Twenty-one years ago, I saw Mystic River at the Charles here in Baltimore. It was in theater 4 or 5, and was packed like just about every matinee until the 2020s; besides the bracing set piece where Sean Penn discovers that his daughter has been killed, what struck me that day was the atmosphere in the theater—the same feeling that appeared later during screenings of, for example, Syriana, Milk, Fahrenheit 9/11, Spotlight, Goodnight and Good Luck, Shattered Glass, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This was a (relatively) intelligent audience earnestly looking for (relative) edification with their entertainment. In other words, culture.
I like horror movies, but American cinema can’t survive on horror movies, fantasy spectaculars, and children’s movies. One might be tempted to point to the “biopic,” but 20 years ago, this was a chintzy genre that was treated as such: James Mangold’s paint-by-numbers Johnny Cash movie Walk the Line came out in 2005 and got Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar; two years later, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story obliterated the musical biopic for at least a decade. Now, after the enormous success of monstrous mediocrities and outright insults like Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Judy, Back in Black, Mangold has returned unembarrassed with A Complete Unknown, a movie that looks even more phoned-in and fake than a single frame of Walk the Line. Paraphrasing Kurt Cobain upon seeing endless lines for Eagles tickets in early 1994, it’s like Dewey Cox never happened.
Clint Eastwood tried, but Warner Bros. head David Zaslav refused to release his superb Juror #2 in more than 50 theaters; during its brief theatrical run in October and November, it was largely confined to New York and Los Angeles, at least in America; despite glowing reviews from every direction, a stellar cast (Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J. K. Simmons, Zoey Deutch, Cedric Yarborough, Kiefer Sutherland, Chris Messina), and a killer premise, Zaslav insisted on dumping the movie on Max, leaving millions of dollars in the streets and, worse for us, deprived the country of a moviegoing experience leaps and bounds ahead of, say, Conclave, another hit that the Warner Bros. head would’ve doubtless dumped on Max as well if he had the chance.
Hoult is called to a trial; it’s a hit-and-run, and he quickly realizes that he’s the one that did it. The innocent boyfriend is shown to be aggressive in flashbacks, and he’s a member of a well-known gang, but he didn’t kill his girlfriend. Hoult, a recovering alcoholic brought to the breaking point, stared at a glass of whiskey alongside one of his sobriety coins; he drives home panicked and ashamed, and when he hits the woman, he’s startled, but believes he hit a deer or some piece of debris in the road—not a human being.
He never gets close to being caught, but by the end, just about everyone important knows that Hoult did it, or, at the very least, was involved. Like Martin Landau in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, the guilt will gnaw at him for the rest of his life, even as he’s free to start his family with Deutch. The boyfriend may be innocent, but is it a greater loss than the destruction of a new family and an “upstanding, productive member of society”? Two sides of a good argument, no neat solution—in other words, exactly what a movie should be. Calling this “a movie for adults” is an insult to common intelligence; this is the standard we should accept, nothing less.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith