The Power of the Dog

Gloves Off

or

"Well, Well...I Wonder What Little Lady Made This?"
 

Jane Campion knows her Westerns. You can tell that with an opening shot of The Power of the Dog, tracking along the windows inside a house, the interior black, but the outside bright with sunlight, focusing on the outsider walking along parallel to the side of the house, but not a part of it, echoing John Ford and echoing The Searchers, but in her own way.

 

Like Ford, she will play with light and shadow in her western, even depending on it for a visual motif that will form a sub-text in the film, and she will pay particular attention to landscapes that separate people and must be conquered if anything resembling civilization is to take root in that wilderness. Ford's westerns were all about that and the land he photographed was itself a character in that/those stories, not merely a back-drop, not location-for-location's sake. 

 

But, that's what she takes from Ford and goes her own, entirely different way, leaving him and the dream of civilization in the dust. For Campion, the world-building of westerns is as much a myth as the westerns themselves. Civilization is about what people decide to agree on, and if the point of rugged individualists is to play by their rules, there won't be much agreement. Or very little civil.

The man in the window is Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), who, with his brother George (Jesse Plemons) is part of a well-to-do family with a cattle ranch in 1925 Montana. Both brothers—"Romulus and Remus" Phil calls them—are college educated with George knowing the law and Phil the classics of English literature. But, the two couldn't be more different, from each other and their educations. Phil is rough in speech and manner and does most of the work around the ranch, while George is sensitive and does the paper-work. Where Phil is coarse and brutal, George is quiet and empathetic.

They've been working the ranch for a long time, with George leavening the coarseness and conflicts the acerbic Phil causes in whatever he does. At the end of their cattle drive, the crew stops into an inn run by Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) for drinks and chow. They're served by Rose's son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who is slight, effeminate, and shy. Peter becomes an easy target for Phil's malice, making fun of everything the boy does, including using the artistic center-pieces that Peter has meticulously created to light his cigarette. Rose breaks down over this and George tries to apologize, since Phil wouldn't think of it, nor would he were it suggested to him.

But, this starts a series of events that drives a wedge between Phil and George, starting with the gentler brother marrying the Gordon woman—Phil considers her (as he says to her face) "a cheap schemer" only after the family money, and once she sells the inn and moves to the Burbank ranch-house, he begins a campaign of intimidation and hostility towards her that drives her to drink—a habit that she had previously disdained. George has paid for Peter to go away to college, but when he comes back, he finds his mother a wreck, and an open hostility against him from the cowboys working the ranch.

Campion breaks with Ford in the portrayal of women as revered stabilizers in the wilds of the West—Rose doesn't have the strength to take command and be the influence that Ford's women are in the isolation of the prairie—and Phil's cunning brute is too entrenched in his "man's world" view to allow any sort of control out of his grasp. The presence of a woman is just too intrusive to his staked-out territory.

But it's more complicated than that. And to say anything more would be to take away some complexities and motivations that might spoil the bumps and shocks that the movie has in store and could ruin its journey for audiences. Let's just say this: Campion has made a Western in locale (and borrowed some tropes from the genre), but she has other influences as well, taken from psychological thrillers and even thrown a shade of Hitchcock, making The Power of the Dog a definite hyphenate. It starts out as one thing—which may make some reconsider if they want to watch something that dark—and eventually changes into something else—something much darker.

But, one cannot parse just how beautiful The Power of the Dog is. Campion, working with cinematographer Ari Wegner, has created images of vistas and landscapes that at times take the breath away, sometimes mimicking iconic shots from previous Westerns, at times taking their cue (as in the shot above) from the paintings of Frederic Remington—as previous directors had done. Sometimes you just want to hold on an image before it inevitably movies on, wondering at how it managed to be lit by a single match, or how it captures the troubling disquiet of twilight.

It's a good watch, that will inspire questions and cast a refraction on past examples of the Western—whether the winning of the West wasn't as much a loss, and whether in bringing European culture to the frontier, we didn't drag along something horrible in the process, something that only seemed tame, in our taming of the frontier.

Last Night in Soho

Killing Two Birds with One Stone

or

Who Are you Wearing?

 

Edgar Wright's new film, Last Night in Soho, is his first horror/thriller film where the purpose isn't to make fun of them, where the emphasis is on the disorientation and not the whimsy (but don't worry, there are a lot of cheeky touches to it).

 

In it, a mousy fashion-design student, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie—from Jojo Rabbit) moves to the big city of London to attend classes and achieve her goals of becoming au courant. But, as her grandmother (Rita Tushingham !!) warns her "London can be a lot." 

