Luce (2019)

Film: Luce (2019)
Stars: Naomi Watts, Octavia Spencer, Kelvin Harrison, Jr., Tim Roth
Director: Julius Onah
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Is anyone else struggling with finding the quality films of 2019?  I have been trying (largely in vain) in the past few days to get to a couple more 2019 movies, particularly arthouse films that are under-the-radar in hopes of getting some stronger year-end honors, especially in acting categories.  Considering the trailers were eerie, and that Octavia Spencer is one of my favorite actors working right now, Luce felt about as good of a reason to go to the movies as I had thought, but about two-thirds of the way into the movie, I realized that I was watching a movie that I didn't really know how it was going to end...and not in a good way.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Luce (Harrison), an all-star athlete who is supposed to be 17 but could only pass for such on Dawson's Creek (Harrison is a handsome man, but is 25 in real life and that's about how old he looks in this movie).  He seems to have the perfect life-wealthy parents, a great track career, exemplary grades...the kind of kid you want to root for, and the fact that he grew up in a war zone and overcame such obstacles makes everyone in his world, particularly the white authority figures at school go out-of-their-way to encourage him.  The only person who doesn't seem to celebrate Luce is his teacher Harriet Wilson (Spencer), a single woman who teaches him history and is disturbed by Luce writing a paper where he has to take on the characteristics of an historic figure, and he chooses one who advocates violence.  Harriet brings this to Luce's mother Amy (Watts), who at first thinks that Harriet is over-reacting, but then starts to reconsider as she begins to navigate the son she might not know as well as she thought.

The film deals with a lot of major issues, and this is arguably what attracted such impressive talent (Spencer, Roth, & Watts are all Oscar nominees, after all) to the picture, but it's also the film's downfall.  The movie tries to function under-the-guise of a thriller, but in doing so it makes the depictions onscreen problematic, and frequently going into the intensely offensive.  The movie has subplots that include having a black woman, playing someone struggling with mental illness, storm nude into a school (she's the sister of Spencer's Harriet) as a way of trying to bring down Harriet, and it's largely implied that Luce is helping to instigate this humiliation...yet the nudity and humiliation feed little plot purpose.  Later in the film, we see a young woman who may well have been sexually-assaulted (the film isn't clear here), but also lies about her assault as a way to discredit Harriet, all while trying to help Luce gain points on her.

As a result, we are left with a film that heavily implies that a woman will lie about her own assault just to take down another woman to help her boyfriend, and that a couple of white parents will destroy the life of an innocent woman of color while also letting another woman of color bear the burden for a sexual assault that, if it happened, almost certainly involved their son.  And we're not really supposed to care too much about either of those two actions if we also buy the movie's final moments.  The film tries to have it both ways, making us challenge our assumptions about what we think about Luce, but also making him almost certainly do things that we would universally consider to be bad (without punishment).  The film ends with Luce running, potentially feeling either relief or joy for having removed Harriet from his life and letting unspoken realities of his home life (where his father, at the very least, didn't really want him) surface, but I just left thinking this was a spaghetti-against-the-wall strategy-where you throw in enough social issues that the audience gets confused into thinking they're watching an important issue film when in reality they're just watching squandered talent pitch a movie whose script makes little sense.  Spencer & Harrison are both good in their roles (Spencer gets a part that's very atypical to what she's usually thrown, and aces it), but it's hard to recommend either of them when a movie is such a giant, borderline-offensive mess.