Allow me to introduce you to a 1990s romcom starring Sarah Jessica Parker as a lovelorn Manhattanite whose romantic rut dating commitment-phobic bachelors is disrupted by the attentions of a brash Big Spender. Instead of talking it out over brunch with the gals, she’s rescued by a skydiving Nicolas Cage in an Elvis costume. Okay, in all honesty, Honeymoon in Vegas has very little in common with Sex and the City outside of Parker’s casting. If anything, the film is more weirdly predictive of the Adrian Lyne erotic thriller Indecent Proposal than it is of Parker’s signature HBO sitcom. For one thing, its story is filtered through the perspective of her reluctant fiancée, a marriage-cynical private eye played by Nic Cage. While Sex and the City is narrated by Parker’s voice as a cosmopolitan sex columnist, Honeymoon in Vegas allows Cage to narrate the story in 1940s noir speak, the film’s only notable stylistic touch (before it floods the screen with Elvis impersonators in the third act). The closest Parker’s allowed to get to a full Carrie Bradshaw moment is in her casino-lobby outrage with Cage for getting them into an Indecent Proposal scenario in the first place, shouting within earshot of children & milquetoast Midwest tourists, “I’m a whore, Jack! You’ve made me into a whore. You brought me to Las Vegas, and you turned me into a whore!” It’s impossible to watch this incredulous meltdown without recalling Bradshaw’s outburst at an Atlantic City craps table in the classic Sex and the City episode “Luck Be an Old Lady.” That is, it’s impossible if you happened to have spent all of this year catching up with and thinking about Sex and the City for the first time in your life, which is exactly where I’m at right now.
I’m only focusing on Sarah Jessica Parker so much here because it’s rare to see her out of Carrie Bradshaw drag, whereas opportunities to see a frantic Nic Cage impersonate Elvis are much more plentiful. See also: David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, SNL’s “Tiny Elvis” sketch, and Cage’s real-life marriage to The King’s daughter, Lisa Marie. I guess it’s pretty rare to see him dressed up in the full Elvis costume, though, unless you’ve happened to be personally invited to tour his home full of Elvis memorabilia. In order to justify this indulgence, Cage had to team up with workman comedy director Andrew Bergman, who cast him in two back-to-back mediocre romcoms as a hapless leading man: Honeymoon in Vegas & It Could Happen to You. He’s less of a Nice Guy dreamboat here as he is in that latter film, spending most of his honeymoon tailing James Caan’s high-roller conman villain as he seduces Parker away from him. Cage starts the film terrified of marriage because of a deathbed promise he made to his mother, but he loves Parker’s sweetheart schoolteacher character so much that he’s willing to go back on his word. Only, he doesn’t act quickly enough, so Caan swindles him into a rigged card game, bullying him to put a weekend with his fiancée on the table as a substitution for poker chips. Parker’s outrage with being “turned into a whore” isn’t played for the same moral or seductive complexity as Demi Moore’s own monogamy crisis in Indecent Proposal, even as she flirts with the idea of letting Caan sweep her off her feet (via helicopter). Mostly, it’s just an excuse for sweaty, farcical Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World shenanigans as Caan elbows Cage out of the picture . . . until he skydives back into it dressed as Elvis.
There isn’t much on Honeymoon in Vegas‘s mind besides setting the stage for its ludicrous skydiving-stunt finale, which is emphasized in a marketing tagline that sells it as “A comedy about one bride, two grooms, and 34 flying Elvises.” The Elvis costumed skydiving team The Flying Elvi has since become a legitimate Vegas attraction, boasting on their website to be “the only officially licensed skydive team by Elvis Presley Enterprises.” The creation of that novelty act might be the movie’s only lasting triumph, but it’s at least more a more appropriate movie tie-in than, say, the Mardi Gras scooter gang The Krewe of the Rolling Elvi hosting a private screening of Sofia Coppola’s dour drama Priscilla (a real thing that recently happened at The Prytania; I cannot imagine the mood that took over that room by the end credits). Otherwise, there’s nothing especially recommendable about Honeymoon in Vegas except for its opportunities to think about where it fits in its various players’ long-term careers. James Caan coasts along as the comedic heavy. Pat Morita & Peter Boyle give career-worst performances as a disaffected cab driver and a Hawaiian mystic, seemingly having gotten their scripts swapped in the mail. Seymour Cassel is given the funniest character detail as a mobster named Tony Cataracts. A young Tony Shalhoub is adorable as a nervous concierge who’s terrified of Caan. An even younger Bruno Mars is even more adorable as the world’s tiniest Elvis impersonator. Nic Cage gets in a few signature bizarro line-readings in his sing-songy angry voice, getting increasingly funnier as his character gets increasingly apoplectic. And then there’s Sarah Jessica Parker, who gets one big scene where she gets to shout about being made into a hooker before being passed around like a trophy between the two male leads. Luckily, she got a lot more to do down the line in the Sex and the City series, unless you want to take a really cynical view of Carrie’s long-term love triangle with Aidan & Big.
It’s a disconcertingly popular pastime among Millennial & Gen-X film nerds to ponder “What’s the next Heathers?” every time the discourse turns its evil eye towards the high school comedy genre. Maybe it’s because we’re old enough to remember a time when Heathers had legitimate pretenders to the throne: that bitchy late-90s malaise that birthed such vicious teen girl high school comedies as Jawbreaker, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Sugar & Spice. Maybe it’s because we’re too old to take full delight in those films’ recent, toned-down equivalents in titles like The Edge of Seventeen, Do Revenge,The DUFF, and Spontaneous. If any films have earned enough cultural capital to compare to Heathers‘s sickly, surrealist take on high school culture in the decades since 1988, only Clueless & Mean Girls could claim to share in its enduring popularity and, although both are very funny in their own way, neither are nearly cruel enough to match the acidity of Daniel Waters’s influential screenplay (or its deliciously evil late-90s echoes). Whatever the case, it’s not surprising that most professional reviews of Emma Seligman’s high school black comedy Bottoms mention its place in the Heathers lineage, despite there being infinite other heightened high school satires to choose from for easy points of comparison: Better Off Dead,Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Clone High, Daria, and the list goes on. I won’t go as far as to say declaring every successful high school dark comedy “the next Heathers” is a hack move (despite being a certifiable hack who’s guilty of that behavior myself), but I at least want to note that the search for The Next Heathers is becoming a time-honored tradition among an aging generation of media critics.
