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G is for Gangsta Granny

Chet Kozlowski — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 14:34:04 +0000

G is for Gangsta Granny Chet Kozlowski June 25, 2024 - 10:34

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Old people are harmless, right? You can ignore them, you can exploit them, you can displace them and wait for them to die. Old people are insignificant and easy victims.

There’s a familiarity to the setting of the gripping new thriller The G: a midwinter working class town: bare trees, patches of snow dirtied by tires, dry leaves. It’s as craggy as the film’s protagonist, a 72-year-old woman with a perpetual scowl. Ann Hunter smokes, swears, and cares for her invalid husband Chip.

One day, big men come to take them away. These guys have worked the system to become legal guardians: their scam is to put old folks in a facility, sell their home, and seize their assets. It’s a sort of human trafficking, and it’s perfectly legal. Because what are old people going to do about it?

But these guys haven’t dealt with the likes of Ann Hunter.

She’s The G of the title (which stands for “Granny”), and both she and husband Chip have pasts, step kids and second marriages, a complicated web of relationships. Ann Hunter is more capable of revenge then she lets on. Add to that the unspoken rules of criminal allegiances and you have the makings of an unusual and suspenseful thriller.

Ann is played by Dale Dickey, a character actor who’s been in just about everything. You’ll know her from Hell or High Water, Leave No Trace, and Winter’s Bone, usually playing the grizzled matriarch of a cretinous family.

Ann and Chip are placed in a nondescript care facility, where they are belittled and abused. “What is this place?” Ann asks Joseph, a fellow inmate and gardener. “A place for old people,” Joseph replies. But it feels more like a prison, to Ann and to her plucky granddaughter Emma (played by Romane Denis). Emma has a testy relationship with her father’s mother, her G: “I should abandon you like everybody else. But instead, I’m going to get you out of here. Just to piss you off.”

Movies exist in conversation with movies that came before. The G takes our expectations of the noir and thriller genres and subverts them, keeping us off balance, as Tarantino famously did with Pulp Fiction.

The G also subverts the trope that simple folk are underestimated. Think Bob Odenkirk in Nobody, Jackie Chan in The Foreigner, even Walter White in Breaking Bad. They appear ordinary and impotent, unlikely enforcers. Yet push them far enough. The G’s strength is structural, what it tells us, when, and what it doesn’t. We’re given just enough to keep us wanting more. We join the story in medias res, and writer/director Karl R. Hearne (whose previous feature was Touched, 2017) drops his other shoes slowly. He builds on simple moments. Symbols abound and are used deftly: porch lights out, a spindly bulb plant in an otherwise barren kitchen, a hard-boiled egg ominously peeled. Feet are washed.

Dale Dickey plays Ann without vanity, crusty and chain-smoking, and proudly displaying the evidence of her years. “My mother used to say you let your anger out, you live longer,” she says as Ann. “She lived to be 102.” It’s a stark performance. We can assume Ms. Dickey doesn’t often get a role quite this meaty, with generous screen time, and great emotional range. She makes the most of it.

As Emma, Romane Denis is excellent. She’s feisty, by turns tender and belligerent, young but not naïve. Emma’s as comfortable attending a knitting circle as wielding a gun. Ms. Denis appeared in Canadian TV series Nomades and Le Monde De Gabrielle Roy, and the films Slut in a Good Way and My Salinger Year.

Besides Ms. Dickey and Ms. Denis, acting standouts include Greg Ellwand as Chip, and Bruce Ramsey, ominous as kingpin Rivera. Roc Lafortune brings an aching sweetness to his role as the hapless Joseph.

The G achieves a certain poetry before the mechanics of the thriller kick in. Its denouement is rushed and illogical—antagonists who have hovered throughout are dispatched without a second thought—and ultimately sets itself up for a sequel (or a geriatric franchise?). Too bad. Up till then, for about three quarters of its runtime, The G is distinguished by its originality and clever scenario.

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The G. Directed by Karl R. Hearne. 2023. From Level Film. In theaters. 105 minutes.

