This is not my time of year.  While every multiplex in town is overbooked with screenings of four-quadrant crowd-pleasers like Wicked: Part 1, Moana 2, and Gladiator 2, my e-mail inbox is overflowing with FYC screeners for the critical favs that premiered at festivals months ago but distributors have held back for optimal last-minute Oscar buzz.  Neither option is especially appealing to me, personally, as most of my favorite new releases tend to be the high-style, low-profile genre titles that quietly trickle into local arthouse cinemas during the first half of the year, playing to mostly empty rooms.  Still, I make an effort to catch up with what hipper, higher-minded critics single out as The Best Movies of the Year, mostly as an effort to stay informed but also somewhat as an effort to not waste my time & money on the corporate IP currently clogging up American marquees.  It’s during this holiday-season FYC ritual that I’m most often confronted with my most hated & feared cinematic enemies: Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint.  It’s also when I watch the most capital-A Acting, since these tend to be projects greenlit & distributed with the intent of stirring up awards buzz for a particular performer on the poster.  If there’s any one theme to the trio of FYC screeners I happened to watch over Thanksgiving break, it’s that they were all easy-to-watch dramas about difficult-to-handle people, each highlighting the acting talents of their headlining performers by allowing them to get socially & emotionally messy onscreen without other cinematic distractions getting the way – petty details like dynamic, daring cinematography and editing, the art of the moving image.

If you’re ever in the mood to watch a movie that values acting over any other cinematic concern, you can always look to actors-turned-directors to scratch that itch.  Jesse Eisenberg’s second directorial work, A Real Pain, is a two-hander acting showcase for himself and screen partner Kieran Culkin, who are both good enough in the movie that it’s been in The Awards Conversation for almost a full year since it first premiered at Sundance.  Jesse Eisenberg stars as a Jesse Eisenberg type: a nervous New Yorker who can barely finish a conversational sentence without having a panic attack.  Kieran Culkin is his socially volatile cousin: a bi-polar timebomb who breaks every unspoken social convention imaginable while still managing to charm every stranger he meets.  Structurally, the film is a travel story about the cousins’ journey to Poland to reconnect with their Jewish heritage in the wake of their grandmother’s recent death, which leads to a lot of solemn sightseeing at major sites of The Holocaust.  From scene to scene, however, it functions as a darkly, uncomfortably funny comedy about two men who love each other very much but have incompatible mental illnesses that make it impossible for them to share a room.  No one wants to hear their Awards Season drama described as a breezy, 90min Sundance dramedy about The Holocaust, but that’s exactly the movie that Eisenberg made.  A Real Pain‘s saving grace, then, is the strength of the performances the two central actors deliver as absurdly difficult people.  Culkin’s social brashness and emotional volatility makes his difficulty more immediately apparent, but Eisenberg gives himself plenty of room to do his Nervous Fella schtick as much as possible.  It’s an anxious archetype that Culkin’s character aptly describes as “an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late.”

Marielle Heller is another actor-turned-director who has made empathy for difficult characters a core tenet of her artistry, most successfully in Can You Ever Forgive Me? and The Diary of a Teenage Girl.  Her new adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel Nightbitch doesn’t reach far beyond that search for empathetic cheerleading, though, and the movie is mostly a dud as a result.  Amy Adams stars as a visual artist who has put her creative pursuits aside to raise a child while her husband travels for work.  Spending weeks in isolation with only her young child for company, she loses her adult social skills and essentially goes feral, convincing herself that she is physically transforming into a dog.  Suppressing her artist’s spirit to play housewife breaks her brain, causing her to hallucinate monstrous canine hair, tail, and nipple growth in the mirror and to act out wildly in public (barking, stealing food off strangers’ plates, dressing her son in a leash, etc.).  Where her internal fantasy of motherhood bringing out her most animalistic traits ends and her external, real-life social misbehavior begins is intentionally kept vague, as Heller is more concerned with seeing the world through her protagonist’s color-blind eyes than with constructing genuine, heartfelt drama.  Nightbitch is conceptually amusing as a body-horror metaphor for how motherhood physically & mentally transforms you, but it’s pretty lackluster in execution, especially as a page-to-screen adaptation.  There are long stretches of narration in which Adams recites passages from Yoder’s book, as if Heller’s relationship with the material was more admiration than inspiration.  She’s so concerned with landing its political jabs about gendered, invisible domestic labor that she forgot to make its characters feel like real people, so the whole thing ends up hollow & phony no matter how committed Adams’s performance is as the titular Nightbitch.  It should’ve been an audiobook.

Mike Leigh did not start his career as an actor, but he does have a career-long history as a stage theatre director, which is a very actorly profession.  That background heavily informs the sparse, minimalist approach to familial drama in his new film Hard Truths, which sits with its characters’ interpersonal conflicts rather than resolving them.  As the most difficult person of all in this triple feature, Marianne Jean-Baptiste stars as a middle-aged grump who wages a one-woman war against the “smiling, cheerful people” of the world for 100 relentlessly sour minutes, including her own loving sister. Her performance is intensely funny and bitter, as she finds so much to complain about every second she is awake that she cannot even sit comfortably in her own home without obsessing over the activities of the pigeons, foxes, and bugs outside the window.  There are multiple scenes that start with her gasping in horror at the sensation of waking up from a nap, and her nonstop tirades against the waking world’s many offenses leads to the highest incredulous-teeth-sucking-per-minute ratio I’ve ever seen in a movie as her audience is held hostage by her hostility.  Meanwhile, a softly droning violin draws out the pathos of her pathological misery, especially in scenes where her much better adjusted sister gently attempts to diffuse her anger.  Leigh pays careful attention to the social & economic circumstances of the sisters’ past that would’ve burdened one with awareness of the world’s wretchedness while leaving the other unscathed, but most of the thematic & emotional impact of the picture is achieved through the forcefulness of Jean-Baptiste’s performance, which is exactly how all of these movies work, even the lesser ones. 

If any of these movies indulge in the Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint that torment me during the Awards Season screener deluge every year, it’s Hard Truths, which is what makes it so unfortunate that it’s the best of this batch.  If all of the cinematic value of a picture is going to be invested in the difficulty & thorniness of a central performance, that performance might as well reach for the extremity of Marianne Jeanne-Baptiste’s, which is a cinematic spectacle in and of itself.  The problem with Amy Adams, Kieran Culkin, and Jesse Eisenberg’s performances—if there is one—is that you always get the sense that their respective directors need you to like their characters, so they’re careful not to push their difficult-person conflicts far enough to abandon the audience.  Mike Leigh is fearless in that respect, even if he restrains himself elsewhere.  Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s hopeless grump is somewhat lovable as a movie character, but you wouldn’t want to be in the same room as her for ten consecutive minutes, whereas you could easily imagine yourself splitting a bottle of wine with Adams, Culkin, or Eisenberg’s grumps to hear more of their side of things.  If I’m going to watch a low-key movie about a high-maintenance individual, I’d prefer that character to be as high-maintenance as possible.  Make them a real pain, a real bitch – a really, truly difficult person.

-Brandon Ledet