Godzilla: King of the Monsters

“Godzilla: King of the Monsters” has a sense of wonder. After I left the screening late at night and emerged onto a dark city street at nearly one a.m., I wanted to look up rather than straight ahead, just in case Ghidorah the three-headed dragon or Rodan the giant pterodactyl came screaming down from the clouds. That's not the same thing as saying this is a perfect movie. It's far from that. But its errors fall mainly under the heading of failing to get out of its own way, and its imperfections are compensated by magnificence. 

Directed and cowritten by Michael Dougherty ("Krampus"), the movie follows on the heels of the 2014 "Godzilla" and the 2017 "Kong: Skull Island." It's conceived as part of a shamelessly Marvel-styled "shared cinematic universe" of stories that interlink and gradually build towards a series of peaks (the first of which is 2020's "Godzilla vs. Kong"). The human heroes are part of a top-secret project called the Monarch Initiative. This mythology visualizes Godzilla and the other giant monsters made famous by Toho studios, including Ghidorah, Rodan, Mothra, and King Kong (an American creation folded into that universe) as part of an ancient ecosystem of long-hibernating giant monsters that predate the dinosaurs. They can travel from one part of the globe to the other quickly via tunnels through the center of the planet (this is what's known as "Hollow Earth theory"). They are emerging now  in response to humanity's despoiling of the environment through atomic testing, nuclear and chemical waste-dumping, mountaintop demolition mining, and other practices that amount to assaults on Mother Earth.

This Hollywood-financed American series is an internationalization of original Toho Studios-produced Godzilla pictures, with a correspondingly international cast, all representing different takes on the monster problem, such as it is. There are appearances by characters from the 2014 film, including a couple of monster specialists played by Ken Wantanabe and Sally Hawkins, but the main characters are a fractured nuclear family, consisting of two Monarch project scientists, Doctors Mark and Emma Russell (Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga) and their teenage daughter Madison ("Stranger Things" star Millie Bobbie Brown). They lost the fourth member of their family, Madison's older brother, five years earlier during Godzilla's battle with the MUTOs in San Francisco, and the parents ultimately separated. It soon becomes clear that the split was equally due to grief and a philosophical disagreement over how to deal with Godzilla and his ilk—the father thinks they should all be exterminated, while mom believes they can be manipulated through a special sonar device that mimics the dynamics of whale songs. 

At least that's our impression of the mother, but everyone in the family (indeed everyone on the planet, probably) is dealing with the monster problem in their own emotional way, and some of them are secretly or not-so-secretly destructive. The openly destructive contingent is defined by Charles Dance's Colonel Alan Jonah, a former British Special Forces veteran turned eco-terrorist who seems to believe that the monsters are punishment for humanity's sins against the environment and is working to awaken as many of the hibernating beasts as possible, the better to hasten the thinning of the human herd. As revealed early in the film (as well as in all the teasers and trailers), Emma is on board with Jonah's take on things, and actively participates in waking up the beasts—including Ghidorah, a lightning-spitting dragon who represents the only serious threat to Godzilla's position as the Hollow Earth's apex predator. 

One of the fascinations of this film is the way it treats the monsters as outward manifestations of the characters' personal issues, at times like enormous dopplegangers or golems representing their grief, trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder. But in addition to the individual grief being experienced by the characters, "King of the Monsters" is suffused with grief for what might be the impending death of human civilization itself, which according to real scientists is a certainty if we don't turn our environmental act around over the next hundred years or so. Jonah and Emma are quite explicit (too explicit; this is a talky film when it's not blowing stuff up) in their belief that the human species has, via inattention and greed, become bystanders in the drama of its own extinction—and that we might as well go ahead and speed things up with a little help from Godzilla, Ghidorah and company, since that's what the planet itself needs, and what humans deserve. 

Emma even compares human civilization to a virus, and the monsters to a "fever" that could wipe most of it out and restore biological balance. A sort of compacted TED Talk in the middle of the film even reveals that once the monsters have finished fighting, and depart the ruins of a city, the radiation they leave behind acts as a biological accelerant, activating the rapid growth of plant and animal life that all the concrete, glass and steel once restrained or destroyed.

