Movie Review: How to Build a Girl (2019)

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Even before sixteen-year-old Johanna Morrigan (Beanie Feldstein) grabbed a box of red hair dye so bright it could be seen from space in order to reinvent herself as firebrand rock critic Dolly Wilde, she was the very definition of "extra" and proud of it. In fact, as we learn at the start of How to Build a Girl, the precociously bright Wolverhampton girl seemed to operate under the assumption that you should never do less when more is available.

Turning in thirty-three page essays in place of the five required by her assignment, Johanna not only didn't know when to say when but long before she started spending her time going to rock clubs, carousing, and writing all night before she woke up minutes later for school, she loved to burn the candle at both ends.

Indulging in rich fantastical conversations with figures like Sylvia Plath (Lucy Punch) and Sigmund Freud (Michael Sheen) who come to life on her "God Wall" partition that splits the room she shares with her loyal brother Krissi (Laurie Kynaston) right down the middle, when her piece on the Annie soundtrack gets her foot in the door at a local newspaper, Johanna breaks the damn thing down.

Invited there as part of a bet because nobody could believe that someone would write with such earnest passion about a children's musical, after an imaginary pep talk from Bjork, Johanna sets out to prove to her new colleagues, family, and classmates that instead of the nerdy girl with glasses who lives in her head, she is an iconoclastic early ‘90s woman of action.

Given additional courage, thanks to a nine pound makeover with hair dye, dark second hand clothes (including a top hat which will become her signature), and that new wild pseudonym Dolly Wilde, in How to Build a Girl, Johanna Morrigan makes good on her name and forgets who she truly is in the process.

Knowing that cynicism and snark sells and eager to provide for her cash-strapped family, she goes from writing sweet, sensitive pieces about music and the artists she loves (including Alfie Allen's dreamy John Kite) to take down hits that earn her the "Asshole of the Year Award" before reality and remorse catches up with her.

A shallow yet deeply cynical film masquerading as a tender coming-of-age story based on the semiautobiographical novel by Caitlin Moran and adapted by the author, though it has everything in the world going for it, How to Build a Girl is as authentic as a box of hair dye and as in flux as our leading lady when it comes to its sudden lurches in rhythm and tone.

Tenuous and inconsistent, although it takes a cue from Britcoms like the Bridget Jones series (which has producers in common with this one) in its initial set-up, the movie from acclaimed, award-winning small screen director Coky Giedroyc has as many walls up as Johanna has "gods" on that partition in Wolverhampton.

Unwilling to delve beyond the surface of our lead character's ever-changing facade, for a majority of the first act, we're asked to laugh at Johanna rather than with her. And though a top-notch Feldstein is the highlight of the picture, Girl only endears Johanna to us in a gorgeous sequence when she spends a romantic day in Dublin with Allen and lets down her guard to show both him and us who she really is. Unfortunately, the effect is short-lived, as just like Wilde, the movie seesaws so quickly and so improbably that — rather than a realistic portrait of Johanna's struggle to find herself during adolescence — it feels like a bad cliché at the expense of teenage girls as opposed to in celebration of them.

Never seeing the forest for the trees, How to Build a Girl focuses so intently on individual moments — and with its first rate cast and amazing soundtrack it does land some great ones — that it doesn't bother to question whether it flows organically from one scene to the next. And this problem is magnified tenfold by the film's end, which wraps everything up in a thoroughly unearned bow, mere minutes after the increasingly dark film finds Johanna hitting a dangerous rock bottom in a sequence that comes out of nowhere and is cheapened by a jolt of humor, which is sure to confuse young girls who might be watching.

An all-around misfire that should've been right up my alley as a precocious young nerd who tried to grow up too quickly in her '90s teen years and join the writing world as well, perhaps one of the reasons I was so utterly disappointed by Girl is because I went in assuming I'd see, if not me than others I could relate to, and left shaking my head at just how many opportunities were missed. From randy colleagues who proposition her with come-ons and casual sexual harassment — resulting in one very funny scene when Johanna sits on a man's lap and gives him the opposite of what he wanted — to becoming the morally torn breadwinner of her family, there were endless areas that the film could've planted a flag in and explored.

