My rule of thumb for spoilers is subjective: I don’t disclose what I was glad not to know going in. And, the better a movie, the more joyful every discovery. When movies are getting their world premières, the near-total lack of information becomes a pleasure in itself, a feeling of freshness and revelation that, thanks to festivals and early reviews, has usually evaporated by the time release day actually arrives. I have a little theory about why spoilers have become such a problem—why readers have become so leery of them, why critics have become more cautious about them, and why studios and publicists have become increasingly specific with critics about plot points they’d prefer undisclosed.
There are two reasons for the current trend of spoilernoia, one involving the business of movies, the other involving the art. The first reason concerns the information economy. The less that is known about a movie in advance, the more essential it is to see it in theatres, when it’s a new release. When a film sparks widespread curiosity and thus becomes news, the feeling of knowing little or nothing about it is, itself, an incentive to see it quickly. Spoiler control increases the difference between knowing something about a movie and actually experiencing it; the resulting informational scarcity is a conspicuous kind of subliminal marketing.
The second reason for heightened fear of spoilers has to do with changes—indeed, progress—in the art of the cinema. Although people may, perhaps, as is widely feared, be less text-literate than in the past, they are ever better at parsing and decoding audiovisual works. Hence the dazzling complexity of many major releases, whether Christopher Nolan’s calculated conundrums, Greta Gerwig’s metamaniacal “Barbie,” Jordan Peele’s visionary metaphysics, Wes Anderson’s mercurial intricacies, or Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s whirligig documentary “You Can See Everything.” Such movies routinely deliver tours de forme and display levels of complexity that were once seen only in the most arcane or challenging of art-house films. In particular, the sophistication of these movies often involves a radical handling of narrative structure, turning form itself into an essential element of plot. As a result, spoiler vigilance is no longer just a matter of not giving away the ending of a film; sometimes even simply describing its over-all dramatic shape is enough to preclude suspense. Fastidious critics are left with nothing but crumbs to scatter on a trail of discussion leading to the door of a theatre, and readers have to extrapolate critics’ full opinions from the fragmentary account that could be written before release. Some notable recent movies, of a varying range of artistic accomplishment, provide prime examples.
La Bola Negra
The form of “La Bola Negra,” a romantic melodrama of ambitious historical scope, by the Spanish directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, defies spoiler-free description. The action takes place in three periods. In 1932, a young man named Carlos (Milo Quifes), the scion of a rich and prominent family in the conservative provincial city of Granada, is blackballed from membership in the town’s posh casino because he’s thought to be gay. (The movie’s title means “The Black Ball.”) In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, a young man named Sebastián (played, in an acting début, by the musician Guitarricadelafuente) survives the destruction of his small village by an air raid; captured by the right-wing Nationalist side as he flees, he claims to be one of them, joins their army, and in the course of his service has a romantic awakening with another man. In 2017, in Madrid, Alberto (Carlos González), a young, gay graduate student of history, who is also a former playwright, receives a mysterious inheritance from his late, long-estranged grandfather.
The setup shows a leap from a time of fear to one of freedom. What Carlos fears isn’t the law but, rather, his father (Antonio de la Torre), a casino member and a local dignitary, who demands that the young man uphold the family’s reputation by returning to the casino and swearing that he’s not gay. (Carlos’s mother, played by María Morales, is sympathetic to his plight and suggests that he run away to Madrid, where city life might afford anonymity.) The 1937 story features a historical character, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), an actor in Federico García Lorca’s theatre troupe and briefly the writer’s lover, who died fighting with the left-wing Republican forces in the Civil War. The memory of Lorca, who was assassinated by the Nationalists, looms over the movie, whose title is that of a play by him. Rafael’s encounter with Sebastián is the fulcrum of the movie, a soaringly, schmaltzily symphonic vision of pure-because-impossible romance that turns out to control not only the future but, in ways that I wouldn’t dare disclose, the past.