So, in the interest of mixing things up, I’d like to compare Bottoms to a different heightened high school comedy that I love dearly: Strangers with Candy. Specific events and characters in Seligman & co-writer Rachel Sennott’s screenplay might have more direct correlations in Heathers (especially in the comedic approach to a potential school bomber), but the tone of the humor is much more closely aligned with the vintage Amy Sedaris sitcom. The surrealism of Heathers has a dreamlike, soft-focus quality you will not find in Bottoms, which instead repurposes the rotten dirtbag energy of Sedaris’s cult show. Sennott co-stars with Ayo Edebiri as the film’s Jerri Blank equivalents: two adult actors in hideously slovenly high school drag who relentlessly proposition their classmates for sex while everyone around them obliviously focuses on normal high school media conflicts like homework and the upcoming football game. In both works, teachers and school staff match the teenage deviants’ dirtbag mentality with equally monstrous comebacks, sidestepping the decorum of professional, adult behavior. No one acts like a real human being at any time, reflecting the collective, horned-up mania of American high schools’ insular worlds. The filmmaking is deceptively commercial in both cases (mocking 1970s afterschool specials in Strangers with Candy and mocking 1990s high school boner comedies in Bottoms), delivering pitch-black narcissist line readings with the cheery poptimism of a well-behaved mainstream sitcom. If you deeply miss the mixture of high-femme costume designs with high-artifice teen cruelty in Heathers, there are plenty of modern movies willing to offer a facsimile. Meanwhile, if you deeply miss watching Jerri Blank hit on a comically naive Tammi Littlenut (“Pee on me.”) or trade vicious barbs with Principle Onyx Blackman (“You must be about as worn out as a hooker on VJ Day.”), Bottoms is your only viable modern substitute.
The only reason it’s so tempting to compare Bottoms to previously existing works—Strangers with Candy, Heathers, or otherwise—is because Seligman & Sennott’s screenplay is so referentially rooted in teen sex comedy tradition. Its basic premise, in which two unpopular, unfashionable high school lesbians start an afterschool “defense class” in a misguided attempt to bed cheerleaders, functions as a basic-bullet-points mashup of Fight Club and Revenge of the Nerds. Sennott & Edebiri are obviously not the typical protagonists of the genre’s losing-your-virginity crisis template, but there have already been plenty other post-Porky’s, post-Superbad correctives to make it clear that high school girls get desperately horny too: The To Do List, Blockers, Booksmart, Never Have I Ever, Plan B, Slut in a Good Way, etc. None have quite matched the shameless selfishness of Sennott & Edebiri’s manic libidos, though, at least not since Jerri Blank described the way high school football makes her “damp as a cellar down there – all mildewy.” There are two basic placement tests that will determine your relationship with Bottoms as an audience: whether you find the jokes funny and whether it speaks meaningfully to your personal, pre-loaded high school comedy reference points. The former can’t be helped, but I would at least like to encourage people to look beyond Heathers to better support the latter. In general, we could all stand to look past Heathers more often when considering the genre’s darkest subversions; there are plenty other titles to choose from, to the point where the exercise of identifying The Next Heathers is getting a little silly. Really, what’s most encouraging about Bottoms is how little comparison it supports against Seligman & Sennott’s previous collaboration, Shiva Baby, despite both being queer nightmare comedies starring Sennott. It’s nice to still feel surprised even while also feeling as if you’ve seen it all before.
You know I love a pastiche, and I was bummed when I wasn’t able to catch this one in its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical run. Despite the inherently sci-fi nature of the title, I wasn’t expecting just how far into that genre the film would lean, and I was delighted.
In the Glen, an area that federal and state funding has not so much forgotten as forsaken, Fontaine (John Boyega) is the dealer at the top of the food chain. Far from the exciting life of danger that one would expect, it’s a monotonous routine; he gets a bottle of alcohol and a lottery scratch-off from the corner store, pours some out into the extended cup of elderly, conspiracy-spouting Frog (Leon Lamar), pumps some iron, mournfully contemplates the “In Remembrance” clipping for his younger brother on the fridge, knocks on his mother’s door to see if she wants anything (she never does), and receives delivery of the day’s cash intake. On the day that the film opens, two out-of-the-ordinary things happen. The first is that he gets word from elementary aged Junebug (Trayce Malachi) that a pusher for rival dealer Issac (J. Alphonse Nicholson) has been spotted in Fontaine’s territory, leading Fontaine to kneecap said pusher. The second is that local pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) has failed to pay up, so Fontaine tracks him down to his hotel, which leaves the younger man vulnerable to a drive-by at the hands of a retaliating Isaac. Then he wakes up. Dismissing the shooting as a dream, Fontaine resumes his quotidian: scratch-off, Frog, iron, Remembrance, mother. Only when he once again goes to confront Slick Charles, who tells him that he watched Fontaine die, a fact which is corroborated by sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). Following a suspicious black SUV, the unlikely trio discovers that there’s much more going on than meets the eye.
There are a few different misdirections in the film that lure the savvy audience member into thinking that they know where the film is headed. Fontaine’s day(s) has all the trappings of a time loop narrative, which wasn’t uncommon prior to COVID, but which has really blossomed as a story device since lockdown, during which many people began to see something of their own quarantined routine in these stories. This theory is blown out of the water when other characters recall Fontaine’s death. Further complicating matters is the widespread lack of specificity about the time period in which the film takes place. Older model cars line the streets and Charles dresses like Willie Dynamite, which would date the film to the 1970s, but Junebug talks excitedly about SpongeBob SquarePants, which moves the setting closer to our own, but given that the show premiered in 1999, that still jives with the omnipresence of CRT model televisions. That is, until Yo-Yo mentions blockchain, which means that this must take place in the present (or future), but a present dotted with anachronistic technology. Of course, given that this is an extremely tightly constructed script, it’s no surprise that there’s a reason for all of this, but revealing any more than that would spoil too much.
Speaking of which, this is one of those movies with a plot that’s all but impossible to talk about without revealing too much. Luckily, the performances give us more than enough text to dig through. Jamie Foxx stays working, which means that he’s forever ending up in projects that fail to really use him to his greatest potential; here, he’s utterly fantastic as the has-been Charles, whose bygone primacy is a point of pride (he boasts that he won Pimp of the Year at the Player’s Ball in 1996), undermined by his current washed-up status. There’s a bit of the Cowardly Lion in him, but he comes through when needed, and, just like the other characters rounding out the trio, he’s savvier than appearances would suggest. Boyega is also on top of this game here, and there’s a bit of his performance as Moses in Attack the Block that bleeds through here, perhaps intentionally. The breakout is Parris, who is having quite the year, given that she’s co-headlining the upcoming Marvel feature The Marvels after her character was introduced to the MCU via WandaVision, where she was easily one of the best things about the program. Every character’s hidden depths are important, as they bely the cluelessness and patronizing shallow-mindedness of the antagonists, but Yo-Yo’s fascination with Nancy Drew is particularly endearing to me, as is her ambition.
