Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, but better options are on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue below [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
5/22/2024—Before this week’s review, though, I'll announce Film Reviews from Two Guys in the Dark takes a break next week while Nina and I celebrate our annual 3-day marathon of the Godfather trilogy (Francis Ford Coppola [1972, 1974, 1990]) as she gets a break from meal preparation (I do my best to manage spinach salad, spaghetti, and chianti), we both get to revisit the Corleone family. I should be back with you on June 5, 2024, though, likely with comments on a new documentary about the Beach Boys, coming to Disney+ on May 24 (for subscribers to that platform).
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: On the outskirts of contemporary London, Adam (Andrew Scott) is a screenwriter for movies and TV, lives in what seems to be a nearly-empty high-rise apartment building, is very isolated and lonely (somber opening shots show the emotional emptiness of his world), not so much because he’s gay but more so as he’s had a morose life since he was 12 when his parents were killed in a car accident, leaving him to be raised by his grandmother. One night he gets a surprise knock on his front door from a downstairs neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal), who says he’s seen Adam watching him from his high-up window, wonders if he’d like some company. Adam’s reluctant, sends Harry away. Next, as Adam’s trying to write a script about his parents he leafs through an old family album, gets on a train out to the suburb where he grew up, finds his old family home, now unoccupied, then meets a man (Jamie Bell) he seems to know, leaving us to believe it’s some sort of hook-up. Instead, we’re now back at the family home where it becomes clear this man is Adam’s father, with his mother (Claire Foy) also inside the house encouraging her son to come in.
The parents are the same age as when they died—35 years ago—so now Adam’s older than them, but despite this strangeness he seems comfortable with them, all engage in easy conversation. Back at his apt. building, Adam again runs into Harry; this time he’s much more accommodating, invites Harry up to his place where they talk (Harry prefers “queer” rather than “gay,” Adam seems more comfortable with the latter), then kiss, then it’s passionate sex (heated, not graphic; this is just an R film, after all). Adam continues to visit his parents who seem to know nothing about their son or the world in general since the time they died, so at one point Adam tells Mom about his sexual orientation; she accepts, concerned not so much about his identity but more about how he’s not sharing his life with anyone. As for Dad, Adam tells him how it hurt when he didn’t come to his son’s room to offer comfort when the kid was crying due to bullying at school; Dad admits his failure as the 2 men reconcile. When Adam’s not with his parents he’s with Harry, having more sex, then going to clubs, but one day he wakes up back in the suburbs, sharing Christmas decorating with the parents, then climbing into bed with them that night, unable to sleep (as he did when he was a small child).*
*During this Christmas-themed scene the soundtrack plays the Pet Shot Boys’ "Always on My Mind". (On their 1987 It Couldn’t Happen Here album; written by Wayne Carson, Johnny Christopher, Mark James, first recorded by Brenda Lee then Elvis Presley in 1972, became a huge hit for Willie Nelson in 1982. Given its lyrics it could easily have been the Musical Metaphor I use at the end of these reviews, but I decided on something else so you decide if I made the right choice.)
