Tropic Sprockets
BY IAN BROCKWAY
KONK LIFE COLUMNIST
In style and content, Justin Simien’s “Dear White People” speaks about the daring and influence of Spike Lee as much as addresses Obama’s intent for harmony. In big bold images akin to a graphic novel. The director places his audience within the pastoral, yet claustrophobic realm of Winchester College, an Ivy League institution.
With dry tones reminiscent of Whit Stillman’s “Damsels in Distress,” college radio host Samantha White (Tessa Thompson) presents a biting show titled “Dear White People” and a newsletter “Ebony and Ivy.”
As a protest, she runs for head of her residence, wanting to make the hall exclusively for black students. This sets off an acidic war with Kurt Fletcher (Kyle Gallner) an aloof and narcissistic boy, the son of the college president. Coco (Teyona Parris) is the princess-like student who wants to uphold stratification and keep the status quo of Winchester just as it is.
Lionel (Tyler James Williams) is the bookish outsider with a wild Afro who is approached to get the story on the racial tension through these hallowed halls. No one gets off easy in this film. Every character presents a ruse, a masquerade or a mania, and the film empties its ammunition upon every persona and type.
All of the characters bite and jab one another with the exception of Lionel, who is a walker on the fringe. Every person becomes embroiled in a nest of scorpions. Sly is the concoction reserved for Obama whose complacency and hopes are well lampooned: His positivity is jabbed upon in Samantha’s film “The Re-Birth of a Nation” showing people in white face makeup, disappointed in the Obama Dream.
The most corrosive accents are engineered for Spike Lee’s oeuvre as his charged characters are satirized by turning obsessive and narrow in intent. There are still shots of silent men in rigid impassivity as if in parody of and tribute to “Do The Right Thing.” A party scene presents racism with an appropriate stinging sleaziness, showing humans locked in their own stereotypical prisons of cartoons, ill-realism and coercion. With Obama in office or not, racism rears its filthy, anemic head under the All Hallows’ Eve of inappropriate kitsch, and Money, its green-eyed cousin, waits to brand itself and consume every person regardless of his or her persona or spirit.
Gone Girl
David Fincher’s “Gone Girl” has arrived again at The Tropic, based on Gillian Flynn’s page-zipping novel. Fincher (The Social Network) has wonderfully brought out the alien and isolating quality of this contemporary “surprise” story. The director’s trademark visual tints of gray-green and brown are well in evidence here, making every person look as if they are either confined in a computer screen, or have morphed into a group of trapped bugs under smoked glass.
Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is a lethargic husband. Once, he had the virile curls of a superhero — he was writing well and in love with an effervescent and bubbling Amy (Rosamund Pike) who appears as rare as Tiffany glass. Indeed with the cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth, Amy shines, a pale and racy dollop of feminine mercury.
In impressionistic snippets, we get small details of Nick and Amy’s marital adventures, complete with steam and motion, as Amy caresses and tears at Nick’s clothes almost in the style of an Adrian Lynne (Fatal Attraction) film. But then, Nick gets laid off. The lovebirds argue and events go south. On the morning of their anniversary , Nick leaves for work at his bar. After a talk with his sister (Carrie Coon), he receives a call that his door is left open with his indoor cat outside. He races home to find his McMansion empty. Amy is gone.
The film is punchily edited to give a knock in the eye and heart with each image alternately running across your field of vision either like cool syrup, or throttling adrenaline. Ben Affleck is perfect as the monotone polo shirted Everyman, Nick. He mumbles often and it is a nice touch that, as in the novel, he is a man who is both inhibited and haphazard with his emotions: they just don’t match.
Nick Dunne is clearly Affleck’s best work. This is a visceral haunt story in the best sense as taut and anxious as “The Silence of the Lambs.” Rosamund Pike too, is terrific. She has the ability to seem like a chimerical spirit, not of the flesh even though she is clearly ambulatory.
Neil Patrick Harris delivers well as a milquetoast creep who lives in a Thomas Kincade style house as if remodeled by Stanley Kubrick. Also well cast is the acting of Tyler Perry, as a vain but obsessively detailed and controlling lawyer.
Under David Fincher, the overriding and well executed tone is one of remoteness, creepy nonchalance and transgression and we are never sure of what is about to transpire, no matter if it details this couple’s past, present or future. The film has one singular scene that almost outdoes Hitchcock in one anoxic and jarring moment that will sneak up on you quicker than the snap of some nouveau riche bed sheets. But no spoiler here.
“Gone Girl” is kaleidoscopic , spacey, askew and masterful in its millennial noir, but better still, it might have you sincerely disturbed about this particular arc of a shared life and the elements contained within.
Write Ian at [email protected]
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