12 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
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For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town COURTESY HBOIrony has never sounded as sweet as it does in the director Penny Lane’s
“Listening to Kenny G,” in which the sentimental saxophonist eagerly
and earnestly takes part in a work of pop-star portraiture that quickly
morphs into a sharp-minded exploration of the sociology of aesthetics
and the philosophy of taste. (It’s streaming on HBO Max starting
Dec. 2.) The movie tells the straightforward story of how Kenny
Gorelick, a teen-age virtuoso in Seattle in the early nineteen-seventies,
became the best-selling instrumental artist of all time. (Hint: the
record executive Clive Davis had something to do with it and, on
camera, explains how.) It also unstintingly parses the hostility that
the musician has long faced from critics, scholars, and others whom
Gorelick derides as the “jazz police.” (Some of his detractors appear
in talking-head interviews that prove both self-questioning and
illuminating.) But, above all, Lane lets Kenny G do the talking, and
the playing, and the displaying of his creative process onstage, at
home, and in the studio, which comes off as the authentic expression
of a distinctive personality—for better or for worse.—Richard BrodyWHATTO STREAM
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MOVIES
Benedetta
Paul Verhoeven’s violent, erotic, and hollow
historical drama depicts religion as a tool
of political power, a method for controlling
women’s sexuality, and a fiction skillfully ma-
nipulated by nonbelievers. His skepticism,
however justified, is dramatically flip. The
action, set in the seventeenth century and
based on a true story, is centered on an Italian
convent to which a girl named Benedetta is
consigned. The adult Benedetta (Virginie
Efira) proves smart, independent, and desper-
ate for power. She convincingly forges mir-
acles of which she’s the star, and she rescues
a young peasant woman named Bartolomea
(Daphné Patakia), who soon makes sexual
advances toward Benedetta. Her initial resis-
tance (with its hilarious visions of deliverance
from lust by a sword-wielding Jesus) gives
way to a passionate, reckless romance that
inevitably comes to grief. Verhoeven’s cheap
cynicism emerges in characters who seem like
present-day people planted ludicrously in a
miserable past. The Church’s political games—
involving the Reverend Mother (Charlotte
Rampling), the Provost (Olivier Rabourdin),
and the Papal Nuncio (Lambert Wilson)—are
given short shrift to make way for copious
sex and horrific violence, which Verhoeven
appears to enjoy equally. In French.—Richard
Brody (In theatrical release.)House of Gucci
The new Ridley Scott film, springing from
real-life scandals, stars Lady Gaga as Patri-
zia Reggiani, whose father owns a trucking
business. Aiming high, she marries Maurizio
Gucci (Adam Driver) and gets snarled up
in the tangled affairs of the Gucci dynasty.
Prominent honchos of the clan are played
by Jeremy Irons, Al Pacino, and Jared Leto,
and connoisseurs of luxury ham will have
a delicious time trying to judge who gives
the saltiest performance. Almost everyone
converses in rich Italian (or “Italian”) accents;why has this old cinematic habit not been laid
to rest? The movie, though executed with
Scott’s habitual panache, is ominously long,
and Gaga, in particular, is impeded from giv-
ing it the comic flourish that it badly needs,
and which she seems ever ready to supply.
The plot has less to do with fashion than with
fiscal irregularities; it’s a relief when Tom
Ford (Reeve Carney) shows up and makes
something happen on the catwalk.—Anthony
Lane (In theatrical release.)The Humans
Stephen Karam, for his directorial début,
adapts his own play of the same title. It’s set
in a rundown duplex apartment in China-
town, where a thirtysomething couple—Brigid
(Beanie Feldstein), a composer, and Richard
(Steven Yeun), a social-work student—have
just moved in. It’s Thanksgiving, and with
scant furniture they welcome Brigid’s family—
her sister, Aimee (Amy Schumer), a lawyer
from Philadelphia, and her parents, Deirdre
(Jayne Houdyshell), an office manager, and
Erik (Richard Jenkins), a longtime school
custodian, who’ve come in from Scranton and
brought Brigid’s grandmother (June Squibb),
who’s disabled and has Alzheimer’s disease.
The family is enduring long-silenced woes
that they voice in the course of the day, involv-
ing money, work, physical and mental health,
frustrated ambitions, and secret betrayals.
Though Karam’s presentation is vastly empa-
thetic, most of their troubles have a political
basis that both he and the characters ignore;
there isn’t a word of politics, or much sense
of a world outside. His mainly stage-bound
direction offers one attention-grabbing trope
of little dramatic import: an obsession with
infrastructure, with leaks and pipes, circuit
breakers and machines that go bump day and
night.—R.B. (In theatrical release and streaming
on Showtime.)Strange Victory
Filming in 1947 and 1948, Leo Hurwitz uses
newsreel images of the Second World War
in his quest to uncover the source of the fear
seen in the faces of urban passersby, who, he
says, seem “haunted in broad daylight.” The
premise of this extraordinary documentary
essay (featuring journalistic research, archi-
val footage, and fictional reconstructions)
resembles that of a film noir, but Hurwitz,
with his audacious editing and blunt com-
mentary, infuses it with a substance far more
radical and harrowing than anything Holly-
wood could produce. The horrors of a world
in which extermination camps went unchal-
lenged are shown to have a pathological par-
allel in American prejudice—anti-Semitism,
anti-Catholicism, and especially racism in all
its forms, from job and housing discrimina-
tion to lynching, the victims of which Hur-
witz calls “the casualties of a war.” Hurwitz,
considering Hitler’s rise and fall, is shocked
to find “the ideas of the loser still active in
the land of the winner.” The film is a kind
of collective psychoanalysis of a segregated
and prejudiced nation; its findings are yet to
be worked through. Released in 1948.—R.B.
(Streaming on the Criterion Channel.)