Review: Coin Heist

by Patrick Bromley

Emily Hagins keeps growing up, but now I'm missing the kid a little bit.

I have been eagerly awaiting the next movie from writer/director Emily Hagins since seeing her last film, 2013's Grow Up, Tony Phillips, on the very first night of the very first Chicago Critics Film Festival. Hers is a career I have followed since Zombie Girl: The Movie put her on my radar -- the 12-year old with a feature film already to her credit and a bright future ahead of her. I've watched her grow and improve as a director over the course of the next 10 years and several features (though her 2009 movie The Retelling is impossible to come by, and Hagins admitted on a recent episode of The Movie Crypt podcast that she plans to keep it that way). Tony Phillips represented a big leap forward in both craft and in balancing a delicate tone, so I was excited to see where Hagins would go next.

Her new Netflix Original movie, Coin Heist, is another creative leap: it's her best looking, most polished film, one that no longer carries any of the "child prodigy" baggage and feels like it could have been made by any professional filmmaker. This is a double-edged sword, of course. With over a decade of experience, five features and an anthology segment under her belt, Hagins is very much a professional filmmaker. She knows how to tell a story, and better yet knows how to pull the emotional beats out of said story to make it resonate beyond the plot. The flip side of that Coin Heist, however, is that there's something a little impersonal about her latest effort. It feels more like a for-hire job than her past work, probably because it is in some ways; instead of generating her own material, for the first time Hagins is adapting a popular YA novel by Elisa Ludwig. It's good work -- one that clearly wants to be honest about the teenage experience in a way that another director would probably ignore (and did, when Brian Robbins made The Perfect Score). But I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss the unique personality that Hagins brought to her other films.

When the headmaster of a Philadelphia prep school is caught embezzling funds, all clubs and activities are shut down and the school is in danger of closing. A group of four students from different walks of life -- your basic Breakfast Club archetypes, though never nearly as broadly drawn -- band together to rip off the United States mint and make enough money to save the school.

For a movie with "heist" in the title, Coin Heist is almost totally uninterested in the actual heist -- a teenage Ocean's Eleven this ain't. Hagins' script is far more focused on the teenage drama that exists between all of the characters: these two used to date, these two like each other, this one has a mean boyfriend, this one feels like an outcast, etc. etc. etc. (having not read the novel, the same may be true of the source material, too). The investment the movie has in its characters helps supplant the lack of an interesting or exciting scheme; we want these kids to get away with their plan because Hagins has made sure we care about them as people. If there's a bummer to the approach, it's that what seems like it might be a fun and bouncy adventure -- kids have to steal coins! -- instead gets weighed down by the emo-ness of it all. No one really seems to have having any fun in Coin Heist.

So much of the actual heist feels like an afterthought that I felt less tension in the will-they-pull-it-off-or-won't-they of it than I did in wondering if the band would be able to play the big dance. The movie is so focused on the smaller day-to-day problems of these teens that it can't work up much excitement for the more "movie" aspects. To Hagins' great credit, she is always sure to really listen and empathize with these characters, never allowing them to become teenage stereotypes when it very easily could have gone that direction. She clearly wants to portray young people who feel authentic, and between her adaptation and the actors' portrayals (which are authentic even though they veer into "mopey" too often), there is real attention paid to never condescending to both these young characters and what I assume is the film's intended young audience. Like the classic movies of John Hughes, Hagins has created a film that tries to reflect the way being a teenager feels, even when we adults know better.

What's missing is any levity, and with a lighter touch or at least the occasional comic bit, Coin Heist could be a home run. This, of course, is a case of me reacting to the movie I want it to be rather than the one that it is, but don't we all? If I see something and feel like a piece is out of place or missing, am I wrong to take note of it? This doesn't mean that the filmmaker has failed. Emily Hagins made the movie she wanted to make, and made a good version of that movie. But there are ways in which it didn't connect with me that her past efforts have, and I miss the specificity of the worlds Hagins' previous movies inhabit. Coin Heist is her most accomplished, most commercial movie and I hope it leads to more big opportunities. I just don't want her to lose her 12-year old self.

Review: Barry

by Rob DiCristino

“The world is a big place, honey. You’ll find your way.”

In just a few weeks, the presidency of Barack Obama will come to an end. Many op-eds will be written on his legacy. Many economists will evaluate his policies. Many racist grandpas will gleefully ride the proverbial atom bomb into the scathing hellfire of the Trump Administration. The rest of us will huddle in bunkers and remember a time in which we embraced complex world issues and invited cooperation, when we were inclusive and empathetic, a time when healthcare was a right and women were people. We’ll talk about the way we elevated high-minded political rhetoric and how our neighbors challenged us to be our best selves. For many of us, Barack Obama set these examples. His is the most American of stories, and Vikram Gandhi tells its opening chapters in his new film, Barry. While it falls short of the truly memorable biopics, Barry is a fascinating look at an American icon in a moment of crisis, a peek into the defining years of a man who would define a generation.

