Margo Martindale

  • The Hollars (2016)

    The Hollars (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, September 2021) While writer-director-actor John Krasinski earned rave reviews as director of A Quiet Place, he already had two feature-length movies in his filmography before his horror breakout. The Hollars is the second of them, and it falls squarely in that favourite playground of low-budget independent cinema: the dysfunctional family dramedy, coupled with a “city boy comes back to town” plot to tie it all together. A cherubic beardless Krasinski anchors the picture as the prodigal son coming back to his childhood home after his mom gets ill — only to discover a bankrupt father, bitter brother, clinging ex-girlfriend and the realization of the fears holding him back from marrying his pregnant girlfriend. This is thoroughly familiar stuff, only slightly elevated by decent execution and a rather good cast. While such familiar names as Anne Kendrick, Sharlto Copley, Charlie Day, and Richard Jenkins add to the film, it’s Margo Martindale who earns the most attention in a tough part as a sick matriarch. The rest of the film is not bad, but it is familiar enough to be forgettable, and there are enough half-sketched subplots to make anyone wonder if the film ended up stuck between comedy and drama, instead aiming for a half-satisfying compromise. Watchable but not memorable, The Hollars is an honourable result for Krasinski, but a pale precursor to his next films.

  • The Kitchen (2019)

    The Kitchen (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) Performative female empowerment, 1970s cosplay and antiheroic rhetoric smash into each other in The Kitchen, a crime thriller taking us back to 1978 NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood to show how three mob wives turn to crime in order to make ends meet while their husbands are in prison. It’s no accident if the film happens to showcase three of the most notable actresses of the moments in a search for serious drama credentials: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss, all thoroughly deglammed and relishing their tough-girl roles. Haddish arguably gets the most out of it: Moss’s dramatic credentials are solid and McCarthy’s been pretty good in off-persona dramatic roles, but Haddish’s career has been almost entirely comic to date, so there’s something new for her to do here. In bits and pieces, The Kitchen is fun: while the narrative is often ham-fisted in how to get from Point A to Point B, seeing our heroines discover some self-resourcefulness as underdogs is an engrossing crowd-pleasing arc. Writer-director Andrea Berloff has fun with her material, Margo Martindale has a good supporting turn and Trump gets a not-so-subtle slam in passing. Highlights include a romantic meet-cute in which a supporting hero (Domhnall Gleeson) meets one of the heroines by shooting her would-be rapist dead, then teaching her how to dismember the body and dump it in the river. (Dismemberment becomes such a recurring motif in this film that it becomes almost comic in its predictability—whelp, someone’s getting dismembered at the end of this scene!) Alas, this leads us to The Kitchen’s more vexing aspect, which is to say its problematic use of violence as empowerment. While the film does lead us closer to a realization that the real antagonists are male-dominated power structures, the underdog status of the heroines turns into hubris. With an ending that’s not as retributive as one could hope for, the film doesn’t even approach an argument that violence is not necessarily more acceptable when it’s perpetrated by women—hypocrisy becomes real in the film’s last-act ballet of revenge when the husbands are released from prison and the action goes all over the place. (Unlike other movies, The Kitchen is weakly-built enough that it does not earn its use of violence.) A few twists punctuate the end of the film, leaving an impression that there’s a better movie somewhere in The Kitchen that is not fully realized—and, in fact, may not be fully realizable at the moment where violence is portrayed as being good as long as it’s committed by the good people on the bad people.