~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Sometimes there’s not a movie in sight that looks worth the investment and then there’s now: I saw three in one week and I have six more on my list.
“Allied” is a Second World War tale from Paramount Pictures. Screen writer Steven Knight wrote the original script from what he said was a true story told to him when he was 21. It starts in Casablanca, so be prepared to be charmed by association: Bogart and Bergman’s 1942 “Casablanca” is one of the world’s favorite love stories of all time.
“Allied” has the same romantic aura — the beautiful women smoking away with their long cigarette holders, drinking champagne and looking languid; handsome fellas in uniforms (German of course; Morocco is occupied); the lingering danger around every corner; the frenetic bon homme of each bar, restaurant and party.
Brad Pitt plays a Canadian Air Force pilot/spy working for the Brits who falls in love with former French Resistance worker (French actress Marion Cotillard) now living in Casablanca. They’ve been paired up by the powers behind the scene in London to pose as husband and wife in order to finagle themselves into the high life of the German Command in Africa. Their goal — to kill a high-ranking German officer in the French Moroccan city.
They figure they won’t live through the assassination, so despite their cynicism and mutual decision not to become involved with one another, they (Surprise!) fall in love. And live. They make it back to London, and there, the plot takes a turn. She has a baby, he works in the office of secret operations that initially sent him to Casablanca, they are wildly happy . . . until. . . .
There are a couple of things in the movie which do not ring true for the era, one of which is two women having an openly gay relationship; probably wasn’t happening in the Allied armies in 1940. But the anachronism is quickly forgiven because it is such a good movie. I’m not usually sappy, but this film made me cry.
The second movie I recommend is “Arrival,” from Paramount Pictures directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer based on a 1998 short story by Ted Chiang. Amy Adams is the lead with Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker.
And Amy is at her cute but serious best as one of those girls who knows more than anyone around her about the subject at hand; which in this movie is linguistics. She is brought to a desolate spot in Montana where aliens have landed (kind of landed; their space craft hovers two feet off the high plains mesa). Five more of these crafts hover in other places across the globe, and as in the U.S., armies are marshaled and pointing their weapons at the possible enemy. Surely they have not come in peace.
The impossibility of communication between whatever or whoever occupies the vertical ovals floating above terra firma and the human let’s-shoot-’em-all-and-ask-questions-later leaders of the free and not-so-free countries of Earth prompts someone to call in Amy, who within a short time figures out how to understand what is definitely not an alphabet.
Romance is not the central them. There is a lot of watching the amorphous alien figures through a screen as they paint their pretty but indecipherable drawings on the clear canvas between them and the homo sapiens puzzled by it all. The message, eventually figured out by heroine Amy, reveals a benign idea — about compassion and changing the perception of time, not about conquering the world.
This sci-fi film is an excellent story, fear versus goodwill, hope and great music. “Arrival” has been nominated for Golden Globe Best Actress and Best Original Score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who began work on his score at the beginning of producing the movie, inspired by the screenplay itself as well as the art.
The story is complicated. I would like to see this movie again.
The third — and best so far — movie I’ve seen is “Fences,” also a Paramount release. From the 1983 August Wilson play which won a Pulitzer for best drama in 1987 and a Tony for Best Play that same year, the new “Fences,” the film, is a work of exceptional realism from the players. The two main characters reprise their performances in this play that won a second Tony in 2010, for Best Revival.
Hard-working garbageman Troy played by Denzel Washington and his wife Rose played by Viola Davis are so real that I felt I was watching true lives through a window in the house across the alley from their backyard. They have been married 18 years when the play opens; they have a teenage son Cory who wants to play football. The father-son relationship, fraught with anger, resentment, envy and love, reveals that Troy is dead-set against his son playing football. This tug-of-war is the long-time-brewing anger of Troy as victim of racial prejudice when he was a young man disallowed from playing pro baseball.
The relationship between the husband and wife seems deep and caring but runs into a shocking divide late in the story.
One of the most interesting things about this film is that it is more like a stage play than a movie. Almost all the action takes place in the backyard, and the voice of Rose coming through the kitchen window carries that sound of off-stage voices in a theater. I soon realized how beautifully it worked, how intimate it made the movie.
“Fences” has accumulated 17 awards and has been nominated for an additional 25. Playwright Wilson, who died in 2005, wrote 10 plays, one for each decade of the 20th century; “Fences” is his story of African American life in the 1950s. He called the series The Pittsburgh Cycle and was adamant that only an African American “possessed of sufficient maturity and life experience” direct any of his plays. Denzel did a superb job on this one.
The rest of my list includes:
- “Hidden Figures” — Three black female mathematicians working at NASA
- “Jackie” — former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy after the assassination
- “Manchester by the Sea” — an uncle having to step up and take care of his orphan nephew
- “Loving” — interracial couple in the 1950s
- “Sully” — emergency landing of a commercial jet in the Hudson River
- “La La Land” — song and dance love story set in modern day Los Angeles
