Julianne Moore – The Magnificent 60s

The selection process for my weekly Monday visit to the cinema has sorely let me down. I never refer to reviews in advance, not wishing to learn anything, however inadvertently, about the story. So, I went into this arthouse trio – all showing I hasten to add at my local multiplex – with high hopes.

May December

I find it impossible work out how anyone, least of all a brace of Oscar-winners like Natalie Portman (here listed as producer) and Julianne Moore, could seriously consider making a movie about someone convicted of child sex abuse. In this case, I guess, the excuse is that because it’s a woman it’s either a) understandable or b) excusable. But if the subject was a male sex abuser I doubt if he would be given the same latitude.

This is one of those films that would have been far better dealt with as a documentary where the facts can be treated more straightforwardly rather than deliberately clouded by fictional elements and sympathetic treatment. Supposedly, the audience is provided with perspective since the movie revolves around an actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) doing preparatory work 20 years after the event as a prelude to playing the character in a television movie.

The fact that Gracie (Julianne Moore), the married woman convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old boy, denies that she committed any crime, maintaining a) that it was true love and b) that she was the victim, that the boy was “in charge” and the seducer, seems a very deliberate attempt to muddy the waters. Especially, when it becomes clear that the boy, Joe (Charles Melton), now of course a man, has been forced to bury his true feelings about the subject.

With the usual showbiz entitlement, Elizabeth sees nothing wrong with disrupting what is, on the surface at least, a reasonably happy family, forcing the children of this relationship to come to terms with the fact that at least one of them was born from an illegal coupling.

Not to mention the damage this will do to the innocent children of the couple on whom the story was based, Mary Kay Letourneau (since dead) and Vili Fualaau. That Elizabeth turns out to be pretty creepy herself – explaining to a shocked teenage audience that she gets aroused during sex scenes and seducing Joe – seems to be an attempt at mitigation (oh, look, we all do crazy things once in a while!).

Saltburn

Brideshead Revisited Meets Carry On Downton Abbey. Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the way it was actually pitched, it’s just so uneven, veering through several different styles without ever finding a target. The shock elements are, unfortunately, just risible. Via the trailer this appeared to be a moody, atmospheric picture about entitlement, the downside, if you like, of Downton.

Instead, it’s just plain barmy, which might well have worked if its take on the bizarre had been consistent, but, really it’s a contender for the coveted So-Bad-It’s-Good Award with Rosamund Pike odds-on to nab a gong for Best Maggie Smith Impression. .

Oliver (Barry Keoghan) is supposedly a scholarship student at Oxford, coming from a sinkhole estate in Liverpool, parents drug dealers etc etc. Out of his depth, by chance he latches on to sex god Felix (Jacob Elordi) and is invited to spend the summer at the latter’s stately home complete with sneering butlers and demonic family all graduates of the Over-Acting Academy.

Turns out we’ve not been watching Downton Abbey at all, but The Usual Suspects, Oliver not an innocent little bookworm but an extremely malevolent character who manages – in the absence (luckily) of post-mortems – to bump off the entire family in order to inherit (don’t ask!) Saltburn in order to, in a bizarre nod to Risky Business, dance naked through it.

The only reason it gets any points at all is Jacob Elordi, who exhibits tremendous screen charisma, and because the barmy extremely self-centred and out-of-it Rosamund Pike does elicit a few laughs and maybe, courtesy of Richard E. Grant, has a haircut to enter some kind of Hall of Fame.

A Forgotten Man

This wants to say something important about the neutrality stance of Switzerland during the Second World War. But unless you live in Switzerland, you won’t have a clue what it’s trying to say. And if you thought The Crown was off-the-wall in summoning up the ghost of Princess Diana, wait till you start counting the number of ghostly apparitions here of young Swiss chap Maurice (Viktor Poltier), whom the protagonist Henrich (Michael Neuenschwander), while Swiss Ambassador to Berlin during the war, failed to prevent being executed.

I’ve no idea if this aspect is based on a true story. Either way, fictional or not, it’s a preposterous central conceit. Supposedly, Maurice had been arrested for trying to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Theoretically, we should all be applauding his actions. He should get a free pass for trying to rid the world of a monster. But, in reality, how would you expect an Ambassador to go about pleading clemency for one of his citizens who tried to murder the ruler of Germany?

