In Review: 'Spider-Man: No Way Home,' 'Nightmare Alley,' 'The Lost Daughter'
The MCU contracts as it expands, Guillermo del Toro puts a sumptuous spin on an old noir, and Maggie Gyllenhaal makes an auspicious directorial debut.
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Dir. Jon Watts
148 min.
In a dark period between 2006 and 2010, the filmmaking team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer directed a series of spoofs built roughly around genres, like rom-coms (Date Movie), epics (Epic Movie), sword-and-sandal actioners (Meet the Spartans), and disaster movies (Disaster Movie). (I reviewed Date Movie. It got the rare A.V. Club F, but deserved worse.) Friedberg and Seltzer were ostensibly working in the tradition of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker parodies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun, but their films function like crude anthologies of the most popular hits of the day, with barely any comic spin on them whatsoever. Rather than big laughs, Friedberg and Seltzer settled for thin chuckles of recognition. As I wrote of Date Movie, “the result is a comedy that congratulates its audience for getting references to movies that made over $200 million.”
Those spoofs mercifully fizzled out in popularity, but their spirit lives on in a culture of unprecedented timidness in Hollywood, where properties are endlessly recycled and increasingly self-aware. We’re all expected to be Rick Dalton in the Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood meme, sitting in our chairs and pointing at the things we recognize. These “easter egg” hunts can pander woefully to fans, as Keith lamented in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but even at their most sophisticated, they can feel like a creative dead end. Though Spider-Man: No Way Home is the most robustly entertaining of the current, wobbly phase of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, it has the faint munching sound of a snake eating its own tail. Opening up the multiverse causes it to contract more than it expands.
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It also limits what I can say in a review, for fear of ladling out even the meagerest drops gruel that Marvel wants audiences to spoon up for themselves. And so I’ll be dutifully vague about the film’s very premise: In Spider-Man: Far From Home, our friendly neighborhood web-slinger (Tom Holland) traveled to Europe and beyond to defeat Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), but not before the villain comics fans know as ‘ol fishbowl head could reveal Peter Parker’s true identity to the world. That’s a problem for Peter, because Spider-Man has become a polarizing figure at home, revered as a hero by some and a destructive force by others, including J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), an Alex Jones-like conspiracy theorist who broadcasts diatribes against him on the internet. It’s also a problem for the people closest to Peter: College plans he had with his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and his best buddy Ned (Jacob Batalon) are thwarted, and his poor Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) doesn’t want helicopters hovering around her apartment building. Being a celebrity sucks, to say nothing of the target it places on his family and friends.
Peter turns to his buddy Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) for help: a spell to make people forget that he’s Spider-Man. But when the casting goes awry, a crack opens in the multiverse, sending… well, I guess I should stop there. If you’ve seen the trailer or the superior Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the possibilities aren’t difficult to imagine. Suffice to say, no piece of intellectual property goes unexploited here, and it’s fair to predict that your reaction to No Way Home will likely reflect your investment in the character—not just in the MCU movies, but in multiple iterations. Even with all this cross-franchise playfulness, the film still represents what the MCU world-building has always been about: Paying off long-term, multi-film investment in its heroes. It’s Avengers: Endgame for Spider-Man 3.0.
To that end, it’s mostly fine. The MCU is a high-floor/low-ceiling enterprise, and No Way Home is slightly closer to the ceiling than the floor, exactly like all the other Spider-Man movies. Franchise bloat has pushed this installment to an unpardonable 148 minutes, sacrificing pace for a parade of surprise cameos and supporting turns that each demand time, as if they’re speakers on the Congressional floor. But the pleasing lightness and quality banter that defines the MCU Spider-Man offers an essential buoyancy, and when the film isn’t ploddingly democratic, it can get unexpectedly emotional. The usual CGI sludge of a climax turns into a chorus of sincerity that Holland and company have worked hard over three movies to earn. It’s hard to guess where Tom Holland’s Spider-Man could go from here, though: After Homecoming, Far From Home, and No Way Home, he can never go home again. — Scott Tobias
Spider-Man: No Way Home is in theaters everywhere.
Nightmare Alley
Dir. Guillermo del Toro
150 min.
With a grin on his face and no suggestion of guilt in his eyes, carnival manager “Clem” Hoatley (Willem Dafoe) clues newcomer Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) in on the secrets of getting and keeping a geek, the feral sideshow performers who make their livings biting into the necks of a live chickens. First, you have to find a down-on-his-luck, hard-drinking fellow and make it sound like you’ve got an offer of temporary work. You don’t even have to mention that the fringe benefits include drinks laced with opium. (In fact, it’s better if you don’t.) But once you get ‘em hooked, mister, you’ve got yourself a geek. In Nightmare Alley, there are show people and there are suckers. But sometimes being the former doesn’t protect someone from doing double duty as the latter.
