Annette

Amazon is powerful and its owner, Jeff Bezos, is probably the world's wealthiest man.  It's probably a good idea to be reasonably respectful of Amazon's market share, political clout, and the movies that it releases.  Perhaps, this accounts for the generally respectful tone of reviews of the Amazon Films production, Annette (Leos Carax, 2021).  Most critics have suggested that the movie, although flawed, is a ambitious, often brilliant, and well worth watching.  These reviews are wrong.  The film is an awful debacle, completely misconceived and poorly executed, the sort of calamity that is destructive to the careers of everyone involved in the production.  I'm interesting in the works Leos Carax and have seen all of his films.  A few years ago Holy Motors, an enigmatic, if visually spectacular, movie directed by Carax was broadly thought to be the best film of the year -- I didn't agree and considered the movie too clever and obscure for its own good.  But I had to acknowledge that many of the scenes were superb and that the movie, although incoherent, was a fascinating attempt to fuse narrative cinema with the most compelling aspects of music video and advertising.  Annette, by contrast, is prosaically plot-driven and, even, conservative in its construction -- the film purports to be a bitter critique of pop culture as embodied by its three protagonists, an opera singer, an aggressive stand-up comic, and a literal enfant terrible, a toddler who sings like Madame Butterfly.  At every point in the film, the viewer can tell what is going on -- and this is the problem with the movie:  without the mystifications introduced by Carax to Holy Motors, we can see the film's subject all too clearly and it is banal, obvious, and ridiculous.  The movie is about two hours and twenty minutes and it's a long, hard slog.  By the mid-point, Carax seems to have lost interest in the project and scenes are just thrown away, shot in a perfunctory style that's indistinguishable from any other big budget Hollywood movie -- many scenes resemble the sort of garden-variety mise-en-scene that one sees in a Marvel or DC comic book movie:  bright colors, obvious editing, and broad, stereotyped acting and gestures.  This is a pity because Carax is one of the most effective film-stylists working in the cinema today.  The fundamental problem with Annette is that nothing occurs "organically" or, as a result of the character of the protagonists or their plights -- rather, the film is a series of contrivances designed to solve plot problems which became increasingly obvious as the movie advances.  Annette doesn't have a script; rather, it's just a series of episodes written in the most primitive style imaginable -- the whole thing is brainchild, I believe, of a pop  group called "Sparks" and the dialogue seems to have been written in crayon:  it's a childish scribbled mess.

The film's story involves a thuggish stand-up comedian, Henry McHenry, the "ape of God", played by Adam Driver.  Driver sulks and his saturnine good looks will impress some fans for some of the movie.  But, as the film progresses, he becomes ever more despicable, quite a feat when you consider that he starts the picture as a selfish, vicious brute.  For some reason, Carax models many of the film's early scenes involving McHenry on Scorsese's masterpiece Raging Bull.  For instance, we see McHenry dressed like a boxer, wearing the hooded warm-up jacket as he emerges through clouds of smoke into the arena of a stage to joust with hecklers in his audience.  Carax clearly expects the audience to see McHenry as a sacrificial beast, the "raging bull" who is mercilessly tormented in the boxing ring, and who destroys himself and all those around him.  But Scorsese's Jake LaMotta was good at something -- he could take a beating and stay on his feet to the amazement of those watching his bouts.  McHenry isn't good at anything at all.  Carax makes the mistake of showing us a few samples of his handiwork as a stand-up comic and it's not even arguably funny -- in fact, it's the exact opposite of funny:  McHenry goes out on stage, tells vicious stories about killing his wife or being murdered on-stage and no one really laughs -- at best, he earns some nervous titters.  Then, the heckling starts and we are on the side of the hecklers; none of the self-indulgent crap that we have heard from the so-called "comedian" is amusing or, even, entertaining in a confessional mode -- it's just egregious whining and self-pity.  

Somehow, McHenry is romantically involved with Ann Defranoux (Marion Cotillard), an opera singer -- although not a very good one.  (Carax makes his leads sing their parts and this is a disastrous choice -- Cotillard has a sweet voice, but not the lungs of an opera singer and poor Driver can't carry a tune to save his soul -- and he's not aided by the score that requires him to sing his final scene in a squeaky, impoverished falsetto.)  McHenry and Ann get married.  They have a child, Annette.  The child is portrayed by a wooden puppet, very lifelike and engaging in a cute and kitschy sort of way.  (One would be tempted to say that the puppet gives the best performance in the movie).  This is a bold measure but required by the circumstances of  production -- the infant has to sing, levitate, and enter a huge stadium carried by angelic drones to perform atop a sheer spire for the crowd at a Super-Bowl event (called the Hyper-Bowl in the film).  Even more alarming, the script calls for the infant to be ferried around on McHenry's motorcycle with neither father nor child wearing a helmet, obviously something that would not be allowed in a Hollywood production.  The fact is that the plot requires the child to be exposed to all sorts of dangers and it would be unseemly to put a real infant in such danger.  Therefore, the expedient of the nimble and expressive puppet is used to solve these problems.  Note that the puppet doesn't serve any artistic purpose and isn't required thematically -- the puppet is a contrivance required to make the plot work.  This is typical of the film -- oddities in the mise-en-scene and story are generally explicable by the requirements of the plot.  The director and his scenarists wanted certain effects and so they had to bend the picture's production to achieve these outcomes.  This is what I mean by the criticism that nothing in the film seems "organic" or a rational outgrowth of the personalities of the characters or their plight -- everything is engineered to make possible certain effects required by the movie's story.  

