Feud: Bette and Joan. The Complete First Season

FEUD: BETTE AND JOAN

Television now has allowed itself to tell one story, briefly, without a desire to go on for several seasons.  Feud: Bette and Joan is in the tradition of another Ryan Murphy production, American Horror Story, in that every season will tackle another subject (next season, it will be the feud between His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales, and his first wife, the late Lady Diana Spencer.  Still no plans as of this writing to tackle Olivia de Havilland/Joan Fontaine feud.  All's the pity).

Bette and Joan chronicles the war between Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) and Joan Crawford (Murphy muse Jessica Lange) primarily centered around the making of the only film they made together: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. We see how these two divas undercut each other in ways large and small, both during the production and the follow-up, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (which Crawford pulled out of through less-than-straightforward, unable to endure another round with Davis). It's a well-produced limited series, with standout performances by Lange, Sarandon, Alfred Molina as director Robert Aldrich, Stanley Tucci as Warner Brothers head Jack Warner, and Judy Davis as gossip maven Hedda Hopper.

Curiously enough, the war between Hopper and her fellow gossip maven Louella Parsons might make for a good Feud season, their rivalry already covered in a television movie, Malice in Wonderland.

I say well acted, which it was, but I also was not convinced by Lange's portrayal of Crawford.  Physically, Lange and the make-up crew did wonders to capture the Crawford look.  Vocally, in all eight episodes of Bette and Joan, Lange never sounded like Crawford.  There was a soft, breathy tone to her voice that didn't come close to what I remember of the real Crawford. 

Much better was Sarandon as Davis.  It wasn't an impersonation, but Sarandon got the short, clipped manner to Davis.  Molina was a delight as the forever put-upon Aldrich, having to deal with power-mad moguls and temperamental divas making his life eternally miserable. Davis was all acid as Hopper, frenemy to Crawford.  I think Tucci wasn't spot-on as the tyrannical Warner, the last of the great movie moguls, but when it came to Hollywood, Feud really is more about how it is today than how it was yesterday.

Feud is not just a tale of two women locked in a lifelong war that went on beyond the grave (Davis, outliving Crawford by more than a decade, still bitched about her long after Joan's body was a-moldering in the grave).  It's also about the relatively low position women have in Hollywood.  Warner at first doesn't want to hire Crawford and/or Davis for anything.  First, both of them gave him endless trouble when working for Warner Brothers (Davis more than Crawford, but both insufferable to him).  Second, he considers both of them, women in their fifties, would appeal to audiences.

Warner coldly dismissed them both due to their ability to arouse him sexually.

There's more than poetry in that idea, as today very few actresses past forty have both box office and 'sex' appeal.  Meryl Streep is a rare example, but today's Hollywood, like the one that saw Crawford and Davis relegated to has-beens, does not go out of its way to hire actresses of a certain age.  As I've pointed out, in the past decade the Best Actress Oscar winner has been on the young side (ironically, Streep pushes the average age up), while the Best Actor winner tends to be older.  The youngest Best Actor winner this decade is actually older or the same age as five Best Actress winners.

Older actresses (say 50+) are not given major parts in big films.  It is more than ageism, though that cannot be dismissed.  It is because Hollywood today is reluctant to make films that would require older actresses.  Today's Hollywood is more focused on comic book adaptations, franchise building, and the foreign market (particularly the Chinese market) to care about Sharon Stone, Julia Roberts, or Meg Ryan.

Think on that versus older actors like Jeff Bridges or Kurt Russell, who still appear in blockbusters.

In More, Or Less, we saw what was true then is true now: behind the scenes, it has not improved.  Female directors are still rare, female writers still struggle harder.  One character speculated that by the 1970s, studios would be forced to hire more female directors and writers because there would be more women. What was not seen was that the studio would respond to population growth, but not that of women, but of young boys.

If women were the economic powerhouse that it was thought they might be, would we really have the Marvel Cinematic Universe or its poor relation, the DC Extended Universe? Would we have The Fast & The Furious franchise (which came about virtually by accident)?  Perhaps the latter: F&F has wide appeal through all races and genders, but it is more male-centered than female.

Even in more female-centric films and television, they tend to be closer to what might appeal to men: gone are the days of Loretta Young, sweeping in wearing elegant gowns on her anthology show.  Now it's women like Chelsea Handler and Amy Schumer, women who've built their careers on being as raunchy, even vulgar as any of their male counterparts might be.  

I doubt anyone who watches Handler, Schumer, or Samantha Bee would imagine them wearing gowns and reveling in the glories of femininity.  Part of it is the change in society, which equates equality with similarity.  I've long argued that men and women are equal, but are not the same.  As such, things that might have mattered to Davis and especially Crawford: good parts where they could be strong women without being female versions of men, do not matter to those who are now en vogue in Hollywood.

Women are still not employed in larger numbers as directors or writers, let alone in the business office. So long as this continues, films will continue to go where the market is, and the market is in two places: China and the boys middle-school locker room.

