Don't apologize for having a dream
Honestly, would be better without the inner monologuing. I almost lost it during the first 30 minutes.
What a simple, mature and beautiful movie. No unnecessary "filmy" drama. Highly recommend.
It's a fantastic movie! The acting is superb, and the cinematography is unparalleled!
This was such a breather from all the overly Patriotic american shit that Netflix has been releasing lately, it's nice, simple and the story is attractive and interesting. Not to mention the acting is perfect! I would love to see more of this kind of shows
"Shit like this always happens to my girl Nancy Drew. Sis be coming across some weird, kinky shit that don't make no sense, but in the end, it always turns out to be some regular-degular, missionary-position vanilla shit."
The comedy and dialogue go hand in hand here, it really works. The comedic interactions between characters is what made it a good watch for me. The title reveals a big part of the mystery but there's still plenty to offer and a few twists and turns. The funk hip-hop synth score and songs were a pretty good fit. The SpongeBob and Nancy Drew callouts were funny. It's too long though, I was about ready for it to end and there was still 50 minutes left—which turned out to be worth it. A good third act. Overall, it had it's moments but I can't see myself remembering this for too long.
I want some fried chicken now
[8.3/10] I kept waiting for it all to go wrong somehow. Things don’t simply “work out” in the world of Better Call Saul. This show is a tragedy, after all. People succeed, but only at a cost. There’s always some unexpected wrinkle, some unforeseen consequence, that makes victory more complicated and bittersweet than anyone on either side of the screen imagined.
Time and again, season 6 presented the plans of Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim(Rhea Seehorn) as nearly falling into ruin. If Howard (Patrick Fabian) spots his erstwhile foe in the country club locker room, if a valet walks a step quicker, if Jimmy can’t summon the strength to move a parking sign, the whole scheme falls apart. With each step, they were this close to being discovered. Every time they flirted with disaster. Surely their luck couldn’t last forever.
For its part, “Plan and Execution”, the midseason finale, gives the two of them one last hurdle to leap over. As established in the previous episode, the Sandpiper mediator unexpectedly wears a cast, screwing up their whole plan to stage photos where it looks like he’s taking a bribe from Saul. Now, Kim and Jimmy have to scramble to reassemble their team and restage the pictures, with the ticking clock of the impending mediation to add to the pressure.
By god, it’s fun! If you step back and look at Kim and Jimmy’s trickery, it’s easy to see how they’re destroying someone’s life for thin reasons. However much Howard may deserve some comeuppance for his own misdeeds, this is, at a minimum, disproportionate retribution. But competence in stories is thrilling and competence with flair is captivating. What Jimmy and Kim do isn’t good; but good lord are they good at what they do.
Jimmy persuades his actor to do the job via a stirring speech about the love of performance. His director parlays the “emergency” into more cash in a canny fashion. His make-up artist is dressed up like a Gelfling but no less dedicated to her craft. His boom operator rushes to the scene with the proper equipment in tow. Kim herself fashions a makeshift cast (who would know better?) and races, shoeless, to adjust the blocking for the “scene.” These are pros working their magic in a crunch, and the delight of seeing them work is only matched by the underhandedness of their deeds.
The pièce de résistance comes when the episodes reveals that Howard’s private eye is in on the deal. The ploy of switching the phone number for Howard’s usual detectives is a little convenient. But it adds one more flourish to the scheme: a chance for the P.I. to seed the misleading photos, for Kim and Jimmy to lace them with the drug that will mess with Howard’s head (and, importantly, his eyes), and have their inside man switch them out with some phonies to make Hamlin look like a clown.
It’s the perfect crime. And the last minute change in plans, forcing our would-be heroes to scramble to overcome one more monkey wrench thrown into the proceedings, only shows how brilliant they are at this sort of thing.
So something else has to go wrong, right? Maybe the AV kids realize something’s amiss and decide to call the cops. Maybe poor Irene, the class representative who Jimmy originally recruited, comes into contact with the chemical agent intended for Howard and faints in the middle of the mediation. There have to be complications, unforeseen problems, something to show that for all their skill, all their talent, Kim and Jimmy are flying too close to the sun here.
There aren’t, though. The plan goes off without a hitch. Howard becomes unhinged the second he sees the mediator and makes the connection to the bribe photos. He rants to all involved about how Saul clearly set him up. His pupils are dilated as he cuts the image of someone unwell. He raves like a madman, sounding paranoid, delusional, yelling at strangers about a conspiracy whose only proof is pictures of Jimmy returning some jogger’s frisbee. This is it. This is Jimmy and Kim’s con artist masterpiece.
The mediator walks. The other side lowers their offer, smelling blood in the water. And Clifford Main (Ed Begley Jr.) has no choice but to blink. Maybe he believes Howard. Maybe he can envision a world where his longtime colleague is telling the truth, and the former employee who once bilked his firm out of a signing bonus is devilish enough to orchestrate all of this.
But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Because Jimmy and Kim want their money and their revenge. Howard wants to do anything to prevent Saul from winning. But Cliff, the most decent man in this universe, only wants to do what’s best for their clients. That means salvaging what he can from this disaster, avoiding the shaky uncertainties that lie ahead, and taking the offer.
It worked, by god. Kim and Jimmy’s plan worked and worked perfectly. It may have cost Kim her chance to supercharge the pro bono practice that supposedly motivated all of this, but at the end of the day, their plan went off without a hitch. As Kim’s mother might say, they got away with it.
The same can’t be said for Lalo (Tony Dalton). He’s had preternatural success to this point. The cunning drug lord tracked down Margarethe Ziegler. He found one of Werner’s “boys.” He uncovered the location of Gus’ (Giancarlo Esposito) superlab. But to this point, he has no proof. “The Chicken Man” is too good at covering his tracks. Instead, all Lalo can muster is a video intended for Don Eladio, spelling out his theory, and a plan to murder Fring’s guards to secure the evidence he needs to support it. It’s a hard-fought plan, one born of sleeping in cars and lurking in the sewers until the time is right.
Except he slips up. He calls Hector (Mark Margolis), maybe to say goodbye in case things go wrong, maybe just to make his uncle proud before he dives into a dangerous situation. But Mike (Jonathan Banks) has tapped the nursing home’s phones, and now Fring’s men know Lalo’s back. The full court press surveillance worked. Unlike Saul’s scheme, Lalo’s plan ran aground on his opponent’s defenses.
