Reviews from gulag: Police abuses

Well, it's probably not the most inappropriate connection I've drawn between two films, but we are trying to do an end-of-year wrap-up here with barely 48 more hours to go before it's moot, so that's what we're going with.  Today's subjects: I'm Still Here and Hit Man.

I'M STILL HERE

Ainda Estou Aqui

I'm Still Here, concerning the extrajudicial murder undertaken by the Medici-led military government in Brazil that triggered the mid-life ascendance of famed human rights lawyer Eunice Paiza to prominence, is exactly the kind of movie you'd guess it was from the "I'd never heard of it till it was nominated for Best Picture" thing it's got going on, and even then you'd probably ask "of the movies broadly like it, why this one?", though a more charitable response would be "why not?"  Maybe it's because it looks alright, albeit mostly by virtue of being shot on film (a 35mm so grainy I thought it was 16, and now I'm a little unsettled about it); maybe it's because it couldn't possibly offend anyone, though it does come off categorically anti-military coup, and I think that's just awfully closed-minded of it.

Still, I can't help but think it's sort of wrongheaded, as a matter of its overall narrative strategy.  Which isn't to let the tactics off the hook: take, for instance, the extended pre-inciting incident first act that's just this naturalistic slice-of-life for a Brazilian family, one that I assume was this large and of this composition in real life, because there are, like, at least three more children than the actual film can handle in its extant configuration (something the film even sub rosa acknowledges in numerous ways throughout, for instance being noticeably relieved to have gotten rid of the eldest daughter by way of a long trip abroad once her function of "being a politically-conscious teen" and "providing some almost nauseatingly-shaky Super 8 home movies" has been accomplished), but this is a slice-of-life that has no goal whatsoever besides impressing on you that bad things can still happen to nice people.  And they are, for sure, nice: with the obvious exceptions, it seems like it'd be cool to be in this family, and live in their cool beach neighborhood, and enjoy the 70s Brazilian lifestyle of wearing underwear or overclothes but not both simultaneously, but this does not, by itself, make them all that interesting to watch.  (And as long as we're talking small stuff, then the constant reference to period pop cultural signifiers is a routine example of the movie's naturalistic tolerance of dead air—I assure you, I do get that it's right at the transition to the 1970s.)

Then the bad thing happens to them, when first dad Ruben Paiva (Guilherme Silveira) then mom Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) are hauled off by the military, and E. Paiva's tenure in prison is probably the best part of the film by virtue—well, as this really happened, the vice—of its nooselike tautness, yet I don't think it should be the best part.  The person I saw it with had assumed it was going to be about E. Paiva's sublimation of her grief into her later significant work, but it's not (I did not even understand she became a crusading lawyer till the closing title cards told me so, I thought she was just a teacher*).  I had fewer preconceptions, then, but from what I'd absorbed I thought it was going to be how the family just, you know, dealt with the big gaping wound that'd been torn in their side, both as a matter of emotions and practical logistics, a procedural regarding what you do when your husband is vanished by a fascist state, and it's not really that either, or if it is it's only that intermittently.  It's almost an anti-procedural, and in some respects an anti-story—it's important history but, again, that doesn't necessarily translate into interesting narrative—regarding how characters, though by that I mean almost exclusively just E. Paiva, whose circumstances dictate they will be completely inactive throughout, are drip-fed information that they by and large can't do anything with, and this is what tends to constitute the content of this narrative rather than anything chewier.  (It's kind of why I want to say "Paiva" rather than "Eunice" because I don't really feel I know her personally despite spending two and a half hours with a character by that name in an intimately-drawn movie.)  There's a strange scene with a left-leaning magazine doing a photo spread on the victimized Paivas, some substantial time after their father's disappearance, where they are told they shouldn't smile because obviously the presentation would be undermined by a happy family; and I'll accept the Paivas being even momentarily baffled by this request as an excuse to get to what the movie's doing with the stalled-out emotions of a tragedy they have already come to terms with.  But maybe that shouldn't have arrived immediately subsequent a scene, with no sense of actual time passing between them, where they are tremendously sad, because there's just not the organic sense I was looking for of that wound healing (or maybe just scarring), despite this being what I perceive the movie to "be about."