Feud, in a sharp way, uses the past to illustrate the present.  Women in front of the camera still struggle to get parts if they are past their child-bearing years (will people like Jennifer Lawrence or Emma Stone really go on to play Chekov on film once they get to be Sharon Stone's age?).  The desire a woman may have to write and/or direct will still face a harder struggle than a man might.

Even if a man did get his film done, like Aldrich he might find himself having to constantly battle with studios who won't back his own vision and want to 'improve' on things, usually but not always with disastrous results.

The more things change...

Feud: Bette and Joan has so much going for it.  It has great acting, writing and directing.  It has nods to other projects like the Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest.  It gives us sometimes sympathetic portraits of Davis and Crawford, two women who despite protests to the contrary were far more similar than different.  It also has much to say, in a subtle way, about how things are now versus how things were then: the gimmicks, the struggles for things large (Oscar campaigns) and small (order of billing).   It's not a bitchy slap-fest of two old broads (though we have good old-fashioned sniping), but a well-crafted production about how something unique emerged out of a lifelong antagonism between two legendary actresses.

Feud: You Mean All This Time We Could Have Been Friends? Review

FEUD: YOU MEAN ALL THIS TIME WE COULD HAVE BEEN FRIENDS?

Feud is a tragedy.  Not in terms of production, for it's a well-created, well-crafted limited series. Instead, it's a tragedy in that we see how Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, at the center of the first season, ended: sad, relatively lonely, and with little to show for their decades-long rivalry. You Mean All This Time We Could Have Been Friends? wraps up this sad and sordid story of these two divas, who hopefully will be remembered more for their work onscreen than their wickedness off screen.

The episode, longer than most, first goes into chronicling Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange).  Facing serious health issues (including deteriorating teeth due to surgery to further her career), Crawford keeps drinking as she suffers from the poorly-funded filming of Trog, her final film.  She is genuinely appalled at how low the production is, and isn't too thrilled whenever people ask her about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, even when promoting her lifestyle book.

In a lengthy sequence, as she slips into hallucinations in the final week of her life due to cancer, she imagines a lavish yet intimate dinner party with her frenemy Hedda Hopper (Judy Davis), her difficult boss Jack Warner (Stanley Tucci), and even Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon).  While everyone there bemoans how low Hollywood has gotten, the two bitter rivals at this dinner appear to finally bury the hatchet, but not for long, as Mamacita (Jackie Hoffman), who has returned on a part-time basis, leads the disoriented Crawford back to bed, and in essence, to eternity.

Davis' career isn't going well either, having appeared in a series of failed pilots.  Her old friend Victor Buono (Dominic Burgess) tells Davis that Crawford is dying and urges her to make peace, telling her that Crawford is the only one who knows what Davis is going through.  He further points out that both have had parallel lives: struggles in their careers, ungrateful children.  Davis does call Crawford, but cannot bring herself to speak.

We finally go back to the Academy Awards of 1978, which have been the framework for Feud.  We learn that all these interviews of people like Joan Blondell (Kathy Bates) and Olivia de Havilland (Catherine Zeta-Jones) were for a documentary, one that Davis stubbornly will not participate in.  They, along with Pauline Jamison (Alison Wright), the assistant who found new life working on documentaries, watch the In Memoriam of the Oscars.  Blondell notes sadly that fifty years career were reduced to two seconds as Crawford's photograph is included in the montage.

We end with speculation about the first day's shooting of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and we see that Crawford and Davis actually got along quite well, laughing like two old chums, before they head out to their separate dressing rooms.  Another montage tells us of the real people involved in this Feud.

The episode I think gets why this story is a tragedy, particularly for Crawford.  We see the indignities she went through with Trog, her final film, how bad pictures of her and her friend Rosalind Russell made her a recluse, how the stories in her daughter Christina's book Mommie Dearest privately devastated her, and how she died a lonely woman.  For Davis, we see how she kept working but in projects that did not fit her talent, how one of her few rivals (Katherine Hepburn) rejected her (in essence inflicting the same haughtiness on her that she inflicted on Crawford), and how her own daughter ended up rejecting her.

A scene between Davis and her daughter B.D. Hyman (Kiernan Shipka) reveals the resentment the latter had and how she disapproved of her mother as both mother and daughter.  The coldness Hyman has would be a preview of the devastating turn of events when Hyman wrote her own memoir, My Mother's Keeper.  However, unlike Crawford, who died before Mommie Dearest was published but was aware of its contents, Davis was very much alive when My Mother's Keeper came out (though disabled by a series of strokes and recovering from cancer).  Davis never again spoke to her daughter.

Despite all their hatred, the two did indeed have parallel lives.

There is a sense of tragedy in You Mean All This Time We Could Have Been Friends?, and the double meaning of the title (a line from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) rings true. The tragedy runs throughout the episode, from Mamacita's sad observation that people came when Crawford died but not when she needed them to Davis' discovery of someone she ended up hating more: Faye Dunaway, whom she worked with in a television movie and found more intolerable than Crawford (who at least was always professional on the set). The fact that Crawford had praised Dunaway and said she would be the only person who could play Crawford probably made things more maddening for Davis.

