Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

This week I’m looking at three American movies about individuals dealing with oppressive forces. There’s a man in the 1970s fighting the K.K.K.; a girl in the ’90s fighting to remain gay, gay, gay; and a woman trapped in small-town New York fighting the urge to stay, stay, stay.

Puzzle

Dir: Marc Turtletaub

Agnes (Kelly Macdonald) is a committed wife and mother in a sleepy, workingclass town in New York. She wears frumpy clothes and has an unobtrusive manner What With home, family and church she’s always busy, but no one seems to appreciate her – herself included. She cooks, cleans, does the accounting – she’s a whiz at math — and takes care of everybody else. Her husband Louis (David Denman) and son Ziggy (Bubba Weiler) work at Louis garage. Her other son Gabe (Aaron Austin) is the golden boy, headed for University. Louis says he loves her, but does he ever include her in important decisions? Not a chance. it’s like she isn’t even there. Until a birthday present from her aunt changes everything. It’s a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, and she puts it together almost automatically. Something in her brain is awakened and she wants more. She takes the train into NY City to find more puzzles and in a serious of coincidences, ends up meeting Robert (Irrfan Khan: Lunchbox, Slumdog Millionaire)

A millionaire inventor and dilettante, Robert lounges around his townhouse in silk robes. He is as impressed by her naïveté as he is by her genius at puzzles. And she’s overwhelmed by everything about him. He invites her to be his partner at a two-player puzzle competition. If they win, they’ll fly off to Brussels for the Iinternational Championships.

Soon Agnes is splitting her life between her home and Robert’s glamourous mansion. And she keeps it all a secret from her family and friends. Are her clandestine meetings just a temporary diversion? Or do they signal a change in her life?

Puzzle is a fun, feel-good movie about the awakening of a middle aged woman. Scottish actress KellyMcDonald is perfect as Agnes and actor Irrfan Khan is great as the diffident Robert.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Dir: Desiree Akhavan

It’s the1990s. Cameron (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a teenaged girl raised by evangelical grandparents. (Her own parents died in a car accident.) Cam is smart, popular, and has a steady boyfriend. But her whole life falls apart on prom night when she’s caught having sex in the back seat of the car – not with her boyfriend, but with a girl she likes.

Next thing you know she’s being shipped off to a camp in the woods called God’s Promise. It’s run by Reverend Rick – he looks and acts like Ned Flanders – who plays the guitar and is always upbeat. And behind the scenes, the boss of it all, is his sister, Doctor Lydia Marsh in her shoulder-pad Atlas Shrugged power blouses. Pretty soon, Cam figures out why she’s there: to be “cured” of her same sex attraction. Because – they say — there’s no such thing as homosexuality, just sinning. The gay conversion therapy goes like this: Each kid is given a cartoon drawing of an iceberg. The students had to fill in all their sins – and the underlying trauma that gave them their “disorder”– before they can be free of their gayness.

In practce this means they’e subject to tough love: watched 24/7, woken up in the middle of the night by guards with flashlights – to make sure they’re not being “sinful” (doesn’t work) – and forced to go to group therapy sessions to bare their souls – only to be humiliated by the other members.

Luckily, Cam discovers two rebels she can hang with: Jane (Sasha Lane), a cynical girl with dreads who loves polaroid cameras; and 2-spirited Adam whose politician dad sent him there (Forrest Goodluck – he played Saul in Indian Horse). Can Cameron resist the brainwashing? Can she leave this place? And will she ever see her girlfriend again?

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is an eye-opening look at a repellent practice that’s now banned in most of Canada. And while this role was hardly a stretch, I’ll see anything with Chloë Grace Moretz in it. On the other hand some of the period dialogue feels anachronistic, and the story, though realistic, is tamer than I might have liked.

Still, it’s a good indie pic.

BlacKkKlansman

Dir: Spike Lee

It’s the early 1970s and Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) is the first – and only – black policeman in Colorado Springs. Hi first job as an undercover detective? To infiltrate black activists at a speech by civil rights leader Kwame Ture (whom the white cops still call Stokely Carmichael.) There Ron meets Patrice (Laura Harrier) the leader of a student group that invited Ture to speak. They begin to date, without Ron ever admitting he’s a plainclothes cop.

But things take a big turn when Ron discovers the notorious white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan has a branch in this city. Ron calls them up – using s real name, and lets loose with a racist tirade, including frequent use of the N word. So the KKK – composed of powerful locals and sketchy rednecks — invite him to come by their shack in the woods. problem is… he’s black (they don’t know that) and the KKK was founded to terrorize African Americans. What to do?

He gets Flip (Adam Driver), a white cop from his team — to play him in front of the KKK. It just happens that Flip is Jewish, and the Klan – headed by notorious racist David Duke – doesn’t like them much, either.

But soon, they are deeply involved in an undercover operation to stop the Klan. Can the two of them fool the KKK at its own game, and possibly uncover domestic terrorist cels? And will Ron come clean with Patrice?

Blackkklansman is Spike Lee’s latest and his best in a longtime. It’s very entertaining, funny, exciting, even a bit of a thriller. And it’s full of film references, chronicling Holywood’s anti-black attitudes, from Birth of a Nation to Gone with the Wind to blaxploitation. The photography is sumptuous, including a montage of faces during Ture’s “Black is Beautiful” speech. This is a great movie.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post, BlackKklansman, and Puzzle all open today in Toronto; check your local listings.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.