BEFORE: Kerry Condon carries over from "Angela's Ashes". I really didn't have too many choices coming out of that film, there are no other films with either Emily Watson or Robert Carlyle on my list, and the rest of the cast seems to be made of obscure Irish actors, or at least ones who didn't make many other Hollywood movies. I suppose I got lucky that there was ONE connection that gets me closer to "Wonder Woman 1984", and sometimes one connection is all I need. In fact that can make things easier, I don't have to make a tough decision or make a flow-chart with all the choices to see which one gets me where I ultimately want to go or might please me more. This one ran on PBS a few months back, and I love checking the movies they run on PBS here in NYC on Saturday nights, and not just because they usually pair one classic movie with a newish indie film (plus a short, but who cares?) but because it's public television, so they don't run that signal that prevents me from copying the film to DVD for my archives. That's legal, because I'm part of the public, and by definition their shows belong to me, to you, to all of us. Months later, this film is now streaming on HBO Max, but I already have my copy, thanks but no thanks, HBO. (HBO is one of those channels that DOES run that signal, so anything they run, I can watch, but I can't dupe.)
I'm back on the Nazi beat today, well, sort of, so here's a look at today in history where Germany is concerned - on March 18, 1793, the first modern German republic, Mainz, was declared as formed. On March 18, 1848, the March Revolution took place in Berlin, a struggle between the military and the civilians that took 300 lives. And on March 18, 1940, Hitler and Mussolini met at the Brenner Pass in the Alps. to form their alliance against France and the U.K. - I wonder what ever became of that? Fast-forward to March 18, 1990, when citizens in East Germany (GDR) voted in their first Democratic elections after being part of a Communist dictatorship. And still checking in with Women's History month, it's the birthday of Madame de la Fayette, author of France's first historical novel, "La Princess de Cleves", born in 1634. Born on March 18, 1927 was Lillian Vernon, businesswoman and philanthropist, and on March 18, 1933, Unita Blackwell, U.S. civil rights activist and the first woman elected mayor in Mississippi. Also, happy birthday to Irene Cara, Queen Latifah and Vanessa Williams.
THE PLOT: Cheyenne, a retired rock start living off his royalties in Dublin, returns to the U.S. to find the man responsible for a humiliation suffered by his recently deceased father during World War II.
AFTER: I'm intrigued by this film for sure, but unfortunately, only up to a point. I want to know more about the inspiration behind it, because I don't see how anyone just comes up with this sort of thing out of thin air. It's a foreign film in that it comes from an Italian director, and it did well at Cannes before playing at Sundance - but those are two strikes against it when it comes to being accessible to American audiences, I think. It seems like the director was fascinated by stories of people who track down former Nazis in their old age, so they can be prosecuted for war crimes, even though they're 80 or 90 years old by now. Then he tried to think of who would be the most unlikely type of person to go on a quest to find a still-alive Nazi, because apparently in the U.S. we could have several nursing homes set aside just for them, and he landed on an aging former Goth rocker - so the plot here is sort of reverse-engineered to be as ridiculous as possible, and not make any sense. This might explain why Sean Penn agreed to star in it.
Penn's character here is Cheyenne, whose look is clearly based on Robert Smith of The Cure, but the name's probably derived from Siouxsie Sioux, lead singer of Siouxsie and the Banshees - don't get hung up on gender here, because they sure didn't back in the 80's. Penn decided to play the character with a gayish, disillusioned but also sort of damaged voice - and I'm not saying that was the wrong choice, because it may have been spot on. However, it also made the character very hard to understand without subtitles - damn, maybe I should have watched this on HBO Max, because then I could have turned the subtitles on.
Cheyenne spends his days hanging out with his daughter, Mary, (she claims to not be his daughter, this was very confusing) and trying to set her up with the guy who works at the food court at the mall, who wants to date her, only she's not that into him. Cheyenne's got a wife, or maybe two, this was also very confusing - if he's got a wife at home, then who's the blond lady that's also Mary's mother - is that his ex-wife? Long-time former live-in partner? What, exactly is the deal? And what's with the giant stadium that looms in the background of every shot near where they live? Am I supposed to know what or where this is? (EDIT: It's Aviva Stadium in Dublin, but I had to look it up. Yes, it is THAT big, and that close to residential homes.) Cheyenne receives a call at the home of his not-wife that his father is dying, so he heads to America to be with him in his last days.
