Triangle of Sadness ★★★★
(M) 147 minutes
How much human degradation and depravity is too much? Like the waiter in the Monty Python sketch about the overweight man in a restaurant,Swedish iconoclast Ruben Ostlund keeps offering us “just a wafer-thin slice” to take us over the edge,where discomfort becomes the point. He wants to make a movie that is worth leaving the house for. It’s basically a(longish) vomit-comet of cinematic bile and guile.
For Ostlund,subtlety is overrated.Triangle of Sadness shows us why he has a point. It’s a spectacular demolition of modern life,a disruptor movie full of ideas and nuance,as violent in its way as a Pieter Bruegel painting.
Ostlund grew up on a Swedish island,and his mother was a teacher and a communist. He has no difficulty in identifying the enemy. The surprise is how sympathetic he is once he has them up against the wall,squirming like an insect on a pin.
A brief introduction throws us into the gorgeous lives of two models. Yaya (South African actress Charlbi Dean Kriek) earns four times as much as Carl (Harris Dickinson),but still expects him to pay for dinner. After a spectacular argument brings them closer,they board a super yacht as invited guests. Yaya is an influencer,accustomed to her beauty opening all doors. It’s her currency.
The location is unclear,but it feels like the Mediterranean,somewhere near Greece. Ostlund assembles a basket of deplorables,most of whom are only there because they’re rich. An impeccably mannered English duo,cutely named Winston and Clementine (Oliver Ford Davies and Amanda Walker),enjoy a family fortune built on land mines and hand grenades. Fat Russian billionaire Dimitry (Zlatko Buric) declares proudly that “I sell shit”. His wife Vera (Sunnyi Melles),pickled in champagne,gives outlandish orders to the exquisitely polite crew:money buys obeisance.
In his cabin,the alcoholic Marxist captain (Woody Harrelson) refuses to come out. When a storm hits the ship,the Marxist and the Russian capitalist get so trolleyed they take turns reading the Communist Manifesto over the PA. Meanwhile,most of the passengers are hurling the contents of the seven-course captain’s dinner. Then the sewage tanks overflow.
Ostlund does not hold back:this is one of the most revolting (and hilarious) sequences in the history of movies,a brilliantly satirical square-up as nature overturns privilege. The survivors wash up on a deserted island. Neither beauty nor money means anything now. Abigail (Dolly De Leon),a Filipina who cleaned toilets on the ship,finds a new role. She knows how to fish. It’s likeGilligan’s Island meetsThe Hunger Games.
Ostlund made some waves withForce Majeure andThe Square.Triangle of Sadness bolts onto those as the grand finale of a trilogy about masculinity in trouble in a world without pity or moral compass.
Force Majeure was about a family falling apart. Ostlund indicted the art world and its patrons inThe Square. He dissects multiple forms of privilege here,from beauty to heredity to sheer dumb luck,but he does it with compassion. He loves the characters he tortures. There’s an emotionally powerful shot here,with one character crying over the body of another. Until this,both had seemed like empty shells,the victims of their own misbegotten fortune. Death and grief make them human again.
If Ostlund goes too far,he does it with purpose rather than ego. He never draws attention to his own (considerable) skills. He wants us to be helplessly under the spell of the story,drowning in ideas and meaning,struggling for comprehension and relief,even as he makes us laugh and cry. That’s some combination of effects.PB
Triangle of Sadness is in wide release in cinemas.
Whitney Houston:I Wanna Dance with Somebody ★★★½
(M) 144 minutes
What more is there to say about Whitney Houston,whose brilliant career,drug-taking and premature death has been hashed over exhaustively on screen and in the tabloids?
I Wanna Dance with Somebody tackles that question by taking her story back to the music. It’s written by New Zealander Anthony McCarten,whose screenplay forBohemian Rhapsody didn’t dilute the tragedies in Freddie Mercury’s short life while still managing to evoke the exhilaration to be had from Queen’s greatest concerts.
It took a delicate touch and other rock stars haven’t been as fortunate. WhileRocketman was just as exuberant in doing justice toElton John as a performer,theAretha Franklin biopicRespect (2021) became more depressing as it went on.The United States vs. Billie Holiday,also released last year,was the same. It was powerful but it was no celebration. Then there wasBaz Luhrmann’sElvis,which was more glitz than heart,clouded by the decision to tell the tale from the venal viewpoint of Presley’s manager,Colonel Tom Parker.
Members of Houston’s family were interviewed at length for a documentary four years ago. But for this film,also produced with the family’s co-operation,director Kasi Lemmons made extensive use of the singer’s original recordings,including those laid down en route to the final versions. It allowed star Naomi Ackie to take Houston’s false starts,double takes and spontaneous comments as prompts in shaping her performance. Although she was filmed singing,her voice was replaced by Houston’s.
She does well,catching the contradictions in Houston’s character – the naivete,the fear of failure,the rebellious streak and its effect on her religious convictions. But physically,Ackie bears only a superficial resemblance to the singer. With Houston’s image still so fresh in the memory,this is a distraction.
The script is impressionistic in style,covering a lot of ground by being selective and using Houston’s songs to drive the narrative. Much is made of her relationship with the record company chief Clive Davis (one of the film’s producers),who discovered Houston and helped her choose songs for her albums. He’s played by a wryly urbane Stanley Tucci,giving us a character whose iron fist is well covered in velvet. Appalled when Houston takes up smoking,he looks sadly at her as she lights up,remarking that it’s like watching a Stradivarius being left out in the rain.
