A couple of years ago it would have been unthinkable that major film makers such as Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and David Fincher would debut their new films on streaming services such as Netflix. But Netflix’s willingness to finance big projects, coupled with the Corona crisis resulted in films such as The Irishman (Scorsese), Da 5 Bloods (Lee) and Mank (Fincher) being debuted on this streaming service company. This trend has continued and is likely to persist even after the Corona crisis has been averted.
Streaming companies such as Netflix and HBO are in the driving seat and can afford to pick and choose. Clearly American product is not sufficient to satisfy the quantity and quality of products that these services need, and they are increasingly turning to Europe, India and other film producing nations for product.
Three recent films which debuted on Netflix are I Care a Lot (J Blakeson), Adu (Salvador Calvo) and Malcolm and Marie (Sam Levinson).
I Care a Lot features Rosamund Pike, whose career can be divided into two stages: Stage one, 1999-2014 and Stage Two, 2014 onwards. In the first stage she acted in over 30 films and series, including both a James Bond movie and the James Bond spoof, Johnny English. There were also some worthwhile films such as An Education and Pride and Prejudice, but mainly in peripheral roles. Then in 2014 Gone Girl changed all that. It was a juicy role, the kind that actresses dream about. It put her on the higher steps of the ladder of actresses in demand and brought her a Best Actress Oscar nomination. It also highlighted a type of role that was tailor-made for her, an angel on the surface and a bitch inside and brought her sought-after lead roles in films such as A Private War and Radioactive.
A nightmare for many people who are post retirement age is to end up at a care home. They fear that their offspring will want to dissolve themselves of any responsibility for their old parents and put them care homes. Now, what if they actually wanted to care for you, or they respected your wishes to live on your own in your own house, but the law required you to be confined to a care home and be supervised by a court appointed nurse?
In her latest film, I Care a Lot, Rosamund Pike plays Marla Grayson. A care nurse who has devised a unique and very cruel scam to make lots of money. With the help of her girlfriend Fran (Eiza Gonzalez), plus a crook psychiatrist and a rogue doctor, old people are certified with dementia and Marla is selected as their care nurse, with the state giving her total power to manage the patient’s finances to pay for her treatment. Despite continuous protests by families of those in her care, Marla is able to sell all the patient’s belongings, including house and car, and pocket considerable money. Rosamund Pike plays Marla in a manner similar to Louise Fletcher’s portrayal of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
With her latest in-care patient, Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), Marla appears to have hit the jackpot. Jennifer has been in finance and has substantial assets, plus a bank safety deposit box with surprising contents and, best of all, no apparent family members to cause any troubles. That is until a mysterious man called Roman (Peter Dinklage) shows up, who is very interested in wellbeing of Ms. Peterson.
J Blakeson’s script, which he has directed himself, is full of twists and turns which help to maintain the viewers’ attention throughout the film. The best scenes are the verbal fights between Marla and Jennifer, that is between Oscar nominee Rosamund Pike and double Oscar winner Dianne Wiest. Though I Care a Lot does not break any new cinematic grounds and does go over the top in a few scenes, it nevertheless provides couple of hours of solid entertainment. Intriguingly, J Blakeson’s next assignment after this film was to provide the story for an Indian romantic thriller!
The Spanish film Adu, follows the pattern of films such as Amores Perros (Alejandro Inarritu) and Crash (Paul Haggis) where we follow a few parallel stories which are neatly connected at the end. The topic here is the emigration from poor, mainly African countries, into Europe. The film starts by what seems to be CCTV footage showing hundreds, perhaps even thousands of Africans trying to force their way from Morocco into Spanish territory. A group of them try to go over a barbed wire fence. In the scuffle with the civil guards one of the would be emigrants falls to his death from top of the fence and we follow the after effects of this incident which someone had recorded on a mobile and put on the net. There is a court hearing and the film focuses on one of the civil guards, Mateo (Alvaro Cervantes) who is having a crisis of conscience.
