The Media Tourist

Keira Knightley, Jessie Buckley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw headline cast of feisty flick about worlds-collide moment in British women’s-lib history

Misbehaviour
Starring Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Jessie Buckley
Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe
Unrated
In select theaters and on VOD Sept. 25, 2020

A lot was going on back in 1970.

The Beatles broke up. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died. The astronauts of Apollo 13 gave everyone a scare when their spacecraft glitched two days into the mission, nearly stranding them between the Earth and the moon. The Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four and wounding nine others.

It was a turbulent time. And over in England, some women were shaking things up too.

This British true-life character drama is based on the true story of a group of “mischief makers” who disrupted the 1970 Miss World competition in London—a major TV event—with a message that resonated far beyond that raucous November evening at tony Royal Albert Hall.

Claiming that beauty competitions were demeaning to women, the newly formed Women’s Liberation Movement gave the growing grassroots crusade a bracing jolt of international publicity at something the whole world was watching.

Misbehaviour crafts its feisty, worlds-collide story of female activism, women’s rights and an era locked down in a cocky, casual grip of patronizing patriarchy through converging storylines about a cast of real-life characters who all come together at the pageant.

There’s Sally Alexander (Keira Knightly) and Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley), vastly different but aligned in rallying for a common cause—planning a demonstration against an event they liken to a world-stage “cattle market,” where women are measured, weighed and displayed for mass-market consumption.

The Miss World contestants arrive in London by the busload from the airport, and we get to know them—and they get to know each other—as they’re put through their rehearsal paces and prep under the tutelage of pageant founder Eric Morley (Rhys Ifans) and his wife (Keeley Hawes).

Cool and cocky Miss Sweden (Clara Rosager), the odds-on international favorite, acts bored by the whole shebang. Shy, wide-eyed Miss Africa South (Loreece Harrison) admits that she’s never been on an airplane, or anywhere outside of her own repressive country. If either she or Miss Grenada (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) wins, it will make history as the first time for a Black woman, representing any country, to take home a Miss World trophy.

Meanwhile, American stateside superstar comedian Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear) is preparing to make a return Over There to provide some Yankee-Doodle yuks at the event. But his jaded, longsuffering wife (Lesley Manville) isn’t so hyped about the trip, remembering how badly her infamously flirtatious husband behaved the last time he was in merry old England.

When Morley, the Miss World owner, hears of the planned demonstration by the Women’s Libbers, he dismisses it as just a bunch of “anti-establishment mischief makers.”

But when the big night arrives, the demonstration becomes a sneak-attack invasion and there’s a boisterous break-out of total disorder in the middle of Hope’s mid-show comedic monologue. Chaos reigns when the feminist infiltrators unleash an arsenal of anarchy inside the auditorium—unfurling banners, waving signs, tossing leaflets, hurling bags of flour onto the stage, rattling rattles, shouting and squirting ink-filled water pistols. The fracas shuts the telecast down. Alexander, Robinson and the other agitators are hauled off to jail, but they know they’ve done what they intended to do, and they’ve scored a media victory.

The (mostly British) cast is great, filled with familiar actors and fresh faces. Busy-bee Buckley is on fire as the radicalized Jo; this is her fifth project this year, including a significant role in this season’s Fargo and starring in director Charlie Kaufman’s recent Netflix adaption of the trippy novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Mbatha-Raw, a standout on Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, is equally impressive as Miss Grenada, Jennifer Hosten, whose calm demeanor conceals passion, ambition and dreams far beyond Miss World. Knightley, of course, has been in everything from high-toned dramas (Pride and Prejudice and Atonement) to blockbusters (the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise) and larky romcoms (Love Actually). She’s perfect here as a proper young British mom and wife who knows just how much she has to lose by throwing in with a commune of ragtag anarchists—but weighing how much she’ll throw away if she doesn’t. Manville (she was Princess Margaret in The Crown, among her 100-plus TV and movie roles) is superb as Delores Hope, who literally gets the last laugh at her philandering, floundering spouse. And speaking of The Crown, maybe you’ll recognize Miss South Africa—she’s played by Emma Corrin, who portrayed Lady Diana Spencer in 2019’s season four of the Netflix series.

