Blood Jump #9.3: Chicago International Film Festival pt.3
Poor Things. The Bikeriders. Anatomy of a Fall.
The last issue in this miniseries is running behind schedule, so we’ll get right into it: In today’s Blood Jump, we’re wrapping up coverage of the 59th Chicago International Film Festival with three final flicks. Poor Things. The Bikeriders. Anatomy of a Fall. Let’s begin.
Poor Things
Does God deserve our pity? When things get to be Too MuchTM, I’ll picture a chain-smoking, coffee-guzzling God at the end of his rope as something of a balm. Look at this horrible mess I’ve made, all these fools stumping for genocide, all these dopes and their dumbass hats and their Lauren Daigle concerts. There’s something about a celestial Howie Bling crying into Julia Fox’s lap that takes the edge off. Beyond an easy joke, though, the idea of a fallible creator is compelling, and one that squares more easily with Western religion’s inherent paternal functions. Many of us learn to love our parents after we grow old enough to understand their flaws, but the state of God’s creation can inspire crises of faith that are harder to reckon with.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is not a biblical allegory but is very much interested in what to do when God lets you down. Emma Stone is Bella Baxter, a Frankensteinian creation by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), whose quilted face and steampunk colostomy imply he himself is only alive because of similar experiments. Dr. Baxter created Bella after he found the body of a pregnant woman dead from suicide in a river, and he revived the cadaver by splicing what was salvageable of the brains of the woman and her fetus. Baxter employs his pupil Max (Ramy Youssef) to help chronicle Bella’s rapid growth from adult infant to adult child. Max quickly falls in love with Bella and asks the doctor for her hand, but before they can walk down the aisle, Max is cucked by lawyer-cum-dirtbag Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo in his best Paul F. Tompkins). Duncan whisks Bella away from Baxter’s mad lab for her first foray into the real world on an adventure of fine cuisine, self-actualization, and insatiable fucking.
A baby-brained and mega-horny woman child left at the discretion of cartoonishly evil men is a recipe for a good deal of extratextual hand-wringing. Poor Things’s writer, director, and source novelist are all men, and ostensibly feminist movies helmed by the fellas have an understandably fraught reputation. But to meet Poor Things with political cynicism is to deny the force of Emma Stone’s performance, a career best and one without easy parallel reference. We meet Bella as a toddling baby, riding tricycles and pissing on the floor and jerking off regardless of whoever else might be sitting at the dinner table. The remainder of the movie finds Bella careening toward a realized human being—via discoveries of wage gaps on a cruise ship, of Goethe and Thoreau, of socialist meetings in between shifts at a brothel—and Stone’s command of her voice and body is a laser-focused index of Bella’s progression. It’s hard to emphasize just how much fucking goes on in this movie and even harder to describe Stone without calling her “brave.” Stone served as an executive producer on Poor Things, and her involvement in and direction of the movie’s sex scenes are a welcome reprieve from the limp depictions at female sexuality that came before it.
Emma Stone’s athleticism is met near wholly by the remainder of Poor Things’s cast and crew. Kathryn Hunter and Ruffalo are standouts in a feat of casting that fits like a jigsaw piece in Lanthimos’s gothic, bouncy hellworld. Costume Designer Holly Waddington deserves her inevitable flowers for a protofuturist swath of Victorian dresses, and Robbie Ryan’s cinematography works in concert with the movie’s VFX to recall the most out-there sequences of Twin Peaks: The Return. It all amounts to a reminder that steampunk can actually supersede its B.O. raddled reputation. Poor Things is as fun as it is bizarre and horrifying, a world filled with pig-chickens you’ll want to last forever.
At Poor Things’s start, Bella barks throughout the Baxter laboratory with quasi-verbal half-syllables, shortening the name of her creator the apropos “God.” Her rise through infancy to agency is fantastic and often thrilling, if not politically familiar, but it’s backed by a staggering and tender nuance when she makes her inevitable return home. What does a creation do with its horrible history, with the selfish humanity of its creator? To say more would spoil the movie, but it’s a welcome ground for Poor Things’s high fantasy. The result is a maximalist, bloated mess, Lanthimos’s—and this year’s—best film yet.
Note: The initial publication of this segment noted the film was shot digitally, which is not the case. I’ve edited the post accordingly and have wrapped my torso in barbed wire so’s I learn my lesson next time.
The Bikeriders
Adapting a film from a book is typically a practice of selective omission. Fitting a 300-page novel or biography into a 100-page script demands content as sacrifice, and with a few notable exceptions, adaptations provide only a limited aperture toward their source material. The Bikeriders is different. Jeff Nichols’s movie pulls from the Danny Lyon book of the same name, a 96-page collection of photographs bookended by a series of interviews that comprise a casual oral history of a gang of midwestern bikers called the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. That sort of piecemeal foundation leaves hefty narrative gaps to be filled for an adaptation, and The Bikeriders is less a reliable window into the reality of an era than the daydreamy biproduct of hours spent poring over glossy photos.
That loose tether to history is The Bikeriders’s biggest strength and riskiest gamble. On the surface, it makes sense: Johnny (Tom Hardy) is inspired to form a motorcycle club, here dubbed the Chicago Vandals, after watching Marlon Brando rev his engines in The Wild One on TV. He pieces together a gang of cornfed ersatz greasers—among them, Benny (Austin Butler), Zipco (Michael Shannon), and Cal (Boyd Holbrook)—who link up to ride bikes and smash beer bottles and bicker with their wives at club picnics. There’s something of the lost boys to the Vandals: you get the sense they’re making things up as they go along, married more to the thrill of being a part of a biker gang than any sort of guiding philosophy.
