The New York Times - USA (2020-08-07)

C8 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2020

THE CURSE THAT KEEPS ON GIVING,the
weeping woman known as La Llorona, is
back. The last time this specter worked her
mojo onscreen, in the “Conjuring” horror
franchise, she terrified a Los Angeles fam-
ily. She goes after a more obviously deserv-
ing target in her most recent outing, “La
Llorona,” a thoughtful, low-key Guatemalan
movie that deploys its genre shocks inside a
sober art-house package.
Monsters can be in the eye of the behold-
er, and so it is with La Llorona. A figure out
of folklore in Mexico and other parts of Lat-
in America, she is a malleable emblem of fe-
male power, by turns tragic and chilling,
sometimes both. Although the particulars
of her misfortune and her symbolism can
differ from tale to tale, the basic story in-
volves a ghost forced to wander weeping for
her dead children, whom she drowned. Like
Medea and others of her like, she is the
giver of life and its destroyer.
The title character in “La Llorona” takes
a while to make her entrance. By the time
she does, you are nicely hooked on the mov-
ie’s good looks, sly moves, weird women
and disquieting vibe. One of its more ob-
scure pleasures is that its early scenes —
with their mannered delivery and narrative
ellipses — are right out of the modern art-
film stylebook. Several times during this
leisurely, ambiguous first stretch I flashed
on the director Lucrecia Martel (“The
Headless Woman”), a specialist of unease.
Certainly Martel seems like an obvious ref-
erence point for the director, Jayro Busta-
mante, in how he uses the sins of the bour-
geoisie to explore the ghastly history of a
country.
With his weathered face and proud white
mustache, the movie’s old tyrant (Julio
Díaz) certainly looks like a stand-in for Gen.
Efraín Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan despot
who in 2013 was convicted of genocide and
crimes against humanity. The dictator here
— called General by his bodyguard, En-
rique by his family — also stands trial. In a
courtroom that looks like a stage, Busta-
mante uses bodies in space to express the
larger social coordinates, placing one wit-

ness, an Ixil woman, in the center of the

frame, her face to the camera. Behind her,

Enrique’s wife (a very good Margarita

Kénefic) and daughter (Sabrina De La Hoz)

bear witness to his patrimonial guilt.

With precise framing, compositional flair

and a steady hand, Bustamante layers the

story, adding daubs that suggest rather

than explain. Typical of his approach to-

ward narrative is an early scene with a

group of women that plants a question he

never hurries to answer. Instead, this cere-

mony, with its intense, cryptic chanting

sends a loud, early warning signal that

something has gone wrong — but what?

One of the most conventional of narrative

conventions is that a story needs an inciting

incident to disrupt the ostensible status

quo, which is then restored. Yet what if the

status quo is disrupted from the get-go —

what if it’s already murderous, patholog-

ical?

The arrival of a new maid in the general’s

house, a Kaqchikel woman, Alma (María

Mercedes Coroy), pushes “La Llorona” into

more familiar terrain, some of it amusing.

With long dark hair that falls down her back

like a funeral shroud — and which briefly,

tantalizingly, Bustamante exploits with the

finesse of a Japanese horror auteur — Alma

soon shakes up the general and his family.

Coroy doesn’t have much to do other than

deliver fixed stares and appear foreboding,

which she does. That adds to the misterioso

atmosphere, but it’s also frustrating that the

human being behind the veil and gaze never

fully materializes.

Bustamante wants to draw us into Alma’s

story, her endless nightmare. Yet even as

her history emerges, she remains an ab-

straction, a symbol of her people’s suffer-

ing, while the general’s wife and daughter,

with their fears and dawning comprehen-

sion, become more wholly human. There

are some very good scenes in the movie’s

second half; even so, it’s striking that the

most unsettling aspect of “La Llorona” is

that history doesn’t simply shape the mov-

ie. It also haunts and finally overwhelms it

with terrors far more unspeakable than any

impressively manufactured shock.

