Bad times at this hotel make for good times at the cinema
Mad Men fans still mourning the end of that show have reason to rejoice: Jon Hamm revisits the late ‘60s in Bad Times at the El Royale, a period noir mystery that has stylistic echoes of Matthew Weiner’s acclaimed series. Imagine if Don Draper were a southern appliance salesman (still with a deep secret, of course) instead of a New York ad man, and you’ve got a sense of Hamm’s role here. But Hamm’s return to a 1969 persona is just one small reason to see this well-crafted and well-acted thriller, which has retro style and clever twists to spare.
Writer/director Drew Goddard, who earned an adapted screenplay Oscar nom for The Martian here makes his second joint writing/directing effort after 2012’s equally fine The Cabin in the Woods. While El Royale is less of a horror film than Cabin, its narrative is similarly smart and wholly unexpected. In his new film, Goddard gives us a version of the classic “locked room” scenario: we are introduced to seven strangers who have converged on the famed El Royale hotel, which straddles the Nevada/California state line in Lake Tahoe. That idiosyncrasy is just one of many that Goddard uses to create a slightly eccentric mood; his characters, too, are also unconventional, and the film takes its time unspooling their individual stories and reasons for being at the hotel.
Goddard does a terrific job presenting the seemingly different threads, and he respects his audience enough to allow them to piece together the various puzzles instead of spelling everything out quickly. In addition to Hamm’s salesman (or is he!?), we meet an anxious desk clerk (Lewis Pullman), a struggling singer (Cynthia Erivo), a priest (or is he!?) fighting early dementia (Jeff Bridges), a hostile, private young woman (Dakota Johnson) and her sister (Cailee Spaeny), and a charismatic cult leader (Chris Hemsworth). Learning how and why these characters intersect is the film’s great pleasure, and Goddard never lets his audience down. Using a framing device of one character story per each hotel room, Goddard often shows the same scene from differing character viewpoints, which adds to the fun of figuring out the various mysteries and motivations.
The less said about the picture’s plot specifics the better; suffice to say the narrative is one of the most carefully and sharply constructed to be seen in cinemas in quite a while. A few cast standouts deserve a mention, though. Chris Hemsworth brings a Jim Morrison-esque sexual energy to the sociopathic cult leader Billy Lee; he radiates such a palpable magnetism that we can almost understand why his young followers have taken to him.
And Cynthia Ervio, a Tony-award winning Broadway actress, as the singer Darlene Sweet, owns what’s easily the movie’s best — and most currently relevant — moment, when she delivers a monologue about being “tired and bored” of the men trying to control her and her career. She startles even Billy Lee when she correctly calls him out as “a fragile little man, preying on the weak and the lost.” Ervio nails the exhaustion, frustration, and anger of the moment, and the scene is jarring in its intensity. Ervio also has a nice scene partner in Jeff Bridges, whose work can be a bit hit or miss (for every Hell or High Water there’s an Only Living Boy in New York), but who commits fully here to creating a complicated character who is both haunted by his past and seeking redemption before it’s too late.
That moment comes in the form of Pullman’s desk clerk Miles, whose confession to Bridges’s Father Flynn of having done “horrible things” eventually results in one of the picture’s most moving scenes. Despite the film’s unabashed and rather frequent reliance on violence (consider yourself warned), ultimately the picture speaks to the power of grace and forgiveness, in much the same way did last year’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. But Goddard’s stylized and pulpy noir never feels pedantic; on the contrary, it’s so fresh and engaging that even those who usually disdain mysteries should make it a point to see this one.
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Bad Times at the El Royale opens today at Bay Area theaters.
