Grade: B
This has been the season for actors appearing in two recent high-profile movies. Michelle Williams is in All the Money in the World and The Greatest Showman. Lucas Hedges appears in both Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Ditto for Tracy Letts, who is in Lady Bird and The Post – and I’ll go ahead and throw in Bradley Whitford for Get Out and The Post. And now we have Timothee Chalamet, who was awesome in Lady Bird, and is even better in Call Me By Your Name. He plays Elio Perlman, a 17-year-old living in Northern Italy circa 1983. Part of his character reminds me of myself in that it seems like the most comfortable and best he is at expressing himself and “sharing his heart” is when he plays a musical instrument. Elio loves to play classical pieces on piano and sometimes even fingerpicks them on guitar. The film begins with the arrival of Oliver, played by Armie Hammer. Go ahead and mentally make a baking soda joke. I certainly did the first time I saw the name of this gifted actor from Hacksaw Ridge.
Oliver is an attractive, sexually ambiguous 24-year-old who arrives at the Perlmans’ villa as the annual summer intern, there to help out and serve as a research assistant for Mr. Perlman, a professor who specializes in Greco-Roman culture. Michael Stuhbarg is captivating as the dad. Soft-spoken and sporting a Robin Williams Good Will Hunting beard, he has a speech close to the end which is gorgeous and perfect in its simplicity and wisdom. Throughout their summer together, Oliver and Elio form a close friendship. Will it potentially be more than a friendship? Do they want that with each other? The movie finally gets around to following through with that, after a first hour which takes its sweet time with exposition, followed by a frustrating amount of being vague, playing games, dancing around the subject, and saying a whole lot without actually saying or accomplishing anything. James Ivory’s screenplay, based on the novel by Andre Aciman, certainly makes us lean in and hang on every word, wondering if, at last, they’ll go there. Armie Hammer has a voice that was born to speak Shakespeare, if he hasn’t already. And believe it or not, every sound effect is lovely. This is a beautiful movie to listen to.
Call Me By Your Name could have been a truly special movie if its first half had as much power, resonance, and forward momentum as the brilliant second half. I think you could walk in to the theater an hour into it, whisper to somebody “hey, I just got here – what’s happened so far?” – and after about a 10-second recap, you’d be caught up.
Grade: B
Film Reviews by Mark 
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