The transformative power of ‘Women Talking’

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

3D films at the Academy. The Academy Museum is presenting the series “3D-cember!” from Dec. 26 to 31, in part to show off the state-of-the-art 3D projection system in its smaller Ted Mann Theater. (That’s the one in the basement with the beautiful green chairs.) The series will include classics such as “Dial M for Murder” and “House of Wax” and recent family films such as “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.” But the real treats may be Wim Wenders’ dance film “Pina” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Goodbye to Language.”

The Godard film is among the last projects by the filmmaker who died earlier this year and provides an opportunity for some end-of-year reflection. It’s inspiring and uplifting to think about an artist who had already remade the medium over numerous times and continually rethought his working methods still pushing himself into new territories right to the very end.

Envelope Directors Roundtable. I recently had the distinct pleasure of moderating a roundtable with directors Rian Johnson (“Glass Onion”), Jordan Peele (“Nope”), Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The Woman King”), Maria Schrader (“She Said”), Charlotte Wells (“Aftersun”) and Florian Zeller (“The Son”).

They were a lively and engaged group, having largely all seen and admired each other’s work. As Johnson described Wells’ “Aftersun,” he referred to its ephemeral examination of memory by saying, “It feels like kind of putting a frame around smoke.”

The full video of the conversation will be broadcast early next year. On a lighter note, the directors all participated in a “Very Important Questions” video.

‘Women Talking’

Directed by Sarah Polley, who wrote the adaptation of the 2018 novel by Miriam Toews, “Women Talking” is in fact about that, but also much more. A story of startling directness and deep moral complexities set amongst a rural religious community, the film sees the women realize they have been systematically sexually assaulted by the men of their group and made to disbelieve what was happening to them. The women must now decide among three essential actions — do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The finely tuned ensemble cast includes Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Ben Whishaw, Claire Foy, Sheila McCarthy and Judith Ivey. The film is in theaters now.

For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “The very idea of forgiveness can feel anomalous and even alien in this context, and Polley’s commitment to exploring the idea, with its explicitly Christian underpinnings, is but one measure of her movie’s integrity and quiet radicalism. When Ona declares at one point that ‘forgiveness is better than revenge,’ many in the audience will surely disagree, and I suspect Polley would be disappointed if they didn’t. That may be why the closing passages of ‘Women Talking,’ thrilling and wrenching in equal measure, feel like a beginning and also an invitation. The conversation ends with the expectation that the next word, if hardly the last, will be yours.”

Meredith Blake spoke to Polley about the ways in which the set of the movie itself was transformed from many typical shoots, with the production rethinking working hours for crew members and the treatment of child actors. Polley recalled what producers Dede Gardner and Frances McDormand said to entice her into working on the project, overcoming reservations about returning to work and leaving her own family: “‘Men have written these rules in the film industry and created absurd expectations of hours that are not conducive to families.’ I realized they were willing to break a model and build a new one to allow me to come back, and that was a really big deal.” Polley added, “it’s better to build a new table than get a seat at a rotten one.”

For the New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “Polley takes the religious life of the colony seriously, refusing to treat it as exotic or outlandish. The point of leaving isn’t to reject belief, but to reestablish it on a firmer, more coherent moral basis, to imagine ‘a new colony’ of trust and safety. That idea is by definition Utopian, and also consistent with the radical Christian tradition that the existing colony represents. The root of Protestantism, after all, is protest — against arbitrary and unaccountable authority in the name of a higher truth. ‘Women Talking’ reawakens that idea and applies it, with precision and passion, to our own time and circumstances. The women don’t want pity or revenge. They want a better world. Why not listen?”

For the Globe and Mail, Sarah-Tai Black wrote, “It is tough, as a critic, to ostensibly chastise a film for caring too much. But I would suggest that the fundamental disconnect of ‘Women Talking’ is not in its women talking — in the ways that they talk or even what they talk about — but in the film’s inability to shape a world for these women and girls, through the use of its own means and methods, that speaks to the full textures and depths of their experiences. … It is a constraint of cinematic vision that flattens the potential of the figures, the speech, and the movements of ‘Women Talking.’ It is less about what is being said here — flawed yet fierce as it is — and more that, in order to realize the full impact of its meaning, what is being said needs to fight through the film’s own lacklustre veneer to be able to convey itself with any sense of spirit.”

For the Associated Press, Lindsey Bahr wrote, “Polley’s version is expressionistic and lyrical, biting and poetic. The conversations are messy, the feminism contradictory and the trauma complicated. … ‘Women Talking’ is not melodramatic or desperate or exploitative. It is astute and urgent and may just help those previously unable to find words or even coherent feelings for their own traumatic experiences. And hopefully it might just inspire more works of wild female imagination.”

Emily Mitchell stars as Miep, from left, Claire Foy as Salome and Rooney Mara as Ona in director Sarah Polley’s film “Women Talking.”

(Michael Gibson / Orion Releasing)

‘Babylon’

Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, “Babylon” is set amid the raucous bustle and upheaval of Hollywood in the era when silent film transitioned to sound in the late 1920s to early 1930s. In roles that are fictional composites of real-life figures, Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad, an established screen star; Margot Robbie is Nellie LaRoy, an ambitious young actress; and Diego Calva plays Manny Torres, a Mexican American who moves his way up the ladder of studio power. Jean Smart, Li Jun Li, Jovan Adepo, Tobey Maguire, Katherine Waterston and many others help round out the cast. The movie is now in theaters.

