Film review

  • Late Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nisha Ganatra (2019)

    At the start of Late Night, Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) is receiving some kind of lifetime achievement award for comedy.  In her acceptance speech, she expresses obligatory astonishment, asking why America should bestow such an honour on an Englishwoman.  The audience at the ceremony laughs contentedly even though Katherine’s knowing, borderline scornful tone makes for charmless delivery.  It’s hard to tell whether this is part of her performing persona (and recognised as such by her audience) or just the effect that Emma Thompson usually has when she’s doing sardonic.  At any rate, it’s the first in a succession of puzzles in Nisha Ganatra’s comedy-drama, written by and co-starring Mindy Kaling.

    Katherine, who first came to public attention as a young stand-up, has become an institution and a phenomenon – the only woman to host a long-running late-evening talk show on US television.  Its ratings have been in steady decline, though, and it’s not far into the film when the new-broom head of the TV channel (Amy Ryan, miscast again) informs her that the current season of the show will be Katherine’s last.  Committed to ‘excellence’ and implacably opposed to dumbing down, she has for years chosen to interview academics and serious politicians in preference to popular celebrities – but increasing numbers of people don’t want to watch, let alone listen to, Doris Kearns Goodwin or Dianne Feinstein.  Those two examples of her guests might suggest Katherine is keen to give air time to women with something to say yet she also has the reputation of not liking her own sex.  She strongly denies the charge, which appears to be based entirely on the team of scriptwriters for her nightly opening monologue being all-male.  She fires these writers at the drop of a hat, however.  When the latest vacancy occurs, Katherine, without enthusiasm, instructs her long-suffering producer Brad (Denis O’Hare) to hire a woman to the team.

    That’s how Molly Patel (Kaling) enters the picture – just at the moment that Katherine herself is told she’s fired.  Molly, who looks to be in her mid- to late thirties, has no previous experience of TV scripting. she works in quality control at a chemical plant in Pennsylvania but she does amateur stand-up, for which she writes her own material, and is an avid fan of the show.  Brad is interviewing Molly and it’s not going well for her until he takes a call from Katherine midway through.  In order to be able to say he’s done as she told him to, Brad hires Molly on the spot.  Once in the job, Molly is the only member of the team with constructive ideas of how the host might transform her public image and the show’s fortunes.  She recommends that Katherine, in spite of her aversion to all things Internet, should start doing person-in-the-street videos that can go, and might go viral, online; exploit social media; and, in her monologues, express her own views rather than speak the words that others have written for her.

    Emma Thompson, although she is throughout on top of her character rather than inside it, has some of her best moments in Katherine’s reactions to Molly’s nervous but determined and admiring attempts to persuade her to try new things.  When Molly tells Katherine how inspiring she’s found her comedy (at one point, Molly watches video of the young Emma Thompson doing stand-up, presumably in the 1980s, on her laptop screen), Katherine awkwardly replies, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way but your earnestness can be very hard to be around’.  Mindy Kaling is likeable and shows in her face, though subtly, how often unkind remarks penetrate her defences.  There’s more authenticity in her acting than in her screenplay, though.

    Katherine’s alleged misogyny isn’t explored but serves a dual purpose that reflects Late Night’s approach more broadly.  It’s a handy set-up, designed to emphasise Molly in the scheme of the film.  Although introduced as one of Katherine’s idiosyncrasies, it also functions as a criticism of how American television actually and generally operates:  according to The Guardian, ‘Of all genres, US late-night TV remains [the most] dominated by male writers and hosts’.  Molly is a diversity hire – as was Mindy Kaling, born in America to Indian parents, when she joined the cast and writing team of The Office in 2005.  Kaling clearly knows what she’s writing about but her use of Katherine as a vehicle for critiquing media politics raises confusing issues that she and Nisha Ganatra, a Canadian who’s also of Indian descent and may well have faced issues similar to ones that Kaling has faced, aren’t interested in exploring.  Since Katherine is herself a woman in a man’s world and likes getting her own way, why does she have only men (and only white men) in her team of writers?  Because it provides a means of showing Molly isolated among male colleagues most of whom treat her with suspicion and derision.  It’s also a getting-your-own-back tactic:  these men are repeatedly humiliated by a strong female boss.

