Because Jessica Chastain

THE HOUSE is empty. Pam’s off on the annual girls’ trip to the great magnetic rock. The roster on that annual escapade is ever changing. This year it’s Pam, our three girls, two of their aunts from Arizona, a cousin from Maine, a couple of friends from California in for five or six days of Manhattan restaurants, wine, shopping, wine, museums, wine, Broadway…

This year they saw The Tina Turner Musical.

The trip was on hiatus last year, obviously. The city was shut down. It’s been reopened now for the fully vaccinated.

Left here to my own devices, I’ve done all right. Pam can come home at a time of her choosing and find no truck parts in the oven, no motorcycle parts in the dishwasher, no unauthorized female companionship.

With nothing going on, I mean really nothing, I caught a movie the other night, Ava, which is so awful I urge you to see it. Jessica Chastain plays a contract killer. How did A-list actors like Chastain get attached to this turkey? There has to be a story there.

My take on Ava: It’s not a movie. It’s a comic book.

So many action movies are. Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, most of the movies you know them for are comic books. Generally bad comic books.

Their movies may not be inspired by a comic franchise, no superpowers, no costumes, no CGI, but it’s that kind of writing, comic book writing, the creation of worlds that invite the viewer to embrace the preposterous.

Good comics writing presents the preposterous in a way that delights the reader. If the story is simply preposterous and that’s the end of it, if it doesn’t make a narrative space on its own terms, doesn’t delightfully separate itself from the world as it actually is, then the writer has failed.

Ava fails in so many ways. I’m reluctant to hang it all on the writer. Not without seeing his script. Dozens of people get to put their fingerprints on the story.

Often, the writer is far removed, even banned from the set. I suspect this one probably was.

There are quite a few press accounts that paint him as a troubled personality, one that keeps turning up in court with a psychiatrist at his side to plead for leniency. Your honor, my patient beats up his girlfriends and assaults hotel clerks because the poor fellow’s an addict and bipolar and he’s very very sorry and will never do it again until next time.

Whoever made Ava what it is didn’t know it was a comic book. Not knowing that blinded them to the fact that their antihero is a psychopath and a sadist.

And that’s perfectly fine, that story can work, but you’ve got to get into it. They don’t. They think she’s a misfit who’s had a few bad breaks and somehow drifted into a line of work where she cuts people’s throats and blows their brains out. Other than that she’s all right.

Just in case you were going to miss that they think Ava’s a misfit, here she is wearing a tee for the punk band The Misfits.

Ava’s dead father was a louse and the first person she ever considered murdering. Indeed, she ran off and joined the Army to escape the daily temptation to murder him. Ava’s mother (Geena Davis) was and is of no help to Ava. She’s catty, psychologically fragile, a layer-on of guilt trips.

If that backstory made any sense whatsoever on the real-world side of a failed comic-book space, a contract killer’s time would be worth maybe three bucks an hour. Half the people on your street would be contract killers.

Then there’s the comic-book action.

Ava fights men toe-to-toe. Every other blow they land would end all conflict with a male foe. Somehow, five-foot-nothing Ava is unfazed when they land those blows on her.

Ava goes to Saudi Arabia to assassinate a German Army general, botches the job, then seamlessly kills 16 other guys while escaping the hotel.

When I say German Army general don’t picture a German Army general. He’s played as a socially awkward 13-year-old boy getting his first look at cleavage. A comic-book reader, in other words. How did that not tip somebody off?

The plot, well… Ava works for a murder-for-hire organization, naturally it has to want to murder her at some point. This may sound like a writer breaking in by aping those who have broken in, but, again, I haven’t seen the script, let’s have some charity in our hearts.

Without pointing fingers, the finished work is a bad comic-book movie cribbed from other comic-book movies, like, uh… Hey, what if Jason Bourne was a woman!? I hope someone piped up and said, You mean like La Femme Nikita?

Ava is so derivative it ends up being about everything except its central character. It doesn’t begin to explore the psychopathy and sadism she exhibits right from the opening scene.

Instead, the story’s about commercial murder, money, alcoholism, drug addiction, abandonment, war, veterans’ woes, bad parenting, worse parenting, sibling rivalry, betrayal, codependency, interracial love, substitute father figures, blended-family tensions, religious hypocrisy, sex voyeurism, 12 steps of recovery, infidelity, obsessive-compulsive disorder, suicidal ideation, surprise pregnancy, a love triangle, illegal gambling…

This is supposed to add depth, but to pull that off the production would need to know the difference between a tour de force and a stewpot. The only other thing this pot needed was a badass mama san in a Catwoman suit.

No, wait, actually… here she is in my notes…

You know how comic books have secret spaces and secret passageways galore? The criminal underworld this woman runs, her lair, if you will, is accessed through a porta potty, I shit you not. So to speak.

To her credit, Chastain never phones it in. She delivers every preposterous scene they put in front of her.

Here’s Simon (Colin Farrell), the boss of the organization.

Ava’s immediate superior, Duke (John Malkovich) wouldn’t agree to close Ava, that is, kill Ava. So Simon closes Duke and stalks Ava with the same intention.

They shoot guns, fight over guns, trash the place, beat the hell out of each other.

Ava’s knee finally finds the ol’ bocce balls. That never fails to put a funny face on a point of contention.

Homicidal enemies collapse in a kind of afterglow… wow, what a fight that was. Psycho-sexual issues, anybody? Don’t be embarrassed, speak up!

Simon, I’m so glad to finally meet you…

Collapsed in a chair, Simon delivers a line so funny I almost fell out of mine: “I see why he (Duke) liked you so much, Ava. You’ve got moxie.”

She’s got what!?

Farrell deserves an Academy Award for delivering the line without a guffaw. I wish they had played it for me in the emergency room last week, I would have passed that kidney stone right then and there.

Now that they’ve taken the measure of each other, Ava and Simon have a kind of unspoken truce. Except psycho Ava has yet another gun hidden behind the refrigerator. She follows Simon, corners him under a highway overpass and dispatches him.

“On the count of five,” she says.

If you’re familiar with the cliche, you know that means she’ll pull the trigger after the count of 1. And so she does.

The movie ends with the late Simon’s daughter, also a professional killer, following Ava down the street to even the score. I find this alarming. Not because a killer is after Ava, I mean just the fact that they’re teasing a sequel.

Okay, that’s all I got. With Pam in New York I’ve been back on daycare for a few days. The little girl who happily pronounces herself 2 and a half will be waking up from her nap shortly.

Cutest thing she said to me this morning: “Tone, I’m not pensive anymore.”

Do marvel at the preposterous Ava some evening, if only because Jessica Chastain. You’ve been duly advised on its dearth of delight.

Tony DePaul, October 19, 2021, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA