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      What ‘Pocahontas’ Tells Us About Disney, for Better and Worse

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      The animated tale was both controversial and an Oscar-winning box office hit. It’s also one of the rare films from that era that the company isn’t eager to remake.Disney’s animated achievements — certain ones — are imprinted on our brains, in part because the company reminds us about them seemingly nonstop. Fresh from the Disney vault! Restored to its original glory!“Wish,” which arrived last month as part of Disney’s centennial self-celebration, is a collection of callbacks to classics like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), “Sleeping Beauty” (1959), “The Little Mermaid” (1989) and “The Lion King” (1994). Disney theme parks have recently unveiled attractions based on “Frozen” (2013) and “Moana” (2016), among others.But there are also films in Disney’s animated canon that the image-conscious company does not talk about much, and the reasons are usually obvious. Some were box office failures. A few of the older ones traffic in racist stereotypes.If we are going to look back at Disney’s history with animated movies, however, as the company has invited people to do with its 100th anniversary bash, the problem films should be part of the discussion. To wrestle with Disney and its legacy — the good and the bad, the past and the present — the misfires sometimes offer as much insight as the masterworks.Consider “Pocahontas.”Released in 1995 at a time when Walt Disney Animation Studios was experiencing a creative renaissance, “Pocahontas” pulls from history and legend to recount — sort of — the story of the real-life Native American girl who, in 1607, supposedly saved an English settler, John Smith, after he’d been taken as prisoner by her father’s tribe. The film won two Oscars (for song and score) and was celebrated by leading critics for its vibrant color palette and magical realism (a murmuration of autumn leaves, the advice-giving Grandmother Willow). Janet Maslin, reviewing the movie for The New York Times, called it a “landmark feat of animation.”“Pocahontas” also has some severe problems, starting with the title character. Disney depicted her not as a girl of about 11, as historians agree Pocahontas was at the time she interacted with Smith, but as an ultra-voluptuous young woman. Disney took other extreme liberties with the story, in particular inventing a romance between Pocahontas, who was voiced by Irene Bedard, and Smith (Mel Gibson). Disney higher-ups pressed the “Pocahontas” creative team to make it more like “Beauty and the Beast,” which had been a runaway hit at the box office — presto, a romance.The character was portrayed not as a young girl but as a voluptuous woman.Buena Vista Pictures/Disney, via Everett Collection“Disney made a lot of unfortunate decisions with this movie,” said Angela Aleiss, a film scholar whose books include “Hollywood’s Native Americans: Stories of Identity and Resistance.”“It should be a lesson,” she added of “Pocahontas,” which was directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg. “Why not let Indigenous people tell these stories?”Recent Disney films like the animated “Strange World,” with its gay teenage protagonist, have become cultural flash points. But “Pocahontas” prompted a full-blown fracas. Some people accused Disney of whitewashing history — for leaving out the fact, for instance, that Pocahontas died at 21, perhaps of smallpox, after being taken to London and paraded around as an example of a “civilized savage.” Others blasted “Pocahontas” for depicting some white settlers as bigoted plunderers (though historians would argue this was accurate). Some Native Americans winced at the ways in which the film perpetuated the Good Indian stereotype, which posits that worthy Native Americans were those who helped white immigrants. Psychologists complained that Disney’s rendering of the heroine gave girls yet another impossible body standard to live up to.For these reasons, “Pocahontas” lives in a netherworld at Disney.The company does not hide it. The movie is available on Disney+, and the character is designated an official Disney Princess. “Wish” contains a couple of subtle references to the film. But bring up “Pocahontas” at Disney headquarters, and people get visibly tense. The vibe is: Let’s please change the subject. A couple of years ago, Disney decided that “Pocahontas” would be one of the few animated hits that would not be remade as a live-action spectacle. Too fraught, especially in the social media era. (“Pocahontas” was very much a hit. It cost about $112 million in today’s dollars, and collected $707 million — less than the Disney movies that preceded it, but a lot of dough all the same.)Disney declined to comment for this article.Animation historians contend that “Pocahontas” is more important than most people realize — that the film’s challenges have obscured its true standing in Disney’s animated oeuvre.