Review: The Hate U Give

Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) lives in two worlds. Her home is in the rough and mostly black neighbourhood of Garden Heights, but by day she goes to the mostly white and well-off Williamson Prep private school, where she ditches her hoodie and any attitudes or turns of phrase that might make her seem “ghetto” – even if her dorky white friends are doing it - to become "Starr version two". 

It's a prime set-up for a culture clash comedy. But this is a film (based on the best selling YA novel) with a lot more on its mind, as becomes clear when Starr meets up with old friend Khalil (Algee Smith) at a neighbourhood party, only for them to be pulled over by police later that night. Khalil was driving her home after a fight broke out at the party; turns out they might have been safer there.

Then things get complicated: the police want to make what happened about Khalil’s drug dealing for long crime kingpin King (Anthony Mackie) – who used to be partners with her father Maverick (Russell Hornsby) before he got out of the life. If she testifies, it'll go public and her life at Williamson will collapse; worse, her family will be under threat from King. If she doesn’t speak up, justice will be denied and she'll have to live with the burden of her own silence. 

There's nothing easy about Starr's choice, and there's nothing simplistic about this film. Everything here is firmly rooted in character; at first Starr's worry is about losing her friends - including white boyfriend Chris (K.J. Apa) - and it's only later as she's forced to face again and again the wider issues around police violence and her community that her viewpoint grows.

Rather than glossed over, other points of view are addressed and argued down. Starr's best girlfriend at school is pretty much the whitest girl alive (with "that poor cop might lose his job" views to match), but even she isn't a completely one-dimensional bad guy, and Starr doesn't treat her as such (until there are no other options). As the political side of things evolves, this expresses the changing situation through the characters and their shifting reactions; the good guys grow and learn, the bad guys spout catchphrases or stay focused on their own interests.

There's a strong supporting cast, but this is Stenberg's film and she gives an outstanding performance, tracking Starr's journey with a note-perfect slow burn as she goes from a quiet, head-down type to someone willing to stand up for her friends memory even when things get tough. Even during the occasional moments when the film hits a flat patch (George Tillman Jr.'s direction gets the job done, but rarely adds anything to any given scene, which can be a problem when things are required to get tense), she's never less than totally committed.

The Hate U Give is relentlessly topical without being simplistic, telling a personal story that's dramatically political. At over two hours it covers a lot of ground, but not a single moment feels wasted. There's a lot more to YA fiction than just bad science fiction and romance, but for a while now that's the only material that's been brought to the big screen. Hollywood needs to cast their net wider: hopefully this excellent adaptation is just the beginning. 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Green Book

The year is 1962, and New York nightclub bouncer Frank Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) needs a job. The rough-edged Italian-American is as far from the smooth and urbane classical African-American musician Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) as you can get, but if Don is going to survive a tour of the deeply racist Deep South he’s going to need a driver who can throw his weight around. You don't need a road map to see where this is going.

This is a film best described as "well-meaning", though just how much slack good intentions gets you these days is up for debate. It's been raking in awards nominations all over the place (and just grabbed a swag of Oscar noms), but if you really want to get outraged that a "quality" film is being put up for awards that tend to go towards "quality" films there are probably worse films around if you want to look for them.

Here director Peter Farrelly (who co-wrote the script with Vallelonga’s son) doesn’t shirk from the ingrained prejudices of the Jim Crow-era South, and both Mortensen and (especially) Ali give nuanced and often moving performances. But this takes a firmly old-Hollywood view of race relations, telling a story (firmly disputed by Shirley’s relatives) where both men equally suffer from superficial prejudices - ones they easily shrug off to embrace their shared humanity while traveling through a region ruled by blatant, institutionalised racism. 

The result is a film where racism is overcome by personal growth and understanding, but the characters are constantly surrounded by deeply racist impersonal institutions that have no interest in understanding the people that are harmed by their bigotry. It's a feel good film where the reason to feel good has nothing to do with what we're seeing on the screen - you could tell roughly the same story set a hundred years earlier, only then the realisation that all this blatant racism would outlive the cast of characters no matter how much they personally learn and grow as people might upset awards voters.

Still, taken purely on the level of a buddy film this largely acquits itself well, delivering the required emotional high points and comedy chuckles in a professional manner. But even on this most basic of levels, this can't help but come across as occasionally tone-deaf: one of the supposedly humorous bonding moments occurs when Vallelonga teaches Shirley how to eat fried chicken. 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Glass

As you’d expect from the final installment of a trilogy that began in 2000 with Unbreakable, Glass has a decidedly retro take on superheroes. More retro even than The Incredibles, which was driven by the kind of design-driven Golden Age fandom that didn't really become a thing in comics until the late 90s. Unbreakable, on the other hand, was driven by the question that comic book readers were too smart to ask until the early 80s: what if superpowers were really real?

It's a question that's been long passed by in the real world - in part because the answer is almost always a bunch of grim & gritty clenched-teeth drama that gets boring real fast, and in part because these days movies firmly believe that "check out these cool special effects" is a much more interesting hook for a film. Which makes this film’s low budget world, where having superpowers means you’re just super enough to make your actions hard to explain away, feel either frustratingly limited or enjoyably off-kilter depending on your mood. 