MANOHLA DARGIS FILM REVIEW

María Mercedes Coroy as the

maid Alma in “La Llorona,”

directed by Jayro Bustamante.

SHUDDER

The General in His Horrific Labyrinth

A thoughtfully creepy, sober

Guatemalan movie features

the weeping woman’s return.

La Llorona

Not rated. In Spanish, with

subtitles. Running time: 1 hour

37 minutes. On Shudder.

“AN AMERICAN PICKLE,”a time-travel farce
directed by Brandon Trost and adapted
from a New Yorker story by Simon Rich,
marinates crisp almost-timeliness in the
mild brine of nostalgia. It’s not too salty or
too sour, and it’s neither self-consciously ar-
tisanal nor aggressively, weirdly authentic.

The subject, more or less, is what it means
to be Jewish, and given how contentious
that topic can become — can I get an oy
vey? — the movie finds an agreeable, occa-
sionally touching vein of humor.
The setup for most of the jokes is that, in
1919, an impoverished immigrant named
Herschel Greenbaum, recently arrived in
Brooklyn from a fictitious, Cossack-ridden
anti-Anatevka called Schlupsk, falls into a
vat of saltwater and cucumbers. He leaves
behind a pregnant wife, Sarah (Sarah
Snook). She has a son, who has a son, whose
son, in 2019, is a sad-sack tech guy named
Ben. When Herschel is fished out of his cen-
tury-long bath, alive and perfectly pre-
served, he goes to live with Ben, his only
known relative, setting up a cross-genera-
tional odd-couple situation brimming with

comic potential.

All the more so because both Herschel

and Ben are played by Seth Rogen, who

does the bewhiskered Yiddish thing and the

diffident millennial thing with equal crafti-

ness. While the characters are recognizable

types — from popular culture if nowhere

else — Rogen brings more than mere shtick

to the performances. Herschel is neither a

sentimental schlemiel nor a twinkly old-

world grandpa, but rather an impatient,

sometimes intolerant striver with a violent

streak. His pre-pickling experience of the

world was hard and bitter, leavened only by

the hope that future generations of Green-

baums would be better off.

Which is just what happened, of course.

Herschel once confessed to Sarah that he

hoped to taste seltzer water before he died,

and Ben has a gizmo in his apartment that

makes it on demand. He’s even less of a cari-

cature than his great-grandpa — not a hip-

ster nor a nerd so much as a smart guy with

a deep streak of melancholy. It turns out

that what connects him to Herschel isn’t

just genetics: it’s also grief. Ben’s parents

are dead, and Herschel’s accident robbed

him of the pleasures and consolations of

family.

That’s some pretty heavy stuff, but “An

American Pickle” is swift and nimble

enough to avoid weighing itself down with

schmaltz. It’s almost too thin to sustain its

premise for the running time — a scant 90

minutes — and sometimes feels more like a

stretched-out sketch than a fully developed

feature.

The century that separates Herschel

from Ben allows the story to leapfrog over

quite a lot of history, including the Holo-

caust, Israel, socialism, and the compli-

cated process of upward mobility, accultur-

ation and self-preservation that is the mov-

ie’s very condition of possibility. The drama

of Jewish male selfhood that preoccupied so

many in the middle generations — the

whole Philip Roth-Woody Allen megillah —

is all but erased. Herschel had his beloved

Sarah. Ben has no apparent sexual or ro-

mantic interests, or even any friends that

we know about. There’s no room for women

in this pickle jar.

But the flimsiness of the movie’s conceit

also works to its benefit. At its best, it’s a

brisk, silly plucking of some low-hanging

contemporary fruit. Food trends. Social me-

dia. Unpaid internships. The inevitable con-

flict between Herschel and Ben turns a fam-

ily squabble into a culture-war skirmish, a

conflict played out in a way that feels both

satirically sharp and oddly comforting.

