Antebellum (R)

Janelle Monáe gives a good performance in the murky, underdeveloped Antebellum.

I don’t think I can avoid spoiling some of this movie’s plot. As others have noted, Antebellum takes 35-ish minutes to tell you something that you know going in if you have seen its trailers (which IndieWire says were first released in November 2019). If you want to see Antebellum innocent of spoilers, my advice is to wait for it to be cheaper than $19.99 to rent; despite the strong central performance by Monáe, there are a lot of elements to this movie that just don’t gel for me. I mean, that’s my advice for everybody but skip the rest of this if you don’t want to know more.

The spoilers start with the main character’s name. When we first see Janelle Monáe’s character, a man tortures her to get her to say her name is Eden. It is actually, we later learn, Veronica. Veronica is trapped at a plantation where violent men in Confederate uniforms run weird “military” drills and otherwise spend their time forcing captives (a few dozen people maybe, all African American, I think) to pick cotton and not talk. The only “civilians” here are Elizabeth (Jena Malone) — the daughter of the plantation’s owner (Eric Lange) and the wife, probably, of a “soldier” (Jack Huston) — and her young daughter.

This opening third of the movie drops details that suggest what we finally learn when we get to a flashback: Veronica is a present-day, successful and well-known author and speaker about race and gender. She engages in the familiar struggle to balance her family life, with her husband (Marque Richardson) and their young daughter (London Boyce), with her career which occasionally takes her away from home. We see her travel to a conference to speak and promote her book and then enjoy a dinner with friends (Gabourey Sidibe, who is So Fun here, and Lily Cowles). Her success affords her luxuries — a private yoga trainer, a high-end hotel suite — but it doesn’t shield her from racism, such as a brief encounter with a weirdly hostile hotel clerk or dismissive treatment at a restaurant.

So, persistent and pervasive racism in the modern day; a nightmarishly horrifying race-based system of enslavement from the past. The movie presents these two things (in detail) but I’m not sure what it’s saying about how they connect: maybe that the human evil that allowed for the horrors of the past isn’t gone but just barely hidden, still peeking out in small ways and waiting to be reanimated? Something like that? We get terrible evil and workaday evil but the wires between the two don’t completely connect, the “thoughts and ideas” element doesn’t illuminate and come to life. Because this movie graphically portrays the violence and despair of slavery, I felt like it needs to say something clearly, something beyond just “this is bad” and “the perpetrators are evil” (and “the perpetrators” as presented are either “these bad guys in this narrow outlandish circumstance” or “those bad people long ago” which prevents the movie from saying something more pointed about race in modern America). Slavery is a cataclysm that our country is still grappling with (and not) in key life-and-death ways but here it’s ultimately the backdrop for standard horror story beats.

Monáe’s brings more to this movie than seems to be on the page. We dive right into her character when she is in the middle of the nightmare situation. She says and does things that make sense at the time you’re watching them and more sense later on and hang together with the Veronica we meet in the flashback. It’s a demonstration of what a strong actress Monáe is and how good she is at portraying a whole complex person in small moments.

I feel like this movie wants to sit on the shelf with “horror but more” movies like Get Out and The Invisible Man and present itself as art that talks about race and gender while giving us a scary story. But this movie doesn’t deliver on the “more.” C+

Rated R for disturbing violent content, language and sexual references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, Antebellum is an hour and 45 minutes long and is distributed by Lionsgate. It is available for rental for $19.99.

Unpregnant (PG-13)

Two friends hit the road in search of an abortion clinic in Unpregnant, a sweet road trip comedy.

Seventeen-year-old Veronica (Haley Lu Richardson) finds out she’s pregnant. She can’t tell her group of best friends — or her very Catholic parents — for fear of their reactions. She tells her boyfriend, Kevin (Alex MacNicoll), but his response is to propose — and tell her too belatedly about a mishap with their birth control. Helpfully, though, he does give her a ring, which she pawns to help fund her planned-to-the-minute, two-and-a-half-day trip to New Mexico, the location of the closest clinic open to parentally-unaccompanied teenagers for this Missouri resident. But she needs a car and someone to be with her at the clinic.

Enter Bailey (Barbie Ferreira).

Bailey and Veronica were once best friends but had a falling out before high school. Bailey happened to walk into the girls bathroom just as Veronica learned the results of her pregnancy test and she owns a car. Despite their difficulties, Veronica feels Bailey is the only person she can get help from. The two set out on Friday night with Veronica having carefully scheduled a trip that will get them back by Sunday night, with her parents never knowing where she was. Naturally, things very quickly go awry.

Bailey and Veronica have a friendship that reminded me a lot of the Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever friendship in Booksmart (and the Richardson and Hailee Steinfeld friendship in The Edge of Seventeen, which is the first place I think I saw Richardson, who continues to be an extremely promising young actress). I appreciated how this movie, like those movies, gets to some of what can pull close female friendships apart in their teens, as they’re figuring out who they are and how to deal with the world around them, but then also how nobody is the onehigh school stereotype they appear to be.

The girls’ relationship takes this movie to a really sweet place, which both is and isn’t jarring with the core story of a girl needing an abortion and a system that has turned a health care situation into an adventure quest. Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the excellent and terrifying movie from earlier this year with roughly the same story line, is the too-real dramatic version of this tale. There, the girls’ money woes and the distance they need to travel heighten the constant danger. Watching that movie was an edge-of-your-seat anxiety trip that I am happy to discuss (say, at Oscar season!) but don’t think I want to experience again. Here, there are money woes and long-distance travel and some of the people are still jerks but there’s a lightness (the problems are often setups for comedy situations; the girls also meet good people along the way) and a sunniness as the girls’ friendship is rekindled. And yet, both movies end up at a well-crafted indictment of the political situation that makes the premises possible. All that and Giancarlo Esposito singing a few bars of “Since You’ve Been Gone”? HBOMax earns its keep for another month. B

Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, sexual content, strong language and some drug references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg with a screenplay by Rachel Lee Goldenberg, Bill Parker, Jenni Hendriks, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Ted Caplan (based on a novel by the same name by Hendriks and Caplan), Unpregnant is an hour and 43 minutes long and is distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures and is available on HBOMax