Review: To The Stars

To The Stars (2019): Written by Shannon Bradley-Colleary, directed by Martha Stephens. Starring: Kara Hayward, Liana Liberato, Malin Akerman, Shea Whigham, Jordana Spiro, Adelaide Clemens, and Tony Hale. Running Time: 109 minutes.

Rating: 2.5/4

               It's tempting, on occasion, to give a pass to narrative flaws in a film that tackles heavy, sensitive, or even traumatic real-world issues. To say that, well, these things really do happen, so by presenting them unvarnished, the movie does the world a service regardless of other factors involved like the quality of the script, casting, or production choices. I can certainly understand the appeal of such a perspective, and I myself do not hold back when I feel a film has an importance that elevates it above its earthly flaws. However, simply recreating bits and pieces of real-world cruelty and stringing them together is not enough to tell a compelling story; if there isn't something there to glue the disparate parts together, people just aren't going to want to return to the well.

               To The Stars is the fourth directed film by Martha Stephens, based on an original screenplay by Shannon Bradley-Colleary. Filmed in crisp black-and-white, it follows the dreary, torment-filled high school life of Iris Deerborne. She doesn't fit in with the “cool crowd” at school, and there's no respite for her at home; her parents don't live together so much as they co-exist under a mutually agreed cease-fire. All that starts to change with the arrival of Maggie, a tough, brash-talking “city girl” who first appears literally out of the blue to save Iris from a fresh round of bullying from some of the football boys.

               Clearly, there's something different about Maggie, and she starts to draw Iris out of herself in a way no one else has before. They skip school, get makeovers, and each in their own ways start to push back against the rather stifling social conformity that fills the town around them. Kara Hayward and Liana Liberato are aggressively compelling in the lead roles, with a genuine chemistry that elevates all their scenes together. The film would truly fall apart without them. Hayward in particular seems to be on a remarkable trajectory; her first role was that of Suzie in Wes Anderson's masterpiece, Moonrise Kingdom, a fact that I am ashamed to say I was wholly unaware of until I checked her filmography. Not only that, I found out that she was apparently also in Manchester By The Sea, Paterson, and even Us. Even though those last three were only bit roles, that is still a uniquely impressive resume for someone still not able to legally drink; keep a sharp eye out for this one, because she is going places.

               Sadly, while I could spend many a film enjoying the precocious exploits of Iris and Maggie, the movie around them isn't quite on the same level. It's not bad, per say, just less focused; once the film moves away from the regular, everyday trials of teenage girls and more towards the general bigotry of the town, the plot turns start to feel more and more contrived, until by the end the charm that defined the first half has largely dissipated.

               The particular form of bigotry this movie tackles is homophobia; it's eventually revealed that the reason Maggie and her family suddenly moved out of “the city” to a backwater town is because of some unspoken (albeit very pointedly implied) “scandal” that made Maggie's father (a stunningly compelling Tony Hale) feel forced to uproot the family and resort to the belt to cure his daughter of her “bad deeds.” His scenes are few, and maybe it's just because I know him almost exclusively as Buster, but boy, it is an experience to see him play an Evangelical hardliner. He even has a line about drinking juice, for Christ's sake.

               Ultimately, though, the particular beats to how the homophobia plays out and affects the various characters simply feels less like an organic development of the story, and more like outside artifice forced in just to create tension. I found this especially frustrating because, well, high school sucks regardless of sexual orientation. There was already plenty of tension inherent in the interactions between the teenage characters from the start, when latent sexuality was just being hinted at. There was way more effective drama to be mined here that goes untapped in favor of far more rote narrative beats. The best scene in the entire movie is a heartbreaking nighttime conversation between Maggie and Iris that, sadly, is not built upon afterwards.

               I wish I didn't feel as critical of this film as I do. It's heart is in the right place, and the casting and cinematography are excellent. The holes are impossible to miss, but it is worth seeing, if for no other reason than to say you were on board from the beginning when Kara Hayward wins her third Oscar.

-Noah Franc

Review: Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood

Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood (2019): Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Starring: Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell, and Al Pacino. Running Time: 161 minutes.

Rating: 3/4

**spoiler alert for the entirety of the film**

               Well. That escalated quickly.

               Tarantino's latest film comes so, so very close to being the most relaxed, most meditative, and least eventful film he's ever made. For the bulk of its close-to-three-hour runtime, it is content merely being a very thorough callback to a very specific time and place in the era of "Old Hollywood," or at least "Older Hollywood." It drenches itself in period dress and a production design so minute and detailed, that it's basically guaranteed to run away screaming with the Oscar for Best Production Design next year, along with (most likely) a bevy of other awards. Scenes and montages riffing on Tarantino's usual grab-bag of cultural callbacks range from the gentle and poignant to aggressively in-your-face, and simply occur over the course of a handful of days with no clear narrative thread connecting them.

               Until, that is, the time for some very bloody historical revisionism hits at the very end, and the whole affaid explodes into an orgy of blood and violence on par with what we've come to expect from QT. Even here, though, while the sparks are viscerally impressive, they aren't on quite the same level as some of the most shocking bits from Pulp Fiction, Django, Basterds, or even The Hateful Eight. Maybe Tarantino is growing soft and uncertain with age. Or perhaps there is only so far provocative violence can go before it starts feeling increasingly unnecessary or redundant.

