Train Dream (c) Netflix
Film: Train Dreams
In Cinemas on November 7, streaming on Netflix on November 21
Writer director Clint Bentley made the 2021 modest, modern western, Jockey, focusing on an aging racehorse jockey (played with grace by character actor Clifton Collins, Jr.) trying to hang onto his career while dealing with his ailing and failing body. So, it’s not surprising that Bentley’s next movie would be the adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novella, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, which follows the life of a rather unremarkable man named Robert Grainier, a seasonal logger and railroad worker in 1917, who endures a horrible tragedy and tries and fails to move on. Grainier is played sensitively and with uncharacteristic restraint by Australian actor Joel Edgerton, mostly known for memorable machismo roles in Animal Kingdom, Warrior and as the young Uncle Owen in the Star Wars prequel series Obi-Wan Kenobi. I also saw him on stage as Stanley Kowalaski opposite Cate Blanchett in 2008’s A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM. But, in Train Dreams, Edgerton is at his best with a character who has barely any dialogue, but able to project big emotions while never breaking from Grainer’s interiority.
Train Dream (c) Netflix
Bentley is certainly working on a Terrence Malick canvas here, capturing with cinematographer Adolpho Veloso the huge American vista of the Pacific Northwest, slowly being decimated by the upcoming Industrial Revolution of train travel. With the help of an expressive and engaging score by Bryce Dessner, the director makes Robert Grainer an everyman of the early 20th century, through his hard labor during one part of the year and his all-too short homelife during the rest with his loving wife Gladys (played by fellow Star Wars alum, Felicity Jones) and his young daughter. Thankfully, the film, co-written by Greg Kwedar, doesn’t avoid the racist elements of this time in history found in the novel, from the government rounding up Chinese immigrants when Robert was a young boy to his participation in the death of a fellow Chinese train worker (Alfred Hsing), an event that haunts him throughout his life. Also in the film are the reliable William H. Macy as a veteran dynamite expert and the lovely Kerry Condon as Claire, a forest ranger, who like Robert, is choosing a solitary life after a tragedy of her own. Towards the end of Train Dreams, Robert is given a chance to fly in a two-seater plane, and that image of a man who is forever bound to Earth finally getting a chance to see what the birds see, is the perfect symbolic capper to the best film I have seen so far this year.
Hedda (c) MGM Amazon Studios
Film: Hedda
In Cinemas, streaming on Amazon Prime Video on October 29
It is always amazing when an actor with extreme potential in diverse projects finally gets to emerge as the movie star they were always destined to be, and that is certainly the case of the always watchable Tessa Thompson in Hedda. The film is writer/director Nia DaCosta’s adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play, Hedda Gabler, transposing the action from Norway of 1891 to a British country estate in which the play’s action is compressed into a lavish and decadent all-night party given by Hedda and her new husband George Tesman (Tom Bateman) as they wait for George’s inevitable job offer to teach at a nearby university. But Hedda finds out that there is now competition for the position by Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss from Tár), George’s nemesis and Hedda’s former obsession, who has written a novel that is sure to give her the advantage. She invites Eileen (who was a man in Ibsen’s original) and her new protégé/lover Thea (Imogen Poots) to the party to find a weakness for Hedda to exploit. And exploit she does. For actors. Hedda Gabler is often thought of as the female Hamlet, but she really is closer to Shakespeare’s scheming and power-hungry Richard III. DeCosta’s vision of Hedda is always fascinating, whether she is incredibly bitchy to her servants, who defied her “no flower at the party” decree, as well as how she manipulates her friends, like the no-nonsense Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock) and her spineless husband. Thompson is delicious in the role, incorporating a petulant British accent, with eyes that keep darting around the room to find a solution to get things done her way.
Hedda (c) MGM Amazon Studios
Thompson is best known for playing Valkyrie in the MCU, mostly as foil to Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, but she has slowly amassed a wonderful collection of film roles that highlight her versatility from the 1920s period film Passing to the 1960’s Sylvie’s Love to the contemporary Little Woods, Nia DeCosta’s first film. But Thompson’s Hedda is in a class of its own. Thompson is best when showing how Hedda’s boredom manifests itself in her biting wit, always dripping with unfeeling nastiness. She delights in her role as the puppet master to her own fate, and when she becomes desperate as things go sideways, she needs to improvise, using her sexuality when needed and her father’s gun when pushed to her limits. Nina Hoss is somehow able to match Thompson’s intensity, at least at the start of the film, but her Eileen has too much emotional baggage, and the strain in her face and voice is heartbreaking as the film progresses. The liberties DeCosta takes with the original play feel organic here, including the gender swap, the racial difference between Hedda and most of her friends, condensing the play’s action into one night and the wonderfully anachronistic and hypnotic Hildur Guðnadóttir film score and song choices ("It's Oh So Quiet" is sublime). The film’s tone occasionally runs the risk of teetering between biting satire and high camp, and some might feel it ultimately lands in the latter, but I found Hedda fun, transporting and a thrill.
Bugonia (c) Focus Features
Film: Bugonia
In Cinemas
I have always liked director Yorgos Lanthimos’ films, but something in his absurdist presentation and flights of fancy keep me at a distance, even when its social commentary is on point in films like The Lobster and The Favourite. He went to the extreme with his toy box of a film, Poor Things, and while I delighted in its audacity, I am more taken with his most restrained (and in turn, most horrifying) The Killing of a Sacred Deer. I also experienced that distancing feeling as the plot of his latest film, Bugonia presented itself. Lanthimos’ current muse, Emma Stone (it used to be Colin Farrell), plays Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceutical company CEO, who tells her employees to have a healthy work and home life balance, but she has to add “if people still have work to do, they should absolutely stay,” which negates the whole thing. She is mysteriously kidnapped by a pair of cousins, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Donny (Aidan Delbis), kept in their remote home in the basement with her hair buzzed off and body smeared with hydrocortisone. Why? I don’t want to spoil too much of the plot (there’s not much of one, to be honest), but clues can be found in Teddy’s hobby as an Apiarist (the film’s title refers to an ancient theory of how bees spontaneously generated) as well as in Lanthimos’ last film, the anthology Kinds of Kindness, in which the second story, R.M.F. Is Flying, is about a man (Plemons) who believes his newly rescued wife (Stone), formerly lost at sea, is not his wife at all. That idea is taken to the extreme in Bugonia as Teddy and Donny’s worldviews are tainted by internet conspiracy theories, with Teddy trying to find a cure for his mother’s (Alicia Stilverstone) illness.
Bugonia (c) Focus Features
It’s no stretch to say that Bugonia, an adaptation of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, goes into dark, surrealistic and graphically violent moments, but by the last act, when a character jumps out of a moving vehicle for no reason at all, I couldn’t believe where Will Tracy’s screenplay was heading. I can’t say I enjoyed this film more, however, the audacity of its finale did make me admire it more than most Yorgos Lanthimos’ films. It’s sort of a cliché now, but Stone is just astonishing and the standout of the whole affair. She grounds most of the film as the sanest person in the room, while also being a horrible, out-of-touch capitalist. This could be her third Oscar nomination in a row for a Lanthimos full-length feature, and I wouldn’t mind that at all. Plemons is convincingly unhinged while newcomer Delbis turns out to be the heart and soul of the film. Stavros Halkias also has a small part as a police officer who has an unhealthy obsession with Teddy that adds to the tension. Will Bugonia have the same arthouse and Oscars appeal that Poor Things received? Never underestimate the cult of Yorgos Lanthimos.
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