Kirby, Vanessa (1988- )

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    ‘Napoleon’ Review: A Lumpy, Grumpy Little Man

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    Joaquin Phoenix is oddly mesmerizing as the French emperor in Ridley Scott’s historical epic charting his rise and ruin.When he was in his mid-20s and first visited the studio where he would late shoot “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles is said to have likened the movies to the best electric train set a boy could have. Welles is a defining inspiration for Ridley Scott, who is best known for monumentally scaled historical epics like “Gladiator” and “Kingdom of Heaven.” In these movies as well as in his latest spectacle, “Napoleon,” Scott plays, to push Welles’s metaphor further, with the biggest train sets conceivable — giant, beautiful, gleaming machines that can, by turns, transport and overwhelm you. He’s a heavy metal guy.“Napoleon” is a very big movie, as you would expect given that it follows its title subject from the bloody delirium of the French Revolution to battlefields across Europe, Africa and, catastrophically, into Russia. More startling, though, is that the movie is also often eccentric and at times eccentrically funny. You expect refined craft and technique from Scott and the pleasures of spectacle filmmaking at its most expansive. You expect heft, seriousness, not snort-out-loud humor, which I guess explains why, while watching the movie, I flashed on Karl Marx’s axiom about history being first tragedy and then farce.It opens in Paris amid that convulsion of violence called the Terror, with surging, shouting crowds and the metallic hiss of the falling guillotine blade. Aristocrats are losing their heads (Scott re-creates one execution with gory verisimilitude), and Napoleon Bonaparte — a mesmerizing, off-kilter, lumpish Joaquin Phoenix — will soon profit from the chaos. Before long, the story has jumped forward and now Napoleon is in the southern French port city of Toulon, where he strategically routs the Anglo-Spanish fleet that has taken the city.Scott establishes Napoleon’s early rise to power with bold imagery and brusque narrative economy, vividly setting the historical moment with scenes from both inside the corridors of revolutionary power — enter Robespierre — and the surging anarchy out in the streets. Napoleon’s rise at this point is largely facilitated by the politician Paul Barras (Tahar Rahim), a silky operator with the pacific mien of a patiently lurking predator and an inescapable aristocratic hauteur. Everyone addresses one another as Citizen, which, in Barras’s case comes across as the 18th-century version of performative political correctness. Together, Barras and Napoleon consolidate their positions. Exit Robespierre.Joséphine (a fine Vanessa Kirby) makes her entrance soon after, catching Napoleon’s notice (her décolletage helps) and ushering in the story’s second plotline. A widow whose husband lost his head during the Terror, Joséphine has been recently released from prison, an ordeal that has left her with short, choppy hair and a very keen sense of self-preservation. It’s not at all clear what she actually sees in Napoleon, other than his uniform, growing reputation and obvious interest in her. She’s (relatively) poor for a society woman and has children, so desperation plays a role, though the movie suggests that what Joséphine truly sees is power.After Joséphine appears, the movie soon bifurcates into two lines of action, one involving Napoleon’s military campaigns, and the other the couple’s relationship. This kind of dual plot structure is a familiar template of old Hollywood that features two entwined strands — involving adventure and romance — that together bring everything to a close. What’s unusual here is how separate the lines of action remain in “Napoleon” and how they don’t as much interconnect as run on parallel tracks. When he’s not facing off against the Austrians, the British and the Russians, Napoleon is struggling with Joséphine, who vexes him almost as much as the Duke of Wellington (an amusing Rupert Everett).Written by David Scarpa, the movie tracks Napoleon’s relentless rise to despotic power — he crowns himself emperor — amid political intrigues, bloody battlefields and some occasional hasty rutting with Joséphine, who invariably cuts him down to size. He’s a little man, you are regularly reminded, and his relationship with Joséphine (who soon and understandably takes a lover) makes him smaller. Periodic bits of text function as de facto chapter headings, grounding the story’s chronology and announcing the next conflagration. Historical figures come and go (Paul Rhys plays Talleyrand), but for the most part the movie slides over the complexities of both the revolution and Napoleon’s reign as well as the reasons France has been swept up in endless battles on so many fronts.The war scenes are extraordinary, vigorous, harrowing and rightly grotesque. The tremendous scale of some of these battles helps give them their visceral power, as does Scott’s complex staging and use of masses of human actors and horses. With cannon blasts, bursts of smoke and the sights and sounds of armies of men thundering over fields toward their deaths, he conveys the frenzy of war, its heat and terror. As the fighting grimly continues, and the body count mounts, the absolute waste of it all becomes overwhelming, which is, I imagine, why Scott seems so uninterested in Napoleon’s vaunted military genius.