18 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town COURTESY AMike Mills’s tender and turbulent new melodrama, “C’mon C’mon” (in
theatrical release), amplifies its emotional power with a documentary
current that runs throughout the action. When Viv (Gaby Hoffmann),
a Los Angeles writer, has a family emergency, her brother, Johnny
( Joaquin Phoenix), a New York radio producer, flies over to take care
of her idiosyncratic and imaginative nine-year-old son, Jesse (Woody
Norman). The loving yet uneasy bond between uncle and nephew is
drawn in discerning and passionate detail, which the cast brings viv-
idly to life. (Norman, spontaneous and intensely focussed, is among
the great child actors.) Johnny’s work involves travelling to interview
young people about their lives and aspirations, and that project is inte-
gral to the drama: in off-hours, he speaks trenchant and self-searching
monologues into his tape recorder, giving rise to an intricate interplay
of flashbacks. Johnny takes Jesse on a working road trip that challenges
and deepens their relationship, and Mills weaves real-life interviews
with kids into the fabric of the film, along with Johnny’s extended riffs
on the power of recording to, as he tells Jesse, “make mundane things
be immortal.”—Richard BrodyONTHEBIGSCREEN
tale, adapted from a story by Haruki Murakami.
The first forty minutes are a long setup in-
volving the strange collaboration of a Tokyo
couple—an actor named Yusuke (Hidetoshi
Nishijima) and a screenwriter named Oto
(Reika Kirishima). Then, after Oto’s sud-
den death, from a cerebral hemorrhage,
Yusuke accepts a job directing a production
of “Uncle Vanya” at an arts festival in Hiro-
shima; his method involves listening, in his
car, to a cassette tape of the play recorded
by Oto. The drama is centered on Yusuke’s
friendship with his driver, a young woman
named Misaki (Tôko Miura), whose bitter
past gets sublimated behind the wheel, and
on his complex relationships with his cast—
an international group, all of whom per-
form in their own first languages (including
Korean Sign Language). Hamaguchi inge-
niously and movingly weaves Chekhov’s play
into the lives of Yusuke and his associates;
the film’s essence is the continuity of art and
life, and the playwright’s reflections merge
with the characters’ confessional monologues
to fill cityscapes and rural vistas with their
grand passion.—Richard Brody (In limited
theatrical release.)Tick, Tick... Boom!
Lin-Manuel Miranda, in his feature-film
directorial début, expands the late play-
wright and composer Jonathan Larson’s
quasi-autobiographical solo show into an
exuberant and hearty musical filled with
fantasies and flashbacks. In early 1990, Jon-
athan (Andrew Garfield) is about to turn
thirty, with little to show for his exertions.
He’s working as a waiter and pinning all
his hopes on a workshop performance of
a science-fiction musical that he has spent
eight years writing. Meanwhile, his girl-
friend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp), a dancer,
has been offered a permanent out-of-town
job, but still can’t get Jonathan’s attention;
his best friend, Michael (Robin de Jesús),
has traded acting for advertising; the AIDS
epidemic is ravaging his circle of friends;and, amid conflict, temptation, and tragedy,
he has just a few days to compose a new song
for the play. The movie’s clever production
numbers are held together by Jonathan’s
onstage performance of the show; though
the eager and energetic Garfield invigorates
the drama, he isn’t enough of a musician to
hold the camera’s attention when he sings,
and much of the film’s busyness appears to
be merely an elaborate workaround.—R.B.
(In limited theatrical release and streaming
on Netflix.)The Virgin Suicides
For her first feature, from 1999, Sofia Cop-
pola adapted Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel,
about the desperate escape of five teen-age
girls from their repressive family, as a sur-
prisingly intricate struggle with absence,
grief, and memory. The story (set in sub-
urban Michigan in 1974, and told mainly in
flashbacks) is anchored by the charismatic
Lux (Kirsten Dunst), the most daring of
the Lisbon sisters, whose golden dreams
appear fleetingly onscreen. But she, like
the other girls, remains alluringly elusive
as Coppola evokes, with poised and pre-
cise images, the bemused frustration of the
boys—now men—who knew them, and who
are still trying to read the pages that were
torn from their lives. Coppola deploys an
evocative batch of period Top Forty tunes
and flashes of backlit cinematography to
summon the characters’ lost world, with its
stifled experience and receding fantasies.
What remains tantalizingly out of reach
for the girls—as for the boys who have lost
them—is ordinary life. In her first film,
Coppola is already a master at rendering
inner depths startlingly, immediately visual.
With James Woods and Kathleen Turner, as
the girls’ parents.—R.B. (Streaming on the
Criterion Channel, Pluto, and other services.)The Wrestler
This straightforward tale is given tremen-
dous extra punch by its leading man, Mickey
Rourke, who plays Randy (the Ram) Rob-
inson, a wrestler whose career has tumbled
from a high of twenty years before. No one
else, it seems fair to say, could have played
the part; for one thing, no one but Rourke
combines a gently spoken sweetness with
so glazed and inflated a physique, together
with a willingness to be treated by his peers
like a veal chop. The scenes in the ring, in
which Randy, despite a heart attack, strug-
gles to prolong the dregs of his appeal, are
often hard to take, but even more agonizing
are his attempts to forge enduring bonds
with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel
Wood) and a tired stripper (Marisa Tomei).
The film has a grainy, bloodied sadness that
slips at times into the sentimental, but the
director, Darren Aronofsky, knows precisely
where the heart of the story beats. There
is nothing less mystical, or more moving,
than watching the Ram reduced to serving
at a deli counter: a good man at the end of
the line. Released in 2008.—Anthony Lane
(Reviewed in our issue of 12/15/08.) (Streaming
on Hulu, iTunes, and other services.)