Soon, Adam’s coming back to consciousness again, this time on a train where he sees his young self screaming in a window reflection, then wakes up distraught with Harry in the apt. after Harry brought him home due to a panic attack. Adam tells Harry the details of his parents’ deaths, with Dad dying at once, Mom wasting away in the hospital for a few days, Grandma keeping Adam from seeing her because of her horrid condition (he even says he found one of her eyes on the side of the road). Adam finally gets Harry to accompany him to visit the parents, but when they get there the house is empty; however, as they leave Adam sees Mom in a reflection of the front door glass which he pounds until the glass breaks. ⇒The next morning, Adam wakes up with his parents who tell him Harry went home, that he needs to let them go so he can work on building a relationship with Harry. They then go to his favorite childhood restaurant where they ask about their deaths; Adam lies, saying they both died instantly, a relief to Mom, after which they vanish. Returning to his building, Adam goes to Harry’s place, finds the door unlocked but an awful stench inside which Adam traces to Harry’s dead body, followed by Harry’s ghost appearing, distraught Adam saw his corpse, telling his friend he died (suicide?) on that long-ago night of Adam’s first rejection. Adam takes upset ghost-Harry upstairs., comforts him as they spoon in bed, as the image fades away into the night.⇐
So What? All of Us Strangers is adapted from Taichi Yamada’s novel, Strangers (1987), which I know about only through reading a brief summary, but the essential aspects of the film’s plot are there regarding how the protagonist (not gay) is lonely due to divorce and estrangement from his teenage son, then he meets a couple who remind him of his parents, who turn out to be ghosts but of a more menacing type than the ones we encounter in the film. And, for that matter, what are these entities that Adam encounters: ghosts, hallucinations, the projections of some sort of fantasy he’s concocting? Ultimately, that will be up to us to decide because director Haigh doesn’t want to provide a definitive answer, as he notes in his commentary to one of those analysis-of-a-scene videos you’ll find connected to Alissa Wilkinson’s extremely-supportive review farther below in the Bottom Line Final Comments section of this posting. If Adam’s encounters are hallucinations—in one of the club scenes Adam and Harry are taking ketamine (used medically for anesthesia, recreationally for relief from depression and pain), maybe just about everything we see here after the opening, quiet shots is all in Adam’s mind; if not, these ghosts he may be encountering seem to have physical substance so they certainly aren’t pale spirits, but we’ll never know for sure, although the possibilities of what’s going on here certainly make for extended, animated post-viewing discussions.
Even if all we see is simply generated in Adam’s mind, this well-received film is a marvelous exploration into the consciousness of a person whose justifiable-traumas have set him on a course of despair, something we can usefully learn from if we’ve been lucky enough to not having gone to those psychological depths (yet) ourselves or can (hopefully) appreciate as a valid reflection of such emotional loss if we’ve ever been burdened with such emptiness. In regard to my borrowed title for this review, though, All of Us Strangers takes a different twist on the events of The Sixth Sense because in that famous film the kid, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), is a young child who sees ghosts still hanging around in our environment because they haven’t been able to move on yet, telling his story to child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), although in a shocking revelation—no, I’m not going to do my Spoiler alert dance for something that came out a quarter of a century ago—we find out Crowe actually died in a scene early in the film, became a ghost (so he was able to interact with Cole), but denied it to himself until he had to come to grips with the truth. In … Strangers the ghosts—or hallucinations?—only come about due to Adam’s need for comfort/ interpersonal connection so once we find out Harry’s full story—OK, now I do have to move again into Spoiler territory—⇒it may well be that everything we see in this film after Adam initially turns Harry away is just Adam’s projections of what he needs/desires, so none of the depicted events have actually occurred; otherwise, these ghosts in his life have a seemingly-tangible physical existence, but it’s not clear how Harry’s presence (?) is ultimately going to benefit Adam, if at all.⇐ Yet, Adam has come to such a desperate point in his life that however he’s able to share himself with these manifestations, he must have rationalized (like most of us do, at some point[s] in our lives) that this is what he needed, yet where will it take him? But, speaking of rationalizations …
Bottom Line Final Comments: In my previous posting, reviewing the renovated version of The Beatles in their Let It Be documentary (Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 1970), with lots of footage shot near the end of their group-career, I made the point that my intentions for the rest of this year are to focus only on 2024 releases rather than slipping back into those from 2023 now that the Oscars for last year are notably behind us. However, I rationalized that it was acceptable under my own self-restrictions to review Let It Be because Peter Jackson had used the same enhancement technology he’d employed on his own multi-hour Fab Four doc, The Beatles: Get Back (2021), so this revised version of Let It Be (simply improved imagery and sound, not re-editing) seemed proper to me as a re-release available for review just as I had reviewed the truly new re-release (same footage, but new editing, some scenes rearranged) of The Godfather: Part III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990/2020) in our December 17, 2020 posting. Well, this time I’m having to stretch farther in my rationalization of All of Us Strangers as a 2024 release because I normally make that determination based on when something debuts in the domestic market (U.S.-Canada), but in this case that happened in just 4 U.S. theaters on December 22, 2023, then expanded a bit in the weeks after that, first to 42 venues in the first weekend of January, 2024, finally getting up to 275 by the end of that month, almost disappearing during February, then coming back to life again in 205 theaters in early March before completely disappearing (this film seems sort of like a ghost itself) the week after that, having taken in a mere $4 million at the box-office ($20.2 million worldwide). Rationalization valid?
