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Review: ‘Wild Mountain Thyme,’ starring Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, Jon Hamm and Christopher Walken

December 11, 2020

by Carla Hay

Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt in “Wild Mountain Thyme” (Photo by Kerry Brown/Bleecker Street)

Directed by John Patrick Shanley

Culture Representation: Taking place in Ireland and in New York City, the romantic drama “Wild Mountain Thyme” has an all-white cast of characters representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Two oddball Irish farmers—one female and one male—have very different views of love and marriage, while the male famer’s rich American businessman cousin might be part of a love triangle for this would-be couple.

Culture Audience: “Wild Mountain Thyme” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching romantic movies that are pretentious and ridiculous.

Jon Hamm, Jamie Dornan and Christopher Walken in “Wild Mountain Thyme” (Photo by Kerry Brown/Bleecker Street)

The production notes for “Wild Mountain Thyme” describe the movie as a “comedic, moving and wildly romantic tale.” Comedic? The reality is that “Wild Mountain Thyme” is a drama with a lot of unintentionally so-bad-it’s-funny moments. Moving? This painfully dull movie doesn’t pour on the sentimental sap until the last 15 minutes of the film—and it does so in the corniest way possible. Wildly romantic? The characters in “Wild Mountain Thyme” are so dysfunctional and/or emotionally repressed that there’s almost no passionate romance in the film, and the characters spend most of the movie bickering about land ownership and who’s a legitimate farmer.

“Wild Mountain Thyme,” which takes place mostly in Ireland and partially in New York City, was written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, who adapted the movie from his 2014 Broadway play “Outside Mullingar.” Even though Shanley has won an Oscar (for writing 1987’s “Moonstruck”) and a Tony and a Pulitzer (for the play “Doubt: A Parable”), those prestigious awards don’t mean that someone is incapable of making an embarrassing stinker. “Wild Mountain Thyme” is an overly verbose story that ultimately doesn’t have much to say and should have remained on the stage, where pretentiously worded dialogue is expected and therefore much more palatable than it is for a movie audience.

“Wild Mountain Thyme” (which was filmed primarily in Mayo County, Ireland) gets its name because there are scenes in the movie where people sing “Wild Mountain Thyme” in a pub. The cinematic version of the story also greatly benefits from showcasing the lush and gorgeous landscape of rural Ireland. There’s no denying that the film’s cinematography by Stephen Goldblatt is one of the movie’s few high points.

But right from the start, the tone of “Wild Mountain Thyme” is off-kilter, by having a dead character as the movie’s intermittent guide/storyteller. There’s voiceover narration from Irish farmer Tony Reilly (played by Christopher Walken, doing his usual eccentric schtick) explaining how the would-be couple at the center of the story first came to know each other. Tony announces at the beginning of the narration that he’s dead, so people will know that they’re supposed to be hearing the voice of a ghost. Very morbid.

Tony says, “They say if an Irish man dies while telling a story, you can rest assured, he’ll be back.” This movie is so unimaginative that, sure enough, toward the end of the film, Tony’s voice comes back into the narration to repeat the same line. The narration is really unnecessary because Tony doesn’t provide any insight that isn’t already presented in the movie characters’ actions.

“Wild Mountain Thyme” producer Martina Nilan is quoted in the movie’s production notes as saying that “Wild Mountain Thyme” is “a timeless fable with a heightened fairy-tale tone.” However, the movie isn’t timeless and actually is very outdated with its old-fashioned views of strict gender roles for men and women when it comes to love and romance. Based on what the “Wild Mountain Thyme” characters say and how they act, they believe that women’s ultimate goal in life should be to get married and have children, and women have to wait until men make the first move in a courtship.

The movie also has the sexist notion that women who’ve never been married by a certain age have to be desperate to get married. “Wild Mountain Thyme” also pushes a narrative that a woman isn’t considered a “real woman” unless she wants to become a mother or is a mother. Meanwhile, men who’ve never been married and have no kids by a certain age might be considered “strange,” but they don’t have to be desperate to find a spouse.

It’s this moldy concept that stinks up the “will they or won’t they” relationship of Rosemary Muldoon (played by Emily Blunt) and Anthony Reilly (played by Jamie Dornan), two Irish farmers who embody the old-fashioned stereotypes of what usually happens in romantic dramas: The woman wants to be romanced by the man and be in a committed relationship with him that leads to marriage, while the man spends almost the entire story resisting. In other words, the man always has the “upper hand,” because he’s the one who decides if there will be a romantic relationship or not.

The movie sticks to this formula like patriarchal glue. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a story about falling in love and wanting to get married and have kids. But the way this story is told in “Wild Mountain Thyme” is extremely off-putting because the filmmakers want to pretend that it’s a feminist movie, when it’s just the opposite. For almost the entire movie, Rosemary mopes around and sulks because she’s waiting for Anthony to show a sign that he wants more than a platonic relationship.

As Anthony’s dead father Tony explains in the narration, Rosemary has been in love with Anthony since they were both 10 years old. (In flashbacks, Abigail Coburn plays a young Rosemary, while Darragh O’Kane plays a young Anthony.) The Reilly family and Muldoon family are farmers who live right next door to each other in rural Ireland, so the kids grew up knowing nothing but life on a farm.

The adult Rosemary and Anthony in this story are now in their late 30s. Because of Tony’s ghostly narration, this entire story is a flashback. Tony’s death and funeral are eventually shown in the movie.

The Muldoon family owns a strip of land that overlaps into the entrance of the Reilly family’s home. Tony tries in vain to get the Muldoon family to sell that strip of land to him. The questions over who owns this strip of land and who will inherit the entire Reilly family property are sources of contention throughout the story.

Anthony’s widower father Tony wants Anthony to inherit the farm. However, Tony is having doubts about his son’s ability to handle the responsibility because Anthony is an emotionally immature loner who doesn’t seem very smart about the business side of running the farm. Tony also disapproves of Anthony not showing any interest in getting married and having kids, while Anthony is extremely unwilling to become a husband and father. In fact, Anthony shows no interest in having a committed relationship with anyone.

What’s odd is that later in the story, Tony mentions Anthony’s two other siblings: Trish and Audrey, who are never seen or heard in the film. It’s implied that these two sisters are still alive somewhere. But because the movie has a sexist tone to it, these female characters are easily dismissed and never mentioned again, as if Anthony is the only rightful heir in the family.

Tony’s wife Mary (played by Clare Barrett), who died when the children were young, is also sidelined. She’s only seen briefly in flashbacks, where she’s cheerfully singing or cooking in the kitchen by herself, with no lines of dialogue. Considering this film’s sexist attitude about women only existing to be wives and mothers, it’s no wonder that Mary is only seen in the kitchen.

At one point in the movie, Tony admits to Anthony that he married Mary out of loneliness, not out of love, but that Tony eventually came to appreciate his wife, who was the one who pushed for them to get married in the first place. It’s an obvious parallel to what’s going on with Rosemary and Anthony. The only time that Anthony mentions his mother is when he tells Rosemary: “When my mother died, I couldn’t see colors anymore.” Cue the violins.

Rosemary is an only child who lives with her widowed and very opinionated mother Aoife (played by Dearbhla Molloy), who also wants Rosemary to get married and start her own family. But Rosemary is pining over an emotionally stunted Anthony, because she thinks he’s “the one.” Aoife (who affectionally calls Rosemary “mad,” as in crazy) also thinks that Anthony is a good match for Rosemary, but you get the impression that Aofie mainly wants to see Rosemary become a wife and mother to any suitable man who might come along.

Rosemary won’t come right out and tell Anthony that she has romantic feelings for him because she expects him to do the “manly” thing and make the first move and ask her out on a date. When Anthony tells her that he’ll never get married, she says that she doesn’t believe him. Rosemary even tells Anthony that she will have her eggs frozen if necessary, until he comes around to the idea of being her husband and the father of her children. But Anthony just acts confused and slightly repulsed (apparently he’s ignorant about modern fertility treatments) and tries to ignore Rosemary’s desperation.

In a flashback to Rosemary’s childhood as a 10-year-old, she’s doing what she usually does in this movie: pouting and obsessing over Anthony. Her father Chris (played by Don Wycherley) notices Rosemary sulking at the kitchen table. She tells her father in a depressed voice: “I’m just a girl. The world is full of girls.”

Her father responds by saying, “You’re not just a girl … You’re a queen … You are the white swan … It means no one can top you. The world is yours. You can do anything.”

Because of this little pep talk, Rosemary becomes fascinated with the ballet “Swan Lake.” There are several references to “Swan Lake” throughout the movie. And these “Swan Lake” references are as cloying and sappy as you might think they are.

In the beginning of the movie, which jumps around in flashbacks throughout the film, Chris has died, so viewers don’t really get to see the relationship that Rosemary had with Chris when she was an adult. However, Rosemary is very close to her mother, who can often get on Rosemary’s nerves with nagging about Rosemary being a spinster. However, no one puts more pressure on Rosemary to become a wife and mother than Rosemary herself.

There’s also a hint that Tony has been attracted to Aofie for quite some time, but he didn’t act on that attraction because she was married. Not long after Chris’ funeral, Tony doesn’t waste time in flirting with Aofie and making it clear that he’d like to get to know her better if she’s interested. Thankfully, that potentially awkward storyline goes nowhere.

After Chris’ death, Rosemary has fully taken over the Muldoon farm’s operations. Of course, the movie doesn’t actually show her doing much dirty work on the farm, since the filmmakers want to confine Rosemary in the stereotypical role of woman who’s mainly concerned with getting an uninterested man to be her husband. There are some scenes with some adorable animals though, with the predictable cute “reaction” shots of an expressive pet dog who seems to know what the humans are saying and has the head tilt and emotional eyes to prove it.

In the ghostly narration, Tony describes Rosemary as being “besotted with love,” which will make viewers wonder if Rosemary’s obsession with Anthony is true love or if she’s just in love with the idea of being married and having her own family. The filmmakers try to make Rosemary look like a moody, tobacco-smoking feminist (she smokes cigarettes and pipes), but she’s really just a run-of-the-mill “damsel in distress” who’s waiting around for a sour and grumpy Anthony to rescue her from her loneliness.

In addition to the cliché of a desperate woman longing for an emotionally unavailable man, “Wild Mountain Thyme” has another over-used cliché in movies about romance: the possibility of a love triangle. It starts from Rosemary and Anthony’s childhood, when there are a few brief scenes of a character named Fiona (played by Anna Weekes), whom Rosemary sees as a threat for Anthony’s affections. It’s mentioned that in her childhood, Rosemary even got into a physical fight with Fiona, by pushing her down. The adults didn’t do much about it but give Rosemary a mild scolding.

However, just like all the female characters with supporting roles in the movie, Fiona only seems to be there for filler and not to further the story in any way. When Anthony and Rosemary are adults, there is a brief reference to Fiona when Anthony mentions to Rosemary that he saw Fiona by chance somewhere and he had brief conversation with her. (Anthony and Fiona’s conversation is never shown in the movie.) Rosemary gets visibly jealous when she hears that Anthony and Fiona were in contact with each other.

There’s a brief scene that shows Anthony is interested in dating women when he has a drunken encounter with a pretty but scruffy blonde named Eleanor (played by Lydia McGuinness), who’s got spiky and messy hair styled like the ’80s female pop trio Bananarama. Anthony and Eleanor meet in a pub, get drunk together, and hang out on a ledge, where she confesses some sordid sexual secrets to him. She’s so tipsy that she loses her balance and falls off of the ledge. Eleanor is never seen again in the movie.

The main love triangle in the story is between Anthony, Rosemary and Adam (played by Jon Hamm), who is the American son of Tony’s brother. Adam is a single, successful money manager in New York City, because apparently the “Wild Mountain Thyme” filmmakers want to shut out any possibility that there are plenty of eligible bachelors in Ireland who could catch Rosemary’s fancy. Adam, who is very brash and confident, loves to flaunt his wealth. And by his own admission, Adam relishes being the center of attention.

Because Tony has doubts about Anthony’s ability to take care of the farm, he tells Anthony that he’s contemplating having Adam inherit the farm, even though Adam has no experience in farming. However, Tony is impressed with Adam’s business skills and he thinks the farm has a better chance of thriving if Adam took over the operations.

And so, Adam is invited to Ireland to look over the farm. Adam thinks of himself as someone who can easily be a farmer, because it’s something that he’s been fantasizing about for a while. However, it’s clear as soon as Adam comes to visit, he’s really a city dweller at heart. He wants to own the farm, not be an actual farmer.

Because he’s a showoff, Adam drives up to the farm one day in a silver Rolls Royce, which greatly impresses Tony. Meanwhile, Anthony is naturally feeling overshadowed and unappreciated when Adam is around. Anthony makes a point of telling Adam that he’s not a real farmer. The business-minded Adam is appalled that Anthony and Rosemary don’t know how many acres of farm land that they have.

It isn’t long before Adam shows that he’s attracted to Rosemary. The feeling isn’t really mutual, but Rosemary likes the attention, which is something that she doesn’t get from Anthony. Whereas Anthony can’t even be bothered to go over to the Muldoon house to visit Rosemary (even though she lives next door), Adam eagerly invites Rosemary to visit New York City, within a few hours of meeting her. Rosemary tells Adam that she’d love to go to the theater in New York. And this is the point in the movie where viewers can predict that if Rosemary does ever go to visit Adam in New York, you know exactly which stage production she’ll want to see.

Meanwhile, whenever Anthony gets irritated with Rosemary (which is often), he tells her that she should think about selling the farm and that she should leave Ireland. She usually replies in a huff that maybe she will leave. But she’s not fooling anyone. Rosemary is too obsessed with Anthony to leave.

Anthony occasionally mentions that he’s thinking about leaving farm life behind too. At one point, he makes a very un-patriotic comment about Ireland: “It’s a terrible place for a decent person.” Anthony, who keeps telling people that he thinks he’s “mad” (as in mentally ill), is also somewhat of a social outcast in the community.

Anthony’s oddball reputation is further fueled after an incident when a neighbor named Cleary (played by Barry McGovern) sees Anthony practicing a marriage proposal in a field. Anthony is rehearsing this proposal because he’s starting to wonder if maybe he should marry someone someday. Anthony thinks the only witness to his “marriage proposal rehearsals” is a donkey in the field.

But the nosy neighbor sees Anthony and wrongly assumes that Anthony is proposing marriage to the donkey. He tells other local people about what he saw, and soon Anthony becomes part of a community joke that Anthony might be into bestiality. Although this notion about Anthony is far-fetched, it at least accurately demonstrates how quickly gossip can spread in a small town.

When Rosemary asks Anthony why he won’t leave the farm, he replies: “These green fields and the animals living off them. And then there’s us living off of the animals. And over that, that what tends to us, lives off us maybe. Whatever that is, it holds me here.” This is the type of eye-rolling dialogue that’s littered throughout the movie.

“Wild Mountain Thyme” has scene after scene that’s supposed to be “deep philosophy from Irish farmers who look like movie stars,” but it all just sounds like nonsensical crap. For example, Rosemary asks Anthony: “How many days do we have until the sun shines?” Anthony replies, “It’s not shining.” Rosemary then says, “I believe that it is.” Obviously, this is a not-so-subtle reference to Rosemary’s optimism about love and Anthony’s pessimism. And only in a badly written entertainment project do farmers really talk like that.

One of the worst things about “Wild Mountain Thyme” is that it pushes a narrative that a romantic person who’s desperate to be in love, just by sheer force of will and being persistent, can “change” a person who resists the romantic person’s amorous intentions and the romantic can “make” that person fall in love with them. But “Wild Mountain Thyme” can’t even push this narrative in a clever way. It’s an unhealthy approach to relationships because true love is accepting people for who they are, not trying to change them to fit someone else’s fantasies.

One of the most cringeworthy scenes in the movie is when Rosemary and Anthony have an argument after she tells him about an encounter that she had with Adam where Adam made it very clear that Adam is interested in dating Rosemary. Rosemary declares to Anthony during this argument: “I want a man! Adam smells like soap! He smells like the lilies of the field!”

Anthony replies, “Why would you want to smell the cows on me, when you can smell the lilies on him?” Rosemary shouts, “I’m the one who should smell good! A man should stink—like you!”