While the episode slips into fantasy (the extended dinner sequence and the first day shooting scene, the latter still a point of debate about its reality), it does draw you in.  We are aware that the whole thing is in Crawford's head, but knowing that she is days from death makes the whole scene, where the mixture of bitterness and elegance brings them a sense of peace.  Crawford in her dementia is allowed a moment of bliss and catharsis, and that seems poignant.

Davis talks about losing her 'high standards' in order to keep working, but fortunately Feud didn't.  Even in their smaller roles, Davis and Tucci were wonderful as the acid-tongued Hopper and the unapologetic Warner.  In her one scene, Shipka was cold and effective as B.D., forever angry. 

As for the two leads, You Mean All This Time We Could Have Been Friends? is more Lange's hour-plus as the dying Crawford.  While I question just how unhappy she was in making Trog (by all accounts, she was aware it was bad but remained the professional), Lange made Crawford a person, hurt and lonely, desperate to hold on to the one thing that gave her reason to live: her career.  Even if it cost her a set of teeth or suffered indignity upon indignity, Lange's Crawford kept going, rarely letting cracks appear.  When they did, like when her daughter Cathy (Audrey Moore) comes to visit with her own children, we see the vulnerability and pain of her final years.

Sarandon keeps that haughty demeanor to her Davis, but she also has regrets, particularly when she cannot bring herself to speak on the phone with Crawford.  The bitterness will not go away, and it makes it again, all the more tragic.

Again, sometimes the musical choices are a little too on the nose (playing The Doors' The End as Crawford films Trog is a bit too much), and proves a bit distracting.  I also question whether the episode had to be as long as it was.  However, these are minor complaints.  As an elegy to Crawford and Davis, to the end of their Hollywood, and to how Hollywood as an industry still can't do right with women (especially of a certain age), we see the present reflected in the past.

You Mean All This Time We Could Have Been Friends?  Yes, they could have, but chose not to.

Bette Davis: 1908-1989
Joan Crawford: 1904-1977

8/10

Next: The Complete First Season

Bates Motel: The Cord Review

BATES MOTEL: THE CORD

...but the Mother and Child Reunion is only a murder away...

Somehow, I figure that would have been a better title for the series finale of Bates Motel, though The Cord does bring everything full circle from the premiere episode.  Here we had to wrap up everything, and somehow for me things did not end particularly well.  It felt a bit unfair, a bit underwhelming given everything that has come before.  For me, The Cord was probably the worst Bates Motel episode, and given that it's the last one, it ended on a weak note.

Sheriff Alex Romero (Nestor Carbonell) has forced his nemesis, Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) to take him to the body of his late wife, Norma.  Norman, still as sarcastic as ever (referring to his former stepfather as "Sheriff Lonelyhearts") does so.  A devastated Romero beats Norman within an inch of his life, then stops to cradle the body.  Bad move, as this distraction is enough for Norman to get a rock, beat Romero with it, then shoot him dead.

Despite having been shot multiple times, even in the head if memory serves right, Romero STILL lives (a latter-day Rasputin), telling Norman that he is a sick man for murdering his own mother.

Sheriff Jane Greene (Brooke Smith) doesn't care what happens to Norman, but she is extremely worried about what could happen to her deputy, Regina (who was also taken by Romero).  This lack of empathy angers and worries Norman's half-brother/uncle Dylan Massett (Max Thieriot), who is desperate to get Norman the help he so desperately needs. 

Unbeknown to anyone, Norman casually gets Norma's body and drives back to the hotel, where even more surprisingly he manages to get a guest and her two sons to check in.  More than likely this situation would have continued, perhaps completely unknown if not for the fact that Norman calls Dylan to invite him to dinner.  Dylan is shocked at all this, especially since he realizes that Norman is so far gone he thinks he's basically started over and that what has happened in the past five-odd years hasn't.

Dylan, against the advise of his wife Emma (Olivia Cooke) goes to the house and doesn't tell the police.  There, Dylan finds Norman completely divorced from reality, making dinner while their mother's corpse sits there, causing Dylan to vomit in horror.  Dylan really tries hard to tell Norman that Mother is dead, that none of this is real, and that he needs to get help; Norman won't hear this, and gets a knife.  Dylan has come with a gun courtesy of his old friend Remo, and is forced to shoot his brother.

Norman whispers a soft 'thank you' while Dylan tearfully cradles his brother in his arms.  We see Norman and Norma 'reunited' joyfully in some ethereal world, and Dylan, Emma, and their daughter are now happy in a sunny Seattle.

Somehow, a lot of The Cord rang false for me.  Of particular irritant was the idea that Norman and Norma would reunite happily in the afterlife.  Now, as someone who does believe in an afterlife, I don't object to that per se.  I object to the idea that Norman should get a happy ending.  Yes, he was disturbed, with serious mental issues.  He was also pretty cold-blooded, selfish, and unrepentant.  He wasn't under Norma's control when he killed Sam Loomis or Sheriff Romero.  That was all Norman. 