That's not terrible, at least, though it's not much coming at a glacial pace, mostly thanks to Torres binding it together—she's good, as E. Paiva, even if it is a bummer that this rather long movie still feels like it has only fractions of other characters and not even the whole of her character, and she can frankly get a little too technical with her performance (she and director Walter Salles are so proud of her adrenal shaking when she gets arrested that they do an encore for a scene with a hugely different valence that doesn't benefit from it).  But it burns what goodwill it had on something like a solid half hour (maybe more) of epilogue, the first of which is fine, albeit stretched, and you may visualize me tapping my imaginary watch.  The second one is actively squirmy.  Both are a little unintentionally funny.  When the second one hits, my first thought was Mike Nelson saying "seven years later" at the advent of every other scene transition in The Final Sacrifice, but that's not even the part that's accidentally funny.  The first time jump covers twenty years, and the aging that the extremely beautiful but mature Torres has done over these two decades is get a itty-bitty bit of gray in her front locks (that's this movie's idea of "plus twenty years," as one of the daughters gets it too); and okay, it's a movie, but in the second they replace her with Torres's own actual mom (Fernanda Montenegro, an apparent big deal Brazilian actress herself), made-up to appear even older than she is, so she looks a thousand years older than Torres, and it feels like the movie slipped on a banana peel for a second epilogue that mostly exists to provide the highly valuable story information that (I hope you're writing this down) people who were middle-aged in the 1970s, who hadn't died, had actually gotten quite old by the 2010s.

I am forced to wonder what this screenplay could've done with those thirty extra minutes if they'd applied them to the actual movie part of this movie.

Score: 5/10

*The poster I'm using here is a bit of a tell, too.  These aren't even the important children, until the epilogues, when they're the only important children, maybe sometimes light fictionalization for the needs of a motion picture is okay.

**This is my fault, but professions are sometimes hard to parse here.  I remain fucking bewildered by the guy in charge of Ruben Paiva's disappearance—the one cosplaying as Stanley Kubrick—identifying himself as "a parapsychologist."  This must mean something much different in Portuguese, that got transliterated rather than translated, because this is only Ghost Dad in the most metaphorical sense.

HIT MAN

I do not know quite what to do with Hit Man, except to mentally fix its title typography.  Nevertheless, it's my favorite Linklater I've seen in a good while (since Before Midnight, in fact, though I have not been religious about the director).  I recall some high-flying discussion from its boosters that it would've been the Savior of Cinema this past summer if Netflix had let it be (I mean, it does seem to have gotten some kind of theatrical release, presumably undercut by a simultaneous streaming debut), and I can absolutely see how you'd come out of it buzzing: it is the rare movie that basically only gets better as it goes along, and the kind of comedy where its most laugh-out-loud funny joke is its very, very last atom of material (that joke being the closing title card), and it's crowd-pleasing in all kinds of ways (it is, to be sure, an inestimably better showcase for its male lead, Glen Powell, than Twisters was).

And I know nobody even really cares about this anymore but... it can be bothersomely boring to look at.  That's not exactly the same as looking bad, though I might go as far to say it is edited noticeably poorly sometimes: besides a metric fuckton of really mechanistic shot-reverse shot in the early going that kind of actively aggravated me, the introduction of its female lead, Adria Arjona, is so fucking bizarre I assume it was intentional, this complete "normal" out on the street that's buffered by a pretty needless insert of signage followed by a romanticist giacometti blow-out of her backlit figure entering a restaurant to meet Powell, and I'd love to get ahead of myself and say "this sure seems like an example of the movie being more intellectual than even is maybe even good for it"—lo! you have now entered the fantasy at the heart of this romantic comedy!—but it would be nicer if the technique weren't so thuddingly awkward, and also that this were not the only time the visuals even do something expressionistic like that, so that I could be more confident in saying Linklater and/or editor Sandra Adair really did do it that way on purpose.  Because for the vast majority of this movie about its protagonist's aesthetic, and how his aesthetic presentation bends not only his identity but the whole world around him in a way better-suited to his needs, Linklater and Adair and cinematographer Shane F. Kelly—hell, composer Graham Reynolds, for all he contributed a noticeable score—all seem to have gotten together before production and agreed that since they were making a movie for Netflix, nobody's even going to be looking at it because they're on their cellphones, so there was no need to tax themselves much at all, and it could be a radio drama with moving image illustrations, and the latter mostly just in case the audience happened to occasionally glance up.  So besides the shot I just mentioned, I think there's literally only one other composition, a good hour and a half later (involving a fellow with a bag on his head, but you probably knew exactly what I meant if you've seen it because there's no competition), that is built in any particularly interesting way and while I'm pleasantly surprised to find I'm not angry at how much the movie cost, it still doesn't really feel like it should've cost so much as $9 million.  I am not entirely sure, but I don't think it manages a two-shot before the forty minute mark, and it's not exactly a creative one, though at least it had actors visibly acting together.  On the plus side, the color grading is pretty okay, poppy and warm.

