In case you didn’t get the press release, I’ve made my first journey to the quaint little village of Park City, Utah, this year to attend the Sundance Film Festival’s 2015 edition with a few dozen fellow film lovers. I’m sharing a lovely hovel with a few of my Chicago-based film critic buddies, and I’ve just completed my first day of movies…well more like a half day, since things start late on Day One. I’ll do my best to keep the reviews coming with some degree of regularity, but for now, let me tell you about the vastly different films I saw today—different in terms of subject matter and quality. Enjoy…
WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? I kicked off my first Sundance with this lovely, melancholy, beautifully put together and surprisingly emotional documentary chronicles the life and hard times of Nina Simone, a singer whose vocal stylings cut right to your heart and soul, as well as a gifted pianist and an important figure in the Civil Rights movement. Director Liz Garbus (the Oscar-nominated 1998 doc THE FARM: ANGOLA, USA; BOBBY FISCHER AGAINST THE WORLD) wisely uses generous archival concert footage to drive home the clear fact that Simone’s title as the High Priestess of Soul (also the name of one of her finest albums), before spending a great deal of the latter half of the film diving into her long, sad history of mental illness, poverty, estrangement from her daughter, and general lack of respect from the music business.
The first part of the film plays it a bit safe and feels a lot like an episode of PBS’s “American Masters,” but it explores Simone more as a music phenomenon and less like someone whose life goal was to be the first black woman to play classical piano at Carnegie Hall. But as the film steadily moves along, factors in Simone’s life—both internal and external—begin to take shape and forecast a dim outlook for her later life. Her marriage to a former New York detective leads to him taking over her career—for the better, by and large, until he starts abusing her late in their marriage—but she resents feeling controlled. Her hair-trigger temper in all aspects of her life leads to many burned bridges as well.
Garbus has gathered some terrific interviews for this film, both archival and new, and they are all from people that new Simone personally. The lack of music “experts” and historians is refreshing, actually. But a great deal of what makes WHAT HAPPENED… shine is the staggering concert footage. I’ve seen the classic NINA SIMONE: LIVE AT MONTEUX 1976 film before, and thankfully the filmmakers pull liberally from that. There’s footage of Simone singing Janis Ian’s “Stars” that might be the most heartbreaking musical performance I’ve ever seen. In addition, there are also a great deal of rare interviews with Simone that have been sampled as well, and those are a mix of enlightening and biting.
As much as Simone’s music rests at the heart of WHAT HAPPENED…, the history lesson we’re given about her important to the Civil Rights movement is so important. Luckily, Garbus and her team spell out that history clearly and pay wonderful tribute to Simone’s contributions and inspiration to African-Americans everywhere. The flaws here are minor, and the history is honest, penetrating and deeply intimate. But it’s the music that draws you in and captivates with such force. Look for it on Netflix at some point in the coming year.
THE BRONZE I don’t watch “The Big Bang Theory,” so I went into dark, absurdly raunchy comedy THE BRONZE with no clue who Melissa Rauch was, which provided me with just the right mindset to believe she was some newly discovered actress who was hired for her ability to say the nastiest, rudest, and most manipulative things with a straight face and a mind-blowing amount of uncut venom. She’s a destructive force of nature here that’s impossible to like for most of the film, and even in the end-of-film moments where she softens—just an iota—she’s still pretty abrasive by normal human standards.
Rauch plays Hope Annabelle Greggory, a former gymnastics wunderkind whose competitive dreams are cut short after a brutal injury and failed attempts at a comeback. (The film can’t actually say she won a bronze in the “Olympics,” but you get the picture; and the fact that the movie is populated by cameos from actual Olympic winners drives home the point pretty clearly.) In the 10 or so years since her accident, Hope has milked what little fame she achieved in her small Ohio hometown for all that it’s worth. She’s run up tabs all over town, treats those around her like utter shit, had sex with pretty much every man in town (or those passing through), and has earned the distrust of even her loving father, Stan (Gary Cole).
When her former coach commits suicide, Hope receives a letter in the mail from her that turns out to be a suicide note/challenge to hope to see the error of her ways and make something of her life in exchange for all of the coach’s remaining money, $500,000. All she has to do is take over training another Olympic hopeful named Maggie Townsend (relative newcomer Haley Lu Richardson) and get her to her competitive trials with the help of the training facility’s owner Ben (Thomas Middleditch of “Silicon Valley”), who has had a crush on Hope since there were in primary school together.
It turns out that Hope is actually a natural at coaching, and after some trial and error, she actually gets Maggie to the qualifying trials, where she’s up against another gymnastics protégé, Lance Tucker (Sebastian Stan—yes, the Winter Soldier himself), whom Hope lost her virginity to all those years ago, but now the two loathe each other.
I’ll admit, most of the very few times I laughed at THE BRONZE were the result of Rauch just cutting loose on someone. Her face clenches up, her perfect bangs shake ever-so slightly, and a hint of steam trickles from her ears. It should come as no surprise that her tirades were carefully crafted by the star and husband William Rauch; first-time feature director Bryan Buckley adds very little by way of style, but there are a few key moments of observational humor about small-town life that were nice.
The problem with THE BRONZE is that so many of the jokes fall as flat as a gymnast tripping on the balance beam and landing face first. And it results in about the same laughs. As I indicated Rauch is working so hard to make Hope so aggressively unlikable that I admired the determination, but in the end everyone is playing their roles varying degrees of exaggerated, and this lack of believability kept distracting me. And yes, a film with this ludicrous story does rise or fall in large part due to its lack of authenticity, because the actual gymnastic routines are perfectly executed.
I genuinely like the idea for THE BRONZE. It’s a commentary on American’s desperation and willingness to become flash-in-the-pan celebrities (Hope was on a single episode of “Dancing with the Stars” and was cut first), but even that message gets lost early on. For a film that is so forcefully nasty, it also hedges its bets far too often. There is one great moment, however: a sex scene involving Hope that is basically a full-on gymnastics routine of fucking. I don’t care how much you might not like the film up to that point, that sequence will make your jaw (and maybe your pants) drop.
But the film as a whole is just a succession of near-misses and absolute failures as a comedy that ultimately made me so frustrated that I was longing for it to end (perhaps THE BRONZE’s worst crime is dragging out its ending). I could see so much potential in this one, but time after time, THE BRONZE can’t stick the landing.