Why then am I supposed to accept that he can get a happy ending?  That just didn't sit right with me.

I also had a hard time believing that there would be no checking at the Bates Motel itself by the police, or that Norman could just waltz back to the hotel and open it up, or that some woman who happened to stumble into the hotel would believe some random person that knocked on her door and told her to get out because the nice young man that checked her in is really bonkers, or that a man who has been shot more than once could still find time for a final monologue.

That whole Romero business was something else that never sat well with me.  Why didn't Romero just shoot Norman, or at least tie him up or put him in the trunk of the car while he mourned?  And again, after getting shot again (having made a near-miraculous recovery from the last time he was shot), he still has enough within him to taunt Norman with his Joker-like look?

Why didn't Emma call the police if Dylan refused to?  Norman, even in a state of delusion, killed her mother, so it isn't as if she was going to be particularly sympathetic to him.

No, a lot of The Cord felt as if things just had to be wrapped up.  There were ten episodes to set up a good, proper ending.  Somehow, I felt it wasn't a good and proper ending (even with Norman finally dead and buried: 1995-2017). 

I can't say much in terms of performances except that Highmore and Thieriot were good: typical for the former, slightly atypical for the latter. 

Somehow, I was disappointed by The Cord.  It just didn't feel like an ending, but a finish, a way to just close out a series because you had to.  Good thing too, because if it hadn't been the final season, I probably would have stopped watching after this episode.

3/10

Bates Motel: The Complete Fifth & Final Season

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Review

BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK

I have not read Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, and like many people, skipped it when it was released in theaters.  It's surprising given how BLLHW was essentially touted as some great Oscar-winning epic.  It had a high pedigree, a topical subject, and a great polish.  However, it ends up being a film that thinks it has a lot to say, and it says a lot, but it never says anything worth our time.

Covering one day in the life of our titular hero (Thanksgiving Day 2004), BLLHW tells us of our nineteen-year-old Texas veteran, Private William Lynn (Joe Alwyn).  He was cajoled into joining the Army to help pay for medical treatment for his abused sister (Kristen Stewart) and found himself in Iraq.  There, he is mentored by two officers: the metaphysical Shroom (Vin Diesel), who quotes Hindu scripture and believes that if you are meant to die on the battlefield, 'the bullet's already been fired', and the more blunt Dime (Garrett Hedlund), who has no problem telling off everyone he meets if they don't meet with his approval.  Due to what is perceived as his bravery in battle (fortuitously captured on video), Lynn, along with his company, the Bravos, are held up as great figures for a disillusioned nation tiring of the Iraq Intervention.

The Bravos are feted at the Thanksgiving Day football game in Dallas (though the film can't use the name "Dallas Cowboys" and almost goes out of its way to not suggest that's who the team is, we pretty much know it is).  There, they have two forces they must endure: Albert (Chris Tucker) a fast-talking agent who is working hard to get the Bravos a good movie deal (at one point bragging that Hillary Swank was on board to play Billy), and the "not Jerry Jones" owner of the "not Dallas Cowboys", Norman Oglesby (Steve Martin).  Oglesby is delighted to use the Bravos as props, I mean, honor our brave men in uniform.

He gets them special seats.  He has them over in the posh dining area of the "not AT&T Stadium", here named the Valero Dome (probably after the gas station company).  They're featured in not one, not two, but at least three events.  There's a pre-game shout-out.  There's a press conference where Billy imagines how his fellow troops would answer if given a chance to give real answers (ex.: how do you spend your free time? Answer: masturbate).  Here is where he meets Faison (Mackenzie Leigh), a "not Dallas Cowboys cheerleader" who is both Christian and wildly hot for Billy (who at nineteen is still a virgin...the shame).  They get to pose for pictures with Oglesby and the "not Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders".

Eventually, we get to the third or fourth use of the Bravos: the fabled halftime show, here featuring Destiny's Child.  Despite having no rehearsal time or clear idea of what to do (or even the right outfits, they being told to quickly change from their dress uniforms to the camouflage ones which they happen to have), the Bravos find themselves in the middle of an overblown production, mixing leering looks at Beyoncé with confusion, even terror of the explosions and pyrotechnics.

While being made to participate in this spectacle, Lynn has flashbacks of what really happened in Iraq and his guilt over it.  Before you know it, the production is over, and the Bravos don't take kindly to having roadies tell them to move to clear the field for the second half.  Eventually, struggling with himself, Billy Lynn decides to go against his sister's wishes and return to battle.  He does also find Faison still eager to be with him, and there's even a fight when they are taken by surprise by those roadies.

All in the day of Billy Lynn.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk strikes me as the type of film that thinks it has something deep and profound to say about war, about those who fight it, about the reality versus the illusion of it all.  It just doesn't get about to say anything because it throws in a lot of things that either don't make sense or that seem very forced.

