Christopher Schroeder

Category: reviews

  • Unto Ourselves?

    The movie Islands, which was written by Jan-Ole Gerster, Blaž Kutin, and Lawrie Doran, is an engaging exploration of appearance, reality, and aloneness that never quite coalesces into clear conclusions.

    Tom (Sam Riley), a former tennis pro and current resort coach, has an apparently ideal life at least to Canary Islands tourists. The sun is constant, his obligations are limited, and even these can be avoided when he wants. Nevertheless, he suspects that something is missing, especially when a local family, with whom he has become friends, announces their imminent retirement, and return to their former homeland.

    Tom soon befriends a family on holiday, who also have their own needs. They’re struggling with infertility, and perhaps infidelity, and as a result questioning their choices, including their marriage. A second child seems to be Ann’s (Stacy Martin) answer, but her husband Dave (Jack Farthing) is less certain of what they’re doing and who they are.

    Tom agrees to escort Dave to a nearby club where he disappears. Any uncertainty Tom might have been feeling evaporates as he assists with the search for the missing husband, who had disclosed his suicidal intention to Ann. Tom later supplies a false, and unsolicited, alibi for, and subsequently has sex with, her.

    Dave, dehydrated and exhausted, is eventually found while swimming toward a volcano where he intended to throw himself over its crater. Tom and Ann have a moment in the hospital just before she returns to Dave’s side. Tom then returns to his previous life, and recreates a former moment of glory on the courts for the latest group of mouthy, boisterous tourists.

    There he passes out, and is found by Dave, who has brought the payment for his son Anton’s tennis lessons and some additional money for Tom’s efforts, including Dave tells him caring for his family. Tom in other words is still hired help whereas Dave, Ann, and their son are returning to their own lives.

    Audiences are to be attracted to Tom’s experience, which has the outward appearance of Eden or heaven. The sun is constantly shining. His responsibilities are minimal, especially when he can eat and stay at the resort when he wants. He has a constant churn of female companionship and court-mates.

    This movie succeeds as a psychological thriller, and also explores an almost palpable loneliness in all of their lives. Moreover, it suggests that Tom’s desperation isn’t as much malicious as perhaps opportunistic, which makes it all the more poignant.

    The ambiguity almost seems borderline excessive, but the only obviously false moment is the conclusion. Tom back in his own apartment is eating the cereal he purchased for Anton when he swipes his wallet and keys and then races to the airport. Once there, he asks if he can still purchase a ticket, which he can, and then is asked to where.

    Perhaps he intends to follow this family although that seems less likely than the possibility that he could be fleeing from his unsatisfying life. The details however are wrong. He seems not to have a passport for example perhaps because he in his haste left it at home.

    The bigger problem is the emotional resources he will need to leave. Are audiences to think that he is ultimately incapable of escaping as his camel-farm friends did? Or that Tom has acted rashly again?

    Even his front desk friend has had enough of his shenanigans. Has he learned anything from escaping his self-manufactured legal jeopardy?

    Is his motivation even the point? Perhaps not, the title seems to suggest. Maybe all of us in contrast to the line from the John Donne poem are islands unto ourselves, and perhaps forever are so.

    That could be the conclusion of this movie. All the ambiguity while not ruining the experience unfortunately makes that unclear.

  • Plagued By Its Own Success

    The Plague, which was officially released on 24 December and nationally available soon thereafter, was good but could have been even better.

    This psychological thriller, which is set in a summer water polo camp, immerses audiences within teenage social dynamics. Ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin) and the other campers act as if Eli’s (Kenny Rasmussen) acne and rash are symptoms of a highly contagious disease that is transmitted through contact. Newcomer Ben (Everett Blunck) wants admission into this group yet increasingly objects to its exclusionary tactics, which has dangerous consequences.

    Author and director Charlie Polinger demonstrates the wisdom of writing what one knows. He reportedly found his old sports camp journals when his mother asked him to sort through the contents of his childhood bedroom where he had been quarantining from COVID ( < > ).

    Both inform his script and direction, which along with the lead performances, cinematography (Steven Breckon) and the score (Johan Lenox) establish an engaging experience for audiences as illustrated by an eleven-minute Cannes standing ovation. In the dark theater, I was transported almost immediately to those days, and remained simultaneously mired in this movie and that muck for most of the time.

    One such recollection included a brother whom I contacted later that night. I omitted this motivation in my message, but wouldn’t have thought of it, or reached out to him, if I hadn’t seen this movie although he never inquired about any of that.

