Is Lydia Tár the New Black Panther?
Better Than Vertigo. Decision to Leave (2022. Written by Park Chan-wook and Jeong Seo-kyeong. 138 minutes) When the reviews began piling up for this new Korean film, I was intrigued…
Better Than Vertigo.
Decision to Leave (2022. Written by Park Chan-wook and Jeong Seo-kyeong. 138 minutes)
When the reviews began piling up for this new Korean film, I was intrigued by the fact that most of them mention Charles Bennett’s Fat Little English Friend’s Vertigo (1958). I had not liked Vertigo when I first saw it in 1958, and I have liked it less each of the few times I have seen it since. If you see it with a crowd of Hitchcock devotees, you might think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. See it with a regular audience and I can tell you the minute the picture loses the audience: when James Stewart rescues Kim Novak from San Francisco Bay and SHE STILL HAS HER SHOES ON!
My problem with Vertigo has always been that we learn nothing about the character Kim Novak plays. What does she think about all this? What does she do about all this? Kim Novak is wonderful in many of her movies (watch the male audience to Picnic [1955] sweat blood when she dances), but this is her worst performance because the script gives her nothing to do, nor does Hitchcock in his direction.
For years I have been telling my screenwriter friends that they should remake Vertigo but from the woman’s point of view. None of them have done it, probably because I did point out to them that while you could make that movie, you could not get it made because somewhere along the line you would run into a male executive who would insist on changing it back into the man’s story.
To the best of my knowledge, neither Park Chan-wook (who also directed) and his co-writer ever heard me talk about remaking Vertigo, although I did have some students from Korea who may have passed it on to him. Decision to Leave is not literally a remake of Vertigo, but you can see why critics mention it. Detective Hae-joon is investigating the suspicious death of an older businessman. He either fell off a cliff or was pushed. Hae-joon is suspicious of the man’s widow Seo-rae. He is also attracted to her. The evidence against her piles up and he is torn. Then more evidence turns up that seems to prove her innocence. Now Hae-joon is really torn, since he is more or less happily married. He gives up Seo-rae and he and his wife move to another town. Guess who shows up in the new town. And that is all the plot you will get from me, but there is a lot more left.
What makes this different from, and better than, Vertigo is that the writers have given Seo-rae all kinds of things to play. We and Hae-joon think she is guilty, then he doesn’t, but we are not so sure. How does she feel about him…I mean really? We are as confused as he is, and we like him cannot take our eyes off her. She is played by Tang Wei in a wonderfully subtle, nuanced performance. Well, good screenwriting will give you good performances.
Return to Wakanda.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022. Screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole, story by Ryan Coogler. [From the comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, although that credit appeared in the first Black Panther film, it does not appear here. How quickly we have forgotten Stan Lee] ) 161 minutes)
One of the tricky aspects of writing a sequel is figuring out how much exposition of the first film you have to include and when. The degree of difficulty for this film is even higher than normal.
The star of the first film was Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa and boy, was he the STAR. Just as they were going into production of this film, Boseman died of the colon cancer he had been fighting for four years. So the script had to be completely reconceived. Like changing a tire on a car going 60 miles an hour. Coogler, who also directs both movies, and Cole have done a tricky job very well.
The script does not pretend T’Challa has never existed, or that he has gone to Hawaii on vacation. As the film opens he is sick and dying. Shuri, his little sister, whom you may remember I described in my review, which you can read here, as “a combination of a bratty kid sister and Q from the Bond movies,” has grown up and is working desperately on a cure for whatever ails him. She fails and T’Challa dies. So the characters get to mourn him and Boseman, and we do too. The writing of these opening scenes is so beautifully balanced that we do not feel our tears are being jerked.
T’Challa’s mom, Ramonda, takes over ruling Wakanda, and she has to deal with a serious foreign policy issue: the world has discovered the wonder miracle mineral vibranium, which supposedly exists only in Wakanda, and they want it. Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda gets to deliver a powerful speech to the U.N., which seems to have moved from New York to Geneva. Bassett is spectacular as always, although Ramonda is something of a one-note character. The role of Athena Grant, whom Bassett plays in the TV series 9-1-1, is written as a much richer and varied character, which gives Bassett more to work with than Ramonda.
