Wesley Morris

I keep a file on my phone labeled Wellness. It’s got zero fitness tips and no meditation advice. It’s full, instead, of stuff about Gwyneth Paltrow movies. Like how, in “A Perfect Murder,” she buys Viggo Mortensen a fancy espresso maker and tells him, “You could use a little civilizing.” I called my Paltrow file Wellness because, last year, I thought it’d be amusing to find some overlap between her acting and Goop, her lifestyle brand. How many times had a Paltrow character tried to upgrade the lives of the people around her, just as a matter of taste, like that espresso machine or the matchmaking she tries to do in “Emma”?

But I had to stop, because eventually — and I mean after two movies — it was clear that the average Paltrow character doesn’t get to make anybody’s life much better because somebody’s always making hers worse. Imagine playing a pregnant woman who sits around a dingy apartment, as Paltrow does in “Se7en,” while Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt hunt the psycho who, at some point, removes your head then boxes it up like it’s a hat from eBay. Imagine playing the girlfriend of suspiciously missing Jude Law and having to run for your life, as Paltrow does in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” because Matt Damon knows that you know he killed your man? And “A Perfect Murder”? It’s supposed to be hers!

Now, there’s a kind of person who’d remember her decapitation and feel kittens-on-the-internet happy, because there’s a kind of person who just doesn’t like Gwyneth Paltrow.

This person probably would have felt this way before there was ever a Goop. The tearful, gushing (utterly sincere) Oscar speech from 1999 would have set this person off. As well as the comedy about the loser who loves a fat version of Paltrow because he can see her true, beautiful inner self, and she’s skinny Gwyneth. And the fact that she dated Pitt and Ben Affleck, that she married the guy from Coldplay and named their first child after orchard fruit.

Maybe that kind of person dislikes the permanent pout of her mouth or her mild patrician drawl, the private-school privilege of it all. Maybe her brightness and ambient affluence are too “debutante” for them.

There’s a kind of person who watched the virus thriller “Contagion,” heard Paltrow’s grim opening line (“[cough, cough]”) and grinned: She’s so doomed. When two scientists peel back the top of her lifeless head (eyes still frozen in shock, mouth agape) so that it and her blonde hair cover half her face, there’s a kind of person who laughed out loud, not only because Steven Soderbergh shoots it so that it is kind of funny but because, again, they do not like Gwyneth Paltrow.

I am not that kind of person. I’m the kind of person who, when Paltrow collapses on her kitchen floor, gandered gravely at his watch (We’re only eight minutes in?); who, when she’s pronounced dead a minute later, seriously searched for the nearest exit — and this is a Soderbergh movie, one with Damon, Law, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne and Sanaa Lathan.

So, no: I am some other kind of person, the kind of who believes that Paltrow was, for a while, the best young American actor in Hollywood. She’s still among the very last generation of movie performers — including Cotillard and Cate Blanchett, Winslet and Nicole Kidman — for whom stardom and skill seem scarily, thrillingly natural.

I love the whine in Paltrow’s flirtation, the shock of her rage, how she can go from luminous to lost just like that, how she’s able to summon worry, misery and rue 70 different ways in a single performance. I was drawn to her intelligence and her radiance and the swings of her mood, improbably perhaps, but not really.

Lots of the women she’s played tend to exist on estates, in mansions and academia, but hers isn’t the acting of entitlement, the brattiness of privilege. If she laughed, I laughed. If she ached, I did, too. Damn the gentry. If Jessica Lange or Matt Damon is coming after her, I’m calling the police.

The end of the 1990s and start of the 2000s was High Paltrow. Everybody knew she was going to be major. They knew not because Harvey Weinstein, who made a string of Miramax movies with her, willed it but because people who went to the movies said so.

Noting that she made 15 films in five years is more weather report than adulation. But she made great weather — partly cloudy in “Sliding Doors,” partly sunny in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Great Expectations,” hazy in “Hush,” stormy in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” perfectly clear in “Shakespeare in Love.”

These were movies people liked (mostly). People seemed to like her in these movies. They gave her an Oscar for that last one, and something about that moment seemed to alter the forecast. Could it have been all the crying in the speech and the princess-pink Ralph Lauren dress? Or the idea that she beat Blanchett and Fernanda Montenegro, who complained to the Brazilian press that Paltrow won for being a “romantic figure, thin, pure, virginal”? Or the idea that Weinstein had manufactured her a win that came too soon, whatever that would even mean? Either way, something had changed.

That Wellness file of mine was a shallow excuse to write about a favorite performer who, in the last decade or so, appeared to lose her zest for performing. I, at least, had trouble making do with her alongside Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, playing Pepper Potts, his assistant then partner then wife then co-Avenger then widow. She was breezy with him, but where was the beef?

Between Marvel movies, I’d take what I could get. That meant watching her, on the Goop site, slice pork with Jon Favreau, drink margaritas with Seamus Mullen; fry chicken with John Legend — well, he fried his; she baked hers. Was Paltrow hiding, taking a vacation, retiring, making absurdly savvy business decisions? She’s got a good part, as a mansion-dwelling mommy with a secret life, on a new Netflix show called “The Politician.”

The middle has gone out of the movies. And the middle was where Paltrow lived. Where else, besides streaming, would she even go now? Still, how could a person who seemed to act all the time, and at the height of her talent, gradually stop acting? Were there no roles that challenged her? She’s 47 now: Were there just no roles?

But last week, I finished “She Said,” a stressful new book by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey about, in part, how they broke the Weinstein sexual harassment story for The New York Times. In an epilogue there is a gathering of a dozen very different women (lawyers, a fast-food worker, Christine Blasey Ford) at Paltrow’s home where they talk about their experiences surviving and fighting back against a range of men. Among these women, she discloses the discovery that, even though she resisted him, Weinstein had been exploiting her success to prey upon women: How do you think Gwyneth has what she has?

“That has by far been the hardest part of this,” she tells the group, “to feel like a tool in coercion of rape.”

Weinstein’s effect on the many women he’s alleged to have harassed, assaulted and worse remains largely private. For the actors, maybe he actively cost them work. Maybe what he did to them changed their relationship to their work.

I’ve spent two years wondering whether Paltrow’s taste for acting had diminished because of that man, whether having his company seem synonymous with some of her strongest, most popular work compelled her to start a company of her own, one where the work concerned not acting but being, being whole, being better, being ridiculously better.

How much power does a female actor truly have in Hollywood? Not just autonomous power, but the power to completely protect yourself from predation? Why not build something that doesn’t control you because it’s yours? Intelligence is an essential component of Paltrow’s screen self. She rerouted that intelligence into the kind of workplace some people wish they had.

But I’ve spent a couple of years wondering about the work, too, her old work. I went back to a lot of it. And that dopey Wellness file became a catalog of the ferociously unwell. Melancholic widowhood in “Bounce.” Manic-depression in “Proof.” It’s true that somebody was always trying to kill Paltrow. But then she started trying to kill herself. Suicidal depression in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Suicide in “Country Strong.” Drug addiction with suicidal depression in “Two Lovers.” A molten incarnation of Sylvia Plath in “Sylvia.”

It’s true that she was funny in her minute or so as Dixie Normous in “Austin Powers in Goldmember” and that she tried (too hard) to be, as a flight attendant in “View From the Top.” It’s also true that the dark parts were juicy and played to her capacity for making the most vivid music out of fraying psychological noise. Paltrow won that Oscar basically for playing the sun. But she’s even more astonishing in black holes.

But maybe you get tired of all that darkness, of the suffering, of the being made to suffer. Maybe you really do just want the lightness of celebration, the benefit of salves and powders and whatever a jar of ashwagandha purports to do for you.

Looking for personal clues in somebody’s acting is probably a folly. The words are a writer’s. And the direction usually comes from someone else. But I kept wondering anyway. Was this woman working through — working against — something else? I’m that kind of person, the kind who hears a theater full of people cheer half her face being covered by scalp and wants to cry. The excellence in her acting — even as a corpse — is a key in the lock of my humanity. It’s hard to watch her suffer. It’s hard to know she’s suffered — and that suffering has always felt bigger than any one character — or, really, any one actor. It’s felt representative.

In “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Paltrow plays Marge, a 1950s coed, who starts off with some of Grace Kelly’s glamour and exits with lots of Kelly’s disillusionment. The movie is a Hitchcockian potboiler, a Weinstein production directed by Anthony Minghella, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel and set in the poshest parts of Italy. At some point, Marge’s boyfriend, Dickie, vanishes, and she becomes increasingly certain that his creepy pal, Tom, is responsible. She discovers proof off camera and disturbs Tom’s bath to angrily confront him. He receives her wrapped in a towel, yells at her to shut up and when he tries to grab her, he drops the towel and exposes himself.

She jumps and gasps. One hand covers her eyes, the other an ear. He retreats to put on some clothes. But she stands there, her mouth still hidden by the fist she’s making, like a shocked little girl who’s seen a young man explode into a monster. She attempts to leave. Tom tries to talk her into staying, by bad-mouthing Dickie, by telling her that he loves her, better even than he loved Dickie, better than Dickie loved her. She backs into the door, and the closer he moves, the more terrified she becomes, weeping and shivering at the same time. His boyishness becomes psychotically serene. “Can I hold you? Will you let me hold you?” he asks, moving closer in.

It’s a scenario reminiscent of so many accounts by Weinstein’s accusers, including the one that Paltrow has told — the isolation, the menacing persistence, the terror. And here’s a cinematic version of it. Except Marge is saved when her friend, Peter, opens the door: “Get me out of here!”

Who knows what Marge will do after a boat drags her out of the movie, away from trying, uselessly, to beat a confession out of Tom? But she knows the truth. And the world doesn’t care. These are 15 of the best, most suspenseful minutes of Paltrow’s career. And they could stand in for all the shrewd, magnetic, unhinged work she’s done. There’s a kind of person who’ll remember her in this movie and maybe behold her on “The Politician” and hope it’s work she still believes is worth doing.

