Review: honor among chevaliers, familiars, and the Super Mario brothers
“What do movies do?”
It’s a simple question, but also a strange one: after all, who ever thinks of a motion picture as “doing” anything? If most of us were to consider our tangible relationship to movies — those ephemeral mirages that are projected onto a screen — we’d think of ourselves, people, as the active agents. We go to see movies. Movies themselves are merely seen.
Yet I don’t think this is true. Remember how you cried at the end of that one romantic drama? Or how pumped up you felt after that sci-fi adventure? Or how your cousin’s kid became obsessed with a character from that animated musical, and now sings songs, draws pictures, and carries a doll of said character everywhere he goes?
Movies do things to their audiences. As far as a relationship goes, it is often we, the audience, who are the passive ones.
I was thinking about this last week while watching Chevalier, the new biopic of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, an 18th-century French-Caribbean musician who is now recognized as the first prominent Black classical composer. I’d arrived at the movie a few minutes late; it takes me an hour to drive from my apartment in Catskill to the Regal Galleria in Poughkeepsie, and I wasn’t in a terrible rush. If I missed a scene or two, no biggie — not only did I have low expectations for this movie, but I knew that more than backstage trysts, African diaspora and Napoleonic intrigue awaited me at the Galleria.
You see, my plan was to take in not just this one film, but three others as well. I was making a day of it: a medley of mediocrity, a cavalcade of commercialism. At any given time, there are often several movies playing in theaters that I’m only slightly interested in seeing. I’d never leave my home to see just one of them… but if I could squeeze in several at once, then the drive might be worth it.
So I didn’t anticipate being blown away by Chevalier — and I wasn’t, though as it flickered or, more accurately, shimmered before my eyes, I was startled to discover that it actually wasn’t half bad. My line of thought grew more and more existential: who is this movie intended for? What purpose is it meant to serve? As of this writing, Chevalier has scraped together a measly few million dollars at the box office. (Its production company has yet to publicize its budget, presumably out of embarrassment.) Given this lackluster audience reception, the film is unlikely to have much of an afterlife: it will receive no awards attention, nor will it be remembered beyond the three or four weeks that it plays in theaters.
And this got under my skin. Chevalier is not a great work of art, but it is good. It’s moving, entertaining, handsome. It doesn’t waste a second of screen time, Kelvin Harrison Jr. is glamorous in the lead role, and its production values are on point. So what is its point? If movies are meant to be seen by people, then this particular movie, for all its attributes, for all its lovely non-genius-ness, has fallen short.
This line of questioning points to a larger, systemic dilemma related to filmgoing in general. Today, most people stream their “movies,” if we can call them that, on Disney+, Netflix, or Amazon. In an era of housebound boundlessness, of wall-to-wall media and high-speed spectacle, what do honest-to-goodness theatrical movies hope to accomplish? What can movies do?
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The simple answer to this question, obviously, is to make money. That’s certainly the mission (or the quest, so to speak) of Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which was the second movie I saw that day. A jolly, diverting adventure based on the massively popular tabletop game, it reminded me of 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood — what with its Medieval frivolity and Korngoldian score. Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and Regé-Jean Page make for charismatic disciples of Errol Flynn’s swashbuckling outlaw, quipping tongue-in-cheek dialogue while strolling through sprawling, bustling sets that resemble elaborate illustrations in a children’s picture book.
It’s a fun, if not quite high-spirited affair, and makes for a refreshing counterpart to most contemporary superhero flicks. As opposed to Marvel’s stoic defenders of a capitalist status quo, the Paramount-produced Dungeons and Dragons focuses on renegades, scrappy rebels, and crusaders for justice, and thereby proves itself a welcome exception to Disney’s leaden rule.
But it is still Marvel, in the sense that it adheres to Hollywood-wide standards for what kinds of stories — i.e., fantasy, science fiction, comic book — are worthy of big-budget attention. From studios’ perspectives (or, more accurately, from the perspective of their parent companies), the purpose of making movies is to generate as much profit as possible with as few risks as possible. This typically translates to relying on excessively familiar and, therefore, widely marketable source material, like Spider-Man or a bestselling board game. (Of course, this strategy doesn’t always work: Dungeons and Dragons has barely surpassed its production budget’s break-even point, which qualifies it as a failure.) But for those of us who long for something unique at the theater, for versions of “artistry” and “personality” that extend beyond production design and self-referential jokes, such thinking results in movies that, no matter their individual merits, collectively come across as absurd, pointless repetitions of shticks we’ve all seen a million times.
It has its charms, but Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves certainly slips into this unhappy collective. Again, I repeat: what is the point? What more might movies do? And do they even have a chance of doing more when the risk of a financial plateau is so high?
