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      Terence Davies, 77, Dies; Filmmaker Mined Literature and His Own Life

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      With a poetic sensibility, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” echoed his Liverpool upbringing, and “The House of Mirth” put Edith Wharton’s novel on the screen.Terence Davies, a British screenwriter and director known for his poetic, intensely personal films like “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and literary adaptations like “The House of Mirth,” died on Saturday at his home in the village of Mistley, Essex, on the southwest coast of England. He was 77.His manager, John Taylor, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause, saying only that Mr. Davies had died after “a short illness.”An obituary from the British Film Institute said, “No one made movies like Davies, who precisely sculpted out of a subjective past, creating films that glided on waves of contemplation and observation.”The very specific “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988) starred Pete Postlethwaite as a violently abusive Liverpool father who terrorizes his wife and children. When the film was rereleased in 2018, The Guardian called it the director’s “early autobiographical masterpiece” and declared it “as gripping as any thriller.”When critics referred to Mr. Davies’s film dramas as musicals, they were only half joking. Songs are sung or heard in his movies just as they are in real life — at bars, at celebrations, at church and on the radio.In “Distant Voices,” the townspeople and their children sing “Beer Barrel Polka” in a bomb shelter to distract themselves from the horrors of World War II. Audiences hear “If You Knew Susie” at a wedding reception, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” while Mr. Postlethwaite takes a curry comb to a horse and “Taking a Chance on Love” issuing from a radio in the background even during the most brutal scenes.The film won the International Critics’ Prize at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.Mr. Davies directing Gillian Anderson on the set of “The House of Mirth,” which was released in 2000. “Brilliantly adapted,” The Village Voice said.Sony Pictures Classics/Everett Collection“The House of Mirth” (2000), based on Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel, starred Gillian Anderson as the doomed heroine, Lily Bart. Writing in The Village Voice, J. Hoberman called the film “brilliantly adapted” and Ms. Anderson’s performance “unexpectedly stunning.”Stephen Holden of The New York Times found the film “funereally gloomy,” but he had to admit, he wrote, that the story was “so gripping, it almost doesn’t matter how it’s couched.” And The San Francisco Chronicle praised it as “such a mesmerizing downer.” For all that, it grossed only $5 million worldwide (a little more than $9 million in today’s currency).The industry eventually forgave him for his commercial limitations and continued to back his films, including “The Deep Blue Sea” (2011), starring Rachel Weisz, which was based on Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play about a judge’s wife having an emotionally destructive affair.It was not a blockbuster either, but critics were generally admiring. A review in New York magazine noted Mr. Davies’s “ability to blend the particular with the iconic, to turn ordinary moments into something almost mythical.”Terence Davies was born on Nov. 10, 1945, in Liverpool, England, the youngest of 10 children in a working-class family.When Terence was 7, his father died of cancer. He grew up in his mother’s Roman Catholic faith but developed doubts and rejected religion completely when he was 22.“Then I realized it’s a lie,” he recalled in an interview with The New Yorker in 2017. “Men in frocks — nothing else.”He left school at 15 and worked as a shipping clerk and a bookkeeper. More than a decade later, he changed course and enrolled in a drama school in Coventry, more than 100 miles south of Liverpool, near Birmingham.A scene from “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” Mr. Davies’s 1988 portrait of a working-class English family. From left, Freda Dowie, Dean Williams, Angela Walsh and Lorraine Ashbourne.Mary Evans/BFI/Ronald Grant/Everett CollectionHe was still a student when he began work on his first short film, “Children” (1976), later edited into “The Terence Davies Trilogy” (1983).The next half-century or so brought Mr. Davies awards, film festival attention and a prestigious list of credits.He did “The Long Day Closes” (1992), a young gay man’s battle with the church, his family and his own guilt; “The Neon Bible” (1995), starring Gena Rowlands, based on John Kennedy Toole’s novel, set in the American South; the documentary “Of Time and the City” (2008), a history of and reflection on his hometown, Liverpool (a “lovely, astringent film,” A.O. Scott wrote in The Times); and “Sunset Song” (2015), starring Agyness Deyn, based on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel about coming of age in early 1900s Scotland.Finally, Mr. Davies, who always said that he was drawn to the past, began to explore the lives of the poets themselves.He made “A Quiet Passion” (2016), in which Cynthia Nixon portrays Emily Dickinson, the reclusive 19th-century American poet. The Times’s critic found that Mr. Davies possessed “a poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep, idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.”His last film was “Benediction” (2021), a drama about the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. The New Yorker called it “an energizing and inspiring movie about the vanity of existence itself.“Mr. Davies, who was gay and never married, leaves no known survivors and had lived alone since 1980. He had tried the gay dating scene, he said, and dismissed it for, among other reasons, what he called its devotion to narcissism.Lamenting the age of complete license — in the arts as well as in daily life, he told L.A. Weekly in 2012: “The first thing that goes is subtlety. The first thing that goes is any kind of restraint or even wit sometimes. I don’t know how to deal with that in the modern world.” More