When we were talking about coverage and discussing the Barbenheimer phenomenon, Brandon generously offered me the opportunity to be the one who covered Barbie, after I declared in no uncertain terms that I had no interest in Oppenheimer (sorry, Cillian). I did my part, going to the movie on opening night, wearing the only garment I own with any pink in it—a mostly-blue luau shirt with flamingos nestled in the pattern—and having my picture taken in the doll box that was being hastily assembled in the lobby when I arrived. It’s looking like this one will end up being a favorite for a lot of the Swampflix crew, and I’m happy to report that I had a good time as well.
Barbie (Margot Robbie) is the most popular resident of Barbieland, a pink utopia inhabited by a seemingly endless series of Barbies, including President Barbie (Issa Rae), Doctor Barbie (Hari Neff), Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), Journalist Barbie (Ritu Arya), and Author Barbie (Alexandra Schipp). There are also a multitude of Kens, including the “stereotypical” Ken (Ryan Gosling), whose job is “beach” and who is paired with likewise stereotypical Prime!Barbie. Also present is his primary rival Ken (Simu Liu), and several others (including Ncuti Gatwa), as well as one-offs like Ken’s friend Allan (Michael Cera) and poor pregnant Midge (Emerald Fennell). Every day is beautiful, as Barbie interacts with her dreamhouse, drinking imaginary milk from empty doll cups and bathing in a waterless shower, then goes about her adventures before retiring back to her home for a nightly dance party. Things couldn’t be more perfect, until one day Prime!Barbie asks the others if they ever think about dying, which brings the party to a screeching halt. The next day, nothing goes right; her shower is inexplicably cold, her imaginary milk is spoiled, her heart shaped waffles are burned and fail to land perfectly on her plate, and worst of all, she’s somehow become a flat-footed doll in a world of high heels. At the advice of her compatriots, she seeks guidance about her situation from “Weird” Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who was “played with too hard.” Weird Barbie sends Prime!Barbie on a quest to the real world to find the girl who’s playing with her so that she can cheer her back up so that her distinctly un-Barbie thoughts stop finding their way into Prime!Barbie’s head.
In the real world, Gloria (America Ferrera) is the receptionist at Mattel, a company that, despite depending on the monetization of the fantasies of little girls, is run entirely by men in identical gray suits; she finds herself drawing concepts for new dolls that share/embody her personal ennui. When Barbie (with stowaway Ken) escapes the boundaries of Barbieland and enters California via a portal at Venice Beach, young Mattel employee Aaron (Connor Swindells, the third alum from Sex Education in the movie) is contacted by the FBI to warn the dollmakers about this breach, and he delivers the news directly to the CEO (Will Ferrell). Elsewhere, Barbie’s search for her doll seems to lead to a dead end as she finds Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), her presumed dollplayer, only to find that the girl has become a tween edgelady who dresses down the cowboy-clad living doll for her ties to capitalism, neoliberal feminism, and body dysmorphia. While this is happening, Ken comes face-to-face with the omnipresent patriarchal nature of the real world, wholeheartedly buying into the ideals of male domination because of his own lack of fulfillment in his non-relationship with Barbie. Upon his return, he spreads this anti-gospel around to the other Kens, which leads to all of the Barbies losing the memories of their impressive accomplishments in lieu of becoming servile dolls to the Kens with whom they are paired. With help from Gloria and Sasha, who are mother and daughter, Prime!Barbie has to try and wrest control of Barbieland back before it becomes the Kendom forever.
Early marketing for the movie featured that famous image of Margot Robbie, currently poised at the moment between memetic and iconic, with the tagline “Barbie is everything.” And not only is she, but Robbie is a star, baby. Although there may never come a day when society forgives Suicide Squad, it’s time for us to all try and forget it, because Robbie is really outdoing herself with each new project. As an actress, her absolute control over her every movement and facial muscle is astonishing. When confronted by a world in which she is frequently hated instead of universally beloved, it would be easy for this sort of narrative turn to feel like one of those “the regent learns their subjects hate them” plots, but because Robbie’s Barbie is kind, empathetic, fun-loving, and heretofore carefree, it’s emotionally devastating, and Robbie makes it work. That having been said, the beating emotional heart at the center of the film is America Ferrera, whose Gloria is the motivating factor behind all of the events of the film, and who gives a powerhouse monologue near the film’s climax that utterly steals the show. Kate McKinnon’s smaller part is also a delight, and the explanations of how she came to be the way that she is have a kind of quintessence of truth that I couldn’t help but laugh at. I was a bit disappointed upon the initial entrance into the real world with Gosling’s Ken instead of Liu’s, the latter of whom I found much more charming in their initial scenes, but given that specific Ken is called on to temporarily become the king of the jerks, literally and figuratively, I came to prefer that it was Gosling’s Ken who becomes the film’s antagonist for a bit.
At the core of that antagonism is Ken’s deep and profound insecurity. Ken’s existence, his destiny, is to be “and Ken” to Prime!Barbie, secondary to her. Since Barbie—as the idealization of a certain idea of liberated womanhood—doesn’t need him the way that he needs her, he lives in a perpetual existential crisis in which he has no real job or purpose other than an exaggeratedly asymmetrical relationship. It’s precisely this lack of security in his identity that leaves him open to being brain-poisoned by patriarchy, and he even ultimately admits that he got carried away and that what he really wanted to get into wasn’t phallocentric government so much as horses (it makes sense in context … sort of). There was no way that a movie like this one wasn’t going to end up on the radar of all the expected grifter outrage manufacturing machine mouthpieces, but the ones who can’t stop blathering on and on about film’s “woke” agenda with the fury of a man who’s mad that his wife put the cookies on a shelf he can’t reach; they’re really tattling on themselves with this outing, even more than usual. It takes a truly deep level of self-doubt and an utter dearth of self-reflection to take a look at this movie, which is about how sad, unfulfilled men unsuccessfully try to fill that void inside with toxic masculinity and be like “This is a movie that attacks me personally.” Do you not even see how much you’re showing your whole ass with that, bro? The Kens aren’t even doing the things that are violent, just the things that are annoying, like keeping a slovenly house, favoring patent leather couches, and mansplaining The Godfather. They’re not trying to entrap women through emotionally manipulative therapy lingo, or being shitty to their pregnant wife while she begs to be allowed to leave the house without administering veterinary medicine that she’s medically forbidden to handle, or isolating a woman with the intent to do harm. Don’t be like that. Just have a “brewski-beer” and teach yourself how to play a Matchbox Twenty song or two and let this one float past you in the stream, man.
