Capone's Art-House Round-Up with FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER, REBEL IN THE RYE, and RAT FILM!!!

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a few films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…


FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER
The quality of the films debuting on Netflix over the last couple of years has been on a steady incline. Even still, I wasn’t quite prepared for the devastating, true-life story of a young Cambodian girl named Loung Ung (Sareum Srey Moch) and her family during the early days of the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power in the aftermath of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Adapted by Ung (from her memoir), who is now a human rights activist, and director Angelina Jolie, FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER: A DAUGHTER OF CAMBODIA REMEMBERS shows us some truly unbelievable and unspeakable conditions through the eyes of this young girl from the time she’s five until nine years old.

Jolie’s record as a director has been hit and miss over the years (UNBROKEN, IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY, BY THE SEA), but there’s no disputing that this is her strongest work as a storyteller and visual artist. By showing us this journey through the eyes of a child who doesn’t quite understand what is happening around her, Jolie captures fragments of the world around Ung, glimpses of the way the Khmer Rouge rounded up people from all over the country—but especially big cities—and marched them hundreds of miles to re-education camps and farms where they’d grow food for troops on the front lines against the invading Vietnamese. Young Loung, we learn, still has memories or her comfortable life back home, where her father (Phoeung Kompheak) worked for the American-backed government, a fact the family must keep secret to keep him and themselves alive.

The Khmer Rouge slowly take away from the Ung family—first their car, then their money and other possessions, until finally they come for the oldest children (I believe there were six siblings altogether), who are removed from the camp to serve in the revolutionary army. After the danger of starvation, disease and countless physical abuses at the hands of their captors, Loung’s mother (the remarkable, soulful Sveng Socheata) sends her remaining three youngest out of the camp, imploring them to walk in different directions and never tell anyone their real names for fear of being executed. It’s a moment that rips your guts out as the mother sends her youngest children out into an unknown future, rather than have them stay and face more certain death.

Loung is taken in by a camp that trains child soldiers, a regimen that focuses on weapons- and fight-training as much as drilling into the heads of the impressionable youth the idea that the Vietnamese must be slaughtered for coming into their country. But when the camp is bombed relentlessly, it becomes clear that the woefully underarmed Khmer Rouge don’t stand a chance against the well-equipped Vietnamese. One particularly nerve-twisting sequence involves Loung walking precariously through a minefield, not unlike the ones where she planted explosives as part of her training.

FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER is magnificently shot, with some of the most heart-wrenching child performances I’ve ever seen. Loung is made so numb by the terrible things she sees and experiences every day that her tears have simply dried up and she’s left with an empty stare, the embodiment of hurt and loss. The siblings are separated, reunited and separated again, but in the end, we know that Loung will make it out alive to tell her unfathomable story to the world, both in her book and in this phenomenal movie, which premieres on Netflix today.


REBEL IN THE RYE
Working from the biography “J.D. Salinger: A Life” by Kenneth Slawenski, writer-director Danny Strong (a successful screenwriter of such works as LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER and the two-part THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY films, as well as one of the creators of the TV series “Empire”) is attempting a type of film he’s never been involved with before.

In some of his most inspired screenplays, RECOUNT and GAME CHANGE (both for HBO), Strong covered a small but significant sliver of real life and zeroed in on the bizarre cast of real-life players in both the election results that led to George W. Bush becoming president and the McCain/Palin run for the White House, respectively. But with his new film, REBEL IN THE RYE (Strong’s first as a feature director), he broadens the scope on the life of Salinger, from ambitious, teenage would-be writer to jaded, paranoid, successful celebrity and eventual recluse.

Portraying Salinger throughout the years in a fantastic performance is Nicholas Hoult, who has proven himself in bigger-budget, genre works like the more recent X-MEN films and MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. Here, he gives a sweeping, shifting performance as the wide-eyed, cocky optimist who believes he is a genius early in life and is just waiting for the rest of the world to discover it. One who spotted his potential early was his writing instructor Whit Burnett (Kevin Spacey), who pushes Salinger not only on how to make his work more personal, but also suggests that he take a character from one of his short stories and build an entire novel around him. That character is Holden Caulfield, and Salinger dragged the writing of “The Catcher in the Rye” with him through years of tough fighting on the European front lines of World War II.

