Los Angeles Times - 02.08.2019

E4 FRIDAY, AUGUST 2, 2019 LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR

AT THE MOVIES

LATIMES.COM/MOVIES

Movie recommendations

from critics Justin Chang

(J.C.) and Kenneth Turan

(K.T.). In general release

unless otherwise noted.

The Art of

Self-Defense

Riley Stearns wrote and

directed this unnerving,

exacting dark comedy about

masculinity and violence,

starring Jesse Eisenberg as

a socially awkward young

man who gets much more

than he bargained for when

he starts learning karate.

(J.C.) R

Avengers: Endgame

After 11 years and 21 previ-

ous films, this opening

chapter of the Marvel Cin-

ematic Universe comes to a

mighty finish with a

thrilling, exhausting and

inevitably moving adven-

ture featuring Iron Man,

Captain America and all the

others we’ve met along the

way. (J.C.) PG-13

The Farewell

Lulu Wang’s tender, funny

and melancholy dramedy

about an elaborate family

deception is personal film-

making at its most incisive,

with superb performances

from a cast that includes

Awkwafina, Zhao Shuzhen,

Tzi Ma and Diana Lin. (J.C.)

PG

The Last Black Man

in San Francisco

Jimmie Fails plays a fiction-

alized version of himself in

director Joe Talbot’s gor-

geous Sundance prize-

winning debut feature,

which tells a deeply person-

al story of friendship, com-

munity and the yearning for

home. (J.C.) R Limited

Midsommar

Starring a terrific Florence

Pugh as a young woman on

an ill-advised Scandinavian

holiday, Ari Aster’s latest

grief-soaked horror film

isn’t quite as terrifying as his

earlier “Hereditary” but

may be even more auda-

cious in the way it pushes its

moody story beyond the

conventional grammar of

horror cinema. (J.C.) R

Once Upon a Time

... in Hollywood

Written and directed by

Quentin Tarantino and

starring Brad Pitt and

Leonardo DiCaprio, this

leisurely, two-hour, 41-min-

ute epic is an unexpectedly

elegiac tribute to both a

bygone era in Los Angeles

and the kind of masculine

charisma and camaraderie

that the movies have always

specialized in. (Kenneth

Turan) R

Toy Story 4

This movie will blow you

away in ways you won’t be

expecting. As directed by

Josh Cooley and written by

Stephany Folsom and the

veteran Andrew Stanton,

the film surprises with the

amount of genuine emotion

it generates with its focus on

love, loyalty and what mat-

ters most in life, to humans

as well as toys. (K.T.) G

BRAD PITT,left, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin

Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.”

Andrew CooperCannes Film Festival

If you haven’t seen “Maiden” yet, you are missing out on one of the year’s best films. Period.

End of story.

Edge-of-your-seat exciting and blessed with numerous unexpected and dramatically sat-

isfying story lines, this is much more compelling than even its once-in-a-lifetime story line

would indicate.

The focus is 1989’s first all-female crew to compete in the grueling Whitbread Round the

World yacht race, at 32,000-plus miles the longest contest on Earth — and what a saga it turns

out to be, filled with grit and daring in the face of conflict, fear and life-threatening situations.

What makes “Maiden”especially good is the candor and cooperation of the people in-

volved, all speaking with the perspective of decades, including skipper Tracy Edwards, who

talks about getting so angry with a crew member “I wanted to rip her throat out.” Docu-

mentaries don’t get much more intense, or more moving, than this one.
—Kenneth Turan

CRITIC’S CHOICE

From Tracy Edwards / Sony Pictures Classics

CLAIREWarren, left, Tracy Edwards, Dawn Riley in the documentary “Maiden.”