In this case, the MST3k mantra applies on a couple of levels. Remember, this is just a movie, and you should just relax, both in any attempts to make this light, effervescent, bubblegum movie into another wedge in the culture war, and in the more traditional sense of letting go of the urge to try to figure out the exact limits of the film’s internal logic. It’s not what anyone is here for. This is an aesthetic experience just as much as (if not more than) it is a narrative one, and that’s what art is, baby. Just have a good time.
When recently writing about middling campus thriller The Curve, several people commented that they thought that film was called Dead Man on Campus; in fact, The Curve was previously titled Dead Man’s Curve and its title was changed to avoid just that confusion. Both came out in 1998, both feature a serious scholarship student paired with a perpetually manic roommate, and both feature plots that are predicated on the urban legend that the roommate(s) of any college student who commits suicide automatically passes their classes that semester. Whereas The Curve was rarely intentionally funny and attempted a kind of campus noir that fails to be compelling, Dead Man on Campus is an outright comedy, from the creative team that would four years later release a personal favorite, Pumpkin. Pumpkin director Anthony Abrams is on the writing side this time, co-penning this one with future Pumpkin co-writer Adam Larson Broder and Michael Traeger. This one errs a little broader than Pumpkin‘s melodrama satire but has a lot of the same semi-sequitur one-liners, slapstick treated with unblinking stoicism, and invoked tonal whiplash.
Josh (Tom Everett Scott) is an incoming student attending a prestigious northeastern university on a scholarship, on a pre-med track with a heavy, difficult course load. In the dorms, he’s placed into a suite with non-stop party machine Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and hair-trigger Catholic rage jock Kyle (Jason Segel). Kyle pairs off with a girl he meets at a party (Linda Cardellini) and moves in with her, leaving Josh and Cooper with a spare room. Josh loses some of his academic focus when Cooper introduces him to Rachel (Poppy Montgomery), a creative writing student with whom he hits it off, and Cooper’s lackadaisical attitude rubs off on Josh a little too hard. By midterms, both are failing, with doomed prospects on the horizon: Josh will lose his scholarship and drop out of school, and Cooper’s father will stop paying his tuition and force him to start at an entry level position in the family custodial business. Cooper, upon hearing the urban legend about automatic A grades for the roommates of students who take their own life, forces Josh to accompany him to break into the library and review the school charter to see if this rule actually exists, and, upon learning that it does, hatches a scheme to use Josh’s student job at the housing office to file paperwork to move a suicidal person into the vacant room and wait things out, possibly even pushing over a domino or two. Josh is initially horrified, but is ultimately convinced to join in, and they set their sights on a few prospects: untameable frat moron Cliff (Lochlyn Munro), paranoid Unabomber-esque Buckley (Randy Pearlstein), and depressed British goth rocker Matt (Corey Page).
Like Pumpkin, Dead Man on Campus is a tasteless movie, but I have an appetite for tasteless movies, especially ones that are as willing to go all in like this one does. Through a modern lens, it’s insensitive (and may even have been so for the time), but its insensitivity reads more as irreverence than edginess, and at times it verges on prescience … for the most part. The film’s weakest link is the first contender that the boys select; he’s loud, brash, oversexed, dim-witted, and within the already wacky reality of the film, he stands out as a particularly poorly placed element, like he dropped in from National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. It’s a pretty small role, but Alyson Hannigan is here as one of Rachel’s roommates, and Cliff immediately asks “Which one is for [him]?” from among the women, getting so amped up to share a bong with her that he lights her hair on fire (Hannigan has her longer ‘do from Buffy seasons 1 and 2 here), and it feels like it’s presaging some of the indignities that she’ll experience over the course of the American Pie movies, but less funny (or that she’ll find herself in in Date Movie, but funnier). In a film that’s mostly raucous and only occasionally raunchy, Cliff’s scenes are the weakest. Gosselaar toes the line with Cooper; he’s also obnoxious, but it’s more moderate. It’s as if Gosselaar is aping the title character of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose but can’t quite break free from Saved by the Bell‘s Zack and ends up annoying, but there’s a certain Bugs Bunny-esque playfulness to his frenetic energy that keeps him from crossing the line into being too annoying.
The second and third contenders that the boys select are much better suited to the film’s tone. Conspiracy theorist Buckley is a lot of fun, down to the choices in set dressing (his dorm room is adorned with black and white posters of … himself). Even though this film is from the pre-9/11 time when conspiracy theories were just some nonsense that your older stoner friend would prattle on about and not matters of legislation in a crumbling empire, Buckley manages to spout some ideas that wouldn’t be unreasonable to hear (from morons) in this day and age; notably, he believes that he is being stalked by Bill Gates, who wants to steal the rest of his brain (having already stolen half of it when Buckley fell asleep in a Gateway store). The way that Josh and Cooper convince him to move in with them, which includes Josh dressing up in a hazmat suit and spraying water on the plants outside of Buckley’s first dorm building, hits the right level of absurdity, and it’s a welcome change after suffering through the Cliff portions. All of the boys’ interactions with third contender Matt are even funnier once it’s revealed that his suicidal ideology is all an act to seem more mysterious as a tragic musician, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of making fun of self-flagellating college-aged artists. Some sample lyrics for Kiss My Ass, Matt’s band, include the utterly self-satisfied lines “My words are my sperm/Spewing forth my tragic germ/I’m dying to kiss you/I soil the tissue.” That’s art, baby.
The movie is not without other weaknesses outside of Cliff. Things get a little saccharine at the climax, and it’s not handled as deftly as it would be later in Pumpkin; just compare any of the maudlin-to-the-point-of-ridicule scenes that make up that film’s finale with the mostly-played-straight conclusion to this one. The romance between Josh and Rachel also feels a bit tacked-on, and Poppy Montgomery is largely wasted in a shallow role. That Josh could fall into drinking and partying without the temptation to spend time with her makes it so that she could largely be excised from the plot, especially as her later actions—giving Josh a copy of her short story to read and then being disappointed that he didn’t—do nothing to put more pressure on Josh than he is already under. It’s ridiculous that she’s third billed and is less memorable than Hannigan, who at least has a later role in the film when she arrives at a party in a ridiculous wig. Still, if you saw The Curve and thought it would work better as an irreverent comedy, or if you’re itching for something in the vein of Pumpkin and are willing to accept the diet cola version, this one’s out there waiting for you.
