Blu-ray Review: A Vigilante (2018)

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For Now She Dances: Part One

(Click to Read Part Two)

Introduction:

Written and directed by women, two feature filmmaking debuts centered on female vigilante badassery were released this week. Involving not only the same jumping off point of a world  — in both, upstate New York — where men who wrong women go unpunished but similar themes as well, the two cathartic films allow us to live vicariously through their anti-heroines as they scream, dance, and fight their way back to life with various levels of success. Come along on their journey and click here to read the review of #Like.


A Vigilante Review:

"Love, I feel like it was gone, gone, gone, gone 

Let's do this like a prison break 

I want to see you scream and shake." 

- "Black Tongue" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Sadie keeps a fork in the door and a knife under her pillow. Tomorrow she'll fight but for now she dances with abandon to remind herself of her humanity at a time when color has been drained out of her world.

With tight, graphic novel like frames and minimal external light, the hues of writer-director Sarah Daggar-Nickson's feature filmmaking debut are dulled down as if every shot had been captured, filtered, and then washed over by a sea of gray paint.

Keeping us with Sadie (Olivia Wilde) every step of the way, as she keeps moving so does the cinematographer's camera, zooming in claustrophobically close to watch her make her way from one abusive home to the next to deliver a darkly inspiring sense of justice to the world.

"I know what you do to her," she tells a wife-beating husband at the start of the movie in a voice that's loaded with experience.

Facilitating transfers of titles, bank accounts, and job resignations to remove (largely male) abusers from dangerous home situations, Sadie gives the first man we see onscreen a warning that if he bothers his wife and kids again, she'll kill him, adding sincerely, "I want to kill you."

Cutting through the drama to reach the truth of the scene at once, with that chilling line delivery, Wilde lets us know that yes, not only is this extremely personal, but she's also dancing precariously to the border of chaos and control.

Alone back in her cheap motel room with a fork in the door and that day's inevitable disguise off, we get our confirmation as to just what life must be like for Sadie when the camera focuses on a series of hellish scars on her upper back right before she has a panic attack.

"We're going to keep it in the family

Yeah, well, even though we're on the run." 

- "Black Tongue" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Playing a victim of both abuse and PTSD who travels from one place to another to try and build a better ending to someone else's story rather than dwell on her own, Wilde gives a masterful performance in the film and completely loses herself in her role. Likewise, steeped in authenticity and featuring the stories and words of real support group participants, the film is as haunting as it is riveting.

Swinging like a pendulum from various moments in time in Sadie's life, long before it reaches its inevitable — albeit meanderingly overlong — conclusion, it runs out of narrative gas about midway through. Unfortunately, you get the sense that as well-intentioned as it is, A Vigilante would have been much more successful had the director fallen back on the skills in her past and turned it into a longer short.

Produced by its star and released on disc and demand a week after Olivia Wilde's own female-centric directorial debut Booksmart hit theaters, rather than build the plot like a traditional genre film, we are served up one searing, unflinching look at the worst impulses of man throughout, for better and worse.

And although it's recommended more on its premise than its overall execution as it loses and confuses us in places with its time jumps, Wilde, in her tour de force performance as Sadie stays strong.

Closing herself off with her knife and fork, she reminds herself she's human in between beatdowns, moving with intensity — while losing herself to a Yeah Yeah Yeahs beat — as she waits for tomorrow.

Click Here to Read - For Now She Dances: Part Two - #Like Review

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DVD Review: Drinking Buddies (2013)

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Photo Slideshow

   

Nobody gets lost in space in Drinking Buddies, nor are there any scenes of kidnap, torture or Wall Street greed. Banks aren’t robbed and celebrity homes aren’t ransacked and nobody reaches toward the blinking green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

There are no fast cars or folk singers and this isn’t the story of a butler or some other biopic. It isn’t a tale of courage under fire unless you count the courage it takes to know who you are, who you want and open yourself up enough to fall in love.

Nor are there any slaves in writer/director/editor Joe Swanberg’s fully improvised ensemble comedy, unless you consider the quartet of characters it follows in its romantic round-robin of confusion, temptation and flirtation slaves of the heart.

   

If so, then we’re all guilty of that label as Swanberg’s film – like the ones that came before it and Nights and Weekends in particular – is preoccupied with love and as such he realizes that unlike the romantic comedies that Hollywood churns out by the dozens each year, the best way to capture a beating heart is to accurately reflect the human in which it resides.

And this is precisely what he does in his true-to-life (as in "You Are Here" Cinema) documentation of four twenty to thirty-somethings who are coupled up… perhaps with the wrong partner, although Swanberg is wise enough to know that there may not be just one right partner for each person and explores that fully in Drinking's ninety-minute running time.

In one of 2013’s greatest romantic movies not named Before Midnight, we’re introduced to our two leads Kate and Luke (played by Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson) as they go about their day wisecracking and working together at Chicago’s Revolution Brewery.

  

When we meet Kate and Luke, we initially think we're being given the classic ingredients of a romantic comedy in the representation of the characters. But while these two friends essentially embody the 21st century term “work spouse” by finishing each other’s sentences, they also click with each other chemically on a sidekick level – like Vaughn and Favreau in Swingers or Damon and Affleck in Good Will Hunting but with the added possibility of Hepburn and Tracy sex.

Yet Swanberg has enough respect for both the audience and his characters not to cheapen the plot with corner cutting -- daring to introduce us to the unmarried significant others of both leads in the form of Anna Kendrick and Ron Livingston, thus making them so damn likable you don’t want anyone to get hurt.

Throughout the film, he flirts with genre contrivances like a shared kiss between two otherwise attached characters, a one night stand, a fight in the street and questions of romantic timing with regard to a breakup and a trip similar to the way the characters flirt in their own right.

  

But Swanberg employs all of the elements in an unexpected and postmodern way, understanding – just like the Before trilogy – that real life is much more difficult to maneuver and that while we may be presented with windows, we’re the ones that have to make things happen rather than just hoping we’re in the right place to experience fireworks at the right time.

Using a heightened sense of reality that cinematically seems to hark back to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s era of provocative partner switchers like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and the bittersweet sting of laughing so hard you could cry or crying so hard you could laugh of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Swanberg’s seasoned cast of veterans bring the method to the masses.

   

And throughout Drinking Buddies, the flirtatious, feisty and downright funny foursome make the pace fly right by thanks to their fully realized, fresh, fiercely relatable and yes, (at times) slightly intoxicated performances as people unsure how to handle the feeling of their hearts being pulled in two directions at once.

Easily identifiable to the point that the authenticity of Drinking Buddies rings even truer than Before’s one falsely dissonant note of Julie Delpy’s over-dramatic monologuing in the third-act of Richard Linklater’s otherwise brilliant trilogy-ender, Buddies features breakout turns by the witty and wondrous Olivia Wilde and a sensitive, deeply nuanced portrayal of the unenviable frustration of a heart too full of love by Jake Johnson.

One of the best romantic comedies since Ira & Abby and the strongest of Swanberg’s career so far, Drinking Buddies which also offers worthwhile supporting turns from Jason Sudeikis and Ti West may be a sleeper now but it’s only a matter of time before viewers realize that instead of a one-night stand, in 2013’s Buddies, they’ve found long-lasting love.

     

Text ©2013, 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.