I knew, going in, that Pearl was nothing like X in terms of style and execution. But I was expecting that and consider myself to be open-minded to change and the like. The forthcoming MaXXXine likewise looks like a very different sort of movie. If director Ti West and lead actress Mia Goth want to see what they can do with different cinematic styles, I’m all for that. That Pearl was filmed about the same time and in the same location as X says a lot about the creativity involved at least in making both movies, and Goth even got a co-writing credit for Pearl, so I was expecting and welcoming a different sort of movie.
I was not expecting some pandemic commentary with masking as the movie is set firmly in the middle of the Spanish Flu pandemic and was filmed in the middle of the early stages of the COVID pandemic, but here we are.
It’s 1918, and Pearl (Goth) is on the same farm as she was in X. Her dreams are to go to Hollywood and become a star. Her husband Howard is off fighting in the Great War, and she’s living with her parents on their farm. Her father (Matthew Sunderland) is locked within his own body and needs constant care while her mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) is a joyless scold, conscious of the family’s financial problems and uninterested in her daughter’s dreams of fame and fortune. Pearl tries to find ways to still expose herself to her passions, sneaking off to the movie theater when she can while striking up a relationship with the bohemian-minded projectionist (David Corenswet), a man who seems inclined to encourage her dreams if for no other reason than to maybe get himself a little something on the side while Howard is away.
Pearl, however, has a darker side. Sure, she may have named the farm animals after silent film stars, but when a goose wanders into her barn, she’s pretty quick to kill it and feed to an alligator that she has named for actress Theda Bara. Pearl isn’t well, and her dreams of fame and the various barriers getting in her way aren’t helping much. There is an audition for a small traveling church dance troop that Pearl sees as her ticket to finally get off the farm she has come to hate, and that becomes her sole obsession. X viewers know Pearl will still be on that farm in 1979, 61 years later, so it’s less a question of whether or not Pearl gets off the farm as much as it is about how many people are going to die when she doesn’t.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: stylistically, this is as far from X as Ti West could get. X is basically an exploitation/slasher style of horror with a lot of strong characterization, something that genre rarely achieved. Pearl is a psychological character study of someone who isn’t well, a woman with a desperate smile on her face when she wants something to go well but knows on some level that it isn’t. In terms of looks, the movie looks like an old school, full-Technicolor musical. The best way to understand what’s going on here might be to say it would be like halfway through The Wizard of Oz decided to instead make Taxi Driver on the same sets and with the same tone and acting style.
The result is not a subtle movie, but Pearl is not a subtle character. The mostly bright coloring always seems to dim whenever Pearl’s mother enters a room, and the effects appear practical and don’t look like anything that couldn’t have been achieved in the 1930s or 40s. The closest the movie gets to what might amount to obvious nuance is when Pearl and her mother have a climactic argument where Pearl’s mother likewise expresses a similar level of disappointment in her own life and how it turned out, suggesting either that Ruth is simply passing her own disappointment off onto her own daughter or that Ruth just deals with life better than Pearl does. But as a character study, the real horror is Pearl, an unstable character from the first frame she appears in, up until the closing credits playing over Goth as she smiles desperately, one last time, to get acceptance for something she has done. I think, as a result, I liked this one a little more than X. I think I am ready for MaXXXine now.
Grade: A-
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