Tales of the City: Thoughts on Luke Cage

"For black lives to matter, black history has to matter."  A character says this shortly into the first episode of Luke Cage, Netflix's third MCU series, and the fourth season of television it has produced in collaboration with Marvel as it ramps up for its Defenders mega- event.  It's easy to read this line as a thesis statement on the nature of the show we're about to watch, but it's not until some way into Luke Cage's first season that we realize the full import of what creator Cheo Hodari Coker is saying with it, and how challenging its implications will end up being.  As has been widely reported and discussed, Luke Cage is the first black MCU headliner--not just on TV or on Netflix, but at all.  And, unlike the forthcoming Black Panther, whose story is set in a fictional African superpower, Luke Cage is explicitly a story about African-Americans in the more-or-less real world, at a moment when the problems and indignities suffered by that community are at the forefront of public discussion.  It is, therefore, a show that comes loaded with tremendous expectations, not just of introducing a compelling character and telling a good superhero story, but of addressing increasingly fraught issues of race, in both the real world and the superhero genre.  It's perhaps unsurprising that Luke Cage falls short of these expectations, but what is surprising is how often it doesn't even seem to be trying to reach them.  Or, perhaps, not surprising at all--as the first episode spells out, Luke Cage is less interested in black lives than it is in black stories.

Introduced as a supporting character and love interest in last year's Jessica Jones, Luke Cage sees its title character (Mike Colter), whose skin is super-strong and impervious to harm, moving uptown to Harlem, hiding out in a neighborhood barbershop and working odd jobs under the table.  When some young employees at the barbershop end up embroiled in a plot to rob a local crimelord, Luke steps in to try and defuse the situation, only to watch his benefactor and friend, Pop (Frankie Faison), get caught in the crossfire.  The first half of the season revolves around the war that erupts between Luke, until that point a reluctant superhero, and the crime boss Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali).  In the second half of the season, Cottonmouth is sidelined by his cousin, Mariah Dillard (Alfre Woodard), who had been using his money to fund her legitimate projects to revitalize Harlem, keeping it in black hands and staving off gentrification.  With Cottonmouth's illegal business ventures crippled by Luke's activities, Mariah turns to slippery operator Shades (Theo Rossi), and his mercurial boss Diamondback (Erik LaRay Harvey) to solidify her position, not realizing that Diamondback has his own personal history with Luke, which leads him to set Harlem on fire in pursuit of our hero.

There's more to be said about the season's plot (and I have, in fact, elided certain points for the sake of brevity), but quite frankly, it's not worth spending much time on.  It is, perhaps, time to admit that Jessica Jones was unique in being able to dredge through its character's comics history to find a genuinely interesting story that was perfectly suited to the multi-episode format.  Both seasons of Daredevil, and now Luke Cage, have failed to achieve that same alchemy, and instead end up bogged down in predictable origin story beats--Luke protests that he is no hero; various characters, such as Pop and recurring Netflix MCU player Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson), insist that he is; some tragedy occurs to make him understand that they are right.  These inevitably lead to a boss fight with a forgettable and over the top villain, in which there is much property damage.  The end.

There is, to be fair, a little more to it than that.  The first half of Luke Cage feels more like a crime story--albeit one whose beats are fairly obviously derivative, most plainly of The Wire--than a superhero story.  It's elevated by the presence of Cottonmouth, whom Ali imbues with a touching ambivalence.  There's nothing terribly original about the story of a mob boss who dreams of going legit, but whose soul is too tarnished by the life he's lived to ever truly leave it behind (and some of the beats of Cottonmouth's story, such as the revelation that as a boy he dreamed of being a musician but was pushed into a life of crime by his family, are downright hackneyed).  But the show gives the character, and the performance, enough space to breathe, in particular when it charts the thorny, deeply dysfunctional relationship between Cottonmouth and Mariah, which is powered by competing currents of love and resentment.

It's in these episodes, too, that Luke Cage introduces its secret weapon, and what I hope will be its breakout character, Misty Knight (Simone Missick), a police detective who ends up as the third point of the triangle between Luke and Cottonmouth, trying to unravel the former's secrets while stopping the latter from starting a gang war.  Stalwart, bold, and curious, deeply rooted in her neighborhood but also committed to a system that has failed it repeatedly, Misty commands the eye and the attention almost from her first appearance.  She's a force in her own right, moving diagonally to both men, and sparring, as well, with Mariah and with her own superiors in the NYPD in her pursuit of the truth.  If Netflix's executives truly believe that Jon Bernthal's Frank Castle--a bloodthirsty serial killer driven by entitlement and self-justification--can carry his own series, then there is simply no justification for not doing the same for a character as magnetic, as interesting, and as blatantly heroic as Misty Knight.

Even with Misty, Cottonmouth, and Mariah to enliven things, however, the first half of Luke Cage's season feels a little perfunctory, and especially when you remember that this is, after all, meant to be a superhero story.  It is, therefore, not much of a surprise when a major twist halfway through the season reveals that its true conflict will be between Luke and Diamondback.  But it is a profound disappointment, because Diamondback is a terrible villain, with antics that were clearly intended to come off as menacing and deranged mainly registering as annoying and over the top.  It's in these episodes, too, that Misty is frustratingly sidelined, from a main actor in her own story to a supporting character in Luke's, who must scramble to prove his innocence when Mariah and Shades scheme to frame him for Diamondback's (and their own) crimes.  (The one bright point in these episodes is that they give Claire Temple a great deal to do, though here, too, there are some odd choices, chiefly the one to make Claire Luke's love interest.  Considering that Claire was previously involved with Matt Murdock, and broke up with him because he refused to give up his vigilantism, the fact that she has no such issues with Luke feels strange--as if his main attraction for her is the fact that he has superpowers.)

You may have noticed that I've said almost nothing so far about the show's title character, and this is unfortunately true to the space he ends up taking in the story.  Colter has tremendous presence, both physically and emotionally.  He's great at conveying both Luke's charm and his determination, even at moments when he's at his most withdrawn and uncommunicative.  But unlike Daredevil or Jessica Jones, Luke Cage isn't interested in digging past its protagonist's facade and poking at their insecurities--on the contrary, even as it reveals his tragic and abusive backstory, it is mostly concerned with validating his belief that he has the right, and the authority, to act in order to protect his community without being questioned or hindered.  You can see why the show makes this choice--by virtue of his skin color, Luke (and men like him) have it repeatedly drummed into them that they are inherently lesser (and perhaps also inherently villainous).  So the fact that this character is possessed of an ironclad belief in his own value, and in his right to act, is quietly revolutionary.  But it also leaves Luke feeling rather flat.  When he learns, for example, that his dead wife had lied to him, and was complicit in the abuse he suffered in prison and the experiments he was subjected to against his will, his only response is to mouth a few platitudes and quietly move on.  Compare that to the moment in Jessica Jones in which Luke learns that Jessica is the person who killed his wife, and that she lied to him about it while becoming romantically involved with him.  There's more vulnerability and humanity in Luke's five-minute reaction to this betrayal than there is in the entire first season of Luke Cage, and the show is all the poorer for that.

Diamondback's introduction is clearly intended to address some of the flatness of Luke's characterization--he and Luke turn out to have a complicated history, and he challenges our hero's simplistic understanding of his past and his family when he reveals that they are half-brothers.  But this history is introduced so awkwardly that it never really registers, especially since, even in these moments, Luke still isn't allowed to drop his facade of emotional invulnerability.  The revelation that his admired father was flawed, and that Luke himself contributed to the victimization of his half-brother, has virtually no effect on Luke, so it can't be expected to register with the audience.  When the final episode in the season opens with a flashback to the young Luke and Diamondback sparring, it feels like too little, too late--Luke is too flat, and Diamondback is too aggravating, for us to become invested in this friendship, much less its dissolution.

What makes Luke Cage work, despite the vagueness of its story and some of its characters, is the specificity of its setting.  It's been a running joke that the Netflix MCU shows tend to treat New York neighborhoods as if they were their own cities, but Luke Cage is the only one of the three to actually earn that approach, first by leaning on Harlem's storied past as a center of black culture and community, and second by showing the neighborhood to us, lingering on distinctive bits of architecture or street art.  Some of the best moments in the season are the ones that let the story pause and allow its setting to simply be.  In that sense, the choice of Pop's barbershop--that prototypical setting for black male bonding and camaraderie--is both obvious and richly rewarding.  It allows Luke and his friends to simply talk, about their favorite books, or boxers, or musicians, or just about the events of their lives.  More than any entry in the MCU, Luke Cage feels specific to a particular setting, which it depicts lovingly and with careful attention to detail.  It's amazing how often those are the qualities that distinguish a flawed but interesting work from one that has no value.

One of the most interesting ways in which Luke Cage creates a sense of place--and one that feels particularly relevant given the recent accusations of blandness leveled at the MCU's musical texture--is the show's soundtrack.  Music is a vital component of the show, down to episode titles taken from the songs of the hip hop duo Gang Starr, or a guest appearance from Method Man, who freestyles an impromptu ode to the title character (a charmingly old school touch, reminiscent of the days when superhero stories didn't take themselves so seriously).  It's also all over the show.  Cottonmouth owns a nightclub, which gives the show an excuse to feature multiple live performances in various genres associated with black culture--everything from hip hop to funk to R&B.  The soundtrack, as well, features multiple interesting cuts, as well as a distinctive and often playful score.  Musically, Luke Cage is the most exciting thing to ever come out of the MCU, and it's that music that gives the show an identity that its storytelling often lacks.

At the same time, Luke Cage's emphasis on giving Harlem its own unique, self-contained identity can have a strange, not always positive effect on the show's politics.  As promised, Luke Cage delivers black stories, and there is something genuinely revolutionary about a superhero story in which not only the hero and the supporting characters, but virtually every minor character, every bit player, every face in the background is black or brown (and in which the perspective of white characters is almost completely ignored).  The fact that Luke is a superhero operating within a community that has suffered from difficult relations with the official authorities gives his actions a weight that most other superhero stories have struggled to achieve.  In a year that has seen multiple attempts to grapple with the morality of superheroes, all of which fell flat, Luke Cage makes a convincing argument that what was missing from these stories was any acknowledgment of race (as in, to take a particularly blatant example, Civil War, in which two powerful, privileged white men grapple over the morality of committing global-scale violence, while the murdered and mutilated bodies that drop as a result of their dispute just happen to all be black).  The fact that the police in Harlem are unwilling or unable to properly police the neighborhood, to protect its residents without criminalizing them, gives Luke a justification for existing that Matt Murdock, for example, doesn't really have.  The fact that the same authorities that wink at Matt, let Jessica Jones off the hook for cold-blooded murder, and bring Frank Castle into court alive, also mount a manhunt for Luke, carrying weapons especially designed to kill him, is a pointed and deliberate choice by the show's writers.