The biggest surprise of all, however, isn’t a plot point but an award—the one for Best Director that the Cannes Film Festival jury gave to Ambrossi and Calvo (ex aequo with Paweł Pawlikowski, for “Fatherland”). The pair, jointly known as Los Javis, just got a deal with HBO Max, but their direction isn’t very distinctive. Just about all of their artistry is exerted on the script, which deftly intercuts between the time frames, advancing their plots in episodes that, though tersely dramatic, are superficial in their efficiency. (The script was co-written with Alberto Conejero, based on a play of his.) There is little in the way of cinematic inspiration, and the emphatic visual style with which the filmmakers aim to enliven the story life tends to turn characters into pristine emblems, albeit adorned with a few picturesque behavioral touches. The result is a handful of finely tuned gazes and pauses conveying emotional pangs that, in quiet intensity, substitute for the script’s evasions.
The only moment in the film that comes to life through the synergistic passion of image and performance is a musical sequence starring Penélope Cruz as the mistress of ceremonies and the star—an imperious, wily, witty, and utterly free singer, dancer, personality, and comedian—in a cavernous, barnlike theatre where Civil War troops are entertained. Her performance steals the film. I’d gladly trade all the artificial realism of “The Invite” for her few glorious minutes of flamboyant artifice here. There’s an altogether different film yearning to burst out of that scene, one that’s not at all by the book.
In general, the contemporary episode is more engaging than the historical ones, for the simple reason that Alberto inhabits the same world that Los Javis do, and they perceive and realize it most vividly. Still, there’s sadly little about Alberto’s theatrical beginnings; his historical research, involving a quest for recordings from the nineteen-twenties of Greek popular songs with queer or gender-ambiguous lyrics, is fascinating but remains undeveloped. The textual literalism that dominates the action is shown up by a few moments of keen-eyed observation—above all, in a calm but mighty reveal in Alberto’s episode. There, a few quiet lines of dialogue do a better job of delivering grand passion via modest suggestion than the rest of the movie does by means of tumultuous depiction. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is no spoiler.
Digger
There have probably been classified documents whose release caused less fuss than that of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger,” whose plot was kept under airtight wraps. I’m frankly not sure what I’d have done if I’d been reviewing it ahead of its release; critics were asked not to reveal the movie’s big twist. Yet this twist comes early in the film, and no discussion of the film would make sense without it. By now, secrecy hardly matters, given the film’s startlingly dismal performance at the box office; two weeks into its first run, it has taken in only some fifteen million dollars in U.S. ticket sales, behind the likes of “Hokum” and “Melania.” There’s little risk in disclosing what the few people who’ve seen it already know, and what the many who’ve stayed away don’t care to know.
The titular character, played by Tom Cruise under heavy makeup that makes him look like a cross between George W. Bush and Ned Beatty, is an oil-company tycoon who is recruited by the President (played by John Goodman as a petty version of Lyndon B. Johnson, a profane blowhard with nothing of Johnson’s brains or principles) to deal with an emergency. Digger has been drilling covertly in Greenland; the result is a fractured ice shelf, which has put a chunk of ice five times the size of Washington, D.C., on a collision course with Continental Europe. Digger, joined by his earnest and exasperated head of environmental safety and security, Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), heads to Europe to try to avert an unprecedented environmental disaster.
The story unfolds as a wildly derisive political satire in the vein of “Dr. Strangelove,” with hectic exaggerations and garish décor and costumes. But this post-apocalyptic drama turns out to be actually a play, being acted out on a technologically complex stage. Cruise is playing an actor, named Curtis Markson, who’s playing Digger, just as Goodman is portraying an actor who portrays the President, and so forth with the whole teeming cast, including the Vice-President (Michael Stuhlbarg), the all-male Cabinet, other oil-company colleagues, and the Europeans whom Digger encounters.
To be sure that his viewers get the idea, Iñárritu decorates a dressing-room wall with a poster of John Cassavetes’s 1977 film, “Opening Night,” one of the greatest backstage movies. The comparison does no favors to “Digger,” in which, unlike in Cassavetes’s film, precious little happens backstage and none of it sheds light on the actors’ art. Later, a plot point in which Curtis, the actor, casts doubt on the usefulness of performing the play at all calls to mind a very different movie, Preston Sturges’s comedy “Sullivan’s Travels,” from 1941. In that film, a director famous for comedies yearns to make grimly earnest movies about the Depression, but learns that what people in dire straits crave is the distraction and release of comedy. “Digger” stands that notion on its head: the play is being performed for audiences in dire straits (spoilers lurk) in the hope of provoking catharsis. In effect, “Digger” is Iñárritu’s self-justification for offering a film about climate catastrophe to viewers whose faces are already being rubbed in a daily dump of bad news.
