One door closes, another one opens. No sooner did I sign off on the unexpected cornucopia of riches that comprised two weeks of the Toronto International Film Festival when two weeks of the smaller, elitist New York Film Festival began in earnest. Far fewer films of any real interest are ever shown at this rarefied event, and they mostly interest only the people who financed them in the first place. This year, they surprised me with only one genuine masterpiece—Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s rich, luxurious and breathtaking biopic about Leonard Bernstein with a spectacular star turn by Carey Mulligan as the bisexual genius conductor-composer’s tortured wife Felicia—but several worthy and rewarding supplements worth noting. Highly recommended: The Zone of Interest, a detailed chronicle of domestic life among privileged Nazis living in comfort and peace outside the walls of Auschwitz; Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s closeup look at what it was like to be the wife of Elvis Presley; and Hit Man, Richard Linklater’s clever and original juggling of the facts in an unlikely but true story about a charismatic character named Gary Johnson (a star-making role for Glen Powell) who doubled as a button-down philosophy professor by day and an undercover contract killer for the New Orleans Police Department after dark.
On the dark side of the coin, there was, unfortunately, a hateful and pretentious load of pornography called Poor Things that trashes the career of Emma Stone, and a deadly bore called Foe, about a disintegrating marriage in some bizarre futuristic world in the year 2065 plagued by catastrophic droughts, A. I., and bad acting. It just opened commercially to a firing squad of bad reviews, so here goes.
A married couple named Hen and Junior live in a 200-year-old farmhouse in a once-productive Midwest farming community now ravaged by scorched land, depleted crops, and people replaced with robots created by Artificial Intelligence. Junior works in an industrial chicken plant. (I kid you not.) Hen works in a diner, but mostly, she just sits around moping and stands naked in the shower, crying her eyes out. They are played by Irish hunk Paul Mescal and the charming, resourceful Saoirse Ronan and whoever convinced them to appear in this paralyzing fiasco should be placed under house arrest. Water is a valuable commodity and it must be conserved in the limited amount of time left before the planet ceases to exist. Nobody has any water to drink, but Hen and Junior are always uncorking an endless supply of Cabernet Sauvignon.
FOE ★ (1/4 stars) |
One day, a stranger arrives to inform Hen and Junior they’ve been picked by lottery to desert their barren fields and move to another planet. Junior will go first, and while he waits for instructions, Hen begins to worry. How long will he be gone before she can join him, and will their already rocky relationship survive? An extramarital affair might be the answer, but since nobody else seems to live within a thousand-mile radius, who can she sleep with—the man on the U.P.S. delivery truck? They fight. They argue. They endlessly debate the fate of the world. The talk is dull and repetitive, but in the hope of keeping the audience from snoring, there is plenty of nudity.
After a year painfully passes, the stranger returns to inform them the spaceship will leave two weeks later, and the government plans to send Junior off to settle the new planet. Hen opens another bottle of Cabernet and plans a new kind of life form for a domestic situation to replace Junior while he’s gone. Long bouts of self-indulgence dominate the screenplay as they talk about what is missing in their lives and the parts that need re-inventing, delivered at a level so low only a dog can hear. There is no ending, but before it fades to black, Junior is cloned, and now there are two of him, but you never know which one is the original Junior and which is the robot. While Hen opens another Cabernet, the two Juniors sink into an inconclusive bout of head-scratching yammering. Eventually, it left-turns into a new romance between Hen, Junior and the replicant. By this time, I could no longer keep my eyes open, so I haven’t a clue about what happens next, and I do not intend to see it again to find out. The title of Foe makes no sense, and neither does anything else in this rambling heap of junk. The actors deserve a medal for babbling so much convoluted claptrap with a straight face. Written and directed by Garth Davis from a 2018 novel I never want to read by Iain Reid, Foe is not just a bad dream. It’s a colossal nightmare.