The Mule (2018): inspired by a New York Times magazine article written by Nick Schenk; written by Sam Dolnick; directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Clint Eastwood (Earl Stone), Bradley Cooper (Colin Bates), Andy Garcia (Laton), Diane Wiest (Mary7), Laurence Fishburne (Unnamed DEA Agent), Taissa Farmiga (Clint's Grand-daughter), Alison Eastwood (Clint's Daughter), and Manny Montana (Axl?????):
The Mule is sort of awful and sort of fascinating, a meandering melodrama based on the true story of a 90-year-old Detroit florist who worked as a drug mule for the Mexican cartels.
All the family agita in the movie is entirely fictional and bathetically awful yet also underdeveloped. The drug-mule stuff is interesting until it turns into a ludicrous road movie in which star/director Clint Eastwood romps with buxom hookers and delivers life advice to DEA agents and Cartel higher-ups alike. It's somehow well-worth-watching and utterly disposable.
A scene in which our lovable mule calls a couple of African-Americans "Negroes," acts like he wasn't aware that it's not a term generally used in 2017 (when the movie is set), and then lectures them (like so many others) on their smartphone usage while helping change their flat tire is the most bonkers scene in the movie. Clint Eastwood, Twinkly Racist!
I'm pretty sure Larry Fishburne filmed all his scenes in about two hours, given that he's stuck in either the same hallway or the same office for all those scenes. Bradley Cooper is, well, Bradley Cooper. A fine cast does what it can. Recommended as a sort of car wreck.
Freedomland (1998) by Richard Price: A critical and commercial hit in 1998, Freedomland has lost none of its sting in the intervening decades.
Maybe it's more relevant now in The Age of Trump than ever, dealing as it does with America's deep-seated racial divisions and unequal treatment at the hands of the law, media simplification of tragic events, knee-jerk bigotry, the politics of policing, and so many other 'Hot-button' topics.
A white woman stumbles into a hospital in New Jersey claiming to have been carjacked by an African-American man at the very border between the 'white' and 'black' sections of the New Jersey city. And her 4-year-old son was in the car.
What follows is more than 700 pages of tense, mournful, and sardonic prose. It's a thriller that takes its time drawing its characters and situations, its places and racial strife. That 700 pages covers just about 4 days of events.
It's all rendered in third-person narration that alternates its focus between Housing Project police officer Lorenzo Council and ambitious reporter Jesse Haus. The mother, Brenda Martin, is a major character as well -- really THE major character -- but she's observed entirely from without by Council and Haus.
This is the sort of big, ambitious, intimately epic popular novel that often out-survives and out-performs far more self-consciously 'literary' works. It's heart-rending though sometimes hopeful. Price, a screenwriter as well as a novelist, is a great writer of dialogue and of pungent, slyly metaphorical description.
Freedomland is, quite simply, a Great American Novel, one that entertains and instructs in the way only the best Art does. Highly recommended.
Marshall (2017): written by Michael Koskoff and Jacob Koskoff; directed by Reginald Hudlin; starring Chadwick Boseman (Thurgood Marshall), Josh Gad (Sam Friedman), Kate Hudson (Eleanor Strubing), and Sterling K. Brown (Joseph Spell): Marshall plays a bit fast and loose with history in its tale of then-NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall's participation in a rape trial in Connecticut in 1940. The major alteration come with re-imagining veteran Civil Rights lawyer Sam Friedman as a young, inexperienced Josh Gad.
Of course, this is a bit of a 'sauce for the goose' situation. The movie diminishes the contributions and experience of a white character (albeit Jewish and thus also familiar with bigotry) so as to foreground the competence and accomplishments of an African-American character. The movie does hew fairly closely to the facts of the case, so kudos for that.
Chadwick Boseman is riveting as Thurgood Marshall. The NAACP would send Marshall to consult on cases involving Civil Rights matters across America. How this hasn't been the basis for a TV show, I have no idea. Boseman has now played real-life characters Ernie Davis, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and Jackie Robinson. And he's the Black Panther!
Josh Gad is fine in a somewhat simplistic sidekick role. Equalizing the power relationship between Friedman and Marshall might have made for a quieter, better movie. But it's amazing that this film got made at all. And seemingly with the help of a lot of Chinese investors. What is up with that? Reginald Hudlin, whom I still associate with House Party, navigates a period-specific drama with grace and aplomb.
The movie navigates the very, very hazardous territory of a false rape accusation with care and finesse. The reason for such a rarity of a false accusation are made perfectly clear, and the film foregrounds the sympathetic reasons that Kate Hudson's lonely socialite would have done such a thing. Sterling K. Brown is solid as the accused, a chauffeur with a checkered past (but not a rapey past). In all, recommended.
