Bardo, False Chroncile of a Handful of Truths: A Review - Inarritu's Head Up Inarritu's Ass

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent…not to mention pretentious, piece of crap.

In case you’d forgotten, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has won two Best Director Academy Awards – for Birdman and The Revenant, which puts him in some very rarified air. To put into context, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have one Best Directing Oscar each, and Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman have none.

I readily admit that I enjoyed Birdman (2014) and thought it was clever, and in hindsight its critique of superhero culture was spot-on and before its time, but I also thought the film badly bungled its ending.

I thought The Revenant (2015) was a flawed film but was deeper than it appeared on the surface and became much more interesting when seen through Jungian dream analysis rather than through the pop culture lens.

Except for those two films, Inarritu’s filmography is littered with some truly abysmal and pretentious pieces of work. For example, Inarritu’s 2006 shlockfest Babel may be the worst ‘taken seriously’ movie of the 21st Century…and its main competition is another Inarritu movie, 2003’s 21 Grams.

Which brings us to Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Inarritu’s newest cinematic venture, which is currently streaming on Netflix.

Bardo, which was a Netflix production and hit the streaming service October 27th, was written and directed by Inarritu and stars Daniel Giminez Cacho and Griselda Siciliani.

The movie, which describes itself as an epic black comedy-drama, is a fictional, pseudo-autobiographical story that chronicles Silverio Gama – a sort of stand in for Inarritu himself, as he navigates his life as a big-time journalist and documentarian who immigrated from Mexico to the U.S.

Gama wrestles with his career success, his critics, his artistry, his family, his grief, and his past, as well as the past of Mexico and his guilt over having left the country of his birth. Of course, these are all the same things with which Inarritu grapples.

Bardo, which runs two hours and forty minutes, is another in a bevy of films this year made by auteurs examining their own lives in feature films. For example, I recently reviewed Armageddon Time, James Gray’s dismal autobiographical effort, and I’ve yet to see Spielberg’s The Fabelmans or Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light.

I will say this about The Fabelmans and Empire of Light…it is absolutely impossible for them to be worse than Bardo. Bardo is bad-o. Really bad-o. Like excruciatingly bad-o. Like so bad it makes the awful Armageddon Time feel like Citizen Kane.

Bardo, which has a grueling two-hour and forty-minute run time, is somewhat remarkable as it’s simultaneously self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent.

The problem with Bardo is not cinematic incompetence on the part of Inarritu. If Inarritu is anything it’s competent. He knows how to shoot a film and make beautiful images – and he’s aided in this effort by cinematographer Darius Khondji (who…curiously, also shot Armageddon Time – poor bastard). What Inarritu doesn’t know how to do is turn off his ego and turn down his adolescent maudlin impulses in order to tell a coherent and compelling story.

Bardo is supposed to be infused with magical realism but is devoid of magic and allergic to realism. In their stead Inarritu injects an extraordinary lack of subtlety and pronounced heavy-handedness as well as a steaming hot serving of middlebrow bourgeois bullshit philosophy.

This movie is, without exaggeration, literally a director bitching about how persecuted he is by critics, how envied he is by jealous less successful people, and imagining how devastated everyone will be when he dies. This is more akin to something a petulant teenager would dream up as they cry in their bedroom after their parents refused to buy them a sports car for their sixteenth birthday than something an adult filmmaker should put in a feature.

To give you an indication of what an absolute shitshow Bardo is, consider this…the film features a graphic scene where a baby is literally pushed back into a vagina, and another scene where Gama’s adult face is CGI’d onto a little kid as he has a discussion with his father in a sort of dream like sequence. Did I mention it was heavy-handed? Yikes!

In addition to all of that self-serving navel gazing, Inarritu also throws colonialism and anti-Mexican racism shit against the wall to see if any of it sticks…and none of it does.

Then there’s the virtuoso filmmaking stuff, like the extended, one-shot dance scene, which I was supposed to be impressed by but which I wasn’t impressed by.