British director Philippa Lowthorpe, who’s steered several episodes of Call the Midwife and The Crown, keeps things brisk and lively, with distinct dashes of British whimsy even when dealing with weighty issues like apartheid, sexism, misogyny and oppressive international politics.    

Misbehaviour gives a sense of the complex, complicated web from which the tapestry of women’s rights was woven. The Women’s Liberation Movement was made of many threads, in many places, some far apart and wildly different, like rabble-rousing activists and beauty pageant contestants. But the movie suggests there’s a common thread that connects all women, and it reaches around the globe.

There’s a subtle scene where several of the women in the pageant catch a BBC appearance by Alexander on TV; she’s on a local talk show presenting the view of the Women’s Libbers and why they’re against the idea of beauty pageants, but not against the contestants themselves. We watch the contestants as they watch Alexander, and we can see the conflict seeping into them as she makes her points, giving them pause as they try on their gowns in their hotel rooms or practice their pageant-perfect smiles.  

And the movie leaves us with a lesson, about how most things worth having are worth standing up for—and sometimes that might mean standing up with a banner, or a bag of flour, or squirt gun pointed at Bob Hope.

“You get the world you deserve,” Jo tells Sally. “And if you don’t fight, you deserve the world you f—’in get.”

The women in Misbehaviour believed in fighting, or at least in misbehaving for a cause. And it’s a cause not only timely, but very much with us; as everyone is well aware, all-too-real battles continue over women’s rights, and women’s bodies, today. But 50 years after Miss World 1970, this bright little charmer of a British micro-moment history lesson is a macro reminder of how much impact the events of one night, or anything, can have on everything and everywhere—and how little threads can connect to become something bigger, bolder and so much stronger.

Evan Rachel Wood and Gina Rodriguez bring heart and heartache to the quirky charms of ‘Kajillionaire.’

Kajillionaire
Starring Evan Rachel Wood, Gina Rodriguez, Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins
Directed by Miranda July
R
In limited theatrical release Friday, Sept. 25

So what’s a kajillionaire?

Someone with a lot of money—a lot more money than the Dolios, a family of small-time grifters, scammers and subsistence-level thieves, have ever seen.

“Most people want to kazillionaires,” says Robert, the Dolio dad. “I prefer to just skim.”

In this quirky, colorful, character-driven tale that’s already won film-festival raves, Robert (Richard Jenkins), wife Theresa (Debra Winger) and their 20-something daughter, Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), eek out a meager living in Los Angeles, where they mostly get by on selling things they’ve pilfered from a local post office.

The Dolios are barely a notch above living on the street; their “home” is a shabby, abandoned space of rundown office cubicles adjacent to a factory, where each day they are faced with a comically endless task: cleaning up an overflow of pink bubbles that comes cascading through the wall from next door.

If only those billowing bubbles were money. The Dolios are three months behind on their rent, but Old Dolio—you’ll find out eventually how she got such an unusual name—comes upon an idea, an insurance scam, that might net them some sizably bigger bucks. That’s how they happen to cross paths with Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), a young Latinx woman who’s roped in by the oddball allure of these eccentric “outlaw” characters—and titillated by the prospect of bringing some sizzle into her own humdrum life.

“I’m super-psyched!” Melanie gushes, admitting how much she loves the Oceans 11 heist movies.

You many not be familiar with writer/director Miranda July unless you follow the independent film circuit, but she’s made a couple of well-received art-house features (The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know) and numerous short films, and has acted in others, including Madeline’s Madeline (2018). Back behind the camera again for her first feature film in nine years, she returns with this audaciously engaging, eccentrically original, nearly unclassifiable yarn that walks a delicate line between humor and heartache as we discover the wrenching disfunctions of the Dolio clan. Their quirks, tics and oddities seem almost whimsical at first, but it soon becomes clear that Old Dolio is almost a feral child who’s grown into full adulthood without ever experiencing the love, affection and attention of a “real” mother and father.

The off-kilter family dynamic is thrown into an even wonkier tailspin when mom and dad Dolio take more of a shine to the newcomer, Melanie, than they do to their own daughter. But since Melanie is the first person who’s ever treated Old Dolio with anything resembling compassion or kindness, the two young women form an unlikely bond.

