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      ‘Blonde’ Review: Exploiting Marilyn Monroe for Old Times’ Sake

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      She was an actress of uncommon talent. But once again a director is more interested in examining her body (literally, in this case) than getting inside her mind.Given all the indignities and horrors that Marilyn Monroe endured during her 36 years — her family tragedies, paternal absence, maternal abuse, time in an orphanage, time in foster homes, spells of poverty, unworthy film roles, insults about her intelligence, struggles with mental illness, problems with substance abuse, sexual assault, the slavering attention of insatiable fans — it is a relief that she didn’t have to suffer through the vulgarities of “Blonde,” the latest necrophiliac entertainment to exploit her.Hollywood has always eaten its own, including its dead. Given that the industry has also always loved making movies about its own machinery, it’s no surprise that it also likes making movies about its victims and martyrs. Three years ago in the biopic “Judy,” Renée Zellweger played Judy Garland near the end of her troubled life. “Blonde” goes for a more comprehensive biopic sweep — it runs nearly three hours — embracing a bleakly familiar trajectory that begins with Monroe’s unhappy childhood, revisits her dazzling yet progressively fraught fame, her depressingly abusive relationships, myriad health issues and catastrophic downward spiral.After a brief prelude that introduces Marilyn at the height of her fame, the movie rewinds to the sad, lonely little girl named Norma Jeane, with a terrifying, mentally unstable single mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson). Childhood is a horror show — Gladys is cold, violent — but Norma Jeane crawls into adulthood (a fine if overwhelmed Ana de Armas). She models for cheesecake magazines, and before long breaks into the film industry, which is another nightmare. Soon after she steps onto a lot, she is raped by a man, here called Mr. Z and seemingly based on Darryl F. Zanuck, the longtime head of 20th Century Fox studio, where Monroe became a star.“Blonde” is based on the 2000 Joyce Carol Oates hefty (the original hardback is 738 pages) fictionalized account of Monroe’s life. In the novel, Oates draws from the historical record but likewise plays with facts. She cooks up a ménage a trois for Monroe and channels her ostensible thoughts, including during a lurid tryst with an unkind President John F. Kennedy. In the introduction to the book, the critic Elaine Showalter writes that Oates used Monroe as “an emblem of twentieth-century America.” A woman, Showalter later adds without much conviction, “who was much more than a victim.”The writer-director of “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik, doesn’t seem to have read that part about Monroe. His Norma Jeane — and her glamorous, vexed creation, Marilyn Monroe — is almost nothing more than a victim: As the years passed and even as her fame grows, she is mistreated again and again, even by those who claim to love her. Prey for leering men and a curiosity for smirking women (unlike Monroe, this Marilyn has no women friends), she is aware of her effect on others but also helpless to do, well, anything. With her tremulous smile, she drifts and stumbles through a life that never feels like her own.All that’s missing from this portrait is, well, everything else, including Monroe’s personality and inner life, her intelligence, her wit and savvy and tenacity; her interest in — and knowledge of — politics; the work that she put in as an actress and the true depth of her professional ambitions. (As Anthony Summers points out in his book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,”she formed her own corporation: Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc.) Mostly, what’s missing is any sense of what made Monroe more than just another beautiful woman in Hollywood: her genius. Watching “Blonde,” I wondered if Dominik had ever actually watched a Marilyn Monroe film, had seen the transcendent talent, the brilliant comic timing, the phrasing, gestures and grace?Fictionalized histories play with the truth, hence the hedges that filmmakers stick on movies, that they’re “inspired by” or “based on” the truth. “Blonde” doesn’t announce itself as fiction right off, though it carries the usual mealy-mouthed disclaimer in the credits. But of course this is all about Monroe, one of the most famous women of the 20th century, and it revisits her fame and life — Bobby Cannavale plays a character based on Joe DiMaggio, and Adrien Brody on Arthur Miller — with enough fidelity to suggest that Dominik is working in good faith when he’s simply exploiting her anew.With Adrien Brody playing a character based on the playwright Arthur Miller, her third husband. Scenes switch between black-and-white and color (as her films did).NetflixThat the first image of Marilyn in “Blonde” is of her ass makes that clear. The movie opens with a short black-and-white sequence that re-creates the night Monroe filmed the most famous scene in Billy Wilder’s garish 1955 comedy, “The Seven Year Itch,” about a married man lusting after a neighbor played by Monroe. During the film, her character stands on a subway grating and coos as a gust of air twice whooshes up her pleated white dress, exposing her thighs. “The Seven Year Itch” only bares her legs, although apparently the massive crowd that watched the scene while it was being shot saw more.As camera flash bulbs pop, flooding the screen white, Dominik shows some fleeting images of the crowd and then cuts to Marilyn as her dress billows. Her back is to the camera — the framing of the shot lops off most of her head and legs — and she’s leaning a bit forward, so that her butt is thrust toward the viewer, as if in invitation. Dominik does get around to showing her face, which is beaming as the camera points up toward Marilyn in outward supplication. The high-contrast of the images makes the color black seem bottomless (metaphor alert!) while the white is so bright that it threatens to blot her out.For the rest of “Blonde,” Dominik keeps peeping up Marilyn’s dress, metaphorically and not, while he tries to make his filmmaking fit his subject: He uses different aspect ratios and switches between color and black-and-white (she made films in both); reproduces some of the most indelible photos of her; and now and again employs some digital wizardry, as when a bed she’s sharing with two lovers during a vigorous romp turns into a waterfall, which happens around the time Marilyn makes “Niagara.” In other words, again and again, Dominik blurs the line between her films and her life.But by so insistently erasing the divide between these realms, Dominik ends up reducing Marilyn to the very image — the goddess, the sexpot, the pinup, the commodity — that he also seems to be trying to critique. There’s no there there to his Marilyn, just tears and trauma and sex, lots and lots of sex. It’s a baffling take, though particularly when he takes us inside Marilyn’s vagina — twice (!), once in color and once in black-and-white — while she’s having abortions. I’m still not sure if this is meant to represent the point of view of her cervix or fetuses, who also make appearances. It certainly isn’t Marilyn’s.Dominik is so far up Marilyn Monroe’s vagina in “Blonde” that he can’t see the rest of her. It’s easy to dismiss the movie as arty trash; undoubtedly it’s a missed opportunity. Monroe’s life was tough, but there was more to it than Dominik grasps, the proof of which is in the films she left behind — “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” “Some Like It Hot,” “The Misfits” — the whole damn filmography. To judge from “Blonde,” her performances were shaped by her agonies and somehow happened by chance, by fate, or because she’s a mystical, magical sex bomb. That’s grotesque, and it’s wrong. But if Dominik isn’t interested in or capable of understanding that Monroe was indeed more than a victim of the predations of men, it’s because, in this movie, he himself slipped into that wretched role.BlondeRated NC-17 for sex, nudity and substance abuse. Running time: 2 hours 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Wendell Pierce Steps Into ‘Death of a Salesman’

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      A Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman” has a Black lead for the first time, giving Pierce a chance to step into a role he was “born to play.”“Are my best days behind me?” Wendell Pierce said as he put down his steak knife. “Was I ever any good? A man can’t go out the way he came in. A man has got to add up to something.” It was here that he began to cry.This was on a recent weekday evening at the Palm, an upscale steakhouse in the theater district, and Pierce was quoting, at least in part, from Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” which is in previews now and will open on Broadway on Oct. 9, following a successful London run a few years ago. Pierce, 58, stars as Willy Loman, the decompensating salesman of the title. It is his first Broadway appearance in more than 30 years. And even though Pierce has enjoyed a robust career, which includes long stints on prestige television shows and an Obie award for sustained excellence of performance, the questions that obsess Willy — questions of attainment, opportunity, legacy — are questions that obsess him as well. So much that when asked to consider them, he found himself weeping into his surf and turf.“I want to make my mark, too,” he said. “I’m like Willy Loman.”Pierce grew up in Pontchartrain Park, a midcentury New Orleans suburb that attracted middle-class Black families. He graduated from an arts high school, then matriculated at Juilliard, graduating in 1985. For years he was a journeyman, filming an episode of television here, a movie there, then perhaps appearing in a play, like Caryl Churchill’s finance industry farce, “Serious Money,” which came to Broadway, briefly, in 1988. (He has helped to produce two other Broadway shows, but “Salesman” marks his return as an actor.)In 2001, he was cast as William Moreland, a detective nicknamed Bunk, on the HBO series “The Wire.” While Bunk’s partner, Dominic West’s Jimmy McNulty, commanded the larger story lines, Bunk emerged as a character as richly drawn and portrayed as any. When the writer David Simon began to dream up his next series, “Treme,” created with Eric Overmyer, he built a role, that of the trombonist Antoine Batiste, with Pierce explicitly in mind.Sharon D Clarke as Linda Loman and Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman in the Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman,” which opens Oct. 9 at the Hudson Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“He can play anything,” Simon explained in a recent phone conversation. “He can play belligerent, he can play vulnerable, wounded. The angles are all really acute.” Simon went on, calling Pierce an actor’s actor, a student of the human condition, a “total pro.”That evening, at the Palm, Pierce looked professional, dapper and gentlemanly in a well-cut suit and pinstriped shirt. He has a round face, like a moon that’s nearly full, streaks of silver in his beard and deep-set, observant eyes. His expression looks as if it ought to relax into a smile, but it doesn’t. If you have heard his voice, then you will know that it is rich and sonorous, barrel-aged, with cadences that border on the biblical. Had acting not worked out, he has the skill set to have made a great career as a preacher, which he seems to know.