It's also, however, a comparison that is left to the viewers to make.  While the show is vocal in its discussions of the hostility between Harlem's community and the police--which culminates in ordinary citizens donning bullet-riddled hoodies, both as an homage to Luke and a way of shielding him from the police's attentions--it is surprisingly silent when it comes to the role that white institutions, white supremacy, and systemic racism played in bringing us to this situation.  Harlem's insularity appears to extend to the complete absence of influence from any of the city's mostly-white institutions.  Luke Cage seems to take the standard superhero approach, in which government begins and ends with policing.  It thus doesn't address education, infrastructure, health care, housing, or jobs, the neglect of all of which has been the main cause of poverty, crime, and drug addiction in the inner city.  The only character who brings up the role of government in deliberately neglecting black and brown inner city neighborhoods is treated as a joke (and immediately killed off).  Speaking about Luke, Method Man opines that "there's something powerful about seeing a black man that's bulletproof and unafraid." But the show never really seems to want to talk about what it is that Luke--and other black men who are not bulletproof--have to be afraid of.

Nowhere is the strangeness of this lacuna more evident, or more troubling, than in the show's handling of police brutality.  Given Luke Cage's emphasis on Harlem as its own self-contained world, whose problems are rooted in crime rather than systemic racism, it would perhaps have been understandable if the show had simply chosen not to depict instances of police brutality at all (after all, and as noted by several members of the show's cast and crew, the very choice of a hoodie as Luke's uniform is already a powerful and deliberate statement about this issue).  Instead, the show chooses to feature multiple instances of policemen abusing black and brown citizens, but always slants its depiction of these incidents in such a way as to avoid an obvious association with Black Lives Matter and its message.  In one case, Misty's partner, Rafael Scarfe (Frank Whaley), murders a young black man--by strangulation, no less.  But the significance of the moment is very easy to miss, because Scarfe isn't motivated by racism, but by corruption--he's in the pay of Cottonmouth, who wants the young man killed.  Later in the season, Scarfe is mortally wounded, and an entire episode is expended on humanizing him and extending him sympathy--chiefly from the direction of Misty, who still cares about her partner despite his crimes.

Later instances of police brutality show more willingness to call a spade a spade--when Misty attacks Claire in an interrogation room, or when another detective brutally beats a young boy who refuses to tell him where Luke is.  But here, again, it's significant how much the show works to downplay associations with Black Lives Matter.  Both Misty and the detective who attacks the boy are black.  More importantly, both are suffering from extreme emotional distress--Misty recently had an encounter with Diamondback that nearly ended with her death, and the detective is upset because his friend and fellow officer was murdered by, as he believes, Luke--and are trying to lay their hands on a suspect whom they believe to be extremely dangerous.  As Noah Berlatsky wrote recently, one of the problems that emerges when mainstream TV tries to engage with police brutality, even from a standpoint that sees it as unacceptable, is the assumption that the murder or brutalization of innocent black people at the hands of the police tends to involve cops who are in distress, usually over a troubling and serious crime that they're investigating.  In reality, most heavily-publicized cases in which the police kill black people involve victims whose crimes were either minor and non-violent--as in the case of Sandra Bland or Eric Garner--or who had committed no crime at all--as in the case of Tamir Rice or Philando Castile.  So Luke Cage not only minimizes the prevalence and ubiquity of police brutality, it focuses its attention on just the wrong place--the emotional state of the officers who committed the violence, and the excuses that can be offered for it (after Misty's attack on Claire, for example, we spend a whole episode with her in a session with a psychologist)--rather than on the system that encourages these officers to see certain people as inherently dangerous, and thus killable.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Luke Cage's approach to police brutality is what happens after Misty's colleague beats up the boy who refuses to tell him about Luke.  Swooping in with the boy's mother, Mariah Dillard uses the incident to castigate the police for their indifference to violence against black people--and really, to get them to further intensify their pursuit of Luke and draw attention away from her own crimes.  She organizes a rally, ostensibly about police brutality, but with the real purpose of inflaming attitudes against superpowered people, and laying the groundwork for lobbying the city to equip the police with rounds that can penetrate Luke's skin, which are supplied by Diamondback.  So we have a black politician cynically leveraging Black Lives Matter rhetoric in order to achieve her own personal, criminal ends.  And we have that same black politician orchestrating the over-militarization of police, again in order to conceal her crimes and get rid of a personal enemy.  When a city official expresses reservations about equipping cops with these new bullets, it's only because "any weapon that the police or military has eventually ends up on the street", not because the police will inevitably use this hyper-lethal ordinance on regular people, as they have every time in the past.

At the end of the season, when Misty is informed that she doesn't have the evidence to prosecute Mariah Dillard, she rants that "the system is broken!"  That's a fairly standard expression of frustration for a police officer in a superhero story, the justification that such stories offer for the extra-legal violence of someone like Daredevil.  But in the context of a police officer who has, by that point, attacked two different suspects, and whose complaint is that she isn't allowed to go even further outside the law in her pursuit of them, it feels like the show prioritizing the conventions of its genre--in which extra-legal force is necessary to stop bad guys--over their associations in the real world--in which the perception that some people are "bad guys" is used to justify their immediate execution.

In the season's final episode, having defeated Diamondback and while taking a well-deserved moment to rest and reflect, Luke Cage reminds us that his show is about black stories:

People are scared.  But they can't be paralyzed by that fear.  You have to fight for what's right every single day, bulletproof skin or not.  You can't just not snitch, or turn away, or take money under the table because life has turned you sour.  When did people stop caring?  Harlem is supposed to represent our hopes and dreams.  It's the pinnacle of black art, politics, innovation.  It's supposed to be a shining light to the world.  It's our responsibility to push forward, so that the next generation be further along than us.

Just as in the first episode, it's a thesis statement for the show.  And just as in that episode, it's a frustrating one.  Luke is placing the burden of healing and repairing a community that has been neglected and abused for decades on the very people who have suffered the most from that neglect and abuse--perhaps even blaming them for it.  On one level, it's a very superhero kind of approach.  Superhero stories always come down to individual solutions.  The idea of a systemic problem that can't be solved by a single person with powers is anathema to their very existence.  But in the context of a story about a black superhero in a black inner city neighborhood, that statement takes on a very different tone.  It becomes the conservative bugbear about "personal responsibility," the insistence that the only people responsible for black people's problems are black people themselves, and that all those problems could be solved if they would only pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  Luke Cage is obviously trying to paint its hero as an aspirational figure, someone who inspires black people (though mostly black men) to believe in themselves and in their ability to change the world.  That's an important message, but like so much else about the superhero genre, it's a double-edged sword.

As I've written in the past, superhero stories tend to have a complex, dysfunctional relationship with the concept of abuse.  Because so many superheroes have a background of abuse, the stories we tell about them tend to fetishize it and treat it as a means to an end.  Most of all, they tend to be harshly prescriptive about what the "right" reaction to abuse is, and to divide people into heroes and villains according to how they respond to their traumas.  But what happens when that abuse isn't personal, but communal and generational?  To reduce the complex problems faced by black communities to a need to "push forward", an imperative not to become "sour", is superficially true, but beneath that surface it raises a lot issues that Luke Cage isn't willing or able to address.  Ultimately, Luke Cage's problem may not be its politics, so much as its unwillingness--or inability--to break free of the conventions of its genre.

X-Men: Apocalypse

I promise, at some point I'll go back to writing about things that aren't superheroes.  Though that would require Hollywood to stop blasting superhero stories at us in such close succession (I haven't even written anything about the second season of Daredevil, though you can get a sense of the existential despair it plunged me into from the thread starting at this tweet).  Coming at the end of that barrage, it's perhaps understandable that the third (or sixth, or eighth) X-Men movie should be met with a muted, not to say exhausted, response.  And some of the reviews have gone further and been downright brutal.  I'm here to say that both of these reactions are unearned.  X-Men: Apocalypse is by no means a great movie, and it has some serious problems.  But I still found myself enjoying it a great deal more than any other work in this genre since Deadpool.  Perhaps this is simply the relief of a superhero story that is not about grim-faced men taking themselves very seriously, and which instead tells an unabashedly silly story in a totally committed way.  Or it might be because alongside the flaws, there are also things to praise in X-Men: Apocalypse, things that hardly any other superhero works are doing right now.

If there's a core flaw to X-Men: Apocalypse, it is that what it really wants to be is a six-part miniseries.  You can even see the places where the chapter breaks would have gone, complete with intermediate climaxes leading up to a world-destroying conflict with the villain Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac, largely wasted on a nondescript character covered with the kind of makeup that forestalls any attempt at acting), who wants to kill off most of humanity so that the survivors can rebuild, stronger than ever.  Apocalypse eventually comes to seem like the highlights version of its own story--just the big, climactic moments; hardly any of the connective tissue.  As flaws go, however, this one is a lot less disruptive to the viewers' enjoyment than, say, the seemingly endless let's-get-the-band-together scenes in the first act of Avengers.  It's easy to sense the movie that Apocalypse is trying to be, and as a result the actual product is rushed, but not incoherent.

On the other hand, Apocalypse's compressed, just-the-highlights approach also means that most of its characters are underserved.  The X-Men films have always been characterized by a wide ensemble, and have tended to handle it more elegantly than the comparable Avengers movies (or even Civil War).  But the sheer weight of events--mostly explosive ones--that happen in Apocalypse means that a lot of its cast gets lost in the shuffle.  This is particularly true of the four disciples that Apocalypse gathers to help in his world-destroying plan.  Angel (Ben Hardy) and Psylocke (Olivia Munn) are there to act as warm bodies in fight scenes, and are otherwise completely wasted.  Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is coasting off the previous two films' character development, but even so his presence by Apocalypse's side feels barely-justified.  Worst of all is Storm, who has a kickass introduction and is played to perfection by newcomer Alexandra Shipp, but who the film then pretty much forgets about--a particular problem since Storm is, of course, a major good guy in the X-Men universe, and her turnaround in Apocalypse thus deserved a lot more screen-time than it gets.