Wood, who rose to TV stardom as a robot who outsmarts her human programmers in HBO’s Emmy-winning sci-fi series Westworld, provides the emotional core of the movie, dressing in baggy, shaggy, shapeless boys’ clothes and talking in a low, husky voice to play the emotionally stunted daughter. Her whole performance suggests someone who didn’t have a conventional childhood, to say the least, raised to be a petty criminal, taught to be invisible and undetectable not only to security cameras, but to everyone. She’s an outcast and a misfit, distressed in almost every way, and you cheer on her halting, difficult quest to break out of her shell of invisibility into the bigger, brighter world.

Rodriguez, the critically lauded star of TV’s Jane the Virgin, brings kilowatts of enthusiastic pop as Melanie, who’s sexier, showier, more successful—with a real job—and far more “sophisticated.” But she too has her own needs for connecting with something, and someone, beyond herself and outside her tiny, closed-in apartment.

As different as they seem to be, and as they certainly are, Old Dolio and Melanie find out how much they actually have in common.

And that’s really what this surprisingly charming movie is really all about. It’s a paean to the oddball and misfit in anyone and everyone, to all who’ve ever felt like they didn’t belong or fit in—with their mother and father, or with the world. It’s about family and parenting and raising kids, all the way back to the moment babies pop out of their mamas. It’s about breaking with addictive, toxic relationships. It’s about people who hear “Mr. Lonely,” the old Bobby Vinton song, and can hopefully remember it’s how their lives used to be, not how they are now. 

And it’s about how the real kajillionaires are people lucky enough to find someone to love, and someone to love them back.

This sneaky little L.A. story—about a family that steals, scams and skims—will sneak up on you, for sure, and steal a little piece of your heart.

Doc takes deep dive into Deep South subculture

Red, White and Wasted
Documentary
Directed by Andrei Bowden-Schwartz and Sam B. Jones
Unrated

This is a really dirty movie.

But not in the way you’re probably thinking. So, get your mind out of the gutter—and prepare to get muddy.

This documentary about “mudders,” enthusiasts of off-road events featuring trucks, cars and “extreme mud” mayhem, centers on a small group in central Florida. When their last mudhole in Orlando is closed down, it causes a near-existential crisis to the mud-man known as “Video Pat,” who has spent most of his life attending mud events and chronicling them on his videocams.

Pat—whose real name is Matthew Burns—has raised his two teenage daughters to love the mud as well.  

“Mud is like a drug to me,” he says.

So that’s what the documentary is “about.” But what’s it’s really about is a sobering, sloppy, gloppy plunge into a muddy pocket of deep-South redneck subculture that most Americans will never see, a place in the swampy shadows of Disney’s gleaming fantasy-land tourism mecca where the stars and bars of the Confederate battle flag still fly and the politics are far, far-right and deep, deep red.

It’s a place where mudders wear cut-out masks of Trump and Melania and T-shirts with the slogan “Isis Lives Splatter,” and sport tattoos of Smith and Wesson 9mm pistols and the 2^nd Amendment. One young man talks about how he’s moved out of the city to get away from all the “liberals and pansies” and how he worries about what will happen to his gun rights if “the liberals get their way.”

“I like Russia,” says the boyfriend of Pat’s youngest daughter, Jessie, showing off bumper stickers on his pickup. “I have a lot of respect for Vladimir Putin.” He has stickers that say Nuke ‘Em All and Yankee Go Home.

“I’m not fully racist,” says daughter Krista. “I have some Black friends on Facebook.”

Mud events are good-ol’-boy bacchanalias of beer, boobs and bawdy behavior, punctuated by the constant roar of trucks making as much mess and muck as possible.

Pat pulls out an old VHS tape of an event from several years ago, one where things got particularly rowdy and out-of-hand. “This one here,” he says, “I think it caused some of my divorce.”

These mudders are, for the most part, small-timers. Pat looks at awe at the bigger, “professional” mud events, like ones staged by the Redneck Yacht Club, with gigantic, customized, decorated monster trucks and thousands of attendees. The Orlando mudders are more localized—and radicalized. Their MO is to slip deep onto private property, typically trespassing, until someone—or something—makes them leave.

