginning doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s been there.

Rob Reiner’s new film, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, is a documentary about Brooks, yes, but it’s also a chronicle of all the ways he’s been there and all the people he inspired along the way. Reiner, who has been best friends with Brooks since they were in high school together, takes us through every stage of Brooks’ amazing career.

We see the early variety and talk show appearances, which presage what we would now call the alt-comedy movement. We see the early short films he made for Saturday Night Live, a tradition that continues on the show to this day. There is a brief standup career, which serves as proof that a mind like Brooks’ cannot be confined to the stage. No, this act must be presented before the largest audience possible, which means TV and, of course, the movies.

The movies. The first Brooks-directed film I saw was Defending Your Life, a staple of TBS in the late ‘90s. About a man who arrives in Judgment City, the way station between life and the afterlife, the premise held much appeal for a kid who was scared of dying. We don’t know where those trams are going at the end of the movie, but they must be headed somewhere, and anywhere would be better than the void. It’s a wonderful fantasy.

Brooks tells Reiner that Meryl Streep approached him at a party and (maybe) jokingly asked if there was a role in the movie for her. He demurred, then realized, ‘Well, yeah, of course there’s a part for Meryl Streep.’ She is, naturally, excellent in the film.

Reiner’s documentary is full of these kinds of Hollywood stories and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Much of the film is told by Brooks to Reiner as they sit at a restaurant booth together, á la My Dinner with Andre. There are clips from just about everything Brooks has been a major part of, and there are interviews with everyone from David Letterman to Neil DeGrasse Tyson to Steven Spielberg. It’s a tremendous boon to the film that Reiner can call upon his famous friends, but the stories make it clear that for most of the interviewees, the privilege is theirs to be able to honor Brooks in this way.

Along with Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, Albert Brooks absolutely deserves to be in the conversation as one of the best comedic filmmakers of the 1970s and ‘80s. Allen had the accolades and the prodigious work ethic, while Mel Brooks had the bigger-than-life spoofs and outrageous gags. Albert Brooks instead flew under the radar, working rarely and often with little help from the studios. A number of the doc’s best stories involve Brooks getting studio notes, then ignoring them to his films’ great benefit.

So, Brooks has never won an Academy Award nor had a particularly big box office hit. He is what we would refer to as a “filmmaker’s filmmaker.” Other artists love him because they get it. Brooks is simply always ahead of the curve. With hindsight, though, it seems apparent that Brooks’ first three films – Real Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981), and Lost in America (1985) – serve as the sharpest critique of yuppie culture that we have. Each remains relevant today, and in many ways, they grow more relevant every day.

Watching these early films makes you feel like you are in on a secret, and no matter when you discover them, you feel that Brooks is speaking directly to you about the world you occupy. Twenty-one years before Survivor landed and changed the television landscape, there was Real Life, a perfect distillation of what reality TV would become. Give the two leads in Modern Romance a couple iPhones and it becomes virtually indistinguishable from dating in the 2020s.

Lost in America was explicitly about the post-Vietnam generation of yuppies who were too busy consuming to concern themselves with the bigger questions. But, release it today and see what millennial doesn’t identify with the desire to chuck it all and start over, while feeling trapped by the relentless grind of life. There is no generational divide when it comes to middle-class, middle-aged ennui.

Ahead of his time at every turn, Brooks is very obviously a genius, but he is also a comedic genius, and one thing I am underselling is just how damn funny this movie is. Whether it’s your first time seeing the ventriloquist act or the 50th, it remains riotously funny. Even today, the 76-year-old Brooks, né Albert Einstein, is as quick-witted as ever, cracking up Reiner at every opportunity.

There are brief sections, as well, on an acting career that features pitch-perfect supporting turns in everything from Taxi Driver to Drive to his Oscar-nominated performance in Broadcast News. Obviously, he is a top-tier guest star on The Simpsons, serving as the best part of one of the single greatest episodes of perhaps the greatest television show ever made (Hank Scorpio, “You Only Move Twice”; enjoy).

For me, though, it all comes back to the movies and wishing we got more than just the seven features written and directed by Brooks, including just one this century. That would be 2005’s Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, another biting satire about looking for connection in an increasingly disconnected world. Of course that film would face difficulties, coming as it did in the midst of the “War on Terror,” and Brooks found himself at odds with the studio again.

In the closing moments of the documentary, Brooks says to Reiner:

“I had a very famous agent, and he said to me, ‘I don’t know why you always take the hard road.’ And, my answer was, ‘You think I see two roads, and I don’t. If there was an easy road, I’d have a house there.’ I said, ‘What do you think? I get up. I can’t wait for the goddamn trouble I’m gonna get into.’ I said, ‘... I see one road.’”

This hit me hard. I’m no longer a kid, afraid of death. I can accept the void. At 35, if I’m very lucky, maybe I have a little more life in front of me than behind me, but there’s only one road, and it only goes one direction. That’s true for all of us, and all we can do is the best we can. And, hopefully, if there is a Judgment City out there, our best is enough.

New movie review: Anatomy of a Fall

The first thing we see is a tennis ball haphazardly tumbling down the stairs. We never see what caused it to tumble, who might have thrown it, dropped it, or perhaps accidentally knocked it. We accept the mystery because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter. Anatomy of a Fall will ask us to accept the mystery many more times over the course of its story, and we will learn bitterly that some mysteries are easier to accept than others.

Director Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning drama forces us to confront the way our culture has turned murder into a spectator sport by way of true crime podcasts, sensationalized media, and our own need for tidy endings and easy answers. It is a brilliant piece of work that instantly joins the pantheon of that ever-vaunted genre: the legal thriller.