The catch is that Lalo is as clever and resourceful as Jimmy and Kim are. Realizing he’s been foiled, he calls his uncle back and declares it’s time to go back to Plan A -- a thinly veiled threat on Gus’ life. He knows Mike will hear it, that Fring will respond, and that the security apparatus will shift. So much of the conflict between Lalo and Gus is a game of chess. Fring’s operation makes a move, and the Salamancas respond in kind. Lalo’s remaining moves are dwindling, but it’s not a checkmate just yet.
The game is done for Jimmy and Kim, though. They relax at home with a bottle of wine and an old movie. No more marks left to fool. No more schemes left to deploy. Only a bit of clean-up left. Howard shows up to congratulate and confront them, and they dutifully permit it. At this point, he cannot win. They’ve seen to that, and he knows it.
His earlier parable about Chuck’s habit with soft drink cans speaks to a sort of vigilance the elder McGill brother internalized. It’s the kind that presumably helped him fend off prankster younger siblings who’d shake up sodas to get one over on their big brothers, the sort that Howard sorely wishes he’d adopted. Hamlin can’t win anymore. But he can dress Jimmy and Kim down for their misdeeds, speak to the rot in the soul that would allow them to justify such an elaborate and immoral act, and try to make it harder to live with.
Howard isn’t wrong. The audience is inclined to side with Jimmy and Kim here. They are our protagonists. They work together and love one another. They’re damn fun to watch in every scheme and scam. They work meticulously to win the day and plan for every eventuality. As their own victim highlights, they rose from humble circumstances while Hamlin had a leg up from his father. Howard’s done crappy things to both of them. The couple is entitled to some righteous indignation.
What’s more, television shows are more fun when the main characters achieve what they set out to do. There’s a natural tendency to root for perspective characters, to hope they’ll see things through, even if deep down we know it’s wrong.
Nevertheless, Howard speaks the truth. Jimmy could have taken a different path, but he was born to color outside the lines. Kim is a person of incredible talent and potential, who uses those attributes to aid those who need it most and to wreak vengeance upon the people who’ve wronged her. They do get off on this, with their sultry celebration during the announcement of the settlement as the latest example. Hamlin has lost, but he diagnoses them to a tee. He draws into stark relief how they ruined a man’s life -- a man who has his own sins to answer for but is still struggling and sympathetic -- and how they’ll have no trouble sleeping at night.
Or at least they don’t betray one iota of regret. Howard points out that they have to play it that way, to feign ignorance and innocence. But they’re both consummate actors, unbothered by the routine, barely suggesting a whit of remorse for their actions. In their eyes, this is karma. This is reaping what you’ve sewn. This is a game to them.
Until it isn’t.
It’s just a wisp at first. A wick bends. The flame flickers. Something is coming. Writer-director Thomas Schnauz and his team deploy the suspense masterfully. The way the mood suddenly shifts is brilliant. Those subtle hints pile up, until the expressions on Kim and Jimmy’s faces tell the tale. They’re no longer gently asking Howard to leave because they’re done with him. They’re imploring him to go for his own safety. Lalo has arrived.
The twist is fabulous. Lalo’s call to Hector was not a means to smoke out Fring or lighten security at the superlab. He knew it would prompt Mike to circle the wagons and pull security away from tertiary targets like Saul, leaving him and Kim exposed and vulnerable. There’s more than one way to get to Gus and, backed into a corner, Lalo found another one.
It’s a spectacularly terrifying scene: the way he emerges from the shadows, the way he’s unnervingly calm despite his overwhelming menace, the way his “lawyers” desperately beg the man who was, just a minute ago, their worst enemy, to get out now if he wants to save himself.
Only It’s too late. The shock arrives as Lalo grows tired of waiting, of tolerating potential witnesses, and puts a bullet through a well-coiffed stranger’s skull once he’s fully diagnosed the shared pathology of his antagonizers. This is the worst day of Howard Hamlin’s life, and also the last day. Holy hell.
There it is. There is where things go wrong. There is the cost for taking things too far and tiptoeing too close to danger and disaster. Better Call Saul is a show that, commendably, zigs when viewers expect it to zag. It doesn’t traffic in twists for the sake of twists. The surprises are earned and the natural consequences of the characters’ actions, rooted in what will affect them most.
The recompense for so many risky ploys to sully a man’s career and reputation is not that the scheme ultimately falls apart or exposes Kim and Jimmy instead. It’s that it crashes into their earlier grand scheme, the source of their blood money, that quickly becomes that much bloodier. There is great surprise, rich irony, and dark poetry in that.
Six episodes remain of Better Call Saul, half a dozen more outings to firmly and finally resolve how what’s left of the life of Jimmy McGill runs headlong into the life of Saul Goodman. In the moment when the barriers between those two personas tumbles down for good, there lies a firm reminder. The “magic man”, whom viewers know and love from his entertaining skullduggery on Breaking Bad, arrived at that colorful existence from a soul-shaking path -- one that always comes with a trade-off, a complication, and a price
i don't... what.. i just can't breathe aright now... holy holy damn
The using switch phones to turn Huel Babbinah into some small backwater town in Albuquerque's version of Santa Claus has got to be one of my favorite Jimmy schemes to date.
Kim has become the Jesse Pinkman of this show for me: I very badly want to see her escape everything unscathed, but fear the worst.
Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler going straight off on Howard at about 36 min in literally gives me goosebumps.
Kim Wexler is my hero.
Jesus, as soon as the silence started to linger in the last scene I tensed up, wondering if this is going to be Kim's exit from the series. Thankfully not, but that was still a well-shot build-up and nasty shock.
That was also a new low for Jimmy; my heart ached for the poor old lady. The show has been building the "Fall" (per episode title) for both Jimmy (into Saul Goodman) and Kim (into work exhaustion) for half a season now, but it still hits hard when they both come to be.
[8.2/10] There is no show on television that threads the needle between symbolism and literalism better than Better Call Saul. Part of the show’s success, and that of its predecessor, stem from the fact that it works equally well as an exciting story as it does a commentary on human nature and what relationships with bad or shady people do to us. No character represents that idea better in “Fall” than Kim Wexler.
The scene with her out on the Texas-New Mexico border to interface with her new client works well as foreshadowing, and as a sign that Kim is trying to take on too much by herself and coming close to suffering for it. When her car gets stuck in the dirt, she has so much going on, another tight deadline to meet to try to make up for Jimmy’s possible shortfall, that she tries to take care of it all herself. She find a nearby board, heaves and pushes on the car until it budges, and panics when it starts heading toward a nearby oil derrick. Only by racing into the driver’s seat and slamming on the breaks at the last minute does she avoid a grisly wreck.
