get out

Jordan Peele's tremendous debut Get Out is one of the finest new horror films I have seen in quite some time. Perhaps the first flat-out horror masterpiece of this decade. It's also an excellent and sharp social comedy. 

After a chilling opening of a kidnapping of a black man on a nighttime suburban street (complete with Flanagan and Allen's "Run Rabbit Run" instantly adding both idiosyncrasy and wit), the story initially focuses upon Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and the anxieties of his first visit to the secluded, woodsy manor of the family of his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams). In true (and symbolic) fashion, the couple hit a deer en route (quite an elegantly-framed jump scare moment) and thus begins the Polanski-esque unrelenting sense of dread. The parents (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) are seemingly genial even if somewhat peculiar. Their worst traits seem to be their tinges of patronizing behavior. Their black groundskeeper and housekeeper (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel, respectively) act bizarrely. And the brother (Caleb Landry Jones), with his reddish blond pony and beady eyes, has a brash, off-putting intensity in the guise of a friendly headlock. 

Peele and lead Kaluuya carefully draw us into a setting of this goldish-cream colored walled house of artsy knick knacks, surrounded by slim, stark trees and soon populated with a party of quietly sinister white people (similar to the subtly off-kilter depictions of characters in '75's The Stepford Wives and Rosemary's Baby) where the smallest gestures and comments give off a heightened sense of fear and paranoia and laughable disgust. All of it quickly descends into a terrifying and exquisitely apt "Twilight Zone" of its own.

This movie comes at a time where there are pretty much zero studio films (this one was picked up by Universal) that are fascinating and challenging, incredibly well-assembled but also encourage yelling, laughing, screaming and clapping. There have been critically praised slavery epics in the past few years--Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave the most notable and Tarantino's Django Unchained (which this film has certain glimmers of--especially in its candlelit dinner scene) and also problematic films like The Help which are from the perspective of whites and deal with racism by creating an unrealistic, plasticity over-the-top central villain. Hidden Figures was a bright spot in last year's mainstream movies by using a Hollywood glossy narrative usually tailor-made for white historical men to effectively tell the stories of three black women. Get Out shares similar themes of racism, the commodification of black bodies and minds and yet is set not in the antebellum south but in a modern-day, self-proclaimed liberal enclave (Steven Thrasher assesses these ideas much more brilliantly in his Esquire write-up). It also flips the gender role of the traditional final white girl being a black man (notoriously the black man has always been one of the first few victims in a slasher pic).

While Get Out absolutely stands on its own as an original horror film, the movie has many fun homages and relationships with other fright flicks. The rich score by Michael Abels is full of many influences: I found the use of a "Love Theme," which begins with standard earnestness and twists itself into a more absurd connotation, reminiscent to Pino Donaggio's score in Don't Look Now. A astonishing hypnosis scene--a hybrid of performance (Kaluuya's haunting, tearful eyes and Keener's chilly balefulness), sound design (the repetitive stir of a spoon in china), film editing (by Gregory Plotkin), photography (by Toby Oliver), and a creepily lulling string score--invokes a painful childhood memory of Chris which recalls the demons of Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.

I wasn't so into LilRel Howery's tonally off comedy but it's hard to knock something that brings so much joy. Especially as he kind of becomes this film's Scatman Crothers. A scene with him and a detective (a great small part turn by Erika Alexander) is quite hilarious and disarming. Peele's debut film is so impressive and one that seems flashy but holds such a delicate web of emotions. The balance between satire, humor, and horror is perfectly handled. Any slight misstep could have cracked the picture (reminiscent of its broken-pane poster design), which is what makes the film-making and writing all the more stunning. The cast too, is perfectly chosen and everyone plays their roles with gusto. Thank God for this picture released in the doldrums of early winter which requires so much engagement and thought (one can go on and on in all the themes it explores) but is also a tense, crowdpleasing hoot. The rousing reactions of the packed crowd I saw it with certainly added sparks to the film's already well-honed electricity. ****

-Jeffery Berg

catching up with some films of 2011

Trust - Consider me surprised that David Schwimmer has directed such a deft drama.  The plot is a bit Lifetime-melodrama: 14-young girl Annie (well-acted by Liana Liberato) becomes victim of a sexual predator from the net.  Family breaks down and father (Clive Owen) becomes more and more manically obsessed with revenge while mother (the always naturally good Catherine Keener) tries her best to connect with her distraught daughter.  The best aspects of the film--including Liberato's portrayal, the ambivalent nature of Annie's hookup, the bland, matter-of-fact presentation of her predator--are deeply unnerving.  Too often though, the script is a bit clunky; Owen's psychological breakdown and his job as a developer of provocative tween ads are a bit contrived.  Schwimmer seems to pay homage to one of cinema's best family dramas--Robert Redford's Ordinary People.  Both are set in wealthy Chicago suburbs, have sympathetic counselors at the helm (here, Viola Davis in another thinly-sketched part that doesn't demand enough of her skills as an actor), show the effects of tragedy on a family in low-key style, and end with fathers crying and coming to terms in cold backyards.  Trust is not nearly as complex of a jolt as Redford's film but it's still an unsettling, often compelling cautionary tale.