And then, Rosemary says to Anthony: “It’s good that you’re tall. Men are beasts. They need that height to balance the truth and goodness of women.” We shudder to think what Rosemary might think about men who are short or average-sized. What’s also strange about this dialogue is that Anthony isn’t really that tall.

Anthony replies to Rosemary by saying something that viewers are thinking at this point: “There’s no answer to blather like that.” Rosemary continues undaunted, with a pseudo-feminist rant: “Hope is a force. And women are the salvation of the world! I believe that, and mean to make you believe it!”

The actors should be commended for not doing this scene without breaking out into laughter at the ridiculousness of it all. That’s no guarantee that people watching the movie won’t laugh (or groan or cringe) at this scene, which is intended to be a serious emotional moment in the film, but comes across as something that might be in a rejected soap opera script. And again: What kind of farmers talk like they’re competing in a Bad Prose of the Year contest?

Blunt gives it her best shot to make Rosemary as feisty and “lovable” as possible. But it’s all just a façade, because Rosemary’s actions and intentions show how she’s not the strong-minded, independent woman she would like think she is. Almost everything she does in the story is to try to impress Anthony or get a reaction out of him. Her self-esteem is wrapped up in him, not in herself.

And the chemistry between Blunt and Dornan isn’t very believable, not the least of which because Anthony is supposed to be this sulking, brooding type who does everything he can to avoid having a serious romance with anyone. At one point in the story, Rosemary asks Anthony if he’s gay. He emphatically says “no,” and acts very offended by the question. And when Rosemary asks him if he’s a virgin, he scoffs at the idea.

You can’t really blame Rosemary for asking, because there’s no indication that Anthony has ever had a serious girlfriend. One of the biggest flaws of “Wild Mountain Thyme” is that even though the main characters in this movie talk a lot, they don’t really show much personality. Anthony comes across as cold and very hard to read. Rosemary’s only real passion is trying to get Anthony to fall in love with her.

However, fans of Blunt (who starred in the Disney movie musicals “Into the Woods” and “Mary Poppins Returns”) will at least be happy to know that she does sing quite well in “Wild Mountain Thyme,” since she has a solo performance when Rosemary gets up on stage at a pub to sing “Wild Mountain Thyme.” Dornan also breaks out into song in the movie. And the music in “Wild Mountain Thyme” is a family affair, since Dornan’s wife Amelia Warner is the film’s composer.

The biggest unintentional laughs in the movie are toward the end, when Anthony confesses a secret to Rosemary, after she begs him to tell her why he’s so against the idea of falling in love and getting married. It’s when the movie goes from bad to beyond redemption, and takes an abrupt turn into the depths of phony schmaltziness. “Wild Mountain Thyme” tries to throw in this sweet sentimentality to try to pander to a certain formula, but the movie really just stinks like the garbage that it is.

Bleecker Street released “Wild Mountain Thyme” in U.S. cinemas and on digital and VOD on December 11, 2020.

Review: ‘Wander Darkly,’ starring Sienna Miller and Diego Luna

December 11, 2020

by Carla Hay

“Wander Darkly”

Directed by Tara Miele

Culture Representation: Taking place in the Los Angeles area and Mexico, the drama “Wander Darkly” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with some Latinos, African Americans and Asians) representing the middle-class and working class.

Culture Clash: A man and a woman who have a newborn baby are involved in a car accident that alters the way that they look at their lives.

Culture Audience: “Wander Darkly” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in mind-bending “flashback” movies that put a lot of emphasis on “what if” aspects of life and the ongoing debate over personal choice versus destiny.

Sienna Miller and Diego Luna in “Wander Darkly” (Photo courtesy of Lionsgate)

“Wander Darkly” puts a very clever and absorbing spin on a concept that has often been used in movies: Someone gets injured in an accident and tries to right some wrongs, or “do over” their life. Written and directed by Tara Miele, “Wander Darkly” isn’t a horror movie, but it’s a psychological drama that goes deep and keeps viewers guessing over who died and who survived a terrible car accident that is the catalyst for almost everything that happens.

The Los Angeles couple at the center of the story are Adrienne (played by Sienna Miller) and Matteo (played by Diego Luna), who have recently become parents to a baby daughter named Ellie. Adrienne and Matteo are both in their late 30s or early 40s. And they both give the impression that they feel like life is passing them by too quickly and they don’t have much to show for it except for their child.

Matteo is as an independent contractor who does construction jobs and also works as a handyman. Adrienne is a visual artist who does art installations, but now that she’s become a mother, taking care of the baby is taking up a lot of her time too. Matteo and Adrienne live in a co-op building, where most of the residents are younger than they are.

And, as Adrienne says at one point in the movie, the couple is “broke.” They’re not so financially desperate that they’re on the verge of being homeless. But money is tight, and their household income is barely enough to pay their expenses.

There are other signs that Adrienne and Matteo’s relationship is fraying, or at least hit a rough patch. While driving to a friend’s house party for a “date night” (Matteo does the driving), tensions are running high because Adrienne had to remind Matteo that this was their date night. She’s irritated that he had forgotten, and she reminds him it was his idea to have date nights because their date nights “are cheaper than therapy.” And there are a lot of issues in this relationship that looks like it could need therapy.

Adrienne is also annoyed with Matteo because she thinks he’s being too laid-back about their financial situation. A lot of the passion has gone from their relationship, which has always been plagued by jealousy, mostly coming from Adrienne. She thinks Matteo has cheated on her with a younger, attractive female friend of Matteo’s named Shea (played by Aimee Carrero), but Matteo insists that he and Shea (who is very affectionate with Matteo) have a strictly platonic relationship.

There’s also a lot of underlying tension over Adrienne and Matteo’s marital status. When people assume that Adrienne and Mateo are married, Adrienne quickly corrects them and tells that she and Matteo are not husband and wife. Meanwhile, Matteo doesn’t seem to mind if people assume that he and Adrienne are married. In the beginning of the movie, it’s somewhat unclear if Adrienne really wants to get married or not. But it’s later revealed in the story what the couple’s true feelings are about being married to each other.

When Adrienne and Matteo get to the party, more issues come out under their forced smiles and somewhat sarcastic comments. At the party, Matteo mentions to two friends who are couple—Gary (played by Lamont Thompson) and Kevin (played by Ethan Cohn)—that he and Adrienne’s domineering mother Patty (played by Beth Grant) don’t really like each other. Matteo says about his relationship with Patty: “When she comes to the house, we play this game like we can’t see or hear each other.”

And it’s also implied several times throughout the story that Patty is a religious conservative, while Adrienne and Matteo are not. There are also veiled inferences to Patty being a racist who doesn’t approve of her daughter dating a Latino man who’s originally from Mexico. No one ever really comes right out and says that there’s this racial and cultural tension in the family, but it’s clear that there is, based on the strained way that Patty and Matteo interact with each other. Adrienne’s father Steve (played by Brett Rice) meekly goes along with whatever Patty wants.

Adrienne isn’t the only one who has jealousy issues. There’s a good-looking man at the party named Liam (played by Tory Kittles), who seems thrilled to see Adrienne there. The feeling is very mutual and they greet each other with warm smiles and hugs. Matteo has noticed that Liam is at the party too, and Matteo doesn’t seem happy about it at all.

Unlike Matteo’s relationship with Shea, there’s no ambiguity over Adrienne’s relationship with Liam, based on Matteo’s reaction. Although it’s not said out loud, Liam and Adrienne were once romantically involved with each other, but are now just friends. It’s never made clear how long Liam and Adrienne were together, but Matteo feels uncomfortable with Liam and Adrienne still having contact with each other.

And that jealousy comes out during an argument that Matteo and Adrienne have in the car on the way home. Matteo brings up the subject of Liam at the party and Matteo’s perception that Adrienne was being too affectionate with Liam. Adrienne tells Matteo that they’re allowed to have friends. And she also says, in an exasperated voice, “Why are we even together anymore?”

And then, the car accident happens when an out-of-control car blindsides Matteo and Adrienne from the front of their car. Adrienne wakes up injured in a hospital. And it’s here where the movie takes many twists and turns that can’t be described in this review without giving away too much information.

However, it’s enough to say that viewers will be wondering who survived the car crash: Was it Adrienne, Matteo, both or neither? There are several scenes where Adrienne and Matteo reflect on their lives and the choices they made. And there’s a time-warp aspect to the story, since Ellie is seen as a 4-year-old (played by Olivia Popp) and as a 15-year-old (played by Inde Navarrette), with the teenage Ellie reading some of her mother’s journals.

Although Matteo is one-half of this couple, this story really belongs to Adrienne, who goes through the more harrowing emotional journey in the movie. “Wander Darkly” uses a lot of fade-out camera and editing techniques to take people back and forth into scenes that could be flashbacks or could be a chance for Adrienne and Matteo to “do over” something in their past.

Luna and Miller are both very good in their roles as this couple wondering where things went wrong in their relationship and trying to recapture some of the magic they had in the beginning of their romance. Miller is fascinating to watch in this psychological mystery, because she goes through every conceivable emotion in this movie without ever veering into campy territory or giving away too much in advance of where this story is headed.

There are times where viewers will think that Adrienne and Matteo might be dead and in purgatory. And there are times when people will think Adrienne and Matteo are alive but just might be delusional. In one memorable scene, Adrienne is depressed after the accident, and she’s moping on the couch while watching TV. George Romero’s 1968 classic zombie movie “Night of the Living Dead” is playing on the TV screen.

Matteo goes in the room and expresses surprise that Adrienne is watching this horror movie because he says that she hates zombies. But Adrienne replies, “They’re my people now. I feel connected to them, actually. They’re very misunderstood.” Later, Adrienne says, “I feel soulless, hollowed-out.”

Thanks to notable performances from the cast members and impressive writing and directing from Miele, “Wander Darkly” is anything but soulless and hollow. People who have short attention spans probably won’t enjoy this movie as much as people who like to try to solve mysteries while watching a complicated relationship. However tragic the car accident was (both Adrienne and Matteo suffered serious injuries from the car crash), “Wander Darkly” offers an impactful message of resilience in the wake of tragedy.

Lionsgate released “Wander Darkly” in select U.S. cinemas and on digital and VOD on December 11, 2020. The movie’s released date on Blu-ray and DVD is February 9, 2021.

Review: ‘Chick Fight,’ starring Malin Akerman, Bella Thorne and Alec Baldwin

December 9, 2020

by Carla Hay

“Chick Fight”

Directed by Paul Leyden

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed U.S. city, the comedy film “Chick Fight” has a predominantly white cast (with a few African Americans and Latinos) representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: A woman who’s going through a financial crisis reluctantly gets involved in an underground all-female fight club.

Culture Audience: “Chick Fight” will appeal primarily to people who like dumb, crude and predictable movies.

Malin Akerman, Kevin Connolly and Dulcé Sloan in “Chick Fight” (Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution)

When a movie has a title like “Chick Fight,” you know going in that it’s already got some level of stupidity. Even with expectations lowered, “Chick Fight” still manages to be a time waster by being relentlessly vulgar in its pathetic attempts at comedy and completely unimaginative in its weak attempts at serious drama. It’s very possible for entertainment to have foul-mouthed comedy that actually works well if there’s some insight or wit to the comedy. That doesn’t apply to “Chick Fight,” which is just a tacky, dull mess.

Directed by Paul Leyden, “Chick Fight” has an entire plot built around a warped idea that women who beat each other up for fun are doing something admirable and that this type of demented bullying is supposed to be therapeutic for them. It’s all just an excuse to show women getting bloodied and injured while trying to pretend that this type of violence is not misogynistic at all. After all, the filmmakers seem to be saying, if men can have underground fight clubs, why can’t women?

The problem is that a movie like “Chick Fight” (written by Joseph Downey) still perpetuates unrealistic, sexist stereotypes that portray women who fight as not to be taken as seriously as male fighters. Movies about men who have underground fights usually depict the realistic, long-term physical and psychological harm that these fights can bring. In a moronic movie like “Chick Fight,” viewers are supposed to believe that these female fighters can just wipe off their bloodstains, put on their makeup, and go about their regular lives when the vicious fight is over. And that phoniness is not just insulting to the female characters but also to the viewers’ intelligence.

For example, the movie has a ridiculous plot development where the main character Anna Wyncomb (played by Malin Akerman, who is one of the producers of “Chick Fight”) is completely shocked to find out that her late mother Mary (played by Julie Michaels in flashback scenes) started an underground female-only fight club. Mary was one of the club’s top fighters for many years, starting from when Anna was a teenager. (Anna is now supposed to be in her late 30s or early 40s.)

And yet, Mary was able to kept this secret from Anna the entire time that Mary was alive. When this story begins, Mary has been dead for nine months and Anna found out this secret only after Mary dies. Viewers are supposed to believe that Anna, who was very close to her mother, never saw any of her mother’s fight injuries during all of those years that her mother was involved in the fight club.

Even in the flashback scenes, Mary looks too pristine to be a “legendary” underground fighter, who realistically would be more bashed-up and bruised than Mary is. It’s an example of how the filmmakers still don’t want to depict women as capable of getting as down and dirty as men when it comes to these fights. The lack of realism when it comes to physical injuries is one of the biggest of many big problems in “Chick Fight.”

“Chick Fight” takes place in an unnamed city that’s supposed to look like somewhere in a U.S. state with a lot of palm trees, but the movie was actually filmed in Puerto Rico. At the beginning of “Chick Fight,” Anna’s life has been going on a downward spiral. Anna owns a coffee shop that’s failing financially. She’s so heavily in debt that one day, she wakes up to find that her Prius is being repossessed.

Anna desperately pleads with the middle-aged tow-truck operator (played by Norman Grant) not to take her car. “I can show you my boobs,” she tells him. He replies, “Yes, you could, but unless you’ve got $1,000 attached to each nipple, I’ve still got to take the car.” That’s what’s supposed to pass as comedy in this movie.

The crass and unfunny jokes about female body parts continue throughout the film. And the filmmakers have Anna’s best friend Charleen (played by Dulcé Sloan), who happens to be a cop and a lesbian, as one of the worst offenders of objectifying women, by portraying Charleen as a borderline sexual predator. Charleen is also the epitome of the formulaic stereotype of a large-sized African American woman being a loudmouth sidekick.

In one of the movie’s early scenes, Anna and Charleen (who are both single with no kids) are hanging out at Anna’s coffee shop and talking about their love lives. Anna says that she’s going through a “self-imposed abstinence,” while Charleen is scolding Anna for being celibate. Charleen ogles a pretty and innocent-looking barista at the coffee shop, who’s about 10 to 15 years younger than Charleen.

Charleen tells Anna: “I’m going to have her. I don’t even know if she’s straight or not, but I’m going to make that girl yell so loud, that only dogs are going to be able to hear her.” Charleen then sticks out her tongue, lecherously flicks it back and forth, and says to Anna: “See how fast I am with my tongue. I’m going to set her pubes on fire!” Anna doesn’t seem at all concerned that her best friend wants to sexually harass one of Anna’s employees.

That evening, Anna spends time with her widower father Ed (played by Kevin Nash) at his home. They’re seated in the backyard and talk a little bit about how much they miss Mary. Suddenly, Anna hears what sounds like someone in the house, even though Ed lives alone. She quickly figures out from Ed’s reaction that he’s got a new lover who’s in the house.

Ed admits it, but says that he’s not ready to introduce this person to Anna yet. However, Anna is too curious not to find out who it is. She walks quickly in the house, with a nervous Ed following her. And that’s when Anna meets her father’s new lover: a sassy man named Chuck (played by Alex Mapa), who looks young enough to be around Anna’s age. In addition to their age difference, Ed and Chuck have a height difference, since Ed is about eight inches taller than Chuck.

After Ed awkwardly introduces Chuck and Anna to each other, Ed tells Anna that although he loved his late wife Mary, he is pansexual and was in the closet about it during the marriage. With Mary’s passing, Ed says he can now feel free to express his true sexual identity. Anna is shocked, but she immediately accepts the situation and tells Ed and Chuck, “That’s great. I’m happy for you.”

Anna decides to make a hasty exit. But before she goes, she asks Ed and Chuck about their big height difference when it come to sex: “How does this even work?” Chuck replies, “Oh honey, it’s like a Great Dane trying to mount a Chihuahua.”

Although Anna has reacted with a friendly and very tolerant demeanor to what she’s discovered about her father, deep down she’s shaken to the core. She calls up Charleen and tells her to meet her at the coffee shop because she wants to tell Charleen some bombshell information and she needs someone to vent to about it.