Dolly Parton owes her half-century of success & popularity to two specific talents. First & foremost, she’s a songwriting machine. Parton’s distinctive, meticulously crafted image & voice would’ve only taken her career so far if it weren’t for her uncanny ability to crank out a hit song in an afternoon as if it were as easy as washing the dishes. Over 3,000 titles into her songbook, her career is overflowing with anecdotes about writing “Jolene” & “I Will Always Love You” in a single session or tapping out the rhythm for “9 to 5” while she was bored between takes in her trailer. She also owes her longevity to her talent for the business end of show business, always knowing exactly what moves to make at what time to expand her brand far beyond the typical boundaries of a Nashville singer-songwriter career. When she started performing as a side act on The Porter Wagoner Show in the 1960s, she was able to reach a much wider audience than she would’ve just cutting records. Once she had thoroughly charmed every country music fan in the US through their television sets, she left the show to become a main attraction elsewhere, aiming to charm the rest of America as a big-screen movie star. Parton quickly accomplished that goal in her first couple roles, finding a perfect vehicle for her talents in the legalized-prostitution musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and stealing the show from legendary comedian Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5. The only problem is that most Hollywood executives don’t share Dolly’s creative or business talents, and they weren’t entirely sure how to package her as a comedic lead without the ensemble-cast support of hits like 9 to 5 or Steel Magnolias. Her awkwardly chaste chemistry with Burt Reynolds in Whorehouse was cute and a huge part of the film’s Broadway musical appeal, but by the time she was romantically paired with the eternal asshole cynic James Woods in 1992’s Straight Talk, it was clear casting directors & boardroom executives weren’t sure how to balance Dolly’s country-fried warmth with a proper love-interest leading man. This disconnect, of course, was never more glaring than it is in her pairing with Sylvester Stallone in the 1984 romcom Rhinestone, the most notorious flop of Dolly’s career – at no fault of her own.
Rhinestone finds Dolly & Stallone at their Dolliest & Stalloniest, clashing their respective rural sweetness & urban gruff in cultural combat instead of romantic entanglement. They fire incoherent line readings at each other for two schticky, jittery hours without ever once having an actual conversation, not even for a second. Intentionally or not, it’s America in a nutshell, capturing the great, wide cultural divide between small-town hospitality & big-city living. If that either/or cultural binary were a contest for moral & intellectual high ground, Dolly clearly wins the debate, sassing Stallone with the zinger “There are two kinds of people in the world, and you ain’t one of them.” She’s correct. Her costar is an Italian NYC cabbie & proud knuckledragger, navigating modern urban life like a drunk toddler who missed naptime. Nothing he does or says makes a lick of sense, which makes Dolly’s simplified country livin’ sensibilities seem like the only reasonable way to live. She did move to the big city herself to become a famous singer, though, which is how she gets involved in a classic Cinderella bet that she can turn the lughead city-dweller into a popular country musician in just a few weeks’ time. When agreeing to the bet, she failed to take into account that she was working with subhuman raw material, which becomes apparent by the time Stallone is screaming half-remembered lyrics to “Tutti Frutti” while banging on random piano keys at his helpless parents’ family-owned funeral parlor (mid-service, of course, for full comedic effect). Thanks to the touring Acrocats band, I have literally seen cats & chickens play musical instruments with a clearer sense of rhythm & song structure. Dolly’s helpless country star-to-be also didn’t take into account matters of the heart, which catches her off-guard when the mismatched pair’s discordant rapport suddenly turns romantic without warning. The first time they kiss & make love is a scarier plot development than anything you’ll see in director Bob Clark’s landmark slasher Black Christmas; it’s so wrong it’s haunting. And yet there’s something sweet about watching these two crazy kids get together, if not only because the heart & social fabric of America itself hangs in the balance of their volatile dynamic.
As bizarre as Dolly’s chemistry with Stallone can be, she does have clear, coherent chemistry with New York City at large. Although the song never actually plays in the movie, Rhinestone is “adapted” from the Glen Campbell novelty hit “Rhinestone Cowboy,” which it essentially boils down to the clash of big-city glam vs. simple country livin’. If there’s anything about the film that “works” the way it’s intended to, it’s the fish-out-of-water humor of sending Dolly to the bright lights & mean streets of NYC. In an opening song (penned by Dolly herself, naturally), she yodels over helicopter footage of the Statue of Liberty and complains “Life ain’t as simple as it used to be, since the Big Apple took a bite out of me.” The Big Apple of Rhinestone is defined by discos, pizza, room service, and casual racism. Meanwhile, small-town America is all front-porch concerts, farm animals, and Christian sweethearts who are willing to teach a city boy how to honky tonk even though the city is way less inviting when the cultural exchange flows the other way. Stallone’s fish-out-of-water humor as a boneheaded, punch-drunk cabbie who can’t walk ten feet in the country without slipping and falling in pig shit is much less convincing, but only because he’s much less convincing as a human being. Dolly also wrote Stallone his own song to define his struggles in life, a novelty tune about black-out alcoholism called “Drinkenstein” that he barks & howls more than sings. It’s difficult to tell how much of the film’s baffling, uncanny humor is a result of the miscasting of Dolly & Stallone as a romantic pairing vs how much is just a result of Stallone going off the rails in a Nic Cagian freakshow that disrupts the flow of the picture around him. In Straight Talk, there is absolutely no chemistry between Dolly & Woods, who might as well have filmed their shot-reverse-shot “conversations” on entirely different shooting schedules. In Rhinestone, by contrast, there is disastrously explosive chemistry between Dolly & Stallone – like, the poorly homemade pipe bomb kind of chemistry, the chemistry of an oil spill disrupting freshwater pH.
In the short term, Rhinestone may have been a professional embarrassment for Parton, but everything that makes it so off-putting & ill-fitting for her rests on Stallone’s shoulders. In the long term, it’s endured as one of her strangest, most memorable movie projects, one that inadvertently exemplified how refreshingly out of place she was in Big City show business outside her Nashville songwriting roots (and how bizarrely inhuman the show business urbanites could be on the other side of the table). Or, at least, it could endure that way if those Big City lugheads hadn’t allowed it to slip into distribution limbo after its decades-old DVD went out of print.
