Wonder Wheel

Not everyone is enamored of "the later" Woody Allen oeuvre.  "I liked him better when he was funny," such viewers insist.  If so, they are missing the consistent contribution of an important auteur, who acidly chronicles the cracking and peeling of the societal veneers in the lower, middle, and even upper classes.

His latest, Wonder Wheel, is of a piece with the darker, dramatically intense body of work that includes domestic turbulence, marital rifts, disorders of caste, and the trendiest depressions of various etiology.

The marvel of W.W. is the remarkable evocation and golden-sienna drenching of Coney Island in its tawdry heyday of the early '60s, exactly like the many dog-eared and faded postcards showing the Parachute Jump, the Hurricane roller coaster, the sticky-icky boardwalk confectionery emporia (if that word does not connote too classy an image, which it does).  Some watchers are ultra-familiar with Coney Island, having spent a Tuesday evening or three with chums, watching the fireworks amid the gummous cotton candy, crinkle French fries at Nathan's, and the carnival barkers of freakazoid carny "attractions."    

Set inside this effluvial mise en scène, a harassed wife, Ginny, married beneath her would-be station ambitions (played excruciatingly by Kate Winslet, never better), copes shakily with her near-alkie carousel-fixer husband, Humpty (an amazing Jim Belushi, at the peak of his acting prowess), a pyromaniac young son of Ginny's former spouse, and living smack atop the shabbiest Coney rundown, when the husband's nubile daughter appears.

Caroline has fled her mobbed up spouse.  On the run, threatened with mob killing, she's desperate.  Softening to his fragile daughter, her estranged father Humpty takes her in.  Complicating matters, both wife and step-daughter vie for the attentions of a literary lifeguard, the narrator in a break-the-fourth-wall device.  A louche opportunist, Mickey is attending NYU nights to nail his master's before "creating some major work of lasting value."  Justin Timberlake disappoints.  He is unbelievable as lifeguard, illicit lover, or Woody Allen stand-in.  Comparing his perf here with his masterly turn in The Social Network (2010) renders his stagey act here hard to take.

The agità created by mobsters seeking to kill the runaway wife – Caroline, a terrific Juno Temple, a close lookalike of Scarlett Johansson – generates tension and empathy.  Ginny, like her earlier incarnation, Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine, is unraveling, hysterical for some rescue knight, deeply scarred by character failings, an unsavory past, and yearnings that look hopeless now that she's entangled as a clamhouse waitress and humdrum wife of a good but simple man not given to tolerating Blanche DuBoisisms.

What becomes clear as the intensity builds is that Allen has updated the classic Greek mythos, giving additional punch to the disturbing story we witness with bated breath.  Bubbling underneath her white-knuckle grasp on her life, roiling jealousies, and unstated revenge fantasies are the tragic tropes of Euripides and Aeschylus.

Stripped of a need for metronome laughs, this is a worthy meditation on self-destruction, marriage blight, thwarted ambition gone permanently astray.

The Greek mask for this cutting cameo: the grimace of tragedy.

The Shape of Water

Another film whose provenance is the late '50s, early '60s, director Guillermo del Toro takes off from the heated frenzy of millions after the Area 51 hullaballoo and its alleged UFO crash that spurred so many imaginations and active inquiries "after the fact."

Here, an aquatic being caught somewhere in Florida is chained and prodded by "well meaning" officials in a grim subterranean fastness, imprisoned and harassed by scientists and military (a cold, nasty Michael Shannon is excellent if villainous), who see the seven-foot green-scaled amphibian as but a larger lab mouse.  To this come the cleaning women, Sally Hawkins (utterly believable) as a mute messiah toward the briny fishman and her loyal no-nonsense coworker, the ever wonderful Octavia Spencer.  They are the heart of the film, understanding that fishman is more than microscope fodder.

It's a sci-fi thriller mystery sometime rom-com exploration.

Intriguing to this viewer is the seeming parallels between the evil Michael Shannon character, who wants to harvest and dissect the creature whom Hawkins has taught to do sign language and appreciate Fred Astaire, and the sea being himself.  There is a Russian subplot further complicating the proceedings.  Kind of a James Bondiana with a scullery maid as map-hero.

Is this a parable of destroying at our peril the outsider, the alien?  Is this yet another cloaked plea for amnesty, admitting illegals who may not behave, look, or commune as we do?

Warning: Do not pay heed to the trailer, which gives away, as most lately do, too much.

Warning 2: Though the whale's portion of the film is juicy, fun, and winning, not everyone will buy into the unlikely and far-fetched denouement.  Gills up, grokkers.

Downsizing

Not about corporate firings, alas.  This is yet another in Matt Damon's efforts to plead Earth rescue, in a story quite replete with weird sci-fi suppositions.

The story involves the voluntary choice of many to undergo permanent belittling – as they become so small, these miniature people can live in luxe dollhouses and supposedly save the planet by consuming a fraction of the resources regular big people now do.

Unasked questions pervade the viewer as he wonders how the small folks have tiny iPhones, cars that cannot traverse real roads, and miniaturized food, and a whole panoply of logical inconsistencies better left unasked, we assume.

Kudos to the casting people for using as a major character a spunky Vietnamese woman with one leg.  Her advent is a bright spot in a murky plot that ends much where you would predict a cultish Damon film to resolve itself.

It's beginning to feel a lot like signature Damon.

Audiences exited with confusion and uncertainty.

Cold of Kalandar

Part of the recent Turkish film festival, and a standout in terms of cinematography, storyline, acting, and believability.  Other entries in the fest were bizarre, experimental, scarcely what one might expect from a Turkish film.

A poor family living on a hardscrabble hillside, trying desperately to overcome nature and sustain itself from a terrain that promises little and yields less.  The husband goes off from the family yurt to seek his golden hope, a being of gold or precious metal, ascending perilous steeps to pick at icy rock.  The wife struggles with refractory children, a Down syndrome child, and impossible challenges.

Gorgeous landscapes, not a single curse word or CGI trickery, and believable characters in an earthy tale that could be the biography of probable millions across the globe.  English subtitles.