Saltburn

Oh no, I haven't ignored Saltburn among the year-end releases. I've just been waiting for Saturday, which is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day.

What This Movie Needs is a Good Autopsy

or

The Talented Mr. Rip-Off

 

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The observation of the rich is a deep well for writers to exploit, whether they're exploitative or not. Whether it's "Brideshead Revisited" or "The Great Gatsby" those of us with lesser means can always have a good chortle at the eccentricities and excesses of the very well-off (who are so well-off they don't give a rip what you think).

 

Saltburn, by the very talented Emerald Fennell (she made Promising Young Woman, which I liked) fits right into that category, while also pinging off a couple other sources that would spoil the movie before we even get started spoiling it good and proper.

It follows the adventures of young Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan—who is becoming dependably reliable for a good performance no matter the movie), freshman at Oxford, who does quite well grade-wise, but is a bit of a dullard, socially. He's on a scholarship. His clothes are cast-offs and second-hand. He's not exciting and not fashionable. Actually a literal outsider, watching the "cool kids" and the "in-crowd" from an envying distance.

Until the day comes when preppy Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) gets a flat in his bicycle tire when he's hurrying to a class. Oliver rolls up and offers young Catton his bicycle to make the time. And Felix is floored by his generosity. And kindness. And takes Oliver "under his wing", as it were. He's taken by Oliver's story about how he grew up in a home of abuse and addiction, and how he got a scholarship by the skin of his teeth in a chance to escape and make a better life for himself.

And at the end of the year, Oliver is stunned by the news that his father has died, and Felix, out of kindness and sympathy, invites Oliver to stay the summer at his family's estate, Saltburn, spend time with his family and maybe heal a little. Oliver gratefully accepts. I mean, who wouldn't?

Saltburn being the country estate of Sir James Catton (Richard E. Grant) and Lady Elspeth Catton (Rosamund Pike)—she being a former fashion model and he, well, he's a "sir." Also there are Lady Elspeth's friend, Pamela (Carey Mulligan, all too briefly)—in the credits, she's listed as "Poor Dear Pamela"—Felix's sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) and their American cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe)—who doesn't like Oliver and probably never will. Lady Elspeth immediately takes to Oliver and Felix's sister eyes him like he's a veal cutlet. 

 

And then, the fun begins.

Oliver, who had previously been something of a staid character, begins a campaign of either seducing family members or blackmailing them, whichever will be the most effective to get them on his side or out of the house. You start to wonder if he has an evil twin that took the bus-trip to Saltburn and replaces him, but, no, it's the same guy. He's just written differently, and if, within 15 minutes of his estate arrival you haven't figured out that Oliver is not who he pretends to be, you don't know many sociopaths. Needless to say, once the first change in behavior happens, nothing else should surprise you no matter how extreme.

It must have been awfully fun to write. However, somewhere along the way "structure" was dispensed with and then just tossed as "getting in the way." That would be in the same way that, once the bodies start dropping, a semi-competent medical autopsy would raise red flags and have the bobbies put an end to the movie right then and there with a proper "What's all this, then, eh?" No amount of "let's-put-one-over-on-the-rich" sympathy can obfuscate the "rules don't apply" cherry-picking of the script. Unless it's some political parable, but even then, the sheer blinkerdliness of what's prioritized makes one think that Fennell just wanted to make it easy on herself.

One can't fault her, however, for the direction (other than her persistence in lingering on things once the points been made). She gets lovely performances out of everyone—Grant's childishness, Pike's obliviousness, and Elordi manages to sell the worldliness/naivete combination—and Keoghan fully commits to the moment, depending on what moment it is. And her shot choices are lovely with a keen eye towards detail and, at times, brutally close in a way that could betray any mis-steps by an actor. There aren't any.

Because the writing of the thing isn't their fault. And it's what keeps Saltburn from being an upper-class melodrama rather than just a pretender.

The Banshees of Inisherin

The Best of Enemies and the Worst of Friends

or

A Tall Tale About Small People Giving Their Neighbors the Finger...

 

Banshee—"hence bean-síghe, plural mná-síghe, she-fairies or women-fairies, credulously supposed by the common people to be so affected to certain families that they are hears to sing mournful lamentations about their houses by night, whenever any of the family labours under a sickness which is to end by death, but no families which are not of an ancient & noble Stock, are believed to be honoured with this fairy privilege"

O'Brien's Irish- English Dictionary

 

The island of Inisherin sits off the West Coast of Ireland, close enough to hear the cannons from the Irish Civil War over the expanse of water that separates the conflict from its citizens (at least in 1923, when the film, The Banshees of Inisherin, takes place). One would think it was a peaceful respite for its denizens, which contain many Irish folk and the animals in their keep and their trades. But, as close as they are to the fighting that couldn't be further from the truth.

