At the Cinema, vol. 1
A Complete Unknown, Mufasa, and Nosferatu. Or: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
At the Cinema is a round-up of movies that I have watched recently — not necessarily in the theater — and some quicker, shorter thoughts on them.
The end-of-year holidays are primetime for movie-goers, and for movie studios hoping to bring you — and your entire nuclear and extended family — to the theater for various excitements. I have done my best to catch up after my holiday break, seeing three new releases in three days at the theaters (and a great old documentary at home). Here’s how these past few days have gone, chronologically:
Nosferatu (Robert Eggers, 2024)
My experience watching this film was surprising and unfortunate, in that it was similar to my experience watching 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: as soon as 30 seconds had passed, I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy what the movie was going to be.
Nosferatu is Robert Eggers’ long-gestating cover of the 1922 film of the same name by German Expressionist F. W. Murnau, a great film I watched just two weeks ago. Eggers, of The Witch and The Lighthouse fame, is a marvelous image maker, and a devoted researcher of lore, folk tales, and the occult. This movie is undoubtedly packed with information that was true to the experiences and stories of the people of these times — the way they deal with vampires here is not typical American lore — but those insights are scattered throughout a rickety screenplay. Eggers has spoken at length about his desire to represent this story for his entire creative life, even staging it in high school and again at a local lower-level theater, and has talked at length about Hollywood legend Christopher Columbus (Home Alone, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) being the primary creative producer helping to get Eggers’ story accurately onto the screen. Even still, I found the experience to be uneven, messy, and ultimately uninteresting. I’m disappointed!
Lily-Rose Depp stars as the demon conjurer Ellen Hunter, who is possessed for the length of the movie, and kept at home for the length of the movie. Her physical performance here is potentially unrivaled in film, but two hours of writhing and drooling in thin nightgowns is tiresome. There is a story of women’s unheralded desires and of the world’s need for their courage and sacrifice, or something, but finding that thread in this machine is laborious.
Nicholas Hoult is the co-star, Ellen’s husband Thomas Hunter, who must journey to the alps to sell Nosferatu — known to the human world as Count Orlok — a house in their own small German town. He enters his own nightmare state, and ultimately gives Orlok the keys to his invasion, in an effort to finally “make it big” and secure a financial future for his family. God, what a sell-out.
Bill Skarsgard, cast as Count Orlok after his work portraying Pennywise the Clown in the IT movies, is mostly cast in shadow and mostly buried in prosthetics, but he gives a great finger performance here, and is outfitted in incredible facial hair, and was enabled to do his own voice work, which is dribbling, sharp, and pretty cool. Nosferatu, the character, is eventually just framed as an evil guy floating around, talking to Ellen in shot-reverse-shot fashion, and his affect is handled strangely — caught in between the original film’s naked staging of Orlok as a weird-but-human-looking guy, and between JAWS’s mostly-hidden shark.
My favorite parts were three other dudes: an avatar for the audience — not sure what is happening, not believing silly folklore — Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Friedrich; a plot explainer local doctor, Ralph Ineson’s Dr. Sievers; and (way too late into the movie) Willem Dafoe’s Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, an outcast occult believer who actually has all the answers, or all the beliefs, to guide humanity from damnation to salvation. These three dudes are giving wacky performances that don’t align with the “Robert Eggers” of it all, and I love them for that. They give levity to a dark and heavy movie-going experience.
I was saddened to see the narrowing of craft work on this film as well, as Eggers’ sense of styling, imagery, and sound are some of the best in the business. I am loath to report that the stark contrast of light and dark imagery is frequently flattening, that Jarin Blaschke (Eggers career-long cinematographer) does not find his typical new invention, and that the music in the film is mundane and rote. On the positive side is Craig Lathrop’s picturesque production design and Linda Muir’s costume design, both of whom are also Eggers’ career collaborators. They saved this thing for me.
