The Poppies of Terra #66 - The Survival Games

Over the last week I watched six films in various movie theaters. Though initially it seemed they had nothing in common, on reflection I see that in one guise or another they’re all about survival. 

Perhaps this says something about the anxieties of our particular day and age. From the societal fears of political division in One Battle After Another, environmental devastation in The Lost Bus, and personal isolation in Anemone, to name a few, we seem to be collectively fretting.

Here are my capsule reviews for each title:

The Strangers: Chapter 2

During the power struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy over the appointment of church officials, a conflict known as the Investiture Controversy, in 1076 Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV defied Pope Gregory VII’s authority by convening a synod at Worms that demanded the Pope's abdication. As a result, the Pope excommunicated Henry IV in February 1076, releasing his subjects from their oaths of allegiance. In order to try and have the excommunication lifted and avert further rebellion among German nobles, Henry traveled all the way to Canossa Castle in northern Italy in January 1077, where the Pope was staying as a guest of Margravine Matilda of Tuscany. Once there, Henry IV stood barefoot in the snow for three days (from January 25 to 27), dressed in a hairshirt, fasting, and begging forgiveness. Three days! Talk about a dramatic act of penance. On January 28, the Pope absolved him, though the reconciliation proved temporary as the broader conflict continued. This episode of history is so iconic that the phrase “to go to Canossa” (in German, “Gang nach Canossa”) still means to make a humiliating apology or act of submission today. Even if he stood barefoot in the snow for three days I doubt that Renny Harlin’s public apology would be sufficient to merit absolution for this utterly ill-conceived sequel to one of last year’s worst theatrical releases. 

The Strangers: Chapter 2 underwhelms in almost every regard: scenes are stretched out needlessly to pad the runtime, the screenplay substitutes a string of incidents for any semblance of a plot, character decisions break believability over and over, and there’s a completely out-of-place wild hog sequence in which I was rooting for the hog. Madelaine Petsch gives it her all, but her performance is obscured by tepid production values. The flashbacks related to the origin of the titular strangers are not only psychologically simplistic, but counterproductive whichever way you take them: as an explanation of what drives the strangers, they demystify them by making them known, and as a lack of explanation doubling down on them always having been unknowably evil, they’re a waste of time.

Survival here is all about enduring the immediate moment–or, in the case of the audience, bearing the film. I don’t have high hopes for the concluding installment in this trilogy, but I do hope that the director of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, Cutthroat Island, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Deep Blue Sea and other fun outings can clear this slump and find his way back to us.

Dead of Winter

If you like cold-set thrillers about isolated, everyday folks dealing with unusual pressures–Fargo (1996), A Simple Plan (1998), Wind River (2017), for instance–you’ll be pleasantly chilled by the new movie starring and executive produced by Emma Thompson. The screenplay is a lean-and-mean exercise in understatement: Barb (Thompson) is making her way out to a remote lake in Minnesota for personal reasons when she gets turned around and ends up asking a stranger (Marc Menchaca) for directions. Her intuition and attention to detail tell her something’s wrong, and though she tries to mind her own business, the evidence soon becomes undeniable. A deeply moral person thrust into dangerous and terrifying circumstances, she has no choice but to act.

Thompson, who recently starred in the outstanding Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, and whose new series Down Cemetery Road is set to premiere later this month, is in excellent form. Judy Greer, as the Purple Lady, is her equal, every bit as chilling, self-justifying, and desperate as Barb is reassuring, compassionate, and clear-headed. Marc Menchaca, playing Camo Jacket, delivers a multi-note turn made memorable for the changing emotions it elicits from the audience. The screenplay plays fair, for the most part, and though there are one or two moments that push up against the boundary of disbelief, the illusion is swiftly restored in each instance, drawing us back into an enthralling battle of wills. But it’s not the eruptions of action and violence that stand out, though they’re smoothly staged, as much as the character development, particularly Barb’s. A life furnished with love yields goodness, and closure may not always arrive how we plan or expect. 

Brian Kirk’s focused direction leverages the Finnish locations that double for Minnesota and turns them into a further presence of both possibility and peril. Oscar-winning composer Volker Bertelmann’s music heightens and deepens moments of tension and memory respectively with considerable aplomb and pathos. The struggle for survival in this picture is related to an immediate existential threat, to be sure–but it equally pertains to the protection of one’s values and their place in the world. 

