In Which We Remain By Jamie Foxx's Side At All Times

Real Blaxploitation

by ETHAN PETERSON

Baby Driver
dir. Edgar Wright
113 minutes

No film has ever represented the abduction of black culture into dominant white paradigms so much as Baby Driver; few films have ever been so brazen as to celebrate the same. When Baby (Ansel Elgort) meets Leon (Jamie Foxx) in the basement hideout of robbers intent on going after the U.S. Postal Service for some reason, Leon is immediately suspicious of a young white man who purports to embrace crime. (It turns out, subsequently, that he has a similar distrust of all such white people.) Leon implies, not so subtly, that he cannot understand why someone who is white and lives in the American South would ever resort to crime. What is the point of pissing in Paradise?

Edgar Wright, the stylish British director who frequently feuds with clueless studio executives, writes a marvelous scene to illustrate this misunderstanding. Baby is listening to "Tequila!" a 1957 song by the son of Mexican immigrants who was forced to sign away his royalties to the tune. That music, constructed by a person of color for the pleasure of all, is overheard by Leon. He instantly bristles at the appropriation. "I have enough to listen to with the voices in my head," he informs the crew's driver, who mainlines tracks in order to soothe his tinnitus.

The suspicion that Leon focuses on this young Atlanta resident is justified later on. Despite the fact that Leon never threatens him with violence or even speaks to him in anything like a raised tone, Baby wishes him harm, and ends up acting on his hatred in Baby Driver's most mystifying scene. Baby never even thanks Leon for saving his life when a militant witness to a bank robbery chases them from the scene. This is the hero of Baby Driver – a white man with no idea how good he has it.

In Baby's private moments, he fantasizes about his dead mother, who drove into the back of a semi because she was distracted. Baby sees a local Atlanta waitress named Debora (Lily James), who is five years his elder, working in the same restaurant his mother did before her untimely demise. He immediately begins imagining Debora in the role of his mother in similar "memories." This transference is not even subtle, and it suggests that Wright is consciously or unconsciously as disgusted by the life choices of his main character as we are. For her part, Debora has no qualms about pursuing a relationship with a wealthy criminal.

In order to humanize this thief, Edgar Wright has him live a double life as the kindly caretaker of his foster father (C.J. Jones). You see, we might feasibly theorize, it is fine that Baby derives his own identity from music composed by others, since he is a caring son to this mute, wheelchair-bound African-American. We never learn how Baby's foster father became mute, or how was ever able to take in an orphan boy in his condition, because Baby Driver is about as interested in the plight of an elderly black man as I am in the plight of an attractive white 23 year old.

The first hour of Baby Driver marches on quite blissfully without a single non-musical moment. Once Wright runs out of licensed music by blacks, Latinos or gays, the film sort of comes to a thudding halt. Attempting to spice up the diegesis is Buddy (Jon Hamm), who has been living as hard as the actor who plays him, sampling the finest cocaine with his wife Monica (Eiza Gonzalez), a former stripper. The two do not really have much in the way of chemistry and spend most of Baby Driver's running time making out gratuitously.

It is Elgort's magnificent performance as the title character that makes Baby Driver possible at all. Wright often obscures or brilliantly covers for the weaknesses of his stars, but outside of Hamm's broad, not-so-splendid performance, the entire cast is well-suited for these flashy roles. Elgort in particular makes every line meaningful and renders his silent moments as enthusiastically as his quiet vehicle operator is able.

Even among this group, Foxx steals the show as the only character in this milieu with any sense. Despite taking on a series of lesser projects that he needed in order to presumably pay escalating debts, Jamie finally seems to be growing into himself as an actor now that he has reached the place we all arrive at eventually: middle age. That Baby Driver consigns Leon to such an ignominious fate means that it misunderstands the events it describes about as thoroughly as this handsome young white fellow ignores his privilege.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which We Were The Worst Of An Awful Lot

Comfort Food

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Bad Batch
dir. Ana Lily Amirpour
115 minutes

The Bad Batch, the dynamite second feature of Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour, begins when Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is dumped into a cannibal desert wasteland. Everything is going against the film at that point: an overly glamorous model lead, music from Die Antwoord that impinges on every aspect of our senses, the constantly reused desert setting selected for its lack of cost to the production. Ten minutes later, Waterhouse is missing her right arm and her right leg, and Amirpour has written over every cliché you thought she was settling into so obscenely.

We first meet Miami Man (the consistently excellent Jason Momoa) in his trailer, where he is painting a portrait of his daughter. It is such an eye-raising way to discover a character, especially a cannibal. A few minutes later, Momoa is snapping the neck of a captured woman begging for her life. Amirpour offers these moments in a meaningful way; she chooses neither to overlay them with music or glorify the violence. She is fully in control at all times, and by the end of The Bad Batch, you realize what a miracle it must have been to shoot this on a budget of only $6 million.

Instead of sweeping, dull shoots of this wasteland environment, Amirpour has a deft eye for people — how they speak and relate to each other in ways that are unmistakably human. Scenes with Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves and Giovanni Ribisi might have come across as stunt casting in another context. Each performer takes these smaller roles with a diverting seriousness that never takes away from the affecting moments of The Bad Batch. Even the tiniest scene, like a drifter asking Miami Man to sketch his portrait, is full of life.

