As simple as point A to Blood

Vikings have been the hot thing in various media for the past several years. From Michael Hirst's Vikings (now with a Netflix sequel, Vikings Valhalla) to The Last Kingdom to games like Raiders of the North Sea and Champions of Midgard. On the one hand, you could say that it's just an historical period that hasn't gotten as much exposure as many others and people jumped on the wave once it started forward. On the other hand, you could argue that some of the impetus may be coming from the surge in White nationalism that is on the rise in places like the US and Western Europe. (No, I'm not saying that just because someone makes a Viking movie or game that they're a White nationalist. Please save the outrage for something actually pertinent.) The latest entry in the cinematic field is Robert Eggers' The Northman.

When we first saw the trailer, it was intensely visually appealing. It was clear that a great deal of craft had gone into the lighting, costuming, and cinematography. This was a film that was fully immersed in the idea of the visual medium. The cynical side of me might suggest that that concerted focus was because there wasn't much of a story to back it up and they were trying to cover that fact with fancy visual effects and moments of shock to keep the audience interested at all. The screenplay is about as "stock Hollywood" medieval revenge fantasy as you can get. Son witnesses father die to usurper. Son spends decades with his rage keeping him alive. Son finally finds a way to try to avenge his father. Much blood happens. The end. There's a difference between "simple" and "simplistic." Rashomon is a simple story. The Northman is the latter and does not benefit for it. What happens in those instances is that any of the audience versed in either/both popular culture and/or adventure stories can immediately start drawing parallels to what has gone before. The scene where Amleth's (Alexander Skarsgârd) vengeance is set in motion is almost a carbon copy of the scene in Conan the Barbarian, where the latter is also set on the path of revenge. Amleth's muttering of how he'll avenge his father and save his mother to keep focused while rowing a boat out to (presumably) the North Sea is reminiscent of nothing so much as Arya Stark's list of people that she's going to kill. What results is that nothing in the film feels original. It feels like a pastiche of what Hollywood thinks a big budget Viking film should be.

Again, there's no arguing that the visuals are resplendent. From the vistas of Iceland and Scandinavia to the intensity on Amleth's face as he pursues his ultimate goal, the emotion and wonder are there in abundance. In that way, it's not dissimilar from Eggers' previous film, The Lighthouse, but the two scripts are completely night and day, with the latter presenting an opaque situation with plenty of mysticism and things to question, while this film is basically lifted right from an Icelandic saga, most of which were both linear and not too complicated by dint of the form and because they were preserved in the oral tradition. We've, uh, moved past that just a bit in the last millennium. Those intense visuals don't stop at the regular intervals of violence, either. My friend, Larissa, visibly flinched at several instances of blood showering this or that corner of the set, while I started raising an eyebrow at the absurdity of it all about halfway through the film. Yes, it was a violent era and a fairly violent culture at the time. But are you saying that your film is so linear that the only way to get through its 2+-hour running time is to follow that straight line through a sea of blood? Oh. I guess you are.

The performances were solid, such as they were. Anna Taylor-Joy is still a delight as Olga of the Birch Forest, while Nicole Kidman does a good turn as Queen Gudrún, Amleth's seemingly conflicted mother, although her role was as predictable to me as anything else about the film. I also liked Ralph Ineson (Dagmer Cleftjaw of GoT fame) in a bit role as the Rus captain who aids Amleth and Olga in their attempt to reach Iceland. And, of course, with many things Icelandic, Björk was involved and at least played an interesting version of herself as the Seeress of Amleth's dream-state. But none of that can cover for the fact that the initial story pitch had to comprise about 40 words, at best, and left me thinking of a half-dozen other films or TV shows, rather than the one right in front of me. I didn't get lost on the straight line. I just didn't feel like I should've bothered by the time I got off it.

