Eat the Rich

Movies: The Menu

Warning for spoilers in this review.

Directed by Mark Mylod, The Menu is a perfectly cast dark comedy-thriller treat. Margot (Anya Tayor-Joy) is a down-to-earth girl who has been invited by Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a food snob to the nth degree, to join him for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dine at an exclusive restaurant that takes only 12 patrons per night at $1250 per plate.

The restaurant, Hawthorne, is located on an island where the restaurant grows and harvests all the ingredients for each exquisitely made dish. Joining Margot and Tyler on the journey are two regular customers, Richard and Anne Liebbrandt (Reed Birney and Judith Light), washed up actor George Diaz and his assistant, Felicity (John Leguizamo and Aimme Carrero), famous restaurant critic Lillian Bloom and her assistant, Ted (Janet McTeer and Paul Adelstein), and three absolutely insufferable finance bros, Soren, Bryce, and Dave (Arturo Castro, Rob Yang, and Mark St. Cyr). The 12th guest for the evening is the chef's own mother, Linda (Rebecca Koon). 

Taking care of the guests is Elsa (Hong Chau), Chef's formidable right-hand woman.

Chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), is a man from humble roots who now commands his restaurant with an iron fist and a quiet voice.

So, I took the time to name all the main characters and the actors who play them because the acting in The Menu is one of the film's strongest features. Taylor-Joy is wonderful as a woman who doesn't really give a hoot about all this fancy food bullshit, but is happy to go along with it as long as it's all on Tyler's dime. Nicholas Hoult is perfection as a man we've probably all met and hated: the food snob. He is obsessed with Chef Julian, but also immediately breaks Chef's rule that no pictures of the food should be taken. He is worshipful, yet entitled.

I also especially enjoyed Janet McTeer as the powerful restaurant critic who finds even the smallest imperfections in Hawthorne's haute cuisine. And Ralph Fiennes is quietly terrifying as a man who has turned fine dining into, well, a death cult.

If you've seen the previews for The Menu, you know that something goes horribly wrong during this evening of luxury dining. As each course is served, the theme of the courses becomes increasingly hostile towards the patrons of the restaurant, starting with a bread course in which there is no bread, only savory dippings for the breads. Chef explains that since bread was historically a food of the lower classes and all the patrons of the restaurant are not in the lower class, they will go without bread. While the finance bros are a little pissed off at this, the food snobs in the room all marvel at Chef's creativity and "food as social commentary". 

But things only get worse from there on out. It becomes clear that these guests were chosen to be part of a "final menu" that, well, is going to be pretty damn final if you know what I mean. However, there is one problem: Margot. Originally, Tyler invited his girlfriend to join him at Hawthorne, but the GF dumped him. Margot is an escort whom Tyler hired for this special evening. Right away, both Elsa and Chef know that Margot "doesn't belong". Over the course of the evening, Margot tries to find ways to escape. Chef confronts her and asks if she is with "them" (the customers) or "us" (the cooks). What he means is Margot is a giver or a taker? A server or the served? Margot's answer won't make a difference in the end, however, since Chef is adamant that no one will leave the island alive. Once Margot realizes Chef's plans, she has to race against time to find a way out of this terrible situation. 

The Menu is another "eat the rich" film--a genre that has been very popular over the past few years (I wonder why?). Joining the ranks of Ready or Not, Us, Parasite, Knives Out, and many others, The Menu pits a working class protagonist against rich and powerful people. However, this film turns some of the tropes of class warfare on its head because in this movie, the "working class" (i.e. Chef and his assistants) are actually more powerful and deranged than the rich and powerful they are serving. Margot is literally the only person in the room who doesn't give a fuck about Hawthorne and its fancy, bullshit food. Therefore, she may be the only one who doesn't deserve the fate Chef has planned for everyone else.

Although The Menu has a few plot twists I found annoying, the film is overall really fun, funny, and tense. The script is filled with humorous bon mots that I couldn't hear half the time since the sound in the theatre sucked...so I'll definitely be watching the movie again with subtitles on! 

As a girl who far prefers a cheeseburger to a breadless bread course, I really savored The Menu and plan to partake of it again. 

Grade: B+

Young, Gay, and Sad

Movies: Benediction

Directed by Terence Davies, Benediction is a slow, meditative, melancholic film about the life of poet Siegfried Sassoon. I didn't realize until near the end of the film that I watched it on Veteran's Day, which is very appropriate given that Sassoon served in WWI and went on to be staunchly anti-war.

The film opens with Sassoon writing a letter to his commanding officer stating that he will no longer serve in a war that he feels is being prolonged on purpose by the powers that be. This letter, titled Finished with the War: A Solider's Declaration states, "I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest."

Sassoon was declared unfit to serve due to shell shock and sent to the Craiglockhart War Hospital to convalesce, which pissed Sassoon off since he would have preferred a court martial, which would have allowed him to further express his anti-war opposition in public. Even though he potentially would have faced execution, Sassoon wanted to take the risk of dying for his beliefs rather than being declared emotionally unfit and hidden away in a hospital. This is the first of many blows life dealt Sassoon.

