THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 17
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MOVIES
American Dharma
Errol Morris’s documentary, built mainly
around his interviews with the far-right strat-
egist Steve Bannon, is clearly motivated by his
hostility to Bannon’s ideas and his dismay at
their electoral triumphs. Drawing on Bannon’s
earlier career as a film producer and on his my-
thologizing of classic Hollywood depictions of
(white) masculinity, Morris films Bannon in a
Quonset hut and other settings borrowed from
the 1949 war film “Twelve O’Clock High”—yet,
in hoping to debunk Bannon’s heroic vision of
himself, Morris merely perpetuates it. He gives
Bannon a wide platform on which to trip him-
self up in his own rhetorical tangle, but Ban-
non, a practiced performer, deftly and gleefully
unspools his philosophical pronouncements,
which Morris leaves largely unchallenged.
When he does challenge Bannon’s assertions,
the movie’s fussy editing delivers contrived
drama rather than authentic conflict. In the
absence of the journalistic agility to rebut Ban-
non’s pompous and exclusionary generalities,
Morris gives them a showcase.—Richard Brody
(In limited release.)Araya
This majestic documentary portrait, from 1959,
of several families on Venezuela’s vast and arid
salt-marsh peninsula, is the only feature film
by its director, Margot Benacerraf. Its arresting
images of sea and sky evoke a vast historical arc;
the individuals at its center—mainly laborers
on their hard and monotonous rounds—emerge
only gradually from the community at large.
The Pereda family works mightily to build a
pyramid of salt, only to break it down to sell in
sacks. At a nearby beach, the Ortiz family, which
survives by fishing, carefully calculates what
they must consume and what they can afford
to sell. Benacerraf’s grand style captures the
drama of subsistence in the face of nature; the
overwhelming beauty of the wide-open spaces
contrasts with the workers’ burdened trudges
through them. She offers a wealth of fascinat-
ing and moving details but little intimacy or
analysis, avoiding with equal discretion both
the subjects’ inner lives and the wider politi-
cal context. In Spanish.—R.B. (Museum of the
Moving Image, Nov. 10, and streaming.)Burning Cane
The nineteen-year-old writer and director
Phillip Youmans displays a preternatural ma-back in the early seventies, but, at age seven-
ty-three, he still knows the value of a buffed
tone, a perfectly placed note, and a gracefully
symmetrical musical line; he’s long displayed the
wisdom of a jazz master. His “Infinity” quintet
cohorts include a younger wonder—the saxo-
phonist Mark Turner—and the guitarist Charles
Altura.—S.F. (Nov. 7-10.)
Junglepussy
Pioneer Works
The world within hip-hop that the vibrant rap-
per Junglepussy occupies is one filled with co-
pious sex, self-love, and self-improvement; she
can lecture on healthy eating just as readily as
she can record an ode to oral sex—both receiving
and giving, but only “if he start eatin’ vegeta-
bles.” It’s a kind of duality that also functions
as subversion, much the way her stage name can
force listeners to confront their stereotypes head
on. She performs within the immersive exhibi-
tion “You’re at home,” created by the multimedia
artist Jacolby Satterwhite, a different kind of
surrealist.—B.Y. (Nov. 8.)
Lusine
The Sultan Room
The Seattle-based composer and producer Jeff
McIlwane, who works as Lusine, began releas-
ing ambient and down-tempo music of pointil-
list detail in the mid-two-thousands. But on his
third album, “The Waiting Room,” from 2013,
he began veering into techno-pop; he often
cuts his collaborators’ vocals into confetti and
aligns them with gridlike beats that chirp and
snap elusively. Lusine typically performs alone,
but for this appearance he’s accompanied by
another Seattle musician, the drummer Trent
Moorman.—Michaelangelo Matos (Nov. 9.)
Devon Welsh
Public Records
Devon Welsh is trim, bald, and frequently
dressed like a stagehand; his skewed pop songs
are even less garlanded. Formerly the front man
of the Montreal duo Majical Cloudz and now a
lone wolf tucked away in Wisconsin, the singer
embodies a strange kind of minimalism that
extends from his spare synthesizers to his dis-
armingly blunt lyrics. The night before Welsh’s
concert, Public Records showcases another sort
of unvarnished sound with sets from the vet-
eran guitar dynamos David Grubbs and Glenn
Jones.—Jay Ruttenberg (Nov. 9.)