Anna and Charleen meet up at the coffee shop, which is closed for the night, and Anna tells Charleen about her father’s confession that he’s pansexual. Charleen’s reaction is to laugh and say that Ed can now openly be part of the LGBTQ community. Anna and Charleen also discuss Anna’s messy life while sharing a marijuana joint. Charleen says she got the marijuana by stealing it from police evidence. Anna jokes that Charleen is the “worst cop ever.”

But what do you know, in a dumb movie like this, before Anna and Charleen leave the coffee shop, they just carelessly toss away the joint, which is still lighted, on the floor of the coffee shop. And the lit joint falls right into a puddle that happens to be an unidentified flammable liquid, thereby causing a fire that burns down the entire coffee shop. Predictably, Anna doesn’t have fire insurance.

Needless to say, Anna’s life goes from bad to worse. With her coffee shop gone, she struggles to find other work. Charleen tries to cheer up Anna one night by taking her to the female-only underground fight club, which is in a seedy area of the city in a dirty, warehouse-styled building. Anna later finds out that her mother Mary was the person who started this fight club.

The fighters do not use boxing gloves or wear mouth guards, although they can cover their hands with cloth or other fabric. The rules are that they can do anything during the fight, except for hair pulling, biting and eye gouging. Everything else is fair game. Every time someone wins a match, a dollar bill gets put up on the wall.

Charleen introduces Anna to a burly and tough woman named Bear (played Fortune Feimster), who manages the fight club with Charleen. Bear says she got her unusual name as a child because she was born with a lot of body hair. Later in the story, Anna finds out that Bear considered Anna’s mother Mary to be Bear’s mentor and biggest inspiration—so much so, that Bear keeps a poster and lots of mementos of Mary in Bear’s one-room apartment, which is in the same building and right next to the room with the boxing ring.

After a horrified Anna witnesses a brutal and bloody fight in the ring, Bear tells Anna that it’s a tradition for anyone visiting the fight club for the first time to fight someone in the club during that first visit. Bear also tells Anna that she has a choice to fight either Bear (who looks like she could do serious damage) or a terrified-looking woman with a slight physique who’s sitting in a corner by herself. Bear says that the other woman’s name is Carol (played by Marissa Labog), who’s a schoolteacher.

Anna predictably chooses Carol, who looks like she’ll be a much easier opponent than Bear. But (surprise, surprise) Carol turns out to be a tough fighter, who pummels Anna in the ring while using her legs to put Anna in a headlock. Anna is humiliated but also relieved because she thinks she doesn’t have to go through that experience again. But there would be no “Chick Fight” movie if she walked away that easily.

The fight club has a doctor named Roy Park (played by Kevin Connolly), who happens to be Bear’s brother. (Cue the joke about Bear’s full name being Bear Park.) Roy and Bear being siblings sort of explains why he’s the only man allowed in the room during the fights and why he would be willing to do medical exams for this illegal fight club as a favor to his sister. Roy examines Anna after the fight and determines that she’ll be okay.

But since Roy is the only man who’s allowed into the fight club room on a regular basis, you know what that means in a catfight movie like this: He’s going to be the center of a love triangle between two of the female fighters. And sure enough, after Anna gets the deluded idea that she’s going to honor her mother by becoming an underground fighter, Anna ends up taking on the fight club’s toughest competitor: Olivia (played by Bella Thorne), who’s about 15 to 20 years younger than Anna and who is also attracted to Roy.

This insipid movie puts up a fake front of being a feminist empowerment film, so it’s no surprise that “Chick Fight” reduces the story to the old cliché of two women fighting over a man. Olivia is supposed to be a tough-talking badass, but she’s actually a one-dimensional “mean girl.” Olivia has two sidekicks: Noel (played by Vitoria Setta) and Veronica (played by Ekaterina Baker), whose only purpose in the movie is to make Olivia look like she’s got some kind of posse. Anna is supposed to be “empowered” by taking on the challenge of fighting Olivia, but it’s actually quite pathetic that a supposedly mature woman who should know better is catfighting with someone who looks like she’s barely out of high school.

And really, the underlying motive for Anna and Olivia’s rivalry is that they both want to prove who’s more sexually attractive to Roy. However, Roy’s personality is extremely bland and he’s not very well-suited for either Anna or Olivia. And so, viewers can only conclude that Roy’s doctor salary has a lot to do with the attraction that Anna and Olivia (two very different women) have to Roy. And once again, it plays into outdated gender stereotypes that women need to find a man who makes more money than they do in order to have a happy love life.

At any rate, Anna needs a trainer. And fast. You’d think that with this female fight club existing for so many years, there would be some talented female alumni who still live in the area who could possibly mentor or train Anna.

But no. The filmmakers refuse to consider that qualified women could ever train other female fighters, because they make Anna go into training with a drunken and boorish has-been named Murphy (played by Alec Baldwin), whose main claim to fame is that he used to be the trainer of “Sugar Ray,” according to Charleen and Bear. Viewers are supposed to assume that “Sugar Ray” means Sugar Ray Leonard, but we can also assume that, for legal reasons, the filmmakers couldn’t use his full name, in order not to have Sugar Ray Leonard’s name associated with this crappy movie.

There’s also a not-very-funny subplot of Charleen being threatened by a female fighter named Betty (played by Nicole Paone), whose teenage son (played by Brian Dean Rittenhouse) was recently busted by Charleen for drug dealing to students. (The drug bust is shown in the beginning of the film.) Betty wants revenge on Charleen by challenging her to a fight. It should be noted that Paone, Akerman and Feimster also worked together in the 2020 comedy film “Friendsgiving,” another stinker of a movie with self-centered, obnoxious characters.

Sometimes, a bad movie is a little more tolerable if at least one of the main characters is appealing or if the acting is better than the material. But there’s almost nothing to like about this annoying group of characters in “Chick Fight,” and the acting is mediocre at best. The fight scenes are very unrealistic, because it’s easy to spot the difference between the stunt double and the actor. “Chick Fight” is so idiotic and unpleasant to watch that viewers will feel like it’s an assault on their time, patience and common sense.

Quiver Distribution released “Chick Fight” in select U.S. cinemas and on digital and VOD on November 13, 2020.

Review: ‘Fatman,’ starring Mel Gibson and Walton Goggins

December 9, 2020

by Carla Hay

“Fatman”

Directed by Eshom Nelms and Ian Nelms

Culture Representation: Taking place in Alaska and other parts of the United States, the dark comedy film “Fatman” features a predominantly white cast (with a few black people) representing the middle-class, working-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: After a 12-year-old bratty rich kid gets a lump of coal for Christmas, he hires a hit man to murder Santa Claus, who is a grouch dealing with his own personal issues.

Culture Audience: “Fatman” will appeal primarily to people who like movies that put a dark comedic twist on Christmas folklore, but the movie’s humor and action fall flat in too many scenes.

Walton Goggins in “Fatman” (Photo courtesy of Saban Films)

“Fatman” is a Christmas-themed film that tries to be inventive and funny, but just ends up being not inventive enough and not funny enough to be considered a great movie. The “Fatman” plot often wanders and gets very dull. It’s as if the filmmakers want this movie to be a cult classic like 2003’s “Bad Santa” (starring Billy Bob Thornton as the title character), but they couldn’t come up with enough clever ideas to make it happen.

Written and directed by brothers Eshom Nelms and Ian Nelms, “Fatman” is essentially one in a long list of Mel Gibson movies where he plays a grouch who can get violent if anyone tries to mess with him. In “Fatman,” Gibson portrays Chris Cringle, also known as Santa Claus, a crusty curmudgeon who’s experiencing a financial crisis. Because the world has become more cynical, there are less people in the world who believe in Santa Claus. And so, the demand for his services has plummeted.

In this particular Christmas season that takes place in “Fatman,” Chris and his loyal and loving British wife Ruth Cringle (played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste) have to decide whether or not to take a government subsidy to help offset the couple’s expenses, in order to keep the Cringles’ elf-populated factory in business. (Instead of the North Pole, the Cringles live in North Peak, Alaska.) The subsidy is to pay for the elves to make control panels for FJ63 fighter jets, and Chris is very reluctant to have his factory used for this type of military work. The subsidy also isn’t very appealing to Chris because it’s only half of what he and Ruth need to get them out of their financial hole.

This dilemma is a big part of the “Fatman” plot, but it takes a while to get to that point, because so much of the story is unfocused and wastes time during the first third of the movie. Expect to see a lot of scenes with Chris just walking around being stubborn and miserable. He’s the type of “anti-hero” Santa Claus who doesn’t wear the traditional red and white suit and hat, but instead looks more like a scruffy trucker in flannel shirts, jeans and ski caps.

Although he appears to be self-absorbed and short-tempered, Chris has a “psychic” side to him, because he has the ability to know everything about people’s lives without anyone telling him. And so, when he encounters people he’s never met before, Chris often likes to catch them off guard by telling them personal details about their lives that he would have no reason to know unless he had these “psychic” abilities. He also has the ability to self-heal quickly from physical wounds, which is an obvious sign that he’s not a “regular” human being.

As an example of his “psychic” abilities, one day Chris goes inside a bar where his platonic female friend Sandy (played by Susanne Sutchy) works as a bartender. Chris sees a trucker named Mike (played by John Tokatlidis) sexually flirting with Sandy, who expresses interest in meeting up with Mike later for a tryst. While Sandy goes in another part of the bar where she can’t see Chris, he approaches Mike, even though they’ve never met before, and tells him, “Hello, Mike, I hope Nicole and the kids are doing well.”

Mike is startled and asks Chris if they know each other. Chris won’t say, but he essentially shames Mike by informing him that he knows that Mike is married with kids and shouldn’t be trying to hook up with Sandy, who doesn’t know that Mike is married. Mike is so unnerved by how this stranger knows so much about him that he quickly leaves the bar.

When Sandy comes back to where Mike was sitting, she has no idea why Mike left, but she makes a comment about how something keeps going wrong with her “dates” whenever Chris is around. It’s an example of the clunky humor in the story. The “Fatman” filmmakers seem to want this Santa Claus to be a “badass” Santa, by making this movie geared to adults (there’s foul language and bloody violence), but there are many scenes in “Fatman” where this Santa Claus’ bark is a lot worse than his actual bite when it comes to confronting or scaring people.

On the one hand, “Fatman” wants to be a dark and edgy comedy. On the other hand, there’s a lot of corny and uninteresting dialogue in the film. For example, there’s a scene where Chris and Ruth are discussing the government’s offer to pay the subsidy.

Chris says, “We are a business. And don’t kid yourself, Ruth. Altruism is not a deductible on their bottom line.” Ruth replies, “Don’t put it all on them. You’ve changed too.”

Chris continues, “You might be right. Maybe I’m just like them.” In response, Ruth says in an encouraging tone of voice, “You’ve still got it.” Chris says in a world-weary tone, “All I have is a loathing for a world that’s forgotten.”

And why is this movie called “Fatman,” even though this Santa Claus isn’t fat? Because that’s the derogatory name given to Chris by the people in the story who want him dead. One of those people is the eccentric and off-kilter assassin (played by Walton Goggins) who’s hired to murder Chris. The assassin is given the name Skinny Man in the movie’s credits (although no one actually calls him Skinny Man in the movie), and his real name is revealed toward the end of the film.

Skinny Man is one of those assassins who’s been seen in many types of dark comedies before: He’s cold as ice but he has unexpected quirks that show he has a soft spot for certain things. John Travolta’s Vincent Vega character from the 1994 classic film “Pulp Fiction” was an obvious influence for the Skinny Man character, who isn’t nearly as amusing or fun to watch as Vincent Vega.

One of the quirks that Skinny Man has is that when he drives his car, he likes to keep his pet mouse in the passenger seat. He will go to certain lengths to make sure that the mouse is comfortable. He also has a fixation on items that have a label that shows that it was made in Santa’s workshop. It’s explained later in the movie why Skinny Man is so attracted to these items.

Skinny Man was hired to kill Santa Claus by a sociopathic wealthy kid named Billy Wenan (played by Chance Hurstfield), who is 12 years old and lives in an unnamed part of the U.S. that isn’t Alaska. Billy is supposed to come across as a “poor little rich boy” because his workaholic single father is rarely at home and he neglects Billy. (Billy’s father is never seen in the movie. Billy’s mother is not seen or mentioned.) Even though Billy is essentially a loner who’s mostly ignored by his father, Billy is really just an entitled and vindictive brat who goes to extreme lengths to get what he wants.

Billy has a collection of Best of Show blue ribbons that he won in science fairs. He is so proud of these ribbons that he shows them off on the lapels of his suit blazers that he likes to wear, even around the house. Billy’s ailing grandmother Ann Marie (played by Deborah Grover) is his main caretaker. However, because of her physical condition (she has an oxygen tube and often uses a wheelchair), Anne Marie can’t keep track of all that Billy does, and she basically lets him do whatever he wants. Ann Marie also mistakenly thinks that Billy is a good and obedient child.

How cruel is Billy? When he comes in second place at a recent science fair, he publicly congratulates the winner—a fellow classmate named Christine Crawford (played by Ellison Grier Butler)—but privately, he plots his revenge. Billy ends up hiring Skinny Man to kidnap Christine, who is held captive and ordered by Billy to give up her winner’s title for the science fair. He concocts a plan for Christine to lie to the science fair authorities by making a false confession that she cheated in her winning science fair project. Billy figures that the authorities will then take the winner’s title away from Christine, and then Billy will be named the winner by default.

On Christmas Day, Billy’s father isn’t at home because he’s working somewhere. Billy is essentially alone when he unwraps his presents. And he finds that because Santa Claus knows that Billy has been “naughty,” Billy has received nothing but a lump of coal from Santa Claus. Billy is so angry that he goes outside in the snow and yells to the sky, “You just messed up big time, Fatman!”

When Billy hires Skinny Man to murder Santa Claus, they both use the name Fatman to describe Santa Claus. Billy steals some of his grandmother’s checks and forges her signature in order to pay the assassin. It’s very stupid to leave this kind of easily traced paper trail for an assassin payment—one of many unnecessary plot holes in this sloppily written movie. Ever hear about paying in cash? And the person whose checks were stolen can eventually find out about the stolen money through bank records.

“Fatman” isn’t even that much of an action movie, since the only real showdown happens in the last 20 minutes of the film. And even that confrontation is predictable and filmed in a very “by the numbers” formulaic way. And really, when the movie shows way in advance that Santa Claus has a supernatural ability to heal quickly from physical wounds, there’s no suspense in what will happen if he gets shot or injured in vital organs.

Goggins seems to be having some fun with his mysterious assassin character, but the rest of the cast members appear to be just going through the motions. There are supporting characters in the movie that come and go with no real purpose or have wasted potential, and the main characters are often one-note and predictable. For example, a U.S. military official named Captain Jacobs (played by Robert Bockstael) makes frequent visits to the Cringle home and factory. This character, which could have been hilarious or memorable, is as bland as bland can be.

At this point, Gibson has played so many gruff characters in movies, he can do it in his sleep. “Fatman” might offer some mild and occasional laughs to people with low expectations. Just like the bad gift that Billy gets in “Fatman,” the movie is like a Christmas present that looks enticing on the outside, but once you unwrap it, you find out it’s really just a disappointing and useless piece of coal.

Saban Films released “Fatman” in select U.S. cinemas on November 13, 2020, and on digital and VOD on November 24, 2020. Paramount Home Entertainment will release “Fatman” on Blu-ray and DVD on January 26, 2021.

Review: ‘Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America,’ starring Gretchen Sorin, Allyson Hobbs, Craig Steven Wilder, Christopher West, Fath Ruffins and Eric Avila

December 7, 2020

by Carla Hay

Ben Chaney (center) and his family in the car on the way to the funeral of his brother James in Meridian, Mississippi, on August 7, 1964, in “Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America” (Photo by Bill Eppridge/Courtesy of PBS)

“Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America”

Directed by Gretchen Sorin and Ric Burns

Culture Representation: The documentary “Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America” features a predominantly African American group (with a few white people and one Latino) of academics, entrepreneurs, historians and authors discussing the racial prejudices and challenges experienced by African Americans who’ve taken various modes of transportation, especially cars, in the United States.

Culture Clash: African Americans are often the targets of bigotry, violence or other acts of hate for driving or traveling.