 

That it can be. Even in one time-line. Eloise has a rough first day, what with meeting her room-mate and a coven of snarky "mean girls" who occupy her dorm. It's tough on Eloise, who misses her Mum (she'd committed suicide when Eloise was a girl, but kept seeing images of her in the mirror back home). Finally, she decides to rent a room in Soho from Mrs. Collins (Diana Rigg !!) who's been there forever and wouldn't think of selling the place—"Too many memories".  That should have been put in the advert.

Eloise loves the place, seeing as she's obsessed with the 1960's. She's constantly spinning the old EP's—traveling, she takes an over-loaded suitcase and a record-player—and her fashion-sense runs to the eye-popping 60's. It's the place she'd most like to go-go. But be careful what you're wishin' and hopin' for. She goes to sleep with the neon buzz of the "Soho" sign right outside her window, and with the R.E.M blink of an eye, she finds herself back there, to find a world still fruging and twisting and swinging.

There's one little hitch, though. When she looks in the mirror—or any reflective surface—she sees somebody else's reflection, a woman who turns out to be named Alexandra (Anya Taylor-Joy)—"Call me Sandy"—an aspiring singer-dancer who wants to be the "next Cilla Black." Eloise and Sandy are tied to each other as they roam around the "Cafe de Paris" separated only by a silvered plate of glass, as Eloise watches her make her way through the club, fending off would-be suitors until finally latching on to Jack (Matt Smith), the loungiest of lounge-lizards, who promises to get her into "the business."

But, as Eloise witnesses whenever she goes to sleep, the path of success is littered with slimy, handsy men making promises and repeated pick-up lines that end up in disappointment and being used. As the old saying goes "nostalgia isn't what it used to be" and Eloise finds these visions only adding to her "outsider" stress and fears about life in the big city. Could Alexandra's cautionary tale be something that Eloise is inextricably tied to? And when that tale leads to murder is there anything she can do from being drawn into that fate?

Wright's ability to use effects and imagery are magical here—at times, in a moment's flash, Alexandra becomes Eloise and vice versa—so, one has to keep on one's toes, and the soundtrack is filled with a British Invasion of hits commenting slyly on the action going on-screen. The relationship between the two women is the strongest of the ones on-screen and Wright's tricks to achieve the doppel-ganging leave you utterly convinced, as things get darker and darker and darker.

One wishes the ingenuity required to pull it off extended to the screenplay. Oh, there are clever touches in the details throughout, and one sits on the edge of one's seat, anticipating the next twist. But, the longer the film goes, the more one realizes that time is slipping away, and Last Night in Soho feels longer than it's less than 2 hour running time would suggest—lately I've been seeing things with much longer lengths that seemed to zip by far more quickly. Perhaps there are one or two too many red herrings crowding the narrative—at one point, I was losing any sympathy for Eloise when a "what is she concentrating on them for" question crept in and lodged in my skull. Ultimately, it's merely a diversion, although it's rather short-lived (but then what do you expect in a thriller/horror film?).

But, it put enough doubt in my mind to make me question exactly what Wright was trying to say in this movie. Horror films, have—at their slimy core—some caution, some elemental lesson, that they're preaching in the most ghastly way. Is Last Night in Soho a plea to live in the moment? That seeking revenge against one's oppressors is a fool-hardy act? That victims can be just as dangerous as the ones who attack? Lord, I hope not. I just wish the intellect that kept the threads of who's who had been used to clearly say what's what. I was disappointed and somewhat appalled.

Jojo Rabbit

Dann Sind Wir Helden
or
"Gesundheit" (Definitely Not a Good Time to Be a Nazi...)

Ah, satire.

You can't win with it. There are going to be people who say it goes too far and there are going to be people who say it trivializes horror and injustice and there are going to be people who say it doesn't go far enough.

Which means that it's pissing people off and that's just right. It's doing its job. Autocrats of all stripes do not like satire. And they won't like New Zealand director Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit, either. 

That's alright. Autocrats don't deserve to have a good time.

Waititi might be new to some, his most popular movie being Thor: Ragnarok, which brought a breath of fresh jovial air to the most atrophied of the Marvel Universe series, but his earlier works, Boy, What We Do in the Shadows, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople showed an anarchic sense of comedy and film-making that was fun, heart-warming, and refreshing. He makes darn fine films, even if the silliness in them might discourage one from thinking so.

But, Waititi's free-form adaptation of the first half of New Zealand author Christine Leunens' "Caging Skies" is one of those approaches where to go all out silly might be the antidote to a story that is, on the face of it, about cruelty, inhumanity, and the depths of evil that human beings and a complacent society can sink into.