There’s clearly some angst about the fact that Switzerland managed to emerge unscathed after a war which left the rest of Europe in turmoil. But it’s pretty hard to summon any sympathy for anybody, least of all the director because whatever point he’s trying to make is made so obliquely it fails to register. That it gets any points at all is due to its brevity and that, as the first movie in my self-selected triple bill, I came out of it in a far better mood than the other two.

I stopped watching this mid-drivel so don’t count on me for a balanced assessment. But it does point up the dangers of the current Netflix obsession. In the cinema, no matter how bad a picture, I would always stay to the end. Particularly with Netflix’s movie joblot I found myself switching off in frustration that it was ever given the green light. I bet, though, Twentieth Century Fox were delighted to have been able to offload it onto Netflix, which provides no acceptable measure of audience response, rather than watching it sink like a stone at the movie box office.

It’s also a cautionary tale about the problems of snapping up a bestseller supposedly in the Gone Girl (2014) and The Girl on a Train (2016) vein, both featuring as here an unreliable narrator, without working out how such fiction might translate to the screen. Buying bestsellers is usually an astute piece of business from the Hollywood perspective. Both the novels mentioned sold in excess of 20 million copies. Even if only 10 per cent of the book buyers went to see the movie, you are talking about $20 million already at the box office. If it’s 20 per cent, then that’s a flat $40 million, and so on.

Bestsellers tended to get snapped up quickly, often in pre-publication, and although they might come with riders attached relating to copy sales, generally you are looking at a movie sales tag of around $1 million. That’s a tiny fraction of the cost of any movie budget with the double bonus that readers will more than offset the purchase price and that the bestseller angle provides an easy marketing hook.

I go to the movies once a week and watch at least two films and sometimes as many as four. And I pay to go. I buy my ticket rather than, as a movie critic, gaining free access. So I’m a sucker for almost anything and if you’ve been reading my Blog you’ll see that I have a pretty high tolerance level and enjoy a wide variety of pictures. So it takes a lot for me to get a downer on a particular movie.

So what’s gone wrong here? The book pivoted on the notion that the protagonist Anne Fox (Amy Adams), imprisoned by agoraphobia in her apartment, views the world through the prism of old Hollywood movies. So old pictures inform much of the writing, they are referenced all the time, almost in the sense of “what would Humphrey Bogart do.” That’s just not an option for a movie, so we are only given a few glimpses of films like Spellbound and they do not play any part in explaining her mental state.

So then it’s basically a re-run of Rear Window (1954) with instead of voyeuristic proclivities being deemed acceptable because it’s James Stewart doing the peeking we have what is effectively a creepy “cat lady” (minus the cats of course) who moons around her apartment drinking. She employs a psychiatrist but he’s redundant in movie terms because we already know she’s loopy and we don’t need to be told that, and that no matter what she did it’s not going to make us look upon her with any more kindness. Why? Because she has a singularly unattractive personality.

Amy Adams (Arrival, 2016) can normally be relied upon to deliver a good performance, but she is hopeless, generating not an ounce of sympathy for her predicament, not helped by going spare at kids doing nothing more dangerous than enjoying Halloween. But she’s not alone in producing audience antipathy. Of the couple across the street whom she spies upon, Jane Russell (Julianne Moore) has obnoxiousness down to a tee while husband Alistair (Gary Oldman) is over-the-top. And if an audience can’t find anyone to like it’s not going to like the film.

For a film boasting two Oscar-winners – Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour (2017) and Julianne Moore (Still Alice, 2014) – plus six nominations for Adams and one for Jennifer Jason Leigh and stars Anthony Mackie and Wyatt Russell from current television mini-series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), this is a hatful of talent waiting for a rabbit to jump out and perform a miracle cure on a thriller with no thrills. A packet of exposition gets in the way of audience involvement and director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, 2005) fails to make any headway in the Hitchockian department.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of his movie car crash is that its timing could not be more apposite. A film about not being able to go out during a pandemic that confined global populations to their homes should have struck some kind of chord. Of course, it’s been sitting on the Twentieth Century Fox (now rebranded as “20^th Century Movies”) shelf since 2019 and it might have been better for all concerned had it stayed there.

Catch this on Netflix.

Tag: Julianne Moore

Triple Bill of Duds: “May December” (2023) * / “Saltburn” (2023) / “A Forgotten Man”

The Woman in the Window (2021) *