THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME (US - 2020) Directed by Antonio Campos. Written by Antonio Campos and Paulo Campos. Cast: Tom Holland, Bill Skarsgard, Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Haley Bennett, Harry Melling, Eliza Scanlen, Douglas Hodge, Kristin Griffith, Pokey LaFarge, David Atkinson, Michael Banks Repeta, Gregory Kelly, David Maldonado, Michael Harding, Lucy Faust, Abby Glover, Zack Shires, Ivan Hoey Jr, Drew Starkey. (R, 138 mins) Based on a 2011 novel by Donald Ray Pollock, whose bleak rural noirs set in the colorfully-named southern Ohio town of Knockemstiff have often been termed "hillbilly gothic" by literary critics, THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME presents a relentlessly grim, fatalistic tableau that, despite the change in medium, unfolds with the precision and patience of a riveting page-turner. There's enough going on here that director/co-writer Antonio Campos (2016's criminally underseen CHRISTINE, a haunting biopic of Florida news reporter Christine Chubbuck, who infamously committed suicide on live TV in 1974) could've easily turned it into a Netflix miniseries instead of a Netflix original film, but it manages to cover everything it needs to in its never-dull 138 minutes. THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME jumps around for much of its first half, going back and forth from 1945 to 1957 to 1965 in a way that can be initially disorienting but eventually works everything out as the various characters, their connections, and their situations are put into play. The main character--troubled loner Arvin Russell (Tom Holland)--doesn't even take center stage until 45 minutes in, and to get a grasp on who he is, we must first learn about his father Willard (Bill Skarsgard), a quietly shell-shocked WWII vet who fought in the South Pacific, haunted by the mercy-killing of an American soldier he found crucified, barely alive, and being slowly devoured by flies. Discharged and en route to his home in the podunk West Virginia town of Coal Creek, the shy Willard stops at a diner in Knockemstiff and is immediately smitten with kind-hearted waitress Charlotte (Haley Bennett). They eventually marry and live in a house on a hill above Knockemstiff, and she soon gives birth to Arvin.
Willard remains troubled by his wartime experiences, and despite his devoutly Christian ways, he teaches nine-year-old Arvin (Michael Banks Repeta) that if anyone starts something with you, be sure to finish it, which he demonstrates by nearly beating two local yokels to death after they make derogatory comments about Charlotte. Rapidly going off the deep end, Willard builds a large cross on the back of his property, where he takes Arvin on nightly trips of emphatic prayer, which increase in frequency and intensity when Charlotte is diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Arvin will eventually be sent to Coal Creek to live with his grandmother Emma (Kristin Griffith) and his uncle Earskill (David Atkinson), who have adopted an orphaned baby named Lenora. Cut to 1965 as Vietnam is beginning dominate the news, with Arvin (Holland takes over the role at this point) and now-teenage Lenora (LITTLE WOMEN's Eliza Scanlan) sharing a close sibling bond that's tested with the arrival of new preacher Preston Teagardin (a reptilian Robert Pattinson), who opens his first Sunday service by passive-aggressively insulting the fried chicken livers prepared by an embarrassed Emma for a potluck dinner, the only meat she could afford at the butcher shop. Other characters drift in and out of the narrative, including Carl (Jason Clarke) and Sandy Henderson (Riley Keough), husband-and-wife serial killers who pick up male hitchhikers (calling them "models") and stage sexually explicit photos before Carl kills them; corrupt sheriff Lee Bodecker (Sebastian Stan); Lenora's birth parents, insane fire-and-brimstone religious fanatic Roy Laferty (Harry Melling) and his demure, wallflower wife Helen (Mia Wasikowska); and Knockemstiff pimp and white trash crime lord Tater Brown (Douglas Hodge), who's got Bodecker's nuts in a vice.