“Pocahontas,” for instance, “marked a new turn in Disney storytelling toward empowered heroines,” said Mindy Johnson, an animation scholar whose books include “Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation.” Johnson added, “Many credit this to ‘Mulan.’ But ‘Pocahontas’ paved the way.”Despite its invented romance, the film ends with Pocahontas spurning John Smith’s invitation to go with him to England. She chooses to stay with her tribe.“Pocahontas” was the first animated Disney film to focus on a woman of color. It was the first (and only) time that Disney made an animated movie about a real person. And in many ways, it was Disney’s first overt “issues” movie for children. Developed in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, “Pocahontas” explored the idea that “if we don’t learn to live with one another, we will destroy ourselves,” as Peter Schneider, then Disney’s animation president, put it in “The Art of Pocahontas” by Stephen Rebello.“Environmental messages are equally present and so relevant, especially today,” Johnson said.Disney movies had always had a moral, but this went much further — and the film’s implicit political message freaked some people out: Disney is messing with our kids. The uproar helped push the company back toward lighter material, resulting in comedies like “The Emperor’s New Groove” and “Lilo & Stitch.”After “Beauty and the Beast” proved a hit, Disney executives pushed the “Pocahontas” filmmakers to make it romance.Buena Vista Pictures/Disney, via Everett CollectionA similar shift is going on right now at Disney. The company has become a political punching bag, partly because it has added openly gay, lesbian and queer characters to its animated movies. The emphasis on diversity in some of Disney’s live-action films, including “The Little Mermaid,” “The Marvels” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” has also led to fan complaints. Although Disney has also received positive feedback, the blowback — and poor ticket sales for some of the films in question — has prompted Disney to retrench.“Creators lost sight of what their No. 1 objective needed to be,” Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said at the DealBook Summit last month. “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.”It should be noted that “Pocahontas” has plenty of fans. Some point to the clever, sweeping ways in which the film’s songs are visualized. Alan Menken (“The Little Mermaid”) and Stephen Schwartz (“Wicked”) wrote the music, which includes the Oscar-winning “Colors of the Wind,” sung by Judy Kuhn.“A graceful and well-intentioned entry in the Disney canon,” Sophie Gilbert wrote in a 2015 essay in The Atlantic that defended the film as progressive and feminist. (The magazine also published letters from readers who did not agree.)Hanay Geiogamah, a former director of the American Indian Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, was hired by Disney in the 1990s to consult on “Pocahontas” and its straight-to-video sequel, “Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World.” In a phone interview, he called working with Disney “a really positive experience,” noting that some of his concerns about authenticity (the depiction of dancing and ceremonies, for instance) led to prerelease changes in the film.“I understood why people were upset, and, at the time, I made my voice heard, too,” Geiogamah said. “But you have to remember, at the end of the day, this was a Disney animated fantasy. I was actually pleasantly surprised with how it turned out. Yes, there was a falsity at its core. But it also gave millions of young people a positive impression of Indian life. It wasn’t all battles and ugliness and harshness.”The many opinions are a reminder of how powerful the Disney brand is: People care — they really care.Affinity for the brand runs so deep that it can quickly recover when the company stumbles. Life in the Magic Kingdom goes on. Five months after “Pocahontas” arrived in theaters, tresses swinging, Disney released the first film from an experimental new animation company called Pixar. The movie was “Toy Story,” and the response was so rapturous that “Pocahontas” — and the fighting around it — started to fade into history. More

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      Michel Ciment, Eminent French Film Critic, Is Dead at 85