Other characters, however, get better handling.  Existing good guys like Charles Xavier, Beast, and Havoc get just enough screen time to establish their rapport and the community they've built at Xavier's school, but the film really belongs to Mystique.  Jennifer Lawrence--whose naked and blue time the film reduces to a bare minimum--is predictably wonderful as a woman struggling with a painful past and crushed hopes.  Her growing realization that she's become a heroic figure within the mutant community, and slow acceptance of a leadership role in it, are one of the most gratifying choices made by the rebooted X-Men movies.  Similarly rewarding is the film's new version of Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), a problematic character whose handling in the original X-Men trilogy revolved mostly around her fear of her powers, and Wolverine's unrequited love for her.  Turner's version is still saddled with a character whose only possible development is into a force that must be violently stopped (usually by men), but in this movie, at least, she plays Jean as someone who is learning to understand, control, and use her powers.  In the middle part of the movie, it's Jean who drives the action, using her powers to lead the juvenile members of the X-Men on a mission to save Xavier and Mystique.  And where previous X-Men movies might have depicted Jean unleashing the full force of her abilities on Apocalypse as a surrender to a force she can't control, in this movie it's painted as a choice, an embrace of power that makes Jean one of the X-Men team's foremost members.

Part of the reason why Apocalypse can get away with being so rushed, so compressed in its storytelling, is that the climaxes that it delivers every time Apocalypse reveals the full scope of his powers are exhilarating and beautifully executed.  Apocalypse isn't a very interesting villain, but the sheer scope of his powers means that he is still scary.  In one scene, he unleashes all of the Earth's stockpile of nuclear weapons, and you keep expecting it to turn out to be a dream, or for Xavier, Magneto, or Jean to stop it, until you finally realize that no, this is really happening.  I can't remember the last time that an action set-piece in a superhero movie had the power to shock me in the way that this sequence did.

But of course, none of this would work if Apocalypse didn't have such a firm handle on its action components.  I was never a huge fan of Bryan Singer's first two X-Men movies, but there's no denying that with his return to superhero filmmaking he demonstrates just why he was the one who made this genre of movies viable.  The action scenes in X-Men: Apocalypse put to shame just about every other attempt in this genre in the last ten years, and simultaneously bring home how cluttered, busy, and overwhelming every other superpowered free-for-all on our screens has been.  (Someone will no doubt bring up the Russo brothers, but it's important to note that their forte has been one-on-one fights, mostly between people without extravagant powers.  When it comes to city-destroying mayhem, the best that the MCU has to offer is Joss Whedon's work in the Avengers movies, and, well.)  It is, for example, totally unsurprising that the film tries to top the "Time in a Bottle" sequence from X-Men: Days of Future Past, in which Quicksilver (Evan Peters) zips around merrily, solving everyone's problems in his own good time.  But what's amazing is that Apocalypse actually succeeds at this, effortlessly upping the stakes and bringing across the true extent of Quicksilver's powers, while still stressing his fundamental silliness.

There are, however, some problems with this movie that its stunning set-pieces can't overcome.  Unlike X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past, Apocalypse is not a very political movie, which means that it doesn't delve into the question of mutants' place in the world, and how they interact with human society.  For the most part, this is a function of its story and villain--Apocalypse doesn't care about human vs. mutant disputes, and is happy to deal out death equally to both groups, so long as a select few, whom he sees as the elite, survive.  And while it is, as I said above, a little refreshing to have a superhero story that doesn't try to engage with real-world political issues (which it will inevitably do poorly) but instead just gets to the business of a bunch of good guys fighting a bunch of bad guys with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the complete failure to engage with any political issues contributes to the sense that Apocalypse underserves huge swathes of its story and cast.  Storm, for example, is introduced as a punk-ish thief in Cairo, with an Arabic-language magazine cover featuring Mystique hanging on her wall.  There's an opportunity here to connect to Arab nationalism, to the frustrations and resentments of the third world with the systems that have kept it poor and exploited, and to the way that revolutionary figures can have cross-cultural appeal.  But the film's neglect of Storm after these opening scenes means that any chance at a political subtext is lost.

This is particularly unfortunate because Storm is one of only three people of color in this movie (the others are Psylocke, and Jubilee, played by Lana Condor, who gets only a few lines and doesn't participate at all in the super-heroics).  The lack of focus on her, as well as the fact that the staff at Xavier's school seems to be made up entirely of white men (we see some female teachers in background shots, but none of them even get to speak), reinforces the sense that the mutant problem, in the world of X-Men: Apocalypse, is one that afflicts mostly white, middle class Americans.  That certainly seems to be the thrust of the plotline that introduces Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), who arrives at the school shortly before the film's events kick into gear, and seems designed as its point of view character.  But though unobjectionable, Scott Summers fades into the background when Jean Grey and Mystique get to interact with one another, and it would have only done the film good if there had been similar interactions between Mystique and Storm.

If there's one problem that really comes close to scuttling X-Men: Apocalypse for me, it is the film's handling of Magneto.  In my past writing about the X-Men movies, and particularly the rebooted universe beginning with X-Men: First Class, I've been pretty sympathetic to this multifaceted villain, and since then I think I've only gotten more entrenched in that position (it doesn't help that Xavier's approach just gets less tenable the more you think about it; as Steven Attewell points out in some recent discussions in his People's History of the Marvel Universe series, it's increasingly disturbing that an organization nominally devoted to securing mutant rights spends so much of its time fighting other mutants).  But Apocalypse takes Magneto beyond the pale, just at the point where it clearly believes that it is returning him to the fold.  The film's obvious intent with Magneto is to tell a story in which he experiences a horrific loss, responds by giving in to violence and anger, and is then brought back to his senses by the reminder that he has people who care about him and believe in his goodness.  The problem with this is, first, that the execution is terrible--it's here that Apocalypse's rushed, compressed nature works most powerfully against the film's intended effect.  The minute we meet Magneto's saintly wife and daughter, it's obvious that they're going to be killed off in order to provide him with angst, and their characterization is so nondescript that it's virtually impossible for us to empathize with his grief and anger over their loss.

More importantly, there is the simple fact that there are only so many times a person can decide their own suffering matters more than the survival of the human race, before that stops being an excusable reaction to trauma, and becomes a reflection of their shitty personality.  Despite what Charles and Raven keep telling him (and us), the Magneto in X-Men: Apocalyse does not, in fact, seem to have any good in him.  On the contrary, he seems to be a selfish, self-absorbed person, whose reaction to pain and anger is to start murdering people left and right, and then to happily act as a key component in Apocalypse's plan to kill billions of people.  It's downright galling that his last-minute decision not to do so is presented by the film as a meaningful turn to the light, with newscaster voiceovers at the end of the movie informing us that he is now being hailed as a hero--for stopping the calamity that he himself caused.

(On a personal note, I find Apocalypse's handling of Magneto particularly offensive because this version of the character has made so much of the fact that he is a Holocaust survivor.  As it happens, there have been survivors who lost their entire families to the Nazis, rebuilt their lives after the war, and then lost their families again.  The film's attempts to justify and excuse Magneto's murderous reaction to such a trauma are an affront to these real survivors' resilience and enduring humanity in choosing not to do the same.  That Apocalypse's seduction of Magneto to his ethos of destruction and death culminates in a visit to Auschwitz only makes the film's use of the Holocaust more risible.)

The only positive note in Apocalypse's handling of Magneto is the way the film uses Quicksilver, who enters the story knowing that Magneto is his father and eager to connect with him.  In the film's climactic scene, Mystique and Quicksilver confront Magneto and try to convince him that he still has something to live for.  While Mystique appeals to Erik's humanity, Peter is obviously nonplussed by the monster that his father has become.  When questioned, and given the opportunity to declare himself as Magneto's son (which, unbeknownst to him but obvious to us, would restore to Erik something of what he lost with the deaths of his family), Peter instead says obliquely "I'm here for my family."  At the end of the movie, he announces that he might tell Erik the truth some day, but not yet.  Aside from being a clever character note--surely any reasonable person would balk at letting Erik Lehnsherr claim them as family--it's also a moment of judgment against Magneto in a film that doesn't contain nearly enough of them, and a thin thread to cling to for those of us who refuse to see him as a redeemed figure.

It's in talking about moments like this one that I come closest to articulating why I enjoyed X-Men: Apocalypse so much more than objectively better films like Civil War, and despite the fact that it has so many glaring flaws.  When Quicksilver chooses not to acknowledge his relationship to Magneto, he reminds us that he has an inner life and a story of his own, and that this is true of so many (though, unfortunately, not all, and not always the most compelling) of the series's characters.  Taken together, they create a sense of community, of family, that none of the other superhero series currently running have managed.  Even the MCU, despite its best efforts, always feels more comfortable in its standalone movies, and has yet to convincingly argue that its characters have real, lasting relationships, or that they've formed a community.

Perhaps another way of putting it is that the X-Men films--and particularly the rebooted, post-First Class films--know what their story is about in a way that the MCU and the Justice League movies don't.  Where just about every other superhero franchise is still stuck rehashing 9/11 and the war on terror, the X-Men movies are creating their own world, and with it their own identity.  What they do with this world is rarely as interesting or as comprehensive as I would like (and the mutant metaphor remains a millstone around this story's neck, especially since the movies are so resistant to letting people of color take center stage).  But after two years of superhero stories struggling to root themselves in our politics and failing miserably, it's honestly a relief to return to a universe that is complete in itself.  X-Men: Apocalypse is flawed in many ways, but it wears those flaws more lightly than many other, better films' accomplishments.  It isn't trying to prove to us that it's worth engaging with.  It's simply telling a story, and inviting us to come along.

Civil Links

It's been two weeks since Captain America: Civil War opened (a week in the US), and I think it's time to call it: the conversation surrounding this movie has been surprisingly, and disappointingly, muted.  Most reviews seem to have reached a consensus of good-movie-that-handles-its-politics-well, which, even notwithstanding that I only agree with the first part, feels like only scratching the surface (meanwhile, the more character-focused conversation on tumblr has tended to revolve around the kind of arguments that only serve to remind me why this is a good life rule).  Around this time after the comparatively incoherent Age of Ultron, we were practically swimming in thinkpieces and conversations, and while Civil War doesn't have as obvious an outrage hook as awkwardly implying that infertile women are monsters, one would think that people would still be able to find things to say about it.  Perhaps the truth is simply what I suggested in my own review: that the worldbuilding and politics of this movie are built on such a flimsy foundation that any attempt to engage with them inevitably leads to the conclusion that they're not worth talking about.  Nevertheless, here are a few interesting links that I have been able to find--obviously, I'd be interested in any others you could suggest in the comments.