Directed by Guillermo del Toro from a script co-written with critic Kim Morgan, this is the second film version of William Lindsay Gresham’s revered 1946 crime novel of the same name, following a 1947 adaptation directed by Edmund Golding and starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. But it’s spiritually akin to del Toro’s previous film, the Best Picture-winning The Shape of Water. Both play like the work of a filmmaker who’s never been able to let go of a movie that marked him at an early age—in this case, Golding’s original; in the earlier, The Creature From the Black Lagoon—embracing the chance to tie it to his own obsessions. The fusion mostly takes. Here, Del Toro brings his signature flourishes to a film that’s at once classically stylish, luxuriously detailed, pessimistic about humanity’s potential for goodness, and, at times, unapologetically grotesque. (The depiction of geekdom, for instance, goes beyond talk.)
Though reverent of its noir inspirations, del Toro’s film opens with a moment of tweaked expectations. If most noirs are divided by what noir scholar Eddie Muller calls “the noir moment”—the choice that sends their heroes down a troubled path—Nightmare Alley’s arrives before the action even really begins, via an opening scene that finds Stan committing an act that will haunt him. Its exact nature won’t be clear until later, but it’s the sort of deed a man has to run away from. Then,during a bus trip layover in the middle of nowhere, Stan sees an escape route. Watching a little person heading toward some twinkling lights in the distance, he becomes a transfixed Alice following his own March Hare.
Stan arrives at the grimy but enchanting wonderland 0f a traveling circus and, with nothing to lose, takes a thankless job. He doesn’t stay on the bottom (or the just-above-geek) rung for long, however, befriending both halves of a clairvoyant act: the alcoholic Pete (David Strathairn) and his wife Madame Zeena (Toni Collette). After becoming Zeena’s lover, Stan learns about the elaborate verbal and physical signals Zeena and Pete exchange to create the illusion that Pete’s reading the minds of an audience. Soon, he’s dreaming up his own twist on the act, and imagining what a great partner Molly (Rooney Mara), another performer, would be. After all, she can’t pretend to die by electrocution forever.
It’s at this point that Stan and Nightmare Alley bid adieu to carny life for a higher class of scam. A time leap finds Stan and Molly using Pete’s playbook to entertain high-paying nightclub customers, but with a higher class of clientele comes the temptation to push the grift further, even when they’re being encouraged by an obvious femme fatale—in the form of Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a therapist whose office is equipped with blackmail-friendly recording equipment.
The film’s two distinct worlds are rendered with unmistakable love for the era, whether it’s the lurid ads advertising carnival acts sure to shock and amaze, the exquisite woodwork of Ritter’s office, or the Veronica Lake waves of her hair. But carnival and high society turn out just to be different venues for the same vices and schemes, as Lilith’s ability to figure out what makes her clients tick (and use it against them) mirrors Stan’s self-serving exercises in empathy. She just has credentials and science backing her up.
As with The Shape of Water, del Toro acts as a skilled, knowledgeable tour guide to movies past. But where Shape was driven by a desire to get beneath the surface of the classic monster movie, Alley remains content to cruise atop its genre of choice. Del Toro recreates classic noir on a bigger scale, but that bigness isn’t always matched by boldness. Yet if Nightmare Alley doesn’t have that much to add to what’s come before, it at least repeats the past with flair. It’s an exquisite indulgence, and if both the film and some performances sometimes play like exercises, the coda, featuring some of the best moments of Cooper’s career, collapses it all back down to a human-scaled story of one man’s undoing. Del Toro’s film is heavily referential, self-aware, and self-reflexive—but still a noir to the bottom of its dark heart. —Keith Phipps
Nightmare Alley is playing in theaters.
The Lost Daughter
Dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal
121 min.
In the opening sequence of The Lost Daughter, Leda Caruso, a middle-aged woman on holiday, stumbles her way onto a beach at night and collapses in the sand from some unseen wound. What’s happened to her? Is she dead? We won’t find out until much later in the film, which flashes back from there, but the image, reinforced by an insinuating score by former Tindersticks member Dickon Hinchliffe, lingers in the mind, creating a permanent unease that hovers over the drama. There are mysteries upon mysteries that reveal themselves, layer by layer, as the film unfolds, which is no doubt thanks to the structural wizardry of Elena Ferrante, who wrote the novella. But the atmosphere, performances, and patient revelations are so precisely managed by its writer-director, Maggie Gyllenhaal, that it’s hard to believe this is her debut behind the camera.
