Capital Projections: Being alive edition
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting arthouse and repertory screenings in the coming week.
MARRIAGE STORY
Is it a spoiler to warn viewers that a character unexpectedly bursting into song is likely to leave them an emotional wreck? The new drama from writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) is such a tearjerker that at the screening I attended, staff handed out branded tissues. You’ll need them. Inspired by Baumbach’s own failed marriage to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, which ended in divorce in 2010, the film plays out in the rarefied milieu of Manhattan’s creative class. Yet even if the lifestyle of entertainment professionals is well beyond your experience, this broken family will break your heart.
Marriage Story chronicles a union that — much like Baumbach’s with Leigh, who starred in his 2007 film Margot at the Wedding — was made for the sake of art as much as love. Charlie (Adam Driver) is a New York theater director who specializes in avant-garde provocations that just barely pay the bills. His wife and leading actress Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) gave up her native Los Angeles and a floundering movie career to make something more challenging with her husband, and their creative output includes Henry (Azhy Robertson), their 8-year-old son. We meet the family in a breezy falling-in-love montage that recalls a happiness long gone; as the narrative unfolds in the present day, Charlie and Nicole are sitting across from each other on the subway, not speaking to each other, and pondering the next move in their divorce.
The process is excruciating. While the couple at first agrees to part amicably, things rapidly get ugly, especially when a series of lawyers (Laura Dern, Ray Liotta and Alan Alda) become involved, each setting a very different tone for the legal conflict. Yes, the plot summary may seem like little more than Family Melodrama 101. But Baumbach invests this personal tale with so many perfectly crafted details and gestures that — despite his focus on privileged characters who, thanks to some fortuitous windfalls, can afford to throw thousands at so-called “family” lawyers — chances are something will resonate with your personal experience.
This is a far cry from the indulgence of such critical darlings as Baumbach’s 2012 Frances Ha, which seemed populated with spoiled, insufferable characters, including Adam Driver’s obnoxious Lev. But here Driver hits every note just right as he conveys all of Charlie’s flaws and heartaches, which reach their peak in a singing performance that alone should earn him an Oscar. Spoiler alert: Soon after we witness a brutal, screams-turning-into-tears fight between Charlie and Nicole, the action turns to the director at an after-theater gathering with his colleagues at a piano bar. When the pianist begins a familiar tune, Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive,” Charlie starts to sing. It turns out, this popular showstopper captures everything the avant-garde artist has been going through with his marriage, and it just floored me. I suspect that, even if you know it’s coming, you’ll have trouble keeping a dry eye yourself.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Nov. 15, at E Street Landmark Cinema. $12.75.
THE WARRIOR QUEEN OF JHANSI
British Army officer Sir Hugh Rose famously described the subject of this historical adventure as “an Indian Joan of Arc.” For the most part, however, her thrilling life story falls flat on screen. The film is set in 1850s India, where Rani Lakshmibai (Devika Bhise) rules the city of Jhansi with her husband, Gangadhar Rao (Milind Ginaji). But after her husband dies, the British East India Co., whose proprietors built their fortunes on trading routes in the region, stakes a claim to annex Jhansi. Rani sees no choice but to lead a mutiny.
This is the first feature from director Swati Bhise, who was trained in classical dance and founded a nonprofit that promotes Indian culture. Her film’s strongest sequences display the vivid pageantry of 19th-century Indian life. But the script, which Bhise co-wrote with her daughter and star Devika, is weighed down by some heavy-handed fortune telling. Queen Victoria (Jodhi May), furious with the brutality shown by British troops while fighting the Jhansi rebels, laments that “the Empire’s reputation will be tainted for centuries!” Worse, Sir Hugh Rose (a hammy Rupert Everett) chides the sadistic Sir Robert Hamilton (an equally hammy Nathaniel Parker) with one of the most egregious cliches of historical drama: “Times are changing, Robert! It would do you good to keep up.” The Warrior Queen of Jhansi tells a story worth hearing; I just wish it were told better.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Nov. 15, at Regal Majestic, Regal Potomac Yard, Regal Ballston and AMC Hoffman. $12.99 to $14.93.
SCANDALOUS: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER
Respectable, unbiased journalism too often seems like a relic of the past, and, in an entertaining new documentary, no less than Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein blames the National Enquirer. Director Mark Landsman (whose 2010 doc Thunder Soul profiled a Houston high school’s successful jazz band program) chronicles the history of the infamous tabloid. Its very origins are seedy, the paper having emerged from a failed New York broadsheet purchased in 1953 by Generoso Pope Jr., allegedly with support from the mafia.
From its early days of gory crime photos to its ingenious placement at supermarket checkout stands, the Enquirer represented the lowest rung on the journalistic ladder. Yet even detractors can acknowledge the paper had a number of aggressive reporters (at first pulled from British tabloids whose staffs were more ruthless than their American counterparts) whose persistence produced results, albeit of a frequently sordid variety. Overshadowing those stories, however, are the sensationalistic, alien-abduction, Elvis-is-alive type items that one associates with the national tabloids. It’s so easy to assume that Enquirer articles are complete fiction that, even when you learn the story behind the paper’s front-page image of Elvis Presley in his coffin, you may still think it looks fake.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the reputation for sex, lies and newsprint, the Enquirer’s dogged, unscrupulous staff would more than once scoop the mainstream press on a story deemed legitimate news. (Think of a political sex scandal from the past 20 years, and chances are the Enquirer got there first.) Does that make the paper, and the movie about it, a moral and aesthetic good? Of course not. But in its survey of a half-century’s worth of gossip, Scandalous is a juicy and sobering 90 minutes.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Nov. 15, at Landmark West End Cinema. $12.50.
A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY
The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center continues its series Taiwan Cinema Rediscovered with director Edward Yang’s 1991 epic about a ’60s teenager’s fall from grace. Chang Cheng, who would later star in films by such masters as Wong Kar-Wai and Hsiao-Hsien Hou, plays Xiao Si’r, a disaffected youth who goes to a strict school but hangs out with gangsters and sings in a rock ‘n’ roll band at night. The movie is four hours long, but don’t let that deter you from seeing what is considered Yang’s masterpiece. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott describes it as “a crowded, complex crime story that is also a tale of sexual awakening and an understated exercise in kitchen-sink realism. In short — or rather at mesmerizing, necessary length — this film has everything, and is well worth a day of your life.”
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, Nov. 17, at the AFi SIlver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW
As if holding up a mirror to Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, this bittersweet drama from 1937 warns of the potential downsides to a long, loving relationship: ungrateful children. Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore star as an elderly couple who have been married for 50 years. When they lose their house to foreclosure, they hope that one of their five adult children will step up to help. But none of their offspring are willing to take them in. Prolific director Leo McCarey is best known for screwball comedies like The Awful Truth, which won him a Best Director Oscar the same year Make Way for Tomorrow was made. As director/film historian Peter Bogadonavich tells it, McCarey admonished the Academy, “You gave it to me for the wrong picture.” With a plot that directly inspired Yasuhiro Ozu’s 1953 masterpiece Tokyo Story, this may be McCarey’s best film. The Library of Congress (disclosure: I work there, but didn’t program this film) will be screening a 35-mm print. Bring tissues — if you have any left over from the Baumbach film.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, Nov. 21, at 7 p.m. at the Mary Pickford Theatre on the third floor of the Madison Building of the Library of Congress. Free. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
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