Buffalo Movies: A review of three newly released films playing in WNY

(Above: Photo by Jaap Buitendijk)

By M. Faust

As summer winds its way to a halt, Hollywood continues its annual August ritual of unloading movies that it has little commercial hopes for. 

The Roses opens with the titular couple, Ivy and Theo Rose (Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch) meeting with their therapist. They have been asked to prepare lists of ten things they love about each other. The items go from begrudging—” I would rather live with her than a wolf”—to a hostile burst of British profanity so ornate that they both burst into appreciative laughter. 

The Roses think of this as repartee. The therapist, on the other hand, is so appalled that she proclaims “I don’t think you have the capacity to fix your problems.” 

This scene takes place at about the halfway part of the story, as the movie goes back to chart the history of the Rose’s relationship. Through the ups and downs, that opening stuck in my head, as I wondered who I was supposed to believe. Are they actually, as the therapist says, a hopelessly broken couple? Or are they just using verbal banter to express and expel their frustrations? That is, after all, a trait we think of as being embedded in the British DNA, and you don’t get more British than Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch.

I don’t have an answer to that question. And if you took a poll of the folk who created this film, I don’t think you would get a consensus. 

The Roses is a loose adaptation of the pitch-black 1989 comedy The War of the Roses, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as a yuppie couple whose marriage goes as bad as a marriage ever could, culminating in a battle royale inside the luxurious house that neither one of them is willing to cede to the other. It is a movie that could not possibly be remade, and to his credit screenwriter Tony McNamara, best known for scripting Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and The Favourite, has not really tried to. If you know the earlier film, you’ll enjoy spotting the little ways that McNamara references it, like a shot of a chandelier crashing to the ground that echoes the original ending. 

McNamara is a lot more nuanced with his characterizations, and a lot less harsh. The story takes place over a period of about 15 years, and he charts Ivy and Theo’s changes with care, making neither party the bad guy. Theo is an architect whose career is ended when his dream project falls apart; Ivy is a former restaurant worker who on a lark opens a seafood shack that becomes a huge success. Each of them feels that what they value most in life has been taken away from them. If it weren’t for the Roses perpetual, endlessly baroque sarcasm, this would play more like a drama about two likeable but subtly flawed people than a comedy. 

Or at least it might if the director were someone other than Jay Roach, a specialist in not terribly subtle comedies (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents, Dinner for Schmucks). 

Still, it’s too easy to say that Roach ruined McNamara’s script. I think the problem with The Roses is that no one involved ever figured out how to adapt an unadaptable movie. The changes that have been made feel like they have been made for that reason alone, to set it apart from its inspiration. This is nowhere so obvious as in the film’s final 60 seconds, when the filmmakers essentially throw up their hands at how to resolve their story. It made me wonder, was I supposed to despise these characters throughout the movie? I don’t think so—I didn’t—but I honestly don’t know how I was expected to regard them. 

***

I’ll tell you who else was confused by this movie; whoever designed the poster, which makes it look like an ensemble comedy. Of the nine people featured on the poster, the movie has moderate supporting roles for “SNL” alumni Kate McKinnon and Andy Sandburg, a funny but brief bit for Allison Janney as a ferocious divorce lawyer, and very little for the others.

There has also been a fair amount of misleading promotion for another new film, Caught Stealing. The trailer makes it look like a new movie from Guy Ritchie, as an average guy (Austin Butler) tries to stay afloat in a stew of trouble involving Russian gangsters, Hassidic thugs, Bronx cops and a Mohawked British drug dealer. Audiences are thus primed to expect action, profanity and general absurdity. In fact, the director of this is Darren Aronofsky, a filmmaker who has never had (or I suspect desired) a light touch. 

Set in late 1990s New York City, Caught Stealing stars Butler as Hank, a bartender in an Alphabet City dive bar. He has never found a life’s ambition to replace the dream of playing professional baseball that died (along with his best friend) in a car accident when he was 18. Asked by his punk neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) to watch his cat while he goes to London for his father’s funeral, Hank soon finds himself the target of various bad guys who think he knows the location of something Russ has hidden. 

The first half made me think of Aronofsky’s grimmest movie, Requiem for a Dream, with its grungy locations and cold gaze. When Hank gets the kind of beating that usually leaves movie heroes with a few bruises and a short-term limp, Aronofsky doesn’t let him off so easily: he’s off to the hospital, and his physical pain is palpable for much of the rest of the movie. (I suspect a lot of this tone comes from the script by Charlie Huston, adapting his own novel.) 

Caught Stealing (which ironically shares a title with one of the few alternative rock songs of the era that does not show up on the film’s soundtrack) does have a fair share of the comical mayhem that the trailer promises, especially in the second half, but it’s an uncomfortable balance. I enjoyed Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio as the bubbe-loving Hassidic bad guys, but their cute dialogue hardly obscures some of the awful things they do. (Only Quentin Tarantino seems able to get away with this kind of thing.) The comedy keeps the movie from being as unpleasant as it might have been, but it’s a mixed bag that may not satisfy either audience. 

***

Elsewhere on the cinema crime beat, Honey Don’t! is a new movie by the Coen Brother. Just the one, Ethan, who in recent years has been working separately from his brother Joel. This one has as much comedy as the trailer implies, though a lot less script rigor than the Coens as a duo have always displayed. Margaret Qualley stars as a lesbian private eye in Bakerfield, Calif., investigating a case in which — well, I can’t give a plot synopsis for a movie that turns out to be an 80-minute exercise in misdirection in which almost nothing is relevant to the resolution. Mildly amusing and instantly forgettable.