Culture Audience: “Driving While Black” will appeal primarily to people interested in well-researched historical accounts of racial bigotry in America, but the movie lacks perspectives from young people and in-depth coverage of recent “driving while black” controversies.

A crowd attacking cars driven by African Americans in “Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America” (Photo by Robert W. Kelley/The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images)

There are tragically too many stories, both known and unknown, of people of color being refused service, getting harassed, assaulted or killed because of their race. The documentary “Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America” gives a mostly somber historical chronology of how race plays a role in the mistreatment of black people who travel by motor vehicle in America. Directed by Gretchen Sorin and Ric Burns, the documentary has a very scholarly tone, since most of the people interviewed for the film are academics.

The movie, which has the usual blend of talking heads and archival footage, can come across as too dry and stodgy for some viewers. No one under the age of 50 is interviewed in the movie. And shutting out that youthful perspective is a strange choice for this documentary, because young people are often the most vulnerable and frequent targets of racism for “driving while black.”

Because a great deal of “Driving While Black” is about what happened before the 21st century, “Driving While Black” might also disappoint people who are expecting more current events to be the primarily focus of the film. The movie is told in chronological order, so it isn’t until the last half-hour of this nearly two-hour film that people will see modern examples of racist incidents caught on video, involving African Americans who were harassed in or near their cars and were sometimes killed. News clips and viral videos are shown of these incidents, but the documentary doesn’t try to investigate or reveal anything new.

In other words, don’t expect to see any groundbreaking insight into some of the most notorious “driving while black” incidents that are widely described as racist because of controversial police actions against Rodney King, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Richard Hubbard III or Jacob Blake. All of these incidents stemmed from these unarmed African Americans being stopped by police while in or near a car. The documentary has brief snippets of video clips from these incidents but doesn’t interview anyone involved.

Even though the title of the movie is called “Driving While Black,” the documentary actually covers all major forms of transportation (except airplanes) and how transportation pertains to racial bigotry. The movie begins with an overview of how Africans were captured and brought to America in ships as slaves in the 1600s. “Think of the trauma and the terror and the violence of that forced mobility,” comments Stanford University historian Allyson Hobbs.

The movie covers how white racists who want to control where and when African Americans could go is a shameful part of American culture, harkening back to the slave days when slave owners would viciously beat or kill slaves for not following orders on where the slaves could or could not go. Controlling and limiting a slave’s movements were obvious ways to keep them in captivity. Massachusetts Institute of Technology historian Craig Steven Wilder comments on this slavery era: “Right away, you have some elements of racial profiling, from the very beginning of the black experience in America.”

And after the Emancipation Proclamation freed U.S. slaves in 1883, many former slaves were left homeless and their mobility was limited by the types of housing that was denied to them by white racists. The Reconstruction Era after the Civil War gave way to a backlash against racial progress, and the Jim Crow era made racial segregation legal in the U.S. until the Civil Rights Act in 1964 outlawed it. Part of the American Dream includes ownership of land, which is a dream that is all too often denied to people because of their race.

Carolyn Finney, author of “Black Faces, White Spaces,” comments: “Land isn’t just about land. It’s about political and economic power, the power to choose. It’s about the freedom to move freely in space.”

The documentary covers the Great Migration during the Jim Crow era, when many African Americans from the South migrated North and West for better opportunities in housing and employment. Kathleen Franz, a historian at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, comments that lynchings of African Americans in the South fueled a lot of this migration. But even though many U.S. states outside of the South during the Jim Crow era technically didn’t make racial segregation legal, that didn’t mean that racism didn’t exist outside the South. Many African Americans and other people of color still came up against racial barriers all across America during the Great Migration.

It’s stated many times throughout the documentary that for most white people, taking a road trip means a fun-filled vacation. For many African Americans, taking a road trip can be fraught with danger. That’s because it’s part of African American culture to know, usually through first-hand experience, that being black means you will experience what it’s like to be questioned, stopped, harassed or attacked in places where you’re minding your own business and not breaking the law—just because someone might decide that you don’t belong there because of the color of your skin. The movie doesn’t say that it can’t happen to other races in America, but rather that this type of racism is more likely to happen to black people in America.

“Driving While Black” co-director Sorin is one of the commentators in the movie. She says in the beginning of the film: “Mobility is essential to freedom. I think the automobile is emblematic of the importance and the value of mobility in free society. But it also goes beyond mobility and allows us to understand the way that African Americans have moved forward in this country and the way that African Americans have been pushed back.”

Cars are usually a status symbol, so African Americans who drive luxury cars are often held under more scrutiny on the road than white people who drive the same cars. And even fame and money can’t make a black person immune to this racism. Many highly paid black celebrities have gone public about being pulled over by the police for “driving while black” and doing nothing wrong.

African American contributions to the auto industry are included in the film. Columbia University historian Kenneth Jackson notes that black people have often been tasked with doing the most dangerous jobs in auto factories, such as working foundries where steel was forged or lifting engines. And unfortunately, black neighborhoods are often targeted for destruction, as highways and freeways were and still are frequently planned to be built though these neighborhoods, forcing many of the residents to move. Writer/filmmaker Lois Elie comments on how a neighborhood’s racial population and property values are always factors in construction of highways and freeways.

As black people in the Jim Crow era started to have more access to cars, it became important to know which businesses and areas were safe for people of color on road trips. There were several guide books, such as “Smith’s Guide,” “Grayson’s Guide” and the most well-know one of all: “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” which was first published in 1936 by its creator Victor Hugo Green, an enterprising African American entrepreneur who had no previous publishing experience.

The documentary includes an interview with real-estate salesperson Howard Glener, whose father took a chance on Green to print the first editions of the book, which many other white publishers refused to print. “The Negro Motorist Green Book” (which inspired the Oscar-winning 2018 movie “Green Book”) was widely distributed, with Esso gas stations being one of the publication’s main distributors.

As historian Hobbs mentions in the film, road trips for black people during the Jim Crow era had their pros and cons. On the one hand, the road trips gave black people more freedom and mobility. (These road trips were often to look for work or to visit family members.) On the other hand, Hobbs says that road trips gave black people more “exposure to more violence, indignity and humiliation.” Travel guides such as “The Negro Motorist Green Book” certainly helped many road travelers, but it could never cure the cancer of racism.

Not all of “Driving While Black” is about the doom and gloom of racism. One of the great things to come out of these travel guides was the sense of community that developed between businesses that welcomed black customers during the Jim Crow era when other business refused to serve black people. The Dew Drop Inn in New Orleans is mentioned as one of the more well-known establishments that was a haven for black people during the Jim Crow era. And several African Americans began to build their own upscale communities, such as Lincoln Hills, Colorado. Nancelia Jackson, a Lincoln Hills resident, calls it a “country club for black people.”

Dooky Chase’s, an African American-owned restaurant in New Orleans was one of the businesses that was in the travel guides listing safe places where black people could go during road trips. The documentary includes interviews with Dooky Chase’s owner Leah Chase and her daughter Stella Chase Reese (the manager of Dooky Chase’s) who offer their perspective and fond memories of the community of customers that the restaurant has had over the years. However, Chase laments that a lot of that community started to fade away after racial integration, because she says that wealthier black people began to gravitate to businesses owned by white people.

Cars played an important role for black people during the Civil Rights Era in the 1960s, when people were boycotting public transportation (such as buses and trains) that were racially segregated. Many civil rights activists organized carpools in their communities. Wilder comments, “It’s a wonderful way of thinking of how black people deployed the automobile to challenge Jim Crow.”

During the documentary’s last half-hour, there’s some discussion about how smartphones and social media have helped expose the types of racial profiling and racist police brutality that have been committed against black people who are driving or on the road. Fath Ruffins, a curator/historian at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, compares this media exposure to when the civil rights movement was broadcast on TV in the 1960s: “Something similar is going on today, where people who are not African American have begun to see, ‘Wow, there is really a tremendous difference in what driving around America and being black is than the average white American.'”

But being exposed to these racial differences and wanting to do something about racial injustice are two separate things. Jackson says that there is “widespread indifference or complicity by whites” in police violence against black people who are pulled over in traffic stops. Pasadena City College historian Christopher West gets emotional and tears up when he talks about the fear and sadness that he has for his children and other black children who have to get “the talk” about how to act when they’re being racially profiled. “Driving while black means driving while afraid,” West says with heartache in his voice.

Other academics interviewed in the documentary include Herb Boyd, historian and author of “Black Detroit”; film director /George Manson University Professor Spencer Crew, who is interim director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture; Thomas Sugrue, a historian at New York University. And other interviewees include Alvin Hall, creator/host of Driving the Green Book podcast; Walter Edwards, chairman of Harlem Business Alliance; Candacy Taylor, cultural documentarian/author of “Overground Railroad”; Jennifer Reut, historian/founder of Mapping the Green Book Project; Gary Jackson, a Denver County court judge whose great-grandfather co-founded Lincoln Heights; Five Points business owner Mae Stiger; journalist Tamara Banks; and Alison Rose Jefferson, historian/author of “Living the California Dream.”

People who already know a lot of African American history probably won’t discover many new facts that they didn’t already know if they watch “Driving While Black.” However, the documentary offers a lot of intelligent and thoughtful commentary, as well as important archival material (photos, videos and audio recordings) to give a deeper understanding of this history. Some of the archival material includes recordings and interviews with people who lived through the Jim Crow era.

Overall, “Driving While Black” is recommended for anyone who wants a broad historical context for why so much racial injustice is still happening in the United States. “Driving While Black” co-director Sorin wrote the 2020 nonfiction book “Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights,” and this documentary can be considered a visual companion to the book. Just like the book, the documentary is a sobering declaration that the history of racism continues to repeat itself.

PBS premiered “Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America” on October 13, 2020.

Review: ‘Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan,’ starring Shane MacGowan

December 6, 2020

by Carla Hay

“Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan”

Directed by Julien Temple

Culture Representation: The documentary “Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan” features an all-white group of people discussing the life and career of Irish-British singer/songwriter Shane MacGowan, who is best known as the former lead singer of The Pogues.

Culture Clash: MacGowan has had lifelong battles with drug addiction, mental illness and the prejudices between Irish and British cultures.

Culture Audience: Besides the obvious target audience of MacGowan fans, “Crock of Gold” will appeal primarily to people interested in an unflinching look at what happens when a self-destructive artist ruins his health and career and knows that his best creative days are behind him.

A 1988 photo of Shane MacGowan in “Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan” (Photo by Andrew Catlin/Magnolia Pictures)

A lot of hedonistic rock stars would like to think that they can be like Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. Despite being an admitted and notorious alcoholic, drug addict and heavy smoker (the only drug he’s admitted to quitting is heroin), Richards is still able to function and do tours with one of the most successful rock bands of all time. He says he’ll never retire. And because of his down-to-earth, roguish charm, as well as his influential legacy of legendary songwriting and musicianship, Richards isn’t just a respected rock star. He’s beloved.

But the reality is that Richards is something of a medical miracle and truly an exception to the type of lifestyle that leaves most people dead before they reach middle-age or living a deteriorating existence plagued with myriads of health problems once they reach a certain age. It’s exactly this reality faced by Shane MacGowan, the Irish-British singer/songwriter who’s best known as the former lead singer of The Pogues. Richards is 14 years older than MacGowan, who was born in 1957, but MacGowan looks much older than most people in his own age group. Although there’s a noticeable tone of celebrity worship in the documentary “Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan,” the movie also shows without judgment that celebrities aren’t the invincible gods some people would like to think they are.

Johnny Depp (who’s had his own very public battles with substance abuse) is a producer of the documentary. And he’s a longtime friend of MacGowan and of Richards. (Depp directed a documentary about Richards in the 2010s that remains unreleased.) Depp appears throughout “Crock of Gold,” in scenes in a pub where he, MacGowan and MacGowan’s wife Victoria Mary Clarke are gathered for a very obviously intoxicated MacGowan and Depp to trade quips and memories about their lives and friendship.

It’s a microcosm of what this documentary is about: a select number of MacGowan’s family and friends reminiscing with him about his past, while mostly avoiding talking about his present or future. And it’s obvious to see why. The present-day MacGowan is confined to a wheelchair and barely coherent. Everything he says in the movie—from his past interviews to the interviews that he filmed for this documentary—has to have subtitles, not because of his thick accent but because he’s constantly slurring his words. It should surprise no one that he drinks alcohol during the documentary interviews and never seems to be sober.

On the one hand, “Crock of Gold” (directed by Julien Temple) veers into “hero worship” territory where people are afraid to say the obvious out loud: MacGowan is a mess and a faded shell of his former self. On the other hand, no one really has to say it out loud. It’s all painfully obvious from the footage that’s in the movie.

The problem with making a documentary about an often-incoherent celebrity who rambles a lot is that the documentary can be incoherent and rambling too. Although “Crock of Gold” is worth watching as the definitive visual biography of MacGowan, the movie also tends to be unfocused and repeat itself like, well, a drunk who can’t stop talking about how great he thinks he is. Simply put: This 124-minute movie could’ve used better editing.

There are only so many times that we need to hear MacGowan say how he was chosen by God to save Irish music, or brag about his intoxicated shenanigans over the years, or preach about how much he loves the IRA (Irish Republican Army) before it gets too boring and repetitive. The movie tends to overstate MacGowan’s influence in worldwide pop culture. He’s actually revered mostly in Europe, not so much in other continents. And everyone who participated in this documentary knows that MacGowan made his best music in the 1980s, because that’s the decade that gets the most screen time when discussing MacGowan’s creativity.

When watching “Crock of Gold,” it becomes apparent that the filmmakers couldn’t get a lot of recent interview footage for MacGowan to film for this documentary. Instead, there’s a mishmash of quotes from interviews that MacGowan did over the years for various media outlets. Some of these interviews are shown as archival video clips in the documentary, but most are used as voiceovers. Therefore, viewers can’t really be sure which period of time the voiceover comments were made in, because they’re not identified by year or media outlet.

The other way that “Crock of Gold” fills up its screen time is through animation, stock news footage and a random selection of unrelated film clips to depict MacGowan’s commentary. It’s a technique that documentary aficionados will see right away as an indication that the filmmakers just didn’t have enough original, exclusive footage of MacGowan to fill a feature-length film, so they had to resort to these gimmicks. Ralph Steadman fans will at least enjoy his eye-catching and unique animation of MacGowan’s several tales of hallucinations that MacGowan had while he was stoned. During one of those hallucinations, MacGowan says that he was in a hotel suite in New Zealand sometime in the late 1980s and imagined that blue Māori ghosts were telling him to be just like them, so he proceeded to paint himself and the entire suite blue while naked.

In “Crock of Gold,” there are many references to how MacGowan’s Catholic upbringing shaped him as a person; Irish folklore and “the luck of the Irish”; stereotypes of Irish people being drunks; and the love/hate relationship that MacGowan has with British culture. (He was born in Pembury, Kent, England; was raised in County Tipperary, Ireland; and his family moved back to England when he was 6 years old.) And there are some not-so-subtle comparisons that MacGowan makes of himself to Jesus Christ, just because MacGowan was born on Christmas Day.

In the beginning of the film, MacGowan is heard in a voiceover saying: “It’s God-given. I’ve been chosen to lead us out of the wilderness. God looked down on this little cottage in Ireland and said, ‘That little boy there, he’s the little boy that I’m gonna use to save Irish music and take it to greater popularity than it’s ever had before.'”

Apparently, MacGowan wants to forget about Van Morrison, the first world-famous Irish rock star who had a lot of Irish culture in his music. And, of course, Irish superstar band U2 was a commercial success, years before MacGowan ever released his first album with The Pogues in 1984. U2’s first album, “Boy,” was released in 1980, and U2’s Irish anthem “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was released in 1983.

In another voiceover, MacGowan also comments: “I’m sure, because I was born on Christmas Day, I was born lucky. I thank Christ for that.” But is MacGowan so “charmed” and “lucky,” considering all of his health problems and his admitted inability to no longer be the type of creative person he once was? Viewers will have to decide if they would want to be like MacGowan, and how much value should be put on “fame” when fame can’t buy health or happiness.

In the documentary, it’s clear that humility is not one of MacGowan’s virtues. He admits that he can be a difficult and “aggressive” person. And there’s a flash of his bad temper that’s shown during an interview, when he asks a female employee (it’s unclear if she’s a part of the film crew or an assistant), who’s not seen on camera: “Can you put on some recording? Some Northern soul? Tamla Motown?”