Well, even though this film isn’t as purely a 2024 release as I’d prefer, I’m going with it anyway. Nevertheless, if you want to see it now you’ll need to turn to streaming where you can get it for free on Hulu (if, like me, you take the cheaper subscription, you’ll have to tolerate commercials) or you can pay $5.99 to rent it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, etc. The CCAL certainly joins me in encouraging such action as the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews are a whopping 97% (no misprint, based on 258 reviews), while the usually-lower Metacritic average score is a huge 90%.
As an example of those positives here’s a review from Alissa Wilkinson of The New York Times (this got a 100 score from the MC score-keepers so they obviously find it flawless): “ ‘All of Us Strangers’ acts as a prism through which loneliness and its manifestations are refracted, like colorful light onto a wall. Adam is alone physically, emotionally, mentally and artistically, a man untethered from most everyone. But perhaps his greatest sense of loneliness comes from encounters and experiences that could have happened, but didn’t: the trip he and his parents didn’t take, the Christmas trees they didn’t trim, the conversations they didn’t have about his sexuality, the comfort his father never gave him when he was a boy crying alone in his room. […] We live our lives surrounded by ghosts. […] We are, we know, strangers in our families and in our lives and our cities and our own bodies, and our life’s work is to move from the strange to something approaching the familiar. All, I think, of us.” Of course, you can’t please all of the people all of the time (although it did to take some effort for me to find negative reactions), so here’s a rejection from the unimpressed Gary M. Kramer of the Philadelphia Gay News: “Out gay writer/director Andrew Haigh’s uneven metaphysical romance addresses themes of love, grief, loneliness, trauma and memory, but the film provides more ambiguity than insight. Despite a suitably elegiac mood, this film feels undercooked — when it isn’t too on the nose. […] Haigh provides many clues, but too few answers. ‘All of Us Strangers’ is a slow, contemplative drama that invites viewers to puzzle out the truth. But it is also easy to resist the magical realism, as Adam is frequently waking from sleep, blurring his fantasy and reality. […] ‘All of Us Strangers’ will have its admirers, but the film is more ambitious than good. Despite some strong elements, it lacks the emotional power it strives for. The tone is all heartache and loss, but the melancholy and longing somehow feels too muted and subdued.” Not a fan, huh?
I can’t speak from any direct knowledge in my life as to how well All of Us Strangers addresses a gay man’s longings in particular, but such estrangement as Adam suffers through is a heartbreak anyone probably has felt, can surely relate to as a universal human challenge, presented here in a unique, intriguing set of circumstances I think you’d find fascinating to watch, then puzzle over later.
To close out, I’ll finally get to that official Musical Metaphor I hinted at many a lengthy-paragraph ago, a song called “On My Own” by a likely mostly-unknown Texas musician, B.W. Stevenson* (born a couple of years after me in 1949, died way too early in 1988, saw him once at a concert in Austin—terrific), on the 1972 album named for him at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qo56vm 7XSE. While these lyrics are specifically about a romantic breakup, I think you could metaphorically see such lines as “If I don’t see you before I go / Remember what you’ve seen and what you know […] I want to be on my own / It’s a long way home / I feel like a baby boy just being born” and others could apply to what Adam experiences with his parents and Harry, just as “Get outside your shell / Those things don’t make you well / You’re a broken part of a living fairy tale” could easily be Adam talking to himself. Also, this song brings back melancholy feelings for me given associations it has to my long-ago failed first marriage (fortunately, the current one to Nina works so much better), so any sadness it might generate for any listener is right in line with what we'd come to know here of Adam.
*Decades ago my grandmother married a man named Stevenson (distant cousin of the 1950s Presidential candidate). B.W. was from Dallas, my grandfather was from west Texas near Abilene; I can’t help but wonder if there was any family connection, but no one’s alive now who could help me.
SHORT TAKES
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
(1) Coppola's Megalopolis debuts at Cannes; (2) Theatrical releases to stream/rent at home.
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