Review: "THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN" is Entertaining and Artsy, Until It Becomes Tiresome

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 5 of 2023 (No. 1894) by Leroy Douresseaux

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

Running time:  114 minutes (1 hour, 54 minutes)

MPA – R for language throughout, some violent content and brief graphic nudity

WRITER/DIRECTOR:  Martin McDonagh

PRODUCERS:  Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, and Martin McDonagh

CINEMATOGRAPHER:  Ben Davis (D.o.P.)

EDITORS:  Mikkel E.G. Nielsen

COMPOSER:  Carter Burwell

DRAMA/COMEDY

Starring:  Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan, Gary Lydon, Pat Shortt, Sheila Flitton, Bríd Ní Neachtain, Aaron Monaghan, and David Pearce

The Banshees of Inisherin is a 2022 black comedy and drama from writer-director Martin McDonagh.  The film focuses on two longtime friends who come to an impasse when one abruptly ends their friendship, with alarming consequences for both of them.

The Banshees of Inisherin opens in 1923 on the fictional Irish isle of “Inisherin,” near the end of the Irish Civil War (1922-23).  Small dairy milk producer, Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell), and folk musician, Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson), are friends … until just this moment.  Colm abruptly begins ignoring his longtime friend and drinking buddy, Pádraic.  “I just don't like you no more,” Colm tells him.

Colm eventually clarifies, saying that he finds Pádraic to be too “dull” and does not want to waste any more time on him.  Colm says that he would instead like to spend the remainder of his life composing music.  Pádraic is crushed by the loss of Colm's friendship, and even his sister, Siobhán Súilleabháin (Kerry Condon), can't life his spirits.  When Pádraic continues to make attempts to speak to him, Colm gives him a shocking ultimatum – one that could lead to tragic consequences.

A friend of my sister's once said of films like The Banshees of Inisherin, “What's the point?”  What kind of film is The Banshees of Inisherin?  It is a prestige drama, the kind to which some people refer as “Oscar bait.”  The Banshees of Inisherin did recently (as of this writing) receive nine nominations at the 2023 / 95th Academy Awards.  It is well-written by writer-director Martin McDonagh, and there are several nice characters.

But what's the point?  I had had enough of Padraic and Colm's “war” before the film was over.  I would say that I was done with them with about 40 minutes left.  At first, I was willing to go along, and I was intrigued by the mysteries and complexities of this friendship gone wrong.  Then, I found them tiresome, in spite of the good performances by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, especially the former.  Their feud is contrived, and I get that storytelling is basically a contrivance.  It's just not supposed to come across as so obviously contrived as this film's friendship turned sour.

The film has two outstanding supporting performances:  Kerry Condon as Padraic's sister, Siobhan, and Barry Keoghan as a sweet, but simple young man, Dominic.  I wanted to see more of those two actors and get to know their characters better.

One critic unfavorably compared The Banshees of Inisherin to early films of brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen.  That is correct, right down to the fact that Carter Burwell has composed film scores for both the Coens and for Martin McDonagh.  However, The Banshees of Inisherin lacks the wit, style, and purpose of any of the Coens' films.  The Banshees of Inisherin is a very well made film about sadness and despair, seemingly for art's sake.  I would never call it a bad film because it is a prestige drama that has indeed become prestigious.  I like the prestige of The Banshees of Inisherin, but I'm just not willing to call it one of 2022's best films.

7 of 10

B+

★★★½ out of 4 stars

Thursday, January 26, 2023

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Review: Jessica Chastain in "THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE" - Good Gawd!

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 19 of 2022 (No. 1831) by Leroy Douresseaux

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

Running time:  126 minutes (2 hours, 6 minutes)

MPAA – PG-13 for sexual content and drug abuse

DIRECTOR:  Michael Showalter

WRITER: Abe Sylvia (based on the documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato)

PRODUCERS:  Gigi Pritzker and Rachel Shane

CINEMATOGRAPHER: Michael Gioulakis (D.o.P.)

EDITORS:  Mary Jo Markey and Andrew Weisblum

COMPOSER:  Theodore Shapiro

Academy Award winner

DRAMA/BIOPIC

Starring:  Jessica Chastain, Andrew Garfield, Cherry Jones, Vincent D'Onofrio, Mark Wystrach, Sam Jaeger, Louis Cancelmi, Gabriel Olds, Fredric Lehne, Jay Huguley, Dan Johnson, and Chandler Head

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a 2021 biographical drama film directed by Michael Showalter.  The film is based on the 2000 documentary film, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which was directed and produced by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.  The Eyes of Tammy Faye the movie takes a look at the rise into fame and fall into infamy of evangelist and television personality, Tammy Faye Bakker.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye introduces young Tamara Faye LaValley (Chandler Head) in the year 1952.  Growing up in a religious community in International Falls, Minnesota, Tammy is an outcast because her mother, Rachel Grover (Cherry Jones), divorced Tammy's father.  Although she is now married to Fred Grover (Fredric Lehne), Rachel believes that she is seen by some as a harlot.  She hides Tammy in order to hide her shame.  However, young Tammy Faye ain't having none of that and inserts herself into the church.  The parishioners become attracted to the way she speaks Biblical scripture and the way in which she “speaks in tongues.”

