Like most westerns, The Harder They Fall is boring. I’m not a fan of this genre due to its restrictiveness: as with the rom-com, the western’s conventions are so strict that they typically exclude significant innovation. The story of a western must play out in an extremely specific way: a good and a bad cowboy, one of whom is a newcomer of sorts, slowly build toward a showdown, and eventually the good cowboy shoots the bad cowboy dead. The end.
Having the cast be comprised of black actors is a good idea, but it ultimately doesn’t change things. We still have a swaggering villain, a climactic shootout, etc., and the pieces fall into place as they must. I should add that this movie is very long (also a hallmark of westerns), due, as usual, to the many, many threats the characters drawl at each other that don’t advance the plot in any way.
To his credit, director Jeymes Samuel seems to sense the staleness of his foundation, and he wants to jazz it up. But his efforts backfire. The story is about a certified badass outlaw (Nat Love) and his gang (RJ Cyler and Edi Gathegi), who are possibly even more badass than he is. Also, his love interest (Zazie Beetz) is without question more badass than the gang is, and they’re also helped by a sheriff (Delroy Lindo) who might be the most badass of all. Meanwhile, the man (Idris Elba) who murdered the protagonist’s parents is a legendary badass, and his badass partner in crime (Lakeith Stanfield) is the quickest draw around. And…his love interest (Regina King) is almost certainly more badass than any of them.
Do you see the problem here? Every character cannot be a badass. Badassery is a zero sum game: being a badass means that other people are not badasses. As Syndrome would say, when everyone is a badass, then no one is—it’s just the norm. Samuel has created a world in which being a mega-badass is the norm. He’s overstuffed his movie so that there are no particularly memorable moments, no focal points. What he winds up with is two plus hours of people comebacking and one-upping each other, such that who comes out on top doesn’t feel important.
Samuel has also made a number of intentionally anachronistic decisions: the hip hop score, the glamorized sets, the lack of proper accents. Again, I credit him for trying to mix it up. But the effect of these choices is to create a feeling that it’s all playacting, that it’s not to be taken seriously. It implies, actually, that accuracy of setting and of tone were never truly important components of the western: that only the characters and their motivations gave the genre its impact.
That’s an interesting theory, but it’s not right. The setting is indeed the central component of the western (hence its name) and the reason its aesthetics remain with us. We watch the classics—The Searchers, High Noon, Shane—to reacquaint ourselves with the Wild West and its idiosyncratic yet alluring set of values, but The Harder They Fall shrugs off the possibility of allowing us that glimpse of what used to be. It therefore doesn’t offer us anything from the past, only the present. And apparently, the present is full of badasses.
—Jim Andersen
For more reviews, see my thoughts on Netflix’s Mank.
One of the more welcome recent developments in the entertainment industry, in my opinion, is that video games have largely become more like movies. That’s due in part to improved console technology, which has allowed for more expansive and detailed world creation, but also in part to gamers maturing and developing appetites for more intricate narratives and characters. I’m no gamer myself, but the rise of cinematically influenced franchises like Fallout and Mass Effect seems like a good thing, a burgeoning venue for authentic artists to work relatively free from big dollar pressure.
What has been perhaps less expected is that at about the same time, some movies have endeavored to become more like video games—a trend that came to full fruition with the 2009 release of James Cameron’s Avatar. It’s maybe the most overpraised movie of the century thus far. (Slumdog Millionaire (2008) at least had the good sense to fall out favor eventually.)
Notice that I said overpraised, not overrated. That’s because critics and fans alike have been sober from the beginning about Avatar’s more obvious weaknesses, and because of those weaknesses, no one claims it as high art. Specifically, it’s agreed that film’s storytelling leaves much to be desired. It recycles an “invaders versus natives” plot line that’s been more interestingly fleshed out in, among others, Dances with Wolves (1990), FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), and even Pocahontas (1996).
For what it’s worth, my favorite of that bunch is FernGully, which has surprising candidness in celebrating the virtues of pacifism and environmental stewardship while also acknowledging their inevitable vulnerabilities in the face of hostile actors. By contrast, Avatar wants to have its cake and eat it too: the nature-spiritual religion of the Na’vi somehow turns out to be…scientifically correct? There’s a literal synaptic connection between the trees and the… Actually, let’s not get into it.