And pickles can be comfort food. Not too

filling, good for the digestion, noisy and a lit-

tle sloppy rather than artful or exquisite or

challenging. This one, as I’ve said, isn’t bad,

and even allows a soupçon of profundity

into its formula. The tough, pious ancestor

and his sensitive, secular descendant have

almost nothing in common, and the imagi-

native challenge is to find an identity that

can include them both more or less as they

are. What makes them both Jews? The an-

swer turns out to be simple and, at least for

this conflicted 21st-century Jew, persua-

sive: the shared obligation to mourn the

dead.

A.O. SCOTT FILM REVIEW

Seth Rogen plays both a Jewish immigrant from the early 20th century preserved by pickle brine, left, and his contemporary great-grandson.

HOPPER STONE/HBO MAX

A Half-Sour Tale of Identity

An American Pickle
Rated PG-13. A little violence, a little swearing.
Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. On HBO
Max.

This extended Jewish joke also

has serious undertones.

TWO YEARS AGO,T: The New York

Times Style Magazine published

the photographs of more than a

hundred of the city’s artists who

had died of H.I.V./AIDS — a

shocking record of creativity cut

short and careers unrealized.

Howard Ashman, the lyricist

behind Disney classics like “The

Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin” and

“Beauty and the Beast,” just 40

when he died of AIDS in 1991, was-

n’t in that photo array; but I

thought of it as I watched “How-

ard,” Don Hahn’s warm yet poign-

ant documentary about this prodi-

giously talented man. Like that

magazine spread, “Howard” is a

film intimately aware that no cele-

bration of a life can be uncoupled

from the emptiness left in its

wake.

As we stumble through another

plague, that seems fitting. Yet

“Howard,” borne along by won-

derful songs and Ashman’s play-

ful delight in his work, is the oppo-

site of mournful.

Drawing entirely from abun-

dant period footage — cassette

tapes of interviews and song

demos, home movies, film of Ash-

man at work in recording sessions

and writing rooms — Hahn steers

clear of talking heads. Friends and

family and collaborators speak

mostly off-camera, their voices a

gentle undercurrent to the lyrics

that dance across the screen.

Almost three decades later,

these words have only gained cul-

tural force as stage and live-action

versions of the original animated

movies are either completed or

planned. And as we’re guided gen-

tly through Ashman’s Baltimore

childhood, his founding of a small

theater company in New York

City and his fruitful partnership

with the composer Alan Menken

(beginning with their astonish-

ingly durable “Little Shop of Hor-

rors”), we see both the strength of

Ashman’s artistic vision and its

fearlessness. Whether adapting a

Kurt Vonnegut novel or a Roger

Corman movie, Ashman refused

to be deterred by more cautious

advisers. He wanted to fuse music

and narrative in aggressively new

ways.

Not until he joined Disney,

though, did he find his true home.

Seeing animation as a natural fit

for musicals, he helped revive the

studio’s languishing animation di-

vision and taught others how to

shape a character’s story through

song. Charmingly buoyant se-

quences — like Angela Lansbury

and Jerry Orbach singing a duet

at a recording session for “Beauty

and the Beast” — slide smoothly

into more ruminative moments,

as Ashman sickens without re-

vealing his diagnosis.

Concerned about how a family-

oriented studio would react to his

illness, he continued to attend

press junkets, even writing, to-

ward the end, from a hospital bed.

He would die before knowing he

had been awarded the Oscar (with

Menken) for the title song in

“Beauty and the Beast,” only one

of the many magical pieces he left

behind. Yet, by the end of “How-

ard,” it’s the songs we’ll never

hear that may haunt us most.

JEANNETTE CATSOULIS FILM REVIEW

Tale as Old as Time:

A Life Cut Short

Howard Ashman, in a striped shirt, with Alan Menken, at left.

DISNEY

Howard

Not rated. Running time:

1 hour 34 minutes. On

Disney+.

Movies