She responds by saying it can wait until later, after they’ve finished filming. (Obviously because she knows that having background music would mean having to get clearance for the music rights to use in the film.) MacGowan then snaps haughtily, “No, now! Or I don’t say another fuckin’ word!” It’s quite the display of obnoxious entitlement from a has-been rock star.

That’s not to say that MacGowan didn’t make great music, but even he knows that his relevancy as a prolific music artist is now over. The documentary doesn’t sugarcoat this fact, but it also doesn’t fully acknowledge that, given this irrelevancy, MacGowan doesn’t need to be coddled and worshipped as if he’s still making great music. This is very much a nostalgia film for MacGowan and anyone who appreciates the talent he had in the past.

MacGowan’s arrogant tantrum in this movie is an indication of what the filmmakers probably had to go through to get the exclusive interview footage that did end up in the documentary. A producer’s statement in the movie’s production notes confirms that it was difficult for the filmmakers to get MacGowan to open up for new interviews, so they enlisted the help of MacGowan’s wife Clarke and MacGowan’s friends Depp, Gerry Adams (former leader of the Irish political party Sinn Féin) and Bobby Gillespie (lead singer of the Scottish band Primal Scream) to interview him for the documentary.

The unidentified producer comments in the film’s production notes: “Various trips were made to Dublin during the course of 2019 in order to catch Shane in his natural habitat, although only a few attempts proved successful. More nuanced methods were required in order to capture those notorious, honest profundities native to Shane, that Julien was searching for. Ever distrustful of the cameras and any unnecessary lighting equipment, Shane would reveal himself when less proved to be more, surrounded by those he trusted. And it was through these conversations between Shane and this special coterie of specific individuals that the film began to grow.”

Depp’s pub interview with MacGowan is more like a conversation of humorous recollections. Their banter also includes MacGowan saying that before he was famous, he made money as a “rent boy.” MacGowan quips, “Just hand jobs. It’s just a job in hand.” MacGowan also tells Depp that Depp has probably never had to be a rent boy because Depp’s good looks gave him a lot of opportunities. “You’re a sugar cube baby,” MacGowan says to a chuckling Depp. “You’re so cute, you make me sick, actually.”

In another part of the interview, they joke about Depp’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie franchise. (Depp has said that Richards was the biggest influence in how Depp portrays the “Pirates of the Caribbean” character Jack Sparrow. Richards has also appeared in multiple “Pirates” movies as Jack Sparrow’s father.) “What made you think I was able to stay awake during ‘Pirates’?” MacGowan aks Depp. Depp replies with a laugh, “What makes you think I did?,” implying that he had a hard time staying awake too.

MacGowan’s interview with Adams focuses a lot on Irish history. It’s here where MacGowan gives a lot of commentary about his affinity for the IRA and how his songwriting was an extension of his ideological beliefs. MacGowan mentions more than once that he didn’t become an IRA soldier, but he became a musician instead to express his political views.

Gillespie’s conversation with MacGowan is mostly of MacGowan rambling about the music he made with The Pogues and his difficulties in the band. MacGowan gets the most personal and most vulnerable with Clarke, a journalist whom he married in 2018, after several years of being together as a live-in couple. They clearly love each other deeply, not in one of those showboat “I’m married to someone famous” way, but in the “ride or die” way that people who’ve been through the depths of despair together decide to stay together, no matter what.

The movie delves into the darkest parts of MacGowan’s personal history with his own reflections on his harrowing experiences with addiction and mental illness. He describes growing up in a very dysfunctional household, where he was encouraged to drink alcohol and even get drunk from the age of 6. MacGowan explains that a lot of people in Irish culture at the time believed that the younger a person starts drinking alcohol, the less likely that person will become an alcoholic because that person will learn at an early age how to handle alcohol. Obviously, that theory didn’t hold true for MacGowan, who also began smoking and doing drugs before he became a teenager.

The Catholic religion was also a big influence on MacGowan. As a child, MacGowan says he seriously contemplated becoming priest up until the age of 11. He thought it was an ideal job at the time because he saw the perks of the job as being able drink alcohol and smoke whenever he wanted.

“There was booze and cigarettes in heaven. That’s what I was told,” he says in the documentary. As an adolescent, MacGowan says he became so disillusioned with religion that he became an atheist. He mentions that his drug hallucinations about life had something to do with why he changed his mind about religion. But later on in his life, MacGowan says that he made peace with his Catholic upbringing.

Shane and his younger sister Siobhan (who was born in 1963) both say in the documentary that they grew up in a very permissive household. Their father Maurice MacGowan was a department-store clerk whom Shane describes as a “left-wing, IRA socialist supporter,” while Shane’s mother Therese was “beautiful” and “a brilliant singer.”

Maurice, who is now a widower, is interviewed in the documentary. There’s also archival footage of Maurice and Therese interviewed on TV about Shane. Maurice says in “Crock of Gold” how his relationship with Shane changed during Shane’s childhood: “He and I were like pals, until he was 12 and discovered Creedence Clearwater Revival, etc. … and sniffing glue.”

Shane comments that he was allowed to do whatever he wanted as a child, as long as he went to Mass. As an example of how his family was strict about religion but permissive about other things, Shane mentions that his Aunt Nora was the “religious leader” and “religious fanatic” of the family who also gave an underage Shane alcohol and cigarettes and taught him how to gamble. Shane also mentions: “My main hero when I was small was my Uncle John” and Shane says that his Aunt Ellen “was a shit-hot fucking concertina player.”

Shane identifies as Irish, but technically, he’s a British citizen too, since he was born in England and lived there for a great deal of his life. He talks a lot in the film about how moving back to England as a child was a major trauma for him, because Irish people experienced a lot of bigotry and violence from British people. Shane says that Irish people are always negatively stereotyped as being drunks, but he fails to see the irony that he has willingly reinforced that stereotype.

Shane remembers being bullied for being Irish, and he says that he grew to hate British culture. (When playing war games as a child, he says he always wanted to be an IRA soldier, not a British soldier.) And he also expresses his disdain for how British culture places a lot of emphasis on a family’s social class to determine how people will be treated in British society.

However, Shane says that he grew to love British culture too. As a teenager, around the same time that his parents split up, he discovered the London nightlife scene and punk music. The Sex Pistols had an enormous influence on him. (There’s archival footage of Shane in the front row at several punk concerts, including the Sex Pistols.) As for Irish artists, Shane cites poet Brendan Behan as another major influence: “He was the Irish writer I identified with the most.”

Shane’s youthful rebellion and drug addiction were seemingly intertwined. After winning a writing contest, he got a literature scholarship to attend the prestigious Westminster School, but he was expelled when he was caught being a drug dealer to the school’s students. This movie review doesn’t really need to rehash all of the sleazy and horrific drug-addict/alcoholic stories about him, some of which he talks about in the film. Tabloids, other media outlets and Shane himself have exhausted that topic.

However, Shane mentions that his parents let him and his druggie friends party a lot at the MacGowan household because his parents thought it was safer for them to do drugs in the house instead of in random places. Shane says that the most frightening experience that he had with drugs was when he was a teenager and took LSD with two friends named Jez and Sarah. Unfortunately, Sarah freaked out during her acid trip and threatened to jump off of the apartment’s balcony, while his father got very angry at what was going on.

Luckily, they were able to talk Sarah off of the balcony and she changed her mind about killing herself. And shortly afterward, she ended up becoming Shane’s girlfriend. (He describes seeing rainbows when they had sex.) This near-death experience with Sarah didn’t scare Shane off of drugs though, because he seems to almost be proud for being known as a hardcore alcoholic/drug addict who’s survived longer than people thought he would.

Shane is also candid about his mental-health struggles, which he’s talked about before in many other interviews. He says in the documentary: “I had my first nervous breakdown at 6 years old,” which he says was triggered because he was so unhappy in England. Later in the documentary, his sister Siobhan and father Maurice talk about the times that Shane was involuntarily committed to psychiatric facilities and the heartbreak it caused the family. They both say that Shane was never really the same after The Pogues’ grueling 1988 tour, which they believe broke him in many ways.

The documentary doesn’t reveal anything new about Shane’s career as a musician before, during and after The Pogues, a now-defunct band that was formed in 1982. There’s the expected archival concert footage and interviews of Shane and The Pogues over the years, but his former band mates are not interviewed for this documentary. The filmmakers wisely chose to not interview talking heads who are music industry “experts,” because that would go against Shane’s enduring punk spirit.

Frank Murray, the manager of The Pogues from 1985 to 1990, died in 2016, at the age of 66. Shane describes Murray as someone who acted like he wanted to be another member of The Pogues. And he mentions that Murray got a 20% cut of all of The Pogues’ concert revenues and music publishing. Siobhan hints that Murray was a greedy taskmaster because she partially blames the unrelenting Pogues tour schedule in 1988 as being the reason for Shane’s massive nervous breakdown that year.

Even before the breakdown, Shane says that he was getting sick of being in the band, which had commercial success with hit songs such as “Fairytale of New York” and “The Irish Rover.” In “Crock of Gold,” Shane repeats the story about how he went into a coma, after falling out of a van while the band was on a 1991 tour in Japan. When he woke up from the coma, the rest of the band fired him because his out-of-control drinking and drugging made him too unreliable.

Shane says his ouster from the Pogues was a “relief” for him. He went on to form another band (The Popes) and launched a solo career, but his creative output after The Pogues wasn’t as well-received by fans or critics. He gives credit to “Fairtyale of New York” duet partner Kirsty MacColl (who died in a boating accident in 2000, at the age of 41) for making the song the big hit that it was, but he also expresses mixed feelings about having that type of popularity.

By contrast, Shane doesn’t have much that’s good to say about Elvis Costello, who produced The Pogues’ 1985 second album “Rum Sodomy & the Lash,” which had the hit song “A Pair of Brown Eyes.” Shane says he fired Costello from producing the follow-up album to “Rum Sodomy & the Lash” because Costello was a “fat fuck” who was on a health-food diet and didn’t tolerate Shane’s decadent lifestyle. Shane also says that he wanted to fire Costello earlier, but the situation was complicated because Costello was romantically involved at the time with Pogues bassist Caitlin O’Riordan, who left the band in 1986. Costello and O’Riordan were married from 1986 to 2002.

But if you think “Crock of Gold” has Shane sharing a lot of inside stories about his musicianship or songwriting process, forget it. Except for a brief explanation of what inspired “Instrument of Death” (the first song he says he wrote) and “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” Shane doesn’t give further insight into how he crafted any of his songs. Most likely, his brain is too fried to remember a lot of great stories that he could’ve told about what it was like to create some of his songs that his fans love the most.

Instead, “Crock of Gold” seems intent on reminding people about Shane’s legacy in music. The end of the film includes footage from the 60th birthday tribute to Shane that was held at Dublin’s National Concert Hall in January 2018. Guest artists included U2 lead singer Bono, Nick Cave, Sinéad O’Connor, Gillespie and Depp. At the show, Shane was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by Ireland president Michael D. Higgins.

When interviewer Adams asks Shane if he’s writing any new songs, Shane replies, “I’ve run out of inspiration at the moment.” In the interview with Clarke, she asks Shane what he wishes most to happen in his life. His response: “I’d like to prolifically write songs again.” And then, he gives a long pause before adding, “And I’d like to be able to play pool.”

Although anyone can see the damaging effects of Shane’s alcoholism and drug addiction (he will only admit to giving up heroin), his family members insist in the documentary that Shane doesn’t really want to die. These declarations from his family members can either be considered being optimistic or being in denial.

His sister Siobhan comments, “I certainly don’t think he has a death wish. It’s probably the opposite. He’s probably one of the people who doesn’t accept death at all, I don’t think.” Shane’s wife echoes that belief: “People think he’s got a death wish. When in actual fact, that’s not the case. He just doesn’t enjoy life without a drink.”

Even though Shane hasn’t lost his sense of humor, it’s clear that he’s deeply unhappy when he thinks about how he’ll never be able to recapture his glory days. His eyes also express a lot of fear and sadness when he talks about how his creative output isn’t what it used to be. For all of the tales that are told in “Crock of Gold” about sex, drugs and rock and roll, people can judge for themselves how it all worked out for Shane MacGowan and if his lifestyle choices were really worth it in the end.

Magnolia Pictures released “Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan” in select U.S. cinemas and on VOD and DVD on December 4, 2020.

Review: ‘I’m Your Woman,’ starring Rachel Brosnahan

December 5, 2020

by Carla Hay

“I’m Your Woman”

Directed by Julia Hart

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed Northeastern city in the U.S. in the 1970s, the dramatic film “I’m Your Woman” has a predominantly white cast (with some African Americans) representing the middle-class and the criminal underworld.

Culture Clash: After a woman’s criminal husband goes missing and she’s told that her life is in danger, she is forced to go on the run with their adopted baby son.

Culture Audience: “I’m Your Woman” will appeal primarily to people who like slow-burn crime dramas that are predictable but have good acting.

Marsha Stephanie Blake and Rachel Brosnahan in “I’m Your Woman” (Photo Wilson Webb/Amazon Studios)

People who are used to seeing Rachel Brosnahan as the fast-talking and witty stand-up comedian in her Emmy-winning Amazon Prime Video series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” are in for a big surprise when they see Brosnahan in the moody and often slow-paced dramatic film “I’m Your Woman,” also from Amazon Studios. Brosnahan stars in both vehicles, but these two projects—and the characters she portrays in each—are very different from each other.

The brightly colored, upper-middle-class 1960s world inhabited by Brosnahan’s sassy Midge Maisel character in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” is in stark contrast to the shadowy and gritty 1970s world of Brosnahan’s terrified Jean character in “I’m Your Woman,” who has to quickly adjust to life as a fugitive from gangsters. It’s a transformation that’s a testament to Brosnahan’s enormous talent, even if “I’m Your Woman” is not as well-written and as compelling as “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

“I’m Your Woman” (directed by Julia Hart, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jordan Horowitz) is set in an unnamed Northeastern region of the U.S. in a time period that takes place in the late 1970s. (The movie was actually filmed in Pittsburgh.) In the beginning of the film, Jean seems to be living an easy, pampered life as a suburban housewife. She’s seen lounging in her backyard in a magenta maribou robe, while smoking a cigarette with a glass of wine nearby.

Jean deadpans in a voiceover that sums up her marital life up to that point: “Eddie and Jean met and fell in love. Eddie and Jean got married and bought a house. Eddie and Jean were going to have a kid, but didn’t. So, every morning, Eddie kisses Jean, Eddie leaves the house, and Jean’s alone.”

As a housewife with no children, all Jean has to do is keep the house clean and cook for Eddie. And one of those things she doesn’t do very well. There’s a semi-joke during the movie about how Jean, by her own admission, is a terrible cook. For example, she can’t even make toast without burning it.

Her husband Eddie (played by Bill Heck) is understanding about Jean’s lack of cooking skills. But is this a picture-perfect marriage? Of course not. The first sign that Eddie is into some shady dealings is when he suddenly comes home one day with a baby boy and hands the child to Jean and tells her that the child is now theirs.

Jean doesn’t ask the type of questions that most people would ask. Instead, she tells Eddie, “Is this some kind of sick joke? Because I’m not in the mood.” Eddie replies, “It’s all worked out. He’s our baby.” He then tells Jean that she can name the baby. She names him Harry.

This is the part of the plot where viewers will have to suspend a lot of disbelief, because it’s explained later why Jean immediately wants to become this child’s mother without asking any crucial questions, such as: How did Eddie get the child? Who are the child’s biological parents? Where is the child’s birth certificate?

It becomes quite clear that Jean is a “don’t ask, don’t tell” wife. She knows her husband is a thief and doesn’t really want to know what else he might be up to doing for “work,” as long as he keeps her happy. But it’s revealed later in the story that the one thing in their marriage that has kept Jean very unhappy is that she’s had several miscarriages. She desperately wants to become a mother and has a lot of emotional scars from being unable to carry a baby to childbirth.

The shock of having an “instant” baby takes a while to wear off because Jean is completely unprepared for all the responsibilities of taking care of a newborn baby. It’s a lot harder than she thought it would be. (The role of Harry is played by three different boys: Jameson Charles, Justin Charles and Barrett Shaffer. The movie has the predictable cute baby expressions edited in certain scenes, to make it look like Harry is reacting to something.)