• Probably my favorite straight-up review of the film comes from Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com.  Amid a torrent of reviews that have tended to overpraise the film as both a piece of storytelling and a political statement, Seitz is refreshingly even-handed, finding things to be positive about (as there undoubtedly are) without ignoring some of the fundamental issues in the film's construction.
  

  There's a fair bit of "The Dark Knight" logic, or "logic," to the storytelling. Characters do things to other characters because they know it'll set off a chain reaction that'll eventually lead to a very specific moment at the end; luckily for them, each step goes according to plan, because if it didn't there would be no movie. And, as in the inferior yet thematically similar "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," the hero-versus-hero slugfest only seems to spring from real and deep philosophical differences. It turns out that the real problem is that these characters don't talk to each other when they should.

• Writing in the Washington Post, Henry Farrell (perhaps best known to readers here as one of the bloggers on Crooked Timber) lays out all the ways in which Civil War gets global politics wrong.  This might seem so trivially obvious that it's not worth even spelling out, but I actually found it quite useful to have all these issue laid out in plain language.
  

  "Captain America: Civil War" talks about how superheroes might be perceived as vigilantes. There's an even uglier word for someone who jumps into a political situation, blows things and people up and disappears again — terrorist. When Thomas Barnett writes about "super-empowered individuals" in world politics, he isn't talking about Ant Man and Spider-Man. He’s talking about Osama bin Laden and the Sept. 11, 2001, plane hijackers, who acted as individuals to change the shape of global politics. The Avengers have better intentions but the same potential for causing chaos without accountability. Even if they're acting to save the human race, it's unsurprising that governments should be angry and unhappy at their willingness to intervene across the world, regardless of the collateral damage.

• One of the points made by Farrell is that Civil War irretrievably skews its story by focusing so myopically on American concerns and perspectives, even as its heroes seek the freedom and authority to operate all over the world.  Samira Nadkarni expands on this issue in a Storify of her tweets about the movie, in which she argues that "the MCU insists that a bomb in Lagos and even the inclusion of an African subplot is basically all about America and the Global North."  Her arguments touch on the way that Avengrs (which is to say American) interference outside of the US, and chiefly in the Global South, is seen as an American issue; on the problems with Wakanda as an African nation that is explicitly un-African; and on the choice to center the discussion of registration (inasmuch as it exists) on Wanda, a white European, whose terrorist activities would surely not have been so easily swept under the rug if she were a Middle Eastern man.
  
  
• If you haven't done so already, check out Samira's review of the TV series Shadowhunters (based on Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments books) at Strange Horizons.  Though published several weeks before Civil War's release and focusing on a (nominally) different genre, it touches on a lot of problems with the way that superhero stories center white, Western people even as they claim to be about issues that largely concern people of color and the Global South.  The construction "a TV show about moderate racists taking on a vehement racist so they can learn to be slightly less racist" describes so much of the current superhero genre (and gets at why I've grown increasingly bored, not to say suspicious, when stories in this genre trot out cartoon Nazis as their ultimate villains--at this stage, it just feels like a distraction, a way to keep me from noticing the heroes' less overt fascist tendencies).  Samira's segue into her outrage at the way that the trailers for Civil War centered Steve's devotion to Bucky, even as other stories about superhero registration have treated people of color as the villains, feels particular prescient:
  

  In Marvel's TV property Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the character of Jiaying (played by Tibetan-Australian actress Dichen Lachman) fights against registration being enforced by S.H.I.E.L.D., as a result of having lived through this information being misused, leading to torture, organ theft, the death of the majority of her community, and the loss of her child. Her desperate attempt to start a war in response to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s American neo-colonial statement-threat of "we'll leave you in peace if you register" with its consequent policing and control of the Asian-themed city of Afterlife, is framed within the show as terrorism and strongly disavowed. Her story of fighting against forced registration isn't one that matters. The reasoning behind her actions—which also involves tortures of various kinds being a possible likelihood for her people as part of her lived experience—isn't endorsed. But, oh, yes, do tell me more about Bucky Barnes. Divorce this story even further from the people it affects. We've always been the villains of the piece. 

• Brian Phillips, writing at MTV.com, makes a valiant attempt to reconcile Civil War and the world of the MCU (and other superhero movies) with present-day political anxieties, trying to get at why we're seeing so many stories about how (and if) we can reconcile the existence of superpowered individuals with democratic society, and with the post-9/11 penchant for violent global interference.  That he doesn't quite succeed is probably not his fault, given how muddled this genre (and the thinking about these issues in Hollywood) are, but this is nevertheless a well-written, funny essay that articulates some of the core problems with this project:
  

  The other explanation for that focus is an irony that, when you start to lay it out, is kind of gobsmacking, and that gets at an almost Greek-tragic dimension of recent comic-book movies. (Let’s say Norse-tragic, because Thor.) The irony is this: The superheroes in superhero movies are always the only force capable of saving humanity from the threats it faces. But with astounding regularity in post-9/11 comic-book films, the threats mankind has to be saved from were either unleashed by the heroes themselves, came into being simultaneously with the heroes, or both. In other words, the chaos from which the heroes are required to save the world is implicit in the heroes’ being in the world in the first place; even when the protagonists aren’t actually the authors of the crisis they are fighting against — something that, again, happens with startling frequency — they are manifestations of the same fundamental shift. Hark!

• Over at my tumblr, I talk briefly about my favorite Bucky Barnes moment in the film--the one that seems most obviously opposed to the woobification impulse that seems to take over fandom when it discusses not just this character, but all the handsome white men in this universe.  I also mention some of the ways the film could have used Natasha better (which is to say at all).
  
  
• Linda Holmes at NPR does the obvious pop culture thing of linking Civil War with, what else, Hamilton.  Clickbaity as that sounds, Holmes has a valid point--both works are about people who initially try to work out their problems through discussion, but who find themselves, by the end of the story, pointing weapons at people they care about once their disputes have passed the point of no return.
  

  There's a fascinating sequence, perhaps unique among movies of this budget and scale, in which a group of characters who are all known to be decent, known to be moral, known to be noble, and known to be literally both Super and Heroes sit in a group talking through this critical disagreement about acceding or not to outside supervision — to acting only when a group of governments working in concert tell them they can (and must). They find themselves forced to balance legitimately compelling arguments on both sides. They argue back and forth, not in the "fight" sense but in the "argument" sense: Someone offers support for one answer, then someone else offers support for the other. Everyone has a point. They all respect each other. They all know they cannot split the difference and cannot find a choice in the middle. They cannot punch or shoot or zap their way out of it. The choice is binary: They will say yes or they will say no, and despite the breadth of their agreement on the relevant issues, they cannot agree on the answer.

  I'm linking to this piece mainly because I want to disagree with it, or at least to point out that drawing comparisons to Hamilton does Civil War no favors.  Holmes is right that some of the discussion scenes in the first half of the film are exciting precisely because they're not the sort of thing we're used to seeing in this genre, but she ignores the fact that by its second half, Civil War makes it clear that these discussions were never the point--that what it really wanted was to get to the fighting.  This is very different from how Hamilton handles its characters' descent into violence, which is depicted as the act of two stubborn, childish men, and, more importantly, not the way to resolve political disputes.  Hamilton and Burr end up in a duel not because they have fundamental political disagreements, but because of their pride and immaturity.  Meanwhile, political action is still happening through conversation--either in the thrilling "Cabinet Battle"s that are the highlights of the play's second act, or in the "Room Where it Happens," where people sit down and hammer out policy details.
  
  Even more importantly, the way in which Hamilton handles its descent into violence is a direct rebuke to Civil War's glibness towards the same subject.  Holmes is right to highlight Burr's line, immediately before his duel with Hamilton, that "This man will not make an orphan of my daughter!"  Newly-minted Tony nominee Leslie Odom Jr. all but screams the line, going off-key as a way of demonstrating the desperation of Burr's will to live.  That desperation is completely absent from the climactic fight scene in Civil War, which both the film and the characters treat almost as a game, thus robbing the film of most of its emotional weight.  It's also significant that after killing Hamilton, Burr's life was basically ruined.  Even in the early 19th century, there were social consequences to his choice to abandon civility in favor of violence.  No one familiar with the MCU will be able to expect similar consequences for any of Civil War's characters.  On the contrary, the film blatantly leaves an opening for Steve and his fellow renegades to use violence in a socially sanctioned matter, saving the world from Thanos in Infinity War, thus sweeping away all their crimes in this story.
  
  
• Not directly Civil War-related, but of interest to people who want to have a discussion about politics (and particularly progressive politics) in comics and have been disappointed in the dearth of such conversations surrounding this movie.  Since the beginning of the year, blogger Steven Attewell has been writing A People's History of the Marvel Universe, in which he discusses the history of the comics company's heroes and how they intersect, and emerge from, the politics of their day.  A lot of the discussions, as you might expect, center on the X-Men (the last few weeks in particular have focused on the infamous "mutant metaphor"), but Captain America has also featured heavily.  It's a great resource for people, like myself, who know these characters mainly from the movies, and would like to know how they developed, and how their political stances reflect social issues of their era more than ours.  If you're reading along at Lawyers, Guns and Money, where the series is being cross-posted, there's also a lively discussion in the comments.
  
  (Incidentally, it occurs to me that Attewell's series is precisely the sort of thing that the Best Related Work Hugo category should recognize.  I'm not crazy about the recent trend of recognizing individual blog posts in this category, but the People's History series is now approaching book-length, and I for one would love to see it recognized as such next year.)

Captain America: Civil War

It's a bit of a strange thing to say, but I might have liked Captain America: Civil War better if it were a less good movie.  When films like The Dark Knight Rises or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice deliver rancid political messages wrapped in equally rancid plots and characterization, the reviewer's job is made easier.  We can point to how a failure to recognize the actual complexity of a situation, or to imbue characters with full humanity, both informs and reflects the simplistic, quasi-fascist message of the movie.  Civil War is a trickier customer.  It tries--and on some level, manages--to be more intelligent and more thoughtful than something like Batman v Superman.  Its characters take the film's central conflict seriously, discussing it rationally and trying to find a way to resolve it without descending into fisticuffs.  But even as they do so, they reveal the inherent impossibility of their project, the way the core assumptions of this entire genre combine to form a black hole that it can never escape.  I've said it before, but the minute you start taking superheroes seriously, and debating the rights and wrongs of them, only one conclusion is possible: that superheroes are a really bad idea, and that any fictional world that houses more than a handful of them will inevitably devolve into a horrifying dystopia in which the rule of law and the authority of democratic government are meaningless.  In the end, and despite the wide gulf of quality between them, Civil War ends up telling the same story as Batman v Superman: a tragedy about people who don't know any way to address their problems except through violence.