This article originally appeared in

(Critic's Notebook)

A Natural at Fusing Stardom and Skill

Once upon a time, we made do with less television. Three broadcast networks dominated everything. (Channels weren’t flipped so much as triangulated.) We had a local public station and whatever oldies a UHF signal could tune in. Now? Now, we romanticize our cable-assisted, internet-borne so-called golden age and carp about the galactic girth of the streaming era. Somebody even lent the girth a fretful name: “peak TV” — the “money can’t buy happiness” of screen life.

In retrospect, less television has come to imply lesser — by volume, by value, by verisimilitude. But what was “Friends” lesser than? There are 236 episodes of it, merely one fewer than a combined tally of “Game of Thrones,” “House of Cards,” and “Orange Is the New Black.” Most of those episodes are perfect as tidy comedies. Maybe it’s hard to think of “Friends” as perfect, let alone as great, because it looked easy.

Most “old TV” looked easy — even when characters broke up, bled and died. That’s because, even when they did, they were obviously not in a movie. TV now is the movies, so we love it more. We believe it more. For its entire existence, the American sitcom was anti-cinematic, beholden to the demands of advertisers.

Before there was too much TV, there was simply a lot, including a lot of NBC’s “Friends.” Think about the effort required to make about 24 episodes in a nine-month season (certain scripted shows somehow made more). This was impossible work that we at home took for granted. A network like NBC could turn “granted” into “mandatory” with maximal FOMO threat. “Let’s all be there,” it demanded in the 1980s. A decade later, we had to be there for “Must See TV.” Technologically, it was an uncertain age. If you missed an episode, who knew when you’d be able to catch it again?

“Friends” was easy TV at an elite level. So many jokes, so much body comedy, so many surprises and awwws, and squeals of live studio audience excitement. Hairdressers were doing — and not infrequently botching — the Rachel. Coffee shops became people’s second homes. Tens of millions of Americans watched all of that writing and directing and acting, all of that seemingly effortless effort, for all 10 of its years. That work and a country’s devotion to it feels like proof of a golden age of something.

Familiarity is the magnet of every decent American sitcom. The “com” can’t compete alone and neither can the “sit,” even though, together, they’re obviously quite the sandwich. But the many nights I’ve spent recumbent on my sofa laughing at, say, Ross and Phoebe debating evolution, or Phoebe, Joey and Ross impersonating Chandler, or Chandler blanching at Monica’s desperate new cornrows or Rachel taking forever to tell somebody who the father of her baby is — those nights have never really been about the situation comedy of “Friends.” They’ve only ever been about us — me and these six people — and my apparently enduring need to know what they’re up to and how they are, even though I’ve known for 25 years.

“Friends” debuted on NBC in the fall of 1994, ran for an entire decade, typically had around 25 to 30 million viewers a week (sometimes many more) and now airs in Nickelodeon’s Nick @ Nite block, which my cable conglomerate has stationed near the top of the channel pyramid. That means if you’re a chronologist like me, the five-channel trip from NY1 — past the local news, TNT and “The Simpsons” — always terminates at Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross. Laziness is a factor. (Do you use the number keys on your remote? I’ll bet you don’t even have a remote at this point.)

But, really, it’s simplicity. “Friends” actually is enormously easy to watch. The genius of “Seinfeld” (and “The Simpsons,” too) has everything to do with the “com” arising from the “sit.” What trouble will Jerry and the gang instigate? Whether you’re watching an episode for the first time or the 27th, the inciting premise is a major element of the pleasure. The premise of “Friends” is the friends.

Of course, the friends started out with a touch of the Jerrys. They, too, were a white cohort living in New York City (the West Village rather than Seinfeld’s Upper West Side). And many an early episode involved defending social etiquette (“Those are not the rules!” Ross barks at a foe in a laundromat) and trying out twisted dating schemes (Monica and Joey try to bust up a couple in order to have the newly single partners for themselves). But on “Seinfeld,” the city and the characters’ righteous belief in their own norms spurred them on to increasingly lunatic misanthropy. They were anti-socialites.

Matters of behavior and economic inequality only seemed to bring them together. Take the show’s 29th episode. Everybody goes out for a nice dinner to celebrate Monica’s promotion, and Phoebe, Joey and Rachel order the cheapest items on the menu, then balk at evenly dividing the bill. Income turns those three against the other three, until Monica loses her job and Joey valiantly offers to pay for her $4 coffee — with Chandler’s money. The theme song didn’t lie: They really were there for each other, punchlines and all. That thereness was the show’s intangible hook. The writers could engineer plots for the directors to orchestrate. But these six actors working together, on anything, on nothing — it was the highlight of many a person’s week. That thereness was phenomenally elastic, too. These were six people who could snipe at one another, who could fight and lie and practice what we’d now call radical honesty yet keep so many secrets, who can break up (many times, in many ways) but, as a sextet, keep snapping back together. I like them that way, as half a dozen. I like them in tandems and trios, as human math problems, as chemistry experiments. Maybe 10 times I’ve watched Chandler, Joey and Monica break down and confess to the other three that, yes, Chandler did pee on Monica’s jellyfish sting.

I don’t know how many takes that sequence took or how much caffeine was consumed. But it’s never less than a marvel of harmonized hysterics. That kind of exclamatory, high-energy comedy could happen in any configuration of the cast because it was the best such collection in the history of television. Other hall-of-fame comedies, like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Cheers,” had wits and jesters and clowns mixed in among the goody-goodies and grumps. Some, like “All in the Family” and the first few seasons of “Designing Women,” were all zingers, personality and delivery before the whole thing went to schtick. A few permanently watchable jewels like “The Golden Girls” and “Frasier” sneaked in a combo platter of slapstick, vinegar and fuzzies. But the proportions were bigger on “Friends.” They went for more, more often, and rarely missed.

For one thing, the actors had more to play with. The “Friends” friends started out as types. Rachel was a princess, Monica a control freak, Joey a dumb actor. But the types kept recombining.

Ross seemed like a geek because his paleontology was frequently mocked and there’s something gluey in the music of David Schwimmer’s whine. But Ross was sad, needy, insecure, quick to anger — dark, basically — and built like a jock. Phoebe evolved rapidly from hippie naïf to schemer, dreamer, peacekeeper, and pot-stirrer. In another era, she’d have been the “Three’s Company”-era Suzanne Somers of the bunch, a hapless bombshell. But Lisa Kudrow, with her akimbo intelligence, brought the part in sideways. Not far into the show’s run, actually, some of the six are watching TV and Chandler, in Matthew Perry’s contagious sardonic snark, says “I think this is the episode of ‘Three’s Company’ where’s there’s some kind of misunderstanding.”

“Then I’ve already seen this,” Phoebe snaps and turns off the TV.

“Friends” could easily have been “Three’s Company,” where “sit” and “com” strained credibility. Chandler was so frequently presumed gay that he could have been Jack Tripper, the faux-mosexual from the other show. And Matt LeBlanc played Joey like Somers but by way of Tony Danza. That probably would have made Courteney Cox the Joyce DeWitt of “Friends” — neutrally sane. For a few episodes at least, Cox, as Monica, seemed meant as the crux of the pack. Monica was Ross’ sister. Rachel was an old high school friend who became her roommate.

But halfway through Season 1, it was clear this boat had no captain, just a lot of oars. And the rowing Cox did has never received its due. She wasn’t as rubbery a funny person as Perry and Schwimmer or as radiant and tangy in her approach to comedy as Jennifer Aniston was as Rachel. She couldn’t physicalize sarcasm and shock with as much cursive and calculus as the other five. But athletic gumption launched Monica entirely beyond classification.

I mean, I guess her type was Type A. Monica made the most psychological sense, as a former fat person who’s holding onto whatever it took to shed the weight and keep it off. We can shake our heads now at the idea of the show’s laughing at her size through the fat suit Cox wears in flashbacks. These flashbacks also explain why she seemed to think everything was grist for competition, why winning and losing mattered so much to her, why control was so important. And Monica lost so much control, so much cool, so much coolness. Each actor managed to do a lot with intensity, but Cox made it a state of Monica’s mind.

People now ding “Friends” for all kinds of offenses — regarding homosexuality, mental health, race, interracial dating, ethnicity. (Here’s pregnant Rachel, exasperated by the surfeit of gift diapers at her shower: “What are we feeding this baby — Indian food?”) “Friends”-as-problematic disserves the show’s complex relationship to those issues. Sometimes it winked at them. Monica did a lot of winking, especially under a spell of casual blackness. Her cornrows and Chandler’s disdain for them were one thing. My favorite, though, is the time she comes down with a cold but refuses to give up on sex with Chandler. He’d rather not. She comes at him anyway, in a bathrobe as plush and scarlet as a Muppet, full of mucus and the R&amp;B; of Guy. “Are you saying,” she asks, thrusting her body at her man, “that you don’t wanna. Git. With. This?” It’s peak Monica: addicted to victory, unlimitedly white.

There’s a way to watch “Friends” so that its very whiteness — and the associated entitlement — is the problem. That magical casting configuration probably couldn’t happen now without considerable umbrage — umbrage I’d understand. For a great while during “Friends”-mania, Eriq La Salle, of “ER,” was just about the biggest star on a smash-hit show who wasn’t white. “Friends” gave you white people who leave infants on city buses without consequence, who only rarely face a challenge to their permanent spot at Central Perk (for many years, a “reserved” card rested on the coffee table). But I’m not sure this was the show to do the labor, to open those doors with the same alacrity.

“Friends” could never have had, say, Joey drop by a black party in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and tell Chandler how strange or exhilarating an experience it was without it also becoming a Very Special Episode. For some of its run, “Friends” aired opposite “Living Single,” on Fox, a good, “Friends”-ish show that was also the black party. As it is, Ross and Joey did date nonwhite women without their race being even a point of interest in the 1990s and 2000s, and even if that seems willfully naïve, it actually did feel special.

“Friends” made most of its social bets on gender differences, the way men get away with being chauvinists and lust buckets and layabouts, and the women have to pick up the slack. But tweaking the stereotypes became a meaningful staple of the show. Once, the girls’ failure to know the boys as well as the boys knew them cost Monica and Rachel their apartment. To be fair: Do you know what Chandler does for a living? Nonetheless, their place suddenly belongs to Joey and Chandler. It remains a shocking turn of events. I watched the early years of this show with roommates in the dorm of a college where bad housing could ruin friendships. I wasn’t watching a comedy that night. I was watching a cautionary tale. The show knew our loyalties were with the women and that Monica might not survive making breakfast in a man cave. So it refused to shake the Etch A Sketch. She unleashes a scream of “no” fit for no sitcom. It belonged in “Hamlet.”

“Friends” left prime-time television in 2004, just as the culture began to distrust meaningful intergender adventure. Its offspring — “How I Met Your Mother,” “The Big Bang Theory” “The Mindy Project,” “New Girl,” the short-lived masterpiece of repartee “Happy Endings” — did their best. But “Sex and the City,” which hit HBO in 1998, and the movies that sprang from Judd Apatow’s laugh factory would so convincingly relocate the sexes into ladies’ nights and boys’ clubs that the culture never quite came to reinvest in the coed comforts of a Central Perk.

“Friends” wasn’t a fantasy during its original run. But I can see why so many people who weren’t alive the first time around have devoured the show on cable and streaming like it’s a tub of ice cream. (I know of a 10-year-old as “Friends” conversant as I am.) There are no sexual threats, just Monica, her robe and her cold; just a vengeful guest star, in Julia Roberts, stranding Chandler in a pair of her underwear as comeuppance for a preadolescent prank; just a last run of Rubik’s Cube hookups and occasionally vaguely funny lechery. Otherwise, the show was an oasis: adult women hanging out with adult men, with no monsters to fear, run from or prosecute. That could explain why droves of us are addicted to it. Sure, it’s excellent Easy TV — funnier, dirtier and more audacious than you heard it was, than you remember it being. But maybe, now, “Friends” is a fantasy. If you’re looking to restore some thereness to your life, maybe it’s more than must-see TV. Maybe it’s a clue.

'Friends' Is Turning 25. Here's Why We Can't Stop Watching it.

(Critic’s Notebook)

I come from a family with a history of zero fanciness. Cleaners and drivers and coaches and catch-as-catch-can. Few diplomas, fewer degrees. But the women liked to read. Gloria Naylor and Sidney Sheldon. Stephen King and Danielle Steel. A man once left my Aunt Marge’s place with her copy of “Roots” like it was a piece of Tupperware, and she cursed him for years. The book wasn’t for dinner.

Reading a novel was entertainment and a point of pride. Reading a Toni Morrison novel was group therapy. My aunts, my mother and her friends would tackle “Beloved” in sections then get on the phone to run things by one another. With all due respect to the recently deceased Judith Krantz, I don’t recall them needing to do that for “Scruples.”

They admired the stew of a Morrison novel, the elegant density of its language — the tapestry of a hundred-word sentence, the finger snap of a lone word followed by a period, the staggering depictions of lust, death, hair care, lost limbs, baking and ghosts. Morrison made her audiences conversant in her — the metaphors of trauma, the melodramas of psychology. She made them hungry for more stew: ornate, disobedient, eerie literary inventions about black women, often with nary a white person of any significance in sight. The women in my family were reading a black woman imagining black women, their wants, their warts, how the omnipresence of this country’s history can make itself known on any old Thursday.

I wanted to feel what my mother felt, to know what made her mouth crack open like that or her eyebrows arch toward her scalp like a stretching cat. So, in my senior year of high school, I stole her new copy of “Jazz,” from 1992, the time-shuffling love story (among a man, his wife, and his dead mistress) that Morrison wrote after “Beloved” and which therefore wilted, unfairly, in its shadow. Much of the writing, seen through the eyes of a wise-weary narrator, is an achievement of attitude. But of all the arresting paragraphs in that book, this one actually cuffed me.

“Anything that happens after this party breaks up is nothing. Everything is now. It’s like war. Everyone is handsome, shining just thinking about other people’s blood. As though the red wash flying from veins not theirs is facial makeup patented for its glow. Inspiriting. Glamorous. Afterward there will be some chatter and recapitulation of what went on; nothing though like the action itself and the beat that pumps the heart. In war or at a party everyone is wily, intriguing; goals are set and altered; alliances rearranged.”

My mother is gone now, so I’ll always wonder if this is a paragraph that put a smile on her face. Or maybe it was just the book’s very first words: “Sth, I know that woman.”

That “Sth” is the sound of a woman sucking her teeth. For me, it was the second coolest use of “onomatopoeia” after learning how to say “onomatopoeia.” It was also distinctly black. That the “s” wasn’t a “5” but a syllable of vernacular disdain brought me into a world that I didn’t want to leave. A life spent savoring Toni Morrison, both as a novelist and a scalding, scaldingly moral literary critic, makes clear that almost no one has better opening sentences.

“He believed he was safe.” (“Tar Baby”)

“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.” (“Beloved”)

“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” (“Paradise”)

“The woman’s legs are spread wide open, so I hum.” (“Love”)

“It wasn’t my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and I have no idea how it happened.” (“God Help the Child”)

For all of the astonishing edifices she built, the woman knew what to do with a brick.

She also knew how to name. Baby Suggs. True Belle. Pallas Truelove. Joe Trace. Sixo. Guitar. Jadine and Son. Stamp Paid. Milkman Dead. BoyBoy. Florens. Ajax (lord, Ajax). Kentucky Derby. Pecola Breedlove. Dorcas. Maginot Line. And, of course, Sethe — no name I’d ever heard before “Beloved,” no name I’d ever pronounced. It described a woman I’d never encounter beyond Euripides, a figure of guilt and rage and anguish, with a name one letter short of “seethe,” a name you, too, can’t pronounce without a suck of the teeth.

Toni Morrison didn’t teach me how to read. But she did teach me how to read. Hers is the kind of writing that makes you rewind and slow down and ruminate. It’s the kind of writing that makes you rewind because, god, what you just read was that titanic, that perception-altering, that true, a spice on the tongue. These spasms of disbelief are so ecstatic that immediate rereading is the only cure — I get them from Nabokov and from her.

Morrison is dead now, her legend long secure. But what comedy to think how the writers and critics who loved her labored to get her mastery treated as majesty when she’s so evidently supreme. The women in my family knew that long before the Swedes threw her a Nobel party. So did the people who took up writing in her wake. She did for generations of writers what Martin Scorsese did for generations of filmmakers — jolt them, for better and worse, into purpose. Morrison didn’t make me a writer, exactly. What she made me was a thinker. She made the thinking seem uniquely crucial to the matter of being alive.

I grew up with a Bible open on a dresser in my bedroom. My mother’s idea. Not a religious one, per se. She felt that an open Bible was an illuminating guide, a protectant, this night light for the soul. From time to time, I read it. But mostly, I let it guide me. Who knows where that Bible is now? What I have instead is some novel by Toni Morrison, kept near my bed, whether or not I’m reading it. A night light for my soul. And, in every way, a Good Book.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/books/toni-morrison-death-remembrance.html" id="8e246207-00de-3318-ac75-6b052025c65d">The New York Times</a>.

You need to be able to read to be able to read. Especially if Toni Morrison did the writing. I at least thought I knew what it was for my eyes to sail across and down a page, through a flight of description or a feat of characterization. At 11, I thought I could read. Then I read her. My mother told me I wasn’t ready. Not for Toni. My Aunt Katie caught my little-boy eye on her brand-new, great big copy of “Beloved” and told me: <em xmlns="http://w...

Toni Morrison Taught Me How to Think

Comfort is an essential component of a certain theatergoing experience. The seating should provide some comfort. Given the money a ticket costs, so, in some ways, should the show. It could be based on something known: television, the movies, the nightly news. It wouldn’t push too hard or be too strange or make people feel worse than they did when they got to that seat. The thing ends, and everybody stands up and claps.

But occasionally, a play ends and nobody really knows what to do, because it just took an audience to outer space, to the center of the Earth, to this new electric zone that knows what’s wrong with this country and isn’t afraid to personify it, laugh at it, behold it. Even though the work may take place at hospitals or in the presence of a shrink, it doesn’t care about comfort. It’s haywire, rude, blunt, poetic, self-reflective, sexually unpredictable, emotionally catastrophic, exhaustively acted, intelligent, searching and unafraid.

The work is also black — its blackness providing a lens through which to see and be seen. Its blackness is also what distinguishes it from other plays I’ve seen in the last year about race and racism. In less than 18 months a new class of young and youngish African American playwrights has established some kind of radical moment in American theater. Their work doesn’t need to exploit topicality (police shootings, this presidency, even the previous one, for the most part) in order to consider black life in this country as a simultaneous current predicament and historically endangered event. It’s responding — with anger, social acuity and structural chaos — to psychic devastation and national trauma, making roommates of today’s dismay and 400 years of horrors.

The authors have names like Jackie Sibblies Drury and Jeremy O. Harris and Aleshea Harris. And amazingly they’ve had six shows staged in New York over the past year and a half — difficult, apocalyptically messy productions where, especially for Drury’s “Fairview” and “Marys Seacole” and Aleshea Harris’ “Is God Is,” the process of cleaning up afterward, seven or eight times a week, would have seemed like a job for a hazmat crew.

In different ways, these playwrights are descendants of Pirandello’s freighted absurdism and Brecht’s theories of audience confrontation. But these three don’t feel radical just for the theater. They’d seem radical anywhere in American culture right now, different from a generation of, say, young black musicians trying to re-establish certain R&amp;B; traditions or honorably subvert jazz’s hefty history, different from an unprecedented influx of strong black filmmakers. What further distinguishes Drury, Harris and Harris is a belief in the possibilities of form that puts their ingenuity in the larger company of folks like the rappers Tierra Whack, a newbie, and Kanye West, a part-time underdog; and writer-directors like Boots Riley and Jordan Peele.

