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56.Will-o'-the-Wisp (Joao Pedro Rodrigues); grade: B+
58.Amsterdam (David O. Russell); grade: B+
59.Raymond & Ray (Rodrigo Garcia); grade: A-


"He was a racist who liked everybody," that's how half-brothers Raymond (Ewan McGregor) and Ray (Ethan Hawke) remember their enigmatic father who left behind psychic wounds that remain fresh in Rodrigo Garcia's Raymond & Ray. The enigma of race haunts the most intriguing romantic entanglements in three films made my deeply serious artists who seem over-burdened by contemporary political concerns.

Will-o'-the-Wisp (Joao Pedro Rodrigues)
For Joao Pedro Rodrigues, this tension manifests itself in the structure of Will-o'the-Wisp. The prologue and epilogue overtly conjure the absurdities of political idolatry (Greta Thunburg, Barack Obama). Then, the film's main narrative about a blanco Spanish Prince (Mauro Costa) who joins the fire department and falls in love with a Black fireman (Andre Cabral) achieves an uncanny combination of Bunuelian surrealism and amazing sensuality to tear down contemporary shibboleths. It begins with a rhapsody on fire department drill movements and climaxes with a frisson-busting 69 position in a fire-ravaged forest with looming phalluses framing contrasting angelic faces trading naughty racially-tinged provocations. At the film's best, its sweetness (when Cabral comforts Costa after a prank) and its bold gay sexuality (nude firemen recreating famous artworks) challenges the assault on intimacy in the post-Obama, post-Covid, post-January 6 era.

Amsterdam (David O. Russell)
The tension between universal longing and divisive politics--expressed as the trauma of WWI and threat of WWII--in David O. Russell's Amsterdam results most plainly in it not being funny--and hence making a mess of history. Russell's technique appears to involve establishing the context for actors to unveil their own luminous individuality. Russell achieves an awesome spectacle: when Zoe Saldana and Christian Bale perform an autopsy looking at each other and down at the camera to express shared integrity and attraction, when Margot Robbie, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Rami Malek appear in a forward-facing three-shot balancing expositional and emotional cross-purposes, when Robbie looks at John David Washington (Denzel's son) in a p.o.v. shot to divine his essential innocence, and when WWI veterans put on a benefit show demonstrating their various talents. Through cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's emphasis on faces and the eyes shining through them, it's the most beautifully photographed American movie since Byron Shah shot Joe Nussbaum's Prom (2011). These inherently democratic images clearly testify to the uniqueness--the value--of each actor in a creative dynamic undercut by the overstuffed plot conflating political paranoia and the desire to escape. (Put bluntly, Russell proves oblivious to the contemporary resonance of a plot combining eugenics, exploitation of workers, and despotism.) Interestingly, Russell proffers escape in the form of romantic fulfillment--essentially conventional--made more complicated in Rodrigo Garcia's new film.

Raymond & Ray (Rodrigo Garcia)
Russell and Garcia are the best American directors of actors since the passing of Altman and Jonathan Demme. In Mother and Child (2011) and Nine Lives (2006), Garcia elicited from 12 actresses their best-ever performances in which they transcended even themselves to reveal each character's spiritual kernel of truth. In Raymond & Ray, Garcia gets to the essence of men's difficulty with expressing their feelings when two half-brothers reunite to bury their callous, magnetic father. McGregor and Hawke's characters suppress their pain so much that they stop short of a brotherly hug when grabs his own crotch and chides: "Hug this!" Scene-by-scene (during the car trip, interacting with two women at the wake, meeting more brothers for the first time at the burial), the brothers discover new facets of their father's mystery. They also clarify each of son's distinct responses to their father's abuse--what made jock McGregor and scholastic Hawke inseparable as children and estranged as adult cuckold and addict ("The boys are not the men"). When the funeral ritual calls upon McGregor and Hawke to say their piece, one can only speak with a trumpet, the other with a gun. These expressions draw out the feminine instincts of the "racist" white father's Mexican lover (Maribel Verdu) and Black nurse (Sophie Okonedo)--a felicitous twist of fate reminiscent of Annette Bening's reunification with her long-lost daughter Naomi Watts in Mother and Child. Through Garcia's direction--the camera tracking through the cemetery taking in the expanding brotherhood, closeups shot from the corpse's p.o.v.--McGregor and, especially, Hawke achieve such transparency that the slightest shifts in facial expression tap a wellspring of compassion.

Catharsis, at last!