In 1960, while attending North Central Bible College in Minneapolis Minnesota, Tammy (Jessica Chastain) meets and falls in love with fellow college student, Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield).  In 1961, the two marry and drop out of college.  They drive around the United States to preach and inspire Christian communities, with Jim preaching and Tammy singing and playing with puppets for children.  Seeking to create and have control over their own programs, the couple create “The PTL Club,” the flagship show of their PTL Satellite Network.  Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker become increasingly popular over the years, but with fame comes more money and more secrets and lies.  Can Jim and Tammy Faye save themselves with the success in which they save souls?

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is about Tammy Faye LaValley/Bakker/Messner, and as Tammy Faye, Jessica Chastain gives the performance of her career.  That is saying a lot, as Chastain's career is filled with bravura performances, except for her god-awful turn in 2019's (X-Men:) Dark Phoenix.  Chastain, who recently won a “Best Actress” Oscar for this performance, buries herself in the work of this film's make-up and hairstyling artists (who also won and Oscar) and reemerges as an attractive and alluring fictional version of the real life Tammy Faye.  I couldn't stop watching her, believing in her, and seeing Chastain's Tammy Faye as a real person that I wanted to think about for the entire run time of this film.

It is a testament to Andrew Garfield's acting skills that he created space in this film for Jim Bakker.  Garfield makes his Bakker a hollow man who is beset by greed and full of hypocrisy.  He condemns Tammy's minor infidelity while hiding three decades of homosexual dalliances and affairs.  Garfield's Bakker, however, can survive in the vortex that is Chastain's Tammy Faye.

The script presents Tammy as having good intentions, as being loving, and as being naive.  Jim Bakker is in love with himself and with money and fame as much as he loves God.  The story suggests that Jim's faults make the couple vulnerable to opportunists and predators, such as Jerry Faldwell, whom actor Vincent D'Onofrio portrays as some kind of evangelical crime lord.  On the other hand, the film suggests that Tammy Faye's ignorance and unwillingness to speak up at certain times contribute to her unwillingness or inability to pay heed to the warnings of Rachel, her mother.  Rachel is played by Cherry Jones in an excellent performance that would have been noticed more if it weren't in the shadow of Chastain's.

Director Michael Showalter takes the fine performances of his cast and makes a movie that is the epic as character drama.  He gives us the rise and the fall and the (somewhat) redemption of a woman who had a moment in time that ultimately trapped her in the public sphere as a figure worthy of mocking.  To me, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is saying that she did not deserve this, but I remember her as someone who deserved some of the derision pointed her way.  As the guiding force of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Jessica Chastain deserves all the praise and awards pointed her way.

8 of 10
A

Tuesday, April 5, 2022


NOTES:
2022 Academy Awards, USA:  2 wins: “Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling” (Stephanie Ingram, Linda Dowds, and Justin Raleigh) and “Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role” (Jessica Chastain)

2022 BAFTA Awards:  1 win: “Best Make Up & Hair” (Linda Dowds, Stephanie Ingram, and Justin Raleigh)

2022 Golden Globes, USA:  1 nomination: “Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture-Drama” (Jessica Chastain)


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Review: "THE FRENCH DISPATCH" is Ultimate Wes Anderson

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 14 of 2022 (No. 1826) by Leroy Douresseaux

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (2021)
Running time:  107 minutes (1 hour, 47 minutes)
MPA – R for graphic nudity, some sexual references and language
DIRECTOR:  Wes Anderson
WRITERS:  Wes Anderson; from a story by Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and Hugo Guinness
PRODUCERS:  Wes Anderson, Jeremy Dawson, and Steven Rales
CINEMATOGRAPHER:  Robert Yeoman (D.o.P.)
EDITOR:  Andrew Weisblum
COMPOSER:  Alexandre Desplat

COMEDY/DRAMA/ANTHOLOGY with elements of fantasy

Starring:  Jeffrey Wright, Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Lea Seydoux, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Liev Schreiber, Mathieu Amalric, Stephen Park, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Winston Ait Hellal, and Owen Wilson and Anjelica Huston

The French Dispatch (full title: The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun) is a 2021 comedy-drama and anthology film from writer-director Wes Anderson.  The film focuses on the French foreign bureau of a Kansas newspaper and the features magazine it produces.

The French Dispatch introduces Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray).  When he was a college freshman, he convinces his father, the owner of the newspaper, the “Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun,” to fund his transatlantic trip.  Junior would in turn produce a series of travelogue columns, which would be published for local readers in the Evening Sun's magazine supplement “Sunday Picnic.”  Arthur, Jr. sets up shop in the (fictional) French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé.  Over the next decade, young Arthur assembles a team of the best expatriate journalists of the time.  In 1925, he transforms the Sunday Picnic into the weekly magazine, “The French Dispatch” (something like The New Yorker).