    The crisis of her impending sacking triggers urgent meetings between Katherine and the writers.  We’re meant to believe she hasn’t met the team for years – except to dismiss or, in one case, have sex with members of it (see below).  Even now, she’s so impatiently uninterested in them as people that she calls them not by name but by a number that she assigns to each.  There seems no good reason why the striving-for-excellence Katherine would have let her show go stale or not have kept urging the writers to do better.  It would make more sense if she’d got into showbiz through being, say, a media academic so eccentric fronting documentaries that she got her own chat show.  It makes no sense for someone with roots in writing comedy.  But Katherine’s reducing the men to numbers does resonate with the script’s conception of them.  Expected to function as an untalented, sexist male collective, they’re allowed just one or two characteristics each.   If they have two – as in the case of the entitled, self-styled senior writer Tom (Reid Scott) or the apparently sympathetic Charlie (Hugh Dancy) – it’s only in order that they can show a different side when the time is right.

    The drama in Late Night focuses largely on a scandal that engulfs Katherine just as her ratings, thanks to Molly’s innovations, are rapidly on the rise again.  Shortly after her much older, emeritus professor husband Walter (John Lithgow) was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Katherine had an affair with Charlie.  Here too, Ganatra and Kaling take a media hot potato and set Katherine up as the guilty party so as to move the plot forward.  But they know their audience knows that abusing a position of power in a working relationship in order to pursue a sexual one is more likely to be something a man does to a woman than the other way round.   By the time the affair between Katherine and Charlie is a major issue in the story, he has already been shown as exploitative, vain and promiscuous:  he’s tried to hit on Molly, is miffed not to get an instant grateful reaction and rejects her when she responds at a time that’s inconvenient to him.  He’s even suggested to Katherine that they resume their fling, even though she regrets it ever happening and firmly says no.  Once allegations of the affair hit the headlines, Charlie disappears from the script team and the film.

    Katherine is remorseful about being unfaithful to ailing, nicer-than-nice Walter but effectively exonerated of the charges the press makes against her.  Her redemption is confirmed when, after taking a break from the show, she returns to it with an opening speech in which she admits the affair did happen and tells her viewers it’s just as reprehensible for a woman to do what she did as it would have been for a man.  (Viewers of Late Night know better – know how reprehensible Charlie is in the matter.)  Katherine’s mea culpa is striking too in relation to an earlier showdown with Molly, in which Katherine complains that the younger generation has an obsession with catharsis, that this is a form of narcissism, that there should even be a new word for it – ‘catharsissism’.  When Katherine comes clean on camera, it’s catharsissism, all right.  Has she decided that, in this respect too, if you can’t beat them join them?  Or is Nisha Ganatra just deciding to forget what was said earlier and expecting us to follow suit?   It seems the latter.  When the TV studio rise to their feet to applaud Katherine and she smiles gratefully back, there’s not a hint of cynicism in front of or behind the camera.

    The film is consistently evasive.  Katherine reluctantly interviews a YouTube sensation called Mimi Mismatch (Annaleigh Ashford), assumes she’s as inane as her videos, treats her derisively and is startled when Mimi articulately fights back and gives her an on-air dressing down.  We also see Katherine go spectacularly off-script when her guest is the feebly scatological young comic (Ike Barinholtz) lined up by the channel to replace her on the show – she makes him look the fool she knows he is.  We never see her talking to the intellectually high-powered people she has traditionally interviewed – a pity because it’s hard to imagine how her inherently combative style would adapt to conversation with someone she admires.  When Brad, shortly before hiring Molly, desperately asks Katherine if a gay man would do instead of a woman, she snaps back no.  Nisha Ganatra cuts and moves on at this point, presumably in the hope we’ll just laugh at Katherine’s cross reply and not dwell on whether Brad is as ignorantly homophobic as his question sounds.  It hardly makes sense anyway, given that the single characteristic of one of the existing team (played by John Early) is his camp manner.

    Late Night is inviting comparison with well-known films like James L Brooks’s Broadcast News (1987) and David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada (2006), for understandable reasons.  It shares with the one themes of sexual politics in the TV workplace, crowd-pleasing style vs thought-provoking substance, and so on.  Like the other, it describes how an unexpected and initially despised newcomer wins over a woman boss-from-hell, who comes to depend on her.  Although it appears to deal with weightier matters, what’s remarkable is how sentimental and weakly conciliatory this new film is compared with the Frankel movie.  The Devil Wears Prada included much less than Late Night about the dragon lady’s personal life; Emma Thompson is excruciatingly false expressing Katherine’s tearful contrition towards her husband.  Frankel’s protagonists finally parted company and both knew it was the right thing to do.  ‘One year later’, Katherine’s show is still on the air and Molly still working for her and alongside Tom, who’s turned out to be really nice after all.  The bland, smiles-all-round conclusion implies that Katherine has changed for the better, though we’ve no idea how – or how that’s impacted on her show’s style and content.  Late Night has potentially strong themes which Mindy Kaling’s personal experience and investment in the subject matter might have reinforced.  The film that’s resulted is interesting as itself a reflection of the current landscape of the entertainment industry.  It’s hamstrung by its conflicting desires to be politically incisive and commercially safe.