At some point early in the third act, you'll see where the story is taking Arvin, who takes his father's lessons to heart in the way he's hellbent on finishing shit that other people start. Not only does Campos do a masterful job of vividly capturing the atmosphere of rural southern Ohio from the '40s to the '60s, but THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME also shows characters in a perpetual cycle of hopelessness, almost imprisoned by fate. Repeated cycles of violence and tragedy are handed down like family curses, and a propensity for always making the worst decisions seems like a genetic pre-disposition for everyone. Campos has created what plays a lot like a Derek Cianfrance downer that's particularly reminiscent in tone and structure to 2013's THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES, especially with a lead character switch and a main star's unexpected exit around the 45-minute mark.
Skarsgard's taciturn, tightly-wound performance echoes the kind of peculiar eccentricity of the Michael Shannon of a decade ago, while Holland keeps Arvin's rage at a constant low boil, never exploding but always letting you see it growing in his eyes. Some of the ensemble--Bennett and Wasikowska, for example--aren't onscreen long enough to make a big impression, but whoever cast the unique-looking Melling and Scanlen as father-and-daughter is a genius. The biggest impression left by the supporting cast comes from Pattinson, who continues to establish himself as one of the most versatile and chameleon-like actors around with his loathsome, manipulative preacher, seducing a teenage parishioner and smugly trying to skate out of an unintended consequence with "How can you be pregnant when all we did was spend time with the Lord?" THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME is certain to provoke divisive reactions and one can argue that it has a couple more subplots than it really needs, but the degree of detail and characterization are testaments to Campos' dedication to the world-building essential to Pollock's writing, and it gets an added bit of authenticity from having the author narrate as well.
THE LAST FULL MEASURE (US - 2020) Written and directed by Todd Robinson. Cast: Sebastian Stan, Christopher Plummer, Samuel L. Jackson, Ed Harris, William Hurt, Peter Fonda, LisaGay Hamilton, Jeremy Irvine, Diane Ladd, Amy Madigan, Linus Roache, John Savage, Alison Sudol, Bradley Whitford, Dale Dye, Ser'Darius Blain, Zachary Roerig, Cody Walker, James Jagger, Richard Cawthorne, Ethan Russell, Bruce MacVittie, Asher Miles Fallica, Travis Aaron Wade, Rachel Harker. (R, 116 mins) An extremely earnest and well-meaning chronicle of the efforts to award a posthumous Medal of Honor to a fallen Vietnam War hero, THE LAST FULL MEASURE wears its heart on its sleeve and you can't fault the nobility of its intentions. Jumping between 1999 and flashbacks to the botched Operation Abilene in the ill-fated 1966 Battle of Xa Cam My on a rubber plantation roughly 30 klicks outside of Saigon, the film doesn't shy away from a deep dive into hagiography in the story of Air Force pararescueman William "Pits" Pitsenbarger (played here by Jeremy Irvine), a Piqua, OH native who was killed in action on April 11, 1966 while treating and rescuing 60 Army infantrymen, then refusing evacuation and staying behind to help the unit defend their position against VC snipers. Because it was an Army operation, the request for a Medal of Honor citation was denied and Pitsenbarger was instead awarded the Air Force Cross. But the men saved by Pitsenbarger, along with retired Air Force Sgt. and fellow pararescueman Tom Tulley (William Hurt) have never given up the fight for his heroism to be properly recognized. The MOH inquiry lands in the lap of ambitious (and, like almost everyone else here, fictional) mid-level Pentagon staffer Scott Huffman (Sebastian Stan), who has loftier goals than sifting through boring paperwork for info about a 33-year-old battle that nobody remembers, and he's practically encouraged by his smarmy boss Carlton Stanton (Bradley Whitford, cast radically against type as "Bradley Whitford") to blow it off and bide his time before pawning it off on someone else.
