I much prefer imperfect big swings to solid movies that play it safe. Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s new film, is unquestionably an imperfect big swing, but it’s so miss-prone that it temporarily made me long for the sort of undaring solidity I thought I liked less. The movie, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to both raves and eyebrow-raises earlier this year, continues a mode common in Audiard’s oeuvre — empathetically telling the stories of people living in society’s margins — but with a lot more can-he-do-this audacity. The largely Mexico City-set movie is about a bottomlessly powerful cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) who offers a successful but professionally unhappy lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldaña), the big bucks to do the legwork to realize a dream they’ve always had: to undergo gender-affirming surgery to finally live as the woman they’ve always wanted to be.
Emilia Pérez is, on top of its unusual conceit, also a musical. Surprisingly, that aspect of it is, by and large, arguably one of the few things it functions effectively as. Mostly eschewing spectacle-forward numbers — one of a few exceptions is memorably found in a bemusing Bangkok hospital-set sequence where Rita is presented surgical options for her client as if they were easily pluckable buffet items — the songs fluidly weave into the fabric of everyday life in a way that’s welcomely redolent of Jacques Demy’s entirely sung The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), catchiness be damned.
Emilia Pérez’s missteps grow the more it spins the narratives of its middle and third acts, where the drug lord is “reborn” as the glamorous, newly altruistic eponymous character and made to deal with the messy aftereffects of her long-awaited self-actualization. Emilia’s physical transformation coincides with a soulful one: she decides to right the wrongs of her past by starting a nonprofit that helps identify the bodies of those “disappeared” as part of her past self’s business operations.
Selena Gomez in Emilia Pérez. All Emilia Pérez imagery courtesy of Netflix.
The film doesn’t engage very deeply with the idea that Emilia might still be reprehensible — something one especially feels as she presents herself publicly as rather saintly, and as she essentially keeps her wife (Selena Gomez) and children in a gilded cage under someone else’s guise — because it’s too busy simplistically extolling the virtues of transformation, as if affirming one’s identity were not much different from an all-mistakes-forgiven baptism. (There is something to the idea, though, that if one’s needs are met, and if they feel assured in their identity, then they’re far less likely to commit harm — but that’s only stating the obvious.)
This all is not to say that Emilia Pérez, originally imagined by Audiard as an opera libretto, doesn’t have any potential: I’m not the only person who’s watched it and thought a director like Pedro Almodóvar might have better handled the material. Almodóvar is adept at locating the humanity in a bold, breathlessly told storyline that would be at home in something directed by Douglas Sirk; his popping-with-color visual style has consistently been a complement to plots matching in their emotional noisiness and daring twists of the plot.
Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoe Saldaña in Emilia Pérez.
Emilia Pérez, however, prefers a visual naturalism — the camerawork is often shaky, with colors drained of their energy and the lights dimmed — that feels at odds with a movie aware that what it’s doing is a little heightened, divorced from reality. (On that note: Emilia Pérez is much more inclined to play it straight than give in to campy flourishes that would go down well both in a genre as extravagant as the musical and in a movie with this melodramatic of a plot.)
Emilia Pérez’s aesthetic and general avoidance of humor suggest that it wants to be taken seriously. But that only puts into more relief that Audiard is clearly wading into a world in which he isn’t familiar and hasn’t particularly tried to become, overly simplifying the realities of transitioning and facilely depicting the nightmare of cartel violence. The performances, especially Saldaña’s and Gascón’s, are very good, teeming with physical gusto and desire. The movie’s centerpiece number might be the one where a red-velvet-suited Saldaña admonishes fundraising-gala attendees for their hypocrisies (her singing recalls hissing) while whipping around the room with tango-like fervor.
But the greatness of their work has more to do with their originality as performers than Audiard’s broad-stroked writing. Some of Emilia Pérez’s champions have admitted to being moved to tears by the film’s ostentatiously tragic ending, but I didn’t feel inclined to think anything but what Rita exasperatedly declares at the climax of one of her early songs: What bullshit!
Toni Collette and Nicholas Hoult in Juror #2. Photo by Claire Folger, courtesy of Warner Bros.
Clint Eastwood’s 40th (and maybe final) movie, Juror #2, has a pleasing old-fashionedness; it feels, in some ways, cut from the same cloth as gripping, sensationally premised 1990s courtroom dramas like The Client (1994) or Primal Fear (1996). But the pronounced disillusionment at its core and Eastwood’s understated, unfussy direction give it a contemporary lift that feels just right in a moment where a new, dread-inducing era of governmental darkness looms.