A significant chunk of the movie is dedicated to exploring Sassoon's sexuality and his many affairs with men throughout the 1920s before he finally married a woman, Hester Gatty, and fathered a son. The film bounces back and forth between Sassoon's later years in life, when he is a very sad and angry older man who converts to Catholicism as a way to find some measure of peace, and the his younger, more hopeful years. Jack Lowden plays the young Sassoon who, perhaps not surprisingly for a poet, is a romantic. Two significant relationships are explored: one with actor Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine), who is cruel, preening, faithless, and catty, and one with aristocrat Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch), who is capricious, fey, and also not a super nice guy.

What's interesting is that Benediction really aims to give the viewer more of an impression than accurate or clear details. Watching the movie, you might think that Novello was the great love of Sassoon's life, given the amount of time spent on their relationship. But, in fact, Sassoon's relationship with Tennant not only lasted longer (6 years), but was also far more devastating and impactful on Sassoon's life. When Tennant abruptly broke things off with Sassoon via a letter, Sassoon went on to marry Gatty, whom he stayed with for decades. Much of the context and timeline I gathered from reading the Wikipedia article about Sassoon and not from the film, which is rather confusing.

Peter Capaldi plays Sassoon as an older, depressed man. It's an interesting casting choice since Capaldi doesn't look much like an older version of Lowden, and Capaldi's thick Scottish brogue is incongruous with the fact that Sassoon was English. Gemma Jones plays the older version of Hester Gatty, which is also a strange casting choice since she looks as old as, if not older than, Capaldi--but in actuality Gatty was two decades younger than Sassoon. 

So, clearly this movie has some flaws and questionable choices. But as an impressionistic piece about a man with a beautiful soul and mind who tries to find steadfast love but never quite finds it, it's a very good movie. The film is interspersed with Lowden in voiceover reading Sassoon's poetry over footage from WWI. There is a wistfulness that permeates the film, and a beauty as well. This is very much a movie that is not for everyone and I don't even know if it's a movie for me. I've only seen one other Davies film, Deep Blue Sea, and I didn't care for that one. That said, I was surprised at how quickly and easily this long film (2 hours and 17 minutes) flew by. 

Overall, I have to give Benediction a positive score because it really is a beautiful film. My bias in favor of sad, young, gay, white men might be skewing my thoughts a bit, but oh well! I love my sad, young, gay, white men and I will not apologize!

I'll end my review with the words of another reviewer, from Vox, who really sums up Benediction perfectly: "There is no happy-go-lucky ending here, only the sense that an ineffable longing we have, to know and be known, is so precious and rare that most of us never find its fulfillment here on Earth. But the film's title lays bare its aims: to offer words of blessing over a man who never quite found the love he craved and, yet, kept looking." 

Grade: A-

Rictus Grin

Movies: Smile

Smile, directed by Parker Finn, is a nerve-shattering horror movie that leaves you feeling empty and sad. It's one of many horror movies where a ghostly or demonic entity is a stand-in for trauma and mental illness, which is a tricky line for a scary movie to walk. Films like Lights Out and The Lodge have faced criticism in their depictions of mental illness. For example, in the 2016 film Lights Out, the scary ghoul that haunts the main character is a metaphor for depression. The film ends with the main character killing herself to protect her loved ones from the ghoul. While it may not be the intended message of the film, it seems to suggest that the family and friends of chronically depressed people are better off without them--a very, very dangerous message for folks struggling with suicidal thoughts. 

Similarly, trauma is at the heart of Smile and the ultimate message of the film, intended or not, seems to be "don't bother facing your trauma and making peace with your past, because it's all pointless anyway." Again, a severely dangerous message to be putting out there, especially during *gestures broadly* all this. That's not to say that films can't explore these dark feelings, just that it's something to be mindful of, especially given that this is a very popular movie that many people will see. And even though Smile works very well as a horror film, I ultimately have to dock it points for the way it handles trauma.

Now, onto the plot of the movie: Sosie Bacon (excellent in this role) plays Dr. Rose Cotter, a therapist at a psychiatric hospital. Rose encounters a patient, a young woman, who is absolutely terrified. The woman witnessed her professor complete suicide in front of her and now she is seeing something--something that is smiling at her, "but not like a friendly smile". When she begins screaming at Rose, Rose calls for help--but the young woman takes a piece of glass and, while smiling creepily, slices her neck from ear-to-ear.

Witnessing such an event would rattle anyone, even a professional like Rose, but Rose is more than unsettled. She, too, begins to see people staring at her, smiling unnervingly. She keeps having flashbacks to her childhood, when she watched her mother die of a drug overdose. She can't sleep. And within just a couple days, she is in a complete mental health crisis.

Sosie Bacon plays the role of a professional, put together woman slowing unraveling so perfectly, that it's almost more haunting than the many jump scares (and there are many) and creepy smiles in the movie. What's worse is that her sister and fiance don't believe her when she tries to convince them that she's seeing whatever the young woman saw. If there is a positive message in this film, it's the importance of believing people when they are having a mental crisis and not turning your back on them.