For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “You could think of this movie as ‘La La Land’s’ manic, mean-spirited cousin, spinning like a tornado through the Hollywood hothouse of the 1920s and ’30s, and spraying booze, excrement, vomit, gunfire and blood in all directions. At some point — maybe when Robbie tussles with a rattlesnake, or when someone ingests a live rat — you may well wonder: Is this movie a bloated, ghastly wreck, or merely a credible depiction of a bloated, ghastly wreck? That may be a distinction without a difference. In any event, I’ll admit that I found much of ‘Babylon’ mesmerizing, even when (maybe especially when) I also found it naive, bludgeoning and obtuse. Chazelle’s demolition of the Dream Factory may be rather too taken with its own naughtiness, but coming from a filmmaker who until now has been precociously well-behaved, it can be a welcome blast of impudence and sometimes just a blast.”

For the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging and hard-living, and not just because their exertions don’t seem very fun. They work and party, hit marks and cut loose, follow directions and run wild; you see their technique, stamina, flubs, upstaging tricks and power moves, as well as their bloodshot eyes. Jack, Nellie and Manny seem to like making films, or at least they like the perks, and each speaks of the magic (or whatever) of movies. But their offscreen habits aren’t interesting — people do drugs and have sex, big whoop — and the real scandal is that there’s nothing special about their films, which Chazelle makes look silly, slapdash and ugly.”

For Time, Stephanie Zacharek wrote, “In a moment of heedless generosity, you could almost commend Damien Chazelle for caring enough about the last days of the silent film era to make a movie about it—if he showed any evidence of caring at all. ‘Babylon’ isn’t a film made with love, or even with any degree of exactitude; it pretends to be a movie about ‘loving movies,’ but more than anything else, it seeks to reflect glory on its creator. ... Writer-director Chazelle thinks he’s created a vision of 1920s Hollywood, but no matter how much research he may have done, he hasn’t listened at all to what these faces, these stories, have told him. He treats people of this lost era like primitive creatures who just didn’t know any better. He’s not capturing the past; he’s only condescending to it.”

For Vulture, Angelica Jade Bastién opens her review with the rather thrilling line, “All great directors are perverts.” She goes on to say of the film, “Where it ultimately stumbles and falls is in its characterization — those particulars of humanity that the classic films Chazelle so loves excelled at portraying. … He wants to print the legend of the silent era and what was lost when Hollywood found sound, and critique its mores at the same time. He’s torn between loving film and having to defend its existence, amounting to a movie fueled not by that scintillating thrill that powers the works he’s nodding to, but a deep fear about the extinction of his own kind. ‘Babylon’ is a film too busy writing an elegy for the still-breathing body of film as a medium to capture the true beauty and complications of being alive.”

Margot Robbie in a scene from “Babylon.”

(Scott Garfield)

‘Living’

Directed by Oliver Hermanus from a screenplay by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, “Living” is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film “Ikiru.” In the film, Bill Nighy plays Mr. Williams, a government bureaucrat in 1950s London who discovers he only has six months to live. His ordered life is turned inside out. The film is in theaters now.

For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “Within emotional parameters that other actors might have found gloomily constricting, Nighy coaxes forth a tour de force of understatement, suffused with an almost musical melancholy. His performance, which won a lead acting prize from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. earlier this month, is a gorgeous minor-key symphony of downcast gazes and soft-spoken pronouncements, lightened occasionally by a faint little ghost of a smile. There’s a whisper of humor to Mr. Williams, a sense of irony about a death sentence that he keeps secret from all but a trusted few. In the movie’s best moments, Nighy lures you into the impression that he’s sharing a private joke with you, a glimmer of comic insight into an unbearably sad situation.”

For the New York Times, Beatrice Loayza wrote, “At its worst, ‘Living’ wallows generically, employing an overbearing piano score as the camera repeatedly sits with Williams’s sadness to diminishing effect. Though, captured by the cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay, there’s also a warmth and twinkle to Williams’s existential plight; as in a David Lean movie, passion mingles elegantly with repression, and Williams emerges as a kind of romantic figure, a man shocked, then delighted, by the thrill of finding himself.”

For the Hollywood Reporter, Angie Han wrote, “Like so many other Ishiguro protagonists — including those from his novels ‘The Remains of the Day’ and ‘Never Let Me Go,’ both of which were also turned into brilliant films — Williams initially seems to exist to be overlooked. … As Mr. Williams strains to find meaning in his final days, ‘Living’ moves from a devastating portrait of a life wasted to an inspirational one of a life reclaimed — and then promptly complicates it with a bracing dose of reality, in the form of conversation among his colleagues about Williams’ tenuous legacy. It’s a shrewd move that turns ‘Living’ from a sentimental fable to a cautionary tale, and it leaves us with more to chew on than if we’d been allowed to just end with Williams’ small but hard-won victory.”

For Vulture, Bilge Ebiri wrote, “‘Living’ doesn’t try to reinvent or reimagine ‘Ikiru’ so much as transport it, as if to speculate what Kurosawa’s masterpiece might have looked like had it been produced in the British film industry, in color, at around the same time. … It would be incorrect, however, to call Hermanus and Ishiguro’s approach a replication, or imitation. The music and the cutting, or for that matter the performances, aren’t in themselves what you’d find in a ’50s film. This is not campy cosplay, but a kind of communion with the spirit and simplicity of the past.”

Bill Nighy as Mr. Williams in “Living.”

(Jamie D. Ramsay / Number 9 Films / Sony Pictures Classics)