Black Panther

Before I review the Ryan Coogler-directed Black Panther, let’s get something out of the way: I am a tallish, middle aged, middle class, college-educated, white male. One of my colleagues at work once referred to me as “a walking power structure,” the physical representation of everything that historically has given someone influence and privilege. So I acknowledge that I can never fully wrap my head around what it feels like to be underrepresented, to not have stories about people like me told or to not have the opportunity to tell those stories. 

 Black Panther is significant in terms of cultural representation because, while he is far from being the first black superhero, he is one of the first for whom blackness is an essential character trait, not an incidental fact. Panther’s alter ego, T’Challa comes from the fictional African country of Wakanda. He is also one of the first who is the main character and not a sidekick or comic relief. Black Panther is the star of this 200 million dollar film rather than just being on hand to make Captain America or Iron Man look good. And importantly, he is not a villain, a slave, a convict, a victim, or a drug dealer. Instead, most of the cast of Black Panther plays kings, queens, warriors, and leaders. While it has all the trappings of a Marvel superhero movie, it is definitively different than the mostly white, mostly American, smart-alecky slugfests of the past. That difference is valuable.

The film picks up just days after the events of Captain America: Civil War where Black Panther made his debut. In that film, T’Challa’s father is killed by an assassin’s bomb, and now the son must ascend to the throne. We learn that Wakanda, rather than being an empoverished, third world country, is actually incredibly wealthy and technologically-advanced with a rich cultural and political history. To keep their wealth and technology safe, Wakandans let the world think they have nothing. But of course, there are those who know their secrets and want it all for themselves.

 The film is largely about palace drama, and the parts of the film dealing with tradition and heritage as well as with T’Challa’s desire to be a good man and  a good leader are its most effective. Chadwick Boseman, who has played James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall, knows how to play a character with power and dignity, and he brings a sincerity that’s rarely seen in Marvel movies. However, as good as Boseman is, he’s actually the least interesting thing about the movie. In particular, it is the women who surround his character who are the most compelling. Letitia Wright as his brilliant 16 year old sister, Shuri; Lupita Nyongo as Nakia a Wakandan spy and T’Challa’s former lover; Angela Bassett as Ramonda, the Queen of Wakanda and T’Challa’s mother; and Danai Gurira as Okoye, the captain of the royal guards are all excellent. I’d watch a movie about just them.  

The other standout is Ryan Coogler’s muse, Michael B. Jordan, as the villain, Killmonger. Marvel has been working hard in recent films to provide memorable, meaningful opponents for its heroes, and Jordan’s performance is a worthy effort. His villainy is driven by pain, loss, and betrayal, and Jordan makes that feel real and visceral. His hungry, wounded anger is a nice counterpoint to Boseman’s serene regality.

The film doesn’t ignore history either. Killmonger’s plan is to take over Wakanda and use its technology to arm oppressed black people across the world. His point is that people who “look like” him have only been kept down because they were never given the tools to rise up. It’s a surprisingly complicated and thorny idea for a comic book movie to address – is the answer to chronic, systemic oppression and violence more violence? Black Panther is exciting, fun, and at times, thought provoking. I’d tell you to see it, but you probably already have.

The Shape of Water

Director Guillermo Del Toro famously has two houses in Los Angeles. One he lives in with his wife and children, and the other, which is actually two adjoining structures, houses his massive collections of books, films, toys, movie posters, scientific specimens, and props from some of his own movies like Pacific Rim and Pan’s Labyrinth as well as from many classic horror and sci fi movies. He calls this second home Bleak House, and it is a physical representation of all his obsessions – classical Hollywood, 1950s gee-whiz science fiction, fairy tales, and horror movies of every stripe.

Del Toro’s films are like Bleak House in that they too are giant collections of all the things he loves. He has made a career of making movies are that unmistakably his, even when it comes to adaptations of other people’s existing material like the Hellboy films. Del Toro’s eye for detail and meticulous attention to every color, texture, and design choice is exacting to the point of almost being fussy. He’s an extremely idiosyncratic filmmaker and his work is both fascinating and entertaining. He won critical and commercial acclaim with 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, and while most of his other films have been reasonably successful, they were primarily niche pictures. So it was exciting when his latest project, The Shape of Water, earned the most Oscar nominations of any film this year with 13 nods. 

 The film is a remarkable mishmash of The Twilight Zone, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Rogers and Astaire, Shirley Temple, and Amelie. It’s a lot to pack into one film, but Del Toro is nothing if not ambitious and visionary.