"I am Jojo Betzler. I am 10 years old...today, I will become a man." That traditional line of a Bar Mitzvah is turned on its head, as Johannes (Roman Griffin Davis) is dressing for his first day on his way to becoming a man, thanks to a camp to train Hitler Youth, run by Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell). It is a dream of the scrawny young Jojo to do well at the camp for his ultimate dream is to be made part of the honorary guard to his hero, Adolph Hitler (Taika Waititi) himself. It should be a shoe-in, as the Fuehrer is already an imaginary friend of Jojo ("Heil me, man!") appearing in times of confusion and distress to provide simple advice that a 10 year old boy might understand ("People used to say a lot of nasty things about me: 'Oh, this guy's a lunatic' 'Oh, look at that psycho, he's going to get us all killed!'").

Johannes lives with his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) who is skeptical of his devotion to Nazism while maintaining a sunny disposition, despite her husband being missing from the household. Johannes thinks he's fighting for the Nazis in Africa, but his Mom remains mum.

The Hitlerjugend Camp is run—if that is the term—by Klenzendorf, a hard-drinking, not very competent soldier who has clearly been given an assignment he can't screw up, let alone harm the floundering war effort. He barks the rhetoric with a slightly cynical weariness, wears the uniform not too nattily (while secretly designing something a little flashier if highly unregulation), knows he's been benched from anything important, but is a good little soldier who does his duty ("Even though we're losing the war, everything seems to be going fine...").

Jojo does not have an easy time with the prospective Hitlerjugend. He can salute precisely, has a force-fed hatred of the Jews (of whom he knows nothing about and who take on mythic properties), but even the worst of best intentions does not necessarily translate to actions. When he is picked out to kill a rabbit by strangulation, he can't do it, and is mocked mercilessly by the trainers and his fellow acolytes, with a new name pointing out his weakness—"Jojo Rabbit".

Jojo runs away to the woods is consoled by his pal, Adolph. So much so, that, his brio renewed, he charges back to the camp in the middle of a grenade training class...

...and manages to blow himself up.

Needless to say, grenade training is suspended for the day and Klenzendorf is reprimanded and given a dressing-down by Jojo's mother, who puts Jojo's further training in Klenzendorf's hands, but, this time, but now restricted to the Hitler Youth headquarters.

Jojo spends some time in hospital and is distressed that his face is scarred up, making him look less Aryan and therefore "monstrous," making him feel further ostracized from his Nazi countrymen.

Jojo learns, though, to be independent because his mother is spending less time at home (she is secretly working for the resistance). But, he's also home alone more than usual. He begins to hear odd noises in the house, coming from within the house. A furtive investigation finds that, hidden in a storage section of his late sister's room, is a teen-aged girl named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie). Jojo takes an immediate dislike to her because 1) he's scared of her, 2) she's a girl, and 3) she's in his house and 4) she's Jewish.

Elsa takes advantage of his confused terror, keeping him quiet about her presence—he and his Mom will be arrested, too, of course, for hiding her. So, an uneasy pact must be made between Jojo, Nazi-in-training, and "a Jew"—who has a name, a personality, and a vague resemblance to his sister. In the waning days of the war, with everything "going fine," Jojo must deal with his own "otherness" and be in close proximity to the most wanted "other" in his blighted country.

Heavy stuff. And the monstrousness and tragedy that is the yin and yang of the Nazi machinery and those who are caught up in it is not given short shrift in Jojo Rabbit. Terrible things happen and the pain and ache and villainy of it is made apparent and communicated appropriately.

But, despite this, the movie, generally, is funny as Hell.

Partially, it's because Jojo is a kid and a mass of misinformation, schadenfreude, and the inability to live up to the rhetoric. Combine that with the lampooning of Nazi doctrine where there is no room for doubt despite ample evidence to the contrary surrounding you and you have, not so much a comedy of errors as a comedy of dogma.

And therein the front of satire lies. Everything you know is wrong, yet you march on in the same goose-step anyway even if it's through a mine-field of your own making. Fortunately, the movie spends a great deal of time mocking the tenets of Nazism leading to such observations as Jojo's friend telling him: "It's not a good time to be a Nazi. Our only friends are the Japanese—and just between you and me, they don't look very Aryan." It may be a little UN-PC, but it's to the point. If it had been merely this, it would not be very successful. But, as it involves a change of heart and a valuable learning experience on the part of the protagonist, it's actually valuable and sweet.

And Hitler has never been funnier.