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      ‘The Mill’ Review: A Cog in the Machine

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      This spare dystopian thriller offers a serviceable but mostly unimaginative satire of a capitalist nightmare.If we as a nation are reaching an increasingly critical juncture over the fate of labor, “The Mill” is a film that appears startlingly well-suited for the moment. The dystopian thriller, directed by Sean King O’Grady, almost literally translates the idea of cog in a machine, following Joe (Lil Rel Howery), a middle manager within a major corporation called Mallard, as he mysteriously wakes up in an open-air prison and is forced to push a grist mill hundreds of times, 18 hours a day. He doesn’t know how he got there, only that, as a neighboring prisoner who talks to him through a vent explains, you better keep working or get “terminated.”It’s an intentionally spare work — most of the film is confined to this one small outdoor space — but its stripped-down nature exposes the film’s often graceless execution. While it aims for sharp-edged commentary, the movie at times reads, ironically, like an A.I. generator took a handful of anticapitalist talking points — the ruthlessness of the corporate apparatus, the unwieldy danger of Big Tech’s algorithms, the power of labor organizing — and spit out a serviceable but unimaginative dystopian satire.The film lacks any well-executed surprises to help it push past one-dimensional satire, and Howery is not strong enough of a dramatic actor to keep a single-setting, single-character film like this consistently engaging. As Mallard’s computer overlord increases Joe’s work demands and punishments, the film has the feel of an overextended, limp episode of “Black Mirror”: moderately entertaining, but lacking any teeth to its political bite.The MillNot rated. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and Its Insight Into Grief, Family and Gender

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      For one critic, every encounter with this Shakespeare play deepens her understanding of its insights into grief, family and gender.A few weeks ago two friends and I were talking about our obsessions. One had been sleepless all week, playing the new Zelda video game with few breaks. The other revealed that she was deep into Taylor Swift. I said I had so many fandoms that I didn’t know if I could name a favorite.My Swiftie friend quickly set me straight. “We already know your main fandom,” she said. “Hamlet.”It’s true. If you look at my bookshelves, the art on my walls, even the art on my skin, you’ll find anime references and mythological figures, lines from Eliot and Chekhov and illustrations from Borges and Gorey stories. But none of these interests enjoys a prominence as great as the one afforded “Hamlet” in my home — and on my body, where the majority of my tattoos, by far, are inspired by the play.My friends know well that I’ve seen numerous productions of the work, recite Hamlet’s monologues to myself, even put Kenneth Branagh or Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” on in the background as I clean my apartment. For me, the text’s themes — about death, duality, gender, family — deepen each time I read, see or hear “Hamlet,” and as I grow older, new insights are revealed about the characters and the language.I first read “Hamlet” in high school, as an artsy poetry-writing teenager who found death a fascinating, albeit abstract, concept. I imagined the young prince — witty, privileged yet tortured, and forever trapped in his own head — as kin. He was less a lofty figure of English literature than the emo kid I crushed on, abandoning his math homework to read Dante’s “Inferno” as angsty pop punk played in the background.When I watched Michael Almereyda’s 2000 “Hamlet” film soon after, it did little to disabuse me of this notion. Taking place in New York City, with Ethan Hawke playing a hipster film student who’s heir to the “Denmark Corporation,” this “Hamlet” was contemporary, rife with irony. Watching Hamlet offer the great existential query of “to be or not to be” while strolling the “action movie” aisles of a Blockbuster store, I learned that even tragedy can contain a hearty dose of comedy.When I reread the play for a class on Shakespeare’s tragedies a few years later, I became fixated on one line in particular: “The rest is silence.” With these four words, Hamlet’s last ones in the play, the prince is acknowledging his final breath, but also perhaps breaking the fourth wall, announcing the end of the play like Prospero at the end of “The Tempest.” Or maybe Hamlet is offering us the line in consolation: After five acts of musing on death, he can assure us that death is simple, and it’s quiet. This line is now tattooed on my right arm.In Branagh’s 1996 “Hamlet” film, an unabridged adaptation that paired inspired direction with refined performances and respect for the text, Branagh wheezes out the words, his eyes glassy and staring into the distance. “Silence” lands after a pause, as though he’s listening to the deafening silence of all of humanity that’s preceded him.Clockwise from top left: Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in the 1948 film, Ethan Hawke in the 2000 film, Kenneth Branagh in his 1996 film, Ato Blankson-Wood (with Solea Pfeiffer as Ophelia) in the 2023 Shakespeare in the Park production, Ruth Negga in the 2020 production at St. Ann’s Workshop, and Billy Eugene Jones, left, and Marcel Spears in 2022 Public Theater production of “Fat Ham.”From Olivier’s fervent philosophizing Dane in the 1948 film to David Tennant’s lithe, boyish interpretation in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production, there’s a reason that Prince Hamlet remains one of the most coveted roles an actor, especially a young man of a certain age and celebrity, can take on. “Hamlet” is, after all, a man’s play.In Hawke’s “Hamlet” and Mel Gibson’s visceral, sensually charged 1990 “Hamlet” I first realized how often directors use the female characters as stand-ins for fatalistic, taboo love. (Which is why I also savor