    9 June 2019

  • Booksmart

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Olivia Wilde (2019)

    A caveat … There’s a lot of dialogue in the comedy Booksmart, much of it spoken at speed.  My ears didn’t adjust as they usually do to what I was meant to be hearing; I missed plenty of words and may have misunderstood some important elements of Olivia Wilde’s debut feature.  The premise is clear enough, though.  Hard-working, academically successful students Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) have grown up together in San Fernando, California, and been best friends for years.  Amy is going to Botswana for the summer – teaching local women to make their own tampons, she says – before taking up a place at Columbia.  Molly has got into Yale.  On the eve of high school graduation, the pair realise that concentrating on good grades has deprived them of all the extracurricular fun their contemporaries have been having.  Amy and Molly embark on desperate last-minute attempts to compensate.

    Everyone in the girls’ class is sworn to secrecy as to their higher education or job destination – in order not to hurt each other’s feelings.  This is presumably class president Molly’s idea and ignored by everyone who despises her all-work-and-no-play philosophy – so that only she and Amy are still in the dark about what their classmates are doing next.  Even the high school principal (Jason Sudeikis) makes clear in an early conversation with Molly that he finds the don’t-tell policy tedious.  In the school toilets, she receives shocking news from three other students, the notoriously promiscuous Annabelle (Molly Gordon) and two boys, one of whom is off to Stanford, the other to a six-figure-salary job with Google.  Like Molly, Annabelle – aka ‘Triple A’ – is headed for Yale.  ‘I’m incredible at handjobs, but I got a 1560 on the SATs,’ she explains.  Molly is horrified and incredulous:  ‘But you guys don’t even care about school!’  Annabelle corrects her:  ‘No, we just don’t only care about school’.

    Although that’s the key (audible) line of Booksmart, its implications aren’t clear cut.  Are Amy and Molly isolated from the other students because they’re swots or because they’re more generally serious-minded?  They decide to crash a succession of graduation eve parties.  At one of these, someone expresses surprise the duo isn’t otherwise engaged in ‘some kind of boring demonstration’.  But there’s no evidence, beyond the stated purpose of Amy’s trip to Africa, that they translate into action the right-on surface of their lives – the pictures of Michelle Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Molly’s bedroom wall, the ‘Warren 2020’ sticker on Amy’s car.  This may, of course, be down to the story’s short timeframe but the screenplay (by Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel and Katie Silberman) is slippery about just what kind of killjoys Molly and Amy are.  As a result, Olivia Wilde tars with the same brush nerdiness and humanitarian aspiration.

    Compared with another recent schoolgirl coming-of-age story, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, this film is opaque about the protagonists’ financial circumstances.  Even so, Booksmart gives the impression that Molly, at least, is also different from her peers because her background is less privileged.  Her parents are conspicuous by their absence but their daughter is unusual in not already having her own car.  Further up the economic scale, it’s somewhat refreshing that the girls’ super-rich classmate Jared (Skyler Gisondo) emerges not as a spoiled brat but as kind-hearted – and lonely because the other students assume he’s a spoiled brat:  except for his druggy friend Gigi (Billie Lourd), the heroines are the only arrivals at his graduation party, on a yacht.  Later, all the main characters, including Jared, end up at another party at an enormous house with a swimming pool – which somewhat blurs the standard-of-living distinctions between the better off kids.

    The host of the latter party is Nick (Mason Gooding, Cuba Gooding Jr’s son), the class vice-president.  Nick’s popular with all his classmates (how come he didn’t get elected president?) and Molly has a crush on him.  Amy came out as lesbian in tenth grade but hasn’t yet had a relationship, though she’d like one with Ryan (Victoria Ruesga).  The two (stereotyped) leading lights of the school drama society are differently camp:  waspish, bossy George (Noah Galvin) and glamorous, queenly Alan (Austin Crute), white and black respectively.  The sexual and ethnic diversity of the students, though hardly unstressed, is enough to give Booksmart a contemporary feel.  Yet what gives the two lead performances depth is the persisting suggestion – even though next to nothing is said to this effect – that personal insecurities drive Amy’s and Molly’s scholastic focus.  Molly is overweight and dresses like someone twice her age.  It may be personal shyness rather than disquiet about her orientation that’s held Amy back but she’s evidently found the step from announcing to realising her sexuality intimidating.  Both girls assume that sex life will start after high school – in other words, at a point in the future.