But at what price balance? That's the big question, the Thanos of it all. The great Ghidorah—frozen in a wall of ice in deep underground in an Antarctica-based Monarch facility, and looking like the biggest, baddest art installation of all time—is this film's equivalent of the extinction-level threat, the fever bomb who's fated to burn through the human virus. Dougherty and his army of designers and special effects people do a great job of building up Ghidorah as if he (it?) is an ancient and unstoppable evil force whose very name fills the human heart with dread, even envisioning him as a Voldemort-like threat, the dragon whose name can't be spoken (he's also called Monster Zero, shades of Patient Zero) and whose image must be distorted, because to picture him exactly is to summon him. (A selection of past artwork allegedly depicting Ghidorah includes William Blake's painting "The Great Red Dragon and Woman Clothed in Sun," also a fixture in Hannibal Lecter stories). 

Gareth Edwards' franchise'-starting "Godzilla" was a huge International hit, but divided viewers because of its flat, action figure-like characterizations, its meticulous, almost "Jaws"-like unveiling of Godzilla and the two Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Objects (MUTOs) that he ended up fighting, and its relative dearth of actual Godzilla footage (about seven minutes). The movie also placed the big fella within the larger ecosystem of wolves and snakes and birds and such. It contained more nature footage than you expected to see in a city-stomping kaiju epic, to the point where you half-expected Terrence Malick shots of honey-tinted fields and perhaps a narration by Godzilla ("Fire...water...why do you wrestle inside me?"). There were fears (among those who loved the original) and hopes (among people who hated it) that future movies would offer less philosophizing and atmospheric indulgences and more footage of giant monsters beating the tar out of each other, and the Vietnam-era period piece "Kong: Skull Island" delivered plenty, pitting the now super-sized ape against a series of Lovecraftian giants that seemed to be half-insect, half-demon, and making sure that the story didn't go five minutes without a burst of violent spectacle. 

"King of the Monsters" tries to blend the two approaches, not always successfully, and it suffers mightily from its inability to trust the audience to understand both the substance and implications of the action that it presents so boldly and intelligently onscreen. This movie is a succession of miracles and cursed disasters, wheeled or unfurled onscreen with dazzling showmanship and plenty of overscaled grace notes, from the way Rodan chases and catches an F-14 fighter jet and bits off its nose cone like a hawk beheading a sparrow, to the way Ghidorah's three heads talk and whisper to each other, and at times even abuse each other, like the Three Stooges treating slaps as the continuation of conversation. (The middle head is Moe, the other two are Larry and Curly.) The constant need to summarize and annotate every significant moment grows wearisome (it's like being stuck watching a sporting event with a couple of sportscasters who don't know when to shut up) but at the level of image, sound and music, this is a frequently brilliant film: simultaneously real science fiction that earnestly grapples with the ideas it presents, and a religious picture about faith and spirituality, sin and redemption, where monsters die for our sins so that humankind won't have to. 

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An Ode to Mothra, Co-kaiju of Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Ma

The thrills come extra cheap and late in Tate Taylor’s “Ma,” a horror movie torn between campiness and compassion, all while an Oscar-winning actress struggles to hold it together. It's the initial ambition of the story that’s likely to keep you in your seat, as Octavia Spencer adds a wicked smile to her maternal persona and treats the mammy archetype as a predator. But as great as that all sounds, the film proves to be more shallow than its edgy premise and subsequent themes promise. 

The first red flag about “Ma” is that it’s dreadfully boring for the first hour of its 90-minute running time. Usually there’s something at the beginning of a horror movie to bookend its overall terror, but Taylor and Scotty Landes’ script plays it mighty vanilla by focusing on high school-age Maggie (Diana Silvers of “Booksmart”) and her mother Erica (Juliette Lewis) settling into the Ohio town her mother grew up in. It immediately feels like the wrong narrative focus, offering a bland idea of how a decent new kid could be corrupted by the schoolmates who wield their popularity like they're the one-percent, or how returning home can be embarrassingly painful, like when Erica runs into her classmate Ben (Luke Evans) and his friend Mercedes (Missi Pyle). 

