Mass (2021)

Thoughts and Prayers/Tantrums and Stares

or

My Truth and Reconciliation with Andre

Everybody's nervous. Judy (Breeda Wool), the administrator of the Episcopal Church is over-thinking and over-fretting. Should there be refreshments? She has too much. How should the chairs be positioned? Is the table alright? Will the noise from the church above—music lessons, choir practice—be a distraction? How about the decorations? Too much? She wants to help, but perhaps too much. Things are the way they are, and she's reassured by the social worker (Michelle N. Carter) that everything's fine. It will be fine. Don't change anything. It is what it is. They're ready. After all this time, they're ready.

 

The place may be ready, but not the participants. At this stage of the game, they all have doubts. And fears. Oh, the legalities have been taken care of. Whatever is said, can't be used in court against any of the parties; all those potentialities have been waived and agreed to by all. But, do they want to do it? Still? After all this time? What can be gained (after so much loss)? What is the point of it?

It's probably Richard (Reed Birney), who has insisted on the legalities. He seems the most defensive, the most guarded, and, right off the bat, indicates that he has some place he's going to have to go. His wife, Linda (Ann Dowd), however, is anything but. She has brought flowers for the others, the only one not empty-handed. And she is solicitous, forthcoming, open where Richard is reserved. She is the least reticent of them all and seems to be the one most in need.

The others are the Perrys, Gail (Martha Plimpton) and Jay (Jason Isaacs), middle-class (by the looks of it) and, each with an agenda but not sure how they'd get there. They are angry, but they've been angry for years, and they've tamped down their bitterness and it's come to this. Now, maybe they'll get answers. Answers to why their son is dead from a school shooting. Why Richard and Linda's son shot him.

Mass, the first film by actor-writer-director Fran Kranz, couldn't be more simple: four people in a room trying to figure out what happened, and trying to figure out each other. The way to negotiate that mine-field and get answers (if they can be found or understood). Four people, two couples, facing each other and the event that they share. It's as claustrophobic as could be and Kranz, in that limited space, has as much room to maneuver as he would if he were filming a court-room scene—the drama is on the faces and the choices he makes in framing, cutting have to be precise and pointed.

Fortunately, he has four extraordinary actors doing exceptional work; Birney, Dowd, Plimpton and Isaacs are photographed from the waist up, due to that table, and there is no place to hide, anything false will be betrayed by the camera. And every hesitation, eye-flick, every avoidance is as detectable to us as it is to the participants. We get to see the redness come into the eyes or the scowl deepen. There is no escape from the concentration of the gaze as they search for some meaning to it all, search for the beginnings of it, try to explain it, and relive it in all its horror and implications. They've been dealing with it for years. Now, they have to learn to live with it and each other.

It is edge-of-your-seat drama, but without histrionics and melodrama, and the tension already built in to the setting and the situation. It is slowly uncoiling the past, confronting mistakes and missteps, signs ignored or just fallen through the cracks, deciding the blame if blame can be found, and trying to make sense of senseless acts. There is no politics here, science is brought up but fails, and, in the end, nothing will change, the dead can't be brought back, but a future might be salvaged. To what end?

The performances are extraordinary and may be the best ensemble work of the year, each actor allowed their run through the gauntlet, but it's the cumulative effect that your remember. And you'd have to be made of stone to make it through the movie without tears being shed. For everybody.

The Death of Stalin

Dr. Strangebedfellows: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Bury the Politburo
or
"How Can You Run and Plot at the Same Time?"

"The Death of Stalin is aimed at inciting hatred and enmity, violating the dignity of the Russian (Soviet) people, promoting ethnic and social inferiority, which points to the movie’s extremist nature. We are confident that the movie was made to distort our country’s past so that the thought of the 1950s Soviet Union makes people feel only terror and disgust."

Petition from the Russian Cultural Ministry

"[a] western plot to destabilise Russia by causing rifts in society"

Public Council of the Russian Ministry of Culture

Oh, those poor Russkies.  They finagle our elections, annex territories, disrupt social media, and conspire with tyrants, while bagging as many rubles for themselves in their so-called "everybody-is-equal" political system. 

But, criticize them and they bleat like sheep.

Never mind that the director has been making fun of the British and Americans with his past work—like In the Loop and "Veep"—that no doubt cheers them and think are a laugh riot. But, turn the same satirical eye against them and it's a plot to "destabilise" Russia. As if they needed any help doing that themselves.