It functions as a sign that Kim is juggling too many balls, that she’s letting small but important details slip, with her car as a particular conduit for this idea, in a way that could come back to bite her.
But it also functions as a larger metaphor for what Kim’s going through with Jimmy. She has a problem of being stuck in the muck herself -- with the threat of Chuck’s machinations to get his brother disbarred and Jimmy’s ensuing suspension putting pressure on her to carry the firm. So Kim does what she always does -- she pushes and pushes and pushes until she can get things moving again. Little does she realize that in all that pushing, she may be headed for disaster, and it’s only her frantic heroics that allow her narrowly avoid it. Sooner or later, those heroics will come up short, sooner or later, trying to expend all of her efforts to keep Jimmy out of that muck will backfire on her. It’s only so long that she can go to such lengths and avoid that crash.
Everyone’s hustling hard to avoid a crash in “Fall,” though most of the plots of the episode involve financial decisions rather than ones involving dirt and chrome. That includes Mike who, in a brief scene, does his due diligence with Lydia to make sure he’s putting his name down with the right people, but it also includes Jimmy, who is pushing hard to speed up the timing of his payment from the Sandpiper case.
To that end, he finds roundabout ways of putting pressure on Irene, the named plaintiff, in settling the case so that he gets his percentage of the common fund. That means, plying her with cookies to take a look at the latest letters advising her as to the status of the case. It means giving her a free pair of walking shoes to make her look like a big spender. And it means going so far as to rig a bingo game to make it look like fortune keeps smiling upon her at the expense of all her friends and erstwhile well-wishers.
Many of these sequences are funny. It’s amusing to see Jimmy decked out in full mall-walker gear as he puts in plan into motion. There’s something undeniably entertaining about Jimmy being ensconsced in a spirited session of chair yoga when turning Irene’s friends against her. And it’s enjoyably silly hearing him play “let’s you and him fight” while playing innocent in the Sandpiper lobby. There is a prosaic quality to Jimmy’s treachery here, and his million dollar payday requiring him to hobnob with a pack of old ladies creates a certain amount of inherent farce.
But it also brings a cruelty, a cavalier and callous quality to the story. Jimmy is not entirely without scruples – there is a moment of hesitation, a momentary wince, when he sets the rigged bingo balls into the chamber – but in the end he’s willing to turn poor, innocent Irene into an outcast, to leave her crying in a back room from the ostracism, to get what he wants. That’s who Jimmy is. When he’s in a tight spot, it doesn’t matter that this is someone who is kind to him, who trusts him, who was his key to getting the Sandpiper case in the first place – he wants what he wants and he’ll do what he needs to do to get it, regardless of how dishonest, crafty, or cruel he has to be to do it.
The same, appropriately enough, is true for Chuck in “Fall.” When the malpractice insurance providers show up and declare that they’ll double the premiums on every lawyer in the firm so long as Chuck is in practice there. Chuck vows to see them in court, and Howard, initially kindly and then more forcefully, suggests that Chuck ought to retire. Howard tells his partner that there’s a place for him at the local law school, and less gently, that he no longer trusts Chuck’s judgment.
It’s easy to see Howard as just as mercenary as anyone here (including Jimmy, whom Howard accuses of being like Golem as he tries to move a settlement along), but he’s not wrong. Chuck seems to legitimately be a great legal mind, and he genuinely appears to be getting better, but he has his vendettas, his blindspots, his irregularities that, understandable or not, have made him a liability to the firm he helped create. It’s hard to accuse Howard of any sort of altruism in this, but he’s been supportive of Chuck, stood by him, and it’s not unreasonable for him to reflect and say that Chuck is doing more harm than good to the company that bears his name.
But Chuck doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t care about outrageous premiums or putting his firm’s good name on the line as part of a byzantine plan to catch his brother in the act, or even about destroying his firm by trying to cash out his share. He puts on a show for Howard, one that sees him having turned the lights on and used an electric mixer to try to puff himself up in front of a friend-turned-adversary, to show Howard that he is not the crazy man who ranted and raved on the stand but a sharp thinker making great strides who can either be a vital asset or a one-man poison pill depending on which side Howard chooses.
That’s the thing about Chuck, and his brother for that matter. They are willing to destroy, or threaten to destroy, the lives and livelihoods of the people around them to achieve their own goals, and damn the consequences. (Those consequences may, providently enough, make Howard more likely to want to settle the Sandpiper case in order to have some liquidity and cash on hand.) Even the people close to them, who have helped them and looked out for them, are not immune from suffering in their wake.
That catches up with Kim in the end. She can’t celebrate with a miffed Jimmy when he brings in a fancy bottle of booze in honor of his scheme to prompt a settlement working, because she has to do much to do to try to cover his behind. There’s been hints that her efforts to do it all herself rather than deal with her lingering concerns about Jimmy were going to hurt. There’s the five-minute naps in the car before meetings at Mesa Verde. There’s the near-miss out at the oil derrick. There’s other instances where simply being proximate to all this mess has put Kim in harm’s way.
As always, the show shoots it beautifully. There’s something quietly ominous about the silence in the car after Kim rehearses her speech. The scenery outside the window starts to fade away. Suddenly, in a blink, the accident hits. She moans in pain as she pulls herself from the wreckage. Her carefully-crafted binders blow away in the wind. Smoke billows into the austere New Mexico landscape as she surveys the tumble of metal and legal documents before her. This is, despite all her efforts, despite all her attempts to carry everything on her own back, something unavoidable.
That’s the rub of “Fall” and of Better Call Saul. Except when facing one another, the McGill brothers almost always get what they want. They know how to work the system, to tilt things in their favor, to intimidate or challenge or call the bluff of whomever is standing in their way. And because of that, they rarely suffer.
But the people around them do. The people who care about them, who try to help them, who do anything to tarnish their pride or their patience end up worse for being in the unfortunate orbit of these two men, just as Nacho’s father is worse for his son’s association with the Salamancas. It’s never Jimmy or Chuck who has to face the consequences, has to stomach the hardships of their failings or difficulties -- it’s the poor old lady made a pariah so that Jimmy can have a payday, it’s the man who stood by Chuck until it threatened to destroy his firm, and it’s the smart, decent woman who became Jimmy’s confidante, accomplice, and caretaker, straining to keep the two of them from ruin, and finding herself asleep at the wheel, surrounded by crushed chrome and the detritus of her meticulous work.
There is no escaping the McGill brothers. There is no fixing them or correcting them or saving them. There is only the doomed efforts that emerge in their wake, that inevitably end in a crash.
Watching Jimmy bring ruin to an elderly woman's social life for his own gain was flat out disgusting.
It was the first time I've ever felt genuinely disgusted with him. All the other lies and schemes - even his bar scams as shitty as they were - didn't feel as repulsive to watch as seeing him manipulate those women like that.
Pride, anger and desperation have stripped him of his moral limits. If he ever had any they're gone now. He's not Jimmy anymore, he's Saul Goodman.
[9.8/10] One of the ways you can tell that a show is great, not just good, is when it’s engrossing even when there’s not anything particularly exciting or notable happening. It’s easy to be engaged, even giddy, about Better Call Saul in the midst of McGill-on-McGill courtroom combat, in the middle of another of Jimmy’s capers, as Mike Ehrmantraut is springing another one of his traps, or when another little Breaking Bad easter egg pops up. But the mark of a great show is that it can be just as transfixing, just as mesmerizing, to watch Chuck have dinner with his ex-wife, the moment laden with hopes and expectations, with little more happening than a conversation between old friends.
Better yet, that flashback to a time when Jimmy and Chuck were using their scheming in concert and not against one another isn’t simply a flight of fancy to contrast their later antagonism, or a simple pleasing vignette of the early point of Chuck’s condition. It’s a character study, a set of scenes that never comes says anything outright about Chuck McGill, but tells us so much about who he is, how he reacts to obstacles and difficulties, and quietly sets up the bigger fireworks to come.
It shows that Chuck is a prideful man. That’s not much of a revelation, but what’s striking about the flashback are the lengths that he goes to hide his condition from his ex-wife, Rebecca. He concocts a story about a mixup with the electric company (poetically enough, involving transposed letters on an address), and tries to keep it all under wraps.
When Rebecca uses a cell phone that causes his “acute allergy to electromagnetism” to flare up (featuring superb camera work and sound design to convey his perception of it), he throws it out of her hands. But when called to account for his behavior, he doesn’t come clean about why he did it. Tellingly, he not only comes up with an excuse, he not only turns the blame onto Rebecca herself rather than accept it for be honest, but he frames it in terms of propriety, in terms of what’s “right,” in terms of a decorum that he sees himself as adhering to and chastises others for not meeting his standard. It is a defense mechanism, a self-preservation method, one that in that moment and in the future, causes him to mask his frustrations in grandiose notions of propriety and principles rather than face his own failings and prejudices.
But most importantly, even when Rebecca is effectively storming out, an act that would thwart the elaborate lengths he went to under the clear purpose of winning her back, he keeps Jimmy from telling her the truth. Even though Chuck seemed on the cusp of making a breakthrough with a woman he clearly still had feelings for, he could not bear to be thought of as sick; he could not bear to be though of a lesser; he could not bear to be thought of as crazy. Jimmy McGill knows that, and though he clearly takes no pleasure in it, it’s how he takes his brother down.
In just five minutes, Better Call Saul gives its audience a snootful of character detail and foreshadowing that establishes and reestablishes every hint and bit of shading to make the series’ peak drama at the end of the episode that much more understandable and meaningful. It’s a sign of this show’s virtuosity, and the way it understands tension, character, and storytelling like no other show on television.
And that’s just the first five minutes! “Chicanery” goes full courtroom drama in a way that BCS, despite being one of the best legal shows to grace our television screens, hasn’t really done before. The show sets it up nigh-perfectly, laying out witness testimony, objections, and grants of “leeway” that make sense in context while also providing enough wiggle room for the major characters to be a little more theatrical that would be typical for a disciplinary proceeding.
That extends to the episode’s supporting characters as well. Kim Wexler, who is Better Call Saul’s secret weapon, is not only sharp and decisive in the courtroom, but amid all the intra-McGill squabbling, gets a big win. Rather than relishing in her success, Kim distinguishes herself from both McGill brothers by coming clean to the representatives from Mesa Verde about all this ugliness, only to have the head of the bank brush it off and call her the best outside counsel he’s ever had. It’s subtle but important way that Kim and Jimmy fully win here, and that the blowback from Chuck’s machinations do not sink the client and the work that Kim has put so much effort into.
It also extends to Howard, who, while frequently a cipher on this show, continues to offer some of the most pragmatic and complex approaches to these situations of anyone. He is clearly on Chuck’s side, and clearly interested in preserving the good name of his firm. But he is also firmly honest on the stand, complimentary about Jimmy when he doesn’t have to be, frank about how his rise and fall within HHM, and cognizant of Chuck’s limitations and liabilities in a way that Chuck himself simply isn’t.
What ensues is an incredible chess match, a battle of wits and wills, between Jimmy and Chuck. Chuck carefully rehearses his testimony, again careful to couch his attack on his brother as not coming from a place of affront or weakness in himself, but to an abstract, platonic ideal -- the law. Chuck is out to show that he does not hate his brother; he cares for him, wants what’s best for him, but also wants what’s best for the legal professional he claims to hold so dear.
“Chicanery” subtly undercuts the sincerity of Chuck’s words not just by their rehearsed nature, but in the selection of detail that precedes them. He professes to love the law because it guarantees equal treatment to everyone under the same rules and regulations, and yet he is driven to these proceedings in a jaguar, pulls up to the courthouse in the presence of reserved parking cones, and saunters in as the concerned god on high, blameless for his own misfortunes and ready to direct judgment at those he sees as at fault.
But Jimmy is ready, as always, with a plan of his own, one that is not completely above board. His official goal is to not to dispute that it’s his voice on the tape or that it was tampered with, but that he said what he said because he was concerned for his brother’s wellbeing and more importantly, his sanity. In that, he hopes to convince the disciplinary committee that he did not undertake the elaborate, “baroque” scheme to disrupt his brother’s dealings with Mesa Verde that Chuck alleges, but that he gave into Chuck’s paranoid fantasy so as to prevent his brother from slipping further.
And like the best of Jimmy’s lies, it works because there is a grain of truth to it. We know that Chuck isn’t wrong that even if there was no hard evidence of it, Jimmy unleashed an elaborate ploy to trip up Chuck. But we also know that Jimmy means it when he says he would say anything to make his brother feel better, to prevent Chuck from slipping back into his aluminum foil-lined nightmare. Jimmy may have been admitting what really happened rather than telling Chuck “whatever he wanted to hear,” but coming from Slippin’ Jimmy, that is the truest sign that he genuinely would have said anything, even the god’s honest, to make his brother feel better.