“Here endeth the sermon,” he joked at the close of one of his speeches. And then, self-consciously: “Actors, man.”Acting did, of course, work out. (Detours into entrepreneurship have met with perhaps less success.) But Pierce has rarely been a leading man and he’s aware of that, sometimes painfully. His résumé reveals a long career as an ensemble player, a sidekick, lately a dad, nearly always an actor who subsumes himself to the character. When I mentioned to friends that I would soon speak with him, there was often a pause while they scrambled to look up his credits, followed by a “Yes. Of course. That guy.”Simon has a theory about this. Two theories. One emphasizes the texture and realism of Pierce’s acting. “A lot of our culture is about everything is heightened. And nothing about Wendell Pierce’s performances are ever heightened,” he said. The other comes down to a question of prettiness. “Wendell has an everyman look,” Simon said. “He’s an attractive man. But he has an everyman look.”And yet, all of this — the everyman quality, the realism, the vexed relationship to his own success — makes him ideal for Willy. As Marianne Elliott, who co-directed the London production of “Salesman” put it in a recent conversation: “He was kind of born to play it. He’s so perfect for the part.” Perfect, but with one significant departure. Pierce is Black. And Willy, in America, has nearly always been played by white men.A few years ago, while directing “Angels in America,” Elliott had an idea for a “Death of a Salesman” with a Black family at its center. Together with her associate director, Miranda Cromwell, who is directing the Broadway production, and in conversation with Rebecca Miller, Arthur Miller’s daughter, Elliott put together a workshop as proof of concept. When they saw that this staging could work, with hardly any changes to the script, Elliott and Cromwell reached out to Pierce, seeking an actor of both stature and deep feeling.Willy Loman is a role that Pierce never anticipated having the opportunity to play and a role that yet felt uniquely personal.Nate Palmer for The New York Times“He’s an exceptionally classically trained, brilliant actor, but he has so much heart, so much warmth, so much charisma,” Cromwell explained in a recent interview. “There is a complication within him and a vulnerability.”“He is not afraid to share his personal lived experience,” Cromwell continued, “and really be vulnerable on that stage.”Pierce sprang at it. Because Willy Loman is a great role and a lead role, a role that he never anticipated having the opportunity to play and a role that yet felt uniquely personal, even though Pierce has the gift of making every role he plays feel personal.“Wendell acts the way he lives: With the deepest appreciation for where he’s from and an insatiable curiosity of where he can go,” said John Krasinski, Pierce’s co-star in the Amazon series “Jack Ryan.”REHEARSALS BEGAN in 2019 and the show, which co-starred Sharon D Clarke as Willy’s wife Linda, opened in June at the Young Vic in London before transferring to the West End that fall. In a glowing review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley noted that in Pierce’s hands, “what has often felt like a plodding walk to the grave in previous incarnations becomes a propulsive — and compulsively watchable — dance of death.”That wasn’t necessarily what I saw when I visited the New York rehearsal room in early September to watch the cast — all new, except for Pierce and Clarke — work through the first scene of “Death of a Salesman.” After the cast sang a spiritual, Pierce entered, plodding, through a stage door. “I’m tired to the death,” his Willy said. His overcoat seemed made of lead and he looked hunched, beaten down, a decade older easily.But this, he explained to me at dinner, is what he spends the rest of the play fighting against. Those sunken shoulders represent every obstacle that Willy encounters, the threats to his livelihood, his masculinity, his sense of himself as a self-made all-American man. In this production it also represents the racist behavior that Willy faces, the microaggressions and epithets.“I have to know and feel that lead coat, the heaviness and the weight of the world that is placed upon Willy so that I can fight with all the fire and exuberance,” he said.Clarke, the Tony-nominated actress who has worked with him for more than three years, noted the energy that Pierce had brought to the role and the sense of overpowering love that his Willy has for Linda and their children.Pierce, right, as Bunk Moreland in “The Wire,” with Dominic West, left, and Larry Gilliard Jr. David Lee/HBO“His Willy is so lovable,” she said in a recent interview. “He will make you laugh, he will make you feel joyous, which makes the heartbreak at the end all the more deep and all the more resonant.”Rendering the Loman family as Black aggravates that heartbreak. As Cromwell explained it, the play remains the same, but its themes hit even harder. “The play is still, I believe, about the American dream,” she said. “When we see that through the lens of a Black family, we really see how much further away that dream is.”Playing Willy has eluded the great Black actors of previous generations, if they dared to dream it at all. In considering the opportunity, Pierce listed off at least a dozen actors — James Earl Jones, Ossie Davis, Roscoe Lee Browne among them — whom he thinks of as his forebears, all of whom, he believes, would have made a magnificent Willy.“I am humbled to be here now for them, to honor them, to honor their desires,” he said. “I owe it to them to step up and do my part and make a contribution to the American theater and that’s a humbling and a beautiful honor to have.”That contribution may hit differently here than it did in London, when this distinctly American play has returned to an American stage and to America’s particular racial climate. Cromwell told me that the play felt changed already.“Because it is closer to home,” she said. “I really feel that it’s holding a mirror to itself. It’s a great classic play being seen through a lens that it hasn’t been seen through before. And it will be surprising and dangerous in that space.”That this lens centers a Black family has and will continue to make headlines. But Pierce brings much more than his race to Willy, and the role has brought him things in return, some of which he anticipated, some he didn’t. Willy’s mortality has made him conscious of his own. He has dreamed about death throughout the rehearsal process — his own death, those of his loved ones — and had been preoccupied with how much time he has left and if he has used his time well.Willy finds solace, however incomplete, in his family. Pierce has never married. He has no children. And yet, he relates to Willy in this way, too, as a man who has put his career above his personal life. “My disruption has been that personal aspect,” he said. “So now I’m trying to learn the lesson of not being blind to what’s there. That’s what the lesson of this play will be for me.”Well, it’s one lesson. Others help him to appreciate the work and the choices that have brought him here. People have told him that he shouldn’t think of himself as a journeyman actor, but he does. And that, he said, is what makes him so much like Willy. He was crying through this, too. And he asked me to write about it, so that a reader would understand how much all of this means to him.“I want people to know. I want people to know. I want them to know,” he said. “It’s close. It’s so close. I’m proud of that.” More

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      Whoopi Goldberg Will Not Shut Up Thank You Very Much

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.On a recent summer afternoon, Whoopi Goldberg led me to her backyard so I could see her plants. Goldberg, a native New Yorker, lives in New Jersey, in a gated community previously inhabited by Thomas Edison and the Colgate family, of toothpaste fame, which means her garden is measured not in yards but in acres. In the greenhouse there was a pineapple plant, grown from cutting off the top of the fruit; around the corner were the vegetables — tomatoes, green peppers, eggplants. Not that she eats them, she said, but they’re nice to have around. In one corner of the yard, flowers in Crayola shades grew next to a small sign: Emma’s Garden, named for her mother. Clusters of grapes dripped from gnarled vines, and garden gnomes stood watch all over the place. As we meandered, I joked that I felt as if I were in the Garden of Eden, and I asked her if she ever felt like God. “Well, yeah,” she responded matter-of-factly, “but I’ve played God so often that it’s sort of understandable that I would.” As with the Lord herself, Goldberg appears to everyone in a different way. Someone who has found her through “The Color Purple” or “Ghost” or “Sister Act,” her three best-known films, believes her to be a bona fide movie star with hazardous levels of charm. A person who recognizes her from the list of 17 people who have an EGOT — an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony — probably knows that her roles swing from the very good to the shockingly bad, her résumé stacked with weighty achievements but even more blunders. A person who thinks: Whoopi Goldberg? You mean that surly lady on my TV in the morning? That is a regular watcher of “The View,” the daytime talk show that Goldberg has moderated for 15 years. And the person who considers Goldberg an unrecognized genius who has managed a one-of-a-kind, first-of-its-sort, decades-long career with dreadlocks on her head, no eyebrows on her face and her foot in her mouth? She knows Goldberg has actually played God only twice, but isn’t about to correct her. Though Goldberg, somewhat famously, loves living alone — a 2016 interview with her, published in this magazine, went viral for Goldberg’s assertion that, after three marriages, she knows she doesn’t “want somebody in my house” — she had rare houseguests that June afternoon. Alex Martin Dean, her daughter, and Dean’s children streamed in and out of the kitchen, draping themselves over one another as they stood around the kitchen island, bare except for a box of Popeyes and a script for “Harlem,” the Amazon TV show in which Goldberg has a small role. One of the grandchildren, Amara Skye, who had recently completed her celebrity-relative tour of duty and filmed a reality show, waved hello. (Called “Claim to Fame,” it was a show in which 12 relatives of celebrities moved into a house and had to guess their opponents’ family connections.) Skye’s daughter, Goldberg’s great-grandchild, Charli Rose, was around somewhere, watching TV. Tom Leonardis, the president of Goldberg’s production company, milled between rooms, finalizing travel plans. Despite indications toward cliché (have you heard the one about the old unmarried woman who lives alone with her cat?), Goldberg is perennially cuddly. Her skin is smooth, her cheeks juicy like a baby’s, even at 66. She lives every day like the Sabbath: When she’s not working, she told me, she sits around her mansion, moving from one room to another. Those rooms have the overstuffed charm of an antiques shop but the orderliness of the Met, with a dash of celebrity-bus-tour glamour. In the foyer stands a bowling pin painted with the image of Deloris Van Cartier, her character in “Sister Act”; a white grand piano covered in framed family portraits dominates her living room. On each floor of her house, there is a different photograph of Goldberg with the Dalai Lama. As we ate lunch in the kitchen, our plates laid atop a spotless white tablecloth with the Seven Dwarfs chasing one another around the trim, our backs pressed against the face of a cowboy embossed into the chair. A Kit-Kat clock shifted its eyes and tail toward me, while a genteelly dressed Black family encouraged me to “Choose Pepsi!” Over Goldberg’s right shoulder, I could see a panel from one of the late-19th-century Darktown Comics depicting a “coon club hunt.” “Uh,” I stammered, taking it all in. Little black sambos hanging on the walls watched us eat our mozzarella. “Have you always had these decorations?”Goldberg dipped her fork into her rice. “I love it because I don’t ever want to forget what it looked like, and what it is,” she said. Though she quit smoking 10 years ago, her voice is enticingly gritty, gravel topped with whipped cream. “We can do a better job, but this was the norm.” When I said that, for some people, it was still the norm, she replied: “In the past, I could understand, because they didn’t know any better. But people are willfully ignorant now.” Throughout her career, Goldberg has taken it upon herself — whether as a comic, or a social critic on “The View,” or the author of “Is It Just Me? Or Is It Nuts Out There?,” her ode to public civility, or even a producer of films like the forthcoming “Till,” about what happened after Mamie Till decided to send her son away for the summer — to temper that ignorance. In a September screening for the film, in which Goldberg plays Mamie’s mother, she spoke to the necessity of telling these