“Wicker”
In “Wicker” it turns out a decent man requires a little basket weaving. At least, that’s the hook in this bawdy fairy tale, adapted by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer from Ursula Wills’ acclaimed short story “The Wicker Husband,” in which a woman’s pursuit of companionship sends a dour village into a tizzy. The premise is fanciful, but the sexual double standards, marital dissatisfaction and resentment of another person’s happiness are familiar enough.
Olivia Colman (“The Favourite,” “The Lost Daughter”) plays an unnamed fisherwoman who lives on the outskirts of a seaside village and occupies a similarly marginal position in its social order. Ridiculed for her dowdy appearance and fishy smell, she commissions a local basket maker (Peter Dinklage) to fashion her a husband. What arrives is Alexander Skarsgård in woven form, somberly polite, virile and more than dutiful in attention—got a leaky roof or a squeaky bed, he’ll have it fixed in a jiffy. Just don’t ask him to do anything with fire. His existence becomes an affront to the community’s understanding of how marriage, and women, should work.
“Wicker” falls somewhere between “The Princess Bride” (1987) and “Caligula” (1979), with its mystical underpinnings — Dinklage’s conjurer feels more amiably puckish Rumpelstiltskin than maniacal Frankenstein — medieval-
adjacent setting and frothy talk of shagging and making babies. You could think of it as King Richard’s Faire dialed up to 11 on the naughty scale.
The perceived marital bliss of Colman’s fisherwoman overthrows social norms, making it the bane of those atop the social hierarchy, especially Elizabeth Debicki’s judging matron, a Karen OG constantly relegating others to places below her station.
Colman anchors the story’s emotional center with assurance, while Skarsgård’s casting supplies a layer of absurdity, putting the hulking berserker from “The Northman” inside an unfamiliar body, with Debicki (“Tenet,” “The Crown”) as the face of the village’s traditionalist status quo.
As lithe and sprite as “Wicker” is, the osiers of its are novel concept are stretched thin by as the plot gets deeper into the woods. The organic nature of a woman’s quest for companionship and respect becomes subsumed and the cheeky, burlesque-leaning humor fades. Still, its apt, able ensemble renders it a merry mug of cinematic mead. — Tom Meek
Playing at Kendall Square Cinema and AMC Assembly Row 12.
“Wildwood”
The latest from Laika, the stop-motion animation studio behind “Coraline” (2009) and “ParaNorman” (2012), sends a Portland teenager into an enchanted forest on a rescue mission that quickly entangles her in a power struggle. Adapted from the 2011 novel written by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy and illustrated by Carson Ellis, veteran animator Travis Knight (“Kubo and the Two Strings”) gives it a lush visual rendering that’s impressively detailed, especially when you consider it’s all done via stop-motion animation with palm-sized puppets.
Our imperiled heroine is Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a snarky teen whose infant brother, Mac, is snatched by a murder of crows and carried off into the “Impassable Wilderness” across a railway bridge at the far end of the city. (The crows’ creepy descent onto the playground where Prue and Mac is a neat homage to Hitchcock’s 1963 classic “The Birds.”) Prue had promised her parents she wouldn’t take Mac out of the house while they were out, so she knows she’s in big trouble and gives harried chase on bike, accompanied by her awkward but loyal classmate Curtis Mehlberg (Jacob Tremblay, “Unabomber”).
What lies across that bridge is a concealed alternate universe, a civilization with talking animals, a magnetized clan of humans in bearskins and competing authorities. Finding Mac means navigating political divisions, dangerous allegiances and rising conflict worthy of “Alice in Wonderland.” What begins as one sister’s urgent search for her brother becomes a fight that will determine the future of the forest itself.
At the center of the darker machinations is Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), an exiled dowager governess whose grief over her dead son has drawn her to the dark arts. Opposing forces include Brendan the Bandit King (Mahershala Ali) and the woodland outlaws he leads. Prue’s encounters also bring her into the orbit of the General (Angela Bassett), a giant golden eagle, and Owl Rex (Richard E. Grant), an avian royal, both of whom dispense wisdom and riddles of prophecy. Others in the impressive cast include Awkwafina as the voice of Septima, a rat who becomes Curtis’s spirit animal, Tantoo Cardinal as Iphigenia, a mystic associated with the North Wood, Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine as Prue’s parents and Charlie Day and Tom Waits as part of the pack of militarized coyotes neatly equipped with muskets, bayonets and red coats under Alexandra’s command.
In the corners of the frame hang love and grief as well as parents holding on and holding back their charges. It’s a rich narrative, often epic in scale, that Knight and his animation team have meticulously assembled for our wonderment. There are scenes of violence and death that don’t usually make their way into most animated family fare, hence the PG-13 rating. — Tom Meek
Playing at Apple Cinemas Cambridge and AMC Assembly Row 12.
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