Taraji P. Henson as Janiyah Wiltkinson in Tyler Perry’s “Straw.” (Photo by Chip Bergmann/Perry Well Films 2, courtesy of Netflix)
Echo Valley doesn’t earn its talented acting ensemble; Mountainhead overestimates our tolerance for fabulously wealthy tech bros.
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Steve Murray’s monthly musings on TV in Atlanta and beyond.
You might say it’s a low bar to clear, but Straw is one of the better movies written and directed by Atlanta’s media machine, Tyler Perry. (Yeah, we know all about the recent sexual harassment charges lodged against him, but let’s just talk about his latest flick, OK?)
The strengths come less from the script or direction than from its powerhouse star, Taraji P. Henson. At first, it’s an uneasy fit between actor and character. She plays Atlanta single mom Janiyah, who wakes up one sultry morning, barely cooled by an electric fan beside the bed she shares with her daughter Aria (Gabrielle E Jackson). A precocious kid, Aria has been working on a science project with wires and lights that looks like (spoiler alert!) what Fisher-Price might put out if it made toy bombs. The little girl also has a slew of health issues that aren’t covered by the tiny paycheck her mom earns working checkout at a low-rent grocery store.
On this particular very bad, no good, horrible day, Janiyah counts on this check to pay her overdue apartment rent and lunch money at Aria’s school. But she gets into a fender bender with a ’roided-out white cop, loses her car, loses her job and gets mistakenly ID’ed as a bank robber when she wanders into her local branch with a gun and Aria’s flashing school project.
This tale of woe-is-me-to-the-nth-degree is on brand for Perry. Starting with Diary of a Mad Black Woman in 2005, he’s built his career on soapy female trauma porn. Poor Janiyah suffers a Job-ian cavalcade of calamities so extreme, I was reminded of Carmen Maura struggling through her own troubles in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1984 comedy What Have I Done to Deserve This? Adjust the dial a touch, and Straw could just as easily earn laughs.
A female hybrid of Dog Day Afternoon and John Q., Straw plants Janiyah for its second half in that small bank branch. For a little too long, she’s bewildered by the freaked-out actions of the tellers and customers, unaware they think she’s a criminal.
It’s difficult to watch Henson — an intuitively shrewd, live-wire performer known for empowered turns in Hidden Figures and Empire — playing desperate and, especially, dumb. Wailing “nobody ever helps me,” she grounds the character’s pain into believability; I haven’t seen her in a role this vulnerable since she first made an impression in 2005’s Hustle & Flow, playing a beaten-down sex worker who literally finds her voice in the recording studio.
Too bad the rest of the movie isn’t up to her standards, but it has its pluses. Sherri Shepherd is sympathetic as the branch manager who liaises between Janiyah and the cops who circle the bank. And though she sticks out at first like a model jammed into a plainclothes uniform, speaking her lines woodenly, singer Teyana Taylor grows more confident as a police detective who figures out what’s going on with Janiyah: “I think she may have just snapped.” (OK, so she’s a detective, not a brilliant analyst.)
The movie achieves an atmosphere that captures the weary community spirit of this strip mall’s businesses: that rundown grocery, the small bank and the cash-checking place that targets the monthly paychecks of struggling workers like Janiyah.
Still, Straw can’t help being a Tyler Perry movie. Any hint of discipline flies out the window with multiple twists that feel like ideas he considered in earlier versions (assuming his scripts go through more than one draft), then just threw together at the end, to hell with logic. Still, Henson keeps you watching. She turns Janiyah from a beaten-down repository of bad luck into an everywoman who reminds us of the power and necessity of simply being seen.
APPLE TV+
Big twists also mark the climax of the movie Echo Valley, a thriller that doesn’t earn the talent of its stars Julianne Moore, Sydney Sweeney and the always flavorful Fiona Shaw. You may or may not buy those twists. The bigger problem is, you might not care.
Moore plays Kate, still grieving the death of her wife, the “lesbo ranch hand” she met at the stable she owns, leading to her divorce from her husband Richard. We meet Richard near the movie’s start in a cameo from Kyle MacLachlan. He lays the groundwork for the film’s central conflict and fatal flaw. He reminds Kate that “we both made pledges not to enable” their daughter, berating her for not maintaining those tough-love boundaries.