That’s also what makes it so tragic, so impressive but sad, that Jimmy will now do anything to show that his brother is insane. Better Call Saul is tremendous at muddying the moral waters in complex, unassuming ways, but Jimmy’s plan to provoke Chuck may be the apotheosis of an act that is clever, resourceful, full of Jimmy’s trademark showmanship, understandable, and yet also more than a bit diabolical. It’s easy to root for Jimmy, particularly in the shadow of his brother’s superciliousness, but it’s one more case of Jimmy covering up one dirty trick with yet another.
While Jimmy normally revels in that sort of gamesmanship, in the razzle dazzle that makes him as effective as lawyer as he was a conman, he seems to take no joy in it. He reveals that he had Mike take those photographs of Chuck’s apartment to lure Rebecca back, something that he knew would put his brother off balance. But when he stands by the vending machines (which create a subtle buffer to prevent Chuck from confronting him about it) he does not have a wisp of glee at his plan coming to fruition, just the hurt resignation that it’s come to this.
Jimmy, however, is not done. In his final act meant to prove to the disciplinary board that his brother is unbalanced and thus untrustworthy, he resorts to some of the titular “chicanery.” He employs Huell(!) to slip a cell phone battery in Chuck’s pocket, and what follows is one of the best scenes in the show’s history.
It involves a back and forth between Jimmy and Chuck. Jimmy seems to pulling every rabbit out of his hat that he can come up with to expose his brother as a nut. He shows pictures from inside Chuck’s house. He gestures to Rebecca in the audience and even garnishes an emotional apology from Chuck to her. He plays “commit and contradict” with Chuck about his alleged illness, trying to establish for the disciplinary committee that Chuck’s issues are psychosomatic, and getting his brother to affirm that he is not feeling electromagnetic waves from anywhere in particular in the room.
It’s then that Jimmy takes out his cell phone, presumably expecting a reaction from Chuck to prove that his brother would respond to it on sight. Instead, Chuck, appearing wise to Jimmy’s machinations, determines that the phone is without is battery, and it seems, for a moment, like Jimmy’s stunt has been foiled, more fodder for Chuck to demonstrate that his brother is a two-bit huckster, not a lawyer. Instead, Jimmy plays the magician, revealing the final element of his trick -- the battery that Huell slipped into Chuck’s breast pocket.
That is what sets Chuck off, as he pulls the battery out like it’s radioactive and tosses it on the floor. He goes into a deranged rant that ought to earn Michael McKean an Emmy. He howls about his brother’s irresponsibleness, about how Jimmy’s billboard stunt had to be staged, about how defecating in a sunroof, about slights going back to childhood. The camera zooms in slowly on Chuck as he digs himself deeper and deeper, each word making this crusade seem more like the childish vendetta from a mentally-disturbed man against the imagined slights from his little brother than a high-minded mission to uphold the law. As more and more of his angry, pontificating face fills the frame, he stops, and the ensuing shot of the disciplinary board’s reaction says it all.
Jimmy has done it. In front of the state bar, in front of their partners, in front of the women they love, Jimmy exposes his brother as a mentally ill person ranting and raving, not the dignified legal lion he tried so hard to present himself as, in the courtroom and in that dinner with Rebecca way back when. The episode cuts to a far shot of Chuck, seeming so small, so defeated in the frame, as the buzz of the exit sign looms large next to him. This is his Waterloo, the terrible culmination of two brothers’ issues with one another, laid bare in a court of law for all the world to see.
Chuck, more than Hector or Howard or the cartel, is the villain of Better Call Saul. That makes it easy to hope that Jimmy overcomes him. But in that final moment, Jimmy again mixes fact with fiction. His brother is telling the truth. As paranoid as it sounds, as childish as it is to hold onto certain grudges and resentments, Chuck is correct in all of his assessments. And yet, as the opening scene tells us, he is a prideful individual, unwilling to admit to his illness, to his difficulties, as anything that would make him seem the lesser or not in control. That is his downfall, the fatal flaw that not only keeps him from carrying out his plan, but from what we see in this episode, which costs him the love of both his wife and his brother. That is unspeakably sad -- the story of an individual, even a villain, coming so close, and losing everything worth having in the end, when the worst of him is put on display.
Probably the best episode of TV this year, if not one of the strongest I have ever seen.
[8.5/10] You could be forgiven for asking, “Hey, isn’t there some guy named Saul in this show?” for most of the runtime of “Sabrosito.” It’s an episode that turns over most of the proceedings to the happenings in the orbit of Gustavo Fring, with enough of a narrative side dish for Mike and Jimmy to remind you that they are main characters in the series.
But I’m not complaining. Giancarlo Esposito has a presence that can hold your attention like few other actors can. The details we see here -- the cold war brewing at Don Eladio’s compound, the affronts between Gus and Hector, the declaration of resolve from Fring himself, add so much shading to what we already know about the grudges and rivalries within the cartel from Breaking Bad. In a way the rest of Better Call Saul hasn’t really, “Sabrosito” serves as a direct prequel to the events that Walter White would eventually get tangled up in, and by using Gus as a conduit for that, the show practically guarantees a compelling episode.
And, as usual, there is some connective tissue between the seemingly disparate, constituent parts of the episode. Gus’s story is ultimately about standing up to bullies, standing up to intimidation, standing up to the people who believe that you deserve less. It’s about pushing back against those who do not respect you, who believe that your new ways don’t measure up to their old ones, and who believe you need to kowtow to their wishes.
But so is Jimmy’s. Sure, an ornery older brother trying to drum you out of the legal profession is not exactly the same thing as a rival drug dealer using his standing in the cartel to lean on you, but “Sabrosito” draws a line between Chuck and Hector. Both of them are old timers, long entrenched in the systems in which they operate, ready to use their connections, their standing, the power and network they have amassed in their time, to stamp out the people who challenge their hegemony.
For Hector, that means preventing the upstart Gus from infringing on his territory. The opening of the episode in Don Eladio’s pool not only puts Breaking Bad fans on alert for little pink bears, but it calls to mind both Gus’s partner being killed at the edge of that pool, and Don Eladio himself meeting his end there. It’s an interesting shot that immediately makes the setting of the scene laden with meaning before a single word is spoken.
Don Eladio, gregarious shit-stirrer that he is, makes Hector feel the lesser man next to the bigger stack of crisp, clean bills Gus sends Don Eladio’s way, and the Los Pollos Hermanos shirt Don Eladio puts on only adds insult to injury. So Hector goes to throw his weight around with Gus, in the best way he knows how - by messing with him at his restaurant.
