Female Film Critics 24/375
Michelle Pfeiffer’s icy, incandescent performance garnered her a Golden Globe nomination, even though Azazel Jacobs’ film leaves much to be desired. Pfeiffer plays elegant, entitled Frances Price, a once-wealthy Manhattan widow who has fecklessly blown through her late husband Frank’s fortune.
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Michelle Pfeiffer seems to have nine lives in French Exit. She is also a poster child for the wealthy WASP mavens of the last century who never ate, rarely emoted, smoked and drank heavily and were perfectly turned out at every waking moment. Women named Babe, Alva, Muffy and Cornelia.
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There are some who think that Valerie Mahaffey ritzes up the joint, that she adds quirk and zest and uniqueitude. The character actress does just that to French Exit although the film is already a bit quirky and different, so Mahaffey fits right in with Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges.
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Inspired by his own childhood, actor Shia LaBeouf wrote this memory drama in which he plays James Lort, a thinly fictionalized version of his own father. Trained as a rodeo clown, he’s a bitter, divorced Vietnam War veteran and recovering addict who’s emotionally abusive to his 12 year-old son Otis , who works as an actor on television.
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In Honey Boy, Shia LeBeouf takes ownership of his own screwed-up childhood back when he starred on a Disney Channel series and splashes it on the big screen in a form of performance therapy. This biographical shrink session, based on a script he wrote as part of his rehab, is a far cry from his Transformers sci-fi blockbusters that get a skewering in the opening moments. On top of that, he makes matters even more interesting by playing his own shiftless, unstable and self-absorbed abusive father – probably the most honest acting he will ever achieve as he attempts to shoo away the demons that haunt him.
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Alma Har’el, best known for the 2011 documentary Bombay Beach with its intimate moments of beauty in a gritty story about life on the margins, must be credited for the searing, memory-soaked urgency of Honey Boy, her fiction directing debut. What could have been a maudlin melodrama about family dysfunction is instead, despite the heartbreaking and disturbing abusive father-son relationship at the center, a haunting and lyrical memory piece.
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With the tragic opioid epidemic, the topic of rehabilitation and a family’s dealing with a struggling member certainly merits cinematic attention. But dramatizing the issue with sensitivity, insight, and honesty presents unique challenges. All the more credit, then, to writer/director Peter Hedges for what he achieves in Ben Is Back, starring his Oscar-nominated, real-life son Lucas as recovering addict Ben.
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