On the basis of films such as Barbara, Phoenix and Transit, German filmmaker Christian Petzold has become one of the more acclaimed directors on the world cinema scene of late for reasons that continue to elude me. He is technically proficient, handles actors well and his films are reasonably ambitious but, with the sole exception of his oddly likable romantic fantasy/mystery Undine, I always feel some strange remove when watching his work that keeps me from embracing it in the way that many other critics clearly have. That is certainly the case with Afire, a minor-key comedy-drama with increasingly apocalyptic overtones that, unlike the Baltic seashore area where it is set, never quite catches fire. Two friends—Felix (Langston Uibel) and Leon (Thomas Schubert)—are heading to the vacation home belonging to the former’s mother for a few days of relaxation when their car breaks down. After hoofing it the rest of the way, they discover that there is another person already staying there, the eternally charming and bubbly Nadja (Petzold regular Paula Beer). While Felix and Nadja are perfectly willing to go with the flow, the insecure Leon—a writer struggling to complete his new book who seems to have come on the trip just so that he can tell everyone within earshot that he is much too busy writing to do anything—acts petulantly towards the unexpected guest. Nevertheless, she persists in trying to penetrate his shell of obliviousness towards everything that doesn’t revolve around him with a seemingly inexhaustible amount of good cheer. Meanwhile, off in the distance, a huge and slightly symbolic forest fire rages that threaten to bring their idyll to an abrupt halt.
I have seen Afire twice now and having done so, I am convinced that in at least this case, my inability to connect with what is unfolding on the screen has less to do with my limitations as a viewers and more to do with the fact that Petzold has not created a particularly compelling narrative this time around. The key problem is not so much that the story is based around an irritatingly self-absorbed character as it is that it is based around an irritatingly self-absorbed character who is ultimately not very interesting. Schubert is undeniably pitch-perfect in the part but since Petzold isn’t able to come up with any reason to develop any rooting interest that he will finally take his blinders off and recognize that what is going on around him is infinitely more interesting than his achingly pretentious book, much less deserve the attentions that Nadja showers him with throughout. The film also suffers from a clash in tones that doesn’t quite pay off—the early (and better) scenes go for a lightly comedic take comparing Leon’s killjoy attitude with the more freewheeling approach to life and work embodied by the others but the later scenes take a much darker approach (especially the stuff involving the seemingly inescapable fire growing around them) that doesn’t really seem to jibe with what came earlier, except to demonstrate the old trope in which others have to suffer mightily so that the mopey central character can hopefully learn some valuable life lessons. Outside of a few striking visual moments and the effortless charm of Beer, Afire is an ultimately frustrating misfire that I suspect even his most ardent supporters will find themselves struggling a bit to embrace as well.
Perhaps recognizing that audiences were beginning to tire of films recounting the origin stories of superheroes, Hollywood seems to have made a sort of pivot in 2023 by coming up with a number of films dramatizing (with varying degrees of fidelity towards the truth) the origin stories of beloved consumer products—so far this year, we have seen the likes of Air, Tetris, Blackberry and Flamin Hot. Now comes The Beanie Bubble, in which co-directors Kristin Gore (who also wrote the script) and Damian Kulash explore the strange story behind the line of small stuffed animals that quickly grew into a billion-dollar industry in the 1990s before the fad finally collapsed. The man generally charged with the creation and astoundingly successful marketing of the dolls was Ty Warner but—as the casting of Zach Galifianakis in the role might suggest—the film’s basic thesis is that it was three women who really helped to make Beanie Babies what they were and it was only after he betrayed them all in order to grasp all the money, fame and power for himself that the whole thing began to tumble down. Robbie (Elizabeth Banks) is a neighbor and occasional lover who helps him begin and build his company back in the 1980s, only to get her contributions erased to satisfy his ego. Single mother Sheila (Sarah Snook) falls for his peculiar charms in the 1990s and her two young children help inspire the Beanie Babies themselves but he eventually turns on them as well. Finally Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), a whip-smart Asian-American woman who impulsively takes a job at the company instead of following the plan to become a doctor, uses her computer skills and eye for market analysis to help foster the developing craze for the dolls but ends up getting pushed to the side at promotion time by Ty for a dopey guy whose ideas seem destined to crater the company.