There’s something about the way that people have been reacting to the sudden appearance of A.I.-generated “art” that makes me sad. Not because I think that it’s “coming for my job” or because I think it can replace art made by human beings (it definitely can’t, no matter how many attempts your preferred media monopoly makes in order to try to make that happen), but because it once again reveals just how unbelievably stupid a lot of people are, or perhaps how lacking they are in that ineffable quality we might call “a soul.” Specifically, I’m talking any person who looked at any of the A.I.-generated trailers for movies within the past couple of months and then reposted it on social media. Some did it with a dire warning that this braying abomination heralded the death of artistic careers, others relished in the lizard brain delight of watching an algorithm shuffle a deck of Star Wars images into a deck of almost-but-not-quite-accurate Wes Anderson references and create a nightmare. To take a quick diversion, think about all of the fairy tales that you read as a kid in which some clever boy or girl defeated something wicked posing as a human because they recognize the villain’s otherworldly bizarreness and think out a method to outwit them. What I’m trying to say is that there were a lot of eyeballs on these monstrosities and an awful lot of people failed to recognize the fundamental inhumanity of the image with which they were presented. Nothing is real, nothing is convincing, and it’s like people have no real interest in being convinced.
Into all of this comes a real Wes Anderson film, and one which plays with the concept of narrative and nesting stories. It also deals with the nature of separation, distance, and isolation. Software can’t do that because software doesn’t get lonely; software is never tempted to give their ex-boyfriend another chance; software never had to figure out how to deliver bad news. Software doesn’t have to go into quarantine for a time that ends up stretching to the horizon, and software doesn’t understand how that kind of thing might make one lose their grip on reality, and software really, really can’t grasp why people might come out of the other side of that with a song in their heart and a spring in their step.
Asteroid City is a play, being performed for a broadcast over the air in the days of pre-color TV. It’s also the name of the tiny desert settlement in which the play takes place. The TV program host (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to this setting through the use of stage directions, which include a hand-painted mountain backdrop, an eternally incomplete elevated highway on-ramp as a permanent testament to the apparent insignificance of the place, a diner, a mechanic, a motor court with individual cabins, and, most importantly, a meteorite (and its attendant scientific complex). Each of these elements is first presented as stage dressing before we enter the full color world of the narrative itself, complete with proportion shift in addition to the Wizard of Oz-esque transition between the world of the artificial mundane and the imaginative sublime … which is somewhere that shouldn’t be that interesting, and yet it is. That is, perhaps, the point. Asteroid City the place shouldn’t be anything special; it’s the tiny little nowhere that, in a film with broader, more mainstream appeal, we would only see as a crane or drone shot as our protagonist dashes through it so that we can see that they are leaving everything behind through the visual language of them speeding away from the last outcropping of civilization into a desert of the unknown. For Anderson, this isn’t fly-over (or drive-through) country; this inhospitable specimen is made hospitable, and fascinating.
Within the play, Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is, like Chas Tenenbaum before him, a widower who has not yet figured out how to tell his children that their mother has died. He and his four kids—teen genius Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and girl triplets Andromeda, Pandora, and Cassiopeia—find themselves stranded in Asteroid City when their car breaks down, and Augie calls his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) to collect the girls. The town was already the final destination for Augie and Woodrow, however, as the boy is a finalist for a scholarship prize in the Junior Stargazer convention, as a result of his invention of a device that allows one to project an image onto the moon. There, he falls in puppy love with another finalist, Dinah (Grace Edwards), whose mother happens to be famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), with whom the emotionally raw Augie finds some connection and solace. The play itself has a huge cast, including an entire class of children on a field trip with their teacher (Maya Hawke), a singing cowboy who seeks to woo her, three other finalists with their own strange inventions (including death rays, jet packs, and brand new elemental particles), the meteor science team leader Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) – honestly, too many names to name without essentially reciting the IMDb page. And that doesn’t include the “outer” layer of “reality,” which features not only the aforementioned host, but also stage director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), his wife Polly (Hong Chau in a brief but memorable scene), and the actress who would have played Augie’s wife in a flashback if that scene hadn’t been cut in the final draft (Margot Robbie). And that’s not even the half of them.
Asteroid City is a matryoshka doll of stories, like a few of Anderson’s recent works. He’s always had an obvious talent for creating a sort of tableau within itself and an intentionality in his evocation of stage elements for the purpose of drawing attention to the artificiality of the form. There’s an escalation of it here that I really love, because the inherent staginess of Asteroid City and the way that it gives way to the vibrant “real” Asteroid City is a beautiful externalization of what we mean when we talk about the suspension of disbelief. I recently ranted in my There’s Something Wrong with the Children review about how far (that is, not very) most modern audiences are willing to extend their patience for narratives that require more than 25% attentiveness, and along comes this movie with imagery that illustrates this exact idea. Art can sometimes merely be evocative and then transport you to some distant place; it’s your choice to stay trapped in the Platonic cave staring at the set decoration, or you can choose to transcend the limited ability of painted flats to stand in for an open sky and just see the sky. Any text with which we interact must put in some of the work to meet us halfway, of course, but it’s on us to let go a little and embrace the opportunity to slip these surly bonds and let our spirits soar.
And soar you will, or at least I did. There is a distinct loneliness that flows out of the screen, and even if Anderson hadn’t confirmed in an interview that the story was informed by COVID, the fact that the play’s third act (and therefore the film’s final act as well) takes place in quarantine makes this all but explicit. There are many scenes in which Augie and Midge talk to each other between cabins, sitting at their respective windows, at once so close that they don’t have to raise their voices to be heard while nonetheless separated by a distinct barrier – a tableau that calls to mind the imagery of early quarantine when these sorts of six-feet-apart casual visitations were the temporary norm. Every character, like every human being on earth, is lonely in his or her own way; Stanley has lost his beloved only daughter, Augie his wife, his children their mother, the schoolteacher her certainty about the order of the cosmos, Schubert his own wife, and the world a brilliant playwright with the death of Asteroid City‘s author, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Even quarantined on top of one another in a tiny town, we are all alone, but that’s okay, because we’re all alone together.