In 1975, fifty years after he left Kansas, Arthur Howitzer, Jr. dies suddenly of a heart attack.  Although it has half a million subscribers in 50 countries, as per his will, The French Dispatch will immediately cease publication following the release of a farewell issue that will feature Arthur's obituary and four articles by magazine's best writers:

In “The Cycling Reporter,” Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) gives a sight-seeing tour.  It is “a day in Ennui over the course of 250 years” and demonstrates how much and yet how little has changed in Ennui over time.

In “The Concrete Masterpiece,” J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) delivers a lecture at an art gallery.  She details the career of Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), a mentally disturbed artist serving a sentence in the Ennui Prison-Asylum for murder and the two most important people in his lives.  The first is Simone (Lea Seydoux), a prison officer who becomes Moses' lover and his muse.  Moses paints a portrait of Simone, and that second important person, Julien Cadazio, an art dealer also serving a sentence for tax evasion, is immediately taken by the painting.  After buying the painting, Cadazio uses it to turn Moses into an international sensation.  However, Moses struggles with inspiration, and his relationship with Simone becomes complicated.

In “Revisions to a Manifesto,” Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) reports on a student protest breaking out in the streets of Ennui, one that soon boils over into the “Chessboard Revolution.”  Krementz fails to maintain “journalistic neutrality” when she falls in love with Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet), a college boy who is the self-styled leader of the revolt.  She secretly helps him write his manifesto, but Juliette (Lyna Khoudri), a fellow revolutionary who has some feelings for Zeffirelli, is unimpressed with his manifesto – thus, creating a love triangle.

In “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) is the guest of a television talk show host (Liev Schreiber).  Wright recounts the story of his attending a private dinner with The Commissaire (Mathieu Amalric) of the Ennui police force.  The meal is prepared by the legendary police officer and chef, Lt. Nescaffier (Stephen Park).  Nescaffier is the creator of a kind of “haute cuisine” specifically designed to be eaten by police officers while they are working.  The dinner is disrupted when the Commissaire's inquisitive and bright son, Gigi (Winston Ait Hellal), is kidnapped and held for ransom by a large gang of criminals, led by a failed musician known as “The Chauffeur” (Edward Norton).

They mourn his death.  Now, the staff of The French Dispatch must put together a final issue with these four stories that Arthur Howitzer Jr. touched in some way?

The French Dispatch has been described as a film that is “a love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional twentieth century French city.”  The film presents four of the magazine's stories of the city.  Director Wes Anderson has apparently stated that this film is inspired by his love of the venerable weekly magazine, The New Yorker, and that some of the film's characters and events are based on real-life equivalents from that magazine.  During The French Dispatch's closing credits, there is a dedication to several writers and editors, many of whom wrote for The New Yorker.

To that end, The French Dispatch is a movie that celebrates magazine writers, illustrators, and editors and the stories they tell.  This film is a love letter to stories of local color and of locales written for magazines.  The film demands patience and attention on the part of the audience.  The French Dispatch is a hybrid.  It is an anthology of four main stories and of a few small chapters, although everything connects in the end.  The audience has to follow each of the main stories, paying attention from beginning to the end.  That is where the pay off comes.

In fact, each of the main stories seems like one thing in the beginning, but fully develops over the course of the narrative in something different.  At the end of each, I realized that the story was about wonderful characters living lives both ordinary and extraordinary.  In the extraordinary, Anderson gives us a reason to love what is so ordinary and human about them.

This is brilliant character writing on Anderson's part.  His gift is to make not only the lead and supporting characters fascinating, but he also makes even the characters who say little and the extras seem worth knowing – even when the narrative passes them by.  To that end, I think Roebuck Wright is the character that ties all the characters and stories together.  He is the narrator/writer of “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” the final story.  Both his first meeting and final conversation with Bill Murray's Arthur coalesces the film's theme of expatriate writers, and he begins Arthur's obituary, which also brings together the film's shifts in time.  It would have been nice to see Wright receive a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for his work here, but The French Dispatch did not receive any Oscar nominations.

The film's production values:  art direction and production design, costumes, and cinematography all meet the wonderfully inventive and incredibly imaginative standards that audiences have come to expect from Wes Anderson's films.  The French Dispatch looks like no film I have ever seen.  Even Alexandre Desplat's score sounds like something entirely new in film music.  I described Anderson's 2014 film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, as Wes Anderson art for Wes Anderson's art sake.  The French Dispatch is Wes Anderson high art.

9 of 10
A+

Thursday, March 17, 2022


NOTES:
2022 BAFTA Awards:  3 nominations: “Best Costume Design” (Milena Canonero); “Original Score” (Alexandre Desplat), and “Best Production Design” (Adam Stockhausen and Rena DeAngelo)

2022 Black Reel Awards:  1 nomination: “Outstanding Supporting Actor” (Jeffrey Wright)

2021 Cannes Film Festival:  1 nomination: “Palme d'Or” (Wes Anderson)

2022 Golden Globes, USA:  1 nomination: “Best Original Score - Motion Picture” (Alexandre Desplat)


The text is copyright © 2022 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for syndication rights and fees.

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