Weekend Screen Scene: A Different Man, The Wild Robot

 

 

Last week saw the release of The Substance, a black horror comedy about fame, beauty standards, vanity, and identity. This week brings us A Different Man, a black comedy that also touches on vanity and identity, but this time the story centers on a male actor, not a woman.

Sebastian Stan stars as Edward, a struggling actor in New York city. He has neurofibromatosis, which causes extreme facial deformity, so his roles are relegated to things like industrial training films about how to handle tricky situations with disabled coworkers. He lives in a dilapidated apartment with a leaky ceiling, and is in love with his friendly and perky playwright neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve of The Worst Person in the World). When he's approached to partake in a drug trial that may cure his disease, he agrees. The drug works, though the transformation is not pleasant (and is pretty gruesome to watch).

The second half of the movie finds Edward now living a "normal" life, working as a hot shot real estate agent. But his past comes back in the form of Ingrid, now producing her play, and Oswald (Adam Pearson of Under the Skin) a happy and popular man with the same facial deformities that once plagued Edward.

While Stan's facial deformities are the creation of talented makeup artists, Adam Pearson actually does have neurofibromatosis. For both of them, facial movements are limited, and their eyes are partially obscured, yet both are able to give truly memorable performances despite these limitations. 

 

Stan's pre-transformed Edward is slouched and nebbish, clearly trying his best to remain as invisible as possible, but he also exudes a shy charm that his neighbor Ingrid definitely finds herself drawn to. Stan is really, really good in this. 

 

Pearson's Oswald is Edward's complete opposite. He's friendly and gregarious, always wearing something loud, and when he enters a room, he's the center of attention, not because people are horrified but because people are drawn to him.

This is something Edward cannot understand, and the film does some interesting things with his resulting crisis of confidence. It also does some things that are a little muddled, taking the plot near the end of the film in directions I wasn't completely on board with. Still, the performances by Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson more than make up for any faults of the plot.

 

The animated featured The Wild Robot is based on a series of children's books by Peter Brown, about a futuristic task robot who finds itself on a forest island devoid of humans after a container ship loses its cargo.

Lupita Nyong'o voices the robot "ROZZUM unit 7134," (eventually just "ROZ"), and damn, is there nothing this woman can't do? She's perfect, imbuing ROZ with both robotic imperatives and maternal warmth as she finds herself adopting an abandoned gosling she names Brightbill, accepting motherhood as another task to complete, teaching him to swim and to fly so that eventually he'll be able to leave.

 

The first 10 minutes of the film only feature the voice of ROZ, and I was wondering if it may end up being an entire movie of just a robot talking to animals that don't understand it, but the plot finds a way to work talking animals into the story, so we also get Pedro Pascal as a Fink the Fox, Catherine O'Hara as an opossum mom, and Mark Hamil as Thorn the grizzly bear.

The Wild Robot is one of the most beautiful animated films of the year, with aesthetics that are closer to the hand drawn animation of classic Disney than to most contemporary CGI animated films. It's also one of the most emotionally touching, absolutely earning my tears by the end. It will easily go down as one of the best of the year.

Weekend Screen Scene: The Substance, Never Let Go

There’s a moment near the end of The Substance, director Coralie Fargeat's latest provocative horror movie, where Sue/Elisabeth is getting ready for a big show. She's looking in the mirror, putting earrings on, and the famous Bernard Herrmann music from Vertigo starts to swell in the background. A little while later she faces an angry crowd, yelling back at them that she’s not a monster; that she’s "still the same person!" And I immediately thought, “Oh shit. This movie is about Kim Novak!”

OK, that may stretching it, but no one is going to tell me it was not at least partly inspired by Kim Novak’s 2014 Academy Awards appearance, and the horrible online reactions to her face, which only emphasized the lose/lose situation older women in the public eye find themselves in. Look old, and you're relegated to the sidelines. Do what you can to look "younger," and you risk a botched job and being called a monster.

In The Substance, Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress-turned-TV celebrity who, after her 50th birthday, is fired from her show, as the network head (played, almost too disgustingly, by Dennis Quaid) deems her too old to host. She receives a mysterious offer to try something called "the Substance," which promises her regained youth, with a catch: she must live one week as her own age, and one week as a younger version, switching back and forth every seven days. Don't make the switch, and bad things will happen.

Bad things happen.

Margaret Qualley plays the youthful version, who deems herself just "Sue." She instantly gets hired for a new version of the show Elisabeth was fired from. That the show, supposedly a monster hit, is, essentially just an exercise show (it brought to mind the ridiculous Aerobisize videos from the early 80's), reducing her stardom to, literally, just her tits and ass, is one of the many ham-fisted details in the film; this is not a subtle movie. But that is not a criticism, per se. I think it's very much by design - everything in it is an off-kilter or exaggerated version of celebrity life, from its version of Hollywood, which consists of seeminly one palm tree-filled street, to billboards that face into apartments and not the city below. Setting The Substance in this bizarro version of L.A. better prepares you for the completely unrealistic way "the Substance" itself works.

This tone can often throw the movie into camp territory, but what saves it from become something you'll do nothing but laugh at are how fiercely Moore and Qualley throw themselves into their roles. This is not a tame horror movie; it is at times really horrific, a result, much of the time, of how committed the two actresses are to just going full throttle into it. More than once I was reminded of Isabelle Adjani's remarkable turn in Possession. This is no holds barred body horror that even Cronenberg could see as going too far. (Along with many Cronengberg films, it also briefly brought to my mind 1989's insane Society).

Yes, The Substance is not subtle, but neither is removing fat from your ass and injecting it in your face. Surgeries and treatments to prolong youth can be gory; the self-inflicted violence some women feel compelled to commit on themselves because society has deemed them no longer fuckable, or sellable, or just...able may not be as horrifying as some of what The Substance shows us, but it can still be pretty damn horrifying, and in the end, you may still just be called a monster by a crowd that once claimed to love you.

In Never Let Go, Halle Berry plays a mother trying to survive in the woods with her young twin sons after an evil has taken over the world, turning everyone into literal monsters. An old family cabin provides shelter, and the family is protected as long as they are inside, or tethered to the house via long ropes tied around their waists.

It becomes clear pretty early on that mom may not be entirely sane, and the fact that only she can see the "demons" haunting the woods gives credence to that. The first half of the movie plays with that notion, but knowing that all of this horror may just be in her mind actually makes the film a tough watch. If she is imagining all of this, then what she is putting her boys through is essentially horrific child abuse, and the question becomes, what is the real horror?

I won't say where the movie lands, but I will say, after what is a pretty shocking twist about three quarters of the way through, it heads in a direction I would have been satisfied with, and then veers off towards an ending that, to me, did not make a lot of sense. Never Let Go has good performances from Berry, and Percy Daggs IV and Anthony B. Jenkins, the young actors playing her sons, and being a movie set in an old cabin in the woods, it has some good scares. But in the end, it just lost me