The point is that Avatar’s story sucks, and everyone knows it. I’d be remiss not to also mention the facepalm-worthy writing that pervades even non-story elements of the script. The humans, for example, seek to obtain…“unobtainium.” (Spoiler alert, they don’t.) The natives are called the “Na’vi,” in the same way that Dwight Schrute’s dentist’s name is Crentist. Why these lazy bits were allowed to stand throughout the production process is beyond me.
But as previously mentioned, failures like these were generally recognized by both critics and casual viewers and therefore need no expanded treatment here. The subject of my essay, instead, will be the effusive praise of the film as a monument of stunning visuals, praise that continues to this day.
Roger Ebert called Avatar a “technical breakthrough,” and David Denby of The New Yorker praised it as “the most beautiful film I’ve seen in years.” Pretty much anyone who has seen the film—and pretty much everyone has—will tell you that, although, sure, the plot is lame, the visuals of the movie’s invented world, Pandora, are unquestionably amazing.
But let’s examine closer.
If we’re going to talk about visuals, we need visual evidence. So take a look at some spoiler-free scenes from classics that, in my opinion, deserve their reputations as visual masterpieces. We’ll start with the desert trek from Lawrence of Arabia (1962):
Notice the perfect framing of the faraway shots, as well as the wonder captured in the shots nearer to the characters’ viewpoints. The camera always lingers a while, underlining the protagonist’s amazement with the surroundings, as well as giving us the opportunity to survey and absorb the vast beauty of this exotic, otherworldly location, which is totally real—no CGI.
Similarities abound between this sequence and the one from Lawrence. Both linger with their shots, confident in the beauty of what’s being presented. Both exemplify meticulous framing, leading to a succession of aesthetically balanced, painting-like images. They emphasize vast, empty space. They feature musical scores grand enough to suit their visuals. And while 2001, unlike Lawrence, is effects-driven, its effects are understated, deployed unobtrusively. This allows viewers to appreciate the aforementioned scale and framing in a similar manner to Lawrence.
Now, here’s a visually oriented scene from Avatar:
The first noticeable difference is that the camera is moving a lot more in this sequence than in those of the first two films. There isn’t a single shot where the camera isn’t twirling around or even shaking as though it’s being held by hand. In addition, the camera cuts far more quickly, lasting only a few seconds per shot. These differences create a more frenetic, disorienting experience: there’s limited chance to take in any rich visual detail compared with the first two films.
But if the surroundings are so historically brilliant, as the film’s proponents claim, why not allow the viewers to survey them at leisure? Because—and here I finally state my thesis—they’re not that brilliant.
It’s impressive that these visuals were created, yes. They surely required a lot of work from many talented people. But because they consist solely of CGI imagery—which necessarily falls short of the detail offered by reality, even in its best attempts to simulate it—they can’t stand up to the scrutiny of truly great cinematic visuals.
I think the first tip that there’s something lame about the world of Avatar is that real people aren’t used in any of the supposedly gorgeous shots. Instead, humanoid, uh, creatures, have replaced the actors, so that no one will notice any discrepancy between the appearance of real life and the appearance of Pandora. It’s difficult to say, exactly, how real the surroundings look when there’s no human being around to compare them to.
Thus, a simple mental exercise of imagining the human characters actually walking around Pandora can illuminate just how insufficient the CGI of Pandora is as a believably realistic world. Such a scene would be a visual mess, a clash between reality and kind of reality, with Pandora surely looking awkward and tacky next to real people with skin blemishes and full sets of facial muscles.
Cameron can only allow his CGI jungle to be invaded, late in the movie, by some outfitted troops. Their humanness is safely hidden from view by gear and weaponry. When Colonel Quaritch lands in Pandora, the only non-anonymous person to do so, he remains inside a machine in a strangely large clearing. This is by necessity: people and Pandora are oil and water. The Na’vi, with their smooth, plasticky blue skin (no wrinkles in sight), set a low bar for detail that Pandora can meet. Humans, not so much.
Perceived in this way, the film’s title is perhaps more appropriate than it might initially seem. I know that after my own first viewing back in 2009, I wondered why the film was named after the not quite narratively central device of having the characters exist in substitute bodies. (Especially when this title would certainly cause confusion with the popular television series of the same name.) But now I realize that the concept of the Avatar was likely the film’s first idea. It’s certainly its most important one: it’s the curtain behind which the wizard, Cameron, operates his magic show.
