Short Cuts

Flow. (Courtesy of Janus Films.)

Flow: This gorgeous-looking animated film from Latvia, written by Gints Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza and directed by Zilbalodis, is one of the few treasures of a disappointing holiday season. Set in a jungle in the wake of a tsunami, it seems to take place at the end of the world – there are no human beings in it, and the animals who populate it travel on a deserted sailboat. Its subject is the surprising harmony of living creatures who need to look to each other to survive. Flow has an obvious underlying melancholy, but it’s sweet and playful. The protagonist is a cat, a natural loner who is befriended by a secretary bird, a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur and a Labrador. The most striking relationship is between the cat and the secretary bird, whose attempt to reach out with an offering of freshly caught fish is met with hostility from his pack, who ostracize him and step on his wings so he can’t fly away with them. On the boat with the others, the cat reciprocates; he also figures out how to navigate the bird’s regal pride. This coming together of two solitary creatures in a strange, almost mystical friendship is the most touching element of the film but far from the only one.

James Norton, Bill Nighy, and Thomas McKenzie in Joy. (Photo courtesy of Netflix.)

Joy: This treatment of the difficult pioneering days of IVF went straight to Netflix. It’s conventional but quite satisfying because of the intelligence of the script (by the prolific English playwright Jack Thorne), the understatement of Ben Taylor’s direction and the four central performances. James Norton plays the biologist at the head of the initiative, Bob Edwards; Bill Nighy is Patrick Steptoe, the surgeon who becomes his collaborator; Thomasin McKenzie (she played the teenage girl living off the grid with her father in Leave No Trace) is Jean Purdy, their nurse, whose commitment to the experiment affects her relationship with her devout Christian mother (Joanna Scanlan) and results in her unofficial ouster from her church community. This is not the first time I’ve waxed enthusiastic over Norton, but he’s an amazing actor, even among the current breathtaking crop of Brits. He’s as handsome as any movie star from Hollywood’s big studio era yet somehow he vanishes into every role he plays.

Ralph Fiennes in Conclave. (Photo courtesy of Focus Features.)

Conclave: A didactic melodrama built around the process by which the cardinals of the Catholic Church elect a new pope. The idea that the Vatican is just as political as the government of any nation and that its factions are just as eager to expose each other’s secrets is hardly new, but it’s engaging enough to keep the movie entertaining, and the director, Edward Berger (whose last picture was All Quiet on the Western Front), is highly skilled. But the movie is also fairly ridiculous, what with familiar actors sweeping through the corridors of the Vatican in immaculate scarlet robes and caps trying to convince us that they’re members of the clerical aristocracy – John Lithgow? Stanley Tucci? – and meeting each other in pairs and trios for secret conferences. It made me giggle long before the preposterous eleventh-hour twist. Ralph Fiennes gives a remarkably compelling performance in an increasingly implausible narrative as Cardinal Lawrence, who has been put in charge of the process and has to meet one unanticipated challenge after another, and Isabella Rossellini is very good as the head nun. Watching Conclave made me think fondly of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s obscure 1977 movie Nasty Habits, based on a slender Muriel Sparks novel, in which the nuns in a convent stand in for the main figures in the Watergate scandal. Nasty Habits is the better picture.

Juror # 2: Clint Eastwood is particularly clunky when he tries to make a popular thriller. (The Changeling and Blood Work come to mind.) Jonathan Abrams’s screenplay for Juror #2, set in Savannah, is 12 Angry Men with a twist. In a jury otherwise sold on the guilt of a young man (Gabriel Basso) accused of murdering his girlfriend, one man (Nicholas Hoult) plants doubt among the others. In 12 Angry Men the holdout (Henry Fonda) is the symbolic good citizen whose presence guarantees the triumph of justice. In Juror #2 the reason he’s so eager to undermine the various predilections of the others is that he himself may be responsible for the victim’s death. So he acts on the advice of his AA sponsor (Kiefer Sutherland), who happens to be a lawyer and claims their conversations are protected by attorney-client privilege. It doesn’t bother the lawyer that revealing what’s said during jury deliberations is illegal. The plot is hilariously farfetched and doesn’t even make sense on its own terms: at one point there’s a shift so baffling I wondered if I’d drifted off to sleep and missed a key scene. A filmmaker can get away with this kind of nonsense with some style and wit – or if a flashy cast supplies it, which is what happened in Runaway Jury (from a John Grisham novel), which was even more idiotic than Juror #2 but had the benefit of John Cusack, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Rachel Weisz and Bruce Davison. However, style and wit are not adjectives I would apply to Clint Eastwood, and most of the actors are instantly forgettable. The others are hamstrung because he treats the whole thing as a piece of realism; even Toni Collette, as the prosecutor, looks stranded; only J.K. Simmons as a retired cop on the jury comes across as relaxed. Nicholas Hoult, who’s a good actor, is helpless here; everything that might have given the character a little color has been taken out. (He’s a recovering drunk who wasn’t even acting under the influence.) The poor bastard is having a really bad season: he’s even worse in Nosferatu.

Babygirl: Apparently this turkey was intended to be a feminist erotic thriller, but it isn’t really a thriller (you keep anticipating a twist that never appears) and the story about a high-powered middle-aged businesswoman who gets involved with an intern who leads her by the nose is pretty much the opposite of feminist – like Gone Girl, but at least that was a thriller. As for the erotic part, we never get to see any sex, so our only remaining hope, that Babygirl might have provided some dirty fun, is also dashed. Does that mean we’re supposed to take it seriously? Well, it doesn’t present a coherent argument about power balance or the needs of women who wield power, and simply introducing a topic doesn’t mean a movie is about that topic. Nicole Kidman gives a fatuous performance in the lead, and whatever surplus work she’s had done on her face gives her an unnervingly plastic look, like a manikin with a bad hairstyle. The choice to cast opposite her a young British actor named Harris Dickinson who hasn’t made much of an impression in his other films is bewildering. He’s blandly photogenic and the only emotion he seems able to play is insolence, though that may be the fault of the writer-director, Halina Reijn, who didn’t bother providing his character with any motivation. His scenes with Kidman produce no sparks and no narrative logic either.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.