Before we get to that, however, let's note that for all my praise of it, Civil War is not a top-notch MCU movie.  Though it does a better job of wrangling a truly epic number of characters than last year's Age of Ultron, the need to service all of them--and set up several future entries in the franchise, chiefly Black Panther and the next iteration of Spider-Man--means that the film is overlong and occasionally listless.  It loses control of its tone--the one quality that has made the MCU undeniably excellent as a comics adaptation--at several crucial points, most importantly its climactic battle scene.  The relationships that were such a delight in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier--particularly the friendships that Steve Rogers develops with Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanoff--are given short shrift, and in general those characters leave the movie feeling flattened and uninteresting^[1].  Perhaps most importantly, the film completely fails to sell the supposedly deep bond of friendship and loyalty between Steve and Bucky Barnes.  Whether you read the relationship as platonic or (as most of fandom does) romantic, Steve's devotion to Bucky is what drives his actions throughout the movie.  And yet what shows up on screen between the two friends is curiously inert--it's never believable that Steve would go the lengths he does for a man that he seems, at most, mildly fond of.  Meanwhile, the relationship that's meant to carry the film's romantic weight, between Steve and Peggy Carter's niece Sharon, never grows beyond a not-very-convincing concept.

Having said all that, there are also a lot of things to praise about Civil War.  Like Winter Soldier before it, it tells a relatively small-scale story, more rooted in espionage and conspiracy tales than in superheroics.  This grounds the film and gives it a weight that was absent from the more high-concept Avengers movies.  The action scenes, similarly, are excellent precisely because their scale is smaller, with the focus placed more on one-on-one matchups than CGI extravaganzas in which our heroes hit large things with even larger things.  Chris Evans continues to anchor the Captain America series--perhaps the entire MCU--with his turn as Steve, conveying the character's staunch beliefs without ever making him seem stiff or inhuman.  The film also, and a little more suprisingly, does a good job with Tony Stark, who is very nearly rehabilitated from his stint as an almost-world-destroying mad scientist in Age of Ultron.  This Tony is more damaged and more thoughtful without losing his defining egotism, and the best scenes of the movie involve him and Steve arguing, not because either one of them is a bad guy, but because they have fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews.  It's in these scenes that Civil War comes closest to selling its argument that "superheroes: yes or no" is a question on which reasonable people can disagree, and that both Tony and Steve have valid points to make.

In order to achieve that gloss of reasonableness, however, Civil War has to commit several rhetorical slights of hand that, as soon as they become clear, undermine not just the film's argument but its very premise.  Our heroes' problems kick off when an Avengers mission in Lagos goes wrong, leaving dozens of civilians dead.  It's the last straw for a world that has grown tired of seeing superheroes at the center of city-destroying mayhem, and as a response the Avengers are asked to sign the Sokovia Accords, which would place them under the auspices of the UN.  While Tony champions the agreement, Steve demurs, refusing to once again place his power at the disposal of the authorities, and insisting that "the best hands are our own."  What seems like a stalemate erupts into open conflict when the summit at which the accords were to be signed is bombed, apparently by Bucky Barnes.  As Steve scrambles, first to bring Bucky in alive, and then to break him out when it becomes clear that he's being framed, he and Tony draw battle lines, with the other MCU characters falling in on both sides.^[2]

There are so many problems with this premise, and with how Civil War develops it, that it's hard to know where to start.  For one thing, there is the subtle but insistent way in which the film massages the events of Age of Ultron so that no real blame attaches to any of the Avengers, most especially Tony Stark.  Civil War makes much of the guilt that Tony feels, and of the personal consequences he's suffered as a result of the earlier film's events--we learn, for example, that he and Pepper have broken up.  But like so much else about the movie, this is a bait-and-switch.  The film pretends to acknowledge Tony's guilt, even as it obscures the things he is actually guilty of.  When Tony tells Steve about his breakup with Pepper, for example, he blames it on his inability to leave behind the life of a superhero, not on the fact that he made the unilateral decision to build an all-powerful AI who went crazy and nearly destroyed the planet.  People who hold Tony responsible for the deaths caused by Ultron are similarly unaware of his real guilt, which means the film can act as if it is taking the events of Age of Ultron seriously, without ever facing up to the consequences they should have had.^[3]

In other words, Civil War pretends that the problem with the Avengers is collateral damage, their inability to save everyone when they involve themselves in a messed-up situation--this, for example, is what happens in Nigeria, when Wanda Maximoff tries to levitate away a man wearing an explosive vest, but fails to contain the blast long enough to prevent any casualties.  But the real problem with the Avengers is not what they don't or can't do, but what they have done, and what they've gotten away with.  In one particularly galling scene, Wanda sadly muses that the world fears her for her psychic powers.  When really, if anyone fears Wanda, it's probably because she's a former terrorist who sided first with Hydra and then with Ultron, who knowingly sicced the Hulk on a city of three-quarters of a million people, and who has avoided any consequences for these crimes because she enjoys the protection of powerful, connected people like Steve Rogers and Tony Stark.

Another way in which Civil War fudges its premise in order to make it workable is the very purpose of the Sokovia Accords.  The film claims that, as in the original Civil War comic, the accords exist to regulate the actions of "enhanced" individuals, and uses Wanda as a poster child for that need.  But the truth is, people like Wanda are the vast minority of MCU superheroes, and recent additions to boot--Wanda and Vision were introduced in Age of Ultron, and Spider-Man is new to Civil War.  That leaves Steve as the only Avenger whose power is innate.^[4]  Every other MCU hero is either someone who dons a supersuit--Tony, Sam, Scott Lang, James Rhodes, T'Challa--or a highly-trained super-agent--Natsha, Sharon Carter, Clint Barton.  Once you realize this, it becomes easier to see that while Civil War claims to be about the question of whether we should have superheroes, what it's actually asking is whether people who are rich and famous (and, for the most part, white and American) should be allowed to form their own private armies, and carry out military missions in population centers all over the world.

Once you ask the question that way, it's clear that the answer is no, and the fact that Steve does not give this answer, while not entirely unearned, is ultimately inexcusable.  Given the events of Winter Soldier, you can see why Steve would balk at placing himself and his powers under the control of any authority.  Civil War also, and wisely, works its way up to the moment when Steve decides to become an outlaw and a criminal--initially, he merely refuses to sign the accords, and tries to bring Bucky in peacefully; it takes several fight scenes for him to become the aggressor.  But ultimately, Steve's reticence to follow anyone's orders but his own is taken to extremes that are not justifiable, and which can't be explained by his loyalty to Bucky.  Aside from anything else, it's not a believable turn for the character, who has to be flattened into self-satisfied authoritarianism in order for the story to work.  The film tries to argue that Steve believes that he's doing the right thing--most notably, by quoting one of Cap's most famous comics lines, "When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world: 'No, you move.'"  But of course a person who truly believes this sort of thing can just as easily be a monster as a hero.  The thing that has made Steve Rogers into the latter rather than the former has, until now, been the sense that he realizes this.  In Civil War, that no longer seems to be the case.

Steve's failure to recognize just how far beyond the pale he's gone may or may not be a betrayal of the character^[5], but it certainly makes him seem unreasonable, and ultimately even a little villainous.  So does the fact that he can't seem to find any middle ground between getting exactly what he wants, and erupting into violence when he doesn't.  In fairness to Steve, Civil War does not seem to take place in a world in which such a middle ground exists.  When he brings Bucky in to stand trial for the UN bombing, Steve's request that Bucky be represented by a lawyer is greeted, literally, with laughter and derision.  When Steve's allies are arrested near the end of the movie, they are placed, without trial, in a secret prison in the middle of the ocean--even the ones, like Sam or Scott, who have no superpowers without their suits.  It in fact gets a little hard to blame Steve for his intransigence when we realize just how untrustworthy and villainous government is in this movie.  This, however, is a flaw in the story, not a justification for the characters' actions.  It's a flaw that is hardly unique to Civil War, the MCU, or even superhero stories--seemingly all of Western pop culture has bought into the notion that government is either incompetent or evil, and that individual action, usually of the violent variety, is the only way to achieve change.  But it reinforces the sense that for all the movie's pretense to thoughtfulness and sophistication, it ultimately has very little to say.  In a world in which there are only two ways to respond to a problem--surrender and all-out war--there's only so much talking you can do before throwing punches becomes the only possible way to advance the plot.

Nowhere are Civil War's confusion and incoherence more palpable than when its characters finally start throwing punches, in a battle royale between the supers aligned with Steve (Sam, Bucky, Wanda, Scott, and Clint) and the ones aligned with Tony (Natasha, T'Challa, Rhodey, Vision, and Peter Parker).  It is, simultaneously, the film's best scene and its worst one, a brilliant piece of action filmmaking that makes it clear that, for all the thought and care that went into making Civil War seem like a not-stupid movie, in the end this was all it was ever about--an excuse to get our heroes fighting each other, no matter how thin the pretext and how many contortions it has to take their personalities through to get there.

Most of the characters who choose to involve themselves in the climactic fight of Civil War have no real reason to be there.  Why would Scott Lang and Clint Barton endanger their freedom and their lives with their families?  Just because Captain America asks them to?  That sort of thing worked in Winter Soldier, but when Steve's motives are so much murkier and less defensible, it's a lot less believable--and makes Scott and Clint a lot less sympathetic when, later in the movie, they are shocked to discover that breaking the law has landed them in prison.  And then there's the matter of Spider-Man, who is not only a teenager, but, as played by Tom Holland, a very young-seeming one, whose heroics have so far amounted only to tackling street crime.  The fact that Tony Stark recruits this inexperienced child to fight against trained killers is unforgivable.  The fact that Steve Rogers, upon realizing that he's been pitted against a child, doesn't immediately lay down his arms is equally so.  In a coherent story, this alone should disqualify either character from ever again being called a hero.

But Civil War doesn't acknowledge this, because it wants us to, simultaneously, take this scene very seriously--to thrill to the angst and conflict as our heroes are compelled to fight against one another--and not to take it seriously at all--to lean back and enjoy the quips and jokes, forgetting that it actually means something when people abandon diplomacy and compromise and choose violence instead.  The ultimate effect of this tonal zigzag is to make these previously-beloved characters look callous and foolish, something that is only exacerbated by the choice of venue for this fight.  The filmmakers clearly chose an empty airport runway because of the by-now frantic fear shared by all superhero storytellers of seeming indifferent to civilian casualties, but it's a choice that also reinforces the heroes' silliness.  They end up looking like nothing so much as a bunch of hooligans, meeting up for a fistfight at an empty weekend parking lot, because violence is the only way they know to resolve their disputes.^[6]

Late in the movie, Steve tells Tony that the fundamental difference between them is that while Tony puts his faith in institutions, Steve chooses to believe in people.  This is, obviously, a false and facile dichotomy, but what's worse is that it isn't even true.  There is nothing about Steve's behavior in Civil War that suggests that he believes in people.  On the contrary, his actions can only be explained by a profound distrust--perhaps even disdain--for the public, the press, and anyone who might form an opinion and pass judgment on his choices and actions.  Instead of arguing publicly against the Sokovia Accords, instead of demanding in the press that Bucky be granted the same right to a fair trial as anyone else, instead of exposing things like the government's secret prison, Steve's approach is to expect everyone else to trust him, implicitly and without question, even as he repeatedly squanders that trust through his choices and actions.  Civil War is a lot more subtle and insidious about it, but by its end the portrait it paints of Steve is not that different from Zack Snyder's take on Superman--they're both men who believe that they have the right to exercise violence as they see fit, and that anyone who tries to question them is so wrong that they're not even worth engaging with.  For a character who was introduced, way back in Captain America: The First Avenger, with the line "I don't like bullies," this is a profoundly disappointing turn.

In Civil War's final scene, Tony and Steve finally realize that they've been played--that the entire purpose of the film's events, and the plot to frame Bucky, was to get them at each other's throats.  It's a truce that doesn't last long, because the film's villain (Daniel Brühl as Zemo, whom I haven't mentioned already because he's ultimately not that important to the story, but who does a good job with a character who deserved more space and attention) reveals what Steve had already known and kept to himself, that one of Bucky's assignments as the Winter Soldier was to kill Tony's parents.  The film obviously sees nothing wrong with the fact that this revelation sparks the final, knock-down fight between the two former friends^[7], leading to a rift between them that will obviously not be resolved until Steve and those who have sided with him return to triumphantly save the day in Infinity War.  But to me, Tony's choice to resort to violence--and Steve's choice to go along with him--reveal everything that is wrong, not just with this movie, but with the MCU and possibly even the superhero genre as a whole.

It's OK for Tony Stark to be furious at what he learns about Bucky and Steve.  It's OK for Tony Stark to throw a punch at Steve Rogers.  It is not OK for Iron Man to try to kill Captain America over what is, in the end, a personal matter.  The minute that Tony (and Steve) feel free to use their powers to gratify their own roiling emotions, they cease to be heroes, because a real hero knows that they have the responsibility not only to act, but to know when not to act.  To use their power only as a last resort, and not for frivolous or unjustified reasons.  That both Tony and Steve fail this test is perhaps understandable and human.  But that Civil War does not recognize this as a failure--that it sees their descent into violence as understandable, natural, perhaps even desirable--tells us everything we need to know about its world, in which people arrogate to themselves tremendous power and the right to use it whenever and however they want, and the rest of us don't even get to question it.  Much as I enjoyed it, I think Civil War is the point where the MCU and I part ways, because there is, quite simply, no one left to root for.

---

[1] This is particularly true of Sam, whose devolution, from a counselor who was happy to befriend and help Steve but who also had his own life and his own career, into Captain America's sidekick, has been one of the more disappointing turns of the post-Winter Soldier MCU movies. ↩

[2] As an aside, it's extremely gratifying that the country that takes the lead in championing the Sokovia Accords is the fictional African superpower Wakanda.  Obviously, as far as the MCU's handlers are concerned, this serves the purpose of introducing the Wakandan crown prince T'Challa, also known as the Black Panther.  But given how casually the MCU's movies and TV shows have assumed that their American heroes are entitled to jet into sovereign--and mostly non-Western--nations, cause mayhem, and jet away, it's encouraging to see that within the films' universe, the pushback to this approach comes from the leaders of non-white countries.  I've seen some conflicting reactions to the entire concept of Wakanda--why, some people quite reasonably ask, invent an African nation instead of using one of the many real ones that Hollywood blockbusters tend to treat as nothing but a backdrop?  The answer to that question will obviously depend a great deal on how Black Panther handles its setting, but the little we see of it in Civil War--and the fact that Wakanda is able to demand concessions from the Western world--feels encouraging. ↩

[3] The fact that the world has been allowed to remain ignorant of Tony's role in creating Ultron is one of the huge potholes in the MCU that Civil War can't avoid falling into.  It robs Tony of any moral authority he might otherwise have had, while making the other characters look stupid for not even bringing it up in their arguments with him. ↩

[4] Bucky is not an Avenger at any point in this movie, and anyway it's never been clear to me whether he has actual superpowers or is simply supremely trained.  Technically, Thor and the Hulk should also count as supers with innate powers, but neither of them appears in this movie, and more importantly, it should be obvious that the Sokovia Accords can't be applied to either one of them. ↩

[5] Certainly by this point there seem to have been more MCU movies that depict Steve as a self-righteous prig than ones that take a more nuanced view of him. ↩

[6] It should be noted that not everyone in the film is so casually accepting of Steve and Tony's recourse to violence, but that the characters who question it are, for the most part, also the ones given the least space in the story.  Natasha initially sides with Tony because she feels that signing the accords is the best solution to a real predicament, and stands with him in the parking lot fight.  But she also chastises him for letting his ego guide his decisions, and, realizing that the situation between him and Steve can only escalate into further violence, removes herself from it.  She is thus absent from the film's final act.  Vision correctly warns that Tony and Steve's unwillingness to compromise will lead to calamity, but when his warnings go unheeded, he apparently feels obliged to join in the fighting.  Only T'Challa is allowed to truly grow in his views, and to see clearly how foolish and pointless Steve and Tony's squabbling is.  But he is also the character who is most disconnected from the rest of the story and its characters, existing, seemingly, in his own narrative that just happens to coincide with theirs. ↩

[7] It is darkly funny that in both Civil War and Batman v Superman, the crucial turning point in a battle between the two heroes is rooted in the Batman character's lingering issues over the murder of his mother. ↩

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

To get the obvious stuff out of the way, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a terrible movie.  I mean, you didn't need me to tell you that, right?  It's been out for three weeks, and the reviews have been so uniformly terrible that its 28% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes actually seems a bit high.  And before that consensus formed, there were the pre-release reviews, which were if anything even more brutal.  And before that, there were the trailers.  And before that, there was Man of Steel.  And before that, there was the overwhelming majority of Zack Snyder's career.  No one should be shocked by the fact that Batman v Superman turned out to be a bad movie, and though I have to admit that I was surprised by how bad it turned out to be--bad enough that even with my expectations lowered by all the factors listed above, I was still surprised by its badness; bad enough that my brother and I spent an hour after the movie enumerating its many flaws and still came up with a few more when we met again the next day--that's not really what I'm here to talk about.

Nor am I here to talk about how Batman v Superman fundamentally betrays its two title characters--and betrays, along the way, the fact that Snyder and writers David S. Goyer and Chris Terrio fundamentally do not understand what either of those characters are about.  Because the truth is, I don't really care.  I'm not a comic book reader, but I've been watching Batman movies for twenty years, and good or bad they all depict the character as, at best, someone who is working out their mommy-and-daddy issues by beating up poor criminals, and at worst, an outright fascist.  I'm perfectly willing to believe that there is more to the character, and that the comics (and the animated series) have captured that, but I think at this stage it's a mug's game to go to a Batman movie expecting to find more than what they've been known to give us.  As for Superman, if I want stories about a character who is all-powerful yet fundamentally good, and still interesting for all that, I've got the MCU's Captain America, not to mention Supergirl, so that fact that Batman v Superman depicts Superman as someone who seems genuinely to dislike people, and to be carrying out acts of heroism (when he deigns to do so) out of a sense of aggrieved obligation, doesn't really feel worth getting worked up over.  On the contrary, I was more upset by those scenes in Batman v Superman in which characters insisted--despite all available evidence--that its Superman was a figure of hope and inspiration, because they made it clear just how badly the people making the movie had misjudged its effect.

So instead, let's talk about a single scene--to my mind, the strangest and most telling scene in this strange and telling movie.  Having suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune--read, having been subjected to a moderate amount of public criticism for such things as not saving a room full of people from a bomb lying just a few meters from him--Clark Kent decides to depart the world of men and run off somewhere to sulk manfully.  Along the way he encounters the ghost/hallucination of his father Jonathan, who tells him a story about the time when, as a child, he helped his father save their farm from a flood, only to realize later that they had directed the floodwaters into the neighbors' land, drowning their horses.  Leaving aside for the moment the fact that this is a ridiculous story--what Kansas farmer doesn't know exactly where the flood-path across their land goes?--it also feels, at first, like taking the character of Jonathan to ridiculous extremes.  Along with Superman's failure to even try and prevent some of the collateral damage from its final battle, one of the things that drew the most fire in Man of Steel was its depiction of Jonathan, who in one scene is so frantic about the dangers of Clark exposing himself to the world that he suggests it would have been better for Clark to have let a bus-full of children drown rather than risk it.  And if on the collateral damage front, Batman v Superman is almost hilariously prone to over-correct, constantly assuring us that wherever Superman, Batman, and their enemies end up fighting just happens to be uninhabited, when it comes to Jonathan the film chooses to double down on its miserablism.  Here is a Jonathan who is outright saying: never try to do anything, son, because any sense of accomplishment you might feel will turn out to be illusory and fleeting.

And yet the more I thought about this scene, the less it seemed to me like yet another unintentionally hilarious instance of Snyder and his writers mistaking gloom for substance, and the more it just seemed sad.  As in: depressed.  As in: Jonathan Kent clearly suffered from serious, lifelong depression (possibly related to the fact that he was raised by an asshole who thought it was OK to drown his neighbors' farms), and dealing with that, and with the poisonous worldview that he promulgated as a father, is coloring every one of Clark's choices as an adult and a superhero.  I mean, the man's death was practically a suicide, right?  And the thing is, once you choose to read the character this way, the entire character of Superman in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman clicks into place.  The core premise of Superman is that he is good not because of his alienness, but because he was raised by good and decent people who taught him to value life and care about others.  In the world of Snyder's movies, Superman seems instead to have been raised by a joyless misanthrope, so it's maybe not so surprising that he seems genuinely to resent every act of kindness he commits, to engage in heroics almost despite himself, and to take no pleasure in helping others.  (It also ties in rather neatly to the raft of daddy issues driving the other characters in the movie: Lex Luthor hates Superman because he sees in him a reflection of his all-powerful, but abusive, father; and of course Batman is all about parental issues.)

