Skip to main content

REVIEW: Malcolm & Marie

 

Sam Levinson's new film, Malcolm and Marie, drops on Netflix and select theaters today--just early enough to not be this year's Valentine's Day offering. In this case that's a good thing. Don't misunderstand, the film hits a sweet spot, but that spot is decidedly far away from the likes of Life as We Know it and While You Were Sleeping. An intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, the movie displays love in all its cracks and contours and bites at the audience just as aggressively as it bites at its own stars.

Malcolm & Marie finds our titular characters, longtime lovers, coming home after the press premiere of Malcolm's new feature film. Malcolm is an artist convinced that his work transcends human description. Marie is a recovering addict and an actress who walked away from the camera before she ever found the spotlight. As they await the onslaught of reactions from the critics, subterranean tensions between them stir, erupting in emotional outbursts that threaten to leave their relationship shattered and strewn across the polished floor.

Our titular characters are the only characters the appear in the film, (though "that white lady who writes for the LA Times" earns so many shoutouts that Levinson might as well have let us hear her side of the story), and so the responsibility falls squarely on stars John David Washington and Zendaya to carry the film. Good news: they never miss a beat. Washington's fire collides with Zendaya's ice in a way that is always charged and never melodramatic. Both Washington and Zendaya know that an artful stink-eye can be every bit as withering as a shouting match. 

The seed of discord between them is Malcolm forgetting to mention Marie in his speech. This plotpoint occurs offscreen but becomes the throughline of the argument that will carry them well into the night. In broad strokes, you can see what twists and turns this prolonged duel of wills is going to take, but the texture of the conflict only becomes clear as you put in the time in the kiln and watch the intimate details Malcolm and Marie reveal themselves.

I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the lovers' quarrel didn't occasionally veer into the excessive. Early on Marie derails a moment of understanding after Malcolm plays on the stereo the wrong apology song and we're plunged into another exchange of profanity-laced rancor, and you're just left thinking the movie could have ended right there if Malcolm had only put on The Greatest Showman. You're about halfway through the film before the signposts of genuine love start to break the surface and you're sure that, yes, you do hope these two will figure it out. It's to the credit of the script that the tension between the lovers grows more tolerable as the conflict escalates.

If the performances manage to feel true to life, the rhythm of the conversation doesn't always. Midway through the film, for example, Malcolm goes straight from comparing Marie to a twig (a twig he can break with one hand) to telling her that she is the only authentic part of his film. This he does basically in one breath. Each swell of emotion has either Malcolm or Marie launch into a prolonged sizzling monologue while the other patiently waits for his or her turn with the talking stick.

If Levinson pulls this off, it owes it in part to the creative photography of the film which casts a dreamlike glaze over the 106 minutes of runtime. The camera's fractured framing offers a window into the splintering psyches of Malcolm and Marie--the composition almost aggressively geometric, drawing out the divisions between the lovers into physical space. And why don't we see more films in black and white?

    As the reflections and retorts become more intimate and scathing, the audience starts to realize that what our lovers revile more than anything isn't being forgotten or underappreciated, but being understood--having their identity diagramed for easy comprehension and summarized in a monologue recited by the person who knows them best.

Wading through the angst between Malcolm and Marie, and between the audience and the characters, the film moves beyond easily sorted romantic platitudes and into something that might genuinely change the audience. 

Valentine's Day is only one day of the year anyway.

                --The Professor

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 1 The Disney of Your Childhood

  So, I’m going to put out a somewhat controversial idea here today: The Walt Disney Company has had a tremendous amount of influence in the pop culture landscape, both in recent times and across film history. Further controversy: a lot of people really resent Disney for this.  I’ve spent a greater part of this blog’s lifetime tracking this kind of thing. I have only a dozen or so pieces deconstructing the mechanics of these arguments and exposing how baseless these claims tend to be. This sort of thing is never that far from my mind. But my general thoughts on the stigmatization of the Disney fandom have taken a very specific turn in recent times against recent headlines.       The Walt Disney Company has had some rather embarrassing box office flops in the last two or three years, and a lot of voices have been eager to link Disney’s recent financial woes to certain choices. Specifically, this idea that Disney has all the sudden “gone woke.”  Now,...