Octavia Spencer’s Sue Ann randomly pops into the lives of Maggie and her new friends, as a passerby outside a liquor store who agrees to buy them booze. She's a wolf in vet clinic scrubs and a Dorothy Hamill haircut, and wins their respect quickly, sharing her own fondness for drinking in the same rock quarry they're going to. But not long after, "Ma" enacts one of its unforgivable caveats: the youngsters don’t deduce that when a cop arrives later to break up their party, maybe it was Sue Ann who reported them. It's not the last time "Ma" has a laziness for its teen writing, and that lack of honesty rots at the screenplay: you don't buy that a cavalcade of teens would find it cool to hang out in a random woman's basement, or that pissed-off adults wouldn't just stop the movie's villain by means of "Local Woman Charged with Hosting Underage Alcohol Party" news headlines.

In one of Taylor’s cheapest methods to show that danger is coming, the narrative simply expands to show Ma’s point of view, which largely concerns her quiet life as a vet (in which she's often yelled at by her crotchety boss, played by Allison Janney). Ma stalks Facebook, and then stares into space. We’re supposed to feel uneasy about these inserts, especially as they flash back to when she was in high school, when she was unaware of the traumatizing bullying her classmates put her through. But these prove to be over-baked moments, one that would defeat a performer not of Spencer's fortitude. Taylor just can't find that nuance between creating pity while also making everything unsettling. 

Soon enough, the teens treat Sue Ann like their servant, and a novelty: they rename her "Ma," and throw loud parties in her basement while she serves up shots. An emotional, tragic note is hit: these scenes give Sue Ann the opportunity to experience popularity she never had in high school, and she finds a relevancy and excitement in being needed. It’s mildly amusing, too, to see her teasing her new young friends, or getting down to "Funky Town." But then Ma starts to push boundaries, like when she pops up on campus and asks them to come over and party on a school day. She's too much for these kids, but she's also persistent.

Spencer paints her monster with splashes of recognizable emotions in these passages, of loneliness, neediness, and someone more disturbed than their giddy Snapchats indicate. But as Sue Ann gets to know the kids, she starts piecing together their connection to those who traumatized her in high school. A switch is then flipped, simple as that. Sue Ann simply chooses to start wreaking havoc, allowing the script to go from barely a slow burn, to weak jump scares, to its final form of diet torture porn. Even the secret that Sue Ann has in her house, meant to make her more complicated than plainly monstrous, feels too much like a device. 

Meanwhile, the doomed teenagers of “Ma” form an amorphous blob, one that grows with each rager that Ma throws in her remodeled basement. The one standout is Silvers, who has a dull storyline of growing apart from her mother, and starts an innocent relationship with a boy named Andy (Corey Fogelmanis). But Silvers is better at leading us into the horror of the story, working as a frightened surrogate who at one point dares (along with McKaley Miller's Haley) to break Sue Ann's strict rule of never, ever going upstairs. 

Taylor’s most distinct stylistic choice here, preceded by obvious music cues and stale party scenes, are Sue Ann’s torture methods. Given the unwritten rules for horror villains, one can be grateful that Taylor and Landes stay true to her physical capacity and accessibility—I’ll let you imagine what clever terror a middle-aged veterinarian can orchestrate, but some of it had my screening audience wriggling in unison. And yet delivered within such a gutless course of events, Sue Ann’s actions feel less like a cumulative grand finale, and more like a reward for simply staying tuned. 

It’s hard not to fault “Ma” for being such a lost opportunity. You desperately want the movie to take its cultural context and go wild, like how “Brightburn” last week imagined a pseudo 12-year-old Clark Kent as a super serial killer. The set-up for “Ma” has that same inherently disorienting quality, but it abandons the many discernible themes that come to its surface: popularity as power, tokenism, the lingering horror of our high school years. “Ma” can’t even muster a delicious slice of nastiness—it’s not sharp enough for that. 

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Perpetual Grace, LTD is Your Next TV Obsession

Always Be My Maybe

Sometimes, the great love you’re meant to end up with (in other words, the one) is right in front you. At least according to the age-old happily-ever-after premise of countless romantic comedies including “When Harry Met Sally,” in which two longtime friends fall to bed and become lovers—first awkwardly, then passionately. Nahnatchka Khan’s “Always Be My Maybe,” an eager-to-please yet unsatisfying genre dish, follows a similar formula with all the correct on-paper ingredients: a pair of likable leads, quirky sidekicks, eye-catching locations and through a brief role hilariously played by Keanu Reeves, even some major movie star appeal. It is then unfortunate that this tempting package by Khan, a creative and producing force behind ABC’s “Fresh off the Boat,” is so bland, feeling less like a movie and more like the output of an assembly line.