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That final concern is something which the third movie I saw, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, never had to worry about. Based on the ubiquitous Nintendo videogame characters, it certainly doesn’t add much to conversations about artistry or personality. What it does offer is beautiful animation, a delightfully simple plot, and palpable, sentimental devotion to its pre-Mushroom Kingdom setting of Brooklyn, New York. (Of course, its idea of Brooklyn is much closer to what you’ll find in the Williamsburg of today than to what the borough resembled when Mario made his first appearance in arcades forty years ago.) If there was ever a movie meant to make money, it’s this one: Universal already has a cool $1.1 billion in the bank from their venture, ten times the amount they put into it. But it’s hard to be cynical when you’re watching such well-orchestrated fun — from Mario’s gladiatorial battle with an oddly sexy Donkey Kong to Bowser’s (voiced by Jack Black) disarmingly hilarious piano ballads to Princess Peach.
Given its commercialism, Super Mario Bros. may not be worth having affection for, but it does stir up affection nonetheless. In other words, it does what it is designed to do, and well. I don’t see this fact as something to be resented, but, rather, to be enjoyed… with some perspective.
There’s a moment early in the movie when Luigi (voiced by Charlie Day), after watching the first airing of a TV ad that he and Mario created for their plumbing business, tries to assuage his brother’s self-consciousness: “That is not a commercial — that is cinema!” I cringed at this line, hearing in it a forced claim to creative authority from screenwriter Matthew Fogel and directors Aaron Forvath and Michael Jelenic. As I see it, there is a certain division, a point-of-no-return, between art and commerce. Some filmmakers (e.g., Sam Mendes, Christopher Nolan, Alfonso Cuarón) manage to straddle it. Others (Michael Bay, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg) succumb to it. Either you take risks, and are an artist, or veer clear of them, and are a hack.
If we delude ourselves into agreeing with its creators — that The Super Mario Bros. Movie is cinema, rather than a commercial — then we might as well give in and let AI take over.
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The final movie I saw that day played as though it had been written by one of the cruder AI bots. Renfield, a dark comedy set in the present day about Count Dracula’s (Nicholas Cage) co-dependent “familiar,” or assistant (Nicholas Hoult), was both the selection I’d been most curious about seeing and, annoyingly, the most disappointing. Aside from a lovingly-rendered opening sequence that places Mr. Cage in black-and-white recreations of old Bela Lugosi movies, director Chris McKay struggles to maintain a consistent tonal voice with Ryan Ridley’s out-of-tune screenplay. There are some bursts of inspiration here, namely from the actors — Ben Schwartz, who has a smaller part, is always a delight, while Cage makes for a delectably hammy Prince of Darkness and Shohreh Aghdashloo is formidable and sultry as a well-clad crime lord.
But alas, Mr. Hoult has his own codependent habit of agreeing to projects that use him as a reliable softie, discarding his services like a Kleenex once they’ve cleared their noses of snot. This latest schnoz of a flick he’s signed to has the comic pulse of a hastily-slapped together SNL skit, with crappy jokes (e.g., several characters’ extended and baffling mockery of ska music) and the overplayed Awkwafina clogging its arteries like so much bad cholesterol.
It was an admittedly crushing final film to see that day; after Renfield, I made the nighttime drive home — all the while catching fanciful glimpses of a cloaked Nick Cage under florescent streetlights — feeling a bit deflated after more than ten hours of, overall, agreeable yet tawdry entertainment. Of all the movies I saw, Dungeons and Dragons was the most surprising, a legitimate and unexpected good time, while Chevalier was certainly the most purposeful: to resuscitate the memory of a dead Black artist is a noble undertaking. That is something worth doing. It sure beats the opportunistic cash grab of Mario Bros., or a lazy comic rendering of one of the world’s greatest villains.
“When no one came for me, I figured I wasn’t good enough to be reclaimed.” So says Joseph Bologne to his lover (played by Samara Weaving), while reflecting on his origins as, the way he sees it, a twice-abandoned child — first by his aristocratic white father, then by his enslaved African mother. Yet the opposite is precisely what director Stephen Williams’ and screenwriter Stefani Robinson’s movie does for the Chevalier de Saint-Georges: it reclaims him. And it gives those few of us who have gone to see it some new angle, some new dimension to our understanding of the history of racism.
Just after seeing Chevalier, earlier in the day, I dropped into a sushi restaurant outside the Galleria to get some lunch before my second movie. While there, from the booth next to mine, I overheard two men, neither of whom was Black, chatting about how “racism is definitely an issue in the country today. But…” As I listened, they went on to qualify their awareness of this “issue” with justifications for their personal, work-related racist choices — like suspecting certain nonwhite coworkers of stealing, or clarifying how to distinguish between “intelligent” and “dumb ones.”
They dipped in and out of hushed tones, picking over racism like it was a spicy tuna roll, pausing only whenever their shy teenage server brought over yet another dish of Japanese cuisine. After packing it all into their bellies — their food and their bile — they got up and left. They hadn’t noticed anything lacking in themselves, or their words; they left those revelations to me. To reflect on, just as I was reflecting on Chevalier.
I pulled out a notebook, which I’d kept on hand during the movie. I flipped it open, and returned to that first question I’d jotted down at the very top the page:
“What do movies do?”