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      He helped define cinema as high art for generations of moviegoers and filmmakers in France and beyond, even if he irked some of them with his passion for Hollywood.Michel Ciment, a French film critic whose passion for cinema helped define it as serious art for generations of French moviegoers, directors and producers, even while irking some of them with his unabashed love of American film, died on Nov. 13 in Paris. He was 85.His death was confirmed by the film magazine Positif, for which he had long served as editor in chief, and by the Cannes Film Festival, which called him “a free spirit with an insatiable curiosity” and “the embodiment of cinephilia.”Mr. Ciment (pronounced SEE-mah) derived his authority from just that: his unbounded love of movies and an encyclopedic knowledge of film that sprang from it. He was an adept of the uniquely French cult of movies as high art, and of the great director as genius. But that was counterbalanced by an embrace of “all types of cinema,” the Cannes festival said, a passion born in his childhood addiction to American westerns and gangster movies.Mr. Ciment was an unabashed Americanophile in a French cultural environment in which checking the anti-American box is often a prerequisite to being taken seriously. He was sometimes reproached for it, his son Gilles recalled; in later years he became a senior lecturer in American Civilization at the University of Paris.He communicated his enthusiasm for film, beginning with his first critical forays in the early 1960s, in a torrent of books, reviews, interviews and radio broadcasts. (His status in the world of film criticism was such that he was often interviewed by other critics.)Mr. Ciment celebrated the great directors of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in books on Joseph Losey, Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan and Francesco Rosi, each thick with probing interviews in which critic startles director with his detailed knowledge of their films.These directors trusted him and opened up to him because, he told the Toronto Film Review in 2020, “I asked questions that were about philosophy, about history, about politics.”His son recalled: “They would say that an exchange with Michel Ciment was like nothing else. With him, he really knows your film, he remembers the characters’ names. And then he would put your film in relation to the history of cinema.”For his book “Kazan on Kazan” (1973), Mr. Ciment spent 10 days with the director and conducted 40 hours of interviews. That was typical of his methods. He favored those who believed, like him, that “all the arts are found in cinema,” as he put it to an interviewer this year with the radio channel France Culture. For him, the superior film combined visual, aural and literary greatness.A 2009 book by Mr. Ciment compiling interviews he conducted with many movie directors. They opened up to him, he said, because “I asked questions that were about philosophy, about history, about politics.”Berg Publishers“All the great directors I hung out with — whether it was Losey, Kubrick, Kazan — they had a generalized culture,” Mr. Ciment said in the radio interview. “These were people who had read an enormous amount, who listened to music, who had seen lots of paintings.”He criticized contemporary directors like Quentin Tarantino, who, he said, work in a cruder idiom and have “encouraged the young toward an absence of culture.”The son of a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant tailor who narrowly escaped being rounded up with other Jews in Paris by Nazi collaborators during World War II, Mr. Ciment traced his pro-American views to childhood memories of the liberation of France in 1944.“At 6, to see the Americans disembark, pitching cans of food, chewing gum — it’s thanks to them we regained our liberty,” he told France Culture.In contrast to the sometimes doctrinaire impulses of that other pole of French film criticism, the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, where directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut propagated theories of cinema that they went on to put into practice, Mr. Ciment’s instinct at Positif was free-form.“Always a bit anarchist, libertarian, we couldn’t have cared less about fashions,” he told the Toronto Film Review. “We said what we thought about films, what we loved about films, without preconceptions.”His serious approach to film is evident in his book about the politically oriented realist Italian director Francesco Rosi, who made films about the mafia, corruption, injustice and war. Implicit in the book is the idea that film is as worthy of close analysis as serious literature, a view Mr. Ciment gained from his early studies with two postwar French masters of literary and philosophical criticism, Paul Benichou and Gilles Deleuze.Mr. Ciment praised Mr. Rosi for “hunting down the lie, cornering it in its hide-out,” for a “close engagement with reality in which the smallest false step would have been a betrayal,” and for being “conscious of the impossibility of reaching the truth.”Even in this early book, Mr. Ciment’s attention to detail in film is evident: At one point, referring to Mr. Rosi’s antiwar film “Many Wars Ago” (1970), he asks the director why “the night battle sequence is predominantly blue in color.”Mr. Ciment, second from left, with fellow members of the jury for the 1978 International Film Festival in Cannes, France. The American director Alan J. Pakula is third from left, and the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann is next to him. Jean Jacques Levy/Associated PressMichel Jean Ciment was born on