gender-crossed Hamlets, whether in the form of the theater pioneer Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 or Ruth Negga in 2020.) Queen Gertrude is either stupid, selfish or promiscuous, blinded by her untamed lust. Many productions opt for a physical staging of Act III, Scene 4, when Hamlet accosts his mother in her bedchamber. Hawke’s Hamlet grabs his mother in a black robe, then presses her against a set of closet doors. Gibson’s deranged Hamlet also fights and clutches at Gertrude, as did Andrew Scott’s in the 2017 London production by Robert Icke. Thomas Ostermeier’s wild “Hamlet” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year emphasized Gertrude’s sexuality to an extreme, having her slink and shimmy as though overwhelmed with sexual energy. The text implies that a woman too free with her affections digs her own grave.That includes, of course, Hamlet’s eternally damned love interest, Ophelia (memorialized on my right forearm with a skull and pansy). I used to dismiss her as a frail female stereotype, and have craved a production or adaptation that could give this character agency — any kind of agency — within the space of her grieving, her madness and her death.Kenny Leon’s otherwise underwhelming “Hamlet” at the Delacorte this summer did just that. Solea Pfeiffer played an Ophelia who matched Hamlet in wit and sass, who spoke with a knowingness and rage that lifted the character from her 17th-century home into the present.This duality in Ophelia — between sincerity and performance, raving madness and clear, articulated rage — is welcome. It’s a duality that many directors literalize in their productions overall, some using mirrors as nods to Hamlet’s constant reflections at the expense of action, others turning to hint at the divide between presentation and truth.But as much as “Hamlet” can serve as a character study, for me the story extends far beyond a production’s conceptualization of a lost prince with a splintered ego. This is a story that begins and ends with grief.I have a tattoo for Hamlet and his dear, departed father — a jeweled sword piercing a cracked skull in a crown. Having lost my dad almost a decade ago, I’m familiar with the feeling of being haunted by a father who may not be a literal king but perhaps just a patriarch taking the same cheap shots from the afterlife, like Pap in James Ijames’s “Fat Ham.” In the play, a Black, queer take on “Hamlet” in conversation with Shakespeare’s original text, Hamlet is not just tied to his father through a sense of filial obligation but also through guilt, regret, shame. In Pap I saw my own father’s flaws — the spite, the prejudice, the toxic masculinity. It made me wonder how much of Hamlet’s grief is for his father, and how much for the stability his father symbolized.Lately I’ve been listening with more regularity to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue, that great conference with death that feels as germane to the English language — our rhetoric, our poetry, our elocution, our linguistic imagination — as soil to the Earth. In the span of about a week this summer, I lost a grandmother, and a dear friend shared that his cancer had returned. Having buried both her parents in the past two years, my mother has been talking more about funeral arrangements and where our family would like to spend our post-mortem days. I, on the other hand, take less stock in the expensive ceremonies and planning around death. I don’t plan to make a show of my finale; like Hamlet, I wonder what it will even mean — in that everlasting sleep, who knows what dreams will come?I didn’t fall in love with “Hamlet” because of its action and intrigue; I love the play because it lets me reconnect with the spaces where death has brushed my life. “Hamlet” helps me sit with my own existential fears, all packaged in words of wit and elegance. Because I’m convinced now that if you let Shakespeare in, his voice becomes the one bellowing from the backstage of your life. More

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      When Did the Plot Become the Only Way to Judge a Movie?

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      At the New York Film Festival, auteurs conjure up moods and sensory experiences that show why the story isn’t always the thing.It’s time to take a stand against the tyranny of “story.” In Hollywood these days, “story” and “storyteller” are privileged terms, seemingly interchangeable with “films” and anyone who makes them — a distressing development considering the medium’s wild range of possibilities.The “story” framing used to feel fresh, anchored, however tenuously, to the effort to bridge racial and gender diversity gaps in the industry. It’s not just one kind of story, this line of thinking goes, but all colors and stripes of good stories that matter.As I sunk into my first week of screenings at this year’s New York Film Festival, which runs through Oct. 15, this sentiment didn’t feel wrong, per se. Just insufficient. To think of, say, a full-body sensory experience like Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” as merely a story about a Nazi family; or Raven Jackson’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” which consists of lush memory fragments, as merely a story about a Black woman’s coming-of-age, would feel dismissive of the filmmakers’ full intentions.I can’t imagine a single director in this year’s beautifully eclectic lineup who would call themselves a “storyteller” with a straight face — outside of a pitch meeting with investors. One film even satirizes the connection between moviemaking and corporate brand marketing. I’m looking at you, Radu Jude (“Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World”).That’s because movies aren’t just stories. Narrative can play a part, but the medium also encompasses feelings, moods, distortions of time and logic. The movies are exercises in freedom.From right, Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel in “The Taste of Things,” by Tran Anh Hung.IFC Films“The Taste of Things,” by the French Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung, is, at face value, a conventional Belle Époque-era romance about a