You might think it unfair of me, though, to compare Avatar, a summer blockbuster, with two titans of classic film, regularly ranked among the greatest of all time. I’d argue that the degree of praise heaped on Avatar’s visuals warranted that, but fine. Let’s compare Avatar instead to Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), an equivalently popular blockbuster. Watch:
For my money, these three minutes are more visually enjoyable than every scene in Avatar combined.
Awesome special effects are crucial to this sequence, but, as with 2001, they’re understated and draw as little attention as possible. The shot of Dr. Grant and Dr. Sadler looking up the neck of the dinosaur creates the feeling of enormous scale that Avatar, for all its precision, neglects to establish. The dinosaur’s one act—rising to its hind legs and crashing back down—is mild but breathtaking, and Spielberg has the patience to watch it play out, allowing his gentle monster to be a purely visual wonder.
This dinosaur’s purpose—beauty—is served in this one scene. Cameron, the weaker filmmaker, by contrast needs his beasts to be narratively consequential: they all return in the finale to kick some human butt, placing any potential visual grandeur in the backseat.
But the primary value of this Jurassic Park scene in the context of this essay is that it demonstrates the wonder that can be achieved in cinema by placing the impossible within the realistic. The sight of the herd at the pond (the end of the clip) is visually powerful because impossible creatures have been made to look believable, and have been placed in an actual, real landscape. They are a ridiculous creation, but because they appear on an actual grassy plain and are observed by actual men and women, we’re nevertheless forced to accept them as legitimate for two hours. That’s the power of special effects in film.
By contrast, on Avatar’s Pandora nothing is real—all is CGI. If Jurassic Park places the impossible within the realistic, Avatar places the impossible within the impossible. The juxtaposition of fiction and reality that makes the Jurassic Park sequence so goosebump-inducingly memorable is lost; there’s no compelled legitimacy for what we’re seeing. It’s Pixar on steroids. And just like a Pixar film, Avatar‘s visual pleasures are only the manufactured kind: technologically impressive, yes, and fun at times, but lacking the power to create authentic awe.
Now, it’s not Cameron’s fault that total CGI can’t compete with reality, but we need to be clear: it can’t. The floating mountains of Pandora, suspended with keyboard clicks and computer code, are nothing next to the majestic desert of Lawrence of Arabia or the picturesque outer space of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and also pale in comparison to the visuals of superior blockbusters like Jurassic Park.
Just watch the characters’ reactions. While Drs. Grant and Sadler are struck dumb with shock upon seeing the dinosaur, Jake Sully’s avatar bounces around Pandora like a kid on the monkey bars. This is merely cool for him. It’s merely cool for us, too.
There is a realm, though, more appropriate to Avatar’s accomplishments. A realm where placing the impossible within the impossible is indeed praiseworthy, where absurd worlds are computer-built (by necessity), and absurd characters are accordingly developed to populate them. I refer to the realm of gaming.
I’ve read online commenters remark that Avatar would make a great video game. But such a game would be redundant, because the movie, for all intents and purposes, is already a video game. It’s a journey through a scenic CGI landscape complete with passing, forgettable allies; surreal creatures; fierce, colorful battles; and an angry, generic final boss. But it’s less fun than other video games, because we don’t have any say in what’s going on. That leaves us with an entertainment of questionable value.
James Cameron has made some great movies. The Terminator (1984) has stood the test of time, and I’d call Aliens (1986) one of the best sequels ever made. Even Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Titanic (1997), although they demonstrate Cameron’s increasing emphasis on special effects at the expense of narrative authenticity, have some great moments. It’s a shame that he forgot, or never realized, that those moments were predicated on the raw things that truly impact moviegoers: relatable human stories, complicated human emotions, and, most basically of all, the humans themselves—without which any CGI achievements exist only for their own sake, and are therefore in danger of becoming groundless, farcical, and weak.
Mank will be an inscrutable entry into the Best Picture academy field this year. Directed by David Fincher in his first feature film since 2014, this quirky dramedy stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the smart-tongued screenwriter who pens the cinematic masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941).
To derive any enjoyment whatsoever from this movie, one has to be familiar with Citizen Kane, and even then, it’s not easy to keep up—either with the endlessly ironic Mank or with the screenplay’s many pivotal references to Hollywood history and lore.
