Caught up with a couple of movies, one fairly recent and one a little older, over the weekend.
The Wonder, a 2022 Florence Pugh movie, is about an English nurse who travels to Ireland to spend two weeks observing a Fasting Girl, who claims to have not eaten food for four months. Slow, atmospheric, and at first it built some suspense amid (despite) multiple shots of Pugh walking across the Irish landscape in a muddied blue dress. Pugh is good, the reliable Toby Jones and Ciaran Hinds show up, the latter too briefly. Tom Burke plays a reporter, originally a local and now based in England, who disdainfully attempts to browbeat Pugh to get face time with the Fasting Girl. They have an antagonistic relationship until they suddenly, without regard to the plot to date, actor chemistry, or how human beings actually behave, and solely because it will be necessary for the plot resolution, bang. "I thought you did not like me" Pugh says post coitus, which is fair because UP TO THAT VERY POINT HE DID NOT.
Anyway, Pugh solves the mystery of the Fasting Girl, (hint: it involves Allofeeding) and the movie plods on to an ending that requires a character to essentially ignore everything she had said or done or believed in for the entire movie and abandon her entire life and outlook for a new one in the course of maybe one minute. For this movie, it would be hard to think of a worse and more artificial ending for the story. Add to it the director apparently having his soul possessed by Wes Anderson for framing scenes at the beginning and end of the movie, and a self aware voice over narration, both of which the movie does zero with, and it was two hours of my life I definitely would like back.
But at least it was also only two hours, separating it on the positive side from The Good Shepherd. Jesus. Just because I wasted my time is no reason for me to waste yours with anything more.