More like playing a rock critic for Halloween than shadowing a real one for a day, while it's one thing to barely touch on what life is like as a professional writer, the thing I can't forgive is that it does the same thing for the teenage girls it's purporting to salute. Going for more, more, more, just like Johanna even before she went Wilde, eventually we realize that the more Moran and Giedroyc throw onto the the pile, the less we care about the girl who should be so much more interesting than those fire engine red roots which ultimately serve as a placeholder for a personality and a character in search of a film.


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Blu-ray Review: Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

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Whereas some businessmen rule their companies with an iron fist, relying on tough love and strategy from Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Machiavelli’s The Prince to get the results they’re after, Mickey Mouse creator Walt Disney preferred to use the golden rule as his modus operandi.

Putting everyone on equal footing by insisting on first names as opposed to formalities and assuring the people he hoped to collaborate with that they could trust him, the last thing Walt Disney wanted to do is break a promise or go back on his word… especially when he’d made a promise to a child.

Not fond of playing games or pulling rank, Disney’s version of tough love was to take an even more hands-on approach than before, taking the meeting out of Walt Disney studios and trying to make his guest more comfortable by taking the day off to ride a merry-go-round at Disneyland while offering up the seat of his wife’s favorite mechanical horse.

And as depicted in Saving Mr. Banks, that is exactly the tactic Disney (Tom Hanks) had to take with the famously temperamental Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) whom he’d annually courted for twenty years to acquire the rights to her book after promising his young daughters that he would adapt her work for the big screen.

Having remained steadfast in her refusals for two decades, it’s only after the now economically desperate Travers is threatened with the loss of her home that she reluctantly travels to Los Angeles (the land that in her mind smells of chlorine and sweat) to review the progress made by screenwriter Don DeGradi (Bradley Whitford) and the film’s composers, the Sherman brothers (B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman).

Having been granted the studio’s first official agreement of script approval, Travers sets out to make the most of that opportunity to hold as tightly to the reigns of the work that means so much to her before signing over the rights for good.

Demanding that every work session be recorded and immediately choosing to veto every possible idea from the casting of Dick Van Dyke to the inclusion of animation or at her most ridiculously temperamental – the color red – the Disney staffers are pushed into a creative battle that in all actuality wound up pushing the men in the room to produce some of the finest work of their entire career.

While the masterful final result is well known to viewers, it’s fascinating to see the creative process at work, particularly with regard to the Sherman brothers who toy with the meanings of words to provide a thrilling musical counterpoint to Travers's imaginative world.

Yet through a series of extended flashbacks from the point of view of the complicated Travers, we soon discover that what the studio believes is merely a delightful children’s book is in fact a largely autobiographical work of creative wish fulfillment and regret about her difficult childhood.

Filled with a stellar ensemble cast including a wickedly witty yet undeniably moving turn by Thompson and great supporting work from Tom Hanks and scene-stealers Colin Farrell and Paul Giamatti as Travers’ father and the Los Angeles driver with whom she forms an unexpected bond, Saving Mr. Banks is a remarkable achievement.

Though screenwriters Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith walk an unenviable tightrope throughout by going back and forth in time and telling two completely different yet interrelated stories, the film from The Blind Side director John Lee Hancock doesn’t make a misstep.

Part biopic and part behind-the-scenes celebration of the intersection between fact and fiction and how writing what you know can take a completely unexpected form, while Disney buffs who’ve watched behind-the-scenes Poppins features and/or the wonderful Sherman Brothers documentary had assuredly heard tales of the war waged on Disney by Travers before, this sensitively made work offers a much richer understanding of the situation.