What’s astonishing about Bardo is that Inarritu has made himself the hero of the story but only succeeds in exposing himself as being relentlessly unlikable. The Inarritu character Gama is one of the most punchable people to have graced the silver screen this year, and maybe this decade.

Even the film’s more interesting visual sequences, like when people start dropping dead in Mexico City, is derivative. I saw the same sequence done better in a Radiohead music video nearly thirty years ago.

Speaking of derivative, it seems to me that with Bardo Inarritu was trying to copy/emulate his fellow Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron’s film Roma (2018), and maybe even Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups (2015). Roma is a brilliant, magical realist, autobiographical story about growing up in Mexico, and Knight of Cups is, in my opinion, a dreamlike masterpiece about navigating the hell of Hollywood and moviemaking.

The problem though is that Inarritu is no Cuaron and no Malick. He lacks their deftness, their depth and their profundity. Inarritu is an artistic poseur. A pretentious pretender who thinks cinematically pouting and preening is equivalent to being profound.

What is bothersome about Inarritu’s failure on Bardo is that we are witnessing the end of the auteur era at Netflix. The streaming giant in recent years made the decision to throw money at auteurs and let them do what they want. In the case of Cuaron, David Fincher and Martin Scorsese, that decision was cinematically fruitful as it gave us Roma, Mank and The Irishman. This year the two auteurs blessed by Netflix’s desire for prestige were Noah Baumbach and Inarritu, and they delivered the excrement filled dump-trucks that were White Noise and Bardo. It should not be a shock that Netflix announced this year that they will no longer throw money at auteurs…thanks Baumbach and Inarritu.

The bottom line is that Bardo may finally expose Inarritu for the philosophically trite filmmaking fraud that he is. His elevation to the heights of Hollywood success is more a testament to the buffoonery of the movie business than to the artistic genius of Inarritu.

Whatever one may think of Inarritu as a filmmaker, there is simply no denying that Bardo is an artistic catastrophe of epic proportions. This movie is nothing but a vacuous, vapid and vain exercise in cinematic masturbation. Avoid it at all costs.

©2023

White Noise: A Review - Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An unconscionably boring and banal, poorly written, directed and acted movie. I’d rather die in an airborne toxic event than watch this movie again. Go read the book instead.

It has been said that White Noise, Don DeLillo’s classic 1985 postmodern novel, was unfilmable, and now with Noah Baumbach’s flaccid cinematic adaptation now streaming on Netflix, that assertion has been proven true.

At the very end of Baumbach’s brutally boring and banal White Noise something miraculous occurs. After enduring two-hours and sixteen minutes of the most middling of middlebrow and mundane moviemaking, the film ends with all of the characters doing a choreographed dance sequence in a supermarket to a new LCD Soundsystem song while the credits roll. This credit rolling scene pulsates with the wit, vitality, frivolity and vibrancy that is entirely devoid from the film that precedes it, and highlights the glory of what could have been.

White Noise stars Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle, and tells the story of Jack Gladney (Driver), a professor of Hitler Studies at the College on the Hill, his wife Babette (Gerwig) and their four kids as they navigate life and contemplate death in 1980’s America.

The book is a clever postmodern meditation on existentialism amidst the controlling and conformist nature of America’s toxic, pre-packaged consumerist culture. Baumbach’s movie though is so poorly written, directed and acted that it barely scrapes the surface of those meaty topics and ends up being little more than an arthouse version of one of those Are We There Yet? movies starring Ice Cube.

Baumbach’s film tries to be an incisive satire of the 80’s, but ends up being an insufferable, self-indulgent, instantaneously forgettable piece of work largely due to a script that’s intolerably verbose with contrived dialogue that feels dramatically lethargic, if not leaden.

Baumbach’s decision to makes some changes to DeLillo’s novel, like adding a silly car chase scene and injecting Babette into the climactic sequence, not only dumbs down the material but is actively at cross-purposes with the drama and tone of the story.

The car chase in particular is cringe-worthy. The car mishap and drive through the river and woods that leads to a jump into a field is the most hackneyed, inane, embarrassing thing any filmmaker has done this year…and I say that having seen Amsterdam.

