TALE OF TALES, dir. Matteo Garrone
A barren queen (Salma Hayek) performs a ritual that grants both her and a servant girl identical, albino sons, who become close as teens against the queen’s wishes. A lustful king (Vincent Cassel) is seduced by the songs of a local laundress, who attempts to hide from him the fact that she is actually old, haggard, and scaly. Another, older king (Toby Jones) secretly begins to tend for a blood-sucking insect, which he starts babying just as his daughter becomes of marrying age.
These are the three stories of Matteo Garrone’s film, and though they intersect occasionally by nature of them all taking place in the same world, they are mostly isolated from one another. The film isn’t sectioned off into chapters, but rather begins with a prologue of the Hayek segment before alternating between all three as the film goes on.
The first thing you realize about TALE OF TALES, which some of us who saw the trailer already surmised, is that it’s a visual delight. The Elizabethan-esque world that these characters inhabit is massive and fully realized, with huge castles, caravans, and labyrinths permeating the various kingdoms. The landscapes, shot in gorgeous Italian locations, feature forests, seas, and mountains that are as eye-poppingly breathtaking as anything you’ve seen in modern fantasy (up to and including LOTR and GOT). There are long stretches without dialogue, particularly early on, but there’s always something either beautiful or dramatically relevant (usually both) in the frame, and by the end, its the camera that has told the story more than the script.
That’s not to say that the plotlines themselves aren’t interesting. Rather, they’re lovely, dark, often funny fairytales that manage to feel traditional yet still manage to surprise. Adapted from the Pentamerone, a collection of stories assembled by Giambattista Basile in the 17th century, these are grimmer and more baroque than the Brothers Grimm, with dark, cynical overtones about human nature and royal privilege. The Hayek section (which features a small part for a regal, super-serial John C. Reilly) is a little softer than the other two, but even that one goes to sinister places as Hayek’s matriarch gets more controlling and unhinged. The Jones story lets the actor score laughs with his loopiness early on, but is eventually taken over by a game Bebe Cave as his poor daughter. Cassel, whose introduction is the stuff of legend, isn’t really the star of his segment, which is more focused on the laundresses played by Shirley Henderson and Hayley Carmichael, and its humor is so dark that it nearly veers into melodrama.
There’s violence and nudity on display, certainly enough to earn the film an R rating on this side of the pond, but nothing compared to your average episode of GAME OF THRONES. After seeing that series touted as the high-water mark of contemporary fantasy for a few years now, I found it deeply refreshing to be able to be swept up in something that didn’t rely as much on dialogue and crowd-pleasing fights, but rather tone, atmosphere, and style. There’s no political bullshit, or extensive chit-chatting in dark rooms, but rather grand, elegant, visual storytelling that nonetheless feels precise and focused despite the opulance.
My biggest problem with the film, if you could call it that, is that there’s not enough of it. The three stories end somewhat inconclusively, with a scene that intertwines all the main characters without actually giving them solid resolutions. But then, I realize, that’s not the point. These aren’t neat, pat fables like the ones you were read as a child. This is more lyrical, poetic, and ornate, shot in English but very European-feeling, with no easy victories (though one late, bittersweet moment involving a knife had the audience cheering) and no drawn out melodrama. The highest compliment I can pay the film is that, after years of finding excuses not to watch Garrone’s GOMORRAH, this has somehow made me more interested in checking that film than the scores of great reviews and recommendations from my friends over the past 7 years. This movie assures that this guy's a real filmmaker, and I can’t wait to dig into the rest of his filmography after this great two hours in the theater.
THE 33, dir. Patricia Riggin
The first and coolest thing I realized about THE 33 was that it was a movie about a bunch of guys confined to a cave for two months that was directed by a woman. It’s one thing for WONDER WOMAN or CAPTAIN MARVEL or SUFFRAGETTE to be directed by women, but machismo depicted through the female lens is something more rare and, in my opinion, more worth celebrating (speaking as someone who worships at the altar of AMERICAN PSYCHO). Knowing that a woman directed the film made me excited to see its depiction of these 33 male egos as they fight to keep their resolve and strength while buried under a massive fucking mountain.
Unfortunately, that trivia was arguably the most notable thing about this film.
Everyone knows the gist of the story. In 2010, a copper/gold mine in San Jose collapsed, trapping 33 miners inside. With no evidence that anyone inside survived the collapse and with resistance from the mining company (who simply wanted to cover it up and move on), the Chilean government nonetheless began drilling into the top of the mountain in an attempt to reach the subterranean refuge that they hoped the miners were housed in. 17 days after the incident, the drills reached the miners, who sent up a message reading, “We are well in the shelter, the 33.” Then began a nearly two-month process of actually getting the miners out, utilizing three massive drills provided by multiple governments (including the U.S.), as they sent messages and video clips to the outside world via the first, tiny drill path. When they were extracted, one by one, on October 13th, a billion people were watching around the world, making it a massive human interest story, and turning these workers into international heroes.
Frankly, they deserve a better movie than this.