After her violent amputation, Arlen escapes her confinement by smearing her body with feces and escaping when her captors try to clean her. She pushes her way across the landscape on skateboard, presumably unable to find a stick of any kind. Amirpour makes a point of not keeping Arlen in anguish or pain throughout. We might have emphasized more with the character if we were filled in on her struggles, but there is a deliberate effort here not to focus on a theme of suffering. This is just the way the world is, and Arlen knows it.

Waterhouse herself has some struggles. She is still growing as a performer, and her dark eyebrows barely move throughout The Bad Batch: she seems incapable of emitting measured, smaller responses to events. Her face remains vaguely placid no matter the situation, and her body does not really shake or move either. Sexuality is the last meaningful thing in her life. The first images we see of her smooth legs parody a cinema of exploitation until one of those limbs is quickly shorn off. In various ways Waterhouse would resemble an anime heroine if Amirpour had not put in evidence enough remarkable moments to make her real.

Because she is hateful of cannibals, when Arlen finds Miami Man's wife and daughter in a local dump, she shoots and kills the mother to save the girl from a fate of eating human flesh. Instead of explaining the motivation of every act in The Bad Batch, Amirpour's script is delightfully minimal, allowing us to puzzle out the various moralities and motivations ourselves. In this way, the metropolis of Comfort seems most like a living, breathing whorl. When Arlen finally meets Miami Man as he searches for his daughter, the coming together of these two disturbing figures is more than the sum of their parts.

Music by Jordan Lieb under the name Black Light Smoke preserves the dystopia in its latter stages. Arlen finds the young girl in custody of the Dream (Keanu Reeves), who lords over Comfort with a harem, in the film's least original aspect. Reeves' dialogue is so perfect it doesn't matter to us. The Bad Batch enters us into its hypnotic fugue, its rapid day and night cycles establishing a continuity independent of our own time. This exciting sophomore effort — from such an assured voice — heralds the coming of a new master.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

In Which We Encounter Sofia Coppola's Darkest Mood

Visitor Man

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Beguiled
dir. Sofia Coppola
94 minutes

An elegy for the Confederacy may not be the most politically appropriate theme these days, but Sofia Coppola is unafraid. She is willing to turn anything, even the War Between the States, into a fulcrum of boredom. The Beguiled, a remake she conceived at the behest of her close friend in tone deafness, Quentin Tarantino, turns the story of a runaway Union soldier into a two hour admiration of Colin Farrell's body by a group of eight women with ages ranging from 11 to 50. The resulting feature film feels like reading a novella; it is really over before it has even begun.

Speaking of Colin Farrell's body, his legs are hairy but his torso is mostly hairless. He has clearly dieted down for this important role. Matted hair covers the lower part of his face, and his left leg contains shrapnel and a vertical cut of three or four inches. Ill or well, he is the central figure of The Beguiled. Despite being a movie with a bunch of women living together, where they might have friendships or conflicts, we find nothing of that here. I guess the reason is that they are literally beguiled by Farrell, even though he is a little old for them, speaks with an Irish accent, and is quick to anger.

Coppola's trailer for The Beguiled was rather exciting, but after viewing the final product, you realize it is one of those trailers that disappointingly captures the entire movie. I don't mean this in a metaphorical or casual manner, either: this piece of promotional material even includes the final scenes from the film. Probably Coppola was afraid no one would go see the movie if they thought it was about a bunch of women flirting with Colin Farrell; they had to have some darker intent for him, like ghosts or at least sustained violence.

The Beguiled moves at a breakneck pace through its non-plot. Nicole Kidman is a bit overly familiar as the head of this small girls' school, and her lack of subtlety or verve indicates she does not have much to offer in this role. We never learn much about her, except that she is willing to completely give herself over to a man she barely knows. As her second in command, Kirsten Dunst continues to show how much she has grown as a performer over the past decade, and Coppola wisely gives her most of the action in the film.

Directing younger actresses is Ms. Coppola's forte, and expanding the role of Oona Lawrence, who plays the young woman who finds Farrell dying below a tree, would have probably added a lot here. Instead we have to watch the ghastly spectre of Elle Fanning making out with an unconscious Farrell as he recovers in the house's music room. Except for Dunst, none of these women possess any inner life, and that is the greatest disappointment of The Beguiled. Rather than develop these characters and their relationships, The Beguiled is more focused on establishing a definite mood, of a cocooned hideaway impervious to happening of any kind.

Between every scene, Coppola cannot help but show the overgrown property of the girls' school in the gloaming. Without music for the vast majority of the film, the sounds of crickets and birds make up the overwhelming portion of the soundtrack. This is an effective way of building tension; unfortunately it never really leads to much. Farrell's soldier recovers and begins gardening; as soon as he is on two feet he is on the verge of convincing the women to stay when he is caught in Elle Fanning's room. Two scenes of violence, accidental and then intentional, follow.

The metaphor for the fate of the American south is sure laid on thick here. It is a Northerner's understanding of that place. Even these women, who are ostensibly future wives of the Confederacy, all speak with their own accents. Coppola understands that the audience for her films has no desire to witness versimilitude. This is the South in name only. Stripped of any substance or agency, the women of The Beguiled move to and fro as if in a dollhouse. It is all too obvious none of this is real.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.