The fact that Baumbach added the car chase and yet cut from the film the scene in the book where Jack’s youngest son Wilder goes on a perilous and harrowing big wheel journey, is pretty telling of the kind of director he is…which is spineless and sackless.

To Baumbach’s credit, the credit rolling dance sequence really is infectiously enjoyable, as is a scene mid-film where Jack and fellow professor Murray co-lecture a class about Hitler and Elvis in a sort of dueling intellectual dance. Those two scenes are literally the only things that are remotely watchable in White Noise, and beg the question, why didn’t Baumbach make the whole film with that type of absurdist energy?

And I suppose it’s also to Baumbach’s credit that he attempts some ambitious things on White Noise, like using a few 360-degree shots, and imitating/paying homage to different directors, like Spielberg – whom he imitates by injecting some controlled familial messiness ala early Spielberg, or Robert Altman, whom he copies by having overlapping dialogue and conversations throughout scenes.

Unfortunately, Baumbach’s Spielbergian familial messiness feels a little too contrived and manufactured and his Altman-esque overlapping dialogue scenes feel unintelligible, cluttered and irritating because they’re undermined by subpar sound design and Netflix’s notoriously poor audio quality.

Baumbach is adored by critics but I find his filmography to be hit or miss…mostly miss. I liked the flawed The Squid and the Whale, and found While We’re Young to be amusing, but everything else is odious dogshit masquerading as arthouse gold. A perfect example was Marriage Story, Baumbach’s last film – which was nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay despite being an absolutely heinous, heaping pile of flaming garbage.

Baumbach’s films are usually much smaller in terms of scope, scale and budget than White Noise. This movie has a reported budget of $100 million, with some reports stating $140 million, and Baumbach doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. The film looks paper-thin and unconscionably cheap, with the exception being the gloriously staged supermarket with its spot-on color scheme and period proper pricing and products.

Maybe the budget went to the cast, but if so, that was a huge waste of money.

Adam Driver is horribly miscast as the lead Jack Gladney and gives an absolutely dreadful performance. Driver, like Baumbach, is a critical darling, but pinning down why exactly people think he’s a good actor is as elusive as getting a hug from Bigfoot – a role I’d actually like to see Driver play because then you wouldn’t see him much and when you did, he’d be hidden under make up and hopefully wouldn’t talk.

Greta Gerwig is another critical darling, and she’s in a long-term relationship with Baumbach, so they’re sort of the critical darling couple of American cinema. Gerwig plays Jack’s wife Babette and is abysmal in the role. Gerwig is nothing, she’s a dead-eyed, empty vessel entirely devoid of any gravitas or inner life. She’s like a tumbleweed rolling through scenes with no grounding and no life.

The rest of the cast are equally lifeless and/or underused.

Don Cheadle is never given enough to do. Andre Benjamin is a glorified extra. Poor Raffey Cassidy is distracting because she looks like a trans Harry Potter.

White Noise claims it is an “absurdist comedy drama”, but while the absurdity is self-evident, the comedy and drama are non-existent. There is nothing interesting, insightful, amusing or engaging in this entire two-hour and sixteen-minute venture except for the fun music video at the end.

If you’ve read the DeLillo book you’ll be entirely underwhelmed by Baumbach’s movie adaptation, as it loses everything in translation. If you’ve not read the book, you’ll be bored out of your mind watching Baumbach’s movie, not to mention completely lost in terms of its incomprehensible and incoherent plot.

The bottom line is that Baumbach’s White Noise is just another in a long line of directorial disappointments over the last few years in the world of cinema. The cinematic drought since 2019 is real and feels like it might even be getting worse.

I hope 2023 marks a turn-around for the art of cinema, but if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that just when you think movies have hit bottom, and 2022 sure feels like the bottom, there’s always some deeper level of hell for things to fall to.

So, skip White Noise on Netflix as it’s a total waste of time, but if you’re interested maybe pick up DeLillo’s book and give it a read instead. It’s not transformational, but it is, unlike the movie, amusing. That’s how bad movies have gotten, I’m now recommending you go read a book. God help us all.

©2023