Tag: Joel Edgerton

“The Plague” Is Tour de Force Debut Feature Film

On October 19, 2025

“The Plague” showed Saturday night in a crowded theater at the 61^st Chicago International Film Festival, the debut feature film for Writer/Director Charlie Polinger. It was everything I hoped it would be. I’ve heard great things about this film. The director remained true to his vision and assembled an outstanding cast of 12 to 13-year-old boys, all of whom did an excellent job (especially the characters of Ben, Eli and Jake). Polinger refused to cave to tired tropes and made, instead, a movie with a theme that is universal. The film has been picked up for distribution (near Christmas). Said Head of IFC Entertainment Group Scott Shooman, “ The Plague’s hypnotic and captivating psychological dive into sports, competition and adolescence is one of the most riveting debut films we’ve ever seen. The technical craftsmanship and excellent performances captured our attention and solidified our desire to collaborate on the launch of this impressive film from a talented auteur visionary.”

PLOT

Kenny Rasmussen (Eli) and reviewer Connie Wilson on Saturday, October 18th, after the 9 p.m. screening of “The Plague” at the 61st Chicago International Film Festival.

Here is a synopsis : “’The Plague’ is an accomplished directorial debut from Charles Pollinger that engrosses you in the troubling dynamics of a boy’s water polo camp. The film doesn’t shy away from the ickiness of adolescence, whether bodily or socially. Instead, it festers in those spaces, leading to a fidgety, discomfiting but utterly convincing watching experience. Stylish, vibrant 35mm cinematography from Steven Breckon elevates the film’s visual language, but it is the alchemy of the young cast that creates the film’s atmospheric sincerity.”

The film was nominated in 2 categories at Cannes. Polinger said, “Premiering The Plague at Cannes was a dream. I’m thrilled to share it with a wider theatrical audience through Independent Film Company, who’ve championed so many of my favorite films.” “The Plague” also won the top prize at Fantastic Fest in Austin. It was named the Best International Feature at the Calgary International Film Festival and won the Critics Award and a Special Grand Prize at the Deauville Film Festival. It is an impressive film debut, not only because the writing is so good and true to life (and turned into believability by a talented cast) but also because the sound (Johan Lenox) and cinematography (Steve Brockton, “Griffin in Summer”) were extraordinary. Some of the water shots of the girls’ team practicing their synchronized water ballet were truly impressively beautiful and different. Even the opening shot of the boys diving into the water was unique and captivating.

CANNES & SOUND AWARD

After “The Plague” showed at Cannes, it received an 11-minute standing ovation. It also won an award there for Best Sound Creation (Johan Lenox, composer). During the screening tonight, I tried to describe the sounds that were used to ratchet up tension in the film. It isn’t music, exactly. There are discordant voices. There are intense, driving, pulsing, weird, three-part disharmonies, similar to people panting in sync. Surging strings are heard at the beginning of the “Under the Sea” school dance at the Tom Lerner Water Polo Camp in 2003. Really interesting sound and equally unique cinematography.

INSPIRATION

“The Plague”

When asked how he happened to write this script, Polinger mentioned cleaning out his old childhood room at his family home and coming upon journals that he had written when 12 and 13 years old—junior high school age. He took those notes and turned them into a script that the teen-aged boys playing the leads made seem “real.”

UNIVERSAL TRUTH

Everyone wants to belong. When one person is singled out to be shunned, often the person with the most charisma or assuredness can get the others to conform and determine where each person stands in the pecking order. Polinger mentioned an interesting social psychology study that took 10 people into a room and, of the 10, nine were “plants” programmed to misname a color. [Example: say that red is blue.] He pointed out that 80% of the time, the lone hold-out (who was not in on the experiment) would cave and agree with the majority, even though the color was clearly being misidentified.

SPOKE TO ME

Every critic who spoke about the film on tape or in print had the same reaction to this remarkable film. It went something like, “That happened to me.” There is even a Dennis Rodman quote in the script: “Don’t let what other people think determine who you are.”

