The Schmear Hunter's Brainwash [44] - Cannes Edition
Unpacking the Hype, Elevating the Unknown: 'Furiosa,' 'The Apprentice,' 'The Surfer,' 'Flow'
Hunters,
This week’s SchmearCast featured a break down of Cannes Week 1 and a dive into such films as Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, Yorgos Lanthimos’ new Kinds of Kindness with Emma Stone, and the Anya Taylor-Joy-starring Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Euronews Culture Editor David Mouriquand joined the show to help discuss those big-ticket films and so much more.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Today’s post is a very special Cannes 2024 edition of the Brainwash, consisting of films that premiered here on the Croisette, especially applicable since one of the movies, Furiosa, already hits theaters today.
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Now enough of that heart-on-sleeve shit. Let’s get into today’s Brainwash. And as a heads-up, since this is an exclusive Cannes edition, some of the letter will be paywalled. Let me tell you, you’ll want to know all about these under-the-radar gems this week.
The Hype
Furiosa is electric, but not quite the bolt of lightning that was 2015’s Fury Road
The Apprentice, a new Donald Trump biopic starring Sebastian Stan, isn’t bold enough to take on (and take down) its larger-than-life subject
The Unknown
The Surfer is a pulpy, over-the-top Nic Cage freak-out film set on Australia’s golden shores
Flow, a new animated feature from Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis, has eye-opening Miyazaki echoes.
The Hype
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Logline: The origin story of renegade warrior Furiosa before her encounter and teamup with Mad Max.
Category: Out of Competition Premiere
George Miller, that crazy Australian bastard, has done it (nearly) again with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel to 2015’s perfect Mad Max: Fury Road. While the Anya Taylor-Joy-starring Furiosa doesn’t rev up to the same gear as Fury Road, it is a strong, adrenalized, and imaginative approximation.
Smartly sensing there was no way to just make Fury Road again, Miller and co-writer Nick Lathouris craft a different, more epic revenge saga set over the course of 18 years. In a rip-roaring, half-hour opening sequence, the film introduces us to Furiosa as a child, as she’s kidnapped from her edenic, women-filled society by a boisterous biker gang led-up by Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus. It’s impossible to place what Hemsworth is going for, and because of that, it's extra-entertaining to behold his character
In a chaotic scene inside Dementus’ tent, we’re first treated to Miller’s immense world-building prowess. Every character, from Dementus to his henchman, is bedecked in ridiculous and bizarre steampunk costumes (from legendary, 3-time Oscar winner Jenny Beavan) that make perfect sense in this universe.
Furiosa’s mother, played by a wonderful, steely Charlee Fraser, tracks her down, facing off against Dementus, and dies before him, thus kicking off Furiosa’s unquenchable vengeance. It’s by far the best, most breathless stretch of the film, and it’s unfortunate that it’s how we start and not how we end.
Furiosa is traded to Immortan Joe at the Citadel, escapes his harem, and grows up disguised as a boy, working on his armada of autos. Here, Taylor-Joy takes over and while she does a great Charlize Theron impression, her performance is devoid of charisma, which is disappointing since we know Taylor-Joy has that ineffable “it” quality. She starts driving rigs under the tutelage of Praetorian Jack (a striking but underutilized Tom Burke), and just like that, we’re back on the road.
One of Furiosa’s best qualities also works to undercut it, and that is the plethora of colorful, strange, weirdos, and freaks that populate this world. Immortan Joe and his posse are unforgettable (especially the nipple-rubbing banker The People Eater), as is the tattooed History Man, as well as a dwarfish War Boy who meets a demise in the truck’s produce section and a deaf fella who seems to move like a machine.
To enjoy all that but then come back to the one-track, revenge-minded character of Furiosa is a let-down. It worked in the nonstop Fury Road for Tom Hardy’s Max, but doesn’t hold up as well in the bright, hot sun of post-apocalyptic desert day.
The filmmaking remains exciting and kinetic, even if it feels a little less palpably dangerous than Fury Road. Miller loves to employ intense zoom push-ins to blood-pumping effect. When the road battles went aerial, with a sort of ski bike turning into a parachute, my jaw was admittedly on the floor.
The action has a thrilling sort of video game logic, taking us to playable levels like “Gas Town,” “Bullet Farm,” and “The Citadel,” and the sheer imagination of these renderings is enough to distract from the shaky plotting.
After a ho-hum ending, the credits are interspersed with clips of Mad Max: Fury Road. While Furiosa provides a clear onramp to that film, I found this to be a weird choice that just had me wanting to watch Fury Road instead. It’s as if it’s saying, “See? You’re ready now, right?”
And yes, I’m ready. And yes, I’m being tough on this film that I did enjoy and felt revved up by. But I would’ve liked the Mad Max series to move forward, not look back, even if that backward gaze is a thrilling one.
It’s funny (and amazing for Warner Bros.) that this comes out in the same year as another propulsive, visually arresting, full-steam-ahead desert epic, Dune: Part 2. That film felt like a massive step up from Dune, while this feels like a small step down from Fury Road. Furiosa is still a dazzling success, but lightning never strikes the same spot twice. As Furiosa herself knows, you gotta keep driving ahead.
Verdict:
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga offers a thrilling and imaginative prequel with impressive world-building and action, though it ultimately falls short of its predecessor, because how could it not.
