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FALLEN LEAVES
*** Tracking the absences in Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves reveals a lot about this love story’s autumnal flavor. Set in present-day Helsinki (with constant reports of the Russian military bombing of Mariupol on the radio), Fallen Leaves contains almost no digital technology. There are no careers—only jobs. No forward momentum. No children. Hell, there’s no one younger than 40 in the film, save for a synthwave duo that plays at protagonist Holappa’s local bar one evening. (The passion in their music stirs in him only the sadness to have another drink.) Even so, Ansa (Alma Pöysti) is interested in Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). They’re two townies firmly in middle age, wrapping themselves in the stoicism of a hard day’s work (industrial cleaning and shelf-stocking) and lonely beds. The emptiness of their lives and their city makes them seem destined to connect, but with Helsinki’s understated harshness, what vulnerability is left? The filmmaking mimics the characters’ stiffness with long static shots while costuming Holappa and Ansa in monochromatic reds and greens, as if suggesting that emotionality has to live somewhere, if only in vibrant dyes. To this end, Kaurismäki cuts a few corners in the film’s 81-minute runtime, using folk and pop songs to loudly express what Holappa and Ansa might feel. The audience can really hear the music. Can the characters? NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.
NAPOLEON
**** Near the end of Napoleon, the eponymous French emperor (Joaquin Phoenix) demands to know what happened to the adoring letters he wrote to his beloved Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby). Yet for all his lordly airs, Napoleon doesn’t sound like a conqueror; he sounds like a high schooler whining about his flirty love notes to a cute girl in algebra class getting tossed in the trash. Such is life in Napoleon, which fuses the beautifully erratic humanity of Phoenix with the sweeping meticulousness of director Ridley Scott. Portraying Napoleon as both a devilish strategist and a lovesick dope is hardly a stretch: When the emperor died in exile in 1821, his final words were, “France, the army, head of the army, Joséphine.” That demands a paramour of mythic proportions, though “mythic” hardly does Kirby’s Joséphine justice. A scene in which she bares her crotch to Napoleon (“Once you see it, you will always want it,” she prophetically declares) is memorable but barely necessary; one word spoken in Kirby’s steely, velvety voice could seduce all but the sternest of authoritarians. Napoleon is even better as a sex comedy than it is as a violent spectacle, which is really saying something: Even the melees Scott staged for Gladiator are outdone by his poetic and brutish re-creation of Napoleon’s theatrics at the Battle of Austerlitz, which leaves Lake Satschen filled with ice, blood and cannonballs. Still, Scott never lets us forget that Napoleon is the overgrown adolescent who, in one scene, shames an Englishman by shouting, “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” Cry havoc and let slip the boys of war. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Cedar Hills, City Center, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Progress Ridge, Studio One.
AMERICAN SYMPHONY
*** American Symphony explores a year in the life of musician Jon Batiste, who has worked with artists ranging from Stevie Wonder to Ed Sheeran. Director Matthew Heineman’s documentary briefly touches on Batiste’s life growing up in New Orleans, his time at Juilliard and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and his Grammy success, but for the most part stays focused on Batiste putting together his first symphony while his wife, Suleika Jaouad, battled leukemia. Heineman captures moments both sweeping and subtle in Batiste’s life; in one scene Batiste guides a room full of dozens of musicians with enthusiasm, while in the next he faces depression. One wishes more of Jaouad’s life were explored beyond her cancer diagnosis (Heineman occasionally holds her at arm’s length), but American Symphony reaches a moving and rousing climax when it offers a look at the performance of Batiste’s symphony at Carnegie Hall. When Batiste is forced to improvise on the piano, the moment is a testament to his brilliance as an artist, as is the film itself. PG-13. DANIEL RESTER. Netflix.
EILEEN
*** The coastal Massachusetts winter of 1964 is testing Eileen. The 24-year-old (played by Thomasin McKenzie) never intended to keep her penitentiary office job this long. Her car is fuming. Her mother is recently deceased. She lives with her father (Shea Whigham), an ex-cop who likes vodka and revolvers. This depressing tableau—with its underexposed lighting and searching woodwind score—pushes Eileen into an active fantasy life, with visions of impromptu sex and fratricide. Then into the prison strides new resident psychologist Rebecca Saint John (Anne Hathaway)—blond, Harvard-educated, willowy, single, unflapped by the patriarchy. Eileen couldn’t have dreamt up a more enviable model of 1964 womanhood, and Rebecca immediately takes young Eileen under her wing. Hathaway’s ability to smoke while flirting (in a Katherine Hepburn-esque voice) juxtaposed with McKenzie’s wide-eyed youthfulness make Todd Haynes’ Carol the obvious comparison. Yet Eileen, based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel and directed by William Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth), is a shiftier narrative than Carol to both exhilarating and wobbly ends. There’s a Hitchcockian streak at work, from the title-card typeface owing to Marnie (1964) to the psychologist stereotypes borrowed from Spellbound (1945). Eileen looks more forward than inward at the plot hijinks caused by playing God with traumatized people. Still, dimensionality be damned, there are worst sins than taking a wild left turn in a character study. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bridgeport, Cascade, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Living Room, Lloyd Center.
THANKSGIVING
*** Director Eli Roth offers up a bloody feast for fans of old-school slashers with Thanksgiving, a feature-length adaptation of his fake trailer that played in front of Grindhouse (2007). The film opens with a bang as chaos spreads in a Right Mart during Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving night; Roth treats the scene more like a zombie invasion than a shopping event. The plot then jumps forward a year as a killer in a pilgrim mask targets a group of teens he finds responsible for the previous holiday disaster. Thanksgiving may be Roth’s best horror effort since he traumatized audiences with Hostel (2006). Yes, the premise is silly, but the movie knows it, winking at the audience with absurd scenarios and over-the-top gore. (One scene involving a cat is especially welcome.) The killer’s identity, motivation and even downfall can be guessed pretty early on, but seasoned horror fans should enjoy watching Roth cook with ingredients borrowed from Pieces (1982) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). Dinner is served. R. DANIEL RESTER. Cedar Hills, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Pioneer Place, Stark Street, Vancouver Mall, Vancouver Plaza.
MAESTRO
** “I love too much,” Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) confesses in Maestro. “I’m reining it in!” Fat chance. Belted with mock seriousness, that declaration makes clear that Bernstein has no intention of containing his passion for anything—not composing, not conducting, not women and not men. Best known for his swooning, transcendent West Side Story melodies, Bernstein was both an unyielding artist and a crusader for civil rights and nuclear disarmament. Neither side of his personality feels fully present in Maestro, which was directed by Cooper, who prefers to feast on Bernstein’s tortured marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). After a beautifully surreal first act packed with spry dancing sailors, Maestro dutifully details Bernstein’s extramarital conquests, remaining remarkably unmusical for a movie about the man who became the most famous conductor in America at 25. Yes, Cooper ebulliently re-creates the 1973 performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 that Bernstein conducted at Ely Cathedral, but since the film shows barely any interest in the craft of conducting, he may as well just be an elegant arm waver. (Cate Blanchett was more credible as a fictitious conductor in Tár.) And the brutal, borderline exploitive scenes chronicling Felicia’s battle with lung cancer? They inadvertently reveal the shallow swagger of Cooper’s vision. For all its pretensions, Maestro isn’t art; it’s punishment. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Living Room.
POOR THINGS
** Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) experiences a feminist awakening in ways that only a man could write, like making love to Mark Ruffalo and working in a French brothel. Shocker: We’re in the minds of director Yorgos Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara, the lurid stylists of The Favorite (2018). That film whipped up a soufflé of 18th century sexual intrigue, but Poor Things, based on Alasdair Gray’s novel, strides into Victorian England, where the automatonlike Bella is cared for/imprisoned by surgeon Dr. Godwin (Willem Dafoe) and his lackey Max (Ramy Youssef). Bella, jerky in movement and literal in speech, has a blunt innocence that inspires a wonderstruck Max to describe her as “a very pretty retard.” Few things betray shallowness of vision faster than a fetishization of the politically incorrect, but Lanthimos barrels on with his juvenile flourishes, blending Wes Andersonian whimsy with lame “witty” lines like, “Let us touch each other’s genital pieces!” By the time the director tacks on an extended homage to Freaks (1932), it’s excruciatingly clear that his affectations—monotone dialogue, steampunkish visuals—are a thin mask for his paucity of ideas. Only in the presence of Ruffalo, playing a sleazy and seductive lawyer, does the film vibrate with life. Adopting an English accent about as convincing as Spam packaged in a tin of Walker’s Shortbread, Ruffalo’s performance is the antidote to the artificial quirks of Poor Things. He’s so joyously fake that he’s scarily real. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Cinema 21, Hollywood.