“Napoleon” is consistently surprising partly because it doesn’t conform to the conventions of mainstream historical epics, which is especially true of its startling, adamantly unromanticized title character. (The movie also doesn’t always conform to the historical record, and some may take issue with the portrayal of the Battle of Austerlitz.) In the early scenes, Napoleon seems to be another of Phoenix’s taciturn, unnervingly volatile, enigmatically damaged, violent men. The difference is that this Napoleon, with his bloat, scowls and consuming needs, often resembles nothing as much as an angrily petulant baby, one whose cruelty and pathological vanity make the horror he unleashes unnervingly familiar.NapoleonRated R for intense scenes of war. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes. 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      ‘The Son’ Review: Father Doesn’t Know Best

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      Hugh Jackman plays the father of a troubled teenager in Florian Zeller’s leaden drama.At one point in “The Son,” directed by Florian Zeller and based on his play of the same name, a clinician briefs a divorced mother and father on their teenage son’s condition after a mental health emergency. “He’s in very good hands now,” the doctor says, referring to the hospital staff. “Now” is the key word; the implication is that the wealthy, well-meaning Peter (Hugh Jackman) and Kate (Laura Dern) are unfit to handle the issues their son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) is facing.In my professional opinion (I’m a critic, not a physician), the same should be said of the movie surrounding Nicholas, which tackles adolescent depression about as deftly as an estate lawyer performing open-heart surgery. Despite its contemporary New York City setting, “The Son” seems to have appropriated a midcentury understanding of mental illness, and the emotion on display feels even more artificial than the rooftop vista erected outside the windows of Peter’s industrial-chic Manhattan loft.Peter shares this apartment with his wife, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and their infant son, and though his work as an attorney is consuming, he relishes his downtown idyll. But the sweetness curdles when Peter learns that Nicholas, who lives with Kate in Brooklyn, has been acting volatile and would prefer to move in with him. Never mind that the teenager is friendless, cutting class and has taken to self-harm; Kate and Peter agree that a change of scenery will restore the cheerful child they raised. (We eventually meet a 6-year-old Nicholas in flashbacks that are so euphoric they could double as airline commercials.)The leadenness of “The Son” is puzzling given the ingenuity of Zeller’s “The Father,” which positions the audience within the point of view of an aging man with dementia. (The film won two Oscars in 2021.) Unlike that triumph of subjectivity, “The Son” declines to probe the perspectives of Peter or Nicholas, compelling the audience to survey the wreckage of their relationship from a distance. It also leaves the actors seeming somewhat stranded, trading clunky lines or lurching into tantrums without the psychological depth to underpin their affliction. The movie may take place inside a pit of despair, but the theatrics leave us with the uncanny sensation of feeling nothing at all.The SonRated PG-13. Divorce and remorse. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The World to Come’ Review: Cold Comfort

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘The World to Come’ Review: Cold ComfortKatherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby play two women who share a gradually recognized love in upstate New York in 1856.Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby in “The World to Come.”Credit…Vlad Cioplea/Bleecker StreetFeb. 11, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThe World to ComeNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Mona FastvoldDramaR1h 38mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Though shot in Romania, “The World to Come,” directed by Mona Fastvold, conjures an almost artisanal feeling of life in rural upstate New York in 1856. Generically, it plays like a western — a romance in untamed territory where snowy landscapes foster isolation, not explorative possibilities. When her young daughter dies of diphtheria, Abigail (Katherine Waterston) does not anticipate “a better world to come.”Still, the shy Abigail’s life improves when she meets a new neighbor, Tallie (Vanessa Kirby), who becomes her brash and effusive foil. Abigail can’t decipher Tallie’s relationship with her husband, Finney (Christopher Abbott), whose outward civility masks an abusive streak. Abigail’s husband, Dyer (Casey Affleck), a farmer with a fondness for mechanical tools, initially seems like the less polished of the men.[embedded content]Despite pervasive voice-over supplied by Abigail’s writerly diary entries, “The World to Come” leaves much unsaid. When Tallie asks Abigail what she thinks about the two of them together, Abigail says she does not “know how to put it into words.” (The screenplay is by Ron Hansen, of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” and Jim Shepard, from a story by Shepard.)Waterston and Kirby are both superb at creating characters whose attraction must be shown to grow by degrees, without overt admission. Affleck and Abbott, too, navigate a tricky dynamic, playing men who perhaps lack an understanding of their own compassion or brutishness. The use of film stock, natural light, narrow compositions and an offbeat, clarinet-heavy score by Daniel Blumberg all contribute to the sense of a story dusted off from the past.The World to ComeRated R. Discreet sex; animal slaughter. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Vanessa Kirby Has Been Waiting for a Role That Scares Her

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyVanessa Kirby Has Been Waiting for a Role That Scares HerFor her first lead in a film, the actress wanted a character as challenging as many of those she’s played onstage. She found it in Kornel Mundruczo’s “Pieces of a Woman.”“Pieces of a Woman,” which debuts Jan. 7 on Netflix, is the first lead film role for the actress Vanessa Kirby.Credit…Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesDec. 31, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETLONDON — Vanessa Kirby has never given birth, but after shooting her first lead movie role in “Pieces of a Woman,” she kind of feels like she has.“Whenever I see a pregnant woman now, or someone’s telling me that they’ve just given birth, I smile,” she said in a recent video chat. “I feel with them.”The two full days she spent shooting a searing scene for the film could explain this psychic confusion, as could the thorough way Kirby, 32, immersed herself in the role.In “Pieces of a Woman,” which debuts Jan. 7 on Netflix after a limited theatrical release in December, Kirby plays Martha, a pregnant woman whose home birth goes horribly wrong.This pivotal event at the beginning of the film plays out in a 24-minute, single-take scene that starts with Martha’s first contractions and ends in tragedy. The camera follows Martha, her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and a midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), around the couple’s apartment, condensing the agonies of labor into under half an hour.Credit…Benjamin Loeb/NetflixCredit…Benjamin Loeb/NetflixIn September, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Kirby won the best actress award, and began to be talked about as an Oscar contender.Kirby said she wanted to portray Martha’s labor as authentically as possible. “That was terrifying, because I didn’t want to let women down,” she added.So she got down to research. Watching many onscreen depictions of birth left Kirby no closer to understanding the experience, she said, since they were so censored and sanitized.“Then I was even more scared, because I realized that I had a responsibility to show birth as it is, not as it’s even edited in documentaries,” Kirby said.She talked to women who had given birth and women who’d had miscarriages, as well as midwives and obstetrician-gynecologists at a London hospital. While she was there, a woman arrived having contractions, and agreed to let Kirby observe the birth.The experience of watching that six hour labor “changed me so profoundly,” Kirby said. “Every second of what was happening to her, I just absorbed.”“It was, I think, probably the best career experience I’ve ever had,” Kirby said of shooting the film.Credit…Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesAnd she began to understand how to play Martha. The woman in the hospital went into a primal, animal-like state, Kirby said. “Her body was taking over and doing it, so that helped me so much for the scene,” she added.Over two days, that long take was shot six times. In a phone interview, the director, Kornel Mundruczo, who also works in theater and opera, said that preparing it was like getting a stunt scene ready: “Lots of planning, but you don’t know what’s actually going to happen.”In the end, each take was different, Kirby said: Martha and Sean’s conversations shifted, the way Martha’s body reacted to the contractions was distinctive each time.“It was, I think, probably the best career experience I’ve ever had,” Kirby said of those two days of shooting. Inspired by the labor she’d observed, she tried to think as little as possible, she said, and not judge what her body was doing in the scene.After a decade of work, “Pieces of a Woman” is Kirby’s first time leading a feature film, and it is a bold and memorable role that shows her flexing her acting muscles. Mundruczo said he needed an actor at Kirby’s exact career point: “Where all of the skills are already there, but the fear is not,” he said. “When you are very established, you are more and more careful.”Left to right: the actress Ellen Burstyn, the director Kornel Mundruczo, and Kirby in a scene from “Pieces of a Woman.” Credit…Philippe Bosse/NetflixKirby has been honing those skills since she was a teenager. She grew up in a wealthy, West London suburb, where she attended a private, all girls’ school and escaped the social pressures of teenage life onstage, in plays and youth drama clubs.