Released just a few days before Election Day, the movie foists a nightmarish question onto its 30-something family-man title character, a feature writer at a local magazine named Justin (Nicholas Hoult). What if you actually were the one responsible for a death being positioned as a murder in the trial for which you’ve been summoned for jury duty? The victim’s rough-around-the-edges boyfriend, played by Gabriel Basso, has been charged. But after Justin, a recovering alcoholic with multiple DUIs to his name, hears some basic facts about the case, he realizes that the unseen object he hit on a dark and stormy drive back home from a bar a while ago might not have been the deer he inferred it to be.
Justin is understandably reticent to come forward. He has a wife (Zoe Deutch) nearing the end of a high-risk pregnancy. His AA sponsor, who’s also an attorney (Kiefer Sutherland), is certain that if Justin brought what he thinks happened to the public, a jury would not be kind, even if they heard the truth that he didn’t give into his impulses to drink that night. So he compromises. The bulk of Justin’s fellow jurors are immediately firm on the boyfriend’s guilt, some tinged with disconcerting “I don’t care; I want to go home”-style callousness. Justin thinks it wiser to hold out, to push the narrative that the culprit is actually an unknown hit-and-run driver rather than this man with a mistake-laden history and known-to-be-short temper.
Eastwood has never betrayed much faith in the justice system in his directing career. Juror #2 takes him to a new echelon of pessimism that wisely goes unrelieved by an eventually shoehorned-in, faith-averring resolution. The screenplay, by Jonathan Abrams, shrewdly — and thankfully never didactically — ponders how easily the system’s noble aims can be muddied by easy-to-digest narratives and self-benefiting agendas, and the monstrous biases it has against those whose lives have been blighted with moral transgressions (especially when the accused is lower-class) no matter if they’ve been atoned for or are unrelated to the case being investigated.
Guilt and trepidation practically beam off an excellent, often conspicuously clammy Hoult, whose work feels like the acting equivalent of a quivering, popping-out forehead vein. Affecting a lilting Southern accent, Toni Collette is wonderful, too, as a politically ambitious, sure-of-herself prosecutor with a blade-like ponytail whose doubts mount the more she hears whispers that the conclusions she’s arrived at are more the result of a hasty, tunnel-visioned investigation than anything founded in reality. “Cheers to the justice system,” the suspect’s lawyer (Chris Messina) will unenthusiastically say to Collette’s character mid-movie while they unwind at a bar, his glass poised for a clink before getting to the discomfiting kicker: “It’s the best we’ve got.”
JoJo Cincinnati in Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. Courtesy of Omnes Films.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, co-written (with Eric Berger) and directed by Tyler Thomas Taormina, might be the best evocation I’ve seen in a movie of what the title holiday might typically feel like for an average family. It captures the warmth of a household rowdy with small talk and reminiscences (and inevitable disagreement-borne-but-still-loving tension) while also vivifying the melancholy that comes when you’re reminded of time’s passage and faced with the bound-to-be-a-little-unsatisfying conclusion of built-up-in-your-head Christmas-based anticipation.
This year’s festivities are especially bittersweet for the Balsanos, the Long Island clan on which Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point mostly focuses. This will likely be the last spent in what everyone agrees is the family home. The movie, essentially plotless, has a naturalistic approach; with its cameras often seeming to show action simply as it’s unfolding, it’s garnered apt comparisons to the carefully constructed, lived-in chaos of Robert Altman’s ensemble works. But it every so often puts particular attention tinged with absurdity on a certain image to remind you of life’s ticklishness: Grandma (JoJo Cincinnati) sitting in an upright chair, sleeping with her mouth agape, in front of an endlessly traveling train set, unbothered by the household’s restless din; a family member mounting a stationary bike mid-argument; a phone call taken in the freezing-cold backyard where the caller secretly entertains himself by casting shadow puppets onto the bushes.
Cinematographer Carson Lund finds a delicate balance between cozy, I’m-not-here faux-vérité and painterly framing that accentuates a moment’s beauty (e.g., the assortment of made-with-love dishes that crowd the dinner table) or goofiness, things that are not always mutually exclusive. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’s sensory-first novelty eventually does wear slightly thin: it might lose you a little when the action moves out of the household and into the out-of-the-home shenanigans of a group of teenagers looking to free themselves from familial claustrophobia. But the affection I immediately had for it never did. I wish more holiday movies were like it, seeking not to concoct a narrative that harmonizes well with the feelings of the season but trying to seize those hard-to-describe feelings themselves.
Peterson Reviews 