gastronome (Benoît Magimel) and a cook (Juliette Binoche) who together create sumptuous multicourse meals. Over half of the film is entrenched in the raw physicality of their work, the textures of the foods they wash, boil, chop and sear into magnificent forms. The film doesn’t rely much on dialogue because the couple’s passion is transmitted through a decadent display of food porn. In one scene, a voluptuous poached pear gives way to a shot of Binoche’s disrobed derrière. It conveys an ineffable quality: that of loving and being loved through the act of cooking.When I think about what makes a good story — a tale that traces out a plot and a path from A to B — the answers don’t always square with the parts of movies I love best. I’m not super hot on Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro,” but the scenes in which Lenny conducts are magnificent and powerful, like being thrown into the middle of a sonic storm. The rest — the tortured-genius bad-wife-guy intrigue — sometimes felt like homework. I often found myself thinking, “Let’s get back to the music.”That’s because the best things in life are gratuitous, like sex — kinky sex, weird sex, sex whose finer details you’d think twice before sharing. Joanna Arnow’s deadpan dramedy “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” relishes all of the above. The 30-something Brooklynite played by Arnow herself (in a perpetual Garfield the cat scowl) goes on dull dates and powers through a numbing office job. The focus is her sex life, specifically the submissive role she plays in a B.D.S.M. relationship with a divorced lawyer (Scott Cohen). These scenes are cringey and absurd, but there’s something compelling about choosing the conditions of your own humiliation — and having some fun with it.The images in Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City” are of Amsterdam during the pandemic lockdown, but the narration is about the Nazi occupation in the 1940s.A24Steve McQueen’s postmodern ghost story, “Occupied City,” which clocks in at a whopping four and a half hours, forces us to rejigger and expand our understanding of how movies communicate meaning. The film takes an almost pointillist approach to the telling of history. Based on a book by McQueen’s wife, Bianca Stigter (a Dutch filmmaker and historian whose research into the Holocaust also yielded one of last year’s most astounding nonfiction movies, “Three Minutes: A Lengthening”), “Occupied City” consists of hundreds of mostly static shots of Amsterdam during the pandemic lockdown. With each shot, an impassive narrator (Melanie Hyams) details the corresponding crimes that took place in each location in the early 1940s, when the Nazis invaded the country.The conceit is willfully repetitive, and its simple, matter-of-fact approach departs from the manipulations of empathy-generating narratives that tend to dominate the subject matter. Often, my mind wandered throughout the film’s countless enumerations, which triggered pangs of guilt and also putting things in perspective: It’s distressingly easy to forget, to lose focus, in the face of horrors whose size and scope are impossible for the human brain to fully process.Every year I try to take in a few films from the Revivals section, which features restorations of vintage titles, many of them previously inaccessible. “Un rêve plus long que la nuit” (A Dream Longer Than the Night), by the French American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, stood out. Years ago I had visited a de Saint Phalle exhibition where one of the most striking pieces was a door-sized vaginal opening nestled between a behemoth pair of legs. Silly, beautiful, and terrifying all at once, the film is a pagan fever-dream that envisions a feminist revolution through the eyes of a young girl, and its best qualities are in the details: the sheer diversity of papîer-mache penises is astounding.Also playing in Revivals is a program of shorts by Man Ray, the artist best known for his photographs, but whose films — dizzying experiments with light and movement — turn familiar objects into alien entities. For Man Ray, conventional photography was about capturing reality, meaning his work would manifest images only possible in fantasies and dreams. Now, in the vertiginous age of the internet, with increasingly sophisticated film technologies at artists’ disposal, it’s worth considering films with similar ambitions: those that make legible the unreal. In “The Human Surge 3,” the director Eduardo Williams uses a 360-degree camera to capture the roamings of a multicultural group of friends, each from a different part of the world: Peru, Taiwan and Sri Lanka. Using uncanny, stretched-out images that resemble those on Google Earth, Williams’s remarkable vision of digital interconnectivity collapses borders and language barriers in wondrous, psychedelic fashion.“Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” from Thien An Pham, tracks a man’s journey through rural Vietnam.Kino LorberFor more brain-breaking adventures, I recommend scouring the shorts and midlength programs. Preceding Deborah Stratman’s “Last Things,” an eerie, science-fictional take on evolution (from the perspective of rocks!), is a gem: “Laberint Sequences,” by the visual artist Blake Williams, the only 3-D film in the lineup. This 20-minute short is thrillingly destabilizing, and its considered yet adventurous employment of 3-D makes Hollywood’s innovations look juvenile by comparison. Also of note for their beautifully baffling subversions of the cinematic status quo: Ross Meckfessel’s modernist horror jaunt “Spark From a Falling Star,” Onyeka Igwe and Huw Lemmey’s “Ungentle,” in which a disembodied narrator (Ben Whishaw) ruefully remembers his past — part gay awakening, part spy thriller — over banal shots of contemporary England.A descendant of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ethereal excursions, Thien An Pham’s transportive feature “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” tracks a man’s journey through rural Vietnam after the sudden death of his sister. You could say the film is about faith, the anxiety of fatherhood, or the existential unease of mortality itself, but plot is beside the point.What matters is the riveting sensuality, the way the images ensorcel you, vesting quivering landscapes with an almost divine power. It’s the kind of film that makes our culture’s devotion to movies click: It’s not about watching stories, but inhabiting worlds they have not told us of.For more information on the New York Film Festival, go to filmlinc.org. More