It’s unexpectedly tense for a scene set at a fast food chicken restaurant. Still, Hector knows the best way to violate the sanctity of Gus’s domain, to twist Gus where it will bother him the most. He wanders around the meticulously kept restaurant violating every norm of cleanliness and decorum imaginable. He intimidates customers; he smokes; he wanders in the back and carves gunk off his shoe. The message is clear -- I am in charge here, and even if there’s a greater authority than myself to consider, you’ll accede to my wishes.
That’s the message Chuck sends as well. There is the same air of tension as the McGill brothers, and their legal representatives, file in to accept the A.D.A.’s deal. Chuck, true to form, leans on his brother about every niggling detail, from the wording in Jimmy’s confession to the cost of the destroyed cassette tape. And from the minute Ms. Hay converses with Chuck about his condition, it’s clear that this is far from a neutral proceeding, removing any doubt that she is, knowingly or not, taking Chuck’s side on this. The peak is when she requires Jimmy to not only sign his confession and make restitution, but to apologize to his brother.
This is where Gus and Jimmy stand in the same position. Both are clearly on edge, facing the men who want to squeeze them out. But each maintains their composure, not rising to the bait meant to throw them off balance, letting their tormentors believe that they have won this battle. Gus, stoic as he is, simply makes velvety threats and stands there dignified and unmoved. Jimmy, a little more heart on his sleeve, turns his supposed apology into a recrimination, albeit one subtle enough to pass muster with the A.D.A.
But neither of them is beaten. Through Kim’s clever phonebooking and Jimmy’s use of Mike’s combined conman/handyman skills, the pair not only have a plan to thwart Chuck from getting Jimmy disbarred, but they have evidence and the benefit of Mike casing the joint to go on. Gus, for his part, stays resolute, but clearly is unspooling a big plan in his own mind. When he speaks to his frightened employees, he speaks off a refusal to bend, to allow the old guard to flex its muscles and have the newcomers cower in fear. He resolves to stand his ground, and the people who work for him applaud him for it.
And poor Mike may be a big part of that big plan. His is the most understated story in the episode, but it’s also, in its way, the most poignant. Mike is a taciturn individual by nature, which calls upon Jonathan Banks to fill in the blank spaces of dialogue with his world-weary expressions. With his granddaughter Kaylee nestled in his arm, there is a hint of wistfulness, of regret in his eyes, enough for his daughter-in-law to pick up on it. These are the loved ones for whom he committed those terrible deeds for, for whom he got other innocent people killed. Better Call Saul plays its cards close to the vest, but Banks’s performance gives the sense of the moral calculus of those acts weighing on Mike in that moment.
When sitting down with Jimmy at the diner, Mike remarks that it was nice to fix something for once. When we see him later in the episode, he’s reading Handyman Magazine. Mike is good at what he does -- the way he manages to nonchalantly shoo Chuck away with his power tools shows that -- but there’s also a sense that he’s weary of this. Keeping his daughter-in-law and granddaughter in that nice neighborhood, with the good schools and safe havens, costs real money, and Mike’s most marketable skill, the one that brings those brown paper bags full of dollar bills, isn’t a pleasant one. Maybe, Mike just wishes he could rest -- build things instead of tear them down.
One of the best qualities of Better Call Saul is the way it uses its status as a prequel as an advantage rather than a difficulty. The tension between Gus and Hector in “Sabrosito” is heightened because we know there is enough bad blood between the two of them in the future that Hector sacrifice his own life so long as he can take out Fring at the same time. Jimmy’s tet-a-tet with Chuck has added intrigue because it seems as though Chuck has his brother dead to rights, and yet we know that Jimmy will continue practicing law, by hook or by crook, leading the audience to wonder how he’ll wriggle out of this one.
But it also creates a sense of tragedy, of star-crossed destiny for characters like Mike. It isn’t a bully who compels him, and it’s hard to imagine someone being able to intimidate him into doing anything. And yet, he is no less pulled by forces beyond his control -- the need to care for his family, the need to make up for the death of his son that he feels responsible for -- that we know will keep from the life of a contented handyman.
The encounter between Mike and Gus at the end of the episode, where Mike agrees, in his typically cagey way, to work for Gus, is in part a momentous one, because it serves as a milestone for a partnership that will pay dividends for each of them. At the same time, it’s a recommitment to a line of work that will ultimately grind away at Mike, that will lead to his death, that will jeopardize those stacks of dollar bills he has stashed away for his granddaughter.
It’s hard to say it will lead him to ruin. Mike is not a young man and he enjoys close to a decade of being able to care for his family. But for at least a moment in “Sabrosito”, it seems that at a time when Gus and Jimmy are desperate and resolute to stay in the game, Mike wants out. And we know, however much he may want that, the ability to while away his time fixing doors instead of dusting cartel goons, he’s fated to keep at this until, one day, it kills him.
[8.0/10] Two devices, each meant to record, to track, to create leverage over another person, are at the forefront. Each, in their own roundabout way, needs its batteries replaced, and in both instances, that necessity leads to the monitoring party being exposed. It continues to amaze me how two stories that seemingly have nothing to do with one another can maintain such close but unshowy thematic ties.
By which I mean, Better Call Saul is back! That simple parallelism is a reminder as to how great this show is at setting up the little things that have much bigger echoes. The two plots in this episode – one about the fallout from Jimmy revealing his malfeasance to Chuck, and the other hinging on Mike trying to figure out how a mysterious stranger realized he was headed out to the desert to do some business – take things slow, letting us see the incremental progress of each story thread. But it’s immediately clear in each of them how these developments are building to a bigger reckoning.
The former story centers on the lifeblood of the series – the relationship between Jimmy and Chuck. After Jimmy has seemingly resolved the issue with Chuck retiring from HHM, and helps his brother start taking down the aluminum foil, a chance discovery of an old book rescends into a mutual bit of reminiscing. Chuck talks about how he used to read to Jimmy; Jimmy compliments his brother’s memory for recalling details like the shade of his nightlight, and for a split second, the two are brothers again.
But then, Jimmy mentions a young neighbor, and Chuck’s expression changes, and without underscoring it, there’s the perfect hint that some Slippin’ Jimmy incident from the past is back at the forefront of Chuck’s mind. He stops the trip down memory lane, and tells Jimmy that he has not forgiven him and, moreover, that Jimmy will pay for what he’s done. When describing the events to Kim later, Jimmy is lost in frustration, telling her that for ten minutes Chuck didn’t hate him, and Jimmy had forgotten what that was like.
It’s heartbreaking in its way. The events of “Klick” demonstrated that as much as Jimmy resents Chuck sometimes, he still loves his brother, and is willing to subordinate his own interests when his brother truly needs him. While Chuck is undeniably petty, we’ve also seen that to some degree, he’s earned his brother’s mistrust, but there’s still something sad about the way the two siblings are seemingly fated to tear one another down, as Chuck promises to do right to his brother’s face.
