Though he doesn’t make films for children, few filmmakers have dedicated themselves more assiduously to depicting children than Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. There have been exceptions (like After Life, Air Doll, and The Third Murder), but even his features firmly focused on adult characters tend to pivot around parent-child issues, while several including Nobody Knows and I Wish have been entirely from children’s viewpoints. The very best of his movies, such as Still Walking or Like Father, Like Son, have wrenching insight into the painful side of family bonds, and earn their tears en route to happy endings without recourse to melodrama or easy sentimentality.
His sixteenth feature Monster treads on familiar ground in a sense, in that it again spotlights discordant relationships between kids and grownups (as well as within those groups). But the screenplay by Yuji Sakamoto, in a first collaboration with this director, takes a more structurally tricky approach than usual for Kore-eda. It’s the kind of “reviewing events through several different perspectives” conceit that inevitably recalls Rashomon, the Kurosawa classic that first pushed Japanese cinema to international attention over 70 years ago.
In a small town, Saori (Sakura Ando) and son Minato (Soya Kurokawa) are celebrating—if that’s the right word—the late husband-father’s birthday, as part of their coping with his still-fairly-recent death. But fifth grader Minato obviously isn’t coping well, demonstrating some erratic, alarming behavior. She suspects this has something to do with his hitherto beloved young teacher, Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), who may have called him the titular term, and even hit him. The widowed mother is furious, her outrage only increasing when school officials (including Yuko Tanaka as a principal sunk in her own fresh domestic mourning) simply recite formal apologetic platitudes rather than answering direct questions about just what exactly happened. Worse still, Mr. Hori isn’t fired—and he seems to treat the whole thing as a sort of joke.
But after about forty-five minutes, these events get replayed from his view, which is privy to scenes and intel mom didn’t witness—and which he is constrained from telling her about. What he saw suggested Minato was in fact bullying his friend, easily pushed-around classmate Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), among other misbehaviors. When Minato got “hit” by his teacher, it was an accident in the midst of restraining the child during a wild outburst.
But that isn’t the last or defining perspective on offer here, either—it requires yet more retellings of the same events before we begin to grasp the true complexity of what each central figure only partially glimpsed.
This is the first time Kore-eda hasn’t written his own script since 1995 debut feature Maborosi. While the puzzle-like structure here certainly lends an element of intrigue, Monster’s screenplay also has coded into its DNA the very things this director has hitherto avoided—overt sentimentality and melodrama. Too much of the plotting revolves around contrived misunderstandings; the real fault for things turns out to rest on under-explored minor characters, leaving our principal ones as victims pure as driven snow. Speaking of inclement weather, the story doesn’t shrink from providing a climax in which high winds, a driving rainstorm, and frantic adults searching the wilderness for missing children goose viewer emotions.
Needless to say, Kore-eda employs all this as tastefully as possible, handling actors across the age gamut with his usual care. (A surprising deficit, however, is the treacly piano score by the recently deceased Ryuichi Sakamoto—this complicated tale could use underlining less sugary and more ambiguous.) But while Monster would be fairly impressive coming from lesser talents, its manipulative gist seems a bit beneath the standard of someone normally so attuned to psychological nuance. It’s not at all a bad movie, but neither is it good Kore-eda. Monster opens at local theaters including the Opera Plaza and Metreon this Fri/15.
Definitely intended for kids, and their minders, is the new Wonka—an “origin story” prequel to Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was previously filmed as a so-so 1971 musical with the inspired casting of Gene Wilder as chocolatier Willie W. That movie was something of an initial flop, only to become a beloved perennial in TV and other revivals. The opposite trajectory was traced by Tim Burton’s 2003 version, a big hit that quickly vanished from memory, its charmlessness heightened by a Wonka from Johnny Depp that found the actor’s bag of tricks emptied out.
I wasn’t at all excited by the notion of Timothée Chalamet as some kind of hot young Wonka—this performer’s teen-idol-ish appeal has eluded me, and so has any evidence of particular talent, save as the drug-addicted son in 2018 drama Beautiful Boy. In that film, at least, he wasn’t preening. But too often he seems to radiate the slightly vacuous self-confidence of the boy who thinks he’s the cutest in class, and may be mistaken about that.
Wonka sure won’t change which side anyone stands on as far as its star goes—I found him lacking from the opening scene, as he sings from atop, then shimmies down a ship’s mast, convinced he’s got us in the palm of his hand. Never mind that his singing and dancing skills are pretty much on par with a decent high school musical performer’s, more a matter of “fake it till you make it” than any real skill. (In fact he reportedly didn’t have to audition for the role, getting it on the strength of videos from his actual high school musicals—not something I’d brag about, if I were this film’s producers.)
The fun but nonetheless slightly sinister edginess with which Dahl imbued the older Willie, and Wilder reveled in, is nowhere to be found here—this junior Wonka is just a male ingenue. He does magic tricks, but there’s no magic in him. Part of that is the fault of the script (by Paul King and Simon Farnaby), which is a real letdown. But most of it is due to Chalamet, who I guess is just a matter of taste I find lacking in much flavor at all.