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      ‘Last Stop Larrimah’ Review: The Unusual Suspects

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      This true-crime documentary investigates a murder case in a tiny Australian town, showcasing its brash inhabitants.You might think that a murder case in a one-horse town of 11 people would be a little easier to solve. You would be wrong when it comes to the remote Australian outpost of “Last Stop Larrimah,” a true-crime documentary which gives free rein to the gossip and bickering of its mutually suspicious inhabitants.Fran the meat-pie queen, her pub-owning rival, Barry, and his dog-loving bartender, Richard, are among those holding forth on the mystery of Paddy Moriarty — a “larrikin” (in Aussie parlance) who sounds less and less endearing. Paddy and his dog disappeared one night shortly before Christmas in 2017. The sometimes entertaining residents of Larrimah spin theories about each other for the film’s director, Thomas Tancred, who adds their past incautious interviews for television.Tancred finds initial charm in the Australian embrace of big personalities like these sunbaked veterans of the Northern Territory. But the movie resembles reality shows that string together insinuations and trash-talk without knowing when to quit. The convoluted structure feels like overworked dough, with some dubious song cues and oddly dismissive treatment of police investigators. (As a murder mystery, the movie also games the system by postponing crucial information.)The bloat saps the fun and intrigue from the film, which can’t navigate between playing up eccentricity and committing to the notion that hell can be other people (even in a one-time refuge). The infighting seems quaint in the first hour, but by the second, you just want to get out of town.Last Stop LarrimahNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      Book Review: ‘Madonna: A Rebel Life,’ by Mary Gabriel

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      Mary Gabriel’s biography is as thorough as its subject is disciplined. But in relentlessly defending the superstar, where’s the party?MADONNA: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel“I want to be alone,” Greta Garbo’s dancer character famously said in “Grand Hotel,” a quote permanently and only semi-accurately attached to the actress after she retreated from public life. Garbo was first on the list of Golden Agers in one of Madonna’s biggest hits, “Vogue,” but the pop star has long seemed to embody this maxim’s very opposite. She wants to be surrounded, as if with Dolby sound.“Before Madonna even had a manager, she had a court of valets and minstrels following her everywhere,” the record executive Seymour Stein observed.Though technically a solo vocalist, Madonna has been backed by dancers from the beginning of her career in the early 1980s. She has six children: two biological, four adopted from Malawi. Many more consider themselves her spiritual offspring: gay men to whom she’s been den mother; younger female performers she’s inspired.And she’s trooped around the world with an elastic entourage of friends, writers, producers, directors, handlers, photographers, publicists, reporters and fans, all of whom helpfully populate Mary Gabriel’s big, indignant new biography of her: a dogged, brick-by-brick bulwark against any detractors bobbing in the moat of her castle.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is one of those books you measure in pounds, not pages: almost three, which would have been more if the publisher hadn’t decided to post the endnotes and bibliography online rather than printing them. It’s not going to fit on the little shelf of the StairMaster at the gym — a classically Madonna piece of exercise equipment — though you might hoist it afterward for wrist curls.If you wander into an aerobics class instead, not only are chances high that the instructor will play a song from Madonna’s catalog, but she’ll probably be wearing a hands-free headset microphone — and that is muy Madonna as well. As Gabriel notes, though the technology was used before by pilots and Kate Bush, it was her subject who popularized it on her 1989 “Blond Ambition” tour.For this book, though, the woman born Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1958, the same year as Prince and Michael Jackson, stayed quiet. Her voice is piped through from plentiful previous interviews, recorded performances and the occasional post on Instagram, where early in the pandemic she outcringed the Gal Gadot “Imagine” video with one of herself naked in a bath amid floating rose petals, declaring Covid-19 “the great equalizer.”The closest Gabriel gets to Madonna in the actual flesh is half a dozen conversations with her brother, Christopher Ciccone, whose best-selling 2008 memoir, “Life With My Sister Madonna,” caused at least temporary estrangement between the siblings, longtime professional collaborators. (Madonna’s sense of betrayal is hard to jibe with her ardent defense of free personal expression.)Gabriel also talks to 30-odd other sources, surprisingly few for the scope of the work, and turns up a few interesting archived nuggets, such as Norman Mailer, in an early draft of the more than 200 he wrote for a 1994 Esquire profile, describing Madonna as a “pint‐size” Italian American (he used an ethnic slur instead) “with a heart built out of the cast‐iron balls of a hundred peasant ancestors.”Previous Madonnagraphers have either been breathily unauthorized — Andrew Morton, J. Randy Taraborrelli — or taken a more “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” approach; universities have offered entire courses on her. Gabriel brings extra intellectual cred to the task. “Love and Capital,” her book about Karl Marx and