At the movies: Disclosure Day.

DISCLOSURE DAY

You’ve got to love a structural feint, and Disclosure Day starts with one audacious enough that you’ll spend the first hour and change simply dazzled by how this atypical SciFi summer tentpole movie chooses to hit the ground running. It’s exciting and invigorating and does a great job of sweeping you away. Obviously your mileage may vary, and it’s been a rollercoaster of discourse during the film’s opening weekend- though divisive responses are almost always a good thing- but in the first reel there’s an incredible sustained shot that uses a reflection in a windshield and it’s the best use of it as a visual storytelling technique since Olivier Assayas’ demonlover and its pointillist rainstorm.

I’ll be real- like with The Sheep Detectives, I was not expecting intelligent spiritual discussion to be part of the narrative. But it’s good when the movies surprise us, and that’s something that Disclosure Day manages to do at several different points.

It’s a mistake to cast Wyatt Russell as a bad boyfriend. This is not a knock against his performance- like Michael Johnston in Obsession a smartly-observed critique of Fundamentally Decent Guys*- but simply that you can’t take someone with the next generation charm of both Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell and make them read as malign. (The exception to this is Cold in July, which if you haven’t seen, you should.) We see the flaws in his Jackson in the way he treads water in his relationship with Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild, and we understand exactly the way that he has come to instill doubt in her during their time together. When cosmic forces intervene (stopping just short of Halle Berry-in-Boomerang tactics), of course she takes that step into the unknown. And one of the ongoing wonders of this film (of which there are a few) is how good Emily Blunt is in what could have been an utterly insane role.

She carries a lot of this film on her emotional back- leaping between different languages and different lives in the kind of forty-eight hours that would break most of us. She’s got a healthy sense of curiosity and a Samwise Gamgee level of emotional strength, and she’s going to be an instrument of human evolution (though not, defiantly, anyone’s religion). Collectively, we have always liked Emily Blunt, and now (like Tom Hanks in the late ‘90s and early aughts) she has become something more than herself in the way we process what she says in her performances.

Respect to Eve Hewson for a great turn as the weirdest onscreen nun since Andie MacDowell in Hudson Hawk, Colin Firth for giving us a very interesting kind of villainy, and Josh O’Connor for finding a new variant of Everyman to incarnate. (He’s always good, and here plays the Flavor Flav to Blunt and Hewson, reinforcing their work and balancing tone wherever he goes.) Maximum respect also to Colman Domingo, who has a gift for knowing exactly where to step on the tightrope between Too Much and Just Enough.

Steven Spielberg returning to the extraterrestrial subgenre is always a big deal. You can’t not address the legacy of Close Encounters of The Third Kind when you’re dealing with the idea of human-alien contact, and I’m sure there are lots of Gen Xers who wonder if that film might have been the inciting incident in their parents’ divorce. Close Encounters and E.T. are enduring works of art; strong statements about how the human animal can’t help but respond to having their cosmic absolutes completely shattered and reconstituted, and ideally, hopefully more empathetic than when they started. And Disclosure Day is trying to find a different approach to that particular sandbox of possibilities. For me, it more-often-than-not succeeds. I get the uncanny valley CG animals and what they represent, but it’s still off-putting. I absolutely understand how there’s a certain amount of naïveté present to think that people can truly be transformed by something massive and shocking. There’s an inherent hope in this film, and it feels deeply at odds with the world around us. And also, this film is absolutely about the Epstein Files.

 

At the movies... Mamma Mia!

The plot is simultaneously simple ("who is the father of the bride?") and complex (three different trios of people, mistaken identities, subterfuge, possible divine intervention), pulling equal amounts of inspiration from dinner theatre revue and Greek tragedy. Sophie (Amanda Seyfried, best known as the sweetly dim Karen in Mean Girls) is getting married at the hotel her mother Donna (Meryl Streep, who seems to be having an insane amount of fun) runs on a picturesque Greek island. Having been raised without knowing the identity of her father, our plucky heroine (thanks to a purloined diary) has narrowed the object of her paternity down to one of three men: architect Sam (Pierce Brosnan), adventurer Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), and banker Harry (Colin Firth), each of whom she has invited to the wedding. It's both flimsy and overwrought, but it's as close to an immovable force of effervescence and poppy regret as one could hope for.

Mamma Mia! is certainly the most democratic of big screen musicals. One of the aspects of last year's similar jukebox musical Across The Universe that torpedoed its possible success was how it kept the Beatles' songs at a distance from the audience, tying them to sweeping social movements and operatic character arcs that at no point allowed the audience to identify with what Lennon and McCartney were saying (notable exception: "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"). In direct opposition to Julie Taymor's high-minded, high-concept approach to the Beatles, director Phyllida Lloyd approaches the Abba catalog with the gusto of a drunken karaoke night with friends and lovers past and present, and it works like gangbusters. There's very little art to be had here, other than Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus' immortal and majestic pop songs (and let's not forget Stig Anderson, who helped out on "Honey Honey," "SOS," "Mamma Mia," and "Dancing Queen"), and the end result is a film that is lovable in its bright and frothy madness. When Christine Baranksi and Julie Walters show up as Streep's lifelong friends/band members/Greek chorus, the film has committed to a sensibility that feels like a combination family reunion/drag show fuelled by heartfelt Swedish pop and vats of stout Greek liquor.

The only serious misstep carried over from the stage show involves taking "When All Is Said and Done" (which may very well be the best pop song ever written about divorce) and giving it to Pierce Brosnan (who gives it his all but really has no business singing in public) as a happy wedding song, which runs counter to the heart of the song. But even that can be forgiven, such is the film's manic zeal and festive atmosphere.

But jettisoning "Under Attack" from the film entirely is a catastrophic mistake, and it manages to undo one of the sly achievements of the stage show, which is exposing audiences to some of Abba's lesser-known material- just witness Streep and Seyfried wringing every somber moment out of the masterful "Slipping Through My Fingers," and you'll get a feel for how powerful Andersson and Ulvaeus' work can be. Even as it is, there's a lot of pleasure and daffy fun to be had here, and I find myself gleefully recommending the film with a big, slackjawed grin on my face. It's not for everyone, but a timeless melody and Oscar winners shaking it to the hits is entertainment money well-spent.