Sally Hawkins plays Elisa, a mute woman who works as a custodian at a secret government facility in Cold War-era Baltimore. She lives her very routine life, sharing it only with her next door neighbor, a closeted, aging artist played impeccably by Richard Jenkins and her co-worker at the facility, played by Octavia Spencer who basically just does a variation of her character from The Help.  One day, government workers bring a new project to Elisa’s workplace: a fish man dragged from a lagoon in South America. Humanoid but with gills, webbed hands, feet, and arms, and no ability to speak, he’s kept chained in a pool while scientists, soldiers, and an extraordinarily off-putting government agent played by Michael Shannon decide what to do with him.

Between her custodial duties, Elisa falls in love with the fish man. At first it seems to be mere fascination with his exoticism and difference, but pretty quickly things turn romantic. As viewers, we’re meant to see that both Elisa and the creature are, pardon the pun, fish out of water – oddities that others can’t seem to communicate with but who find in each other a kindred spirit.

When the government decides that vivisection is the best option to get information about the creature, Elisa and her friends stage a daring escape and she houses him in the tub in her apartment until the canals of Baltimore fill with enough water to get him safely out to sea.

The film is beautifully shot and intelligently written and acted, but frankly, as much as I love Del 

Toro and his mishmash Bleak House films, I had a hard time getting behind The Shape of Water. Everything seemed a little too literal and real world for the allegory to function. In the end, the love scenes between Elisa and the fish man that are meant to be dreamy, romantic, and fantastic are just a little…squicky. For me, the film falls just short of transcending into a moving story about acceptance and finding your fellow weirdos in life and unfortunately just stays a movie about a woman and a fish guy getting it on. Your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for this particularly pure distillation of Del Toro’s Bleak House obsessions.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

I find movie awards fascinating. They’re such an interesting horse race of art, commerce, popularity, politics, and zeitgeist. As ostentatious and self-important as they often are, I really do love all the trappings – the nominations, the self-promotion, the ridiculous red carpet pageantry, all of it. While they seem self-congratulatory and unimportant, in Hollywood things like Oscars, Golden Globes, and SAG awards have lots of real world consequences. An Oscar is the difference between being an unknown indie actor getting paid scale to appear in movies no one actually sees and commanding 20 million dollars a picture. Just ask Jennifer Lawrence. 

But it’s important to remember that awards are not the final word in quality or accomplishment. Plenty of worthy films, directors, actors, technicians, and artists go their whole careers without a major award. Hitchcock never won an Oscar.

On the other hand, there are also instances when the award went to the wrong film altogether. I’m not talking about last year’s Oscar mix-up between Moonlight and La La Land. I’m talking about when the wrong film wins. Does anyone actually think How Green Was My Valley is better than Citizen Kane? That Shakespeare in Love was more of an accomplishment than Saving Private Ryan? That Crash deserved anything? Sometimes, winners seem like a good idea but then age badly like 1999’s American Beauty.  Other times, it’s just a head-scratcher all the way around. 

 This is the case for me with the current Oscar front runner for several awards, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Written, produced, and directed by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, the film centers on grieving mother Mildred Hayes, whose teenage daughter’s assault and murder hasn’t been solved in the seven months since her death. Hayes rents three billboards outside of town and accuses the beloved local sheriff of not doing enough in ten foot high letters. Of course, the signs are divisive and make trouble for Mildred, the sheriff, his dimbulb racist deputy, and basically everyone else involved. 

Three Billboards won an armload of big Golden Globes awards and has nine Oscar nominations. The acting awards it has won are understandable more or less. Frances McDormand is excellent in everything she does, and her unrelenting performance as Mildred is intense and unapologetic. Sam Rockwell was fine, I guess, though it’s hard to believe that his was the best supporting performance of the entire year.

No, my problem is that the film won Golden Globes for best screenplay and best picture when it clearly deserves neither. McDonagh’s screenplay reads like a some kind of European Disneyland version of America featuring Hillbillyland or something. It is as though he tried to write about rural middle America without ever having been there and only having read fourth grade level books about it. There is a stageyness to the entire film that never coheres into anything other than an off-putting sense of falseness. It also doesn’t appear to take place in any kind of real world universe I recognize. 

At one point, Sam Rockwell’s deputy character savagely beats a completely innocent citizen and throws him out of a second story window in broad daylight. Nothing happens to him. No charges, no arrest. He gets fired and goes home to read comics at his mom’s house. That’s it.

Also, both his character and McDormand’s Mildred turn on a dime. They are unrelenting in their bitterness or their smallness until suddenly they’re not anymore. And their big epiphanic moments are dumb and clunky. The ending is particularly dissatisfying. A friend suggested it was a European ending because of its ambiguity. I love an ambiguous ending but this conclusion was just unearned, uneven, and lame. Instead of inspiring thought and wonder, I just shook my head. The film wants to be a black comedy that’s also a resounding hymn of redemption, but mostly it’s a pretentious attempt at depth that stumbles along the way. I hope something, anything more worthy wins at the Oscars in March.