Eileen (2023)

Director: William Oldroyd

Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland, Anne Hathaway

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I probably went into the day of the screening a little bit more during my review of Don’t Change Your Husband (1919). A perfect movie day, even if the movies themselves were not my favorite.

Did I Like It: I’ve been watching a lot of noir lately, and the rhythms become all too comfortable. That also probably puts me probably in the wrong headspace for any film that trucks in a lot of the noir tropes, but then tries to subvert them.

I’m on board with nearly every element of this film. Hathaway slithers through the film with barely contained chaotic energy. She doesn’t get nearly enough credit for her ability to vamp through a movie, largely because she’s only been really allowed to flex that muscle in forgettable or mildly disappointing movies like The Witches (2020) or The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Her chemistry with McKenzie is electric, then sexy, then a perfect synthesis of unsettling and revolting. It’s very nearly a perfect amalgamation of all the elements that made those noir films so great, but with the added feature of not being weighed down by the Hays Code, allowing the film to be unrelentingly unflinching.

But some of the fun of movies like these is the palpable tension that comes with the world closing in on the main character who have wandered off the straight and narrow path. Here, though, the movie doesn’t so much concludes as it just stops. One might be able to make the argument that the movie isn’t about the escalating ring of murder surrounding the characters, but more about Eileen’s (McKenzie) shedding the elements of her life that are holding her back*, but it also leaves the entire affair a little unbelievable. There’s no way this girl doesn’t get picked up for murder before she gets past the Massachusetts border.

*A quick scan of a summary of the source material indicates it doubles down on that notion, which may ironically enough make this film better than the novel upon which it is based.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

Director: Edgar Wright

Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Terrence Stamp

Have I Seen it Before: Never, but man, how I’ve wanted to. The film had completely flown under my radar until seeing a trailer for it tied to No Time To Die (2021). The marketing was spot on. Beside both films sharing an essential Britishness, there are plenty of subtle Bond nods in the film, including setting the film precisely in time with a massive Thunderball (1965) poster greeting us in the past, and characters reflexively ordering Vespers.

Did I Like It: In my review of The Night House (2021), I remarked that it was possible that the fusion of ghost stories and Hitchcockian thrillers was intuitively obvious, but ultimately disappointing.

I spoke too soon. Wright has yet to make a bad movie, and this is a perfect fusion of style and suspense. That alone would merely meet expectations, but the man who has made his bones making confections of almost pure homage in the TV series Spaced and his collaborations with Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), and The World’s End (2013)) has moved on from purely making a reference to something else, but instead charting his own course.

This type of film isn’t going to be at all accepted by the audience of the visual world is not completely immaculate (and other examples of the genre can at least lay claim to that much), but here the true legacy of Hitchcock is maintained and the plot is completely immaculate. I may have had a sense that Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg, who died shortly after production and ended her stellar career on a high note) knew more about what was happening to Ellie (McKenzie, also perfectly cast) and so the big twist may not have hit as hard as it had been intended, but the trip trough it was so delightful, I couldn’t possibly care. After all, who younger than the age of 60 saw Psycho (1960) for the first time and didn’t know what was coming in the fruit cellar?

Wright here has pulled over a supreme trick, and one for which I cannot readily award another filmmaker. He has grown up beyond the types of films which made him famous (films which I enjoyed immensely) and leaves me in equal measures not mourning the fact that he might not make those types of films ever again, and supremely excited for what he might have up his sleeve next.

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Director: Taika Waititi

Cast: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Taika Waititi, Scarlet Johansson

Have I Seen It Before?: Never. Regretfully, painfully, I missed it in the theater. I desperately wanted to go, but the timing never worked out, and so I’m left with a Blu Ray.

Did I like it?: Oh, man…

For some, the precarious moral stretch to make a movie about a boy (Davis) and his imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (Waititi) is never going to work. Especially now, the business of anything even resembling moral equivalency within twenty miles of fascism gives one the ickiest of icky feelings.

A lesser filmmaker (myself included, although I would have probably chickened out at the funny Nazi movie, and you would have, too) would have been so wrapped up in the tone of the piece that they would have insisted on shying away from the horror and evil of the time, content in the fact that it will still appropriately loom over the smarter audience members.

Here, the horror of everything is real from the beginning, and in one of the best balancing acts in my cinema memory, the jokes are woven seamlessly into the tragedy.

All right, sure, one can easily make the argument that the need for a “good” Nazi—in the face of the Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell)—is not far enough removed from the ethical insanity that has so thoroughly mired our recent history, but I think that is the wrong read on the character. Klenzendorf isn’t the Nazi with a heart of gold. He’s just as much of a shit as the rest of them, and as all Nazis must eventually do, he is a broken shell of a man. Every idiotic thing he ever believed in has come crashing down around him as the allies approach the fatherland. With that, he does decide to do two decent things with his last acts on Earth. It doesn’t redeem him; it gives him a moment of comfort to realize that at least his death can be of use, even if his life wasn’t.

Oh, did I mention the movie’s also one of the funnier ones in years? Well, it is. I probably should have spent more of the review talking about that, but why dwell on that, when you should really be watching it right now for yourself.