Take Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell), for instance. A local milk-man, he has a stable farm with cows, a horse, and a donkey named Jenny on whom he dotes and allows too much domestic privileges. At least in the mind of Pádraic's sister, Siobhan (Kerry Condon), who has shared the farm's duties since their mother and father passed many years ago. Pádraic makes the rounds, then, like clock-work goes to see his neighbor Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) promptly at 2 pm, where they will proceed to O'Riordan's pub to quaff a pint (or three) and Colm entertains with his fiddle. At least, that's the way it's always been for as long as things have been.

Except for today. Pád goes down to Colm's shack of a place and sees him inside smoking. He tells him he'll meet him at the pub later, but Colm doesn't even acknowledge him. He goes home and Siobhan is surprised he's not gone off drinking with Colm. Pád tells her what's transpired and immediately has a question and an answer: "You been rowin'?" "I don't tink we've been rowin'! We was fine yesterday!" "Well, maybe he doesn't like you anymore!" she scoffs. He blusters back to Colm's and sees the door's open, Colm's gone and, well, there he sees him, off in the distance, heading for the pub. By himself.

At O'Riordan's, Pád sees Colm and confronts him. "Sit somewhere else," Colm says without looking at him. It's a clear rejection, and Pád schlumpfs off to an outside table to stew in his beer. Colm finally has enough pity to come out and explain the situation, but it's no comfort. "I just don't like you no more," he puts it bluntly. He finds Pád dull, talking about the minutiae of his life that Colm just isn't interested in...at all...not at this point in his older life. He's concerned now about legacy and his fiddle-playing and Pád's harping on his donkey and his life is just on another plane of existence now...a far lower plane, and as his days get shorter, he has fewer hours to waste.

Pád just doesn't understand. "How am I different from yesterday?" And it being a small isolated island, everyone starts to get involved, even Pád's sister. "He's ALWAYS been dull!" she shouts at Colm. "But ya live on a feckin' island off the coast of Ireland! What are ya hopin' for?" Colm starts to get it from all sides, even the local priest—who's just as prickly and easily offended as the rest of them. Finally, Colm has had it. He draws the red line. He has a pair of sheep shears. "Each day you talk to me, I'll cut a finger off and give it to you." Which is madness; he's a fiddle player and his fiddling is uppermost in his mind right now.

But, Pád just can't...and won't...let it go. He's a man who keeps chewing long past he's swallowed and he's lost in the squirrel-cage of his mind. On a small "feckin'" island what else does he have to do? Alcohol doesn't help with any restraint. And Pád starts to see himself in a different light. "I thought I was one of the nice guys!" he grieves when a confrontation sees Colm cut off index of his fingering hand and throw it at the Súilleabháin door. And he is. But, outside forces are starting to change him and his behavior and his opinion about his behavior.

If only he'd consider the lilies of the field. Or better yet the animals that co-habit with the Inishereens. McDonagh, the director, has them as a silent chorus throughout the movie, doing their jobs and not complicating matters. Like the singular deer in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, they are silent witnesses going about their business while the bi-pedals mess things up. Even the gun-reports from the Civil War don't phase them. I found myself in sympathy with the animals, especially a random shot of goats with one facing the camera as if asking "What the...?"

The Banshees of Inisherin may well have been inspired as a result of the Covid-19 prácás and its long periods of forced isolation and the fevered carousels of people's minds running without brakes (or consideration) without any one around to slow down the ponies. Little things become big issues and they can escalate to the point of irony and beyond to the absurd. Self-fulfilling prophecies and being our own worst enemies should have been among the list of symptoms for humans who either don't think or think too much. Even with disaster looming like some hectoring banshee because we think we know so much, when we don't even know what we don't know.

So, The Banshees of Inisherin is going to stay with me for a good long while—even if it sounds depressing and dark, one should see it for the brilliant performances, particularly of Farrell and Gleeson and Barry Keoghan's turn as the village not-quite-so-idiot ("i'm agin' 'em—wars and soap"), with its O. Henry sense of black irony of how red lines can be as thin as skin and how crossed swords turn quickly to crossed purposes. But, also, how even in the worst circumstances, there can be small moments of grace like a rainbow piercing a cloudy day.

Eternals

You Don't Know Jack

or

The Marvelization of Chloé Zhao!!

 

Jack Kirby was "The King" of comics. That's what Stan Lee called him, anyway—and the two had their disagreements over the years. But, Kirby's influence in the funny-books from the 40's on towards infinity was immense, preceding anything Lee did. Marvel Comics, as we know it, flowed from Kirby's drawing table and legitimately his draftsmanship could be called the "soul" of that comics line, becoming its "house style". I could list the comics series and characters he created, but the list is long and there are other places you could find that information, and this is about a movie version of one of his creations, rather than some obligatory mention of its origins (which I seem to be doing, anyway). 