You have to give Wonka credit for being an original screen musical, something fairly rare these days, as well as a pretty traditional one. If only it were also good. The songs by Neil Hannon, occasionally abetted by a reprise from Anthony Newley’s 1971 score, are weak stuff. Slave laborers toiling in a laundry-dungeon for their captors (Olivia Colman and Tom Davis) get nothing better than the dully repetitious “Scrub Scrub,” while elsewhere there are damp squibs like “A Hatful of Dreams” and “For a Moment” (“For a moment/Life doesn’t seem quite so bad/For a moment/I kind of forgot to be sad”). Yes, this is the sort of movie in which “dreams” are good, chocolate is magic (in fact it’s used more like a drug, with similar sedative or consciousness-altering effects), and that’s about the extent of the big ideas on hand.
The story has young Wonka arriving from an apprenticeship at sea to make his sweet-toothed fortune in a vaguely circa-1900, sorta London-meets-Paris town, only to discover a “chocolate cartel” is already in control. He’s already stumbled into the indentured servitude to wicked innkeepers noted above when he realizes further that the CEO trio of additional villains (Paterson Joseph, Matthew Baynton, Matt Lucas) will gladly rub out any potential competitor, with help from their heavily bribed—and as a result increasingly heavy-set—police chief (Keegan-Michael Key).
Chalamet has no chemistry with his new BFF, Calah Lane’s equally ill-fortuned “urchin” Noodle, and these candied corporate baddies are conceived in the laziest old-school way (i.e. played as snobbily kinda-gay), without a laugh between them. Ditto for the limply “zany” laundry crew. Even Hugh Grant as the only Oompa-Loompa this time around doesn’t get to bring much fun. The production is expensive without being especially imaginative, Wonka’s eventual Chocolate Factory wonderland less wondrous for being obviously CGI, and the production numbers seem designed mostly to disguise the star’s limitations by requiring little more than the odd kick or dance-ish posturing.
It’s all particularly disappointing because director Paul King made the monumental Paddington 2—plus perfectly nice Paddington, but never mind—the best live-action children’s movie for grownups since Hugo, only even better. (I am not alone in this: An entire running gag in last year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent rested on Pedro Pascal’s character trying to convince Nicolas Cage that the teddy bear sequel was actually among cinema’s great achievements.) If this film had had their genuine fantasy sweetness, let alone a number half as good as P2’s closing-credits showcase for Grant, its abandonment of most things Roahl Dahl-ian would be happily forgiven.
Still, one viewer’s yellow snow may be another’s banana Sno-Cone, and Wonka does seem to work for some, including a companion who “thoroughly enjoyed” it. I can’t imagine anyone levitating with joy in imitation of those onscreen who’ve digested the hero’s “Hoverchocs.” But anyone not averse to the charms of Timothée Chalamet, or over-loyal to those of Gene Wilder, may have the good time I very definitely didn’t. Wonka opens in theaters nationwide this Fri/15.
Prior, more barbed versions of Dahl’s story have no doubt scared as well as delighted generations of children. I’m pretty sure I was scared at a formative age by The Night of the Hunter, one of those old movies that got thrown onto a local TV channel’s afternoon broadcast slot with nary a care for its hair-raising content. (Admittedly, this wasn’t quite as traumatizing as running across the uncut Night of the Living Dead a few short years later.) Now actor Charles Laughton’s first and lamentably last directorial feature, a complete commercial dud in 1955 that’s been acclaimed ever since, is being shown as a matinee at the Alamo Drafthouse this Fri/15 (more info here). An opportunity to freak out any kids in your care with demonic Robert Mitchum on the big screen!
Night really is a sort of a children’s film, or rather nightmare. Adapted by the famed author James Agee from Davis Grubb’s novel, it’s the Grimmest of fairy tales, albeit filtered through a Southern Gothic sensibility. Shelley Winters plays Willa Harper, a naive widow whose husband (Peter Graves, well before Mission: Impossible and Airplane!) dies in prison, the whereabouts of the loot from a robbery unknown…at least to her.
Unfortunately, its existence is known to ex-con Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a purported Reverend with “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed on his knuckles. Let’s just say he doesn’t exactly do the Lord’s Work with either of them. A raging misogynist, he finds Willa easy to seduce into marriage—then to slut-shame and otherwise terrorize afterward. Unfortunately for them, her young children John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) do know where the money is hidden. Once mom is out of the picture (not in a nice way), the siblings must flee from their pseudo-gospel-spouting new “daddy,” who would gladly wring their little necks to access that filthy lucre. Mercifully, they gain a protector in the form of Rachel Cooper (silent film legend Lillian Gish), a saintly woman who takes in “stray” children.
In one of his greatest roles, Mitchum makes as indelible an impression as he would a few years later in the original Cape Fear—two similar sociopaths oozing both magnetism and menace, though this is the richer film. (Reportedly when the director pitched “Reverend” Harry to his star as a “diabolical shit,” the enthusiastic Mitchum answered “Present!”) The portrait of thoroughly corrupted evangelical hypocrisy that seemed shocking and bizarre during the Eisenhower era may play as a lot more credible (not to mention familiar) now. But despite the conventionality of its musical score and some other factors, what primarily distinguishes Night is director Laughton’s feel for storybook lyricism and Expressionist horror, as well as the vivid centrality of the children’s perspective. Night of the Hunter was also recently released on Blu-ray in a 4K scan from the original 35mm negative by Kino Lorber.