Few viewers have taken his admonition to heart. Iñárritu would have done well to consider George S. Kaufman’s theatrical bon mot that “satire is what closes on Saturday night.” But I attribute the film’s commercial failure less to the subject than to its execution, starting with Cruise’s makeup, which renders him all but unrecognizable and transforms his boyish heartthrob gleam into slack and sodden bloat, instantly reducing the movie’s commercial appeal. But a performance it is, with a capital “P.” Cruise is a roaring, seething, slashing, prancing engine of domineering bluster, and Iñárritu gives him a singular clip for his Oscar-nomination show reel: a speech to the European Parliament, delivered in a single long take, in which, as if on trial for his company’s misdeeds, Digger turns the tables on his accusers and derides their heedless demands for the comforts, conveniences, and pleasures that only an ever-increasing supply of fossil fuels can provide. The substance of the speech is dispensed in a handful of lines, but the rodomontade runs about ten minutes, in which the words themselves might as well be vocalise and Cruise might as well be scat-singing, spinning out verbal notes with exciting but vain virtuosity.
“Digger,” in all its grandeur and its mockery and its mock-grandeur and its touches of grim realism, never comes close to doing justice to the enormity of its subject. It’s simple and superficial—cheesy fun decked out in undertaker’s garb. Yet its intricate storytelling and elaborate trickery, the very things that critics were instructed not to discuss, make it one of Iñárritu’s most entertaining movies.
Misty Green
With Chris Rock’s “Misty Green,” the spoiler is the ending, which passes a harsh judgment on the film’s title character (played by Rosalind Eleazar), a Hollywood actress. Misty is a long-ago Emmy winner whose career has slipped through her fingers, in part because of reckless behavior on and off the set and and in part because of racist and ageist prejudices in casting. Misty’s effort to rebuild her career, a project on a back burner, becomes an intense tick-tock panic: she’s been squatting in the apartment of a now dead lover whose widow (Amy Landecker) is giving her a week before kicking her out. Having previously rendered herself persona non grata for slugging a crew member during a high-profile shoot, Misty now finds herself reading for parts in a pair of remakes—of the 1994 film “Fresh,” and of “Dreamgirls.”
The latter would at least showcase her superb singing, but its director was also the director of the film from which she was previously fired. Coincidentally named Jordan Green, he is played by Rock himself and cuts a retro figure, with an outfit—a rain jacket, a tie, a fedora—that reads like a nostalgic nod to classic-jazz album covers. After seeing Misty give a spectacularly torchy musical performance at a local bar, Jordan wants to give her another chance. But Mephistopheles beckons, in the form of a minor Hollywood player named Zach (Adam Driver), who compensates for scant talent with brazen sexual availability, a bottomless supply of drugs, and a set of louche connections. He comes up with a sordid proposal, and the movie’s real drama is what can make Misty accept it. It doesn’t help that her brother (Daniel Kaluuya)—also named Jordan Green—shows up at her home, just released from prison and struggling with untreated mental illness.
Rock’s caustically satirical vision of Hollywood—the humiliations of casting offices, the enticements of predators, the false and transactional relationships, and the baked-in racism—is also a cautionary tale that builds its warnings recursively. Misty didn’t walk the straight and narrow of good Hollywood citizenry, and, being a Black woman, she got no second chance. This, though, is largely where the movie falls apart: Rock can’t decide whether to treat Misty as a force of nature whose self-destructive drives are inseparable from her unsparing artistry or as a sociological case whose personal failings are an inevitable product of the oppressive system. Eleazar’s performance is typhonic; it’s her first starring role in a movie, and she persuasively portrays Misty as one of the profession’s overlooked greats. Unfortunately, as becomes evident when the plot produces its final twist, the movie’s drama is constructed like a mechanism whose purpose is ultimately to put Misty, and just about any woman, in what it deems to be her place.
Fjord
Ignorance of the law may be no excuse, but, on flights to Singapore, travellers are nonetheless warned that the country’s penalty for drug trafficking is death. It makes sense that unusual laws enforced unusually should be part of visitors’ welcome. The Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord” is the story of harsh laws left unmentioned and the effects of the resulting ignorance on a country’s new residents. It’s an apolitical film about a political crisis. A family of seven moves from Romania to a small Norwegian coastal village: a Romanian man named Mihai (Sebastian Stan); his wife, a Norwegian woman named Lisbet (Renate Reinsve); and their five children, ranging in age from newborn to adolescent. They’re evangelical Christians whose beliefs involve a severe way of life: the children consume no secular media, and prayer and religious study are mandatory family routines. They gently proselytize in town, rendering themselves conspicuous in a country that takes secularism seriously. Their situation becomes critical when one of the adolescent children, Elia (Vanessa Ceban), is observed by a teacher to have a mark on her face and scrapes on her back. When Elia admits, after first telling a different story, to having been hit by her parents, a social worker launches an investigation, in the meantime placing the children in foster care.
The parents admit to some corporal punishment, but of a mild sort—the kind that might startle a child but which wouldn’t do bodily harm. It’s even suggested that Elia’s injuries might have resulted from a minor accident at home, or even wrestling in gym class. But that’s for the law to decide, and, meanwhile, the parents risk criminal charges and a permanent loss of custody. (Mihai claims ignorance of the law; the film does not contend with the fact that Lisbet, being Norwegian, would presumably be aware of it.) Ultimately, when the couple’s administrative efforts to get their children back fail, Mihai takes his case to the digital and literal streets: he contacts the Romanian Embassy and members of his church worldwide, and the case becomes an international issue. The church unleashes a campaign—online and onsite—demanding the family’s religious freedom, and the most fervent outcry and mobilization come from the political far right.
The movie is of no aesthetic originality or distinction; it’s filmed, transparently, in scenes of straightforward dramatic realism, neither maintaining an individual character’s point of view nor evoking subjectivity. Clinical and forensic, the movie puts its viewers in much the same position as the investigators—in other words, as Norway’s bien-pensant officials—by leaving unclear what has actually taken place in the household. Elia certainly knows, but the movie obscures her knowledge under a language barrier; she and the other children still hardly speak Norwegian, and thus misinterpretations loom. Meanwhile, is Mihai troubled by the political allies he makes and the political conflict he stirs up, and does the family’s religion imply a preëxisting political leaning? Does Norway have an active right wing intent on weakening secularism and the state’s power to intervene in family matters? Above all, what do the children think?
The basic trouble with “Fjord” is its premise: the well-being of children is its core, yet Mungiu refuses to break his cagily constructed narrative—he doesn’t stick with those children and reveal what they think and feel, whether in conversations with friends or with one another, in internal monologues, or by any of many other subjective devices that could have put their experiences and voices at the center of the movie. Mungiu is more interested in the controversy than in the children; this makes him no less a shit-stirrer and a button-pusher than the far-right activists whom Mihai mobilizes. Elia’s observations of—and about—her father’s machinations would make for a far better movie. I’m not saying that Mungiu shares, or is seeking to platform, the political doctrines that come to the fore, but that the fundamental misconception of “Fjord” precludes just about any virtues and turns Mungiu’s aesthetic, from script to performance to image, unsympathetic, narrow, and regressive.
Primetime
Yet another misconception. Lance Oppenheim’s drama about the implosion of the network TV show “To Catch a Predator,” in 2006, as its host Chris Hansen (played by Robert Pattinson) pursues ratings and confronts personal problems, misses the main subject of interest in the story it tells: Who in the world thought that this show was an acceptable idea in the first place? The film’s ostensibly moral consideration of how sensationalism was remorselessly ramped up in pursuit of ratings isn’t too little too late, but too much too late. For “Primetime” to have been the unflinching story that it aspires to be, it would have needed to start earlier in the chronology and show how “To Catch a Predator” came into being—the “Aha!” moment (or, rather, the “Bwahahaha!” moment) of its conception, executives weighing its viability, the conversations of lower-level staffers among themselves and with family and friends, and the media discourse that surrounded the show when it made its début. Without any of this, the movie, as it exists, is superfluous from the start, as is the effort to jazz up its fulsome round of ethical lapses by way of a splashy variety of visual formats. Even the movie’s spoiler-immune dénouement—the show’s widely known filming of an accused predator’s suicide—is a slathering-on of sensationalism that parallels the grotesquerie of the show itself. ♦