Capone's Art-House Round-Up with 20TH CENTURY WOMEN, CLAIRE IN MOTION, OCEAN WAVES, and BEST WORST THING…!!!

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a few films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…


20TH CENTURY WOMEN
A few years ago, writer-director Mike Mills (THUMBSUCKER) made a touching and uproarious film that was both a tribute to his father and all fathers called BEGINNERS, which resulted in Christopher Plummer getting a much deserved acting Oscar. His latest work, 20TH CENTURY WOMEN could be looked at as his tip of the hat to mothers around the world, but I’m not sure many of them would approve of the way the mother in this film decides to life coach her teenaged son, circa the late 1970s in Santa Barbara, California. In fact, the film seems to be a spiritual companion to another 2016 release, CAPTAIN FANTASTIC, which also dealt with unconventional parenting.

In both cases, the pluses and minuses of their respective radical approaches are weighed, and ultimately the verdict is that, while the kids being raised exit the experience with a far more open mind than their conventionally raised counterparts, they do harbor some regrets about their methods. In other words: “Sorry for the shitty upbringing, but at least you have great stories to tell your kids.” The mother in 20TH CENTURY WOMEN is Dorothea (Annette Bening), a single mother raising her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann, better known as the creepy lead ghost kid in SINISTER 2) in a time in America where the last vestiges of the ’60s are fading and she is feeling ill-equipped to raise her son without the influence of other, varied voices contributing to his knowledge base, particularly when it comes to women.

She recruits a few familiar faces to help with Jamie’s alternative education, including her boarder Abbie (Greta Gerwig), an artist and would-be punk rocker; Jamie’s best friends, Julie (Elle Fanning), a slightly older girl who is discovering her sexual boundaries with everyone but Jamie; and local handyman William (Billy Crudup), who is helping rebuild parts of their crumbling house, while flirting with pretty much everyone.

While Abbie and Julie are interesting characters, they are trapped by this far-less interesting film, in which Benning is so underserved, every word out of her mouth sounds like a chapter heading in the worst imaginable self-help book on parenting. I tend to believe any film is made a little bit better by the presence of Gerwig, and that certainly is the case here, as she adds layers of honesty and authenticity to every scene.

As she did in THE NEON DEMON and her other release this week, LIVE BY NIGHT, Fanning’s potential as an actor are still being discovered with each new role. Here, she is attempting to teach Jamie about what qualities in a man appeal of women, all the while being the great, unreachable object of his affection. Their friendship is shifting, and the days of her crawling in his window in the middle of the night and innocently tucking herself in bed next to him are at an end.

The problem with 20TH CENTURY WOMEN is sometimes elusive, but it all seems to come back to it feeling too much like one big life lesson. Each time someone opens their mouth to issue advice or some other brand teaching for Jamie, you feel like you should get out your highlighter and run it across each word that comes out. It’s a series of four running monologues aimed at a kid who seems to have his act together without any guidance from anyone. The movie is far more effective when the group is simply hanging out in various combinations and being themselves rather than Jamie’s appointed educators.

20TH CENTURY WOMEN has sporadic inspired moments and a few scenes featuring genuine raw and fragile emotions. But overall, it feels passive-aggressively preachy, vague in its lessons, and overwritten to the point where I was genuinely dreading every moment Bening was gearing up to speak. That isn’t her fault, but Mills has simply overwritten his work to the point where this parenting experiment only exists in an intellectual exercise and not as an actual, compelling drama. Maybe it’s supposed to be funny or entertainingly cynical, but it comes across as mostly awful.


CLAIRE IN MOTION
The setup is fairly straightforward even if the purpose is elusive. The latest film from directing team Lisa Robinson and Annie J. Howell (2011’s SMALL, BEAUTIFULLY MOVING PARTS) concerns Claire (Betsy Brandt from “Breaking Bad”), a woman whose husband Paul (Chris Beetem) goes for a solo camping/hiking trip (as he frequently does) and never comes home. Claire and the police search the mountains where he vanished for weeks before finally giving up, but as Claire begins to dig into her husband’s affairs, she discovers that he had a secret life that she knew nothing about.

The most fascinating things about CLAIRE IN MOTION isn’t that Paul’s other life doesn’t involve crime or a torrid affair. It involved an art project that her scientist/professor husband was working on with a somewhat conniving graduate student named Allison (Anna Margaret Hollyman), who always seems to be keeping secrets about Paul from Claire, even if she doesn’t have any. The disappearance and subsequent discoveries send Claire into something of an existential tailspin, not only questioning the man she married but her own life and future with their young son Connor (Zev Haworth).

Brandt’s fractured performance is what drives the film forward and opens up the emotional complexities of her situation. It doesn’t help that the Allison believes Paul ran away from his life, a theory that radically conflicts with Claire’s belief that he died in an accident on what was meant to be an overnight trip. CLAIRE IN MOTION would have been intriguing if it had just been about a woman’s life falling apart as a result of not knowing her husband’s fate. But when you compound her grief with layers of anger, confusion, and doubt, it makes for devastating drama. Lest you think this film is about whether the husband returns or not, it is not. Claire In Motion is about a series of events that sends a woman spiraling; the tension comes from seeing where, or if, she lands. This is a quiet, messy, moving work that takes a bold approach to what could have been a run-of-the-mill story and makes it original.


