Dr Strange, Alt-reality loses the plot

Benedict Cumberbatch is a fine actor but sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

Benedict Cumberbatch in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (M)
In cinemas
★★½

Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), the genius neurosurgeon turned magic-wielding superhero, dies in the opening minutes of the latest Marvel movie, Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. I think I can reveal that without a spoiler alert as he remains the star of the movie for another two hours or so.

This is the blessing and curse of the comic book universes from Marvel and DC. It means characters we love, or loathe, are able to return for film after film.

It also means their deaths are less important, less permanent than once was the case.

Iron Man and Black Widow died in Avengers: Endgame (2019). Captain America may well be dead too.

Does this mean we will never see them in another movie? I would not bet my life on it.

The Marvel multiverse is best described as a collection of different universes, a set of different realities.

One of the new characters in this film, a young woman named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), tells Dr Strange she has been to 73 of them. She, unlike other superheroes and supervillains, is able to travel between universes.

Different versions of ourselves live in different universes. America Chavez also tells Dr Strange he is the worst of the three Dr Stranges she has met.

The madness, to borrow from the title, of this multiverse can be used comically, as with the scenes between the three webbed wonders, Andrew Garfield, Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland, in the excellent Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021).

This time, however, it doesn’t work.

Will Dr Strange meet his other selves? Fair bet he will, which means Benedict Cumberbatch acts with Benedict Cumberbatch. As fine an actor as he is, it might leave some viewers feeling a little short-changed. How many Benedicts are too many? For this viewer it’s when one of them has, minor spoiler alert, a third eye in his forehead.

This movie is directed by Sam Raimi and there is a nice joke towards the end that nods to his creation of the Evil Dead horror franchise. It’s written by Michael Waldron, who has Marvel on his CV via the TV series Loki.

The plot is thin and the jokes even thinner. The acting is nothing special.

America Chavez’s multiverse hopping is a power that one-time Avenger Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), now the powerful Scarlet Witch, wants so she can move into an alternate universe and mother the two children she lost in her own.

“I am not a monster. I am a mother,’’ she explains. When it’s pointed out to her that the two boys are not hers and have a mother (i.e. the version of herself in that universe), she does not deny that that mum will have to move on.

This moment goes to the philosophical point (I think) that we can draw from the multiverse. It’s about our solipsism, our me-first attitude in whatever universe we are in. When it comes down to it, how much do we care about the people across the road, over the border, in the next galaxy?

Dr Strange, with the help of American Chavez, must stop the Scarlet Witch. He also tries to make good, in various universes, with the woman he loves, Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams).

The best scene is when Dr Strange is interrogated by a group of superheroes we know, but whose genders are bent for this movie. An unbent Patrick Stewart, aka Professor X, has a cameo.

Other than that it all unfolds in a predictable fashion and the final 10 minutes are so mawkish and trite that I almost needed a paper bag.

After seeing this movie, my teen son and I debated whether it was better or worse than Morbius, the recent Marvel film starring Jared Leto as the living vampire. We disagree on that (I think it’s worse) but we agree that neither is a good film.

I suspect one reason for this is the number of Marvel films being made. There were five in 2021. Looks like there will be four this year, with Thor: Love and Thunder, starring Chris Hemsworth, next up.

Some, like Spider-Man: No Way Home, are good (four stars from this critic), but others, like Morbius and Dr Strange’s Multiverse, feel like placemats on the table awaiting a proper meal to be served.

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This Much I Know To Be True (M)
In cinemas for a limited time from May 10
★★★★

What do you get when you put three geniuses in the same room? No, pub trivia experts, the ­answer is not a takeover of Twitter. What you get is an extraordinary film that reflects on the ­salvation of art and the transformative power of grief.

This Much I Know To Be True documents the making of two albums by the Australian musicians Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Ghosteen and Carnage.

Though “documents” is perhaps too prescriptive a word. It’s more that we are allowed into the stark, spacious rooms in London, and in Cave’s home town of Brighton, to be with them as the records are made.

The director is Andrew Dominik and This Much I Know To Be True is a companion to One More Time With Feeling (2016), which focused on another album, Skeleton Key.

All three albums were made after the accidental death of Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015. He fell from a clifftop in Brighton.

Together, they mark a profound and ongoing evolution in the now 64-year-old singer-songwriter-novelist who started his life in wild bands such as The Birthday Party.

Unlike a concert, we see the musicians up close. There is pain on Cave’s face, in his eyes, as he sings the songs. Some of them I still find hard to listen to, such as Waiting For You from ­Ghosteen, which opens with a couple driving to the beach: “Your soul is my anchor, never asked to be freed / Well sleep now, sleep now, take as long as you need.”

There’s an almost casual, friends-in-a-room approach to the filming. Dominik asks the questions and wanders into shot now and then. “All I can hear is Andrew screaming. That’s the title of the film,’’ Cave muses at one point.

There’s a wonderful moment where the director asks the musician to redo one of the songs, Balcony Man from Carnage. The perfectionist yields. Ellis walks over and sits beside him at the piano. They do the song. This, and other intimacies, are captured with quiet power by Oscar-nominated Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who filmed Cave solo at the piano at London’s Alexandra Palace in the remarkable Idiot Prayer (2020).

I said three geniuses. It’s only my opinion but I think Cave and his long-time collaborator Ellis deserve that description. And the director has made only a handful of films because he refuses to bend his art to the financial will of others.

His 2000 debut, Chopper, starring Eric Bana, is a near masterpiece. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) is a masterpiece, and is only the un-studio length it is, 160 minutes, because star Brad Pitt stood up for the director.

His neo-noir crime movie Killing Them Softly (2012), also starring Pitt, is good. His next film, due later this year, is Blonde, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates and starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe.

While I love all of the Cave-Ellis songs – we see a dozen being made in this 105-minute documentary – it’s the off-the-instrument moments that plumb the emotional register.

There are funny interludes, such as a guest ­appearance by Marianne Faithful, and Cave speaking about how he and Ellis work together.

“A whole lot of terrible shit happens when me and Warren get into a room … but there are ­moments … where it clicks into something ­transcendent … and I am amazed by it.”

And the highlight, for this viewer, is Cave reading and responding to the emails he receives from fans via his Red Hand Files (theredhandfiles.com), where he tells them they can ask him anything.

When “Trev from Ireland” asks him to put aside the music, the words, the suits, the tenderness, the shame, guilt, grief and joy and just say who he is, Cave ponders for a bit and replies that he no longer thinks of himself as a musician and writer.

“I see myself as a person, a husband, a father, a friend, a citizen who makes music and writes, rather than the other way around.”

In a response to another fan he says he feels “like I am moving to something where the world is a meaningful place and people are meaningful beings”.

The final line of Balcony Man is “And what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier”. Here art does not reflect the singer-songwriter’s life. Sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you more vulnerable, more unguarded, more human, and it’s that combination that makes this a beautiful film.

Australian musician Nick Cave performing in London in March 2021, in a still shot from the Andrew Dominik film This Much I Know To Be True, released in 2022. Picture: Supplied / Bad Seed Ltd