Somewhere along a desert highway in the American Southwest, where there's not much to do besides get drunk, shoot guns, and pump iron, a stranger comes to town.
Based on Savannah Knoop’s memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I became JT LeRoy, Justin Kelly’s film skims the surface of the sensational literary hoax of the early 2000s, that far-off time before avatars, gender fluidity and fake online identity were part of everyday life.
The story of Lizzie Borden, controversially acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892, has been explored many times on screen and in print (there’s even an opera and a musical version, not to mention the Los Angeles metal band Lizzy Borden).
What is Personal Shopper? Is it a haunted-house horror movie, a woman-in-peril thriller? Is it a satire on celebrity and the fetishistic world of fashion or an exercise in existential angst for the generation more familiar with texting than talking? It’s all those things, and more.
From the opening shot of a distant train making its slow journey toward the camera across flat plains ringed by Montana’s mountains, the audience knows they’re in for one of those subtle, low-key American art films. Kelly Reichardt, who doesn’t just direct her movies but edits and writes them too, is the queen of the slow-burn 21st-century Western.
Whatever one thinks of Café Society - and responses to Woody Allen's latest as ever are likely to be divided - few will dispute the visual lustre that the legendary cameraman Vittorio Storaro has brought to this tale of love upended and deferred, set in 1930s Hollywood to a period-perfect soundtrack pulsing with the music of Rodgers and Hart.
Every frame has a ready-made, natural shimmer that communicates Allen's love affair with the cinema, however one responds to a narrative about displaced nebbish Bobby Dorfman (Allen soundalike Jesse Eisenberg), who falls hard for LA glamour girl Vonnie (a radiant Kristen Stewart), a one-time Nebraskan who by the final credits has against the odds become Bobby's aunt.
That might sound like a sort of inverted commentary on Allen's much-debated personal life, but it's possible to look past the writer-director's circumstances in a story which exerts an unexpected emotional pull. The ending, set on the cusp of a new year, finds its leading players casting a ruminative, regretful glance back at their pasts.
Allen devotees, too, will note the shift in perspective between the mockery to which a sunlit, soulless Hollywood is subjected in Annie Hall and the dreamscape captured so easefully by Storaro here. With Bobby we look on in wonder at a realm in which the likes of Joan Blondell and Adolphe Menjou are only an unseen phone call or canapé away, while Bobby's gangster-brother Ben (Corey Stoll, pictured above with Saul Stein) casually cuts short the lives of all and sundry on his grubby home turf.
The boys' echt-Jewish mother Rose (Jeannie Berlin, terrific) clocks but doesn't want to address how exactly it is that Ben spends his days. That, in turn, makes the itinerant Bobby's screen outings with Vonnie to catch the latest from Barbara Stanwyck seem a welcome alternative - at least for a while - to shadier goings-on back east, and Allen gets considerable comic mileage out of the disparity between Rose's beer-swilling, cantankerous husband (the wonderful Ken Stott) in the Bronx and the swellegant poolside environs newly available to Bobby. Eisenberg plays the perennial Allen surrogate with an open-faced gentleness that couldn't be further from the self-immolating distress he brought to his recent London stage turn in The Spoils.
The twist, of course, is that a glistening LA casts its own confusion and gloom when it transpires that Bobby's beloved Vonnie is in fact the mistress of Bobby's long-married Uncle Phil (Steve Carell, ably inheriting a role earmarked for Bruce Willis), the hot-shot agent who ends up taking Bobby under his wing, with Vonnie the appointed guide to his newfound home. The resolution lands both young lovers with a more-than-acceptable mate, even as they can't help but ponder the road not taken. Bobby, we're informed, has "a touch of the poet" about him (note the O'Neill reference), but the narrative, one feels, wouldn't be out of place in Chekhov.
Stewart, on this evidence, would make a natural Yelena in Uncle Vanya, and her performance is the revelation here, as Vonnie shuttles between Bobby and Phil, alive to the needs of both men yet dulled on some level to doubts she clearly harbours within and about herself. Playing an ad hoc philosopher who puts her life up for examination but only to a point, the actress finds a soulmate of sorts in Storaro, who gives Vonnie the shimmering entrance of anyone's dreams. And if Allen is heard but not seen in an intermittent narration, he continues to gift his performers with unanticipated grace notes, none more so than a leading lady whose triumph in society comes tempered by a sense of loss.
The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is very far from central casting. Indeed, nothing in his career so far has suggested that he could punch his way out of a paper bag.
That includes the film’s opening scenes, which position Mike as a geeky stoner working the till at a convenience store in the fictional Liman, West Virginia. His girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is the competent one who rescues the omelette from burning, owns quite a nice Subaru and fields his constant apologies. Then one night he gets mugged by two armed thugs. Without an idea how, he dispatches both in a trice and is soon banged up by the sheriff. More killers arrive and this time Mike needs a little longer to do them in.