stories: “You can’t get pissed off when people are stupid when you have the ability to make them smarter.” ‘I don’t think anybody had ever said or led me to believe that I could be part of this country that I was living in.’Which makes things all the more thorny when she says something out of pocket or just plain wrong. This is undoubtedly one way people come to Goldberg, through the controversies that flare up over comments she makes. The most recent one unfolded this winter, during an episode of “The View” about a school board’s decision to ban the book “Maus,” when she claimed that the Holocaust was not really about race because both Germans and Jews were white; she tried to apologize but ended up doubling down on the comments during an appearance that evening on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” (The next day, she apologized on “The View” and was suspended from the show for two weeks.) Goldberg told me that she initially thought my interview request was a joke, or a grave misunderstanding. Then she thought about how long she’d been working — “Till” is the 100th or so film she has appeared in over 35 years — and figured that was probably worth something. She’s not wrong. But perhaps even more impressive is that her career has endured despite her habit of making people uncomfortable. Goldberg has always said what is on her mind, and this elicits a special frisson: Will it be wild and thought-provoking or wild and offensive? Most celebrities feed us bland platitudes and workshopped comments. Goldberg has never held anything back. She knows that this is part of her legacy, but also what it can cost her. When I arrived and asked her how she was doing, she replied simply, “Nobody’s mad at me today.”Goldberg has never wanted to be called “African American.” When she became famous, one of her first controversial positions was rejecting the label. To her, the prefix denotes an unnecessary difference, a verbal “where are you really from?” In her second book, 1997’s cheekily titled “Book,” she writes:I refuse to be labeled an African American. When you tell the story of this country, I’m part of the fabric. Black people, stop trying to identify elsewhere. This is yours. People in the South got their legs chewed off, got hit with [expletive] fire hoses, got their children blown up, got yanked, burned, hanged and sliced so that you wouldn’t have to pretend you were from someplace else. So that you wouldn’t have to say, “No, I’m not entitled to this.” Well, [expletive] that. You’re entitled to all of it. Take it. It’s ours. With her fame came the pressure of representation, the weight of a race on her back. But the flip side of Goldberg’s venerated authenticity is a rejection of respectability. Her preternatural confidence, and an unshakable sense of belonging, were there from the very beginning.Goldberg was born Caryn Johnson in New York City in the fall of 1955. She grew up in Manhattan in what is now known as the Chelsea-Elliott Houses with her older brother, Clyde, and mother, Emma. The three were very close. (Emma died in 2010; Clyde died five years later.) In “Book,” she writes that her childhood was largely sheltered from racism; the civil rights movement “didn’t resonate the way it did in the rest of the country. There was no place that was restricted to me.” The families in her housing development were uniformly poor, but diverse in races and ethnicities, making it the sort of place where you had to know a few words in multiple languages to ask if a friend could come out to play, and where if you were caught acting up, somebody’s mother would deal with you until your own mother got home. As a kid, Goldberg performed in community theater and spent hours gorging on old movies with stars like Carole Lombard and Bette Davis. But her primary interests were otherwise books and sports. (“The subtle art of being a girl evaded me,” she told Roger Ebert in 1985.) One day, John F. Kennedy campaigned in her neighborhood. People from all over the city came to watch him speak, but Goldberg took the matter quite personally: The future president of the United States cared about her. Later, when she heard his Inaugural Address — “ask not what your country can do for you” — she realized that he was speaking to her too. “That was the first time I thought, Oh, I’m part of this,” she said. “Because I don’t think anybody had ever said or led me to believe that I could be part of this country that I was living in.” After struggling through school — her test scores were so low that teachers told her she was intellectually disabled — she dropped out of high school after one year. (As an adult, she was diagnosed with dyslexia.) Her mother, a Head Start teacher, cut her a deal: She could leave school, but she would have to participate in some sort of cultural enrichment, “just to keep my mind juicy.” Goldberg cobbled together her own education: going to the American Museum of Natural History and learning about the solar system and paleontology, or heading to the New York Public Library for an exhibit on Lewis Carroll and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Her mother would quiz her when she got home.Goldberg in 1985.Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis/VCG via Getty ImagesBefore she turned 25, Goldberg had become addicted to drugs, gotten clean, married her drug counselor, given birth to her daughter, Alex, and divorced. After her marriage ended, Goldberg and Alex moved to San Diego. She earned money working as bricklayer and a morgue beautician, and she found some success in repertory theater and improv groups. It was there that she became Whoopi Goldberg, a name that combined her radical embrace of flatulence and an alleged Jewish ancestor. (In a 2006 episode of a genealogy show hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Goldberg was not shown to have one.) Eventually, she and Alex moved to Berkeley, where Goldberg started to develop characters for something more ambitious.“The Spook Show,” equal parts Lenny Bruce and Moms Mabley, premiered soon afterward. In it, Goldberg transformed into different characters — a Jamaican nurse, a surfer chick, a woman with a physical disability — each given a monologue laced with surprising, if occasionally unsubtle, wisdom. She put the innermost thoughts of her characters on display, introducing her audience to the sorts of people they didn’t know but probably passed every day. After some local success, Goldberg and her partner at the time took the show on a short tour of the United States and Europe before she parked it at the Dance Theater Workshop in Manhattan. The show was a word-of-mouth phenomenon, and Goldberg went from performing in front of only a handful of audience members to packed houses that included many celebrities. One evening, the director Mike Nichols found Goldberg backstage and, with tears in his eyes, told her he would produce anything she wanted. It was one of the great before-and-afters of her life: Nichols moved the show to Broadway, where he produced it and looked after her, helping her forge connections in the theater community. Goldberg eventually turned the show into her first comedy album, which won a Grammy in 1986.In 1984, Steven Spielberg, just off “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.,” was looking to cast the lead role for his next film and asked Goldberg to perform “The Spook Show” at his personal theater in Los Angeles for him and a few friends. Backstage, Goldberg peeked around the curtain and saw Michael Jackson. Soon after, Spielberg offered her the lead role of Celie, a downtrodden woman who has to learn her own strength, in “The Color Purple.”A critical and commercial success, the film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including a best-actress nomination for Goldberg. Roger Ebert, who named it the year’s best film, called Goldberg’s role “one of the most amazing debut performances in movie history.” But even after this triumph, the film industry didn’t quite know what to do with her. Was she the next Eddie Murphy (wily and cunning, in films like “The Associate” or “Burglar”) or a Black woman hired to teach white people important lessons (“Clara’s Heart”) or the person to call when Shelley Long was unavailable (“Jumpin’ Jack Flash”)? She had been tasked with spit-shining the junk given to her — in “Theodore Rex,” a film she was contractually obligated to complete, she played a detective assigned to an investigation with a dinosaur — but she still became a punchline: The comedian Sam Kinison joked in an interview that Whoopi Goldberg is what happens when “a nation is afraid to hurt a person’s feelings.” Goldberg in “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1986).Everett Collection“Clara’s Heart” (1988).Everett CollectionIt wasn’t just that she was Black and a woman; it was that no one knew exactly what kind of woman she was. Dreadlocks, Jewish last name, old-man clothes, a smile that could blow out an electrical grid. Did she have sex appeal, and what would the industry do with her if she didn’t? Worse: What would it do with her if she did? Even in her turns as a romantic lead in films like “Made in America” or “Fatal Beauty,” where she played opposite white men, her characters always stayed chaste.Soon after the success of the “The Color Purple,” Goldberg learned of a forthcoming adaptation of “The Princess Bride” and wanted to audition for the title role. She was laughed away. The matter came up in a 1997 Playboy interview: “I said: ‘But the book is about a princess who doesn’t look like anybody else, who has a very different attitude. So why not me?’ It hurt my feelings because I thought, Are you telling me that because you think I couldn’t be a princess that all these other doors are going to slam too? Basically, yes. So I took the stuff that nobody seemed to have a problem with me doing.”Goldberg says she couldn’t get an audition for “Ghost” until the film’s star, Patrick Swayze, threatened to pull out unless she was given a chance. She went on to win an Oscar for her performance as the psychic Oda Mae Brown. Lost somewhere in the confusion about what to think about Goldberg was her actual talent, especially when paired with material that treated her as more than a visual gag, the humor rooted in the mere fact of her presence. The 1990 drama “The Long Walk Home,” released around the same time as “Ghost,” is a hidden gem in Goldberg’s oeuvre. She plays a maid who, during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., has to walk to and from her job. Gone is the sass and the racial bewilderment required of many of her post-“Color Purple” roles, and what’s left is a soft-shelled tenderness, her face — the subject of so much derision — conveying a steady sense of hope even amid the dramatic violence.In “Book,” Goldberg wonders about whether such a role could promote stereotypes. When she filmed “The Long Walk Home,” she fell into the trap of contemporary confidence: She briefly believed that she would’ve made different choices if she had grown up in the South during the civil rights era. But she started talking to the Black women who worked as nannies and maids at that time, and they sobered her up. “ ‘You wouldn’t have done it any differently,’” one of the women told her. “ ‘When we were coming up, if you made any noise, they’d hang you.’” Goldberg realized that she didn’t know her own history well enough if she could fantasize about alternatives. These women became her heroes. She writes: “They held their breath and their tongue until the world caught up to what was right. They kept the family together — theirs, and the upper-class white families they were working for. And they survived. So what the hell was wrong with playing them? Nothing. Nothing.” Goldberg took over the lead role in “Sister Act,” the fish-out-of-water comedy about a lounge singer forced to hide out in a nunnery, after Bette Midler, for whom the role was originally written, turned it down. It was a smash success, and the rapidly made sequel, “Sister Act 2” (1993), briefly made Goldberg the highest-paid woman in Hollywood, at a reported $7 million. But the fulfilling roles were still scarce. Goldberg worked steadily — occasionally appearing in schlock but always appearing in something. She M.C.ed the Grammys once and the Oscars four times, her humor inflected with just enough severity so viewers could never quite relax. (In 1994, at the Oscars: “Lorena Bobbitt, please meet Bob Dole.”) She had an ingenious short-lived talk show and a few stand-up specials on HBO that skewered Black anxiety and white nonsense. With Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, she repeatedly hosted the “Comic Relief” telethons to raise money for the homeless, the motley crew of comic do-gooders becoming incredibly close friends in the process. She was political and unafraid to be insolent where it counted, unmoved by expectation or custom. Crystal told me that once, Senator Edward M. Kennedy invited the trio to Washington for lunch to discuss federal aid on homelessness. Williams and Crystal arrived in suits, but “Whoopi was in a baseball-uniform top that said, in script across it, ‘Balls.’ And Ted Kennedy said, ‘Is that a team?’ And she said, ‘No, it’s a plea.’” Williams and Crystal grabbed each other’s hands under the table. (Kennedy laughed.)Goldberg with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams at a “Comic Relief” telethon in 1986.Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesAnd then suddenly the work was gone. To this day, she is convinced that something she said had finally damned her, making people hesitate to send her scripts. Fifteen years after winning an Oscar, she was hosting the Universal Studios Hollywood theme-park tour.Despite her two-week suspension from “The View” early this year or, say, the outrage after Ted Danson, her boyfriend at the time, wore blackface to a roast of her in 1993, Goldberg thinks she has really been canceled only once. In 2004, she and a bunch of other celebrities gave remarks at a fund-raiser for John Kerry, then running to be the Democratic presidential nominee. Everyone took potshots at the incumbent: Meryl Streep wondered “which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our president’s personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families of Baghdad.” Chevy Chase got a round of cheers for saying, “Clinton plays the sax, John plays the guitar and Bush’s a liar.” John Leguizamo quipped: “Latins for Republicans? It’s like roaches for Raid.” Amid all this, Goldberg told a joke herself. The next day, a reporter named Deborah Orin published an article in The New York Post with the headline “DIRTY TRICK: LEWD WHOOPI BASHED BUSH.” The story referred to Goldberg’s remarks as an “X-rated rant full of sexual innuendos against President Bush.” Orin continued covering the story closely, as Republicans insisted that Democrats release the recording of the monologue that “turned Bush’s name into a crude sexual joke.” As other outlets picked up the story, more performers were also called out, but the focus and furor were trained squarely on Goldberg, then a darling of the Democratic Party and a close friend of the Clintons’. Goldberg’s career went dark. SlimFast, the diet-in-a-can brand for whom Goldberg had been the spokeswoman, dropped her. Friends stopped associating with her in public. She was disinvited from the Democratic National Convention. But the worst part of all? Nobody ever printed the joke.“You know why they couldn’t print what I said?” Goldberg asked me. “Because I didn’t say anything that was bad.”It was a sweaty August afternoon, and we were at her summer home on the coast of Sardinia, in Italy, eating at a table topped by a lazy susan as wide as a hula hoop. The property has two houses: one for Goldberg (remember: “I don’t want somebody in my house”) and one for guests. She decided to buy the place after spending a single night, waking up to the sight of the sun pulling itself from the horizon over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Goldberg is an avid real estate browser; she refers to it as her porn. When I first met her, I asked which was her favorite: Zillow? Realtor.com? “Christie’s,” she replied. She took a beat, then without energy or interest, recited part of the joke as she remembered it: “I love bush. Somebody’s giving bush a bad name. So let’s take him out and everybody get out and vote.” Her eyes flicked over to me, and the monotone switched off. “I might’ve said, ‘[Expletive] — so get out there and [expletive] vote.’ But to hear them talk about it, I was disgusting.”Over the course of reporting this story, the magazine’s research department dug up the actual text of her joke, and it was as tame as she remembered it; There wasn’t even any cursing. “When Bush comes to shove, don’t whine,” she told the crowd. “Vote Kerry. And that’s why I’m here tonight. Because I love bush. But someone’s giving bush a bad name. Someone has tarnished the name of bush. Someone has waged war, someone has deliberately misled the country, someone has attempted to amend the Constitution, all in the name of bush. The bush I know and cherish would never do such things. My bush is smarter than that. And if my bush is smarter than that, you can understand just how dumb I think that other bush is.” She closed by saying, “Vote your heart and mind, and keep bush where it belongs,” pointing at her crotch.Hearing her riff read back to her, Goldberg said, gave her something she had wanted for 20 years: proof. Her remarks weren’t obscene — at least, no more than anyone else’s. She wasn’t crazy in her self-defense and insistence that she hadn’t done anything wrong. The only thing she was guilty of was being funny, and then unfairly maligned.In Sardinia, I asked her whether she thought the quick drop was just the way Hollywood worked, or was perhaps unique to anything about her. “Well, it’s unique to me, because I didn’t say any of the shit that they have accused me of saying,” she said. It’s not that she didn’t want to be called out for her actions; she just wanted to be called out accurately. “I mean, I did stuff” — her character on her short-lived sitcom “Whoopi” had a cardboard cutout of Bush that she routinely kicked down the stairs — “but I didn’t do what they said I did. And I will take anything that you’re mad at that I actually did. But you cannot accuse me of shit I didn’t do.” Here’s a small offering of things Goldberg has actually said, all over the past few years on “The View”: to let the football player Ray Rice defend himself against his wife (“I’m sorry, if you hit somebody, you cannot be sure you are not going to be hit back”), to cut Rachel Dolezal some slack (“If she wants to be Black, she can be Black”), to be crystal clear on the criminal charges against Roman Polanski (“I know it wasn’t rape-rape. It was something else, but I don’t believe it was rape.”). So yes, some of the backlash is warranted. Her otherwise generous and typically mainstream sensibilities — racism is bad, people should be kind — get gummed up. She has spent so much time avoiding becoming a role model that she seems to have forgotten the weight of her words, especially when standing at a pulpit before millions. She’s not always as precise as she should be — better if she had said “forcible rape,” or had noted that her understanding of race is not definitive — and her own cancellation in 2004 has made her almost too skeptical of judging other people. But she knows what it’s like to be misunderstood before you’ve even had a chance to explain yourself, and she is willing to be a dam against the tide of swift public opinion.‘She makes it look so easy, but I imagine that it has cost more than we would imagine.’“There’s a wider range of topics that she tackles every day, but the fearlessness and the fierceness hasn’t changed,” Crystal told me. “The compassion that she has for people, alongside the acerbic quality to intelligently go after people and sometimes make mistakes. She’s on the edge a lot, which is a wonderful place to be. She doesn’t back down.”Few among us could expertly navigate having to speak on topics as varied as “Miami School Board Rejects Sex-Ed Textbooks” to “Guest Brings Eggs to a Vegan Wedding” every weekday morning, for years, with a bunch of people hired to appeal to a different demographic from the one you’re in, and not end up on the wrong side of a comment. Her thoughts can be maddening in their simplicity, but expressing unvarnished thoughts is also increasingly rare. She’s not trolling; she’s just trying to stay true to herself, even when the moment demands that it’s better for her not to.In Italy, Goldberg told me that she had heard people describe her as an “O.G.,” but she didn’t know what it meant. I explained that it stood for “original gangsta.” “OK, well, that is true,” she allowed. “Everything I am saying and everything I’m telling you about myself should allow people to understand that I am an original gangsta, because gangstas just don’t care what you think.”The B-plot of a 2009 episode of “30 Rock” finds Tracy Jordan, a buffoonish comedic actor longing to be taken seriously, aiming for an EGOT. Jordan, played by Tracy Morgan, seeks advice from Goldberg, the first Black person with an EGOT. Goldberg won a Tony Award in 2002 for producing the musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” the 1991 best-supporting-actress Oscar for “Ghost” and a Grammy in 1986 for her comedy album. In the episode, when Jordan reacts with derision to learning that in 2009 Goldberg won a daytime Emmy for hosting a talk show, not a prime-time Emmy, she shrugs him off: “Girl’s gotta eat.”Previously, the EGOT achievement was an esoteric industry joke, a long-forgotten goal once set by Philip Michael Thomas, a star of “Miami Vice,” in interviews. Thomas was so committed that he had the letters engraved on a pendant that he wore around his neck, holding the goal close to his heart. (He has yet to win any of the awards.) But as the designation took hold in pop culture — after the episode, news organizations began to refer to it — a reverence for Goldberg crept in with it, as if people could finally understand her aptitude now that there was a yardstick with which to do so. In one of our conversations, I asked Goldberg what people misunderstood about her. Over her entire career, she responded, even now, people are shocked to find out that she’s actually talented: that she writes books and produces films, that she owns businesses, that she possesses any dramatic skill, that she’s not a daffy pothead who moves without intention or foresight, that her career did not come about solely through luck or by playing off white guilt. Even with the EGOT designation, and a peer group too small to fill the roster of a hockey team, some people continue not to take her seriously. She told me she wasn’t sure why, but we both knew the litany of possibilities, the problems people have had with her from the beginning.I noted how frustrating it must feel to have been underestimated for so long. “That’s a good way to put it,” she said, chuckling. Then she turned solemn, as if she were taking in what I said. “That’s a good way to put it.” On the set of “The View” in 2009.Steve Fenn/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesWhen it comes to Goldberg’s peers, I think less of comedians and actors than I do music artists: women like Tina Turner and Donna Summer and Missy Elliott, who had clear visions to cut uncharted paths but were stymied by people who didn’t think they looked the part. About Elliott, the cultural critic Hilton Als wrote, in 1997, that the rapper-producer was one of the New Negroes, which he defines as “a woman who considers her marginal status a form of freedom, and a challenge — she takes the little she has been given and transforms it into something complex, outrageous and ultimately fashionable.”If enough people tell you that they have no idea what to make of you, no idea where you fit, next to that pain of rejection grows a thrill: If you’ve already discounted me, why limit myself? I like to think of Goldberg as a trickster: a person who eludes category by shifting unpredictably, upending expectation each time. She pushes up against social boundaries, turning them inside out and shaking out the dust. Take something as simple as her hair: Despite decades of complaints (and the ensuing ill-fitting wigs she has had to wear), she has never changed it, never opted for something more feminine, confident in the relationship between her sexuality and her androgynous appearance, even if the industry hasn’t been. “What fascinates me beyond the phenomenon of Whoopi’s persona is the way she has embraced the mainstream while remaining so radically herself,” the