‘Dope’ Uses Old Clichés To Its Advantage

DOPE

Rick Famuyiwa’s hyped coming-of-age flick, Dope, is obsessed with the ‘90s. Shameik Moore, Tony Revolori, and Kiersey Clemons are a trio blipster nerds in LA’s rough-and-tumble Inglewood neighbourhood, who dress up in daisy-age threads and blast old-school jams (Digable Planets, Tribe, Hip Hop Hooray. But Famuyiwa’s obsessions go deeper, the filmmaker summoning ghetto-movie tropes that lean on the lingering influence of the films of the era: Boyz N The Hood, Juice, Fresh.

But where, a generation ago, this micro-genre was ripe for tragedy, Famuyiwa replays the old clichés with a smirking, subversive spirit, re-examining long-held assumptions about race, class, and on-screen depictions thereof. Sometimes, this feels like incisive social satire; other times, like the old clichés’ve just been given a fresh coat of paint.

Somewhere in the middle, there’s the film: a bright, colourful, coming-of-age comedy in which being unwittingly dragged into the centre of the local drug trade is played for laughs. The kids are initially in over their head and out-of-place, but as they work to turn their fortunes (and shill their ill-gotten stash for cash), extrication from this precarious place plays like extra-curricular activity.

There’s real limits to the film’s cinematic worth and storytelling smarts, but Dope skates by on an abundance of charm. Part of that is related to its pop-cultural quotations, but it never just scans as exercise in retro nostalgia. Its best sequence comes when a wild house party is depicted not as it happens, but solely via social media recollections. Where coming-of-age movies once needed journeys, pilgrimages, road-trips, Dope knows that formative memories, these days, are remembered from the distant future, but instantly encoded as videos, texts, tweets, and memes, and celebrated the morning after.

SOUTHPAW

Jake Gyllenhaal is a boxer. He’s the schoolyard brawler turned champion-of-the-world, a kid from a Hell’s Kitchen orphanage now fighting in front of hometown fans at Madison Square Garden. He and his wife, Rachel McAdams, met as orphans, got matching swallow tattoos behind their ears, and sired a precocious 10-year-old girl. He’s rich, beloved, and filled with love. What could go wrong?

In a piece of screenwritten contrivance you can barely believe, McAdams is shot-and-killed in a fight involving Gyllenhaal’s budding rival Miguel Gomez. Our hero’s life falls apart, he’s suddenly broke and drunk and forbidden from seeing his daughter. But, lo!, atonement as it hand. By night, he can clean the toilets at a dank, old-timey gym run by Forest Whittaker. By day he can train... for the fight of his life! And this time... it’s personal!

Southpaw literally climaxes at a fight in which Gyllenhaal takes on The Guy Who Killed His Wife, with the ante upped by having the legal custody of his daughter somehow involved. Oh, and Gomez is trained and managed by the turncoats who were once Gyllenhaal’s old team (50 Cent!, Dominic Colón), so there’s multiple opportunities for revenge. And, if that’s not enough, a kid in the gym Jake G’d taken a shine to also dies along the way —in a random, thrown-in, mentioned-in-passing fashion— so, y’know, he can win it for the kid, too, as well as for his own kid.

Southpaw marks the latest work for Antoine Fuqua, who authors hyper-macho action films that carry themselves with a sense of heft. Here, Gyllenhaal embodies the film’s imagined weightiness with a performance that’s hugely physical. Less in his washboard stomach and convincing approximation of a pugilist, more in the way he carries himself: eyelids drooping, body battered, with a coiled fury lurking inside, ready to explode in an instant.

A forgiving reading of the film would be that it’s a portrait of how such ferocious violence cuts both ways: how it can win fame and fortune in the ring, but destroy lives outside of it. But Southpaw doesn’t earn that forgiveness. Because, for all its tut-tutting at its anti-hero’s self-destructive behaviour and its valorisation of the hard road of rehabilitation, ultimately it just ends up as pure sports-movie cliché: everything forgotten and forgiven at the final fight, the inevitable climactic victory providing moral validation via sporting success.

IRRATIONAL MAN

Another year, another Woody Allen film. The grand old creepy-uncle of American cinema refuses to slip quietly into his dotage, the 79-year-old continuing his indefatigable film-a-year pace. Cranking ’em out the way he does, the quality of Allen’s films waxes and wanes between mildly-entertaining and depressingly mediocre. Only occasionally does he court actual disaster (Small Time Crooks, To Rome With Love), most often his endless pics just feel interchangeable, instantly forgettable.

