A number of major film featuring star performers or directors, which had been planned for theatres, have been hit by the Corona effect and instead have surfaced on various streaming sites. In three of these films, women have a central role.
Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray last teamed up as director and star respectively in Lost in Translation (2003), a quirky comedy portraying Murray as a stranger in a strange land, i.e. an American in Tokyo. It was original, unpredictable, funny and touching. In On the Rocks (2020), we have a married couple, Laura and Dean (Rashida Jones and Marlon Wayans), who on the surface have everything going for them, two happy children, a nice apartment in New York, no finance worries. That is until the wife suspects her husband of two timing her with a girl from work (Jessica Henwick). This part of the movie which sets the scene and introduces the couple is fairly flat and uninteresting as there is very little chemistry between Jones and Wayans, neither of them come across as particularly charismatic and nothing of interest happens in the story. However, things pick up considerably when Laura’s dad, Felix (Bill Murray) enters the fray. Once Felix hears of Laura’s suspicions of her husband’s infidelity, he takes the role of a sleuth determined to catch Dean red handed. He has his own theories about men, “men are forced to dominate and impregnate all females” and though his daughter is willing to believe that it could all be a matter of misunderstanding, Felix will have none of it.
The uneasy, touching and humorous father-daughter relationship depicted here is reminiscent of Maren Ade’s Toni Erdman (2017), though lacking that film’s inventiveness and originality. Thanks to Bill Murray, On the Rocks is always entertaining and has a few funny set pieces but it is quite predictable and lacks the originality and freshness of Lost in Translation.
In Run (2020), Sarah Paulson is Diane Sherman. We see her at the start of the film giving birth to a daughter. Flash forward a few years and the daughter, Chloe (Kiera Allen) has more ailments than one would wish on one’s worst enemies. She is wheelchair bound, has diabetes, heart problems, etc. and has a daily intake of multitude of medicine. Diane has dedicated her life for her, installing all sorts of gadgets and instruments to allow movement around the house for Chloe, feeding her only organic products from her garden and so on. However, one day Chloe finds out a secret which changes the course of the film from drama to thriller.
The mother-daughter relationship here is not a million miles off the one between characters played by Piper Laurie and Sissy Spacek in Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976). Though we can guess the outcome, Run has enough twists and turns to keep the viewer interested and the final pay-off is smart enough to justify sticking with the movie to the bitter end. Aneesh Chaganty who showed a lot of promise and innovation with the thriller Searching (2018) which he wrote and directed, does the double duties here too and is proving himself to be a competent, imaginative writer-director of thrillers. Sarah Paulson is sufficiently creepy as the mother, perhaps practicing for her role in the Netflix series Ratched and Kiera Allen is impressive in her feature film debut as Chloe.
In 1971, Steven Spielberg in his feature film debut Duel (it was actually a TV movie) introduced the concept of an innocent driver being followed by a seemingly insane truck. We never saw the face of the truck’s driver, but in Unhinged (2020) we see the driver. It is Russell Crowe, who after gaining many extra pounds to play the disgraced Fox News creator Roger Ailes in the TV miniseries The Loudest Voice (2019), has continued his “anti-diet” regime and become so bloated that he appears to be preparing for an Orson Welles biopic (his later years) rather than Gladiator 2.
Rachel (Caren Pistorius) is having a bad day. She has overslept and because of that lost a client. She is also late in taking her son to school. However, her bad day is nothing compared to the man played by Russell Crowe. After a bad argument with his wife, he burns their house down, killing her and their children. Clearly a guy that you don’t want to mess with. So, when he is late in moving his truck, thus slowing down Rachel even further, and she bangs on her horn and then exchanges a few unkind words with him, you know what’s coming. We have the Duel type chase but more relentless and far more violent. The excessive bloody violence moves the film from thriller category to horror. Crowe is not just super big but also super nasty and Pistorius, who had impressed me before in Slow West (2015) brings a well-judged combination of vulnerability, strength and resolve to her character. Lacking the skill and finesse of Spielberg, director Derrick Borte uses blood and gore to provide shock effects. You stick with Unhinged only because you want to witness Crowe getting his just deserts, but it is not one of the bright spots in Crowe’s resume.
© 2020. UniversalCinema Mag.