In a rather reflective "coalition of the willing" The Death of Stalin combines French, British and American forces; it started as a french comic book, and is a combination of Brit and Yank talents to bring it to the screen. Maybe the Culture Ministry feels that's a little too much attacking from the same forces. Satire does raise hackles. However, the satire of In the Loop and "Veep" produced an echoing silence (tacit approval?) while The Death of Stalin creates howls of protest and conspiracy concerns. What's good for the goose is not always good for the self-satisfied gander. 

So, what's causing the fuss? The Death of Stalin looks at the scrambling done by the prominent members of the Politburo following Stalin's death by a cerebral hemorrhage on March 5, 1953.

The events begin when Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) requests a recording of a performance he'd heard on Radio Moscow that night. Unfortunately, when the live concert was broadcast, a recording was not made—but one does not disappoint Stalin (one might get shot). So, a second impromptu concert is staged, paying off the piano soloist (Olga Kurylenko), to repeat the performance and rousting a replacement conductor from his bed, after the original one suffers a debilitating accident while fainting at the prospect of any potential consequences. The pianist includes a note with the recording, deriding the Premier, whose reaction (either from the note or the poor rushed recording) prompts his stroke. The guards outside his door hear him collapse, but, having orders not to disturb his sleep under penalty of death, do nothing but hold their post.

The next morning, the dacha housemaid enters the room and finds Stalin unconscious on the floor. Phone calls are made—not to any "good" doctors as many of them have been purged—but to the senior officials under Stalin. They include Georgy Malenkox (Jeffrey Tambor)—who has been rumored to be replaced (and killed) in Stalin's plans, Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale), the security director of the secret police, the NKVD, and Moscow Party Leader Nikita Krushchev (Steve Buscemi), who is awakened by the news and is so exercised about the event that he arrives at the dacha in pants and pajamas. Beria manages to get there first, finds the body and searches for the key to Stalin's files and manages to smuggle some out. Before Krushchev and Lazar Kaganovich (Dermot Crowley) can arrive, Beria convinces Malenkov that he should be the next Premier, knowing that he's weak and easily influenced. When Krushchev and Kaganovich enter the room, Beria and Krushchev begin to butt heads over who can out-blackmail the other to gain a stronger footing.

But, one should never count their hens. When Stalin is moved by the four (with the help of Anastas Mikoyan (Paul Whitehouse) and Nikolai Buganin (Paul Chahidi) to his bed and examined by the best doctors not currently in prison or a gulag, it looks like the Premier might make a recovery, and the group returns to the fawning postures that (of course) they hope for a full recovery and everything will stay just the same—until Stalin actually dies and they return to dividing the spoils. No sooner do Beria and Krushchev curry favor with Stalin's daughter Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough) while marginalizing his drunken son Vasily (Rupert Friend) and leave the premier's quarters, that the NKVD move in and evacuate the building, take over all the possessions and furnishings and murder any witnesses.

Once Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) is brought on board (Beria has released his wife from prison where she was imprisoned for supposedly being anti-Stalinist), the group can start having rather tentative meetings and votes on how to proceed—everyone eyes each other to see how the other will vote, hands tentatively half-raised before committing—and is decided that Comrade Krushchev should be kept busy planning the late Premier's funeral...where the personal positioning for power can really move into full swing.

The political fandango is based (advisedly) on true events, with comedic license for interpolations. To see the power elite of Moscow at their most insecure, even while the stakes are life-changing is a hilarious dance of desperation that shows how petty and craven the instincts of those in power can be displayed (even before Twitter). That's what satire does—expose the frailties, whether in people, in systems, in governments, and how the best-laid plans have beach-like foundations. It's a release valve for the toxic stress involved in the absurdities of flawed circumstances. But, the only way to see the humor of it is to admit the flaws. To not do so runs the risks of making the same mistakes over and over...which really is the height of both tragedy, as well as comedy, comrade.