writer Ottessa Moshfegh wrote to me in an email. Her novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” featured Goldberg as a near-deity. “To me it’s very hopeful to see a consummate artist take the stage with such optimism and honesty. She makes it look so easy, but I imagine that it has cost more than we would imagine.”In my early 20s, I would take the B train from Prospect Park to the Upper West Side, where I would unleash my myriad anxieties on a junior therapist, because she was all I could afford at the time. She was beautiful and confident and told me she learned English by watching episodes of “Friends,” but the thing I hated most about her was that all she ever seemed to tell me was that I was normal. That wasn’t what I needed to hear. In fact, it was offensive. I had never aimed for normalcy, a land for middle children and people who knew how to drive — I liked feeling different from everyone else, and I had felt that way as long as I could remember. What I wanted was to feel OK about those differences, to feel their power instead of their weight.Assimilation is a grieving process: losing the very essence of you for the comfort of acceptance. That Goldberg has refused makes her a role model (even if she would hate that) for going against convention and relishing it. This summer, the comedian Jo Koy appeared on “The View” and was so thrilled to meet Goldberg that he cried on air. As a child, he stumbled across one of her specials on HBO and was transfixed by this woman who looked like nobody else in comedy. “You watch Whoopi, and you go, Oh, OK, you can be yourself,” he told me. Goldberg didn’t give us permission to be weird, but she made it look impossibly cool. The actress Mary-Louise Parker, who co-starred with Goldberg in “Boys on the Side” in 1995, has remained close with her. We talked on the phone for an hour. (“I know it sounds like I’m laying it on,” she said of Goldberg’s generosity. “But she was — she was in my son’s short film.”) Parker avoids social media and all celebrity news coverage, so I filled her in on some of Goldberg’s controversies over the past few decades. She was unmoved by other people’s opinions. “If a person has never done anything that offends anyone, or that nowadays in society you have to apologize for them, they are not being authentic,” she said. Abandoning herself would cause an almost physical pain for somebody like Goldberg. “The two are not compatible.”In Sardinia, Goldberg and I sat down to eat dinner with Leonardis, her business partner, who was staying in the guesthouse for a few days before visiting his fiancé in Bologna, and Paolo Alberti, a friend of theirs. Though the conversation leaned sophisticated — Leonardis and Alberti were going over every detail of a recent Dolce & Gabbana presentation — Goldberg punctuated it with short bits, animating whatever might be at her fingertips with funny voices and scenarios. When a gravy dish with tiny clay feet ended up in Goldberg’s hands, it came alive, arguing with her about where it belonged, telling her it could get its damn self to somebody else’s plate. After a fly landed in her drink, she gave us its inner monologues, compressing her voice into a squeak: Now the fly is donning his swim camp and getting ready for some exercise. Our companions, obviously used to this, laughed along, but I found myself totally enchanted. Goldberg didn’t give us permission to be weird, but she made it look impossibly cool. Ruth Ossai for The New York TimesAs the fly started doing laps in her prosecco — perhaps training for the Olympics — the phone rang: Alex called to tell her that Olivia Newton-John had died.Out of respect, Goldberg told her Alexa to play the soundtrack from “Grease,” explaining that it is her daughter’s favorite movie, hence the emergency call. Once, when Alex was young, Goldberg got John Travolta to meet them at Disneyland as a surprise. In her seat, Goldberg started re-enacting the dance moves from “Greased Lightnin’.” Leonardis and Alberti had returned to discussing fashion, so I had no choice but to join her, the two of us wordlessly dragging our pointer fingers toward an invisible audience, pumping each arm up and to the side. The next morning, news about Issey Miyake’s death broke moments after we had been talking about him. We were all disoriented by the coincidence, but Goldberg was clearly affected — she loved his clothes, which is why we were talking about him in the first place. And then it set in: Newton-John is one, Miyake is two. … “It’s always three,” Leonardis said. All eyes turned to Goldberg. “I’m not getting on the plane, I’m not getting in the car, I’m not getting on the Segway, I’m not doing anything today,” she responded.But eating, she decided, was safe, so we had one last lunch. While the groundskeepers, a married couple, tittered around, their golden retriever amused himself with an extremely squeaky ball. Goldberg took the bait: She became the dog. Her voice high and goofy, dog-Whoopi breathlessly recounted the pleasures of having balls on your face, then advocated playing with balls in general. Somehow it came out that Alberti had never seen the viral video of Eartha Kitt responding to the idea that relationships require “compromise,” so somebody pulled it up on a phone. Goldberg relished the rancor with which Kitt repeated the word, which was about a dozen disgusted times in under three minutes. “If a man came into your life, wouldn’t you want to compromise?” an off-screen interviewer asks Kitt. Her face twists into bewilderment and disgust. “A man comes into my life,” she responds, “and I have to compromise? You must think about that one again.” She laughs wickedly. Goldberg was pleased as punch. She reminded me of a kid encouraged to make their own fun, one who could find amusement with any toy. And away she went: Goldberg started her Kitt-themed variety hour. She taught us a bit of Kitt’s history — did you know that her two most popular hits, “C’est Si Bon” and “Santa Baby,” were released in the same year? — and did a rendition of “C’est Si Bon,” her voice in a different register of smokiness. And then she went back to the video itself, which goes viral every few years as a paean to independence, a rejection of the idea that an institution — that anything, really — can force you to conform to external expectations. Goldberg replayed it, this time folding her hand into a puppet, performing as earnestly as she would onstage. Her commitment made it feel real. “Compromise? What is compromising?” she made her hand say. “Compromising for what? Compromising for what reason? To compromise? For what?”Hair by Issac Poleon. Makeup by Mata Marielle.Ruth Ossai is a Nigerian British photographer whose work celebrates identity, particularly Nigerian identity, and culture. More

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      Stream These 13 Titles Before They Leave Netflix in October

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      A major TV comedy and a couple of indie gems are among the many shows and movies leaving for U.S. subscribers next month. These are the ones not to miss.Sound the alarms: One of the most beloved sitcoms in recent TV history is leaving Netflix in the United States in October — and early in the month, so get that last binge going with a quickness. The streaming service will also bid a fond farewell to a handful of Gen-X favorites, an Oscar nominee or two, a couple of indie gems and a bold remix of one of the great movies of the 1970s. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Schitt’s Creek’: Seasons 1-6 (Oct. 2)The “SCTV” legends and Christopher Guest repertory company members Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara memorably re-teamed for this uproariously funny Canadian comedy series, which Levy created with his son Dan, who also stars. The three play (alongside their comedy secret weapon Annie Murphy) the Rose family, an absurdly wealthy and comically out-of-touch brood who find themselves unexpectedly broke and stuck in the title town, which they purchased as a joke. The smart scripts mine the endless possibilities for comedy of class and manners, but the key to its longevity is its cast; all manage to play the silliness of their characters without losing touch with their humanity, and their arcs into becoming (marginally!) better people are uncommonly poignant.Stream it here.‘Apocalypse Now Redux’ (Oct. 13)This 1979 Vietnam War epic from Francis Ford Coppola was a notoriously troubled productions, and by the time it hit theaters, the director had been through so many trials and tribulations during its making that some questioned whether he could see the forest for the trees. Two decades later, he went back to his original footage, restoring 45 minutes of deleted shots and scenes. Some of the new material doesn’t quite land (he originally cut the “French plantation” sequence because it slowed the picture to a crawl, and its restoration here proves the accuracy of his early instincts), but that which does is glorious, lifting the film to its rightful perch as an heir to the likes of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Ben-Hur.”Stream it here.‘Everything Must Go’ (Oct. 13)Will Ferrell has never quite managed to pull off the Robin Williams/Jim Carrey-style flip to becoming a serious dramatic actor, though it’s certainly not for lack of trying, or of his specific gifts. He proves to be an ideally flawed protagonist in this character-driven indie comedy-drama from the writer and director Dan Rush, playing a newly relapsed alcoholic who, after losing his job and his wife, tries to make a fresh start with a big yard sale — one of the more explicit “lose your baggage” stories imaginable. Rush’s screenplay is based on the Raymond Carver short story “Why Don’t You Dance,” and it gets Carver’s distinctive (and difficult) tone just right.Stream it here.‘Sinister 2’ (Oct. 15)The original “Sinister” was one of the best horror films of the 2010s, a brutally efficient and inspired hybrid of “Blair Witch”-style found footage and “Poltergeist”-inspired suburban dread. Its success landed its director and co-writer, Scott Derrickson, and his collaborator C. Robert Cargill a lucrative gig making “Doctor Strange” for Marvel, but they made time to write the script for this sequel, following the “Sinister” supporting player James Ransone into a new and terrifying story. Shannyn Sossamon is an empathetic lead, while Robert and Dartanian Sloan make a memorable impression as her twin sons. But the most valuable addition is the director Ciarán Foy, whose moody, atmospheric lensing and nightmare imagery is a good fit for Derrickson and Cargill’s world.Stream it here.‘Yes, God, Yes’ (Oct. 21)Religious faith and raging hormones crash into each other with uproarious results in this coming-of-age comedy from the writer and director Karen Maine. Natalia Dyer (best known as Nancy from “Stranger Things”) is delightful — funny, credible and endlessly sympathetic — as Alice, a Catholic teen in the early 2000s who discovers that the internet (specifically that millennial relic, that AOL chat) helps her tap into her blooming sexuality, and all the sin and guilt therein. The “Veep” M.V.P. Timothy Simons stands out as a rather clueless man of the cloth.Stream it here.‘8 Mile’ (Oct. 31)When Eminem decided to make the leap from music to film, he could’ve easily taken the easy route, spitting out a “Cool As Ice”-like exploitation flick to make a quick buck. Instead, he hooked up with the gifted director Curtis Hanson (“L.A. Confidential”), the super-producer Brian Grazer and a cast that included Kim Basinger, Mekhi Phifer and Brittany Murphy to make a real, respectable motion picture debut. He was also smart enough to keep his acting ambitions modest — he basically plays himself, a tough-talking Detroit kid who finds his voice, and his confidence, in the city’s underground rap battles. But his is a compelling story, and it is well told by Hanson, who makes Eminem’s home turf atmospheric and lived-in.Stream it here.‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ (Oct. 31)Renée Zellweger nabbed her first Academy Award nomination for her work in this zingy adaptation of the Helen Fielding novel, itself a loose-limbed update of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” It’s a justifiably beloved performance, by turns snarky, spiky, silly, and sympathetic, as our heroine jots down every stray thought on her journey to quitting smoking, losing a few pounds and finding true love. Colin Firth and Hugh Grant are exquisite as the two leading contenders for romance, with Firth perfectly cast as the upright, uptight riff on Mr. Darcy and Grant at his bad-boy best as a gorgeous, selfish hedonist.Stream it here.‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ (Oct. 31)Few words in our modern vernacular have been abused like “iconic,” yet that feels like the only one to properly describe the title character of this comedy classic from the writer and director John Hughes. Matthew Broderick became a generational hero (and a bane to the generation before it) as the wise and witty high schooler who fakes sick for one last day of consequence-free senior year hooky. But it’s not all fun and games; he brings along his best buddy, Cameron (the future “Succession” co-star Alan Ruck), and his girlfriend, Sloane (Mia Sara), and what first seems like goofing off becomes something like group therapy. Jennifer Grey (later of “Dirty Dancing”) is especially funny as Ferris’s bitter sister.Stream it here.‘Friday’ (Oct. 31)When this indie hit landed in 1995, its star and co-writer Ice Cube was still best known as a tough guy, both on film and on wax. Audiences were pleased to discover he also had considerable comic chops, joining forces with the up-and-comer Chris Tucker to create something of a ’hood Cheech and Chong. The stakes are low — as suggested by the title, it’s set entirely in one day, as the frustrated Craig (Cube) and his stoner pal Smokey (Tucker) try to dodge nagging parents and a neighborhood tough guy. But the laughs are big thanks to Cube’s low-key charm, Tucker’s manic energy, and a spirited supporting cast that includes Regina King, Nia Long, John Witherspoon, Bernie Mac, Faizon Love and Tommy Lister Jr. (The sequel “Friday After Next” also leaves Netflix next month.)Stream it here.‘Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events’ (Oct. 31)Fans of the frisky and fun “Series of Unfortunate Events” Netflix show would be wise to check out this earlier attempt to adapt the popular young-adult book series, released in theaters in 2004. The director Brad Silberling (“Casper”) finds the right mixture of dark menace and light comedy to dramatize the first three volumes, while Jim Carrey makes an inspired Count Olaf, digging into the character’s theatricality and evil with delicious relish. Viewed now, it seems less like the beginning of a failed film series and more like a pilot for the show, which closely followed its visual style, character design and cockeyed worldview.Stream it here.‘Miss Congeniality’ (Oct. 31)A fair chunk of this 2000 Sandra Bullock comedy hasn’t held up too well — its gender politics, especially early on, are genuinely cringe-worthy — but it’s still worth watching for Bullock’s stellar work in the leading role. She stars as Gracie Hart, a socially awkward F.B.I. field agent and unapologetic slob who finds herself unexpectedly glammed-up for a dangerous undercover assignment at a high-profile beauty pageant. Bullock has a blast, taking falls galore and exploring the comic possibilities of newfound hotness with winking charisma, and her joy is infectious. (The 2005 sequel, ‘Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous,’ is also streaming on Netflix.)Stream it here.‘The Notebook’ (Oct. 31)We can snicker all we want about the novels of Nicholas Sparks and the cookie-cutter films adapted from them. But this 2004 sleeper hit had just the right combination of elements: committed direction by Nick Cassavetes, a first-rate supporting cast (including Sam Shepard, Joan Allen, James Garner and the director’s mom, Gena Rowlands) and most of all, the impossibly beautiful and charismatic leading actors Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, whose burn-the-house-down chemistry was so intense it turned into a yearslong offscreen relationship. Yes, “The Notebook” is schmaltz, but schmaltz is rarely rendered with this much skill.Stream it here.‘Rock of Ages’ (Oct. 31)Let’s not have any misunderstandings here, for this is not a full-throated endorsement; Adam Shankman’s film adaptation of the ’80s-infused Broadway jukebox musical is awfully corny stuff, and enjoying it requires just the right combination of ironic detachment and unreasonable nostalgia for a mostly unfortunate period in popular music. But right in the middle of all that dreck sits a terrific Tom Cruise performance as an aging rock star trying desperately to keep himself relevant. Cruise’s own career was a little wobbly at the time he made “Rock of Ages,” so his work here is delightfully self-aware, displaying a wounded vulnerability that makes this a surprisingly personal piece of acting.Stream it here. More

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      ‘Goat,’ ‘Dope’ and More Streaming Gems

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      A list of quality movie selections that are off the beaten path.This month’s off-the-grid streaming suggestions are an even more eclectic mix than usual: a handful of indie dramas, genre treats for your late-night needs and thoughtful documentaries on movies and economics.‘Goat’ (2016)Stream it on Amazon.Harry Styles’s big acting moment is generating plenty of coverage (for good and ill) this fall, but let’s not forget the boy-band-members-turned-thespians that preceded him. One of the best, at least in recent years, is Nick Jonas, who paused his music career at its mid-2010s zenith to take on a supporting role in this adaptation of the harrowing memoir by Brad Land. Ben Schnetzer stars as a young man entering college who pledges at the same fraternity as his brother (Jonas), but finds their elaborate hazing rituals brutal and abusive. The director Andrew Neel orchestrates the action for maximum impact, making this not only Land’s story but one of the insidious influence of toxic masculinity on campuses across the country.‘Dope’ (2015)Stream it on Netflix.The writer and director Rick Famuyiwa’s “The Wood” and “Brown Sugar” were two of the most insightful snapshots of young adulthood released in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For his Sundance sensation “Dope,” the filmmaker crafts an entertaining and energetic story of three teenage friends (played with verve by the charismatic Shameik Moore, Kiersey Clemons and Tony Revolori) who still ride bikes and play in a punk band for fun yet find themselves in possession of a backpack full of stolen drugs and a loaded gun. Famuyiwa hopscotches tones with ease and moves his story like a locomotive, though he occasionally slows for a charming flirtation between the main character Moore and his dream girl, played by Zoë Kravitz.‘Support the Girls’ (2018)Stream it on Amazon.Regina Hall — currently capturing attention for her excellent work in “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul” — is hilariously flustered and enormously sympathetic as the manager of a Hooters-style sports bar in this first-rate comedy-drama from the writer and director Andrew Bujalski. Lisa (Hall) is equal parts boss, den mother and support staff, keeping her team of attractive young waitresses on the ball and a safe distance from their leering customers. It’s a relatively modest (and not heavily plotted) hangout movie, but the writing is shaggily funny and the ensemble cast is aces, with particular praise due to Haley Lu Richardson as the most spirited member of Lisa’s crew.‘The Man With the Iron Fists’ (2012)Stream it on Hulu.From the time they burst onto the hip-hop scene in the early 1990s, Staten Island’s own Wu-Tang Clan has sung the praises of kung fu cinema, borrowing samples for their albums and mythology for their members. So it was probably inevitable that founding member RZA would make a martial arts movie of his own, directing, co-writing and co-starring as the blacksmith of a village in 19th century China that is taken over by an evil clan. But the blacksmith fights back, with the help of a resourceful madam (Lucy Liu) and a hedonistic gun-for-hire (Russell Crowe, clearly having a blast), in a series of thrilling action scenes choreographed by the Hong Kong cinema legend Corey Yuen.‘Piranha’ (2010)Stream it on Netflix.Joe Dante’s original, 1978 version of “Piranha” positioned itself somewhere between a spoof of “Jaws” and an exploitation movie rip-off. Alexandre Aja’s remake sends up the Spielberg classic even more explicitly, thanks to an opening sequence that shows Richard Dreyfuss himself fishing and singing “Show Me the Way to Go Home” before he’s attacked by the title creatures, a particularly vicious strain of flesh-eating, bloodthirsty fish, unleashed by an earthquake under Lake Victoria on the eve of spring break. The result is a stew of bikinied babes, venerable character actors and cartoonish kills, culminating in a literal blood bath on the beach. It’s both gloriously stupid and embarrassingly entertaining, with stars Elisabeth Shue and Adam Scott miraculously finding the right, straight-faced note for all the silliness.‘The China Hustle’ (2018)Stream it on Hulu.“There are no good guys in this story,” the investor Dan Davis explains. “Including me.” Davis was the documentarian Jed Rothstein’s entry point into the story of what he calls “an enormous fraud that spanned the globe” in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis — and one that was entirely legal, a “reverse merger boom” of wildly overvalued stocks for fraudulent businesses in China. Telling that story involves a fair amount of detective work, which Rothstein executes with flair; it’s smart as a whip without alienating the less savvy viewer, explaining the story’s complex financial transactions without (much) condescension and taking down some fairly sacred cows in the process. (General Wesley Clark does not come off well.)‘Varda by Agnès’ (2019)Stream it on HBO Max.When the great French-Belgian filmmaker Agnès Varda died at age 90, in 2019, she left a rich and varied filmography — more than fifty credits over as many years, including heart-wrenching dramas, surrealist short films and freewheeling documentaries. In this, her final film, Varda revisits her career, encapsulates her work and shares her philosophies of filmmaking, living and loving. It’s a chatty and warm overview, featuring copious clips from her films and insights from various public talks and Q. and A.s, amounting to a combination of autobiography, TED Talk and much-earned victory lap. More

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      Film Academy’s Museum Connects With Visitors in First Year