    Nonetheless, I was occasionally distracted by the relative absence of adults except for the coach (Joel Edgerton), who was an unreliable role model. Other adults appeared in loudspeaker announcements in the school for example or the absent part of a phone conversation or were occasionally seen walking through the pool area or eating in the school cafeteria, and were cited in conversations but were otherwise mostly absent.

    The effect is an overpowering account of group dynamics that only relents near the end. Until that point, the movie has been a deep dive into the horrors of teenage group psychology, which is where many remain immersed. Nonetheless, the story seems to succumb to its own pressure almost as if the need to end it surprised its author.

    Perhaps the body-horror violence could be forgiven. Such violence had been foreshadowed, and at least seems potentially plausible. Neither could be said for Ben’s development.

    Ben ostensibly found a way despite challenging circumstances to jump into the deep end and as the coach (Daddy Wags?) advises just be himself. He returns to the coed dance and mimics Eli’s moves, and thus assumes his role. Ben is mostly ignored by the others, which shifts the focus from group dynamics to an individualized, and inconsistent, account.

    The significance is too ambiguous. What would, or could, motivate such a transformation? Or had Ben, who also has a rash, become Eli, and if so, is this rash, and the others’ reactions, symbolize a physical and emotional contagion?

    These unanswered question rather than deepening this experience only made it murkier, which was a disappointing way to end, and leave, this otherwise engaging, and ultimately worthwhile, experience.

  • Half-Way Is Enough?

    I agree with others who assert that Hamnet is a moving movie but wonder whether it works as a story.

    This movie, which offers an account of Shakespeare’s family play, focuses on his wife Agnes (Anne). As such, it becomes in this adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel by Chloé Zhao and O’Farrell a story about the passion between a reputed forest witch who is alienated from her foster family and a Latin tutor who is repaying his father’s debt.

    Agnes (Jessie Buckley) later refuses to join Will (Paul Mescal) in London where she convinced him with her brother’s help to go because she fears for the health of their twin daughter Judith. However, their other twin Hamnet is the one who dies before Will can return, and her grief is compounded when Will returns to London where he develops a different play, which Agnes eventually recognizes as an account of their shared yet different sorrow, and a testament to Will’s love for her.

    Such a movie — artists whose work matters more, children who die — usually bores me, but this one has several moving scenes that brought me back to my own relationships, which the best stories often do. Moreover, its direction (Zhao) combines with compelling cinematography (Łukasz Żal) and powerful lead performances to establish an almost mystical mood, and an intoxicating joy, that makes their loss, and its threat to their marriage, all the more moving.

    I am most interested in this depiction of the connection that can exist between married couples, and thought it is a compelling corrective to the account of Will’s and Anne’s (Agnes’s) marriage that I had been given in grad school. Little about their lives if memory serves is reliably know, so this fictionalized account is as good in my opinion as any other. Moreover, it refocuses the attention afforded this canonical author, which I’ve never understood, on the relationships that could have sustained and inspired him, and as such serves as a reminder of their significance.

    Regardless, I think this movie flirts with melodrama — Agnes inspires both the author of this play and the audience at its premiere — but never makes good on such suggestions until its end. Agnes initially suspects that her son’s memory is being exploited by his father, and her husband, but later realizes that it’s a tribune to his life and their grief.

    Agnes is so entranced at its conclusion in part because she discovers that her ability to see visions has been restored. She actually can see her son leave this world and moved into the next one, and she reaches for the hand of the actor who plays Hamlet, and in so doing motivates the entire audience to reach out to him.

    That is a powerful scene but also the place where this story unravels at least for me. Will’s motivation while ambiguous is presumably his own existential questions, and that in this account informs Hamlet’s family soliloquy yet never reaches a plausible resolution.

    The betrayed in Will’s new play are the son (Hamlet) and his father (King Hamlet), and the betrayer is his mother and the wife (Gertrude). In contrast, Will cannot completely be the betrayer after he was encouraged by Agnes earlier in the movie to establish a London life, and yet Agnes hasn’t quite betrayed Will by insisting upon what she as a mother thinks is best for their sickly twin daughter Judith.

    That bothers me more than the misrepresentation of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, which seems more complicated than the simple contemplation of an existential question that is widely regarded to be. In contrast, I think it’s more a consideration of contingency and chance, and the difficulty in such conditions of defining duty, but such complexity is lost in the oversimplified suggestions of this movie.

    Perhaps in the end such scrutiny is unwarranted, and unnecessary. Without it, this movie is the story of a lost woman who finds acceptance and love in someone who would become one of the most famous people in the history of humanity. Who wouldn’t want such romance, especially at this time of the year?