The bulk of the liability can be attributed to the writing, with responsibilities shared across Michael Golamco, Randall Park and Ali Wong—the latter two artists, real-life friends and like Khan, well-affiliated with “Fresh Off The Boat,” also play the co-leads. Recycling a tried-and-true recipe with a contemporary spin is certainly not a wrongdoing in itself—from haunted house movies to time travel flicks, various genres continuously source brand-new thrills and joys from familiar premises. But somewhere along the way here, the screenwriting trio foregoes building plausible dramatic turns, and instead, delivers something that dutifully ticks expected boxes. While they feel like the right boxes for the most part, “Always Be My Maybe” doesn’t ultimately offer sturdy emotional stakes to hold the film (and our attention) together. The plainly bright, sitcom-like cinematography, which lacks a visual identity throughout, doesn’t help matters, either.

And yet it all starts encouragingly enough, at a time when young Sasha Tran and Marcus Kim (with their adult selves played by Wong and Park respectively) are next-door neighbors in San Francisco. Often neglected by her parents who work long hours, Sasha seems accustomed to preparing her own dinners—she can make even a can of spam look fancy—and learning the intricate details of Korean cuisine from Marcus’ sweet, sacrificing mom. With Sasha spending most of her time with Marcus’ family, the two kids grow up as friends, somehow lose their virginity to each other as teens and upon the passing of Marcus’ mother, have an awkward falling out in their formative years.

Cut to 15 years later, and Sasha is now among America’s hottest celebrity chefs in Los Angeles, engaged to the equally successful restaurateur Brandon Choi (Daniel Dae Kim). But her nuptial bliss gets delayed, when she heads back to San Francisco to open a new restaurant and Brandon, on his way to India for a new business venture, proposes to postpone the wedding and have an open relationship along the way. You guessed it right. This is when Marcus—in A/C business with his father and still driving the same car—re-enters the picture, albeit with a quirky, comic relief of a girlfriend (the thankless part is spiritedly played by performance artist Vivian Bang). The two old friends re-connect, open up old wounds, fight, bicker, bond and ultimately, unite around their love for one another, lifting each other up professionally. Always wary about growth, Marcus finally finds the courage to step up his game as a musician. Thus far into fancy culinary trends—words like non-denominational and elevated are thrown around to describe food — Sasha remembers her roots and what made her love cooking in the first place.

These developments would certainly have felt more moving, if the duo’s break up were stemming from reasons more memorable or consequential. And … if only we could see Sasha at work more; even just once! But while Wong walks around with the earned attitude of someone deservingly successful at her job, “Always Be My Maybe” forgets to grant her adequate scenes where she gets to perform her craft to make her character plausible. The film poignantly engages with the Korean-American experience from familial, societal and professional angles and hits upon sweet, sharp-eyed insights in that regard. But its other ambitions—like critiquing gentrification—fall flat, with jokes around “kale” and “rich people in t-shirts” feeling immediately stale.

Wong and Park have lovely chemistry (more as friends than lovers), with Wong especially delivering a feisty performance while sporting Leesa Evans’ terrific costumes. But as tentative as its title, “Always Be My Maybe” feels very much like the fancy tasting menu Marcus complains about in one scene. It awakens a craving, but leaves you starving for something a lot more substantial. 

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Mouthpiece

In 2015, "Mouthpiece," a show written and performed by Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken, premiered at The Theatre Centre in Toronto as part of the Why Not Theatre residency program. Nostbakken directed, as well as composed the music. Taking place in and around a bathtub on an empty stage, Sadava and Nostbakken, in white bathing suits, played different fragments of the same woman, as she struggles with life, personal problems, men, family. "Mouthpiece" was just over an hour long, and often featured the women moving in tandem (you can find clips on Youtube). "Mouthpiece" won all kinds of awards, and was eventually brought to Los Angeles by Jodie Foster, who had seen the show while on vacation in Canada. It has now been adapted into a film, directed by Patricia Rozema ("Into the Forest"), with both Sadava and Nostbakken playing the roles they created. The original idea was built as a performance-art piece, and is so high-concept, so abstract, you might think it wouldn't work in a cinematic context. But Rozema, Sadava and Nostbakken have done a beautiful job moving this material into the "real" world of cinema—cinema is a much more literal space than theatre. They've kept the concept intact, and they have a lot of fun with it, finding ways to make it visual. Best of all, they haven't sacrificed emotional impact. "Mouthpiece" is a deeply moving piece of work. 