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 2 Disney vs the 21st Century

  In the first half of this series , we looked at this construction of the Disney image that the company has sold itself on for several decades now. Walt himself saw the purpose of his entertainment enterprise as depiction a happier world than that which he and the audience emerged from, and that formed the basis of his formidable fanbase. But because the larger culture only knows how to discuss these things in the context of consumerism, a lot of intricacies get obscured in the conversation about The Walt Disney Company, its interaction with larger culture, and the people who happily participate in this fandom.  Basically, critics spent something like fifty years daring The Walt Disney Company to start being more proactive in how they participated in the multi-culture. And when Disney finally showed up in court to prove its case, the world just did not know what to do ... The 21st Century          With the development of the inter...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

          Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it.       Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate.    So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

The Paradox of The Graduate

     If you've been following my writings for long, you might know that I'm really not a fan of American Beauty . I find its depiction of domestic America scathing, reductive, and, most of all, without insight. I don't regret having dedicated an entire essay to how squirmy the film is, or that it's still one of my best-performing pieces.       But maybe, one might say, I just don't like films that critique the American dream? Maybe I think that domestic suburbia is just beyond analysis or interrogation. To that I say ... I really like  The Graduate .      I find that film's observations both more on-point and more meaningful. I think it's got great performances and witty dialogue, and it strikes the balance between drama and comedy gracefully. And I'm not alone in my assessment. The Graduate was a smash hit when it was released in 1967, landing on five or six AFI Top 100 lists in the years since.      But what's int...

REVIEW: ELIO

    Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth.      There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true.      The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space?      But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Tangled: Disney Sees the Light

On November 21st, 2010, The LA Times ran its article “ Disney Animation is Closing the Book on Fairy Tales .” It pronounced that although the Walt Disney company was built on films in the style of Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid , that form of Disney magic was history, reporting, iCarly (2007) “Among girls, princesses and the romanticized ideal they represent — revolving around finding the man of your dreams — have a limited shelf life. With the advent of ‘tween’ TV, the tiara-wearing ideal of femininity has been supplanted by new adolescent role models such as the Disney Channel’s Selena Gomez and Nickelodeon’s Miranda Cosgrove.” “You’ve got to go with the times,” MGA Chief Executive Isaac Larian said. “You can’t keep selling what the mothers and the fathers played with before. You’ve got to see life through their lens.”    Th e same day this article ran, the executives at Disney disavowed the viewpoints expressed and assured the public that Disney was NOT in fact s...

REVIEW: The Long Walk

I suppose we owe some respect to the new film adaptation of The Long Walk . Based on one of the earliest novels by Stephen King, this sort of ancestor to The Hunger Games sees a group of boys, living in an authoritarian society. willingly entering an annual state-sponsored competition in which they all embark on a nationwide walk, all maintaining a consistent walking pace. If they fall below that, they get a bullet to the cranium. Last boy walking wins. Full credit, there aren't a lot of studio films that stitch together a solid piece of entertainment with such basic materials. There's minimal computer-generation and only a handful of actors, none of whom are really household names. (The obvious exception being Mark Hamill.) Much of the film is portrayed in relaxed long-takes that really let the actors' charisma shine. This movie proves that creative film language can be enough to turn a walk down the country road into a full-on warzone.  But the movie has a system error t...

My Crush on Sarah Connor is Hard to Explain

  I had an experience this last fall working at a residential treatment facility for boys with behavioral issues.  My boys had been dying all week to watch Black Widow. These boys very seldom got to watch new movies while they were with us except for special field trips or when on home visits, and this movie  had only just become available on Disney+. The staff all agreed to let them have a special viewing as a reward for their deep cleaning leading up to Parents' Weekend.  I was really proud of my boys for their enthusiasm. I took it as a token of their evolving social awareness that they were as excited for a female-led superhero pic as they had been for Falcon and the Winter Soldier. My boys were becoming little feminists, or so I thought.       Imagine my disappointment when we finally watched the film and they spent the entire runtime catcalling Natasha and her sister. An entire film dedicated to a powerful heroine moving heaven and earth to ...

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

          Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving.  From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality?       This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

    This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence.      But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else.  Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism.     On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...