I’ve been lousy about predictions on this show, but I’ll venture a guess as to how he means to do it. When Hamlin hears Chuck’s surreptitiously recorded tape, he asks what possible use the tape could have, given the questionable legality or utility of the tape in any court of law or professional setting. It’s potentially not a coincidence that in the preceding scene, we see a glimpse of discord between Jimmy and Kim, one spurred on by her continued distaste for the very act of stepping outside the bounds of ethical behavior that committed by Jimmy to benefit her.
We only get short scenes of Kim in “Mabel,” but they’re meaningful, conveying the discomfort she feels from capitalizing on Jimmy’s misdeeds. She blanches when her contract from Mesa Verde trashes Chuck for his incompetence. She stays up late into the night agonizing over every punctuation mark in her filing, desperate not only to earn this (somewhat) ill-gotten windfall, but to prove that she will not make the same sort of mistake, that she deserves this despite how it came to her. It’s not hard to imagine Chuck being able to drive a wedge in the already fraught relationship between Jimmy and Kim, to make his brother pay by trying to take away one of the few people in his life that Jimmy truly cares about. The irony, of course, is that Chuck is one of those few people.
People care about Mike Ehrmantraut too, though perhaps not in the way he might prefer. As I discussed in the context of BCS’s network sibling, The Walking Dead, there’s something impressive about a show being able to tell a complete story nigh-wordlessly. Mike is, characteristically, a man of few words, and his Season 3 debut doesn’t depart from that, but communicates the confusion, desperation, insight, and turnabout of Mike’s adventures with a tracking device expertly despite that limitation.
It is still such a thrill to see Mike work. One of Better Call Saul’s best qualities is the way it takes time out to show its characters thinking, working out problems, without ever belaboring the point. In fact, Mike’s tinkering with the duplicate tracker he manages to get his hands on (via the shady veterinarian we met previously) is, mid-process, a bit too opaque, to where it’s clear he’s onto something, but it’s not clear what. And yet, the moment an unnamed goon shows up to Mike’s house to replace the battery and Mike’s little radar lights up, it’s clear where his ingenuity has led him.
But more than that bit of excitement at everything coming to fruition, it’s just as enjoyable watching Mike chew on this problem and slowly but surely piece everything together. Like its predecessor, Better Call Saul sets up these miniature mysteries, requiring its characters to use their wits and their determination to solve them. The promotion for the new season strongly suggests where Mike’s clever use of the tracker will lead him, but the way he reaches that point is just as compelling.
It is not, however, the only instance in the episode where such a device meant to give the user an edge over their would-be prey backfires. Of all the great moments in “Mabel,” the best may be the one where Ernesto goes to replace the batteries in Chuck’s tape recorder, inadvertently hears the recording of Jimmy, and is immediately dressed down and quietly threatened by Chuck.
I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time to wax rhapsodic about how interesting a foil Chuck is in this show, but what’s telling is how quickly Chuck segues from pure anger to a quick cover up and CYA maneuver centered on misdirected notions of legal confidentiality, to not so subtle threats directed at poor, innocent Ernesto should he volunteer the information he overheard. Better Call Saul repeatedly plays up the cruel irony of how Chuck looks down upon Jimmy for his unethical ways, but is not above bending the rules, or at least mischaracterizing, when it suits his needs, most frequently in order to stifle his brother.
Jimmy clearly feels the brunt of that from his brother. When confronted by the young captain who calls him out for lying to get his eight-second clip of the B-29 bomber for his commercial, Jimmy clearly projects his frustrations with Chuck onto the young man who, like his brother, seems concerned with Jimmy’s less than upstanding tactics. Jimmy, as is his talent, manages to misdirect and in a strikingly similar fashion, threaten the man to keep his lie under wraps, but the pain of the brothers’ relationship lingers with each of them.
Better Call Saul is cagey about whether the McGill brothers will ever be able to overcome that. We know that Jimmy becomes Saul. We know that Chuck isn’t around, or at least remains unseen by the time of Breaking Bad. There’s little hint that they will be able to forgive one another and reconcile, or if the show believes that sort of thing is even possible.
If anything, BCS seems skeptical that a tiger can ever really change its stripes. In the episode’s opening, we see Jimmy as Cinnabon Gene, making every effort to keep a low profile and continue living his life as a schnook. But despite strenuous efforts, he cannot resist yelling to a young shoplifter that he should say nothing and get a lawyer. That part of Jimmy will seemingly always be with him. Chuck recognizes that, but fails to see that the same manipulative bent lies within him as well, and the devices meant to expose his brother, unwittingly exposes him as cut from the same cloth.
[9.3/10] When I think about the things that connect the six different vignettes that make up The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Western-themed anthology film from the Coen Bros., I come up with the same two themes that are present throughout the duo’s filmography: uncertainty and death. That’s a little grim for what is an, at times, bleak, foreboding, heartbreaking film, but also one that is funny, whimsical, and even downright sweet at times. And yet whether they’re putting the wind at your back or having it blow you down, the sense of the unpredictability of life, and the way what comes after puts that into relief, is present through each of the disparate but connected segments.
The film features a seemingly unflappable gunfighter being suddenly and unexpectedly flapped (and then doing some flapping of his own). It has well-dug claims being subject to interlopers, a random series of events leading a man away from and then back into the noose, and an unanticipated romance being felled by the consequences of a yapping dog. And in each of these stories, death looms large, whether it be the brutal results of an act that no longer sells or the balance of choosing an easy death and the certainty of the afterlife over enduring the potential for a brutal one, or a portentous carriage ride that has more in common with passage down the River Styx than an amble through the countryside.
As befits a film from directors with a throughline entries as diverse as The Big Lebowski and No Country For Old Men, this movie revels in the unknowable nature of the working of the world, where the only certainty lies in the unavoidable journey to the next one.
But it’s also full of absolute aesthetic splendor and pitch perfect visuals as the Coens ply their audience with tales of the mortal and unexpected. Scruggs makes the most of its western setting, with gorgeous vistas, striking weather-worn towns and encampments, and image after image of bold figures flanked by the desert landscape. The lighting makes a big difference in the film, from the bright crisp tones of the outsized opening vignette of the segment that gives the film its title, to the darkening hues of the final scene which signals the sort of descent the characters are experiencing.