But Huffman proceeds with at least pretending to give a shit, his obvious ambivalence to the assignment earning the derisive scorn of Tulley as well as the Cam My survivors he tracks down to half-heartedly interview (their stories are intercut with combat flashbacks to that fateful day), all of them embittered and shattered from the horrors they experienced and witnessed: Jimmy Takoda (Samuel L. Jackson), Ray Mott (Ed Harris), and Jimmy Burr (the late Peter Fonda, in his last film), the latter with a bullet still lodged in his head and suffering from PTSD so intensely debilitating that he carries a loaded shotgun at all times and sleeps during the day because he remains terrified of the darkness of night. A pencil pusher and company man who seems to demonstrate no understanding of the sacrifice these men have made, Sanford inevitably comes around to seeing the light, feeling their pain, and legitimately caring about the legacy of Pitsenbarger, especially after he meets his elderly parents, Alice (Diane Ladd) and Frank Pitsenbarger (Christopher Plummer), who's terminally ill with cancer and wants nothing more than to see his son properly honored before he dies.
It's doubtful you'll find a film in 2020 with more honorable intent. This was a longtime passion project for writer/director Todd Robinson (who previously directed Harris in the instantly-forgotten, low-budget submarine thriller PHANTOM), who spent 20 years trying to get it made before production finally began in 2017 (Roadside Attractions, Lionsgate's art house division, has been sitting on this for a while). Pitsenbarger's story could've been told without resorting to melodramatic embellishment, like the invoking of an actual friendly fire incident during the two-day battle that the film uses to lend credence to a generally debunked conspiracy theory that Pitsenbarger was denied the Medal of Honor because of potential embarrassment it would inflict on the US Army, not to mention the presidential aspirations of a fictional senator (Dale Dye) who, in the context of the film, was one of the architects of Operation Abilene. The dramatic license taken with this plot tangent certainly necessitates nearly everyone--the exceptions being Pitsenbarger, his parents, and Linus Roache as Clinton-era Air Force Secretary Whit Peters--being composite characters or whole cloth fictional creations "inspired" by actual participants. The best parts of THE LAST FULL MEASURE are provided by a stacked cast of national treasures and one ageless living legend in the always-magnificent Plummer, who's just heartbreaking when Mr. Pitsenbarger looks out of his son's bedroom window, recalling when he was just a boy, and saying "Sometimes I can still see him out there mowing the lawn." Jackson, Harris, Hurt, and Fonda are all granted time in the spotlight to work their magic, their characters haunted by memories of war and the sacrifice Pitsenbarger made to save them. When these guys are onscreen, as opposed to the bland Stan's uninteresting Sanford, THE LAST FULL MEASURE is often gut-wrenchingly powerful. That's especially true for Jackson, who gets a great monologue about coming home from Vietnam only to have the locals call him a "baby-killer," and Fonda, who goes out with a marvelous farewell performance as a broken man who's been absolutely unable to psychologically function in any capacity since the day Pitsenbarger saved his life.
Peter Fonda (1940-2019)
There's enough real drama in this story that it shouldn't have been difficult to avoid the fictionalization and the unfortunate second half turn toward the maudlin and overwrought. That begins right around the time Sanford travels to Vietnam to find another Cam My survivor (THE DEER HUNTER's John Savage), who stayed behind and turned the battle site into a CGI butterfly-filled memorial of prayer and reflection in a ridiculously long sequence that looks like an outtake from an apparent John Savage self-help meditation video. It's not long after that when Hurt's otherwise solid performance is completely derailed by a ludicrously melodramatic, saliva-spewing survivor's guilt breakdown that has him slobbering all over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Characters start giving speeches as the inspirational score swells and tugs at the heartstrings, and no matter how sincerely it's delivered, not even a great actress like three-time Oscar-nominee Diane Ladd is capable of selling florid dialogue like "Talking about Bill is one of the greatest joys of our life...keeping him alive keeps us strong...it's how we balance our grief and live a happy life without him." And around the time Pitsenbarger gets his posthumous Medal of Honor and Whitford's loathsome prick character has his come-to-Jesus moment and is shown leading the ovation with a slow clap (are we still doing this, Hollywood?), you might ask yourself why Robinson is so determined to sabotage a generally credible movie with this kind of mawkish, pandering horseshit. For most of its duration, THE LAST FULL MEASURE is a terrific showcase for some great actors, and if you're a fan of Peter Fonda, you'll be hard-pressed to not get a little choked-up at his last scene (fittingly, the film is dedicated to him). In the end, even with the second-half stumbling and bumbling (it was nice to see Savage on the big screen again, but his whole section is a momentum-killer that should've been left on the cutting room floor), it's a suitably effective--and refreshingly non-jingoistic--man-weepie that dads and grandpas will love, and I can't help but wonder if it's in theaters now so the Blu-ray will make a great Father's Day gift in June.
