Issue #88: Making A Comeback 🎯

Welcome to Thirty, Flirty + Film on Beehiiv, our newest home for this sweet little newsletter of ours. For those of you keeping track at home: Knock it off; what is modern media, if not a series of frying pan platforms to surf the fires of content on?

Plus we’re on to bigger things — namely our latest issue! First up, we’ve got Cate on Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, with Denzel Washington and Lee’s delightful idiosyncrasies. Then Zosha previews next week’s release of The Smashing Machine, the new A24 movie starring Dwayne Johnson as a fighter (if you can imagine it). Movies!

If there’s one thing that cements a director as an auteur, it’s their style. If I asked you to picture a Wes Anderson, Emerald Fennell, M. Night Shyamalan or Greta Gerwig film, it’s likely you wouldn’t have much trouble conjuring an image that gestures at their favored visual landscapes. Spike Lee is also one such director. But in Highest 2 Lowest, his most familiar stylistic impulses may not have served him well.

Starring Denzel Washington, Highest 2 Lowest follows music industry mogul David King as he navigates an ill-fated ransom plot — just as he’s scrambling to find the money to buy back the majority interest in his legendary music label before an impending corporate buyout. 

Having seen far fewer of Lee’s films than I should have, it’s difficult to parse how many of the creative choices he makes here are ambitious but unsuccessful, versus hackneyed and cliché. But if Tom Cruise gets to run fast and ride motorcycles in all 1200 of his films, I can hardly begrudge Lee his signature dolly shot. 

Highest 2 Lowest — a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low — is billed as a crime thriller, but for much of the film, it feels like Lee didn’t quite get the memo. What on the surface should be a taut, tension-filled fight to the finish, reads instead as a languid stroll through the melodramatic scenes of a mediocre drama. Chief culprit is the film’s soundtrack and score. Plodding and obvious, the film’s various musical cues repeatedly function as invasive interruptions to the performances onscreen. And it’s a pity, because the movie is chock-full of them. 

In one such scene, Paul (Jeffery Wright) — David’s driver and confidante — begs David to pay the ransom for his son Kyle. It turns out he’s been mistakenly snatched by the kidnappers instead of David’s own son, Trey. With gestures at a fraught past and deep friendship we learn little about, Paul confronts David, begging his oldest friend to save his son. But $17.5 million isn’t chump change, and they both know David already had plans for that money. It’s an emotional scene that hammers in the stakes of the sticky situation they’re both in. 

Wright’s work here is subtle but affecting. Already boiling near the surface because of repeated confrontations with the cops who’ve set up shop in the Kings’ penthouse, he conveys the extraordinary restraint it’s taking for him to keep himself together long enough to make the ask in the first place. But you’d be forgiven for missing Wright’s deft touch, because the heavy-handed string score will undoubtedly wrestle your attention into a vise grip. It’s a frustrating choice from Lee, because it undermines not just Wright’s performance (easily the standout in the film) but the story itself. It’s a pivotal scene in the story’s narrative, it’s overshadowed by an apparent overfondness for bombast. 

Now, I’m on the record as being a huge fan of bombast. Luhrmann isn’t a favourite because of his skill with a script. But with the choices made here? Eyes closed you’d think this movie was a WWII period drama about a middle class white woman and her soon-departing longtime love. A film’s music holds its mood, and with few exceptions, the musical choices in Highest 2 Lowest are incongruent to the point of incomprehensibility. 

That’s not to say there is nothing to credit the film. A police chase set piece that runs through New York’s Puerto Rican Day Parade is one of the only parts of the film injected with the kind of adrenaline a story like this demands. Inventively staged and enjoyable to follow, it’s also one of the few scenes that isn’t overrun by the humdrum of a soporific score. Unfortunately, once the excitement is over, it mostly serves to highlight the listlessness of the rest of the project.

Alongside Wright, we can take for granted that Washington turns in an excellent performance. But it’s still quite something to watch him work. At 70, his acting style is well-refined and recognizable — he deploys familiar physical tics and rhythmic patter to great effect. You can see a “Denzel Washington” performance coming from far over the horizon. But what’s exciting is seeing the way he uses those affectations not as a crutch, but as clay he’s free to mold as the situation demands. It takes high level expertise to make infinite new dishes from the same few ingredients. When he tugs at his ear to focus David’s “best ears in the business” or flashes his big impish grin to charm his way into his son’s good graces, the gestures feel unique, despite being a staple of Washington’s long career.

ASAP Rocky leaves his mark too, as the kidnapper and would-be rap superstar Yung Felon, who idolizes King. In his first major scene with Washington — a standoff in a recording booth — his turn is effective. The careless bravado of a young man with little to lose comes through loud and clear. Without more of his work to compare it to, I’m unsure if Rocky’s performance here is stellar, or if the character is simply well-pitched to the tenor of his natural demeanor. Either way, he stands his ground against one of our greatest living actors with a presence that feels both engaging and believable. That alone is a feat that should be credited to him. 

It’s to the movie’s detriment though that we don’t actually learn very much about our characters. David used to own his label now he doesn’t. Paul is an ex-con of unknown origin or motivation. His young son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) is principled and likes basketball. And his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) apparently has a thing for much older men. Ironically, we learn the most about Rocky’s Yung Felon — history, dreams and grudges included. 

But despite the film’s many scabbed-over flaws, what it lacks in momentum and taste, it makes up for with style. Gorgeous, sprawling views of the New York skyline feature prominently, stalking David as his life falls apart; and his command of the city’s riches with it. The Kings’ penthouse is immaculately appointed, with reproductions of art from Lee’s personal collection dotting the walls, emphasizing their wealth and reinforcing King as a mythic tastemaker. Even the costuming is easy but studied, doing more to flesh out the inner lives of these characters than even the script itself.