True-life adventure is tops

Acruel story of youth,
race and the politics of
respectability, “Luce” grows
out of a conflict between a
high school history teacher,
Harriet Wilson (Octavia
Spencer), and one of her star
pupils, Luce Edgar (Kelvin
Harrison Jr.).
Harriet has a will of steel
and a nose for trouble; Luce
has a dark past and a bright
future. The trouble begins,
or so it seems, with a school
assignment. Instructed to
write a paper from the per-
spective of a historical fig-
ure, Luce adopts the contro-
versial voice of the pan-Afri-
canist philosopher Frantz
Fanon, echoing his ideas
about the savagery of co-
lonialism and the necessity
of revolutionary violence.
Luce himself was once
one of Fanon’s so-called
wretched of the Earth. For-
merly a child soldier in war-
ravaged Eritrea, he was
adopted at age 10 by Amy
(Naomi Watts) and Peter
(Tim Roth), a Virginia cou-
ple with a nice house and un-
impeachably good inten-
tions. Their devotion to their
son is apparent in their easy,
affectionate family banter
and also in the character of
Luce himself. To look at him
today — an academic and
athletic star, handsome,
popular and disarmingly
suave — you wouldn’t guess
that he has lived through a
hell that few of his peers
could imagine.
That’s very much to the
point of this coolly analytical
and absorbing movie, a
point that Luce himself ar-
ticulates: “You never really
know what’s going on with
people.” But if “Luce” is
partly about how appear-
ances can be deceiving, it is
also about how expectations
can be terribly damaging.
Everyone expects greatness
from Luce, and he hasn’t dis-
appointed them so far. (At
one point, a character jok-
ingly likens him to President
Obama.) But beneath the
weight of so much pressure
we can sense the barely sti-
fled cry of a soul in extremis.
The purpose of that writ-
ing assignment, Harriet
says, was to encourage her
students “to think outside
the box.” That idea will be re-
visited a bit too tidily later,
when she and Luce fiercely
debate a different kind of

box, namely the tight, unfor-

giving mold that society has

carved out for him and other

young black men. The direc-

tor, Julius Onah, plays with

the image of a box more than

once in the establishing

shots of Luce’s school, a rect-

angular building with dark-

ened windows, and also in

the rows of student lockers

that figure into the plot.

Unnerved by Luce’s Fan-

on paper, Harriet takes it up-

on herself to search his

locker and finds a paper bag

full of fireworks, which she

promptly hands over to a

shocked Amy, warning her

to keep her son on the

straight and narrow. Harri-

et’s actions would seem to

defy plausibility as well as

protocol, a flaw that is offset

somewhat by the unflinch-

ing authority and determi-

nation in Spencer’s gaze. Ef-

fective as she was at terroriz-

ing teenagers in the recent

“Ma,” she’s both scarier and

much more human here,

turning even compliments

and pleasantries into verbal

weapons and mustering the

full weight of history itself in

her defense.

What makes Harriet’s

stance so compelling is that

she sees Luce as both a

threat to be neutralized and

a promise to be fulfilled. A

young man so rich in real

and symbolic potential — an

African immigrant who sur-

vived a war zone and proc-

essed his trauma to become

a shining American success

story — must be protected

and uplifted at any cost. But

there are few things that

children can really be pro-

tected from, suspicion per-

haps least of all. And suspi-

cion soon sweeps through

the halls of the school —

casting shadows over two

other classmates, Stephanie

(Andrea Bang) and De-

Shaun (Astro), who dwell

unhappily in the margins —

and into the rooms of Luce’s

home, poisoning even Amy

and Peter’s goodwill as they

struggle to give him the ben-

efit of the doubt.

Recognizably but intelli-

gently adapted from a play

by JC Lee (who wrote the

script with Onah), “Luce” is

a neatly constructed puzzle,

an engrossing weave of sub-

urban drama and sociopolit-

ical whodunit. It is also, un-

apologetically, a thesis mov-

ie, in which even small talk

has a way of accelerating

into discourse. Onah, re-

bounding nicely from the B-

movie hackwork of last

year’s “The Cloverfield Para-

dox,” neither embraces nor

disguises the material’s

stage foundations. He builds

every scene with clear, delib-

erate forethought but also a

commitment to low-key re-

alism, filling the frame with

lived-in details and long

shadows. (The 35-millime-

ter cinematography is by

Larkin Seiple.)