Pat and his buddies remember mud parties closed down by massive fires, where a mother and her child died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and another when a motorcyclist “decapitated himself.” All those mud holes are gone, closed down, or taken over for construction projects. “Power and money,” Pat says, gesturing at a “No Trespassing” sign blocking the entrance to a once-favorite mud hole, the site of many memories soon to become a hotel, condo, business park or yet another tourist attraction. For the mudders, Orlando’s march of commercialization and progress is a march in the wrong direction; Disney and other developers are the big, bad wolves who have gobbled up all the places in the wild where they once roamed free.

A friend of Pat’s notes wistfully, “My grandson will never experience that part of the woods.”

The “red” in the title is for the political color, as well as for “redneck,” which so many of the mudders use as a badge of honor. And you’ll get eye strain looking for any skin colors other than white at most mudding events. (For punctuation, the movie throws in a guy hollering, “White lives matter!”) As for “wasted,” well, that’s a reference to all the beer and the bongs at mudding events as well as Pat’s own house, which his daughters keep blanketed in a haze of pot smoke. But it could also be a bit of a judgement call on people so obsessed with anything—like mudding—that they neglect other, well, more basic needs.

Early in the film, we see Pat, Jessie and Krista dumpster-diving, and Pat later tells us that his oldest daughter never made it past middle school; but he proudly notes that she’s “good [at] being on the phone.” Pat scrapes by on reselling junk and scrap metal. Jessie skips the medicine that controls her epileptic seizures and ends up in the hospital. Krista gets pregnant and has a baby; Pat kicks her out of the house.

It’s depressing and distressing and downright pitiful in a social-services kind of way, but it’s also grotesquely fascinating, like one of those cable-TV shows—Hoarders, or Addiction—about people whose train-wreck lives are so messy and messed up, you’re just thankful you’re watching from a safe, sanitary distance. For most viewers, this may be the only way to ever experience this particular slice of deep-red, pro-gun, casually racist, proudly anti-progressive America—a kind of drive-through movie safari to a place you’d never actually dream of going otherwise.

When Pat becomes a grandpa to Krista’s new baby son, Matthew, he reveals a sentimental, almost poignant side. He takes the toddler to his first mudding event, gently dipping his tiny feet in the gooey black muck just churned by a monster truck—a new generation baptized not in the blood, but in the mud, symbolically bestowing him an indominable yahoo survivalist streak, a fierce, don’t-tread-on-me independence, a disregard for anything that might be considered “political correctness,” and a rebellious spirit that knows no limits.

“The South’s been rebelling since the Civil War,” says Jessie’s boyfriend. “And we ain’t never stopped.”

If the Red, White and Wasted revolution ever comes, people, get ready—it’s gonna be a messy, muddy one.

On Demand Sept. 22, 2020

‘Stranger Things’ have happened—than Millie Bobby Brown playing the spunky little sibling of the world’s most famous British gumshoe

Enola Holmes
Starring Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, Sam Claflin, Lewis Partridge and Helena Bonham Carter
Directed by Harry Bradbeer
PG-13
On Netflix September 23, 2020

You probably know that Sherlock Holmes, the famous fictional British detective, has been played by some 75 different actors—including Robert Downey Jr., Basil Rathbone, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sir Ian McKellen, Roger Moore and Will Ferrell. According to Guinness World Records, he’s the most portrayed human character ever in film and TV history.

You might know that his famous office was on London’s Baker Street, and this his creator was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote about Sherlock in four novels and 56 short stories.

But did you know Sherlock had a little sister?

You did, and you do, if you read the mystery novels of Nancy Springer about Sherlock’s spunky 14-year-old sibling, around which this fun, feisty new movie adaption is spun.

In Enola Holmes, which draws primarily from Springer’s “The Case of the Missing Marquess,” we meet Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) riding her bicycle across the English countryside. It’s 1884, and she’s on a mission to meet her older brothers, Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroff (Sam Clafin), at the train station.

The Holmes bros have come back to their childhood manor to look into the circumstances of the disappearance of their mother, the eccentric and mysterious Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter). Sherlock, we learn, is already famous as a crime-solving super-sleuth. Mycroft is…well, appalled that their mother has let home-schooled little sister become such an “uneducated, underdressed and poorly mannered wildling.”