And Annette's story is slight and the film claustrophobic -- setting aside the puppet, Carax stages all scenes with two principals, either McHenry and Ann or McHenry and Ann's accompanist, played by no less than Simon Holberg, the tiny Jewish actor who had the role of Howard Wolowicz  in The Big Bang Theory.  Holberg is about half the size of Driver.  Driver throws him around like a rag doll in the scene in which he drowns the poor bastard -- the bestial McHenry has figured out that the accompanist was Ann's lover and, even, may be the father of Annette.  The film is so badly written that the accompanist is introduced about an hour into the proceedings with no backstory -- there are no clues planted that he was Ann's lover and, possibly, the father of the female Pinnochio (Annette).  Carax just sticks the character into the movie midway and gives him a bald recitative uttered while he's conducting an orchestra to fill in what we are supposed to know.  (I haven't remarked that the movie is an opera and that all of the dialogue is rhymed and sung, accompanied by utterly banal and repetitive music. The libretto consists of characters simply repeating quotidian phrases -- for instance, "we love each other so much" over and over again  It's like Stephen Sondheim dumbed-down to a sub-literacy.)  At first Ann and McHenry are in love.  But, then, the baby arrives and there is tension in the marriage.  McHenry fantasizes killing Ann and, finally, accomplishes her death when he takes her out on his yacht.  There's an enormous tempest and Ann with McHenry get knocked around on a sort of tilt-a-whirl ship deck in front of rear-projection images of towering waves.  Ann goes overboard and the ship sinks. (This seems a variant on the sad fate of Natalie Wood on Robert Wagner's yacht.)  McHenry and the baby escape to a barren island where the dead opera singer appears saying that she will haunt her husband through the baby.  (For some reason, Ann's either got brilliant red hair, like the puppet, or black tresses -- as a ghost, her hair is black.)  With Ann out of the movie, midstream as it were, the film deflates totally and becomes just a grim march to its grim denouement.  McHenry figures out that the accompanist, who had suddenly appeared in the movie, was Ann's lover.  So he drowns him in his elongated swimming pool at his mansion in the Santa Monica mountains.  Meanwhile the baby is revealed to be an infant diva, singing melodiously as she levitates in the air.  McHenry (with the accompanist before he's killed) take the kid on tour and exploit her to within an inch of her life.  After McHenry has murdered the accompanist in a fit of drunken rage, the baby is engaged to appear as a half-time show at the Hyper-Bowl.  The center of all the attention in the world, the baby refuses to sing and instead baldly intones a little melody with the burden that "(her) daddy kills people."  This upsets the authorities and McHenry is arrested and tried in a courtroom scenes that is like something from Gilbert and Sullivan if those collaborators were complete morons. By this point, the film has slipped into a buffoonish parody of Lars von Trier's disturbing, if equally idiotic, Dancer in the Dark.  McHenry languishes in jail.  The four-year old comes to visit him, an odd scene in which the baby sits across from her pa in the visiting room of a maximum security prison -- she's been carried into the room by an obliging guard.  Suddenly, the puppet is discarded and the little child is now acted by a real girl.  (Again, this is by necessity -- the scene requires a heartfelt exchange of dialogue that would be beyond the capacities of the wooden puppet; suddenly, Carax wants the scene to seem "realistic", an utterly futile ambition since the entire milieu of the infant visiting her dad in prison is risibly absurd.)  After some dialogue and Adam Driver's falsetto aria, the film abruptly ends.  

The genius of American musical theater, of course, is the intricate witty word-play in lyrics complimented by pleasing, sometimes, ravishing music.  The music in Annette is awful, dull and repetitive, and the lyrics are simply doggerel, inane rhymes that have neither wit nor charm.  The whole thing is a travesty that, as you might grasp from the tone of this review, isn't amusing, isn't so bad as to be good, and is just infuriating.  The best comparison is the equally loathsome but very upsetting Dancer in the Dark in which poor Bjork goes blind, gets accused of murder, and ends up being electrocuted in von Trier's fantasy about the American justice system.  The plot made no sense, but the songs were okay, and, by the end, against your better instincts, you felt some sympathy for the heroine.  In Annette, the plot makes no sense to the point of being insulting, the songs are awful without any vestige of merit, and you don't care at all about the so-called "Ape of God" -- you wish him the worst and the worst is what he gets.  I have no idea what people thought they were doing when they made this film.