Spoiler alert: The following discusses certain aspects and plot points of Marriage Story and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
2019 has been the year of Adam Driver with five movies hitting US theaters: Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, in which he plays a megalomaniac film director; Scott Z. Burns’ The Report that casts the actor as real-life Senate investigator Daniel Jones; Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, where Driver partners with Bill Murray and Chloë Sevigny as police fighting a zombie invasion; Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, in which he is a theater director going through a divorce; and he reprises his role of villain Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Already a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild best actor nominee for Marriage Story, Driver is all but a lock for an Oscar nomination.
It’s truly been a stellar year for Driver, but here’s the weird thing: Marriage Story and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker would make one of the oddest yet most oddly compelling double bills of all time for those remaining rep houses that still book them. On the surface, the two films have nothing in common other than a single actor. But the men Driver plays in them share certain personality traits that make it all too easy to imagine that Charlie, the theater director, is the great-great-to-however-many-powers grandfather of Kylo Ren. The seed for all that intergalactic strife was planted in 21st century New York.
Unlikely, you say? Check it out: They share the same defining personality trait, petulance. Charlie sulks his way through his divorce, further alienating his ex, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson). Centuries later, Kylo’s peevishness leaves him to reject his parents Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), embrace his dark side, and eventually murder his father in Star Wars Episode VII – The Force Awakens. Despite the power he’s amassed since, Kylo’s mood hasn’t improved in The Rise of Skywalker. Instead of acting the winner, he’s a whiner.
Of course, I’m sure there are those that would defend Charlie and Kylo as emo rather than pouty, and maybe they would have a point. At least, it would explain their jobs. Charlie is supposed to be some kind of theater savant, he even wins a MacArthur “genius” grant during the course of Marriage Story. But Charlie is awkward and stunted, and it is hard to imagine that his theater doesn’t reflect that. Part of the reason Nicole leaves is because she feels smothered and much of that has to do with her work in his theater, the place pretentiousness and self-seriousness call home.
As for Kylo, sure, he embraces evil and he’s always attacking his mother’s forces, but his ways clearly don’t spark joy. One wonders what Darth Vader, the granddad he worships, would say about this sad boi, this gangly perpetual teenager who always seems on the verge of bursting into tears. Is this villainy or merely pique? You can almost hear him screaming at his mother, “I don’t want to be a Jedi and you can’t make me!”
Charlie and Kylo also share a certain sense of it is all-about-me-ness when it comes to the women they profess to love. Charlie is left poleaxed by Nicole leaving him, because he never saw it coming, never really saw her, never saw that she was unhappy in her role as an extension of his work, and ultimately, of him.
Kylo’s intensity toward Jedi warrior Rey (Daisy Ridley) is that of a stalker as he insists on their future together despite her protests. And what a future! The only thing he can imagine is the two of them sitting on the Palpatine throne as Sith king and queen. That Rey doesn’t want to embrace her own dark side and has worked damned hard to become a Jedi matters not to Kylo. Nor does it dawn on him that Rey isn’t someone likely to embrace a fate that would involve the wholesale slaughter of her friends. Of course not, because, really, it’s all about Kylo and what he wants. He’s a bad boyfriend.
There you have it. In a galaxy far, far away is a troubled man. And the seeds of that trouble aren’t in his turning his back on the Jedi and his parents or even in killing his dad, but in a theater director in our own galaxy and our own time. That ambition to conquer Broadway sprouts many years later as an ambition to conquer worlds. It’s family. It’s legacy. There is no escape. It’s family dysfunction for the ages. –Pam Grady
When Charles Aznavour died just over a year ago in October 2018, it brought the end of not just one of the world’s great singers but also an actor of considerable charisma. That quality is on full display in The Fabiani Affair (1962), a tense crime drama that is one of 15 1960s Gallic film noirs screening at The French Had a Name For It 6, Thursday, Nov. 14-Monday, Nov. 18 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater.
Stealing a beer from my uncle’s fridge and running off to share it among the four of us behind the nearby grammar school used to be a thing for me, my two cousins, and my little sister (who we were corrupting, since we were tweens and she wasn’t). Then one day when they were going to come to my house for a sleepover, we stashed a beer in my sister’s purse where my mom discovered it. Busted. Sleepover canceled. Beer filching days over.
In a key moment of Wild Rose, aspiring country singer Rose-Lynn Harlan (Jessie Buckley) travels to London—probably the farthest she’s been outside of her hometown of Glasgow—to meet one of her heroes, real-life BBC The Country Show radio host Whispering Bob Harris—who tells her that if she is serious about making it in country music she needs to write her own songs. It is a suggestion that flummoxes her; she feels she has nothing to write about. She can’t see what the audience sees: Her life is a country song. And so is this movie, the story of a working-class heroine who can’t seem to get out of her own way, whose life would utterly defeat most other people, but whose hope and big dreams remain undistinguished.
Rankin-Bass probably doesn’t have cause for action, but it is impossible not to feel the influence of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in this fourth Toy Story adventure. The world Woody (Tom Hanks) stumbles on where toys go unloved and unwanted is not an island nor toy world unto itself, but a dusty antique store where toys go unloved and unwanted. For Woody, beginning to contemplate his own obsolescence and a time when no child will call him his own, the place is a revelation. If this is truly Woody’s last roundup, he goes out in a blaze of laughter and tears.
Nicolas Brown adapts Sean B. Carroll’s book The Serengeti Rules, at once paying homage to the five scientists at the heart of it, and explicating their theories in a handsome, engaging documentary. Like so many environmental docs that have come before it, it identifies a threat to our planet, in this case, the degradation to our natural world that ensues with the loss of biodiversity. But unlike so many films of its nature, it is more hopeful in tone. The scientists know what needs to be done to cure this particular malady; the trick is getting it done. The Serengeti Rules serves as a clarion call for action.