Even with a batch of Holmes stirring about, the movie clearly belongs to Enola. She’s a budding detective who not only dives into the case of her missing mom, but also finds herself at odds with her snooty brother Mycroff, who declares himself her guardian and tries to ship her off to a finishing school to “make her acceptable to society”—and find a husband.

Of course, Enola will have none of that. Running away from home, she dons a disguise (the first of several) and hops a train, where she meets up with another teen fugitive, a renegade, run-away royal named Lord Tewksbury (Louis Partridge), the “missing marquess.”

Sherlock, meanwhile, more sympathetic to his younger sister, suspects that something else, perhaps something bigger, is going on…

The game, as they say, is afoot.

Actually, Mycroft does say exactly that, as he begins to try to decipher where his sassy sister has gone, and why. Enola Holmes is a grand game, a passel of puzzles to solve, a hive of hints that you’ll have great Knives Out-kinda fun sorting out—playing along with Enola, who frequently turns and talks into the camera and tells you how things are going, who’s who and what’s what.

And it’s about time a movie took some of the spotlight off Sherlock and put it on someone else—specifically, someone female. It’s no coincidence the story weaves its plot into England’s upheaval at the time about voting rights and the women’s Suffragette movement, or that Enola’s mother—seen repeatedly in flashbacks—tells her she can “do anything and be anything,” making sure Enola is well-versed not only in history, science and art, but also the art of self defense (specifically jujitsu).

Enola’s mother tells her that a better future is worth fighting for.

“Paint your own picture, Enola,” she says. “Don’t be thrown off-course by other people—especially men.”

Best known for navigating the monstrous sci-fi scares of Netflix’s Stranger Things, Brown is  a delight and a dynamo as the fledgling British sleuth, forging her own path, following her mother’s advice—as well has her trail—as Enola zips in and out of London, dodges a mysterious assassin (Jamestown’s Burn Gorman), uncovers a bloody royal scandal and helps change the course of English history. Director Harry Bradbeer, a two-time Emmy winner for directing episodes of Amazon’s acclaimed series Fleabag, knows how to coax out just the right levels of humor, action and emotion.

Cavill, taking a break from playing Superman in the D.C. movie franchise, certainly doesn’t try to swoop in and steal the show. He knows this flick belongs to little sis, and he lets her have it. And he plays Sherlock as London’s genius detective who’s smart enough to know that even he has a few things to learn.

“You see the world so closely,” a female character chides him, noting that he’s always poking around with his nose in coal dust and footprints. “But do you see how it’s changing?” The suffrage movement, the struggle for the right for women to vote, was finally ratified 100 years ago in the United States—a centennial marked just a few weeks before you’ll be seeing young Enola make the liberated leap from page to screen.

Set in a Victorian era that was indeed changing and evolving, headed to a better, brighter future, the juiced-up, teen-titan girl power of Enola Holmes makes for a right-on, righteously fun romp with a revved-up, fem-forward message that still rings, ever louder and truer today.

All-star cast delivers scathing socially distanced satire in timely, topical quarantine comedy

 

Coastal Elites
Starring Bette Midler, Daniel Levy, Issa Raye, Sarah Paulson & Kaitlyn Dever
Directed by Jay Roach
Sept. 12 on HBO

In this “quarantine comedy,” five socially distanced characters grapple with politics and the COVID-19 pandemic in a back-to-back series of monologues, rants and confessions delivered directly into the camera.

It’s a timely, extremely topical movie for these extreme, extraordinary, even apocalyptic times—in more ways than one.

Each individual “segment” was filmed separately, during the pandemic, in a socially distanced, quarantined environment, with each actor performing remotely. A punchy, prickly political satire from Bombshell director Jay Roach, it was originally intended for live presentation at the Public Theater in New York—and written by acclaimed playwright Paul Rudnick—before the pandemic quashed those plans.

The cast is top-notch, putting an A-list spin on the comedically caustic concept of how liberal “elitists” are suffering under the right-wing rigors and ripple effects of the Trump administration. The term “coastal elites” is a more recent spin on just simply “elites,” a longtime pejorative political label used to stir up mainstream, grassroots voters and rile them against big business, big banks and—most recently—the perceived affronteries of science, research and education.