Cassandra, a 30-year-old woman living in Toronto, wakes up one morning, hungover, to the horrifying news that her mother—who had sent her a series of rambling voice-mail messages the night before—died of a stroke. Now Cassandra has to get herself together to plan the funeral, flowers, food, eulogy. She's not ready for any of it. None of us are, when the moment comes. 

"Mouthpiece" unfolds over the couple of days leading up to the funeral, with flashbacks to Cassandra's childhood, living in the shadow of a mother (Maev Beaty) who has given up her career as a writer to raise children, and clearly has a lot of ambivalence about it, ambivalence which she passed on. The solemn-faced child Cassandra (not yet "split off" into different selves) observes her mother, catching glimpses of adult misery: her mother crying at night, or—in a crushing moment—dropping her writer's notebook into a bowl of soup she's cooked for her kids. The child absorbs the adult's anxiety. The main struggle Cassandra has is writing the eulogy (which nobody in her family wants her to do. They fear she will make a scene). The two Cassandras riff on their mother as they bicycle around Toronto, throwing out ideas, at a total loss as to how to sum her up: "She made pie." "She was a hardass." "She was a doormat." 

What makes this material charged and exciting is Rozema's approach, and the performances of Sadava and Nostbakken, not to mention the many ways they find to portray the "conceit" of having two women playing one role. The women move in unison, creating a strange doubling effect, and Rozema and cinematographer Catherine Lutes double it up further, using mirrors and beveled glass in many scenes, fracturing the faces into fragments, or reflecting them into infinity. Sometimes one of the women is "sent forward" to deal with a certain situation, almost like "I got this one," while the other hangs back. They trade off "mouthpiece" duties. One has to deal with the brother. The other handles the florist. There's one scene with a sometimes-boyfriend where the women share duties (this is a brilliant scene, portraying self-consciousness in the most literal way: "What is that face you're making right now? Where did you learn that?" asks one of the women, observing her "other" in action with the boyfriend). The women push their hair back together, trip over their dangling scarves, curl up in the tub together, their bodies curling around each other protectively. Eventually, they come to blows, in a highly stylized sequence that builds on all that came before.

Throughout, other issues come up: eating French fries in public, the ridiculousness of Spanx, the objectification of women, catcalls from men. A guy on a scaffold shouts "You look pretty good!" at them, and one of them responds with, "Go fuck yourself" while the other smiles and says, with what looks like true appreciation, "Thanks!" These are moments where the "conceit" works best, where the idea of women split off from their natural responses, fractured into separate voices, is made palpable. There are a couple of full-on musical numbers, too, "All That Jazz"-inspired, as Cassandra attempts to imagine a proper eulogy for her mother. The play has been opened up to include more characters, a friend, the brother, the boyfriend, the father. Some of these characters feel shoehorned in, particularly the best friend, but it's a small lapse. Music composed by Nostbakken, and performed by Nostbakken and Sadava, swoons throughout, and since it's just vocals without words it makes an eerie counterpoint. 

"Mouthpiece" is the kind of movie-going experience I love. I felt a similar way about Celia Rowlson-Hall's "Ma" from 2016, which I also reviewed. "Mouthpiece" so clearly comes from a very authentic place. These two actresses/writers wanted to create a piece about their experiences, right now, in today's world. They have put their whole lives into "Mouthpiece", everything they know, everything they don't know, everything they're attempting to understand. I appreciate so much those who grapple with things, those who aren't certain 100% of the time. Needing characters—particularly female characters—to be strong all the time is just as limiting as any other kind of stereotype. Being vulnerable is not being weak. Not knowing what to do is not being weak. It's being human. In an increasingly corporatized world, where franchises suck up all the oxygen, where small personal films can barely get made anymore, "Mouthpiece" vibrates with the urgency behind its shared expression. Nostbakken and Sadava had something to say, and found a unique way to say it. The existence of a film like "Mouthpiece" is a small triumph for art.

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The Fall of the American Empire

"The Fall of the American Empire" is an unbearably preachy post-financial-crisis civics lesson in heist movie drag. We follow a motley crew of criminal misfits as they lecture each other about the economy and the lose/lose nature of global finance as they plot to make off with a bunch of money that they stole from, uh, Irish and Jewish gangsters. 