And it makes sense. After all, Lee is nothing if not a stylist; his output routinely resembles that of a dandy — loudly preening and fawning at its own cleverness. But it’s an earned kind of smugness. It can be forgiven when it rankles. 

Highest 2 Lowest is ultimately a meal in need of a recipe. Because all the ingredients are there.

Mark Kerr can’t relate. That’s the note that The Smashing Machine sets in its opening moments, as we watch him undertake his first UFC fight in Brazil. The room itself is nothing special; some mirrored tile and a fighting ring in the middle of what feels like a repurposed hotel ballroom. But for Mark (played by Dwayne Johnson), the gates of heaven have been opened. His voiceover from an interview tells us about how he lets his “animal instinct” take over, spoken with all the wonder of a child who has just encountered real magic for the first time. He waxes philosophical all while we watch him kick a guy’s face in, ducking down to take a fighter out by lifting him from the knees. His dreamy tone doesn’t square with the brutality of UFC fighting; that’s the point.

This is Mark Kerr, and this is The Smashing Machine, a movie that revels in highlighting the gulf between man and myth, and, in the end, the legend he helped create. This is not the high-roller sport we know it as now. It’s the upstart beginnings, the humble era when an honest fighter still had to hustle to make his way in that world and find some balance to its innate harshness. To borrow from a different sport, Smashing Machine calls its shot early, demonstrating a lesson it will drill into its audience with all the vigor that Mark approaches his bouts with. And in the end, that’s really all the movie is.

The film itself takes place between 1997 and 2000, a tumultuous couple of years for Mark Kerr, who’s struggling with an opioid addiction and relationship problems with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), on top of self-esteem issues. It’s a point of pride for him that he has never lost a match; when an interviewer asks him to imagine what it would be like, he chuckles and says he simply can’t. Everywhere he goes he has a serenity to him, speaking softly and politely about the sport and his golden track record. RIP to the others, but he’s different.

Until he isn’t: One bout in Japan goes wrong (either because of shoddy reffing, as he believes, or because perfect records are no way to survive), and suddenly his sense of self is in total disarray. It’s here that writer-director Benny Safdie’s skill is at its strongest. Safdie lets the camera lurk like a spectral voyeur, one that Mark actively turns to hide his tears from as long as he can on the way back from his fight. We see Mark’s life as captured through reflections — an elderly lady in the doctor’s office side-eyeing his bruised face; Dawn hugging him close as he processes in a dressing room, the mirror’s edges distorting their quiet moment.

Like so much of The Smashing Machine, this is an interesting thought that doesn’t advance much. Safdie doesn’t evolve the visual language, and even in the dizzy, handheld kaleidoscope of Mark’s world that the film wants to render it renders the movie a bit monotonous. (The percussive jazz soundtrack doesn’t help.) It matches Mark’s external zen: Intriguing, but shallow. As it skips through the standard sports movie conundrums, the repetition and remove start to betray a lack of something substantial to say, or at least a lack of resolve about the whole things.

That’s not true everywhere: Johnson plays Mark fully rounded, a facade that has grown self aware. And he’s best rendered when he and Blunt get to pinch apart the toxic relationship their characters have, and Mark’s own with his self. On first blush, they are well-paired if oppositional: She’s flashy and he’s practical; Mark is a champagne Land Cruiser to Dawn’s bright red convertible he can hardly fit in.

As a sports movie — whether in the self immolation or the drug use — Smashing Machine is standard; not fully rote, but nothing special. Despite Safdie’s best efforts, his affinity for capturing a “truer self” in the interstitials (like listening to the national anthem play alongside his friend and possible challenger) feels a bit too underwhelming. It’s the relationship drama where the film feels like it actually has something to say. From the jump, Dawn is insecure about how much access she really has to Mark’s world (be that the literal fights he has, or the inner turmoil he wrestles with). She tries to understand the high he gets, but sees the way he locks in when he talks to other fighters and talks around her attempts at interest. Blunt lets that insecurity splash over, sometimes as anxious pleas and other times as outright barbs. And it’s in these scenes, Johnson’s Mark feels most clearly formed, a human being pushed and pushing himself to a breaking point in more ways than one. For all his peaceful veneer, Mark lashes out like a solar flare when he’s alone with Dawn. Her attempts to relate curdle in the face of his attempts at serenity, and they’re both rendered venomous as a result.

It’s a messy relationship, but a deeply human one. And in these moments, it often feels like the movie fell in to a better version of itself than it meant. The focus on the two of them reveals so much both about them as characters, about Mark’s mental state, about how our relationships alchemically soak up the basest parts of ourselves, for better or worse.

This is the crux of Smashing Machine: The idea that we are best captured less by our desires, our dreams, our demands on this world, and more in the way that we are what we leave behind. And ultimately this is where the film falls short, too meek to say much about real people and, thus, trapped by an unwillingness to really marry the realities of history with the needs of story. In the end, the film’s interest in what that means peters out like so many standard sports movies of yore; a man did his best, and there is something to appreciate there. But the most interesting parts of Smashing Machine — the kind that actually linger with you and lurk around your thoughts — are the parts that are most specific to Mark and the realities, for better or worse, of his world. The Smashing Machine’s Mark Kerr can’t relate. That’s the point.

Do you ever catch yourself idly thinking these days: What could a major solar storm do to our planet? The joy of persona! Jimmy Kimmel Live! returned — the opening monologue crystallized something bleak. (And reminder: This is who Charlie Kirk was.) Which! Brother! Do! I! Pick?????? And my current work in progress: The Crypto Maniacs and the Torture Townhouse.

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Zosha + Cate <3