I have pretty much given up trying to anticipate anything
that Jon S. Baird does. With each new release, he not only creates something
that stands out wholly from anything else that’s released next to it, but even
from the previous production Baird worked on. He's gone from the psychological
dark comedy of Filth to the vaudeville tragedy of Stan & Ollie… to a Cold
War-era political thriller wearing the skin of a corporate biopic in Tetris.
Well, we seem to have found my limit when it comes to movies about the magic of movies. Following up his one-shot-trick feature 1917 (and bringing back DP Roger Deakins and editor Lee Smith), Sam Mendes has decided to get in on the recent trend of storied filmmakers tipping their hats to the art form they exist in. But where directors like Steven Spielberg and George Miller and even Ti West had a sturdy head on their shoulders when tackling that level of idealism, what Mendes and company have cooked up here is… well, cooked.
Scott Cooper knows a good idea when he sees it. As much as I’ve been pretty lukewarm on the films of his I’ve reviewed in Black Mass and Antlers, they’re both built on sturdy foundations. With the former, it was a different take on the standard crime drama that must’ve clung to Joel Edgerton’s brain since then, seeing as his recent turn in The Stranger turned out quite similar in purpose and thematic drive. And with the latter, it was a creature feature that used a wendigo as a monster metaphor for parental abuse and the trauma associated with it; a properly fascinating direction to take such things. And with his latest, he’s found another potential gold mine in the 2003 Louis Bayard novel The Pale Blue Eye, a detective story set on the American frontier and co-starring Edgar Allen Poe, serving as much a tribute to his style of American Gothic horror as it is to his lineage as the godfather of detective fiction at large.
Of course, this also brings in the main problem I keep running into with Scott Cooper as a filmmaker: He can recognise good story ideas, but isn’t necessarily well-equipped to make the most out of them on the screen. Black Mass, in better hands, could’ve been the gangster answer to Citizen Kane with its storytelling, but Cooper kept settling for more bog-standard tropes within the genre. And in Antlers, he kept burying the best aspects of the story underneath everything else he wanted to get into, watering down the potent ideas at its core. And unfortunately, the same is true of this, which shows Cooper once again losing track of the story’s strong point in favour of… well, just more of the usual.
And coming from these particular creatives, I’d lying if I said I was entirely hopeful that this could hold up alongside those other two classic efforts. This is directed and co-written by Gil Kenan, who is not only co-writer on the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but who we last checked in on with the totally unnecessary remake of Poltergeist, and also co-written by Ol Parker of Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again fame. If nothing else, this should be make for some interesting write-up fodder.