Grade: 85
The Apprentice - Ali Abassi
Logline: The story of how a young Donald Trump started his real estate business in 1970s and 80s New York with the helping hand of infamous lawyer Roy Cohn.
Category: Palme d’Or Competition
The Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice was one of the films I was most excited to see at Cannes, especially after I checked out its director Ali Abassi’s stunning 2022 Iranian serial killer drama Holy Spider. With a script from star journalist Gabriel Sherman, Sebastian Stan as the Don, and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, The Apprentice seemed can’t miss.
And while it’s true that it doesn’t miss, it doesn’t hit too hard either. The performances are excellent, and Abassi’s direction is strong, but the story is by-the-books and the film itself is rather paint-by-numbers. For a larger than life figure, I needed a commensurately grand, bases juiced, home-run swing.
This dark origin story starts in the 1970s, while Nixon is still president. We meet Trump as he collects rent in slums for his father, the OG bully (played by Martin Donovan). He has a dream of opening a midtown hotel, but too many bureaucratic obstacles stand in the way of pulling it off.
Enter the pugnacious attorney Roy Cohn, whom Trump courts at an NYC members club. When we flash to Jeremy Strong’s Cohn, he’s staring down Trump from across the room like the devil incarnate. His face says hangdog, but his rep is all pitbull.
Cohn takes a shine to Trump, teaching him some early lessons like “file a lawsuit” and “everyone wants to suck a winner’s cock.” He also shares his 3 rules to life: 1. Attack 2. Truth is not truth. Admit nothing, deny everything, and 3. Claim victory, never defeat.
There’s little subtlety to the fact that these are apocryphal lessons for the young Trump, like when Cohn shows him his evil basement surveillance lair and instructs Don to “record everything” or when he takes Trump aside and tells him that “truth is a malleable thing.”
It’s all very expected—too expected—like a book report or a Wikipedia entry. Ditto for the grainy Taxi Driver-esque filmstock to evoke the “ooooh dangerous” 70s, the seen-it-before stock footage of New York City on the brink, and the cliche disco soundtrack. It’s more of the same when we arrive in the 80s, except now we’re seeing Reagan pressers, cocaine, and hearing Pet Shop Boys. I’ll concede that the change to garish digital camerawork is cool.
Normally, these things hit for me! But think about the complicated, dastardly version of Roy Cohn, haunted by the phantom of Ethel Rosenberg, that Tony Kushner dreamed up for Angels in America. Or the riveting Pablo Larraín biopics Jackie and Spencer, where he daringly turns real history into ghost stories. For the first true and real adaptation of the larger-than-life, stranger-than-fiction Trump legend, I needed to be shown more.
The performers hold up their end of the bargain. It’s funny to see Jeremy Strong here, as he starred in James Gray’s Trump-adjacent 2022 saga, Armageddon Time. Kendall Roy peeks out a little distractingly for me early (maybe exacerbated by the Succession-esque camerawork), but Strong’s talent is somehow able to make the demonic Cohn empathetic, especially at the end of the film as he wastes away with AIDS.
In an entire world of Trump impressions, with Donald himself doing one too, Sebastian Stan’s version is pretty great. Jowly and awkward early, like 3 kids stacked in a trench coat, he somehow becomes bigger, more golden, and more glowing as he amasses professional victories, yet his humanity slips away and the cartoon begins to emerge.
But it’s all pretty obvious. Towards the end, Abassi’s darker, more artistic instincts finally edge out Sherman’s straightforward script. The film has a sharper, more unsparing edge to it, especially in an extreme portrayal of assault by Trump against Ivana (Maria Bakalova) and a Godfather-inspired cross-cutting between a children’s choir singing “Let Freedom Ring” and Trump receiving some gross cosmetic surgeries.
The arc with Cohn is technically made whole, but it still manages to feel unsatisfying, as Strong’s character drops out for much of this act before reappearing only at the end.
For me, it comes down to the fact that the Trump tale is too real, too scary, and too sociopathically fucked to receive such a down-the-middle biopic. In the way that Don is so satirical that he can’t be satirized, he might be too bizarre to biographize too.
Trump’s team has their lawsuits ready for The Apprentice, which is scheduled to premiere in September, though it doesn’t yet have distribution. That rancor will provide helpful press for the film, and paired with a Marvel star in Stan, it could give it enough oxygen to break out of the arthouse and be a medium-stream success. But sadly, this is just a good biopic, not a great one.
Verdict:
Despite strong performances and competent direction, "The Apprentice" offers a disappointingly by-the-numbers biopic of Donald Trump, failing to fully capture the larger-than-life complexity and dark allure of its subject.
Grade: 73
The Unknown
The Surfer - Lorcan Finnegan
![CRITIQUE] The Surfer (Lorcan Finnegan)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F144a5e2c-a08a-4a79-b753-f033cb881fe1_1200x630.png "CRITIQUE] The Surfer (Lorcan Finnegan)")
Logline: When a man returns to his beach side hometown in Australia, he is humiliated in front of his teenage son by a local group of surfers who claim ownership over the secluded beach of his childhood.
Category: Midnight Screenings
The newest Nic Cage freakout The Surfer has a deliriously simple set-up. Cage plays “The Surfer,” an affable American in Australia intent on buying the home where he grew up. When he tries to take his son surfing to share the news of the impending purchase, he is taunted, bullied, and driven mad by the handsome, aggressive, territorial local surf gang.
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