Interpreting this chatty throwback is a doozy, but here goes. In summary, I view Mank is a kind of Marxist statement about the origins of art. The primary concern of the film seems to be Mank’s left-wing politics and the alienation they cause him in high up Hollywood circles. He irks studio executives with his irreverent disdain for their money-grubbing ways, and he pulls hard for liberal candidate Upton Sinclair, who ultimately loses the California governor’s race (thanks in part to Mank’s bosses)—all against a distant backdrop of rising fascism in Germany, which no one but Mank seems to be taking seriously.
It’s implied that Mank’s building animosity toward greedy bigwigs fuels his inspiration for Citizen Kane, the title character of which he bases on the curmudgeonly news tycoon William Randolph Hearst, greediest of them all. By extension, then, Mank the film argues that Citizen Kane is essentially a political reaction to a ruling elite increasingly detached from the reality of ordinary people at that time.
But is it just me, or this a pretty bad theory? For starters, Charles Foster Kane the character is actually written with great empathy, a far cry from the hard villain that Mank makes of Hearst. And the screenplay of Citizen Kane really just isn’t political in any way: it’s focused almost exclusively on the personal successes and failures of one man, with little attention paid to historical affairs. Fincher’s rendition of Herman Mankiewicz and the actual finished product of Citizen Kane just…don’t connect.
Nevertheless, when it’s all said and done, I have to admit the vision is interesting. I thought we had lost David Fincher the artist after big name adaptations like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gone Girl (2014) started dominating his feature film oeuvre, but surprisingly, he’s come back swinging. He may be our foremost visual presenter of bitterness: among his sour creations are William Somerset from Se7en (1995), The Narrator from Fight Club (1999), Paul Avery from Zodiac (2007), the entire cast of The Social Network (2010), Lizbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Amy Dunne from Gone Girl; now we can add Herman Mankiewicz. Where there’s dissatisfaction and disappointment, there’s Fincher.
I don’t think he’s ever produced a masterpiece, and I don’t think Mank is one, but the technical attention to detail and genuine artistic interest of his latest entry, however flawed, makes me hold out hope that one day, he still might.
As anyone might have predicted, there was a noticeable decline in overall quality this year. Some of the entrants are uneven streaming-only releases that likely wouldn’t have made it into the field in a normal Oscar season, and this year’s apparent favorite, Nomadland, would be in my opinion one of the worst winners in recent memory (and that’s saying something). Overall, I gave 4 of this year’s 8 nominees negative reviews, compared with only 3 of 9 last year.
Nevertheless, there were two films that I greatly enjoyed this year, which are #’s 1 and 2 on this list. I highly recommend both of these pictures, which prove that even in the worst of circumstances, we can still be treated to great cinema.
Without further ado:
Promising Young Woman
“It doesn’t bother fulfilling most of the responsibilities of cinematic storytelling, such as character arcs or crafted visuals; it struck me instead as a kind of ritual sacrifice to the #MeToo gods, a wild, disturbing attempt to cleanse the ugly demons haunting Hollywood.” (Full Review)
The Trial of the Chicago 7
“…the stench of pandering transcends politics, current events, and even movie craftsmanship. Sorkin, in trying to please somebody—the Twitter universe, perhaps—has made an inauthentic film, a lowlight in his successful career.” (Full Review)
Nomadland
“[This] movie thus devolves into, essentially, a collection of shallow images that we can easily get elsewhere or even stage ourselves. It’s been said that Nomadland is “lyrical” and “poetic;” if so, it’s surely Instagram poetry: its tagline might have been, #wanderlust.” (Full Review)
Sound of Metal
“Poorly paced and freewheeling as it is, this script is just too messy, and it should be said that some technical aspects of this movie are messy as well.” (Full Review)
Mank
“I don’t think [Fincher has] ever produced a masterpiece, and I don’t think Mank is one, but the technical attention to detail and genuine artistic interest of his latest entry, however flawed, makes me hold out hope that one day, he still might.” (Full Review)
Judas and the Black Messiah
“What is the artistic value of a film that denies us hope for its hero? In my own opinion, the value is considerable. It makes for a bleak watch, but there’s honesty in bleakness.” (Full Review)
Minari
“Insistently small in scope, opaque in narrative trajectory, and complex in its treatment of characters who surprise (and disappoint) to the very end, Minari is a truth teller’s rendition of the immigrant tale, a quirky family saga that makes a worthy bid for inclusion in our canon of cinematic Americana.” (Full Review)
The Father
“This has been a year of small movies rather than grand, sweeping visions: fitting, since we lived 2020 in such little worlds. Fitting also, then, that The Father, smallest of them all, is also the best.” (Full Review)
I seem to forget every year that the amount of hype a film receives during award season is no real indicator of its actual impressiveness. The Father, directed by Florian Zeller and starring Anthony Hopkins, has had barely any fanfare as the Oscars have approached, so when I finally readied to see it, I expected, based on the lukewarm buzz around it (and the boring title), a conventional, slow paced drama. Instead, I was treated to my favorite film of the year.
