Chaotic, electric, completely alive from the first frame to the last. Safdie just gets this kind of guy completely. Marty is unpleasant, selfish, kind of pathetic. And yet I can't stop watching him. Chalamet is brilliant here, plays it with zero interest in being liked which is exactly right. The hustle is constant and it's genuinely one of the best things about the film. The way he moves through people, through rooms, through every situation like there's always an angle.…
PTA shoots this in VistaVision, a format built for epic landscapes, biblical scale, the American west at its most mythic. And the format earns it all, the set pieces, the chases, the scale. And then earns the quiet moments just as completely. At faces. At the small, private moment where a parent looks at a child and wonders what they're handing them. The child inherits courage, and inherits the damage too. The fear that hardened into certainty, passed down as…
"I can bring you in warm, or I can bring you in cold."
The black and white cinematography alone makes this worth sitting with. Stefan Czapsky's use of chiaroscuro gives the whole thing this beautiful, expressionist quality. Very much fitting for a film about a man obsessed with old monster movies. This is a film about what passion looks like when the talent isn't quite there to match it. Ed believes completely, in every terrible frame of every terrible film.
The period detail is completely alive. A film about bad filmmaking that is itself great filmmaking.
