Movie Review: Life Itself (2018)

Genre: Romantic Drama  

Director: Dan Fogelman  

Starring: Oscar Isaac, Annette Bening, Olivia Wilde, Antonio Banderas, Mandy Patinkin, Olivia Cooke, Samuel L. Jackson  

Running Time: 117 minutes  

Synopsis: The story is told in multiple ultimately inter-connected chapters across many time periods, all revolving around themes of love, death, and life's inherent unpredictability. 

• In New York, Will (Oscar Isaac) is grieving the loss of his wife Abby (Olivia Wilde), and reveals their love story in sessions with his therapist (Annette Bening).
• Dylan (Olivia Cooke) suffered multiple losses during her childhood and was raised by her grandfather (Mandy Patinkin). Now in her early twenties, she is a rebellious teenager angry at the world.
• In Spain, Javier (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) labours in the olive groves of land owner Saccione (Antonio Banderas). Javier marries Isabel (Laia Costa) and they have a son, but a family trip to New York undermines their happiness.
• Rodrigo (Àlex Monner) is a foreign student in New York, where he has a casual relationship with Shari (Isabel Durant) before meeting the love of his life.

What Works Well: Writer and director Dan Fogelman crafts an intricate multi-generational drama about the quirks of fate and the small moments that make a big difference across decades. A bus accident connects the stories in a split-second of joint inattention, but sorrow and loss are the seeds of birth and renewal as the human spirit carves pathways around tragedy. The fragmented structure creates an engaging puzzle-like milieu, and the impressive ensemble cast members find character depth despite sharing the screen time.

What Does Not Work As Well: The foul-mouthed prologue involving Samuel L. Jackson (as himself) is wholly unnecessary. Once the narrative settles, the intended themes lack subtlety, and the sentimentality reaches extreme levels.

Conclusion: Life's standard trajectory is a series of curves.



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Movie Review: Sound Of Metal (2019)

A drama about loss, Sound Of Metal bores into the psyche of one man confronting the sudden on-set of a life changing condition.

Recovering drug addict Ruben (Riz Ahmed) is a drummer for a two-person heavy metal band, supporting his girlfriend and lead singer Lou (Olivia Cooke). While they are on a club tour living and traveling in an RV, Ruben experiences sudden severe hearing loss. A doctor advises the hearing will not naturally come back, an operation to install implants would cost up to $80,000, and Ruben should focus on preserving the little hearing he has left. 

Through a friend's referral Ruben reluctantly joins a commune for deaf recovering addicts run by Vietnam War veteran Joe (Paul Raci), while Lou departs to Paris where her father lives. Joe encourages Ruben to accept deafness, learn sign language, and volunteer with deaf kids. Ruben does make progress, but he remains full of concealed anger and intent on securing funds for the operation to restore his hearing.

A story of profound misfortune, Sound Of Metal is one character's journey into the unthinkable. Director Darius Marder co-wrote the script with Derek Cianfrance, and keeps the focus on a far-from-perfect man pushed into yet another crisis. The film is intimate, sometimes frustratingly constrained, and powered by the coiled rage of a restless Riz Ahmed performance.

The abrupt onset of deafness is all the more devastating because Ruben's life was on the upswing. Clean from drugs and even smoking, on a successful club tour, and devoted to his true love Lou, the worst seemed to be behind him. Now the loss of hearing drops a boulder on burgeoning optimism. It's no surprise that denial is Ruben's strongest response, followed by fixating on a short-cut bring-back-the-past solution without researching the implications.

The script railroads Ruben into a long episode on Joe's peculiar commune, where accepting deafness and thriving anyway is the laudable goal, but the rules designed for addicts don't always appear conducive to dealing with recent trauma. Here Marder explores the difference between the silence imposed and the value of elusive meditative stillness, and the narrative loses its way. The second act is only partially successful as a foundation for a reintegration and reunion where reality and recognition start to take hold.

The sound design is superlative, conveying Ruben's hearing difficulties with stunning impact. The concert roar of aggressive drums and Lou's forceful vocals yields to the disorienting inability to hear, only for the consequences of cochlear implant surgery to throw another wrench. Within its limited scope, The Sound Of Metal achieves hushed immersion.



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Movie Review: Thoroughbreds (2017)

A drama and dark comedy with crime thriller elements, Thoroughbreds seeks to subvert superficial expectations while poking at scars of emotional detachment. 

In suburban Connecticut, teenagers and former grade school classmates Amanda (Olivia Cooke) and Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) resume a friendship after a period of estrangement. Amanda admits to not feeling any emotions and is undergoing psychological assessments for harming a thoroughbred horse. Lily is pampered and comes from an exceptionally rich family, but hates her stepdad Mark. Lily is also keeping some secrets to herself.