The opening sets up a big clash between multiple personality monster The Horde (James McEvoy) from writer-director M Night Shyamalan’s previous film Split and super tough guy David Dunn (Bruce Willis) from Unbreakable. But before we can get the big fanboy-pleasing fight we've all been waiting for since at least last year, things are rapidly short circuited as both superheroes end up in the same institution as Dunn’s evil and now heavily sedated nemesis Mr. Glass (Samuel L Jackson). 

There things slow down a lot as Dr Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) starts treating the trio for their “delusions”; those expecting a traditional superhero film may struggle with the plot-driven character study this turns into before things eventually get physical. Shyamalan scraped together the 20 million dollar budget himself (more control, plus more money for him if it hits big), but a few extra dollars wouldn't have hurt in this middle stretch - this is one massively understaffed mental institution, even if the lack of staff does turn out to have a (possible) explanation. 

Likewise, the absence of big superhero effects is a part of the story, not a flaw, though Shyamalan's replacement for those effects - having superheroes go to a form of therapy that seems designed to convince them they're in a completely different movie - feels a little misjudged as the middle stretch drags on. Fortunately the performances are all good: McEvoy gets the lion's share of the story, while Willis starts out strong (and gives a solidly engaged performance) but fades into the background a little once Jackson's highly entertaining Mr. Glass starts making his moves.

Back in his Sixth Sense heyday Shyamalan often talked about having cracked the code for writing Hollywood hits, and while he never (to my knowledge) spelt that code out it's not that hard to figure out once you've seen more than one or two of his self-penned scripts. It's not so much about having a twist ending as it is an ending that recontexualises what's come before... which is pretty much the definition of a twist ending, only his don't really need to be a surprise to work (ie Signs). 

So it's no shock twist to reveal that this is a film as much about the stories around superheroes as it is about having them pummel each other. The real fight here is about who gets to tell the stories that go with superpowers; that is to say, what context they're going to operate in. It's a battle between rival forces for what kind of twist ending we're going to get, either one that expands the possibilities of storytelling or one that shuts them down - though if Shyamalan really wanted to make this a metaphor for his career in Hollywood, he really should have put in a few more punch-ups.

- Anthony Morris

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Review: Instant Family

Instant Family manages to be both a surprisingly insightful look at the pleasures and perils of adopting a bunch of kids old enough to already have their own personalities and exactly the sappy feel-good tear-jerking drama the trailers have been selling for months. How does it pull off this extremely difficult and to be honest somewhat impressive balancing act? Let's start with Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne.

They play Pete and Ellie Wagner, professional house flippers and enthusiastic home renovators, which should instantly make them the worst people in the world but because they're played by Wahlberg and Byrne they're actually kind of fun in a self-aware kind of way. Both have firmly established comic personas as "wacky parents" (Wahlberg from the Daddy's Home films, Byrne from the Bad Neighbours series), and that experience gives their performances just enough of a cartoony edge to make their uptight stressed out characters likable.

Deciding that they'd like to have kids and that adopting an older child would be a good way for them to avoid being the oldest parents at high school, they dive right into to world of adoption - cue montage of online photos of adorable kids saying things like "I need a mommy and daddy that will keep me safe" (no wonder Pete demands Ellie keep those photos away from him). Their guides in this world are a tag-team of guidance counselors played by Tig Notaro (the serious one) and Octavia Spencer (the sassy one), and they are in no mood to pull any punches.

Much like the casting of Wahlberg and Byrne, their appearance signals that this is a film that isn't afraid to get some laughs out of what seems like it should be a Very Serious Subject. And this is a film that's hyper-aware about pretty much every issue you could possibly think of around adoption. Are white parents adopting children of another race going to be seen as "white saviours"? Maybe - but it's a lot better than having "whites only" stamped on your file.

So it's the cast that's tasked with smoothing out the bumps in a film that on the one hand is really thoughtful about the problems and conflicts that come with adoption (director Sean Anders was working in part from his own experiences) and on the other has a bunch of Blind Side jokes about one parent looking to adopt a black child who's good at sports.

The Wagners eventually adopt a trio of kids, each with their own issues even before it turns out their birth mother might still be in the picture (obviously this doesn't come to light until the Wagners have totally bonded with them). The constant whiplash between cheap but often effective jokes and corny but often effective emotional moments is somehow both erratic film-making and a decent attempt to capture the roller-coaster ride of parenthood; this never quite figures out what tone it wants to take, but ends up making that conflict seem like the point of the whole exercise.

Usually this kind of thing would be filed under "crowd-pleasing", but the two extremes are so extreme - or at least, they feel that way compared to each other - that it's a little hard to figure out what this is aiming for. If you're into the sharp insights into race and privilege, then the heart-rending moments might feel exploitative; if you want a feel-good story about a family coming together and finding each other then some of the harsher jokes might rub you the wrong way.

But Byrne and Wahlberg make for great parents; Byrne especially gets a lot of milage out of the way just about everything in this film - including her character - snaps wildly from one extreme to the other. If Hollywood isn't going to give us another Bad Neighbors movie, this'll have to do.

- Anthony Morris