HTRK
Elsewhere
The Melbourne duo HTRK makes murmur-
ing synth pop that’s assiduously minimalist yet
crawling with detail, rooted in the tiny, brittle
constructions of the Welsh post-punks Young
Marble Giants. Jonnine Standish’s oft-blurry
vocals play hide-and-seek—sometimes mul-
titracked to dizzying effect, sometimes half
audible behind a throbbing bass line. The pro-
ducer Nigel Yang’s arrangements tend to be built
around effects as much as instrumentation; a
stray looped rustle may take on the force of a
melody line or transform into a rhythmic ac-
cent.—M.M. (Nov. 10.)
turity in this intimately textured, far-reaching
drama, set in rural Louisiana and centered
on a middle-aged black woman named Helen
(Karen Kaia Livers), who is weary in body and
in soul. She lives alone in a house near cane
fields, with an ailing dog as her sole compan-
ion. Her dissolute husband died of AIDS; her
son, Daniel (Dominique McClellan), a heavy
drinker who can’t hold a job, physically abuses
his wife, Sherry (Emyri Crutchfield), while
nonetheless asserting his right to raise their
young son, Jeremiah (Braelyn Kelly). Mean-
while, Helen’s friend and pastor, the recently
widowed Reverend Tillman (Wendell Pierce),
is undergoing a spiritual trial that makes him
judgmental and aggressive. Youmans, who does
his own cinematography, depicts these harrow-
ing emotional crises in dramatic fragments
and shadow-drenched, often oblique images;
they suggest his anguish at a legacy of male
frustration, violence, rage, and self-destruction
that leaves the region’s women trapped in futile
silence.—R.B. (In limited release.)The Irishman
Martin Scorsese’s new film, lasting three and
a half hours, marks a return to his old battle-
ground—to the glory days when wise guys
walked the earth. The action spans decades,
chopped up into flashbacks, and covers the adult
life of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who
sits in a nursing home and steers us through
his past. We find him as a truck driver in Phil-
adelphia, who falls in with one mobster, Russell
Bufalino (Joe Pesci), and then another, An-
gelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel), before becoming a
bodyguard to the labor leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al
Pacino). The cast, which includes Ray Romano
as a lawyer and Stephen Graham as a union boss
known as Tony Pro, is almost absurdly strong,
though Anna Paquin, as Frank’s perspicacious
daughter Peggy, is too often confined to the
wings. As a rueful roll through time, the movie
is grandly sustained; seldom has Scorsese’s mas-
tery felt more secure.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed
in our issue of 11/4/19.) (In wide release.)Tokyo Twilight
Yasujiro Ozu’s direction brings emotional depth
and philosophical heft to this turbulent and
grim family melodrama, from 1957. A mid-
dle-aged businessman slowly awakens to the
fact that his two grown daughters are unhappy
in love. The elder, who agreed to an arranged
marriage with a respected intellectual (de-
spite loving someone else), finds her husband
overbearing and egocentric; the younger is
involved with a dissolute student who neglects
his studies for gambling. But as family secrets
emerge—the father’s long-concealed romantic
humiliations, as well as wartime disruptions
and degradations—it becomes clear that secrets
themselves are the problem. Ozu reveals the
emotional corrosion caused by maintaining
a brave front in the face of problems and by
shielding children from darker issues—even
those regarding their own past. By the movie’s
end, all Japanese society seems rotted out by
the lies that pass for civility and propriety.
An ostensibly happy ending offers little but
resignation. In Japanese.—R.B. (Film Forum,
Nov. 8-14, and streaming.)Moon Duo
Music Hall of Williamsburg
Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada, the mar-
ried couple who perform as Moon Duo, de-
vote themselves to psychedelia the way that
the less constitutionally trippy might embrace
culture or creed. The Portland, Oregon, duo’s
approach is ecumenical and thoroughly contem-
porary; the musicians cherry-pick influences
from across genres, eras, and national borders.
On Moon Duo’s new album, “Stars Are the
Light,” they incorporate a pulse ripped from
disco—once the perceived nemesis of the rock
arcanist, now another chic old sound to distort
at will.—J.R. (Nov. 12.)1
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