Welcome to Episode #188 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Hanna, and Britnee discuss the glamorously adulterous romcoms of Old Hollywood legend Ernst Lubitsch, starting with Trouble in Paradise (1932)
00:00 Welcome
03:03 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) 05:48 Sorcerer (1977) 07:50 Reality (2023) 12:45 Savage Grace (2007) 16:55 You Hurt My Feelings (2023) 23:03 Rimini (2023) 28:08 Sanctuary (2023)
30:51 Ernst Lubitsch 39:35 Trouble in Paradise (1932) 55:55 Design for Living (1933) 1:13:43 The Shop Around the Corner (1940) 1:28:10 That Lady in Ermine (1948)
Ed Chilton (Steve Buscemi) is a mama’s boy; he may, in fact, be the mama’s boy to end all mama’s boys. See, her voice is still ringing in his ears, a year after her death. The late Mabel Chilton (Miriam Margolyes) went to her grave a full twelve months ago, leaving her hardware store to Ed, where he employs the kindly (Gary Farmer) and fields phone calls from the murderous Reverend Paxton (Rance Howard), who has frequent questions about what hardware would be best to kill his adulterous wife. On an otherwise normal day, Ed finds himself visited by A. J. Pattle (John Glover), a salesman peddling resurrection for the late Mabel, payable on delivery. Ed agrees, much to the chagrin of his live-in uncle, Benny (Ned Beatty), the exact kind of peeping tom horndog that pegs this movie to 1993. The object of Benny’s desire is next-door-neighbor Storm Reynolds (Sam Sorbo credited under her maiden name), who, in fairness, parades around intentionally, trying to attract attention. Uncle Benny is even further perturbed when his sister reappears in the flesh, little worse for wear. She and Ed both have something to fear from the unstable Rob Sundheimer (Jon Gries), a former employer who was convicted by Mabel’s testimony and who’s out on parole with vengeance in his mind.
There’s something very familiar about Ed and His Dead Mother. It’s very tonally inconsistent in a way that really pigeonholes it as something that could only be created at a certain time; it felt a lot like My Boyfriend’s Back and Stepmonster. And wouldn’t you just know it, all three films were released in 1993 (there’s also a little hint of 1991’s Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead). There’s some played-for-laughs not-quite-body-horror here that’s very reminiscent of Boyfriend; for one thing, a distinction is made between bringing someone back to life and bringing someone back from the dead, and as Pattle notes while upselling Ed another product, only latter was promised, not the former. As such, Mabel is forced to consume “life,” meaning living things (mostly roaches), but she isn’t above considering a neighborhood dog, or worse. We never have to see Mabel eat roaches like it’s Fear Factor, nor are we confronted with the image of a canine in distress; like Boyfriend and Don’t Tell Mom, there’s no real gore (at least until the end, where it’s still not very realistic), and there’s very little real sense of menace. Like Stepmonster, it places itself in a very specific time when someone can peep on their hot lady neighbor and the film acts like this is perfectly acceptable behavior that doesn’t soil our protagonist’s character, and here, this goes beyond simple safe-for-TV underwear shots, but a full-on bare-assed striptease and even frontal nudity, a little more than you’d expect from a PG-13 flick and especially something that you wouldn’t expect in a film where the humor feels as juvenile as the aforementioned movies. The sex factor is too high for kids in this movie, but the jokes are either too heady or too obvious for a more upper-teen demographic. It is still darker than any of those, however, as none of the end in a cemetery in which a man must bury his mother’s head in one corner and her body in another, lest she rise again.
There are a lot of bits here that are quite good. The increasingly unhinged Reverend whose rage at his wife’s infidelities (with all of the church council no less, even the women — all at once!) is a lot of fun, and when we get to see another side of Pattle, whom we’ve only seen as a hectoring salesbully with Ed, sheepishly being lectured by upper management about draining Ed of every cent that he got from his mother’s insurance instead of giving so many discounts. Margolyes is clearly having a lot of fun chewing the scenery as Mabel, especially when she’s cartoonishly grinding meat, chasing dogs, and locking herself in the fridge. Glover is always fun, especially when he’s getting to push people around, and Buscemi carries the thankless lead role of the feckless Ed effortlessly. I just wish it was funnier, that it made me laugh a little more. Maybe I’m just not in the target demographic, but then again, I don’t know who is.
Middle-aged Beau Wasserman lives in a nightmare. To be more accurate, he lives in several nightmares, some of them in succession, some layered atop one another like an onion of misery. Beau is a man who is haunted: by images of overflowing bathtubs, by visions of choppy water, by memories of an unconventionally abusive childhood, by the gap in his life where his father should be, by the ever-present preoccupation with the possibility of death imposed upon him by congenital health issues, and by a thousand other intangible things that aren’t immediate threats but which nevertheless ostensibly guide him through his choices, moment by moment, day after day. Beau is also a man who is endangered, not by those things which haunt him, but by real menaces that confront him on a daily basis. His neighborhood is parodically dangerous, as if the entire area is the product of a fever dream of someone whose brain was rotted by conservative cable news fabrications about hellish city life. Just going home from his appointment with his therapist requires Beau to start sprinting down his street from blocks away so that he can get into his building and lock the door behind him before a menacing vagrant can chase him down; not in the abstract, either, as he’s actually racing against his attacker. There’s no real order or authority in the world; a dangerous nude murderer wanders the streets, there are men gouging each others’ eyes out between Beau’s building and the Cheapo Depot across the street, and there are automatic weapons being sold on the street with abandon. His home itself provides little comfort, as there is a known brown recluse in the building and he spends the entire night receiving increasingly threatening notes slipped under his door in regards to an increasingly loud sound system that does not exist. Beau is afraid, and he has every reason to be, but things really only get worse for him from here.
Beau is Afraid is almost a picaresque. In fact, it opens almost exactly the same way that one of the foremost examples of the genre, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, does: with the protagonist’s birth. However, unlike Tristram (or Candide, or Huckleberry Finn), there’s not much appealing about Beau. He’s not roguish, or courageous, or even much of an active player in his own life. A series of horrible things happen to him and his only option, over and over again, is to run, because he has no defense against the things that haunt or endanger him. In each of these vignettes, things seem to be taking a turn for the better for Beau before deflating every potential chance for his luck to improve. He’s hit by a car, then nursed back to health by kind strangers, then that situation falls apart because of the impulsive actions of the family’s youngest child and he is pursued into the forest by a shell-shocked veteran, then he’s found by a woman who’s part of a traveling forest theatre troupe which performs a play that transports him on an emotional journey by playing out this hope-to-despair cycle in miniature, then the performance is disrupted by a spree killing, and so on.