These elitist bogeymen were originally based in big Eastern waterway access cities of culture and commerce, like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston, or San Francisco and Los Angeles to the West. The political divide eventually widened to include ideology—particularly Hollywood—so that “elites” came to represent a certain upper-class of people, beyond geography, whose liberal lives and lifestyles, morals, intellectual pursuits, values and vested interests were markedly different from those of more conservative so-called “real Americans” in the heartland.

Coastal Elites introduces you to five of them, all with a different take and a different situation to share.

Singing, songwriting and acting icon Bette Middler kicks things off as Miriam Nessler, a New York City schoolteacher and gabby Jewish widow. Why is she in a police station? It’s something about a guy in a MAGA hat, and her finally getting pushed past her breaking point. But she’s been close to the breaking point for a few years now, especially when she picks up her beloved New York Times or turns on the TV, encountering a barrage of news about something the president said or did that makes her blue blood boil. “Since the election, I haven’t been able to stop cursing,” she admits.

Schitt’s Creek star Daniel Levy is Mark Hesterman, a struggling Hollywood actor teleconferencing with a therapist from his apartment during a moment of career crisis. After finally feeling fully emerged as a gay actor, he’s nailed a big callback audition for his dream role—a gay superhero called Fusion in a new Avengers-like franchise. But his high spirits are crushed after hearing about Vice President Mike Pence’s strident anti-gay agenda.

Issa Rae, the co-writer, creator and star of TV’s Insecure, is New Yorker Callie Josephson, who’s having a Zoom call with one of her besties. Callie is well-educated, well-heeled and very well-off, like her dad, a super-rich, super-successful Black businessman whose connections lead them both to an unlikely dinner at the White House. There Callie reconnects with someone she once knew as a little girl when they attended the same Manhattan prep school, where Callie mainly remembers Ivana Trump’s big, fake-y smile—and it haunts her.

Sarah Paulson, whose many movie and TV credits most recently include Mrs. America and American Crime Story, plays Clarissa Montgomery, a soothing, self-styled motivational YouTuber who breaks down in the middle of a taping to tell viewers about an unsettling visit to quarantine with her extended family during the pandemic. Heading out of the city to rural Wisconsin, she recounts how she felt like a tiny fleck of blue flotsam in a sea of bright red, baited into traps by her overbearing Republican brothers. Then her father confesses something to her that floors her.

And finally, Kaitlyn Dever from Booksmart is a Sharynn Tarrows, a young nurse who’s flown in from Wyoming to work triage at New York City’s Mt. Sinai Hospital, ground zero in the pandemic’s hot zone. As she looks into the camera—we never know who, exactly, she’s talking to—she poignantly tells about meeting, treating and getting to know a certain patient who changes the way she looks at life—and the way she’s going to vote.

And then, that’s it—it’s over. Five characters, five mini-stories.

It’s a “satire,” yes, but this comedy has razor-sharp teeth. And the blood it draws, when it bites down to the bone, flows bright, bright red. So beware: If zingy political humor wrapped in barbed wire’s not your bag, maybe you should stay inland, away from these churning, deep-blue “coastal” waters.

The writing is brilliant, and the performances are perfection—no supporting players, no pros, just pure delivery and straight-up acting chops. Often the characters seem all too “real,” and the emotions too raw; if someone wanders in while you’re watching it, they might even think it’s a documentary, fact instead of fiction.

But it’s fiction wrapped in fact; audio of actual Trump quotes weaves in and out between each segment: “I’m a very stable genius,” “No one respects women more than Donald Trump,” “I know more about ISIS than the generals.” In such a surreal setting, we know the people we’re watching are actors, sure. But their characters are so representative, so tapped into this unhinged moment in time, this ghastly gestalt of global pandemic and polarizing politics—they seem like genuine people, people you might really know, really revealing themselves, unloading their concerns, responding to a world gone mad.

Because yes, the world really has going mad.

Coastal Elites won’t make the madness go away. No movie has that kind of mojo, alas. But it might make you smile and even laugh, here and there, make you feel a little less alone, help you look at some things with some renewed optimism and hope—and maybe make you stop cursing, for at least 90 minutes.