Smash Cut

Tag: Carey Mulligan

  • ‘Promising Young Woman’ has high ambitions | movie review

    ‘Promising Young Woman’ has high ambitions | movie review

    The titular Promising Young Woman spends her nights baiting male predators into taking her home with them and teaching them a lesson they’ll never forget

    Promising Young Woman balances its serious subject matter with a darkly comedic tone and satisfyingly entertaining revenge narrative that feels like a centerpiece of the #MeToo era. Add in a career-best performance by Carey Mulligan and you have a unique gem of a film.

    ▶︎ Available on-demand and in theaters on Christmas Day.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    If points were being awarded for level of difficulty, Promising Young Woman would score a ten. The incredible amount of thematic, tonal, and character weight that director and writer Emerald Fennell has to balance in the film—her debut—is admirable. Does it all work? Most of the time. Sometimes it gets away from her, but even when it does it’s hard to look away. 

    The movie, which makes a play for my heart by instituting Charli XCX’s “Boys” to great effect, opens with Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) doing her best impression of me at a bar pre-pandemic. She’s sh!tfaced, barely able to hold her head up. Watching from afar, of course, are a group of men just off of work on the prowl. Fennell captures the group like predators—which you’ll see why—stalking their prey. 

    One of them, however, seems like a nice guy. Jerry (Adam Brody) chastises the men for objectifying Cassie before offering to help her get home. And that seems like the plan at first, but while in the car her makes a last minute decision to take her to his apartment. There he begins to try and have sex with her even though she’s passed out. However, he’s horrified to find you that she’s not drunk. 

    This is what Cassie does over and over every night as a way of scaring men into never preying on women again. We dig into exactly why Cassie is doing this throughout the movie in bits and pieces, but the core is because of an incident in college where her friend Nina was raped and, as the story often terribly goes, wasn’t believed. Though it’s never said, it’s heavily implied that Nina eventually killed herself. 

    After a swoon-inducing meet cute with Ryan (Bo Burnham), an old classmate, Cassie decides to finally enact revenge on the people that led to Nina’s suicide—a friend that didn’t believe her (Alison Brie), the dean of the school (Connie Britton), the lawyer who bullied her into silence (Alfred Molina), and the man who did it (Chris Lowell). 

    ADVERTISEMENT

    This is the point when Promising Young Woman hits its stride with a keen handle on its darkly comedic tone mixed with devilishly fun revenge thrills—the movie is broken into sections as Cassie takes them down one by one. However, what elevates the movie is the sensitive exploration of Cassie’s complex and fractured psyche. We explore her motivations and why she’s chosen the life she’s chosen—with interludes with her parents played by Clancy Brown and the legend Jennifer Coolidge and her boss Gail (Laverne Cox). She was once on track to be a doctor, but this incident threw her life off track like it does many women. 

    The observations about men, sexism, and the systems in place—both societal and institutional—that allow predators to often get off free are both broad and specific, giving an acute insight into the plights of being a women in a society that doesn’t protect them. And that very ambition is admirable of Fennell. 

    The film does feel uneven at points. There’s a lot of story and development to get through—and to pack it up in a glossy and entertaining experience makes it even more difficult to pull off. However, Mulligan’s performance, emotional without being overwrought and campy without being over-the top, keeps us grounded in something real. She’s a revelation. 

    Even with a questionable ending, Promising Young Woman is one of those movies that you’ll find yourself coming back to. Its a heavy subject that it’s trying to cover, but Fennell does it with both reverence and a bit of cheeky fun that only someone who has a deep understanding of its complexities can pull off.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    More movies, less problems

    Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter and Letterboxd. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

    💌 Sign up for our weekly email newsletter with movie recommendations available to stream.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    💌 Sign up for our weekly email newsletter with movie recommendations available to stream.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    ADVERTISEMENT
  • ‘Wildlife’ review — Paul Dano’s directoral debut is a career high for Carey Mulligan

    ‘Wildlife’ review — Paul Dano’s directoral debut is a career high for Carey Mulligan

    Paul Dano’s directorial debut Wildlife is a quiet but powerful tale of self-destruction with a masterful performance by Carey Mulligan.

    Wildlife has all the workings of a classic kitchen sink drama. However, instead of the poor industrial towns of England, actor Paul Dano’s directorial debut moves the setting to 1960s Montana and follows a working-class family as they struggle through economic hardships.

    However, Wildlife subverts the expectation of having a disenfranchised “angry young man” at the center of it. There is a man that fits that description in the story. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the patriarch of the family Jerry Brinson, a greenkeeper at a local country club who is fired because, according to him, he is “just too well liked.”

    But he isn’t the center of the story. That would be his wife Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), a classic 60s housewife who is denied her full potential because that’s not what is in society’s expectations of her, and their 14-year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould), who serves as our point-of-view for the film.

    After losing his job, Jerry’s pride is clearly wounded. He came to Montana looking for quick success, but his dreams are quickly dashed away. That’s mostly because he thinks he is entitled to his dreams. “I thought it was that easy,” he says. 

    Instead of demeaning himself by taking his old job back after they offer it to him, or any job in the town for that matter, he takes a job battling wildfires that are threatening the Canadian border. It’s dangerous and low-paying work, much to Jeanette’s dismay, but he’d rather face that than his failure. 

    wildlife
    Carey Mulligan appears in Wildlife by Paul Dano, an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

    From there, we watch as Jeanette struggles through life horrified that her husband chose to nurse his pride rather than support his family. But this isn’t a story about a woman sulking and yearning after her brave husband away protecting them from the fires.

    No, the screenplay, written by Dano and actress-writer Zoe Kazan (from last year’s The Big Sick), paint Jeanette as a real and complex woman who is abandoned by her husband without discussion or conversation. All the while, Joe is in the periphery absorbing what is happening—he’s not always understanding it, but always seeing it. 

    The screenplay is quite a marvel and Dano, adept in his direction, knows how to extract the meaning out of every beat and line. Even the most unassuming lines have an impact. One of my favorites come after Jeanette goes to the local YMCA looking for a job, but being turned away after the secretary job she was applying for was no longer available. She briefly walks out of frame away from the woman working at the front desk, then comes back and says, “do you have any work for a man?” 

    As one of my favorite movies of the year Annihilation puts forward, one destroys themselves so that they can become something new. Jeanette wears new clothes, drinks more heavily, and begins cozying herself up to a wealthy man named Warren (Bill Camp) all in front of her son. 

    wildlife
    Carey Mulligan, Ed Oxenbould, and Jake Gyllenhaal in Paul Dano’s directorial debut Wildlife.

    In the eyes of another director or writing pair, Jeanette might have been the villain. But in Wildlife, she isn’t necessarily the hero. She’s just a human dealing with life. That’s a lesson that Joe quickly has to learn as both of his parents deal with their troubles in drastic ways. 

    Oxenbould has to tackle the challenging job of being an observer to the action without reacting to it in any over-the-top way and succeeds. Gyllenhaal does great work with what he has, as well—he’s not in the film as much as you’d expect.

    However, this is Mulligan’s film. She tackles the web of emotions that Jeanette has to navigate with empathy and makes you understand her even when what she does doesn’t make sense. It’s an impressive triumph of a performance.

    There are a few films that are made by their final shot and Wildlife is one of them. It’s no wonder that it is splashed on every poster for the film. And it emphasizes what makes the movie great. Dano relishes in the silences as much as he does in the dialogue. They both hold equal power.

    In the final seconds after the last line of dialogue and we’re just looking at the characters, you can trace how that self-destruction has changed each of them, for better or worse.

    Wildlife is playing in theaters in limited release.

    Karl’s rating: