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Amazon Prime Video
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Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx in The Burial
The Burial **
The formula for the cinematic courtroom drama isn’t particularly hard to pull off—as Barton Fink’s Jack Lipnick might put it, “Whaddaya need, a road map?”—but this fact-based story over-complicates things to the point where its simple crowd-pleasing elements get lost. In 1995 Mississippi, small-time funeral business owner Jerry O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) faces financial ruin when a big corporation slow-walks a handshake deal, leading Jerry to hire flashy personal-injury lawyer Willie Gary (Jamie Foxx) for a breach-of-contract lawsuit. The case ultimately gets tangled up in questions of shady, racist business dealings, which feels a bit weird from the outset since the actual plaintiff is white. But the real messiness comes from confusion over who the real protagonist of this narrative is, and an accompanying shallowness to the performances: Is it Jerry, who often feels mostly like a salt-of-the-earth plot-advancing device? Willie, who might need to put substance over style? The defense attorney (Jurnee Smollett) who might be too good to be on the wrong side of things? The showy witness-stand moments hit some of the necessary applause-break or setback-groan notes, and director Maggie Betts makes a bold structural choice by not giving Willie a grandstanding closing argument. It’s just hard to make an emotional connection with a movie when you might understand what it’s about, but not
who it’s about.
Available Oct. 13 via Amazon Prime Video. (R)
Joan Baez: I Am a Noise ***
As much as this documentary by filmmakers Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle and Karen O’Connor is a profile of folk singer/activist Joan Baez, it’s also in some ways a meditation on the challenges of autobiography, between the selective decision of what to reveal, and the unreliability of one’s own memory. The film takes as a jumping-off point Baez’s decision to launch a farewell tour in 2018, following life on the road and intimate performance footage. But it also covers the span of her personal and professional life, including her rise to celebrity as a teenager, her professional and personal relationship with Bob Dylan, and her struggles with mental health and drug addiction leading to hypnotherapy and recovered memories of childhood abuse. Considering Baez’s public image as self-serious and overly earnest about social issues—to the point that it was parodied in a 1980s
Saturday Night Live sketch—the greatest success here might be showing the singer’s playful side, laughing or dancing barefoot in the street. Otherwise, it’s dealing with some pretty standard artist bio-doc rhythms, though it gets a huge boost from the availability of correspondence and recordings from the Baez family archives. At its best, it’s an acknowledgement of how hard it is for us to know the public figures we think we understand, if for no other reason than they don’t always even known themselves.
Available Oct. 13 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)