his wife, Jenny, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; her group portrait of five female painters, “Ninth Street Women,” was rhapsodically received. But she doesn’t describe her own connection to this project, as she did the others, and this reader was left wondering if it might be less love than capital.Not that Gabriel doesn’t make a diligent case for Madonna’s cultural importance: inviting us to consider, for example, her Mylar-encased coffee-table book “Sex,” pummeled with judgment when it was published in 1992, in the same light as James Baldwin’s novel “Giovanni’s Room.” She airs at length the praise of the curator Jeffrey Deitch, who worked with Madonna on a 2013 multimedia installation called “X‐STaTIC PRo=CeSS.”Maybe we’ve all miscast Madonna as the Queen of Pop — a dubious analogue to Aretha Franklin’s Queen of Soul — and she’s closer, on a mass scale, to Karen Finley, the performance artist who used to smear her nude body in chocolate or honey? Indeed, describing the period Madonna lived in Miami, Gabriel writes of her “daily ritual of covering herself in honey and jumping into Biscayne Bay, where she floated until the honey melted away,” with no apparent concern for sharks.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is organized as a busy, seven-decade, mostly urban travel itinerary. Like Franklin, Madonna lost her mother early and was raised in Detroit, where her father, who also had half a dozen children, “thought we should always be productive,” she said. Her Barbie would tell Ken: “I’m not gonna stay home and do the dishes. You stay home! I’m going out tonight. I’m going bowling, OK, so forget it!” Among her formative influences were J.D. Salinger and Anne Sexton (literary); the Shangri-Las and David Bowie (musical); Martha Graham and Frida Kahlo (visual). “The sight of her mustache consoled me,” she said of the latter.I might be biased as a native who craved rubber bracelets and lace socks and waited to hear if FM radio played “Borderline” through the “la-la-la-la,” but the section when Madonna arrives in New York City, though well trafficked, is one of the most compelling in this book. She eats French fries out of garbage cans; learns guitar at an abandoned synagogue in Flushing Meadows nicknamed “the Gog”; brings a demo tape to the DJ booth at Danceteria; and, signed by Stein from his hospital bed, hangs with a “coterie” of artists that included Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She was also raped at knife point on a rooftop, an ordeal not publicly aired until the punishing Abel Ferrara film “Dangerous Game” in 1993.Having segued to Hollywood (and later Broadway and the West End), she gave the middle finger to its male establishment: walking away from an early marriage to Sean Penn, cursing out David Letterman on the air and roundly shushing Harvey Weinstein when he offers feedback on “Truth or Dare,” her 1991 documentary. (“I don’t care what your point of view is,” she tells him. “I never want to hear it. Who the hell are you to tell me what kind of film I should be doing?”) Her onetime paramour Warren Beatty, who directed her in “Dick Tracy,” mocked how she wanted to live on-camera all the time; who with an iPhone now does otherwise?Madonna is rightly celebrated here as a pioneer of AIDS education — she lost countless friends to the disease — and a genuine philanthropist. But as she grows more practiced with the press and isolated by her fame, the book softens and suffers. The muchness of Madonna, her cross-disciplinarity — from MTV to “Evita” — seems impossible to corral.Madonna’s drug is work — she makes a discipline of even decadence — and “A Rebel Life” increasingly becomes a litany of remote description and tabulation: boundaries crossed, records broken, shows staged, money made, countries visited, foreign cultures sampled. “All artists appropriate,” is how Gabriel defends her against a frequent charge. “It is called inspiration.”Clichés sneak into her prose. Madonna is burning the candle at both ends, igniting a firestorm and is a lightning rod for controversy. She has never taken the road most traveled, but does take a long hard look in the mirror.Speaking of mirrors: Gabriel acknowledges Madonna’s talent for self-reinvention, but oddly ignores her transformation after cosmetic procedures and the resultant backlash — a sensitive matter to parse, but hardly irrelevant for someone whose oeuvre has been so entwined with image. “I’m going to make it easier for all those girls behind me when they turn 60,” the star said when promoting her 2019 album, “Madame X.” Well, some of those girls want to know why she can’t shake her skull-topped cane at the anti-aging industrial complex.“A Rebel Life” hits its marks but rarely soars, as Madonna did suspended by cables during her Drowned World tour. (Rather, the book is submerged in names, places and dates and historical exposition.) Then again, assessing Madonna’s legacy before she has a chance to recover from recent health setbacks may be an impossibly premature endeavor.“The verdict time and again would be that she had gone too far, that her career was over,” Gabriel writes. “Time and again, the jury was wrong.”MADONNA: A Rebel Life | By Mary Gabriel | Illustrated | 858 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $38 More

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      Errol Morris Did Not Like This Q&A About His le Carré Film

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      John le Carré’s spy novels traffic in the philosophical, emotional and practical ambiguities complicating concepts like truth, deceit and self-awareness. Which makes their author, who died in 2020 at 89 and whose real name was David Cornwell, an ideal foil for the legendary documentary director Errol Morris, himself an artist compelled toward questions about those […] More

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      ’12 Years a Slave’: An Oral History

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      A decade on, the Oscar-winning portrait of American slavery feels more potent than ever. The filmmakers explain its personal origins and ultimate triumph.“So, what do you want to do next?”The question shadowed the director Steve McQueen’s first tour of Hollywood, in late summer 2008. His debut film, “Hunger,” a mesmerizing and unsettling character study of the Irish revolutionary Bobby Sands, had electrified audiences in Cannes that May and won the prize for best first feature. In rounds of meetings in Los Angeles — McQueen’s first time in the city — executives and producers on studio lots and in restaurants cast themselves as allies-in-waiting, eager to help a visionary new talent mount his second picture.McQueen had thought his follow-up would tackle another formidable historical figure, perhaps the African American singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson, or the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer and political dissident Fela Kuti. But, emerging from the Hollywood meetings, he told his agent that he wanted to make a film about slavery. The decision, he said in a recent interview, had been inspired in part by the meetings themselves — an ineffable look he’d seen on people’s faces when they’d first laid eyes on him.“They didn’t know that I was Black,” said McQueen, who was born outside London to a Trinidadian mother and a Grenadian father. “I think because I had made a movie like ‘Hunger,’ these white guys didn’t think that they would be meeting with a Black person.”To McQueen, the mistaken assumption about his identity — to say nothing of the carelessness of not having bothered to look him up — was evidence of deep and unexamined prejudice. The legacy of slavery had haunted him since childhood; his mother kept a family tree that traced her ancestors back to Ghana. But, in Britain, his education on the subject had included “Roots” and little else. In America, a country with an ample history of anti-Black violence, he sensed a similar strain of mass amnesia.“There was a certain sense of nonresponsibility, like it was something deep in the past,” he said. “I wanted to hold people to account, to say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute — this happened here.’”“12 Years a Slave,” McQueen’s version of a wake-up call, was released 10 years ago this month. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Lupita Nyong’o — in her first feature film role — and written by John Ridley, it was based on the real-life autobiography of Solomon Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped in 1841, enslaved and later escaped. (In the end, it was McQueen’s third film. “Shame,” a frank portrait of sex addiction, came out in 2011.)Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, in “12 Years a Slave.” The film was based on the 1853 memoir of the real-life Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped, enslaved and later escaped.Jaap Buitendijk/Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentA serious, R-rated Black drama with no movie stars in the lead roles that would go on to gross nearly $190 million (most of it abroad) and win three Oscars (including best picture, the first for a film by a Black director), “12 Years” arrived in Hollywood like a U.F.O. landing. Its success paved the way for two other landmarks of Black cinema from the same production company, Plan B — “Selma” (2014) and “Moonlight” (2016) — and dispelled the longstanding myth that “Black films don’t travel,” one year before Disney announced “Black Panther.”The movie’s journey from gut impulse to unstoppable force was possible because of blind faith — that of an in-demand filmmaker impervious to industry dogma, and a coterie of producers who fanned his flame — and the efforts of actors and crafts people who faced the relics of human bondage, an actual lightning strike and the daily broil of New Orleans in July.These are edited excerpts from their stories.STEVE McQUEEN I knew I wanted to make a movie about a free man who got caught up into slavery.DEDE GARDNER, producer We had a subject matter before we had a narrative.JEREMY KLEINER, producer He has a kind of divining rod for taboos and just goes right to them.McQUEEN My wife [the author and filmmaker Bianca Stigter] said, “Why don’t you try to find some material instead of trying to write it?” John Ridley and I did some research and my wife did some research, and she found the book “12 Years a Slave.” When I read it, I said, This is it. This is the piece.GARDNER The urgency of John’s script, and how cinematic it was, was evident. We try to develop a film as far as we can before going to find the financing. Can we get it written? Can we get it cast? The hope is that eventually you cross a line of deniability.McQUEEN I met Brad [Pitt, co-founder of Plan B] and he was very receptive. He didn’t blink.GARDNER He loved the script and wanted to help get it made, which I think we all knew would entail his being in it. [Pitt plays a small but critical role as a Canadian carpenter and opponent of slavery who helps Northup secure his freedom.]Brad Pitt, left, a co-founder of Plan B, the production company behind the film, on set with McQueen. “I met Brad and he was very receptive,” the director said. “He didn’t blink.”Jaap Buitendijk/Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentMcQUEEN I had wanted to do a film about Fela with Chiwetel and I had him learning to play the saxophone. I remember calling him and saying, “Actually, I want to do this slavery film instead.” [Imitating Ejiofor] “Man, I’ve been practicing for the last three months!”BRAD WESTON, former president of New Regency, co-financer The script was great and the talent was undeniable.With a budget set at $20 million, financed by River Road, Summit Entertainment and New Regency, “12 Years” began filming in New Orleans on June 27, 2012. Shooting took place on four former plantations outside the city, not far from where the real Solomon Northup had been held captive. On the first day, the temperature hit 108 degrees.SEAN BOBBITT, cinematographer How hot does hot get?McQUEEN Horses were collapsing in the fields next door to us.ADAM STOCKHAUSEN, production designer It was a battle between wanting to take off as much clothing as possible and not wanting to be eaten alive by mosquitoes.McQUEEN It was brutal, but you realize how people had