BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: a review of "The Substance"

"THE SUBSTANCE"
Written and Directed by Coralie Fargeat
**** (four stars)
RATED R

It is not often, especially these days, when the movies really step up to the cinematic plate and just go for it!

To begin this posting, I feel it necessary to return to a film experience, while brilliant, was one so disturbingly overwhelming that I strongly feel that it is one that I truly can never return to it for a second viewing regardless of its excellence. The film in question is Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem For A Dream" (2000), and for the uninitiated, the proceedings chronicles various drug addictions between four interconnected characters. The film's final third, entitled "Winter," is where this already stylized, distraught film descends into nightmare for its quartet. 

Arguably, the most tragic figure is Sara, portrayed in a fearless swan dive of a vanity free performance by Ellen Burstyn. Throughout the film, we have watched her succumb to the addiction of reclaiming her youth by way of a crash diet and amphetamine pills as she wants to fit into a favorite, yet years unworn, red dress for a scheduled appearance upon her favorite game show. Over the course of the film, Sara's energy waxes and wanes, she increases her pill usage in order to wear the dress and she eventually is fraught with drug induced hallucinations, building with terror. Aronofsky pulls out all of the stops with a relentless audio/visual dynamism that is impossible to turn your eyes away from even as you are unquestionably horrified. The experience worked me over and then some! Remembering it now as write is sending chills up and down my spine as I can still remember the drilling music, the razor sharp editing and undeniably Burstyn as Sara disintegrating before our very eyes.  

Dear readers, I recalled that movie memory for you because I feel compelled to have to first explain to you that I was extremely trepidatious with the thought of seeing Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance." While the tenor of the reviews have been quite high, the reported intensity of the work and all of the body horror gore contained therein, made me wonder that perhaps even as I was curios, it might be an experience just not designed for my temperament. That being said, my curiosity overtook any sense of fear I was harboring and I took the plunge.

At a time when the motion picture industry is clearly uninterested in taking any cinematic risks at the expense of what they feel to be the sure things of sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots and re-imaginings, every once in awhile, something comes along that defies the norm and loudly announces itself with unapologetically bold strokes. 

Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance" is a visceral, voluminous and volcanic experience. Fearless in conceit and execution, Fargeat takes the core of a cautionary fable and utilizes it to unleash a bombastic Hollywood satire, as well as a take no prisoners diatribe against unrealistic to impossible beauty standards and the disqualification of women in society, especially past a certain age. Most of all, Fargeat has helmed an enormously felt howl, a wrathful, rapacious scream into the unforgiving maw of a world that teaches girls and women to hate themselves. It is gruesome. It is grotesque. It scratches, claws and gnashes its cinematic teeth into a frenzy. 

And it is also a film of superbly high achievement. It is with out question one of the best films of 2024.

"The Substance" stars an astounding Demi Moore as Hollywood legend, but now fading celebrity, Elizabeth Sparkle, who, as the film begins, hosts a morning television exercise show akin to the type Jane Fonda created during the 1980s. On her 50th birthday, lecherous, disgusting executive Harvey (!!), enthusiastically played by Dennis Quaid, fires Elizabeth from her show due to her age, and immediately begins the pursuit for someone younger, hotter and better to lead the program. 

Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth comes across a black market product known as "The Substance," a cell replicating liquid, once injected, will allow her to birth a younger version of herself. Yet, the rules are strict. While effectively another entity, the two beings share the same consciousness. But, while one is active in the world for seven days, the other will remain comatose during that same time period. After seven days, the two must switch places for the next seven days and the cycle continues with full adherence to respecting the connective balance between the two. 

Unfortunately, Elizabeth's other self, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), very rapidly takes Elizabeth's old job, becomes a media sensation and becomes increasingly reluctant to switch places back with her older self, which then produces terrifying side effects. 

To reveal much more would certainly spoil the full effect of Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance," but I am here to report that its impact is unapologetically pummeling. At nearly two and a half hours, Fargeat unveils a narrative furiously propelled by its own rocket fueled nightmare logic. It possesses high style and superlative confidence in itself. While subtlety is not on the menu whatsoever, it would be mistaken to suggest that Fargeat has not ensured "The Substance" exists without nuance or even poetry. 

In fact, I absolutely loved Fargeat's usage of a variety of visual motifs through the film from eggs, eyes, mirrors, all manner of spheres, palm trees, to even the shape and form of the human (notably female) posterior. The film's opening sequence, starring an overhead shot of Elizabeth Sparkle's Hollywood Walk Of Fame Star, is a gorgeous montage of the trajectory of Elizabeth's career, from its rise to its Winter stages. To that end, I loved how the film's final shot perfectly double ends itself to that opening, making for a final image that is simultaneously disgusting and undeniably profound.

