Entertainment
In the enjoyable 'Franklin,' Michael Douglas plays a flirtatious founding father
Michael Douglas, star of “Romancing the Stone,” “Fatal Attraction,” “The American President” and so much more, is not the actor one would think of as first in line to play portly, balding man on the money Benjamin Franklin, but he has nevertheless done just that.
In the very enjoyable if not always convincing “Franklin,” which premieres Friday on Apple TV+ and follows the founding father through seven of the nine years he spent in Paris, crafting an alliance with the French and negotiating a peace treaty with the British, he’s neither portly nor balding, but something of a hunk. Franklin’s notoriety in France has been regularly compared to that of a “rock star,” at least since that was a term, and though Douglas, 79, is technically too old for the role — Franklin was 77 when the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War in 1783 — we live in age of fit septuagenarian pop idols, and Franklin, in his seventies, was reportedly catnip to women. We might say, then, that the actor is playing the essence of the man, rather than the form.
Written top to bottom by Kirk Ellis and Howard Korder and directed by Tim Van Patten, “Franklin” is based on Stacy Schiff’s 2005 lively work of scholarship “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America” — which is to say, it borrows its research, changes some things, leaves much out and adds a bunch of stuff, as such projects have done before the movies could talk. It’s a handsome production, a feast for the costumers, the hair and makeup artists, the production designers and set decorators. The crowd scenes are well populated, which I ever regard as a sign of seriousness on the part of the producers, or whoever writes the checks to make that so. And the toy-theater credits are so good I watched them with close attention every time.
The eight-episode series begins in December 1776 as Franklin and his teenage grandson, Temple (Noah Jupe), who has come along to act as his secretary, are rowed ashore in Brittany on a cold and windy night. They make their way to Paris, where Franklin’s coach is mired in admiring crowds.
“They have it in their heads that I invented electricity,” Franklin explains. “Who am I to dissuade them?”
Anne Louise Brillon de Jouy (Ludivine Sagnier) in a scene from “Franklin.”
(Apple TV+)
The Franklins alight into the company of Edward Bancroft (Daniel Mays), who in this telling is conceived as Ben’s bosom buddy, personal physician and nonspecific sometime assistant, and (factually) a man with a secret. Other players are gradually introduced, portrayed with various degrees of historical fidelity. Having been told that he has connections at Versailles, Franklin approaches Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (Assaad Bouab) as he rehearses one of his “Figaro” plays. (There are some nice evocations of late 18th century show business through the series.) Beaumarchais, an exuberant sort who has a habit of referring to himself in the third person, is high on the American project and, when not plopped down in the prompter’s box, will smuggle arms to the rebels.
The wealthy merchant Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont (Olivier Claverie) will lodge the Franklin party in a wing of his Passy estate, west of Paris, for the duration, where Franklin will establish a printing press and get chummy with his lovely neighbors: unhappily married Anne Louise Brillon de Jouy (Ludivine Sagnier), who plays the harpsichord and sits with him in the park making up stories about passersby like Woody and Diane in “Annie Hall”; and Anne Louise’s free-spirited, freethinking rival for his profligate affections, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius (Jeanne Balibar), for whom he performs upon his famous glass armonica.
“You are terribly ancient,” she coos to him, “but you still have most of your hair.”
“Perhaps you’d like to fluff it,” Franklin replies.
Among the wining and dining, some work gets done. Thibault de Montalembert (Mathias from “Call My Agent”) plays Louis XVI’s foreign minister Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, the man Franklin has to convince to get the king to come to his side. De Montalembert’s somewhat weary authority makes De Vergennes seem like a fully formed human, more than most of the characters here; it’s an unusually warm performance for a person whose scenes are almost entirely centered on political gamesmanship. (That he has a smart wife, played by Isabelle Candelier, whose advice he takes, on work and clothing, makes us like him even more.) Many of Douglas’ best scenes are played opposite him.
Thibault de Montalembert plays Louis XVI’s foreign minister, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, in “Franklin.”