The Father unmistakably dwarfs most of its more celebrated nominees in inventiveness, honesty, and even empathy, demonstrating superior craftsmanship and an incredibly moving acting performance.
The world of The Father is a crumbling world, owing to the failing mind of its perceiver. The key to understanding the movie’s structure is realizing that Zeller, instead of simply presenting a series of random, jumbled experiences and proclaiming it the experience of dementia, has instead placed the onscreen episodes into a highly tenuous narrative, which, as becomes evident throughout the movie, is the narrative that the protagonist, Anthony, has laboriously constructed in an effort to make some sense of what is happening to him.
Unfortunately, all Anthony has available to him to construct this narrative are unreliable fragments of memory, so the best he can do is scramble them into a weak thread of mysterious persecution by unclear parties, and even this can’t fully account for the many discrepancies that continue to frustrate him throughout the film. The retrospective nature of what we have been watching becomes clear when we realize that nurses in Anthony’s new nursing home have been infiltrating scenes that took place well before he met them: his present has bled into his past, and he can’t separate the two.
It’s an ingenious setup, and I’m already looking forward to when I can see this movie again, so that I can try to trace the (faulty) connections between the scenes that Anthony uses to place them in (incorrect) order. I don’t think this will be an impossible task, because Zeller has mercifully provided us with one reliable overseer of events: Anthony’s alarmed daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman). A few scenes take place from her point of view, and these are verifiably true, although they also appear in the jumbled order decreed by Anthony’s nonsense narrative, such that we see Anne buying a chicken at the store long after we’ve seen other episodes during which we know that the chicken has already been brought home. The trick, then, will be to use what we know for sure, from Anne, to discern what, in Antony’s struggling mind, is false.
I don’t know how valuable any praise of Anthony Hopkins’ performance is, since it speaks so obviously well for itself. But safe to say, it’s extraordinary. More than extraordinary. Anyone who has had a family member or worked with an individual with dementia will recognize the out of place witticisms, the showy bluster, the matter-of-fact rambling, the sudden and uncharacteristic ferocity, the too-absurd tall tales, the startled, vacant stare.
By all accounts, the Best Actor Oscar this year will go, posthumously, to Chadwick Boseman. And indeed, Boseman has earned recognition. But let this rightful commemoration of Boseman’s achievements, both the ones we remember and the ones that were sure to come, not avert us from the other great performances turned in this year, especially this masterpiece from a fellow acting legend, one of the great talents in all of movie history.
This has been a year of small movies rather than grand, sweeping visions: fitting, since we lived 2020 in such little worlds. Fitting also, then, that The Father, smallest of them all, is also the best. The admittedly worthy argument against its candidacy for Best Picture is that this isn’t the time for it: that now is simply a moment in history for other films to shine. Judas and the Black Messiah, for example, explores with raw authenticity the conflict between police and political revolutionaries, so relevant to today’s current events. Nomadland follows, less skillfully in my opinion, the economically displaced of rural America, another story undeniably in need of telling.
These films have been described, with some truth, as “urgent.” But when, then, will be the urgent time to tell about the Anthonys of the world? More forgotten than anyone, no movements will be dedicated to them; no one will rally in their name. Zeller, though, knows that our engagement will be elsewhere: for his last shot, he pans to the trees outside the nursing home—the ones, unlike poor Anthony, with all their leaves, bright and bustling in the wind, going on amongst themselves with the business of being alive: business that Antony, who’ll have to content himself with a walk among them in the park later on, isn’t quite an important part of, anymore.
Judas and the Black Messiah, written and directed by Shaka King, took me a few days to mull over, because its storytelling methods are quite unorthodox. You’d be forgiven for leaving the theater unsatisfied after seeing this impressively original movie, because whereas we expect historical dramas to embellish their facts, King seems to have, if anything, pared down his content, keeping his characters oddly flat and minimizing our engagement with their assorted concerns.
Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) is the titular black messiah, an anti-capitalist revolutionary who never wavers in his mission. In a conventional film, he might be tempted at some point by material gain or the fear of punishment—but here, truly Jesuslike, he stays true: in a late scene, he even refuses money for his own escape and directs it to be used to start a medical facility. His counterpart, Bill O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), is the Judas of the tale, and he’s roped in early by the FBI and never escapes.
Where, we start to wonder, are the character arcs for these individuals? Without any real changes in their attitudes or situations, the narrative begins to seem…well, a bit boring.
But King isn’t interested in making a white-knuckle thriller, nor does he want a traditional two-character study. Instead, he presents us with an atypically stoic tragedy, a pained lament for a historical figure’s early death that drops all pretense of uncertainty. In the film’s opening, we’re introduced to its five-note main theme—Best Original Score, please!—and it’s a sad, almost funereal dirge, setting King’s tone for the remainder of the film. Judas and the Black Messiah is essentially a visualized death march for Fred Hampton, a mourning of his long-assured fate from a studied admirer. Nothing is so conveyed in this film as the utter inevitability of Hampton’s eventual death: the pieces are in place from the very beginning, and nothing can change.
I think my favorite moment of the movie is when an anonymous, unseen FBI agent shouts, after examining a sedated Hampton in his bed: “He’s actually gonna make it!” It’s heartbreaking to hear, because it reminds us of what, in our hearts, we already knew: that O’Neal’s cooperation wasn’t truly essential, that Hampton would have been killed regardless of the duplicity.
We have to ask ourselves, I suppose: what is the artistic value of a film that denies us hope for its hero? In my own opinion, the value is considerable. It makes for a bleak watch, but there’s honesty in bleakness. Had King relented a bit, we might have seen something closer to Aaron Sorkin’s far inferior The Trial of the Chicago 7 (review here), which addresses highly similar themes and, unlike Judas, does employ the traditional rules of drama—but finds itself too often in corny territory and ultimately sounds an out of place, Kumbaya-style final note.
Perhaps the survival of pregnant Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback) is the glimmer we want: Hampton may have been doomed, but maybe, if we work hard enough, his son won’t be. Musings like this are possible, even necessary, when a director insists on a certain vision. So while his characters may not be as dynamic as we’d like, King leaves us with no less to ponder for it.
Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter of some rightful cinematic classics like A Few Good Men (1992) and The Social Network (2010), as well as, more relevantly here, television shows like The West Wing (1999-2006) and The Newsroom (2012-14), has taken to the director’s chair to realize his script for the historical drama The Trial of the Chicago 7, now out on Netflix. The notorious knock on Sorkin, which he earned mostly via The West Wing, is his penchant for long-winded speechmaking and didacticism, especially as a means of promoting mainstream, diplomatic liberalism.
This new film is a transparent attempt to rewrite that reputation. Sorkin has researched a historical event highly relevant to today’s political climate, and, as usual, has written a central character—Tom Hayden, played by Eddie Redmayne—who espouses the virtues of pragmatism and restraint in order to most effectively achieve liberal victories. But this time, Sorkin wants to be hip. So he’s written Abbie Hoffman (Sasha Baron Cohen) as a witty frenemy for Hayden in order to represent the more progressive wing of liberal politics, and the two characters go at it with spirited debate about how to best conduct the fight for social justice.
Sorkin thinks he’s written an evenhanded philosophical dispute, but he’s Sorkin, so he hasn’t. In the movie’s thematic climax, when Hoffman questions Hayden’s liberal convictions, Hayden delivers this devastating, unanswerable excoriation:
Hayden: “My problem is that for the next fifty years, when people think of progressive politics, they’re gonna think of you. … They’re not gonna think of equality or justice; they’re not gonna think of education or poverty or progress. They’re gonna think of a bunch of stoned, lost, disrespectful, foul-mouthed, lawless losers, and so we’ll lose elections.”
How coincidental that Hayden’s fifty-year imagination extends forward to…right now! It’s almost as if this eerily prophetic speech was written, in fact, by a screenwriter fifty years in the future who stacked the deck for this particular character by endowing him with infallible foresight.
Hoffman protests, but he can’t erase the absolute demolition Hayden has just wreaked upon hippies and Bernie Bros everywhere. Not to fear, though, because Hoffman eventually does manage to suitably impress Hayden by revealing that he has read all of Hayden’s own writings. Hmm.