And yet, it stands above such genre trappings. Triet employs a sense of style rare among courtroom dramas, and even the best American legal thrillers can tend toward formula. Anatomy of a Fall is anything but formulaic. Yes, it helps that to outsiders, such as myself, the French trial process will seem downright bizarre, but the film’s specialness goes beyond any cultural oddities. Its genius lies in the multitude of small, human interactions it gets right, in its deft handling of the subjective and objective points of view, and in the wonderful performances Triet gets from her actors.

Chief among these, of course, is German star Sandra Hüller, whom you may recognize from the international breakout hit Toni Erdmann or 2021’s lovely I’m Your Man. Here, Hüller is given the unenviable task of playing a woman so convinced of her own righteousness that she can seem aloof or unfeeling. In her most private moments, however, we can see that she is anything but. Rather, she simply seems tired of participating in the games so many others are committed to playing. Her Sandra wants what she wants, and right or not, she is willing to take it.

In a subtle bit of foreshadowing, we hear Sandra before we see her. Over images of that falling tennis ball we mentioned, we hear Sandra talking to a student who hopes to base her thesis at least in part on Sandra’s work. Sandra is an author who has based much of her fiction on circumstances from her own life, as many authors do, but she comes off as strangely unaware of the many parallels that exist. 

Their conversation, which is being recorded for the student’s notes, can be read two ways, and Hüller plays that space between perfectly. On the one hand, Sandra is a German woman who has moved to her French husband’s small hometown, and with few, if any, friends, she could be seeking comfort in a genuine human connection. On the other hand, as she drinks what is not her first glass of wine this afternoon, the bi-sexual Sandra may be trying to seduce the student, literally right under the nose of her husband, who is working upstairs.

Friendship or seduction? It could be either, and this is the first time but not the last that we are asked to live in the mystery. This same tension underlies everything that follows, emphasizing just how ephemeral the idea of objective truth really is.

Triet drives this point home in the film’s standout scene, one of the best scenes in any movie this year. Sandra is on trial, accused of murdering her husband, Samuel (a superb Samuel Theis), and the prosecution reveals it has a secret recording of a fight between the couple that occurred the day before Samuel’s death. The fight takes place in English, so the members of the court are provided a French transcript so that they may follow along with the recording.

For the first time in the film, we get a true flashback. We finally get to meet Samuel, who has been a ghost haunting the film up until this point. We see the husband and wife argue. It starts off small, turns petty, then explodes, as arguments between long-term couples with simmering resentments are wont to do. 

From a filmmaking standpoint, it is a bravura sequence, with Hüller and Theis delivering wonderfully lived-in performances, convincing as two exhausted people who have been through this before, too many times. The writing is a masterstroke of observation, exemplifying the ways small grievances fester and turn toxic, poisoning a relationship. In this one scene, we learn everything we could ever need to know about who these people were, who they are, and how they got this way.

It is absolutely devastating to witness these two people verbally tear each other to shreds. Then, at the peak of the emotional tension, just as it is about to boil over into physical violence, Triet cuts back to the courtroom. On the recording playing for the jury, we hear glass break, a slap, more breaking glass and possibly dishes, and more physical violence.

The director does not cut away here to shield us from the brutality that is evident. The film is unsparing in what it chooses to show us. Rather, once the confrontation turns physical, it exits the world of objective truth and becomes something subjective. The transcript, the recorded words, this is all that can be known for sure, so we are allowed to see it. What happens outside of that must be interpreted, guessed at. Sandra provides an explanation, but it is only her side. We are not allowed to see it because that would be the film showing us something that cannot be known.

The argument sequence is one of those rare, magical moments in cinema when everything – the writing, the themes, the performances, the filmmaking – comes together at once to crystallize whatever the filmmaker is trying to say. Every single person I have spoken to about the film has mentioned this scene. It has a way of sticking with you long after you leave the theater. You feel compelled to play it back in your mind, thinking through the twists and turns, looking for some clue that explains it all. I’ll save you the time: No such clue exists.

This is Triet’s and co-writer Arthur Harari’s final trick. The media are filled with lurid true-crime tales and murder-of-the-week stories that teach us to look for the signs, to be junior detectives, parsing every detail for information. Generally, at the end of these stories, the clues add up, the murderer is caught, and we are satisfied that wrongs have been righted and justice prevails. Anatomy of a Fall exposes these stories for what they are: wish fulfillment. Life is so often messier, and Triet and Harari understand this.

Sandra’s attorney has argued that Samuel killed himself, though Sandra herself doubts this theory. At one point, a TV commentator says plainly that a famous writer murdering her husband is a lot more interesting than a sad teacher killing himself. During the trial sequences, Triet often cuts to the gallery, filled with spectators who have no skin in the game but their own fascination with a dead man and an accused woman. They are invested in a story of a murder, not a story of facts and truth.

Among these spectators sits Daniel, Sandra and Samuel’s preteen son. Played by Milo Machado-Graner, in one of the greatest child actor performances you will ever see, Daniel is the collateral damage of a marriage turned sour, a culture turned cold. The final half-hour turns on what Daniel may or may not remember and what he chooses to do with that memory. His process is gut wrenching to witness, and we know that no matter what choice he makes, he will never be the same.

At the end of the day, when we cannot know the truth, all we are left with is a choice about what to think and whom to believe. In general, movies are a safe space because filmmakers are omnipotent. Even the best, most subtle films offer us objective stories wherein we can feel secure because we will be told what is real and what to feel. Anatomy of a Fall is anything but a safe movie, and therein lies its power.