I first watching this ahead of a particularly gruelling close shift at Dishoom in the summer of 19. Sat in the breakroom eating dal, stewing with rage the more I thought about the precious afternoon that had been wasted on such a cruel, heinous movie.
Six years on, having now escaped the woes of hospitality, I was curious to revisit this outside of the furore of that hot discourse summer. And, well, it's still completely rancid. The farcically racist…
Had a much better time with this than expected — "anti-brutalist, pro-Zionist" might otherwise have been concocted in a lab specifically to vex me, and it did, but there's thankfully enough to chew on here to make this more than just an ideological exercise in auteurist bravado and large-format celluloid fetishism.
Plenty to ire, then. Most of all, quite astonishingly, Joe Alwyn: a Transatlantic boxcar and "fat-headed son" (a line reading impeccably delivered by Guy Pierce, whose brandy-acting here hit…
shades of john waters' polyester, not least in diane ladd's glorious channelling of francine fishpaw — overbearing mother, always only moments away from an eruption of violence.
lynch, though, has always been a much more heartfelt filmmaker than I often think is appreciated, and where polyester is unmistakably a satire of americana, here those influences feel so infectiously sincere: the clicking heels of dern, a traumatised dorothy longing to wake up from oz; the crooning of cage, the snakeskin elvis (or "E"), loving tender.
reeks. a marketing boardroom musk, high on its own supply — the stench not of sweat-soaked hotel room sheets, only the clinicism of a dental surgery.
torturously yas king! sexual politics ("umm actually that's an outdated view of sexuality... :/") and a liberal feminism that fails to explore the pernicious symbolism of leading a warehouse automation company.
instead, trivial set dressing for an appropriately SheEO coda: "if I wanted to be humiliated, I'd pay someone to do it." groan!
growing more than a little weary of the overly studied, mechanical sandboxes of mr eggers — undoubtedly a great image-maker, but whose films feel so incredibly ordinary.
I'd hoped the source material would help finally bridge this gap, but a stale air of A24 horror™ haunts these gothic proceedings, as does an uncharacteristically sexless count... the rotting skarsgard is channeling both doctor eggman and general grievous.
still, plenty to sink your proverbial gnashers into with this. this is a movie…
my gladiiator power rankings:
↑↑↑ denzel "that's politicssssssss" washington: godbless. no reason whatsoever for him to be operating on this level for what is otherwise an essentially worthless movie, but he's near enough guaranteed this an eventual rewatch for his gilded machiavelli alone. outrageously good.
↑↑ fred "hail, dondas!" hechinger: love this little freak!
→ pedro "big sexy" pascal: largely uncompelled as initial (faux) antagonist, but really comes into his own as the true machinations are revealed. led grossly astray…
a pompous, self-indulgent puff piece that — like so many sports docies in the wake of the last dance — is more interested in preserving a legacy (one that, curiously, has recently been under the spotlight in the wake of beckham's ambassadorial role for the qatari state) than interrogating anything genuinely interesting about its subject.
[2 stars for the crisp archival footage of Manchester United Being Good, a rare phenomenon these days, that I gladly took refuge in 🔴]