Two years ago, West would have been the only one of these people, working in their current mode, who made blips on my radar. Now they’re all part of a standard to which I’m holding all kinds of other artists, all kinds of other products. Is this thing I’m watching, reading, listening to going down deep enough, far out there enough, inward enough? Is it doing the most it can to provoke, unnerve and dazzle me? Is it awake to what else this country is — and has always been?

Jeremy Harris has had two shows in a matter of months: “Slave Play” and “‘Daddy.’” And “Slave Play” is the single most daring thing I’ve seen in a theater in a long time (and yes, I’ve been to “The Ferryman”).

It’s outwardly concerned with plantation erotics — naughty house slaves and horny white masters — until it reveals itself to be inwardly concerned with the psychosexual dynamics of plantation erotics. Side 1 presents three discrete slavery scenarios. Side 2 turns those scenarios into group therapy. Those psychosexual dynamics demonstrate what spells Harris can cast as a dramatist, dialogist, satirist and shrink.

“‘Daddy’” doesn’t knock you out in the same way. It’s a play about a young black artist and the older, white art collector he’s living with. It’s needier, full of monotonously needy people. It doesn’t have the four-dimensional self-revelation of “Slave Play,” or its sense of itself as a contraption. But both works show off Harris’s irreverence. Both works underscore his youth. (He’s 29.)

Drury’s “Fairview,” which just won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and “Marys Seacole” are just as daring as “Slave Play” — and maybe more out there. “Fairview,” very loosely, is about a family dinner that gets dysfunctional after one act, farcical after two and like Armageddon after three. The meal being prepared and fretted over is restaged, but the dialogue in the repeated version has been replaced by the voices of white actors having an increasingly specific conversation about race. The mounting tension blows up in the finale, after which one of the show’s actors invites the white people in the audience to come to the stage so she can have a moment to herself with everybody else.

“Marys Seacole” — very, very loosely — is about a Jamaican caregiver, in both the 19th century and this one, whose ambitions exceed the white medical establishment’s interest in her. The show moves, among other places, from aristocratic old-world Kingston to a modern medical facility in the United States to a battlefield in Crimea. But the locations keep bleeding into one another.

The thrill of both plays is how metaphysical and structurally unstable they are. Drury likes repetition and circularity and how that circle is really more of a spiral and how, after two or three acts, the spiral starts to look an awful lot like the fuse of a bomb. For the audience, the stress (the riveting, delightful stress) comes from not knowing when this play is going to detonate — and how?

Aleshea Harris might be the biggest surprise of these three — her second piece is an ornate elegy called “What to Send Up When It Goes Down” — since her work is the least obviously polished. But to watch “Is God Is” is to see a playwright as lawless as any of her peers has been. It’s about twin sisters who fulfill their mother’s wish that they execute their father. (“Make your Daddy dead. Dead. Dead. All the way dead.”) In 90 minutes, it manages to get from somewhere in Atlanta to the American West.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a crude, physically one-dimensional production explode into something as emotionally and psychologically panoramic. It’s as if the artifice falls utterly away, and you’re wherever Harris insists you are. Decades of moviemakers, novelists and playwrights have been trying to unlock the mysteries of Sam Shepard. This woman is the first to convince me she’s got a key. “Is God Is” signals the arrival of a very good playwright. It also feels like the staking of a major claim.

Drury, Harris and Harris have classmates. I’d put Branden Jacobs-Jenkins among them, as being young and exceptionally good. But by bearing down on what is — and isn’t — human (or humane), his work — namely “An Octoroon” and “Gloria” — makes formally sophisticated, aggressively anthropological, unexpected challenges to what a black playwright is even “supposed” to be writing plays about. His answer appears to be whatever he wants.

The subject of all these plays — and of pretty much everything other black American playwrights have been doing for at least the last four years, in work both brilliant and boring — is trauma. Not just the pitiable state of this moment, but the centuries-long, hundred-car pileup that has always been being a black person in this country. Trauma is history with a head wound, and it’s what unites black artists across mediums — the legacy of racial pain, how to live with it, and, sometimes, how to wield it.

Trauma puts Drury, Harris and Harris in the company of esteemed peers like Tarell Alvin McCraney and, master elders like Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks and August Wilson (whose mystic streak makes him a supernatural forebear), and once-radical, racial-confrontational stage classics like George C. Wolfe’s 33-year-old “The Colored Museum.”

What’s exhilarating about this moment is how it’s tethered to theater’s past but is freer to be more lunatic in its blackness. Jordan E. Cooper’s “Ain’t No Mo’” comes out of the “Colored Museum” tradition in its gathering of a handful of sketches around blackness in crisis. What the show lacks in ideological coherence and intellectual rigor it almost makes up for in ferocity, humor, pathos and lunacy. Cooper is 24. He’s still trying to figure out what to do with this pain.

Parks’ “White Noise” wonders whether the answer to trauma is to just make yourself a slave. That’s what her protagonist does after an incident with the police: enslaves himself to his white best friend. Parks can’t find a groove for the farce or a steady gear for the tragedy. The show is simultaneously about the presentation of surfaces and, as drama, superficial. Everybody in “White Noise” speaks in proscriptions and diatribes. They can present the aching, but none of them actually aches.

What Drury, Harris and Harris do with form as an expression of trauma is wild. Instability is built into the very structure of their plays. The sets are destroyed — trashed. But so is everything else. These plays trash living rooms, relationships, logic, hope. The weight of all that this country is and has done just cracks the works’ themes open. Knowing the history is traumatizing. And that knowledge terrorizes their comfort. Even coherence feels like a luxury — and it isn’t that we can’t afford it. These playwrights are saying we don’t deserve it. They’re not going to handhold and explicate. They won’t let you play dumb or give you Racism for Dummies.

They know how their extraordinary machines function. These are plays with abrupt changes of time and space. They’re built like trap doors, figurative ones, and with wormholes, through which everybody falls: characters, audiences, props. And those abrupt alterations of place and meaning function as indictments of an endless history. These are plays that know who, given the socioeconomics of theatergoing in cities like New York, is coming to see them. They know that nobody in the house is immune to the physics of the falling, and yet they sense that some of us might have farther to fall than everybody else.

And that might be why it’s been harder for audiences to leap to their feet at the end of “Slave Play” than for a travesty like “American Son,” a drama by Christopher Demos-Brown, who is white, that coasted on headlines about police shootings but lacked the moral imagination to do more than turn its invisible black victim into an anecdote. It’s easy to applaud when racism is a problem of law enforcement.

The thrill of this generation of black playwrights is that they’ve harnessed the true power of the theater. It’s their gamble on danger, their trust in risk that may explain why none of them has yet made it to Broadway. They don’t give a damn about your comfort.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/theater/african-american-playwrights.html" id="09b5ec51-76d4-35cc-a80d-8d26690c62c6">The New York Times</a>.

Blackness as a Lens for the Stage

He lived in defiance of physics and race and gender, and we just kind of lived with that. We ate it up. Just the odyssey of his nose from bulb to nub seemed somehow like a people’s journey. For so long, so much about Michael Jackson won our awe, our pity, our bewilderment, our identification, our belief that he was a metaphor, an allegory, a beacon, a caveat — for, of, about America. You need to do a lot of looking at him to feel this way. You also need to do a lot of looking the other way.

But, eventually, all the suspension reaches a logical end. You run out of hooks to hang things on. There’s a moment in “Leaving Neverland,” Dan Reed’s documentary about Jackson’s alleged pedophilia, where I simply ran out of hooks. The movie devotes itself to two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who claim, in separate accounts, that Jackson sexually abused them for years, from boyhood into adolescence.

And of all the allegations, the moment that really got me is the ring.

Now, this is 90 minutes into a four-hour movie, which HBO is showing in two parts starting Sunday, and I’ve learned how Jackson has ingratiated himself into two families, starting around 1987 or ’88, after the release of his album “Bad,” during his world tour. I’ve heard a recording of a mock interview Jackson does with Safechuck, a solidly middle-class Southern California boy, in which Jackson says the best part of a trip to Hawaii that he arranged for the boy and his mom was “being with James Safechuck.”

I’ve stared at a lingering shot of a photograph of Jackson, who would have been around 30 and Safechuck who was about 9 or 10, and Jackson is beaming in sunglasses and a military jacket, flashing a peace sign, and James, in a too-big baseball cap, is turning to the camera, looking alarmingly ruminative for someone whose life should be rumination-free. By the time you get to the ring, I’ve already heard how Jackson lured Safechuck into sex, by masturbation (James, again, is about 10), and how the closer he got to James on tour, the farther the parents’ hotel room would get from their son’s.

The way Safechuck remembers it, there was so much sex, and he says Jackson told him that if anybody found out about it, their lives would be over. I’ve heard about Michael buying the Neverland complex in Santa Barbara County, California, (mansion, amusement park, zoo!) and the elaborate system of doors and bells to alert Jackson of any encroachment on the lair in which some of the abuse supposedly occurred. I’ve seen Wade Robson, a doll-faced Michael Jackson impersonator from Brisbane, Australia, say he was 7 when Michael began abusing him, describing a grim scenario in which he was naked on all fours at the edge of the bed, poised — trapped — between his idol, who was masturbating to him, and a cutout of Peter Pan.

I’ve heard all of this — and a distressing deal more — by the time the documentary gets to the part where Jackson allegedly takes Safechuck shopping for a ring. But there’s something about the way the filmmakers reserve this scene for the back end of Part 1 that ices your bones, something about the way an adult Safechuck doesn’t seem to want to go back there. But here he is, talking in a TV documentary about the vows he says that he and Jackson exchanged. Here he is, forlorn, holding the ring that he’s kept, all this time, in a handsome box.