"The Fall of the American Empire" is also the third part of a trilogy that Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand began with "The Decline of the American Empire" and continued with "The Barbarian Invasions." Which is weird, because "The Fall of the American Empire" isn't narratively related to either of those two earlier dramas, both of which feature the same characters. The only thing that unites all three movies is that they're all thematically driven by know-it-all Socratic dialogue (scripted by Arcand) about sex, ethics, and money. 

The condescending tone of Arcand's dialogue suited both "The Decline of the American Empire" and "The Barbarian Invasions," since both of those films are about holier-than-thou Canadian academics. But while "The Fall of the American Empire" is as vinegary as those two earlier films, it's not as warm or as attractive. The most substantial thing that Arcand's three films have in common is that they all follow self-absorbed characters who insist that traditional morality doesn't apply to them, not in a world governed by uncaring G-men and/or capitalists. But Arcand doesn't seem to care about his characters either. They are, for the most part, whiteboards that he uses to tell banal truths about charity and criminality in the 21st century. 

Arcand half-heartedly asks viewers to root for Pierre-Paul (Alexandre Landry), a nebbish courier who tries to launder money that he took from an aborted heist orchestrated by Jacmel (Patrick Abellard) and Chenier (Kemy St-Eloy), two woefully under-developed black crooks who listen to loud rap music and steal cars. But Pierre-Paul's not the only one who wants Jacmel's loot: there's the West End Gang, who are negligibly repped by white, torture-loving gangsters (we're helpfully told that they use the same interrogation tactics that the SS used at Auschwitz); and there's police officers Carla and Pete (Maxim Roy and Louis Morrisette), who apparently stand in for, uh, all of the Canadian government? (Pierre-Paul: "The police force is the government. They're never there to help.")

Pierre-Paul, speaking on Arcand's behalf, uses credible economic anxieties as an unbelievable pretext for robbing the mob (seriously, though: the Irish and the Jewish mob? What decade is Arcand living in?). Pierre-Paul reminds his accomplices that he has no financial dependents and is stuck in a job that doesn't pay well since a position in academia (his goal) simply doesn't pay. Pierre-Paul also knows that his courier job will, in time, physically deplete him: his knee joints will wear out and he probably won't be rich enough to repair the damage. Pierre-Paul also considers himself above the law—"I don't respect society" —and insists that he does not come from money: "For generations, my family's been poor." And, as if Pierre-Paul's straits couldn't get more dire: he has unpaid student loans! Wow, say no more, dude, just take whatever you can carry.

So Pierre-Paul nervously, but persistently assembles a crack team of equally opportunistic stick figure characters who help him avoid capture by investing Jacmel's money in a series of fake charities and off-shore banking transactions. Pierre-Paul's merry men are: Jacmel, who barely gets any dialogue; Camille (Maripier Morin), Pierre-Paul's love interest and a stereotypical sex worker with a heart of gold; Sylvain (Arcand regular Remy Girard), a surly ex-con biker who has been studying tax law while in prison; and Wilbrod (Pierre Curzi), a law-bending stock broker who specializes in money laundering and tax shelters.

Too bad Arcand spends way more time defending Pierre-Paul's actions than he uses to establish Pierre-Paul and his fellow thieves as sympathetic (or just human enough) characters. Pierre-Paul mostly just lectures people using Wittgenstein and Marcus Aurelius quotes. And Camille isn't much more down-to-earth: she insists that people judge her using retrograde movie cliches and adds that "Legally, I'm a criminal, but I never hurt anyone." Understood; now when does the movie start, and will there be a quiz later?

Arcand explains (and explains, and explains) how crime does, in fact, pay (when you're rich and white enough). But he never seems to be interested in his characters' motives, as he has Camille explain when she runs into an ex-lover: "Let's not talk about what can't be explained." So we get a lot of a belabored, self-serving talk about necessary crimes and a few wan moments of sensuality: a flash of leg, a tight outfit, an off-camera (and preemptively interrupted) sex act, etc. If you thought "The Big Short" should have been more patronizing and less earthy—Canada awaits! 