I’m one of those guys who gets turned off when an international story is told in English with broken accents. In my mind, if you don’t do the Greek drama thing, where everyone speaks in elegant British accents instead of the actual language they would have been speaking, then just shoot in the native language. How am I supposed to get immersed in the film while watching native Spanish-speakers wrap their mouths around English dialogue instead of the tongue both they and the characters they’re portraying would naturally be speaking? I’m not stupid; I know that subtitling the film will cut their chances at box-office success, as well as maybe hurting their chances at Oscar glory (which, make no mistake, was an intention of this production). It’s just hard to believe these guys are the actual miners when they’re speaking in heavily-accented English instead of Spanish, which immediately keeps me at arms length with the intense drama Riggin is going for.
But alright, fine. I can forgive that. Reality of the marketplace, and hey, everyone loves THE LAST EMPEROR. But let me list some of the cast members playing Chileans in the film. Juliette Bincoche. Bob Gunton. Gabriel Byrne. Now, I can obviously deal with the fact that the hispanic actors playing the miners hail from all over the globe, with only one of the main actors (Cote de Pablo) actually coming from Chile. It was probably impossible to find a bunch of well-known Chilean actors that are both talented and famous enough to sell the movie worldwide. But, for gods sake, watching the woman from THE ENGLISH PATIENT and the warden from SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION overact in silly accents while covered in bronzer made me feel insulted. The idea that they couldn’t find any hispanic actors well-known enough to cast in these roles, let alone talented enough to do it, is ludicrous, and is a massive credibility killer as far as I’m concerned. One of my favorite films, CLOUD ATLAS, was raked over the coals for its depictions of white actors in “yellowface,” and there are far more Spanish-speaking citizens in this country than Asians, but I have a feeling that no group out there is going to voice their concerns over these backwards, offensive casting decisions.
Even without these racist, ostensibly commercially-driven caveats, the film fails to bring anything new to the story we all know. There’s a huge emphasis on the activities around the camp, with the characters played by Binoche, Byrne, and Rodrigo Santoro getting a ton of screentime as the attempts to get traction for the rescue operation drones on. Now, I’m not saying there’s not something to be said for the wives, sisters, and children sitting outside the mine, demanding action and information from the government, but to balance that almost 50/50 with the ACTUAL DUDES TRAPPED IN THE MINE FIGHTING TO SURVIVE is misguided and eventually starts to get annoying, particularly when the almost ARMAGEDDON-esque “A-ha, we can do this!” drilling moments start piling up (“Now you’re thinking like a miner” is a particularly egregious eye-roller). There’s this subplot with a miner played by Oscar Nunez (Oscar from THE OFFICE) and the feuding between his wife and his mistress (EASTBOUND AND DOWN’s Elizabeth De Razzo), that is played completely for laughs, without being funny for one second (there’s a repeated punchline about how he farts in his sleep, waka waka). Aside from maybe 4 or 5 guys, including a token Bolivian and Binoche’s drunken brother (whose whole subplot stems from the fact that he’s a difficult, emotionally closed-off fuckup), we don’t really get to know any of the individual miners on any meaningful level, depriing potentially cathartic moments, like a scene where they start hallucinating a feast as they nibble on the last morsels of their food, of their desired effect. There’s this layer of artifice through the whole thing that kept me from engaging emotionally, and when the moment comes where they start pulling these guys out, all I could think of was, “I can’t wait ‘till the end when they show the actual guys instead of these phony-baloney actors” (I wasn’t disappointed; there’s a corny epilogue showing the miners eating a feast on the beach. “They remain brothers to this day.”).
That’s not to say this film isn’t without its pleasures. I knew from the first trailer that there would be some solid Antonio Banderas speechifying in this movie, and on that front, I was not disappointed. His “Super” Mario Sepulveda is the de facto leader of the miners, and frequently attempts to restore the faith of his fellow captives with monologues about faith, resolve, compromise, loyalty, and the importance of family. In a film where every performance, glance, and musical cue is pitched to 11, Banderas is the one who’s most perfectly suited to the material, and he digs into every line and moment with full aplomb, singlehandedly sustaining the energy of the movie on his shoulders like he’s bloody Sisyphus. Bonus points for squaring him off against Lou Diamond Philips, who gets his showiest role in years as the foreman who was aware of the instability of the mine but kept the knowledge from his fellow miners (though he tried, in vain, to increase the safety precautions beforehand). Watching the stars of THE MAMBO KINGS and LA BAMBA sweat and scream desperately at each other while covered in dirt was definitely pleasant for this ‘90s boy, and every time they cut away to the outside, I couldn’t wait for them to go back to Banderas and Philips.
The sequence of the actual collapse, while played like a disaster scene from something like 2012, is technically impressive, as we watch the world fall apart around these guys with nothing but tiny lights and headlamps to show what’s actually going on. We know they’ll all end up ok, but damn it doesn’t seem like they’re gonna be when those massive rocks are falling from above. I can’t deny there’s genuine drama built into this story; even the heavy-handed machinations can’t diffuse the real-life triumph of these guys surviving and being extracted without a single casualty, and there are a few moments where I couldn’t help but get affected by how these men stayed resolute and resilient despite the apparent hopelessness of their situation. But this movie is going to live on long after the memory of the actual event has faded, and because of the Anglophilic touches and playing-to-the-cheap-seats sentiment, I don’t think it’s a worthy representation.