Sorkin also forays into racial tensions in America. He holds up well enough here, and there are some profound moments. They’re predicated, though, on the requirement, which, to be fair, is true to the historical record, that Bobby Searle (Yahya Abdul-Mateen) isn’t going to stick around for the whole movie. As in any old school horror, which I suppose this is in a way, the black guy goes first.
That leaves room for Hayden to steal the finale—patriotic music playing, evil judge raging—by proving once and for all that he’s one of the gang, one of the cool kids. That he’s on the right side of history.
It’s a bit of artistic anxiety: Sorkin in 2020 is worried that, with a body of work that features The West Wing, he might not be. And he could be right or wrong: I, unlike Sorkin’s characters, don’t have a screenwriter to feed me unfair prescience. Maybe pragmatic liberalism will stand the test of time. In fact, I hope it does.
But it doesn’t really matter here, because the stench of pandering transcends politics, current events, and even movie craftsmanship. Sorkin, in trying to please somebody—the Twitter universe, perhaps—has made an inauthentic film, a lowlight in his successful career. His impulse toward those pushy political radicals has always been exasperation, and that impulse is perfectly artistically valid. But it’s precisely because it is valid that it is impossible to hide, and if Sorkin keeps trying to bury it, the quality of his work will continue to suffer going forward.
Promising Young Woman, directed by Emerald Fennell, is punching well above its weight as a Best Picture nominee. It doesn’t bother fulfilling most of the responsibilities of cinematic storytelling, such as character arcs or crafted visuals; instead, it represents a kind of ritual sacrifice to the #MeToo gods, a wild, disturbing attempt to cleanse the ugly demons haunting Hollywood. By virtue of this film’s undeserved nomination, the academy appears to hope, maybe the legacy of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk will fade into distant memory? Maybe the constant drip of reported malfeasance by male stars and bigwigs will finally stop? Please?
There’s not much to discuss in the way of depth or nuance. The film’s trailer pretty much hits all the highlights, because above all, this movie wants to be quotable. The problem is that all of its quotes have already been said or written many times over: it’s a Frankenstein’s monster of feminist thinkpieces—especially the pieces that want to let you know that you, whoever you are, aren’t off the hook…so don’t get too comfortable!
In channeling them, the talented Carey Mulligan goes uncharacteristically over the top, packing so much swaggering snark that she can’t help but burst frequently into campiness. Since I’m a fan of Mulligan’s work, I choose to believe that it was director Fennell’s decision, not hers, to have the character, whenever she drops her drunk girl charade, pop open her eyes cartoonishly like Sandy Cheeks coming out of hibernation.
What Promising Young Woman does have is rage. If you loved the movie, you probably have a decent amount of it, too. This is the kind of film you wish that all the worst people would watch, so that they could recognize themselves and see how terrible they are (but they won’t watch it because they suck too much—argh!). Or perhaps your friends and family who aren’t quite feminist enough, who don’t quite get it: if only they watched this movie, and felt the proper shame!
Don’t get your hopes up. Possibly, just possibly, outrage is the one thing we have plenty of already, which is why this film doesn’t feel original in any way. What we always need more of, on the other hand, is intimate, truthful storytelling, but Promising Young Woman, with its swollen, pandering bravado, falls far short of providing that.
It’s notable that this film, for all its ostensible sympathy with the unheard plight of survivors, leaves its own victim off the screen entirely: we never see the pivotal video of Nina’s attack, nor the character’s subsequent decline. Fennell, then, has chosen to commemorate the invisibility of these women rather than use her powers to illuminate. Who will be the director brave enough to shine the light?
– Jim Andersen
For more reviews, see my positive review of Minari.
Minari, directed by Lee Isaac Chung, is a stubborn film, one that refuses to be what we expect it to be. What could be a more reliable mark of authentic artistry? Insistently small in scope, opaque in narrative trajectory, and complex in its treatment of characters who surprise (and disappoint) to the very end, Minari is a truth teller’s rendition of the immigrant tale, a quirky family saga that makes a worthy bid for inclusion in our canon of cinematic Americana.
In the film’s opening sequence, the Yi family arrives at their new home, an unremarkable trailer that feels poorly captured by the frame, as if Chung is intentionally depriving us of the full picture. This serves to introduce us to his directorial strategy: we will experience this story, like the children of the Yi family, without the full picture, wondering about things unseen and unsaid.
How big is the farm, really, and where is it located? How is it doing financially? Do Jacob (Stephen Yeun) and Monica (Han Ye-ri) still love each other? Is Grandma Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) up to something? Why does Jacob want this so badly? Bits and pieces filter down to us, through the walls, from around corners.