The story of the ring and the vows feels as graphic as the memories of masturbation and French kissing and nipple tweaking. If you happen to be the sort of person who’d try to balance, say, the multiple counts of child molestation Jackson was charged with in 2003 and acquitted of later with extenuating details from Jackson’s biography (Wasn’t he abused and too famous too soon and prematurely sexualized? He never had a childhood! He’s still a child!), if you partook in the steady diet of fluffy news stories about Jackson and some little boy (often identified as “Jackson’s friend”) and thought mostly that they were cute or banal and that Jackson just related to kids as kids — like, platonically — if you thought that he couldn’t know there was a real difference between adult passion and child’s play, then perhaps you’ll find Safechuck’s memory of the ring particularly shattering. I did. It’s so private and wrong, not just to us but clearly to Jackson, who makes up a story at the jewelry store that the ring is for a woman, even though Safechuck is there by his side.

He knew.

I’m staring at the coat rack looking for somewhere to suspend more disbelief, and there’s no more room. I have to hold this.

“Leaving Neverland” is long but delicately, patiently done — and so quiet; you can practically hear yourself listening. It’s not a feat of investigative journalism so much as an act of bearing witness. Reed sits, individually, with Safechuck and his mother, Stephanie, and with Robson and his mother, Joy, and his siblings, Chantal and Shane. It doesn’t try to make cultural or political sense of the allegations. It’s not a masterpiece saga about fame, race, gender, sexuality and the legal system; it’s not “M.J.: Made in America.” (For a long view, there’s “On Michael Jackson,” Margo Jefferson’s pungent, essential critical X-ray from 2006.) “Leaving Neverland” is about one man’s possible contribution to the ruin of two families and the anguish that still disturbs them and, in some way, how that ruin and anguish should disturb us.

The movie presents Jackson almost entirely from the two families’ points of view, in photographs, answering machine messages and a montage of lovey-dovey faxes he sent to his “little one,” which is what James remembers Jackson calling him. He even remembers the lullaby Jackson built around the phrase. The movie re-creates for us the haze Jackson cast over them. Its only moments of disputation arrive in the form of television, from, say, Jackson’s defense lawyers during the 2004-05 trial, and, in 1993, from Jackson himself, in a recorded statement against molestation charges brought by the father of Jordan Chandler. (It was nationally broadcast, as news.)

Reed appears to have encouraged everyone in the movie to try to be in the original moment as best they can. For James, Wade and the rest of the on-camera participants (Wade’s grandmother is here, too, as are, in Part 2, both men’s wives), they seem happy enough in the early telling, when everyone’s a little star-struck. So the movie has a real emotional arc — as well as an abundance of orchestral strings and too many handsome drone shots. The tears don’t come until well into hour four. James, though, appears to be reliving it all. He winces, cringes and grimaces; he does a lot of nervous neck scratching.

It’s here that I should offer the Jackson estate’s disclaimer. It vehemently denies what James and Wade allege, and is suing HBO for $100 million. The movie breaches a nondisparagement clause in a contract with Jackson from the early 1990s, according to the suit. Around 1993, James and Wade told authorities that Jackson didn’t molest them; and Wade testified in court on Jackson’s behalf in 2005. Several years ago, both men filed lawsuits against the estate that were dismissed because of statutes of limitations. And their suits are now under appeal. Fatherhood and, presumably, therapy have encouraged both men to reverse their stories, acknowledge what they believe happened to them and tell their families that they lied about not being abused.

This is a strategy that puts a lot of faith in the accusers and obviates the possibility of counterargument. Much is asserted and nothing is proven, and yet you docome to understand how a mix of showbiz and fandom brought so many boys into Jackson’s life. James starred in a 1986 Pepsi commercial with him. Wade’s uncannily sharp impersonation wins him some nights onstage during the “Bad” tour. Both Stephanie and Joy, the mothers, seem proud to have raised sons so appealing to the planet’s most worshipped person. He tells the Safechucks how lonely he is. And so, in an alarming throwaway detail, the family starts disguising Jackson to sneak him out of Hayvenhurst, his pre-Neverland estate, and into their normal, suburban house. It’s like he actually was E.T. At the Safechucks, Jackson could be a regular, what exactly, kid? We do see Polaroids of him sans makeup, doing funny faces, looking guilelessly happy, so yeah, sure: a kid.

Having Stephanie and Joy speak here as much as they do is a relief for any number of reasons. But let’s just focus on two. First, they’ve had some time to process all of this. They’re lucid. Jackson’s trial, conducted on behalf of a 13-year-old, Gavin Arvizo, featured testimony from Janet Arvizo, the boy’s mother, who spent five days on the stand and, by most accounts, was a terrible witness for her son. She claimed Jackson imprisoned her family, and yet she was allegedly free to leave Neverland to pamper herself? She snapped her fingers at the jury. The defense claimed she committed welfare fraud, for which she was later prosecuted. So we shifted the blame. What’s wrong with her?

The parents of any kid who passed through Neverland were more convenient to indict. How could you let your child sleep in an adult’s bed? It’s been 15 years, though. Someone should find Janet Arvizo and give her a do-over.

That brings me back to how crucial it feels to have Stephanie and Joy speaking in this documentary. (Neither man’s father is interviewed, although, in the case of James’, we never find out exactly why.) You can’t hear a parent wrestle with this blame question enough, whether it’s being asked in relation to R. Kelly or Michael Jackson, your pastor or your priest: How could they let their child spend that much time with an adult stranger? There’s never a “right” or “good” answer. But faith is usually a factor. And faith entails a suspension of disbelief.

The mothers both mention an early limit they set. For Stephanie, it was refusing to let James sleep in Jackson’s room on that trip to Hawaii. And Joy recalls vehemently nixing Jackson’s request to abscond with Wade for a year. But Jackson ultimately wins, anyway. He gets his way, in part, because he could be as manipulative as he could be affectionate, but also because each woman feels, in her way, maternal toward him. He was, both women more or less say, a member of their families. Both families defended him, in the moment, against detractors and accusers. Both boys denied that they were molested — Wade at the trial and to the news media; James to his mother and to a grand jury. So their sons’ falling under his spell — that required some suspension of disbelief. The mothers had fallen, too.

We all had. It was so easy to fall.

Nobody bought more Michael Jackson vinyl LPs than we did of “Thriller.” The euphoria for anything associated with that album was cross-racial and intergenerational. Upon visiting anybody’s house, I’d ask if they had a copy. If the answer was “no,” I’d turn into a 1980s sitcom kid and say something like, “What is your problem?” (I would have been 7, 8 or 9.) If the answer was “yes,” I’d ask to play it, and while it was on, I’d lay on the floor and take long drags on the album’s inside photo: Jackson, in a white suit, laying on his side, one leg bent, looking at us. On the knee of his bent leg is a tiger — a tiger cub. I stared with deep longing. He was so pretty, with his absurd curls and isosceles triangle of a nose and creamy brown face. I’m calling it a photo when, really, it was a centerfold. But what did I want from that picture? What did I want from Jackson? Friendship? A handshake? A souvenir? Ahug?

Pictures and TV footage of Jackson and other boys were easy enough to come across — him and Emmanuel Lewis, him and Alfonso Ribeiro, him and Sean Lennon (none of whom have accused him of any abuse), him and E.T., him and the boy I now know is James Safechuck. There were so many of him and James. Google didn’t make these images simple to find. Magazines did. Teen magazines. I wanted a picture, too. I wanted the warmth and surprise and serious, only-us closeness in some of those images, although James never looks entirely happy in many of them. The seriousness I identified in a lot of the boys’ faces is what adult-me would now call stress.

At the time, I wanted my friends to see Michael Jackson whisking me out of airports and into limousines. I didn’t do an imitation of him or anything, and I never begged my mother to take me to see him. She didn’t have money for that. MTV and “Entertainment Tonight” and the stray issue of Right On! would have to do. But what if I did beg and beg because I was really good at being Michael Jackson? Would that have made a difference? Would she have sacrificed our little family to make my 7-year-old’s dream come true?

Ideally, a parent is a backstop against innocent fervor; against foolish, zealous choices and blissful ignorance. So I have to believe that my mother would have saved me from the hazards of my desire. That was her job. But that’s what adult Wade and James think their mothers’ job should have been, too. What’s still eating each woman up, toward the end of “Leaving Neverland,” is that neither woman disagrees.

It’s entirely possible that we’ve spent the last 26 years preparing for a moment like this — for somebody to lay it all out, graphically, frankly; for somebody to tell us a story, their story. For a long time, the chief teller of any such story was Jackson himself. He would install his sense of persecution into music videos, like the one for “Leave Me Alone,” from 1989, the finale of “Black or White,” from 1991, and “Ghosts,” from 1997, into songs like “Why You Wanna Trip on Me?” (1991), “Scream” (1995) and “They Don’t Care About Us” (1996). Very good songs, mostly about his tribulations as a so-called weirdo (the tabloids named him Wacko Jacko) and, especially, as a black man.

He tried, in highly rated television interviews, to let us see him as wounded and vulnerable and, well, normal. In 1993, he let Oprah Winfrey grill him (about the boys, but also about his altered appearance). He would let Martin Bashir do an occasionally pseudo-vérité version of the same, in a roving two-hour, 2003 TV documentary (“Living With Michael Jackson”) that exposes him as being helpless against himself. (There’s a long, astounding passage, for instance, in which Jackson leads a caravan of children on a Neverland excursion, and he seems taxed by such an overwhelming — and overwhelmingly absurd — baby-sitting assignment. Yet he’s able to bring himself to have one of his park’s homemade snow cones, anyway. It’s like the parody of Jackson’s hapless eccentricity you can see in Harmony Korine’s celebrity-impersonator film, “Mister Lonely,” and in the “Teddy Perkins” episode of FX’s “Atlanta.”) Then, after his arraignment in 2004, Jackson even danced, for appreciative fans, atop a car. Five years later he was dead.

