24 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
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MOVIES
After the Wedding
Bart Freundlich’s film is based on a Dan-
ish movie from 2006, directed by Susanne
Bier. The main character, an aid worker who
travels from India to the West to raise vital
funds for a charity, was originally played by
Mads Mikkelsen. The role now passes to
Michelle Williams; whether the switch of
gender assists the plausibility of the plot,
which was far-fetched in the first place, is
open to debate. The aid worker, Isabel, ar-
rives in New York, presents her case to the
vastly wealthy Theresa (Julianne Moore),
and gets invited to the wedding of Theresa’s
daughter (Abby Quinn). At the happy event,
Isabel encounters Theresa’s husband, Oscar
(Billy Crudup), with whom she shares an
unhappy past. The coincidences mount, as do
the contrasts—glaringly signalled—between
Indian poverty and American wealth. Such is
the movie’s smooth solemnity, indeed, that
some viewers may struggle to keep a straight
face.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of
8/19/19.) (In limited release.)
American Factory
In 2016, in Dayton, Ohio, where unemploy-
ment and despair were widespread after the
closing of a G.M. plant, the Chinese automo-
tive-glass company Fuyao opened a factory
and hired thousands of local residents to
work under hundreds of Chinese supervisors.
For this documentary, Julia Reichert and Ste-
ven Bognar had extraordinary access to the
facility, its employees, and its managers. The
filmmakers discover trouble of an ordinary
corporate variety—management’s opposition
to unionization—and find that it’s amplified
by underlying political conflicts. The C.E.O.,
visiting from China, threatens to close the
plant if it unionizes; the company propagan-
dizes against the union drive and fires the
organizing leaders. Workers contend that
their safety and well-being are disregarded;
violations are discovered; supervisors com-
plain that employees are insufficiently sub-
missive. Senator Sherrod Brown, advocating
for the union, outrages management; on a
visit to China, the local “union” is shown to
be run by the C.E.O.’s brother-in-law and
linked with the government. The filmmakers’
probing analysis reveals the basic principles
of freedom and dignity within the political
essence of labor issues.—Richard Brody (In
limited release and on Netflix.)
Blinded by the Light
In this heartily sentimental comedic drama,
directed by Gurinder Chadha, a sixteen-
year-old British high-school student named
Javed (Viveik Kalra), the son of Pakistani
immigrants, is torn between his family’s cus-
toms and the lure of wider experience. The
story is set in 1987, in the industrial town
of Luton, where Javed, an aspiring writer,
feels oppressed by his practical-minded fa-
ther (Kulvinder Ghir) and cowed by local
neo-Nazis. Then his classmate Roops (Aaron
Phagura), who is Sikh, introduces Javed to
the music of Bruce Springsteen. Inspired
by the Boss’s lyrics and attitude—and en-
couraged by a teacher (Hayley Atwell)—
quickly pairs off with a darkly handsome,
suavely understated Mob lawyer (Robert
Taylor) and tries to pry him away from the
underworld. Ray’s direction, with its gar-
ish, searing streaks of color (red has rarely
slashed the screen so violently), sharp diago-
nals, and quickly lurching wide-screen views,
reflects its characters’ raging energies and
inner conflicts. A spectacular flameout of a
dénouement reveals the self-destructive folly
of unchecked ambition. Yet Ray lavishes sim-
ilar passion on the elaborate backstory—and
on a strange medical subplot, suggesting that
the evil doings on which the plot runs are not
failings but maladies awaiting treatment of
their underlying causes.—R.B. (Film Forum,
Aug. 24, and streaming.)The Peanut Butter Falcon
Zack Gottsagen, an actor with Down syn-
drome, stars in this affectionate drama as
Zak, a young man with the same condition,
who escapes from the Georgia nursing home
where he lives in order to search for a pro-
fessional-wrestling camp that he wants to
enroll in. Along the way, he meets a small-
time tidewater fisherman on the run (Shia
LaBeouf), who reluctantly agrees to help
him in his search. As their rafting trip be-
gins, a nursing-home attendant (Dakota
Johnson) looking for Zak catches up with
them and eventually agrees to become a
part of the adventure. The trio meet color-
ful characters in the course of this journey
through photogenic landscapes (the cinema-
tography is by Nigel Bluck). Tyler Nilson
and Michael Schwartz wrote and directed
the film; despite their screenplay’s clichés,
they don’t let life-lesson dialogue distract
from the genial Mark Twain-esque settings.
