Would make an interesting double feature with NICKEL BOYS, another movie that’s (very successfully) built around a formal gimmick to show the passage of time, changing mores, etc. (“Gimmick” is not intended derogatorily for either film, just descriptively.)
In this case, the gimmick—keeping all the action in one static space and cutting back and forth between the years to create rhythms and rhymes—has the uncanny effect of making much of the acting feel as though it’s being performed on the stage. (Indeed, Paul Bettany gives an occasionally disastrous turn that sometimes resembles a very poor DEATH OF A SALESMAN.) And while I can quibble with some of the effects work, and how it all looks like it was shot in a Volume, and how the lighting is kind of off … it’s devastatingly...