I taught 12 and 13-year-old students (7^th and 8^th graders) for 18 years. It is an interesting age, rife with bodily changes, raging hormones and horny boys. There is some truth to the rumor that my two children are spaced 19 years apart because I did not want to ever have to stand up in front of a room full of horny 7^th and 8^th grade boys while nine months pregnant. The mind of a junior high school aged male is often fixed on matters sexual (as accurately and humorously represented in the film), I’ve seen the cruelty of junior high school students up close and personal. Like nearly every critic on the planet, I also have my “Me, too” stories about Amish shunning. As Edgerton put it, “ The savagery in this is like ‘Full Metal Jacket’ for tweenagers.”

CAST

Joel Edgerton (foreground) as the water polo coach and Everett Bunck as Ben in “The Plague,” which screened at the 61st Chicago International Film Festival on October 18th.

The “good guy” in the film is young Ben, whose mother divorced his father and moved the two of them to town from Boston. He has been enrolled in the water polo camp and, as with others in the camp, one wonders if the parents really want to encourage water polo competence or whether some of them just want to get the kids out of the house. Ben has a slight speech impediment, which involves not pronouncing the letter “t” very well. When, as the new kid in town, he first joins the boys and uses the word “stop,” another boy at the table, Jake (well-played by Kayo Martin) begins taunting him, leading to a nickname of “Soppy” for Ben.

ELI

Kenny Rasmussen, who plays Eli in “The Plague,” at the showing at the 61st Chicago International Film Festival.

Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) is the social outcast who is being systematically ostracized. If he approaches a lunch table, the other boys get up and leave. The myth is that Eli has “the plague.” All of his tormenters know that it is not true, but Eli behaves so weirdly in their eyes that they punish him for being different. It is true that Eli has a rash, resembling psoriasis or rosacea. He always wear a shirt, even in the water.

The boys are merciless in their shunning and shaming of Eli. Ben (Everett Blunck) knows this is wrong. He is a kind boy. That comes through, including in his defense of being a vegetarian. Ultimately, Ben attempts to be friendlier to Eli. But the tables then turn. (No good deed goes unpunished). The Chief Instigator of mean-spirited actions, Jake, turns the group of boys against Ben, rather than Eli. Now Ben is truly miserable.

There is a semi-humorous scene where the Coach tries to cheer Ben up with the promise that “this, too, shall pass.” (“Be yourself, because what else are you gonna’ be?”) With a single tear making its way down his cheek, Ben says, “This is the most depressing pep talk ever.”

CONCLUSION

Joel Edgerton is correct in his assessing Polinger’s promise.He apparently can do it all, including the editing. I look forward to seeing more feature films from this director, who has assembled 7 credits since 2013. As his first feature film “The Plague” is truly a tour de force.

I would urge you to put “The Plague” on your holiday viewing schedule.

[Cast members in “The Plague:” Everett Blunck as Ben; Kenny Rasmussen as Eli; Lennox Espy as Julian; Elliott Heffernan as Tic Tac; Lucas Adler as Logan; Kayo Martin as Jake; Kolton Lee as Corbin. Joel Edgerton as the Coach.]

“Train Dreams” is Break-Out Film at Sundance 2025

By Connie Wilson

On January 31, 2025

In Movies, Reviews

Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones appear in Train Dreams by Clint Bentley, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Adolpho Veloso.

One of the big break-out success stories of Sundance 2025, so far, is “Train Dreams,” the 102 minute film based on Denis Johnson’s novella. Director Clint Bentley premiered the film on January 26^th at the Library Center Theatre in Park City and it has since been snapped up by Netflix for a figure said to be “in the high teen millions.” Only Alison Brie’s and Dave Franco’s horror film “Together,” bought by WME Independent, has created more buzz this year so far about a Sundance purchase.

Black Bear productions, established by Teddy Schwarzman in 2011 to market quality films to the UK, Ireland and Canada is behind this film. Schwarzman, a former lawyer, was behind 2014’s “The Imitation Game.” Now he is involved with Director Clint Bentley’s look at the areas where logging and the railroad were big industries at the turn of the century as the country was laying railroad(s).

That theme attracted me to this film, since my Norwegian immigrant grandfather was said to have helped lay the B&O Railroad (before dying young of Tuberculosis). I was also familiar with cast members Joel Edgerton, William H. Macy, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins, Jr., and narrator Will Patton. Add to that that the fact that the director co-wrote and produced “Sing Sing” for A24 and won a 2021 Sundance U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Best Actor and I’m in.

The film pulls from the novella of the same name. Screenwriters (Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar) have adapted its poetic language, as when the film opens with these words: “There were once passageways to the old way. Even though that has been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.”