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Too Late to Die Young

Like Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” or Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir,” Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor Castillo’s latest film, “Too Late to Die Young,” is an exercise of memory and interpretation. Growing up at a time when her country made the shift from dictatorship to democracy, her family worried about further political upheaval. They left town with other families to form an off-the-grid style commune, away from busy cities and the problems that came with them. Only there would be other issues for a young girl growing up in these conditions to confront.

However, “Too Late to Die Young” is not a straightforward memoir movie. The film follows not one but three young characters—teenagers Sofía (Demian Hernández) and Lucas (Antar Machado) and the younger but equally conflicted Clara (Magdalena Tótoro). They are likely amalgamations of the director’s adventures both good and bad, stories she heard of other’s experiences, made-up “what if” scenarios and the existential crisis that sets in when you feel uprooted from your home. After a screening at last year’s New York Film Festival, Sotomayor said that in the process of recreating these memories, she’s no longer sure where reality stops and fantasies begin.

The setting is a remote woodsy place with no electricity, paved only by dirt roads, and access to a fresh water supply seems questionable. For the adults in the camp, it seems as if they are having an enjoyable time of returning to the land and creating a world of their own. The kids, too, spend much of their time scampering through trees and swimming in a makeshift pool under the idyllic summer sun of the holidays (it’s hot during the end of the year in the Southern Hemisphere). However, Sofía is not enjoying her time in nature. She’s the surliest teen in the bunch who openly argues with her father, crushes on an older stranger with a motorcycle and wants to rejoin her mother back in the city below the camp. Lucas is more the “suffers in silence” type. His longing gazes at Sofía are never returned. The tiny Clara plays against this teenage angst with problems of her own, especially when it comes to her dog Frida and her ailing dad. The group of kids and teens look over at the adults, and even the youngest among them can sense that the grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing.

Unlike the holier-than-thou separatist fantasy, “Captain Fantastic,” the politics that drove these settlers away from the city are not worn on the movie’s sleeves. Even if you knew nothing about 1990’s Chilean politics, you can get a sense that these upper-to-middle-class artists and idealists had the means to get away from it all. The neighboring city of Santiago, which looms large in one stunning shot of the horizon, responds in kind to its rejection. Almost every trip down from their pastoral commune ends with some kind of chaos, fight or resentment.

Hernández is the standout actor in the troupe of professionals and non-actors. Sofía feels trapped by the open air. Her best chance of escaping is her first love, which is just about as much stock as you put into your first real crush. Hernández, who transitioned shortly after the production, carries his performance with the confidence of an angry yet wounded teenager. His presence is very much a part of the fabric of this community, and it’s his character who undergoes the most change and has the most growing up to do.

Sotomayor’s camera often films its subjects from afar, as if putting the audience in these languid settings with the characters. There’s an extent to which these characters feel distant and relationships between them are sometimes hard to figure out. But that distance is always composed and artful, like in the stylized way in which she and cinematographer Inti Briones film Sofía smoking in the bathtub. The cigarette smoke wafts in the air like steam rising above pale aqua-colored bath water in a bathtub. Another gorgeous moment shows up near the end of the movie when the tarps that have doubled as walls of a home are gone, leaving behind only the wood frame of windows support beams. The outdoors now look like wallpaper.

Similar to Lucrecia Martel’s “La Ciénaga,” Sotomayor’s film also shares an ear for sound design and a sense of humor. In one scene, Clara’s dog laps water inside their home in the foreground, and through semi-opaque tarp dividing the interior from the forest, her sick father is getting help with his shower. The sound of the dog lapping up water drenches the scene, even though it’s off-screen and the image of the man showering is not the one we’re meant to see the most. Earlier in the film, while the camera is panning over the setting, we can hear someone drinking water from a hose, until someone yells at Clara not to drink the water because it’s been poisoned by a dead horse. The camera meets her face just as she’s spitting out a stream of water.

“Too Late to Die Young” almost has a timeless quality to it, a period unencumbered by outdated tech and dusty cultural references. But this dreamy world would not exist without the outside forces that go unmentioned. In this microcosm of life and society, there is much to observe and learn, even if we don’t feel any closer to the characters than when we first met them. The story belongs to the kids questioning authority and those who wonder what’s beyond where our parents said we can go. In that sense, “Too Late to Die Young” says just as much about our experiences—our heartbreaks, curiosity and resilience—as it does about this specific chapter in Chile’s history.

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