Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Peter Sarsgaard’

SHORT TAKE: “The Survivor,” “Honey Don’t”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 9, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Ben Foster

“THE SURVIVOR” My rating: B+(HBO Max)

105 minutes | MPAA rating: R

How have I not discovered “The Survivor” before now?

This 2021 feature has so much going for it:  A famous director (Barry Levinson), a gut-wrenching real-life story and a lead performance by Ben Foster that made me rethink just about everything I’ve ever felt about this actor.

Hertzko “Harry” Haft was a Polish Jew who survived a series of Nazi death camps because of his boxing skills.  Haft fought more than 60 bloody bare-knuckle matches for the entertainment of S.S. officers who placed bets on the outcome.  Haft was betting, too…with his life.  The loser of each match was summarily executed.

Relocated to the States after the war Haft did the only thing he was good at.  For a couple of years he was a professional boxer; he even fought Rocky Marciano.

The script (by Justine Juel Kilmer, based on a nonfiction book by Haft’s son, Alan) alternates between Haft’s post-war life (these scenes are in color) and the horrors of his camp experiences (brilliantly captured by cinematographer George Steel in black-and-white images that uncannily evoke newsreels from the period).

“The Survivor” isn’t a sports movie; nor is it exclusively a Holocaust chronicle. It’s a character study of a man whose psyche was shredded by what he saw and by guilt over what he was forced to do.

Ben Foster is simply shattering in the role.  He appears to have lost 50 pounds for the concentration camp flashbacks; in the present (the film follows him through the 1960s)  he has the beefy look of a boxing pro.  In the latter scenes he’s absolutely believable as a man in a soft-stomached middle age.  It’s a transformation right up there with DeNiro’s in “Raging Bull.”

This is  a haunting performance capable of moving the viewer to tears. (Comparisons to Rod Steiger’s great performance in “The Pawnbroker” are apt.) 

I’ve not always been a Foster fan.  Following his solid feature debut (as a suburban Jewish teen in love with a black girl) in Levinson’s “Liberty Heights” he started landing roles as eye-rolling crazies (”3:10 to Yuma,” “30 Days of Night”).  But in recent years he’s shown both range and restraint (“Hell or High Water,” “Leave No Trace”).  How his work in “The Survivor” failed to register with the presenters of the various acting awards is a puzzler.

Vicky Krieps, Ben Foster

Other players include Danny DeVito and John Leguizamo as boxing coaches, Peter Sarsgaard as a sports  journalist, and Vicky Krieps as the Holocaust survivor aid worker who marries Haft.

Sonya Cullingford has a brief but unforgettable scene as Haft’s long-lost first love, with whom he  was reunited just weeks before her death from cancer.

The film’s main flaw is what it leaves out. We see in flashback how Haft escaped from a Nazi work party, but not how he survived on  his own until the end of the war.  That’s a deliberate choice.  According to his son’s book, the fugitive Haft killed three civilians he feared would turn him over to the Germans. The filmmakers obviously feared that showing those murders could turn an audience against their protagonist.

The good news is that this choice doesn’t significantly dilute the film’s power.

Margaret Qualley

“HONEY DON’T” My rating: C+(Netflix)

89 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Since splitting (temporarily, apparently) from his filmmaking sibling Joel, Ethan Coen has created two films centering on lesbian characters.  Margaret Qualley stars in both.

In 2004 ’s “Drive-Away Dolls” Qualley’s character goes on a road trip with luggage that includes a briefcase full of dildos and a severed human head.

In “Honey Don’t” she plays Honey O’Donahue, a lesbian private eye in sun-baked Bakersfield who wears high heels and hosiery with seams down the back.  The entire project (like “…Dolls” it was co-written with Tricia Cooke) plays like a Jim Thompson potboiler directed by a lesbian version of Russ Meyer.

It’s rude, it’s crude, it’s gleefully exploitative.

The cast includes Chris Evans (as the sexually voracious leader of a religious cult), Aubrey Plaza (as a gay cop), Charlie Day (as a horny police detective) and Lera Abova (as a mysterious Vespa-riding assassin).

It’s fun…until it wears out its welcome.

| Robert W. Butler

Read Full Post »

“THE LOST DAUGHTER”: Don’t say…do

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 17, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Dakota Johnson, Olivia Colman

“THE LOST DAUGHTER” My rating: B (In theaters)

121 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Many a man has bailed on his family and kept his social status…but let a woman exhibit indifference toward her children and the pillars of civilization start to crumble.