We Were Here - David Weissman & Bill Weber's (The Cockettes) quietly elegiac documentary traces the devastation of AIDS in the San Franciscan gay community in the 1980s and 90s.  The film's sensitive interviews of five people who survived a terrible era are powerful.  By focusing on such a small group of individuals and the details and accounts of their lives (a poster with pictures warning of a new "gay cancer," wrenching drug trials, a flower man's witnessing of death and trauma of those around him) makes the film an arresting and important testament.

Hanna - Joe Wright's (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) Hanna is a bit of thin-skinned schlock but it's also an entertaining tale of Finnish-bred assassin (Saoirse Ronan) on the run from wicked witch agent (Cate Blanchett).  Reminiscent of Firestarter (another film with another wickedly powerful blonde girl on the lam), the movie owes much of its atmosphere and fun to its offbeat European settings, the pulsating Giorgio Moroder-inspired Chemical Brothers score and a campy Blanchett.

please give

For New Yorkers, there is a lot to relate to in Nicole Holofcener's (Friends with Money, Lovely & Amazing, Walking and Talking) excellent Please Give. There are plenty of rude, wickedly sardonic people, awkward elevator conversations, dog walkers with shit bags, facial spas, and thrift furniture shops where everything is mod, uncomfortable and priced in quadruple digits. Holofcener has Woody Allen's gift for soft satire and also a keen eye for contemporary, uncomfortably human moments (her film opens with close-ups of breasts readying for mammograms). As evident in her other works, and in this film in particular, arguably her best and most moving, she also knows how to direct a cast. Catherine Keener, skinny, long-haired, clad in black, Debra Winger-raspy-voiced, plays the owner of an overly priced 10th avenue furniture store. Her character is almost terrifyingly real. Anyone who has browsed one of these kinds of shops may be familiar with this type of person: sitting behind a Mac, asking, without much interest, if you need any help. Her jokey, rather lame husband (Oliver Platt) may be familiar too. He has a wandering eye and an affectation for Howard Stern. Sometimes people like this, with their seemingly endless stream of money and morally askew ways of making it (here, they nab items from dead people's places and overcharge it exorbitantly) are ingratiating company. Yet, Holofcener is quite adept at showing the frailties of these people. While the couple plots to annex the apartment of the 91-year old woman (a very funny Ann Morgan Guilbert) next door, Keener's Kate, is slowly sanded down by the guilt of her occupation. She attempts to remedy this, much to the disdain of her awkward 15-year old daughter (Sarah Steele), by volunteer work and giving five and twenty dollar bills to the homeless, but she is only capable of pity.

The grandaughter of Kate's neighbor, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall, in another remarkably real performance) is, in a way, Kate's opposite. Her job, as a radiology technician, is noble. Her romantic life is the pits. And without much help from her relentlessly insecure sister (Amanda Peet, subtly brilliant), she has been selflessly "giving" by taking care of her cantankerous grandmother for years. As the film builds, layer by layer, Kate and Rebecca form a bond in one of the film's surprisingly deeply moving moments. Holofcener doesn't make this bond sentimental nor easy. Perhaps the film's only flawed moments are within the love affair that develops between Platt and Peet. Yet the cast is just so good and Holofcener is so generous and wry with these characters (both could have been easily one-dimensional in a lesser-film) and their everyday frustrations, that even the few weak spots have something interesting to offer. The film is constructed like a great short story or a poignantly funny personal essay (Sarah Vowell appears in an amusing cameo), and it may frustrate viewers by not offering much in terms of resolution (I questioned it at first). There are some quiet moments of growth and transformation but like some other great films of the year (The Social Network, Winter's Bone and The Kids Are All Right), the film's authenticity derives from how we all value different things and how characters sometimes never change the way we may expect or want them to. ****

-Jeffery Berg

I agree with a lot with what Joe Morgenstern articulates in his glowing WSJ review.