By this time in the film, we have finished mourning T’Challa and are beginning to get into the plot. Somebody has detected vibranium somewhere other than Wakanda and the operation to recover it has been hijacked by a group of men who seem to live underwater. It is a spectacular action scene, if, like many other scenes in the movie, overlong, and it has some fun getting rid of one of the minor white supporting characters.
The underwater men live in an underwater country called Talokan, which introduces us to a totally new culture. This one is not based on African cultures, but on the Mayan culture that lived in Mexico. This is one of the freshest elements of the film, although I think more time is spent on the culture of Talokan than needs to be. It does enrich the film, however.
Shuri is sent to Boston to try to recruit the 19-year-old science whiz who has built the vibranium detector. We get a very conventional car chase and Shuri and Riri, the whiz are captured by the bad guys from Talokan. Shuri and Riri are taken to Talokan and no, I have no idea how they breathe there---or how the Talokans breathe that much in Boston, either. I have those kinds of problems with sci-fi movies all the time, which is why they are not my favorite genre. And if you think I am a grouch, you should have heard my late wife, a scientist, bitching about Fantastic Voyage (1966). That’s the one where a submarine is miniaturized and sent through the body to fix damage to a man’s brain. My wife complained, “That body part does not look like that! That’s not the right color of that organ! You can’t get there from there!”
We get a lot of the culture of Talokan and then Shuri and Riki escape. Namor, the super-macho king of Talokan, tries to get Wakanda to work with him to protect vibranium, but Ramonda refuses. There is an attack on Wakanda by Namor and then later a spectacular fight between the two kingdoms on and under the ocean.
I am not going to give you any more of the plot for two reasons. One is a lot of it involves “spoiler alert” material. The other one is that a lot of the details were not clear to me while watching the film. Very often so much is going on that we miss details. It was not clear that the potion Shuri uses to A) contact somebody from the beyond and B) make a particularly useful element of clothing was the same potion she was working on to save T'Challa at the beginning of the film. I learned a lot from the Wikipedia entry on the film about things that were not clear from the film itself.
I must admit I enjoyed the film a lot, especially the last battle, but I would have enjoyed the film a lot more if I knew what the hell was going on.
Sort of a Mess.
Tár (2022) Written by Todd Field. 158 minutes)
Tár has become a darling of the fall film festival circuit winning some awards (Cate Blanchett for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, deserved) and being nominated for others. It was nominated for Best Screenplay by one organization I will not embarrass by naming in public.
Gently put, the screenplay is a mess. But it is not an uninteresting mess, and the film made from it has many striking elements to it. I can see why film festivals love it.
The film starts out at a snail’s pace. We are introduced to Lydia Tár as she is interviewed on stage about her fabulous career as a classical music conductor, and we get a lot of exposition about her. Then get more long scenes, one in which she has lunch with a man whom I thought was her agent, and then I thought he was a fellow conductor, and looking back at Jason Chang’s review it turns out he is just an investor. This lack of precision about the secondary characters is an irritating flaw, especially since it can make the action very confusing if we do not know who we are watching with Lydia.
The first hour of the film is almost entirely a character study, with very little forward moment. There are details brought up which later turn out to have some significance, but it takes a while to get to that information. We do not get into plot or at least a plot-like substance, until the second hour of the film, and even then it is developed slowly.
Field and Blanchett have created a fascinating character and Blanchett runs with it, giving us her good and bad sides. We can’t not watch her, which makes the film work as well as it does. As much as we enjoy watching her, we are appalled at what she does to the people around her. So it is not surprising that she gets her comeuppance, and probably not surprising that it comes in a variety of ways.