No matter what anti-war/pro-soldier message was either in the film or in Ben Fountain's novel, the movie had me think that key events, particularly the halftime show, simply would not have happened.  No matter how rah-rah uber-patriotic a spectacle the halftime show was meant to be, there is no way that a group of untrained, unrehearsed men would just be thrown in there (or that this group would agree to make fools out of themselves on national television).  There had to have been rehearsals and perfectly timed practices.

Sometime during the game, the soldiers are harassed by a clearly drunk individual, questioning them about 'don't ask, don't tell'.  One of the Bravos then proceeds to put a sleeper choke hold on this rowdy person to where he almost kills him, and the drunk guy's frightened group quickly takes him away.  Two things struck me as wrong here: one, I figure soldiers would be more professional that that, and two, no matter how brave the soldiers were in battle, they wouldn't be allowed to almost kill a civilian without any kind of retribution.  

Lest we forget, General George S. Patton was severely reprimanded for slapping a soldier.  Anyone think that a simple trooper who almost killed someone in front of dozens of people would get less severe treatment?

I can get that BLLHW is meant to be more symbolic: the image of war versus the actual cost of it to these men, how their actions (which they struggle with) are used by others for reasons of their own (money, publicity, what have you).  Still, when you start questioning the logic of certain things, you forget all about the deep meanings behind them.

It got so bad that when one of the Bravos says that there are no Asian or Latino football players, I just said "Gonzalez, Archuleta, Polamalu, Dat Nguyen (who played for the Cowboys)".

It's interesting that BLLHW has a host of good actors doing pretty bad work.  Diesel at least is branching out from purely action films, but his Shroom came across as a bore, forever quoting obscure New Age-type ideas.  Not that Hedlund's Dime was any better: forever crabby and gruff, he didn't have anything interesting.  I think that pretty much would be how the Bravos were in BLLHW: one-note (the traumatized one, the funny one, the one who wants to get away). Steve Martin, who has been underused in drama, somehow failed here: his Oglesby was so obviously insincere, or worse, was sincere and it just looked insincere.

The only good performance was Alwyn as Lynn.  His face says more than his words, and there is a realness to him, making Lynn a real person, one who is haunted but still able to find joy in things.  Alwyn is so good you would never tell he was British and not American: not once does his accent slip or sound unconvincing.  This is a standout performance and one that in a better film would have really been a knockout debut.

Alwyn is the only reason to see Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, a film that is more shallow than a real halftime show and less entertaining.

DECISION: D-

Live By Night: A Review (Review #907)

LIVE BY NIGHT

Live By Night had a lot of hallmarks into being yet another Oscar-winning film from Ben Affleck.  Affleck directs, and he's had a good track record when he's behind the camera (Gone Baby Gone, The Town, Argo).  Just as with Gone Baby Gone, Affleck goes to a Dennis Lehane novel to mine it for potential recognition.  Unlike Gone Baby Gone or any of his other films, Live By Night is dull, long, confused, rambling, almost incoherent and frankly full of itself, a pompous indulgence that had a lousy screenwriter, a weak director, and a terrible actor.

And each of those was all one and the same.

Joe Coughlin (Affleck) is a sad World War I veteran who returns to his hometown of Boston and become in his own voice-over, an outlaw.  He's a bit forlorn in his outlook but still a criminal, working to stay out of the turf war between Irish mobster Albert White (Robert Glenister) and Italian mobster Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone).  Joe does fool around with White's moll, the Irish girl Emma Gould (Sienna Miller).  Despite warnings from his cop father Thomas (Brendan Gleeson), Joe continues fooling around with Emma, until she's forced to betray him to an angry White. 

Joe would have been killed, but a chance accident has saved him, though the cops arrest him for murdering other officers during his last bank heist.  Thomas, with some influence and pressure, helps his boy get a much lighter sentence, and after his release Joe goes to Pescatore to join him in revenge for Emma, who is presumed dead. 

Pescatore sends Joe to Florida, where he is to muscle out White in the illegal rum business (it is Prohibition at this time) and expand to narcotics and women.  Joe has no problem working with Cubans, and soon he begins a passionate affair with Graciela (Zoe Saldana), an Afro-Cuban who is in the rum-running business with her brother.

After this, well, the film kind of lurches from one thing to another, as if working hard to stuff its two-hour running time.  Joe deals with a very dysfunctional family, the Figgis family.  Sheriff Irving Figgis (Chris Cooper) is pretty happy to not interfere so long as they don't cause trouble (and to be fair, he isn't on the take), but everyone else connected to him at one point or another makes life hard for old Joe. 

First is Sheriff Figgis' brother-in-law,  RD Pruitt (Matthew Maher, apparently auditioning for the Truman Capote story).  Pruitt is a member of the Ku Klux Klan, who isn't keen on Joe's Catholicism or his interracial romance but who is willing to forsake white purity for a 60% share of the illegal trade.  An offer of 15% is first taken, then violently declined.  There's a gang war between the mob and the Klan, with the latter losing.