Finding the right elephant

Most films are created with an intent. Unless you're doing something avant garde, you're not just throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. (TV series, on the other hand...) If you're the director, you get a screenplay and think: "This is the film that I want to make." and then proceed into production and casting and everything that's going to make your piece of rock eventually look like an elephant. If you had a competent writer, that piece of rock should already have impressions for trunk, tusks, and tail, but some directors can overcome that absence (and others can ruin the rock when they first take a chisel to it.) With that said, it has to be noted that Everything Everywhere All at Once is a remarkable film, not only for what shows up on the screen, but for the driving vision of co-writers/co-directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. No matter what else I may say about it, it has to be clear that I enjoyed it and would probably like to see it again someday. Can I recommend it to everyone as the gushing hordes on Twitter have insisted? Well... no. I think there's something essential that is lacking there that would turn it from "interesting and enjoyable" into "GREATEST FILM EVAAAAAHHH!" as seems to be the popular opinion among many of the younger people I know and hear from. Perhaps the way to explain this without sounding too harsh is to do a comparison.

There's a film called Big Trouble in Little China. It was made during the extended downswing of Jobn Carpenter's career and has a decent-sized cult audience. Amusingly enough, what first made me consider this comparison was when I was sitting in the theater watching EEAaO and noticed that one of its leads was James Hong, who played the wicked Lo Pan (Indeed!) in Big Trouble. Carpenter's film is somewhere between a B-action flick and an intentional farce. With Kurt Russell chewing scenery and Kim Cattrall doing an exposition dump every five minutes, it's not a good film, but I'd argue that it was never intended to be. It's pretty clear about 20 minutes in that both Carpenter and his cast had decided to go full-bore into the absurdity of the situation and let whatever happened, happen. What did happen is that it justly bombed at the box office, but has since developed a following among those who'd seen it and simply appreciated the circus for what it was.

EEAaO is in a similar but not identical situation, in that I think Kwan and Scheinert intended to present a visual spectacle, first and foremost. In that respect, they succeeded. The repeated transitions of Michelle Yeoh through multiple and wildly varying other-dimensional versions of herself is definitely entertaining to watch. You could almost have gone down that more artistic, experimental path that I referenced above and still had something worthwhile to display. But, instead, the filmmakers decided to angle toward a more philosophical bent, constructing an elaborate story that explores all of Evelyn's (Yeoh) personal foibles, relationships, history, and emotions. All of these things are splayed out in often jarring fashion that leaves the audience little room to digest what's happening... until the third act, when all of it is regurgitated again in repetitive, droning, agonizing detail. There is something to be said for a story about a main character who simply fails to register what's right in front of them. Constructing the entire third act of a film about a character who simply refuses to do so is something else entirely.

And that was my main disaffection with the film. As enjoyable and funny and surprising as it could often be, I think the filmmakers lost the thread of what they had begun weaving when they got into it. Big Trouble was clearly intended to be a cult film. It's a circus and you're supposed to just turn your brain off and enjoy it. (Something I often have a very difficult time doing.) But EEAaO presents as a circus, but attempts to drown you in personal metaphor in that third act. Suddenly, everything has deeper meaning and you will be repeatedly instructed on how to absorb said meaning before you leave your seat. It's kind of like an analogy for P.T. Barnum, who is credited with various bits of sage advice from running a carnival and a "museum of oddities" in the 19th century. No matter how sage Barnum could be, in the end, he never held himself up as anything other than a showman trying to squeeze coins from the local audience for coming in to see the freaks. Kwan and Scheinert attempt to attach a very serious underpinning to their circus and it never quite finds its footing. In a way, their story rooted in personal travail and the difficulties of human relationships ends up so overwhelmed by the dizzying array of visuals that it all ends up feeling lighter than it should have been. The story isn't married to the visual storytelling, but is kind of an adjunct that makes the third act longer than it needs to be when it could've been just a great show.

Most of the performances are excellent, with both Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis as a menacing IRS auditor particularly standing out. If this elephant could've had a slightly shorter and less onerous tail, I think it would've reached the heights that a lot of others are assigning to it. But that would've been a somewhat different beast (Indeed!)

Everything means something else

The use of parable to establish customs and convey larger meaning has been around since the dawn of civilization. Telling someone "Things aren't always as they seem" generally has less impact than if you tell them the story of the blind men and the elephant. My guess is that that's where writer/director Goran Stolevski began with You Won't Be Alone. Having dual Australian and Macedonian heritage, he decided to explore some of the roots of the latter by telling a story about witches, societal roles, sex, personal identity, questioning social mores, and half a dozen other things in 19th-century Macedonia, which was still under the rule of the Ottomans, which is also pointed out several times and is often important in understanding modern Balkan societies. Does that sound like a lot to pack in to one story? Because it is and that may be the film's overarching flaw that detracts from something which may have been better delivered with the extraneous parts cut away. Or clawed away, as the case may be, because that happens quite a bit in this film, too.

