(Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...pretty simple. Today: two films co-starring Jamie Dornan)
Synchronic - 2019, d. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead - Netflix
Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar - 2021, d. Josh Greenbaum - Crave
Let's talk, very briefly, about Jamie Dornan. Up until I put on Synchronic I didn't quite know who Jamie Dornan was. Honestly, I thought he was an actor from Game of Thrones but I couldn't place which character he was. My wife, the GoT expert had to set me straight that he was not in the show...and wasn't he the 50 Shades of Gray guy?
Yeah, that's him.
Like an older Robert Pattinson, Dornan's big break was as the lead male love interest in the most egregious of housefrau book-to-film adaptations, the type of film that actively rebuffs any sort of hetero male or critical viewing. The type of film we look down upon the stars of for nothing else but association with the property what deigns to have a rabid fanbase of female followers. The type of film that said stars have to crawl out from under the weight of. It took Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson years to get out from under the Twilight shadow. Dornan's 50 Shades co-star Dakota Johnson has had a bit of an easier time escaping the series, but the perception of Dornan seemed to relegate him to second-string man-candy, and the generic black-haired handsomeness that likely gets him confused for Sebastian Stan, Kit Harrington or Richard Madden by the populace at large.
Mackie is the focal figure here, a New Orleans paramedic with a brain tumor who becomes very intent on figuring out the strange deaths he's encountering throughout town. Dornan is his paramedic partner, his best friend. Where Mackie is terminally single, Dornan feels bogged down in his marriage and being father to a once-suicidal teenage daughter. He's envious of Mackie's freedoms, but doesn't see the loneliness that Mackie bravely smiles through, weary of the one night stands. They both look at each other with the view that the grass is greener on the other side.
The strange deaths seemed to be linked to the drug "synchronic", but it doesn't explain the weird, anachronisms that surround the bodies, like sword wounds and venomous snake bites. Mackie tracks down the source of the drug and buys out the supply, and has a weird encounter with its creator who explains how it allows the user to time travel for a short period of time, but only younger users whose pineal glands are less calcified than a normal adult (as a result of his tumor, so is Mackie's).
When Dornan's daughter goes missing after taking the drug, Mackie starts experimenting with Synchronic, to learn how it works, and how he can possibly return her home.
Like Toasty , I think a lot of Benson and Moorehead, and their thoughtful, creative and playful endeavors into sci-fi via left-field approaches. Their prior features The Endless and Resolution are part of the same reality and play with time in complimentary ways while remaining independent films. They have greater plans to explore that universe, and I had hoped, knowing that time travel was part of Synchronic that this film would further expand that world.
Such is not the case, which is not to say that's what disappoints me about the film. To be clear, I liked it, I enjoyed viewing it, I was happy I watched it, but I was disappointed, mainly in how the story broke down.
With the mystery of the weird deaths as a result of the drug, I was expecting an atypical detective procedural where Mackie, and maybe Dornan along with him, would start piecing together the mystery and discover the bigger scale time travel reveal. But when Dornan's daughter goes missing towards the end of the second act, the film fractures, and Mackie is on his own in his experiments, while Dornan (and Katie Astleton [Legion, The League] playing his wife) sees his marriage disintegrating before his eyes.
The story doesn't know exactly what it wants to do with these disparate elements. Benson and Moorehead really like the grounding of characters and placing their woes and relationships at the forefront while the weirdness of their reality creeps further and further in until it can't be ignored. It's a good formula, but in severing Mackie and Dornan it creates multiple streams, one kind of awe-inspiring, the other uncomfortably mundane, that don't compliment each other well. It's to the point that you almost don't need Dornan in the film at all, that Mackie, facing death anyway, could have gone on a solo detective adventure through the whole film, then help rescue just a random girl who disappeared.
It's a film that keeps Mackie in the spotlight and tries to give Dornan something beefy for his character, but Dornan still seems shunted to the background, and he doesn't pop much at all beyond a supporting player.
It would take something very bold, very bizarre to make this handsome, raven-haired Irishman to really pop off the screen (besides his handsomeness and Marvel-esque physique).
I didn't even know he was in Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar when I put the film on. Honestly, I didn't even know what Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar was when I put it on, except the latest Kristen Wiig-starring vehicle which she co-wrote with co-star Annie Mumolo (her real life BFF and co-writer on Bridesmaids). In the wake of The Pause, a LOT of films were shunted on to Video-On-Demand or streaming services with little advertising or fanfare. Barb and Star was one of those.
The most I knew of Barb and Star... was the promotional poster images, the bright Floridian inspired pastels that seem...I dunno, like Postcards from the Edge: Redux. It wasn't inspiring me to watch, or even seek out more information. It just said "comedy...for your parents."
The thing I forget is, I'm now a parent, and the comedy that's made for me is, well, often made for me. But all too often comedy features are just bland, for-the-masses-but-for-noone comedy (like 75% of Melissa McCarthy's or Jason Bateman's individual outputs [and 100% of their together-output]). I was lumping Barb and Star... into that tired "for the masses" group. Even loving Bridesmaids and knowing that Wiig's sensibilities of comedy aren't really that mainstream, I couldn't even bother to watch a trailer.