Amanda suggests to Lily that maybe she should consider killing Mark. After initially recoiling, Lily warms up to the idea. The girls approach their acquaintance and petty drug dealer Tim (Anton Yelchin) to do the dirty deed, but not surprisingly, their half-baked plans will go sideways.

Exploring themes of friendship, the class divide, and most acutely the hidden damage within teenagers, Thoroughbreds is captivating and disquieting. Writer and director Cory Finley imports Hitchcockian touches (notably from Strangers On A Train) into a Generation Z world presented as over-analyzed, over-medicated and empathy-deficient, and adds mean streaks of humour and disorienting unpredictability.

The two girls are currents of turmoil beneath a calm surface. Amanda speaks her mind with dumbfounding directness, is always one mental step ahead of everyone else, and never hesitates to reveal her smarts. Lily hides behind the prim and proper facade of the elite. Both harbour violent tendencies born out of life's disillusionments and absentee fathers. Amanda openly embraces her weirdness while Lily is more coiled, circumspect and perhaps repressed. Despite their combined psyches inching towards malevolence, their rebuilt friendship also emits a warm glow of authenticity.

Other than a typically edgy Anton Yelchin assist (in one of his final roles), the film is essentially a two-character drama and rides entirely on the shoulders of Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke. Both actresses deliver less-is-more performances of understated efficiency, finding the manipulative gaps between truth and lies to advance individual versions of deception deployed for survival.

The film buzzes with style thanks to an unhinging mood, playful sound effects and camera work alternating between curiously gliding and passively observant. However, Finley's shortcuts are sometimes severe, and the film cries out for more than the 92 minutes of running time. All the key events in the lives of the two girls happen off-screen, and stepdad Mark is too quickly consigned to the evil category. The mothers of the girls appear in ultimately meaningless snippets.

Thoroughbreds races on a new course of its own creation, original and stark if not quite perfect.

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Movie Review: Me And Earl And The Dying Girl (2015)

A high school comedy drama about the dangers of friendship and dealing with loss, Me And Earl And The Dying Girl carries an attractively impish attitude to help tackle serious themes.

Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann) is doing his best to cruise through high school unscathed. He maintains cordial but distant relations with everyone and avoids all cliques. Greg's one friend is Earl (RJ Cyler), but Greg even refers to him as a co-worker rather than a friend, since they have been creating amateur short movies together since childhood. Avoiding the cafeteria at all costs, Greg and Earl have lunch everyday in the office of cool teacher Mr. McCarthy (Jon Bernthal).

When news spreads that Greg's classmate Rachel (Olivia Cooke) has been diagnosed with leukemia, Greg's mom insists that he spend time with her. Initially reluctant, Greg and Rachel gradually do become friends, as he helps her through her treatment sessions. In turn, Rachel challenges Greg's philosophy of avoiding close relationships with anyone. Encouraged by attractive classmate Madison (Katherine C. Hughes), Greg and Earl start a project to make a movie just for Rachel. But for a young man who has avoided making friends all his life, getting close to a dying girl will prove problematic.

Riding the momentum of movie adaptations of young adult books dealing with death, Me And Earl And The Dying Girl joins efforts like The Fault In Our Stars and If I Stay in tackling themes of life in the shadow of the big goodbye. The formula is familiar, and features the attractive and likable leads, a soft romance, mildly irritating parents on a slightly different wavelength, and enough irony, sarcasm, and wit to make the difficult final resolution palatable.

Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, adapting the Jesse Andrews novel, throws in an unreliable narrator, a friendship-averse main character, and some laugh-out-loud moments thanks to an inadvertent misadventure with some hallucinogens. But for all its potential Me And Earl And The Dying Girl does get sidetracked. Greg and Earl's hobby of creating amateur short films inspired by movie classics starts out cute but is overplayed, threatening to take over the film. By the time Greg's final film plays its role, the ideas have clearly run out and supposedly deeply meaningful abstract mysticism replaces content.

Also undermining the film is choppy handling of the central relationship between Greg and Rachel. Well before the ending the evolution of their friendship peaks and then stagnates before kicking into reverse, leaving an emotional void in place of momentum as the final act approaches.

The relatively inexperienced cast is decent in relatively straightforward roles. Thomas Mann and Olivia Cooke do their part in portraying teenagers just on the brooding side of adolescence, in his case due to an unwillingness to risk any connections, in her case because of impending death.

Me And Earl And The Dying Girl captures its spirit and content in its title, and does not stray far from what is expected.

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