Barry (Devon Terrell) sits in a courtyard, admiring the grandeur of Columbia University. A security guard approaches him — this is private property, he says — and Barry must move along. Barry kindly explains that he’s a student. About to be, at least. He’s new here. It’s 1981, and Barry is alone. Physically, emotionally, existentially, Barry is alone. His parents…well, you know that story. But Barry hasn’t lost faith. He’s here to find himself in the only way that any of us know how: go to school, meet new people, and try to learn something. In the weeks that follow, he’ll room with Will (Ellar Coltrane), hang with Saleem (Avi Nash), and maybe even fall in love with Charlotte (Anya Taylor-Joy). But right now, he’s got to move along. He’s not Barack Obama just yet. Right now, he’s just Barry, and he has no idea what that means. Barry is black, white, Kenyan, Hawaiian, Indonesian, Californian, and none of the above. He’s the Invisible Man. A blank slate. Everyone and no one.

To begin: Devon Terrell is masterful in Barry. Due respect to Parker Sawyers’ portrayal in Southside with You (an empty film with its heart in the right place), but Terrell rises above mere imitations of affect and posture to truly separate Barry from Barack. He’s the same man — same walk, same smile, same ticks and cadence — but still growing into himself. We see it most in the moments he shares with his mother (Ashley Judd, playing the whip-smart hippie Ann Dunham equal parts maternal and naive), when the sheepishness really comes out, when we get to see the stone-cold Spock we know waver a bit. Barry’s Barry is still feeling himself out, playing up his postured, charming “whiteness” with Charlotte’s affluent parents while letting his diction slip a bit with his friends in the projects. No matter the circumstance, we can always see the mental wheels turning. We can always see how much he’s leaving unsaid. Devon Terrell seems to know how lucky is he to have a range of emotions to play with and manages to elevate some very good material.

And it is good. Adam Mansbach’s screenplay never reaches the dramatic heights of the JFKs or Capotes of the world, but it is thoughtful and well-conceived in a style befitting its subject. This is not the Obama of grand gestures and rousing speeches. This is an insecure and conflicted Obama slipping in and out of the spaces between race, gender, and class. He doesn’t fit in with the trust fund kids or the dope fiends. Rich white liberals and black street vendors patronize him in equal measure. Everyone around him seems to have a pre-constructed identity (burnout, activist, Wall Street banker), but no such path exists for him. He’s forced to experiment, to see his neighbors sneer at his white girlfriend and to feel the crushing embarrassment of being accidentally tipped in the men’s bathroom at the Yale Club. Despite all this, the film takes great care in avoiding clear and obvious villains (not even the dickwad who tells Barry to “get over” slavery is completely irredeemable), a wise move that preserves the narrative’s integrity. This is the story of all of us, and we’re all just people. It’s how Barry learns to walk among us that matters.

It’s also a story of fathers and sons, as Barry struggles to reconcile his father’s abandonment with his own sense of purpose. So much of his story is defined by where he comes from (track the variations on his answer to this question over the course of the film) that he’s never sure whether to embrace his past or push against it. How do our parents’ sins reflect upon us? At what point do we let go of old grudges and start taking new risks? There’s a great bit where Barry goes to Charlotte with his tail between his legs and she tells him that not everything is about him; not everything is about his inner turmoil, and he’s going to miss out on a lot of opportunities if he makes it his entire life. These are the parts of Barry that really work, the really smart moments that avoid overdramatizing and instead trust the audience to project their own faults and insecurities onto the character. Unlike Southside with You’s blunt and obvious box-checking approach to the Obama legend, this one embraces nuance for a much more interesting result.

Barry isn’t going to win any awards. None of the performances are showy enough to earn acclaim, and many of you will find it a bit underwhelming. That’s fine. But it’s a story that might sneak up on you if you give it a chance. It’s an opportunity to reflect on what connects us while we listen to all the noise about what divides us. It’s a reminder that great struggle usually leads to even greater insight and inspiration. It avoids clichés where it can and shoots for something more than the mindless stenography that makes most biopics feel like homework. In the coming years, we’ll spend a lot of time trying to better understand who Barack Obama is and what he means to us. Barry shows us what he had to go through just to understand what he means to himself. “I’m from a lot of places,” he tells a young kid over a game of horse, “but I live here now.”