The story was that Jackson never molested anybody. And we stuck to it, and it stuck to him. And the question now, of course, is what do we do? It’s the question of our #MeToo times: If we believe the accusers (and I believe Wade and James), what do we do with the art? With Jackson, what can we do? Wade became a successful choreographer who’s made a career out of teaching his version of Jackson’s hydraulic bounces, whips, and stutters to Britney Spears, ‘N Sync, Cirque du Soleil and rooms full of aspiring dancers. “Look Back at It,” the big single from A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s No. 1 album from January, is built out of two Jackson hits. Michael Jackson’s music isn’t a meal. It’s more elemental than that. It’s the salt, pepper, olive oil and butter. His music is how you start. And the music made from that — that music is everywhere, too. Where would the cancellation begin?

Jackson provided us an early occasion to ask the question about the art without ever realizing it was being asked. We simply lived with it, with the possibility of his guilt, and the many compartments we make to contain everything he was: the conscientious enthusiasm for and the comedy of him, the tragedy he so obviously represents. Perhaps we can live it because it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether he was living with the contradictions himself.

There is something about the way Jackson morphed from pretty to disfigured, closer to Joseph Merrick, the medical case study whose “elephant man” bones Jackson swore he never tried to buy. The morphing could have been a result of the pigmentation ailment, vitiligo, that he told Winfrey he suffered from. But what if all of that change he so notoriously underwent, all the damage he seemed to wear on his body, all the creatures his videos turned him into (werewolves, zombies, a panther, a skeleton), what if his outward self became some semiconscious manifestation of a monster that lurked within?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/arts/television/michael-jackson-leaving-neverland.html" id="2955416b-dac2-3b66-aa59-1a4082ae31f7">The New York Times</a>.

If the average cultural experience demands the suspension of disbelief, if we ought not think too much about this movie we’re watching, this novel we’re reading, this magic trick being performed right before our eyes, if being entertained means setting aside skepticism, logic and possibly a sense of morality, then what a magic trick we had in Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson Cast a Spell. 'Leaving Neverland' Breaks It.

Shmuel wants to know what’s to become of the body of his recently deceased wife. His sorrow mutates into a paralyzing obsession that mystifies, annoys and embarrasses his mother, two young sons and orthodox community. The boys actually think he’s possessed, by a dybbuk in the guise of their mother’s ghost.

This isn’t so much a spiritual or even existential concern for Schmuel as much as a scientific one: What, practically speaking, happens to a corpse? Like, how long does it take to decompose? When his faith and religious leaders have no easy answer, he corners Albert, who reads him one from a forensics textbook.

That should be a wrap, honestly. But the movie has more than an hour to go, meaning we have to tolerate some obnoxious behavior (Albert actually curtails an office-hours session with a needy black student to turn his attention to Shmuel, who as far as I can tell doesn’t pay a dime of tuition). It means forced absurdity. Schmuel arrives at Albert’s, for instance, with a hog whose suffocation, burial and decay are meant to serve as a soothing science experiment. When that doesn’t work, the movie has them hit the road for even more scientific answers.

You can see what this movie is after, something cockeyed but sincere, something in the neighborhood of Paul Mazursky, Elaine May or Alexander Payne. But the writing and filmmaking (Snyder directed) just aren’t quick enough. The film’s heart just isn’t in all of the pig chasing, fence climbing and disinterring. Broderick appears to be here for the comic relief of his mere familiarity, Albert being this diminished echo of his best public-education parts, in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Election.”

It’s not until the final minutes when the movie relaxes, the cute (and gross) stuff falls away, and the dark beauty of Shmuel’s suffering finally gets to breathe. Rohrig was the face (and soul) of “Son of Saul,” that formally audacious, morally appalling Auschwitz drama from 2015 (it won the foreign-language Oscar). He never made me laugh here, but he did nearly bring me to tears. Rohrig is so good at searching despair that I don’t know why the filmmakers didn’t just give the whole movie over to him.

Rated R for decomposing animals, corpses and toes. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/movies/to-dust-review.html" id="b0a41668-22fd-3b17-aa53-4b550aeffd65">The New York Times</a>.

“To Dust” runs an hour and a half, and that feels right for a buddy movie whose comedy is as stubborn as this one’s. But the movie is also trying — daring — to seriously consider grief, and that movie could have gone on for much longer. You can feel the script, by Jason Begue and Shawn Snyder, straining to tickle an audience. So it has a bereft widowed Hasidic cantor named Shmuel (Geza Rohrig) team up with Albert, a dumpy, mildly grizzled community college biology professor — and complete str...

'To Dust' Review: Death, Decay and Grief Wrapped in a Buddy Movie

It’s also possible that he read the script — with its tale of a chain-smoking, heavy-drinking, sweat-soaked fishing boat captain, his ex, her battering new husband and the elusive tropical tuna that haunts the captain’s every waking hour — and recalled the last time he was on the high seas then said aloud, “I miss ‘Fool’s Gold.'” More than half the reason I went to see this movie is because I miss “Fool’s Gold,” too. But that movie is 11 years old. And the days of low-stakes thingamabobs with some stars and even a little bit of writing are gone.

Instead of a caper with Kate Hudson, McConaughey has got a mess written and directed by Steven Knight. The captain — his captain, Baker Dill — has unsexy sex with Diane Lane’s character. He tries to catch that fish alongside his dutiful first mate (Djimon Hounsou). He puts up with the nerdy, White Rabbity stranger (Jeremy Strong) chasing after him and managing the return of Karen, this ex of his and mother of his son. She’s played by Anne Hathaway, as a blonde, and her arrival at the local bar appears to be an event so momentous that the camera has to sprint-swoop around her to gawk. I laughed when it did. Baker Dill is a lousy character name. But that camera pivot is lousier.

Karen asks Captain Dill to take her mean spouse (Jason Clarke) for a boat ride but doesn’t ask to bring him back. But maybe Dill would rather catch that fish than commit murder. So Karen keeps alternating between femme fatale and mysterious detective-novel damsel until he consents.

For reasons known only to Knight, “Serenity” couldn’t just be a film noir. He’s laid some kind of science-fiction nonsense atop it because, apparently, the movie needed a ply of trashy pretension to echo Adrian Lyne’s thriller “Jacob’s Ladder” and complement the luxe incoherence of McConaughey’s Lincoln ads. There are cutaways to Baker and Karen’s son feverishly typing code while, offscreen, his stepdad can be heard slapping Karen around. (It’s possible that Baker can hear his son — telepathically!) The more we learn about that half of things the less sense the rest of the movie makes. That includes a big reveal that’s like the worst of Christopher Nolan, M. Night Shyamalan and the condolence-card section at Walgreens.

Rated R for violence — against wives, fish and paying audiences — and some dull sex. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/movies/serenity-review.html" id="f961263c-cf54-3648-a7ee-fa3cc579264b">The New York Times</a>.

I’m no actor, but I’d like to think if a script ever came my way with lines like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if nobody knows anything?” and “Just how many years have I been here, Jack?” and “How dare Old Joe feed my cat,” I’d know that the movie would probably open in the middle of January when the studios leave their garbage on the curb. But I’m just me, so it’s possible that Matthew McConaughey was sent the pages for “Serenity” and saw something more fit for April or May, when the movies don’t n...

'Serenity': McConaughey, Hathaway and One Very Bad Mess

That rearview-mirror image isn’t a still from the movie but a warmly painted rendering of one, this vague nuzzling of Norman Rockwell Americana. And its warmth evokes a very particular past. If you’ve ever seen the packaging for Cream of Wheat or a certain brand of rice, if you’ve even seen some Shirley Temple movies, you knew how Miss Daisy would be driven: gladly.

As movie posters go, it’s ingeniously concise. But whoever designed it knew the concision was possible because we’d know the shorthand of an eternal racial dynamic. I got off the subway last month and saw a billboard of black Kevin Hart riding on the back of white Bryan Cranston’s motorized wheelchair. They’re both ecstatic. And maybe they’re obligated to be. Their movie is called “The Upside.” A few months before that, I was out getting a coffee when I saw a long, sexy billboard of white Viggo Mortensen driving black Mahershala Ali in a minty blue car for a movie called “Green Book.”

Not knowing what these movies were “about” didn’t mean it wasn’t clear what they were about. They symbolize a style of American storytelling in which the wheels of interracial friendship are greased by employment, in which prolonged exposure to the black half of the duo enhances the humanity of his white, frequently racist counterpart. All the optimism of racial progress — from desegregation to integration to equality to something like true companionship — is stipulated by terms of service. Thirty years separate “Driving Miss Daisy” from these two new films, but how much time has passed, really? The bond in all three is conditionally transactional, possible only if it’s mediated by money. “The Upside” has the rich, quadriplegic author Phillip Lacasse (Cranston) hire an ex-con named Dell Scott (Hart) to be his “life auxiliary.” “Green Book” reverses the races so that some white muscle (Mortensen) drives the black pianist Don Shirley (Ali) to gigs throughout the Deep South in the 1960s. It’s “The Upside Down.”

These pay-for-playmate transactions are a modern pastime, different from an entire history of popular culture that simply required black actors to serve white stars without even the illusion of friendship. It was really only possible in a post-integration America, possible after Sidney Poitier made black stardom loosely feasible for the white studios, possible after the moral and legal adjustments won during the civil rights movements, possible after the political recriminations of the black power and blaxploitation eras let black people regularly frolic among themselves for the first time since the invention of the Hollywood movie. Possible, basically, only in the 1980s, after the movements had more or less subsided and capitalism and jokey white paternalism ran wild.

On television in this era, rich white sitcom families vacuumed up little black boys, on “Diff’rent Strokes,” on “Webster.” On “Diff’rent Strokes,” the adopted boys are the orphaned Harlem sons of Phillip Drummond’s maid. Not only was money supposed to lubricate racial integration; it was perhaps supposed to mitigate a history of keeping black people apart and oppressed.

The sitcoms weren’t officially social experiments, but they were light advertisements for the civilizing (and alienating) benefits of white wealth on black life. The plot of “Trading Places,” from 1983, actually was an experiment, a pungent, complicated one, in which conniving white moneybags install a broke and hustling Eddie Murphy in disgraced Dan Aykroyd’s banking job. The scheme creates an accidental friendship between the duped pair and they both wind up rich.