REBEL IN THE RYE doesn’t simply play connect the dots through the high points of Salinger’s life, his struggle to finish “Catcher,” and his equally tough road to get it published with the help of his literary agent, Dorothy Olding (Sarah Paulson). It hits a few obvious highlights, including a youthful love affair with Oona O’Neill (daughter of playwright Eugene, played by Zoey Deutch), who left him while he was fighting in the war to marry a much older Charlie Chaplin. Strong also gives us glimpses of Salinger’s contentious relationship with his parents, particularly father Sol (Victor Garber), though his mother (Hope Davis) does the best she can to make peace between them.

What the film gets right is how Salinger took his life experiences—from suffering a broken heart to all-out wartime post-traumatic stress disorder—and fed it all into the Caulfield character. He resisted notes or requests to change anything about the book, even from his publishers, and the result was a universally praised first novel that made Salinger so famous and hounded by fans who saw themselves in Caulfield that he had to move the isolation of a spacious country home.

REBEL IN THE RYE doesn’t shy away from Salinger’s admiration for pretty, young women—the first of which was his eventual wife, journalist Claire Douglas (Lucy Boynton)—whom he essentially abandons by working nonstop for days on end in a separate office on the country estate. The film only skims the surface of the way Salinger regularly had young women visit him in the country only to dispose of them rather callously (these stories are better detailed in the salacious 2013 documentary SALINGER). It also doesn’t follow Salinger into old or even middle age, so I never got a sense that Strong was attempting to sugar coat any bad behavior.

One of the most difficult things to do in a film about any type of artist is capture the creative process. Filmmaker Strong is aware that simply featuring long stretches of Salinger typing isn’t particularly interesting, so instead he examines what elements went into his early short stories and his most famous work. It’s certainly only one approach, but for the most part, it serves as a workable, watchable entry point for the uninitiated. Those looking for more in-depth observations, especially about the creation of “The Catcher in the Rye,” might be better of reading books on the subject. The performances, especially Hoult’s, are what kept me engaged in this flawed work, which deep dives on certain aspects of Salinger’s life just enough to make it a passable biopic.


RAT FILM
Unlike the horror movie approach of Morgan Spurlock’s 2016 doc RATS, director Theo Anthony’s first feature, RAT FILM, works more subtly in building anxiety levels. Here, it directly links the city of Baltimore’s shocking rat infestation to a nearly 100-year-old city-planning model that made certain that all non-white families lived in specific areas of the city. Those areas then became overcrowded, rundown and a perfect habitat for what would become a major rat problem.

Anthony’s examination of the Baltimore situation feels like investigative journalism in video essay form, but the end result is an astonishingly well-reasoned, beautifully edited work. It’s a slightly surreal analysis that moves effortlessly from the personal to systemic racism that runs so deep through Baltimore’s roots it practically moves through the sewers right along with the vermin.

RAT FILM features interviews with people who have found their own way of dealing with the creatures—from a city employee whose only job is dealing with rats to a few local residents who use various means to captures or kill the little bastards. The gentleman with the fairly sizable collection of laser-sighted pellet guns is a particular favorite. But Anthony is also sure to visit a few folks who keep rats as pets and cuddle them like they would any soft, fuzzy creature. We meet folks who feed baby rats to their equally personable snakes, and others who bait fishing poles with sliced turkey and peanut butter and cast their lines down dark alleys, ready with a baseball bat for anything they hook.

While not nearly as graphic as Spurlock’s movie, RAT FILM does feature a haunting narration by one Maureen Jones. I’m not familiar with any other work she might have done, but her delivery here is so dramatically even-keeled (imagine Werner Herzog but as a woman and with no accent) that it only added to the tension I was feeling waiting for rats to pop out of every dark corner of the screen (seriously, even the cats in this movie appear terrified). The way that Anthony ties Baltimore’s long and troubling history with its rat problem (which includes a discussion of the politics of selecting the correct rat poison many decades earlier) is masterful.

As our resident rat catcher points out early in the film, “Baltimore doesn’t have a rat problem; it has a people problem.” That sounds like a clever line when we hear it, but it also turns out to be 100 percent true. The question then becomes, which people have historically been the real problem? After several generations of its people and buildings being used as some kind of socioeconomic experiment by banks, politicians and even members of the scientific community, portions of Baltimore continue to struggle in many ways. The rats are more a symptom than the actual problem.

RAT FILM is a bold, creative, avant-garde documentary, with an often unsettling score from Dan Deacon, that all somehow combines into one of the most informative works about American culture that I’ve seen in quite some time.


-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter