This is yet another “no, not that one” review. Instead of Julianne Moore’s physical and psychological deterioration in affluent suburbia, we have Will Patton’s crumbling exhaustion in a nearly deserted Atlantic City casino.
Patton plays Francis, the aging head of security for a casino that feels too quiet and empty. It’s a honeycomb, hollowed out in a series of vacant—but still monitored—rooms; he enters and leaves it via the seemingly endless spiral of a parking garage. Its best days, like its hopes, are behind it, but all the same, it’s hard to escape. That’s just how it was built. Obligations work the same way.
Francis has a wife, Anna (Cindy Katz), but almost everything we see of their relationship is mediated through their (initially absent) son. Danny (Philip Ettinger) has become a black hole, sucking everyone’s efforts and attention towards him while offering nothing in return. Anna calls him “careless,” which brings to mind a key quote from The Great Gatsby:
They were careless people … they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
Francis is in the middle of trying to clean up one of Danny’s messes, or at least extricate him from it. Danny, as we discover in a kind of cold open I’m not sure a 16-minute short film needs, got into a fight at a club and left a badly beaten man behind when he hit the bricks; Francis has been hiding him in an unused office at the casino, protecting him from the cameras by letting him know when he can and can’t leave the room.
But Danny is exactly as careless as his mother says, and “Safe” is about Francis facing down his son’s obnoxious, entitled breeziness, minute after minute. This is a rich little film with an insight as sharp as a razor tucked deep inside it, to the point where you could write an entire thinkpiece on Baby Boomer white masculinity from two wordless turning points near the end.
That’s all humanized by Patton’s performance. Patton is the kind of character actor who, despite many showcase roles, works steadily, and he’s always able to make himself into a sweaty cartoon (No Way Out) or a low-key gentleman (The Forever Purge; the Halloween revival trilogy) depending on what the picture and its leads require. “Safe” recognizes that Patton is a supporting actor, and it uses that, looking at what it would be like to lead a supporting life, to define your personhood, not just your profession, on what someone else needs. And the answer, visible in every weary line of Patton’s face, is that it would be hell, at least with someone as thankless and oblivious as Danny.
“Safe” sympathizes with that answer and with Francis himself, but it doesn’t valorize either one. It allows for muddying complications, like the timing and proximate cause of a major decision, and for caveats. If this is what fatherhood is, it’s still easier for Francis than it would be for many. That last idea, embedded in the film’s final images, calls back to the title, making it more pointed and less generic than it first seems.
“Safe” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Doctor Who, “The Seeds of Death,” first three parts – It might have been me since it was a long day, but it might have also been the show. This was just really kind of dull. Some interesting ideas about the folly of abandoning old tech when the new becomes all, but everything just happened so slowly. And the Doctor (Troughton here) doesn’t really feel on his game. Hoping the back end is better.
The Practice, “Reasons to Believe” – The main story has Lindsay’s law school mentor Edward Hermann (more recently an adversary over tobacco cases) killing someone who’s been stalking him, and Bobby trying to come up with a case that will allow the jury to let him off. The secondary case gives us the murder of a babysitter, and the only witness is a four year old. Ultimately, Helen cannot call the poor kid to the stand and lets the killer go, but let’s be real, no court in the US would ever call a child to the stand. Meanwhile, Rebecca tries her first case, a misdemeanor case so piddling that most lawyers would just accept a deal, but no, not our new sassy lawyer. (She actually hits her teen client in the head with a file. We are way too deep into stereotype here.) Plus welcome Marla Sokoloff as Lucy Hatcher, the motormouted, hypercompetent, possibly ND-coded new secretary.
Frasier, “The Dog That Rocks the Cradle” – Bulldog returns, out of work but surprisingly capable with Roz’s daughter. so Roz hires him to babysit. Naturally, he uses that to scare off Roz’s dates but not just to get her in bed again but because he’s in love. What starts out rather broadly turns into a surprisingly sad moment for both Bulldog and Roz. Meanwhile, Niles and Martin both purchase cemetery plots, which is a very effective driver for gags. (Martin’s vision for his funeral is Daphne’s vision for her wedding!)
“let’s be real, no court in the US would ever call a child to the stand” – as long as Netflix Daredevil is out there, this is a possibility.
The Long Walk
This is a very solid movie. The cast is exceptional–while the leads (Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson) are both great, this is really a film where the ensemble supporting players shine, getting to reach heights of desolation, grotesquerie, and transcendence that the more “leading man” characters don’t. I think this was regarded for years as a famously hard book to adapt, and while it’s true that a lot of the sensory and psychological immersion can’t really come across here, there’s at least one incredibly cinematic scene, with all the Walkers going up a steep hill in the dark, Garraty walking on three warnings with a soldier’s rifle almost directly in his ear waiting for his pace to flag for even a second, and muzzle-flashes going off all around him. Fantastic, tense, and disorienting bit.
All that being said, there’s a choice here to
SPOILERS
give this all a more conventional, heroic arc, and I understand the urge but can’t really get behind it. This is partly because I’m just going to be one of those annoying people who feel It Doesn’t Capture the Spirit of the Book, Man–but I’m fine with adaptations making changes because fuck it, the book’s still there. I just feel like some of these changes make the material less interesting (giving Garraty a solid, rebellion-based motivation for joining the Walk as opposed to exploring the hypnotic allure bad choices can have, coupled with the “nobody expects to lose, nobody expects to die” part of humanity; making McVries sunny instead of self-destructive; cleaning up the eventual “nobody helps” pact until it has no real weight) and that they don’t gel into a coherent ending.
Garraty picking McVries up and getting him moving again only to then sacrifice himself to make McVries the winner is pretty great, and a change I’m totally fine with; it’s even a good use of movie!McVries’s optimism to have Garraty decide he should live because he’s the one who can imagine a better future. But then the dark, satisfying final beat should be McVries choosing the violence he’d told Garraty to reject, and the movie almost stops there, with McVries’s execution of the Major. And it could be awesome! It fits with the movie’s more heroic, solve-the-dystopia outline! You could even have it cut to black right after the gunshot and the Major falling, just for maximum impact.
Instead, the movie has McVries succeed in shooting the Major–“This is for Ray”–and then it kind of awkwardly folds in the more ambiguous, unsettlingly sad book ending on top of that. The presence of the crowd seems to fade away, and McVries goes back to walking, and it doesn’t fit the movie’s themes or what just happened in the plot at all. (To the point where there are probably already a dozen essays about whether or not McVries shooting the Major actually happened or not.) It defuses the power of the book’s ending and the power of the movie’s own independent ending by not picking a lane.
Also, while I really appreciate the diversity in casting and even implicitly (though in a plausible deniability way) gay McVries, there’s something sad about the fact that the 1979 novel has a lot more queer subtext than this 2025 film. That always resonated with me, and I don’t know that this would have, even if I didn’t know what it was lacking. But on the other hand, I did hear a couple Black guys in the lobby afterwards enthusing about McVries as a character and how the ending worked out for him, so even if some things that mattered to me were stripped away, some things that mattered to other people were added on, so maybe it all balances out. And like I said, the book is still there.
All in all, a film that has some exceptional scenes and moments, even if it didn’t quite work for me as a whole. I think it would watch quite comfortably, give or take the awkwardness of the ending, for someone who didn’t come to it with such a huge love of the book, though, and it was heartening to see the theater pretty full for a Tuesday night. I hope it does well and that all these actors go on to have killer careers.
The Suspect – everything feels autumnal so I guess it’s time to make a dent on some of these unwatched film noir box sets. This is an unconventional one, it’s set in early 20th century London and follows kindly shop owner Charles Laughton as he tries to extricate himself from a loveless marriage and eventually realises that the only way out is… murder! I’m not sure I’ve seen a film that seems to empathise quite as much with a killer as this one does, it’s very odd – particularly for 1944 – but I definitely found myself rooting for him to get away with his crimes even if the era means that there’s absolutely no chance that he will. Definitely good rather than great but I feel like it turns the official “crime cannot pay” mandate into a strength with a smart, melancholy ending and I always appreciate that. Also it has some excellent cat content!
Cats, Charles Laughton, noir, sympathetic murderers: how have I not seen this already?
It really reminded me of an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode (“Don’t Come Back Alive”) because it has one of those characters who are so determined to convict the protagonist of their crime that they just start hanging around ALL the time even though surely they have other work to do.