DESTROYER (US/UK - 2018) Last fall, DESTROYER had some awards-season buzz going for Nicole Kidman, but financially-strapped distributor Annapurna decided to focus their attention on the Oscar-baiting VICE instead, leaving DESTROYER to flounder on just 235 screens at its widest release. Looking what can be charitably described as several degrees south of haggard, Kidman did get a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as hard-drinking LAPD detective Erin Bell, a disgraced ex-FBI agent who's pretty much regarded as a total shitshow among her colleagues and always looks like she hasn't slept in days. Though two other cops have already caught the case, she shows up at a homicide where the John Doe murder victim was shot dead and has dye-stained $100 bills scattered around his body. Back at the precinct, someone mails her an envelope with an identically dye-stained $100 bill. She's convinced it's a message and she knows who's sending it: Silas (Toby Kebbell), the leader of a ring of bank robbers she and her former FBI partner Chris (Sebastian Stan) infiltrated as part of an extensive undercover operation nearly 17 years ago. Going rogue and blowing off her partner Antonio (Shamier Anderson), Erin starts tracking down all of Silas' known associates, none of whom are happy to see her since her cover was ultimately blown. She eventually works her way to Silas' sleazy, money-laundering lawyer DiFranco (Bradley Whitford), who's been holding the take and doling it out as requested in clandestine park handoffs to Silas' drug-addled girlfriend Petra (Tatiana Maslany). As Erin predicted, Silas' money is running out and he's resurfaced to plan another robbery and settle old scores.
At its core, DESTROYER is another saga of a morally-conflicted cop, with Kidman fearlessly diving into her own TRAINING DAY crossed with a bit of BAD LIEUTENANT, with one shock value scene where she goes to absurd lengths to get info on Silas' whereabouts from one of his terminally-ill former accomplices. But director Karyn Kusama and writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (the trio also worked on 2005's AEON FLUX and 2016's terrifying THE INVITATION), have a few unexpected tricks up their sleeves beyond a cleverly-constructed ending and one incredibly intense robbery sequence. These are doled out slowly in a series of flashbacks to the undercover operation that play as a parallel timeline to the current events. Erin's job, boozing, and pill-popping are at the expense of fractured relationships with her ex Ethan (Scoot McNairy) and her teenage daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn), and as the backstory gradually fills in, you finally get a sense of the extent to which she's gone to numb the pain. Everyone in her life has written her off, with the possible exception of her sympathetic former FBI boss Gil (Toby Huss), who invites her to a Bible study, insisting "It's low-key...nobody's handling snakes," prompting one of the very few times present-day Erin cracks a sort-of smile. In the end, DESTROYER doesn't absolve Erin of her sins and doesn't ask the audience for sympathy, but Kidman succeeds in conveying the humanity underneath an irreparably damaged person who can't stop making terrible decisions. (R, 121 mins)
WE DIE YOUNG (US/Bulgaria/UK - 2019) Following the French drama THE BOUNCER, Jean-Claude Van Damme gets another chance to go serious with the earnest but cliched WE DIE YOUNG. Hampered by obvious budget constraints, the film gets off to a clunky start with too many shots of a Bulgarian backlot unsuccessfully portraying the mean streets of Washington, D.C. (no streets have as many mailboxes and pay phones as these do), but it gets better and more compelling as it goes on. Set in a barrio war zone controlled by MS-13 kingpin Rincon (David Castaneda of the Netflix series THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY), who's already reaching "heavy is the crown" levels of paranoia, so much so that he really only trusts teenage drug delivery boy and collector Lucas (Elijah Rodriguez), who lost his older brother in Afghanistan and is doing everything he can to shield his younger brother Miguel (Nicholas Sean Johnny) from gang life. Rincon is preoccupied with the wedding of his baby sister Gabriella (Robyn Cara) and entrusts Lucas to deliver two bricks of heroin to a contact just outside his territory. But Lucas is distracted when he learns that Rincon's guys are planning to initiate Miguel into MS-13, so he never makes the drop and is instead pursued by Rincon's hot-headed cousin and ambitious second-in-command Jester (Charlie MacGechan). Fleeing for safety, they end up in the car of Daniel (Van Damme), an Oxycontin-addicted neighborhood mechanic and ex-Marine who lost his ability to speak when he took some shrapnel in a bomb blast in Afghanistan.
