Mia Wasikowska

  • Judy & Punch (2019)

    Judy & Punch (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) I wasn’t all that fond of writer-director Mirrah Foulkes’s Judy & Punch, and half of it has to do with ignorance, and the other half with mood. The ignorance part first: While I know the Punch & Judy puppet show is an integral part of mainstream Anglo-Saxon culture, I was never exposed to those at an impressionable age, nor did I find much to like when I was finally made aware of it. As a result, an entire film built on a feminist subversion of the puppet show conventions is largely lost on me. The other half of my lack of enthusiasm for the result is plainly a matter of mood — I simply wasn’t in a mood for black comedy featuring the death of a baby and the violent dismemberment of its antagonist by the protagonist. While there are nice odd touches of humour in the opening moments of Judy & Punch, I stopped caring shortly afterwards, and stopped liking not much later. Neither Mia Wasikowska nor Damon Herriman impress much in the lead roles. Some films are like that — no matter how well they’re made, they just don’t work on specific people at specific times.

  • Maps to the Stars (2014)

    Maps to the Stars (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) As someone who will systematically watch any movie about movies, it stands to reason that I would eventually make my way to Maps to the Stars, a Hollywood melodrama that, at least at first, appears to be about the dark underbelly of Hollywood. Director David Cronenberg, in the middle of his realistic period, turns his attention to the twisted tale of a burn victim, a screwed-up child actor, a driver, an actress chasing her dead mother, and an abusive help-help guru… plus the ghosts. So many ghosts: roughly a third of the cast is undead, popping up at various times to discuss matters with the living protagonists. It’s weird all right, but in a restrained way that owes more to incoherent melodrama than to fantastic cinema. While Cronenberg can here benefit from a striking cast (including what is, in retrospect, one of the first movies to show that Robert Pattinson would have a better career than being pigeonholed as a teen heartthrob) and a rich subject matter to treat with his usual cynicism, Maps to the Stars ends up being a substantial disappointment. Despite a wild story that eventually ends up in depraved incestuous abusive territory, my own biggest letdown was realizing how little of the story actually had anything to do with Hollywood or the movie industry: with very little retooling, the story could end up being about tech billionaires, oil magnates or Manhattan financiers without losing much of its third act. It’s about the problems of the rich and screwed up, and Hollywood is more an enabler than the main topic of discussion. Even in leaving that aside, Maps to the Stars does suffers from a lack of tonal unity and narrative coherence: the story flutters from one thing to another in a way that has more to do with TV series plotting than a sustained film. Despite the increasing sex and violence, it doesn’t build to a big satisfying narrative finale—although those who had “sex scene between Pattinson and Julianne Moore” on their movie-watching bingo card should be happy. Mia Wasikowska is curiously underutilized despite a potentially rich role, and the use of fantastic plot devices really doesn’t end up meaning much. I still like some of it—it’s rare for a film to commit so fully to tragic melodrama—, but this is really far from being the best movie possible with those elements. In other words—quirky, intriguing but neither successful nor satisfying. I’ve seen worse this week, but there’s a frustrating amount of unrealized potential in Maps to the Stars.

  • Piercing (2018)

    Piercing (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) Maybe Piercing is about a man with an urge for serial killing. Maybe it’s a dream. Maybe he leaves for a “business trip” and checks himself into a hotel to hire a prostitute he intends to kill. Maybe it’s not important that a hotel would be a terrible place (logistically speaking) for that kind of thing. Maybe Ryū Murakami’s novel, from which this is adapted, makes more sense. Maybe he tries to kill her, except it goes wrong and now he’s got to go to the hospital with her. Maybe writer-director Nicolas Pesce knows what he’s doing. Maybe the prostitute comes back to him with a plan of her own. Maybe the obvious use of miniatures and unreal sets feeds into the film’s strong visual style. Maybe both leads have a long conversation in which it’s not clear whether sex or death or food is on the menu. Maybe Mia Wasikowska does better than Christopher Abbott in a role within a minimal cast. Maybe the strong sense of exploitation filmmaking begins before the opening credits with pseudo-VHS effects and a 1970s-inspired credit sequence. Maybe he eventually decides to kill her. Maybe the giallo soundtrack points to this being a dark thriller dipping in horror from time to time. Maybe the characters are so spectacularly abnormal that it’s useless to hope for anything approaching traditional characterization. Maybe Piercing is a style exercise where the narrative can be fun to follow through its initial twists and turns but eventually flops upon itself by not leading anywhere and not being all that interesting. Maybe.

  • Alice through the Looking Glass (2016)

    Alice through the Looking Glass (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, July 2018) Considering that I really disliked the 2010 Tim Burton live-action remake of Alice in Wonderland (for being dull and ugly, mainly, but also useless), I really didn’t have very high expectations for the sequel, and in fact delayed its viewing for more than a year before its impending disappearance from Netflix hurried matters along.  To my surprise, I actually liked Alice through the Looking Glass a bit better.  But here’s the crucial distinction: I liked the aspects of the sequel that wandered further from the original, and still disliked whatever linked the film to its predecessor.  I’ll allow that Mia Wasikowska is fine as the lead actress. Otherwise, though, the farther away the film runs with its time-traveling concept, the better it becomes.  Alice through the Looking Glass never breaks out of the increasingly mechanistic nature of 2010s fantasy films, but it does have some fun along the way, playing with grand visuals and peeking at younger (and less ugly) versions of the characters.  Heck, even the story is slightly more original than the usual time-travel stuff. Even the chronological theme does harken back to the Lewis Carroll mathematical games in the original novel.  It’s when the sequel clings to the original that it becomes much weaker.  Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is just as annoying as in the first film, Helena Bonham Carter’s character is still grotesque, and what the heck is Anne Hathaway doing with her hands in that role?  Pink’s catchy “Just Like Fire” anthem song makes for a nice single illustrating an expensive-looking end credit sequence but has nothing to do with anything in the film, the series or Lewis’ legacy.  As for the science-fictional devices, forget it – time-travel here is a story device that explicitly positions itself as taking place in an unchanging timeline.  Even the framing device fails to find a satisfying denouement, showing quite a bit of laziness in the story department that fails to properly support the visual aspect of the film.  And I won’t talk about the inevitable tendency of modern sequels to over-explain everything in their entire pocket universe.  I still don’t think Alice through the Looking Glass is a good movie, but at least it’s better than its predecessor, and it offers a few good moments even as the rest of the film drowns it in market-mandatory mediocrity.

  • Crimson Peak (2015)

    Crimson Peak (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2016) Every so often, a movie manages to make me happy by sheer force of execution. Given that Crimson Peak is Guillermo del Toro’s return to dark fantasy in the vein of El Espinazo del Diablo and Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s not a surprise if the film is a sumptuous success in terms of atmosphere and visual design. Never mind the simple but satisfying story, the movie’s main set-piece is a decaying British manor in which snow falls through a hole in the roof, red clay oozes from the floor and vicious winds make the house creak and breathe. Crimson Peak is Gothic goodness pushed to a delirious limit, and the film is an eye-popping visual feast from beginning to end. The story may be predictable, but it acts as a decent framework for the atmosphere and the images, with capable supporting roles by Jessica Chastain (playing against type), Tom Hiddleston and Mia Wasikowska. Still, the real star here is del Toro, orchestrating lavish production values, fine-tuning his script until even the one-liners click and infusing a mature approach to genre elements in a unique mixture. Much like his previous dark fantasy films, Crimson Peak isn’t quite a horror movie, isn’t quite a ghost story and isn’t quite a Gothic romance: it’s a blend of elements that somehow fit together in a way that pays homage to a tradition without being slaved to it. It plays with tropes, gets much better in time (the first half-hour is hit-and-miss, but once the film makes it to the manor, it kicks in a different gear) and doesn’t let plot simplicity in the way of packing a lot of layers, call-backs, foreshadowing and allusions. If this review feels slightly giddy, it’s because I’m writing it still under the influence of the film—it’s a terrific piece of work, the kind of which gets essential at a time when all blockbusters are made for mass consumption. Crimson Peak may not be for everyone, and that makes it even better.

  • Stoker (2013)

    Stoker (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2014) Oh, what a fiendishly troubled family relationship is set up in Stoker‘s unapologetic gothic madness. Big foreboding house, dead father, crazy mother, troubled daughter and deranged uncle: it’s all there, along with generous helpings of tentative incest and confirmed murder. It takes a special kind of audience to play along, but director Park Chan-wook’s stylish direction means that everything look good even as the script makes no effort to be anything but a deep genre homage. The film surely takes its own time setting up all of its elements: Stoker is moody and contemplative at the best of time. It doesn’t help that the entire film exists in its own reality out of time, the characters living in personal orbits that have more to do with Hitchcockian homage than anything else. Mia Wasikowska is remarkable as the introspective teenage heroine, easily stealing the spotlight away from Nicole Kidman’s by-the-number deranged mother, but it’s Matthew Goode who gets the acclaim with his Anthony-Perkinsesque role as the visiting Uncle Charles, as his handsome features barely disguise a completely demented mind. The best moments of the film are in the heroine’s reactions to his psychopathy, as they take us farther from classical gothic thrillers and into something quite a bit more twisted. And then there’s the sumptuous direction, which imbues a great deal of class to a script that could have been handled as schlock in less-experienced hands. Where Stoker isn’t as successful is in doing anything with the elements at its disposition. Much of the third-act revelations are obvious, whereas what actually happens during the conclusion feels a bit flat despite the increasing amount of blood being spilled. Stoker makes more sense on a shot-per-shot basis than a sustained film, but the direction is so striking at times that it’s hard to be all that disappointed in the result.