At this point, I am compelled to mention the film's level of violence and gore, which is exceedingly high. A strong stomach is encouraged as it is not for the faint of heart as we are subjected to an orchestra of bodily fluids, viscera, entrails and an amount of blood that could rival anything we have already seen in the likes of Brian De Palma's "Carrie" (1976) and Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" (1980), two films in particular "The Substance" references and pays homage. Even with its usage of practical make up effects, which recalls the stomach churning works of David Cronenberg's "Scanners" (1981) and "The Fly" (1986) as well as John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982), I will say that the violence in the film is not end to end or even gratuitous to the point of stretching beyond tasteful limits, so to speak (but I do concede that will depend upon your own personal tastes and limitations certainly--if you fear needles, I recommend that you stay away). 

As wrenching as it all is, for me, the unreality of the gore--especially during the film's biggest swings in the absolutely wild final third--made it a tad easier to regard. I never had to leave the theater and recompose myself, if that means anything. Coralie Fageat ensures that her gore usage is riveted to the demands of her story, characters and overall themes and with that, her film never felt to be exploitative. 

For that matter, for all of the copious female nudity on screen from both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, Fargeat's cinematic gaze is also never exploitative and when it is sexualized, it is for stinging satirical commentary. Again, her usage of mirrors and the amount of screen time that the characters of both Elizabeth and Sue regard themselves, whether in wonder or horror, speaks volumes towards Fargeat's central themes. As Sue galivants during her time in the world, racking up attention and adoration, while Elizabeth remains comatose, after the two switch places, Elizabeth regards Sue's continuous victories--mirroring the ones she used to have when she was younger--while trapped in a self imposed isolation where her sense of inadequacy, loneliness and self-loathing only grows in power.

One of the film's most striking and devastating sequences is one when Elizabeth, readying herself for a date with a former high school classmate who once (and still) adores her, finds herself in a position I would think absolutely anyone can relate with. It is a sequence without dialogue. Just Elizabeth struggling to reconcile how she is viewed by this classmate with how she views herself. She alters her outfits and makeup over and again, hoping to improve but only making everything worse, including her dwindling self-esteem. 

Time is literally ticking away--for her proposed date, certainly. But her sense of relevance and mortality, definitely. What begins with a nervous confidence ends with a face and hair shredding fury as what we are witnessing is the very emotional, psychological violence Elizabeth, and therefore, all of us, especially women, are all doing to ourselves to try and attain a status that does not exist but are constantly being told that it is. In Elizabeth's case, a massive billboard of Sue that faces (and therefore, taunts) her points directly at her mammoth window outside of her dream world apartment. It is just one remarkable sequence in a film that keeps topping itself and Demi Moore is equal to every single moment of it.

I am of an age when I can remember Demi Moore before I even really knew her name as she portrayed ace reporter Jackie Templeton on television's "General Hospital." I have grown up with her in many regards, in films I have loved as well as others that I have not. But, over so many of these years, she has remained a strong presence that I have rooted for, much like her acting contemporaries. Having Demi Moore in "The Substance" is a masterstroke considering all that we know about Moore's history in the public eye, especially her status as a sex symbol, grafted onto her whether she wanted it or not.

 Considering the subject matter of "The Substance," I would think that any actress could have performed this role. That said, Demi Moore grabs onto Fargeat's vision firmly, completely and like Ellen Burstyn in "Requiem For A Dream," it is a performance without a trace of vanity and a go for broke commitment to absolutely everything required of this story and character. Much like Natalie Portman's blistering performance in Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan" (2010), Demi Moore has to travel to despairing depths and layers of Hell...and believe me, she takes us with her. If the rumblings prove themselves to be true come awards season, I would be thrilled if Demi Moore's superlative, staggering work here were to be recognized.       

Margaret Qualley, I feel possesses an equally difficult role and frankly, with even less dialogue and she is compulsively watchable. Reminding me tremendously of the Replicant characters from Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" (1982), and even Emma Stone's character in Yorgos Lanthimos' audacious "Poor Things" (2023), the character of Sue emerges into the world without any of Elizabeth's psychological baggage, even though they share the same consciousness. Sue functions without empathy, essentially soulless, driven by her narcissistic desires regardless of the dire consequences. Yet, over the course of the film, the same insecurities that hinder Elizabeth rise rapidly in Sue, providing her motivation to also remain relevant and her refusal to be discarded by anyone, especially Elizabeth via means I won't discuss here so as not to produce spoilers.