Set over the course of Gabriella's wedding day, WE DIE YOUNG turns into a standard-issue, urban "survive the night" scenario with Rincon's guys eventually catching Lucas and Miguel, forcing Daniel to channel the long-dormant warrior within to mount a daring one-man rescue. Making his narrative feature debut, Israeli-American documentary filmmaker Lior Geller has obviously spent time worshiping at the altar of Alfonso Cuaron, with a couple of reasonably well-executed handheld, long-take chase sequences, both in a car (complete with blood splattering against the lens, as required by law) and on foot. The problem is that you've seen them all before, along with the heavy-handed digital insertion of the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument into the background to remind you that This Is America, and all the hackneyed literary allusions with Daniel trying to get Lucas to read A Tale of Two Cities and Rincon serving as an ersatz Shakespearean figure who even quotes The Merchant of Venice at one point. To his credit, Castaneda tries to bring some complexity to a potentially cartoonish character, and Van Damme (one of 37 credited producers) does a fine job letting his aged face, pinched into an almost constant contorted grimace due to Daniel's chronic pain, speak volumes. But for the most part, there's nothing new here--the kid who's been sucked into the gang life trying to keep his little brother from the same fate, the SCARFACE trope of the powerful gangster being possessive of his little sister, the quiet loner silently suffering in a shell of his former self until he has a reason to take action. In the end, it's a decent enough Redbox rental, as Geller gussies it up with some occasionally effective documentary immediacy, and its three solid lead performances (Castaneda and Rodriguez were both in SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO as well) give it a little more credibility than those early Bulgarian backlot scenes would initially indicate. (R, 93 mins)
LOGAN LUCKY (US - 2017) Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Rebecca Blunt. Cast: Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Hilary Swank, Seth MacFarlane, Riley Keough, Katie Holmes, Katherine Waterston, Dwight Yoakam, Sebastian Stan, Brian Gleeson, Jack Quaid, Farrah McKenzie, David Denman, Macon Blair, Jon Eyez, Deneen Tyler, Ann Mahoney, Jim O'Heir. (PG-13, 118 mins) Steven Soderbergh cried wolf on retiring from feature films a number of times before finally making it official after 2013's SIDE EFFECTS, but he never really went away. He directed HBO's Liberace biopic BEHIND THE CANDELABRA and all 20 episodes of Cinemax's two-season series THE KNICK. He didn't direct the MAGIC MIKE sequel MAGIC MIKE XXL but he served as its cinematographer under his D.P. pseudonym "Peter Andrews" and he edited it as "Mary Ann Bernard." He was also executive producer on other series like Amazon's RED OAKS, Starz's THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (a spinoff of his experimental 2009 Sasha Gray vehicle), and Netflix's upcoming GODLESS, in addition to producing indies like WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN and Spike Lee's DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS. In short, Soderbergh is working more than ever, and with an arsenal of pseudonyms that's approaching Joe D'Amato and Jess Franco levels, his return to the big screen was only a matter of time. LOGAN LUCKY, shot by "Peter Andrews," edited by "Mary Ann Bernard," and written by the unknown "Rebecca Blunt," which is already assumed to be yet another Soderbergh alias, finds the filmmaker in familiar territory, insofar as it's a heist movie that puts it in the same wheelhouse as his OCEAN'S ELEVEN trilogy and OUT OF SIGHT, and like the OCEAN'S movies, it's played for laughs, but Soderbergh's feature film homecoming has some tricks up its sleeve that make it very much its own unique thing.