Ultimately, the failure is in being a collection of scenes and images and ideas rather than ”a movie”. I described it to my partner and viewing companion as: the movie only uses two volumes in its presentation: a 2 and an 11. If you spend 70% of your presentation at volume 11, telling the audience that this is a spooky scene, then they run out of stamina and interest for being and becoming scared. If the other 30% of your presentation is talking in rooms explaining to the audience what is happening, then we don’t have a chance to have the same interest in the story that we have to spend on the spooky scenes. A movie should have emotional and experiential range. We should be slowly ramped up to 10, spending real time at 4 and 6 and 8, and you should hammer us — once — with your 11. Nosferatu (2024) is a binary experience. Nosferatu (1922) is much more accomplished, and much more fun.
…Having said all of that, it was an intriguing time at the movies, it sparked wonderful car-ride-home discussion, and I know there is entertainment and bewilderment value in this thing for almost anyone. Give it a shot for yourself!
A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024)
Movie biopics are a hazardous wasteland these days. James Mangold — who helped lead the charge of the oversaturation of this style with 2005’s Walk the Line — has returned to the genre to tell us two things: that the wheel doesn’t need to be reinvented, and if you let the wheel spin as it should, then it works damn well.
Mangold’s production — of the arrival of Bob Dylan, and of a pivotal early decision point in his career — is a time-capsule of 1960’s New York, and of the artists that littered it. The film is portioned into two halves, both successfully attempting different things. In the first half, placed in 1961, we meet Dylan, the New York folk music scene meets Dylan, and we watch the seas part for him as he walks the line to stardom. He is young, sure of himself, and definitely an asshole. He evaporates cigarettes by the pack, and he is never not writing or playing music. When the world as he knows it is literally and legitimately threatened, he takes to the streets, not to flee the dangerous city, but to perform. He finds a match in Sylvie Russo, moving in and attempting long-term relationship, and then he finds Joan Baez, a match of a different sort. He plows through the lives of others as he blazes his path. Is there any other way?
The second half of the movie jumps to 1965, where Dylan is expanding his sound and interests, but the genre that has supported and carried him is unwilling to expand with him. Where the first half was typical and effective idol-building, the second half slows down, becoming nearly a “two days in the life” story of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, in which Dylan releases his new torrent of sound upon the ears of those standing firm in his blowing wind. Relationships and ideas come to a head, and we get to see Dylan confront these things — or not. It was a pleasant change in style, neatly packaged with the expectation-filled beginning.
The magic of the movie is in its simplicity. It is sharply casted, and it knows that its material — the music — is gold, so it simply plays the hits. There must be 30 songs in this thing, and each is placed either in full, polished view, or it is placed within the world of Dylan’s day-to-day life, giving context and grounding to the source of our adorations. The film is Spielbergian, in that we spend a lot of time watching people fall in love with Dylan and/or his songs — long close-ups of actors making eyes, being moved. It also doesn’t have a dry city street in sight, a trademark of Spielberg’s main guy, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. We love puddles and reflections on the ground, don’t we folks?
The star of the show is a bonafide star. Timothée Chalamet shines, and occasionally disappears, as his real and learned guitar playing allows him to exist in front of the camera at all moments, not being carefully hidden to hide his inauthenticity while the music plays. The movie gives us entirely recreated versions of Dylan’s songs, and the recreations are fucking good. They don’t attempt full copy-catting of Dylan, nor his individual voice, but rather an approximation. Chalamet gives a great and subtle physical performance, filled with the ticks and squirms of the young, anxious, and chain-smoking Dylan. The movie rests completely upon this performance, and the movie works. All praise to Timothée, known ball-knower.