We are next in Cameroon. Director Salvador Calvo and his cinematographer Sergi Vilanova start this section by showing the magnificent African scenery of green forests and jungles and flowing rivers, as to pose the question why would people be so desperate to leave such a beautiful paradise to go to overcrowded European cities? They provide the answers in the shots that follow. First we see a small boy called Adu (Moustapha Oumarou) and his sister witness some poachers killing an elephant for its ivory. Their life is in danger as the poachers do not want to have any living witnesses. Then we follow these two as they take shelter in their dilapidated hut in a shanti town. Adu is sporting the famous Ronaldo No.7 football shirt. Only it’s not a shirt and the name and number are painted on his bare back as he cannot afford to buy a shirt.
In the third story, Gonzalo (Luis Tosar) who is working for the UN to prevent poaching, is having problems with local guards who don’t seem that interested to after the poachers. He also faces personal problems when his daughter Sandra (Anna Castilo), who is a drug addict, visits him.
Mateo discusses his regret about the death of the guy at the fence with his colleagues. One of them tells Mateo that the problem with African countries is that all their people want to leave, nurses, teachers, etc. So who is going to fix their problems? And he adds that the message the fence gives to these people is “solve your own problems.”
Adu’s father, who has already gone over to Spain has paid a smuggler to bring his family over. His wife in trying to prevent elephant poachers getting to her children, sacrifices her life. The smuggler takes the children to an airport and tells them to hide in the wheel department of a plane bound for Paris. Only it happens that the plane is bound for Senegal. There Adu bonds with a young boy who just to survive, steals and sells his body to truck drivers.
The film does not tell us anything that we didn’t know before. It highlights problems which we are already familiar with, without adding much insight into them. We just witness more gut-wrenching stories of desperate people doing desperate things just to survive. The film also appears to take a poke at Islam. In a few scenes, shots showing poverty are intercut with shots of Muslims praying and the only bona fide Muslim in the film, an Arab taxi driver, is a pedophile who tries to abduct Adu.
Malcolm and Marie is a two hander. Malcolm (John David Washington) is a film director. He has just come back from the premier of his latest film with his actress partner Marie (Zendaya). When they come home, we see a shot of her that is fast becoming one of the cliché shots. That is her sitting on the loo, doing her business while talking to her partner. Do these shots make it more realistic? Do they add drama to the scene? They are becoming so frequent in movies that it’s rare to find women sitting on a chair and talking!
What follows for the next two hours is the two of them arguing and bickering about a number of things. What ignites these arguments is Marie’s feeling of not being given enough credit by her partner. Though Malcolm and Marie has the look of a play, it is an original script by Writer-Director Sam Levinson (son of Barry Levinson, director of Diner, Rain Main, Bugsy, …). In a play, dialogue is everything. Unfortunately, Sam Levinson is not Harold Pinter, David Hare or August Wilson. The dialogue in plays by those playwrights has tension, humour and great resonance. The dialogue in the film is mostly bland and banal. Much of it seems improvised. Levinson has tried to compensate for this deficiency of the script by upping the visual side of the film. Firstly, he has filmed it in black and white. As Sam Fuller famously said, “life is in colour, but black and white seems more realistic.” Then he and cinematographer Marcell Rev have framed almost every shot within the frames of a window, door or as reflection in mirrors. But what has really helped to drive the story forward is a superb soul and jazz soundtrack featuring the likes of James Brown, William Bell, Dionne Warwick and other greats.
Washington and Zendaya do their best with the dialogue that they’ve been given but hardly any of it is memorable and resonates greatly. This is a shame as both actors act their heart out and are superb. They discuss some very interesting topics such as meaning and value of art, race relations, understanding and communication between couples and so on. However, hardly any of the dialogue used to discuss these topics remains in the memory after the film ends. Hopefully Levinson will improve this aspect of his future scripts.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.