NETFLIX: ‘Fair Play’
Brutally/beautifully acted, written and executed, the Netflix thriller Fair Play has one major problem. Its characters are such awful people, you may have zero rooting interest in how their venal lives turn out. Viewers’ mileage may vary.
A divisive buzz generator at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Chloe Domont’s debut feature introduces us to Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) at a wedding. The two make out drunkenly, then messily, in a bathroom during the reception in a scene — hot, horny and suddenly bloody — that shows off its stars’ frisky chemistry and sneaks in apt symbolism for the high-stakes conflict to come.
The following morning, Emily and Luke wake to their 4:30 alarm, don business attire as meticulous as armor, exchange a have-a-nice-day kiss, then march in different directions to the same destination. They’re a Capulet and a Montague swimming voluntarily in a shark tank: a Wall Street hedge fund where, as junior analysts, they conceal their relationship because it’s against company rules. (Those rules are personified by the great British actor Eddie Marsan as their boss, Campbell, his cold lizard eyes belying the infernal heat of his viciousness.)
When Luke is rumored for promotion, Emily acts psyched. So does Luke, briefly, after Campbell instead hands the job to Emily. Initially, Luke has to stomach hearing his bruh colleagues brag that they could’ve gotten the promotion if they’d had double-x chromosomes and spread their legs for the boss. Soon enough, feeling the daily emasculation of answering to his (secret) fiancée, Luke also signs onto the sexist cliché that she must have used her wiles to climb one rung above him.
Often, Fair Play works like a horror film. You want to shout as the characters make the wrong decisions. Emily tries to placate Luke’s wounded pride with a night at a posh hotel he can no longer afford himself. Luke shows up drunk at the office with all the staggering confidence that comes with threatened privilege. Neither is entirely right or wrong; both behave badly.
At its weakest, the movie can feel like a thesis, checking off points about male insecurity, gender dynamics and the pluses and minuses of the MeToo movement. You could say Fair Play is either the best or the worst date-night movie around. Whatever your take on the film (love it, hate it, but don’t call it ineffective), the lead actors go hard.
Known for appearing in promising films that underperformed/bombed (the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply and ouch-iest of all, Solo: A Star Wars Story), Ehrenreich gives his all and isn’t afraid to look ugly. Dynevor matches and maybe outstrips him in a performance far from her turn as Bridgerton’s Daphne. Her character there seemed insipid, even when having hot sex on ladders and staircases with her hunky duke. But not insipid here — not at all.
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NETFLIX: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’
The bigger that writer-director Mike Flanagan’s career got, the weaker his series became. The Haunting of Hill House could never match Shirley Jackson’s novel or Robert Wise’s elegantly sinister 1963 film version, The Haunting. But Flanagan’s 10-episode 2018 take fractured the story line and reassembled it into smart, scary variations. His redo of The Turn of the Screw, 2020’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, had moments but was overlong and uneven. Last year’s boring, monologue-freighted Midnight Mass lost me after two episodes.
The good news? Flanagan’s rendering of Edgar Allan Poe stories in the eight-episode The Fall of the House of Usher is a return to form. His last production under his Netflix deal, it’s clever, gory and surprisingly topical. He turns the doomed Usher family — led by scheming paterfamilias Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and ruthless sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell) — into the heads of a very Sackler-like family with a big pharma company whose products have hooked and killed millions.
Karmic payment comes in the form of Verna (Carla Gugino, bringing her bruised Kewpie-doll charisma to Flanagan’s projects ever since he teamed her with Greenwood in the 2017 Netflix film Gerald’s Game). She’s a shape-shifting, ageless agent of fate who makes a 1980 New Year’s Eve deal with the Usher siblings that brings their family riches and doom.
The series is told as a long flashback, narrated by Roderick to Detective Dupin (Carl Lumbly) in the wake of the violent deaths of his six adult children. (Four are played by Flanagan regulars Henry Thomas, Rahul Kohli, T’Nia Miller and Flanagan’s off-screen wife, Kate Siegel.) The kids are a spoiled, inbred lot designed to remind you of Trumps, Murdochs and the battling brats of fictional Logan Roy. You can think of Usher as a goth Succession; at its best, the dialogue is snappy and smart, if not in the league of that HBO hit’s lethally acrobatic wordplay. The verbal takedowns of capitalism are sharp, and the deaths are bloodily inventive. A good, spooky ride.
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NETFLIX: ‘Henry Sugar and other shorts’
If you enjoyed the Wes Anderson/Roald Dahl combination in the 2009 feature Fantastic Mr. Fox, Netflix offers four short films by the director based on the darkly witty British writer here. While Fox was animated, these new quickies, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison, are basically live-action cartoons themselves. Anderson has dug so deep into his twee aesthetic, we’re at a point of no return. For hardcore fans, that’s good news. The news for fence-sitters like me (yes to Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel and no to Darjeeling Limited, Life Aquatic, French Dispatch, etc.) is mixed.
But apparently, the shorter they are, the better. Sugar is 37 minutes, the others 17, each performed with maximum archness by a cast including Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel, Rupert Friend and Richard Ayoade, delivering their lines with all emotion erased on sets manipulated by visible stagehands. Anderson’s storybook artifice and the dark barbs at the ends of some of these stories makes for a fascinating contrast. But the airlessness of the enterprise can choke you.