The film is based on The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, a non-fiction account of the craze and its aftermath by Zac Bissonnette and indeed, a straightforward documentary take on the story might have proven to be more beneficial, at least more so than what Gore and Kulash have whipped up here. Their screenplay is a real mess—little more than a collection of expensive song cues linked together by scenes that demonstrate zero insight into either the craze or its cultivation and which deploys a time structure that leapfrogs back and forth between the 80s and 90s in a manner that doesn’t do anything to inform the material except to ensure that any dramatic momentum that builds in a given scene will be dissipated in a few minutes as the focus shifts to a different period. It also gives no particular insight into Ty Warner as a person or as a businessman, preferring to depict him mostly as a slightly creepy weirdo whose ability to charm, persuade and manipulate the women in his life is never particularly convincing. As a weirdo whose grand ego and grander capacity for self-delusion ultimately lead to his downfall, Galafianakis seems like ideal casting as Warner but he never quite registers, either as the face behind such a strange and once-profitable craze or as a plausible human being. Oddly, even though they are the ultimate focus of the film, the women in the story are equally bland and colorless as well—only Viswanathan is able to bring a spark of life to her scenes as Maya and that is clearly due more to her own personality that to the material she is working with here. In the end, the best thing that one can say about a film as clumsy and formulaic as The Beanie Bubble is that it is better than the likes of Flamin Hot—unfortunately, it isn’t that much better when all is said and done.
In the wake of Nicolas Cage’s beautifully understated work in the acclaimed drama Pig, many observers might have assumed that his work there signaled a shift to a more naturalistic performance realm. However, his latest, the bizarre two-hander Sympathy for the Devil, seems to have been calibrated specifically to disabuse viewers of that notion to such an extent that it feels at times like a feature film version of those YouTube compilations of his most (in)famously over-the-top bits. As the story opens, a man (Joel Kinnaman) drops his young son off with his mother before heading to the hospital, where his wife is about to have a baby in what is expected to be a difficult delivery. He pulls into the parking lot but before he can get out of the car, a red-clad stranger (Cage)—officially billed as The Passenger—climbs into the back seat and forces him at gunpoint to drive him to places unknown. At first, the man assumes that he is the victim of a random carjacking but as they drive off into the night, the Passenger’s incessant chatter suggests that he was picked for a very specific reason. Now the man has to try to figure out why he was picked while at the same time finding a way of escaping his captor’s clutches and getting back to his wife.
The premise sounds interesting enough in theory, I suppose, but the screenplay by Luke Paradise has two major structural problems that essentially doom it right from the start. Once the initial premise has been set up, it is fairly obvious that there will be a reveal that allows us to discover that there is more to the seemingly mild-mannered family man than initially meets the eye—even the film’s title offers up some indications that things aren’t going to go entirely as planned—but the script waits so long to reveal its secrets that it just gets a little tiresome after a while. The other problem is an odd lack of suspense throughout—after establishing the crisis involving the wife giving birth, the film just kind of puts all of that to the side and a lot of potential suspense gets set aside as well. Director Yuval Adler keeps things moving along at a steady pace and shows some undeniable flair during an extended diner sequence that veers from hysterics to horror but doesn’t really make it seem particularly fresh or interesting. Adler must have realized that he had only one real card to play—Cage’s scenery-chewing ways—and decided to make that the focus throughout. Cage’s work will not go down as one of his great performances—there are a number of times when you feel that he is indulging in some of his histrionics in the hopes that they will go viral instead of making them a part of his character. That said, he does give the film what momentum it has and he does come up with a few inspired line readings here and there that amuse. However, unless you are desperate to commit the sight of Cage imitating Edward G. Robinson or going on a homicidal rampage while singing along to “I Love the Nightlife”—and I suspect that will be enough for some people—Sympathy for the Devil will prove to be a bit of a drag that seems more interested in creating meme-worthy moments than in telling a compelling story.