Movie Review The Almond and the Seahorse

The Almond and the Seahorse (2022) 

Directed by Celyn Jones, Tom Stern

Written by Celyn Jones, Kaite O'Reilly

Starring Rebel Wilson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Celyn Jones, Tryne Dyrholm 

Release Date December 16th, 2022 

Published December 15th, 2022 

The Almond and the Seahorse stars Rebel Wilson in a rare dramatic role. Wilson is Sarah, an archaeologist who is married to Joe (Celyn), a gregarious house husband. At least, that's what you assume if you don't know what The Almond and the Seahorse is really about. You see, Joe isn't merely unemployed, he's not staying home by choice. Joe had a brain tumor that has caused irreparable damage to his memory which slips away more and more as each day passes. 

Sarah has tried to care for Joe using medication and list-making, and tapes that remind him of who he is and why he can't leave home or what might happen if he left home unsupervised. Eventually however, Sarah will be forced to admit that she can no longer care for Joe on her own. Joe is going to have to go to a facility that can care for him as his memory continues to deteriorate. Sarah thus is dealing with losing Joe both emotionally and physically as he forgets who she is and is no longer under her care. 

Running concurrent to Sarah and Joe's story is that of Toni (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Gwen (Tryne Dyrholm), a long term couple who have lived with Gwen's traumatic brain injury from a car accident for more than 15 years. Recently, Gwen has begun to no longer recognize Toni who has begun to show her age. For Gwen, she's not left the day of their accident and thus Toni has slowly become a stranger to her as she no longer recognizes her as her wife. 

Like Joe, Gwen has reached a point in her growing memory loss that she can no longer live at home. She's become a danger to herself who wakes up in the morning thinking a stranger is in her bed. Gwen and Joe will each be living at a hospital facility overseen by Dr. Falmer (Meera Syal), a loving and thoughtful woman who does nearly as much to help Sarah and Toni as she does for Joe and Gwen. The people left behind in the wake of those losing their memories are suffering nearly as much and need nearly as much care. 

The title, The Almond and the Seahorse, is a reference to the shapes that make up the parts of the brain that retain memory. Beyond that, the title reflects the strange and jarring storytelling, seemingly disconnected moments that seem like reality but have an uncanny quality because one person in the scene sees reality a little differently than another character. Joe, for one, thinks Sarah is the one who is having delusions and acting strangely. He doesn't remember his tumor or recognize that he's changed in any way since the tumor was removed. 

Gwen, more frighteningly, wakes up each morning screaming for her wife and unable to recognize that Toni is standing in front of her. Imagine what that must be like, waking in fear every morning and taking most of the day to recover from that. Each day becomes more of a struggle for Toni to reach her wife, calm her, soothe her, and then losing her all over again by the end of the day. It's heartbreaking to imagine and Charlotte Gainsbourg and Tryne Dyrholm bring that heartbreak to devastating light in The Almond and the Seahorse. 

If the film isn't fully successful it's because there is a rather rote quality to the drama. A sort of surface level presentation of the material that limits your emotional involvement. So much of the film is obsessed with the upturning of day to day routine for these two couples that the film fails to build out beyond the surface to illustrate the full breadth of what has been lost here. We empathize with these characters but only on a basic level. Our empathy is limited by not getting to know these characters as the movie focuses the showier parts of their story, the dramatic loss of memory and the bigger emotional displays that come with that. 

There is a focus, unfortunately, in The Almond and the Seahorse, on the more showy, actorly aspects of memory loss in these movie characters. Celyn Jones especially, in his role in front of and behind the camera, favors Joe's broader expressions of his memory loss. We get little grounding in who Joe was and what we are left with is the struggle as expressed in the broad enacting of trauma and the growing emptiness behind Joe's eyes. Jones is a fine actor but, I needed more than his big performance to connect me to this character beyond a basic sense of empathy. 

As for Rebel Wilson, in her first major dramatic leading role, she's overmatched here. Stripped of her sense of humor, Wilson seems not to know what to do with herself in any given scene. I'm thinking specifically of a scene in a library where she's left the ringer on her phone on and it continuously interrupts the quiet of the library. The scene is pointless, it has no purpose. It's the kind of scene in any other Rebel Wilson movie where she would do some kind of bit, a physical or verbal gag. Since however, this is a drama and not a Pitch Perfect movie, Wilson is left to being awkwardly apologetic. Why did this scene exist? 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Aftersun

Aftersun (2022) 

Directed by Charlotte Wells 

Written by Charlotte Wells 

Starring Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall 

Release Date October 21st, 2022 

Published December 14th, 2022 

Aftersun is a quiet and thoughtful meditation on the struggles of growing up as both a child and a young parent. Paul Mescal stars in the film as Calum Paterson, the father of Sophie (Frankie Corio), a precocious young woman. Together, father and daughter are taking a holiday in Turkey, some time in the late 90s. It's unclear why Dad chose this location or whether he could even afford such a vacation, his work back home in England seems unstable, at best, based on a few snatches of dialogue throughout the film. 

First time director Charlotte Wells takes a fly on the wall approach to Aftersun which gives the storytelling a strongly authentic feel. Father and daughter talk but the drama of the story is in what is not said. It comes from the moments when Calum, clearly struggling with his mental health, likely depression, does everything he can not to let on to his daughter that something is wrong. He already feels guilty for not being around more, he and Sophie's mother have split up, and he's struggling with being young and not knowing how to be a father. 

The film story evolves through a series of set pieces, seemingly mundane moments of father-daughter bonding. Swimming, sun tanning, dinners, video games, even a little pool hustling, dad and daughter have an unconventional relationship. Calum is a loving father, he takes his fatherly authority seriously but he's also young, inexperienced, and rather clueless about how to be a dad to a growing young woman. He's filled with love but also fear, confusion, and mild ambivalence. He's fighting internally over whether Sophie could be happier without him. 