Yes, there are clear allusions to the likes of Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), Joseph L. Mankiewicz's "All About Eve" (1950) and Robert Zemeckis' "Death Becomes Her" (1992), but I wish to be clear about the following: Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance" is not another movie about two women fighting each other. As the shadowy, unnamed corporation that supplies the elixir extols and subsequently warns both Elizabeth and Sue: "Remember...You Are One." 

Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance" is a film about one woman at war with herself. While Fargeat's rage against the patriarchal based expectations that lie within the male gaze is never let off of the proverbial hook (especially in the film's unleashed David Lynch-ian climax), she affords us the opportunity to see how that male gaze fuels the self gaze. 

Elizabeth Sparkle's inability to accept herself arrives at a time when it is possible that she never really knew herself at all as she she spent her life in an industry feeding off of outside validation. It feels as if she has no friends or family...something real or tangible in the world that possesses a grounding security that the fleeting Hollywood machine is not interested in cultivating, especially for women. So, when all that she has achieved has been swiftly taken away, where does she turn? Her need for outside validation at the expense of any sense of self reflection or acceptance, all the way to the point where she willingly defies the natural law sends her on this odyssey, consequences be damned. 

To that end, Sue appears as plastic as the mannequins she emulates and in a great touch, Fargeat never even gives Sue a last name, for why would these lascivious male Hollywood executives care about her identity when all they are looking for is a young, hot woman to fit the skimpy leotard? Sue plays the game to her advantage as far as she is able to take herself, again, without heart, conscience or  consequence...but there is always a price to be paid.

During my college years, when I was majoring in Communication Arts and taking a film production class, I assisted my then girlfriend now wife with the filming of a Super 8 project of a deep personal prevalence. She titled her film "Seeing You See Me," and it was a work about body image and the level of self loathing that arrives when the person you are and see yourself as does not match with the images that confront you harboring a beauty standard that doesn't exist. 

Her film concluded with a striking sequence, which I will call the "Binge and Purge" set piece. After wandering through a magazine shop filled with all manner of glamour and fashion magazines, she ends up at home surrounded by food, which we presume she will consume. She eventually enters her bathroom and kneels over the toilet. What is regurgitated are images from magazines, make up tools and even a small American flag. There is no dialogue. Just music and images. Her film was shown to the entire film production class at the request of our Professor and I vividly remember witnessing many female classmates openly weeping to sobbing...and a few of them even approached my then girlfriend now wife with variations of the same response: "That's exactly how I feel!" 

I thought of my wife's college film quite often during Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance." Yes, Fargeat has delivered an extraordinary, visionary work that takes it all to the wall, bursts through and keeps going and is filled with all of the cinematic gifts--Editing, Cinematography, Sound Design, Art Direction, Music Score--in her full unwavering command. However, and trust me dear readers, this film is no exercise in style whatsoever.

In Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance," the pain, the horror and the rage is absolutely real.

GOODBYE, AMERICA: a review of "Civil War"

 

"CIVIL WAR" 
Written and Directed by Alex Garland
**** (four stars)
RATED R

I do not know about you but for each day that remains before the next Presidential election, it feels to me more and more like a ticking doomsday clock.

Dear readers, I have the suspicion that I have voiced sentiments similar to the one I am about to deliver...but in case I have, here we go again. I am devastated by how every election cycle has become "the most important election ever." Now, this is not to suggest that I feel that we have existed within a sense of hyperbole. On the contrary, I believe that every election cycle since President Barack Obama's victory in 2008, has raised the stakes. I remember on the night of his historic glass ceiling shattering win that pundits were already remarking that we now live in a "post racial society." As I heard those words, I instantly scoffed and said to myself, "It's going to get worse."  

I never imagined how much worse. 

For almost 10 years, we have been subjected to the seemingly endless chaos of well documented racist, rapist, 34 time convicted criminal and remarkably, former President of the United States Donald Trump, the Republican Frankenstein monster birthed from the likes of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, and who now leads what has emerged into a full fledged neo-Nazi, White supremacist regime where unimpeachable truths do not exist unless dictated in Orwellian fashion and a 900 plus page document entitled Project 2025 serves as a blueprint for what will be enacted should he win another Presidential term this November. 

For myself, life has grown increasingly darker due to all that stands to be lost for myself, the people I love, the children I teach and for the citizens of this nation and world at large who happen to not be wealthy, White, evangelical male should this existential threat come to pass. The additional threats of political violence are mounting and have been so for several years, making me more fearful, especially as my school is located mere blocks away from our State Capitol building. 