Irrational Man plays a little differently, and has a different energy, thanks to its leading man. The fact that he’s a philosophy professor communicating existential despair via witty one-liners sounds plenty Woody-ish, but, as played by Joaquin Phoenix —hulking, awkward, pained, talking out the side of his mouth, perpetually drunk— he carries a physicality that’s at odds with the trifle-light tone of most Allen films; as if he’s walked off The Master’s beach and onto campus.

That campus resides amidst the moneyed milieu of summery Newport, Rhode Island, a sunny, picture-postcard setting that contrasts with its protagonist. In classes, Phoenix pushes his dark, self-destructive views on impressionable youth; talking Kant, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger, in lessons that echo the film’s own text. Phoenix sleeps with Parker Posey, charms his apple-polishing pupil Emma Stone, and laments that he’s turned from idealist activist to drunken, passive intellectual.

In a neat bit of unexpected screenwriting, the film suddenly veers towards a new identity after Phoenix and Stone overhear a conversation; and, thereafter, Phoenix commits himself to —and discovers purpose in— “the creative challenge of bringing off the perfect murder”. Murder, here, is treated so jauntily you half expect Angela Lansbury to be brought in to solve the case, but it, too, is used as a philosophical device; something with which to view ideas about moral relativity, justice, crime and punishment.

There’s nothing particularly profound about this, and, admittedly, as whole Irrational Man essentially scans as ‘pleasant’. But it’s smarter —and better— than your average Woody Allen film, and there’s no fucking Dixieland jazz on the soundtrack to boot.

SHE’S FUNNY THAT WAY

She’s Funny That Way is a broad Broadway farce, in which a nebbish director (Owen Wilson), his snarling starlet wife (Kathryn Hahn), his callgirl-turned-ingénue (Imogen Poots), a sleazy star (Rhys Ifans), and a bland playwright (Will Forte) all work on the same play. There’s also Austin Pendelton as an infantalised judge obsessed with Poots, George Morfogen as a private dick tasked with tailing her, and Jennifer Aniston —who gets the film’s best lines— as a foul-mouthed, ultra-judgmental therapist; the whole cast connected together with comic contrivance. They’re constantly brought together in farcical scenarios —everyone coincidentally descends on the one restaurant, or the same hotel at the same time— but the comedy generated feels more laboured than inspired. This in spite of the fact that all the performers seem to be delighted working in what’s, essentially, an energetic, screwball style.

The top-line cast and old-timey façade and dated gender values are eternally reminiscent of Woody Allen; but the film is actually the latest work for Peter Bogdanovich, his first film since 2001’s also-old-timey-nostalgic The Cat’s Miaow. And, despite the years away, his return is strictly low-stakes, low-reward. Bogdanovich earnt a permanent place in American cinematic lore with that run of The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, and Daisy Miller from 1971-’74, but that’s just another way of saying that he hasn’t done anything that’s mattered in 40 years.

THE WOLFPACK

If a great documentary starts with a great story, The Wolfpack had it made from the day Crystal Moselle started rolling her camera. One day, in 2010 in New York, Moselle befriended six identical-looking brothers, all dressed in suits and sunglasses, with waist-length long hair. It turned out that they’d spent most of their lives confined to the one Manhattan apartment, schooled by a father-cum-cult-leader who kept his family under lock-and-key. Dad was, however, a big film fan, so his kids had come to understand the world outside by cinema; adopting goonball mannerisms through obsessive re-watching of The Godfather films and Reservoir Dogs.

The Wolfpack, then, is a fascinating, sometimes problematic portrait of clandestine worlds, documentary access, and the power of the lens. Spending hours with the brothers —Mukunda, Narayana, Govinda, Bhagavan, Krisna, Jagadesh— in their dark, cloistered, rundown apartment, Moselle is an interloper, an outsider; being shown around these handful of shabby rooms as if toured around a subterranean kingdom. At this point, the film plays like an empathetic, artful take on the old freakshow; a look at a group of kids whose lives sound like something out of speculative fiction.

When the brothers —in the throes of adolescent defiance— begin to break away more and more from their father’s totalitarian rule, the camera bears witness to fascinating moments of first contact, in which you see how deeply cinema informs the siblings’ perception of the world; the way they remark how everything looks ‘3D’, and Central Park looms like the forests of Lothlórien. They go to the beach and feel the sand between their toes, confront the terror of the ocean, eavesdrop on how people in the non-scripted real world actually talk.

