ANIMALS. Setting aside, at least for the moment, his acting and his frequently very public private life, let us consider Ben Affleck as director. Making a startlingly surefooted debut with Gone Baby Gone (2007), which benefitted from Denis Lehane’s solid source novel, he then delivered The Town (2009), a riveting Boston bank-robbery/class-struggle picture that just might be a modern classic. Then it was on to Argo (2012) and a Best Picture trophy (albeit as a producer; no directing nomination) and, one would think, an ongoing success story.
The business of show being what it is, though, Affleck went right into Live By Night (2016), a gangster period piece (maybe passion project?) that turned out to be less than the sum of its parts and was neither particularly well received critically nor commercially. And so began a fallow period, during which he may or may not have been in Director Jail, and which ended with Air (2023), a proudly middle-of-the-road drama about the modern age of sports superstardom and the endorsement economy.
Air, as much as I enjoyed it, strikes me as a decidedly middle-aged-man movie, and they certainly have their place. But it was/is also noteworthy because Affleck moved himself, as actor, to the edge of the frame and, as Phil Knight, remade himself as a goof in ridiculous running tights. It felt like a calculated move, a departure from the seriousness bestowed by awards recognition and the arduous ordeal of making a bootlegging movie set in the Everglades that nobody seemed to like all that much. Air felt appropriately buoyant, but it also had substantial things to say about self-advocacy in the face of corporate greed, and the reclamation of one’s achievements and identity. It also seemed like it might have been a fun project to work on with old friends, which strikes me as a logical trajectory for somebody who has been inside the machine of Hollywood for the better part of four decades.
All of which makes Animals a little confounding. Co-written by Affleck, Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray (one of the few name-brand screenwriters left standing), it would seem to owe its plot to Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963): a mayoral candidate’s son is targeted for kidnapping, but the housekeeper’s boyfriend’s child is abducted instead. The candidate, Mark Kimball (Affleck), having leveraged all his personal assets in his run for the office, is forced to call in a spooky nonpartisan fixer (Gillian Anderson) with ready cash, usurious rates and few compunctions about killing. Within this frame, of course, Mark’s relationship to his therapist wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) is in shambles and we never really find out why the kidnappers want their pound of flesh.
Despite its self-seriousness and near-catastrophic collapse at the climax, Animals is quite good in places. There are moments of brightness and humor amid the dour chaos, and the scenes shared by Affleck, Washington and Steven Yeun (as Kimball’s calculating campaign manager) often sing with the energy of a cast truly in concert. Anderson seems a little out of place with her almost science-fiction take on the character, but for Gillian, all can be forgiven. R. 146M. NETFLIX.
SACRIFICE. Despite (or because of) the fact that I found this compelling, frequently funny and beautiful to look at, I am somewhat troubled by the possibility that its ambition may outstrip its narrative integrity. Which is to say, it is a work touching on, if not grounded in, a number of heavy themes and motifs (climate devastation, greed, celebrity, mythology, self-sacrifice, narcissism, filial piety and loss, to name a few) that are represented aesthetically in the locations, production design and cinematography of the piece, but perhaps not in the journeys and inner lives of the characters within it.
Emerging from a period of self-enforced solitude and ego death, movie star Mike Tyler (Chris Evans) has chosen a ne plus ultra self-aggrandizement party costumed as a climate change summit. Put on by the probably dastardly industrial titan Ben Bracken (Vincent Cassel, excellent as always) and his pop-star wife Gloria (Salma Hayek-Pinault), the ridiculousness of the event is highlighted by Tyler’s ill-timed, worse-informed grandstanding, which is then upstaged by a terrorist cell intent on placating a volcano via human sacrifice.
The starkness of the movie’s settings, the interplay between the natural and the manufactured, the folkloric and the technocentric, create a not-inharmonious feeling of tension, of objects in motion. And the cast, given not infrequent opportunities to make fun of themselves and each other, are obviously in on something, together. I’m just not sure that the narrative impulse to default to uncertainty, rather even than to ambiguity, is actually in service of anything greater than artifice. Gorgeous artifice, it must be said, but absent as much gravity and import as it would seem to self-ascribe. R. 103M. NETFLIX.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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For showtimes, visit catheaters.com and minortheatre.com.
This article appears in The Eureka Chinatown Monument.