Both Gottsagen and Johnson deliver endear-
ing performances, and LaBeouf’s scruffy,
ramshackle manner lifts the film above its
predictable roots into something lived-in
and surprisingly memorable.—Bruce Diones
(In limited release.)Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
This adaptation of tales from Alvin
Schwartz’s trilogy of children’s books makes
their composition its very subject. The action
is set between Halloween and Election Day,
1968, in Mill Valley, Pennsylvania, where
three nerdy high-school students, Stella
(Zoe Colletti), Auggie (Gabriel Rush), and
Chuck (Austin Zajur), plus their new friend,
Ramón (Michael Garza), who’s evading the
draft, head to a haunted house. There, they
encounter the ghost of a woman—and the
book of stories that she’s writing. As new
tales appear, written on blank pages by the
ghost’s invisible hand, their horrors are vis-
ited on the town’s residents—including the
four young people, who do some research into
local history in the hope of finding the cause
of the terror and ending it. The director,
André Øvredal, working with a script by Dan
and Kevin Hageman, delights in the details
of small-town adolescence and the period
reconstruction, but the sequences derived
from Schwartz’s work lack its uncanny and
unhinged whimsy.—R.B. (In wide release.)Javed makes a name for himself in the school
newspaper, local journalism, and a literary
competition, but faces increasing conflict
with his father. Civic realities, such as high
unemployment and Thatcher-era protests,
mesh with personal relationships—including
Javed’s romantic awakening with an activ-
ist classmate (Nell Williams)—in a wishful
vision of progress sparked by the universal
power of an American pop icon. Though
the situations have the ring of authenticity,
the film’s saccharine treatment denatures
them.—R.B. (In wide release.)Cold Case Hammarskjöld
This new documentary from the Danish
director Mads Brügger dwells obsessively,
though by no means exclusively, on the death
of the former U.N. Secretary-General Dag
Hammarskjöld, in 1961, in a plane crash. The
movie digs into some of the theories that have
gathered around what may, or may not, have
been an accident. The investigation takes
place largely in Africa and leads to a number
of shady figures, a fair proportion of whom
are either self-evident fantasists or white co-
lonialists fearful of black majority rule. The
problem is that Brügger cannot resist planting
himself at the center of the story, occasion-
ally dressed as if he were playing a character
in a period drama. More tiresome still, he
admits to growing weary of Hammarskjöld
(who is scarcely an uninteresting subject)
and switches his attention to yet another
conspiracy, this time involving the spread
of AIDS.—A.L. (8/19/19) (In limited release.)Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
The director Stanley Nelson’s biographi-
cal documentary, about the trumpeter and
bandleader who shaped the history of music
from the mid-forties through the mid-seven-
ties (and who died in 1991, at the age of six-
ty-five), rushes admiringly through Davis’s
musical achievements and focusses attention
on disturbing aspects of his personal life—
in particular, his violence toward women.
In interviews, Davis’s first two wives, the
dancer Frances Taylor and the singer Betty
Mabry, describe his acts of physical abuse and
relate them to his substance abuse, which, in
turn, they link to his medical issues. The film
also gives overdue attention to Taylor and
Mabry’s crucial behind-the-scenes artistic
contributions to Davis’s career. Important
but brief sequences portray Davis’s experi-
ence of racist discrimination and violence,
such as a beating by New York police in 1959.
Interviews with his musical collaborators are
given short shrift, and archival footage and
recordings are dismissively used as visual
and sonic backdrop. The movie’s simple arc
and conventional contours flatten both the
passionate originality of Davis’s music and
the destructive chaos of his life.—R.B. (In
limited release.)Party Girl
Nicholas Ray’s crime drama, from 1958, takes
a retrospective look at gangland Chicago
in the early thirties, but his psychological
approach to the violence is altogether mod-
ern. The film starts with a musical scene,
featuring Cyd Charisse, in the title role,
as a hard-nosed night-club danseuse who1
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