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APPLE TV+ : ‘Flora and Son’ and ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’
Irish writer-director John Carney returns to musical form familiar from Once, Begin Again and Sing Street with his latest, Flora and Son. A potty-mouthed, crowd-pleasing family dramedy, it stars Eve Hewson as, yes, Flora, with Orén Kinlan as Max her, yes, son. The ex in their lives is Ian (Jack Reynor), still cruising on semi-fame as a band member who opened once for Snow Patrol. Flora and Ian both try to raise Max from separate homes, but the kid is constantly in trouble, stealing musical equipment to impress a neighborhood girl with his homemade raps.
When Max shows no interest in the busted guitar she salvages from a garbage bin, Flora starts learning to play herself, tutored by a $20-an-hour online songwriter from Los Angeles, Jeff. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the guy with perfect calibration as a onetime up-and-comer reconciled to almost-was status who rediscovers his craft through brash, adorable Flora. (It helps that, along with her innate musical instincts, Flora dresses sexy for him in their digital encounters.)
With a touch of magic realism, the movie gets Jeff off Flora’s laptop screen and into her world; they interact and build songs together, seemingly in the same locations. The movie’s semi-red herring is the romance that starts to build. Don’t forget that Jeff isn’t one of the two people named in the title. Flora and Son is about the reconstruction of family, not the jump-starting of a new relationship — the kind that solves all problems in weaker flicks. Gentle, enjoyable, ultimately forgettable, the movie won’t waste your time.
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More memorable — even as its subject questions the very nature of “memory” — is Apple’s The Pigeon Tunnel, directed by documentary filmmaking great Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War). His subject is David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, writer of innumerable spy novels and the memoir that shares the film’s title.
A low-level worker in Britain’s secret services, Cornwell was assumed to be drawing on his own experiences in his books about spy-craft. But no. Son of a larger-than-life con man named Ronnie, the younger Cornwell was sent to posh schools where he felt, more than he did working at MI5, like a spy in enemy territory. This identity as an outsider continued throughout a life that he says he lived inside an imaginative bubble, as a writer, importing elements from the real world. (The film, obviously, was made before Cornwell died in 2020.)
The Pigeon Tunnel is a mosaic, neither a straightforward biography nor an exegesis of le Carré novels. It’s fascinating to know that the inhumane erection of the Berlin Wall served as “confirmation of my understanding of the world,” Cornwell says. And it sparked his first, still best-known book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Depicting the writers’ process as being as lonely as it can be fulfilling, Tunnel poses fascinating questions about the very nature of what we think of as “self.”
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HULU: ‘The Other Black Girl’ and ‘No One Will Save You’
Based on a popular novel, The Other Black Girl pushes hot topical buttons. But what’s with the evil/magical hair goop? Maybe it makes more sense in Zakiya Dalila Harris’ book. What starts off as a witty expose of gender, race and the politics of self-promotion in the workplace gets lost in some dark magic metaphors.
Sinclair Daniel plays Nella, personal assistant at a publishing house where two Black women, an author and her in-house editor, made names for themselves years ago. For Nella, now, she’s the one spot of color in a sea of White until the new Black girl of the title is hired. Her name’s Hazel-May, and though she comes on strong as Nella’s BFF-in-waiting, she wastes no time undermining her colleague. (Ashleigh Murray plays Hazel-May with a passive-aggressive brio that keeps us off-balance about her motives at the start.)
From this promising start, Black Girl starts to veer into supernatural territory that almost feels like it’s in the same neighborhood as Roderick Usher’s family. Three episodes in, I clocked that I’m never gonna be the intended audience for the show and tuned out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmYkNE0wYw
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Also on Hulu, another good premise takes a hard dive in the stand-alone sci-fi thriller No One Will Save You. In Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the best moments come early: those strange lights in the sky, both promising and ominous. Before they reveal themselves to Richard Dreyfuss as amiable, squishy creatures at the Devils Tower finale, the ETs unknowability felt scary. And the scariest sequence of all happens to little Cary Guffey as a tyke whose home is besieged by out-of-control toys and household appliances.
In No One, Kaitlyn Dever plays a grownup variation of the Guffey role, a shunned, isolated loner battling CG aliens from on high, while never speaking a word. Cool idea, but writer-director Brian Duffield’s film is an overlong, arty experiment. It leaves Dever’s character stuck in a collaborationist’s fantasy world, an ending almost weird enough to save the rest of the movie. Almost.
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NETFLIX: ‘Sex Education’
For its first three seasons, I wanted to hug every character in the Brit teen comedy Sex Education. For its fourth and final season, I wanted most of them to walk off a cliff. For most of its run, the show demonstrated huge generosity of spirit. It found dignity and grace in all its characters, including the bully Adam (Connor Swindells), his rigid dad Michael (Alistair Petrie) and the school’s chief mean girl, Ruby (Mimi Keene). Through it all, geeky sex expert Otis (Asa Butterfield) and Maeve (Emma Mackey) did a protracted will-they-won’t-they mating dance. Though comically heightened, the show kept one foot (or a toe at least) in a recognizably real world.
The final season dispenses not only with several beloved characters, it loses any sense of reality. The kids’ new school is a transgender, rainbow-splattered fantasia where cishet people are rare as unicorns. The last thing on any of the students’ minds is actually attending classes. New characters are generally unlikable, and even Ncuti Gatwa’s beloved, flamboyant Eric is now painfully self-absorbed. The show collapses into scenes of students complaining about their niche needs and identities, and the whole thing becomes stickily self-righteous. Huge sad trombone . . .
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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming columns here.
