12 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
ALEX HARSLEY / COURTESY SHOES IN THE BED PRODUCTIONS
The public-television series “Soul!,” which ran from 1968 to 1973, was
produced and hosted by Ellis Haizlip, a former theatre producer. (Twen-
ty-four episodes are streaming on Tubi.) Haizlip, who was Black and gay,
made the show the premier national showcase for Black artists (such as
Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Carmen de Lavallade), activists (including
Kathleen Cleaver and Louis Farrakhan), and writers ( James Baldwin
and Nikki Giovanni, among others) who were rarely on other TV pro-
grams. “Mr. Soul!,” an enthralling and illuminating documentary about
Haizlip and the show’s place in history, is directed by Melissa Haizlip,
his niece, who also endows it with a moving personal perspective. Ellis,
who died in 1991, had a discerning eye for talent, and his freewheeling
setup gave established artists, such as Stevie Wonder, an extraordinarily
open creative space. Copious interviews with scholars and artists, along
with the show’s co-producer Christopher Lukas, detail Haizlip’s bold
vision of the political role of the arts—further seen in the infuriating
story of its cancellation, which involved Richard Nixon. “Mr. Soul!” is
streaming on virtual cinemas.—Richard BrodyWHATTO STREAM
by the rough-and-tumble city. Reinette’s pas-
sage from idealism to practicality parallels
Rohmer’s own; the movie’s incipient two-
woman revolution suggests that it takes a
roiling crowd to nurture silence and solitude.
Co-starring Fabrice Luchini, as an archly jar-
gonizing art dealer; Marie Rivière, as a well-
dressed cadger; and the real-life Housseau
family, who are farmers. In French.—R.B.
(Streaming on Metrograph.)
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
A young couple’s troubled relationship pro-
vides a strong framework for the intricate
speculations of Charlie Kaufman, who wrote
and directed this boldly but narrowly imag-
inative drama (adapted from a novel by Iain
Reid). Jessie Buckley plays a woman whose
name may be Lucy, Lucia, or Louisa, and
who may be a scientist, a poet, an artist, or
a waitress. During a mounting blizzard, she
hesitantly joins her boyfriend, Jake (Jesse
Plemons), on a road trip to visit his elderly
parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) at
their remote farmhouse—although she must
get back home that night because of work obli-
gations. The house haunts Jake, and fragments
of his past infiltrate his partner’s psyche, too;
as she changes identity, in abrupt shifts, so
do Jake’s parents. The actors negotiate these
twists deftly but are offered little room for
spontaneity; Kaufman truffles the film with
ample references to artists and writers, pro-
viding guideposts to an adventure that’s in
the spirit of David Lynch but lacks his radical
vision; the earnest themes fit together with
the rigid plainness of a jigsaw puzzle.—R.B.
(Streaming on Netflix.)Merrily We Go to Hell
Dorothy Arzner, the only female director who
worked steadily in Hollywood during the
nineteen-thirties, begins this 1932 melodrama
with a young woman fighting off the grop-
ing and kissing of an older man at a Chicago
high-society party. A local reporter and aspir-
ing playwright named Jerry (Fredric March)
drunkenly observes these aggressions from theterrace and, when the woman, an industrial
heiress named Joan (Sylvia Sidney), comes out
for air, playfully makes himself a nuisance; the
pair fall instantly in love and, rebelling against
her father (George Irving), she marries him.
But Jerry is an alcoholic (Prohibition is no
deterrent; the city is awash in drink) who’s also
still in love with his ex, a brassy and schem-
ing actress named Claire (Adrianne Allen).
Arzner perches the blithe whirl of social graces
and casual deceit, public norms and private
anguish, on a delicate edge of heartbreak;
Sidney, already a star at twenty-one, endows
the inexperienced but determined Joan with
tremulous grace and nerves of steel.—R.B.
(Streaming on the Criterion Channel and the
TCM app.)Shallow Grave
This claustrophobic chamber piece, from 1995,
set mostly in a Scottish apartment, poses an
old Hitchcockian question—What’s the best
way to lose a dead body?—and comes up
with some fresh and bloody answers. Kerry
Fox, Ewan McGregor, and Christopher Ec-
cleston are three roommates confronted by
the corpse of their new lodger and the stash
of drug money that he has left behind. They
do the obvious thing (obvious, at any rate,
according to the juicy amoral standards that
prevail here): they bury the body and keep the
cash. Greed and paranoia soon kick in, and the
plot, smartly worked out by the screenwriter
John Hodge, marches toward its climax. Not
that you care too much how it ends up or what
happens to these people—the film is less a
thriller than a frosty exercise in logic. But the
director, Danny Boyle, does wonders with a
small budget, and the suave, dense-hued look
of his movie stays with you long after the hor-
ror has evaporated.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed
in our issue of 2/13/95.) (Streaming on Amazon,
iTunes, and other services.)Sollers Point
The title of Matthew Porterfield’s quietly
anguished 2017 drama refers to a Baltimore
neighborhood that’s home to many former
employees of a shuttered steel mill. There,
the twenty-six-year-old Keith Cohoe (McCaul
Lombardi), recently released from prison and
under house arrest, is living with his father,
Carol (Jim Belushi), a retired mill worker.
Keith is white; many of his friends, including
his ex-girlfriend, Courtney (Zazie Beetz),
are Black, but, in prison, Keith belonged to
a white-supremacist gang, and its members
expect him to rejoin when his house arrest
ends. Meanwhile, Keith, in need of quick
money, begins dealing drugs again. His des-
perate rounds thrust him into wary contact
with a wide range of characters, including
his grandmother (Lynn Cohen), two young
women who work as strippers, a terrifying
neo-Nazi, an art-school student, and a heroin
addict hoping to break her habit. Detailing
Keith’s inner conflicts and practical struggles
with graceful, mood-rich lyricism, Porterfield
presses gently but painfully on some of the
most inflamed and sensitive parts of American
society.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon, Vudu,
and Kanopy.)
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