One Battle After Another

Expectations were high for Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent cinematic outing, a star-studded, three-hour long loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990). Anderson has taken on the seemingly impossible task of bringing Pynchon to the screen before, with Inherent Vice (2014), which I thought succeeded only intermittently. Here, the storied director seems much more at ease with Pynchon’s offbeat, paranoid, postmodern antics, and there are stretches of One Battle After Another that manage to deliriously sustain, aided by Jonny Greenwood's score, the most unlikely of timbres.

The film’s plot is as byzantine as you might expect, given the source material, but as important to the narrative engine as the chain of events linking seemingly disparate characters is Anderson’s expert modulation of tone. The film begins with what some have described as a forty-minute prologue, in which there’s much tension, some bizarreness, and very few laughs. The middle section is more ramshackle and outrageously footloose, while the closing act adheres to more classical modes of thriller-style tension-building. The cast, which includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Chase Infiniti, is more than the sum of its ensemble parts. Names throughout are a thing of beauty: Bob “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, the French 75, the Sisters of the Brave Beaver, and the unforgettably monikered Christmas Adventurers Club. 

The screenplay deals with politics not in terms of value judgments but as expressive agency for its impassioned characters. While on diametrically opposed sides of the political spectrum, what these folks have in common is that they themselves, rather than any ideological system, prove to be their own worst enemies. As much as they are determined, they are flawed, and spend much of the movie bungling around. Survival often becomes a fight to push through one’s own ineptitude and blind spots. This is where the satire emerges, one that comically skewers all types of affectations and inclinations, much in the way that Stanley Kubrick did with Dr. Strangelove (1964). Replace that classic’s focus on Cold War brinksmanship with an emphasis on domestic terrorism and authoritarianism, throw in some of the Coens’ The Big Lebowski (1998) absurdism, add Hitchcockian precision in the finale’s chase, and you’ll have an idea what this heady brew is like. But only an idea. As with Anemone, the last film I’ll discuss, Anderson’s movie is a rollercoaster of moods, a vibe piece, that should be experienced first and understood later. 

The Lost Bus

The terrible 2018 California wildfires have already been the subject of various docs, including Ron Howard’s Rebuilding Paradise (2020), but now the heroic deeds of a single bus driver are dramatized by Paul Greengrass, working off Lizzie Johnson’s book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire (2021). Greengrass, who helmed several Bourne films, is also experienced in bringing real events to the screen, as evidenced by his riveting United 93 (2006) and pulse-pounding Captain Phillips (2013). He brings the same level of kinetic energy to The Lost Bus, in which we meet Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), the titular bus driver, who, like Barb in Dead of Winter, is thrust into extraordinary circumstances and must drive a group of stranded schoolchildren through ever-worsening conditions. Here the menace is the result of nature rather than human malice, and Greengrass excels not only at summoning the sense of the scale’s disaster, but its incredibly fast-moving nature. Numerous shots following power lines whipping and snapping in the wind, and sparking the wildlife around them into multiple fires that together form a conflagration, are almost as electrifying as the action sequences involving human characters.

The film’s co-lead is America Ferrera, who plays Mary Ludwig, the school teacher who ends up on the bus with Kevin and must do all she can to keep the children quiet, or at least not panicked, while their circumstances go from palpably bad to worse. McConaughey’s Kevin is a man struggling to keep up with his payments, his parental responsibilities, and his bus maintenance, the archetype of an individual pushed to the brink who finds the inner reserves of strength to deal with the unthinkable. He’s knowledgeable, nimble, and practical; by front-loading the consequences of his flaws, the screenplay wisely avoids canonizing him, though my theater audience couldn’t help but cheering at one of his successes.

Greengrass is to be commended for marshalling and fastidiously orchestrating incredible practical resources and then amplifying them so that they appear even more multitudinous. He is an intensity multiplier. Another directorial strength is his ability to shift between micro-moments of extreme claustrophobia with perspectival macro-scenes. 

As one might expect with a film of this sort, there are occasional moments of obeisance to the disaster movie sub-genre and its attendant cliches, and James Newton Howard’s score is overly subdued. But, just as Kevin manages to keep his bus one step ahead of calamity, Greengrass understands the value of tropes as shorthand and steers clear of over-indulging them. The Lost Bus may not be very original or fully transporting, but it’s an exhilarating ride with a gratifying destination.  