Jean barely has time to adjust to being a new mother when something happens that also drastically alters her life. Very late one night, Jean is woken up by a thug named Jimmy (played by Jarrod DiGiorgi), one of Eddie’s colleagues, who frantically tells her that she has to pack up some things and leave the house with Harry. A shocked and confused Jean asks Jimmy why.

All he tells her is that something happened, she and Harry have to go into hiding, and that Jean has to go with someone named Cal (who is waiting outside the house), and do whatever Cal says. Jimmy also gives Jean $20,000 in cash. Eddie is nowhere in sight, and Jimmy doesn’t seem to know where Eddie is.

Jean only has a light travel bag and Harry with her when she leaves with Cal (played by Arinzé Kene), whose car is parked outside. Cal is a strong, silent type, who also doesn’t know where Eddie is. It’s at this point it becomes very obvious that Eddie is into illegal things that are more serious than stealing.

However, Jean is in deep denial, and she doesn’t understand until Cal literally tells her why she has to go into hiding. Eddie has killed a powerful gangster, Eddie has been a murderer for quite some time, and now he’s gone missing. The cronies of the murdered gangster are out to get revenge on Eddie and his family. Eddie seemed to know that a day might come when he would get into this type of trouble, so he already arranged for a safe house where Jean could go in case she needed to hide.

And how does Cal know Eddie? He tells Jean that he used to work for Eddie. But as the story goes on, there are major signs that Cal and Eddie had some kind of falling out, because Cal gets very tense whenever Eddie’s name is mentioned. Cal also makes an offhand, somewhat snide comment when he says that Eddie must still have friends if Jean was warned to leave and go to a fully furnished safe house.

The safe house is several miles away and it will take more than a day to get there by car. During their road trip, Cal and Jean stay in a motel for one night and try to keep a low profile. However, Harry (who has been crying a lot) seems to have a fever. Against Cal’s objections, Jean insists that they go to a hospital to get medical help for the baby. Hospitals keep records, and Cal doesn’t want any trace of where he and Jean are.

After Harry gets treatment at the hospital, it doesn’t take long for the baby to recover from his fever, so Jean and Cal abruptly leave with the baby, without formally checking out of the hospital. This health scare leaves them exhausted, so during their road trip, they pull over to the side of a road to take a nap.

They are woken up by a racist police officer, who immediately assumes that Cal is up to no good and that Jean might be a kidnapping victim. The cop won’t let Cal talk during the questioning, and he keeps asking Jean if she’s okay, as if expecting her to tell him that this African American man is holding her against her will.

Jean can see where this line of questioning is going, so she lies and says that Cal is her husband and they were just taking a nap because they were worn out from the health scare that the baby had. Jean makes sure to keep the baby’s face covered, so the cop can’t see that the baby is white. The cop lets them go with a warning, while still glaring suspiciously at Cal. As Cal and Jean drive off, she tells him with a certain amount of pride, “I didn’t know I could lie like that.”

At the safe house, Cal tells Jean that there’s a phone upstairs to call only if there is a real emergency. He also gives her a number to call if an emergency happens. Cal says that he can’t watch her 24 hours a day, and he gives Jean strict orders not to talk to anyone except for him while she’s at the safe house. But, of course, you know in a movie like this, rules will be broken, and something is going to go wrong.

Jean begs Cal not to leave because she says she’s never been on her own before. (Jean’s life before she married Eddie is never revealed in this movie.) Cal is fairly even-tempered, but at this moment, he gets irritated with Jean and snaps at her: “I’m doing the best I can!” Then in a calmer voice, as if he regrets losing his temper, he says to Jean: “Let’s do the best we can.” Why is Cal caught up in Eddie’s mess if Cal no longer works for Eddie? That’s explained later in the movie.

Jean breaks the “no talking to anyone else but Cal” rule one evening when the doorbell rings and she answers it. The visitor is a lonely and slightly nosy neighbor named Evelyn (played by Marceline Hugot), an elderly widow who lives two houses down on the same street. Evelyn introduces herself and makes small talk with Jean, who is very guarded and doesn’t want to talk to Evelyn for very long. Jean also lies and says that her name is Mary, but she tells the truth about her baby being named Harry. Before Evelyn walks away, she gives Jean a bouquet of garden flowers as a housewarming gift.

Evelyn, who says she used to know the people who lived in the house, shows up unannounced again at the front door on another evening. Evelyn has brought some homemade lasagna with her. And since Jean is a terrible cook and is longing for a good meal, she lets Evelyn into the house, where they talk some more over their meal at the dining table.

Jean is still wary about telling Evelyn details about herself, but Jean finds herself having a friendly rapport with this neighbor. Evelyn offers to help Jean with anything that she might need. However, Jean still can’t trust Evelyn completely. Jean’s paranoia becomes evident when Evelyn asks to use the restroom upstairs. Jean hears Evelyn walking around upstairs and has panicky thoughts and calls out Evelyn’s name to make sure that nothing suspicious is going on.

At this point in the story, Jean still thinks that Eddie will eventually show up and that their lives might go back to normal. But Jean is in for a rude awakening, when a series of events happen where she has to “toughen up” in order to survive. During the course of the movie (which takes place over an unspecified period of time but it’s definitely less than two weeks), Jean goes from being a sheltered housewife into a street-smart badass. And this evolution is expected and handled in a mostly predictable way, although Brosnahan adds interesting layers of nuance that make the performance worth watching.

What’s less interesting than Brosnahan’s performance is how the pace of the movie sometimes tends to drag. I’m Your Woman” has a running time of two hours, but it could’ve easily been 90 to 110 minutes if some scenes had better editing. And some elements of Jean’s transformation are just a little too convenient for this story.

For example, Jean is supposed to be a wife in deliberate denial about her husband Eddie’s criminal activities that don’t involve stealing. She seems shocked to find out that he was secretly a serial murderer involved in gang activities. However, there’s a scene in the movie before Eddie disappears where he invites some of his goon colleagues over to the house, and everything about them screams “gangsters.”

And based on Jean’s reaction, she’s seen these guys with her husband before. But during the course of the story, Jean’s naïveté suddenly disappears and she’s able to intuitively figure out big secrets in Eddie’s life (that don’t involve murder), just by having a few conversations with certain people. It’s a drastic change that doesn’t always ring true.

It can certainly be left up to interpretation that Jean had these street smarts all along, and her ordeal of being on the run from gangsters helped bring this uncanny intuition out of her. But it all just looks like too sudden, too “on the nose.” One minute, Jean is panicky and can’t think straight. The next minute, Jean is figuring out Eddie’s web of lives as if she’s logical Miss Marple having a big detective “a-ha” moment.

At any rate, the safe house no longer becomes safe, so Cal takes Jean to his family log cabin for protection. It’s here that Jean meets Cal’s wife Teri (played by Marsha Stephanie Blake); Cal and Teri’s son Paul (played by De’Mauri Parks), who’s about 9 or 10 years old; and Cal’s father (played by Frankie Faison), who ends up teaching Jean how to use a gun.

“I’m Your Woman” takes its time to get to some of the action that people might expect to be happening throughout the movie. Instead, there are only sporadic pockets of real action, such as chase scenes or gun fights. Jean and Teri end up forming an unexpected bond with each other, but there are moments where Jean is left wondering how much she can trust Teri or anyone at all.

As for baby Harry, his origins are never really explained. Jean says that Eddie told her that Harry’s young, unwed mother arranged for Eddie to get the child through a private arrangement, which is implied to be an illegal adoption. (Jean never asks to see paperwork.) But considering that Eddie lied about so many things to Jean, who really knows if that’s true? The child could have been kidnapped, but it’s clear that Jean doesn’t care. As far as Jean is concerned, she is now Harry’s mother.

“I’m Your Woman” shares some things in common with writer/director Hart’s 2019 female superhero movie “Fast Color,” which was another slow-paced film that was focused less on fight scenes and more about the interior transformation of a woman gradually coming to terms with and learning to use the power she didn’t really know she had. Jean is not a superhero, but her maternal instinct kicks in fiercely during the story because she begins to understand the type of parental love that puts children above anything else.

The movie’s portrayal of the 1970s is mostly authentic for its production design and costume design (lots of tones in sepia, olive or mustard), except for one scene where people run out of a nightclub where there was a gun shooting, and the entire street looks like a movie set instead of a real Pittsburgh street from the 1970s. And there are some little details that the movie gets right in showing Jean’s maternal instinct to think about the baby before anything else. In one scene, Jean is barefoot in a grocery store because she frantically ran there to get some baby formula for Harry. It’s explained in the movie why she’s barefoot.

Some scenes are a little corny, such as when Jean and Cal are in a nearly-empty diner together soon after they meet, and they end up singing Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” It’s a great song, but very over-used in movies and TV. Other scenes are emotionally resonant, such as when Jean starts to come out of her shell and connect with Teri and her family. And there is some melodrama, such as when Jean has a tearful breakdown in a laundromat.

The movie doesn’t make any heavy-handed commentaries about race relations, but it does show (not tell) how Jean and Teri—two women from very different backgrounds—can form an alliance organically without any bigotry getting in the way of their friendship. Brosnahan and Blake have an authentic rapport with one another that make their scenes together the movie’s definite high points. And it’s refreshing that this movie didn’t resort to catty clichés of the two women bickering before they found a way to get along with each other.

If people hear that “I’m Your Woman” is about a gun-toting mama on the run from gangsters, with her newborn baby in tow, they might be misled into thinking that it’s a fast-paced action flick. It’s not. This is a thoughtfully acted crime drama where the emphasis is on a family’s collateral damage because of a gangster’s misdeeds. The movie shows what happens during one woman’s survival journey during a specific period of time; how she got some unexpected help along the way; and how her life perspective drastically changed.

Amazon Studios released “I’m Your Woman” in select U.S. cinemas on December 4, 2020. Prime Video premieres the movie on December 11, 2020.

Review: ‘All My Life’ (2020), starring Jessica Rothe, Harry Shum Jr., Kyle Allen, Chrissie Fit, Jay Pharoah, Marielle Scott and Keala Settle

Harry Shum Jr. and Jessica Rothe in “All My Life” (Photo by Patti Perret/Universal Pictures)

“All My Life” (2020)

Directed by Marc Meyers

Culture Representation: Taking place in New Orleans, the dramatic film “All My Life” features a predominantly white cast (with some Asians, Latinos and African Americans) representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: Shortly after getting engaged to be married, a couple experiences a major health crisis that threatens the life of the man in the relationship.

Culture Audience: “All My Life” will appeal primarily to people who like predictable dramas about romances that are plagued by cancer.

The dramatic film “All My Life” (directed by Marc Meyers) is one in a long list of sappy tearjerkers that’s more like a formulaic “disease of the week” movie made for television instead of a well-made cinematic experience that tells a story in a unique way. The city where “All My Life” takes place isn’t mentioned in the story, but the movie was filmed in New Orleans and has some very noticeable New Orleans landmarks. Even though “All My Life” is based on a true story, there’s something very phony and off-putting about this film that some viewers might notice, while others won’t.

If something seems “off” about this movie, that’s because there is something very unbalanced about it: The male partner in the relationship has a family who is never seen or mentioned. In fact, this whole movie seems designed to make the female partner in the relationship look like the well-rounded family person who’s practically saintly during this romance. She plays the role of “emotional rescuer” and “life coach” to her more insecure male partner, whose family background is of no concern to the filmmakers of “All My Life.”

The couple in this relationship happens to be interracial—she’s white and he’s Asian, just like the real-life couple—and their racial identities don’t have be the focal point of the story. But to completely erase any mention of him having a family—especially considering the life-threatening illness he experiences in the story—makes this “romantic” movie feel very one-sided and inauthentic. A culturally tone-deaf film like “All My Life” is one of the reasons why Asians are underrepresented in American-made entertainment.

The screenplay for “All My Life” (written by Todd Rosenberg) is also littered with so many lazy clichés that people who’ve seen enough of these types of hackneyed movies will already know exactly how this story is going to end even before it starts. “All My Life” is told from the perspective of the female protagonist Jennifer “Jenn” Carter (played by Jessica Rothe), which is obvious from the get-go because she’s the narrator in the voiceover that starts off the film. The romance of Jenn Carter and Solomon “Sol” Chau (played by Harry Shum Jr.) is at the center of the story.

At the beginning of the movie, Jenn is portrayed as a bright and energetic woman in her mid-20s who’s got a very busy life where she works and goes to school. But as is usually the narrative in hokey movies like this, her life is supposed to be “empty” until she’s found her one true love. In the voiceover, Jenn says that an average person lives 27,375 days (that’s 75 years, for anyone who doesn’t want to do the math), and she was living a routine life until something major happened to her. “I didn’t notice that my life was becoming a series of forgotten days,” she says in the tone of voice that might as well shout, “My life was boring until I fell in love!”

Jenn and Sol have their “meet cute” moment at a sports bar, where Jenn and her two best friends Amanda Fletcher (played by Chrissie Fit) and Megan Denhoff (played by Marielle Scott) have gone with the intention to just have one drink before heading somewhere else on their evening out. Jenn’s job is vaguely described in the movie (at one point in the story, she mentions to Sol that she works in “decoration”), and the movie never actually shows her working. She’s also studying to get her master’s degree in psychology. There’s a brief scene of her in a classroom.

The details of Amanda’s career are also not revealed, but apparently she works in some type of office job, because Jenn and Megan raise their drinks to her in a congratulatory toast for Amanda getting a promotion and a new assistant. Amanda is the sassiest of the three women, but she and Megan basically have sidekick roles in this story. Megan’s job is never really mentioned, but she seems to be some kind of event planner, because she does all the organizing of Jenn and Sol’s inevitable wedding. Sol and Jenn’s wedding is not a secret plot development, since it’s in shown in this movie’s trailer and other marketing materials for “All My Life.”

Back at the sports bar, the three female friends are immediately noticed by three male friends: Sol, who works in digital marketing; his best pal Dave Berger (played by Jay Pharoah), who’s a professional boxer; and Kyle Campbell (played by Kyle Allen), whose job is not mentioned in the film. The three men (who are all around the same age as the women) make their way over to the women’s table. There’s some mild flirting, but it’s clear that the most romantic sparks are flying between Jenn and Sol. Thankfully, there’s no “triple date” scenario in this movie, where all six of them unrealistically pair up into convenient couples.

Jenn and Sol quickly begin dating each other. For their first date, they go jogging together in a park. Sol has some pain near the right side of his waist, which foreshadows what’s to come later. He assumes it’s just a cramp and doesn’t think much of it, but it happens again later in the film.

Sol and Jenn’s romance is portrayed as very conventional, with a lot of tropes that have been seen before in similar movies: romantic dinners, getting caught in the rain during a date, and the couple having a signature song. For Sol and Jenn, their signature song is the Oasis hit “Don’t Look Back in Anger” (originally released in 1995), which they see a musical string trio perform in the park on their first date, and Sol begins singing along. People who are fans of Shum because of his role in the TV musical series “Glee” will get their big cheesy musical moment later in the movie.

Sol and Jenn eventually become lovers. There are no sex scenes in this very tame movie. Jenn and Sol are a believable couple together, but the way that they are written for this movie, they’re utterly predictable. And because this movie is hell-bent on denying that Sol has a family, his character comes across as someone who only exists to fulfill the romantic fantasies of Jenn. The limited way in which Sol’s character is written is a disservice to the real-life person.

One of the ways that the movie makes Sol a vessel for Jenn’s wish fulfillment is in how she steers him in another career direction. Sol hates his digital-marketing job because he has an overly demanding boss who makes him work long hours that go beyond his job description. Sol’s real passion and talent are in cooking. And he’s very good at it, based on the reactions he gets from people who eat any food that he prepares. But because Jenn is the “emotional rescuer” and “life coach” in this story, she spends a lot of time trying to convince Sol to leave his miserable job and become a restaurant chef.

Jenn’s older cousin Gigi Carter (played by Ever Carradine) conveniently owns a restaurant, and Jenn says that Gigi would love to hire Sol as a sous chef at the restaurant. Sol has some previous experience in food service, since he briefly worked part-time at a food truck. But he’s reluctant to become a full-time chef because he says that he doesn’t have formal training (even though it’s common knowledge that many professional chefs never went to culinary school) and he tells Jenn that he can’t afford to quit his digital-marketing job. As a solution, Jenn suggests that Sol move into her apartment to share expenses.