When we saw the trailer, it was presented as a horror film, which it ostensibly still is. I went in expecting something spooky and largely centered around the isolation that comes with being an apex predator that human society- your prey -will work pretty hard to, well, isolate and destroy. What we got instead sprawled in so many different directions that any sense of the horrific was subsumed by all the other messages being delivered. This is what the term "overwritten" often refers to and this film was a prime example of it. We begin with Nevena, as a baby, being marked by Old Maid Maria; the seeming progenitor of the scourge of witchery. In response, her mother imprisons Nevena in a cave, occasionally bringing food and some grooming, so that Maria won't be able to find her and steal her away when she comes of age. The fact that imprisoning her daughter in a cave without human contact is effectively stealing her away better than Maria might have apparently doesn't occur to mom. But that's one of those messages about the need for community in the human condition. The problem here is that that same community would tear the witchling Nevena "to shreds" as her mother warns. These aphorismal contrasts continue throughout the story; the need for men to provide the literal seed leading to the joy of children, despite their abusive behavior; the need for the weaker members of society to depend on the assistance of that community, despite being scorned or mocked for their weakness; the question of identity and the individual within that larger grouping and how difficult it is to see things from someone else's perspective; and so on.

The largest theme is that which centers around the mistreatment of women, not only in the chauvinistic cultures of the 19th-century Balkans, but in human society in general. It's pointed out that Old Maid Maria becomes bitter and vengeful, and continues to carry out that bitterness against Nevena who refuses to share it, essentially because she didn't get married and serve in the role that women are nominally assigned. Of course, that whole perspective is a form of misogyny. Maria is pointedly the villain, not only towards normal humans, but also Nevena, who is so desperate to be like them that she begins wearing their skins not to prey upon them, but to assimilate. But Maria is the villain because she essentially shrugged off that role that society tried to dictate to her. She preys on those who wanted to treat her as a resource, rather than a human, and tried to burn her alive. It's kind of like suggesting that  revolution is something we should aspire to, but the person who started said revolution is a criminal who shouldn't be tolerated. It ends up becoming something of a mixed message, likely because of the overload of themes that Stolevski attempted to pack in. We don't really spend much time getting to know anyone but Maria, since Nevena is kind of a blank slate attempting to be like others, but when Maria is pointedly the villain, the question of whom we're supposed to sympathize with becomes muddled. Clearly, it's Nevena to a certain degree, but we end up sympathizing with her because she's denied the chance to be the subservient resource that society says she should be...?

Visually, I was somewhat disappointed, as well. The implications of the trailer gave me the idea that we would be seeing something that was much more phantasmagoric in nature and with camera work that involved the scenery in a more arresting fashion. Instead, we got a lot of very basic shots of mundane dwellings and not overly interesting forests and hillsides. Was the visual medium just the framework to hang all of those metaphors upon? Even when attempting that, you'd usually like to include something that was cool to look at while delivering your message. But most of the visual effects, involving a not atypical level of gore, weren't that impressive; not least because most of the transformations took place off-screen and were more audibly interesting than anything that showed up in the lens. It was as if someone had decided they wanted to do a version of The Howling but didn't have the money to pay for the CGI or makeup (which, for all I know, may have been the case.)

It sounds like I'm trashing the film, but I don't think it was bad, per se. I just think it was trying to do and say too many things at once and so didn't say any of them well at all. I'm still glad that I took the time to see it because it's not often we get to see something from that corner of the world. But I can't really recommend it to the horror fans I know, nor to the drama fans, nor to those who just like watching cool things happen on screen. It underdelivered in all of those respects, even though it was reaching higher than most other storytellers try to in the space of two hours.