To be clear, I'm not trying to say that this was Snyder and Goyer's intended reading.  One of the most frustrating things about Batman v Superman is that it clearly believes that Jonathan was a good man who has inspired his son's heroism, and that that heroism is, in itself, inspirational, despite the fact that what turns up on screen is nothing of the sort.  But I think that very disconnect is revealing, and in fact points to the core flaw of Snyder's superhero movies.  There's a name for the kind of mindset that mistakes depression for profundity, that associates an inability to feel or express joy, or sadness, or any emotion other than anger, with heroism and manliness.  In 2015, it informed the shape of most of our blockbuster movie villains, from Immortan Joe to Kylo Ren.  In 2016, it seems, it also afflicts our heroes.  The actual villain that both Batman and Superman need to fight in this movie isn't Lex Luthor, or Doomsday.  It's toxic masculinity.

Everything about Batman v Superman--right down to the color palette--makes sense if you assume that it's a movie written, created, and told from the point of view of people mired in toxic masculinity.  People who go through life trapped in a low-grade but pervasive depression, and who are disconnected from most of their emotions.  The entire story would have been over in ten minutes if either Batman or Superman were capable of communicating in any form other than violence.  Lex Luthor's master plan--to kidnap Superman's mother and force him to kill Batman, who by this point has been primed to see Superman as a threat--would have immediately crumbled if the two men would just talk to one another.  But for that to happen, Superman has to be willing to make himself vulnerable, to look weak, to say things like "please, I need your help."  This Superman isn't capable of expressing himself that way.  Neither is Batman, who falls into an immediate, burning hatred of Superman in the film's opening minutes and is incapable of considering any approach towards the other superhero that doesn't end in Superman's death--in part, it seems, because he is so threatened by a force he can't control that it is impossible for him to rest until he has a weapon that can destroy it.  (To be fair, Batman comes away from the movie looking slightly better than Superman, largely on the strength of an opening scene in which he rushes to the Wayne Industries building in Metropolis in the middle of Superman's fight with Zod, sans suit and Batmobile, in order to evacuate his employees.  But this is only to stress that Batman is most human when he's not being Batman, and for the rest of the movie that human side of him largely recedes in favor of the revenge-obsessed superhero.)  Even the indifference to the loss of human life starts to make sense when you realize that the mindset of toxic masculinity is one of total, overwhelming entitlement and self-absorption.  For both Batman and Superman, everything bad that happens in the movie is first and foremost something that happens to them, and it's impossible for someone who feels that way to take joy in helping others, or feel meaningfully affected when faced with loss of life.

(One thing that I will say for Batman v Superman is that it does not manage to drag Wonder Woman down into this maelstrom of entitlement and self-absorption.  The role of women in the toxic masculinity narrative is to act as receptacles for the soft emotions that the manly men can't or won't feel.  This is the role the film assigns to Lois Lane and Martha Kent, the latter of whom becomes a symbol of hope that the two men can bond over, simply by dint of sharing a name with Bruce's dead mother.  But Wonder Woman, though obviously more emotionally stable than either of her fellow superheroes, does not allow them to force her into representing hope and goodness.  She's just as much of a warrior as either one of them--and one who seems to like what she's chosen to do with her life, which makes her a breath of fresh air--but though she's willing to lend a hand in battle, she clearly isn't interested in being their sounding board or moral support.  In just a few scenes, Gal Gadot managed to make me feel more hopeful about the Wonder Woman movie than just about any other upcoming superhero movie--and who knows, maybe it'll even be in color!)

For several years now, the conversation about DC and Marvel's superhero movies has tended to focus on jokes, and a little more broadly, on the perception that DC makes serious movies, while Marvel makes funny ones.  Even ignoring that this is simply untrue--the Captain America movies, or Jessica Jones, are not "funny" in any sense of the word--what bothers me about this mentality is that it seems to concede the field without ever taking it, to accept that DC's (these days, Snyder's) approach represents one slice of the human experience, while Marvel's represents another.  When the truth is, DC's approach isn't simply to focus on something other than laughter.  It is to ignore--to deny--the very possibility of laughter.  The difference between DC and Marvel isn't tone, but the breadth of human experience that they are willing to acknowledge.  Jessica Jones has endured suffering and abuse on a level that would send both Superman and Batman into a catatonic state, but she's still capable of being funny, loving, compassionate, snarky, and brave, as well as cynical, self-destructive, angry, and depressed.  Batman and Superman, meanwhile, don't seem to have access to any emotions other than negative ones, even when the film pretends otherwise--which is to say, when it tells us that Clark loves the women in his life.  And this, to me, is a direct offshoot of toxic masculinity, of the mentality that sees any display of emotion except anger as inherently suspect--inherently unmasculine.  Batman v Superman takes that approach to its uttermost, most irrational extremes, finally imagining a world in which even emotions like hope, love, and inspiration look joyless and threatening.

There's a temptation when talking about Batman v Superman--one that I had to suppress several times while writing this review--to talk about the things it could have been.  To say that it could have been a cynical critique of the superhero genre, because it depicts its heroes as dumb psychopaths who do much more harm than good.  To say that it could have been an interesting meditation on how the existence of a Superman in the world changes it, because in its first act, it includes a lot of conversations about this topic, including from talking heads like Andrew Sullivan and Neil deGrasse Tyson.  To say that it might have joined the upcoming Captain America: Civil War in discussing how civil society and legal authorities respond to the existence of superheroes, because its most compelling character, a senator played by Holly Hunter, is occupied with just these questions.  But this is to make Batman v Superman seem much more interesting, much smarter, than it actually is.  This isn't a potentially interesting movie that falls short of its intentions because its creators' reach exceeds their grasp.  Batman v Superman could never have been any of these movies because, in the end, it isn't interested in being about anything at all--anything but its two heroes smashing each other in the face in order to prove their manhood.  That's the awful truth of toxic masculinity.  It looks interesting.  It looks as if there might be something you could say about it.  But in the end you always find out that it is completely hollow.  And so, in its hands, are Batman and Superman.

Recent Movie Roundup 21, Part 1

Every year I promise myself that this is the year I'll start watching more grown-up movies, instead of just flocking to the same action and superhero movies.  And every year I remember why that's a difficult promise to keep--because unlike TV, the Israeli movie market is still stuck in the 80s, with screens devoted almost exclusively to either blockbusters or middle-of-the-road pablum aimed at people thirty years older than me.  An additional complication is that Israeli film distributors only bring out prestige movies if they've been nominated for awards, so all the Oscar contenders show up here within the space of a month, making it even more a challenge to catch up.  (This, by the way, is an additional wrinkle to the #OscarsSoWhite problem that hasn't gotten a lot of play.  Israeli film distributors will only buy a movie focused on African-Americans if it's received award attention, which means that lot of those movies never even make it here.  I suspect we're not the only country of which this is true).

This year I was determined not to be overcome by these challenges, and it even felt like a good year to make an extra effort, because so many of the Oscar nominees seemed a little unconventional and off the beaten path.  Instead, the first batch of these movies--there are still several more to come--has reminded me why I tend to steer clear of what Hollywood terms prestigious.  While there are good performances and ideas here, so far the 2016 Oscar race has mostly left me feeling rather bored--and still rooting for my favorite film of 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road.

• Carol - I've seen some reviewers compare Todd Haynes's mannered, intimate lesbian romance to Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain.  Aside from the fact that they're both prestigious historical movies about same-sex romance with gorgeous visuals and music (and let's face it, how many of those have there been?), I don't see that the comparison makes sense at all, and in fact it might lead prospective viewers to expect very different things from Carol than what it actually delivers.  Brokeback Mountain was a sweeping romantic melodrama, but Carol is a character study and coming of age story, in which the romance often feels more like the means to an end than the point of the exercise.  Set in the early 50s, the small-scale story begins when wealthy suburban wife Carol (Cate Blanchett), who is in the middle of an ugly divorce, meets shopgirl Therese (Rooney Mara) and is immediately smitten.  The two quickly develop an intense friendship, which only turns romantic fairly late in the story, but which is nevertheless all-consuming, with Carol acting as a mentor to the unformed, uncertain Therese, and Therese functioning almost as a surrogate daughter for Carol, whose own daughter has been removed from her care by her husband.
  
  The late point at which the romance between Carol and Therese develops is only one of the ways in which Carol defies the expectations of the genre it leads us to expect.  This isn't a story about two repressed women discovering their sexuality.  Carol knows exactly what she is, and isn't particularly bothered about it--she's even slightly frustrated by the fuss that everyone, especially her husband, makes over it.  Therese, meanwhile, is on a journey of self-discovery, but her sexuality is only a small component of it.  Over the course of the movie she finds herself as an artist and an adult who knows what she wants from life, not just what gender she's attracted to.  It's perhaps for this reason that the romance between the two women never feels entirely convincing.  While we never doubt the intensity and importance of their connection, there isn't much sexual heat between them, and I never found myself longing for them to fall into each other's arms.  By the end of the movie, I was fairly sanguine about whether Therese and Carol would even end up together--they were, it seemed to me, at such different points in their lives, and Therese in particular was still figuring out what she wanted, that to tie themselves together might actually do more harm than good.  Both characters are fascinating as people--especially Carol, who knows herself more fully than most fictional characters; who is, as she says, not a martyr and thus not willing to give up her own happiness for the sake of propriety, but who also recognizes that just because her brand of happiness is forbidden doesn't make it OK for her to trample over other people's lives.  The romance often feels more like a way of illustrating them than something worthwhile in its own right.
  
  Haynes's painterly direction, the sweeping score by Carter Burwell, and most of all, the two lead performances, are what carry Carol and make it special (though it is an obvious crock that Mara has been allowed to submit herself as a supporting actress in a movie in which she is the main character; I might even argue that it is Carol who is a supporting character, since she so often functions as the object of Therese's fascination and curiosity).  They can't do quite enough, however, to conceal that the film's script is sloppy and a little misshapen, with a first act that dragged and left me rather bored, and not enough attention paid to any of the supporting characters, no matter how important.  In one scene, Carol tells her husband Harge (Kyle Chandler) that he shouldn't drag their divorce through an ugly dispute in the courts, because "we're not ugly people."  This is plainly true of Carol, but Harge, who has functioned solely as an antagonist who stands in the way of his wife's happiness, has been nothing but ugly, no matter how much we might want to sympathize with his confusion and hurt feelings.  The lack of a tighter script around the two central characters means that Carol ends up feeling small and a little ephemeral.  There's enough here to watch for, but the movie as a whole is not entirely successful.
  