    Until Nick’s graduation party, that is.  Things soon go wrong there for Amy when she sees Ryan making out with Nick but that’s not enough to discourage Molly.  Insisting something ‘could really happen’ between her and Nick, she refuses to leave when Amy says they’ve done enough partying.  This sparks a home-truths row between the two best friends, in which Amy says she’s fed up of being organised by Molly and announces she’s spending not just the summer but a whole gap year in Botswana.  She then has a panic attack in a bathroom, where she’s found by classmate Hope (Diana Silvers), reputedly a bitch but not so now.  The girls’ preparations for sex together are stopped in their tracks when Amy vomits over Hope.  Molly gets no further with Nick than dancing with him for a few seconds.  She leaves alone and is heading home on foot when Triple A stops and gives her a lift.  Back at the party, police arrive to make a drugs raid.  Amy surprises everyone (me included) by distracting police attention to allow everyone else to get away.  She spends a night in the cells; by next morning, she’s the class heroine.  I didn’t understand why Molly too was so rapturously received at the graduation ceremony.  At this stage, tensions and animosities between the students have simply vanished without trace.

    The film’s most successful combination of instant-impact joke and socio-economic comment concerns not one of the students but the principal, when it’s revealed he supplements his income driving for an Uber-type outfit.  When Molly and Amy get a cab and find him at the wheel, Jason Sudeikis plays the principal’s embarrassment sensitively.  In most other respects, though, Booksmart cuts down to size authority figures – adults generally – as in a traditional teen movie, though sometimes with a fashionable flavour.   It’s not enough for the principal to need a second job; he also accidentally plays pornography through the speakers while Amy and Molly are in the back seat of his car.  After escaping from the lavishly costumed murder mystery party that George is holding, the girls find out the address for Nick’s party from a pizza delivery man (Mike O’Brien), who then refuses to give them a lift there.  The next morning, Molly sees an artist’s impression of a serial killer outside the police station where Amy is being held.  The drawing looks just like the pizza man and Molly trades the information to get Amy out of jail.

    Amy’s doting, embarrassing mother and father (Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte) make an appearance only for an easy laugh or two.  Their daughter’s decision to go partying thwarts their plans for a graduation-themed celebration supper for her at home.  Her parents are so lovingly ready to accept Amy’s sexual orientation that they wrongly assume she and Molly are even more special friends than they actually are.  The most striking treatment of a grown-up, however, is that of Miss Fine (Jessica Williams), a teacher who’s ‘always there’ for, and very popular with, her students – especially Theo (Eduardo Franco), the apparent dimwit who’s landed the Google job.  He has a crush on Miss Fine and the two of them end up having a fling, which Olivia Wilde presents as cute and funny.  It’s obviously unthinkable that she would have done so if the characters’ sexes had been reversed.  By the same token, the Botswana tampons joke – an uncomfortable one in the moneyed context of the film, especially when none of the other students appears to have anything altruistic in mind – would rightly be deplored if the screenwriters were male.

    But is Booksmart funny?   I didn’t think so – perhaps because I missed some good lines, certainly because of unease about its ‘feminist’ double standards, also because of the prevailing acting style that Olivia Wilde has surely encouraged.  All the young cast are more than competent.  All, except for the two leads and Skyler Gisondo, seem to be doing a turn.   This works well enough with characters like George and Alan, whose performance and personality seem virtually indivisible.  In the case of, say, Hope or Theo, it comes across as shallow characterisation.  This is the third time I’ve seen Kaitlyn Dever this year; I’m afraid I didn’t recognise her from the two other films (Beautiful Boy and The Front Runner) but she naturally makes a stronger impression as Amy.  Beanie Feldstein, wonderful in Lady Bird, confirms here that she shares her brother Jonah Hill’s ability to move easily across a wide tonal range.  Even so, I liked her best at the very start of Booksmart, in one of her simplest moments.  Amy arrives to give Molly a lift to school.  Molly dances her way out of the house to meet her friend.  Beanie Feldstein’s movement has wonderful eccentric verve.

    5 June 2019

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