Sol and Jenn negotiate over their live-in arrangement, such as which types of furniture they will or won’t keep, and who will do the cooking and when. Jenn also tells Sol in a serious tone that she has one major condition of them being committed to living together: “Step up when it’s time to step up. Mistakes I can handle. Regrets I can’t live with.” Sol agrees to the terms that Jenn sets, because this movie is more concerned about Jenn’s thoughts and needs than Sol’s.

At first, things go well for Jenn and Sol. However, Jenn is dismayed that Sol’s office job has been making him so worn-down and exhausted that he seems to have lost interest in cooking. Jenn and Amanda come up with the idea for Sol to cook for the Thanksgiving dinner party that will be held at Sol and Jenn’s place. In addition to Sol and Jenn, the other people at the dinner party are some of their friends, Jen’s single mother Hope Marie Carter (played by Molly Hagen) and Jenn’s cousin Gigi, who owns the restaurant where Jenn thinks Sol should work.

It’s at this dinner where Gigi tastes Sol’s cooking for the first time and basically hires him on the spot. He agrees to work at Gigi’s restaurant as a sous chef. Jenn is thrilled because she knows that she was the driving force behind this life-changing decision for Sol. Because this Thanksgiving dinner party was for family and friends, it’s where observant viewers will really notice the big erasure of Sol’s family in this movie.

Jenn’s mother and cousin are in several scenes with Jenn, and all three of these family members are obviously a support system for each other. Jenn’s father is not seen or mentioned in the story. But what this movie leaves out is any explanation for why Sol’s entire family is never seen or mentioned in the story. Not once does Jenn seem curious about Sol’s family or interested in meeting them. Sol doesn’t mention them either because it’s obviously not in the screenplay.

And although “All My Life” is the type of movie that wants to be “color blind” by not mentioning anyone’s race, it actually seems racist to portray the Asian person in this couple as the one who doesn’t deserve to have any family background whatsoever. The filmmakers obviously didn’t want to cast any additional Asian people as Sol’s family members, but it wouldn’t have been so hard to at least mention why Sol doesn’t have family members to support him during his health crisis. Needless to say, there’s no mention of Sol having family members at his wedding either.

However, the movie does want to get some mileage out of Shum’s “Glee” fame, because Sol’s marriage proposal is an overblown musical scene right out of something that would be in “Glee.” At the same park where Sol and Jenn had their first date, Sol stages an elaborate presentation where he, all of their friends, that same musical string trio that Jen and Sol saw on their first date, as well several people who have never been seen before in the story, perform and sing “Don’t Look Back in Anger” to Jen. The proposal happens near a lake, so some people arrive by boat for this big musical number. Some anonymous spectators are part of this musical number too. It’s as cringeworthy and unrealistic as it sounds.

By the way, Keala Settle (of “The Greatest Showman” fame) has a small role as Viv Lawrence, who works at a vintage shop that sells clothing and some vinyl records. Sol goes in the store one day to look for a gift for Jenn. As he sifts through the crates of vinyl records, Viv recommends anything by Pat Benatar.

Viv tells Sol that Viv used to work in a nightclub where every time a band played the Pat Benatar song “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” the crowd loved it. As soon as Viv says that, you know what’s coming later in the movie. And it does: Viv sings “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” at Sol and Jenn’s wedding.

Before the wedding happens, there’s a lot of turmoil because of the health crisis. Shortly after getting engaged, Sol wakes up drenched in sweat. He’s taken to a hospital and gets a diagnosis from his doctor Alan Mendolson (played by Dan Butler), who tells Sol and Jenn that Sol has a perforated ulcer. But then, the doctor breaks some news that’s much worse. Actually, its not a perforated ulcer. Sol has a cancerous tumor on his liver.

After surgery, Sol and Jenn are told (much to their great relief) that Sol is on track to make a full recovery. They want to get married in a back-patio area at Gigi’s restaurant, but event planner Megan thinks that this space is too small and not upscale enough. The debate over where Sol and Jenn will have their wedding becomes trivial when they get more bad news: Sol’s liver cancer has returned with vengeance. He’s given only six months to live.

When he was initially diagnosed, Sol told Jenn that if he ever gets a medical diagnosis that’s terminal, they should get a dog together. Jenn finds out that Sol’s medical condition has gotten worse when she comes home one day and sees that he’s gotten a dog, which he’s named Otis. Sol gives her the details of his terminal diagnosis.

Sol and Jenn are devastated, of course, and Sol eventually wants to cancel the wedding. Jenn disagrees and thinks that Sol is giving up too easily. Amanda and Megan come up with the idea to start a GoFundMe campaign to raise $20,000 for Sol and Jenn’s wedding and honeymoon. Amanda and Megan insist on it, and Sol and Jenn agree to this plan.

Mario Cantone has a small role in the movie as Jerome Patterson, the flamboyant manager of the sought-after venue that ends up being rented for the wedding ceremony and reception. Conveniently, there’s a sudden cancellation that allows Sol and Jenn to book the venue on very short notice. They plan to have their honeymoon in an unnamed tropical location that has all the characteristics of a dream vacation, including staying at an upscale beachside resort.

As the story goes on, Jenn is portrayed as someone who doesn’t seem to have any real flaws. Jenn has vulnerabilities (which are not the same as flaws), because there are the inevitable scenes where she wails and cries during the health crisis that shakes this fairytale romance to its core. At the same time, Jenn is portrayed as being the more “motivated” partner in the relationship. She’s the one who gives the pep talks for Sol to change careers and when Sol inevitably becomes pessimistic about his cancer.

Sol’s reaction plays into fairytale stereotypes that men are supposed to be stoic and not cry when they’re faced with having a terminal disease where there’s a high probability that they will die a very slow and painful death. But Sol, the sensitive romantic who pours out his emotions during an elaborate marriage proposal, never shows the emotional vulnerability of crying about his cancer. The most that he does is complain about all the side effects he gets from his cancer treatment. Of course, there isn’t one way that people are supposed to emotionally react to a cancer diagnosis, so Saul’s macho “I’m not going to cry” reaction shouldn’t be judged too harshly.

The movie depicts Jenn as vacillating between trying to lift Sol’s spirits and expecting him to coddle her when she wants to equate his pain with her pain. At one point in the movie, when Sol explains to Jenn that he can’t really think about anything except his cancer treatment’s painful side effects that he’s experiencing at that moment, Jenn makes a scolding remark along the lines of “We’re in this together!” It comes across as a bit insensitive on Jenn’s part, because Jenn’s not the one going through the physical trauma of cancer and the nauseating side effects of cancer treatment.

Although this movie doesn’t show Sol expressing any deep fear and gut-wrenching sadness (Jenn is the one who has the emotional meltdowns), there’s something that does ring true when it comes to some male emotional vulnerability shown in the story. Sol’s friend Kyle is somewhat of a generic character until it’s revealed that Kyle’s father died of a terminal illness. Sol’s diagnosis has triggered Kyle into having bad memories of watching his father slowly die, especially when Kyle goes to the hospital to visit Sol.

And the only way that Kyle knows how to cope is to start avoiding Sol, which he does for the majority of Sol’s cancer treatment. Kyle’s reaction is explained as being similar to having post-traumatic stress disorder. And it’s bad enough where Kyle doesn’t even want to be one of Sol’s groomsmen, although Kyle is still invited to the wedding. The movie shows whether or not Kyle will end up going to the wedding.

“All My Life” is supposed to be a romantic movie about a young and modern couple who go through a lot of turmoil leading up to their dream wedding, but there are some old-fashioned and backwards mindsets that stink up this movie, beginning with the erasure of the groom’s Asian family. There are also some sexist ways in how the gender roles for the couple are framed in the movie. Jenn’s career is barely given a thought, while there are plenty of scenes of Sol at work and a lot of emphasis on how his career is going.

After Jenn meets Sol, her scenes are almost always about the energy she puts into the relationship with Sol. It’s a very big gender imbalance in how these two people are portrayed, which is made all the more noticeable because Jenn doesn’t want to be a full-time homemaker. Yet her career goals are buried in the story, and she spends more time trying to help Sol in his career. It’s really the filmmakers’ way of saying that they don’t think Jenn’s career is as important as Sol’s.

Although the character of Jenn is supposed to have many melodramatic emotions in this movie, Rothe is very good at not going too over the top into campy territory. Her acting skills make the mushiness in the screenplay more tolerable than it should be. Shum is more hampered with playing a stilted character who has no backstory or fascinating character development, so there isn’t really anything he can do but play a character whose disease is often used as a stand-in for his personality.

Aside from erasing Sol’s family and erasing any depiction of Jenn actually working at a job that helps pay her bills, another omission that makes “All My Life” look very fake is that Jenn and Sol never talk about whether or not they want to have kids. Sol’s cancer diagnosis would definitely affect any family planning they might or nor might not have, but that’s an issue that’s unrealistically left out of the movie. Maybe it’s because if Jenn and Sol talked about having children, then it would remind viewers that Sol and Jenn’s kids would be biracial, and it would be more of a reason for people to notice that Sol’s family isn’t in this story.

“All My Life” is the type of movie that looks like it’s not worth paying extra money as a rental or a purchase but instead belongs on the Hallmark Channel or as part of a Netflix subscription. The cast members are serviceable in their acting roles, but the screenplay and direction are utterly in “hack” territory. Worst of all, the filmmakers went out of their way to erase some very realistic and interesting aspects of this real-life romance that could have made this movie stand out from all the “disease of the week” movies that are just like it.

Universal Pictures released “All My Life” in U.S. cinemas on December 4, 2020. The movie’s VOD release date is December 23, 2020.

Review: ‘Half Brothers,’ starring Luis Gerardo Méndez and Connor Del Rio

December 4, 2020

by Carla Hay

“Half Brothers”

Directed by Luke Greenfield

Some language in Spanish with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in Mexico and the United States, the comedy film “Half Brothers” features a cast of Latino and white characters representing the middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Two half-brothers—one who’s Mexican and the other who’s American—have conflicts with each other when they’re forced to go on a road trip together as part of their father’s dying wish.

Culture Audience: “Half Brothers” will appeal primarily to people who like dumb comedies with obnoxious main characters.

Juan Pablo Espinosa and Ian Inigo in “Half Brothers” (Photo by John Golden Britt/Focus Features)

What does it say about a movie when a goat is the most appealing character in the film? A goat is used as a “cute pet” gimmick in the awful and dimwitted comedy film “Half Brothers,” which takes a very unoriginal comedy concept (two opposite people who don’t get along are forced to spend time together) and shoves it in viewers’ faces in extremely annoying levels. The movie is also filled with hateful stereotypes about Mexican and American cultures without any sense of witty irony. And the movie becomes so repetitious that many viewers will be bored enough to fall asleep.

“Half Brothers” (directed by Luke Greenfield and written by Eduardo Cisneros and Jason Shuman) is the type of movie that seems like it could’ve been a made in a previous century when people were more accepting of stupid comedies that rely too heavily on broad ethnic stereotypes. What’s worse is that “Half Brothers” is one of those movies that thinks it’s funny but it’s not, so it uses the same type of ethnic jokes for the entire movie. That’s not to say that racial and nationality differences can’t be used in comedy, but there has to be some intelligence behind it or something that will make people think about race and nationality in a more important context, instead of just spewing hate.

Everything about “Half Brothers” reeks of toxic masculinity and the misguided idea that being loud-mouthed or a jerk automatically means that you’re funny. And this is one of those movies where almost all of the women with speaking roles are literally only in the movie to play characters who either marry the men, work for the men, or be nuns. It’s just such a disgusting display of small-minded, outdated and idiotic sexism.

There’s supposed to be a big “treasure hunt” aspect to the story that has an outcome that is incredibly predictable to anyone smart enough to notice the obvious recurring theme about the father/son relationships in this movie. The beginning of the film takes place in San Miguel De Allende, Mexico. Viewers see a father named Flavio Murguía (played by Juan Pablo Espinosa) watching while his son Renato (played by Ian Inigo), who looks like he’s about 10 or 11 years old, is flying a remote-controlled toy plane.

Flavio (who is an aviation engineer) and Renato both love planes, and Flavio promises Renato that one day, he will build a real plane for Renato. However, Renato is quite the little brat because he likes to fly his toy plane as a way for it to pester people, scare unsuspecting victims, or do property damage. Flavio thinks it’s hilarious that Renato uses the remote-controlled plane to cause mischief, and he encourages his son to irritate people with pranks. Sometimes Flavio gets in on the pranks too. Flavio also lets his underage child drink beer with him. It’s all Flavio’s way of bonding with Renato, who is Flavio’s only child at this point.

Renato is too young to know that any parent who acts this irresponsibly is going to end up hurting people emotionally. And that’s exactly what happens to Renato, as well as Flavio’s wife Rene (played by Bianca Marroquin), who is Renato’s mother. She’s one of those passive wives who has a “boys will be boys” attitude when she sees how her husband is teaching their son some questionable morals.

San Miguel De Allende is hit hard by an economic depression. Businesses in the area are shut down, and unemployment is high. The Murguía family sees a news report on TV that the demand for the U.S. dollar is much greater than the Mexican peso. Flavio ends up reluctantly leaving his family to travel to the United States with a group of other Mexicans to try and find work.

When Flavio arrives in the U.S., life is tough for him because he doesn’t speak English at first. In the movie, it’s implied that he’s an undocumented immigrant. Therefore, he can’t get a job in his chosen profession. He has to do menial jobs with other Mexican immigrants.

There’s a scene where Flavio is in a group of Mexican immigrants who are hired on a farm as cheap labor to replace the American workers. The scene literally shows the Mexican immigrants walking past the laid-off American workers, who stare at the Mexicans with hatred. This movie is not subtle at all about its intentions to fan the flames of bigotry in many of its scenes.

It’s not shown right away in the movie, but it’s eventually revealed that Flavio has learned English and gotten a job working for an American aviation company in Chicago. Because he’s supposed to be “brilliant,” according to this movie, Flavio comes up with some clever engineering ideas that catches the eye of a woman whose family owns the company. Her name is Katherine (played by Ashley Poole), and she and Flavio end up having an affair.

Flavio has feelings of guilt about the affair and plans to go back to Mexico to his family. But Katherine gets pregnant (Flavio is the father) and gives birth to a boy named Asher. Through a serious of circumstances, Flavio never goes back to Mexico, and he essentially abandons his first family to start a new life with Katherine and Asher. Flavio also becomes a successful executive at the airplane company.

Flavio dumps his wife Rene over the phone. She and Renato are devastated to find out that Flavio is not coming home as promised. Rene and Flavio eventually get divorced. Flavio marries Katherine and spends the rest of his life in Chicago with her and their son Asher, who is the only child they have together. However, Asher is a strange and hyper kid, and Flavio isn’t that great of a father to him either. Flavio doesn’t really emotionally connect with Asher, who grows up feeling doubts that his father truly accepts him.

Years later, Renato (played by Luis Gerardo Méndez) is now a 35-year-old ambitious and aggressive entrepreneur who has started his own successful aviation company in Mexico. He is engaged to be married to a single mother named Pamela (played by Pia Watson), whose son Emilio (played by Mikey Salazar), who’s about 7 or 8 years old, is someone Renato feels uncomfortable being around because he thinks Emilio is too weird. Emilio does things like walk around wearing gory Halloween masks, and he uses squirt guns filled with green goo on Pamela and Renato. It’s an obvious cry for attention, but Renato just treats the kid like a pest.

The adult Renato is also extremely prejudiced against Americans. He hates America so much that he refuses to expand his company into the United States. In an early scene in the movie with the adult Renato, he’s doing an interview with an American female reporter (played by Shira Scott Astrof), and Renato spews a lot of hateful rhetoric about Americans. Renato’s publicist Perla (played by Nohelia Sosa Crisafulli), who is there during the interview, nervously tries to change the subject.

Renato’s rant includes him telling the reporter his list of reasons for why he despises Americans: “They’re entitled, they’re ignorant, they think Mexico is just a bunch of drug cartels and Cancún. They’re idiots. And you know what else? They’re fat!”

Even after this incredibly xenophobic tirade, this movie excuses Renato’s ignorant mindset by having the two women laugh it off. It makes all of them look stupid. And it’s a gross display of how the filmmakers think it’s funny too.

