Jeffrey Wright

  • Westworld, Season 3 (2020)

    Westworld, Season 3 (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Obviously, Westworld could never stay confined to the park for more than a few seasons, and so this third season of the series boldly takes us to the outside world, with androids not only exploring it but also changing it irremediably. It’s a bold move, introducing a new main character (played by Aaron Paul) and taking up the issues of control versus self-determination into a wider context. The production design of this third season is exceptional, credibly presenting (through shooting in modern East Asian cities) a future vision of 2040s Los Angeles with automated cars, mood-showing T-shirts and oppressive social control. Wait, where did all of that come from? Yes, that’s where Westworld is showing its seams. Down to the new visual motifs of this season, we’re presented with so many new elements in exploring this future that there’s reason to believe that half of it is being made up as the series goes along rather than being part of a coherent plan. There’s little in the first two seasons to suggest Rehoboam the all-controlling AI, except as a thematic counterpart to the morality plays taking place in the parks. As a result, much of this Season 3 feels half-rushed, half-indulgent. Even though the first two seasons’ ten-episode plans had plenty of fat to trim, this eight-episode series still couldn’t keep the series’ worst pseudo-profound moralism at bay. There’s no baseline depiction of the world under Rehoboam—our sole significant new character is an underclass, which doesn’t give us a good yardstick to judge the philosophical conflict taking place in this third season. It probably doesn’t help that I have somewhat significant differences with the series’ morality so far. I’ve been Team Maeve since the beginning; I see Delores as a villain despite a last-minute contrition; I have trouble seeing Serac as a monster despite the series’ insistence that I should; and most of all, I am terribly unhappy with the series’ “light the match, burn everything up, let the survivors choose” approach to global revolution and eventual human extinction event—the best way to effect social change is to coopt the comfortable middle class, but I’ve given up on the series taking such a reasonable technocratic approach when it can play with its characters becoming gunslingers, ninjas and social revolutionaries. But, of course, we’re midway through a six-season arc with no way of knowing where it’s going (except for increasingly loud hints of an apocalypse coming up). At least there’s enough to keep us interested on a micro level. Everyone is turning in decent work on the acting front (although I’ve never been much of an Aaron Paul fan), and there’s something quietly amusing in the way the series’ actors are constantly given different personalities to play. Still, some character arcs (maybe even the season as a whole) feel like throat-clearing and seat warming before later events. While Thandie Newton is a constant delight, her character seems a caricature of previous seasons. Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard also seems to be biding his time until there’s a real role for him to play, and Ed Harris’s William seems increasingly contrived. This season was clearly all about Rachel Evan Wood’s Dolores, but this is wearing thin when you could reliably predict that none of her many enemies would manage to stop her before The Plan was revealed. The series has good ideas and set-pieces (Williams’s self-therapy session being one of them), even though its reach often exceeds its grasp—the “genre” drug sequence didn’t quite match its potential. Still, and this is significant, Westworld remains insanely ambitious and daring for a flagship cable TV show—It could have contrived a way to remain in the park, but chose a vastly riskier route. I may not love the results as much as I did in previous seasons, but I’m still on-board to see where it takes us next.

  • The Goldfinch (2019)

    The Goldfinch (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) The truth about filmmaking is that so many people are involved and so many things can go wrong that it’s almost a miracle when something good comes out of the process: Good movies are the exception, not the default. This is true no matter your budget, your actors or your source material. While you can try to stack the deck with seasoned professionals, the result is still often a game of luck. (And now you know why Hollywood loves the sequels.) So it is that with The Goldfinch, producers certainly did get the best of everything—an award-winning novel, a seasoned screenwriter, a handful of great actors, Roger Deakins doing cinematography, enough budget to do justice to the story’s globe-spanning narrative, and all of the other production niceties afforded to a prestige drama. (I’m sure the catering must have been really nice.) This thing is taking us to the Oscars, they must have thought. And yet, and yet—nobody knows anything and, in the end, The Goldfinch is a messy, unwieldy adaptation of a novel that probably should have been best handled as a TV series (if at all) than as an unfocused, herky-jerky two-hours-and-a-half train wreck. The weird result blends genre thrills and pretentious narrative conceits in an attempt at becoming a so-called serious drama. In this regard, it reminded me a lot of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close—along with sharing terrorism plot points and Jeffrey Wright—although I suspect that The Goldfinch is far too ludicrous to age as gracefully. If you’re looking for solace while you’re stuck in the film’s interminable length and ludicrous plot points, you can at least point at the actors, some of them used against type (Luke Wilson), others in more familiar characters (Wright) but none of them are any more comfortable with the results, as they are prisoners of a script that jerks characters around like puppets. While The Goldfinch is not strictly bad (it looks far too good for that), it’s just not very pleasant to watch most of the time. Even the structure tries for a collage and ends up with what feels like undisciplined flashbacks. But worse of all is the feeling that The Goldfinch had Best-Picture-of-the-Year ambitions and then, through hubris or complacency, completely wasted everything it had at its disposal.

  • Cadillac Records (2008)

    Cadillac Records (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) It’s not easy to make a successful ensemble musical biography, but Cadillac Records does manage to put together a fun and intriguing look at the life of Lionel Chess and the heydays of Chess Records, a pivotal Chicago-based record company that played a crucial role in rhythm-and-blues, as well as the formation of early rock-and-roll. The ensemble cast clearly has fun playing musical legends, what with Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters, Beyoncé as Etta James, Eamonn Walker as Howlin’ Wolf and Mos Def as Chuck Berry, with Adrian Brody as producer Leonard Chess. Writer-director Darnell Martin’s script doesn’t stray far from either the truth or the music movies clichés, but it does have a good narrative rhythm to it. It’s perhaps most remarkable for focusing on a label rather than just a single artist, giving us a glimpse of the relationships between a group of people moving forward in time. The characters are memorable, their stories remain interesting and the music is about as good as it could be. Don’t be surprised to want to revisit Cadillac Records only for the music, leaving it as background ambiance while doing other things.

  • Source Code (2011)

    Source Code (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2011) I wasn’t as fond of Duncan Jones’ Moon as a lot of people were, but I was really interested in seeing his follow-up effort, and Source Code does not disappoint.  The theme of the deceived protagonist is still there, the setting is just as constrained and the scientific premises is just as wobbly (not to mention a nonsensical title), but Jones here has a bigger budget, a bigger concept, bigger stars and a faster pace.  Ben Ripley’s disaster-movie premise script is ingenious, but it’s paired with other well-paced revelations and the interweaving of both plotlines is effectively achieved.  Jake Gyllenhaal is hitting his stride as a heroic protagonist, with good supporting work from Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga and a halting Jeffrey Wright.  Still, the real star here is writer/director Jones, who delivers a fast, clever and entertaining film with some depth and artful gloss.  The ending manages to be elegiac and optimistic at once, and provides a surprising amount of thematic depth for what could have easily been a straight-up genre exercise.  We don’t get quite enough SF movies like Source Code, but given the boost it will give to Jones’ career, chances are that we will get a few more.