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Scorsese's Coda

Chet Kozlowski — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 01:49:35 +0000

Scorsese's Coda Chet Kozlowski April 2, 2023 - 21:49

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One night recently I couldn't sleep, so I turned on The Irishman. I told myself I'd watch it for a few minutes. Just till I get drowsy, I thought.

I'd seen Martin Scorsese's film in a theater when it came out in 2019. But now that all the hubbub about DeNiro's digital de-aging and the Netflix's Oscar gambit had died down, I decided a fresh look was in order. Where did it fit in Scorsese's pantheon? I could call up moments: Frank Sheehan in the old folks' home; the assassination of Joey Gallo; Anna Paquin's haunting presence; Frank's stammering phone call to Hoffa's widow just after he, Frank, had just killed the man. All my memories of The Irishman were all fond. What better time to rewatch it than in the wee small hours?

As a show of craft the film is stunning, the work of a cinema master. As a tableau of characters and events, it is as sweeping an epic as has ever been shown on any screen, big or small. I couldn't watch it without thinking of Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed—Scorsese has remained on point, seeing America's epochs through the lens of the gangster picture. The Irishman is as propulsive as the others but more contemplative. Its violence is low key and mostly seen from a distance.

Watching it late at night, I fell into a deeper appreciation. Martin Scorsese, I realized, is one of the few filmmakers who has been able to complete his oeuvre in a genre for which he is best known. We can say that of Hitchcock, who invented his own genre. Say it of both Vincente Minnelli (Musicals) and John Ford (Westerns), though they would tell you they were just doing their jobs in the studio and dismiss the auteur label. Clint Eastwood, who took the traditional Western and ran with it, sunset-ed early (to belabor the cowboy cliché) with Unforgiven (1992). He continued making movies, but he'd said his last word about that genre.

The same can't even be said of Scorsese's "New Hollywood" cohorts, the crew he came up with. Lucas cashed out. DePalma burned out. Coppola withdrew (his recycled Godfather Part III only took what was once innovative—i.e. Gordon Willis' lush cinematography—and commodified it into a "look"). Their visions were dynamic but incomplete, sometimes even completed by others. Only Steven Spielberg has the sustained excellence that caps off a life making movies, in his autobiographical The Fablemans.

In a way The Irishman can be read as autobiographical, too. Scorsese grew up in and relates so completely to this lifestyle, these characters, and this medium. It's appropriate that the film portrays an entire career (albeit ill-spent) that has played itself out on its own terms.

With traditional ("legacy") filmmaking being replaced by stealthy CGI, The Irishman stands out for its poignancy and grace. Its CGI flourishes go beyond smoothing out DeNiro's wrinkles, to canny use in several sequences, like the dumping of taxi cabs into the river, and the massive crowds at Jimmy Hoffa's rallies. Scorsese has always used technical advances that will aid, and not overwhelm, his art. As far back as Kundun (1997), he's incorporated digital backgrounds. His awestruck praise of mat paintings in Michael Powell's Black Narcissus sweetens his DVD commentary for that film. Movies are magic. They are an illusion of motion. And in Scorsese's hands the illusion is a living, breathing thing.

As I said, I first saw The Irishman on a big screen in its original release, in one of its few showings prior to joining the Netflix queue. There were only a few people in the theater. Projected that big, the flaws in the film were evident, but so are the virtues. The scenes roll out—bap, bap, bap—but the pace was languid, punctuated by Robbie Robertson's mournful harmonica refrain. I sunk back into my seat as if lowering myself into a warm bath and just let it wash over me.

I felt the same the other night, at home on a 55-inch flat screen. Even though Scorsese will keep making movies, The Irishman might well be the culmination of his career. He got the old gang back together one more time, and it won't happen again. People cash out, burn out, and withdraw. But to have produced a film so rich, and so much of a piece with what he's done before—to be able to end as passionately as he began in the medium that he loves—is a rare and wonderful thing.

So: thinking these deep thoughts, I saw the end credits of The Irishman come up. I checked the clock: 5:28. Just a few minutes, I told myself when I turned it on, and I'd watched the whole thing.

Who was I kidding? If it's on and it’s Scorsese, I watch it to the end.