At home, Renato is just as insufferable as he is at work. While going over the guest list for their wedding, his fiancée Pamela points out to Renato that he only has three guests, while she has 60 guests. She half-teasingly comments that Renato has no friends. It’s one of the few things in this movie that makes sense, because Renato is a self-centered and arrogant bigot.

Meanwhile, when Pamela mentions to Renato that her son Emilio is being bullied at his school, she asks Renato to give Emilio a pep talk to make Emilio feel better. Renato reluctantly talks to Emilio, and Pamela notices that Renato makes only half-hearted and awkward efforts to bond with her son. Pamela wonders out loud to Renato if she should marry someone who can’t really love her son like a father should.

The wedding is five days away when Renato gets an unexpected call from Katherine, his father’s second wife. Katherine tells Renato that Flavio is dying (she never says what kind of illness he has), and she asks Renato to come to Chicago to see Flavio before he passes away. Renato’s immediate reaction is to say no, but Pamela talks him into going on the trip.

When he arrives in Chicago, Renato’s rideshare driver Irene (played by Mona Malec), who picks him up at the airport, is his worst nightmare because she’s every stereotype that he thinks about Americans: She’s overweight and ignorant about Mexican culture. Upon hearing that Renato is from Mexico, Irene starts speaking to him louder and slower (as if he can’t understand English) and then asks him what Cancún is like. Irene is also shocked to hear that Renato has never ziplined in his life, because she thinks that ziplining is the main leisure activity in Mexico.

At a coffee shop, Renato is standing in line when he sees a loudmouthed red-haired man doing a livestream on his phone, as if he’s some kind of social-media star. After he finishes his livestream, the man gets behind Renato in line and asks him for money to buy a donut. A disgusted Renato says no, but the man keeps pestering Renato to give him money.

The motormouth redhead notices that the barista behind the counter has a nametag with the name Beatrice, but he insists on pronouncing her name as Beat Rice. When Renato gets to the counter, he tells the barista Beatrice (played by Teresa Decher) that he wants to buy all the donuts in the shop, and he wants her to immediately throw the donuts away. He flashes a wad of cash to make it happen, while the pesky redhead behind him tells Renato that what he just did is cruel. Renato just smirks.

But is this the last time that Renato will see this irritating loser? Of course not. When Renato goes to the hospital to visit Flavio on his death bed, who walks in the room just a few minutes later? The redhead from the coffee shop. And it should come as no surprise to anyone but Renato that this guy is his half-brother Asher (played by Connor Del Rio), who becomes more and more obnoxious as the story goes on.

After Flavio very awkwardly introduces the brothers to each other, he tells them that he has a gift for them. It’s an envelope with a message that leads to some clues for a hunt to what Flavio hints is a big treasure. They have to find someone or something named Eloise at the end of the trip. And Flavio insists that the only way they can get the treasure is if they do the hunt together.

And of course, it’s a cross-country trip because there would be no “Half Brothers” movie without a contrivance of these two cretins being stuck together for days during this road trip. The brothers are too greedy not to find out what this treasure is. And there’s a “race against time” because Renato needs to get back to Mexico in time for his wedding.

Keep in mind that Renato met Asher just five days before his wedding. Flavio dies very soon after Renato and Asher meet each other. But somehow, this moronic movie crams in Flavio’s funeral too, even though it would take at least a few days for the funeral to be prepared, thereby taking time away from the road trip. Therefore, the timeline of the road trip doesn’t add up. But the “Half Brothers” filmmakers think people watching this movie are too stupid to notice a big stinking plot hole like this one.

During the road trip, Renato takes on the role of the “smart” brother, who is condescending to “dumb” brother Asher, whose job experience includes being a “brand ambassador” (someone who hands out flyers) and a failed waiter at Chili’s. Renato likes meticulous planning. Asher is impulsive. You get the idea of how the rest of the movie is going to go.

The goat comes into the picture early on in the road trip, when Renato makes the mistake of falling asleep while letting Asher drive the bright orange Mercedes-Benz 300TD Turbodiesel that they take on the trip. When Renato wakes up, he sees Asher running away from a farm with a young goat in his arms. Some angry farm employees are chasing after Asher, but he’s able to put the goat in the car and drive away before he can get caught.

Asher stole the goat because he thought the goat was silently speaking to him to free it from the farm. And why did Asher stop at the farm in the first place? He saw a road sign advertising that the farm was open to visitors. Renato is furious when he finds out that Asher took a detour of more than 100 miles to go to the farm. The goat is really the only adorable thing about this terrible movie.

“Half Brothers” is a series of these not-very-funny scenarios that usually involve Asher doing something idiotic that causes a setback, and Renato getting angry at him and trying the fix the mess that Asher made. The brothers get into predictable fist fights too. And as for Eloise, this movie can’t even come up with a good mystery in this treasure hunt because it’s so obvious what the “treasure” is, if you think about what a guilt-ridden Flavio would give as his final gift for his sons to find.

Aside from the terrible jokes in “Half Brothers,” the movie’s road trip is very unimaginative and doesn’t show much appreciation for the different locales that are visited. The personalities of these two louts don’t get better as the trip goes on. They get worse, until the movie tries to cram in some phony sentimentality at the end that anyone with a brain can see coming. It’s enough to say that the ending of “Half Brothers” is as creatively bankrupt as the rest of the movie.

Focus Features released “Half Brothers” in U.S. cinemas on December 4, 2020.

Review: ‘Nomadland,’ starring Frances McDormand

December 4, 2020

by Carla Hay

“Nomadland”

Directed by Chloé Zhao

Culture Representation: Taking place in 2012 and 2013 in various parts of the United States (mainly the West Coast and Midwest), the dramatic film “Nomadland” features an almost all-white cast of characters (with a few African Americans and Latinos) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A widow, who lives in her van by choice and makes a living doing temporary jobs, leads a nomadic existence and is unapologetic about this lifestyle choice to people who don’t approve.

Culture Audience: “Nomadland” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in well-acted realistic character studies about people who live on the fringes of society and are often overlooked by mainstream media.

Frances McDormand and David Strathairn in “Nomadland” (Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures)

“Nomadland” is a great American film that represents people who haven’t achieved the great American Dream in the traditional sense but are surviving on their own terms. It’s a drama about a culture that’s rarely seen in a narrative film: People who are not completely homeless but who choose to live in a motor vehicle and travel to find work, wherever and whenever they can. They don’t want anyone’s pity. They just want the respect to live their lives non-traditionally.

And the fact that this story centers on a middle-aged widow with no children makes it even more unusual but no less impactful, because she doesn’t fit the usual profile of nomadic people who get movies made about them. She’s an American refugee in her own country, because the city that she lived and worked in for several years was economically devastated and shut down, so she’s been forced to find a life elsewhere as a nomad.

Written, directed and edited by Chloé Zhao, “Nomadland” is based on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 non-fiction book “Nomadland: Surviving in America in the 21st Century.” As such, most of the film’s cast members are real-life nomads (whose last names are not revealed in the cast credits), which give the movie a level of authenticity that can’t be duplicated by a cast filled with professional actors. Zhao’s masterful cinematic version of the story also makes the sweeping landscapes of the open road as of much a character as the story’s protagonist: Fern (played by Frances McDormand), a no-nonsense, self-sufficient widow who is still recovering from the grief of losing her husband after 32 years of marriage.

Fern used to live in the very small town of Empire, Nevada, which had a population of 217 people in the 2010 census. In real life, Empire suffered from an irrecoverable loss on January 23, 2011, when the United States Gypsum mining plant (the rural town’s main employer) shut down, due to reduced demand for sheetrock. By July 2011, Empire’s zip code (89405) was discontinued. This information is stated in the movie’s prologue.

Fern’s husband died around the same time that Empire became a ghost town. And so, with nothing to keep her in Empire, this widow has been on her own, living in her van, and trying to find enough work to keep herself financially afloat. The movie’s story takes place over the course of about 12 to 14 months, beginning during the year-end holiday season in 2012. Fern reports to work at an Amazon warehouse, where she has signed on for temporary work as a package processor, since the company has increased demand for workers during this holiday season.

Fern is friendly but emotionally elusive. She’s good at making small talk and bonding with passing acquaintances, but she’s closed-off when it comes to revealing her true inner feelings and making long-lasting close friendships. Throughout the film, there are glimpses of her emotional turmoil, but she never lets anything get her too depressed. She can’t afford to be depressed. She has to keep going for survival.

Fern is not old enough to retire, but she’s too old to be considered a viable candidate for a lot of jobs that require a lot of strenuous physical activity. Even if Fern were at retirement age, she can’t afford to retire. She and her husband had no children (apparently by choice, since Fern expresses no regrets about not having kids) and whatever savings they might have had is long gone.

She’s too proud to ask for financial assistance in most situations. If she does ask to borrow money from someone she knows (which happens a few times in the movie), it’s only as a last resort. And it’s clear that she finds it very difficult to ask anyone for money, because it makes her feel worthless. She always considers the money that she asks for to be a loan, not a gift or a handout. She promises to pay back the money, and you get the feeling that she means it.

The closest thing that Fern has to a best friend is a woman about 10 years older than she is named Linda May (played by a real-life nomad named Linda May), who helped Fern get the temporary job at Amazon. After this temp job is completed, Fern decides she kind of likes the city and goes to an employment agency to try to find work so she can stay longer in the city.

The female agency employee who assists Fern warns her that there’s almost no additional work in the area this time of year. The agency employee is correct. Fern can’t find another job there, so she has to move on to a place where she can find work. And the work that she finds is usually temporary. This a pattern that repeats itself for much of the story, because people without a permanent address have a much harder time finding a permanent job.

“Nomadland” was filmed in Nevada, South Dakota, Nebraska, Arizona and California. None of the cities where Fern ends up is ever named, because the names of the cities don’t really matter. This movie is all about Fern’s experiences and the people she meets along the way in this particular time period in her life. Because the movie begins and ends during the winter months, there are multiple scenes where Fern has to deal with sleeping in her van during freezing weather.

A few times, some people who come across Fern express concern that she’s living in a van all by herself in freezing temperatures. Having a portable heater doesn’t really help and can sometimes be dangerous in an enclosed automobile, if the heater is kept on for a long period of time. Sometimes Fern stays at camping sites and RV parks (which usually cost money), while other times, she sleeps somewhere for free in a parking lot or out in a deserted area where she thinks she won’t be bothered. She refuses to stay at homeless shelters.

Linda May tells Fern about a nomad community gathering called Rubber Tramp Rendezvous (RTR), led by a charismatic man named Bob Wells (who portrays himself), who can best be described as someone who looks like a flannel-wearing Santa Claus. RTR is based in Quartzsite, Arizona, and it’s a support system geared mainly to nomads who are in desperate need of help. Fern looks at an online video of Bob speaking (she has her phone for Internet access) and politely tells Linda May that she’s not interested in going to the next RTR gathering.

But at some point, Fern changes her mind when she’s running very low on money. And she finds that RTR is a community of nomads who are a lot like she is: Over the age of 60, barely getting by financially, but loving life on the road. In the first meeting that she experiences with Bob, he talks about how people in their age group are a lot like work horses that are considered too old to be useful and are put out to pasture. Bob tells them to think of RTR as being like work horses who look out for each other. Fern likes what she hears, so she decides to stay.

Later, when Fern has a one-on-one meeting with Bob, he tells her: “I think you’ve come to the right place to find an answer. I think communing with nature and a real, true community and tribe will make all the difference for you.” Fern replies, “I hope so.”

The RTR gathering is almost like an informal seminar, because it includes instructions and advice on living in a vehicle. It also has swap meets for many of the attendees to trade or give away items. It’s at one of the swap meets that Fern meets Dave (played by David Strathairn), a tall and bearded gentleman who’s around her age or slightly older, and he seems as if he’s immediately attracted to Fern. She plays it cool though, and they talk about their can openers before going their separate ways.

Later, Fern and Dave see each other again at a social gathering and he asks her to dance. She warms up to him a little and he basically tells her that he’s available, but she still gives him the impression that she’s not interested in dating him. Although Fern doesn’t say it out loud, it’s pretty obvious that she’s still grieving over the loss of her husband, whom she speaks fondly of later in the story when she opens up to someone about him.

Although Fern considers her to be independent, there are scenes in the movie where she still shows some naïveté about basic things when it comes to looking out for her safety as a road traveler. For example, Fern’s tendency to be a loner means that she often parks in areas that are too isolated and would be disastrous if she needed help from someone nearby. When she sleeps in her car during the cold winter months, she has a thick blanket and layered clothing, but she doesn’t think of ways to better protect herself from getting sick or frost-bitten.

And she’s not as skilled in auto mechanics as she should be. One day, Fern finds that her parked car has a flat tire, but she does not have a spare tire. But even if she did, Fern doesn’t know how to change a tire. Luckily, another nomad whom she knows named Swankie (played by real-life nomad named Charlene Swankie) is parked nearby and can help her.

Fern asks Swankie to drive her to the nearest gas station to get help and a spare tire. Swankie mildly scolds Fern and tells her that it’s time for her to learn how to change a tire and that she should always have a spare tire. During a heart-to-heart conversation in Ruth’s van, Swankie tells her that she will soon turn 75, she was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she now has only seven or eight months to live. Swankie doesn’t want to go through cancer treatment. Instead, she wants to spend her last days on Earth doing things she always wanted to do, like go to Alaska.

Swankie tells Fern that she learned this lesson after she watch a close friend die from a terminal illness and how this friend had a boat parked at his home that he never got to use because he kept putting it off until he had more time. Swankie also opens up about the suicidal thoughts that she had when she found out that she had cancer. Swankie says she even read Jack Kevorkian’s controversial “Final Exit” book to get ideas, but she changed her mind about killing herself because she didn’t want to leave behind her two dogs. In turn, Fern reveals some of the feelings that she went through when her husband was dying of a terminal illness. It’s one of the best scenes in the movie.

During the course of the film, Fern takes different temporary jobs, including working as a camp host. She encounters Dave (who sometimes works as a fossil guide) at different times during the story and they become closer. She ends up meeting Dave’s musician son James (Tay Strathairn) and other members of Dave’s family. Fern also spends time with her married sister, who’s led a much more traditional and conservative life than Fern has. Viewers will get more insight into Fern’s family background during this crucial scene.

People should not expect a typical road-trip movie in “Nomadland.” Most road-trip movies want to stuff the plot with a lot of mishaps or high-octane action, but “Nomad” often focuses on the mundane but realistic everyday activities of Fern at work and in her free time. She takes pleasure in simple things, as demonstrated in a scene where Fern and Linda May pretend they’re at a spa and put tissues on their faces and cucumbers over their eyes.

And it’s a very intimate look at Fern life—maybe too intimate for some viewers, because there’s a scene of her urinating out in the desert and a scene of her defecating in a bucket in her van. (For people easily offended by bodily functions depicted on screen, you’ve been warned.) The defecation scene is not so graphic that viewers see the end results, but it’s explicit enough where people might find out more about Fern’s intestinal activities than they care to know. There’s also a full-frontal nude scene of Fern floating on water as she takes a relaxing dip in a lake.

These scenes are meant to give this drama a documentary feel, especially when Fern is alone. McDormand is so talented that she doesn’t need to speak in any solitary scenes, because her facial expressions say a lot more than what many scripted lines would say. The cinematography from Joshua James Richards gives emotional resonance to the seasons and terrain that Fern experiences during her journey. It’s during the freezing winter months that viewers get the most impactful sense of Fern’s isolation, because even she doesn’t know if she’s putting herself in a situation where she could wake up with frostbite or her van too buried in snow to drive.

But what “Nomadland” captures best is the reality that for nomads like Fern, the only thing constant is change. People come and go out of each other’s lives. Home means not having a building as a permanent place to live. There’s a pivotal scene in the movie were Fern has to make a choice to live a comfortable and more stable life in a regular house or keep living her more difficult and unstable life on the road. The choice she makes tells viewers what they need to know about what Fern’s definition of “freedom” is and what she might or might not be willing to give up to have that freedom.

Searchlight Pictures released “Nomadland” in select U.S. virtual cinemas on December 4, 2020. The movie is set for a release in select IMAX theaters in the U.S. on January 29, 2021. “Nomadland” goes into wider release in U.S. cinemas and debuts on Hulu on February 19, 2021.