May 26, 1938, in Paris to Alexander and Helene Cziment. His father “Frenchified” the name after the war, Gilles Ciment said. Michel’s father, who had immigrated from Hungary in the early 1920s, was a tailor for the great French fashion houses, and his wife worked with him.One morning in July 1942, the police came by the house to warn Helene that her husband had best not come home that evening: It was the eve of the great roundup of Paris Jews known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, named after the stadium where they were taken. Some 13,000 Jews were seized and subsequently sent to the death camp at Auschwitz.The elder Mr. Ciment escaped to Normandy and was hidden by peasants there for the duration of the war. His son followed him there, and his wife went back and forth from Paris.The family regrouped in Paris after the Liberation, and Michel Ciment went on to study at two prestigious secondary schools, the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and the Lycée Condorcet. It was as a student that he discovered, in the intense Paris film culture of the day, the great silent films of Erich von Stroheim, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.He later studied at the Sorbonne and received a Fulbright Scholarship in the early 1960s, allowing him to study at Amherst College in Massachusetts. “It was American education that completely confirmed me in my tastes,” Mr. Ciment told France Culture.He made his debut as a critic with a defense of Orson Welles in Positif in 1963. He later joined its staff and went on to become editor in chief.From the 1970s on he published a stream of books. Besides the ones on Kazan and Rosi, there were others on American cinema, Losey, Stanley Kubrick and Theo Angelopoulos as well as “Passport to Hollywood,” a book of interviews with directors, including Roman Polanski, Milos Forman and Wim Wenders.In addition to his son, he is survived by his second wife, Evelyne Hazan-Ciment. His first wife, Jeannine Ciment, who worked with him at Positif, died in 1986.Mr. Ciment’s passion for film never flagged. As Jérôme Garcin, his colleague on the popular French public radio cultural review “Le Masque et La Plume,” said of him in the French magazine L’Obs, “At 85, he remained, when the lights went out and the magic lantern began to dispense onscreen its dream-colors, a child in wonderment.” More

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      What Took the ‘Chicken Run’ Sequel So Long? The Reasons Are Epic.

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      A flood, a fire, Covid and “Shrek” were just a few of the roadblocks to “Dawn of the Nugget,” arriving 23 years after the original hit.When “Chicken Run” was released in theaters in June 2000, audiences and critics alike were charmed by the Claymation chickens Ginger and Rocky and the story of their escape from a sinister farm.The movie, which was the first feature from Aardman Animations (home of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep), grossed more than $220 million and became the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film — a record it still holds.Now the sequel “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” is finally arriving on Netflix. The director Sam Fell; Aardman’s creative director, Peter Lord; and the production designer Darren Dubicki explained what caused 23 years of delays.At first it was sheer exhaustion.Despite the instant success of the first film, Aardman, its partner on the production, DreamWorks, and the creators were in no rush to make a second one.Sequels weren’t as much of an expectation then as they are today, and the arduous process of Claymation had left the team relatively exhausted and ready for a break.“It’s like you’ve just run a marathon and someone says, ‘Hey, how about running another marathon?’ You think, ‘Well, not just now,’” Lord said. “So right back in 2000s, we were perhaps not ready. But after that, we had no objection to making a sequel at all.”DreamWorks had agreed to make five films total with Aardman, but any potential new productions fell off the priority list. The Hollywood studio instead focused on other stop-motion animated projects that were already in the pipeline and quickly zeroed in on a sequel to “Shrek” after the original became a box office smash in 2001.“So for a few years, the studio was sort of distracted, the relationship with DreamWorks finished and ‘Shrek’ arrived,” Fell said, adding that Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation at the time, “was probably more interested in ‘Shrek,’ too, by then.”There was also a fire.Even before sequel plans were in place, there was a setback: In Bristol, England, the warehouse filled with all the “Chicken Run” puppets, molds and sets caught fire. When it was time to start working on a second film, “we had to really start from scratch,” Fell said.He explained that they “didn’t have any reference apart from the making-of book — there were no puppets or anything to refer to.”Lord added, “We were briefly discouraged by the scale of the problem, and then we thought, ‘Well, no, it’s just like any other movie. Just get on with it.’”The do-over allowed for greater creativity: while the first film took place primarily in a single location — a Yorkshire chicken farm — the second one has dozens of intricate and colorful sets.