Meewella | Critic

According to P

Tag: Rooney Mara

QuickView: Women Talking (2022)

“When we have liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”

Ona

Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel is a dour but moving experience, its desaturated melancholy swallowed by heavy blacks. Toews described her novel as an “imagined response to real events”, chronicling the women in an isolated rural religious community deciding whether to stay or leave after a series of rapes come to light — for women with no voice, merely making a decision for themselves becomes an act of defiance. Polley’s direction is restrained, not showing the violence but instead alluding to it through repeated recollections of the bloodstained aftermath. Women Talking feels theatrical in both the constraints of its hayloft setting and its near-exclusive reliance on dialogue. Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy all excel in voicing varied aspects of the group’s response — thoughtful, angry, and fearful of change — though there is a definite artificiality to the debate with actors representing ideas more than fully rounded characters. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s gentle score colours scenes with a simple melody that coils itself around you, squeezing a little too tight. The biggest change in Polley’s script is a perspective shift: the book is narrated by August, a gentle man who attends the discussion to take minutes, and apparently Ben Whishaw recorded substantial voiceover before it was decided that this did not work in a cinematic medium. Instead, the voiceover — more commentary than narration — comes from the youngest of the girls, speaking to a child some time in the future. It further mutes Whishaw’s meek performance (“I want to help and I don’t know how”), but that is appropriate within an intentionally female space. Women Talking perhaps arrives a little too late in the #MeToo era and it asks rather than answers questions, but it is engrossing and thoughtful in its consideration of structural issues and religious belief without judgement.

8/10

QuickView: Una (2016)

“I don’t know anything about you except that you abused me.”

Una

Content Warning: child sexual abuse

Rooney Mara delivers an utterly absorbing performance as Una, a woman who has decided to confront the man who sexually abused her as a teenager, in an effort to understand and reclaim her past. David Harrower’s script delves into shades of grey in the emotions and motivations of the pair, but not in culpability — even Ray makes no attempt to justify his actions, only to contextualise his feelings, a fine line that Ben Mendelsohn deftly navigates through quiet chemistry with Mara. Una is deeply uncomfortable to watch, and there is a disparity between the memories recalled in conversation and the flashbacks to a fragile thirteen-year-old, ensuring the viewer never loses sight of the victim. Most remarkable about this translation from stage to screen is its use of space and light. The conversations between Ray and Una shift between rooms in a deliberately sparse warehouse with only artificial light: clinically white when the lights are on, and shrouded in darkness when off. This lighting parallels Ray’s past being dragged into the harsh light, yet he often finds it easier to admit to concealed truths in the dark. Throughout the middle section of the film, Ray’s colleagues relentlessly search the building for him, a metaphor for his past catching up with him. Whilst this adds a sense of urgency, the dialogue flounders as the conversation becomes repetitive. The final third of the film shifts to other locations which is necessary to push the story forward, but in the process loses some of the caged tension that drove the film. It allows us to appreciate how prison was finite punishment for Ray but it provided no closure to Una’s relationship with him, this inability to move on leaving her emotionally stunted, using promiscuity in an artificial attempt to reassert control.

7/10

QuickView: Her (2013)

“Sometimes I think I have felt everything I’m ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I’m not gonna feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I’ve already felt.”

Theodore

Although Her is ostensibly science fiction — one of its central characters is a sentient artificially intelligent operating system — Spike Jonze approaches this ambitious film as a traditional love story in which one of the participants simply lacks corporeal form. Theodore and Samantha’s chemistry rests as much on Scarlett Johanssen’s charm and curiosity through just a disembodied voice (no doubt recorded with a great deal of direction when she replaced Samantha Morton who originally voiced the role during filming) as it does on Joaquin Phoenix’s presence onscreen. Jonze uses the premise of this unusual relationship to deconstruct the loneliness of modern life as we regard one another from an increasing distance and — one decade and a global pandemic later — his vision of how our computer-dominated society is evolving feels eerily accurate. Theodore, sympathetically underplayed by Phoenix, is a kind and creative man struggling with divorce and, although he has friends and colleagues who like him, only his OS seems to understand how to support him. Whatever one’s view of the relationship, its effects on Theodore are tangible, and that is where Her, with its non-judgmental perspective, truly fascinates.

9/10

QuickView: Nightmare Alley (2021)

“People are desperate to tell you who they are. Desperate to be seen.”

Pete

Where Guillermo del Toro’s previous film, The Shape of Water, featured a mute protagonist, the manipulative Stanton Carlisle is quite the talker. However his larconic introduction, sporting an Indiana Jones silhouette and barely speaking for the opening 20 minutes, allows us to breathe in the 1930s carnival world that lends itself to del Toro’s visual mastery, at once fascinating and unpleasant. When the plot demands that Carlisle’s mentalism act graduates from carnival to cabaret, Nightmare Alley remains sumptuous but can feel hollow. The cast is excellent, with a smattering of star power and a smorgasbord of supporting character actors. Bradley Cooper is on strong form as the noir anti-hero, charming yet greedy, perfectly offset by Cate Blanchett’s underestimated femme fatale — their scenes together are the best part of a deliberately slow burn story that meanders for slightly too long, punctuated with an abrupt jump that makes a well-signposted conclusion less satisfying. Whilst its storytelling can be faulted, Nightmare Alley is never less than vividly captivating.

8/10

QuickView: Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

“If you must blink, do it now. Pay careful attention to everything you see and hear, no matter how unusual it may seem.”

Kubo

I have no excuse for my tardiness in catching the latest stop-motion animation from Laika, the studio who produced Coraline. The decision to focus solely on this overlooked art form allows them to develop new technology that drives the medium forward from one film to the next. The scale of some of the puppetry here is incredible, though size can be deceptive on-screen. Strong art direction coupled with stunning lighting separates the film visually from the average family animation, though it is likely to appeal more to older children. The meta-narrative about Eastern storytelling through origami figurines is a nice touch for the beauty of what they physically produced, even if it only remains in ephemeral film.

9/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

Up ↑