10 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
EVERETT
The ongoing tribute to Isabelle Adjani at French Institute Alliance Française
continues, on Sept. 24, with “The Story of Adèle H.,” from 1975, in which
Adjani starred, at the age of nineteen, and for which she received an Oscar
nomination for Best Actress. This historical drama, directed by François
Truffaut, is based on the diaries of Adèle Hugo, the French writer Victor
Hugo’s daughter, and unites Truffaut’s three central themes—doomed love,
family conflict, and writing. The action, set in 1863, is centered on Adèle’s
hopeless obsession with a British officer named Pinson (Bruce Robinson);
she follows him to his new post in Halifax and takes increasingly delusional
measures to persuade—or, if necessary, force—him to marry her. She lies
to her disapproving father about her intentions; she also pours out her
emotional turmoil in her diary and writes bitterly of women’s dependence
on their fathers and husbands. Adjani’s fiercely focussed performance, aug-
mented by Truffaut’s Hitchcockian stylings, captures the desperate ardor
with which Adèle dashes toward humiliation and ruin.—Richard BrodyINREVIVAL
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-townbougie New Yorker named Theo (Ansel Elgort)
contemplating suicide in a cozy Amsterdam
hotel room; two-plus hours of flashbacks show
what went wrong. As a thirteen-year-old (played
by Oakes Fegley), Theo gets separated from his
mother at the Metropolitan Museum just before
a bomb goes off and kills her; in the resulting
chaos, an elderly man gives him a Dutch-mas-
ter painting that fell off the wall. Temporarily
nurtured by a rich classmate’s mother (Nicole
Kidman) before being whisked off to Las Vegas
by his deadbeat father (Luke Wilson) and even-
tually running away to New York, Theo grows up
to become an antique dealer, a drug abuser, and
a fraudster—as well as the vanished painting’s
secret custodian. He also suffers from unre-
quited love, an engagement of convenience,
and additional bereavement; the teeming plot
is trimmed to index-card snippets detached
from a sense of place and performed with bland
efficiency. Directed by John Crowley.—R.B. (In
wide release.)Hustlers
The writer and director Lorene Scafaria’s mild
drama, about a ring of strip-club dancers whodrug male clients and bilk them out of tens of
thousands of dollars, is based on a well-known
piece of investigative journalism by Jessica
Pressler. The film stars Constance Wu as Dor-
othy, a.k.a. Destiny, a dancer whose income
plummets after the 2008 financial crisis. But her
former mentor, Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), has
been doing well luring men to the club, and she
brings Dorothy in on a new scheme—slipping
the men knockout drops to gain access to their
credit cards and personal data. The two women,
in turn, recruit other women and rake in vast
sums of money until they’re caught. Scafaria
insightfully builds the action around Dorothy’s
interviews with a journalist (Julia Stiles), but
the duo’s methods—the elaborate webs of seduc-
tion, the employment of sex workers—and their
canny business minds are all but elided in favor
of a heartwarming tale of friendship, family, and
shopping. Cardi B and Lizzo are brilliant in all
too brief dramatic roles.—R.B. (In wide release.)Porgy and Bess
Otto Preminger, filming George Gershwin’s
opera in lifelike settings, kept the camera rolling
in front of such artists as Sidney Poitier, Doro-
thy Dandridge, Pearl Bailey, and Sammy Davis,
Jr., for vast, sculptural takes of four minutes or
more. The starkly dramatic results could well
be watched as a silent film, so quietly forceful
is the acting; Poitier plays the disabled Porgy
with the most heartrending of techniques—he
walks on his knees. Preminger achieves a rare
embodiment of substance in style: the stately,
massed movements of the oppressed inhabitants
of Catfish Row—while hinting at great social
actions soon to come—evince a spiritual dignity
as strong as the music’s, and suggest a hieratic
pageantry of Old Testament power. The Gersh-
win estate sought to destroy all existing prints
of Preminger’s film for its infidelities to the
score. But that effort was misguided; Preminger
and the cast overcome the opera’s contrivances
and stereotypes to recapture Gershwin’s un-
derlying humanistic vision of celebration and
deliverance. Released in 1959.—R.B. (Lincoln
Center, Sept. 19.)Pull My Daisy
This short film, from 1959, is a neat Beat pick-
me-up set in the slaphappy bohemian pad
of a railroad conductor whose pals include
Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory
Corso—all of whom carry on, naturally enough,
like poets in their youth. Jack Kerouac based
the script on the third act of his play “The
Beat Generation,” which, in turn, was based
on the real-life visit of a progressive clergyman
to his pal Neal Cassady’s house. But there’s
no story to speak of, and, in fact, there’s no
dialogue: the hilarity emerges from the way
Kerouac’s non-stop voice-over narration gives
breezy comic ripples to seemingly spontaneous
shenanigans. Under the co-direction of Alfred
Leslie and the photographer Robert Frank,
who wields his camera with tipsy intimacy,
the mostly amateur cast conjures an infec-
tious, arrested-adolescent joie de vivre. The
artist Larry Rivers plays the conductor, and
Delphine Seyrig is his long-suffering wife;
the painter Alice Neel plays the clergyman’s
mother.—Michael Sragow (Streaming.)an acrobat living in Puerto Vallarta, arrives to
care for her, he disputes the charges against his
father. So do Diego’s brothers, Rodrigo and
Bruno, who join him in caring for América,
as does Rodrigo’s girlfriend, Cristina. Yet, as
Luis’s case crawls through the judicial system
(and its corruption), the three brothers—at
first reunited in a circus act—increasingly come
into conflict over matters of time and money.
Meanwhile, local authorities, keeping tabs on
América’s condition, subject the household to
intrusive scrutiny. The documentary’s directors,
Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside, never make
clear their connection to the family, even as
they film intimately amid its fault lines. None-
theless, the movie’s fusion of medical, legal,
and personal issues echoes far beyond its short
span, and it briefly reaches grand philosophi-
cal heights in discussions of América’s state of
mind and emotional life.—Richard Brody (In
limited release.)
The Goldfinch
This sprawling yet rushed adaptation of Donna
Tartt’s novel is textureless and flavorless. It
starts with a blood-spattered twentysomething