The lengthy Oscar season is already in progress, and in at least one small respect it’s proving – in a near-anomaly – entirely devoid of Meryl Streep. This despite Streep having a performance in the hunt, and rather a game one, too. As the grizzled, bourbon-marinated title character of Jonathan Demme’s suitably messy messed-up family drama Ricki and the Flash (Sony, 12), she’s not straining to impress, and the result is more airily human than a number of her more heavily worked (and heavily honoured) turns of late.
As an underachieving bar-band rocker and prodigal mum, reluctantly lured home to face three adult children with personal crises of their own, she’s only playing notionally against type – we knew from Postcards from the Edge, for example, that soused embitterment and lusty, rootsy singing are well within her skill set. But it’s pleasing, in the film’s fleeting but fraught stretches of real domestic tension, to see this perennially capable actress forced to play someone at a loss as to how to act, or react; one wishes Demme’s loosey-goosey rhythm and Diablo Cody’s quippy script were willing to push Ricki’s many issues further. I referred to Ricki as the title character earlier, though Streep may as well be credited as the Flash, too: she’s the hot, close-to-burnout lightbulb around which this film amiably flits.
Also sitting out the Oscar race, following a surprise omission from the Academy’s documentary shortlist, is The Wolfpack (Spectrum, 15), a Sundance sensation that draws you in with its stranger-than-fiction promise – but doesn’t press hard for facts. Director Crystal Moselle is justly enamoured of the peculiarities of her subject, or subjects: six lank-haired, movie-fixated teenage brothers on Manhattan’s Lower East Side who have been aggressively sheltered from society by their father. Home-schooled and permitted to leave their claustrophobic apartment only a handful of times a year, they’ve never heard of Google, but stage elaborate reenactments of their favourite films, from Reservoir Dogs to Gone With the Wind. It’s a situation outlandish enough to recall Greek black comedy Dogtooth, yet I can’t help being wary of this haphazardly structured film, in which so few pertinent questions are asked or answered – beginning with why Moselle was granted access to this cultish household in the first place – that even its most poignant observational details obscure more than they reveal.
It has somehow taken three years for Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep (StudioCanal, 15) to shuffle its way over to our shores, during which time this already lukewarm political thriller hasn’t gained much extra heat. Still, Redford’s sturdily old-school directing sensibility, plus a sincere streak of still-burning 60s-radical idealism, make easy watching of this tale of a a former Weather Underground militant (Redford) gone overground in colder millennial climes. The film is both overcast and over-cast: name actors from Shia LaBeouf to Susan Sarandon lend a clubby feel to proceedings, though it’s a kick to see Julie Christie back in her counterculture element.
Still, it’s a more respectable gig than Heist (Lionsgate, 15), a good-natured but junkier-than-junket B-movie that fulfils the generic requirements of its title and no more, and scarcely seems able to afford Robert De Niro’s services as a hardened casino boss. Still, it’s superior trash to two wholly vacant sequels, rickety horror routine Sinister 2 (Entertainment One, 15) and the Jason Statham-less The Transporter Refuelled (Icon, 15), rounding out the DVD pile this week.
With pre-1970s cinema still a regrettably sparse shelf in the Netflix library, it’s hard to determine much guiding reason behind certain vintage selections: Stanley Kramer’s modestly regarded On the Beach seems a particularly random recent addition. Having never seen this 1959 adaptation of Nevil Shute’s doomsday novel, however, I found my curiosity rewarded. It creaks in many of the expected places – as many of Kramer’s once-nutritious message pictures now do – but there’s a stark, bleak practicality to this study of military intelligentsia and civilians alike muddling through a post-nuclear fug that holds up as unexpectedly modern. Kramer was no one’s idea of a visionary film-maker, but he was an empathetic one; even as the all-star performances (by Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins et al, some embellished with wobbly Australian accents) occasionally freeze up, this is a moving curio.