The Smashing Machine

While I’m not intrinsically interested in boxing, I’ve happily watched all the Rocky and Creed films, and can attest that Joyce Carol Oates’ On Boxing remains a fascinating read. This is the power of good sports-related stories: the athleticism becomes a language spoken by the characters that expresses their fundamental drama, so that it becomes inherent to rather than distinct from them. This is something the following films all have in common: Raging Bull (1980), Million Dollar Baby (2004), The Wrestler (2008), The Fighter (2010), Warrior (2011) and Southpaw (2015). Though I didn’t think as highly of The Iron Claw (2023), at least in terms of its assembly, it’s trying to pack the same kind of narrative punch. Perhaps my all-time favorite film that peeks behind the curtains of wrestling is Bennett Miller’s icy Foxcatcher (2014). 

Sadly, Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine doesn’t live up to the standards of the aforementioned movies. The approach here seems to more heavily foreground the aestheticizing of a particular period of time over the human arc unfolding during that time. As a result, the shot choices, the color grading, the photography and editing all handsomely serve the lens of history. Alas, the screenplay doesn’t do nearly as much to get us to care about Mark Kerr and his girlfriend Dawn as, say, the stage design of their home. That’s a problem.

The fault lies with a heavily episodic narrative that alternates between ring matches where we have almost zero knowledge regarding the opponents, and thus witness an impersonal clobber-fest rather than a genuine expression of character, and domestic sequences which reiterate that the relationship between our two leads is codependent and toxic. This does provide some flashy moments of drama for Dwayne Johnson, who disappears into prosthetics and an assumed mantle of perennial, soft-spoken gentility, and for Emily Blunt, who can sell these kinds of upsets with ease. 

As with some of the other movies I mentioned, questions of mental health and substance abuse are also raised, but the depiction of how Kerr manages to persist despite these, as most everything else, is executed from a distance. Moments come and go, and it all just kind of sits there. The narrative seems to adopt the point of view that we should know and care about MMA fighter Mark Kerr because of his struggles and accomplishments. Unfortunately, it presents neither in an engaging manner, so that we’re more witness than vicarious participants. Folks who are in the know suggest seeking out the documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr (2002) for a more coherent and informative look at the athlete, but that seems like a critique of the current movie as much as it is an endorsement of the former one.

Because of its production values and performances, The Smashing Machine isn’t a total loss, but neither is it the rousing, or at the very least thought-provoking, sports melodrama it might have been. I call No Contest.

Anemone

At its core, Ronan Day-Lewis’ filmmaking debut is a straightforward tale of war-related PTSD, alienation, and the sins of the fathers being bequeathed unto the sons, even if by absence rather than observed behavior. This seems especially apt for a screenplay developed by father and son.

Jem (Sean Bean) and Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis) are siblings who haven’t seen each other in twenty years, since Ray walked out on his wife and civilization at large, choosing instead to live alone, like an anemone, burrowed not in the sea floor but deep in the woods. Will the troubles his son is going through lure back into the world? Over the course of several days, redolent with finely textured micro-observations of character and a cavalcade of almost hallucinatory nature imagery, we follow Jem on his journey to understand his brother.  

Bean’s performance is subtle and perfectly calibrated to provide Daniel Day-Lewis with the filmic stage necessary to convey the depth of his torment and the strength–or perhaps buried fragility–of his convictions. Day-Lewis, who hasn’t acted since Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017) is in as fine shape as ever, ranging from subdued to mercurial as befits the moment, and often mesmerizing simply with a quiet look. He is a rare master of both imploded inwardness and exuberant, seam-bursting outwardness, instinctually mediating the tension connecting both of these worlds and styles of performance.

Besides the acting, which includes nice anchoring work by Samantha Morton and Samuel Bottomley, the film is a marvel of craft. Ben Fordesman’s photography is exquisite, Nathan Nugent’s editing is startling, and Bobby Krlic’s dirge-like, mesmerizing score may be one of his finest yet. Like Ray, the film reveals itself in layers, with long silences often acting as the third interlocutor between Jem and Ray. Leaning heavily into a visual-arts style of storytelling, the film may try the patience of film-watchers looking for a conventional narrative or familiar plot beats to provide a sense of forward momentum. That’s one of the beauties of dreams. Blueprinting our emotional landscapes, they scramble our sense of place and time. And like Ray, who has been scrappily surviving only by feeding the fire-logs of his present into the furnace of his past, we cannot ever truly escape them, but only choose by how much they consume us.