While the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has inject an essential ray of light, hope and joy into these proceedings so blinding in intensity that it instills hope inside of me, I simultaneously feel unquestionable terror. For is the excitement, grit and grass roots voting enough to topple the rage and political cheating already underway? What happens if Kamala Harris does indeed pull out a victory, which will have its own glass ceilings to shatter? What happens if Trump loses again? What happens if he wins again?  

Writer/Director Alex Garland's "Civil War" is an astounding feat, a horrific "What If?' scenario that meets us all within this moment when our very democracy sits upon the most precarious knife's edge where it feels like the smallest puff of wind can blow the country either this or that way and at its worst, into a landscape from which we cannot recover. At this time of writing, I have seen Garland's film twice and I have been legitimately stirred while also finding myself amazed with the superior artistry on display as he conceptualizes our destruction, a quality which makes his film stand superbly taller than existing as some sort of political statement but as a richly delivered multi-layered experience which does indeed force us to question how much have we been desensitized to our surroundings as brutal and unforgiving as it has become...as well as how it has always been.     

Set in an undetermined future dystopia where the (unnamed) President of the United States (Nick Offerman), now in his third term, and his administration are attempting to fend off a rising national secessionist uprising as led by a combined armed resistance known as the "Western Forces (WF)" of Texas and California (?!) with possibly another secessionist movement from Florida thrown in for good measure.

After surviving a suicide bombing attack in New York City, emotionally deadened war photo journalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and her colleagues, Reuters journalist Joel (Wagner Moura), and Lee's mentor and veteran New York Times journalist Sammy (a warmly grave Stephen McKinley Henderson) plot to drive from NYC to Washington D.C. to potentially interview the President before the aforementioned secessionist forces descend and fully overthrow the government. Unexpectedly joining the trio, and much to Lee's chagrin, is Jessie Collin (Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring war photo journalist who cites Lee as her source of inspiration.  

Their journey is by turns solemn and harrowing with dashes of hope, levity, compassion, grace and humane sacrifice as the drive takes them through a rapidly dilapidated United States inching closer than ever to full oblivion.

If "Civil War" is to be the final film directed by Alex Garland, who has announced that he intends to step away from filmmaking to focus solely upon writing, then his film is indeed a striking document to leave behind as is final directorial statement. While I do realize and understand how Garland's approach may have been frustrating for some critics and viewers as it takes a decidedly apolitical stance in a politically themed film of such urgent brutality, I actually found the reluctance to "pick a side," so to speak, was precisely what this film needed in order to allow us to have a certain nuance within the overall warning signs. 

The film's bird's eye view of war and conflict during a period of national history where we are deeply embedded within divisive conflicts increasingly fueled by rampant disinformation and violent political rhetoric and actions around the country as our 2024 Presidential election looms larger and larger due to the closeness of its proximity. 

We are existing in what feels to be a horrific hallucination, a life as if we have inexplicably slid into a deathly dark alternate timeline. That is the feeling Alex Garland evokes with precision, and "Civil War" gives us a cinematic experience that reflects the everyday madness back to ourselves but with visual amplifications that fully mirror our disbelief, confusion and nightmarish awe as we question upon a daily basis, "Did I really see what I just saw? Did I really hear what I just heard?" And every day, our answer is a shaken "Yes." Our very fabric of reality is being called into question as what was unfathomable is now commonplace, and after a time, it almost doesn't even matter how we arrived here. We are NOW here...and we have to keep riding the waves to figure out how to survive. That is the nature of Garland's vision and it is as disturbing as the real lives we are living, where we are further  being challenged to understand that yes...it can happen here in the supposed land of the free and home of the brave.. 

Alex Garland's "Civil War" is a multi-layered experience that creates and amalgamation of the political thriller, road movie, and socio-political cultural critique. It is also a vibrant love letter to journalism and those who place themselves over and again into hellish, life threatening conditions to solely collect and report the stories for our benefits while additionally serving as a character study of a certain "adrenaline junkie" nature in these journalists that is akin to the character study we witnessed in Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" (2008). Returning to the road movie conceit, the film often transported me to Francis Ford Coppola's iconic masterpiece "Apocalypse Now" (1979), as our journalists' vignette styled travelogue towards the shadowy President references the odyssey up river to locate the mysterious Colonel Kurtz. 

Yet, perhaps even most of all, Garland's film allows his characters, as well as all of us in the audience, profoundly serious self reflection regarding our relationship with violence, whether the very real events we see every day and night upon the news as well as within what we consume in our fiction based media with its swath of anti-heroes, serial killers, and fantastical acts of depravity and degradation, mayhem and madness. 

