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Best Picture Rankings: 2021

Originally published March 2021

The annual rankings are here!

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:

 

  1. 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)

 

  1. 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)

 

  1. 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)

 

  1. 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)

 

  1. 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)

 

  1. 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)

 

  1. 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)

 

  1. 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)

 

 

–Jim Andersen

For more rankings, see my thoughts on last year’s nominees.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: The Father

Originally published February 2021

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.

 

—Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my praise for Judas and the Black Messiah.

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Movie Review: Judas and the Black Messiah

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.

 

— Jim Andersen

For a related review, see my more negative thoughts on The Trial of the Chicago 7.

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Movie Review: The Trial of the Chicago 7

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.

 

– Jim Andersen

For more negative reviews, see my piece on Promising Young Woman.

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Movie Review: Promising Young Woman

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.

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Movie Review: 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.

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Movie Review: Nomadland

Originally published December 2020

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.

 

– Jim Andersen

For more reviews, see my review of Sound of Metal.

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Movie Review: Sound of Metal

Originally published January 2021

Sound of Metal, directed by Darius Marder and starring Riz Ahmed, features original subject matter and some memorable acting, but it’s too sloppy for my taste. I see its appeal, as there are certainly some powerful moments in this film. Those tend to be the scenes including both Ahmed’s character, a heavy metal drummer who quickly loses his hearing, and his concerned girlfriend, played by Olivia Cooke.  But these moments arise too infrequently from behind a flawed script that tries to tell two stories, neither of which are completely fleshed out and neither of which connects especially strongly to the other.

Within minutes of Sound of Metal, Ruben Stone (Ahmed) is deaf.  But before the halfway point of the movie, he has already found purpose and tranquility among a shelter for deaf individuals, having learned sign language and having started teaching deaf children music and other joys. It feels a bit rushed. This could have been the full movie, but for some reason Marder doesn’t want it to be, and instead Stone leaves the shelter on his own and gets surgery for a cochlear implant, disregarding all of what it seemed that he had learned and essentially restarting the movie.

In fairness to Ruben, the primary philosophy of the shelter—that deafness isn’t a handicap—can’t really be applied to his case: it may not be a handicap in general, but to a professional drummer, it is. Shelter leader Joe (Paul Raci) accuses Stone of acting like an addict, but isn’t this a bit unfair? An addict to…his career as a musician? His livelihood?

Stone rejoins his girlfriend Lou (Cooke) in Paris, and an excellent scene ensues during which they mutually recognize that given their assorted issues—Lou has ongoing mental health struggles—returning to tour won’t be possible, even though they’ve already essentially saved one another’s lives with their earlier mutual support. But the completion of this interesting arc, which, again, could have comprised the entire film, is unfortunately drowned out by a different problem that comes to dominate this portion: Ruben doesn’t like his cochlear implant. And indeed, we get to hear what he hears, and it’s not pleasant. So he decides not to use it anymore.

This is meant to be a triumph: Ruben has finally come to heed the advice of Joe and others that deafness is no handicap at all. But this isn’t quite right, because the problem wasn’t the return of hearing per se; it was that Stone’s implant sounded terrible. Well, anyway, this opens the door for Stone to return to the shelter: will he reconcile with Joe? Maybe express feelings for noticeably attractive deaf teacher Diane (Lauren Ridloff), and start a new relationship?

Whoops, we’re out of time.

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. For example, Stone initially has to use a speech-to-type translator, and it somehow knows how to spell names like Lou, and to capitalize their first letters. In one scene, it even reflects sarcastic quotation marks when Joe expresses disdain. We must find this state-of-the-art AI being used in rural Missouri, and bring it back to the rest of the world!

Visually, these scenes don’t quite work either, with the back and forth camera angles creating high suspicion that Ahmed and Raci aren’t actually in the same room. They also clash with the primarily handheld camerawork that characterizes other scenes at the shelter. There just isn’t sufficient attention to detail throughout, and this is subject matter that demands extraordinary attention to detail.

On some level, I suppose Sound of Metal is supposed to be jarring and unorthodox, like heavy metal. But it feels like the work of multiple hands trying to develop various unrelated themes: the difficulty of coping with a new disability, the idea that deafness is in fact not a disability, the power of love to weather difficult times, the power of community to weather difficult times in the absence of a loved one (who could serve as a distraction), the constant battle of overcoming addiction, and last but not least, that cochlear implants don’t sound good. As any band would know, everyone has to be on the same page, and this movie never quite gels.

 

–Jim Andersen

For other movie reviews, see my review of Beckett.

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Movie Review: The Tinder Swindler

It’s time to review the latest Netflix sensation, as I do every so often (see my last one on the dull Beckett). Up to bat is the documentary that’s been all the buzz for the past few weeks: The Tinder Swindler.

To me, this movie belongs to a sort of trilogy of Netflix documentaries that also includes Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019) and The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley (2019). Each is about scams and, especially, the scammers: Who are they? Where did they come from? How did they pull the wool over everyone’s eyes?

And each consists primarily of rattled bystanders and victims recounting how smooth sociopaths (Billy Macfarland in Fyre, Elizabeth Holmes in The Inventor, and Simon Leviev in The Tinder Swindler) cashed in by exploiting absurdities in our image-obsessed culture.

