Carey Mulligan | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The new movie “Maestro” is one of those end-of-year movies that you know as soon as the film starts will have a great chance to win the best picture Oscar. For this movie, the quality of the cinematography and especially the amazing makeup making actor Bradley Cooper look exactly like the subject of this good biography – Leonard Bernstein are both huge standouts. The first half of this movie is in black and white and looks a great deal like movies that were made in the 1930s and 40s. The second half of this film is in color, and this reminded me of the famous movie “The Wizard of Oz”, which was released in 1939, that also started out in black and white and finished in color.

The acting is also outstanding throughout, including Bradley Cooper who both co-wrote and directed this movie as well as starring Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan who plays Bernstein’s long-suffering wife Felicia Montealegre. Throughout the relationship between Montealegre and Bernstein, Bernstein was constantly cheating on her with numerous other men. Over a long period and so many affairs, this story does a good job of showing how much all of this cheating was affecting Felicia. Standup comedian Sarah Silverman has a short but very good cameo as Bernstein’s sister Shirley Bernstein.

The only problem with this film is that there is really no sequential story, just a series of scenes, some connected but most not connected. This lack of a sequential story might have been by design, along with the black and white then color idea, but for any film to hit a home run, there always must be a contiguous story. Otherwise, for some important reasons, the story becomes more of a documentary than a movie biography of Leonard Bernstein. I also thought there should have been many more scenes of Bernstein’s musical genius and conducting and less of the soap opera aspects of Bernstein’s life.

I agree with the only good rating of 81% on Rotten Tomatoes, mainly due to the screenplay and the lack of a sequential story that ultimately might prevent this film from winning the Best Picture Oscar. I do recommend this movie, mainly for the outstanding acting and the great makeup work on Bradley Cooper, which has to be a 100% guarantee for an Oscar.

On January 17, 2015 a young Stanford college student Chanel Miller got extremely drunk and was sexually assaulted by another college student named Brock Turner. Chanel later released a memoir about this assault stating that rape is not a punishment for being drunk. Odds are that the screenwriter and director of “Promising Young Woman”, Emerald Fennell was inspired by this story or another like it. Because this is the main idea behind this dark comedy/drama about a former medical student Cassandra, played by Carey Mulligan seeking revenge for a close friend who was sexually assaulted by several other college students when she was very drunk one night.

The two hours of this solid drama unwind the series of events from some seven years earlier where the medical school did nothing to prosecute those involved in the sexual assault of Cassandra’s friend Nina. A lawyer who dug up irrelevant dirt to discredit Nina and fellow students who showed Nina no empathy or understanding, ultimately turning their backs on her. Nina later dropped out of medical school along with Cassandra who devoted her time towards helping her friend recover from a violent assault that ruined her life.

Most unusual about this film is the lack of extreme-murder-eye-for-an-eye that is typical of revenge movies like this one. The revenge Cassandra seeks is more in line with an admission of guilt and retribution, rather than killing people, that I thought was a refreshing new approach. Cassandra regularly goes to bars, pretending to be very drunk only to later turn the tables on any man who takes her home and tries to take advantage of her – in a half hearted attempt to avenge what happened to her friend Nina. There are numerous attempts to be different with this story, that mostly all work, and an ending that was very unexpected, but did reach a satisfying conclusion. As have said many times in this blog, so many of us go to the movies because we crave justified conclusions that happen in real life, far too rarely.

The Rotten Tomatoes reviews of Promising Young Woman are an extremly high 91%. I agree with this rating and highly recommend this film.