  
• Spotlight - A short way into Tom McCarthy's dramatization of the investigation by journalists at the Boston Globe into the decades-long conspiracy to conceal and enable the actions of pedophile priests, I found myself wondering what I go to the movie theater for.  As I said in the opening of this post, I often forget to get my recommended allowance of grown-up films, so a lot of the movies I see in theaters are extravaganzas of special effects and explosions, and it's obvious what the added value of an evening out is in their case.  But there are also some more mature movies, like Birdman or Upstream Color, that benefit from the immersive experience you get in a movie theater.  Spotlight, on the other hand, could just as easily have been a TV movie on HBO, for all its interest in the visual or cinematic--and given how much more prestigious television has become in the last few decades, it could probably have done so without losing any of the A-list actors it features.  What, for example, is the difference between Spotlight and The Normal Heart, an HBO movie about the early days of the AIDS epidemic and the struggle to get homophobic authorities to take it seriously, which, incidentally, also happens to feature a stellar performance by Mark Ruffalo as a crusader for justice who allows his righteous anger over the indifference of those in power to take over his life?
  
  None of this should be taken as saying that Spotlight is not an excellent movie.  The story it tells is fascinating, and it tells it in a clear, compelling, and exciting way, without sensationalizing it.  The actors are all excellent--as well as Ruffalo, Michael Keaton is very good as the more seasoned reporter who leads the investigative team that breaks the story, and Stanley Tucci nearly steals the show as a cagey but determined lawyer representing some of the victims.  Perhaps most importantly, Spotlight avoids what must have been a powerful temptation to tell a story in which the protagonists are stalwart crusaders for justice battling an evil foe.  The film makes it very clear that it's not just the Catholic Church that is to blame for enabling and turning a blind eye to abuse, but an entire system that takes it for granted that some people get to abuse with impunity, while others don't get to complain when they are abused.  What's more, the reporters of the Globe are part of that system--in one of the most powerful scenes in the movie, the oily lawyer whom our heroes have been castigating for helping to conceal the abuse reminds them that he tried to blow the whistle years ago by sending information to the Globe, which ignored it.  What Spotlight is saying is that abuse is the product of an entire community, and that we're all trained from a young age to accept and ignore it.  That standing up and shining a light on these violations can often be an act of redemption for people who have been complicit for too long.  That feels like a powerful, important statement, in any medium.
  
  
• 45 Years - The end credits of Andrew Haigh's film note that it is based on a short story, by David Constantine.  This does not come as a surprise, since even at a rather short (90 minutes) running time, 45 Years is, like a lot of literary short stories, all premise and no development.  Days before the celebration of their 45th wedding anniversary, the marriage of Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay) is rocked by a letter informing Tom of the discovery of the body of his girlfriend Katya, who died suddenly in a fall while they were hiking in Switzerland fifty years ago.  While it's never made entirely clear what Tom has told Kate about Katya, it's obvious that the depth of his emotional response to the news is shocking to her, and as the week draws on she begins to suspect that she--and her marriage to Tom--have only ever been a replacement for the great love he lost with Katya's death.  But the thing is, that's all that 45 Years does with its premise.  Rampling is great at conveying Kate's growing grief and anger, but the story around her never gives her another note to play.  And as much as 45 Years tries to present itself as a mystery, with Kate slowly working out just how much Katya meant to Geoff, it's hard not to conclude that the problems in their marriage actually come from someplace much more mundane--that Geoff is selfish, and happy to let Kate take care of him and shoulder the burden of maintaining their marriage, while he stews over his own preoccupations (and that he most likely would have been just as emotionally absent if he'd married Katya instead of Kate).  45 Years is one of those movies that you know everything about once you've heard their premise, and despite great performances from Rampling and Courtenay, it never delivers more than what that premise implies.
  
  
• The Big Short - From the moment I first saw a trailer for this movie, I had only one question: how in god's name could director Adam McKay manage to make sympathetic heroes out of people who were trying to get rich off the 2008 financial crisis?  And the answer is, he can't.  Which on one level is reassuring--it means we haven't got another Wolf of Wall Street situation, where a movie ends up making its reprehensible main character a lot more charismatic than it wants him to be.  But on the other hand, this is also a huge problem for The Big Short, which does want us to see its protagonists--a group of Wall Street bankers and hedge fund brokers who realize, a few years ahead of the pack, that the US housing market is built on a foundation of quicksand, and go about making bets against the market that stand to net them billions of dollars--as heroes.  The movie's argument is that the banks, mortgage peddlers, and credit rating agencies who created the financial crisis are so much more odious than our heroes that taking their money is laudable even if it happens with the pesky collateral damage of the destruction of millions of lives all over the world.  And there are indeed moments where it managed to get me to feel the outrage it was aiming for--mostly scenes involving Steve Carell's cynical, world-weary fund manager, who rails against the injustices of the system before finally realizing, to his own disgust, that he is part of it.  But in the end, The Big Short is still constructed like a heist movie, a Robin Hood story in which the rich steal from the even more rich, who pass along the cost of their mistakes to the poor.  The entire final act of the movie revolves around the protagonists' indignation that the banks with whom they placed bets against the housing market are refusing to downgrade mortgage-backed securities even as the number of defaults rise, and somehow the movie doesn't realize how whiny this makes them look.  If you go into business with a corrupt system--with the intention of profiting off that corruption, no less--you don't get to complain when it behaves in a corrupt way.  You certainly don't get to do so with the self-righteousness that The Big Short's heroes do, selfishly complaining that the economy isn't collapsing fast enough for their get-rich-quick schemes to pay out.  The Big Short wants to be a movie dripping with anger and righteous indignation, but its focus on its dudebro heroes, and obvious desire for them to come out ahead, means that its anger is inescapably undermined.
  
  There's a very obvious comparison to be made between The Big Short and Spotlight, another movie about a real-world travesty being exposed by a group of plucky crusaders.  The two movies' styles couldn't be any more different.  Spotlight is dry as a bone, a dramatized newspaper article.  The Big Short is consciously stylized, comedic in tone, and deliberately artificial--characters occasionally address the camera to explain that the scene we just watched didn't actually happen in real life, and was merely included in order to make the real events seem more dramatic, and when complex financial concepts are explained, the film brings in various celebrities, who play themselves, to speak to the camera and explain them.  It's all very entertaining, but in the end I found myself less engaged by The Big Short than by Spotlight, which has an honesty and a sense of integrity that The Big Short never comes near.  The Big Short lacks Spotlight's sober acknowledgement that its characters were complicit in the horrors they uncovered, instead trying to sugarcoat that realization by making them seem like unsung geniuses (though there's even some question about that argument).  Maybe that's inevitable, since unlike Spotlight, The Big Short can't claim to have put the scandal it exposes to bed--as the film's conclusion points out, hardly any of the people responsible for the crisis suffered legal or even financial consequences, and the banking system continues to try to play the same games, getting rich by selling garbage bonds to ordinary people.  In light of that, it's perhaps understandable that The Big Short wants to wring some sense of triumph out of its characters' success, but to me that's just adding insult to injury.
  
  
• Deadpool - In a slight break from this post's theme of consuming grown-up, mature fare, if you sympathized with my recently expressed frustrations with superhero stories and their reductive, reactionary politics, Deadpool might very well be the movie for you.  Which is not to say that it's a movie you should see if you're looking for progressive politics--on the contrary, it shares the common Hollywood flaws of being mostly white and treating the naked bodies of women like wallpaper, and adds to them a truly dizzying number of rape jokes.  But in a pop culture landscape still trying to seriously ponder the question of how one maintains a civil society in a world that has superheroes in it, Deadpool is refreshing for admitting that this is basically impossible.  That all superheroes, be they heroes or villains, are effectively thugs who inject chaos and mayhem into any situation they find themselves in.  I'm sufficiently fed up with this genre that simply owning up to this felt like a tonic.
  
  As for the movie itself, Deadpool has the advantage of an R rating, which means that unlike, say, Guardians of the Galaxy, when it claims to be outrageous and rude, it actually backs up those claims (up to a point, that is; this is still a movie looking for major box-office success, which means that it knows where the line is; and, as is unfortunately typical for such movies, when it chooses to skirt near that line it's usually with misogynistic comments, because that's the most "acceptable" kind of over-the-top humor).  At the same time, though, Deadpool is more often outrageous than it is funny--in fact, its best joke might come in the opening credits, which replace the actors' names with catch-all descriptions like "hot chick" or "gratuitous cameo"--and that outrageousness has a short half-life that doesn't last until the end of the movie.  (This is especially true of the film's fourth-wall-breaking humor, which constantly comments on the conventions of superhero movies; it only takes a few dips into this well to realize that Deadpool doesn't really have anything to say on this subject, beyond pointing out things we all already noticed.)  The film works largely because it takes the by-now-familiar, Apatovian approach of using its rude exterior to only lightly conceal a soft, gooey center, in this case the undying love between mercenary-turned-mutant Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) and prostitute-slash-stripper Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), the only person in the universe to match his filthy sense of humor and even filthier sexual proclivities.  The romance between them is rather sweet (the Valentine's Day release date turns out to have been on the nose), and a nice reminder that people don't have to be squeaky clean and vanilla to have a good, successful relationship.  The actual details of the superhero plot turn out to be ancillary to this love story--Wade, who has been disfigured by the same treatment that gave him his powers, wants the bad guy who created him (Ed Skrein) to return him to his previous appearance because he fears that Vanessa won't love him with his current face.  Along the way the X-Men get involved, but in a way that only reinforces the film's distrust of the very notion of superheroes as saviors of humanity--these are just a couple of street gangs raring for a brawl, which once again strikes me as a lot more honest and realistic than nearly any other movie in this genre.
  
  The central romance and refreshingly dubious approach to superheroes keep Deadpool afloat long after the jokes (or rather, "jokes") start falling flat, and on the whole I found the movie enjoyable--albeit in a way that left me utterly uninterested in seeing any more of the character.  In that sense, Deadpool is both a massive success and a complete failure.  It's clearly trying to sell the idea of a fourth-wall-breaking, irreverent, potty-mouthed, decidedly unheroic hero, but though Reynolds is very good in the part, the script simply isn't tight or clever enough to make that character seem like anything more than a one-trick pony.  The movie is at its best when Reynolds and Baccarin deliver precisely the kind of earnestness that is supposedly Deadpool's anathema, and at its worst when it keeps trying to convince us how bad, how outrageous, and how groundbreaking it is.