Only Cheyenne's got a lot of personal hang-ups, it seems. He spends a lot of time hanging out in a cemetery, and later we find out that's where two of his fans are buried, and they committed suicide based on something they heard in his songs, so he feels very guilty about that. He's also got a fear of flying (who doesn't?) so after a failed attempt to fly to the U.S., he ends up taking a cruise there instead, but wait, I thought he was in a rush to get there? Surprise, he arrives too late to spend any time with the father who he's been estranged from for the last 30 years. See, this is where things stop making sense, which coincidentally is also when he visits an old friend from the 1980's, with David Byrne playing a fictional (?) version of himself. (Hasn't he always?)
I'd say this film also feels like a big commercial for Byrne, only his Broadway show "American Utopia" didn't come along for another decade. But we do get to see him perform here, on the Talking Heads song that inspired the film's title, and there are at least five different covers of that same song throughout the film. I'm not sure if this counts as a motif, or was a cost-saving measure so that the filmmakers only had to license one song five times, in place of five different songs. As much as I love cover versions, this does seem like a bit too much, even if you happen to love that particular song. This film was made back when David Byrne had converted an abandoned ferry terminal in NYC into a giant, building-sized instrument, using the resonating frequencies of the giant room to create musical sounds via an organ-like interface. Which seems interesting, and I wish the film could have given us just a taste of what that sounded like, but I guess there was no time for that.
The death of Cheyenne's father connects him with one of those Nazi hunters, and sends him off on a quest across America to find the very elderly man who once humiliated and persecuted his father at Auschwitz - and remember, Cheyenne doesn't like to fly, so it's road-trip time, thankfully as a former rock star Cheyenne has the money and the time to do this, though his family in Ireland just assumes he's gone off to find himself again. What appear to be random actions on Cheyenne's part are really bits of detective work, or at least they're supposed to be, as he visits the Nazi's (alleged) widow and pretends to be one of her former students, in order to gain enough information to plan his next stop - only I think much of this was also quite unclear.
Other interactions with the Nazi's grand-daughter and the owner of a gun shop also have a clear purpose, but honestly I think they've got more of a "Borat"-type feel to them, as Sean Penn dressed up like a Goth rocker basically interviews them while also extracting information about his target, and also American society in general. "Angela's Ashes", I get it, somebody had a shitty childhood and wanted/needed to write a book about it - but this, I have NO idea what purpose this movie serves, or what point it's even trying to make. And when he finally tracks down his target, there's so much random build-up to it, how could the ensuing confrontation be anything but a big let-down?
With Frances McDormand appearing here, it's very tempting to program "Nomadland" next, because that film's already on Hulu, and it would be great to get to a current Oscar nominee, but that's bit of a dead end for me right now, I could link out of that I suppose, but it would screw up the plan I have in place for the next two weeks. So I suppose I'm going to follow the Harry Dean Stanton link as planned. Another quandary - which actor provided the narration here, the voice of Cheyenne's father? The IMDB and Wikipedia can't seem to agree - it sure SOUNDED like Frank Langella, and I'm pretty good at identifying celebrity voices (I'm great at identifying narration in car commercials, and I'd do even better figuring out who's on "The Masked Singer" if they didn't scramble their speaking voices) but perhaps this was a Frank Langella sound-alike?
Also starring Sean Penn (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Frances McDormand (last seen in "Promised Land"), Judd Hirsch (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Eve Hewson (last seen in "Robin Hood" (2018)), Grant Goodman (last seen in "The Campaign"), Harry Dean Stanton (last seen in "You, Me and Dupree"), Joyce Van Patten (last seen in "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding"), David Byrne (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Olwen Fouéré (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Shea Whigham (last seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer"), Liron Levo, Heinz Lieven, Simon Delaney (last seen in "Delivery Man"), Johnny Ward, Sam Keeley (last seen in "Burnt"), Bern Cohen (last seen in "Norman"), Gordon Michaels (last seen in "Out of the Furnace"), Madge Levinson (last seen in "Whip It"), Seth Adkins, Davis Gloff and the voice of Fritz Weaver (last seen in "The Big Fix") (or is it Frank Langella? (last seen in "House of D")) with archive footage of Jamie Oliver, Sarah Palin and the voice of Barack Obama (last seen in "Fyre Fraud").
RATING: 4 out of 10 games of handball in an unfilled swimming pool
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