The film falls a little short of its claim to be warts-and-all,condensing the low points in Houston’s turbulent marriage to Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders),but it doesn’t hold back in dealing with her father’s financial mismanagement. Nor does it underplay the importance of her enduring friendship with her former lover,Robyn Crawford – played with a lot of verve by Nafessa Williams.
And while it leaves her death off-screen,preferring to go out with the show-stopping medley she delivered at the 1994 American Music Awards,I’m not complaining.Sandra Hall
Whitney Houston:I Wanna Dance with Somebody is in wide release in cinemas.
For the family
Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical ★★★★
(PG) 117 minutes
Roald Dahl was not the first storyteller to acknowledge many children’s taste for the macabre – the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen got there before him. But nobody has ever extracted as much fun from this discovery as Dahl has.
Matilda Wormwood (Alisha Weir) is one of Dahl’s most popular creations – a small girl forced to survive as best she can in a world governed by some of the most malevolent grown-ups in children’s literature. Her parents (Andrea Riseborough and Stephen Graham) are bad enough – crass,venal and spiteful,with voices piercing enough to shatter glass – but Miss Trunchbull,headmistress of Crunchem Hall,the gothic house of horrors that is Matilda’s school,is worse. She’s a monster.
Trunchbull was played by a man whenMatilda:The Musical began its triumphal march across the world’s stages. When the screen adaptation was announced,it seemed the role would go to Ralph Fiennes. Instead,Trunchbull is brought hideously to life by an unrecognisable Emma Thompson. Her face looks as if it has been moulded out of concrete,while she stamps around her domain in a get-up with an unsettling resemblance to a stormtrooper uniform. Thompson abandoned her vanity long ago,but this creation goes quite a few grotesque steps further than her Nanny McPhee of the single bucktooth and hairy mole.
Matilda is sent to Crunchem Hall because her parents don’t like having her around. She does her best to keep out of their way,having adopted the local mobile library as her second home. Librarian Mrs Phelps (Sindhu Vee) has become a substitute mother,as well as being a receptive audience for the stories spun by Matilda’s fertile imagination.
The film is directed by Matthew Warchus,who is the artistic director of the Old Vic in London and worked on the original stage production. He has done a wonderful job transferring the musical’s energy to the screen.
Two hundred children were recruited to portray Matilda’s schoolmates – or Crunchem’s “maggots”,as their headmistress refers to them – and their chorus work brings great vitality to Tim Minchin’s music and lyrics,which are crucial in advancing the plot and crystallising the mood of the film. They’re also gifted comedians adept at the slapstick that gives the choreography such charge.
Eventually,the “maggots” all learn how to stand up to the execrable Trunchbull,as does her sweet-natured underling Miss Honey (Lashana Lynch). Despite his love of the sardonic,Dahl did believe in happy endings and Dennis Kelly’s script keeps the story’s dark and light sides in perfect balance.
Twelve-year-old Weir does the same. It’s a performance in which innocence and intelligence are bound up with bravery and righteous anger. You cheer her all the way as she takes on the seemingly impossible.
The ferocious Trunchbull may be too much for young children,but those who relish being scared in the belief that things will eventually come right will have a ball.SH
Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical is streaming on Netflix.
Lyle,Lyle,Crocodile★★
(G) 106 minutes
Puss in Boots:The Last Wish★★
(PG) 102 minutes
Apparently a classic in the US,the children’s bookLyle,Lyle,Crocodile wasn’t part of my childhood. But Will Speck and Josh Gordon’s new adaptation,a hybrid of live action and animation,felt almost familiar – starting out as a homage to the great Warner Brothers cartoonOne Froggy Evening,then morphing into a bid to recreate the success of the genuinely charmingPaddingtonfilms.
Canadian singer Shawn Mendes supplies the voice of Lyle,a shy but musically gifted young crocodile who is discovered hiding out in the attic of a New York brownstone by the family that has just moved in.
This is supposed to be an “elevated” children’s film,meaning we get Javier Bardem as a flamboyant magician,a suite of unmemorable songs from the team who worked onThe Greatest Showman,and Adult Swim comic Brett Gelman playing a nosy neighbour named Mr Grumps with hipster irony.
Less ironised is the core message,which appears to be the same one sometime Pixar songwriter Randy Newman satirised long ago in his novelty hitSimon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear:even rank outsiders can be accepted anywhere,provided they know how to sing and dance.
Joel Crawford’s fully animatedPuss in Boots:The Last Wish has a few more things going for it,at least for viewers like me who are easily won over by the notion of an intrepid marmalade cat who’s voiced by Antonio Banderas and can buckle a swash with the best of them.
True,I can’t say I yearned to see this feline Zorro undergo a midlife crisis and face his own mortality. But given the character made his debut inShrek 2in 2004,it’s understandable that weariness would start to set in.
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Having used up all but one of his nine lives,Puss in Boots can only regain his mojo by embarking on a shamanistic spiritual quest through a psychedelic landscape where his fears manifest in physical form (the painterly style,influenced by anime,makes a change from the usual “photorealistic” approach).
Hot on his tail is a parade of villains,including the menacing Jack Horner (John Mulaney) and a Cockney version of Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) who has turned the three bears into her criminal sidekicks but still yearns for the day when everything will be “just right”.
There are a fair number of amusing moments along the way,but also a few scenes that may alarm younger viewers. (One of these,involving carnivorous flowers,I found pretty creepy myself.)
Both films leave the same uncanny aftertaste,common to much current Hollywood family entertainment:a sense that wit,personality and emotional insight have been more or less skilfully simulated.JW
Lyle,Lyle,Crocodile andPuss in Boots:The Last Wish are in wide release in cinemas.
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