Illustrating the importance of believing in yourself coupled with artistic catharsis, Banks is a wonderful tribute to the man who told us to wish on stars, the brothers who praised the benefits of a spoonful of sugar through the power of song and the woman who set out to save a family but in doing so, inspired us to save each other. Now that’s the way we should all set out to do business… merry-go-rounds optional.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Last Chance Harvey (2009)

"I want to see people who I actually believe to exist, who are vaguely like me, falling in love... People who aren't perfect, who aren't so beautiful that anyone would go for them. You don't see love stories about that, you just see very beautiful people falling in love with each other and I'm just bored, I'm bored witless. I don't care about them!"

-- Emma Thompson

(As Quoted in the Production Notes for Last Chance Harvey)

Obviously, she isn't alone as Last Chance Harvey garnered Golden Globe nominations for both Thompson and her leading man Dustin Hoffman, reuniting for the first time following their work in Marc Forster's brilliant Stranger than Fiction.

Recent recipient of the Heartland's Truly Moving Picture Award, making Harvey (and the other honoree Marley and Me) one of the first titles to have been bestowed such an honor in 2009, this refreshingly human love story centering on characters over forty is equally filled with tragedy, romance, and humor. In that regard, it's similar to not only Fiction but Thompson's turn in Love Actually, 2008's bittersweet love story mystery Definitely, Maybe and 2007's underrated Dan in Real Life.

Easily dubbed "Before Sunrise for Baby Boomers" by a cynical faction of critics adding character descriptions including "lovable losers," "sad-sacks" and "failures" when summing up the romantic leads, while the film cuts deeply into melancholy situations that are instantly recognizable to viewers, in the end it's a romance you truly believe in and want to work.

Part of this authenticity is what brought the Oscar winning actors on board as Hoffman illustrated that since "Emma and I have done character roles all our acting lives... This time, we wanted to do something very close to ourselves." Although it intercuts the plights of both characters, we're first very invested in Hoffman's Harvey Shine, a New York based jingle writer who ventures to London for his daughter's wedding and finds himself fired not only from his job but his wedding duties as his daughter (Liane Balaban) tells him she's asked her stepfather (James Brolin) to walk her down the aisle.

Essentially treated as though he were the last kid to be picked for dodgeball, Harvey withdraws from the festivities and tries to catch the first flight home when he happens upon Kate (Thompson), an Office of National Statistics poll-taker airport employee who struggles with endless bad dates, botched fix-ups, and a clingy mother (Eileen Atkins) who phones her even more often than Lorelai called Rory on TV's Gilmore Girls.

True to the genre, the couple have a few near-meets before they finally exchange actual dialogue and when Hoffman finally makes an attempt to chat her up in the airport bar, eating lunch across from her (when she refuses to dine with a stranger), he gets her laughing enough to catch the woman off guard. Thus begins their whirlwind courtship as budding friends with a flirtatious overtone as he manages to sweet talk her into accompanying him back to his daughter's wedding reception.

The sophomore directorial effort from Jump Tomorrow's award winning filmmaker Joel Hopkins whose delightful Jump earned a fan in Harvey's leading lady, Emma Thompson who loved the first draft of Harvey, via e-mail offered to send it directly to Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman's response was positive, e-mailing Thompson back roughly forty eight hours later with some notes as the actors began contributing more and more to fine-tuning the characters so that they're not only a bit more suitable for the actors but that they're instantly believable as people you'd meet on the street.

Hopkins, who expressed in the press release his affection for more mature and older characters whom he finds "much more interesting" as "they've experienced so many more things and they've got so much more baggage, which is good...[and] always interesting," wanted to ensure that, as he wrote on a Post-it note when working on the casting, there would be "No baddies in this movie." Instead, he desired everyone in his screenplay to become fully developed humans as opposed to cardboard caricatures.

Joking that he believes the old adage that "directing is mostly getting your casting right," he humbly acknowledges his cast, saying he didn't need to do anything over and beyond telling "them where to stand," however one feels he's selling himself a bit short with a second assured piece of filmmaking.

Still, it must be said that Thompson and Hoffman instantly vanish inside their characters and we with them. True to Thompson's earliest quote, we're never bored by the tales of these two whose flaws make them even more fascinating in feeling both their joy and sorrow. And more often than not, we find ourselves identifying with, if not all of their struggles, then at least some as people from all walks of life try to navigate the rocky terrain of love, all with various baggage we have difficulty trying to check,whether we're going down the street or journeying to another country.