Also on the plus side, this is a lot of fun and, as noted, steadily improves.  It is, I think, uniformly better at being a neo-noir romantic thriller than it is a comedy: everything signposted as "funny" (Sanjay Rao and Retta as a pair of shtick-spewing cop handlers, the costume changes on Powell that the premise requires) is maybe only merely tolerable, and there's a distinct feeling of spinning wheels whenever we have to revisit with Powell's fake hitman's adventures, because they're not adventures, they're just the same scene of Powell playing dress-up over and over again, only with different costumes (eventually some very silly ones), so repetitive that it feels like the movie is straight leaving a scene that's been practically laid out for it by the scenario (that is, a scene of a contract meeting actually gone bad) on the table and for no earthly reason, except, again, that nobody wanted to exert themselves much in manufacturing this.

But, man, once it finally gets to its much more darkly comedic neo-noir situation ("fake hitman and entrapment specialist steers a chick away from murder instead, because her desire to kill her abusive husband is sympathetic, and more importantly he'd like to fuck her, so at her invitation he does so, and it turns out she really gets off on the idea of being with a murderer, and may also have learned how to properly murder people from him"), it's very good at that, because it's good at being funny obliquely now.  There is, perhaps needless to say, some pretty freakish kink operating just under the surface of the story, but the story itself is very obviously aware of it, and that's one way it's funny—continually poking a pontificating moral philosopher nerd who's pretending to be a Gribblesque soldier of fortune to remind him how fraught all of it is, whilst Powell responds to this confrontation, almost as a function of his movie starness, "well, maybe that's bad generally, but when I do it, it's probably good."  It's why it's honestly weird that the movie itself is so autopiloted, because Linklater and Powell's script is really interesting, to the point it's frankly risking its own dysfunction.  For one thing, there's just the matter of how obvious it is, if you think about it, that Gary Johnson, the fact-based inspiration for the movie character Powell's playing, had his adventures long, long before the Internet was a household fixture, yet this movie takes place square in the 2020s where his usability as a fake hitman in literally dozens of cases comes off ridiculously implausible; or consider his day job as a professor, I believe a professor of Dead Poetsology; or consider how the plot doesn't work if someone just says "or we could get a warrant for her phone records"; or consider Gary's baseline personality, which is "Glen Powell wears glasses and combs his hair differently, and is therefore an immense geek," complete with a voice that's an annoyingly twerpy and hugely blatant put-on.

It's shockingly fucking phony, but then I also spent a substantial part of the movie almost just wishing this guy were an actual hitman, and he was actually just fucking his very-willing client; so in fact it's doing its job well, pursuing a fascinating (and not too-overbearing) metanarrative about movies as fantasy constructs and relationships as fantasy constructs and even personalities as fantasy constructs, mostly as a means of emphasizing that it's fun to have fun and cool to be cool, but maybe an important survival skill, too, when the shit really hits the fan—while also continually reminding us of the ethics of it all, since while only the world's dreariest person would bother problematizing it if the movie were "actual hitman, actual client," the diegetic phoniness of the movie triggers you to treat it as real deception, and real perversion, rather than a normal movie's pure expression of fantasy.  I don't know if it ultimately has a coherent thesis about any of this (it's how the phrase "more intellectual than is maybe even good for it" popped into my mind), and I'm not sure that we're even supposed to ask the question if Arjona's Madison is fooling herself with her hitman beau out of blinding desire for an excitingly-bloodstained white knight; but, still, I'd rather it be incompletely smart than stupid all over, and "there's all sorts of potential in people you might not readily imagine" is enough of a thesis to get by.  Besides, at bottom it knows the side its bread is buttered on is the fantasy anyway, and it banks on the enjoyability of watching Powell and Arjona be pretty electric in combination.  I probably could go higher on the score, and certainly considered it, but not today.

I would be remiss, however, not to mention that Powell's fairly frequent voiceover narration in Gary's geek voice will, dollars to donuts, start to get on your nerves.

Score: 7/10