Maria Film 2024: Separated, Maria, Kill The Jockey
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Innovative documentarian Errol Morris’s earlier films, like Gates of Heaven about a pet cemetery and the harrowing true-crime story The Thin Blue Line, delved deep into questions of mortality and morality without losing his sense of dry humor. His more recent work is ambivalent. Stream this movie on Flix free Movies. His 2018 film American Dharma, about the political monster Steve Bannon, irritated many audience members here at the Biennale for not criticizing Bannon harshly enough. Maybe he wasn’t criticizing Bannon at all.
I saw this strategy as a kind of reorientation — Morris knew his audience was made up mostly of people with progressive politics, and presenting Bannon as intelligent, cunning, insightful, and sometimes magnetic was a way to show that audience why this man, once called “Sloppy Steve” by the other monsters who used him most constructively, was worth taking seriously.
In any case, perhaps this was an era in which dry humour seemed meaningless to Morris. Nick Lowe sang in "Cracking Up" that "I don't think it's funny anymore," but the Trump administration's policy of separating illegal immigrant children from their parents certainly wasn't funny. This is the subject of Morris' new film, Separate, which I opened at the Venice Film Festival, also known as the Biennale. Morris' film is a solid, infuriating work. There are laughs, but they are of the most poignant kind. By painting portraits of Trumpian figures like Scott Lloyd and Kirsten Nielsen, he shows how the bureaucracy delights in the severity with which it implements "tough" policies, but then grows pale and ultimately blue. They recoil when the public response paints them as sadists. Well, the fish stinks, and this kind of nonsense is typical of President Trump, who gets angry when he thinks people treat him "mean." The film is seen as a wake-up call for a possible second administration.
I've never been particularly fond of the work of Chilean director Pablo Larraín. As I wrote in my review of "Neruda" almost a decade ago, his work tends to be "admirable in its ambition, but ultimately unsatisfying in its execution." And I wanted to be gentle. After "Neruda," I avoided seeing his subsequent films. That means that "Maria," about the opera singer Maria Callas, which I was asked to watch for this magazine, is the only part of Larraín's trilogy of famous women. The second half of the 20th century, or whatever he calls it, that I actually saw.
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