At the same time, the framing and editing are superb. Scruggs is a tactile, patient film, showing the audience the ominous advance of boots on bankhouse boards, or the steady rhythm of panning for gold in azure waters, or the advance of a fleet of indigenous fighters from far off in the distance. The Coens and their team know when to stop and focus on the individual details that give texture to this world, when to hold fast on the faces of the souls at their center and help the audience feel what they’re feeling, and when to pull back and give you the sense of worldly scope at play in each of these stories. As well-written as each vignette is, it’s the perfect visuals and staging that let’s each land with such force.
It also helps that despite the commonality of the western setting, Scruggs evokes different visual moods at the same time it’s delivering stories with different tones. There’s a tall tale-esque, exaggerated, even impressionistic vibe to the opening sequence, that looks back on the heightened reality of gunfighting in the public consciousness with bemused romanticism. But that’s contrasted by the “Meal Ticket” segment, which tastefully but brutally telegraphs a grim end for a disabled performer who’s no longer useful. (The segment also can’t help but intimate some subtext about the Coens’ own classically-informed creations falling in esteem and attention in favor of flashier, chicken-multiplying blockbusters at the box office.)
There’s a trademark sense of literal gallows humor and irony in the “Near Algodones” vignette, where a seemingly simple bank robbery turns from lethal reprimand to mortal reprieve and back again over and over. That sense of the strange, tragicomic unpredictability of life is clearest here, with glimpses of beauty and unknown forces pushing our outlaw protagonist like a leaf on the wind. It’s balanced, though, by a separate parable in “All Gold Canyon”, a tale of persistence and determination and good and bad fortune, but also one of the indifference of bucolic nature to our quests and impediments. While the workings of the world push the outlaw in the former around, the world is at bay, waiting to return to normal, after the old prospector’s steady, and unexpectedly bloody perturbation of land to find his fortune.
The final segment, “The Mortal Remains”, is one long conversation about the nature of men and of relations between them, that ends when the tenor of their destination becomes clear and eclipses such worldly concerns. It’s one of the most elliptical pieces in the film, as filled with writerly dialogue as it is with symbols and portents. But it also offers the movie’s sharpest take on death, the way it sneaks up unawares and intrudes on the more prosaic concerns that consume our lives.
Still, I don’t think it’s the key to Scruggs and its tales of wonder and woe. That comes in “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” the penultimate vignette, the one that feels the most like a complete story, and for my money, the best of the six. It features the Coens’ sweetest romantic relationship since Fargo, their exploration of the expectations placed on and the options available to women in this time and place, and the apotheosis of the way that the unexpected can bring great joy to our lives when we embrace its uncertainty, but also how the random barking of a dog that narrowly escaped its own death can instead bring it to those on the cusp of settling into that joy. It is the most heartening and eventually harrowing segment in the film, one filled with richly drawn characters, stunning visuals, and the clearest encapsulation of the movie’s ideas in the conversations between the titular “gal” and her earnest suitor.
Those ideas boil down to that “embrace the mystery” lesson that the Coens have been toying with for decades, most notably in A Serious Man, and the prospect of death, whether it’s of peace, of shock, or of ominous portents, that lurks in the background. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs gives us all sides of these notions, and a buffet of different tones and tales to put them into relief. It is an alternatively hilarious, dispiriting, and inspiring film that collects the best and various modes of the Coens, and fits them into one varied but complete package, representing their most venerable motifs with charm and poignance.
I found the whole exchange about how 'the punishment should fit the crime' completely hilarious. If there was any scene that summed up Saul Goodman perfectly, that was it.
The first of half of this movie kinda felt like a live action Studi Ghibli movie and then shit gets real.
Post-credits scene at the very end
Last year saw two prominent movies taking socially relevant topics and telling a story that subverted expectations. Jana Gana Mana was one, and Gargi was the other. 'Gargi' follows the events surrounding the eponymous character after her father is accused of gang raping a minor. What follows are the endless rounds of court, media trials, and the instant judgement meted out by people and social media.
Gargi gives a glimpse on how we as a people can lose all sense of rationality, perspective, and right and wrong in this era of information overload. On the other hand, it also reminds us of the old adage of not judging a book by its cover; of how we can jump to conclusions based on some preconceived notions that we grow up with, especially when it comes to caste, professions, and other basic things.
The story is fairly tight, with very little procrastination. The direction and score is decent. However, this movie is all about performances, especially that of Sai Pallavi as the titular Gargi. And, she does the character great justice. Showing strength and vulnerability in equal measures. While she shines in moments where she is supposed to face up to the judges, media, and people, it is in her private moments that she truly shows her class. R.S. Shivaji, as the accused portrays the helpless father with great aplomb. Kaali Venkat as the, at times. clueless but determined lawyer helping out Gargi wins our hearts.
Overall, Gargi is a movie I'd definitely recommend.
Another robot revolution. The bad guys looks a lot like Robocop.
I am going to assume that anyone reading this already knows that the film is about a couple going through the divorce process (if you didn't know this you find out right at the beginning). Halfway through the film I asked myself why the film wasn't called "Divorce Story" as the story is really about the difficulty that families face when a relationship falls apart. After mulling this over for a day or so I think I realized the answer. The film isn't about divorce as much as it is about relationships. In the film the couple doesn't seem to have problems that couldn't be worked out. In the opening sequence we see that there is actually a lot that they like about each other. As the film plays on we see that there is a fair amount of baggage that each of them has.
And that's where the heart of the film is. Much of the baggage are things that the characters have carried around in silence and thus they were allowed to grow and mutate internally. The film isn't so much a cautionary tale about divorce as it is a cautionary tale about relationships. The key to the film was said by Alan Alda's character in the middle of the film: after all of this is said and done you're still going to have to work this out between the two of you. So yes, the repressed feelings ended up being spoken by lawyers at the cost of hundreds of dollars an hour. And yes, when it was all said and done they did have to learn how to get along. But the real problem is that they had not learned to talk to each other years before and they were just starting to learn how to do it when the dust settled. What if they had learned how to do so years before?
It is wonderful to see A-list hollywood actors doing adult dramas again. Adam Driver has really been on a role with some fantastic films (including the criminally unseen Paterson). This wasn't the most entertaining Baumbach movie that I've seen but it may be the most intelligent (and in some ways, the most important). The writing and acting are superb.
follow me at https://IHATEBadMovies.com or facebook IHateBadMovies.
So THIS is what Indian films would look like without being shackled by commercialism and formulas? I’m so proud to see this. You always think will people from your homeland ever make anything as good as Koreans and other countries. I’m glad to say they most definitely can. I’m very happy to see such beautiful visuals, fantastically executed horror fantasy which is rooted in India. Excellent! Jai Ho!