Years go on, and their stories push outward, and you get the sense that Moselle —who started filming The Wolfpack whilst still a film student— doesn’t quite know the film she’s making, or how to make this story suggestive of a greater social subtext. But, even in its loose form and guided by a tentative hand, to experience the film is still a singular experience, the fact that this story was ever caught on camera a wild success unto itself. Even if that success was largely dictated by Moselle being in the right place at the right time, it’s hard to fault her for having the fortune to land at the frontlines of a true stranger-than-fiction tale.

GIRLHOOD

Though her name’s barely-known outside of film-nerd circles, Céline Sciamma has, through three films, established herself as contemporary cinema’s pre-eminent chronicler of female adolescence; exploring female identity, gender conditioning, and nascent sexuality across 2007’s Water Lilies, 2011’s great Tomboy, and, now, the audacious Girlhood. With a magical tracking-shot walking amidst an ever-thinning posse of girls on the way home from school, Sciamma introduces us to our lead —Karidja Touré, an otherwise-quiet African-French girl from an immigrant family— and the milieu in which she lives: the endless tower-blocks of the rough-and-tumble council-estate fringes of Paris.

Touré’s swiftly drawn away from familial duties and school-work by the charismatic girls of a local gang: soon dressed in their uniform of straight-haired wigs, leather jackets, and gold name-plate jewellery; soon echoing their defiant, anti-social behaviours. Sciamma suspends judgment and moralising, instead looking at how someone at a formative age can readily adopt an identity —here: brash, obnoxious, aggressive, in some ways quintessentially masculine— so as to survive their environment, and the emotional minefield of adolescence.

AND, FINALLY...

FILM CAREW’S MIFF TOP 10

The 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival is over. Long live MIFF. Returning to life-as-usual after spending an ever-delightful stint eyeballs-deep in Australia’s definitive cinematic event is always a little sad. So, having ended up seeing 130-odd films from MIFF’s 250+ program, let your old pal Film Carew catalogue the hits-and-misses of the fest, with a countdown that essentially doubles as a snapshot/capsule of the year in art cinema.

First of all, glory be to those that could’ve cracked the Top 10: Prophet’s Prey (Amy Berg, USA), The Witch (Robert Eggers, USA), The Club (Pablo Larraín, Chile), Louder Than Bombs (Joachim Trier, Norway), Welcome To Leith (Christopher K. Walker & Michael Beach Nicholls, USA), Toto And His Sisters (Alexandre Nanau, Romania), In The Basement (Ulrich Seidel, Austria), The Wolfpack (Crystal Moselle, USA), Krisha (Trey Edward Shults, USA), The Overnight (Patrick Brice, USA).

And then, drumroll please...:

10. Phoenix (Christian Petzold, Germany): Petzold’s latest symbolic thriller is a taut portrait of post-war reconstruction, both personal and social.

9. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Taiwan): Less wuxia movie than minimalist daydream of one, there’s cinematic rapture in every ruffling curtain.

8. Angels Of Revolution (Alexey Fedorchenko, Russia): Handsome Soviet idealists hit remote Siberia, proselytisin’ the people’s revolution by making propaganda films (and pornos).

7. The Russian Woodpecker (Chad Gracia, USA/Ukraine): A wild, sometimes-ridiculous ride through Cold War paranoia, Chernobyl conspiracy theories, and millennial Ukrainian tension.

6. The End Of The Tour (James Ponsoldt, USA): One of the greatest films about writing ever written.

5. Me And Earl And The Dying Girl (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, USA): This arch, ironic, self-reflexive take on teen-cancer tropes is less ‘Sundance crowd-pleaser’, more ‘profound work of cinema’.

4. The Duke Of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, UK): Would a human toilet be a suitable compromise?

3. The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin, Canada): Forever rummaging through silent-movie mayhem, Maddin descends into the giddy depravity of infinitely-regressing nesting narratives.

2. The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, UK): Its deadpan dystopia starts as social-satire, then, unexpectedly, becomes a portrait of the power —and limits— of love.

1. Magical Girl (Carlos Vermut, Spain): This stark, claustrophobic thriller plays like an Almodóvar melodrama imprisoned in meticulous frames and grim tableaux.