to live in those conditions.BOBBITT It was very important to Steve that it look real and that it be real. We talked a lot about simplicity and truth, about not having any frippery. The book is very straightforward and honest.STOCKHAUSEN There were terrible storms. One of our sets in the wharf [where a ship carrying Northup arrives in New Orleans] blew down two weeks before we were set to shoot.BOBBITT There was one day when a lightning bolt struck the edge of the ship set and blew out all of our electronics and sound. Everyone — maybe 100 extras and the key actors — hit the ground, screamed and ran away. Luckily, no one was injured, but the E.M.T.s rushed in and checked everyone out.Among the most challenging shoots was a much-discussed scene in which Patsey, an enslaved woman played by Nyong’o, is whipped by the volatile plantation owner Edwin Epps (Fassbender). It unfolds in a single, swirling four-minute shot.BOBBITT It was three or four takes, with one camera. We never used the word “coverage.” It’s anathema to filmmaking — anyone can go out and do 20 shots on each scene, give it to a very good editor, and you’ll get a movie. Will you get a great movie? From my point of view, it’s unlikely.A serious, R-rated Black drama with no movie stars in the lead roles, “12 Years” grossed nearly $190 million and won three Oscars, including best picture.Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentMcQUEEN We did a lot of rehearsal and [Nyong’o, Ejiofor and Fassbender] were incredible. Lupita made everyone raise their game. You could put her in a dustbin bag and she would work it out. [Representatives for the actors declined to make them available for this story because of restrictions around interviews during the actors’ strike.]BOBBITT It was emotionally draining for everyone, but the idea was not to give the audience the chance to look away, to drive home the true horror of what was perpetrated on the slaves for 200 years.McQUEEN We couldn’t shy away from it, we had to go to very dark places. But in the evenings, we would all come together, we would hug each other, we would eat together, we would get drunk together, and then we would come back the next day. It was beautiful.The film had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on Aug. 30, 2013. It received a rapturous standing ovation and was instantly hailed as an Oscar contender. But an obstacle came into focus a week later, during a news conference at the Toronto International Film Festival, when a white, visibly uncomfortable moderator repeatedly emphasized how “harrowing,” “brutal” and “tricky” it was.McQUEEN We had a little bit of a … not very good press conference in Toronto. I thought the questions were a bit silly. My response wasn’t great.PAULA WOODS, McQueen’s publicist He was a bit taken aback after having such a great premiere. It fed into this whole “Is it too difficult to watch?” conversation that we were all annoyed by.HANS ZIMMER, composer It was full of injustice, but it was full of human dignity, as well.McQUEEN Cameron Bailey [then the artistic director of the Toronto festival] took me to one side and said, “You know, this movie’s more important than you.” I had to put my emotions aside and get on with the job of promoting the movie.WOODS Before #OscarsSoWhite, people would write things that would never get written today. It’s part of the greater problem of systemic racism. I remember we were in New Orleans visiting one of the plantations with a journalist, and a man who was working there sidled up to me — with one eye on Steve — and said, “You know, it wasn’t nearly as bad as they say it was.”“It was emotionally draining for everyone,” said Sean Bobbitt, the cinematographer, “but the idea was not to give the audience the chance to look away.”Jaap Buitendijk/Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentNANCY UTLEY, former co-chairman of the distributor Fox Searchlight It was challenging, but that’s part of what we thought made it special — that it was willing to take you places that are difficult to go.STEVE GILULA, former co-chairman of Fox Searchlight We had a two-pronged approach with the campaign: One was the festivals, and the other was African American opinion makers.UTLEY We did screenings with Skip [Henry Louis] Gates Jr., the Equal Justice Initiative, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Museum of Tolerance.GILULA We didn’t want it to be pigeonholed as an art film. When we opened, it performed very well at African American theaters.After winning top prizes at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, “12 Years a Slave” entered Oscar night, on March 2, 2014, with nine nominations, close behind Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” and David O. Russell’s “American Hustle,” with 10 each. The best picture race was widely considered a tossup.McQUEEN I came with my mother and sister, and when we got out on the red carpet they just burst into tears.WESTON We knew that we were in the conversation in a real way, but you don’t let yourself go further than that. You never know.KLEINER There’s an old mythology that films that are a little tougher might not be to the academy’s taste. “Ordinary People” over “Raging Bull.”Nyong’o and Ridley were early winners in the best supporting actress and best adapted screenplay categories. But, late in the night, best director went to Cuarón.UTLEY That’s when your heart goes in your stomach, because often director and picture are paired.McQUEEN Will Smith [presenting best picture] looked directly at me and said, “12 Years a Slave.” It was amazing. I slapped it out of the presenter’s hand, gave my speech and jumped as high as I could.UTLEY It was a calling card for a lot of the talent in the movie, and for us, as well. Everyone got to make more stuff.KLEINER It felt significant that when people now think about how this industry has represented that period — “Birth of a Nation,” “Gone With the Wind” — they might also think of “12 Years a Slave.”BOBBITT There are states in America where that film would be banned from schools today, but it’s there, and it will always be there.McQUEEN We made history. At that point, there was no going back. More