Through the character of Lee Smith, we have one of our conduits and again, Kirsten Dunst surprised me with her depth of reach with her quietly blistering performance. Over the years as she phased from Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" (1999) to her criminally misunderstood and beautifully layered work in Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown" (2005) to Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" (2011) and more, with "Civil War," I saw a performance of such unprecedented hardened gravity, so often with just her far reaching gaze and without ever saying a word. 

Lee is the embodiment of desensitization, spending her adult life chasing the story and the image while enduring unspeakable events of violence. Only her sense of journalistic duty and the camera lens separates her from the barrage of carnage--or does it? "Civil War" charts her inner journey from desensitization towards a certain reclamation of her humanity as we witness her tenuous relationship with Jessie, which begins with a guarded callousness towards one of genuine friendship and even a hint of Motherly protection with rubs against Jessie's comparative innocence, youthful recklessness, hero worship (and possibly some inferred sexual attraction). 

To that end, Jessie represents who Lee once was and the older Sammy represents what Lee could possibly still be as Sammy's own adrenaline junkie nature and intense pursuit of the journalistic truth has not dulled his humanistic empathy which he continuously offers up as a sage. Even further, is Jessie's journey from innocence towards desensitization making the film function as a riveting and tragic dual narrative/character study of working professionals trying to retain a sense of justice, integrity, duty, morality and sanity in an insane world.  

Always the camera is the truth teller and the barrier, for where are the humane lines drawn with what is visually captured, and how it is disseminated to the masses? Is every moment in life and death demanding to be documented--again, a commentary upon our social media culture as well our consumption of violence through the media. 

One of the most striking sequences in the film is a gunfight and political executions scored to De La Soul's "Say No Go," a wholly jarring merging of sound and images. This particular montage sequence threw me off initially but then, it just clicked...and brilliantly so. For what Garland accomplished was a sly commentary upon a most overused set piece in films and television: the violent action sequence set to a pop song. What better way to be desensitized than have something to tap our feet to as people are being blown away.  

In "Civil War," Alex Garland's impeccable visual style matches and enhances the grim subject matter, again showcasing how the camera itself provides both clarity and distance towards the images the photographer, and in this case, the filmmaker, is chronicling. The quality of the film visually is glistening! Garland, working alongside Cinematographer Rob Hardy, ensure that every moment in "Civil War" is presented with a crystal sharpness, making the film--frame by frame--look like the types of photography enshrined in the pages of LIFE magazine or National Geographic. 

This tactic is present even in sequences of grisly, graphic violence, which I assure you is never gratuitous but realized again just as if these motion picture images could simultaneously serve as the actual photographs Lee and Jessie are taking as well as the ones we are accustomed to viewing in real life. And throughout everything, Garland is challenging his characters and us to question at which point do these acts of inhumanity cease to just exist as images we can be detached from and affect us as the reality that has been captured, especially when the loss of life is caught on film.

"Civil War" concludes with a bravura 25 minute sequence (again juxtaposing cinematic trills with approximations of real world political destruction) depicting the Western Forces' assault upon Washington D.C. and into the White House itself, ending with a devastating final shot (pun intended) and it's an absolutely killer image and has haunted me ever since having seen the film. And what a stunning achievement even that moment is for within this fabricated image, Alex Garland forces us so uncomfortably into the "What If?" nature of his film that we cannot help but to think of our current reality and ponder just what would become of us should this happen for real.

The camera is the key to the truth, about the world as well as ourselves. While I do not see myself as a photographer, I adore taking pictures and scratching my filmmaker's itch by seeing if I can capture images in an artful way. I remember in 2011, during the lengthy protests at the State Capitol building against former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, which I attended week after week and at which I took hundreds of photos. I would capture as much as I possibly could and return home to annotate every shot and then upload them to my Facebook page for my online community of family and friends to catch wind of what was happening here and what the main news media would either feature or choose to ignore. I fantasized myself as being some sort of war correspondent, feverishly placing myself right at the epicenter of one moment after another to get the story and once the protests faded away eventually, I found myself having great difficulty readjusting myself to the relative silence I existed within before the protests began. 

In my own miniscule way, I think I may have captured a taste of what real photo journalists might experience in their careers, which they enter willingly and repeatedly for the purpose of getting the story. I cannot begin to fathom what psychological, emotional toll and damage it must take upon them to tell our collective human story. Alex Garland's "Civil War" is a sobering tribute to those figures while serving as an essential warning and lament for all that we are bound to lose should we continue hurtling towards our own extinction by our own hands.

Alex Garland's "Civil War" is one of 2024's very best films.