Jan 10, 2022
As Tony crooned to Maria, “There’s a time for us…” apparently it’s right now.
Of all the movies in all the world this one has sentimental meaning to me. Tapping into my memory bank of emotion, as a young woman the passionate soundtrack of the 1961 Oscar-winning film with Natalie Wood filled my childhood home. My mother starred as Maria in High school and later I starred as her, too. Sadly, the soundtrack’s ‘Maria’ was my chosen theme for my mother’s died-too-soon funeral. So while I long anticipated this Steven Spielberg version, I had ambivalence and a lot of angst.
But rest assured it is pure perfection.
On every level Spielberg captures the pulse-racing magnificence of young love, the liveliness, the subtlety of unsettled souls, the clashing of the Sharks and the Jets, the exhilarating kiss of Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zegler) and the powerful close body shots (unlike the 1961 original.) Even the Jets dance differently than the Sharks instead of in sync. The colors explode on the big screen like the grandeur of Costa Rican birds at sunrise.
This is a gorgeous film by the master. It’s a joy to see Spielberg make this this late in his career. Bravo. And it’s equally gratifying to see Rita Moreno make an appearance as Valentina. It’s just a shame that Spielberg’s stunning adaptation of the Broadway show (some sixty-four years ago) had to be released the year of COVID at a time when movie theaters are empty. Add in the fact that its intended audience is the baby-boomer afraid to GO to the theatre, and it turns into the glorious film that slipped away. But I skipped all the way from the theatre to the car singing “I feel pretty.”
Jan 1, 2022
Whatever Leda (Olivia Coleman) might be feeling the film opens on her feeling freedom from cruising down the highway to a sun-drenched Greek island resort. Lyle (Ed Harris) the resort manager greets her, carrying her luggage full of books to her room. Leda is a divorced, professor from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and this is her idyllic escape except one can never truly escape the challenges of motherhood vs work. Especially when a boisterous Italian family plops down on a nearby beach blanket reminding you of ‘family.’
And that’s what Writer/Director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s gem of an emotional film is all about. Motherhood. Ambivalence.
Leda watches with voyeuristic ambivalence this loud young family who have descended on her oasis. She’s reminded of her own past as she witnesses Nina (Dakota Johnson) young and beautiful as Leda once was, frustrated with family life. We can almost hear the wheels of Leda’s head turning with the thoughts “Youth is wasted on the young.” Her desires become a pie of life – wrestling for a balanced slice of work, writing, husband, children, and housework. Women still want it all. But kids make it complicated. Or as Leda says, ‘Children are a crushing responsibility.”
But there’s another component, too. Back in the day we all took Home Economics classes in High school teaching us to sew a button on a would-be husband’s shirt. But there were no instruction on how to be a mother…how to change a diaper, or deal with an emergency. ‘Stuff’ we really could have used. So the film begs the question ‘what does a new and young mother really know?’ There is no manual.
Through Leda’s flashbacks of her past, we intercut when she was once a young mother of two daughters, daring to write and find her way while falling for Professor Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard.) Young Leda is played brilliantly by Jessie Buckley, intercutting between the past (Buckley) and the present (Coleman) with emotional precision. Most of the movie takes place inside Leda’s head.
But, as Leda and Nina’s lives become more tangled, we witness some concerning behavior as Leda’s taboo-past surfaces immorally as well as ambitiously. It’s clear she was devoured by pregnancy and then motherhood, strangling out any hopes of what she might have become.
We’ve seen this saga before in Gwenyth Paltrow version of Sylvia (Plath)…the young intellectual mother torn between desire and responsibility all without the resources to juggle the manifested guilt, the longing, the confusion, as any mother (myself once a working mother of two daughters) has certainly felt.
Fortunately for Leda, not Sylvia, it doesn’t end with her head in an oven. But it does end in deep reflection. And choice. A powerful word: Choice.
Gyllenhaal directs with a vulnerable albeit confident Oscar-worthy hand from a book by the Italian author, Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend) bringing to life what we, as women, as mothers, often don’t verbalize. And Coleman, well, Coleman is pure Olivia Coleman magic…complex as ever…undoubtedly making a bee line to the stage for an Oscar acceptance speech two years in a row.
Dec 30, 2021
We’ve seen a lot of ‘end of the world’ disaster movies in our times and most of them star Will Smith, trying to make sense as he sifts through the rubble of the Statue of Liberty, while we stare at the big screen chomping popcorn. But our world has changed…and the disaster films are becoming more a true-life probability. So perhaps that’s why there’s been so much disdain for Adam McKay’s latest Netflix masterpiece, Don’t Look Up. People don’t want to know what they don’t want to know…
Billed as a comedy (or at the very least a dramedy) it’s not too dissimilar to McKay’s past mockery films Vice or The Big Short this time trading in mortgage markets for low level scientists (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) who wind up on a wacky media tour after discovering a comet that will destroy planet Earth.
The lead actors’ sincerity is anything but funny. Scientists are scoffed and laughed at in real life where folks find more security in reading some guy-in-nowhere-land’s post with his pull-from-his-ass data on Global warming.
Yes, alternative facts, fake news and the like, cover Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truths’ of our present-day world. And that’s why this is so spot-on genius.
More scary is the fact that brilliant and amusing performances from Meryl Streep, as the President, Jonah Hill as her dumb-wit son, and Cate Blanchett as a knockoff Fox morning show personality are based on real life people.
Sure, the movie descends into ‘camp’ but it’s brilliant and frightening film about the truths of our stupidity slapping us in the face. Funny thing…It was about a decade ago that I realized just how stupid we’ve really become when New Jersey’s ‘Snooki’ read her first book and decided the next day “I could do that…write…” and published a memoir shortly after. Sigh.
