The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)

The most straightforward Cronenberg film since A Dangerous Method (2011), The Shrouds tells a downright Oedipal tale of Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a wealthy businessman mourning the loss of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). With apparently bottomless reserves of capital, he founds GraveTech, a state-of-the-art graveyard that allows clients to monitor the decaying bodies of their loved ones. The bodies are wrapped in full-coverage shroud technology that facilitates close-up and 360 views of the deceased. One evening, a select number of graves are vandalized, including Becca's, and Kash's IT guy Maury (Guy Pearce), who is unhappily divorced from Becca's sister Terry (also Kruger), eventually regains access to the grave feeds. But he discovers nodes growing on some of the bones (again, including Becca's), nodes that may be surveillance devices. This wrinkle plunges Vincent into a maelstrom of conspiracies and he spends the second half of the film wondering who to trust, even his sexy AI avatar assistant Hunny (also Kruger). 

However convoluted all of that sounds, Cronenberg drops not a single spinning plate over 119 minutes, apart perhaps from a few awkward dream vs. reality moments. In fact, as with Twisters, of all things, I honestly thought there was an hour left to go as the final credits started to roll. But that left an empty feeling that might not work in the film's favor. I kept longing for some pushback from the women characters akin to an early scene in which a first date, Myrna Slotnik (Jennifer Dale), at GraveTech doesn't go too well; in classic feminist film theory mode, Myra makes it clear to Karsh that she does not want to look at Becca's decaying body on the GraveTech monitor. And Kruger's sex-which-is-not-one characters are not so much foils as enigmas helping Karsh speed along his oedipal path towards knowledge. 

Then again, maybe a bit of emptiness is what Cronenberg was after. Karsh is an obvious stand-in for Cronenberg who lost his wife Carolyn to cancer in 2017. He presents himself as a husk incapable of believing that someone so vibrant and alive as Becca (or really anyone?) can just be gone one moment and then spend eternity rotting away. And when confronted with larger, inconceivable structures of political intrigue that generate conspiracy theories, as Karsh must do, perhaps a modicum of emptiness serves as a necessary component of mental health, keeping cynicism, nihilism, and madness at bay.

Grade: A-minus

Deception (Arnaud Desplechin, 2021); Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022); Company (Third Broadway Revival, 2021)

Deception (Arnaud Desplechin, 2021)

Deception is one of the most egregious violations of the Show Don't Tell rule in cinema history. On one hand, Desplechin had no choice but to tell tell tell since the 1990 Philip Roth novel on which the film is based is all dialogue. But on the other, perhaps that was an indication that no one should attempt to film the thing because Deception is a disaster. The French excel at cinema featuring little more than characters talking for the entire running time, e.g., select titles from Rohmer, Eustache, Garrel, etc. But the talk either points to a world outside the local concerns of the story at hand or epitomizes an exquisite waste of time. Deception dotes on Philip (Denis Podalydès) aka Philip Roth. Or the Philip Roth that comes through conversation, i.e., maybe not the real Philip Roth. For who could know the real Philip Roth including the (real?) Philip Roth himself? Isn't all self-fashioning mere deception? The film stays at this level of Philosophy 101 throughout as Philip's King Kong ego pulls all the women in his life (few of whom have names, e.g., Léa Seydoux plays "The English Lover") into his orbit. What any of this has to do with Desplechin remains a mystery. Even worse, sometimes Desplechin will show and tell for double the dreariness as when Philip's wife tells Philip that she's seen a revealing notebook of his and then we see her seeing the revealing notebook. In ventilating this airless novel, Desplechin suffocates it all the more. Nadir: the mock trial in which feminists accuse Philip of misogyny. 

Grade: C

Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022)

It's no Crash. But I loved it, of course. I need to see it with closed captioning, though, since I missed a lot of the sotto voce lines - what did Kristen Stewart (a great performance, appropriately unnatural in its perpetual weepiness) whisper to Viggo Mortensen at his first performance with Léa Seydoux? Also, much of the crime aspect of the film escaped me. For now, I read the final shot as hopeful. Or, more precisely, the only hope we have to survive the destructive path of capitalism is to rearrange our bodies to use destruction as our fuel. 

Grade: A-minus

Company (Third Broadway Revival, 2021)

This revival has Katrina Lenk playing a woman, Bobbie, in the role Dean Jones originated in 1970 as a man, Bobby. The gender reversals do nothing to diminish the majesty of some of Sondheim's greatest music and lyrics, their Bacharachian swells, their dizzying repetitions, their absurdly long notes. The finest moments in musicals are ensemble numbers anyway precisely because they subsume a character's particularity. Company's money shot comes early in the opening title (and best) number. The cast is crammed into Bobbie's apartment, waiting to surprise her on her 35th birthday. But in this production, the apartment moves to the front of the stage for the final chorus at which point our audience burst into helpless applause. The sole purpose of this narratively unnecessary movement is to bring us closer into the company. And for a brief moment, there were no protagonists and antagonists, no performers and audience, just orgasmic oneness. No other art form better offers that illusion.

Still, like so many musicals, Company is too damn long - 2 hours and 40 minutes including intermission in this iteration. I felt my attention flagging in the second act despite the presence of several classic numbers. Not being a ballad guy, I suggest cutting "Someone Is Waiting" and "Marry Me a Little," Bobbie/Bobby's solo numbers from the first act. Bobbie/Bobby is the least interesting character in the show, presumably by design. Things happen to and around her/him. So retaining only "Being Alive" for the finale would lend the song extra force and bring to the fore its complexities, holding marriage as exhilarating and marriage as stifling in tension with one another.

Grade: A-minus