New on DVD & Blu-ray for the Week of 1/11/09

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Brideshead Revisited (2008)

Director:
Julian Jarrold

As much pressure as there is when making a period film to keep contemporary viewers interested, extra hurdles are added when the period film is based on one of the most critically acclaimed books of the twentieth century. And the anxiety doubles when it was also adapted into what most devotees assumed was the definitive take on the source material in a wildly popular, classic twelve-hour British miniseries. In taking on Brideshead Revisited, instantly one runs the risk of being labeled a copycat as well as going against conventional wisdom of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but by employing celebrated, award-winning screenwriters Andrew Davies (Mr. Adaptation himself having penned updated versions of some of literature’s most beloved works) and Last King of Scotland scribe Jeremy Brock, the filmmakers hoped to tackle that problem head on. However, in telling the story of the poor underdog Charles Ryder (Match Point’s Matthew Goode) who gets tangled up in the lives and loves of the wealthy but ill-fated Sebastian Marchmain (Ben Whishaw) and his headstrong sister Julia (Hayley Atwell), the results are mostly mixed.

Sumptuously photographed and with amazing attention to detail, including filming in Yorkshire’s awe-inspiring tourist attraction, the Castle Howard which had first doubled for the Marchmain’s home Brideshead in the prior television adaptation, Becoming Jane director Julian Jarrold’s sophisticated film is sure to rake in Oscar nominations in the fields of art and costume design as well as a probable nomination for Emma Thompson as the devoutly Catholic, domineering Marchmain matriarch.

And while no doubt one has to admire the intelligence of such a gorgeous work, especially in its daring summer release opposite mindless comedies and special effects driven superhero films which will definitely come as a much needed quiet treat for film reviewers everywhere to heap praise onto the movie, I felt like it kept viewer’s emotions at an arm’s length. Never shaking the museum feel that proves so daunting for period works-- much like another critically loved classic book turned Miramax film, The Wings of the Dove, I had a hard time becoming invested in this rather icy tale. This was especially difficult when considering that—while Charles is positioned as its hero—frequently, he’s the most unlikable character onscreen and often we’re left wondering just whom is using whom when it comes to his dealings with the Marchmains. While one never has to unconditionally love a lead character, the question then becomes whether or not you feel invested in the person’s plight and with Charles, most of the time, I didn’t.

Ultimately, I felt that that while it’s a beautiful looking work bolstered by its talented cast (Whishaw, Goode, and Atwell no doubt have excellent careers ahead of them), I sensed a barrier between myself and the production, which I can only liken to flipping through a photo album with a friend who’s just returned from a trip and can’t wait to show you hundreds of their photos. While the anecdotes and visuals are amusing enough, we realize we’re missing the full effect which was no doubt best experienced by reading Evelyn Waugh’s original novel and/or in the lengthy lauded miniseries.

This being said, I applaud the bold decision to bring the homosexual and extramarital infidelity plots to light and overlap the previously three separate tales in changes that the production notes explain were approved by the Waugh foundation. However, despite a great respect for the brilliance of Davies, I couldn’t help but imagine that this Brideshead adaptation may have been best served by brining in a more contemporary styled yet equally literary and thematically similar writer in the form of The Hours scribe Michael Cunningham. In addition to The Hours along with the brilliant A Home at the End of the World and even in his unsuccessful but imaginative interpretation of the novel Evening, Cunningham routinely explores love triangles and the struggle to come of age while reconciling one’s own desires within their immediate environment and familial obligation. Thus, being that the Brideshead filmmakers made the decision to “out” Sebastian in a greater way than in previous versions as well as try to fight against the Masterpiece Theatre trappings of most period films, by bringing in someone who isn’t usually lumped together alongside the usual suspects of the highbrow British fare, they may have breathed some much needed life into a claustrophobic and slightly overly long adaptation.