(Apple TV+)
If the series does a thorough job of picturing the highlights of Franklin’s time in Paris, with its romance, intrigue and salon diplomacy — a subject colorful enough that it became a Broadway musical, the 1964 “Ben Franklin in Paris,” with “Music Man” Robert Preston in the title role — it’s less successful when following Temple’s largely imagined adventures. I would guess that at some point in the series’ development the grandfather-grandson relationship seemed a profitable peg on which to hang the narrative. And there was real-life drama in the family, involving Franklin’s son and Temple’s father, William Franklin, the royal governor of New Jersey, who supported the crown and plotted against the Americans, causing a rift never to heal, which is cataloged here if not explored. There is “errata in every man’s life,” says Franklin, ever the Philadelphia printer, when his grandson accuses him — fairly, unfairly, who are we to judge — of being a bad husband, parent, etc.
But the Temple storyline, which runs for the most part on a separate track from Franklin’s and occupies a good deal of screen time, seems designed primarily to get some roistering young people into a series dominated by sedentary middle-age and elderly folk. Horses are ridden, swords drawn, revelry reveled.
Invention is unavoidable in such a project, but the plotting around Temple feels increasingly unlikely — even in the fictionalized context it’s too goofy by half — to the point that the character himself becomes annoying. He falls in with not so much bad as boisterous companions, of whom the most serious is Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (Théodore Pellerin), itching to get to America and kill British soldiers. His friends fill his head with notions and dust his face with powder, and Paris, against whose temptations his grandfather has warned him, does the rest. It’s like a teenage “Rake’s Progress.” Will Temple come to his senses in time to witness the Treaty of Paris, concluded with late-arriving John Adams (Eddie Marsan), Franklin’s temperamental nemesis — his frenemesis — forever incensed over what he sees as the older man’s devil-may-care attitude to just about everything?
Douglas has opted for a strangely dry, deliberate delivery, which, for all anyone knows, might be exactly the way Franklin spoke. (The Ben I hear in my head is the one played by Stan Freberg on his album “Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years,” and that is surely not accurate.) Paradoxically — or perhaps not, since we are in Paris where Franklin is the foreigner — this “natural” American, who eschews the fripperies of fashionable dress for a trapper’s fur hat and simple cloth clothing, comes off a little stiff. Or perhaps he is being subtle. His most dynamic scenes show him working wordlessly at his printing press; they give us a taste of Franklin’s capability and Douglas’ own.
And as to Franklin’s chronologically asymmetrical flirtations, well, let’s remember who’s married to Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Sail we must, on Homer’s “wine dark sea” from Ithaca to Asia Minor and many points in between for the greatest story of them all, the tale of “a face, a fleet…of a war with Troy, of a man and a ‘trick’” and “Zeus’s Law, defied at mankind’s peril.
For his latest feat, Christopher Nolan takes us on the epic quest that is the cornerstone of Western literature and Western civilization, Homer’s saga of Odysseus, “hero of the Trojan War,” a trickster ready to wield his brain and his brawn in a titanic struggle not just to win that war, but the many tests that stand between himself and “home.”
And in Nolan’s telling, what makes “The Odyssey” timeless is the remorse of civilization’s unraveling, of the violence and pitiless greed that brings great epochs and empires to an end. Odysseus, played with equal parts cunning and gravitas by Matt Damon, spends his years “coming home” from The Trojan War filled with regret at what he’s seen, what he’s done and what’ he’s caused to come to pass.
His men and even he see himself as “punished” by the gods for his acts, playing god himself as he is forced to choose who lives and who dies. He pay for his hubris with more tests, more violence and more second guessing than we’ve ever seen in in a film or mini-series about him, the original “classic” hero of Western literature.
Nolan’s ancient epic is more historical and slightly grander than Wolfgang Peterson’s mythic star vehicle “Troy,” more touching than the riveting and brutally heroic “300,” and more tactile than either. We’re seeing real seas, realistic reconstructions of ancient armor, cities, galleys of war and a real dog — Argus — waiting for his master to return from decades of fighting and traveling.
Note to “Supergirl” and “Superboy” filmmakers and anybody else thinking “Let’s just digitally animate the damned dog.” Nobody cries when a digital dog dies.
If I’m honest, Nolan’s version of an oft-told tale had me from the moment I saw “the horse,” the “trick” of the tale-teller’s account of “clever” Odysseus. Troy really existed, and if there really was a “Trojan Horse,” I’ll bet it looked a lot like this — half-buried in the surf, a “Planet of the Apes” post-apocalyptic monument and tribute to the gods that had to be hauled, sans wheels, from the sand to the city whose blasphemous undoing it held hidden in its belly.