The rest of the cast are accurate imitations of the real things: Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez, who is the biggest revelation of the film; Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger, a lovable loaf of folk truism; Dan Fogler’s Albert Grossman, Dylan and Baez’s always-by-their-side manager; Will Harrison’s Bob Neuwirth, fellow musician and Dylan’s roadshow manager; and many more. I can’t speak to the historical accuracy of Elle Fanning’s portrayal of a named-changed version of Dylan’s girlfriend of the time, but her chemistry and aching performance are vital, and effective. I also can’t speak to the look-alikeness of Scoot McNairy’s Woody Guthrie, but I can speak to the emotional quality of his performance: it rocked.
Most importantly, a massive “HELL YEAH, BROTHER” to Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash, a truly remarkable bolt of lightning in this movie that casts a shadow even over Chalamet’s Bobby.
A Complete Unknown is a great time at the movies, and you should go see it with anyone that will go with you. It is an affecting starting point for future Dylan fans, it is an effective story of trailblazing, craftsmanship, self-belief, and artistic freedom, collaboration, and experimentation. The movie really sings.
Additional material:
I came home from this movie and almost immediately watched D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, a 1967 verité documentary about Bob Dylan touring his last ever acoustic-only set in England in 1965. It is marvelous in and of itself, and it reflects greatly upon the work done in A Complete Unknown. You can find it on The Criterion Channel, or other places. Highly recommended.
I saved this piece about Toshi, the unsung hero behind Pete Seeger’s success, and finally read it after watching the movie. I love the work Merrill Markoe does here, and I loved thinking about Toshi throughout the film.
Mufasa (Barry Jenkins, 2024)
I didn’t really consider what I was getting into here until I entered the screening room for Mufasa at 1:30PM on a weekday: this is a movie for young children. I always knew that, of course, but the allure of this being helmed by genuine auteur and genius filmmaker Barry Jenkins allowed me to think it could, and would, be something more. I’m, again, loath to report that it was not.
Structured around the idea that Rafiki is telling this story of Mufasa to the grandchild of the titular lion allows the movie to cut away from its story back to the “present day”, where Rafiki is waxing poetic to Kiara — Mufasa’s grand-daughter, Simba’s daughter — and also to Timon and Pumbaa, played by Billy Eichner and Seth Rogan. This structure was exclusively frustrating, toying with the attention spans of its viewer, not believing they can handle more than twelve minutes of uninterrupted story. Again, realizing that this is for iPad kids, this format is certainly what Hollywood thinks it has to resort to for effectiveness, but for a 1900’s kid like myself, it was a rock in my shoe.
The actual story, of Mufasa being separated from his family, and finding a new one, was okay. The screenplay shied away from full conversations, and tried to pack in a lot of action in a screentime that somehow — at 118 minutes — felt 20 minutes too short. Jenkins gives us opportunities to look these computer-generated lions in the eyes and share their emotions, but they did not reach me.
The worst part of the movie was the music, which had interesting musical ideas and components, but was so clearly not essential to the production: the sound mixing was awful, the lyrics were overly simple — Mads Mikkelson, playing the evil Kiros, performs a song that has him singing “bye bye” in a creepy, ironic voice what felt like 200 times — and the visuals paired with the music did not take advantage of the opportunity to be creative at all. There was no juice in the five or six songs, and if they received no care on the creative end, they won’t find any care on the receiving end.
The movie works fine as a prequel to The Lion King, and I minorly enjoyed learning the backstory of some of the characters, especially Rafiki, who is the most enjoyable and successful piece by far. The film needs you to have seen The Lion King first, and wants you specifically to have seen the live-action remake from Jon Favreau in 2019. Somehow, this is probably the second best Lion King movie they have made, because — thankfully — they have only made three, plus a remake. Even though I adore and admire Barry Jenkins, and will watch everything he ever makes, this is another opportunity to be right in saying: we had it better when we were kids.
Additional material:
Watching this movie, and considering its cinematography and staging, was deeply enhanced by having read this Matt Zoller Seitz piece on Vulture about the making, and the choosing to make, of Mufasa by Barry Jenkins. Highly recommended.