Meanwhile at CIA headquarters a turf spat has broken out between Mike’s former handler Lasseter (Connie Britton, pictured) and her preppy younger boss Yates (Topher Grace), who has decided to flex his muscles by wiping out her sleeper agent, the only success of a programme to train up mental patients as government assassins.
The script by Max Landis has a twist or two along the way, including a nice reveal about Phoebe that gives Stewart more to do than look on admiringly as Eisenberg lays waste to all-comers. “You’re his girlfriend, his mom, his maid and now you’re his lawyer?” says the cop when she advises him under arrest. Maybe that’s not all she is.
The film crescendos into a festival of splatty, splurgy cartoon violence: director Nima Nourizadeh has been hard at study of action genre tropes. Gore has not been this glorified in a comedy since James Gunn’s Super, in which a loser cast himself as a horribly vengeful superhero.
Are the laughs good enough to keep pace with all the punctured flesh? More or less. The joke of Mike’s incomprehension holds up reasonably well (“Is that a lyric?” he asks when greeted by a bafflingly coded message from Lasseter). Before he has accepted his destiny as a ruthless killer, Mike frets neurotically that he may be a robot. The best laughs are at the expense of the CIA, though there’s nothing to match the sheer bliss of Robert de Niro outwitting the Agency in Midnight Run. Eisenberg and Stewart are likeable, and there are fun cameos for John Leguizamo as a paranoid drug dealer who thinks he’s black and Bill Pullman as a national security capo. The film seems all set to cue up a sequel, but instead compresses it into the closing minutes. By then, the joke has done its job and run its course.
Overleaf: 'Piss My Pants' – watch a clip from American Ultra
When Hollywood characters revisit their youth it tends to be through the school reunion, with generally trite results; how typical of a French filmmaker, and of the cerebral, cinephile Olivier Assayas in particular, that his character should be an actress, who is pushed towards midlife crisis by a role.
Oscar winner Julianne Moore: the phrase has been a long time coming but it finally came true 10 days ago when the actress, long considered one of Hollywood's best and brightest, added an Academy Award to her groaning mantelpiece of trophies for her work in Still Alice. Is this actually the finest performance yet given by the flame-haired 54-year-old? Probably not (Far From Heaven, anyone?), and Still Alice – an entirely well-meaning venture that inspires admiration more than actual affection – is some way from the most memorable movie to yet showcase Moore's gifts.
But as a Columbia University linguistics professor who succumbs to early onset Alzheimer's, the Richard Glatzer-Wash Westmoreland collaboration tells its sorrowful story with sensitivity if no particular inspiration. Let's just say that as a platform for a performer possessed of generally unerring instincts, Still Alice joins the likes of Monster and Blue Sky among the ranks of trophied Oscar titles that will be remembered primarily for their leading ladies.
The irony of an academic who has given herself over to the study of human language only to watch her command over her own verbal acumen, and much else, fall away in itself feels familiar. Glatzer and Washmoreland clearly love their theatre (Kristen Stewart, cast true to sullen type as one of Moore and husband Alec Baldwin's three children, here plays a budding theatre actress), and some may find echoes in this adaptation of Lisa Genova's novel with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Edson play Wit, in which an English professor dying of ovarian cancer clings to such works as Donne's "Death, Be Not Proud" even as death comes to claim her. (Stewart and Moore are pictured above)
And it wasn't quite a decade ago that Julie Christie found herself at the Oscars for playing an Alzheimer's patient in Away From Her (in the end losing the prize to Marion Cotillard's Edith Piaf), though Moore's struggle here feels more fearsome moment-by-moment, not least because the Still Alice filmmakers keep their focus on their leading lady, in effect sidelining Baldwin, Stewart, and some fine actors elsewhere in the cast. (Baldwin is clearly a good luck charm when it comes to winning Oscars for his female co-stars: he was Cate Blanchett's husband in her 2014 turn in Blue Jasmine.)
One watches as Alice searches for a word in public or can't find the bathroom within the privacy of her own home, and it's only a shame that the creative team settle for as pat a choice for poetic citation as Elizabeth Bishop's (admittedly wonderful) "One Art", with its opening line, "The art of losing isn't hard to master." We witness the indignities of Alice unable to tie a shoe on the one hand and calling a daughter by the wrong name on the other. You get the inevitable standing ovation moment alongside a worsening chronicle of the illness-induced privations that exist behind closed doors.
The ending, like much else in the film, is overreliant on an extant source, this time on Tony Kushner's Angels in America, the play that budding thesp Stewart happens to have been working on as her mum's recall gives way perhaps for good. But if Still Alice has to borrow rather too often to achieve its effect, the film is lifted by one of the few actresses out there who can make even the blankest of despair feel entirely fresh.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Still Alice
What can another film about American malfeasance in its War on Terror add to our knowledge and disapproval? Camp X-Ray has too narrow a scope to offer much; yet it’s impossible not to be affected by its depiction of utter hopelessness for those illegally imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.