Nolan’s narrative opens with that “trick,” and tells the tale from three temporal perspectives — the war, as remembered, events back home in the Ithaca with the queen (Anne Hathaway) and son (Tom Holland) that King Odysseus left behind to fight, and the epic quest to return from that war as recalled by Odysseus in the company of his most alluring captor, Calypso (Charlize Theron).
The central conflict isn’t the war, or the murderously ruthless “suitors” for Queen Penelope, foremost among them the handsome and venomous Antinous (Robert Pattinson). It is between Odysseus and his superstitious men as he struggles with hardened warriors (Himesh Patel plays his stoic but questioning second in command) convinced their commanding officer has offended and re-offended the gods, especially Troy’s patron, Poseidon.
“You can’t live by omens and sacrifices,” Odysseus scoffs. But in this “time of apparent magic,” even our Ur-hero is given pause by Cyclops, the Sirens, the enchantress Circe (Samantha Morton) and the gigantic armored man-eaters that confront them, the Laestrygonians.
And even Odysseus has his Mount Olympus spirit guide. Zendaya plays the goddess Athena, who warns him “Your cleverness will get you into trouble.”
As indeed it does.
Damon’s “brand” as an actor has long been the intelligence he conveys in all but the silliest roles. That’s put to great use here as we see him plotting and planning this escape or that ambush. “The gods help those who help themselves,” he preaches. But his Odysseus also lets us see him second-guessing himself, a wearying and ageing man weighed down by the heartbreaking burdens of leadership.
Hathaway, in the role of the dutiful wife weaving and unraveling her tapestry while bullying suitors impose themselves on her household, shows us her own burdens. She said “Promise me you’ll come back.” And all she’s left with, decades later, is rising anger at the plight her long-absent and presumed-dead husband has placed her in. She is queen, but their overmatched son (Tom Holland) is too unsophisticated and physically weak to take the throne in the presence of entitled, murderous brutes.
Jon Bernthal brings a rough bluntness to the gruff Menelaus of Sparta, a hardnosed ruler dragged into war when Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) ran away from his brother Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) to Troy.
And John Leguizamo nimbly plays the loyal blind swineherd who tries to help Penelope and son Telemachus (Holland) cling to power as long as possible against long odds that his master, Odysseus, might return. Horror icon Mia Goth plays Penelope’s treacherous handmaiden.
Nolan’s “all-star cast” makes something of a statement in terms or the film’s intentions and modern messaging. The first character we see is played by the transgender actor Page, with a Black Helen of Troy and Black and Asian characters giving this ancient world the cosmopolitan flavor it most certainly had.
A running theme through all this is the breakdown of an old order, “Zeus’s Law” about piety, square dealing and how to treat strangers and guests and the rest of the human race, Trojans included. Nolan is talking about the “Dark Ages” to come, and the “Dark Ages” which have revisited us whenever the people lose their way and the violent and rapacious are empowered over us, often at our own doing.
Take a gander at insensate monster Cyclops and who he seems to resemble. Imagine him in a diaper if you have trouble making the connection.
This “Odyssey” is almost exactly what we’d expect from Nolan, a very good film not on a par with the unnerving novelty of “Inception,” lacking the poetry and stunning suspense of “Dunkirk” — just an epic yarn given epic treatment/
This is a filmmaker who has something to say to modern audiences, and a pretty good idea of how to say it within the context of a 3000 year old tale of “a face” that “launched” a “fleet” of “a thousand ships,” of “clever” Odysseus” and the gods and all-too-human men who bedeviled him every step of his guilt-ridden and bloody journey “home.”
Rating: R, graphic violence, nudity, profanity
Cast: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Elliot Page, John Leguizamo, Samantha Morton, James Remar, Ryan Hurst, Mia Goth, Jon Bernthal and Charlize Theron
Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on “The Odyssey” by Homer. A Universal release.
Running time: 2:52
Kris Jenner’s mom, Mary Jo “MJ” Shannon, has died.
Jenner announced the news of Shannon’s death Thursday in an Instagram tribute. She was 91.