It was a podcast recommendation that got me to put the film on... and all the person said was that they were watching Barb and Star... again and their cohosts seconded how great an idea it was. I still knew nothing about the film, except that one group of reviewers seemed to think that this was a film worth watching repeatedly.
Well, I've watched it twice now in the span of a week, and I may watch it again very soon. Wiig is great, playing dual roles (we'll get to that), Mumolo who I don't know if I've ever seen (or at least noticed her) on screen is fabulous, and, oh, Jamie Dornan steals the whole goddamn thing out from under them. Yes, that Jamie Dornan. He's the goddamn highlight of the movie and the most central part of what will bring me back to the film.
But what is this film?
Let me explain the opening sequence. A young Asian-American boy rides his bicycle delivering newspapers, headphones on, singing emphatically along to the Barbara Streisand/Barry Gibb duet Guilty. The production of this opening sequence is phenomenal, with Greenbaum creating a grandiose sense of scope providing overhead shots of the bike riding down the center of the street, and the boy's very casual distribution of the newspapers until he stops dead in front of one house, his last paper to deliver, the music cutting out, and an ominous moment of score subbing in. From the POV of the house the newspaper hits the porch with a thud. We cut back to the boy, who gives a menacing look, and without changing expression, busts back into "Guilty" and the music kicks back in over him and his emphatic expressions return.
It's a brilliantly crafted opening that upends every expectation I had going into this film (and I honestly had no expectations). But what was that all about? Why the sinister moment? What the actual eff....?
Moments later the boy is biking out of civilization, stops in front of a tree, is scanned by a robotic owl perched on a branch, and the tree opens to reveal an elevator. It descends into the secret lair of Sharon Fisherman, a strikingly pale albino woman, with a severe jet black wig and a gap in her front teeth. Is that... Tilda Swinton? Nope, it's Kristen Wiig basically made up to look Swinton-esque. She's basically a Bond villain who is crafting a plan of revenge involving killer mosquitos. The boy, Yoyo (Reyn Doi), is adopted/abducted child/protege while the doe-eyed, doting handsome Edgar (Dornan) is her loyal lackey whom she has wrapped around her finger. She is sending him to Vista Del Mar to enact a revenge plot against the town that abused her as a teen.
Yeah, this is where the movie starts.
It's a good 10 minutes before we meet the titular Barb and Star, sitting on the couch having an old fashioned mid-western gab session, speaking a mile a minute, occasionally pausing to enjoy the rhythms of Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like A Woman" and drink their tea. We catch a glimpse into their lives, their history, their personalities in this introduction, it's everything we need to know. These women are best friends, with shared losses (one is widowed, the other divorced). They work and live together, and are basically inseparable. They're so of the same mind that they continue each others run-on sentences. But that means that when their lives are uprooted suddenly that they dare to do something wild, like go visit the middle-age paradise of Vista Del Mar ("View of the mar"/"View of the swordfish" they say in tandem).
Arriving in Florida and their hotel, they are greeted by a grandiose musical song-and-dance number. It's that kind of movie. They are like kids in a candy store, just awed by everything without any sense of where to start. They want to do it all. In the evening at the bar (with arch piano accompaniment from famed comedic lounge act Richard Cheese) they meet a lovelorn Edgar and they hit it off, and the night.gets.weird.
The next day, Edgar makes his walk of shame only to discover he's accidentally botched his mission, while the two once-inseparable women start talking deceit so they can go see Edgar independently. From there Star learns that she can be loved even as a divorcee, Barb learns to embrace her independence, and Edgar learns that relationships don't need to be toxic. Even Sharon Fisherman learns that, if she lets go of her bitterness, she can find acceptance. But it's a radically goofy ride along the way.
Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar is just utter bananas. Every scene is completely unexpected and the laughs are so unique, most of which is derived from this veritable swarm of delightful characters crafted in this film. Barb and Star are indeed so alike and yet Wiig and Mumalo still manage to give them distinguishing characteristics and personalities.
Dornan's boy-in-puppy-love routine is endlessly hilarious, even if it hits its goofiest heights in his adorably literal rock-ballad musical-number "Edgar's Prayer" early in the film. It's the shot in the face that the dull but handsome rich man of 50 Shades... needed. It takes that image and twists and twists and twists until its unrecognizeable, and Dornan is so earnestly game, but also completely capable comedically.
This is a big, friendly cartoon of a movie. There's nothing threatening here (except the hilarious Vanessa Bayer as the sole perpetrator of the famous midwestern passive-aggresive pleasantness in the role of grand diva of Talking Club), and it doesn't punch down on anyone which is why it works so well. It could easily be taking a chunk out of midwestern women, or Floridians, or that guy who is always walking around in his yellow speedo, but it embraces them all for their own quirky weirdness. It's a film that accepts everyone. Everyone except Gail, who arrived just after 6:00 and is therefore not welcome to Talking Club - nor a bowl of hot dog soup - this day.
No comments:
Post a Comment