“It was pretty apparent when we started reading the script, the scope and scale of the script meant that the world was much vaster than the first film,” Dubicki said.For Lord, seeing the characters come back to life after being lost in the fire was a moving experience.Then came the flood.After designs were rendered and all the puppets recreated, production of the sequel was on track — until the warehouse where the production team was storing all the characters and sets, as well as filming the movie, flooded.“The roof buckled in the heat of the hot summer and then it just started raining like mad for three days,” Fell explained. “The whole studio started leaking, like, not just a little bit, like a lot.”The team ended up engineering a system of funnels from the ceiling and bringing the water away from the sets. Fell likened it to Willy Wonka’s factory.On top of that? The pandemic.Preproduction began in the early months of 2020, but like everything else, it came to a screeching halt as the pandemic shut down regular life.When the crew started working again, the necessary Covid-19 precautions significantly slowed down the process.“Stop-motion animation is a very collaborative business — it’s about people being together in the same place, discussing, making group decisions, looking through the camera, choosing the building, designing, planning camera moves,” Lord noted. “In Covid, you couldn’t do that. You had to bring everyone on the set one at a time.”Dubicki added, “You had to be really mindful of bringing people together at various points that were integral to making it move forward.”It turns out that not only did staff members have to quarantine if someone tested positive or felt sick — the clay characters did as well.Crew members “hold and touch and move the puppet with their hands, so by the time they were finished their shot, the chicken was then considered to be potentially contaminated and someone had to come in with gloves and a mask and take the chicken to the quarantine area,” Fell explained.“There were shelves in a tent with a U.V. light where Babs would be put on the shelf for 10 days before anybody could touch her again,” he added, referring to Ginger’s knitting compadre.“Weather, wind, pestilence, plagues — we survived it all,” Fell said with a laugh, and joked, “Next one’s coming out in 2050.” More

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      Watch Jeffrey Wright Grapple With Stereotypes in ‘American Fiction’

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      The screenwriter and director Cord Jefferson narrates a sequence from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A conventional Black novel comes to life, with both comedic and dramatic results, in this scene from “American Fiction.”The film, written and directed by Cord Jefferson, who adapted Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, “Erasure,” follows the writer Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), who goes by Monk, through his frustrations with the kinds of stories he thinks Black writers are allowed to tell.After one of his more academic books has poor sales, a frustrated Monk decides to pen a more stereotypically Black story under a pseudonym. That book’s title is “My Pafology.” In this scene, as Monk begins to write, his clichéd creations come alive before him: Willy the Wonker and Van Go, played by Keith David and Okieriete Onaodowan.Narrating the scene, Jefferson said that this sequence doesn’t appear in the novel; rather, the book recreates the entirety of “My Pafology” within its pages. To make Monk’s writing cinematic, Jefferson chose to stage it with Monk at the desk writing, his characters acting out his dialogue around him.While humor is the intention of the scene, Jefferson said, “Ok and Keith David are such great actors that you have this inclination to take them seriously.” He said that nuance, and the desire to not play the scene too broadly, only makes the scene better.Read the “American Fiction” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      The Best Movies of 2023 by Genre

