Mare of Easttown

 

In a small town in eastern Pennsylvania, Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) is a former high school basketball star turned police detective. Following her son’s suicide, she is locked in a custody battle over her grandson with the baby’s ex-addict mother, and she is plagued by being unable to find a friend’s daughter after a mysterious disappearance. When another teen girl turns up dead, Mare is reluctantly partnered with a county detective, Colin Zabel (Evan Peters). With a list of suspects that includes the girl’s former boyfriend, his jealous new girlfriend, and a priest with a dark past, the two detectives will need to learn to work together in a hurry.

 

Created by Pennsylvania native Brad Ingelsby and directed by Craig Zobel, Mare of Easttown (HBO) plays like a Keystone State miniseries version of Mystic River, and that’s hardly a bad thing. Deftly written and powerfully acted with a strong sense of place and character, Mare of Easttown uses the mystery at its center to pull viewers into an exploration of addiction, loss, and the difficulty of forgiveness.

 

A disheveled, downtrodden, oft-vaping Winslet is excellent in the title role. Mare is a tenacious and skilled investigator, but she also displays a detestable side as she struggles to keep her family close and piece her life back together. In Winslet’s hands, she’s believable and magnetic, and the actress also nails a Philadelphia-area accent (evident in “phone” and “home”). Jean Smart gives a humorous supporting turn as Mare’s acerbic mom while Angourie Rice is solid as her troubled daughter. Peters, often cast in weirdo or comic relief roles, is more down to earth here, but he’s far from dull. The same cannot be said for Guy Pearce, however. He’s also given a break from his usual sinister/creepy casting, but his underwritten nice-guy literature professor makes for a bland, one-note romantic interest for Mare.

 

The hard-bitten Easttown of the screen is a considerably bleaker place than the actual township that shares its name, and the show’s litany of tragedies can feel exhausting at times, but Mare of Easttown is a well-crafted slice of small-town anguish.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

 

A young woman (Jessie Buckley) takes a road trip through the snow with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) to visit his parents’ farm despite her reservations about their relationship. Along the way, she weighs her desire to end the relationship against what she sees as Jake’s better qualities. Meanwhile, a lonely old high school janitor (Guy Boyd) makes his rounds, ignored by students who are enthusiastically rehearsing for a production of Oklahoma!

 

Charlie Kaufman’s 2020 adaptation of Ian Reid’s twisty psychological thriller isn’t the first time the writer/director took on difficult-to-adapt source material. But whereas his take on Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief took on a life of its own (yielding the excellent Spike Jonze-helmed Adaptation), I’m Thinking of Ending Things hews more closely to the source material albeit with Kaufman’s strange, discomfiting, boldly imaginative stamp.

 

There’s little that can be said about this film’s plot without spoiling its surprises. Eschewing a conventional narrative structure, I’m Thinking of Ending Things instead offers a series of increasingly surreal set pieces (tense conversations in a car, an awkward family dinner, etc.) whose symbolism only becomes truly apparent toward the end. Kaufman revisits some of his favorite themes – fear of failure, loss of identity – while dishing out allusions to poetry, film criticism, science, and musical theatre. While that sounds like an esoteric slog, there’s plenty of tension here. The cinematography at times evokes a horror film while the deliberate disregard of continuity has a deeply unsettling effect.

 

Both of the film’s leads rise to the challenge of navigating viewers through the film’s ambiguities. Much as she did in season 4 of Fargo, the Irish Buckley boasts an impeccable American accent, and her increasingly skeptical inner monologue makes her an effective audience surrogate. The seemingly placid Plemons offers moments of bashful hurt and verge-of-snapping rage while a chameleon-like Toni Collette plays his mom as kind-hearted though a bit ditzy. Opposite her, David Thewlis is equally benevolently awkward/oblivious though his English accent seems out of place for a midwestern farmer.

 

Though less self-indulgent than Kaufman’s opus Synecdoche, New York, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a challenging and divisive film that will likely leave you feeling cold by the end. However, the strange detours it takes to reach that point may make it worth your while.

Spider-Man: No Way Home

 

After being framed for murder and outed as Spider-Man, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) sees his life turned upside down. While attorney Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) is able to get him out of legal trouble, he, his Aunt May (Marissa Tomei), his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), and his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) are all hounded by negative publicity. This prompts Peter to ask sorcerer Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to wipe knowledge of Spider-Man’s identity from the public consciousness. However, Strange’s spell goes haywire, bringing in villains faced by other Spider-Men in other realities. Strange is adamant that they must be sent back to where they came from even if it means they will die fighting their respective Spider-Men, but Peter believes he can save them, a noble stance with a dangerously high price to pay if he is wrong.

 

The third film in the most recent Spider-Man trilogy (a Sony-Marvel collaboration) is somehow both its most ambitious and its most essential. The previous two outings (2017’s Homecoming and 2019’s Far From Home) were entertaining and energetic, but they also had to contend with fitting Spider-Man into the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Tony Stark in particular cast a long shadow over the proceedings. Holland did an admirable job under the circumstances, but his designation as “kid in over his head” definitely constrained the character. Though the creative team (director Jon Watts and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers) returns for this outing, they are finally letting Peter grow up. The stakes – both personal and universal – are higher this time around, and the film is able to pull off darker and weightier turns without sacrificing its sense of hope or humor.

 

Watt’s direction is slick and fluid though it lacks a discernable “wow” factor. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to do much heavy lifting here given the charismatic cast. Holland gives perhaps the best live-action Spider-Man performance to date, imbuing Peter with everything from anxiety to optimism to conviction to cold vengeance as the story unfolds. MJ and Ned remain as snarky and as loyal as ever, but their characters take on more sincere and conflicted shading. While rival Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori) remains a sitcomesque nemesis, May is finally, after two films of being diminished and objectified, given more focus here, and Tomei steps up by capturing the character’s protectiveness and morality.

 

These performances are matched by a cadre of returning villains (and Cumberbatch, who plays Strange as exasperated and begrudgingly helpful) from previous Spider-Man film series. Some, such as Flint Marko/Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) and Dr. Curt Connors/The Lizard (Rhys Ifans), are given little to work with, a causality of the film’s inflated character count. On the other hand, Jamie Foxx is able to play Max Dillon/Electro as something closer to himself in both appearance and temperament (compared to his maligned blue-hued turn in The Amazing Spider-Man 2), and a digitally de-aged Alfred Malina effortlessly slips back into Otto Octavious/Dr. Octopus. The real standout, however, is Willem Dafoe as Norman Osborn/Green Goblin. Here, the personality split between the two is more pronounced than it was in the character’s debut twenty-plus years ago. As Norman, Dafoe is confused and regretful, a sympathetic, mentally disturbed inventor. As the Goblin, his nefariousness is cranked up well past his hammy initial portrayal to Joker-esque levels of sadism. Dafoe puts his famously expressive face to good use here sans mask, and though he too gets the digital de-aging treatment, the sixty-something actor impressively did much of his own stunt and combat work, establishing the Goblin as both a physical and psychological threat.

 

Part of Spider-Man’s appeal as a character has always been his flawed relatability, and Peter’s early-film woes (social media harassment and college admissions anxiety) will feel recognizable to many. Another part comes from his sense of duty no matter how many times he gets put through the ringer, and the film does not shy away from seeing if there is a breaking point. At times, No Way Home can feel like too much – a superfluous character, a shoehorned in line of fan-pleasing dialogue, an awkward conversation that goes on too long – but its winning performances and deft balance of humor, action, and tragedy make it among the best cinematic Spider-Man stories ever told.