Mickey 17, The Last Journey, Black Dog and White Bird: A Wonder Story are in cinemas
Editor’s note: Also released in New Zealand this week, but not reviewed, were Sundance Audience Award-nominated documentary Every Little Thing (too few sessions, too far away) and Aussie comedy Spit (technical difficulties with a screener).
One of the things that sets director Bong Joon Ho from his contemporaries is how successfully he raises stakes. He does this within scenes – think of the sequence in Parasite where the rich family have gone away for the night leaving the poor ones to party, only for an unexpected return to prompt absolute mayhem – but also the propulsion of his stories. I’m thinking about the push to get to the front of the train in Snowpiercer, as every carriage reveals more about the shocking inequality of the train’s “society” and what it will take to overturn it.
Mickey 17 has a similar narrative drive but it isn’t quite as direct, as if Bong’s attention is continually being distracted by something on the other side of the room.
Robert Pattinson (who upends all of my assumptions about his range) plays Mickey Barnes, in hock to a sadistic mobster after his macaron business inexplicably fails. Attempting to escape the clutches of the bone saw wielding henchmen, he signs up for a tour of “the off-world colonies” not quite realising that the small print of his contract makes him an “expendable” – 3D-printed humans who can be respawned after every industrial accident, failed experiment or criminal misadventure.
It’s immortality of a sort but Mickey soon realises that it ain’t what it’s cracked to be. Dying takes a toll. His deaths are exploited by a failed politician and pseudo religious cult leader (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Toni Collette) to help them set up a colony on the inhospitable ice planet of Niflheim, an ill-thought-out plan if ever there was one. The only bright side is security officer Nasha (Naomi Ackie) and their hyper-calorific lovemaking.
In tone, Mickey 17 is closer to Okja-level farce than Snowpiercer-type thrills or Parasite’s dread-inducing tension. This makes for perfectly acceptable entertainment but fairly obvious politics and the scenes with Ruffalo and Collette drag in very un-Bong ways.
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What is typical Bong is the combination of cynicism and sentimentality – that people are stupid, venal, selfish and shortsighted, but that we have to do what we can to save them anyway.
The Last Journey is Sweden’s most successful documentary ever and it’s easy to see why, indeed there’s a universality about it that should see audiences worldwide respond positively.
Lars Hammar is a former beloved schoolteacher who is conspicuously failing to enjoy his retirement. Like many people entering their 9th decade, the topics of conversation tend to revolve around physical ailments and the loss of old friends. The future doesn’t look like it will be much fun.
Lars’ son Filip can’t abide watching his father’s deterioration and decides to take matters into his own hands. He tries to recreate the period of his father’s life when he was at his happiest – attempting to flick the switch back to positivity from depression. This period was the regular summer holidays the family took in the South of France – the wine, the surf, the sunburn – so Filip buys an orange Renault identical to their old car and crams his poor father into it, along with best friend Fredrik (who he tells is going to have the job of bathing the old man because Filip can’t bring himself to do it.)
What we didn’t know while we were watching was that Filip and Fredrik are two of Sweden’s most beloved television stars – they came to New Zealand to film a travel show in 2007 – and that Swedish audiences are already accustomed to their mix of childish pranks and sentimentality.
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The Last Journey leans further towards the sentimental side but was often surprisingly funny, helpful when you are dealing with such heavy subject matter.
While the “last journey” belongs to Lars, it is Filip’s slow acceptance of the reality of his father’s condition, and that it is the bond between them that his father is responding to rather than francophile triggers, that moved me the most.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Guan Hu’s Black Dog contains as much CGI as Mickey 17, but because it’s in the service of a Chinese neo-realist fable rather than a giant space opera, we are not supposed to notice.
It’s 2008 and Lang (huge Taiwanese star Eddie Peng) is retuning to his old hometown on parole. He was convicted of manslaughter after his involvement in the death of the town big shot’s nephew a decade earlier. Lang was a celebrity in the town but now just wants to keep his head down and rekindle a relationship with his alcoholic father.
The town – in the middle of the Gobi Desert – looks all-but abandoned, waiting for the government to turn up and renew it and the stray dog problem means that Lang has a ready-made job on the dog catching team where he makes an unlikely canine friend.
Black Dog is like a Western – or at least Lang is like a Western hero, a man of very few words but with a capacity for violence and an innate sense of justice. But it also has a Coen Brothers-like absurdity. It opens with a pack of stray dogs causing a bus crash in the middle of the desert, and the abandoned amenities, like the zoo, the bungie jumping platform, the snake farm, and the empty apartment blocks, all contribute to a unique and off-kilter world.
There may be one narrative dog-leg too many – it probably doesn’t need an eclipse and the Beijing Olympics going on in the background – but I really enjoyed the strangeness of it all.
White Bird (aka White Bird: a Wonder Story) is not strange at all and, at first, I found myself wondering whether we needed yet another story of innocent young people caught up in the Holocaust. But then I took a look at the state of the world and realised that, yes, of course we do.
A classy production aimed at the young adult audiences who will have enjoyed the source (graphic) novel, itself a spinoff from the 2012 novel Wonder (turned into a film in 2017). The framing device – the bully from Wonder gets shown some perspective by his Holocaust surviving grandmother (Helen Mirren) – is somewhat clunky but the main body of the film is quite affecting. At least, there were plenty of sniffles to be heard at the screening I attended, some which were quite close to home.