Next comes the Sheriff's daughter Loretta (Elle Fanning).  We meet her once, when she heads off to Hollywood to become a star, only to end up a heroin-addicted whore.  Joe gets hold of pictures showing her in this sad condition and puts the squeeze on Figgis to serve his brother-in-law on a silver platter, but now Loretta is back.  She's evolved into some white-clad almost looney charismatic preacheress, speaking against all sorts of vice, including gambling.  This puts a damper on Joe's plans to build a casino in Sarasota once Prohibition ends, which Joe sees coming.

Good thing for Joe that Loretta decides to kill herself, leaving a devastated Figgis alone, repeating one word over and over again, "Repent".  Graciela and Joe have even more issues: they're in love and want to marry, but Joe spots a photo that might be of Emma, who may still be alive.  Pescatore also comes to Florida to settle business with Joe, and Joe finds he's been set up as Pescatore and White have made an unholy union.  Joe, however, has a few tricks up his sleeve, and he triumphs over White, Pescatore, and Pescatore's dimwitted son Digger (Max Casella, barely recognizable).  He finds Emma, who declares herself free of everything. 

Joe, Graciela, and their son appear happy, until a deranged Figgis shows up, shouting "REPENT!" and firing his gun into their house.  Joe manages to kill Figgis, but not before in the melee Figgis manages to his Graciela.  A devastated Joe buries her in Cuba, and he spends his life caring for their son.

Live By Night, I figure, wants to be taken seriously, but this is just the starting point of where it goes so terribly wrong.  Affleck's tone, from the visuals to his idiotic voice-over (a bane of my cinematic experience), is so serious that it comes across not as somber but as self-important.  Even the opening voice-over monologue of how the war taught him he'd never let others be in charge of him made him sound almost pompous in his own self-worth.

Things go by so slowly, and yet despite this most of the characters are essentially unknown.  Joe is rather opaque, Affleck's almost perpetual forlorn expression trying to pass itself off as moving or emotional.  It does not help that Affleck still can't act, even in voice-over (something that I can't quite say about his brother Casey, who might have been a more interesting choice for the role).  Affleck never showed that Joe was a good man to begin with: he was a criminal, he was screwing a woman he knew he shouldn't have been screwing, and if he had any great conflict within it got lost in how somber he tried to be.

When he tried to be 'a good man', Affleck was trying too hard.  When he tried to be menacing and gangster-like, it was slightly amusing.  Ben Affleck is as threatening as a turkey sandwich in Live By Night.

Everyone else pretty much faded into the unintentional hilarity of the self-serious project.  Cooper was a bit comical as Figgis, again unintentionally so.  I hope his final scene, screaming "REPENT!" as he flays about the front yard of the Coughlins' home doesn't come back to haunt him.  Bless him, for he tried to work with the script (also by Affleck) but it did nothing for him.  Maher as Figgis' racist brother-in-law was equally hilarious.  He really should use clips from Live By Night if they ever have another Truman Capote biopic, because his voice and mannerisms all channeled the diminutive writer. 

Saldana was probably the best of the lot, but her role didn't give her much to do apart from looking lovingly at the beauty that is Ben Affleck. 

Affleck is really a top-notch director, which makes Live By Night all the more puzzling and frustrating.  He was clearly aiming for a serious crime drama, but there is such a thing as too serious to where it is almost if not actually self-conscious about how serious everything should be.  There's no life, there's no real emotion in Live By Night.  It's too wrapped up in being serious it failed to be entertaining, let alone good.

Affleck was just lost in every aspect of filmmaking.  He isn't an actor, and Live By Night shows it (despite his claims, there was no evolution to his character).  His screenwriting was disastrous: such clunky lines as "The king and pawn end up in the same box in the end," is what passes for wit.  Adding more problems, the overall story goes from one thing to another without a real sense of cohesion.  The mobsters get in a war with the Klan, and once that's over, we go to another foil: this reformed drug addict (whom we barely know and is apparently spanked into preaching the Word).  We see her for less than two minutes the first time, then when she returns (with only photographs to indicate her fall from grace), she's suddenly the Aimee Semple McPherson of northern Florida.  Then she confesses to Affleck that her faith isn't as strong as she suggests, and kills herself off camera.

I truly wonder if Affleck would not have been better served to have essentially cut out the first twenty minutes or so, the entire Boston sequences, and started with his arrival in Florida, allowing us a blank slate with some flashbacks indicating his fall to the good man gone bad he wanted to portray.  It would have allowed us more time to show these other characters who pop in and out, to flesh them out more instead of hitting them every so often.

For the longest time, what I thought would be a major plot point (Joe's revenge against White for Emma), was all but forgotten until it got thrown in at the end for a chance at a shoot-out.  So much time was lost on other things going hither and yon that being reminded of it came as a bit of a jolt.

The failure of Live By Night lies squarely on Ben Affleck's broad shoulders.  As an actor, he still hasn't shown promise.  As a director, he focused too much on the look and not much if any on the characters.  As a screenwriter he didn't know where to start or stop a story and just let it spin out this way and that.  Affleck is lost in the trappings of the Roaring 20s and took things way too seriously.  He was just lost, and due to that, so was the audience.    

DECISION: F

Bates Motel: Visiting Hours Review

BATES MOTEL: VISITING HOURS

We are now coming to the end of our saga of Norman Bates, with Visiting Hours giving us our closing look at a saga that knows when to end.  Visiting Hours gives us a great moral crisis for one of its characters, resignation from another, and righteous fury from yet another.

Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) has been formally charged with three murders, but there is a chance that he could get away with it.  His lawyer suggests he plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but "Mother" (Vera Farmiga) pushes hard against it.  There certainly is a good case for it, as the police marvel at how Mother's room is almost museum-like (or perhaps mausoleum-like) in preserving a semblance of life.  Norman is essentially trapped in an unreal world.

Dylan Massett (Max Thieriot), Norman's half-brother/uncle who is perhaps the sanest member, is caught in a terrible bind.  He loves his tormented brother, but he also loves his wife, Emma (Olivia Cooke), whose mother was one of Norman's victims.  Emma understandably is angry about all this, despite being distant from her mother versus Norman's postmortem connection to his.

Emma sees to her mother's cremation, then sees Norman.  She sees a very polite but distant and creepy figure, and at one point Emma 'talks' to Norma.  Emma sees just how far gone Norman is, and leaves in great pain.

Lurking in the background is our dear Sheriff Alex Romero (Nestor Carbonell), still plotting revenge on Norman.  He finally discovers what has happened to Norman, but despite being arrested he won't let go of his mad plan for vengeance.  It appears to have given him more fuel, as he storms the jail, takes Norman hostage, and kidnaps them.  Romero, full of rage, stops short of strangling Norman right then and there, instead ordering Norman to take him to Norma's body.

Visiting Hours is a showcase for Thieriot, who has mastered the art of looking forever forlorn and sad.  His Dylan has that great crisis of conscience between loyalty to his brother and his love for his wife.  A lot of Visiting Hours was almost a domestic drama between Dylan and Emma, with the latter perhaps harder on the former than necessary.

As has been the case almost since the beginning, Bates Motel hasn't used Cooke as much as her talents would have warranted, and Thieriot has never been the most versatile actor on the show. However, he in this episode gives a very strong performance.  In fact, both did extremely well, especially Cooke, who communicated so much even when saying little, for example, when her mother is burned to ashes; the conflicting emotions of the whole situation play out in her face.

However, as has been the case this season, Visiting Hours is Freddie Highmore's show.  He is frightening when speaking to Emma: in turns calm yet creepy, intense and frightening, Highmore in a sane universe would almost be a shoe-in for at least an Emmy nomination.  However, he's on Bates Motel, not the perennially-nominated Game of Thrones, so he pretty much is out.  Much the pity, as Highmore's Norman Bates is the only one to challenge Anthony Perkins' iconic take on the character.

Then there's Carbonell's Romero.  I don't dislike him or his performance, but given how we're one episode away from the series finale, I really don't care for his revenge bit.  It might also be that overall, with the show winding down (as it should), things seem to be done just to wrap them up.  You have to have a character's arc end somehow.

Visiting Hours isn't my favorite, but it does its job.  With strong performances by Thieriot, Cooke, and especially Highmore, it is a well-acted story.  It's one I can't build great enthusiasm for, but it still works well. 

6/10

Next Episode: The Cord

Feud: Abandoned! Review

FEUD: ABANDONED!

Last week, I thought Feud was very much pro-Bette Davis.  Now, with Abandoned!, I think it's swung completely the other way and is pro-Joan Crawford.  Abandoned! displayed in all its naked, ugly 'glory' why the reteaming of Crawford and Davis for Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte ultimately collapsed, but also portrayed Davis in particular as the really vindictive, bitter bitch in this war; though Crawford could be petty and spiteful, Abandoned! makes her out to be almost a victim, partially of a Davis-Aldrich axis, partially out of her own decisions.

Production on the now-titled Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte appears to be going relatively smoothly.  Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange) is giving a good performance, earning the production team's respect and admiration.  Crawford is doing her best, even giving up drinking while on the job (a remarkable decision given she's a virtual alcoholic). Crawford, however, is worried that her costar, Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) is undercutting her, particularly given how close and chummy Davis is with their director, Robert Aldrich (Alfred Molina). 

Crawford isn't completely off the mark: Davis and Aldrich appear to be having some form of liaison, and she spots Davis in her hotel room apparently mocking Crawford's performance, weakening her fragile ego.  In reality, Davis is actually marveling how Crawford is able to do things in one take, but she is too mean to give her hated rival a compliment.  She is able to make her life insufferable by openly criticizing her, by cutting the script to take lines away from her, and worse, by pushing Aldrich to make Davis associate producer, giving her more power. 

All this pushes Crawford back to the bottle.

Davis has become an absolute control freak: not only calling the shots on Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (essentially emasculating Aldrich) but on her daughter, B.D. (Kiernan Shipka).  B.D. at sixteen wants to marry twenty-nine year old Jeremy Hyman (David Foy Bauer), whom Davis dismissively calls B.D.'s "elderly playmate Jerome", but Davis will have none of it. Eventually she consents with the proviso that Davis run the show.