In the first scene following the opening P.O.V. birth sequence, Beau’s therapist asks Beau if he would return to a well that made him sick the next time that he was thirsty. This is a film with nigh-constant imagery of water, in its abundance and in its absence, and in the film’s first (of many, many) acts, we the audience are introduced to the arc words “always with water,” which is Beau’s therapist’s warning to him about his new prescription. Beau is adrift on that water (literally, by the end); he bobs in it and he is pushed by its motion as it surges and recedes like waves, and he is never in control. Beau’s journey truly begins when he is forced to leave his building to cross the street for a bottle of water in order to finish taking his pills because the water in his apartment is out. Because of circumstances beyond his control, he has to leave his building and apartment open in order to get back in once he does so, which results in his home being invaded and destroyed. After getting back inside, he immediately receives terrible news, resulting in his bathtub overflowing even before he can get in.
This absence-to-abundance-to-absence imagery cycle is obviously no accident. Between the opening horror show that is Beau’s everyday life and the next vignette (which is at first hopeful and then violently terrifying, another cycle to be prepared for in this narrative), he flashes back to a childhood cruise that he took with his mother and on which he met his first and only love, Elaine. In all of these sequences, however, there’s one thing that we never see: the ocean. Characters dine above deck, sunbathe above deck, and take walks in the moonlight, but for the audience, all of this is happening against a backdrop of sky alone, as if in a void. In his dreams, Beau is in a bathtub (one that overflows, naturally, in abundance), watching a braver version of himself standing up to his mother and being punished for it by being sent into the attic. When he is being cared for by Grace and Roger, great attention is paid to the fact that he is given water in the monogrammed cup which belonged to their son, who was killed in action overseas. When he finds the actors in the woods, we see water pour over a point-of-view shot from Beau’s perspective as a fresh head wound is tended, and in the sequence in which the drugged, concussed Beau becomes the character on the stage who builds a life that is completely destroyed by a flood. In the end, Beau meets his destiny on the water, sailing out to face judgment for his supposed sins. The waves go forth and they retract, and a buoy rises and falls, and through it all, Beau has no agency in what moves him.
This absence and abundance is everywhere. When Beau is taken in to be cared for by Grace and Roger, he is put in their teen daughter’s room, where she has posters for various K-pop acts and similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from Marvel “grrl power” pin-ups on her walls. With regards to the former, she has posters both for a solo artist named Only1 and a gigantic boy band called KI55, as a reference to the number of members, all of whom are crammed onto the same poster in quarter-sized photos. I’m sure that there are many more that I’m missing or didn’t pick up on, because this film is dense, and for someone like me who loves details and puzzle pieces, there’s a lot happening. Much criticism has been directed at the film with regards to its length, but I only felt its runtime in my bladder, not in my attention. With that said, I’m not at all surprised that this movie hasn’t been to everyone’s liking.
Beau is Afraid largely concerns itself with guilt, but it isn’t titled Beau is Guilty because Beau isn’t guilty, he is simply made to feel guilt. His therapist projects guilt onto him, his mother’s lawyer lays a guilt trip on him for his worthlessness, and his mother herself, in flashbacks and in the present, manipulates him over and over again and then pelts him with guilt when he reacts in just the way she has set him up to. Before we see her in flashbacks or the present—when she’s no more than a voice on the phone—we see that Beau has one photo of each parent; his father is a blur, his snapshot taken while he was moving, so that there’s no clear image of his face at all, and in the photo of his mother, she is holding him as a newborn, his bald head in the foreground, but instead of a gentle hand supporting his wobbly noggin, her long, pointed nails create an image of her son trapped in her claw like prey, which is all that he ever is. There’s even the implication that everything that he has suffered (or at least large parts of it) are the result of her machinations, given that there’s a photomosaic of her face at her home that is composed of her employees’ staff photos, and it includes a character who appeared earlier as a good samaritan Beau encountered. This isn’t the kind of movie that “makes sense” in the traditional way, as it’s a surreal fantasy that’s not supposed to be treated as a straightforward, rational narrative, so even when the film implies Beau’s mother has been acting behind the scenes, we’re still then treated to the revelation of who (or more accurately what) Beau’s father is, in a way that defies any attempt to rationalize what’s happened to Beau as being merely a protracted trial to demonstrate his love for his mother.
There are two major touchpoints that the film reminded me of: mother! and Marie NDiaye’s 2007 novel Mon Cœur à l’étroit. In the case of the latter, there is a scene in the film’s first act in which Beau, unable to return to his apartment, climbs the scaffolding outside of the building and is forced to watch as his home is ransacked and destroyed, which was reminiscent of the scene in Darren Aronofsky’s film where the titular character is running from room to room, unable to stop her husband’s unruly party guests from destroying her meticulously planned and curated home. That sense of helplessness and desperation that you feel when empathizing with Jennifer Lawrence’s character in that movie is present here as well; everything in this movie is happening to Beau, as he has no choice but to continue to be compelled forward by the motion of the sea on which he is adrift, the tide carrying him to an unjust damnation. Mon Cœur à l’étroit, which was translated into English as My Heart Hemmed In in 2017, is about a woman who awakens one morning to the sudden realization that she is hated by everyone around her. Where Beau most resembles it is in the way that people interact with him. The protagonist of the novel, Nadia, is confused by all of her neighbors’ and friends’ sudden antipathy toward her, which is only further agitated by the fact that, when she confronts them, they all start to voice an accusation that trails off without providing any real information. This happens to Beau as well, as the people he encounters continuously approach him with variations on “You know what you did” and leave notes for him to find that say “Stop implicating yourself.” How much his mother was influencing things (not to mention how much that matters to the reading of the text, really) is up for debate; how much Mona Wasserman shaped her son’s reality is less important than how she shaped his perception of reality, which was … a lot. He can only perceive reality through the lens of guilt, both when she’s gaslighting him directly and when she’s gaslighting him by proxy through the way her abuse has shaped his brain so that he induces it in himself.
Like Mon Cœur à l’étroit, mother!, and Tristram Shandy for that matter, Beau is Afraid will not be for everyone. It’s been pretty divisive, and I’m not surprised. Between the length of the movie, some detours into the kind of wacky ground that wouldn’t be out of place in a movie by The Daniels, and mainstream American audiences’ overall aversion to anything too complicated to be half-watched while you fart around on your phone, there are sure to be plenty of people who find this one off-putting, not fun, and too strange to enjoy, but I’m not one of them.
Swampflix 