Fury (2014)

Are you Saved?
or
"Here I Am; Send Me"

There is no good day in war, just like there's no good day in Hell. "Good" days are only for the immature and the vain-glorious. Or for those who merely observe and report. "The only glory in war is surviving, if you know what I mean" wrote Samuel Fuller in his screenplay of The Big Red One. There are no gradations in the conditions of war. It's all bad. But if you want the worst days, look to the end of a war, where communal desperation mixes in with the carnage and the nearly complete rubble of what used to be civilization. No holds are barred. No one is safe. It comes down to numbers and bodies, and the second of our 20th Century "world wars" was emblematic of that, in all theaters of combat, but, most desperately, in the battles taking place in the center of what was to be an aborted "Thousand Year Reich," Hitler's Germany. They put helmets on kids and told them to do their duty for the fatherland, a Children's Crusade, and as successful as all the others. The last sacrifice in war is always the future. And that is the world of David Ayer's' new film, titled simply Fury.

Ayer's last movie (of note—in between he did an Arnold Schwarzenegger DEA movie, as long as we're talking about desperation—was the run-and-shoot End of Watch about L.A. cops in a drug war-zone. The camera-work has settled down and become more professional and traditional, but the shooting only intensifies in Fury, his film about a WWII tank platoon during the final stages of World War II.

The Allies have made their way to Germany and Hitler is down to using children as fighters. But, they're only a few years younger than the grizzled vets who have been years at war. The 66th Armor Division is limping along amid the rubble of battles and one Sherman Tank, nicknamed "Fury" by its crew (Brad Pitt in command, Shia Labeouf, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal) who have been together since North Africa, has just lost their co-pilot/bow-gunner "Red" in the last battle—there are parts of him still in the tank when they roll into a bivouac. The men are exhausted and Sgt. Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Pitt) is barely keeping it together. So, it's not good news when he gets a new gunner/driver straight out of the typing pool (Logan Lerman).

Life inside a tank

This is just another bad piece of news for Collier who comes by his name "Wardaddy" quite literally. Things are already going badly and he gets a raw recruit, barely better than the kids Hitler is sending out, to work with the men he has diligently tried to keep alive (so that they can do the same for him) since Tunisia, and he has to employ the toughest of tough love to whip him into (or bend him out of) fighting shape. It's Blood n' Guts 101 and it would seem like hazing if it weren't a matter of life and death. The kid learns all too quickly the "simple math" (as Collier calls it) of combat—"You kill him or he kills you"—and pushes him beyond the tolerances of physicality and morality, of body and soul, and into the Practical and the Now.

Pretty typical war movie stuff. The tank crew is ethnically diverse, besides Pitt's father-figure and the waif, there's a bible-thumper (who is presented not ironically or cheaply and played by La Beouf in one of his better performances), an ethnic type (Latino division) and an "okie"-type, the kind of diversity (for the time) that represents the melting pot that is America, in visual contrast to the uniformly blonde soldiers of the Nazi forces. Where the American crews are rag-tag, the Nazi soldiers are tightly grouped, and more often than not faceless and indistinguishable from one another.

What's different is the savagery and conditions. Yes, the tank-crew is typical, but their behavior is anything but—they're all exhausted and in various shades of stunned PTSD as walking and rolling wounded. The guns spew out tracers that look like they've zapped out of a "Star Wars" movie and the casualties are quick and final—limbs and heads are vaporized in an instant by rocketing shells, and not contemplated or mourned—they just are and then are not. And that "simple math" is pretty basic—you either shoot an enemy soldier or you stab him or you club him, just so long as he is dead, dead, dead. Then you shoot them again, just to make sure. "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.." blah blah blah.  

But he also never won it on a slow learning curve, either. And "Wardaddy" takes the clerk under his wing...and beats him with it. It's survival out there (if you're lucky) and stragglers usually need to be buried. Or, as in one vivid image from the film, they're crushed into the mud until they're indistinguishable from just another stretch of bad road. If the kid doesn't learn—and learn fast—he'll be the weakest track in the tread and every member of the crew will die for his hesitancy. 

One thing that distinguishes Fury from most war-movies (and it checks off very very many of the tropes from the list) is its sense of history: there is none.   Nobody talks about home. Nobody talks about what they're going to do after the war. This is an existential war movie. These guys are living in the moment, because, for all their efforts to survive, they've enough experience to know it is unlikely. The only time "Wardaddy" reveals anything beyond the Here and the Now is when he pulls out a grenade container to reveal that it contains eggs that he has commandeered from a farm. There was enough fore-thought to think that he may use them someday.

But, that's it. There are very few war films that don't sentimentalize the state with the hope of a future. Fury is one of a handful that is pure nihilism and reflects the grunt's perspective of being there in a permanent temporary basis.