Power gets to Davis' head: dictating Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, controlling B.D.'s wedding plans, and undercutting Crawford, with the nadir being when Crawford's trailer on set is left abandoned while she took a nap.  Crawford is astonished, heartbroken, and furious to find the whole crew left her and Mamacita (Jackie Hoffman) stranded in the Louisiana bayou.

Back in Los Angeles, Crawford thinks she'll get a better deal, but soon she sees the rewrites to the script and how Davis again is exercising her powers on set.  Crawford has had enough and relies on an old Hollywood trick: she becomes 'ill'.  Davis is infuriated that Crawford is holding up production, but there's little she can do.  Aldrich for his part is firmly in Davis' camp, telling Crawford she can essentially take her ideas and stick them up her ass.  The war continues until the 'illness' so weakens the production that Crawford is fired, enraging Crawford enough to throw a vase in Mamacita's direction.  True to her word, Mamacita walks out.

Davis is shocked when B.D. tells her that her 'first marriage' has already occurred, having married the moment she signed the consent forms.  To replace Crawford, Davis vetoes Vivien Leigh (saying there's no way anyone would believe Leigh as a Southern belle, Gone With the Wind notwithstanding and A Streetcar Named Desire not even mentioned).  Davis has someone else in mind, her old friend Olivia de Havilland (Catherine Zeta-Jones).  At first, de Havilland declines (though she suggests that if they need someone to play a bitch, they should get her sister Joan Fontaine).  However, de Havilland eventually agrees, and everyone celebrates by opening up bottles of Coke.

Davis, spiteful, vindictive and bitchy to the end.

Abandoned! is a shift for Feud in that it is as close to portraying Joan Crawford as a victim and Bette Davis as a villain.  There is no way anyone could watch Abandoned! and not be pushed to Crawford's side in this awful battle to the death between these two old divas.

Crawford's sympathetic portrayal starts right off the bat, when we see her making a conscious and determined decision not to drink.  We see how Davis constantly undermines her on-set, how she pushes to cut down scenes favorable to Crawford, how she uses her small power as 'associate producer' to bully her rival, and even in bringing in Coke to mock the unofficial Queen of Pepsi.  Even the most sad scene, when a despondent Crawford awakes from her nap to find the crew has left her, gives Crawford a terrible sense of tragedy, of a woman so whittled down that it just about breaks your heart.

Davis' villainy is further showcased when we see how she was towards B.D., her need to make a production out of her daughter's wedding to please Davis, and how she genuinely didn't care about B.D.'s happiness (misguided as she might have thought to someone thirteen years her senior).

Abandoned! was wise in showing that Davis' friend and costar Victor Buono (Dominic Burgess) warns Davis to control herself, and even lets Crawford gets words of wisdom from her old friend George Cukor (John Rubenstein).  Sadly, by this point nothing can heal their vicious war.  Abandoned! also shows that deep down, Davis and Crawford resented each other because one had something the other thought she lacked.

For Crawford, Davis was 'the legitimate actress', and this fed into her sense of inferiority.  Davis came from the theater, while Crawford came up as a dancer in clubs before breaking into silent films.  For Davis, Crawford was 'the great beauty', a woman admired for her physical attributes while she wasn't (Davis telling Aldrich that she had overheard Jack Warner after her screen-test, 'Who'd want to f*** her?', a comment that demoralized the then-virgin.  Warner's comment that he wished Davis looked like Crawford put the final nail on that coffin). 

The best moment in Abandoned! I think is when Crawford confronts Davis.  Joan at the end asks Bette what was it like to be the most talented, and she says it was wonderful...but it was never enough.  Davis asks what was it like to be the most beautiful, and she says it was wonderful...but it was never enough.

Helen Hunt (yes, THAT Helen Hunt), directing this episode, makes great use of her actresses, both Lange and Sarandon giving great performances.  I'm still not with Zeta-Jones as de Havilland: Zeta-Jones being almost too glamorous to play the more elegant but still approachable de Havilland.

As a side note, if Ryan Murphy won't make a Feud: Season Three (should there be one) about Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, he is either missing the boat or far too reverential to de Havilland. 

Not everything was perfect, of course.  Hunt's recreation of a bad de Havilland film, Lady in a Cage (which if memory serves correct has been mentioned earlier in Feud) was comically bad (at least I hope it was intentionally bad, for de Havilland couldn't be THAT campy and broad and deliberately awful).  The intercutting between the events chronicled in Feud with the faux-interviews of de Havilland and Joan Blondell (Kathy Bates) still jar.  The latter is not Hunt's fault.  The former is.

However, Abandoned! was a more sympathetic portrayal of Joan Crawford, even if, as Mamacita observed when leaving the hysterical actress, she did this to herself. Bette Davis may have won that round, and had a hit film, but she wins no one over to her side.

8/10

Next Episode: You Mean All This Time We Could Have Been Friends?