The New Yorker - USA (2019-12-16)

14 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019

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Though early Soviet cinema is best known for its political dramas,

it also includes scintillating and innovative silent comedies, such as

the half-hour romp “Chess Fever,” from 1925 (screening on Dec. 16

at MOMA). It’s a bold docu-fiction that depicts a major international

chess tournament held that year in Moscow, and it features the reigning

champion at the time, José Raúl Capablanca, in a brief comedic role. A

chess nerd (Vladimir Fogel), decked out in checked socks, scarf, and hat,

is so busy playing a game against himself that he misses his wedding

to Anna (Anna Zemtsova). Even as she bemoans the influence of the

game, it holds the entire city in thrall, as dramatized in fascinating and

antic on-location scenes, such as when a policeman neglects a crowd

of streetcar-fare beaters after one of them whips out a pocket set and

challenges him to a game. Jolting special effects evoke the magnetic grip

of the checkerboard pattern on the hapless hero, and macabre subplots

don’t dispel the collective gaiety of fanatical delusion.—Richard Brody

INREVIVAL

Army. Though he grudgingly reports for duty,

he refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler; claiming

conscientious-objector status, he is arrested,

imprisoned, tortured, and prosecuted. Mean-

while, his wife, Franziska (Valerie Pachner),

ostracized by their village, does her best to

fend for their children. The drama is rooted in

plain gestures and stark principles, yet Malick

depicts it with eye-rolling grandiosity—and

his familiar repertory of roving wide-angle

shots and nature imagery seems unusually

effortful. Stereotypes abound, as when he-

roes speak English and villains are rendered

as central-casting Nazis barking in German.

The immensely empathetic view of Franz is

overwhelmed by vague spirituality and vaguer

politics; the impressionistic methods dispel the

story’s powerful and noble specificity.—Richard

Brody (In limited release.)

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

An artist named Marianne (Noémie Mer-

lant) journeys to a remote house in Brittany,

where she has been hired to paint a portrait of

Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a young woman on

the brink of marriage. To begin with, however,

the subject refuses to pose; Marianne has

to do the painting in secret, so that Héloïse

won’t know what she’s up to. From these fur-

tive beginnings, Céline Sciamma’s new film,

set in pre-Revolutionary France, fans out

into a love story of startling openness and

power—one zealously performed, edited with

great concision, and concluding in a barrage

of unforeseen and barely manageable emo-

tion. With Valeria Golino as Héloïse’s mother

and Luàna Bajrami as Sophie, the family’s

loyal maid. Sophie has troubles of her own,

which, far from being ignored by her social

superiors, are assuaged, in a stirring show of

female solidarity. In French.—A.L. (12/9/19)

(In limited release.)

Richard Jewell

Working with a script by Billy Ray, Clint

Eastwood delivers a pained, complex, and

pugnacious dramatization of the woes of the

title character, a real-life security guard at the

1996 Atlanta Olympics who discovered a bomb

amid a crowd and helped to clear the area, but

was wrongly accused by the F.B.I.—and the

media—of having planted it in order to be

hailed as a hero. Paul Walter Hauser offers an

intricate portrayal of Jewell as immature and

vain, bighearted and deeply compassionate.

His prior misjudgments as a campus officer

and his awkward personality count against

him in the eyes of a by-the-book agent (Jon

Hamm). As the investigation continues, an

unprincipled journalist (Olivia Wilde), in a

needless and smarmy plot point, propositions

the agent in exchange for a hot tip. Eastwood,

whose career-long theme has been the danger

of demagogy, elides ideology (including, un-

fortunately, that of the actual bomber) in this

seethingly paranoid drama; this tale could have

fit the nation’s 2016 obsession with Hillary

Clinton’s e-mails just as easily. With Kathy

Bates as Jewell’s anguished but unshakable

mother and Sam Rockwell as his lawyer.—R.B.

(In wide release.)

Uncut Gems

Adam Sandler’s frantic and fidgety perfor-

mance as Howard Ratner, a diamond-district

jewelry dealer scrambling to stave off calamity,

provides the emotional backbone for the broth-

ers Josh and Benny Safdie’s recklessly auda-

cious and wildly accomplished blend of crime

thriller, family melodrama, and sports drama.

Howard, a compulsive gambler, is deep in debt

to loan sharks, one of whom (Eric Bogosian)

is menacingly insistent. Howard has left his

exasperated wife (Idina Menzel) for his em-

ployee (Julia Fox) and is trying to set the whole

mess aright with the sale of a smuggled stone,

in which a distinguished client, the profes-

sional basketball player Kevin Garnett (playing

himself), takes an interest. The supercharged

action—from a script by the Safdies and Ronald

Bronstein—ingeniously intertwines real-world

sporting events and real-life characters (in-

cluding the Weeknd) with sharp-eyed scenes

from the high-pressure gemstone business, the

gambler’s tightrope walk, and the habits and

rituals of suburban Jewish New Yorkers. The

movie’s pinball-rapid combinations rise to a

frenzied pitch that’s exhilarating and awe-in-

spiring.—R.B. (In limited release.)

for putting meteorology on the map. It was
in pursuit of this scheme that, on Septem-
ber 5, 1862, he rose in a balloon to a height
of some seven miles above the Earth. The
movie re-creates this vertical odyssey, and
the cinematography, by George Steel, unveils
cloudscapes of splendor and breadth. In a
brave departure from historical fact, Glaisher
is accompanied on his adventure by Amelia
Wren (Felicity Jones), who pilots the balloon
and also, when required, crawls to its summit
to save the day—a fantastical but spirited in-
vention. Would that the scenes on the ground
were half as much fun. With Tom Courtenay
as the hero’s father, whose mind is on higher
things.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of
12/9/19.) (In wide release.)

A Hidden Life
When a giant stumbles, the thud is colossal.
Terrence Malick breaks a long streak of mas-
terworks with this Second World War drama,
based on a true story, that strains at exaltation
and sometimes lapses into self-parody. It’s cen-
tered on Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), a
farmer from a remote Austrian mountain vil-
lage who is drafted to serve in Nazi Germany’s