“Today, we said goodbye to my beautiful Mommy MJ. … There are no words that could ever capture what she has meant to me or the heartbreak of having to say goodbye. My mom was the heart of our family.”
Jenner wrote that her mother, the matriarch of the Jenner-Kardashian clan, taught her everything that “truly matters.”
“To love your family fiercely, to be kind, to show up for the people you love, and to never take a single moment together for granted,” she wrote alongside a glamour shot of Shannon. “She taught us that family is everything. She showed us how to love unconditionally and how to find joy in the little moments. She showed me how to face life’s challenges with resilience and faith.”
Jenner concluded the post with an open letter to MJ:
“Mom, thank you for every sacrifice you made, every piece of wisdom you shared, and every moment you loved us so completely. I will miss our daily talks, your smile, your laughter… Our hearts are broken, but we find comfort knowing that love like yours never truly leaves us. Your love will live on in our family, in our traditions, in every moment we are together, and in every life you touched. When I look at my kids and my grandkids, I will forever see pieces of you in all of us. There is not a part of me that isn’t shaped by you. And if I have done anything right in this world, it’s because I spent my life trying to live in a way that would make you proud. Every memory, every moment, every blessing, it was all because of you, and I will forever thank God every single day for making you my mommy. My heart is broken into a million pieces… thank you for giving me the greatest childhood and oh what a beautiful blessed life… I love you forever Mommy. Thank you for giving us everything.”
Born Mary Jo Campbell on July 26, 1934, MJ married her high school sweetheart, whom she divorced two months later. Then in 1954, she wed Jenner’s dad, Robert “Bob” True Houghton. She gave birth to Jenner the following year and Jenner’s late sister, Karen Houghton, in 1958. After seven years of marriage, MJ and Bob called it quits and she married Harry Shannon, a businessman who helped raise Jenner and her sister in San Diego, where MJ ran a children’s clothing store.
Harry Shannon died in 2003.
MJ was featured on the famous clan’s E! reality series “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and the follow-up Hulu series “The Kardashians” numerous times over the years. In a clip from the show, granddaughter Kim Kardashian detailed that her grandmother had survived colon cancer and breast cancer and, in her sunset years, struggled with sickness resulting from the cancer treatments.
In one clip from the show, MJ said she didn’t have an appetite without taking her “medication” first. Then she persuaded her daughter, Jenner, to have marijuana gummies with her. Together they lit some incense and munched on muffins and chips and guacamole.
In another clip, Jenner interviews MJ about her life, and during the sit-down, Jenner asks MJ, “What’s your biggest fear?”
MJ replies, “I try not to fear,” and then follows up asking Jenner what her biggest fear is.
Jenner starts to cry and says, “I don’t want to say it. I can’t believe I’m crying. … Just, losing someone.”
On Thursday, Kim Kardashian caught flak online when a post featuring the Skims mogul and her sister Khloe Kardashian swigging tequila from a boat on a lake published shortly after Jenner announced the news of MJ’s death.
“This post was scheduled a few days ago before we lost MJ, so its timing came right alongside her passing,” Kim wrote in the comment section of the post. “I’ve been by my mom and grandma’s side this past week, and my heart is completely with my family right now. We love and miss her so deeply, and in the days ahead, we’ll be focusing on celebrating her beautiful life.”
Kim followed up with a post celebrating her grandmother, writing, “My sweet Grandma MJ, my best friend, my gossip buddy, my forever twin … You taught all of us the importance of family, and those values are something we’ll carry with us forever!!!!! You were the woman who showed me what it meant to be a hardworking businesswoman. You gave me my very first job at your store in San Diego and taught me lessons about work ethic, strength, and confidence that I’ve carried with me ever since.
“You always believed in me, championed me, and were my safe place. You truly were the matriarch of our family, and your love is woven into all of us. I know you’re at peace now. Give Papa Harry, Aunt Karen, and my dad a hug for me. You will always be a part of me, I love you soooooo much and I will miss you forever and ever. … YOU ARE THE BEST OF US!!!”
Two weeks ago, Jenner’s bodyguard, Mason Haynes, who also worked as a close protection guard for other members of the Kardashian-Jenner family, died in a traffic accident. He was 52.
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