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      We look at the finest in science fiction, horror, action and international films, all available to stream.Science FictionEnvironmental disaster and artificial intelligence run amok have emerged as the major science-fiction concerns of our time. Compared to those, gray, almond-eyed aliens in flying saucers, hellbent on destroying humanity, feel like a throwback to simpler times. But “No One Will Save You,” Brian Duffield’s genre exercise, is deceptive.Kaitlyn Dever plays Brynn, a demure semi-recluse who turns out to be surprisingly adept at fighting back the murderous visitors. The movie uses the suspenseful logistics of physical survival to grab viewers; Duffield has a terrific command of economical action filmmaking. But that is not the reason I’ve been mulling over this nearly dialogue-free movie since it premiered on Hulu in September: The story is actually about psychological survival.An outcast in her small town, Brynn is haunted by a traumatic event in her past, and when she fights for her life, her battle plays like an extreme version of a coping mechanism. I’ve read several theories about the ending, but the entire movie is coded, with the aliens’ retro appearance being a major clue. Under its straightforward exterior, “No One Will Save You” is a melancholic look at what Brynn does not just to live, but to live with herself. — ELISABETH VINCENTELLIStream “No One Will Save You” on Hulu.HorrorA scene from “The Outwaters.”CinedigmMy two favorite horror movies this year took apples-and-oranges paths to clock me in the face and rip out my heart.“The Outwaters” starts as a lighthearted found-footage account of four friends on a trip to the desert. But almost an hour into the film, a silhouetted figure appears in the dark distance, and that’s when the writer-director Robbie Banfitch shifts into gut-punching high gear with a frenzied maelstrom of screams, grunts, creatures and guts. The result is an experimental fever dream, a sustained and visually stunning sensory assault — I could smell fear — that’s singularly thrilling. Turn up the volume for a true razor’s edge experience.Paul Owens’s low-fi “LandLocked” delivers equally brutal blows but with softer gloves. It’s about a young man (Mason Owens, the director’s brother) who finds a VHS-era camera in his family’s old home that lets him glimpse his past wherever he points the lens. (Owens used his real-life family’s tapes as footage.) Even in empty rooms, demons long thought to be buried instead lurk, and in the film’s most terrifying passage, one monstrously emerges. It’s an assured, understated and deeply creepy slow-burn study of memory, loss and, most meaningfully, fatherhood. — ERIK PIEPENBURGStream both “The Outwaters” and “LandLocked” on Tubi.ActionJorma Tommila in “Sisu.”Antti Rastivo/Freezing Point Oy/LionsgateAt first glance, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), the silent, bruising figure in the Finnish World War II exploitation film “Sisu,” wouldn’t strike you as an activist. After all, he is a stoic prospector who, at the outset of the writer-director Jalmari Helander’s film, discovers a mother lode of gold. But the action genre is often where bold political statements are made through simple symbolic figures. So when the vicious SS tank commander Bruno Helldorf (Aksel Hennie) learns of Korpi’s riches, what arises is a Finnish anti-imperialist story with elements of female empowerment.Helander interweaves these themes through common action tropes. There is the cadre of Finnish female prisoners of war held by the Nazis who will eventually become the kind of army familiar to the exploitation genre, ultimately, winning their bodily freedom. The retired Korpi is also an unstoppable killing machine so feared by the Russian army, it nicknamed him the Immortal. Helldorf throws everything at Korpi: tank shells, bullets and a minefield. Korpi remains unbowed. His repeated return from near-death scenarios is a wonderful gag that marries comical violence with thematic heft, turning “Sisu” into this year’s sharpest resistance film. — ROBERT DANIELSRent or buy “Sisu” on major platforms.InternationalPaula Beer in “Afire.”Sideshow/JanusFor me, this year in international cinema is defined by two images: one of red fumes filling the skies above a German forest in “Afire,” and the other of blindingly blue waves towering over a Tahitian beach in “Pacifiction.”“Afire” is a horror-inflected summer comedy about vulnerable masculinity and bemusing desire from Christian Petzold, known for his postmodern period melodramas (“Transit,” “Phoenix”). “Pacifiction” is a woozy thriller about modern-day colonialism from Albert Serra, the Catalan filmmaker with an acclaimed oeuvre of formally stringent, often historically perverse films (“Liberté,” “The Death of Louis XIV”). Both movies move away from their directors’ usual obsessions with the past. They are animated, instead, by a trembling anxiety about the apocalyptic stakes of the present.In “Afire,” forest fires spurred by climate change spell doom for a group of four young lovers. In “Pacifiction,” a nuclear threat lurks in the ocean, the dark waters barely concealing the machinations of imperialist powers. If the elements rise dramatically to the heavens in both, it’s less to inspire awe than caution — a warning that the forces we have knowingly, venally wreaked upon the world and on one another may just consume us all. — DEVIKA GIRISHStream “Afire” on the Criterion Channel and “Pacifiction” on Mubi. More

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      ‘The Family Plan’ Review: Who’s Your Daddy?