Babylon 5 — LONDOWNAGE. Some shit that has building for a while is resolved in a way that is foreseeable in structure but not any less boss for that, and extremely unforeseeable in its particulars. And uncomfortable! Strascynski has brought religion into the show a decent amount and if he fumbles at times it is still impressive that he is adding this to the stew (and I think he has even bigger plans down the road), but here he is using language (in particular inventing a riff on something) that I do not think he fully grapples with. But it is fascinating and compelling stuff.
just some tv lately
only murders in the building. This is a lunch pail show. It’s a gym rat. Nothing flashy, not reinventing anything, just super solid on the fundamentals.
And this is a cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason—with this season’s murder victim being a doorman, it really is like New York City is another character / the show is a love letter to New York. What could be more New York than the uniformed doorman?
Rick and Morty. Time to put this one out to pasture. They’re running out of juice. It’s weird—it’s not like Roiland’s voice was irreplaceable, or like his improv was that great, but he may have inexplicably been the glue that held it together. Or the show is just close to spent as a creative force.
Wednesday. Solid performances and production design. It’s almost charming enough to surmount the garbled plot and the sense that this is just burton-produced pastiche of burton.
The Diplomat
I found this season apathetic. The story doesn’t really evolve, and when it does, another theme gets shoved in the middle. The conflicts between the characters aren’t well developed, and the relationships that could have been explored more deeply are either thrown in or barely mentioned.
The entire season basically revolves around three points: the investigation into who destroyed the UK’s ship, the struggles within Kate and her husband’s marriage, and the relationship between Eldra Park and Stuart. We stay stuck on these for five out of six episodes, only for the show to suddenly shift into a new theme, pushing the relationships into the background. And the worst part is that the main storyline doesn’t even get a clear resolution. It feels like everything that was built up just gets tossed aside.
Sure, there are resolutions, but they feel half-baked. Apparently, the storyline that Debora Cahn and her team tried to develop really needed more episodes to be properly fleshed out and grounded. As it stands, everything feels like some mix between “Super Powerpuff Girls” and “let’s save the world,” and nothing else.
I believe this might be the narrative style Netflix is pushing across its shows, because The Lincoln Lawyer follows the same pattern. I’m frustrated with the series. Keri Russell is a great actress, and even though the cast has its limitations, they still deliver solid performances. What’s really becoming exhausting is the writing—it could and should be much better.
Justified, Season Three, Episode Two, “Cut Ties”
This was an interesting episode that feels like it had very little closure. It’s very strange to me that the show would let Art torture a guy Mackey-style and have no real consequences for it; it feels like something it would have Raylan do and then pay badly for it pretty much immediately, particularly coming after we watch him do quieter, less badass, but much more cool work. Conversely, Raylan seems like he’s on his way to being a normal dude; the reason Primeval City makes no sense to me even now is that by that point in his life, Raylan should be Art.
I love that Raylan figures out Boyd is scheming because he knows Boyd never does anything he doesn’t want to. It’s not enough to stop him, but it is enough to inconvenience him.
Biggest Laugh: Strangely, for an episode focusing on him, Art doesn’t get any funny lines.
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “Well… now, Raylan, you’re talking to a man who’s sleeping with his dead brother’s widow and murderess, so if you’re looking for someone to cast stones at you, I think you’ve picked the wrong sinner.”
Top Ownage: “Sorry, Bill, but you know how it is.”
There are a couple Justified moments where someone does something that I feel like should have major consequences, and it just sort of … doesn’t. It’s disconcerting on a plotting level, because you can feel the characters being rescued by the writing instead of even by other characters.
Loved that non-Art laugh line, especially the specificity of “murderess.” Also, I just love any moment of weird rapport between Raylan and Boyd.
Ironically, in a dumber or more meat-headed show, I’d take it in stride. Justified is normally more interesting than this kind of thing.
Yeah, Justified experiencing the perils of excellence here, where it’s so good that I expect it to be that good all the time.
Year of the Month update!
Here’s a primer on some of the movies, albums, books and TVwe’ll be covering for 1973 in October!
Oct. 7th: Lauren James: Working
Oct. 22nd: Lauren James: The Wicker Man
Oct. 2oth: Sam Scott: F for Fake
Oct. 29th: Lauren James: Don’t Look Now
And there’s still time to sugn up for any of these movies, albums, books, from 1938!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Holiday
Sept. 24th: Bridgett Taylor: Rebecca
Sept. 25th: Cori Domschot: Bringing Up Baby