Which, fair enough. The Bikeriders is most successful in its function as a hangout flick (Easy Rider is both an inarguable inspiration and name-check within the film), thanks in large part to the chemistry of its cast. It’s a joy to see these bloated Illinois dads careen toward a rewon sense of freedom and watch as the scene they built flourishes into something real and grows big enough to bury them alive. The scenes in which the Vandals shoot the shit around campfires and fistfight between rounds of cooking dogs on the grill feel closest to the book’s sense of pioneering New Journalism: this movie doesn’t serve as anything more than a sense of what it was like to hold court with these guys, snatching your beer off a table before another Vandal is thrown through it.
The Big Chill of it all is put to the test, though, by The Bikeriders’s framing device. We learn about the Vandals through a series of interviews with Kathy (Jodie Comer, the movie’s lead and strongest performer), who fell in love with Benny in the gang’s salad days and saw them through their darkest hours. Kathy speaks with actor Mike Faist’s turn as Danny Lyon himself, whose appearance here is an unforced error. Anchoring The Bikeriders’s hypermasculine daydreaming to a real-life figure pokes holes in the charade of it all and threatens to undermine a fun and fascinating look into the nuances of generational male fantasy as little more than cheap voyeurism. It’s an odd choice for a movie that knew enough to steer away from the original Outlaw’s name and insignia, and the decision to leave one foot in reality as the other flaps in the wind is curious at best.
Still, a wild imagination runs through The Bikeriders that can’t be pinned down by unfortunate conventions. Kathy and Benny are as alive as any other couple on screen this year; Tom Hardy’s hulking body becomes teddy-bear soft under the nasal of a Chicago accent (flicking switchblade notwithstanding); even Norman Reedus shows up with rotten teeth and bathtub gin for a good time. Your mileage for The Bikeriders likely depends on your patience for its leash on authenticity, but it’s willing to show you a good time if you’re down to take the ride.
Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall is quick to speak to its own resolution. The movie’s opening card is a URL that reads “didshedoit.com,” a cheeky link to the film’s press site that features an a/b poll for its audience’s opinion on whether its lead, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), is guilty of murdering her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis). The URL serves both as a meta joke and a tacit admission that the question of guilt is not the film’s priority.
We meet Sandra, a celebrated novelist, as she sips wine and winces her way through an interview in her new chalet in Grenoble. The interview isn’t going well: Sandra’s husband, who’s working on the loft upstairs, seems hellbent on derailing his wife’s conversation by blasting the same song on a loop (a calypso rendition of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P. in the most inspired needle drop I can call to mind). Among the clatter, Sandra tells the interviewer it’s best that they reschedule; Sandra’s visually impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), takes his guide dog on a walk through the snowy French woods. He returns to find his father splayed dead with a headwound in front of the loft’s third-story window.
The rest of Anatomy’s 2.5 hours takes the shape of a steely procedural. The police become a constant presence in Sandra’s home, snapping photos and running interrogations and recreating Samuel’s fall regardless of eleven-year-old Daniel’s proximity. Daniel is as stalwart as is possible for a kid his age, but the court sessions pick apart his parents’ lives in brutal detail: Samuel allegedly had tried to kill himself six months prior (his therapist denies he was depressed); Sandra is bisexual and had at least one affair with a woman while married to Samuel; the prosecution plays a recording that Samuel had made of a fight between the couple that became physical. Early into the proceedings, Sandra negotiates with the court to stay at home during her trial to care for Daniel. The request is granted at a hefty cost: Sandra is burdened both with the presence of Marge (Jehnny Beth), a court-appointed intermediary tasked with supervising Daniel’s wellbeing, and with the responsibility of watching the trial’s fallout on her own son.
Hüller is Anatomy of a Fall’s greatest strength. Sandra jumps between three languages, from her native German to her brittle French to an easier English to speak with her son and the courts, as the proceedings tear privileges of discretion from her hand. Hüller’s performance sings in conversation with director Justine Triet, who wields a precise economy of attention almost squarely on Sandra’s experience for the full film. We’re not subject to any press release or news coverage or talking head that Sandra does not see herself, and that deliberate narrowing of perspective is in direct service toward the court’s capacity to choke the air from its subjects. The camera’s adherence to Sandra fertilizes an empathy for the now single mother even as her ugliest tendencies are cracked open for the public: it’s difficult not to cheer for Sandra after she defends herself against the recording of her fight with Samuel, even if that recording proves the most damning case against her. A lesser movie might concern itself with the trial’s outcome; Anatomy becomes most exciting when it asks not whether Sandra is guilty but why the audience endears itself to her regardless of a verdict.
And thank God for that. Anatomy of a Fall is one of the year’s stronger movies but it hits enough dry stretches to watch its momentum cool in moments of the proceedings, and its courtroom climax puts undue pressure on both Daniel’s performance and his in-text wisdom (it’s difficult to imagine a child’s testimony tipping a judge’s scales save for the introduction of concrete evidence). But if Anatomy isn’t quite a perfect procedural (and it does get close), it is a monumental study of a complicated tragedy’s effect on a family and our own predisposition to moral allegiances.
Sample Draws
Killers of the Flower Moon is every bit as monumental as you’ve heard and the quickest 3.5 hours of my life. I’d known that Lily Gladstone was a massive talent from her work in Certain Women, but she proves herself as a full-on miracle here. If you haven’t read it, I also highly recommend David Grann’s book of the same name.
I was bowled over by Priscilla, which struck me as Sofia Coppola’s slow-burn snowglobe form perfected. I suspect he was a bit cooler on the movie than I was, but I loved Ethan Warren’s write-up of the movie’s strongest scene for
.I started taking mandolin lessons (?) and it’s been a real treat to start a hobby that’s not in service of some greater goal. I recommend it! (Taking up a hobby, not playing mandolin, which has been brutalizing my fingertips.)
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. We’ll be back in a couple weeks with the next issue.