In his fourth Soderbergh film, Channing Tatum stars as Jimmy Logan, a West Virginia construction worker fired by his crew boss after failing to disclose the bum knee from a high school football injury that ended his once-plausible chances of making it to the NFL. His ex-wife Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes) lives just across the state line in North Carolina and is planning to move with their daughter Sadie (Farrah McKenzie) to Lynchburg, VA, where her wealthy second husband (David Denman) is opening a new car dealership. Jimmy receives little consolation from his younger brother Clyde (Adam Driver), a bartender with a prosthetic left arm in place of the one he lost in Iraq. Clyde reminds Jimmy of the "Logan Curse," which has affected generations of their family, prompting Jimmy to take drastic measures to reverse it. With the help of their baby sister Mellie (Riley Keough), the Logan siblings team up to rob the cash deposit vault of the Charlotte Motor Speedway during the final NASCAR race of the season by taking advantage of the pneumatic tube system that moves throughout and under the speedway via chutes, a system Jimmy discovered on his last job with the construction crew, remedying a series of sinkholes that formed beneath the speedway property. The Logans enlist the aid of appropriately-named explosives man Joe Bang ("introducing Daniel Craig"), and are not deterred by the problematic fact that he's still locked up ("I am in-car-cer-ra-ted!" Bang sounds out for the Logans) for another five months and the job needs to be pulled off before the construction crew completes their work in four weeks.
Other figures drift in and out of the story in inspired, Coen Bros.-like situations, from obnoxious British business mogul and NASCAR team owner Max Chilblain (Seth MacFarlane, looking like a cross between Mandy Patinkin and Avery Schreiber); Dayton White (Sebastian Stan), a Chilblain driver who suffers a bad reaction after being contractually obligated to drink a Chilblain-endorsed energy drink on camera; Joe Bang's lunkhead brothers Sam Bang (Brian Gleeson) and Fish Bang (Jack Quaid); and, much later, humorless, no-nonsense FBI agent Sarah Grayson (Hilary Swank). Soderbergh goes against your gut expectations by avoiding the easy trap of milking these characters for condescending laughs, instead opting for a Coen Bros. approach where he shows much empathy for the Logans, and even for Joe Bang's brothers, who are more the stereotypical hillbilly yokels to a certain degree (they're introduced toilet seat-pitching and bragging that they "know everything there is to know about computers," including "all the Twitters"). Jimmy's plan is ridiculous and damn near impossible but time and again, he, along with Clyde, Mellie, and Joe Bang, prove themselves quite resourceful and have clearly thought this whole thing through even as obstacles constantly threaten to halt the job. The often absurdist humor doesn't approach the lunacy of, say, RAISING ARIZONA, but rather, the more deadpan side of FARGO. Tatum and especially Driver really nail the tone here and are gifted with numerous bits of quotable dialogue. Sure, Clyde's prosthetic arm is played for some easy laughs, but they're great laughs, and one brief detour into a prison riot negotiation (the standoff arranged to get Joe Bang out of jail) between the exasperated warden (Dwight Yoakam) and inmates demanding the prison library stock the titles in the Game of Thrones series that George R.R. Martin has yet to publish is brilliantly funny, as they refuse to believe that the new books don't exist and the warden can't convince them that the TV series has moved past the novels. LOGAN LUCKY could maybe run 15 minutes shorter and it has a few too many characters than it has time to properly showcase (MacFarlane, Stan, and Katherine Waterston as a nurse in a mobile free clinic are barely in it, and Swank doesn't even appear until 95 minutes in), but it's a lot of fun and a reminder that "offbeat" and "quirky" can still be a good thing. Plus it's got one perfect scene involving Sadie and John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," that's maybe the sweetest thing Soderbergh's ever done.