“The Lost Daughter,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s impressive writing/directing debut, is about a bad mother. At least that’s what a traditional moralist would say.

But things aren’t nearly that cut and dried in this smart, thought-provoking adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s  novel. 

This is a deeply ambivalent, jaw-droopingly subtle effort that eschews the usual big dramatic exposition (“…this is why I did what I did…”) in favor of showing us, building its story (and its case) through the slow accumulation of images and information.

Leda (Olivia Colman) is vacationing alone on a Greek island.  She’s a college professor, a Brit by birth but working in America, and she’s going to spend her summer sitting in the sun and researching her next book.

She tolerates the scuzzy American ex-pat (Ed Harris) who manages the vacation home she rents.  And she’s amused by Will (Paul Mescal), her eager-to-please cabana boy. They enjoy a chaste flirtation.

But Leda is absolutely mesmerized — and appalled — by the family with whom she shares the beach.  They’re a loud, obnoxious bunch.  The head of the clan seems vaguely shady;  he’s got a pregnant trophy wife half his age.

The real object of Leda’s fascination, though, is the man’s daughter-in-law, Nina (Dakota Johnson), who has a handsome but pushy husband and a pretty but spoiled young daughter. 

Lena appears obsessed with the tiny interactions between weary, frustrated mother and willful child. When the little girl goes missing the family is thrown into a panic. Leda finds the child and returns her to the fold…but not without secretly claiming a souvenir of the encounter that will come back to haunt her.

“The Lost Daughter” is being described as a “psychological thriller.” Actually, “psychological jigsaw puzzle” seems more accurate.

Through casual conversation — Gyllenhaal’s dialogue is amazingly unforced and natural — we learn that Leda has two daughter, now in their 20s, who live with her ex.  Apparently she rarely sees them.

Peter Sarsgaartd, Jessie Buckley

In flashbacks we see her as a young mother (played now by Jessie Buckley), struggling to balance family and career, and engaging in an affair with a much-admired professor (Peter Sarsgaard, Guyllenhaal’s spouse) that will push her further away from her conventional existence.

Most women have days in which they would just as soon dump the husband and kids and strike out for parts unknown.  Leda is the rare individual who actually kicks motherhood aside in the hope of discovering a different sort of fulfillment. 

But one does not achieve that sort of liberation without paying a huge emotional price, and the wonder of Colman’s performance is how she tells us everything about what Leda is feeling without actually ever saying anything. 

A lesser filmmaker might make excuses for her heroine’s choices, providing her with explanatory monologues, poking at every little shred of guilt clinging to Leda’s consciousness.

There’s no need for that when you have a leading lady with Colman’s range.

Is Leda a heroine or a villainess?

Why not neither? Or both?

| Robert W. Butler

Read Full Post »

“THE SOUND OF SILENCE”: Harmonic dissonance

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 26, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Peter Sarsgaard

“THE SOUND OF SILENCE” My rating: C+

87 minutes | MPAA rating:

Before it goes off the philosophical rails and disappears up its own nether regions, “The Sound of Silence” casts an eerie spell.

Our protagonist is acoustic specialist Peter Lucian (Peter Sarsgaard), a self-described “house tuner.”

Peter is paid to visit the apartments of his fellow New Yorkers, bringing a suitcase filled with tuning forks and tape recorders.  His job is to study the “sound environment,” identifying and eliminating aural anomalies that may be responsible for sleeplessness, anxiety, and a whole host of psycho-physical modern maladies.

For instance,  he may discover that the musical voice of a client’s heating system creates dissonance when heard in conjunction with the imperceptible sounds emitted by an electric toaster. Time to get a new Sunbeam.

Sounds like woo-woo, but Peter has recently been written up in The New Yorker. So there.

Michael Tyburski’s debut film (the screenplay is by Ben Nabors)  is nothing if not out there. In mood and overall story arc it bears more than a little resemblance to “The Conversation,” Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 classic about a sound technician whose specialty is surreptitiously recording conversations under impossible circumstances.

Peter is pretty much obsessed with his  inquiries.  He often walks through Manhattan wearing sound-cancelling earphones; at other times he stands in public places twanging his tuning forks and taking acoustic readings.

He’s studying “harmonic resonance,” all so that he can develop a sort of unified field theory of sound.  His research has already drawn the attention of an industrialist (Bruce Altman) who has big plans to monetize it, but Peter is a purist.  His dream is to have all his findings published in a scholarly journal.  Only then will he consider the commercial applications.

(more…)

Read Full Post »