But that Daddy Warbucks paternalism was how, in 1982, the owner of the country’s most ferocious comedic imagination — Richard Pryor — went from desperate janitor to live-in amusement for the bratty son of a rotten businessman (Jackie Gleason). You have to respect the bluntness of that one. The movie was called “The Toy,” and it’s simultaneously dumb, wild and appalling. I was younger than its little white protagonist (he’s “Master” Eric Bates) when I saw it, but I can still remember the look of embarrassed panic on Pryor’s face while he’s trapped in something called the Wonder Wheel. It’s a look that never quite goes away as he’s made to dress in drag, navigate the Ku Klux Klan and make Gleason feel good about his racism and terrible parenting.

These were relationships that continued the rules of the past, one in which Poitier was frequently hired to turn bigots into buddies. The rules didn’t need to be disguised by yesterday. These arrangements could flourish in the present. So maybe that was the alarming appeal of “Driving Miss Daisy.” It went there. It went back there. And people went for it. The movie came out at the end of 1989, won four Oscars (best picture, actress, adapted screenplay, makeup), got besotted reviews and made a pile of money. Why wasn’t a mystery.

Any time a white person comes anywhere close to the rescue of a black person, the academy is primed to say, “Good for you!,” whether it’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Mississippi Burning,” “The Blind Side” or “The Help.” The year “Driving Miss Daisy” won those Oscars, Freeman also had a supporting role in a drama (“Glory”) that placed a white Union colonel at its center and was very much in the mix that night. (Denzel Washington won his first Oscar for playing a slave-turned-Union soldier in that movie.) And Spike Lee lost the original screenplay award for “Do the Right Thing,” his masterpiece about a boiled-over pot of racial animus in Brooklyn. I was 14 then, and the political incongruity that night was impossible not to feel. “Driving Miss Daisy” and “Glory” were set in the past and the people who loved them seemed stuck there. The giddy reception for “Miss Daisy” seemed earnest. But Lee’s movie dramatized a starker truth — we couldn’t all just get along.

For what it’s worth, Lee is now up for more Oscars. His film “BlacKkKlansman” has six nominations. Given the five for “Green Book,” basically so is “Driving Miss Daisy.” Which is to say that 2019 might just be 1990 all over again. And yet viewed separately from the cold shower of “Do the Right Thing,” “Driving Miss Daisy” does operate with more finesse, elegance and awareness than my teenage self wanted to see. It’s still not the best movie of 1989. But it does know the Southern caste system and the premium that system placed on propriety.

The movie turns the 25-year relationship between Daisy, an elderly Jewish white widow from Atlanta, and Hoke, her elderly, widowed black driver, into both this delicate, modest, tasteful thing — a love letter, a corsage — and something amusingly perverse. Proud old prejudiced Daisy says she doesn’t want to be driven anywhere. But doesn’t she? Hoke treats her pride like a costume. He stalks her with her own new car until she succumbs and lets him drive her to the market. What passes between them feels weirdly kinky: Southern-etiquette S&amp;M.;

Bruce Beresford directed the movie and Alfred Uhry based it on his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which he said was inspired by his grandmother and her chauffeur, and it does powder over the era’s upheavals, uprisings and blowups. But it doesn’t sugarcoat the history fueling the regional and national climes, either. Daisy’s fortune comes from cotton, and Hoke, with ruthless affability, keeps reminding her that she’s rich. When she says things are a-changing, he tells her not that much.

Platonic love blossoms, obviously. But the movie’s one emotional gaffe would seem to come near the end when Daisy grabs Hoke’s hand and tells him so. “You’re my best friend,” she creaks. But her admission arises not from one of their little S&amp;M; drives but after a bout of dementia. And in a wide shot, he stands above her, a little stooped, halfway in, halfway out, moved yet confused. And in his posture resides an entire history of national racial awkwardness: He has to mind his composure even as she’s losing her mind.

One headache with these movies, even one as well done as “Driving Miss Daisy,” is that they romanticize their workplaces and treat their black characters as the ideal crowbar for closed white minds and insulated lives.

Who knows why, in “The Upside,” Phillip picks the uncouth, underqualified Dell to drive him around, change his catheter and share his palatial apartment. But by the time the movie’s over, they’re paragliding together to Aretha Franklin. We’re told that this is based on a true story. It’s not. It’s a remake of a far more nauseating French megahit — “Les Intouchables” — and that claimed to be based on a true story. “The Upside” seems based on one of those paternalistic ‘80s movies, “Disorderlies,” the one where the Fat Boys wheel an ailing Ralph Bellamy around his mansion.

Phillip’s largess and tolerance take Dell from opera-phobic to opera-curious to opera queen, leading to Dell’s being able to afford to transport his ex and their son out of the projects, and permitting Dell to take his boss’ luxury cars for a spin whether or not he’s riding shotgun. And Dell provides entertainment (and drugs) that ease Phillip’s sense of isolation and self-consciousness. But this is also a movie that needs Dell to steal one of Phillip’s antique first-editions as a surprise gift to his estranged son, and not a copy of some Judith Krantz or Sidney Sheldon novel, either. He swipes “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (and to reach it, his hand has to skip past a few Horatio Alger books, too). Most of these black-white-friendship adventures were foretold by Mark Twain. Somebody is white Huck and somebody else is his amusingly dim black sidekick, Jim. This movie is just a little more flagrant about it.

There’s a way of looking at the role reversal in “Green Book” as an upgrade. Through his record company, Don hires a white nightclub bouncer named Tony Vallelonga. (Most people call him Tony Lip.) We don’t meet Don for about 15 minutes, because the movie needs us to know that Tony is a sweet, Eye-talian tough guy who also throws out perfectly good glassware because his wife let black repairmen drink from it.

By this point, you might have heard about the fried chicken scene in “Green Book.” It comes early in their road trip. Tony is shocked to discover that Don has never had fried chicken. He also appears never to have seen anybody eat fried chicken, either. (“What do we do about the bones?”) So, with all the greasy alacrity and exuberant crassness that Mortensen can conjure, Tony demonstrates how to eat it while driving. As comedy, it’s masterful — there’s tension, irony and, when the car stops and reverses to retrieve some litter, a punch line that brings down the house. But the comedy works only if the black, classical-pop fusion pianist is from outer space (and not in a Sun Ra sort of way). You’re meant to laugh because how could this racist be better at being black than this black man who’s supposed to be better than him?

The movie Peter Farrelly directed and wrote, with Brian Currie and Tony’s son Nick, is suspiciously like “Driving Miss Daisy,” but same-sex, with Don as Daisy and Tony as Hoke. Indeed, “Miss Daisy” features a fried chicken scene, too, a delicate one, in which Hoke tells her the flame is too high on the skillet and she waves him off. Once he’s left the kitchen, she furtively, begrudgingly adjusts the burner. It’s like Farrelly watched that scene and thought it needed a stick of cartoon dynamite.

Before they head out, a white character from Don’s record company gives Tony a listing of black-friendly places to house Don: The Green Book. The idea for “The Negro Motorist Green Book” belongs to Victor Hugo Green, a postal worker, who introduced it in 1936. It guided black road trippers to stress-free gas, food and lodging in the segregated South. The story of its invention, distribution and updating is an amusing, invigorating, poignant and suspenseful story of an astonishing social network, and warrants a movie in itself. In the meantime, what does Tony need a Green Book for? He is the Green Book.

The movie’s tagline is “based on a true friendship.” But the transactional nature of it makes the friendship seem less true than sponsored. So what does the money do, exactly? The white characters — the biological ones and somebody supposedly not black enough, like fictional Don — are lonely people in these pay-a-pal movies. The money is ostensibly for legitimate assistance, but it also seems to paper over all that’s potentially fraught about race. The relationship is entirely conscripted as service and bound by capitalism and the fantastically presumptive leap is, The money doesn’t matter because I like working for you. And if you’re the racist in the relationship: I can’t be horrible because we’re friends now. That’s why the hug Sandra Bullock gives Yomi Perry, the actor playing her maid, Maria, at the end of “Crash,” remains the single most disturbing gesture of its kind. It’s not friendship. Friendship is mutual. That hug is cannibalism.

Money buys Don a chauffeur and, apparently, an education in black folkways and culture. (Little Richard? He’s never heard him play.) Shirley’s real-life family has objected to the portrait. Their complaints include that he was estranged from neither black people nor blackness. Even without that thumbs-down, you can sense what a particularly perverse fantasy this is: that absolution resides in a neutered black man needing a white guy not only to protect and serve him, but to love him, too. Even if that guy and his Italian-American family and mob associates refer to Don and other black people as eggplant and coal. In the movie’s estimation, their racism is preferable to its nasty, blunter Southern cousin because their racism is often spoken in Italian. And, hey, at least Tony never asks Don to eat his fancy dinner in a supply closet.

Mahershala Ali is acting Shirley’s isolation and glumness, but the movie determines that dining with racists is better than dining alone. The money buys Don relative safety, friendship, transportation and a walking-talking black college. What the money can’t buy him is more of the plot in his own movie. It can’t allow him to bask in his own unique, uniquely dreamy artistry. It can’t free him from a movie that sits him where Miss Daisy sat, yet treats him worse than Hoke. He’s a literal passenger on this white man’s trip. Tony learns he really likes black people. And thanks to Tony, now so does Don.

Lately, the black version of these interracial relationships tends to head in the opposite direction. In the black version, for one thing, they’re not about money or a job but about the actual emotional, psychological work of being black among white people. Here, the proximity to whiteness is toxic, a danger, a threat. That’s the thrust of Jeremy O. Harris’ stage drama “Slave Play,” in which the traumatic legacy of plantation life pollutes the black half of the show’s interracial relationships. That’s a particularly explicit, ingenious example. But scarcely any of the work I’ve seen in the last year by black artists — not Jackie Sibblies Drury’s equally audacious play “Fairview,” not Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You,” not “Blindspotting,” which Daveed Diggs co-wrote and stars in, not Barry Jenkins’ “If Beale Street Could Talk” or Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther” — emphasizes the smoothness and joys of interracial friendship and certainly not through employment. The health of these connections is iffy, at best.