“Every time I walked into that space, I suddenly felt not judged at all, I just felt accepted,” Kirby said. “You didn’t have to be anything, or do anything right.”After graduating from college, where she studied English literature, Kirby was accepted to the prestigious London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art in 2009. A few months before term began, though, she was offered three stage roles by David Thacker, a former director-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who was then the artistic director of the Octagon Theater in Bolton, a town in northern England.Come to Bolton, he told her, and you will learn more from these roles — which included Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Ann Deever in “All My Sons” — than you will in three years of drama school. Kirby agreed, and now describes that season as her training.“I learned everything there,” she said. Working with Thacker taught her to trust herself, to find her own way as an actor, rather than waiting for other people to tell her what to do, she said.Kirby has been working steadily ever since, with lead roles in the West End, as well as high profile supporting roles in films and British TV costume dramas. She starred as Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of “The Crown,” a performance that earned her a BAFTA award. Her Margaret fizzes with restless energy, an ideal foil for Claire Foy’s restrained Queen Elizabeth.In 2018’s “Mission Impossible — Fallout,” she played the White Widow, a glamorous black-market broker who carries a knife in her garter, and knows how to use it. She is slated to appear in two further “Mission Impossible” sequels.Credit…Alex Bailey/NetflixCredit…Chiabella James/Paramount PicturesEven as these supporting roles brought her critical praise and awards, Kirby wasn’t in a hurry to find her first onscreen lead role, she said. She’s played many complex characters onstage: women like Rosalind, the fiercely intelligent heroine of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” She was holding out for an onscreen lead in whom she could feel some of Rosalind’s “magic,” she said, which made performing “like flying when you step onstage.”“I could never find those roles at all onscreen,” she said. So she waited, using her smaller parts as opportunities to observe and learn, asking Anthony Hopkins about his craft when they worked together on the British TV drama “The Dresser,” and watching how generous Rachel McAdams was onset for the film “About Time,” she said.It’s fitting, given Kirby’s theatrical background, that “Pieces of a Woman” started life as a play, written by Kata Weber, Mundruczo’s partner, who drew on the couple’s own experience of losing a child. The play “Pieces of a Woman,” which is set in Poland, consists of only two scenes: the birth, and an explosive dinner with Martha’s family that occurs about halfway through the film adaptation. Its 2018 premiere, directed by Mundruczo at the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw, was a hit, and the production is still in the company’s repertoire.Around the time Mundruczo turned 40, five years ago, he started wanting a bigger audience for his work, he said, so he switched from working in German, Hungarian and Polish; “Pieces of a Woman” is his first English language film. In adapting the play for the big screen, Mundruczo set it in Boston, he said, because he felt the city’s Irish Catholic culture mirrored Poland’s conservative social landscape.The loss of a pregnancy is rarely featured in onscreen entertainment. Mundruczo said he hopes watching Martha’s experiences will encourage “people to be brave enough to have their own answer for any loss,” he said.Kirby said she found that women who had experienced pregnancy loss were “actually really relieved” to talk about it.Credit…Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesIn recent months, the model Chrissy Teigen and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, (writing in The New York Times), have shared stories of their experiences with pregnancy loss. Kirby said that, while researching for the role before filming, she found that women who had experienced one were “actually really relieved to talk about it,” and appreciated that someone wanted to understand.“Pieces of a Woman” was shot over just 29 days last winter, but Kirby said it took months for her to shake off the experience of playing Martha. “I knew my job was to feel it, to feel what she felt,” she said. Carrying that degree of empathy was “really difficult and disturbing,” she said, but added that the privilege of spending time inside another’s experience is what she loves about her work.Kirby’s next project will see her co-starring as Tallie, one of two farmers’ wives who fall in love in the United States in the 19th-century in “The World To Come,” a meditative drama from the Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold slated for theatrical release next month.And after that? Kirby said she was reading scripts, on the hunt for the next role that will scare her. She’s looking for an “untold story about women,” she said, that will feel as urgent to tell as Martha and Tallie’s did.“What’s that expression?” she said. “Feel the fear, and do it anyway.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More