 

So...briefly...this is that. In the 1970's Kirby left Marvel to go over to the DC comics line—Superman, Batman—and wrote and drew "The New Gods", a series of books joined by a singular history that had nothing to do with Krypton or anything associated with DC's previous output.* The books were canceled at some point (but the characters retained) and Kirby went back to Marvel and did something somewhat similar for them, writing and drawing "The Eternals."

Marvel Studios has now made a film of the Kirby creation, Eternals, and it has a hard duty to fulfill. Kirby basically took the 2001 story-line—he did a comics adaptation of the film that same year—of an extra-terrestrial "god"—called "The Celestials"—who create two off-shoots of primitive life on Earth, homo immortalis ("The Eternals") and homo descendus ("Deviants"). The Eternals defend the nascent humans from the Deviants in order that humanity evolves into a kinder, gentler race where everybody just gets along. It's going to be a long wait, but The Eternals, borrowing Starfleet's Prime Directive, are beholden to not interfering with human history and just defending us mere mortals. That's the gist. The mythos has expanded and gotten wildly complicated since the series debut in 1976.

Eternals doesn't make it any less complicated, but they do put a different spin on it, giving it a couple of Mobius twists that have less to do with the comics and more with basic cosmology and energy equations. That comes up later, but the main thing for movie-viewers to know is that in the year 5000 B.C. ten Eternals come to Earth at the behest of the Celestial Arishem (The Judge) to fight Deviants to protect human evolution. They are (bear with me): Ajak (Salma Hayek) a healer, Ikarus (Richard Madden), with super-strength and heat-vision, Sersi (Gemma Chan) a matter-manipulator, Thena (Angelina Jolie) a warrior who can make any weapon out of cosmic energy, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) who can project energy projectiles, Gilgamesh (Don Lee) the strongest fighter, Druig (Barry Keoghan) who can manipulate minds, Sprite (Lia McHugh) a projectionist, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) who's fast, and Phastos (Bryan Tyree Henry) a weapons and technology expert.

That's a lot of people to introduce in 2 hours, 37 minutes and one can look at them and go "Well, he's Superman and she's Wonder Woman and she's the Flash" and the rest have a lot of left-over powers—in fact, this Marvel movie pays lip-service to Batman's butler and Clark Kent, which is odd (I mean, they're so daaaark!)—but the basics are that over seven millennia they build up a lot of resentment towards the slow evolutionary process of mankind and they have a tendency to rebel and go their own ways. As the movie shows, that's not necessarily a bad thing, and given the proclivity of meat-puppets to do stupid stuff, one could hardly blame an eternal for self-imposed exile or discretionary mind-control.

Now, Eternals writer-director Chloé Zhao just won the Best Director Oscar for Nomadland (deservedly, I thought), and the nuance of that film, the story-telling through images, the lived-in feeling of the performances...and pretty much absent in this movie. Okay, there is some location shooting with battles out in the open instead of a disguised green-screen, but we've seen this before as the Marvel movies have been moving out of the standard New York locations since the second Iron Man movie. Performances are fine, but run the gamut of slipping dialects to "I've-got-to-take-this-garbage-very-seriously" earnestness. One gets the impression that there might be a four to five hour version of the thing because some of the transitions and montage sequences seem a bit disjointed. One says this advisedly as one realizes that the bar for audience satisfaction for these things is an action sequence every ten minutes.

For all the effort, and the obvious attempt to extend the scope of the Marvel Studio output and to make it a more inclusive film—despite stepping on some embarrassing tropes along the way—one has to say that it is considerably less than an involving experience. For all the cosmology bandied about (and it's about 5% of the "woo-woo" Kirby was capable of conveying) it comes down to trying to sell the concept that our Pale Blue Dot amounts to a hill of beans in a limitless, roiling expanse of space-time. I wasn't buying it, even if I was supposed to be rooting for Our Team. The motivations are too random and unearned...or even very well articulated. Given what has happened previously in the MCEU, I suspect that this is all some positioning of structural rebar for a bigger story to be revealed later throughout "Phase IV" of the studio's game-plan. But, at this point, I'm searching for a reason to care and I simply don't.

* Kirby's ink-stained fingerprints are all over comic-based movies—I mean, Thor, Hulk, Cap'—but the first time one of his wholly creator-acknowledged creations was realized on-screen was the character Steppenwolf in Justice League (and also Darkseid, DeSaad and Granny Goodness in Zack Snyder's Justice League).