Baby Driver

Baby Driver (2017, dir. Edgar Wright) is all motion, speed, action, and sound. The plot is hackneyed: our young man has a car wreck with a local crime boss, Doc (Kevin Spacey).  Baby agrees to pay for the damage he has caused by driving cars for Doc to and from various heists and robberies around the city. It also so happens that the young man (played by Ansel Elgort), referred to throughout the film only as “Baby,” has tinnitus, the result of a car wreck when he was five years old that killed his parents.  He still mourns and loves his mother. Over the five-years since the wreck, Baby has earned his way out of debt and stops driving for Doc. He gets a job delivering pizzas. And he falls in love with a young woman named Debra at a local restaurant. She falls in love with him. Doc blackmails Baby into driving for him again, threatening Debra’s life and the lives of others close to him.

The film encourages us to see that Baby is basically a good person caught in a tight situation. He does good deeds for people. He takes care of an old black man who is confined to a wheelchair and who shares his apartment. He returns a purse to a woman whose car he has just hijacked. He warns another woman to stay out of the bank about to be robbed. Baby is good. The circumstances he finds himself caught in are bad. Baby might also be somewhat stupid, given some of the decisions he makes, though the film doesn’t consider this possibility.

There are a number of non sequiturs in this film, a number of questions one might want to ask. As good as he might be, Baby certainly makes a number of bad decisions.  Couldn’t he have found a way to extricate himself from Doc‘s control? Kevin Spacey seemed not quite right as the crime boss. (Of course, since I saw the film, he’s been revealed to be not quite right in more significant ways). Why do I not believe in John Hamm’s portrayal of a drug addict? These quibbles don’t matter.  The action matters: it is almost relentless. And Baby matters: he is the one we care about.

Excellent editing and camera work make this film what it is. Some scenes last only a few seconds. But over the course of the first half of the film through various maneuvers and edits the director builds a narrative that hurls itself forward.

Baby Driver is set in Atlanta. We see Atlanta streets and newspapers and buildings. However, the film really doesn't make much of its Atlanta setting, which it mostly takes for granted. That's okay. This is not a film about place, about a local region. It's about speed, motion, and Baby Driver.

Don't Kill It

Don’t Kill It (2016; Mark Mendez) opens with scenes of the Mississippi swamp where a man is hunting with his dog. Ominous music and thunderclaps provide the backdrop as the dog wanders off the trail and finds a strange looking object. That object, as we come to know, contains an ancient demon which escapes to terrorize the small Mississippi town where this film is set. The film makes use of the backwoods landscape and the comical, dimwitted citizens of the small Southern town as it shows us how the demon possesses one person after another, compelling them to kill anyone who comes in sight. The violence in this movie is considerable though not realistic -- in realism it reminded me of the original version of 200 Maniacs. We have several scenes of carnage, of families being killed, of teenagers being obliterated. A number of children are killed too, mostly off-screen. A demon killer named Jebediah Woodley finds his way to town. He's played by Dolph Lundgren. Jebediah teams up with FBI agent Evelyn Pierce to track down the demon. She has returned to the town after a long absence. The difficulty about the demon is the fact that it moves from one person's body to the next. When someone shoots the person whom the demon has possessed, the demon immediately transitions to the killer’s body. Hence the title of the film. If you kill the demon, he possesses you. Instead of being killed, he needs to be contained. No one can tell who the demon is, except for the way his or her eyes turn completely black and for the shotgun or the pistol or the machete that he or she is carrying and the roaring sound he or she makes as he or she runs towards the next victim – in other words, the demon is fairly obvious. The plot is slightly more intricate than I've made it out to be. We learn that the FBI agent Pierce is descended from an angelic lineage, a fact that plays conveniently into the plot, though it's not explained very well. Oddly, there's comedy in this film, which makes fun of the limitations of the people of the small town, many of whom are dead by the end of the film. This was a film so unlikely and so ludicrous that I found myself longing before the midpoint for it to end yet at the same time not willing to give up on it.

Don’t Kill It employs a number of southern conventions:  Gothicism, religious extremism, small-town hokum, the supernatural, swamps. A fundamentalist minister in town is convinced that the demon hunter Jebediah is himself the demon. He musters the paranoid support of parishioners to try to stop the demon hunter and the FBI agent. I've already mentioned the small town and its dimwitted citizens. A bumbling Barney Fife-like policeman provides minor comic relief. Dolph Lundgren's character is eccentric and mysterious and crazy. Lundgren does a good job with his character. He's the only strong point of the film, in a relative way. But the major relief this film provides comes when the closing credits roll.

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Why a demon in a small Mississippi town? Is there anything particularly southern about the demon in this film? I suppose demons, if you believe in them, can appear anywhere. One could argue that the demon in Don't Shoot It incorporates all the stereotypical worst traits of a small town southern resident: love of weapons, love of violence, pleasure in shooting or assaulting anything, whether animal or human, religious mania. This demon’s appearance in a Mississippi swamp is totally arbitrary, which is not to say that arbitrariness somehow invalidates its existence there. The appearance of the demon, which we can understand as a source of bad luck, terrible events, misfortune, random chaos, that is, as a supernatural explanation for anything evil that can happen in the world, is explanation enough. We’re always looking for explanations. Explanations for what caused the Deep Water Horizon disaster, what led to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, what led to any number of terrible earthquakes or tsunami or volcanic eruptions or hurricanes or tornadoes, for plagues. We’re always grasping for explanations, and we’re always fearful of them. The demon in this film is one explanation and it certainly calls enough for fear. But I prefer to spend my time considering more plausible, rational, human, physical explanations.

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Moonlight

Moonlight (2016; dir. Barry Jenkins) is difficult to categorize. It opens up to the casual viewer an unfamiliar world: the world in which a gay African-American young man must live. The film is divided into three sections, with each section focused on one period of the main character Chiron’s life (in each section Chiron has a different name). It shows us a young man whose mother is a drug addict, whose father is absent, and who doesn't understand why he feels a certain way. He's profoundly lonely throughout most of the film. The first section shows him as a boy around nine years old who is chased and tormented by a group of other boys from the projects.  Compared to them, Chiron is small and weak, and he runs from them. An older African-American man named Juan befriends him. It's not clear at first why this man is interested in the boy.  Juan sells drugs in the project where Chiron lives.  He keeps a paternal eye on goings on in the project, trying to make sure that nothing goes wrong.  Selling drugs for him is a necessary way of life.  The film never sees him as a negative social force.  If anything, at least for Chiron, he's the opposite.  Yet he also sells drugs to Chiron's mother. When the boy asks him if he sells drugs, and he shamefully admits that he does, their relationship ends (as far as I could tell). Chiron obviously makes the connection.

The second section shows us Chiron at the age of around 16. We learn that Juan is dead, but not why or how. Once again, Chiron is isolated and lonely. He is bullied by other boys in his high school who call him names. Only one boy, Kevin, seems interested in being his friend. It's with this boy that he has his first sexual experience. A few days later, one of the school bullies forces Kevin to beat Chiron up.

In the third section Chiron is 26. He's been working out, he's all pumped up, he wears a gold chain around his neck and sells drugs. He gets a phone call from Kevin, whom he has not seen or talked to in 10 years. Kevin now lives in Florida and Chiron drives there to meet him.  The film ends with a moving but uneasy and uncertain reconnection between Chiron and Kevin, who showed him affection in high school 10 years before, but who also beat him up.

The film is depressing. It's supposed to be. Such is the nature of the boy’s life at every age of his existence, from when he was nine with a drug addicted mother to when he was 16 and bullied to when he is 26 and lonely and selling drugs. It's also quite moving. Every element of this movie coheres almost seamlessly to give us a portrait of this man's life—music, cinematography, editing, screenplay (written by director Jenkins), direction. The acting is excellent, even though most of the people who appear in the film are relative unknowns. The actors who play Chiron at the three stages of his life are all wonderful actors. I would say this especially of Trevante Rhodes, who portrays Chiron as an adult. He says very little. The film shows us his face and his eyes and we can tell without being told how lonely and unconnected he is.