Compartmentalizing

There are times when you just have to make things fit. Or you want to find ways to make them fit and readjust your perspective in the process. That's true for both large events, as in the ones depicted in the two films I'll be talking about, and sometimes small ones, as in why I'm talking about two films in this post and not just one. The first is Compartment No. 6; a Finnish film, which is unusual on its face, since not many from that nation make it to this part of the world. It was also partially funded by the Russian Ministry of Culture, because it's wholly based in that nation. It's about a Finnish paleontologist taking the long train ride from Moscow to Murmansk to study the petroglyphs in the area. Along the way, she rides in the title sleeping compartment, sharing it with a Russian man who's heading there to work in the mines. Their personalities are as disparate as their professions, as Laura is pretty delicate and introverted, while Lyokha sometimes literally fills the room, physically and socially. Along the way, both have their expectations met and readjusted, revealing more about who and what they are and how they relate to each other.

Right away, I'll say that I enjoyed the film, but wasn't particularly inspired by it. While Yuri Borisov's performance was frequently hilarious, there was something to be said for the texture and tenderness of Seidi Haarla, as well. Both of them were relatable and, in a film that spent half the time in an 8' x 8' box, that's a great feature. Furthermore, it was a great insight into typical Russian life and the reality that everyday people, even those on the wealthy Moscow end, encounter. The lack of the omnipresent smart phones was notable, especially because Laura's most prized possession is a camcorder (When's the last time the typical American audience saw one of those?) It also said some good things about how relationships can often be only valued for their immediacy, as Laura learns that her girlfriend in Moscow considers her to be out of sight, out of mind, while it becomes easier to be attracted to the boorish Russian who has an equally sensitive side that he strives to hide. But it also didn't really say anything original and began to drag in act 3 when we had all arrived in the promised destination of Murmansk and watched everything proceeding just as act 2 told us to expect. We get that both main characters' perspectives on the other had change, but none of this is really enlightening or invigorating. I think it was a good film, but I wouldn't urge anyone to rush out and find it unless you're particularly interested in that corner of the world.

We also watched Master; the title for which I've been trying to parse more out of. The film was insistent on saying so many things that it really feels like there should be more to it. On the one hand, it's a casual reference to the dated traditions and titles of tiny New England universities and prep schools, as Regina Hall plays Gail Bishop, a professor and college leader/dorm supervisor at the fictional Ancaster University. On the other hand, it's also a play into the overarching theme of the story, which is about the persistent racism in such places, where Blacks who were almost exclusively servants until the 1970s, are now filling different roles and occasionally even being treated as humans. That atmosphere of racism is constantly reinforced, sometimes subtly in new student Jasmine Moore's (Zoe Renee) interactions with classmates, and sometimes overtly, like when the librarian insists on nervously checking her bag to see if she's walking out with more books than permitted. The foundation to this whole story is its presentation as a psychological horror film, in which old paintings are seen with broken skulls instead of faces and old servant bells are mysteriously rung with no one in the room and  a cloaked figure representing a 17th-century witch stalks the campus. Almost all of said horror is directed at the Black characters of the story, both in the past and in the present, which is continually presented in a manner that suggests nothing has really changed.

The problem that I encountered was that the film seems to be trying too hard to deliver too many messages at once. There's the occasionally-hurled-cinderblock-obvious metaphor for racism present in all of the horror elements. But we're also given a great deal of material about the witch trials of early America which were primarily directed at White women. Certainly, you don't have to draw a line between misogyny and racism and the story is set up to engage both, since all three of the main characters are both Black and identify as female. But the witch angle, aside from depicting those horror elements which could've been simply presented as typical ghosts, seemed superfluous. On top of that, halfway through the film, we're informed that a local community of pseudo-Amish people who still dress and act in a manner akin to the 17th century, live nearby and one of them has a child at the school who no longer identifies as White. So now we suddenly have cultural appropriation on the menu, as well, which leaves the viewer as distracted and unfocused as poor Gail is by the end of the film. There are some great moments of tension and the horror elements are handled well, with a lot of it happening off-camera and presenting only the reaction of the victims to the circumstances (think: Jaws.) And, again, there's nothing wrong with weaving those thematic social ills together, as they are often symptomatic of the dominant White culture resisting change in America (witness the same people shrieking about Colin Kaepernick and Disney's support of LBGTQ+ folks.) But it leaves what seemed like a solid and occasionally even subtle film about racism hieing off in other directions that it really didn't need to go. I think a stricter editor might have produced a tighter package. Just like Compartment 6, it's not a bad film, but I'm not raving about it, either.