Argylle

 

Score:  C-/D+

Directed by

Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Henry Cavill

Running time: 139 minutes

Rated PG-13

Long Story Short:  Argylle is the latest from acclaimed action fantasy director Matthew Vaughn, but it lands with a thud.  Ignore the trailers - this is simply a bewildering yet boring adventure led by two unappealing characters.  It seems like it's written by AI, smashing all the successful genre movies it can into one, with absolutely no original or interesting things to say.  Avoid, both at theaters and at home on streaming.

Elly (Howard) is an international best-selling author, releasing tense spy thrillers that captivate her readers.  As she struggles to finish her current series of novels starring agent Argylle (Cavill), Elly is attacked on a train.  Fortunately, a real-life - if much scruffier than Argylle - agent named Aidan (Rockwell) comes to her rescue.  Aidan tells her that as entertaining as her writing may be, it also is surprisingly accurate about actual events - and the bad guys want her information.  So the two go on the run together across the world, and Elly finds that there is much more to herself - not just her writing - than she realizes.

Argylle is one of the most derivative, poorly written and performed movies I've seen in awhile; it has a small amount of entertainment value, but that is far overshadowed by its poor quality and ridiculous length.  Matthew Vaughn has made some of my favorite recent-ish action movies (Kick-Ass, Kingsman, X-Men First Class) and this seemed to be in the same mold.  Well, the first warning sign is that the trailers, which emphasize a glamorous if silly spy world, are very misleading.  Instead, we follow two dull, annoying characters in Howard's Elly and Rockwell's Aidan around the world.  There are so many "twists" that their changing relationship dynamics make your head spin, from one stereotype to the next.  The actors are given terrible lines, but they also do nothing to elevate the material.  I know Rockwell can do well, but he clearly phones this in; I've never seen a great performance from Howard (not that she hasn't done one) so I'm unsure if she was not well cast or just not good.  The other good actors (Cranston, Jackson, O'Hara) are also clearly in this for the pay checks.  The plot is completely incomprehensible (I gave up after probably ten minutes), and the style is just a mash up of contemporary "heightened" action cliches - some of which Vaughn self-plagiarizes.  The action is also dull and derivative, and falls to ludicrous lows in the finale.  What can I say that's good?  Well, the cat Elly drags around is occasionally amusing - it's one thing in the movie that approaches clever or likable.

***

After some excellent Oscar-level drama in January, I was ready to dig back in to blockbuster action.  With Vaughn directing and some stylish trailers, Argylle looked like a great way to kick off 2024's movie season.  The result, unfortunately, was an utter disaster.  The one thing about it that heartens me is that, even though it was produced by one of the Big Tech companies - Apple - they still released it in theaters rather than just for streaming.  This is not a good movie to see anywhere, of course, but I'm nervous that as Big Tech takes over more film production, they (especially Netflix) are moving away from theaters.  Beyond that, part of my negative reaction to the movie may be that I'm just getting tired of the genre - though I still really enjoy good examples of it, like last year's John Wick 4.  Oh, well.  Considering that there is only one new Marvel superhero movie coming out this year, I think I will look for more variety in my theater-goings than usual.  Hopefully the next one I see is a lot better than Argylle, whatever the genre!

* By https://www.cinematerial.com/movies/argylle-i15009428/p/laqk5lhx, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71214151

American Fiction

 

Score:  A-

Directed by Cord Jefferson

Starring Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, Issa Rae

Running time: 117 minutes

Rated R

Long Story Short:  American Fiction is director Cord Jefferson's first film but it's a good one, portraying both the wild and the domestic events in the life of a Black writer.  A brilliant cast breathes life into both the writer's family world - siblings, declining mother, and more - and his unexpected evolution from unknown academic to sensational best-selling author.  It's a little uneven, but that's more than compensated for by the performances and its thoughtfulness.  Highly recommended. 

Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Wright) is a brilliant writer and teacher, but also a lonely and frustrated one.  Although his books receive literary praise, they don't sniff the best-seller lists, and he is asked to take a break from the university after his tension boils over in the classroom.  He returns to his hometown of Boston where he reconnects with siblings Lisa (Ellis) and Cliff (Brown) and his mother, Agnes (Uggams).  A sudden tragedy keeps Monk around longer than expected and, with large bills looming, grudgingly attempts a more popular writing style.  Monk feels both his personal and professional lives transforming rapidly and out of his control, and he'll have to choose what to fight - and what to accept.

American Fiction is a creative, well-made, and entertaining drama, though some dissonance in the film's tone and themes holds it back a little.  The story is straightforward drama, refreshingly ordinary in some ways. While focused on Monk, the film keeps momentum by alternating (imperfectly; more on this later) between his very realistic family life and his extraordinary professional life.  The personal side is the film's strongest element.  Monk and his family are Black, but most details of their relationships and living conditions are standard American; race is not really relevant.  It's serious, complex drama, with genuine characters and dynamics and great interactions among Monk, Lisa, Cliff, Agnes, and more.  The acting is tremendous, with Brown's Cliff and Uggam's Agnes being scene stealers.  The professional side of the story is much different: Monk's academic writer borders on caricature, disdainful of the "lower" art that gets all the attention.  There is plenty of humor here and some outrageous scenes and twists; it's almost Judd Apatow-like at times.  With such different strands to blend, the ending is impressively cohesive.  Demonstrating life's messiness, it doesn't really resolve the personal or professional concerns. There's also some sly ambiguity, especially with the fate of Monk's best-seller scheme gone awry.

American Fiction is multifaceted and keeps you thinking, but it falters a bit in its ambitious plans.  The significant difference in tone between Monk's personal and professional lives can be jarring.  While it's good to have variety, this back-and-forth also dampens the effectiveness of each side.  It makes sense to have humor and even some shock value as Monk awkwardly tries to pivot from his scholarly ambition to a pragmatic but unpleasant (to him) pop style.  It's also good to expose the hypocrisy and absurdity of white people's embrace - yet condescension - of black culture and artists.  But the movie didn't have to be so hyperbolic to achieve this, I feel, and so it missed out on a more cutting edge it could have provided.  It is certainly still (cringingly) funny, though.

American Fiction is not trying to perfectly mirror today's cultural/artistic world, but it's close enough that the differences are disorienting.  Black Ebonics and 'hood life books are both best-sellers and critically praised here.  Monk loathes this not just because he feels his (and similar) works are superior art but because the best-sellers simply cater to pandering white expectations of stereotypical Black culture.  Monk believes - rightly - that Black culture is both much richer and more varied.  I agree with Monk, even though, as he acknowledges, there is also obviously value in communicating genuine Black experiences of poverty, violence, discrimination, too.  So the movie makes literary culture into kind of a "straw man": but in real life, there is plenty of excellent, rich literature by Black writers that is both popular and deservingly lauded by critics.  There's some use to critiquing Black and other cultural "trauma porn" but I wish American Fiction had gone further, even if only briefly, to highlight the bigger problem: that white America feels content with supporting Black artists and expressing guilt, but is not willing to take substantive action to support Black communities through voting rights, economic and educational opportunity, and so on.  But maybe that's for a different movie.

***

Two weeks in a row now my local theater has played Oscar Best Picture nominees - a great treat for a dreary January!  I had heard little of American Fiction before, other than seeing it get rave reviews in an issue of The Week (aside: that is an excellent news digest magazine, I highly recommend it!).  It's a return to great movies from Black filmmakers that were so prevalent in the mid-2010s but seemed to peter out a bit in recent years.  In that way, American Fiction is a little "meta" in its story, and while I don't think it did so perfectly, it's important that it continues the discussion.  So I hope that you get a chance to see this in a theater, too, as Oscar season continues to count down to the March 10 ceremony.  Until next time!

* By http://www.impawards.com/2023/american_fiction_ver2_xxlg.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75101757