Right on cue, hot-mess Claire (Sweeney) arrives once more on the isolated grounds of Kate’s farmhouse, swearing, “I’m clean, Mom, I’m good.” That’s because she broke up with her user boyfriend Ryan (Edmund Donovan), throwing all his things into a river, unaware that those things included a load of smack belonging to Ryan’s drug dealer, Jackie.
Jackie is played by Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson, giving good sleazebag. Soon, he’s blackmailing Kate after she once again does too many of the wrong things to help her awful daughter. That does not include sending her to rehab but involves sinking a bloody body to the bottom of a lake in the dead of night. Moore and Sweeney have thankless roles in different ways. You want to yell at Kate for playing doormat to her junkie daughter. Meanwhile, Claire never develops beyond a strung-out, manipulative mess. Shaw, as Kate’s friend Leslie, provides the movie’s only common-sense relief.
Directed by Michael Pierce, responsible for 2017’s terrific, unnerving Beast, Echo Valley does a decent job of showing you the ravaging effects of addiction on a user’s family. It doesn’t show you a valuable model for dealing with the issue, though. In the end, it’s just a cynical plot point in an implausible flick that plays like a wannabe Mildred Pierce on drugs.
Another Apple TV+ also-ran is Murderbot, a wry sci-fi series that has every reason to be a zillion times better. Based on Martha Wells’ award-winning book series The Murderbot Diaries, it stars Alexander Skarsgård as a security android, or SecUnit. He — it — has secretly adopted the name of the title. He thinks it’s cool. He also thinks it may be accurate, due to a fragmentary clip from his partly wiped memory banks that suggests he was involved in a murderous attack on humans in the past.
Overcoming the “governor module” designed to restrict his independent actions, he uses his freedom merely to download endless episodes of his favorite sci-fi soap opera, Sanctuary Moon, starring John Cho as the Kirk-like captain. (It’s one of the show’s shrewd digs at the ways we humans waste our potential by gorging on junk.)
At the series start, Murderbot is assigned to accompany a party of scientists exploring a little-known planet. The human crew is led by Mensah (the appealing Noma Dumezweni), a measured leader who trusts the droid more than her five touchy-feely colleagues. They’re a multicultural, nonbinary bunch (including one throuple) that allows for some mild — too mild — spoofing of their ineffectual humanist values.
Mildness is generally the problem with the show, even though there are attacks on the crew by giant alien beasties, rogue SecUnits and the occasional human. The tone is one of slow-burn bemusement, set by Murderbot’s nonstop voiceover criticizing the humans he’s assigned to protect.
Each episode is so short, less than half an hour, momentum barely builds from week to week. It isn’t until episode three that anything much happens, with the appearance of a second, genuinely murderous SecUnit. Maybe that’s the point: brief bursts of violence colliding with the show’s cooler-than-thou disengagement from real dramatic stakes. There are rich existential questions — about identity, self-will and what it means to be human — buried deep in its premise. But Murderbot is too busy being deadpan to excavate them. Well, I’ve only seen seven of its 10 weekly episodes. Maybe when the last one drops on July 11, all these drawbacks will be resolved. Maybe.
HBO MAX
Like me, you’ve probably had enough of billionaires for literally a lifetime. But if you’re a fan of Jesse Armstrong’s pungent dialogue from his show Succession, you might hold your nose long enough for his stand-alone movie Mountainhead. The first half of it, anyway.
Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef play longtime friends and former colleagues who’ve gotten fabulously rich on tech. You don’t need to know their names because they’re all assholes, differentiated mainly by who has the most money.
Their latest, um, asset-measuring contest takes place in the snowy fortress that gives the movie its title, owned by the poorest of the lot (Schwartzman’s character), who’s worth a mere half-billion. There for a poker retreat that recalls their glory days as young tech inventors before they hit it big, their recreation gets sidelined with news that one of their latest deep-fake video apps has caused a literal apocalypse on the Earth far below them. Rather than step up and take moral accountability, the bruhs try to figure out how to further monetize the chaos.
At one point, Smith’s character asks the others, “Do you believe in other people?… 8 billion people as real as us?” It’s the sort of solipsism you can imagine among money-mad people like this, who had the luck of striking it rich and then think that makes them smart about everything. And everyone else on the planet.
Armstrong’s dialogue is shrewd, salty and often hilarious, but your laugh may sound like a death rattle. When three of the guys plot to murder the fourth, the stakes are low because you want all of these MFs to die.
