Film Reviews: Emily, Jesus Revolution, Turn Every Page | Film Reviews | Salt Lake City Weekly

Film Reviews: Emily, Jesus Revolution, Turn Every Page 

Three new biography-based films come to theaters.

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BLEECKER STREET FILMS
  • Bleecker Street Films
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Emily
The eternal biopic dilemma is how much you owe to history vs. how much you owe to effective dramatic filmmaking, and actor-turned-first-time-feature director Frances O'Connor just can't quite get the balance right in this attempt at a character study of writer Emily Brontë (Emma Mackey). The narrative tracks a fairly narrow window of time in Emily's adulthood, including her close connection with her troubled brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), her often-contentious relationship with sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) and a possible romance with William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), the new associate minister to her pastor father (Adrian Dunbar). Frances shows a facility for visual filmmaking, including a wordless sequence capturing Emily's profound social anxiety, and the gothic intensity of a guessing game that abruptly becomes a kind of séance. In theory, though, a narrative of this kind should be about giving us a vivid sense of who Emily Brontë was as a person that informed her writing—and no matter how much screen time O'Connor devotes to close-ups of Mackey staring directly into the camera, she too often comes off like a chaotic mix of behaviors that don't add up to a character. Maybe many of these things are true, or at least truer than the timeline for the publication of Wuthering Heights. But while the truth is always an acceptable defense in a libel case, that's not always enough to make for a successful story. Available Feb. 24 in theaters. (R)

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Jesus Revolution
Co-director Jon Erwin used part of this story as the foundation for the intriguing 2021 documentary The Jesus Music—and honesty, he should have quit while he was ahead. Working this time with co-director Brent McCorkle rather than his brother Andrew, Erwin focuses on the creation of hippie-centric Southern California-based Christian church Calvary Chapel in 1968 from two perspectives: Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammar), the pastor who needs to shake his knee-jerk disdain for the unkempt youth; and Greg Laurie (Joel Courtney), a teenager from a dysfunctional home looking for answers (and whose memoir serves as the source material). As was true of The Jesus Music, Erwin and company are interested in the way conservative structural intransigence can get in the way of spreading the Gospel, which at least gives the first half a bit of an edge. But the second half is a long slog built around the conflicts between Chuck and Calvary co-founder Lonnie Frisbie (Jonathan Roumie), and Greg's soppy romance with a fellow convert (Anna Grace Barlow). And the filmmaking is just desperately clunky in its melodrama, giving an alarmist blurred-around-the-edges look to scenes of kids on drugs. Throw in some convenient historical whitewashing—like ignoring that Frisbie was gay, and that his 1993 death was from AIDS—and you've got the kind of thing that makes faith-based films so consistently maddening. Available Feb. 24 in theaters. (PG-13)

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Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Director Lizzie Gottlieb's profile of two titans of the literary world proves to be fascinating, except for the fact that its title turns out to be slightly misleading. The subjects are Robert Caro and the filmmaker's own father, Robert Gottlieb—the former a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and writer of the landmark, ongoing multi-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson; the latter Caro's longtime editor, with credits that include classics like Catch-22, Beloved, Jurassic Park and more. Each of the two men offers insight into the process of what they do, with fascinating details that address Caro's immersive research and Gottlieb's philosophy of providing "an intelligent and sympathetic reaction to the text." It's generally great stuff, with the caveat that the running time is ultimately weighted towards Caro's work and the hidden facts he uncovered, and understandably so. But Lizzie Gottlieb also informs us early on that both men opted not to let her cameras record the entirety of how they work together, which does end up feeling like a bit of a bait-and-switch for a movie that seems to be promising a full perspective on how they collaborate, how they argue over suggested changes, and how a great editor makes a great writer's work even better. As much as we do learn about the two subjects individually, the movie might more accurately have been subtitled The Adventures of Robert Caro and the Adventures of Robert Gottlieb. Available Feb. 24 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (PG)

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Scott Renshaw

Scott Renshaw

Bio:
Scott Renshaw has been a City Weekly staff member since 1999, including assuming the role of primary film critic in 2001 and Arts & Entertainment Editor in 2003. Scott has covered the Sundance Film Festival for 25 years, and provided coverage of local arts including theater, pop-culture conventions, comedy, literature,... more

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