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      Mark Wahlberg plays a husband and father hiding a secret identity in this breezy, entertaining action-comedy.“The Family Plan” has a familiar premise: A seemingly ordinary family man with a clandestine identity is hiding a violent past. It’s been done as farce, in “True Lies,” and as drama, in “A History of Violence,” in both instances to rousing effect. “Family Plan,” starring Mark Wahlberg as the dissembling patriarch, plays it for laughs, using his deception and its unraveling as a springboard for screwball comedy.It takes the form of an action picaresque, when Wahlberg’s Dan, a former hit man using an alias, whisks his unwitting family on a cross-country road trip, trying to evade the approaching assassins who’ve exposed his suburban ruse. Dan, his wife (Michelle Monaghan), their bickering teenagers (Zoe Colletti and Van Crosby) and their 10-month-old baby cruise from Buffalo to Vegas in their minivan, flailing through high-speed getaways and shootouts along the way.This is pretty routine material, but it’s been realized with charm and enthusiasm: The director, Simon Cellan Jones, maintains a good handle on the comic-thriller tone and shoots the action with wit and creativity, finding clever ways to integrate the diapers and BabyBjörns of fatherhood into the brisk, “John Wick”-style fight scenes. (Highlights include a whisper-quiet car chase set to Enya’s “Only Time” and some grocery store kung fu involving an infant.)Wahlberg is more charismatic than he’s been onscreen in nearly a decade, and his chemistry with Monaghan is the foundation of a plausible marriage — they keep the domestic aspect grounded, even as the assassin stuff gets a touch ludicrous. The great Ciaran Hinds is the villain, appearing to enjoy himself as much as everybody else. He, too, understood the assignment: Have fun.The Family PlanRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘The Zone of Interest’ Review: A Hollow Holocaust

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      Jonathan Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.What is the point of “The Zone of Interest”? I’ve seen Jonathan Glazer’s movie twice, and each time I’ve returned to this question, something that I rarely feel compelled to ask. Movies exist because someone needs or wants to make art, tell a story, drive home a point, defend a cause, expose a wrong or simply make money. All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.Written and directed by Glazer, the movie is loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis with the same title. Heavily researched — Amis lists numerous resources in the emotional afterward — the book is narrated by three men, including a fictionalized character based on Rudolf Höss, the S.S. commandant who for several years ran Auschwitz. There, he oversaw a factory of torture and death in which, per the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, an estimated 1.1 million men, women and children were murdered, the vast majority Jews.In adapting the novel, Glazer has jettisoned much of Amis’s novel, most of its characters, plotlines and inventive, at times near-hysteric, language and tone. What Glazer has retained is the novel’s intimate juxtaposition between the horrors of the extermination camp and the everyday lives of its non-inmate characters. Unlike Amis, however, who routinely invokes and at times describes the barbarism inside the camp — with its “daily berm of corpses,” as he writes — Glazer significantly and pointedly keeps these horrors at an oblique remove.Instead, Glazer focuses on the day-to-day routine of the camp’s commandant and his family, using their real names. Together with their five children and a smattering of servants, Rudolf and Hedwig Höss — played by the relatively undemonstrative Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller — live in a nondescript, somewhat austere, predictably orderly multistory house. There’s a spacious garden with a small wading pool, beehives, a sprawling greenhouse and beds of flowers tended by camp prisoners. A tall wall topped with barbed wire borders the garden; through the wire, the tops of numerous death camp buildings dot the view.The proximity of their home and these buildings is a jolt, and based on fact. The real Höss family, like their fictional counterparts, lived in the Auschwitz complex, a swath some 15 square miles in size that housed different camps in an area called the Interessengebiet or “interest zone.” The house was tucked near a corner of the oldest camp, Auschwitz I, which had prisoner barracks, gallows, a gas chamber and crematory. After Höss was arrested in 1946, he wrote that “my family had it good in Auschwitz, every wish that my wife or my children had was fulfilled.” The children ran free and his wife had “her flower paradise.” He was hanged at Auschwitz in 1947, not far from where the family had lived.The time frame in Glazer’s adaptation is vague, though primarily seems to take place in 1943 before the real Höss was transferred to another camp. The movie opens on a black screen accompanied by some music, a foreboding overture that gives way to a pacific scene at a river with a group of people in bathing suits. Eventually, they dress and motor off. Much of the rest of the movie takes place at the Höss family home, where Glazer’s carefully framed, often fixed cameras record the children playing while the parents chat and sometimes argue. You see Rudolf going off to