NICO 1988

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Writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli crafts a brief biopic about Velvet Underground legend Nico that is at turns inspired, frustrating, thrilling, and inchoate. Trine Dryholm’s unvarnished performance holds the film together with a weathered beauty teetering on the edge of an abyss that only her drug-addled character can see.

One element missing from the film is any regard for the stunning beauty of Nico’s youth — she worked as a model — who captured the hearts, minds, and libidos of Jackson Browne, Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, Brian Jones, Jimmy Page, and notably Alain Delon with whom she had a son named Ari. Never mind that Delon never claimed the child who Nico abandoned when he was four-years-old.

Dryholm embodies the tone-deaf chanteuse with the same nihilistic charisma that Lou Reed freely exhibited for most of his career. Nico clearly copped Reed’s heroin habit and refused to ever let it go. Her fascination with death comes through in the songs of her later career as featured in the film.

Audiences unfamiliar with Nico’s ‘60s era collaborations with Reed and The Velvet Underground, under the guidance of Andy Warhol, receive no hand-holding in this film. If you don’t already know the haunting sound of Nico’s baritone European accented voice on the songs “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “Femme Fatal,” or “Sunday Morning,” then you’ve got some homework to do.

Living a junkie existence with a band of amateur musicians, save a classically trained violinist, Nico (real name Christa Päffgen) performs for small audiences around Eastern Europe. Border crossings pose imminent danger. She hates the communist youths that risk jail to host her performance. She also loathes her fans, especially if they appear in the guise of naïve young women.  

We get that Nico was a child of war; she carries around a portable recorder to capture source sounds from the environments she visits, in the hope of rediscovering the sound of Berlin being bombed when she was a tyke. Nico longs for annihilation.

Ultimately, “Nico 1988” fails because it never convinces the audience as to why we should empathize with this brutal person. That Nicchiarelli omits the moment of Nico’s lonely death on a bicycle in Ibiza, comes across as laziness on the part of the filmmaker. “Nico 1988” is a solid showcase for Trine Dryholm but it doesn’t make a case for Nico’s music. 

Rated R. 99 mins.

 

DARKEST HOUR

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Joe Wright is a director who specializes in period kitsch.

Wright's 2005 version of “Pride & Prejudice” is a well-defined dollop of cinematic tough love as experienced through Jane Austen’s emotional turbulence of class struggles.

“Atonement” (2007) found Wright following his muse Keira Knightly through the war-torn romantic terrain of Ian McEwan’s novel with emotional grace notes played in ringing succession.

The keen-eyed filmmaker maxed out with his visually embellished adaptation of Anna Karenina, once again featuring Keira Knightley, this time as the title character of Tolstoy’s epic love story.

However deft Joe Wright clearly is with clearing his theatrical space for actors to deliver finely crafted performances in “Darkest Hour,” the filmmaker is hamstrung to liberate the film from screenwriter Anthony McCarten’s staid text and dull plotting.

There is no question that Gary Oldman’s performance as Winston Churchill is a portrayal for the ages. As well, Kristin Scott Thomas is purely grounded as Churchill’s wife Clemmie. Ben Mendelsohn’s King George VI casts a long shadow that few living politicians could pretend to fill.

The problems with this dull, drawn-out film announce themselves early on through Dario Marianelli’s bombastic musical score that attempts to mask narrative shifts that clash rather than mesh with the aural hamburger-helper. The story takes place over a one-month period during May of 1940, when Winston Churchill took over as Britain’s Prime Minister at a time when Germany was winning World War II.

For as unpopular as Churchill was at the time, he put his head down and got to work, or so the story goes.

"Darkest Hour" gets overwrought and fussy regarding Churchill’s mistreatment of his youthful secretary Elizabeth Layton (Lily James), who has to develop much thicker skin if she is to endure the demands of taking dictation from the head of the British Empire. We accept the sub-plot ruse in the beginning, but it runs threadbare by the time Churchill is pressured toward engaging in peace talks with Hitler.

References to Dunkirk come across as gratuitous considering that awful film’s recent engagement to a plethora of fawning critics who seem to have never seen a competent war film in their lives. There should be a moratorium on World War II films considering that era's disconnected irrelevance to our drone-dominated modern warfare, and the fact of Cinema's already mile-high coverage of World War II.

When Oldman’s Churchill boards a London subway to get a feel for the will of the people, it’s clear that the filmmakers have sunk to a new basement level of pandering to their audience.

The scene works in spite of itself, but it nonetheless represents an unforgivable sin of sewing up a mess of a movie with a flurry of hand-stitching. “Darkest Hour” is a brief, and presumably misleading, biopic aimed more at winning awards for acting than in connecting our modern political problems with those of the past. Here is a film to sip tea over, rather than watch with any sense of urgency or relevance beyond the endearing performances of its cast.    

Rated PG-13. 125 mins. 

WAR MACHINE

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Although crushed under the smothering weight of director/writer David Michôd's relentless voice-over-narration, a lacking vision of satirical tone, and undisciplined editing (courtesy of Peter Sciberras), “War Machine” enjoys considerable lift from the efforts of its (mostly) solid cast — Topher Grace go to your room. Still, you couldn’t be blamed for not wanting to endure all the talky narration (from a character you don't even see until half way though the movie) to get at the story hiding underneath.

This Netflix-produced movie is inspired by Michael Hastings’ 2010 book “The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War In Afghanistan,” but the author of “Animal Kingdom” (Michôd) doesn’t grasp first rule of screenwriting; 'show, don’t tell.' There isn’t a single thing that Scoot McNairy’s narrating journalist Sean Cullen tells us that we wouldn’t better receive without the audio-present redundancies. It feels as if the projectionist were substituting audio from a documentary over a feature film.

Disaster.

Brad Pitt’s General Glen McMahon (The Glenimal) would fit neatly into Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” a similarly themed anti-war film that this movie can’t otherwise hope to aspire to. Pitt’s character is based on General Stanley McChrystal, whose exposure as a rogue U.S. military asshole of epic proportions became public knowledge after Michael Hastings’ feature article (“The Runaway General”) for Rolling Stone Magazine (in 2010).

Brad Pitt colors his warmonger persona with features that boldly boarder on the cartoonish. He keeps his right eye in a near-permeant squint, and contorts the fingers of his hands when using them to add emphasis in convincing those around him to agree with his every crackpot idea. Dude is a real piece of work. Meg Tilly steals the movie as the General’s doting wife Jeannie McMahon. If only the filmmakers better knew how to balance Tilly’s authenticity with the satirical zing they never attain. Part of the problem is that, regardless of how tweaky Brad Pitt makes General Glen, the guy doesn't stack up as the anti-hero you want to build your story on. It should have been the reporter's story to begin with.  

There may well be a good movie hiding somewhere beneath this film’s ton of narration and poorly edited construction. I’d like to take a shot at cleaning it up, that’s for sure. The predictable soundtrack on display would be the second thing to go; I don't care if Nick Cave was responsible. 

You do come away from “War Machine” with a clear understanding of the utter worthlessness of America’s copyrighted Afghanistan War. And, you’ll know exactly what an “insurgent” is and is not after watching this frustrating film.  

Not Rated. 122 mins.