BEST WORST THING THAT EVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED
When I interviewed LA LA LAND writer-director Damien Chazelle a couple months ago for Ain’t it Cool News, we discussed one of the film’s themes being the power of rejection and failure as an artist, about how some use it as a supreme motivator, while others allow it to crush them and give up their dreams. The documentary BEST WORST THING THAT EVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED… explores the short-lived production and run of the musical “Merrily We Roll Along,” which had a Broadway run in 1981 of 16 performances before it was essentially run out of town by critics and audiences alike. What made the production so notable was that is was the last of an otherwise hugely successful run of musicals by songwriter Stephen Sondheim and director Hal Prince, including “Company,” “A Little Night Music,” and the game-changing “Sweeney Todd.”

I’ve seen other behind-the-scenes docs about Broadway shows before but never one about a certifiable flop, made all the more personal in its telling because one of the original cast members, Lonny Price, also directs the film (he went on to continue acting and eventually became a celebrated theater director in his own right). The structure of the musical is important because in many ways, Price cleverly frames his movie in a similar fashion. “Merrily” begins with its characters as adults, and with each new chapter scene jumps backward in time until we see them finally as graduating high school students filled with dreams, ambition and hope. When we meet them, they’re cynical, bitter, and melancholy, so the show peals back the weight the world has put on them, and we’re reminded of the eternal hope of youth. Audiences didn’t understand it; critics found it leaden and tedious. It’s probably of little comfort that the soundtrack album still sold well and the show has been redeemed and revered in more recent productions.

Coincidentally, Sondheim and Prince wanted to cast unknown young actors—with ages ranging from 16-25—to star in “Merrily,” and the film is essentially the modern versions of them looking back on that more innocent and exciting time in their lives. Many have found careers outside of the arts, but a surprising number have found a way to stay in entertainment to some degree, including one of the show’s principal cast members, Jason Alexander. Thanks to an ABC news team on hand to document the original production, there is a wealth of audition and rehearsal footage for Price to use to give us a rare glimpse into the creative process. Even still, nothing quite prepares us for the scathing reviews and shocking number of walkouts during previews.

Any chance to see Sondheim and Prince at work is well worth it, even for a show that took them decades to revisit and finally appreciate. In the early 2000s, Price reunited with his fellow original cast members to do a concert performance of the show, which by this time, was in full rediscovery mode. Sondheim and Prince attended to watch the performance and finally fell in love with the piece again. The newest footage in the doc involves Price catching up with the cast, seeing where they are today, and as one song in “Merrily” testifies, their younger selves likely wouldn’t believe the twits and turns their lives took since the show closed.

BEST WORST THING is about dreams being realized and shattered in the space of a few months. Everyone assumed the show would be a hit (or at least good), and that it would launch their careers as stage performers. One of the closing sequences is also one of the most moving. When the ABC footage is discovered after Price had been told two years earlier that it was destroyed, he watches film of himself being interviewed right after being told he was in the cast. His youthful exuberance and starry eyes pop off the screen, as the slightly battle-hardened version of himself today watches the monitor with tears in his eyes. He’s happy that the young Lonny doesn’t embarrass himself in the footage and seems fairly certain that young man would like some of the older version’s work since the early 1980s. Fans of the theater and musicals will rejoice at the level of access and depth of emotion that the film gives us. And it’s a crazy, often surprising story on top of that, so lovers of drama should be satisfied as well.


OCEANS WAVES
Following last year’s first official U.S. release of 1991’s ONLY YESTERDAY, the famed Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli is rounding out its unreleased (stateside, at least) titles with the 1993 GKids feature OCEANS WAVES in a 4K digital restoration. Directed by Tomomi Mochizuki and aired originally on Japanese television, the film is very much grounded in the real world and not in the fantasy/supernatural/ universe so often occupied by Ghibli founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, whose protégés created the film.

Told mostly in flashback, OCEANS WAVES is the story of a college student name Taku, who reflects on his high school first crush, Rikako, who was also the object of affection of his best friend at the time. The stakes of the film are fairly low, but it does an admirable job of captured the frame of mind of teenagers and early 20-somethings, to whom such events mean the world while they are caught up in the moment. The movie also examines cliques, the fickle nature of friendship, the distancing of children from their parents at a certain age, and how time tends to make forgiveness an easier task.

A sequence of the film in which Takue escorts Rikako to Tokyo to visit her estranged father because he’s worried about her is when the film goes from an innocent piece about flirtation and young crushes to something more adult and heartbreaking is easily the best section of the piece. But it also makes us see Rikako as the true manipulative rich girl that she is, which makes her a lot less sympathetic as the film goes on, which is actually one of its problems.

Based on the novel by Saeko Himuro (and adapted by Kaori Nakamura), OCEANS WAVES is a slight film that is as intricately rendered as you’d expect any solid Ghibli offering to be, but it’s probably only worth seeking out if you’re a Ghibli completist (and there are many of you out there), Since the film is only about 75 minutes long with credits, it’s being coupled with GHIBLIES: EPISODE 2, a humorous 2002 short film from director Yoshiyuki Momose that was inspired by the inner workings of the studio’s staff, but it also is a fantastic and energetic showcase for the animator talent working at Studio Ghibli at the time.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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