work in the camp while Hedwig oversees the house. At one point, you also watch a prisoner quietly spreading ash on the garden as a soil amendment.In “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer deploys a number of art-film conventions, including narrative ellipses and long uninterrupted takes. Throughout, characters are kept at a remove (as if they are being surveilled) and filmed mostly in medium or long shots; I only remember one grim close-up of a face. There are bursts of music (by Mica Levi), one bit features unnerving yelping and whooping, though not a conventional soundtrack. For the most part, the intricately layered audio foregrounds everyday conversations and chatter over a low, persistent machinelike hum, a droning that is regularly punctuated by train sounds, muffled gunfire and indecipherable yelling and screaming. It sounds like the engine of death.The overall effect of Glazer’s approach to this material is at first deeply unsettling, in large part because — as ordinary life ticks on — you worry that he will take you into the extermination rooms. Instead, he continues focusing on the Hösses’ everyday life without obvious editorializing (or outrage), swells of emotion-coaxing music or the usual mainstream cinematic prompts. The camerawork — save for a few traveling shots that underline the closeness of the house to the interior of the camp — is smooth and discreet. It’s demonstrably unshowy. It’s all very matter of fact, whether Hedwig is showing a visitor around the garden or Rudolph is with some suited executives discussing plans to expand the camp.In stressing the quotidian aspect and placid texture of the family’s life, Glazer emphasizes just how commonplace this world is, a mundanity that invokes what Hannah Arendt, in writing about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the organizers of the Holocaust, famously called the “banality of evil.” Rudolf and Hedwig give the appearance of a conventional bourgeois married couple (however creepy). When he gets a promotion that requires them to move, she resists. Every so often, though, fissures crack the surface of this calm as when Hedwig tries on a fur coat that’s been confiscated from a prisoner; she shuts herself in a room first, which suggests that she’s hiding and, by extension, knows she’s doing something wrong.There are other disturbances, too, like the clouds of dark smoke and the screams that one of the children hears and which discomfort him. More dramatically, Glazer inserts several eerie black-and-white scenes of a girl or young woman placing apples around the camp at night, presumably for prisoners. (Later, you learn that she’s an outsider.) These interludes are radically distinct in look and tone from the rest of the movie: They were shot with a thermal imaging camera and are accompanied by violent music. They also show the only instances of kindness and resistance in the entire movie. Yet what is most striking about these sections isn’t the singularity of this woman’s actions but their stylistic bravura, their wow factor.“The Zone of Interest” is a blunt, obvious movie. In scene after scene, Glazer underscores the blandness of these characters’ lives without resorting to exegesis, weeping violins and faces or, instructively, a heroic figure like Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who helped save hundreds of Jews and is the title character in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Schindler’s List.” Spielberg’s film has been criticized for, among other things, focusing on a non-Jewish hero, a focus that speaks both to most filmmakers’ inability to honestly engage with the Holocaust — in its full, numbing, routinized barbarism — and to mainstream cinema’s compulsive desire for happy endings or at least some reassurances in the face of the abyss.Glazer peers into the abyss but wisely doesn’t attempt to “explain” the Holocaust. Notably Rudolf and Hedwig don’t spew Nazi ideology; they embody it, which is foundational to the movie’s conceit. Deeply self-interested, they enjoy their power. They are, the movie suggests, representative of the millions of ordinary Germans — and, yes, perhaps anyone, anywhere — who chatted over breakfast while their neighbors were slaughtered. As Hedwig reminds Rudolf in one scene, they have the life they’ve always dreamed of. They are villains, full stop. And like so many other movies, mainstream or not, this one is fascinated with its villains, far more than it is with their victims, whose suffering here is largely reduced to room tone.In “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer doesn’t simply tell a story; in his use of art-film conventions he provides a specific frame through which to watch it. This is clearly part of its attraction as is the breathing space his approach creates: it is scary, but not too.These conventions can create a sense of intellectual distance and serve as a critique, or that’s the idea. They also announce (fairly or not) a filmmaker’s aesthetic bona fides, seriousness, sophistication and familiarity with a comparatively rarefied cinematic tradition. They signal that the film you’re watching is different from popular ones made for a mass audience. These conventions are markers of distinction, of quality, which flatter filmmakers and viewers alike, and which finally seem to me to be the biggest point of this vacuous movie.Zone of InterestRated PG-13 for references to the mass death. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More