The key to all these documentaries’ success is that we inevitably root for the scammer. Their charisma attracts us just as it attracts their victims, and their success compels our admiration. By extension, the victims receive our contempt. And it’s fun to be contemptuous of Macfarland’s and Holmes’ victims, since they’re such big shots. After all, few of us could afford a luxury Caribbean music festival or invest in a Silicon Valley startup, so watching people who do have that kind of clout get taken for a ride is ready-made schadenfreude.

But in The Tinder Swindler, the swindled are ordinary people, posing a moral conundrum. And we fail the conundrum: we still root for the swindler; the effect of the movie is still undeniably schadenfreude. Resist it we may, but truly, no viewer can help getting a thrill from a close up of the $250,000 “loan,” which, we know by this point, is actually a down payment on another woman’s dream date. In fact, our smiles are already cracking when a doomed victim’s opening narration extols the wondrous virtues of love. It doesn’t matter that Leviev, a dweeby-looking would-be aristocrat, is the least likable scammer in the trilogy: like MacFarland and Holmes, he’s the protagonist by virtue of the stunned plebeians he leaves in his wake.

This may be why the predominant reaction to this movie online has been frustration and even anger directed toward the women. What were they thinking? How could they have been so stupid? We attack them because their errors have made us root against the common interest, against love. Morally, we want to side with them, but we can’t: like Trump, we like people who weren’t captured. I’ve noticed that most viewers have scrambled to distance themselves from the defrauded women in some supposedly crucial way, for example pointing out the privilege in being able to cough up so much dough, or cursing the gold-digging ways of women, or criticizing users of shallow dating apps, or sighing at women’s typical naivety in romance (surely no man in the era of OnlyFans would ever be sapped of his savings by an illusory romantic connection!).

I amiably grant these viewers their solace in whatever distinction they make between themselves and the Tinder Swindled. True, these women had affluence to burn. True, dollar signs were in their eyes anyway when they boarded a man’s caviar-equipped private jet.

But whatever defense you might justifiably summon to grapple with this documentary’s success in amusing you with the ruin of people who might be your neighbors, I maintain that the engaging quality of The Tinder Swindler, heightened in comparison to its Netflix predecessors, owes to its relative small scale, to its relatability. Indeed, with each successive documentary, our fascination with scams is gradually shedding its disguise to reveal its true self: fascination with our own individual stupidity.

Yes, a current of self-loathing runs beneath the popularity of these documentaries, and it’s getting closer to the surface. Closer, actually, to the aesthetic of horror movies, in that the entertainment doesn’t come from the victims’ demises, but rather from the exciting possibility of our own. Michael Myers doesn’t hunt down Wall Street fat cats, and neither does Simon Leviev. The next Netflix swindler might just be coming for you!

Am I saying that we subconsciously want to be taken for a ride, that we want to be swindled? Of course not. But…wouldn’t it be wild if we were? (And if we were, wouldn’t we totally deserve it, too?)

 

– Jim Andersen

For more Netflix reviews, see my review of I Care a Lot.

 

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Movie Review: I Care a Lot

Originally posted February, 2021

I Care a Lot, directed by J Blakeson, is the Netflix flavor of the week, and it isn’t good, but that’s almost besides the point. The movie isn’t trying to be good; it’s trying to be provocative. And since I’m writing this review, I suppose that in a way, it worked.

Rosamund Pike stars as Marla Grayson, a greedy scam artist who makes bank by usurping guardianship status of capable but vulnerable older folks. The point of this exposition is to make you question whether it could, in fact, happen—while betting that you’re too paranoid to reach the correct answer: no. Considering the movie’s popularity, however short lived it’ll surely turn out to be, the bet is well placed.

Supposedly, there’s also a feminist flavor to this film, which, according to its proponents, is owed to the unabashed nature of Grayson’s conniving; after all, men have been conniving unabashedly for decades, haven’t they now. But this kind of feminism has no aesthetic value, only historical. That Grayson has been intentionally drained of a soul—with even a haircut of inhuman severity—may make the movie notable, but not fun. How can we have fun watching a character who doesn’t seem capable of having it herself? At least Gordon Gekko enjoyed being rich.

And Grayson’s greediness is pushed so far that her actions begin to seem plainly stupid: even a money-hungry bitch, I imagine, would probably refrain from demanding ten million dollars from a mobster who has her bound up and is promising to kill her on the spot.

Peter Dinklage does his usual best as Pike’s counterpart, but he’s been given a lousy bit. Like Pike, he’s been cast as a cunning outlaw, but, also like Pike, he’s been failed by the screenwriters, who have no cunning to bequeath. For example, Dinklage’s character plots to extract his mother from Grayson’s imprisonment but strangely decides that the leader of this all-important mission will be…a random goon whom he almost murdered the day before for incompetence. (Even more strangely, the employees of the nursing home, who are not part of Grayson’s scheme, have loaded guns and lay heavy fire on the goons, who ostensibly only want to visit a resident.)

Netflix seems to be refining a sort of recipe for making movies. The ingredients are 1) a provocative premise, 2) one or two well-liked stars, 3) vague social commentary, 4) everything else in the movie being extremely lame. This formula gave us the highly popular Bird Box (2018) and its many descendants; it will certainly give us many more titles and content options well into the future. Because it seems that Netflix’s all-knowing algorithms have caught our streaming population red-handed: we pick movies based on their trailers, don’t pay much attention while watching them, and don’t remember much of what we’ve seen. With new releases appearing on our TV sets, we’ve become vulnerable to movie clickbait, and I Care a Lot is only the latest to fleetingly pique our collective interest.

 

–Jim Andersen

For more on Netflix films, see my review of The Tinder Swindler.