Onah’s cool tone and

spare aesthetic choices —

among them an ominously

percussive score by Geoff

Barrow and Ben Salisbury

—give the material some of

the creepy, insinuating men-

ace of Michael Haneke, the

Austrian director known for

his ruthless eviscerations of

privileged, educated white

liberals (including the ones

who regularly flock to his

movies). That Watts and

Roth previously played a

clueless suburban couple in

Haneke’s 2008 shocker

“Funny Games” is surely no

coincidence, and their char-

acters’ spluttering anger

and confusion here is as

sympathetic as it is subtly

damning.

Whether Luce owns the

illegal explosives — and if so,

what he might have been

planning to do with them —

becomes the source of much

suspense and uncertainty.

And Harrison’s perform-

ance, at once slippery and

surgically precise, com-

pounds that ambiguity in in-

genious fashion. He exhibits

aquality that might have

seemed like mere self-con-

sciousness in a different ac-

tor’s hands — at every mo-

ment, Luce seems to be try-

ing to calibrate the best,

most presentable version of

himself — and making it one

with the character’s subtext.

Does something sinister

lurk beneath Luce’s charm-

ing smiles and those stirring,

silver-tongued speeches he

is regularly called on to de-

liver at school assemblies? Is

he a dangerous, tormented

individual who has mas-

tered the tricky art of code

switching to a near-socio-

pathic degree? Or is this all

just a big misunderstanding

—an unfortunate product of

the fact that he and his less

enviable, less privileged

friends share lockers? And if

so, does that really make the

situation any better, so long

as the right people remain

blameless and the right ones

are punished?

Luce makes a natural

conduit for Lee and Onah’s

sharp ideas about the limi-

tations of tokenism and the

moral bankruptcy of priori-

tizing optics over human

lives. But he is also the cen-

ter around which the movie

constructs an ever-expand-

ing and increasingly flimsy

house of rhetorical cards,

barely held together by topi-

cal nods to school security,

mental illness, sexual as-

sault and teen privacy in the

social media age. “Luce” has

a lot on its mind, and its de-

sire to provoke and disturb is

far from unwelcome. But in

attempting to think outside

the box, the movie may un-

wittingly trap itself inside

one too.

As Luce insists, he

doesn’t want to be reduced

to either a stereotype or an

exception to the stereotype.

(Or, to use the recent formu-

lation of a presidential can-

didate, he doesn’t want to be

either “a gangbanger” or

“the next poet laureate.”)

But as admirably compli-

cated and contradictory a

figure as he may be, he can-

not easily shrug off the heavy

symbolic weight that the

movie ends up saddling him

with. Until the climactic mo-

ment when the earnest, defi-

ant smile-mask finally slips,

he often seems less a person

than a puzzle — an emblem

of ambiguity, a devil’s advo-

cate for every occasion, a

problem that cannot be

solved.

A pointed study in extremes

An adopted teen shows real promise, but did he leave his violent past behind?

Jon PackNeon

OCTAVIASpencer, left, as a teacher, Kelvin Harrison Jr. as her student “Luce” and Naomi Watts as his mom.

‘Luce’

Rated:R, for language

throughout, sexual

content, nudity and some

drug use

Running time:1 hour,

49 minutes

Playing:Arclight Cinemas,

Hollywood, and the

Landmark, West Los

Angeles

JUSTIN CHANG
FILM CRITIC

REVIEW

“Consequences,” “Kings of

Beer,” “Ladyworld,” “Moop”

and “Union” are also playing

in limited release.

The reviews can be found

online at latimes.com/

entertainment/movies.

Additional

reviews online