Clint Bentley, director of Train Dreams, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Clint Bentley.

Robert Grainier is a logger who works for $4 a day and travels to where the trees are, whether in Bonnie’s Ferry, Idaho, as far east as the town of Libby, 40 miles inside the state of Idaho, or in the Spokane area. Grainier is portrayed by Joel Edgerton (“Loving”) and he is a bit of an enigma. He (somehow) lost his original family and watched Chinese families being mass deported from his former home town. Robert quit attending school in his early teens and his life really starts when he meets Gladys at church.

Within three months the couple are inseparable and build a cabin on an acre of wooded land. Soon, they have a daughter, Kate, but Robert is constantly leaving their small cabin in the woods to work alongside men from Shanghai and Chattanooga as a logger. In the summer of 1917 he worked for the Spokane International Railroad and witnessed racism against Chinese laborers, who were sometimes summarily executed without cause, which bothered Robert’s conscience a great deal.

In the course of his work as a logger, Robert met many characters, including one portrayed by William H. Macy who used explosives to fell trees—sometimes successfully. In another incident, a Black man crashes into the logging camp, demanding to know the whereabouts of a man named Sam Loving from New Mexico. When one of the loggers makes a break for it (apparently because he IS Sam Loving) that man ends up dead, shot in the back. Incidents like these, including details about Hank Heeley, who lived in the trunk of a felled tree, comprise the narrative.

In between these logging adventures, Robert returns to his family in the small cabin in the woods and to his beloved wife Gladys and daughter Kate although he says, “He began to feel a dread, like some punishment was seeking him.”

When Robert returns to his small cabin in the woods this time, there has been a terrible fire (that looked all too reminiscent of the recent Los Angeles fires.) His cabin and family are gone. For two weeks he searches for Gladys and Kate. The acting in the scenes where Edgerton is mourning his lost family and sleeping outside, exposed to the elements, are especially good and the cinematography of the area (Adolpho Veloso) is gorgeous.

The visual effects of the fire, coupled with great vistas and good sound all contribute to a superior film. Robert held out some faint hope that Gladys and Kate might still be alive and come home, so he lived on speckled trout during the summer and began rebuilding the cabin. As the novella said, “He wandered the city as though he were looking for something he had lost, out of time and space. He kept waiting for his wife and daughter to return.”

While in a theater in town, Robert sees his face in a mirror for the first time in a decade, and says, “He felt that he was just only beginning to have some faint understanding of his life, even though it was now slipping away from him.”

Aside from the logging adventures (later, he takes a job helping move people) the main message is that Robert spends what is left of his life mourning his lost family. The film also comments on racism in America. This made it a fine companion piece to the Sundance film “Third Act” that I had just watched, which referenced discrimination against Japanese Americans and the interment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

It’s a beautifully done film with good acting and some historical worth, as well.

“The Boys in the Boat” Brought Home the Gold in 1936

By Connie Wilson

On January 18, 2024

In Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews, Television

George Clooney

I just watched George Clooney’s film (he directed) “The Boys in the Boat.”

My spouse did not want to watch it, declaring it to be “too predictable.”

THE GOOD

I wanted to see Joel Edgerton in action as the coach, and the lead actor playing Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) was a new star, for me. He’s British and the Brits have been saying he is “the star of tomorrow” since 2014, which is 10 years ago. He’s 34 now (born in 1990) so perhaps a better title would be “the men in the boat.”

I did notice that the pictures at the end of the movie featuring the real Washington crew were all very handsome young men. They had great teeth, The love story between Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) and Joyce Simdars (Hadley Robinson) was nicely done.

The cinematography was also wonderful, although all of the close-ups on the oar locks made me think that one of them was going to give way at a crucial moment.

The “boys in the boat” were the crew members who journeyed to Hitler’s Germany for the 1936 Olympics. I have watched another documentary about how piqued Hitler was when Jesse Owens performed so brilliantly, defeating his Aryan athletes.

THE BAD

We know how this movie comes out before it even starts. In that regard it reminds of the movie about space launches where we know whether the launch went well or poorly.

My husband was right that it was “too predictable,” but it was still worth a look.

It cost $19.99 to rent “The Boys in the Boat.”

Maybe wait till it comes down in price.