After doing some research with the help of her ex, who is a cop, Rose realizes that this chain of people killing themselves in front of other people goes back a long way. Only one man seems to have escaped the chain, and it's only because he killed someone else--in front of a woman who then went on to continue the chain. When Rose visits this man in prison, he explains that the entity needs trauma to feed on. Rose's only way out is to kill someone else in front of someone to the point where the witness is traumatized by the event and the entity jumps to them. Well, Rose isn't ready to commit murder to save herself. Instead, she holes up in her dilapidated childhood home to avoid other people and to face her demons.

Through flashbacks, we find out that Rose not only watched her mother die of an overdose, she had the opportunity to call for help and didn't. That guilt has been haunting her for decades. However, facing that guilt head on and forgiving that little girl who was scared and not at fault for her mother's decisions isn't enough to save Rose. The entity enters her and causes her to kill herself--right as her ex enters the home, effectively passing the curse on to him. Fin.

Pretty sad, right? Very hopeless. I don't mind hopeless movies but this one didn't sit right with me. I have to give Smile credit for being genuinely scary on multiple levels. The movie had tons of jump scares and creepy imagery, but the horror of watching Rose lose her mind and those closest to her turn away from her was probably the scariest thing of all. As I said above, this is truly a nerve-shattering, feel-bad movie. If you like horror, you'll probably find something about it to enjoy. 

Grade: C+

Depressed Friends

Movies: The Banshees of Inisherin

Martin McDonagh's most recent film is a complex and heartbreaking exploration of loneliness, isolation, social ostracism, depression and relationships. It's a comedy, but also a tragedy. And there's even a bit of horror mixed in there. Like McDonagh's other films, such as In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the movie pushes us a bit past our boundaries and expectations. But I would say that this film is transcendent in a way that his earlier films are not. McDonagh has really perfected his craft here.

Banshees takes place in 1923 on the fictional island of Inisherin, off the coast of Ireland. The Irish Civil War rages on the periphery of the characters' lives, but they don't seem to understand or care about the fighting. They have their own petty grievances to attend to.

Brendan Gleeson plays Colm, a folk musician, who is best friends with Padraic (Colin Farrell), a simple farmer and self-described "happy lad". One day, Colm stops speaking to Padraic and when Padraic pushes for an explanation, Colm says "I just don't like you no more." Padraic is baffled and hurt, of course. Colm explains a little more: Padraic is dull. Colm is getting older. He doesn't want to spend his precious time listening to Padraic blather on about what he found in his pony's shit. Colm wants to write and play music, with the hope of leaving behind some kind of legacy. 

After Padraic continues to push Colm and talk to him after Colm has told him not to, things take an...interesting turn. Colm tells Padraic that if he talks to him again, Colm will take a pair of shears and cut off a finger and give it to Padraic. He'll continue to do this until Padraic gets the message or until Colm has no fingers left. And remember: Colm is a musician. Losing his fingers is a big deal.

Padraic and Colm aren't the only citizens of Inisherin who have shit going on in their lives. Padraic's sister, Siobhan (Kerry Condon), is becoming increasingly lonely and restless on the island where everyone knows everyone else's business. When an opportunity for a job on the mainland falls into her lap, she has to decide between leaving to save her sanity and staying behind to support her brother. There's also Dominic (Barry Keoghan), a weird young man who we find out is being abused by his alcoholic policeman father. Dominic is a heartbreaking character, played wonderfully by Keoghan. He's straight up creepy and inappropriate, but he's also the victim of his terrible father. Keoghan finds a balance of repulsive and sympathetic and walks that line really well. 

Banshees asks the question: what do we owe other people, and what do we owe ourselves? Each character has flaws and each character has good reasons to behave the way they do. Each character makes mistakes. Each character hurts another character, either on purpose or accidentally. Colm, for example, certainly has a right--and good reasons--to want to hang out less often with Padraic. But cutting him off completely seems a little harsh. And then cutting his own fingers off to make a point is straight up insane. It's pretty clear that Colm is suffering from something bigger than just being bored by a tiresome friend. When he goes to confession at church, the priest asks "How's the despair?" This is what therapy was like in 1923 Ireland: your priest asks how the despair is going and then gives you Hail Marys to say instead of SSRIs to take.

Although Banshees is a dark comedy--and it is indeed very funny--there is true and genuine heartbreak in this film. Anyone who is sensitive to rejection will feel this movie in their bones. Gleeson and Farrell have enormous chemistry, with Gleeson playing his character as more resigned than cruel. Colm doesn't want to hurt Padraic, but he basically "just can't even" with him anymore. Farrell gives a stunning portrayal of male vulnerability. Padraic goes through all the stages of grief in this film: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. He is an enormously sympathetic character who captures that swirl of feelings anyone would have when facing a situation where a friend just stops wanting to be your friend. Hell, I've been there! We all have!

The Banshees of Inisherin is a revelation of a movie. Definitely one of the best of 2022 and probably McDonagh's best. I feel like I can't fully explain it in this review because it's a movie that you feel more than you think about. It is truly a masterpiece and I highly recommend it to everyone--just be sure to bring tissues with you.

Grade: A