With Solo: A Star Wars Story and Under the Silver Lake, Cannes Goes Back to the Future

Image may contain Ron Howard Donald Glover Woody Harrelson Alden Ehrenreich Paul Bettany Human and Person
Joonas Suotamo, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson, Ron Howard, Emilia Clarke, Alden Ehrenreich, Donald Glover, Chewbacca, Paul Bettany, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge attend the screening of Solo: A Star Wars Story during the 71st annual Cannes Film Festival.Photo: Getty Images

Cannes has always been a tango between its fabled past—Cary Grant and Grace Kelly seducing the world’s cameras with their otter-sleek glamour—and the challenging future; say, juror Kristen Stewart defying decades-old protocol forbidding red carpet flats by walking barefoot at the premiere of BlacKkKlansman. Over the past 24 hours, that tango has taken to the big screen itself, where two big Hollywood movies looked back to the future.

Cannes is often treated as the mecca of high-class international cinema, so it’s only natural that the festival’s hottest ticket would be for—you guessed it—Solo: A Star Wars Story. As the movie’s advertising suggests, this safely enjoyable prequel has its eyes set firmly on the 1970s and the beginnings of the Star Wars saga, perhaps the closest thing to a new religion that we’ve seen in the past 100 years.

Of course, any new movie in this franchise is tricky to review, because should you offer even the mildest of spoilers, you’re quickly hung from the lampposts of the Twittersphere. Yet there are a few things that your intrepid Cannes correspondent can safely report: Alden Ehrenreich stars as the young Han Solo (you know, the guy who turns into grizzled Harrison Ford), a good-hearted rebel from an oppressive planet who’s in love with Qi’ra—the Khaleesi herself, Emilia Clarke.

When the two get separated after the opening chase scene, each follows a different path. Han has a series of adventures that service the Star Wars faithful by showing how he gets his name; meets Chewbacca; and comes to own the Millenium Falcon spacecraft. Along the way, he gets involved with space outlaws, nicely played by Thandie Newton and Woody Harrelson (who, frankly, have far more on-screen weight than the movie’s younger leads); meets up with Donald Glover’s Lando Calrissian, who sometimes appears to be impersonating an 18th-century fop; and meets up again with Qi’ra, whose life has become linked to the film’s vein-faced villain, Dryden Vos, played by Paul Bettany. And that’s all I’ll say, aside from the fact that the wonderful Phoebe Waller-Bridge has a funny, scene-stealing role voicing L3, a freedom-fighting droid.

During its boisterous opening hour, the movie is simply okay, as it dutifully introduces all the characters and serves up the obligatory action sequences (pretty fair ones by Star Wars standards). In these early scenes, neither Ehrenreich nor Clarke register all that strongly. But the excitement picks up in the second half, when the film slows down enough so that we can have some feeling for the characters. It’s at the one-hour mark that Ehrenreich, whose performance is an encyclopedia of faux raffish grins, finally begins to take control of his character. While his Han doesn’t yet have the Bogie-like cynicism of Ford’s original (he seems, instead, like a very nice young man), he has a winning enough presence that you enjoy watching him—and should continue to even more, as Han becomes increasingly less nice. And Clarke finds her footing, too. She’s always at her best when she’s playing a woman conflicted by power, and this film’s open ending sets up the inevitable sequel in which her Qi’ra will be doing just that.

Solo was directed by Ron Howard, whose virtue and vice is that he’s totally conventional. If there’s any damning flaw in the film, it’s that he is its perfect director, for it never strives for anything bigger than what it was set up to be: another way for Disney to extend, and cash in on, the world’s most popular movie franchise. There’s not a risky second in its 135 minutes, and the scary thing is, that won’t matter at all. It’s still going to make a jillion dollars.

David Robert Mitchell at the screening of his film Under the Silver Lake at the 71st Cannes Film Festival.Photo: Getty Images

I wager that won’t be happening with Under the Silver Lake, a new thriller by David Robert Mitchell (who did the terrific horror film It Follows), which is as wildly ambitious as Solo is tame. Also casting his eye back to the 1970s—an early vision of a topless apartment dweller pointedly alludes to Robert Altman’s ’73 classic, The Long Goodbye—Mitchell is aiming for no less than to make the great modern noir and the great modern film about Hollywood.

Andrew Garfield stars as Sam, one of those guys who hangs around the fringes of the movie biz doing—exactly what? It’s not clear, but then again, opacity is part of the point. Sam lives in Silver Lake, which is overcome by eerie signs—there’s a dog killer about, a squirrel drops from the sky—and things only get stranger when he meets the sexy, spiky Sarah (Riley Keough), who quickly gets under his skin and then just as quickly disappears. He spends the rest of the movie trying to find her, a quest that finds him enlisting his buddies (Jimmi Simpson and Topher Grace), attending parodic hipster parties, meeting up with enticing starlets with names like Balloon Girl (Grace Van Patten), and pursuing mysterious symbols scrawled on walls, an idea surely taken from Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49.

As with Solo, it would spoil things to say more. You see, Mitchell is attempting to transform what might sound like a routine search for a missing woman into a surreal journey through a wormhole Hollywood, one chock-full of allusions to old movies, from Hitchcock and The Long Goodbye to Inherent Vice and especially Mulholland Drive (David Lynch’s presence looms over the whole film). You never quite know where you’re heading.

Indeed, Under the Silver Lake is aiming so high—Mitchell clearly wants to knock our socks and shoes off—that I only wish I could say that he’d succeeded. The reaction here at Cannes has ranged from “great!” to “terrible!” with younger critics more likely to be on the positive side. Me, I think it’s something of a folly—neither terrible nor great—that I keep wishing was more pleasurable to watch. (There are scads of badly timed jokes.) While Mitchell comes up with some striking images, clever bits of satire, and genuine shocks (I never thought I’d see Andrew Garfield beat up a child!), he seems to be suffering from a case of Young Male Genius Syndrome, the belief that his talent is so special that he’s ready to join the ranks of the Lynches, Paul Thomas Andersons, and all those ’70s superstar directors. But as Han Solo could tell him, if you shoot for the stars, you’d better hope you make it.