In 1989, Lee was pretty much on his own as a voice of black racial reality. His rankled pragmatism now has company and, at the Academy Awards, it’s also got stiff competition. He helped plant the seeds for an environment in which black artists can look askance at race. But a lot of us still need the sense of fantastical racial contentment that movies like “The Upside” and “Green Book” are slinging. I’ve seen “Green Book” with paying audiences, and it cracks people up the way any of Farrelly’s comedies do. The kind of closure it offers is like a drug that Lee’s never dealt. The Charlottesville-riot footage that he includes as an epilogue in “BlacKkKlansman” might bury the loose, essentially comedic movie it’s attached to in furious lava. Lee knows the past too well to ever let the present off the hook. The volcanoes in this country have never been dormant.

The academy’s embrace of Lee at this stage of his career (this is his first best director nomination) suggests that it’s come around to what rankles him. Of course, “BlacKkKlansman” is taking on the unmistakable villainy of the KKK in the 1970s. But what put Lee on the map 30 years ago was his fearlessness about calling out the universal casual bigotry of the moment, like Daisy’s and Tony’s. It’s hot as hell in “Do the Right Thing,” and in the heat, almost everybody has a problem with who somebody is. The pizzeria owned by Sal (Danny Aiello) comes to resemble a house of hate. Eventually Sal’s delivery guy, Mookie (played by Lee), incites a melee by hurling a trash can through the store window. He’d already endured a conversation with Pino (John Turturro), Sal’s racist son, in which he tells Mookie that famous black people are “more than black.”

Closure is impossible because the blood is too bad, too historically American. Lee had conjured a social environment that’s the opposite of what “The Upside,” “Green Book,” and “Driving Miss Daisy” believe. In one of the very last scenes, after Sal’s place is destroyed, Mookie still demands to be paid. To this day, Sal’s tossing balled-up bills at Mookie, one by one, shocks me. He’s mortally offended. Mookie’s unmoved. They’re at a harsh, anti-romantic impasse. We’d all been reared on racial-reconciliation fantasies. Why can’t Mookie and Sal be friends? The answer’s too long and too raw. Sal can pay Mookie to deliver pizzas ‘til kingdom come. But he could never pay him enough to be his friend.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/arts/green-book-interracial-friendship.html" id="b015b12c-d910-3d2d-a6e0-ece7a447bc33">The New York Times</a>.

“Driving Miss Daisy” is the sort of movie you know before you see it. The whole thing is right there in the poster. White Jessica Tandy is giving black Morgan Freeman a stern look, and he looks amused by her sternness. They’re framed in a rearview mirror, which occupies only about 20 percent of the space. You can make out his chauffeur’s cap and that she’s in the back seat. The rest is three actors’ names, a tag line, a title, tiny credits and white space.

Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies?

Momoa is why some of us are going to “Aquaman.” He’s in one poster with his smoky eyes peeking out of some water. One hand’s gripping a trident. The other’s going “hang ten.” (He’s half native Hawaiian.) But none of that surf humor and none of that hotness are really anywhere in this movie. It’s just 2 1/2 years — sorry, 2 1/2 hours — of oceanic screen savers and hair that won’t stop undulating so we know when we’re underwater.

Aquaman’s been dragged out of DC’s Justice League. His pals include Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and his movie is as mediocre as the latest versions of theirs. Maybe “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “The Shape of Water” have set the bar too high for marine absurdity, but your local aquarium has a stronger sense of wonder than “Aquaman.”

It does get off to a good, romantic-comedy start, though. Nicole Kidman washes up wounded, more or less, at the Maine lighthouse of Temuera Morrison. He nurses her. She slurps up his goldfish. And Kidman gets closer to Daryl Hannah in “Splash” than you might have thought necessary.

Anyway, here she’s Atlanna, the superpowered queen of Atlantis, and she’s fleeing an arranged marriage. He’s Tom Curry, a civilian hunk in flannel. Together, they have a kid named Arthur Curry, whose ability to talk to marine life makes him Aquaman. And, after a quick, home-demolishing battle, Atlanna is dragged back to Atlantis, leaving adult Arthur bitterly certain that the Atlantan power structure has killed her for her sexual amphibiousness.

What ensues isn’t a search for her or a plot for revenge. It’s a film that seems obligated to be a movie about an Arthur — the wrong one! There’s a nice, beery scene that lets Momoa sulk at a bar with Morrison in a way that calls to mind Dudley Moore’s miserable heir who drank himself silly in “Arthur.” A whole movie of that would have been something. Instead, we get the tired old, other Arthur, a plebe destined for royalty, who, here, is put on a quest to find some long-lost trident that will help prove him King of Atlantis. Because he doesn’t want the job, the movie saddles him with Mera (Amber Heard). She’s some water warrior who doesn’t want to see her home ruled by Arthur’s power-drunk, younger half brother, Orm (Patrick Wilson). So she has to keep shoving Arthur into heroism.

Meanwhile — you knew there’d be a meanwhile — we get to know a sexy pirate (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). He wants Aquaman to pay for letting his pirate father (Michael Beach) die on a doomed ship they were trying to rob. This means lots of time with Pirate Jr. cooking up a way to get back into the main plot. His chance comes courtesy of Orm, who communicates with him via holographic splotch.

There is a frisson of delight in seeing a biracial hero dominate a superhero movie and, in Abdul-Mateen, his black foe. But you can’t build a whole blockbuster out of just that. The novelty of Momoa in this part isn’t unexciting. He’s an inspired left-field choice for Aquaman, who in the DC comic books, and the cartoons they inspired, tended to be a slab of Eagle Scout-y blondness.

In another age, Paul Walker would have played him. Now he’s this imposingly big, impenetrably chill, multiracial, biker type, sheathed in tribal tattoos, with a long, dark mane. (Now, only the highlights are blond.) That physique is a draw. You could make a taco with the crease in his back, and his pecs almost whisper for a pillow case. This is to say that Momoa might be the last person you’d pick for somebody named Arthur but the first for a movie in need of a star to plow shirtless from one wet location to another.

But the people responsible for “Aquaman” seem a little embarrassed to lavish Momoa with even a lick of lust. The camera doesn’t manage to take him all the way in until closing time. And after an introduction in which he fights crime in only a pair of dark jeans, he endures a sequence in the desert (please, don’t make me explain) wearing a long-sleeved Henley and linen slacks. (With all due respect to SpongeBob, those are square pants.)

The people who made three “Thor” films never seemed to have this problem. The people who made three “Thor” films also had Chris Hemsworth, an actor eventually allowed to find his hunkiness kind of funny. Momoa, for now, seems stuck. Should he give this part some personality? Should he give an actual performance, as an Adonis or even as an Arthur?

Back in 2011, the movies tried to make a star of him in a recycled version of “Conan the Barbarian,” which seemed to believe that all there is to do with fit actors is have them do the routines of fit forebears. Having them play superheroes instead is only slightly more imaginative. Momoa is a better Aquaman than he was a Conan. And yet grumpy, cocky, mumbly Arthur is still an action-star salad — a little bit Willis, a little bit Stallone and the tiniest chip off the old Rock. And the movie, which James Wan (“Saw,” “The Conjuring,” “Furious 7”) directed from a script credited to David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Will Beall, doesn’t seem interested in giving him a character with either an inner life or much of a personal one. Momoa is merely required to hit plot points — and people.

No wonder he rarely seems excited to be here. There’s nothing to be excited about. “Aquaman” is so much like parts of “Thor” and “Black Panther” and “Avatar” and “The Jewel of the Nile” and so reliant upon an ancient British legend that you don’t know why the people who made this movie bothered. None of Wan’s skills as a builder of suspense sequences come in handy here. He’s minding a circus. When Adbul-Mateen makes his big re-entry, he has to announce his new villain name, but through a giant helmet that makes him look like an electronic music DJ at the BET Awards. The helmet is so big that when he says, “I am. Black —” I didn’t catch what Black he was. Black Mamba? Black Mumford? Apparently, it’s Black Manta, but I really did have to look that up.

Wilson’s silver hair is slicked back so he looks like his father is either Draco Malfoy or Ivan Drago. As it happens, the man who played Ivan Drago is here, too, as the king Kidman fled. But this is the sort of obvious aquatic movie that might have cast Dolph Lundgren because his name is Dolph. Poor Amber Heard has to perform her scenes in a scarlet wig and emerald green costume and do superpower acting with her mouth agape. She looks like she ate 40 Katy Perry songs and is belching them up. There’s even room for a hobbit-y Willem Dafoe, as Arthur’s guide and trainer. And: What are the physics of Atlantis? How do some things float and others lethally — loudly — hurtle to the sea floor?

There’s no joy or wonder to behold, just comic-book movie blah-blah. All these larded-on extra characters and this extraneous plot leave you with the sense that nobody trusted Momoa to carry more of this thing on his own. Has nobody seen this man’s shoulders! He does get saddled with romantic silliness and lots of “half-breed” put-downs. And, in its way, the movie treats him accordingly, like he’s 50 percent bouncer and 50 percent something that you’d get with a Happy Meal.

Additional Information:

Rated PG-13. Sea monsters, lasers, wet suits and the bodies that go in them. Running time: 2 hours 23 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/movies/aquaman-review.html" id="babb1aa0-3361-3bb2-ab4a-8aa71a5ac89e">The New York Times</a>.

Nobody’s going to “Aquaman” for the metaphors. And to be fair, nobody put metaphors in “Aquaman.” Yet when a set of plastic six-pack rings drifts past the camera, you do wonder whether it’s a nod to pollution or a wink at Jason Momoa’s fitness.

Wesley Morris

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