               OUATIH follows Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his longtime stuntmen/handyman/best friend (only friend?) Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Both are seemingly on the downside after years spent atop the Hollywood totem pole, and neither seems to be processing it well. Rick drowns himself in drink, cigarettes, and tearful pity-parties before friends and strangers alike. Cliff maintains a ceaselessly laid-back, devil-may-care attitude on the surface, but there are reasons aplenty to think it's at least partially a facade, as his own history includes a supposed fisticuffs with Bruce Lee that got him blackballed and (possibly) getting away with actual murder.

               The minuteai of what their career histories are and what, exactly, they each do on-screen to try and get their careers back on track is less important than the general world they inhabit, one that their daily lives reveal to us in bits and pieces. The comittment to recreating the general vibe and feel of Hollywood in the late 60's is nothing less than slavish, and it is indeed an impressive film in how carefully it maintains this atmosphere.

               The twist ahead, however, is set up fairly early- we know right away that Rick just so happens to live next door to Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, in the very summer where Tate and her friends were infamously, and brutally, murdered by members of the Manson family. For those who lived through it, this was an event so culturally traumatic it is still considered by most to be THE moment that the Hollywood of the 60's, the one Tarantino dedicates this entire film to, ended for good.

               Margot Robbie continutes to shine as one of the next big film stars, suffusing Tate with a confidence and joy that radiate off the screen despite having relatively few scenes or moments of dialogue. Indeed, she is almost more of an idea, or a ghost, than an actual character. While I can understand faulting the film for this approach, I myself found her scenes remarkably effective, the highlight being a moment where she goes to the theater to see her own film and takes a clear pride in how the audience responds to her work. Sharon Tate will forever be defined in the eyes of most by the tragedy that ended her life, so, personally, I am for any effort to bring her at least partially out of Charles Manson's shadow, even though doing so completely will likely never be possible.

               The other controversial parts of the film are a bit more difficult to parse, at least for me, specifically the treatment of Bruce Lee in his one main scene and the exact nature of the violence at the end of the film. In both cases, I feel particularly ill-equipped to offer moral judgment on the film. Bruce Lee is treated as a parody of himself, and while there are signs that this portrayal is something of a fantasy spun by Cliff (we "see" his fight with Lee as a memory he revisits some years later), I won't argue with either Lee's family or any other fans who consider the scene a black mark on the film.

               And then there's the ending, which is likely to be one of the most controversial film choices of Tarantino's career. Instead of the Tate murders going down as they did in reality, the would-be attackers decide to break into Rick's house instead, after an evening Rick and Cliff spent getting (respectively) stupidly drunk and fantastically high. Even in their impaired states, though, they manage to fight off and kill each of the attackers in stupendous fashion. Sharon Tate and her friends are never murdered, Rick befriends her and her husband and possibly gets a fresh start to his career, and the glorified image of a specific past is, perhaps, allowed to endure a little longer.

               Should it have endured though? Or was it necessary for the Hollywood of the 60's to, somehow and someday, go the way of the dodo? Out of all of his movies, this might be the one that is hardest to separate from what we know of Tarantino as a person. This is clealy a deeply personal film, possible his most personal; a lot about Rick Dalton's character and his fears of being left behind, overshadowed, forgotten by a new generation could be a bit of self-reflection on Tarantino's part. Plus, while he has written some of the best and most compelling female characters of the past few decades, his relationship to and statement on sexist tropes, endangerment of women, and an unwillingness to confront the darker parts of the film industry both past and present are.....extremely mixed, to put it diplomatically. In the wake of #MeToo, it is especially hard to watch this paeon to a lost age and NOT think about all the abuse and manipulation of women and minorites that is definitely happening off-screen. I'm as ready to give an artist the benefit of the doubt as anybody, but I admit I am rather sceptical that QT has ever given much thought to this aspect of his love for this particular bygone time and place.

               There is also the fact that, once again, terrible, horrific violence is visited upon the human body, specifically female bodies, in a way that easily draws laughter and even applause from many moviegoers. Here, too, as a man, I feel I would be out of my league to try and either condemn or justify the decisions made in this part of the film. I myself didn't find it funny at all, but plenty in the theater with me sure did, and I'm pretty sure most of them were men. All I can offer is some advice to my male readers; ask the women in your life what they think, and listen to them when they answer.

               And yet, despite all of this, for all the flaws inherent in Tarantino's obsession with a gaudy past he was never actually a part of and maybe doesn't glamorize for the right reasons, there is an undeniable power in his capacity for visual storytelling and the unspoken richness the people he casts bring to their roles. And I, too, fervently wish that I had the power to reach back to specific times in history and give evil its proper comeuppance, preferably via flamethrower. As flawed and and as arguably reprehensible as his revision of the Tate murders might be, the impulse to play with the Fates in this manner is one I am all too familiar with.

               That may not be a very objective, or sound, or moral reflection on myself. But it does signify that, like Tarantino, I'm only human, in the end. And time marches on.

-Noah Franc