If the first two hours of the film are slower than we might like, the last twenty minutes, showing what happens to Lydia after the poop hits the fan is much too fast. I would have loved to get scenes at that point that are as nuanced and details as those in the first part of the film. But, to use Bette Davis’s last line in Now, Voyager (1942), “Don’t let’s ask for the moon! We have the stars!” Or, in this case, the star, Cate Blanchett at the top of her powers.
And Now a Real Mess.
Amsterdam (2022. Written by David O. Russell. 134 minutes)
This script is a real mess, in terms of narrative and especially tone. On a narrative level, it wanders all over the place, including scenes that make no sense being in this movie. The tone varies not only from scenes but within the shots themselves.
This film is also one of the best, or worst if you look at this way, an example of how a messy script can screw up the good actors who appear in the film. The three main characters are Burt (Christian Bale), a disfigured World War I veteran with a glass eye; Harold (John David Washington), a Black vet who is a lawyer; and Valerie (Margot Robbie), a nurse who treated Burt and Harold during the war and is now (1933) buddies with them. Bale plays Burt as though he were a character in the Thirties screwball farce, doing a lot of slapstick shtick with his glass eye. Robbie is playing it more or less straight, using her star power in smart ways as she usually does. Washington is a block of wood.
There is also a whole gallery of supporting actors, each one acting as though they were in a different movie. Toward the end, Russell brings up to a highly fictionalized version of a fascist plot to kill President Roosevelt and take over the country. Robert De Niro plays the general who reveals the plot at a meeting of veterans, and De Niro plays him as if De Niro thought he was in a straight historical recreation of the actual events.
Hmm. Fascists plot to take over the country by getting rid of the duly-elected president. Where have we heard that one before? Ah, yes, right now. Several critics have assumed that Russell wants us to think about Trump and his minions, but I am not sure he did. There is nothing in the writing or the acting that calls attention, either obviously or subtly, to anything connected to Trump.
An Odd Duck of a Movie.
Ticket to Paradise (2022. Written by Ol Parker & Daniel Pipski. 104 minutes)
If you have seen the trailer or even the film, you know it is being sold as a comedy. A long-divorced couple fly to Bali to keep their law-school grad daughter from marrying a guy she just met. Ah, in the grand tradition of the “divorce comedies” of the 1930s and 40s: The Awful Truth (1937), His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story (both 1940). There is, however, a big difference.
The earlier films had great comic dialogue. Just listen to one or all of them. The dialogue was sharp, edgy, and very funny. The dialogue in Ticket is none of the above. Oh, alright, it might be sharp, but it reads more like lines from a drama. Julia Roberts and George Clooney try to force the lines to be funny, but they just are not. So it is not surprising that the two stars are better in the few dramatic scenes since they can play the scenes straight.
Oddly enough, Kaitlyn Dever, who plays the daughter finds the right tone and is more interesting to watch, and listen to, than the two stars. Look at her with the knife in the wedding scene.
Another related problem is that in the earlier divorce movies, the husband and wife are written so we know they will get together in the end. So much time in Ticket is spent on the two being nasty to each other that you are not sure they ought to get married again. Their last act is funny and sort of romantic, but the writers missed a great opportunity to show what I guess would have been the other people’s horrified reactions to it.
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Tom Stempel is a Professor Emeritus at Los Angeles City College, where he taught film history and screenwriting from 1971 to 2011. He has written six books on film, five of them about screen and television writing. You can learn more about his books here. His 2008 book Understanding Screenwriting: Learning from Good, Not-Quite-So- Good, and Bad Screenplays evolved into this column. The column first appeared in 2008 at the blog The House Next Door, then at Slant, and then Creative Screenwriting before it found its forever home at Script.
In the column he reviews movies and television from the standpoint of screenwriting. He looks at new movies, old movies, and television movies and shows, as well as writing occasional other items, such as appreciations of screenwriters who have passed away, plays based on films, books on screenwriting and screenwriters, and other sundries.
In September 2023 Tom Stempel was awarded the inaugural Lifetime Achievement in the Service of Screenwriting Research by the international organization the Screenwriting Research Network.