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      The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures attracted about 20 percent more people than it expected since opening in September 2021. Now it needs to keep the momentum going.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has been something that almost no one in Hollywood expected: an instant hit.After an almost comical series of setbacks, the Academy Museum opened in Los Angeles in September 2021 and has since attracted more than 700,000 visitors, about 20 percent more than its pandemic-adjusted goal, according to Bill Kramer, chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (For months, gallery capacity was limited.) Half of the museum’s visitors have been under 40, he added, citing attendee surveys, and half have self-identified as being from underrepresented ethnic and racial communities. Adult tickets cost $25.“There was perhaps a slight concern, and I’m choosing my words carefully, that young people, people under the age of 40, might not be interested in film history or a cinema museum because they are streaming movies in different ways now,” Kramer said. “It has not been true, not even remotely. One of the many success stories of the museum is that it’s helping to cultivate a new generation of cinephiles.”The bad news? The academy now has to keep the momentum going, and with a potential recession on the horizon.“I’ve been thinking a lot about how to encourage repeat visitors — building a sense of community so that, not only do people see new things when they come back again, but they also feel that they’re participating with us in creating this experience,” said Jacqueline Stewart, the Academy Museum’s president. “Our museum depends in a lot of ways on breaking down some of the barriers I think that people might have felt when they hear the term academy. There’s an assumption that it’s an elitist institution.”The museum has sold 24,000 memberships, which cost between $100 and $1,000 annually. Additional revenue has come from hosting more than 100 private events; renting out the glass-domed terrace atop the museum’s spherical theater building runs $50,000 on top of a corporate membership, which starts at $10,000. Fanny’s, the museum’s well-reviewed restaurant, has served more than 150,000 people, according to the academy. Dishes range from $16 to $90.The museum’s gift shop has generated more than $6 million in sales, an amount that Kramer called “beyond our wildest expectations.” An Oscar made out of Legos, which sells for $500, and the $50 catalog for the museum’s Hayao Miyazaki exhibition have been among the top sellers.Add in philanthropic contributions and additional revenue — an opening gala generated $11 million — and the Academy Museum is comfortably covering annual operating costs while delivering returns that will ultimately be used to pay down hundreds of millions of dollars in construction debt, Kramer said.At the very least, the museum’s rosy first-year financial picture makes it something of a rarity among nonprofit cultural institutions, many of which are still reeling from the pandemic.By the time the seven-story museum opened last year, it was four years behind schedule. Its cost had ballooned by 90 percent, to about $480 million. Setbacks included the discovery of mastodon fossils by excavation crews, sparring architects, internecine warfare over the curatorial focus and, of course, the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, academy leaders became known for one blunder after another regarding their most high-profile undertaking, the annual Oscars ceremony.While the museum’s first-year financial picture is rosy, it will soon face fresh competition for visitors.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“Many began to wonder if the Academy Museum, rising as box office fell, was some bizarre hoax that would never actually be finished,” Mary McNamara, a Los Angeles Times columnist and critic, wrote last year.Soon after opening, the museum was hit with accusations of antisemitism. While taking great care to honor the contributions of women and artists of color to the cinematic arts — achievements long overlooked in an industry historically dominated by white men — curators had excluded the mostly Jewish immigrants, white men all, who founded Hollywood. To rectify the matter, curators announced a new permanent exhibition, “Hollywoodland,” about the founding of the American film industry, specifically the lives and contributions of the Jewish studio founders; it will open next fall.Other upcoming exhibitions include “Director’s Inspiration: Agnès Varda,” and “The Art of Moviemaking: ‘The Godfather.’” “Casablanca,” “Boyz N the Hood” and “The Birds” will be showcased in smaller galleries.But visitors were plentiful from the start. The museum’s retrospective of Miyazaki, the Japanese animation titan behind films like “Spirited Away” (2001), was a major draw, Stewart said. The museum also offers extensive public programs — 137 in year one, including onstage discussions with filmmakers like Spike Lee and actors like Denzel Washington. The institution also operates a separately ticketed cinematheque; more than 500 films were shown in its first year.“I met a guy a couple of weeks ago who said it was his 83rd visit to the museum and was committed to reading every label,” Stewart said.If nothing else, Angelenos now have somewhere to take Hollywood-fascinated visitors that does not involve the dreaded Hollywood & Highland shopping mall or the sticky, stinky Walk of Fame.What the future holds is anyone’s guess. Tourism officials hope that 2023 will mark a full recovery for Los Angeles, which would benefit the museum; the number of visitors to the area, particularly from overseas, is still far behind prepandemic levels. But a recession could just as easily stymie growth.The Academy Museum will also face increased competition in the years ahead. The adjacent Los Angeles County Museum of Art is in the middle of a colossal expansion. And construction has begun near downtown Los Angeles on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will house items collected by George Lucas, including 20th-century American illustrations, comic books, costumes, storyboards, stage sets and other archival material from “Star Wars” and other movies.For the academy, the continued financial health of its museum is of crucial importance. The construction debt is secured by the academy’s gross revenues, the vast majority of which come from the annual Oscars telecast. But awards revenue — after rising for decades — declined 10.8 percent in the academy’s 2021 fiscal year, reflecting plummeting Oscars viewership. Kramer, facing the likelihood that broadcast rights for the ceremony will continue to decline in value, perhaps dramatically, is scrambling to diversify the organization’s revenue streams.“It’s what any healthy nonprofit needs to do and should do,” Kramer said, “and the museum is helping us greatly with that.” More

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      Sundance Liked Her Documentary, ‘Jihad Rehab,’ Until Muslim Critics Didn’t

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      The film festival gave Meg Smaker’s “Jihad Rehab” a coveted spot in its 2022 lineup, but apologized after an outcry over her race and her approach.Meg Smaker felt exhilarated last November. After 16 months filming inside a Saudi rehabilitation center for accused terrorists, she learned that her documentary “Jihad Rehab” was invited to the 2022 Sundance Festival, one of the most prestigious showcases in the world.Her documentary centered on four former Guantánamo detainees sent to a rehab center in Saudi Arabia who had opened their lives to her, speaking of youthful attraction to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, of torture endured, and of regrets.Film critics warned that conservatives might bridle at these human portraits, but reviews after the festival’s screening were strong.“The absence of absolutes is what’s most enriching,” The Guardian stated, adding, “This is a movie for intelligent people looking to have their preconceived notions challenged.” Variety wrote: The film “feels like a miracle and an interrogative act of defiance.”But attacks would come from the left, not the right. Arab and Muslim filmmakers and their white supporters accused Ms. Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda. Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men.Sundance leaders reversed themselves and apologized.Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, had been the executive director of “Jihad Rehab” and called it “freaking brilliant” in an email to Ms. Smaker. Now she disavowed it.The film “landed like a truckload of hate,” Ms. Disney wrote in an open letter.Ms. Smaker’s film has become near untouchable, unable to reach audiences. Prominent festivals rescinded invitations, and critics in the documentary world took to social media and pressured investors, advisers and even her friends to withdraw names from the credits. She is close to broke.“In my naïveté, I kept thinking people would get the anger out of their system and realize this film was not what they said,” Ms. Smaker said. “I’m trying to tell an authentic story that a lot of Americans might not have heard.”Battles over authorship and identity regularly roil the documentary world, a tightly knit and largely left-wing ecosystem.Ms. Smaker wanted to explore what leads men to embrace terrorism. But Arab American filmmakers say that framing was all too familiar. Meg SmakerMany Arab and Muslim filmmakers — who like others in the industry struggle for money and recognition — denounced “Jihad Rehab” as offering an all too familiar take. They say Ms. Smaker is the latest white documentarian to tell the story of Muslims through a lens of the war on terror. These documentary makers, they say, take their white, Western gaze and claim to film victims with empathy.Assia Boundaoui, a filmmaker, critiqued it for Documentary magazine.“To see my language and the homelands of folks in my community used as backdrops for white savior tendencies is nauseating,” she wrote. “The talk is all empathy, but the energy is Indiana Jones.”She called on festivals to allow Muslims to create “films that concern themselves not with war, but with life.”The argument over whether artists should share racial or ethnic identity and sympathy with their subjects is long running in literature and film — with many artists and writers, like the documentarians Ken Burns and Nanfu Wang, arguing it would be suffocating to tell the story of only their own culture and that the challenge is to inhabit worlds different from their own.In the case of “Jihad Rehab,” the identity critique is married to the view that the film must function as political art and examine the historic and cultural oppressions that led to the imprisonment of these men at Guantánamo.Some critics and documentary filmmakers say that mandate is reductive and numbing.“What I admired about ‘Jihad Rehab’ is that it allowed a viewer to make their own decisions,” said Chris Metzler, who helps select films for San Francisco Documentary Festival. “I was not watching a piece of propaganda.”Ms. Smaker has other defenders. Lorraine Ali, a television critic for The Los Angeles Times who is Muslim, wrote that the film was “a humanizing journey through a complex emotional process of self-reckoning and accountability, and a look at the devastating fallout of flawed U.S. and Saudi policy.”She is dismayed with Sundance.“In the independent film world there is a lot of weaponizing of identity politics,” Ms. Ali said in an interview. “The film took pains to understand the culture these men came from and molded them. It does a disservice to throw away a film that a lot of people should see.”From Firefighter to FilmmakerMs. Smaker was a 21-year-old firefighter in California when airplanes struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. She heard firefighters cry for vengeance and wondered: How did this happen?Looking for answers, she hitchhiked through Afghanistan and settled in the ancient city of Sana, Yemen, for half a decade, where she learned Arabic and taught firefighting. Then she obtained a master’s from Stanford University in filmmaking and turned to a place Yemeni friends had spoken of: the Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center in Riyadh.The Saudi monarchy brooks little dissent. This center tries to rehabilitate accused terrorists and spans an unlikely distance between prison and boutique hotel. It has a gym and pool and teachers who offer art therapy and lectures on Islam, Freud and the true meanings of “jihad,” which include personal struggle.Hence the documentary’s original title, “Jihad Rehab,” which engendered much criticism, even from supporters, who saw it as too facile. “The film is very complex and the title is not,” said Ms. Ali, the Los Angeles Times critic.To address such concerns, the director recently renamed the film “The UnRedacted.”The United States sent 137 detainees from Guantánamo Bay to this center, which human rights groups cannot visit.But reporters with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and others have interviewed prisoners. Most stayed a few days.Ms. Smaker would remain more than a year exploring what leads men to embrace groups such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban.Saudi officials let her speak to 150 detainees, most of whom waved her off. She found four men who would talk.A film still of the guard tower. Ms. Smaker envisioned the documentary as opening with accusations facing the men — bomb maker, bin Laden driver, Taliban fighter — and peeling layers to find the human.Meg SmackerThese conversations form the core of the movie and cut far deeper than earlier news reports. That did not dissuade critics. Ms. Disney, a titan in the documentary world, picked up on a point raised by the film’s opponents. “A person cannot freely consent to anything in a carceral system, particularly one in a notoriously violent dictatorship,” she wrote.This is a debatable proposition. Journalists often interview prisoners, and documentaries like “The Thin Blue Line” give powerful voice to them, without necessarily clearing this purist hurdle of free consent.Ms. Disney declined an interview request, saying she wished Ms. Smaker well.Lawrence Wright wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” and spent much time in Saudi Arabia. He saw the documentary.“As a reporter, you acknowledge the constraints on prisoners, and Smaker could have acknowledged it with more emphasis,” he said. “But she was exploring a great mystery — understanding those who may have done something appalling — and this does not discredit that effort.”To gain intimate access, he added, was a coup.Ms. Smaker envisioned the film as an unfolding, opening with American accusations — bomb maker, bin Laden driver, Taliban fighter — and peeling layers to find the human.Distrust yielded to trust. Men described being drawn to Al Qaeda out of boredom, poverty and defense of Islam. What emerged was a portrait of men on the cusp of middle-age reckoning with their past.Ms. Smaker asked one of the men, “Are you a terrorist?”He bridled. “Someone fight me, I fight them. Why do you call me terrorist?”Her critics argue that such questions registered as accusation. “These questions seek to humanize the men, but they still frame them as terrorists,” Pat Mullen, a Toronto film critic, wrote in Point of View magazine.Mr. Metzler of the San Francisco festival said a documentarian must ask questions that are on a viewer’s mind.The film in fact dwells on torture inflicted by Americans at Guantánamo Bay. Ali al-Raimi arrived at age 16. “Every day was worse than the last day,” he said.He tried to hang himself.“Nothing,” he said, “was worse than Guantánamo.”The men longed for the prosaic: marriage, children, a job. Khalid, a voluble man, was trained as a bomb maker; in the film, he said he now crafts remote-control car alarms in Jeddah. Ambiguity lingers.Success, InterruptedSundance announced in December that it had selected “Jihad Rehab” for its 2022 festival, held the following month. Critics erupted.“An entirely white team behind a film about Yemeni and South Arabian men,” the filmmaker Violeta Ayala wrote in a tweet.Ms. Smaker’s film had a Yemeni-American executive producer and a Saudi co-producer.More than 230 filmmakers signed a letter denouncing the documentary. A majority had not seen it. The letter noted that over 20 years, Sundance had programmed 76 films about Muslims and the Middle East, but only 35 percent of them had been directed by Muslim or Arab filmmakers.Sundance noted that in its 2022 festival, of the 152 films in which directors revealed their ethnicity, 7 percent were Middle Eastern. Estimates place Americans of Arab descent at between 1.5 and 3 percent.Sundance officials backtracked. Tabitha Jackson, then the director of the festival, demanded to see consent forms from the detainees and Ms. Smaker’s plan to protect them once the film debuted, according to an email shown to The Times. Ms. Jackson also required an ethics review of the plans and gave Ms. Smaker four days to comply. Efforts to reach Ms. Jackson were unsuccessful.The review concluded Ms. Smaker more than met standards of safety.Ms. Smaker said a public relations firm recommended that she apologize. “What was I apologizing for?” she said. “For trusting my audience to make up their own mind?”Prominent documentary executives said Sundance’s demands were without precedent.An executive who has run a major festival went so far as to write an email to Sundance cautioning that its demands of Ms. Smaker might embolden protesters. Festivals, the executive wrote, will ask “two, three, four times what are the headwinds” before extending an invitation.That executive had earlier invited Ms. Smaker to show “Jihad Rehab,” but she had declined as her film was not yet completed. This executive asked to remain anonymous out of concern of offending Muslim filmmakers.“Jihad Rehab” premiered in January; most major reviews were good. But Ms. Smaker’s critics were not persuaded.“When I, a practicing Muslim woman, say that this film is problematic,” wrote Jude Chehab, a Lebanese American documentarian, “my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isn’t. Point blank.”Ms. Disney, the former champion, wrote, “I failed, failed and absolutely failed to understand just how exhausted by and disgusted with the perpetual representation of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists the Muslim people are.”Her apology and that of Sundance shook the industry. The South by Southwest and San Francisco festivals rescinded invitations.Jihad Turk, former imam of Los Angeles’s largest mosque, was baffled. In December, his friend Tim Disney — brother of Abigail — invited him to a screening.“My first instinct,” he said, “was ‘Oh, not another film on jihad and Islam.’ Then I watched and it was introspective and intelligent. My hope is that there is a courageous outlet that is not intimidated by activists and their too narrow views.”An Elusive Happy EndingIn June, Ms. Smaker received another screening — at the Doc Edge festival in New Zealand.She hopped a flight to Auckland with trepidation. Would this end in cancellation? Word had leaked out, and Mr. Mullen, the Toronto film critic, tweeted a warning.“Oh wild — controversial Sundance doc Jihad Rehab comes out of hiding,” he wrote, adding: “Why would anyone program this film after Sundance? File under ‘we warned you!’”Dan Shanan, who heads the New Zealand festival, shrugged.“What happened at Sundance was not good,” he said. “Film festivals must hold to their belief in their role.”Ms. Smaker has maxed out credit cards and, at age 42, borrowed money from her parents. This is not the Sundance debut of her dreams. “I don’t have the money or influence to fight this out,” she said, running hands back through her hair. “I’m not sure I see a way out.” More

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      Louise Fletcher, 88, Dies; Oscar Winner for ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

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      She was largely unknown to the public when she was cast as what the American Film Institute called one of cinema’s most memorable villains.Louise Fletcher, the imposing, steely-eyed actress who won an Academy Award for her role as the tyrannical Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” died on Friday at her home in the town of Montdurausse, in Southern France. She was 88.The death was confirmed by her agent, David Shaul, who did not cite a cause. Ms. Fletcher also had a home in Los Angeles.Ms. Fletcher was 40 and largely unknown to the public when she was cast as the head administrative nurse at an Oregon mental institution in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The film, directed by Milos Forman and based on a popular novel by Ken Kesey, won a best-actress trophy for Ms. Fletcher and four other Oscars: best picture, best director, best actor (Jack Nicholson, who starred as the rebellious mental patient McMurphy) and best adapted screenplay (Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauber).Ms. Fletcher’s acceptance speech stood out that night — not only because she teasingly thanked voters for hating her, but also because she used American Sign Language in thanking her parents, who were both deaf, for “teaching me to have a dream.”The American Film Institute later named Nurse Ratched one of the most memorable villains in film history and the second most notable female villain, surpassed only by the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz.”But at the time “Cuckoo’s Nest” was released, Ms. Fletcher was frustrated by the buttoned-up nature of her character. “I envied the other actors tremendously,” she said in a 1975 interview with The New York Times, referring to her fellow cast members, most of whom were playing mental patients. “They were so free, and I had to be so controlled.”Estelle Louise Fletcher was born on July 22, 1934, in Birmingham, Ala., one of four hearing children of Robert Capers Fletcher, an Episcopal minister, and Estelle (Caldwell) Fletcher; both her parents had been deaf since childhood. She studied drama at the University of North Carolina and moved to Los Angeles after graduation.She later told journalists that because she was so tall — 5 feet 10 inches — she had trouble finding work in anything but westerns, where her height was an advantage. Of her first 20 or so screen roles in the late 1950s and early ’60s, about half were in television westerns, including “Wagon Train,” “Maverick” and “Bat Masterson.”Ms. Fletcher married Jerry Bick, a film producer, in 1959. They had two sons, John and Andrew, and she retired from acting for more than a decade to raise them.Ms. Fletcher and Mr. Bick divorced in 1977. Her survivors include her sons; her sister, Roberta Ray; and a granddaughter.She returned to movies in 1974 in Robert Altman’s “Thieves Like Us,” as a woman who coldly turns in her brother to the police. It was her appearance in that film that led Mr. Forman to offer her the role in “Cuckoo’s Nest.”“I was caught by surprise when Louise came onscreen,” Mr. Forman recalled of watching “Thieves Like Us.” “I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had a certain mystery, which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Ms. Fletcher in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” “She had a certain mystery,” said Milos Forman, the film’s director, “which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Herbert Dorfman/Corbis via Getty ImagesReviewing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael declared Ms. Fletcher’s “a masterly performance.”“We can see the virginal expectancy — the purity — that has turned into puffy-eyed self-righteousness,” Ms. Kael wrote. “She thinks she’s doing good for people, and she’s hurt — she feels abused — if her authority is questioned.”Ms. Fletcher is often cited as an example of the Oscar curse — the phenomenon that winning an Academy Award for acting does not always lead to sustained movie stardom — but she did maintain a busy career in films and on television into her late 70s.She had a lead role as the Linda Blair character’s soft-spoken psychiatrist in “Exorcist II: The Heretic” (1977) and was notable in the ensemble comedy “The Cheap Detective” (1978), riffing on Ingrid Bergman’s film persona. She also starred with Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood as a workaholic scientist in “Brainstorm” (1983). But she was largely relegated to roles with limited screen time, especially when her character was very different from her Nurse Ratched persona.After a turn as an inscrutable U.F.O. bigwig in “Strange Invaders” (1983), she appeared in “Firestarter” (1984) as a fearful farm wife; the police drama “Blue Steel” (1990) as Jamie Lee Curtis’s drab mother; “2 Days in the Valley” (1996) as a compassionate Los Angeles landlady; and “Cruel Intentions” (1999) as Ryan Phillippe’s genteel aunt.Only when she played to villainous stereotype — as she did in “Flowers in the Attic” (1987), as an evil matriarch who sets out to poison her four inconvenient young grandchildren — did she find herself in starring roles again. And that film, she told a Dragoncon audience in 2009, was “the worst experience I’ve ever had making a movie.”Later in her career, she played recurring characters on several television series, including “Star Trek: Deep Space 9” (she was an alien cult leader from 1993 to 1999) and “Shameless” (as William H. Macy’s foulmouthed convict mother). She also made an appearance as Liev Schreiber’s affable mother in the romantic drama “A Perfect Man” (2013). She appeared most recently in two episodes of the Netflix comedy series “Girlboss.”Although Ms. Fletcher’s most famous character was a portrait of sternness, she often recalled smiling constantly and pretending that everything was perfect when she was growing up, in an effort to protect her non-hearing parents from bad news.“The price of it was very high for me,” she said in a 1977 interview with The Ladies’ Home Journal. “Because I not only pretended everything was all right. I came to feel it had to be.”Pretending wasn’t all bad, however, she acknowledged, at least in terms of her profession. That same year she told the journalist Rex Reed, “I feel like I know real joy from make-believe.”Mike Ives More