What happens with Calum is a bit of a mystery. We know that this vacation occurred in the pre-internet past. No cell phones or email. We know, from flash forwards to an older Sophie, played by Celia Rowlson-Hall, that Calum was, at the very least, absent from his daughter's life some time after this vacation. And we know from a series of brief dream sequences that there is antipathy between father and daughter though what that antipathy extends from, we don't know, we assume it comes from his absence. 

Charlotte Wells is deliberately vague about Calum's motivations and what his intentions are after having spent this week on vacation with his daughter. The temptation is to assume that he may have committed suicide but there is no direct indication that this is what occurred. Aftersun subtly and brilliantly leaves bread crumbs that could lead in that direction but the movie isn't about setting you up for a big gut punch, this is an observant human drama where you will have to discern for yourself what the outcome may be. 

Aftersun is a gorgeous film, the locations are lovely but also fitting of a man who can't afford luxury but appears to be spending all that he has for what luxury he can get. The father-daughter dynamic is lovely with Frankie Corio delivering a charming performance, never too precocious, never beyond her years. She's observant, and she does act as an audience avatar, trying hard to understand her loving yet inscrutable father, but she's mostly just a kid who loves her dad. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Documentary Review Call Me Miss Cleo

Call Me Miss Cleo (2022) 

Directed by Jennifer Brea, Celia Aniskovich

Written by Documentary

Starring Miss Cleo 

Release Date December 15th, 2022 (HBO Max) 

Published December 14th, 2022 

Call Me Miss Cleo is high level cringe. This is a rare documentary where the filmmakers and the subjects appear equally delusional about the subject they are discussing. In this case, the subject is late former fake TV psychic, Miss Cleo, real name Youree Dell Harris. In the 1990s, Harris invented the character of Miss Cleo while working as a playwright and performer in Los Angeles at the Langston Hughes Theater. Then, she left for Florida where the character of Miss Cleo became a full on persona that Harris adopted and claimed was real. 

Picked up by a pair of con artists operating a fake psychic hotline, Miss Cleo jumped off the screen. She was a charismatic pitch woman whose staged phone calls which involved her seeming to read the minds of callers and giving them important information and advice, became not merely a local sensation, she was quickly a nationwide phenomenon. Late night television become Miss Cleo's home and her broad, FAKE Jamaican accent cut through the detritus of her infomercial competition to garner a loyal following. 

Behind the scenes, Miss Cleo would remain in character at all times despite rarely, if ever, taking a live call from one of the millions of desperate people who called her psychic hotline. Instead of Miss Cleo, callers to the Psychic Readers Network would end up talking to an underpaid, completely unlicensed, part time worker whose job it was to keep people on the phone for 5 minutes, regardless of what the person was calling about it. 

In the strongest portion of Call Me Miss Cleo, the documentary brings forward the people who answered calls to the Psychic Readers Network who express regret over their role in bilking desperate people looking for Miss Cleo's sage, Jamaican Shaman, view of their future. Most people who called were desperate, sad, lonely individuals who could not afford these calls but hoped against hope that a look into their future might solve their problems. People who likely needed real help from mental health professionals were instead consoled and lied to by part time employees pretending to be avatars of a fake Jamaican Shaman and Psychic. 

Then, as quickly as Miss Cleo became a cultural phenomenon, she was gone. Lawsuits filed against the con artists who employed Miss Cleo and the part time fake psychics on the 800 number she shilled for, led to the end of the Psychic Readers Network. As for Miss Cleo, she managed to escape the lawsuit. Legal documentation exists that legally defines Miss Cleo as little more than a mascot for the 800 number, a pitch woman and actress hired to perpetuate a brand. And yet, Miss Cleo never stopped living as Miss Cleo, Jamaican accented psychic. 

Here is where the documentary, Call Me Miss Cleo, takes a turn into cringe territory. Interviews with friends of Miss Cleo work very hard to rehab her image from con artist to beloved and supportive friend and real psychic. Miss Cleo's closest friends maintain to this day, several years after Cleo herself passed away at the relatively young age of 54, that she was an actual psychic. Cleo lived the gimmick to the end and found a circle of friends who enabled her to live this lie to the last days of her life. 

The presentation of these interviews with Miss Cleo's friends contains a strong indication that the filmmakers are joining in an effort to rehabilitate Miss Cleo's reputation. The final act of Call Me Miss Cleo is a loving appreciation of Miss Cleo, her coming out as Gay, and her support of the LGBTQ community. These are wonderful things and they should be embraced and celebrated but while the documentary does that, we also lose the perspective that this was a delusional person who pretended to be Jamaican psychic until the day she died. 

Making things extra cringe, is how Miss Cleo's circle of friends is entirely made up of white people. I don't feel I can say this with the kind of authority that a black critic could, but it needs to be said. The final act portrays Miss Cleo's circle as having their very own 'Magical Negro' in real life. Miss Cleo pretended to be a sage Jamaican psychic and her friends all accepted and furthered that delusion. The documentary doesn't portray this as strange or wrong, but rather as kind of wholesome and perfectly normal. 

I feel like the documentary should be slightly critical about this fact. Perhaps the question should be asked as to why this group of people felt it was appropriate to further this woman's delusion. These people appear to genuinely care about Miss Cleo but that doesn't make this situation normal. Really nothing about this is normal. Miss Cleo created a reputation that was built upon stealing from poor desperate people and finished her life not ashamed or repentant, but instead remaining in character, alleviating her guilt by keeping up the lie in every moment of her life. 

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media.