The Lost Daughter delves into the fraught issue of maternal ambivalence, but it takes its time getting there, allowing a tense situation to develop while sketching out some curious characters. Most curious among them is Leda herself, played by Olivia Colman in a performance that mixes vulnerability and calculation while tapping into Colman’s acrid sense of humor. Leda is staying alone in a rented apartment near the beach on the Greek island of Spetses, and her presence immediately draws curiosity from the locals, starting with Lyle (Ed Harris), the flirtatious handyman who leads her to her room. Any expectation of sunning herself in peace is disrupted by the noisy presence of a large family that would seem to have Mafia connections, though the film doesn’t define the threat more sharply than that. When Leda politely refuses to move her beach chair to accommodate them, it sets off bad vibes that never abate.
As she observes this family, Leda takes a particular interest in Nina (Dakota Johnson), a young mother whose laxness in looking after her little girl triggers Leda’s own memories of being a mother of two daughters. Through flashbacks, the film follows Leda in her 20s, played by Jessie Buckley, as her ambitions as an academic and a writer are smothered by her obligations to a marriage that isn’t working and a relationship to her children that doesn’t come naturally to her. In the present, Leda sees some of herself in Nina, and the two bond after Nina’s girl goes missing for a stretch and it’s Leda who finds her. And yet Leda also does something odd: She swipes the girl’s favorite doll and tucks it away in the rental place.
We know from the opening of The Lost Daughter that Leda faces physical danger, but Gyllenhaal isn’t trying to make a thriller, just a psychological drama that feels like one. The deepest impression here is Leda’s feeling of suffocation: Even on vacation by herself in a faraway isle, she cannot escape the shame and scrutiny that’s been trailing her most of her adult life. As an actress, Gyllenhaal has played complicated mothers herself, like the drug addict trying to go clean for her daughter in Sherrybaby or the prostitute-turned-porn-actress-turned-filmmker on HBO’s The Deuce, whose profession makes visits with her son near-impossible. In the flashbacks, young Leda’s situation is different, because she’s the one trying to limit access to her own children, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t care about them. She just never took to motherhood easily.
The relationship between Leda and Nina grows from a mutual feeling of inadequacy as mothers, though nothing in The Lost Daughter is as simple as that. The two are a wonderfully odd pair—Leda contemplative and eccentric, Nina restless and instinctual, improvising her way through a life of nonstop chaos. Gyllenhaal captures Leda’s longing not merely for liberation but for a connection with someone who knows how she feels and doesn’t attach judgment to those feelings. But even in this slice of Greek paradise, peace is hard to come by. She cannot escape scrutiny, least of all from herself. — Scott Tobias
The Lost Daughter is streaming exclusively on Netflix.
Me have had piece in back of head for while now about this nascent genre of recycled IP that, for better or worse (worse!), Hollywood probably going to stick with for while now. Because me think there important distinction to make between absolute bottom-of-barrel that feel like "here is thing you recognize!" (Ready Player One, Space Jam), movies that seem to make genuine effort to do something new and then backslide into rehashing old stuff (Ghostbusters, Star Wars, JJ Abrams' two Star Trek movies), and movies that are aware of long history and affection we have with these characters and try to use that to tell interesting stories (Bond, MCU, current Trek TV shows).
That last group all have success and failure at various times, but Daniel Craig Bond films invested in playing with Bond mythos and iconography while telling new stories, as opposed to "somehow, Goldfinger has returned." And Star Trek: Discovery certainly uneven, but me respect that when show brought Spock in, it attempt to show us different side of character, rather than Abrams' Chris-Farley-like "remember in Wrath of Khan? When he shouted 'Khan'? That was awesome."
Me also curious to see how Matrix fall on this scale of nothing-to-offer-but-nostalgia to merely-mostly-nostalgia. But it worth remembering that most of these beloved IPs came about because someone had new idea, or new take on idea. George Lucas made Star Wars because he not could get rights to Flash Gordon, and Spielberg made Indiana Jones because they not would let him direct Bond movie. Me wish more people said no to modern directors and they gave us iconic new movies out of spite.
I really like Tom Holland and Zendaya in these roles, but I also really don't like the direction they've taken in these movies. making SM essentially a version of iron man? having the world know his identity? bleh. it's not the SM stories I want to see.
you know what I think I *would* like? 90 min SM animated films that can continue as a series without relying on the actors being available or looking the same.