Tag: Allison Janney

I, Tonya

Margot Robbie shines in “I, Tonya,” but the movie often feels tone deaf in its comedic depiction of domestic violence amid Tonya Harding’s tabloid story.

i tonya posterIt’s a cliché to announce at the beginning of your movie “based on a true story,” but it’s almost become as much of a cliché to now be tongue-in-cheek about it. “Based on wildly contradictory interviews,” the opening to “I, Tonya” proclaims. It tells you two things about this movie: that it thinks it has a blank check to take as many liberties as it wants with Tonya Harding’s (Margot Robbie) tabloid story, and that this movie wants to have a sense of humor it maybe doesn’t deserve.

That’s because “I, Tonya” feels tone deaf in trying to meld the goofy, unreliable testimonies of Harding’s family and cadre of rednecks with a more sobering story about domestic abuse and mental torture at the hands of her husband and mother in her pursuit to be the best. It’s a movie about domestic abuse, but hey, let’s try and be funny and edgy too! Continue reading “I, Tonya”

Margaret

Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret” has the same emotional resonance and poetic understanding of a post 9/11 New York City as Spike Lee’s “25th Hour.” Yet unlike Lee’s intensely literal depiction of race and omnipresent anxieties in the tragedy’s immediate aftermath, “Margaret’s” virtues are contained within deep, complex metaphors that engulf Lonergan’s stirring character drama.

Meant to be released over five years ago but delayed due to legal battles between Lonergan and distributor Fox Searchlight Pictures over the film’s final cut (the edit I watched is the shortened, 2 ½ hour version edited by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, but the extended Director’s Cut exists on the DVD), “Margaret” is a flawed masterpiece.

This version’s editing is a mishmash of vignettes, arguments and moments out of time all surrounding one teenage girl. The movie’s length, the web of subplots and the film’s rich cast and numerous characters for me paint a lush portrait of a whole city full of grief, regrets and anxieties. If it seems to never approach a rational ending, what could sum up this new mentality we’ve lived with for 11 years now?

“Margaret’s” central character is Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), a smugly confident high school student giving off an attitude that she knows just how phony she is. On the street one day, she distracts a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), causing him to run a red light and hit a pedestrian named Monica (Allison Janney). Lisa cradles her in her last moments and feels devastated. But fearing the bus driver will be in trouble for something she caused, Lisa lies to the police and claims it was an accident free of negligence.

But this is just in the film’s first 15 minutes. For the next two-plus hours, Lisa will go through life trying to find closure and solace in battling her parents, losing her virginity, arguing with classmates and pursuing a lawsuit against the bus driver. Continue reading “Margaret”

The Help

“The Help” isn’t really a drama about racism but about snobby, white Southern socialites.

 

What’s the real evil in civil rights era Jackson, Mississippi? Is it racism or controlling, white female socialites? “The Help” thinks it’s the former but the film is simply an entertaining movie about the latter.

It tells of how the budding young journalist Skeeter (Emma Stone) returns from college to find she is more enlightened and intelligent than her prejudiced housewife friends and that the black maid that helped raise her as a child is gone from their home. She’s embarrassed by a rule that would force black servants to use a separate bathroom outside the house and decides to write a book from the perspective of the help.

Skeeter’s two most animated subjects are the life of the film. Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minnie (Octavia Spencer) are fun, sassy, strong and complex individuals with a lot of stories about one of their employers, Hilly Holbrook. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Hilly with spunk and whiplash tartness, but her character is a one-dimensional, bitchy control freak who determines who’s in and who’s out in her middle class WASP social circle of women. Continue reading “The Help”