By extension, we learn about the characters progressively throughout the film, such that their actions even late in the story reveal major new facets of their personalities. When little David (Alan Kim) tricks Soon-ja into sipping pee, for example, she chases after him, enraged, and he flees accordingly. But when Stephen and Monica lay out his punishment—Chung isn’t afraid to show what discipline in this family inevitably looks like—Soon-ja backtracks and hilariously recants her complaint: “It was fun!”
We thus learn of her soft side just as David does, allowing us to experience his relief in real time. Jacob’s character, too, is constantly in flux: he initially seems the easygoing, down to earth dad, juxtaposed with his frustrated wife—but after an eccentric war vet visits for dinner, we realize that Jacob may in fact be the more prideful and inflexible of the pair. We, like children, must rely on these rare cracks in the facades to help us mold our impressions of the adults.
Chung knows to mostly avoid easy comic scenes in which his immigrant characters interact awkwardly with the community. These “fish out of water” scenarios, in my opinion, are a frequent misstep of immigrant movies, since they create the impression that the family is basically united, an alliance of common purpose facing an uncomprehending world. Whereas in reality, as Chung shows us, the important conflicts for an immigrant family—as with any family—are all within the family itself.
Minari doesn’t conclude with the family “making it;” if anything, the opposite occurs. And questions linger about family tensions that aren’t quite resolved. But Chung pushes us to identify a different type of happy ending, and sure enough, it’s there. His initial aim was to adapt Willa Cather’s great American novel, My Antonia, and this personal film indeed showcases him as an up-and-coming disciple of Cather’s: a fellow celebrant of self sufficiency, pioneering spirit, and the endless mysteries of the people we love.
-Jim Andersen
For more reviews, see my negative review of Nomadland.
Is this movie seriously going to win Best Picture? By all accounts, Nomadland, directed by Chloe Zhao and starring Frances McDormand, is the odds-on favorite, which is bewildering, since it offers little in the way of artistic or entertainment value. Despite solid cinematography and acting, Nomadland’s thematic center is gooey and insincere. Its current critical acclaim, rest assured, will fade into disinterest with time.
Nomadland could only have appeared in the age of Instagram. The film’s imagery is reflective of the kind of superficial profundity that we ourselves have popularized on social media: a woman stands atop a cliff gazing at nature, a gathering of strangers sings around a campfire, big animals trudge across terrain. Zhao doesn’t have any insight as to why these scenes might be deep; she only knows that we’ve trained ourselves to think they are. Her movie thus devolves into, essentially, a collection of shallow images that we can easily get elsewhere or even stage ourselves. It’s been said that Nomadland is “lyrical” and “poetic;” if so, it’s surely Instagram poetry: its tagline might have been, #wanderlust.
And the sappy, social media flavor of this film pervades its narrative, too. The story follows Fern (McDormand), a forgotten victim of the Great Recession, whose hometown was shuttered when the plant closed down, and whose husband died long before that, leaving her totally adrift. It’s an intriguing backstory, but instead of seeing it fleshed out, we watch Fern serve primarily as a kind of sponge for others’ similarly sad stories, so that the movie can squeeze in as many of them as possible.
A nameless woman’s husband died of cirrhosis, for example. A man’s son committed suicide. And so on. These stories are heartfelt, but we only hear about them, never experiencing them for ourselves: the power of film is left untapped. In trying to herd so much untold sadness into one place, Zhao has made something closer to shareable CNN segments than a cohesive work of art.
The film’s high point comes early on, when a terminally ill companion of Fern’s delivers a monologue reflecting on her life and recounting a particularly touching moment of natural beauty. The delivery is great, and the descriptions are memorable—but even so, it still rings somewhat shallow. Pretty words are always nice, but without any insight or wisdom, they flutter away from us, groundless. Even the pinnacle of the movie, then, is more John Green than Shakespeare.
McDormand is one of our finest actresses, and here, as usual, she’s a bright spot. With her talents and the film’s serious, somber premise, Nomadland could have been so much more. It may do well at the Oscars, where sentimentality often rules the day, but it would still be an unusual entrant into the award season history books. After all, even the bland Green Book’s (2019) sentimentality was of the traditional, feel-good sort; Nomadland instead borrows the breathless, melancholy kind cultivated by my own generation of indie musicians and social media influencers.
I suppose they don’t call them influencers for nothing.
