Butler's Cinema Scene

Bill Nighy, Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton

“JOY: ” My rating: B (Netflix)

115 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

I wasn’t expecting much from “Joy.” I knew one of the stars was the always-watchable Bill Nighy, and that the subject was the development of the in vitro fertilization technique in the 1970s.

Maybe I was in for a docudrama or dry medical procedural?

I wasn’t prepared for the sneakily effective emotional journey cooked up by first-time feature director Ben Taylor and scenarists Jack Thorne, Rachel Mason and Emma Gordon.

“Joy” works so well for a couple of reasons. First, the screenplay focuses less on the scientific challenges facing physician/researchers Bob Edwards and Patrick Steptoe (James Norton, Nighy) than on the cultural backlash their work elicited.

Today IVF is opposed by many who associate it with abortion. A mother is implanted with just one of several of her eggs fertilized in the lab; the rejects may be destroyed. If you believe that every fertilized egg is already human, then that’s murder.

Fifty years ago, though, the opposition to IVF was based on the notion that “test tube babies” would be born with defects that would make their lives a living hell. Voices in the media, the church, the political arena and even the medical establishment compared the work of Edwards and Steptoe to that of the fictional Dr. Frankenstein. The doctors were accused of playing God.

As a result they did most of their work in a remote clinic away from prying eyes. Not precisely off the grid, but close.

Also, the filmmakers were incredibly wise in focusing the film on a third member of the team, Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie), a young nurse whose official title was lab technician but whose pivotal role in IVF wasn’t recognized for decades.

When we first meet her Purdy appears to be all business, not particulxarly warm. But exposed to the desperation of the young women who come to Edwards and Steptoe looking for a miracle, she becomes more than a nurse or researcher. She becomes a friend, a confidant, a cheerleader, a shoulder to cry on.

Only later do we realize that she is motivated at least in part by her own inability to have children.

And because of her work Purdy finds herself ostracized by her church and community and disowned by her rigidly moralistic mother (Joanna Scanlan).

McKenzie, who was so effective as a teenage survivalist in “Leave No Trace” and had a strong supporting perf in “Jojo Rabbit,” is just about perfect here. She’s attractive without being at all glamorous, and she excels at allowing her character’s inner life to percolate through that stiff Brit carapace.

By the time “Joy” is over (the title isn’t explained until the last moment, and it’s sob-inducing revelation) you’ll be deeply invested in the story and its real-life characters.

Danielle Deadwyler, John David Washington

“THE PIANO LESSON” My rating: B (Netflix)

125 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

It features near-flawless performances and a script based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

So why didn’t “The Piano Lesson” work for me? Or why did it only work part of the time?

Produced by Denzel Washington, starring his son John David Washington and directed and co-written by yet another son, Malcolm Washington, this production is a family affair.

Which is fitting, since August Wilson’s play centers on a family and the different ways in which its members deal with (or attempt to reject) their shared history.

The piano of the title is a family heirloom, quite literally paid for with the blood of ancestors.  

In pre-Civil War Mississippi a plantation owner named Sutter sold members of the enslaved Charles family to buy the upright piano for his wife. Subsequently portraits of the sold slaves were carved into the instrument’s wood by a remaining family member.

In 1911 the piano was stolen by Charles family survivors and it now sits in the Depression-era Pittsburgh home of Doker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), where it will generate a family crisis.

Doker’s nephew Boy Willie (Joh David Washington in the most astonishingly nuanced performance of his career) has driven up from Mississippi hoping to sell the rarely-played piano. He’ll use the money to buy land long owned by the Sutter clan, now up for sale thanks to the mysterious death of the last Sutter, who fell down a well.

Boy Willie’s plan is fiercely opposed by his sister Bereniece (Danielle Deadwyler). It’s not the loss of a musical instrument she minds (she refuses to play, though her young daughter sometimes doodles on the keyboard); it’s the thought of giving up her last connection to her ancestors.

Also, she suggests Boy Willie may have murdered the last Sutter to get his land. She even claims to have seen a dead white man — Sutter’s ghost — haunting the upstairs hallway.

Though director Washington makes a few attempts to open up the acton  “The Piano Lesson” is mostly talk — talk that reveals the various outlooks of a mixed slate of characters (the cast is rounded out by Ray Fisher, Corey Hawkins and Michael Potts). Everyone is excellent.

Here’s where I think things went sour:  In Wilson’s play Sutter’s ghost is talked about but never seen. He’s offstage…provided, of course, that he even exists outside the characters’ imaginations.

But in the movie we see him.  He even gets into a physical brawl with Boy Willie, amd it threatens to derail the entire narrative. Instead of a figurative haunting we get a literal one.

Now it’s a ghost story. I don’t believe that’s what Wilson had in mind.

Cailee Spaeny and friend

“ALIEN ROMULUS” My rating: C (Hulu)

118 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Going in I suspected that “Alien Romulus” would be a budget-basement spinoff from the long-running monsters-in-space franchise.

You know…cheap f/x, tacky production values, a straight-to-video approach. When Ridley Scott directs (“Alien,” “Prometheus”) you expect top-of-the-line everything…except, perhaps in the script department.

But “Alien Romulus” looks great, and even has been designed with tongue firmly in cheek to reflect on earlier (and much better) episodes. The plot may be one “Alien” cliche after another, but the physical production is solid.

Directed and co-written by Fede Alvarez, this is a teens-vs-aliens movie.  On a mining planet a handful of wage slaves plot to hijack an abandoned spaceship and get the hell out of Dodge.

What they don’t realize is that the ship, the Romulus, houses a breeding lab for those nasty, acid-blooded critters.  After losing most of its crew to the aliens the ship’s operator, the infamous Weyland-Yutani Corporation, pulled out. The idea was to let gravity suck  the ship into the rings that circle the planet, destroying it and its deadly cargo.

But our adolescent heroes know none of that, though once on board they’ll learn quickly. 

There are no “names” in the cast.  You may recall Cailee Spaeny as the wannabe journalist in “Civil War.” And David Jonsson has a plum role as a replicant (they still prefer the term “artificial human”) whose levels of intelligence and empathy vary depending upon what computer chip is clicked into a slot on his neck.

The real hero here is production designer Naaman Marshall, who has a whole lot of fun recreating the world of the first two Alien films from way back when, right down to the retro/crude graphics on the ship’s computer screens.

Oh…and did I mention that the late Ian Holm has been digitally resurrected? He appears as a worse-for-wear replicant clearly manufactured in the same batch as Ash from the original 1979 “Alien.”

| Robert W. Butler

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